Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Vanessa Russell

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1497348935

  ISBN 13: 9781497348936

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014905249

  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

  North Charleston, South Carolina

  When a woman like that whom I’ve seen so much

  All of a sudden drops out of touch

  Is always busy and never can

  Spare you a moment, it means a Man.

  Alice Duer Miller, in Forsaking all Others, 1915

  RUBY March 1964

  RUBY 4 months earlier, December 1963

  Ruby’s Chapter One ~~ December 1963

  Bess’s Chapter One ~~ December 1963

  Katy’s Chapter One ~~ December 1963

  Jesi’s Chapter One ~~ 1963

  Ruby’s Chapter Two ~~ 1910

  Bess’s Chapter Two ~~ 1920

  Katy’s Chapter Two ~~1943

  Jesi’s Chapter Two ~~ December 1963

  Ruby’s Chapter Three ~~ 1910

  Bess’s Chapter Three ~~ 1920

  Katy’s Chapter Three ~~ 1943

  Jesi’s Chapter Three ~~ December 1963

  Ruby’s Chapter Four ~~ 1910

  Bess’s Chapter Four ~~ 1920

  Katy’s Chapter Four ~~ January 1964

  Jesi’s Chapter Four ~~ January 1964

  Ruby’s Chapter Five ~~ 1910

  Bess’s Chapter Five ~~ 1920

  Katy’s Chapter Five ~~ 1943

  Jesi’s Chapter Five ~~ 1964

  BESS ~~ March 1964

  Epilogue

  Jesi is lying in a coffin and I haven’t the faintest clue why. “Move on, Mama,” Bess whispers, rustling a stack of papers. Why papers? “You’re holding up the line.” Very well. My daughter sees it and she doesn’t seem to question it. My granddaughter, Katy, is beside her and she doesn’t seem to question it. But my great-granddaughter is lying in a coffin and I haven’t the faintest clue why.

  At least they’re crying, so they haven’t totally lost their senses. But accepting it is beyond my comprehension. I want to scream, Someone, somewhere has made a terrible mistake, but honestly, having the next two generations watching my every move, anything I say is taken the wrong way so I’ll simply clam up and write this down. I clinch my teeth and cling to my handbag with all ten fingers as if its calf leather is Jesi’s arm. I see Bess’ arms extend into the coffin and lay the stack of hand-written pages to the side. I point a trembling finger to question this but my shoulders are firmly pushed and I step forward.

  I take one step and then another, forcing my body to turn away from this horrid lure as I might from an automobile accident, its image staying in front of me like a photograph. I turn to see all these faces watching me and I detest having eyes on me, always have. I look down and not a moment too soon, my shuffling takes me out of that stifling room.

  My question still hangs there, ready to submit to Bess. Finally I can be still no more. “Are we heading back to the dining room table?” I ask. I should know better than to speak my thoughts. Bess annoys me again by whispering to Katy - about me again I’d wager. Something about an embarrassing old-timer’s disease.

  Yes, I’m old. And forgetful. I’ll grant them that. I may not know why we’re here but I remember where we were. Last I recall, the four of us were sitting around the dining room table writing, and I know we haven’t reached the end of our story. I want to go back. But then, what else is new?

  And I have another question: Is this how Jesi ends her chapter of our story? She wasn’t very cooperative in writing. Perhaps she wants to show us instead. She’s played tricks before. Why one time not long ago I remember her face painted white, her long hair painted black and blending right in with the wisp of a black dress, its fluttering layers cut like the outline of a spider’s web. Her teeth had looked dingy in comparison to the white around it as she grinned at my hand at my throat in alarm. Did someone die and she was in morbid mourning, I had asked her? “Relax, G-G,” she had said, calling me by my nickname, short for Great-Grandmother. “It’s Halloween.”

  What a ghastly holiday, I’ve always thought. What in the world is there to celebrate in being frightened to death?

  Could today be Halloween, too?

  My mind connects one question to the next until it becomes one long train rumbling so loud, I can’t hear anything else.

