What Remains (2 page)
Authors: Carole Radziwill
But in the dark, on this night, did she sense his frustration and impatience? Did she dismiss it? We were all frustrated and impatient that summer. She was sitting directly behind her husband, the backs of their seats touching. He could have, if he had wanted, reached a hand around his seat to her. Her sister was beside her.
I sometimes mark time now in three-minute intervals. When I am talking on the phone, or walking around the city, or sitting on a plane, I glance at my watch and reflexively mark the time. There is so much that can happen in three minutes. It’s enough time to think you can fix things.
I’m sure she was reading magazines. She always took a pile of them because she scanned them quickly and she didn’t like to run out. She sounded tired when I spoke to her. Her voice was soft. She was trying to distract herself. We were all trying to distract ourselves. It was a bad day, if you had to choose one, to die. There had not been enough time.
“I love you,” she said before she hung up. And then again, “I love you.” We always said this to each other, but I didn’t want to love anyone that night. I was tired, and I didn’t say it back. “I know,” I said instead.
You never know when something is going to happen to change your life. You expect it to arrive with fanfare, like a wedding or a birth, but instead it comes in the most ordinary of circumstances. The Roman goddess Fortuna snaps her fingers and changes the channel—click. I was sitting in a chair, reading, preparing for one death, and then
click
. It was silent. Was there a noise? I always thought tragedy had a sound. I always thought there was something you would
hear.
We were holding our breath until Anthony died. Believing that everything else would wait.
Carolyn had a theory about relationships.
“You’re much happier when you wait,” she used to tell me. “The ones that come to you are the only ones worth anything, Lamb. It’s like standing on the shore and spotting something in the water. You can splash around to try to get it, or you can wait and see if the tide brings it in.”
I was thinking this while I stood on the shore one day, dreading what the tide would bring. Her makeup bag, a luggage tag.
The weekend before, we were all at the house. She came early in the afternoon, and John flew in later. Effie made a big dinner of grilled fish and roasted potatoes, pie for dessert. John had arranged for him to be there that summer. He cooked for us and maintained our routine—dialysis in the morning, the beach during the day. A table set for dinner at a planned time each night. We welcomed diversions. We’d have dinner, linger at the table, play Bartlett’s if we were up for a game.
We had friends staying for the weekend and we were all sitting in the backyard, waiting for John, and suddenly a plane was right above us. He flew low, buzzing over the house before he landed, a fun thing. He broke up tension. He always knew to. A sort of childish but innocent thing to do, flying over us, dipping the left wing.
Just like him.
We all looked toward the sky.
“Hey!” We waved. Except Anthony, who just shook his head, a reflex after so many years. Anthony’s eye roll and John’s sideways smile.
I got you, Principe.
“He’s here!”
Carolyn looked up, smiling, squinting, her arm in front of her to block the sun.
“He’s crazy,” someone said, laughing. He brought people to life. He could relax a room, and we counted on him for it. He flew over the house and dropped a dash of exhilaration on the weekend.
I would come to think of it as my summer of tragedy. I was reading love stories, the classics, one after another. You could lose yourself in someone else’s heartbreak while you held your breath for your own. I brought a stack of books and piled them in the bedroom next to
Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
which John picked up one day. “Do you see what your wife is reading?” he said to Anthony, shaking his head. “It’s worse than I thought.” Carolyn was reading
Light in August
. We had no time for a badly told story.
I wonder if in those last three minutes he called out to her. I have learned that engines sound different at that rate of descent—a whining noise and much louder as the plane starts into a corkscrew. There was a hard shift to their flight in the last thirty seconds. Did he call out to her, panicked, his voice strained?
Three minutes, one hundred and eighty seconds, is enough time to think through whether he should tell her, and then to struggle with his decision. It is plenty of time to consider who would be waiting for a phone call on the shore. It is the length of an average story on the evening news.
It was a fairly ordinary accident, all in all. The plane dropped neatly into the water after its pilot lost his course. For all the experts, the theories, the newspaper ink, it was a simple crash. A small plane dropping out of an unlit sky.
I was reading
Anna Karenina
by a light in the living room. The window near me looked out onto a pond, and then farther, to the water where they lay for four days. Their crash didn’t disturb a soul, until later. I was sitting comfortably in a room where I had seen them days earlier. In the house where we’d agreed to meet the next evening, before she hung up the phone.
