You Are the Love of My Life

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To Vermont by plane to pick up Maggie,” she said. “You know about what’s happened from Adam, don’t you?”

  “He told me about the car ride with Maggie and that Zee is in the hospital. He wanted you to see this before you arrive at the Children’s Home.” He gave her the envelope. “Their daughter—they have a daughter—lives in the home.”

  Lucy didn’t open the envelope until the plane was headed north and west, flying overland, no water visible, which unaccountably seemed safer to her if the plane were to go down.

  Inside the envelope was a newspaper clipping from the Metro page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, August 3, 1963.

  TODDLER ALMOST DROWNS

  The twelve-month-old child of a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and his wife accidentally fell into a tub of melted ice during a party at her parents’ apartment on Spruce Street in West Philadelphia last night. She was taken to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital listed in critical condition. Police have cited the parents with negligence.

  MAGGIE SAT IN the front seat of the rental car, her legs crossed, her arms folded tight over her chest, looking out the window as the trees whipped by.

  Lucy talked.

  From the moment she picked Maggie up in the driveway of the Children’s Home, claimed her, gripped her daughter’s shoulders, kissed the top of her head, thanked the nurse for taking care of her, the girl, Laura, who said how excited she was to meet Lucy because she’d read her books when she was little—seen the child Miranda from a distance carried by a small man with a red beard—she doesn’t walk or talk—Laura said—but she’s very happy here.

  From the moment she had reached across Maggie sitting in the front seat and pushed down the lock on the passenger side, Lucy talked.

  The plane was empty—only a young man with a broken arm, a student at Dartmouth College who had to do summer school because he flunked physics—got up from his seat and sat down next to mine—Lucy said. I brought a sandwich for you, peanut butter and honey even though I know it isn’t your favorite but I was afraid to bring tunafish that the mayonnaise would spoil and of course it isn’t even hot in Vermont so it wouldn’t have spoiled.

  Maggie put her feet up on the dashboard, put the peanut butter and honey sandwich in the glove compartment, and closed her eyes.

  I have told you that I was twelve when my father died.

  Lucy had decided on the drive from Lebanon to Cavendish that she would tell Maggie about her father. That she would begin there.

  Do you want me to tell you about that? About his dying?

  Sure, Maggie said, her eyes still closed.

  It was June 1951, a Saturday, and my father was painting the house he rented as an income property and maybe someday he planned to live in it or not. Although he probably would have gone back to Chicago which was his home if he hadn’t died but he did die and I was the one who discovered him in the basement of that house where we now live.

  She glanced at Maggie, who gave no evidence of a reaction.

  My mother and I had been shopping for sleepaway camp clothes for me but we didn’t call it sleep away then—you either went to camp or stayed at home and if you went to camp you slept there without your parents which is what I did starting at nine years old. But that day, my mother decided that we should stop at the rental house to remind my father that he had to be home early for dinner with friends and so she parked behind his car and asked me to go into the house to remind him about a dinner party but I knew that my father did not ever forget his obligations and I should have known that it wasn’t a good idea for me to go into the house because something could have happened in there.

  Maggie was looking at her.

  I checked for my father in every room of the house and finally I went to the basement and he was there and he had died.

  Lucy was lost. There was a turn to Lebanon she had missed, maybe a few miles earlier, and she made a left into a driveway on the two-lane road and set off in the opposite direction.

  “I know about your father,” Maggie said finally, looking out the window. “He killed himself because he was important in the government and he was caught having sex with a man.”

  Lucy held her breath.

  “I read about it in August’s book.”

  Lucy was driving too fast. She checked the speedometer. It was essential that she keep her wits about her.

  “Did you know it was your grandfather when you read the pages in August’s book?”

  “No,” Maggie said. “Just now I knew when you told me about your father dying. I put it together.”

  Lucy adjusted herself in the seat, checked the rearview mirror, a truck behind her too close the way trucks tend to be impatient on country roads. She slowed way down just in case a deer or rabbit or raccoon happened to cross the road and she would need to stop quickly and the truck could smash into the back of her small rental.

  “I am sorry for keeping secrets or telling lies or however these stories might seem to you,” she said. “I should always have told you the truth and did not.”

  Maggie didn’t move, her head turned slightly towards the passing road, a surprising calm about her body.

  At the small airport, Lucy turned in the car and they had to run to catch the plane, which was crowded, all the seats full, Maggie in the second-row aisle seat, Lucy in the back. Weather coming in, the stewardess said. The pilot wanted to take off while he could get out.

  When they landed in Washington, Maggie waited at her seat, getting in line behind her mother to deplane.

  “We’ll take a cab,” Lucy said leading the way to Taxis, settling into a yellow cab. Witchita Hills at the north end of Connecticut Avenue, she said, and gave him the address.

  Their shoulders touched and Lucy ached to take Maggie’s hand but she didn’t. The driver swung around the circles, over Memorial Bridge coming up on the back of the Lincoln Memorial and onto Rock Creek Parkway.

  “Your name was Lucy Baldwin, right?” Maggie asked finally.

  “It was.”

