A Big Storm Knocked It Over

by Laurie Colwin

  “I have Edie’s car,” Jane Louise said. “I can give you a lift.”

  Teddy shook the water out of his hair and smiled at her. “That would be nice,” he said. “I came by bus and my old friend Peter Peering—he’s the organic farmer on Rexhill Road—picked me up.”

  They walked slowly from the lake to his mother’s house, and he invited her in. She went, but something told her not to stay too long. Upstairs in the guest bedroom was a big bed with a carved headboard: a basket of fruit and flowers and two fat little cherubs.

  “What a beautiful bed!” Jane Louise said and shut her eyes against a vision of her and Teddy in it.

  “It belonged to my grandmother,” said Teddy.

  “I’ll call you Sunday morning,” said Jane Louise.

  But the next day some profound restlessness overtook her. Her heart was racing. The air was suddenly thick. The sun turned silvery and menacing. She could not contain herself. She walked right over to Teddy’s house. She knew that Teddy’s mother was in England, and she did not care if Teddy misinterpreted her. She felt propelled. He was standing at the door as if he had been waiting for her. Neither of them smiled. From their faces it might have been thought that they were embarking on some dire enterprise.

  He took her hand and led her up the stairs. The window was blocked by a rose of Sharon tree that made the sunlight come in speckled. In that bed she and Teddy were as speckled as leopards. They connected with a kind of ferocious thirst and stared at each other in rapture. They could scarcely catch their breath, and they stayed in bed all afternoon as clouds moved across the sky and the sky darkened and it began to rain. They told each other everything, and Jane Louise listened carefully because she knew somehow that this was the only time she would hear these things.

  Now he was her husband, and she sat next to him in his mother’s car on the way up to Marshallsville. This car was a relic, an old British Rover kept immaculately by Eleanor, who was in other matters an indifferent housekeeper. Because of her lack of interest in what she called the girlish sides of things, her curtains needed cleaning and the sink was far from bright, but she rubbed her furniture with beeswax and kept her shoes in perfect condition with neat’s-foot oil, which had also preserved the car’s leather seats. This car had been made in the time before bucket seats, and therefore a person could sit quite close to the driver. Jane Louise slipped her hand under Teddy’s thigh. Her hands were always cold, and she had gotten into the habit of using his leg as a warmer.

  Her husband squinted into the twilight. The leaves had turned. Everywhere Jane Louise looked the road was carpeted in gold and red, and the wind shook the leaves against the windshield. Eleanor was never profligate with heat, so Jane Louise had packed a winter nightgown, and since there was never much in the way of food, she had provisioned herself and Teddy a large basket, which included coffee for her and decent tea for Teddy.

  Since it was a posthoneymoon weekend, she had splurged and bought French butter, goat cheese, and a very expensive steak because Teddy had invited Peter and his wife, Beth, for dinner.

  Peter and Beth were everything Jane Louise and Teddy were not, at least in Jane Louise’s opinion. Peter had grown up in Marshallsville, gone away to college, and then gone to Africa to study sustainable agriculture. When he came home his father gave him a hundred acres, and he had started his organic farm. He had met Beth in Africa, where she was doing fieldwork, and they had married and produced three daughters in a row: Laura, Harriet (known as Birdie), and Geneva. Beth baked cakes and made jam. She was on the board of the child development center and was the head of the Parent Teacher Association. She took her girls to the farmers’ fair, where they regularly won the prize for the best pumpkin or the nicest calf.

  When Jane Louise looked at Beth and Peter, she saw stability, fidelity, people to whom lewd or unseemly or seditious thoughts were unknown. She did not imagine that Beth had had time to have much of a checkered past before she married Peter—after all, she had been only twenty-four—whereas Jane Louise had been in love quite unsuccessfully a number of times and had done any number of stupid things in the name of romance. She often wondered if Teddy would have been happier with a less blemished person, and she often asked him. His look told her that her question was totally moronic to him, and also that he was puzzled. Why would you marry someone if you didn’t mean to?

