by Sue Miller
Then in her peripheral vision she saw Jeanne step quickly forward and put her arm around Lucas. Annie looked over and saw the tears running freely down Lucas’s face. She moved to him then too, to put her hand on his shoulder. She turned to look over at Sarah, but she seemed all right, she seemed absorbed in the task. And in spite of his tears, Lucas kept taking his turns, snuffling and breathing irregularly, but reaching in again and again, and watching the ashes fall, slightly windblown, from his long fingers.
When they’d finished, when Sarah had turned the empty bag over and shaken the last of the ashes out, the four of them stood huddled together for a long moment, their arms around one another.
They separated. Swiping at his face, blowing his nose, Lucas went to the side of the cottage. He opened the spigot the hose was attached to, and they took turns watering the ash into the earth around and under the flowers. When Annie’s turn was done, she stepped back. Watching the other three, she moved a little to change the angle from which she saw them. She realized abruptly that she was composing a picture she might have taken, and felt a familiar sense of something like shame.
She and Sarah had driven up together, bringing the ashes with them, the wooden box set upright in the middle of the back seat. Glancing over at it from time to time, Annie had had the thought that it looked like some strange, small passenger—an ET, hitching a ride.
Now, driving back to Cambridge by herself, she felt solitary in the car. Sarah had offered to come with her, but Annie insisted she go back to Cambridge with Lucas and Jeanne, who’d driven up from New York to meet them at the cottage in a rental car.
She had thought they might want to talk. As she was packing up the perishables from the cottage kitchen, she’d been listening to the murmur of Jeanne’s and Sarah’s voices out on the porch. She’d heard Sarah say, “This is so exciting! Do you know what it is yet?”
She had stopped what she was doing to hear Jeanne’s answer. “No,” she said. “They can’t tell you that until a little bit later than this. And quite honestly, I am not sure that’s something that Lucas and I even want to know ahead of time.”
Annie understood immediately what this was: a pregnancy. Neither Jeanne nor Lucas had said anything about it to her. Perhaps this was something they didn’t want people to know yet.
Now, alone in the car, she wondered if Frieda knew.
Then she thought again of how complicated things had become with Frieda. After they got back to Cambridge tonight, for instance, Sarah, Lucas, and Jeanne were going out to dinner with her. They had asked Annie along, but she’d said no, that she’d see them the next day at the parties for Graham, that she thought that Frieda should have her time alone with them, as she had had hers today. She didn’t explain that she felt this the more so—this wish to give the evening to Frieda—because she’d been relieved that Lucas and Sarah had wanted to scatter the ashes without Frieda. She had some guilt about that. Guilt about the decision itself—which she thought had been mostly Lucas’s. And guilt about her own relief at the decision.
In any case, she had let the decision stand.
The plan was that Lucas would be the one to tell Frieda. Annie wasn’t able to imagine how he would do it, but she allowed herself to believe that he would know what to say, how to present things in a way that made sense to his mother. That rescued her feelings.
But this was not at all what happened.
One day in mid-August, Annie had answered the phone. It was Jeanne. She wanted to let Annie know that she had told Frieda of the decision about half an hour earlier. That Frieda had called her, “out of the blue” she said, to ask when the scattering of the ashes was to take place, and Jeanne had been forced to tell her both the date, and then that she, Frieda, wouldn’t be a part of it.
Frieda had been upset at the news, Jeanne said, and she thought Annie might be getting a call from her. She thought Annie should be prepared for that.
Annie was silent for a moment, thinking of Frieda, imagining her shock. “That must have been difficult for you,” she said finally to Jeanne. For Frieda, is what she was thinking.
“Of course it was,” Jeanne said. “I did try to put her off, in order for Lucas to be the one to talk to her, as we’d planned, but she couldn’t understand why I simply couldn’t tell her. So I did, finally. I didn’t see how I could reasonably get out of it.”
After a long moment, Annie asked, “What did she say?”
