Winter Street (5 page)

A
fter the news that Mitzi is leaving him and that he will be getting divorced
again
sinks in, Kelley does the only thing he can do: he drives to Hatch’s and buys a bottle of Wild Turkey and a pack of Camels. Then, once back at the inn, he grabs a couple of Cokes from the complimentary guest fridge and heads to his bedroom, where he locks himself in.

It’s noon on Christmas Eve. He pours himself a drink and smokes his first cigarette in over two decades. It makes him cough. According to Mitzi, alcohol and tobacco are poison, and he is sure to be on death’s door any second.

But right now, it feels good. Or not good, exactly, but rebellious and exciting, which is the most he can hope for.

Inspection of the bedroom leads Kelley to understand that Mitzi has been planning this exodus for a while. She packed only two suitcases to take with her, but every single one of her belongings is gone with the exception of two things. The first is her Mrs. Claus dress, which is probably two or three inches too short for a woman Mitzi’s age but which she insisted on wearing to their party every year anyway. Kelley is confused. She ran off with Santa Claus but neglected to pack her matching outfit? Then he remembers her words:
I was hoping to make it through Christmas, but it didn’t work out that way.

So she left the Mrs.-Claus-as-street-worker dress here, just in case.

The other item hanging in the closet is a gold lamé jumpsuit, which Mitzi used to wear to the roller disco and which Kelley hilariously squeezed himself into one long-ago Halloween. Mitzi must have shipped all her other clothes to Lenox. Kelley had noticed her packing up large boxes, but he’d assumed they were Christmas gifts for Bart.

Bart
. Kelley has alerted Kevin, Patrick, Ava, and even Margaret about Mitzi’s departure, but he has no way to reach Bart other than e-mailing him, which seems cruel. A phone call is in order, surely? He is, after all, the one who will be most affected. Kelley lights another cigarette; he is smoking defiantly, without even a window cracked open. The room will stink for all eternity; as an innkeeper, Kelley knows this.

Kelley wonders for a second if, perhaps, Mitzi has already
broken the news to Bart. Mother and son do share an unusual and possibly unhealthy intimacy, or so Kelley always thought. She was never a mother the way Margaret was a mother, back when Margaret was a mother and not the most famous newsperson in America. Margaret stuck firmly to rules and boundaries—no kids slept in their bed, ever; there were no sleepovers without communication between Margaret and the other parents; there was no grade below a B; and there was a list of rotating chores, the schedule for which was taped to the refrigerator and adhered to. Margaret loved the kids, but she didn’t pander to them. Mitzi is another story. She never reprimanded Bart growing up; if he misbehaved, there was always a long, philosophical inquiry as to
why
Bart bit another child / went into the ocean without telling Mitzi / got drunk at the age of fourteen and threw up inside Ava’s piano. Mitzi used to walk around naked in front of Bart; she used to tell him when she was menstruating. Kelley wouldn’t be surprised if Mitzi had confided her affair to Bart—even years earlier.

Kelley is so incensed by this thought that he pours himself another Wild Turkey and logs on to his computer.

Mitzi has always been the one to keep up the Winter Street Inn Facebook page, but now Kelley takes matters into his own hands. He posts (to all 1,114 of their page’s “friends”):
In light of my recent discovery that my wife, Mitzi, has been conducting an affair with George (Santa Claus) for the past twelve years, tonight’s party at the Winter Street Inn is canceled.

And will be canceled for the foreseeable future,
he thinks. He’s going to sell the inn. God, what a relief it will be—financially and emotionally. He will list it for four million but accept three-five. He will call Eddie Pancik on the twenty-sixth; everyone on island calls him Fast Eddie, which Kelley
hopes
means Eddie Pancik will sell the inn quickly.

But why wait for Eddie Pancik?
Kelley wonders as he finishes his drink. He goes back onto the Winter Street Inn Facebook page. His post of a few minutes earlier hasn’t garnered any “likes,” only one comment from Mrs. Gabler, who was Bart’s kindergarten teacher and who is the first person to arrive at the Christmas party every year.

Mrs. Gabler’s comment says:
Is this some kind of crank call?

Crank call?
Mrs. Gabler is elderly and confused. At the party, she drinks only cognac, and Kelley always keeps a bottle of Rémy Martin on hand just for her. Extravagances abound!

Kelley feels embarrassed that no one else has liked his post, but, of course, who
would
like it? There should be an option to dislike a post. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this?

