Nick knew that Hughes wanted a girl, but a boy wouldn’t have to deal with all of life’s mundane details. He would call the shots, do whatever he pleased. He would be strong and determined and independent, without having to apologize or bake cookies he didn’t even want to eat.
She stopped. “For crying out loud, cheer up,” she told herself. She found these black moods coming over her more and more frequently these days. Dr. Monty had said it was normal to feel off during pregnancy.
“Many women feel a bit down during this time,” he said, his hand lingering a little too long on her knee as they sat in his little office off Brattle Street. “It’s very normal, Mrs. Derringer. It’s a big change for any woman, but a welcome one.”
Last week he had recommended she start reading more enlivening books, eyeing Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime suspiciously. “Many of my patients have found following patterns very uplifting. Industry, that’s what I recommend,” he said, assurance leaking out of his voice.
And Nick had gone and bought a book of patterns, for day dresses. It was sitting upstairs in her dressing room, still wrapped in its brown paper.
She put a finger to the meringues. They had cooled. She brought over the black tin lined with waxed paper and gently started placing them in it, taking care not to break their peaks. She wondered what Helena was doing at that moment, how she was dealing with life with a baby. Ed was four months old now, and Nick kept telling herself that her cousin must be awfully busy with her son. But she couldn’t help feeling that during their brief chats on the telephone, Helena sounded increasingly far away, like she was underwater.
Each time, it made Nick a little sorry, although not entirely, for the way they had parted at the end of Helena’s visit. After their first conversation about Avery, they had stuck to happier subjects. But the night before Helena went back to Los Angeles, Nick couldn’t help bringing him up one last time.
“You don’t have to go back to him, you know,” Nick said. Hughes had gone to bed and they were finishing off what had already been a little too much wine.
“I want to go back to him,” Helena said, not looking at her.
“You don’t owe him anything. I know you think you do, but you have a right to be happy, too.”
“I don’t think you’re really one to be dispensing marital advice.”
It was the first time in their lives that Nick felt something akin to contempt in Helena’s voice, and it took her aback.
“I just want you to be happy.” She felt her own temper rise.
“You don’t know anything about it.” Helena looked directly at her. “Nothing makes you happy except what you don’t have. You’ve never known how to do anything but to take and take and then ask for more. You have everything and you act like it’s nothing. So how would you know what makes me or anyone else happy?”
Nick was stunned. “I guess I should be glad that we’re finally telling the truth,” she said, tasting metal in her mouth. “Since we’re not mincing words, your neediness is what makes you so goddamn self-centered that you can’t see past your sorry little world. I’m supposed to be happy just because I have more than you? For heaven’s sakes, listen to yourself.”
“No, you listen to yourself,” Helena said, rising. “I’m going to bed.”
They had made their apologies in the morning, and kissed warmly at South Station, but the episode had left Nick wondering how well she did know her cousin’s heart.
“The birds are in full cry during the breeding season, after which the cry is seldom if ever heard; and this being the principal indication of the birds’ presence, it is difficult to say at what precise time they depart, so silently and furtively do they slip away from our midst.”
Nick slid her mother’s silver letter opener under the fold of the first letter in her pile. There was no return address and her hand shook as she tried to pull the card out. She knew it would just be an invitation to a cocktail party thrown by the wife of one of Hughes’s colleagues, or a note from a neighbor on the Island reporting on her hydrangea, but she felt her mouth go dry nonetheless. Ever since the Letter, as she thought of it, she found this dread creeping up on her when confronted by an unknown sender.
“Don’t be a silly goose,” she told herself firmly, but felt unconvinced.
She had to put the card down and stare out the window for a minute before she could read it.
Nicky dear,
Tea on Wednesday?
4 p.m.
Love,
Birdie
Nick laughed with relief. Just tea, just Birdie. It was fine. She felt elated, high. Hughes would be home soon, she had baked his favorite cookies and they were having a baby. It was fine. Everything was just fine.
