by Luanne Rice
“Wouldn’t that be rare, in these waters at this time of year?”
“Perhaps. Are you terribly upset?” she asked, lowering her voice.
“About an octopus in the bay?”
“About Nick.”
“No, I’m not. Not at all. Nick has to work really late—what am I going to do, sit in a hotel room waiting for him? It’s much better to stay on the Point,” I said crisply.
“I’ve always thought it clever of you to follow him into the city. Something I think Clare should do more of, but of course with the boys . . .”
“The way you put it—‘follow him into the city,’ ” I said, feeling disgusted.
“Why deny it? I’m not criticizing you. I think it’s a very good idea. If there were a later train, I’d say take it.”
“There’s no later train. You make it sound as though I shouldn’t trust Nick.”
“I’m not saying that. Not at all. I love and adore Nicky, he’s ten times better than most men, but there you are.”
“Aaargh,” I said, to let her know I wanted to drop the subject. Pem jiggled the glider as she stood up. I reached for her arm, to pull her down.
“Let her go,” Honora said. That meant she wanted to talk about Pem; although Pem was hard of hearing, Honora disliked talking about her in her presence. I watched Pem shuffle into the house, stopping to break a long tendril off the honeysuckle vine. She liked flowers tame and spiky. The screen door banged behind her.
“I nearly killed her today,” Honora said. “I had all my papers spread across the dining room table, bills and canceled checks, all my financial stuff organized month by month. I went out for my swim, and when I came back I discovered she had bundled everything up and set the table for eight. She does that every night; it’s my fault for leaving the papers out. I just forgot.”
“Martinis!” Clare called, Pem trailing close behind.
“Many happy returns of the day,” Pem said as we toasted.
Honora repeated the story of the octopus for Clare, who said Eugene had claimed to have seen one while snorkeling.
“I miss your bay profile, Georgie,” Honora said. “Time was, an unusual sea creature couldn’t pass by without you telling us about it. Remember the sunfish? And the summer of the blue lobsters?”
“Eugene and Casey were so upset when we cooked them and they turned red,” I said, laughing. The sun had nearly set now. I glanced west, down the horizon toward New York. The ferry to Orient Point was passing Plum Island.
“There’s the ferry, Pem,” I said loudly.
“The ferry!” Pem said. “There used to be three steamers leaving the dock at Providence for Newport and Block Island, and if you weren’t there by nine, they’d be jam-packed.”
“What were they called?” Clare asked.
“Let’s see . . . The Mount Hope, the New Shoreham, and . . . the Penguin,” she said without a trace of uncertainty. I smiled; she had never mentioned the Penguin before.
“Did I ever tell you Nick and I once stopped by that dock on our way to Fall River?” I asked. “It’s right off the Wickenden and India Streets exit, and the steamer still runs. There’s only one now.”
“Donald and I once stopped,” Clare said. That dock had great significance to our family beyond Pem’s happy memories of the ferries. Pem’s mother had stepped off a boat there after crossing the Atlantic from Plymouth, England. The boat had docked on Christmas Eve. My great-grandmother had celebrated her ninth birthday on board. Her people were Catholic, and they had left England to escape religious persecution. Promised jobs at a hosiery mill in Providence, Rhode Island, they had looked forward to arriving in the New World. I imagined their joy at landfall on Christmas Eve: they would be able to worship in a church. The mill owner greeted the ship. My great-great-grandfather asked where they could find a church. “You’re Catholic?” the mill owner had asked with dismay. Of course he had expected workers from England to be Protestant. If persecution met them on the shores of New England, it also made them tougher, I thought, looking at the last survivor of her generation in the family. Pem of the wild hair and noble nose and dark brows.
Oh, the pleasure of sitting with my family on that terrace! Lights blinking on Long Island, the sound of the waves, the gentle breeze making me glad of my sweater, the predictability of Pem’s stories and Honora’s worries. Nick’s absence was the only blight. I imagined him sitting in a smoky conference room, arguing for hours over the same paragraph, eating food soggy with steam. Missing me and the Point. Missing an evening like this.
