Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  Caitlin turned away and with only one thought in mind: freedom.

  But Peter did not let her go. After having led her to the door, he blocked her passage.

  Annie was still raving. But it was more of the same: morbid, foul, heartbroken visions of excrement. It was a transcription of the dull roar that fills every corner of hell.

  “Move,” said Caitlin, pushing at her father.

  He didn’t know why he kept her from fleeing, he only knew he must. He wanted to master something. He gripped her tight and his hard, capable hands branded her with the pain they could inflict.

  She twisted free, and ran down the stairs. She almost fell; she saw the steps rushing toward her, but she righted herself, continued. She hit the ground floor at a dead run and raced across the foyer and out toward the side door, which led to the bluestone patio.

  Jamey was just walking in. His face was red and his upper lip was like a generous slice of purple plum: he’d been hit by a tennis ball. He was sniffling about it and didn’t see Caitlin, and when he did and tried to get out of her way it was too late. She ran into him as if deliberately and left him there, sprawled like a toppled chess piece on the black and white marble squares.

  And as she ran across the long, sloping lawn she realized she had no idea where she was running. She happened to look up and there was the sky, still deep blue but filled with more clouds than before, and in the clouds, as if riding upon them, riding a chariot of heavenly vapor, was an angel, or a spirit, or a vision: a being wrapped in white, with a calm, serious face, holding an immense sword with both of its hands and aiming the glistening tip of the sword down at the earth, down at Caitlin really, and when Caitlin moved the sword moved, too.

  She stopped and looked around to see if anyone else was there to see what she was seeing. She could hear voices coming from inside the house, but outside she was all alone. She looked back up at the sky, expecting that in the moment her attention had strayed the angel had left her. But it was still there, moving its sword back and forth, breathing quietly as its vaporous robe blew gently west toward the river.

  APRIL 8, 1939

  Caitlin was in her room, reading The Grapes of Wrath. She had woken that day with a headache, a vague sense of uneasiness. She felt as if she hadn’t slept; her nerves were raw. And so she did what was for her an extraordinary thing: she simply did not go to work.

  Annie was working in the mansion, and she said she would call the George Washington Inn to tell them Caitlin was ill, but Caitlin knew the chances were Annie would forget to make the call. She had only used the telephone a few times in her life; it tended to be an ordeal for her. She gripped the receiver with one hand and that hard black lily of a mouthpiece with the other.

  Caitlin didn’t care if the call was made or not. She knew the hotel would never fire her; she got as much work done there as any three other employees. She had inherited her father’s tragic capacity for diligence.

  It felt strange and so wonderful to just lie in bed. A light, rather brittle rain was falling. The trees were bare but some of the branches were budding. It was windy; the single pane of glass in Caitlin’s window rattled in its frame. Her father had gotten some violets from the Riverview Greenhouse and they were in a Mason jar on the windowsill. Their petals were as purple as royal robes against the cold gray window pane.

  She wore a flannel nightgown, knee socks, and green woolen gloves. She had cut the fingertips off the gloves so she could comfortably turn the pages of a book.

  She had been reading since eight that morning. She was the first one to have taken the new Steinbeck out of the Leyden Free Library. She had never read a book whose pages were so white, so crisp; they seemed to resist her each time she turned one over.

  And the book was breaking her heart. She was in a melancholy rapture from Mr. Steinbeck’s notions of the open road and hobo camps, soft, idealized pictures of the Joad family, and, most of all, from the fact that the writer was out there in the great unknown world, with his tweed jacket and his pipe, his carefully combed hair, his neat mustache, and the look he must have had in his eyes while he wrote this all down, the creased forehead, the glass of warm whiskey, the old dog sleeping at his feet, the pen flying across the page.

  It was noon. The sun was over the house and its pale golden light touched the water in the jar of violets. The shadow of the jar and the violets shimmered on the bare wooden floor; the sunlight passed through the flower petals so that even the shadow showed pale blue.

