Summer of '69(15)
They spent their first Thanksgiving at Exalta’s house in Beacon Hill. Blair made Julia Child’s Tarte Normande aux Pommes and presented it proudly to her grandmother, who handed it off to her cook. Exalta then linked her arm through Angus’s and escorted him to the library for cocktails and canapés. At Thanksgiving, Exalta always served cherrystones on the half shell, a relish tray with French dressing, and cocktail peanuts. Blair helped herself to a clam and then a few moments later bolted for the bathroom in the back of the house, the commode the servants used, because she was going to vomit.
A week later, it was confirmed: she was pregnant.
Her dream of attending Harvard would be put on hold. Blair wrote the admissions committee a letter explaining that she found herself with child and would like to defer enrollment until the following year or the year after that. She heard nothing back; probably, they felt they didn’t need to respond because they accepted as a matter of course what Blair could not: she would never attend Harvard.
Indeed, the pregnancy disrupted even the meager routine Blair had established for herself on Commonwealth Avenue. She was absolutely flattened. Entire days slipped past when she didn’t even leave the apartment. The nausea set in at five in the afternoon, like clockwork. Blair spent at least an hour on her knees in front of the toilet, retching. The only things that kept the nausea at bay were smoking and a small glass of scotch, which was odd because normally Blair drank gin, but her pregnant body craved brown liquor, the older and more complex, the better.
On the day Blair chose to put up the Christmas tree, her mother came over to help. Between the two of them, they managed to wrangle the tree onto the stand, and then Kate went about stringing the lights while Blair collapsed on the divan with a cigarette and two fingers of Glenlivet, willing the nausea to just leave her alone for once. She had invited her mother and David for dinner and planned to serve cheese fondue; she’d painstakingly cubed a loaf of sourdough and sliced some cured sausage, both provisioned that morning from Savenor’s. Angus had called at lunchtime and said he would be working late again, and Blair wanted to cancel the dinner altogether, but Kate insisted that Blair needed company, so now Blair could look forward to a lopsided fondue dinner with her parents.
She watched her mother wind the lights around the tree, infinitely patient, careful, thorough, and competent in her task. She wore a dark green shirtwaist and pumps and had pearls at her throat; her blond hair was in a smooth chignon, her lipstick perfect. Kate was always put together, always impeccable. How did she manage it? Blair knew that her mother had suffered dark times. Blair’s father, Wilder Foley, had been fighting in Korea for much of their early marriage, and then when he came home, there were, as Kate put it, “adjustments” to make. Blair remembered her father’s homecoming: They picked him up at the airport; he was wearing his dress uniform. She remembers him at the breakfast table in a white undershirt, smoking and eating eggs, pulling Kate down into his lap and growling at Blair to take her sister and brother upstairs to play. Wilder didn’t drive Blair to school or ballet; her mother did. Her mother prepared their food, administered their baths, read the stories, and tucked them in. Blair remembered one night her parents had gone out for dinner. Her mother wore a red sheath and her father his dress uniform, and Janie Beckett from down the street had come to babysit, which had been a matter of great excitement. Kate had bought Coke to offer Janie, and Blair had sneaked peeks at the three exotic green bottles in the icebox; the Foley children weren’t allowed soda. That night, Janie gave Blair one sip of the Coke; it had been so crisp and spicy and unexpectedly fizzy that Blair’s eyes had teared up and her nose tingled.
She had retained all of those details but relatively little about her own father. And then, suddenly, he was dead. Kate had found Wilder’s body in his garage workshop, a gunshot wound to his head.
On that morning, Blair had been taken to school by her grandfather, which was unusual indeed. When she got home, there had been men at the house, so many men—neighbors, Mr. Beckett (Janie’s father), a swarm of policemen, and, later, bizarrely, Bill Crimmins, the caretaker for the house in Nantucket.
Blair doesn’t remember being told that her father was dead; possibly, she overheard something or just intuited it. Nor does Blair remember her mother screaming or even crying. This struck Blair as unusual only when she was older. When Blair was sixteen, she and Kate had an argument about Blair’s public displays of affection with her boyfriend, Larry Winter, and Blair turned Kate’s composure during this time against her, saying, You didn’t even cry when Daddy died. You didn’t shed one tear!
And Kate had spun on her in an uncharacteristic show of anger. What do you know about it? Tell me please, Blair Baskett Foley. What. Do. You. Know. About. It.
Blair had had to admit that she knew nothing about it, really, and that was true to this day. Kate must have been devastated, haunted, and set adrift by her husband’s unexpected death. Blair was tempted to ask her mother now what it had been like to find him, how she had coped afterward. Blair wondered if she could learn something about her own marriage by asking Kate those questions. But at that moment, her mother held her hands up to showcase the tree. The lights were evenly hung at different depths on the branches in a way that created a glowing, three-dimensional marvel.
“What do you think?” Kate asked.
Blair admired her mother so much, she couldn’t summon words strong enough to praise her. She nodded her approval.