A Big Storm Knocked It Over Read online

  “I don’t know,” Jane Louise said. “The whole thing is sort of depressing.”

  “Depressing!” Edie said. “It sounds like heaven in a teacup.”

  “I guess we’ll be each other’s families again,” said Jane Louise.

  “We might even have some fun,” said Mokie.

  “Fun,” said Jane Louise. “What a weird thing to think about at holiday time.”

  CHAPTER 12

  In the end they bundled into Edie and Mokie’s old car and drove to Vermont, four very tall adults in a not terribly large space. Mokie and Teddy sat in the front, and since the seats were pushed back to accommodate their legs, Edie and Jane Louise squashed into the corners of the car and stretched their legs out crossways. Jane Louise passed around a thermos of coffee. In the trunk were four pairs of ice skates, and tied to the top of the car were Teddy’s cross-country skis.

  They stayed at an inn kept by an old Swiss couple. The four of them were the only guests. The hostess had kept fires going in their rooms and put hot-water bottles into their beds. It was freezing cold.

  After they gulped down a few excellent sandwiches, they crawled into bed. Jane Louise woke in the night to see that it was snowing. The fire in the room had died down. At dawn she woke up again to find herself inside a greeting card from another century. Outside the snow fell straight down in large, flat flakes. The room was wallpapered with a print of cabbage roses. The Persian rug was faded. One of the inn cats was asleep on a blue chair. It was Christmas Eve day, and she was far away from her family.

  Teddy was fast asleep. Down the hall was her closest friend in the world, the person who knew her longest, understood her best, and knew her past as well as her own. The idea of a holiday with her mother and her stepfather suddenly seemed impossibly appealing, although in her mother’s new house and with her mother’s new husband she felt tense and uncomfortable. Teddy’s breathing was a solace to her. But were they not as strangers, all alone?

  Since the beginning of mankind, men and women had gone off together to form a unit, a couple, an entity with a history behind it and a destiny in front. Was it easier when you did this in the context of an enormous family, or worse?

  Jane Louise shifted around. Her husband had broken down and put on his pajamas in deference to the cold. She covered his shoulder and watched him sleep: He was as relaxed as a child. The tension of the day had left his face. He smelled sweetly of sleep. How easy it would be to do wrong to a sleeping man!

  Such availability, such access! Jane Louise shivered, and she huddled next to him. He turned and put his arms around her. His embrace was so familiar, and so remote, it caused her almost to shudder. They were now related to each other by marriage and were protected by law from any number of incursions into their privacy. They were a legal and economic unit. To undo their relationship would take the intervention of a court of law. And yet they were in this bed because they loved each other, and were meant to love each other in spite of everything, for ever more. It was their mandate to create a family, and fill their lives with photos and memories and trials, and odd bits of family lore and family occasions, and their children would go out into the world and say: “In our family, we always . . .” and, “We feel . . .” She and Teddy, these two unprepared tall humans, whose backgrounds included rancorous divorce and financial uncertainty, were supposed to create some unswerving, stable, and dependable structure. How were they supposed to do that?

  As Teddy was shaving, a tap came at the door, and there stood Edie in a dark green robe and striped slippers.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yours woke up. Mine says it’s too cold and went back to sleep. I think he expects breakfast in bed.”

  “As you may remember,” said Teddy, squinting into the mirror, “I suggested someplace hot.”

  “It was too expensive to go someplace hot,” Jane Louise said.

  “Think of the wonderful amounts of money we’ll pay in doctor bills for bronchitis from freezing our asses off up here.”

  “It is pretty cold,” Edie said. “The radiator’s tepid.”

  “It’s because of these quaint, old-fashioned fireplaces,” Jane Louise said.

  There was another tap on the door, and in walked Mrs. Schuldes, the owner’s wife, bringing a large basket of what looked like shale.

  “Cannel coal,” she said. “Burns very hot. It was five below this morning, but it’s supposed to warm up to ten above. Come down to breakfast. The dining room is quite overheated.”

