Souvenir of Cold Springs

Souvenir of Cold Springs

A Novel

Kitty Burns Florey

This book is dedicated to my mother

Geraldine Goodson Burns

1910–2001

Though much is taken, much abides.

Tennyson, “Ulysses
”

Kerwin Family Tree

MARGARET

1987

Anywhere, Margaret thought. Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, but preferably someplace warm. Honolulu, Acapulco, Saint-Tropez. On the subway, she recited the names of cities to herself, a rosary of places that weren't Boston. Palermo, Pamplona, San Juan. Miami Beach, for heaven's sake.

The T was cool and clammy; outside, the day was even colder. Daylight savings time was just over, all the trees were leafless, and the streets got dark at five o'clock. Buenos Aires, Palm Springs, Algiers. But anywhere, really. Paris, London. No, not London. Or would it matter? What were the chances of her running into Matthew in a city the size of London? And what would it matter if she did? Paris, London, Rome. Anywhere, anything.

She tried not to look at the other people in her car. She read the advertising instead. Vodka, beauty school, Jobfinders, beer. The procedure to follow in an emergency was posted by the door in both English and Spanish, and she read it over and over. Pull the ring and slide the lever to the left, then follow the instructions of the train crew. An emergency seemed imminent. It always seemed to Margaret that people on the subway at odd hours looked disturbed in some way. Mornings, everyone going to work, they were absorbed in their newspapers or not awake enough to make trouble, and at the evening rush hour they were blank-eyed and exhausted. But during less busy times—like now, four in the afternoon—they weren't a crowd, they weren't safe. They were separate individuals, thinking. They were all potential maniacs.

Q: And what about me? I'm on the subway. Am I a potential maniac?

A: A maniac
in potentia
. Potential comes from the same Latin root as powerful, so you are a paradox: a powerless potential maniac. And so not really a maniac at all. You don't have the energy to be a maniac. Your maniacal days are past. Remember that.

En el caso de una emergencia por favor siga las instrucciones del personal del tren.…
How beautiful things sounded in Spanish. Majorca, Madrid, Managua, Manzanillo, all those warm and maternal words, everyone speaking Spanish, the food fiery with chiles, the hot blue skies continuing into the evening, and then the long, sweaty nights. Guitars. Bars. Men with cigars. The windows open to the stars. The doorways would be arched, carved into thick stone walls that were rough to the touch. Moorish. There would be flowers everywhere, everything red and yellow and lush, rampant green. She stared at an advertisement for shampoo that would make people want to smell her hair and thought: I've got to get out of here.

She was on her way to Cambridge, to see some people about driving their car to San Francisco. All right: San Francisco wasn't that warm, but it wasn't Boston, either. On the phone, the woman with the car—Mrs. Haskell, whose daughter at Berkeley needed their old Toyota—had said, “I suppose you've heard Mark Twain's famous comment, that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Margaret hadn't heard it. The only thing she could quote from Mark Twain was the last sentence of
Huckleberry Finn
about lighting out for the territory. She said she was thinking of doing that, and Mrs. Haskell had laughed tinklingly and said, “Oh, that's wonderful—the territory—because of course California still is in some ways such an uncivilized place, isn't it? I mean, compared to Cambridge.”

She would drive the Haskells' Toyota to California, and she wouldn't come back. She could find a job, a neighborhood, people to live with. The main thing was to escape her parents and Roddie Smith and everyone else she knew and the cold city and the sidewalks full of dead brown leaves. The main thing was to chuck everything and start over.

At Park Street station, where Margaret changed trains, a young woman was singing. The song was a lament about a maiden fair, with rose-red cheeks and coal-black hair, the love that fades like the morning dew, the price you pay for a love untrue. No one was looking at the singer, though there were coins in the basket at her feet. Margaret dropped in a quarter: the price you pay for distraction. Then she leaned against a post and studied the singer—a mousy, overweight girl, who sang smiling. Her voice was shrill and powerful, like the voice of Joan Baez on an old record, echoing off the steel rafters and the mosaic walls, the posters advertising booze, the maps of the Red Line and the Green Line, the gleaming, frightening tracks—filling the subway station with (Margaret thought) madness. It was mad to stand there singing about lost love, singing for no one, singing for quarters. What could make her do that? Did she believe what she was singing? Did she wish as she sang that she had rose-red cheeks and coal-black hair? Had she experienced a love that faded like the morning dew? The station was strangely still, as if people were irresistibly, secretly listening. The voice was gorgeous, the song haunting. Margaret closed her eyes, and in the darkness the sound pierced her like a knife in her skin. When the Cambridge train came she was thankful.

All the way across the river to Harvard Square, she huddled in a corner of the car with her sunglasses on and the collar of her shirt pulled up around her ears. The thought of Cambridge still filled her with terror. She had dropped out of Harvard in April with her junior year unfinished. Officially, she was on leave. They would take her back, she knew. They longed to take her back. She felt Harvard's kindly, fatherly hands on her shoulders wherever she was, but it was worst of all at the Square. She never went there anymore. Even going through on the subway was risky, and Porter Square, where she was headed, couldn't be more than a mile from Room 105, in Emerson, where she had disgraced herself. She always thought of it that way, probably because her mother had said, “Well, you've finally disgraced yourself,” as if disgrace was what she had been waiting for since the day Margaret was born.

