Souvenir of Cold Springs (31 page)

How could she tell him about the little soldier, the waves washing on the shore.

“Well, Mary. These years have been hard on you. Plenty of reason for you to be tired. But we might want to run some tests.”

Then he and Charles talked in the hall. She closed her eyes.
Thump thump
. Whatever it was, whatever the tests showed, she knew she was a goner.

Nell came with cocoa and a paper to write for school, and poor young Jamie with his drawing pad. They sat with her in silence, and their presence was a comfort. Charles with his sad face, holding her hand. Then they were gone, into the dark, and wasn't the wind at the cemetery like ice, like fire, wasn't it cold, his body flown in over the cold sea. Not much of a Christmas this year, Mrs. Kerwin. No. She heard the springs squeak as Charles got quietly into the bed, heard him blow his nose in the dark, heard him lie there awake, quiet, and then heard him go to sleep.

Something nagged at her: the store. Harper and Kerwin Hardware, been there on Butternut Street forever. Well, it had fallen on hard times. Never be the same. Hard Times Hardware, Charles called it. Did they get that loan? Or was that just talk, just an idea. No: they were closing the store. Don Harper wanted to retire. Charles said:
hell, Don, we're too young to retire. I'm not sixty
. Don and Florence were going to Texas. Texas! Live in the desert, dry up, become skeletons in the sand. Charles went to work for Unger's.
It's a comedown, Mary. A lifetime's work, gone
. His hand was warm and dry, rough, as familiar as her own.
Hard times
, he said.
Hard times, Mary, my love, my dear
. She remembered his warm insistence in the night, his hands on her, waking up to find his knee parting her thighs, always in silence and darkness, and she gave him the comfort she could.
We had some good years, though. Didn't we
?

She slept, and woke again in the dark. It seemed always dark. She liked the curtains open. Without her glasses, the windows were squares of powdery gray that shifted and pulsed, they were doors that let them in, the soldiers, they grew bigger, they filled the room, the waves battered the shore, the brave little soldier said
no no no
.

Once when she woke up in the dark, she was remembering the first time with Charles, before the wedding, her shock at how big he was—that this was what it was like. How he had kissed her, whispered her name, tears in his eyes: his awful gratitude, as if she had made some monumental sacrifice for him. She wanted to say
please, it was nothing
, but it didn't sound right. She remembered how embarrassed they had both been the next morning. She remembered what Charles told her once when he had too much to drink: that he desired her so much he told it in Confession, even though she was his wife. By then—by then, she had gotten almost to like it, and what he said pained her, that he thought she was a sin.

Another time, she remembered Peggy's birth—her first baby—the long pain, the endless pain like a knife, the exhilarating pain, and the baby coming out: that dark wet head like a swimming dog, like a piglet: her daughter, yelling into her face.

And then—ah, then, she remembered Caroline at the funeral. Cried: of course she had cried, her lovely blue eyes brimmed with tears, the tears ran down her white cheeks and dripped onto the fur collar of her coat.
Mama, what can I do, what am I going to do, oh God, oh God, help me, what can I do
.

The light of death is very cold. They're coming.

Nothing
, was what she thought, trying to remember how to say it in French. It wouldn't come to her.
Nothing
, she thought. Did she say it out loud?
Nothing
, hearing Caroline's anguished pleading, seeing Caroline's beautiful tears.

CAROLINE

1940

Caroline was in the library reading about the Middle Ages. She had found a carrel in front of an open window that let in a breeze, and she sat with her feet tucked under her, a book about thirteenth-century monastery life on her lap. Yes: she would be a prioress, like Chaucer's Madame Eglantine with her little dogs, her coral beads, her golden brooch, her tender heart.

