The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

  “Here it is,” Caroline said at last, and pulled in to a short, gravelly drive.

  The front yard of Caroline’s forever home was covered with damp, unraked leaves and flanked by a row of overgrown shrubs. A fallen tree branch long as the car. A side bed of brittle, brown daisies. A white plastic bag stuck on a bush that flapped in the breeze. Caroline’s eyes swept over the mess, but she didn’t comment on it, just tilted her head back to take stock.

  The house was a pale lavender with yellow trim, the paint faded and flaking. Green clumps of moss clung to the steeply pitched roof, and the front steps were grayed and sagging with age. But the place was large, a true Victorian, with tall windows, gabled molding, and, best of all, a rounded towerlike structure with its own pointed roof rising from the second story.

  “It’s just like a castle,” Caroline said, turning to me, eager as a puppy for affirmation. It was a look I’d never seen before. I was so young when Caroline left Bexley, and then she’d always lived so far away. And all those blond, clever Goats took possession of Caroline in a way that I understood and resented only years later. They helped her through pregnancies and childbirths. They advised on what kind of minivan to buy, would Montessori be a good fit for Louis, do the twins really need that DTaP vaccine? She let herself be folded into the Duffys, and who could blame her? Two bright, chirpy parents, cousins and family football games at Thanksgiving. The Skinners were too few and too complicated to compete with all that photogenic togetherness.

  But now here she was. Her hair hung lank from airplane air, her red coat was too thin for this chilly day. She’d arrived into JFK at five fifteen that morning, traveling all this way for a house she’d seen only in photographs.

  “You’re right, Caroline,” I said, and smiled. “A castle.”

  We opened the front door and stepped into a damp and penetrating cold. I shivered. We stood at the foot of a wide staircase that led up into darkness. To our left, the large living room was bare, with a sooty fireplace on the far wall that gaped dark and menacing as a wound. There was dust everywhere and a dry brown substance crusting the shadowy corners of the room. The place smelled of mold and something else. Something closed-in, musty, animal.

  Caroline dropped the bag of cleaning supplies to the floor.

  “I think we might need some help,” I said. “What about Renee or Joe?”

  “Renee’s taking on extra ER shifts,” Caroline answered in a monotone. “As if the surgical fellowship isn’t enough. And Joe . . . I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.” The last she said vaguely, walking away from me into the dim interior of the house.

  We went room to room, the only sound our dull footsteps and Caroline’s occasional sharp intake of breath as another mess or sign of age came into view. In the kitchen there was a squat white refrigerator with a long silver handle and a walk-in pantry, its shelves lined with scraps of greasy paper, smelling of old bacon and ammonia. In the hall we found one half bath with an unspeakable toilet. In the dining room, cobwebs intricate as chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

  We finished our circle and arrived back in the living room.

  “Caroline, can the college find you another house?” I asked gently. The kids and Nathan were set to arrive from Austin in two days.

  “Oh, no, this is the only one,” she replied. “It’s rent-to-buy. It’s all we can afford.” Her eyes were bright. “But I love it. It’s perfect. That big front window? These original floors?” She rubbed a toe along a floorboard to reveal a grainy, dark wood beneath the dirt. “Let’s get started.”

  And so we began to clean with spray bottles and brushes and paper towels, wearing unwieldy yellow gloves and those small paper masks I associated with Asian flus and hypochondriacs. As we worked side by side, I realized how good it felt to have her back. I’d missed Caroline for herself, but what I’d missed more was the idea of us, the four Skinner siblings, together. She was the missing piece of the puzzle of adulthood that I’d been trying for years to put together here in New York with Joe and Renee. Now I could be the quirky aunt to Caroline’s kids, taking them to gallery shows and poetry readings in the city, teaching them to swear, and buying them candy. Renee would be the role model who showed them how to work hard and succeed, who examined their cut knees with professional concern. And Uncle Joe would tell them fart jokes, give them extravagant electronics for their birthdays, teach them to catch and throw. Joe still loved baseball, even if he no longer played, and who knew? Maybe Louis would be a natural. And here in Hamden, Caroline would host family dinners where we’d all gather and make toasts and drink and eat cake and play Scrabble. At last we would be siblings who were no longer children.

