Souvenir of Cold Springs (10 page)

He was looking for an excuse to get mad at her: that was her theory. No one, not even Jamie, could genuinely be this disturbed to discover that his fifty-seven-year-old sister had a woman for a lover. He must have wanted to pick a fight—stir things up, like Teddy always did with Kay. “Life gets dull, Aunt Nell,” Teddy said just before the divorce, when he and Kay were having one of their battles royal. But how absurd. She and Jamie were brother and sister, after all, not husband and wife, though they'd often been mistaken for an old married couple—something that always amused her but agitated Jamie. “Heavens, no—she's my older sister,” he would say. Vain, silly little man, bald as a trout. “He's my baby brother,” she sometimes got in first, to annoy him.

And life was never dull: that was Nell's firm opinion. It wasn't life that was dull, it was people like Jamie.

But really, he was absurd, and now he would be a problem with Thea, at least for a while, until he got used to the idea. He would be cold; she could just see it. He would say, “Oh—hello, Thea,” when she came in, and then pointedly leave the room. He would disdain the rolls and cookies she brought as if they were poisoned. She imagined him perfecting his tight, polite little smile in front of the bathroom mirror.

Oh dear. She would have to call Thea. They would meet tomorrow to discuss it. Where? Not here. Brunch at the bagel place. Lie low for a bit. He's such an absurd person, Thea. I hope you won't be hurt by this, you know how he is, but he's good at heart, he'll get over it, promise you won't let him get to you.

When she came out of the kitchen, he was in the front hall with a suitcase.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm moving into the loft,” he said stonily. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the suitcase. It was Dad's ancient leather one—of course. Jamie didn't own a suitcase, he had never gone anywhere in his whole life.

“Why on earth are you moving into the loft?”

He took one hand from his pocket and gestured. “I can't—”

She said, “Oh Jamie,” and began to laugh again, but she was more appalled than amused. He really meant it. She had dreaded his ever finding out, but she had never expected this reaction. Shock and outrage, maybe. Disgust, too. But not rupture. Not a family feud. “Can't what, Jamie? What can't you do?”

“You know damn well,” he said, mumbling.

“Wait—yes—don't tell me,” she said. “You can't stay another minute in this corrupt house. Is that it? You're afraid I'll contaminate you? That if you live under the same roof with me for another minute you'll start chasing boys? Making a pass at the mailman?” She clasped her hands at her chest and said, “Jamie, you poor silly thing, look at you with your daddy's old suitcase, how can you act this way, Jamie, at your age, at my age, what does it matter whom we love as long as we love somebody?”

He didn't speak. From the kitchen, the dishwasher made its customary noise:
beena-wab, beena-wah
. A perfect fifth. Jamie had been the one to notice, last year when they had it installed.

“Jamie?” She reached out to touch his arm. He moved away. “I'm sorry,” she said.

She meant she was sorry for her last words. She knew he didn't love anyone, he hadn't had a woman in years, so far as she knew. Had he ever?

“Well, that's something,” he said, sighing, and she knew he thought she meant she was sorry she wasn't like other women. He picked up his suitcase and moved toward the door.

“You are an ass,” she said.

He left, closing the door gently. She moved from window to window, watching him. He walked briskly and purposefully, like a Fuller Brush man with a case full of samples, aware she was watching. He went down the front walk to the sidewalk, down the sidewalk to the driveway, down the driveway to the garage, into the garage by the side door that led upstairs. She saw the light in his studio go on. She imagined him methodically taking his stuff out of his suitcase. Summer pajamas, clean undies, shaving kit, library books. What would he do next? Turn on the radio and listen to
Evening Concert Hall
. Read his book on hermit crabs. Work on the surgeon's wife. Tuck himself into his little cot early. Then what? Cry himself to sleep? Masturbate, taking pride in his wholesome heterosexuality?

