Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
Joseph
April 1960
There is a loud crunch of tires as someone roars up the driveway, and I peek out the window to see Maelynn’s teal Chrysler. Evelyn, in the middle of cleaning up from the guests’ breakfast, wipes her hands on her apron and goes to the doorway. Thomas peeks from behind her hip.
“What are you doing here? What a surprise! My mother isn’t here, you could play with the kids for a while.”
After too many arguments with her sister when their visits coincided, snide comments about Maelynn’s travels, about how she shouldn’t be left with the children since she never had her own, Maelynn prefers to visit only when we can be alone. Evelyn’s mother still comes by, especially when the inn is booked solid and we need to turn morning checkouts over by early afternoon, but not as often as she used to. She has less patience with the children now that she and they are getting older. She tolerates Thomas, an obsessively neat child for six, who is never far from either of us, ducking behind our legs. But she lets out audible sighs when she spots Jane in the meadow, barefoot with her braids undone as she digs in the dirt.
“Evelyn, I’d love to, but I really must hit the road.” Her smile is wide, her voice tinged with excitement, gesturing at her back seat full to bursting with suitcases.
“Where are you going? Why are you all packed up?”
“Los Angeles—LA. I’m moving, finally .” She emphasizes finally , like the waiting has been particularly dreadful, although it’s the first we’ve heard of the idea. She is vague about her frequent visits to California, there has been talk of someone special living there, but she’s shared no details, only hints at his existence. Evelyn and I figure she has been seeing him for years, but she refuses to admit it.
“LA? What will you do there?”
“What does it matter? I’m fifty years old. I want to move, so I am!” This part is unsurprising; after we moved away Maelynn’s only tie left to Boston was the school. Evelyn had told me her poetry was selling well, and she couldn’t stand the newest headmistress, so she was probably not long for that place. Maelynn reaches for Thomas. “Goodbye, Thomas, be good for your mommy now. Where are Violet and Jane? I must hug them.” She pokes her head in to where I sit in the front room balancing the books. “And, Joseph, you, too, come on now.”
Evelyn fumbles as if she is short-circuiting. “You’re leaving, right now? This second?”
“Yes, dear. Didn’t you ask why the car was packed? I wouldn’t be packed if I wasn’t leaving! I’m driving all the way.” Her voice is so light, each word lifted by a laugh. “Why wait?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell us until now.” Evelyn calls into the house, “Jane! Violet! Aunt Maelynn is here!”
I walk to the door with the sensation of standing up too quickly, caught off guard by this sudden arrival and departure.
Maelynn grips Evelyn in a tight hug. “Well, don’t be too upset. I just decided. Life is a crazy thing, isn’t it? Do tell me you’ll visit.”
Evelyn’s voice is muted, nearly a whisper. “I’ve never been to California.”
Jane, eight years old, rushes through the doorway to hug her great-aunt, knocking Thomas aside, and Violet, four, dawdles after her.
Maelynn shrugs, as though Los Angeles is the next town over. “Well, all the more reason for you to come by! Girls, I am off.”
Jane cocks her head at me, then at Maelynn. “Off where? You just got here.”
Maelynn, known to steal Jane away and bring her home with a scrape or two, brimming with secrets, tugs on one of her curls until she giggles. “Yes, well I did, and now I’m off! I’m moving to California. Your mother will take you all to visit me, won’t you, Evelyn?”
“Cool.” Jane hugs her great-aunt again, her eyes wide with the promise, another adventure for them to share.
Violet begins to cry. “Aunt Mae, you leaving?”
“Yes, dear. But don’t be upset! It is a beautiful thing! Now give me a kiss.” She lifts Violet, and Violet wraps her arms around her neck, giving her a wet smooch on the cheek. Maelynn hugs us both, urges us once more to visit. Then, as quickly as she arrived, she leaves, her headscarf fluttering behind her as she walks away. Her car sputters and is gone.
For weeks after, Evelyn talks of nothing but California, of traveling and exploring distant lands. She is so impressed that Maelynn started a new life, in a new city, at fifty, because she wanted to. To me, it isn’t glamorous or brave. It is sad, lonely, to have built so little around you that you can pick up and leave at a moment’s notice. But Evelyn won’t let it go.
