Souvenir of Cold Springs

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Aunt Alice came home just before teatime every afternoon. If Peggy was sitting on the balcony, she would watch her aunt come up the street and turn into the cobbled sidewalk of the Clarion Apartments—a tall, strong-featured, slightly overweight woman in a split skirt and matching jacket, a flowered turban covering her wild gray hair. If she saw Peggy, she would call, “Hi there, kiddo,” but mostly she walked as if she were lost in thought, seeing nothing but the pavement under her feet or, probably, the blobs of rough clay she had left behind.

  Teatime was at four o’clock and Aunt Alice took it very seriously. As the weeks went by, Peggy too began to look forward to it with an eagerness that astonished her. The prospect of drinking endless cups of tea, eating pastry, and listening to her mother’s sister talk about Frank Lloyd Wright, or Roosevelt, or the projects her students were struggling with was not something that would normally fill her with anything but mild dread. Now it was the highlight of her day.

  When she was in the wrong mood, she considered this a tragedy, and she would write to Ray that her dependence on the small and insignificant had become pathetic. She thought about that often, how things she had barely noticed in her previous life, or taken for granted, were now the whole world to her. The arrival of the mail. A tray bearing a teapot and a platter of cakes. A chat with someone at the drugstore. Claire and Frances coming to tea. A new magazine. Once, when she was watching for the mailman, the sun came out from behind a cloud in a burst of white light and illuminated Laguna Street—the tile roof of the building across the way, the pots of yellow and rose lantana that lined the walk, the gleaming maroon chassis of a Buick sedan parked out in front. Even after the sun disappeared again, the scene stayed in her mind, its colors and clarity and brilliance, like one of Cora’s paintings but infinitely more beautiful.

  When she was aware of the baby kicking, even if it was the middle of the night, she got up and walked around to distract herself, and did her best not to imagine a little fist, or a foot with tiny toes jabbing at her. She tried not to think of the baby at all. It came into her head sometimes not as a living creature but as her old doll, Madeleine, whose smocked pink dress and real leather shoes with mother-of-pearl snaps had been the joy of her childhood.

  They had arranged for her to see a doctor—a cold, painless act that she could endure with half of herself turned off. After her visit, she couldn’t remember his name or what he looked like or the sensation of his gloved, Vaselined fingers in her vagina. He talked distantly about her general health and what she should be careful of—no mention of an actual baby. And, mercifully, Aunt Alice stopped talking about it after the first couple of weeks. Uncle Ralph never mentioned it at all, and kept his gaze off her middle: when he talked to her he looked fixedly into her eyes, his round face stiff with the effort of it. This would have amused her if she hadn’t been so grateful to him.

  At first, she wrote home critically about her aunt and uncle, making jokes, with exclamation points, about their dinner table conversation, which almost exclusively concerned shipping and art. She described Sunday mornings, when they all walked to Mass at Saint Mary’s Church—a red-brick monstrosity, Peggy wrote, like a church in a horror story—and her aunt and uncle singing hymns at the top of their lungs, Aunt Alice in a shrill, off-key soprano, Uncle Ralph a rumbling monotone.

  “They made ‘Holy God, We Praise Thy Name’ sound like a duet for mouse and freight train,” she wrote to her friend Ruth, who appreciated such things.

  Her letters were full of funny stories about Claire and Cora and Frances, and about Bernarda, the Mexican cleaning lady whose only English words seemed to be clean and dirty and whose lunch was a beer and a greasy tortilla wrapped in newspaper. She presented her life in California as if it were a play with a comic cast of characters—something like You Can’t Take It With You, which she and Stewart had seen at the university with Ray and Caroline.

  And yet this was her sanctuary, and she knew she’d better get used to it: the San Francisco home of her rich aunt, who had married late but enviably to a shipping tycoon, a man whose claim to fame in her family was that he made money during tough times. All through the last hard years, while Harper and Kerwin was slowly going downhill, Steele Ocean Transport had been thriving, and Aunt Alice had not only tucked little checks into the letters to her sister Mary (purple ink on heavy rag paper with ALICE WOODRUFF STEELE printed across the top) but paid Peggy’s and Caroline’s bills at the university. At Christmas she shipped oranges—once, a case of champagne, most of which was still sitting down in the cellar on Hillside Street; and on birthdays she sent exotic, peculiar clothes like embroidered Mexican shirts, a red leather fringed vest, wildly colored Chinese silk shirts for the girls, lederhosen for John and Jamie. Aunt Alice fascinated the Kerwin children—she was their eccentric, lovable savior—and when California was proposed as a haven, Peggy seized on the idea of her wealthy and sensible aunt who would get her out of the mess she was in.

