Authors: Beth Gutcheon
As an oldest child, I had my own story to tell. Then Dinah said to Grace, “I suppose
your
mother had you all kitted out with supplies and instructions?”
Grace said, “Are you joking? My mother hasn't noticed I'm out of grade school. She'd still be having those fucking yellow ducks embroidered on my socks if the Women's Exchange hadn't gone out of business.”
I was thinking of some way to say how well Avis meant, without sounding mealymouthed. Dinah wasn't. She roared her great gravelly laugh. “Ducks? On your socks? You
must
be kidding.” It was like a romance, what had sprung up between Grace and Dinah. They couldn't get enough of each other. I wasn't sure myself how Dinah had come to be so important to Grace so quickly, so much more than I had ever been to her, but it happens like that sometimes. I could adduce reasons, so could you, but it wasn't reasonable, it really was a matter of the heart. People were always falling in love with Dinah.
M
rs. Oba's niece, Stephanie, had come to work for me, to learn the business. She handled the walk-ins, and she could run the shop on her own if necessary, which left me free to get away for more than a long weekend now and again, a welcome development. One afternoon in early spring I came downstairs to take a break from a new inventory program I was wrestling with to find Stephanie with a tall, rather strongly built redhead whom I had never expected to meet in the flesh. She was wearing a periwinkle blue strapless sheath with a sexy kick pleat and a matching stole, appraising herself in the mirrored back wall of the showroom. On her feet she still wore a pair of ballet flats. She turned from her reflection to me as soon as I entered the room.
“Good afternoon,” I said, taking her in every bit as carefully as she was regarding me. “That's a marvelous color on you.”
For some seconds, she just looked at me. Finally she said, “Of course, the shoes don't help.”
“Would you like to borrow a pair of heels?” We were now standing side by side, reflected in the mirror. She was younger than I, but not by as much as a decade. Her haircut and color were dramatic for my taste, the shade a dark russet not found in nature, and the cut severe, but well done; Frédéric Fekkai, I would guess.
“Do you have a pair? I'm a nine.”
“Certainly.”
Stephanie, who had been hovering, disappeared and returned with some silver evening sandals.
“Are you shopping for a special occasion?” I asked.
“Oh, no, I was just . . .”
“Yes,” I said.
She turned her figure sideways to appraise the effect in the mirror while my reflection watched. Her belly was going a little soft; otherwise, she was admirably trim. Normally at this point in the proceedings I flatter a little, if the dress really suits the customer, or if it doesn't, suggest something else. In this case, I stayed quiet.
Eventually she said, “I like the built-in . . .” She put her hands on her ribs, indicating the foundation garment upon which the bodice was constructed. I nodded. “And the price?”
I mentioned a number that was not small. She didn't react, a sign that either she wasn't seriously considering a purchase or that money was no object, and I didn't think it was the latter.
“Well,” she said at last, “I'll think about it.”
She turned to look at me directly. Then she turned to the dressing room, and Stephanie followed her, carrying her flats. As she drew back the curtain, I saw that there were at least five cocktail dresses on the peg inside.
“Is Madame still considering any of these?” Stephanie asked, very correctly.
“I liked this one.” She took it and held it up, as if she were asking what I thought of it, though she wasn't.
I said, “That's a new designer for us. I think he's going to work out very well.”
“American?”
“Yes. From Seattle, oddly enough.”
“Why oddly?”
Oh God. Why had I said anything? I'd been doing so well.
“I don't know, I just hadn't thought of Seattle as a fashion hub.”
“Oh.”
“I guess now it's an everything hub. What with Starbucks. And Bill Gates.” Shut up, Loviah.
“I haven't been there.”
“I haven't either. This designer came to me.”
She stopped in the door of the dressing room. “Really? That's interesting.”
Was it? Why? I wanted her to go in and put her own clothes back on before I said anything dumber.
Eventually she did. She emerged, wearing a pair of jeans and a jacket off the rack from Armani Ex. We showed her out.
Then I went upstairs and called Gil.
“Guess who was just here?”
He said, “Who?”
“Meredith.” His oldest daughter.
