The Color of Water in July

by Nora Carroll

  Enough, Jess thought. It was like writing and rewriting a paragraph until she couldn’t understand her own words anymore. A long time ago, she had put that summer with Daniel between brackets—big, bold, black brackets; it was one subject that she had thought about enough. She should be honest—thought about way too much.

  Jess could hear Russ’s voice inside the cottage, talking with the architect, Paul Banyer, who had arrived late the evening before. They were talking about weight-bearing walls, islands, and peninsulas—it seemed to have something to do with kitchen counters—and Corian and granite. This was Russ’s stuff, and it had always pleased Jess, so concrete and tangible, so unlike the intangibles around which she tried to make her life’s work.

  No, she rarely indulged herself in thinking about Daniel Painter. Now, she could recognize the cauldron of emotions that as a young girl she had mistaken for love. She had left her mother, not just for the summer but, in every real sense, forever. She was going to college, and though she had always called herself an American, she was planning to live in America, really, for the first time.

  Then, there had been that awful thing with Phelps Whitmire. Oh, she’d been pawed on a time or two since then, and gotten much better at seeing trouble coming and fending it off.

  Even now, it pained her to think of what had happened to her after that summer—struggling as a premed at the University of Texas. She had been so distracted, so lost in her thoughts, so chewed up and burned by the flash of experience she had mistaken for love. Still, she had maintained straight As in the premed program, until . . .

  Jess reached down and picked out another cigarette from the new pack of Marlboro Lights she had bought last night when they’d picked up Paul at the Traverse City airport. She shrugged slightly and lit up, the unread novel lying open on her lap. The acrid taste in her mouth made her grimace. It was one thing in a bar, with her mouth awash in beer, but here on the front porch with the clean lake smell in the air it made her feel dirty. But—she thought, taking another puff—now that she was started, she might as well keep going. There was a sailboat race going on out on the lake, the boats heading west past Loeb Point. They had their bright-hued spinnakers out, making brilliant dots on the water.

  Jess was thinking about how she had decided to be a premed in the first place. There was a famous picture of her mother, Margaret, the kind of picture that kept showing up in photomontages, like the greatest one hundred journalistic photos of this century. Her mother was a young woman then, one of the few women reporters in Vietnam. She looked just like Joan Baez in those days—long, jet-black straight hair, and piercing eyes under dark eyebrows that formed a straight line across her forehead. Margaret was shoving a microphone into the face of a young American soldier who was lying in the dirt, gazing up at Margaret as though she were the Madonna herself. The photograph took in the face of the boy, the microphone, all of Margaret’s intense hippieish beauty, and the pool of blood, dark against the ground, that was forming around the boy’s leg, shot off below the knee.

  Jess saw that photo—saw it a million times—but she still remembered the first time she had seen it, the overwhelming wrongness that she felt, like she had caught Mommy in the act of doing something private and embarrassing.

  “Why didn’t you help him with his leg, Mommy?”

  “Because I’m not a doctor, darlin’,” she said. “My job is askin’. Askin’ how does it feel to get your leg blown off, young man? Then the doctor’ll come around later and fix him up. That is, if the poor bastard isn’t dead by then,” Margaret laughed.

  So Jess made up her mind that she wanted to be a doctor. She would go with her mother to all the places that she was always leaving for, and follow behind, and after Margaret was done with her asking, Jess would sew them all up and send them on their way in much better shape than she had found them.

  And then there was Gary. For a while—Jess must have been about twelve—Margaret had dated a doctor, from Doctors Without Borders. Gary was nothing like most of Margaret’s boyfriends. He had a thick wave of golden hair that flopped into his eyes from time to time, and sapphire-blue eyes that were both penetrating and gentle. Jess had been fascinated by his stories of working in refugee camps on the Thai border, and of going into Biafra during the famine. He didn’t seem like a real grown-up to her; he had a bushy beard and always wore worn-out corduroys with hiking boots. Once, Gary had taken them along to a presentation about Beirut at the American Church in Paris. They sat in one of the cold wooden pews near the front; the stone Gothic building was half-empty, only a smattering of wives here and there, American women with overbright makeup, purses clutched two-fisted in their laps.

