Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Eric’s wife.

  Oh, Eric! Darling Eric! Dorothy clutched Clara tighter to her shoulders and walked back to the French doors overlooking the 106

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  drive, hoping for another sight of her beautiful son, but he had gone.

  Now Dorothy knew why Victoria had not planted her little wifely stakes all over Eric like all the other daughters-in-law. Just a few days ago, Eric had told Dorothy that Victoria confessed to him she’d never told her mother they were married, legally wed. Celia had been conveniently left with the impression that Victoria and Eric were living in sin, domestic partners, as Victoria so coyly put it. Eric had told Dorothy all this, confided in his mother how it hurt, really, to know that Victoria had not told Celia she had married the man she loved. Dreadful. Dreadful, said Dorothy. But she was secretly touched; his telling her this proved that Eric had not altogether left his old mother, that he trusted her with his feelings and his confidences. This made Dorothy proud and happy, though she was sad for him at the same time. Now I understand, Dorothy had said soothingly to her best-loved boy, I understand why you went to the judge one afternoon and had no proper wedding at all. (Though she had not added, wouldn’t want to hurt Eric by saying that she, personally, had been heartbroken that her dear boy, her favorite, should call her from a downtown phone booth to say he’d gotten married in a judge’s office on his lunch hour.)

  When Victoria had declined Dorothy’s offer of a wedding reception (wouldn’t hear of it, would not, would not, would not), Eric just thought his bride was delightfully unconventional. But now they knew the truth of it, didn’t they? Sweeping Clara up in her arms, Dorothy paced the room hoping to get warmer, admitting to herself at last (honesty if not candor) she was glad she didn’t have to give them a wedding reception. So hard on the floors, guests were. Scruff and scrape, the high heels making nasty little jab marks in the wax.

  But to let a year go by before Victoria told her mother. Really! And at that—Eric’s sweet voice had trembled—Victoria wouldn’t have said a word to Celia, but Bethie made her! The sister who was getting married said this lie could not continue: Victoria must tell Celia.

  And she must tell her this very day, at the engagement party. Eric told Dorothy he was crushed, hurt beyond words. You’d think she’d be proud, Mom,

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  proud I married her instead of just living together. I made a commitment, Mom. What did she make?

  For this Dorothy had no answer, and though she tried to comfort Eric, it remained a thorny question. Why: what made Victoria so reluctant to acknowledge to her mother the fact that she had gotten married? Why wouldn’t she tell Celia? And slowly, it came out. Or rather, slowly Dorothy came to understand that Celia did not believe in marriage, hated marriage and thought anyone who committed it was a fettered prisoner caught in the shackles of society’s twin claws, Custom and Oppression. Celia in fact had refused to marry any man after Henry. That meant Celia had not married Bobby Jerome. The bar sinister crossed Dorothy’s mind. Victoria might well be, was in fact illegitimate. Victoria’s illegitimacy was implied, if not assured, since Eric went on to say that Celia believed in something called the Unfettered Life, or Love Unfettered, something like that. These were values Victoria had been raised with. This is incredible, Eric! No, Mom, it was the truth. And there was worse. Worse? I am ready, she had declared to her sweetest son, though she sat down now to catch her breath though there had been no exertion to speak of. She tucked her cold feet underneath her in the chair and pulled Clara closer and sank into the welcome of the chintz-covered chair by the cold fireplace. Tell me the truth of it, Eric.

  The truth was, though Celia did not believe in marriage, she believed in love. She had had lots of lovers and lots of weddings.

  ( Patently unfair, sulked Eric, we didn’t get to have a wedding, but she does?) Well, several weddings, all on Sophia’s Beach: that is, weddings, as in celebrations to formalize relations between her and her lover, The Man of the Moment, according to the girls. Clearly, however, they were men of various, indeed, many moments: at least two before Bobby Jerome and after him, others. Several, certainly, of whom the most notorious was Andrew Hayes. There was no end of upheaval with Andrew Hayes. Andrew had lived with Celia and brought two boys with him, or rather two boys were dropped off at the Useless post office by their mother who said they were incorrigible and they had ringworm besides. (Ring-108

