Souvenir of Cold Springs Read online

  Souvenir of Cold Springs

  A Novel

  Kitty Burns Florey

  This book is dedicated to my mother

  Geraldine Goodson Burns

  1910–2001

  Though much is taken, much abides.

  Tennyson, “Ulysses”

  Kerwin Family Tree

  MARGARET

  1987

  Anywhere, Margaret thought. Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, but preferably someplace warm. Honolulu, Acapulco, Saint-Tropez. On the subway, she recited the names of cities to herself, a rosary of places that weren’t Boston. Palermo, Pamplona, San Juan. Miami Beach, for heaven’s sake.

  The T was cool and clammy; outside, the day was even colder. Daylight savings time was just over, all the trees were leafless, and the streets got dark at five o’clock. Buenos Aires, Palm Springs, Algiers. But anywhere, really. Paris, London. No, not London. Or would it matter? What were the chances of her running into Matthew in a city the size of London? And what would it matter if she did? Paris, London, Rome. Anywhere, anything.

  She tried not to look at the other people in her car. She read the advertising instead. Vodka, beauty school, Jobfinders, beer. The procedure to follow in an emergency was posted by the door in both English and Spanish, and she read it over and over. Pull the ring and slide the lever to the left, then follow the instructions of the train crew. An emergency seemed imminent. It always seemed to Margaret that people on the subway at odd hours looked disturbed in some way. Mornings, everyone going to work, they were absorbed in their newspapers or not awake enough to make trouble, and at the evening rush hour they were blank-eyed and exhausted. But during less busy times—like now, four in the afternoon—they weren’t a crowd, they weren’t safe. They were separate individuals, thinking. They were all potential maniacs.

  Q: And what about me? I’m on the subway. Am I a potential maniac?

  A: A maniac in potentia. Potential comes from the same Latin root as powerful, so you are a paradox: a powerless potential maniac. And so not really a maniac at all. You don’t have the energy to be a maniac. Your maniacal days are past. Remember that.

  En el caso de una emergencia por favor siga las instrucciones del personal del tren.… How beautiful things sounded in Spanish. Majorca, Madrid, Managua, Manzanillo, all those warm and maternal words, everyone speaking Spanish, the food fiery with chiles, the hot blue skies continuing into the evening, and then the long, sweaty nights. Guitars. Bars. Men with cigars. The windows open to the stars. The doorways would be arched, carved into thick stone walls that were rough to the touch. Moorish. There would be flowers everywhere, everything red and yellow and lush, rampant green. She stared at an advertisement for shampoo that would make people want to smell her hair and thought: I’ve got to get out of here.

  She was on her way to Cambridge, to see some people about driving their car to San Francisco. All right: San Francisco wasn’t that warm, but it wasn’t Boston, either. On the phone, the woman with the car—Mrs. Haskell, whose daughter at Berkeley needed their old Toyota—had said, “I suppose you’ve heard Mark Twain’s famous comment, that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Margaret hadn’t heard it. The only thing she could quote from Mark Twain was the last sentence of Huckleberry Finn about lighting out for the territory. She said she was thinking of doing that, and Mrs. Haskell had laughed tinklingly and said, “Oh, that’s wonderful—the territory—because of course California still is in some ways such an uncivilized place, isn’t it? I mean, compared to Cambridge.”

  She would drive the Haskells’ Toyota to California, and she wouldn’t come back. She could find a job, a neighborhood, people to live with. The main thing was to escape her parents and Roddie Smith and everyone else she knew and the cold city and the sidewalks full of dead brown leaves. The main thing was to chuck everything and start over.

  At Park Street station, where Margaret changed trains, a young woman was singing. The song was a lament about a maiden fair, with rose-red cheeks and coal-black hair, the love that fades like the morning dew, the price you pay for a love untrue. No one was looking at the singer, though there were coins in the basket at her feet. Margaret dropped in a quarter: the price you pay for distraction. Then she leaned against a post and studied the singer—a mousy, overweight girl, who sang smiling. Her voice was shrill and powerful, like the voice of Joan Baez on an old record, echoing off the steel rafters and the mosaic walls, the posters advertising booze, the maps of the Red Line and the Green Line, the gleaming, frightening tracks—filling the subway station with (Margaret thought) madness. It was mad to stand there singing about lost love, singing for no one, singing for quarters. What could make her do that? Did she believe what she was singing? Did she wish as she sang that she had rose-red cheeks and coal-black hair? Had she experienced a love that faded like the morning dew? The station was strangely still, as if people were irresistibly, secretly listening. The voice was gorgeous, the song haunting. Margaret closed her eyes, and in the darkness the sound pierced her like a knife in her skin. When the Cambridge train came she was thankful.

