Souvenir of Cold Springs

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “I certainly do.” He picked up his wineglass and drained it, looking at her steadily with his ironic smile.

  MARGARET

  1974

  The year Margaret was six, there were twelve people at Aunt Nell’s for Thanksgiving dinner. Even Aunt Kay showed up, after three years of refusing to associate with her husband’s family. Aunt Kay with her diamonds and her French cigarettes. Margaret liked to look at her and Uncle Teddy together. They were like no one else: Teddy tall and curly-haired and elegant, wearing a cashmere jacket and, sometimes, a silk ascot; and plump, beautiful Kay, wearing something long and silky and smelling of Chanel No. 22. Margaret knew they fought a lot when they were at home, but that year at Aunt Nell’s they always sat near each other, and sometimes he would reach over and touch her shoulder or link his pinky finger with hers, and she would smile at him. When she put her head back to blow smoke at the ceiling you could see her silver eyelids, and her long eyelashes stuck together with mascara.

  Margaret liked Aunt Kay because she paid no attention to children. She neither made a fuss over them nor scolded them; she simply ignored them, her own included. When Margaret threw a tantrum or Heather started showing off, Aunt Kay went into her own world—lit a cigarette and made herself a drink, crossed her legs and hummed an old song and blew smoke at the ceiling. Uncle Teddy was the kind of adult who made a fuss, but he was always fun, so nobody minded. He couldn’t yell at the kids without making it into a joke. He used to ride Margaret around on his shoulders, and he was so tall that her head would have hit the light fixtures if he hadn’t walked hunched over with his knees bent—his ape walk, he called it, and when he did it he talked the way he pretended apes talked. “Me—want—food,” he would growl in a deep voice as he slouched into the kitchen, carrying his glass in one hand, and Margaret would have to reach into the cookie jar on the refrigerator and cram a cookie into his mouth. “Thanks, human,” he would mutter, and when he finished the cookie he always said, “Me—want—more.” He could eat gingersnaps forever. Sometimes Aunt Nell told him to stop, for heaven’s sake—as if he were a little kid. Sometimes, when he came into a room, Margaret’s father left it.

  Margaret’s mother was going to have a baby, and she had to be careful. They all said that: “Lucy has to be careful.” More careful, they meant, than ordinary people who had to be careful crossing streets and not spilling their milk and running with scissors. She sat down a lot; some days she stayed in bed. They weren’t letting her help with the Thanksgiving dinner. She just sat in the living room with Dinah on her lap and talked to Mr. Fahey while Aunt Nell and her friend Thea cooked dinner. Her mother didn’t even bring the two pumpkin pies she usually did. Aunt Kay had brought pies—her own creation: apple-pumpkin tarts, plus a gadget she had bought for the occasion that you filled with cream and it squirted it out whipped.

  “Don’t let Peter get his hands on that,” Uncle Teddy said, ruffling his son’s hair. Peter danced around Heather and Ann and made squirting motions.

  “Will someone please control that child,” Heather said, and Ann began to cry. Aunt Kay left the room, trailing smoke.

  “Why don’t you kids go up and play in the attic?” Uncle Teddy suggested. He picked Ann up and hefted her over his shoulder like a sack of something. She stopped crying and began to giggle. “Come on, I’ll escort you up. Let’s go, Annie. Margaret and Heather will protect you from that wild animal.”

  Peter made wild animal noises all the way to the attic. He was twelve, and out of control. All the grown-ups said he was, except Mr. Fahey, who was too polite, and Aunt Kay, who ignored her son. Uncle Teddy said it fondly, but Margaret’s parents said it sternly, and Aunt Nell always said it with exasperation, looking like she wanted to tear her hair at the thought of him. Every once in a while a grown-up would say, “Is someone keeping an eye on Peter?” and they’d send Heather to go and find him. The Thanksgiving before, he had gone into the garage and smoked cigarettes in Uncle Jamie’s new Chevy, burning a hole in the upholstery. He had also decorated the dining room with a roll of toilet paper, but that wasn’t as bad, and he had meant well, Uncle Teddy said; he had really meant it to look nice, the pink paper draped over the chairs, the china, the wineglasses, and hanging from the chandelier in streamers. “I doubt that,” Heather had said, and Uncle Teddy got mad at her, and Aunt Nell got mad at Uncle Teddy.

