The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

Ellie had been quietly warming up leftovers in the kitchen. Sam had opened the front screen door and picked up the latest edition of the Erietown Times, just as she always did.

  There was only one headline on the front page, a double-decker in giant letters:

  MOTHER DRIVES THROUGH BRIDGE RAILING, PLUMMETS TO HER DEATH

  Sam had stared at the large, black-and-white photo of the Fairlane dangling off the hook of a giant truck on the edge of the Clayton County River. Two police officers were pointing at the car’s collapsed roof. The driver’s door dangled from its hinges.

  She had run up to her bedroom and sat on the floor against the closed door before reading the story. Six years later, it felt only sadder to Sam.

  A local woman, a longtime bartender at Sardelli’s Restaurant, lost control of her car around 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, crashing through the north railing of the Clayton County Bridge and plummeting to her death in the river. Police Chief Walter Casey said the tragedy that claimed the life of Rosemary Russo appeared to be an accident, and one that could have been avoided.

  “We’ve been saying for months now that the city needs to reinforce those rails,” said the Chief. “It was only a matter of time before this kind of thing was going to happen.”

  Mrs. Russo was 29 years old and lived with her 2-year-old son and her aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Daniel Martinelli. Mr. Martinelli said in a telephone interview that they were “heartbroken,” and would raise the boy. “Family takes care of family,” he said.

  According to Mr. Martinelli, Mrs. Russo was preceded in death by her husband, Anthony Russo, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who died in 1967 in Vietnam. “He never made it back to see his son,” he said. “Rosemary never talked about that. She tried to stay positive for her son.” Mr. Martinelli stressed that Mrs. Russo never drank, and that fatigue led to her death.

  “She was out late because she worked a longer shift at the bar to make extra money for her son,” he said. “She was exhausted. We’re sure she fell asleep at the wheel.”

  Funeral services for Mrs. Russo will be private.

  Mayor Frank De Luca expressed his sympathy to the Martinelli family and called on City Council to close the bridge and fix the railing before another innocent person is killed. “What does it take to make city council do its job and

  (Story continued, page 8A.)

  Sam picked up the second clipping and felt a chill crawl up her spine. In the bottom right corner of the page, there was Rosemary Russo. She was smiling, holding baby Paull-two-els in her arms.

  The boy in Otto’s, she thought. Table seven. She had recognized him, but he was leaner than the chubby little boy she had rocked to sleep on their porch that day.

  In the photo, Paull was wearing a cone-shaped party hat, his cheeks smeared with cake. Rosemary Russo with her son Paul, in 1968, the caption read. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Martinelli. They had spelled it wrong, Sam had noted that day.

  She set down the clippings and unfolded the place mat. She ran her fingers again along the boy’s crayoned letters. BUTRFLYS BY SAM AND PAULL.

  The only time Sam had dared to ask her mother about Paull, two years after Rosemary’s death, her mother had pulled over the car and grabbed her arm. “That boy was not your father’s,” Ellie said. “That woman was just trying to get your father’s money.”

  “But, how could she do that if Dad hadn’t—”

  Ellie squeezed her arm harder. “Every man makes mistakes. He had a weak moment. Just one. She slept around with everybody and tried to pin it on your dad.”

  “You’re hurting me, Mom.”

  Ellie loosened her grip and rubbed Sam’s arm. “Let’s never talk about this again.”

  Sam picked up the front page and stared at the yellowing photo of Rosemary Russo. She had long ago stopped trying to forget that day. Sometimes even as something is happening you know it’s going to change you for the rest of your life.

  She could see it all, those last hours of her childhood. That little boy with the same hair, same Johnny Lightning car as her brother’s. The white sheets billowing on the line. Her mother dropping her father’s wet socks on the ground. Her father’s face when he pulled into the drive, looking in the rearview mirror at Rosemary’s car parked in front of the house. And the boy, Paull, asleep in her arms.

  Over the next year, so much had changed.

  Two days after Sam’s father moved out, he was back, with no explanation. That night, the four of them sat down to dinner. Just as Ellie was serving canned peach slices for dessert, Brick reached under the table and pulled out a box from Brennan’s department store.

  Sam studied her mother’s face as she peeled back the layers of tissue paper and held up the lavender silk blouse. “Oh, Brick, it’s beautiful.” She smiled at Reilly. “Did you help pick this out?” Reilly nodded, beaming. “I told Daddy your favorite color was purple.”

  Sam watched in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?” she wanted to yell at her parents. “We’re just going to act like none of this happened?” She was disgusted with both of them, and asked to be excused from the table.

  Within months, Brick and Ellie told the kids they were moving to a new house, one that they would own. Ellie got a job as a nurse’s aide at Erietown General Hospital. A few months after she started working, Brick surprised Ellie with a used Dodge Dart for their anniversary. “So you can drive yourself to work,” he said.

  With each big change, Sam felt her parents leaving her further behind. For the first time, she had been glad that Lenny was her only close friend. “You’re my only friend who knows about Paull-two-els,” she said to him on their last night together in the same neighborhood. “What would I have done if everyone had known what Dad did?”