  For a relatively cheerful person, Jane Louise’s need for reassurance was quite intense. For a man who seemed on amiable terms with life itself, Teddy seemed quite unwilling to give it, as if it were something fluffy and unnecessary, like a flounce on a skirt or painted decorations on a car.

  In Jane Louise’s experience life was a series of scrambles—to make friends in a new school, to get comfortable in a new town, to scrape together the money to take a trip. She had the deep optimism of a scrapper, but she felt she needed to be told quite often that the roof was not going to cave in.

  Whereas Teddy, who seemed so able to get through the things of life without scrapping, could not be turned to for reassurance that everything was going to be all right because, in his experience, it often hadn’t been.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was cold when they got there. On the hall table was a long note in Eleanor’s precise, prep-school hand to remind them to spray for whitefly in the glasshouse with the organic compound in the old mayonnaise jar and to cut back the last of the mums.

  The house was chilly and damp and exuded a smell of must, beeswax polish, and lavender wax that Jane Louise found irresistible: It almost brought her to her knees.

  It was Eleanor’s intention that when she got too old to cope with stairs, she was going to build herself a trim little one-person cabin and turn her house over to Teddy and Jane Louise. She had bought four acres on Cabbage Hill Road overlooking the swamp where, every summer, a great blue heron came to nest.

  Jane Louise could not remember living in a dwelling owned by her and her family. They were renters. When she was a baby, her parents had rented a summer house and had then stayed on, year-round, for years. When they moved to Boston, they had lived in a rented apartment, and when they made their last move to a suburb of New York, they had rented a large garden apartment. The idea that Eleanor’s house would someday be hers filled her with a mire of emotions. She did not want to inherit this house because she longed for something that could truly be her own. On the other hand, she loved Eleanor’s house, every single board of it.

  It was a white clapboard house set by John Crampton’s apple orchard. It had a large, sunny kitchen with a big harvest table and a wood stove that was used only when Teddy and Jane Louise visited. Eleanor was as indifferent to food as she was to the cold, and in her pantry were dozens of dusty, unidentifiable jars of this or that, the castoffs of her occasional attempts to produce something interesting for a dinner party. At Eleanor’s table Jane Louise had encountered a kind of food she had never seen in her life. Lilly, her own mother, was lavish. Even when money was tight and the car was barely functioning, she produced standing ribs, smoked salmon, and filet mignon. Eleanor offered starker fare: roasts of a kind Jane Louise was unfamiliar with, which were tough and required intensive chewing. Frozen vegetables, watery potatoes.

  Her living room was plain and comfortable. The tapestry on the wing chair was frayed, and the old Persian rugs were worn. The mullioned windows looked down a grassy slope to a stone wall. On the other side were the apple trees. If you woke up early enough in the morning, you might see deer grazing on the windfalls.

  Teddy and Jane Louise slept in the ornamental bed in the guest room. His boyhood room had been turned into Eleanor’s study. On a shelf above her desk she kept the things he had brought home to her from Vietnam—he had been drafted and served for eighteen months—a little bamboo cricket cage, a brass Montag-nard bracelet, a bolt of woven fabric, a basket. Her own bedroom had nothing in it of a personal nature except for garden catalogs, but the bedroom window overlooked her one great extravagance: a greenhouse, which she
called a glasshouse. It had been put together by Teddy, Eleanor, and Peter Peering from a kit. On Sunday mornings Eleanor liked to read her newspaper and listen to music in it. On the coldest day, it was warm. In this space she set her cold frames, her orchids, her miniature roses.

  When Jane Louise went upstairs she saw that Teddy had brought up the bags and also that he had turned down the bedcovers. Teddy was not generally expressive, and when he was, Jane Louise felt like a person in a fairy tale whose heart had been pierced by a rose thorn.

  In this house her husband assumed a posture she did not normally see. This was his house, his history. The intimacy of the occasion struck Jane Louise. She did not know this house, did not know where to find the extra string or the clothesline. It was not second nature to her. Teddy was the rightful inhabitant: She was still the guest, no matter how many wonderful meals she had prepared in its kitchen.

