You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  “Hello, darling,”

  “Hello, Reuben.”

  “I’m so happy to be seeing you,” he said.

  “Me too,” Lucy said.

  “So think about whether we’ll get hours together, just us, in the day maybe while the children are in school, maybe late at night. I want to be sure there’s enough time with you to last me weeks until the next time and the next and the next.”

  WHEN LUCY CAME back from taking Felix to play school, August was in the kitchen with coffee and an English muffin in the toaster.

  “Good news!” he said.

  “For me too.”

  “I finished the introduction last night. Can I read it to you?”

  Lucy took a deep breath.

  “What about later?”

  Since Reuben called, she had forgotten about her father as a subject in August’s book but she didn’t want talk this morning, certainly not about the book.

  “Later this afternoon?” August asked.

  “Maybe tomorrow morning when you come. Now I have too much on my mind.

  He picked up a page from the stack of manuscript.

  “Just the first page to give you a sense of the range of the book.”

  “No, August. I can’t. My editor is coming.”

  “Today?”

  “Not until Monday but I’m so exhilarated. He never comes to work with me and now he is and I can’t settle down.”

  She opened the fridge and took out a yogurt.

  “Want one?” she asked.

  “I have the feeling you’d rather be by yourself. I understand that,” August said, gathering his papers, flushed, probably embarrassed. “I like to be by myself too, most of the time, all of the time.”

  “August,” Lucy said, “would you like a yogurt?”

  “Yes, yes. I would like a yogurt. Strawberry.”

  She set a carton of strawberry yogurt and a spoon on the table.

  “Sit down,” she said. “I can’t talk to you about your book today but you eat your strawberry yogurt and I’ll eat mine. I want you to stay.”

  Something in the way he was standing, rubbing his hands together, his cheeks bright with color, his pupils dilated as if in darkness, reminded her of a moment she had had with someone else, someone she knew well, in this very kitchen, in the morning light—but the memory flew through her mind just beyond catching.

  She reached over and touched his hand.

  LUCY AND MAGGIE cleaned all of Saturday and Sunday, scrubbing out the refrigerator while Felix drew pictures of superheroes in his drawing book. They vacuumed and washed the woodwork and cleaned the mirrors and picture frames, opened the windows to air out the house even though it was chilly. They rearranged the living room, creating a circle of furniture around the fireplace, and filled a tub with forsythia and pussy willow next to the couch.

  “Let’s get a new couch, Mama.”

  “You think?”

  “This is so ugly and old and dirty.”

  Lucy stood in the living room imagining Reuben’s arrival at the front door of this house he had known about since she met him. And there in the living room, the beautiful cantaloupe living room with forsythia in full bloom, was a brand-new couch. Certainly he would think that Lucy was doing well, that her life was full of opportunities and friendship. It might even sadden him to think she was doing so well without him. Fill him with longing for what they could have together. Reuben Frank and this strong, resilient woman who was the mother of his very favorite children in the world.

  “We will get a couch,” she said.

  And they did at Conran’s in Georgetown, in a pale yellow soft material with puffy cushions and rolled arms. August and Will Sewall helped them carry it from the VW van into the living room.

  “I’ll probably be tied up with my editor until Wednesday,” Lucy told August Russ. “But after that . . .”

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Lucy was up at dawn, showered, dressed in the tight little green blouse that Reuben loved and one of the short skirts she made herself and tights.

  She wandered through the house seeing it through Reuben’s eyes, the new couch at an angle in the living room, the soft light from the side windows falling randomly across the pale yellow, the cantaloupe walls. In her studio, she pinned her unfinished illustrations for Vermillion on the clothesline between the rafters, a bowl of purple tulips on her drawing table, the windows open just enough to give a sense of air.

  Maggie left early for school, sweetly, kissing Lucy goodbye for the first time in days, taking the front steps two at a time. Lucy took Felix to nursery school for the day expecting Reuben would arrive sometime after two, but in any case before Maggie got home from school at three-thirty, so at least they would have an hour together until the children came home. She had made coq au vin for dinner and bought a bottle of good red wine at the liquor store on Connecticut Avenue. She had never spent so much on wine but the wine merchant had promised it was worth it.

  The telephone was ringing as she came into the house with groceries, croissants for breakfast, thick sliced bacon. Possibly Reuben had already arrived in Washington on the shuttle.

  She caught the phone on the third ring, dropping it first, breathless from hurrying up the long front steps.

  But it wasn’t Reuben.

  It was his chirpy assistant calling to say that Reuben had pneumonia.

  “Pneumonia?” Lucy’s breath vanished.

  “He got sick on Friday and he was worse on Saturday and his wife took him to the emergency room at New York/Cornell Hospital and they diagnosed pneumonia and that’s where he is.”

  In all the years Lucy had known him, Reuben had not been sick, nothing more than a sinus infection. He had never missed work.

  “Reuben never gets sick.”

  “Well, he is now and he hasn’t been top form for the last few weeks, at least in the office.”

  “He said nothing to me about feeling ill.”

  “Well, Reuben is close to the vest about things. I don’t know how well you know him.”

