“I’m not too modest, Dad,” Jerry said, laughing. Bill had poured him a glass of wine, and he drank half of it down right away as if it were Pepsi. “Heck, any fool could see they needed me out there to save their asses. Whoops, excuse me, ladies.”
“Jerry” Marge said, blushing.
Charles changed the subject. “Now tell us all about this New York thing, Alice. Marge here has been wanting the inside dope about the gallery that’s giving you a show.”
Marge dabbled in watercolor, Alice knew, and so she told Marge all about her New York solo show—not her first, but undoubtedly her biggest and most important, in a gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street. As she talked, she could see that Jamie was listening, and she tried to speak directly to him, to say what she thought he might like to know—how hard it was to get started, to get any kind of recognition, and how gradually over the years she had built up a clientele, a sort of fan club, people who were aware of her work and looked for her name.
“Of course, the important thing is to keep at it, keep doing it, don’t let anything else get in the way,” Alice said.
It was meant as encouragement for Jamie, but Marge took offense. “Unless you have to take time out for child raising,” she said. Her voice was so sarcastic, and she cut so savagely into a piece of dark meat, that Alice wondered how often Mary had wounded her neighbor with extravagant tales of her successful artist sister. Marge jammed the turkey in her mouth, chewed it fast, and washed it down with wine. “It certainly would be wonderful to have the luxury to do nothing but paint,” she said.
Jamie raised his head and looked at his aunt. “Do you ever paint? Or have you always worked in clay?”
For a moment, Alice wasn’t sure who had spoken; until now, she hadn’t heard Jamie utter more than two words at a time. She looked at him, and he dropped his eyes quickly to his plate. “No, I’ve always been a sculptor,” she said. “At least since one of my teachers in art school told me I had the most depressingly conventional color sense he’d ever seen.”
Jamie didn’t look at her again, but the corners of his mouth turned up, just slightly, and Alice felt she had taken the first step toward taming a scared animal. She looked at his bowed head, the long Kerwin nose and gaunt cheeks, the sandy hair that matched his skin, and her heart soared. Somehow, she knew he had the gift: she sensed it. And she would help him. Jamie would be her discovery—her own nephew, the son she had never had, who would follow in her footsteps.
The conversation turned back to football, to the phenomenal growth of Pepsi stock since the war, to Stewart’s law firm and Teddy’s loose front tooth and the early snow, early even for Syracuse. It was the kind of talk that made Alice confused and unhappy—no real conversation, no subject dwelt on for more than a moment, just noise, and silences filled up. Alice ate too much and began to feel sick to her stomach, and then there were two kinds of pie, and coffee.
When it was time to do the dishes, Bill offered to help Nell in the kitchen, but Alice roused herself to say firmly that Nell had done enough, and offered her own services, which, fortunately, were refused. In the end, the men did the dishes—Bill and Jerry and Stewart—while Caroline took the cranky children upstairs to read them stories, and Charles went back to his easy chair and his radio, and Jamie went out in the dark to shovel more snow, and Alice and Marge and Nell sat dozing and looking at newspapers in the living room.
After a while, Alice went upstairs to the bathroom, and stood for a moment in the hall, listening. From downstairs, the rattle of dishes, a low rumble of male voices, and, very faintly, Charles’s radio. Outside, the clink of tire chains as a car labored up Hillside Street in the snow. She heard Nell cough, and Marge’s voice saying, “Oh my goodness me, I must have dozed off.” Lucy and Teddy were quiet at last; Alice peeked into Nell’s room and saw the two of them cuddled together on the bed with Caroline beside them, asleep sitting up with a book in her lap.
Across the hall, the door was closed to the attic where Jamie had his room. On impulse she opened it and flipped the light switch, and then went quietly up the stairs. At the top was another switch, and when the light came on she saw that the attic room was full of paintings—a wall-to-wall explosion of canvases that almost made her reel backward. The paintings were startling in themselves, but it was the fact that they were Jamie’s that made her gasp and press her hand to her heart. Jamie did this: this was what he did up here alone. Every minute of his spare time, Nell said, was spent in this room. He never showed anyone anything. He had implied once that what he produced in the studio at school was only to make his teachers happy, and that his real work was done here.
