Souvenir of Cold Springs (12 page)

Thea paused on the step above her. Even in her ratty old bathrobe she looked regal. And still beautiful, not a mass of wrinkles like Nell. It paid off to be a tad plump. Nell wanted to put her arms around her and rub her face against Thea's stomach, but she waited to see what she would say.

“Will you, Thea?”

Thea looked down at her and slowly shook her head. “Nell, you are such an ass.” Nell blushed: just what she had said to Jamie. “Why would I desert you?” Thea said. “You're my whole life, you idiot.”

She did put her arms around her, and they stood there like that for a few moments. Three years later, when Thea was dead, that was the morning she would keep remembering as almost the best.

They carried their work to the backyard and spread it out on the picnic table. It was term paper time, and they each had a stack of them to grade—Nell's on
Dubliners
and
The Wasteland
, Thea's on the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity.

But it was a beautiful afternoon, hard to get going. Nell walked around the yard, deadheading tulips, followed by the cat. “What a relief it is,” Nell said suddenly. “To have someone know. To tell someone. To say it!”

“Isn't it?”

They smiled at each other. Nell thought she would die of this happiness, she would fly up into the air she was so happy, the world was such a perfect place.

“Come here,” Thea said. “Smell the lilacs.”

They stood, sniffing, in front of the bush Nell's mother had planted in 1935. “My God, Thea,” she said. “Do you realize Jamie has never lived anywhere but this house? Even when he was in art school he lived at home. He's never traveled, never gone away on a vacation. I'm trying to think if he's even spent a night anywhere else in his whole life.”

“It's really a wonderful thing,” Thea said. “At his age.”

“At any age.”

If someone had looked out a window, they would have seen what Jamie had seen the afternoon before: two aging women, one tall and plump, one tall and skinny—one in a long skirt and peasant blouse with her hair tied up in a scarf, the other in jeans and bright red socks and sandals, her gray hair frizzy and wild. They stood in the sunshine with their arms around each other.

LUCY

1978

The parting with Jerome was bitter. Jerome had begged her to go to California with him—he couldn't make it without her, he said. He was a television producer with a small cocaine problem that she knew was getting bigger. Their affair had been going on for three years, but it wasn't until he asked her to go away with him that she knew she didn't dare commit herself to someone like Jerome.

When he saw she meant it, he had threatened to tell Mark everything. She had hit out at him, enraged. He had hit her back, and she had fled into the night and run all the way from his apartment on Mount Vernon Street to Park Street station, taking her purse with her but leaving her keys in the pocket of a jacket that hung over the chair in Jerome's bedroom. She had worried for days about those keys: should they have the locks changed? Imagining arriving home someday to find Jerome sitting at the kitchen table, laughing the way he did when he was high, ready to spill the beans. She had done nothing about it, of course: how could she? She told Mark the keys must have fallen out of the hole in her jeans pocket—showed him the ripped seam. Neither of them mentioned the bruise on her face.

The bruise faded. Every day she looked in the mirror and told herself that when the bruise was gone she would be over Jerome. It went from a deep yellowish purple, to violet, to pale purple, to nothing. It took about two weeks, and she still wasn't over Jerome—still missed him, still thought about him compulsively, was tempted to phone him, couldn't get any work done, cried the mornings away after Mark and Margaret had left.

She drove to Providence and told the whole sordid story of the breakup to Teddy, drinking tea and talking nonstop in the tiny bare kitchen of his apartment while he drank gin from a pint bottle. He let her finish, and then he said, “Oh Christ, Lucy,” and began to cry.

She was flattered before she realized he was drunk. Then it became obvious that it wasn't her loss of Jerome he was crying for, it was himself. “You're so lucky,” he said. “You had this thing with Jerome for three whole years. You've got that to look back on, at least.” He tipped the pint up to his mouth but there was nothing left. He held it upside down and shook it. “Just like my life,” he said. “Empty.” He smashed the bottle hard against the side of the table. Glass flew in all directions.

Lucy jumped up. “Jesus, Teddy!” Shards of glass littered the floor, the tabletop. A piece glistened in her teacup like an ice cube. She imagined it in her eye. Reflexively, she looked for a broom, though she couldn't imagine that Teddy would have such a thing.

