Souvenir of Cold Springs

by Kitty Burns Florey

  How shocking his rage and bitterness had seemed because he was only eleven. Little Jamie, the pet. “Forty-two years,” she said.

  “You don’t have to believe in God to go to church with the woman you love,” he said, and Thea shook her head, agreeing, her eyes misting over again.

  Jamie stood up. “I want to say one more thing, Nell. Thea.” He pursed up his lips again but it wasn’t the same. He would always be different now: she would never see him as he used to be. And how had that been? She’d never known him, and vice versa. The thought came to her: I don’t know him, but I do love him—old Jamie, her baby brother. She could remember him in diapers, Peggy changing him, saying baby shit looked like cooked squash.

  “What, Jamie dear?” Thea asked. Sometimes she went too far.

  Jamie looked at her anxiously. “I apologize for what I said yesterday about you two, Thea. I’m sure Nell told you how upset I was. It was a shock, I admit it. You think you know someone, and—”

  “Life is stranger than you think, Jamie,” Nell said, looking sharply at him. “And it’s much more interesting that way.”

  “No, no, I know that, Nell. Don’t get mad at me all over again. I had a long talk with Sandra last night. She’s very tolerant, very—wise about things like this.”

  “English,” Nell said, nodding at Thea. Thea smiled and, under the table, pressed Nell’s bare foot with her own.

  “And you were absolutely right, Nellie,” Jamie went on. His voice was jerky, forced. He was doing his duty, making a speech. She imagined Sandra squeezing a promise out of him. Jamie, my deah boy, you ebsolutely mahst a-pole-ow-gize. “What you said yesterday. That as long as you love someone. And if things are a bit unorthodox, well—I mean, I know people will say things about Sandra and me. I’m more than twenty years older than she is. I’m practically an old man, and she’s so—” He gestured vaguely, with his secret smile. “So I just want to say that I think it’s fine about the two of you. Who am I to—” He stuck his hands abruptly in his pockets and jingled his keys. “As long as we’re all happy,” shrugging, and then beaming at them with his new, youthful grin.

  They embraced him at the door, and when he was gone they made a fresh pot of tea and ate more scones. There were endless things to talk about. They decided that Thea would move in when Jamie left. They’d split everything fifty-fifty. Thea could stop paying her exorbitant rent; it would give her a lot more money; they could easily afford England. They could go over for the wedding. They could visit Nell’s old friend Gillian Welsh, who was in a nursing home in London, and they could see the Turner exhibit at the British Museum. And they could buy Jamie and Sandra a wedding present over there and save shipping—get something arty in a craft shop. They said over and over that they couldn’t believe it—old Jamie—what next? Finally, when two more pots of tea were drunk, when they couldn’t stuff in another sip, another bite, when they had thoroughly hashed over Sandra and Jamie and the wedding and their trip and their new life and how unbelievable it all was, they began to believe it.

  Except that a voice in Nell’s head kept saying: it’s too perfect, it can’t last, I don’t deserve it. She imagined herself alone someday, living in the house she had shared first with Jamie, then with Jamie and Caroline, now with Thea. How much harder it would be. How bereft she would be, how black the void. They both assumed, always, that Thea would die first. Nell had the constitution of a tank, the energy of a girl in her teens. Thea had ailments—all kinds, and she was past sixty. She had no gall bladder, no uterus, cataracts forming, arthritis in one foot. Breast cancer ran in her family, her mother and sister had both died of it …

  Jamie was gone, Thea would die. Even Dinah—her fifth Dinah, after all—wouldn’t live forever. And there Nell would be, alone. She’d have nothing again—just the relatives coming to see her once a year, at Thanksgiving. All that arguing. Teddy drunk, Lucy nursing her bad memories, Mark being alternately sarcastic and silent. And the kids—well, not really kids anymore. Not the sweet little people she used to cuddle. Heather primping in the bathroom, Margaret with her nose in a book, Peter such a smart alec—like that time he cursed Teddy, and Teddy didn’t say a word, just poured himself another drink. Poor little Ann on tranquilizers and antidepressants, stuck away in those terrible schools, at the age of ten, eleven. Half the family vegetarians, refusing the turkey. Even poor old Mr. Fahey wouldn’t make it to many more dinners. But Thea’s empty place at the foot of the table would be the worst.

