Nancy Culpepper (3 page)

“They’re none of my people,” says Mom, studying the picture through her bifocals.

“He died when I was little, but I think that’s him,” says Daddy. “Him and Aunt Lucy Culpepper.”

“Who was she?” Nancy asks.

“Uncle John’s wife.”

“I figured that,” says Nancy impatiently. “But who
was
she?”

“I don’t know.” He is still looking at the picture, running his fingers over the man’s face.

Back in Granny’s room, Nancy pulls the string that turns on the ceiling light, so that Granny can examine the picture. Granny shakes her head slowly. “I never saw them folks before in all my life.”

Mom comes in with a dish of strawberries.

“Did I pick these?” Granny asks.

“No. You eat yours about ten years ago,” Mom says.

Granny puts in her teeth and eats the strawberries in slurps, missing her mouth twice. “Let me see them people again,” she says, waving her spoon. Her teeth make the sound of a baby rattle.

“Nancy Hollins,” says Granny. “She was a Culpepper.”

“That’s Nancy Culpepper?” cries Nancy.

“
That
’s not Nancy Culpepper,” Mom says. “That woman’s got a rat in her hair. They wasn’t in style back when Nancy Culpepper was alive.”

Granny’s face is flushed and she is breathing heavily. “She was a real little-bitty old thing,” she says in a high, squeaky voice. “She never would talk. Everybody thought she was curious. Plumb curious.”

“Are you sure it’s her?” Nancy says.

“If I’m not mistaken.”

“She don’t remember,” Mom says to Nancy. “Her mind gets confused.”

Granny removes her teeth and lies back, her bones grinding. Her chest heaves with exhaustion. Nancy sits down in the rocking chair, and as she rocks back and forth she searches the photograph, exploring the features of the young woman, who is wearing an embroidered white dress, and the young man, in a curly beard that starts below his chin, framing his face like a ruffle. The woman looks frightened—of the camera perhaps—but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass. This young woman would be glad to dance to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away.

Blue Country

“The Blue Lantern Inn—that’s a name straight out of a Nancy Drew book,” said Nancy.

“Is Nancy Drew your namesake?” teased Jack.

Nancy laughed. “Nancy Drew always stopped at some quaint wayside inn for tea, and there would be a mystery to solve. The inns were just like this. I feel I’ve been here before.”

Nancy and Jack were at the Blue Lantern Inn on the coast above Boston. They had come for the weekend to attend the wedding of a friend from graduate school who was finally getting married to the man she had lived with for five years. Nancy and Jack had driven for six hours from Pennsylvania. On the way Jack had said, “Why couldn’t the wedding be two weeks from now, when the autumn leaves are just right?” They used to live in New England, and Jack was crazy about the fall foliage. He was always critical of autumn in Pennsylvania. He would complain about the brown-and-gold splendor on the mountain ridge near their home. Not a single flaming red sugar maple on the whole mountain, he would point out, like someone judging a parade.

That evening, in a seafood house on a wharf, Jack and Nancy ripped apart bright lobsters and laughed. They drank a bottle of rosé— to match the lobster, Jack said. But the colors didn’t match at all. Jack acted silly, calling her “Toots,” the way he did to tease her when they were first married. Nancy called him “Mr. Toots” in return and giggled. Jack had been teasing her all day. Going to a wedding made them happy. Water leaked from the boiled lobster into Nancy’s lap. Jack splintered a claw and a tender orange hand slithered out.

Afterwards, they walked in the dark on the beach in front of the Blue Lantern Inn. The tide had gone so far out they had to hike to meet it. The sand was wet and marshy in places, and it was too dark to see the water. Some birds skittered by quietly.

“I had forgotten how much I love the ocean,” Jack said. “I can’t wait till Sunday.”

“I’m not sure I want to go out there in a little boat to watch whales,” Nancy said. “The idea is terrifying.”

“It won’t be terrifying in the daytime,” Jack said. “Whales are friendly.”