W
e'd always wondered how much Althea knew about us, or if she knew everything and didn't care. Either was possible. The children were a different matter. They hero-worshipped their dad, Meredith especially. As did I. Meredith's relationship with Althea was often strained, but in spite of being what any statistician would have to call middle-aged, she was Daddy's Little Girl.
I described Meredith's visit, how she had seemed prepared to try on everything in the store to kill time until I showed up. How we had circled each other, tails erect, sniffing.
“No wagging?” he asked. He used to tease me about my little Norwich terrier, Hannah. It's a cliché, I suppose, the childless woman and her pet, but there are reasons for clichés.
Some helpful soul had told Meredith about me, that much was sure. The question was, what would she do about it? There'd been a time when I'd pictured having her as my stepdaughter. Someone to protect and laugh with, someone to take to Elizabeth Arden for massages and manicures. But that was always a dream I dreamed alone. Althea didn't believe in divorce. She was Catholic, but that wasn't why: she just thought it was common. “So undisciplined,” she was known to say. Althea gained no weight she didn't mean to gain, barely ever was ill, never complained and never explained. It had to be like being married to the queen of England.
We talked it over that weekend at our place in Connecticut. Sitting with his long thin frame collapsed like a stork's into the wing chair by the fireplace, Gil looked hardy and content, still with thick dark hair, barely silvered, still with the muscular grace of the athlete he was. It was hard to believe he was nearly eighty. He wore an old tweed jacket and a pair of thick socks with slippers; the only sign of age I could see in him was that his feet were always cold.
Hannah, the traitor, abandoned her spot beside me on the sofa and stood before him, wiggling and making a little imploring noise in her throat until he picked her up and settled her on his lap. I brought him his silver bullet, a very dry gin martini with three olives. He sipped his drink slowly, and at the end ate two of the olives and fed the third to me. He delivered this to me on the end of a toothpick, as if he were feeding a baby bird. To this day, the scent of a gin-soaked olive is enough to transport me to a happier time.
“Do you think she just learned about me? Did she come to see what a Scarlet Woman looks like?”
Gil was quiet, pondering. We both looked out the window at my rose garden, which was filled with color although it was early in the season.
“Something must have happened. Something's changed.”
Gil didn't like to talk about Althea with me. We were separate things to him. He'd chosen to stay in the marriage, and so had she, and I had to respect the privacy of that. So it was unusual that he said now, “Althea is coming home for the summer.”
“Home. To New York?” I tried not to show the shock I felt. She had spent the summers in Provence for as long as I'd been in the picture.
“I've taken a house in Easthampton for her. She wants to have the grandchildren out to stay with her.” Meredith had two children; George, the youngest, had one and another on the way. Clara, the classic middle child, claimed to be married to her career, which so far consisted of big parts in very small dark foreign films and a series of seriously unsuitable boyfriends.
After a pause, I said, “Is this the new pattern? Or an experiment?”
“Experiment, I think. She lost two old friends in France this winter. One had been ill, but the other just died in her sleep. Those were body blows. She may give up the Paris house.”
We looked at each other. I couldn't imagine what that would mean for us if it happened.
“Is she likely to enjoy playing Go Fish with four-year-olds?”
“You never know. She's a surprising person.” I got up and took his glass into the pantry to pour him his dividend.
“She comes from a line of long-lived women,” Gil said after I was resettled on my sofa. “When the husbands in that family die at ninety-five, the obituary always reads âsurvived by his wife and his mother.' ”
I understood. If she wanted to be closer to her family as these inevitable losses mounted, anyone would understand.
And what did Meredith's visit mean? There seemed nothing to do but wait and see.
A
t a dinner party on Gramercy Park that spring, the guests were talking about their summer plans. Some people called Delafield were divorcing; my hostess's house was right next to theirs on Georgica Pond. “It's heartbreaking, really. They just finished the guesthouse.”
“What happened?”
“He has depression. But he's been much better lately. New pills or something.”
“I don't think I know them.”
“Yes you doâPaul and Elsa, second marriage, she's from Oslo, he's in publishing? They go to Brick Church?”
“Is she leaving him
because
he's better and now she can?”
“That really is sad, if true.”
“It might be Paul who's leaving. I heard there was a handsome tennis pro involved.”
