Souvenir of Cold Springs

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Caroline had chosen Santa Fe because Mr. Fahey’s son Jerry had gone to New Mexico to see the Pepsi bottling plant in Albuquerque. They were experimenting with a new capping device there, and Mr. Fahey wanted it checked out. Jerry and his wife had turned the trip into a vacation—had rented a car and driven to Santa Fe and Taos and up as far as Denver before they flew home. They sent back postcards to the office, and Caroline took one look at the austere lines of the adobe church against a pure blue sky and thought: why not? She was ready to do something extravagant, something as unlike the rest of her life as possible. She squinted at the postcard, imagining that one of the tiny people in front of the chapel was herself.

  That was in the spring. By September, when Teddy and Lucy were ready to leave for Colgate and Cornell, she had sold everything, packed her bags, and blown most of her savings on a plane ticket. Teddy and Lucy didn’t take it well.

  “So where do I go on vacations?” Lucy demanded.

  “You go to Daddy in Albany, of course. I’ll come back at Christmas. At Thanksgiving, you can go to Aunt Nell and Uncle Jamie’s. Then next summer you can decide what you want to do.”

  “This is my first year away. I’d like to be able to come home sometimes. Just on the spur of the moment, if I want to.”

  “Your father would be very hurt to hear you say that his place isn’t home. Especially since he’s paying the bills.”

  Lucy said, with tears in her eyes, “You always do something like this.”

  “Like what? Something like what? What are you talking about?” Caroline heard her voice get shrill and unconvincing, the way it used to during arguments with Stewart when she suspected he was right.

  Teddy took his mother aside and told her she was being unfair to them, especially Lucy. Teddy was seldom entirely serious, but when he was he took on some of Stewart’s mannerisms—squinting up his eyes and stuttering slightly, his whole body tight with earnestness. Caroline blew up at Teddy’s solemn little speech. She said he and Lucy were grown up, they were in college, and if he could manage to join a fraternity and stay drunk all weekend he could certainly manage to take care of himself. As for Lucy, she had her brother and her father and a will of iron, and it was time she learned to get along in the world.

  She also said something she immediately regretted: that it was the simple truth that having children so young and so close together had screwed up her life and now she was getting it back. Teddy’s face was stricken, and she apologized, tried to hug him. Teddy pushed away, said, “The hell with it,” and slammed out of the house.

  She walked a mile to work every morning. The names of the streets were like incantations. Camino del Monte Sol, Acequia Madre, Alameda, Paseo de Peralta. She had lunch at a little place called Tomasita’s and ate the hot, unfamiliar foods happily, though she had to wash them down with cold milk, which amused the waiters. It also amused them that she showed up every day promptly at noon. Even Tomasita advised her once, “You should try another place. Make a change. Eat some other kind of food.” But she knew Tomasita’s; the menu was familiar, and the corner table, where she could turn her back on the room and read while she ate, was almost always available.

  She was hurt that she wasn’t asked to have lunch with the nuns. She had confided to Mother Rosaria that she had been away from the Church for years and had just had a change of heart; she had expected that fact to make the nuns befriend her—the prodigal daughter, the lost lamb returned to the fold. Mother Rosaria had asked, almost absently, “What brought you back to the Church, then?”

  The honest answer would have sounded peculiar: to say that one day last spring in Syracuse, walking home from the Italian bakery where she bought bread, she had stopped in at Assumption Church to get out of the rain. She had sat in the back pew and looked around her as if she had never seen it before, marveling at how really beautiful it all was, how abundant and welcoming: gold everywhere, red carpeting, statues smiling down on her, masses of Paschal lilies on the elaborate carved altar with its three arches. Even on a rainy day, the stained glass windows glowed with a secret light. She had thought to herself: maybe I’ll stop in at Mass on Sunday, the way she might think: maybe I’ll pick up a loaf of semolina bread at the bakery; and at that moment she had heard, very distinctly, a voice say; yes. She was Saint Paul, felled from his horse and blinded. She had whirled around, searching the church for someone, some mumbling sacristan whose voice she had mistaken for the Voice, but there was nothing, no one in the church but herself and the statues and the presence, the Real Presence, the presence that was always there, always watching, always reaching out, always wanting …

  She had flung herself down on her knees and put her head in her hands. Long after the rain had stopped and the setting sun blazed like fire through the stained glass, she was still there.

