Anyway, Helen and Margaret sat in the living room for a few minutes; Helen fingered her gold earring and said “So, how are you?” and Margaret said that she and Bob were both just fine. “How are you?” Margaret asked, and Helen said she was worried about little Ernie; then Helen brought out her phone and showed Margaret pictures of her grandchildren, Margaret putting on the pair of glasses she wore attached to a black string over her large bosom, peering at the phone and saying, Oh, they were just adorable, weren’t they. “I’ll probably talk about them too much,” Helen said, and Margaret took her glasses off and said, “Oh, no worries,” so Helen showed her two more pictures, then she put her phone away and said, “Shall we go?” And Margaret got her handbag and off they went.
* * *
As soon as they were out of Crosby and driving on the back roads to Shirley Falls, Bob felt a happiness rise in him—it overtook the apprehension he had been feeling earlier—and now he was just happy. His brother drove. “Jimmy, it’s so good to see you up here,” Bob said, and his brother turned and smiled at him laconically. “You’re all right, right?” Bob asked then, because he was suddenly aware of something slightly different about his brother—he couldn’t put his finger on it—but it was as though Jim was not quite there.
“I’m fine,” Jim said. “Tell me what you’re up to.”
So Bob told him—which Jim already knew—that he still drove to Shirley Falls three days a week to work arraignments, and Jim asked if he had many Somali clients, and Bob said a few but not many. The Somalis had moved to Maine almost twenty years earlier, settling in Shirley Falls because they thought it was safe. Bob had recently had a case where a Somali woman was accused of welfare fraud, and Jim seemed interested in this.
Jim, who had gone to Harvard Law School on a full scholarship, who had been famous at the height of his career for successfully defending the singer Wally Packer after Wally was accused of killing his girlfriend, these days did only a few small defense cases, and when Bob asked him about them now, Jim just waved a hand dismissively. Instead, Jim asked, “What did you think of Helen? You think she looks okay?”
“She looks great,” Bob said. “She’s always looked great. She looks smaller, but not much older.”
“She looks smaller because I’ve gotten bigger,” Jim said. “Nice of you not to say anything.”
“You look pretty good, Jimmy.”
After a moment Jim said, “What’s with Margaret’s hair?”
“Oh.” Bob let out a sigh. “She said she was tired of worrying about it, so she let it go natural and cut it off.”
Jim glanced over at Bob. “Okay.” Then Jim said, “Did you think I was going to say she looks like a lesbo?”
Bob answered honestly. “I figured that’s the first thing you were going to say to me when we were alone.”
“Nah, she looks fine. Who cares. I’ve mellowed out. So, Susan’s okay?” Jim asked.
“She’s great. You’ll see. She looks great. I mean, you know, for Susan.”
“Can’t believe her mental son is getting married,” Jim said. “Jesus, he seemed practically normal when he came to New York last year.”
“Right?” Bob glanced out the window at the field they were passing with the rocks in it; the grass was a vivid green, and the sun poured over the whole thing. “Everything worked out, Jimmy.” He looked over at his brother.
Jim looked at the road in front of him. “Okay,” he said.
* * *
Helen became tired as they went down the street and stopped at every display of art. Booth after booth of white canvas sporting a variety of artwork: watercolors and oil paintings. Helen thought it all terribly amateurish—many of the paintings were of the sea, and also white clapboard houses, the corners of them, often with a rosebush painted in. “Look at all this,” she said to Margaret. “It’s lovely!”
Margaret said that it was.
It kept bothering Helen, the way Margaret looked. She had forgotten that Margaret had such large breasts. They seemed positively huge to Helen, and Margaret wore a long loose dress of dark blue and they still poured forth beneath it. And her hair! Why would anyone wear her hair in such a way? Just chopped off like that. Oh dear, Helen thought, glancing at Margaret through her sunglasses. Oh, Bobby, what a change you made! Pam had been very stylish—if not a little overdone, in Helen’s view—but Bob had now lived with this other wife for almost a decade. Well. What could you do about it? Nothing.