  I was musing about all this, scrubbing with a hard plastic brush the dried-on something from a corner of the kitchen floor, when Caroline pulled off her paper mask and said,

  “Fiona, when was the last time you saw Joe?”

  I sat back on my heels. “Well, I . . .” I tried to remember the last time I’d seen our brother. It was a month ago at least. An uptown French place with wicker chairs, stiff white napkins at 11:00 a.m. Sandrine had been there, too.

  “I met him for brunch,” I told Caroline. “I can’t really remember when exactly. He’s been so busy with work and wedding stuff.”

  “Did you notice anything? I mean, anything off about him?”

  I struggled to remember the details of that morning. They’d arrived late, both of them hungover, too thin, undeniably glamorous. They had asked me to write a poem to commemorate their engagement, a poem to be read at the party next week, and I’d said yes. I’d been flattered and immediately nervous. What if they didn’t like it? I had never written a love poem before.

  I told Caroline about the poem for Joe and Sandrine. I’d brought a copy with me to Hamden, hoping I could do a test reading for my sister. But Caroline wasn’t interested.

  “Fiona. We’re talking about Joe,” she said. “How did he seem?”

  “He seemed fine,” I answered. “He’s lost some weight, but he works too hard. You know that.”

  “Renee is worried about him. She saw him a couple weeks ago about an irregular heartbeat. She thinks we should all speak to him. Together.”

  “Heartbeat—” I began, but just then we heard noise from upstairs, a high-pitched animal sound. Across the ceiling a creak of floorboards traveled from one side of the room to the other. Then the noise stopped.

  “What was that?” Caroline whispered.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go check it out.” I still remembered the ferocity of Caroline’s nightmares, the bruised shadows of sleepless nights beneath her eyes.

  But Caroline shook her head. “No, we should both go.”

  * * *

  As an adolescent Caroline believed what Noni told us about independence and self-reliance and strength. More than anything Caroline did not want to disappoint our mother. But putting Noni’s lessons into action proved more difficult for Caroline than for the rest of us. She could do nothing to impress Noni. It had been clear for so long that Joe and Renee were the impressive ones, and for this Caroline felt a certain jealousy and resentment but also a deep, abiding relief.

  What remained for Caroline was to surprise our mother. And she did.

  As she moved with Nathan for his summer research opportunities and guest teaching positions, Caroline stayed in school. She studied anthropology, history, art history, biology, Spanish, theater. With each move the transfer of credits became more difficult, the registrars more impatient, the path to an actual degree more complex. Caroline persevered. She was not an academic star, no trophies lined her dresser, but our mother valued tenacity.

  And then, back in Kentucky, Caroline became pregnant. She was twenty-one years old. Nathan was three years into his graduate research on Central American tropical frogs. In their rented bungalow, one entire room was devoted to a series of plastic kiddie pools joined together by a complex filtration and pumping system, lit by heat lamps, the temperature maintain
ed at a steamy ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. Inside this ecosystem lived plant life indigenous to a tropical climate and eight tiny Panamanian golden frogs.

  On the day Caroline finally disappointed Noni, she left Nathan at home with the frogs, crouched before the pools, notebook in hand. He nodded absently as she kissed him on the cheek. Caroline was running late for class, again. This one—Ancient Chinese Ceramics—was located across the wide green campus lawn, up a short punishing hill, through a heavy door, inside a room that looked like a doctor’s waiting room or a preflight boarding area: white and gray and brown, full of people who slouched and yawned.

  At seven months pregnant, Caroline felt unwieldy as a cello. She was panting slightly, her face hot, as she pushed open the classroom door. The teaching assistant glanced up and then away with a roll of his eyes. Although she knew she had nothing to be ashamed of, Caroline felt ashamed. For being late to class, for being married and pregnant, for being distracted and sleepy, for being herself.

