Souvenir of Cold Springs (16 page)

“Enough, little bunny?”

“Mmm.”

“You're half-asleep.” She turned Margaret over as if she were a doll, and put the nightgown over her head, then hugged her close for a minute. “You're a dear girl,” she said. “You're my favorite little bunny, do you know that?”

She tucked Margaret's old, flattened-out teddy bear in bed with her; after she left Margaret would set the bear gently on the floor by the bed because she was too old to sleep with a stuffed animal. Aunt Nell smoothed back her hair and kissed her square in the middle of her forehead. With a flash of pain, Margaret missed her mother. Aunt Nell stood up and she clung to her. “What's a souvenir?” she asked, to keep her there.

She pronounced it soo-venner, and it took her aunt a while to catch on. “Souvenir,” she said. “Oh—it's a French word. It means something to remind you of something else—a sort of memento.”

Of course: a memento. Aunt Nell kissed her forehead again and went out, closing the door softly as if Margaret were already asleep. But she wasn't asleep, not quite. She thought about the ring, but she was afraid to go up to the attic alone. She thought about the baby. What Ann said was stupid. Of course, the baby wasn't lost. But she wondered where it was. It had been in her mother's stomach, and now it wasn't. She wondered how it got out and where it had gone. She wondered why there was blood.

She didn't put the bear on the floor. She hugged it tight. When she closed her eyes, she imagined something coming to the door, opening it, crawling up to the bed: something crying and covered with blood. It was then that Peter's face came back to her, his big teeth, and his mocking laugh that followed her down the stairs and wouldn't let her go.

CAROLINE

1973

“I wish I'd known you when you were a nun,” Mort said. “I was never a nun, Morty.”

It was nearly noon. Caroline and Mort were having breakfast alone. Nell's summer vacation had just started, and she had gone over to the high school to drop off final grades. Jamie, of course, was out in his loft over the garage—presumably transferring endless tubes of paint to endless yards of canvas.

“Half a nun, then,” he said. “Which half, I wonder?”

He reached under the table and put his hand on her thigh, squeezing it through the silk nightgown. She slapped his hand, not hard. “None of that,” she said. “You've had more than you deserve.”

She poured him more coffee and he dropped in a saccharine tablet. “Damn it, Caroline, I wish you weren't so set on going. I don't see the point.”

“I'm homesick,” she said. “I really miss the desert, the mountains. And I have friends there.”

“You have friends here.”

She smiled at him. “I know. And don't think I won't miss you. It's just—” She shrugged. “I can't explain.”

She had told him the night before that she was thinking of moving back to New Mexico in the fall. She was negotiating for a little house there, she said, a hacienda overlooking the river, with a view of the blood-red mountains, and she'd be flying out in a couple of weeks to look at it. None of this was true. She wanted to plant in his brain the idea of losing her. She wanted to make it easier.

“You must know what I mean,” she said. “How you can feel you belong to a place.”

He looked at her—studying her, she felt, as if she were a patient with an elusive symptom. She didn't turn away. “I'll come out and see you at Christmas,” he said. “If you're really going.”

“I'm going, all right.” She let her smile intensify. “You'll love it at Christmas,” she said. “Santa Fe is beautiful, so cold and clear, and all the lights.”

“You can teach me to ski.”

“I never did any skiing.”

It was in Santa Fe that she had been half a nun. She had spent years there, listening to God talk to her, trying to find a purpose for her life. Then the purpose had been revealed to her, and she had come home.

“That's right,” he said. “Nuns don't ski. Well, you can teach me to pray.”

“I've forgotten how, I'm afraid.” She smiled at him. “That was in another life, Morty. I do other things now.”

They had leisurely third cups of coffee, and then she kissed him good-bye at the front door. He didn't keep office hours on Mondays, but he was due at the hospital. “I'll call you tonight,” he said, keeping his arms around her.

“Make it tomorrow, sweetie. I'm really pooped. I think I'll go to bed early.” He rubbed his cheek against hers; he was freshly shaved and smelled of Brut. What a nice man he was—still sexy, barely gray, not even a potbelly, just that sweet softness around the middle. And a heart of gold. “I'm awfully fond of you, Morty,” she said. “You know that, don't you?”

