“I’m not bored in the least,” she said. “Though I must admit I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to have dinner with you.”
“Oh, really?” He leaned toward her. The table was so small his face nearly touched hers. She pulled back. “May I ask why?”
“I just wondered what we could possibly talk about after all these years.” He looked hurt, tightening his lips like Caroline did, and she felt bad for drawing away from him. She said gently, “But I’m enjoying this, Jack. I really am.”
She would have liked to elaborate, to tell him she believed that to talk about the dead, the past—what he insisted on calling the good old days—was important, and that the living—this was a confused thought, but—that the living were a sort of repository for what remained of the dead, who could do nothing for themselves, who depended on the living to keep them alive somehow. To stop time by remembering. She wanted to say all that, and she had a feeling Jack would understand her, but before she could speak he leaned toward her again, took her hand, and said, “How come you never married, Nell?”
At the touch of his hand she became aware, suddenly, of how drunk she was. She put down her fork—she couldn’t eat another bite—and her eyes closed. She could have gone to sleep right there in her gilded chair. “A good-looking girl like you,” Jack said. The inside of her head whirled, and she opened her eyes and looked down at their two hands linked warmly together, palm to palm across the table. His fingernails, she noticed, were clean. His hand was tanned an even beige. There were three pearly buttons on the sleeve of his white jacket. “That’s something I could never understand,” Jack went on, and from the slow carefulness of his voice she knew that he was drunk, too. He said, “Unless you just don’t like men. There was some speculation about that, years back. Nothing serious, but—” She looked up at him, into his eyes. His were bright blue, a little sad, crinkled at the corners. “What’s the story, Nellie?”
It was partly the champagne, partly the intimacy of their talk, partly his warm sympathy, his concerned steady gaze that didn’t falter though she knew he must be shocked, disgusted, repelled to the core. She clutched his hand, and told him the truth.
And then later, in the car in the parking lot, he tried to kiss her. “You intrigue me,” he whispered. “God, Nell, women like you, you’re so innocent.” She pushed him away, but he wouldn’t let her go. He said, “Maybe you just need a real man.” He slid her dress off her shoulder and put his lips to her skin, and his hands moved down the blue silk over her breasts. She was horrified by a wild urge to give in to him. She hadn’t been this close to anyone in years. How long since she had felt someone else’s warm breath against her cheek? She closed her eyes with a little sob, and let him kiss her, kiss her again. Then he pushed her down on the seat, put his bulky weight on her, and reached under her skirt.
She gasped and recoiled, twisting away. She was overcome with the need to get out of the car and throw up. She pushed at him, and he let her go, and she sat up and leaned her forehead against the window. The nausea passed. She heard her pulse beating against her temples.
He said, “That’s not something you should do to a guy.”
“I’m sorry.”
He was sitting behind the wheel, breathing hard, running his fingers back through his hair. “You ought to give it a chance, Nellie. You might be surprised.”
She shook her head, and after a minute he started the car and backed quickly out of the parking lot. After a minute she said, “I do apologize. It’s been a lovely evening. The dinner. The champagne. I enjoyed it very much.”
He said, “Well, good, I’m glad,” and they were silent the rest of the way to her house.
She woke the next morning feeling sick and panicky. The hangover passed, but the panic stayed with her. She couldn’t talk herself out of the cold fear that her life would become at any moment grotesque—shameful and melodramatic and ruined. She waited for Caroline to say something to her, for Stewart to make a joke, and she stopped going leafletting with Jessie, imagining anonymous letters to the Peace Council office. When Jessie phoned, she made excuses to hang up in a hurry, and when they called from the Peace Council and asked her to work she said she was busy. For the rest of the school year she froze whenever Joe Carlucci, the principal at Northside High, spoke to her. He called her to his office one morning, summoned her out of class on the loudspeaker, and she sat down opposite him in a cold sweat, but he wanted her to see the mother of one of her students who had come in about her daughter’s problems with the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Nell talked to the woman for ten minutes, and afterward had no idea what she had said. She went to Maine in the summer for two solitary weeks, and was afraid of what she would find when she got back. A notification from the Board of Education, maybe, or a call from Pat Garvey about the astonishing rumors that were sweeping the city.
