He told Teddy to wait outside, but Deanna could stay. Lucy went behind the screen and took off her skirt and underpants. She draped herself in a white sheet and climbed up on the table. Deanna wandered around the room until the doctor said, “Please—stay with the patient if you don’t mind,” and Deanna came over and stood next to Lucy, holding her hand, looking away while the doctor performed his examination.
He confirmed that she was three months gone. Lucky she hadn’t waited much longer. And she should really get fitted for a diaphragm when this was all over. He said he’d be glad to do it himself if she came back after her next menstrual period. Lucy said that she would. The doctor smiled briefly at her, and then he asked Deanna to go over to the desk where Teddy had put the money, and turn on the radio, volume high. While something by the Beatles blared into the room, the doctor pulled up his mask. “You’re going to feel just a little discomfort,” he said, and began to scrape.
The pain was immediately unbearable, a violent cramping that twisted inside her like death. She hadn’t known there was pain like that: Was it worse than childbirth, some distant part of her brain wondered. The doctor paused, changed instruments, and the pain ebbed, lapped at her from a distance. Deanna asked, “Are you all right?” and Lucy nodded. She was all right, she would be sensible, it would be over soon, it couldn’t take long, it must be over soon.
She saw the doctor’s gray head again between her knees. The pain resumed, familiar now, expected. Lucy gripped Deanna’s hand and tried to concentrate on the music. That was why the radio was on, of course: to give you something to think about besides the pain, the red pain. She couldn’t see what was so special about the Beatles; they sounded like every rock-and-roll group she had ever heard: pound, pound, pound, a little falsetto, and very ordinary guitar work compared, say, to Big Bill. It wasn’t until Deanna put her hand gently over Lucy’s mouth and said, “Shh, Lucy, shh, please,” that she realized the music might be on to drown out her screams.
The doctor stopped his scraping and laid his hand on her stomach. The pain subsided to a whine, a shadow, a small crimson center. “You aren’t allowed to move,” the doctor said. His voice was very calm. “It’s important that you not move. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Lucy said, and when he began again she screamed and felt Deanna’s hand over her mouth. The music seemed to fade. She wished, suddenly, that Nick was there: his calm voice, his hands on the guitar, his rough music would cut through all the noise, the pain.
“Hold her.”
“Lucy, please,” Deanna said. Lucy looked up at Deanna’s face and saw it was contorted, her mouth stretched wide, teeth bared, tears dripping down her cheeks. A primitive mask that said, “Please, Lucy.” The pain struck again, and she screamed for Teddy; from behind the door he said, “Oh Christ, I’m here, baby, I’m here, Luce.”
She heard the doctor’s quick intake of breath. He muttered, “Goddam it,” and then, “Don’t move, for Christ’s sake,” and then it was over. The doctor stopped scraping, she heard a metal instrument clink into a pan, and she opened her eyes. “She Loves You” was just finishing up. The doctor stripped off his gloves and dropped them into a plastic-lined wastebasket. The gloves were red. Lucy closed her eyes. Someone snapped off the radio. “Give her aspirin if there’s any pain,” the doctor said. “If she bleeds for more than a day or two, call me.” He took the envelope from the desk drawer and left the room, still in his surgical mask. Deanna helped her down from the table, helped her get dressed. Deanna’s right hand, where Lucy had held it, was red and swollen.
Back at Teddy’s apartment, the bleeding became worse. The sanitary napkins were no good. Deanna made a contraption with half a box of napkins wrapped in a pillowcase, and it soaked through in a couple of minutes. The pain never completely stopped, and from time to time it intensified, so that it was difficult not to scream. Lucy sat on the toilet, listening to the blood drip from her, sure she was dying. Teddy tried to call the doctor, but there was no answer. Finally she put a wad of bath towels between her legs, and they took her to the emergency room.
The admitting doctor called it a spontaneous abortion. Teddy registered her as Mrs. Nicholas Madziuk. “My sister,” he said. “This is their first baby. She comes to visit me for the weekend and this has to happen.” In the hospital they gave her something for the pain, and the nurses thought it only natural that she should cry.
