The Loved Ones

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  Oh, I believe you, she’d said and then waited out the sulky silence on the other end. Lionel preferred to persuade at length.

  Please come, he said, finally. Could you come right now?

  Her arrangements were easily made. Lily was spending the night at Margaret Foley’s. Jean could leave food and some newspaper on the floor for Perry in the basement, close off the good part of the house, and go.

  She boarded the train in Red Bank with the last wave of commuters. You have me for an hour, she’d said. But ringing the door, just past ten on Sixty-Second Street, she knew her day was lost. She already heard herself calling Doris to arrange for her to check in with Lily around dinnertime. The Foleys couldn’t always be counted on.

  She drew back from the door and looked up at the brownstone facade, freshly pointed, all the window trim painted a subtle unexpected gray green. So Lionel—something to catch your eye and keep you looking to figure it out. Feeble blue Christmas lights twinkling off-rhythm in daylight. This must be Kitty’s hand at work. How did he find them. All of Lionel’s wives were named Katherine. But only the first, the loveliest and the sanest, had used the full title. The rest—only four! said Lionel plaintively—were Kates and Kokos and now, the most infantile, Kitty. The latest Mrs. Lionel Devlin was barely out of her teens. Is she out? Doris had asked, all earnest fact-finding, and Nick and Jean had roared with laughter. Maybe not, dearest, said Nick. Very possibly not.

  How does a grown man meet a girl that young? Doris wanted to know. Jean took an exasperated breath, and Nick answered, Luck, dear. Someone’s luck, anyway, we’re not sure yet who’s the fortunate one. But I think it may be Lionel. She’s very sweet, this Kitty.

  Oh, come on, said Jean, incredulous. She’s embryonic.

  A quality most don’t appreciate right away, said Nick, and Jean gave him her slyest smile.

  Lionel appeared at the front door in his uniform black silk kimono, belted with a hideous necktie, something in a zigzag horizontal knit. And sure enough, her eye went there, to the hangman’s knot he’d affected in the brown flame stitch. She smiled up at him. You’re a wonder.

  No, you! How did you get here so quickly? I adore you. Come in.

  He scanned the sidewalk behind her, happily, as if there might be some other pleasant surprises, and then sighed and stood back; the waft of some new scent caught her as she skirted by him. He took up the doorframe, yet assumed the posture of allowing her entry. Such an old-dog trick, he made her laugh. Look at you! she said.

  His hair, usually a careful bell from crown to nape, was a nest of wet ringlets. Silver, black, beige, even green-looking damp tangles, cheeks bright pink, and teeth brushed, just, and he was saturated, completely saturated with a cologne that smelled of grapefruit rind. She barely made it past him and wondered why it never made Nick jealous—Lionel knocking her half silly with a greeting.

  He’s only practicing, said Nick when she asked him. But she wasn’t so sure.

  Practicing hard, then, she’d said.

  He listened. What would you like me to say?

  She shook her head. As if she’d started something stupid. He’s a silly man, your brother, she said. But silly wasn’t what she meant at all.

  Lionel gave the door a pat when closed as if commending a faithful servant, odd the ways he got her to watch him. Thank god you’re here, he said. We are desperate.

  You are always desperate, she laughed at him and shrugged off her jacket. Where is this nightmare unfolding?

  It’s not funny, Jean.

  No, of course not.

  She’s in the upper flat and won’t come down. It’s been days.

  Days?

  Day, then.

  All right, she said, dropping her jacket on the red lacquer chair, all right. Have you had any breakfast?

  Of course not. Lionel tugged at his knot, pulled in his belly.

  Well, you’re emaciated I can see. She put a fond hand toward his wet hair. Go find a brush. I’ll put the coffee on.

  What about Kitty?

  Kitty next.

  She went on to the kitchen and untangled the cord from inside the percolator, found coffee and corn toasties and Aquavit in the freezer. Even if the toasties were a thousand years old, just the scent of them would calm everyone down. Lionel reappeared in gray flannel trousers, red cashmere turtleneck, and black velvet slippers with a coat of arms embroidered in gold thread. His hair combed straight back from his forehead, his face soap shiny, fingertips pink from the scrub brush.

