Another You

Cocoanut Grove

WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN there that night, the night of the great fire that burned the Cocoanut Grove, except that Miles received a business call at the Ritz, and when Miles received a business call, you could always gauge its importance by whether or not he untied his shoes. That night, not two minutes into the call, he stepped right out of them: soft black leather lace-up evening shoes he’d had mailed to him from Lobb’s in England, just before the war broke out. He always ordered shoes in duplicate, so although he couldn’t get the shoes anymore, he still had a brand-new pair he’d never taken from the box that he’d just taken out of the suitcase a few minutes before. Lobb’s shoes: how he loved them. He wanted to look dashing at his friend’s wedding. It was winter, 1942. Holy Cross had just beat Boston in college football, and he was in a very bad mood before he answered the phone, because he’d made a rather large bet that Boston would win. At first he thought the phone call was from his friend, wanting to collect. Then he realized it was something that would take a while and he waved me away, as if he were dispersing cigarette smoke — as he so often did when he took a business call. I think he was convinced women could die of boredom. I think he thought his standing there, holding the phone, was as dangerous to a woman’s well-being as her being on a battlefield. It was not that usual that a lady visiting Boston would be sitting alone in the lobby of the Ritz, but I wasn’t silly about things like that. I knew I’d be perfectly safe, and who cared if an eyebrow or two was raised? I had on a peach silk dress and nylon stockings and a pair of black high heels he’d bought me. It was a coincidence that I wore the same size, exactly, that she wore. It’s very hard to find a AA shoe these days, but then it was a common size. Women’s feet were narrower. So I had on shoes not terribly dissimilar from shoes she’d picked out for herself, though mine had higher heels. My hair was auburn, and I knew the peach silk set off the highlights in my hair. I was so excited to be going to the Cocoanut Grove. You’d think the party was for me — though many years would elapse between that night and the night of my marriage. I was never sure I’d be married at all, to tell the truth, and it certainly never would have crossed my mind I’d be married to Miles. I thought about our relationship the way he had presented it to my parents long past the time I should have; I realized I wasn’t there in Maine to help take care of Gordon and to teach Alice French. She had no interest at all in learning French, and I felt so silly, bringing it up, as if it were my own obsession. “Bonjour, Alice!” I would say, and she would sigh, or tell me, “Bonjour, chérie. Ça suffit,” which was her little joke about not intending to converse in any language but English. But in spite of the way things were, I kept thinking about the way my parents had been told things would be, and I tried to pretend that was the reality. They would have been stunned, of course, if they’d ever known my real position in the house. And certainly they would have been shocked to think that from the winter of 1937 until 1941, when his courtship resulted in my pregnancy, and I finally realized I would have to go with him, to do whatever he said … they would have been stunned to know I’d been courted by letter and in person by Miles, for years. That I’d gone to a hotel with Miles would have been inconceivable. I was no different than a whore in that hotel room, though nobody but the two of us knew that. She knew it too, of course, but she didn’t know at that very moment where we were, didn’t care to know, is what I think now, because she liked me. After all, if it hadn’t been me, he would have had some other indiscretion. She had no idea she might have lost both of us in the horrendous fire that was to kill 492 people that night. A busboy stood on a stool and lit a match to replace a lightbulb. The headlines the next day blamed the busboy, but really: he was working in unsafe circumstances; he’d made a simple mistake and suddenly one of the artificial palm trees caught fire, went up like a torch. There were luxurious silk draperies that caught fire, and before anyone could react, the entire nightclub was aflame. When it was over, the firemen would find the partygoers, Miles’s good friends, the bride and the groom, dead inside. Some people said they were lying six deep, scattered like garbage dumped from a trash can, piled one on top of the other so the firemen found it all but impossible to enter the nightclub through the revolving doors. The bar was downstairs, the restaurant and dance floor up above. There was no sprinkler system, there were no marked fire exits. It became an inferno, the palm trees burned, the drapes sizzled into sheets of flame, the tables went up as if they’d been doused with gasoline, they burned so fast, everything contributing to the explosive heat that was to kill more than half the people who had gone there with so many pleasant expectations. If not for that call, we might have been among them. Maybe we would have been among the lucky — the ones who crawled out a bathroom window, or who found some other way out. But we never went to the Cocoanut Grove. I sat in the lobby for a while, then returned to the room. Ten or fifteen minutes into his call, he wasn’t happy to see me, but what could he do? I was slightly relieved, after all. People at the party knew his wife. However he introduced me, they would suspect. Deceptions of that sort just did not bother him; he only felt obliged to say something perfunctory — not necessarily to state the truth. He was so charming; you could see it in people’s eyes that they didn’t believe him, but neither did they contradict him. “If they say nothing to my face, they’ll surely say nothing to yours,” he said, and that was one of the truest things he ever said. I only saw it in their eyes, or in their exaggerated politeness. Alice was another matter — as well she might have been. Imagine any married woman finding out her husband had a twenty-three-year-old lover — being presented with this person as a fait accompli, and then being told later the same day that the twenty-three-year-old girl, the daughter of her husband’s Canadian friends, who’d come to help them set up a summerhouse on the coast of Maine, was pregnant. I wasn’t sitting in any lobby in a silk dress with my hands folded neatly in my lap during those two encounters with Alice several hours apart, you can well believe that. She threw a glass of orange juice in my face and stomped her foot on the empty glass, cutting her hand as she picked up a big shard to throw at him, screaming words I never heard her use again. I was terrified. Simply terrified. She was only three years older than I was, but she was so sophisticated. She had been so nice to me when my parents and I had first joined them in New York. She’d brushed my hair for me in the ladies’ room, told me she’d heard I was very skillful on skis. That was in 1936, in the Plaza Hotel. It was snowing outside, just as it had been when I left Montreal by train with my family. Miles and my father were business acquaintances. It never so much as crossed my mind that he had his eye on me. It never crossed my mind any more than it did Alice’s. The only love talked about that day was the love of the Duke of Windsor for Wallace Simpson, the divorcée he could not marry and still ascend to the throne. George V had died, and his son was supposed to be the next King of England, but he had already fallen in love with Wallis Warfield Simpson. Some said he wasn’t fit to be King, and that it was all for the best, but there was much concern between Miles and my father about what would happen to the English economy if Edward VIII abdicated. My mother thought it was all wonderfully romantic. I don’t remember that Alice had much to say — only that England was so far away, a truly foreign country. It was a place her husband brought her sweaters from. Sweaters and tea, fine English teas that were not imported in those days. This was December of 1936. Early December. In February Miles came to Montreal, and he and my father took me to an elegant French restaurant, where I sat quietly at the table as they discussed business. Until the last minute, my mother had also been expected to come, but suddenly she was taken with a chill. I made her hot tea with lemon and took it to her in bed, but she said she felt cold all over — that there was no way she could attend the dinner. I must go in her place, she said. And she let me wear her beautiful lace dress, the tawny-colored dress I’d always admired, but which she’d said made me look too mature. Surely she couldn’t have known what was going on — though why do I think that? She might have known. She might not have thought it would have such disastrous consequences. A flirtation, a little titillation — what was that? Indiscreet, on the part of a married man, but hardly calamitous. In truth, she did whatever my father told her to do.

