“Done, Felix,” she said. “A perfect snowman.”
She kissed him on his cold nose.
It was almost eight, the sun striping the snow with glitter, the day warming. Upstairs in the house, Maggie had opened the window.
“Mom!”
“We’re making a snowman,” Lucy said. “Come on out.”
“I can’t!” Maggie said, and shut the window with a crash.
“Girls!” Lucy said, bemused. “That was Maggie.”
August was sitting on the step while Felix began a second snowman.
“It’s going to warm up later today,” he said. “Will Felix be upset if it melts?”
“He’ll be upset.”
Lucy stood away from the house looking up where Maggie had been but the light of the morning sun was on the window glass and she couldn’t see through.
“Zee tells me that you write.”
“Children’s books.”
“I’ve never met a children’s book writer,” August said.
“Write isn’t exactly the word for what I do. My books are for young children before they have language.”
His beard was blond, Lucy noticed, glancing at the side of August’s face, at his strong bones. A new, scruffy beard and she thought to ask him why with such fine bones he wanted to grow a beard. But that was just the wandering of her mind for something more to say, at a loss for words as she had a tendency to be.
“Language is the most important part of my life,” he said, stretching his legs out in front of him, his bare calves resting against the snowy steps.
Lucy pulled a pouting Felix onto her lap, wrapping her arms around him.
“You’re a professor.”
“I was. Now I write books, which is why I’m interested in your house.”
He stood and started up the steps to the house.
“Are you going in now?” he asked. “It’s getting cold.”
She looked up at him, standing on the steps, his bare legs red with cold, his hood up. He ground out his cigarette on the bottom of the step.
“I’m not,” she said. “We’re making another snowman, right, Felix?”
“No,” Felix said. “NO more snowmen.”
“A snow girl, then,” Lucy said. “It doesn’t snow every day, Felix, so we need to make one while we can.”
August had leaned towards her, clouds of his warm breath between them.
“This is your house, isn’t it?”
“I inherited it.”
Her mother’s name was probably on the deed. Caroline Framboise or Caroline Baldwin. Easy to look up at the Bureau of Records and Deeds, and if he really had an interest in her house, he could find that record too, so she must go downtown and register the house in her own name.
“I was given the house in the will of an old friend of my family’s,” she said, thinking how one lie leads to another and another and how many she had told and would tell in the future.
Lucy got up from the step, took off her mittens and shook them.
“I can’t seem to help myself,” August said, coming back down the steps, standing next to her. “I’m passionate about information.”
In the clarity of morning light Lucy noticed that the soft crepey beige skin just under his one eye was quivering and then his one eye closed, and conscious that she was looking, he turned his head away from her.
He had a tic. That pleased her. So he must be apprehensive too, cautious with people. Something so small as a tic, but revealing. Lucy thought better of him already.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Obsessional, my mother used to tell me growing up. I get on a subject . . .” his voice trailed off.
Across the street, Zee Mallory was walking down her front steps with a cup of coffee, heading in their direction.
“I’m doing research for a book called Biography of the Outsider which isn’t really a biography but ten stories of distinguished people—outsiders, all of them,” he said. “So I’m always locked up in my house researching with too many books around me and too few people. I live entirely to myself.”
“An academic book?” Lucy asked.
“More general than academic,” he said.
Lucy brushed the snow off her coat.
Did he want her to ask why he was no longer a teacher or would he have told her if he’d wanted her to know. She wasn’t particularly curious about secrets. Reuben had said that about her, finding it surprising, especially in a woman. Perhaps that was because she had her own secrets. Or perhaps her mind was too full of children and Reuben and the imaginary creatures who peopled her books. All her head could hold.
“I’m going in to fix breakfast,” she said, taking Felix’s hand. “We’ll be back to make the snow girl later.”
“I’m looking for a reader,” he said.
But Zee was coming up the front steps.
“Hi, guys,” Zee called. “Such a gorgeous day!”
“It is.” Lucy opened the front door and walked with Felix through the hall into the dining room, glancing out the window as she passed.
August was seated on the top step and Zee, one boot resting on the step where he was sitting, her hand on her hip, her head thrown slightly back, was laughing.
She caught Lucy’s eye and waved.
MAGGIE WAS SITTING on the edge of the kitchen table in jeans and Lucy’s best blouse that Reuben had given her, long-sleeved, billowy at the wrist, and she always wore it for dress.
Some nights when he came to her apartment after the children were sleeping, he’d lock the bedroom door, shut off the light so the room turned luminous with filtered streetlights. He’d slip the blouse off her shoulders, his lips soft against her temple, her eyes, her lips. And then, as if to the rhythm of a soundless song, he’d undress her, sliding the blouse over her hips, unbuttoning her trousers.
“I borrowed your blouse,” Maggie said.
Lucy opened the fridge, her back to Maggie.
“Last night when that man came in the house, I called Uncle Reuben but his wife answered the phone and said he was already in bed. I don’t even know her name.”
“Her name is Elaine,” Lucy said, taking out eggs.
