Somehow or other, thought Lisa, you never expected people to die during the month of May, for in northern New England, May always seemed like the beginning of everything. Lawns were like heads of newly fuzzed green hair, ready for cutting, and every brook and stream scrambled its way toward the sea in what seemed an absolute frenzy of freedom. In front of the house that Chris and Lisa had rented in Gammon’s Landing, Massachusetts, there were two round, fat forsythia bushes that looked almost comical under their heavy load of yellow blossoms, like two cheerful club women in yellow flowered hats. Just beyond the eastern rim of Gammon’s Landing was the sea and along the beach front, people had started taking down the wooden boards that had protected the windows of their cottages all winter long. Hot-dog stands and shooting galleries sported new coats of paint as everyone got ready for the crowds that would begin to arrive over the Memorial Day weekend. It seemed that the whole world was beginning to stir again after a winter of hibernation and it seemed impossible for anyone to die amidst all the life that pulsed on every side.
But it did happen, thought Lisa, as she packed two bags for herself and Chris. In Cooper’s Mills, Irene St. George was dead and Lisa thought how typical this was of her. Leave it to Irene to do everything differently from everybody else. Lisa sighed as she snapped the second bag shut. Now she’d have to start in on the children’s things. Thank God for her new friend, Janie Wright. Without Janie, Lisa and Chris would have had to drag the kids up to Cooper’s Mills and while Midget and little Chris wouldn’t be too much trouble, Linda was still only six weeks old and woke in the middle of the night for a feeding and a diaper change. In one way, though, Lisa was sorry they weren’t bringing the children. She would have liked to stop off in Cooper Station and visit Polly Sheppard and show off her new daughter. Still, perhaps it was just as well. In all the months that she’d been in Gammon’s Landing, Lisa had received only three letters in reply to the many she had written to Polly, and none of the three had included anything that sounded like an invitation. Still, thought Lisa as she folded the last of Linda’s diapers to take over to Janie’s, perhaps it was always that way when you moved away from a place. You started a new life in a new house and made new friends and you didn’t have time to think about last year or the year before that. Just the same, though, it was funny the way things had turned out with Polly. You’d think after they’d been friends for so long that Polly would have made some attempt to maintain her end of their relationship. Well, she’d just wait and see if Polly showed up for Irene’s funeral and if she didn’t, then Lisa would consider their friendship over. It was perfectly all right to make excuses for Polly’s not writing, after all she was always busy with a million different things, but a funeral was something else again.
Linda Pappas awoke quickly, with loud demands to be fed, and Lisa laughed as she bent over the crib. Linda’s fat little face was red with anger at being kept waiting for more than three seconds and she was soaked clear up to her shoulders.
“Never mind, my love,” said Lisa as she picked up the baby, “we’ll have you all fixed up in a minute.”
She stood in front of the gas stove half rocking Linda in her arms as she waited for the bottle to warm.
My love, thought Lisa. My love. Anthony used to say that all the time.
Lisa did not let herself think of Anthony often any more. But in the beginning, when she and Chris had first come to Gammon’s Landing, she had thought of him often. Mostly in the morning, when she was so sick she wondered if she’d ever get through the day. Then she had leaned, retching over the toilet, and cursed him along with Chris and every man ever born. Then, everything had been wrong. Her doctor was a native of Gammon’s Landing by the name of Wendell Garrett, and she missed Jess Cameron with a fury that made her feel even sicker than she was. At least Jess had always had soothing, comforting words for her, even when he couldn’t stop the morning sickness, and she could talk to Jess. Dr. Garrett, on the other hand, was brusque almost to the point of rudeness.
“It’ll pass,” he told Lisa when she complained of her illness.
“Is that all you can tell me?” Lisa had demanded.
“Mrs. Pappas, you’re not the first woman in the world to have had an incurable morning sickness, and you won’t be the last. It passes.”
“Goddamn him,” said Lisa angrily to Chris. “I never really appreciated Jess until now.”
“Gee, baby, I’m sorry,” said Chris. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” mimicked Lisa, “there’s nothing you can do. Just leave me to hell alone.”
Then she went into the bathroom and threw up again.
Bastards, she thought feelingly. Every goddamned last one of them.
