“Yeah, a pervert. That he wanted to paint women naked in their stages of pregnancies. I think that’s what it was.”
“Oh, okay, thanks,” Bob said. And he thought: Phew.
After a moment Bob said, “Well, here’s a piece of news. Pam fell off the wagon.” And again, Jim surprised him by looking at Bob and saying with apparent real concern, “That’s too bad.” And then Jim stared straight in front of him as though thinking about this. “But just tell her to put her big-girl panties on and get back on the wagon.”
“I did,” Bob said.
“Oh man, I hope she can do it,” Susan said. “We had such a nice visit that morning when she came up here.”
“She’ll do it,” Jim said.
And then Susan turned to Jim and said, “Now listen, Jim. Just so you’re not taken by surprise. I probably shouldn’t tell you, but Larry and Ariel are going to ask you to go to some Caribbean island with them next month as a conciliatory birthday present to you.”
Jim looked at her, then out the window. “I’d rather slit my throat,” he finally said.
2
“Come in, come in,” Olive Kitteridge yelled from her wingback chair, and Lucy Barton came in, still wearing her puffy black coat even though April was almost over. She unzipped her boots and took them off, and took her coat off, then sat down on her coat, which she spread over the little couch.
“I’m ready. Let’s hear it.” Lucy clapped her hands twice.
Olive said with a nod, “Okay. Now, this is a love story.”
“And a loneliness story?” Lucy asked teasingly, and Olive held up a finger and said, “Oh, I suspect there was a lot of loneliness along the way, ay-yuh. Now hush up and listen.”
Lucy settled back on the hard little couch, sticking her feet forward. Her socks matched each other, Olive noticed. At least they were both a dark color.
“My first husband, Henry—” Olive pointed at the photograph of Henry there on the hutch. Lucy nodded. “My husband Henry had four aunts, and one of them was named Pauline. Now they all lived here in Maine—Henry’s grandmother had come over from England with her husband to start a tea shop in Portland—and after the grandmother died—all four of the girls adored their mother, by the way—after she died, these four sisters all stayed close to each other. Three of them lived right here in Crosby along some little road, one little house after another they lived in—when their husbands had died—are you following this?”
“Yes,” Lucy said. “Three old widows in little houses lined up on a little road.”
Olive said, “Good. Now, Pauline was slightly different. Pauline stayed in Portland her whole life, and oh, she would come to visit her sisters here in Crosby, but she had her life in Portland, and Pauline was— Well, she was a very lovely-looking woman. To be fair, all those girls were striking, but there was something a little different about Pauline. I wouldn’t call it an elegance, but she liked nice things, she always kept her figure, even when she got old, she had a small waist and full breasts and she dressed nicely. Not fancy. But just different from her sisters.
“Now, I got to thinking about Pauline the other night, who knows why. But I remembered this: When she was a young girl, I don’t think she was more than twenty years old, she taught for one year on an island off the coast, Cliff Island, in a tiny little one-room schoolhouse. And every morning a fisherman drove her in his boat to that island. Every morning.
“And—” Olive gave a meaningful nod. “She fell in love with him. And he fell in love with her.”
Lucy said, sitting forward, “Oh, I can picture this. A beautiful young woman with a sort of longish coat, and nice shoes, being helped into his boat each day, I mean he must have taken her arm to help her get in and out of the boat. Did he pick her up afterward as well?”
“Oh yes. Twice a day they saw each other.” Olive gave a firm nod of her head.
Lucy said, “Wait—was he married?”
Olive nodded again, and said, “He was. I think he was about ten years older than she was. And she was really quite in love with him, which of course her parents found out about, her mother must have known, because, as I said, they were all close to their mother. And so the minute school got out in June, they sent Pauline off to England for a year. Off Pauline went, back to England to cool her heels.”
Lucy waited and then she said, “So when she came back it was over?”
Olive nodded. “Ay-yuh. But there’s more to the story.”
“Tell me,” Lucy said.
“She came back, and she married a man who was—more than her sisters had married—a man of some money. He was invested in a grocery store, or a line of them, I guess. Anyway, Pauline came back and married this man and that was that. She did very well for herself.”
“That’s the story?”
“No,” Olive said. “The story is this—as far as I can see, the story is this—her husband, can’t remember his name, oh, it was Frank, Frank dropped dead of a heart attack in his early sixties.” Olive waited a moment, and then she said, “But my husband, at that point, had a boat. You know, not a big boat, but he had a boat, and a few years later he said to Pauline, ‘I’ll take you out to Cliff Island if you want to see that school again,’ and she said, Yes, she thought she would like to see it. She hadn’t been there for over forty years.
“I was there, I will never forget it, we drove in the boat with Aunt Pauline, well into her sixties herself by then, but healthy, you know. And pretty—as I’ve said—still an attractive woman with her white hair. And Henry dropped her off at the wharf, and he said, ‘We’ll just wait in the boat while you go see the schoolhouse’—which was no longer a schoolhouse. And we waited and we waited, and we waited, then Pauline finally came back, and she was very red in the face, and she said, ‘You’ll never believe who I saw.’ ”
Olive nodded and said, “It was that same fellow who had taken her to and from the island so many years ago.”
“Seriously?” Lucy asked.
“Perfectly seriously,” Olive said.
They were both quiet for a moment. Then Lucy said, “Did she say what they had talked about?”
And Olive said, “Not a word. But that woman sat in our boat with her face red as a ripe strawberry. She did not say one word. We dropped her off and she thanked us, and off she went.”
“Do you think she ever saw him again?” Lucy asked.
“Nope. Not that I know of. No, I don’t think she did.”
After a moment Lucy said, “I think she was right not to marry the fisherman. Back then a divorce would have been—you know, not good—and also you said she liked nice things. It’s hard to think of her with a fisherman.”
Olive shrugged. “Well, she didn’t marry him.”
Lucy asked, “Had she any kids with this husband of hers?”
