A Big Storm Knocked It Over

by Laurie Colwin

  “I mean nice people,” Erna said.

  “Nuns are often extremely nice people,” Sven said.

  “How do you know that?” Jane Louise said.

  Sven gave her a look.

  “Now, children,” Erna said. “Let’s get serious. We have a very big book here, and it has to be produced just right. Hugh Oswald-Murphy has turned in his masterpiece.”

  “Author of Polar Weekend,” Sven said to Jane Louise. “It was published before you got here.”

  “It was called Eskimo Faces,” said Erna. “I wish you would behave, Sven.”

  “Eskimo Love Nest was the sequel,” Sven said.

  Erna turned to Jane Louise. “He’s an anthropologist and explorer with a towering literary style. You should read Eskimo Faces, Jane. It’s one of the great books.”

  “It had everything about Eskimo nookie,” Sven said.

  Erna flushed and turned to Sven. “You’re like a little boy!” she said. You could tell she wanted either to slap or kiss him. “It’s got to be plain but handsome, if you see what I mean.”

  “Like the author, no doubt,” said Sven, stretching and yawning. “Any photos? Line drawings? Poems in Eskimo? Drawings in the text?”

  “Nothing,” Erna said. “But it has to look majestic.”

  “Janey, call that guy who does the gold leaf. We could probably get a list price of about six thou per copy.”

  “Enough, Sven,” Erna said. “I would like a top stain and a full cloth cover.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Sven said, yawning again.

  “And Jane, I’d like a beautiful typeface. Devinne or maybe Bembo.”

  “We can’t get them,” said Jane Louise. “I can get you Garamond or Caslon.” She doodled on her pad. Erna was a fountain of little-used or almost extinct typefaces. Jane Louise believed that Erna spent her nights browsing through old type spec books, and Jane Louise was not entirely wrong.

  “Oh, these beautiful old fonts,” Erna said. “What a tragedy.”

  “It’s nothing compared to teen pregnancy and wife beating,” Sven said. “I’m sure Janey can get you Bembo for display type.”

  A few minutes later Erna withdrew to the editorial floor, leaving Jane Louise with an enormous, untidy manuscript.

  “I wonder if old Alfred slaps her around,” Sven said. “Jesus, it’s like having a whole stable of nervous horses in here. I wish she’d shut up about type. It just goes to show that girls are ruined by reading. Even her nasty children have opinions on these subjects. She told me that her oldest had a fondness for Baskerville.”

  “All fourteen-year-olds do,” said Jane Louise.

  Sven gave her a look almost of longing. “That’s my girl,” Sven said to her. “These women with important parents. Her father was some big judge. It makes them overheated, like your little friend Edie.”

  “Edie is taller than you are,” Jane Louise said. “I never should have introduced you two.”

  “Is she married to that spade or do they just live together?”

  “He’s her business partner,” Jane Louise said primly.

  “Yes, and I am a Chinese emperor. Does she feel her distinguished father would have a stroke if he thought his white-fleshed daughter was in bed with a darkie?”

  “We feel he’d have a stork,” Jane Louise said. “Now I’m taking this untidy manuscript into my cave.”

  “They do it under bearskins,” Sven said. “They all sleep together in their little snow houses. Then it all heats up. The walls melt a little and then turn into ice.”

  “Edie and Mokie?” Jane Louise said. “Actually, they have a nice loft near the river, and Edie is allergic to fur.”

  “Eskimos,” Sven said. “They swap wives.”

  “Gosh,” Jane Louise said. “Maybe they’ll let you join.”

  At her desk there were four messages: two from Edie, one from Teddy, and one from her mother. Jane Louise knew what they were about. She looked out the window. The sky had gotten dark, and the temperature was dropping. In a few weeks it would be Thanksgiving.

  Soon the holidays would be upon them like an oncoming train, loaded with complicated feelings. These days Jane Louise felt like one of those floating specks Erna gathered around her festive tables—those waifs and strays she cheerfully collected. Jane Louise’s mother produced an elaborate Thanksgiving that included a large number of Charlie Platt’s relatives and children and grandchildren. Lilly adored them all and looked almost sadly at her solitary daughter. Jane Louise’s sister, Nora, rarely made an appearance with her two perfect sons and her very rich husband, Jaime Benitez-Cohen. They traveled first-class and stayed at an expensive inn. Or else they stayed in San Francisco and entertained Jaime’s enormous family.