“Hey, hi there,” said a woman to Margaret, and Margaret said, “Well, hello.” And she stopped and talked to the woman, who seemed about Margaret’s age, who even had hair not unlike Margaret’s, they chatted about the woman’s sister, how she was doing much better, and then Margaret said, “Oh, this is my sister-in-law, Helen,” and Helen stuck out her hand and the woman seemed surprised, and she shook it, and then they walked their separate ways. This happened a number of times: people stopping Margaret to talk. They all seemed glad to see her. Margaret asked about their kids, and jobs, and someone’s mother, but she didn’t say again “This is my sister-in-law, Helen,” and Helen just stood there trying to look interested. So at one point, when Margaret was talking to a man, Helen said, “Hi, I’m Helen, I’m Margaret’s sister-in-law,” and she stuck her hand out, and the man—it was a big man this time that Margaret was talking to—brought his hand out of his pocket to shake Helen’s hand with little vigor.
“You’re very popular,” Helen said to Margaret as they continued down the street, and Margaret said, “I’m a minister. When we moved here a few years ago, I was lucky to get a part-time job with the UU church.”
“The what church?” asked Helen.
“Unitarian,” said Margaret.
And Helen said, after a moment, “Well, you’re still popular.” Margaret looked at Helen through her sunglasses and laughed, and so Helen laughed as well. They were moving past a café that had its doors open. Helen stopped and brought out a straw hat from her bag, the hat could be rolled up, and now she unrolled it and put it on her head.
“You look like a tourist,” Margaret said to her, and Helen said, “Well, I am a tourist.”
Another man walked by, he had a gray beard, and Helen saw that he was wearing a skirt. Helen looked away, then looked back at him. It was a kilt, she realized, though it didn’t seem as long as a kilt usually was. It was brown, and the man wore a gray T-shirt and brown walking shoes. “Hello, Fergie,” said Margaret, and the man said, “Hello, Margaret.”
When they were past him, Helen said, “Why was he wearing that?”
“I guess he likes it,” Margaret said.
“I’ve lived in New York for fifty years, and I have never seen a man walking down the street in a skirt,” said Helen. “A kilt,” she added. Margaret turned her sunglasses toward Helen, and Helen said, raising a finger, “Whoops, that’s not true. There used to be a man who went jogging on Third Avenue in a black negligee. Which is still not a skirt.”
“Well, I guess you win,” said Margaret. “Far as I know we have no men jogging about in black negligees.”
“He was old, too. The man in the black negligee,” Helen said.
Margaret kept walking.
“It was kind of weird,” Helen said. “You know.”
And Margaret didn’t say anything; she just stopped at the next booth of art.
Helen was becoming hot, even with her hat stopping the sun from hitting her straight on her head, and she said to Margaret as she stepped up behind her, “I didn’t know it got so warm in Maine.”
Margaret said, “Well, it does.”
And then Helen decided she would buy a piece of art. That’s what she decided to do so that Margaret wouldn’t think she was a snob, because maybe Margaret was thinking that Helen was a snob. “Hold on,” she said, touching Margaret lightly on the arm. “Let me look at these paintings.” They were seascapes, a lo
t of purple waves and foaming spray. Helen found one, a smaller piece stuck up high on the white canvas: It was a painting of a rock with water swirling around it. “Oh, I’ll take that,” Helen said, and she brought out her credit card and the fellow seemed very pleased to sell it to her. “I’ll just take it, no need to wrap it in anything,” Helen said, because the fellow was ready to put it in brown wrapping paper.
As Helen took the painting and turned to go, she bumped into a tall big old woman who was saying loudly to the man she was with, “God, have I seen enough of this crap! Come on, Jack.”
Margaret said, “Oh, hello, Olive.”
The woman looked surprised and she said, “Hello, Margaret.” Then she looked Helen up and down through her sunglasses; Helen could see the woman’s head move slightly as she took Helen in. “Who are you?” the woman asked.
