You Are the Love of My Life

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “Maybe, but he didn’t want to marry her so I guess it wasn’t much of a crush,” Maggie said, and just saying out loud what was in her mind made her suddenly feel sick.

  “She’s pretty, Maggie. Even my old-fashioned stuffy dad has crushes, like he has a little one on your mother. He says That Lucy is crazy cute.”

  “Disgusting.”

  “That’s what my mom says,” Maeve said. “Dis-gust-ing like she’s jealous, which she probably is.”

  Zee sat down between Lane and Josie on the top step of the porch, their husbands gathered around the grill with Adam.

  “Have you noticed Miles Robinson lately?” she asked.

  “He’s tense,” Lane said. “But he always seems tense and now that he’s doing the Watergate thing, he has a reason to be.”

  “I don’t mean Watergate,” Zee said. “It’s just odd but this is the third time I’ve seen him go over to Lucy’s house without Robin.”

  “I haven’t seen him there before, but he’s there now,” Josie said. “I watched him walk up the steps behind her.”

  “I didn’t know they were friends,” Lane said. “It doesn’t make sense that they would be, but who knows with Lucy.” She draped her arm around Zee’s shoulder. “He’s so uncomfortable with women it’s like talking to a plate glass window.”

  “Well, Lucy is imaginative and arty,” Zee said breezily. “Maybe she brings him out of his shell.”

  “What are you thinking, Zee?” Josie asked.

  “Nothing, just noting that it’s unusual. Zip, zip.” She pretended to zip up her lips. “Maybe Lucy has a way about her that makes a man like Miles comfortable.”

  “I do know one thing,” Lane said. “He wants another child.”

  “I know that too,” Zee said. “And Robin is done with babies.”

  “That isn’t exactly answering your question about what he’s doing at Lucy’s house,” Josie said.

  “I don’t have a question.” Zee hopped up, collecting plates. “Just a quick observation. Nothing worth noting.”

  In the kitchen, she stood at the sink looking out at the backyard where the beds of flowers were in full and spectacular bloom before the heavy heat of summer sucked the life out of them. She loved this moment of June in Washington, the purple lilacs spraying their perfume as far as the open kitchen window.

  “Losing your grip, Zelda?” Adam asked, coming up behind her, his hands in the sink, washing off the grease.

  “My grip?”

  “Never mind,” he said wiping his hands on his shorts. “I just came in to get another beer.”

  “What do you mean, Adam?”

  “Just an observation,” he said. “I’ve known you for a very long time.”

  In the coming dusk, the shadows of evening falling across the kitchen window, Zee could make out her reflection and what she saw was her face as a young woman. Still vibrant, even beautiful. She wanted to believe that.

  What she’d said about Miles and Lucy Painter was deliberate. Planting seeds of trouble as she had done since high school for no reason, and in the case of Miles Robinson without evidence except the unlikeliness of his pursuit of any woman. Nothing about Lucy except what Zee wanted people to think for her own purposes.

  And what were her purposes?

  The ends do not justify the means, her mother used to tell her father about nearly everything. When Zee finally understood what her mother had been saying, she disagreed. Otherwise she would still be in Revere, Michigan, married to a local boy, always pregnant, working half-time at her mother’s jewelry store.

  She had never longed for anything in quite the visceral way she longed for Maggie Painter, this replication of her hopes and dreams, this child of her heart. She was willing to do anything.

  “Zee.” Maggie burst into the kitchen. “Why is Miles Robinson at my house?”

  “Probably visiting, don’t you think?”

  “Lane and Josie were outside talking about it as if there were something wrong in his being there.”

  “Oh no, Maggie. Nothing wrong about it at all. I’m sure they didn’t mean what you might be thinking.”

  She ran her hand across Maggie’s cheek, casually.

  “I’m thinking nothing,” Maggie said coldly, and she headed out the front door, across the street and up the front steps to her house.

  Zee’s heart sank.

