by Sarah Blake
“Do we have to go to the park?” the biggest one asked as Kitty passed.
“Yes, Miss Lowenstein, you do.”
Jews, Kitty noted, making her way toward the dark green awning that shaded the well-polished door, straightening her back without thinking. Little Jewish girls. And up here, on the Upper East Side.
“Hello, Johnny.” She inclined her head toward the doorman with a smile.
“Mrs. Milton.” He nodded, holding open the door for her, Neddy’s stuffed bear in his arms.
“Oh lord, they’ve done it again?” She smiled, taking the battered bear from the doorman’s hands. “It’s a game, you realize,” she said. “You only encourage them.”
“Keeps me busy.” Johnny’s eyes danced. “Out of trouble.”
“Is that so?” She cocked an eyebrow by way of her thanks. Beneath the uniform—any uniform—men all just wanted to play ball.
I must speak to Neddy, however, she promised herself, making her way across the black-and-white tile to the elevator doors. He oughtn’t to presume on Johnny’s good humor. Johnny had a job to do, and it didn’t include retrieving the stuffed bear that Neddy had tossed from the open window, fourteen stories up, to see if Bear could fly.
She smiled. Neddy, who wouldn’t sit still, Neddy, whose hand she had to keep a tight hold on—he had a tendency to go off and explore. No one had prepared her for boys and their impulsive wandering, setting off this way and that, a creature on some scent, following their noses into trouble. Little ferrets.
She waited as the machinery of the lift hummed its way downward and bounced lightly before the grate was pulled and then the door slid across.
“Hello, Frank,” Kitty said to the elevator man as she walked into the lift.
“Mrs. Milton.” Frank glanced at her and pushed the grate across.
They rode in silence up the fourteen flights, both pairs of eyes watching the light on the dial as the elevator rose through the numbers. At her floor, Frank spun the gear, slowing the elevator until it stopped just at the lip of the threshold. He pulled the gate back and waited.
“Thank you,” she said, catching sight of herself in the mirror hung in the center of the tiny elevator hall. She had a flush on her cheeks, and the pleasure of the afternoon still shone in her eyes.
The light was on in the library. To the right the early-evening sun lit up a swath of the living room, out of whose windows Kitty glimpsed the bright green spring waving in the treetops. She slipped out of her coat and reached for a hanger in the cedar closet, tucking the wooden shoulders into the cloth and hanging it back upon the rod, where it hung now beside Ogden’s. Mr. and Mrs. Milton. She smiled at the cloth couple, touching the sleeve of his coat, and then leaned and buried her face in its neck, possessed by this wild, irrepressible love of the coat and her coat and the hall and— Oh, I am ridiculous. She smiled. Absurd. But the sense of joy that had begun that afternoon in the taxi and had carried through the music in the hall, back out into the park, that sheer abundant light in her heart as she had walked home, open windows, oh, she wanted to burst out of her body, she realized, pulling herself out of the closet and shutting the door on her coat beside his.
Ogden, she thought, come home.
The afternoon her cousin Dunc Houghton had first brought Og, newly returned from Germany, to one of her grandmother’s interminable soirées—one moment there she was, Kitty Houghton, standing next to her sister, Evelyn, just inside Granny’s library door, bored and perfumed, but ready and on hand to be the girls at yet another musical evening, and the next moment, there she was, quite simply, not.
She was something else entirely. Standing there with Evelyn, she’d heard the commotion in the hall behind her as the street door was thrown open and men’s laughter clattered over the yellow silk settee and the two Queen Anne chairs—Hello, Barker, hello, sirs, may I take your hats—and crash-banged right into the front room, where Granny’s guests were busy finding chairs.
Go and see what that is! her grandmother’s face had commanded Kitty silently. And Kitty had slid round the door, emerging into the hall just as Dunc crowed, “See, Ogden. This is what I’m talking about—”
Dunc was pointing to the John Singer Sargent portrait of her grandmother hung (too high, the little curator from the museum had sniped when he had stopped by one evening) above the entrance to the library behind her, but the man next to him was not looking at the painting.
