Mrs. Welsh was standing at the door looking out into the rain, smoking a cigarette. She came running when she saw Nell.
“You poor lamb, look at you,” she said, and sent the vacant-eyed Irish maid to run a bath in the second-floor bathroom. Nell sat dripping on a stool in the kitchen, drinking whiskey and listening to Mrs. Welsh’s stories about climbers who were lost on the mountain, including Wordsworth’s Charles Gough and a man named Scoursby who had stayed at that very hotel.
The whiskey tasted wonderful to Nell. Her bones warmed. The sun came out and filled the kitchen with dusty light. The flowers in the back garden gleamed like gems. Mrs. Welsh refilled her glass, and by the time her bathwater was ready, the mud, the slide, the silly fear of Skiddaw had moved to a distant part of her mind, and it didn’t seem at all odd that Mrs. Welsh came into the bathroom with her, helped her out of her unspeakable clothes, and then scrubbed her all over with a big soft sponge as if she were a child, talking in her quiet London voice about Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy who, in her opinion, had more to do with Willie’s poems than anyone would admit.
Nell sat happily in the hot water, watching her skin turn red and the suds turn gray. She lowered her head to her bruised knees while Mrs. Welsh soaped her back. She thought of nothing except the perfect comfort she had found. When she stepped out of the tub, Mrs. Welsh wrapped her in an immense terry-cloth robe and took her across the hall to her own room where Nell, much to her own surprise, put her arms around the woman and kissed her. When Mrs. Welsh kissed her back, Nell had to suppress the urge to laugh—to do something crazy, like racing away down the hall, giggling. She had never kissed a woman before—not like that. Mrs. Welsh untied Nell’s robe, let her own cotton dress be unzipped. She was tall, not slender, not especially young or beautiful, but her large soft body was as full of knolls and hollows as a kind, welcoming mountain.
They kissed again, and Nell stopped wanting to laugh. “Ah, my dear girl,” the woman kept saying, and she had a way of tipping her head back with a gasp of pleasure, exposing her long white throat where a blue vein pulsed.
They spent an hour in her bed with the door locked while the maid coped with the salmon fishermen who came back and wanted their tea. Nell found herself knowing things she hadn’t even suspected were there to be known. When Mrs. Welsh left—her name was Gillian, she was forty-four, she had been widowed two months after her wedding, that was all Nell knew about her—she fell asleep with the feeling that she had experienced this before in another existence, or in some vast dark dreamworld that had been there, all those years, alongside the innocent, meager world of Hillside Street. And, being truly honest with herself for (it seemed to Nell) the first time in her life, she understood why she had taken all her money out of the bank and sailed over three thousand miles away from home: for this, this thing for which she had no word, this feeling of perfect peace and well-being slightly tinged with wickedness that she carried with her into sleep and into the years to come.
ALICE
1946
No one but Nell wanted to talk about Peggy, and Nell seemed satisfied with whatever she was told. Easily pleased, Alice thought. Easily fooled. Still infatuated with her sister. Alice had brought with her the issue of Art News Today with the spread about the 1939 San Francisco Art League show—with her sculpture, The Future, prominently displayed. Just in case any of them had been told the truth.
But Alice kept the magazine locked up in her dressing case: Mary had taken her daughter’s secret to the grave. Caroline told her aunt about Mary’s last weeks. A weeping Caroline—not the girl Alice remembered, the pretty little exhibitionist she’d met on her last trip east to see Mary: 1923, Caro must have been four or five. The scene in her mind was of her sister brushing Caroline’s curls around her finger, making them fall in thick, perfect blond sausages, then looping them back with a white ribbon. And Caroline hanging on Mary, interrupting by touching Mary’s cheek to make her turn her head. “Mommy, Mommy,” and Mary’s indulgent smile, Caroline’s confiding whispers: she wanted to dance for Auntie Alice. Auntie had not been impressed.
And now she was this weeping wife, mother, daughter, holding tight to Alice’s hand as she talked. “She burned everything,” she said. “The strangest things, like her clothes, things we’d given her, our old schoolbooks and toys. It was as if she wanted to wipe us all out. It was a superhuman act, Aunt Alice, to do what she did. She packed just one box for each of us, mostly useless odds and ends. Everything else went into the furnace! And she wasn’t strong, she must have been in pain all that time, Dr. McCarthy said.”
