Chapter Nineteen #3
Though she was still in and out of sleep a great deal, it seemed as if whenever she woke up, Mother was there, either sitting by her bed or speaking to the doctors and nurses.
Eventually, after a few days, the fog began to lift, and Julia could at least carry on conversations. Unfortunately, this was when she began to notice that practically every person who entered her room wanted to talk about the disaster at the Knickerbocker, and to tell her how lucky she was.
Julia had spent hours beside a child lying under his mother’s dead body. She had heard people scream, and then heard them fall silent. She knew she was fortunate, that she should be grateful, but for some reason, she found the talk unbearable.
After one of these exchanges, Michael popped into her room and found her near tears.
“What’s wrong, Jules?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Come on. Tell me.”
She shook her head. He plopped down in the chair and leaned forward, his arms folded on the side of her bed.
“Thing is, Julia, I’m a reporter, and an annoyingly persistent one.” He looked at her sympathetically, as if his being nosy was an immutable quality beyond his control.
“Oh, all right.” Julia let out an irritated sigh and looked up at the ceiling.
“It’s just that everyone who comes in here wants to talk about the theater.
I know I’m lucky, and it makes me feel selfish, like a terrible ingrate…
” She felt her throat tighten, and she struggled to complete the thought.
“But I can’t stand it. Not yet, at least.” Maybe not ever.
In an instant, the smug reporter was gone, and in his place was good old Michael, with his gentle smile, and his one eye, kind enough for two. He shook his head, and with perfect, reassuring sympathy said, “It is not in the least selfish, Julia. Not even a bit.”
From that point on, nobody spoke of the theater catastrophe in her presence. The omission was so pronounced, in fact, it actually became a source of amusement. Julia wondered if Michael had put a sign on the door. Mention the Knickerbocker on penalty of death.
Visitors were limited, and Julia was glad.
The only person she wanted to see was Louisa, but to her dismay, Mother said she had been called to Boston for a work project.
She sent flowers and a note, but when days went by with no more word, Julia asked for stationery and wrote a letter of apology, hoping to clear the air.
It was hard to keep track of time in the hospital, but the sense of being suspended somewhere between past and future suited her.
While she tried to avoid dwelling on the particulars, Julia knew her life had been in a sorry state when this accident happened.
Like the person who goes on a trip without cleaning house first, she was not eager to return and face the mess.
Not all talk of the future could be avoided, of course. The doctors, Mother, and the Seabornes had many discussions about her progress. The break had been relatively clean, but she would need a good deal of rehabilitation once she was discharged.
Julia did not ask where this follow-up care would take place, and she did not find out until ten days or so into her stay at Garfield, when Mother and Margaret Seaborne came in to speak to her. Mother sat on the side of Julia’s bed and took her hand.
“Julia, I must go back to Boston tomorrow,” she said. “Mr. Seaborne has been in contact with an orthopedist at Walter Reed Army Hospital. They learned a great deal about physiotherapy treatments during the war, and he will oversee your case.”
“You won’t be able to manage the stairs at your apartment,” Margaret added. “So you’ll come stay in my studio.”
“I am sorry it cannot be immediately,” Mother said. “But we hoped this might give you something to look forward to.”
Julia managed to say the right things to Mother and to thank Margaret.
She realized, though, that despite her best efforts to remain glued to the present, once she had learned Louisa was in Boston, a vague notion had formed in the recesses of her mind that Mother would stay indefinitely and then take her home to Back Bay.
Now, not only was Mother leaving, but she seemed distracted, as if she had one foot on the train already, and Julia felt unaccountably hurt. Abandoned, even. But as with Louisa, who had yet to respond to her apology, Julia knew she bore a great deal of responsibility for any distance.
It was all part of the mess that the accident had interrupted, and which she still had no desire to face.
Three weeks later, Julia was installed in Margaret’s studio.
The space had been arranged so everything Julia needed was on the first floor—a bed and bath at the back, and the living room at the front, with its large fireplace, comfortable furniture, and pretty, diamond-shaped windowpanes, framed by curtains of ivy.
