The Peerless Four Read online

  The medical field, as we soon discovered, had far more challenging requirements than the domestic sciences, leaving me with plenty of time to ponder, study, read, and discover other interests, and thus grew my enchantment (though Wallace termed it an obsession) with Onata Green.

  Three other girls in our department often came to my place for study sessions, but really they were informal gatherings where we smoked, drank, gossiped, argued, discussed, and philosophized.

  One of the girls always had a bottle of whiskey (hence the birth of my fondness) and a pack or two of cigarettes. Her father, much to our benefit, was a member of the Seagram’s empire, and he indulged his youngest of four with whatever she wanted, including a higher education, a sizable weekly allowance, and an endless supply of Seagram’s.

  I began to take a relish in the aroma of tobacco and alcohol that greeted Wallace on his returns: dishes stacked in the kitchen, the spectacle of a clump of my dirty underthings mingled with his in a corner of our bedroom.

  Thankfully, he was consumed in his studies and didn’t complain. “Did you know,” he’d say in amazement, stepping over a stack of my books at the floor, “that your brain is eighty percent water?”

  Once, his mother came to visit, and she sat at the edge of a faded overstuffed chair, drinking her tea in measured sips from a chipped cup, casting brittle and observant glances around the room.

  Her eyes went to a three-inch daddy longlegs working its way across our wall, and she shuddered.

  “Get it,” she said. “Son: kill it.”

  Wallace cupped the spider, opened our front door, and set it gently on its way.

  I loved him more or as much in that instant than I had when I’d said my marriage vows. I could never have predicted that our relationship would weaken.

  At one point, he excused himself to the lavatory, and his mother asked me, “Why do you allow my son to live like this?”

  “We’re all right,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything, making a sharp and discerning survey of our surroundings, her shoulders pulled back and her face tilted up. I’d dusted before her arrival and set vases of fresh-cut flowers on two tables.

  “We’re happy,” I said.

  Her lips pressed in resolve, and she said, “If you cleaned more, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

  I felt a nauseating hatred for her but I swallowed and nodded.

  “Are you feeding him well?”

  I nodded.

  “His stomach has always been sensitive to butter.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t overdo butter.”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  “Throw away those awful curtains,” she said, flinging a pointed finger their direction. “Buy something decent.”

  “Sure,” I said. I hadn’t even noticed the curtains before.

  “I’ll write a check,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  But the check arrived by post two weeks later, in my name, and without telling Wallace, I cashed the money and took the girls in my department to a feast of a dinner at the best restaurant in town.

  We stayed out well beyond a reasonable hour, laughing and eating and drinking, and when I awoke the following morning, I smiled immediately at the remembrance of the cashed check and the resultant revelry.

  Not long after, a cousin brought me a large file with letters, documents, tattered notebooks, and a rippled photograph, introducing me to a distant relative.

  “You like history,” my cousin said. “So you’ll like this. I found it at my Grandma’s, with a bunch of other stuff.”

  “Onata Green,” I said, looking at her name on the notebook.

  No one knew how the items came into her grandmother’s possession. Her grandma didn’t even remember her own name, much less the packet of memorabilia, suffering, as she did, from dementia.

  The university didn’t want the file for their historical records, she explained, and it had no financial value. “Believe me, I checked. So,” she continued, “because you’re sentimental like that, and you love to read and write, here—” and she set them on my table, gifting me.

  With my cousin watching, I pulled the photograph from the file, and immediately I tried to hide from my face that I couldn’t wait for her to leave.

  Across time, Onata Green’s sad, intelligent eyes stared at me. She looked comfortable and luxurious sitting in a chair, her black hair stacked in a messy bundle, one hand cupped upward in her lap, the other draped across the armrest. She wore a silky dark dress, revealing her shoulders, the faint outline of a necklace, a formidable body, stocky and secure.

  Onata Green died in 1886, the same year I was born, and an envelope contained her death certificate.

  She died near the farm where she took her first breath thirty-five years earlier, as the primary sentence in her journal indicated:

  I have an affidavit executed by my brother, George Green, seventeen years my senior, stating that I was born on May 21, 1851. He should know as he was sent on horseback to call the doctor to preside over the event. No governmental entity has ever, to my knowledge, taken note of my birth, though there is documentation of my mother’s death, and a certificate, for in giving me life, she lost hers; that is the reason for the affidavit.

  I survived, she did not. I have often wondered what course my life would have taken had I known a mother and father.

  Onata’s father died from typhoid six months before her birth, and three of her siblings before him in quick succession went to their graves, leaving George, who also happened to be my father’s uncle’s cousin’s son, though I never met him.

  The impulse to write came from Onata’s need to unleash feelings and experiences, and also, she wrote: “Inasmuch as I have always had difficulty recounting, I have decided to reduce my thoughts to prose so that I may be able to finish, without being reminded by George’s showing of fingers, that I have told that one before.”

  Perhaps, she mused, a wanderer might come across her words “to find and know me long after my skin and bones dissolve.”

  The urge, she admitted, was a habit connected to her troubled soul. “Nowhere else can I unfold my inner life with freedom.”

