“Well, good,” Olive said, and Lucy shook her head slowly and said, “No, it was really sad.”
Olive rolled her eyes.
Lucy said, “Go back to your story. So your mother died. At Ardele’s house,” she added, and that pleased Olive, that Lucy Barton had remembered that detail.
“Yes, she died at Ardele’s house, and in her handbag—” Olive shifted slightly in her chair and leaned forward. “In her handbag, when I went through it, I found a tattered old clipping. It was not in her wallet but slipped into a little pocket on the inside of her handbag that zipped shut. A newspaper clipping. Now, back then, at that time, when someone of so-called importance came to town there would be a silly little newspaper article about it. And this clipping was dated from back when Mother would have been married about seven years and already had her two daughters. And the clipping was this.”
A small newspaper article in the Shirley Falls Journal—with a photograph—saying that Dr. Stephen Turner—son of Blah-blah and the late Blah-blah Mr. Turner—and his wife, Ruth, had come to town with their daughters. Stephen Turner was a doctor in Boston, his wife, Ruth, was the daughter of some hoity-toity in the Boston area, and they also had two very small girls who were also in the photograph.
—
The girls’ names were Olive and Isa.
—
Olive waited.
Then Lucy said, “Oh my God.” And Olive nodded her head. Lucy began tapping her knees together, and she looked around the room, her hands on the sofa. “Oh my God,” she repeated, looking at Olive now, and again Olive gave a small nod.
“Ay-yuh,” Olive said.
“So your mother kept that clipping her whole life.”
“She did.”
“And his kids had the same names as you and your sister.”
“That’s right.”
Lucy shook her head slowly. “So your mother and Stephen Turner must have spoken of the names they wanted to call their kids.”
“Well, I did wonder about that,” Olive said.
“You should wonder about that.” Lucy sat forward. “It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence, the names are too unique.” One of Lucy’s hands moved as she said slowly, with a sense of wonder, “They talked with each other about what to name their kids. And of course Ruth, the man’s wife, never knew that. No woman would name her kids the same names that her husband had planned to name his children with a previous girlfriend.”
“Well, this is what I thought—”
But Lucy continued. “So for the rest of their married lives they were never in touch, your mother and Dr. Stephen Turner?”
“Oh no, I don’t think so. No, no, I don’t think that was ever part of the story.”
Lucy nodded. “Probably not.”
Lucy sat back and looked straight in front of her, and then she looked down at her hands, and finally when she looked back at Olive her eyes were very red. And then tears came out of her eyes. Tears!
“I thought you never cried. Isn’t that what you wrote in your memoir?” Olive said.
“I think I wrote that it was hard for me to cry.” Lucy was looking through her coat pocket. “Right there,” Olive said, pointing to the table at the other end of the couch, and Lucy got up and took a tissue and sat back down.
“Now, why is this making you cry?” Olive really wanted to know.
“Because it’s such a sad story!”
“Well, it’s an interesting story. At least to me.”
“Mrs. Kitteridge, this is a sad story.”
Olive looked out the window again. “Yes, I guess it is.”
“It’s sad because your mother and this Stephen fellow—they were really in love. They were young and deeply in love—talking about what to name their kids—and his mother breaks them up and they never forget each other. So the whole time your mother is married to your father, every time he does something she doesn’t like, she thinks of Stephen and how wonderful he would have been in that situation. And Stephen’s wife, this Ruth woman—the same thing, probably. Every time she disappointed him, he would think of his pretty, cheerful Sara and what a life together they might have had. So both these couples lived their entire lives with these ghosts in the room. And that is sad. Sad for everybody, but especially for your father and Ruth, who didn’t even know they were living with these ghosts.”
Lucy was no longer crying. But she wiped her nose with the tissue.
Olive said, “My parents did not have a happy marriage. Father would try and please her, but she was not to be pleased. He would go and get her every week during the Depression, she taught three towns away, and he was the one to take care of us when we were little, and he would go and get Mother in his old beat-up truck that was always breaking down, every Friday afternoon, and one time he stopped and picked her a bouquet of mayflowers. And I don’t think she even cared.”
Lucy was sitting far back on the uncomfortable couch, her skinny legs stretched out in front of her. And then she sat back up.
“What are mayflowers?” she asked.
“Oh—” Olive looked around the room and then she said, “They’re a wildflower that you find in the darker parts of the pine forests, and Father had stopped by the side of the road and gone into the woods and picked her a little bouquet of them.”
“How do you know your mother didn’t care? Did your father tell you that?”
Olive considered this. “In my memory Mother told me, and she said it—oh, not exactly disrespectfully—but as though she didn’t care. As though he would think it might help them, but what were mayflowers going to do? That’s how I always understood it.”
Lucy tapped her hand against her mouth. Finally she said, “So do you blame your father’s suicide on your mother?”
Olive felt a small stinging in her chest. She looked straight ahead and said nothing for a long time, and then she said, “Yes, privately I have.”
