“Don’t you dare get off the phone, Johnny. Now tell me, what do you want me to do?”
“Talk to Louise. Tell her to do this for me, as a favor.”
“As a favor? Forget it. I’m not going to pressure Louise about this. Betsey can hire someone to be her bridesmaid if she’s run out of Aryan-looking friends to color-coordinate into her wedding party.”
“My own cousins aren’t happy for me,” said Johnny. “I don’t expect you to ever give Betsey an even break, but Louise, I thought Louise would come through. It’s lousy.”
“Why do you keep trying to force Louise to clap her hands for you? I don’t see you clapping your hands for her about Hub.”
“Hub.” He snorted ungracefully. “That little candy-ass.”
“Oh, Johnny. You are so transparent, you know that?”
“Boy, you get an idea in your head and you don’t want to let it go, do you? I’ll just have to talk to your mother, then,” said Johnny. “I didn’t want to bring her into it. See you at Thanksgiving.”
He rang off before I could say anything else. But despite its abrupt end, his call lifted my spirits. I felt that in some subterranean fashion, things were happening with Johnny and Louise. I was only sorry I couldn’t think of a way to push them along.
The night before I left to go home for Thanksgiving, I was up until one o’clock folding gold paper napkins into the shape of turkeys, under Margaret’s direction, for the St. Jude’s “Strikers’ Thanksgiving Mass and Gala Dinner.” Eric was not part of these preparations, having been sentenced to a day of banishment by Kate, who’d caught him teasing the hospital security dog again.
“He came this close to being nipped,” she said. “Bill turned his back for a second and Eric had his hand on Punch’s collar, saying, ‘I command you to heel, Punch.’ He saw some show on public television on dog training. I hate to punish him, but the only thing that seems to cause him any pain is not being here.”
“Punish him more, then.”
“He’s a good kid at heart, Nicky. I think he may be so smart that he’s bored out of his mind at school, which is probably why he acts up. I’m going to talk to Mary about getting him tested for one of those gifted and talented programs.”
“I’d like to get him tested, all right.”
The day before the holiday I caught an evening flight home. I wanted to stay in Winsack for the dinner, which was going to be the parish’s biggest blowout since its one-hundredth anniversary steamers and-corn feast a few years earlier. I’d written flyers for the big event, gone with Father Peter to collect donations from area businesses, and helped decide the crucial issue of round vs. rectangular tables. I’d even done my time on the phones asking people to bring the dull but important supplies—paper cups for the kids, sugar for coffee, and foil wrap for the leftovers which Kate, with great tact, would make sure went to the families who were the most short of cash right now.
I was putting in a lot of nonbillable hours. Ron would have had an apoplexy if he had known just how many. Somehow I’d gone from being a PR flack with duties apart to being just another person Margaret bossed around in her party planning. It felt good that I did my own shift on the picket line and that Mrs. Crawley said every morning at breakfast, “Well, how are you nurses shaping up today? Any trouble expected out there?” although I’d explained to her again and again that I was not a nurse.
It felt especially good that Tony forgot the bad blood between us enough to ask me, almost kindly, when I’d be back.
“In three days,” I said. “Try not to settle the strike until I get here.”
I gave him a quick little grin to let him know it was not a criticism.
“I wouldn’t dream of settling without you,” he said, and in his voice I heard an echo of an echo of the old teasing affection.
“Well, you know where to reach me if anything comes up.”
“I might call you just to run a few ideas past you,” he said. For the first time since I’d come to Winsack, he wasn’t staring over my head or frowning down at his feet. His eyes were weary but they were looking right into mine for the first time in five years.
“Tony, if you need me here, I can stay. My mother’s turkey is nothing to fly home for.”
“I remember her date-prune stuffing,” Tony said.
“See? No great loss.”
“You go. It might be the only break you get before Christmas. You’ve earned it.”