  All the way across the river to Harvard Square, she huddled in a corner of the car with her sunglasses on and the collar of her shirt pulled up around her ears. The thought of Cambridge still filled her with terror. She had dropped out of Harvard in April with her junior year unfinished. Officially, she was on leave. They would take her back, she knew. They longed to take her back. She felt Harvard’s kindly, fatherly hands on her shoulders wherever she was, but it was worst of all at the Square. She never went there anymore. Even going through on the subway was risky, and Porter Square, where she was headed, couldn’t be more than a mile from Room 105, in Emerson, where she had disgraced herself. She always thought of it that way, probably because her mother had said, “Well, you’ve finally disgraced yourself,” as if disgrace was what she had been waiting for since the day Margaret was born.

  Buckingham Street was three blocks from the subway station, a street lined with planer trees, which her mother poetically called sycamores and which always seemed to Margaret to be diseased, their bark tumorous and scabbed. Number seventeen was a brick house with a fanlight over the door. As soon as she saw it, Margaret knew she wasn’t going to be hired by Mrs. Haskell to deliver her Toyota to California. She imagined a patrician old lady, honest gray hair in a bun, flowers on a polished table, thin Yankee lips pursed in disapproval of Margaret’s punky hair and purple nails. And now that Mrs. Haskell had had time to think about it, would the name Margaret Neal sound familiar? Wasn’t there a Professor Haskell in the English Department? Would Margaret’s disgrace have reached as far as Buckingham Street?

  She passed by the house, crossed the street, and backtracked to Mass. Ave., where she turned in the direction of Harvard Square. She hadn’t had her Daily Suffering yet. Not getting the Toyota wasn’t enough. She had known that particular dream wouldn’t come true. No: her Daily Suffering would be to walk through the Square. Maybe even stop in the Coop or get a cup of tea somewhere or stroll through the Yard, past Emerson. No, not that. Just the Square.

  Q: Can I keep my sunglasses on?

  A: Yes, even though it will be almost too dark to see by the time you get there. You’ll see well enough to suffer. If you don’t, you’re honor bound to take off the sunglasses.

  She was wearing a flannel shirt over a turtleneck and a long, deeply flounced skirt, tights, and lace-up boots. Everything black except the shirt, which was black-and-blue plaid. One of her mourning costumes of the second rank. And then the sunglasses. Earrings long enough to bang against her jawline when she walked. She looked at her reflection in shop windows: a dry cleaner, a liquor store, Erewhon, a craft store with a
window full of patchwork quilts, rag dolls, duck decoys with every painted feather in place.

  She pushed her sunglasses up on her head and studied herself against a pink-and-white quilt. How wholesome the quilt, how dolesome the Margaret. A woman in the shop smiled dubiously out at her, raising her eyebrows. Coming in, dearie? Want to buy a nice dead duck? Margaret pulled down her sunglasses and went on. She tried to think what she could do after she negotiated the Square. She could call Felicity, whom she hadn’t spoken to since April, and arrange to meet her for dinner at Adams House, ha ha. She could call Roddie and get him to take her to a movie. She could ride the T back to Boston and walk around the city and get dinner someplace and see a movie by herself. She could go home. She could make a beautiful, hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind noose in decorator colors out of her mother’s needlepoint yarn and hang herself from a beam in the attic.

  Harvard Square was darkening. The cars had their headlights on, and the neon Out-of-Town News sign was red in the gray air. At the Coop corner she waited to cross. This was going to be uneventful. She saw no one she knew, and no one looked at her. Dressed all in black, maybe she could disappear into the darkness. Cars zipped by. A homeless woman snored on a bench, surrounded by bundles. Someone played a banjo. A man with Reagan’s picture on a stick was passing out bumper stickers that read NO MORE SHIT, and Margaret took one. A girl in a Stanford sweatshirt jogging by bumped into her and said, “Whoops.” Just then, she spotted Felicity.