Thirty seconds is what it would have taken me to read a few paragraphs in my book. Thirty seconds and I am completely absorbed in a scene in someone else’s story. Thirty seconds, after Anna Karenina’s final and fatal decision leaves her kneeling awkwardly on the railroad tracks—the train a split second away from her inelegant end. It is enough time to become anxious, then calm and then anxious again—as you might do reading an account of the end of a life. I may have paused once, put a marker in the book, and taken a sip from a glass on the table. This is very likely what I am doing as my best friend rushes to the end of her life, in water visible from the window of the room where I am sitting. Enjoying an unusual moment of quiet calm in an otherwise restless summer.
We dressed for dinner that summer. We’d come in from the beach, take long, cool showers, and slip into floor-length skirts. Long gowns and bare feet. We dressed for dinner every night, and our husbands liked it—it lifted us up for a moment. We could pretend it was all the way we had once imagined a summer like this—suntanned shoulders and salty kisses.
Anthony looked thin and small in his bathing suit, his legs knobby like a boy’s. His face was strong and handsome.
I was surprised when Carolyn called from the airport. I didn’t think she’d be coming. She had mentioned that she might not come. There was a wedding, and we were all doing our best. We were holding our breath, trying to pass time while we waited for Anthony to die. When you’re waiting for someone to die, passing time is the cruelest thing to have to do.
She had started a tradition the Christmas before. Christmas dinner, just the four of us. “Every year we’ll do it. Don’t you think we need a tradition?” she had asked. “Marta will come and cook a big Christmas dinner.”
“It sounds great,” I replied, caught up in her enthusiasm.
I don’t have many things left. What I kept is mostly in boxes now, stored away. You go through what remains and there isn’t a lot that is meaningful, except your memories.
There is another scene months before this night. I am with John on this same route. I am his only passenger, and we are flying in the old plane, the one with his father’s initials and birthdate on the tail wing—529JK. The trip takes one hour and forty-three minutes from the time we park his white convertible in the corner of the lot in Caldwell to the time we touch down on the runway of Martha’s Vineyard.
“You slept the whole way!” he says, laughing, when we land.
“Oh, I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
He climbs out and reaches for my hand.
“Don’t be,” he says. “It’s a compliment.”
But I am reading a book by the window on a different night, and as his cousins fly up the foggy coastline, my husband sits next to me watching a movie he doesn’t care about, then goes to bed. When he wakes up they will be missing.
Once it was the four of us, with all of our dreams and plans, and then suddenly there was nothing.
Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.
—M
ARGARET
A
TWOOD
,
The Robber Bride
Saturday, August 27, 1994
I’ll start with the fairy tale.
Orson Welles said to Gore Vidal once, in an interview about a movie he was writing,
If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop your story.
My wedding, then, might have been a good place to stop. I never dreamt of myself in a wedding dress, but here I am. White, naturally, and silk gazar, because I’m told this is what they are making them from this year. “Keep it simple,” I say to the designer, a family friend of my fiancé’s who called in June to say she would design the dress. We trade sketches back and forth—mine a woman with a Scarlett O’Hara waist and saucy, flirty mouth. A woman, I imagine, who knows a proper card stock, knows to register at Bergdorf Goodman, to get listed in
Town & Country
.
It is simple, elegant: long chiffon sleeves in August because I am conscious of my freckles, but otherwise perfect. I am standing in this dress at the edge of the floor where parquet meets the green lawn like Jay Gatsby on the terrace gazing out. For a brief moment I go unnoticed beneath the edges of the tent, under the billowing soft silk, at the fringe of light fingering through the baby’s breath candle chandelier. Famed party designer Christian Tortu was flown in from Paris to create it.
The sky, if I were to step from under the tent and look up, is full of stars. The dark ocean, even, is lit up tonight, because my mother-in-law has thought of everything—has tucked lights into the foliage along the dunes. The night is all twinkles and light and sparkle. The tinkling of crystal, trickles of laughter, silver clinking on porcelain. Seashells carefully picked, artfully scattered on the tables. Off-duty policemen stand in the shadows along the path to the beach. Music floats out and drops on the waves like bubbles. The ocean slaps onto the sand, like faint applause, behind me.
The Polish prince and the small-town, working-class girl. This is the moment when my worlds collide—Kingston, Suffern, American royalty, my ABC News career. This is the crossroads. Everyone raises a glass to futures, beginnings.
My uncle Benny has one arm around the senator, the other stretched out in front of them holding a camera. My mother is talking to the news anchor, my father having a cigarette behind the bar. John poses patiently with two of my cousins. Uncle Jimmy is laughing with the movie director at something one of them has said.
Anthony’s stepfather, Herbert, is elegant in his classic navy suit, sipping champagne from fluted crystal. His gaze is fixed on my mother-in-law, in pale green Armani and white gloves, her light-brown hair brushed back to frame an extraordinary, elegant face.
