Love Walked In Read online

  The first sign didn’t even strike me as a sign until I was stepping through the door of Fringer’s Antiques on the heels of my friend Linny at about ten the next morning, which was roughly twenty-four hours after the sign dropped into my life. Actually, it didn’t drop into my life as much as fall out of my mouth. I’m talking about the reference to my mother, the one I made when Martin asked me to go to London with him.

  I almost never talk about my parents to anyone. They’re fine people. I love them. Don’t sit there waiting for me to disclose some dark childhood secrets—and I hope and pray I’m not one of those tiresome underachieving, unabused offspring who blames her parents for her limping career, designer-knockoff shoes, and broken toaster oven (my shoes are generally quite good, just so you know). Let’s just say that, from a fairly early age, my home life felt like a movie set I’d stumbled onto by accident. If you’ve seen Katharine Hepburn as a Chinese revolutionary in Dragon Seed, you know what I’m talking about. Good intentions, talented players, everyone trying hard. Just bad casting.

  In any case, my bringing up a topic to Martin that I only ever broach with my most intimate of intimates was remarkable. I took it as a sign.

  “I take it as a sign,” I said to Linny.

  “A sign that you’re deranged,” belted Linny into the cool silence of the shop. She tapped her finger on the side of her head, a head that was wrapped in a scarf. It was an awful scarf, a horror of polyester silk printed with Monet’s waterlillies.

  “Shhh!” I hissed as Mr. Fringer inclined his head to shoot a look over the tops of his glasses at us. His shop was not one of the truly elegant ones on Pine Street, no mint-condition eighteenth-century writing table posing tiptoe like a ballerina in his window. No mint-condition anything. But a good shop—my favorite. The garbage, the not-bad, the godforsaken, sat cheek-by-jowl with the stunning-but-for-a-ripped hem, -missing knob, -water stain, -torn cover—the only unifying principle being that at one time or another, old Mr. Fringer had taken a shine to each and all.

  Mr. Fringer was severe, but I liked him for two reasons. First, he was unabashedly gaga over his wife, had photos of her in gilt frames hanging behind his desk, and would work the fact of her beauty into almost any conversation. She was beautiful, too, in a broad-shouldered, duchessy, Ingrid Bergman–type way. What was so great about Mr. Fringer’s love for his wife was that she wasn’t dead, as one might have expected. I’d even met her a couple of times. I found it quite moving that a man could be so awe-filled and celebratory about the woman he came home to every night.

  The second reason I liked Mr. Fringer was that he was a reasonable man, a man who could be bargained with. I’d once talked him down from five hundred dollars to two hundred for a great big, Depression-era chandelier—a wreck, but a salvageable wreck, or so I’d thought upon seeing it, even though I know squat about antiques. And I was right. Not to boast, but it’s the kind of thing I have a knack for being right about. I polished up the brass, hunted down crystals that matched it, and talked my landlord into hanging it from my apartment’s high ceiling. Every day, I could look up and watch it sparkle like my own personal galaxy. So if Mr. Fringer wanted his store, his precious merchandise, swaddled in reverential hush, I was happy to oblige.

  “But you were right to turn him down. He could be a homicidal maniac,” stage-whispered Linny.

  I picked up a black, asymmetrical, upside-down tornado made of felt.

  “Could be. But wasn’t. You don’t know; you didn’t see his eyes. They were brown,” I whispered.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so before?” snorted Linny. “Did you give him your number? And what the hell is that?”

  “A hat. I did. I wrote it in my very best penmanship.” I set the hat down. Very Ninotchka, but like every other human being besides one who’s ever lived, I’m no Garbo. Besides, some things just can’t make the leap from past to present, and that hat was not a leaper.

  A young man in what can only be called a blouse—paisley gauze and piratelike with poufed sleeves cinching at the wrists—entered the shop with what can only be called a saunter. He carried an overloaded backpack over one shoulder that he probably called a rucksack because he was just the type. I saw Mr. Fringer sharpen his gaze and aim it toward the backpack, watching its proximity to breakables; he leaned his head and shoulders back, a cobra ready to strike.