That night in the restaurant Miles was very solicitous of me. He wanted me to take him skiing the next day, before he left Montreal. My father had an appointment he could not break, though he left the table twice to telephone, hoping things could be rearranged so he could come along. Did he really want to come along? I’m not saying he could see the future, only that he deferred to Miles, respected him greatly and quite simply deferred to him, as so many people did. He might have guessed that Miles would prefer to be on the ski slopes with me, alone. There is no reason to imagine that my father, in the restaurant bathroom, smoking a cigar, pacing back and forth to allow time to elapse, only pretended he was trying to rearrange the next day’s business. Yet I do have that feeling. It’s because he told me when I was a little girl that he did that, sometimes: had the men’s room attendant light a good cigar for him, so he could have a few puffs and allow whatever was happening at the table to reach a certain crucial point before he returned. Then, later, he’d go back to the men’s room and have the attendant relight the cigar, so he could have a few last puffs. Miles, himself, did not smoke cigars, but he did enjoy brandy. He and my father ordered two brandies before the night ended. My mother would have hated being there. The brandy was always her cue to leave the table, and she hated to be sent away just when things were getting interesting, she said. Yet my father did not give me a cue that I should leave, so I sat there, not quite understanding what they were saying about Haile Selassie, I think it was. A name almost forgotten now. “It is us today,” I remember my father intoning, shaking his head and raising his brandy snifter in a toast. I sat there in my mother’s dress with its dropped waist that no one could see once I was sitting down, but I knew it was lovely, with a drooping bow at my left hip, and I felt so grown-up. She would be proud of me, I thought. I had graciously and immediately agreed to take Miles skiing le jour prochain. I had not been asked to leave the table when the conversation turned serious. Neither my father nor Miles felt sympathy toward Haile Selassie, as I recall. Noses buried in their brandy snifters, they snorted instead of inhaling. “You understand that the man is asking the age-old question, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ ” my father said to me. I had not been fidgeting. I had been trying to follow what they said, though they spoke so elliptically, or at other times so softly, that it would have been difficult, even if I had known the exact subject being discussed. I had assured my father I understood entirely. What I must have looked like, sitting there in my grown-up dress, speaking so seriously. The next day, on the ski slopes, Miles asked me: “Don’t you smile?” A strange question, I came to think when I knew him a bit better, because he so rarely smiled himself. At any rate, he was not smiling when he took the call in the hotel room that evening when he stepped out of his shoes, loosened his bow tie. When he stood there, saving his life, saving mine, though he had no idea that was what he was doing. I felt bad enough about being there, about going to Boston behind Alice’s back, on the day she had gone to Rhode Island to visit her friend Amelia. I mean, there I was in my peach silk, and she had a slight cold, herself, and of course she also had Gordon and baby Martin. Still, there the two of us were, sitting peacefully in the Ritz sipping champagne, to say nothing of the fact we were about to go to a lavish wedding reception with oysters Rockefeller and other wonderful food and enjoy a night of dancing. We were all preoccupied with the war, tired out by the children, exhausted, frustrated and exhausted, yet she’d dressed Gordon in a new outfit and put the baby in the stroller and insisted upon setting off by train to visit Amelia at her parents’ house in Rhode Island, refusing to listen to Miles’s suggestion that she wait until the weekend, when he could take us all by car. She could have been in Rhode Island when she got the news — if such news had been forthcoming. It wasn’t, though. We did not burn in the fire. Having missed too much of the festivities, we made love in the big bed inside our room at the Ritz — only the second time since I’d given birth to Martin — and it was not until much later that we heard the news, shouted by someone in the hotel corridor, that a terrible fire was raging. This came to mind because tonight a folk-singer — a long-haired folksinger, a perfectly nice young man with long hair and daydreams in his eyes — came to the nursing home and entertained us after dinner by playing the guitar and singing. He sang songs by James Taylor and by Carole King. I recognized most of them. One of the women, feeling mischievous, asked for “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” He had a nice way about him, and he tried to play it, but none of the old fogeys, myself among them, could remember the name of the woman who’d put a lantern in her shed. So it was: “Old Mrs. Something put a lantern in her shed / Cow kicked it over, and this is what she said / ‘There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.’ ” The man’s voice announcing the fire at the Cocoanut Grove seems like yesterday. It was almost unprecedented to hear anyone speak above a whisper in 1942 in a hotel corridor.

