“Welcome to Witchita,” Zee said, popping the cork on the bottle of champagne.
“We’re smug about Witchita Hills,” Robin Robinson said, a small woman, Lucy’s height with a fleshy figure, thick hair in a ponytail, a self-conscious nervousness about her, fiddling with her hair, the scarf around her neck.
Pressed against her chest, her arms wrapped around it, she held a folder.
“Not smug, Robby. We’re simply deliriously happy here,” Zee said. “And you’ll be happy too, Lucy.”
“We hope you will,” Lane said. “It’s a very close group.”
“This is the hour we meet for Chablis after dinner whenever we can,” Zee began. “Just before the children’s baths. But tonight we brought champagne for you.”
She poured Lucy a glass.
“And presents.”
“Just little things to cheer you up,” Robin said. “It’s always lonely at first when you move to a new place.”
“It’s lonely for you, Robby. Not for everyone,” Zee said.
“So the house is yours or rented?” Josie asked, always after the particulars, scooping icing onto her finger and licking it.
“Mine,” Lucy said.
“It’s been rented out ever since we moved here five years ago,” Josie said. “Mainly to creeps.”
“Creeps and government workers,” Zee said.
“The house has belonged to me for a long time and I’ve been renting it out,” Lucy said, and then because it didn’t seem sufficient explanation, “It belonged to my parents who are dead and I’m an only child.”
“How awful for you but lucky for us that you’re here now,” Zee said.
“When the last tenants moved out in December I thought we’d try it in Washington because New York is . . .” She shrugged as if they already knew why she had moved.
“Because New York is so expensive and crowded,” Zee finished her sentence for her. “No wonder you wanted to move. And the crime with children. It must be awful.”
“I suppose,” Lucy said. “And also it’s . . .”
But she didn’t seem able to form her thoughts or finish her sentences, and why, she wondered later, did she feel the pressure to begin to say something she had no intention of finishing?
“My grandmother was French,” Maggie began out of the blue as if expecting currency from such a confession. “Only she’s dead.”
“French, how very interesting,” Lane said, and Maggie nodded.
“I was the only person with a French grandmother at my old school in New York City,” Maggie said.
“Excellent, Maggie, a small triumph,” Zee said. “I don’t think you’ll find a single French grandmother at Lafayette Elementary.” She put her arm around Maggie. “Now open your presents, you guys.”
The prize—the “pièce de résistance,” as Zee called it, was wrapped in tissue paper and yellow ribbon with a card: From the studio of Robin Robinson.
“From all of us to you,” Zee said. “We hope you’ll love it here.”
Something about the package itself, the crinkly tissue wrapping of it, the wide grosgrain bow, sent a shiver down Lucy’s spine.
“Open it, Mama,” Maggie said, nervously sensing her mother’s hesitation. “People want you to open it.”
“Of course,” Lucy said with a soft unnatural laugh, a smothered giggle, realizing she must have been standing there blankly with some kind of expression on her face, maybe bewilderment, or fear or humiliation—some neuron shooting watch out in her brain.
“I will, of course I will,” Lucy said, taking the package from Robin, setting it on the table, undoing the ribbon.
“How lovely . . .” she said with a kind of desperation—lovely a word she never used, her mother’s word, the only English word her mother had thought more beautiful in English than in French.
She unfolded the tissue, careful not to rip it, to delay what she already knew instinctively by the ceremony of the evening, would upset her.
And it did.
A black-and-white 81/2-by-11 photograph of the house taken that morning just after they had arrived in Witchita Hills lay in the tissue-paper bed.
“Robin is one of the best photographers in the city,” Zee was saying.
“She is,” Josie added. “With credentials from the Corcoran.”
“We wanted you to have a Robin Robinson like the rest of us do,” Lane added.
“Thank you,” Lucy said when the room got quiet. “Thank you all very much.”
Or did she thank them, she wondered later, reading to Felix before he went to sleep. She must have said something although she couldn’t exactly remember what happened next as they stood around the kitchen drinking champagne, eating the Welcome cake.
“Why don’t you like the photograph, Mama?” Maggie asked after everyone had left.
“I do like it,” Lucy said. “It’s excellent.”
“No you don’t,” Maggie said. “I can tell.”
Lucy wrapped the remaining Welcome cake in Saran and put it in the fridge, sank into a chair, and pulled Felix into her lap for body warmth.
“It makes me feel exposed,” Lucy said quietly.
Maggie was leaning against the sink, her arms tight across her chest.
“They’re going to think you don’t like them,” she said.
“I suppose they will.”
Lucy had not intended to fall asleep with Felix. She lay down beside him, thinking of Reuben, the weight of him across her body, his face above her face, lips on her lips, his long legs against her legs, the way she fell asleep the nights Reuben was there.
I don’t sleep with Elaine, he had told her. Hardly ever. She is not that woman.
What woman is she not? Lucy had asked.
She is not the woman with whom I sleep, he said. You are that woman.
She had decided that Felix would sleep in her bed for the time being because he needed her, because she wanted him there and later when he had adjusted to his life in a new place he’d sleep in his own small bed in the room she had painted tangerine.
