Souvenir of Cold Springs

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Good-bye, Mister Blues, why don’t you leave me alone?

  You been my best friend ever since my gal been gone.

  During her senior year, Lucy spent part of her Christmas vacation in New Mexico. By mid-December, that particular winter in Ithaca was already cold and blizzard-plagued, and school wasn’t going well. Lucy was an English major, but she had been interested in art and photography all through college, and she had begun to wish, desperately and belatedly, that she had majored in art. When she tried to settle down and wade through the critical works she needed for a paper on Shakespeare or Chaucer, she felt that her whole life was in question, that she had wasted twenty-one years, that the future held nothing for her. She would have liked to stay in college forever, living in her tiny apartment on Eddy Street and spending long hours in the photography lab. She had lost interest in her English courses and was two papers behind in her Chaucer seminar, but the real problem was Photography 315: The Portrait, an upper-level course she had been allowed into by permission of the instructor, Mr. Ziedrich, who seemed to regret his magnanimity—seemed, in fact, to dislike her. Her highest grade from him had been an A-minus for a self-portrait that was technically more adept than anything she’d done but that made her look ugly, squinty-eyed, fat, slightly cretinous. It was hanging prominently in a student exhibit in Wells Hall.

  “I’ve got to get away,” she said to her father, and added, hesitantly, “What I’d really like to do is go out and see Mom.”

  Stewart gave her the trip west as a Christmas present. “Just do me a favor and make it clear to your mother that I’m the one who’s shelling out for this,” he said. He spoke in the ironic, distantly affectionate tone he’d developed for dealing with Caroline since the divorce—a tone that revealed nothing about his true feelings. “And give her my regards,” he said.

  Lucy had been out to New Mexico once before, in the summer, with a group of friends from college; they had camped in Apache Canyon, and she had seen her mother only twice, at the beginning and the end of her trip. This time she went alone, stayed in town at a hotel, did some sightseeing in Santa Fe, rode to Taos on a bus, and dragged her Nikon wherever she went, Ziedrich continually on her mind.

  She met her mother in the convent parlor each morning and evening for roughly an hour—an apparently arbitrary restriction imposed, as far as Lucy could see, by Caroline herself. They had strangely formal conversations about school, about what Teddy was up to, about what Lucy had seen on her snowy walks around town. They spoke very little about life at the convent; when the subject came up, Caroline tended to veer off on some newsy topic, as if Lucy were an inquisitive stranger she met on an airplane. They talked about the Kennedys and thalidomide babies and Dr. Strangelove, which Caroline was dying to see but couldn’t, of course.

  “Why of course, Mom?” Lucy asked. “Is there an actual rule that says you can’t go to the movies? Or that you can’t go out to a restaurant or someplace with me instead of sitting in this parlor every day? Dad gave me plenty of money, I could take you out for a good Mexican meal.”

  Caroline frowned and looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. She wore a navy blue gabardine skirt and a long-sleeved cotton blouse, with stockings and sensible shoes. Her hair was clipped short. She was thinner than Lucy remembered, and from a distance she looked young and vulnerable: it was hard to think of her as Mother, Mom. She could be a girl recovering from a wasting illness. But up close she seemed gaunt, and her scrubbed face was sallow, with dry little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and new hollows under them. She was beginning to look like old pictures of Lucy’s grandmother.

  Caroline said, reluctantly, “My position here is so odd, Lucy, that I have to make my own rules.”

  “In other words, you could go to movies but you won’t.”

  “I feel I shouldn’t, really, if I want to be part of the life of the convent.”

  “Holier than the Pope? So they’ll let you take the veil?”

  “Something like that. It’s going very slowly. I’m starting to think it will never happen.”

  “Would that be so terrible?”

  Caroline shrugged, looking annoyed; she obviously didn’t want to continue the conversation.

  “Well, would it?” Lucy asked stubbornly, and waited. If her mother was no longer like a mother, what was she like? Not a sister, not a friend. And—to be fair—not really like a stranger on a plane: Caroline was warmer than that, gladder to see her. She had listened to Lucy’s recital of her school troubles with sympathy, had even suggested she spend another year at Cornell taking enough courses to get her into graduate school in art.