One of the photographs of Teddy and Deanna showed them standing in front of Teddy’s car, which was parked at the curb of Angelo’s Pizza House. The car was a 1958 Chevy, a model strangely curvy and finless for its period. Teddy was wearing chinos, a plaid shirt, and a short jacket from the pocket of which protruded what looked like a paper bag with a bottle in it. Deanna wore a miniskirt with tights and had a leather drawstring bag slung over her shoulder. In the preceding shots, they had been mugging for the camera—grinning widely, heads together, Teddy making a V of horns behind Deanna’s head, Deanna kicking up one leg like a pinup girl. In this picture, no one was smiling. Deanna was frowning off to one side; Teddy was staring straight ahead at the camera and he looked, for some reason, angry.
All her dreams ended in blood. She entered a cafeteria; she was working in the art library; she sat at the front table at the Cellar, listening to Nicky Magic play his guitar; but always, eventually, there was the blood oozing from her like a red scarf.
She was at her father’s house, resting. He had picked her up at Teddy’s in his new white Bonneville, and had made her lie in the backseat all the way to Albany. Teddy had told him about the abortion, a fact Lucy still couldn’t take in. She kept trying to imagine Teddy and her father having this conversation, Teddy saying the words “pregnant” and “abortion,” her father apparently taking it all calmly, saying Lucy needed to rest, arranging to drive down and pick her up.
He put her to bed in her old room and went downstairs to make her some lunch. She dozed: she was in the library, the pain was like a knife in her belly, and the blood pursued her down the stairs. When her father came in with soup and an English muffin on a tray, she woke and began to cry. Stewart stood there with the tray for a moment. Then he came over to the bed and patted her arm while she cried. She heard him take a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and light it with his ancient Zippo. She stopped crying and kept her eyes closed, listening to him smoke—the small breathy sound on an inhale, pause, the cigarette tapped against the side of an ashtray, then a noisy exhale which meant that he had something on his mind. She tried to guess, out of all the possibilities, what it could be.
“What is it, Dad?” she asked finally, and turned her head to look at him. Nice sad old Daddy, gray hair falling over his forehead, his thin old lips pursed around his cigarette. She and Teddy speculated endlessly about whether Stewart had women. There had never been a shred of evidence. As far as they could tell—even though she had walked out on him, divorced him against his will, refused to communicate with him, and now was trying to get Rome to declare their marriage null and void so she could enter the convent—he was still faithful to Caroline. One of her glamorous 1940s photographs was in his bedroom, framed, on the wall. “Your mother and I are still married, as far as I’m concerned,” he had said once when Teddy hinted.
The tray was on the dresser. She could smell the soup, and she realized she was hungry. Stewart exhaled a stream of smoke and said, “I guess I just wonder about the boy involved, Lucy.”
There was a silence, and then a cough caught him by surprise—the fierce, painful smoker’s cough that could jerk his body back like a gunshot and leave him red-faced and breathless. But it didn’t last long this time, and when he finished Lucy said, “What about him?”
“I just wonder why you chose this route. Why marriage wasn’t an option.”
“I just didn’t think it was.”
“You mean you don’t want to marry him?”
“I mean I didn’t think he’d want to marry me.”
He stared at her. “He
wasn’t consulted about this at all?”
“I might tell him eventually.”
“It’s this boy Nick you talked about at Christmas?”
Boy. She turned her head away. “Yes.”
“You made him sound like a reasonable young man, Lucy. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t tell him a thing like this.” She didn’t speak. “Lucy? It does seem to me that it’s his business, as well as yours. Not that I don’t think you should make the final decision, but it seems unfair that this should be a secret from him. I can’t believe he wouldn’t want to take some responsibility.”
