Souvenir of Cold Springs (19 page)

Nell shook her head. “I believe in moving with the times.”

“Really?”

“I certainly do.” She took a deep breath. “When you say the good old days, you're talking about a lot more than just your youth. The good old days involved a lot of injustice. They weren't so great for most people, when you think about it.”

He looked at her blankly for a minute, and then said, “I take it you approve of what's going on in this country, then. The chaos and the rioting and the filth.”

“Call it what you like,” Nell said. She thought of Jessie Rose marching down University Avenue, carrying a lighted candle that illuminated her pure young face and her halo of hair. “You have to admit there's a lot wrong with our society.”

Jack said, “Well, I'm no Humphrey fan, but I have a lot of sympathy with old Hubert when he says the only thing to do is work from within—not to tear things down but to try to build things up.”

“Humphrey,” she said. “That lukewarm yes-man.”

Jack raised one silver eyebrow and said, “All I can say is if I was taking a bath I'd rather have the water lukewarm than boiling hot.”

“It depends how dirty you are, I suppose.”

He threw back his head and laughed. Nell noted that his teeth were either excellent or false. He had a shaving cut on his neck. She remembered him at John's funeral, slumped in a pew with his head in his hands. She wondered if John would have grown older to be like this, a fat-cat seducer who ordered champagne in restaurants and laughed at what was serious. It was impossible to imagine John over thirty. She missed her brother, suddenly, so much her eyes stung with tears. If John were alive Jamie wouldn't be so weird. If John were alive there would be his family, his wife, children, people to love.

She stared coldly across the table at Jack Wentworth. He gave one last chuckle and said, “You're something, Nellie.” He reached over to lay his hand on hers. “But forgive me for saying so, if there's one thing I don't want to talk about with you tonight, it's politics. Please.”

“Oh.” With her free hand, she picked up her glass. “I'm sorry.”

“That's all right. It's just that when I go out to dinner I like to have a good time.”

A good time: what did that mean to a man like Jack Wentworth? Playing footsie under the table. Blowing money on expensive food and wine. Going out on the town with some bimbo who would flatter him to death. Unfortunately, the champagne was glorious. Unfortunately, she was no Michael Spengler. She drained her glass and held it out for a refill.

“I guess I don't see why serious conversations aren't considered a good time,” she said.

“Oh, come on, Nell, you know what I mean.”

The waiter brought shrimp cocktail. Jack let go of her hand to pick up his fork. She dipped a shrimp in red sauce and said, “So what do you want to talk about, Jack?”

He shrugged. “Something pleasant. Something that goes with champagne.”

They had a stilted conversation about Jack's skiing trip to Colorado and about Nell's last vacation in England. They skimmed lightly over his law firm and her teaching, and she told him about Jamie's show at his New York gallery. Then finally, inevitably, they got talking about the good old days, after all. What other ground did they have in common, she thought, besides middle age and a taste for champagne?

Jack reminisced about John, some of the wild times they'd had, the girls they'd known, did she remember Peggy's friend Ruth Sawyer, and that time she got so drunk at the Club Dewitt—no, Nell was too young to remember that. But the time John, on a bet, drank a pint of scotch and skated around the lake blindfolded. And Peggy and that snake-in-the-grass Ray Ridley, and the marriage of Caroline and Stewart, which Jack always knew was a mistake, who didn't, and Christ it was a shame about Stewart and the emphysema, though it was great the way things turned out with him and Caroline—not like Jack's own marriage to Penny Horgan, which had gone sour right away and stayed that way through the divorce and even now they didn't speak, they had met at Jack Jr.'s wedding and didn't exchange a word, not that that was a problem, he was better off without her, that was for goddam sure.

Jack ordered more champagne to go with the filet mignon. Another ice bucket, another ostentatious pop, more heads turning. What would they think—Miss Kerwin from the high school out with Jack Wentworth, everyone knew who Jack Wentworth was and what he stood for. Two bottles of champagne.

Nell went to the women's room, where she looked in the mirror and saw that her cheeks were as pink as a teenager's. She combed her hair and peed, and when she got back Jack filled her glass and said, “Tell me frankly. Is all this boring you?”