Buckingham Street was three blocks from the subway station, a street lined with planer trees, which her mother poetically called sycamores and which always seemed to Margaret to be diseased, their bark tumorous and scabbed. Number seventeen was a brick house with a fanlight over the door. As soon as she saw it, Margaret knew she wasn't going to be hired by Mrs. Haskell to deliver her Toyota to California. She imagined a patrician old lady, honest gray hair in a bun, flowers on a polished table, thin Yankee lips pursed in disapproval of Margaret's punky hair and purple nails. And now that Mrs. Haskell had had time to think about it, would the name Margaret Neal sound familiar? Wasn't there a Professor Haskell in the English Department? Would Margaret's disgrace have reached as far as Buckingham Street?

She passed by the house, crossed the street, and backtracked to Mass. Ave., where she turned in the direction of Harvard Square. She hadn't had her Daily Suffering yet. Not getting the Toyota wasn't enough. She had known that particular dream wouldn't come true. No: her Daily Suffering would be to walk through the Square. Maybe even stop in the Coop or get a cup of tea somewhere or stroll through the Yard, past Emerson. No, not that. Just the Square.

Q: Can I keep my sunglasses on?

A: Yes, even though it will be almost too dark to see by the time you get there. You'll see well enough to suffer. If you don't, you're honor bound to take off the sunglasses.

She was wearing a flannel shirt over a turtleneck and a long, deeply flounced skirt, tights, and lace-up boots. Everything black except the shirt, which was black-and-blue plaid. One of her mourning costumes of the second rank. And then the sunglasses. Earrings long enough to bang against her jawline when she walked. She looked at her reflection in shop windows: a dry cleaner, a liquor store, Erewhon, a craft store with a window full of patchwork quilts, rag dolls, duck decoys with every painted feather in place.

She pushed her sunglasses up on her head and studied herself against a pink-and-white quilt. How wholesome the quilt, how dolesome the Margaret. A woman in the shop smiled dubiously out at her, raising her eyebrows. Coming in, dearie? Want to buy a nice dead duck? Margaret pulled down her sunglasses and went on. She tried to think what she could do after she negotiated the Square. She could call Felicity, whom she hadn't spoken to since April, and arrange to meet her for dinner at Adams House, ha ha. She could call Roddie and get him to take her to a movie. She could ride the T back to Boston and walk around the city and get dinner someplace and see a movie by herself. She could go home. She could make a beautiful, hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind noose in decorator colors out of her mother's needlepoint yarn and hang herself from a beam in the attic.

Harvard Square was darkening. The cars had their headlights on, and the neon Out-of-Town News sign was red in the gray air. At the Coop corner she waited to cross. This was going to be uneventful. She saw no one she knew, and no one looked at her. Dressed all in black, maybe she could disappear into the darkness. Cars zipped by. A homeless woman snored on a bench, surrounded by bundles. Someone played a banjo. A man with Reagan's picture on a stick was passing out bumper stickers that read
NO MORE SHIT
, and Margaret took one. A girl in a Stanford sweatshirt jogging by bumped into her and said, “Whoops.” Just then, she spotted Felicity.

Felicity was crossing Brattle Street with a boy Margaret didn't recognize. They were deep in conversation, Felicity doing most of the talking, sticking her teeth in the guy's face as she always did when she got excited. “You know?” Margaret knew she was saying. “You know what I mean?” The boy nodded, grinning. He was unremarkable looking, one of those people it was impossible to describe—the kind who get away with crimes. Well, officer, uh, brown hair, and some kind of eyes, I don't know, sort of average height, I guess …

She followed them across the street. He walked with his hands in his jacket pockets and Felicity held on to his arm. He was perhaps an inch taller than she, so that would make him five feet eight. Wait: Was Felicity wearing heels? Margaret maneuvered until she could see. Sneakers, both of them. Okay, then, five feet eight. Brownish corduroy jacket, the same dead color as his hair. Narrow shoulders. The skinny drippy preppy type Felicity always said she despised. Behind them there were two women with shopping bags, then a caricature of a professor (gray crew cut, tweed jacket, briefcase), then Margaret. If Felicity and Mr. Blah turned around they would see her instantly. Margaret took off her sunglasses. The risk would be part of D.S.

Still talking, they turned into Au Bon Pain. Margaret stopped dead, and the crowd parted around her and went on, oblivious.

Q: Do I have to go in there?

A: Decide for yourself.

She imagined herself going in after them, ordering a greasy spinach croissant, following them to their table and sitting down nearby. Or would they just be getting coffees to take out? Okay, she'd stand at the counter and order a cup of tea with milk in a loud, clear voice. Felicity would turn and look at her. Felicity would—what? Puke? Scream? Laugh? What could Felicity do that wouldn't be horrible in some way? Even if she sank to her knees on the phony Frenchy black-and-white tile floor and begged Margaret's forgiveness. Even if she pretended nothing had happened, yelped with joy, and hugged her.

No. Forget Au Bon Pain. Even for Daily Suffering, that was too much. She put her sunglasses back on and stood outside by the door. Here, in better weather, people sat at tables; here she had sat with Roddie, with Felicity, with fun fellow students, discussing professors and theses and movies and vacations and the weather.
Normal life
, she thought. Had that been normal life? She imagined herself being interviewed, at some point in the future, by some big-shot evening-news type. They are back in the Square—scene of her quaint youthful peccadilloes. She has a streak of gray in her hair, like Susan Sontag. She crosses her legs; her legs are spectacular; the camera pans back. She smiles off into the distance and says,
It seems so long ago. We were all so young
.