One night, I see her scribbling on a list, a habit she picked back up after she got pregnant with Violet, when I felt the shift in her I never quite understood, a happiness that bloomed like a flower growing through a rock wall, resilient and inexplicable. She uncovered the piano so it could be played again, rather than used as a shelf for picture frames, and taught Jane the basic notes and chords. It was the only time Jane sat still, and even then, she itched to play faster, louder, to learn every song. Even Thomas liked to press his pudgy toddler fingers against the keys while he sat in her lap. Newborn Violet often fell asleep burrowed into Evelyn’s neck while she cradled her in one arm and played with the other. Years passed like this, a new golden age of ease and contentment I wasn’t sure we would ever find again.
Evelyn, brightening the inn with her music; in the evenings, our living room full of neighbors and guests and wine and laughter and she is the shining center of it all. In the summer, we hustle through our work to soak up rare afternoons together on Bernard Beach. She kneels beside Thomas, pushes an armful of sand to create a foundation for his castle, Jane flips through slow rolling waves, Violet giggles as I swing her toward the surf. It is something we both need, to be near the ocean; it relaxes us, reminds us we are a part of something bigger. Being landlocked reminds me of war, of dust and heat and anger. I need the cool calm of the water lapping against the shore and the smell of the sea to feel at home.
When Evelyn goes to brush her teeth, I peek between the pages. On a fresh sheet she wrote: California. It was crossed out, and beneath was: Fly to California. That, too, was crossed out, and at the very bottom simply: Fly .
Three more years race by before we know it. It’s Thomas’s tenth birthday, and we’re struggling to come up with money to celebrate. Over the summer, the Vietnam War tightened the purse strings of our regular guests, and the usually overbooked inn had multiple vacancies. Evelyn teaches piano lessons in town a few times a week, which helps, but it barely covers groceries. By October, the children had outgrown their clothes, the car needed new tires and the Oyster Shell continues to show its age, demanding a new roof, paint, carpets, seemingly all at once, and now we’ve come up short on funds for a celebration. Evelyn and I stay up late reviewing bills, balancing and rebalancing the ledgers, but we are at a loss.
“I wish we never did that historical house registry thing, the repairs just cost more now.” She says this with blame, like I created the standards around which we must now operate.
I try to reason with her, our records covering the kitchen table. “You know the inn slows down after the season. It’ll pick up by Christmas, it always does.”
She rolls her eyes. “I’m not talking about Christmas. I’m worried your son will be disappointed on his birthday—ten’s a big deal.”
“Why do you have to say it like that? Your son . Like if he’s disappointed it’s my fault.”
“Well, you were the one who wanted to reopen the inn.”
I sit up straight. “Are you serious?”
“You think running the Oyster Shell was a big dream of mine?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I rub my forehead, incensed. “What about what I want, huh? Just because I don’t have these wild dreams like you, what I want doesn’t matter?” Evelyn says nothing. “Let’s not forget, we did the Boston thing. We tried. It didn’t work.”
“No, it didn’t,” she scoffs, a jeer disguised as agreement.
“Damn it, Evelyn! This isn’t about you. For once. There isn’t any more money. I can’t make more money appear because you want me to. What would you like me to do?” I yell. I never yell at her.
Something snaps, and she growls. “Maybe you should stop making promises you can’t keep.” She stands from the table, slamming the chair in behind her.
“Evelyn! Stop.”
She whirls around, fuming. “What?”
“You can’t use that to win a fight. I don’t care how upset you are.” She freezes, caught picking an old wound, a promise I had made so many years ago, that I had broken, to keep Tommy safe, for us both to come home. I lower my voice. “You can’t.”
Shame dislodges her anger like a popped cork. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” She sighs, deflated and chagrined. “God, Joseph, for once, would you fight dirty back?”
“You didn’t mean it.”
She shakes her head. “I should’ve never brought him up.”
“It’s okay. We’re both frustrated.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not okay that I attack you because of my issues.”
“Come here.”
She sinks toward me and I wrap her in my arms, burying her burning face in my chest. I hold her tight for a moment, recollections of fighter jets jostling into an idea, a solution forming clearly, and I whisper, “Maybe we can do something special that doesn’t cost anything at all.”