  After graduation, after Wallace established his practice as a doctor, and after we moved to our home, I returned to Onata Green.

  I decided to write her biography.

  I visited the farm where Onata was raised, looked at photographs, collected information and facts, until I felt that I knew Onata Green and her beloved brother George.

  I didn’t finish, though I have a detailed working outline.

  My incomplete Onata biography became indistinguishable from my stunted athletic career, and eventually I gave up on running, on babies, on myself, and on Onata.

  I got this far:

  Start at the beginning, at the farm, which, Onata had been told, had been purchased by her grandfather, who took title from the government, and who later lost his life after a drunken brawl, clobbered on the back of his head with a shovel by the same sober foe when he was turned and unaware, drinking from a water spring.

  Her grandfather married her grandmother to help with his primary concern: building a log house and settling. Wood was plentiful, and a stream—too small to have a name—ran through the home place.

  Her grandparents were religious and her brother George once said that Revelations was her grandmother’s favorite book of the Bible. Onata wondered why, for she found it lacking, except in its vivid images.

  Onata didn’t know her maternal grandparents, but George told her stories. She was named after her maternal grandmother. The grandparents used to make regular calls when her parents had been alive.

  The grandfather always had an apple in his pocket, but took his time about giving it to George. He wore leather pants when he was young, and he liked to proclaim that this was how he attracted Grandma Onata.

  On cold mornings, he would drag the pants into bed to warm them before putting them on.
He courted his future wife, though she lived eight miles away, which was really getting around in those days.

  He was especially impressed that Grandma Onata could play a guitar and a mouth organ at the same time, the mouth organ held by a frame around her neck. She was part Mohawk and sometimes wore a stovepipe hat.

  A remarkable woman, with ideas way ahead of her time, Grandma Onata took George to a lecture about sex matters, given by a woman. It was a very embarrassing experience, and he didn’t like discussing it.

  Grandma Onata held the shocking notion that women’s legs should not be hid any more than a man’s. She insisted on piloting the horse buggy, and she taught George table manners that stood him in good stead.

  Once, when George was four, Grandma Onata was seated in the buggy talking to George and Onata’s mother, who was standing alongside. George asked, “Where’s your whip?” and Grandma Onata raised her right hand holding the whip high. The whip had been out of sight on the other side of the horse.

  George always liked her for that silent reply. In her honor, he tried to interact with children as equals, and without an adult’s standard patronizing manner.

  As Grandma Onata got older, and after her husband died, she became more peculiar. She wore her husband’s pants underneath her dresses, and she walked circles around the house, walked and walked, so that she wore a path in the dirt. She continued to drive the buggy, sometimes veering close to the trees.

  Once, a squirrel ran across the road ahead of them, and Grandmother Onata handed George the lines, jumped from the buggy, then over the fence and into the woods, picking up a stick as she ran toward the tree where the squirrel was headed.

  When she reached the tree, she hit around blindly and killed the squirrel. She brought it back to the buggy and made George hold it by its tail because, she said, it might come alive.

  So he did, all the way home, and then he buried it.

  Shortly before Grandma Onata died, she told George what had happened to her as a young girl of thirteen, years before she met her husband.

  One morning, George built a fire in the fireplace and asked Onata to sit so that he could speak with her. When he told Onata, she could tell that it was important and that he’d been struggling with how to let her know.

  He said that what Grandma Onata had told him was a vulgar story, and that it troubled him to speak it aloud. But he also believed it would help Onata through her life, knowing that her grandmother was fierce and that Onata carried her not only in name, but also in blood.

  George was right: it was this story that shaped and strengthened Onata.

  George was thirteen when Grandma Onata told him what had happened to her at the same age, and because he was so young, and because the story shocked him, he could not remember the circumstances that had led Grandma Onata to be captured by a soldier and help captive deep in the woods.

  The man had had his way with Onata and was resting near the campfire, naked, except for his revolver hanging from its holster at his hip. He’d held a knife to Onata’s throat and sang in her ear while he violated her, just cutting at her skin so that her blood dripped down her front. She was tall for her age, almost as tall as the soldier, and brown as a tree. He drank from a bottle and ate grilled rabbit meat, and he told her, between bites, that when he was done with her, he would kill her.

  Onata sat naked with her knees pulled to her chin, blood dribbling. The fire popped and the soldier reached for a stick, shuffling the wood in its pit, mesmerized by the dancing flames, crouched with his back to Onata.

  In a stealth quiet duck walk, she moved to him. When he bent forward, she reached and seized the dark mass hanging between his legs, twisting in a vise-like grip. A noise issued from him like an animal, and he hurled forward, missing the fire, curled into a ball. She ran and ran and ran and ran and heard the distant report of bullets and never saw him again.

  The image of her grandmother reaching and grabbing the naked soldier’s genitals came to Onata with frequency, at times both trying and easy, and whether she beckoned it forth or not.

  When Onata was seven, George courted and married a woman named Lulu, and they raised Onata as their own, and had four children besides. Onata was prone to reminding them that they weren’t her real father and mother. Lulu’s father was a wealthy bank owner, and George worked for him but continued to farm.