“I lied before,” I said suddenly. “I didn’t miss the train. Nick didn’t want me in New York tonight.”
Clare and Honora leaned toward me, their chins jutting forward, worried expressions on their faces. “What’s wrong?” Clare asked.
“He’s just decided it’s best that when he works late I stay here instead of at the Gregory.” I felt tears running down my cheeks.
“Honey, I said such awful things!” Honora said. “All that jawboning about not trusting men—I was just carrying on. I’m sorry.”
“When Donald and I were first married we went through something like this,” Clare said. “He had to spend a month in Tokyo—do you remember?”
“I remember,” Honora said.
“I was dying to go,” Clare said. “I mean, there I was, staying home, being what I thought was the perfect wife, with all the time in the world to travel with my husband. Especially to Tokyo—I planned to illustrate a travel diary with brush and ink, and to learn Japanese lacquer. But Donald told me I couldn’t go. The reason, I later learned, was that he was embarrassed. No one was taking a wife along, and he didn’t want to be the only one.”
“That’s a very uplifting tale. Thank you so much, Clare,” I said, grinning sarcastically.
“My point is, they’re under a lot of peer pressure,” Clare said. “Sometimes Donald tells me his biggest regret is that he didn’t buck the trend and take me to Japan.”
“Is your biggest regret that you didn’t go?” I asked.
“No—it’s just one regret of many,” Clare said. Clare was motherly and voluptuous, but when she smiled at me that way, I remembered her when we were girls: skinny, taller than I, with an expression that told me she loved me more than anyone in the world. “Nick’s all right,” Clare said. “He probably feels better knowing you’re on Mom’s porch than in a stuffy hotel room.”
“Clare’s right,” Honora said. “Nick’s thinking of you.” Then, because the time had come to change the subject, she clapped her hands. “The coincidence!” she said, pronouncing each syllable with force. “I can’t get over it, the partner at Nick’s firm overseeing your grant. Isn’t it bizarre, Clare? Have you ever heard anything like it?”
“I nearly fainted when I found out,” I said. “There I was, standing on the club terrace, making what I thought was small talk with John Avery. I mean, he is always very polite, very interested in what the associates’ spouses are doing.”
“That is a real talent,” Honora said, “making the other person feel important. That time I was on Dick Cavett, he made me feel that I was the most interesting guest he had ever had. Me, Weather Woman. Hah! Go on.”
“Then I mentioned the Swift Observatory, and at that instant I connected him with Avery and he connected me with Swift and we both about fainted.”
“It’s unreal,” Clare said. “And he said he liked your work?”
“Yes.”
“Great, great,” Honora and Clare said together.
Honora stood. She collected our empty glasses on the tray. We started into the kitchen. I gave Pem a hand, and she slipped her arm through mine. “Take my arm and call me Charlie,” she said.
After dinner both Honora and Clare invited me to spend the night at their houses, but I said no. We all kissed, and Clare and I left at the same time.
“That’s a terrible story about Tokyo,” I said. “I wonder why I never realized it at the time.” Honora’s grass needed
mowing; the long grass, wet with the night air, tickled my bare ankles.
“You were single then. You didn’t want to hear about married problems. Remember how upset you were when I first married Donald?”
“I was jealous of him.”
“I know, but you never said that. What you did was tell me how foolish I was to get married instead of working. Of course I saw no reason why I couldn’t paint and sculpt at home. Not to mention keep up with biochem. An architect came to design a studio in the garage, but we never had it built.”
“That portrait of the boys is great,” I said.
“Oh, thanks.”
We had come to the spot where Clare turned right and I turned left, but we stood still, listening to the waves. “You start off thinking you can plan the way your life will be,” Clare said. “But I don’t think you can. Sometimes things just happen. But we’re lucky, Georgie. More good things happen to us than bad.”
“Think of the sisters who don’t live near each other. That’s sad, isn’t it?” I asked, kissing Clare.
“Sleep tight, Georgie,” she said.