“She was upset, quite naturally. Or really, she was angry, though she wouldn’t have acknowledged that to me. She asked who had decided this, and I said of course the family had. She asked me if I was in on it—that’s precisely what she said: ‘in on it,’ as though it were a crime—and I said I wasn’t. That I hadn’t been there for the discussion.”
“Did she ask about me? About whether or not I was ‘in on it’?”
“She did. And I told her no. But then she asked if you had approved the decision.”
“And you said?”
“I said, I think, that you had yielded to the others.”
“Oh, Christ,” Annie said.
“Yes. Well, she got very angry then, although she still wouldn’t admit it. I could tell, though. But I must say that I got angry too, Annie.”
“At Frieda?” Annie said stupidly.
“Yes. I said you had already shared so very much with her. That I would never have been as generous as you have been. And that perhaps you had a right to the moment just with Graham, just with his children. I told her I understood the decision. That I agreed with it.”
Annie said nothing, and after a moment Jeanne spoke again. “She doesn’t have the right, Annie, to be angry at any of you. Not you, not Lucas. And I told her so.”
Annie was silent. She was shocked. By what? By Jeanne’s . . . toughness. By her honesty, really.
Finally she said, “I just don’t know if I can do this, Jeanne.”
“Do what?”
“Stick with the plan, I guess. Not include Frieda.”
Now it was Jeanne’s turn to be silent. Her voice, when she spoke, was chilly, Annie thought. “Of course you must do what you need to do, Annie. I know that you’re friends with Frieda. I will only say that for Lucas—and perhaps for Sarah too, I wouldn’t know—it would be better. Better to stay with this plan.”
Annie didn’t know what to say. She felt cornered, she realized.
“I feel that Lucas has the right to be just with his father,” Jeanne said. “That is my stake in this affair. I want for him what he wants. What he needs. It will have a different meaning for him to have his mother there. It will make everything harder.”
After a long moment, Annie said, “God, what a choice.”
“You mean, for you?”
“Yes, for me.”
After a moment, Jeanne said, “But perhaps, in this case, it really isn’t your choice. You don’t need to feel it is. He was your husband, Annie, of course. I understand that. But Lucas and Sarah are his children, and this is the way they wanted it. Perhaps it was more Lucas, yes. But Sarah too, I think.” Jeanne was quiet for a moment, as if to let Annie think about this. Then, the coup de grâce. “And I must say, I feel that today I have borne the brunt of this—isn’t that what you say? Brunt?”
“Yes.”
“Another strange word. Very English. The brunt of it, then. I was the one who had to tell her. Who was honest with her. I faced all of her hurt and her anger, and told her what I thought. So it’s done. There don’t need to be all these telephone calls back and forth. It’s over. Fini.” Annie didn’t know what to say. After a long moment, Jeanne said, “Let it rest, Annie. It doesn’t need to be such a big . . . drama. Frieda will get over it.”
As soon as she got off the phone with Jeanne, Annie called Frieda. Who wasn’t home. She left a message on Frieda’s phone, but didn’t hear back that day.
She called Frieda again the next day, and again had no return call.
And then she decided not to keep calling. What she felt
was that, after all, Frieda had a right not to have to discuss her pain with someone who’d been a part of causing it.
And Annie had a lot to do just then, anyway, to get ready for her part of the memorial events. It made it easier to let it go, to imagine Frieda was perhaps slowly letting it go too.
20
There were to be two memorial gatherings the day after the ashes were scattered. The first was the bookstore party, which Peter and Lucas and Sarah had planned with the staff. And Annie had decided finally to host a separate party after that one, back at the house. Hers would be smaller, just family and close friends, but even so she’d had a long list of things to do and order and arrange in the weeks ahead of time. She’d found herself almost grateful for this—for the sense of purpose it provided. And then after the difficulty around the scattering of the ashes, for the distraction it offered from her worries about Frieda.
