I glanced at Jimmy, on the opposite end of the wooly red couch from me, the space of the worn cushion between us summing up the awkwardness of us being around each other, now that the drama of Trusty’s injuries seemed to have passed.
I looked back at MayJune. “But Will was just four when Mama died,” I insisted. He was out on the porch with Trusty, spooning watered-down chamomile tea to Trusty from a new bowl. “I would have been ten—just shy of Will’s age now! How can he remember? Why don’t I?”
MayJune gave me a sympathetic look that made me stare down into my mug. I didn’t want sympathy—I just wanted to understand. “You’ve had so much on your mind, honey, so much to take care of, since your mama died.”
To my dismay, my eyes welled up with tears. I blinked them back, but some moisture still crept out of the corners of my eyes. “But I should remember more than just…just snatches of things. And then there are things I’ve found that don’t make sense with what I do know about her life.”
I stopped, suddenly worried about saying too much. The sense that talking about Mama was taboo came over me again, but then I thought, Grandma and Daddy and Miss Bettina aren’t here. Will was out on the porch. And what could I say in front of Jimmy that would make him feel worse about me than his feeling of betrayal over me and Mr. Cahill?
“I found Mama’s old clothes—clothes that must be from before she became our mother—in our basement,” I said quietly. “Packed away with mothballs in suitcases. They’re all so elegant. Outfits for a fine lady. And there were costumes, as if for someone in a stage show. But it doesn’t make sense. Daddy must have kept those clothes after she died—but why?” I paused. Then again, why would he keep her car? The house with the exact same furniture and appliances as right before she died? We’d grown up living in a shrine to our long-lost mama, Will and I. “But from what little I do remember of her, she wore dowdy housedresses, or robes, and—”
I stuttered to a stop, looked up at MayJune, ready to apologize. MayJune, after all, was wearing a dowdy housedress, a pale green with a faded pink floral print. But she didn’t seem to mind my comment at all. Instead, she smiled as she put her cup of tea on a small side table, grasped the arms of her rocker, and pulled herself up to stand, then hobbled slowly, with that hitch in her left hip, over to a china cabinet that was squeezed into the space to the right of her fireplace.
She carefully knelt, mindful of her creaking knees, opened a drawer meant to hold napkins and silver, and then stood as upright as she could, holding a scrapbook. I stood, taking a few steps to meet her. MayJune handed me the scrapbook, then collapsed back in her rocker, her weight tipping it against the wall. All of the hustle she’d had upon our arrival was gone.
I sat back down on my end of the red couch. Jimmy glanced over, curious. I ran my hand over the worn, dark blue leather cover of the scrapbook.
“Go to the middle,” MayJune said. I carefully opened the scrapbook. There were photos of people I didn’t recognize, clippings from the Groverton Daily News: obituaries, birth announcements, an occasional article. MayJune saw my look of confusion and added, “Keep going, another page or two.”
Slow understanding showed on my face. MayJune sighed with satisfaction. “There,” she said. She picked up her cup from the side table and took a long sip of tea.
I stared at the photos of a young woman, painfully beautiful, a firm set to her jaw, but something uncertain in her smile, something sad about her wide eyes. I wondered what color those eyes were. In all the poses, she was onstage, singing behind a microphone, wearing dresses with too many ruffles, or with feathers, or boa trim.
The photos were sepia, so the dresses were, too, and it was hard to tell type of fabric or trim details like sequins, but still, my heart clenched as I thought, I recognize that dress…but I can’t recognize that dress….
Jimmy, overcome by curiosity, had scooted over beside me. He gently tapped his finger next to a photo that focused most closely on the young woman’s face. “Is that your mother?”
“What are you talking about? Mama was never a singer, she was—” I stopped. Yes, Mama had been a singer. Will remembered a specific song she’d sung well enough to hum the melody. I remembered it, too, once MayJune sang the words—then explained that the song was a mournful ballad or shanty song, written by Haydn Wood and Royden Barrie and popular in the 1940s. And I had other memories, vague though they were, of Mama singing to her records, even after they stopped, in her and Daddy’s bedroom, brushing her hair, gazing off into space, lost in some world that was hers alone, nothing to do with the reality of being a wife and mother in Groverton, Ohio.