The sky is a cloudless blue and the air is crisp, like life renewed, the trees burst orange and red as we near Hartford. Evelyn and I wanted some alone time with our son, who often gets lost in the fold, so we leave Jane and Violet with their grandmother, much to Jane’s preteen dismay. Thomas is quiet in the back seat as we pass golden hills, no more of a presence alone than he is among his sisters. A wicker basket sits to his left, ham and cheese sandwiches, apple cider and pumpkin cupcakes inside, his eyes flicker over the fiery landscape as we pass. There is something different about his silence now, neither cold nor distant. It is electric, an anxious anticipation, counting every tree, snapping each detail in place like they unlock something magical to come.
We drive past signs for Bradley Airport and I glance over my shoulder to Thomas, fingers tapping against his jeans in anticipation.
“Almost there, champ.” I grin at Evelyn, Thomas’s excitement contagious.
As a father, it is strange to know so little about my son, especially because as a toddler Thomas was never far from our ankles. I can list the obvious things: he loves model airplanes and wants to join the air force. Anyone could walk into his room and ascertain as much. I also collect practical tidbits that come with occupying the same house: how he doesn’t add milk to cereal because he hates for it to get soggy, or how he always wears a jacket even in the slightest chill. There is so much else I don’t know, so many more important things...how he feels about school, if he has many friends, if he has started to notice girls. If he understands how much I love him. If he sees himself as different from the rest of the family, and if that makes him feel alone.
Truth to tell, his demeanor has always been a bit of a mystery. Jane is all Evelyn, brazen and adventurous, and Violet is much more like me, her heart on her sleeve, but Thomas...he is nothing like his namesake, although I do not fault him for it. He never knew his uncle and I wouldn’t expect him to take on Tommy’s personality because we gave him his name. His face does resemble my best friend’s boyish features, sometimes there will be a certain tilt of his head, an ancient mannerism that jolts me. But he is built like I was at his age, a lanky height sure to turn broad as he grows, and his brown eyes are mine as well, steady and unchanging. Still, I wonder how this quiet and analytical boy was born from flesh and bone of his mother and me.
We veer off an exit and follow a side road hedged by a golden-brown meadow. The Buick bumps along as we sidle off the paved street onto a rough path, our tires kicking up dirt. We rumble to a stop halfway down the field and the dust settles around us. We step out of the car and Evelyn reaches into the back seat for the wicker basket and blanket, our three door slams resounding across the landscape. The sun is warm on my face despite the fall breeze, and Evelyn rolls up the sleeves on her wool sweater.
Thomas peers around at the wide, empty countryside, skeptical. “Dad, are you sure this is the place?”
I shrug, playing into his doubt. “I thought so...”
Then, we hear it. The low roar of an engine like distant thunder, then something more acute, a high-pitched whoosh, blasting through the clearest sky, as a galvanized fighter jet soars into view over the amber treetops. Its shadow sweeps the meadow and Thomas takes off in a sprint, whooping and cheering in its wake. Evelyn drops the basket and we chase him, our arms lifted to the air. The wings of the plane so low they eclipse the sun. The wind whips as we run, and it glides higher, the shadow slipping away until it is well past the trees. Thomas stands still ahead of us, mesmerized, watching the jet until it is smaller than a distant moon, until it disappears, leaving only a white stream like a brushstroke to show it had been there at all. He turns, awed, his face its own beam of light.
“Mom! Dad! Did you see that?”
Evelyn nods, her mouth agape. “Incredible.”
A roar reverberates behind us again, another set of drills, this time three jets in a triangle. A sound that would have once caused me panic, but here we are untouchable, the peace we’ve settled into is a shield from even the horrors inside my own mind. Thomas gallops off, chasing the rumble as the planes soar the length of the field and vanish. I unfurl the flannel blanket on a gust of wind, and lie back, resting on my elbows. Evelyn settles next to me and unpacks the basket, unpeels the paper liner off a pumpkin cupcake and sneaks a bite, a smudge of icing above her lip. I sip apple cider, still steaming in the red plastic thermos, warmed by the scent of clove and cinnamon. We spend the afternoon like that, stretched side by side, watching our son run, his arms extended like wings, his eyes never leaving the sky.
