The Bridegrooms (4 page)

“Stop calling him that.” Vada’s words came out harsher than she intended. “We are not engaged. We have an understanding.”

“But—”

“And that’s not the point. Garrison would never leave his office long enough to have lunch downtown.”

“Not even for you?”

“No.”

Hazel laid her head on Vada’s shoulder. “Sure there’s nothing you can do to convince him?”

“Oh, Hazel, feminine wiles would never work on Garrison.” Or at least she didn’t think so. She’d never actually tried.

“Please, Vada.” Her sister took her in a full embrace. “No one’s ever wanted to take me to lunch before. Please?”

Vada’s mind filled with images of ballrooms and parlors. Parties full of young people gathered around punch bowls and dance floors flashing beneath swirling skirts. All of it she remembered as a blur, as she had been the one spinning and laughing and dancing. And at the corner of her
vision, Hazel sat with a cup of punch and a cookie balanced on her lap or standing in full view, trying not to look for a partner. Her dress permanently rumpled, her hair disheveled on one side, her face clinging to dignity.

She sighed. “All right, Hazel. I’ll ask him.”

“Oh! Thank you!” She gave Vada a final squeeze before she took a pushpin and impaled the cream-colored envelope right next to Barth’s portrait.

During the week, Molly Keegan controlled the Allenhouse kitchen with a fearsome Irish fist. She arrived before dawn each morning with a basketful of fresh eggs, butter, and cheese from her family’s small farm just outside of town and spent the day clattering pots and pans, slamming cupboards and drawers—all the while singing tales of heartbreak in her thick Irish brogue.

But every Thursday night, promptly after serving the family supper, her meaty hand swiped the pay envelope from the kitchen counter and stomped out the back door, yelling over her shoulder that she’d be back Monday mornin’ if the good Lord willed it and the drink didn’t kill her.

More than once the Allenhouse daughters implored her to leave a little something bubbling on the stove to get them through the week’s end, but she always refused, saying it was a sorry lot of girls they were that couldn’t stir a stew.

So it was Vada who found herself rattling around, finding a few of Thursday’s sausage-stuffed corn muffins in a bowl covered with a blue-checked towel and the remnants of yesterday’s fish wrapped in waxed paper in the icebox. Four potatoes were left in the basket hanging above the icebox, a tin of peaches in the cupboard, and half of a blueberry cobbler in the pie safe.

“It’ll have to do,” Vada muttered to herself. She lit the stove’s burner and put a pot of water on to boil. Just as she touched the knife to the first
potato, the back door opened, ushering in the third of the Allenhouse sisters, her arms full of brown-wrapped packages.

“Althea, let me help you with those!” Vada took the largest of the packages, feeling its familiar bulk within the coarse twine. “Pork roast?”

Althea’s weary nod mirrored Vada’s lack of enthusiasm.

“And let me guess. Yams, turnips, and carrots?”

Althea silently confirmed each item on the list, and the two busied themselves stowing the vegetables in the hanging basket and the roast in the icebox until the next morning, when all would be assembled in the oven to simmer while the family was at church.

The Allenhouse girls knew how to prepare exactly four meals: the pork roast being one, followed by pot roast (with similar vegetable trimmings), fried bacon and eggs, and corned beef hash, provided they had leftover corned beef. It made for monotonous Sunday rotations, but to linger in the kitchen for the culinary tutelage of Molly Keegan meant being at the mercy of her unpredictable temper.

Vada poured her sister a glass of water from the cool pewter jug and placed it on the table before resuming her chopping. “Anything interesting come over the wires today?”

She spoke with her back to Althea, knowing full well she wouldn’t get an answer. Not that there was anything wrong with Althea’s ears. She could hear a whisper in a windstorm; she simply didn’t speak. She wasn’t a mute—not in any medical way. In fact, she had been a normal little girl, born when Vada was nearly five years old, and the older girl clung to memories of Althea’s little voice singing songs, counting pebbles, and wailing at childhood injustices. Most of all, Vada remembered the sound of Althea’s voice the morning the sisters woke up to find their mother gone.

“Where’d Mama go?” Althea had asked. “Is she coming back?”

Though Vada never asked about their mother, she had followed Doc day and night around the house, trailing his gloomy footsteps from one room to another, down to his basement exam room, and up again to the kitchen where he gave them bread and sliced cheese for supper three nights in a row.