“But you look just like this woman,” Jimmy was saying.
I studied the photo and wanted to say, No I don’t, to deny that I looked remotely like this beautiful, this sexy young woman, who despite the hint of doubt in her smile stared with an openly lusty expression into the camera, as if she was half-wooing, half-daring the photographer to come a little closer, to capture in full measure the desires of her being.
Surely, I wanted to say, in my most prim Grandma voice, I don’t ever look like this. But then I realized…I had. When I was posing for Mr. Cahill, the last time, my senses lost in the Boléro music and to the taste of the persimmon.
And that expression, when I’d run out to check on Will, hadn’t entirely faded from my face, even in my panic. That’s what had scared Jimmy—that I’d somehow tapped into something so primal that revealed itself on my face, while alone with Mr. Cahill, even more freely than when Jimmy and I made love. A schoolgirl crush he might have forgiven, but that look, just as I came out of Mr. Cahill’s house…
“It’s your mama, all right,” MayJune was saying. I opened my eyes, coming back to the moment. “She had Joey, my oldest boy, whose passion is photography even though he works over at the mill—well, now, of course, he’s on strike—” Jimmy blushed. He represented the epitome of what Joey and the others were striking against. But MayJune went on. “Anyway, she had him take these photos of her, first week she sang over at the Pinewood Club on the corner. Still there. You probably passed it coming here. Anyway, she said she needed some publicity photos. Sure enough, the club used them in their newspaper ad. Turn the page in the album—you’ll see.”
But I couldn’t bring myself to move. Jimmy reached over and carefully turned the album page. I stared down, saw the photo again, but printed on yellowing newspaper this time. My eyes darted to the Groverton Daily News masthead, the date—June 18, 1934, just two years before I was born—the photo, the ad copy that read, “The Pinewood Club, featuring new singing sensation Rita McKenzie.”
McKenzie. Mama’s maiden name.
I looked up at MayJune. “I don’t understand. How did you know my mother well enough that she’d ask you, ask your son—”
“Honey, your mama grew up just a few houses down. I knew her from the day she was born and I can tell you stories about her singing in the neighborhood, and singing in church, and—” she gestured at the china cabinet where she kept framed photos instead of china, and albums instead of silver, and the loose flesh of her arm wobbled. Something in her voice told me that she had known my mother very well, and liked her. “I have photos of her scattered in among my own family photos. I can show you pictures of her as a little girl, and from when she was your age, from her singing days, right up until—”
She stopped. Her soft look of sadness flashed into something sharper. “Well, up until she met your daddy.”
MayJune had taken a liking to Will and me, and was willing to watch out for us and help us, because we were the children of a woman she’d known as a child, a woman who had maybe been like a daughter to her. I understood that while she was helping us at that moment because by then she liked us just for us, her interest in Will, in us, had started because of knowing our mother. Which had to mean our mother had mattered enormously to her.
What about our mama’s family? Why did she stop singing, if she loved it so much, when she met Da
ddy? And how did she meet Daddy? I was trying to figure out where to start, what to ask first, when Trusty limped into the parlor.
“Wow!” Jimmy exclaimed. “Whatever you did sure worked. Trusty is walking already!”
But MayJune and I shared a quick, knowing glance—Trusty was not miraculously well. He’d forced himself to limp in here, his jaw stretching in a soundless howl, to get us.
I shouted my brother’s name, shoved the album at Jimmy, and jolted up from the couch, and I rushed to find Will.
Chapter 20
Four days later Dr. Marshall said, “Acute lymphoblastic leukemia.”
At the new wing of Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton he’d ordered a test of Will’s white blood cell count. He’d assessed Will’s symptoms. And his diagnosis was that Will had too many white blood cells. The most common kind of childhood cancer. The kind that was survivable for five years, at most.
