Love Walked In (24 page)

It
was the look on Clare’s face that decided it for me, that set the whole plan piecing itself together in my head like a jigsaw puzzle—a child’s jigsaw puzzle, really, because the pieces were large and simple, although the final picture they made took my breath away.

Rapt. When Clare stood in my family’s kitchen that first day, Clare was rapt, rapturous, enraptured. Clare was a flesh-and-blood girl, and her story was no fairy tale, but she got bewitched all the same—bewildered, too, probably—and in about two blinks of her brown eyes. But if those eyes were telling the truth, and they always did, she wasn’t bothered a bit.

It has a certain allure, my family home, I can’t deny that. (In recent months, for example, it had lured Cam and Toby right back into it “temporarily,” although they had no discernible plans to leave.) A scrubbed, oak-y, apples-in-a-blue-porcelain-bowl variety of allure that is no less alluring than any other variety. More alluring, if you were Clare at that particular moment in her life. At that particular moment in her life, what reflected off the copper pans hanging from their rack and the clean, tile counters and the faces of my family was hearth light, home light, the very light of comfort and joy, and Clare fell before it, dazzled.

I’d expected her reaction. I wanted it. It’s why we came. All the same, as I watched Clare enter the merry, laughing, genuinely goodhearted tumble of humanity that is my family fold, I wanted to tell her, “Love it, honey, but don’t love it too much.”

I know how that sounds, but I’m not referring to the individual people, who are certainly lovable and much beloved. Beloved by me, in fact, much. As I live, I love them. Believe that. It’s the package, really, that I’m talking about. The allegorical Happy Family—robustly happy, as polished and fully realized as a pearl. Our family is as happy as Martin was debonair: unassailably, impenetrably, consummately. We are a pretty picture hung on the gleaming nail of my mother, who is the most consummate one of all, and carved into our pretty frame are the words:
DON’T ROCK THE BOAT
.

But sometimes, a boat needs to rock; a boat needs to head straight for the heart of a storm and come out on the other side, weather-beaten but with flags flying. Pictures. Boats. Do I mix my metaphors? Very well, then, I mix my metaphors. Sometimes, when you’re in a tight spot, only a mixed metaphor will do.

To put it another way, in my family I have comrades—hearty and loyal—when what I need are intimates, and I’ve never figured out how to get us all to make the switch. I’ve never found a way in.

But sometimes souls need still waters, and just now, Clare had a soul like that. Clare, my Clare, she needed an unrockable boat. She deserved one.

But
back to my plan. If it began its forming, as I said, after I took one glance at Clare’s bewitched and shining face, then the last piece of it clicked into place the next day, at Mrs. Goldberg’s funeral. (If you feel my story is heavy with funerals, downright cluttered with them, trust me when I say that this is the last one you’ll get.)

I sat between my father and Toby in the black dress that was making its second appearance in the space of a week and which I planned to rip from my body and burn to cinders the first chance I got, and I listened to person after person tell stories about Mrs. Goldberg’s life. I even told one myself. For an old lady who wasn’t the least bit sweet, not “sweet old lady” sweet, and who neither was the least bit adorably crusty, who wasn’t an old lady in any of the easy ways people expect and like, Suzette Goldberg was universally loved. Loved for her magnificence and beneficence and brains and humanity, as all of us should live so long to be loved.

I spoke, I listened, and my heart broke, which is to say that it didn’t break at all but became suddenly aware of its own wholeness in such a way that it hurt like hell. Mrs. Goldberg loved me; she’d singled me out. Quite suddenly, I understood that such a woman, in leaving me a house and a houseful of treasures, meant to leave me more. A chance. More than a chance. A challenge. She’d thrown down a gauntlet disguised as a pair of opera gloves. There, Cornelia! What will you do next?

Fight for Clare is what I’d do. Fight like a wolverine to keep her. Become a whirlwind of teeth and claws. Draw blood. Hire a lawyer, go to court, ten courts, if I had to. Fight and win.

Clare would help me. I remembered her that first day in Martin’s apartment, how she’d looked at her father and darted him three true, piercing words, what I know now to be an accusation—no, more than accusation. A verdict, guilty: “She. Was. Sick.” I remembered the cold burn in her eyes. The girl had steel. Besides, Clare was no waif blown by fortune’s breezes, but a heroine, the queen of happy endings, the girl in the novel who ends up living with someone who adores her. Anyone could see that.

And I had the house, Mrs. Goldberg’s gift. I’d hold it up for everyone to see. A home. The word, with all its golden freight of connotation, was there, unmistakable, in the pitch of the roof, the perfume of the lilacs, the wavy glass windows, and the gently sloping lawn.
Enter
, the house breathed from every brick.
Enter and be home.