Then on the fourth night, sitting around a table full of empty, crumb-scattered dishes, he dragged his reddened face out of his hands and looked across the table at three little pleading faces. “She’s not coming back. Ever.”

Young Vada and Hazel clasped each other’s hands, their feet swaying in tandem beneath the kitchen chairs, but Althea would not be silenced.

“But why? But where? Papa? Papa!”

Until the man rose to his terrible height. “Never!” he roared. “Never! Never! Never!” His fists slammed into the table with each repetition, making the dishes rattle and the crumbs jump off the plates. “And if you mention her again, I’ll throw the whole lot of you out to the wolves!”

That was back when the family lived in a tiny town in southern Ohio—before the ugly rumors prompted the move to the city—and their father seemed just crazed enough to toss them into the whirling snow. So the little girls fell silent and remained hungry until the next morning when Dr. Allenhouse greeted each one with a hug and a kiss and a bowl of fluffy scrambled eggs.

They’d breakfasted in silence, and for Althea, the silence continued. No amount of threat or cajoling or outright trickery could bring her to speak again. So she was the ideal employee at the telegraph office, never betraying the triumphs and tragedies that came across the wire to be typed onto precise yellow papers.

Still, Vada always asked about Althea’s day, more to fill the silence than to seek information, and she smiled when she looked over her shoulder
to see Althea running her finger along her tightly closed lips, the final say against any further prying.

“Just as well.” Vada turned her attention to the chore at hand. “There’s enough excitement around here to keep a mind busy.”

She prattled on, filling Althea in on Hazel’s newest correspondence and Monday’s lunch date, pausing only when Althea’s soft intake of breath warranted a face-to-face commiseration.

“And the widow Thomas is here again.” Vada pointed down toward their father’s office with the knife. “I don’t know why Doc can’t see through that woman. She’s no sicker than I am, but maybe he likes the attention.”

She turned to see Althea tapping the end of her nose.

“I just hope the woman doesn’t plan to be asked to stay for dinner. It’s a pretty pathetic spread we have tonight.” Vada dropped the potatoes into the simmering water, added a generous shake of salt, and put a lid on the pot. “It’ll be hard enough to stretch it for the five of us. Speaking of which…” She wiped her hands on a tea towel and squinted at the clock on the wall. “It’s late. Did you see Lisette outside?”

Althea offered an indulgent smile and shrugged one shoulder.

“Honestly, that girl.” Vada strode through the swinging kitchen door, nearly colliding with the widow Thomas in the hall.

“My goodness, dear.” The older woman reset her hat. “A lady really mustn’t charge through a room like a rampaging bull. Why, if Dr. Allenhouse were to see such behavior—”

“I doubt my father would have much to say on how I conduct myself in my own home, Mrs. Thomas.” She ignored Mrs. Thomas’s breathy retort and opened the door, swinging it wide enough to usher the widow out.

The woman’s nattering decreased with each stomp down the concrete steps. Vada stood in the open doorway, arms folded against the cool spring
evening. She intended to stay long enough to see Mrs. Thomas round the corner but regretted her decision when she saw the look on the woman’s face as Lisette turned onto their street.

The girl, as usual, sailed along in a sea of young suitors—half-a-dozen young men all jockeying for position to see who could walk closest to her, shielding her from the dangers lurking at the edge of the sidewalk.

Lisette was seventeen years old, her hair a mass of caramel curls, long and loose down her back, held from her face by a burgundy velvet ribbon at her crown. Her wide pink lips were turned down in a pout, even as her eyes, dark and sparkling, danced with mischief.

She stopped in her tracks, causing the boys who followed to nearly collide with each other in her wake, and whispered something that made the tallest of the six clutch his heart in mock agony while the others exploded in laughter.

It was at just this moment that the little group crossed paths with Mrs. Thomas, and even from this distance, Vada could sense the woman’s disapproval.

Lisette managed to hold a contrite expression until Mrs. Thomas turned the corner, but the minute the train of the unpleasant woman’s skirt disappeared, the youthful party exploded in new mirth.

“Lisette Allenhouse!” Vada shouted from the top step. “Supper’s on the table.”