“Who gets the house?”
“She's in the apartment, with the children. The house in Easthampton is rented.”
“Lucky renters. Do you know them?”
“Gil and Althea Flood. They're older. The Realtor says they're lovely.”
“I thought she lived in Paris.”
“Does she?”
“You know, I have a friend who would be perfect for Paul.”
I stopped listening.
M
y sad and dignified friend Avis, knowing New York would hold nothing for me that summer of 2003, invited me to come visit her in Maine, where she'd been spending each August on an island since Harrison died. Her cottage was modest, two bedrooms only, with a kitchen that hadn't been changed since the 1950s. A lady came from the village to clean once a week; otherwise she was alone. It took me two days to get there.
As we approached it on the ferry from Northeast Harbor, the island, soft with summer grasses, appeared golden in the sun, studded randomly with austere white houses and looking altogether like an Andrew Wyeth painting. The day was gorgeous, with a high pure sky, and the bay shimmering.
Half the population seemed to be waiting at the dock for visitors, packages from FedEx or UPS, or in our case, the crabmeat Avis had ordered for our lunch. Hefting my bags down the gangplank, I spotted her chatting happily with a short man in a navy mechanic's jumpsuit that had
TOM
embroidered over the pocket. He was tanned like leather except for the white seams around his mouth and eyes. The nails on his hands were so deeply edged with black grease, it seemed they couldn't have been clean in years. Avis was wearing a pair of baggy sun-faded pinkish shorts, espadrilles that no longer had a color, and a man's white shirt, open at the neck. On her head was a wide-brimmed straw hat, its edges coming unwoven in places where something had chewed it over the winter. “Tom” accepted a large gray canvas sack stamped
U.S. MAIL
from one of the deckhands and started off up the hill, pushing his sack before him in a wheelbarrow. Avis put her hands on my shoulders and kissed the air beside my ear. It was a warm greeting; touching people is hard for Avis. She took my smaller bag, although I warned her it was the heaviest.
“You weren't kidding,” she said. Carrying it made her walk with a hitch in her gait, but she wouldn't give it back. “What's in here?”
“Books. Laptop. A bottle of champagne.”
“Oh how nice! We'll have more use for the champagne than the laptop, though.”
Uh-oh. No Internet? I hadn't thought of that.
“We have dial-up. Sometimes. But don't worry, if it's important we can go over to the main and use the computers in the library.” No silent nightly exchange of the day's news with Easthampton, then, no wishing one's absent loved one peaceful sleep and sweet dreams.
She was putting my bags into the trunk of a battered gray Karmann Ghia that had to be fifty years old.
“Oh my goodness” is all I could think of to say when I saw the car.
“This is Betty,” she said. “Belinda gave her to me when I turned eighteen. I can't put her top up anymore, so we have to walk if it rains, but otherwise she's doing well for an old bag.”
Betty's engine started with a gruff rumble that reminded me of something, a sound from when I was young, bringing a shock of pleasure.
“I used to know someone who had one of these,” I said, remembering a shy blond young man who had courted me for about five minutes during my debutante summer. With the memory came the scent of honeysuckle in Canaan Woods and the warm green smell of June lawns. We turned onto the main road that ran along the ridge of the island.
“She isn't legal, of course,” Avis said. “None of the island cars are. There's no one to inspect them, unless you take them to the main, and why would we do that?”
“How do you keep them running?”
“The man I was waiting with at the ferry does it somehow.”
“Tom?”
“Brian. He got that jumpsuit on eBay. He has a brother with an auto graveyard on the main, where he gets the parts.”
We drove past a weedy pair of clay tennis courts, past the tiny library and the post office and down to Avis's little house. My room, the guest room, was upstairs, papered with old-fashioned wallpaper, with pale blue ribbons twining against a white background. There were gauzy white voile curtains and a view out to open sea. I had my own widow's walk, although Avis was the actual widow. Her bedroom was downstairs with a slightly more modern bathroom than mine, which had a claw-foot tub and no shower. There was plenty of hot water, though, and the towels and bed linens were fresh and new, and the mattress was excellent. I unpacked my clothes and books, sat for a moment appreciating the heart-stopping sweep of the meadow and the bay and the thoughtfulness of fresh sweet peas in a little vase on my bedside table. I wished Gil could see it. I wished I could see the room he was in at that moment. I hoped that Althea was hating the Hamptons and wished briefly that she would fall down a hole and break her neck.
