Souvenir of Cold Springs

by Kitty Burns Florey

  They saw a lot of the Neals—Teddy’s sister Lucy and her husband. Mark was a postdoc at MIT. Lucy was a painter and photographer but she was working at IBM because they needed the money. Kay never understood what it was exactly that either of them did: Mark was part of some big-shot physics professor’s grant to study some sort of particles, and Lucy had a cretinous office job that involved punched cards being put into computers to do something or other. Kay offered to get her into the graphics department at Gottlieb/Bayard, but Lucy said she didn’t mind her job because it left her brain free to think.

  The Neals lived in a first-floor apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Allston. The MTA rattled by their front windows. Their back windows looked out on an alley full of trash cans. They had two white cats, Peachy and Bingo; Kay learned never to wear black to their apartment. What Lucy really wanted was a baby; they were “trying,” but it was going to be a problem because of a botched abortion Lucy had when she was in college. Kay tried not to think about Lucy and Mark trying to make a baby: she imagined grunting and prayer.

  The two women met for lunch sometimes, usually at the Raleigh because Lucy couldn’t afford anything else and wouldn’t let Kay pick up the check.

  “I don’t understand that kind of pride,” Kay said. “It’s not like real money, Lucy. Nobody earned it. It’s just there, to be spent. Think of it as pennies from heaven.”

  “You don’t know what it is to be poor,” Lucy said.

  “Richard and I weren’t exactly rolling in it. We ate plenty of peanut butter.”

  “That doesn’t count. You had the Hamlins.”

  “You’ve got Stewart.”

  “Oh, come on—there’s no comparison,” Lucy said. “My God, Kay, you were driving a Saab, you had a nanny for the kids, you had leather boots from Bonwit’s.”

  Kay shrugged. She had no intention of telling Lucy about her life before she met Richard. But she thought about it. Back when she was living at home on the canned spaghetti and soda her mother served for dinner, or when she was struggling to keep herself alive and independent all through college—or even when she and Richard were flat broke by midweek: would she have accepted free lunches from a wealthy relative? The question was absurd.

  “If you’re so poor, should you be thinking about having children?” she asked Lucy.

  “That’s a whole other thing,” Lucy said, and bit savagely into her egg salad sandwich.

  Kay told Teddy his sister was a self-righteous wet blanket, and Teddy said, “You’re always judging. Lucy’s been through a lot.”

  “Who hasn’t?” asked Kay. “So she had an abortion. Big deal.” Kay had had two abortions when she was in college. She hadn’t told Teddy about them, and she hadn’t told anyone that she would never have given birth to Heather if Richard hadn’t been so thrilled at the prospect of a second child so soon after the first. When she told Richard she’d missed her period—Peter was only six months old—he went out and bought her a dozen red roses and a satin negligee. It was almost the only grudge she had against him.

  Kay said, “Maybe it’s being brought up Catholic.”

  “We weren’t exactly brought up Catholic. Except for my mother, the family’s about as lapsed as you can get.”

  “Maybe it passes through the maternal line, like Judaism.”

  Teddy said, “It’s not religion, Kay. It’s not anything. Lucy just wants a kid. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

  Kay would have been happier if her children didn’t exist; that was another truth she never told anyone. It wasn’t that she didn’t love them. It was just that children were so difficult and so time-consuming. Mrs. Hickey arrived at seven-thirty in the morning and left at six, except for Saturday nights, when she stayed late. She had Sundays off. On Saturdays, Kay and Teddy almost always went out for the day—shopping, or to the museum, or for drives to the north shore in the new Saab, which was just like the old one but a later model, and red instead of blue. They often went right from their outing to dinner with friends. If they ate with Mark and Lucy, it was in the Allston apartment or at a pizza place because the Neals wouldn’t let the Quinns pay for a good dinner out and Kay refused to cook. On Sundays, after a chaotic family breakfast, Teddy took the children out to the park or the zoo or just for walks around the neighborhood—things parents were supposed to love doing with their kids but that Kay hated. Peter would get whiny; Heather would want to climb out of her stroller and be carried; Peter would ask for everything he saw, from the giant panda in the window of F.A.O. Schwartz to the ducks on the pond in the Public Garden; Heather would scream if she saw a dog. They would have to stop and carry on inane conversations with perfect strangers about Peter’s bear and Heather’s pretty pink dress.

