"They said congratulations," Nicholas told me when he'd hung up the phone after telling his parents about us. "They want us to come out tomorrow night."
It was clear to me after our first visit that Astrid Prescott liked me about as much as she'd like a Hessian army overrunning her darkroom. "They did not say that," I answered. "Tell me the truth."
"That is the truth," Nicholas admitted, "and that's what bothers me."
We drove to Brookline in near silence, and when we rang the doorbell Astrid and Robert Prescott answered together. They were dressed fashionably in shades of gray, and they had dimmed the lights in the house. If I had not known better, I would have assumed I'd arrived at a wake.
During dinner, I kept waiting for something to happen. When Nicholas dropped his fork, I jumped out of my seat. But there was no screaming, no earth-shattering announcement. A maid served roast duck and fiddleheads; Nicholas and his father talked about bluefishing off the Cape. Astrid toasted our future, and we all lifted our glasses so that the sun, still coming through the windows, splintered through the twisted stems and littered the walls with rainbows. I spent the main course being choked by the fear of the unknown, which lurked in the corners of the dining room with the stale breath and slitted eyes of a wolf. I spent dessert staring at the massive crystal chandelier balanced above the lily centerpiece. It was suspended by a thin gold chain, light as the hair of a fairy-tale princess, and I wondered just what it could take before it broke.
Robert led us into the parlor for coffee and brandy. Astrid made sure we all had a glass. Nicholas sat beside me on a love seat and put his arm over my shoulders. He leaned over and whispered to me that dinner had gone so well he wouldn't be surprised if his parents now offered us a huge, extravagant wedding. I knotted my hands in my lap, noticing the small framed photos tucked in every spare inch of space in the parlor--in the bookshelves, on the piano, even beneath the chairs. All were photos of Nicholas, at different ages: Nicholas on a tricycle, Nicholas's face turned up to the sky, Nicholas sitting on the front steps with a ratty black puppy. I was trying so hard to see these pieces of his life, the things I had missed, that I almost did not hear Robert Prescott's question. "Just how old," he said, "are you really."
I was caught off guard. I had been examining the ice-blue satin paper on the walls, the overstuffed white wing chairs, and the Queen Anne side tables, tastefully highlighted with antique vases and painted copper boxes. Nicholas had told me that the portrait over the fireplace, a Sargent which had held my interest, was not anyone he knew. It wasn't the subject that had led his father to purchase it, he said; it was the investment. I wondered how Astrid Prescott had found the time to create a name for herself and a house that could put a museum to shame. I wondered how a boy could possibly grow up in a home where sliding down the banister or walking the dog on a yoyo could unintentionally destroy hundreds of years of history.
"I'm eighteen," I said evenly, thinking that in my house--our house--furniture would be soft, with curved edges, colored bright to remind you you were alive, and everything, everything, would be replaceable.
"You know, Paige," Astrid said, "eighteen is such an age. Why, I didn't know what I really wanted to do with my life until I was at least thirty-two."
Robert stood and paced in front of the fireplace. He stopped directly in the middle, blocking the face of the Sargent so that from where I sat it seemed he was the painting's center, hideously larger than life. "What my wife is trying to say is that of course you two have the right to decide what you'd like--"
"We already have," Nicholas pointed out.
"If you please," Robert said, "just hear me out. You certainly have the right to decide what you'd like out of life. But I wonder if perhaps your thoughts have been clouded by faulty judgment. Now, Paige, you've barely even lived. And Nicholas, you're still in school. You can't support yourself yet, much less a family, and that's to say nothing of the hours you'll spend doing your residency." He came to stand in front of me and placed his hand, cold, on my shoulder. "Surely Paige would prefer more than the shadow of a husband."
"Paige needs time to discover herself," Astrid said, as if I were not in the room. "I know, believe me, that it's virtually impossible to sustain a marriage when--"
"Mother," Nicholas interrupted. His lips were pressed together in a thin white gash. "Cut to the chase," he said.
