High Street
Teddy Bell was not a freak. Crunchy-preppy, Joanna thought when he met them on the stairs that first time. A little too tucked in and crisp and mainstreamish to qualify as a trustafarian, though from Meg’s vague reports about his background, he might be on the cusp. (Joanna was forever slotting people into pigeonholes, and she did it with the reckless speed and acumen of a postal worker, which is to say her percentages were good but she rarely got everything perfectly right.) She and Amy had just paid a disconcerting amount of money for a brief, urine-smelling cab ride from the New Haven train station, and though Meg had warned them that she wouldn’t be waiting in the apartment because it was Yale’s shopping period and she had to attend some classes that met at overlapping times, Amy, typically, just couldn’t resist pressing the buzzer marked with a new GREEN/BELL label printed in Meg’s block letters.
“But it’s black,” Amy said, after a moment of silent purposeless waiting on her part, while Joanna was in any case fumbling with the ring of indistinguishable keys Meg had given her. The small lobby was disappointingly dingy, and Joanna privately hoped its faintly urinaceous atmosphere had arrived with them as a lingering memento of their taxi ride and wasn’t going to be an olfactory theme of their new lives.
“What is?” she snapped, irritated, not sure that any of the five identical-looking keys worked the lobby lock. Apparently, none of them did. She dropped everything she was carrying in order to try each key again with both hands free. Finally, one did work. It was one of those unwieldy turn-while-shoving lobby door locks. Their four heavy duffel bags and Amy’s bulky drawing portfolio awkwardly filled the little tiled entryway. Joanna had a fleeting nostalgia for Mike the doorman.
“The bell. The bell button, anyway. It’s a black bell button. It’s a Bell bell button. If Teddy Bell lived in Bilbao then it would be a Bilbao Bell black bell button. And if it broke, the electrician who repaired it would send him a—”
“—Bilbao Bell black bell button bill,” Joanna muttered in accompaniment, at last turning the correct key in the lock. Everyone in the family was used to Amy’s echolalic habit, and it was customary to join her in the concluding chorus, which helped hurry the word attack to its conclusion. Joanna flung the lobby door open and with her foot she nudged the biggest duffel bag across the gritty floor toward the bottom of the stairs.
Unfortunate long-term cooking smells wafted through the building, which felt deserted. The aroma was of the type their mother called Body Odor Curry. Why would anyone willingly consume something that gave off that sort of stench? Joanna had the impulse to report to her mother on this manifestation. Then came the painful awareness, a little shock of rediscovery, the sort of reknowledge one keeps having when there has been a recent death, that her mother was no longer someone to whom her middle daughter reported about anything.
The bass line from somebody’s over-amped stereo thumped faintly overhead. The building was not deserted after all. There were perhaps twenty apartments in the Oxbridge Arms, Meg had said, all occupied by Yale undergraduates except for a pair of little old ladies on the ground floor in the back, who had lived there since the Truman administration because of some law that allowed
them to pay an infinitesimal rent indefinitely, much to the sorrow of the rapacious landlord, who preferred to rent to an ever-changing population of prosperous undergraduates with parents willing to fund the slumlike living arrangements that are a requisite element of any decent Ivy League education.
The Grouch Sisters, as they were known in the oral tradition of the Oxbridge Arms, were possibly a lesbian couple, or maybe they really were spinster sisters, no one was sure which. They were, in either case, presumably deaf. And deaf in the nose, too, unless they were the ones cooking up pots of foul-smelling stew as a passiveaggressive assault on noisy, inconsiderate students. They could probably remember when decent people lived in those apartments un-ironically, back when the hallway floor was clean and every other stair rail wasn’t missing.
“Eew,” said Amy, who was sensitive to odors of all kinds, a step behind Joanna.
Footsteps clattered down a flight of stairs overhead, then down a hallway, now down the stairs to the lobby. Although he had been on his way out, Teddy Bell flung himself to a halt on the bottom step to avoid a collision.