  Jess remembered that she hadn’t wanted to go; she had brought her homework with her and had planned to do it with her books balancing on her knees. At first, she had squirmed uncomfortably in the wooden pew, not listening, peeking sidewise at Gary, who was both leaning forward listening intently and at the same time fondling her mother’s knee. But then, the words of one speaker had started to captivate her, to draw her in. The speaker was a midwife, British, who described attending to refugee women in labor, in primitive conditions, while the bombs were raining down around them. The woman was stout and rather plain, with gray hair pulled back in a stern knot, but her words were full of compassion as she described her credo: to make the world better “one healthy baby at a time.” Walking out of the building with Margaret and Gary, Jess had shyly spoken of her admiration for the woman.

  “Oh, she’s incredible, isn’t she? She’s single-handedly kept the maternity program going in the refugee camps . . . Dropped the infant mortality rate by more than fifty percent,” Gary said.

  Jess had felt her blood rise along her hairline and under her ears, a small flush of pride because of his approbation.

  “Gawd,” Margaret hooted. “I couldn’t stand her. What was all that ‘one healthy baby at a time’ crap? The world is far too big a place to help people one at a time—let the babies die and storm the barricades. That’s what they ought to do.”

  That was a moment when Jess passionately hated her mother. She felt the burn at the pit of her stomach, stared down at her scuffed shoes on the pavement, looked out at the gray water of the Seine as they walked toward the Pont de l’Alma, wishing that she could think of a rejoinder, hoping desperately that Gary would.

  But Gary only laughed and yanked on Margaret’s arm, pulling her closer so that he could nuzzle her neck there at the nape where a fine fringe of black hair grew.

  “Bravo, darling. Go ahead and storm them,” he said, laughing.

  “I’ll help the babies,” Jess whispered, but neither of the grown-ups gave any sign that they had heard.

  Gary was gone not long after that. “Off somewhere,” Margaret had said offhandedly. “Saving people,” she had snorted. But Jess had harbored the image of the plain woman in the church, her voice ringing with the clear tones of conviction, and Jess had bided her time, and studied her science and hunkered down to wait, believing that she could do it; believing that it could be done.

  Staring at the lake, taking a long searing pull on her cigarette, Jess remembered that it hadn’t exactly turned out that way . . .

  She had ended up studying French, a language she had learned growing up in France. After graduation, she had gotten a job in a university library, a job whose quiet, orderly concentration was as far from her life with her mother the foreign correspondent as anyone could possibly imagine.

  Sometimes, she regretted that she had never gone on to medical school—it was hard to imagine she was helping anyone now, except the few college professors and graduate students who needed her resources.

  But youthful dreams are just that—dreams. Jess scratched at a mosquito bite she had gotten when she and Russ were in the woods. She closed the novel, suppressed a yawn, and turned to face the cottage, telling herself she would dwell on the past no longer.


  Russ’s voice, self-assured, businesslike, was audible through the screen door, mingling with the lower, softer voice of the architect. She had always loved to hear Russ talk about business. She listened to his voice, sharp, clipped, and to the point. “I’ll talk to Karla over at Viking—they’re always looking for product placement.”

  I love Russ, Jess thought. Managing affairs, doing business, tidying up the past, and moving on. That’s what love feels like. Not like a hash, a swamp, and a stew. She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette in the enamel ashtray and stood up to join the men in the cottage. She was eager to see what plans they would have to bring the cottage up to date, to bring some light in, to make it look more like a beach cottage and less like a mournful dirge, an old never-sung tune.

  She gathered up the books to carry them inside. She was keeping Daniel’s book wedged between the others, holding it so that she couldn’t see it, so that not even her fingers would touch the shiny edges. Jess could not even bear to look at the cover of the book, much less open it. But this was something that she would not admit, even to herself, and so she carried it in, disarmed, among the other books, which she laid down on Mamie’s table, a tidy, academic-looking pile.

