by Nora Carroll
“I remember once he took her to a party at the Loeb estate, and then he just left her there. She did not even know where he had gone. She had to get Dickie Loeb to get one of the servants to drive her back. I used to tell my mother that there were stories about Chapin . . . He drank . . . Some say he gambled . . . He was . . . ” Mamie stopped speaking again. Something about him, she was having a hard time putting into words.
“He had the swankiest car at the Club. I just thought he wanted the prettiest girl to go with it . . . Like a Rolex watch or something . . . Like something to wear. But then again, Lila had no sense. She just did not think straight sometimes. People at the Club were starting to say . . . ”
Jess closed her eyes for a few seconds, trying to concentrate on Mamie’s words, to follow them. She opened her eyes, then laid her head down on her arm.
“Jess, now is not the time. You need to rest. I can see that you’re exhausted.”
“No,” Jess said, sitting up again. “You have to tell me now. I can’t wait another minute.”
Mamie hesitated, opened her mouth as if to protest but then thought better of it. She picked up two sugar cubes and dropped them into her teacup, making a thin pinging sound as she stirred with her silver teaspoon.
“People were jealous of her, so pretty and being courted by the heir to the Flagg fortune. Still, I was worried that people might believe . . . ”
Mamie looked straight at Jess, studying her face. She seemed to be wondering whether her granddaughter was able to understand her, as though speaking about the past was like conversing in a foreign language—a language that Jess might not understand.
Jess turned her head and looked out the window; light was playing in the gently moving leaves of the old maple behind the kitchen. She could see that the tips of the leaves were already tinged with yellow and orange. Fall came so early up there in the North.
“Might believe . . . ?” Jess had no idea what Mamie was trying to get at, or why they were talking about this old forgotten story now. She kept thinking about Daniel. Was there something about him she should have noticed but didn’t?
“Well, of course it wasn’t true,” Mamie continued, almost as though she were talking to herself. “I never believed it. Not for one minute. To think that a Tretheway . . . ” It did almost seem as if Mamie were speaking a foreign language. Jess was unused to having to decode messages. Her own mother, Margaret, was always perfectly blunt.
“Anyway, Chapin married her. Right under the rose arbor in front of their cottage, Aldergate. He had a gown flown in from Paris, beaded all over, cut up above the knees in front, with a long train hanging down the back. Scandalized everyone in the Club, getting married outside, with her kneecaps showing and a beaded veil over her bobbed hair. Then, she went off with him, to Europe for a Grand Tour. It was that very summer, the summer that Lila married, that I met Thomas Cleves—and right from the start, we were in love.
Mamie sipped her tea, looking intently at Jess as though trying to see if somehow, across time, her granddaughter was getting it. Jess too was looking at Mamie, trying to see through her stern demeanor, stiff gray hair carefully coiffed into pin curls once a week.
“I thought that Thomas might propose to me almost right away, that very first summer, the summer Lila married. But Thomas was called away suddenly when his father took ill. So, hard as it was, we parted with our plans as yet unsettled, not to see each other again for almost a whole year.”
Unexpectedly, Jess felt her throat tighten and the need to fight back tears. She looked away from Mamie and around the familiar kitchen, taking in the hinged beadboard cupboards, the faded green-and-white linoleum floor. She knew her plane ticket to Texas lay on the glass-topped vanity upstairs, the departure date less than a week away.
“You know, Jess, no sooner had I boarded the steamer to head back to Chicago than the porter brought me a telegram, and then another, and then another. Thomas Cleves sent me telegrams and letters every day, sometimes several times a day, and so I never felt apart from my beloved, nor did I ever feel lonely, though my own dear sister was away in Europe with Chapin, and I was home alone in our house on Sycamore Street, going about my solitary ways.
“We were to meet at Pine Lake, near the end of May. We arrived at the Club a few days before the Cleveses did. I still remember those last few days of waiting, pacing up and down the front walk, as though I could will the hours away, as though the lake wouldn’t turn blue nor the trees green until I could look at them knowing that he was by my side.”