On their Facebook page, Kelley sees, are happy photos of Christmas Eves past, and now that Kelley looks closer, he sees that nearly all the photos on the page include George in his Santa suit, and most of them have Mitzi in the slutty Mrs. Claus dress and her high black-suede boots. There are several photos of George and Mitzi together. This is disgusting! How did Kelley not notice this before?

He posts again:
Winter Street Inn FSBO. $4M. Please call…

He feels better than he has in eons! He pours himself another drink and considers another cigarette but demurs. What else can he do?

He slips the gold lamé jumpsuit off the hanger. He is going to light it on fire. Not in the bedroom—with his luck, the whole house will go up in flames—but in the bathroom. In the bathtub, where the fire will be contained. The claw-foot porcelain tub with antique fixtures that Mitzi insisted on during the renovation, and which cost him four thousand dollars.

For a while, he had believed it was the best four thousand dollars he’d ever spent. He can remember dozens of times when Mitzi would lie in the tub for one of her scented baths—jasmine in the summer, sandalwood in the winter. She would pile her honey-colored curls on top of her head in a bun, and she would read poetry. Poetry was made for the bath, Mitzi believed. She was partial to Pablo Neruda. Kelley can practically hear her reciting to him from “If You Forget Me”:

“Ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated… my love feeds on your love, beloved.”

The air was filled with sweet steam; Mitzi’s skin was rosy and glowing from the heat of the water. Kelley often brought her a mug of lemon-ginger tea, and more often than not, she would emerge from the bath and let Kelley help her on with
her thick, white robe. She had looked like the subject of a Degas painting but far more lovely.

My love feeds on your love, beloved.

Those days are OVER.

What else can Kelley throw on the fire? Because it’s Christmas, he can’t bring himself to torch the Mrs. Claus dress, even though the sight of it sickens him. Just as he can’t seem to get out the trash can and dump all of Mitzi’s carolers and nutcrackers.
I’ll leave those for the rest of you to enjoy
. More like,
I’ll leave those here to torture you and make you cry.

Kelley ransacks Mitzi’s drawers. She has taken everything. She has, he realizes, taken every family photo that has Bart in it. The only photos left in the bedroom are ones of him and the three olders.

On the top shelf of the closet, he finds the accessories that go with the gold lamé jumpsuit—namely, a gold braided headband and gold wristbands, excellent in their absurdity. He throws them into the bathtub, then wishes for lighter fluid. He finds half an inch of Mitzi’s organic hair spray. Will this work? He pours the hair spray over the gold lamé mess, then hits the leg of the jumpsuit with the Kiss lighter he bought at the liquor store. The Kiss lighter resonates with Kelley’s sense of irony, and it’s even better now that he’s using the lighter to set the gold lamé jumpsuit on fire and, along with it, the vision of Mitzi dancing and skating to “Rock and Roll All Nite.” The material smolders at first and
emits a toxic smell, like something coming out of Jersey City during a sanitation strike in the dog days of summer. Then the fire catches—the organic hair spray is clearly flammable. The jumpsuit curls and crinkles like aluminum foil; the bathroom fills with smoke, and Kelley hurries to open a window, but he has trouble because he installed the storm windows right before Thanksgiving, and they’re sticking tight. He turns on the bathroom fan. If the smoke alarms go, the inn will have to be evacuated, and the fire department will come, and Kelley will have some explaining to do.

There is a knock on his bedroom door, which he ignores.

He watches Mitzi’s roller disco outfit transform into something even more hideous than it was, if that were possible.

“Daddy!” Ava says. “Open up!”

Ava, his sweetheart, his only little girl. He loves her like crazy, but she has always belonged first to Margaret. In fact, her voice right now sounds just like Margaret’s.

“Daddy!” The edge of hysteria, or just extreme impatience. The same tone Margaret used to take when she had to stay late at the studio and she
really needed
Kelley to leave work to go pick up Ava from piano lessons or attend one of the boys’ basketball games.
One of us has to be there, and it can’t be me!
Well, it couldn’t be him either a lot of the time; a lot of the time, the Quinn children had neither parent representing, which was humiliating to everyone involved and ended with Kelley and Margaret fighting, each of them
screaming,
My job is important!
Whose job was
more
important? They could debate that, at 110 decibels, for hours. Margaret was more visible; Kelley made more money. He asked Margaret to quit; he wanted her to stay home and parent.
Why me?
she said.
Because you’re the mother,
Kelley replied. Kelley had been doing a lot of cocaine at that time, to stay sharp, to stay awake, to constantly monitor the overseas stock markets. It was the late eighties, the administration of Bush 41, but that was no excuse. Kelley asked Margaret to quit, and what did she do? She moved out.