  Suddenly I find myself outside this monstrosity of a church on the top step. Below me is a sea of black pavement bobbing with black hats and coats and black shiny roofs. I fear I’ll drown in all this black. I stop and won’t budge, like an old mule.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “For God’s sake, to the graveyard, Mama,” Bess says, but I don’t like her tone. She seems exasperated every time I open my mouth. Mercy. I declare I’ll seal my lips and dry my ink well if this keeps up, and then she’ll never get the ending to my story.

  White faces surface in front of my eyes and then submerge, always with the same grim expression and glass bottom eyes. “She was so brave … what a tragedy, the papers say … murder really …”

  Black … white.

  “The world is not black and white,” Jesi has shouted to me, to her mother, Katy, and even to her grandmother, Bess. “If it were, I wouldn’t have so many bitchy mamas and I’d have a daddy-o.” Well, I wish she was here to see all these ghastly black costumes and white faces bobbing around me; she’d see she was wrong all over again.

  But then she does make one point; these “mamas” are getting on my nerves, too. One on each side of me, hands clamped to my elbows, they force me down, one step at a time, leaving my great granddaughter behind. Elbows as bony as wings on a fat-breasted bird, nonetheless I wish to flap and fly away. Well, isn’t that a fitting ending; I’ve been that way my whole life.

  I hold my breath and go down for the count.

  Not a man to our name. In spite of that, or because of that, our four generations of daughters shall meet here each night to write “our year of awakening”. All of us with heads bent, writing diligently, as if our lives depended on it. I suppose it does, with so many sacrifices notched into the lines on our faces like a soldier keeps score of enemy kills. All in defense, of course – I believe we women only act in defense, believing all are good, until offended.

  I wish I could capture this dining room circle on a photograph; me in sepia tones I fear, faded with age with my Gibson-girl bun and high lace collar, my series of diaries ready to tweak a recessed memory. In contrast sits my daughter beside me, sixty-four-year old Bess in her no-nonsense starched white blouse and black skirt, as straight and narrow as the Prohibition Days she endured, stacked at her ready are clippings and diaries. Her vivacious daughter, Katy, sits across from me captured in 1940s Technicolor with a cut-short bold red hairdo (where do you suppose she finds this color of dye?), looking older these days than her forty-one years, and a mysteriously pockmarked leather journal by her diaries. Then there’s our rebel Jesi, Katy’s daughter, my great granddaughter, at age nineteen sitting on my right with one sheet of paper in front of her, yet no diary at all. Long hair not pinned up, hanging loose as a noose, all in a quick flash of Polaroid with the colors stirred up in a tie-dyed T-shirt. She rebels against our old-fashioned ways of woes in womanhood. We must look so dull to her in today’s times.

  The harsh fluorescent light of nowadays where so much is exposed; no longer the old ways where lives were softened and shadowed in some secret of mystery and romance in that day’s flickering light of candle and gas lamps. We’re always in daylight these days it seems, tiring my faded blu
e, eighty-two year old eyes.

  Eighty-two years. I’ve outlived my husband and lost four children to war and disease. Only we women remain. This saddens me too, and yet, how do I explain to you in my simple uneducated way that if I had a choice (which thank God we never do) and could see into the future (which thank God we never can) I would choose this same table of company to churn old memories into a solid journal. For only these ladies, my legacy, can branch out from me, understand me completely, can continue my story, painful as it may be. It is for this reason that we gather, each to tell our own personal year of awakening and link to the other, like an intricate braid or necklace; or better yet, a perennial ivy that links and binds, to bud and grow, its stem to curl and link past to future, its glossy leaves living only in the present to have its moment of beauty and then fall away leaving its roots of strength to pass on to the next in line.

  As if reading my mind, Bess leans over to me now and says, “Remember, Mama, tell all, exactly as you remember it. And, yes,” she adds to my raised eyebrows, “I shall do the same.”

  “Well, mercy, Bess, you can’t start dictating—”

  “We all will, won’t we?” she says to the other two, bless her heart, always needing to orchestrate. She narrows her eyes and stares at them intently, waiting for agreement, the only acceptable answer.

  Katy laughs easily at her mother and nods with a puff of smoke, saying “Be careful what you wish for!”