  “What did you say to Maggie?” she asked Lane as she came into the kitchen with a stack of plates.

  “I’m afraid Josie and I took your observation too far, Zee, and Maggie overheard us suggesting that something was happening between Miles and Lucy.”

  “I meant absolutely nothing by it.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry but it did honestly sound as if you were implying—”

  “I was not.”

  In a heat of anger, Zee took the keys to the van from the kitchen drawer, got in and backed out of the driveway.

  “Is something the matter?” Josie called.

  “Nothing,” Zee called through the open window. “Make yourselves at home.”

  She drove out of Witchita Hills, across Connecticut Avenue, and parked in the shadows across from Lafayette School.

  Adam was right. Something was certainly the matter with her. If she lost Maggie, she wanted to die. That was how she felt.

  MAGGIE SLAMMED HER bedroom door and sat down at the end of her bed with the light off. The party at the Mallorys’ seemed to be winding down. Josie was walking across the yard with Rufus, and Zee was backing out of the driveway, heading towards Connecticut Avenue.

  She pulled her knees up under her chin and burrowed her face in the space between them.

  Just half an hour ago, she had loved Zelda Mallory beyond all measure and hated her mother. Now she hated her mother and Zelda Mallory. She felt terrible about her feelings and not terrible. She wanted to move away from Lucy’s house, far, far away, and she wanted to move into the Mallorys’ house across the street.

  It was too much. The frustration and sadness, the carefully constructed entrapments that adults design to capture children, the sense of failure that had accompanied every moment of her life since she was born without a father.

  Maggie got out of bed, remembering the pages she had pulled out of August’s manuscript. The lights were out in her room but the streetlights outside her window illuminated the bookcase, and kneeling beside it, she took out the social studies book.

  In the long summer afternoons sitting in Zee’s kitchen while she cooked dinner, she had almost forgotten about the pages she had hidden in her textbook.

  LUCY SAW MILES in the light from the streetlamp, walking down Witchita from his house, in shorts and a T-shirt. He stopped on the sidewalk in front of the Sewalls’ where Will Sewall was wrestling with the beagle trying to put his leash on. And they spoke, Will’s hand on Miles’ shoulder.

  She was in her studio. Felix was sleeping, Maggie’s door locked, her light on, and Lucy was standing by the window.

  A restlessness about the evening as if the heat itself were impatient.

  Dying had been on Lucy’s mind, not in an actual sense and she wasn’t fearful about it. Just a sense she had of something happening. Once on a walk in Santa Fe, she had found a snakeskin on the path behind her house—not a large snake and the skin itself was dull in color and brittle. But she wondered about the color of the snake which had emerged from that reptilian refuse. Was it more brilliant than the one he’d left behind, more intricate in design?

  Miles was knocking at the front door. She had watched him walk up the street, knowing he was coming to see her but not rushing to answer the door.

  “Miles Robinson is here, Mother,” Maggie called from behind her closed bedroom door. “You might want to answer the door.”

  “I didn’t know if you’d be coming back,” Lucy said, opening the front door.

  “Apparently I left my wallet on your kitchen table.”

  “I must not have seen it.”

  “I was
distracted when I left but I’m sure it’s here.”

  And there it was when Lucy turned on the light in the kitchen, as if he’d left it intentionally on the seat where he had been sitting.

  “Maybe I’ll stay for a few minutes, if that’s okay,” he said, sitting down at the table.

  “I’d like that.” Lucy slipped into a chair across from him.

  “You probably think it’s odd, my dropping by when I’m not a casual person . . .”

  “It’s perfectly fine,” Lucy said. “August used to drop by—just come right in without asking. I liked that.”

  “August always struck me as a recluse. I hardly know him except that the women are nuts about him, and for no reason that I can see.” He shrugged, reaching over for a plum in the bowl of fruit on the kitchen table.

  “Mind?” he asked.

  “It’s surprising to me how little we know about one another,” he went on. “Even living in the same house day and night as I do with Robin. Like August. Who could imagine?”