When he was gone she rinsed their dishes and loaded the dishwasher for Nell. She considered another cup of coffee and decided against it. She went into the living room where Nell kept the liquor, screwed the top off a bottle of Chivas Regal, thought for a minute, and put it back. Then she went slowly upstairs.

She took a shower, being careful to keep her hair dry. She squirted her underarms with Arrid and puffed on the White Shoulders Dusting Powder Mort had given her for her birthday. How could Mort call her beautiful? Her face in the mirror looked ancient, full of strange hollows and creases, her eyes sunk in their sockets. But she looked at it with satisfaction: it was fine, it was the face she wanted.

She went back to her room and put on clean underwear and stockings and finally the bathrobe that had been Stewart's last gift to her. He had made Nell take him downtown to the Addis Company, where he had picked it out himself: red silk lined in hot pink, with kimono sleeves.

“I saw it, and I said to myself this is what Caro means to me,” he told her. “This is what you've done for my life. This is the way I feel about you.” She had lain beside him wearing the robe, and he had pulled back the brilliant red and pressed his face between her breasts. He didn't have the strength to do anything else. A week later he was dead.

She had never worn the robe with any other man. With Mort and the rest of them, she wore frilly nylon things, pastels. From Paris, when he was at a medical conference there, Mort had brought her silk stockings and a black garter belt with pink rosettes, and a man named Forrest gave her a quilted calico housecoat that she had passed on to Nell when she and Forrest split up. She saved the red silk for the evenings when she was alone in her room with Stewart's photograph—when, sitting absolutely still in the old leather reclining chair she'd brought with her to Nell's, she pulled the robe tightly around her and looked into his eyes and felt his presence:
really
felt it, as a living entity, the way she used to be conscious of the presence of God. Sometimes she could hear his voice, as once she used to hear God's voice.
I don't deserve you
, Stewart had said. God never said that.
I don't deserve you
, clutching at her hand. His coughing, the oxygen, the wild flailing of his hands, the look in his eyes. And then nothing but the smell of his fear lingering in the room. No God at all.

When she heard Nell come back, Caroline called downstairs. “Nellie? Come up here for a minute?”

When Nell appeared in the doorway, Caroline was back in bed, propped on pillows with an old
Time
magazine. Nell asked, “Are you sick?”

“Not really. I think Mort and I had too much breakfast. One fried egg too many. A touch of indigestion.” She laid her hand over her heart. “Here.”

Nell had put on her gardening apron and sneakers and pinned up her hair. She came over to the bed and laid the back of one hand against Caroline's forehead. “Not feverish.”

“Of course, I'm not feverish,” Caroline said. “High cholesterol doesn't make you feverish, it just clogs up your arteries or some damn thing.”

“Oh come on,” Nell said. “Don't tell me we've got to start worrying about that stuff already.”

“Not you, child. You're a spring chicken. Mort told me I should go easy.”

Nell smiled. “I like old Mort.”

“He's not that old. He's sixty-two.”

“He seems younger than that.”

“Don't I know it,” Caroline said. “I'm glad I didn't know him when he was fifty.” She laid her hand on her chest again and groaned. “I'll tell you, Nell, I don't know if it was breakfast or what, but I've definitely overdone something. I think I'll just sack out here all day. This hard living is getting to me.”

Nell shook her head and pretended to look shocked. “You're certainly a terrible example to your baby sister.”

“I try to be.”

Nell brought her some more magazines from downstairs and said she was going outside to weed the rose bed, and then to Thea's to cook Chinese and drink champagne and celebrate the school year being over. The mail was here, the usual junk. Dinah had plenty of food and was asleep outside in the sun. And Jamie could eat the leftover stew in the fridge for supper.

Jamie. “Would you tell him not to bother me, Nell?” she asked. “Not that the charming boy is speaking to me, anyway.”

Nell laughed. “Did you hear him last night? When Mort was downstairs in the kitchen with me? Jamie came in, saw Mort, got that look on his face and said,
Oh
—
good evening
. No
Hi, Mort
, no
Hey, Mort, how are you
, or anything, God forbid, just this very pompous little nod and—
Good evening
.”

Caroline said, “One of these day's somebody's going to mistake him for the butler.”

