Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  The islands that we saw along the Scottish coast that summer broke Henry’s heart because they were so magical and reminded 287

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  him of Isadora. As we jostled around Scotland on teeth-rattling buses, he said that whatever happened, he knew he would forever fight his father’s notion of success, which was to be the richest man in the graveyard. Henry preferred his Aunt Sophia’s definition: to create, to contribute, to touch and move others, to love and be loved, to be part of people’s lives. He wanted to be like her. He wanted to be an educator.

  My idea of success? He asked me what was my idea and I confessed to him that I thought it was to be memorable. To be able to do one thing so very well that whoever experienced it would never forget it, I said as we sat amidst the ruins of an old castle near Edin-burgh.

  “Art?” asked Henry.

  “I hope not. I can’t draw or paint or act or dance, or write a line of poetry, or play an instrument, or hold a tune, save for ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Abide with Me.’”

  “I think a person can teach memorably.”

  “Maybe you can, or your Aunt Sophia could,” I replied, “but not me. I can type and file, stuff like that, but it’s hardly memorable.”

  The quality that made something memorable, said Henry, wasn’t any one thing, but what connected it to some larger experience. “Like the way a perfect frame sets off a painting, makes it more beautiful.”

  When I set about putting Henry’s House together, I remembered that, remembered Henry’s wish to touch and move people. I think I have achieved what we’d wanted, hoped to accomplish together in the first flush of our adult lives. Henry’s House has touched and moved people, the work done in both our names, Celia and Henry.

  Everything has been in both our names. Even the men I have loved I have loved as Celia Henry and the daughters I have raised, the Henry girls. And judged by that youthful standard—the things we wanted when we were young—perhaps I have less to regret than many women pushing fifty.

  But your standards can’t resist time any more than your body can.

  For all my loud blather about the Unfettered Life, I haven’t 288

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  lived unfettered, and now I begin to understand that I never wanted it anyway. From the first time I put my hand in Henry’s, on our way to Steve Goldblum’s attic room, it’s clear to me I wanted connection.

  In fact now, I most fear being unfettered. Living alone when they all leave. And they will. The passenger side of my bed empty. Russell was a good man, though not perhaps a good man for me. Anyway, he’s gone. My girls are gone. Victoria no longer comes over with Eric. I have not seen her in weeks. She won’t see me. Victoria is bone-marrow angry with me, not for what I’ve done or left undone, but for what I somehow am, and cannot alter. Victoria’s loss feels like desertion. Bethie’s feels like death. Even after that terrible confrontation last month, all of us at Wade’s apartment, I still had hopes, faith that Bethie could, would break free of Wade. She’d come to her senses. Now I know better. She is lost to me. If she can endure a betrayal of that magnitude and still kneel at that man’s feet, she is lost altogether. So I am unfettered at last, I guess. But in truth, I am lonely. It looks lonely from here.

  Isadora! they called out on the loudspeaker, Isadora Island!

  Thronging the narrow metal stairwells, I joined the exodus of Isadora passengers, down into the belly of the boat where I got in my truck and waited. The ferryboat docked at Dog Bay, making all the usual clangs and rumbles, groans and creaks, engines roaring, the rush of water as they secured the ferry to the pilings, logs smeared with pitch, smelling of homecoming. Chains across the front of the boat were loosed and drawn back; the ferry personnel directed cars up the ramp and off the boat. I turned left, toward Useless, following those few cars in front of me, who one by one turned off the road till my lights alone lit up the August night all the way to Useless Point, where the crazy currents and the desperate rocks of Assumption Island were swallowed up in darkness.

  The old truck protested the steep drive up to my house and I pulled into the unpaved yard, lit here and there with moth-mad bulbs. Sass and Squatch roused and barked, and flitting through the patches of light that fell from my kitchen windows 289

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  I could see forms and shadows. I’d no sooner stepped from the truck than Brio burst through the door bounding out to meet me, her high, bright voice piping as she waved Baby Herman in greeting and the dogs danced around her. Sunny followed, her shoulders hunched over so that no one would notice how lovely she truly was. And following Sunny, Dorothy came into the yard. With her halo of gray hair, her sweet face, her voice, touch and step all modulated, muted, masking her otherwise steely resolve, oh, you would never guess at the stern stuff that was truly Dorothy Robbins. Launch lounged at the kitchen door, weather-beaten but not careworn, and then Grant came out, with his laconic smile and his calloused hands and his heart full of Sunny Jerome. Their forms and shadows danced about the yard in the uneven light, their voices caught in the August wind ruffling over Useless. They were eager for news of Bethie and though such news as I had was sad, surrounded by all of them, I felt buoyant. Connected. These were in some genuine way—if not the flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone—ties, sinews created out of those human obligations, the ones God put on old Adam and old Eve. Not in the Garden, but as they left.