  “So I would be Maggie Baldwin if you had done everything the same and had me with the man I don’t know who is my father.”

  “I suppose that’s right if that’s the way things had gone.”

  “I like the name Painter better.”

  It was coming on dusk and the parkway was crowded, a warm but not too hot Saturday in Washington, cyclists on the path that ran along the creek, the creek dried out with summer, the trees a thick umbrella over the road, a melody of cicadas through the open window, warm wind on their faces.

  Nineteen

  REUBEN FRANK WAS coming on the Sunday night of Labor Day weekend. When he called her the morning in late July after he returned to his office from the Cape to say he had to wait until Labor Day weekend, Lucy was confident that he would come.

  She had left him no choice.

  That first night after a late dinner Maggie went upstairs to her room, put on her nightgown, and climbed into bed.

  “Could you leave my door open,” she asked, “and the light on in the hall?”

  On Sunday, she had stayed in bed all day. Lucy brought her trays of food to share with Felix, who off and on through the day climbed into bed with her.

  “If you’d like to talk . . .” Lucy said on Sunday night.

  “I wouldn’t,” Maggie said.

  She was simply quiet and still, propped up against the headboard, her arms dropped to her side staring out the window. Occasionally Felix climbed into her bed, leaned against the headboard.

  “Do you still like Zee even though she kidnapped you?” he asked her.

  “She didn’t kidnap me, Felix.”

  “Well that’s what Teddy said because that’s what his mother, Lane, said to him.”

  “I wanted to go with Zee to Vermont.”

  Lane had called to say that the Mallory family would not be back to Washington until Zee was released from the hospital in
Hanover. The boys would go to public school in town for a couple of months and Adam had taken a leave of absence from his job. The plan was they’d all return in late autumn.

  “They’re calling it a nervous breakdown,” Lane said, “but Will says there’s no such thing. What she had was a psychotic breakdown, he says, but what’s the difference.”

  Later she called to ask if Maggie had said anything about what happened on the trip.

  “Nothing,” Lucy said. “She seems exhausted.”

  “I’m sure she was terrified.”

  “Were you frightened?” Lucy asked Maggie on her second day back.

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said.

  Sunday it rained, a thin, warm rain that by night had gotten prickly cold on the skin, continuing into a dark gray Monday morning when Reuben called from New York as planned.

  MAGGIE SIMPLY STOPPED. She didn’t think about Zee Mallory or what had gone on in the car between Washington and Cavendish or why she had wanted to leave home in the first place. She didn’t read or talk or see her friends, not even Maeve, except occasionally she talked to Felix when he crawled into bed and wrapped his body around her.

  She didn’t feel anything. That was the worst of it. Nothing at all.

  She wanted something to hurt, to cause her physical pain.

  Then gradually through the month of August, the compulsion to sit on her bed in her room and stare out the window drifted away and what remained was absence.

  ON THE SUNDAY before Labor Day, Lucy picked Reuben up at Union Station. Driving down Massachusetts Avenue, the windows up, hot wind whipping her hair, warming her cheeks. She felt a new self emerging. She was settled and at ease, springs of energy lifting her out of her seat, into the air, and airborne she had a sense of flying. She had finished Vermillion the Three-Toed Sloth the night before, washed her hair, and climbed into bed late after midnight, falling immediately to sleep.

  Reuben had taken the noon train to Washington and was standing on the curb in front of the station wearing khakis and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, strap sandals, his hair thinning. He had lost more weight and was pencil-thin and pale. He didn’t kiss her when he climbed into the car. She didn’t expect it.

  “I’ve got to be back in New York tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” Lucy said.

  He put his feet up on the dashboard of her old VW van, rolled down the window, and lit a cigarette, holding the hand with the cigarette out the window.

  “So do you have a plan for this?”

  “I see a plan in my mind.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “We go home. I have told Maggie and Felix that you’re coming to visit and that you’ll only be able to stay for a short time?”

  “And what do you have in mind for that short time.”

  “You talk to them this afternoon, just ordinary what’s going on in your life kind of talk, go somewhere while I’m cooking, and then we eat dinner and then we go, maybe to my studio or the living room. We could even talk at dinner.”

  “You know I think this is a terrible idea,” he said, a catch in his voice. “The wrong idea. The wrong plan.”

  “We have no choice.”

  “How much are you telling them?”

  “The simple truth. Who you are and who I am.”

  “And all about your father?”

  “Maggie already knows about my father and Felix is too young.”

  “And this makes sense, Lucy?”

  She turned into the Safeway and pulled up to a parking spot.

  “I was going to get fish but maybe I’ll get a steak because you’ve lost so much weight you look bloodless.” She turned off the engine. “Steak and corn and salad and chocolate sundaes. Okay?”

  When she came back to the car, Reuben had closed his eyes, his head back, his arm slung across his brow.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” he said.

  “You can, Reuben.”

  “So...” Reuben said, flicking the cigarette into the street, closing the car window to keep out the noise of traffic. “How exactly do we begin?”

  “With the story of what happened.”

  “Something like Remember Uncle Reuben?” he said, his tone raw and caustic. “Well good old Uncle Reuben is kaput.”

