My Name Is Lucy Barton(25)

I know that my husband came more than that one day to visit me. But it is that day I remember, and so I write it down. This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us. But I can tell you this: My mother was right; I had trouble in my marriage. And when my girls were nineteen and twenty years old, I left their father, and we have both remarried. There are days when I feel I love him more than I did when I was married to him, but that is an easy thing to think—we are free of each other, and yet not, and never will be. And there are days when I have such a clear image of him sitting at his desk in his study while the girls played in their room that I almost cry out: We were a family! I think of cellphones now, how quickly we are in touch. I remember when the girls were young I said to William, I wish there was something we could each wear on our wrists, like a phone, and then we could talk to each other and know where the other was all the time.

—

But that day that he came to see me in the hospital, when we barely spoke, it might have been when he had found out his father had left him no small amount of money in a Swiss bank account. His grandfather had profited on the war, and had put no small amount of money into a Swiss bank account, and now that William had turned thirty-five, the money was suddenly his. I learned about this later, when I came home. But it must have made William feel strange to think what the money was and what it meant, and he was never a person who could speak easily of his feelings, and so he lay on the bed with me, I who had—as we joked over the years, or perhaps only I joked—I, who had “come from nothing.”

When I first met my mother-in-law she was a great surprise to me. Her house seemed enormous and well-appointed, but over the years I came to see that it was not so, it was just a nice house, a nice middle-class house. Because she had been a farmer’s wife in Maine, and I thought of Maine as smaller in their farms than the Midwestern ones I knew, I had pictured her to look like some of the hired hands’ wives, but she didn’t look like that, she was a pleasing-looking woman who looked—she was fifty-five—no older than she was, and who moved through her lovely house with ease, a woman who had been married to a civil engineer. The first time I met her she said, “Lucy, let’s take you shopping and buy you some clothes.” I did not take offense, I didn’t take anything but some surprise—no one had ever said such a thing to me in my life. And I went shopping with her, and she bought me some clothes.

At our small wedding reception she said to a friend of hers, “This is Lucy.” She added, almost playfully, “Lucy comes from nothing.” I took no offense, and really, I take none now. But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing.

—

Yet there was this: After I left the hospital I had recurring dreams that I, and my babies, were to be killed by the Nazis. Even now, so many years later, I can remember the dreams. In what looked like a locker room, I had my two little girls with me; they were both very young. In the dream I understood—we all understood, for there were others in this locker room—that we were to be taken and killed by the Nazis. At first we thought that this room was a gas chamber, but we came to understand that instead the Nazis would come and take us to another room and that would be the gas chamber. I sang to my babies, and held them, and they were not afraid. I kept them off in a corner, away from the other people. And the situation was this: I accepted my death but did not want my children to be afraid. I was terribly scared they would be taken from me, perhaps they would be adopted by the Germans, for they looked like the little Aryan children they were. I could not bear to think of them mistreated, and there was some sense—a knowledge—in the dream that they would be mistreated. It was the most terrifying dream. It never went beyond that. I don’t know how long I had this dream. But I had it as I lived in New York, with some affluence and as my children were growing and healthy. And I never told my husband that I had this dream.





I wrote my mother a letter. I said I loved her, and I thanked her for coming to see me in the hospital. I said I would never forget that she did that. She wrote back to me on a card that showed the Chrysler Building at night. Where she got that card in Amgash, Illinois, I cannot imagine, but she sent it to me and said I will never forget either. She signed it M. I put the card on my table near the telephone by my bed and looked at it often. I would pick it up and hold it, looking at her handwriting, no longer familiar to me. I still have the card with the Chrysler Building at night that she sent to me.

When I was able to leave the hospital, my shoes did not fit. I had not thought that losing weight meant losing it everywhere, but it did—of course—and my shoes were too big on my feet. I packed the card in the bottom of the plastic bag they gave me to put my things in. My husband and I took a taxi home, and I remember that outside the hospital the world seemed very bright—frighteningly bright—and I did feel frightened by that. My children wanted to sleep with me on my first night home, and William said no, but they lay on the bed with me, my two girls. Dear God, I was happy to see my children, they had grown so. Becka had a terrible haircut; she had got gum in her hair, and the family friend who had no children of her own, who had brought them to me in the hospital, had cut her hair for her.

—

Jeremy.

I didn’t know he was gay. I didn’t know he was sick. No, said my husband, he never looked sick the way so many do. And now he was gone—he had died—while I was away. I wept steadily, a quiet weeping. On the front stoop I sat while Becka patted my head, Chrissie sometimes sat down next to me, putting her small arms around me, before the girls danced up and down the stairs again. Molla came by and said, Oh dear, you’ve heard about Jeremy. She said it was very bad, a terrible thing to happen to men. And women, she added. She sat with me while I wept.