  Thea bustled around the kitchen. Dirty dishes in the dishwasher, leftover scones in a plastic bag, tea leaves into the compost. She hummed the Bach cantata as she worked; she had a rich, pretty voice, slightly off. Nell sat in her chair watching her. She remembered the first time Thea had come to her house, an afternoon in early spring. They had sat in the living room and drunk sherry. A spar of sunlight lay across Thea’s chest. Nell had raised her hand, and the gray shadow of her finger in the sun touched Thea. A phantom touching her breast, stroking it. Thea had noticed nothing. Nell had trembled with desire and then, in shame, clenched her hands together in her lap. Then that night they had talked, she had confessed everything, and Thea had touched her in just that way, the way Nell’s shadow had. But not a shadow. A flesh-and-blood woman. The love of her life.

  She wanted to tell Thea she was scared. She knew she was like Jamie in some ways—she had the melancholy streak that all the Kerwins seemed to have, and she was, underneath it all, timid and afraid of change. Afraid also that if Thea lived with her, got to know her that extra, intimate bit more, she would stop loving her.

  To get rid of her fears, she joked. “Can’t you just see Jamie as the perfect English gentleman? He’ll wear tweeds and pick up Sandra’s accent and write indignant letters to the London Times about people letting their dogs foul the footpaths.”

  “Poor Jamie,” Thea said. “He’s going to be a respectable married man soon, Nell. You shouldn’t make fun of him.”

  “What nonsense,” Nell said. “God wouldn’t have created people like Jamie if he didn’t mean us to laugh at them.” And then, when they were going upstairs to get dressed, she caught Thea’s arm and blurted it out. “You won’t desert me, will you?”

  Thea paused on the step above her. Even in her ratty old bathrobe she looked regal. And still beautiful, not a mass of wrinkles like Nell. It paid off to be a tad plump. Nell wanted to put her arms around her and rub her face against Thea’s stomach, but she waited to see what she would say.

  “Will you, Thea?”

  Thea looked down at her and slowly shook her head. “Nell, you are such an ass.” Nell blushed: just what she had said to Jamie. “Why would I desert you?” Thea said. “You’re my whole life, you idiot.”

  She did put her arms around her, and they stood there like that for a few moments. Three years later, when Thea was dead, that was the morning she would keep remembering as almost the best.

  They carried their work to the backyard and spread it out on the picnic table. It was term paper time, and they each had a stack of them to grade—Nell’s on Dubliners and The Wasteland, Thea’s on the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity.

  But it was a beautiful afternoon, hard to get going. Nell walked around the yard, deadheading tulips, followed by the cat. “What a relief it is,” Nell said suddenly. “To have someone know. To tell someone. To say it!”

  “Isn’t it?”

  They smiled at each other. Nell thought she would die of this happiness, she would fly up into the air she was so happy, the world was such a perfect place.

  “Come here,” Thea said. “Smell the lilacs.”

  They stood, sniffing, in front of the bush Nell’s mother had planted in 1935. “My God, Thea,” she said. “Do you realize Jamie has never lived anywhere but this house? Even when he was in art school he lived at home. He’s never traveled, never gone away on a vacation. I’m trying to think if he’s even spent a night anywhere else in his whole life.”

  “It’s really a wonderfu
l thing,” Thea said. “At his age.”

  “At any age.”

  If someone had looked out a window, they would have seen what Jamie had seen the afternoon before: two aging women, one tall and plump, one tall and skinny—one in a long skirt and peasant blouse with her hair tied up in a scarf, the other in jeans and bright red socks and sandals, her gray hair frizzy and wild. They stood in the sunshine with their arms around each other.

  LUCY

  1978

  The parting with Jerome was bitter. Jerome had begged her to go to California with him—he couldn’t make it without her, he said. He was a television producer with a small cocaine problem that she knew was getting bigger. Their affair had been going on for three years, but it wasn’t until he asked her to go away with him that she knew she didn’t dare commit herself to someone like Jerome.