  And then the pathos of the book was unbearable. It toppled from her hand as she covered her face and wept. And when she felt it had gone on long enough, she did something she had learned a few years before. Whenever she cried she asked herself: What are you crying about? And the question would stop her cold, because there was a difference between the generality of sorrow and the specificity of the answer to that question, and that difference was like digging up the ground around a fire—the flame would extinguish itself when it came to the circle of barren earth.

  I’m crying for the Joads, she thought. For the Okies, for farmers everywhere, for Mr. Steinbeck’s enormous heart, I’m crying for the want of someone to tell my story, too, because I am in this room, and the sun is moving over the roof and it is the warmest part of the day and soon it will be afternoon and cold again. I am crying for some reason I cannot discover, a wound I can’t remember.

  FIVE

  JULY 11, 1940

  Morning began with a paroxysm of desire. The soul longing, the body yearning, the ego pacing back and forth like a beleaguered old auntie left in charge of two incorrigible children.

  She lay in her bed and watched the morning light shimmer like reflections of water against her wall. She was covered by a single sheet, with a bare foot extended to keep her a little cooler. The mattress beneath her molded to her form, held her loosely but possessively.

  Strange, still, to awaken so deeply alone, to be rapturously bereft of the familiar sounds of Twin Ponds—the wind through the hickory trees, the hysterical squabbles of domestic geese, the careful clinking of her father’s flowered coffee cup in its cracked but matching saucer. Her alienation from her own desire had had a symmetry then; the familiar surrounded sensual hunger like sentinels, with orders to shoot to kill. Yet here, in this strange room, this strange house, somewhere in the vast circular chaos of this strange, sultry city, the familiar, dreary regime of denial had been subtly but inexorably subverted.

  Caitlin lived now in a converted attic room in a house owned by a family named Zweig. Thomas and Hilda Zweig were one of the many families who let rooms to government employees. They were Austrians who ran a small wine-importing company. They were elegant, rather formal people. Mr. Zweig wore a coat and tie to breakfast, Mrs. Zweig wore gloves whenever leaving the house, even in the summer. In the evenings they sat in their parlor listening to music and reading newspapers and magazines (though Mr. Zweig had a taste for private-eye novels as well) and they referred to Caitlin either as Miss Van Fleet or Dear. Caitlin had chosen to live at the Zweigs’ house her first full day in Washington. She had been given a typewritten list of houses in which single young ladies could room, and the Zweig house was closest to Betty Sinclair’s apartment, where Caitlin had spent her first night in Washington.

  “Zweig,” Betty had said, “could be anything. German, Jew, not that it matters, but it’s fun to try and guess.”

  Caitlin’s room was slanted, high in the center and cramped at the edges; she had to practically get on her knees to look out the small diamond-shaped windows. The walls were pale yellow; the floors were dark, and little Persian rugs were scattered here and there. Her narrow bed was in the center of the room. Next to it was a night table with a porcelain lamp in the shape of a French lady walking a dog. She had an easy chair with a floor lamp next to it, a dresser with eight drawers—mostly empty still—and a mirror that made her look fat. There was a half-bath down the hall from the Zweigs’ bedroom that had white tiles and butterscotch-painted p
laster and that Caitlin had all to herself. If she wanted to bathe, however, she needed to use the Zweigs’ bathroom, and the near intimacy of being with their towels and lotions and aspirin tablets, their razors and witch hazel and tooth powder, their tweezers, their laxatives, made her feel confused, and strangely ashamed.

  It was Saturday. In Leyden, Caitlin used to sleep until noon on days she didn’t have to work, and her parents, though they disapproved of late sleeping just as they did of early drinking, allowed her this luxury, feeling it was the least concession they could make for a valedictorian. They could not afford to give her travel or college but they could keep the house quiet on the weekends.

  In Washington, however, she awakened with the first light and waited for the day and her life to begin. She pulled the pillow out from beneath her head and placed it over her breasts; she ran her hand over the pillowcase until she found a patch of linen that had not been heated by her body heat, and this cool spot sent a spiral of pleasure through her as if it were a stranger who had slipped into bed beside her.

