The Peerless Four Read online

  “You’re dehydrated,” I said.

  “That’s what happens,” said Farmer.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked, and I never did find out who gave her the liquor and still wonder to this day.

  She shot me a sickened look, and then padded her way to the bathroom. We heard her drinking from the faucet. Then the noise changed to coughing. When that was done, she was at the doorway again, leaned against it, and she said miserably, “I feel so sick. My head hurts.”

  “That’s what happens,” I said, but she wasn’t listening, gulping from the faucet again. After that, she did a crouch-walk back to the bed, sat gingerly, and cradled her head in her hands.

  “Was he worth it?” I asked.

  Her head came up and she seemed to ponder the question.

  Farmer said, “Leave her be, Mel.” But then she looked at Bonnie, adding, “Well, was he?”

  “No,” Bonnie said, but I got the impression that the breadth of her love for Coach Frank impressed her.

  Chapter Five

  Slip Aways

  Late that morning, with the train pitching us forward into the bright day, puffing across its track, and after the girls had gone wild over their seats that converted into sleeping compartments, instigating an impromptu pillow fight, I sat in the lounge compartment across from Jack and said to him, “The Peerless Four. The papers are calling the girls the Peerless Four.”

  He smoked his cigarette and observed me, his body rocking gently with the train’s movement. “Can you believe that crowd?” he asked. There’d been a brass band and a preacher offering up prayers. At least five hundred well-wishers. Flags, banners, confetti, a speech from the mayor.

  Jack had yelled at the girls because Coach Sacks didn’t believe in yelling, after they’d already been shouted at for their pillow fight, chastising them for drinking soda and—“yes, that’s right, at least one of you that I know of was caught drunk last night, that’s right, drunk!”—the girls listening with bowed heads. Now there was a pleasant, chastened quiet.

  “I love trains,” Jack said. “I always feel like I’m getting away with something when I’m on one.” He smiled, his head pivoting to make sure no one was watching, passed me his smoke.

  “Like running away from home,” he said, spotting Flo and Bonnie and snatching his cigarette back before I got a hold of it in my lips.

  The train let out a whistle and he said, “Best sound in the world, lonely and happy all at once.” He contemplated me some more. “You know what that feels like, don’t you?” In case I’d missed his insinuation, he added, “Lonely and happy. You know what it feels like to run away from home, Mel?”

  I said that I did and I asked him to shut up.

  His eyes went to the window and the blur of sun and landscape. “The Peerless Four,” he said to the window. He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I like it.”

  He closed his eyes, his chin going down, and lapsed into a nap, causing a coil of jealousy to rise inside me. I could no sooner sleep in public then eat my own fist. His cigarette smoldered between his knuckled fingers, his hand at his knee. I took the smoke and finished it in four long and satisfying pulls, looking around as I did so as to make sure no one noticed. Then I watched Jack’s chin tremble at his sternum. Every now and then, he lurched, his eyelids lifting. But then he righted himself and was off slumbering again.

  I pulled a novel from my purse. Always, I had a book to read. As a girl, reading was central to my development. No one else would teach me what I wanted to know. I sneaked books that I wasn’t allowed to read, and when I became an adult, I read them in the open. I read to become wiser and then I read more because I wasn’t any wiser, and then more still. I read to find out what it was like to be a man. To be Russian, Spanish, and French, to be a different race, to be royalty, dirt-poor, a wealthy New Yorker, a homesteader or a gold miner in the pioneer West. I read for pleasure, distraction, sustenance, enlightenment, instruction, and to pass the time. I read the Bible because I was supposed to learn about God and Jesus and loving my neighbor and an eye for an eye and turn the other cheek. But the more I read the Bible, the more confused I was. So I read to find out about the universe, to discover how sex worked, how babies were born, what was moral, what was immoral. How to live. I read to find out what it was like in another’s skin. Did other people doubt, feel, and fear like me? If not, why? What was I missing? What did they know that I did not?

