Souvenir of Cold Springs (29 page)

Old Charlie Kerwin. Not so old, really. Younger than Ralph by several years, but wasted, his daughters said, since Mary's death. His hair had gone from graying to white, and he had no more pep than an old dog. He'd been attractive once—lighthaired like Caroline, tall and muscular. Alice remembered him at the wedding, how he could hardly keep his hands off Mary. Her little sister, married at nineteen to this tall man of thirty. Alice had liked him herself, but he had never looked at her once he saw her sister. “What a pretty traveling suit,” someone said when Mary had changed and come down the steps. A gray suit, hobble-skirted, with a polka-dotted shirtwaist and a straw hat trimmed with red ribbon. Charlie's brother had grinned and said, low-voiced, “Charlie can't wait to get it off her,” and Alice had felt thrilled by these words, and by the sight of Mary and Charles in the rumble seat of Larry Laidlaw's Ford, his head bent to hers, Mary's hand up to hold her hat on. Larry was driving them to the train station; they would take a sleeper up to Plattsburgh, to honeymoon at Lake Champlain. Alice imagined them in the narrow berth, naked together. Alice was twenty-six, but she'd never had a serious beau, and wouldn't meet Ralph Steele for three years. Standing there watching them go, thinking of marriage, of being in bed with a man like Charles Kerwin, she could feel her pulse beating hard in her temples.

And now look at him. And Mary dead.

Alice watched Caroline dab at her eyes one last time and stow the handkerchief in her pocket. The children were out playing in the snow with Stewart; she could hear Lucy's shrill cries. Stewart was a better father than Caroline was a mother—or so it seemed to Alice. But what was wrong with that? She had a quick vision of Ralph, when the doctor told him they would never have children—his face stricken as if he had a dozen children and he'd heard that all of them had died, all at once, in that instant.

“I loved her,” Caroline said. “Mom.”

They stood up. “I know you did, Caroline,” Alice said. “And you made her happy, she was always telling me that.” She patted her niece's shoulder. “I don't know how to explain what she did at the end. All I can say it was her illness, it was the tumor on her brain, it wasn't lack of love.”

They went down to the kitchen, Alice to peel potatoes, Caroline to stand at the door and wave at her boisterous children in the snow. Marge Fahey in a hideous frilled apron was talking to Nell about lipstick shades. “You should try something that's not so pink and girlish,” she said. “What do you think, Alice? Isn't she too old for the Tangee look?”

“I think she looks lovely.” Poor Nell, the plainest of her nieces, all freckles and angles and flushed from turkey basting, actually looked ugly and miserable, any makeup she might have worn sweated off in the hot kitchen.

“I'm going to get you a tube of Montezuma Red,” Marge said with decision. “Elizabeth Arden. Sixty cents plus tax down at Dey Brothers. It'll be my Christmas present to you, Nell. I have a hunch you need some livening up.”

Nell said nothing. She shut the oven door and brushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Alice smiled at her—a smile meant to be conspiratorial, comforting—and Nell smiled back, closing her eyes to indicate her weariness with good-hearted Marge. She and Alice had had a long talk the night before. Nell, in fact, had met her aunt at the station. The train from New York was late, but when Alice had finally got in, there had been Nell, sitting upright and patient in the waiting room, reading a book of poetry. Alice kissed her cheek and said, “What's this? Byron?” and Nell had blushed and said, “It's my only vice.” The two of them had stayed up until midnight, drinking cocoa in the kitchen.

As she peeled each potato, Alice set it in a big pan of water. She hadn't peeled a potato in years, and she was rather enjoying it—trying to get the peel off in one continuous strip. She thought about Mary, who had probably peeled potatoes every day of her life: Mary at the end destroying the evidence that life had been lived. Alice imagined the tumor pressing against her brain, telling her to let go, let go …

All those letters must have been burnt, then. The bulletins on Peggy's health and progress. Or maybe they were destroyed as soon as they were received. Too risky: what if Charles read them? Or the children. Dear Mary—so timid and conventional, so Catholic. All those children. And now only three left—two and a half, considering Jamie. Mary had quit the Church after John's death. They all had, Nell said, except her father. The damned war, Nell said, and looked at Alice to see if she was shocked by her profanity, but Alice echoed what she said:
yes, the damned war, it took so many
. Her friend Cora's son, she was thinking of, who left those lovely babies. Ralph's sister's boy, George, who would have gone into the business with him. Her own nephew John, that handsome lad, Mary's pride and joy.

