“It’s sort of greenish.”
“Ugh.” She picked up Doris Day. “This is getting boring. Let’s do the poor servant girl.”
“Okay.”
Gold said, “It’s time for the rough stuff.”
Doris Day gave a quiet, resigned scream. “No no no!”
“Yes yes yes!” said Weasel triumphantly. He picked up a stone and threw it at her. Lucy dropped Doris and jumped back just in time. The stone hit Doris on the chest. She screamed: “Ah ah ah!” Then Gold threw one and missed. He threw another and got her in the leg. She lay on her face without moving, but they could hear her whimper.
Gold picked up more stones. “Take that,” said Gold. “And that.”
“Let me throw one,” said the Queen in her most imperious voice.
“No no! Please don’t hurt me anymore! I’ll do whatever you wish.”
“It’s too late for that,” said the Queen, and tossed her stone. It hit Doris square in the back of the head. Doris gasped once and was silent.
“She’s done for,” said Weasel, and laughed his maniacal laugh.
“You mean she’s dead?”
“Yes, your majesty.”
Lucy and Teddy looked at each other. “You mean, really dead?”
“Yeah. Sure. Why not?”
Lucy said, “Why not?” and sat looking down at the still body of Doris in her red dress. Then the Queen said, “Good.” She turned to Weasel and Gold, who bowed in unison. “A fine day’s work, my faithful ones.”
“A privilege, your majesty.”
“And now—remove the body,” said Queen Dragnetta. “We will have to find a new servant girl.”
From downstairs, Caroline called. “Wash up! Lunch in five minutes!”
“You go first,” said Lucy.
“Pick up the stones, or she’ll murdalize us.”
Teddy went down the hall to the bathroom, and Lucy gathered up the stones and put them in the box that had been Doris Day’s iron lung when she had polio. Now she was dead: what next? She straightened Doris Day’s dress again, and stowed her away in another box with Gold and Weasel and the Queen and Renard. Then she lay down on Teddy’s bed and looked straight up at the ceiling. Teddy had put a piece of bubble gum on the end of a baseball bat, stood on the bed, and attached the gum to the ceiling. Then he pressed a piece of newspaper to the gum, a headline from the Syracuse Herald-Journal: YANKS SLAM PHILLY IN FOUR. It was dated October 10, 1950, and it had turned a brownish yellow, darker in the center where the wad of gum held it. You could barely read the words, but after a year and a half Lucy knew them by heart. Teddy wanted to see how long the gum would stick. He was betting on ten years, but Lucy gave it five at the most.
Teddy came out of the bathroom and clomped downstairs. Caroline said, “Must you always, always make so much noise? Even in stocking feet?” and there was an argument about milk versus Pepsi, which Teddy won. On the radio, an announcer began to give the news. From outside came the noon whistle from the candle factory. Lucy could smell chicken-noodle soup. Any minute, her mother would call her in that high voice she used when she was impatient, and she would have to go down and eat her lunch and listen to Teddy’s singing along with the radio. But she lay for one more peaceful moment on her back, looking up at YANKS SLAM PHILLY, feeling her nose stuff up again. I must have been crazy to marry you, she said softly. Oh really. Yes really. Oh really. Then her mother called her, and she went downstairs.
NELL
1950
June was an endless month. The students were sleepy and sweating in the hot classrooms, oblivious to the delights of Browning and Tennyson and adverbial clauses.
Nell wrote on the blackboard: Though much is taken, much abides.
“These are just possibly my favorite lines of poetry,” she said. “What do they mean to you?”
The students, even the good ones, yawned and looked out the window at green trees, hot sun.
In the teachers’ lounge, where Nell spent her fourth-period break, the conversations were bleak and irritable, mainly about the attitude problem of various students and about the difficulty of planning anything decent for the summer on a schoolteacher’s salary. In central New York, they desperately needed rain; the governor asked people to cut back on water use. All through final exam week, the temperature was in the high eighties, and the air in the classrooms of Northside High was yellow with heat, dank with humidity.