“Les autres sisters Verte, I presume? I’m Teddy. Was that you guys buzzing just now? Meg said you had keys. Hey, nice to meet you guys. Oh, good, you do have keys. Look, I’m terribly sorry, but see, there’s this totally amazing class I’m supposed to be checking out, but wait, let me take that big one—”
Too bad about the goatish little beard thing on his chin, Joanna and Amy agreed, after he helped them carry their monstrous bags up the two flights before scampering off to class, late. Teddy Bell seemed friendly, civilized, rather pleasantly adult, actually—someone, in short, with whom it wouldn’t be at all scary to share the apartment. And the bathroom. Amy was pleased, and said she thought he looked a lot like Meg, didn’t he, almost the way a big
brother would have looked if he had been born first in their family? And his mop of black hair seemed friendly, didn’t it? Amy was practically babbling with relief. Joanna indulged her while noting to herself that she had liked him more than she could say, having been struck by something solitary and hungry in his eyes. Meg had done well after all, coming up with Teddy Bell for a roommate, when you considered all the possibilities of awfulness. The younger Green sisters were, they concluded, happy for what he was, and relieved for all he might have been and wasn’t. They began to unpack.
Known for the occasional perfectly timed, carelessly uttered witticism in certain seminars, Edward Emerson Bell was secretly serious. Something about him—his posture, the tilt of his head, the flop of his hair, the way his perfectly ordinary clothes draped on his angular body—seemed of another time and place, though it would be hard to say what time and place that would be.
Contrary to Meg’s vague impression from the seminar, he wasn’t exactly a New Englander. His education before Yale had been at an international school in Paris, where he had lived most of his life, because of his father’s work. (Alfred Bell, perfectly kind but utterly remote and formal as a father, had headed the Paris offices of a big New York law firm.) Yet Teddy didn’t have the weirdly clipped and accentless English that is an accent of its own (the kind with which so many of his American schoolmates in Paris spoke, none of them having ever lived for very long in America).
Teddy’s summers, after his mother’s death in a terrible car accident in the Périgord the winter he turned seven (of which his strongest memory was his own broken arm, the unique sight of his father’s tears, and the astringent smell of the hospital in Périgueux), were habitually spent on the coast of Maine, at his father’s old family house. (Thus Meg’s impression wasn’t entirely wrong, just incomplete, as are, inevitably, most impressions.) There
he had spent two months every summer until college, more or less alone with his widowed grandmother, the famously opinionated Avery Bell, feminist philosopher and writer of mysteries exemplifying those opinions.
Avery Bell’s theory of boys was that they were not quite as bad as mosquitoes, though just as inevitable. Her theory of child management began and ended with benign neglect. And so Teddy, the only child of an only child, was left, happily enough, to seek out whatever company he liked. This was rarely his own cohort, once he outgrew desultory wasted hours of petty vandalism and pointless, boastful obscenity. Having become impatient with the local population his own age by the time he was thirteen, Teddy preferred to spend time with the lobstermen, the boatbuilders, and the crews who ran the makeshift ferries, most of them converted from retired lobster boats, which ran visitors out to the perpetually fog-shrouded islands that lay prettily on the horizon of the harbor view from his grandmother’s porch. The last two summers in Long Harbor, Teddy worked regular shifts on the ferries, which he never would have been permitted to do had his father not died very suddenly of a heart attack in Paris the summer after Teddy’s graduation from high school. The job would have annoyed his father as a pointless sort of make-work. It delighted his grandmother, who deplored the snobby tendencies of most of the summer people who populated Long Harbor on their predictable migratory schedule.
Teddy’s speech habits, consequently, were like certain elements of his personality—an odd mixture of highly formal international diplo-brat correctness and coast-of-Maine colloquialism. Thus the occasional erroneous and unfair conclusion, reached by the occasional semi-observant person, that Teddy Bell was affected.
