“We’ll work all that out,” said Frances Kay excitedly.
Janet bunched up her lips and thought for a moment. “I’m wondering, though — crack babies — they aren’t always shriveled-looking and heart-tugging, are they? If we want to tug a little more on our customers’ heartstrings, I think the way to go would be babies with congenital defects — visual ones like harelips and prolapsed eyelids, that are easy to see without having to go in too close with the camera.”
“What is it you girls are cooking up now?” asked Mrs. Ludden, who was writing on a little pad: Tyrell threw Mr. Rothman into his wheelchair with unnecessary force. Check for bruises tomorrow.
Janet answered for her sisters: “Frances Kay is very serious about this new Christmas album idea and selling it through an infomercial. And now Brenda wants us all to hold special-needs babies in our arms as we’re singing carols. Which carols do you think the little deformed babies would like, Brenda?”
“‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ would be nice. It’s about having a nice Christmas even in the midst of troubles. For example, let’s say you’re a baby born without legs or you have Down syndrome or something. You can still have a merry Christmas if the fates allow.”
Patricia hummed a few bars of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as she pondered what her sister had just said. Then she said, “You can’t have just one Down syndrome baby in a setting like that. It pulls focus from the other babies. They should probably all be severely retarded, don’t you think?”
“Is there a special way to hold a retarded baby?” asked Eunice. “It’s been so long since I’ve held one that I’ve forgotten.”
“When did you ever hold a retarded baby, Mama?” asked Frances Kay.
“Many years ago. Before any of you were born.”
“What was the occasion?” asked Patricia.
“The occasion? Well, what was the occasion? Let me think about that.”
“Anyway…” said Janet, attempting to put the discussion back on track.
“No, I’d really like to know, Mama,” interrupted Patricia.
“It isn’t important,” said Mrs. Ludden in a quiet, hedging voice. Then Eunice Ludden amended what she’d just said. “Well, of course it’s important. And I’ve kept this from you girls long enough. The little retarded girl was your oldest sister.”
Absolute silence greeted this announcement. All that could be heard in the room was the sound of two cooks in the kitchen off the dining room rattling their pots under the running sink faucet, and Mrs. Malloy being harshly berated by one of the nurses for having accidentally knocked her juice glass on the floor. Such a thing would have ordinarily sprung Eunice, crusading investigator of nursing home mischief, into action, but now she just sat, looking at each of her daughters with significant solemnity.
Finally she took a deep breath and said, “It’s a long, sad story. I’ll give you the short version, because it’s already cast a terrible pall over me. I dated your Mr. Rausch in college. You probably know that he had a show on the radio back during the war. I knew when everybody was gravitating to television that he would go too. His variety show was perfect for television. I am a farsighted woman. I knew that with your father’s good voice and fine looks and my fine voice and good looks, we would have beautiful, songfully talented children. I had no idea that I was destined to have only girls, but girls is exactly what the good Lord blessed Felix and me with. It was my dream to put you on Augie’s show and make you famous. There was only one problem: my firstborn was neither beautiful nor talented. Nor was she even normal. What we did in those days, dears, was we put damaged little girls and boys in places where they could receive specialized care.”
“You institutionalized her?” asked Patricia, with unconcealed horror.
“Well, she wouldn’t have been any good for Augie’s show, and what’s more, I didn’t have time to see to the very demanding needs of such a child. It was imperative that I spend my time raising normal, healthy children — beautiful little songbirds who would grow up to make Felix and me proud.”
“And Daddy went along with this?” asked Frances Kay.
“At first he did,” replied Eunice. “But then — well, I must tell you, dears, that when he walked out on us in 1959, it wasn’t for the reason that I told you. There was no floozy waitress. There was only your father’s profound disappointment over the fact that I had chosen to sacrifice little Frances Kay so that the four of you could become famous.”
Frances Kay shook her head, confused.
Eunice explained: “Oh, my firstborn was also named Frances Kay. I so loved the name that I gave it to you, dear. I hated to see it go to waste.”
Brenda stood up. She was the tallest of the four daughters of Eunice Ludden, and now she towered, imposingly, over her mother. “Is she still alive — our sister?”
“I suppose she is, although I’ve lost touch. The last I’d heard she was in Des Moines. I’m sure she’d love to see her sisters on television again. She always enjoyed watching you perform.”
Mrs. Ludden’s daughters got quiet. Something both profound and troubling had just occurred. Although the Ludden sisters didn’t realize it fully at that moment, a song in their repertoire had just changed its key from major to minor — a mother’s lullaby, the oldest song they knew.
The infomercial was a success, though in the end, the idea of singing to babies — any babies, for that matter, with Down syndrome or otherwise — was dismissed as shameful pandering to the sensibilities of viewers whose hearts were already open and receptive. It was the Ludden Sisters, after all! Frances Kay II was able to pay for her daughter’s surgery and move the two of them into a charming little bungalow in West Hollywood within view of the famous Hollywood sign.
That Christmas, rather than join their mother in Cleveland (she was now working undercover at a different nursing home, which had been accused of putting its residents in adult diapers and nothing else), the sisters took their children and spouses to Des Moines to spend the holiday with their oldest sister Frances Kay I, or Frannie as she would later be called. Frannie, as it turned out, had long been deinstitutionalized and was now living in a group home with several other mentally challenged young and middle-aged adults. The Ludden sisters were lucky. The day that they became five sisters was also the day that they met their father for the first time in thirty years. He was one of the house “parents” who watched over Frannie and the other residents.
“I had to make a choice,” he explained, “and this was it. I’ve followed your wonderful careers from a distance, and I couldn’t be prouder — but my place has always been with Frances Kay, and all those others here who need me.”
Patricia and Janet and Frances Kay II and Brenda didn’t know which parent was the bigger disappointment: a mother who had never intended to tell four of her daughters about their discarded sibling, or a father who had been willing to permanently detach himself from the lives of four of his very own children. It was concluded by Patricia, and seconded by each of her songstress sisters, that as parents, both their mother and father were sadly flawed, but in the end, deserving of some semblance of forgiveness.
It being Christmas and all.
Merii Kurisumasu.
1990 GERONTOCONCUPISCENT IN VERMONT