She remembered the fights he used to have with Caroline during the troubled year she had lived with them before she died. She had been, as Jamie put it, active until the end: he meant sexually active, of course. When she moved in she brought her big antique double bed with her—she hadn't wanted to sleep in the bed Mother and then Dad had died in—and there was always one of her men around, lounging in front of the TV, joining them for breakfast, sitting on the porch while Caroline posed against the railing—still gorgeous and sexy in her fifties. “I don't know what's come over me, Nell,” she said once. “I never liked sex when I was younger. Back in my crazy prudish religious days. Now I can't seem to get enough.”

Nell didn't mind. She had met Thea, and everything enchanted her—other people's love lives, especially. Even Caroline, whom she decided she had spent too many years disliking. But Jamie was in a state of perpetual agitation.

“She's promiscuous,” he said to Nell. “She doesn't care who she brings home.”

“How do you know?” Nell countered, thinking
whom
. “Maybe she cares a lot, maybe she's madly in love with all of them.”

She liked Caroline's men. They were more fun than Stewart, Caroline's husband, had been. They were friendly and talkative, and they did things around the house—took down the screens, raked the leaves. More than Jamie did. And Nell liked their predictable, comfortable wit, based on insults and things they heard on TV. They always had the latest jokes, the one about Nixon, Mayor Daley, and Pope Paul in a lifeboat: it still made her laugh.

But Jamie hated every minute of her stay. “Slut,” he finally called her, and she laughed at him. That was when he put the cot in the loft. It was also around that time that he stopped painting his beautiful, enigmatic abstractions and began doing portraits and making money.

When Caro died—suddenly, swiftly, of a heart attack—Jamie had told Nell he couldn't help it, he couldn't grieve, he was glad she was gone, and for a while Nell had hated him for those words.

As she watched, his light went out. After a minute she saw him leave by the side door. The old Chevy was in the driveway. He backed it out and drove down toward Wadsworth Street, the muffler growling. She stood in the front door watching the blinking red lights until they were out of sight, and then she stood there a while longer. Dinah came to rub against her legs. It was a soft spring evening. She could smell lilacs, earth, mown grass. She raised her arms above her head, clasped her hands and stretched. Then she picked up the cat and went inside to phone Thea.

Nell was fifteen
when her sister Peggy froze to death on the ice in 1938. Peggy had been her best friend, the only person on earth she loved without reservation. When Peggy came home from California early in December, she and Nell went Christmas shopping together. They had bought Mother a pair of slippers, Dad a scarf, Jamie the drawing pen he'd been wanting. There was so much she could still remember perfectly—the pen nesting in its box against purple velvet, the soft pink slippers. What did they get Caroline and John? That was gone. But they had stopped at Wells and Coverly for the scarf, and Peggy knew the clerk, some girl she'd gone to high school with. Louise something? Lorraine? Afterward, they had cocoa at Scrafft's—cocoa with marshmallow—and Peggy told Nell all about San Francisco: the Golden Gate Bridge that was lit up at night like a necklace, the hilly streets of the city, the cable cars, the weird Chinese food. Aunt Alice had a cleaning lady. Uncle Ralph had a wine cellar. They had been good to her, taken her everywhere. Peggy made it sound like paradise, every minute an adventure, everything fun. She had loved California, but missed snow. It never snowed in San Francisco! When they told her that, she couldn't wait to get home.

When she died, a cold black hole opened up in Nell that wasn't filled until 1950, that first summer in England. No: not really filled until she met Thea, ten years ago in March.

Still, after more than forty years, she missed her sister. The night Jamie left, she lay in bed sleepless, back to back with Thea, remembering Peggy. How her first reaction had been a feeling of betrayal: the unfairness of it all, that Peggy should come home only to die like that, just when Nell was finally old enough to be treated like an equal, when they went shopping together, talked late at night while Caroline was out somewhere, made plans for the summer when they would both be helping Dad at the store, how they would have lunch together, trade clothes, do each other's hair …

She never got over it. Time never made it any easier to bear. She had been cheated, robbed, betrayed. She had missed out. She could never explain the particular fascination Peggy held for her. Peggy, who wasn't pretty—not like Caroline—Peggy with her skinny legs and thick ankles, a long nose like Jamie's, and wispy hair that wouldn't stay put. And who was flighty, everyone said. They had always said it. Peggy was flighty the way John was a wise guy, Caroline was a beauty, Nell was smart, Jamie was artistic. What they meant was that you never knew what she would say or wear or laugh at. And then she decided college was boring, said she wanted to go to work and make some money. But first she wanted to see the world. So she took the train to California, and Aunt Alice and Uncle Ralph liked her so much they made her stay for three months.