Caroline’s lower lip trembled, and she caught it in her teeth, looking down at their linked hands while tears gathered on her lower lids. Lord, the girl was pretty! Alice felt a pang of envy, and was immediately ashamed.
“I just wonder if she ever loved us,” Caroline said. She sobbed once and clutched her aunt’s hand tighter. “I wonder if she loved me at all. How could she just burn everything I ever gave her?”
“Hush, hush, my girl.” Alice knew she should put her arms around her. This was the time to hug her, to cuddle little Caroline against her breast. She was unable to do it: if she took this pretty young niece close to her she would begin to weep herself, not for Caroline’s sorrows but for her own. “Hush now,” she said, and pulled a clean handkerchief out of her sleeve with her free hand. “She wasn’t herself. Mary adored you, you know that. You were her favorite. You and John. Here.”
Caroline took the handkerchief and blew her nose. It was Thanksgiving Day. There was dinner to be seen to. The smell of turkey was already wafting faintly from the kitchen. Nell was there, and Marge Fahey from next door. Jamie was shoveling the front walk—a steady metallic scrape scrape—his first appearance since Alice’s arrival. And Charles was in the back room, in his easy chair, with the cat on his lap and the radio on. He was resting, Nell said. He hadn’t been well, apparently—working only two or three days a week at Unger’s. The old Butternut Street store was closed, all those bolts and brooms and saws Charles had loved so much and Mary had been so proud of. There was a drugstore there now, Nell said, and they were talking about tearing the building down and putting up an apartment house.
Alice couldn’t imagine how they were managing. Nell’s schoolteacher salary couldn’t be large, and Jamie had just started at the university. Studying art. She would have loved to see some of his work, but Nell said he was very secretive. That strange, silent boy: damaged was the word that came to mind. She should get close to him, do her duty as his artist-aunt, try to help him. But who could get close to such a sullen young person? He had said hello without looking at her, his head down, snow shovel cocked like a weapon. From what she could see of his face, he looked startlingly like Mary—a drabber version of Mary in her youth, and with Charles’s long nose.
She had seen Charles the night before—gone in to say hello to him. He’d seemed fine at first, turned off Jack Benny to ask her a million questions, all about money one way or another. Was she selling her sculpture? How much were people willing to pay for things like that? What kind of commission did those New York galleries get? And how was Ralph’s shipping business doing? Then he got tired—visibly. His face grayed, sagged. He asked her if she was aware of the astonishing fact that Mary had died five months to the day after FDR. This wasn’t quite accurate: the president had died on the twelfth of April, Mary on the ninth of September. But never mind. Alice kissed his cheek and told him she would leave “a little something” with Nell before she left, and he turned his head aside so that she saw his sharp profile against the white doily, and whispered, “You’re a life-saver, Alice. Always have been.”
Old Charlie Kerwin. Not so old, really. Younger than Ralph by several years, but wasted, his daughters said, since Mary’s death. His hair had gone from graying to white, and he had no more pep than an old dog. He’d been attractive once—lighthaired like Caroline, tall and muscular. Alice remembered him at the wedding, how he could hardly keep his h
ands off Mary. Her little sister, married at nineteen to this tall man of thirty. Alice had liked him herself, but he had never looked at her once he saw her sister. “What a pretty traveling suit,” someone said when Mary had changed and come down the steps. A gray suit, hobble-skirted, with a polka-dotted shirtwaist and a straw hat trimmed with red ribbon. Charlie’s brother had grinned and said, low-voiced, “Charlie can’t wait to get it off her,” and Alice had felt thrilled by these words, and by the sight of Mary and Charles in the rumble seat of Larry Laidlaw’s Ford, his head bent to hers, Mary’s hand up to hold her hat on. Larry was driving them to the train station; they would take a sleeper up to Plattsburgh, to honeymoon at Lake Champlain. Alice imagined them in the narrow berth, naked together. Alice was twenty-six, but she’d never had a serious beau, and wouldn’t meet Ralph Steele for three years. Standing there watching them go, thinking of marriage, of being in bed with a man like Charles Kerwin, she could feel her pulse beating hard in her temples.
