"Your mother used to do that when she was a little girl. Curl up into corners. I suppose it was because Stefan and I were forever taking her to places where we stayed longer than we thought we would. Sometimes days longer. Poor Katherine, we would find her curled in corners, fast asleep. Sometimes I think I was a bad mother." Tallie fitted a long cigarette into an even longer holder, and leaned forward to light it in the flame of the candle that still burned in its squat sculpted container on the table.
"Oh, you weren't, Tallie. I'm sure of it. Mom tells wonderful stories of her childhood."
Tallie smiled. "It's good having you here, Natalie. My Modigliani granddaughter. Do you think I look old?"
Her face was lined, and her hair was gray, but her eyes were dark and vivid, her mouth and hands alive and expressive. She was slender and small. "No," said Natalie honestly. "You don't even look old enough to be a grandmother, to me."
"Damn." Tallie laughed. "Thank you, I guess. But I am dying to be a fascinating old woman. Next year, perhaps."
She picked up the empty tea things and took them to the kitchen. "Let's go to bed now, Natalie," she called, "so that we can get up early tomorrow and have an all-day picnic. I'll take you to my favorite cove. How do you feel about going skinny-dipping in ice-cold water with an elderly friend?"
"I'll try anything once." Natalie laughed as she carried her backpack up the stairs.
11
"I WISH I didn't have to go back," said Natalie sadly as she walked with Tallie to the boat landing on Sunday afternoon.
"Stay, then. We'll pick wild strawberries and make jam."
Natalie sighed. "I have to work tomorrow. Dad needs me. And the next free weekend I have—"
"You're going to go to that place—what was the funny name it had?"
"Simmons' Mills."
"Simmons' Mills. Yes. You'll find things there that will surprise you, Natalie. You're not afraid of them, are you?"
Natalie laughed uncertainly but she said, "No. I think they'll probably be very ordinary things. Nothing to be afraid of."
Sonny, still buttoned up in his salt-stiffened jacket, helped her into the rugged little boat. She reached up and held Tallie's hand tightly for a moment; then Sonny revved the engine and the boat moved gently from the dock.
Tallie had wrapped her arms around herself to shield her body from the chilly wind that was lifting foam from the murky and turbulent water of the bay. Natalie watched her grandmother diminish in size as the Egret carried them steadily apart, until Tallie was no more than a speck on the outlined edge of the island dock, and then she was nothing at all as light gray fog appeared and blurred the transition between sky, land, and sea.
Natalie felt the edges of her backpack to assure herself that the small box Tallie had given her was still safely there. "Open it later," Tallie had said, "when you have time, and solitude. I don't know if it will help at all. But it will add another dimension. In art, it's important to find all the dimensions, even if you choose to discard some."
12
"MOM," said Natalie the following Tuesday evening, when she had come home exhausted from work and was resting in the kitchen with her shoes off, "why didn't you ever tell me that Tallie had been married before?"
Her mother was stirring spaghetti sauce. She put the lid back on the heavy cast-iron pot, and turned to Natalie with a puzzled, surprised look.
"Nat, you're not going to believe this. In fact, if I were you, I know I wouldn't believe it. But I forgot."
"You're right. I don't believe it."
"No, really. Of course, Stefan Chandler was my father. An incredible man. I so wish that you girls could have known him. And Tallie—my mother—did tell me that she'd been married before. I don't think she ever told me any of the details. It wasn't important. Tallie and Stefan were such a ... well, how can I describe it?...theirs was such a good marriage. It was as if they must always have been together. They adored each other. They adored me, too, when I came along, and they made me part of it, of whatever they had."
"And you really didn't remember about her first husband?"
"No. Not until you mentioned it. But now I remember that she showed me a clipping once, his obituary—"
"It was twelve inches long, she said."
"Leave it to Tallie to make an obituary sound mildly obscene!" Kay Armstrong sat down at the kitchen table and smiled. "What else did she tell you?"
Natalie grinned. "That she was a terrible mother, and you used to curl up in the corners of strange places and sleep because she forgot to put you to bed."
Her mother laughed affectionately. "Yes, I remember. She and Stefan used to take me everywhere. There were always loads of people—isn't it funny, how she's preferred solitude, since he's been dead?—and they would talk, and sing, and dance, and argue. After a while I would find myself a comfortable little spot somewhere and curl up, just the way she said.
"She's teasing, though, when she says she was a terrible mother. She was the best kind of mother. Did she tell you, though, that it hurt her dreadfully when I decided to marry?"
"It did? No, she didn't tell me that. Didn't she like Dad?"
"She does now. But then—well, I guess it was because he was so unlike Stefan. And Stefan had died only the year before. I think she hoped I would perpetuate that kind of wonderful crazy happiness by marrying someone exactly like him, so there would be three of us again."
"Was it hard for you, to disappoint her?"
Her mother thought. "No, strangely, it wasn't. Because I was all grown up then, and I knew what she wanted wasn't the same as what / wanted. I told her that. We were always very honest with each other. She understood. After a while, it was all right. She didn't tell you any of that?"
"Actually," said Natalie, "I guess she did. It was part of what she was saying."
13
TALLIE HAD SAID to wait until she had time, and solitude. They were both hard to come by. Her job took long hours of the day, frequently running over through dinnertime if there were patients still in the office; when she went home in the evenings, she went home still saturated with the burdens of other people's pain and with the stimulation of watching her father go about the intellectual and intuitive process of healing.