  “I know him,” she said, and she wanted to tell the assistant everything she knew about Reuben. And then to kill her.

  “Can you tell me anything else?”

  “Only that Elaine called this morning and said that he was in the hospital and could not take phone calls and I should call this new science writer we’ve signed up to write a book whom he was coming to see in Washington today. And Elaine said that I should call you because he was going to talk to you about your new children’s book. That’s all I know except that he will reschedule.”

  “I can’t talk to him?’

  “Elaine says no calls. He needs complete rest. I’m sure you understand.”

  I CAN’T CALL? He can’t call me? Rueben Frank can’t call the mother of his children to tell her he is ill, that he wishes it were she with him and not Elaine. That he loves her beyond all measure. That he will come soon and live with her forever.

  Lucy leaned against the wall.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “No problem,” the assistant said.

  And then Lucy called the hospital and asked for Reuben’s room.

  “I can’t connect you,” the operator said. “Mr. Frank is not receiving calls. I’ll connect you to the nurses’ station on his floor.”

  “I am Reuben’s sister,” Lucy said when a nurse answered. “I’m calling to inquire about him.”

  “His wife is here if you’d like to speak with her.”

  “No thank you,” Lucy said. “I would not.”

  “Mr. Frank’s condition is critical but stable,” the nurse said. “I’ll tell him you called. Are you his only sister?”

  “I am,” Lucy said, and hung up.

  His only sister.

  She threw on her parka, left the groceries on the kitchen table with the flowers, hurried out the front door, down the steps, climbed into the van and drove. She drove into Maryland along Connecticut Avenue to Knowles and left on Rockville Pike and back
into Washington, left on Porter Street to Connecticut, relieved to be in a familiar place, but she needed to drive and wished it were not in the city so she could drive the old VW as fast as it would go, maybe up to 70 miles an hour and she’d open the windows so the cold damp of March blew over her, stripping her of everything she had known, all of her past, until at the end of this long journey she would be emptied out of history, left with only herself, and her children, her darling children.

  She drove all the way south on Connecticut Avenue until it became 17th Street and intersected with Constitution Avenue, turning left on Constitution past the Washington Monument, the Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art—past the Capitol where her father had worked before he died—she had not even brought the children downtown to see the city of Washington, to tell them their grandfather worked at the very center of it where north and south and east and west meet at the Capitol, at the heart of the heart of the known world. She turned right on 1st Street, past the Supreme Court, left on East Capitol, the Library of Congress to the right, the Folger Shakespeare Library, wandering through the back streets of Capitol Hill to a right on 4th Street, and again on A Street—two blocks to 426 A Street, S.E., a blue clapboard, three stories with a turret.

  She had not been back since she was twelve.

  Traveling slowly down A, she almost drove by the house and then she saw the bay windows on either side of the front door and remembered the afternoons when she got home from school and kissed her fingers and touched the window on the right and then the one on the left.

  “Why do you kiss the windows?” her father had asked.

  The scene came back to her intact, a small frame in her mind’s eye.

  Her father standing at the door in his suit and tie, just her father, his hand out to take her hand.

  “I kiss the windows for good luck,” she’d said.

  “But that’s superstition,” he’d said. “Do you believe kissing the windows will bring you good luck?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Then I will kiss them too.”

  Tears spilled down Lucy’s cheeks.

  Whatever it was that August Russ had written in his book about her father would be wrong, the wrong story. August would misunderstand everything about Samuel Baldwin, was bound to misunderstand. Lucy would go over to August’s house sometime when he was at the library or the grocery store and take his stupid book and burn it.

  She drove deeper into Capitol Hill collecting the landmarks of this geography for reassurance that she could find her way in and out of that neighborhood again where the houses were unspecifically familiar. But she could get lost unless she were vigilant, and as she drove, just in the process of navigation, the weight of Reuben’s absence lifted and she was capable of going home.

  It occurred to her more as an intellectual observation than raw fear that Reuben could die, and if he were to die, she wouldn’t know about it until, with the rest of his authors, she was notified by the chirpy assistant. He was in fact no more than an editor in her life. She had no claim.

  Spring 1973

  Eight

  APRIL 17 WOULD have been Samuel Baldwin’s seventieth birthday and Lucy celebrated it, as she always celebrated her father’s birthday since her children were young, at breakfast with Felix and Maggie, clicking wineglasses full of orange juice.

  She had been up since dawn slipping out of bed without waking Felix, tiptoeing downstairs barefoot to make cupcakes—cupcakes for breakfast with chocolate icing in honor of her father at seventy. Standing at the counter measuring the sugar and salt and sifting the flour, she tried to imagine how he might have looked at seventy. Not necessarily old but would Samuel Baldwin have been an old man had he lived? She had thought of him as already old when he died at forty-eight, his hair sprinkled with silver, heavy pouches under his gray eyes, a certain weight of years to his bearing that made him seem older than the fathers of her friends.

  Outside the kitchen window August Russ was on an extension ladder cleaning out the gutters. Cool and damp, no rain expected, becoming cloudy after noon, according to the weather report, but he was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, his jeans rolled up, his back to her.