The bookstore party started off crowded and noisy. It reminded Annie of the party at which she’d met Graham, many of the same people cramming the aisles, leaving their empty or half-full plastic cups everywhere, even among the books on the shelves. Again those shelves had been pushed back to make an open space in the middle of the shop. There were maybe fifty or so chairs set up there, but hardly anyone was sitting in them. They all preferred being able to move around, to talk, to get more easily to the tables set at opposite ends of the space, the tables laden with wine and crackers and cheese and plates of canapés.
Annie, along with Lucas and Sarah and the bookstore staff, was busy greeting people, thanking them for coming. She saw John Norris across the room and waved. She would talk to him at the house—she’d sent an invitation to him with a note saying how much she appreciated his sitting with her the night after Graham died. Natalie and Don Schumer were there, Natalie in a kind of caftan that made her look more enormous than ever. She saw Edith near the doorway. Bill, Rosemary Gregory, Georgie. Dozens of others. She saw Frieda too, but couldn’t catch her eye. They would have to talk at some point today, that was clear. It would be too awkward not to. What she hoped was that by now Frieda would have found a way to let go of her anger.
After half an hour or so of everyone’s mixing and greeting, Peter went to the microphone set up in the middle of the chairs and asked them all to sit down. He waited, watching them, letting them settle. Annie moved to the back to find her seat. She would have to leave early to get back to the house ahead of the crowd.
When almost everyone was seated, Peter welcomed them on Graham’s behalf. It would be a bit like a Quaker meeting, he said—anyone could speak when the spirit moved them.
There was the initial awkwardness of that kind of gathering. After the long silence, Peter rose and went to the mike again. Annie watched him as he choked up, trying to talk of his friendship with Graham. After he sat down, Bill stood up and spoke movingly about the early days of the bookstore, how it was Graham’s energy and bonhomie (“I had to look up how to pronounce that,” he said, smiling) that made it all work. And John spoke very briefly, about their long friendship and his inability to truly believe that it was over.
Then Frieda got up and walked to the microphone. She was in her usual uniform, a longish skirt, Birkenstocks, and a striped, long-sleeved T-shirt. Annie was suddenly nervous for her, she looked so awkward, so vulnerable.
But to Annie’s surprise, as she began, her voice was steady, she seemed completely comfortable. She made people laugh, actually, introducing herself to those who didn’t know her as Graham’s first wife, the one who “barely escaped alive,” she said. “But I’m smart enough to look back on my years with him as the most lively, the most funny, the wildest years of my life, too.” She told a few anecdotes about Graham’s kindness to her over the years. “Nothing he needed to do,” she said. “But he did it.” She said what she most admired about him was exactly that kind of thing, because, she said, “he was a person who never wasted a friendship, or a relationship.” It seemed to Annie that Frieda was looking at her, but it was hard to tell because of her glasses.
“To Graham,” Frieda said then, raising her glass. Then she was looking at Annie, directly. “And to Annie, who did so much better a job of it than I.”
Unexpected sudden tears rose to Annie’s eyes. From across the room, she raised her opened hands ceremonially in a gesture meant to thank Frieda. For the toast, of course. For everything it must have cost her to be able to give it. For making things right again between them. And for weathering for so long the lasting complexity of their entwined lives.
A number of people had turned to Annie, smiling, raising their glasses, and Annie smiled back, nodding.
When the next speaker got up, though, she took the opportunity to make her way to the door, out of the shop, and into the still-hot evening air to begin her slow walk back to the house. As she walked, she was thinking first of Frieda, feeling a near-joyous relief that Frieda had been able somehow to put the pain around the scattering of the ashes behind her.
And she’d been so elegant! Annie had been worried for her as she walked to the mike, worried about how she would do. She’d grown so used to Frieda’s role in her life and Graham’s life that she hadn’t thought about Frieda’s other life, her life as a teacher, as someone who stood up in front of people every day and talked to them about history, about the movement of peoples around the world in ancient times. She was glad for that too, she realized—for being reminded of this other Frieda.
