(1910)

Lulu felt the wind, what Percy had called a “cold front” but that seemed to her like a big boisterous person shouldering his way along, coming down her street bumping into the houses and making the windows rattle. She was reminded of a Maxfield Parrish picture she’d seen years ago, the wind pictured as a huge man – where had it been, in McClure’s magazine or another. O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being. Shelley’s wind seemed a little more gracious than this one. She sat brushing her hair at her dressing table, with the silver-backed brush with the soft bristles; one hundred strokes each night, as she had done for twenty years while her hair grew longer and longer. It was at once tedious and gratifying to do.

Percy was already in bed out on the sleeping porch, the windows open as always, admitting the wind’s prying hands. It was surely cold out there, but not as cold as it would be in December when sometimes she’d wake to find snow on the blankets — but the health benefits of a sleeping-porch over a stuffy bedroom were well established, and when they moved from the apartment in Mamaroneck to a house they had designed themselves, sleeping-porches were among the first hings they had agreed on. Now Percy, weary after a long day, was under the featherbed with his nightcap on; his nose would be as cold as the snow when it touched her cheek. Out in the dark on Montrose Road the trees that couldn’t be seen could be heard thrashing. Abner’s piles of raked leaves would be all blown apart by morning, and he’d have to begin again.

 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? Spring was a person too, a small delicate person neither boy nor girl, in a white shift, walking and wondering in the Scarsdale streets where the apple trees and the cherry trees flowered but never produced apples or cherries.  But now in allowing these thoughts to capture her she’d lost count of her strokes, and after a few further passes she wound up the great length of it—which she mostly loved, her fussy and wilful but charming offspring. She wound it up loosely in two hanks and pinned them up, holding the long hairpins in her teeth. Tomorrow morning she’d braid them with care and wind them in opposite directions around her head into a crown. Like Elsa in Lohengrin her cousin Betty said: but Elsa’s was golden and hers plain brown.

The door to the porch and the bed was shaken by the wind. Lulu  gathered her robe around her and took a breath. Here we go. 

*

Percy and Lulu had both been born in Brooklyn, and grew up not far from one another, though they never met as children — or if they met the meeting didn’t remain in either’s memory — so they supposed they hadn’t, and it seemed to them a remarkable thing. In fact it seemed that whatever hand had kept them apart until Lulu was eighteen did it only so that when they did meet, at a card party to which Lulu came invited by a girl-friend, sister student at the Packer Academy, it came as though fated. Lulu’s friend knew one or two of the guests, but not Percy. And yet there he was, his rich brown beard just coming in, wearing pince-nez eyeglasses just like her own (though being a male he didn’t have to feel shy about them) and a face of easy welcome. He too was there by chance, to make up an even number. The company played cards and gambled with peppermints, and when that grew tiresome the hostess brought out games, and they played the old Checkered Game of Life on a battered and edgeworn board, but no one minded – the game was meant to bring couples or would-be couples together, to laugh at the troubles or successes they got in, spinning the arrows and moving from Intemperance to Ruin or to Poverty, laughing too at players who leapt to Cupid, then Matrimony, then Family. Percy objected because it was all based on chance – there seemed nothing you could do to advance yourself by thinking or calculation of the odds. But life is chance, isn’t it? Lulu had said, sitting down opposite him, and his fine thin skin blushed hotly.

 Lulu was the only daughter of Herbert Beebe, reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. Herbert saw to it that a notice of the party was printed in the social columns — who was present, who poured, what games were played — embarrassing his daughter no end. Her grandmother had told her long before that a woman should appear in the newspapers but three times: when she is born, when she is married, and when she is deceased. We don’t see it that way, Lulu darling, said Herbert, laughing. It’s a new world.

