A Big Storm Knocked It Over

by Laurie Colwin

  “You know what I mean,” Sven said.

  “I don’t,” said Jane Louise.

  “Passion,” Sven said, “is the sweater of pillage pulled inside out.” He looked enormously pleased with himself.

  Jane Louise looked at him, saying nothing.

  “You probably think it’s all about oneness and unity.”

  There was nothing Jane Louise could say to this. She did think it was all about oneness and unity.

  “It’s because women are receptacles that they feel that way,” Sven said.

  “Seen in that light, you guys are simply garbage men,” Jane Louise said. “Get out of here, okay?”

  This conversation rattled and upset Jane Louise. She felt her flesh creep in ways not entirely unpleasant. She also felt slightly sweaty, as if her clothes had suddenly grown too tight.

  She pushed some papers around on her desk. She fiddled with some type and answered a memo. She put the enormous manuscript in her canvas bag to take home. She called her husband, but he was in a meeting.

  Teddy’s office, unlike Jane Louise’s, was large and uncluttered. The laboratories were painted a greenish white. The light was intense and focused. The halls of his workplace were quiet, unlike the offices of a publishing company, in which people could be heard yelling at one another, or barking over the telephone, or laughing in front of the coffee maker. Here radiators and windowsills were stacked with manuscript boxes, dozens of yellowing memos, and jacket sketches, and C-prints were pinned to bulletin boards. Teddy’s office seemed like a monastery in which there were no extraneous words or things, although Teddy told Jane Louise that there was enough camaraderie to keep a friendly person happy. There were football pools and, during racing season, Derby pools.

  Jane Louise imagined meetings at which sober, clean-looking scientists produced and analyzed data. This was, in fact, pretty much what Teddy described. Meetings of the editorial and design department were not like that at all.

  Every now and again when some book presented design problems, Jane Louise was hauled upstairs to the editorial meeting. There Erna presided over a squadron of eccentrics: Delphine Kolodny, a nasty piece of work known to Dita as “the Flatworm.” Dita had the sweetest lunches with Delphine and then reported that Delphine took notes on everything she said. She felt that, given the chance, Delphine would sneak into her office and copy names off her Rolodex. Delphine had confided to Dita at one of their sweet little lunches that she wanted to be a “really top editor.” Dita recounted this story with considerable relish.

  Dita’s left side was always commandeered by Jeff Pottker, whom Dita had once French-kissed in a darkened office during the annual Christmas party. She revealed to Jane Louise that his wife was preoccupied with such paraphernalia of infancy as baby shit and breast-feeding, which seemed to have put a crimp in his libido. There was Omar Majors, editor emeritus, a fine-looking old man with the head of a Roman general, whose brother had once courted Dita’s mother. And Willa Gathers, who did the cookbooks, and venerable Thomas Moss, who for years and years and years—he had never had another job—had edited poetry, art books, and history. Jim Phillipi came in three days a week and worked on an unending series of war memoirs. It was rumored that he had been on the Long March with Mao, as a journalist. Jane Louise surveyed this mostly underdressed (except for Dita) crowd, many of whom felt that designers were like cleaning personnel, while they, the editorial staff, were towering intellects.

  If she looked around the table, what an amazing amount of information she had about these people, some of whom she barely knew: Bob Lodge, senior editor (known to Dita as Blodge), was having a lunchtime affair with a dopey young woman who looked like his ex-wife when young. Little Jeannie Sprout had a terrible crush on Mike Church, head of the sales department, and so on.

  At meetings and on crowded buses, Jane Louise always had the same thought: Each of these people was born with a personality and a family history and a set of unique feelings that they were truly entitled, for better or worse, to express whenever they felt like it.

  CHAPTER 11

  At dinner Teddy said: “What if we went away at Christmastime?”

  Jane Louise thought that meant to stay with Eleanor in the country.

  “I mean away,” Teddy said. “To some nice place where it’s hot.”

  “What about your mother?” Jane Louise said. “We already didn’t go there for Thanksgiving. Shouldn’t we go to either mine or yours?”