We watch the footage in the living room, our inn full of guests visiting their families for Thanksgiving. JFK has been shot. A young woman next to me weeps. The roles of host and guest dismantled in the intimacy of our shared loss, as we were all stunned into silence, shook in our utter disbelief. When JFK was elected, he was only three years older than I am now. Forty-three years old and the president of the United States. I am forty and I run my parents’ inn. An innkeeper. That’s all I have ever been. Probably all I’ll ever be. How can he be a few years older than I am and suddenly be dead?
The phone rings, jarring us all, and Evelyn excuses herself to answer it in another room, and I follow her, needing air.
“The Oyster Shell Inn, how can I help you?” she says, with false cheer. There is a pause, her voice shifts, concerned. “This is Evelyn.”
She gives me a quick panicked glance, and lowers herself to sitting at the kitchen table. I sit beside her, and she moves the receiver between us, leaning together so we can both hear.
“Evelyn... I’ve heard so much about you... Maelynn loved you so much.” There is a female voice on the other end of the line, a voice I don’t recognize. “I wish this wasn’t—” the voice breaks “—god, I’m sorry, I tried to pull myself together before calling.”
She presses a hand to her chest, rubs her clavicle. “I’m sorry, who is this?”
“My name is Betty, I lived with... Maelynn was my...” Her voice catches. “I have terrible news.” A pause. “There was an accident.” There is a muffled sob on the other end. “Maelynn...she’s gone.”
A sharp intake from Evelyn. I falter, nothing I can do to protect her from this, the last thing we thought we would ever hear. Betty chokes out the details, and I grip Evelyn’s hand. A head-on collision, the other car ran a red light. Maelynn died instantly. The other driver died later, at the hospital.
JFK murdered in a car; Aunt Maelynn killed in a car crash. A motorcade. A gunshot. A red light. The squeal of tires. Different tragedies, different cars and cities, the same end.
Evelyn’s chin crinkles, trying not to cry, and she leans into me. It doesn’t seem possible someone as alive as Maelynn could be gone. I’m terrified this news could be enough for her to crumble again. I want to turn the volume down on the television, reverse the bullet, stop the cars, freeze anything that threatens our salvaged serenity.
“I’m so sorry.” Betty coughs, her breath labored, trying to get the words out. “I wish we could’ve met under different circumstances...your aunt, this may be shocking, but she—she was the love of my life. And I think, well she told me, I was hers too.”
Betty, the mystery man that turned out not to be.
The true love that Maelynn finally found.
Evelyn lets out a laugh, a relief, wiping at her cheeks. “Honestly, Betty, there is nothing about Maelynn that would shock me.”
That night, we tell the children about what happened to Aunt Maelynn. We also talk about JFK and try to help them grasp the news. Jane cries, angrily wiping the tears as they fall. Thomas sets his jaw; his face somber but controlled. Violet, almost eight now, doesn’t understand. She asks me so many questions when I tuck her in—about death and why it happens and where you go and what it means. Questions I don’t have the answers for, outside of vague Christian teachings about heaven and hell, the loose structure Evelyn and I were raised in that we shed in adulthood like clothes we outgrew. Angels and a blissful eternity sounded more like stories than something we believed, ideas we wished were as real to us as death itself.
Her questions plague me as I try to sleep.
Evelyn asks, side by side in the darkness, “How has my mother, of all people, outlived everyone else? I wouldn’t be surprised if she outlived us all.”
I say nothing. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. To trudge along after those closest to you have died, to continue on without your love beside you. How lonely that would be, how horrible to keep saying goodbye, to exist in the spaces they no longer fill. I can’t imagine my life without Evelyn, I have never known a world she didn’t brighten; I wouldn’t want to inhabit the darkness her absence would create. So, tonight, I grip her tighter. I hold her like holding her will make sure she never goes. But still I can’t sleep. My heart thuds as I lie still, my stomach tight. I rest my head on her chest, grip her waist. She strokes my hair, kisses my forehead and tells me it will be alright. But no amount of soothing changes the truth haunting me.
Someday, I will lose her too.
