Souvenir of Cold Springs (24 page)

Back in Ithaca
, Lucy threw herself into her new photography course: Photographic Abstraction, it was called. They were supposed to take something ordinary and distort it, make it into something unidentifiable and striking. They dabbled in macro-photography; Lucy turned a scrap of Kleenex into a desolate lunar landscape. They practiced unorthodox darkroom techniques; they slashed the film and painted on it; they studied Aaron Siskind and Minor White, and Edward Weston's fruitlike nudes and animal-like vegetables. “What you are photographing here, always, is yourself,” Ziedrich said.

Lucy told Nick, finally, about the abortion, mainly to explain why she was too sore for sex. He didn't have much to say. When he asked her why he hadn't been informed, she told him about Gwen's boyfriend. “You think I'm like that asshole?” he asked. “Thanks a lot.”

Things didn't go well between them. They lost the knack of talking to each other, of telling every little thing that was on their minds. When they were together they went on long walks so the puppy could get some exercise and Lucy could take photographs. After a while they gave up on the idea of sex; Lucy stopped going to the Cellar; she began dating a graduate student in physics named Mark Neal. Just before final exams Nick told her that he and Tony were driving out to the coast, where they had a lead on a job in a club in L.A. At the end of the summer, Lucy and Mark were married at Stewart's church in Albany; Mark was going into the postdoctoral program at M.I.T., and they would be moving to Boston. Caroline didn't come to the wedding, but she sent a Hopi kachina that she said was a symbol of fertility.

The last photograph
Lucy took of Nick showed him in front of the apartment house, leaning against an iron fence. The building, of dark brick, was on a nondescript street north of the Cornell campus. The season was early spring; there was a small tree behind him to the left, just budding. His hands were in his pockets. He was wearing baggy camouflage pants, his tattered wool jacket, and leather boots that showed beneath his cuffs where one foot crossed the other. There was something in his pose, in his light-colored eyes, even in the gentle gleam of the sun on his blond hair, that suggested he would be perfectly happy to stand there forever, leaning against the fence and smiling at the photographer.

CAROLINE

1959

The sun in Santa Fe was different from the sun back home. Not just hotter: she thought of it as more aggressive, more intimate, the way it entered your body and became a part of it, the way it penetrated your bones and your blood. Even at night, when the sun retreated and the cool, black mountain air made it necessary to wear a sweater and put blankets on the bed, she was aware of the sun banked behind the mountains, waiting.

I will never go back
, she thought.

She got the job at the convent almost immediately, through an employment agency. Mother Rosaria interviewed her and pronounced her skills superb. The Sisters of Mary had never had a real secretary before; Sister Marguerite had done the job for thirty years, until she got too old, and none of the other sisters could type. They were a semicontemplative order connected with the mission church of Saint Grazia; they ran a small school and a soup kitchen for the poor, but they spent most of their time in prayer. Caroline did the same things for the nuns that she had done for Mr. Fahey at Pepsi-Cola the past six years: took dictation, typed letters, and answered the phone. The salary was exactly half what Mr. Fahey was paying her when she left, but her expenses were light.

She lived in three rooms on Camino del Monte Sol not far from the river, on the top floor of an apartment house built in the twenties. Her place was sparsely furnished, with thick stucco walls that kept out sound. There were niches in the walls for statues of saints, which Caroline left empty. The apartment suggested a stage set—it had that same hushed, expectant, alien quality. When she came home from work and entered the apartment, the quiet leapt out at her. The phone ringing or the noise of the radio was like a violation—even dishes left undone or her coat thrown across a chair. She became very neat.

Her living-room windows looked down on the street and across to a taller building that blocked the view, but the bedroom ones faced east, with a view of the Sangre de Christo Mountains. She had never seen mountains before—just one trip to the Adirondacks long ago, with Stewart and the children. She'd barely noticed the mountains then: all she remembered from that vacation was exhaustion and arguing. But she was sure the Adirondacks were nothing like this.