  Jesi has stopped writing, her arms folded like a mutineer, her leg’s metal brace clanging rhythmically against her chair leg. “Hey, man, you’re not tricking me,” she says to scattered papers. “You’re just doing this to try to get the scoop on my scene. You’re all too prim and proper to have anything juicy to say.”

  (Which brings me to wonder: Are we here to write what we know or to read what we don’t?)

  Ah, Jesi, if you only knew – but of course she doesn’t, no, how could she? There are things we’ve never spoken of - too prim and proper, indeed! She must be told that we all rebelled in our own ways.

  Yet we contrast, age I suppose does that and the different eras in which we rebelled. Older ones feeling superior in believing our generation was the best and thinking the next has deteriorated somewhat. Always making those on the bottom rung, like Jesi, believe they’ll never reach the top, born too late with too little, so why bother. We should be more honest with her and with ourselves. Truly look at our lives and try not to inflate and paint and exaggerate to give us more meaning. Funny how time softens the hardships of the good ol’ days; makes churning butter nostalgic when in fact it brought on blisters.

  We all want to make our mark. I disobeyed by marching in that parade of long ago, yelling at an octave I’d never used before - even to scold my sons - holding a sign high saying “Fight for Women’s Right to Vote!” My strength came in numbers, in my ladies group where we pretended to have a tea party when in fact we partied the historic Bostonian way (metaphorically of course) by using the Ladies Tea as a platform to campaign for women’s suffrage.

  (Really, why did those cowardly men disguise themselves as Indians and only throw overboard a woman’s drink? Pray tell, where was their whiskey?)

  Ah, I digress as old women often do.

  Bess on the other hand stood on her own terms. Spoke openly and aggressively – as I was forbidden to do (but I had my moment in the sun, yes!) – in front of many a microphone and man, and helped win the women’s right to vote in 1920. She seems impersonal, yes. Many don’t like her - which I take full responsibility for. I pushed her out there at the ripe old age of twelve as an extension of my weak arm, without love of man or money. She proved me right, she proved me wrong. I’ve never told her this, but I admire her strength – why have I never told her? What a personal tragic loss my daughter bore, and continues to carry like a load of dirty laundry. Sometimes I want to shake it out of her. There, I’ve said it.

  Then there’s my granddaughter: spirited idealistic Katy, who followed in her father’s footsteps and found herself in her mother’s shoes. Something happened in her year away in Georgia, opening a birth control clinic. She came back here cussing like a sailor, smoking like a chimney, and looking ten years older, just dropped off on the street by “an old coot named Jerry”. Sometimes I hear a cry in that brassy laugh of hers.

  And then there’s my great-granddaughter, Jesi. I typically sigh around her, sometimes provoked, sometimes not. She fights against us all, resenting our battles for women’s rights, yet creating her own. Her story is the saddest one of all – if she will talk about it – her handicap, I mean. I’m assuming that’s why she refuses to marry. I have yet to meet a beau of hers, though she’s pretty enough. Very sad. Why must she break all the rules? I see chicken scratches on her paper, lines crossed out, two lines remaining. She does disappearing acts and I wonder if Katy knows? (Katy now throws down her reading glasses and taps Jesi on the arm to sit still! and I catch the glare Jesi returns. Oh I do hope someday they come to terms-they seem so detached from one another.)

  Which makes me look over all these years through sepia lens and tea-stained lace and wonder: With all the freedoms we fought for and earned, there came a price, a dear price that stripped us down to my great-granddaughter’s raw nudity, emotions exposed with no sensibilities, no secrets, no coyness … no femininity. Somewhere, in winning our women, we lost our ladies.

  Ah, I’m rambling again and I’m not even sure Bess will type what I’ve written thus far. Suffice it to say I have no regrets, just occasional melancholy.

  So! Sitting around this table, I realize – we have come full circle! I shall begin where Jesi is in her thinking – in the raw. I’m not to be outdone – I have some fight in me yet. The men are gone so I shall throw my propriety to the wind! I’ll begin my sentimental journey with the “seed” of how it started: My wedding day in 1898 and its conception of my daughter. How shocking! But this might perk Jesi up … which will make Katy go red in the face … which will feed into Bess’s aggravation. Oh how I do love my girls!