  Much improved, she said. All right, I’ll root out the girl.

  You’re an angel. Really, he said. You are. His eyes held her gaze then he jimmied a mug out of the dishwasher. That look he always gave her. Jean climbed up the interior stair to the upper duplex. What was that look. Longing, admiration, even love, lust, respect, something like awe, tenderness. Always something rich and good she wasn’t getting much of elsewhere. But sometimes the eyes were just big and dark and blank. Today, for instance, he’d used the same attentive watchfulness to rinse the dirty cup.

  Jean reached the top floor, tucked in her loose blouse, knocked shave-and-a-haircut on the bedroom door. Kitty? Sweetheart, it’s Jean. Will you let me in?

  The door opened a tiny crack. That didn’t take much; she’d have Kitty downstairs before the toasties were defrosted.

  She pushed the door gently and entered the dark, dank-smelling room. Some sweetish, moldy smell seemed to be coming off the sheets of the rumpled bed. Opaque drapes were drawn and a yellow seam of light between each pair shone bright like strips of neon. Kitty was curled on the floor. A suitcase, a very small apple-green one, like a child’s overnight case, was stuffed with blue jeans and embroidered tops.

  It’s no use, Jean. It’s really over, said Kitty. It’s like a death this time. There’s no changing it. I’ve tried everything.

  She put her head inside the green suitcase and sobbed, very muffled sobs, but her shoulders shook under the peasant blouse she wore, a wispy blue and identical to the one she’d given Lily last birthday. Jean looked at the pantomime unfolding on Lionel’s very good carpet. She imagined Kitty had unlocked the door then rushed into her fetal position beside the suitcase. Kitty’s narrow shoulders quivered.

  Jean lowered herself down, slowly, as if Kitty might be startled into a bite like Perry. Come on, she whispered, and arranged her tweed skirt close to her hips and thighs, in case Lionel decided to sneak in on them. Shh, she said and draped a very light, very tentative arm around Kitty’s waist. Sweetheart, hush now, really, now.

  Kitty cried harder. But soon she pulled her head out of the suitcase and dropped her face into Jean’s lap, which was alarming, and for a moment Jean suspended her hand’s caress, then she remembered what to say: There’s nothing here that can’t be fixed. Nothing.

  She stroked the fragile head under the thin blond hair. The skull felt light, as if Kitty’s bones were thinner than other heads she’d held. Both her children had been born with hard thick heads she’d thought would protect them. She felt the thin bone under the too fine, too light hair. The weeping girl who meant well but had foolishly married Lionel. What can be so terrible? Jean crooned a little; she heard herself sounding like a cartoon character. Hmm? What’s so awful as all this.

  Then of course she got the answer, a baby on the way. Lionel’s inability to keep his prick in his trousers.

  But surely, Jean started to say. But she was a prude. She was a cartoon prude; she felt Lionel’s prick was out of her range of operation. Sort of, she thought and laughed, and Kitty looked up confused. You’re married, darling heart. Aren’t you?

  Yes, yes, but Lionel doesn’t even know what married means.

  Kitty, sweetest, you’re pregnant now.

  Kitty sat up and blinked. The same wide-eyed deep blank look that Lionel gave her. And Jean made the exact same gesture. Pushed back the light fluffy hair as if to get more of that look, whatever it was. You are having a baby, said Jean. Imagine how beautiful that baby will be
. Imagine. My goodness.

  She pulled Kitty into an embrace now, very light, better, much better than the collapse, and she felt the warmth of Kitty nestle into the curve of her lap, the tender softness of her slender arms holding Jean’s own. What a pretty picture they would make if Lionel came this moment.

  How about a nice bath, said Jean. I always loved baths when I was pregnant. I’d feel the baby and I were doing the same thing, just floating.

  That’s disgusting.

  Try it.

  She’d drawn the bath and changed the sheets and found clean clothes in the piles on the floor. She’d opened the drapes and for a while, the windows. By the time Kitty was tottering down the stairs smelling of lemon verbena there were voices in the kitchen. Kitty snuggled right into the depths of Lionel’s turtleneck. Heaven, he said into the top of her head. The man leaning against the counter said, You’re the rescuer I hear. He shook his head as if she’d done something wrong.