Nights later, all the children are tucked in, the dining room is set for the morning, and from my spot under the quilt I watch Evelyn get ready for bed. The door to the bathroom is ajar and she is in her nightdress, running a comb through her hair.
I say, “You’re doing better than I thought you would, with Maelynn.” Evelyn is stronger. I can see it in her posture, the length in her neck, the square angle of her shoulders. She doesn’t seem to carry Maelynn on her back, as she did Tommy when he died, faltering under her grief. “I was afraid it might be like last time.”
“I don’t really have a choice. We were younger then...the kids need us, the guests need us. I don’t have time to fall apart.”
“You can feel it, though.”
“I feel it, trust me.” She comes out to meet me, and sits on the edge of the bed. “I thought she was invincible.” Her eyes well, remembering her aunt who was her dearest friend. “I wish she’d told us, about Betty. Like we would care? I don’t understand why she felt she had to keep that secret from me... I can’t believe she’ll never visit again, that we’ll never see her.”
Betty told us Maelynn didn’t prepare any will or final wishes. Part of me believes she assumed she’d never die, or she wasn’t worried about what would happen when she did.
We decided her body should be sent back to Boston for the funeral, she was beloved by many students who would want to say goodbye. Betty sent us the newspaper clippings and made the arrangements. In the letter that arrived along with the obituary she wrote, I won’t be at the funeral. I hope you can understand. I said my goodbye the day she died and I can’t bear to do it again. Every day I wake up praying it is all a terrible dream.
My stomach wrenches as I read her words. Someday, that will be me. Or someday, that will be Evelyn. No one in love gets out of this life unscathed.
There is a light knock on our door, and Violet, in one of Jane’s old nightgowns, too long for her, peers inside. It has been years since Violet has entered our room after bedtime, complaining of monsters and ghosts in her closet. But recently, death seems to plague her in her dreams. I pat the quilt next to me and she pushes herself up to her knees, crawling toward me. She settles in my arms as Evelyn shuts off the bathroom light and slides under the covers alongside us both.
“Oh, sweetie, can’t sleep again?” She strokes Violet’s hair, damp from a bath.
“I’m afraid I’ll have a bad dream.”
“Well, then, let’s think of happy things before bed,” Evelyn says, and scoots closer to me. I feel her body relax and I am filled with a rush of affection. Violet rests her head on my chest and I’m struck with how little she still is. Maybe because she is the baby of the family, she has always seemed more fragile than her brother and sister. Or maybe it’s because she has always seemed to carry more in her heart, as if she bears all the emotions in the house in her tiny frame.
“What kind of happy things?” She peers up at me, and her eyelids droop, even as she fights to appear awake.
“How about the story of when I fell in love with Mommy?”
“I love that one,” she sings, and scoots closer. Evelyn adjusts her position against me on the other side and lets her eyes close. I catch her smile as I begin. Violet interrupts the story in all the usual parts, giggling when I mention the color of Evelyn’s dress, asking questions about her uncle Tommy, which lead back to questions about Aunt Maelynn and what it means to die. I give simplified answers to pacify her, to quiet my wandering mind, until her eyes close and her fingers twitch against my chest.
I slide away from Evelyn, who shifts against the pillow in my absence, and carry a sleeping Violet to the room she shares with Jane. I peek at Thomas on the way, and through the darkness I can see the lump of his body under his covers, fast asleep. Jane is awake in bed with a flashlight, clutching a newspaper and scissors. She has spent the last few days glued to the television or buried in the news, cutting out and keeping articles in a shoebox. Smoke rises on her nightstand, the room thick with the stench of incense. We’ve been fighting her about burning it in her room, but tonight, it doesn’t seem worth the battle.
I nod to her as I tuck Violet in. When I sit on the edge of Jane’s bed, she doesn’t acknowledge me, her flashlight gliding over the words. John F. Kennedy’s face gleans from the front page with the headline “A President Remembered.” Aunt Maelynn’s obituary is taped to the wall by her pillow.