But nothing happened. She never heard from Jack Wentworth. Eventually, Caroline mentioned that he was going to get married again, to the widow of an old friend. “You missed your chance, sweetie,” Caro said, and Nell said, “That old fascist,” and they laughed, but she felt the blood rise to her face and her heart thump in her chest. She would never think of Jack Went-worth again without an anguished prayer of thanks. In the fall, when she had a postcard from Jessie and Michael in California, she felt almost nothing but relief, and in the November election she voted for Hubert Humphrey.
KAY
1964
At her first wedding, Kay wore a long white satin dress that was a gift from the family of her husband-to-be. At her second, to Teddy Quinn, she wore black silk and a diamond choker that she paid for herself. She also paid for the reception, which was held in the walled back garden of her house on Beacon Hill: flowers everywhere, an open bar and a jazz band, a Japanese chef who cooked steak over an open flame. The wedding cake was flown in from a Viennese bakery in New York City. Kay gave Mrs. Hickey the afternoon off and hired two young nannies—a blonde for Peter, a brunette for Heather—dressed in rented uniforms with frilly white aprons and Mary Poppins straw hats trimmed with cherries.
Heather, who had just had her first birthday, sat placidly in her English pram while the brunette nanny wheeled her around the brick paths showing her off; when she got tired of the pram, she took a few charming, tottering steps hanging on to the garden furniture and grinning at the guests. She had a long nap, and when she woke up she ate a piece of wedding cake and had her picture taken with a mouthful of crumbs, waving her filthy little hands and looking ecstatic.
Peter began screaming shortly after the reception began and had to be taken by the blonde nanny up to his room, where he yelled for at least an hour and then fell asleep. His noise penetrated quite easily to the garden. Kay paid no attention to it, but Teddy kept apologizing and saying, “The terrible twos.” When the nanny returned, her Mary Poppins hat had disappeared. Kay made her go back inside and find it and comb her hair; when she came out again, Kay said, “Everything okay?” and the nanny nodded curtly and headed for the bar.
Kay didn’t invite any of her family, the Bakers, to her second wedding. The first time, her parents—Carl and Faye—had driven straight through to Boston from Chicago in their broken-down Dodge and showed up at the church half an hour late, her father in a shiny brown suit, her mother squeezed into a turquoise chiffon dress with stains around the armholes. They drank too much at the reception. Carl filled Mr. Hamlin in on his lifetime of bad breaks. Faye kept telling Mrs. Hamlin what a nice-looking young fellow Richard was, you wouldn’t think there would be such nice-looking young men at a place like Harvard, she always thought the boys at places like Harvard were—you know. When the dancing began they did the flamboyant dips and spins they’d learned from Arthur Murray’s TV show and, finally, when Kay and Richard had changed into their traveling clothes and were about to leave, Kay’s parents enveloped her in weepy hugs and wouldn’t let her go.
After that, Kay told them news only when it was safely stale: the babies’ births, Richard’s death,
her engagement to Teddy—all of it was relayed in polite belated notes on her engraved stationery. Her parents sent presents to the children that Kay gave to Mrs. Hickey for her grandchildren. They sent a huge sympathy card with a picture of Jesus on the front, and, inside, the words GATHERED TO HIS LOVING ARMS in Gothic script.
Kay planned to let a couple of weeks pass, and then write a letter announcing that she and Teddy had eloped on the spur of the moment and were married by a J.P. somewhere. Or maybe she’d just skip the whole thing. Teddy’s mother, Caroline, wasn’t at the wedding. Caroline, as Kay understood it, looked like a movie star and was living in a convent in New Mexico. His father, Stewart, was a lawyer in Albany; he drove to Boston on the morning of the wedding and took Teddy and Kay out for a late breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton.