But, of course, the sickness did pass after several agonizing weeks, and Christopher Pappas silently thanked God for that. Maybe now, Lisa would be a little easier to live with.
“I know none of this has been pleasant for you, honey,” said Chris, “but I haven’t exactly enjoyed it either you know.”
He slipped his hand under her pajama top and began to stroke her and Lisa moved impatiently under his touch.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Chris, cut it out,” she said crossly.
But he continued to handle her. “I’ve missed you, baby,” he whispered against her hair.
Lisa sighed aloud and in aggravation. “I don’t feel well, Chris,” she said.
His hand was still and for a moment he said nothing.
“What is it, baby?” he asked at last. “The morning sickness is all gone. So what is it?”
Lisa sat up in bed and reached for a cigarette.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said crossly. “Is it so damned hard to understand. I’m pregnant, for God’s sake. How do you expect me to feel? Like doing cartwheels or something?”
“Not exactly,” said Chris and now his voice was impatient and edgy. “But neither do I expect you to act as if I had the plague. Sometimes you act as if you hate me.”
Lisa smoked and stared up at the ceiling through the dark.
“I don’t hate you,” she said.
And that much was true. She did not hate Chris. In fact, in some strange way she loved him more than she ever had. It was comforting to live with a man like Chris. To know where she stood every minute and to never feel out of her depth. It was only when he tried to touch her that she felt something stir within her.
You’re a fine little animal, my love.
But that’s all over, Lisa argued silently. Anthony was fine in bed. Wonderful. But you can’t spend your whole life with your clothes off. It’s over and done with and a good thing for me it is, too. I never would have been happy with him.
But still, when Chris tried to make love to her, she felt slightly disgusted, as if she were being unfaithful to Anthony and in a way that she had never felt when she was being unfaithful to Chris.
It’s crazy, she told herself. I don’t owe Anthony one single thing. All I owe I owe to Chris and I should be concerning myself only with his happiness.
Anthony. Her whole body cried out silently for him. Anthony, I need you.
“No,” said Lisa to Chris. “I don’t hate you. I just don’t feel well.”
She felt that she should reach out to him, touch him, reassure him, but she could not and she felt guilty and angry with herself.
“For heaven’s sake, Chris, I can’t help it, and I should think you’d be able to understand how I feel.”
“Christ, it wasn’t all my fault, you know,” said Chris angrily. “You had your fun, too.”
For a moment, Lisa felt a fear that was almost panic. “What do you mean, I had my fun?” she asked.
“I mean as well as I did,” retorted Chris.
Lisa breathed easily again. For a frightening moment she had thought that Chris was referring to her and Anthony. But of course, that was ridiculous. Chris had never suspected her for a second, in spite of all the talk that had gone around Cooper Station. In the first place, none of it had ever reached his ears, and even if it had, he would have put it down as part of the vicious plot to get rid of him. He had accepted Lisa’s explanation that she and Anthony were simply friends and neighbors at its face value and he had, in fact, been friendly with Anthony himself.
“He’s really intelligent,” Chris had said of Anthony. “Too bad he’s so mixed up.”
“What do you mean, mixed up?” asked Lisa defensively.
“Are you kidding?” asked Chris. “That guy’s got the weirdest set of values in the world. Hurry up and grab everything today. There’s no tomorrow for Anthony.”
“Well, Anthony doesn’t need the same set of values as you do,” countered Lisa. “He isn’t a married man with a family. And even if he never wrote another word, he’d still have all that Cooper money to fall back on.”
“Maybe,” said Chris, and Lisa thought he sounded a trifle smug, “but I sure wouldn’t want to live that way.”
Lisa almost hated him. “No, you wouldn’t,” she said sarcastically. “Not you. You’ve got to do your lousy bit for mankind. What the hell do you care if the kids don’t have shoes as long as you can wear that damned white collar of yours and teach school for peanuts.”
Chris looked at her sharply. “You sound just like my old man,” he said coldly, knowing that this would reach her as would nothing else. She hated his father and Chris knew it. “Maybe you think I’d be better off in the fruit store at Cooper’s Mills,” he continued. “Then I could wear a work shirt and an old apron and sell bananas.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Lisa crossly, unable to think of anything to say.
