The Peacock Feast, page 29
18
Oyster Bay, an April Friday, 2013
“It will be so tiring for you, Mrs. P,” Maricel objects when Prudence tells her about the trip Grace has organized to Oyster Bay to see what remains of Laurelton Hall.
“My great-niece is renting a car. She’ll pick me up here. It will be very easy.”
“It’s too cold by the water. You’ll catch a draft.”
“I’ll wear that puffy monstrosity. She wants to see where her grandfather was born.”
“And you too…,” Grace had added.
* * *
At the edge of the narrow beach, Prudence lets Grace untie her shoes and roll up her slacks. Her feet, once so tiny and childlike they’d embarrassed her, are now disfigured by bunions and corns and yellow nails. Horrid, though not as bad as her mother’s before she died when her toes turned black and gangrenous, at risk, the doctor warned, of snapping off like pea pods from a vine.
It is a warm day, in the sixties, but Prudence is indeed dressed in the puffy knee-length down coat she promised Maricel she would wear. While Grace sets up the canvas folding chairs Maricel’s husband dropped off for them and Maricel insisted they bring, Prudence approaches the water. I’m like one of those salmon Carlton talked about, she thinks. Traveling back to the very place where they were born to spawn and die. For me, though, there will be no spawn. Only die.
When the cold water, so much colder than she expects, washes over the tops of her feet, Prudence sucks in her breath. The blue and gray of the sea and sky blacken as a wave of vertigo overtakes her and her knees buckle. Her bottom hits the ground, and then she hears Grace scream, feels the pounding in the sand as Grace runs to her.
“Aunt Prudence … Are you okay?”
Prudence looks up. Grace has one shoe on, one off. Her eyes are enormous.
“Yes.” Prudence smiles. “I’m fine.” She shakes sand off the sleeve of her coat. I am fine, aren’t I? “The shock of the cold water made me lose my balance.”
The ground is cold too, but she wants to stay here, with the water lapping her feet. She inhales the brackish air. Was it her mother who’d told her that the servants had used the beach when the Tiffany family was not in residence? In her memories, she sees both her mother and father here with her at the water’s edge.
“I’m sorry for screaming. I panicked seeing you fall.” Grace puts her hands under Prudence’s armpits and hoists her to her feet. “I can’t recall the last time I panicked. I’m known for staying calm.” Grace brushes off the little stones that have stuck to Prudence’s coat. “Did you get wet?”
“Not at all. This ridiculous coat. I was never particularly vain, but I did, in my time, pride myself on dressing tastefully. This looks like a life preserver.”
“It served its purpose.”
Holding Grace’s arm, Prudence walks back to the folding chairs and the tote Maricel packed for them with a blanket and towels and a thermos of Earl Grey tea. To their left, Prudence can see what remains of the mansion: a few brick walls and the minaret that had housed the heating system.
“Why don’t you take off your coat?” Grace says. “I can spread it out to dry. I think you’ll be warm enough now that we’re away from the water and in the sun.”
Prudence nods. She’d remembered the minaret as taller and clad in tiles the same blue as the tableware at Jean-Christophe’s mother’s house. Now the tiles seem to be largely gone.
Grace helps Prudence out of her coat and into one of the chairs. She unfolds the blanket and tucks it around Prudence, then kneels to dry off Prudence’s feet with a towel.
“I can do that. You needn’t do that.”
“I’m a nurse. This is what we do. Bathe and dry people.”
Prudence studies the gentle face of her great-niece. Why isn’t she a mother, drying the wet heads and backs of children rather than worn-out bodies such as her own? Prudence’s father had been one of seven children, her mother one of nine. How can it be that three generations later, the family line has come to an end, it seems, with Grace?
Grace lowers herself into the other chair. “My grandfather was always so terrified of the water. Not for himself. For us. As children, we weren’t even allowed to go onto a beach. When my father was a teenager, he took up surfing, but he hid it from my grandfather. Angela figured it out, but she never told him. She was afraid he would have a heart attack.”