“But they’re so big.”

“They’re like horses. Horses are very careful not to step on cats and chickens.”

“Tell that to Ahab,” said Nancy, squeezing his hand.

In the inn during the night, she heard the sea whispering, and toward morning she heard a gurgling sound—rain falling from the drain spouts. Suddenly, there was a sharp tapping on the door and an urgent voice: “Phone call. Phone call.” Nancy was in her jeans and sweat shirt and downstairs in the lobby before she could realize what she had heard. She was afraid something had happened to their child, Robert, who was staying with friends at home.

It was Nancy’s mother, in Kentucky. “Nancy? Did I get you up? Granny passed away last night, about eleven o’clock.”

Nancy had expected this phone call for years. But now she was stunned and her mother sounded bewildered. Nancy’s grandmother was ninety-four and had been arthritic and senile for several years. During the past summer her health had deteriorated, and for many months Nancy had not traveled without notifying her parents where to reach her.

Nancy’s mother said, “She had mass-matter on the brain.”

“What in the world is mass-matter on the brain?” Nancy cried. A tall man in a blue blazer turned his head in her direction.

Mom said, “Sometimes the blood vessels running to your brain mat together in a pocket? They call it mass-matter.”

“You mean she had a stroke.”

“She was acting wild on us all day,” Mom went on. “Hollering and carrying on. Trying to walk for the first time in a year. I went in about ten-thirty to give her a pill and I thought she was dead. But she wasn’t completely dead yet.”

While her mother described the funeral plans, Nancy looked out the front window and saw that the ocean was still far away. The tide had come in and gone out again. She should leave for Kentucky immediately, for the funeral was the next day.

“I don’t know how soon I can get there,” she said. “I’ll have to check with the airlines.” She suddenly looked down, wondering if she had remembered to dress. Guests were entering the dining room for breakfast.

She spoke with her father, who sounded weary and distant.

“Can’t you wait till Monday?” Nancy asked him.

“Nobody would come on Monday. They’d have to work.”

“I’ll try to get there,” she said. “I just woke up. I’m looking out at the sea. It’s beautiful. We’re at this nice inn—”

“I know how much you always cared for Granny, and you had always planned to come back for her funeral,” said Daddy.

“Yes,” Nancy said.

Jack was still sleeping. Telephone calls never alarmed him. Nancy instinctively feared bad news from the telephone. She was fourteen, on the farm in Kentucky, when the family first got a telephone, the same year they got television. Jack came from a different world— private school, summer camps. How did we ever get together? Nancy thought wildly, as she woke him up and told him the news.

“Granny had some kind of fit,” she said. “It sounded unreal.” She remembered the way her grandmother lay curled up, barely able to turn, for so long. Nancy’s father had once said, “Old people get that way, drawed up like a baby in the womb.” They had attempted once to take her to a nursing home, but she had refused to go.

Jack sat up on his elbows, looking disappointed. Jack, a photographer, had planned to make a wedding album for Laurie and Ed as a present.

“Do you want me to fly down with you?” he asked.

“No. It’s not necessary.” Jack was always uncomfortable in the South. The first time he went with her, in the late sixties, a truck driver had threatened to beat him up. It was Jack’s hair. Nancy said now, “You don’t have to go. I don’t want you to miss the wedding, and you were counting on seeing whales tomorrow.”

“You may not even be able to get there because of the airline strike,” Jack said, getting out of bed and parting the curtains. “Oh, it’s raining,” he said. “I was going to run.”

“Well, if I can’t get there, then I can’t get there,” said Nancy.

“How would they feel if you didn’t go?”

“I don’t know.” She pulled her sweat shirt over her head. Her face was still in her sweat shirt when Jack drew her to him and held her, waiting for her to cry.

“Would you call the airlines for me while I take a shower?” Nancy asked. “This hasn’t registered yet. Look at me. I’m not even crying.”

