Souvenir of Cold Springs (32 page)

“Yes, I'm sick,” he said. She reached her hand out to feel his forehead, but he shook his head. “No—sick at heart, Caroline. I heard something today that just knocked me out. I had to come home.”

She removed her hand. He took a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket and lit one, shaking out the match with a listless motion, as if he cared about nothing. What could he have heard? Something about her. Someone was reading her mind.
Caroline's unhappy, she regrets the marriage, she wants out
. Or that stupid party at the Maloneys' where Chip Maloney cornered her in the kitchen.

“It's about Peggy.”

“Peggy. What about Peggy?” She pressed her two hands to her heart, feeling it pound. “Goodness, Stewart, I thought—I don't know what I thought.” She stared at his suffering face, the pouches under his eyes. She watched him inhale, exhale, puffing out his cheeks. “Peggy. Everywhere I go I hear about Peggy. Who cares? Peggy's dead.”

Her words, coming out like that, shocked her, but he ignored them. “I don't even know if I should tell you this.”

“Then don't,” she said abruptly, and stood up. There was Pepsi from Mr. Fahey in the icebox. “Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it.”

Behind her, she heard him sigh heavily—a shaky sigh that made her suspect he had been crying when she came in. During Stewart's breakdown after Peggy and Ray died—whole days of his helpless weeping, and long, miserable nights—she had felt a kind of affectionate contempt for him, but along with it there had been genuine awe that he cared for her sister so deeply. She imagined Ray, if it had happened to her: how long would he have cried?
No one has ever loved me like this
, she had thought. And also:
I will never love anyone like this
.

What had impressed her especially were Stewart's dreams. They were like the newspaper accounts come to life, made into a nightmare of a movie. He would dream he was out on the ice with Peggy, or with Peggy and Ray both, and the storm would begin, first just scattered snowflakes, then a serious blizzard, and they would laugh at first, say how beautiful it was, everything white, Peggy would throw her head back and catch the flakes on her tongue, and then it would get worse, and they would decide to head back to shore, and that was when the snow got so thick, the wind came up, and there was only white air, white ground, white horizon, and then nothing, nothing, so that Stewart woke up screaming, shaking with cold no matter how many blankets he slept under.

Sometimes in the dream he became separated from Peggy, and knew that if he could reach her he could save her, but he never made it. Sometimes he was on shore, and could catch glimpses of Peggy and Ray out in the middle of the lake—Peggy's striped stocking cap, or her red boots. He would call and they wouldn't hear. Or he would see nothing, just hear Peggy calling his name.

People said: what happens is that you get drowsy and fall asleep. It's a very peaceful death. They were found almost halfway across the lake, far from shore, far from Ray's ice-fishing hut. They were huddled together, his coat tucked around her, his gloves on her frozen hands, his scarf wound around her head. His body over hers. In the hut were four lake trout, a half-empty flask of rye, and a used condom frozen solid.

Caroline's dreams, when she remembered them, were never about Ray, much less Peggy. They were full of people she'd never seen before and mysterious events. The night Stewart had his first freezing dream she had dreamed she was shelling peas in the kitchen of her grandmother's house on Fernwood Avenue, and a strange fat man was looking for something—a book? a pen? And while the peas plopped into Grandma Woodruff's old tin pan, Stewart had been shivering and screaming, dreaming of ice.

But that was a year and a half ago. She stood at the sink, drinking Pepsi from the bottle—long cold swallows that numbed her throat. Her lunch leavings were still on the counter: coffee cup, plate, the crusts from her sandwich. She read what it said on the Duz box:
DUZ DOES EVERYTHING
. The hell it does. And the Dutch Cleanser with its inane grinning Dutch girl, stupid fake windmill.
Deliver me
, she thought.
Deliver me, God, from all evils, past, present, and to come
. A line from the Mass. Why should she remember it? She hadn't been to church in all that time, not since Peggy's funeral.

“I think you should know,” he said. “She had a baby not long before she died. It must have been in California, she must have had it out there. Tom Wilhelm told me. He heard it from a guy he knows at the—you know. Bogan and McKay.”

She whirled around to face him. “The funeral home? Some ghoul who embalmed her? They
looked
at her? That's disgusting. That makes me sick.”

