July 1933
When Nora first announced to the president and his staff that she would be taking a vacation north through New England and Quebec, driving in her own car with her journalist companion, the head of the Secret Service said, No, absolutely not, preposterous.
Nora called me at Mitchell Place, delighted. “They think they can tell me no,” she said.
I sat down in the chair beside the telephone, and Prinz trotted out the open apartment door and sat on my bare feet. I hadn’t really expected the trip to pan out, hadn’t allowed myself to get my hopes up, so I was unperturbed. “And they can’t?”
She laughed her lovely singsong laugh. “They say it has only been a year since the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped—that we could be abducted. Shoved into the trunk of someone’s car.”
A smile opened on my face, and the feeling was as inelegant as the wrenching of a wedged cupboard door. After a few months of drink and sorrow, of scraping by on savings and freelance assignments, I was starting to thaw. I kneaded the thick fur around Prinz’s collar. “I’d like to see the criminal who could lift me into a trunk. Still,” I said, “what can you do? If they say no, they say no.”
“We’ll see,” Nora said.
A few days later, she called back. “Pack your suitcase, darling.”
“No. I don’t believe it.” Mrs. Jansen’s head popped into the hallway and the hem of her quilted dressing gown swept the doorframe. She disappeared with a huff when she realized that yet another call had come in for me instead of her.
“I promised you, didn’t I? Never doubt my promises, Hick.”
If she only knew how I lived solely for those promises these days. “But how did you get them to agree?”
Nora paused. “I told them we would bring a gun in the glove box.”
“A gun? Do you even know how to shoot a gun?”
“I do,” she said, “but this one is just for show. I put the cartridges in the teapot in my sitting room.”
She collected me in her gleaming Buick, and we drove Prinz out to a kennel on Long Island where he would have the run of the clover-pocked fields. Then we set out north, through the Adirondacks, with the top down. The scarves we wore tied over our hair whipped in the breeze and twisted their ends toward each other like fingers. We were giddy with the freedom of traveling alone and unnoticed, just two middle-aged biddies, anonymous in the way plain women are. But what we felt—the deep-down-in-the-bones gratitude at having found each other, the understanding that our long, lonely slogs had been leading us, step by step, to each other—was an aria in my mouth and I was not afraid to sing it.
Reaching Burlington and Lake Champlain felt like yanking open a grimy window shade. It was just so lush and green—enormous trees, crystal clear water, hawks in the trees and herons soaring over the lake. It was a breezy July day, and Nora drove the whole way because I still didn’t know how, though she threatened to teach me. I rested the back of my head on the seat and squinted at the bright blue sky. From this position, it looked like the very same sky that hung over the barren prairie, and one could almost be fooled, except for the scents the breeze carried. In Bowdle, it was eau de cow pies, the tang of iron in the dirt; in Vermont, everything smelled fresh and clean, of sap and rain. I thought of the trout as big as my arms that were likely swimming in the lake.
Nora glanced over at me, divining my train of thought. “Are you hungry?”
I smiled. I was starting to feel something strange. The muscles in my face felt loose and my shoulders had descended by about an inch. My skin felt warm. I wondered for a moment if I was about to have a heart attack—I reached instinctively for my cigarettes, as if they could save me—but then I realized what it might be. The phenomenon people called relaxation.
The gravel crunched beneath the tires as she pulled in to a roadside hamburger stand off Route 2. Its red-striped awning rippled in the breeze over two picnic tables. We ordered fish sandwiches and french fries and apple pie.
When the food came up, we took our trays to one of the picnic tables and dug into the deep-fried bliss. In the weeks leading up to the trip, I had gone around and around in my head about what the future held and whether I had made a huge mistake in leaving my job. But somehow, out in the fresh air and far from New York, I was able to make some kind of pact with myself. I’d get back to the fretting soon enough. For the moment, I wanted just to be in my skin, next to Nora, with a view of the mountains. In the morning, we would continue north to Quebec City, Le Château Frontenac, where, Nora had promised, we would dip strawberries from the hotel garden into our glasses of champagne. We would lie on the coverlet in the middle of the day. Nora would light a cigarette in her own mouth and then hold it to my lips for me to take a drag.
For now, there was a gull casually sidling toward us and our food. I laughed.
“Shoo!” Nora yelled, and it screamed at her and took off.
“Darling,” I said, giggling, “you’ve a bit of mayonnaise on your lip.” A few strands of hair danced around her face, golden in the sunshine.
She licked the mayonnaise off. “Oh, Hick,” she said, taking my hand. “Why can’t it always be like this?”
“Let’s pretend it is,” I said.