Jess’s own thoughts flew to Daniel.
“And then, finally, there he was. Oh, Jess, it seemed he was taller than ever, and handsomer still than I remembered him. The very first time I saw him, he dropped to his knees before me and offered me a ring.” Jess could see that Mamie was fingering the emerald-cut diamond that she had always worn on her ring finger.
“And so, we agreed to be married, and the wedding was set for Christmastime. We were supposed to be married in the Ironton Congregational Church, with the reception at home.”
“And you were?” Jess asked.
“No,” Mamie said, suddenly sounding businesslike, more like her usual self. “Tragically, my younger sister drowned in the lake, and because of the need for a year of mourning, it meant that we would have to postpone the wedding. Lila drowned in May, and after a terrible year of waiting, suddenly we were facing another year.”
A year, Jess thought, looking out again at the multihued leaves outside the kitchen, framed by the weathered, unpainted casement now pushed open to let in the soft August air. What would a whole year of waiting feel like? What about a whole lifetime?
“I’ll never forget the day of the funeral. Lila lay in an open casket. You know, Jess, she was fair, like you are, but in death, she was almost a ghost, her skin whiter than whiteness can be, eyes closed, yes, but to me, they were staring up at me like they did when we pulled her out of the water, as dead and cold as a stone. Thomas took it very hard. He was there when she drowned, you know, right out there in the rowboat, rowing alongside; after all the killing he had seen in the war, it was as though it was just one death too many. He stood there at the funeral like a block of granite, gray as a tombstone, but he was crying—tears just slipping silently down his face. Miss Ada was out of her mind with grief, just wailing and wailing until someone finally had to lead her away. But you know how I felt, Jess? I felt angry. Angry at my sister for going off and getting herself drowned. It was supposed to be my turn, but that was Lila. She could always steal your thunder.”
Mamie was quiet for a moment, and Jess looked at her, surprised at her candor. Mamie’s eyes were still far away, looking through Jess to another time.
“So that night, after the funeral, we left,” she continued. “Just took off, the two of us, down toward Indiana. I don’t remember which one of us thought of it. But we just realized that we couldn’t wait. Hitched a ride down to Traverse on Billy Webster’s old Model T and then got the steamer from there. Oh, we were so much in love, and, Jess, it felt like the right thing to do. We took off and got ourselves married, no fancy wedding on Sycamore Street, no honeymoon Grand Tour, just two foolish young people in love.”
And what had happened to all that passion, Jess wondered. He seemed to have left no trace behind but his name.
“And that’s it,” Mamie said, folding her hands primly in front of her. “The rest of the story you know.”
Jess looked at Mamie with bewilderment. The rest of the story she knew? What on earth did she mean? She had just stopped the story at the part that Jess already knew. Mamie ran off with Thomas Cleves. And then what?
“Miss Mamie,” Jess said, “I don’t understand.” An icy sensation gripped the back of her throat. Could she have misunderstood what the doctor had said? She did not want to understand.
“I take it that Daniel told you nothing about his mother?”
> “His mother? Mrs. Painter?”
“Thomas Cleves left me,” she said curtly. “Married again, had a family . . . had a daughter . . . named Elizabeth Cleves.”
“But what does that have to do with Daniel?”
“Did he never mention his mother’s name to you?”
“Yes, I think he said his mother’s named—Elizabeth.” Jess felt realization bloom as she spoke the name aloud.
“Elizabeth Cleves,” Mamie said. Jess could hear the cruel edge in her voice. “Aunt Elizabeth. Your mother’s half sister.”
“That makes me and Daniel . . . ?”
“First cousins,” Mamie whispered. “And I suggest you stop doing what the Lord never intended. It’s just not right. Not proper. It’s sinful . . . ” Mamie’s face crumpled, and as she covered her face in her hands, her shoulders started shaking. After a moment, she looked up, and Jess saw that her face was full of tears. “I’m sorry, Jess. I should have stopped you. I never imagined it would come to this.”
