Caroline leafed through magazines until she heard Nell’s car pull out of the driveway and head down Hillside Street. Then she went to her dresser and removed two things from her underwear drawer: a tiny envelope and an index card. She put the envelope in the pocket of her robe. On the index card was a scrap of poetry copied out in her neatest handwriting:
He first deceased, she for a little tried
To live without him, liked it not and died.
Some seventeenth-century woman’s epitaph, she forgot whose. Under it she had written the date of Stewart’s death in 1972. Caroline got her pen out of the desk to write another date beneath it: June 19, 1973. Then she put the paper back under a stack of panties and closed the drawer.
Who would find it? Lucy? Nell? Mort? Anyone? It didn’t matter. It was her private code, her silly scholarly footnote to her own life. Really: it didn’t matter. No one, least of all her own sister, her own children, would have suspected her capable of such a thing. It was important only to her to leave this oblique record: it satisfied her love of order and completeness, the tying up of details.
Not that she was being very scientific about it. She had not made a will, for example. But she knew Lucy and Teddy could be trusted to split things amicably. The jewelry was Lucy’s, of course. Caroline had told Kay she could have the leopard coat—poor Kay, who had come to her after Stewart’s funeral for a loan, with stories about Teddy’s boozing and chubby little Ann’s problems at some expensive nursery school. She’d been selling her antiques—the furniture, and the French art glass she’d inherited from her first husband’s family. And Teddy had been playing the stock market, losing most of Kay’s money, and a real estate deal somewhere had gone wrong.… Kay got the loan, and when she admired the coat, Caroline said, “Take it.” Kay said she couldn’t, and Caroline said, “Take it when I’m dead, then.” The other coats would go God knows where. Lucy would never wear them. No fur for Lucy—or Nell either, probably. Caroline couldn’t see them on her daughter or her sister. Glamorous Kay could take them all, as far as she was concerned. Give them to the Salvation Army. Put them out with the trash. As if it mattered.
The house was very quiet. When she listened, all she could hear was a crow squawking in the fir trees out back. It made her smile: those damned crows. The whole neighborhood complained about them and their horrible noise. What bad-tempered birds. Or maybe their noise was a sign of happiness? Rapture? Maybe when a crow was in love, its first impulse was to let out an ear-splitting skrawwk! Well, why not?
She would miss the crows, she decided. The crows, Mort, Nell, and her children. Was that all? She thought fleetingly of her years at the convent, the long hours she used to spend in prayer, the way her heart yearned for God, for certainty. For something that would open and enfold her. She looked at Stewart’s photograph, and her eyes filled with tears. Lucy had taken it years ago, a ridiculous picture of him in a train station wearing a suit and tie—very proper, very much the lawyer, the pillar of the community. But he looked so healthy and robust, and he had that look on his face that she loved, and after long consideration Caroline had decided on it as her favorite and had it framed in silver.
Stewart. Timor mortis conturbat me—a line she always remembered from one of the medieval lyrics she was so hung up on when she was young. A million years ago, before everything. Timor mortis: fear of death. Imagine the poet back in those pious days, God and His works all around him, and the fear of death as urgent as hunger or love, as much a part of his life. Fear of hell, of course, was what it was. Fear of the loss of God forever and ever was what made him sweat and tremble. What a strange notion, she couldn’t help thinking. She had abandoned God for Stewart, and she had lost God completely on the day Stewart died. Loss of God seemed very natural: no sweat, no trembling. Loss of Stewart, whom she had traveled home from the desert to care for, was something else.
God, death, hell—no, those weren’t the things she feared.
She would miss the crows, Mort, Nell, Lucy, and Teddy. She considered calling Lucy in Boston and complaining about her indigestion. She imagined Lucy, afterward, saying, “I talked to her just a couple of hours before it happened—she thought she had indigestion.” Her dear daughter, whom she had failed so often. She would have liked to hear Lucy’s voice once more, say one last thing to her, or to little Margaret—what, she couldn’t imagine. Or Teddy—call Teddy? No. Phone calls were like a slug of Scotch: needless complications. It was kinder and easier to leave it as it was. Let them be.