Sprinting across Old Campus that first afternoon, late for class, Teddy Bell had no idea, of course, that there had been anxious
speculation about his possible freakishness or unfortunate motivations for wanting to live in the apartment on High Street with the three Green sisters. Why, indeed, had he agreed to it so readily at the last moment? Because of Meg.
Meg Green, calling him out of the blue, asking him to live with her and her sisters? It was like the manifestation of a daydream, like something he had willed into reality from his imagination. How could he resist that? Meg Green wasn’t like anyone else he knew. He possessed very few actual facts about her. Something reminded him of old photos of his mother, but it was in a nice way, not a sick way, that he made this connection. Meg was old-fashioned, gracious, and competent, yet somehow not quite in her proper element as a college student, like someone Grace Kelly would play in a movie about a debutante who gets a job at a newspaper.
Meg Green, though not a bit of a flirt, had made eye contact with him for many lingering moments of connection, and she had somehow, without ever speaking directly to him, developed what felt to Teddy like a genuine (though intangible) sort of claim on him. He wouldn’t have been able to explain this. Her term paper, “From Babbit to Rabbit: The Failed Male from Apex to Zenith,” one of three chosen by the professor for discussion at the final class meeting, had knocked his socks off.
Just knowing that somewhere out there Meg Green was thinking her Meg Green thoughts, living her Meg Green life, had seemed sufficient to nourish Teddy’s fascination over the summer. His intrigue was romantic in a sense, true enough, but not so very different from his fascination with Isabel Archer.
But then she had called him on the telephone and her Meg Green life had turned out to be quite unhappy and complex, and her Meg Green thoughts had turned out to be a tumult of worry and unhappiness that he, Teddy Bell, could assuage in an instant. It all seemed so perfectly inevitable. Would he really not mind living with her two younger sisters, was he certain? How could she
even ask? What would be more welcome news than that there were two more Green girls, about whose existence he had known nothing until now? Ever since arriving at college, Teddy had fallen in love about once a month—small, brief flames that flared briefly and died in a quick blaze of hope, despair, and resignation. But his deep fondness for Meg Green was more enduring than that.
Meg knew this, of course. Girls have a way of allowing—really, encouraging—boys to develop all sorts of strong feelings of which they, girls, make satisfied note and then proceed to ignore most of the time, to the desperation or relief of the boys, depending on confidence levels. All through the previous school year, Meg had never really acknowledged Teddy’s intensities, but from time to time there had been something between them—a casual gesture, a look, a slight touch—that she knew stirred him.
What was he thinking about on that still August afternoon, while Joanna and Amy were unpacking, as he hustled through Phelps Gate on his way to a music theory class in Hendrie Hall which he would presently decide, unimpressed by the last half of it as he would be, to drop from consideration on his schedule?
Teddy Bell was thinking of many things, as always. Often bothered by the stupidity of the world, he was, at the same time, quick to see and feel beauty of any kind. There was something beautiful and sad and precious about the Green sisters as an entity, and he hadn’t even yet seen them all three together at the same time. He wanted to protect them from harm, from unhappiness, forever. He felt as if his life were beginning at last.
Teddy skimmed over the New Haven sidewalks, dodged the cars on Elm Street, and took the few steps of Hendrie Hall in a single leap, narrowly missing a collision with a lost freshman in a Yale T-shirt so new the fold creases still showed, gazing hopelessly at a Blue Book of course listings. Teddy was happy. Happy as Larry, the ferryman from Halifax, the one who rolled his own smokes and always called him Joe College, might say.
Reader’s note: It seems strange “Teddy” isn’t represented here with his own reader’s notes in this manuscript before publication. AG
Reader’s note: I urged him to comment but he declined. He disapproves of these reader’s notes, in fact. MG
Author’s note: I am especially grateful for the vote of confidence from all the interested individuals who read the manuscript at various stages and expressed their views directly to the author without resorting to demands for legal agreements requiring the public display of personal reactions to the text.