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  worm? Dorothy shuddered even now.) Poor Victoria and her sister, young girls obliged to live in the same house with ring-wormed brats who were not even their own brothers! Victoria and her sister had to share their mother with these boys who were in trouble continually with the family, the school and the law. They had to share their mother with these boys’ father who was repeatedly unfaithful, cheated on Celia for years. Not till everyone had already lived through years of tantrums and tears did Andrew move out. The brat boys were so pissed off with their dad they wrecked his truck on a logging road. Imagine, Mom. But Dorothy couldn’t. After Andrew left, upheaval continued, ongoing anguish because Celia was emo-tionally on all fours. That was Victoria’s description. Wretchedly vivid. Later, there was a guy named Phil. A marine biologist who had come to Isadora Island to study marine life and enjoyed a few happy years in Celia’s bed and actually believed she’d leave with him and go back to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. ( Ha ha ha, Victoria had said, Ph.D. or not, you could see how stupid he was.) No wonder Victoria wanted to escape Isadora Island! Eric had commiserated with his wife. No wonder she had vowed she would never return.

  Of course she had to escape! How could you live someplace where everyone knew that your mother was a great slut, a—Eric cast about for some word equal to his outrage—a strumpet.

  The word strumpet had set off in Dorothy a pang of alarm then, did so again now as she sat here, feet curled up and going to sleep, tingling, and Clara around her soothingly. And yet. And yet—Dorothy felt a sudden seizure of conviction, or something very like it—the woman who could create this room, this house, could not be a strumpet, not with everything that nasty word implies. It was not possible. There was, there must be, in that woman a well of reverence, a deep chord of caring, an instinctive understanding.

  What had one of those girls said? The pretty girl, the skinny one from California (the husbandless one with the fatherless child), she’d said that no one lived here at Henry’s House, and now Dorothy knew why. It was a museum of inspiration, this house. The woman who had created inspiration

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  could not be a strumpet. And whatever Celia might say about the Unfettered Life, Unfettered Love, she clearly knew that not all fetters were equal. That much was evident to anyone with eyes, with imagination, with heart. Dorothy was pleased to include herself in this elect.

  She roused out of the chair, slowly, because her feet had gone to sleep and as she walked, gingerly, her feet sent jagged zaps of pin-like pain radiating up her legs. She walked and walked and when the pain finally passed and her feet had woken up, she found herself at the bureau where, on a starched lace dresser scarf there were perfume bottles. Empty, but with the labels still on and in some cases, sticky amber still glopped in the bottom of the bottle. Chanel Number Five. Oh, who was that? Enid. Enid Brislow and Cousin Lucy, too. Joy! Oh, she breathed deep in Joy because that was Barb Binton, Madcap Barb, so daring, so confident, Madcap Barb was full of Joy. And Estée Lauder, oh, Mary McAslund was all but in this room.

  Tabu. Ugh.

  She corked Tabu and rubbed her nose against its after-scent as she tugged at the top bureau drawer, expecting to find it empty (Henry’s House was a B-and-B, after all, not a real home, but a commercial enterprise), but even as these thoughts occurred, the drawer yielded, and in it Dorothy found pressed linens. In the next drawer she poked through all sort of miscellaneous junk, the sort of untethered flotsam whose worth is entirely in the eye or mind or heart of the beh
older.

  Foreign coins. A key without a corresponding lock. A plastic fat baby of the sort to top a christening cake. A Christmas angel in wax, which might once, forty years ago, have been a candle that no one ever burned. A pin that said Have a Nice Night. Silly. A tiny silver-plated bud vase. Turning this in her cold hands, Dorothy noted little rosebuds worked round the rim and on the base and on the two tiny handles so that the vase looked like a small urn or trophy, something one might win or earn. She pressed the silver vase in both hands to warm it, perhaps to warm her own hands. She put it back in the drawer. Then she picked it up again, and put it in her pocket.

  Never had she done such a thing. She could not do it now.

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  She chided and lectured herself, wrangled and hectored, but she did not put it back. The sight of the little silver vase, so nice, so lovely, there amidst all that junk, it just spoke to Dorothy: Rescue me, it said.

  Rescue me from the tawdry trash of this world, the detritus, the orphaned keys and geriatric angels. Rescue me. Liberate me. So she did. Then she went on down the bureau, opening drawers to see if there might be any other items in need of rescue, but nothing else spoke to her. At the bottom drawer, however, a whisper wafted up in the form of fragrance, over, around, eluding the usual Damp (ever-present, everywhere pervasive). In this drawer she found lacy dresser scarves ironed with a whiff of ironing wax. Lemon-scented ironing wax.