“I do see,” he said.
She blushed.
“Oh yes.” Dunc turned to his friend and clapped his hands appreciatively. “Yes, my cousin Kitty. The flower of an altogether different age.”
The young man had crossed the rug between them and taken her hand in his. “I’m Ogden,” he’d said.
One of the Pierpont Place Miltons, he was a catch in anyone’s book, though he was quite a bit older and had traveled, and there had been whispers of a woman somewhere. But the man in front of her had blue eyes and a lean face ending in a grin that seemed to her right then, her hand in his, to shine on her alone. He had experience. Very well. She hadn’t been frightened in the least. She was not her mother. A man’s life stretched into all corners, ran like water where it was tipped. The past was, simply, past. He had come to her with his arms wide and his heart full, and they had begun.
All her life Kitty had moved hand to hand forward, lightly holding on the line strung between signposts for a woman’s life. As a girl, it had been firmly set down that one ought never speak until one was spoken to, and when one did, one ought not speak of anything that might provoke or worry. One referred to the limb of the table, not the leg, the white meat on the chicken, not the breast. Good manners were the foundations of civilization. One knew precisely with whom one sat in a room based entirely on how well they behaved, and in what manner. Forks and knives were placed at the four-twenty on one’s plate when one was finished eating. One ought to walk straight and keep one’s hands to oneself when one spoke, lest one be taken for an Italian or a Jew. A woman was meant to tend a child, a garden, or a conversation. A woman ought to know how to mind the temperature in a room, adding a little heat in a well-timed question, or cool a warm temper with the suggestion of another drink, a bowl of nuts, and a smile.
What Kitty had learned at Miss Porter’s School—handed down from Sarah Porter through the spinsters teaching there, themselves the sisters of the Yale men who handed down the great words, Truth. Verity. Honor—was that your brothers and your husbands and your sons will lead, and you will tend. You will watch and suggest, guide and protect. You will carry the torch forward, and all to the good.
There was the world. And one fixed an eye keenly on it. One learned its history; one understood the causes of its wars. One debated and, gradually, a picture emerged of mankind over centuries; one understood the difference between what was good and what was right. One understood that men could be led to evil, against the judgment of their better selves. Debauchery. Poverty of spirit. This was the explanation for so many unfortunate ills—slavery, for instance. This was the reason. Men, individual men, were not at fault. They had to be taught. Led. Shown by example what was best. Unfairness, unkindness could be addressed. Quietly. Patiently. Without a lot of noisy attention.
Noise was for the poorly bred.
If one worried, if one were afraid, if one doubted—one kept it to oneself. One looked for the good, and one found it. The woman found it, the woman pointed it out, and the man tucked it in his pocket, heartened. These were the rules.
She could hear the children in their bath and Nurse’s steady scolding, like a drum beneath the children’s patter. She shouldn’t bother them, she thought. She should let them be.
But a squeal and then the delighted laughter of Neddy drew her back, and she turned the knob on the bathroom door.
“Mummy!” Moss cried.
Two wet heads turned to her, standing on the threshold.
“You’ve got Bear,” Neddy crowed.
“I do.” Kitty stopp
ed herself from smiling. “But we must have a talk—”
“Indeed, we must.” Nurse turned on her stool, her face quite terrible. “I’ve told the boys I would report their behavior today.”
Behind her, Neddy grinned and held his nose, sliding under the water. Moss stared.
“Very well,” Kitty said, knowing she was meant to be stern, knowing she was meant to speak. But here were her two boys in the bath, their hair wet and their faces shining—Neddy rose back up out of the water, with his yellow car that he took everywhere in his hand. “Plonk,” he said, running it along the rim of the tub. It was too sweet, too delicious.
“We’ll have a talk after the bath,” she promised Nurse. “Send them down to my room when they are out.” And she turned from the steaming room to hide her smile.
Oh, she thought again, hurrying down the hall. Here it is. Again. Life.
