The children’s clothes were more problematic. As she unwrapped smocked dresses, white lace-up shoes only four inches long, a pair of velvet-collared coats with brass buttons, she tried to remember how Frances and Blair, her two daughters, had looked in each outfit. It was hard to imagine them young and small. Three years apart, she’d insisted they dress as twins, but early on they had minds and wills of their own and refused to be treated as dolls. Richard Pratt, then her husband, had laughed as he’d watched her wrestle with the toddlers. “You should feel flattered. Your daughters are just like you. Nobody will ever tell them what to do.”
The clothes had been packed carefully in white tissue to preserve them for a future generation, although so far grandchildren remained nonexistent. Aurelia had almost given up hope for a second generation, or her redemption as a doting grandparent. Frances, her eldest daughter, had passed up her opportunity for motherhood when she broke off her engagement to Pietro Benedetti, the handsome Italian who had been her beau since her first year at law school. Aurelia had liked Pietro. He seemed like the gentle sort, soft-spoken and modest, despite his financial success and somewhat flashy clothes. She never understood what the problem had been. Frances didn’t share, and Aurelia knew better than to pry. Now, at thirty-eight, Frances appeared to have no prospects for a family.
The marriage of Aurelia’s youngest daughter, Blair, to Jake Devlin held faint promise. Aurelia had heard nothing of their plans for children. They seemed consumed with their Manhattan gallery and had such busy social lives that Aurelia often wondered if her daughter and son-in-law had to pencil in time with each other around the various dinners, meetings, charitable events, and art openings that filled their schedules. Besides, if a junior Devlin ever did appear on the horizon, fashion-minded Blair would spurn recycled clothing.
Aurelia concluded that the miniature wardrobes should go to the church.
She rested her palms on the small of her back and glanced around the attic. All that remained was the unidentified box. As Aurelia separated the interlocking flaps, dust filled the air. She coughed, removed her tortoiseshell glasses, and rubbed her eyes. When her vision cleared she looked inside at hundreds of letters bundled in batches held together by rubber bands. Aurelia closed her eyes, remembered the grab bags of her daughters’ birthday parties, and reached in. She removed a handful of correspondence. The elastic snapped and broke against her thin fingers as she tried to stretch it loose. A sheet of folded crepe paper topped the pile.
Happy Birthday, Mom
, block letters in red surrounded by yellow crayon sunbeams, jumped out at her. She could still see a ruled pencil mark underneath the letters to keep the lines straight. Inside, Blair had written,
Don’t be sad your 35. Someone will marry you soon.
Aurelia laughed, as much at her nine-year-old daughter’s spelling error as at the sentiment. Each “o” had two eyes and a mouth smiling back at her.
Aurelia spread the assorted correspondence on the floor. Stationery, notebook paper, thin sheaths of airmail dimpled by the pressure of a ballpoint, greeting cards for birthdays, Mother’s Day, a few anniversaries, her hip surgery, these documents marked her life’s major and minor events. The penmanship varied, but she recognized most, including her own, a small, neat script perfected in secretarial school. Aurelia opened the creased page.
March 27 1966
, it read in the upper-right-hand corner. She continued:
My dearest Richard
,
I am ill equipped to explain my feelings or why I think it best for us to part. You have been a good husband to me, and a wonderful father to the girls. I cannot ask for more, but I realize, as the ritual of our life together becomes ever more complicated, that I feel increasingly stifled, weary of the obligations imposed on me by the life we have built, threatened by a domesticity upon which other women seem to thrive. Don’t misunderstand me. I love to watch our beautiful daughters run across the lawn, or make angels in the sand dunes. I love to feel their small hands around my neck, to hear the sounds of Frances’s voice. I relish the day that Blair too may speak fully so that we may know what is behind those expressive eyes and garbled sounds, but I don’t want my time spent buying school uniforms, coordinating ballet and piano lessons.
You deserve better, a wife who will care for you, who will live up to your expectations, who can be the joy in your life, who will make sure that the doormen are adequately tipped at Christmas, who will not bring vagrants into your elegant world. I have not meant to hurt you, have not meant to do anything wrong, but I seem to cause nothing but aggravation. I want so much to be different, but I cannot will myself to change.