Then I went down to join Avis on the porch, where she was waiting with crab salad, a bowl of cherry tomatoes, and homemade lemonade.
After lunch we walked down to the post office, a white clapboard two-room building with a small wall of ancient mailboxes in the entryway and a cheerful young woman in a flowered summer dress who got up from her chair behind the counter to greet us.
“Good afternoon, Audrey.”
“Afternoon, Avis. Is this your company? Up from the big city?”
I introduced myself.
“How long will you be staying?”
“Two weeks. Her mail will come care of me,” said Avis.
“I'll pop 'em in your box then. You have a package, do you want it now?”
“How big is it?”
Audrey approximated with her hands.
“We'll come back for it with Betty. We're taking our constitutional at the moment.”
We walked out to the end of the island, stopping to chat with people we met, accepting an offer to tour an ambitious garden with a yellow climbing rose that interested me particularly. It belonged to a young couple from Philadelphia who were expecting a group from the Garden Club of America the next week. They were anxious that their clematis make a good show. The lady from Philadelphia was the only person on the island who didn't call Avis by her first name.
Out past the village, we picked warm blueberries and ate them in the sun. They had a lovely tartness and felt slightly grainy on the tongue. We made some plans for how to spend the time of my visit. I offered to cook dinner that evening or to take her out to eat, if there was anywhere to take her, but she said she was going to make her world-famous chicken burgers. I was allowed to shell the peas, which had come from the garden minutes before, and her neighbor Caroline had baked a raspberry pie.
It wasn't until we were seated over our supper, with candles and a bottle of rosé, that Avis mentioned Grace. In the evening light her strong narrow face looked surprisingly young. She reminded me of the girl I had first known at school, all legs and angular bones, with the regal bearing that sent a different message from the rather anxious expression in her eyes.
“She's decided to take a degree so she can teach. She got into Columbia,” Avis told me, doing her imitation of a mother with a normal bond with her daughter.
I knew that already but didn't say so.
“Will she come up to visit while you're here?”
“Oh yes, she's coming next week.”
I was puzzled, since I myself was occupying the only guest room.
“Not here,” said Avis. “She'll go to visit Belinda in Dundee, on the main. I thought we'd get Brian to run us over for a day, if you'd like to.”
“I'd love it. I haven't been there in years.”
“It's absolutely charming. Belinda found a house there that suits her perfectly when Nantucket got too overrun for her.”
I wondered, if it was so charming, why Avis was here instead of there, but didn't ask. It was easy enough to see that this island life suited her.
“Were you sorry about Nantucket?”
“No, it was always too much of a scrum for me. I went because Grace loved it.”
I thought of Gil, saying fondly that Avis was an odd duck. Nantucket was my idea of heaven. I wished I'd had a mother with a house there, instead of a mosquito-infested campsite in the Rangeley Lakes, which was our childhood summer vacation if we were lucky.
“Grace is much more like Belinda than she is like me,” Avis said. “They both love hubbub.”
“Is there hubbub in Dundee?”
“Apparently. Have you seen much of her this spring?”
“Belinda?”
“Grace. I'm told she has a beau coming with her this visit.”
I had a moment of feeling extremely cross with Grace. She was angry with Avis, I understood that, but that was not an excuse to be unkind. There were manners that should be observed, no matter what one was feeling.
Then I remembered how little my own mother knew about my private life.
“Have you met him?” Avis asked, carefully attending to getting peas onto her fork. She was hungry to know but surely understood that any answer would hurt her feelings. There was nothing to do but ignore the unkindness.
“Wait till you hearâit's my godson Nicky Wainwright. Dinah's son!” I said, light and bright and feeling as if I had slapped her.
There was not a moment's hesitation in Avis's response. A huge smile lit her face.
“How absolutely wonderful!” she cried. “The younger one, the actor?”