  Because her mother, of course, had gone to pieces. She assumed the father of the baby was Stewart, and couldn’t seem to understand that it wasn’t—they had gone out together for so long, Stewart was so obviously crazy about her, why couldn’t they just get married, how had she let it go so long, maybe it still wasn’t too late for a wedding.

  She finally convinced her mother it wasn’t Stewart, and her mother became hysterical all over again. Some unknown seducer—how much worse, worse than anything. Her mother had slapped her, called her stupid and stubborn, and then cried, horribly, like a child. Peggy endured it as silently as she could. She was surprised by the desire to tell the truth to someone. Not her mother. Nell, maybe? But Nell was so young, and she already disliked Ray. Ruth—but Ruth could never keep a secret. Louise? She would drop dead of shock. She had fantasies of telling Caroline, and imagined Caro’s outrages, the breaking of the engagement, Ray’s elation, the quickie marriage, the happily ever after—but at the heart of her fantasy was a knot of fear not only of her parents and Caroline but of Ray.

  Meanwhile, there was her mother, lecturing her and crying and wringing her hands, and moaning about how Dad must never find out—all he needed was the disgrace of his daughter on top of his troubles at the store. If he knew, he would call her a whore and throw her out of the house: this her mother made clear. “We have to find a way to keep it from him,” her mother kept saying, as if that were the important thing and not the baby growing inside Peggy, getting daily bigger and more insistent. And never a word of sympathy.

  Finally, her mother pulled herself together and came up with her brilliant idea: she wrote to her sister, and Aunt Alice wired back that Peggy should come immediately. Peggy’s mother broke down again. Alice was a saint, to take in a girl she hadn’t seen since she was a child. Peggy didn’t deserve such charity. Peggy should kneel at her feet.

  Peggy refused to acknowledge her mother’s resourcefulness or her aunt’s goodness. She hardly spoke at all, those last days at home. She spent the evenings in her room with the key turned in the lock, reading magazines and sorting though her clothes, deciding what to pack, keeping her mind on details—ironing, mending, organizing her trunk. Ray was out in Ohio, on the road. Stewart kept calling, and she kept making excuses not to see him. In the back of her copy of A Girl of the Limberlost, she made a calendar showing the days left until November twenty-second, the date she figured she was due. Every night she blacked out a square with her fountain pen, slowly and carefully filling up every bit of it with a mesh of tiny inkblots. By the time she got on the Broadway Limited for Chicago, in August, there were a hundred and twelve days left.

  Officially, she was going to California because childless Aunt Alice had expressed a wish to see one of her nieces, and Peggy was the one chosen to go.

  “That’s just great,” Caroline said. “She gets rewarded for dropping out of college while I drone away at bio lab.”

  “She’s the oldest,” their father said. He accepted calmly the charity of his sister-in-law. He accepted eve
rything calmly—his children’s troubles, his financial crises, the state of the world—in studied contrast to his wife, who met life with hysterics. He put his arm around Peggy at the train and kissed her on the forehead. “It’s a great opportunity for you, darlin’. See the world a bit. Find out what you want to do with your life.”

  She put her head on his shoulder and hugged him hard, sideways, keeping her thickened waist out of the way. She thought of what her mother had said, how his face would change if he knew the truth, what things he would say to her in his rage. She looked up into his gentle blue eyes and knew it was true, and it was her mother she clung to at the end, resenting the necessary conspiracies of women, the unreasonableness of men, the secrecy that had to accompany something as simple and good as her love for Ray. She wrote to him on the train and mailed it when she changed at Chicago:

  I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t have the heart. I didn’t know what you would say. I guess I was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me anymore. I’ll stay in California until it’s over and when I come back you can decide what you want to do. But at least the baby won’t be there to make you decide on something you don’t want. I couldn’t bear for you to say I forced you. So this is good-bye for now, my dearest.

