The Yellow Braid

by Karen Coccioli

  The Yellow Braid

  a novel by

  Karen Coccioli

  Copyright © 2012 by Karen Coccioli.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The Yellow Braid is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and real people, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Cover Photo by Entwashian

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Love is like the wild-rose briar;

  Friendship is like the holly-tree.

  The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms,

  But which will bloom most constantly

  ~Emily Bronte

  Caro tiptoed to mute the resounding click-clack of her heels on the marble floor, but not before several family members glared at her with their faces pulled down in a collective frown. Shrinking under their tacit disapproval, she continued walking toward the altar of Saint Anthony’s Church as they filed out.

  During the memorial service Caro had sat in the back pew with the staff from New Century Publishers, who’d taken time to pay their respects to their veteran editor, Marcie Harrington. Unlike them, Caro wasn’t there out of a sense of propriety.

  She’d met Marcie twelve years before when New Century bought out its rival, the press responsible for introducing Caro to the literary world with her first book of poetry. Thus, she’d been prepared to hate Marcie for putting her previous editor out of a job. But the unexpected happened. Their relationship gathered momentum from the outset. Before long they were inseparable and Caro came to depend on Marcie’s impeccable advice.

  Outside of work, they lunged headlong into each other’s lives. Caro had squeezed in beside Marcie during New Jersey Nets basketball games. She’d suffered through New York Giants football games even though she was clueless as to the nuances of play. Marcie was at Caro’s elbow when Caro’s daughter, Abby, had boarded British Air to live in London. Together Caro and Marcie hiked the 146 miles of the Appalachian Trail that wound through the center of Vermont’s Green Mountains.

  Caro couldn’t now let Marcie go without getting close to her one more time. The sense of so much stale air between Marcie’s spiritless body and Caro’s empty heart made her feel weightless, even worse, shiftless. The ordered pattern of her days seemed to have gotten tucked into the pinched corners of the quilting of Marcie’s coffin. Personal tasks and job actions, appointment times with the publisher, and venues for book readings had been subject to Marcie’s approval. Without her friend’s intervention, those agendas would pass in scattered disorder. Marcie was the logician, the organized planner.

  As Caro approached the casket, sequins of sunlight from the stained glass windows shimmered over Marcie’s flesh. She seemed infused with life, her death a malicious hoax.

  She laid her hand on Marcie’s and rolled her finger over the braided gold ring that she and her husband, Zach, had given Marcie for her fiftieth birthday. The inscription read: With unending devotion, Caro & Zach. Then suddenly overcome with emotion, she backed away. How careless to walk in Morningside Park alone at night! Raised on the Upper West Side, she knew better. Morningside had a worse reputation for muggers than its famous neighbor, Central Park. A blow to the head with a bat and she was gone.

  Caro sensed someone’s approach. She glanced up to find her publisher shaking his lowered head.

  “It’s such a tragedy. I know she was like family.”

  Caro replied without taking her eyes from Marcie’s face. “Thanks, Ethan.”

  The funeral director appeared moments later. “It’s time.”

  “I’ll wait for you outside,” Ethan said and patted her shoulder.

  Carol cupped Marcie’s cheek and stared hard at her face, afraid that as soon as she left she’d forget its details. Even though she’d been married to Zach for twenty-four years, after he died his features sometimes blurred in her mind, and occasionally she found herself studying old photos of him to re-ignite her memory.

  In the parking lot, the hard heat of the cement burned under the soles of her sandals and she squinted Ethan’s form into focus.

  “Are you going ahead with the beach house, Caro? My wife’s cousin has a friend who is interested in taking over Marcie’s half.”

  The beach house. Caro groaned at the reminder. The summer was the beginning of a year-long sabbatical from her professorship at Columbia University to finish her latest collection of poems, In Search of Eros. She and Marcie had planned to spend June through August in Westhampton Beach, Long Island.

  “I know it wouldn’t be easy, being so soon and all,” Ethan said. A ring of perspiration encircled his neck and colored the collar of his shirt. “We didn’t want to think of you not going. You’ll need the change more than ever.”

  Caro regained her earlier composure. “As much as I appreciate the thought, I’d be horrible company.”

  “All right then.” He stepped in and kissed Caro’s cheek.

  Throughout the final viewing and service, Caro had wanted to be alone with her misery. Now as she watched Ethan pack his stout body behind the wheel of his Mercedes sports coupe, she leaned forward, about to call him back, but stopped herself. He wasn’t who she wanted.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul. ~Edith Wharton

  When Zach had died of a massive coronary five years earlier, the loss had struck Caro in a different way. It had been sharper than her present grief—a razor-blade kind of hurt that caused her to cry for days, hard tears that turned her eyes into burning slits.