The Letter had arrived on a Tuesday five months ago, during an unseasonably cold September. She had been on the fence about whether to take the pot roast out of the freezer or make a run to the butcher for lamb chops before Hughes got home, leaning toward the pot roast, because it meant she would have time to go buy some new gloves in Harvard Square instead.
She had thought, I’ll just open the mail first, and then decide. It had been the third letter in her pile. It was a bulky, brown envelope, almost a parcel. It was addressed to Hughes, but it was handwritten instead of typed, so she knew it wasn’t a bill. Also, it had been forwarded on from the base in Green Cove Springs, and she had been afraid that it might be a letter from Charlie Wells, perhaps an act of revenge for her behavior after their lunch together.
The minute her hand felt the expensive correspondence paper inside, however, she knew it couldn’t be from Charlie. The first thing she noticed was the initials at the top, ELB. Frowning, Nick scanned down the card to the slanted, elegant script.
I know I said I wouldn’t write. The world’s not on fire anymore.
But I still love you.
I wanted you to know that, wherever you are.
Besides, everyone deserves to be happy.
Nick reached her hand back into the envelope and pulled out a silver skeleton key attached to a brass plate that read CLARIDGE’S ROOM 201.
The key was heavy and the plate so smooth. Nick rubbed her thumb over the shiny brass, leaving a greasy smudge. She looked at her thumb and it suddenly seemed fat and dull and dirty. Common hands, as her mother had told her as she massaged butter into her fingers at night, that’s what every lady must avoid.
Nick picked up the card and read it again, deciphering every line, measuring it, trying to decide which word meant something, and which had just been pressed into service to connect those that carried weight.
There were few that weren’t significant, she decided. “That” and “to be” were the only spares, and even they couldn’t be done without. Besides, everyone deserves to be happy.
“Oh god,” she said, as the full weight of the words, the stationery, the heavy silver key, hit her. “Oh god.”
She put her head down on the counter and tried to cry, but nothing came out. She watched her breath as it steamed up the Formica before vanishing again.
After a while, she sat up and straightened her back. She passed her hand over the Letter again. Leaving the key on the counter, she picked up the thick, creamy card and walked into the bar in the garden room, where she mixed herself a martini and upended it into her mouth.
Then she mixed another. After she had drunk the second one, she looked at the card again. The world’s not on fire anymore. But I still love you. She mixed herself a third, this time letting three olives drop into the glass. Then, with the Letter in one hand and the martini in the other, Nick walked into the living room, where the fire she had lit earlier that afternoon was now smoldering and spitting.
She sat down on the embroidered low bench in front of the fireplace and took one last look.
I know I said I wouldn’t write.
Then she threw the Letter on top of the sagging logs, where she watched it curl and slowly, slowly turn to ash.
&nbs
p; She stayed there, twirling the stem of her glass between her fingers, feeling hypnotized by the fire. Then she rose and wandered into the library. Taking out her address book, Nick placed a long-distance telephone call to Helena.
As she waited for the operator to connect her, she pulled a cigarette out of the box on the telephone table. Lighting it, she stared out the small bay window that made the library her favorite room in the house. The low branches of the ash tree outside the warm room scratched at the windowpane. The operator told her to hold for her connection.
Nick sipped what was left of her martini.
“Pot roast,” she said to herself drunkenly.
By the time Helena’s voice came down the line, Nick felt numb.
“Nick?” Helena’s voice sounded scratchy.
“Oh,” she said, suddenly surprised to be talking to her cousin.
“Is that you?”
“Yes, yes, it’s me.” Nick found words difficult. But I still love you.
“How are you? Is everything all right?”
“No, it’s not all right,” Nick said. “I … I was just suddenly missing everything. Do you remember our little house on Elm Street? And how hot it was the first summer?”
“Yes.” Helena sounded hesitant. “Nick, what’s wrong? Is Hughes all right?”