I love you. I do now as much as ever, but I sense that we both recognize that our lives, our priorities, have drifted apart, yours into a world grounded in work and a society that I find alien, mine in a creative chaos that you label destructive. Our shared love for Frances, Blair, and the safe haven of our home in Southampton cannot hold us together. These are common loves. They do not make us a couple. I will miss you. I hope that we can stay friends, for the girls, but also for us. I am sorry.
Aurelia reread the letter through several times. She remembered preparing drafts, changing the words and phrasing to try to capture her emotions, her sense of loss, her compassion for the man whom she honestly did love, but she couldn’t remember what had ultimately made her decide not to send it, especially since it contained thoughts that she had expressed to Richard many times before, and after, that date. Perhaps it had seemed too formal, or too irrevocable.
The vagrant, though, she remembered well. That was Albert.
It had been Christmas, she presumed 1965 given the date of her letter. There was a timelessness to the holiday season in New York City, the Salvation Army bell ringers outside of Bloomingdale’s, fake garland and colored lights lining the small shops along Lexington Avenue, carols piped through outdoor speakers into the streets, filling the frigid air with familiar tunes. Piles of snow laced with soot and dirt obstructed pedestrian traffic.
She encountered Albert by accident, nearly stumbling over him lying across a grate as she came out of the 59th Street subway station at Lexington Avenue. Her packages showered over him as she lost her balance and let go of her shopping bags to free her hands. She managed to avoid falling, but only barely. As she straightened herself, she looked down and noticed a bearded face peering out from amid a heap of glittering gift-wrapped parcels. He accepted her apology without a note of hostility or resentment in his voice.
“It’s my fault for being in the way,” he replied.
She gathered up her purchases, reaching across his bundled stomach for a blue box that had fallen behind him. She could smell a stale, acidic odor on his clothes and a mixture of fried potatoes and whiskey on his breath.
“What are you doing here?” The words spilled out, and she stood up, embarrassed. She, like most New Yorkers, generally avoided interaction with strangers. “I beg your pardon,” she said quickly. “It’s none of my business.”
“That’s all right. Don’t worry.” His voice was soft, and she found herself staring into his dark eyes. She knew that she should move along, get her merchandise home, wrapped, and strategically placed under the eight-foot blue spruce that she and the girls had decorated. Instead she found herself listening.
“I ask myself that question all the time. Why are any of us where we are?” He ran his dirty hands through his hair. Aurelia noticed his unevenly bitten fingernails, his soot-stained wrists. He continued, “I suppose it’s a mixture of circumstance, luck, and willpower, an odd combination given that only one is in our control.” He folded his hands in his lap. “Did you actually want an answer to your question?”
Nodding, Aurelia lowered herself onto his worn blanket. Her black cashmere overcoat spilled over the curb, and she could feel the hot fumes of the passing subways wafting up through the grates. The crowds hurried past her. Several people cast perplexed stares her way, but as she listened to Albert speak, she became oblivious of the noise, the hundreds of booted feet slogging past, the frenzy of rush-hour traffic. Before long she had learned that Albert had been a stockbroker. “I was reasonably successful, not super-rich, but I made ends meet. I lost my job when I started showing up drunk. Everybody understands a hangover. Half of Wall Street shows up hung over, but I was drinking on the job. There’s no way to excuse that.”
“Did anyone offer you help?”
“Sure. Yeah, my boss discussed some program he said I could get into through our firm. A colleague offered to take me to an AA meeting, but I declined. What you’re calling help is the kiss of death in my profession. Makes you seem weak. Besides, I thought I could handle things on my own.”
Shortly after he was terminated, Albert’s wife returned to her parents’ ranch in Wyoming with their son. For all Albert knew, they were still there. By the time the divorce papers were filed, there was virtually nothing left to divide. He took several changes of clothes, a pipe, and a duffel bag.
“What do you plan to do?” Aurelia felt the urge to caress his whiskered cheek.
“Well…” He paused. “I have to figure out if I should sit for my recertification exam.” In response to what must have been her surprised look, he added, “My broker’s license is up for renewal next month. If I don’t take the test, I could miss out on some great opportunity.”