"Your mother and I think you ought to wait," Robert Prescott said. "If you still feel the same way in a few years, well, of course you'll have our blessing."
Nicholas stood up. He was two inches taller than his father, and when I saw him like that my breath caught in my throat. "We're getting married now," he said.
Astrid cleared her throat and hit her diamond wedding band against the rim of her glass. "This is so difficult to bring up," she said. She looked away from us, this woman who had journeyed into the Australian bush, who, armed only with a camera, had faced Bengal tigers, who had slept in the desert beneath saguaros, searching out the perfect sunrise. She looked away, and all of a sudden she changed from the mythic photographer to the shadow of an aging debutante.
She looked away, and that was when I knew what she was going to say.
Nicholas stared past his mother. "Paige is not pregnant," he said, and when Astrid sighed and sank back in the chair, Nicholas flinched as if he had fielded a blow.
Robert turned his back on his son and put his brandy snifter on the mantel of the fireplace. "If you marry Paige," he said quietly, "I will withdraw financial support for your education."
Nicholas took a step backward, and I did the only thing I could: I stood up beside him and gave him my weight to lean on. Across the room, Astrid was looking blindly out the window into the night, as though she would do anything in her power to avoid watching this scene. Robert Prescott turned around. His eyes were tired, and in the corners were the beginnings of tears. "I'm trying to keep you from ruining your life," he said.
"Don't do me any favors," Nicholas said, and he pulled me across the room. He led me out of the house, leaving the door wide open behind us.
When we were outside, Nicholas started to run. He ran around the side of the house into the backyard, past the white marble bird-bath, past the trellised grape arbor, deep into the cool woods that edged his parents' property. I found him sitting on a bed of dying pine needles. His knees were drawn up, and his head was bent, as if the air around him was too heavy to keep it upright. "Listen," I said. "Maybe you need to think this through."
It killed me to say those words, to think that Nicholas Prescott might disappear into his parents' million-dollar house and wave goodbye and leave my life what it used to be. I had come to the point where I truly did not think I could exist without Nicholas. When he was not around, I spent my time imagining him with me. I depended on him to tell me the dates of upcoming holidays, to make sure I got home from work safely, to fill my free time till I felt I would burst. It seemed so easy to blend into his life that at times I wondered if I had been anyone at all before I met him.
"I don't need to think this through," Nicholas said. "We're getting married."
"And I suppose Harvard is going to keep you on because you're God's gift to medicine?"
I realized after I said it that it was not phrased the way it should have been. Nicholas looked up as if I had slapped him. "I could drop out," he said, turning the words over like he was speaking a foreign language.
But I would not spend the rest of my life married to a man who, at least a little, hated me because he never got to be what he had wanted. I didn't love Nicholas because he was going to be a doctor, but I did love him because he was, unquestionably, the best. And Nicholas wouldn't have been Nicholas if he had to compromise. "Maybe there's a dean you can talk to," I said softly. "Not everyone at Harvard is made of money. They've got to have scholarships and student aid. And next year, between your salary as a resident and mine at Mercy, we could make ends meet. I could get a second job. We could take out a loan based on y
our future income."
Nicholas pulled me down beside him on the pine needles and held me. In the distance I heard a blue jay trill. Nicholas had taught me, a city girl, these things: the differences between the songs of blue jays and starlings, the way to start a fire with birch bark, the humming sound of a faraway flock of geese. I felt Nicholas's chest shake with every breath. I made a mental list of the people we would have to contact tomorrow to figure out our finances, but I felt confident. I could put off my own future for a while; after all, art school would always be there, and you could very well be an artist without ever having attended one. Besides, some part of me believed that I was getting something just as good. Nicholas loved me; Nicholas had chosen to stay with me. "I will work for you," I whispered to him, and even as I said it I had the dark thought of the Old Testament, of Jacob, who labored seven years for Rachel and still did not get what he wanted.