  The young man’s glance settled on Linny. His face darkened with recognition, and he approached, sleeves gently burgeoning.

  “Your poetry selection is for the birds,” he declared, his eyebrows arched. Linny had deferred her acceptance to law school a few years back and worked in a bookstore.

  “Tweet,” tweeted Linny loudly, after a pause of just the right length. Linny is a master of the pause. The man stared, blinked twice, then wafted out of the store. Mr. Fringer gave Linny an approving smile. She smiled back, with a modest, one-shouldered shrug, before turning to me, wide-eyed.

  “His shirt,” said Linny.

  I shut my eyes to block out the memory.

  “I loved it,” said Linny. I opened my eyes and looked at Linny in her scarf, striped engineer’s overalls, and embroidered Chinese slippers. A wave of love splashed over me. Linny is truly the only person I know who wears whatever the hell she likes. If ever she hauled off and went to law school, they’d probably send her home to change clothes. Maybe not, though. She’d apparently rolled out of bed one morning, stretched, taken the LSAT practically on a whim, and gotten a score that had the whole Ivy League drooling like a basset hound.

  “I love this,” I said. Divine, perfect, made for me. Made maybe seventy-five years ago, but definitely for me. Black, sleeveless, narrow, dropped waist, a touch of black beading, possibly real jet. Light as a feather and no bleaching under the arms, thank you, God. A first-date dress to die for; a first-date dress Louise Brooks would die for. I knew it would fit.

  “That wouldn’t fit a Chihuahua,” said Linny.

  Like a glove. Sign number two.

  What surprisingly few people know is that before Joan Crawford was terrifying with eyebrows like two shrieking crows, she was adorable and sylphlike and funny. At the end of Forsaking All Others, a film that will charm you but will not alter the warp and woof of your life’s fabric, Joan finds out it was old pal Clark Gable not, as she had supposed, lifelong love Robert Montgomery who, on what was supposed to be her wedding day, filled her room with cornflowers, her favorite of all flowers. When a friend informs her of this, her pretty face fills with light, the scales fall from her eyes. The flowers are a sign! She is transfigured! Clark is her man! Put aside the fact that, despite Robert Montgomery’s goofy cuddliness and nice posture, a choice between him and Clark Gable is no choice at all; put aside the fact that RM got drunk and married a floozy with an appallingly artificial speaking voice the night before he was supposed to marry Joan. It’s the flowers that send Joan out the door, stranding RM on their would-be second wedding day, and onto the ship that’s about to carry Clark away forever.

  It was my day off, but after Linny reminded me one more time that Martin Grace did not step off some movie screen into my life and after I’d rolled my eyes at her and shoved her through the doorway of her bookstore, I popped my head into Café Dora.

  And there they were: two dozen, in full bloom. Sent by a man to whom, in our whole half-hour conversation, I had never breathed a word about flowers. A cloud, a flock, an aria, a glory of peonies, as lush as hope, as white as a promise. I nodded at them, and twenty-four snowy heads nodded back.

  Sign number three.

  4

  Clare

  Clare sat on her bed with her notebook, sorting examples. The examples seemed to fall into two categories: girls who used sweetness and girls who used pluck. Little Women contained both kinds of girls. Beth March was gentle and shy, so scary Mr. Laurence next door gave her a piano. When Jo March looked him right in the eye and told him he wasn’t as handsome as her grandfather, he laughed and said she had spirit.


  It was important that Clare figure out how to get a man to like her, because she had decided to call her father. Clare’s father wasn’t frightening in any ordinary kind of way. He wasn’t ugly with wild hair, he didn’t shout, and she couldn’t remember him ever getting angry at her. Clare wasn’t even sure that she was scared of him, but the thought of calling him made her heart pound. She had never called him before. When she told Max the cleaning lady this, Max started puffing and sputtering and cleaning the kitchen table with swipes that were more like slaps.

