Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  Of course, I wasn’t supposed to know either. Eleven-year old girls in 1931 weren’t allowed to know about sex. But the booted feet of men tramping up wooden steps a few feet from my bed was difficult to disguise in a house the size of ours as were the noises associated with sexual intercourse. I should have been asleep when the visitors came, but I fought to remain awake, acting like some sort of sentry in my mind. And despite Jim’s worried, “Hush!” it was the creak of foot on board rather than the deep voices of men that awoke me. I counted twelve visitors on the staircase that February, each one noisier than the last. In the morning, the tin with its growing booty told the truth when I reached inside Jim’s nightstand to check it.

  Jim and I never discussed what happened upstairs that winter, but it put both a bond and a wedge between us. Whenever I thought kindly about Jim’s accomplishments over the following years, I would inadvertently harken back to 1931 and what he had done to Ronnie. But conversely, whenever I felt adrift from him, which happened often since our separations were so lengthy, I would rediscover the bond that sharing such a secret created, or I’d realize just what our fate would have been without the scheme he set in motion.

  My memories were a child’s though, and each passing year deepened the veneer, blurring the truth. Seventy years later, I’m hard pressed to separate what I remember from what I have invented or imagined. A particular scent, a scuffling noise, the color of the sky on a winter’s day and I am back in my mother’s bed listening with the sharp ears and faulty reasoning of childhood.

  None of Jim’s actions would have been possible if our mother hadn’t taken a job sitting up nights with a dying woman across town. She was gone from dinnertime until early morning, putting our plates on the table with her coat already buttoned. She earned two dollars and fifty cents a night, considerably less than her daughter earned upstairs.

  “Don’t forget to put the plates away, Rose,” she’d say to me each night when she left the house. “Dry them and put them in the cupboard.” It saddened her to come in at breakfast and find the dishes still in the rack, the oilcloth on the table sticky with dried up food. “And don’t forget to lock up,” she’d remind Jim. “Desperate men pass this way after dark.”

  We’d both nod, taking another bite of our dinner. Before she could get out the door, Ronnie would chime in with her oddly formal, high-pitched voice saying, “And what should I do, Mother?”

  “Keep an eye on the children,” Mother told her every night. “You’re the oldest, Veronica.”

  Ronnie would nod her head solemnly, looking to us for confirmation. She was seventeen that year, but couldn’t read or write or tie her shoes. There were few programs for dirt-poor, retarded children anywhere in 1931, fewer still in a rural community. Children like Ronnie ended up in institutions for the feebleminded, the term used then. Ronnie had attended school for as long as the teachers tolerated her disruptions in their classrooms. Then, in about third grade, I guess, Mother and Daddy held a mock graduation one June, telling her she was now grownup and needed at home. After that, she stayed home nearly all the time; Mother fearing the stinging words and careless hands of other children would hurt her.

  In some ways, Ronnie didn’t seem that different. She could hold a conversation if the subject was simple and the questions direct, and she knew everything there was to know about flowers. She was neat and spoke clearly. Oddest of all was her ability to play the piano by ear, which she did every Sunday at church. My sister looked like an angel sitting on the raised platform, hands poised over the piano, and that was where the men in town grew a bit obsessed with her most amazing characteristic: her beauty. She was simply the prettiest girl any of us had ever seen. Neither Jim nor I were attractive at all. The tradeoff seemed fair considering her deficits.

  As long as Daddy was around, no men came near our place. Our father wasn’t particularly big, but he was unpredictable, and that gave him an edge in protecting both himself, and later, us. Men in town remembered peculiar skirmishes in his youth, times he had kept punching someone long after the fight was won, times he ambushed boys who thought he had taken their quips with good humor, and didn’t want to provoke him. Myths surfaced that he wouldn’t hesitate to bite off a nose or ear should the need arise. I remember him as remote, uneasy with hugs and kisses, preoccupied with how to earn a dollar from men who had none to spare. And he was a drinker, of course.

