Souvenir of Cold Springs (28 page)

In London, at her hotel, she met a group of Canadians—two married couples with a widowed friend and a young niece—who took a fancy to her and with whom she saw the sights. She and the niece, a college girl named Amy, went together to Westminster Abbey, where they had a guided tour (Nell's treat) by a gaunt, aged sexton whose mumbling English accent was almost impenetrable, and where Amy wept over the memorial to Blake. (
Real and very pretty tears
—
fake emotion
, Nell wrote in her diary.)

On the train to Oxford she met a don who bought her a sherry and wanted to show her the inn where Pope got drunk and the room at Christ Church where Lewis Carroll wrote
Alice in Wonderland
—an invitation which, after some thought, she declined. Something about his gray moustache made her think of Mr. Fahey's hands cupped over her breasts, the horrifying shock of his hard penis pressed against her, his voice in her ear begging her not to tell.

In Stratford, she attended a performance of
Much Ado About Nothing
with a touring group of librarians from Iowa, and she spent two lonely, overcast days in Shrewsbury, strolling along the banks of the Severn feeling sorry for herself.

The Brontë parsonage in Haworth was closed, and the Yorkshire moors were awash in rain. She took refuge in the Black Bull Inn (“one of the scenes of the unfortunate Branwell Brontë's humiliation,” she would say to her students, without elaborating, when she showed them her snapshot) and discussed growing roses with a bus driver and his wife on holiday from Manchester, getting quietly tipsy on Worthington's Pale Ale while the rain thudded against the windows.

In York she toured the cathedral alone, but she met some nice people in a pub, and ended up going out to dinner at the Maid's Head with an art historian from York University who was writing a book on medieval glazing. He talked about the glasswork in the Chapter House at York Minster. They shared a bottle of wine and then had a nightcap. When he took her back to her hotel he kissed her several times, with increasing insistence and passion, in the hallway outside her door. Finally, his lips on her neck, he asked her if he could come into her room. She enjoyed kissing him, and she liked his hair, which was thick and thatchy, and his full lower lip, and his tweed jacket. Also, she looked forward to telling Pat Garvey about the encounter, so she opened the door with her key, took his hand, and, smiling, led him inside.

“I like you independent American girls,” he said as he unbuttoned her blouse. He wasn't her first; he was, in fact, her third. His name was Colin; when he asked her if she had a steady boyfriend, she told him that she was engaged to a man back home named Oscar, who ran a butcher shop. They struggled on her bed for what seemed to Nell a very long time—he had trouble, it turned out, staying hard—until finally, when she thought she was surely going to fall asleep, he achieved an orgasm and collapsed on her, by which time they were both hot, sweaty, and exhausted, and heartily disliked each other.

After he left, she was wide awake and depressed. She wrote in her diary:
sex with an Englishman named Colin. The usual combination of disgust and amusement, in about equal amounts
.

In the Lake
District, which she had longed to see more than any part of England, she was unhappier than she had been in years. The weather was perfect: Nell stayed for a week in Keswick and it didn't rain once—most unusual, she was constantly told by Mrs. Welsh, the widowed ex-schoolteacher from London who ran the hotel.
You've brought the good weather
, Mrs. Welsh said, beaming at her.

Every morning, awakened in her sunny room by birdsong and the voices of her fellow guests on their way down to breakfast, Nell became more and more reluctant to get up and spend the day in her own company. She bought a guidebook and went sightseeing, always feeling she was missing the best things. The village of Grasmere was crowded with people who had come to see the wrestling matches and sheepdog trials. Dove Cottage was closed, and the Wordsworth Museum seemed expensive for what it contained. On the day she took the steamer around Lake Windermere, the sun was so bright she developed a headache and missed most of the trip because she was lying on a bench belowdecks waiting for the aspirin to work and counting up mentally how much money she had left. She worried constantly about running out of money or losing her traveler's checks. Everywhere she went, the mountains bulked blackish-green against the blue sky, menacing the tiny perfect villages: the terrifying monsters Wordsworth had bad dreams about and called “huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men.”

