by Hood, Ann
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Peter said. “Does anybody work here?” He waved at a waitress who carried a large tray overflowing with plastic baskets of food.
Claire’s cheeks grew hot. He was always short, even rude, with people in service jobs: waitresses, the washing machine salesman at Sears, Roebuck, bellboys and meter readers. It embarrassed her, the way he snapped his fingers and ordered them about. Even on their first date, a romantic steak dinner at Frankie & Johnnie’s on West 45th Street in Manhattan, he’d acted like that. Claire had two brandy Alexanders and French wine and crème de menthe afterwards. She’d blamed the drinks for the flush that crept up her chest and neck when he complained about the temperature of their soup, that his steak was overdone. When he’d snapped his fingers at the busboy, she’d looked down and sipped her cocktail.
The waitress delivered the food to a large rowdy group of men and boys, all wearing red shirts with logos, a team of some kind. When she was done, she came over to their table. Her uniform was splattered with ketchup and brown gravy and she looked exhausted.
“Two fried clam dinners,” Peter said, snapping his menu shut. He didn’t even glance at the waitress.
“Oh, just one,” Claire said.
He frowned, confused. “You just told me you wanted the fried clams. You said you loved them.”
In her wet boots, Claire could feel her feet swelling. She looked at the waitress, a tired woman with rings of smeared mascara beneath her eyes and a drooping ponytail.
“Just a grilled corn muffin for me,” Claire said. “And a hot dog for Kathy.”
The waitress wrote the order on her pad.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said. “And a high chair?”
“Right,” the waitress said. She lumbered off in her white nurse’s shoes.
“Why do you do that?” Peter said.
“Do what?” Claire lowered herself to the very edge of the booth, the only place her belly and the sleeping child could fit.
“Apologize,” Peter said, leveling his gaze directly at her in a way that made her look away. “For everything.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“You did it just now. Apologized for asking her to get a high chair when that’s part of her job.”
In the booth behind her, two men argued about how Kennedy’s Catholicism would affect the country. The pope’s our new boss, one man said. You’ll see.
“Claire?” Peter said.
“It’s just politeness,” Claire said. “That’s all.”
“Well, it’s annoying.”
Claire nodded. Since Peter had walked into that room that day, the traits of hers that annoyed him had multiplied. She touched her hair too often. She wasn’t a good listener or a careful shopper. She could not parallel-park. Claire did not argue with him when he attacked her this way. It was her guilt that kept her silent. She knew that. Her guilt and her foolish idea of how to be a wife. Of course, she reminded herself, if she truly believed that foolish idea, she would not have slept with another man.
The waitress arrived with the high chair, banging into tables as she did. The high chair was covered in vinyl with a cowboy pattern. Claire stood to put Kathy into the seat. The waitress helped her to hold the child while she buckled the strap and slid the tray in place. Gently, Claire lowered her daughter’s head onto the tray, smoothing her tangled brown hair.
“Where’s our coffee?” Peter said.
“You didn’t order coffee,” the waitress said, flipping the pages of her pad until she found their order. “Two fried clams, then one fried clam, a grilled corn muffin, and a hot dog.”
“And coffee,” Peter said.
The waitress didn’t answer him. As she walked away, she squeezed Claire’s shoulder.
We’ll all have to become Catholics, the man behind her said. You know that, don’t you?
Claire leaned across the table. “Can you hear this?” she whispered, motioning with her head.
Peter nodded. “Foolish, isn’t it?’ he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“What do you know about it?”
“Well,” Claire said, “for one thing, I know we won’t all have to become Catholics.”
Peter laughed. “Some people worry about what’s next. If we have a Catholic president, then who knows? We might even have a Jewish one someday.”
“Or Negro,” Claire said.
Peter grinned. “There will be no stopping anyone.”
