Souvenir of Cold Springs (20 page)

Kay planned to let a couple of weeks pass, and then write a letter announcing that she and Teddy had eloped on the spur of the moment and were married by a J.P. somewhere. Or maybe she'd just skip the whole thing. Teddy's mother, Caroline, wasn't at the wedding. Caroline, as Kay understood it, looked like a movie star and was living in a convent in New Mexico. His father, Stewart, was a lawyer in Albany; he drove to Boston on the morning of the wedding and took Teddy and Kay out for a late breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton.

Kay immediately loved Stewart. He was everything she wished her own father was: quiet and courteous and well dressed. At the reception, he made the rounds, introducing himself to all Kay's young friends and playing peek-a-boo with Heather. He didn't talk much, but he knew how to listen, and he had a wonderful smile, like Teddy's. And though he drank a lot he could hold it—which was the main thing, Teddy said: not how much you drank but how well.

She had been lucky in her fathers-in-law. She had adored Mr. Hamlin; she had called him Daddy just as Richard did. After the accident, her grief was divided equally between Richard and his father. The death of her mother-in-law, whom she called Irene and who left Kay a string of pearls in her will, barely touched her.

The three of them had been killed in a head-on collision on Route 1. Richard had just picked up his parents at the airport; they were returning from Paris. It was pouring rain, and foggy. A truck swerved into their lane and demolished the Saab, its inhabitants, and the Hamlins' custom-made leather suitcases, which contained not only some exquisite Parisian baby clothes for the children but a signed Emile Calle vase they had picked up in a shop on the Left Bank. Most of Daddy's money was invested in Boston real estate and European antiques, particularly French art glass. He had written them about the vase, which he was giving them for a fifth anniversary present. He said it was a very rare specimen, worth ten times what he paid for it. Kay tried hard not to think about the vase, but the image of it smashed to bits on Route 1 outside of Boston haunted her, and she always wondered if there wasn't some way the pieces could have been retrieved from the wreck, just so she could see the colors of it, the delicate browns and mauves, and the blue dragonfly Daddy had described in his letter.

She still missed Richard and his father, even after a year, even after the money, even after the marriage to Teddy Quinn. She missed Richard in an intense, intimate way—missed his body, his smell, his voice. She missed him in a way that she knew would eventually pass. But when she thought of Daddy, she saw him in the shop on the Left Bank, imagining a nondescript little place full of clutter and a shrewd, stout Frenchwoman in an old cardigan and shapeless shoes, her hair in a bun. The vase would be sitting dustily on the bottom shelf of an étagère that was partially blocked by a fake Empire bureau and a couple of authentic but battered Louis XVI chairs. Daddy would spot it. His face would reveal nothing; he wouldn't even lift an eyebrow at Irene, who would be examining some old Marseilles linens, for which she had a passion. Daddy would take his time. Eventually, in his fluent but badly pronounced French, he would ask the woman about the vase. She would shrug and quote a price, Daddy would look skeptical and argue, the woman would protest a bit and then come down, come down again, and the deal would be made. Daddy would take Irene to Chez Gaston for dinner.

His letter to Kay and Richard said, “If you think a piece of glass can't be full of elegance and wit, you are wrong,” and went on to describe the blues and mauves. He was the kindest man Kay had ever known, as well as the richest.

She married Teddy because he was unusual. She could afford to marry a poor man (an unemployed struggling writer five years younger than she) because she had money of her own—all the Hamlin money, which came to the ghost of Richard through his parents' death and to her through Richard's.

The money was a shock she got over quickly. She found that having money of her own suited her—something she couldn't have foreseen. She had grown up in poverty on Chicago's northwest side, had waitressed her way through Boston University and then worked at Gottlieb/Bayard writing ad copy for three hundred dollars a month, and even after she met Richard they lived mostly on her salary plus his stipend at Harvard, where he was a graduate teaching assistant in art history. There were gifts from his parents, of course, but the Hamlins believed their only son should learn to get along on his own. They did pay for Mrs. Hickey, and for the 1962 Saab in which they had eventually died; they took Richard and Kay out to dinner every Friday night; they bought them extravagant birthday and anniversary gifts; and when he was killed Daddy was pondering the wisest way to set up trust funds for Heather and Peter.