  So, there on the train, I opened my book, which happened to be Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. But after about five minutes, my attention strayed to Jack, staring at his hands, resting and vibrating at his knees. I thought about how we met, which was my lying to him, telling him the paper had sent me to write a profile. In truth I was done with the paper by then, tired of all the myth-making fabrications, of being directed to write about female athletes’ clothes and shopping habits rather than their skills, not wanting to be a part of the Giant Lie.

  I was in one of my worst prolonged Slip Aways—not like my childhood Slip Aways—a bad one, sleeping late and then waking to watch the day from my window. Wallace didn’t bother me, so I could lie there as long as I wanted, going over all the things I wouldn’t be doing—writing, reading, going to the moving pictures, lunching, shopping, visiting friends—letting it slide like water off my skin. Yes, during bad Slip Aways, even reading failed me, and the most I could do was look out the window. I’d continue lying there, deciding not to get up, floating above, around, inside death, similar to falling asleep, drifting, and then a door slams or a thought erupts and pulls you back, and you never die. An aimless reverie that ends not in the void, only near it.

  But this time I’d gone too far, staying in bed for days that turned into weeks, smuggling in whiskey, hiding bottles, bribing poor Patricia, our housekeeper, to collude in my deception. It had happened once before, sometime after my final miscarriage and after I’d stopped writing. I’d been working on a biography of Onata Green, a distant relative, an Iroquois female lacrosse player, and I dug a pit in the yard, burned a box of my old running shoes, so that Wallace came home to a scorched patch on our lawn and made me go see another doctor, this time for my head. The doctor was useless except for the sedatives he prescribed. The afternoon I dragged myself from bed to meet Jack, I’d been getting better, going that week to lunch with a friend, and once for a swim, and to Jack’s Athletic Club to watch the girls stretch, run, play basketball, and, my favorite, badminton, the feather-like ball jerk-floating between their racket slaps.

  That afternoon, he sat behind his desk and I sat in a chair before him, firing one indelicate question after another, notebook open at my lap, alluding to his ulterior motives, when he coughed, laughed, asked, “What kind of column did you say you were writing, Mrs. Ross?”

  “Mel,” I corrected.

  “Mel,” he said, trying it out. “Mel, Mel.” I wore a long dress that reached my ankles, and he appeared to be studying them. His eyes lifted back to mine. “Now, Mel, what kind of article is this?”

  “Why,” I asked, “hire girls that don’t know how to type or dictate?”

  “Charity?” he said, a lilting question, asking me to accept. “Goodwill?” He paused. “I can’t see your eyes,” he said, “under that hat.”

  “Do you like muscular women?”

  He grinned sourly, peered as if he could see beneath my dress, answered in deadpan: “I like all women, Mel.”

  My face heated and I pulled my eyes from him, collected my nerves.

  He lifted from his chair, went to the water cooler at the corner of his office. When he leaned forward to fill his cone-shaped paper cup, I saw that his shirt was stuck to his back.

  He slugged down about ten cups—probably hungover—before returning to his desk. He seemed to have calmed, lighting a cigarette and giving me a spiel about how his mother and sisters had been thwarted athletes. When his hockey career ended, he said, he found a new purpose.

  “Why’d you stop playing?”

  He sm
iled in a peculiar way, and then ran his tongue over his lips. His expression grew somber. “Let’s see,” he said. “Was it the arthritis in my hips and knees, or the constant pain in my legs?” He went on in this manner: It might have been because he kept separating his shoulder, he said, having to jam it back in its place. Maybe because he was either losing his bowels or regurgitating before each game, and sometimes both. Or the times he got beat up on the ice, fists coming at him. His third smashed nose. Or when he played with a broken arm, permanently damaging it, leaving it longer than the other.

  He stood, hung both arms before his chest. A visible difference of an inch or more.