  And then, after two more hot, sleepless days and nights in a roomette on the Forty-Niner, reading a blur of newspapers and magazines and Pocket Books she bought at the stations they went through, she was in San Francisco, in the small oval-windowed spare bedroom in flat 3-A of Clarion Apartments, where her blushing uncle’s first act when she arrived was to give her ten dollars as her weekly allowance, and her large aunt who chain-smoked Luckies in an ivory holder told Peggy about the new direction her sculpture was taking since the European situation had become so serious.

  It took her two days of moping in bed, drinking orange juice and crying, to recover from the train trip. Uncle Ralph politely avoided her whenever he could, and, when this failed, told her about California history—the Missions, the Gold Rush, the fire, the shipping business, last year’s opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. Aunt Alice tried tactfully, dutifully, to talk about Peggy’s “predicament,” as she called it, and Peggy hurt her feelings by refusing to discuss it.

  After her first few disoriented days, the apartment, her refuge, began to seem more like a jail, in spite of the overlapping Oriental rugs on the polished floors, the new Frigidaire full of food, the velvet-upholstered furniture, the flowers everywhere, the sparkling clean bathtub where she took a long bath every morning using her aunt’s L’Heure Bleu bath oil. The quiet was overwhelming, and the constant presence of Bernarda disconcerted her—her silent scurrying with rags and mops, and the way she flattened herself against the wallpaper when they passed in the hall, hissing a polite “Señora” and showing her missing teeth.

  A jail cell, Peggy thought compulsively. A convent. A hermitage. A cage. She roamed the apartment, avoiding Bernarda, expecting to see bars on the windows. Or to look out and see miles of ocean, as if she were on one of Uncle Ralph’s ships, trapped, isolated, in the middle of nowhere.

  Then, on her second Sunday afternoon, her aunt and uncle took her out for a drive, first to Golden Gate Park to visit the Conservatory and have tea at the Japanese Tea Garden, and then down Route 1, where below them they could see the terrifying surf crashing against the rocks. She was shy with her relatives, and Aunt Alice did most of the talking while Peggy sat, slightly carsick, in the Buick’s backseat and looked out the window at decaying adobe houses, fields of flowers, trucks loaded with artichokes, rows of cypress trees, the vast gray sky and brown hills. They ended up at Half Moon Bay, where Aunt Alice bought vegetables from an Italian farmer and Uncle Ralph, smoking a cigar, walked with Peggy down a dirt road lined with fields of brussels sprouts, and told her that grizzly bears used to live there. Then her aunt introduced her to the farmer and his wife: mia cara nipote da New York. Mr. Mazzi smiled and bowed to her over his clasped hands; Mrs. Mazzi gave her a mango, a fruit she had never seen. It was Peggy’s first hint that her aunt and uncle weren’t going to hide her away and be ashamed of her, and the knowledge of this flooded her with the gratitude and affection she had failed so far to feel.

  She found herself becoming interested in the lives of her aunt and uncle. She didn’t understand her aunt’s sculptures, but she learned not to mind hearing her talk about them, and she began to enjoy the tea table gossip about the art world and the students at the School of Fine Arts. She became familiar with Uncle Ralph’s ships: the newest one, a fast freighter called the Alice Ann after her aunt, the Cheney, which had been wrecked in the Indian Ocean, the Einar, which brought back from China the very tea they drank every afternoon. There was a map on the wall in her uncle’s study that followed, with colored flags, the course of the Steele ships across the Pacific; weekends, they brought it up to date, her uncle consulting a list of latitudes and longitudes he brought home from the office every Saturday, Peggy moving the pins to their precise positions.

  Her uncle gave her a street map, and with her allowance in her purse she began to spend the afternoons walking in the strange hilly city where palm trees lined the streets, and gaudy unfamiliar flowers bloomed everywhere, and there were so many beggars, so many foreigners—a city that was warm and sunny when she arrived, as August should be, but two days later became as gray and foggy as March. Her uncle quoted Mark Twain, who said that the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco, and Peggy repeated that in letters to Ruth and Louise, with a certain pride.