But as they sat there drinking cocoa, Nell didn't want to talk about the war or John or Mary's death—only about Peggy. “She wrote me the most wonderful letters,” Nell said. She had showed Alice Peggy's picture, framed, in the place of honor on her bureau: her high-school graduation picture, idealized, with spit curls. “All about Chinatown, and Uncle Ralph's ships, and all the flowers. She made San Francisco, California, sound like heaven on earth.”

“Well, it's a very pretty place,” Alice said. It occurred to her that she could invite Nell out to visit in the summer, when school was out. But better check with Ralph before she mentioned it. He was getting crotchety as he got older. Set in his ways. Liked his comforts, his routines. And Peggy, after all, had been a bit of a trial. “Every time I come home, there she is, just moping around, Alice. Why doesn't the girl
do
something?” Not that he hadn't come to love her, finally. But a difficult girl. Of course, Nell would be different. She had a lively mind: Byron in the Syracuse train station! A good schoolteacher, Alice had no doubt. The kind that inspires her students, the girls especially—gives them noble and romantic ideas, broadens their lives. Reads poetry aloud, with expression. Puts on little plays, scenes from Shakespeare, costumes whipped up from bedsheets and old curtains. Ralph would like her immediately, even her sharp face and her tall angular body, the hair pulled tight into a pony-tail, those bright naïve blue eyes. Not a moper. Of course, Peggy had had some reasons to mope. But another kind of girl would have handled it differently. Alice thought wistfully of the baby, a fat-faced boy—nameless. Peggy had given him up without a second thought, apparently.
Ralph and I should have taken him
, Alice thought as she often did.

“I miss her so much,” Nell said. “Even now. After all these long, long years.”

“She was a dear girl,” Alice said. “I'm glad I got to know her. We loved having her with us.”

“She was always such fun,” Nell's blue eyes were tearful, her hands clasped together under her chin. “She was always so—I don't know. You never knew what she would say. She didn't care what anyone thought of her. She was such an original.”

“Wasn't she?” Alice tried to remember. “We had a lot of laughs,” she said, though when she thought back eight years she couldn't remember that many. What she remembered was just Peggy, as lumpish in her pregnancy as the red clay that Alice transformed by her own hands into something beautiful—into
The Future
, whose memorial rested upstairs in her dressing case. What if she told Nell about it? Showed her the pictures?
This is your sister who didn't care what anyone thought of her. This is when she was hiding out in California before she gave her baby away
. And she was shocked at the contempt she felt—even now, as Nell would say, after all these long, long years.

Thanksgiving dinner was
moderately unpleasant. There were eleven of them, counting the children—Caroline's little Lucy and Teddy, who spent most of the time crying and complaining over one thing or another, plus the Faheys' sixteen-year-old son Jerry, who had pimples and talked football football football, whether anyone listened or not.

Alice knew the Faheys only from Mary's letters. Bill and Marge—they had lived next door forever, and Mary had been close to them. When she met them in person, Alice was surprised that Marge was so empty-headed—Marge's conversation, Alice thought, would drive her over the brink if she lived next door to her—and that no one seemed to notice that Bill, the big Pepsi executive, had a crush on Nell. He had brought cheap pink sparkling wine, and the more he drank of it the worse he got—teasing Nell about her freckles, her long bones, the way she must drive the boys wild, all of which would have been not amusing, not even acceptable, but at least bearable if Nell were fourteen. But she was twenty-three, a grown woman, a university graduate and a teacher at the high school. When Bill Fahey leaned across the table to squeeze her arm, it was Alice's opinion that Nell should have given him a slap instead of a weak giggle.

“This should be an annual event,” Charles said when Bill had carved the turkey, and Marge had forced her marsh-mallow-topped sweet potatoes on everyone, and the glasses were filled, and the gravy was passed, and spilled on the white tablecloth, and passed again, and grace was garbled by Lucy while Teddy sulked because he had wanted to be the one to say it. “The Kerwins and the Faheys, and the Steeles from California,” Charles said. He sat at the head of the table smiling, not eating much. On his right, where Mary must have sat every night for the thirty years of their marriage, was Nell, still drooping from the effort of cooking, her wineglass untouched in front of her.