  “Eleanor’s tough,” Teddy said. “She’s feeling very liberated. All those years of struggling through Christmas. Now she’s a free woman. She jumped the gun on us and she’s going to England to stay with her old college friend Audra Llynch. She was afraid to tell us because she thought we’d be unhappy.”

  “Ain’t that something,” Jane Louise said. “Well, my mother can be heartbroken.”

  “Your mother can say she’s heartbroken, but she and Charlie can go away to someplace hot and expensive,” Teddy said. “She can have a lovely vacation and torture you at the same time.”

  “Maybe they’ll all be heartbroken,” Jane Louise said.

  “Listen,” said Teddy fiercely. “We’re all heartbroken. I’m heartbroken. Until I met you I never had a holiday I enjoyed.”

  Jane Louise gaped at him. She had never expected to hear such a naked declaration from her husband. He was eating his dinner as if he had not just said a momentous thing, but his face was grim. She stood up, took his fork away from him, and threw her arms around his neck.

  “For God’s sake, Janey,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” Jane Louise said. She sat in his lap and pressed her lips against his neck and breathed him in. She could feel his neck pulse against her cheek. Her tears slid onto his collar. She knew he hated storms of emotion, but she needed to feel him close to her. She wanted to make up for everything: for the conflicts and loneliness of his childhood, for the year and a half he had spent, an only son, in Vietnam, racked with a free-floating guilt that his mother would be left alone. She wanted to wash away his awful feelings about his father and his half-sisters. How was she going to do this?

  As she sat, with her husband in her arms and his warm breath on her neck, she felt fragile and exhausted. How am I going to keep him cheered? she wondered. How could she, a person whose life had been far from settled, make him some nice, safe place in which to rest comfortably?

  A holiday away! Jane Louise imagined herself and Teddy alone in a hotel room, lying next to each other on a hotel bed, holding hands but not speaking. She imagined herself turning to her husband and watching the cloud of sadness she so dreaded rolling over him. She imagined them skating at an ice rink. Teddy on ice was as easy and secure as a bird. It was a natural element for him. She imagined them skating arm in arm—she was a pretty good skater, too—trying to skate away from the sense that they were alone and isolated at a time when people clung together with their loved ones.

  Jane Louise expressed this vision to her husband. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Do we know people who are happy to be in the bosom of their family?”

  “Peter and Beth,” Jane Louise said.

  “Well, let’s decode Peter and Beth,” Teddy said. “Beth’s family stopped speaking to her when she married Peter because he isn’t Catholic. They only got back together when the kids were born. She hates them, actually.”

  “Why does she bother?”

  “It’s a hunger,” Teddy said. “She wants the kids to have grandparents.”

  “They have Peter senior and Laura.”

  “Those are Peter’s parents,” said Teddy. “Now let’s take Peter senior and Laura. On the one hand, it’s all very cozy, and they all live together in a small town, and Peter got such a great piece of land from his father, but Marjorie didn’t inherit a piece of land from her father, so now she takes dictation from horses. Peter’s glad he has the land, but he also has his father breathing down his neck. It’s nice in a small place. It’s also hell. It’s not like
here. Here you don’t have to be careful every minute of offending someone or hurting his feelings and having the whole thing snowball. There it’s different. When Peter started farming without chemicals, Howard Vincent and Arnold Kingshot and Jack White took it as a slap in their face since they farm with chemicals.”

  They were sitting on the striped couch. Teddy sat upright. Jane Louise slumped next to him. She wanted to crawl under his sweater.

  “Do you think we’ll ever be happy?” she said.

  Teddy looked down at her. “Aren’t you happy?” he said.

  “I mean in the cosmic sense,” she said.

  “No one is ever going to be happy in the cosmic sense,” Teddy said.

  “I mean,” said Jane Louise, “what will our life be like?”

  “Listen, Janey,” Teddy said, “our parents never had to think about what life would be like for them, and look what happened. And hundreds of holidays rolled around and we survived.”

  “I want something better,” Jane Louise said. “I want to have a child who doesn’t dread those occasions.”