The wide bed with its white bedspread tucked precisely beneath the two pillows appeared wider in the late sun. The windows were shut against the evening and she set the bear down on the window seat and shoved one of the windows all the way up, wanting all the air in, the city in, the sound of traffic and far below the click of someone’s heels on the pavement. The smell of heat reached all the way up to her, with the deep dark of spring.
She turned, stripping her wrists of her charm bracelet and her gold watch, slipping out of her flats, and walked into the bathroom, the green tile cool beneath her stockinged feet, and opened the china knobs in the sink. A hard cold gushed out of the tap. Startled, she pulled her hands out and caught sight of the grimace on her face in the mirror. The woman looking back smoothed her frown and studied herself. She had the Houghton lines, the Houghton nose, the high cheekbones above a curved mouth that now smiled back at the glass and at the generations.
“Born a Houghton and married a Milton,” her father had crowed appreciatively, raising his glass at their wedding. “Kitty has exchanged one ‘ton’ for another!” Then, chuckling to the room around them, he finished—“And she’s shown the great good sense to remain in the same weight class!” And the long bare arms of Kitty’s bridesmaids lifting their champagne glasses lazily upward in the toast had reminded Kitty of swans at twilight, swimming effortlessly, beautifully curved and silent.
“These are the best years of your life.” Mrs. Phipps leaned across the white tablecloth to her, putting a hand on Kitty’s for her attention. “You don’t know it, but it’s true.”
Kitty had flushed, nodding at her mother’s friend, knowing she ought to thank her, knowing it was meant well. But old women were thieves. They wanted to steal possibility, put one in one’s place and snatch the time they had lost back into their own baskets. Even here, on her wedding night.
Well, she had declared to herself that night, she wouldn’t do it. No matter how wise she grew, she promised, curving her lips into a smile for Mrs. Phipps, she’d never tell a girl like her at the end of every meadow there is a gate.
She buried her hands and then her face in the thick towel and then, lowering it, saw in the mirror that Neddy and Moss, freshly bathed and now in their wrappers and slippers, their hair combed, had come silently into the room behind her, where they had found Bear and had climbed onto the window seat.
Her heart stuttered.
The window was pushed high above their heads. There was nothing at all between them and the air.
“Get down, boys,” she said into the mirror.
They hadn’t heard. Moss was on his knees, perched against the sill. Neddy was standing above him and leaning out, leaning out way too far, about to launch Bear over the sill.
Kitty spun round, moving to get to him. “Neddy!”
Startled, the little boy turned. And Kitty saw that she would never get to him in time. There would be nothing to save him from the open sky.
And then he simply fell.
Two
SHE COMES AGAIN in her clean white Keds and stands at the foot of the bed, waiting. They are on the Island, in the pink room, in the Big House. In the rooms around them, the others lie sleeping, everyone sleeping in the thick sea-dark.
Evie, she says, we must go. We must get there before it is gone.
It’s a dream, Evie tells herself in the dream.
Evie. Her mother stands, waiting.
I am sleeping, Evie says, lying in the bed that was not her bed in the room that was not her room, but the room they all slept in as girls. I don’t want to go.
Evie—
And when Evie rises, her mother turns, her shoulders set, her step quick along the hall and down the stairs, determined. Goodbye, Granny K, Evie says to the door where her grandmother slept. Goodbye. Goodbye, Aunt Evelyn. We must go.
They move out of the house across the lawn and up the small hill to the graveyard where the Miltons lie, the little humps of granite, the names—
Ogden. Kitty. Evelyn. Moss.
Joan.
Whose is this? Joan points at this last one, the new one, hers.
We thought you’d died, Mum.
Joan looks down at the stone.
Died, she whispers.
Died? She turns around. But not here, Evie. I told you. Not—
* * *
HERE.
