Drowning Ruth Read online

  “COMPELLING …

  The immediately impressive thing about Drowning Ruth is not the author's talent, though that is apparent within the first few pages, but the ambitious narrative scheme she's devised to tell her tale.”

  —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “Schwarz pays meticulous attention to her characters… Drowning Ruth offers tender gifts—the shore, the lake, the island, all keeping their own mysteries.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “The real power of Schwarz's narrative is her characters, whose tortured self-examinations evoke empathy and engage the reader in meditations about unconditional love, self-imposed parameters of happiness, and sadly, a manufactured sense of home that has more to do with obligation than with love or belonging.”

  —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

  “Captivating … Not only a tantalizing tale, but also a commentary on the precarious balance of weakness and strength and good and evil in the human soul.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “[A] page-turner … A tale all the more disturbing because it is unmistakably human… It remains gripping to the end.”

  Please turn the page for more reviews …

  —The New York Post

  “[A] HAUNTING DEBUT …

  The perfect read for a stormy night …

  filled with simmering family secrets.”

  —Marie Claire

  “An absorbing tale in which, remarkably, the suspense comes from the unfolding of its characters—people as complex and surprising as anyone you might actually know… When the cracks in Amanda's fiercely protected life begin to widen, the secrets that seep through defy expectations, and most readers will be entirely under Schwarz's spell.”

  —Salon.com

  “ ‘Ruth remembered drowning.' The first sentence of this brilliantly understated psychological thriller leaps off the page and captures the reader's imagination… Schwarz deftly uses first-person narration to heighten the drama. Her prose is spare but bewitching, and she juggles the speakers and time periods with the surety of a seasoned novelist. Rather than attempting a trumped-up suspenseful finale, Schwarz ends her novel gently, underscoring the delicate power of her tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “An engrossing read from a writer to watch … With quietly powerful prose and carefully nuanced description, [Schwarz] creates a satisfying fictional world inhabited by complicated people painfully coming to terms with their common history.”

  —Kirkus Review (starred review)

  “Recommended … A gripping tale of sisterly rivalry, family loyalty, and secret histories.”

  —Library Journal

  To Ben

  and in memory of

  Louise Baecke Claeys

  (1902 —1999)

  and Marfa

  Acknowledgments

  I am infinitely grateful to Caitlin Flanagan, who has been unstintingly generous with both her trenchant editorial advice and her friendship. Were it not for the reward of reviewing pages with her, I would have quit many times over, and if the plot of this novel is in any way compelling, it is owing to her good sense. I also thank Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, who, with supreme competence and confidence, did for me what I never could have done for myself. She and Deb Futter, whose keen eye spotted the holes I'd missed, utterly changed my life with their commitment to this book. Linda Rudell-Betts helped me to begin and saw me through. Mary Ewens Meyer supplied me with myriad details about life on a Wisconsin farm and lake in the 1920s and '30s, and Jennifer Stuart Wong shared her psychological insight. Timothy Audley, Kathleen Buster, Anthony Meyer, Nicholas Meyer, Sue Parilla, Ann Schwarz,Carol Waite, and Barbara Wallraff all gave me the benefit of their knowledge in subjects ranging from farming practices to pregnancy. I'm grateful to Alan Buster for telling me to quit my day job, to Thomas Flanagan for his kind encouragement, to Brian Morton for advice on the first chapters, to Barbara and Carol Facul-jak for their enthusiastic reading of early drafts, and to Shelley Wall Reback for her decisive response to a crucial plot element. I'm indebted to Mitchell Duneier, Mira Kamdar, Henning Gutmann, Linda Kent, again to Caitlin Flanagan, and especially to Silvana Paternostro and James Chace for helping me find the right agent, to Belinda Cooper for clean copies when my printer rebelled, and to Mona Simpson for vouching for my sanity. Most of all, I thank Benjamin Schwarz, without whom I would neither have begun nor finished, and whose editing made all the difference. He is, among other fine things, the best reader I know.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Ruth remembered drowning.

  “That's impossible,” Aunt Amanda said. “It must have been a dream.”