And now look at him. And Mary dead.
Alice watched Caroline dab at her eyes one last time and stow the handkerchief in her pocket. The children were out playing in the snow with Stewart; she could hear Lucy’s shrill cries. Stewart was a better father than Caroline was a mother—or so it seemed to Alice. But what was wrong with that? She had a quick vision of Ralph, when the doctor told him they would never have children—his face stricken as if he had a dozen children and he’d heard that all of them had died, all at once, in that instant.
“I loved her,” Caroline said. “Mom.”
They stood up. “I know you did, Caroline,” Alice said. “And you made her happy, she was always telling me that.” She patted her niece’s shoulder. “I don’t know how to explain what she did at the end. All I can say it was her illness, it was the tumor on her brain, it wasn’t lack of love.”
They went down to the kitchen, Alice to peel potatoes, Caroline to stand at the door and wave at her boisterous children in the snow. Marge Fahey in a hideous frilled apron was talking to Nell about lipstick shades. “You should try something that’s not so pink and girlish,” she said. “What do you think, Alice? Isn’t she too old for the Tangee look?”
“I think she looks lovely.” Poor Nell, the plainest of her nieces, all freckles and angles and flushed from turkey basting, actually looked ugly and miserable, any makeup she might have worn sweated off in the hot kitchen.
“I’m going to get you a tube of Montezuma Red,” Marge said with decision. “Elizabeth Arden. Sixty cents plus tax down at Dey Brothers. It’ll be my Christmas present to you, Nell. I have a hunch you need some livening up.”
Nell said nothing. She shut the oven door and brushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Alice smiled at her—a smile meant to be conspiratorial, comforting—and Nell smiled back, closing her eyes to indicate her weariness with good-hearted Marge. She and Alice had had a long talk the night before. Nell, in fact, had met her aunt at the station. The train from New York was late, but when Alice had finally got in, there had been Nell, sitting upright and patient in the waiting room, reading a book of poetry. Alice kissed her cheek and said, “What’s this? Byron?” and Nell had blushed and said, “It’s my only vice.” The two of them had stayed up until midnight, drinking cocoa in the kitchen.
As she peeled each potato, Alice set it in a big pan of water. She hadn’t peeled a potato in years, and she was rather enjoying it—trying to get the peel off in one continuous strip. She thought about Mary, who had probably peeled potatoes every day of her life: Mary at the end destroying the evidence that life had been lived. Alice imagined the tumor pressing against her brain, telling her to let go, let go …
All those letters must have been burnt, then. The bulletins on Peggy’s health and progress. Or maybe they were destroyed as soon as they were received. Too risky: what if Charles read them? Or the children. Dear Mary—so timid and conventional, so Catholic. All those children. And now only three left—two and a half, considering Jamie. Mary had quit the Church after John’s death. They all had, Nell said, except her father. The damned war, Nell said, and looked at Alice to see if she was shocked by her profanity, but Alice echoed what she said: yes, the damned war, it took so many. Her friend Cora’s son, she was thinking of, who left those lovely babies. Ralph’s sister’s boy, George, who would have gone into the business with him. Her own nephew John, that handsome lad, Mary’s pride and joy.
But as they sat there drinking cocoa, Nell didn’t want to talk about the war or John or Mary’s death—only about Peggy. “She wrote me the most wonderful letters,” Nell said. She had showed Alice Peggy’s picture, framed, in the place of honor on her bureau: her high-school graduation picture, idealized, with spit curls. “All about Chinatown, and Uncle Ralph’s ships, and all the flowers. She made San Francisco, California, sound like heaven on earth.”