  Oh, did people do such things anymore? Dorothy’s mother always used ironing wax, lemon-scented, on all her clothes, lingerie especially. It gives things such a nice finish, Dorothy, Mother used to say, and it’s just a little luxury, not an indulgence. As a girl all Dorothy’s slips had been ironed with lemon-scented ironing wax, and sometimes she could feel the fine finish crack slightly along her legs, not altogether unpleasant as a sensation. And the ironing wax in her slip had not cracked, but melted on a summer day, hot, especially hot for Seattle, temperature in the nineties, wilting heat, heat unabating that afternoon when she was a college girl and she had wilted under heat and his welcome weight and the ironing wax in her slip had melted under, with the lovely heat of that dazzling boy who was not Neddy. Before Neddy.

  She closed the drawer abruptly. Feeling rather wobbly, she pulled herself up with one hand on the dresser, using the other to keep Clara tight against her. Clutching Clara she lurched slightly back toward the window where the lamp was lit in broad daylight. The lamp lit for the dead man. Perhaps it was not so very inefficient after all. Perhaps, if you loved someone, even if the love had not endured as marriage, it endured in some other form, underwent some slow change over time, but it remained recognizable, at least in the eye of the beholder. Beholding now Useless Point and beyond, Assumption Island, that gorgeous gray rock, Dorothy felt happy here. Behold the outer islands: great

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  blue bolsters, the sea quilted, an undulating bed of fog, and the lovely gray and granular light Dorothy had known all her life, loved all her life. She had hated Rome if the truth were told. (Which it had not been: candor disconnected in that instance from honesty.) On her honeymoon she had followed Neddy and their nasty, grasping guide all around the Eternal City, eternally hot, too much heat in Rome, that terrible unabating heat and all those beggars and bright colors, swarms of both and all that ancient dust and Old World decay, dust and dirt and desiccation everywhere with no proper saltwater breezes, just a corrupt old river winding nearby. No, for Dorothy, the beloved Northwest patinas were dearest: moss, old, thick, fuzzy, gooey, napping moss growing under cloud-clotted skies, moss and lichen, ferns, rocks in all those shades and strands of gray and green evading nomenclature, fog all grainy, stippling every distance and the air so thick with dampness you could taste it; the trees in huge stands, creating thick, black shadows, evergreen trees with ever-black shadows. The Northwest coast, the saltwater Sound, the freshwater rain so ever-present it felt like a friend.

  Dorothy had a friend here in Henry’s House. Maybe two. Clara and Celia. Celia kept dazzling floors and she kept a lamp lit for a man long dead. Dorothy understood both.

  A touching story. That’s what Ned said. It was a touching story about the lamp kept lit off-season and Henry Westervelt. It would have remained merely that, a touching little story, except for the gory details, and Ned had blamed Dorothy at the time for having elicited the gory details, for having asked Victoria all those tender questions and pressing her for details which turned out to be gory.

  When he blamed her, Dorothy had cried a little, and Ned had said, There, there, but she cried a lot now, just let go and wept noisily, wiping her nose with Clara and smudging mascara mucky with makeup, because she had only pressed for details to be nice to Victoria because of Eric. Because she didn’t want to lose Eric, and she could not tell Ned that. She loved Eric too much. Maybe she had loved everyone too much, because certainly no one had loved her back, not as much as she had

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  loved them. Few to love, and no one ever equal to her love. Dorothy blubbered outright to remember that Wordsworth poem she had read in college. She had cried even then in the dorm room she shared with Barb. She cried because the poem had described, warned her what life had in store for her. Barb Binton had chided her, Get hold of yourself, Dot, it’s just an old poem, quit your crying. And, in honoring Madcap Barb, Dorothy tried, even now, to get hold of herself, but it was hard. Hard not to sob outright, great heavy swells coming up in her throat, choking and constricting tightly in her chest, tears running unheeded down her face and dripping off her chin because She dwelt amongst untrodden ways

  Beside the Springs of Dove

  A maid whom there were none to praise

  And very few to love.

  Very few. Very, very few. Eric maybe. Maybe Eric had loved her as much as she loved him. So when he had married this inoffensive, pretty, polite and otherwise unremarkable girl, Dorothy had tried to be extra, extra nice to Victoria because she didn’t want to lose Eric as she had lost the other boys to grasping wives. Dorothy had made every effort to love Victoria so as not to lose darling Eric, to prove to Victoria she had a warm heart, a willing ear and open arms. And so as Victoria had told her story, Dorothy had inquired concernedly, How did he die, dear? How did Henry Westervelt die that your mother should leave the lamp burning night and day for him in the window overlooking Useless Point?