Alice took two steps into the room and looked around, overwhelmed. She thought of what she had said at dinner about her defective color sense. No wonder Jamie smiled. The paintings were mostly portraits, mostly of women, slightly abstracted, brilliantly colored, full of reds and yellows and a particular shade of clear, greenish blue that he seemed to favor. The portraits were remarkable, but what she found herself staring at, coming back to again and again, was a work-in-progress on the easel, a still life of apples and a blue bowl in a space filled with pure white light—too simple a subject, undoubtedly. Trite, Lord knew. What more was there to say about apples in a bowl? Maybe a school assignment, the same sort of dreary uninspired thing she’d been assigned thirty-five years ago. And yet all she could think of was a Van Gogh she had once seen in Amsterdam, pears in a basket glowing, trembling, with life and color.
The noise behind her was, of course, Jamie. He stood in the stairway, his eyes stricken, his cheeks bright red from shoveling snow.
“Please,” he said in a choked voice. “Please don’t look.”
“Jamie, your work is marvelous.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“But it is!”
“It isn’t.” They stood there looking at each other, and then he said, “What does it matter, anyway? I just don’t want anyone to see it,” and went over to stand by the window under the pointed roof, his back to her, hands clenched at his sides, waiting for her to leave.
She stood there obstinately. “It matters, Jamie,” she said. “I assure you it does. It matters more than almost anything.” He didn’t reply. She went on. “I hope this doesn’t sound condescending, because I certainly don’t mean it to, but this is amazing work for an eighteen-year-old. I’m in awe of what you’ve done here. Listen to me, Jamie. If for any reason you aren’t satisfied with the teaching at the university, with the art department, and you want to study somewhere else, let me know. Just tell me, and I’ll arrange for you to study wherever you like. New York, Paris. Anywhere.”
He whirled around to face her, and she saw the fear in his face before he turned back to the window. No one said anything. She stood there a while looking at the apples in the blue bowl.
“All right, Jamie?”
He made an impatient movement with his shoulders. From the hall downstairs, she could hear the Faheys at the front door putting on their overshoes and coats, calling loud good-nights to Charles in his back room. Alice stood there waiting for what seemed like a long time, watching Jamie’s back as he gazed out the window into the snowy dark, and then she turned and went quickly down the stairs. Behind her, she could hear Jamie’s door close softly, and that was the image she was left with: of something beautiful—of life, joyful and pulsing—shut up in an attic behind a closed door.
All of a sudden she couldn’t wait to leave, to get out of this house that was once her sister’s and now seemed to belong to no one, a house full of death and memories and lost souls. She wanted to go home to Ralph, to her own place, to her big cold studio with its sweet smell of the red earth.
MARY
1945
After Peggy died, she was always expecting the worst, so that when the telegram came about John she hadn’t really been surprised. One by one, they would all die—Peggy, John, all of them, her children, those babies, those blessed little troubles. But she wouldn’t be seeing anymor
e of it, thank God. If any fact was clear to her, it was that one.
The house was too big. Ridiculous, with just the four of them in it now. It was a long way from the attic to the cellar, and it took her days to cart everything down and burn it. She filled a box for each child, and stowed it away neatly in the attic, but everything else went into the furnace: letters, books, old clothes, you name it. Like a witch in a fairy tale. Open the heavy iron door, squeak squeak, see the red coals, and in you go, my pretties.
Ice kills, fire kills: how strange, she thought. She didn’t watch it burn. Black coal, red flame, gray ash—she didn’t stay, just slammed the furnace door shut and went back upstairs to rest before she crammed in another load. It was the dead of winter; the furnace was hot. There was a smell, but no one was home to notice. She sorted and labeled and burned, and went up and down the stairs, cellar to attic, a million times. Once she started, it was hard to stop. She liked the bareness of those attic corners, the empty bureau drawers in the dusty unused bedrooms, the closets freed from their mess. She herself needed nothing, and it wasn’t good to leave trouble and secrets behind for the others.
She needed nothing: nothing was enough. There was something wrong with her head. It made it no better to stay in bed, but she preferred that, propped up against the pillows. It was easier, she was left alone more. She wore the rose-colored nightgown John had sent her for Christmas. Rosy silk, lace-trimmed, and by the time the package arrived he was dead.