Within a year, she was hired away from NY1 by CBS. It was the big time, national news, and her salary eclipsed Kelley’s. Made it look like milk money.

“Daddy!” Ava says. Pounding with the flat of her hand now, he can tell.

He sighs and opens the door. Ava is pale, and her eyebrows are knitted into a V. Her red hair is tucked behind her ears, which is exactly how Margaret used to wear it. And her green eyes, clear as glass, are exactly the same as her mother’s. These eyes are flashing with annoyance now.

“What,” Ava asks, “is that
smell?
” She pokes her head around the door and sees smoke billowing from the bathroom. “What are you
doing,
Daddy?”

“Uh…,” he says. He ushers her into the bedroom. He’s afraid if smoke gets in the hallway, the alarms will go off.

She charges like a bull into the bathroom, where she starts coughing and gagging. “What
is
that?”

“Mitzi’s roller disco outfit,” he says. “Her headband and her…”

Ava turns on the water in the tub, and the whole mess smokes and hisses like a wet, angry dragon with golden scales.

“… wristbands,” Kelley says weakly.

“I saw your Facebook post,” she says. “Really, was that necessary?”

“Uh…?” Kelley says. He feels a crushing sense of shame. He is a sixty-two-year-old man who just sought revenge on his wife via social media.

“We are
having
the party tonight,” Ava says. She eyeballs the pack of Camels and the bottle of Wild Turkey like a mother superior. “So, please, pull yourself together.”

H
e knows what he has to do. It is only a matter of courage.

And, also, of money. He has socked away twenty-nine thousand dollars in the years since Norah sold their house, took the profit in lieu of alimony payments, and left Nantucket for points south. Twenty-nine grand doesn’t sound like a lot, compared with the millions that Patrick makes,
but Kevin is pretty proud of himself, considering he gets paid in cash, which could have easily flowed through his hands like water. It takes extreme willpower for him to make it to the bank with a deposit, and yet he does it every week. Before he met Isabelle, he was focused on getting out from under his father’s roof—he’s thirty-six, and living at the inn has done a number on his self-esteem—but now that he’s fallen in love with Isabelle, getting his own place is even
more
important.

He wants to buy a cottage where he can take Isabelle, so the two of them can stop sneaking around. He wants to somehow turn into a man who wears a watch instead of a sailor’s bracelet, who owns a nice pair of suede loafers instead of bar clogs, a man who rises at six a.m. to work, rather than at noon.

Is it a winning strategy to spend two or three or five thousand dollars on an engagement ring?

His stomach squelches with nerves.

No more women
. It was a vow he made to himself.

It’s not just Isabelle, though. There is a baby. He is going to be a father. It’s time for actual self-improvement, which will start with bravery, and an abandonment of his bitterness. He can’t let his actions now be dictated by what happened with Norah; if he does, then he is
still
letting her control him.

He will spend five thousand dollars on an engagement ring.

But.

Kevin is in bed, his cell phone resting on the pillow next to him, which is where Isabelle’s head should be. She is in the house somewhere. She and Ava are probably running around trying to get ready for the party tonight without Mitzi. If Kevin sets foot out in the hallway, he will be enlisted to help. Never mind that he brought home cases of beer, wine, liquor, and mixers from the Bar last night. He will be asked to carry things, hang things, move things, and possibly chop and stir things.

He closes his eyes. If he’s going to do this, then he has to get into town sooner rather than later. The red-ticket drawing is at three o’clock, and Main Street will be mobbed by one thirty. After the drawing, the Catholics will go to Mass, and everyone else will go drinking until the time comes to descend on the Winter Street Inn, for the biggest open-invitation party on the island.

He’s running out of time.

He does what he always does when he feels scared, unsure, adrift: he calls his mother.

“Sweetie?” she says, answering on the first ring. “How are things there?”

“Um…?” Kevin says.

“I know Mitzi left,” Margaret says. “I wonder how your dad is doing.”

“I haven’t seen him since it happened,” Kevin says. “I was at work.”

“I can’t imagine he’s taking it well,” Margaret says. “He’s
not good with rejection. And Bart just deployed, and we’ve lost sixteen soldiers over there in the past forty-eight hours. It must feel like Armageddon there.”

