Love Always (31 page)

Rita felt sure that their religious training had been neglected. They had memorized the recipe for chocolate chip cookies before they knew the Ten Commandments. They were so worshipful of each other that it was hard to make Mary take on any real character. The apostles paled by comparison with the lives of their stuffed animals. She should have sent the girls to church regularly. Eventually, the minister might have prevailed.

He would not have prevailed. It got to the point where no man could persuade them of anything. Jane didn’t even take men seriously enough to bother finding one who was better than the rest. Except that there was a similarity in the men she chose. She liked childish men. Not because she felt threatened by men or because she wanted to have power over them, but because it became increasingly difficult as she got older to find
women who were childlike, and Jane always enjoyed childhood so. She would have been perfectly happy to remain a child.

With Lucy, it was another matter. Her father influenced her much more. They weren’t close, but he never begrudged giving her time. Jane seemed to bore him. He and Lucy did seem to have some relationship. It upset her very much when he left. She latched on to Hildon, and stayed attached to him.

They were once so naïve that they thought the paisley sheets would make them pregnant. There they were on the floor in the morning, because they wouldn’t lie on the sheets. It was one of those mysterious tableaux of childhood that didn’t get explained until years later.

They were so busy when they were children that Rita could still not believe that they had grown up and done whatever they could to avoid work. They liked doing things of all sorts. Their days were so scheduled, they barely had time for school. They lived for summer. Night, and summer. At night they turned their bedroom into the Old Vic. Jane’s bedroom. Lucy was always in Jane’s room. One time she had a cap gun. Rita could remember taking it away and wrapping it in newspaper as if it were a fish. Then she threw it away. Real guns or toy guns too often led to tragedy. She had read, recently, that some man had picked up his son’s water pistol, when the paper boy was being adamant about the money he was owed. The paper boy came back with a revolver and aimed it through the window and shot the man in the back of the head. She believed in gun control, no matter what the hunters said. The paper boy with the gun had no more trouble getting it than a person would have going out to buy a candy bar. He was thirteen years old.

She understood that she was not to think about what went on in the world. That the New York
Times
no more reflected the problems of the day than a statement made by the Queen of Hearts. She was not supposed to embarrass people by reading the paper and telling them what she had read.

Dear Lucy—I try not to think of Jane as dead. Frankly, this means, lately, that I try not to think about Jane
.

Jane probably got too much attention. People would say,
Oh, it must be wonderful not to have the children fighting all the time, jealous of each other, but the two of them together—they were almost always united in everything—were an ebb tide to a person’s reasoning. Insist, and you’d feel like a bully.

Rita believed that little things did get remembered. The small things in her house were quite lovely. One lovely thing made a more perfect statement than half a dozen objects put out on a tabletop.

What were Jane’s last thoughts? She hoped that they were peaceful. Jane must have been scared to death even before she died. Or perhaps it made her angry, because she hated predictable things that she couldn’t control. Friday night traffic, backed up on the road to the beach.

Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” came to mind. It was her favorite painting, for purely sentimental reasons.

It must be very difficult for Lucy. In some ways, she acted as if she were much older than Jane: placating her, indulging her. She was good at distracting her. She could invent a game right on the spot. They loved to scare each other. They would take any excuse to jump out of a closet. Even if one knew the other was in there, she would be frightened enough to jump or scream. They would play Ghosts. Or Africa. What did jumping out of a closet have to do with Africa? She remembered the time Lucy knocked down the clothes bar and all the clothes fell on the floor of the closet. Henry had said, “What game is this? Niagara?”

Henry. Henry Nolan Spenser.

She thought: the aspen is the most beautiful tree, followed by the birch.

She found herself thinking that Mozart was born in 1756, Blake one year later. What an age that must have been. Contemporary poetry was all about young fathers’ perceptions of their sons. Speculative poetry, about rocks talking and planets humming.

They loved music. The carrousel. Music boxes.
Dear Lucy—Do you remember that I would sing you to sleep when you were restless? Those songs always seemed sad, sung at night—songs such as “I Love You Truly” and “You Are My
Sunshine.” The sadder the song, the later the hour, the prettier my voice. That really was true. Until I had children I was inhibited about singing. I still would not sing in a room filled with people. Not even a Christmas carol. Two years ago I found myself in such a situation and lip-synched “Jingle Bells.”

Most people simply stopped seeing her when Henry left. A common reaction—people felt awkward, as if they themselves had deserted the person. This resulted in their deserting the person.

It was written somewhere that Joseph P. Kennedy agreed with his father that there were only two great things about the modern age. One was that there were window screens. The other thing … there was another thing. There were actually many things to like. Digital clocks, although they were not functionally an improvement over regular clocks. The kinds of teas that were readily available were amazing. In almost any small grocery store, you could find camomile, rose hip, mint. Women’s shoes were now often quite stunning, though there seemed to be no standardization of the M width. A skate blade would not fit in some M width shoes. In others, the span was adequate.