  “Stewart can afford it,” she said, and her tone was similar to his, though perhaps marginally less affectionate and more detached.

  Like a nice but distant auntie you don’t see very often, Lucy thought. Like Aunt Nell.

  Her mind wandered. It was very warm in the visitors’ parlor. The walls were an interesting shade of aged, dark beige, like walls in an old sepia photograph. The furniture was Anglo and antique, probably valuable. The convent was almost completely silent. Lucy imagined the nuns in their bare cells, down on their bony knees; they taught in the mission school and ran a soup kitchen but spent a good proportion of their time in silent prayer and contemplation. That was the word they used: contemplation. Contemplation of what? God, probably. But how did you contemplate God? What was there to contemplate?

  Abruptly, Caroline spoke. “I would like to have some official place in the world,” she said. “I would like to belong to something. I would like to have my function in life set before me clearly. I would like to be of use.”

  The short, impersonal sentences were like part of a legal deposition—as perhaps they were, part of the petition to Rome that had been pending nearly two years.

  “I would like to have my position clarified,” Caroline went on, as if she were the mistress of a man who refused to marry her. “And I would like to be able to give myself heart and soul to the life I’ve chosen.”

  Like a legal deposition. Like Caroline’s prim blouse and sturdy shoes. Like the sterilized atmosphere of the parlor, where the windows gleamed and no speck of dust was allowed to exist. Perversely, Lucy thought of Nick Madziuk. She was still, technically, a virgin, but the last time they were together they had wrestled half-naked on his bed, on filthy sheets that smelled of sweat and sex and cigarette smoke, and lying there with him, his semen sticky against her thigh, she had loved the mess of it all, the friendly sordidness of the stinking bed, the cheap disorderly room with their clothes all over and the ashtrays overflowing and empty beer cans on the windowsill and Nick’s guitar propped against a chair.

  “It doesn’t seem to me that life is meant to be that neat,” Lucy said. “That clear-cut and easy, all laid out for you.”

  “I’m not talking about an easy life,” Caroline corrected her. “Quite the contrary. And you don’t have to agree with me. I’m an adult, Lucy. I’ve been here four years. I know what I want.”

  Lucy felt a pang of envy. Do you have to wait until you’re past forty, she wondered, to know what you want? About herself, all she knew was what she didn’t want: she didn’t want to leave college to work at some hateful job, she didn’t want a life like her mother’s, she didn’t want a stormy, disappointed marriage like the one her parents had had. She didn’t even know if she wanted Nick, a Cornell dropout, an itinerant guitar player with the stage name Nicky Magic. To give yourself heart and soul to something: when Lucy tried to imagine what that would be, her mind skittered off and came to rest with the idea that what she’d really like was to get an A in the course from Ziedrich.

  “I guess I’ll just never understand why you want what you want,” Lucy said, and added, “Mom.”

  “That’s all right,” Caroline said in her gentle, hesitating voice. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  From the corner of her eye, Lucy saw the black shape of a nun hurry by the doorway, head down, beads rattlin
g. It was nearly time for evening prayers, which Caroline never missed. Lucy sighed, and they both stood up.

  Lucy said, “You might like to know that Dad still spends a lot of time trying to convince me you’re crazy.”

  Caroline narrowed her eyes, and for a moment Lucy imagined that her mother might lash out against her father in anger like she used to do. Lucy remembered those monumental fights almost with pleasure—times when she and Teddy clung to each other upstairs in the hall, unable not to listen, their hearts thudding together.

  Caroline rearranged her face into a benign, ironic look. “Has he convinced you, Lucy?”

  Lucy said, “Almost,” but she smiled so her mother would think she didn’t mean it.