He smiled at me. I could smell his aftershave, which is a brand that comes from the drugstore in a box with a cowboy on it. Once or twice, after we’d broken up, I’d actually opened a box of this cologne and sniffed it, homesick for him. But in the box the stuff had far too sweet an odor, whereas on Tony it acquired, somehow, a scent of cedar and wood smoke.
“Nicky,” he said, “I know I’ve been—”
A hand fell lightly on his shoulder. It was Suzanne, wafting up the way she always did.
“You’re still here,” she said to me. “I wanted to talk to you about the hospital suppliers’ issue, but I know you have to make your plane.”
“I have twenty minutes.”
“It’s not important. Just another area of wasteful spending that belies their argument that there’s no money for that two percent raise or for more staffing. Their purchasing process is positively byzantine. I don’t think there’s been any competitive bidding around here for years.”
“Can we accuse them of some kind of sweetheart arrangement with the supplier, with the extra profits coming back to Coventry?”
“Maybe. But I don’t want to be too hasty.”
She spoke as placidly as if we had years ahead of us for a leisurely explanation of the iniquities of Coventry’s sharp business practices. It was the fourth time she’d hinted about having discovered mud I could actually sling at Coventry, then prevaricated. I cast an impatient glance at Tony, but he was staring down at his hands, twiddling a pipe cleaner from a stack Margaret had left on the counter.
“Are you saying you have something we can use soon? I could whisper in the ears of a few reporters if so.”
“Not yet. We shouldn’t rush to judgment.”
“It seems to me that if there was ever a time to rush to judgment, it’s now.”
I’d had it up to here with her. Here she was with Tony, a light work schedule that seemed to consist of riffling through the pages of audits and calling her cronies to gossip, and a wardrobe that I was ten pounds too heavy to look good in, even if I could have afforded it. Enough was enough.
“Suzanne, you’ve been here, what, a month? Please, for the love of heaven, give me something that’s not embargoed. Give me this, or give me some other damning statistic or unorthodox pattern. Anything. If the feds are investigating these guys, they’ve got to be screwing up somehow. In that whole pile of papers and annual reports and computer printouts you’ve amassed, there must be something you can hand me.”
She just smiled, and moved an inch closer to Tony, the inch that spelled the difference between business-collegial and intimate. That smile of Suzanne’s. I’d disliked it from the beginning. That perfectly confident, slow, sweetly unkind smile.
“You’re in such a hurry all the time, Nicky. Tony did warn me that you’re sometimes too quick to make up your mind. He said it’s your only fault. That you made a decision and that was it.”
Now Tony looked up, finally. His eyes were guilty, and I saw that he had told Suzanne the tale of our romance and spared me not at all in the telling.
Well, I hadn’t survived four years at St. Madeleine Sophie’s to be cowed by a glammed-up bluestocking like Suzanne. I set down my suitcase and reached for a pen.
“I think I’d better take a later plane and go over the details of these purchasing irregularities with you, Suzanne, so that you’ll feel comfortable with whatever we do with this. In fact, if I have to miss everything out of Logan tonight my family will understand. They’re troopers. Besides, Father Pete said he wished I could be here for the di
nner, anyway.”
At the thought of forgoing the promised holiday from my presence, Suzanne grew arch for the first time in my acquaintance with her. Her moment of malice was over, having served its purpose.
“No, no. I’m sure we can put something together once you’re back. You go home now to whoever that wonderful person is who sent you those lilies.”
She gazed at me with that air of patient waiting that always made me wonder what the hell she was waiting for. It was that atmosphere about her of prolonged, entitled expectancy that made people want to rush in and fetch her whatever it was she wanted. I had seen it work on everyone here—except, perhaps, Kate.
I shrugged on the shearling jacket that no longer fit Kate’s sister Caroline, feeling like a polar bear next to Suzanne in her size-two knit skirt and twinset.
Tony followed me to the door.
“Nicky,” he said. “I was drunk one night and did some talking. I didn’t know she’d throw it in your face.”
“Then I guess you don’t know much. She’s obviously been waiting for the chance.”
