Off Season (3 page)

“So what do you think was responsible for all that? It sounds like Brigadoon.”

“The ocean,” I said suddenly, as sure of that as I had ever been of anything in my life. “The bay. The water.”

He laughed. “You sound like a sea nymph or a kelpie. Couldn’t it have been that you were all the same people you were all year, and the place, and the water, and all the old associates just called out different parts of you? Parts that just weren’t . . . winter parts? People don’t have two different selves, Lil. There are countless sides to all of us.”

“No. We were different people there. I’m sure of that.”

I was obscurely annoyed at him. He was undoubtedly right; Cam was always, among a thousand other things, my voice of pure reason. But I knew what I knew. I was different at Edgewater; I had always been different there. Back in Washington I was very much a child of my time; that sweet, smug, late fifties and early sixties world shaped me like potter’s clay. I was touched by most of it. But in those Maine summers I was a creature of water and wind and tides and rock, a much simpler being, awkwardly pure and without artifice except for that last summer, when I became a spy, and there was something essentially artless even about that. Cam was wrong. The sea changed me.
I remember that I began to feel the sea recede as soon as we pulled out of the gravel driveway at Edgewater. By the time we crossed the Piscataqua River into New Hampshire, the breath of the bay was as faint as that of a dying child. By the time we reached Washington, D.C., it was gone, though its cadence whispered to me for months, a ghost without enough strength to do a proper haunting. In the first few humid, swaddling days before my classes at the National Cathedral School for Girls began, I was like a timid, newly caged wild thing: scarcely remembering but feeling in every cell the world I had lost, sniffing and tasting the somehow familiar cage into which I had been put, creature of neither, creature of both. My mother never failed to say that I was impossible in those few days; a changeling. My father simply touched my tangled curls and said, “It’s not easy when you first come back, is it? But in a few days you’ll be right at home at Cathedral, and then before you know it it’ll be time to go back to Maine again.”

I was nine or ten when I realized that it must be hard for him, too, newly returned to the most urban fortress of George Washington University, where he taught Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Lake Poets to juniors and seniors who had not had the grades or the wherewithal to attend one of the Ivies. George Washington has a lustrous academic name now, but it was not always so. I am certain that my father never minded that. He was essentially a content man, perhaps a happy one. He was easy in his skin and confident in his calling, and a born family man. I have seen him angry, but never at us, though he must have been sometimes. His blue eyes often narrowed at injustice, unfairness, cruelty. But I have also seen them fill with tears as he looked at us around the dinner table or together in the sun at Edgewater. I think he was a very good man. I wish I had inherited more of that, instead of his wide mouth and light, straight stature.

I think my mother minded about his academic station and his ambition, or lack of it, though. The winter before that summer had changed everything. My mother’s best friend, Tatty Glover, had come for tea, bringing her daughter Charlotte to play with me. She was slightly older than I, and I thought her timorous, whiny, and a sissy. I can see that I must have intimidated her. I was impulsive, clamorous, a taker of risks and scorner of softness. I shudder to think now what those obligatory play sessions at our house must have cost her.

It was raining and I was bored with the pretty pink, green, and white bower that was my bedroom. Charlotte did not know how to play board games; she was afraid to climb on the gym set my parents had set up in the cavernous, white-painted basement for Jeebs and me. Jeebs had never paid it the least smattering of attention, being gone into the concerti and fugues of numbers inside his head by the time he was eight or nine. That left it to me—and to my father. He was delighted with it, and spent as much time as possible with me on the bars and swings. He was small, slender, firmly muscled in shoulders and arms and legs; indeed, he had the build of a gymnast. My mother was surprisingly amicable about our basement sessions on the gym set. She would only say, smiling, that she hoped all had gone well with the Flying Wallendas that day. Most of the summers of my childhood, when my mother and I and Jeebs were at Edgewater and my father’s duties kept him in Washington, I wondered if, there alone in the big house on Kalorama Circle, my father swung and leaped and thumped and laughed in the silent white Olympic ring of his basement.

So it was that day, petulant and disgusted with the shrinking Charlotte, that I said, “Okay, then, you think of something. What do you like to do at home? Comb your dolls’ hair?”

