by Sofia Grant
Thelma wrapped both towels around Jeanne’s waist and led her, stumbling, to the couch, where she helped her lie down with her head on a bolster.
“Jeanne, listen to me.”
The girl lay unmoving, her lips slightly parted, her eyes all but closed, the feathery lashes quivering. Thelma patted her lightly on both cheeks. Not quite a slap. “Jeanne, I’m going next door to use the telephone. I’ll be back in a moment and we’re going to get you some help. Jeanne. Jeanne.”
There was no indication that the girl had heard her. “Do not die on me, do you hear me?” Thelma muttered as she backed toward the front door, but there was so little she could do but pray.
She would play the part she had been dealt, and God help all of them.
Peggy
Peggy hurried down the street, the rain whipping around her legs, cold and wet beneath her coat. She wasn’t wearing the proper shoes for this, and her heels twisted on a crack in the pavement, threatening to cause her to fall. She should have taken a moment to change into her flats, but when she’d come home from the movies with Tommie, Mrs. Slater came bursting out of her door.
“Your sister’s taken ill,” Mrs. Slater said breathlessly. “Thelma’s with her. She says meet them if you can. I’ll watch the little one.”
Then she rattled off an address in Northeast Philadelphia, a place none of them ever went, where eastern Europeans had immigrated to the apartment blocks and crowded houses above Pennypack Park.
“But—what are they doing there?” Peggy asked, Tommie squeezing her hand in alarm. Tommie didn’t care for Mrs. Slater, who had a mean little dog she kept in her kitchen.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Mrs. Slater said, distaste flashing across her flat, doughy face. Peggy had never liked the old widow, who spied on people all day long from her front window and wore men’s trousers to wash her windows. But she absolutely hated her now. “She just said to come, if you can. Here, give me the child.”
Mrs. Slater had grandchildren of her own, three or four of them, sturdy little things with trunk-like legs and unruly brown curls, but their visits were rare. Mrs. Slater wasn’t the sort of woman any child wants for a grandmother, with her oniony breath and thousands of dusty knickknacks and the carpets stained with dog urine. Peggy hesitated: “I’ll just take her with me.”
But of course, that was an impractical thought, especially as she had no idea what was wrong with Jeanne or why she was in the Ukrainian part of town. All of it was frighteningly strange, especially as Jeanne had been fine enough this morning, despite the headache she claimed was keeping her from joining their movie outing. Jeanne had headaches all the time. But what if this one was different? The uncle of one of the girls at work had come home on a recent weekday, poured himself a glass of lemonade, turned to his wife and uttered four words before dropping dead—and the words weren’t anything one would hope to choose as one’s exit from this world, like “I love you, darling” or “Keep our children safe” or even “Oh God help me”—they were “Crack it all soon,” as well as the girl’s aunt could make out. Or perhaps “That’s a monsoon.” Nonsense, at any rate.
Had something similar befallen Jeanne? Could she—and this was the thought that spurred Peggy to thrust Tommie at Mrs. Slater and turn and run back toward the trolley stop—be dead? Oh, please please please God no, no no don’t take her—
Peggy ran, her suede heels chafing as she went, giving her blisters that would rub painfully for a week before the skin finally tore away, the one on the left becoming infected and eventually forming a crescent-shaped scar that would never fade. Peggy ran, Tommie forgotten for the moment, and she begged God for everything to be all right, if necessary to take her own life for Jeanne’s. Please just don’t let her die.
Now she limped past one little house after another, her heels in agony in her shoes, peering up onto each sagging porch, looking for number thirty. In this part of town, entire families squeezed into flats carved from the humble buildings. She could hear squalling infants and husbands yelling at wives, smell smoke and rot. There—that one, a single story with a peaked roof, automobile parts strewn on the lawn, the brass numerals crooked on the siding. Peggy clattered up the wooden steps, and by the time she reached the top the door had already been thrown open.
Thelma stood in the doorway, clutching her collar against the wind and rain. “Where’s your umbrella?”