  Tonight, Jess, Russ, and Paul were sitting around the Formica table in the breakfast nook, the table littered with empty and half-full takeout containers of Chinese food: moo shu pork, scallion pancakes, and steamed pot stickers, now cold and congealed to the side of the white cardboard box. All the lights were on, and Paul had even dragged in several standing lamps from the other room, saying that he couldn’t bear dark spaces. There was lots of fast, loud talking, and Paul’s beeper kept going off every twenty minutes or so. Sections of the New York Times were strewn across the tables, some with grease spots from the Chinese food. Jess was feeling altogether much more like herself, her real self, as she thought of it.

  “You know, that whole dressing-room area, between the living room and the kitchen, can come down. It’s not a weight-bearing wall. The cost will be minimal. I can get my guy to do it, as a favor. We’ll throw a skylight up here over the work-triangle area, then you won’t believe the place.” Paul’s speech was staccato. He was wearing a denim shirt and thick black horn-rimmed glasses.

  Jess was leaning close to Russ, pressing her shoulder into his side. In front of her on the table was a half-empty glass of red wine, a plate with a pot sticker with one bite taken out of it, and some wilting shreds of cabbage. Russ was sitting on a bar stool; she had to tilt her chin up so that she could look at his face as he talked.

  “God . . . you know . . . it’ll be so much better . . . so much more light, and a kitchen you can actually do something with.”

  Jess saw the enthusiasm in Russ’s eyes. For barely a moment, she let herself slip into thinking that they would keep the cottage, modernizing it. They could spend summers here. Summer in the city was awful, and normally she could barely afford a vacation—much less her own summerhouse.

  “You need to go through the stuff in that hallway thing and decide if there’s anything you want in there. Empty it out so we can take out the wall.”

  “Sure,” Jess said. “I think I know what’s in there. Sheets. A helluva lot of white sheets.”

  “I found some papers in an old trunk marked Linens. I was trying to find a towel and I opened it.”

  “Papers?” Jess said, surprised. “Mamie wouldn’t have left anything important in a linen closet, I don’t think.”

  “Well, you should look through it anyway, just in case . . . ”

  Papers in an old storage trunk marked Linens? That was not Mamie’s style. The lawyer had told Jess about the perfect order of Mamie’s affairs, the bequests to charity, the trust fund for her cleaning woman, the gift of the cottage to Jess. Curious, she agreed to take a look.

  Jess sat cross-legged on the smooth old floorboards, looking through tidy stacks of dusty, yellowing papers. Her instincts were right. There was nothing of interest here. It was just a storage place for housekeeping details. There were bundles of summer receipts, each labeled with the year that the items were bought, going back to 1952. A complete set of Mamie’s dining-room and telegraph bills from the Wequetona Club, and a packet of business cards from every small-tradesperson she had ever dealt with. Jess looked with bemusement at the neat collections of schedules: the SS Jefferson, some kind of a boat, with docking times right at the Wequetona dock. Timetables for the Chicago-to-Charlevoix train on the now-defunct Pere Marquette Railway. She saw a yellowed paper, “Rules of the Wequetona Club,” with orange thumbtack marks in the corners.

  Dutifully, Jess sorted through the papers, the mundane details of a lifetime of cottage summers. At the very bottom of the trunk, there was an ornate embroidered folder. Jess picked it up and could feel that there were more papers inside.

  She opened the folder slowly, afraid that a dusty mess of papers would spill out. Inside, she was surprised to see that there were some photographs. On top, there was an old tintype that Jess had never seen before, of people wearing dungarees standing barefoot on the front porch of a wooden shack, a few scrubby pines and a mule in the background. There was a packet of postcards, black-and-white, of watering holes in Europe, faded-out blood-colored ink with short statements on the back: It’s great here, loving it . . . Addressed to Mamie, signed Lila in a loopy, spidery hand.