  “He wanted me to listen to his book.”

  “Instead of reading it.”

  “I think he wanted to hear it in his own voice,” Lucy said, conscious that Maggie had opened her bedroom door, that she might be headed downstairs. And then what? Maggie was not in the humor for visitors.

  “Well, I suppose I am asking you to listen too.” Miles stood, tossed the plum pit in the trash, and leaned against the cabinets.

  A shiver went through Lucy, a flutter of butterflies in her stomach.

  “If Maggie comes downstairs in a bad humor, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  They stopped talking to listen, Lucy walking to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Maggie?”

  “I just called Uncle Reuben from your studio phone,” she said.

  Lucy stiffened.

  “And what did he say?”

  “I wanted him to know that Mr. Robinson was here, in case he was interested. No problem, is what he said.”

  Lucy heard her bare feet slap across the wooden floor in the hall, her bedroom door slam and click.

  “Whew!” she said, sitting down.

  “Who is Uncle Reuben?”

  “My editor,” she said. “I doubt Maggie really called him, but if she did, I’m sure his wife was furious to hear from her at almost midnight.”

  “Young girls are complicated.”

  “I don’t know what Maggie was trying to provoke,” Lucy said. “But provoke is what she does.”

  “Sara too and Maeve Sewall. I was just talking to Will. You probably know he’s been appointed a psychiatric advisor to the White House because of the concern about Nixon’s mental health.”

  “I heard that, actually from Maggie, so it must have come from Maeve.”

  “Will said it’s tricky how much the tension of Watergate is contributing to the president’s erratic behavior, but Nixon was problematic before.”

  “Is Nixon what you wanted to talk to me about?” she asked, concerned that any moment Maggie would come downstairs. “I hardly ever listen to the news and we don’t have a television. I’m afraid I have nothing to say about Watergate.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because I’ve come about myself.”

  She folded her arms on the table, her eye on the clock above the stove.

  “I wonder if you’ve heard anything about Robin from the other women?”

  “What might I have heard?” Lucy shrugged. “I’m not very close to these women, certainly not a confidante.”

  “I know that but I thought some gossip might have come your way.”

  “Only from Maggie and nothing about Robin.”

  “Then I’ll tell you what I think has happened and I’m asking you because that group seems to operate as a team under Zee’s direction and I don’t want to make a federal case of this,” he said. “And somehow I trust you, maybe because you’re an outsider in this knitting circle of Witchita Hills.”

  Leaning across the table, his hands folded tight together, he told Lucy what he had come to ask her about.

  He had wanted another baby for a long time but Robin thought another child would be too much for her. And then, sometime in late October, she agreed but she didn’t get pregnant. He asked if she’d be willing to see a fertility doctor and she said yes in a year if nothing happened. By March, two months into this year, Miles knew she was pregnant, a little mound above the pubic bone, her breasts—well, you know what happens. By June, she still hadn’t mentioned the pregnancy and finally just before the Fourth of July, he asked her and she replied, No, sadly. She wasn’t pregnant.

  “I knew she was lying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m quite sure she had an abortion,” he said.

  “I’m not up to date on things like this and I don’t have a talky relationship with other women.”

  “I feel the need to find out the truth.”

  “You’re a lawyer.”

  He shrugged. “I’m a husband. Wouldn’t you want to know in my place?”

  “I really don’t know what I think,” Lucy said. “There are always secrets between people. Necessary secrets and lies.”

  She stood up, pulled the chair away from the table.

  “I don’t understand what you mean by necessary. But I’m part of an investigation of a public lie and possibly the victim of a private one.” There was a tremor in his voice, a high tenor voice. “A lie can be dangerous between people.”

  And then without warning, nothing in the air to alert Lucy, he got up from his chair, took hold of Lucy’s waist, and pulled her towards him, his hand on the side of her face, tilting her chin.

