Souvenir of Cold Springs (18 page)

“How's Lucy?” Nell asked.

“You mean, how's my baby,” Caroline said, and jumped up. “Wait. I've got some new pictures.”

“And Kay and Teddy are thinking of producing one of their own,” said Stewart. “Wouldn't that be something?”

“That would be wonderful.” Knowing Kay, Nell wondered if it would.

“Here. Isn't she adorable?” Caroline had color shots of Margaret, their first grandchild: a hairless, grinning little thing propped up on a sofa with pillows. Some of Lucy pushing her in a stroller down a Boston street, Lucy looking unexpectedly matronly and contented. Caroline said, “See what you're missing, Nell? If only you'd said yes to old what's-his-name. Henry Tillman.”

Nell said, “Caroline—please.”

“Look at those eyelashes.” Stewart gave another weak cough but subdued it with a sip of water. “And that rosebud mouth. What a little beauty.”

“He wasn't so bad, if I recall. And he was certainly crazy about you. And what about that other one?” Caroline closed her eyes and raised her head, searching her memory. “The one who always wore a hat. Good-looking guy. What was his name?”

“This is not something I particularly want to talk about,” said Nell.

“It's not too late.” Stewart put down the chunk of ham he had raised to his lips. “Speaking of Jack Wentworth, Nell, he always asks about you. I mean it. He stopped in just the other day and the first thing he said, practically, was what's Nell up to. Wanted to know if you were still up on the barricades. Still out there marching.”

“He's a real card.”

“Don't knock Jack,” Caroline said. “He's not a bad catch. And nice-looking. He can't be more than—what, Stewart? Fifty-four? Fifty-five?”

“Caroline. Stewart.” Nell put down her fork and raised her hands, palms out, in front of her chest. “Please. I think it's very nice that you two got back together.” In truth, she found it incomprehensible—that Caroline, who had scorned and despised Stewart when he was a healthy man, adored him as a dying one, and had given up everything to come back east and see him through it. She said, “But just because you've found connubial bliss and all that, don't keep trying to inflict it on me. I'm sick of it.”

Stewart shook his head back and forth and said, “Oh, Nellie Nellie Nellie.”

“I mean it.” She lowered her hands and clasped them, her knuckles white. “I'm not interested in marrying anyone, least of all a pompous Republican capitalist pig like Jack Wentworth. Please. This may sound crazy to you, but I'm quite content to be a dried-up old spinster with no life. Okay? Will you take my word for it? I like it that way.”

Caroline, annoyed, pursed her lips to one side; Stewart looked sad-eyed and chagrined. Neither of them spoke. Nell sliced into her ham. “And another thing. My political activities are not a joke. You can think what you want, you can say what you want, but just don't make fun of what I believe in. Don't treat me like a nutcase because I go out and try to do something about the state of this rotten world.” Caroline took a breath and opened her mouth to speak. Nell said, “And don't tell me I wouldn't think the world was so rotten if I had grandchildren, Caroline. Or religion.”

“That's not what I was going to say at all.”

Stewart looked at his wife with concern. “What were you going to say, honey?”

“I was going to get all humble and apologetic,” she said, and stood up to put on water for coffee. “I was going to tell Nell that sometimes I envy her to death.”

Jessie drove Nell
home from the Peace Council, and Nell invited her in for a cup of coffee. Her house, as they went up the steps, embarrassed her: the pretentious white pillars holding up the roof of the tiny porch, the prissy middle-class lawn, the mailbox with
KERWIN
painstakingly picked out in stick-on letters. She could imagine Jessie thinking the place was a crime, it ought to be torched or turned into a commune. The scheme for renting out rooms made perfect sense when she was with someone like Jessie—it was so clear to her, the absurdity of two people occupying so much space. She and Jamie could easily put up a couple of grad students, or a welfare mother with her children—or someone like Michael Spengler, who lived wherever he could find a bed and who was chronically short of money because of his efforts on behalf of the peace movement. It would be the ultimate heroic act to take Michael into her house out of the kindness of her heart and her belief in the principles of democracy.

“What a marvelous house,” Jessie said.

