You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  Maggie opened the bag, took out a manila folder with book marked in red and secured with rubber bands. Paper-clipped to the folder was a note to her mother: Dear Lucy: Check Chapter 9 pages 135–200. SAMUEL BALDWIN. Love, August.

  Something about the note captured Maggie’s attention. A message specifically intended for her mother. A thing of importance.

  Any moment, her mother would be home.

  Maggie crumpled the note and tossed it in the trash, rifled through the manuscript and took out Section 9, pages 135–200, and slipped them between the pages of her social studies text. She put the rubber bands around the manila folder and pushed it under the new couch in the living room. Upstairs, she stuffed the social studies text into her crowded bookcase with her other books.

  Later, she thought with some excitement, she would read the important pages.

  Just the act of hiding the manuscript under the couch where her mother might find it felt to her like freedom.

  IT WAS ALMOST seven when Lucy arrived home and parked the van. Reuben would be on the plane to New York, back at home by the time she took Maggie and Felix out to dinner at the Pizza Palace in Chevy Chase. Nell would greet him at the front door, kiss his cheeks with her tiny bow lips—You’ll never guess what happened today, she’d say in her high-pitched voice. He’d pour himself a beer and sit down at the kitchen table while Elaine made dinner, telling her the business secret that Lucy had no interest in hearing. What a great trip to Washington, he’d say. So much accomplished.

  Maybe they’d kiss when he walked in the apartment, his lips still sweet with Lucy’s body.

  Maggie was slouched on the couch, To Kill a Mockingbird face down on her stomach. Her eyes were closed.

  “The babysitter took Felix to the playground and then the library,” Maggie said. “She’s a moron.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was playing out front and she was sitting on the steps making out with her boyfriend. Felix could’ve been run over while they kissed.”

  Lucy’s chest tightened. She walked into the kitchen, turning on the light. The gas was on, the teapot almost empty of water.

  “I told the babysitter I’d be here by seven at the latest. When did she leave?”

  “Hours ago,” Maggie said. “I don’t even remember.”

  “Well get your coat and I’m driving to the library to find Felix and then we’ll get pizza at the Palace.”

  “I don’t like the Pizza Palace pizzas.”

  “You don’t have to eat them,” Lucy said, shutting the car door, turning on the engine.

  Maggie sat in the front seat, her feet on the dashboard.

  “I called Uncle Reuben today because I haven’t talked to him since Friday,” she said.

  “You called the office?”

  “His secretary said he had gone to Washington for a meeting and wasn’t coming back to the office and then I wondered how come he doesn’t see us while he’s here and I thought maybe the meeting he was having was with you.”

  Lucy hesitated.

  “He came for business but I had a drink with him.”

  “And did he say anything about us?”

  “Of course he did. He sent you kisses and hugs and said next time he would see you and it’s taken him so long to get over pneumonia and he does look terribly thin and wan.”

  “He’s dropped us.”

  Lucy pulled up to the library just as the babysitter was walking out the door with Felix.

  “Sorry about that. I know I’m late to bring him home,” the babysitter said, taking the money Lucy gave her, counting it, sticking it in her pocket. “Usually I get five dollars an hour.”

  “I paid you three,” Lucy said. “I understand your boyfriend was at the house while you were working.”

  She picked up Felix, carrying him down the steps, into the backseat.

  “Why did you pay her when she wasn’t supposed to have her boyfriend there?” Maggie asked, reaching back to give Felix a pat.

  “I paid her less and told her the reason for that was her boyfriend.”

  “She also smoked, didn’t she, Felix?”

  “Cigarettes,” Felix said.

  They drove around Chevy Chase Circle into Maryland and pulled up to the Pizza Palace.

  “Zee says it’s perfectly fine with her if we go over to the Mallorys’ when you’re busy so you don’t have to pay for a babysitter.”

  “It’s not perfectly fine with me,” Lucy said.

