Mark Dunn - American Decameron

I should have defended my sister, maybe just a little bit. After all, Sibyl, for all her wrong-headedness and duplicity, does have some good points. I just couldn’t remember what any of them were at that moment.

Nurse Gibson arrived a few minutes past nine. Obviously aware of the fact that she was late, she came flying through the front door, a large knitted raffia carry-bag swinging wildly from her bouncing shoulder. Her nurse’s hat seemed almost swallowed up in her Working Girl big hair — which was both prodigious and somewhat untamed.

She had almost made it to the elevators by the time Lindsey popped up from her seat and called out to her.

Nurse Gibson turned. “Yes?”

Lindsey went to her. Winnie and I both stood. Winnie, generally a tower of composure and strength, seemed a little faint. I wondered if I was going to have to hold her up.

“Hello, Ms. Gibson.”

“Hello, Lindsey.” Nurse Gibson looked surprised to see my niece.

“I want you to meet someone,” said Lindsey. “This is Winnie Habjan. She’s, like, my third grandmother.”

“Hello, Ms. Habjan,” said Nurse Gibson. Walking over to shake Winnie’s hand, she added, “I was wondering if I was ever going to have this opportunity.”

Winnie looked confused.

Nurse Gibson went on: “Hallie— Ms. Walters —well, she asks about you quite often. It was hard for me to understand what she was saying at first, but I got her to use her good hand to write things out for me.”

Winnie began to cry. Something with which I wasn’t familiar began to form in my throat. A lump. Is that what they call it?

Nurse Gibson pulled out a tissue and offered it to Winnie. “I said, ‘Now, Ms. Walters, who is Winnie? She isn’t on the family list. Is she a neighbor, a good friend?’ I have Ms. Walters’ response here somewhere. I’ve kept the piece of paper she wrote it on.”

Nurse Gibson dug around a moment in her oversized tropical bag. Then she produced the slip of paper. It had jagged handwriting on it. The stroke had immobilized my mother’s right side, so it was a challenge for her to write with her unaccustomed left.

In answer to Nurse Gibson’s question, “Who is Winnie?” my mother had labored to scratch out the following four words: “She is my everything.”

Nurse Gibson smiled. “I’ve been half waiting for you, Ms. Habjan. Let me go up first and swear my co-conspirators on the nursing staff to complete secrecy. Then I’ll be back down for you. As for you two—” She was now pointing to Lindsey and me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to stay down here tonight. You’ll have ample opportunity to see the patient tomorrow.”

Winnie dabbed at her eyes with the tissue. “Taking me up to see her — that won’t get you into trouble?”

Nurse Gibson shook her head. “Not if we’re careful.”

Later, when Lindsey and I found ourselves sitting on the front steps of the hospital, both of us having been shooed out of the building by the aforementioned security guard, I asked my niece how it was that she was so sure that Nurse Gibson would do this for Winnie.

“Ohmigod! I totally forgot to mention that there was another woman with Nurse Gibson at the grocery store that day. The way the two of them were looking at each other, you could tell that they were, like, so totally in love. Nurse Gibson gets it.”

Fer shur.

The singing career of the Ludden Sisters lasted roughly a dozen years, from early 1959, when the four teenagers were “discovered” by bandleader Augie Rausch, until late 1970, when the quartet, wishing to devote more time to their husbands and to their growing young families, decided to “retire.” Their whirlwind years of appearances on Augie Rausch’s Variety Hour and tour performances before large, appreciative crowds led to significant fame and no small fortune. The girls — and they were just girls when they first started out (the youngest, Brenda, only thirteen years old when Rausch plucked her and her sisters from obscurity) — were the most popular members of the bandleader’s “musical family,” and as such received more fan mail in a day than all of Rausch’s other performers did in a month, mostly from women of a certain age who wished that their own daughters and granddaughters could be more like the adorably wholesome Ludden Sisters.

Three of the four sisters married wisely. Patricia wed a successful railroad attorney twenty years her senior; Janice a popular NFL quarterback; and Brenda, a multiply published author and Yale history professor. On the other hand, Frances Kay married a scheming huckster named Burt Squires, whose most recent claim to fame, after a long series of failed business enterprises, was leg warmers made of Old English Sheepdog fur.

Frances Kay and Burt Squires married in 1971, divorced in 1973, remarried in 1976, and divorced in 1982 after Squires, without his wife’s permission, invested every last penny of her large financial holdings in an ultimately disastrous non-alcoholic wine cooler venture. (“Isn’t it just, you know, juice?”) Although Frances Kay continued to receive residuals from her appearances on the syndicated version of Augie Rausch’s Variety Hour (its network incarnation cancelled in 1971 in the midst of CBS’s “Rural Purge,” an attempt to clear the network’s airways of all programs that appealed to an older, less sophisticated, less urban demographic), and though she received royalties from the re-release in compact disc format of some of the Ludden Sisters’ more popular LPs, the third-oldest member of the singing group was, by 1989, struggling financially. She and her physically challenged teenaged daughter Carly Ann moved from their large five-bedroom/three-bath ranch-style in Brentwood to one of Hollywood’s more seasoned garden apartment buildings, the Oleander Arms, where the two lived next door to an elderly cigar-chomping character actor named Irv Miller. Irv was best remembered for his hardboiled 1940s newspaper editor roles and for the enduring catchall catchphrase, “I’m running a newspaper here, not [fill in the blank: the Ladies’ Home Journal , the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a corn-shucking contest for hoedownin’ hayseeds, etc.].”

Frances Kay’s three siblings each helped their pecuniarily precarious sister as best they could, but by 1989, with the need for a hip replacement for Carly Ann (who was born with a compromised acetabulofemoral joint), Frances Kay watched as her financial situation became even more dire. Frances Kay’s ex-husband, Burt, was of no help; though recent re-releases of the films Fame and Flash Dance revived customer interest in leg warmers, especially those using non-traditional fibers, none of the income generated by these sales went to Frances Kay, and she had not the wherewithal to seek legal redress.

In early March, the four sisters gathered in Columbus, Ohio, to celebrate their mother’s seventy-fifth birthday. The mother, Eunice, lived in a nursing home there. She was not an official resident, however, but only pretended to be a resident; Eunice Ludden worked undercover for a watchdog group formed to gather evidence on nursing and convalescent home patient abuse. To protect her anonymity, she never used the last name Ludden, but was, instead, Mrs. Luden . Like the cough drop. And she asked that her daughters come to see her wearing disguises that would protect their identities as well, given that one of the most popular programs viewed in the television room of the Olentangy Manor Extended Care Center was the syndicated rerun version of Augie Rausch’s Variety Hour . The geriatric residents had their favorites among the show’s regular performers, who often could not be remembered by their actual names, but were referred to, in the necessity of the moment, as the “Accordion Man,” “the Happy Married Couple Who Sing about Jesus,” and “The Tap-dancing Negro.” But the Ludden Sisters (or “Those Four Pretty Girls with Angel Voices”) were the most beloved and revered among Olentangy Manor’s television-viewing inmates.