Tigers in Red Weather (8 page)

As she waited for the operator to connect her, she pulled a cigarette out of the box on the telephone table. Lighting it, she stared out the small bay window that made the library her favorite room in the house. The low branches of the ash tree outside the warm room scratched at the windowpane. The operator told her to hold for her connection.

Nick sipped what was left of her martini.

“Pot roast,” she said to herself drunkenly.

By the time Helena’s voice came down the line, Nick felt numb.

“Nick?” Helena’s voice sounded scratchy.

“Oh,” she said, suddenly surprised to be talking to her cousin.

“Is that you?”

“Yes, yes, it’s me.” Nick found words difficult.
But I still love you
.

“How are you? Is everything all right?”

“No, it’s not all right,” Nick said. “I … I was just suddenly missing everything. Do you remember our little house on Elm Street? And how hot it was the first summer?”

“Yes.” Helena sounded hesitant. “Nick, what’s wrong? Is Hughes all right?”

“Hughes is Hughes,” Nick said. “No, I just was sad for our life before. That’s all. I would give anything to be back in that house right now, washing out our stockings in that horrible little bathroom. Do you remember when my last pair just disintegrated, on the hanger over the tub? And we came back and found only a tiny pile of brown dust? And we had a little funeral in the yard?”

“Yes, I remember. And we played the
Moonlight Sonata
for them.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Nick said, running her hand through her hair. “I’d forgotten what we’d played.”

“That was it,” Helena said. “And then I drew a line on your leg with your eyebrow pencil, but it came out pretty wobbly.”

“Yes, and I had a terrible time getting it off.” Nick lit another cigarette. Wind blew against the windowpane.

“Darling, have you been drinking?”

“Yes, a martini, or three.” Nick laughed, but it sounded more like a fork on a tin cup. “I’m sorry, darling, I just wanted to talk to you, talk about something from before.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, yes. I have to go now. Good-bye, Helena.”

“Good-bye, Nick. Write to me soon.”

Nick put the receiver down. “Good-bye,” she said to the quiet room and the wind whistling past the ash tree.

Nick had gone to bed early that night, complaining of a headache
and crying herself to sleep while Hughes ate soup in the kitchen by himself. But the next night, when he arrived home, she was prepared.

She had put on her red shantung dress, the one she had worn to the 21 Club during the war, and had her hair set in Harvard Square. She prepared steaks and mashed potatoes and peppered green beans. She fixed martinis and the pitcher was sweating on the marble top of the bar when her husband came through the door.

She met him in the front hall and took his briefcase out of his hand.

“Feeling better?” he asked, kissing her forehead.

“Much,” Nick said. “Go into the living room. I’ve prepared cocktails.”

Hughes looked at her, saw her hair, her dress. “What’s the occasion?”

“A great occasion,” Nick said, disappearing through the dining room toward the bar, his briefcase heavy as lead.

Her hand shook as she poured the martinis and she had to swab up the tears of vodka that had dribbled down the glasses. She placed them on a silver tray with olives. Nick stood back and looked at them, marveling at how something could look so clean and be so poisonous at the same time.

Patting down her hair, she picked up the tray and walked carefully through the long garden room, her high heels clacking out a rhythm on the tile floor. When she reached the living room, she saw Hughes sitting in his blue wing chair, looking expectantly at her.

Nick set the tray down gently on the side table next to him. She handed him one glass and took the other for herself.

“Hughes, I’ve decided …” She stopped. “I think we should have a baby. I want a baby.”

Hughes put his glass down and stood, taking her in his arms.

“Darling,” he whispered into her hair, sending off the acrid odor of hair spray. “It is a great occasion.”

“Yes,” Nick said.

“I knew you’d want one. I knew you’d change your mind and that you’d want one, too.”

And with that, something hard and pure that had been living inside her, a dream that perhaps had begun in the maid’s room of her mother’s house the day she married, shattered, and dissolved into her hot blood.

