The Wednesday Sisters (25 page)

T
HAT WAS THE WEEK
Arlene Peets announced she was moving to one of the big New York publishers. Kath was devastated, of course. She loved that job, loved working with Arlene, who’d moved her from copy editor to assistant, which hadn’t sounded like much of a move in the right direction to us, but Kath said if it got any better, she’d have to hire someone to help her enjoy it. “I’m busier than a moth in a brand-new wool mitten,” she said. Instead of finding typos and double-checking facts, she was reading through manuscripts, making the first cut, sitting down with Arlene over lunch to recommend which manuscripts she ought to read herself.

“I just can’t believe she’s up and moving to New York without so much as a how-do-you-do,” Kath told us.

It wasn’t as if there were a million publishing jobs to be had in San Francisco back then, either. But Kath put together a résumé, then knocked on Arlene’s door, and went in and sat down, gathered her courage, and asked for a letter of recommendation.

“A recommendation?” Arlene asked.

Kath, sure she sounded ridiculous, said, “So I can apply for a new job.”

“To work for the competition?” Arlene said. “I can’t let you do that, Kath.”

Kath looked to the piles of stacked manuscripts—manuscripts she’d spent hours on, often taking them home, reading late into the night, working her butt off for Arlene. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, she reminded herself. But all of a sudden she didn’t much care about leaving the whole world blind if it came to that. She’d like to start with that little bitch of a medical student.

“Well, that really cocks my pistol, Arlene,” she said. “Here I am working my wide rear off for you and thinking you like my work, and . . .” She stood up. She didn’t even realize it. She towered over Arlene at her desk. “You
do
like my work, you can’t tell me now you don’t! You’re just being ugly here, for not a reason in the whole damned world. You’re walking away from this place yourself, but you’re going to leave me in the lurch, with no recommendation to—”

“But I want you to come
with
me,” Arlene said.

Kath felt herself sinking into her high heels. “
With
you?”

“With me,” Arlene said. “I’m glad to see you’ve learned to stand up for yourself, by the way, Kath.
Literally.
”

Kath sat back in her chair, remembering her daddy’s voice:
You keep letting your mouth overload your tail, Katherine Claire, and you surely will live to regret.

“Don’t look so sheepish,” Arlene said. “I still want you to come with me. Yes, even after that. Good thing I stopped you before you started telling me what you really think of me, eh?” She laughed her genuine laugh, the one Kath would sometimes hear when Arlene was reading a manuscript that Kath, too, had found laugh-out-loud funny, which was the rarest of finds.

“On second thought, go ahead, look sheepish,” Arlene said, still laughing. Then a moment later, “‘Cocks my pistol’? Damn, Kath, if only my authors could express themselves half as colorfully as you!”

Kath was flattered, she really was, but she couldn’t possibly move to New York, not with Lee here. True, part of her thought that might be a great solution—move to New York and start over by herself. Leave Lee behind. But she couldn’t bear to move Anna Page and Lee-Lee and Lacy away from their daddy. And how would she survive without the Wednesday Sisters?

“Gosh, I would just about move a mountain to keep working for you, Arlene. But I can’t move to New York. I just can’t.”

“New York?” Arlene smiled, not the professional smile she pasted on when she met with the most unpleasant of her authors, but a genuine one that went with her laugh. “I’m not going to New York,” she said. “I thought you knew that. I’m opening a West Coast office. Here. And I have plans for you, Kath. Plans that do
not
include letting you go off to work for someone else.”

I
T WAS IMPOSSIBLE
to celebrate anything that spring with Hope’s fragile little future overshadowing everything in the Wednesday Sisters’ lives. How can you bear to feel good for even a moment when your friend is in so much pain? Still, when I received the
Michelangelo’s Ghost
galley proofs—my typeset novel, the way it would look between hard covers—I did feel something. I turned to the dedication page: “to Danny and Maggie and Davy, and to the Wednesday Sisters.” Then to the first page: “Chapter One.” I read the opening sentence. It read like a novel.

