Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  For in their way, Leonard and Meridia were a pair of unreconstructed icebergs. If they had been brought to face their coldness, under that gentility and concern, they themselves might have been shocked. They brought up their boys like healthy weeds that grew on their prize lawn, and cut them back at every turn. Sam and Patrick had dentists for their teeth, counselors for their camp, headmasters for their school, doctors for their allergies, and a tennis pro for their backhands. They had a house in Boston and a house in Maine, and they had perfect teeth and manners too. Every facet of their lives was spoken for, except for the way they were. Sam and Patrick had their own spirits, and it was these spirits that didn’t make any difference to Leonard and Meridia. There were family conferences about grades, about classes and subjects, about what sort of sailboat to buy; and when they put in the tennis court at Little Crab, the boys had their say about that as well. It was a democratic family: Meridia wanted her boys to function smoothly, the way the chairs and the cars and the washing machines did. The Bax boys knew they were attended to and prized, but they never knew if their parents had any taste for them at all.

  Sam’s spirit was one of small-time mayhem. It worried Meridia, since it wasn’t part of the plan. He burned with reckless energy, while Patrick smoldered inside himself, exclusive and private. In the neat terminology Meridia indulged in, Sam was the doer and Patrick was the observer, except that she didn’t much care what it was Sam did or Patrick thought. Patrick did not know a gesture that was not double-edged, but he knew a thing or two about privacy, and if I had had no other cause to admire him I would have loved him for arranging my privacy for me. He knew when I had had it at the Baxes’ and he drove me home. He knew the nights on which I wanted company and the nights on which I didn’t. He came up to Cambridge on the weekends, and when he went back to New York, I felt I had lost my chevalier. He knew that I would want to go through Sam’s things alone, but he knew that I would want him close by. Or he seemed to know: perhaps he just couldn’t bear the thought of having his brother so neatly packed away behind his back. He was as hidden as his father, as remote as his mother, and as intense as Sam, in his way. But you had the feeling that Patrick had reflected upon everything in his life. He was private not because he was remote, but because he was cautious.

  Underneath those smoothly functioning Bax boys was the undertow of anger, and everything Sam did was done in a state of blind rage. Patrick’s privacy was his form of affront—his spirit rebelling against being shortchanged.

  Sam loved me in a way that was as close as love could come to his mother’s indifference. It was playful, bouncy, it accepted the situation between us without annotations, and without realizing it, he stuck me like a buffer between himself and his parents. He had a wife, and that warded them off. How could he be wild if he was settled? How could he be in trouble if he was married? He might have known these things, but coming from that emotionally monosyllabic household, how could he have had a vocabulary for them?

  I loved everything about him. When I met him, I was as game as a goose, and as dumb as they come. But I knew fleetness when I saw it, and defiance, even in its most inarticulate form. All I saw was energy, married to that endearing force of nature. I learned to recognize a form of knife-edge anger I will never possess, and as I watched my husband hack his way through life there was nothing I could do but love him. He was as devoid of passion as Orangeade, because there was nothing in the world he could pit himself against. What he wanted was straight ahead of him, and he picked it up like a windfall apple. But he was graceful, determined, and volatile, and that combination looked a lot like love to me at twenty-one. But I was all wrong for Sam. Sam, Patrick said, needed a conscience, not an appreciator.

  Leonard met me at his club, the sort of dark, brown men’s club with large leather chairs and dim chandeliers that Old Boys keep alive. The whole place exuded historical wistfulness: you looked for formal portraits of the 1910 soccer team and the tarnished cup from the Henley Regatta, but it wasn’t a college club. It was a lawyers’ club and, besides a good kitchen, it contained an excellent library for its members.