She was, in fact, surprised at how much she had begun to enjoy herself. She liked the way things were coming back to her as she sat there with Jack eating shrimp and steak and drinking movie-star champagne. She had forgotten those huge picnics at Sylvan Beach, and forgotten that her brother John was such a hell-raiser; his death in the war had erased all that—all his funniness, his love of practical jokes. In spite of everything, how innocent those days seemed. How sunny and perfect and good: if she closed her eyes she was there, that laughing girl in the striped bathing suit. She did close her eyes, briefly, and thought how easy it was, really, to stop time, to retrieve it: surely the girl in the bathing suit, the boy skating blindfolded, Peggy dancing in her black dress, were still alive—more alive, maybe, than a middle-aged woman in a blue dress and a gray-haired man pouring champagne.

“I'm not bored in the least,” she said. “Though I must admit I wasn't at all sure I wanted to have dinner with you.”

“Oh, really?” He leaned toward her. The table was so small his face nearly touched hers. She pulled back. “May I ask why?”

“I just wondered what we could possibly talk about after all these years.” He looked hurt, tightening his lips like Caroline did, and she felt bad for drawing away from him. She said gently, “But I'm enjoying this, Jack. I really am.”

She would have liked to elaborate, to tell him she believed that to talk about the dead, the past—what he insisted on calling the good old days—was important, and that the living—this was a confused thought, but—that the living were a sort of repository for what remained of the dead, who could do nothing for themselves, who depended on the living to keep them alive somehow. To stop time by remembering. She wanted to say all that, and she had a feeling Jack would understand her, but before she could speak he leaned toward her again, took her hand, and said, “How come you never married, Nell?”

At the touch of his hand she became aware, suddenly, of how drunk she was. She put down her fork—she couldn't eat another bite—and her eyes closed. She could have gone to sleep right there in her gilded chair. “A good-looking girl like you,” Jack said. The inside of her head whirled, and she opened her eyes and looked down at their two hands linked warmly together, palm to palm across the table. His fingernails, she noticed, were clean. His hand was tanned an even beige. There were three pearly buttons on the sleeve of his white jacket. “That's something I could never understand,” Jack went on, and from the slow carefulness of his voice she knew that he was drunk, too. He said, “Unless you just don't like men. There was some speculation about that, years back. Nothing serious, but—” She looked up at him, into his eyes. His were bright blue, a little sad, crinkled at the corners. “What's the story, Nellie?”

It was partly the champagne, partly the intimacy of their talk, partly his warm sympathy, his concerned steady gaze that didn't falter though she knew he must be shocked, disgusted, repelled to the core. She clutched his hand, and told him the truth.

And then later
, in the car in the parking lot, he tried to kiss her. “You intrigue me,” he whispered. “God, Nell, women like you, you're so innocent.” She pushed him away, but he wouldn't let her go. He said, “Maybe you just need a real man.” He slid her dress off her shoulder and put his lips to her skin, and his hands moved down the blue silk over her breasts. She was horrified by a wild urge to give in to him. She hadn't been this close to anyone in years. How long since she had felt someone else's warm breath against her cheek? She closed her eyes with a little sob, and let him kiss her, kiss her again. Then he pushed her down on the seat, put his bulky weight on her, and reached under her skirt.

She gasped and recoiled, twisting away. She was overcome with the need to get out of the car and throw up. She pushed at him, and he let her go, and she sat up and leaned her forehead against the window. The nausea passed. She heard her pulse beating against her temples.

He said, “That's not something you should do to a guy.”

“I'm sorry.”

He was sitting behind the wheel, breathing hard, running his fingers back through his hair. “You ought to give it a chance, Nellie. You might be surprised.”

She shook her head, and after a minute he started the car and backed quickly out of the parking lot. After a minute she said, “I do apologize. It's been a lovely evening. The dinner. The champagne. I enjoyed it very much.”

He said, “Well, good, I'm glad,” and they were silent the rest of the way to her house.