  To Mother Rosaria, she said, “I guess I just felt something was missing from my life”—which was true enough but had nothing to do with the Church.

  Mother Rosaria smiled and patted her arm. “Well, I’m glad you found it,” she said, and gave Caroline the bulletin for next Sunday to type and run off on the hectograph machine.

  Lee was her only real friend. She liked Lee, but she didn’t know what to make of her, and she had no idea how Lee reconciled her sex life with Holy Communion every Sunday. She did stop in at the Santuaria on Guadaloupe Street to light a candle every Friday on her way home from work. But Caroline knew she didn’t go regularly to Confession, because during the hours of Confession on Saturday afternoons, she and Lee were often together, browsing the art galleries or sitting in cafes eating pastry.

  Lee’s only real interests were art and sex. The jewelry she made was magnificent. She worked in silver, using Zuni and Navajo techniques, which she explained to Caroline in meticulous detail. She offered to make Caroline her apprentice. She offered to teach her Spanish. For her birthday, she gave her a cast silver-and-turquoise bracelet. She offered to introduce her to men. She told her the nuns were exploiting her, and advised her to take a hatcheck job at some nightspot like Juanita’s, where with her looks she could make on tips alone what she was making at the convent.

  Every Saturday around five o’clock, Lee looked at her watch and said, “Oh my God, what am I thinking of, I’ve got to get going.” She always had a date, with a variety of men that bewildered Caroline. Caroline never met any of them. Lee would say, “Sure you don’t want to come? I could fix you up like that,” and snap her fingers. Caroline always said no, feeling like a child—the way she used to feel when she was twelve and Peggy was thirteen, watching Peggy put on forbidden lipstick to sneak out and meet a forbidden boyfriend. Lee would laugh at her, tell her she was missing a good time, and the next morning, there she would be—black-mantillaed and late—in the back row at the eleven o’clock High Mass, rolling her eyes and saying, “Am I exhausted! What a night!” Then going to Communion.

  Caroline was grateful for Lee. It took her months to admit to herself that her new life was more difficult than she had expected. Once she got used to the charm of the Spanish names and the food and the warmth and the old adobe convent where she worked, it was a lonely life. Her footsteps in the spare white apartment still echoed. The empty niches in the walls were a constant reproach, but when she tried to fill them—with a vase of flowers, a plant, a cheap carved statue of the Virgin she bought in a shop on Cerrillos Road—they still looked wrong. Everything she did seemed silly and arbitrary and irrelevant. She began to think there was some secret to living in the West that she hadn’t divined—some secret, perhaps, of living comfortably in her own skin.

  She spoke only to Lee, to the nuns, to people who came to the convent, to waiters, to Mrs. Rivera across the hall. Father Grady, who was originally from Brooklyn, stopped in the office to talk and bring her an occasional New York Times because he knew she liked the crossword.

  On her way to and from work, men looked at her, men spoke to her, once a man stopped her and begged her to have coffee with him—a nice-lookin
g man dressed in a suit. He walked along beside her down Alameda, told her he saw her every morning, his intentions were purely honorable, if he could only buy her a cup of coffee so they could get to know each other a little. She walked quickly, shaking her head, looking down at the sidewalk, and eventually he stopped and let her go.

  “But don’t you like being pretty?” Lee asked her.

  “I’ve never really thought about it,” Caroline said, vaguely aware that this was a lie—that in some other life she had thought about it plenty.

  “Think about it now,” Lee said. “If you could trade the way you look for the way I look, would you?” Lee grinned at her, showing her missing tooth.

  “Oh, Lee, you keep saying you’re so ugly, but you’re not.”

  Lee didn’t stop grinning. “That’s not the point at issue here.”