The flotilla continued in strolling lockstep until Lisette had one foot on the bottom step and pivoted to dismiss her faithful tugs. “Good night, boys.” She turned her back, gathered her skirt in one hand, and skipped up the stairs. She barely acknowledged the sister who followed in her wake as she washed through the front door.

“Where have you been all day?” Vada took the girl’s straw boater with its long blue ribbon and hung it on the hat tree in the hall. “And don’t tell
me you’ve been to the library because I know that wasn’t a study group I just witnessed.”

“Honestly, Vada. You’re too young to be such a nag.” Lisette tossed the words over her shoulder on her way to the stairs.

“What about supper?”

“Ugh.” Lisette clutched her stomach and leaned against the banister. “I couldn’t eat a thing. The Britton twins were arguing over who would buy me an ice cream soda, so I had two. One vanilla and one strawberry. If I keep this up, I’ll be as fat as Hazel.”

Vada chose to ignore the comment. She’d had enough conflict for one day.

“Well then, at least come in and have a cup of tea with us.” It was a halfhearted invitation, considering how the girl was sure to ridicule the spread in the kitchen.

“Mary Winston is having a birthday party tonight.” Lisette backed up a step or two. “Did Molly press my dress?”

“Only if you brought it down to the kitchen.”

“Drat!” Lisette spun on her toe and rushed up the stairs, her hair a bouncing cascade down her back.

“Watch your language!”

But by that time Lisette was at the top of the landing, and the next sound was the slamming of her bedroom door.

Moments later, Vada was back in the kitchen, draining the cooked potatoes and tossing them with the last of the cream. Althea came up behind her and silently added salt, pepper, and a handful of dried chives. Hazel made her familiar boisterous entrance, and Vada set her to work flaking the meat off the leftover fish, which she tossed in with the potatoes. The happy find of a small tin of peas completed the dish that, in the capable hands of Molly Keegan, might have been an enticing
chowder. Instead, it was an irregular mass of gradient bits that didn’t even have the courtesy to steam as it was ladled onto the cheap daily ware plates.

“Good evening, girls.” Their father’s entrance was, as usual, without fanfare. He wore a brown rumpled suit that complemented his pale rumpled face.

The photograph of him taken upon the day of his university graduation showed him to have been handsome, if boyishly soft. Now the softness had gathered into little pockets beneath his eyes, and anything left of it was obscured behind a face full of whiskers. “We’re eating in the kitchen tonight?”

“It’s Saturday, Doc.” Vada handed a fork to each one as she took her place.

Hazel plunked the peaches—still in the can—in the middle of the plain, sturdy table. “No need to make fuss with fancy dishes in the dining room for a meal like this.”

Vada winced at the comment. “Without Molly here to help with the cleanup—”

Doc closed his hand around hers as he took his fork. “It was a simple question. No more.” He gave something just short of a squeeze before making his way to the head of the table, stopping to plant a brief kiss on the top of Althea’s head.

When all were seated, he held out his hands and, one by one, each sister grasped the other’s, with Vada stretching her arm to reach Hazel’s across Lisette’s empty place. Doc raised one thick eyebrow in acknowledgment of the absence.

“She’ll be eating later,” Vada said. “At a birthday party.”

Doc’s eyebrow nestled back into place without question, and each of the sisters bowed her head.

“Dear Lord,” he said in his usual, whispery voice, “we thank Thee for the food we are about to eat. May it nourish us to better serve Thee…”

Vada’s mind drifted from the words of the familiar blessing. She heard Lisette’s waltzing footsteps above her head as the girl readied herself for an evening of gaiety and dancing. During her father’s deep, thoughtful pauses, Vada caught bits and pieces of her sister’s breathy voice singing a popular tune. She closed her eyes tighter and tried to hear the words. Something about gliding across the floor with a beautiful girl while the band played on.

Much as he loved music, Garrison had never been much of a dancer, and for the briefest moment, Vada’s mind pictured a swirling room while she looked up into the eyes of a flirtatious journalist.

She shook her head, hoping to dispel the image, but there it stayed until a quick pinch of her fingers brought her back to her senses.

Hazel took her hand away, and the only sound to follow Doc’s “Amen” was the intermittent clicking of forks against plates. Still, it was enough to overpower the music upstairs.