  But Ruth maintained that she had drowned, insisted on it for years, even after she should have known better.

  Amanda

  Of course I lied to Ruth. She was only a child. What should I have said? That her mother had been reckless? That I'd had to rescue her, give her new life, bring her up as my own? There are things children are not meant to know.

  I suppose people will say it was my fault, that if I'd not gone home that March in 1919, Mathilda, my only sister, would not be dead. But I did go home. The way I saw it, I hadn't any choice.

  “March 27, 1919.” That's a good place to begin. That's what I wrote in the top right corner of the page. “Dear Mattie.” The pen shook as I raised it, splattering ink. “March 27, 1919,” I wrote on a fresh sheet. “Dear Mattie.”

  In the end, I didn't bother to write. I knew I would be welcome. After all, Mattie had been begging me to come home for months. And what could I say? I had no explanation. No explanation but the truth, and I certainly didn't want to tell that.

  The truth was that the hospital had asked me to leave. Not permanently, of course.

  “Of course, we don't want you to go permanently, Miss Starkey,” Dr. Nichols said. It wasn't clear whom he meant by “we,” since he and I were the only ones in the office. It made me nervous knowing there were others who had talked about me, perhaps whispering in the hallways, ducking around corners when they saw me coming. They probably gathered in this very office, sipped coffee, shook their heads and tut-tutted me. Who were they?

  Dr. Nichols moved some papers around on his desk. He did not look at me. “When this is over …” He cleared his throat. “When you're yourself again, then we'll reconsider.”

  He was referring to my hallucinations, I believe, although it may have been the fainting or even the accidents. He studied the desktop for a moment and then sighed, saying almost kindly, “You'll feel much better away from this stink, believe me.”

  There was a stink in the hospital. A literal stink of gangrenous flesh and vomit, of ammonia and burnt oatmeal and camphor, of urine and feces. But a nurse gets used to the smells and the screams, and the sight of the men missing pieces of themselves.

  And I was a brilliant nurse. I had the touch; everybody said so. The men worshiped me. Those with faces lifted them toward me when I bent over their beds. Those with arms held them out.

  I loved being an angel. But I had to give it up.

  Dr. Nichols had a point. Somehow, I had lost control. One morning I woke up sure, absolutely positive, that my legs had been sawn from my trunk, and although I quickly realized that I had only been dreaming—my legs were right there, two ridges under the blanket—I couldn't move them, couldn't rise no matter how I tried. My roommate, Eliza Fox, had to pull me out of bed. Another time, I'm ashamed to say, I actually fainted across a soldier's chest while giving him a sponge bath.

  Several times I had to run from the wards to vomit. My insides spewed out every morning, into bedpans and janitors' buckets and hastily twisted newspaper cones and the snowdrift behind the hydra
ngea hedge. Twice I lost the hearing in my left ear, and once I spent four hours sitting in the stairwell, waiting for my sight to return. Syringes flew out to stab my arms; glass vials shattered in my hands; file drawers pinched the tips of my fingers.

  I forgot soldiers' names and the purpose of errands. Three days in a row I locked myself out of the room I shared with Eliza. And always I was so tired, so very tired, that I simply could not stay awake, no matter how often I splashed water on my face or how much black coffee I drank. Finally, I surrendered and fashioned myself a nest among the towels in the supply room. I slept there every afternoon from one-thirty to two until the day Ward F ran out of soap, and Frances Patterson was sent to get some. Altogether, I had to admit they were right—I was beginning to make a better patient than a nurse. My body had got the better of me and could no longer be trusted. To tell the truth, I didn't know myself anymore.

  And so I agreed to go home, not to the Milwaukee boarding-house full of unmarried nurses where Eliza and I had carefully divided the freezing, mustard-colored room into her side and my side, but back to the farm where I had grown up, where the snowy hills were white as bleached linen and where my sister rocked her little girl to sleep beside the kitchen stove while she waited for her husband to come back from the war. I knew that, at home where I belonged, I could set myself right again.