  Caroline thought about it. Lee waited, sipping her coffee. They were sitting on the floor in Caroline’s living room. It was late on a Saturday afternoon. Not much sun came in through the tall windows on this side, only a colorless slice of light that moved across the bare wood floor. Caroline put her hand on it. Even her hand—cool and white and long-fingered—was prettier than Lee’s skinny brown one. She didn’t really have to think: of course she liked being pretty. She loved her hand. She loved her whole body. She wanted to say to Lee that her body was like her wedding dress, something beautiful and useless, to be treasured but not put into circulation, but it made her sound nutty, like a Faulkner heroine undone by years of inbreeding and degeneracy. And, in fact, it occurred to her that her wedding dress was one of the things her mother had burned in the furnace before she died.

  She shrugged and said, “I’m used to the way I look.”

  Lee asked, “It’s not that you prefer women, is it?”

  That was something she used to think about, back in the days when men had begun to touch her and she had shrunk from them. But sex with a woman was not the solution: To imagine being in bed with a man gave her a sick, anxious feeling, but going to bed with some version of herself seemed merely silly and pointless.

  She shook her head. “No. My sister Nell does, I think. Not that she’s ever done anything. But I suspect she’s—you know.”

  “You suspect? You don’t know?”

  “We’re not very close.”

  “Really? God, my sister and I tell each other everything.”

  “I’m not that close to anyone in my family.” Or to anyone anywhere, at least since Mother died. That was something, at least. I did love my mother, she thought, and for a moment she had an irrational impulse to tell Lee all about her mother’s last days: she wasn’t herself, she burned things, she burned everything that belonged to me. She wanted to say: I was there when she died, I leaned over the bed, I held her hand, I said Mother, don’t go, what will I do? She frowned, picked up her coffee and sipped.

  Lee said, “Gee, that’s too bad, honey—that must make it rough. I don’t know what I’d do without my family.”

  For a moment, she did wish she were Lee, not for her looks but for her ability to chat, to take life easily, to sympathize with everyone and fit in anywhere—even to impose her personality on her apartment and fill it unself-consciously with the interesting clutter of her life.

  “So why don’t you want a man?” Lee refused to let the subject be dropped.

  “It’s complicated.” It was complicated by the fact that sometimes she lay awake, especially on Saturday nights, touching her body, thinking she would die if no one, ever again, loved her. It was only when she tried to match up that feeling with the man in the suit, or Stewart, or anyone she had ever known, that she could dismiss it and go to sleep.

  She would have liked to tell these things to Lee, but she suspected that Lee would wink at her and say she knew just the cure. And, in a way, she was tempted to have Lee fix her up; at least, with a date on Saturday nights, she would feel less lonely, she would have something to think about, she might not feel quite so sorry for herself. It seemed to her sometimes that she had felt sorry for herself for twenty years. She had no idea how to stop.

  She wrote far too many letters home—to Nell, Jamie, her old friends from work. To Lucy and Teddy she wrote long, regular, guilty letters full of Santa Fe history and descriptions of Lee and the nuns and Father Grady, half of which she didn’t even mail and most of which weren’t answered. Writing them, she missed her children badly. Sometimes, writing to them, she thought about their childhood, the days when she could hold their lithe little bodies on her lap and kiss them. When they were in Albany with Stewart, her house used to go dead, become full of something like the creepy quiet she came home to now every day in her apartment. In those days the quiet had made her feel both grateful and restless.

  Lee flew to Texas to have Thanksgiving dinner with her sister’s family, and Tomasita’s was closed, so Caroline ate Thanksgiving dinner at home: a piece of leftover chicken and some frozen French fries. She was unable to decide whether she would rather be at Nell’s. She thought of what she was missing—not just the long, logy Thanksgiving dinner, but all the rest of it: Jamie being sullen when he wasn’t pontificating about politics or art, Mr. Fahey making his lame jokes, probably a couple of Nell’s schoolmarm friends grilling Lucy and Teddy about their English courses. Everyone drinking too much of Nell’s cheap wine. Stewart would call, of course, and talk about her with Teddy and Lucy. How peculiar Mom was getting, how hostile it was for her to move so far away on a whim—and the whole thing with her going back to the Church. Well, you know you’re always welcome at my place, kids. We know, Daddy. Be good. Take care. Don’t worry too much about it. She’s always been a strange bird. Everything will work out.