  But once he left town, men began to come around. Most didn’t realize Ronnie was retarded, and somehow such a thing meant less then. Low intelligence was not necessarily a fatal flaw in farm wives who spent their lives raising children, food and animals. Ronnie’s handicap was apparent to anyone who spent time with her, but in church, the only place most people saw her, she was the picture of competence at the piano waiting for the minister to nod her cue to begin. None of us could take our eyes off her.

  I don’t think any of the men who made their way up our road that year intended any harm to Ronnie. But more than once the autumn before, Jim had come home to find a man hanging around, watching hungrily as Ronnie tended her mums or swept the porch. Once Jim came upon an out-of-work mechanic waltzing her around the yard, both of them out of breath with laughter. There were many men that year with nothing to do, men who hadn’t had time on their hands since childhood and who only knew childish ways to fill it. But winter came finally, and once it grew cold, Ronnie stayed inside.

  Over the last seventy years, I have spent countless evenings thinking about where Jim’s idea of using Ronnie to solve our financial problems came from. I think Jim tried to find a job, called relatives in the area, tried to track Daddy down. Mother seemed incapable of doing anything, he said later. In retrospect, she must have counted on Daddy to return at some point and bail us out. That was why the money in the tin box a few weeks later didn’t surprise her.

  Sitting in church week after week, watching men’s faces slacken or go tight when Ronnie walked up the aisle to play “The Old Rugged Cross,” Jim must have believed the only solution to our problems lay in her desirability. Or perhaps it was Mr. Tyson, his high school English teacher, who spawned the idea. Certainly it was Charles Tyson I saw climbing the stairs that final night. Trying to put the pieces together in hindsight nearly drove me crazy, and Jim neatly avoided my attempts in later years to divine the whole truth.

  Our town was small and even if the men who came to our house that winter meant to keep the secret, one of them did not. Sometime that spring, our family physician, Dr. Large, under the guise of a routine examination, told Mother that Ronnie was no longer “intact” suggesting rather firmly that she should be sterilized as soon as possible.

  “She’ll be carrying someone’s child by autumn,” he predicted dourly to our shocked mother.

  The case of Buck v. Bell was only a few years in the past and the sterilization of retarded girls was a routine procedure. “Feeblemindedness” in the age of Social Darwinisn and eugenics was looked on harshly, with society seen as in need of protection rather than the afflicted individual. The state bore down on the poor, the sick, the injured putting them out of sight in many instances, rendering them impotent, helpless before its power. “It’s your duty,” Dr. Large continued, “to insure that another child with Ronnie’s … deficiencies … isn’t born.”

  The reverence of nurses for both doctors and their “scientific pronouncements” made Mother susceptible to Dr. Large’s strong-arming advice. So Ronnie was spirited away one day on the pretext of a shopping trip and the procedure took place in a doctor’s office in a nearby city. Mother never told Jim the specifics of the trip, but Ronnie, frightened of doctor’s anyway, must have suffered. The men in our town had effectively punished their victim for their own weaknesses. All of them could shake their head at the wantonness of feeble-minded girls, looking at Ronnie with both pity and disgust.

  She returned three days later, proudly holding a wicker birdcage with a salmon-colored canary in it, a lasting reminder to us, if not herself, of what she’
d lost. The canary, Sweetie Pie, whistled “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” incessantly, a popular song that year. It was soon all any of us could do to listen to it.

  When the four of us had settled back into the semblance of a normal life, and most of all when I was a little older, I began to blame Jim for much of what happened. Why had he embarked on such an extreme course of action without consulting anyone? Before I was old enough to ask, he left Coryell’s Crossing suddenly, taking a job at the Navy Yard in Norfolk Virginia. A few engineering courses at the local college won him a position there, and he rarely came home afterward. The war, with its dependence on the “inventions” of men like Jim, put even more distance between us.