I thought of Ally as I sat wiping my face to keep tears from dripping on the pages. I imagined her sitting at the hospital with Hope, reading quietly to her. I imagined what her book would look like when it was set, too, after it had sold, which I decided then it had to, it really had to. And I imagined Brett’s book, too, and Linda’s stories gathered into a collection, and even something by Kath. I imagined walking into Kepler’s or Books Inc. or Stacey’s and finding our beautiful books all on the shelves. I imagined the five of us on the bestseller list, numbers one through five. I imagined myself at the top first, but then I put Ally there instead, and my own name second. I wondered if I’d be jealous. I wondered if the other Wednesday Sisters were really, deep in their hearts where they wouldn’t even admit it to themselves, jealous. I knew I would have been. I knew I would have felt the same way I’d felt watching my brothers drive off to college. Not jealous as in wanting to take it away from them, but jealous as in wanting it for myself as well.

I began to read aloud, my words in my voice like Ally’s words in hers. It’s a surprisingly different way of reading. You become more focused on the rhythms. You find all sorts of places where you stumble. You even see typos you never saw before. I remember how silly I felt at first, how I closed myself in the bathroom and turned on the fan lest Danny or the kids hear me and think I’d gone off my rocker. But then I imagined Ally reading in that intensive care unit, and I read on.

T
HE SURFACTANT
the doctors were giving Hope would not help her breathe, though no one knew that then; it would be another ten years before effective artificial surfactants were developed, far too late to help Hope. But she was one of the lucky ones. Slowly, gradually, she turned the corner, needing less and less oxygen from the machine until, finally, she was breathing on her own.

Ally had not yet done anything to get ready for the baby when she found out Hope was going to be released. She didn’t have a crib or a changing table or even diapers. We’d thought we’d have a baby shower for her, but then she’d gone into the hospital and it wasn’t clear the baby would be born alive, then if she would survive. So the minute we learned Hope was coming home, we all just started bringing things to Ally’s house. Brett brought her changing table, because she was done with it, or if it turned out she wasn’t, she could always get it back. I loaned her my crib and my baby buggy. Kath had the most beautiful little antique bassinet that she insisted Ally use for this special child of hers. We all chipped in money, too, and Linda and I went out and bought everything you could need for a baby: diapers and baby powder and pacifiers, a receiving blanket, pajamas, a cute little baby hat. And bottles. We knew Ally’s milk would have come in while Hope was in intensive care, and it would have dried up. But most mothers used bottles then, anyway. We didn’t know things like how very good that first stuff that comes before the milk, the colostrum, is for babies. We assumed the formulas developed by male scientists in jackets and ties must be better for our babies than anything we girls could produce.

So Hope came home, and Ally and Jim settled her into that antique cradle, and as you can imagine they just couldn’t stand not holding her. They picked her up again, and wondered over her the entire morning, watching her clear eyes watching them. They called her “princess” and gave her their fingers to grasp, laughing at the sounds and expressions she made. They kissed her nose, her belly, her toes. And they said over and over again, to her, to each other: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Hope.”

Late in the afternoon of the day Hope came home, a crane with a wrecking ball drove up over the curb and across the grass of the park to the circular drive in front of the old mansion. The driver got out, lit a cigarette, and stood looking up at the place. A second truck, a pickup, pulled up beside it a few minutes later. Two men joined the first and began talking and pointing at the trees and at the park around them. They disappeared around back, reappeared several minutes later, stood talking for another moment before all three loaded into the pickup and set off over the grass again. They left the crane squatting on the cracked asphalt of the circular drive that went nowhere, its wrecking ball looming over the poor old mansion’s grand columns, its peeling paint, its already-falling-down porch.

