“Poor you!” he said, leaning over to kiss my cheek. “Life hasn’t given you many breaks, has it?”
“When all’s said and done, I think it’s more about what I did with the ones given me, don’t you think?” I replied.
Mrs. Radcliffe smiled and nodded. The professor was ready to add his own thoughts when the telephone rang and he heaved himself off the sofa to answer it.
“May I ask something?” I said low to Mrs. Radcliffe when he was out of the room.
“Of course.”
“The pictures of Quinn and me. It was almost ten years ago – I would think after all this time you’d put them away – or something.”
“I was going to take them down and store them, but Quinn objected and asked to have them left where they are.”
“But his other girlfriends; surely they’d object?”
“No,” she said, offering a smile that was so much like Quinn’s it was painful to look at. “Oh, there’s been a girl or two very briefly. He never brought them home. I really don’t think he has the time – or there’s been anyone he’d make time for. His words on the subject if I dare to bring it up are ‘if only.’ I don’t know what it means, but now that you’re here, I can guess.”
I knew what it meant and I felt as if the wind had been punched out of me, as if someone had placed me in a vice and turned the lever.
“Gosh! Look at the time!” I said cheerfully. “I’ve got to run. Dennis and Harry are expecting me back for their annual Christmas bash – of all my sins, tardiness is the worst in their eyes.”
“How is your brother?” Mrs. Radcliffe wanted to know. “I saw him at the market just yesterday and he looked so pale, and he’s lost so much weight.”
“It’s the business, I suppose,” I shrugged as we walked to the door. “He’s got two new Union Street clients – haberdashers with exclusive clientele. He barely has time to sleep from what Harry says, but he’s doing very well and there’s talk of expanding, and getting the Macy’s account. He’s got a studio on Walnut Square now.”
She looked as if she didn’t believe me. I hardly believed it myself.
“Well,” I said breezily, “Merry Christmas! It was nice to see you after all this time.”
“Alice, it really has been too long. Maybe we can get together in the new year?” Mrs. Radcliffe suggested.
“Now that’s a wonderful idea!” The professor had returned with a slip of paper in his hand, which he gave to Mrs. Radcliffe when he thought I wasn’t looking. She flushed and tucked it into a pocket. He turned his attention on me now, saying, “Why not come to the gala at the Opera House on New Year’s Eve and we can ring in 1978 together! I can get box seats!”
I was tying the belt to my heavy winter coat when I took a breath and said, “No, I don’t think that would be good for any of us.”
Most definitely and assuredly NOT what I’d said that Christmas of 1977…
“Going back to Italy, then?” the professor chirruped.
“No.”
I craned my neck to look him in the face. He was smiling a dopey smile and was ready to attempt a cajoling.
“I heard what you said to Quinn – I was in the next room,” I quietly explained. “I know what you’ve done, Professor.”
“What I’ve done?” he laughed, looking at Mrs. Radcliffe first, and then me.
“If anyone should take the blame for what happened, well…”
“Alice, that was five years ago! Have you been holding a grudge – no wait! A torch! Have you been carrying a torch all this time?” the professor chuckled, though his wife and I failed to understand his humor.
“I just want to know whose ego you’re trying to build up. How many people have you hurt trying to out-do us all, other than your son?”
He came at me and before Mrs. Radcliffe could prevent it, I was shoved against the china cabinet, the Professor was too close and I was scared, especially when his wife gasped, “Andrew, not her!”
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I whispered after catching my breath. “You gave him the black eye!”
“Andrew, let her go! I think you’ve had too much to drink!”
I continued to look up at him and waited to see who would blink first and hoped it wouldn’t be me; my breathing was shallow and ragged and the sweat on my face mingled with tears.
The Professor released me, but I would never forget the darkness in those eyes.
“See you around, Alice,” he said quietly and left the room.
I chalked up my unkindness to payback of sorts. It certainly took them by surprise. I was at the door and ready to leave when Mrs. Radcliffe embraced me tightly. She wasn’t one for demonstrations of affection – that was the Professor’s bailiwick – and surprised me by saying, “I should have done something, Sweetheart! Forgive me!”
I was still pondering her words when I walked down the steps to the street and down the hill, keeping my eyes downcast on the dirt path and sidewalk, controlling the urge to cry. I didn’t notice the taxi climbing up the hill, nor did I see its passenger craning to get a better look until the cab sped by. The further I walked from the castle, the worse I felt and I was miserable by the time I was in my neighborhood and arrived at my house. Brenda Lee was already cranked up to blasting on the stereo and from the laughter it was safe to guess that the party had started without me. Rather than go in through the front door, I opened the garden gate and entered the Curiosity Shop.
“That’s that?” the Proprietress demanded as she pounded a very large star into my book, made an entry in her ledger and handed off a Diet Pepsi. “The truth will set you free, Alice!”
“I wasn’t about to tell Quinn’s parents it was two months of non-stop sex and groping, of trying to screw Quinn out of my head! I’m a bit more discreet than that!”
“And do you think they would care – when most likely he was doing the same?” The Proprietress groused and waved me away.