I looked at Daddy and said, “But what about that clinic that Mama went to, in Florida?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw confusion snap Dr. Marshall’s face out of tightness back into sloppy folds, and a little voice in my head said, Dr. Marshall doesn’t know what clinic you’re talking about.
I pulled my hand back from Daddy’s, stared at him, saw in his face the truth I should have known all along—there was no clinic in Florida.
After I put Will to bed the night we returned from the hospital, I went into the kitchen and lined up his medicines. There seemed pitifully few for such a dire diagnosis. I put them in front of that broken-down toaster: the bottle of methotrexate tablets. Antacid for nausea. Aspirin for achy joints.
Will was to start with a week’s dose of pills: three on Monday, then one for each of the next six days. The pills, Dr. Marshall told me, were to block the body’s stimulation of folic acid, believed to promote the growth of leukemia cells, and might worsen Will’s nausea and appetite. I picked up the bottle of methotrexate again, rubbing my thumb over the label, reading and rereading “Lederle Laboratories Division, American Cyanamid Company, Pearl River, N.Y.,” telling myself that the name sounded important and serious, a place that could surely make pills that would help Will, that would buy him time during the clinical trials for new medicines that Dr. Marshall had described near the end of our meeting, after the awkward silence when I brought up Mama.
I heard a knock at our door. On our front porch, shivering even though she wore a thick, oversized sweater, stood Miss Bettina. Of course she’d come; I should have known she would. My heart jumped to my throat, but I pushed it down, down back under the ice floe that seemed to fill my chest since hearing Will’s diagnosis. Still, the cold October air made me gasp a little for breath.
That was enough for Miss Bettina. She pushed herself through the door, pulling me to her in a hug.
“Oh, Donna, I just want to talk to you, to explain. Porter told me you know that Rita—your mama—didn’t go to a clinic.” She guided me into the living room.
I sat in the chair across from the couch and folded my arms.
Miss Bettina sighed. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
Even with all that was happening with Will, I wanted to hear about Mama. The truth.
“Rita loved to sing. She always loved singing…. When we were little girls, growing up in Tangy Town, she’d sing while she was hopscotching. Sing while she was jump-roping. Sing in church. It’s the only thing that made her happy. You remember her singing—I know you do.”
She cleared her throat a few times. “Well, you remember her singing sad songs. But I remember when she sang happy songs, too. Songs that made people forget their own sadness. She sang at church. And then she started singing at the Pinewood Club. After a while, I made her outfits for her performances.”
All those fancy dresses in the basement…
“One night two men came in: Porter Lane and Roger Wilkins. We learned later that Porter was twelve years older than we were, that he’d returned to Groverton to work as an executive at the paper mill after college, and moved back in with his mother after her father died. Roger was closer to your mom’s and my age, and your dad had just hired him as an accountant. But all we knew that night was that they were handsome and interested in us. Your daddy, like every man in the place, was enchanted by her beauty and her singing. She laughed off those men—except Porter. They started dating, and so did Roger and I. We had a lot of good times….”
I pressed my eyes shut, trying to imagine a younger version of her, of my parents, of this Roger that I’d never heard of until now, trying to think of them laughing and talking…but I realized that I was just pulling scenes from movies and books. Stock photos. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t imagine them in this happy past Miss Bettina described.
“Then Harold Litchfield showed up.” Miss Bettina’s voice steeled. I opened my eyes and looked at her. “He was a producer, he said, from Chicago. Wanted to take your mama with him, make a record with her. And so, Rita had a choice—go with Harold, make that record, see what might become of her life if she focused on singing. Or marry your dad.”
“He’d already proposed? Or did he ask her after this Harold showed up?”
I’d meant to stay quiet while Miss Bettina talked, but I had to know.
“He proposed after Harold showed up, told her she had to make a choice, that if she left and came back, it would be no good between them.” Miss Bettina shook her head.
Another question popped out: “Why couldn’t he just go with her?”