  Jess was about to put the folder back into the trunk, when she saw another parchment envelope, medium sized and yellowed with age, that was tucked behind the portraits. Jess pulled the envelope open and saw more photos of what must have been Margaret as a baby and very young child. In one, she was holding the hand of a man wearing a doorman’s-type uniform, and in another, she was sitting on a young Mamie’s knee, one hand reaching up and grasping a lock of Mamie’s thick curly hair. Underneath that, there was an official-looking document, a birth certificate that appeared to be her mother’s, although the name was misspelled, issued by the county courthouse of Folsome County, Indiana. It read:

  Margaret Lila Trathway

  Mother: Margaret Adele Trathway

  Father: none

  Status: illegitimate

  Born: May 30th, 1922

  Place of birth: LaSalle, Indiana (born at home)

  Status: illegitimate. Jess stared at the words, the reality of their meaning starting to sink in as she tried to remember what she actually knew about her mother’s birth.

  She remembered the story she had heard growing up: Mamie was terribly in love with Thomas Cleves. In fact, they were engaged to be married, with a Christmas wedding planned, when her sister, Lila, tragically drowned. Miss Ada, crazy with grief, had insisted that they defer the wedding indefinitely. Thomas and Mamie were so in love that they couldn’t stand waiting. They eloped, had Margaret, and shortly thereafter, Thomas was gone. Jess had asked Mamie once what happened to him, and she didn’t really answer. She just said, “Thomas Cleves was a good man.” One thing was for sure—Mamie didn’t need a man. As the last surviving Tretheway, she had inherited her family’s fortune and moved into the family’s mansion. After that, she was a woman of independent means.

  Jess held the yellowed document in her hands, scanning the words again. So Mamie had never been married in the first place. Of course, that would pretty much explain everything. She couldn’t believe it had not been obvious to her before.

  Jess looked down at the ridged lettering of an old manual typewriter. It was just a simple story, after all, an out-of-wedlock birth, a marriage that never was. Jess noticed that the clerk in the courthouse hadn’t even bothered to correct the typos. Her mother’s last name was misspelled, and the year was typed wrong—1922, not 1923. She could almost picture the clerk, a young woman with cheap, bright lipstick, wearing a red polka-dot dress cinched tight at the waist, a patronizing look in her eyes. Jess could imagine a young Mamie standing at the polished wooden counter, drawing her shoulders up square, insist
ing that the clerk type it again because her name was spelled wrong, the woman in polka dots, drumming her red-painted fingernails on the countertop impatiently, saying, “Come on, honey. What difference does it make? To someone like you.”

  Jess tucked the pictures and the birth certificate back in the envelope. She would show this to Margaret. She put away the rest of the papers, the old faded postcards. She looked again at the tintype of the dungareed people standing in front of the dusty shack; thinking about keeping it but remembering Russ’s comment about “likely-looking ancestors,” she returned it to the folder, which she placed in the trunk.

  When Jess went to stand up, her legs were stiff and she had pins and needles in her feet. She had been so absorbed in looking through the papers that she had completely lost track of time and forgotten all about Russ and Paul—and even forgotten where she was for a moment. She wiped the dust off the back of her jeans and walked out of the little closet hallway into the kitchen, carrying the envelope that contained the pictures and birth certificate. After sitting in the little hallway illuminated only by a single sixty-watt bulb, Jess blinked back the bright afternoon sunlight that flooded the kitchen.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MAMIE

  They say all babies are born with blue eyes, and Margaret was no exception. She was a bit of a thing, small enough to cup in your two hands, and her eyes were the blue of smoke when it hangs low over water; but when I looked at her tiny naked body, I could see from the start that there was something about her that was different. I knew from Cousin Edith’s babies that nipples were supposed to look like tiny rose petals, the palest of pink with filigrees of blue veins showing through. Margaret’s tummy looked white enough to me, but her nipples were amber, the color of sun-warmed wet sand. She had a fuzz of hair on her at birth, and long black hairs growing from the tops of her ears. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but right from the start, I knew she wasn’t quite like the rest of us.