“I’m Margaret’s sister-in-law,” Helen said, and the woman kept looking at her and Helen added, “My husband is Bob’s brother, and we came up from New York to drop our grandson off at camp.”
The woman said, “Well.” She pointed a finger at the painting Helen held. “You enjoy that,” and she turned around, waving a hand over her head as she and the man walked past the two of them.
* * *
“She’s got me all stuffed up on antidepressants,” Jim was saying. He shrugged, and gave his lopsided grin to his brother and sister. “What can I do?”
“Are you depressed, Jimmy?” Susan sat down at the kitchen table across from her brother. Susan was an optometrist, and she had taken the afternoon off to be with both of them. Sunlight fell through the window, making a square on the table and across Susan’s arm.
“Well, not now.” And Jim laughed.
Susan and Bob did not laugh, and Susan said, “But were you before?”
Jim placed his hands together on the table and looked off to the side. “I don’t know.” He looked around the kitchen some more; it was a small kitchen, but Susan’s house was a small house. There were orange curtains at the kitchen windows, one was just slightly lifting in the breeze from the open window; the room was warm. “But she seems to think I’m easier to live with when I’m on them, so—I am. On them.” Jim looked at Bob and smiled. “Maximum dose, so I don’t drink. Which is okay. But I’ll tell you, Helen’s taken up the sauce. She enjoys her nightly wine, I have noticed that.”
Susan glanced at Bob, and they both said nothing for a few moments. Then Susan said, “But you’re okay, though. Right?”
“Sure,” Jim said, looking from one to the other. To Bob it seemed as though he was looking at Jim through a pane of glass; he understood now what was different about Jim. His edge was gone. It’s not that he had mellowed, it’s that he was medicated. Bob felt a slight tightening of his chest, and he sat up straight.
Jim added, “Got that huge house now, all done up spiffy.” His face glistened just slightly.
“You don’t like it?” Susan asked, plucking at the front of her blue-and-white-striped blouse, and Jim looked serious.
“You know,” Jim said, as though he was just realizing this now, “I really don’t. I miss the old way it was, it was a pretty great house, and now it’s like…” He looked around Susan’s kitchen as though the answer was there.
“A palace,” Bob said. “It looks like a modern palace.”
“Yeah,” Jim said slowly, looking at Bob, nodding.
“Well, maybe it was your penance for having those affairs,” Susan said, and Jim said immediately, “Oh, it was, there’s no doubt about that.”
Jim and Helen lived in a brownstone in Park Slope, and a few years earlier they had renovated the entire place. When Bob first stepped inside after the renovation, he could not believe it was the same house. All the old original woodwork, the horsehair wallpaper, all of that was gone, and the house seemed as sleek as a palace. “What do you think?” Helen asked, eagerly, almost breathlessly, and Bob said it was amazing. “Really something,” he said.
“You don’t like it,” Helen answered, and Bob had said that wasn’t true at all, but it was true.
* * *
—
Susan got up to turn off the teakettle, and as she made tea—three mugs with a tea bag in each—Jim said, “I miss Maine.”
Bob said, “What?” And Jim repeated what he had said.
“Do you? I’ve been thinking about Mommy a lot,” Susan said, turning her head toward Jim.
“That’s funny,” Jim said, “because I have too.”
“What have you been thinking?” Susan asked. She brought two mugs to the table and turned back to get the third.
“I don’t know. What a hard life she had.” Jim said, “You know what else I’ve been thinking about recently? We were really poor growing up.”
Susan said, “You just now figured that out?” She laughed abruptly. “Jimmy, my goodness, of course we were poor.”
Jim looked at Bob. “Did you know that?”
Bob said, “Ah—yes. I did know that, Jim.”
“You know, I’ve been rich so long—I mean, I’ve lived like a rich person for so long—that I kind of forgot that when we grew up we were really pretty poor.”
“Well, we were, Jimmy,” Susan said. “I can’t believe you forgot that. We had newspapers stuffed into all the windows to keep the cold out.”