  “Don’t spend any more time on that, Sam,” Lenny said. “We’re getting out of here and going to college. We’re leaving all that behind.”

  She refolded the newspaper clippings and Paull’s drawing and pressed them against the bottom of the case. Lenny was wrong. You can leave, but some things follow you. Some things will never let you go.

  * * *

  —

  She waited until her mother was sitting on the couch working on a crossword puzzle book, her nightly ritual. Sam opened the closet door in the front hallway and started riffling through the jackets.

  “It’s eighty-two degrees, Sam,” her mother said. “You’re not going to need a coat anytime soon.”

  Sam pulled out her winter parka and dropped it to the floor. “I’m not coming home until Thanksgiving, Mom. It could snow before then.” She stepped deeper into the closet before pulling the lighter out of her pants pocket. She grabbed her father’s old softball windbreaker in the back and pulled it off the hanger.

  “Hey,” Sam said, pulling it on and shoving her hands into the pockets. “Dad hasn’t worn this in years. Do you think he might let me have it?”

  “That’s huge on you, Sam,” Ellie said, rolling her eyes. “And, no, I don’t think your father is going to be willing to part with that jacket. He’s had it for twenty years. You know how he is about stuff like that.”

  Sam pretended to fumble with something in the right pocket. “Oh, my gosh,” she said, holding up the lighter with a shocked look on her face as she approached her mother. “Look what I found.”

  Ellie set down the book and held out her hand. “Let me see that.”

  Sam dropped it into Ellie’s palm. “This is the one Dad’s been looking for, right? The one you gave him all those years ago.”

  “Yes,” Ellie said, running her thumb across the inscription. “Yes, this is the one.”

  Sam walked back to the closet to hang up her father’s jacket. “I’ll bet Dad gives me the jacket now,” she said, closing the door.

  Ellie watched Sam climb the stairs to her bedroom and waited for the sounds of her stereo before rising from the couch
and walking to the kitchen. She pulled out the box of aluminum foil and ripped off a sheet of it. She walked to the window over the sink and turned on the overhead light to get a better look at the lighter. So many tiny scratches after years of use, but the inscription was still vivid: LOVE, PINT. She had saved six months of babysitting money in her junior year to buy it for Brick that Christmas. It came in a special box, which she had wrapped in a remnant of fabric, instead of paper, and tied with a piece of Grandma’s leftover bric-a-brac trim. Green, she remembered. He got a kick out of that, seeing the box stitched shut with three large loops of embroidery thread.

  “How do you think of these things, Pint?” he asked, kissing her as she sat next to him in his truck. “I don’t want to open it, it looks so nice.”

  It was the nicest thing anyone had ever given him, he told her that night. He would cherish it for the rest of his life, he said.

  She had believed him, even after Rosemary. All those months he begged her to forgive him. Swore that little boy couldn’t possibly have been his. She finally gave in, willing herself to believe him.

  She clutched the lighter. Unlike her daughter, she would not pretend.

  Ellie had stood at the front porch window that night, and seen it all. Rosemary marching across the grass with that boy in her arms. Spilling the contents of her purse all over the street. Trying again and again to start her car. Ellie had watched all of that, waiting for Rosemary to leave. When she finally pulled off, Ellie had taken a deep breath and started to turn away, but stopped when she saw Sam walk to the street.

  Sam had bent down and run her hands across the pavement. Then she’d stood and held something up to the streetlight. She’d looked back at the house before sticking it into her pocket.

  For six years Ellie had wondered what her daughter had discovered in the street that night. Now she knew. You don’t get a man’s lighter from a one-night stand.

  Ellie picked up the sheet of foil and bunched it around the lighter. She walked over to the metal trash can and pressed her foot on the lever to open the lid. She tossed in the ball of foil and stared at it for a moment.

  “Too bad for you,” she said, slamming the lid shut. “Pint doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “Miss McGinty!”

  Sam ignored the guy’s voice and kept walking.

  “Mizzzzzz McGinty! Wait up.”

  She slowed, but didn’t turn around.

  “Mizzzzzz McGinty, who is in my mandatory Ohio History class!” he yelled. “Wait up for a fellow inmate, please.”

  She stopped and slowly turned. “Could you be more obnoxious?” she said.

  “Absolutely,” he said, panting.

  “How do you know my name?”

  He laughed. “Everyone in the lecture hall knows your name. You’re the only one arguing with Professor Dixon, week after week. Nice touch calling him Professor Nixon today, by the way.”

  “It was a mistake,” Sam said. “I apologized.”

  “Okay,” he said. “If you say so.”

  Her scowl deepened. “This is a stupid course required by this stupid university because we were stupid enough to be born in Ohio.”

  “Stupidity runs rampant, apparently.”

  “Who cares,” Sam said. “Who cares that eight U.S. presidents lived, at some point, in Ohio? Harrison was a southerner and Whig, and the other seven were all Republicans.”

  “Ah, you don’t like Republicans,” he said. “I would never have guessed that from this morning’s tirade about Nixon and the invasion of Cambodia.”

