I put my arms around him and he shrugged me off. He went upstairs and I walked between the downstairs rooms hugging myself, ending up in the sunroom. It was still snowing, and I remembered how I’d rocked Thomas to sleep there the winter he was born, when it made me feel strong to know I was where I belonged.
z
Philip told me two months later, during one of our strained meetings, that he had heard on the radio on the way to meet me that the comedienne had died that day in Los Angeles. We were sitting in a restaurant not far from our home discussing how we would divide our belongings and how long to wait before selling the house. I looked at him for the first time since sitting down. “It was some kind of heart problem,” he said. His face sagged and he kept his eyes averted, watching his hands in front of him on the table. When I didn’t respond he said, “I heard you went to see her a few times when she was in the hospital,” lifting his eyes to my face. Despite myself I felt sorry for him until he said, “What in the world would the two of you have to talk about?”
I did not answer him; instead I had an image of the comedienne when she was a young woman, standing by the sliding door of her home in Los Angeles. It was a house she’d told me about and I was surprised by how clear my image of her there was. She was staring into the yard, her head tilted back as she smoked. She could see her son with his friends lounging around the pool’s aqua calm in the brilliant sun, and, at that moment, her husband came up behind her to kiss her ear, and I thought, you take happiness in whatever fleeting form it presents itself.
“It was strange when I saw her in the car that night,” Philip said. “She was so white, and I thought, well, I thought she was dead, and it made me think how weird everything is.” He became quiet and looked back at his hands as I looked out the window and wondered what the comedienne and her son had been discussing before the accident—the next show? Her new routine? Perhaps she glanced over at the speedometer and thought her son was driving too fast, that the snow was blinding, that she didn’t know where she was, and felt caught in the careening car that torpedoed through the dense white of a snowstorm, and then her disbelief and surprise in that suspended moment just before the crash.
A Nasty Bit of Business
I
In 1939 my husband and I sailed from London to New York on the Queen Mary. I think of that trip now, when I am at that point of life with so much behind and so little ahead that I am flooded with memory and a new sense of longing, not only for the time but for the woman I was then. And for my husband, for the union of us: Frances and Alec. At the time we’d been married for fifteen years, and it was to celebrate that we’d initially decided to take the trip. As we neared the harbour, I went on deck, leaving Alec alone in our stateroom. There I stood in the mist as the Statue of Liberty appeared through the fog, heavy and brooding, and later, behind the uneven edifices lining the shore, the Empire State building loomed over the skyline. I wore high heels and a full-length mink coat, a hat snug over my tight blonde curls. I knew I was attractive, although I’d have much rather been beautiful in that extravagant way some women are beautiful: “attractive” denotes effort. But that’s what people would say if they saw me standing there, attractive and obviously wealthy.
This was the year Germany invaded Poland, a year of fear and uncertainty, another reason we had decided on this voyage, to escape the oppressive mood of Europe and, we reasoned, where better to go than New York, to see the World’s Fair, breath in the city’s bustle and promise for the future. Yet this was not what I was thinking as I stood watching the buildings crowd the shore. I felt safe in the fog, hidden, as I contemplated how my life, a life of privilege and entitlement, was built on deceit; the buildings I saw moving slowly by, indistinct in the fog, those buildings that stood as monuments to fortitude and progress, I knew, mirrored my own determination and resilience.
II
Amy closed her eyes, stretched her neck and used a finger to mark her place in the leather-bound book, a book she had discovered the week before in an antiquarian shop in Athens and, surprised to find it written in English, had included it in her purchases. The store had been a mess of strewn books and old bookcases stacked in no particular order, with items procured through bankruptcy or estate sales, discarded when people moved or died. Burrowed into the mounds of books and papers, the owner of the store, who sat near the front door, told Amy in tentative English that there were many keepsakes and jewellery in the back room, and journals and notebooks throughout the store that might interest her. She spent the best part of an afternoon rummaging through the disarray, leaving the store with five books, this journal among them, and an old pin with silver filigree and a small, scarlet red ruby. When she first saw the brooch she lit upon it; the silver was tarnished but the gem gleamed like a hidden tear of blood. She was wearing it on the day she began reading the old journal. Only twenty or so pages were written upon and the handwriting had elongated spikes for the “p”s and “f”s, giving the text a formal appearance and yet, ever consistent, it moved along smugly, with an obvious rhythm and sense of itself.