  As for Teddy, these holidays made him feel like an underdressed child standing on a dark road. His childhood had been the scene of holiday battles—who got him for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. As a very little boy he dreaded to leave his mother. As an older boy he dreaded both his mother and his father. How lovely it would have been to live in a society with no holidays whatsoever! There was not enough of him to go around. He longed to get sick before an occasion so he would not have to do a thing except lie in bed.

  His father’s wife—he could not bring himself to say “stepmother”—was unlike Eleanor in every way. When Martine sat you could see the lace of her slips, and in the morning she came to breakfast wearing a bright quilted robe with bows. She and Teddy’s father lived clear across the state, and it had been easy enough to ferry Teddy from one place to another. But as Martine produced her three daughters, Lisbeth, Moira, and Daphne, Teddy became less necessary, although he was still picked up from Eleanor’s and brought home again. But the visits diminished. “With all those children, it’s too much for Martine,” Eleanor said. And while Teddy had been relieved, he had also been hurt in his secret heart. How easy it must be for his father not to love him!

  Jane Louise sighed. Eleanor had Thanksgiving with the Peerings. Edie and Mokie often catered for others, which was Edie’s way of avoiding her family. This year Jane Louise had decided to protect herself and Teddy and do Thanksgiving on her own. After all, it was their first year of married life. She was going to ask Eleanor and the Peerings, and Edie and Mokie, and her mother and Charlie, who would say no. Teddy would ask his British colleague, and they would invite their landlady, Mrs. Berger, whose children lived in Israel.

  She did not anticipate the outcry this decision would cause.

  “Oh, dear,” Eleanor said. “The Peerings have been planning this for months.”

  “Couldn’t they come to us just this one year?” Jane Louise asked. “Beth could bring her pies, and Mrs. Peering could bring her sweet potatoes.”

  “Well, I just don’t know,” Eleanor said. “It would be so much easier if you came here. There are eight of us and only two of you.”

  It was not much better with Jane Louise’s mother.

  “It’s totally impossible,” Lilly said. “It’s been planned for weeks. I have the guest cards and the menus, and Charlie’s nice friends from Palm Springs are coming, and we were sure you and Teddy were coming, too. We were counting on it.”

  “We thought if we did it ourselves we could have both mothers-in-law at the same time.”

  “I’ve already written to Eleanor,” said Lilly, who was nothing if not correct. “I know she likes to stay up in the country, but we hoped this first year of your being married she’d come to us.”

  “Supposing she wanted you to come to her?” Jane Louise said.

  “There’s only one of her,” Lilly said. “I’m afraid there are tons of us. It just won’t work. But I’m counting on you and Teddy.”

  “The problem is,” Jane Louise said, “Eleanor is counting on us, too.”

  “Well, darling,” said Lilly. “You’ll have to work it out the best way you can.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Dita appeared in the office three days before Thanksgiving with her arm in
a sling fashioned out of a large, expensive silk scarf. Jane Louise found her on the editorial floor just about to try to pour herself a cup of coffee from the communal coffeepot.

  “This fucking arm,” Dita said.

  Jane Louise poured Dita’s coffee for her and carried it to her office.

  “I sprained my wrist,” Dita said. “Sliding down some ridiculous glacier made of pebbles. I had to be taken to the doctor by canoe. Thank you for bringing my coffee in.”

  Dita’s hair shone under the lamp. She was wearing a black skirt, a white silk blouse, and a pair of suede shoes. Her cigarette box was open on her desk, and next to it was a little gold lighter and a big black fountain pen.

  “You better scoot,” she said, as if to a child. “I’ve got Jacob Elitzer coming in with the copyedited manuscript of his translation. Do you know if Sven has anything back on that? It’s called End of the World: Three Latin American Poets.”

  “I’ll just check it out,” Jane Louise said.

  “And close the door behind you,” said Dita.

  “Dita,” said Jane Louise. “What’s going on with you?”

  Dita looked up. She seemed for an instant like a cornered cat. Then she smoothed out her features—Jane Louise had seen her do this a thousand times after a crying jag or rant—and assumed the posture of a harried worker.