  “Ms. Duffy,” the TA said.

  “Yes?” answered Caroline as she settled into a chair without a desk; she no longer fit behind a desk.

  “Can you please comment on the ceramics of the later Ming years and their use of the symbol of the bee?” A tattoo of a rose crawled up the TA’s neck. He gazed at her with tight, small blue eyes.

  “The bee?” she repeated.

  The TA nodded. The A/C unit abruptly shut off, plunging the room into silence. Around her, Caroline felt the swollen anticipation of the group, all fifteen, maybe twenty students. Where before they had been inattentive and uninterested, now, with notice of her humiliation, they became alert.

  “Um, I don’t know,” Caroline replied.

  The TA moved immediately on. “Mr. Purcell?” he asked the boy sitting to Caroline’s right and Robbie Purcell explained to the class the significance of the bee.

  As Robbie rattled on, Caroline felt strangely buoyed by the TA’s dismissal. Here she sat in a bland room with bland desks and bland chairs, surrounded by bland people who were not pregnant, who were not harboring life within. Now these people were discussing avidly the importance of the bee. At that moment, deep within her, the baby moved, an elbow or a knee just below her left ribs, and Caroline was transported. There existed nothing so momentous as this feeling of intimacy and distance, the strangeness of it and the atavistic understanding. The TA had no idea. Caroline felt a surge of pity for him. Pity and impatience.

  Caroline picked up her notebook and pen and returned them to her bag. She stood and moved toward the door.

  “Um, Ms. Duffy,” the TA called. “You just got here.”

  Someone in the class snickered.

  “I’m leaving,” Caroline said, and she did.

  Caroline went directly to the registrar’s office and withdrew from the University of Kentucky. The registrar’s assistant gazed at her belly and accepted the paperwork without comment. When she arrived back home, Nathan was sitting in the same position as when she’d left. He looked up as she entered the room.

  “No more college,” she announced breezily, standing in the doorway. “I quit.”

  Nathan watched her for one long moment, chewing a pen cap. On his lap was a black-and-white composition book, the kind he used for observations on the frogs. He had dozens of them, shelved carefully in the den, the raw data for his dissertation. Caroline felt her breath shorten and catch. For the first time in their relationship, she feared his rejection. Nathan, steady as a heartbeat, had never wavered in his own professional vision and her place beside him, sharing that life. But a college professor married to a college dropout? The vision tilted and shook. An Etch A Sketch in the hands of a restless toddler. What would Caroline do if she wasn’t with Nathan? What would she do?

  Nathan removed the pen cap from his mouth and shrugged. “You can always go back after the baby,” he said. “It’s just one semester.”

  “Exactly,” she said, exhaling. Her breath returned. The vision stabilized. “I’m so uncomfortable, Nathan. It just seems so pointless.”

  “I agree,” he said, and rose from the chair. “I love you, Caroline.” He kissed her and took her hand and led her into the room. “Did you know that the frogs communicate with gestures?” His face was hazy with wonder. “They wave their hands.”

  “Hands? Is that really the right word?”

  “Yes. Hands.”

  Together they crouched over the pools, lit up like a tropical night by a red heat lamp, and studied the frogs. Their skin was a bright banana yellow spotted with black, the eyes a deeper yellow, nearly gold, and split by a pod of black pupil. Caroline counted the long, thin fingers, each shaped like a tiny upside-down spoon.

  “Don’t they look like the baby’s hands?” Caroline said, turning to Nathan. When their doctor had performed the twenty-week scan, Caroline and Nathan both had gasped. The images offered a revelation of bone and form and quick, jiggery movement.

  “They do,” Nathan said to Caroline. “See? Life.”

