“It’s just right, Dote,” she said, and she kept spinning her until Mary Frances stumbled and laughed.
“You buy one, Anne.”
“I need so many things before a new dress. Besides, who would I wear it for?”
“Oh, come on, now.”
“You’ll see someday. You and Al will have a child, and then what you want will be different. Or god forbid, you won’t know what you want anymore….” Anne wandered to the curtain at the edge of the dressing room and stared off theatrically.
Mary Frances didn’t know if she could bear to hear her go on like this. A baby didn’t make you smarter, or a humanitarian. Without really thinking about it first, Mary Frances blew right into the middle of Anne’s speech to say she wondered if she and Al would ever have a child anyway.
The talk stopped. Anne’s fingers played the base of her throat. “You mean?” she said.
“I thought maybe I was pregnant last spring, but frankly I was relieved to be wrong. Anyhow, I’m not sure it’s for us.”
Anne was quiet. The quiet rang through the dress shop, out to the settee where Edith waited with her tea, and beyond. They had talked often about Anne and Ted, but Mary Frances had never offered anything about her own marriage in return, and in one deep breath she’d drawn back the curtain entirely.
Anne touched the top of Mary Frances’s head and left the dressing room. Edith would know in a matter of seconds, and later Rex, and then Nora, eventually even David. Every Kennedy knew everything about each other. She reached around herself to unbutton the dress, its skirt slicking to the floor, and she wanted to go with it. There would be no one she could ever tell about what she’d done with Tim.
She looked at herself in the mirror. There were carolers on the street, and she could hear them singing about good kings and laden boughs, probably for money, or worse, for food, and here she was about to take a silk dress from a shop because her mother still bought her clothes. She turned to see the shabby edge of lace along her hem, her second pair of stockings, not her good ones, held at the garter with a pin. She fingered her slip at her shoulder where she’d stitched it, just the touch drawing that particular evening to her mind again, and she whispered no no no over and over to herself. This was not her life: this dress, the move to Laurel Canyon. These were not the things she could afford.
* * *
It happened when he was tired. Al had been reading Keats’s letters, then scanning the page, no longer registering words as they were written but rather as they occurred to him, and suddenly he slipped into some kind of liminal space between reading and writing that felt weightless. We take but three steps from feathers to iron. Connections clear and essential, slipped together in his thoughts with a sudden loop of language, until the thump came loud from overhead, and he was himself once again, in a chair, in the Kennedys’ parlor, Alfred Young Fisher, Al.
He looked around: the English antiques, the portraits, the sheer size of the place — you could not see the end of the property from the windows. Rex wanted a dovecote, he built one. He wanted a new car, he bought one. Al wasn’t sure how he was going to pay for the gas they needed to get home, but it had been important to Mary Frances to come here today, and he hated to tell her no. He looked at his watch. She’d only been gone an hour.
These long afternoons at the Ranch were always tedious — Rex ensconced in his office like a resident dignitary, and Mary Frances shopping with her mother, or canning fruit, or carting David and Norah somewhere, or performing some other task that could not be done without her presence, or at least her say in the matter. Edith wasn’t feeble, but she required Mary Frances. Since the divorce from Ted, so did Anne.
Through the ceiling, he could hear the trip-stop of the baby running from the cook, laughing. Not that Ted was such a good guy, or that people didn’t do it all the time, in one way or another, but you could not lose a child the way you could lose a wife, and Ted was an idiot if he thought so. Look at Mary Frances; look at Al here now. The Kennedy family was as much a part of his life as if he’d married them all, and there was no real way to divorce yourself from that.
He thumbed the pages of his book but couldn’t concentrate with the patter overhead, and found himself taking the wide oak staircase two steps at a time to tell Liesl to keep the boy quiet. The day did not have to be a total wash.
The door of the nursery was cracked, and Al stopped with his hand on the knob.
It wasn’t Liesl on the floor with the boy, but Rex in his shirtsleeves, rolling a blue spotted ball and watching the boy chase it back. He was completely taken, laughing nearly as much as Sean. Al could not recall having ever seen him in the nursery, let alone without a coat and tie, kneeling. He tried to back away, but the floor groaned and Rex looked up.
“Sir,” Al said.
“Are we disturbing you, Al?”
“Not at all. I was just curious.”
Sean clapped his hands, his face intent upon his grandfather. And Al thought an invitation might follow, that Rex might call him into the nursery, onto the floor, to play with this baby as if this baby were his concern as well, but Rex just laughed and rolled the ball again.
Al backed into the hallway, pulling the door closed. He would have declined anyhow.
The clock chimed. Next to the clock, an étagère. On one of the shelves, a framed photograph of Mary Frances when she was in high school. Her dark hair was pulled back over her ears, her dress falling loosely from her shoulders, and all that cleverness in her face Al had first been attracted to when he met her in the library. Only in this photo, it was the promise of such a woman, rather than the shifting fact of who she had become.
Al could not guess what she was up to at the library these days, leafing through old books, taking careful notes. In Dijon, she’d started a potboiler mystery novel, a sketchy travelogue, and countless articles for Ladies’ Home Journal, all abandoned at some difficult point along the way. She wanted to write something important, he could see that, but it was a little like watching a kitten with a mouse, fast enough to catch it, but without the instincts to do what needed to be done next. Maybe she would get lucky and find something she wanted to say. But maybe she would lose interest and go back to knitting socks. Now, especially, without Tim to encourage her.
He slipped the photo from the frame and slipped the frame into the bottom drawer of the étagère. There were so many portraits of the children in Edith’s house, he doubted anyone would miss it. Downstairs, he tucked the photo into the back of his book, turned to the front page, and started reading what he’d been trying to read all afternoon, the thwack and patter sounding from overhead, each line repeating, repeating once again.
He was nearly beside himself when the women finally returned, but Mary Frances pretended not to notice. He stood from the chair he’d taken by the fireplace, his books already gathered under his arm. She asked if he was ready to go, and he rolled his eyes.
Anne brushed past them, tugging off the fingers of her gloves. “Sean?” she called. And then, “Good travels, Dote. I’ll see you both next week.”
Al reached out for Mary Frances’s shopping bag.
“I have to see my father,” she said. “I have to say good-bye.”
“Fine, Mary Frances. Whatever you need to do.”
“Thank you.”
Rex was back in his study with his typewriter and a cup of coffee, the closed-up room rich with man and dust and book leather. Edith was forever trying to shove the cleaning woman through there, but Rex protected his schedule. His hours at home were few. He sat with his feet propped up on the desk, his glasses slipped down his nose and his arms thrown back as though he might solve whatever problem you presented, but that was just how he relaxed.