  When he saw she meant it, he had threatened to tell Mark everything. She had hit out at him, enraged. He had hit her back, and she had fled into the night and run all the way from his apartment on Mount Vernon Street to Park Street station, taking her purse with her but leaving her keys in the pocket of a jacket that hung over the chair in Jerome’s bedroom. She had worried for days about those keys: should they have the locks changed? Imagining arriving home someday to find Jerome sitting at the kitchen table, laughing the way he did when he was high, ready to spill the beans. She had done nothing about it, of course: how could she? She told Mark the keys must have fallen out of the hole in her jeans pocket—showed him the ripped seam. Neither of them mentioned the bruise on her face.

  The bruise faded. Every day she looked in the mirror and told herself that when the bruise was gone she would be over Jerome. It went from a deep yellowish purple, to violet, to pale purple, to nothing. It took about two weeks, and she still wasn’t over Jerome—still missed him, still thought about him compulsively, was tempted to phone him, couldn’t get any work done, cried the mornings away after Mark and Margaret had left.

  She drove to Providence and told the whole sordid story of the breakup to Teddy, drinking tea and talking nonstop in the tiny bare kitchen of his apartment while he drank gin from a pint bottle. He let her finish, and then he said, “Oh Christ, Lucy,” and began to cry.

  She was flattered before she realized he was drunk. Then it became obvious that it wasn’t her loss of Jerome he was crying for, it was himself. “You’re so lucky,” he said. “You had this thing with Jerome for three whole years. You’ve got that to look back on, at least.” He tipped the pint up to his mouth but there was nothing left. He held it upside down and shook it. “Just like my life,” he said. “Empty.” He smashed the bottle hard against the side of the table. Glass flew in all directions.

  Lucy jumped up. “Jesus, Teddy!” Shards of glass littered the floor, the tabletop. A piece glistened in her teacup like an ice cube. She imagined it in her eye. Reflexively, she looked for a broom, though she couldn’t imagine that Teddy would have such a thing.

  Teddy sat holding the jagged neck of the bottle. “Empty,” he said. “And broken.” He looked up at her, tears rolling down his cheeks, and they both began to laugh, out of control, holding their stomachs, wiping their eyes. Then they walked to a supermarket down the street and bought a broom and a dustpan, cleaned up the mess, and went out for pizza. Teddy had a long red cut on one finger and refused to put a Band-Aid on it—not that he had any Band-Aids. He said he wanted a visible reminder of what an asshole he was. He drank ginger ale with his pizza, and he apologized for his outburst and his self-absorption. He told Lucy she should have gone to California with Jerome.

  “Okay, so it might have been hell,” Teddy said. “But what’s the definition of a good life if it’s not the constant risk of hell?”

  The next day Lucy called his old girlfriend, Marie Lindbergh, and asked her to get in touch with Teddy.

  “Did he put you up to this?” was the first thing Marie asked.

  “No,” Lucy said. “But he needs you.” She expected nothing from the call, and she wasn’t sure she had the energy for it. She considered hanging up. And then what? What she really wanted to do was go upstairs and lie down, close her eyes, sleep until Margaret got home from school, and then help Margaret work on the chart she was making of the House of Windsor.

  Marie said, “If he needs me he can call me himself.”

  “No, he can’t, Marie. You know how Teddy is.”

  “Right. Crazy.”

  “He’s not crazy. He’s just got problems.”

  “Who doesn’t? Teddy’s always so special, his troubles are always so much worse than anyone else’s. And you spoil him rotten, Lucy. You don’t even let him make his own phone calls.”

  From the kitchen phone, if she looked out the window over the sink, Lucy could see the daffodils in bloom by the garage and remember the daffodils Jerome had bought her that last afternoon, four bunches of them at two-fifty each from a vendor on Charles Street—Jerome’s grand gesture with a ten-dollar bill. Back at the apartment, they emptied a coffee can and stuck the flowers in it. Then they made love. Then Jerome made his proposal, she declined, they fought, she fled.

  Lucy turned her back on the window and said, “I’m not spoiling him, Marie. Be reasonable. I’m just trying to help him. He’s going through a bad time.”

  Marie snorted. “And coping with it in his usual fashion, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, come on, Lucy.”