With the tension diffused momentarily, Claire relaxed a bit. How ironic, she thought, that Miles had been the man to talk these ideas out with her. And now this was what her husband found interesting. Four years earlier, on Election Day, Peter had told her as he left for work, “Remember to vote for Stevenson,” as if she wouldn’t know who to vote for. But they were newlyweds then, and she’d found it charming, how he liked to think for her.
“I thought when you worked on the campaign it was just out of boredom,” Peter was saying, watching her face.
“I told you I believed in John F. Kennedy. I told you it was a passion.”
“Yes,” Peter said. “You did.”
The waitress arrived with their food, announcing each item as she placed it on the table. Fried clams. Grilled corn muffin. Hot dog. Claire saw that she wore a wedding ring, a thin gold band with a small diamond ring above it.
The greasy smell of the clams made Claire queasy. She took a quick bite of her muffin, hoping it would settle her stomach.
“We never got our coffee,” Peter said. He had already begun to eat his clams, dipping them in the tartar sauce and splashing ketchup on the French fries.
The waitress sighed.
“Busy day, huh?” Claire said to her.
“I’m working a double,” the waitress said. “Some of the girls couldn’t get in ’cause of the snow.”
Claire wondered how late the woman would have to be here working. By the matter-of-fact way she had helped get Kathy in the high chair, Claire thought she must also have a child. Or children. And a husband at home while she served cranky people food all day. And then drove home through this blizzard.
“Sorry,” Claire said as the waitress went for the coffee.
“You just did it again,” Peter said. “Why should you be sorry because she can’t get the order right?”
Suddenly, all Claire wanted to do was sleep. She wanted to be in her own bed back in Alexandria with its layers of warm blankets and the familiar pattern of violets on the wallpaper, the curtains drawn against the snow.
“I don’t know, Peter,” Claire said wearily. “I just am.”
He looked confused. “You’re sorry because she’s not good at her job?”
“I’m sorry she’s working in this storm instead of being home with her husband.”
The waitress returned. “Two coffees,” she said, placing the cups on the table.
“Thank you,” Claire said. Steam rose from them, and the bitter smell comforted her. She wrapped her hands around the cup to warm them.
Peter added milk to his coffee, then to Claire’s. A small gesture of kindness that she appreciated since he was so rarely kind to her anymore. She smiled to let him know that and, for an instant, his face softened.
“Peter,” Claire said. “Look.”
The waitress was standing across the aisle from them, taking orders from new customers who had just come in, noisily shaking snow from their coats and stomping their boots. At this angle, Claire saw clearly that the waitress was pregnant. As far along as Claire, maybe more.
Peter followed her gaze. “Jesus,” he said.
“Poor thing. Working two shifts.”
“People do what they have to,” he said.
“Still.”
“It’s not right,” he said.
Claire reached across the table and took his hand, oddly grateful for her own easy life. Instinctively, he recoiled at her touch. She almost apologized, but stopped herself.
The afternoon that Peter discovered them, after Mi
les left, after she’d dressed and gone into the living room where her husband sat on the turquoise Danish sofa they had argued over buying, she sat across from him in the square pink chair. He had thought that modern furniture wasn’t comfortable or inviting enough, and sitting there that afternoon, Claire understood what he meant. It was all angles and wood, this Danish contemporary.
Peter had demanded details. Not when or where they had met, but what they had done. “How many times?” Peter asked her. “Did he come inside of you?”
Out of spite or fear or something else, Claire told him. “I have lost track of how many times,” she said. “And he does come inside me. Yes.”
Peter jumped off the sofa, his eyes wild. As he loomed in front of her, she thought for a moment he might hit her. But he just stood with that scary look on his face, a look that told her he was capable of anything.
The clock, the one she thought looked like a sunburst and he thought looked like a spider, ticked into the silence.
“I have to pick up Kathy at the sitter’s,” Claire said finally.
She stood. He didn’t move. She put on her white car coat, not because the weather had turned cool but for protection. From the pocket, she took a tube of lipstick, Rio Red, and smeared it across her lips. She took the car keys from the little ring where they hung.