Charles came in. Nell, Jamie. Did she want dinner on a tray, a cup of tea, would she rather sit downstairs, they would make her comfortable on the couch. No no no. Nothing. Just thinking of John, just tired, just gathering my thoughts. Smile, and they wouldn’t stay long. Charles touching her cheek, her neck, then her breast through the rose silk, once, gently, then going away.
It wasn’t a headache exactly—nothing so definite. She thought of soldiers marching, men in helmets, men with guns, the sun glinting off cold metal. Thump thump, never reaching their destination, marching in circles, marching for the sake of noise and pain. No, not exactly pain: more like consciousness, a small separate brain that registered—what? Here I am, inside this head. One small soldier, a nice little man, a soldier without a gun, with tiny pink hands, sandy hair, brown boots: here I am, what’s going on, what’s this? And the men in helmets, always increasing, marching in circles, going thump thump thump.
John died of his wounds, they said, on the way to the field hospital. Conscious? She had asked the man who came to the house to see them, after the telegram arrived. Yes, conscious to the end, joking even, and not in pain. How could that be? Jokes, eyes open, painless wounds. And Peggy had felt no pain, they said. Dozed off in the cold, while her blood turned to ice. Just slept, like a baby. Except that when Peggy was a baby she screamed herself to sleep as if she didn’t want to go wherever it was.
At Peggy’s funeral, John didn’t cry. Charles had cried, and poor Nell. They made Jamie stay home, Marge Fahey with him. Caroline: did Caro cry? She couldn’t remember. Lovely Caroline. Caro wasn’t a crier. Stewart, of course. He hadn’t even been able to go to the funeral. Ray’s mother was there, and fainted. But John hadn’t shed a tear. Then afterward, after the church and the cemetery, after the guests back at the house, the food, the dishes, the dark empty rooms, in the silence she had heard him in the cellar, she had found him down there in the old armchair crying himself sick, and had held him—her favorite, her love, her first boy—remembering still his strong young hard body in her arms. And yet at his own death he had joked, had died of wounds that caused no pain.
They lied. They would say anything.
She remembered how when her own mother lay there white and silent, one of her aunts had taken Mary on her knee and said, “Your mother has gone to sleep, Mary. But if you’re a very good girl, and if you wait long enough, Mother will wake up.”
Even when they took her mother away, she believed it, and she waited. She was a good girl. Alice went away to college, and her father said, “It’s just you and me now, little Mary Woodruff.”
“And someday Mother,” Mary said, and that was when her father told her that Auntie Val had lied to her. Mother wouldn’t be coming back. Mother was dead.
Did she want breakfast? It was morning, then. Breakfast: no, not just now. Did she sleep well? Yes, I slept like a tree—no, a log. The children used to ask: what is sleep? She smiled to think of all the children crowded around the table in the mornings before they set off for school. Peggy, Caroline, John, Nellie a toddler, and Jamie just a baby. What did you dream. I dreamed I had a dog. I dreamed I saw Santa Claus. I dreamed my foot fell off. What did Peggy dream of. Did she dream of the ice, dream of the lost baby, dream her secrets, dream of fire and warmth?
It’s a beautiful day, sun on the snow, and Caroline is coming to see you, with Teddy and Lucy. Here’s a letter from Alice, she says she and Ralph are going to Mexico. Would it be all right if Bill Fahey stopped in, just for a moment. With chocolates, of all things. Charles brought the paper, with the war news. Burma, they said. Warsaw. Budapest.
John died in France. She had known he would die, it was in his eyes the day he left: death, like a flash of cold light. Every time she got a letter from him, she wondered if he was dead yet, if the letter was from a dead boy. The letters said: Chère Maman, les petits villages sont très beaux, la vie ici est très étrange, je vais bien. He’d met a French girl with a funny name: Solange. She had picked out the rose nightgown, was teaching him to talk French. He might have married her. My daughter-in-law Solange. Elle est belle, Maman. Elle est gentille.
Il est mort, Solange would cry. Mon amour, mon soldat, mon américain, il est mort.
Mary could remember bits of the French she had learned in high school. Remembered how Alice came back from her year in Paris and helped her with the accent. She thought of Alice and Ralph in a Mexican hotel with a courtyard filled with flowers. She remembered when Alice met Ralph—Alice who had hardly ever had a date, who lived only to paint and mold things in clay, who was too tall and too plump, but was always so serene, always happy. So smart! What a surprise when they got married. “Aren’t you proud of your sister—imagine Alice marrying money!” She remembered someone saying that at the wedding as a silent reproach to Mary, who was there pregnant with her third, and married not to money but to Charles Kerwin.