“I will,” said Chris in that maddeningly calm way of his. “Just don’t go around trying to justify Anthony Cooper’s existence to me. He’s smart and a nice guy and all that, but he doesn’t seem to have much purpose as far as I’m concerned. His novels certainly aren’t going to live after him and he’s never even had enough ambition to get married and produce a son to carry on his name.”
“That’s the Greek in you coming out,” said Lisa. “You’re all alike. Sons, sons, sons. God, I thought your father would die when Midget turned out to be a girl. It’s a damned lucky thing for me that I had better luck producing little Chris or he’d think I was worthless for sure.”
But after that night she wondered often about Chris’s words and of the child she now carried.
What if it’s a boy? she thought. What if it’s a boy and turns out to look just like Anthony?
She knew Chris. Tolerant and kind he might be, but he’d never stand for another man’s son in his home. He’d throw her out on the street and keep Midget and little Chris, and for a moment a picture flashed through her mind of Anthony smiling and welcoming back his love with his baby in her arms. But she didn’t even know if he was still in Cooper Station. He might have gone back to New York the way he always said he would, and besides, she did not want to spend the rest of her life with Anthony Cooper.
Yes, Chris would throw her out even if it meant wrecking his career with a messy divorce. And Lisa would fight him, she knew. She didn’t have much but she wasn’t about to lose what little she had. Not after those lousy years at the university getting Chris educated. Not now, just when they were beginning to get somewhere.
Lisa thought of an eventual return to Irene and Cooper’s Mills and she shuddered. She’d wind up like Marie Fennell, just another old bag to be laughed at and joked about and not even pitied.
What if it’s a boy and he looks like Anthony?
She tried to comfort herself. New babies don’t look like anybody, she assured herself. And even if this one looks like Anthony later on, Chris will be so used to him by then, and Cooper Station will be so far behind us, that he’ll never even think of it.
But she still had her moments of fear. The day the baby was born, Lisa asked, “What is it?” as soon as she awoke.
“A girl,” they told her, and Lisa went back to sleep without even asking to see her.
Thank God she thought as she drifted off.
And the next day she realized that it wasn’t true about new babies not looking like anyone. Linda looked exactly like Lisa. The same pale-brown hair and big eyes. The same nose and mouth and chin.
“Baby, why are you crying?” asked Chris.
“Because I’m so happy,” said Lisa. “I wanted it to be a little girl all along.”
“I guess I did, too,” confessed Chris. “I missed too much of Midget’s babyhood not to want to watch a little girl growing up.” He kissed her gently.
Lisa looked up at her husband and felt a wave of such love go over her that tears formed at the corners of her eyes again.
I’ll make it up to you, darling, she thought and put her hand against Chris’s cheek. I’ll make it all up to you.
Lisa finished burping Linda and put her back to bed.
“And that’s that for another four hours, my love,” she said to the child.
Everything was done. The only thing left was to drop the children and their things off at Janie’s as soon as Chris came home from school and then they could be on their way. Lisa went into her kitchen and made herself a cup of instant coffee, then she sat down and lit a cigarette and wondered why she didn’t feel anything about her mother.
Maybe I’m not used to the idea yet, she told herself.
The telephone call had come just that morning, only a few minutes before Chris and the older children left for school. It was the chief of police at Cooper’s Mills and he told Lisa that Irene was dead.
“Must’ve fallen down the front hall stairs, Lisa,” he said. His name was Johnny McGrath and Lisa remembered that he had always been kind. Plenty of times he could have locked Irene up for the way she behaved. But he never had. He’d always seen her home, drunk as she was, as if he were seeing home a great lady.
“Here you are, Mrs. St. George,” he would say, opening the door of the police cruiser with a flourish and taking off his hat.
“My deepest thanks,” Irene would reply grandly. “Good evening, Mr. McGrath.”
“I’m sorry as hell, Lisa,” said Johnny McGrath. “I always liked your mother. At least it was quick, this way. Her neck was broke and she died right off the bat.”
“Thank you, Mr. McGrath,” said Lisa quietly. “We’ll drive up this evening.”