  He sat again. We were quiet, and then he said that despite everything, he missed the adulation and attention. That hockey was in his blood, no matter how much he hated it, or tried to hate it. He couldn’t get it out of his blood.

  “Loved and worshiped,” he said, smiling as if looking into a bright light, “as long as you win.”

  He paused to smoke and consider, then added, “What do you do, Mel, when the one thing that you truly love, the thing that you’re most good at in the world, the one thing that you depended on and lived for, becomes the thing that gives you the most pain?”

  His face went down and he finished his cigarette. When he was done, he stubbed it out in the ashtray at his desk.

  I couldn’t take his open sadness and went back to my previous tactic.

  “Have you ever had a relationship,” I asked, “with one of your athletes?”

  He squinted at me, confused, possibly wounded.

  “Hire me,” I said.

  He brooded over that for a long time. Then he said, “What?”

  “Hire me.”

  “Now why,” he asked, “in goddamn holy hell would I do that?”

  “My husband,” I said, “is Dr. W. R. Ross.”

  “I know who you are,” he said, squinting again.

  “Do you know my husband?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll come across better,” I said.

  “I’m doing okay.”

  “Public relations,” I said. “Legitimacy. Approval.”

  He threw his hands up. “Christ, Mel,” he said.

  Though I was no bohemian, I was willing to be unconventional if it was understated and didn’t cause trouble or seem indecent. Jack hired me. Wallace reluctantly agreed to let me move out temporarily to chaperone the girls as they trained, saying that he admired my devotion and unswerving dedication to furthering the cause of females in athletics.

  In other words: he was relieved and expected me to shake off my depression. But then time passed and he wanted me home, and I said no. The only thing that I could fathom he needed me for was to re-button his vests, for he was in the habit of buttoning them up wrong. But Patricia could do that, along with providing his meals and turning down his bed. I couldn’t breathe in our house, and at least I was breathing now, but I didn’t tell him that.

  I watched Jack nap and lurch and nap. I read. He woke. We talked. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches. The girls played cards and watched the countryside. Farmer read a book on relay-race technique. Bonnie and Flo hurdled over legs stretched out in the aisle until I made them stop, and then they did calisthenics and jogged in place. Ginger and Danny met a boy on the track team named Hugh Williams, and they sat and talked. But we separated the men’s track team from our team after Flo was caught in a private room with a pole-vaulter.

  The train got quiet again, and then we arrived at Montreal’s Bonaventure Station close to midnight. Spent and tired, we listened to the mayor’s speech, and then lumbered with our luggage and boarded the buses for the short ride to the pier. There we somberly transferred to the White Star Line ocean liner SS Albertic, which loomed like a creaking monster in its dock.

  At the ship I ate two slices of buttered toast and the girls ate sandwiches and drank glasses of milk. Everyone was exhausted and nervous. I made sure the girls were safe and comfortable in their rooms, and then went to my room. This took a while. Only Farmer had been further east than Halifax, and the girls were excited and scared. There were tears and prayers and appeasements, and then I finally went to my room. I got the light turned on and a pitcher of water and a glass set up beside my bed. I took off my shoes and dress and put on my nightgown, propped myself in bed with Wharton. It had begun to drizzle outside, the rain dripping against the dark of my porthole window. The movement of the ship rocked me, blending with the earlier sensation of the train. I yawned. The words in the book floated and my eyelids began to drop.

  “Mel,” said Jack’s voice outside my door. Tap tap. “Mel, open up.”

  For a moment I didn’t answer, but he kept at it and I opened the door.

  “What took you?” He wore pajama tops beneath his jacket, tucked haphazardly into his pants.

  “Too tired,” I said.

  “Can I come in anyway?”

  He looked sad and bleary, and I said okay, just for a little bit. I went to the bed, propped myself up. He came over and took a seat beside me. Really, there wasn’t space to sit anywhere else.

  He leaned forward, poured water into the glass from the pitcher, drank it, poured another, and offered it to me. I drank. The entire time he stared at me with a deep troubled look.