But daily life in Richard and Kay's Dartmouth Street apartment was spartan; they lived on hamburger, Kay carried her lunch to work, and twenty cents for Richard's MTA ride to Cambridge the last couple of mornings before payday sometimes had to be borrowed from Mrs. Hickey. When Kay went from all that to sudden wealth in one rainy afternoon, she was surprised at the ease with which she made the transition.

The first thing she did was get her own lawyer. Mr. Hensley, from Daddy's firm, tended to look at her with disapproval no matter how polite she was to him, no matter how much black she wore to conferences in his office—as if she had personally engineered the accident for the purpose of becoming an absurdly young, obscenely wealthy widow. He also thought it was somehow improper of her to keep her job; now, he seemed to feel, she was free to stay home with her children.

Her new lawyer was a man named Mel Katzmeyer; she hired him because his office was on Newbury Street, down the block from Gottlieb/Bayard, and she could pop in on her lunch hour. He introduced her to Gauloise cigarettes in their classy blue packets, and to the Merry-Go-Round Room at the Copley Plaza. He also handled her investments, and he recommended that she buy the Joy Street house, which Mr. Hensley had cautioned her to wait on, and the diamond choker, which Mel said would cheer her up.

It did cheer her up. The whole process of going from rags to riches cheered her up. Teddy came along in the course of it. She met him at Gottlieb/Bayard, where he had come in to apply for a job. Kay talked to him because both Sam Gottlieb and Tom Bayard were in a conference that Teddy didn't seem worth leaving to interview. He was twenty-three, not long out of college, and he had just come to Boston from Binghamton, New York. His only working experience was a brief stint on the
Binghamton Record
and two months as a stock boy at the IBM Corporation over on Boylston Street where his sister Lucy worked in the office. He had been fired for inattention, he told Kay, and, smiling his wide, beautiful smile, he told her that he wanted to be a writer. He had a room on Marlborough Street. He was writing a novel about a reclusive painter who lived in Monterey and was, he said, based on his uncle Jamie. He had never been to Monterey, and neither had his uncle. He didn't think it was a good idea to get too close to your material. Did she?

Kay said she thought you were supposed to write about what you know; Teddy said in his opinion that was one of the most short-sighted and destructive literary clichés going; Kay said he was certainly an original thinker. They sat smiling at each other across Kay's desk. She liked his sandy-colored curly hair and his ears, which had no lobes—like the ears of royalty. Then Kay said she was really sorry, she could see he was very gifted, but it was hopeless, they needed someone with extensive copywriting experience. He asked her out to lunch, and when she accepted he told her it would have to be down the street at the Raleigh Cafeteria: they had great hot roast-beef sandwiches, he said. Kay picked up the phone and made a reservation at the Merry-Go-Round Room.

They drank martinis at the revolving bar and forgot to eat lunch. They ended up at her house on Joy Street. The babies were napping, and Mrs. Hickey was in the kitchen knitting and watching the soaps. Kay introduced Teddy as Theodore Vanderhagen because she'd forgotten his last name. Mrs. Hickey said please be nice and quiet and don't wake the babies. Kay and Teddy went upstairs to the bedroom and locked the door. While Kay called the office and said she must have gotten food poisoning at lunch, Teddy slowly, tenderly removed her stockings and her half-slip and her underpants and gently eased himself down on top of her.

“Why Vanderhagen?” he asked her eventually. “And my name isn't Theodore, anyway, it's Edward.”

“But didn't it just sound marvelous?” Kay asked him. “All those syllables?”

When they got married, she became monosyllabic: Kay Quinn, which she also thought sounded marvelous, and was quick and efficient for signing checks. “I'll give you one piece of advice,” Mrs. Hickey said. “Make sure he's a good father to those children.” Mel Katzmeyer also gave her one piece of advice: “Don't lose control of your own money.”

The marriage was a success for a long time. The only mistake she made (and it took her years to realize it) was in not keeping control of her money. By the time they were divorced, they were broke; all that was left was the French art glass. On the other hand, Teddy was a good father.