  “Jesus Christ, almost eleven years old, and you’ve never called your own father! The bastard must go out of his way to make you feel pretty goddamn comfortable with him.” Clare smiled at Max’s back, jolted out of her fog of worry for a few seconds by Max’s rapid-fire tirade. Clare thought Max had the most unexpected voice to ever come out of a person. While Max was all cool, art-girl edges to look at—skinny, pierced, inky black bangs in a mid-forehead, straight-across chop above cat’s-eye glasses—her voice was a cartoon airhead chirp. Instead of sounding harsh, her expletives streamed like little silver bubbles in a fish tank.

  “Guess he thinks he can just write a check, and his fatherly duties are done. Forget connection. Forget sharing your child’s life. So wholly fucked-up, as I’m sure you’ll agree.” She paused and looked at Clare.

  “Pretty fucked-up, I guess,” said Clare with a shrug, enjoying the tang of the forbidden words in her mouth, but not really sure they were accurate. Clare hadn’t called her father before not because he’d told her not to but because it hadn’t occurred to her before. She wondered whether she was supposed to want to call him up to tell him about a new friend or a good book or her role in the school play. Maybe she was the one who was fucked-up. Clare considered asking Max about this, but decided against it.

  As Clare watched Max, she thought about how Max dusted in the same way she did everything, with square-shouldered authority, but also with care. She imagined the little muscles of Max’s arms rippling under their tattoos. What if Clare scrapped the whole idea of calling her father? What if she just told her problem to Max instead? Maybe Max could help.

  But Clare decided not to tell Max, after all. Although she considered Max an adult, Clare knew that not everyone would; some people would think of her as a kid, and kids had trouble getting listened to, especially if they had tattoos and funny glasses. Besides, even if someone would listen to Max, in order for Max to get someone to help Clare’s mother, she’d have to tell them how wrong things had gotten, how Clare’s mother wasn’t being a very good mother anymore, and the thought of this scared Clare.

  Clare tried to imagine living with her father instead of her mother, and she just couldn’t; she was sure her father couldn’t imagine it either. If Clare knew anything about her father, it was that he would never let anyone take Clare’s mother away from her. If he decided to help, he’d figure out a solution that would keep them together.

  “I’d truly love to get my hands on that asshole,” tinkle-belled Max, and Clare thought maybe Max would be just what her father needed. That she’d be like Maria bursting into the Von Trapp household with her satchel and funny haircut, waking everyone up, making clothes out of curtains, and making Captain Von Trapp fall in love with music, his children, and her. Clare doubted it, though. She remembered how the captain’s lips twitched when his little daughter Gretel forgot to say her name during roll call. You got the feeling right from the beginning that Captain Von Trapp had a soft heart under his cold, unsmiling exterior, and Clare had never gotten this feeling from her father, even though he smiled all the time and called her “Clare-o the Sparrow.” Besides, Captain Von Trapp had the excuse of being grief-stricken and a widower, and Clare’s father wasn’t either of those things.

  “He’s not mean to me or anything,” said Clare. “He just has this…”

  “This what?” said Max, stopping her cleaning and turning to look at Clare. She pulled off her fisherman’s sweater and sat down on the floor next to Clare, sticking her blue-jeaned, pipe-stem legs out in front of her. Max was usually bundled in layers of clothes: hoodies, long underwear, flannel shirts, child-size tank tops, and sometimes an oversized funny purple-and-green poncho on top of it all. Once Max had left the poncho at Clare’s house and Clare had walked around her backyard in it, loving the way it made her feel cuddled and safe and, at the same time, like a butterfly. Now Max wore a tiny black T-shirt that said HAUSFRAU in pink gothic print.

  “This way of looking at me. The way my mom looks when we go over to the Shrewsburys’ for dinner; she smiles and talks and laughs, but you can tell she’s really bored. That’s how my dad looks at me, like he can’t wait for me to be over,” said Clare. She was glad she’d told Max this, and glad she’d thought of the right way to say it. She hadn’t actually put it into words before, even inside her own head.

  Max put her arm around Clare and said, “His loss, honey-pie.”

  When she was nine, Clare’s best friend Molly had moved to Taos, New Mexico. Among all the losses this meant for Clare—and it ranked, until recently, as the heartbreak of her life—the most painful loss was Molly’s family and her great, ramshackle Tudor house.