“I know,” he said, but from the look on his face—wary, hesitating, the eyes hooded—she could tell he was titillated by it, just a little. Liked imagining it. Got a kick out of telling it to her. “Still, I thought it was something you should be aware of.” He bit his lip, sighed again, tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray.

“I don't want to talk about it,” she said. Her stomach cramped with nausea; she felt it in her throat. “I can't believe you would tell me this. Who
cares
, Stewart? What difference does it make?”

She couldn't bear to look at him. Duz does everything.
Deliver me, Duz, from all evils
. Next door at the Laughlins' the radio was playing: dance music. Harry James's orchestra playing “You Made Me Love You,” with that gorgeous trumpet solo. She closed her eyes, tapping her feet to the music, and it came back to her, all in a rush—like it or not—what it was like to dance with Ray. Lordy, how that man could dance. She remembered the night at the Club Dewitt when the floor was cleared for the two of them, everyone watching how he swung her out, and back, and the way her skirt looked, the violet-colored silk flaring like petals.
Why am I here with this sad gray man
?

But sex, oddly enough, was better with Stewart than with handsome, sexy Ray. Ray was always too rough, too quick, and he always wanted from her what she had no idea how to give.
Come on, come on, baby
—she hated him saying that, right in the middle of everything, in an impatient voice that clashed, to say the least, with the mood. And the first time, when he took her to the hotel, it hurt so much she pushed him off her, and he pulled his pants on and walked around the room swearing and kicking the furniture. She was a senior in high school. It was a long time before she would let him try it again.

Stewart said, “Oh honey,” and she turned back to look at him. Tears in his eyes, hand raked back through his hair, trembling lower lip. “Listen to me for a minute. Try to understand. It was probably his, but it could have been mine,” he said. “It could have been my child. I think back, trying to remember dates and figure it out, and I can't get anywhere, I can't put it together. And I can't stand it, Caro. I can't stand not knowing.”

There was silence—no sound but the radio and a gurgle in her stomach from the Pepsi. What was she supposed to say? She understood that he was upset. All right, it was a shock, it made everything just a bit worse, she could see that. But profoundly, from the bottom of her heart, she didn't care. So what if Peggy had a baby? What difference did it make if the father was Stewart or Ray or the man in the meat market—which was not outside the bounds of possibility. Peggy was gone, Ray was gone. The baby was gone—who knew where? Adopted by some rich California friend of Aunt Alice's, no doubt. Water under the bridge. Water over the dam. What did it matter?

“I wonder if you would find out for me.” He had better control of himself, and he spoke humbly, shyly—the voice he used when he wanted something or criticized her, a voice that was meant to calm and placate but always infuriated her instead. “What happened out there in San Francisco. You could write to your aunt, maybe. Or find out from your mother.”

“I don't want anything to do with it,” she said.

“Please, Caro. I just want to know. I don't want to
do
anything. But—if it's true, for one thing. If anyone knows—I mean, whose it was. And what happened to it. I only want information.”

“I don't get it,” she said. She stood with the window behind her, looking at his naked, saggy face. The sun was hot on her back, and sweat ran down from her armpits. “Why is it so important? These things happen. I can tell you this much—it's true, all right. I don't know why I didn't see it, I must have been blind. She had put on weight, I remember that now. She stretched out the elastic on my green skirt.” What she remembered was glee, that Peggy was getting fat; she remembered that distinctly. Poor Peggy. Not that she didn't deserve everything she got. Well, not everything. But that—yes. The way she carried on.

He said, “I remember how she avoided me, those weeks before she left. Didn't want me to touch her. And her—” He made a rounding motion in front of his chest. “You know—her breasts were—”

“Oh, never
mind
, Stewart. I don't want to hear it.” She finished the Pepsi and clutched the empty bottle. What if she just brained him with it? That thick greenish glass. He'd go down like a big old sawdust doll, too surprised to protest, too miserable. She said, “Maybe she avoided you simply because you were boring, you bored her to death, you bore everyone to death. Did that ever occur to you?” She turned her back on him and banged the empty bottle into the wooden case on the floor. When she stood up he was staring at her, stricken, his face flushed pink.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

She sighed and went to him, put her hands on his shoulders, apologized, cradled his head against her. Oh Lord, it was wrong, it must be wrong, to hurt someone like this—when it was so easy.
She wolde wepe, if that she saw a mous caught in a trap
. “I didn't mean that, Stewart. I'm just upset.”