When she reached the door, Peter said, “If you see him again I’ll kill you.”
Claire turned to her husband. “No you won’t. You’re not a murderer,” she said.
Her heart was beating so fast she thought she might be having a heart attack. She didn’t wait for him to answer, she just walked out.
Despite everything, she did not end the affair right away. Instead, she waited until after the election. Perhaps it was part of her recklessness then, but she kept meeting Miles. Every Monday night she went to campaign headquarters in the law office and sat beside him, calling people to urge them to vote for JFK. They sat at big desks, and drank cold bottles of Coca-Cola, the fat White Pages open in front of them. At nine o’clock, they left along with everyone else, and went to their separate cars, and drove around the block, meeting back in the parking lot where she got into his car and they drove off together. They had one hour to say all the things they wanted to say to each other, to touch each other, to wonder how they could be together. Usually, they parked in an empty bank parking lot down the street. Claire believed that they were in love, and they had just that one hour on Monday nights and Wednesday afternoons together.
On election night, in the Hilton Hotel ballroom, under a ceiling of balloons and streamers, she had kissed him for the last time.
“We won,” he’d said into her mouth. His hand was on the small of her back, and she stood slightly on tiptoe to reach his lips.
By then, she had learned she was pregnant.
“We won,” she said back to him, letting him press his body against hers. She said it, even though she knew it wasn’t so.
While Peter went to call Birdy, Claire tried to feed Kathy the hot dog. She had woken up, fussy and disoriented. In their rush to leave, Claire had forgotten to take Mimi, Kathy’s stuffed bunny, and now Kathy was in a panic, demanding it. “I need her!” she wailed. “Go get her! Get Mimi!”
“Mimi’s at home asleep,” Claire said.
“I need her!”
The waitress walked by, carrying a tray of empty glasses.
“Excuse me,” Claire said, stopping her. “Could you fill this bottle with warm milk please?”
Kathy’s cries pierced the restaurant.
“Tough having to take her out in a storm like this,” the waitress said, taking the bottle.
Claire busied herself with getting Kathy out of the high chair. All of her movements were so clumsy now it was hard to imagine she had ever been graceful. Her face and hands were puffy, her breasts achy and large. She felt like she inhabited the wrong body.
Finally she wrangled Kathy out of the high chair. The child had made her body go rigid, and Claire held her awkwardly on her lap.
Peter appeared beside them. “Well,” he said, “the party’s on. You only turn eighty once, she said.”
He frowned down at Claire. “Can’t you quiet her?”
“The waitress is getting some milk,” she said. She didn’t mention that she’d forgotten Mimi.
“What a mess,” Peter said.
Kathy’s screams were giving Claire a headache. The baby inside her rolled. The bright noisy restaurant was almost too much. Tears fell down her cheeks. Everything was a mess. She was a mess.
“Claire,” Peter said. “Come on. Stop that.” She could hear in his voice that he still loved her, despite himself. Despite everything.
He tugged on her arm, pulling her up and out of the seat. Claire felt everyone’s eyes on her, a pregnant woman with a screaming child and an angry husband. She cried harder, awkwardly holding her stiff wailing daughter as Peter urged her forward. At the door, the waitress ran up to them, holding out the bottle of milk.
“You’ll need this,” she said, looking at Claire with pity.
Outside, the snow covered everything. It seeped into the tops of Claire’s boots. She pulled Kathy’s hood up.
“Wait here,” Peter said. “I’ll bring the car around.”
Claire watched as his charcoal gray coat disappeared in the snow. Again, she found herself imagining him really disappearing, and never coming back. She imagined calling her old roommate Rose and asking her to come and pick her up. Rose would take her and Kathy back to her house and help her figure out what to do next. Claire squinted at the line of cars inching along beyond the parking lot. Rose had married a pilot and moved to New London, Connecticut. She wondered if that was nearby.