  In 1937, an older man with grown children asked for Ronnie’s hand. I was in high school by then and stood up for Ronnie at her wedding. Mother and I were both uneasy about it, fearing what a man might want from a girl (for she would always be a girl) like Ronnie, fearing her ability to be a wife. But Ed was a good man. He had some money and hired a woman to look after things in the daytime. Ronnie tended the garden, fed the chickens and played the piano he bought for her. If Ed ever wondered why no children came, he never asked. Mother remarried during the war, when she could finally divorce Daddy for desertion, and found some happiness of her own.

  I became a teacher but never married. Good looks turned out to be more important than a high IQ to most men, but to be fair, marriage never interested me very much. I centered my life on my students, my books, and a long line of tabbies and was never the worse for my choices.

  Jim and I rarely saw each other over the next sixty years. As I write that number, it seems impossible. But it’s true. When he did come home, it was only for a day or two, and other family members always surrounded him, with Ronnie hanging on tightest of all. His only lengthy visit occurred when Ronnie died in the late 1970s. I was working my way up to asking him … something … the day of her funeral when someone — I forget who — commented on the advanced age of the attendees. “There’s not a soul here under fifty,” the friend of a relative observed to the small circle of mourners at the back of the room. We all looked around and saw the truth in her remark.

  “The average age in this room is dead,” a cousin added.

  “Well, none of us had children.” I said defensively. “For whatever reason.” We all looked at our shoes for a minute.

  “Rose never married,” Jim finally said, his voice gruff. “And I married late — with the war and all.” He cleared his throat. “Of course, there was no way we could allow Ronnie to ….” He said it regretfully, but with a finality that convinced me once and for all that it was Jim who went to Dr. Large about Ronnie. A queer, creeping cold crept up my spine at that moment, and I believed then that I could never forgive my brother. He had used our sister horribly and I felt like his accomplice in keeping the secret. It was bad enough he had used her to raise money, but unforgivable that he had exacted such a price when it was over.

  Last week I decided it was time I called Jim. His wife died a year or so ago, and we were both alone. Only a few hundred miles separated us, a distance that didn’t seem so large, but we hadn’t met in nearly a decade, my first illness precluding my attendance of Betty’s funeral. Since my doctor has assured me recently that I didn’t have another decade, or even another year, I knew it was time to talk.

  “It’s me,” I said when he picked up the phone. Ten years must have altered my voice because the pause was lengthy.

  “Rose?” he asked finally. I could hear the weariness of age in his voice. “Rose,” he said again.

  “It’s me,” I repeated, my voice gruff with feeling too. We talked a bit — about family and friends, the events of the day. And then I told him about my prognosis.

  He sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t call just to talk.”

  “We never did have that find of … relationship.” I’ve always hated that word.

  “Sunday? After church?”

  “How about the Sunday after?” I asked him. “Still driving these days?”

  “If the Olds decides to start.”

  We agreed on the next Sunday afternoon, and I did all I could not frighten him with my appearance. I had my hair trimmed and curled, putting on my best dress with a care I hadn’t exercised in months. I took an extra capsule from the prescription the doctor gave me and sat waiting quietly for my brother. Each time I heard a car turn down the street, I craned my neck, but it wasn’t until the agreed upon hour that he arrived.

  Holding the door open, I was heartened by his appearance. For a man in his mid-eighties, his color was good, his weight much the same. He was dressed in the pale blues and beiges my generation — or is it just the old — seem to favor. Certainly, he seemed destined to outlive me, and for that I was grateful. There would be one family member to mourn my death.

  I showed Jim the garden, accepting his compliments on my lilies, the astilbe and bee balm, and after we talked about the few relatives still alive, we went back inside the house and I poured us an iced tea.

  “Do you know what day it is?” I asked when we had both sat down.

  He looked at me for a minute, and then nodded. “She’s been dead — what — twenty-two years? And Mother’s been dead thirty-five years, Daddy nearly forty. Did you ever think you’d know more people dead than alive?” he asked, rubbing his cheek thoughtfully. He put down his iced tea, gazing out the window where the twinkling yellow of the coreopsis framed his view.