“Hughes is Hughes,” Nick said. “No, I just was sad for our life before. That’s all. I would give anything to be back in that house right now, washing out our stockings in that horrible little bathroom. Do you remember when my last pair just disintegrated, on the hanger over the tub? And we came back and found only a tiny pile of brown dust? And we had a little funeral in the yard?”
“Yes, I remember. And we played the Moonlight Sonata for them.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” Nick said, running her hand through her hair. “I’d forgotten what we’d played.”
“That was it,” Helena said. “And then I drew a line on your leg with your eyebrow pencil, but it came out pretty wobbly.”
“Yes, and I had a terrible time getting it off.” Nick lit another cigarette. Wind blew against the windowpane.
“Darling, have you been drinking?”
“Yes, a martini, or three.” Nick laughed, but it sounded more like a fork on a tin cup. “I’m sorry, darling, I just wanted to talk to you, talk about something from before.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, yes. I have to go now. Good-bye, Helena.”
“Good-bye, Nick. Write to me soon.”
Nick put the receiver down. “Good-bye,” she said to the quiet room and the wind whistling past the ash tree.
Nick had gone to bed early that night, complaining of a headache and crying herself to sleep while Hughes ate soup in the kitchen by himself. But the next night, when he arrived home, she was prepared.
She had put on her red shantung dress, the one she had worn to the 21 Club during the war, and had her hair set in Harvard Square. She prepared steaks and mashed potatoes and peppered green beans. She fixed martinis and the pitcher was sweating on the marble top of the bar when her husband came through the door.
She met him in the front hall and took his briefcase out of his hand.
“Feeling better?” he asked, kissing her forehead.
“Much,” Nick said. “Go into the living room. I’ve prepared cocktails.”
Hughes looked at her, saw her hair, her dress. “What’s the occasion?”
“A great occasion,” Nick said, disappearing through the dining room toward the bar, his briefcase heavy as lead.
Her hand shook as she poured the martinis and she had to swab up the tears of vodka that had dribbled down the glasses. She placed them on a silver tray with olives. Nick stood back and looked at them, marveling at how something could look so clean and be so poisonous at the same time.
Patting down her hair, she picked up the tray and walked carefully through the long garden room, her high heels clacking out a rhythm on the tile floor. When she reached the living room, she saw Hughes sitting in his blue wing chair, looking expectantly at her.
Nick set the tray down gently on the side table next to him. She handed him one glass and took the other for herself.
“Hughes, I’ve decided …” She stopped. “I think we should have a baby. I want a baby.”
Hughes put his glass down and stood, taking her in his arms.
“Darling,” he whispered into her hair, sending off the acrid odor of hair spray. “It is a great occasion.”
“Yes,” Nick said.
“I knew you’d want one. I knew you’d change your mind and that you’d want one, too.”
And with that, something hard and pure that had been living inside her, a dream that perhaps had begun in the maid’s room of her mother’s house the day she married, shattered, and dissolved into her hot blood.
DAISY
1959: JUNE
Daisy would always remember that summer as the summer they found the body. It was also the summer she turned twelve and had first been kissed, near the old ice cellar, where they now kept all the rusting bicycles. But that first flutter of skin on skin had paled in comparison to the excitement of death. When they stumbled upon it behind the tennis courts, they weren’t even sure what it was at first. Just a large lump covered with a dirty travel blanket, with something sticking out of it that looked like a man-of-war.
It had started out like every other June she could remember. Two days after her birthday, her mother had packed up the station wagon and they had driven the two hours to the ferry in Woods Hole. They fought about the radio station. Her mother said that the Clovers were all right, because they sounded like real music. But, she told Daisy, she didn’t understand why all the music seemed to have lost its poetry. And she hated the word “chick.” Daisy smirked to herself.
On the boat, her mother bought her a coffee, with lots of milk. Her mother always drank hers without anything in it, bitter. Young girls must learn to drink coffee, but jangly nerves are unbecoming. “Just a drop,” she told the man in the white cap serving it from the bare steel counter. He gave her mother a queer look, but did as he was instructed, as men always seemed to do.
