Kevin said, “Well, it was nice seeing you, Mrs. Kitteridge.” He glanced at her with a nod meant to signal a goodbye. It was bad luck that she’d encountered him, but he could not be responsible for that. He had felt responsibility about Dr. Goldstein, whom Kevin had genuinely come to love, but even that had receded as he had driven up the turnpike.
Olive Kitteridge was taking a Kleenex from her big black bag. She touched it to her forehead, her hairline, didn’t look at Kevin. She said, “I wish I hadn’t passed those genes on to him.”
Kevin gave the slightest roll of his eyes. The question of genes, DNA, RNA, chromosome 6, the dopamine, serotonin crap; he had lost interest in all that. In fact, it angered him the way a betrayal might. “We are on the edge of understanding the essence of how the mind works in a molecular, real way,” a noted academic had said at a lecture last year. The dawning of a new age.
There was always a new age dawning.
“Not that the kid didn’t get a few wicky-wacky genes from Henry’s side, God knows. His mother was a complete nut, you know. Horrid.”
“Whose mother?”
“Henry’s. My husband’s.” Mrs. Kitteridge pulled out her sunglasses and put them on. “I guess you’re not supposed to say ‘nut’ these days, are you?” She looked over at him. He’d been about to start with his wrist again, but he put his hands back into his lap.
Please go, he thought.
“But she had three breakdowns and shock treatments. Doesn’t that qualify?”
He shrugged.
“Well, she was wired funny. I guess I can at least say that.”
Nuts was when you took a razor blade and cut long strips into your torso. Your thighs, your arms. COMPLETELY CRAZY CLARA. That was nuts. The first night together in the dark he had felt the lines. “I fell,” she had whispered. He had pictured living with her. Art on the wall, light shining through a bedroom window. Friends at Thanksgiving, a Christmas tree because Clara would want one.
“The girl is nothing but trouble,” Dr. Goldstein had said.
It was not Dr. Goldstein’s place to say such a thing. But she had been nothing but trouble: loving and tender one minute, furious the next. The business of cutting herself—it had made him crazy. Crazy breeds crazy. And then she had left, because that’s what Clara did—left people and everything else. Off to somewhere new with her obsessions. She was crazy about the lunatic Carrie A. Nation, the first woman prohibitionist who had gone around chopping up saloons with hatchets, and then selling the hatchets. “Is that the coolest thing you ever heard?” Clara had asked, sipping her soy milk. It was like that. Cartwheeling from one thing to the next.
“Everyone suffers through a bad love affair,” Dr. Goldstein had said.
That—actually—was just not true. Kevin knew people who had not suffered through a bad love affair. Not many, perhaps, but a few. Olive Kitteridge blew her nose.
“Your son,” Kevin said suddenly. “He’s still able to practice?”
“What do you mean?”
“With his depression? He still goes to work every day?”
“Oh, sure.” Mrs. Kitteridge took off her sunglasses, gave him a quick, penetrating look.
“And Mr. Kitteridge. Is he well?”
“Yes, he is. He’s thinking about retiring early. They sold the pharmacy, you know, and he’d have to work for the new chain, and they require all sorts of goofy regulations. Sad, the way the world is going.”
It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning.
“What’s your brother up to?” Mrs. Kitteridge asked.
Kevin felt weary now. Maybe that was good. “The last I knew he was living on the streets of Berkeley. He’s a drug addict.” Most of the time Kevin didn’t think of himself as having a brother.
“Where’d you go after here? Texas? Is that what I remember? Your father took a job there?”
Kevin nodded.
“I suppose he wanted to get as far away from here as possible. Time and distance, they always say. I don’t know as that’s true.”
To get the conversation over with, Kevin said, dully, “My father died last year of liver cancer. He never remarried. And I never saw much of him once I left.”
All the degrees Kevin had acquired, the colleges and universities he had gone to with the fellowships and scholarships he had received, his father had never showed up. But every town had been promising. Every place at first had said, Here you go—You can live here. You can rest here. You can fit. The enormous skies of the Southwest, the shadows that fell over the desert mountains, the innumerable cacti—red-tipped, or yellow-blossomed, or flat-headed—all this had lightened him when he’d first moved to Tucson, taking hikes by himself, then with others from the university. Perhaps Tucson had been his favorite, had he been forced to choose—the stark difference between the open dustiness there and the ragged coastline here.
But as with them all, the same hopeful differences—the tall, hot white glassed buildings of Dallas; the tree-lined streets of Hyde Park in Chicago, with the wooden stairs behind each apartment (he had loved those, especially); the neighborhoods of West Hartford, where it looked like a storybook, the houses, the perfect lawns—they all became places that sooner or later, one way or another, assured him that he didn’t, in fact, fit.