Reading the first page, Amy imagined the buildings of New York through the fog-like shapes of smudged pencil lead, and she saw the woman standing on the deck also washed in the same smoky light, although she’d never been on an ocean liner, had never even been to New York. She was reading the book at a beachside restaurant in Chania on the island of Crete, lifting her eyes on occasion to a view of the shore and the sky. When she’d arrived at the restaurant, the waiter welcomed her with a wide smile and a greeting, and then seated her at a table close to the shore, bringing a small plate of anchovies with the menu. She ordered lunch, a mixed seafood grill, and sat reading, alone at the table, glancing up at times to look at the people strolling by on the beach and the miraculous blue of the sea beyond.
The woman in the journal reminded Amy of her aunt Margaret, a woman of means, as her mother would have said, a woman who married well and was always surrounded by evidence of this lucky turn of events. But Amy was trying not to think of her family, or her home back in Canada. She had come to Greece as a retreat more than a holiday, a way to show herself she could travel and enjoy life alone. Life alone was what waited for her back home. In the past six months she had been left by her husband, who was living with another woman and this woman’s child in the small town where Amy and he had lived for almost twenty years. And her son had gone just weeks before to begin university in Edmonton. The fact that her marriage was over followed her like a high whining sound and was the background to all she did and all she thought. She found that when she went through her day, showering or drinking coffee on the balcony of her hotel, her thoughts would drift back to the town where she had lived and the house that she had shared with her husband and son.
She was grateful for the diversion of the journal, grateful to be able to imagine this woman dressed in her stylish clothes, in the midst of other passengers grouped on the deck, with the famous skyline sliding by. Perhaps because the voice reminded her of her aunt Margaret, Amy could see clearly the way Frances walked, with short clipped steps, or how she’d enter a room taking off her gloves one finger at a time and then folding them into her palm, because this was the kind of mannerism Amy remembered her mother and her mother’s sisters having.
III
My first night in Manhattan I lay beside my husband as he slept and breathed in the evening air full of the sounds of the city, of traffic and voices from the street ten floors below, where darkness was pushed aside by the rush of passersby. It was an impressive room of brocade curtains, thick mouldings and marble floors, like my life at the time, heavy with decorum. I could see the white-veined moon between the curtains like a silk circle caught in the sky. My husband slept as if there was nothing to wake him, no stain on the silk circle of his soul. Only I knew better.
He rolled over, moaned in his sleep. At times I wished I could follow him down the narrow alleyways of his dreams. Wh
at would I find there? Perhaps the couple who raised him, people I’d never met, but who in their simplicity I imagined as slack-jawed with worn red hands. Or was it the face of the Greek farmer who could not understand Alec’s excited words? Our room was very still, very dark, except where the hall light gathered beneath the door and glowed like the line at the horizon the moment after the sun descends.
We had a house in England, my husband’s house, but I wanted to sell it and spend our life travelling and living in rented villas or hotels. It was a change I contemplated after the last time I stood outside the dining room of that old house and overhead the servants speaking. “She’s a different sort, that one,” said a maid named Alice, who had worked in the house since she was a child. “I’ll say,” another servant, a younger woman, said. “And I’m not sure about that nasty bit of business a few years ago; the explanation seemed just a little too convenient.” As I listened I thought how old and soiled the house had become, with its memories and history and the percolating mean-spirited gossip and suspicion, and so I convinced Alec to sell it and we began our travels across Europe and America.