I fought to keep the image out of my head: Quinn working the crowd in a Paris or London discotheque, or wherever he was living for most of the year, charming every woman in the house and working his way up to the tallest, leggiest, blondest eighteen-year old. It was his life and he could live it as he wished. And I had mine…
“It never works does it?” Marie Antoinette asked mournfully as she joined me. “But the sex was fantastic, yes?”
“If you don’t mind?” I demanded, flicking my hand towards her as if she was an insect to be shooed away.
“Tell her!” Marie Antoinette insisted, directing the Proprietress with a glittering, bejeweled hand.
“She’ll find out soon enough,” sniffed the Proprietress.
“Find out what?”
“Your train leaves in fifteen minutes, my dear,” Hildegard von Bingen said as she placed a bouquet of flowers on my table and offered one perfect, white lily.
I didn’t have to pack up the laptop or my belongings. Richard the Third was handing me the book bag and my purse as I crossed the Shop to the door and took a whack at the brochure carousel as I went out again, not bothering to take any publication that whizzed by me. I trudged down the street to the station and met up with Dennis on the way. He hailed me over and I grimaced as we passed one another on the street. I didn’t feel right at all and wished the train I boarded would take me back to wherever I was supposed to be.
“It’s been an adventure, hasn’t it?” Jack Lemmon commented as he punched a ticket that materialized out of my pocket. “Ah! A ‘C’ ride! Well, this is going to be interesting, isn’t it, Miss?”
“You’d answer truthfully if I asked a question, wouldn’t you?” I queried, taking his sleeve to prevent him from leaving.
“It would depend on what you want to know, Miss.”
“Why am I being put through this? What did I do wrong? What is all this about?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said, winking. And off he went again, humming A Time for Us.
The delicious smells from the din
ing car refused to lure me away. I slumped down on the seat and stared out the window, watching, of all things, my life – or vignettes from it – glide by as the train started up and left the station.
There was my fourth birthday, when I cried and ran upstairs to hide from the people singing Happy Birthday. There I was in the pink organza dress with petticoats and black patent leather shoes, the little red toy piano. How long did I stay upstairs banging on those poor little keys?
There was the house in Westminster in London where we lived while my father worked with an architectural firm helping to rebuild London – I was sitting on the stoop with knees drawn up, watching the high street, and waiting for my father to come home. I was never told why he didn’t. I remember my mother stopped crying after that. There we were landing at the Oakland Airport to start yet another new chapter in life several months later…
The scenes were blurring now and soon they were like Jackson Pollack’s paint splatters on a canvas, and then gobs of creamy watercolor squeezed out of tubes until they became bright, hot, wildflowers in a field somewhere on the English coast, the roofs and spires of a village nearby. My heart began to pound in anticipation. I felt the train slow and started gathering up my things.
“What are you doing?” the conductor asked as I came out of the compartment.
“I want to get off here – I know this place.”
“This is not your stop today,” he stated.
“Please!”
“Miss Martin, your ticket says…”
“But I want to get off here!”
“But not today, Alice. Two wrongs will make a right…”
“Not today!” I shouted. “Not ever!”
“What?”
“Stop saying that!”
I was facing Donovan now – he repeated his question with a tone of disbelief, as if my invitation for him to go straight to Hell or back to wherever it was he came was a joke. He was standing on the doorstep, a large bouquet of white flowers in his arms. Behind me Dennis and Harry’s Christmas party was in high gear. He repeated himself a little louder for all the noise.
“What? I didn’t hear you, sorry!” he shouted.
“I said, you’ve got your nerve!”
“Actually, it sounded like ‘Go to Hell you slimy bastard.’”
“Then you heard me right!”
“I know I should have replied to your letters,” Donovan was saying now as he followed me through the living room to the kitchen where I ignored the guests helping Dennis and Harry with more platters of hors d’oeuvres and searched for something to put the flowers in, as much as I wanted to dump them into the trash, or shove them down the garbage disposal – along with Donovan’s head.
“Doesn’t look like you broke your hand,” I said, pulling out one of my mother’s Waterford crystal vases from a cupboard and barely missing his head with it as I jumped down from the kitchen stool.
“Is that…?” Dennis queried as we pushed by once the flowers were in a vase on the mantle surrounded by empties and half-full tumblers and high-balls, shot glasses and paper cups, plates of food.
“No, it isn’t!” I growled.
“For a moment I thought he was Quinn,” Harry murmured in passing. “That torch burns brightly, doesn’t it?”
“Shut up, Harry!” I snapped. To Donovan I said, “The door’s that way – nice seeing you again.”
He didn’t take the hint. Donovan followed me upstairs and once we were behind the bedroom door and we could hear one another, I had nothing to say. Donovan approached tentatively, arms outstretched, but the look I threw made him stop in his tracks. He stood on the little rag carpet in the middle of the room, hands in pockets, looking about as if being in a feminine bedroom was something new to him.
“I owe you an explanation, at least,” he sighed when the silence was unbearable and only brought more tension.
“You’ve come a long way to offer it – or did it just come to mind, since you were going to be in San Francisco anyway?”
“I’m teaching a six week seminar at University of San Francisco. Look, there’s a lot going on. I’ve been out of the country, there were no phones.”