The Keswick Hotel seemed to be full of the members of a climbing club who debated endlessly the merits of Pillar Rock versus Glimmer Crag, and rowdy salmon fishermen who ate their catch for dinner every evening, washing it down with pitchers of ale. At night after dinner, Nell sat in the hotel parlor waiting for someone to talk to her about something besides fish and mountains. She wrote cheery postcards to Pat and Florence and Marian, composed poetic descriptions of the scenery for the benefit of her diary, and devoured the vast collection of Agatha Christies provided by the hotel. She also found a tattered copy of Wordsworth, read “Tintern Abbey,” and wept tears of self-pity when she came to the lines:

For thou art with me here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend …

On the last
full day of her stay, she joined a climb up Skiddaw organized by the local Fell and Rock Climbing Club. The guidebook called the route “safe and easy, with rewarding views.” Her fellow climbers were mostly huge Germans in shorts who gave her a hand when the climbing was difficult but otherwise ignored her. Nell, with her hair in a braid, wearing trousers and a blue sweater in which she was much too hot, gave up halfway through the climb and started back down on her own. Almost immediately the air turned colder, the clouds thickened, and it began to rain. By the time she reached the railway station at the base of the mountain she was wet and freezing and bedraggled, and covered with mud where she had missed her footing and slipped for several feet down a steep ridge—thinking as she fell of her sister Peggy dying on the ice twelve years before: surprised at seeing Peggy's pale face, laughing under her stocking cap, as clearly as she saw the slide of mud and the grayish bark of the young tree she grabbed to break her fall.

She walked into the back garden of the hotel crying. She had lost her rubber band, and her hair hung dripping around her face. Her hands were filthy. The knees of her trousers were ripped, and her legs showed through bleeding and mud-covered.

Mrs. Welsh was standing at the door looking out into the rain, smoking a cigarette. She came running when she saw Nell.

“You poor lamb, look at you,” she said, and sent the vacant-eyed Irish maid to run a bath in the second-floor bathroom. Nell sat dripping on a stool in the kitchen, drinking whiskey and listening to Mrs. Welsh's stories about climbers who were lost on the mountain, including Wordsworth's Charles Gough and a man named Scoursby who had stayed at that very hotel.

The whiskey tasted wonderful to Nell. Her bones warmed. The sun came out and filled the kitchen with dusty light. The flowers in the back garden gleamed like gems. Mrs. Welsh refilled her glass, and by the time her bathwater was ready, the mud, the slide, the silly fear of Skiddaw had moved to a distant part of her mind, and it didn't seem at all odd that Mrs. Welsh came into the bathroom with her, helped her out of her unspeakable clothes, and then scrubbed her all over with a big soft sponge as if she were a child, talking in her quiet London voice about Wordsworth's sister Dorothy who, in her opinion, had more to do with Willie's poems than anyone would admit.

Nell sat happily in the hot water, watching her skin turn red and the suds turn gray. She lowered her head to her bruised knees while Mrs. Welsh soaped her back. She thought of nothing except the perfect comfort she had found. When she stepped out of the tub, Mrs. Welsh wrapped her in an immense terry-cloth robe and took her across the hall to her own room where Nell, much to her own surprise, put her arms around the woman and kissed her. When Mrs. Welsh kissed her back, Nell had to suppress the urge to laugh—to do something crazy, like racing away down the hall, giggling. She had never kissed a woman before—not like that. Mrs. Welsh untied Nell's robe, let her own cotton dress be unzipped. She was tall, not slender, not especially young or beautiful, but her large soft body was as full of knolls and hollows as a kind, welcoming mountain.

They kissed again, and Nell stopped wanting to laugh. “Ah, my dear girl,” the woman kept saying, and she had a way of tipping her head back with a gasp of pleasure, exposing her long white throat where a blue vein pulsed.

They spent an hour in her bed with the door locked while the maid coped with the salmon fishermen who came back and wanted their tea. Nell found herself knowing things she hadn't even suspected were there to be known. When Mrs. Welsh left—her name was Gillian, she was forty-four, she had been widowed two months after her wedding, that was all Nell knew about her—she fell asleep with the feeling that she had experienced this before in another existence, or in some vast dark dreamworld that had been there, all those years, alongside the innocent, meager world of Hillside Street. And, being truly honest with herself for (it seemed to Nell) the first time in her life, she understood why she had taken all her money out of the bank and sailed over three thousand miles away from home: for
this
, this thing for which she had no word, this feeling of perfect peace and well-being slightly tinged with wickedness that she carried with her into sleep and into the years to come.

