It was as much as I’d ever heard Mrs. Sweatt say. I understood, now, why I’d been sent along — to keep her, if not from actually drinking, then from drinking alone.
“I never was a vodka drinker,” I said.
“Me neither. But if I don’t — I get nervous. I can’t sleep.” She offered me the bottle.
“No, thanks.”
“I drink too much,” she said.
“Do you?”
“So they say.” She banged her heels against the seawall, thinking. She shook her bottle again, as if she were trying to conjure up more vodka, and examined its level. “I know people talk about me, I know what they say about me, I just try not to listen or behave too badly. I’d drink whiskey, but people can smell that.” She laughed her magician’s laugh, wistful and miraculous. “That’s all I need, to have people in this town talk truth instead of rumors. Nobody is invisible”—at this she elbowed me lightly—“but I aim to be at least confusing.”
“Whiskey,” I said. “Now you have me wanting some.”
She cut a look at me. “Really? You’d drink whiskey?”
“Sure,” I said. I half expected her to pull a second bottle from her bag, but instead she jumped up. “Come on,” she said. “They’re dawdling. We have time.” She slapped sand off the seat of her dark bloomers. “Come on,” she said again.
She led me to a door with a stained-glass window that showed two pilgrims, heels kicked up, mugs in their hands. The edge of the bar was two steps from the door. Mrs. Sweatt waved at the bartender, whispered something, and held up two fingers. He nodded and delivered two shots of whiskey.
“It’s cold out,” said Mrs. Sweatt to me, “and bourbon’s better than vodka, you’re right.” She took one dainty sip from her glass. “I used to be quite a drinker, when I was younger. Teenager. Sweet drinks.”
“This was where?” I held the glass beneath my nose. I was not a drinker at all. The smell was incredible. I knew from my college experiences that I’d have to down it all at once — the first sip would put me off.
“Davenport. Iowa. Bix Beiderbecke was from there, too. That’s about it.”
“Who?”
“Who? Bix! Really? You don’t know him? Something I know and you don’t. He was a cornet player. Famous one. Before my time, but his family still lived there. Everyone felt sorry for the Beiderbeckes. Drink your whiskey. We should get back.”
“I will. Why did they feel sorry?”
“Well, their son. A jazz musician. And he was a drug addict, too. I think that’s what killed him; he died young, anyhow. Everyone felt so sorry for the Beiderbeckes. Like they feel sorry for me in Brewsterville.”
“They don’t—”
“They do,” she said. She’d finished her whiskey in small furtive sips.
“Have another,” I said. “This is all I’m having.”
“Maybe I will.” She looked appealingly at the bartender, who brought her a second. “No,” she said. “They do. And it’s just like with the Beiderbeckes. Bix was the most important thing to ever happen to Davenport. And Jim will be the most important thing to happen to Brewsterville. I’m not just saying that because I’m his mother. He’ll be famous.”
“I think so,” I said. “A famous lawyer, maybe.”
She looked at me as if I were the stupidest person in the world. “Oh, I’m not talking about what he’ll do. I’m talking about him. He’ll be the tallest man ever, that’s why he’ll be famous.”
“He’s young,” I said. “He won’t grow forever.”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Drink.”
I didn’t want to. I investigated my glass, trying to seem thoughtful. “But your husband,” I said. “He wasn’t from Iowa.”
She wrinkled her nose, then scratched it. Mrs. Sweatt was always itchy when questioned. “No. He was a Cape Cod boy. Cape Cod.” She sighed. “Ruined me.”
“The Cape or the boy?”
“Oh, I guess I can’t pin it on the Cape,” she said. “Drink your whiskey.”
“Okay.” I lifted the glass, paused, poured it in my mouth, and swallowed. I concentrated on whacking the empty glass on the bar, so I wouldn’t shudder.
Mrs. Sweatt smiled completely for the first time in my presence; I saw that one of her lower teeth was entirely silver. “Wow,” she said. She’d forgotten that in whiskey, as in many things, it’s the amateurs who have to be showy.
It wasn’t as cool as I’d expected outside; it had been the wind off the ocean that chilled us, and now we were a block inland. Mrs. Sweatt was back to her usual silence. I still could taste the whiskey on the edges of my tongue. I felt a trifle unbuckled.
From behind us, a voice said, with a conspicuous lack of French accent, “It’s les girls!”
I turned. Oscar, of course.
“Les Brewsterville girls! Where you been, girls?”
Mrs. Sweatt wore a distracted, wistful look on her face, like the girl singer of a big band during a tragic ballad’s instrumental solo.
“Walking,” I told Oscar. “Only walking.”
Even now, I remember Mrs. Sweatt as the embodiment of every sad love song ever written; she believed every musical statement of what love did to you when it went wrong, how it was like a poison without an antidote, how you’d never breathe right again. Most people feel that way only when the music plays; all her days, Mrs. Sweatt’s heart was tuned to some radio frequency crammed with tragedy. Even that night in Provincetown (sitting on the sea wall, walking to the bar, drinking whiskey) she sounded like she was singing her own sad, particular lyrics: Can’t blame it on Cape Cod, guess I’ll blame it on the boy.
To others, perhaps, Mrs. Sweatt and I seemed similar: two youngish single women in a town of married couples. People in town probably pitied our singularity. We were old to be unmarried, and odd, surely matchless. But here’s the difference: she was ruined by love — that’s how she put it — while I was ruined by the lack of it. And the fact is when you’re flooded with something, you’re more likely to rot away, to disappear entirely, than if you dry up slowly. Ask the Egyptians, ask anyone.
The Adventures of Rocket Bride
A month after that night in Provincetown, James brought me a folded piece of ruled paper.
“It’s from my aunt,” he said.
The handwriting said Peggy Cort on the outside of the fold. It was improbably fancy handwriting for the unfancy paper — brown ink and the practiced thick-then-thin cursive of someone who’d been brought up to write thank-you notes promptly.
Inside were the words dinner, friday, six pm, dessert if you’re willing.
All my life, dinner invitations moved me peculiarly. Dinner parties, like romance, always seemed to happen to someone else. I was a librarian approaching thirty, and people perhaps thought I was allergic.
I kept the catalog cards of withdrawn books for scrap at the desk. I picked one up to respond and glanced at the back. A home cyclopedia, encompassing health, nutrition, and child raising. That didn’t seem right. I sorted through the pile, hoping ridiculously I’d find one of the cards for that ruined copy of Tom Sawyer James had kept, but of course I’d pulled them years before. Some long-gone patron had already taken them, jotted down something less important on the back of the title card, the author card, the shelf list. I settled for A History of Rhode Island.