When she finally looked over at Lucy, Lucy was watching her. Olive said, “What? What is it you’re thinking?”
“I’m thinking his father was probably more responsible for it than your mother.”
Olive thought about this, and then she said, “Well, two of his brothers died the same way.”
“They did? Then your mother couldn’t have been responsible.” Lucy let out a huge sigh and said, “But it’s a sad story. Carrying that clipping with her all her life.” She shook her head and said, “Jesus Christ. All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them.” Then she looked at Olive and said, “Sorry for swearing.”
“Phooey, swear all you want.” Olive added, “Well, that’s the story. I always wanted to tell someone. But for whatever reasons I never did.”
Lucy said, contemplatively, “I wonder how many people in long marriages live with ghosts beside them.”
“Henry and I never did.” Though as Olive said that she had a quick memory of Henry liking that foolish girl who worked with him for a while in the pharmacy, and she herself had been attracted to a man she taught with. But weren’t those tiny drops of oil in a fry pan? Not like the story she had just told.
So she looked at Lucy and told her about the nitwit girl that Henry had liked briefly, and the man she had been drawn to briefly.
And Lucy listened and said, “Yeah, that’s not the same thing. I mean, how long did those last?”
“Oh, not even a full year,” Olive said.
Lucy waved her hand. “Little infatuations, unacted-on crushes, they’re not like living with a ghost.” Then Lucy’s phone pinged, and she took it out of the pocket of her coat. She had to really squint at it, and she held it close to her eyes. “ ’Scuse me for just one minute. It’s Bob. He wants to know if we’re through. He picked me up at my studio to bring me here, and he’s going to pick me up now.”
“Well, I guess we’re through,” Olive said, though she was disappointed. She would have liked to talk to this Lucy Barton longer.
“Hold on, let me tell him.” Lucy squinted hard and punched her phone with her fingers and then slipped it back into the pocket of her coat, looking over at Olive then.
“Awful glad to talk with you,” Olive said, and Lucy said, “Yeah, it was great.” She smiled, and what a difference that made to her face! Why, she was almost a pretty little thing! “Really great,” Lucy repeated.
Olive said, “Glad you have Bob as a friend. A good friend makes all the difference. I have a friend, Isabelle Goodrow—”
But Lucy’s face had grown pink again. She said, “His wife, Margaret, she’s a good person too.”
“Never took to her myself. There’s nothing wrong with her. Except that she’s a minister.”
Lucy said, “No, she’s a really good person.” Then she said, “You know, Bob is the main reason I—” She stopped herself. “The reason I got to meet you.”
But when the knock came on the door and Bob Burgess walked in, Olive saw something. She saw Bob’s face, how he looked at Lucy. He was in love with her, and when Lucy looked up at him from the couch, her face changed so radically, it became so soft and happy-looking, and she said, “Hi, Bob.”
“How’d it go?” Bob asked, looking at Olive, then back at Lucy.
“Success,” Olive said.
2
But—Olive Kitteridge was wrong about Bob and Lucy. They were friends, and that was all. They were old enough to be grateful for this friendship that had arrived in their later years, and both Margaret and William were glad for the friendship of these two as well; it made their lives even more comfortable to have their partners have a friend to really talk with.
It felt to both Bob and Lucy that they had known each other far longer than they actually had.
Here is an example of their friendship: Bob had become a (secret) smoker again. After having smoked for much of his life, he had quit when he met Margaret, now almost fifteen years ago, but during the pandemic he started to smoke (secretly) one cigarette a day, and then it went to two. Lucy knew this about him, Margaret did not. That’s all. It was innocent, because both Bob and Lucy were—in a strange, indefinable way—innocent people.
—
It may be helpful at this point to speak briefly of Bob’s background, and of Lucy’s. Bob had grown up a Congregationalist; he was the product of a long line of Mainers, going back on his father’s side to the Puritans who had left England for Massachusetts because their religious practices were so extreme. These original Puritans were against almost everything—it seemed to Bob—except hard work. They were against music and theater because those excited the senses; even a celebration of Christmas was frowned upon. Bob had had an ancestor who was hanged as a witch, and he recoiled at most of these circumstances from which he had come. Also—and this is important to understand about Bob—the Puritans were very much against calling attention to oneself in any way. Generations of genes had not made much progress in taking away this particular aspect of Bob. His ancestry had shaped Bob, as these things do.
Lucy came from a similar cultural background; she had gone to the Congregational church in her Midwestern town for Thanksgivings. Her childhood had been especially difficult: She had come from such extreme poverty—and strangeness—that her family had been completely ostracized by their town. Her mother never touched her children except in violence, and her father had an anxiety left from World War II that manifested itself in frequent sexual urges, although he never approached his children in this manner. And yet Lucy had loved both her parents in an achingly poignant way. But her childhood had been challenging.
The real point here is—if we consider these things, and we should—that Lucy’s ancestors had been similar to Bob’s. They had come ashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then traveled to the Midwest, as—as her mother once told her—“the brave ones did.”
Margaret Estaver had been raised a Catholic before becoming the Unitarian minister that she now was, and William had been raised a Lutheran, as his father had come over from Germany after the war. We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they may not be completely so. We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.
*
Lucy, with her hands in the pockets of her blue and black plaid coat, went with Bob to his car after her visit to Olive, and she said, “Oh, let’s take a walk!” So she and Bob drove down to the river, which was beautiful because of all the yellow leaves and blasting sunshine. When they got out of the car and started to walk, Bob asked if Olive had been unpleasant to Lucy, and Lucy said, “Yeah, at first. But I understood she was just frightened, and then she got over it.”
“Olive frightened?” Bob asked, and Lucy looked at him and said, “Yes, frightened, Bob. She’s a bully, and bullies are always frightened. I liked her, though, and she ended up liking me.” Lucy told Bob the story that Olive had told her. “Heartbreaking, right?” Lucy asked, looking over at Bob, and Bob said, Yeah, it really was.
“It made me cry,” Lucy said.
“It did?” Bob turned to look at her.
“Yeah, it did. These four people, whose lives have never been recorded, living through such a—oh, I don’t know—such a true situation. Both couples living with a ghost in their marriage. That’s sad, Bob.”
Bob nodded, and then after a moment he asked, “How is Chrissy doing? And little Aiden?” Lucy’s daughter Chrissy had recently given birth to a baby boy, but Chrissy had been suffering from postpartum depression and Lucy had been worried about her.
“Much better, I think. And Aiden’s fine.”
Then Lucy said how her other daughter, Becka, who had recently finalized her divorce from her poet husband, Trey—Bob knew that part already—had decided that Trey was a narcissist. Becka had been talking a lot about this to Lucy: the traits of a narcissist. “So I’ve read the stuff she sent me, and I have to agree with her. I think she’s trying, as they say, to process the whole thing.” Lucy shrugged and said with a sigh, “Oh, who knows.”
But here was something funny: Bob felt an uneasiness, and he remembered then how when he had first met Margaret, a disturbed parishioner of hers, a man, had said to Bob, “She’s such a narcissist.” It was a terrible thing for this person to say to Bob, and he thought he had forgotten about it, but it came back to him now as Lucy listed some of the characteristics of a narcissist.