  “No jokes,” Lucy said.

  “I don’t feel exactly jokey, Lucy.”

  “Did you tell Elaine?”

  “I didn’t happen to mention it to her,” he said. “I certainly can’t imagine that conversation.”

  “I’ll go first then. I’ll say what happened to me,” Lucy said. “I’ll tell them I met you when I was very young and I fell in love with you but you were already married and I got pregnant and then I got pregnant again and you couldn’t get unmarried but I still was in love with you. And so we concealed the fact that you are their father in order to protect people’s feelings like Elaine’s and Nell’s. We were wrong to do that and now we can’t pretend any longer.”

  “It won’t make a bit of sense to Felix,” Reuben said, his voice heavy with weariness.

  “Don’t you think children take in only what they can understand?”

  “I don’t.”

  “At least he’ll understand that you are his father and now he has one.”

  Lucy stopped at the curb in front of her house. Maggie and Felix were sitting halfway down the front steps, side by side, Felix waving and waving.

  “There they are, so happy to see you. At least Felix is.”

  Reuben opened the car door.

  Lucy unpacked the groceries, shucked the corn, poured a glass of wine for herself, a beer for Reuben. They sat around the kitchen while Lucy cooked. A normal afternoon as if Reuben had been away on a trip and just returned after a long time.

  After dinner, they took a walk, Reuben and Maggie and Felix, while Lucy did the dishes. It was still early, not even dusk, the smoke and smell of barbecue from the neighborhood circling up into the trees, the air soft on the skin.

  “When we get back,” Reuben said to Lucy as they left. “Okay?”

  “What happens when we get back?” Felix asked.

  “Ice cream sundaes,” Lucy said.

  THEY ENDED UP on the third floor in Lucy’s studio, Reuben bending over the Vermillion drawings spread out on the table.

  “This is not what I thought it would be, Lucy,” he said at the first illustration of Vermillion hanging by his tail from a tree, face out, his large round eyes blank, his mouth parted just slightly, a stillness about him.

  “Vermillion is dead,” Felix said. “But don’t worry because Violet is going to make him alive if you keep reading.”

  “Reading?” Reuben asked. “But there are no words to read in this book, isn’t that right, Lucy?”

  “No words,” she said.

  Maggie had turned around and was leaning against the window.

  “Are we really up here to talk about Mama’s book?” Maggie asked. “It’s like a tornado is about to happen in this room and we’re having a conversation about a dead sloth.”

  “No. We’re here to talk to you,” Lucy said. “Reuben and I want to talk to you together.”

  “I don’t think I want to talk,” Maggie said.

  “I’ll talk.” Felix slid down from the stool.

  “We’ll talk first,” Lucy said, and she started to tell them the story that she’d planned when Reuben interrupted.

  “What I have to say is for you, Maggie, less for Felix because it will be hard for him to understand at three years old, but I think you will.”

  He slid down to the floor, his back against the table, Felix on Lucy’s lap, Lucy’s blood beating in her temples.

  “I was wondering if you have ever felt nothing at all, as if the engine inside of you fell silent and you were a vacant house of a body with nothing going on?”

  “Maybe,” Maggie shrugged.

  “That is how I feel when I leave yo
u kids or I think about you or I remember you when you were born because I was there when you were born, or . . .” He leaned his forehead against his closed fist.

  “I’ll talk,” Lucy said, not trusting Reuben to tell the right story, and she started again.

  “I want to say it, Lucy,” Reuben said. “I want to be the one to say it.”

  The studio was silent. Felix shut his eyes tight, pressed his face into Lucy’s shoulder.

  Reuben got up, pacing. He pressed his shoulder against the wall of the studio, standing across the room from them.

  “You have wanted to know who your father is. I know you have, Maggie,” he began.

  “I almost never think about it,” Maggie said.

  “Well, I am him,” Reuben said, his voice cracking. “I am your father. That is who I am.”

  He was standing at the top of the stairs and Lucy thought for a moment that he might bolt just then but he didn’t. He didn’t move or take his eyes off Maggie.

  “So, I guess we finished the talk, Uncle Reuben,” Maggie said, walking from the window across the room, passing Reuben at a purposeful distance, heading towards the stairs.

  Halfway down the steps, she looked back at Reuben, her head cocked, a wry smile.

  “That must be why I have red hair.”

  And she turned quickly, hurrying down, jumping the last two steps

  Lucy put the pages of Vermillion on a shelf and started towards the stairs.

  “So?” Reuben shook his head.

  She turned out the light and followed him downstairs, through the closet into her room and out, past Maggie’s room, where she was drawing Felix a story.

  “What next?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said.

  “I’m headed back to the hotel and home tomorrow early.”

  “Do you want a ride to the hotel?”

  “I’ll walk,” Reuben said. “A long walk isn’t the worst thing after this day.”

  In the hall, he stopped at the photograph of him on the Brooklyn Bridge hanging next to the front door with new glass.

  “I am a lot thinner than I was in this picture,” he said, touching the bottom of the frame to level it against the wall. He opened the front door.