Every Last Cuckoo (7 page)

S
ARAH HAD BEEN RAISED
in the Northeast Kingdom, the poorest part of Vermont. Her father, William Everett, was a teacher. Her mother, Louisa McGill Everett, was a housewife
with a huge garden, the overabundance of which she sold every summer from a vegetable stand at the end of their long driveway. Even as a small child, Sarah had helped with that enterprise—weeding, harvesting produce, and putting it into baskets or bunches. She kept her mother company in the shade of the roadside stand and could still remember the buzz of insects, the close heat of the small shelter, the dust in the air as people came and went in their boxy black automobiles or horsedrawn buckboards.

Sarah was an only child, so the family had few enough mouths to feed and was well-off by local standards, which were spare at best. Early in Sarah's life, though, her family's welfare suffered along with their neighbors'. By the time she was seven, the poverty that already surrounded her grew desperate under the weight of the Great Depression. Soon her parents' big, peeling farmhouse filled up with relatives who had been wiped out by hard times.

Uncle Burton Everett, William's brother, was the first to show up, having hitchhiked from Boston lugging a satchel and wearing a heavy tool belt, ready to work. With William as his helper, he started right in, tearing down the empty barn and salvaging enough wood to add two rooms to the back of the house and build a two-seater outhouse. Sarah watched the men and handed them tools, once Burton had taught her the difference between a wrench and pliers, a claw hammer and a ball peen, a hacksaw and a crosscut. Uncle Burton was big, loud, and sweaty, entirely unlike Sarah's quiet, reflective father—except for the storytelling. Uncle Burton's tales were wild and silly, her father's more sly, but the family resemblance was there. That had reassured the young Sarah, whose world was changing.

Burton's labors brought the toilet seat count to four (two indoors, two out) and the bedroom count to eight if one included the converted dining room and what had once been a sewing room, hardly bigger than a closet. Each would prove necessary, for the Everett household gradually swelled to a commune of sorts, with ten adults and eight children eking out an existence on fifty rocky acres. William kept teaching, though the three towns that employed him could seldom pay. Burton and three uncles on Sarah's mother's side—Harry, Hollis, and Warren McGill, who came with their wives and children—got so good at tearing down disused buildings and erecting habitable ones that they soon had a small barter business going. They worked for gasoline, flour, milk, butter, used clothing, tools, seeds, and medical care.

Sarah's mother and aunts enlarged the garden, raised chickens for eggs and stewing, canned and preserved produce and wild fruit, and altered hand-me-downs to fit the various members of the extended family. They ripped out moth-eaten sweaters and used the wool to knit new ones. It sometimes took the yarn from three or four small or holey sweaters to make another that would fit one of the larger men or boys. The effect was odd and patchworked, except when Sarah's Aunt Jane Lacey, Louisa's widowed sister, was the knitter. Aunt Jane knitted moons or stars in contrasting colors, or stripes and zigzags, or a white birch against a two-tone field of blue and dark green. This last sweater went to Sarah's father, who wore it until the elbows gave out. Sarah still had the stretched and threadbare garment mothballed in a trunk somewhere.

The last of the live-in relatives and friends moved on when Sarah was halfway through high school. She had almost no
memory, by then, of ever having been an only child; cousins and a few unrelated children, boarded out by their struggling families, had always surrounded her. She had known the whole lot of them were poor, but in her mind that was not a bad thing when there were so many other children to play with, and they all had three meals a day.

While Charles had spent his wild times alone, Sarah had spent her liberty in a pack, like a young coyote. She and her cousins, and one or two refugee boarders in their midst, had discovered every last hiding place, swimming place, wading place, climbing place, berry-picking place, and flat-rock sunning place on the fifty acres. From her companions Sarah learned to be fearless in woods, beside headlong rivers, and in shallows where fish bumped her legs and snakes now and then swam by, writing black esses on the surface of the water.