  Outside the train station, I drew the city's breath, yeasty from the breweries and bittersweet from the chocolate factory, into my lungs and felt better already. My grip on my bag was tight. I wasn't late or excessively early. And now, for the first time in weeks, I was hungry, ravenous, in fact. I went into the station and stopped at a counter to buy myself a bag of peanuts with extra salt and a cup of coffee that didn't burn my tongue. When I'd finished the nuts, I was still hungry.

  “Would you wrap half a ham salad?” I said. “No, better make it a whole. And some of that chicken. And maybe a piece of pie. The cherry, please.”

  Someone down the counter was drinking a chocolate milkshake that looked awfully good, and I was tempted to order one of those.

  “That's what I like,” the counterman said, punching numbers into the register, “a woman who can eat.”

  So I changed my mind about the milkshake. As I was paying my bill, they called my train.

  “One way, miss? Goin' home?” the conductor asked, steadying himself with his hip along the seat in front of me.

  I nearly began to explain that it wasn't right, really, to consider it home any longer, even though legally the farm was half mine. Really it belonged to my sister now, since she lived there, had a family there, and I was just going back for a restorative visit because somehow my body had taken on a life of its own. I wanted to confess that I'd been banished because I had failed as a nurse, because no one, including me, believed that I could coax soldiers back into proper shape when I was such a mess myself. But it isn't in me to say such things out loud.

  “That's right,” I said.

  He winked. “Tickets!” he bawled and lurched away down the swaying car.

  Spring meant even less in the country than it did in the city that year, and by the time we pulled up to the icy little platform in Na-gawaukee, the sky was heavy with unfallen snow. The wind bit at my face, so that I had to duck my head. I watched the toes of my boots as I stepped down the slick platform stairs and picked my way over the snow that drifted across the street in long pulls like taffy. My steps took me one, two, three buildings down from the platform where I stopped at the door of Heinzelman's Bait and Tackle—“A Dozen Grubs for a Penny.” I went in.

  The bell over the door jingled, and the coals in the corner stove gave an answering glow to the sudden draft. Then the curtains behind the counter parted, and Mary Louise Lindgren emerged from the back room. She smiled when she saw me, beamed, you could say, and wiped her hands on her apron front in that nervous way she had, as she hurried toward me.

  “Mandy! What are you doing home?” She put her hands on my shoulders, pressed her cheek against mine. “Ooh, you're frozen, a block of ice!” She held her warm palms to my face for a moment and then grabbed hold of my wrist and gave it a little tug without pausing to let me answer her question. “Come over near the stove. I can't believe it, just can't believe it's you! I wondered—when I heard the bell—I wondered who would be coming in at this hour, and I thought, It's probably Harry Stoltz, but, of course, it couldn't have been, because he's over in Watertown, and then I thought …”

  She would have gone on about what she'd supposed and what she'd thought after that and what she'd done next, but I interrupted. “I'm taking a vacation,” I said, “a rest.” It was true, in a way.

  “Mathilda is going to be so happy!” She frowned. “But why didn't she tell me? She was in here only two days ago.”

  “Mattie doesn't know.”

  That was all I needed to say, because she broke in immediately.

  “A surprise! How wonderful! And, Mandy,” she leaned toward me and lowered her voice discreetly, though there was no one else in the shop to hear, “I have a surprise too.” She waited until she was sure she had my full attention. “George and I may have a little one.” She patted her apron front significantly.

  I didn't know what to say to this. Mary Louise had been pregnant every one of the five years since she and George Lindgren had been married, and she had lost all five of those babies, each when it was several months along. A person ought to know when to give up, I thought; a person ought not to court disaster. At the very least, she should be wary. She should hold some of her feelings back. But Mary Louise was incapable of reticence, and she didn't have the advantage of scientific training, the way I did. She always acted as if nothing could possibly go wrong, as if this child's birth were written in the stars, and she need only wait for the blessed event. Only her hands hovering protectively over her belly betrayed the worry underneath. What she thought was growing could so easily amount to nothing at all.

  “It feels different this time,” she said defensively, although I hadn't expressed my concern.

  “I hope so.” Really, what else could I have said?