  Clare’s mother had owned a party-planning business—still did own most of it, in fact, though she’d gradually turned the day-to-day work over to her partner Sissy Sheehan and had become a kind of figure-head. Back when she was running it, though, Clare’s mother did most of the planning, ordering, arranging—the daylight work, she called it—but sent Sissy to the actual event. Clare wondered how her mother could stand it: choosing the candles, food, plates, flowers, music, sometimes even creating a theme like Ali Baba or the Roaring Twenties, paying attention to details like the color of the lighting or whether to hang tapestries on the green walls to keep everyone from looking jaundiced, but then never getting to see how it all turned out. When Clare asked her about it, her mother had said, “I do see it, Clare. In here.” She’d tapped her head, then smiled and tilted up Clare’s chin with her finger. “Anyway, I’d rather see you,” she concluded, so that Clare understood why her mother did the daylight work.

  Sometimes, though, especially during the holiday season, an event was so important that Clare’s mother had to be there herself. Then she would put on a long crepe or jersey dress, usually black, nothing bright or sparkly, except maybe her chandelier earrings if the event was very special. The point was to be invisible, Clare’s mother told Clare, even though Clare knew her mother would shine like a star no matter what. And she would drop Clare off at Molly’s house, sometimes coming out to talk to Molly’s mother, Liv, or her father, Jim, maybe doing a funny, self-mocking spin or curtsey in her dress, and then would pick Clare up the next morning. Her mother usually arrived when they were still at the breakfast table, and she would sit for a minute and have coffee with Liv and tell vivid little stories about the party: a minor avalanche of profiteroles, a drunk guest’s profanity-studded toast, a hostess swooning in her tight-cinched corset-bodice dress. Clare treasured these moments: the taste of cinnamon toast, flowers on the table, her mother’s dancing laugh, the two girls, the two women, happy and friends.

  When Molly’s family moved, Clare had no place to stay, so her mother hired an assistant named Seth for Sissy and they began doing all the night work. First, though, Clare’s mother had to attend one more function—a big getaway weekend at a mountain resort to celebrate the marriage of the children of two feuding society families.

  “I have to be there to make sure they’re not slipping poison into each other’s martinis. When the guests leave the party on a stretcher, it’s bad for business.” Her mother’s voice softened. “It’ll just be this one time, Clarey.”

  So, after six years of short day visits, Clare had ended up at her father’s apartment in the city for an entire weekend. It hadn’t been so bad, at first. Clare’s father had filled every second with activity: the Natural Science Museum, the art museum, a picnic in the park with restaurant food in fancy
little boxes instead of sandwiches, a shopping trip during which her father bought her a pair of high-heeled leather boots that her mother thought were unsuitable for an eight-year-old and never let her wear and a red double-faced wool coat embroidered with flowers around the cuffs and a matching hat that might have come right out of Sara Crewe’s closet. The first night, they had gone to dinner at the Four Seasons and afterward Clare had fallen asleep with a new white teddy bear the size of a three-year-old child.

  But the second night, she’d awakened around midnight and felt suddenly scared of the unfamiliar room with too much light coming in through the tall windows. She stepped over to one of the windows and looked down at the moving cars and the people on the sidewalks. It felt lonely to be in the room, with all the lit-up busyness down there, all its noises she couldn’t hear. She thought about why she wanted to go home, even though her father was nice to her. Maybe it was because he forgot the names of people she’d just finished telling him about and because he sometimes asked the same questions twice. But the thing that made her feel dull and almost invisible was the way his gaze would drift sideways or over her shoulder as she spoke. His attention was like a child’s when there’s a television on in a room, and Clare could sense his eyes scanning as though another, better daughter might skip into view at any moment.

  After a while, Clare had decided to get a drink of water and glided carefully past her father’s bedroom door to the kitchen. It had taken her a while to find a glass and just as she finished filling it, she heard a low, animal-like sound coming from the living room. She almost made a run for it, back to the guest room, but thought of Mary Lenox from The Secret Garden, how she’d heard crying somewhere in the English manor house she’d been sent to after her parents died of cholera and had marched boldly down spooky hallways looking for the source of the sound.