Lost and Wanted(82)
While she cooked, I explored. The house had wooden siding rather than shingles, and was painted brick red. A yellow tin star decorated the narrow front door. There was a living room with a low, beamed ceiling and a fireplace, furniture in dark green plush. There were lace curtains. From the living room, a steep, narrow staircase ascended to the second floor, past a photo wall with pictures of the family in Baltimore, where Carl and his younger sister had grown up. I recognized Carl in a group of young people, elegantly dressed and crowded at a zinc bar in front of a wall of felt pennants, and as a child on the sidewalk outside a church, holding the hand of a little girl who must’ve been Aunt Penny, in a full-skirted short dress and white gloves, carrying a bouquet. These would have been taken in Baltimore in the fifties and sixties.
A more contemporary photograph showed Penny with her graduating seniors at the school in Roslindale. From Memorial Day until Labor Day weekend, she was always in Gloucester. Charlie and her brother had come to stay for most of every summer, while their parents worked in the city. There was a photo of the two of them playing on the beach with Penny, and another of the whole family, including Carl and Addie and the dogs—a pair of the small white terriers that the Boyces had always kept. There were school pictures of Charlie and William, and a snapshot of their parents, much younger, with their arms around each other, standing on a dock with boats in the background. Carl was grinning, perfectly relaxed, but Addie’s expression was more guarded, as if she had considered the photograph’s long life on her sister-in-law’s wall, and all of the people who might someday look at it. She was beautiful but impossible to read.
Charlie had a theory about her parents’ marriage. She said that when they first met, her mother, by virtue of her class, her education, and her beauty, had all the power in the relationship. It took Carl four years to convince her to marry him, and most of their courtship was epistolary, since she was in New York, and he was using his G.I. Bill benefits for college in North Carolina. It was after the children were born, when Carl’s career had taken off—when he was offered the chair of his department as well as the lucrative television gigs—that the ground shifted, and Addie found herself at a disadvantage.
Charlie said that her father had had an affair with a young stylist on one of those shows, and that her parents had almost split up over it. Her mother had taken her and William to live with a cousin in Paris for a year. When they got back, William had gone to college and Charlie had gone to Choate, where she spent her last two years of high school while her parents figured out their marriage. In a certain mood, Charlie would rail against them for “exiling her” at Choate; in another, she would wax nostalgic about “Deerfield Day,” or something called the “Last Hurrah.” When Charlie talked about the crisis in her parents’ marriage—in a breezier way than she might have if I’d known her while it was happening—she’d described it as a “necessary correction.” Her father had had to prove himself to her mother all over again. Charlie said that this dynamic was what reanimated her parents’ relationship, since it restored the conditions under which they’d first fallen in love—but added that if the guy she eventually married ever did that to her, she’d leave him in a second.
Charlie had instructed me to put my bag in the second-floor guest bedroom, where her parents always stayed when they came up on summer weekends. We’d turned up the thermostat; you could hear the radiators clanking, but it was still cold, and the house had a musty, unused smell. There was a queen-sized bed with a patchwork quilt, and a large wooden armoire with a heart cut out of the door. In the hallway outside the bathroom, a ladder led to an attic room under the steeply gabled roof, where Charlie had joked about Neel putting his telescope. I used the bathroom, where the toilet sat on a raised wooden platform to conceal the plumbing, and the copper content of the water (bracing, from a well) was evident from brilliant aqua stains on the porcelain sink. I looked into the spotted mirror above the sink—my hair a little wild, my cheeks still pink—and thought of the emotional toast I would make about Charlie’s role in our courtship, if Neel and I someday got married.
14.
We were almost twenty minutes late to pick up Neel, and I had been worried during the short drive from Aunt Penny’s that he would have gotten on a train back to Boston. But when we arrived at the quaint Gloucester rail station, with its round sign for the T Commuter Rail, there he was. The temperature had dropped and we were using the heat and the defrost inside the car, but Neel wasn’t taking advantage of the station’s enclosed passenger waiting area. He was standing outside where the light was better, under an antique, bell-shaped streetlamp, reading a book. The red digital numbers on the station’s display board read 6:47, but he seemed unconcerned by our delay. As soon as I saw him, I had a different worry. What if it was too awkward, just the three of us?
Charlie pulled into a space across the street from the station.
“There he is,” I said.
“So cute he’s reading,” Charlie said. “Look how serious he is. Also, I like the peacoat.”
“He doesn’t normally wear glasses.”
“What’s wrong with glasses?”
“Nothing—should we honk or something?”
“What do you think he’s reading?”