  She photographed her mother before she left Santa Fe. It was a clear, sunny day, and Caroline was standing in the courtyard of the convent, wearing her blouse and skirt with a heavy cardigan. In the picture there was no visible snow. Caroline, however, looked chilled; she stood with her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed, a palm cupping each elbow. The shadow from a tree fell across her face and chest, marking her with bolts of shade. (This was, at best, Lucy knew, a C-plus photograph.) From her pose it was obvious that she wished she were elsewhere—indoors, warm, alone—but from the look on her face nothing could be deduced. There was no look on her face: her face was a pale oval half-framed by her cropped hair, her mouth was slightly open, and her eyes were beautiful and dark and perfectly blank.

  Lucy had met Nick Madziuk through her roommate, Liz, who was dating his friend Tony. Nick was blond and very tall, with an ugly appealing face—big nose, thin lips, pitted cheeks, and narrow eyes of an unusual light blue that when he stood in the sunlight almost disappeared, giving him the white-eyed look of an Alsatian dog. He had dropped out of college to do what he really wanted, which was to practice the guitar and play at places like the Cellar on weekend nights. He sang folk songs and blues in a deep, rough growl, and his face when he sang was preoccupied and sad, as if he felt the words about faithless women and wandering men deep in his soul. He paused frequently for intricate riffs on the guitar that were meaningless to Lucy—like something other than music—but that drew whistles and applause from the audience.

  She used to sit at a table near the stage and listen to him. During his breaks he came and sat with her, and when the place closed they used to go out with his friends and drink beer or go over to Nick’s basement apartment to smoke some pot and listen to records—Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and scratched 78s featuring the old blues musicians that Nick revered: Big Bill Broonzy and Robert Johnson and Kokomo Arnold. Sometimes Nick and his friend Tony would play together—guitar and harmonica—and get so absorbed in what they were doing that the crowd would gradually thin out, people would leave, and only Lucy would be there, half-listening, trying to find a pattern in the music, drinking too much beer, waiting—finally dozing off at a table or on someone’s sagging couch. Then she and Nick went into his bedroom and almost, but not quite, made love. He wasn’t pressuring her. He kept a package of Trojans in a drawer and occasionally took them out and looked at them: they’ve got cobwebs all over them, he said, they’re turning into fossils—but good-natured, joking. He loved her, he said. He didn’t want her to rush into anything.

  When she returned from Santa Fe, she decided to go ahead and do it. All the way back on the plane, her mother’s pale silences haunted her, and her failure to penetrate them. She thought of her father’s decorous, uneventful life. She thought of Liz, her roommate, who had quit dating Tony because he was too weird. The more she thought about Nick Madziuk, the more she missed him, the more she feared that even to leave him for this short time had been a mistake—as if reality were that convent parlor, and Nick might be a mirage.

  But when the plane landed at the Syracuse airport, he was waiting for her at the gate wearing his old wool jacket and leather boots, needing a haircut, looking like a cowboy down on his luck. They drove fast back to Ithaca; it was a Friday night, her plane had been late, he was due at the Cellar. She sat there at her table, dazed, talking to people about her trip, listening to Nick play, grateful that she hadn’t dreamed it all. She felt as if she had undergone some trial and come through it. When he came to sit with her he held her hand, rubbing his calloused fingertips over the back of it. His other hand, the one with the long yellow thumbnail, was wrapped around a glass of beer: Lowenbrau Dark, his favorite, which always tasted to Lucy of molasses. He was talking about—what? She couldn’t have said. Something entirely ordinary—the snow, maybe, or someone they knew, or his puppy. He had just acquired a mongrel mutt, named Peeve. “This is my pet, Peeve,” was how Nick introduced him to people, and Lucy’s photographs of Nick and Peeve roughhousing in the quad were what finally earned her the A from Ziedrich.

  Lucy sat looking at Nick’s bony, calloused, used-looking hand holding her pale white one, and it came to her like a flash of light that Nick was the answer to a question she’d hardly even allowed herself to ask.