  “What’s eating you?” I asked, wiping water that had dribbled on my chin.

  His face worked as though he was trying to say something important. Then he sank into himself and gave up.

  For a long time, we listened to the rain slap at the window. There was a feeling in the room.

  Then I said, “You need to go back to your room,” because I had to say it.

  He didn’t answer. He just looked at me.

  “People will talk,” I said.

  “They already do,” he said. “Don’t you know that?”

  “What do they say?”

  “They say that you and me”—he lifted his hand, intertwining his forefinger with his middle—“are like this.”

  His fingers dropped. Then his hand went to my knee and a pleading look came to his eyes.

  This was the first time he’d tried anything with me. I’d been expecting this kind of visit, but it came as a surprise anyhow.

  “All right,” I heard my voice say, and my fingers twitched as I took his hand and set it in his lap. There was still heat on my knee, even without him touching me. It surprised me. I thought I was done with those sorts of sensations. Unseemly, I believed, for a woman my age to have notions, romance being youth’s terrain. But I believed a lot of things then that I don’t now.

  “C’mon, Mel,” he whispered, leaning into me. His breath landed at my neck and my heart went soft.

  Somehow, I told him to stop.

  He did and asked, “Why?”

  “My reputation,” I said.

  “Your reputation?” he said, as if I’d given him a stupid answer.

  Tears welled, making him swim out of focus for a second, and then one broke from my lash and ran down my cheek. I swiped it and no more came.

  But he noticed and looked down. He said, “Sorry, Mel. I’ve had too much—” he lifted his flask from his pocket, shook it ceremoniously and his face stayed down. But he was using the liquor as an excuse.

  “Sometimes,” he’d once told me, in an inebriated and babbling condition, “in the mornings I don’t want to wake up.” The one thought, he said, strong enough to pull him from his bed, encouraging him to once again partake of the sweet nectar called life, was the sheer possibility of settling his face in between a woman’s thighs, tasting that far more rewarding nectar.

  Did he remember telling me? That was the way he was and I couldn’t change him. It wasn’t the perversity. I’d heard of those predilections before. I was no innocent. But I believed it didn’t matter if they were my legs or someone else’s. Women—not me—were his salve. This was what I believed.

  He reinserted his flask in its pocket. “I’ll go,” he said, looking at me with a searchi
ng expression. When I didn’t answer, he apologized while pulling himself to a stand. He paused at the doorway, a suffering pride settling over his features, said it wouldn’t happen again, he could promise me that, and then he left.

  Chapter Six

  Onata Green

  Girls who went to college like me, it was widely believed, were apt to become old maids and bookworms, a dire threat to any girl’s chance of attracting a husband and thus having a worthwhile life. The fear turned out to be valid. After the experience, many women decided not to marry. Instead they pursued social reforms and careers, especially withing the suffragist movement. But I was not at risk, as Wallace and I were already married when we both attended Lawrenceville University, now defunct, Wallace to pursue medicine, and me in the Department of Domestic Sciences, designed and initiated to create top-notch wives and mothers.

  In admitting girls into higher education, the university was working against years of bias, including journalist, historian, and academic Henry Adams, who observed “the pathetic impossibility of improving those poor little hard, thin, wiry, one-stringed instruments which they called their minds.”

  Many still believed, as Dr. Edward noted in his highly regarded 1873 tome Sex and Education, that “a girl could study and learn, but she could not do all this and retain uninjured health, and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system.” His findings were discounted by the healthful advantages of scholarship and looser clothing for physical education, part of the university routine.

  Nothing, it turned out, not even industrious domestic chores, promoted a nourishing flush to the cheek quite like the removal of a girdle and corset, several jumping jacks, and an intellectually stimulating atmosphere.

  Despite the abundance of Dr. Edwardses and Henry Adamses in the world, there I was, a college student, living in a dormitory for married couples with Wallace, Wallace rarely home.