The girl at Park 25

Ruth Irene Tillotson. Rockville, Connecticut.

Ruth walked the cool dark passages of the home at Park 25, Rockville Connecticut, kicking her legs slightly to swish her dress wider in the June morning breeze. It had rained last night, and the air was fresh and clean that flowed through the windows and circulated through the rooms within.

She heard Georgiana, her mother’s cousin, giving instructions to a student at the piano in the front room, and stepped a waltz in the hall briefly in time to the music, stopping with her hand on the door to her father’s office.

She paused.

Then she opened the door, swinging in on an arch while holding the doorknob just like her mother asked her not to. Mother was preparing for a meeting of the Cornelia Circle in the kitchen at the moment. Father sat, absorbed in some paperwork, the telephone directory open before him on desk, his black leather doctor’s bag at the ready next to his feet. Father was always ready in a way Ruth had never thought to question.

Ruth slipped over to the new telephone on the wall and fingered the hand crank on the side. A funny old thing, but a tool that was reserved for the office. The way it fit and ticked in the hand was when turned was hard to resist. William Clinton Tillotson’s patients could ring him at any time, or send a runner or someone on horseback as needed. It was often needed. William gave her a look and she left the telephone alone.

Instead, she crossed to the apothecary cabinet.

The open walnut shelves opposite her father's desk. Rows of amber and clear glass bottles, labels precise and forward-facing, lined the shelves. She knew most of them by now — cramp bark, mandrake root, unicorn root which she had always thought was a magnificent name for something her father gave to people with muscle pain.

But today her eye fell on a small brown bottle near the end of the second shelf.

Asafoetida.

She knew this one too. She lifted it carefully, worked the cork just slightly loose, and immediately held it at arm's length, her face composed in an expression of profound theatrical suffering.

Father, she gasped, I think one of your remedies has died.

William did not look up from his paperwork. But the corner of his mouth moved.

She was still holding the bottle at arm's length when he finally raised his eyes and saw through the window the figure of a patient coming up the front path. The physician in him reassembled quietly and completely.

Ruth.

She corked the bottle. Replaced it precisely where she had found it — she always replaced things precisely, it was simply how her hands worked. Crossed back to the door.

Your piano lesson, he said.

She considered this from the doorway.

The weather, she said, is entirely too fine for Czerny.

William looked at her. She looked back. Then she swung out on the doorknob exactly as her mother had asked her not to and pulled it softly closed behind her.

Hartford Courant, Hartford, Connecticut • Fri, Dec 8, 1899

Later that evening, with the family gathered around the dinner table, Ruth decided to stir the pot.

Father, she said politely between mouthfuls of food, was it completely necessary to mention odors in your letter to The Jackson Ventilating Heater company? They’ve published the whole of it in their advertisement in the Hartford Courant. Now everyone knows that Kenneth smells.

With that, serious eyed Kenneth rolled his eyes and sighed, while Laurie, the youngest, broke out laughing with food in his mouth, pointing at Kenneth. Fanny, Ruth’s mother, reached over and wiped the food spilling from young Laurie’s chin.

Georgiana calmly set down her spoon and cleared her throat.

I’ll be going to the church this evening with friends, she said politely. I won’t be out late.

The way her eyes were indirect told Ruth who exactly Georgiana was going to meet. She’d spied just a bit from the upper room.

Ruth adored Georgiana and tried to copy everything she did. That’s why she watched from the upper window. Longingly. Georgiana was kind, she was polite, and she was an accomplished musician. Georgiana always wore the latest fashions without being to bold or loud.

Ruth knew there was a young and handsome Mr Aborn among that group of friends who’d politely remove his hat to greet Georgiana, and that Georgiana would blush lightly and turn her eyes down so slightly.

Sigh. Ruth could not wait until it was her turn to go out with friends in the evening. But now there was a more pressing matter at hand. Hairs in curlers, summer nightgown on, young Ruth found her worn copy of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.

She’d just settled into the window seat of her room and propped open to her favorite story when Kenneth walked by the door of the room, stuck in his head, and said ‘still reading that old thing?!’

But of course she wasn’t reading. Ruth was practicing. As the june summer sun set, and the room filled with the scent of lilac and rose mingled with coal dust, Ruth spoke dramatically while waving her arms for emphasis ‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox — bred en bawn in a brier-patch!’ at the retreating figure of her tall, mostly serious brother down the hall.

Nestled in comfortably, Ruth yawned. Darkness was beginning to creep into the corners of the room so she crawled into bed. Ruth settled deeper into her pillows. Outside the June dark had finally come.

But what Ruth did not know, as she lay her head down on the pillows, was that the air circulating through that stately home at Park 25 wasn’t actually so pure. But she would not know until Panama.

Dr. William Clinton Tillotson. 25 Park Street, Rockville Connecticut.