  Felicity was crossing Brattle Street with a boy Margaret didn’t recognize. They were deep in conversation, Felicity doing most of the talking, sticking her teeth in the guy’s face as she always did when she got excited. “You know?” Margaret knew she was saying. “You know what I mean?” The boy nodded, grinning. He was unremarkable looking, one of those people it was impossible to describe—the kind who get away with crimes. Well, officer, uh, brown hair, and some kind of eyes, I don’t know, sort of average height, I guess …

  She followed them across the street. He walked with his hands in his jacket pockets and Felicity held on to his arm. He was perhaps an inch taller than she, so that would make him five feet eight. Wait: Was Felicity wearing heels? Margaret maneuvered until she could see. Sneakers, both of them. Okay, then, five feet eight. Brownish corduroy jacket, the same dead color as his hair. Narrow shoulders. The skinny drippy preppy type Felicity always said she despised. Behind them there were two women with shopping bags, then a caricature of a professor (gray crew cut, tweed jacket, briefcase), then Margaret. If Felicity and Mr. Blah turned around they would see her instantly. Margaret took off her sunglasses. The risk would be part of D.S.

  Still talking, they turned into Au Bon Pain. Margaret stopped dead, and the crowd parted around her and went on, oblivious.

  Q: Do I have to go in there?

  A: Decide for yourself.

  She imagined herself going in after them, ordering a greasy spinach croissant, following them to their table and sitting down nearby. Or would they just be getting coffees to take out? Okay, she’d stand at the counter and order a cup of tea with milk in a loud, clear voice. Felicity would turn and look at her. Felicity would—what? Puke? Scream? Laugh? What could Felicity do that wouldn’t be horrible in some way? Even if she sank to her knees on the phony Frenchy black-and-white tile floor and begged Margaret’s forgiveness. Even if she pretended nothing had happened, yelped with joy, and hugged her.

  No. Forget Au Bon Pain. Even for Daily Suffering, that was too much. She put her sunglasses back on and stood outside by the door. Here, in better weather, people sat at tables; here she had sat with Roddie, with Felicity, with fun fellow students, discussing professors and theses and movies and vacations and the weather. Normal life, she thought. Had that been normal life? She imagined herself being interviewed, at some point in the future, by some big-shot evening-news type. They are back in the Square—scene of her quaint youthful peccadilloes. She has a streak of gray in her hair, like Susan Sontag. She crosses her legs; her legs are spectacular; the camera pans back. She smiles off into the distance and says, It seems so long ago. We were all so young.

  She looked through the window. Felicity and John Doe were sitting at a table eating pastries and drinking coffee, still talking. How could they have been served already? How long had she been standing there? She felt chilled with horror and also with the cold. I have to get out of here, she thought. I am going crazy for real.

  A small wind had come up, and the sky was darker. She headed back toward the subway station. She took the bumper sticker out of her pocket and looked at it: NO MORE SHIT. Easy to say, but where else was there to go but home?

  She wrote to her cousin Heather, the only person she knew in California. Heather was twenty-five and had graduated from Berkeley and was working in San Francisco as a paralegal. Heather had been a fastidious teenager who spoke to Margaret only to give her advice about personal grooming. Head & Shoulders for dandruff but follow up with a good-smelling conditioner because Head & Shoulders smells like Lysol. Baby oil on your elbows but make sure you rub it in good or you’ll get grease spots on your blouses. Hand lotion on your neck or else when you’re old it’ll get all stringy like your mother’s. They had met a couple of times since then, at family events, and Heather seemed improved. The Thanksgiving before, at Aunt Nell’s, they had had a long heart-to-heart about Heather’s boyfriend, Rob, who was some kind of banker. Heather was getting tired of him. Rob was obsessed with the West Coast club scene, Heather said. Margaret thought that made him sound interesting, for a banker, but Margaret knew he couldn’t really be interesting or he wouldn’t be seeing Heather.