I was going to lose control. Nicholas's hands and heat and voice were everywhere. My fingers traveled up his arms, across his back, willing him to come to me. He moved my legs apart and set himself in the middle of them, and I remembered how I was supposed to act. Nicholas kissed me, and then he was moving inside me, and my eyes flew open. He was all that I could see, Nicholas spread across this space and filling, completely, my sky.
"I'd like to make a collect call," I told the operator. I was whispering although Nicholas was nowhere nearby. We were supposed to meet at the office of the justice of the peace in twenty minutes, but I told him I had to run an errand for Lionel. I was trying not to touch the grimy glass of the booth with my good pink suit. I tapped the edge of the pay phone with my finger. "Say it's Paige."
It took ten rings, and the operator was just suggesting I try again later, when my father picked up. "Hello," he said, and his voice reminded me of his cigarettes, True, and their cool gray package. "Collect call from Paige. Do you accept?"
"Yes," my father said. "Oh, sure, yes." He waited a second, I suppose to be certain the operator got off the line, and then he called my name.
"Dad," I told him, "I'm still in Massachusetts."
"I knew you'd be callin' me, lass," my father said. "I've been thinkin' about you today."
My hope jumped at that. If I didn't listen too closely, I could almost ignore the thickness wrapped around his words. Maybe Nicholas and I would visit him. Maybe one day he would visit me.
"I found a photo of you this mornin', stuck behind my router. D'you remember the time I took you to that pettin' zoo?" I did, but I wanted to hear him talk. I hadn't realized until then how much I missed my father's voice. "You were so lookin' forward to seein' the sheep," he said, "the wee lambs, because I'd told you about the farm in County Donegal. You couldn'a been more than six, I figure."
"Oh, I know the photo," I exclaimed, suddenly remembering the image of myself hugging the fleece of a dun-colored lamb.
"I'd be surprised if you didn't," my father said. "The way you got the wind knocked out of you that day! You went into that pen as brave as Cuchulainn himself with a palm full of feed, and every llama and goat and sheep in the place came runnin' over to you. Knocked you flat on your back, they did."
I frowned, remembering it as though it were yesterday. They had come from all sides like nightmares, with their hollow, dead eyes and their curved yellow teeth. There had been no way out; the world had closed in around me. Now, under my wedding suit, I broke out in a light sweat; I thought how much I felt like that, again, today.
My father was grinning; I could hear it. "What did you do?" I asked.
"What I always did," he said, and I listened to his smile fade. "I picked you up. I came and got you."
I listened to all the things I wanted and needed to say to him racing through my mind. In the silence I could feel him wondering why he hadn't come to get me in Massachusetts; why he hadn't picked up the pieces and smoothed it over and made it better. I could sense him running through everything we had said to each other and everything we hadn't, trying to find the thread that made this time different.
I knew, even if he didn't. My father's God preached forgiveness, but did he?
Suddenly all I wanted to do was take away the pain. It was my sin; it was one thing for me to feel the guilt, but my father shouldn't have to. I wanted to let him know that he wasn't responsible, not for what I had done and not for me. And since he wouldn't believe I could take care of myself--never would, not now--I told him there was someone else to take care of me. "Dad," I said, "I'm getting married."
I heard a strange sound, as if I had knocked the wind out of him. "Dad," I repeated.
"Yes." He drew in his breath. "Do you love him?" he asked. "Yes," I admitted. "Actually, I do." "That makes it harder," he said.
I wondered about that for a moment, and then when I felt I was going to cry, I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and closed my eyes and counted to ten. "I didn't want to leave you," I said, the same words I spoke every time I called. "It wasn't the way I thought things would happen." Miles away, my father sighed. "It never is," he said. I thought about the easy days, when he would bathe me as a child d wrap me in my long-john pajamas and comb the tangles from my hair. I thought about sitting on his lap and watching the bluest flames in the fireplace and wondering if there was any finer thing in the world.
"Paige?" he said into the silence. "Paige?"
I did not answer all the questions he was trying to ask. "I'm getting married, and I wanted you to know," I said, but I was certain he could hear the fear in my voice as loudly as I could hear it in his.