  “Darling, I’m half crippled and I just got back!” she said. “I’ve got a pile of stuff on this desk that would choke a horse.”

  “I don’t mean now,” Jane Louise said. “I mean—”

  “Kiddo,” said Dita. “Scoot out. I can’t have this sort of conversation on my first day back. Nothing at all is wrong.”

  Jane Louise felt a great number of things were wrong. They had once had a standing Tuesday lunch date: “First my analyst, then you,” Dita had said at the last one.

  Those days were over now. Whatever had happened to Dita was not going to be shared with Jane Louise. Dita existed to prove that people were never knowable: It was a hard lesson—the hardest lesson in life.

  Jane Louise counted on friendship with women. Without Edie she felt she could barely live, and she had considered Dita a very close friend. But then Dita did not have close friends, it seemed.

  She was also slightly suspect at the office. For instance, Erna, who had been two years ahead of her at college, did not approve of her. Erna did not approve of divorce, or short skirts, or female editors having lunch with their male authors and then coming back at four in the afternoon looking haggard.

  Erna did not approve of Dita’s Nick, who had been her classmate. He was restless and easily bored. When bored he spoke in Russian or made rude noises. He was a dicey prospect at a party, since you never knew whom he might be awful to. Sven said he was Dita’s front man and running dog—the pit bull she set on the others she was far too mannerly to be snooty to.

  To someone like Erna, Dita was an affront. Intellectuals ought not to read fashion magazines and have exotic hair treatments at lunchtime. While it was perfectly all right for a bluestocking to wear perfume and lacy slips, it was not all right to show any amount of thigh or laugh in a dirty way. Furthermore, delicate-looking ladies ought not, when they blew their noses, to sound like foghorns. Erna believed that most women had a mandate to stay home and take care of their children—they had a mandate to reproduce, she felt—but those with a Higher Calling ought to find maternal and loving child care and take a four-day week.

  Around holiday time the office was invaded by little Hendershotts, who trooped in wearing school uniforms or pinafores: Simon, Eva, Ben, and Winnie, the baby, who, left to wander, wandered into Dita’s office and came out smelling of Dita’s perfume and bearing a large chocolate truffle in her hand. Dita’s method with children veered from the cavalier to the seductive. She felt, she told Jane Louise, that children were fooling you. “Behind those child eyes, they know all,” she said. “If Erna’s baby isn’t allowed chocolate she should have told me. It’s clear those children are totally deprived. Why, that poor child looked as if she’d never seen a truffle before.”

  Jane Louise, who did not expect children to be wild, found the Hendershott children remarkably well behaved. She said as much to Sven.

  “That’s because they aren’t real children,” Sven said. “They’re props. She got them at that theatrical rental place around the corner. Also, their father is an android. Although that little Eva is going to be quite a honey in a few years.”

  “For crying out loud, Sven!” said Jane Louise, who always hoped that in Sven’s case, children were exempt. She had seen him run a meandering gaze over his own beautiful daughter, Anik, but she also knew that Sven was much too interested in his sense of cool to contemplate anything as tacky as incest.

  “I said ‘in a few years,’” said Sven. “I’m a democrat, little Janey. I like ’em young. I like ’em old. I like ’em in between. Remember Mrs. Leigh Bracken-Rodgers?”

  Jane Louise remembered very well. A small, well-made woman with white hair and beautiful cheekbones who was a curator and had done a book on miniature chairs. She was close to seventy. This had not stood in Sven’s way, although whether or not he had been successful in his pursuit was not known.

  Jane Louise came downstairs to her office feeling bereft. Was it the looming holiday, which, after all, had a terrible underground effect on Teddy? Or was it because it was plain and clear that she had been dumped by Dita, who had so vigorously and ardently taken her up? In public Dita was as perfect as a new white shoe, whereas Jane Louise alone knew that Dita had been unable to resist a young playwright named Joe Ching, whose play, Harvest of the Forlorn, she was publishing as part of the New Theater Series. This person, half Chinese, half Irish, seemed eager to run away with Dita. Dita treated him as you might treat a small dog, although she said he was as silky as a seal without his clothes on.