  I lean toward Jesi and say, “I’ll tell you things that will make your hippie hair curl into a bun!”

  April, 1898

  Memories of my wedding ceremony are little more than blurred images. Of Robert perspiring, his wide mustache quivering, his hand shaking as he slipped the thin gold wedding band on my finger. Of my surprise that he might be as nervous as I. Men slapped him on the back as if he’d accomplished some great deed while women gave me sad teary-eyed hugs, contradicting their happy-for-me remarks. I remember the scratchy lace collar of my light blue wedding gown (women did not wear white those days, which is odd because they were certainly more virgin than women of today. Forgive me, Jesi.). The gown loaned by my mother-in-law, I remember my mama teasing me as she took in the seams around the bust that a few children under the belt would fill in above the belt. That was basically her birds-and-bees talk, along with a reference to the Bible that I must be submissive to my husband. “Your husband will teach you what you need to know.”

  Mercy.

  Vivid even now is the wedding night. Smells and sounds come first; of the buggy’s leather seat, the horse’s heat, his clip-clop on the bricked street (I rhymed!), his snorting, the rattling of his harness, smells and sounds that are long gone but can still trigger nostalgia. Next is the sight of my mother-in-law’s home as we pull up out front. I can still feel that grip of fear as I suddenly realized we were alone for the first time. All I had with me was a small carpetbag; his mother thought it best we wait until after the wedding to bring in my wardrobe. Neighbors might talk, she explained. Like mother, like son, Robert hurried toward the front door, me trailing in his steps, his eyes on the windows of the neighbors’ houses as if an unwelcomed audience is watching. This paranoia became contagious for it wasn’t long before I believed our verandah was center stage, and only came out when necessary for years to come.

  How quiet I remember the house, the ticking mantel clock sounding louder than usual as if
demanding more time. I wished it to be so; why, the dongs of the clock only chimed seven times when Robert walked up the stairs to the bedrooms, my bag in hand. I watched helplessly as he reached the top. Looking down at me he cleared his throat and said, “Well, you’re not waiting to have tea with Mother, I hope?” I could only shake my head and scratch at my itchy collar. “Then come on up the stairs. Mother is not here, I assure you.” His tone became cajoling, as one offering a present to a child. “You will get to see the upper floors.”

  And that’s when I learned to take it one step at a time.

  When I reached the top landing he said to me, “There now, Ruby, that wasn’t so bad was it?” And that’s when he began those famous last words. How many times did I hear him say that?

  I remember the window at the far end, its outside light barely visible at the end of its day. Funny. I lived more than thirty years in that house and could walk all over with blinders on, yet this first image remains most impressionable upon my mind. It’s as if this were my only way out, unreasonable to escape from there, the sun setting beyond as if closing a curtain.

  He pointed to two closed doors on the right, his room and the sewing room, and one on the left, “Mother’s chamber”. He turned and pointed up the stairs. “A large room is up that way, currently used for storage. Mother said it could be made into another bedroom someday.” Taking a handkerchief from his back pocket, he wiped the perspiration from his forehead. I wished we were on the cooler first floor having tea with his mother. Perhaps he did, too; he was fidgeting more than usual.

  I wondered what hid beyond those doors and what they had in store for me, and then I wondered if I really wanted to know. It all seemed terribly unknown.

  Unknown to me as well was a man’s body. The mortification I felt when he pulled down his trousers! Thank goodness he had the decency to turn down the gas lamp. Then and there, in the stifled dimness of his bedroom a wave of homesickness overtook me. I longed for the familiarity of my childhood bedroom of seventeen years. I’d known no other and these rooms were strange to me and Robert was a stranger. How could I possibly share a bed with a stranger? Worse than a stranger, he was my husband and that day’s ceremony had cut off my umbilical cord for good; I could never go back to my home. I was no longer Ruby Johnson; I was now Mrs. Robert Wright. This comprehension of its vows and the loss and what I’d gained gripped me and I in turn gripped the doorframe. He hadn’t noticed that my life had changed in that moment.