Jess was stunned into silence, looking at her hands, the chipped Formica tabletop, out the window over Mamie’s shoulder, anywhere but at Mamie herself. Jess did not have any cousins, did not have a family, just a line of solitary females, Mamie, Margaret, Jess . . . An aunt? A cousin? And that cousin was Daniel?
“Does my mother know?” Jess asked.
“I told her that her father remarried when she asked me.”
“Does she know his family owns a cottage just on the other side of the woods?”
“Your mother can barely remember that I own a cottage. Has she ever been here? Why would she care a whit about that?” Now, the bitterness in Mamie’s voice was not hidden, nor was the ugly twist at the corner of her mouth.
The words of the doctor were ringing in Jess’s ears—genetic incompatibility. She heard what her grandmother and the doctor were trying to tell her, a kind of final and incontrovertible no, an incestuous no, a scientific and moral no. Just last night, she had not been able to think of anything that would make her give Daniel up.
But, of course, she had never thought of this.
When Mamie started to speak again, her voice was soft and trembling a bit. “It was raining really hard the night that Thomas and I left, ran away. We were running so fast, I never even got damp. We ran right through that rain, hand in hand, jumped in the back of an old Model T, no hesitation, never looking back. How I wish I’d had someone close by to tell me to stand still and let myself get wet. If I could have stood still and taken it then, a lot might have been different, a whole lot. Now, Jess, I feel like it’s my responsibility to tell you. You are going to be a doctor, Jess; imagine that, a young lady doctor. You’ve got a bright future ahead of you. Just stand still and let the rain pour down on you. No matter how bad you feel right now, it’s nothing compared to what you would feel if you gave up all of that bright future.”
Mamie stood and neatly pushed in her chair, then clasped her hands in front of her. It was clear that the conversation was done.
“Now, it’s time for me to get to my correspondence if I don’t want to miss the post. And I suggest that you start packing. That trip to Austin, my dear, is just a few days away.”
Time to pack up—hard to believe. Jess stood next to the bed, folding her white T-shirts and stacking them in perfectly symmetrical piles, pressing her jeans on the ironing board into sharp creases. White underwear, bleached and smelling like the dryer, folded, piled, and tucked into a corner. Jess loved packing, had always loved packing time, when all the complexities of her life, wherever she and her mother happened to be, got reduced down to this: neat categories, clean and fresh smelling, each item in its place. Life was never so untidy, Jess always thought, that it couldn’t be stowed neatly in a suitcase, taken to the train station or airport, and carried away. She was leaving the next morning, and she felt ready to pack up her things and carry them away to this new place, her baggage clean, well ordered, and spare, and her mind a blank slate.
She had not seen or spoken to Daniel. Mamie had taken to answering the phone first, and when she saw his white pickup out behind the cottage, she let Mamie open the door and send him away.
Jess’s mother was an untidy packer, jamming things into suitcases at the last minute, clean clothes tangled up with dirty, notes and papers for deadline articles stowed in wrinkled piles. Jess remembered one time in particular, in the train station in Milan. They had flown out of the apartment that they had lived in for two years, rushing haphazard, no time even to make a final round to see if anything had been left behind. Her mother, as usual, had jammed any number of crumpled things into her suitcase at wrong angles, then sat on it, bouncing up and down to try to get it to close. When they got to the station, the train was late, as Italian trains often were, and her mother had dragged her off to a phone booth. Her mother’s battered black Samsonite was precariously closed, and to Jess’s extreme mortification, there was a bit of nylon stocking, the foot part with its homely darkened toe, hanging out of the suitcase, flapping along like an intimate flag as they walked. Jess sat outside the booth while Margaret made two frantic calls, one to her editor promising that her article would be along very soon, another to Giovanni, an ardent but hasty leave-taking conducted in broken, tearful Texan-Italian. That was Margaret.