“How come we don’t know her?” Maggie put her feet up on the chair.
“Reuben is my friend and editor. I’ve never met his wife.”
“Not even for dinner?”
“Reuben and I are not that kind of friends.”
“Then I guess Uncle Reuben’s not going to be much use to us now that we live in Washington, is he?”
“Not if we’re in danger of strangers in our kitchen,” Lucy said, trying to be light, “but I doubt we’ll be in that kind of danger, darling, and we weren’t last night.” She cracked the eggs into a bowl. “Bacon?”
“I want bacon,” Felix said.
“Bacon has too much fat,” Maggie said. “And carcinogens.”
“The man you saw last night lives next door and his name is August,” Lucy said. “He’s interested in our house.”
“Well, he’s a creep to walk right in it without knocking.” Maggie picked up Robin Robinson’s photograph from the kitchen table, setting it on the counter against the wall. “You know about carcinogens?”
“I do.”
“And they’re okay for Felix to eat?”
Lucy shrugged, scrambling the eggs, putting two pieces of wheat bread in the toaster and pouring orange juice, taking the bacon back to the fridge.
“No carcinogens for you today, Felix,” she said. “Too bad.”
“You want to know what Elaine said?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t ever call Uncle Reuben at home.”
“I got his number from information,” Maggie said. “I told Elaine that I was your daughter and we had an emergency and she said she was sorry to hear about it but Reuben didn’t take professional calls at home and she hung up before I even had a chance to say this wasn’t a professional call.”
Nine o’clock, a Saturday morning. Occ
asionally Reuben worked in the office on Saturday. Maybe August, still on the front porch with Zee Mallory, would let her use his phone. She didn’t want to call Reuben in front of the children and the phones upstairs had not yet been installed.
“I’ll be right back,” she said to Maggie, and thought to add, Please take off my favorite blouse and put it back in my closet. Which she knew she should have said but didn’t.
“Don’t bother with August. Use my phone,” Zee said. “No problem at all. The front door’s open. It’s always open. Just don’t let Onion, the cat, out.”
The sun was moving overhead, the snow had stopped, and cars were sliding along the street. She crossed carefully in order not to fall.
“You know,” Zee said, coming up behind Lucy, “I’m sure August has a phone but none of us has ever been inside his house as far as I know. He has a trunkload of secrets. That’s what we all think. You probably already know he was denied tenure at the University of Pennsylvania.”
“He told me he was a failed professor,” Lucy said.
“Or a hero. There’s that possibility too,” Zee said, opening the front door, calling upstairs to the boys—Luke, Daniel, I’m back—she headed into the kitchen, Lucy following behind.
“Zelda,” someone, a male, shouted from upstairs, “the goddamn cat got out.”
“Oh dear,” Zee said. “Phone’s in the kitchen. Take your time.”
She rushed past Lucy and out the front door.
THE PHONE IN Reuben’s office rang once and he answered.
“I thought you might be there,” Lucy said when Reuben picked up.
“Lucy!”
He took a deep breath, an exasperated breath that signaled irritation.
“You know what happened last night?” he asked.
“Maggie called information for your number. A stranger was in our kitchen in the middle of the night.”
“I am in New York, Lucy. There’s nothing I could have done about a stranger in your kitchen,” Reuben said.
He was still talking when Lucy replaced the receiver and walked through the Mallorys’ kitchen and out the front door just as Zee, holding a fat yellow tabby with his back claws exposed, was coming in the door.
“The call was long-distance,” Lucy said, “but short.”
“Never mind,” Zee said. “Come over anytime and bring Maggie. Use the phone. Have a cup of coffee. The door is always open.”
Six
THE DAYS, EVEN the dark days of late February and the beginning of March, were almost agreeable to Lucy. August Russ would arrive at the back door with his manuscript around nine, shortly after Maggie left by the front door for school to meet Maeve at the Sewalls’ house and walk arm in arm with her down Witchita Avenue.
Maggie was given to long periods of staring out the kitchen window at nothing in particular, or lying on her bed on her back, her legs against the wall looking at the ceiling, occasionally short with Lucy. Some days, she didn’t talk at all except to Felix.
“Are you missing New York?” Lucy asked.
Maggie shook her head. “I love Witchita Hills,” she said. “I love everything here but this house and the people in it except Felix.”
Normal behavior, Reuben had said to Lucy. She’s just the age for trouble with her mother.
Mornings after Maggie left for school, August would sit at the kitchen table while Lucy made Felix’s breakfast and washed up the dishes, started the laundry for the day, dropped Felix off at play school, and then she’d sit down across from him sketching in pencil ideas for Vermillion the Three-Toed Sloth while he talked his book out loud to her.
“I thought you meant you needed a readership,” Lucy had said to him the first morning.
“A listenership is more like it. I need to talk out what I’m thinking.”
The particular morning of the fifteenth of March, August was in especially high spirits—Lucy remembered the date later because that early morning Adam Mallory had slammed his car into the empty passenger side of Miles Robinson’s new Toyota station wagon as Miles was on his way back home from the market with milk.