  We agreed then that I should be on my way while there was still light. A few steps from the store, knowing she would be watching, I turned to look back. She held up her hand and, as I mirrored her, I thought of the time when we were just alike, Mary Louise and I, both happy to be finished with school for the day, running and sliding along this very road, scanning the tower of St. Michael's for the lantern light that we believed signaled the escape of a lunatic, talking about why Netty Klefstaad wasn't speaking to Ramona Mueller, and how we knew Bobby Weiss had cheated at spelling, and what to do with the penny after you'd rubbed it on a wart, and sometimes singing.

  Of course, that was before Mattie. By the time Mattie was old enough to go to school, Mary Louise and I walked this same road decorously, with our books squeezed tight against our chests, but Mathilda ran ahead, pitching herself into snowbanks, as we had once done. “Watch me, Amanda! Watch, Mary Louise!” she'd call. Or she would linger behind to study the snowflakes patterning her mitten and summon me back imperiously. “Mandy, look at this one! Hurry up, before it melts!”

  I could never make my sister understand that Mary Louise and I had important matters to discuss. For five minutes or so, Mathilda would stay by my side, cocooned with me in a wool shawl, but inevitably she'd pull away and run and slide until she exhausted herself and begged me to carry her. “Piggyback!” she demanded. Yes, demanded, although she was much too heavy. “You're too big now, Mattie,” I protested. I sighed. I rolled my eyes at Mary Louise, whose eight brothers and sisters were never so much trouble, even all together. But Mathilda stamped her foot. She wailed and clung to me, so that, eventually, I bent my knees, and she jumped on my back and wrapped her arms around my neck, tight enough to strangle. Mathilda was always interrupting, always demanding, and I always gave in. I always did what she wanted. Always. Except that last time.

  When Mathilda was born, I w
as eight years old and not, in the neighbor ladies' opinion, a promising child.

  “What a beautiful baby,” Mrs. Jungbluth said as she and Mrs. Tully and Mrs. Manigold crowded around Mathilda's cradle and cooed over her pretty lips, her lovely chin. With seventeen children among them, you'd have thought they'd seen enough babies. But Mathilda, apparently, was special.

  “Amanda'll be jealous, won't she,” Mrs. Tully said, “to have such a pretty little sister?”

  But my mother said, “No, Amanda loves her sister.” She laid the baby in my lap to prove it.

  Why would I be jealous? Mathilda was mine. The baby that everyone wanted for herself belonged to me.

  A photographer came to the house to take a picture of us on the day of Mattie's christening. They put me in the big green chair—already, my legs were long enough to touch the floor, if I didn't sit back all the way—and I held her, her dress spilling white down my front, one of her tiny wet fingers tangled in the end of my braid, while outside the April clouds chased each other across the sun so that the room was bright one moment and shadowed the next.

  “Smile,” the photographer pleaded, but I refused. At Mary Louise's house, I had seen a picture of the Madonna cradling her baby and I intended to look like her, solemn and noble.

  With the pop and the flash and the smoke, Mathilda began to cry. My mother started to lift her from me, but I was determined to hold on to my baby. I would be the one to comfort her. And Mattie, for her part, wound her fingers more tightly in my hair. She wouldn't let go until my mother opened those tiny hooks one by one.

  I turned now onto Glacier Road, which runs up a hill overlooking Nagawaukee Lake. At the top, the wind hit me full force, scouring my cheeks and tearing at my coat. I gasped and struggled forward, my head low, as far as the icehouse. There I rested, stamping my feet in the straw and flexing my fingers, unwinding my scarf and shaking it free of my frozen breath. I left the door partway open for light. Before me now, as I stood looking out, the land fell away down the steep slope, and through the trees the frozen lake lay like a white scar on the earth. I shifted right, adjusting my angle slightly, and the tree trunks parted to reveal the familiar dark stain amid the whiteness, a crescent crowned with the lace of leafless branches in the northeast corner of Taylor's Bay, the island that had once been mine. I shifted again and could make out on the island the green roof of the house where Mattie and Carl had lived until the war.