Aurelia lost track of time as they sat on his blanket discussing his future, debating the merits of returning to a life on Wall Street. As the gray sky further darkened, she realized the need to return to the home that awaited her. Reluctant to part company, she invited him home, offered him a warm shower, a meal, and a chance to sit with his feet up in the library. He accepted. Back in their apartment, he played Go Fish with Frances and shared her bowl of pretzels.
As the afternoon passed, Aurelia knew that she should telephone Richard at work to tell him about Albert. Richard didn’t like surprises. In retrospect her silence was idiocy, but each time she looked in on Albert and Frances absorbed in their game, she convinced herself that his presence was harmless. Richard and Albert could be introduced when Richard returned home.
She had been naive.
“What are you doing?” Richard asked that evening. Aurelia, speechless, stood against the wall of the kitchen, hugging herself. “This is insanity. He has to leave.”
“Why?”
Richard looked at her quizzically, as if she had left her mind on the subway that afternoon. “If you won’t tell him to go, I will.”
When Albert departed, Aurelia gave him a small oil painting of the ocean off Montauk Point. She had painted the seascape the summer before and framed it in gilt. “To hang over your fireplace, real or imaginary,” she said, embracing him quickly by the elevator. As he tucked the image into his bloated duffel bag, she reached out to touch his arm. “Where will you go?”
“I’ll be all right,” he said quietly.
“Please,” she begged, “I need to know where you’ll be.”
The red indicator button on the wall lit up with the elevator’s arrival. A bell rang as the door slid open on its tracks.
“I need to know.”
Albert smiled and licked his lips. As he held her hand for a moment, she could feel the callus of his toughened skin. “Off the west side entrance of MOMA. There is a subway grate there. The steam’s warm.” He stepped into the elevator without looking back.
Aurelia watched the door shut behind him and listened to the rumble of the cables as the elevator descended. She felt a palpable emptiness. When she turned around, Richard stood on the threshold. Behind him their Christmas tree glittered with glass ornaments and small white lights.
“Are you all right?” Richard said. She didn’t respond. “What were you thinking, you and two little girls alone in the house with a total stranger?”
“Albert is harmless. He entertained Frances for most of the afternoon. Blair was asleep. Apparently she skipped her morning nap, so went down promptly at three. Besides, Bea was here for a while when we first arrived.” Aurelia tried to sound calm, organized, as if the afternoon had been planned perfectly.
“A twenty-year-old baby-sitter is hardly adequate defense,” Richard admonished her, referring to Bea. He moved toward Aurelia and reached out to touch her forehead, as if feeling for a fever. “Maybe we should get a housekeeper, someone to live with us, to help you,” he said patiently, his voice calm. “You need some time to yourself, for your painting.”
“I thought you of all people would appreciate my efforts to provide a moment of comfort to someone in need.”
“Don’t do that, Lia. I am not attacking your sentiment, only questioning your common sense.”
“Well, I think I’m perfectly sensible. It’s important to meet people, to experience the world, to get out of this Park Avenue apartment. We miss things up here on the fifteenth floor, stuck in our routines. Albert has lived through hell. All he needed was someone to talk to, to treat him like a person.”
“Why did that duty fall to you?”
“It didn’t fall to me. He didn’t harm anyone. I enjoyed talking to him. I admire his introspection.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that he’s not like the people I spend time with. He’s open. He examines his own faults. His universe is so unlike our insular one. It’s good for me, and good for our daughters, even if they’re too young to realize it.”
“I doubt what’s-his-name would appreciate being the guinea pig for your social expansion.”
“That’s not fair, Richard. We were talking, that’s all. He seemed lost. Perhaps I did, too.”
Aurelia had often wondered whether these words, her admission of her own troubles, had been Richard’s undoing. Thirty-four years later that fateful conversation rang in her ears, each word, Richard’s tone of voice and facial expression ingrained in her brain. Richard had turned and walked out of the room. Lying in bed that night, she had wanted to leave, to run to Albert, to huddle under a mildewed blanket on the concrete pavement by the Museum of Modern Art, to smell him, even to taste him, but she didn’t move from between her flannel sheets.