Souvenir of Cold Springs

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “Lucy, you’re not going to talk me into this.” From the way she said it, Lucy knew Marie had been thinking about Teddy. Marie lived in Boston, but Lucy never saw her; the breakup of Marie and Teddy had been epic, and had reverberated. The last she’d heard, in a letter from Dave in Iowa, Marie was seeing some scientist from M.I.T. who was about to be tapped for a big job in Washington. Seems a bit establishment for Marie, Dave had written. Sounds like a reaction against Ted, if you ask me.

  “Just call him, Marie. He could use a friend, if nothing else.”

  “You don’t know what I went through with that kid.”

  “Yes, I do,” Lucy said. “We all went through it.”

  “Honey, I lived there. I’ve still got a scar on my shin where that little animal threw a tape recorder at me.”

  The tape recorder incident was famous: Ann’s midnight tantrum, Marie’s intervention, the Sony portable hurled at her, the emergency room, the stitches. “I know, Marie. It wasn’t easy for you.”

  “Easy! It was living hell. And I actually loved him, Lucy. I really did. I loved that schmuck.”

  “He loved you, too,” Lucy said, though she wasn’t positive that was true. “I get the feeling he still does.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “He’s so lonely, Marie.” Lucy pressed her advantage. “I feel so bad for him. I drive down to Providence every week or so, just to give him someone to talk to.”

  “Yes, but you’re a fool, Lucy. You know that?”

  Anger overtook her—not so much at Marie as at Teddy. The same anger she had felt when he broke the bottle: that her brother should put her through these things. Marie was absolutely right, she had spoiled him rotten. She said, “Okay, forget it, Marie. I’m not in the mood for abuse. I’ve got troubles of my own. I’m sorry I called.”

  “No—no, Lucy, I’m really glad to hear from you,” Marie said, her voice suddenly warm. Because she’d won some minor power game? Because she was a genuinely good person? “Maybe I’ll get in touch with him after all. I’m sorry to be such a pain in the ass about it. I’ve been going through a tough time myself, but I really kind of miss him. Give me his number, what the hell.”

  Lucy gave her Teddy’s number, trying not to let her optimism get out of control. Marie would probably never call him; if she did, they’d argue and hang up on each other; if they did get together, it couldn’t last. She remembered the brief time Teddy and Marie had lived together, nearly two years ago—the way Marie had relieved her of Teddy’s burdens, had brought Teddy out of his depression following the divorce—had even, it seemed at first, been good for Ann. That had been a wonderful time, a perfect interlude in Lucy’s life—when was it? January to August, last year. Her best months with Jerome.

  Briefly, she and Marie exchanged information about themselves. Lucy told her about the contract she had signed with the calendar people. Marie told Lucy about her breakup with the scientist and her interview with Pat Nixon for Ms.

  “I asked her what keeps her going,” Marie said. “I always ask people that. You get some interesting answers. You know—what gets you out of bed in the morning. Pat Nixon gave this perfectly awful laugh and told me it’s the challenge of seeing if she’s going to make it through the day. I didn’t print that, of course. But it reminded me of you, Lucy.”

  “Me?” She was startled, thinking of Pat Nixon in San Clemente. The mighty fallen. Her husband walking on the beach in a business suit, making his stiff jokes, golfing with gangsters.

  “It was the kind of thing you used to say when you were talking about leaving Mark. What’s happening with you, anyway? Are you still seeing the cute guy with the beard? Are you and Mark still together, or what?”

  “Still together,” Lucy said. Remembering her long talks with Marie, Lucy felt embarrassment. In those days, she had been going to leave Mark, definitely, it was just a matter of time. “I broke up with the cute guy with the beard,” she said, her throat constricting. “Too old to change, I guess.”

  “I have to admit I’m surprised. Whenever I think about you, Lucy, I always think: well, she’s probably left him by now. Probably remarried to someone really great, some interesting guy, a trumpeter in a jazz band or a famous writer. John Updike, I think. Lucy’s probably run away with John Updike by now.”