At the end of that week, Nell graded the last set of senior Regents English papers and figured out averages. Wearing her new blue shirtwaist dress, she attended graduation and presented the English award to Barbara Swain, who didn’t deserve it but who, undeniably, had the highest average. She took Ruth Ann Grundberg, who missed out on the English award because of her inventive spelling, out to lunch at Edwards Tea Room and gave her Ten Steps to Spelling Power and the Modern Library edition of To the Lighthouse as a consolation prize, and basked in Ruth Ann’s green-eyed smile.
She went to a barbecue at Florence Weiss’s, where one group of her colleagues sat out on the lawn drinking gin and talking about Senator McCarthy, and another group drank beer and danced, and where Henry Tillman, who had been with the gin group, waylaid her when she came out of the bathroom and tried, and failed, to kiss her.
She bought groceries, including enough cornflakes and spaghetti and Jell-O and canned peas and Puss-in-Boots cat food to last Jamie and Dinah for a month.
She had a farewell dinner with Caroline and Stewart and the children.
She went to the bank to trade what was left of her savings for traveler’s checks, and she stopped at Walgreen’s to pick up a hot-water bottle and some motion-sickness pills. She packed her two matching blue suitcases with summer clothes, not forgetting to include a heavy sweater, a raincoat, and a pair of lightweight boots that folded into a canvas pouch. She put her tickets and her passport in a leather folder she had bought for the purpose and tucked that firmly down in the recesses of her shoulder bag. She took the train to New York City.
On the first of July she boarded the Queen Mary.
She was a tall, spare, freckled woman with light-brown hair worn in a ponytail. She had good legs which, even on hot days, she covered with nylon stockings. Ever since her friend Pat Garvey told her she looked like an angel in blue, she thought of it as her trademark. She wore no makeup but pink lipstick, like a teenager with strict parents—though she was twenty-seven that summer and her last remaining parent had died in March. She owned a compact with powder in a shade called Dresden Cream, two cakes of eye shadow (Blue Heaven and Lavender Blue), and a pot of rose-colored rouge. The cosmetic saleswoman at Dey Brothers had helped her choose them, and showed her how to apply them to bring out her hidden beauty. Nell didn’t like the way the makeup felt on her skin, and she felt conspicuous and Carolinish in it, but she packed it all anyway in the zipped cosmetic case that matched her luggage, thinking she might have the urge, in England if not in America, to reveal her hidden beauty.
The trip to England was something she had wanted since, when she was sixteen, Sister Constance had read “Tintern Abbey” aloud in English class and passed around pictures of a romantic ruin surrounded by wooded hills.
… Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee.
Even now, she couldn’t read the poem without feeling her soul yearn for something she fancied could be found only in England. And, of course, her trip would enrich her own teaching; she would bring back photographs to show her students, and would be able to convey to them exactly what it was like to walk the London streets where Pope and Swift once walked, to hike the landscape that inspired “Tintern Abbey,” to view the parsonage where Emily Bronte baked bread and wrote Wuthering Heights.
Going to England was also a means of getting away from Jamie, who refused to find a job after he graduated from art school—refused to do anything but paint, it seemed,
out in his studio over the garage, coming in for meals if he felt like it, and, if he didn’t, refusing to show his face, living on the smell of turpentine and oils, leaving Nell to sit alone with a whole meat loaf or a macaroni-and-cheese casserole—wishing at least that Dad were still alive so she could bring him dinner on a tray, sit by his bedside coaxing him to eat, and then bring her work up to his room, grading papers or reading while he listened to Jack Benny on the radio and sucked the endless striped peppermints that, toward the end, were the only food he liked. There were times she even wished Caroline and Stewart and the children would come over more often. Caro and Stewart weren’t the easiest people in the world to be around; their desperate, idiotic marriage was crumbling, predictably, before everyone’s eyes like a sand castle in the rain. But Lucy was a joy, and Teddy was cheerful and lively—two little beams of sunshine, Caroline always said in that listless way that could mean perfect sincerity or heavy sarcasm, depending on how much you knew about Caroline.