  As they moved east, out of Eden, toward the Land of Nod. Think of them, their figleafs flapping, as the angry cherubim flashing flaming swords prod them toward the future. And what prospects lay ahead? The certainty that they must earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. They must work, so they could eat. And eat, so they could work. The knowledge that their hands and backs and minds must be put to this task or they would starve. Well, they faced death anyway, didn’t they? Don’t we all? And after Eden and until they died, Adam and Eve dropped each night, fell into bed, their bodies bent, energies spent, the demands unchanging, rolling day after day toward death. To sleep, to eat, to squat in defecation, the woman’s flesh penetrated in union and bifurcated in birth. No wonder poets invented love. Someone had to. If we do not dignify our lives with love, grace them with laughter and affection, garnish with pity, then our prospects and obligations are those of vegetables. Are they aware, vegetables,

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  that they bloom and grow, produce, decay? Is it not in part our capacity of love, for pity, for affection and laughter that distinguishes us from the squash blossoms and the pear trees? Not solely and not wholly. When did you last meet an avaricious radish? A vindictive beet? A mean-spirited apple? Still, I don’t believe the fruit from the tree of knowledge could have been sin alone. If we are fallen, so be it, but surely our capacity to fall is equal to, and commensurate with, our capacity to rise as well.

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  P A R T X

  Turn of the Century

  Slapping herself soundly with the dish towel and calling out Doggy doggy doggy, Nona York stood with her longtime editor, Georgieanne, waiting for the afternoon ferry eastbound. They waited with the outgoing foot traffic, those few people leaving Isadora on a September Saturday, summer’s spell long since broken, but the autumn still ebullient. Ordinarily they would have been in Nona’s car and she would have driven Georgieanne all the way down to SeaTac for the flight that would take her to New York. But Nona had not volunteered. The shuttle to SeaTac would have to do. The two women, friends of many years, were happy to be rid of one another.

  Georgieanne, trying vainly to pretend this wasn’t so, chatted away, as though their friendship had not been seriously impaired by the bad tidings she’d brought from New York. Worse, she had to make them explicit now, at their parting, because when 292

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  she had tried to express all this earlier in her visit, Nona had cut her off. It wasn’t merely bad news, but a fundamental difference of opinion separating Nona York, doyenne of Romance, f
rom the rest of the world. Nona’s books, it seems, had not been selling as well as they had in the past, even the rather recent past. Georgieanne, in consultation with Great Powers of Publishing, was of the opinion that younger women wanted something else in the way of Romance.

  Something more. Something different. Women’s choices were changing, their roles were changing and their passions as well. The New Romance, Georgieanne had called it.

  Nona had scoffed at this. Passions never changed. Nona had listened, foot tapping, and then informed her editor it was all rot.

  “I am a classic writer. I’m not about to start writing novels where young career women get mugged and then fall in love with the guy in the police lineup.” Then she had stubbed out her cigarette and cracked a walnut with decisive strength. Georgieanne had not brought the subject up again.

  Until this morning. Just before she was to leave Isadora (and in truth, Nona knew it was coming, this entire visit sadly fraught with what had been left unsaid), Georgieanne blurted out that the House was not prepared to pay Nona her usual advance. Moreover they planned to reduce her print runs and would not feature her as prominently in their ad campaigns. They valued her always, Georgieanne said in a speech which she had clearly rehearsed, but everyone must trim in a scaled-down world. This was the nineties.

  The House would always honor their long association with Nona York, but in truth, things would not be the same.

  No bloody kidding, thought Nona, beating herself all the harder with the dish towel, Doggy doggy doggy. The ferry had docked, so this goodbye would be mercifully short. Across the way, foot traffic coming down the ramp began to straggle off the ferry, most of them cyclists wearing colors and outfits that reminded Nona of beetles, black-purple, black-yellow, black-green, helmets with points at the back and bicycle tires that whirred like

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  beetles’ wings. There was no terminal to speak of at Dog Bay, just a few lanes for the cars, ramps for the foot traffic, a shelter in case it rained and a shabby picnic ground in case it did not.

  While her little dogs encircled her feet, barking at the bicycles across the way, Nona appeared to be listening to Georgieanne’s parting thoughts, but actually she was thinking, Kill the messenger.

  She was thinking how fast she would get on the phone once she returned home. How swiftly she would call her agent and tell her to put the word out that Nona York—the Sir Walter Scott of Romance—would entertain Other Offers. But even as she relished the thought of dumping the disloyal Georgieanne, she squirmed inwardly because she was well aware that none of the new young editors knew who Sir Walter Scott was. And that might very well be the problem. Such a problem did not lend itself to solution. What was this New Romance? These scaled-down expectations? How cowardly. Scale down your expectations in life, perhaps, if you must.

  But in books? All the more reason to praise and polish, to enhance Romance in books. All the more reason for a reader to seize that book, to plunge into a world that was not scaled down at all, but grand and glorious. That’s why women loved a Nona York novel.