The emptiness of my house struck me because I would be alone in it all night. The hook where Nick wouldn’t hang his coat that night, the table where he wouldn’t place the plane’s chart case, the sofa on which he wouldn’t sit beside me. I walked through the rooms aimlessly, accompanied by my own amber reflection in each window. Settling in my workroom, the room where I was always alone and would be least likely to feel Nick’s absence, I glanced through old newspapers. In a way it felt good, to be relieved of worrying about plane crashes for one night. Then I came to a news story about a retired firefighter who was killed by a falling brick on Fifth Avenue. It could happen any time, anywhere. As I sat in my cozy house a meteor could crash through the roof. I thought of what Clare had said: you think you can plan, but you can’t.
The phone rang.
“Nick!” I said into the receiver.
After a long pause, a woman spoke. “Is this Georgie Swift?” she asked.
“Mona?” I asked, recognizing her voice.
“Is this a bother, me calling you?”
“No, I’m glad to hear from you. I’m sorry about your miscarriage.”
“Thank you. This is awkward, but it’s late, I just had a bottle of wine with dinner, and I feel like talking. So I thought of you. We had a nice conversation that day.”
“Yes, I’ve thought of it often. How is everything?”
“Pretty shitty, but not as bad as it could be. My lawyer has managed to arrange for the charges to be dropped if I agree to counseling. So I’m not going to jail.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” I said, feeling genuinely thrilled for her but uneasy about being on the phone when Nick might try to call. I knew what his meetings were like, how difficult it was for him to step away from the conference table. Sometimes he had only one chance an hour.
“They’ve let me see the kids, and Dick is going to be reasonable about it. He keeps saying ‘You’re their mother,’ and I get the feeling he’d let me have them if it weren’t for the severity of the charges. If I’d only hit Celeste instead of stabbing her. He has such unpredictable hours. Everyone thinks an eye surgeon can plan his time, but you wouldn’t believe the calls that would come in at night. Eyes injured in brawls, in car wrecks. Of course he could schedule routine things, like cataract operations, but not the others. So it’s tough for him to take care of the children and keep up his work. He would be better off if we were back together.”
“I know that, Mona. I’ve always felt that way, ever since I met you. I hate to do this, but I have to get off the phone. Could we talk some other time?”
“Oh, sure. I don’t want to bother you.” The change in her tone told me I’d offended her.
“I wish I didn’t have to go. Can I call you tomorrow?”
“Sure, bye.”
The click as she hung up sounded final and mocking, but I didn’t care because the phone rang one minute later and it was Nick.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you,” I said.
We said more, but those were the words that mattered.
THAT SUMMER THE TELEPHONE was the sorcerer’s apprentice, and I was the sorcerer. The alchemy started with newspapers, full of stories about faceless people, victims of tragedy, winners of lotteries, yesterday’s ordinary people made extraordinary by events in their lives. I used a pair of Pem’s old white kid gloves, to keep my hands clean while I paged through the papers. That was part of the ritual. So was the coffee I sipped while I read, the chair in which I sat, the pile of newspapers that grew until Thursday, when the garbagemen came. I would list stories that captivated me, and eventually I would call the people involved. My bookshelves became clogged with phone books from many municipalities. I would dial, transported by the hollow ringing into another person’s life. I envisioned each person I called. They had definite features, families, political views. The minute I heard their voices, they became entire.
Since our cell reception was limited, the telephone company installed call-waiting and also a second line. I wanted to leave one line absolutely free, in case Nick or someone from the family tried to call. For the first time in my life I was putting people on hold. I instructed my loved ones to call me on our original number, while the second line was the meeting ground for people I had read about but would never see or meet. “Hold, please,” I said to Clare when she called in the midst of a conversation with Alfred Hoberg, winner of the New Jersey Jackpot. “Can I call you back? I’m on the other line,” I said over and over to Nick, once I had established that nothing was wrong and he was just calling to talk.
Nick seemed amused by my obsession with the telephone, and perhaps relieved. He thought it was curing me of my obsession with him. “Obsession is not love,” he had said to me the night after our night apart. “It’s driving me crazy, the way you imagine my motives. It scares me.”