  They ordered pepperoni and grape soda and sat in a booth, Maggie next to Felix, who was drawing pictures of robots. The restaurant was new with white tile walls and a black tile floor, the pizza baking in a wood oven behind the counter. The booths full of families, mothers and fathers and children sitting at Formica tables with large pizzas in front of them, pulling off triangles of tomato and cheese, stuffing them in their mouths so their mouths were too full and the tomato dripped out of the corner of their lips and the mothers were shouting at the children to do this or not do that and the fathers were unhappy.

  “You were right, Maggie, ” Lucy said, getting up from the table, leaving a twenty-dollar bill although it was much too much for the service and the cost of the pizza and sodas. “This Pizza Palace is terrible.”

  “Can we get ice cream?” Felix asked.

  “Of course,” Lucy said, nuzzling her face in Felix’s neck, hurrying out of the restaurant before one of the unhappy fathers took out his anger on her family for no reason at all except that Lucy was alone with her children, no father evident, no father necessary. “We’ll get a double-decker chocolate chip ice cream cone with jimmies.”

  Summer 1973

  Fourteen

  LUCY DISCOVERED AUGUST Russ’s manuscript in late June under the new couch in her living room. Her bare foot intersected with the folder while she was scrubbing the yellow material of the couch’s slipcover to get rid of the ketchup stain from Felix’s hot dog the day before.

  It was midday, a Tuesday, and alone in the house, she had just finished working on an illustration for Vermillion. A new Vermillion, one which had unfolded after August’s fall, after Reuben’s drive-by visit to Washington, sometime in the middle of the illustrations she was doing for the old Vermillion, the story developed.

  On her hands and knees, she lifted the couch skirt and there was August’s manuscript secured in a rubber band—578 pages, he had informed her the last morning he visited.

  Lucy made hot tea even though the day was already too hot, adding extra honey and milk. She took a handful of oatmeal cookies and sat down at the kitchen table. Going page by page, not reading exactly but skimming, and that might take hours. She checked the clock. Near eleven. Felix finished play school at two. Maggie wouldn’t be home until five so that gave her time.

  Would the obituary be included or were the articles she knew had been written about her father quoted in full? Was Lucy’s name mentioned? Lucy Baldwin, age twelve.

  The skin on her hands was active, wet with perspiration.

  How often had her mother said to her, speaking mainly in French when they were living in Santa Fe, Samuel Baldwin destroyed our lives. Or had her mother ever said that? Did Lucy simply intuit what had never been said although she had heard it as spoken?

  Car-o-leen Bald-ween, she had called herself before Lucy’s father died.

  Later Painter, Peinture.

  “In painting, there is sometimes a new picture painted over an old one,” her mother had told Lucy one night at dinner in their garden in Santa Fe, “so you cannot even see the first painting unless you have a sense it’s there. So we, Lucy, you, and I, are now the second painting and the first painting is obscured.”

  Her mother had come from France in 1936 to study architecture in Chicago, living in the same building in Lincoln Park as her father, who was practicing law. They met in the elevator, she on her way to classes and he off to meet with the mayor on city business. She had helped him with his tie.

  Caroline Framboise was her name. Ca
r-o-leen, he called her. He liked having a French wife. It must have seemed exotic to him, a suggestion of his virility and worldliness because she was French and wore black dresses skirting her calves and perfume. No lipstick or color on her high cheekbones. Only mascara.

  He was an American of conventional demeanor, though more complicated than he was willing to reveal.

  Caroline Framboise was a distant, preoccupied, nervous woman with a strong sense of either decorum or morality—Lucy was never quite sure of the origin of her mother’s opinions—older than her father. The life they lived in Chicago and later in Washington, D.C., was almost Victorian in its convention and reserve, less artificial in Lucy’s memory than a true reflection of who they were.

  About her mother Lucy had felt a vigilant concern, an occasional rush of affection but seldom love.

  When she got older, Lucy assumed that what had seemed arrogant in Caroline Framboise was actually a mask for shyness or alienation from her complicated husband and his country. But such recognition came too late.