It was a nasty thing to say to a child I had already intimidated, and I knew it. I was half prepared for tears. Charlotte had employed them more than once to be allowed to go home early from our house. Instead, she looked at me out of brown eyes that could only be described as sly.

“Let’s go listen to our mothers. Hide and listen. I do that all the time. It’s fun!”

I stared at her for a moment as if she had lost her wits. Who cared what grown-up women said over tea in a Washington drawing room? On the other hand, there were thirty more minutes left of our enforced confinement. I followed her sulkily downstairs.

Our drawing room—my mother always called it that—opened off a large, high-ceilinged central hall, the focal point of which was a beautiful, curved mahogany staircase that rose three stories to the top of the house. Jeebs and I had worn out the patina on the railings, sliding down them until my mother or Lucille caught us. The drawing room was divided from the hall by heavy velvet drapes that were fastened back on either side with golden ropes and rosette holders. The flowing folds made a perfect hiding place, as secret and secure as a duck blind in a swamp. We crept into the velvet shelter, crouched down, and settled ourselves to listen.

At first the mumbled conversation was boring in the extreme; I could not make out the words themselves. I started to fidget, and Charlotte shushed me, and then I heard. It was Tatty Glover talking.

“What on earth more do you need, Liz?” she said, her voice smooth and oily and laced with humor that wasn’t really humor. I did not like Tatty then any more than I did her daughter, although I could not have said why. My affection for her came much later.
“I mean, you’ve got this fabulous big old house on one of the best streets in Washington, and the summer house in Maine, and the Chevy Chase Club, and the Sulgrave Club, and George has the Metropolitan Club, and a distinguished career as a professor—your children, well look at them. Jeebs is an Einstein already and number one in his class at Saint Albans, and Lilly is at Cathedral and is going to be a pretty thing. I can name thirty of our friends who are green with envy of you. What else is missing?”

Over the chink of china I heard my mother’s low voice. “It’s just that it was all here, Tatty,” she said. “There’s not a piece of it that’s ours; we didn’t choose any of it. It came lock, stock, and barrel from George’s parents and grandparents. The only things we’ve paid for are the cars and the children’s educations, and if you think that’s easy on a college professor’s salary, especially George’s, well, think again.”

“You’re not saying you’re poor,” Tatty said. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Everybody knows how . . . well off the old judge was.”

My mother snorted. “Well,” she said, “Mother Emily made short order of all that when the judge died. Every bit of it went to Susannah and Gregory and the damned Colonial Dames. I guess she figured George would be president of the university sooner or later, so the houses and the clubs and all that would do us.”

“And they haven’t?”

“Oh, of course they have. I don’t mean to sound bitter or greedy. There’s just nothing of . . .
me
in this house. When I look in the mirror I always expect I’ll see old Emily Constable smirking at me under her blue wig.”

“Well, hang some of your paintings. Or sell some. Get a job. Take in sewing. God, Liz. I’d swap my life for yours any day.”

“You know not what you say, Tatty,” my mother said. “Enough of this. I’ll shut up. It’s just that we were at dinner at the club last night and Jackie walked in with her sister and that movie star, the Lawford one, I think, and it was like someone set off roman candles. The energy, the pure style, the sense of joie de vivre—it made me want to come home and burn the drapes and the antimacassars. I want to be part of that. I want to know those people.”

“You will, eventually, what with your good works and all,” Tatty said. “You and George will be dining at the White House and never play bridge with any of us again. Look, I’ve got to run. See you Thursday?”

“Yes,” Mother murmured, her voice subdued. “Look, don’t go telling anybody I’m whining about being poor. I’m just antsy, and it’s February and George has some excruciating faculty dinner I’ve got to go to tonight, and I hate Earl Grey and Lucille knows it, and I’ve got cramps . . .”

“You don’t have to explain. Jackie Kennedy does that to you. I saw her at the Sulgrave last week and wanted to come home and shred my entire wardrobe and buy a Mercedes convertible. So instead I ate a whole box of chocolates.”

There was the sound of laughter and the gathering of coats and scarves.

“Charlotte? Time to go, dear,” called Tatty Glover, and Charlotte and I ran silently back up the stairs and into my room.