  Teddy bore all this with amused patience. Kay was touched by his affection for her children. They had adapted to their new daddy without a fuss. They still preferred Kay or Mrs. Hickey, but there were times when they clung to Teddy and wouldn’t let him go, and he would look helplessly at Kay and pretend to scream, “Eek! I’m being attacked by little people from outer space.” This never failed to crack Peter up, and he would run around the house yelling, “I’m from outer space!” which made Heather cry and drove Kay crazy.

  When she was alone in the silent house, Kay was perfectly happy. The house, she sometimes thought, was her one true friend. It also occurred to her that between the day that Richard died and the day she married Teddy, she had been most vehemently herself—maybe not happy, but herself, the self that had lurked all those years, constrained by parents and poverty and hard work and trying to please. The self that really wanted, underneath everything, most desperately to be left alone.

  On Sundays, while Teddy was out with the children, Kay filled up the coffeemaker and spent the day drinking coffee and eating pastry and reading the newspaper and sitting in the garden and taking long hot baths and prowling around the house thinking of further improvements she could make. The house was, as Mel Katzmeyer had said, a real bijou, a gem, with its walled-in backyard and the herb garden and the vaulted entrance hall and the Adam mantel her decorator had found in a junkyard and rehabilitated. Kay was thinking of installing shelves in the living room for the Hamlins’ art glass, which was presently in storage; on the other hand, she could sell the collection; or she could donate it to a museum and get a tax break. She and Mel often spent her lunch hour discussing the pros and cons.

  She was also thinking of making the third floor into what the decorator called the children’s suite: two bedrooms, a playroom, a kitchenette, and a tiny sitting room for Mrs. Hickey.

  “They’ll love it,” Kay imagined herself saying to Teddy. “Their own little apartment, their own little table for meals, a place to play where they can be as messy as they want. And think of when they’re teenagers.”

  What she couldn’t imagine was Teddy responding with, “That’s a great idea, honey.” She imagined him looking at her oddly and saying, “Kay, I think we should have a talk.”

  She did love them. She expected to love them even more when they were ten, eleven, fourteen, when their diapers didn’t need changing and they didn’t scream when they wanted something. What scared her was Teddy’s desire for a child of his own. No rush, he said. He knew Kay wasn’t ready for another pregnancy, and that Mrs. Hickey wouldn’t be up to handling three little ones. And he also knew that Kay liked her job and wasn’t ready to quit and stay home with the kids. He understood that.

  They talked about it sometimes on their Saturdays out, and when Teddy made this reasonable speech Kay always felt chilled. She did like her job, but that wasn’t why she worked; she worked precisely so that she wouldn’t have to stay home with the kids. This wasn’t something she could tell Teddy, but his failure to see it was like a pit opening before her feet. She would fall into the pit and be caught by screaming children lifting up their hands and wanting, wanting.

  There was something else that bothered her. Teddy had given up his novel soon after they were marri
ed, and gotten a job as a reporter at the Boston Globe. He had gone to the interview on a whim, and neither of them could imagine why he had been hired. Kay thought it was his charm, his smile. Teddy said it was the new Brooks Brothers suit Kay had bought him. Neither of them considered that, in spite of his inexperience, he had demonstrated talent and intelligence, and so an even bigger surprise was that he was good at his job. He had been sent to cover a race riot in Roxbury because another reporter was sick, and the story made the front page and resulted in a three-part series on the problem and eventually a small promotion after only four months on the paper.

  Kay had married Teddy because he was unusual, and part of his interesting uniqueness was his lack of a job, his loony devotion to his writing, his incompetence in the real world. Now he was a reporter for the Globe. Of course, she was proud of him, but his new career changed him, gave him harder edges. He even talked differently; he knew a lot about things that were mysteries to Kay. He had new friends, new hours, a new vocabulary. He even had a new name: his byline was Edward S. Quinn.