  She walked no matter what the weather, because staying inside oppressed her, and because walking tired her out and helped her sleep. She also had a vague idea that going up and down the hills would bring the baby on faster. And what else did she have to do? Map in her pocket, she marched slowly, methodically, up and down the straight, hilly streets, staring back at people if they looked at her, stopping sometimes at a cafeteria or a drugstore to rest and have something cold to drink. She walked rain or shine, wearing her gray raincoat even when the day was too warm for it, but her big belly was no longer possible to disguise. Women she encountered in shops and restaurants were always asking her when the baby was due, was it her first, did she want a boy or a girl. Once she had a long conversation with a waitress, telling her about her husband back east, the new house they had bought, how they were looking forward to their first child—Thomas Raymond if it was a boy, Judith Ann if it was a girl.

  Her favorite walk was straight down Sacramento Street to Chinatown. She liked it there because, oddly enough, no one paid her the slightest attention. But she was afraid to eat or drink anything; the smells made her queasy, and the webbed feet and the pink pigs’ corpses in the butchers’ windows disgusted her. One day she stood for a long time in front of the window of an herb doctor’s shop, wondering if, had she visited Aunt Alice last spring, the baby could have been disposed of by some small, wizened Chinese man with needles and potions. She closed her eyes and let tears come, seeing herself as a bulky, tragic figure in a gray raincoat in the midst of a thousand milling Chinese.

  That was the day when, arriving home wet and exhausted and depressed, she opened the mailbox with the key Aunt Alice had given her, and there was Ray’s beautiful angular handwriting.

  She hurried upstairs with the letter. It didn’t matter what it said. It was the fact of the letter that counted. He had written to her; he had compromised himself. She had proof in her hand if she wanted it: power. He had trusted her with that, had loved her enough to give it to her. “Oh Ray, Ray,” she said softly, and ran her finger over her name: Margaret Mary Kerwin, c/o Steele. She was overcome, suddenly, with longing for him. She had thought pregnant women lost their desire for sex, and it astonished her how much she thought about it, wanted it—even dreamed about it, waking with such an ache between her legs that she had to relieve it, though that always made her cry, it was so sad, so pathetic to do it alone, and she only wanted him more than ever afterward.

  The letter read:

/>   My darling, I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for stealing away like that. Surely you must know that I would have wanted to hold you in my arms and kiss you good-bye. Dearest Peggy, I never suspected this, all summer, you seemed just the same, not even sad, and I admire you more than I can say for being so courageous. I feel you have been wise and made the right decision for us. Our lives are too confused and unsettled now to add this complication to them. But my dearest I wish I could be with you. If there was any way I could get myself transferred to California I would! But in fact the territory here is booming, and I’m going to do especially well this fall. A case of Pepsi-Cola in every pot! That’s our goal. Peggy, keep me posted on everything. Write to me often. I will be on the road a good deal, but your letters will be here when I get home. It would be best to use a plain envelope, with no return address. And I will write to you from all the hot spots of New York and Ohio! And I long to see you when you return, my darling. Ever your loving Ray

  There could not be a more wonderful letter. She hugged it to her heart, kissed his signature. She got out her photograph, a snapshot taken by Caroline of her and Ray and Stewart the winter before. Stewart looked like Stewart, tall and long-jawed and dull. Ray looked like a movie star, better perhaps than he looked in real life, with his burning dark eyes and curly hair and clear-cut features, a faint smile on his lips. She loved the snapshot; she even loved the fact that she herself didn’t look her best: she stood awkwardly between the two men, an arm on the shoulder of each; her stocking cap had slipped back, exposing her broad forehead, and she wore a goofy grin. She wasn’t beautiful like Caroline, and yet she was the one Ray loved.

  Beyond that, as always, she didn’t go. Ray loved Peggy, but he was engaged to Caroline—formally and officially. It had been in the newspaper, and he was supposed to be saving up to buy her a ring. Their families were pleased. Caroline’s father had gotten Ray the Pepsi-Cola job through his friend Bill Fahey. Caroline’s mother and Ray’s mother had become friends. Those were the facts. The situation was complicated. It would work itself out.