  They went to breakfast; Mokie came, too. They wore silk underwear, leggings, T-shirts, turtlenecks, heavy sweaters, and three pairs of socks. They ate dozens of muffins, piles of toast, and cups and cups of coffee with hot milk.

  After breakfast they ambled into the sitting room, sat in front of the fire, and read the papers.

  “Gosh, this is romantic,” Mokie said.

  Then it was time for lunch, and then they went up to their freezing rooms and took naps under their down quilts and blankets. If the Schuldes family was celebrating Christmas, there was little sign of it, although the sitting room was full of pine branches in enormous glass jars, and there were wreaths on every door. In the late afternoon the smell of mulled cider wafted up the stairs.

  Jane Louise realized that she was exhausted. They were all exhausted. The idea of lying around napping took them by surprise, like a fall on the ice, and they surrendered to it. When they came down for dinner—Edie and Jane Louise in long skirts and long underwear—they were surprised to find a cheerful group of people they had never seen before. Mrs. Schuldes explained that these were friends and relatives who always came for Christmas supper and evening skating. Guests of the inn traditionally were included.

  They stood in the living room, drinking hot cider, until the doors to the dining room were pulled back to reveal the kind of table Edie said Mrs. Teagarden would have paid several hundred thousand dollars to have someone fix up for her. On the large sideboard were three roast ducks, a glazed ham, an enormous glass dish containing a mountain of beet and herring salad, greens, roast potatoes, and a gigantic Christmas cake.

  “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Edie said.

  Jane Louise looked around her. It made her feel almost panicky to be sitting at a Christmas table surrounded by people she had never seen before.

  As they began their dinner the front door crashed open, and in walked the three big Schuldes boys and their dogs. They had just come from cleaning off the pond and setting out the flambeaux: huge torches on poles. They sat down and began eating quantities of food Jane Louise found mind-boggling. “Did you and Mokie eat that way when you were teenagers?” she asked Teddy.

  “Honey, I still eat that way,” said Mokie. “This is heaven.”

  He looked around the table, used to being the only person of color. This group was polite and not very talkative, so Mokie started in.

  “My wife and I are caterers,” he said. “Actually, Edie is a cake decorator and pastry chef. She has raised cake decoration to a fine art. And I am a caterer, but I have never seen such beautiful food.” He lifted his glass toward Mrs. Schuldes.

  “My husband does all the cooking,” she said. “It must be very interesting to cook professionally.”

  “You do,” Mokie pointed out.

  “We only do breakfasts, except for Christmas Eve,” Mrs. Schuldes said. “Do you have many interesting clients?”

  Mokie, Edie, and Jane Louise sighed audibly.

  “Tell them about the fairy cake,” Teddy said.

  “The sugarplum fairy,” Mokie began. “We have a client who is what you might call extremely demanding. Every little thing, every big thing, every middle-sized thing. She likes to get it all right. This year our client had a winter party, and she had a vision of something called a Sugarplum Fairy Cake.”

  “Is that one of those hollow cakes with a lady popping out of it?” Mrs. Schuldes said. “You hear of these things at stag parties.”

  “She was unclear what
it was,” Mokie said. “But my genius wife decoded this to mean a cake with a doll ornament. We made her prototypes in cardboard, we found Victorian Christmas cards, we found little dolls of the fifties. Finally Jane Louise found an old bisque doll and dressed it up, but by that time our client had forgotten all about it and was onto something else.”

  “Forgotten!” Mrs. Schuldes said. “After all that work?”

  Mokie smiled a beautiful smile. “These people aren’t afraid of hard work, ma’am,” he said.

  Jane Louise looked over at him. The name of this smile was “the Nigger Funereal Smile.” She and Mokie had in common that they never felt they were where they ought to be, and when they were where they thought they ought to be, they longed to be somewhere else. Mokie’s manners were flawless, a kind of self-parody. He had the very best kind of Sunday church manners. He called women over a certain age “ma’am”; he almost bent double to shake the hands of shorter people. It often drifted into Jane Louise’s mind to wonder what he was like in bed. She wondered this about a great many people: In this regard she was a variant form of Sven. As she ate her dinner, she reflected on this question.