In the shower, Nancy realized that everything in the Blue Lantern Inn was blue. The wallpaper was blue. The rugs were blue. In the lobby downstairs, seashells on blue tiles were mounted on the wall. The inn seemed to be the ideal place she had aspired toward since her childhood, when she read about the pleasant, cozy tearooms in the storybooks. She tried to picture her grandmother’s face—the gentle woman she loved—but all she could see was a silhouette of an old woman hunched over her dishpan set on the gas stove to heat. In the stove, in a compartment next to the oven, would be food from dinner saved for supper. Miraculously, no one in the family had ever had food poisoning. Nancy pushed open the clouded-glass window in the shower and saw the ocean beating, gray in the rain. She dreaded the thought of flying in the rain.

“The only plane that will get you to Louisville with decent connections leaves Boston in two hours,” Jack told Nancy when she came out of the shower. “And you’ll have to fly standby. There’s one from New York at six, but we’d have to drive to New York, and there’s nothing out of Louisville until noon tomorrow. I don’t think that one would get you home in time for the funeral. Anyway, all the flights are booked solid, and you’d have to take a chance on getting a seat.”

“Let’s eat and think about this,” said Nancy. She had hoped for an evening flight so she would not have to miss the wedding. It occurred to her that Jack would have to drive back to Pennsylvania alone.

“What are you feeling?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She spread cold lotion on her legs. “I feel inconvenienced,” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t seem personal. She was so old.”

Jack said, “I hope you’re relieved, Nancy. She’s been a terrible strain on your parents.”

“I know it,” Nancy said, pulling on corduroy slacks. “She’s driven my mother crazy. If I cry, it will be for my mom.”

“Maybe you should wait and go down in a week or two and spend some time with your parents. They might need you more then.”

“That might be better—and I have that important meeting at work on Tuesday.” Nancy began to relax. Jack was always so clear-headed. She put on an Icelandic wool sweater she had bought in Scotland once when she and Jack went looking for the Loch Ness monster. Jack called the sweater her “sheep.”

“Why
don’t
you go down later?” he said, looking happier. He did a few deep knee bends.

Nancy gazed at snapshots of previous guests on a bulletin board in the dining room. On a paper plate thumbtacked next to the tide tables, someone had scrawled, YES, THE MOONIES ARE HERE. A smiling gray-haired man in a striped sweater said to Jack, “We come here every year. We were here all week and the weather was
glorious
until today.”

“There’s an artists’ colony here as good as on the Cape,” a short woman, his wife, said, beaming.

Nancy took orange juice, coffee, and a blueberry muffin from a sideboard and sat at the corner of the long table, facing the ocean. Jack sat down and handed her a napkin and silverware. “You forgot these,” he said gently. He chatted with the cheerful couple while Nancy ate and gazed out the window at the vacant sky and water. Her appetite surprised her. The muffins were homemade, according to the other guests.

Jack brought Nancy another muffin. “Are you O.K.?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“Do you know what you want to do?”

“I don’t want to travel in the rain.” She spread butter on the muffin and watched it crumble. She said, “When my parents were young, they wanted to build a house of their own half a mile down the road. They wanted to buy a piece of land and build. Instead, they built that house next door, on Granddaddy’s land. Mom remembers how Granny fretted at the idea of Daddy moving half a mile away. She said, ‘Well, what if he was to get sick? Who would take care of him?’ She didn’t want her precious son out of her sight and didn’t trust my mother to look out for him. Mom bore that insult to this day. And she ended up taking care of Granny all those years.”

“Think of how free your parents are going to be now,” Jack said.

Nancy ate a bite of muffin. “I know I should go,” she said slowly. “But it seems to me that if you have a choice between a wedding and a funeral, you should go to the wedding.”

“It’s up to you.”

“I know you want to take pictures, and we drove so far.”

More guests were entering the dining room, talking about the weather.