But then Peter drove up, the station wagon skidding to a halt. He leaned across the front seat and opened the door for her. When the interior light came on, Claire paused to study his face illuminated like that. He was handsome, her husband. Even with his dark hair wet with snow and the beginning of stubble along his sharp jaw. Even with his face set hard and his eyes cold.
“Hurry up,” he said. “All we need is for Kathy to get sick on top of everything else.”
Claire sighed, and handed Kathy to him. She had fallen asleep again. Her cheeks were red from the cold and she had snot hardening between her nose and mouth. Peter placed her on the backseat, tucking her little powder blue blanket around her.
He didn’t shift into first gear. Instead, he stared out the windshield, already covered again with snow.
The car grew dark as the snow accumulated on the windows.
“Claire,” he said, his breath a puff in the cold air.
She waited.
“This baby,” he said, but nothing more.
Claire reached for his hand. The leather of his glove was cold beneath her woolen ones. She was glad he didn’t pull away.
Peter turned to look at her. She thought he might be crying.
“Peter,” she said softly, her heart breaking for him, for the mess she’d made of everything. “Don’t even think it,” she told him.
He looked away. “I need to clean off the windshield,” he said, and got out of the car.
They had met on a flight from New York to Paris. Claire had been a TWA air hostess for exactly five years. You flew until you found a husband, that’s how it went. By the time they had stopped to refuel in Gander, Claire already thought Peter would make a very good husband. He had gone to Columbia University, and graduate school at MIT, and now he was off to work at the Pentagon for Hyman Rickover, the man known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy. Peter had an air of importance about him; all of the other girls noticed too. But he only noticed Claire. In Shannon, as they waited to refuel again, he asked her if she’d have dinner with him that night in Paris. They ate in the Eiffel Tower, and had their first kiss at the top. Such a storybook beginning could only lead to happily ever after, Claire had thought.
She had loved her light blue uniform with the silver wing pinned to her ch
est and the way her hat fit just so above her blond French twist. She loved mixing cocktails for the passengers and the way the men eyed her when she walked down the aisle past them. She and Rose shared a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on East 65th Street. They placed an Oriental screen in the middle of the bedroom, with their beds on either side of it. Before they fell asleep, they shared stories about their layovers: the places they’d seen—the Acropolis and the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower—and the men who had taken them to dinner or for a tour of the city. He’s the one, she told Rose when she got back from that trip. They would move to a big house outside Washington, D.C., and have babies and always remember that dinner in Paris, that dramatic first kiss.
She was lucky, that’s what Claire thought. She was a pretty girl from a small town in Indiana, and she had the whole world right at her fingertips. Then Peter walked onto that Super Constellation, and everything changed.
4
The Key to the Majestic
VIVIEN, 1919
Every Friday morning Vivien went to the library. Today she would return the Cather novel, and Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons. The library was small, just three rooms and a sagging front porch. On cold days like today, a fire roared in the hearth in the largest room, and Kay Pendleton, the librarian, had a pot of strong coffee warming. Vivien poured herself some in a chipped cup decorated with pink roses and sat in her usual place at the long oak table in the Reference Room. Kay collected castoffs, like the mismatched coffee cups she kept here and the out-of-print books she bought at estate sales and the like. The books lined a shelf with a handwritten sign hung from it: Kay’s Personal Oddities and Curiosities.
Kay Pendleton herself was something of an oddity and a curiosity. She appeared to be a woman who could plow a field and birth a dozen babies easily. But as far as Vivien knew, Kay was a spinster like her. Her fine blond hair was always falling in soft tendrils from the bun she wore, and her pale blue eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses showed a hint of mischief. Kay wore low-cut blouses that showed off her ample cleavage and the sprinkling of freckles that dotted her chest. Sometimes, Kay Pendleton wore men’s trousers that on her looked feminine and chic. But more often, like today, she wore skirts that hugged her hips seductively. Vivien had seen men have to avert their eyes when they checked out their books, or risk blushing or ogling. How she had landed here in Napa, unmarried and working in a library, remained a mystery to Vivien.