DAISY

1959: JUNE

D
aisy would always remember that summer as the summer they found the body. It was also the summer she turned twelve and had first been kissed, near the old ice cellar, where they now kept all the rusting bicycles. But that first flutter of skin on skin had paled in comparison to the excitement of death. When they stumbled upon it behind the tennis courts, they weren’t even sure what it was at first. Just a large lump covered with a dirty travel blanket, with something sticking out of it that looked like a man-of-war.

It had started out like every other June she could remember. Two days after her birthday, her mother had packed up the station wagon and they had driven the two hours to the ferry in Woods Hole. They fought about the radio station. Her mother said that the Clovers were all right, because they sounded like real music. But, she told Daisy, she didn’t understand why all the music seemed to have lost its poetry. And she hated the word “chick.” Daisy smirked to herself.

On the boat, her mother bought her a coffee, with lots of milk. Her mother always drank hers without anything in it, bitter.
Young girls must learn to drink coffee, but jangly nerves are unbecoming
. “Just a
drop,” she told the man in the white cap serving it from the bare steel counter. He gave her mother a queer look, but did as he was instructed, as men always seemed to do.

Daisy often wondered what invisible power her mother had that made men do that. Daisy did what she was told, too. That was because her mother was a little crazy and she knew better than to cross her, unless she really wanted to get it. But these men weren’t going to get it, not really. And anyways, they were always a bit goofy around her, not like they were afraid, but like what her mother wanted was exactly what they had been waiting their whole lives to accomplish.

Daisy asked her mother about it once. Or rather, she asked her mother if she was pretty, because she had the vague notion that whatever power her mother had was something to do with her looks.

“Being pretty isn’t really all that important,” her mother said. “Men like it when you have it.”

She smiled at Daisy when she imparted this piece of information. An inclusive smile that made Daisy keep quiet. But privately, Daisy wondered who else had
it
and where they might have gotten it from. She thought about the movie stars she liked, but her mother didn’t really look like Audrey Hepburn or Natalie Wood, she wasn’t even pretty, exactly, so maybe that wasn’t really
it
. But then Daisy didn’t look like her mother, either. She was blond and blue-eyed, like her father.

For her twelfth birthday, her mother had taken her to the Nickelodeon in Harvard Square to see
Gone With the Wind
. When the beautiful Vivien Leigh, green eyes flashing, told Mammy that she wouldn’t eat her breakfast, her mother had leaned over.

“She went mad during this picture,” she whispered in her ear. “And you can see it in her eyes. You can see her breaking apart.”

Daisy thought she could see it, too. But what she really thought about afterward was that her mother had eyes just like that and she
wondered if her mother was really, truly going mad, just like crazy Vivien Leigh. Maybe that was
it
. That would not be so good, she decided.

They arrived at Tiger House in the late afternoon. The car was hot and sticky and the coffee had made Daisy feel hollow. The cedar-shingled house, turned silvery from the constant onslaught of sea storms, sat on a property that spanned the length of two streets, a fact that had always amazed Daisy. The back driveway started on North Summer Street and wound between a smattering of other cottages until it opened up into their own back lawn.

The front of the house was dominated by a double-storied, columned porch that looked out across North Water Street. On the other side of that road, a sloping front lawn led down to the small boathouse and rickety dock.

Daisy’s great-grandmother had wanted a “bungalow,” one of the simple shingled homes the off-Islanders built to summer in. But the necessity of a summer and a winter kitchen, then a conservatory for light and a few extra bedrooms for weekend parties, had caused the original plans for the house to grow backward until what had been imagined as a boxy cottage overtook almost the entire back plot. It had been named by Daisy’s great-grandfather, an admirer of the first President Roosevelt and an avid big-game hunter with a particular passion for tigers. A large tiger skin rug, head and all, took pride of place in the green sitting room.

Pulling into the driveway and turning off the engine, Daisy’s mother let out a big sigh. She was looking across a cluster of dusky tea roses at Aunt Helena’s next door. Aunt Helena and Uncle Avery were renting it out this summer, which meant they would all have to stay in the main house.