She went down the hall to the bathroom. She brushed her hair and brushed her teeth. She looked in the mirror one last time: all right, yes, she supposed she had been beautiful once, was still. Would be no more. What did it matter now?
She took the tiny envelope from her pocket and shook its contents into the palm of her hand: four white pills. She ran water into her tooth glass and, without thinking about it, swallowed them all at once. Mort’s gift: he could be prosecuted, if anyone guessed. No one would. It’s everyone’s right, he said, and yes, it was—though she knew he had meant years and years from now, he meant old age and sickness instead of fifty-four. She stuffed the envelope deep into the bathroom wastebasket, under the tissues and wads of hair.
Back in her room, she stood at the window. Blue sky, green trees, Nell’s roses by the fence. The crows were still at it: skrawwk! She stood there a long time. Then she drew the curtains. She got into bed, leaning back comfortably against the pillows. She smiled across the room at Stewart. She never thought of him as a young man: it wasn’t as a young man that she had loved him. She had fallen in love with him while he coughed himself to death. Tears came to her eyes, thinking of his suffering. His goodness. The night he died in her arms.
This day, she thought, quoting again—from a source that as the minutes went by she was too drowsy to remember: this day, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.
NELL
1968
On Wednesdays after school, she sat at a card table at the Syracuse Peace Council and addressed envelopes. On Saturdays, she stood on street corners passing out antiwar leaflets. She went to a rally at the university where Eugene McCarthy spoke over closed-circuit television deploring the Tet Offensive. The night Johnson announced he wouldn’t seek a second term, she joined a horn-blowing motorcade down Westcott Street and got drunk on cheap beer.
At school she wore her usual dull sweaters and skirts, but sometimes she put on jeans and an embroidered shirt and went to parties in noisy, grungy apartments where she smoked pot with people in their twenties. They were fond of her. They said, “I wish I had your energy.” They said she looked like Katharine Hepburn in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—which Nell knew they meant as a compliment, though Katharine Hepburn was at least ten years older than she.
Nell was in love with a young woman she often went leafletting with, a graduate student in history named Jessie Rose. Jessie didn’t know this, of course; no one knew it. The way Jessie’s mere existence enriched her life—that was Nell’s secret, like a hoard of money in a Swiss bank account: she didn’t need to have the money, just know that it was there.
Jessie had a sullen, hairy boyfriend named Michael, who looked to Nell like a throwback to a less attractive evolutionary stage in the sublime history of humankind, but even Michael couldn’t disturb Nell’s contentment. Michael couldn’t be taken seriously; he was an absurdity, a nothing. The important things were Jessie’s long shining hair, her wonderful smile, the time she touched Nell’s hand and said, “You are an absolutely amazing woman, do you know that?”
Nell was also half in love with Eugene McCarthy. She said to Pat Garvey that if all men were like McCarthy she just might be able to imagine herself marrying one. Imagine a poet in the Senate! She liked his elegant wit and his short, crisp hair: the one thing she couldn’t approve of in the younger generation was long hair on men, which (no matter how bearded and moustached they were) made them look effeminate. Long hair with a headband was the worst. She also liked McC
arthy’s cool, stony, reasoned opposition to Johnson’s war.
“Even though my brother John was killed in it, I can see that World War II was a necessary war,” she used to say. “This one is madness.”
She said things like that regularly to Jamie, to get him angry. She also cut out “Fat Freddie’s Cat,” four-letter words and all, from the Syracuse New Times and left it in the kitchen for him to see. The first time she went out in her denim shirt he said, “You look like a pathetic old hag,” which didn’t bother her at all. She knew she didn’t look like any such thing.
“You seem like one of us,” Jessie had said once, after a morning tramping the streets for McCarthy. They were sitting in The Orange having coffee. “I wish my mother had half your guts,” Jessie said. “She lives for her garden club. When Johnson abdicated, she said what a shame it was, Lady Bird had done so much to beautify Washington.”