“I didn’t forget it. I’m just saying I haven’t thought about it.”
Susan sat down. “But we weren’t unhappy, really.” She looked from one brother to the other. “Were we?”
“Nah,” Bob said, just as Jim said, “Yes.”
“Jimmy, you were unhappy?” Susan, who had picked up her mug, now put it back down.
“Of course I was unhappy. I thought I had killed Dad, and every day I thought about that. And about how I let Bob take the blame. Every day I thought of that.”
Susan shook her head slowly. “Oh, Jimmy,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Bob said, “Jim, just let that go. We were kids. We’ll never know what really happened.”
Jim looked at him. “Well,” Jim finally said, “it’s okay to tell me to let it go now, but it was with me every day of my life.” He looked around, crossed one leg over the other. “Every single day.”
“Look,” Bob said—and he was sort of quoting Margaret—“if it had happened today we probably would have all gone to therapy and talked about it. But it happened more than fifty years ago, and nobody ever mentioned anything back then, not up here in Shirley Falls—anything. And you got caught in the middle of it.” He added, “I’m really sorry, Jimmy.”
Jim looked at him with seriousness. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry, Bobby.”
Susan reached and put her hand over Jim’s hand that held his mug of tea. “Oh, Jimmy,” she said. “Well, we’re all here, we all made it through.”
A look of sadness came over Jim’s face, and Bob tried to think of something to say to dispel it, but Susan was asking Bob about Pam. “How’s she doing?” Susan asked. “You know, I think one of the funnest summers was when she lived with us in that house. She was pretty great. Not everyone would have wanted to spend their summer from college living with us in that tiny house, but she did. I guess she came from a small place too. Jim, you were gone…” And Jim nodded. “Anyway, I think of her. She’s okay?”
The last time Bob had been to New York, he had called his ex-wife, Pam, and they had met at a café near where she lived on the Upper East Side. “Bobby!” she said, and threw her arms around him. She looked the same, only older, and he told her this, and she laughed and said, “Well, you look great.”
“I’ve missed you,” he said, and this was true.
“Oh, Bobby, I’ve missed you so much,” she said, flicking her hair back; it was shoulder-length hair, dyed a nice reddish color. “I just keep thinking, are you okay up there in that awful state of Maine? Oh, I don�
��t mean to say it’s awful—it just seems so…”
“Awful,” he said, and they laughed. “I’m fine, Pam. It’s all just fine.”
As Bob remembered this now, he felt a surge of love for Pam; they had married right out of college, just kids. And they had stayed married for almost fifteen years. In Bob’s mind, Pam had left him when she found out—when they found out—that Bob couldn’t father children. And it had broken Bob’s heart. Only later did he realize it had broken Pam’s heart as well, but she found a man, and had her two boys—boys that Bob had met over the years, great kids they were—and her husband seemed fine. She never complained about him; he was a top manager of a pharmaceutical company, and Pam had tons of money now, but whenever she and Bobby got together, they were just like kids again. Only older, and they both said this every time they met.
“She’s great,” Bob said to Susan.
Margaret had not liked New York. This had been evident to Bob on their one visit there together: He saw her fear as they walked down the stairs to the subway, and even though he tried to reassure her, and she tried—he could see this—to take it all in stride, it had not really gone that well, because Bob could not stop himself from sensing her discomfort, and it had made him sad, because he loved New York, where he had lived for thirty years before meeting Margaret in Maine.
“Will you tell Pam I was asking about her?” Susan said, and Bob said of course he would.
Jim said, “You’re better off with Margaret,” and Susan said, “Why do you say that?”
But Bob said, “Susan, tell us how Zach is. Jim said he seemed pretty good when he came to New York.”
“Oh, Zach.” Susan ran her hand through her hair, which was gray and wavy and cut just above her shoulders. “Jim, he’s doing so well. Into computer programming, as I’m sure he told you, and he’s going to marry that girlfriend he met down in Massachusetts.”
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