“She could at least have found some people who don’t hang their laundry line in the yard,” her mother said, in that voice that meant
she was talking to herself.
Rhetorical
, her mother called it.
That means no one wants an editorial
.

Daisy had thought it sounded fun, everyone together; her mother and aunt and Ed. And her father, of course, when he came up on his trips from the city. But her mother didn’t. Uncle Avery needed money for his collection, she knew; something to do with the movies, but she wasn’t sure what exactly. When she thought of it, Daisy imagined a huge room filled with reels of film under glass. Her mother had been very angry about it all and she had seen her father trying to calm her down. But her mother had said, “Goddamn Helena and her goddamn husband,” before realizing that Daisy was standing at the door. She had looked at her with those green eyes, not flashing like Vivien Leigh’s, but flat and cold, like broad beans. Then she slammed the door shut and Daisy couldn’t hear any more.

Her mother pulled Daisy’s little plaid suitcase out of the back of the car and handed it to her.

“Don’t forget to unpack those dresses so they don’t wrinkle,” she said, but Daisy was already racing off, dragging the case through the back door, letting the screen snap behind her.

She was anxious to get upstairs to her room and make sure all the things she had tucked away the summer before were still there. Her comic book collection, the pink, striped shell that, among others, she had found on the beach and the special shampoo she had begged her father to buy her (“So Glamorous! For Soft, Lustrous Hair”).

She ran down the long hallway that led from the back of the house to the front, catching her case on the worn runner every few steps. Just before the front door, the house opened up, with two large sitting rooms, one green and one blue, on either side. Their large, screened windows looked out onto the front porch, and the harbor beyond.

As she crossed to the wide staircase, she caught a glimpse of Aunt Helena sitting in a chintz armchair in the blue room, wearing a soft,
distracted expression on her pale face. Daisy had almost forgotten that her aunt and cousin had already arrived. She wondered where Ed might be lurking.

“Hi, Aunt Helena,” she called over her shoulder as she stomped up the stairs.

“Hello, dear one,” her aunt called back. “Ed? Daisy and Aunt Nick are here, darling.”

Daisy huffed into her beloved bedroom, with the twin brass beds and the pink rosette wallpaper she had been allowed to pick out herself. She threw her suitcase on the extra bed and flew to the window. Pushing up the sash and pressing her nose against the screen, she breathed in the air, heavy with ocean, but sweet, too, with the scent of the albizia tree flowering just outside. She fingered the gauzy, ruffled curtains. Then she went to her secret hiding place.

In order to keep nosy parkers such as her mother or her cousin out of her business, Daisy kept her treasures at the bottom of an old bureau that, considered too bulky for everyday use, had been abandoned in the back of her closet. She pushed back the decoys, an old beach blanket and the enormous stuffed unicorn her father had gotten for her at the West Tisbury fair three summers before. She had been in love with unicorns that summer, but she had been unable to knock down the four bottles to win it. She had spent all her allowance trying, and when she had none left, her father had taken pity on her and handed the man two dollars for it. She had slept with it every night, admiring its golden horn and stroking its flowing mane. But the next year, she had stuffed it in the bureau, suddenly embarrassed by the cheap plastic eyes that stared dumbly at nothing.

Underneath it were the ten
Archie
comics; the matching set of Silver City Pink lipstick and nail polish she had bought at the five-and-dime on Main Street and snuck into the house under her blouse; six nickels she had earned sweeping the walk the summer before; a
pair of oxidizing copper clip-ons, stolen from her mother’s jewelry box; and the picture of her parents on their wedding day. After taking stock of all this, she put the blanket and the unicorn back in their place and shut the drawer. As she was emerging from the closet, she saw Ed standing there, staring.

“Hello,” Ed said.

“Ed,” Daisy said, a little breathless. “I was just looking at my unicorn.”

“It’s all right. I know that’s your hiding place.” Ed looked at her in that strange, impassive way he had that made Daisy feel as if he were looking right through her.

“What are you doing in my room? Sneaking around as usual, I suppose.” She pushed her hip out and tried to flatten her eyes, the way her mother did.