  One of Onata’s earliest memories of Lulu was when Lulu took her to the city to buy her better dresses. Onata became sick on the train and vomited in the aisle, and a porter had to clean the mess.

  She also remembered George taking her to town. One time, Lulu told him to bring home eggs. He was a great jokester. He bought hickory nuts and sent Onata home with them, telling her to say to Lulu, “Here are your eggs.”

  Either because she was so truthful, or because she was afraid to lie when the proof was so immediate and convincing, or because she didn’t want to participate in a farce, Onata said, “Here are your eggs but they are hickory nuts.”

  Onata frequently got into trouble. She cut the other kids’ hair; she put Lulu’s knitting needles in the sofa, and George sat on them; she baptized the kids in a bathtub, saying, “I baptize thee in the name of Onata, the son, and the Holy Ghost.”

  During Onata’s fourteenth year, Lulu died of consumption, and George remarried Lulu’s younger sister, Ida. The sisters had made the arrangement before Lulu’s death. Onata didn’t approve of the quick change, and Lulu’s passing brought forth the devastation and deprivation Onata felt at not having known a birth mother or father.

  At fourteen, she grieved! Often she went into a corn patch in the orchard and cried. Once, George found her with her face buried in a dishtowel, sobbing, and they both grew alarmed because she couldn’t stop.

  When his kind words and sympathy didn’t help, George reminded her that he, too, had lost his parents and siblings, and that she did not have a dominion on grief, and she finally was able to dry her eyes.

  By her fifteenth year, she shifted into a deep rebellion and took to protesting ideas of proper behavior. She disappeared often, most notably from church on Sundays. Clever in mind and body, quick to learn and graceful, she joined a boys’ lacrosse team, until she was discovered and banished.

  George had trouble keeping her at school. She was a wandering girl, and they never quite knew where she was. In frustration, George sent her to a Quaker boarding school for girls, ten miles from the farm.

  At this time, there was an explosion in her heart.

  Life made no sense, and she understood that sanity was as feeble as life itself. Death came to everyone and seemed a reprieve. She began to fantasize. She would look at the mountains and think, The mountains will be here tomorrow and I will not. Yet fear kept her from suicide, and even more, the thought of Grandma Onata, her namesake. She was connected, and it was Grandma Onata’s blood that kept her alive.

  She became sick with pneumonia and was sent back to the farm in a very dangerous condition. George cared for her, spooning medicine and soup in her mouth and giving her clandestine sips of whiskey. Ida went to town and brought back ice, feeding her ice chips. These kind deeds almost undid her.

  Her convalescence began, and each day, she gained strength and stamina. One morning she woke to the sun breaking through the curtains, filling the room with a greenish gold, and her heart luxuriated in the sweetness of its survival. She wanted to live again! She went to the window and watched the beams swaying through the thick foliage of the sugar maples.

  Onata learned how to give herself to the currents of life, without demanding anything, and without thinking about tomorrow, or the day before.

  It was not long after her seventeenth birthday that she met Edward Nedlan at a dinner party, and terror blazed through her like a fire, just from his look. It was mutual. They sat across from each other at the table, throwing stares. She was fully grown, and although not beautiful, she found that her dresses suddenly needed more room up top. Her corsets had tightened and were bursti
ng from the heft. Men looked and their eyes stayed, and she knew that she gained a power hitherto not in her possession. They weren’t looking at her face but at what was directly below.

  Though married, Edward was alone that night, his wife home with the flu, and he passed Onata a note, asking her to meet him the following afternoon at a park. She didn’t consider not showing. She saw him standing near a rose garden, and when she went to him, she felt as if a coal were burning inside her, its ashes having been blown from it.

  The Onata women were tall and substantial. He was a full head shorter and of lesser weight. He remarked on the difference, saying that she might want to pat his head like a child, even though he was her elder by seven years. But she could tell that it attracted him.

  They sat at a bench and talked. His voice was soft and husky, and it burrowed inside her, so that even as he spoke of tame topics, she felt as if he had his hand inside her corset, at her skin, and was rubbing there.

  He wore his hat turned down at the front, shading his face, a line of shadow halted at his lips. “I can’t see your eyes,” she commented. He removed his hat. Oh! What a man! What a face! Wide-open, ravenous. She watched his lips and nostrils bringing in air, and she wanted him to breathe her through him and take possession.

  His head was large in comparison to his body, with lips soft in a continual pout, more accustomed to melancholy than joy. His chin square and strong, and his skin brown from sun, a red-brown at the back of his neck, from bending forward mid-row, sun striking. His hair was black with a purple-oil sheen, and he fingered it, pulling it from his forehead, although it retained a bump from his hat-line.

  She could tell that his muscles were tight and compact, his thighs most pronounced, flexed against his pant legs. His shirt was of a thin white material, so that his dark chest hairs barely showed beneath, like the blurred lines beneath the ice in an ice rink. His smell reminded her of her childhood dog. She loved to bury her face in the dog’s fur, for it comforted her with its dirt and animal odor.