“Let me guess – back at Petra.”
“Yes, but there was more I had to deal with.”
“Go on.”
I knew what it was – the first of many sins committed, and the confession was just as surprising now as it had been then. I watched Donovan pace and then sit on the bed, gingerly shoving aside one of my stuffed animals as if it would bite.
“I had to break it off with another woman. When you left Florence, I knew I had to break it off – I went home in love with you, Alice. I couldn’t sleep, I barely ate, and all I could think about was you.”
“I knew it!” I squealed. “Well thank you very much for turning me into a whore!”
“Alice, don’t belittle yourself.”
“Please!” I sighed, throwing myself on the window seat.
“As soon as I returned to Providence, I told her. I told her the engagement was off.”
“You cheated on your fiancée with me?!” I shrieked. “Get out!”
“You have to understand!” Donovan cried, kneeling beside me now. “We’d been together for years, it was just assumed – Alice, listen to me!”
“Let me guess, the senator and your mother weren’t too keen on your being with a poor little nobody like me?”
“Well, yes.”
“Save it. I’ve already lived through that nightmare.”
“I told them it didn’t matter what they thought – I even told them to withhold the money for the digs, the research, even put the brakes on the new addition to the department at Brown.”
“Christ in heaven! You’re getting a building named after you!”
“It doesn’t matter! I want you.”
“And will you tell this sad little story to the next girl that comes along?”
“Alice!”
He’d grabbed me by the shoulders and I was suddenly afraid, yet I didn’t try to escape. He wouldn’t strike me as Adam might have, I was certain of that. And he didn’t. He just studied my face, his own screwed up in pain, in uncertainty – as if he was trying to find the right words to say, and in doing so, his features became soft, and truly became the mirror image of Quinn – the reason I was first attracted to him.
“Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all,” Donovan whispered. “I can’t pretend to know what’s in your mind.”
“What?”
“I thought I knew what was in your heart – at least, I thought I did.”
He gave me a chaste little kiss on the brow and slipped out of the bedroom as if we’d done something clandestine, something shameful.
The sensation of lightness came over me again and I wanted to spin happily like Maria in The Sound of Music, or Mary in the opening titles of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but I didn’t. I went to my bag and dug around in the depths of it, past the makeup bag, the packet of chewing gum, the keys, and brush, the wallet, taking from it a little leather bound volume – a notebook he’d bought for me in the Mercato San Lorenzo. I tossed it into the wastepaper basket, but not before I took the photographs of us in Florence out of a compartment in my wallet and threw those in, too.
“Not a good idea!” Joan of Arc had materialized and was looking at the contents of the wastepaper basket.
“Too bad,” I said, turning to the mirror and unpinning my hair from its chignon and brushing it out until it crackled from the dry winter air. “Maybe I’ve decided that this is as far as I want to go with patching up holes.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t say next that two wrongs will make a right! I’m sick of hearing it!”
“I don’t have to – you already did,” Joan sighed as she prepared to leave. “And you know we’re right.”
Joan disappeared as quickly as she came and after she left I slowed the frantic pace of my grooming, staring at myself in the mirror. I stopped and put the b
rush down, staring at the reflection of the unhappy young woman facing me.
“This is ridiculous!” I hissed at her. “What’s done is done!”
“Not exactly…” I heard the Proprietress whisper in my ear. “Play it through, Alice! There’s not much more you have to do!”
Sighing, I curled up on the bed and went through old photo albums, knowing it was a bad idea and soon I cried myself to sleep, waking around midnight. I was still miserable and now hungry and went downstairs to see if anything was left over from the party.
“There you are! I thought you went off with your friend – are you okay?” Dennis said, meeting me on the first floor landing.
“Peachy. Anything left to eat? I’m starving.”
“Your friend and I were never properly introduced.”
“I didn’t think there’d be a reason to,” I said, trying to get past.
“At least a name – and a reason why not.”
“He was my last tango in Florence.”
“How are you, Sweetheart?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it would help a bit if you weren’t attracted to or didn’t bring home guys that look like or are Quinn’s evil twin – geez, and here I was trying to compliment your taste in men.”
I had slumped down on the stairs and put my head on my knees, trying desperately to keep from crying.
“I hate it when you’re right!” I sobbed, trying to keep from laughing. “You’re always right!”
“And I’ll have to hear about it for weeks,” Harry sighed as he joined us. “You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Well, come on – we’ve got an early Christmas present for you. Then you can tell Dennis he’s right – again.”
Harry held out a hand and lifted me off the stairs. That hand now went up around my face and covered my eyes. They escorted me one stair at a time down to the living room, and through the house that was now quiet. We kicked aside paper cups and cans on our way into the kitchen and almost knocked over the laundry basket on the back porch.
“What are you up to?” I giggled.
“Just one more step – and…open your eyes!”
“Merry Christmas!”
Quinn’s voice startled me and I opened my eyes, looking at our reflections in his bedroom mirror. It was several years earlier, the winter of 1971, and my first Christmas home from college. Quinn was standing behind me, holding an exquisite silver cross studded with garnets to my neck and fastening the clasp of the heavy filigree chain from which it was suspended.
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