  She could picture Marie—a crude caricature, she always thought, of the wholesome Swedish beauty: yellow hair, red cheeks, pink lips, blue eyes, big white breasts. Marie would be looking irritated, glancing down at her watch, drumming her fingers on a tabletop. Lucy had deliberately called Marie during what she knew were her working hours, so she would catch her at home. Marie was a freelance journalist, like Teddy. Lucy and Marie had been friends during the time Marie and Teddy lived together, but Marie had always made her slightly uncomfortable. She always said exactly what she meant, and she never shrank from asking embarrassing questions: it probably made her a good journalist, but it made her a difficult friend.

  “He only drinks when he’s lonely,” Lucy said. “If you went back with him he wouldn’t do it.”

  “Is he drinking now?”

  Was he drinking now. She didn’t know what to say. He had certainly been drinking the day before. On the other hand, he had been chastened, had switched to ginger ale. And over pizza he had told her that the local Gilbert and Sullivan group had asked him to play Koko in The Mikado. He had been cheerful, had sung “Taken From the County Jail” while they walked back to his apartment.

  “Not really,” Lucy said, hoping it was true. “Considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Well, he’s lonely. He’s not working at the moment, and he really doesn’t have any good friends in Providence since Dave moved to Iowa. He’s living all alone in a studio apartment on Benefit Street. And he misses Ann like crazy.”

  There was a pause as Marie registered this, and Lucy felt the first faint surge of hope. Marie said, “Ann is still at that school, then? She’s sticking it out?”

  “She really likes it,” Lucy said.

  It was only a small exaggeration. Ann had been there since September—at Saint Basil’s, somewhere on the Hudson, a school Kay had found when Ann became impossible for either her or Teddy to handle. A Center for Caring Discipline, was how the place advertised itself, and the entire first semester Teddy had ranted against it.

  “They take a cold shower every morning at six,” he told Lucy. “And then they run two miles, rain or shine or snow or whatever. And then they have breakfast, which is milk and porridge. Can you see Ann eating porridge? Running? Those fat little legs? And then they have classes from eight until four, and Latin is compulsory, and so is phys ed. And every night after dinner they line up and march into the kitchen to wash their own dishes. I mean, leave it to Kay to find a place where they wash their own dishes—Kay who wouldn’t know a dishcloth
from a clothespin.”

  Lucy did admit that the school sounded extreme—so stereotypically Dickensian, in fact, that she wondered if Saint Basil’s was an institution devoted chiefly to irony. Mark said it was absurd, Teddy had to be exaggerating. Lucy called Kay, who told her coldly that it was a perfectly respectable boarding school, Ethel Kennedy had sent one of her children there, it had a dedicated faculty and a long list of distinguished alumni, and if Lucy was so concerned about it she could damn well help with the fees, and besides, what else were they supposed to do with Ann, what other fucking choice did they have, and tell Teddy he could quit involving his goddam relatives in his family’s personal business.

  Teddy said that Ann’s compulsory weekly letters home had become gradually less outraged and hysterical as well as neater and better spelled. She still complained about the showers and the running, as well as the Latin, in which she was doing poorly, and the food, which didn’t improve. Teddy still called the headmaster Kaiser Wilhelm and wrote to him regularly, reminding him that Ann was only eight years old and protesting the effects of cold showers on her delicate constitution; the Kaiser wrote back with good reports of Ann, saying she was running the two miles with ease and hadn’t had a cold all winter. Teddy grumbled, but his harangues stopped, and he settled down to simply bitching about Kay and wishing he had his daughter back. Not working. Living thinly off the proceeds of the book he’d written in 1973. Breaking gin bottles because his life was empty.

  “Ann is doing great,” Lucy said. “It’s Teddy who’s got problems.”

  “Those kids of his are his biggest problem.”

  “Heather goes off to college in the fall.”

  “Where?”

  “Berkeley, probably.”

  “Ah. West Coast. I like that. And what about Peter the psychopath?”

  “Peter’s with Kay, of course. Permanently. He and Teddy can’t live together, Marie, you know that. He’s Kay’s son, anyway, not Teddy’s.” Then she added, with the sense of playing a trump card she’d been hoarding up her sleeve, “Ann only comes home for two days at Thanksgiving and a week at Christmas, plus for two weeks in the summer, and Kay has her half that time.”