  It was her father whom Lucy loved and he loved her with constancy and joy and a sense of humor entirely absent in Caroleen Strawberry, as they sometimes referred to her in private.

  She turned the first page of the manuscript to the dedication—TK. A kind of ease settling over her. Summer. A light breeze, too warm but soft, coming through the open windows next to the kitchen table.

  Witchita Avenue had been quiet that summer during the day. Maggie was at drama camp in the morning and then she walked with Maeve to the village of Chevy Chase, D.C., and the two of them scooped ice cream with Vivienne, whose father owned the shop. Zee was in her television room with Robin Robinson and maybe Lane watching the Senate Watergate hearings which played in the kitchens and living rooms of families all over town. In May, Miles Robinson had been appointed to the office of special prosecutor investigating Watergate and the neighbors appropriated his role at the center of current history to their own lives. Lane Sewall had completed radiation treatments for breast cancer and seemed to be the only one among them in psychotherapy which conversations she reported to each of her friends separately—Keep it a secret, she would say to each one. Gabriel spent his days at the hospital sitting in the waiting room watching soap operas, as he liked to do since he had been advised that visiting with August was counterproductive to his brother’s recovery. August was expected to recover, not fully perhaps, but miraculous, as Zee liked to say.

  Most early mornings Lucy went to the hospital, brief visits since Felix came with her and sat with Gabriel in the waiting room.

  Potluck suppers at the Mallorys’ were weighted with talk of politics and in the evening the mothers sat barefoot, in sundresses with their cold wine, and if Lucy Painter was not present, they talked about her.

  Maggie had left early that morning, heading down Witchita Avenue in the direction of camp with no intention of going. She turned left at the bottom of the hill, walked past the Aikens’ garden on the corner of Connecticut and Witchita and left again up the hill, passing through the backyards of the neighbors until she got to the Mallorys’ where Blue was lying in the blistering heat, his dripping wet tongue hanging out of his mouth. The umbrella table was turned over on its side, the open umbrella broken in two.

  In the front, Zee was waiting for the bus to pick up the twins for St. Alban’s Day Camp. Maggie could see her through the window—a lavender sundress, strapless with a full skirt and bare feet, her thick blond hair piled on top of her head, her hands cupping the faces of Luke and Daniel, kissing them goodbye, waving as the bus took off up the hill to pick up Sara Robinson.

  At night, sleepless, Maggie thought about Zee. About her perfect hands, with two gold rings, one with a pinprick red stone in the center which she wore on the little finger of her left hand. No wedding band. The way her fingernails were kept short, unpolished with perfect half-moons at the cuticle. Maggie would lie on her side, her head on an old flat pillow, her own hands circling her face imagining the hands against her skin were Zee’s. It was delicious and unbearable, nothing Maggie had ever known, the way this woman, this mother, had seeped into her consciousness. She would fall asleep with Zee’s head on her pillow.

  And if she didn’t fall asleep, couldn’t fall asleep for the tremulous excitement in her blood, she would imagine her bedroom, in the room next to Zee’s, between the boys, listening to her breathing in the next room. In her daydream, Adam was always away, always on a business trip. Just Zee in the king-size bed breathing the quiet shush of bird’s breath.

  Maggie loved the way Zee’s toes were long but straight across, evenly lined up, the way her skirts fell just below the knee and her back was small, narrow but very straight.

  Zee turned towards the house, blew a kiss through the window to Maggie and opened the back door for her to come in.

  “Hello, my astonishing Maggie,” she said. “Such a morning I’ve had. Gabriel couldn’t find his trousers and came across the street in his boxers on backwards with the place for his penis to stick through in the back, thinking he might have left the trousers at my house and the doctors called from the hospital to see if I could keep him from coming so often and I said I’d try but it was difficult. And then I put him in a taxi and here you are just in time for us to have a day together if you aren’t going to camp.”

  “I’m not going to camp.” Maggie slipped into a chair in the kitchen, looking across the street at her own house. “Do you think my mother can see me here?”