“I know.” His voice was muffled, his face burrowed into her waist. He smelled of cigarettes. “I shouldn't have said anything. I was afraid it would hurt you. But I felt it was important that we share everything.” He pulled back to look up at her. “And you've been so distant lately, Caro—as if you've got something on your mind. I don't know. Maybe I wanted to get your attention, shake you up a little.”

Well: that was mildly interesting, at least. She stroked his hair, at the spot where she would have brained him with the bottle. He did have wonderful, wavy, thick hair—not really very gray. “Stewart, I really think you should forget this. I don't want anything to do with it—something some horrible man told you. It's disgusting, and it's—it's like an invasion of privacy. I mean, it's Peggy's business.”

She remembered Peggy at the train—the lucky one, off to California, gloating, carefree, hugging everyone, laughing behind the new blue veil she'd bought for the trip.
All that time, she was suffering
. Caroline felt a brief, pure pang of sorrow for her sister—maybe her first one. She looked at Stewart's bent head and took a breath. “Besides,” she said. “Stewart. Look at me.” He looked up. A mouse in a trap. She said, “I really believe that anything you found out would only make everything worse. I don't mean just with you—I mean between us.”

There was another pause. She hated scenes like this, full of pregnant silences, melodramatic declarations, tears. She had thought they were done with all that. But she forced herself to look into his eyes, blue like her own—what were called gray in the Middle Ages: the books she read, all the poems, were full of gray-eyed beauties.

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it, Stewart.”

She stepped back from him and sat down, fanning herself with the morning paper. The heat in the kitchen was oppressive. She could not possibly cook dinner, even if they dragged the electric fan out of the bedroom and set it up in here. They could go out, drive over to Mother's. Stay home and eat crackers and drink beer, she didn't care. Or would they be too upset to eat at all? Would this conversation go on and on, into the night?

She waited, with a detached curiosity, to see what he would say, while the Laughlins' radio was drowned out by a car revving up somewhere down the street. A horn blew. Stewart's cigarette burned itself out in the ashtray. The headline on the paper was about the Germans in Paris: she pictured cruel helmeted men goose-stepping down the wide avenues. Stewart wouldn't be called up if America got into the war, but what about John? What about Chip Maloney and Hank Douglas and all the other men they knew? She put the thought from her. She would go to the library tomorrow after her appointment at the hairdresser. A book on medieval art, she thought. Religious paintings. The Bayeux tapestry.

“You're not happy,” Stewart said, startling her. She had almost forgotten him. He spoke sharply, so that she could tell the notion of her unhappiness had just occurred to him, he hadn't had time to digest it and find a nice way to talk about it. He took one of her hands, clasping it between both of his; his hands were warm and sweaty. She wanted to pull away. Draw a cold bath, fling off her clothes, immerse herself up to her eyebrows, and then sleep, sleep. He said, “Caroline, don't do this to me.”

“I'm not going to do anything, Stewart. What on earth do you think I'm going to do?”

“Don't leave me.”

She knew she wouldn't leave him. It sometimes made things easier for her to imagine leaving him, but she knew there was no question of it. She had married him—why? Because they were linked, because Peggy and Ray had died and thrown them together—yes, that. But what else? She thought back, trying to sort it out. A million years ago. That bleak winter and then the cold wet spring, when everything was so awful at home. John drinking, out until all hours. Jamie not talking to anyone, not even getting out of bed. Nell looking desperate. The store sinking. She was sick of college, sick of her mother's short temper, sick of trying to get used to being poor—that, too, all of it. But when she really thought about it, it seemed to her that she had married Stewart because she had made him forget Peggy: in taking comfort from her, he had fallen in love with her. She remembered his face the first time he saw her naked. It was a face she decided she could love. And out of that mixture of triumph and gratitude and general disorientation, she had found the strength to marry him.