The winters were going to be cold, people told her. There would be snow—as much, maybe, as back home in the Snow Belt of upstate New York. Even now, in September, October, there was snow in the mountains. And Santa Fe could be very dull in the winter, her friend Lee said. “You'll want to go out and meet people, do things, but there's nothing. Not even tourists. Just a bunch of ski bums and freezing Indians on the Plaza. The isolation can get to you.”

“I don't care,” Caroline said. “That's exactly what I'm looking for.”

Lee laughed at her. “What? Ski bums or freezing Indians?”

“Isolation,” Caroline said. “Nothing.” Sometimes she had trouble seeing a joke.

She met Lee at Mass. A tall woman in a black lace mantilla and suede jacket slipped into a pew next to her one Sunday at the Cathedral—ten minutes late, they had already reached the Epistle. All through the service, Caroline admired the woman's rings, two of them on the skinny fingers of her left hand, one on her right: hammered silver set with small turquoises. On the way out they got talking. Caroline told her she was new in town; Lee said she was a jewelry maker and managed an art gallery on San Francisco Street. When they saw each other again the next Sunday, Lee asked Caroline over to her place for lunch. She lived upstairs from the gallery in a bright, chaotic, art-filled apartment that overlooked a
plazuela
. She was a native of Santa Fe, part Navajo, a widow. Her husband had been a climber and tour guide who became lost in the mountains three years before; a blizzard had come up and stranded him somewhere near the summit of Truchas Peak. The rest of the party had been rescued, but he had been out scouting and his body was never found.

Caroline thought immediately of Ray and Peggy, whose deaths on the ice had seemed not only horrible but strange and singular. And yet here was a woman she'd met by chance, telling the same story. Did that mean life was more strange, or less strange, than she had thought?

Lee told Caroline about her lost husband that first day, over lunch. “I can't marry again,” Lee said. “I'll never know what happened to him.”

“But after a certain number of years—”

“Oh yes, legally there's no problem, but how do I know he didn't just take the opportunity to run off? Maybe he's living in Chimayo right this minute. Or up in the mountains, a hermit, biding his time. He had a strange sense of humor. Maybe he's living right here in Santa Fe.” She laughed. “While I light a candle for him every Friday at the cathedral.”

Lee was exactly Caroline's age: forty. She was bony and flatchested, her graying hair was cropped short, she had a tooth missing near the front, her skin was pitted and tanned to leather. But men liked her. “I don't know what it is,” she said to Caroline. “They won't leave me alone. I guess they know I like them. I give off vibes, somebody told me.”

“I hope I don't give off vibes,” Caroline said.

“You don't need vibes. You're gorgeous.”

“Thank you,” Caroline said. “But I've had it with men.”

Lee made a face. “Bad divorce?”

“You could say that.” She laughed. “Bad life.”

“You'll get over it. You're too pretty to be alone for long.”

Caroline had chosen Santa Fe because Mr. Fahey's son Jerry had gone to New Mexico to see the Pepsi bottling plant in Albuquerque. They were experimenting with a new capping device there, and Mr. Fahey wanted it checked out. Jerry and his wife had turned the trip into a vacation—had rented a car and driven to Santa Fe and Taos and up as far as Denver before they flew home. They sent back postcards to the office, and Caroline took one look at the austere lines of the adobe church against a pure blue sky and thought:
why not
? She was ready to do something extravagant, something as unlike the rest of her life as possible. She squinted at the postcard, imagining that one of the tiny people in front of the chapel was herself.

That was in the spring. By September, when Teddy and Lucy were ready to leave for Colgate and Cornell, she had sold everything, packed her bags, and blown most of her savings on a plane ticket. Teddy and Lucy didn't take it well.

“So where do I go on vacations?” Lucy demanded.

“You go to Daddy in Albany, of course. I'll come back at Christmas. At Thanksgiving, you can go to Aunt Nell and Uncle Jamie's. Then next summer you can decide what you want to do.”

“This is my first year away. I'd like to be able to come home sometimes. Just on the spur of the moment, if I want to.”

“Your father would be very hurt to hear you say that his place isn't home. Especially since he's paying the bills.”

Lucy said, with tears in her eyes, “You always do something like this.”