The pain came again—not a bad one, just a cramp—and she could feel blood gush out onto the sanitary napkin. She might bleed slightly for several days, they had told her at the hospital. “But nothing to worry about,” the nurse said. “Just treat it like a normal period.” Then the doctor came in and said, “You may have trouble getting pregnant again, Mrs. Madziuk. We may have to get you in here for some repairs.” He had refused to look her in the eye: he knew everything, of course, and he had pronounced the name wrong, three syllables. Magic, she thought. It’s pronounced magic. “These old magic fingers,” Nick had said, touching her. One of the blues songs he liked to sing contained the line, You gave me seven children, and now I’m givin’ them back to you.
“Lucy?”
She pushed herself up, bunching the pillow behind her, and smiled at him. “Could I have my soup now, please, Dad?”
He sighed and went across the room for the tray. When he set it in front of her, she was already crying again.
There was still film in her camera, and she photographed Stewart that Monday morning before she got on the train for Ithaca. He was dressed for the office: suit, tie, white shirt, overcoat, shiny black shoes. The photograph was taken at the train station, and he was flanked by posters advertising Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Dewar’s scotch. Stewart was smiling. He looked like what he was: a successful lawyer posing patiently for his daughter the photographer because he loved her. He didn’t look at all like what he also was: a sad wreck of a man, whose life had let him down at every turn.
Back in Ithaca, Lucy threw herself into her new photography course: Photographic Abstraction, it was called. They were supposed to take something ordinary and distort it, make it into something unidentifiable and striking. They dabbled in macro-photography; Lucy turned a scrap of Kleenex into a desolate lunar landscape. They practiced unorthodox darkroom techniques; they slashed the film and painted on it; they studied Aaron Siskind and Minor White, and Edward Weston’s fruitlike nudes and animal-like vegetables. “What you are photographing here, always, is yourself,” Ziedrich said.
Lucy told Nick, finally, about the abortion, mainly to explain why she was too sore for sex. He didn’t have much to say. When he asked her why he hadn’t been informed, she told him about Gwen’s boyfriend. “You think I’m like that asshole?” he asked. “Thanks a lot.”
Things didn’t go well between them. They lost the knack of talking to each other, of telling every little thing that was on their minds. When they were together they went on long walks so the puppy could get some exercise and Lucy could take photographs. After a while they gave up on the idea of sex; Lucy stopped going to the Cellar; she began dating a graduate student in physics named Mark Neal. Just before final exams Nick told her that he and Tony were driving out to the coast, where they had a lead on a job in a club in L.A. At the end of the summer, Lucy and Mark were married at Stewart’s church in Albany; Mark was going into the postdoctoral program at M.I.T., and they would be moving to Boston. Caroline didn’t come to the wedding, but she sent a Hopi kachina that she said was a symbol of fertility.
The last photograph Lucy took of Nick showed him in front of the apartment house, leaning against an iron fence. The building, of dark brick, was on a nondescript street north of the Cornell campus. The season was early spring; there was a small tree behind him to the left, just budding. His hands were in his pockets. He was wearing baggy camouflage pants, his tattered wool jacket, and leather boots that showed beneath his cuffs where one foot crossed the other. There was something in his pose, in his light-colored eyes, even in the gentle gleam of the sun on his blond hair, that suggested he would be perfectly happy to stand there forever, leaning against the fence and smiling at the photographer.
CAROLINE
1959
The sun in Santa Fe was different from the sun back home. Not just hotter: she thought of it as more aggressive, more intimate, the way it entered your body and became a part of it, the way it penetrated your bones and your blood. Even at night, when the sun retreated and the cool, black mountain air made it necessary to wear a sweater and put blankets on the bed, she was aware of the sun banked behind the mountains, waiting.
I will never go back, she thought.
She got the job at the convent almost immediately, through an employment agency. Mother Rosaria interviewed her and pronounced her skills superb. The Sisters of Mary had never had a real secretary before; Sister Marguerite had done the job for thirty years, until she got too old, and none of the other sisters could type. They were a semicontemplative order connected with the mission church of Saint Grazia; they ran a small school and a soup kitchen for the poor, but they spent most of their time in prayer. Caroline did the same things for the nuns that she had done for Mr. Fahey at Pepsi-Cola the past six years: took dictation, typed letters, and answered the phone. The salary was exactly half what Mr. Fahey was paying her when she left, but her expenses were light.