Teddy sat holding the jagged neck of the bottle. “Empty,” he said. “And broken.” He looked up at her, tears rolling down his cheeks, and they both began to laugh, out of control, holding their stomachs, wiping their eyes. Then they walked to a supermarket down the street and bought a broom and a dustpan, cleaned up the mess, and went out for pizza. Teddy had a long red cut on one finger and refused to put a Band-Aid on it—not that he had any Band-Aids. He said he wanted a visible reminder of what an asshole he was. He drank ginger ale with his pizza, and he apologized for his outburst and his self-absorption. He told Lucy she should have gone to California with Jerome.

“Okay, so it might have been hell,” Teddy said. “But what's the definition of a good life if it's not the constant risk of hell?”

The next day Lucy called his old girlfriend, Marie Lindbergh, and asked her to get in touch with Teddy.

“Did he put you up to this?” was the first thing Marie asked.

“No,” Lucy said. “But he needs you.” She expected nothing from the call, and she wasn't sure she had the energy for it. She considered hanging up. And then what? What she really wanted to do was go upstairs and lie down, close her eyes, sleep until Margaret got home from school, and then help Margaret work on the chart she was making of the House of Windsor.

Marie said, “If he needs me he can call me himself.”

“No, he can't, Marie. You know how Teddy is.”

“Right. Crazy.”

“He's not crazy. He's just got problems.”

“Who doesn't? Teddy's always so special, his troubles are always so much worse than anyone else's. And you spoil him rotten, Lucy. You don't even let him make his own phone calls.”

From the kitchen phone, if she looked out the window over the sink, Lucy could see the daffodils in bloom by the garage and remember the daffodils Jerome had bought her that last afternoon, four bunches of them at two-fifty each from a vendor on Charles Street—Jerome's grand gesture with a ten-dollar bill. Back at the apartment, they emptied a coffee can and stuck the flowers in it. Then they made love. Then Jerome made his proposal, she declined, they fought, she fled.

Lucy turned her back on the window and said, “I'm not spoiling him, Marie. Be reasonable. I'm just trying to help him. He's going through a bad time.”

Marie snorted. “And coping with it in his usual fashion, I suppose.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on, Lucy.”

She could picture Marie—a crude caricature, she always thought, of the wholesome Swedish beauty: yellow hair, red cheeks, pink lips, blue eyes, big white breasts. Marie would be looking irritated, glancing down at her watch, drumming her fingers on a tabletop. Lucy had deliberately called Marie during what she knew were her working hours, so she would catch her at home. Marie was a freelance journalist, like Teddy. Lucy and Marie had been friends during the time Marie and Teddy lived together, but Marie had always made her slightly uncomfortable. She always said exactly what she meant, and she never shrank from asking embarrassing questions: it probably made her a good journalist, but it made her a difficult friend.

“He only drinks when he's lonely,” Lucy said. “If you went back with him he wouldn't do it.”

“Is he drinking now?”

Was he drinking now. She didn't know what to say. He had certainly been drinking the day before. On the other hand, he had been chastened, had switched to ginger ale. And over pizza he had told her that the local Gilbert and Sullivan group had asked him to play Koko in
The Mikado
. He had been cheerful, had sung “Taken From the County Jail” while they walked back to his apartment.

“Not really,” Lucy said, hoping it was true. “Considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Well, he's lonely. He's not working at the moment, and he really doesn't have any good friends in Providence since Dave moved to Iowa. He's living all alone in a studio apartment on Benefit Street. And he misses Ann like crazy.”

There was a pause as Marie registered this, and Lucy felt the first faint surge of hope. Marie said, “Ann is still at that school, then? She's sticking it out?”

“She really likes it,” Lucy said.

It was only a small exaggeration. Ann had been there since September—at Saint Basil's, somewhere on the Hudson, a school Kay had found when Ann became impossible for either her or Teddy to handle.
A Center for Caring Discipline
, was how the place advertised itself, and the entire first semester Teddy had ranted against it.