  Lucy laughed and touched her cheekbone where the bruise had been. The scene with Jerome came back to her: curses, threats, blows—all of it so unexpected, so particularly horrible after that unseasonably silky spring afternoon, their long walk, the daffodils. And here she was with Mark. There were never any scenes with Mark. They didn’t fight; they clammed up. It was one of the things they had in common—that, the house, their daughter. Also their long history of anguish, though that seemed very far away. Hard to believe they had ever turned to each other for comfort, made love frantically in hope of another pregnancy, wept for joy when Margaret was delivered safely. All those times in the hospital, Lucy weak and grieving, Mark holding her hand—Lucy looked back on them with astonishment: another world. After the last time (a boy, Jonathan, who nearly made it) she had thought she would surely die, drown in the blood or fade away from sorrow. No more, they said. Lucy had her tubes tied. That year, she stopped eating meat and started taking pictures again. They bought the house in Brookline, set up a darkroom. Lucy enrolled in the M.F.A. program at B.U. And she and Mark had gradually withdrawn from one another into what Lucy believed had been the true nature of their marriage all along, its naked reality: sterility.

  “Sorry, Marie,” she said. “I’m still hanging in there.”

  “Then let me ask you my question. What gets you out of bed every morning?”

  “Oh Lord.” She stood up and went to the stove to put on the teakettle. There were the daffodils against the green wall of the garage, the wind whipping them hard. The tight brown lilac buds, the tulips, the primroses exposed along the driveway—all of them being tortured by the wind. “That’s a cruel question,” Lucy said. “Don’t ask me to answer it. Isn’t it enough that I do get out of bed? Every single goddam morning of my life?”

  When they hung up, Lucy took a cup of tea and two aspirin into the living room and sat in the wing chair beside the fireplace. Mentally, she ticked things off. Teddy. Marie. Margaret. Did Mark get the tickets for the Red Sox opener? What else? Tomorrow the darkroom, then lunch with Philip, show him the Maine photographs. What else? Prune the roses. What else? What else? Run away with John Updike.

  In February, when she was in the tiny town of East Waterford, Maine, she had gone out for an early morning walk and seen moose tracks: perfectly round, bisected like the peace signs from the sixties, two pairs of them ambling up the muddy dirt road behind the inn and then veering off into the snowy pine woods. She had waited with her camera in the raw morning air, knee-deep in wet snow, hoping to catch sight of a moose. What a shot for the calendar: that bizarre and magnificent animal glimpsed through the bare trees or silhouetted against a pale sky. She waited until her fingers and toes were numb, rehearsing the description of the scene she would give to Jerome when she telephoned him that night. She would tell him about the tracks, the woods, the dirt road winding away beyond the trees, the odd sensation she had in that deserted place of being watched. He would admire her pluck, her dedication, her feeling for her craft. Standing there freezing, she was overcome with love for him and with the awful, fatalistic knowledge that it was him she would leave—not her husband.

  Someone—probably Marie—had once said to her, “Frankly, Lucy, I don’t see what you get out of your marriage.” Lucy had answered, unhesitatingly, “Safety, security,” but when she was asked, “What kind of security? Safety from what?” she had no answer. What she meant went beyond the two words: what she meant was the bond she and Mark had forged over the years in blood and sorrow. We’ve been through so much, she would think to herself. And in the Maine woods waiting for a moose that never showed up, or fighting with Jerome in his apartment, or sitting in her pristine living room with a he
adache, she still couldn’t find an answer. She sipped her tea and thought, prune the roses. Ask Mark about the tickets. Take the lentil soup out of the freezer.

  “You need another Jerome,” Teddy said to her over pizza.

  “Don’t be cynical,” she responded.

  She had lunch with Philip Talner and brought along her photographs from Maine. Philip had been her photography teacher in graduate school and had helped her land the calendar job. He was older than she, long divorced, well known, proud of her small successes. They had lunch together every couple of weeks.

