Olive Kitteridge (5 page)

“I see.” Mrs. Kitteridge nodded. “She could've been helped today. My father wasn't bipolar. He was depressed. And he never talked. Maybe they could've helped him today.”

Kevin was silent. And maybe they couldn't, he thought.

“My son. He's got the depression.”

Kevin looked at her. Small drops of perspiration had appeared in the pockets beneath her eyes. He saw that she did, in fact, look much older. Of course she wouldn't look the same as she had back then—the seventh-grade math teacher that kids were scared of. He'd been scared of her, even while liking her.

“What's he do?” Kevin asked.

“A podiatrist.”

He felt the stain of some sadness make its way from her to him. Gusts of wind were now swooping in all directions, so that the bay looked like a blue and white crazily frosted cake, peaks rising one way, then another. Poplar leaves beside the marina were fluttering upward, their branches all bent to one side.

“I've thought of you, Kevin Coulson,” she said. “I have.”

He closed his eyes. He could hear as she shifted her weight beside him, heard the gravel again on the rubber mat as her foot scraped over it. He was going to say
I don't want you thinking about me,
when she said, “I liked your mother.”

He opened his eyes. Patty Howe had stepped back out of the restaurant; she was walking toward the path in front of the place, and a nervousness touched his chest; it was sheer rock in front there, if he remembered right, a straight drop down. But she would know that.

“I know you did,” Kevin said, turning to the big, intelligent face of Mrs. Kitteridge. “She liked you.”

Olive Kitteridge nodded. “Smart. She was a smart woman.”

He wondered how long this would have to go on. And yet it meant something to him, that she had known his mother. In New York no one knew.

“Don't know if you know this or not, but that was the case with my father.”

“What was?” He frowned, passed his index knuckle briefly through his mouth.

“Suicide.”

He wanted her to leave; it was time for her to leave.

“Are you married?”

He shook his head.

“No, my son isn't either. Drives my poor husband nuts. Henry wants everyone married, everyone happy. I say, for God's sake, let him take his time. Up here the pickings can be slim. Down there in New York, I suppose you—”

“I'm not in New York.”

“Excuse me?”

“I'm not—I'm not in New York anymore.”

He could hear that she was about to ask something; he thought he could almost feel her desire to turn around and look at the backseat, see what was in his car. If she did, he would have to say he needed to go, ask her to leave. He watched from the corner of his eye, but she was still looking straight ahead.

Patty Howe, he saw, had shears in her hand. With her skirt blowing about her, she was standing by the rugosa, cutting some of the white blossoms. He kept his eye on Patty, the choppy bay spread out behind her. “How'd he do it?” He rubbed his hand over his thigh.

“My father? Shot himself.”

The moored sailboats now were heaving their bows high, then swooping back down as though pulled by an angry underwater creature. The white blossoms of the wild rugosa bent, straightened, bent again, the scraggly leaves around them bobbing as though they too were an ocean. He saw Patty Howe step back from them, and give her hand a shake, as though she had been pricked by the thorns.

“No note,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Oh, Mother had such a hard time with that no-note business. She thought the least he could've done was leave a note, the way he did if he'd walked to the grocery store. Mother would say, ‘He was always considerate enough to leave me a note when he went anywhere.' But he hadn't really gone anywhere. He was there in the kitchen, poor thing.”

“Do these boats ever get loose?” Kevin pictured his own childhood kitchen. He knew that a .22 caliber bullet could travel for one mile, go through nine inches of ordinary board. But after the roof of a mouth, the roof of a house—after that, how far did it go?

“Oh, sometimes. Not so much as you'd think, given how fierce these squalls can be. But every so often one does, you know—causes a ruckus. They have to go after it, hope it doesn't smash up on the rocks.”

“Then the marina gets sued for malpractice?” He said this to divert her.

“I don't know,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, “how they handle that kind of thing. Different insurance arrangements, I guess. Acts of negligence or acts of God.”

At the very moment Kevin became aware of liking the sound of her voice, he felt adrenaline pour through him, the familiar, awful intensity, the indefatigable system that wanted to endure. He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that parts of the water sparkled with frenzied gaiety.

“Unusual for a woman to use a gun,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, musingly.

He looked at her; she did not return the look, just gazed out at the swirling incoming tide. “Well, my mother was an unusual woman,” he said grimly.

“Yes,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “She was.”

         

When Patty Howe had gotten done with her shift, taken her apron off, and gone to hang it in the back room, she had seen through the dusty window the yellow daylilies that grew in the small patch of lawn on the far side of the marina. She pictured them in a jar next to her bed. “I'm disappointed too,” her husband had said, the second time, adding, “but I know it must feel like it happens just to you.” Her eyes moistened now, remembering this; a great swelling of love filled her. The lilies would not be missed. No one went to the far side of the marina, partly because the path that ran right in front was so narrow, the drop-off so steep. For insurance purposes the place had recently posted a
KEEP OUT
sign, and there was even talk of fencing it off before some small child, unwatched, scrambled off into the brush there. But Patty would just snip a few lilies and get going. She found the shears in a drawer and went out to get her bouquet, noticing when she stepped out that Mrs. Kitteridge had joined Kevin Coulson in the car, and it gave her a feeling of safety, having Mrs. Kitteridge with him. She couldn't have said why, and didn't dwell on it. The wind had picked up amazingly. She'd hurry and get her flowers, wrap them in a wet paper towel, and stop off by her mother's on the way home. She bent over the rugosa bushes first, thinking what a sweet combination the yellow and white would be, but they were alive in the wind and her fingers were pricked. She turned to start along the path to where the lilies were.

         

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.