ALICE

1946

No one but Nell wanted to talk about Peggy, and Nell seemed satisfied with whatever she was told. Easily pleased, Alice thought. Easily fooled. Still infatuated with her sister. Alice had brought with her the issue of
Art News Today
with the spread about the 1939 San Francisco Art League show—with her sculpture,
The Future
, prominently displayed. Just in case any of them had been told the truth.

But Alice kept the magazine locked up in her dressing case: Mary had taken her daughter's secret to the grave. Caroline told her aunt about Mary's last weeks. A weeping Caroline—not the girl Alice remembered, the pretty little exhibitionist she'd met on her last trip east to see Mary: 1923, Caro must have been four or five. The scene in her mind was of her sister brushing Caroline's curls around her finger, making them fall in thick, perfect blond sausages, then looping them back with a white ribbon. And Caroline hanging on Mary, interrupting by touching Mary's cheek to make her turn her head. “Mommy, Mommy,” and Mary's indulgent smile, Caroline's confiding whispers: she wanted to dance for Auntie Alice. Auntie had not been impressed.

And now she was this weeping wife, mother, daughter, holding tight to Alice's hand as she talked. “She burned everything,” she said. “The strangest things, like her clothes, things we'd given her, our old schoolbooks and toys. It was as if she wanted to wipe us all out. It was a superhuman act, Aunt Alice, to do what she did. She packed just one box for each of us, mostly useless odds and ends. Everything else went into the furnace! And she wasn't strong, she must have been in pain all that time, Dr. McCarthy said.”

Caroline's lower lip trembled, and she caught it in her teeth, looking down at their linked hands while tears gathered on her lower lids. Lord, the girl was pretty! Alice felt a pang of envy, and was immediately ashamed.

“I just wonder if she ever loved us,” Caroline said. She sobbed once and clutched her aunt's hand tighter. “I wonder if she loved me at all. How could she just burn everything I ever gave her?”

“Hush, hush, my girl.” Alice knew she should put her arms around her. This was the time to hug her, to cuddle little Caroline against her breast. She was unable to do it: if she took this pretty young niece close to her she would begin to weep herself, not for Caroline's sorrows but for her own. “Hush now,” she said, and pulled a clean handkerchief out of her sleeve with her free hand. “She wasn't herself. Mary adored you, you know that. You were her favorite. You and John. Here.”

Caroline took the handkerchief and blew her nose. It was Thanksgiving Day. There was dinner to be seen to. The smell of turkey was already wafting faintly from the kitchen. Nell was there, and Marge Fahey from next door. Jamie was shoveling the front walk—a steady metallic
scrape scrape
—his first appearance since Alice's arrival. And Charles was in the back room, in his easy chair, with the cat on his lap and the radio on. He was resting, Nell said. He hadn't been well, apparently—working only two or three days a week at Unger's. The old Butternut Street store was closed, all those bolts and brooms and saws Charles had loved so much and Mary had been so proud of. There was a drugstore there now, Nell said, and they were talking about tearing the building down and putting up an apartment house.

Alice couldn't imagine how they were managing. Nell's schoolteacher salary couldn't be large, and Jamie had just started at the university. Studying art. She would have loved to see some of his work, but Nell said he was very secretive. That strange, silent boy:
damaged
was the word that came to mind. She should get close to him, do her duty as his artist-aunt, try to help him. But who could get close to such a sullen young person? He had said hello without looking at her, his head down, snow shovel cocked like a weapon. From what she could see of his face, he looked startlingly like Mary—a drabber version of Mary in her youth, and with Charles's long nose.

She had seen Charles the night before—gone in to say hello to him. He'd seemed fine at first, turned off Jack Benny to ask her a million questions, all about money one way or another. Was she selling her sculpture? How much were people willing to pay for things like that? What kind of commission did those New York galleries get? And how was Ralph's shipping business doing? Then he got tired—visibly. His face grayed, sagged. He asked her if she was aware of the astonishing fact that Mary had died five months to the day after FDR. This wasn't quite accurate: the president had died on the twelfth of April, Mary on the ninth of September. But never mind. Alice kissed his cheek and told him she would leave “a little something” with Nell before she left, and he turned his head aside so that she saw his sharp profile against the white doily, and whispered, “You're a life-saver, Alice. Always have been.”