  “She didn’t have such a bad life after all though. With Ed, I mean. Nobody expected much for … for girls like her in those days. She had her own home, her own piano, and nobody ever treated her shabbily.”

  I let it pass, watching a cardinal alight on the dogwood through the window just behind him. “Remember that damned bird she brought back from the city?”

  Jim laughed, but there was no joy in it. “What song did it whistle?” he asked. “‘On the Sunny Side of the Street?’”

  “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries. Sweetie Pie never learned another song. Too bad, too, the way that Ronnie loved music. She was probably hoping for duets.”

  “Your memory’s as good as ever,” he said, admiringly. “I wanted to throw a cover over its cage more than once.”

  Of course I remember every detail, I thought impatiently; my future was set in stone that year. I stabbed at his pain relentlessly, “Ronnie cried her heart out when that bird died.”

  Jim got up and opened the window wider. “Someone bought her a dog after that, right? Buster, wasn’t it? A real junkyard dog, though I almost preferred his endless barking to that bird’s eternal trilling.” He unbuttoned the top button on his shirt. “Phew, it’s gonna be a hot one! Why don’t you have air, Rosie? You could put a unit in here for peanuts.”

  “I’d miss the smell of summer.” He nodded as I hurried on. “Jim, what exactly happened that winter? The one after Daddy went away?” Awkward, but finally said. It was out in the open for us to pick at with our arthritic fingers. I eyed him furtively as he walked back to his chair.

  Sinking back into his seat, he shook his head again. “I have nothing but regrets when I think back on that year.”

  “Can’t have been easy to keep it to yourself all this time,” I said feigning a sympathy I didn’t quite feel.

  “You won’t think better of me after hearing the story. No matter what you think happened, it was worse.” He looked at his wristwatch, comparing its time with the clock on my mantel.

  “Two minutes slow,” I told him. “And as to your story, anything is better to me than dying ignorant.” I sat rigidly expectant in my straight-backed chair.

  He nodded wearily. “I see you’re playing hardball.”

  “Dying has some cachet then?”

  “You think that’s funny?” he asked scowling. Without waiting for my reply, he began. “Daddy left for good after I found him in Ronnie’s bed. I unknowingly saw to it by walking through that door.” Determined to show I could take it, I nodded, reali
zing then I had suspected it for some time.

  “I’d wondered about it,” Jim said echoing my thoughts, “He was so careless … so thoughtless, banging that headboard into my wall like it was a percussion instrument in the school band. Then pretending surprise that I’d heard them.”

  “Did Mother know what was going on?” The last quarter-century had taught us that mothers often look the other way, but I hated to think that of mine

  “I doubt it. She was gone so much. I don’t think she’d have tolerated … that, although she put up with pretty much everything else from him.”

  “Did you tell him to leave on the spot?”

  Jim flushed. “No, I couldn’t get a word out. Stood there frozen while he scrambled for his clothes. Fifteen was awfully young then, and Daddy could be so … crazy.” I nodded, remembering how he could fly off the handle at the smallest thing. “Ronnie was naked, and Daddy didn’t even try to cover her,” Jim continued. “He mumbled some nonsense about Mother never being around when he ‘needed’ her. It was sickening.” His lips puckered with distaste.

  “So he left — when? The next day? Without saying anything?” I tried in vain to remember what his letter had said.

  Jim nodded. “And a night or two later, I turned over to find Ronnie in my bed.”

  I shuddered involuntarily, and Jim turned his head. “I didn’t touch her, of course. I was repulsed, but I tried not to show it. She could be very sensitive about things like that.” I nodded. “All I could think was to send her back to bed, but she turned up the next night and the one after. I don’t know if it was a game to her, or if she had grown used to the sex. Who knows what was in her mind?” He struggled with it. “She probably just liked the warm body in her bed. It could get pretty cold in that house.”