“Is she all right? Oh God, is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” Thelma snapped impatiently. “Practically good as new.”
Relief flooded through Peggy like water in a sponge. “But . . . what are we doing here?”
Behind Thelma a chorus of voices erupted at once, speaking quickly over one another in an incomprehensible cacophony. Thelma stepped aside for Peggy to enter. “We are the guests of the Petrenkos, of whom there are quite a few. Mind your manners.”
This last, Peggy soon realized, had been a bit of sarcasm, because the conduct of the people inside the front apartment wasn’t the least bit mannerly. No one greeted Peggy as she entered, though a woman of about twenty-five yanked her coat from her hands and threw it on top of a hassock on which Thelma’s coat was already wadded. An old woman in the kitchen didn’t even bother to turn around, but continued muttering in her Slavic tongue while she scrubbed a pot in the sink. Two men in undershirts stared unabashedly at Peggy, until a thin, tired-looking woman with a baby in her arms entered the room, who Peggy assumed must be one of their wives. She handed the baby to one of the men and disappeared into the recesses of the house. Children—four, six, it was impossible to say—ran around the room in various states of undress while yet another woman yelled at them in a mixture of English and Ukrainian.
In the center of all of this, Jeanne lay on a sofa, her legs folded under herself to make room for the man sitting next to her. She was wearing a dress that Peggy didn’t recognize, a faded flower-print housedress that was too large on her thin frame. The man on the couch clearly was not part of the large extended family who lived here. He was perhaps fifty, his silver hair slick with pomade, his cuffs folded neatly, even meticulously, over hairless forearms. He wore a wedding band and a gold watch, and above the crust of mud on his shoes, the leather was shiny and new.
“Oh, Peggy,” Jeanne said from the couch, struggling to sit up, only to be stilled by the man’s hand on her arm. She lay back obediently.
“Hello, Peggy,” the man said formally, rising from the sofa. His gaze darted to Thelma and back. “It’s . . . a pleasure to meet you.”
“You’re a doctor?”
“Your sister is going to be fine.”
“But what’s wrong with her?” Peggy seized one of Jeanne’s cold hands. “What happened?”
The man cleared his throat and looked at Thelma. “I should go.”
Thelma crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re leaving?”
The older woman in the kitchen set down her rag and hobbled into the living room. Now, nearly all the adults were crammed into the small front room, clustered around the couch. The old woman tugged on the sleeve of the blond woman who had let them into the house, and let loose a burst of rapid-fire speech. She jabbed a bent finger in Thelma’s direction before turning her back on everyone and returning to the kitchen.
Peggy turned to the younger woman. “Do you speak English?”
The woman, who Peggy belatedly noticed was rather pretty, rolled her eyes in disgust.
“Well, can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Ask the whore,” the woman snapped.
“That’s enough, Katrya,” the doctor said angrily. “Thelma, I’ve done what you asked. I’ve given you my professional opinion. If you refuse to take her to the hospital, you may as well take her home.”
“And you’ll bring the medicine.”
The man closed his eyes and exhaled before opening them. “Fine. We can discuss that later. Now please, we all need to go.”
“We need a ride.”
Peggy
had never seen her mother-in-law speak so disdainfully to anyone, much less a man of position. And even more astonishingly, the man shrugged and nodded. “Very well.”
“Well?” Thelma gestured at Jeanne. “It doesn’t look like she is going to get up and walk out of here on her own.”
The man bent and gathered Jeanne up into his arms. She whimpered and pressed her face to his shoulder. The man carried her to the door, while all the adults looked on. Even the children stopped running around and stared.
“I’ll call,” the doctor said. The blond woman ran from the room, down the dark hallway, slamming a door behind her.
“Thank you,” Thelma said stiffly to the remaining adults, before following the man outside.