In 1936 I was such a naive girl. What I knew about sex was that when a man and woman married, the woman must listen earnestly when the man explained something important to her. That was what my mother had told me; that one day I would be told “something important.” Though I menstruated, I did not connect that with sex. How it ever came clear to me, I don’t exactly recall. Because when I was pregnant with Martin, the doctor, unsolicited, volunteered that after giving birth to a baby, my cramping would end. “Cramping?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. “You don’t have menstrual cramps?” I was shocked to hear him say the word aloud. He was quite affable — a friend of Miles’s who had attended medical school at Yale during the same years Miles was there. I think he talked so much because he was trying to be friendly, though actually he was quite uncomfortable: his friend’s mistress — well, I’d never known the word had that other meaning, until it became obvious by the context in which Alice used the word that awful day we sat in the living room of the house in Maine and he told her everything, that I was someone’s mistress. Whatever name she gave me, I was terrified. I was certain I was going to be sent back to Montreal, and as much as I feared my parents’ disappointment — they thought the United States was another world, a superior country, and I would have been ashamed to have failed there, to have failed at making Alice like me, in spite of everything I’d done setting up the house, in spite of the bulbs planted, the dinners cooked — if you can believe such a thing, there was actually a time when I thought that it was fine to sleep with a woman’s husband because he requested it. I assumed that was my responsibility toward being part of the family. There were secrets my mother had kept from my father: money put away in food jars; the scrawny cat she sometimes set a saucer of milk out for, at the same time he was trying to run it off. In my innocence, I simply thought that sex was a secret Miles and I were keeping from Alice, like a saucer of milk placed under the bushes. It seems difficult to believe, but you have to take it on faith I didn’t know any different. I believed in Santa Claus as a real man who came from the North Pole until some girls set me straight when I was eleven years old. I thought fairy tales were interchangeable with stories in the newspaper long past the time when everyone else understood they were just made-up stories. Though I did not like sex, and I certainly did not want to be pregnant, especially because I had been horrified to have to spread my legs in a doctor’s office and feel his hand inside me — although I considered it a personal failure that had caused misery to everyone and would no doubt cause further misery once my parents found out, I nevertheless did like Alice, so when she raged at me, my heart was broken. If she had not spoken to Amelia and gone through a sea change, I would have died of a broken heart. This many years later, I can only wonder what Amelia must have said to her that caused such a change. Suddenly Alice accepted everything, taking both my hands in hers and apologizing to me, though I don’t remember her apologizing to him. While Martin was just a tiny fetus inside me, it had been decided that the child I carried would be their child. No one would know any different. We would go abroad, and I would give birth there. That plan did not materialize, of course: the war continued, and everything changed. We ended up hiding from people, beginning in my fourth month, in the house in Maine. Miles’s friend from Yale arranged for a doctor to watch my pregnancy, and to send a young colleague of his to be present, along with the local doctor, at the birth. It was decided that nothing would be said to my parents. I was so grateful for that, it was the biggest relief of all. When I wrote them or spoke to them, the baby was the one thing I never mentioned. In all the world, the only people who knew — except for Gordon, who was too young to understand — were Amelia, the doctors, and Miles’s friend Ethan Bedell, who came unannounced and opened the front door without knocking and walked in on us, when I was hugely pregnant. It is so easy to forget that people have their personal preoccupations. When they encounter the unexpected realities of others’ lives, their preoccupations nevertheless continue just as strongly. He was there, if you can believe it, because he feared for the health of the painter Grant Wood; though he did not fear for Wood’s mortality, he feared Miles would fail to acquire important paintings before Grant Wood’s death. “You didn’t listen to me about The Black Flag,” I remember him saying. “You must absolutely listen to me now.” Alice always maintained that Ethan Bedell was the only man she’d ever heard of who went to fortune-tellers. A fortune-teller had predicted the untimely death of someone very talented, known to Ethan only through his work, not personally, and Ethan had jumped to the conclusion the man was talking about the death of Grant Wood, whose painting Death on Ridge Road he interpreted as a curious departure, a harrowing vision of the painter’s own death. After registering his initial shock in how he found us, he recovered himself quickly, then launched into a heartfelt description of the paintings of Grant Wood, pulling one photograph after another from his briefcase, seizing Miles’s hand as if he could, in the moment, press him into buying whatever paintings were available. Alice and I had to leave the room, we were so overwhelmed by Ethan’s fervor. “God — that awful picture of the farmer standing by the ugly woman and the pitchfork!” she had squealed, as we went upstairs.

Martin was born on December 8, 1941—the day after Pearl Harbor. That was when the Americans acknowledged there was a war; everyone in Montreal knew that in 1939, of course. On Christmas Day, Hong Kong was taken by the Japanese. The radio and the fire crackled constantly, and we waited, day after day, for information. I think we all forgot ourselves, forgot our individual lives had real meaning. Strange, the names you remember. Like a song that was being sung by everyone, Miles and the people he talked to on the phone seemed to be in constant contact with a Harvard chemist named Louis Fieser. For a while, it seemed the miraculous substance he was developing in his laboratory would be the solution to the war, and Miles and Ethan Bedell were convinced Fieser should have investors behind him, private investors, as well as the ear of the press, rather than working alone and trusting that the U.S. Army would deal correctly with his product. There were numerous calls every day, instigated by Ethan and by friends of Fieser, who for some reason would not communicate directly with Miles or with Ethan Bedell.