  Gory indeed. Victoria had told them how Henry was sailing with Celia, just the two of them one summer afternoon on a boat called Deo Volente. Really, Victoria had said, wasn’t that awful? A boat called, really, God Willing, and this awful accident happened because Henry and Celia were stoned mindless, tripping away, naked as the day they were born, both of them. Celia lay on the deck and drifted off to sleep and she woke because something rolled and hit her, roused her and Henry was gone. The boat

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  pitched, nearly tipping over, the boom flailing crazily and unsecured, swinging back and forth, the sail flapping, snapping. There she was, Celia, naked and alone, sunburned, stoned silly and no idea of how to sail or what to do, save for keeping her head down and out of the way of the boom, and crying out for Henry, crazy with fear, with grief, crying out as the boat lurched and limped and listed, rocked madly in the open water, Henry! Henry! The boom, still unsecured, might have killed Celia too, might just have swept her, stoned as she was, right off the deck as it had swept Henry off. Help! Help!

  Her voice carrying across the water till some other boaters rescued her. Celia hates boats, Victoria had added. For a woman who lives on an island, she is singularly unfond of boats. You can see why.

  But in fact, in their collective imagination, the Robbins family saw this: a completely naked woman, arms outstretched, sunburned, stoned and stunned to wake and find herself alone. A woman inca-pacitated by marijuana and LSD, incompetent in any event. And culpable? Ned and Dorothy both remembered the story in the
newspapers: Mr. Westervelt had tried to have criminal charges brought against Celia, and there was a sort of inquiry, but nothing more, not even a coroner’s jury because there was no body. Despite Mr. Westervelt’s paying for divers to go down into the waters of the Sound, no one could find the naked body of Henry Westervelt which remained, caught, rocked by the current, resting at the bottom, the cold waters of the Puget Sound.

  Certainly after that little recital, the Robbins family did not, ever again, ask after Henry Westervelt, or how he had died.

  But Dorothy knew that whenever the Westervelt name came up—yes, even in the bathroom—Ned felt a tiny thrill of kinship. He sometimes trotted the story out at parties when he thought Dorothy wouldn’t overhear him, the whole story, including the gory details, in fact relishing the parts about Celia and Henry being drugged mindless, stuporifically stoned and buck naked. And in the telling of the story Ned always managed to leave the oblique impression that his youngest son, Eric, had married the late Henry Westervelt’s daughter, adding that Victoria didn’t have

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  much to do with Westervelts, and the Robbins family was too modest (or too proud, depending on Ned’s audience) to trade on her family connections.

  Animated voices echoed down the long hall and Dorothy turned abruptly from the window, her eyes on the door. Her eyelid trembled involuntarily and she played with the pearl choker. Women’s voices coming down the hall. Victoria’s was one. She recognized Victoria’s voice and the other one, the girl who had just gotten engaged to marry the man who looked like a saint. So forebearing. Not handsome really, but gentle and fore-bearing. You could tell that just to look at him. Wade. Wade made you think of Jesus. Even if you didn’t want to. And another voice, the girl from California. The other ex-half-stepsister, the one with beautiful blue eyes. And Celia. Oh yes, Celia’s bold voice and throaty laughter. But really, they were going to one of the bathrooms, weren’t they? They must stop at the bathroom. Dorothy pulled Clara tighter around her shoulders and mopped the mascara from her face, or tried to. She wished vehemently that Art might instantly triumph over Nature and she would be turned to stone. She wished to become a stone statue because the voices seemed to be coming, were coming, all the way down the hall to this very room. Dorothy stood still, chilled, silent, hoping she wouldn’t be detected, wishing to become a statue, to be or become an inconsequential artifact, to die or dissolve. Or both. They were coming here. Their feet. Their voices. A hand on the door. Dorothy could not move. She could not evaporate, nor turn to stone, but neither could she move before they crashed into the room, where they would find her with Clara and the silver bud vase. They would know she had taken it. Stolen it. They must not know. Dorothy’s heart pounded on the walls of her ribs, she could feel it pound through her bones, the bones in her head, the bones in her feet, the bones in the hand clutched round the silver vase at the very moment the door opened and Celia Henry burst in, her face stricken with surprise, then alight with something else. Concern? Caring?