That was not Jess, who was always packed two days ahead of time, neat and tidy, with no loose ends.
It did not seem right to her to leave it like that. Not speaking to Daniel was like leaving a loose end. See him, don’t see him, see him, don’t see him. It was a chant that went on and on in her mind, a litany coursing along underneath everything, underneath her folding and ironing and washing, her list making and floor sweeping. Clean. She thought, just leave, with the sterile finality of Dr. Coggins’s against the laws of nature, the antiseptic, biological, unlived quality of those words. Or see him, the tears, the good-byes, the swimming in it. Just stand still and let yourself get wet, as Mamie had said. She had to leave without seeing him. She knew that she could not bear to see him again.
“Daniel.” Jess knew from the sound of her own voice, which startled her with its breathless urgency.
“Jess.” She knew again from the sound of his voice, like a waterfall, a waterfall of sorrow pouring down.
“Pick me up at seven.” And then it was done. He had said okay. He had hung up. She stood there staring at the phone in her hands, amazed at the way she had rushed headlong down the stairs, picked up the phone, and dialed the second she heard the screen door screech and knew that Mamie had gone out. No forethought, no plan, just pure action.
The Docksider was a townie joint. Nobody from Wequetona used to ever go there, and then some of the kids found out that they never carded anyone, and that the townies didn’t chase them away. You could smoke there, eat burgers, and drink beer. They had those little jukeboxes that hang above the table, “Hotel California,” “Cherokee Woman,” “Midnight at the Oasis.” Jess had not found a way to talk to Daniel yet. They had ridden out past the moonlit cornfields in silence. Daniel, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, nothing different from usual. Jess, fiddling with the radio dial, switching it around, first country then gospel, lots of static, nothing decent, lots of Bible shows.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Jess said. The only thing she managed to say during the ten-minute ride into town.
“I know when you’re leaving,” Daniel said. Then silence. Jess kept fiddling with the radio dial.
It was a chilly night. Fall came early up in the north part of Michigan, and there was a damp chill in the air that spoke more of autumn than summer. Most of the summer people had already left town; the sidewalks were mostly empty, and a cold, damp mist swirled around the lampposts that lined Main Street. Daniel was wearing faded blue jeans and a navy-blue sweatshirt whose sleeves were a little too short, as though it had been washed in hot water too many times, and his strong, bony wrists protruded
from the sleeves. On one wrist was the woven sailor’s bracelet, slightly grayish, that he always wore, couldn’t take off. His ankles were bare too, as his feet were barefoot in an old worn-out pair of Bass Weejuns. He walked briskly, a step or two ahead of her. As he pushed open the door of the Docksider, an acrid odor of smoke-filled air spilled out into the street.
Jess and Daniel made their way toward the back and sat down in a booth with a scarred-up old wooden table. From where she sat, Jess could see out to the bar, where a few fat, bearded guys wearing lumberjack shirts were smoking and drinking beer. And beyond that to the door, where the neon OPEN sign was flickering, appearing backward, the top half of the E not lit up. Jess pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“It’s over,” Jess said finally, simply, letting smoke out of her mouth as she spoke.
“I know,” Daniel said, flat, miserable. For once not looking up at her, looking at the table. She had thought that maybe he’d be relieved, but she could see the regret that shadowed his face, making him look somehow older.
“You all right now?” he said.
How to answer? She felt light-headed, and there was this horrible roaring sound in her ears. She inhaled hard on the cigarette, blowing smoke rings up at the ceiling. She could catch a look at the side of her face in the smoky mirror—the pallor of her face took her by surprise.
For a few minutes, they just sat there, taking in the scene around them. Jess finished her cigarette and stubbed it out. Daniel ordered a pitcher of beer, and they sat, fingering their glasses, flipping through the racks on the jukebox, like it was any other night.
Jess was cold. She was hunched down low in the booth, with her nylon parka’s collar still pulled up around her cheeks. Her head was edgy from the nicotine. She was feeling her way around what she was going to say.