“My parents bought it in the twenties,” Nell said. “They paid four thousand dollars for this place—can you believe it? I've lived here all my life.”

Jessie said, “Really,” as if that were a truly amazing, even admirable fact. With Jessie at her side, Nell was struck by how little the place had changed since her childhood. It wasn't something she thought about much, but when you looked, there were the same kind of genteel slipcovers her mother had favored, the family photographs on the piano, the worn Persian carpets, the silver urn on the sideboard where it had sat, bright and untouched, since her parents received it as a gift on their tenth wedding anniversary. Even the heavy old black phone on the hall desk had been there as long as she could remember. And the gilt-framed mirror in which she had looked at her face nearly every day of her life.

Amazing it was, but it didn't seem admirable: it seemed to her, all of a sudden, crazy. She thought: someday I'll sell this place, I'll get right the hell out of here, I'll leave this all behind.

“I love the idea of that kind of stability,” Jessie said. “It must make you feel like you've got some roots in this world. My parents have moved all over the country. I mean, I went to three separate junior high schools. And now they're selling the house in White Plains and planning to move to Florida. It would be really comforting to have a house like this, I should think.”

Comforting? Nell couldn't recall that the house had ever given her comfort. Comfort: that was what happened after her Skiddaw adventure. The image came irresistibly into her mind of Gillian Welsh's naked breasts and her brown plaid housedress in a heap on the floor.

She said, “I suppose it does. But of course it's a ridiculously huge old place.”

Jamie started down the stairs, saw Jessie, and ducked back up again without a word. “Hello, Jamie,” Nell called after him.

His voice floated down the stairs, an unintelligible syllable followed by the sound of a door closing.

“My brother,” Nell said to Jessie, grinning to show that she wasn't blind to his strangeness, and that it wasn't important, it wasn't something that bothered her.

“He lives here, too?”

“Sort of. He spends most of his time in his studio over the garage. He's a painter.”

“Really? Is he well known?”

Nell pointed to one of Jamie's oils on the wall by the stairs, an enigmatic study he called
Blue Number Eleven
that was mostly white space with an off center cluster of deep-blue forms that suggested a woman bent forward in an act of either giving or supplication. Nell loved the painting. She had never understood how Jamie could paint like that and be so enclosed in himself.

“James Paul Kerwin—you may have heard of him. He had a show in New York last winter. But he's getting into something new lately. Portraiture. Realism. Commissions.” Nell grinned. “Making some money, at last.”

“I suppose you have to sell out to make it in art just like you do in everything else,” Jessie said. “Not that I know beans about art. I've barely heard of Andy Warhol.”

“Well, Jamie's no Andy Warhol, I'm afraid.”

Nell made coffee while Jessie sat at the kitchen table and talked about Michael. She told Nell that Michael might leave for California any minute. He was trying to set something up with people he knew at Berkeley.

“And how do you feel about that?” Nell asked her dutifully. She had no real wish to hear the answer. She looked at Jessie's hair, which fanned out over her shoulders, slightly crinkled, as if it had just come out of braids. Sometimes she thought that if she could just touch Jessie's hair—put her hand lightly on her head—she would ask nothing else.

“Lousy. I wish he could just settle down. And he's so scornful of everyone around here. You know? He just dismisses everyone as a bunch of Clean-for-Gene types. I'm sure he'd be the first to criticize anyone who judged people by appearances, but that's exactly what he does. God.” She sipped her coffee, frowning. “He really bugs me, Nell. He always thinks someplace else is going to be better than where he is. What does he think he's going to find in California?”

“Well, it does seem that there might be more of Michael's kind of people out there,” Nell said, hating the way her voice sounded: prim and disapproving. “More of the radical element.”

Jessie snorted. “He doesn't even know what kind of person he is. He thinks he's Abbie Hoffman or somebody, but when it comes right down to it I don't think he's got the commitment for that scene.” She sat drinking her coffee in quick little sips, staring out the window. Nell stared out with her, to see what Jessie saw: the untended backyard, just beginning to be touched by spring. Dinah stalking Mr. Fahey's old tabby. The bench Nell was sitting on when she heard her mother screaming that John was dead. Jessie turned away from it. “Sometimes I think he just wants to screw a lot of California women.”