  She met him at a restaurant on Newbury Street and saw immediately that he was upset and distracted. Their lunches made Lucy nervous: she always felt slightly on the spot with Philip, like a prize pupil in an especially demanding class. Things were complicated because he insisted on paying the check, and by the fact that once, in the darkroom, he had stood behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, kissed the back of her neck, and then said, without explanation, “Forgive me, Lucy.”

  It was typical of him. He was given to enigmatic utterances, to grand gestures followed by ambiguity. His students complained that they never knew what he really thought: he would critique a photograph harshly in class, then choose it for a student exhibit. He was a kind man, but he had picked one of Lucy’s photographs for a show—a shot of a shabby elderly couple buying a cabbage at a farm stand—and given it the cruel title Vegetables. Sometimes, when she felt she most needed guidance, he would refuse to say a word, and just when she’d thought he was disgusted with her work, he had recommended her for the calendar job.

  She knew something was wrong because he didn’t mention the portfolio under her arm. She put it on the floor against her chair. Philip sat looking sadly at the menu, raking his fingers through his thinning black hair, and then he began to tell her about his trip to New York to clean out his father’s apartment.

  Old Mr. Talner, Lucy knew, had been killed on the street during a robbery—stabbed by the boy who stole his wallet. It was the kind of death that was almost as disturbing to Lucy as that of her own mother. “I couldn’t stand to look at his stuff,” Philip said. “I gave every single thing he owned to Goodwill, including the dishes and his underwear and his books and some good pieces of furniture. I just had them haul it away, I couldn’t cope with it.”

  “I’m sorry, Philip,” Lucy said. “I know what that’s like. I remember going through that with my mother’s stuff.”

  He smiled at her. “It’s not so bad for you. You’re still young. When you’re my age all you can think is mortality. And not your parents’. Your own.”

  Lucy had a sudden panicky vision of the junk in her desk, the drawers finically neat but full of bombshells nonetheless: a couple of letters from Jerome, a photograph, ticket stubs, a fortune from a Chinese cookie that said, “Make this moment last a lifetime.” She remembered the note in her mother’s underwear drawer. She had never forgiven her for it, and she had no desire to do so—to talk it over with a therapist, for instance, or with Mark or Jerome or her mother’s sister Nell. She felt it was important to keep that small nugget of resentment.

  “Did you go through all this alone?” she asked Philip.

  He shrugged. “My sister lives in Saint Paul. My son and daughter are busy with their own lives. Who was I going to rope into such a distasteful task?”

  “You could have asked me,” she said. “I would have gone with you.”

  He put his hand on hers and said, “Ah, Lucy.” They looked at each other for a moment, and then he released her hand and picked up the menu again, smiling slightly. She studied his face, the bushy eyebrows, beaked nose, thin-lipped humorous mouth. It was a face she would have loved to photograph, but she didn’t dare ask, and she couldn’t imagine showing him the result.

  He looked up from the menu and said, “Why don’t we have lunch and then take your portfolio over to my apartment so we can really look at it?”

  She said, “Fine,” and knew she would end up going to bed with him, not because she loved him or even wanted him, specifically, but because she knew he needed her and because she owed him so much and missed Jerome and was unhappy with Mark. She had known it when she walked into the restaurant—before that, when she ate pizza with Teddy—and maybe even before that: that last night with Jerome, when she told him good-bye, she had known—cynically or not—that there would have to be another Jerome.

  On the day Mark took Margaret to the Red Sox opener, Lucy went to Providence to have lunch with Teddy. They ate at his apartment; Teddy had a jug of Gallo burgundy and frozen cheese ravioli in little foil trays. He had seen Marie twice. He was seeing her the next night, in fact; she was going to watch a Mikado rehearsal, and then he was taking her out to dinner.

  “It can’t last,” he said. “Marie’s a sensible woman.”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic, Teddy.”

  He shrugged and refilled his glass with wine. “A woman is only a woman, but a slug of Gallo is a drink.”

  “I don’t know how you can start drinking so early in the afternoon.”

  “I don’t. I start in the morning.”

  “Oh, Teddy.” She ate a bite of ravioli and looked with revulsion at the glass of wine in front of her; if she didn’t drink at least part of it, she would look prissy and disapproving. She took another forkful and then picked up her glass and sipped.