  She wore a pair of pale green rayon pajamas she had bought with Betty Sinclair. She had never owned anything made of rayon before; it made her feel affluent, modern. Suddenly scornful of her own reverie, she turned on her reading lamp—free electricity came with her thirty-dollar-a-month rent—and read for a while in the Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Betty had given to her. Then, not wanting to awaken the Zweigs, but unable to stay in bed any longer, she put on the dark green, rather Oriental-looking robe she had bought along with the pajamas, and went down the narrow stairway that connected her attic room to the rest of the house.

  She went to the bathroom, washed her face and hands, brushed her hair, her teeth, and then crept down the carpeted second-story corridor, past the Zweigs’ closed bedroom door, past the straight-backed upholstered chair placed reverentially beneath a painting of a young Mr. Zweig wearing the tan uniform and ludicrous pointed steel helmet of the Austrian Army.

  It was just eight in the morning. The heat never really left the house any longer. If she raked her fingers through the air she could practically feel it.

  Caitlin walked barefoot down the stairs toward the parlor. Though she rented only the attic, the Zweigs had made her feel welcome everywhere in their house. A breakfast of coffee and fruit was included with her rent and Mrs. Zweig, who had a cleaning woman but no cook, had from the very beginning of her tenancy asked Caitlin to prepare her own breakfasts on the weekends.

  “It’s our only time to pretend we are just newlyweds, with no responsibilities in the world,” Mrs. Zweig had said, smiling.

  It had struck Caitlin as an almost shocking intimacy, and she often imagined her somber, sedate landlords in bed together, wrapped in each other’s arms, fully clothed.

  The kitchen was large, with blue-and-white linoleum on the floor and a bay window against which honeysuckle nuzzled. Caitlin had never been alone in a kitchen that wasn’t hers before she’d moved into the Zweigs’ and their food was an unexpected source of temptation. She had felt at first that she wanted to taste their food because she had never tasted that sort of noodle or that kind of pastry before, and then, as time passed, she craved the things she had developed a taste for and might never have an opportunity to try again. There was always a pitcher of orange juice in the refrigerator and Caitlin was in a perpetual struggle between appetite and conscience— how to slake her thirst for the sweet, pulpy juice without taking so much that her pilfering would be noticed. And there were always strange doughy cookies in the bread box, which Caitlin counted daily, having devised the rule that if there were twenty she could take two, and if there were ten she could take one, though there were times when she counted out eight and took three. Sometimes her curiosity about the Zweigs’ food lurched toward utter avidity. She once found herself peeling the binding from a leftover chunk of sirloin roast and chewing the burned fatty flavor out of the string.

  Today, she filled the percolator basket with Chase & Sanborn coffee and then drew water from the tap. The Zweigs liked the way she made coffee. Then she surveyed the refrigerator. They must have had company the night before while Caitlin was at the symphony with Betty Sinclair. There were hunks of various cheeses wrapped in waxed paper and a platter of sliced salami and some sort of white meat—it turned out to be smoked goose, which Caitlin did not care for; she spit it into her hand and then threw it into the garbage can beneath the sink.

  Caitlin checked the bread box. Yesterday, there had been two cinnamon buns in a small brown-paper bag. When Caitlin had reached in to see how many there were, a bit of honey and pecan had stuck to her fingertip and after she licked it off she could not resist eating an entire bun. She admonished herself with every bite but she could not control herself. She had developed a palate that could only be satisfied by other people’s food. Surely if there were only two cinnamon buns left then she was eating half of them and that would certainly be noticed. What a humiliation that would be! Yet no one mentioned anything to her and this morning the bag was still there, holding the last bun. Perhaps they’ve forgotten all about these, thought Caitlin, and, after making a half gesture to return the bag to the bread box, she shook the last bun into her hand, crumpled up the bag, and threw it away. She wanted to save the cinnamon bun for her coffee, but suddenly she just ate it while standing in the middle of the kitchen.

  She had, in fact, put on a little weight. Betty had squeezed Caitlin’s upper arm, which had always been hard, almost unyielding, with the biceps of a young boy, but which had of late become soft. “Jewish cuisine,” Betty had said, furrowing her brow in a burlesque of disapproval—yet the words themselves tended to outlive the mitigating mockery.