Sometimes Nell had dinner with Florence Weiss and her husband, or with Pat Garvey or Marian Gelbert. But most of her dinners were eaten alone, and that spring after Dad died, she began to find it boring and oppressive to come home each evening—after an exhausting day cramming English literature into minds that longed only for release—to an empty house, a lonely dinner, a solitary evening, no one but the cat for company.
She told people she was taking the trip to enrich her teaching and to get some good clean exercise walking through the English countryside. To no one did she admit that she was going to England in the hope of having some fun—partly because she wasn’t sure what she meant. She could imagine vague scenarios in which she captivated the English: encounters in hotels and cathedrals and tea shops, on Salisbury Plain, on the shores of Derwentwater, in front of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. That delightful American schoolteacher, that wonderful Miss Kerwin, have you met Nell, isn’t she marvelous—and there she would be, at dinner tables all over England, her conversation sparkling like champagne, her wit as legendary as the wit of Samuel Johnson.
She knew, of course, that her daydreams were absurd, that she would plow through England on her own, a solitary nondescript spinster like someone in an E. M. Forster novel or a Katherine Mansfield story. But in spite of herself, she thought of England as a land of limitless prospects—for what, she wasn’t sure. Fun, yes—that and something else she couldn’t name, couldn’t even imagine: whatever it was that she felt when she read Wordsworth, and that certainly wasn’t available to her in Syracuse, New York, in the silent, empty house on Hillside Street.
On the ship, she shared a cabin with a middle-aged Englishwoman named Lenore Massingham, who saw it as her duty to instruct Nell in the ways of the English by telling her in detail about everyone she knew, from the accountant son living in Leeds to the alcoholic son-in-law tormenting her daughter in Exeter to the expatriate nephew she had been visiting in Buffalo to the London doctor who had botched her hysterectomy. This was amusing for a day or two, and by the time Nell began to find it tedious she and Mrs. Massingham were fast friends who ate their meals together, took bracing walks arm in arm around the deck, and had long cozy talks in their bunks before falling asleep. The only other people Nell met on the ship were the respectable ladies in pearls and sensible shoes that Mrs. Massingham gravitated toward. Nell learned a great deal about hysterectomies and sons-in-law. When they parted at Southampton, Nell gave her friend a hug, told her quite truthfully that she was happy to have met her, and promised—quiteuntruthfully—to get in touch when she passed through Leeds on her way north.
In London, at her hotel, she met a group of Canadians—two married couples with a widowed friend and a young niece—who took a fancy to her and with whom she saw the sights. She and the niece, a college girl named Amy, went together to Westminster Abbey, where they had a guided tour (Nell’s treat) by a gaunt, aged sexton whose mumbling English accent was almost impenetrable, and where Amy wept over the memorial to Blake. (Real and very pretty tears—fake emotion, Nell wrote in her diary.)
On the train to Oxford she met a don who bought her a sherry and wanted to show her the inn where Pope got drunk and the room at Christ Church where Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland—an invitation which, after some thought, she declined. Something about his gray moustache made her think of Mr. Fahey’s hands cupped over her breasts, the horrifying shock of his hard penis pressed against her, his voice in her ear begging her not to tell.
In Stratford, she attended a performance of Much Ado About Nothing with a touring group of librarians from Iowa, and she spent two lonely, overcast days in Shrewsbury, strolling along the banks of the Severn feeling sorry for herself.
The Brontë parsonage in Haworth was closed, and the Yorkshire moors were awash in rain. She took refuge in the Black Bull Inn (“one of the scenes of the unfortunate Branwell Brontë’s humiliation,” she would say to her students, without elaborating, when she showed them her snapshot) and discussed growing roses with a bus driver and his wife on holiday from Manchester, getting quietly tipsy on Worthington’s Pale Ale while the rain thudded against the windows.