When the baby was born, he was the most wonderful distraction for everyone. Even Gordon loved him from the first. Alice and I would pass him back and forth, taking turns walking with him, rocking him. I felt only a momentary pang of regret when the birth announcements went out saying that Alice and Miles were the parents. I thought we would all be together, always, and that the baby had been born into the most wonderful family imaginable. Instead of seeming an enormous burden, he had suddenly become a great gift. Gifts arrived every day: booties; buntings; toys; a copy of the song “There Will Never Be Another You,” from Ethan Bedell, who had been sent the lyrics by his good friend Mack Gordon. It later played in the film Iceland, and everyone started humming it. It became a classic. I remember sitting with Alice, one of us taking care of the baby, the other reading aloud from Liberty magazine, that song playing in our heads even when we weren’t hearing it. Though we never saw Iceland, we did see, and love, The Palm Beach Story, with Claudette Colbert and Rudy Vallee. Such sweet melodies, such pleasant movies going on while the world was at war. It was like receiving a beautiful infant into our arms and finding that some little thing, still so unformed, yet so wonderful and fascinating, could change all the adults’ personalities. We were all at our best. I would have gone on that way forever. I was so perplexed when Miles declared his love for me, when he suggested we “undo the wrong.” He would have left his marriage, risked social opprobrium, for nothing more than exchanging one wife for another, and nightly sex with me. I thought he was mad, and by then I had the courage to tell him so. Things were fine the way they were. I had no intention of causing any more unhappiness to the woman who had been consistently kind to me, except for a brief moment of shock when she lost sight of the fact that all of us were a unit, saw what her husband and I had done — naturally enough — as betrayal. So there was a time when she had great equilibrium; if she lost it later, that is another matter. Everyone changes through time. When it was most important to have it, she had great equilibrium.

I think he had some mistaken notion of punishing me for not doing what he wanted. The closer she and I became, the more he tried to drive a wedge between us. He gave us a book called Generation of Vipers, which caused a scandal in its time — a book about “Momism” ruining male children! We couldn’t take such a thing seriously. He doted on Gordon and never wanted Martin out of his sight, yet the book said that siblings were essential because women would dote unhealthily on infants!

The next child, Marshall, was her child with him: a beautiful boy born in 1944. This time she showed off her pregnancy, friends gave her showers, and only toward the end did she wonder aloud whether she should have allowed Miles to persuade her that three children were not too many. In a magazine I flipped through today in the activity room, I read about a woman who was already a grandmother giving birth to her daughter and son-in-law’s child after having been inseminated with the embryo, begun in a test tube. I mentioned the article when Sonja was visiting, and she said: “Don’t worry. We won’t ask that of you.” Such a sense of humor. She also seems to have come to terms with her inability to have children. “You’re not supposed to say such things, but I think I’m happy to be spared the pain,” she said. I almost agreed with her, automatically, but then I remembered that I had had a child, that it would not be respectful to his memory to state otherwise. Bad enough not to have set the record straight after so many years, but why say I knew just what she meant, why compound the lie? In her eyes, I am another version of her: a childless woman. Whereas, I had a child in 1941, and he died in 1943, walking toward us on the porch in Maine, having gotten out of bed because the noise of the Fourth of July fireworks had frightened him, the fireworks in the distance, lighting up the sky. At first we thought he had tripped. He was walking toward us in the dim light of the porch, carrying a toy he’d brought from bed, and then he went down, with our arms outstretched and Gordon calling his name, he went down, struck by a cerebral aneurysm, a weakness in the brain that might well have been present at birth. From the time he recovered from colic as an infant, he had never been sick, and there he lay, with all of us so stunned that little Gordon was the first to actually reach him. I fell apart, seizing Gordon, in my panic, as if he’d done something wrong, refusing to acknowledge my child lay on the floor. Apparently, after riding with him in the ambulance to the hospital — I am told Alice jumped in with me, and wouldn’t budge — apparently, after insisting to the doctor that what had happened was because of something I had done, while Alice insisted otherwise, I blacked out, and when I came to, I said nothing for two days. Before I did speak I apparently hiccupped nonstop, while the doctors discussed further sedation and Alice begged them not to do it. The next thing I knew, I was out of the hospital, in their bedroom. For some reason, they had put me in their room, as if I were a frightened child who could be soothed by being taken into the adults’ bed, and when I awoke I had the terrifying, confused sense that a war had begun; that the house had been hit by a bomb, which would account for the darkness, for the sheets tangled on the floor, the discarded clothes, and for Alice’s body, dead in the chair. She was asleep. Not a sound in the house, and not a sound I could bring forth. I kept working backward, fixating on the war, trying to remember when the war had begun. December 1941, a voice said inside my head. Then I skipped ahead to the porch, to the fireworks, the bright explosions in the sky. I saw Martin walking toward us in slow motion, not a gun in his hand, but a toy tiger, the tiger on the ground, Martin dead — actually dead — beside it.

