The Gazebo: A Novel (9 page)

Abby put down the letters, leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes. She had finished two tapes now, and she had begun digging through the photographs of Martin and Claire all over Europe: kissing at the base of the Eiffel Tower, posed in front of the Uffizi, standing on either side of a poker–faced Beefeater
at Buckingham Palace, and embracing in front of a huge, mossy stone castle in Ireland. Then had come the correspondence between Claire and Martin—letter after urgent letter bringing each other up–to–date on their separate lives. Abby wished that Claire had never gotten the telegram, that the wedding had taken place at 17 Dobson Mews as planned, that Martin and Claire had been able to stay together in London, sleeping in the sleigh bed of their small flat and starting the rest of their life together. But life, of course, rarely worked according to some plan or diagram. Claire had boarded a plane to Paris in 1952; Abby had a baby on her own in 1992. Each, in her own way, had departed.

And then, abruptly, returned. When Abby took the train back to Longwood Falls for her father’s funeral, she had no way of knowing she was going home for good. If her father had groomed her, had expected her to take over the newspaper, maybe it would have been easier to walk away from it. But her father had never expected any such thing of Abby. He had seemed to appreciate the fact that she was a different person from him, someone with her
own interests and a complicated inner life. When he’d bring friends or business associates by the house and they would shake her hand and ask if they were having the pleasure of meeting the future editor of the
Ledger
, Abby’s father always answered from the background, “I think maybe Abby’s going to be a city girl.” The choice, if and when the time should come, would be Abby’s, and in the end, the choice was this: return to Longwood Falls, or let the lifework of her father die with him.

Her mother didn’t exactly tell Abby what to do. In fact, Helen Reston had refused to offer an opinion. But when Abby told her mother, the morning after the funeral, that she would take over the paper, her mother had seemed to breathe more easily than she had in days, as if relieved that some part of her husband, Tom, would endure after all.

Still, Abby wondered what her parents had meant to each other. Back when she had imagined that she and Sam Bachman would one day settle on the same coast and grow old together, Abby had thought she had found what her mother had not: a man who wasn’t afraid to be expressive about love. But when Abby
became pregnant and Sam disappeared, she realized that somehow she’d gotten it entirely wrong.

And now, even if a man did come along who seemed willing to explore what life with a thirty–five–year–old single mother of one might be like, Abby couldn’t bear the thought of starting over, or, more to the point, ending
up
—after she’d opened herself in ways she’d never thought possible—alone again.

One weekend back in New York City, Miranda had spiked an extremely high fever and lost all her energy, and Abby had bundled her into a taxi and taken her to the covering pediatrician, a young, shaggy doctor she’d never heard of. But Nick Kelleher was gentle, prescribing a pink antibiotic and calming child and mother alike. He’d called that Monday to see how Miranda was doing, and then he’d called Tuesday to see how Abby was doing, and he’d kept calling—in New York City, then up here, first just to chat a little, but then offering to come up and visit, saying he occasionally had a weekend off, and he really liked the landscape of upstate New York, and was there a decent place in the area where he could
stay? Abby, of course, always had brilliant, unassailable excuses why she couldn’t see him, and the wonder of it was that she hadn’t scared him off by now. It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t right. But it was all she could do.

Abby placed her elbows on her desk and rubbed her eyes. Then she poured herself a new glass of wine and reached toward the tape player, curious to see how Claire was faring in her own return to Longwood Falls.

Claire had moved back into her parents’ house on Badger Street to help her mother, but she no longer slept in her childhood bedroom. That room now belonged to Maureen Swift, who needed her own bed at night because she often tossed and turned for hours. Claire slept on a folding cot in the living room, and when she heard her mother mumbling or crying in the night she would bring her another pain tablet or a washcloth dipped in cool water.

At first, her mother had been shocked to see her when she arrived home from Europe. “Well, what did you expect?” Claire had said to her. “When I got the telegram from Margaret, I couldn’t just stay there in England. I had to come home.”

“But I told Margaret not to trouble you,” her mother had said in her muted voice, a hint of chill coming through. “I told her that you had your own life now—you and Martin—and that it was the way you wanted it.”