Only Peggy remained in this room full of strangers. She took one more look around, at the rosary hung from the crucifix over the couch, at the plastic flowers arranged in a painted vase, at the half of a waxy green cabbage resting on the counter next to a heavy cleaver. She imagined the children crammed around the table, the amount of food it would take to feed them all.
“Thank you,” she echoed. But no one answered.
THE DOCTOR DROVE a new black Buick that smelled of pipe smoke and women’s perfume. Thelma sat in the front, her posture painfully rigid, her hands clutching the handles of her bag. In the backseat, Peggy stroked her sister’s stringy hair and tried not to notice the odd smell that clung to her and murmured to her that everything would be all right, when she didn’t even know what was wrong.
Going by car took a fraction of the time it took to go by bus and foot. In moments they were home. It occurred to Peggy that the doctor hadn’t had to ask for directions.
“Well,” Peggy said as the car pulled to a stop, “thank you. Again.”
“I’ll help you into the house,” he offered, his hand on his door handle. But Thelma stopped him.
“I think we’ll manage on our own.”
Between Peggy and Thelma, they were able to get Jeanne out of the car, her arms around their shoulders. She was starting to seem more lucid, and as they started up the path to the door, she tried to walk, taking stumbling little steps.
While Peggy fished for her keys in her purse, Thelma stepped back.
“You go ahead in,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
But it wasn’t just a minute. Long after Peggy got the door unlocked and helped Jeanne inside; after she’d helped her undress and seen the heavy, bloodied rags under her clothes and survived the shock of understanding; after she’d practically carried her up to bed—she’d turned all the lights off in the house but one small lamp in the room she shared with Tommie, and sat on her bed staring out the window onto the street. Next door at Mrs. Slater’s house, Tommie was sleeping in a strange bed; tomorrow morning Peggy would have to go and get her back. Tonight would be the first time she’d slept alone since Tommie was born.
She peered out into the night. The car was still there. It was too dark to see much of anything, but when the clouds obscuring the moon parted for a few seconds, it looked as though there was no one in the front seat at all.
September 1949
Thelma
After the first night, Thelma installed Jeanne in her own bedroom. She boiled a chicken carcass and brought the broth to Jeanne in steaming bowls, along with thick slabs of rye bread bought from the Jewish bakery and smeared with butter, then sat beside her until she ate it. She made a pie that none of them besides Tommie touched, the sugar-dusted crust glinting in the sun on the center of the table.
Peggy came home from work carrying asters wrapped in white paper, sugared almonds, a paperback novel from the drugstore. Tommie got into the act; Peggy found a white cloche in a trunk and told her it was a nurse’s hat, and pinned on a red paper cross cut from a magazine. Thelma gave Tommie cups with an inch of water to carry to their “patient,” and Tommie curled next to Jeanne in the afternoons, exultant to be in the bed from which she was usually excluded, reading her library books.
These sessions slowly seemed to lift Jeanne from her funk. Thelma watched, hidden around the corner, as Tommie turned the pages of her books, sometimes reading aloud to her aunt. After the first day it was Jeanne who read out loud all afternoon long, and Tommie who listened with a rapt expression.
Back in her kitchen with her apron stained with chicken grease, a wooden spoon in her hand, Thelma felt a long-dormant stirring in her breast. But it wasn’t a longing for the days when Thomas had perched on her knee with a book of his own, sounding out the words on the page. It wasn’t fear for Jeanne’s health, because Jack had assured her that all her body needed to heal was rest and nutrition and the pills he had delivered to calm her nerves.
No, what Thelma felt was not sentimental longing. It was impatience.
As Thelma listened to the sound of her granddaughter’s chatter, as she inhaled the traces of her daughter-in-law’s perfume that lingered long after she’d gone to work, something occurred to her that she’d never really considered before. She deserved more. She had married at nineteen and within a year known the bitter disappointment to which her own mother had alluded vaguely on the eve of her wedding. At twenty, she’d held her newborn infant alone, her mother in a fresh grave and her husband at the corner pub, not one to pass up the free rounds being purchased for the new father.