  Sven the Lover she saw as a kind of mechanic, a man with a workbench in his basement, slowly taking the parts apart and slowly putting them back together, with tremendous concentration but no real personal interest. Mokie she imagined as hot and languid, the sort of person who sighs and props himself on one elbow to take a sip from a bedside glass of water. Teddy was ardent and straightforward, like a boy. Unlike Sven, who doubtless went in for accoutrements, or Mokie, who might be able to take a telephone call in the middle and then peacefully continue the enterprise, Teddy did not much go in for frills. Rather, he himself was thrilling. His feelings were the main thing. It amazed Jane Louise, who felt her emotions were pretty obvious, that a person so restrained in daily life could be so carried away. He was a hungry man.

  Here they were, the four of them, at this big table in the middle of nowhere on a major holiday, surrounded by people they had never seen before. Jane Louise was eating her duck and thinking about sex. What was anyone else thinking about?

  After dinner they piled on their coats and scarves, gloves and boots, and went down to the pond for an evening skate. The Schuldes boys had lit the flambeaux. Near the benches, where you could sit and put your skates on, they had lit a bonfire. The pale quarter moon hung in the cloudy sky, and the stars peeked in and out of the fleeting darkness.

  They put on their skates and tested the ice. It had frozen several feet and was as black as obsidian.

  Teddy was a wonderful skater. It was like dancing to him. Recently he had taken their skates to be sharpened, and he circled the pond, his scarf flying behind him, his hands locked behind his back. He skated over to Jane Louise and led her onto the ice.

  Jane Louise, who had usually been the person with the least amount of money in the fairly fancy places her parents moved to, had spent her teen years hanging around the skating club that she could not afford to join. All her friends belonged, and kept their skates there. Members had a little red number tag laced into their skates. How Jane Louise had longed for that! She had never, since money was always tight, asked for lessons, and she had learned by watching. Skating with Teddy was nicer than any skating she had ever done.

  Over on the other side Mokie and Edie were being silly. They looked like a pair of storks. Atop their curly hair they wore stupid-looking hats with pom-poms, and they were attempting to execute an ice tango: They looked like the photo of the scientist dancing with the sandhill crane. At pastry class in Paris they had eyed each other solemnly, and when Edie had come to class with her skates over her shoulder, Mokie made his move. They spent their two years in Paris in bed, in class, on the ice, or in cafés perfecting their French. Now they were waltzing and twirling, and Edie was laughing.

  Mr. Schuldes skated while smoking a large curved pipe and wearing a Tyrolean outfit and feathered hat. Mrs. Schuldes wore an old mink coat. One of the guests, who had been a professional skater in her youth, took off her coat to reveal a pink skating costurne and heavy pink tights. She glided out into the middle and executed a series of twirls and leaps.

  As they skated past the torches, their faces were momentarily lit up. The warm light cast a glowing shadow. Then they skated into darkness. The three Schuldes boys pushed a round wooden table onto the ice and covered it with a cloth. Mrs. Schuldes skated out with a tray of hot chocolate and cookies.

  “I have died and gone to heaven,” Edie said to Jane Louise. “This isn’t really real, is it?”

  Jane Louise thought it was like a fairy tale out of the Old World, like a Victorian postcard or the Nutcracker ballet.

  “God, wouldn’t old Mrs. Teagarden die for this?” Mokie said.

  Teddy drank his chocolate and kissed his wife. He seemed able, every once in a while, to enjoy his life without any anguish or static. It was dark. It was Christmas. He was on ice skates with his wife in the freezing cold, drinking hot chocolate and eating the kind of powdery nut cookies that melt in your mouth. For an instant life was frozen. There was no past—no days in an under-heated house or overheated apartment while adults fought or complained. This was heaven.

  In the flickering light Jane Louise looked up at Teddy. His face, like his face in sleep, was free of worry. He looked completely happy.