I wished Nick and Grace were there that minute so I could paddle them both. Avis had remembered all that I'd told her about Nicky because he was important to me. “Yes, Nicky, the actor-law student.”
“Do you think they're serious?” she asked, marveling.
“I think
they
think they are . . .”
“Isn't this wonderful? Wouldn't it be
fun
?”
“It would be,” I said, with all the heart I could, knowing it was already fun for Dinah. We sat together in the darkening evening looking out at the fireflies in the meadow.
“Let's have the champagne,” said Avis. That was a motion I could second.
O
ur days passed easily and happily. Avis made it easy. One day we went over to the main to hike in Acadia and explore Mount Desert. We picked blueberries and made muffins, most of which Avis put into the freezer so I could take them with me when the visit was over. We spent long hours reading on the porch. We wrote letters. One evening when a thunderstorm knocked out our power, we played Russian Bank all evening by candlelight. At first, in the blackness that had fallen so suddenly, along with the eerie silence of no humming refrigerator, no cranky water pump in the cellar groaning on and off, no anything living in the house except us, we couldn't find the candles in the kitchen, and the flashlight wasn't on the hook inside the cellar door where it was supposed to be. We felt our way around in inky dark, the storm having blanked out the moon. Avis rummaged in the tool closet, hoping to find hurricane lamps and dropping things on her feet. I finally found my purse hung on a coat hook. Avis thought I was a genius to realize that the screen of my cell phone could be used as a flashlight.
The next morning, with power restored, we woke to find all the living room lights on, and the kitchen faucet running. “Thank heaven,” said Avis. “I was afraid we'd have to make our tea with gin.” That afternoon we took Betty to the island grocery to stock up on batteries and lamp oil.
We played some desultory tennis on the clay courts, which apparently belonged to everybody. Avis was surprisingly good, and yet I, who never practice, always seemed to beat her in the end. Over the course of the visit, I figured out that Avis doesn't like to win. I don't know if it frightens her or makes her sad to take something that someone else wants. It raised the question: what in this life
did
she want badly enough to try to take it from another person?
T
he day of our visit to Dundee dawned hot and cloudless. Brian was taking us over in his extremely aromatic work boat, the
Carol Ann
. He had put his lobster pots out around dawn that morning, then come into the town wharf to pick us up. Once we were out on the bay it seemed this was a day the lord had made just to remind us that into every life come moments of perfection.
We skimmed around the Bass Harbor light and up Great Spruce Bay,
Carol Ann
making a cheerful racket, and arrived at Belinda's dock at about ten in the morning. One had a sense of being flooded through the eyes with the blue of sky and sea, the light, the sheer beauty of it. If it had been ink it would have spread through one's soul, tinting everything with glory.
Grace and Nicky, hand in hand, came down the lawn to meet us. Nicky held his big hand out to Avis, introducing himself, while Grace embraced me and kissed me. Then Avis and Grace kissed the air beside each other's ears.
“Sweetheart,” said Avis warmly.
“Mother,” said Grace.
We walked up to the sun porch where Belinda was waiting for us, her white hair perfectly coiffed, wearing a shirtwaist dress printed with nautical flags and a big necklace of white plastic beads.
“You're both just brown as berries,” she said to us. The children began to chatter about what we should do with ourselves until lunch. Tour the village? Climb Butter Hill? Go out in kayaks?
“I've never been in a kayak,” said Avis.
“It's great,” said Nicky. “You skim along like a water bug. Even I can do it.”
“Now don't make poor Lovie go out and paddle around like a duck,” said Belinda. I had never been in a kayak myself and longed to try it, but of course I said, “That's right. You go. I need a catch-up with my pal here.”
So I watched from the porch as the other three went down toward the stone beach where four kayaks lay upside down on the grass above the tide line. They fitted themselves with life jackets and spray skirts. Avis looked a little like a water bug even before she entered the boat, with her long bare arms and legs punctuated by knobby joints, struggling to fold herself into the hollow kazoo shape of the boat. Nicky briskly tucked her spray skirt into place all around the cabin hole so that the boat seemed to replace her lower limbs. Grace gave the boat a shove from behind, and Avis glided off onto the water with a cry of surprise. A maid brought me a glass of sweet iced tea.