  Leonard was as sober as his club. He kept his gray hair clipped like a putting green, and beneath it you could see the elegant shape of his skull, the same shape his boys had beneath their flopping hair. We sat quietly in the dining room, whose ceilings were so high you felt diminished. The room absorbed sound, so you were afraid to speak above a whisper but tempted to shout to see what sort of echo you would get back. There were some beautifully dressed white-haired men having lunch alone, and some beautifully dressed young men reading the paper, and some couples Leonard and Meridia’s age. No one seemed to be talking.

  Had we not been fast eaters, the first part of the lunch would have been a misery. Leonard liked an informal, not very personal sort of chat, but we were too closely connected for that. Anything, even something casual, we said would have been intimate. I didn’t want to talk to Leonard. In some stubborn, childish way, I wanted to talk to Sam’s father, but Leonard was only Leonard. We concentrated nicely on our menus, made our choices, and wolfed down our broiled fish and salad. Over coffee, we got down to cases.

  “You know, Olly, that Sam’s grandfather left trusts for Sam and Pat. They both got some money from their grandmothers, so that was added on. According to the provisions in Sam’s will, you are the beneficiary of Sam’s trust. The actual provision states that it be held for your children, but in the event there were no children, it goes to you. You also get Sam’s share of Little Crab. Those are the sixty acres of the hundred and twenty Meridia’s mother left to Pat and Sam. You won’t be rich, but you’ll be nicely provided for.”

  I said, “Can you make it all over to Patrick?”

  “Now, Olly,” said Leonard, “I don’t think you should make any judgments of that sort now. I just wanted to tell you what’s yours, so you won’t worry.”

  “If it’s my money, I can make it over to Patrick, can’t I?”

  “You can do whatever you like, Olly, but I don’t think you ought to do anything at this particular time.”

  Indicating, of course, that I was in no fit state. But I didn’t want Sam’s money or his sixty acres. How was I supposed to live with it? I did not admire what I thought, but it crossed my mind that I could not fall in love with someone else on Sam’s money. I couldn’t marry again on Sam’s trust. What would I do with Sam’s share of Little Crab, except give it over to the Baxes, who would want to pay for it, thus driving me further from them. Or, if I kept it, could I live any of my own life on it? Five years of marriage had entitled me to quarterly statements and checks, courtesy of the late Cyrus Bax, whom I had never known.

  “You might consider keeping the money in trust for any children you might have, Olly. You’re certain to marry again.” He held me in his gaze as he said this, and I looked back into those round brown eyes, those liquid stone walls.

  “Why should someone else’s kids get Sam’s money? Why shouldn’t Patrick have it? He deserves it.”

  Leonard’s face was oblong and his teeth were the size and shape of almonds. There was a strained look in his eye, and I could not be sure whether it was from discussing these painful issues or the possibility that I might make a scene.

  “Look, Olly dear, you talk to Patrick about this and see what he tells you. I’ve discussed this with your father. Talk to him. He’s a lawyer too, after all. We all think you ought to let things sit until you get settled. If you’re thinking of moving to New York, it might be helpful to you.”

  He was the soul of kindness and concern. The fact that he had talked to my father about this made me want to stab him. But I only said, “I’ll talk to Patrick. This doesn’t sit right with me.”

  “You were Sam’s wife,” Leonard said. “This is the way he wanted it. You are legally entitled.”

  He signed for the check and as we walked out he put his hand on my shoulder. It was the only physical contact we ever had.

  For a while Patric
k spent his weekends in Boston. Most of the time he put up with his parents, but when the house got too full, or they got on his nerves, he stayed in Cambridge with one or another of his college pals. I knew he was putting himself at my disposal, and while it occurred to me that I might be a comfort to him, I did not see how I could reciprocate. Sadness locks you in. All you can see is your own need. To compensate, I made him an elaborate dinner, and then I sat him down.

  “I want to talk to you about Sam’s will,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “I want to make Sam’s trust over to you.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  I said, “Listen, Patrick. I never knew your grandfather. He didn’t intend for some stranger to have that money, and your grandmother intended to keep Little Crab in the family.”