  Teddy’s job also changed her life. He sometimes had to work nights, leaving Kay to give the kids their baths and put them to bed without help. She couldn’t control them the way he could, she couldn’t laugh them out of sullenness and tears, and by the time they were in their pajamas she was exhausted. Getting them to sleep was something else. Peter wanted her to read to him, and Heather was afraid of the dark. Once they were in bed, she would sit downstairs with a glass of wine, tensed for a cry from above, too tired to eat her solitary dinner.

  Kay tried to get Mrs. Hickey to stay until eight, as she used to before Teddy moved in, but even a major salary increase—even tears and pleading—didn’t persuade her. Bedtimes would get better, Teddy said. She knew that, of course, but she also knew Teddy wouldn’t want to put off a new baby for more than a couple of years. “We’re not getting any younger,” he sometimes reminded her in the midst of his no-rush speech—by which he meant that she was nearly thirty. Worse yet, one of Stewart’s friends was editor of the Albany Times-Union; he had seen the Roxbury series and was interested in talking to Teddy about a job.

  “You wouldn’t seriously want to move to Albany, would you?” Kay asked him.

  “Albany’s not a bad city,” Teddy said. “There’s a lot going on in Albany. You’d be surprised.”

  In late summer, over lunch at the Raleigh, Lucy announced that she was pregnant. Kay jumped up and hugged her and said how wonderful it was, imagining the grungy apartment full of cat hair and dirty diapers and cheap toys like the ones she gave away to Mrs. Hickey.

  She and Teddy went shopping and sent the Neals a furnished dollhouse from Schwartz, complete with towel racks and china and needlepoint cushions and a tiny Franklin stove with a bucket of coal. Lucy called up when it was delivered and said, “Really, Kay, you shouldn’t have, my God, we’re overwhelmed,” and the next time they all got together Mark said he hated to think what that thing cost, and he sure hoped they had a girl, he couldn’t really imagine a little boy playing with all that furniture.

  They were at Ernie’s Pizza on Harvard Street. They all stayed silent, chewing, after Mark spoke. The Beatles were on the jukebox. Help! I need somebody. Help! Kay listened absently, leaning back in the booth, nibbling on a crust, and thinking how much Mark’s looks repelled her—his handsome jutting chin and his thick neck and his blue-black five o’clock shadow. He was like the slow-witted, beefy football players she had gone to school with at Irving Park High, except that Mark was supposed to be brilliant. It was true that he could be good company, in a witty, mean-spirited sort of way. And he wasn’t entirely insensitive, a fact that astonished her every time she saw evidence of it. And he apparently adored Lucy, and vice versa. He and Teddy, however, were beginning to dislike each other, and sitting across from him at the table, digesting his remark about her gift, Kay decided she hated him.

  Teddy washed down his pizza with a swig of beer and said, “Well, personally, I don’t think there’s kid alive who wouldn’t get a kick out of that house.”

  “You and I would have both loved it,” Lucy said quickly. “It would have been perfect for The Poor Servant Girl.”

  Kay and Mark were both well educated in the intricacies of The Poor Servant Girl, a game Lucy and Teddy had played as children that sounded creepy to Kay—like the Brontës and their mad kingdoms—but Teddy remembered it fondly. He claimed it had kept him and Lucy sane through their parents’ troubled marriage.

  “I would have freaked out over a dollhouse like that,” Teddy said.

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Mark said with a snicker.

  There was a silence. Lucy looked nervously at Teddy and Kay. Mark was hunched over his pizza, chewing noisily. Teddy drained his glass and put it down on the table very gently. Lucy laughed shortly and said, “God! This song! I just don’t get what’s so great about the Beatles. Don’t you think they’re overrated?”

  Kay stared back at Lucy—that desperate little smile, her hair pulled back with barrettes into a tangled mess, the collection of cheap rings on her fingers. She had another of her visions of the two of them in bed: Mark would be swift and silent and masculine while Lucy emitted ovine cries. These people should not be allowed to produce children, she thought to herself. Under the table, she touched Teddy’s knee.

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t,” she said. “I think the Beatles are the Shakespeare of our age.”

  In October, when Lucy had the miscarriage, Kay felt like a shit. It happened at Peck and Peck, where the two of them stopped after lunch to pick up a dress Kay was having altered. Lucy suddenly doubled over in pain, and then Kay noticed a puddle of blood on the carpet. Lucy saw the blood and began to scream. It was Kay who took over, got someone to call an ambulance, made Lucy sit down and stay calm. She rode with her to the hospital, and she called Mark and Teddy when it was over, glad she could do something, at least. Not that Mark had a word of thanks.