When he got his medical degree from Chicago, attending the ceremony only because of one of his teachers—a kind woman, who had said it would sadden her to have him not there—he sat beneath the full sun, listening to the president of the university say, in his final words to them, “To love and be loved is the most important thing in life,” causing Kevin to feel an inward fear that grew and spread through him, as though his very soul were tightening. But what a thing to say—the man in his venerable robe, white hair, grandfatherly face—he must’ve had no idea those words could cause such an exacerbation of the silent dread in Kevin. Even Freud had said, “We must love or we grow ill.” They were spelling it out for him. Every billboard, movie, magazine cover, television ad—it all spelled it out for him: We belong to the world of family and love. And you don’t.
New York, the most recent, had held the largest hopes. The subways filled with such a variety of dull colors and edgy-looking people; it relaxed him, the different clothes, the shopping bags, people sleeping or reading or nodding their heads to some earphoned tune; he had loved the subways, and for a while the activities of the hospitals. But his affair with Clara, and the end of it, had caused him to recoil from the place, so that the streets now seemed crowded and tiresome—all the same. Dr. Goldstein he loved, but that was it—everyone else had become tiresome, and he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were, and how they didn’t know it.
What he began to want was to see his childhood house—a house he believed, even as he sat in his car now, that he had never once been happy in. And yet, oddly, the fact of its unhappiness seemed to have a hold on him with the sweetness of a remembered love affair. For Kevin had some memories of sweet, brief love affairs—so different from the long-drawn-out mess with Clara—and none measured up to the inner desire, the longing he felt for that place. That house where the sweatshirts and woolen jackets stank like moist salt and musty wood—the smell made him sick, as did the smell of a wood fire, which his father had sometimes made in the fireplace, poking at it in a distracted way. Kevin thought he must be the only person in the country who hated the smell of a wood fire. But the house, the trees tangled with woodbine, the surprise of a lady’s slipper in the midst of pine needles, the open leaves of the wild lilies of the valley—he missed it.
He missed his mother.
I’ve made this awful pilgrimage…I’ve come back for more… Kevin wished, as he often did, that he had known the poet John Berryman.
“When I was young,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, holding her sunglasses in her hand, “—little, you know—I’d hide in the wood box when my father came home. And he’d sit down on the wood box and say, ‘Where’s Olive? Where can
Olive be?’ This would go on, till I’d knock on the side, and he’d act surprised. ‘Olive,’ he’d say, ‘I had no idea where you were!’ And I’d laugh, and he’d laugh.”
Kevin looked over at her; she put her sunglasses on. She said, “I don’t know how long that continued, probably until I was too big to get into the wood box.”
He didn’t know what to say to this. He squeezed his hands in as tiny a gesture as possible, looking down at the steering wheel. He felt her big presence, and imagined—fleetingly—that an elephant sat next to him, one that wanted to be a member of the human kingdom, and sweet in an innocent way, as though her stubs of forelegs were folded on her lap, her trunk moving just a little as she finished speaking.
“That’s a nice story,” he said.
He thought of the boy cleaning the fish, how his father had held his hand out to him. He thought again of John Berryman. Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides…Mercy!…do not pull the trigger or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger…. He wondered if Mrs. Kitteridge, being a math teacher, knew much poetry.
“Look how the wind’s picked up,” she said. “Always kind of exciting, long as you don’t have a wharf that floats away, like ours used to do. Henry’d be down on those rocks with the waves—Oh, God what a fracas it was.”
Again, Kevin found himself liking the sound of her voice. Through the windshield he saw the waves coming in higher now, hitting the ledge in front of the marina hard enough to send a spray far into the air, the spray then falling back languidly, the drops sifting through shards of sunlight that still cracked its way between the dark clouds. The inside of his head began to feel as choppy as the surf before him. Don’t go, his mind said to Mrs. Kitteridge. Don’t go.
But this turbulence in him was torture. He thought how yesterday morning, in New York, as he’d walked to his car, he had for one moment not seen it. And there was that prick of fear, because he’d had it all planned and wrapped up, and where was the car? But there it was, right there, the old Subaru wagon, and then he knew what he’d felt had been hope. Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn’t want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer. That awful story of the man who jumped—and survived—walking back and forth for an hour on the Golden Gate Bridge, weeping, saying that had anyone stopped to ask why he was weeping, he wouldn’t have jumped.
“Mrs. Kitteridge, you have to—”
But she was leaning forward, squinting through the windshield. “Wait, what in hell—” And moving faster than he would have thought possible, she was out of the car, the door left open, and had gone to the front of the marina, her black bag left on the grass. For a moment she disappeared, then reappeared, waving her arms, shouting, though he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
He stepped from the car, and was surprised by the force of the wind that whipped through his shirt. Mrs. Kitteridge was shouting, “Hurry up! Hurry!” Waving her arms like a huge seagull. He ran to where she was and looked down into the water, the tide higher than he’d have thought. Mrs. Kitteridge pointed with a repeated thrust of her arm, and he saw the head of Patty Howe rise briefly above the choppy water, like a seal’s head, her hair wet and darkened, and then she disappeared again, her skirt swirling with the swirling dark ropes of seaweed.