Jamie: the hell with Jamie. He would be out there painting until the light failed, unless he had a student to worship at the shrine. She couldn't keep track of his students—mostly earnest, dowdy young women who thought Jamie was
interesting
. God: if there was one thing her brother wasn't, it was interesting. He had begun sleeping out in the loft. Every morning he came in for breakfast, then he packed his lunch and carried it back out in an absurd tin lunch box, with a thermos of coffee, as if he were a laborer going off to a hard day's work. The chances of his coming in to eat Nell's stew were very small. He hardly ever came in at all. Nell told her she'd caught him peeing out the garage window.

“Why doesn't he just
move
?” Caroline asked Nell. “Get himself an apartment somewhere away from his degenerate sister.”

“Too tight with the buck,” Nell said. Also, Caroline knew perfectly well that Jamie thought it was she who should move. He had told her to her face that he wouldn't have agreed to her moving in with them if he'd known she was going to spend her widowhood behaving like a slut. Jamie: what would he say when she was gone? She hoped he would feel so guilty and remorseful he wouldn't be able to paint again. She hated his paintings, which seemed to her drab, formless blobs or—his new thing—soulless and conventional portraits of people she was glad she didn't know. When she looked at Jamie's work, she really did get homesick for New Mexico: the pottery, the vibrant
santos
paintings in the chapel, the woven Rio Grande tapestries in her office at the convent.

Caroline leafed through magazines until she heard Nell's car pull out of the driveway and head down Hillside Street. Then she went to her dresser and removed two things from her underwear drawer: a tiny envelope and an index card. She put the envelope in the pocket of her robe. On the index card was a scrap of poetry copied out in her neatest handwriting:

He first deceased, she for a little tried

To live without him, liked it not and died.

Some seventeenth-century woman's epitaph, she forgot whose. Under it she had written the date of Stewart's death in 1972. Caroline got her pen out of the desk to write another date beneath it: June 19, 1973. Then she put the paper back under a stack of panties and closed the drawer.

Who would find it? Lucy? Nell? Mort? Anyone? It didn't matter. It was her private code, her silly scholarly footnote to her own life. Really: it didn't matter. No one, least of all her own sister, her own children, would have suspected her capable of such a thing. It was important only to her to leave this oblique record: it satisfied her love of order and completeness, the tying up of details.

Not that she was being very scientific about it. She had not made a will, for example. But she knew Lucy and Teddy could be trusted to split things amicably. The jewelry was Lucy's, of course. Caroline had told Kay she could have the leopard coat—poor Kay, who had come to her after Stewart's funeral for a loan, with stories about Teddy's boozing and chubby little Ann's problems at some expensive nursery school. She'd been selling her antiques—the furniture, and the French art glass she'd inherited from her first husband's family. And Teddy had been playing the stock market, losing most of Kay's money, and a real estate deal somewhere had gone wrong.… Kay got the loan, and when she admired the coat, Caroline said, “Take it.” Kay said she couldn't, and Caroline said, “Take it when I'm dead, then.” The other coats would go God knows where. Lucy would never wear them. No fur for Lucy—or Nell either, probably. Caroline couldn't see them on her daughter or her sister. Glamorous Kay could take them all, as far as she was concerned. Give them to the Salvation Army. Put them out with the trash. As if it mattered.

The house was very quiet. When she listened, all she could hear was a crow squawking in the fir trees out back. It made her smile: those damned crows. The whole neighborhood complained about them and their horrible noise. What bad-tempered birds. Or maybe their noise was a sign of happiness? Rapture? Maybe when a crow was in love, its first impulse was to let out an ear-splitting
skrawwk!
Well, why not?

She would miss the crows, she decided. The crows, Mort, Nell, and her children. Was that all? She thought fleetingly of her years at the convent, the long hours she used to spend in prayer, the way her heart yearned for God, for certainty. For something that would open and enfold her. She looked at Stewart's photograph, and her eyes filled with tears. Lucy had taken it years ago, a ridiculous picture of him in a train station wearing a suit and tie—very proper, very much the lawyer, the pillar of the community. But he looked so healthy and robust, and he had that look on his face that she loved, and after long consideration Caroline had decided on it as her favorite and had it framed in silver.