The words hurt, even though they hadn’t been meant to; they were a paraphrase of what Claire herself had written in the note to her parents that she had propped up on the kitchen table before she left. She was twenty–one years old and was entitled to her own life, but now, with her mother suddenly so sick, the situation had become more complex, and all the terms seemed to have changed. Claire’s life was waiting for her in London, but she couldn’t go and join it yet. She wanted to be with Martin—could think of nothing else, when she wasn’t worrying about her mother—but it wasn’t really a choice. Despite the difficulties between Claire and her mother, she would stay in Longwood Falls and take care of her, as her mother had taken care of Claire when she was a baby.

Sometimes, over the weeks, Maureen Swift felt just fine for an hour or two, and during those periods Claire would play card games
with her, the two women sitting at the kitchen table and slapping down cards in a surprisingly lively game of hearts or blackjack. Claire would tune the radio that sat on the kitchen window to a popular music station, and let “Mood Indigo” and “I’ve Got You under My Skin” drift into the room like a light wind. They talked, mother and daughter, in a way they had never talked before. She found herself speaking at length about Martin.

“I can’t say I approve of it,” Maureen Swift said after a while. “The two of you going off together like that, not being married or anything. So please don’t ask me to.”

“I won’t,” Claire said softly. “But if it makes a difference, we’re planning on getting married, you know. As soon as I go back to London.” These words seemed to upset Maureen, and Claire realized she had been insensitive. Her mother would not want her to go back to London, of course; she would want her to stay nearby, even though she wouldn’t say so. “You know,” Claire continued, “I’m not running away. I’m just going back there to be with him. It’s become our home. He’s found a wonderful job there—the kind of job he’s always
wanted, to his absolute amazement—and we’ve got a little flat upstairs with a sunny room in back where I can sculpt. I’ve been taking classes at the Tate, with the most dynamic teacher, Mr. Paley. He came over to me after class the other day and said that he actually thinks I have real talent.”

Her mother turned, and Claire could see the physical pain she was once again feeling, but something more, too. “You know, Claire,” she said, “I wouldn’t have chosen this life for you, God only knows, but since it’s there and it isn’t going to go away, I have to say that I’m glad he makes you happy. But are you sure you want to be so far away from everything?”

“No,” Claire said, after a moment.

They sat in silence then, slapping down cards and drinking the hot cider that Claire had mulled from one of Martin’s recipes. The small kitchen smelled of cloves and toasted orange rind, a perfume that made everything slightly more bearable. Finally her mother put down her cards and said, “I know why you went with him. I didn’t used to understand, but now I do.”

“Oh?” was all Claire could say.

“I used to think you were just running away from us,” said Maureen Swift. “From our family, from the fact that we didn’t have a lot of money, or many things to offer you. I guess my feelings were hurt, knowing that you would choose him over us.” She took a deep breath, something inside her causing her a new rush of pain. “But I see you now,” she went on, “and I see that you’re different. You went with him so that you could change. It would have been impossible for you to do it here. Now your sister, Margaret, she was perfectly happy to marry Larry Benton and move into a house three streets away from us and work as a doctor’s receptionist and then have those darling twins. But you—that wasn’t the path you were taking, was it?”

“No,” said Claire softly.

“I’ll never be pleased about it,” her mother went on, “but you did it, and now you’re different, and what can I say?”

Her mother was right; she was different. It had happened in slow, ineffable ways, slipping over her at night while she slept or made love with Martin. The lovemaking was a part of it, certainly, for in the months that they had
been together in Europe she had been able to feel a true sense of
privacy
for the first time ever. In the sleigh bed with him in the flat in Kensington, touching each other with hands, mouths—it had only intensified.

But it was everything else, too. The world of two they had created in bed at night had spread, inevitably, throughout everything they did. In the end, they needed very little. They had lived well in the hotels and restaurants of Europe, and then they had lived not as well in a London flat, but the drastic reduction in money hadn’t changed anything, really. Claire didn’t miss the opulence of their early days in Europe, the thick towels, the translucent china, the maids slipping silently in and out of rooms; it had begun to be too much. Even without any money she could be open with him, she could be free. When she was a girl growing up in Longwood Falls, Claire had been many things, but she certainly hadn’t been free.