Nancy said to Jack, “Later I’ll double-check and see if there’s some way I could get there late tonight or tomorrow morning. And I’ll call home later today. They’ll be at the funeral home all afternoon anyway.”

Suddenly, a small blond dog rushed into the dining room, followed by the woman who ran the guesthouse. She cried, “Tuffie—get back here! You know you’re not supposed to be in Blue Country!”

The gray-haired man said to her, “It’s too bad you have to live in the back of the house, without this beautiful view.”

“Oh, in the winter we always move into Blue Country,” she said, smiling and scooping up the dog from the blue rug. She tugged the dog’s ribboned topknot. “Bad boy, Tuffie.”

“That dog doesn’t look half as guilty as I do,” Nancy said to Jack. The wedding had been planned for the beach, but because of the rain it was moved to a summer camp nearby. The redwood cottages, with elaborately carved cornices and red-painted trim, resembled a Russian peasant village. “Everything in New England is quaint,” said Nancy as Jack’s umbrella exploded into shape. They could hear the ocean roaring beyond a low, tree-lined hill. The clouds were rushing by, like something chased, so near they looked transparent as smoke.

The art studio, where the crowd was gathering, was unfinished inside, and spider plants dangled from two-by-fours braced together overhead. Some stretched canvases faced the wall, and the floor was paint-splotched. Nancy sat in a folding chair and scanned the crowd for familiar faces while Jack began photographing Laurie and Ed, who were already there. Nancy had not seen Laurie in four years, and they had met Ed only once, at a restaurant in Philadelphia when he was attending a computer conference. Someone was adjusting the flowers in Laurie’s hair. Nancy did not remember ever seeing Laurie in a dress. Laurie kept hitching up her waistband. Ed, in a dark tuxedo with red, embroidered lapels, was greeting friends and smiling broadly. Nancy remembered that at the restaurant in Philadelphia he had ordered baby octopus and that it had arrived intact, on a bed of pasta. Jack, who found Ed somewhat pretentious, had thought it was vulgar to order such a thing, but Nancy thought it had been adventurous.

When the musicians—two guitarists and a violinist—began playing, Nancy recognized Gypsy music in the wail of the violin. She recalled a Nancy Drew mystery involving Gypsies. She used to read those books on Granny’s front porch. She sat on the porch swing, swinging as high as she could go and wishing hard that she could go someplace Nancy Drew went, and she begged Granny to run away with her, but Granny warned her against Gypsies and did not have a high opinion of unknown places. The violin was mournful at first, then sweet, then ecstatic, before shivering and retreating into a low moan.

Jack sat down beside Nancy. “I think I got some good shots,” he said. “Doesn’t Laurie look incredible?”

Two tall men walked with Laurie and Ed to the front of the room. One of the men took a white gown from his briefcase and fluffed it up. He threw it up in the air like pizza dough and caught it, then pulled it over his head. The other man, a rabbi, draped an embroidered vestment around his shoulders. Laurie tugged at her skirt.

“The minister must be a friend of theirs,” said the woman sitting next to Nancy.

The rabbi spoke in Hebrew and offered Laurie and Ed a glass of wine. Suddenly, in the front row, a man stood up and began talking to Laurie. She turned to listen. Then he faced the audience and said apologetically, “I couldn’t give Laurie away, because I don’t own her. But I ran across some things last week that I wanted to share on this occasion.” He thumbed through the papers in his hand, explaining that they were report cards and drawings he had saved from Laurie’s childhood. “I have this Valentine here,” he said. “It’s signed, ‘Love, Laurie.’ ” He cried, and Laurie, looking embarrassed, embraced him. When he sat down, a woman next to him stood up, her back to the audience, and read a poem titled “The Outermost Limits.” Nancy saw the rain splatter the stained glass, and somewhere a baby cried. The rabbi raised a glass of wine and sang. Laurie and Ed took turns reading parts of their marriage contract. Laurie had a theatrical voice; she was an actress and had once had a part in a soap opera.