by Sue Miller
She stood for a long moment in the yard, looking around again. Everything seemed sad to her. Everything cried out for work. It exhausted her just to look at it. How could she have imagined this would be any kind of haven? She looked down the long dirt driveway she’d come in on, the tunnel between the trees that arched in on either side—the trees that brushed the sides of the car when you drove through them. The driveway curved slightly; you couldn’t see the end of it. There was nothing to do but get in the car and go back down into that endlessness, to go back the way she’d come. There was nowhere to be that would be any better, that could help her with what she was feeling.
She got in the van and turned on the engine.
Twice she stopped. The first time because she realized that she didn’t know where she was, she was so distraught. Nothing looked familiar, and she had no sense of how long she’d been driving. Finally she saw the sign for the rest stop near Exit 10, but it didn’t help—she still felt so wildly disoriented that it frightened her. She pulled off when she came to it, and drove past the few cars to the very end of the parking area. There was a truck there, off to the side, but she didn’t see anyone in it. She cut the engine, rolled down the windows, and sat, trying to breathe slowly and deeply, until her body seemed calmed.
The second time she stopped was to get gas—she had noticed just in time that she was almost out. This frightened her too, the idea that she might have driven until the gas ran out and then have had to wait for help. That image of herself, alone and lost and useless at the side of the road, waiting for some form of rescue, seemed so terrible that she wept for a few minutes in the gas station after she got back into the car.
At home, the door was locked. She let herself in and called for Sarah, even though she could tell by the sense of stillness in the air of the house that she wasn’t there. Then she saw the note on the floor, a book set on the edge of the paper to hold it in place.
“I changed my mind about staying,” Sarah had written. She’d headed to Logan to get on a waitlist to return early to San Francisco. She hoped Annie would find her stay in Vermont “a comfort.” Annie made a noise.
She took her jacket off and draped it over the newel post. She went into the living room and sat down on the couch. The light was almost gone in here, and in the shadowy room everything, all these things she’d chosen as . . . what?—emblems of her life with Graham, with Sarah?—they all seemed alien, unappealing. She closed her eyes. She was glad Sarah had left.
After a minute or two she got up on her knees and bent forward over the back of the couch, reaching down to the oversize books on the shelf behind it. There it was, where she’d left it—Memoir with Bookshop. She brought it up and sat down again, sinking into the old pillows with the book on her lap. She turned on the lamp next to her and opened it, feeling her anger swell. Her hands were trembling.
25
Frieda had been taken aback by her conversation with Jeanne—the conversation in which Jeanne had told her that the scattering of Graham’s ashes was just for the immediate family. In its aftermath, she had felt roughly treated. She went over and over what Jeanne had said, and it seemed to her that nearly every word was a blow. It took her several days to recover.
But as she gained more distance on it, she began to think that Jeanne was right—that of course Annie had a right to keep the ceremony small and intimate, if that’s what she wanted. To make it, after all, about the death of her husband—the marker of the end of her marriage to Graham.
And in what seemed like the logical next step after that, she actually began to admire Jeanne for her role in all of this. How unapologetic she’d been! How clear and unflappable. How fierce, in her defense of Lucas’s interests. That part helped Frieda to see their marriage anew, and she felt glad for him that he had someone so powerfully loyal to him.
She came to feel, too, that perhaps she had taken advantage of Annie in some ways. She’d never considered it, because of Graham, she supposed. Because he had seemed to take it for granted—as she had also, in the end—that she would always be part of his life with Annie. She began to wonder, in those days after she’d talked to Jeanne, what it might have cost Annie to be so generous, as Jeanne had said.
She thought for the first time too of the way in which her presence at so many important moments in Annie’s life with Graham might have been intrusive. Unwelcome. She actually began to feel an element of embarrassment for herself—she must have seemed so needy sometimes, so desperate.
What she seized on to help her with all this was that she needed to make some kind of apology to Annie, an apology that she hoped might rebalance their relationship.