  She had dropped mama for mother. A chilly sound, mother, which seemed just right.

  “I don’t,” Zee said, hurrying around the kitchen cleaning up breakfast dishes. “The morning sun is coming straight through the front windows and it’s just too bright for her to see across the street.”

  “I’m hating camp so I wanted to come over today,” Maggie said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I love it,” Zee said. “You know I love it.”

  She put her hands together, resting them against her lips.

  Sometimes when Maggie and Maeve sat up against the bed, giggling over the pictures in The Joy of Sex, Maeve would lean across Maggie and kiss her lips.

  “Not hard,” Maggie would say. “Just brush them very lightly. Like this.”

  And Maeve would. Softly like the bristles of a makeup brush across Maggie’s full lips.

  “I haven’t told my mother that I’m not going to camp today. Do you mind calling camp?” Maggie shifted in her chair, kicked off her sandals.

  “Just this once, Maggie,” Zee said.

  “I won’t ask you again,” Maggie said. “But I’m sort of upset and my mother never understands.”

  Zee picked up a peach from the bowl on the table.

  “Want one?” she asked.

  “No thanks,” Maggie said, digging in her shorts pocket for the number of the drama camp.

  “Here goes.” Zee dialed the number, a conspiratorial smile at Maggie as she told the director Maggie had the flu and wouldn’t be at camp.

  She poured them both a glass of lemonade.

  “So tell me what’s the matter.”

  “Everything,” Maggie said. “Let’s go someplace and talk.”

  “It’s hot,” Zee said, “but we can go to the Potomac and walk along the bike path. No one is likely to be there in the middle of the day.”

  They got into Zee’s van.

  Maggie slipped down in the back while they drove past her house just in case her mother was looking out the window.

  “So I saw August last night,” Zee said. “He’s lovely and looks well. His color is good although he has one sleepy eye and his speech is fuzzy.”

  “That’s what my mother told me.”

  “They’re keeping the visits very brief but I’ll take you as soon as they let me know.” She turned onto Arizona Avenue from Nebraska, heading to Thompson’s boathouse. “You and your mother had gotten close to August after you moved here, isn’t that right?”

  “Not me.
My mother did. He came over to read his book to her.”

  “He did? ”

  “She said he needed someone to listen, I think, because his wife died and he had no good friends.”

  “He had us, the group in his neighborhood.”

  “He’s weird. Weird people like my mother.”

  Zee drove into the boathouse parking lot, coming to a stop, pulled up the brake, turned off the engine.

  Her arms were strong with long, stringlike muscles and tan. Maggie hadn’t noticed that before.

  “Shall we rent a canoe?” Zee asked.

  “No,” Maggie said, slipping down from the van. “Let’s just walk.”

  Zee took her hand.

  Maggie didn’t know where to begin. Lately she had been thinking without regret that she hated her mother. Hate was not a word she had been allowed to use at home but she didn’t know another to describe what it was like with Lucy. She couldn’t stand to watch her pad around in her sloppy shirts, her messy curls, or drink her tea with little slurps, or click her teeth against her spoon when she was eating, especially ice cream. It wasn’t anything in particular that Lucy had done. Just being was enough. In the same room, in the same house, with the same repeated conversations. Even her mother’s quiet breaths as she lay in sleep next to Felix curled like a cat under her arm irritated Maggie.

  “I have no father,” she said. “You know that.”

  “You do have a father,” Zee said. “You just don’t know who he is, isn’t that right?”

  “If I don’t know who he is, then he doesn’t exist,” Maggie said.

  “That’s not exactly true. He exists but not to you.”

  “Then maybe it’s true to say that I’m embarrassed not to know who my father is.”

  “Why would you be embarrassed?”

  “In New York, everyone knew I didn’t have a father from the beginning so that’s who I was. Just Maggie with a mother and no father and Uncle Reuben, who was my mother’s best friend. And here I’m just a girl called Maggie who arrived in Witchita Hills without a father.”