  In April, when she realized she was pregnant, her first impulse was to do what her friend Gwen had done: go to New York and have an abortion. “Have it out,” was the way Gwen put it, as if it were a tooth. But the abortionist Gwen knew in New York was no longer in business, and another contact she had through a friend of a friend fell through. Liz knew vaguely of a doctor in Syracuse who might do it, but Lucy said she couldn’t go to Syracuse, all her relatives lived there, she couldn’t risk it. She went to the gym and ran laps until her side hurt. She jumped down three steps, then four, then five in the front hall of her apartment building, feeling as if her teeth would jar loose from her head. Liz bought her a bottle of brandy, and Lucy sat in a tub of scalding water all one night getting drunk and then puking her guts out—a remedy Liz had read about in a novel—but nothing happened.

  Finally she called Teddy. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Weren’t you assholes using anything?”

  “Rubbers,” she told him. She was beyond embarrassment.

  “Eighty-five percent effective,” Teddy said. “Great. Why didn’t you get yourself a diaphragm?”

  “It’s not that easy, Teddy. What am I supposed to do—go to Student Health and say I’m sleeping with my boyfriend?”

  “Why don’t you ask me these things, Lucy? What do you think brothers are for?”

  “Well, I’m asking you now. Do you know anybody?”

  He called her back. He had found a doctor in Binghamton who would do it. He’d pick her up Friday after her last class. She’d have to bring a box of sanitary napkins and a hundred dollars in unmarked bills—tens and fives. She could stay with him over the weekend, and she’d be back in school Monday morning. He asked her, “Is Nick going to pay?”

  “Nick doesn’t know,” she said.

  “When are you going to tell him?”

  “I’m not going to tell him.”

  “Am I allowed to ask you why the hell not?”

  She thought of Nick’s face, the way he looked at her after they made love: how serene he was, how content with his life, with her. Gwen had said that when she told her boyfriend she was pregnant, he’d given her the money for Puerto Rico and then dropped her like a hot potato.

  “No,” she said.

  Teddy picked her up, and she arrived in Binghamton in good spirits. She had her camera with her, and she took photographs of Teddy and his girlfriend, Deanna, who went part-time to the state college, in front of the pizza parlor where Deanna worked, and then they all went inside and had pizza. Afterward the three of them drove to the doctor’s office—a shabby frame building on Watson Boulevard. The building was dark. There was a sign in the front window, but Lucy couldn’t read what it said. Teddy parked the car and said, “Wait here, count to a hundred, and then follow me around to the back and walk in the door fast—don’t waste any time.”

  It was like buying pot—there was a place in Ithaca where Nick ran in while she kept the motor running: the same secrecy, the same haste, the same elaborate p
lanning. Deanna counted soberly to a hundred while Lucy fought the urge to either laugh or drive away, and then they groped their way through the dark to the back door.

  Teddy was there to let them in. He locked the door behind them and led them down an unlit corridor. Lucy wondered if he’d been there before, if Deanna had. Teddy always bragged about his wild life in Binghamton, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and spent his weekends drunk in bars picking up girls from the college. Did that life involve arranging abortions?

  At the end of the hall, Teddy stopped outside a closed door and flicked a light switch. The corridor sprang to life; it smelled bad—of what? Lucy couldn’t place it—and looked as if it hadn’t been swept in a year. There was a piece gouged out of the wall, as if someone had struck it with an axe. The closed door had a filthy glass panel. “Maybe we should just forget it,” she whispered, but so softly that no one heard her.

  Then the doctor opened the door, and he looked all right. He was dressed in spotless white; even his shoes were white, and a surgical mask hung at his chin. The room contained an old oak desk, a kitchen sink, a folding screen, and a table with stirrups that was both ominous and reassuring—it was just like the one a regular doctor might have. There was one window, covered with a piece of plywood painted the same color as the walls, the ancient sepia of Caroline’s convent parlor. Teddy counted out the money while the doctor watched; he made Teddy turn over each bill to show that it wasn’t marked, and then he instructed Teddy to put the bills back in their envelope and the envelope in the drawer of the desk at the end of the room. His voice was both matter-of-fact and soothing: he seemed like any doctor, any ordinary gray-haired G.P. that you’d go to for a shot of penicillin or a throat culture.