“Got her over to Breton’s funeral parlor,” said the police chief. “Figured you’d want it that way. Old man Breton took care of your Grandma and Grandpa.”
“That’s fine, Mr. McGrath,” said Lisa. “Thank you again.”
“My, she’s a cool one,” said McGrath to a lounging policeman after he had hung up. “Never said if and or but. Didn’t even act surprised, much less broken up.”
“Well,” said the policeman, whose name was Oscar Roullier, “I don’t see how anybody could get broken up over an old drunk like Irene St. George.”
Johnny McGrath was shocked. “Well, for Christ’s sake, it was her mother!”
“Yeah,” said Oscar Roullier.
Lisa and Christopher Pappas arrived in Cooper’s Mills at seven o’clock in the evening and went directly to the Pappas’s fruit store.
“Hi, Pop,” said Chris as he and Lisa entered.
The old man looked up. “Oh,” he said sourly. “It’s you.”
“Who’d you expect?” asked Chris.
“I dunno,” said Costas Pappas. “I thought maybe you two had got too fancy living down there in Mass. to bother comin’ home to bury her mother.” He indicated her with a jerk of his head toward Lisa. “Your mother’s out back if you care,” he said to Chris.
Nothing changes, thought Chris Pappas as he and Lisa walked toward the back of the store. His father and mother would go to their graves with the idea that their only son had somehow failed them by breaking out of the pattern they had set. The store still looked as it had always looked. Junky, over-crowded and slightly dirty. Just like his father, thought Chris wearily. And he knew he would find his mother the same way.
Thank God, we got out, thought Chris and squeezed Lisa’s arm. We would have died here, and died young, from dirt and boredom and the wanting of something better.
“My son,” said Aphrodite Pappas.
“Hello, Ma,” said Chris and bent to kiss her yellowish cheek. “How are you?”
“I’m good enough,” said Mrs. Pappas, then she leaned away from Chris and looked up into his face. “But you,” she said, “you’re gettin’ skinny.”
Lisa sighed. It was what her mother-in-law always said whenever she saw Chris. He could have weighed three hundred pounds and she would still have said it.
“How are the children?” asked Mrs. Pappas by way of greeting to Lisa.
“They’re fine,” replied Lisa.
She and Chris had something to eat and then went directly to the funeral home to conclude the arrangements that Johnny McGrath had started. When that was over, they returned to the Pappas’s and went straight to bed and even when Lisa realized that Chris’s father and mother had not uttered one word of regret about Irene’s death, she still could not cry for her mother.
She lay on her back next to Chris and the smell of spring came through the open bedroom windows, heavy with scent. She moved a little and Chris’s hand found her breast.
“I love you, baby,” he said against her temple.
Lisa’s heart started to pound. She did not respond, but this time she didn’t move away.
His fingers rubbed gently until her nipples hardened and stood up under the thin material of her nightgown.
“You’ve got the most exciting pair of tits in the whole world,” said Chris, slipping her nightgown down over her shoulders. His mouth found hers and he kept one hand over her heart, reassured by its beating that she was just as aroused as he. “Be my little French girl,” he whispered, stroking her.
Lisa turned her head away. “This isn’t right,” she said and pushed at his hands halfheartedly. “Chris, don’t. This must be a sin. Tonight of all nights. My mother is dead.”
“But you still want it, don’t you?” asked Chris.
And it was true. Already she could feel herself beginning to pulsate, ready for the moment when he would enter her. Her mouth was hungry for him and her hands reached down to find him, to begin their strong stroking.
“Baby,” he whispered as she sent him to heights of excitement he’d never known. “Where did you learn tricks like this?”
She continued to caress him in the ways that Anthony had taught her.
“You’re the one who brought home the Kinsey Reports,” she whispered against his abdomen. “I really profit from what I read,” and she laughed a little.
He began to quiver under her touch. “Baby,” he said, “read them again if it makes you like this.”
“We’re awful,” she whispered against him, but her legs were already spreading themselves for him. “Awful.”
“She’s dead,” whispered Chris harshly into her mouth. “She’s dead and we’re alive.”
The tip of him was touching the maddeningly elusive, excitingly secret place deep inside her and she could feel it starting.