  “I know what you want,” Teddy said. “Safe house, warm hearth. Communion with nature. Happy cooperation. Good vibes.”

  Jane Louise hung her head. “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m not,” Teddy said. “Those are the right things. Most people don’t even believe they’re possible anymore.”

  “I want them,” Jane Louise said. She was amazed at how passionate she sounded.

  “Then you’ll have them,” Teddy said, drawing her close. “Or some variant form of them.”

  “I don’t suppose you could help me out, could you, Janey?” Edie said. Jane Louise was in bed with the phone tucked under her chin. “Mokie’s sick as a dog, and I have another Teagarden event at the end of the week.”

  “Do I get a view of the Teagarden landscape?” Jane Louise said.

  “Complète,” Edie said. “You can see the child’s room with the alphabet stenciled around the wall, and the heirloom quilt they got on Madison Avenue, and the nanny’s room right next door, and their huge Park Avenue stately-home kitchen, and the paneling in the library from a Norman church, and the Old Masters in the hallways.”

  “And do they have a live ancestor sitting in the drawing room wearing a mobcap?”

  “The old parents are always sequestered,” Edie said. “Mrs. Teagarden hasn’t renovated them yet. They’re said to be in Palm Beach.”

  “Yum-yum,” Jane Louise said. “What’s the occasion this time?”

  “They celebrate things I’ve never heard of,” Edie said. “But this is just a simple winter party. The house decorated in pine branches. Big beeswax candles, all the silver candlesticks out. Tiny lights. Baby orchids. Like that.”

  “The piano rubbed with beeswax,” Jane Louise said.

  “Naturally they use only natural household products. The servant does the windows with vinegar,” Edie said. “Mrs. T. has planned a simple but elegant dinner of simple but elegant caviar on roast potatoes, followed by a lovely but modest pile of lobsters, followed by a large, tasteful platter of white Belgian asparagus, and for dessert she wants something she calls a Sugarplum Fairy Cake.”

  “A live ballerina pops out of it,” Jane Louise suggested.

  “White icing, lots of spun stuff, silver dragées, and tiny white sugar rosebuds.”

  “What about the fairy? Is it one of those plastic jobs?” Jane Louise said. “I guess you want me to come over and spin the sugar for you.”

  “I’m very much afraid,” Edie said, “that this will have to be done in Mrs. Teagarden’s state-of-the-art kitchen. She prefers things done ‘on-site,’ as she says.”

  Teddy said, “Who pops out of what?” when Jane Louise had hung up. He was half asleep on his side of the bed.

  “The people with the christening want Edie to do another party,” Jane Louise said. “Mokie has the flu, so I have to help. They invented something called a Sugarplum Fairy Cake with spun sugar, and Edie and I have to produce it. I said I’d help.”

  Teddy yawned and turned on his other side. “Do you really know how to spin sugar?” he said.

  “Oh, sure,” Jane Louise said. “All girls can. Edie taught me. You do it with this wooden thing that looks like a giant comb.”

  “I want to come and watch,” Teddy said. “I didn’t know I had married a woman who knew how to spin sugar.”

  “You never asked,” Jane Louise said.

  “These people have a lot of parties,” Teddy said sleepily.

  “These people have a lot of money,” Jane Louise said. “Maybe we should give a lot of parties. It feels just like family life, but everyone goes home afterwards.”

  “Are you all right?” Teddy said.

  Jane Louise thought for a moment. “I want a great big family that has been in the same place for centuries and has never moved. I want dozens of cousins and millions of relatives.”

  “Really?” said Teddy.

  “Not really,” Jane Louise said. “I can hardly stand the ones I have. I often feel horrible that I love Edie better than I love my sister.”

  “Edie is a hundred times nicer,” said Teddy.

  The next evening Jane Louise stood in Edie’s kitchen listening to Mokie sneezing in the bedroom. Mokie and Edie lived in a loft that was almost totally utilitarian, except for a wall on which was hung Edie’s collection of hats (which Jane Louise thought looked very much like Edie’s cakes) and a large shelf for Mokie’s collection of salt and pepper shakers, all in the shape of black cooks, some smiling, some frowning, and some with mottoes written in fake gold paint, such as, GIT IN THE KITCHEN, BOY! YAS! YAS! Everything else had its proper storage bin, drawer, or closet.