  She had described to Jane Louise her first marriage, not a success in any way. She told the long story of being carried out of her fancy apartment one afternoon by Nick and taken to his grungy flat, where the two of them had holed up for several days, causing her second husband to divorce her and her mother to be outraged. She had been on the verge of confessing something or other about Sven. This, Jane Louise imagined, was part of the reason that Dita no longer dialed her extension, dragged her out for lunch, had girls’ dinners with her when Nick was away and Teddy worked late. And then, not to acknowledge that anything had changed! Jane Louise looked into Dita’s beautiful bony face for some acknowledgment of anything and found a beautiful bony face, as closed and unrevealing as a closed door. She knew in her heart of hearts that Dita never looked back. She had left her first husband without the slightest trace of remorse or regret: It had been a mistake on both parts, and the cleaner one cut one’s losses, the better. This face said: I don’t want to have any idea what you are talking about.

  In her own office Jane Louise closed the door and realized that she was in a rage. She wanted to throw things against the wall. She wanted to take Dita by the shoulders and shake her until she said something, anything. Instead she called Edie.

  “I hate her,” she said into the telephone.

  “There, there,” Edie said. “She’s not a normal person.”

  “It’s so unfair. It’s so out-to-lunch.”

  “It may be that people who get married a lot aren’t very steady,” Edie said.

  “What about people who have a lot of boyfriends?” said Jane Louise.

  “That’s different,” Edie said.

  “How?”

  “Boyfriends are part of the evolutionary process,” Edie said. “You and I don’t trust people who marry their high school sweethearts, do we?”

  “We envy but don’t trust them,” Jane Louise said.

  “The point is you didn’t marry anyone except Teddy. You think marriage is serious. People who get married a lot don’t, like Sven.”

  “Sven is more faithful to his poker buddies. He says that Dita has three friends from childhood
and the rest of us recent acquisitions don’t matter.”

  “You poor duck,” Edie said. “The problem with Dita is she’s fast. I don’t trust people who take other people up so quickly. As Mokie’s mother used to say, ‘There’ll be tears.’”

  “I love Mokie’s mother,” Jane Louise said. Mokie’s mother was a black Scotswoman, a native of Glasgow who was quite a curiosity in South Carolina.

  “I’m very angry,” Jane Louise said.

  “Well, go say something to her,” Edie said.

  “What am I supposed to say? ‘You dropped me! You did a kind of friendship seduction on me and then split!’? I know her. She’ll give me that look and make me think I’m crazy.”

  “Tell her to go fuck herself,” Edie said.

  “I’ll never be given the opportunity,” Jane Louise said.

  CHAPTER 9

  It turned out that no one went anywhere for Thanksgiving. Eleanor stayed home and had dinner with the Peerings. Lilly stayed home and had dinner with Charlie and their innumerable friends. Teddy and Jane Louise stayed home and had Thanksgiving with Edie and Mokie and Mrs. Berger from downstairs. Mrs. Berger owned the building and lived on the first floor. Teddy and Jane Louise lived on the parlor floor. Above them were the young Calzones (the older Calzones lived down the street) and on top, Frank and Ross, a team of interior designers whose attic flat was done in green and white.

  Jane Louise cooked a small turkey, sweet potatoes, chestnuts and onions, and a green salad. Mokie made a mince pie, and Edie baked a pumpkin cake in the shape of a pumpkin, glazed in orange icing with a chocolate stem and marzipan vine leaves.

  Over dinner the subject of multiracial children reared its head. Mrs. Berger said that her late husband, Mr. Berger, had been very much against this sort of thing, but she, Vesna Berger, was not. She began, after dinner, on the subject of her late husband.

  “You know,” she said, “I went to the bookstore the other day, and there was a whole shelf of widow books. Widow this, widow that.” She paused for a tiny bite of pie. “Now, my late husband, Mr. Berger, was a very charming man and very well organized. He bought this house so cheap! On the other hand, he was so very annoying. I looked in these widow books and there was not one word about a husband’s being annoying. For example, I could never buy the Sunday paper on Saturday night because the sports page had to be the last possible edition. And then social life! He didn’t like this one or he didn’t like that one. He would never have rented to the boys in the attic because he disapproved of men living together.”