“Alive,” she whispered. “Alive. Think of the wonder of that.”
And then she could not talk at all. She could merely raise herself up to meet him in the agony of giving.
No, she thought sleepily, later, May was no time for dying. And for the first time since she and Chris had left Cooper Station, she went to sleep without a single thought for Anthony.
It was a quick, simple funeral for Irene St. George, with a Low Mass at the Catholic Church and no one there besides Chris and Lisa but Irene’s old drinking buddies from the Happy Hour Café. They shed their beery tears and left as soon as the Mass was over without going on to the cemetery for which Lisa was grateful. She and Chris buried Irene alone and when it was over they got into their car and drove back toward Cooper’s Mills.
“We’ll have to stay over another day, I suppose,” said Lisa. “I’ll have to see what arrangements she made about the house and her things.”
Lisa looked out of the window on her side and suddenly she wanted to go home.
“Look,” she said, “we could see Mr. LaPlante, now, couldn’t we? He’s always in his office after lunch. He was her lawyer and he must know what she wanted done.”
“We could try him,” said Chris.
“Let’s go,” said Lisa. “Then we could go right home. I’m lonesome for the kids.”
Maurice LaPlante was a stocky, white-haired French Canadian who smoked small cigars and drank wine at breakfast. Lisa had never liked him but Irene had thought him a fine old gentleman and had said so often.
“You don’t find them like Maurice LaPlante anymore,” she had told Lisa. “He’s a gentleman of the old school.”
Well, perhaps he was, thought Lisa, to Irene. But most of Cooper’s Mills regarded him as just another old soak who’d seen much better days. In any case, thought Lisa gratefully, her business with him had not taken long. Irene’s house and its rooms of stiff, well-kept and little-used furniture now belonged to Lisa.
“The house is in good repair,” said Mr. LaPlante, “and the taxes are all paid up to date. She was never one to let things go, your mother. Kept her place right up.”
“Well, what are we going to do with it?” Lisa asked Chris. “We have about as much use for a house in Cooper’s Mills as nothing at all.” Chris shrugged and Lisa turned toward the lawyer. “Put it up for sale,” she said. “The furniture, too.”
Mr. LaPlante put up a restraining hand. “Don’t be so quick,” he warned. “Take a ride over there and look at the place. Maybe there’ll be something you’ll want for yourself. Some souvenir. Don’t be so quick.”
“All right,” sighed Lisa. “I’ll go.”
It was agreed that Chris would go back to the Pappas’s and repack the suitcases while Lisa went on alone to Irene’s house.
“It won’t take me long,” she told Chris. “We’ll be able to get started early.”
The house looked as it had always looked. Drab, dark and unfriendly. Lisa took the key from under a loose board in the porch floor and let herself in. Then she went dutifully through every room in the house. She even took note of the loose carpeting on the stairs where Irene must have caught her heel before she fell, and still she felt nothing. No sorrow, no pang of loss. There was nothing for her here. Nothing she needed or wanted. It was as if she had never lived here at all.
“Aren’t you even sorry for her?” Anthony had once asked Lisa about Irene.
“No. Why should I be?” Lisa had asked, genuinely puzzled at his question.
“Because she hasn’t had much of a life, really,” said Anthony. “Why do you suppose she drinks?”
“For the same reason you do, I suppose,” said Lisa. “Weakness. And the mistaken idea that there is a solution to anything in a bottle.”
“Not all of us look for a solution, my love,” said Anthony. “Some of us ask only for a measure of solace.”
“Maybe so,” retorted Lisa, “but I wouldn’t want momentary comfort at the price of the next day’s bomb of a hangover.”
“You’re a nasty little Puritan,” said Anthony and reached for her.
“That’s what you think,” replied Lisa.
They had made love then and the subject of Irene was forgotten. It never came up again between them.
Now, standing in Irene’s living room, Lisa found herself wondering. Perhaps it had been true about Irene, she thought. Perhaps she had needed solace more than anyone had ever imagined.
I guess she wanted it all, thought Lisa. The fur coats and the diamond bracelets and the handsome men in an adoring group at her feet. And instead of the Paris trips and the iced champagne, she’d gotten Wilfred St. George and Cooper’s Mills and the Happy Hour Café. She felt a sudden kinship with Irene.
