You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  ALSO BY SUSAN RICHARDS SHREVE

  A Fortunate Madness

  A Woman Like That

  Children of Power

  Miracle Play

  Dreaming of Heroes

  Queen of Hearts

  A Country of Strangers

  Daughters of the New World

  The Train Home

  The Visiting Physician

  Plum & Jaggers

  A Student of Living Things

  Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven

  You Are

  the Love of My Life

  A NOVEL

  Susan Richards Shreve

  W. W. Norton & Company NEW YORK • LONDON

  for

  Elodie Julian Eliza Padget Aden

  Henry Isaak Noah Theo

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  June 11, 1951:

  Washington, D.C.

  A Sunday, just after noon, cool, drizzly, the smell of cut grass sweetening the air. Lucy Baldwin’s mother turned left onto Witchita Avenue, driving too fast, her tires screeching around a curve. She pulled to a quick stop behind her husband’s old blue Chevrolet which was parked in front of the house the Baldwins had purchased as an investment property leasing mainly to groups—graduate students, young unmarried men, junior government employees.

  Her father had left their house on Capitol Hill early that morning in his work boots to fix up the house—painting, planting annuals, mowing the lawn, trimming the bushes, the odds and ends that needed doing for new tenants who would be arriving the following day.

  “I’ll be home by six for dinner with the Sargents,” was the last thing he’d said before he left.

  Her parents had been fighting for weeks.

  “Will you remind your father that we have dinner with the Sargents tonight?” her mother asked, leaving the car’s engine running.

  “He knows,” Lucy said.

  “He forgets.”

  Lucy got out the passenger door, walking in front of the car, across the grass, and up the many steps to the porch. The front door was unlocked and she went into the hall, which was small, the walls freshly painted lime green, pale lime mixed with white. She knew colors and could spend hours before she went to sleep at night examining the subtle changes in the palettes her father had picked up at the paint store.

  “Daddy?” she called, wandering through the dining room, into the kitchen smelling of pine and Lysol, all the windows open. She went out to the back porch and down the steps to the garden. No one there but the grass had been cut, the lawn mower resting against a dying elm tree at the far end of the lawn, and annuals, mostly white impatiens, were lined up in flats on the back porch ready to plant.

  Upstairs the three small bedrooms were flooded with light, a ladder in the middle of the largest one with a gallon of yellow paint marked sunshine yellow, a brush lying on top of the open can so her father must have been in the process of painting, although the walls were still white and smudged with handprints.

  “Are you here?” she called again, stopping at the top of the stairs to listen, but there was no answer.

  And Lucy might have left then, hurried down the steps and out the front door, telling her mother that it was evident her father had been there but he wasn’t at the house any longer although he might return because the annuals had not been planted and a paint can was open on the ladder in one of the bedrooms.

  But when she reached the hall, she noticed for the first time that her father’s work boots, the white socks sticking out the top, were side by side in front of a door slightly ajar as if to stop passage into what Lucy thought at first must be a bathroom going off the hall, but checking, she discovered it was the door to the basement, unlit and smelling of dank.

  She moved the boots and opened the door wide so there was light enough to locate the switch at the top of the stairs.

  When Lucy was young, she used to traipse very slowly around the house holding her father’s hand and wearing one work boot which smelled vaguely of sweat and fertilizer while he wore the other, and his boot on her small foot was so heavy she could barely lift it off the floor.

  The basement stairs were wood, half painted gray, the paint still wet, a paint can opened at the bottom as if he were planning to wait for one side to dry before he painted the other. She walked carefully down the narrow unpainted half of each step to the bottom.

  Slowly her eyes adjusted and traveled to the far corner of the cinder block room, the light spreading from a small window illuminated the wall between an old oil furnace and the hot water heater, and she could see the swinging shadow of her father’s long, slender bare feet.

  Winter 1973

  One

  THE AFTERNOON IN February when Lucy Painter was moving from New York City to the house in Washington where her father had died threatened violent storms.

  Lucy stood on the sidewalk outside the apartment on Sullivan Street looking between the buildings at a slate gray, agitated sky, a raw damp to the air.

  “Snow,” she said to no one in particular.

  “Snowman!” Felix said.

  He was standing on the sidewalk next to his mother holding the large yellow chicken Reuben had given him as a going-away present.

  “If it’s snowing in Washington, we’ll make a snowman when we get there,” Lucy said, lifting him into the truck she had leased for the journey.

  Reuben was sitting on the back of the U-Haul eating a turkey sandwich while Mickey, the boy he had hired to help with the move, carried the small items down the steps of the four-story walk-up.

  “Bite?” Reuben asked, patting a seat beside him on the back of the truck.

  Lucy pulled the orange wool cap he had given her for Christmas low on her brow.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  But he pinched off an edge of the sandwich anyway, careful to get plenty of turkey in the bite, and popped it in her mouth.

  “I’ll call as soon as I get to the office in the morning,” he said. “And every night before I leave from work.”

  Not Reuben’s first promise nor the only mention of his plan for keeping in touch after thirteen years of living within blocks of each other, together several times a week whenever he could make it work.