“Um… yes? Kind of?” Kevin says. “And Patrick isn’t coming home, I guess.”

Margaret gasps. “What? Why
not?
”

“I’m not really sure?” Kevin says. Margaret, being a television journalist, asks question after question after question, but Kevin isn’t good at disseminating family gossip. That’s his sister’s department. “You’ll have to check with him? Or Ava?”

“I’ll do that,” Margaret says. He hears her typing on her computer. “And how are
you,
sweetie? What’s going on in
your
world?”

“Well,” he says, “I have something to tell you.”

“Whatever it is, honey, whatever you need, I’m here for you,” Margaret says. “You know that, right?”

She’s assuming it’s bad news—because when, in his adult life, has Kevin ever called with good news?

He blurts it all out in one long stream. It sounds something like,
Imetsomeoneshe’sFrenchsheworksattheinnIreallyloveherMomI’mgoingtoaskhertomarrymeIthinkandguesswhatshe’spregnant.

Margaret screams. With joy, he thinks. She says to her driver, “Raoul! Raoul! I’m going to be a grandmother again! Oh, honey, I’m so thrilled for you! Now, who is it? Is it Isabelle?”

Kevin is confused. His mother does tend to know everything, but how does she know about Isabelle?

“Yes?” he says.

“I met her, briefly, this summer when I was on Nantucket. She answered the door when I stopped by the inn. She is exquisite! She had those long blond braids and that skin, like a milkmaid’s, and then I heard her accent and I thought she was from Switzerland—Lausanne, maybe—but she said Montpellier, where I actually did a segment for
60 Minutes,
once upon a time. There was a demonstration against Sarkozy. Montpellier has a large population of North Africans, and there is a fair amount of unrest.”

“So, anyway,” Kevin says. He wants to get Margaret off the tangent about the sociopolitical climate in Montpellier and back on topic, which is his own very real fear. “I think I’m going to propose.”

“Kevin,” Margaret says, “I hear doubt in your voice.”

“Once bitten, twice shy,” he says.

“I understand, darling,” Margaret says. “But you’re in love?”

He swallows. “Yes.”

“You’re really, really in love, where you feel like a fool in a good way?”

“Yes.”

“Love is always a gamble, honey. Norah Vale got the best of you, but you were incredibly young. I always blamed myself for that. Your father and I had just split, and you
moved to a new place. You had to attach to something and make it a permanent part of yourself, and you chose Norah.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Kevin says. “It was my fault. You and Dad warned me, but I didn’t listen.”

“You’re stronger now. I trust your instincts, and I’m not lying when I tell you that I
felt
something when I met Isabelle. I mean, how many people do I meet in a given week? Fifty? A hundred? And I met Isabelle briefly four months ago… and something about her stuck with me.”

“I’m going to buy a ring this afternoon,” Kevin says.

“Yes,” Margaret says. “If you’re going to propose, it’s good to have a ring. Now… would it be undermining your manhood if I offered you an early Christmas present in the form of cash to help you pay for it?”

Kevin laughs and fills with an unexpected relief. It’s not just the money, although that certainly helps, and it’s a surprise, because Margaret doesn’t like to give handouts.
I’m your mother, not an ATM
. Kevin is strengthened by Margaret’s confidence in him, and her appreciation of Isabelle.

“My manhood can handle it,” Kevin says. “Thank you.” He exhales the remainder of his anxiety. “I’m going to be a father.”

“Darling, I’m over the moon. It’s the best Christmas present ever. I’ll have Darcy wire you the money as soon as I get to the studio.”

His love and respect for his mother combine to form a surge of golden energy, and Kevin jumps out of bed.

“Thanks, Mom!” he says.

“Is it horrible of me to say I hope it’s a little girl?” Margaret says. “I adore Patty’s boys—you know I do—but, oh, how I long for a granddaughter.”

“Mom,” Kevin says, “absolutely nobody knows about this. Nobody even knows that Isabelle and I are seeing each other. It’s going to come as kind of a shock, especially to Dad and Ava, and so I have to beg you to
please
not say anything.”

Margaret laughs. She says, “Of course not, honey. What do you think I’m going to do? Announce it on the evening news?”

Oh boy,
Kevin thinks. “I love you, Mom,” he says.

“Merry Christmas, sweetie,” Margaret says. “Good luck!”