  “But what about the fairy?” Jane Louise said. “I thought about it all day.”

  Edie said, “Mrs. Teagarden wonders if we can find a small, bisque doll. Money is no object. She is, however, open to suggestions.”

  “I’ll make one,” Jane Louise said. “I’ll make one out of cardboard, doilies, and those reproduction Victorian cupids.”

  “Do you think that would work?” Edie said. “I think she wants this to cost a lot.”

  “Tell her it will cost two thousand dollars, and give the money to me and Janey,” said Mokie, ambling into the kitchen. He was wearing wrinkled blue pajamas and his horn-rimmed glasses.

  Mokie was beautiful, with a beautifully round head. Together he and Edie looked like a negative and positive of the same person. Their elegant, bony wrists shot out of anything they wore—everything was too short on them. Mokie was languid. Edie was jumpy. She was wearing a blue shirt and slacks, and a pair of dark red shoes, highly polished. Her feet were long and skinny.

  Jane Louise never tired of watching them. They were like a pair of giraffes, graceful and ungainly at the same time. Edie’s voice was low and calm, while Mokie, who was not as easily flapped, squeaked when he was rattled.

  “Is this more Teagarden horse manure?” he said. “Oh, these people. I’ve had Mrs. Teagarden on my case all morning. She wants something called Sandpine for her greens. I told her it grows only in Florida, and she said, ‘Don’t you have people there?’ I thought she meant darkie relatives, but I guess she meant a branch office.”

  “Maybe we should do institutional catering in a prison,” Edie said. “These people are beginning to get to me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mokie said. “We’ve got a book full of charities to make you feel better. Next week, indigent families, then unadoptable orphans, then rare heart disease, and after the New Year we have all sorts of good stuff: tennis for disadvantaged youth, the penniless or soon-to-be-penniless film archive, and poor struggling writers and poets.”

  “Great,” Edie said. “We can give them that dinner of rice water and gruel we’ve been working on.” She ran her hand through her hair. “I’m sick of working for rich people,” she said.

  “We all are,” said Mokie. “But they’re the only ones who have any money.”


  They sat around the table drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits and watching used tissues pile up next to Mokie. His eyes teared, and he looked forlorn. His sneeze was amazingly loud.

  “The thing about men is, who told them they were allowed to sneeze like that?” Jane Louise said.

  “My mother loved my sneezing,” Mokie said, sniffing.

  “Women are taught to repress sneezing,” Edie said.

  “It’s symbolic,” Jane Louise said.

  “I thought we were talking about rich people,” Mokie said.

  “They aren’t our only clients,” Edie said. “We do for nice people, too.”

  “Not nice enough,” Mokie said. “Nice people don’t have caterers. I’m going to go to divinity school and become a preacher like my old man.”

  Edie looked at him, her brow furrowed. There were times when it must have occurred to her how unalike she and Mokie were. And yet he was the son of a distinguished preacher who had been influential in the civil rights movement. In his family, like Edie’s, achievement was everything. Just as Edie had been groomed to take her place in society, so had Mokie, and they had both met as renegades in Paris, making candy roses and spun sugar and learning restaurant management, the last thing either the Fraziers or the Steinhauses had in mind for their offspring. Their essential life was a secret: their relationship, their line of work. When they finally broke down and got married, would they hide their little mulatto offspring, too?

  “Teddy wants to go away for Christmas,” Jane Louise said. “All of us.”

  Edie had been doodling on her notepad. Her head shot up. “Won’t we feel horrible that we weren’t en famille?” she said.

  “We’re old enough to have our own holidays,” Mokie said. “I like them better that way. But don’t we have some parties to cater?”

  “We only have the ghastly Teagardens. They’re paying us a fortune. We have a few wedding cakes, and then nothing till after the first. After all, we deserve some time off, too.”

  “Where are we going?” Mokie said. “Are we going?”