  For weeks after his funeral, Caro moved through their home with her arms wrapped around herself as if to contain the waves of grief that rose up inside of her. A surprise, really. She had loved Zach, but their marriage was a lopsided affair: in essence, Caro enjoyed the relatively inactive pleasures of reading books on philosophy and ancient history, and listening to classical music in her spare time; Zach built things with his hands and possessed the level-headedness his work as a general contractor demanded.

  In fact, they’d met when she hired him to remodel the brownstone apartment her father had left her in his will. He began work at the end of May, as soon as her teaching semester was finished at Columbia University. By the completion of the renovation in September, he’d moved in.

  Six months later, after Caro accepted Zach’s marriage proposal, he said, “I’ll be so proud to call you my wife. There’s nothing I won’t do to keep you happy.”

  True to his pledge, Zach accommodated Caro’s needs, all in the name of her art. He didn’t complain about the consecutive evenings when she closed herself up in her study imme
diately after supper to work on a particularly difficult poem. He got used to eating breakfast alone on those mornings when she rose from sleep with a new idea and went directly to her computer to get it down before his or Abby’s needs infringed on her thoughts. He took their daughter to her ballet lessons and soccer practice on those Saturdays when Caro was stuck grading papers.

  Once after a rare argument, when Caro lost track of time and was an hour late picking Abby up from school, Zach said to her, “You’re about your work and that’s all. Everything and everyone comes second.”

  Caro’s objection dissolved into tears. “I know I make your life difficult sometimes…”

  “Difficult,” Zach emphasized, “doesn’t even begin to cover it. I put up with a lot from you, Caro, but forgetting about Abby is downright negligent.”

  “That’s not fair,” Caro protested.

  “Oh, yes it is,” Zach shot back. “In fact, I’m being gracious about the whole matter.”

  “Gracious! You’re being a goddamn nag.”

  “That’s what I call being accountable for your actions,” he said, his voice thick with sarcasm.

  As the months passed after his death, Caro’s grief lessened and a quickening sense of freedom stirred inside her because she’d known her limitations as a wife and mother. With him gone and Abby in London, she could now work whenever she wanted and enjoy the solitude of her study without guilt. For her, there was no better place to be.

  As young as four and five, she’d scripted poems with crayons inside her coloring books, graduating to pens and paper as she got older. As she’d title each small verse and sign her name, she’d imagine herself a famous writer in spite of her parents’ rebukes to “stop daydreaming.” Her father had been especially callous. “Who do you think you are, Hemingway? People like him are born different. You’re no more special than anyone else in this family so get that nonsense out of your head.”

  Her mother had patted her head and told her to stand up straight. “You’ll get married and won’t have to write. It’s a husband’s job to make a living and support his wife. Look at your father.”

  Caro had accepted what her mother had said as truth because she was happy with him, and Caro had seen the early photographs of her dad as a twenty-eight-year-old upon his arrival at Ellis Island with nothing more than his suitcase. A head taller than most of his Italian compatriots, his large patrician nose seemed to symbolize how she’d come to know him—a proud businessman who’d celebrated his fiftieth birthday with an upscale move to the suburbs and a brand new Mercedes.

  Even so, the sense of being a somebody never subsided and when Caro read Little Women she took to the character of Jo with unabashed enthusiasm. She’d go about her bedroom reciting the lines written for the heroine: “I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous; that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.”

  As Caro matured, the inner conflict set up by the juxtaposition of her mother’s advice to depend on a man versus her own desire for success and independence, produced a low-grade panic: which path to follow? When she’d met Zach, she tried to tell herself that loving him would suffice.

  But the poetry in her head wouldn’t let her rest and just as when she was a child, she found herself scribbling verses on whatever odd bits of paper were at hand. She progressed to writing on a laptop, and began submitting her work to literary magazines.

  She’d lost count of the rejections she received, but then came the occasional acceptance. For their fifth wedding anniversary, Caro handed her husband a copy of Poetry Magazine. “Check out the table of contents,” she’d said.

  He read, “Three Poems by Caroline Barrone,” and his face creased into a grin. How often had he heard her daydream aloud of her name appearing in Poetry, one of the most prestigious magazines of its kind?

  After that, Caro wanted to maximize the boost in her reputation that inclusion in Poetry created. She dedicated more and more hours to her writing in order both to hone her craft and supplement the number and diversity of her poems.

  Consequently, when she pondered her recent freedom without Zach, she understood better why she had never questioned his death. She hadn’t asked why he had died at so early an age or challenged the universe, asking Why him and not someone else? In fact, her swift acceptance of his passing made her consider that her initial grieving was, to some extent, almost a knee-jerk reaction—society’s instruction on how she must respond to her husband’s death.

