“About swearing. Because she said, ‘those goddamn creeps,’ that was it, about men in show business taking advantage of women.”
“And he said, ‘Ruth, no profanity!’”
“He didn’t allow her to swear?” I asked. “He corrected her in front of people?”
“Absolutely,” Claire said. “And not only that—”
Fay said, “Claire! Let her get a word in edgewise!”
Claire ignored her. “Come on. This is Reenie. All of us, Ruth too, we thought Felicity was going to Costa Rica for field studies with her birds. Shock doesn’t begin to describe it! I may just be a Minnesota housewife...”
“Oh please, Clary, with a PhD and a standing offer from—” Fay began.
Claire, the youngest sister and clearly the favored baby, mother of four-year-old twins, retorted, “Maybe someday, when my boys are older.”
Fay said, “Ruthie was the giant brain, the jewel in the crown, even smarter than Claire, until Felicity, that is. There was nothing Felicity couldn’t do, arts, math, music, which makes it more devastating...”
“Not that we’re elitist jerks...”
Not jerks, I thought, but certainly elitist daughters of the rocket scientist and the mathematician mom.
“And imagine how it was for them when Ruth was describing herself as a submissive wife.”
Then Claire said, “There was that one time,” and Fay nodded. I was reminded of Nell and me. Sisters don’t need complete sentences.
“What one time?”
They exchanged glances, clearly not sure if they should tell me.
Finally, Fay continued. “He grabbed Felicity by the arm, not hard, but hard enough. She fell. She hit her head on the corner of the door. I will say that he didn’t mean to hurt her, he was just so big and Felicity so slight... I remember she was supposed to jump right up and clear the table, house rules, but she wasn’t doing her chores, she was all excited telling my parents about this birding trip she wanted to take, an Earthwatch trip. The boys were little, just starting grade school. They were big enough to help, but they just sat there, Roman didn’t require them to do kitchen work. What was it, Thanksgiving?”
Claire nodded.
Felicity jumped up right away, not really hurt, only upset and insulted. She ran upstairs. Nobody knew what to say. Roman began to apologize.
Fay went on, “But Ruthie’s face just went blank. Her eyes, I’ll never forget this, were black, all pupils.”
“Ruth’s face scared me,” said Claire. “She followed Felicity upstairs. The meal ended right then. Roman cleared the dishes himself. My mother helped, I guess.”
“Was that the end of it?”
“No,” Fay said. “Far from it.”
I asked, “She was still expected to jump up and clear the dishes instead of the younger kids doing it?”
“She was a woman,” Claire said. “It was that kind of house.”
That night after everybody else was presumably asleep, Fay remembered that she’d left the novel she was reading in her purse. Unnoticed, she tiptoed through the darkened downstairs hall to the coat closet but then saw that the kitchen light was still on andcaught sight of Roman and Ruth. The dishes had all been washed and put away. There was nothing on the counter except the last of the apple pie in a container. Ruth was wearing her robe—their bedroom was on the first floor—and yet she was busy with something on the stove. Retreating, hoping she hadn’t been seen, Fay flattened herself against the wall at the turn of the staircase to eavesdrop. Clearly still annoyed, Roman demanded to know why Ruth hadn’t come to bed, and why she was boiling water in her big pasta pot at midnight.
“And she said,” Fay continued. “She said...”
“What?” I prompted her.
“She said, ‘I’m going to wait until you’re asleep and then pour this on you and kill you.’”
“She said that?”
“Obviously, she didn’t mean it.”