“Well, it’s a very pretty place,” Alice said. It occurred to her that she could invite Nell out to visit in the summer, when school was out. But better check with Ralph before she mentioned it. He was getting crotchety as he got older. Set in his ways. Liked his comforts, his routines. And Peggy, after all, had been a bit of a trial. “Every time I come home, there she is, just moping around, Alice. Why doesn’t the girl do something?” Not that he hadn’t come to love her, finally. But a difficult girl. Of course, Nell would be different. She had a lively mind: Byron in the Syracuse train station! A good schoolteacher, Alice had no doubt. The kind that inspires her students, the girls especially—gives them noble and romantic ideas, broadens their lives. Reads poetry aloud, with expression. Puts on little plays, scenes from Shakespeare, costumes whipped up from bedsheets and old curtains. Ralph would like her immediately, even her sharp face and her tall angular body, the hair pulled tight into a pony-tail, those bright naïve blue eyes. Not a moper. Of course, Peggy had had some reasons to mope. But another kind of girl would have handled it differently. Alice thought wistfully of the baby, a fat-faced boy—nameless. Peggy had given him up without a second thought, apparently. Ralph and I should have taken him, Alice thought as she often did.
“I miss her so much,” Nell said. “Even now. After all these long, long years.”
“She was a dear girl,” Alice said. “I’m glad I got to know her. We loved having her with us.”
“She was always such fun,” Nell’s blue eyes were tearful, her hands clasped together under her chin. “She was always so—I don’t know. You never knew what she would say. She didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She was such an original.”
“Wasn’t she?” Alice tried to remember. “We had a lot of laughs,” she said, though when she thought back eight years she couldn’t remember that many. What she remembered was just Peggy, as lumpish in her pregnancy as the red clay that Alice transformed by her own hands into something beautiful—into The Future, whose memorial rested upstairs in her dressing case. What if she told Nell about it? Showed her the pictures? This is your sister who didn’t care what anyone thought of her. This is when she was hiding out in California before she gave her baby away. And she was shocked at the contempt she felt—even now, as Nell would say, after all these long, long years.
Thanksgiving dinner was moderately unpleasant. There were eleven of them, counting the children—Caroline’s little Lucy and Teddy, who spent most of the time crying and complaining over one thing or another, plus the Faheys’ sixteen-year-old son Jerry, who had pimples and talked football football football, whether anyone listened or not.
Alice knew the Faheys only from Mary’s letters. Bill and Marge—they had lived next door forever, and Mary had been close to them. When she met them in person, Alice was surprised that Marge was so empty-headed—Marge’s conversation, Alice thought, would drive her over the brink if she lived next door to her—and that no one seemed to notice that Bill, the big Pepsi executive, had a crush on Nell. He had brought cheap pink sparkling wine, and the more he drank of it the worse he got—teasing Nell about her freckles, her long b
ones, the way she must drive the boys wild, all of which would have been not amusing, not even acceptable, but at least bearable if Nell were fourteen. But she was twenty-three, a grown woman, a university graduate and a teacher at the high school. When Bill Fahey leaned across the table to squeeze her arm, it was Alice’s opinion that Nell should have given him a slap instead of a weak giggle.
“This should be an annual event,” Charles said when Bill had carved the turkey, and Marge had forced her marsh-mallow-topped sweet potatoes on everyone, and the glasses were filled, and the gravy was passed, and spilled on the white tablecloth, and passed again, and grace was garbled by Lucy while Teddy sulked because he had wanted to be the one to say it. “The Kerwins and the Faheys, and the Steeles from California,” Charles said. He sat at the head of the table smiling, not eating much. On his right, where Mary must have sat every night for the thirty years of their marriage, was Nell, still drooping from the effort of cooking, her wineglass untouched in front of her.
“You should come every year, Aunt Alice,” Nell said. “And next time bring Uncle Ralph. I think it’s such a shame that he has to stay all alone in San Francisco for Thanksgiving.”
“He’ll go to his sister’s house in Oakland.”
“But we want him here,” Caroline said, smiling, pretending to pout. “We’ve never even met Uncle Ralph.”
Alice tried to imagine Ralph drinking the sweet fizzy wine and listening to Marge’s complaints about the price of meat now that rationing was over. Eating the marshmallow stuff and the dried-out turkey—overcooked because Bill Fahey and his son were late: Northside High was playing Valley, and they’d stayed until the last heartbreaking touchdown.
“When it’s your boys out there, you don’t give up hope until the clock runs out,” Bill said. Jerry was on crutches; a broken ankle was keeping him out of the game. “Of course, Jerry’s too modest to say that the score would have been a lot different if his ankle was healed.”
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