  Ultimately, she had to admit she hadn’t loved Zach to the depth she’d been avowing all those years. Selfish? Yes. She’d banked her love like gold bullion in a vault, doling it out only when she saw fit, for fear that squandering her feelings would compromise her art.

  Abby’s reaction was so much more appropriate, and for that, Caro was envious. Zach died in February. In March, Caro traveled to London and stayed with Abby for three weeks. She remembered several conversations with her daughter while the girl was still trying to make sense of her father’s death. “I’m mad, Mom. I know shit happens, but why to our family? Why my dad?”

  “I don’t know,” was all Caro could reply. Her inability to feel the same kind of anger that Abby experienced had exasperated her daughter. Theirs was a relationship that for the most part had moved forward because of Zach. He’d mediated many disagreements between mother and daughter.

  When Caro had returned to New York she’d lamented to Marcie, “I feel you’re the only person I can talk to who’s not out to criticize or judge, or tell me how I failed in the mother department.”

  And Marcie had listened as always, because although Zach had been uncomplaining about taking care of many household and parental duties, Caro went to Marcie for her emotional needs. Zach liked to fix things. If Caro vented to him, he’d feel compelled to find a solution when all she wanted was for him to listen. Marcie would let Caro talk herself out. Whatever comments Marcie might make, they were supportive even on the occasions she disagreed.

  Now without Marcie, Caro felt shattered and alone.

  Caro wasn’t normally a cathartic poet. She believed diaries were nothing more than illusory narratives that tethered a person to the past. But she needed to resurrect Marcie on the page, and so she indulged herself an hour of journaling. She began with her first impression of Marcie on the morning Ethan had introduced them.

  2 June I remember…Marcie behind her desk—large hands for a woman—splayed on the rosewood surface…brash, unforgiving voice dictating commands into the speakerphone. Haunting eyes— memorable for their ability to rebuke with their color alone—hard, dark mahogany. Same color hair— bottle-dyed—too long for her age, especially the bangs. Brooks Brothers suit… The high kick pleat showed off her legs. Zach would have been impressed.

  “This is Caroline Barrone,” Ethan said.

  “I normally welcome authors with long-term intentions,” Marcie said. “But I know how I’d feel if a new editor was being forced on me due to publishing power plays. We own your contract for your current book. After that, it’s up to you if you stay or go.”

  Rigid in the overstuffed leather chair…she buttonholed me with her gaze. My previous editor had been warmhearted, a poet in her own right.

  An hour later, Marcie ended the meeting with, “My secretary will set up our appointment schedule.”

  Then…in an unimagined gesture, she picked up my manuscript… opened to a page she had bookmarked. When she read, her voice undulated in meticulous rhythm.

  you whose absence is an everlasting presence—fallen to a higher crownfallen womancrowned in conception—your bodymy soulyour milk is the inkof my poems.

  “‘The Magdalene Poem.’ It’s so evocative. A personal favorite,” Marcie said.

  ***

  Caro stilled her fingers and rested them on the keyboard. She remembered the mental readjustment that had taken place after Marcie’s reading. “The Magdalene Poem” was a personal favorite of Caro’s as well.

  Although not a religious person in
the traditional sense, Caro was devoted to the Blessed Mother. It was a dedication that began in preparation for her confirmation into the Catholic Church when she had to pick a patron saint to emulate and be named after. Not one to cause hurt feelings, her juvenile logic was to choose the head of all the saints, the mother Mary. Before long, praying to her divine Mother became a nightly habit that seemed to quell any disappointments from the day.

  For inspiration, however, she turned to Magdalene, a woman of literature and legend, politics and theology, controversy and conflict. She was the woman from whom Jesus cast out evil spirits, and then sent her on her way, redeemed. Caro took comfort in Magdalene’s story because it showed God’s unquestionable mercy no matter how grave the sin.

  In spotting and savoring that brief poem, Marcie had acknowledged Caro’s core connection to the infamous Magdalene. Caro’s gratefulness for Marcie had begun at that moment and never waned.

  Caro stood and stretched, her back stiff in objection to her prolonged and intense posture while typing. When she was seated again she re-read the paragraphs of her labor, and for the thousandth time asked, How could she be dead? From the beginning, Marcie had seemed indestructible. Overwhelmed by the depths of her love for her friend, Caro pushed away from the computer and dropped her face into her upturned palms.

  ***

  Whenever Caro had writer’s block and needed inspiration, she headed to the New York Public Library, where on several occasions within its iconic walls she’d come across an artifact, quotation, or snippet of prose that had kindled her imagination. Thus, after a restless night puzzling out the different aspects of love she’d had with Zach and Marcie, she headed downtown.