She lived in three rooms on Camino del Monte Sol not far from the river, on the top floor of an apartment house built in the twenties. Her place was sparsely furnished, with thick stucco walls that kept out sound. There were niches in the walls for statues of saints, which Caroline left empty. The apartment suggested a stage set—it had that same hushed, expectant, alien quality. When she came home from work and entered the apartment, the quiet leapt out at her. The phone ringing or the noise of the radio was like a violation—even dishes left undone or her coat thrown across a chair. She became very neat.
Her living-room windows looked down on the street and across to a taller building that blocked the view, but the bedroom ones faced east, with a view of the Sangre de Christo Mountains. She had never seen mountains before—just one trip to the Adirondacks long ago, with Stewart and the children. She’d barely noticed the mountains then: all she remembered from that vacation was exhaustion and arguing. But she was sure the Adirondacks were nothing like this.
The winters were going to be cold, people told her. There would be snow—as much, maybe, as back home in the Snow Belt of upstate New York. Even now, in September, October, there was snow in the mountains. And Santa Fe could be very dull in the winter, her friend Lee said. “You’ll want to go out and meet people, do things, but there’s nothing. Not even tourists. Just a bunch of ski bums and freezing Indians on the Plaza. The isolation can get to you.”
“I don’t care,” Caroline said. “That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”
Lee laughed at her. “What? Ski bums or freezing Indians?”
“Isolation,” Caroline said. “Nothing.” Sometimes she had trouble seeing a joke.
She met Lee at Mass. A tall woman in a black lace mantilla and suede jacket slipped into a pew next to her one Sunday at the Cathedral—ten minutes late, they had already reached the Epistle. All through the service, Caroline admired the woman’s rings, two of them on the skinny fingers of her left hand, one on her right: hammered silver set with small turquoises. On the way out they got talking. Caroline told her she was new in town; Lee said she was a jewelry maker and managed an art gallery on San Francisco Street. When they saw each other again the next Sunday, Lee asked Caroline over to her place for lunch. She lived upstairs from the gallery in a bright, chaotic, art-filled apartment that overlooked a plazuela. She was a native of Santa Fe, part Navajo, a widow. Her husband had been a climber and tour guide who became lost in the mountai
ns three years before; a blizzard had come up and stranded him somewhere near the summit of Truchas Peak. The rest of the party had been rescued, but he had been out scouting and his body was never found.
Caroline thought immediately of Ray and Peggy, whose deaths on the ice had seemed not only horrible but strange and singular. And yet here was a woman she’d met by chance, telling the same story. Did that mean life was more strange, or less strange, than she had thought?
Lee told Caroline about her lost husband that first day, over lunch. “I can’t marry again,” Lee said. “I’ll never know what happened to him.”
“But after a certain number of years—”
“Oh yes, legally there’s no problem, but how do I know he didn’t just take the opportunity to run off? Maybe he’s living in Chimayo right this minute. Or up in the mountains, a hermit, biding his time. He had a strange sense of humor. Maybe he’s living right here in Santa Fe.” She laughed. “While I light a candle for him every Friday at the cathedral.”
Lee was exactly Caroline’s age: forty. She was bony and flatchested, her graying hair was cropped short, she had a tooth missing near the front, her skin was pitted and tanned to leather. But men liked her. “I don’t know what it is,” she said to Caroline. “They won’t leave me alone. I guess they know I like them. I give off vibes, somebody told me.”
“I hope I don’t give off vibes,” Caroline said.
“You don’t need vibes. You’re gorgeous.”
“Thank you,” Caroline said. “But I’ve had it with men.”
Lee made a face. “Bad divorce?”
“You could say that.” She laughed. “Bad life.”
“You’ll get over it. You’re too pretty to be alone for long.”
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