In a way, it was perfect. She was required to go neither backward in space and time to her childhood home nor ahead to her apartment and a resumption of her life. She would continue in her limbo state, but in a far more pleasant setting.
When she had been there a few days, Mina came for a visit. She tossed off her usual “How are you, Duchess?” and wandered about the room, flipping her hair. Julia found it intensely annoying.
Finally, she sat down. “How long will you be locked in the castle back here?”
Julia ignored the insult. “They think I’ll be able to manage stairs by May. Before the end of the school year.”
“Well, that’s good. Will you go to Maine?”
“I haven’t planned that far.”
“Your parents have forgiven you, though?” When Julia nodded, Mina added, “Well, that’s good. I suppose they think you were punished enough for not attending the funeral.”
Julia looked at Mina for a second. “Is it good? You were so proud of me for taking a stand. I’d have thought you’d rather I fully renounced them.”
Renouncing one’s family was a rite of passage among Mina and Pelham’s friends, practically a sacrament. (At any gathering, Julia half expected someone to stand up, tap a glass, and say, “I have a renouncement to make.”)
In college, Julia had once spotted Mina and her mother having tea, and was struck by how such a supposedly monstrous woman could appear so normal and harmless.
It occurred to her now that perhaps Mina’s problem was not that her mother was extraordinary in her awfulness, but rather awful in her ordinariness.
“I think you might be too entwined for a renunciation,” Mina said, completely missing Julia’s meaning. “The important thing is, you let them know you wouldn’t be bullied.”
Bullied into being with my father when his mother was laid to rest, Julia thought, but she did not say it.
Mina inquired about Pelham, and Julia relayed some of what he had said in the few letters she had received.
They were discouraging, but mostly because Europe was discouraging—border disputes from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Russian famine, German aggrievement—ominous signs that the “war to end all wars” had been no such thing.
Another ideal dashed on the rocks of reality.
Pelham’s correspondence was kind, and he always signed his missives “With love,” but he made no reference to the unpleasantness before he departed.
And as he had no idea when he would return, there was little reason to address the future.
However unwittingly, he had written letters perfectly suited to Julia’s suspended reality. She told Mina none of this, of course.
“Well, Duchess, I wanted to let you know, I’ve accepted a job in New York,” Mina said. Her expression was apologetic, as if this would be a great loss to Julia.
Julia asked a few questions and wished her luck, but as she felt acutely uncomfortable with Mina, she was relieved when she moved to the door.
“It will be good to get back in the swing of things with everyone,” Mina said, hand on the knob. “They all send their best, by the way. They were terribly worried about you.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Julia managed, though she knew Mina’s friends would not have cared if she lived or died.
When she left, Julia grabbed her crutches, made her way to the window, then opened it and took in a great gulp of air.
She wondered what it was about Mina’s behavior that had irked her so much.
From the moment she sashayed into the room, she had behaved as she always had.
Julia knew she had not been herself since the Knickerbocker, but she remembered now how relieved she had been to learn that Mina would be in Charlottesville the weekend of the snowstorm.
In fact, this discomfort had been building for months.
Julia recalled a night toward the end of last August. She and Pelham had come upon a street musician playing some Viennese waltz on his violin.
Pelham pulled Julia into his arms and danced her around the sidewalk.
The whole summer had been set to music like that—romantic waltzes and warm operatic recordings, alternating with ragtime’s infectious call-and-response and popular foxtrot songs in brighter keys.
Pelham wanted Julia to himself, so they rarely saw his friends, but that changed when Mina started seeing Gardiner.
At first, Julia thought it was sweet, how eagerly Mina coordinated her and Julia’s visits to New York.
Looking back, though, it was when the happy twosome became a foursome and then, inexorably, was grafted onto their larger group of friends that things started going wrong with Pelham.
The musical accompaniment changed, and everything was in a minor key.
Pelham and Mina’s friends were flamboyant in their pessimism.
They were all dying to go to Paris (it was not for nothing Pelham mentioned that on his last night in Washington).
Europe appreciated its intellectuals and literary men, whereas America was an irredeemable cultural wasteland, where the older generation controlled the youth.