Only later did Sarah learn more about the adults' fears and quarrels in those years, the confinements and necessary dependencies that grieved them all and strained their relationships. When Louisa mentioned the strife to Sarah and Charles, just before they were married, her account lit up memories that Sarah had never understood—an aunt locking herself away in one of the outhouses, shouting out her demand to be left alone; uncles quarreling, possibly drunk; another uncle weeping with a strangled sound that nearly drowned the crooning comfort offered by his wife.

Hearing of those depression years, Charles had been moved by Sarah's sense of security in such hard times. Though his own family had not suffered want—not with their ironclad trusts and securities and their properties that could simply sit until their value rose again—many of Charles's classmates had been
forced to leave the private schools he attended. Some of his parents' friends had lost everything. “Nobody ever told me we were going to be okay,” he said to Sarah. “And I saw so many people ruined overnight. It just made me determined not to stake my life on money.”

In Sarah's last year of high school, she learned she could attend college in Vermont on a full scholarship, an opportunity that opened up for girls when the boys left to fight in World War II. The day after graduation, she moved to New York with a girlhood friend, Adelaide Jones. It was 1945. Though the war was ending and the men would soon return in weary droves, Addie and Sarah raced to join the last shallow wave of New Women, the adventuresome young females who had inspired them by becoming journalists, teachers, and factory workers. Sarah and Addie were eager for careers, a heady plan for two young women from the remote Northeast Kingdom. No other women in their acquaintance had ever finished college—most had not started—and there they suddenly were, earning more in a year than their parents had sometimes been able to earn in two or three.

Sarah joined a magazine called
The Life and Times of Women,
which throughout the war ran stories about her own generation and their older sisters, young women in search of new expression and new roles in a world gone inside out. Sarah excelled as an editor and hoped that she would eventually move to the top. She wanted to choose which stories to run, which writers to nurture, which models of success and intoxicating independence to provide for thousands of readers determined to resist conventional womanhood.

Then, in the late spring of 1946, Wendell Burnham showed
up with his empty left sleeve, his clips from
Stars & Stripes
and
Life,
and his brand-new graduate degree in journalism from Columbia. The publisher of
LTW
hired Wendell not because he was uniquely qualified but because the returning soldiers had earned special consideration. They had families to care for, lives to pick up again. Some of the editorial, secretarial, and production staff bowed to this, but others just up and quit.

Wendell rapidly reversed
LTW
's editorial direction. With a growing staff of men he had known in the war or at Columbia, he ran more and more articles pitched at women but serving their husbands and the magazine's advertisers. The rhetoric covered a single idea from countless angles. Now that the men were home, the nation needed its women back at their traditional stations—the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery, the garden.

Sarah was dismayed that peace should suddenly bring shackles for women who had thrived on adventure and change. Though she did not question the courage of those who had taken part in the war, she wanted more than the dubious freedom of devotion to others.

By the time Sarah met Charles, she had gone through two other jobs with two other magazines, one on amateur photography and one on gardening. The latter made her think she should study horticulture and one day open a nursery or landscaping service back home in Vermont. Having neither land of her own nor savings to buy any, she registered for botany classes at NYU and took yet another job, this time in the medical school's student affairs office, so she could qualify for free tuition.

That was where she met Charles. She noticed him because he was tall enough that she would not feel ungainly beside him. But then, she always noticed tall men, if only in an idle way. As
Charles came and went through the office where she was employed, she heard the other secretaries laugh at his dry jokes; she saw that he was not flirtatious but simply quietly friendly; she drew close enough to notice how light his eyes were in contrast to his dark hair—the same coloring that attracted Charlotte to Tom decades later.

Charles eventually noticed Sarah noticing him. He was used to female attention, which he usually shrugged off as untimely, but, as he often told Sarah when they relived their intimate history, something in her pale freckles, green eyes, and thick light hair and lashes made him think of summer in the open fields of Albert's farm. As he sought out excuses to speak with her, he learned she spoke with an accent that likewise recalled Albert. She was direct and unpretentious and carried her tall self fully upright, not slouched or apologetic. She had elegant long fingers and skin so fine it seemed to have no pores. Charles found her beautiful, and he loved spending time with her. Even so, he thought he could not afford a commitment until he was established as a doctor. What seized him was what Sarah told him about the childhood that had formed her. The more time they spent together, the more he could see that she had always had what he had always looked for.