“They take a cold shower every morning at six,” he told Lucy. “And then they run two miles, rain or shine or snow or whatever. And then they have breakfast, which is milk and porridge. Can you see Ann eating porridge? Running? Those fat little legs? And then they have classes from eight until four, and Latin is compulsory, and so is phys ed. And every night after dinner they line up and march into the kitchen to wash their own dishes. I mean, leave it to Kay to find a place where they wash their own dishes—Kay who wouldn't know a dishcloth from a clothespin.”

Lucy did admit that the school sounded extreme—so stereotypically Dickensian, in fact, that she wondered if Saint Basil's was an institution devoted chiefly to irony. Mark said it was absurd, Teddy had to be exaggerating. Lucy called Kay, who told her coldly that it was a perfectly respectable boarding school, Ethel Kennedy had sent one of her children there, it had a dedicated faculty and a long list of distinguished alumni, and if Lucy was so concerned about it she could damn well help with the fees, and besides, what else were they supposed to do with Ann, what other fucking choice did they have, and tell Teddy he could quit involving his goddam relatives in his family's personal business.

Teddy said that Ann's compulsory weekly letters home had become gradually less outraged and hysterical as well as neater and better spelled. She still complained about the showers and the running, as well as the Latin, in which she was doing poorly, and the food, which didn't improve. Teddy still called the headmaster Kaiser Wilhelm and wrote to him regularly, reminding him that Ann was only eight years old and protesting the effects of cold showers on her delicate constitution; the Kaiser wrote back with good reports of Ann, saying she was running the two miles with ease and hadn't had a cold all winter. Teddy grumbled, but his harangues stopped, and he settled down to simply bitching about Kay and wishing he had his daughter back. Not working. Living thinly off the proceeds of the book he'd written in 1973. Breaking gin bottles because his life was empty.

“Ann is doing great,” Lucy said. “It's Teddy who's got problems.”

“Those kids of his are his biggest problem.”

“Heather goes off to college in the fall.”

“Where?”

“Berkeley, probably.”

“Ah. West Coast. I like that. And what about Peter the psychopath?”

“Peter's with Kay, of course. Permanently. He and Teddy can't live together, Marie, you know that. He's Kay's son, anyway, not Teddy's.” Then she added, with the sense of playing a trump card she'd been hoarding up her sleeve, “Ann only comes home for two days at Thanksgiving and a week at Christmas, plus for two weeks in the summer, and Kay has her half that time.”

“Lucy, you're not going to talk me into this.” From the way she said it, Lucy knew Marie had been thinking about Teddy. Marie lived in Boston, but Lucy never saw her; the breakup of Marie and Teddy had been epic, and had reverberated. The last she'd heard, in a letter from Dave in Iowa, Marie was seeing some scientist from M.I.T. who was about to be tapped for a big job in Washington.
Seems a bit establishment for Marie
, Dave had written.
Sounds like a reaction against Ted, if you ask me
.

“Just call him, Marie. He could use a friend, if nothing else.”

“You don't know what I went through with that kid.”

“Yes, I do,” Lucy said. “We all went through it.”

“Honey, I lived there. I've still got a scar on my shin where that little animal threw a tape recorder at me.”

The tape recorder incident was famous: Ann's midnight tantrum, Marie's intervention, the Sony portable hurled at her, the emergency room, the stitches. “I know, Marie. It wasn't easy for you.”

“Easy! It was living hell. And I actually loved him, Lucy. I really did. I loved that schmuck.”

“He loved you, too,” Lucy said, though she wasn't positive that was true. “I get the feeling he still does.”

“Oh shit.”

“He's so lonely, Marie.” Lucy pressed her advantage. “I feel so bad for him. I drive down to Providence every week or so, just to give him someone to talk to.”

“Yes, but you're a fool, Lucy. You know that?”

Anger overtook her—not so much at Marie as at Teddy. The same anger she had felt when he broke the bottle: that her brother should put her through these things. Marie was absolutely right, she had spoiled him rotten. She said, “Okay, forget it, Marie. I'm not in the mood for abuse. I've got troubles of my own. I'm sorry I called.”