 Lulu was a small person and not very pretty, as she well knew; she wore her eyeglasses even in her school’s annual photograph. And yet she had a certain courage (her father said) and was self-conscious enough not to appear self-conscious. It seemed to her that something — something kind and wise — attended on her, as in the matter of Percy, but long before that too. She was of course a churchgoer, but whatever it was that shaped her ends was different from the watchfulness of God. It was the stars, or something — she didn’t dare think it was her mother’s ever-living self beyond the veil, giving guidance. It wasn’t pride in herself that made her think in these ways; she knew very well her limits and her lacks. She didn’t mind. And even in the brief and sporadic exchanges she and Percy had had that afternoon between hands of Pedro or Cinch, or when the tea and cakes were set out, she knew he didn’t mind either. Didn’t mind what? Well, there it was — he didn’t mind the things about her that she didn’t mind about herself. She only thought this thought on the walk back to Clifford Street that evening, feeling in different parts of her a pleasant coolness and a troubling warmth. Both feelings were made more intense when Father’s social note appeared, and there was her name quite close to his for all the world to see. That took a small effort not to mind; she clipped out the piece and pasted it to a page of her diary, as why should she not?

Not long after, she went with Herbert to the Greenwood cemetery to lay flowers on her mother’s grave. The numbers of monuments and sarcophagi, the urns and obelisks, had multiplied even in one year, and in the sparkling daylight crowds moved among the monuments and walked the curving graveled paths in solemn awe, or chatting merrily. It was evident that most were sight-seers. Lulu shut them from her mind; she laid her armful of roses and pinks on Mary Frances’s grave, and stood for a while in silence holding Father’s hand. She knew that he would now tell her the stories about Frank, as he had always called his wife; and about Lulu’s sister, an infant who died before Lulu was born. She knew all that he would say, and was patient to listen; but she knew also that her mother and her sister were not extinguished, not at all. Now and then she heard her mother speak to her, not in a whisper but in a voice as distinct as Rosa the maid’s. Lou, she would say, my Lou. And nothing more. She was dead three years this summer, and already it seemed she always had been, though Lulu could remember a thousand things she’d done and said alive.

It’s just we two, her father said. He always said that, on these anniversary days. Soon though they would be away, away from Greenwood and Brooklyn, and at the shore in Peconic; and Lulu would bathe and sit on the porch of the lodge and read and think of nothing. It almost made her weep to envision it, and Herbert, misreading her ghost of a sob, pressed her hand and nodded in his big slow way.

 Was she cold-hearted? She wondered, then; she wondered sitting on the steps of the lodge at Peconic, the same cottage of a row of cottages to which they always came for Herbert’s summer holiday away from the city and the Eagle. The warped and salt-silvered boards of the porch were warm; Herbert was at ease in an Adirondack chair, feet bare and trousers rolled up, reading the Eagle (he had it sent out in the weeks they were there) and chuckling, maybe at one of his own comical squibs, which she couldn’t always get the point of. She had a book, The Cloister and the Hearth; she was hot all through, though that couldn’t prove she didn’t have a cold heart.

 Papa, let’s walk the beach, she said.  Ah darling, he said, turning a page. You go on. Later we’ll do a bit of bathing. Good for the skin.

 She got up in something of a huff — her father sat around too much for her — and set out down the beach path. On a bench there withered like an ancient being, for it too had suffered endless summers of salt air and sun, she sat and took off her shoes and stockings. She liked the heat of the sand, and liked when it turned cool where the tide had reached up and darkened it. Hot and then cool; cold, even, when the foam crossed her feet. The vast sky and the sea, like a platter and its cover, was calming in its indifference to her and to all those rushing into the waves and back out again, their black bathing costumes clinging to them. She felt — Herbert used the word this way — philosophical, as though nothing could touch her deeply.

  When they got back to Brooklyn, though, Lulu found a calling card in the box by the door. It was from Percy, and it asked, in a shy blue ink, if he might call upon her, at her convenience. There was an address and even a telephone number. Her heart felt gripped in terror: the card had been left more tha a week before. He would by now believe she had no interest in answering, and turned away. She thought for a moment she’d faint.

*

Of course she hadn’t believed that life was chance, and didn’t in her later married life. Percy, an engineer for the Interboro Rapid Transit Company that was building the underground train system, was sure that life is managed best by reason, study, and planning — though Lulu would quote Robert Burns to him about the best-laid plans of mice and men. As if in deference to all that is unpredictable and beyond the bounds of calculation, when an unlikely good or bad thing befell them he’d sigh and say Ah the checkered game of life, and Lulu would say so too.