“You’re not so rich, are you?” She twinkled at me. Charlotte was famous for her twinkle. “I guess you think you are, but you heard what your mother said. Y’all don’t have anything of your own. It was all your grandparents’. I guess that must have really surprised your mother. My mother says she only married your father for his money.”

A red mist of rage struck me nearly blind. I had felt it before, but not often; it frightened me. I thought while it blinded me I might do something really terrible: smash, hurt, kill. I turned my head away from Charlotte Glover and clenched my teeth until my jaw throbbed.

“Your mother doesn’t know shit,” I said, summoning the worst word I could think of besides “fuck.” “My mother married my father because he loved her the first time he saw her and courted her a year before she said she’d marry him. He said she was so beautiful that it was one of God’s miracles that she ever said she’d marry him, and he was the luckiest man alive. And she says she knew the minute she laid eyes on him that he was the one she wanted to be with the rest of her life. They talk about it all the time.”

“That’s not what my mother says,” Charlotte sang, and scurried down to take her mother’s hand and smirk back up at me. Before I could think of a scathing reply, they were gone out into the early blue dusk and damp of Kalorama Circle, their lilting good-byes lingering after them.

My mother let out a long breath of relief and said, “Finally. I thought they’d never go home. I’ve got to get dressed for that thing of your father’s tonight. Did you have a good time with Charlotte?”

“No,” I said. “I hate her. She makes me itch.”

My mother laughed and came up the stairs and ruffled my hair. “You hit the nail right on the head,” she said. “She makes me itch, too. I think you’re going to grow up to be a writer. Would you like that?”

“Are writers rich?” I said.

“Some of them are, I guess. Why, do you want to be rich?”

“I think so,” I said. “I didn’t know we were poor. Charlotte told me. She said you must have thought Daddy was rich, though, because her mother said you only married him for his money.”

“Did she, now.” My mother’s soft mouth curled into a smile I had never seen. I thought fleetingly that I hoped never to see it directed at me.

“And how would her mother happen to know that, do you suppose?”

“Don’t know,” I said. It had never occurred to me to question the provenance of the knowledge of grown-ups. I thought that great knowledge simply came with adulthood, like driver’s licenses and the right to drink liquor.

“Well,” she said, kneeling and putting her arms around me and pulling my face onto her shoulder so that I could smell the lovely perfume she always wore, Vetiver—it came from Paris. “I am rich, my funny little girl. We are all rich. I have your father, who is the love of my life, and I have my children, especially my little lionhearted girl who’s going to be a writer and get very rich, and we have a really wonderful life. I want you to remember all that the next time some horrible little brat like Charlotte Glover says something nasty about me. Or about any of us. We have us. We don’t need anything else.”

She rose and went swiftly up the stairs and presently I heard the sound of water thundering through the old pipes into the cavernous claw-footed bathtub in her bathroom. I knew it would be deep with billowing lavender-scented foam.

“That’s not what you said today,” I whispered to the empty stairs, but I knew she had spoken the truth. I knew that she loved us, or at least in that moment I knew it, as fully as I ever have. She was rarely so demonstrative with me. I glowed with her touch. It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that one could feel two different ways about anything, as she seemed to about her life, and I shoved the knowledge down deep, where I pushed all the things I could not yet deal with.

When my father came home that night I met him at the door, dancing with impatience.

“Tell me how you met Mama,” I said. “Tell about when you first knew her.”

“Can I take off my hat and coat first?” he said, smiling. “Lilly, I’ve told you that story a thousand times. What’s going on? Have you forgotten it already?”

“No, I just like it,” I said. “Tell me, Daddy.”

He poured himself a glass of whiskey from the decanter on the mahogany trolley beside the drawing-room fire, and sat down in his old leather chair and motioned to me, and I ran across the room and jumped into his lap.

“Well,” he said, sipping whiskey and looking at me through the amber glass, “you know that I had just graduated from Princeton and gone to work at the university. I was very young and I was really only a teaching assistant then, but it was the tail end of the Depression and the job was a plum for me. I was twenty-one and full of myself and a burning desire to fill young heads with the beauty of the English language. I couldn’t have asked for a better job, and I guess I still can’t.”