Prudence feels a chill go through her. “We used to play on this beach.” She crosses her arms in front of her and rubs the tops of each.
“Are you cold? We could go back to the car.”
“No, I like being here. I can’t believe I’ve never come back.”
Grace leans over and swaddles Prudence’s feet with the towel. She takes the thermos and mugs from the tote and pours them each a cup of the Earl Grey tea. Prudence nuzzles hers, letting the warmth bathe her face before she sips. Is it possible that she’s not been on a picnic since the one Jean-Christophe had prepared the day he asked her to marry him?
“You cannot imagine how grand Laurelton Hall was,” Prudence says. “Your grandfather was seven and I was four when we left, so mostly I know it from the photographs I’ve seen since. People now think of those kitschy lamps when they hear Tiffany, but this house was his masterpiece.”
“My grandfather said Louis C. Tiffany was a very flawed man, but he can’t be blamed for those lamps having been replicated for ice cream parlors and pizzerias from Florida to Washington State.”
“The lamps were always commercial. Did I tell you that my mother worked in the factory before she was married?”
Grace shakes her head no.
“According to her, Tiffany didn’t even design most of them. Most of them were designed by a woman who worked for him. Clara Driscoll.”
“And he never gave her credit?”
“Not as much as she deserved.”
Prudence sips her tea. How strange to be here now, after a century of splintered recollections: the Chinese lions, the fountain, a bride. The peacocks. The scent of an apple crate.
“That’s terrible,” Grace says. “Terrible but typical of the time.”
“My mother didn’t think he was a very nice man.”
“Tiffany?”
“Mr. T we called him.”
“Why was that?”
“She claimed he’d assaulted her.”
Grace’s brows knit. “Do you mean raped her?”
Prudence realizes she’s never let herself even think that word. “By the time she told me, the cancer had spread to her brain. It was hard to know what to make of what she said about anything then.”
Saying this, that she’d doubted her mother’s story, assumed it delirium or less plausible because it would have taken place so many decades before, now seems monstrous. “Does that happen?” Prudence asks.
“Does what happen?”
Prudence feels confused herself as to what she is asking. The closest she can get is “How do you know if what people say before they die is true?”
Grace looks at her with what Prudence fears is pity. “Do you mean if we did an investigation into deathbed revelations and brought the findings before a court of law, would they be judged true?”
“I suppose that is what I am asking.”
“My patient’s son who is the evolutionary neuroscientist told me that one of the big questions in his field has to do with why we have false memories: whether there is any evolutionary advantage to this. So maybe yes, maybe no. But if you mean, are they true for the dying person…”
Grace’s patient’s son. Prudence can no longer recall his name. Only that he has an aunt who has invited Grace to dinner.
“For the dying person, they are true.”
* * *
When they get back to Prudence’s apartment, Maricel is there.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” Prudence asks after she has introduced Grace.
“I switched my morning and afternoon jobs. Do you think I’d sleep if I didn’t know you were okay after your trip? And I knew you would want a hot shower after being out by the water. And some hot food.”
Grace smiles at Maricel. Prudence is embarrassed that her great-niece has seen how Maricel treats her like a child. In truth, though, she is thankful to have Maricel here. Here now that her thoughts, since visiting the remains of the place where she and Randall were born, are straining on their tethers like boats at a dock with a hurricane approaching when God knows what will happen.
“My flight isn’t until tomorrow evening. Perhaps I could come around noon to say goodbye?”
“I would like that,” Prudence says. “Very much.”
Maricel stands outside the bathroom while Prudence takes the long hot shower that Maricel is right that she wants. Afterward, there is the chicken-and-vegetable soup Maricel has made. At eight, Prudence shoos her out. “Thank you. But you have your husband to feed. I am fine. A hundred years past being a baby.”
Lying in bed, Prudence thinks about Maricel sitting with her husband at the metal kitchen table where she once fed her three children too, and then about the food Grace told her the sister of her patient had brought to his bedside. The sister who wants Grace to come to her house so they can celebrate what would have been her brother’s ninetieth birthday.