We lived, all of us, in a trance. I would look down and expect to see him, take a nap in the rocking chair and awaken to feel a pressure on my thighs as if a small child had just sat there, and got up to go elsewhere. Certain colors reminded me of toys he had loved; the color yellow saddened me because he had slept in yellow pajamas. I became convinced Martin’s death was punishment for our sins. They tried to reason with me. If it would make me feel better to declare that the child had been his and mine, Alice said, she would understand completely. It was making her miserable, the way people rushed first to comfort her before turning to Miles or to me — she, who was least important. Miles became angry, telling her to stop dwelling on what he called “biology.” Did he not want the secret told, or did he — quite probably, he did — think that the child’s parentage was hardly an important issue, we had all loved him so much? It did not seem that any of us would ever be happy again. We could not even sit on the back porch. We turned inward, became cross with one another, went to bed ourselves as soon as Gordon was tucked in. And do you know what saved us? I thought of it when Sonja visited, bringing little presents with her. We were saved, looking back, by butter. In his blundering but insistent way, Ethan Bedell arrived at the house with a bottle of French cognac, which, when uncorked, smelled to Alice and to me like nausea itself, and with a large crock of butter. Bread and butter had become such a delicious treat, because we almost always used our red stamps for meat. But there was Ethan, with a large quantity of butter and the promise of an almost endless supply. Eating our buttered bread, we began to cheer up. That tells you how desperate we were.

Marshall was born in 1944. Alice said to me — prefacing it by saying that although she was about to overstep her bounds, she still had to tell me what she was thinking — that she hoped it was not lost on me, the fact that quite soon after Gordon’s birth, Miles had gotten me pregnant with Martin, and now, so soon after Martin’s death, she had given birth to Marshall. Next he would want me to have another child, and then he would turn to her again. It was the beginning of her becoming unbalanced. I remember also, that she read, that summer, a book by Wilkie Collins called The Woman In White, and that she imagined that her finding it on a bookshelf was no coincidence, and she became profoundly depressed at the actions of the dastardly Sir Percival Glyde. Miles gave away the book, and also The Moonstone, by the same author. He even got rid of books by Charles Dickens — as if that would protect us from any further misery! I think he did not get her help as soon as he might have because she had also had mood swings after the birth of Gordon — that, and naturally he did not want to think about the serious implications of her behavior. I can remember him telling me, quite sincerely, it seemed, that paranoia was in the air, and he later reminded me that he had seen this trend long before others did. When later the nation got caught up in the Communist scare, he saw Nixon’s persecution of Hiss for what it was, deplored the irrational witch-hunt, became angry at a zoologist he had known years before for publishing a book called Our Plundered Planet, about the alleged dangers of DDT. He thought there was much unfounded paranoia in America, the paranoia of certain fame seekers who knew how to capture the media’s attention, so that their mass paranoia had seeped into sane minds, polluting them.

Actually, he was the one who never recovered. She and I adapted, had our highs and lows, but he became entrenched in his ideas. Americans became worse than fools for believing stories about microfilm hidden in pumpkins — why, next they would believe that the stork would be scared off from delivering babies by people prowling through pumpkin patches. In 1941, when I first went to Maine, he was already raving about Thomas Hart Benton’s having said he hated museums, which Miles saw as a subversive plot to keep people away from culture. He later became furious at the appearance of Abstract Expressionism, saying that now there was a Communist plot, if people had to have their Communist plots: Pollock was only a madman, according to him; his so-called action painting a farce he meant to put over on credulous critics, while pandering to the lowest common denominator of Americans’ credibility by dripping paint on enormous canvasses and claiming that what Miles called “skunk sprayings” were works of art, important personal statements controlled by unconscious forces.

For a while, though, things went along. Marshall was born, and he was a joy to us. Things went along until Alice became too incapacitated to really function, and then he did what men think to do: he took her on a trip to New York, and when he sensed that hadn’t done the trick, he hedged his bets by contacting the doctor she and I had seen, briefly, after Martin’s death, yet he also kept her in New York, far enough away that the doctor could not do her any good, which to him meant any harm, and where I also could not exert any influence. I could shame her into stopping drinking, and he knew it. But he enjoyed it himself. Didn’t want to be told it was harmful. He thought he could re-create the past simply by cutting her off from the present, but she was too smart for that. Still, she must have felt very vulnerable, very uncertain about her own capabilities, if she let him convince her for so long that she should be apart from her children. It wasn’t until she was actually hospitalized that any of my letters to her got through. She wrote back and said she’d heard nothing while they lived for that long time in the hotel. Who would prosper, when they were upset, by living out of a suitcase, being dragged to business dinners, kept away from their children and from everything that provided them with stability? It was wartime. The entire nation was upset to begin with. He had always been so overbearing, but through time he also became smooth. As he aged, people began to think him a charming, if slightly out-of-touch, gentleman of the old school, which of course implied he was an upstanding fellow. It was no different from the way he had first appeared to me, clasping my hand meaningfully and then kissing me discreetly on the cheek, so as not to frighten me. He seduced me sexually, and he proceeded to seduce anyone else he wanted, in any area in which he wanted to seduce them, whether it be for business or for pleasure. Amelia, for example, was a gratuitous seduction. Did he think I’d be flattered he wanted me so much more? Did he think he’d take her to bed and buy her silence? Amelia and I sat together in Dr. St. Vance’s office, during that long time he kept himself and Alice exiled from Maine, and I heard what she had to say. I had guessed there was something between them, just as Alice intuited he still slept with me from time to time, of course. What he hadn’t counted on was how much Alice meant to him. How much his own wife meant. Because when she faltered, when Amelia couldn’t reason with her, when my obvious devotion couldn’t quell her anxiety, he started to realize he had quite a problem on his hands, and that it was a problem none of us would be likely to want to help with: his further subjugation of his wife. She was the one he was reluctant to let go of: not his little children; not his secret affairs on the side. That she had become capable of doing the things he did almost killed him. A woman, having an affair! Drinking! For a long time, he refused to see it. I think he thought that if he could make their world anonymous enough, she would change her behavior, cling to him. So he set up housekeeping in the Waldorf Hotel, exiled both of them from their familiar world that he realized, too late, had caused her such pain, and tried to pretend a different context would allow them to begin a different life. I think he wanted us to vanish: for the boys to disappear; for me to return to Montreal. I did go there, briefly, though I understood he did not really approve of my leaving. My father had had surgery, and my mother seemed disproportionately upset. How strange that the sight of me was not so much soothing in its own right, but that he was reassured I was prospering. That was what he saw, in spite of the fact that my hair had grown long and straggly, I had lost weight, I was at wit’s end, really. Yet when my father looked at me he saw only the prosperous child he had sent to New England. He wanted to see the pictures of the children I carried in my wallet. He showed me their Christmas card, as if Miles’s signature, alone, ensured that all was well. My mother would hardly meet my eyes: she offered me her prettiest dresses, in spite of my description of rural Maine; when I hinted that Miles and Alice had been gone much too long, she equivocated, suggesting that she and I could not understand the complexities of business. I stayed three days. I felt too guilty about leaving Amelia, who knew nothing about children, alone to care for Gordon and Marshall. I think I also feared she might stay. Her staying would validate the desperate circumstances, I felt. On the plane, I actually thought about accepting Ethan Bedell’s proposal of marriage — not because of any feelings toward him, but because … God — there was a time when I cared deeply what people thought. I had internalized my guilt so much that I wanted no one to have anything objective to latch onto with which to criticize any of us: Wouldn’t they be astonished by two women raising children, as opposed to a woman and a man? Now I read about lesbian communities, festivals celebrating modern-day witches, single parents, businesses owned exclusively by women. Then, I would have felt like Hester Prynne. I would have felt entirely conspicuous, and certain that people’s eyes would have followed me wherever I went. Curious, when I think back on it: that I would have gone to a party at the Cocoanut Grove, where everyone would have known I was not merely an au pair, yet nothing would have convinced me I could live alone, or with the help of another woman, in raising Miles and Alice’s children. The simple difference, in my mind, was that if Miles was there at my side, whatever he said would get us through, but anything I did alone, or with Amelia, would be a transparent masquerade that would inevitably disgrace me.