  Sam shifted her books from her right hip to her left. “Would you have called it a tirade if a guy had said it?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “Let me think on that.” He opened his eyes. “You’re right. I would have called it a bloviation. Which, by the way, President Warren G. Harding—from Ohio—once defined as ‘the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing.’ I would never accuse you of such a thing.”

  Sam refused to smile. “It was a necessary clarification of history, of the horrible cost of war. He spent an entire period on”—she raised her right hand and made air quotes with two fingers—“ ‘Ohio at war,’ and never talked about how many boys from our state died in Vietnam.”

  “It’s still a touchy subject.”

  “You don’t know anyone who had to go, do you?”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

  “It means it’s not personal for you,” Sam said. “People like you can pretend it never happened.”

  “That’s a little harsh,” he said. “And who are these people like me? That sounds biased.”

  Sam tilted her head and said nothing.

  “You know,” he said, “not everything that happens in the world happens to you personally.”

  “Ah, quoting Hubbell Gardner,” Sam said. “Your hero.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Damn. I should have known you’d seen The Way We Were.”

  “I’m sorry war is a joke to you.” She turned and started walking again toward the first-floor exit.

  “Oh, c’mon,” he said, catching up to her.

  Sam stopped walking. “How can you not be offended that no one mentioned the students who were killed here?” He leaned back as she flung out her arm and pointed to the wall of windows. “Right there, on our campus, protesting the Vietnam War. Four dead, nine wounded.”

  “Somebody did mention it, as I recall,” he said. “Somebody who was very loud about it and, now that I think about it, looked a lot like you.”

  “Where I come from, we can’t pretend the war didn’t happen,” Sam said. “We lost so many of our boys over there. So many others came back so different.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice softer. “It’s a touchy subject here, is all I mean. All those outsiders agitating, as they say.”

  “They weren’t outsiders,” she said, her voice rising. “They were students here. And they weren’t even all protesters. Sandy Scheuer was walking to class. Bill Schroeder was in ROTC, a bystander.”

  “You’re right. That’s awful.”

  She stopped and turned to face him. “Who are you?”

  “Henry.” He lifted an imaginary hat off his head and bowed. “Henry Wade.”

  “Does anyone call you Hank?”

  He shook his head in mock outrage. “Never.”

  “Too bad,” she said.

  “It gets worse,” he said. “I’m Henry Wade the Third.”

  “Of course, you are. Daddy’s the second, I presume?”

  “Indeed.”

  “What happened to junior?”

  Henry slapped his palm against his chest. “We’re not coal miners.”

  “We’ve had coal miners in our family,” Sam said, “and their manners were a lot better than yours.”

  He tried to pull open the door, but she beat him to it. “I can manage this myself, thank you.” He winced as the bottom of the door slammed against the toe of his sneaker. “Ow. Man, independence sure is painful.”

  She shoved past him. “See you next time,” she shouted over her shoulder.

  He kept pace beside her. “We’re headed to the same place.”

  Sam glanced at him. “You’re not in my honors American literature class.”

  “No, but I’m right next door, in the dishonorable American literature class.”

  She stopped and frowned. “I sounded really full of myself just then, didn’t I?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, that was when you were lecturing me about May fourth.”

  “Why don’t you want to talk about what happened here?”

  “Why don’t you want to talk about anything else?”

  “That isn’t true,” she said.

  “Prove it,” he said, pointing toward the student cent
er. “We have forty minutes before class. Let me buy you lunch.”

  “I can afford my own lunch. I work for my money. Thirty hours a week, waiting tables.”

  He smiled, and Sam noticed how his blue eyes crinkled at the corners. “I wasn’t offering to pay your tuition. I was thinking a hamburger.”

  “I prefer cheeseburgers.”

  “Well, okay,” he said, guiding her toward the student center. “If you’re sure that slice of American cheese won’t cancel out your right to vote.”

  “So sarcastic, Henry the Third,” Sam said, looking straight ahead.

  “So suddenly lucky,” he said, looking straight at Sam.

  Ellie pressed the open book against her chest and considered throwing it at her husband’s head. He was sleeping in his recliner. He’d never see it coming.

  Sam had given her Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room about a month ago. This was a hardback for a change, with eleven handwritten signatures on the inside cover. “Each of us girls in the dorm signed it after reading it,” Sam said. “It’s a manifesto.”

  Sam had given her the book during her final Thanksgiving break at Kent State, where she was apparently learning that her mother had done everything wrong. “It’ll change your life, Mom,” Sam had said after dinner. “At the very least, you’ll finally understand what you’ve been putting up with all these years.”

  “Oh, good,” Ellie said, peering over her reading glasses at Sam. “What happened to all of your JCPenney bras? Did you burn them?”

  “Total myth, Mom. Women never did that, but who could blame them if they had?” Sam smiled at her mother’s frown. “Carly Simon doesn’t wear bras. You can see her nipples on the cover of her No Secrets album.”

  “Shhhh,” Ellie said. “The last thing we need is your father hearing that. Especially now that you’re dating that boy from Shaker Heights. What is his name?”

  Sam looped the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “Henry. And he’s not a boy, Mom. He’s a man, and I’m a woman.”

  “Mmm-hmm. When are we going to meet this ‘man’?”