She didn’t hear the crash but August arrived late that morning to tell her.
“The Ides of March have come,” he called in his rolling baritone as he came in the back door. “Ay . . . but not gone. Did you hear the crash?”
“I didn’t. I must have been doing the laundry. Who crashed?”
She poured August a cup of coffee.
“Adam Mallory. He blamed it on President Nixon and the news that Nixon is reinstating the death penalty. Adam was so furious that he failed to check his rear-vision mirror coming out of his driveway this morning and shot back in reverse straight into the passenger side of Miles Robinson’s car.”
“Sorry, man,” Adam had said to Miles according to August, “but the goddamn president of the United States is a criminal and should be hanged in a public forum.”
Miles had shrugged.
“No problem with that except to remind you that the body-work bill for the Toyota will be delivered to your address.” And Miles headed up the hill with the milk.
After August arrived, Zee Mallory rushed over, knocking on the front door with her tiny fists. She apologized to Lucy for the commotion after the crash, retelling the scene again and again to the neighbors.
“Adam just takes the news too seriously,” Zee said, reporting the incident in detail. “I worry sometimes, especially now—these damaged vets out of Viet Nam and we’ve lost the war there and Adam’s such a darling man.”
And then she headed down the steps and across the yard to August’s house to deliver the same news.
“Zee?” Lucy called.
She looked up.
“August is here having coffee. Would you like to come in?”
“Oh no,” Zee said too quickly. “Never mind. Not at all. I’m in a rush. Tell August hi.”
And she dashed across the street, hopped into the driver’s seat of her van as if she had suddenly forgotten an appointment.
IT WAS WARM for March, not warm enough for the shorts which August was wearing with sandals and his University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt, standing with the manuscript spread out on the kitchen table when Lucy came back.
“That was Zee.”
“I heard her voice.” He was leaning over the manuscript with a pencil making some notes. “Are you becoming friends?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw Zee walking with Maggie to school today before the accident when I picked up the paper on my porch.”
“Maggie always walks with Maeve,” Lucy said, wondering was Maeve sick this morning and should she call Lane.
“Maeve wasn’t with her.”
She slid into the chair opposite him, her mind spinning.
She would ask Maggie about that when she came home from school, ask her why had she walked to school with Zee and where was Maeve. It was nothing really, she told herself, nothing to be concerned about. Nevertheless.
The picture in her mind’s eye was Zee Mallory, a little taller than Maggie but small, reaching down to take her daughter’s hand, Lucy’s only daughter and why would Zee have an interest in someone else’s child. Was this jealousy sneaking in, Lucy wondered, something she had never known before. Not even with Elaine.
Holding hands had been her favorite thing with Maggie, just walking down the streets of the Village holding her soft or mittened hand like a treasure resting in her palm.
She couldn’t bear the thought of Maggie’s hand in Zee’s.
“Were they holding hands?” Lucy asked August in spite of herself.
“I was too far away to see.” He lifted his head. “You don’t like her, do you?”
“I don’t trust her,” Lucy said.
“Oh that,” August said. “Trust.”
The word hung in the air between them, a life of its own.
Lucy opened her sketch pad. She would draw Vermillion with his detaching heart, she thought. Poor complicated Vermil
lion, so slow and witless. He loved too much. He dreamed that he could swallow Violet, the cerulean blue bird—cerulean, Lucy liked the sound of it—swallow her whole so she would never leave him.
Vermillion’s little boomerang heart flew out of the top of his head, wings flapping, into the sky, she wrote at the bottom of the page.
She was always glad to see August, relieved morning after morning, that he was there in her house with his pages, his rumpled hair and wire-rimmed half glasses perched on his nose so he could see her over the top of them.
“I’ve been thinking about the hypothalamus,” he was saying, examining the pages of his manuscript. “Did you know about the thermometer in our brains—a tiny, sensitive gland called the hypothalamus that sounds an alarm when something dangerous crosses our path.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Lucy was sketching Vermillion and his detached heart whipping above his sloth head hoping to obliterate the image of Zee and Maggie walking down Witchita Avenue maybe holding hands.
“When I started this book—well I actually started it while I was still at Penn before I came up for tenure and was denied—but I’ve always been interested in the outsider and how the outsider is feared in spite of the fact that we’re all outsiders in America or once were.” He got up from his chair, pacing as he often did when he was talking. “I’ve been thinking how difference creates a sense of shame and shame leads to deceit. Am I making sense?”
Lucy was listening at a remove, pleased by the sound of his voice, by the way the top of his head looked when he was reading his manuscript so only the mass of golden brown ruffled hair was visible and his large hands holding the paper. But it never occurred to her that August Russ, a scholar of American culture with a certain turn of mind, had anything in particular to say to Lucy.
“The outsider in American culture. That’s the basis for my thesis.”
Something personal had slipped into August’s conversation that Lucy couldn’t identify. Did he expect more from her than simply listening, which she had been doing morning after morning. Was there a request in his demeanor that she mistook for simple conversation. She was suddenly restless.
You Are the Love of My Life Page 7