“She’s jealous. It’s been hard for her.”
“Tell you what, Tony, you scamper on back and reassure her. Tell her you’d never carry a torch for someone as pigheaded and judgmental as I am.”
“Nicky, I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m a vicious bitch who threw you out on your ear without a word of explanation, right? I deserve everything I get.”
Some part of me knew that I was being carried away by my own dramatics, but it was impossible to stop. Since I’d come here he’d insulted me and overworked me and, worst of all, ignored me whenever he could. In front of them all. In front of Suzanne. I was hurting him back at last—I could see how his whole face became set and shut, as if I’d aimed a blow at him—and it felt wonderful. It felt heavenly.
“If you would think for a minute, Nicky. When I … let my mouth run loose with Suzanne, I had no idea I would ever see you again. I had no idea she would ever meet you.”
“I don’t have to think for a minute, Tony. I pride myself in never thinking. You know how I am. Impetuous. It’s part of my charm.”
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Don’t go home this way. Let me … let me drive you to the airport. You can leave the rental car here for two days. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“No, thank you. I wouldn’t dream of taking you away from your work .”
It wasn’t a brilliant exit line, but it was enough to walk out on. In the parking lot I started to cry, but then I realized that if I began I would never stop. To be discovered by anyone—by Tony or Suzanne or Doug—sitting there weeping, wiping my snotty nose with the back of my glove and trying to rub mascara off my swollen face, would be simply too much humiliation for one day.
My last sight of them all through the strike office window, as I sat there snorting back sobs and defrosting the rear window, was of Margaret with an enormous box full of silver napkin rings, passing out polishing cloths. She handed one to Suzanne, who regarded it with puzzlement and walked away.
* * *
Logan was crowded with people who, like me, appeared as if they didn’t especially want to go where they were going and wished the whole ordeal were over. Of course, I hadn’t particularly wanted to stay in the place I’d just left, had I?
I bought an overpriced travel magazine at the newsstand and read it on the plane, sullenly drinking Bloody Marys and weighing the attractions of alligator watching in the Everglades versus an excursion to Macedonia for a firsthand experience of an archaeological dig.
In the taxi home from National Airport, the driver told me how he missed his family back in Ethiopa. I wondered why people who actually wanted to see their families were so often separated from them by chance or necessity, while those whose families exasperated and oppressed them were doomed to celebrate holiday after holiday in domestic discomfort.
My heart grew even heavier as I thought of all I was arriving without. I had no shower invitation design in hand for Betsey. I had no wherewithal to bake the two apple pies my mother had requested I bring the next day, so I’d have to run to the grocery, which would be no more pleasant than the airport was, on the night before Thanksgiving. I didn’t even have a clean pair of tights in which to honor our Puritan forefathers.
Well, I could promise Ma a few sketches for the invitations by the end of the week. I could wash my tights in the sink and hang them over the radiator. And everyone, including my mother, would just have to settle for store-bought pies. They’d taste better than anything that ever came out of my oven, that was certain.
14
MY MOTHER DID not see my point about the store-bought pies.
“You bought the dessert, Nicky?”
No hello, no “How is that exhausting assignment of yours going?”
No motherly hug (she was never big on those).
“Ma, I was lucky I made it to the store last night to get these.”
“These” were two very expensive apple pies and a cheesecake whose price amounted to highway robbery. Driven by an uneasy conscience, I’d skipped the local grocery and headed for one of those condescending gourmet shops that specialize in creating home-baked cooking for overworked professionals who are too pretentious or plagued by guilt to go to the bakery section of the supermarket. The gold cord with which this store’s boxes were tied and the pale pink waxed paper that protected their delicacies from a cruel world should have told my mother that I’d made an extra effort—if not with my mixing bowls, at least with my wallet.
“We’ve never had store-bought desserts on a holiday.”
“Ma, I did not have the energy. These will taste just as good. Better.”
“They won’t taste homemade.”
Joey grabbed the boxes from me and stuck his nose inside.