But she came home for the snow. And she and Nell became friends, more friends than sisters, united against Caroline. And then Peggy went ice fishing with Caro's fiancé and froze to death in the middle of the lake, wearing her black coat with the frog closings and two pairs of black wool stockings and her red boots with the red-dyed fur around the tops and a striped stocking cap and a blue enameled ring no one had ever seen before. If she hadn't died, everyone would have said that was just like Peggy to go off with somebody else's boyfriend, to do something crazy like ice fishing when a blizzard was predicted. What a narrow escape, out there in the middle of it, she could have frozen to death. That girl has always been a strange one.

As it was, they all said how terrible it was, what a tragedy, poor Peggy, poor Ray, poor Mother and Dad, poor dear Caroline, poor young Jamie. When it was Nell who was really poor, Nell who had nothing.

She breathed deeply, adjusted herself against Thea. They wore their matching nightgowns: blue for Nell, pink for Thea. How silly they were. She smiled in the dark and reached for a tissue to dry her eyes. They didn't often get a chance to sleep together. She had been so discreet all those years! And partly, at least, for Jamie, that twerp. She blew her nose softly, but Thea heard her and turned over, hugged her around the waist and snuggled her chin into her shoulder.

“What's wrong, ducky?”

“That damned Jamie.”

“Shh. Never mind.” Thea yawned, her warm breath on Nell's neck. “He's a fool.”

“I know he's a fool. But imagine how many people think like that. What a horrible world it is, Thea,” she said.

“Ssh. No. No, it isn't, Nellie. No.” Thea put her lips against Nell's neck and tightened her arm around her waist. With her other hand she lifted Nell's blue nightgown. “Not so horrible,” she said. “Is it, my little Nell?”

In the morning
they had their special breakfast. Cantaloupe. Whole wheat scones. The raspberry jam they made last summer. Poached eggs. Orange juice. Prince of Wales tea in the pot Nell bought in England. They sat in their bathrobes, eating and listening to the public radio station.

“He's so rigid, Thea. So intolerant.”

“Maybe he'll change,” Thea said. “Maybe this will be good for him. The truth can't do any harm.”

“Jamie's not like other people,” Nell said. “His reactions are not normal reactions.”

“Maybe you don't give him enough credit.”

Nell, lying awake after Thea went to sleep, had heard his car pull in at two o'clock. She would give a lot to know where he had been so late on a Saturday night. Jamie! Who spent his Saturday nights reading. But she would never ask.

She sighed and said to Thea, “Let's go to England again.”

“When? This summer? Can I afford it?”

“You could if you economized, Thea.”

Thea was impossible; she loved to shop, loved clothes. She was tall and slightly stout, and she favored long caftans, bold jewelry, gold sandals, bright scarves tied around her gray-blond hair.

“Is it worth it?” she asked.

“England's always worth it,” Nell said. “Aging lesbians are a dime a dozen over there.”

After all this time, the actual word still made them laugh. “But it's not as if we can walk hand in hand into a tea shop,” Thea said.

“Maybe certain tea shops.”

“But how will we know which ones? There should be some kind of newsletter.”

“Or they should post a sign in the window. Lesbians welcome. Like the signs about dogs.”

They were still laughing when Jamie walked in. “Whoops,” Thea said.

“Good morning,” said Jamie. He went over to the stove and turned on the kettle. He didn't smile and he kept his head unnaturally high.

“There's tea,” Nell said.

“I think I'll just make coffee, thanks.”

“Yes, you'd better. We might have put opium or something in the tea.”

He threw down the coffee spoon with a clatter, turned, and went out the door, his mouth pursed up like a raisin. The door slammed behind him.

A Bach cantata came on the radio into the silence. They sat listening, then Thea said, “You shouldn't have, Nell. He was trying to be civil, I think.” She got up to turn off Jamie's coffee water.