She’d helped her husband in his business and kept their home; she’d stretched the money he brought home to keep Thomas dressed and fed and educated. When Henry came home with other women’s lipstick on his collars, she said nothing. When he sold her mother’s signet ring to pay a gambling debt, she’d locked the bathroom door before allowing herself to cry.
When he’d died, she’d done what she had to do. She’d been fueled by desperation, but she never let that show. She held her head high through the funeral Mass before vowing never to return to the Church, but when her son begged her to change her mind, she swallowed down her bile and returned. When Thomas and Peggy eloped she kept her mouth shut.
When the telegram came, she’d wished herself dead. She wasn’t even to be allowed to bury her son. ON ACCOUNT OF EXISTING CONDITIONS THE BODY IF RECOVERED CANNOT BE RETURNED AT PRESENT, the telegram read. IF FURTHER DETAILS ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE INFORMED.
But there was nothing else to do but to pick herself up and open the door to the foolish girl Thomas had left behind, the girl who now bore their name. When Peggy announced that she was pregnant, Thelma had vowed to raise her grandson in the house his father had grown up in, and that was the only miscalculation she ever made.
When Peggy’s mother died and her sister had to sell their house, Thelma welcomed Jeanne too. What else could she do?
Two young women and a child, and only Thelma and a bit of government money—slim payment, for her son’s life—to support them. And yet she’d found a way. She’d stretched her savings as far as she knew how. And yes, she’d stolen moments for herself here and there and she would not apologize; she would fight God himself if He dared to judge her for them; she’d march proudly down to Hell before she’d give up even a single stolen night or clandestine afternoon. Because it was those moments that had sustained her, that kept her going through the darkest days, that reminded her that her obligations were here and not yet on the other side, where someday she would find repose in death.
She had done everything for everyone, borne humiliation and hardship. Now, just when she had a chance to put that all in the past, God had nearly taken Jeanne. Was it punishment for treating her as merely the extra one, the refuse that had washed up on her shore? “It will be better,” she whispered fiercely that day as she listened to Jeanne reading to Tommie. “It will be different now.”
She called Frank. “One more week,” she said in a tone that didn’t invite argument. For the moment, he was still cowed by her threats; that was an advantage she didn’t expect to keep. Men, especially men like Frank—soft men who balanced a tendency toward shiftlessness with keen awareness of their own interests—did not stay cowed for
ever. Look at how things had ended with Frank and Leo—had Leo not died first, Frank’s laziness and underhanded dealings would have ruined the business.
But Thelma was not Leo. And she had no intention of giving Frank the free rein that Leo had—something he would learn in time.
BEFORE SHE COULD put her foot down and insist that Jeanne get out of bed, something else happened that made it unnecessary: Jeanne received a visitor.
On a Saturday afternoon, when Peggy had taken Tommie to the library, Thelma was dusting in the front room when she looked out and saw a gleaming Packard touring sedan cruising to a stop in front of the house. A plump girl in suede heels nearly tripped stepping up to the curb—and a dark-haired young man jumped out of the driver’s door and raced around the car to help her.
“Jeanne!” Thelma called. “Are you expecting anyone?”
A moment later she heard a muffled crash upstairs. “Thelma, tell them I’ll be down in five minutes,” Jeanne called frantically. “Tell them—oh, tell them I just got out of the bath. Something, anything!”
There followed the opening and closing of dresser drawers, the sound of hangers being pushed on the makeshift closet rod.
Interesting.
Thelma dashed into the pantry—her mirror still hung on the wall, even though no one had used it as a dressing room in many months—and smoothed her hair away from her face and pinched her cheeks. Luckily, she’d worn one of her better dresses today, for no other reason than her workaday housedresses were drying on the clothesline. When she opened the door, she felt as composed as possible under the circumstances.
“Hello,” she said stiffly.
The young woman on her stoop was smiling broadly. “Hello, I’m Gladys!” she chirped. “And you must be Thelma!”
