Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1921
June hadn’t made it all the way out to the living room before realizing that the wool tam-o’-shanter was a bad idea. Her forehead itched from contact with it. She was just about to go back and take it off when she heard John ask Ruth what she liked to read.
She couldn’t help herself—she was proud of her quirky little sister. Ruth was the smarter and the braver of the two of them. She read at least a book a week. And she had once whacked Mr. Horn with a broom! Her hero! But Ruth had become reclusive and surly since June had gone to art school. For no apparent reason, her already sharp tongue was growing barbs. It hurt June to think of her bold little sister becoming a sour old spinster.
“She’s a fan of Sinclair Lewis,” she called out. When Ruth scowled, the nut, June added affectionately, “And other hotheads.”
“Hot head, hot heart.”
She was surprised to see John watching her sister. She stepped forward and put her hand on his arm.
“What are you going to do when you grow up?” he asked Ruth. “Are you going to do something with all that reading?”
June took his hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go.”
There was a delay before he glanced at her and squeezed back.
He held her door for her. She savored his warmth as she passed under his arm. She shouldn’t be falling for him. She had worked too hard to get where she was—Odd Dorothy’s daughter, going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and living in the fashionably bohemian artists’ colony north of the Loop called Tower Town. All right, she was living in a charitable women’s club just outside of Tower Town, but she had flown from her dreary childhood home and had plans. She couldn’t be slowed down. Meeting John when he was visiting Chicago from his farm on the Indiana-Michigan line, and liking him, too much, had not been part of the plan.
They trampled across the tiny covered porch and down three wooden steps, the buckles of her galoshes jingling, and then landed on the shoveled walkway to the street. The metallic creaking of swings filled the frigid December air.
Until the age of five or six, June thought nothing of having a brick fortress across the street from their house. Hers was set among knobby pines that bled milky sap and was guarded by an eight-foot-tall iron fence to which the residents of the castle clung in all weathers—when they weren’t standing in the middle of the play yard or pumping away on one of the eight vulcanized-rubber swings. Behind the swinging residents loomed the palace power plant, with its shining mounds of coal and a cylindrical brick chimney as tall as a princess’s tower. But Rapunzel’s golden tresses did not cascade down from the tower-top, as much as June imagined in her daydreams for it to be so. Most unregally, the smokestack belched sticky soot, which settled over the neighborhood in a fine black web, including on her bedroom windowsill.
On occasion, an older resident would escape, his or her identity tipped off by the hospital gown or, in the case of one memorable fellow, an ensemble consisting solely of brown work shoes. When word got out that an inmate was on the loose, neighbors went inside and locked their doors, as if retardation was catching. Only her mother, contrary in all things, went outside as if to talk to the escapees, although she could never get one to stop for her.
When June was seven, she had been stripping the privet bushes in her yard of their tiny pretend-grapes when two women on bicycles came puffing down her street. She lowered her chipped cup, suspending her game of “little lost child” long enough to stare. Look at the pretty ladies in their white shirtwaists with black neckties! Look at their big balloon sleeves—why, they’re bigger than their heads. And look at the size of their straw hats. You could keep a litter of kittens in them.
“Isn’t she cute?” one of the ladies said to the other as if June were not right in front of her and couldn’t hear.
“Poor thing, how does she stand living across from this place?” said the other.
“Poor baby!”
“I wish I had a penny to give her.”
June’s cup hung from her fingertips, its contents forgotten, as they pedaled away. Until that moment, she’d taken the fortress across the street, the spewing smokestack, and the moaning residents as much for granted as the grass in her yard. It was just there.
But now she knew. The Fort Wayne School for Feeble-Minded Children was not nice. Living within view of it was not nice. She herself was not nice. She’d had an inkling that her mother was not nice—no one outside of the family would ever talk to her—and she knew from their Sunday drives down Forest Park Boulevard that her family was not rich, or even special, but she understood now that she was as pitied as her mother.
She had no school chums over after that—maybe a boy or two, later, in high school, to challenge how much he liked her. And then she would break up with him because he knew too much.
Now a cloud crept over her spirits as she picked along the ruts in the soot-capped snow with John. Behind the spiked iron palings, residents milled aimlessly, some stopping as abruptly as windup toys. A lone student determinedly cranked a swing.
John waved. The student, a thick young woman in a gray coat buttoned all the way down to her work shoes, clung to rusty chains and stared.
He saw June’s expression. “What?”
“No one ever does that.”
“Does what?”
“Waves.”
“Waves to the kids in there? Why not?” He waved again as if to make a point. The young woman’s thick features slowly animated as she lifted her fingers.
He saluted her before turning back to June. “Poor kid. If we ever have a child like that, we’re keeping her at home. We are not going to institutionalize her. Agreed?”
A swift pang jabbed her. He assumed she would be part of his future, his wife, the mother of his children. But she couldn’t be. As much as she adored him. As much as she felt secure and happy and like her true self around him. She was going to be somebody. No matter what. And he was just a farmer.
She waved at the girl, who grinned as if she could not believe her good fortune. “I would never put a child in there,” June told him.
She did not say “our” child. She glanced at him, loping through the snow next to her. Did he notice?
She hadn’t told him why she couldn’t marry him. He hadn’t even asked her yet. But he would. They both knew he would. She had never both wanted and not wanted something so badly in her life.
A pounding came from the direction of the schoolyard, and kept up long enough for them to locate it. On a third-story window of the institution, a girl was beating on the glass, her face mashed against the pane. She slid down, making a snail’s trail with her lips, and then was snatched from sight.
“Good Lord!” John cried. “Shouldn’t we do something?”
“You think that there’s something you can do?”
He frowned at June then back up at the window. “So we’re just supposed to give up? We see things we don’t like, and we’re just supposed to forget them?”
June started walking.
“June, wait.” He caught up with her. “Are you all right?”
She wasn’t all right. There was something terribly wrong with her. He wouldn’t want her if he knew. She was damaged, empty, unlovable, and unloving. Her mother was incapable of love and now she was incapable of it, too.
He put his arm around her. She tipped her head against him.
Please. Don’t give up on me.