“It’s nothing!” they chorused.
Helen smiled hectically and clapped her hands. “I’m so glad I asked. I was really afraid I was losing my mind.”
“Not at all,” Virginia said.
“I feel better. Thank you all so much.”
The women broke into spontaneous applause, and Helen beamed. Everyone seemed set to rights and happy again—so why did Polly sense she’d just witnessed a burnt offering? The conversation went forward, but she was stuck remembering all the times she’d tried to get Dick’s attention and had ended up kissing him on the cheek and calling him a bear. And what of gathering up his underwear from the bottom of the sheets? What of noticing without daring to name it that they were not entirely clean?
“You’re Chauncey’s partner now. Partnerships are rocky.”
“He’ll be able to get much further and do much more because of your efforts behind the scenes. You’ll be the making of him.”
“Our job is to wreathe them in the fresh greenery of domestic happiness and the spicy scent of good counsel!” Virginia said. This got a laugh, but an appreciative one.
“Think of the widowers who remarry as soon as it’s decent to do so. They can’t live without a woman, whereas vice versa is not the case.”
They named examples. Helen looked at each speaker intently, hungrily. When the reassurances died down, though, she had a question.
“I know I can do a lot for him. But what will he do—for me?”
“He’ll take care of you, and he’ll appreciate you. His happiness will make you happy. And he will give you children.”
Helen considered this, and Polly did too. It was the case that she was happy when she made other people happy. She liked the idea of being taken care of, and wanted children. She felt, though, there was a missing piece to all that had been said.
In the hallway Helen thanked them all sincerely and promised to think carefully about their encouraging advice. The plan was for Carol to drive Helen and Polly to the train station. They sat beside each other on the train and Polly hoped Helen would say more, but the conversation was general and typical. At 30th Street Station, they decided to walk across the bridge and down to Rittenhouse Square. They were quiet, each in her own thoughts, until Polly had to speak.
“Helen—you were brave to speak out like that.”
“Oh, I was a bore, for certain.”
“No. You were saying what others feel but don’t dare notice.”
“But it was nothing. Everyone said so. Newlywed blues. What a perfect phrase. Something borrowed, something blue.”
“No. Helen—if they told their own stories, our whole society could fall apart. They have to think it’s nothing. But—”
“All I know is I’m going to a psychiatrist,” Helen said.
They turned west to go along 24th Street, and the episode was over, just like that. As they headed down Walnut, Polly caught glimpses between houses of back gardens dotted with snowdrops and crocuses. Spring was coming! Helen would feel better then, Polly was certain. Her own certainty grew new roots on this walk. This was familiar to her, this groundedness. She wasn’t Helen, and didn’t want to be. She’d never go so far as to consider she’d made a mistake marrying someone whose interior furnishings and emotional tastes were so hopelessly different than her own—for Dick was innocent, too. She knew what she’d wanted in a husband, and he was all those things: tall, handsome, smart, sober, from Philadelphia, grown-up, respectable, and he liked Maine. That there was more to it than that, and that her empathic disturbance in Carol’s living room might be a cairn along the way toward growth, wasn’t an idea that had any precedent in the life she’d led, so she chose not to go on pursuing it. When they passed a Catholic church, Helen said she felt nothing more than the usual admiration for the glass—no pull toward spirituality outside her usual purview. Polly wanted very badly to get away from Helen Vaughn.
“I have a feeling I will have a happy life, thanks to you,” Helen said.
“No, no,” Polly blushed, “not me. And here’s where I split off!”
But she stood for an embrace, shriveling inside.
She’d rarely been so shaken, and the disturbance shook a new feeling loose—I want children. Now.
That night she told Dick about the afternoon, in the spirit of sharing everything as husband and wife. She even described her feeling of alienation from and doubt about him, which now seemed utterly bizarre. He was so unperturbed by her confession that the incident seemed nothing more interruptive than an unfortunate piece of gristle she’d leave at the edge of her plate. “Better now?” he asked, wiggling his eyebrows. “Better!” She kissed him, and made her own vow—that she’d never again indulge in doubting her love, even if she did. What was the point?
* * *
At five she walked over the desire line to Agnes’s, avoiding the graveyard. Enough was enough for one day. Sylvie led her to the living room, where a fire had been lit and they caught up on the events of the winter. In her dry way Sylvie detailed power outages and sunken boats, wringing the drama of small-town catastrophe from these non-events. Polly was glad to hear all the news, as she had nothing to say for herself, nothing had happened between last summer and now. Just grief, which was dramatic, but incommunicable.
Agnes, in her sneaks, walked step by step down the stairs. Polly had thought she looked thinner, and now confirmed it.
“You look like an old lady,” she said to Polly.
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” Sylvie said and left the room, shaking her head.
“Thank you. I’ll pay you the same compliment,” Polly said to Agnes.
“Must we hug?”
“That’s the custom.”
“God forbid we of all people forgo the custom.”
They embraced. Agnes led them to chairs by the fire. The room hadn’t changed in decades, not since the fertile period when Agnes first owned the house and had gone on a mad dash of renovation, jettisoning or painting over all the dour mahogany and adding bright paintings and murals on some of the walls. This frenzy of decoration had stopped when Agnes became serious about writing the When Nan books. The wood had been painted again and again, the murals occasionally touched up but also allowed to fade. They were fantasies of the landscape, inspired by Gauguin, but with the flora and fauna of Maine.
“Let’s be silent.”
They looked within for a few minutes as they usually did in the graveyard every day. Then Agnes reached out her hand to shake Polly’s, ending the meeting from heart to hand.
“I am insanely glad that you’ve arrived,” Agnes said. “I’ve had no one I like to talk to—except Sylvie, of course. No one is you, though.”
Polly was moved by this rare declaration, and she nodded her agreement. She, too, had had no one to talk to, though that was less of a Neither did I than it may have been in other years. This winter she’d had nothing to say. They’d only met twice when Agnes was in Philadelphia over Christmas. Polly wasn’t up to it, and Agnes didn’t press. She’d been through enough loss to know when someone honestly needed to be alone.