Kevin turned, so that as he slid down the high sheet of rock, his arms were spread as though to hug it, but there was nothing to hug, just the flat scraping against his chest, ripping his clothes, his skin, his cheek, and then the cold water rose over him. It stunned him, how cold the water was, as though he’d been dropped into a huge test tube containing a pernicious chemical eating at his skin. His foot hit something steady in the massive swooshing of the water; he turned and saw her reaching for him, her eyes open, her skirt swirled around her waist; her fingers reached for him, missed, reached for him again, and he got hold of her. The water receded for a moment, and as a wave came back to cover them, he pulled her hard, and her grip on him was so tight he would not have thought it possible with her thin arms that she could hold anything as tightly as she held him.
Again the water rose, they both took a breath; again they were submerged and his leg hooked over something, an old pipe, unmoving. The next time, they both reached their heads high as the water rushed back, another breath taken. He heard Mrs. Kitteridge yelling from above. He couldn’t hear the words, but he understood that help was coming. He had only to keep Patty from falling away, and as they went again beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his grip on her arm to let her know: He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.
The Piano Player
Four nights a week Angela O’Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge at the Warehouse Bar and Grill. The cocktail lounge, commodious and comfortable with its sprawl of couches, plump leather chairs, and low tables, was right there as soon as you walked through the heavy doors of the old establishment; the dining room was farther back, with windows overlooking the water. Early in the week the lounge tended to be rather empty, but by Wednesday night and continuing straight through Saturday, the place was filled with people. When you stepped from the sidewalk through the thick oak doors, there was the sound of piano notes, tinkling and constant; and the talk of the people who were slung back on their couches, or sitting forward in their chairs, or leaning over the bar seemed to accommodate itself to this, so the piano was not so much “background” music as it was a character in the room. In other words, the townspeople of Crosby, Maine, had for many years now taken into their lives the cocktail music and presence of Angie O’Meara.
Angie, in her youth, had been a lovely woman to look at, with her wavy red hair and perfect skin, and in many ways this was still the case. But now she was into her fifties, and her hair, pinned back loosely with combs, was dyed a color you might consider just a little too red, and her figure, while still graceful, had a thickening of its middle, the more noticeable, perhaps, because she was otherwise quite thin. But she was long-waisted, and when she sat at the piano bench, she did so with the ease of a ballet dancer, albeit past her prime. Her jawline had gone soft and uneven, and the wrinkles near her eyes were quite pronounced. But they were kind wrinkles; nothing harsh—it seemed—had happened to this face. If anything, her face revealed itself too clearly in a kind of simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman of her age. There was, in the tilt of her head, the slight messiness of the very bright hair, the open gaze of her blue eyes, a quality that could, in other circumstances, make people uncomfortable. Strangers, for example, who passed her in the Cook’s Corner shopping mall were tempted to sneak an extra peek or two. As it was, Angie was a familiar figure to those who lived in town. She was just Angie O’Meara, the piano player, and she had been playing at the Warehouse for many years. She had been in love with the town’s first selectman, Malcolm Moody, for a number of years as well. Some people knew this, others did not.
On this particular Friday night, Christmas was a week away, and not far from the baby grand piano stood a large fir tree heavily decorated by the restaurant’s staff. Its silver tinsel swung slightly every time the door to the outside was opened, and different-colored lights the size of eggs shone amidst the various balls and strings of popcorn and cranberries that adorned the slightly bent-downward branches of the tree.
Angie was wearing a black skirt and a pink nylon top that parted at her collarbone, and there was something about the tiny string of pearls she wore, and the pink top, and the bright red of her hair that seemed to glow along with the Christmas tree, as if she were some extension of its festivities. She had ar
rived, as she always did, at precisely six o’clock, smiling her vague, childlike smile, chewing on mints, saying hello to the bartender, Joe, and to Betty, the waitress, then tucking her handbag and coat near the end of the bar. Joe, a thickset man who had tended that bar for many years and had the watchful eye of any good bartender, had come to the private conclusion that Angie O’Meara was really very frightened when she showed up at work each night. This would account for the whiff of booze on her minty breath if you happened to be close enough to smell it, and it accounted for the fact that she never took her twenty-minute break—although she was allowed to by the music union, and encouraged to by the Warehouse owner. “I hate to get started again,” she said to Joe one night, and that’s when he put it together, that Angie must have suffered from stage fright.
If she suffered from anything more, it was considered nobody’s business. It was the case with Angie that people knew very little about her, assuming at the same time that other people knew her moderately well. She lived in a rented room on Wood Street and did not own a car. She was within walking distance of a grocery store and also the Warehouse Bar and Grill—a walk that took precisely fifteen minutes in her black very-high-heeled shoes. In the winter she wore very-high-heeled black boots, and a white fake fur coat, and carried a little blue pocketbook. She could be seen picking her way carefully along the snow-covered sidewalks, then crossing through the big parking lot by the post office, and finally going down the little walkway toward the bay, where the squatty white clapboard Warehouse sat.