The book said that prioresses, for all their sanctity and goodness, lived well. They sometimes had their own cooks, their own personal attendants, their jewels and horses and musicians. They were almost the only medieval women who were taught to read. They spent their days seeing to the business of the convent, keeping the nuns in order. Or embroidering vestments with gold thread, sometimes strolling in the garden composing poetry in French, or entertaining bishops who came to visit. They were revered by their nuns, deferred to by the clergy, admired by everyone for their goodness and refinement …

She closed the book and opened another:
The Canterbury Tales
. She turned to Chaucer's prioress:

She was so charitable and so pitous

She wolde wepe, if that she saw a mous

Caught in a trap …

In her Medieval Literature course, Mr. Tyler had said that Chaucer's portrait of Madame Eglantine was meant as an attack on materialism and corruption within the Church. She wore jewels, she wept for mice, she fed tidbits to her dogs—worst of all, she exposed her pretty forehead for all to see in days when a woman's forehead was considered sexually provocative. What a strange idea. “It would be like seeing a nun nowadays in a dress slit down to here,” Mr. Tyler had said, poking himself in the vague area of his sternum. “Chaucer's satire is subtle, but we can see that the woman was a scandal.”

Caroline didn't agree with him, and she went to his office one day to talk about it. It seemed plain to her that Chaucer was fond of Madame Eglantine and considered her a type of the ideal woman—a gentle, loving, trusting soul who did only good and wished no one harm. Worldly, maybe—just a bit. A goodlooking woman who still felt herself to be attractive, even after years and years in the convent. Girls became nuns at fourteen in those days.

“You have a point, Miss Kerwin,” Mr. Tyler said. “But I'm afraid we do have to conclude that according to the medieval scheme of things her faults outweigh her virtues.” He smiled at her: wrinkled up eyes behind thick glasses. “Of course, Madame Eglantine is indeed very likable. And don't think I'm blaming her for her shortcomings,” he went on. “Imagine your little' sister, if you have one, giving herself to God before she knew what she was doing. Before she even understood clearly what her other choices were. Just because her father couldn't afford a big dowry to get her a rich husband.”

Caroline tried to imagine Nell, and failed. Nell looked like a nun, maybe, with her sharp nose and her piercing eyes—the plain workaday kind of nun, not a Madame Eglantine. But Nell was too outgoing, too crazy about people. If they were a family in the Middle Ages—her father a prosperous merchant, say—Nell was the one who would make the good marriage and have a bunch of children. It was Caroline, the oldest daughter after Peggy's death, who would enter the convent—willingly, no argument—and who would surprise them all by rising to the position of prioress. She knew she would be good at it, and she knew the life would suit her: silence and beauty, people leaving her alone, strolls in the garden, intimate talks with bishops who came to call—men who could be relied on to keep their hands to themselves.

“You're probably tired of hearing this,” Mr. Tyler said as she stood up to leave. “But you really do have the most extraordinary hair.” He pressed his lips tight together as if he were concentrating and, with one finger, lifted a curl from her shoulder. “Just amazing.”

“No, I'm not, actually,” Caroline had said.

The library was cool and quiet. Caroline loved the serenity of the summer campus. Out the window behind her she could see the deserted path leading up to the library, a neat gray stripe through the green. Beyond the treetops, the university buildings were backed by clear blue sky. She could almost imagine herself in another time, another place. She had settled on medieval England, but almost any other time would do, any other place.

All through June, she had been coming to the campus two or three times a week—early in the afternoon, after she had done the housework, eaten lunch, and baked herself beige in the backyard for exactly half an hour on each side. The big Gothic library welcomed her with its silence and order, and even the grim-faced librarians smiled at her, as if they were genuinely glad to see her there—as if they felt she belonged. She would spend some time browsing through the stacks, deciding what to read—nearly always
The Medieval Village
by G. G. Coulter or the Robinson edition of
The Canterbury Tales
or a volume of thirteenth-century lyrics. Then she sat for a couple of hours, reading, looking out the window, memorizing bits of the General Prologue or one of the beautiful, earthy lyrics written by some troubadour or nobleman or prioress. It was the only thing she had found that could take her mind off what usually preoccupied her: wondering how she had gotten where she was, a housewife at twenty-one, married to Stewart Quinn.