“You’re right, Ma, they won’t taste homemade. Nothing Nicky cooked ever smelled this good.”
But my mother wasn’t to be cajoled by Joey, who can usually laugh her out of any wrongheaded notion or uncompromising mood.
“You can warm the pies up,” I told her. “They’ll taste fine warmed up. Perfectly fine.”
She turned on her heel and walked into the kitchen, where Johnny was leaning back on a chair drinking beer from the bottle and watching the football game on the tiny eight-inch black-and-white my mother kept in the kitchen so that should catch her soap opera even if cooking or cleaning.
“Stop tilting back, you’ll get a skull fracture,” my mother snapped, and then put a coaster under his beer bottle, all without missing a beat in the stage business that was intended to convey her deep displeasure with me: slamming cabinet doors as she pulled out dishes, rattling the silverware around in the drawers, and glancing disdainfully at my outfit for the day, a cream satin blouse with a notched collar tucked into my favorite pair of pants, boot-cut trousers in a very expensive, supple brown suede given to me years ago by a client in the apparel industry. I knew I looked good in those pants. Market research had shown me that. And I knew they were classy, since my former client had never given a tasteless gift in her life.
“You couldn’t put on a dress for once, for the holiday?”
“You’re not wearing a dress, Ma. And you look great.”
I wasn’t just buttering her up. A transformation had taken place. Always before for special occasions, she’d dressed in blouses a size too large in patterns too big for her small features, A-line skirts cut unflatteringly just below the knee, and the sort of “comfort” pumps that you knew would have a trademark name like “Flexi-Shoes,” indicating that no woman had ever been propositioned while wearing them.
But today Ma had come into her own. She was wearing a sage-green crinkled organza tunic top over tapered, narrow pants in the same material. The shade brought out the green of my mother’s eyes, the clarity of her white skin. She looked confident, elegant. She looked … my God, my mother looked sexy. I hadn’t seen her this way since the parties she u
sed to go to with my dad back in Boston when I was three or four, wearing a black net cocktail dress that she still kept in a clothes bag in the back of her closet.
My mother had gone to the lengths of putting on earrings and a bracelet made of scrolly silver wire, and flat ballet slippers in a silvery velveteen. Someone—I was beginning to guess who—had helped her with her makeup. She’d brushed on one of those new face powders that gleam a little, which softened and brightened her face. Louise—I was sure now it had been Louise—had also found a very sheer shell-pink blush for my mother’s cheeks, collarbone, and temples. Louise had always had a nice hand with cosmetics. The question was, why had my cousin suddenly pushed the issue? God knew my mother had never listened to any hints on updating her style before.
“You look beautiful,” I said.
“Can’t a woman get a new outfit once in a while without her whole family acting shocked?” said my mother.
“Not when she looks as great as you do,” said Johnny. My mother gave him a melting smile, then turned to me and unfurled more grievances from the mental list she carries with her titled “Ways in which my only daughter disappoints me.”
“Nicky, I asked you for one thing. One thing. To whip up a few apple pies.”
“Ma, stop harping. I can’t work ninety hours a week and be Julia Child in my spare time. These are good, good pies. These are expensive pies.”
“You think money makes up for effort?”
“Money is effort, Ma. It’s my effort at my job, transformed into apple pie. Transubstantiated, if you like to think of it that way.”
“Don’t be profane,” said my mother in a cool, offended voice.
“Fine, Miss Lavinia Ann,” I said.
We’d once had a tabby cat named Lavinia Ann (my mother’s idea of a classy name, taken from a book). She was a cat of great age and dignity who, if petted too clumsily or startled from sleep, would turn her head away and lift her nose in the air just as my mother was doing right now.
I couldn’t see why Ma was so upset. I’d never been the culinary star of family gatherings. In fact, two winters ago when I attempted ginger cookies for Thanksgiving, my brothers and Johnny had used them as pucks for an impromptu game of hockey on the frozen creek in the woods behind my parents’ house.
The Side of the Angels Page 18