We’d arrive at resorts and hotels with heavy trunks marked with the places where we’d been: Venice, Nice, Monaco; we’d be dressed to the teeth, sable coats, and elaborate hats, dramatic as the plumes of foolish birds; my hair in finger waves and Alec in spats, a fedora, a coat flung over one arm, a hand grasping a cigarette holder. How grand we were, and incomprehensible.
IV
The Hotel Panorama sat on a steep hill, and from Amy’s room, beyond the coast highway and low rise buildings, provided vast views of the Cretan Sea. Behind the hotel were unruly olive groves that stretched across the mounting terrain, its villas like stark white stones in the sun. Amy walked along the pathways through the fields during the late afternoon, passing bushes of wild geraniums and bougainvilleas that glowed a bright, fierce red.
She’d always been a person who enjoyed habit and shortly after arriving in Chania, she found a restaurant across the street from the hotel that looked out on the sea, where she was treated with the appropriate mixture of courtesy and neglect, so that during her stay it became her favourite place to eat. Sometimes that was all she did in a day other than read and walk the steep paths along the hills.
After she’d eat lunch, she watched the tide and the children play in the sand, the tourists walking by, some holding hands, and she read from the books she brought in her canvas bag, a bulky novel translated from the French, a collection of poetry, a book of short stories, but always saving for last the story about Frances and Alec. One afternoon the waiter, a young handsome man of about twenty, approached her. “Beautiful day,” he said and twisted his head to see what she was reading. “What do you have there?” Perhaps because he was the same age as her son, Amy felt warmly toward him, and she responded “Oh this, a journal I bought in Athens or it’s a notebook, I’m not quite sure.” This answer seemed to please him and he walked back to the kitchen humming.
During the following days she learnt that his name was Costa, that his brother owned the restaurant, and that he was hoping to earn enough to be able to become part owner. He would smile when he saw her approach the tables closest to the beach, their blue and white striped umbrellas flapping, and say “good day, reader-lady.” The greeting was like all of his English, a little stilted, and yet Amy found it endearing.
V
Let me return to a point shortly after the war, in 1920, to a time when I was poor, when I was attending university on a scholarship, because you see I was clever, and my parents were dead. They died when I was a young teenager, and I moved in with a maiden aunt, the sister of my father in a house in Beacon Hill in the heart of Boston. This aunt was used to a solitary life and left me to my own devices, which were mainly reading and sketching. I spent most of my time alone walking the streets close to our home, or reading in the library. You’d think that all those calm hours of study would have created in me a love of serenity, for pursuits of the mind, but you’d be wrong, for in my heart I was wild and raging, desperate to escape. My aunt’s kindness, which everyone who knew her thought was the overriding quality of her character, always seemed to me to be a form of stupidity, ineptitude at its worst. The way she’d search out abandoned cats and dogs to feed made me think her an idiot and so I retreated into books, a sanctioned activity that meant she never expected me to help with housework or any of her charitable pursuits. I was a sensible-looking girl, with short thin blonde hair around a sharp-featured face; usually I wore walking shoes and my school uniform, even on weekends.
I’m giving too much detail here; it’s enough to say my cleverness (it was never more than that) won a scholarship for me to attend a prestigious university in Britain and made my aunt irrationally proud. When she invited her friends and some of the neighbours to celebrate, they crowded into her orderly home, and their presence filled the rooms with a sycophantic eagerness. One neighbour in particular, a man who I’d always tried to avoid, followed me, grinning an obsequious grin, and after every sentence he uttered, he’d snort, so that by the end of the evening I could barely contain my impulse to poke his face with something sharp.