When she left
the library that day, going down the cool steps into the heat, she met Louise Stocker coming up. Louise was a girl she knew from her university days, one of John's perennial flames, a sometime friend of Peggy's. Caroline hadn't seen her since that freezing January morning of the funeral, when Louise in a black babushka and no lipstick had embraced John with a cry of sorrow. It was one of the things that meant Peggy's funeral to her: Louise in her scarf, John and the cousins with the coffin on their shoulders as if it weighed nothing, her parents each taking off a glove to hold hands.

She and Louise paused on the steps to chat. After the hours alone in the silence of the library, Caroline somehow couldn't stop talking. Her voice ran on and on, too quickly, saying too much—how well Stewart's firm was doing, what a beautiful apartment they had with its fireplace and sunny kitchen, how he still brought her flowers every Friday, how she had learned to cook all his favorite dishes—even sauerbraten, which she hated.

Louise looked impressed, not just with Stewart's devotion and the posh apartment on Teall Avenue, but with Caroline's involvement in the daily life of marriage, the necessity of getting dinner on the table for her man. “It sounds heavenly,” she said—smiling, sighing. “I wouldn't mind being in your shoes. And believe me, I think it's wonderful that you've come through that terrible time so well.”

That terrible time
. Caroline remembered, the day after Peggy and Ray died, when she and Stewart had turned to each other for comfort, that one of the things he had said was, “I can see that it's going to be worse for you than it is for me.”

She hadn't understood. For her, the shock of the tragedy was that she had found so little love for Ray Ridley among the complicated emotions that assailed her. When Stewart used to break down in her arms, she had cried along with him more from sympathy than from grief. “But you loved Peggy more than I ever loved Ray,” she had protested.

He said, “No, I mean the humiliation.”

To Louise, she said, “What did you think? I was going to kill myself? Crack up or something?”

Louise said, “It's just that I can imagine how hard it must have been, Caro. I felt so bad for you all.”

Caroline studied her: yes, she seemed sincere. She had always been a sweet, unaffected person—Louise. The type who would consider it disrespectful to wear makeup to a funeral. She said, “Well, it was hard. It's not easy to lose a sister. I still miss her a lot. Thank God I've got a husband like Stewart.”

She looked Louise in the eye, daring her to mention her engagement to Ray, Ray's perfidy. Louise's eyes filled with tears. “I'm so happy for you,” she said, which was almost worse.

Stewart's car was
in the driveway. Going up the front steps, Caroline looked at her watch. Almost four o'clock. She held it to her ear: still ticking. Which meant Stewart was home two hours early. Her heart pounded. It occurred to her that never, since they'd been married, had Stewart surprised her or done anything out of character or been where he wasn't supposed to be when he wasn't supposed to be there.

Something was wrong, and what she wanted to do was flee from it, but she hurried up the steps and opened the door. His straw summer hat hung from the stand in the front hall.

“Stewart?” She went into the living room. “Stewart? Are you here?”

She heard nothing, but she sensed he was in the apartment. Ill? Collapsed? Dead? She went down the dark hallway to the end where the kitchen was flooded with light. The afternoon sun entered there in full force, making it, on summer days, almost too hot to cook—but wonderful in winter, just as she had told Louise.

Sounds heavenly
.

He was sitting at the kitchen table looking old: that was what she noticed first. He had just turned thirty, and he looked years more than that. In the brilliant sunshine, she could see gray lights in his brown hair.

“Stewart?”

He lifted his head and said, “Sit down, honey.”

She sat. “What's wrong?” How odd it was to see him in the kitchen at this time of day, just sitting, in his white shirt and striped tie, the coat of his brown linen suit thrown carelessly on a chair. She had helped him pick it out the Saturday before, at Wells and Coverly. He loved it that she took an interest in his clothes—his hairbrush, even. She had bought him a new one when they got married, his was so old and ratty. She picked up the suit coat and hung it over the back of the chair. There were half-moons of sweat under the arms.

“You don't look good,” she said. He had a small heart murmur, a defect from a childhood bout with rheumatic fever that would keep him out of the war if war was ever declared. He looked like a man having a heart attack. “Stewart? Are you all right? Are you sick?”