“Mail call!” Patty the nurse always says, when she pokes her head in the door and has a catalog for me, or a postcard from Sonja of some pretty scene she knows I’ll enjoy seeing. Or in the days when Ethan was still able to write. I said to her that it was as if one snow-flake made her herald a snowstorm! I shouldn’t have, because she, herself, seems cheered when she has mail to deliver. So different from years ago, when I didn’t know what to hope for: more lies, about Alice’s progress, letters announcing his or their imminent arrival, or an empty mailbox, no boot tracks leading to it, no false promises inside, flap closed, like a trap empty of animals. They can be quite beautiful, if you come upon them in the snow: a trap transformed into some harmless igloo, pleasantly insulated by whiteness. You forget what it might contain — what terrible pain. What bad luck. The other day a young woman, a new person, a social worker, came to see what she could do to “facilitate my adjustment,” as she put it. Is one supposed to adjust to loneliness, to old age? I found the question quite stupefying. Well: if it had been years ago, she could have helped by being Amelia, and she could have stood her ground, and stayed in spite of my protests; if the social worker had been Ethan she might have construed my puzzled silence as wavering — a sign she might insinuate herself with me. If she had been Madame Sosos, a woman who was as oddly charismatic as she was lunatic, she might have flattered me and then played poker for my soul with the doctors. I think about that, sometimes. Ethan not knowing what to do, sending his fortune-teller into Alice’s hospital with instructions to look at her palm and predict a long and happy life. She must have been so happy to see any outsider that she wanted to believe what she heard: a full recovery; good health; a quick return to her loved ones. Apparently, the doctor in charge was willing to buy Ethan’s lie that Alice had consulted Madame Sosos for years. Alice was responding so poorly, and indeed she did manage to cheer her: she knew her devoted husband’s name; where she lived; where she’d grown up. Madame Sosos’s mistake was to name only two children, Gordon and Marshall, which devastated Alice because then she was certain that Martin did not even live in the spirit world. Before leaving, Madame Sosos was lured into a game of poker by some of the doctors — who could imagine how or why? — and won every game she played. They never let her in again. The second time she went there she had a special message from Martin, but she couldn’t get into the hospital. Miles had made an enormous fuss. The doctors who’d been beaten at poker pronounced her a charlatan. Alice would never have heard from her again if Madame Sosos hadn’t been clever enough to have flowers delivered, with the gift card saying she’d been contacted by Martin, who was fine, and who sent invisible kisses on each pink petal of the roses. She said she touched them to her lips — not so crazy she believed it true, but liking the idea of holding soft, fragrant rose petals to her lips. After her shock treatments her lips were always parched. Long after she got out of the hospital, she kept jars of Vaseline around the house which she’d dip into to moisten her lips. All day, we would sip tea.