  Downstairs Teddy was putting things to rights. He had turned up the thermostat to heat the living room and had lit a fire in the wood stove. When she got to the kitchen, he was filling the kettle.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Teddy said. “Then we can come back and have tea.” This was also his custom. He liked to get out into the air and take possession of the landscape. Jane Louise also believed that in some way he needed distance from the house in order to get back to it.

  They pulled on their sweaters and walked out.

  The sun was just going down, and the light was beginning to turn a faint lavender. Small yellow leaves blew off the trees and scattered at their feet. Brilliant red maple leaves as large as demitasse saucers floated down onto the road. It was suddenly cold: You could see your breath. Jane Louise huddled next to Teddy. They walked arm in arm, and their long strides matched.

  By the time they had walked halfway down the road, it was almost dark. They could hear the purring of screech owls, who let you get very near and then vanished.

  Coming toward them they could see Eleanor’s neighbor, Dr. Harting, who was elderly and walked with a stick.

  “Hello!” he called out. “Mr. and Mrs. Parker!” He said this with genuine delight, and when he got near he took Jane Louise’s hand in his.

  “How very nice!” he said. “Eleanor told us all about your lovely wedding. Mrs. Harting sent me down to you with this.” He held out a jar with a gingham-wrapped top. “It’s her own special paradise jelly,” he said. “Apple, quince, and cranberry. You can have it on your toast for breakfast.” He coughed slightly as if the idea of Teddy and Jane Louise waking up together and having breakfast embarrassed him.

  “How is your arthritis?” asked Teddy.

  “Oh, it hobbles me,” Dr. Harting said. “There’s some young doctor up in Threadford who uses bee stings and says it works, and some other fellow over at that Vision of the Immortal—what’s the name of that place over in Bryanston, Teddy?”

  “I never get it right,” Teddy said. “Do you remember, Janey? We passed it last summer.”

  “Fellowship of Possibility,” said Jane Louise.

  “She’s my memory,” said Teddy fondly.

  “Well, there’s a fellow there who cures it with acupuncture, and I’m going to give it a try. Mrs. Harting and I were in China three years ago and were very impressed by the acupuncture clinic. Well, I’m off. Got to do my two-mile constitutional.”

  “Please thank Mrs. Harting for the jelly,” said Jane Louise. How like a foreign language these conversations were, she thought. Proper and formal, and all sentences well constructed and in the right place. In thirty years would Teddy refer to her as “Mrs. Parker” instead of “my wife”?

  They walked home in the dark. The air was cold enough to cut through Jane Louise’s sweater. The lights from the house looked warm and yellow, a beacon for a lonely traveler. She clung to Teddy under an old maple tree that year after year was deformed by lightning strikes but year after year put out leaves. These leaves drifted down now, grazing their heads. She wanted everything to be all right, to make everything all right, to be Teddy’s happy memory.

  He was her husband now, for better and worse. Better was his level, lighthearted side—Teddy was a fixer. He could fix the jammed lock on your hall door, or a sticking window. He could get underneath your car and do minor repairs. He could put together a greenhouse from a kit and help if you could not follow the directions that came with the answering machine. He could read the stars in the sky or tell you what bird you were hearing. As a boy he could have walked out into the woods and then told you what the weather would be for the next three days.

  He knew how to camp out, to travel with a knapsack, to talk to foreigners who needed help in a city. If you took his hand you felt secure in a forest or a bad neighborhood. He did not really want to know, but because he had been in a war he knew about weapons. In Vietnam he had had a civet cat for a pet before his Montagnard guides had eaten it. He could take wonderful photographs. Beth Peering often said that if it were not for Teddy, she would have no decent photos of her girls. One of Jane Louise’s treasured possessions was a picture he had taken of herself and Birdie at the lake, both wearing hats and black T-shirts, looking up from their sketchbooks and smiling. It was that photo that made Jane Louise know how much Teddy loved her and how deep into his life she had gotten.