  “Well?” Teddy asked. “Truly an extraordinary vintage, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, it’s great.”

  He looked at her with concern. “Hey, Luce? Is something bothering you?”

  “No.”

  “No? Really?”

  “Really.” She wanted to tell him she was sleeping with Philip; she always wanted to tell Teddy things. But all the ways she could think of to say it made it sound sordid or hypocritical or pathetic. There was no plausible way she could say how unexpectedly happy she and Philip were together. She said, “Mark and Margaret and I are going to England for the last two weeks in June.”

  “Oh God, poor you. Two weeks trapped on that tiny island with the Duke of Boredom.”

  She smiled. “It won’t be so bad. We’ll be sightseeing, moving around. I’ll be taking photographs. We’re going to Stonehenge, and we’ll probably see some plays in London.” Call me, Philip had said. Call me collect from the Tower of London. “And of course Margaret wants to do all the Royal Family stuff. You know how she is.” She took a sip of wine. “We’re leaving on the nineteenth.”

  “Of June? That’s the day Mom died.”

  “I know. Five years.”

  “Christ.”

  Teddy poured himself more wine. Lucy thought as she often did about how Teddy’s reckless lonely life seemed suicidal at times. Every time she climbed the steps to his place, she had half a fear that she would find him dead—an overdose of something, or his wrists slit with the shard of a broken bottle—leaving her to clean out his junk, give it to Goodwill, explain his death to Heather and Peter and Ann. She had a horror of suicide because she had no understanding of it. She was well acquainted with the various degrees of depression that stopped short of sheer despair; she was just coming out of one. But as she told Marie, she always, for whatever reason, got out of bed in the morning. She was unable to imagine the particular madness that led to self-destruction.

  And yet their mother—the most hardheaded of women, the most self-absorbed and self-sufficient—had killed herself, a fact no one knew but Lucy. Not knew: just strongly suspected. That was how she would put it to anyone she told. But she had never told anyone, not even Teddy. Least of all Teddy.

  Not that there was much to tell. An enigmatic remark her mother had made when she was seeing that doctor: one of Caroline’s unsuitable suitors, as Aunt Nell used to call the men who flocked around when Stewart finally died—as if they had been waiting in the wings while he coughed himself to death. The doctor was perhaps the worst of the lot; Lucy and Mark had met him once and thought him merely tedious, a foul-mouthed compulsiv
e joke teller. “Good old Mort,” Caroline used to call him, and once she had added, “Thanks to him I’ll never have to get old and sick.” There was that, and there was the note Lucy found under a pile of Caroline’s silk underpants.

  “I miss that crazy old broad,” Teddy said. “In spite of the fact that she claimed that having kids wrecked her life. Do you remember that?”

  “She probably didn’t mean it.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “Well, maybe she did. But it didn’t matter in the end.”

  “When all she wanted was Dad.”

  Lucy nodded, and then said, impulsively, “Teddy, I really wish you’d try with Marie. I think you’d be so good for each other.”

  “Like beets.” He poured the last of the wine into his glass. “Like tofu burgers.”

  “It’s time you settled down and lived like a normal person.”

  “What? Like you and the King of Ennui?”

  “Sure. Why not? It’s something, Teddy.”

  He picked the wine bottle up by the neck and held it poised above the table. “You’re trying to say my life is empty?”

  “No!”

  Laughing, she reached for the bottle. Teddy set it down and said, “Good.” He leaned back and folded his arms, staring at her. He looked older lately. The moustache he considered essential for the part of Koko didn’t help. Lucy had photographed her brother dozens of times. He was always a willing subject, he’d pose under any conditions, any time, for as long as necessary. But none of the photographs were a success; she had never captured what she considered the real Teddy, the one she saw now, sitting in the white sunlight by the kitchen window, who looked as if nothing mattered to him, nothing ever had or ever could except the present moment: now.

  She wondered if she would ever love anyone the way she loved her brother.

  “You’re a pain,” she said. “You know that?”