The Daughters of Erietown Read online

  The Daughters of Erietown is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Connie Schultz

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Schultz, Connie, author.

  Title: The daughters of Erietown: a novel / Connie Schultz.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019034976 (print) | LCCN 2019034977 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780525479352 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780525479499 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.C4774 D38 2020 (print) | LCC PS3619.C4774

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019034976

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019034977

  Ebook ISBN 9780525479499

  randomhousebooks.com

  Chapter- and part-opener line drawings: iStock.com/KrulUA

  Book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover photograph: Ronny Jaques / Trunk Archive (little boy) and Joseph Szabo / Trunk Archive (car)

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: 1975

  Part I

  Chapter 1: 1947

  Chapter 2: 1956

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part II

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26: November 22, 1963

  Part III

  Chapter 27: 1957

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29: 1962

  Chapter 30: November 22, 1963

  Chapter 31: April 1964

  Part IV

  Chapter 32: November 1965

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part V: 1969

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Part VI: 1975

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Part VII

  Chapter 56: 1978

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58: 1979

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62: 1989

  Chapter 63: 1994

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Connie Schultz

  About the Author

  Gently, Teacher explained the difference between a lie and a story. A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been.

  —Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  Samantha McGinty pressed her cheek against the cold window and exhaled slowly to cloud the glass. She glanced at the back of her father’s head in the front seat before lifting her finger to write in big block letters: LUCKY.

  Every Saturday, for as long as she could remember, her father had spritzed the windows of his car with a mix of vinegar and water and wiped them clean with pages of the previous week’s Erietown Times. When she was little, in the coldest months of northeast Ohio, she would breathe on her backseat window and draw messages for her dad. A smiley face, maybe, or a star with sticks exploding from its five tips. Her father never said a word about them, but she was sure he saw them.

  After that awful day in the summer of ’69, when she was twelve, everything changed. Her father stopped cleaning the car windows every weekend and sometimes went as long as two weeks without washing his Chevy in the driveway. It was too warm for window notes, which made it easier for Sam because it didn’t feel right to do anything nice for her father anyway.

  Then autumn came, frosting car windows every night. One morning before dawn, Sam slipped out the back door before her father left for work and scrawled a message on her car window—SAD, inside a heart—and ran back into her bedroom.

  Her father didn’t even bother to knock before storming into her room just minutes later. “Stop leaving your fingerprints all over the car window, Sam,” he said. “You’re too old for that shit.”

  He was standing at the foot of her bed, a dark silhouette against the window as he jingled the coins in his pocket, which Sam knew to be the soundtrack of his rising discontent. “Dad,” she said, about to apologize, but then her mother appeared in the doorway and turned on the light. In unison, father and daughter looked at her and said, “Are you all right?”

  Ellie stood there, staring at Brick. “Let’s go downstairs,” he said.

  Sam slipped out of bed and stood in her doorway as her father, towering over her tiny mother, walked Ellie down the stairs. “What did Sam draw on the window?” she heard her mother say.

  “Nothing,” Brick said. “Just fingerprints.”

  Sam never drew on her father’s car window again. Until today.

  He would understand why.

  She shifted in her seat and hugged the powder blue train case on her lap, curling her fingers around its handle. She squeezed her eyes shut and whispered in the dark, “I am goin
g to college.”

  Her mother’s beehive bobbed slightly over the top of the seat in front of her. “What’s that, Sam?”

  “Nothing,” Sam said, bolting upright.

  She shoved the shoeless feet of her sleeping brother away from her hip and peered out her window. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour, but she could see life stirring in this rural patch of Ohio. Kitchen windows were aglow, bracketing lives like the frames of a movie reel. She saw a man in a barn coat reach for his hat on a hook. Three frames later, another man opened a door and a small dog slipped out and quickly squatted. A woman lifted a coffee mug, and in the very next frame another woman poured coffee into a raised cup. The early hours have an easy rhythm no matter where you are. It’s the rest of life, Sam thought, that gets away from you.

  Sam shook her head in silent reprimand. Not today. I’m going to college.

  Her brother stirred in his sleep and rammed his feet into her hip again. She reached down to grab the top of first one sock, and then the other, pulling them higher over his bony ankles before easing his feet away. Reilly groaned and curled up like a cat resisting a nudge. “Reill could sleep through a tornado,” Sam said.

  “Let him be, Sam,” her mother said. “He got out of bed at four-thirty for you. That’s mighty early for an eleven-year-old boy. On a Saturday, no less.”

  Sam rolled her eyes. God, the unearned dispensation her mother granted the males in this family. She raised her left wrist and tipped the face of her Timex into the lingering moonlight. Not even six yet. “Why’d we have to leave so early?” she said. “It’s only an hour and a half away, and I can’t even pick up the key to my dorm room until nine.”

  “Your father wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to get there and find the place,” Ellie said. “We’ve never done this before. We’re all doing this for you, Sam.”

  “Ellie,” her father said.

  “Well, we are, Brick. This is new for all of us.”

  Sam’s father glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “I always leave early, Sam. You know that. That way, if you get a flat tire or have to wait for a train, you’re still on time for work.”

  Sam pressed her back against the seat. “Mom, I appreciate everything you and Dad are doing.”

  Her father smiled in the mirror. “Nobody said you didn’t,” he said.

  Really, Mom, Sam thought, but she didn’t say anything. She touched the back of her mother’s seat and mouthed, I get it. I’m going to miss you, too.

  She ran her fingers along the stitching on the train case lid. For all of Sam’s life, the powder blue leather case had sat on the top shelf in her parents’ bedroom closet, loosely covered in faded gold tissue paper. Sam and Reilly were not allowed to touch the case, let alone play with it.