Then, after a few more blocks, walking past all the houses she’d walked past hundreds of times before, she began to think of how familiar this pattern was —leaving the bookstore before everyone else, in the old days the ones who would stay for the refreshments or the signing, or both. Leaving in order to be home in time to get the party ready.
She had a sense now that this particular departure was the ending of a great many things. It wasn’t just that Graham was gone from her life, but that the bookstore too would go away. The life of the bookstore. Peter had talked about this with her a few weeks earlier, his wish to sell. But she had assumed this would happen. The store would belong to someone else. It would change.
Oh, they would welcome her, Annie was pretty sure of that. At readings, at parties. But there would be a slow diminishment of the idea that she was in any way important to these activities. And of course, the after-parties would move elsewhere—the new location depending on who bought the store, who would be running it, and how. In any case, her appearance at those parties, or at the readings, would stop being particularly noted. Perhaps, actually, it would become unwelcome, it would be seen as a kind of sad wish to stay connected to something she was no longer part of, a desire to feel important, somehow.
She could imagine it, at some point someone introducing her as Graham’s wife, as his widow, someone else saying “Graham who?”
And that would be that.
No, she’d stay away from the store after this. There were plenty of other literary events she could go to in Cambridge or Boston—at libraries, at festivals, at benefits. She could be as busy in that world, in all likelihood, as she’d ever been, if that’s what she desired. But this would be the last of the events at Graham’s store for her.
She wasn’t even sure she’d miss it. Some of the point for her had always had to do with him, with his outsize pleasure in it all, his animation at the parties, his gratitude at what she’d made for him.
The house looked beautiful from the street, she thought. She walked slowly up the Caldwells’ driveway and pushed the gate open. She and Lucas and Sarah had bought a viburnum they were going to have planted in the backyard in honor of Graham, but for now, for the party, they’d left it sitting in a big pot by the front steps. It made a kind of bower out of the stoop.
Inside, the wineglasses set out on the big table gleamed in the early-evening light. All the windows were wide open, and the air moved gently in the house every now and then, carrying the glowing dust motes this way and that in the slant of sun. In the kitchen part o
f the room, the students in their white shirts and black slacks were talking back and forth, laughing, setting out the food from the caterer Sarah had hired. Annie moved around among them, making room for herself at the counter, room to toss a couscous salad she’d made, room to arrange some stuffed dates on a platter—both dishes she thought certain of the guests might look forward to.
Then she went upstairs to be alone until she heard the first of the old friends arriving.
It was going well, she thought as she greeted people. There were a number of the writers they’d grown close to, and Annie moved around among them. Mike, Edith’s ex-husband, had come with her, and Annie was glad to talk with him—it had been months since she’d seen him. John hugged her almost fiercely, and then his wife Betsy took her turn.
Annie was standing near the door, and when she saw Frieda coming up the long walk, she stepped outside and went quickly to her. They embraced, wordlessly, for a long moment. When they stepped back from each other, both of them had tears in their eyes.
“That was so beautiful, Frieda,” Annie said. “Your toast. Thank you.”
“I meant it,” Frieda said, “I meant it all.”
They stood, looking at each other. Then Annie said, “Well, come in. Come on in,” making a sweeping gesture of dramatic welcome, and they mounted the stairs together and went into the gathering noise of the house.
Others drifted in. Aaron Lambert was there, and Felicity and Everett Rogers. Don Schumer and Natalie, of course. The Caldwells had come over from next door, bringing their three teenage children with them, all tall and reedy, like their father. The kids stood in a little clot, slim statues, talking only occasionally, and only to each other. Whenever anyone else drew near, they looked awkward and frightened, so Annie didn’t approach them.
Everyone from the store had come. The younger of Annie’s two brothers had flown up from Philadelphia, and she introduced him around. From time to time she saw him in intense conversations, once, for a long while, with Lucas, who’d always liked him.