“So she has, the old bitch,” Nell said, and they both laughed. That was the day Jessie told Nell that Michael was getting really weird, he was dropping acid, he was talking about heading for the coast and joining a fringe group called the Diggers. He was beginning to scare her. Nell said, her heart jumping, “He does seem like a rather difficult, hostile young man.”
“To say the least,” Jessie said. “But damn it, he’s so sexy!”
That night Nell lay awake until dawn. She thought not so much of Jessie as of Gillian in England, and the hairdresser Marietta, and the stocky, short-haired woman who had accosted her in the women’s room of the Waldorf Cafeteria, and one scary, thrilling night in. New York with a woman she met at the Museum of Modern Art.
Jessie wasn’t the first young woman she had had a crush on. Her life as a teacher of teenagers was filled with terror and ecstasy. But what she dreamed of, when she designed her personal Utopia, was not a bouncy, nubile young thing in denims and eye makeup, but what she thought of as a counterpart, someone near her age, someone she could talk to. The perfect Friend she had craved all her life.
Sometimes when Nell lay awake, it seemed that all she really wanted was someone to love. Anyone. That even if Jamie were more friendly, less distant—less Jamie—she could be content to live in celibate happiness, devoting herself to her brother, like Dorothy Wordsworth. Or if she and Caroline were better friends. Or if life could be as simple for her as it apparently was for Jessie, who found love in the stoned, antisocial, and repulsive person of Michael Spengler.
“Well—lonely, frankly,” she responded to Caroline’s how-are-you when she went to their place for Sunday dinner—the new house Caroline and Stewart had bought when they moved back to Syracuse after Stewart’s emphysema had made it necessary for him to give up his law practice in Albany. “I keep thinking I should rent out a couple of the bedrooms. God knows there’s plenty of room in that house. Jamie practically lives out at his studio, anyway.”
“Why don’t you?” Caroline asked. She was putting dinner on the table—not much of a dinner. Macaroni with butter on it, frozen peas, a wizened little ham. In a crystal pitcher, ice water to drink. On the counter Nell saw a Sara Lee cake thawing in its aluminum pan, a jar of Sanka. “Rent out Jamie’s old bedroom in the attic,” Caroline said. “You could put an air conditioner up there. Or you could take the attic for yourself, that way you’d have more privacy.” She sliced three pieces off the ham and went to the refrigerator for a jar of mustard, which she stuck in the middle of the table with a silver knife in it. “You should, Nell. I’m sure you could use the income, too.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Nell said. “I don’t really need the money, and in a way I must admit I do like having things my own way around the house.”
Caroline smiled. Nell had a genetic inability to agree with Caroline, and Caroline knew it. “Well, it’s a thought. Maybe you just need some new friends.”
“I do have my Peace Council people.”
“Kids!”
“I like young people,” Nell said. “I enjoy their company. They’re teaching me a lot. I’ve become quite friendly with several of them. There’s this graduate student named Jessie that I go canvassing with.”
“Jessie, Jessie, Jessie. You’ve told me all about Jessie. She’s the pretty blonde with the awful boyfriend. Right?”
Nell flushed. “Sorry.”
Caroline said, “Oh Nellie, forgive me.” She kept bustling around the kitchen. Another kind of person, Nell thought, would come and sit down when she apologized—look you in the eye, at least. Caroline was draining the peas, plopping them into a serving dish. She said, “But you know, it’s a damned shame you never got married. You could have children of your own instead of getting these hang-ups on other people’s kids.”
“They’re not hang-ups, Caroline. God.”
“Well. Whatever they are.” Caroline put the peas on the table and went to the door to the hallway. “Stewart? Dinner.”