  It had begun to snow fine, needlelike flakes that buzzed and stung. Jane Louise felt her heart open. Maybe everything would be all right after all, and if you worked almost till you dropped, roasting ducks and sharpening your ice skates and planning to move a table out onto a frozen pond, and if you kept your fires burning and picked your friends with care—maybe if you made sure that every single thing was just so, life would not spin out of control and make you sick with anxiety and concern.

  Teddy took her arm. She was suddenly sleepy, and she leaned against him, yawning. Little by little the ice was clearing. The torches sputtered. The chocolate had all been consumed. The platter of cookies was empty except for crumbs.

  “Someday,” Jane Louise said, as she and Teddy took one last, slow skate around the pond. “Someday we’ll get a house with a pond and have a party just like this, except we’ll all do it together and have all our family and friends.”

  Teddy held her tighter. He knew perfectly well that in this world few events pop off so well, and few families and friends gather so peacefully. He did not want to say that this evening had been lovely because Mokie and Edie were their family by choice.

  But of course he did not have to say it. As they walked arm in arm back to their rooms, he knew perfectly well that Jane Louise realized exactly the same thing.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 13

  On a sleety February day Sven ambled into Jane Louise’s office and sat down.

  “When do you think you will be announcing your maternity leave?”

  “And what makes you think I’ll be asking for a maternity leave?” Jane Louise said.

  “You got married,” Sven said, lighting a cigarette. “You’re not a kid. It’s bound to be in the works.”

  “I’ll let you know first thing, Sven.”

  “I find this whole idea of conception very touching,” Sven said. “It’s my opinion you can feel a direct hit. All my wives say that.”

  “I’m sure all your wives say a great many things,” said Jane Louise.

  “I’m sure they do,” Sven said. “Now tell the truth, Janey. Are you secretly pregnant, right this minute?”

  “Guess what?” Jane Louise said. “It’s none of your beeswax.”

  “Don’t be touchy,” Sven said. “This subject interests me. Half of Edwina’s pals have been to one high-tech fertility doctor or another. There’s little I don’t know.”

  “My mommy told me to make sure I had a nice spring baby,” said Jane Louise. “And that’s what I shall have, or we’ll adopt one.”

  “Get on it,” Sven said. “You’re probably losing ovarian viability with each p
assing minute.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” Jane Louise said. “Did you come in here to talk about my ovaries?”

  “There’s a lot of rumors all over town that this place is up on the block.”

  “You mean they’re going to sell it?” Jane Louise said. She felt instantly white with dread.

  “That’s what ‘on the block’ usually means.”

  “But why?”

  “No heir, for one thing,” Sven said. “Expansion, for another.”

  “Expansion into what?”

  “Oh, bigger things,” said Sven. “Books that make more money, more commercial fiction, a new paperback line. You know.”

  “I don’t know,” Jane Louise said. “I hate change. It’s usually for the worse.”

  “It’s on the street that movie people or Europeans want to buy us. Everyone says it’s totally false, which means some part of it is true.”

  The press was owned by a not entirely benevolent millionaire by the name of Hamish Levey, who had inherited it from his father.

  Hamish ran his company for fun and profit. He had been heard to say that he had hired his staff in order to replicate the sort of cultivated and amusing people you might find on an ocean liner. He liked his female employees to be beautiful, brainy, with impeccable pedigrees and manners, and his male workers to have gone to Yale, to play tennis, and have a sharp eye for art and commerce. He liked a winner. When Jane Louise looked around the company, she was always amazed at how many people had independent incomes.

  His wife was named Emerald, a former Broadway actress with an immense head of red hair. She knew the name of every employee and sent booties when you had a baby and flowers when you lost a relative. Their office parties were ravishing.

  Hamish felt, since salaries were so laughable, that it was morale boosting to throw a big office bash once a year at his house. Everyone was invited, from the newest editorial assistant to the boys in the mail room to the board of directors. Towers of luscious food were produced, and famous people often played the piano. The older staff drank too much, while the younger ones could be found in the garden, trying to pretend they were not smoking dope. And since authors were also invited, those sweet-looking, peachy editorial assistants often revealed the next day that Pulitzer Prize–winning authors had tried to feel them up. Later there was dancing, coffee, and wonderful cakes.