  Aunt Nell hated Peter, Margaret knew. She always stuck up for the girls, except for Aunt Kay, whom she detested and who detested her back. When Margaret’s grandmother Caroline died, Aunt Kay had gone upstairs after the funeral and tried to walk out with Grandma’s leopard coat. Aunt Nell tried to stop her, and Kay said, “Caroline told me she wanted me to have it,” and Aunt Nell said, “Oh, my God, the woman is pathological.” They got into a fight, ending with slapping, Uncle Jamie holding them apart. Margaret had watched it all, on the front steps, holding the coat after they dropped it, rubbing her cheek against the soft spotted fur.

  The attic was enormous, obsessively neat, and nearly empty, full of dusty beige light from the windows and the attic dormer. Two bare lightbulbs with pull chains hung from the ceiling, one on each side of the chimney. At the end of each chain was a miniature red plastic fire hydrant.

  There was plenty of space to run around in the attic, even though one whole side of it was walled off to make a bedroom. It had been Uncle Jamie’s room when he was a boy, when there were five children and two parents living in a four-bedroom house. Margaret and her cousins loved that room. It still had Uncle Jamie’s bed in it, a high, narrow bed like an old-fashioned sleigh. The bedspread was black with cat hair: Dinah liked to sleep up there, away from it all. On the dresser was a collection of jointed wooden animals—giraffe, monkey, tiger, a dozen others—which the children were forbidden to play with, but Peter did anyway. One drawer of the dresser held odd bits of Uncle Jamie’s drawing equipment, pieces of charcoal, chalks that crumbled when you tried to use them, pristine pads of yellowing paper, a wooden ruler that said BYRNE DAIRY MILK IS MIGHTY FINE, and a pencil box with a sliding top. They were allowed to use the drawing materials if they were careful with them, and there was a box under the bed full of drawings made by Heather and Peter and Margaret over the years, and some scribbles by Ann from last Thanksgiving.

  In the closet Great-Grandpa Kerwin’s clothes were hanging. They had a concentrated dust smell, the essence of the attic. Heather had discovered that when you jumped on the bed, dust and cat hair rose from it in clouds, and the cousins used to put on the big old jackets and tie the silk ties around their necks and jump on the bed to make themselves sneeze.

  That Thanksgiving, Heather wouldn’t play in the attic with the others. She got mad at Peter for something and clumped down the stairs with Dinah. Margaret knew it was only an excuse. The real reason was that Heather was eleven and thought she was too old to play with little kids. Ann cried when she left. Margaret felt like crying herself—Heather was the only cousin she wanted to play with—but she said, “Come on, Annie, let’s look in the boxes,” to calm her down. Ann was two years younger than Margaret, and a crybaby, but she and Margaret had discovered the boxes the year before, stacked in a niche by the chimney, and they had both been fascinated.

  The boxes were labeled in Great-Grandma Kerwin’s handwriting. A box for each of her children. Of herself there wasn’t a trace. Six years after Aunt Peggy froze to death and three months after Uncle John was killed in the war, she had thrown everything she owned except her nightgowns into the furnace, and a month later she was dead of a brain tumor. She had never been to a doctor, but she knew, and she was famous in the family for foreseeing her own death. When they asked her why she had burned everything, she said, “I didn’t want to make trouble,” and refused to discuss it further. After she died Great-Grandpa Kerwin got sick, and Margaret had heard Aunt Nell say, “He just got smaller and thinner and sicker until finally he was gone.” Margaret tried to imagine this, her disappearing great-grandpa. By the time she was born he had disapp
eared for good.

  There was a box for each aunt and uncle. They were really great-aunts and great-uncles—the old people, most of them dead now. The box Margaret and Ann liked best was Aunt Peggy’s, even though it was the smallest. Aunt Nell’s had mostly old mittens and woolen scarves and flattened purses in it, and Uncle Jamie’s was full of dog-eared science books. The box labeled CAROLINE was empty except for some handkerchiefs and stiff, stinky shoes. Uncle John’s box was filled with his soldier suit and letters from France tied with white ribbon. Everyone had loved John, Aunt Nell had told Margaret. When he died, Great-Grandma went crazy. Talking about it, Aunt Nell had cried and smiled at the same time, and then laughed and hugged Margaret. Oh how time flies, she had said. How time does fly.