“Mama!”
Maggie’s voice woke her up and she jumped out of bed in alarm.
“There’s a man downstairs in the kitchen,” Maggie said, standing over her bed.
“What man?”
“I don’t know what man. I was putting away my clothes and I heard a noise and I actually thought it might be a cat who got into the house but it’s a man.”
“I was sure I locked the doors when the neighbors left,” Lucy said, heading to the stairs.
“He’s standing in the middle of the kitchen like he lives here,” Maggie said.
THE LIGHTS WERE still on and Lucy tiptoed down the front stairs, stopping at the landing to peer around the wall so she could see the kitchen.
The man in jeans and a sweater, ripped at the elbow, the sleeves pushed up, was looking at the photograph Lucy had left on the kitchen table as if it were perfectly normal to walk into a house without knocking and look around.
“Did I startle you?” he asked.
“Of course you startled me,” Lucy said.
He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender—large hands for a small man and broad as if he worked out of doors.
“I walked in because the door was unlocked and I’d seen you in the kitchen with the neighbors.” He pointed to the blue house to the left of Lucy’s. “I’m August Russ next door,” he said. “I’ve been anxious to talk to you about this house.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“I’m so sorry. Is it the middle of the night?” he asked, and answering himself, “Almost midnight. I guess it is. Sometimes I simply don’t think.”
He was boyish, his hair disheveled, his eyes behind the thick lenses of wire-rimmed glasses deep blue in the overhead light.
“I’m interested in your house.”
“Why?” she asked. “It’s just an ordinary house.”
“I have an interest in its history,” he said, starting to si
t down, but she waved him up.
“I don’t know the history of this house, if that’s what you’re hoping to find out,” she said.
She was standing next to the kitchen table, still dressed. Her glasses must have dropped to the floor when she fell asleep.
“I’m a cultural historian,” he said. “My field is actually American culture and society.” His voice was deep and warm. “I’m a professor. More or less a failed professor, and a widower,” he added.
A little crazy, this strange man, Lucy thought. But there was something appealing about him—thick curly hair he wore long below the ears, strong cheekbones. Not a large man but compact, athletic, an element of surprise in his eyes.
Even before he took his leave, he was blossoming in Lucy’s imagination.
His hand was on the doorknob and he was backing out of the house.
“I’m so sorry to intrude,” he said with a wave. “But I’m glad to meet you. Very glad to meet you. See you anon.”
And he was gone.
Five
ZEE STOOD IN her bedroom window overlooking the street watching Lucy Painter leave her house in a red parka, the collar up, the child, Felix, in her arms.
It was snowing, the damp, lacy flakes that fill the landscape, blanketing the black streets, the tops of cars, the branches of trees and bushes, a weighty, silent snow.
This was Zee’s favorite kind of weather, rare in Washington but familiar from her Michigan childhood when she’d sit in the window seat of the old kitchen, a wood fire blazing in the stove, and watch the snow take over her field of vision.
The small farm just beyond the town limits of Revere—with its run of chickens and pigs, two milking cows, no heat besides the two woodstoves, no indoor plumbing until she left for college—could be erased in winter as she sat in the window waiting.
Across the street, next door to Lucy, August Russ was picking up the newspaper, underdressed as usual, bare feet, Bermuda shorts, a button-down shirt with the tails hanging out.
She wondered if he drank himself to sleep at night, if he slept in his clothes, if he cooked for himself or sat in sorrow at the dining room table eating chips from a bag. She must remember to double her order with the vegetable co-op and take a bushel of beans and squash and apples and pears to him on co-op Tuesdays.
“Good morning, sunshine.” Adam came in the door fully dressed, unusual for a Saturday. “The boys are watching cartoons and I’ve been under the impression that cartoons are off your list of allowables for children along with sugar and guns.”
Zee heard him but didn’t turn away from the window.
August must have called out to Lucy since she had walked to the end of her front porch and leaned out to speak to him. And then he went inside, leaving the door open, coming back in L.L.Bean boots and the hooded sweatshirt with the University of Pennsylvania logo which he often wore. He closed the door and headed down the steps, crossing his front yard to Lucy’s.
“Cartoons are fine on weekends,” she said.
“And guns?” Adam asked. “Guns are a good idea too, my treasure, my chosen one, my bride. Good thing I went to Nam on behalf of our great country and learned to use one.”
He flopped down on the bed, and when Zee turned around, he was looking at the ceiling, his arms across his chest, tears running down his cheeks.
This was new, the fury of his bitterness. The tears. She could not find it in her heart to respond.
Weeks earlier, on January 27, they had been at the kitchen table eating dinner when the news of the Paris Peace Accords on Viet Nam came over the radio nightly news announcing the end of the war, providing for complete American withdrawal of troops and a truce.
Zee had just served macaroni and cheese, especially creamy, and she would not forget the menu that night since as the news was broadcast, Adam threw his plate against the window overlooking the backyard, splattering macaroni everywhere, breaking the window although the storms were left intact.