  August still came every morning with his book and sat at the kitchen table, worried about the introduction which he couldn’t get right. The subject of the man who died had not resurfaced. She had come to trust that he had no reason to assume she was related. Sometime before the book was published, if it was ever published, she would ask to read it and see for herself, or so she told herself and pushed her fears to the back of her mind, where Reuben claimed she stored all troubling matters in her life.

  Reuben was still unwell. Pneumonia had leveled him, he told her. He’d been run down, concerned about the future, conflicted about his marriage, and susceptible to illness. He hoped to come to Washington in May. He seemed too weary to care about anything, even his work.

  “To your grandfather at seventy,” Lucy said when the children had sat down for breakfast. “Happy Birthday, my darling father.” They clicked orange juice glasses. “My father was my favorite person in the world.”

  “Our grandfather is dead,” Maggie explained to Felix, delighted to take charge of bad news while Felix, indifferent, plunged his spoon into the sugar bowl and licked it.

  “Did I ever tell you that I was only twelve when he died?” Lucy asked.

  “You tell us that a lot,” Maggie said. “And I’ve told you that twelve is old enough.” She took the rubber band out of her ponytail, shaking loose her curly hair. “I’m almost twelve.”

  “Twelve is not old enough to lose your father,” Lucy said, knowing even before Maggie had spoken that she’d stepped into a black hole with her daughter again.

  “I lost my father before I was even born,” Maggie replied smugly.

  She lit the candles on the table, ignoring Felix, who was slowly pouring orange juice onto his eggs.

  “Every year on his birthday you say my father was my favorite person in the world,” Maggie said.

  “Because it’s true and now my favorite people in the world are you and Felix,” Lucy said quietly, wishing to dignify the occasion.

  It was the only true fact Lucy had told her children about her father and at least in the near future, the only thing she would tell them. They didn’t know that the old yellow clapboard farmhouse was the same house in which their grandfather had died. They didn’t know who their grandfather had been or how he had died or why. They didn’t even know his name, not his real name. Lucy referred to him as Sam Painter.

  On the table beside her bed, Lucy kept his photograph in law school, next to the black-and-white photograph of the children with Lucy and Uncle Reuben—a photograph she had insisted on taking against Reuben’s “better judgment,” in February before they left New York. In the smaller photograph, her father is leaning against a lamppost, wearing sunglasses and a suit, his hair long and wavy, a fedora at an angle, his face in shadow. He could have been any medium-height, slender man in his early thirties, holding a cigarette to his lips.

  “What happened to my dead grandfather?” Felix asked.

  “He died,” Maggie said. “So he was dead.”

  This seemed to please her as she licked the icing off the top of the cupcakes.

  “How come he died?”

  “Sometimes that happens to a person when they get older,” Lucy said.

  Felix was cutting his cupcake in little pieces with a dull knife, eating it very slowly in his organized, determined way.

  “Will you die, Mama?”

  “A very, very long time from now,” Lucy said.

  “We all die,” Maggie said happily, taking her dishes to the sink, slipping into her jacket, lifting her backpack over her shoulder. “Nothing is forever, Felix.”

  She kissed the top of Felix’s head and headed out, no longer kissing Lucy goodbye when she left for school. Making a point of it.

  Luc
y was still sitting at the kitchen table with Felix when there was a knock on the window and August waved.

  See you later, he called. Then he moved the extension ladder around to the front of the house, out of sight.

  It was almost nine, not a school day for Felix so Lucy picked up his Playmobil and headed to her studio where he would play on the floor while she worked.

  The studio was spare—a table made from a door supported by sawhorses, the door stripped of stain and splattered with paint, a high stool, Lucy’s drawings in progress hanging on a clothesline which angled from beam to beam under the pitched attic room. She could work for hours standing up.

  Lying on her back in these breaks from work, whole scenes from her life in no particular order would float across her horizon, sometimes at a great speed—a red scooter she rode up and down A Street, the torn inside of her father’s beloved Chevrolet smelling of gasoline, the tiny German clock on Reuben Frank’s desk in Manhattan exactly like the clock on her father’s bureau in the house where they had lived in Capitol Hill.

  Some mornings when Felix was at play school and after August packed up his book and went home, she wondered if this was what it felt like to go crazy.

  As she passed the dining room window lugging Felix upstairs to the studio, she made a mental note that it was getting late and Maggie was still sitting on the front steps waiting for Maeve Sewall to come out of her house.

  MAGGIE SAT ON the top step of her house, her arms folded across her chest, watching the Sewall house for a glimpse of Maeve, who was late as usual, always late, forgetting her lunch box or her library book or her social studies project. Most days they arrived at school after the bell, which upset Maggie, who was careful with the impression she made.

  She was in a bad humor. Lately she was furious at this and that—impatient, irritable, combative, and for no particular reason except the inescapable fact of hating her mother.

  This morning of her grandfather’s birthday, she was sickened by her mother’s testimonials about a man whom Maggie and Felix had never known, who had died with a secret so terrible that his grandchildren had never been told his real name. She was forced to sit at breakfast while her cheerful mother toasted this stranger, making believe that the orange juice in wineglasses was champagne.