Had she not lost touch with Randall, perhaps she would have flown out to celebrate his birthday. Not his ninetieth, since he’d not lived that long, not his eightieth, since with Garcia in prison then, he had surely not wanted to celebrate that one, but perhaps his seventy-fifth. She would have sat at his table, the table his wife, Carolyn, had purchased so many years before, with Grace and Garcia, then fourteen she computes, and perhaps his friend Mrs. Cecelia Brown. Eaten the chicken with yellow rice Angela would have cooked, sung “Happy Birthday” with the candle flames wobbling in Angela’s golden flan.
* * *
When Prudence wakes not at her usual 4:53 but two hours earlier with her heart pounding out of control, she thinks, It is happening. I am dying. She hears her mother’s voice—“I wonder if he still has those red curls”—so clear she thinks, Oh, I must have died already.
Prudence sits up. Her nightgown is twisted and she feels the seam rubbing under her arm, so she must be alive. She lowers her feet onto the floor, counts to twenty as her doctor has advised to avoid fainting, and stands.
“Oliver,” her mother had cried in her final days.
She moves to the window, parts the sheer curtains. With the nearly full moon, she can see the water towers on the roofs, the bushy tops of the trees in Riverside Park, the high-rises across the Hudson.
There’d been a full moon the night she and Carlton arrived in London, hovering between the towers of the Westminster Abbey. She’d lain awake, thinking about how her mother would have so loved to visit the cathedral, to see the Grave of the Unknown Warrior, where the woman who’d come to be known as the Queen Mother had on her wedding day laid her bouquet in memory of her war-lost brother. In the morning, Prudence and Carlton made the trip to Hampstead to bring papers to Dorothy, who disappointed Prudence by mistaking her mother for one of the other redheaded maids.
“Mark my words,” Dorothy’s sister Comfort had said. “She is having twins.”
Prudence sees the minaret, the coarse white sand. The beached schooner she read about in the newspaper article. Feels the smooth wood under her feet as she and a little boy play on the deck.
The little boy is pretending he’s a pirate. And Randall is there too. They’re using peacock feathers as swords.
Randall’s strong voice: “Ahoy, matey. Your turn, matey, to walk the wretched plank.”
Matey Oliver …
Oliver.
19
Oyster Bay, June 16, 1916
“Go,” her mother says. She fixes her watery blue eyes on Randall. “Your father is in the back garden. Go play where he can keep a look on you. I have work to do and your sister is sick.” She shoos the boys off. Prudence sees the peacock feathers her father gave them tucked in their trousers.
There is the sweet soapy smell of her mother’s hair as Prudence is lifted from her bed and wrapped in a blanket, her rag doll inside. Carried from the gardener’s cottage, where they live, down the flagstone path to the kitchen door. Her mother hands her to Molly, the cook, pads with a towel the inside of a crate that had held apples from the orchard, lays Prudence inside, then covers her with a shawl and smoothes her forehead. Folded into the shawl, the soapy scent of her mother. “Molly will watch you while I work upstairs. When Molly tells you to drink, you drink.”
Molly is singing as she kneads dough for the teatime cinnamon rolls. Later, Molly carries her to the outhouse. There is a horribly loud sound—the world exploding?—and she grips Molly’s arm, afraid Molly will let go of her and she will fall into the terrible black hole beneath her bottom.
“Awful, isn’t it, dearie? Mr. T blowing up that beach so the regular people can’t use it.”
Then she is back dozing in the crate. The kitchen is warm. The door is open, a long triangle of sunlight on the stone floor. The air thick with buttery sugar. Underneath, the sour yeast of Molly’s breath. She closes her eyes again. She is hot, then cold, then hot. She flings off her mother’s shawl. There is a second explosion, even louder than before. The cups rattle on the shelves and the girl peeling the apples cries out, “Mary, Mother of God,” and Molly lifts Prudence to sip cool water from a tin cup, wraps the shawl over her again.