It built up in my stomach and my chest, the feeling, as if I were spiraling into myself. I could feel Nicholas holding back, tensed like a puma, until 1 was ready. I wrapped my arms and my legs around Nicholas, and, together, we came. I loved the way he arched his neck and exhaled and then opened his eyes as though he wasn't quite sure where he was and how he had got there. I loved knowing I had done that to him.
Nicholas cupped my face in his hands and told me he loved me. He kissed me, but instead of passion I felt protection. He pulled us onto our sides, and I curled myself in the hollow of his chest and tasted his skin and his sweat. I tried to burrow closer. I did not close my eyes to sleep, because I was waiting, as I had the last time I'd been with a man, for God to strike me down.
Nicholas brought me violets, two huge bunches, still misted and swollen with the spray of a florist. "Violets," I said, smiling. "For faithfulness."
"Now, how do you know that?" Nicholas said.
"That's what Ophelia says, anyway, in Hamlet," I told him, taking the bunches and holding them in my left hand. I had a quick vision of the famous painting of Ophelia, where she floats faceup in a stream,
dead, her hair swirled around her and tangled with flowers. Daisies, in fact. And violets.
The justice of the peace and a woman whom he introduced only as a witness were standing in the center of a plain room when we walked in. I think Nicholas had told me the man was a retired judge. He asked us to spell and pronounce our names, and then he said "Dearly beloved." The entire thing took less than ten minutes.
I did not have a ring for Nicholas and I started to panic, but Nicholas pulled from his suit pocket two bright gold bands and handed the larger one to me. He looked at me, and I could clearly read his eyes: I didn't forget. I won't forget anything.
Within a few minutes I began to cry. It was not that I was hurt, which Nicholas thought, or that I was happy or disillusioned. It was because I had spent the past eight weeks with a hole in my heart. I had even started to hate myself a little. But in making love with Nicholas, I discovered that what had been missing was replaced. Patchwork, but still, it was better. Nicholas had the ability to fill me.
Nicholas kissed the tears off my cheeks and stroked my hair. He was so close that we were breathing the same square of air. And as he stirred beside me again, 1 began to erase my past until almost all I could remember was whatever I had told Nicholas, whatever he wanted to believe. "Paige," he said, "the
second time is even better." And reading into this, I moved astride him and eased him inside me and started to heal.
chapter 5
Paige
The best of the several memories I have of my mother involved the betrayal of my father. It was a Sunday, which had meant for as long as I'd been alive that we would be going to Mass. Every Sunday, my mother and my father and I would put on our best outfits and walk down the street to Saint Christopher's, where I would listen to the rhythmic hum of prayers and watch my mother and my father receive Communion. Afterward we'd stand in the sun on the worn stone steps of the church, and my father's hand would rest warm on my head while he talked to the Morenos and the Salvuccis about the fine Chicago weather. But this particular Sunday, my father had left for O'Hare before the sun came up. He was flying to Westchester, New York, to meet with an eccentric old millionaire in hopes of promoting his latest invention, a polypropylene pool float that hung suspended by wires in the middle of the two-car garages that were part of the new suburban tract houses. He called it the Sedan Saver,
and it kept car doors from scratching each other's paint when they were opened.
I was supposed to be asleep, but I had been awakened by the dreams I'd been having. At four, almost five, I didn't have many friends. Part of the problem was that I was shy; part was that other kids were steered clear of the O'Toole house by their parents. The bosomy Italian mothers in the neighborhood said my mother was too sassy for her own good; the dark, sweating men worried that my father's bad luck in inventing could ooze uninvited over the thresholds of their own homes. Consequently, I had begun to dream up playmates. I
wasn't the type of kid who saw someone beside me when I took out my Tinkertoys and my dominoes; I knew very well when I was alone that I was truly alone. But at night, I had the same dream over and over: another girl called to me, and together we rolled mud-burgers in our hands and pumped on swings until we both grazed the sun with our toes. The dream always ended the same way: I would get up the courage to ask the girl's name so that I'd be able to find her and play together again, and just before she answered I'd wake up.