  “And that’s that?” Lucy asked.

  “Of course that’s not that, Lucy,” he said. “We have a permanent arrangement.”

  She climbed up on the back of the truck beside him.

  “Somehow the permanent part always slips my mind.”

  He dropped his hand on top of hers, pressing his body closer, and she knew that what he wanted from her now was silence and her company sitting next to him, the heat of their breaths warming the winter air.

  “Can we talk before I leave?” she asked.

  “We always talk, Lucy,” he said, his eyes half closed. “We’ve said everything we have to say to each other.”

  What Lucy wanted was an argument, a chance to fling collected grievances at one another, to set them at serious odds—whatever conflagration that might erupt to alter the sensible path she had chosen, which was to leave New York.

  But Reuben Frank wasn’t going to budge. He would be even-tempered and sweet, quietly determined to avoid a scene until the moment she hopped in the driver’s seat and with the children headed south towards Washington, D.C.

  “Your choice to move, remember?” Reuben said.

  “It wasn’t exactly a choice,” she said.

  She watched as the boy, Mickey, brought the work table she’d had since college down the steps, concentrating on the details of what she needed to do in the hours ahead—the boxes and suitcases and odds and ends she was tossing
in the trash, toys for Felix in the car, books for Maggie—her list of things to do so she wouldn’t be moved to weep every time she caught a glimpse of Reuben’s shock of red hair falling across his forehead.

  “Here comes Maggie,” Reuben was saying as Maggie rounded the corner, her arm around Rebecca Malone—a tendency he had under pressure to register the obvious.

  “Rebecca wants to know why we have to move to Washington,” Maggie said, coming up to the truck.

  “Because of money,” Lucy said as she had said to Maggie many times. “In Washington I own the house and it’s less expensive to live there than in New York.”

  She reached over, brushing her mittened hands across the girls’ cheeks, easy with children, half a child herself as Reuben would say.

  “That’s not exactly true about why you’re moving,” Reuben said, the words falling into his scarf so the girls wouldn’t hear him.

  “What would you have me say?” Lucy asked. “The truth?”

  “I’m just a little surprised that you’re so . . .”

  “Upset?”

  “Angry.”

  Maggie was leaning over the large bin of refuse in front of the apartment.

  “I suppose you threw out my whole childhood.”

  She pulled a Raggedy Ann from the trash, shook her, picked dust motes out of the red yarn hair.

  “You told me Raggedy Ann could be tossed because she’s covered in cat throw-up,” Lucy said.

  “I said she was covered in cat throw-up, not that she could be tossed.” Maggie dropped the soiled doll back in the bin and leaned against Reuben’s legs. “So you’ll come see us?”

  “You know I will,” Reuben said.

  “A lot?”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “I’ll come as often as I possibly can.”

  “And maybe we can go to the beach this summer?”

  “Maybe we can go to the beach,” Reuben replied, which Lucy noted was a lie. How could he possibly get away from his real life long enough to take Maggie to the beach. And what would he plan to tell Elaine?

  “What does a lot mean?” Lucy asked after the girls had headed down the street.

  “I don’t know what it means,” Reuben said, agitated the way he got when pressures bore down on him as they had when he first met Lucy and again and again in the years they’d been together, more or less together, depending on the point of view. “This is a trial, Lucy, and of course I want to see you as much as possible.”

  “Just don’t say, ‘We’ll see.’”

  She could feel his furtive glance, sense the familiar fear mounting in him as he scouted an escape route the way he always seemed to do when she wanted more than he was capable of giving.

  That was the nature of their lives together. His terms.

  Lucy pulled her cap down lower on her eyes so the wool brushed her lashes.

  “I won’t say ‘We’ll see,’” Reuben said. “And I won’t lie to you.”

  “Oh Reuben.” Lucy said. “You have only lied to me.”

  She didn’t mean that, didn’t mean to make a scene on the day of her departure, not in front of Felix, who was sitting beside her while the truck was loaded. Not in front of Reuben especially, who had counted on her free spirit and independence, her willingness to live sufficient unto herself, which was all that had ever been possible between them.

  But she couldn’t help it. She wanted Reuben to ache for her the way she did for him.

  He had opened the New York Times to the front page, retreating to the newspaper to avoid a discussion of his personal life with Lucy.

  “Have you been reading about Watergate?” he asked, crossing his legs, leaning against the side of the truck.

  She shook her head.

  “Every day on the front page. Did you see that Gordon Liddy and James McCord were caught up in this shindig?”

  “I don’t read the newspaper when there’s bad news and there’s always bad news.”

  She seldom read the papers at all and never the national pages. The news of her father’s death had been reported in the national section—on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Evening Star, all over the country according to her mother. Sometimes she read the features, personal stories in the Metro section and occasionally the arts. But never the real news that had marked for Lucy the end of one childhood and the beginning of another.

  “Well, all of them are lying to us, certainly Nixon,” Reuben said. “Lying again as happened with Viet Nam, and how much else don’t we know about the truth? There’s a regular culture of lies infesting our lives.”