They were both silent, listening. First Stewart’s cough. Then the creaking of the bed. Then his slippered feet shuffling down the hall. Caroline had put his bed in the back room on the first floor, plus a big color Sony, a reclining chair for herself, and a shelf unit that held family pictures and library books and copies of TV Guide and Caroline’s New Mexican Madonna. They sat there in the evenings watching the public television station. They’d watch anything: Masterpiece Theater, Agronsky & Co., nature programs, opera, Monty Python. Thinking of Caroline and Stewart, Nell told herself that there were worse things in life than a big silent house with no one but a cat and a reclusive brother for roommates.
Stewart shuffled in. “Hi there, Nell.”
She stood up to kiss him on the cheek. He needed a shave, and he smelled musty, like an attic. Unused, she thought. Dead already. “How are you, Stewart?”
It was the wrong question, of course, but all he said was, “Can’t complain. How have you been keeping yourself?”
“Nell’s thinking of renting out a room,” Caroline said. She was watching him and pretending not to, as he lowered himself into his chair, picked up his napkin, and tucked it in the top of his robe. When she saw that he was settled, she sat beside him and began filling his plate.
“Is that so? Go easy on that ham, Caro.”
“Not really,” Nell said. “It was just an idle thought.”
“You want to watch out, bringing strangers into the house. Remember what happened to Janet Murphy.” A fit of coughing overcame him, and Nell sat looking down at her peas trying not to listen. Stewart’s coughing was dry and desperate. It could escalate into wheezing gasps and Caroline would have to get the respirator.
This time it was brief, but it left him shaken and panting. As if nothing had happened, Caroline said, “Janet Murphy didn’t have the sense of a cocker spaniel.” To Nell she said, “Remember her? She was the secretary in Jack Wentworth’s office who was strangled by—oh, who was it, Stewart? The man who came to read the meter?”
“Plumber,” Stewart said, recovered. He raised his head and picked up his fork. His voice was hoarse, and he cleared his throat, grimacing and putting his hand to his Adam’s apple. “Told her he was the plumber.”
“That’s rather different from renting out a room,” Nell said.
“Granted,” Stewart said. “And you’re no Janet Murphy, God knows, Nell. But it always amazes me that she let him in. It makes you wonder.”
“I believe that it’s better to trust people,” Nell said.
“Hmm. Is that true, I wonder.” Stewart looked at her soberly, frowning hard, thinking it over. Nell wondered what he had been like in the courtroom. He was a completely transparent person: she imagined that defending a client he despised, he would have doubt and revulsion written all over his face. He said, “Actually, I believe you’re right. Seriously. You don’t want to go through life expecting the worst. And, when you think about it, most bad things don’t happen.” He smiled, then sobered again. “Still, you want to check these people out.”
“What people?”
“Anybody you’re considering
renting to.”
She laughed. “I’m not considering that at all, Stewart. It was just an idea.”
“Not a bad one,” Caroline said.
“Caro can rent a room from you when I’m gone,” said Stewart. “How would you like that, honey? Rent your old room from your sister until a second husband shows up.”
There was a chilled silence while Stewart stabbed his fork into a piece of ham, smiling slightly to himself. He said things like that every once in a while, whether to garner sympathy or to shock people or just because they were true, Nell couldn’t figure out.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Caroline said firmly. “Does anyone want some of this mustard?”
“You never know,” Stewart said, still smiling at his food.
“How’s Lucy?” Nell asked.
“You mean, how’s my baby,” Caroline said, and jumped up. “Wait. I’ve got some new pictures.”
“And Kay and Teddy are thinking of producing one of their own,” said Stewart. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
“That would be wonderful.” Knowing Kay, Nell wondered if it would.
“Here. Isn’t she adorable?” Caroline had color shots of Margaret, their first grandchild: a hairless, grinning little thing propped up on a sofa with pillows. Some of Lucy pushing her in a stroller down a Boston street, Lucy looking unexpectedly matronly and contented. Caroline said, “See what you’re missing, Nell? If only you’d said yes to old what’s-his-name. Henry Tillman.”
Nell said, “Caroline—please.”
“Look at those eyelashes.” Stewart gave another weak cough but subdued it with a sip of water. “And that rosebud mouth. What a little beauty.”
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