  “This is all very noble, Elizabeth, but I don’t want it, and you’re entitled to it.”

  “I’m not speaking legally.”

  “Neither am I,” said Patrick. “Besides, you’ll need it.”

  “I have some money of my own, and I can work.”

  “Look. I’m not going to discuss this at length. You can give it all to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Yellow Vegetables for all I care, but you’re a fool to. It’ll nourish you, and you earned it.”

  “Earned it? How did I earn it?”

  “Babysitting,” said Patrick. “Babysitting for the late Samuel Pattison.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” I said.

  “Yes, it is. And it’s a true thing too. As far as I can see, you saved the only life he had going for him.”

  And then the subject was closed.

  5

  I wanted everything to be normal. I didn’t want to be treated like a piece of antique glass. My own fragility, and everybody else’s, was wearing me down. Sam had wanted to leave Cambridge and move to New York, and that’s what I wanted, too, even without him. I was afraid that if I made decisions, if I acted, I would be accused of acting out of panic and grief: after all, I was not thought to be myself. But I was myself, and after a month and a half of suspension, tiptoeing back and forth between exhaustion and desire, I stopped caring much what anyone might think. I wanted to do what had to be done and that fell to the details you arrange after you make a decision.

  I knew I would be leaving Cambridge from the day Sam was buried, and I knew there would be a certain amount of hell to pay. Who would Danny Sanderson call when he got mournful? Wasn’t it up to me to be there when he called? What would the Baxes do without their link to Sam? Patrick had mentioned to them that I might move to New York, so they invited me for dinner to have it made public. By this time I was down to a weekly appearance, and when Meridia called and specified dinner on Friday, I knew I was being called to account.

  Life for Leonard and Meridia had assumed its old shape. Leonard was back at his office, Meridia was back at her charities and garden club. We all wore dark colors in the midst of Indian summer and we walked the streets like ordinary citizens, but we knew in our hearts we were singled out by grief and not like everyone else at all.

  I knew Meridia and Leonard well enough to know that they would want to see my leaving Cambridge as my escape from the thought of Sam, assuming that every tree and turning caused me pain, but they were only a quarter right. Landscape does not call forth that sort of emotion except in poems, but then, how else did Leonard and Meridia summon up their feelings? Cambridge was only a city Sam and I had lived in. Our apartment was just a dwelling we had shared. It was the fact of Sam, the being of him, that made me want to crack my head against the wall, not the muddy hiking boots in the hall closet, not the half-finished bottle of Cuban rum, or the undeveloped film in his camera, the rocks at Maine, or the shrubs outside.

  Leonard, who was a boy scout to the ends of his toenails, probably thought I was moving to complete what Sam had started, as a pledge. The firm of McKeithan, Jarvis, Spain and Pelling had offered him a junior partnership, and they sent me an enormous pot of lilies two days after the funeral. Since I was moving, I gave the lilies to Meridia, who most likely gave them to some less well-heeled member of her garden club. But there was no completion, no pledge. It seemed a sane and sensible way to keep life marching forward.

  Little by little, I began to take stock of my possessions and get estimates from moving companies. I read the real estate page of the New York Times. Life was coming back to normal, and although I spoke to Meridia less often, we had more communion than we had ever had before.

  Their house in Boston had the same rubbed and polished breeziness as the house in Little Crab. Everything Meridia had was old. You could not, for example, imagine her and Leonard starting out as a young married couple. The silver was the Hollander silver from Meridia’s great-great-grandmother. The plates were Leonard’s grandmother’s, and on it went. The housekeeper-cook had been with the family so long you felt she was an heirloom too. But Meridia was modern. She could cook. She could make English plum pudding, cornbread, baked beans, and veal Cordon Bleu. When you watched her cooking in the kitchen, she looked as if she were pushing everything she touched away from her.