  Here you go. He lifted a strawberry-shaped cup from Kitty’s counter-top mug tree and poured the coffee Jean had made.

  Lionel was speaking into Kitty’s hair, and Jean could feel the comfort of that and Kitty’s resistance, both at the same time like a shiver. Irving Slater, said Lionel. Meet Jean Devlin, breathtaking sister-in-law.

  The first thing she noticed was that his mouth looked clean. It had sharp lines, and big-looking teeth, and dimples. It looked like a mouth that made good choices. Not like Lionel’s open-ended banquet, his soft full mouth pressed to the passing parade. Irving Slater had a discerning mouth. She smiled at him. Now that Nick was becoming the great connoisseur of faces, maybe she could play this game, too.

  She took a sip and said, Marvelous.

  You’re modest.

  Oh! she said and now Kitty was laughing, too. This was all very funny. She’d done her job; now she could catch the 1:15 out of Penn Station and be home again as if nothing had happened.

  Just thinking about Lionel made her smile and Jean felt the wheels find traction on the straightaway like another compliment delivered with his usual ease. She was fine and soon the snow would be over for good. December twentieth and everyone predicted an early spring. She really was okay, but once she made it over the bridge to Doris’s house she’d wait out the snow after all and drive home only when the roads were sanded and clear.

  2

  Sister Charitina felt along the length of the microphone for the switch with her thick fingers and a clutch of eighth-grade boys laughed so uncontrollably they had to be sequestered in the milk room. Finally young Sister Mary Claire found a faulty connection in the tangle of cords and a great electric shriek rolled from the speakers silencing the room. Lily Devlin was already listening, Margaret Foley, too. They settled in to the folding chairs the eighth graders had been called in early to unstack and arrange.

  Now the entire school had filed in behind them and Sister Charitina kept her lips a narrow line. Waiting. Lily took a breath and could smell the starch in the overwarm room; the nuns’ vast handkerchiefs pulled from beneath the black folds and pressed along hot foreheads. One way or another, the atmosphere of the old building was beyond regulation for the Sisters of Mercy. It was either stifling or chilled to the bone, but that was the least of their worries today.

  One hundred and forty-eight children, ages four to thirteen, trapped! wailed Sister Agnes when Father’s infallible secretary called to say the roads were already a danger.

  There were always the canned goods. At St. Thomas Aquinas, in the convent, an entire room had been fitted out with shelves to accommodate the nearly two thousand cans of green beans, yams, and stew the children had delivered to school when President Kennedy was still alive and the sisters could depend on reliable information from the government. Now the cans sat, a stay against an unnamable disaster.

  Charitina felt it possible that some small variation on disaster had arrived today. Certainly a test. But she could keep them all in line. She didn’t envy Dymphna over at Star of the Sea with the high schoolers. St. Tom’s stopped at the first edge of adolescence and she never failed, never once failed, to be grateful. Still, there were challenges.

  Lily Devlin for instance. She was becoming a queer one and wasn’t that predictable. Taken up this year with Margaret Foley like her life depended on it. Like her life depended on it, she heard herself say out loud at the dinner table not long ago, and only Mary Claire, still so unsure of herself, had the courage to reply. And maybe it does? All the others were quick to agree with Charitina, and their constant agreement was pleasant and her due and only occasionally wearing. Charitina felt that Lily Devlin needed to be taken down a peg or two. We’ve spoiled her, Charitina said. Killed her with kindness, said Josephine. Too much of a good thing, said Agnes, and Charitina turned her benevolent gaze back to Mary Claire at the end of the table. She was all for well-reasoned dissent. Her brothers were both Jesuits after all. But Mary Claire nodded and said, It’s a terrible thing. I mean what happened.

  We know that, dear, said Charitina and suppressed the sigh she knew would injure. We know.