They saw a
lot of the Neals—Teddy's sister Lucy and her husband. Mark was a postdoc at MIT. Lucy was a painter and photographer but she was working at IBM because they needed the money. Kay never understood what it was exactly that either of them did: Mark was part of some big-shot physics professor's grant to study some sort of particles, and Lucy had a cretinous office job that involved punched cards being put into computers to do something or other. Kay offered to get her into the graphics department at Gottlieb/Bayard, but Lucy said she didn't mind her job because it left her brain free to think.

The Neals lived in a first-floor apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Allston. The MTA rattled by their front windows. Their back windows looked out on an alley full of trash cans. They had two white cats, Peachy and Bingo; Kay learned never to wear black to their apartment. What Lucy really wanted was a baby; they were “trying,” but it was going to be a problem because of a botched abortion Lucy had when she was in college. Kay tried not to think about Lucy and Mark trying to make a baby: she imagined grunting and prayer.

The two women met for lunch sometimes, usually at the Raleigh because Lucy couldn't afford anything else and wouldn't let Kay pick up the check.

“I don't understand that kind of pride,” Kay said. “It's not like real money, Lucy. Nobody earned it. It's just there, to be spent. Think of it as pennies from heaven.”

“You don't know what it is to be poor,” Lucy said.

“Richard and I weren't exactly rolling in it. We ate plenty of peanut butter.”

“That doesn't count. You had the Hamlins.”

“You've got Stewart.”

“Oh, come
on
—there's no comparison,” Lucy said. “My God, Kay, you were driving a Saab, you had a nanny for the kids, you had leather boots from Bonwit's.”

Kay shrugged. She had no intention of telling Lucy about her life before she met Richard. But she thought about it. Back when she was living at home on the canned spaghetti and soda her mother served for dinner, or when she was struggling to keep herself alive and independent all through college—or even when she and Richard were flat broke by midweek: would she have accepted free lunches from a wealthy relative? The question was absurd.

“If you're so poor, should you be thinking about having children?” she asked Lucy.

“That's a whole other thing,” Lucy said, and bit savagely into her egg salad sandwich.

Kay told Teddy his sister was a self-righteous wet blanket, and Teddy said, “You're always judging. Lucy's been through a lot.”

“Who hasn't?” asked Kay. “So she had an abortion. Big deal.” Kay had had two abortions when she was in college. She hadn't told Teddy about them, and she hadn't told anyone that she would never have given birth to Heather if Richard hadn't been so thrilled at the prospect of a second child so soon after the first. When she told Richard she'd missed her period—Peter was only six months old—he went out and bought her a dozen red roses and a satin negligee. It was almost the only grudge she had against him.

Kay said, “Maybe it's being brought up Catholic.”

“We weren't exactly brought up Catholic. Except for my mother, the family's about as lapsed as you can get.”

“Maybe it passes through the maternal line, like Judaism.”

Teddy said, “It's not religion, Kay. It's not anything. Lucy just wants a kid. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

Kay would have been happier if her children didn't exist; that was another truth she never told anyone. It wasn't that she didn't love them. It was just that children were so difficult and so time-consuming. Mrs. Hickey arrived at seven-thirty in the morning and left at six, except for Saturday nights, when she stayed late. She had Sundays off. On Saturdays, Kay and Teddy almost always went out for the day—shopping, or to the museum, or for drives to the north shore in the new Saab, which was just like the old one but a later model, and red instead of blue. They often went right from their outing to dinner with friends. If they ate with Mark and Lucy, it was in the Allston apartment or at a pizza place because the Neals wouldn't let the Quinns pay for a good dinner out and Kay refused to cook. On Sundays, after a chaotic family breakfast, Teddy took the children out to the park or the zoo or just for walks around the neighborhood—things parents were supposed to love doing with their kids but that Kay hated. Peter would get whiny; Heather would want to climb out of her stroller and be carried; Peter would ask for everything he saw, from the giant panda in the window of F.A.O. Schwartz to the ducks on the pond in the Public Garden; Heather would scream if she saw a dog. They would have to stop and carry on inane conversations with perfect strangers about Peter's bear and Heather's pretty pink dress.