And I had the family—mine. Irreproachable and glad to help raise their daughter’s adopted child. My Happy Family’s happiness made me crazy, but don’t think I wouldn’t use it. I’d trot them out, one by one, Toby and Cam, red-cheeked and resplendent in lacrosse gear, my sweater-vested father, a healer by trade, and my mother. I’d stick her in a goddamn gingham apron, if a gingham apron were required.

Because that was part of the plan. Coming home. Or leaving home and coming here, to live, if not in the bosom of my family, then just down the road from it. Here, where Clare would run over tended lawns, eat homemade pie, feel safe and settled in her bones, peaceful in her heart, and where her face would shine all the livelong day.

Easy, from your vantage point, to see what the whole plan rested on: the permanent disappearance of a woman Clare loved, a woman whose permanent disappearance I’d never wish for, never ever. As easy a fact for you to see as it was, somehow, for me to put aside, God and everyone else forgive me. God and everyone else, and you. You forgive me too.

Just
before the graveside service (the part of a funeral out of which I usually bow, but this was Mrs. Goldberg; I’d see the thing through to the end), as I stood in the remarkably mild December air, a hand rested on my shoulder, rested and then sent a streak of heat down the entire left side of my body. My eyes traveled from the hand—so sublime, the human hand, such an intricate construction—up the dark brown coat sleeve to the face, the face among faces, the only face. His chin, his teeth in his mouth, the incomparable curve of his cheekbone. My Teo.

Not mine. Not mine. Not mine. Ollie’s. Ollie’s husband, Teo. The single hour in the car with Teo, the hour in which I’d loved him with a joy that was endless had ended. He was Ollie’s again. Ollie’s husband, Teo. Never forget.

Now,
Voyager, Splendor in the Grass, Dr. Zhivago, Roman Holiday
, even
Casablanca
—of course,
Casablanca
. All those films in which the woman doesn’t get her man, those films of yearning unsatisfied, hearts unappeased. You like them; I’ve liked them too. But I’ll tell you what: try belonging body and soul to a man who will never belong to you; see how well you like those films then. “Don’t ask for the moon—we have the stars!” Sure, Bette, but as I stood there in that cemetery quivering under Teo’s touch, my entire being was biting out the words, “Pardon my saying so, but fuck the fucking stars!”

If I sounded bitter, that’s because I was. Bitter and walking around in pain like a woman on fire.

But consider the alternative:
In This Life
, also starring Bette. Bette as a woman named, for utterly unexplained and inscrutable reasons, Stanley, who steals her sister’s husband and sends herself and nearly everyone she knows spiraling into desolation and despair, ruin and wrack, the deepest pit in hell. You don’t have to be a film scholar to interpret that message: If you steal your sister’s husband, expect a body count.

Not that I could steal him, if I tried. No one could. Even if Teo were unhappy with Ollie, he had too much integrity to run off with her sister or anyone else. And maybe he wasn’t unhappy at all. I tried to hope he was happy, for his sake, deliriously, on-cloud-nine happy with Ollie, but I couldn’t quite manage it, not yet.

“Are
you OK?” Teo asked me, and the question could have set me howling with unhinged, ironic laughter. Could have, but didn’t. After all, he was still Teo, and I didn’t just love him in the new searing, soaring way, but in the old familiar way too. I squeezed his hand.

“OK-OK,” I said, “Not great-OK. But I’ll live.”

And I would.

What do you do when you’re in love with the last man in the world you can have?

You plan a life, a real life, without him.

Clare
had spent the morning baking with Cornelia’s mother and as she stood with Cornelia on the front porch of Mrs. Goldberg’s house, she could still smell the scent of gingersnaps in her own hair, and for a moment it seemed as though the aroma came not from her but from the house itself, from the bricks and pillars and roof. A fairy-tale house, but with nothing wicked inside; Clare was sure of that. Still, as Cornelia turned the key and Clare heard the bolt slide back, Clare held her breath. And she kept her eyes fixed on Cornelia’s back, on the place between Cornelia’s shoulder blades, as the two of them crossed the threshold.

Then Clare looked around and gasped. There was magic inside, but not the kind she’d expected. No sheets over the furniture, turning chairs into lonely ghosts; no velvet, dusty, deep-purple hush like the petals of an African violet. Instead, the magic of a house not haunted, but alive, waiting. Light sluiced in through the windows and spread shine over the floors and tables. A living room, Clare thought, and then: A
living
room. Nothing dead here. Nothing forgotten. Even the sofa seemed to open its arms to her, and without thinking, she walked over to it and sat down.

“Oh,” she heard Cornelia say, and then again. “Oh,” and Cornelia took two steps into the room and sank slowly to her knees like a person in a church. Clare kept quiet, allowing Cornelia to be alone with the house. After a few seconds, Cornelia settled down cross-legged and took off her coat.

“Hello, house,” she said happily.

“It’s alive,” said Clare.

“It is.”