“Bull’s-eye,” he said, getting up from the table. “I’m an excellent marksman, boys.”
He walked out the back door and slammed it.
The boys were stunned to silence.
“It’s very upsetting for your father that he went to Viet Nam as an American to fight for us against the Communists and we lost the war,” Zee said.
“You told us he was a hero,” Luke said.
“He was a hero,” Zee said. “He was given a prize for what he did called a Purple Heart.”
“If he was a hero, why did we lose the war?” Daniel asked.
“It was not your father’s fault,” she said.
The rest of the story was too complicated to explain to the boys. She didn’t understand it herself. She only understood that the war had changed her life and Adam’s in a way that seemed permanent.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you, Zelda.” Adam’s voice was thin. “Did you get back to the people in Vermont?”
“You told me it wasn’t necessary.”
“It wasn’t necessary to call back but . . .” He rubbed his shirtsleeve across his face. “I think you should tell them you won’t be coming to Vermont in the near future.”
Almost a year since she had been there with Adam, and he’d been twice without her. She wondered would she ever have the strength to go again.
She would not have replied to Adam’s request in any case but the phone next to her side of the bed rang and it was Robin calling about the photographs.
“I shouldn’t have taken those pictures until I knew her better, well enough at least to have a sense of who she is,” Robin said. “I think she felt I was intruding and hated the photograph.”
“My fault, Robby,” Zee said, always willing to take the blame for things, disarming in her acquiescence. “Don’t worry.”
She hung up the phone and grabbed her clothes off the chaise heading to the bathroom.
“Have you gotten fat, lovey?” Adam called as Zee shut the door, planning to hurry across the street where August was talking to Lucy Painter.
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“There must be some reason you don’t want me to see you without clothes.”
“There is,” she said flatly.
She put on a V-necked long-sleeved black T so her breasts looked full enough but not large, no cleavage, hooked the necklaces, and opened a pot of rouge which she seldom wore but in the mirror her face had taken on the sallow look of illness. Too much winter.
She wanted to look pretty and she did.
By the time she ran downstairs, jumped over Blue, tearing his purple elephant to bits, Lucy and August were sitting on the brick wall in front of Lucy’s house, Felix mounding the snow on the sidewalk into a small snowman.
Zee grabbed a coffee from the pot Adam had made and put on her coat.
“I’ll be right back,” she called to the children. “I’m heading across the street.”
FELIX WOKE UP at dawn before Lucy was awake and was looking out the window when she opened her eyes.
“Snow,” he said. “All over the place.”
She felt the silence settling around the neighborhood, dusting on the windows, the clarity that comes of waking to the silence of a soft white morning. She dressed quickly, helped Felix into his overalls, checked Maggie, who was still asleep, and went downstairs.
August was on his front porch picking up the newspaper when she and Felix went outside to make a snowman.
“Busy?” he called.
“I’m going to be making a snowman with Felix,” she said, pulling on her mittens and the orange cap Reuben had given her. “This is Felix.”
Felix pulled his hood down over his eyes.
“I’ll come over and help,” August said. “Just a second.”
And he rushed in the front door, returning almost immediately in boots and a sweatshirt, the morning paper under his arm.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said, settling on the top step, his arms wrapped around his chest. “C
old, isn’t it? Cigarette?”
She had gone to the first landing between her front porch and the long set of stairs to the sidewalk and was helping Felix roll a snowball into a bigger one for the belly of his snowman.
“No cigarette,” she said. “But tell me does everybody in this neighborhood feel free to go into each other’s houses? Is that how it happens here?”
“This is an overly friendly neighborhood but I usually don’t walk into people’s houses, invited or not. I’m a recluse.”
Lucy gave him a querying look.
“I work at home.”
The snow body was done and Felix was rolling up loose soil as well as snow for the head.
“He’s getting dirty,” Felix said, stomping his boot on the snow in a temper. “I want him white.”
“Felix is a perfectionist,” Lucy said, brushing off the soil. “I’ll get a carrot for his nose and grapes for his eyes and my old red scarf and maybe you have a man’s hat and pipe,” she said to August.
“I might.” He headed back to his house, returning with a man’s hat.
“No pipe,” he said, “but I have a cigarette.”
He set the hat, an old-fashioned brimmed felt hat like one Lucy’s father used to wear, on the snowman’s head, stuck a cigarette in the place where the snowman’s mouth would go, and tore off two small branches for Felix to stick arms on the round ball of his belly.
“This is great,” he said. “I haven’t done this since I was a kid and I don’t have kids of my own. My wife is dead.”
He pulled up the collar of his coat and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke into a long cylinder that hung in the cold air.
“My wife—her name was Anna—died two years ago, early in the morning of August 30th. I had been up all night with her,” he rushed on. “She wasn’t the love of my life but the neighbors don’t know that. They don’t need to know that.”
“Of course,” Lucy said, on her knees in the snow beside Felix, thinking What an odd, sweet man as she helped smooth the snowman’s body, brushing off the leaves that had collected, poking the carrot into his snow face, grapes for eyes.
You Are the Love of My Life Page 6