“Michael's not good enough for you,” Nell said shortly.

Jessie raised her head, her brow cleared, her eyes softened.
She knows
, Nell thought in a flash. Jessie said, “You're a good friend, Nell. And it's nice of you to listen to me rant and rave like this. I know you think I should just ditch him. You and a lot of other people. And I'm sure you're right.” She leaned forward suddenly with her hands outstretched, like the woman in Jamie's painting. “The hell with Michael,” she said. “Tell me about yourself. It's always so amazing to see people in their own space. You know?” She smiled, showing her tiny, even teeth and a dimple in one cheek. “Come on, Nell. Tell me the story of your life.”

Nell shrugged. It was what she had longed for: a moment of intimacy, a real talk. Jessie's eager smile. Her hands reaching out. Not much, but enough to keep a pathetic old hag going. Her soul opened up: oh, the things she could say to this sensitive young person. And yet she could see the moment was false, a gift Jessie was offering because of what she understood.

“There's nothing to tell,” Nell said. “Really. I've had the most completely boring, nondescript life you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams.”

Jack Wentworth called
to ask her out to dinner. When she heard his voice on the phone, she thought of Caro and Stewart plotting her fate in their stuffy little TV room, and she saw Jack Wentworth in his swanky James Street penthouse, slavering into the phone like some rank animal, an
AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
button in his lapel. But she couldn't think of a plausible excuse, and so she agreed to have dinner with him.

He drove up in a midnight-blue Lincoln, and, from her bedroom window, she watched him get out and come up the walk. Immediately she thought more kindly of him. Was this grayhaired businessman in his absurd car the twisted lecher she had dreaded? This paunchy, aging version of the amiable old Jack she'd known all her life? She ran down to let him in, with the thought that this was the first time a man had come to the house to call for her.

She opened the front door, and he shook her hand energetically and said, “Gee, it's great to see you, Nell.”

Jack Wentworth had been her brother John's friend, as much a part of the scenery of Nell's childhood and adolescence as her father's hardware store or the old black phone in the hall. He used to tease her and pull her ponytail and play baseball in the street in front of their house and go skating with them in the winter. She had seen him around, she knew he was a friend of Caro and Stewart's, but she couldn't remember actually talking to him in years—not since that time he came to see them toward the end of the war wearing his army uniform. He had explained to her what all his stripes and stars meant. She could remember his shy pride in them, masked with fussy details about Army regulations, and the way when he had said John's name his mouth still twisted with grief.

Sitting beside him in the air-conditioned Lincoln, Nell realized that aside from his politics she was fond of Jack Wentworth, she was glad to be spending an evening with him. She even felt a benign gratitude toward Caroline's machinations, and a distant approval of Jack's wavy iron-gray hair, his tan, his white summer suit. The evening might even do him good; let him see there were people around his age who thought about something besides stocks and bonds and expensive cars. She might even get a contribution out of him for the Peace Council.

And then, seated across from him at a tiny table for two in the Rainbow Lounge at the Hotel Syracuse, hearing him say to the waiter, “I think we'll start with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot,” her heart sank. His knees were distressingly near hers under the tablecloth, there was a new, calculating look in his eyes that struck her as transparently sensual, and she knew she had been a fool. The champagne came in a bucket of ice, like something in a Cary Grant movie: the grinning waiter with a white towel over his arm, the cork popping, people turning to look, Jack taking a suave sip and nodding approval. She thought of excusing herself to go to the women's room and cutting out through the back door. Or pulling a Michael Spengler: attacking Jack with the champagne bottle, shouting UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKERS! and singing “We Shall Overcome” until they carted her away.

Jack raised his glass and said, “Here's to you, Nell. You know, you haven't changed in twenty years.” He clanked his glass against hers—gently, but it seemed to her an aggressive act, like ordering the champagne in the first place without consulting her. “Not since you used to run around in that striped bathing suit at Sylvan Beach,” he said. “God—you and those long legs. I don't know about you, but I'd give a lot to be back there. Be twenty-five years younger and know what I know now.” He drank, set down his glass, and leaned forward with his arms folded on the table. “What about it? Do you ever wish for the good old days?”