Lying in bed, she remembered irregular verbs, whispering the conjugations to herself. She remembered so much, even things she didn’t want to. Why couldn’t she remember if Caroline had cried at Peggy’s funeral? She couldn’t remember her even being there. But Caroline must have been there. Only Jamie had stayed at home, with a pill to stop his noise and make him sleep. Was that Caro with her hair tied back under a black velvet hat with a veil? Crying? It was gone, a blur, so many years ago now, there was only Charles with his hand up to his face, John with his stricken eyes, Nell’s loud frantic sobbing, the icy wind at the cemetery. Cold Peggy in the ground so hard they used a special machine to dig it. Buried, and took her disgrace down with her into the cold earth.
And now Caro had her babies. She touched their little hands. Lucy’s chubby knees. The boy: Teddy, just like John. Caro’s boy, and baby Lucy. Death lighting their eyes like winter sunshine.
Please take them away. I’m too—forgive me.
The soldier in the brown boots was getting smaller, but she could hear his voice clearly: what is this, what’s going on here—a tiny piping, petulant as a child’s, somewhere at the back of her head, while the marching never stopped, went up and down, went on and on.
It wasn’t exactly a headache. More what waves must be like hitting the shore, a rough sea, hitting a small white shell on the beach over and over, battering, the men in helmets marching out of the sea, over the sand, the Germans in Russia, the Germans in France, John’s division in what was the name of that town, the beau village where he found Solange, the ruined church, the boulangerie, what was the name. The town where he bought the rose nightgown. She
had saved John’s letters, tied up neatly with one of Peggy’s ribbons. She could look up the name. Someone could.
Charles brought the doctor. She refused to have a priest, though Charles suggested that maybe Father Carmichael could come and talk to her. No, thanks. She had given up priests after Peggy. All those things Jamie said: how awful for a young boy to talk like that, to lose his faith, but of course what he said was true.
“No priests,” she said—shouting. She heard herself and subsided. Charles took her hand. She saw him glance at Caroline, Caroline’s face with her mouth twisted. Then the doctor came, old what’s-his-name: white hair, glasses slipping down his nose, bad breath, his hand on her pulse.
“How’s my pulse? Am I alive?”
“Ha ha. Very much alive.” He took off the glasses, sat back. “Tired, Mary? You’re tired lately? No other symptoms?”
How could she tell him about the little soldier, the waves washing on the shore.
“Well, Mary. These years have been hard on you. Plenty of reason for you to be tired. But we might want to run some tests.”
Then he and Charles talked in the hall. She closed her eyes. Thump thump. Whatever it was, whatever the tests showed, she knew she was a goner.
Nell came with cocoa and a paper to write for school, and poor young Jamie with his drawing pad. They sat with her in silence, and their presence was a comfort. Charles with his sad face, holding her hand. Then they were gone, into the dark, and wasn’t the wind at the cemetery like ice, like fire, wasn’t it cold, his body flown in over the cold sea. Not much of a Christmas this year, Mrs. Kerwin. No. She heard the springs squeak as Charles got quietly into the bed, heard him blow his nose in the dark, heard him lie there awake, quiet, and then heard him go to sleep.
Something nagged at her: the store. Harper and Kerwin Hardware, been there on Butternut Street forever. Well, it had fallen on hard times. Never be the same. Hard Times Hardware, Charles called it. Did they get that loan? Or was that just talk, just an idea. No: they were closing the store. Don Harper wanted to retire. Charles said: hell, Don, we’re too young to retire. I’m not sixty. Don and Florence were going to Texas. Texas! Live in the desert, dry up, become skeletons in the sand. Charles went to work for Unger’s. It’s a comedown, Mary. A lifetime’s work, gone. His hand was warm and dry, rough, as familiar as her own. Hard times, he said. Hard times, Mary, my love, my dear. She remembered his warm insistence in the night, his hands on her, waking up to find his knee parting her thighs, always in silence and darkness, and she gave him the comfort she could. We had some good years, though. Didn’t we?
Souvenir of Cold Springs Page 23