In York she toured the cathedral alone, but she met some nice people in a pub, and ended up going out to dinner at the Maid’s Head with an art historian from York University who was writing a book on medieval glazing. He talked about the glasswork in the Chapter House at York Minster. They shared a bottle of wine and then had a nightcap. When he took her back to her hotel he kissed her several times, with increasing insistence and passion, in the hallway outside her door. Finally, his lips on her neck, he asked her if he could come into her room. She enjoyed kissing him, and she liked his hair, which was thick and thatchy, and his full lower lip, and his tweed jacket. Also, she looked forward to telling Pat Garvey about the encounter, so she opened the door with her key, took his hand, and, smiling, led him inside.
“I like you independent American girls,” he said as he unbuttoned her blouse. He wasn’t her first; he was, in fact, her third. His name was Colin; when he asked her if she had a steady boyfriend, she told him that she was engaged to a man back home named Oscar, who ran a butcher shop. They struggled on her bed for what seemed to Nell a very long time—he had trouble, it turned out, staying hard—until finally, when she thought she was surely going to fall asleep, he achieved an orgasm and collapsed on her, by which time they were both hot, sweaty, and exhausted, and heartily disliked each other.
After he left, she was wide awake and depressed. She wrote in her diary: sex with an Englishman named Colin. The usual combination of disgust and amusement, in about equal amounts.
In the Lake District, which she had longed to see more than any part of England, she was unhappier than she had been in years. The weather was perfect: Nell stayed for a week in Keswick and it didn’t rain once—most unusual, she was constantly told by Mrs. Welsh, the widowed ex-schoolteacher from London who ran the hotel. You’ve brought the good weather, Mrs. Welsh said, beaming at her.
Every morning, awakened in her sunny room by birdsong and the voices of her fellow guests on their way down to breakfast, Nell became more and more reluctant to get up and spend the day in her own company. She bought a guidebook and went sightseeing, always feeling she was missing the best things. The village of Grasmere was crowded with people who had come to see the wrestling matches and sheepdog trials. Dove Cottage was closed, and the Wordsworth Museum seemed expensive for what it contained. On the day she took the steamer around Lake Windermere, the sun was so bright she developed a headache and missed most of the trip because she was lying on a bench belowdecks waiting for the aspirin to work and counting up mentally how much money she had left. She worried constantly about running out of money or losing her traveler’s checks. Everywhere she went, the mountains bulked blackish-green against the blue sky, menacing the tiny perfect villages: the terrifying monsters Wordsworth had bad dreams about and called “huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men.”
The Keswick Hotel seemed to be full of the members of a climbing club who debated endlessly the merits of Pillar Rock versus Glimmer Crag, and rowdy salmon fishermen who ate their catch for dinner every evening, washing it down with pitchers of ale. At night after dinner, Nell sat in the hotel parlor waiting for someone to talk to her about something besides fish and mountains. She wrote cheery postcards to Pat and Florence and Marian, composed poetic descriptions of the scenery for the benefit of her diary, and devoured the vast collection of Agatha Christies provided by the hotel. She also found a tattered copy of Wordsworth, read “Tintern Abbey,” and wept tears of self-pity when she came to the lines:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend …
On the last full day of her stay, she joined a climb up Skiddaw organized by the local Fell and Rock Climbing Club. The guidebook called the route “safe and easy, with rewarding views.” Her fellow climbers were mostly huge Germans in shorts who gave her a hand when the climbing was difficult but otherwise ignored her. Nell, with her hair in a braid, wearing trousers and a blue sweater in which she was much too hot, gave up halfway through the climb and started back down on her own. Almost immediately the air turned colder, the clouds thickened, and it began to rain. By the time she reached the railway station at the base of the mountain she was wet and freezing and bedraggled, and covered with mud where she had missed her footing and slipped for several feet down a steep ridge—thinking as she fell of her sister Peggy dying on the ice twelve years before: surprised at seeing Peggy’s pale face, laughing under her stocking cap, as clearly as she saw the slide of mud and the grayish bark of the young tree she grabbed to break her fall.
She walked into the back garden of the hotel crying. She had lost her rubber band, and her hair hung dripping around her face. Her hands were filthy. The knees of her trousers were ripped, and her legs showed through bleeding and mud-covered.
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