The two of them gazed around the room at the pale gold wallpaper and at the two silver candelabra on the mantel and at the marble fireplace, and Clare wondered if Cornelia was expecting, as she was expecting, flames to blossom on the wicks and a fire to appear, orange and snapping and singing, in the grate.

Then Clare noticed another scent, not gingersnaps, but something fragile and cool. She sat up and looked closely at the bowl of white flowers on the table in front of her. She leaned in and inhaled, then touched a finger, gingerly, to one creamy petal. She pulled her hand back and stared at Cornelia.

“Real,” she whispered. “They’re alive too.”

Cornelia came over and touched the flowers, and for a few seconds, Clare knew they both believed in miracles.

Then Cornelia said in a soft, sad voice, “Gardenias. Of course, gardenias,” and then, “Marielle.”

“Marielle?”

Cornelia wiped her eyes and smiled at Clare. “She’s cleaned Mrs. Goldberg’s house for as long as I can remember. My mom said Ruth and Bern have had her coming in every few weeks to dust and air the place out. She must have rushed back here from the funeral today.”

“She left the flowers for us to find,” said Clare.

“Maybe. I don’t know, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if she left them every time she comes. I’d be surprised if she didn’t. Mrs. Goldberg adored gardenias.”

And somehow to Clare, this seemed no less magical than flowers that stayed alive for years, that one woman could so love another woman that she kept doing nice things for her even after she was gone. Like love was a habit you couldn’t break.

“I’ll show you everything. The whole place. The parlor with the seashells, the two-hundred-year-old kitchen table…soon,” said Cornelia, turning to Clare with shining eyes. “But let’s head straight for the attic. Right now. What do you think?”

“I think, yes,” said Clare. “Right now.”

And as she followed Cornelia up the attic stairs, she found herself not just walking, but placing her feet precisely and trailing her hand fluidly along the wooden rail, as though walking up the steps to the place Cornelia loved best were a dance, something to do in just the right way. And then with one clean motion, like they were blown in by wind, Clare and Cornelia were through the door and standing inside the sloped, honey-brown walls of Mrs. Goldberg’s attic.

I
showed Clare a picture of Mrs. Goldberg as a girl of eleven.

“My same age.” Her voice was breathless, and I saw she felt what I felt in this room: enchantment. In the whole house, but in this room especially. Even when I began to tell the story and to tell it in the hushed, rhythmic storytelling voice Mrs. Goldberg always used, Clare didn’t take her eyes off the photograph.

“Mrs. Goldberg’s family was from New York, but she spent her eleventh summer at the home of her aunt and uncle, a farm not so far from here. Her cousin Sarah was also eleven, and the two of them were watching Sarah’s brother Albert and some of his friends play baseball. One of the boys stood taller than the others and had serious blue eyes. Mrs. Goldberg wasn’t yet in the habit of noticing boys, but she noticed him.” I glanced at Clare.

“I notice boys, sometimes,” Clare said, shyly. “Well, not boys my own
age
, but…” She broke off, smiling.

“Hmmmm,” I said. “I wonder who you mean. Anyway, this boy wasn’t her age either. He was seventeen.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Clare, as though noticing a boy of seventeen were more surprising than, say, noticing a man of thirty-four.

“And while she was noticing him, he stood in the outfield, and her cousin Albert hit the ball right at him and, instead of catching it, the tall boy missed, and the ball whacked him on the side of the head.”

“Oooooh.” Clare flinched.

“And before she could stop herself, Mrs. Goldberg burst out laughing.”

“That’s awful.”

“She thought so too. She was horrified, in fact. And she ran over to where he lay kind of rolling back and forth on the ground, and she knelt down, introduced herself, and apologized. The boy smiled a slow smile at her, put out his hand and said, ‘I’m Gordon Goldberg. And I guess I did look funny going down like a shot duck.’ ‘More like a bowling pin,’ said Mrs. Goldberg, and Gordon laughed and passed out.”

“And they were in love.”

“She was,” I told Clare. “It took him about six more years, but then he was hook-line-and-sinkered. They were married for over three decades, until he died.”

“She never married anyone else,” said Clare with assurance. “There’s only one true love for everyone, right?” A humdinger of a question. A doozy.

“I don’t know. Maybe for some people, there can be more than one.” I said this to Clare. What I didn’t say: “Oh, let me, let me be right. If I’m not right, my goose is cooked.”

Clare and I shared a comfortable silence for a while, looking at the pictures of someone else’s family. Then I felt Clare’s gaze and looked up.

“My mother married my father,” she said, thoughtfully. “That’s weird, isn’t it? They must’ve been in love. And then my mother didn’t marry anyone else. I mean, she hasn’t, yet. But I don’t think it’s because my father was her true love, do you?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. I thought about the redhaired woman at his funeral. Just because I couldn’t fall in love with Martin didn’t mean no one else could.