She woke the next morning feeling sick and panicky. The hangover passed, but the panic stayed with her. She couldn't talk herself out of the cold fear that her life would become at any moment grotesque—shameful and melodramatic and ruined. She waited for Caroline to say something to her, for Stewart to make a joke, and she stopped going leafletting with Jessie, imagining anonymous letters to the Peace Council office. When Jessie phoned, she made excuses to hang up in a hurry, and when they called from the Peace Council and asked her to work she said she was busy. For the rest of the school year she froze whenever Joe Carlucci, the principal at Northside High, spoke to her. He called her to his office one morning, summoned her out of class on the loudspeaker, and she sat down opposite him in a cold sweat, but he wanted her to see the mother of one of her students who had come in about her daughter's problems with the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Nell talked to the woman for ten minutes, and afterward had no idea what she had said. She went to Maine in the summer for two solitary weeks, and was afraid of what she would find when she got back. A notification from the Board of Education, maybe, or a call from Pat Garvey about the astonishing rumors that were sweeping the city.

But nothing happened. She never heard from Jack Wentworth. Eventually, Caroline mentioned that he was going to get married again, to the widow of an old friend. “You missed your chance, sweetie,” Caro said, and Nell said, “That old fascist,” and they laughed, but she felt the blood rise to her face and her heart thump in her chest. She would never think of Jack Went-worth again without an anguished prayer of thanks. In the fall, when she had a postcard from Jessie and Michael in California, she felt almost nothing but relief, and in the November election she voted for Hubert Humphrey.

KAY

1964

At her first wedding, Kay wore a long white satin dress that was a gift from the family of her husband-to-be. At her second, to Teddy Quinn, she wore black silk and a diamond choker that she paid for herself. She also paid for the reception, which was held in the walled back garden of her house on Beacon Hill: flowers everywhere, an open bar and a jazz band, a Japanese chef who cooked steak over an open flame. The wedding cake was flown in from a Viennese bakery in New York City. Kay gave Mrs. Hickey the afternoon off and hired two young nannies—a blonde for Peter, a brunette for Heather—dressed in rented uniforms with frilly white aprons and Mary Poppins straw hats trimmed with cherries.

Heather, who had just had her first birthday, sat placidly in her English pram while the brunette nanny wheeled her around the brick paths showing her off; when she got tired of the pram, she took a few charming, tottering steps hanging on to the garden furniture and grinning at the guests. She had a long nap, and when she woke up she ate a piece of wedding cake and had her picture taken with a mouthful of crumbs, waving her filthy little hands and looking ecstatic.

Peter began screaming shortly after the reception began and had to be taken by the blonde nanny up to his room, where he yelled for at least an hour and then fell asleep. His noise penetrated quite easily to the garden. Kay paid no attention to it, but Teddy kept apologizing and saying, “The terrible twos.” When the nanny returned, her Mary Poppins hat had disappeared. Kay made her go back inside and find it and comb her hair; when she came out again, Kay said, “Everything okay?” and the nanny nodded curtly and headed for the bar.

Kay didn't invite any of her family, the Bakers, to her second wedding. The first time, her parents—Carl and Faye—had driven straight through to Boston from Chicago in their broken-down Dodge and showed up at the church half an hour late, her father in a shiny brown suit, her mother squeezed into a turquoise chiffon dress with stains around the armholes. They drank too much at the reception. Carl filled Mr. Hamlin in on his lifetime of bad breaks. Faye kept telling Mrs. Hamlin what a nice-looking young fellow Richard was, you wouldn't think there would be such nice-looking young men at a place like Harvard, she always thought the boys at places like Harvard were—you know. When the dancing began they did the flamboyant dips and spins they'd learned from Arthur Murray's TV show and, finally, when Kay and Richard had changed into their traveling clothes and were about to leave, Kay's parents enveloped her in weepy hugs and wouldn't let her go.

After that, Kay told them news only when it was safely stale: the babies' births, Richard's death, her engagement to Teddy—all of it was relayed in polite belated notes on her engraved stationery. Her parents sent presents to the children that Kay gave to Mrs. Hickey for her grandchildren. They sent a huge sympathy card with a picture of Jesus on the front, and, inside, the words
GATHERED TO HIS LOVING ARMS
in Gothic script.