It scared me as well. I had thought that people grew comfortable after many years of marriage. In worst cases they became bored with each other when nothing new was left to discover, but mainly they could rest easy, having learned a common language, developed a pattern of days and nights, put down the terrible fears of early love. The vigor with which I telephoned my people, the diligence with which I transcribed those conversations into reports, the effort I made to forget Mona Tuchman because she reminded me of the violence of love: all of these kept my fear in check.
WHEN I THINK of it now, that summer, I try to understand the frenzy. What stirred us up? Had I been a distant observer, I might have seen a normal young couple, living happily among the wife’s family, suffering the usual trials of the man’s demanding career. Even to me, in the midst of everything, that is how it appeared on the surface. But it was beneath the surface, where tensions seethed and poisoned, that counted. How could powerful love be a poison? I thought of it as strong and bracing, life-giving, a sweet, delicious, and sinful nectar. Sometimes I thought of the people I loved and the feelings were so strong I would cry. Sometimes I thought I would die of love for them.
6
NICK’S PARENTS INVITED US TO A FOURTH OF July barbeque at their home in the Berkshires.
“The Fourth is Pem’s favorite holiday,” I said. “But we haven’t seen your parents in a long time. Since Christmas.”
“That’s true, but it’s a long way to go. I can’t take the whole weekend off.”
“But they’re your parents.”
“True,” Nick said.
That exchange typified the debates we would have every holiday. From my cajoling, would you guess that the last thing I wanted to do was leave the Point? In a perfect world, I would choose to spend every holiday with my family, but in the real world, Nick had parents and brothers and sisters. He seemed oddly indifferent about seeing them. Perhaps that was because he felt so close to my family; we talked about it often, but Nick never seemed to care about the answer. It was always I who told him we sho
uld visit his parents, spend Christmas with the Symondses instead of the Swifts-Bennisons-Mackens. I did this partly because I felt it was penance for the great majority of time we spent with my family. I made bargains with myself: if we visit the Symondses for this one holiday, we won’t have to go back until December or March or June. I liked his family very much, but they weren’t mine.
We borrowed the seaplane. The day was perfect: bright sun and a deep blue sky. Nick wore a golden suede jacket and aviator sunglasses. Checking the instruments, he frowned with concentration. I sat beside him, holding the chart of the Connecticut River Valley across my lap. I wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt covered by a woven shawl.
“Ready?” Nick said, leaning across me to make sure my door was locked.
“Kiss and fly,” I said, just before he turned the key.
The engine whirred and the propeller began slowly to turn. Our pontoons slapped the bay’s flat surface as we gathered speed. Motorboats and small sloops, thick in the water, gave us right of way. Then came the lift, and we were soaring straight into the sky, leaving Bennison Point beneath us. Nick banked left, then right, giving me a chance to wave goodbye to everyone: Donald and the boys in their Dyer Dinghy, Clare standing on the rocks, Honora in the rose garden. Pem stood by the stone wishing well, shielding her eyes to watch us. As we wheeled north I lost sight of everyone, but the land’s contours gained sharper focus. I saw the rooftops, the groves of pine and oak, the craggy rocks dipping into the sea. I saw the Point in relation to the rest of Black Hall. Then the sea was behind us.
We followed the Connecticut River north. The plane’s engines were loud, making conversation difficult. I loved flying with Nick. I experienced no fear, and I wondered, as I always did when I flew with Nick, about the bald terror I felt every time I watched him take off. Hartford, with its tall buildings and gold domes, came into view. We flew straight past, past the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, and took a left turn over the Massachusetts Turnpike. Nick seemed so confident as a pilot, as he did in all his walks of life: lawyer, pilot, family man. I viewed each occupation as separate. At his office I looked at him and thought “lawyer,” just as in law school I had looked at him and thought “law student.” In a plane he was the pilot. In bed he was a wonderful lover. At the dinner table he was my dear husband. I couldn’t seem to integrate his selves into one person with many aspects. I did that for the people I studied, but not for my husband.