Or perhaps not an apology, she thought. It might be difficult to discuss it directly with Annie. Surely she wouldn’t want to acknowledge feelings of irritation or anger toward Frieda. Feelings that might, after all, be unconscious on her part. Or if conscious, certainly awkward to confess to her, to Frieda.
She began to focus on the toast to Graham that she wanted to give at the bookstore party. She thought she could write it so that Annie would understand it as her way of saying how sorry she was, but in a way that would put no burden on her.
She had written it out, and then gone over and over it, discarding whole paragraphs, changing a sentence here, a word or a phrase there. She had read it aloud and then spoken it five or six times to be sure she was saying exactly what she felt, to be sure that it was clear, that it was, itself, generous enough.
As she made the toast, she had felt with deep pleasure that it was working. She watched Annie’s face open to her, her hands too opening in gratitude, in blessing. She felt it again as she and Annie embraced later in the evening—and she was grateful to Jeanne again for having spoken as she did.
So much of that was just swept away starting the very next day after the toast—swept away by Annie’s shock and anger at what she assumed was Rosemary’s affair with Graham; and by the way Frieda was complicit in that affair, as Annie saw it. Complicit in having kept it a secret from her.
Frieda was crushed. She had been so hopeful that she and Annie could somehow begin again. Annie’s deep anger—at Graham, at her—had made that seem impossible. It haunted Frieda—partly because of her guilt at confirming Graham’s affair with Rosemary when what she’d meant to confirm was that long-ago affair he’d had with Linda Parkman.
She had tried once in the fall to talk to Annie about all of this, to suggest to her that perhaps Rosemary was simply a sad friend of Graham’s. She said she wasn’t sure that Graham had, in fact, been unfaithful to Annie with Rosemary—Annie’s evidence for it seemed so tenuous, really. So much a matter of her interpretation of Rosemary’s grieving. It was just as likely, wasn’t it, that Rosemary’s grief was for the loss in her own life that Graham’s death had reminded her of? Hadn’t she just been divorced? Hadn’t Annie said that? Frieda knew that emptiness, that sorrowful void—in some ways worse than a death. A failure. A defeat. A deep, deep defeat. It had been so harrowing a loss for her that she could imagine Rosemary’s being reminded of it by Graham’s death.
She said this to Annie on one of the occasions Annie had come over—she had taken to appearing at Frieda’s apartment once or twice a week through these months. Frieda was the only person she could talk to about this, she said. It was too painful, too humiliating, to discuss it with anyone else. She didn’t want to ruin anyone else’s memories of Graham, either.
When Frieda began to make her suggestion that perhaps Rosemary was just another mourner, not necessarily a lover, Annie had sat upright and stared across Frieda’s kitchen table at her. Frieda faltered and stopped talking. Annie waited a moment and then said, “Did you, or did you not, sit there and tell me that you knew they were lovers?” Her dark eyes seemed to snap.
How could Frieda have said then that she was talking about another lover? A lover from earlier in Annie and Graham’s marriage? How could she have added that to the complication of rage and sorrow Annie was feeling?
/> “I did tell you that,” she had said then to Annie. “You’re right, I did. I’m sorry, I just . . . suppose in some way I just can’t believe it myself.”
“You can’t believe it!” Annie said, bitterly. “Imagine how I feel.”
“I know. I know, Annie.”
“And I have to behave as if I don’t feel that way. I have to act my part—my part being the grieving widow. And I hate that, Frieda.” She smacked the table, hard, and Frieda started back. “I hate it. That I have to pretend.” Her voice was almost breaking.
“I know,” Frieda had said. “I understand.”
It was then that Annie had said that Frieda was the only person she could talk to.
What about Edith? Frieda had asked. Couldn’t Annie talk to her? But even as she began to say the words, she understood how selfish she was being.