Evie Milton woke, the word bolting out of her throat, its afterclap hanging in the air. She lay there in her own bed until the pieces of the dream fell back into their places, the walls around her became her own walls in the dark bedroom in the apartment she shared with her husband and their son on the lower end of Manhattan in New York City, in the present, now. It was another morning. The city was awake. Her pulse slowed. Mum was dead. Had been dead for months.
Paul was in Berlin. Seth was sleeping down the hall. The king was in his chamber, the queen was in the parlor, and they—Evie squinted at the ceiling, trying to remember the words of the song—all fall down. But Paul was coming home. She smiled. Paul was coming home, tonight.
A siren’s high G wound its way up Sixth Avenue, and the city symphony that played through the hours—the sustained murmur of cars, syncopated by chatter, people walking beneath the windows, talking, and then at times the sharp rap of someone’s laughter—soothed. The world went on without her, the outside world clattered ahead, and she was a girl again, awake in her bed, amid the grown-up voices echoing up the stairwell in the Big House on the Island, her cousin Min asleep next to her in the dark.
Evie shoved the covers aside and swung her feet onto the floor, pushing back her hair and sitting up, still in the grip of the dream.
What was it?
Fogged in, there was something slipping away just past the ridge of dark trees, just there and hovering; she could nearly see what it was there in the fog past the ridge, tiptoeing around, as if not wanting to bother, not wanting to mention, as if the past had grown suddenly kind. What was it that hovered on the outside of her brain, what was it?
She needed Paul. She needed him to help her parse it all. He would know what it meant. He’d make sense of the quiet.
Her phone pinged on the bureau.
Walser, Paul had texted. Ring any bells?
The dance? she typed back, teasing.
The name, he returned.
Nope, she wrote, and stared at the screen. Come home, she thought. Fly safely, she texted.
The morning sun stretched along the hall, the closed doors ranging one after the other like holes punched in a margin—her study, Paul’s study, the bathroom, Seth’s bedroom—all the long way to the kitchen and living room at the end, overlooking Bleecker Street. Along the inner wall, the cherry red bookshelves they had built in Berkeley and moved from apartment to apartment, from job to job, ranged now floor to ceiling along the length of the hall. Shelved alphabetically and in sections, the spines of their books told one history of their lives: in color and girth, and in the margins of those books Evie could trace her trek from girl to scholar.
“You know we live in a library, right?” Seth had grumbled the other night. “Nothing but books, b
ooks, books.”
“And dirty socks,” she retorted.
“Mom.” He was firm. “Someone’s got to keep it real.”
She headed toward the bathroom.
“Mom?” Seth called.
Evie pushed open the door to his room.
“Do I have to wake up yet?” The voice from the middle of the blankets in the middle of the bed was still half-asleep.
Evie smiled into the dark, the shades pulled down tight against the city outside.
“Ten minutes,” she said, moving to the end of his bed, her eyes on her fifteen-year-old, her boy, his arms wrapped around his pillow, utterly still.
“Mom?”
She drew in her breath, realizing she was standing exactly as her mother had in the dream.
“Ten minutes,” she said again, making for the door and pulling it quickly shut behind her.
Evie had spent her life keeping her mother at arm’s length. The folded in, the silent woman at the center of her parents’ more silent house, was not her, would never, she had vowed, be her. Something had happened to her mother, something that had knocked Joan off her feet, something that fuzzed her. Because Joan Milton—unlike her sister, Evelyn, unlike their mother, Kitty—had been smudged somehow. Clouded. Obscured.
So when the dream began in this month Paul had been away, and kept coming morning after morning, the dream with its insistent, urgent, vital woman taking Evie by the hand and leading her out of the Big House on Crockett’s Island to the new grave, and pointing—what could she do?
She followed.
She was an historian; the past was her butter and bread. But, she thought as she made her way to the bathroom and turned on the taps, nothing had readied her for the gentle persistent feeling growing stronger through this month, a steady rain in the back of her mind, that there was something she was missing, that she had failed somehow, that there had been a turn, back there in the road of her life, a trailhead, an opening she’d barreled right past. Somewhere back there had been the right route, the way through, and she’d missed it.