  When she was sure they would be done with dinner, she telephoned. Lucy and Teddy no longer sounded resentful. Teddy asked her to send him a sombrero. Lucy had a boyfriend and was learning photography. Nell got on the phone and said they were having the house painted in the spring, Mr. Fahey’s new secretary was a disaster, Jack and Penny Wentworth were divorcing, the turkey had been a bit too dry. When they asked, Caroline told them she loved Santa Fe, her job was very interesting. She didn’t know how long she would stay. The mountains were beautiful, the city was lovely, especially now that the tourists were gone, there had been snow but the sun was so strong it melted fast.

  When she hung up, she knew she was right not to go home as she had thought of doing. That wasn’t what she wanted—that easy descent into the family routines, the conversation of her children, the old quarrels and jokes. The Caroline who could sink into that and lie there drowning was the Caroline she wanted to be rid of.

  But the apartment was very silent, and so was the wet street outside her windows. She turned on the radio and heard Christmas carols. When she sang along, her voice was thin and wobbly, and the songs seemed either ludicrous or impossibly sad.

  She thought: you wanted isolation; this is isolation. She had never expected it to be so empty and so alien. She had thought she could fill it with herself, that her self would be enough. Someone had told her that in 1598 a Spanish missionary in the area had sent home confused reports locating New Mexico somewhere between Newfoundland and China, and that was exactly how it felt to her—like another continent, an alien world of vast and terrifying spaces, where the person she had been was obliterated but nothing had come to take its place.

  She washed the dishes and then wandered around the apartment, straightening things that were already neat. She had emptied the wall niches again, and she dusted them all with the hem of her apron. Once, someone rang her bell—a couple of confused Rivera relatives. When Mrs. Rivera opened her door, there was noisy laughter and the smell of cooking and a radio playing Pérez Prado.

  She considered getting dressed and going to someplace like Juanita’s and picking up a man and bringing him home with her. She imagined telling Lee what she had done, and Lee’s delighted, incredulous laugh. She went so far as to change into stockings and high heels and open her closet looking f
or a dress before she had to run into the bathroom and throw up. She sat for a while on the cold floor, conscious of a run in one of her stockings slowly, with a soft tearing sound, making its way up her leg. Then she rose, cleaned the toilet, washed her face, and sat on her bed in her bathrobe, wondering if she was sick because the chicken she’d eaten had been around too long, or whether her soul-sickness, or whatever it was, had made itself felt as a physical thing, and then decided she was being fanciful.

  After a while, she raised the shade and looked out at the mountains, black masses against an ink-blue sky. She thought of Lee’s husband, lost somewhere in that space: a heap of bones or a mad mountain man, he was no more than a speck up there, something small and forgotten in a cave. She sat until dawn, dozing off and on, until the mountains began to light up with the bloody red-orange flush that gave them their name, and then she got dressed and went to early Mass at the cathedral.

  The next week, she saw the man in the suit. He was coming out of a café on Alameda. He looked at her, and she smiled at him.

  They had a cup of coffee together. His name was Lloyd Vegara, and he was an anthropologist who worked for the state Conservation Department. It turned out he knew Lee—he collected Pueblo pottery, which she sold in her shop. He asked Caroline if she had seen the cliff dwellings at Bandelier, and offered to take her there—maybe Saturday? But first she had to let him take her out to dinner Friday night.

  She agreed. He was really very nice—a big, talkative man with wavy black hair. He was divorced, had three grown children, lived alone in a restored adobe house on the old Santa Fe Trail. It was built in 1765 on the site of a thirteenth-century rancheria, and he wanted her to see it. He talked interestingly about his job: his mission in life was to preserve the architecture of the Pueblos. Had she been to Chaco Canyon? He would take her to Chaco Canyon.

  “It must be wonderful to have a mission in life,” she said.

  He smiled at her. “Now I have another one.”