In any case, Annie had said no. She didn’t want to tell anyone else. She shook her head fiercely, her teeth bared. There was nothing pretty about her. “That’s how it becomes gossip, that’s how it happens,” she had said. “You tell one person you trust, and after a while they’re not able to keep it to themselves. They tell one person they trust, and maybe that person doesn’t care as much about you, about the principals in the event, as it were. And it’s such a delicious story, they can’t help but pass it on. And pretty soon you’ve got a universe of people in on the secret.” She laughed, humorlessly. “Yes, in on it, but anxious that you shouldn’t know that, you shouldn’t know that they’re in on it. And so they start acting too, and before you know it, you can’t tell a fucking thing about anyone anymore. About whether they might know, or whether they don’t have the foggiest.”
Frieda sat, silent, at a loss. She felt the accusation in everything Annie was saying.
Annie leaned forward, almost smiling. “And then someone, somehow, eventually tells someone who knows Sarah, or who knows Lucas, and wants to talk to them about it, or maybe just accidentally mentions it—” She sat back. “And then they’re mired in it too. And their sense of knowing their father—it’s done.”
Frieda needed to say something.
“I don’t think that’s right,” she offered. “I don’t think anyone would ever mention anything about it to Sarah or Lucas.”
“No? Didn’t you, in fact, mention it to me?”
“You asked, Annie. I assumed you knew already.”
There was a silence. Then Annie said, “But what if I hadn’t known, Frieda? If I hadn’t known for sure. What if I expected you to say, ‘No, that never happened. No. You mustn’t believe that about Graham for even one second.’”
Frieda had felt trapped, really. Closed in with Annie’s grief and rage.
And she was angry too, she realized. When what she most wanted was to mourn Graham for herself, to remember what had been sweetest in their falling in love, in their early marriage. To remember his generosity to her over the long years, his unfailing loyalty. Every year on her birthday, he came over with champagne and gifts. When her father died, he stayed with her three or four evenings in a row, until she felt she might be able to sleep.
Sometimes he just stopped by, for a game of Scrabble or a beer, and they talked—about Lucas, about Sarah. About books or movies. Stupid things—the price of real estate. A good joke he’d heard.
Why couldn’t she have had her own tender sorrow about all that? Why did she have to be plunged into what Annie was feeling? Why did she have to listen to Annie going over and over her betrayal? Sometimes she wanted to ask her that, or to tell her to stop, to tell her not to come over again. Once she sat upstairs, unmoving and silent, while Annie rang the bell again and again down in the foyer. The shrill of the bell itself seemed full of rage to her, but finally Annie left. And then Frieda felt guilty about that.
It had ended, though. Perhaps Frieda wasn’t able to offer Annie enough of what she needed. Perhaps Annie had a sense of Frieda’s resistance to her view of things. Perhaps Annie had begun to talk to Edith, or to someone else, and was taking comfort there. For whatever reason, as the fall wore on, as the days grew darker, Annie stopped coming over to Frieda’s so much, and then wasn’t coming at all.
What Frieda felt at first was mostly relief. But then she began to worry about Annie. Her dear friend, after all.
So Frieda called her, finally, in early December, to ask how she was, how she was managing. “Very nicely, thank you,” Annie said. Then she’d laughed, unconvincingly. Not even intending to be convincing, it seemed to Frieda.
But Frieda kept trying, kept calling. She reminded herself of the way Annie had responded to the toast at the bookstore party. Of the way she had been feeling about Annie and herself as she planned the toast. She kept calling, and slowly, gingerly, over the holidays and the long dark months of deepest winter, there seemed to be a kind of rapprochement between them. Or so Frieda thought. So she hoped.
Not exactly what she had wished for. That would take time. But she had plenty of that.
In late February, Jeanne gave birth to a girl, Claire, named after an unmarried aunt of hers, the aunt who had favored Jeanne among all her nephews and nieces. Who had paid for the classes at the drama school Jeanne had attended in Paris before she moved to America.