Charles was one of several medical students who had seen combat, but he was the only one who seemed to have shed the war along with his uniform. Many veterans clearly carried the conflict within them, just below their skin. Some were arrogant, others seemed wounded, jaded, or half-belligerent, as if they could not break habits of vigilance or control the lightning reflexes of self-defense.

Many women besides Sarah were attracted to Charles. She
was not the only one to sleep with him, just the last to do so. As they grew closer, he was frank with her about having had lovers before and after the war—not many, three or four altogether, but enough to qualify him in her eyes as sexually experienced. This was a good thing; she didn't want them both to be clumsy fools the first time they made love. She had made out with boys in high school but had scarcely seen an eligible young man throughout the war. That had ended three years ago, and Sarah was impatient. Curiosity and desire had ramped up almost beyond her endurance.

Charles later told her that he would have taken it slowly. He had begun to think of Sarah as his future, and he wanted to court her, tantalize her, and gradually teach her the ways of his body while learning the ways of hers. She was having none of it.

They were finishing dinner at Sarah and Addie's apartment. Sarah had roasted a chicken with vegetables. She had set the table with candles and real linens to dress up the unmatched plates and flatware. With Addie in Vermont for her mother's birthday, Sarah meant to take full advantage of the privacy that was so hard to come by, both for her and for Charles, who lived in a flat full of students. She drank two glasses of wine but ate sparingly, not wanting to feel heavy or drowsy. Besides, her stomach kept fluttering, and her lower abdomen tensed up—pleasurably, nervously—every time she thought of what she hoped would happen that evening.

Charles lavishly praised Sarah's cooking and raved about the peach pie she had made for dessert. He overdid it a bit, and Sarah wondered if he knew what she had planned for later. When at last he rose to clear his plate and utensils away, she followed him
to the cramped kitchen. She set her plate on the counter as he stood at the sink, rinsing, and she put her arms around his waist from behind.

“Never mind the dishes,” she murmured. Her hands were flat against his stomach, one above the other, and she began moving them apart, one stroking upward, the other down until it reached his belt. She hesitated only a second, then went farther down, then up again and down again, slowly. She pressed herself against his back as she caressed him and felt him grow hard under her touch. He turned toward her and reversed their positions until Sarah leaned against the counter and he leaned into her, rhythmically pressing and pulling away, his legs apart, his breathing low and soft, nearly a moan. He put his hands on Sarah's hips, steadying them as he moved against her. She held onto his backside and thrust her lower body forward, matching his slow rhythm. They kissed deeply, then lightly, teasing each other with their tongues, tasting, nipping gently.

Sarah said, “Not here,” and ducked away from Charles and took his hand.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked, following her to the bedroom she shared with Addie.

Her answer was to shut the door behind her and light candles that she'd placed around the room.

Charles went to her and took her face in his hands, looking into her eyes. She looked back steadily as she pulled his shirt from his trousers and slid her hands underneath and up along his back. His body was strong, his skin smooth over the hardness of muscle and bone. Feeling him was not enough, she had to see him, every inch, and she needed his eyes on her as well. Every one of her senses clamored for satisfaction.

They undressed each other until they were naked from the waist up. Sarah had thought she would be shy, but it was as if, wherever Charles looked at her, his gaze touched her skin; she heated up, she wanted him to look at her forever. Her nipples hardened before he touched them, and when he did touch them, she shuddered from head to foot, as if light coursed all the way through her. She wondered whether she could make him hard, perhaps even make him climax, without touching him at all, just by looking at his penis. She laughed at the idea, and Charles grinned at her. “What?” he asked, holding her breasts, rubbing her nipples gently with his thumbs.