She is getting tall, going on thirteen and all limbs and attitude. I’m not sure when things between her and Evelyn began to change, both willful to a fault. They used to spend hours together on the piano; like Evelyn at that age, it was the only time Jane stayed in place, tackling more advanced material, delighting our regulars who remarked at how grown-up she was becoming. She used to love helping around the inn, keys jingling in her grip as she led guests to their room, or pointing out the way to Bernard Beach. But lately she prefers solitude, talks back to her mother and slinks off into her room, absorbed in researching the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs and construction of the Berlin Wall, and devouring every current event as it unfolds around her.
“Hey there, Janey, you going to sleep soon?” I pat her leg, until she reluctantly meets my gaze.
“How could I possibly sleep? In case you didn’t know, the world is falling apart.” She scowls, places the flashlight between her knees to secure it and cuts out the front page.
“Well, then we definitely need some rest so we can face it in the morning.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny. But I don’t want you to stay up worrying about things we can’t change tonight.”
“That’s the problem. No one thinks they can change anything. We’re all following along like a herd of cattle. And we’re all going to slaughter.”
It always surprises me how adult she has become, how cynical and dark her outlook has become at twelve and a half. “I know the world seems scary now. And I miss Aunt Maelynn, too, and so does your mom. But worrying all the time does not help—it will only make you feel more helpless.”
“But we’re all helpless. Aunt Maelynn was helpless. JFK was helpless. Both of them are dead and neither saw it coming.”
“Sometimes things happen, and there isn’t anything we can do but live the best life we can, and hope that we’re ready for them.”
She puts the scissors and the newspaper down, glaring at me. “But she did live a good life, and she finally found someone, and she was killed anyway. And JFK’s son—to have to bury his dad on his third birthday? The way he saluted the casket...it’s not fair, Dad.” Tears form in her eyes, and she turns away, her cheeks red.
My throat constricts, the boy with his hand pressed to his forehead, the bare dimpled legs and buttoned wool coat, a heart-wrenching salute from a toddler too young to understand. A final goodbye to a father he would never remember, whose face he would memorize from photographs, the way our children never knew my parents, their stories like folktales, never would they feel the heat from their bodies in an embrace.
“I know it’s not. It’s not fair. But like we don’t have control over what happens in the world, we don’t have control over when we leave it. All we can do is love the people around us while we can. That is all we can do.” I reach for the scissors and the newspaper clippings and lay them on her nightstand. “Why don’t you put these away for tonight? Try to get some sleep. Things always feel better in the morning.”
She nods and grudgingly slides flat on her back, her flashlight casts our shadows against the wall. She clicks the light off and my eyes work to adjust in the darkness. I lean forward and kiss her forehead, partly surprised when she lets me.
“Sweet dreams, Jane.”
“Good night, Dad.”
I turn to leave and before I reach the door she calls out.
“Dad?” I pause in the threshold, and she continues, “I don’t mean to be so rude to Mom all the time. Sometimes I can’t help it, but I feel bad. Please tell her I’m sorry.”
“You should tell her yourself. She’d appreciate it.”
“Maybe. I wanted you to know, so you’re not disappointed in me.”
“I could never be disappointed in you. And I’ll tell you a secret.”
“What?”
“You are just like your mom was as a girl. And your uncle Tommy too. And they were the people I loved most in the world.” She is silent, the covers up to her chin. “But I still think she’d like to hear what you said. It would mean a lot to her.”
I shut the door behind me and walk down the hall to our bedroom, noting that the carpet we installed when we moved in over a decade ago is thinned and fraying around the edges. We will have to replace it soon. I open the door to our room, the ache of a full day’s work weighing on my body. Evelyn is asleep, turned to face her nightstand. At night we lie together, the curve of her waist pressed into me. Even sleeping alone she has positioned herself to be held.
Her words linger, I thought she was invincible. I switch off the lamp glaring above her and slide under the covers. I move closer and she shifts her hips backward to meet me. I kiss the smooth skin on her shoulders. “Good night, Evelyn. I love you so much.”
She murmurs, muffled words I can only assume mean the same. The thought enters my mind, my fear morphs into a silent vow. I’ll never live without her. Not even for a day.
With that, and her body against mine, a sense of calm washes over me, and for the first night in a while, I sleep. I sleep and dream of a life without death, and an eternity to lie with the woman I love in my arms.