Daisy often wondered what invisible power her mother had that made men do that. Daisy did what she was told, too. That was because her mother was a little crazy and she knew better than to cross her, unless she really wanted to get it. But these men weren’t going to get it, not really. And anyways, they were always a bit goofy around her, not like they were afraid, but like what her mother wanted was exactly what they had been waiting their whole lives to accomplish.
Daisy asked her mother about it once. Or rather, she asked her mother if she was pretty, because she had the vague notion that whatever power her mother had was something to do with her looks.
“Being pretty isn’t really all that important,” her mother said. “Men like it when you have it.”
She smiled at Daisy when she imparted this piece of information. An inclusive smile that made Daisy keep quiet. But privately, Daisy wondered who else had it and where they might have gotten it from. She thought about the movie stars she liked, but her mother didn’t really look like Audrey Hepburn or Natalie Wood, she wasn’t even pretty, exactly, so maybe that wasn’t really it. But then Daisy didn’t look like her mother, either. She was blond and blue-eyed, like her father.
For her twelfth birthday, her mother had taken her to the Nickelodeon in Harvard Square to see Gone With the Wind. When the beautiful Vivien Leigh, green eyes flashing, told Mammy that she wouldn’t eat her breakfast, her mother had leaned over.
“She went mad during this picture,” she whispered in her ear. “And you can see it in her eyes. You can see her breaking apart.”
Daisy thought she could see it, too. But what she really thought about afterward was that her mother had eyes just like that and she wondered if her mother was really, truly going mad, just like crazy Vivien Leigh. Maybe that was it. That would not be so good, she
decided.
They arrived at Tiger House in the late afternoon. The car was hot and sticky and the coffee had made Daisy feel hollow. The cedar-shingled house, turned silvery from the constant onslaught of sea storms, sat on a property that spanned the length of two streets, a fact that had always amazed Daisy. The back driveway started on North Summer Street and wound between a smattering of other cottages until it opened up into their own back lawn.
The front of the house was dominated by a double-storied, columned porch that looked out across North Water Street. On the other side of that road, a sloping front lawn led down to the small boathouse and rickety dock.
Daisy’s great-grandmother had wanted a “bungalow,” one of the simple shingled homes the off-Islanders built to summer in. But the necessity of a summer and a winter kitchen, then a conservatory for light and a few extra bedrooms for weekend parties, had caused the original plans for the house to grow backward until what had been imagined as a boxy cottage overtook almost the entire back plot. It had been named by Daisy’s great-grandfather, an admirer of the first President Roosevelt and an avid big-game hunter with a particular passion for tigers. A large tiger skin rug, head and all, took pride of place in the green sitting room.
Pulling into the driveway and turning off the engine, Daisy’s mother let out a big sigh. She was looking across a cluster of dusky tea roses at Aunt Helena’s next door. Aunt Helena and Uncle Avery were renting it out this summer, which meant they would all have to stay in the main house.
“She could at least have found some people who don’t hang their laundry line in the yard,” her mother said, in that voice that meant she was talking to herself. Rhetorical, her mother called it. That means no one wants an editorial.
Daisy had thought it sounded fun, everyone together; her mother and aunt and Ed. And her father, of course, when he came up on his trips from the city. But her mother didn’t. Uncle Avery needed money for his collection, she knew; something to do with the movies, but she wasn’t sure what exactly. When she thought of it, Daisy imagined a huge room filled with reels of film under glass. Her mother had been very angry about it all and she had seen her father trying to calm her down. But her mother had said, “Goddamn Helena and her goddamn husband,” before realizing that Daisy was standing at the door. She had looked at her with those green eyes, not flashing like Vivien Leigh’s, but flat and cold, like broad beans. Then she slammed the door shut and Daisy couldn’t hear any more.
Tigers in Red Weather Page 6