Kay immediately loved Stewart. He was everything she wished her own father was: quiet and courteous and well dressed. At the reception, he made the rounds, introducing himself to all Kay’s young friends and playing peek-a-boo with Heather. He didn’t talk much, but he knew how to listen, and he had a wonderful smile, like Teddy’s. And though he drank a lot he could hold it—which was the main thing, Teddy said: not how much you drank but how well.
She had been lucky in her fathers-in-law. She had adored Mr. Hamlin; she had called him Daddy just as Richard did. After the accident, her grief was divided equally between Richard and his father. The death of her mother-in-law, whom she called Irene and who left Kay a string of pearls in her will, barely touched her.
The three of them had been killed in a head-on collision on Route 1. Richard had just picked up his parents at the airport; they were returning from Paris. It was pouring rain, and foggy. A truck swerved into their lane and demolished the Saab, its inhabitants, and the Hamlins’ custom-made leather suitcases, which contained not only some exquisite Parisian baby clothes for the children but a signed Emile Calle vase they had picked up in a shop on the Left Bank. Most of Daddy’s money was invested in Boston real estate and European antiques, particularly French art glass. He had written them about the vase, which he was giving them for a fifth anniversary present. He said it was a very rare specimen, worth ten times what he paid for it. Kay tried hard not to think about the vase, but the image of it smashed to bits on Route 1 outside of Boston haunted her, and she always wondered if there wasn’t some way the pieces could have been retrieved from the wreck, just so she could see the colors of it, the delicate browns and mauves, and the blue dragonfly Daddy had described in his letter.
She still missed Richard and his father, even after a year, even after the money, even after the marriage to Teddy Quinn. She missed Richard in an intense, intimate way—missed his body, his smell, his voice. She missed him in a way that she knew would eventually pass. But when she thought of Daddy, she saw him in the shop on the Left Bank, imagining a nondescript little place full of clutter and a shrewd, stout Frenchwoman in an old cardigan and shapeless shoes, her hair in a bun. The vase would be sitting dustily on the bottom shelf of an étagère that was partially blocked by a fake Empire bureau and a couple of authentic but battered Louis XVI chairs. Daddy would spot it. His face would reveal nothing; he wouldn’t even lift an eyebrow at Irene, who would be examining some old Marseilles linens, for which she had a passion. Daddy would take his time. Eventually, in his fluent but badly pronounced French, he would ask the woman about the vase. She would shrug and quote a price, Daddy would look skeptical and argue, the woman would protest a bit and then come down, come down again, and the deal would be made. Daddy would take Irene to Chez Gaston for dinner.
His letter to Kay and Richard said, “If you think a piece of glass can’t be full of elegance and wit, you are wrong,” and went on to describe the blues and mauves. He was the kindest man Kay had ever known, as well as the richest.
She married Teddy because he was unusual. She could afford to marry a poor man (an unemployed struggling writer five years younger than she) because she had money of her own—all the Hamlin money, which came to the ghost of Richard through his parents’ death and to her through Richard’s.
The money was a shock she got over quickly. She found that having money of her own suited her—something she couldn’t have foreseen. She had grown up in poverty on Chicago’s northwest side, had waitressed her way through Boston University and then worked at Gottlieb/Bayard writing ad copy for three hundred dollars a month, and even after she met Richard they lived mostly on her salary plus his stipend at Harvard, where he was a graduate teaching assistant in art history. There were gifts from his parents, of course, but the Hamlins believed their only son should learn to get along on his own. They did pay for Mrs. Hickey, and for the 1962 Saab in which they had eventually died; they took Richard and Kay out to dinner every Friday night; they bought them extravagant birthday and anniversary gifts; and when he was killed Daddy was pondering the wisest way to set up trust funds for Heather and Peter.
