The Sisters by Jensen Nancy

Author:Jensen, Nancy [Jensen, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-11-07T23:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Upheaval

February 1966

Indianapolis, Indiana

MABEL

ONCE AGAIN, VIETNAM HAD MADE the cover of Life. A pair of soldiers in a trench—one, in spite of the great dirty bandage covering his eyes, looked up at the sky, perhaps hoping for a helicopter, while on his leg he cradled the other soldier, whose wounded head was mummy-wrapped, with only a triangle of face left free.

Though it was much too cold, especially since she hadn’t put on a coat when she stepped outside to get the mail, Mabel sat down on the porch swing and opened the magazine. Inside, there were five more full spreads of photographs. She studied them, trembling. Though none of the faces was familiar to her, every one of them called up the faces of her boys—the seventy-two soldiers she had photographed in the last three months.

The project had come to her one day on her lunch hour, when she was on her way into Fleming & Sons to pick up some stockings. A display of official military portraits filled the store’s front window, lined up by the dozens, as if in regiments. By design, the portraits all looked the same—crisp uniform, rigid posture, staring, absent eyes. And terrifying youth—they all had that in common. But there was nothing, not so much as a wrinkle of a lip, to say that this boy is not the same as that one, or that one, or that one. Seeing the photographs, Mabel forgot entirely about the stockings and walked straight back to the desk she shared with three other photographers at the Indianapolis Star. A few moments later, she had scratched out an advertisement offering a free photo session to any serviceman with orders for Vietnam, in exchange for his agreement to let her photograph him once more when his tour of duty had ended. She had meant the ad to run in ten consecutive issues, but by the third day, she was so overwhelmed with calls, she canceled it. Since then, word of mouth had taken care of the rest.

“Mama!” Daisy called from the kitchen. “What do you want to do with all these jars on the top shelf?”

Mabel sighed and went back into the house. The whole idea of this move—an idea Daisy and Barry had cooked up, apparently when they were on their honeymoon—was to make Mabel’s life easier, get her into a place small enough to keep clean, a place with an efficient kitchen, where everything was in easy reach, a place where she didn’t have to face stairs when she wanted to get into her studio and darkroom. So what if her knee gave out a little? she argued. Using the stairs was probably the only thing that had kept the knee from locking up altogether. Besides, she was settled. She liked her neighbors, and the people who worked at the small local grocery all greeted her by name. But then, after Daisy and Barry had shown Mabel the house they’d found for her, two blocks from their own,

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