  Peter hung around, dancing and imitating animals and trying to get Margaret and Ann to pay attention to him, and when they decided to play with the boxes, he came over and wanted to see. Margaret had hated Peter for so long that she no longer knew who he was or what he was like. She had seen with surprise when they arrived that morning that he was getting big. He’s going to be tall like Teddy, her mother had said. Beanpole, Aunt Kay said. He’s a little shit, Heather had said once.

  He put his fingers around Margaret’s neck and pretended to strangle her. His fingers felt grubby, but he didn’t really press hard, so she ignored him and read what it said on each box. She could read and Ann couldn’t. Mrs. Morelli, her teacher, said she read at sixth-grade level. She read not only the names—NELL, JAMIE, CAROLINE, PEGGY, JOHN, written in black crayon—but also Hunt’s Baked Beans, Six O’clock Coffee, Crosse & Blackwell’s Fine Jams Jellies & Preserves, printed in fading red and blue letters on the sides.

  “Come on, let’s open one,” Ann said, unimpressed, and Peter let go of Margaret’s neck and dragged the box labeled PEGGY out into the middle of the floor. Ann pulled away the flaps.

  Mementos, Margaret’s mother called the things in the boxes. Mementos was a beautiful word, and all Aunt Peggy’s mementos were beautiful. There were silky scarves and a black shawl and a Chinese hat and an empty glass bottle with a glass stopper that still smelled like roses. There was a doll whose eyes would no longer open but who had real leather shoes and a brown wool bonnet trimmed with pink ribbon rosettes that matched her dress. There was a book called A Girl of the Limberlost with a picture of a butterfly on the cover. There were more old letters, tied up and stuffed in a tin box with PICKWICK INN CANDY SHOP, SAN FRANCISCO written on the top, and around the sides scenes of long-ago people in top hats and hoopskirts with horses and carriages. Under the letters was Aunt Peggy’s old jewelry.

  “You can play with it, but don’t wreck anything and put every bit of it back,” Margaret’s mother had told them last year. Ann draped the shawl over her shoulders, and Margaret looked at the book, and they passed the doll back and forth. Peter wasn’t very interested in the box once it was opened. He wanted the Chinese hat, but Margaret wouldn’t give it to him, so he went into Uncle Jamie’s old room to draw pictures of tigers.

  “Let’s put on all the jewelry,” Margaret said. There was a necklace and bracelets for each of them, a gold chain with a half-moon pendant that Ann draped around her ear to make Margaret laugh, a ring that Margaret claimed because it was blue, her favorite color, and a pin in the shape of a cat with emerald eyes that she fastened with difficulty to the front of Ann’s sweater. “These are real jewels,” she said, fingering her pearls. She picked up a bracelet that looked like it was made of dead beetles and quickly put it down again. “These are worth a lot of money. Aunt Peggy must have been rich before she froze.”

  “It would be so cold,” Ann said, making a face. They both knew that Aunt Peggy had frozen to death ice fishing on Onondaga Lake, long before they were born, even before their parents were born.

  “No, it isn’t,” Margaret said. “You just fall asleep. My father told me.”

  “I couldn’t go to sleep if it was that cold.”

  “You would if it was cold enough.”

  Ann wanted to pretend she was Aunt Peggy freezing to death, but Margaret didn’t think it sounded like much fun—just going to sleep—and also it didn’t seem right, it was so sad about Aunt Peggy, limberlost forever. Frozen as hard as the beetles. There was a picture of her on the piano downstairs with the other family faces, starting with Great-Grandpa Kerwin’s mother in a long dress with a train, and ending with Margaret, Heather, Ann, and Peter posed on the front porch, all smiling for once. Aunt Peggy had dark hair pulled back from her face, and thin, straight eyebrows and a rosebud mouth. She looked sad, as if she had, like her mother, foreseen her own death. Uncle Jamie had once said, “Margaret’s the picture of Peggy, isn’t she?” and Aunt Nell had replied, “Let’s hope the child has a better chance in life.”

  When Peter called them from the bedroom they put away the jewelry. Margaret didn’t want to, but she knew Ann was tired of it, and when Ann got tired of things she started fooling around. Margaret imagined her breaking the strand of blue beads and thinking up a game to play with them—Ann and Peter racing around the attic trying to hit each other with beads. She put everything carefully back in the box. She could come back after the others left. She and her parents always stayed overnight at Aunt Nell’s because it was too far to drive back to Boston: her cousins and their parents lived in Albany, so they had to drive home. Margaret slept in the room that had been Aunt Peggy’s, which had a bed with pineapple posts. The pineapple on each post was removable, and there was space inside to put something tiny. Last year she had hidden a silk flower from the bouquet in the hall, the year before a tiny tube of lip gloss that belonged to Thea.

