Olive Kitteridge (31 page)

Back in New York, calling from my twenty-sixth-floor apartment one evening, watching through the window as dusk touched the city and lights emerged like fireflies in the fields of buildings spread out before me, I said, “Do you remember when Bob's mother sent him to a shrink? Kids talked about it on the playground. ‘Bobby Burgess has to see a doctor for mentals.'”

“Kids are awful,” my mother said. “Honest to God.”

“It was a long time ago,” I offered. “No one up there went to a psychiatrist.”

“That's changed,” my mother said. “People I go square-dancing with, they have kids who see therapists and they all seem to be on some pill. I must say, no one keeps quiet about it either.”

“So you remember the Burgess father?” I had asked her this before. We did this kind of thing, repeated the stuff we knew.

“I do. Tall, I remember. Worked at the mill. A foreman, I think. And then she was left all alone.”

“And she never married again.”

“Never married again,” my mother said. “I don't know what her chances were back then. Three little kids. Jim, Bob, and Sue.”

The Burgess house had been about a mile from the center of town. A small house, but most of the houses in that part of Shirley Falls were small, or not big. The house was yellow, and it sat on a hill with a field on one side that in spring was so richly green I remember wishing as a child I could be a cow so I could munch all day on the moist grass, it seemed that scrumptious. The field by the Burgess place didn't have cows, or even a vegetable garden, just that little sense of farmland near town. In the summer Mrs. Burgess was sometimes in the front yard, dragging a hose around a bush, but since the house was on a hill she always seemed remote and small, and she didn't answer my father's wave whenever we drove by, I assume because she didn't see it.

People think of towns as bubbling with gossip, but when I was a child I seldom heard grown-ups talking about other families, and the Burgess situation was absorbed the way other tragedies were, like poor Bunny Fogg who fell down her cellar stairs and didn't get discovered for three days, or Mrs. Hammond getting a brain tumor just as her kids left for college, or crazy Annie Day who pulled her dress up in front of boys even though she was almost twenty and still in high school. It was the children—we younger ones especially—who were gossips, and unkind. The grown-ups were strict in setting us straight, so if a child on the playground was overheard saying that Bobby Burgess “was the one who killed his father” or “had to see a doctor for mentals,” the offender was sent to the principal's office, the parents were called, and snacks were withheld at snack time. This didn't happen often.

Jim Burgess was ten years older than I, which made him seem as far away as someone famous, and he kind of was, even back then: He was a football player and president of his class, and really nice looking with his dark hair, but he was serious too, I remember him as someone whose eyes never smiled. Bobby and Susan were younger than Jim, and at different times babysat for my sisters and me. Susan didn't pay much attention to us, although one day she decided we were laughing at her and she took away the animal crackers that my mother always left for us when my parents went out. In protest, one of my sisters locked herself in the bathroom, and Susan yelled at her that she'd call the police. What happened is not anything I remember except there were no police, and my mother was surprised to see the animal crackers still there when she got home. A few times Bobby babysat, and he would take turns carrying us on his back. You could tell you were clinging to someone kind and good, the way he kept saying, turning his head partway, “You okay? You all right?” Once, when one of my sisters was running in the driveway and tripped and skinned her knee, we could see that Bobby felt terrible. His big hand washed it off. “Ah, you're a brave girl. You'll be all right.”

Grown, my sisters moved to Massachusetts. But I went to New York, and my parents were not happy: It was a betrayal to a New England lineage that stretched back to the 1600s. My ancestors had been scrappy and survived a great deal, my father said, but they had never stepped into the cesspool of New York. I married a New Yorker—a gregarious, wealthy Jewish man, and this exacerbated things. My parents did not visit often. I think the city frightened them. I think my husband seemed a foreigner and that frightened them, and I think my children frightened them; bold and spoiled they must have appeared, with their messy rooms and plastic toys, and later their pierced noses and blue and purple hair. So there were years of bad feelings between us.

But when my husband died the same year my last child left for college, my mother, widowed herself the year before, came down to New York and stroked my forehead as she had done when I was little and sick with a bug, and said she was sorry I had lost both father and husband within such a short time. “What can I do for you?”

I was lying on my couch. “Tell me a story,” I said.

She moved to the chair near the window. “Well, let's see. Susan Burgess's husband's left her and moved to Sweden, I guess he had ancestors there calling to him, who knows. He came from up north in that tiny town of New Sweden, remember. Before he went down to the university. Susan still lives in Shirley Falls, with that one son.”

“Is she still pretty?” I asked.

“Not a bit.”

And so it began. Like a cat's cradle connecting my mother to me, and me to Shirley Falls, bits of gossip and news and memories about the lives of the Burgess kids supported us. We reported and repeated. I told my mother again about the time I had come across Helen Burgess, Jim's wife, when they lived, as I once did, in the neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn: The Burgesses moved there from Hartford after the Packer trial, Jim taking a job with a large firm in Manhattan.

My husband and I one night found ourselves dining near Helen and a friend in a Park Slope café, and we stopped near Helen's table as we were leaving. I'd had some wine—I suppose that's why I stopped—and I said to her that I'd come from the same town Jim had grown up in. Something happened to Helen's face that stayed with me. A look of quick fear seemed to pass over it. She asked my name and I told her, and she said Jim had never mentioned me. No, I was younger, I said. And then she arranged her cloth napkin with a little shake, and said, “I haven't been up there in years. Nice to meet you both. Bye-bye.”