Clare didn’t say anything, but the silence we sat in now wasn’t easy; it was the silence of something coming.

“I saw my mother.” I couldn’t read what was in her eyes. She seemed to be seeing something with them that wasn’t in the room. “One night. After she was sick, I saw her. With a man. They were…” She stared at me, unable to finish. Fear. That’s what was in her eyes. Fear and revulsion. I had to think fast, to undo what seeing what she’d seen had done to her. I couldn’t have her growing up with those feelings about sex.

“I don’t know your mother’s reasons for having sex with that man. Sex. You know about that, right?”

“Yes,” said Clare and I noted the note of exasperation in her voice, the what-a-dumb-question note, with relief.

“What they were doing, it wasn’t wrong in and of itself. If it was part of your mother’s being sick, then it might not have been the best thing, but it wasn’t any more wrong than all those cookbooks she bought. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so,” said Clare, and after a pause, “I don’t think she was in love with him. I mean, maybe she was, but I don’t think so.”

I took a breath. “People have different ideas about that, and you’ll have to make up your own mind. You want to know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“I think it’s OK not to be in love. If you like the person and trust him and if you’ve decided all on your own that having sex with him is what you want to do, I think it’s fine.” For the record, I’d thought this for a very long time and did not speak out of my present condition of eternally unrequited love and possible future of never loving another man as long as I lived, although I’ll say this: Loveless life or not, no way was I becoming a celibate. Come on.

“Have you ever been in love?” asked Clare, suddenly blindsiding me. I hoped she didn’t notice my discomfort, but since I sat there frozen and blinking, with a hot flush creeping over my neck and face, she would have had to have been blind as a bat not to notice.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, so casually I practically yawned the words. Then I shrugged one shoulder, completing my transformation into a caricature of a casual person.

“With who?”

“Oh, just—someone.”
Oh, just someone?
Was it possible to be more lame? It was not. I sighed. “Someone who doesn’t love me back.”

“I bet you’re wrong,” said Clare instantly. “I bet he does.”

“Thank you for that, Clare, but nope, nope, nope. For one thing, he’s married to someone else.” I scanned her face for an “aha!” look, but lots of people—maybe every lovable man on the planet, although I sincerely hoped not—were married to other people. She gazed back at me, innocent as a newly hatched bird. “And his feelings toward me are purely fraternal.” I threw that in for veracity’s sake, and I saw Clare’s confused look, but no way was I explaining. I rushed on. “And, as if that weren’t enough, I’m not his type.”

“How could you not be someone’s type?” asked Clare, with an honest disbelief I found adorable.

“No ambition.” But this wasn’t quite what I meant. “No divine purpose driving my life. I’m not passionate enough, maybe.”

Clare laughed. Then she got serious. “Sorry. But that’s funny, you not being passionate enough. You’re passionate about
everything
!
The Philadelphia Story
and Teo’s mom’s pancakes and Mrs. Goldberg and all the stuff in this attic and pajamas and Walt Whitman.” She laughed again.

I laughed too, even though I was so touched I could’ve cried.

“And me. Even me. You’re passionate about me, too, right?” Oh, Clare. Even you?

“From the bottom of my heart, yes,” I told her.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff?” asked Clare, gazing around.

“I’ve thought about that. I want Ruth and Bern, Mrs. Goldberg’s kids, to have whatever they want. Everything, if that’s what they want.”

“I knew you’d say that,” said Clare with satisfaction.

“But first, I’m going to go through and catalogue every object, even every photograph. Catalogue it and write down the story that goes with it, the one Mrs. Goldberg told me, because everything in here matters and has a story.”

“So, when they’re deciding what they want, they’ll know how much each thing matters. It wouldn’t be fair to just show them the object, right?”

“Right,” I said, amazed at Clare’s understanding. “And whatever they end up taking, the stories will go with them.”

“Good idea,” said Clare. She sat, thinking.

“Your apartment is just like this, isn’t it, Cornelia? It really
belongs
to you. I thought that right away, as soon as I got there. How you chose everything, and all of it’s important. You’re exactly like Mrs. Goldberg.” It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.

From the big attic window, I could see the shiny leaves of the magnolia next to the house, bare now of the white rice bowls of blossom that would deck it in summer and, beyond that, I could see the magnificent, ancient white oak that dropped its fat acorns and mantle of shade in Mrs. Goldberg’s yard. And beyond that, the other houses on the street with their chimneys and hedges and flowerbeds, dusk skirting their rooftops. Each house a receptacle of mystery and dailiness, each holding a family inside its walls. And in the distance, the rim of Blue Ridge, encircling us all.

“Cornelia?” said Clare.

“I was just thinking how Mrs. Goldberg gave all her stories to me,” I said, tears blurring my eyes. “And how, if you want, I’ll give all mine to you.”