At Lucas and Jeanne’s invitation, Frieda went down to New York to help out the day after Jeanne came home with the baby. She felt this invitation as a gift, a reassuring affirmation of her place in the family, of her unique role as Claire’s grandmother. Her happiness about this touched everything she did with meaning in those days at the apartment.
She stayed for a week, sleeping on the couch in the living room and getting up in the night when Claire began to cry. Or not to cry exactly, but to make a noise that sounded to Frieda like the creaky hinge on a door that was swinging open and shut slowly, over and over.
She would go to Claire’s crib, just off the dining room. She’d pick her up and hold her until she calmed, singing softly to her, songs she’d sung to Lucas long ago. She’d set her down and speak to her while she changed her wet, sometimes shitty Pampers. She’d clean her bottom, change her sleeper if it too was soaked through. Then she’d pick her up again and take her down the long narrow hallway to Jeanne and Lucas’s bedroom.
When Frieda opened their door, she was aware of the closed-in, humid air. It smelled of birth and milk and old blood and the heat of their bodies, Jeanne’s and Lucas’s. It felt almost shockingly intimate to Frieda the first time she came in. She bent forward to touch Jeanne’s shoulder, holding the weightless curl of Claire’s body against her own. The tiny girl was already turning her head back and forth across Frieda’s front, in quest of the nipple.
When she went back alone to the living room to lie down again on the couch night after night, Frieda was flooded with memories of how it had been when Lucas was a baby—that same sense of being closed up inside a life that had been magically and completely altered.
She had never been as happy as she was then—Graham had seemed so enchanted with Lucas, with her. She had thought this was the miracle that would bring him back to her, the miracle that would make their world—the three of them, the three of them in bed—enough for him. She couldn’t imagine that he didn’t feel, as she did, the joyful sense of having made something whole again that had been broken, having completed something. For a while, it had seemed to her that it might be possible, that miracle.
She didn’t know when it started again, the other women. She didn’t know, actually, if it had ever stopped. She wouldn’t have known, she’d been so inward-turned, she’d felt so safe, so happy.
Until she wasn’t.
She tried not to allow those thoughts to rise. She reminded herself how lucky she was to be here, to have been asked. She focused on the pleasure of being with the baby, of helping Lucas and Jeanne. She did everything for Claire when the little girl was awake. When she needed changing, or a bath. And when Claire slept, there were plenty of chores Frieda could occupy herself with—the shopping, the cooking, the cleani
ng up.
And at night, the endless piles of laundry. (The trip down in the ancient elevator with the smelly crib sheets and changes of clothing, with Jeanne’s milk-stained blouses, her blood-stained underpants. Then the cramped laundry room. The insult of finding your damp things set out on the folding table and someone else’s clothing flopping around in one of the dryers.) It felt good to be so utterly taken up, moment by moment.
Frieda had thought she and Lucas might talk in the evenings after Jeanne went to bed, but he usually went to the dining room table then and spread out his papers. Frieda was tired all the time anyway, so on those evenings, she would take her turn in the bathroom and then lay her bedding out on the couch again and lie down, the light from the dining room falling in through the French doors Lucas had closed. She could watch him as he sat there, his back to her, flipping the pages over from one pile to the other, stopping sometimes to write something on the sheet in front of him. Sometimes she woke to hear the French doors to the dining room open—the click of the latch, the complaint of the hinge—and opened her eyes to see Lucas’s dark shape move across the living room into the mouth of the long, dark hallway.
But two nights before she was to leave, Frieda went to the closed dining room doors and knocked gently on one of the glass panes. She could see Lucas startle before he turned around. He got up and opened the doors.
Frieda came in and sat at the end of the table. Lucas closed the doors carefully and came to sit in his chair, pushing the two stacks of paper, one of them half the height of the other, to the side. He did this unhesitatingly, it seemed, and Frieda thought of how gracious he was being—how gracious he had been through her whole visit. How much he had to do, and yet the implication that he could simply push his work away to take time for her. His face, when he turned to her, seemed older, worn. Her beautiful son.