“You should come every year, Aunt Alice,” Nell said. “And next time bring Uncle Ralph. I think it's such a shame that he has to stay all alone in San Francisco for Thanksgiving.”

“He'll go to his sister's house in Oakland.”

“But we want him here,” Caroline said, smiling, pretending to pout. “We've never even met Uncle Ralph.”

Alice tried to imagine Ralph drinking the sweet fizzy wine and listening to Marge's complaints about the price of meat now that rationing was over. Eating the marshmallow stuff and the dried-out turkey—overcooked because Bill Fahey and his son were late: Northside High was playing Valley, and they'd stayed until the last heartbreaking touchdown.

“When it's your boys out there, you don't give up hope until the clock runs out,” Bill said. Jerry was on crutches; a broken ankle was keeping him out of the game. “Of course, Jerry's too modest to say that the score would have been a lot different if his ankle was healed.”

“I'm not too modest, Dad,” Jerry said, laughing. Bill had poured him a glass of wine, and he drank half of it down right away as if it were Pepsi. “Heck, any fool could see they needed me out there to save their asses. Whoops, excuse me, ladies.”

“Jerry” Marge said, blushing.

Charles changed the subject. “Now tell us all about this New York thing, Alice. Marge here has been wanting the inside dope about the gallery that's giving you a show.”

Marge dabbled in watercolor, Alice knew, and so she told Marge all about her New York solo show—not her first, but undoubtedly her biggest and most important, in a gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street. As she talked, she could see that Jamie was listening, and she tried to speak directly to him, to say what she thought he might like to know—how hard it was to get started, to get any kind of recognition, and how gradually over the years she had built up a clientele, a sort of fan club, people who were aware of her work and looked for her name.

“Of course, the important thing is to keep at it, keep doing it, don't let anything else get in the way,” Alice said.

It was meant as encouragement for Jamie, but Marge took offense. “Unless you have to take time out for child raising,” she said. Her voice was so sarcastic, and she cut so savagely into a piece of dark meat, that Alice wondered how often Mary had wounded her neighbor with extravagant tales of her successful artist sister. Marge jammed the turkey in her mouth, chewed it fast, and washed it down with wine. “It certainly would be wonderful to have the luxury to do nothing but paint,” she said.

Jamie raised his head and looked at his aunt. “Do you ever paint? Or have you always worked in clay?”

For a moment, Alice wasn't sure who had spoken; until now, she hadn't heard Jamie utter more than two words at a time. She looked at him, and he dropped his eyes quickly to his plate. “No, I've always been a sculptor,” she said. “At least since one of my teachers in art school told me I had the most depressingly conventional color sense he'd ever seen.”

Jamie didn't look at her again, but the corners of his mouth turned up, just slightly, and Alice felt she had taken the first step toward taming a scared animal. She looked at his bowed head, the long Kerwin nose and gaunt cheeks, the sandy hair that matched his skin, and her heart soared. Somehow, she knew he had the gift: she sensed it. And she would help him. Jamie would be her discovery—her own nephew, the son she had never had, who would follow in her footsteps.

The conversation turned back to football, to the phenomenal growth of Pepsi stock since the war, to Stewart's law firm and Teddy's loose front tooth and the early snow, early even for Syracuse. It was the kind of talk that made Alice confused and unhappy—no real conversation, no subject dwelt on for more than a moment, just noise, and silences filled up. Alice ate too much and began to feel sick to her stomach, and then there were two kinds of pie, and coffee.

When it was time to do the dishes, Bill offered to help Nell in the kitchen, but Alice roused herself to say firmly that Nell had done enough, and offered her own services, which, fortunately, were refused. In the end, the men did the dishes—Bill and Jerry and Stewart—while Caroline took the cranky children upstairs to read them stories, and Charles went back to his easy chair and his radio, and Jamie went out in the dark to shovel more snow, and Alice and Marge and Nell sat dozing and looking at newspapers in the living room.