  Two nights ago, her mother had called Sam into the bedroom and patted the spot next to her on the bed. She reached for the train case sitting beside her and placed it on the bed between them.

  “You remember Aunt Nessa,” she said.

  “Sure,” Sam said. “She was a teacher, and she was really nice. She saved her prettiest Christmas cards for me. The ones with glitter or that velvety snow stuff. So that I could cut them up and make new cards.”

  Ellie nodded. “She saw early talent in you, the way you liked to draw. She wanted to encourage you to be an artist.”

  Sam shrugged. “Guess I would have disappointed her on that score.”

  Her mother sighed. “Aunt Nessa sometimes overestimated the ones she loved.”

  “There are worse habits to have.”

  “That’s right,” her mother said. “But it can get your hopes up.”

  Sam ran her hand across the smooth leather. “So, Aunt Nessa gave you this?”

  Ellie nodded. “She took me to Higbee’s department store in downtown Cleveland to buy it, a couple of months before I graduated from high school. We shopped in the personal leather goods department, and then had lunch at the Silver Grille. It was a famous restaurant there.”

  Sam pulled the case onto her lap and was surprised by the force when its metal latches sprang open. “It feels so new,” she said, opening the case. She leaned in and sniffed the silky gray lining. “Smells new, too.”

  Sam tilted the case back to see herself in the mirror inside the lid. A diamond of ruffled elastic framed her face. “I’ve never seen a mirror in a suitcase before.”

  “To check your makeup,” Ellie said. She leaned in to peer at Sam’s reflection. “To make sure you look your best before you get off the train.” She pushed back a strand of hair from Sam’s face. “Or off the plane now, I guess.” Ellie dropped her hand into her lap. “So many people flying now.”

  Sam closed the lid and pressed down the latches. “How come you never used it, Mom?”

  “I did, once, when your father and I—” She stood up. “I stayed home. Never needed it.” She slid her hands down the sides of her hips and smoothed the pockets of her capri pants. “Anyway, it’s yours now,” she said, walking toward the doorway. “For this big adventure of your life.”

  Sam spent the rest of that day figuring out what to pack in the train case. “The must-haves,” her mother had said, “the things you don’t want to be without.”

  Things you don’t want to leave behind, too, Sam had decided.

  Now, in the car, she cupped the latches with her hands to muffle the sound as she opened the lid and started pulling out one item at a time. A comb and hairbrush, a small box of tampons, two plastic eggs of L’eggs sheer-toe pantyhose, a new tube of Maybelline Great Lash mascara, and a half-empty bottle of Love’s pink Baby Soft. She smiled at the small sewing kit, a gift from her former 4-H adviser, Mrs. Sandstrom. Mrs. Sandstorm, they used to call her, because she got so worked up whenever the girls failed to take seriously their “marital futures.”

  “Our future as domestic slaves, she means,” Val Murphy had said to Sam.

  Sam had laughed at the time, but now the memory made her sad. Val’s baby was almost six months old already. Before she got pregnant, she and Sam had dreamed of going together to Smith College, just like Gloria Steinem had. Val’s father owned four car lots and could afford to send her anywhere she wanted to go. Val’s dream died the day her parents said they’d disown her if she went to Cleveland and got an abortion.

  “It’s over for me,” Val told Sam through tears after she’d dropped out of high school. “But you, Sam? You could still apply to Smith. Remember what Mrs. Sandstorm’s husband told you at the state fair booth. ‘They’ve got scholarships for girls like you.’ ”

  “He was making a point about my lack of sewing skills.”

  Val shook her head. “He was also right. Which is why you’ve got to write that essay. Go for both of us.”

  Val wouldn’t let up on her, badgering her to fill out the application and even editing her essay. To Sam’s shock, Smith College offered her a full ride.

  Her father killed the deal. “You know what this is,” he said, waving the admission letter. “Charity. Pure and simple. They feel sorry for you.”

  “It’s a full scholarship, Dad. They said they liked my essay. They said I had great potential.”

  “That’s rich people talk for pity. What they mean is they’ll get to show you off like a prize monkey.”

  Sam squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself not to cry. “But it’s free, Dad. It’s where I want to go.”

  “Sam, nothing worth having is free. They’ll own you for the rest of your life. No matter what you accomplish, it will never feel like you did it on your own because you owe that school something you can’t ever pay back.”

  “We’ll owe money if I go to Kent State,” Sam said. “You wouldn’t even let me apply for a federal grant.”

  “And what did you learn after you went behind my back and did it anyway?”

  She shrugged.
r />   “Answer me. What did they tell you?”

  “I didn’t qualify,” Sam said softly.

  Brick shook his head. “That’s right. You didn’t qualify because I make too much money. Your old man may work in maintenance at Erietown Electric, but I still make too much money for you to go to college for free. That’s who you come from. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  “We’ll still have the student loan.”

  “That we’ll pay back, with interest,” he said. “That’s how it works.”

  Sam gave it one last try. “They killed four students there.”

  Brick shrugged. “That was five years ago, and they haven’t killed one since. You’ll be fine.” He walked over to her and squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t worry, kid. Kent State is a great college, with no strings attached. That’s why your mother got her job, so we could afford this.”

  Until then, Sam’s mother had been sitting silently on the sofa. Ellie cleared her throat and said, “That’s not why—” She waved her hand and stood up. “Never mind.”

  That was the end of it. The next morning Sam stepped on the lever to open the flip top of the kitchen trash can and saw Smith’s acceptance letter crumpled and covered in bacon grease.