Two
Teddy and her friend Lila had a standing breakfast date: every Saturday morning at eight. Today they were at Lila’s. On the way over, Teddy had stopped at the little Mexican market that lay between their houses and bought four of the fresh buns they always had on the counter in a plastic box, not too sweet, not too soft, four for a dollar. Lila had heated them up and served them with blackberry jam, butter, Jarlsberg, fruit salad, and coffee. They were sitting on Lila’s shaded back deck, looking at her yard. A large-leafed vine sprawled on a trellis, heavy with the kind of perfectly shaped, cascading bunches of purple grapes Teddy had always associated with the Calvinist Dutch masters: symbols of bacchanalian wantonness and drunkenness. Lilac bushes, tea roses, rhododendrons, and hydrangeas, in splotches of purples, reds, pinks, and oranges, grew against the back brick wall. On the cartoonishly green lawn, under a little pergola, were a white wrought-iron table and matching chairs. Two docile little pear trees rose near the house, thoughtfully blossoming in the spring and bearing fruit in the fall. An equally thoughtful pine tree provided shade in one corner of the yard, under which Lila had had built a playhouse for visiting grandchildren.
Teddy had not been born to end up in a neighborhood like Greenpoint: She had chosen to live here. In 1952, during her sophomore year at Vassar, her English expatriate financier father, Herbert Groverton St. Cloud, the untitled younger son of a nobleman, had lost everything all at once on a bad investment, a South African diamond mine swindle he should have been too shrewd to fall for. He’d sold his Fifth Avenue town house and all his various possessions to pay his debts, and his only child had had to leave college abruptly. Almost penniless, Teddy had camped out with her father at an old family friend’s house and enrolled in a secretarial course, then found work as a secretary for an entertainment law firm and got herself an apartment. Her father, her only family, had died shortly afterward of a heart attack, leaving her almost nothing. She’d zealously reinvented herself as a working girl, settling in Greenpoint in the late 1950s. Originally a nineteenth-century rough-and-tumble riverfront shipbuilding town at the northernmost tip of Brooklyn, just across the river from midtown Manhattan, it had been populated largely by immigrants, Italians and Irish first, then Poles.
Lila also lived here by choice. In 1985, shortly after Sam Scofield, her first husband, had died of colon cancer, she had sold the apartment in Gramercy Park they’d owned since 1968 and bought an old Queen Anne brownstone on stately, tree-lined Noble Street, just a five-minute walk from Teddy’s smallish old brick house with its tiny back garden on the more heavily trafficked, down-at-the-heels Calyer Street. Back then, this neighborhood had been seedy, run-down, so the house was a bargain, and after Lila had had it refurbished and reappointed, it was as elegant as any house, anywhere.
Teddy had always liked coming to Lila’s house, which was the sort of place she’d been born to inhabit, the life she’d lost. Coming here always reminded her how much happier she was as a “single working mother,” lackadaisical housekeeper, and server-forth of imaginative cookery on mismatched chipped dishes than she would have been as the inhabitant of such a house, with its daily maid, grand piano, heirloom dishes, groomed back garden, and state-of-the-art appliances. She loved Lila’s house both because it was comfortable and luxurious and because it reassured her that she didn’t regret her fate.
Teddy had put the Calyer Street house on the market immediately after Oscar’s death; she’d found the house on India Street that same afternoon at the Realtor’s office. The unmarried old owner, Homer Meehan, the last surviving descendant of the family who’d bought it when it was built in the 1870s, had become too crippled to live alone and so was headed for an old-age home and was selling his family house. He left behind odd touches, like the Chinese-cardboard cartoon faces in the lav, ballpoint pen — scrawled maunderings upstairs on the wall of the smaller of the two bedrooms (her favorite: “It’s useless to give up and useless to persevere, so take the path of least resistance with your eyes and mouth shut”), and photos of wild animals mating or about to mate, cut from National Geographics and pasted in a free-form collage on the wall of the tiny boot room leading out to the backyard. Teddy had left all this handiwork untouched, partly out of her heartbroken reluctance to start over in a new place, partly out of an appreciation for weirdo eccentrics.
“He seemed too earnest at first,” Teddy said to Lila, slathering her second bun with jam.
“Earnest isn’t bad,” said Lila. She rightly suspected that Teddy sometimes secretly chafed at her own earnestness.
“Not bad,” Teddy said. “Just a little boring.”
There was a brief, pointed silence. Lila nibbled her roll, then set it carefully back down on the plate. She was a large woman, but she still felt and behaved like the sylph she had once been. Her gestures were miniature, girlish; she wore a gauzy dress that reminded Teddy a little of the “frocks” they had affected when they were freshmen and sophomores at Vassar and had worshiped the campus phantom of the young Edna St. Vincent Millay. Now (more than half a century later) she wore a blue shawl and house slippers with her gauzy dress, but she still looked girlish. Tendrils of her curly pure white neck-length hair stuck to her cheeks and neck in the humidity. Her dress had long, filmy sleeves; Teddy knew she was embarrassed by her arms, which were more sagging and wrinkled than the rest of her skin, which had aged very little. She also knew that Lila took special pains to appear young whenever one of her sons was coming over with the grandchildren; Joe was coming today, her baby, her favorite. Teddy also did the same with her daughters, tried to seem young and alive when she saw them, tried to hide the signs of age as best she could; as mothers, they didn’t want their children to think of them as decrepit, needy, without the ability to help them. But Lila didn’t have to worry. At the moment, she looked like a fat, hot, beautiful baby.
Lila Emerson had been a scholarship girl from a rural Maine family, the youngest daughter of a Presbyterian minister, thirsting to soak up every drop of academic bohemia she could absorb. She’d been instantly intrigued by her roommate, Claire St. Cloud, whose father was rich and English and whose mother had died when Claire was a small child, like the parents of certain heroines of James, Austen, and Brontë, not to mention Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lila’s favorite writer as a girl. Claire was outspoken, extremely smart without being an egghead, confident, unapologetically sexual. Lila was shy, bookish, reserved, and alight with the desire to flee her cage, itching for mischief. She had seduced Claire into being her friend by letting her glimpse hints of the person Lila might become and tempting her with the power to coax that person into being. It was Lila who had given Teddy her nickname; Teddy was half girl, half boy, Lila liked to say, so the androgynous toy-bear name suited her. In homage to Millay, Lila had sewn them both dresses in shades of fawn, ecru, pastel yellow — sleeveless for spring and long-sleeved for winter — which they’d worn with ballet slippers or Greek goddess sandals, bead necklaces or arm bracelets, depending on the season. They had danced on the lawn in them, burbled off to classes, run up the stairs of their dormitory to their room, and, a few times, stripped them off each other.
Teddy had matter-of-factly, with frank lust, initiated these occasional trysts, and Lila was too hot with her own need for subversiveness to resist, or to pay full attention to what her body was doing. Although it wasn’t really so subversive when you thought about it; women’s schools had always been full of affairs between girls who went on to have husbands and children. But at the time, it had seemed to Lila’s puritanical New England soul like the wickedest of transgressions. And their schoolgirl sex, innocent and laughing as it was, had cemented her undying passion for Teddy. When Teddy had to leave Vassar in the winter of their sophomore year, Lila had suffered a mild nervous breakdown and almost had to take a semester off.