  And he kissed her, his lips soft, his tongue along the inside of her cheek, not a long kiss but urgent.

  “Thank you, Lucy,” he said, and put his wallet in the pocket of his shorts. “Thank you for listening.”

  She turned off the kitchen light and stood in the darkness, watching as he opened the door and walked onto the porch without looking back.

  Somewhere in the neighborhood, a person looking casually out the window would see Miles Robinson leaving her house, would check the time—11:15, and make assumptions.

  How had that happened? she asked herself.

  Maggie’s light still shone under the door, a tape of the Beatles playing but not loud, and Lucy could hear the rustling of papers.

  Overcome with weariness, she kicked off her shoes and climbed fully dressed into the bed next to Felix, rolling him on his side, Miles’ kiss still alive in her mouth.

  MAGGIE PROPPED UP her pillows, turned on the light next to her bed, and opened the pages of August’s manuscript.

  Chapter 9:

  SAMUEL BALDWIN: AGAINST THE GRAIN

  On the 21st of June, 1951, Samuel Baldwin, special assistant to President Truman, was found hanged in the basement of an investment property he owned with his wife on Witchita Avenue in the Witchita Hills section of northwest Washington, D.C. On the previous Thursday evening, Mr. Baldwin was arrested in the men’s room of the YMCA by an off-duty policeman. He was in the act of sexual intercourse with a former military officer in the United States Army, an act which is still as I am writing this, in the spring of 1973, considered illegal under the Constitution of the United States.

  On Sunday morning following the event, Mr. Baldwin called President Truman to offer his resignation. He was aware that news of the incident and his arrest would appear in detail the following morning in newspapers all over the country.

  At the time of his death, he had been a senior advisor to the president appointed following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American military. According to the obituaries, he was an esteemed lawyer in Chicago with an impeccable professional record known for his gentle manner, dry wit, and integrity. He leaves his wife and twelve-year-old daughter, who live in the Capitol Hill section of Washington, D.C.

  Maggie put down the pages.

  Th
at a man had committed suicide in a house on Witchita Avenue after he was arrested for having sexual intercourse with another man was of particular interest to Maggie. She was not interested in the man himself but she would like to know the house in which it had happened. Sexual intercourse between men intrigued her. She couldn’t imagine the particulars.

  The story lingered in her mind and she couldn’t sleep. Or else she couldn’t sleep because of Zee and Miles Robinson. She turned out the light and lay against her pillow staring into the darkness. The last time she remembered looking at the alarm clock beside her bed, it was 3 a.m.

  Sixteen

  LUCY WOKE UP in darkness at the other end of the bed, tangled in her sheets, her legs locked together, her thoughts bustling around the highways of her brain. It had been days since she had spoken to Reuben, at least since he’d gone to Cape Cod with Elaine and Nell on vacation. Communication will be minimal, he’d said. They were traveling with other couples, a house party, and Lucy had braced for that separation. But something was different which she couldn’t name. It didn’t have to do with Reuben, predictable Reuben, but with her.

  Mostly these mornings she woke up thinking about Miles Robinson. Not with longing. What had happened between them had nothing to do with love or even desire. Miles was like Fervid P. Drainpipe, a sweet, formal man without the language for connection, lost in his work for lack of knowing how to live in the world. He had kissed Lucy because he didn’t know another way to thank her for listening to him or because he was thinking of kissing her and surprised himself by doing it or because he was lonely at home.

  But for Lucy, Miles’ kiss had been a promissory note.

  Lying on his back, on his pillow at the right end of the bed, Felix was looking at her.

  “How come you’re sleeping at the other end of the bed, Mama?” he was asking when they heard a terrifying scream and leapt from the bed, rushing to Maggie’s room.

  Maggie woke up in the dark to a commotion of voices in the front yard of the Sewalls’ house.

  “I have to leave now!” Will Sewall shouted at Maeve leaning out of the open window of her bedroom.

  “Something awful has happened,” Maeve shouted.