  She rummaged through her desk for some decent paper to write on. She used her desk to store the junk of her youth, and she had to sift through letters and stickers and school papers and stuff about beekeeping, the English royal family, and the Boston Red Sox—some of her obsessions over the years, most of them from when she was eleven and twelve. Almost all the letters were from the Swiss pen pal she’d had during that time, Annette Brise. They were all in bad English; hers to Annette had been in bad French and quite dull: ici ca va bien, she always used to write, forgetting the cedilla. Margaret’s mother had bragged so much about that correspondence that she had to end it, even though she liked writing to Annette and liked getting installments about Annette’s crush on a boy named Denis: an affair of the heart, she called it.

  She found some old stationery with her name and address printed on it, one of her mother’s efforts to encourage her to keep writing to Annette. She took it downstairs to the kitchen, made herself a cup of tea, and sat looking at the sheet of notepaper, wondering what to say. Elegant black letters against cream, and the same address she’d had since she was seven, except for Harvard. It hadn’t felt like her address for a long time: it was her parents’ house, which meant that she was homeless. The Globe was folded up on the table; she could just see the headline, CONCERN FOR HOMELESS TOPS ON DEMS’ CAMPAIGN AGENDA. She imagined Dukakis and Gephardt and Jesse Jackson getting together to buy her a plane ticket to San Francisco.

  Dear Heather, I’m thinking of lighting out for the territory—namely California, preferably San Francisco. I’m getting fed up with the East, the weather, etc. What would you advise in terms of finding a job, a place to live, people? I have no money and will be lucky if I can get out there at all, but if I did—do you know anybody who needs a roommate? Do you have any ideas about where I could apply for a job? Are jobs hard to find? Around here, everybody has Help Wanted signs up. I mean waitressing, working in shops, etc. I’m not looking for demanding intellectual work. I’m sorry to lay this on you, I know you’re busy, but you’re my only contact out there. For any assistance you can give, the undersigned will be eternally grateful. Love, Margaret

  She put it in an envelope before she could think about how stupid and desperate and pathetic it sounded, found the address in her mother’s address book, and took a stamp from the monogrammed brass stamp dispenser her father had given her
mother. She wondered if Heather had heard about her disgrace. Would her mother have told Uncle Teddy? No one would tell Aunt Kay because no one in the family was speaking to her, but her mother had these weird moments of intimacy with her brother, late-night phone calls with a lot of laughter, sometimes tears. Margaret wondered if there had been long-distance tears over her disgrace—or long-distance laughter, which would be even worse. She couldn’t imagine her mother laughing over it: enough to make strong men weep, was one of the dumb things her mother had said. But what about weak men like Uncle Teddy? Enough to make weak men laugh, and then call Heather up and chuckle over it with her? I’ve got to tell you the latest about your cousin Margaret, she got involved with her English professor and then the guy dumped her and she had an abortion and a nervous breakdown and dropped out of school and got this weird haircut and has done nothing since April but sit around the house feeling sorry for herself and driving Lucy and Mark crazy. Isn’t that hilarious?

  No. Not even an alcoholic nutcase like Uncle Teddy, who wore a smoking jacket, sang Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, and called her mother Pieface. Uncle Teddy wouldn’t laugh; he would sympathize. His own life was full of similar disasters and humiliations. She should take off for Providence and get him to adopt her.

  Boring though Heather was herself, Margaret always considered her lucky to be part of an interesting family—a father who wrote books and drank, an anorexic drug-addicted sister, a born-again redneck brother, a mother who had deserted them all. Compare that to being an only child with a mother whose main interest in life was keeping everything neat and a father whose idea of fun was to talk about how much it all cost.

  She walked down to the mailbox at Cleveland Circle. She could take that walk in her sleep—often did, actually. Awake, asleep, there wasn’t all that much difference. The sun shone grudgingly, and off in the distance a huge black storm cloud was riding in from the ocean. It was malevolent-looking, more like a mass of pollution than a natural phenomenon. As she watched it, the sun disappeared again, and she noticed that a similar cloud was approaching from the other direction. They would meet within the hour over Cleveland Circle, she thought. They would meet right over her head, and the heavens would open.