My mother thought that Helen could have been friendlier that night. “She came from money, remember. She'd think she was better than someone from Maine.” This sort of remark was one I had learned to let go; I no longer bothered myself with the defensiveness of my mother and her Maine.

But after Susan Burgess's son did what he did—after the story about him had been in the newspapers, even in
The New York Times
, and on television too—I said on the phone to my mother, “I think I'm going to write the story of the Burgess kids.”

“It's a good one,” she agreed.

“People will say it's not nice to write about people I know.”

My mother was tired that night. She yawned. “Well, you don't know them,” she said. “Nobody ever knows anyone.”

 

On a breezy October afternoon in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, Helen Farber Burgess was packing for vacation. A big blue suitcase lay open on the bed, and clothes her husband had chosen the night before were folded and stacked on the lounge chair nearby. Sunlight kept springing into the room from the shifting clouds outside, making the brass knobs on the bed shine brightly and the suitcase become very blue. Helen was walking back and forth between the dressing room—with its enormous mirrors and white horsehair wallpaper, the dark woodwork around the long window—walking between that and the bedroom, which had French doors that were closed right now, but in warmer weather opened onto a deck that looked out over the garden. Helen was experiencing a kind of mental paralysis that occurred when she packed for a trip, so the abrupt ringing of the telephone brought relief. When she saw the word
PRIVATE
, she knew it was either the wife of one of her husband's law partners—they were a prestigious firm of famous lawyers—or else her brother-in-law, Bob, who'd had an unlisted number for years but was not, and never would be, famous at all.

“I'm glad it's you,” she said, pulling a colorful scarf from the bureau drawer, holding it up, dropping it on the bed.

“You are?” Bob's voice sounded surprised.

“I was afraid it would be Dorothy.” Walking to the window, Helen peered out at the garden. The plum tree was bending in the wind, and yellow leaves from the bittersweet swirled across the ground.

“Why didn't you want it to be Dorothy?”

“She tires me right now,” said Helen.

“You're about to go away with them for a week.”

“Ten days. I know.”

A short pause, and then Bob said, “Yeah,” his voice dropping into an understanding so quick and entire—it was his strong point, Helen thought, his odd ability to fall feetfirst into the little pocket of someone else's world for those few seconds. It should have made him a good husband but apparently it hadn't: Bob's wife had left him years ago.

“We've gone away with them before,” Helen reminded him. “It'll be fine. Alan's an awfully nice fellow. Dull.”

“And managing partner of the firm,” Bob said.

“That too.” Helen sang the words playfully. “A little difficult to say, ‘Oh, we'd rather go alone on this trip.' Jim says their older girl is really messing up right now—she's in high school—and the family therapist suggested that Dorothy and Alan get away. I don't know why you ‘get away' if your kid's messing up, but there we are.”

“I don't know either,” Bob said sincerely. Then: “Helen, this thing just happened.”

She listened, folding a pair of linen slacks. “Come on over,” she interrupted. “We'll go across the street for dinner when Jim gets home.”

After that she was able to pack with authority. The colorful scarf was included with three white linen blouses and black ballet flats and the coral necklace Jim had bought her last year. Over a whiskey sour with Dorothy on the terrace, while they waited for the men to shower from golf, Helen would say, “Bob's an interesting fellow.” She might even mention the accident—how it was Bob, four years old, who'd been playing with the gears that caused the car to roll over their father and kill him; the man had walked down the hill of the driveway to fix something about the mailbox, leaving all three young kids in the car. A perfectly awful thing. And never mentioned. Jim had told her once in thirty years. But Bob was an anxious man, Helen liked to watch out for him.

“You're rather a saint,” Dorothy might say, sitting back, her eyes blocked by huge sunglasses.

Helen would shake her head. “Just a person who needs to be needed. And with the children grown—” No, she'd not mention the children. Not if the Anglins' daughter was flunking courses, staying out until dawn. How would they spend ten days together and not mention the children? She'd ask Jim.

Helen went downstairs, stepped into the kitchen. “Ana,” she said to her housekeeper, who was scrubbing sweet potatoes with a vegetable brush. “Ana, we're going to eat out tonight. You can go home.”

The autumn clouds, magnificent in their variegated darkness, were being spread apart by the wind, and great streaks of sunshine splashed down on the buildings on Seventh Avenue. This is where the Chinese restaurants were, the card shops, the jewelry shops, the grocers with the fruits and vegetables and rows of cut flowers. Bob Burgess walked past all these, up the sidewalk in the direction of his brother's house.

Bob was a tall man, fifty-one years old, and here was the thing about Bob: He was a likeable fellow. To be with Bob made people feel as if they were inside a small circle of us-ness. If Bob had known this about himself his life might have been different. But he didn't know it, and his heart was often touched by an undefined fear. Also, he wasn't consistent. Friends agreed that you could have a great time with him and then you'd see him again and he'd be vacant. This part Bob knew, because his former wife had told him. Pam said he went away in his head.

“Jim gets like that too,” Bob had offered.

“We're not talking about Jim.”

Waiting at the curb for the light to change, Bob felt a swell of gratitude toward his sister-in-law, who'd said, “We'll go across the street for dinner when Jim gets home.” It was Jim he wanted to see. What Bob had watched earlier, sitting by the window in his fourth-floor apartment, what he had heard in the apartment down below—it had shaken him, and crossing the street now, passing a coffee shop where young people sat on couches in cavernous gloom with faces mesmerized by laptop screens, Bob felt removed from the familiarity of all he walked by. As though he had not lived half his life in New York and loved it as one would a person, as though he had never left the wide expanses of wild grass, never known or wanted anything but bleak New England skies.