  For, despite his equitable spirits, his belief that things in the world could be fixed, his ability to deal with life as if life were some sort of trainable dog, there was a seam of despair in him that was thin but deep. Jane Louise abided with this, and when he fell into its crack, he was remote as stone, friendly but distant. He even turned his public face to her, which broke her heart when it happened. It had taken her months to realize that he was not approachable in this condition. It covered him like fog, and he gritted his teeth until it went away. Jane Louise could pet him and stroke him. He kissed her abstractly in a way that told her that she was no help. He had gone through these moments since he was a child, when they had been much, much worse.

  Jane Louise had first seen him fall silent after a conversation on the telephone with his father, who had wanted him to do something or other for Martine’s brother. She had tried to find out what had transpired. It was made clear to her that she was not going to find out. Teddy’s desolation had on it a keen edge of anger, flashy as a newly sharpened blade. She had felt her heart shrink in fear—fear of the person she loved best in the world.

  Now as they walked home in the dark she knew she would never know what he was thinking. They had met too late in life to be each other’s perfect other, but she felt toward him a kind of teen passion as well as a kind of grown-up gratitude. It didn’t matter if she would never quite know what was on his mind: He was hers.

  She felt she had stepped into his life, something new and alien, like a modern chair brought into a room full of family furniture. The fact that she loved him, that he had chosen her, did not bridge this river of differences. Why had he not married some nice girl from nearby? Or an upright girl like Beth Peering who had been brought up in a small New England town, with a father who was a professor of agriculture and a mother who raised children and made pickles? Teddy had married a Jewess, a nomad, a woman with a checkered romantic history. She gave a shiver.

  “Are you all right?” Teddy said.

  “I always think you should have married someone from here,” Jane Louise said.

  “I didn’t want to marry someone from here,” Teddy said. “I wanted to marry you.”

  “I’m freezing,” Jane Louise said as they opened the door. Teddy stoked up the wood stove.

  “I meant my heart was freezing,” Jane Louise said. Teddy gave her a look of puzzlement and pain, a look that said: What do women want? He took her in his arms.

  “Do you think I married you for some funny reason?” he said.

  “I think you married me for complicated reasons.”

  “Everyone marries someone else for complicated reasons,” Teddy said.

  “Not Beth and Peter,” Jane Louise said into
his shirtfront.

  “Beth and Peter just look uncomplicated,” Teddy said. “They don’t think in complicated terms.”

  “They have perfect lives.”

  “Birdie has a learning disorder,” Teddy said. “She isn’t reading. They’re very worried about her.”

  Teddy was Birdie’s godfather. He singled her out and for years had taken her to the county fair while the other two girls went with their parents. He was sensitive to her being the underdog and the middle child. Her sisters were traditional child beauties, with blond hair and blue eyes, whereas Birdie was brown eyed and brown haired, serious and undervalued: a problem.

  Jane Louise loved Birdie, too. She took her off alone whenever she could. Birdie gave her hope, connection. When she took Birdie to the beach, the feel of that skinny hand in hers made her heart expand.

  One afternoon last summer, Edie and Jane Louise had taught Birdie how to make sugar roses—they were decorating a cake for Mokie’s birthday.

  “Did I do it right?” Birdie had asked Jane Louise. She had produced a slightly lopsided but very nice-looking rose.

  Jane Louise had said: “It’s perfect. Oh, Birdie, someday I would like to have a little girl just like you.”

  “Like me?” said Birdie in total disbelief.

  “Just exactly like you,” Jane Louise said.

  When she and Teddy took Birdie to the county fair, the summer before they got married, Birdie took both their hands and skipped between them. It was clear that Teddy was longing for a child of his own. They both knew it: It was only a question of time.

  CHAPTER 6

  Because she had been brought up by her mother, that fiend of etiquette, Jane Louise was highly attuned to social nuance. So, for example, the meal she served to Peter and Beth must not be too fancy but it must not be unfancy. A meal too fancy might be something of an affront—the city person showing off—while a dowdy meal might be an affront as well, the expectation being that if you came up from the city you ought to bring a few nice things to amuse your country friends. Jane Louise grilled a steak and made a chocolate soufflé.