  It was summer and Congress was on vacation. Too hot in Washington to think about any laws but those of nature. Even at night the heat still clung to the city like soiled bandages. Men wandered around in seersucker suits with their collars open, women in sleeveless blouses, their armpits smooth. No one seemed to care.

  With Stowe out of town and little to do in the office, Betty had been introducing Caitlin to museums and libraries, bookshops, perfumeries, parks, and a terrific record store on Connecticut where you could take a Duke Ellington record or an old Bessie Smith into the listening booth and play it for as long as you liked without so much as a glance from the tolerant, music-loving Swede who ran the place. Betty knew all the jazz and blues singers, and she’d sing along with them, making Caitlin blush because she never believed those booths were really soundproof.

  In some strange yet entirely welcome way, Betty was circling Caitlin. If it had not been coming from a woman, it would have been nothing short of Caitlin’s ideal of courtship. It had begun casually, with friendly gestures tempered by natural reticence and respect. Then it had become part of the rhythm of work—a shared lunch, a cup of coffee after work, a burst of heartfelt confiding that did not insist on leading to a complete destruction of all barriers. Contact was uncertain, sporadic, but free of anxiety. They didn’t have to make up a reason to see each other and they didn’t have to invent excuses not to: work took care of all that.

  Once Congress was in recess Betty began more regularly to suggest to Caitlin that they spend time together. It seemed as if Stowe’s absence animated Betty. She smoked more, laughed more, took Caitlin away from her typing and filing tasks for earlier and lengthier lunches. They ate in cafeterias for the most part, but slightly off the beaten track because Betty didn’t like meeting people she knew. Caitlin did enjoy meeting this congressional aide, that senator’s secretary. People who had important jobs thrilled her and it filled her with pleasure and amazement to be treated as if she were on a par with them. But Betty treated every chance meeting as an arduous task, a combination of public relations and sheer endurance, and when the interloper was gone Betty would rub her eyes with her thumb and forefinger, as if she had just been reading pages and pages of fine print.

  Yesterday, after lunch, Betty had taken Caitlin out to shop. Caitlin had bought
a Leading Lady pocketbook, wine-colored, with a more or less alligator grain, for just a dollar. Then Betty talked her into some fancy soaps. “It’s the cheapest way to make a working girl feel like a debutante. Take the Woodbury. Recommended by Mr. Cholly Knickerbocker.” She had tossed a bar of the soap to Caitlin while the saleswoman looked on in prim disapproval—but that was part of the fun. Betty had a way of creating a private world that others couldn’t understand. Then she had Caitlin buy some Kayser hosiery and then, finally, she somehow talked Caitlin into a Playtex makeup cape. The cape was an outsize bib; it was meant to protect your clothes while you did your face. It cost a dollar and it seemed a ridiculous waste of money to Caitlin. “But oh it’s so sheer, so chic, so terribly feminine,” Betty had said, her voice alive with laughter. She brought you close to her, made you want to discover the joke, too. “And look, a swing pocket to hold your powder puff. Now come on. I may not always be there to hold your powder puff, you know.”

  That evening, Betty drove them in her new Ford out to Maryland to see the Roadside Players perform some old play about boyfriends, a lost wallet, switched blazers. Caitlin had always felt there was something inherently solemn and meaningful in anything that deserved to be called drama and she surprised herself with her own laughter. Afterward, Betty said, “I love old plays. Not just the classics but really dumb ones you can make fun of and enjoy.”

  They drove home. The night was so hot it seemed the stars might melt and turn the sky silver. It was a long drive and the sway of the car had lulled Caitlin to sleep. When she finally woke up they were parked in front of the Zweigs’ on Peabody Street and Betty was leaning back in her seat, smoking a cigarette and looking at her.

  “How long have I been sleeping?” Caitlin had asked.

  “Awhile.”

  “You should have—” She sat up, rubbed her face. She felt unaccountably nervous.