My uncle Freddy and aunt Marsha are seated next to the Rutherfords of Newport. Marsha is animated, her laugh carries over the music, the Rutherfords quiet. Buddy is here, too—Governor Roemer when I met him in Baton Rouge on a story. “So happy for you,” he whispered to me earlier in the night. He is here with someone, a friend, and I know it’s likely we won’t see each other again. There’s no reason for our paths to cross. I have his letters piled neatly, tied together with string.
Tony, my cousin’s boyfriend, watches everything closely, drinking a beer. He’ll call a popular radio station tomorrow to report the celebrity sightings here in his rough Yonkers accent. They won’t believe he was a guest until he gives them enough detail, describes what Melanie Griffith was wearing. The DJ will make crude jokes about the bride; he’ll call me a
gold digger.
I have the vantage point of Fortune. Standing in the middle of this, I now know how it all turns out. There will be love and loss and luck and fate—the tent is lousy with it.
Bobby Muller in his wheelchair is getting a drink from the bar. Six months earlier we crossed the Mekong River on a rickety wooden ferry, heading to the medical clinic he built in Cambodia to make prosthetic limbs for land mine victims. I’ll win an Emmy next year for the story and call him from the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel with the news.
Our friend Judd holds a crowd rapt in the corner with his repertoire of stories from the road. He pulls them out like aces from a deck of cards. He’ll die of a brain tumor soon after his twins are born. Two of the couples dancing will divorce before the year is out. A heart attack will kill my uncle Sal a few weeks shy of his son’s wedding, but tonight he is hearty, slapping someone’s back, telling a joke. The celebrated artist talking to the young girl in the hat will die in three years from a sudden bout of pneumonia.
Fortune. Fate. But there are people here, too, who will fall in love. Our friend Kissy will get assigned to the Balkan war and meet her husband Jamie in a bar in Croatia. I sit Anthony’s friend Beth next to Tony, and they fall in love. My sister marries the boy she came with.
I am watching Anthony now. He is handsome and strong, dashing, like the pictures I’ve seen of his late father, Stas, the gallant prince. His hair is grown out, wavy and brushed back the way I like it. He’ll look up for me, spot me here in a moment, and smile. I will not see the bump tonight. I won’t see it until the end of our honeymoon on a beach in Hawaii.
Women in red lipstick and men in cream-colored pants with dark sport coats are sipping cocktails against the ocean breeze. It is a perfect wedding—the bride and groom in love, a Louis Armstrong song, the air tingling with
future
. People fall in love with one another all over, and with life and colors and music. They form instant relationships with people they will never see again.
Linda, my oldest friend, is having a baby any day, so her mother, Vivian, has driven out here alone. I spot her chain-smoking Winston menthols, sweet and anxious. A familiar sight, and I am happy she is here. She hugs me tight and quick in the long receiving line, but I lose her in this crowd and don’t speak to her again. She’ll find out she has lung cancer next week while I’m on my honeymoon. Linda will tell me at her funeral that she spoke of tonight often. “You were like another daughter to her,” she will say.
My four-year-old niece Theresa is singing onstage with the band. My brothers are laughing, heads thrown back. Teasing Mike, I suspect, about driving his rusted Duster to the house in the procession of black sedans. Explaining to the valet about the rope around the steering column holding the passenger door shut.
My mother-in-law is dancing with Hamilton, smiling at something he has said. Anthony whispers to Holly, and she gives him a playful punch. They call me over. The handsome groom, the lovely bride.
They’ll have beautiful children,
someone is surely saying. You do this at weddings, imagine the future.
This is my ball. The carriage arrives in the morning to whisk us away for three weeks. We fly to Australia and dive off the Great Barrier Reef. Anthony teases me about the huge potato codfish. “They’re swarming you, Nut.” Then he says to the dive master, loud enough for me to hear, “Aren’t there sharks in these waters?” I’m new to diving and half-scared, treading water as he takes pictures of me from the boat. “Stop it, Anthony!” I yell at him, and then laugh, trying to be mad. I fix the video camera on him in the car while he’s driving. It’s late, and we are heading down winding country roads to the Mount Cook Lodge. “Tell them,” I say, referring to our imagined audience—all of the people we think are as thrilled as we are about this marriage. “Tell them about the poor little bunnies that got in your way.” He winks at me, at the camera.
How sweet,
you would think if you watched it.
Look at how sweet they are together.
Young and in love, we return to New York and to messages on the answering machine from people who missed us. I write thank-you notes and put the pictures in a scrapbook. We go back to work, flushed from adventure.
I am fortunate, you might say, and that could mean anything. I will tell you what happened and let you judge for yourself.