  Reliable rapture. Sex with gusto. Love with grandeur. None of that foreordained coupling, groping the usual love handles while the 11

  o’clock news droned on the bedroom TV. What women wanted in a book was not what they wanted in life. And why should it be? In life what you wanted was a man, steady, loyal, supportive. A man who would be good to your children and nice to your mother and appreciative of you. Who kept a job. If you were very fortunate, he did the dishes now and then, and took out the trash and could change the oil in your car. In books? Well, any novelist who served up such a colorless stew would be laughed right out of the boudoir.

  No, for years, since Henry Westervelt first brought Celia to Useless, Nona had taken as her mini-muse Celia Henry. Not Celia’s life exactly, but her seemingly unimpaired capacity for romance, a belief in love uneroded by various rocky unions. Ce-294

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  lia’s courage had never failed her, though her judgment certainly had. For most people, failures of judgment ended their courage and they retreated. To Nona’s professional eye, Celia continued to exhibit a kind of bravery not often seen, or maybe merely an ongoing curiosity about the world, and a certain romantic optimism about men.

  She lived as though she believed that reward was somehow always imminent. In book after book, Nona had utilized Celia’s love life in an oblique manner and no one would ever have guessed, say, that the marine biologist Phillip in any way resembled Anthony St. Julien in Tie Your Heart to the Mast, or Edward Sherwood in The Bold and the Reckless. Nona had got any number of books out of Henry Westervelt, though in the books he did not die. That was not allowed in romance. The passionate connection he’d shared with Celia, that was fodder, of course, but more intriguing was Celia’s ongoing loyalty to Henry while she made love to others. Nona had gotten quite a few pages out of all Celia’s men, altering the names and the circumstances (the feckless Bobby Jerome became a brooding concert pianist), leaving the heroines more or less of one cloth. However, not a single resident of Isadora Island had ever so much as hinted that Nona’s books bore the whiff of local gossip. That is, until Dorothy Robbins began her Nona York binge, reading novels insa-tiably throughout the summer. Nona denied it, of course. But perhaps Dorothy’s sense of Celia as heroine was due to having heard of Celia’s love life as tales, not something she had witnessed over the years.

  Besides, Nona had adopted only the general shape of Celia’s love life, not its particulars. For one thing, she had left out all children.

  Children are notoriously unromantic. And Nona had smoothed out the life’s nubby texture, which is to say, she left out most of the confusion. Nona York heroines were seldom confused, though they enjoyed or endured every other emotion associated with love, its loss and eventual fulfillment. The books usually ended with wide-eyed wild rapture, Adam and Eve after the snake had slithered away and before God popped in unexpectedly.

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  Even now, Nona had in her tape recorder a story with a Russell-like character, which did not address Celia’s ambivalence about him, nor mention his bald spot, his teenage children, his fretty wife and his tendency to nag. Nona had recast Russell regally, in her own modest opinion, as a passionate cleric. And now here was Georgieanne telling her that such figments were unfashionable, passé and no longer selling.

  “Romance is timeless,” Nona insisted.

  “We don’t think that’s altogether true,” Georgieanne countered.

  “If it were, we would still be reading Victorian three-decker novels.”

  Nona returned icily, “I meant, in the most general sense. What’s wanted in a romance novel is a heroine whose virtue is in danger, but whose destiny is not.”

  Georgieanne’s perfectly tweezed brows knotted in consternation.

  “I don’t think women believe in destiny anymore, Nona. They’re all divorced and working while they bring up kids on their own, or they’re living with men who refuse to marry them, or they don’t know where to begin to look for a good man. Most of them are going to the gym for romance.”

  “I never heard of anything so stupid.”

  “Look at the pages and pages of dating personals.”

  “Those are all fake! Oh, Georgieanne, surely you knew that? People who run those services, they write those ads so other poor schleps will think they’re not alone. They are not real!”

  “Perhaps you’ve lived too long on this island,” Georgieanne replied. “Perhaps you’ve lost touch with the world. Not with the way it works, but with the way women want it to work. That’s the function of romance. That’s what’s changed.”

  The line of foot passengers started to move toward the ferry and Nona bid a swift and totally insincere goodbye to Georgieanne.

  Thwacking herself the more with her dish towel and collecting the doggies around her feet, she marched back to her Jeep, muttering under her
breath. As she pulled out of the parking area, she saw a single figure walking through the picnic area up toward the road.

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  wearing running shoes and white socks, sweatshirt draped over her shoulder and carrying only a small purse. She wore thick sunglasses; her gaze was downcast, and her step dogged. Nona drove to the stop sign and turned left toward Useless where the lone woman was trudging along the road. Bethie Henry.

  Everyone at Useless Point and most of Isadora knew the story of Lynette and Jennifer Shumley and Celia’s escorting them personally to Wade’s, knew moreover that Bethie had elected to stay with him despite such clear-cut perfidy. Talk about bad judgment! That was the whispered unanimous opinion all around Useless Point. The only person who didn’t whisper about it was Launch. Nona pulled alongside Bethie and offered gallantly, “Do you want a ride, Bethie?