  Their dinner table sat sixteen in perfect comfort. When Sam and I had gone for dinner, the four of us dotted that immensity like little islands and the stillness of the room made me want to shout down the alley to get the butter passed. We sat—Leonard, Meridia, and I—packed down at one end. I had lost the knack of knowing what to say to them, and since this was business, we weren’t going to talk about Sam, our one topic. My heart gave a lurch of relief when Meridia told me that Patrick had flown up for the day on business and would appear in time for coffee.

  “Well, Olly, we hear there’s a move afoot,” said Meridia. “Have you made any definite plans?”

  They knew what my plans were, but I sat at their table, good prisoner, and told them I was moving to New York. Meridia knew how to get things as formal as possible.

  “And what about an apartment?” she asked. “And will you transfer to Columbia or Juilliard?”

  “I’ll get a job,” I said.

  “A job?” said Meridia. “What sort of job?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll see when I’m settled.”

  It was rough going, conversationally. We passed the dishes to one another—it was the cook’s night out—and our most enthusiastic moments were devoted to who had written and who had telephoned and which of Sam’s friends abroad had sent cables. When Patrick arrived, we suppressed sighs of relief. We could ask him how the weather in New York was, and what plane he was taking back. When we had coffee in the living room I was not called upon to talk much, since they had Patrick. And then I realized that with Sam gone, there was no reason for us to be connected at all. There were no grandchildren to bind us together. It seemed to me that I was being written out. Since I was no longer married to Sam, because there was no more Sam, I carried as much weight as a girl who had had a brief affair with their son during a summer of his life.

  Meridia’s emotional spectrum ran from the polite to the concerned. Warmth didn’t filter through her prism. The friends she and Leonard had were friends of their youth. Their most recent acquaintance had been formed twenty-five years ago. Sam was the impulse behind our connection, and if I had hung around for twenty years and produced some children, I would have been family too. Meridia and Leonard liked to have the reasons for their connections clear and traditional: they did not form friendships of the heart. They formed friendships of the school, of the college, of the club. Then there was family, and they put a large store by family. But I was neither. I was no good to them at all except to remind them of their dead boy. At Christmas we would exchange Christmas cards. When they came to New York for a weekend of theater, they might call me up and take me out for a meal. Sam was what had mattered, and sitting in that lovely room, stirring my coffee with a fancy-backed spoon, I had never felt so ancillary and beside the point in my life. I was being read out of the record. I was being settled
in New York. I was no longer Sam’s wife, but “the girl Sam was married to.” It was not malicious. After all, what good was a daughter-in-law when you have no son? What was binding us now was form, and Meridia was very good at that.

  We would have felt awkward if Meridia had admitted awkwardness. It would have done us good to have the conversation come to a startling halt, to have one of us repress a sob or sigh or yawn, for one of us to spill out a sopping, touching story about our absent guest. As it was, I felt we were chattering through clenched teeth. But Meridia knew how to make a conversation go. She spoke as if addressing generalities to an audience of intelligent matrons. Even grief couldn’t flatten that. She was talking about air travel, jet lag, and how to take a dog onto a plane: her friends the Ketchams were taking their Labrador with them to Brussels. Meridia made you mind your manners. I minded mine, and as I watched her turn from me to Leonard to Patrick, and as I watched us add our parts to the conversation—except for Patrick, who drank his coffee and mumbled as he flipped through a magazine—as I watched her scatter her attention evenly, I felt a rush of anger, like a whiff of pure oxygen. She was being sociable for the benefit of a stranger, and I was it.

  But I had my side, too. What good are in-laws if you haven’t anyone to be married to? I felt this lost connection keenly, but somewhere in their heartless souls, Leonard and Meridia accepted it as a fact of life and simply acted on it, although they were certainly up for being concerned and helpful. When it was time to go, there were kisses all around.

  I offered to drive Patrick to the airport, but he asked me to drive him to Cambridge instead.

  “I thought you were taking the last shuttle,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought, but I’m tired and I didn’t want to stay with Leonard and Ma.”