Lisa sat down on one of the uncomfortable, plush chairs that still, after all these years, made her feel itchy and ill at ease. She lit one of the cigarettes which, in her lifetime, Irene had considered so grossly unladylike.
“For heaven’s sake, Lisa,” she had said. “Are you going to go about with one of those things stuck in your mouth like a mill girl? For heaven’s sake, Lisa, remember who you are!”
Lisa finished her cigarette and squashed the butt in the same place she had put her ashes. In the dirt around a rather obscene-looking rubber plant that Irene had kept on a stand in the living room.
Lisa knew who she was all right, she thought as she locked the front door of the house behind her and replaced the key. She was Lisa Pappas, and she wasn’t going to waste her life regretting. She was married to a good man who was going places. A man who would never run off and leave her to fend for herself and her offspring as Wilfred St. George had done. She’d never wind up as a town character as Irene had done because if she wanted something she’d go after it. She wouldn’t sit on her behind in a beer joint and wish false wishes that had no hope of coming true.
Her hands felt very strong on the steering wheel of the car as she pulled away from the curb in front of Irene’s house and headed for the Pappas’s.
She was a happy, contented woman, she told herself. A woman in a hurry to get back to her husband, her home and her children and she smiled a little as she thought of what Anthony Cooper would have had to say about her present state of mind.
“You’ll wind up with a passle of brats and memberships in the P.T.A., a select, snobbish bridge club and the Ladies’ Aid.”
And it was true, thought Lisa. She would go back and join the best bridge club in Gammon’s Landing and she would go to every P.T.A. meeting with Chris. Furthermore, she would bake two cakes for the Ladies’ Aid cake sale next week and they would bring the best prices of all the cakes there.
So there, Anthony, she thought, as she parked in front of the fruit store. I may be all you said I’d be, but I like it that way.
Less than half an hour later, Lisa and Chris had said their goodbyes to Chris’s sullen parents and were on their way home. They could have avoided Cooper Station by taking the new turnpike that bypassed the town but they did not.
“Hasn’t changed much, has it?” remarked Chris as they drove down Benjamin Street.
“No, and it never will,” replied Lisa. “Thank God things worked out the way they did and we got out of here.”
“You were pretty upset at the time,” said Chris and smiled.
“It just goes to show that things do work out for the best,” said Lisa. “I wonder what ever happened to Doris Delaney Palmer. How I hated that bitch.”
“She’ll go on forever,” said Chris. “Her kind always does. She could ride roughshod over the whole world and wind up without a trace of regret on her face.”
Lisa laughed. “You know something funny?” she asked. “I’ve never been able to picture Doris Palmer as anything but full grown and wearing that iron corset of hers. I can’t picture her in bed with anybody, let alone poor Adam Palmer, and it seems almost obscene to think of her having a baby.”
“Maybe Adam thought so, too,” said Chris matching her laughter. “And that’s why they never had any kids.”
They drove past Polly Sheppard’s big colonial-style house and Chris didn’t slow down.
“Are you sorry about Polly?” he asked. “I kept thinking she’d show up for the funeral.”
“So did I,” answered Lisa and sighed. “No, I can’t say I’m sorry. I guess we just sort of outgrew each other. You know, Polly was never really too bright in spite of that fancy college education of hers. She had a narrow mind, just like everybody else in Cooper Station.”
“Are you sorry about anything?” asked Chris, and for just a moment a chord sounded in Lisa.
Come live with me and be my love.
It might have been fun with Anthony, she thought. For a little while, anyway. New York and a nice apartment and interesting nightclubs and Europe next year. But what about when it was over? And it would have been over soon. Anthony would have tired of her easily as a steady diet. What was it he used to say? You’ll never be a gourmet’s delight, my love. You’re too much. Like too much dessert or a heavy wine with the meat course. Of course, he’d been joking, but just the same he would have wearied.
Lisa looked straight into Chris’s eyes just as they were passing the sign that said, YOU ARE NOW LEAVING COOPER STATION. PLEASE COME AGAIN.
“No, darling,” she said and squeezed his arm. “I’m not sorry about one single thing.”