But daily life in Richard and Kay’s Dartmouth Street apartment was spartan; they lived on hamburger, Kay carried her lunch to work, and twenty cents for Richard’s MTA ride to Cambridge the last couple of mornings before payday sometimes had to be borrowed from Mrs. Hickey. When Kay went from all that to sudden wealth in one rainy afternoon, she was surprised at the ease with which she made the transition.
The first thing she did was get her own lawyer. Mr. Hensley, from Daddy’s firm, tended to look at her with disapproval no matter how polite she was to him, no matter how much black she wore to conferences in his office—as if she had personally engineered the accident for the purpose of becoming an absurdly young, obscenely wealthy widow. He also thought it was somehow improper of her to keep her job; now, he seemed to feel, she was free to stay home with her children.
Her new lawyer was a man named Mel Katzmeyer; she hired him because his office was on Newbury Street, down the block from Gottlieb/Bayard, and she could pop in on her lunch hour. He introduced her to Gauloise cigarettes in their classy blue packets, and to the Merry-Go-Round Room at the Copley Plaza. He also handled her investments, and he recommended that she buy the Joy Street house, which Mr. Hensley had cautioned her to wait on, and the diamond choker, which Mel said would cheer her up.
It did cheer her up. The whole process of going from rags to riches cheered her up. Teddy came along in the course of it. She met him at Gottlieb/Bayard, where he had come in to apply for a job. Kay talked to him because both Sam Gottlieb and Tom Bayard were in a conference that Teddy didn’t seem worth leaving to interview. He was twenty-three, not long out of college, and he had just come to Boston from Binghamton, New York. His only working experience was a brief stint on the Binghamton Record and two months as a stock boy at the IBM Corporation over on Boylston Street where his sister Lucy worked in the office. He had been fired for inattention, he told Kay, and, smiling his wide, beautiful smile, he told her that he wanted to be a writer. He had a room on Marlborough Street. He was writing a novel about a reclusive painter who lived in Monterey and was, he said, based on his uncle Jamie. He had never been to Monterey, and neither had his uncle. He didn’t think it was a good idea to get too close to your material. Did she?
Kay said she thought you were supposed to write about what you know; Teddy said in his opinion that was one of the most short-sighted and destructive literary clichés going; Kay said he was certainly an original thinker. They sat smiling at each other across Kay’s desk. She liked his sandy-colored curly hair and his ears, which had no lobes—like the ears of royalty. Then Kay said she was really sorry, she could see he was very gifted, but it was hopeless, they needed someone with extensive copywriting experience. He asked her out to lunch, and when she accepted he told her it would have to be down the street at the Raleigh Cafeteria: they had great hot roast-beef sandwiches, he said. Kay picked up the phone and made a reservation at the Merry-Go-Round Room.
They drank martinis at the revolving bar and forgot to eat lunch. They ended up at her house on Joy Street. The babies were napping, and Mrs. Hickey was
in the kitchen knitting and watching the soaps. Kay introduced Teddy as Theodore Vanderhagen because she’d forgotten his last name. Mrs. Hickey said please be nice and quiet and don’t wake the babies. Kay and Teddy went upstairs to the bedroom and locked the door. While Kay called the office and said she must have gotten food poisoning at lunch, Teddy slowly, tenderly removed her stockings and her half-slip and her underpants and gently eased himself down on top of her.
“Why Vanderhagen?” he asked her eventually. “And my name isn’t Theodore, anyway, it’s Edward.”
“But didn’t it just sound marvelous?” Kay asked him. “All those syllables?”
When they got married, she became monosyllabic: Kay Quinn, which she also thought sounded marvelous, and was quick and efficient for signing checks. “I’ll give you one piece of advice,” Mrs. Hickey said. “Make sure he’s a good father to those children.” Mel Katzmeyer also gave her one piece of advice: “Don’t lose control of your own money.”
The marriage was a success for a long time. The only mistake she made (and it took her years to realize it) was in not keeping control of her money. By the time they were divorced, they were broke; all that was left was the French art glass. On the other hand, Teddy was a good father.
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