The Wednesday Sisters(7)

Linda said Jeff was a doctor at Stanford, and Kath said Lee was, too.

Ally told us her Jim was a lawyer at a new law firm called Wilson, Mosher & Martin. You could see in her puppy-brown eyes that she couldn't help bragging about how he had been editor in chief of the Michigan Law Review. Linda, whose brother was a lawyer, asked, “Why didn't he go to a good firm, then? One on Wall Street or in Chicago or San Francisco?” If Ally had had puppy ears to match her eyes, they would have drooped like she'd just been told there would be no walk today, but she said only, “Jim didn't get other offers,” with an edge of anger in her voice that left even Linda silent.

They'd all met their husbands in college, except Kath, who'd met Lee in high school but had gone to Vanderbilt with him.

I told them my Danny developed large-scale integrated circuits, throwing the term out as if I had any idea what it meant. He'd started at Northwestern University when he was sixteen, and he'd just finished his Ph.D., I said. I worked in the engineering school recruiting office—that's how Danny and I met, but I didn't say that. I didn't say anything that morning about how invisible I'd felt at my secretary's desk before I met Danny, with the students stopping by to check their interview schedules or drop off more twenty-four-pound linen bond résumés without so much as a “Good morning, Miss Downes,” much less a “How about that game last night, Frankie, fourteen innings of shutout lost on one lousy reliever's pitch?” I just went on about Danny's job at Fairchild, making it sound like the job of a lifetime.

We talked about Kennedy being shot then, and about whether the brain surgery he'd had that morning would save him, and what the loss of blood supply to part of his brain might mean. We talked, too, about grandparents and cousins and neighbors who'd died. None of them were parents of young children, though. That broke our hearts more than anything, imagining those poor Kennedy children left without a daddy, like John-John at President Kennedy's funeral with his little hand up in salute and no idea yet that dead meant he'd never see his daddy again.

Then Linda, who'd been strangely quiet, said, “My mom died when I was nine.”

“Heavens, you poor thing,” Ally said softly, and we all looked to our children, to where Anna Page had a whole crew digging in the sand: our gang and two boys who were often here together, one still in diapers and the other in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and a little girl with dark, loose curls and skin as pale as Ally's. Here we were, holding Bobby Kennedy's shooting apart from our own lives—he was running for president, and our own husbands would never run for president—and Linda just brought it right home, right into our safe little lives.

“Nine, gosh. That's hardly old enough to get a whippin',” Kath said, and it was clear that she hadn't known about this before, either, even though she was Linda's best friend.

Breast cancer, it was, and Linda's mother not even forty.

Linda would tell us later that she never saw her mother in the hospital. She didn't know if it was hospital rules or her father's, but she and her brothers weren't allowed to visit their mom. They'd had no warning she was going away the morning of her surgery, either, though in retrospect Linda supposes her mother's voice did crack as she hugged her and said, as she did each school morning, “I hope you have a wonderful day.” She supposes her mother even smelled different that morning—not of hair spray, not of lipstick—although she doesn't remember for sure. What she does remember is ducking out of her mother's embrace, afraid she'd be late for school. “But maybe it wasn't like that at all,” she says. “Everything about that time is so mixed up in my mind.”

Everything except the way her mother looked when she came home from the hospital. It was midafternoon, Linda and her brothers were just arriving home from school, and in their excitement they rushed toward the car in the driveway. Her father intercepted them and ordered them to wait quietly inside until their mother was settled in bed. He ushered them into the kitchen, leaving the nurse he'd hired—a big woman, scary big, Linda remembers—to help her mom upstairs while he poured himself a glass of something from the liquor cabinet. When he caught Linda staring at him—she knew there was something wrong with him pouring that drink even if she didn't quite know what—he said, “Go see your mother now, Linda. Just one at a time. All of you at once will be too much for her.”

He drained his glass. “Go on, go,” he said. “Don't keep her waiting.”

Linda remembers the weight of her legs as she climbed the stairs, the hushed scrape of her leather soles on the wood, the smell as she approached her parents' bedroom, like flowers left too long in a vase. She remembers the terror she felt as she stopped in the doorway, the look of her shoes, scuffed and dirty against the clean carpet, the lines where she'd run the vacuum before school that morning so the room would be nice for her mom.