Dear Lucy—One of the advantages of being old is that you do not have to endlessly explain things. People are afraid to ask you questions—partly because they become deferential and partly because they are afraid that the answer will be too lengthy and boring. They will ask you how you feel instead of what you did on a particular day. This makes it easier to do strange things, because it is unlikely that anyone will question you about what you did. Also, since most people have no way of checking, you can say what is convenient. For example, there is a sepia-toned baby picture on my upstairs table. I have been asked, once or twice, who it is. I have shrugged and said, “Some relative.” Actually, it is the baby picture of the first man I loved. His mother, who thought we would marry, gave it to me the Christmas before he died of the flu. The look in the baby’s eyes is the same as his look when he was a twenty-year-old
man and I knew him. I don’t think I would remember that without having the picture set out. I remember taking a walk on a snowy day and running into his brother, and hearing that he had been taken to the hospital. I was supposed to be home, but I cut across the park with the boy—a younger brother, perhaps fourteen, though he seems in my mind to have been a mere baby compared to Nicole—and I went to see him. He recognized me, but the next day he recognized no one, and the following day he was dead. It was still snowing when he was buried, and they had to delay the funeral until they could dig again in the cemetery. Imagine: the flu, which was so contagious, and I sat at his bedside for an hour
.

Or, she could write: People are reluctant to believe that a parent doesn’t prefer one child, however slightly, to another. Sometimes there would be a period when one of you seemed sweeter than the other, but then the situation would be reversed. It evened out.

Or, that when she went to the hospital, it was the first time that she saw a hospital room that was not painted white. It was painted green.

Or, that Henry had just come right out and said that he was going to leave. For years he had struggled, with little subtlety, to keep himself rooted. He had held on to the wheel of the station wagon, and before that to the handle of the baby carriage, as though all day, everywhere, he was hearing the voices of the Sirens. He was always grabbing onto things. Grabbing the phone, instead of holding it. All that tension was apparent to everyone. Why not admit that it made Jane and Lucy stay childish longer than they might have. They had had better luck with him when they were young, so they thought that being sprites would please Daddy. They always looked at him full face, with their large, lovely eyes. They always had their arms around his neck. They wore long white cotton nightgowns with punchwork and embroidery at the neckline. It seemed that he would carry them, and they would stay plastered against him, until they were so tall that they would have to be dragged. There were nights when he wouldn’t come home.
They would cry and cry. Lucy would make up a story to tell Jane. Lucy hated him a little in the end, and Jane became a dreamer.

Lucy: when Henry left, I no longer rolled toward the center of the bed at night. The mattress wasn’t weighted down, and I stayed where I was. I was always astonished to wake up and find myself on one side of the big bed. For a while I doubted that I had slept.

Homonyms. The trouble you had with those, Lucy—you would have thought that you had been raised in a foreign land. Some people seize on some one thing about someone else and then blow it out of proportion, overestimating its symbolic potential. With you, Lucy, it would be homonyms. Once you heard a word and attached it to a particular thing, you couldn’t admit that there was an alternate reality. The struggle we had with pair and pare. How you wept over there and their.

My memory of the end of day: Reading you
Pride and Prejudice
. That was like singing “La Marseillaise” to a Frenchman. I would sit at the foot of the bed and read while you were propped against your pillows, the covers pulled high, arms underneath, only head and shoulders visible, toys all around you. Dobbin the donkey. Jeepers the monkey, with that mouth that Henry painted on, not very well, when its felt mouth dropped off. Can’t you still see Silly the goose clearly? It was left at a playmate’s house, and the family moved to Denver and never did mail it back the way they promised. If I had known, I would have driven back to get it. I hadn’t doubted that it would arrive. As time went on, I was as upset as you were, but I knew it would be unwise to show it.

The image of little children in bed asleep is always one that pulls on the heartstrings. Like every parent, I was fascinated: all that commotion, all the shouting and running, it was hard to believe the calm. One advantage of all the dolls and animals was that they kept the covers weighted down. When you stopped wearing your sleep-suits with feet, I always put white anklets on you. It is important to keep children warm at night. Not as important as other things, like nourishing food and vaccinations,
but still, something I worried about. Perhaps inordinately.

You both liked the window cracked a bit. Was it because in the cold weather, it made you think of summer? I’d pile on covers, then sometimes put on more as an afterthought, tuck another blanket on top, tapping it down around the menagerie. It was rather like fitting piecrust over the top of a pie. Then, leaving, I would take a final look. Just saying good-night and turning and walking away would be as unusual as glancing only once at a Christmas tree. It seemed so perfect: Jane and Lucy, and Jane and Lucy’s mother standing and smiling. The room wasn’t entirely dark because a streetlight in front of the next house shone in. You didn’t want the shade drawn, of course. I left the door open a crack, as well. That was more for my benefit than yours. You had no fear. Because the door was ajar when I left, I still felt connected. There were always those few seconds in which the house seemed so lonely and quiet; it was as though everything had a sound when you were present, and when you went away, silence fell. I believe that in Oriental rugs, there is often an irregularity in the pattern—a key, it is called—woven that way deliberately, to allow the spirit to escape.

O
F
course Lucy never thought that she wouldn’t see Les Whitehall again. From the minute Myra DeVane told her he had written (eventually, she had forced herself to look at the letter), she had to acknowledge that it figured that he’d get in touch when a million things were happening, and she was least ready to deal with him.

The night before he called to say he was coming, she tried to think of good things about Les and the good times they had had. If she could be calm, she would not give in to temptation and ask him what he thought “Love Always” meant. She knew that even if she asked, she would not get the answer she wanted. He would be insincere, he would equivocate, he would lie. He would try to make her look needy and silly for asking. He would pretend—or maybe it would be true—that “Love Always” was a variation of “Yours truly.” The few times she had ever faced him down and won, he had pushed a self-destruct button: he never admitted that she was right; he began smoking or drinking—anything that didn’t require words—or turned and walked away.