  The blue ring said SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS in gold letters on the blue; Margaret wanted, desperately, to hide it in one of the bedposts, to keep it safe and private where she could always find it. But she would do that later, and she would snap the tiny snaps on the doll’s leather shoes and take the bonnet off and stroke its golden hair, and look at A Girl of the Limberlost to see if she could read it. She was just beginning to read real books, with chapters.

  Peter had drawn a picture of the two of them as animals. Margaret was just a tiger—well drawn, leaping through a hoop of fire and labeled with her name—but he had drawn Ann as a monkey with long brown hair all over her face and grinning gap-toothed mouth. “Look,” he said. “I made you almost as ugly as you really are.”

  Ann grabbed the picture and ran out of the bedroom, crying. She said, “I’m going to tell Daddy,” and Peter said, “Who cares.” When she was gone, he looked at Margaret and laughed. “Aren’t you going to cry, too? Or don’t you mind being a tiger?”

  She said, “It’s a good drawing.”

  He looked surprised and said, “Thanks.” He went over to the dresser and picked up the pencil box. “Come here,” he said. He and Margaret sat on the bed. “Look at this.”

  “What?”

  “This.”

  From the pencil box he took an eraser and handed it to Margaret. It was pink, and said Eberhard-Faber in faint gray letters. It looked unused.

  “So what?”

  “What does it remind you of?”

  “It doesn’t remind me of anything,” she said. “It’s an eraser.”

  He snickered. “It doesn’t remind you of anything else?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because you’re a girl. It reminds me of—” He took it from her and held it up. “See? You know.” She shook her head.

  He sighed. “What do boys have that girls don’t have?”

  She stood up, “Oh, I don’t know, Peter, you’re such a dope.”

  He took her hand and tried to pull her back down beside him. She twisted out of his grasp and ran to the bedroom door, but he was quicker than she was, and he slammed it shut. “Don’t be a baby,” he said. “A big dumb baby like Ann.”

  “I’m going.” She knew she wasn’t a baby. She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t let herself. “Let me go.”

  “Not yet.”

>   The room was darker with the door shut. It was getting late. Dinner, she knew, was at four o’clock. She wondered what time it was. He said, “You want to see my thing?”

  “No.” What thing? She didn’t care. “I’m going down. I’m going to tell if you don’t let me go.”

  He stood against the door, smiling at her. “Just look at this.”

  He unzipped his brown pants and pulled it out. She had never seen one before, except on babies. It was bigger than she expected, much bigger than the eraser. He held it in his hand, like a hose. It was deadly white, whiter than his hand in the dim light, and there was scraggly hair around it, like the hair he drew on Ann’s monkey face.

  Peter waggled it and said, “See? Want to touch it?”

  She put her weight against him and pushed with her shoulder. Still smiling, he let her push him, he fell back with an exaggerated stumble, still holding his thing. He was laughing softly, a horrible, artificial laugh that had nothing to do with her, it shut her out, it was all Peter’s, but at the same time she knew she was the one he was laughing at.

  She opened the door and ran out, across the brown darkness of the attic. “If you tell, I’ll kill you,” she heard him say. Her own footsteps scared her, heavy and thumping. She ran down the wooden stairs, almost falling, fearing he would come after her. At the bottom, in the safety of the upstairs hall, she slammed the attic door and listened. She heard nothing except the thud of her heart and the conversation from down in the kitchen, but she imagined him creeping down the attic stairs, suppressing his laughter, and bursting out to frighten her. She ran into the room where she slept and shut the door.

  Dinah was curled on the pineapple bed, sleeping. Even when Margaret lay down beside her she didn’t stir: a round ball like a doughnut, her black tail trapped under her paws, her black wedge of a face scrunched quiet. There was white under her chin, one V-shaped patch where she liked to be stroked, but you couldn’t see it when she was all curled up. Margaret whispered, “Wake up, Dinah, Dinah, Dinah,” and the cat lifted her head up sleepily and blinked, then yawned and began to purr.