That was what we were doing, sitting and sipping tea, Marshall with his paperdolls, Gordon with his book of fairy tales, with the stories printed on the left side of the book and the right-hand page to draw on. He would draw pictures that were improvisations on what he’d read, drawing mountains when there were no mountains in the story, or drawing the world underwater, though he didn’t even have a snorkel mask. To my knowledge there were no such things for children in those days. He would read the fairy tales and leave the pages empty most of the time, but sometimes, to amuse his brother, he’d demonstrate his skill with drawing, and then we’d see some of the fairy-tale figures in imaginary landscapes, along with a fox, say, that simply hadn’t appeared in the story, or an enormous tarpon he’d decided to put on land, underneath the castle under which Rapunzel had let down her hair. He was always adding to the fairy tales, not just illustrating what he’d read, and Alice and I would be so fascinated: What was that crow, sitting on the bonnet of the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” or the snake peeking out of the shoe in “Cinderella”? They were very original drawings, quite well done, but Miles didn’t like them; he always wanted Gordon to stick to the facts, and he took it personally, as if all those stories he’d read aloud so many times had been misunderstood by his son, or as if the boy must have been bored, if he felt the need to add to what was there. This reaction, if you can imagine, from the same person who so admired Magritte. Fine if a train was rushing out of a fireplace, or if an apple floated in front of a man’s face, but let his son draw a bird sitting on a wolf’s bonnet and he was absolutely at a loss to understand what such a thing could mean. I think it’s possible he saw Alice as unbalanced, and he greatly feared it might also be true of his children. At any rate, that day in the kitchen, where he’d come to sit with us as she was knitting and I was making a list of things we needed to buy to make raisin pudding, he saw the book open on the table and he picked it up and started flipping through, asking us questions about what Gordon had intended, as if we had any idea. Alice said that perhaps Gordon actually was illustrating the characters he read about, but they were in a different form; she thought it possible that he might be including creatures that existed in their reincarnated forms. Alice had come to believe in reincarnation. If only she could have lived to hear authorities on dying: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, for example. Well: Miles didn’t want to hear about religion, so he certainly didn’t put any stock in reincarnation. She was needling him by mentioning it. He’d come into the kitchen and we both could tell the call he’d just hung up from had upset him — business was his deity — and poor thing, she had nothing but vague reports from the doctors, she was no fool, she knew the news was bad, knew more than I did, certainly, because I never believed she was so terribly ill, I thought it was just taking time for her to mend, and what use was he, coming into the kitchen, where we sat peacefully, suddenly starting an argument about his son’s very nice illustrations in a book? Now I think I should not have been so unrealistic as to believe that any surgery simply cured the problem, but he was so insistent that this was so: he claimed to be stating the doctors’ certainty, too. She had been through so much — who could believe there was anything worse in store for her? We were having tea when he pulled up a chair, sat backward in it — which was always a sign he was going to start in on some serious topic — and he said to her, “Tell me that you do not have delusions of an afterlife.” Imagine: she was terminally ill, and he was intent upon disabusing her of the notion there would be an afterlife. I wonder what would have happened if the whole subject could have been turned aside. If we hadn’t taken everything he said so seriously. Sonja tells me the expression “Get a life” is popular now. I wonder: what if one of us had had the nerve to tell him to get a life, if we’d gone on with what we were doing. But she was having none of it that night. She looked so frail in her white nightgown. So haggard. And yet, she had already forgiven so much. She said: “I won’t come back as a person, Miles. I’ll come back as an animal.” She fingered Gordon’s drawing of the fox. “You can marry Evie,” she said, “and I can be your cat. Or your dog. I could be a bird, in a birdcage you could put over there, in the corner. It could be like the secrets we keep now, but then everyone would be thinking how sad that I’m dead, not just sorry you had such a crazy wife. Wouldn’t that be fun, with only you two knowing the cat was really me? I could bring a dead mouse to your doorstep. Or come back as a dog that’s rolled in carrion. I could enact what you really think of me. If I come back as a bird, be sure he clips my wings, Evie. Have it be the same way it’s been in this life.” We were astonished, of course. I understood, though I’m sure he did not, that she was imitating the manner of Madame Sosos. Ethan had insisted I meet her and I’d agreed, intending to put my foot down if she was too obviously crazy and would be sure to upset Alice. He’d driven to Maine with Madame Sosos. The boys were out of the house, which I thought was better. I expected someone in a turban, with a crystal ball. Instead, she had on the prettiest sterling-silver earrings from Georg Jensen. I’d seen them in a magazine, and I recognized them immediately. She had on those earrings, and a little rouge and lipstick, and all she wanted to talk about was how far away Maine was from New York. The car trip had really tired her, and of course she must have been slightly hostile: she was going to see Alice, at the hospital in Connecticut, so why did she first have to see the woman who took care of Alice’s children? We had tea together, while Ethan very kindly fixed a shelf that had fallen in the basement. She’d examined the palm of my hand, lit incense, and found meaning revealed in the rising twines of smoke. There Alice sat, some time later, doing a perfect imitation of the dreamy voice of Madame Sosos, whom Ethan had sent to see her, after all, not Miles, though I don’t blame her for being angry she was condescended to. I think I let out a little laugh — a sound, anyway — but Miles was too astonished to react for quite a while, so we were both shocked when he swept his hand across the tabletop, knocking everything to the floor, our tea, the saltcellar, the book, the ashtray. It made me sure, in that moment, I didn’t want to ever be married to anyone. I was thinking that I was so glad I wasn’t married, I was so glad I was not a person who might say such things, or another person who might react as he just had. I’d witnessed too many such scenes between married people. That was what I thought, sitting there with the smell of ashes in my nose, my ankles wet from toppled teacups. It had started to rain. Gordon stood in the kitchen doorway, having rushed from the living room to see what had happened. He looked confused, then stricken. The book was upside down in a puddle. He rushed to pick it up, but Miles got there first, opened the book, and shook it at Gordon, demanding that Gordon explain the made-up animals. Gordon was speechless. Miles was not a violent man. Even Miles recovered himself the instant he saw the expression on his son’s face. Miles blotted the book with his sweater. Apologized for his outburst. Held out the book to Gordon with one hand and held out the other hand hoping Gordon would put his hand in his, forgive him. But nothing was explicit, and Gordon simply turned and walked out of the room. Marshall had run upstairs. Gordon was very protective of his brother, and he was probably setting out to talk to Marshall, but Alice got up and called him, asked him to come back. She went up and got Marshall. He was too heavy for her to carry, but she did anyway. I put my hand on Gordon’s shoulder and guided him into the living room, hating Miles. Hating him, but at the same time sorry that Gordon had not taken his hand. I knew what that emptiness felt like: it was as if emptiness had weight, and texture. There had been so many times I’d looked down, thinking I felt Martin’s little hand in mine again, only to see nothing. The air. Yet my fingers tingled. My palm was warm. It was as if he’d clasped my hand and vaporized, leaving his bodily warmth. Of course, I never, ever, would have mentioned this to either of them. Her most recent hospitalization had been a terrible time for everyone. We were not up to such a scene as had just exploded. He had tears in his eyes. Things from the tabletop were strewn everywhere. Miles bowed his head and said he was going out. Out in the rain? It was a storm: thunder; lightning. I wanted to take his hand myself, not so much for his sake, but out of sympathy for all of us. Instead, I got the umbrella from the stand and handed it to him, and that was what he used to sweep away everything else in his path on his way to the door, pushing Marshall’s paperdolls off the table, breaking a vase, scattering paper. It was the baby she thought of constantly, he said. She lived in the past, cared only for the baby, who was she kidding by talking about the future, when she was fixated on the past?