My first year at university, I met a wealthy girl whose father was a shipping magnate. She grew up in the type of house I associated with murder mysteries, large rooms with heavy furniture, mouldings and drapery. Being clever, perhaps even conniving, I ingratiated myself to her, and as so many of the other girls were jealous or could not abide her attitude of superiority, we became best of friends. I knew this was possible only because I deferred to her on most every subject and because I wrote her term papers while she’d go dancing with men who studied at a nearby university. I should mention she was beautiful, with long auburn hair and green eyes. Can you imagine how that made me feel? This tall, graceful creature, with the most stylish clothes—they were her true loves: clothes and shoes—who fascinated men with her flamboyance, standing beside me, the church mouse, as I heard myself referred to by the other girls in the dormitory. I hated her, plain and simple. I hated her with an energy that ran through me like a hidden glacial stream, endless and pure. And still, despite the icy current of disdain I felt for her, for everything she represented, we became inseparable during those years at university.
I am racing over the facts of my life when I was young, but of course you know there was an intensity and repetition to the routine of those years; there were nights in my room when the evening sunk into the courtyard outside and when the moon rose and days when sun stretched in long fingers of light into the library where I spent hours reading. You know all this because you know how life happens in a series of patterns and repetitions, of days and months and years, so I will only tell you that I and this woman—Stephanie was her name—became friends and you can fill in the depth of this friendship: in classrooms, walking along the arboured crossways on campus, driving in her car and even spending holidays with her father, where we ate in a dining room so large my aunt’s entire house could easily have fit inside.
I think back on these days and wonder how I was different then than I am today. It was the last period of my life that I was without culpability, when I could not assign the darkness of my drives, my desires, to a deed, to a devious plan.
Stephanie fell in love—of course there were many boys, then men, who were interested in her, but this man was different, a poet on a scholarship. He was exactly the type of man Stephanie’s father feared she would choose to marry and perhaps this was part of his attraction but, as in most things, she was adamant. She would marry him, and it would be the largest wedding in years, in a family noted for conspicuous shows of extravagance.
Her father called me to his office. The walls were lined with walnut bookcases and there was a smell of varnish and something pungent, acidic, lemons perhaps. I tried to identify the scent as I sat waiting for him. When he arrived—a thin man with grey hair and a long drawn face—he said, “Te
ll me, Frances, about this man,” and I told him what I knew, which was not much more than he knew. Then Stephanie’s father said without looking at me, “He will never make her happy; he will not know how to deal with her, to please her.” I agreed, but we both knew there was nothing we could do to change her mind. “I’m glad we had this chance to speak,” he said, rising, “and I guess the next time I’ll see you will be at the wedding.” But it was not to be, because as fate would have it, he died two days later of a heart attack, postponing the marriage by two months.
With her father’s death, Stephanie was now an even wealthier woman, and her attitude changed to reflect her new status. She spoke in a more authoritarian tone to the servants and became increasingly demanding about food preparation, how the table was set, the rooms cleaned. At the wedding I stood for her. Let me stop here for a moment to tell you about that day because it was exceptional. She was dressed in a white lace gown with pearls sewn into the back seam for buttons. She wore a veil over her dark hair and her eyes shone so bright, with such beauty. She was still the same demanding, self-concerned woman, but on that day her happiness was real, it surrounded her, and touched all of us who were there. Her groom, who never left her side, was handsome, blond, tall, and, already at his young age and despite his lack of position, a pleasant, witty conversationalist.
VI
At this point in the reading of the story, Costa surprised Amy by sitting down at the table before her. He was curious about what she was reading, the selection of old books she brought every day and placed on the table, alternating between them and glancing up to look at the sea. He said, “Not as busy today… a good day to sit in sun.”
“Yes, a beautiful day.”
It felt strange to Amy to speak with him after the days of bright quiet and nights of dreamless sleep where she simply drifted in and out of thoughts about her life, as if it were a room she could visit and abandon. A skinny dog, one Amy had seen before along the shore, that looked like a stray, came bounding into the restaurant from the beach, its tail and paws wet from running in the water. “Ah, there’s my dog,” Costa said.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 15