Miss Bettina gave me a long look, and we both knew the answer: Grandma.
“He should have,” Miss Bettina said quietly. “But Rita didn’t hesitate a minute. She chose your father; they married. And Roger and I married. Eventually, we moved into these houses, two happy couples.” She paused, then chuckled. “Your grandma sure didn’t like her son moving out with his new bride. But your mom was so happy then. Your father gave her everything she’d dreamed of, talked about as a little girl. The best furniture. The best clothes.”
Now the furniture seemed faded and worn, out of fashion. And the clothes, well, of course I’d remade those clothes, along with Miss Bettina’s costumes.
Miss Bettina’s tone became somber again. “Rita had you, and I—well. Roger died in France in the war. He left me well-set, and I stayed put and opened my dress shop. For a long time, I think your daddy felt guilty that because of his age he was enrolled for military service but never called up.
“Your mom was kind to me, a good friend. I had trouble with drinking, and she stood by me. She was the only one who did, really. And she encouraged me to get help with a new group she’d read about—your mother was always reading the local newspaper, and papers from other cities, at the library. Alcoholics Anonymous was new here, and I was the only woman who went, so that got some tongues going, I can tell you, but it saved my life. I have your mother to thank for that.”
Tears pricked my eyes and my nose filled, but I refused to sniffle. I blinked back those tears as fast as I could, determined not to cry. Or to care. This was just information. Filling in the blanks. Blanks that Daddy, or Miss Bettina, or someone should have filled in long ago.
“And she helped me even though she really struggled after having Will. She had some difficulty after having you but snapped out of it quickly. With Will it was different.”
“What do you mean—she struggled?”
“Sometimes, honey, women get, well, blue after they have a baby. That’s how your mama was. She always did chafe a bit, after settling down. Truth be told, looking back, I don’t think she really had settling down bones in her. She thought she wanted this perfect life she’d imagined—house, husband, children—but she always seemed…restless. It just got worse after Will. Porter thought it would make her feel better to get out, to go back to the old club, to dress up, hear the music, even to sing again on Friday nights. I watched you and Will those nights.”
“You mean Grandma didn’t want to babysit so Mama could sing in a Tangy Town
bar?”
I’d meant the words to sting, but to my surprise, Miss Bettina chuckled. “No, your grandma didn’t like that one bit.”
Daddy could stand up to Grandma for Mama. But after she was gone, he couldn’t stand up for us….
And then it struck me. Yes, he had. By not letting her move in and take over, or moving us in with her. He’d let me be a mom to Will, let us stay here, next to Miss Bettina, because he’d seen that was the best thing for us. In his own way, Daddy had done the best he could by us.
Tears stung my eyes again. I dashed the back of my hand to my eyes, wanting to smack away the wetness.
“And then,” Miss Bettina was saying, “Harold returned and your mama left with him. Your daddy always believed that she would come back, and it seemed easier to tell you kids that she was sick. He thought that when she came to her senses, he could tell you that she was better.”
“But he told us she died!” My voice was shaking.
“I know, honey. Not too long after she left, he got a letter from Rita, postmarked from Shelby, Montana, Harold’s hometown. They’d gone there until Harold could get some money together to go back to Chicago to produce records. And Rita wanted a divorce. Your daddy went to see her. You and Will stayed with me.”
I remembered staying with Miss Bettina off and on, when Mama had sick spells, and while Daddy was supposedly visiting her in the Florida clinic.
“When he came back, Porter told me it was over. The paperwork was filed. Their divorce would soon be final. He said she didn’t want anything from him, but he kept sending her some money for a few years until she called him and told him to please stop…that she really didn’t want to hear from him, from anyone in Groverton.”
“Not even from Will. Or me.” My voice was taut, cold. I felt numb all over.
“Oh, honey, your dad feared you’d feel that way, that you’d think you’d done something wrong. But it was just…who your mama was. She was never going to be happy settled down. And I don’t think she was particularly happy running off. Even if the singing had worked out, I don’t think she’d be happy.”
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