When he left, she became quite composed. Quite calm, with Marshall in her arms, his chin on her shoulder, his legs dangling. She read to them from the Bible, told them she was going to die, walking back and forth in her nightgown. I thought it was a private moment between them, that I shouldn’t be there, but as I backed away I saw the look in Gordon’s eyes and lingered. I blotted the book dry. Because he’d used crayons, the drawings themselves were not ruined — except that later, the pages puckered. Not that he ever looked at the book again. Or that she ever read aloud from the Bible again. Though I looked at the 121st Psalm the other day, when Father Molloy brought me a Bible as a gift, and I could hear her saying the words, hear her voice as if she stood in the room. What would she make of such a room as mine? She, who had lived in such spacious houses. Lately an old movie has come to mind when I think about houses. Holiday Inn, with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, with all those wonderful songs by Irving Berlin. It was a movie about two friends who turned their home into a roadhouse, so they could perform for visitors every year. Fred Astaire did his Fourth of July number accompanied by torpedoes and firecrackers. I was told they had to call in technicians to build an organ that would set the firecrackers off electrically, so the organist could play the explosions at exactly the right moments, and the fireworks would be coordinated with Fred Astaire’s feet. If I think of the Fourth of July, I like to remember that movie, not what once really happened on the Fourth of July.

My favorite nurse always gets involved in whatever old movie I’m watching on the VCR. Never to have seen Casablanca! Nineteen forty-two was such a vivid year, in part because that was when we first saw that unforgettable movie. The young are made weary by being told they’re young; it’s as rude, I suppose, as pointing out to someone old that they’re old. It seems so many young people are cursed now with weighing too much. Patty is a pretty girl, but she’s always worried about her weight — as well she should be. Sonja has stayed the same pretty, slender girl she’s always been. It wouldn’t have been insecurity about her looks that led her into an affair, I hope. I hope both boys were raised to give a lady a compliment when she deserves one. Who knows what Marshall really sees? Marshall is such a solitary person; it makes him self-absorbed. And Gordon is unobservable, like life on a star. There it is, shining, but you don’t know the first thing about what goes on there. Frustrating, not to be able to find out how time will change them. Yet beyond a certain point, I think the world changes so much that no one can predict. An old person’s intuition doesn’t operate as it once did, because the rules change, familiar faces disappear, the things you came to count on to provide a context aren’t there anymore — not even the music. No one ever hums “Moonlight Becomes You,” and it was one of the greatest songs of 1942. Even before that, Frank Sinatra singing “This Love of Mine,” the year Martin was born. That was also when we first heard “Blues in the Night” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Of course, there was also Ethan’s favorite: “There Will Never Be Another You.”

It’s difficult to imagine that Gordon or Marshall have particular songs that evoke romantic feelings. Sonja loves classical music; Beth tells me she likes “New Age.” I thought to leave Miles’s letters to one of the boys — Marshall, I thought, at first, because he is a college professor, words are his love, his business, but hesitated because he already thinks too much about everything. Neither of them would know that landscape. That haunting music. The resonance of the world in which we lived. Giving the letters to either one of them would be like giving them a silent film, based in a foreign land. Which made me think that Sonja should have them. Yet she is dismayed, now, at how men act. They would only reinforce her skepticism. So: Gordon. Better to give them to Gordon, along with something pretty for his wife, and hope that the person who so patiently explained things in his youth — who explained to his brother, at the same moment he was improvising stories himself — would discover things in them worthy of his attention. Gordon has spent his life on the run. He might be interested to know that there was a period of his father’s life when he, too, kept himself apart from everyone. When he wished to reinvent his life.

I’ve been wondering, lately, what it might have been like if I’d never left Montreal. That first day we spent together alone, when I was still a teenager: Miles jumped off the lift and spread his arms, stood at the top of the mountain and whispered Paradis, then drew his arms in tightly as if to embrace the air. If I had drifted away like hot breath hitting cold then. Or skied down the slope, away. What if I had never started with him, let alone been won back through the years by fragments of romantic melodies. Or by an avalanche of letters to which I added a P.S. that was not there: that he loved me. If I had not responded, on the ski slope, or later, sealing my fate as easily as I licked an envelope, I could have had a different life. I could have been the white space between words.