  Lucy stayed overnight at Beth Israel, crying in a room with two other women who had just given birth—massive tactlessness that Kay tried to buy Lucy out of. But there was a shortage of beds. The baby had been a girl. Lucy’s doctor said it wasn’t impossible that she could have another, just highly unlikely.

  “It was probably my fault,” Teddy said that night when the children were in bed.

  “How on earth could it be your fault?”

  “The abortion she had in college. It was horrible. I arranged for this quack doctor to do it. He was a butcher. She was all cut up.”

  “Oh Teddy.” Kay lit a Gauloise and held it to Teddy’s lips. He took a puff, then waved it away. She watched him exhale, frowning. “Don’t exaggerate.”

  “You should have seen the blood, Kay.”

  “Oh—blood,” she said. “Big deal—blood.”

  Kay’s first abortion had been done in Puerto Rico, in a hospital. Derek Wayne had paid for it—that frat-boy jerk. She could still remember the outrageously handsome doctor. He spoke a little English, she spoke a little Spanish. She had never seen eyes like his again—a sort of topaz darkening to brown. For the second abortion, she had gone to New York, to a shabby walkup office on Ninth Avenue that smelled of Raid. She remembered nothing else about it but crying in a taxi.

  She said, “Teddy, millions of women have had abortions. In the offices of quack doctors. On kitchen tables. Whatever. That doesn’t mean they all have miscarriages afterward.”

  “She’s my sister. I’m supposed to take care of her.”

  “Oh Christ, Teddy, she’s not a little kid any more.”

  “I’ve probably ruined her life.”

  “Don’t overdramatize. These things happen. God, honey, even if the abortion did screw up her insides, you didn’t do it on purpose. You obviously meant well. It certainly would have been worse if she’d had a baby then. Right?”

  He just shook his head, staring at the fireplace. The nights were cool; they had just started having fires. Kay sat beside him on the sofa and fi
nished the cigarette. She hated it that Lucy could do this to him. Maybe they should move away, to some hellhole like Albany, what did it matter.

  She stood up and put another log on the fire and poked the coals. She wasn’t sure what good poking did—she still wasn’t used to the fireplace—but the fire seemed to lick around the new log in a purposeful way. The andirons were owls with green glass eyes; they came from a forge in Vermont. Kay knelt on the floor looking at the flames’ crazy dance, orange and reddish black, and greenish black in the owls’ eyes. Behind her, Teddy was perfectly silent. She could hear the noise of the fire and the tick of the grandfather clock on the landing. She thought: it will kill me to leave this house.

  She sat down close to him again and put his hand on her breast. “Let me cheer you up, lovey. Hmm?”

  He took his hand away. “Come on, Kay. Not now. Please. Let me be for a while.”

  Mark would be bringing Lucy home from the hospital the next afternoon. That morning before work, Teddy and Kay drove out to Allston and loaded the dollhouse with difficulty into the trunk of the Saab. Kay considered keeping it for Heather and Peter, but in the end what seemed right was to take it to the dump in Brighton and set it carefully on a pile of neatly tied plastic garbage bags. Maybe someone would pick it up. Later, on her lunch hour, Kay walked over to Bonwit’s and picked out a quilted French silk bed jacket trimmed in marabou and had it sent to Lucy with a bottle of champagne and a card that read: Deepest sympathy from your loving sister, Kay.

  LUCY

  1963

  The first photograph Lucy took of Nick Madziuk showed him playing his guitar. It was taken from slightly above, so that his cast-down eyes could hardly be seen, but the angle of his head conveyed deep absorption in the music and pleasure in what he was doing. His fingers touched the strings with love and attention; the long thumbnail he used for picking was a blur. The look of anguish that sometimes crossed his face when he played wasn’t there in this photograph. If anything, he looked as if life was going well for him, as if he asked nothing more from it than to play his guitar and sing. There was absolutely no indication that what he was playing was a version of an old Kokomo Arnold blues number and that the words he was singing at the moment the picture was taken were