She wakes to Randall’s crying. He is clinging to Molly, hanging from her neck, and Molly is screaming at the apple girl, “Get Eddie. Get him now.” Someone else has picked Prudence up, is covering her eyes, but it is too late. She has seen. Oliver’s broken body, carried in by one of Mr. T’s men. The white of his femur poking out through the skin, a swath of bloody skull exposed, the wet blue eye of the peacock feather plastered to his chest.
Then her father is there, in the kitchen, and behind him, her mother too. Her father is sobbing. “They were weeding the kohlrabi,” he says over and over. “Both of ’em, there. Just twenty minutes ago, I made Oliver put his hat back on.”
Her mother has sunk to the floor, next to Oliver. She is wailing, the most awful sound Prudence has ever heard, as though her mother’s head, pressed against Oliver’s heart, is being sawed off at the neck.
She knows. Even at four she understands. Her brothers had snuck off to play pirates in the schooner on the beach. They do it every day, the three of them, only today her throat hurts and her head is hot and she is here in the kitchen with Molly.
And now, standing at her window, Prudence sees it—her brothers hiding behind the rocks, watching as the men plant dynamite along the breakwater.
She feels it—the explosion. It shakes the apple crate, throws her brothers to the ground, sends the water rushing onto the beach.
Randall grabs Oliver’s hand. He has it. He has Oliver’s hand. He holds it tight, but there is another wave that hurls them both onto the rocks, and then he no longer has Oliver’s hand …
They’d shared a bed, a carriage, a cradle.
They’d shared a womb.
Oliver, washed out to sea with the explosion and then flung back onto the rocks.
Oliver.
Her brother.
Her twin.
* * *
With the sheen on the water from what Prudence thinks must be a waning moon, she recalls a line from the poem she’d copied into her notebook so many years before:
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.
She looks at her bedside clock. It is nearly four. Soon the streetlights will switch off and the moon will disappear. She remembers first seeing the city lights, so very many of them, so astonishingly bright, through the window of the car that took them the night after the explosion to her aunt’s house in Staten Island. The smell of the leather seats, of the whiskey someone had given her father to try to get her mother to drink. Randall holding a bucket for her when she got sick, and a strange man in the car, perhaps Mr. T’s foreman or one of his lawyers. A man who must have told her father that reporting Oliver’s death to the Oyster Bay police would not bring Oliver back, but the money—the envelopes that continued until Mr. T’s death—and the job her father would be given at the Tiffany house on Madison Avenue would pay the Hell’s Kitchen rent and buy Randall and her shoes and winter coats.
She remembers another two lines of the poem:
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
20
An April Saturday, 2013
When Grace’s phone rings at dawn, as it often does with a patient’s wife or daughter or caregiver, she knows that the person on the other end of the line has been watching the sky, waiting for a streak of light to signal that a call can be made. She knows not to ask questions, to simply pull on her yoga pants—as she does now following Prudence’s “We said noon, but could you come now?”—and go.
Prudence greets her at the door. In her white nightgown with a pale shawl wrapped around her and her snowy hair combed back from her bony face, she looks like an apparition. She smiles feebly, lets Grace take her arm and lead her to the couch.
“Could you bring us some tea?” Prudence asks.
Grace arranges a tray: the thermos Maricel left the night before, a little pitcher with cream, two mugs. She pulls the slipper chair closer to the couch.
“I don’t want to seem melodramatic, but … I woke in the middle of the night and thought I was dying.” Prudence looks at Grace apologetically. “A line from a poem I’d once copied into my schoolgirl’s notebook came back to me. ‘Repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea.’”
Grace recognizes the line as Marianne Moore’s. While she’d lived in Huntsville, she’d asked her grandfather to send her father’s poetry books, and she’d culled through them to find poems to read aloud to Garcia. She’d not read this poem to Garcia, but she’d read it herself several times.