  Felix had scrambled off the truck, dropping the yellow chicken in Lucy’s lap, trotting over to play in the square of garden next to Lucy’s building with his friend Ernie.

  “If I spend any time thinking about lies, it has to do with you and me.” Lucy said, wrapping her arms around her legs, resting her chin on her knees.

  Reuben folded the paper and put it down, uttering a sigh of defeat.

  “Have you thought again about telling the children what happened?” he asked.

  “With you?” Lucy slipped off the back of the truck.

  “With you.”

  “I won’t tell the children anything if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Not asking,” he said. “Wondering.”

  He leaned over, his lips against her temple.

  “You know, Lucy, you’re really kind of an original.” There was weariness in his voice, or irritation or sadness. “Otherwise you’d join the Movement and wear that red and black Women on Top T-shirt and leave me for good.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said. “Not the T-shirt but maybe I will leave you for good.”

  MICKEY WAS LOADING up the U-Haul with boxes and lamps wrapped in blankets, the couch Lucy had taken from the curb after graduation, left there by students at Brown or friends of hers at the Rhode Island School of Design.

  “Our furniture is junk, Mama,” Maggie had said the day before as they were packing up, Reuben dropping by with tacos for dinner. “Maybe we should leave it here.”

  “But it’s our junk.”

  “It’s secondhand. Other people I know have firsthand furniture. Even Rebecca has firsthand furniture and her mother is poor as a church mouse.”

  “Your mother’s an artist, Maggie,” Reuben had said. “She doesn’t worry about furniture.”

  “She writes children’s books. That’s not exactly an artist.”

  “I’m her editor, bumblebee,” he said, grabbing Maggie’s hand, twirling her into his arms. “Lucy Painter is an artist and your perfect mother.”

  Everyone in the neighborhood knew who Lucy Painter was when she walked through the streets of the West Village shopping for dinner or books or off to the playground with Felix or P.S. 117 with Maggie. She was small and girlish with a mop of black curls, in short flowered skirts she made herself like the one on the back of her book jackets, striped tights, a long scarf wrapped around her neck hanging to her knees. Especially the children loved her.

  “That’s Lucy Painter,” they’d call out to their friends or their mothers. And Maggie, walking with Lucy, would whisper, “How embarrassing!”

  But she loved her famous mother, loved the way she looked with her bright cheeks and big boots, her tiny hands like the hands of a child.

  AT THE TIME of Samuel Baldwin’s death, Lucy’s father had been a special assistant to President Truman appointed in September 1945, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a gentle, principled man of value to the White House for his wise and measured opinions. After the article about his death on the front page of the Washington Post with the news of what had really happened, after the Friday service at St. Vincent’s on Capitol Hill which Lucy did not attend—“Not under the circumstances,” her mother had told her—Lucy and her mother left by plane for Santa Fe.

  Her mother’s idea to disappear into a strange landscape—to take up residence in a town just east of Santa Fe above the
Rio Grande.

  In Santa Fe, her mother changed their name from Baldwin to Painter, fearful that someone might trace Samuel Baldwin back to them.

  “But Baldwin is our name,” Lucy said. “It isn’t true to make up a new one.”

  “It is better, a story of who we are,” her mother had said. “And besides, it is a good name for us. Baldwin is too Anglo-Saxon for a Frenchwoman, and Painter is a name with the sound of song.”

  Caroleen Peinture, she called herself.

  The dry, brown, craggy-moonscape geography of New Mexico peppered with dots of intense color became a visual expression of Lucy’s state of mind.

  Lucy was twelve when her father died, and for the next six years until she left New Mexico for the Rhode Island School of Design, she waited. The mind’s-eye picture she had of herself was of a girl sitting on the flat brown rock in the backyard of their cottage outside of Santa Fe.

  “What are you waiting for?” her mother had asked.

  “I’m waiting to go back to Washington,” Lucy said. “The place where I grew up.”

  “You can go back, of course, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” her mother said in her crisp, matter-of-fact manner. “426 A Street, S.E., just beyond East Capitol. I have no interest in ever seeing the house again.”

  “Never?” Lucy had asked.

  Never was her mother’s chosen refrain. Never tell anyone your real name, Lucia, or where you were born or who your father was, she would say. He’s dead. That’s all a person needs to know.

  Never go home.

  SOMETIMES LUCY IMAGINED the inside of the house on Capitol Hill, room to room. She’d follow the narrow corridor, the bathroom with its claw-foot tub, next to her bedroom with a bay window where she sat on a seat between the bays overlooking A Street. In winter, the mated cardinals arguing on the leafless dogwood branches, the nervous sparrows on the telephone wires. In spring, the robins, fat with foraging. And lying on the back porch of the Santa Fe cottage where they lived, she’d watch the broad-tailed hummingbird, its shiny green feathers and white throat speckled iridescent bronze, its long beak plunged into the nectar center of a yellow hibiscus, the stem winding around the posts on the back porch. There were yellow hibiscus in a pot in the garden of the house on A Street too but Lucy didn’t mention that coincidence to her mother, wondering occasionally what went through her mother’s head. Did she ever think about her husband and her marriage? She never spoke of him.