The children wanted to bring a present to Hope—her first teddy bear, they decided, since Hope hadn’t been allowed stuffed animals in the intensive care unit (too many possibilities for germs). So that Wednesday we piled everyone into Kath’s and my convertibles—Kath joining us since she had a few days off while the movers packed up Arlene’s furniture and personal files and moved them into the office space for the new publisher—and we headed for the Stanford Mall.

Of course, the children wanted to deliver the bear to Hope themselves, but even at home Hope wasn’t allowed visitors yet, especially not child-sized visitors with their runny noses and dirty hands. Linda, though, had an idea. While we were at the mall she bought one of the new Polaroid Instamatic cameras, the kind that spit out pictures you could watch develop right before your eyes, and the following morning, bright and early, we brought the children over to Ally’s front porch and waited while Ally took Mr. Pajamas—that’s what the children had named the bear, because Hope couldn’t talk yet and the poor bear needed a name—and put him in the cradle with Hope, and shot off ten pictures, squandering the entire picture pack so we could see them right away. Ally stayed with Hope to rock her to sleep afterward, but I brought the camera out to her front porch, where Linda pulled the film pack from it. We sat on the steps with the children, all of us eating Popsicles and watching the image of Hope and Mr. Pajamas arise from the little gray squares.

“She sucks her thumb,” Linda said. “I sucked my thumb when I was little.”

I had sucked my thumb, too, and carried my blanket everywhere I went. My mom used to joke about it sometimes, when I wouldn’t let go of something I wanted—a new pair of shoes that were too expensive, or an inappropriate boy I wanted to date. I wondered if Linda’s mother told her those same kinds of stories before she died, and if they would have meant as much to a nine-year-old.

“Hope sure does favor her daddy, doesn’t she?” Kath said. Which she did: she had her father’s narrow face and full mouth, and her skin was a creamy light brown that was warm and lovely even marred with newborn acne, as Davy’s had been.

“But she has Ally’s huge eyes,” I said. “Except they’re blue.”

“All newborns have blue eyes,” Brett said.

“Even Indian babies?” Kath asked.

Brett frowned to herself. “Hope is only half Indian,” she said, and I sat wondering if that would be hard for Hope, to be neither entirely one thing nor entirely another.

“She looks like Mr. Pajamas,” Brett said.

“She looks like Mr. Magoo,” I said. “But all babies look like Mr. Magoo.”

“Bless her iddy-biddy li’l heart, she’s just about nothing,” Kath said. “My babies were whoppers compared to her.”

“She looks like a miracle to me,” Linda said, and we all agreed: that child lying in Kath’s antique bassinet in Ally’s room with Mr. Pajamas, covered with the softest blanket Linda and I could find, was definitely a miracle.

An engine rumbled to life across the street as Ally joined us, leaving the front door open so she could hear Hope if she woke. Quite a few trucks had gathered around the mansion that morning, with men in hard hats smoking cigarettes and kicking at the earth. Before we knew it, the crane was swinging its heavy ball at the top story of that poor old mansion, at the windows of the room with the faded-rose wallpaper, where the piano had been. The sound of shattering windows and splitting boards joined the rumble of the crane.

The children had to be told no, they couldn’t watch from any closer, it would be dangerous, something might fall on their little heads.

“How’ll that rascal mansion ghost of yours occupy herself now, Frankie?” Kath said.

“She’ll have to find another home to haunt,” Linda said.

“Maybe she’s done haunting,” I said. “Maybe she’s found whatever she was searching for.”

“Maybe she has,” Ally said. “Maybe she can be at peace.”

We sat silently for a moment, watching the heavy ball swing back again in a long arc, almost in slow motion. It was shocking how quickly the sad old house succumbed to the tyranny of that wrecking ball. Within minutes, only a few walls of the lower floor were standing, and I was left wondering what had been done with the house’s contents, hoping the tuneless piano had found a home in a house with a little girl who would just be learning to play. Then the lower walls, too, were down, the once glorious old home reduced to a pile of rubble. It didn’t even kick up much dust in its last gasp.