“Like what? Something like what? What are you talking about?” Caroline heard her voice get shrill and unconvincing, the way it used to during arguments with Stewart when she suspected he was right.

Teddy took his mother aside and told her she was being unfair to them, especially Lucy. Teddy was seldom entirely serious, but when he was he took on some of Stewart's mannerisms—squinting up his eyes and stuttering slightly, his whole body tight with earnestness. Caroline blew up at Teddy's solemn little speech. She said he and Lucy were grown up, they were in college, and if he could manage to join a fraternity and stay drunk all weekend he could certainly manage to take care of himself. As for Lucy, she had her brother and her father and a will of iron, and it was time she learned to get along in the world.

She also said something she immediately regretted: that it was the simple truth that having children so young and so close together had screwed up her life and now she was getting it back. Teddy's face was stricken, and she apologized, tried to hug him. Teddy pushed away, said, “The hell with it,” and slammed out of the house.

She walked a
mile to work every morning. The names of the streets were like incantations. Camino del Monte Sol, Acequia Madre, Alameda, Paseo de Peralta. She had lunch at a little place called Tomasita's and ate the hot, unfamiliar foods happily, though she had to wash them down with cold milk, which amused the waiters. It also amused them that she showed up every day promptly at noon. Even Tomasita advised her once, “You should try another place. Make a change. Eat some other kind of food.” But she knew Tomasita's; the menu was familiar, and the corner table, where she could turn her back on the room and read while she ate, was almost always available.

She was hurt that she wasn't asked to have lunch with the nuns. She had confided to Mother Rosaria that she had been away from the Church for years and had just had a change of heart; she had expected that fact to make the nuns befriend her—the prodigal daughter, the lost lamb returned to the fold. Mother Rosaria had asked, almost absently, “What brought you back to the Church, then?”

The honest answer would have sounded peculiar: to say that one day last spring in Syracuse, walking home from the Italian bakery where she bought bread, she had stopped in at Assumption Church to get out of the rain. She had sat in the back pew and looked around her as if she had never seen it before, marveling at how really beautiful it all was, how abundant and welcoming: gold everywhere, red carpeting, statues smiling down on her, masses of Paschal lilies on the elaborate carved altar with its three arches. Even on a rainy day, the stained glass windows glowed with a secret light. She had thought to herself:
maybe I'll stop in at Mass on Sunday
, the way she might think:
maybe I'll pick up a loaf of semolina bread at the bakery;
and at that moment she had heard, very distinctly, a voice say;
yes
. She was Saint Paul, felled from his horse and blinded. She had whirled around, searching the church for someone, some mumbling sacristan whose voice she had mistaken for the Voice, but there was nothing, no one in the church but herself and the statues and the presence, the Real Presence, the presence that was always there, always watching, always reaching out, always wanting …

She had flung herself down on her knees and put her head in her hands. Long after the rain had stopped and the setting sun blazed like fire through the stained glass, she was still there.

To Mother Rosaria, she said, “I guess I just felt something was missing from my life”—which was true enough but had nothing to do with the Church.

Mother Rosaria smiled and patted her arm. “Well, I'm glad you found it,” she said, and gave Caroline the bulletin for next Sunday to type and run off on the hectograph machine.

Lee was her only real friend. She liked Lee, but she didn't know what to make of her, and she had no idea how Lee reconciled her sex life with Holy Communion every Sunday. She did stop in at the Santuaria on Guadaloupe Street to light a candle every Friday on her way home from work. But Caroline knew she didn't go regularly to Confession, because during the hours of Confession on Saturday afternoons, she and Lee were often together, browsing the art galleries or sitting in cafes eating pastry.

Lee's only real interests were art and sex. The jewelry she made was magnificent. She worked in silver, using Zuni and Navajo techniques, which she explained to Caroline in meticulous detail. She offered to make Caroline her apprentice. She offered to teach her Spanish. For her birthday, she gave her a cast silver-and-turquoise bracelet. She offered to introduce her to men. She told her the nuns were exploiting her, and advised her to take a hatcheck job at some nightspot like Juanita's, where with her looks she could make on tips alone what she was making at the convent.