  Outside the scrape, scrape of Teedle’s snow shovel made a slow ugly beat. The swirling gray filled in the mesh glass doors and Teedle’s long back could be seen bending like a beetle inching along the path he made from the auditorium to Father Mulroney’s door. She could imagine Mae Manon in the rectory cloakroom brushing Father’s cashmere coat. Sniffing the maroon wool scarf that brought out the kind blue of his eyes, just a dash of lavender she’d put in a sachet to keep away the moths, but would the scent betray itself and overwhelm?

  Mae lined the galoshes and the gloves by the carved oak chair and waited. They were all used to waiting for Father and pleased to do it. It gave life a nice structure. Unlike Monsignor Reese who wouldn’t, couldn’t, leave them alone. There was such a thing as too much benevolence. He’d been sent to the missions in Paraguay where the language barrier would make his constant earnest smiling less oppressive. Mae Manon had shared this observation with Sister Charitina and to her pleased surprise, Sister had agreed with a wink. That wink still played in her mind from time to time—two women unafraid to see what was right in front of them. But the thing in front of her now was the hole she’d failed to notice earlier. Father’s good cashmere coat punctured in the lapel. No doubt some pin he’d been forced to wear and had pulled off immediately, she didn’t blame him, but shivered that she hadn’t noticed earlier and now what. He’d be disheveled just when he needed to be at his most commanding. Charitina would know just who to blame.

  Charitina came down from the stage and paced the front row of eighth graders. Lily Devlin was slumping again. Her round pink knees on full view, chafed above the mismatched knee socks half sliding down her calves. At least she wasn’t shaving her legs yet as so many of the eighth-grade girls were making it their business to do. She had only so much jurisdiction. She couldn’t force the use of deodorants either, though there had been one sad intervention on poor Ruth Le Baron.

  Then there was the whole business of tampons. They’d decided after a nearly unbearable meeting with Father Mulroney to cancel sex education altogether. Father made a joke that even now, thinking about it, stopped her thoughts. The tampon as precursor to married life. She remembered his smiling sip from the Waterford tumbler, the pretty spectrum of amber playing in the facets. Mae Manon had made an admirable fire. The scent of pine sap, warmed and crackling, filling the study. Here is where Father Mulroney conducted his summit talks—his joke—with Charitina. Monsignor Reese had usually invited her to sort clothes for the poor in the basement while they scoured the week’s news at the school. Idle hands, he’d said, idle hands. Father Mulroney always offered her a Rusty Nail. Just one, now! she’d insist, but she was sure she never giggled. The idea of a giggle made her wince. Just one Rusty Nail with Father in the study where he wrote his inspiring sermons. He’d really changed the tone at St. Tom’s. Made Vatican II begin to feel like something they’d all learn to live with, maybe even like.
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br />   So one cool Friday evening early last spring they’d canceled sex education. How much change could a little parish bear? And Sister Charitina had walked the path that Teedle now shoveled so slowly. She walked through the twilight with the peaceful sense of a decision well made with the blessing of all higher authority.

  Lily Devlin remembered to keep her shoulders back and sit up. Slouching was sure to capture Sister Charitina’s attention. She made a basket of her hands in her lap, straightened her head, and lowered her eyes, as though in casual prayer. She could feel her whole self sending the message: casual prayer. Just the way her whole self had sent the message: Ghost of Christmas Past, with her rattling chains and permanent tears. Even her mother had said she was perfect. But her father felt that acting wasn’t any kind of life, so already they were ruling that out. No acting. In a way she was in casual prayer, because she didn’t know what to make of the photograph she protected from Sister Charitina’s expert eyes. Charred and burned. That’s what happened to miscreants. Charred and burned. She felt a laugh erupt, though she didn’t know exactly what was funny. Russell Crabtree still blamed her for his trouble, his long penance as a hall monitor. She’d laughed onstage when his Scrooge flubbed a line and he’d responded by throwing his cane. He blamed her so severely that not one of his friends, or any single person who wished to be his friend in some more fortunate life, would speak to her. They made a big point of it, stepping around her if she happened to be in front of them, cutting her off if she said hello to them. If they were very lucky when they were doing all this, Russell Crabtree would be in the vicinity, so the person cutting her could breathe a little easier. As long as it was Lily Devlin they all understood to be the problem, their own lives could be expected to move along on track.