  * * *

  Inside the Hamden house, I followed Caroline up the stairs. We moved slowly, cautiously. Ferrets, foxes, even bears lived in the woods around here; or maybe the house had a squatter. We stood for a moment on the landing to listen. And then we heard it: a high-pitched, mewling sort of noise like a newborn’s cry. We followed the sound to the master bedroom, where a metal bed frame bereft of mattress sat smack in the middle. Yellow autumn light filtered through the dirty windows, giving the room the feel of an old photo, something ghostly printed on tin. And there in the far corner, splayed atop a pile of old newspapers, was an enormous orange tabby. Her long stomach bristled with pink, distended nipples, and surrounding her were a dozen newborn kittens, each one no bigger than an infant’s fist and just as soft, round, and useless.

  We stood motionless in the doorway. We made no sound, but the cat saw us. Her ears went rigid. When Caroline began a slow approach, the cat pulled back its head and hissed, showing four pointed white teeth, two up and two down. She looked reptilian, or like a small, vicious monster from a fairy tale. A few of the kittens mewed faintly. One struggled to open its eyes, and then it did and they were the hueless blue of water, and they stared straight into me.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  Caroline didn’t answer straightaway. “Well, that’s unexpected,” she said, her voice strained but cheerful. “Of course there’s a family of cats in the master bedroom.”

  “At least they’re cute.” I moved closer to touch one, but the mother reared up its head and hissed. I stepped back. “I bet the girls would love a kitten,” I said. Other than the rabbit Celeste, I’d never owned a pet, but the same childish yearning returned now, an echo of an ache so potent I imagined the girls must feel it, too. How could you not want something to care for?

  “Well, we’ve got Milkshake,” Caroline replied, referring to their yellow Lab who poured like sticky liquid over every visitor. “And the girls have their gerbils.”

  “What about Louis?” I suggested.

  “He’s got Stu the chameleon. And a tankful of saltwater fish.”

  “Well, we could put up signs. Give them away.” I was trying to salvage Caroline’s mood, which I could see was declining rapidly and perhaps irreversibly. She was the camel, and this was the straw.

  “No.” Caroline shook her head. “That would take too long. And Nathan will be here in two days. He’ll want to keep them all. Trust me.” She said the last with a certain testiness.

  “Let’s just clean the downstairs first,” I said. “Let the cats sleep. We’ll decide later.” Postponing a difficult decision was a specialty of mine. I found that often the difficult part evaporated into the haze of delay.

  But Caroline didn’t answer. She was staring at the cats with a mixture of disgust and exhaustion; her mouth had a pulled-down quality, a tired little frown. At this moment all of her family’s worldly possessions were packed into a U-Haul being driven from Austin, Texas, to Hamden, Connecticut, by two men named Sa
sha. The Sashas had claimed they would make no stops. Probably they were in Pennsylvania by now, home of the Amish. Perhaps stuck behind a family in a horse-drawn carriage. Perhaps already running late. Caroline’s children, staying the night with a kindergarten friend in Austin, were undoubtedly eating too much sugar and playing with toy guns. Nathan was living out of a suitcase; he’d packed only one pair of pants. Everyone was waiting for Caroline to proclaim the new house ready.

  There were times—at Christmas, say, or the day we all took Noni to the shore for her sixtieth birthday—when I envied Caroline’s centrality. The way her children bounced around her with their giggles and sticky lips and Nathan rubbed her shoulders as she closed her eyes and sighed: it all looked so fine and sweet. But sometimes it looked simply crushing. A straitjacket of her own making. Every morning she packed three school lunches, each one requiring a different sandwich. Every night three different bedtime stories.

  “Listen, I’ll take the kittens,” I offered. “My roommates keep saying we need a pet.”

  Caroline sighed. “Fiona. You’ll have thirteen pets.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll find homes for some of them.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You don’t know how to take care of a cat.”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “Cats are easy.”

  “They’re living things.”

  “I know that.”

  “They need food and water.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Consistent care.”

  “Caroline. Stop. I’ll keep a few, find homes for a few more. And the rest I’ll take to a shelter.”

  “But they’ll die at a shelter.”

  I tilted my chin, considering. “Yes, that’s probably true.”

  “No.” Caroline shook her head. “I can’t do that. I’ll keep them. I’ll figure it out.”