Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
"Gone? Where?"
"Oh, nowhere! Everywhere. Wherever people disperse to, like milkweed fluff, when they go."
Katya wasn't sure that she liked this. Gone? Everyone?
Gaily Mr. Kidder ushered them into the house. Firmly Mr. Kidder shut the door.
A heavy oak door. Katya wondered if it automatically locked, inside.
As Mr. Kidder chattered, a flush rising into his cheeks, Katya smiled uncertainly, gripping Tricia by the hand. Maybe this was a mistake and she was putting these helpless young children at risk ... With a flurry of his hands, as if to dispel such ridiculous thoughts, Mr. Kidder said, "My fickle houseguests have departed for the city just this morning, you see. Not that I wanted them to stay, nooo! For I knew that Katya, Tricia, and Ke
vin
were imminent. And so the house looms large and empty as a—we will not say
mausoleum.
No, no! We
will not.
And Mrs. Bee—dear Mrs. Bee—has Mondays off and has quite
buzzed away.
"
Houseguests? Mrs. Bee? Katya knew what
mausoleum
meant and hoped that Tricia wouldn't repeat the word later that day, as children of her age sometimes did, like parrots. So far as she could see from the foyer, the enormous house did appear to be empty: rooms opening onto rooms, hallways leading into hallways, as in a maze of mirrors infinitely reflecting. "I had not expected visitors this afternoon," Mr. Kidder said somberly, "though last night there was a moon, and this moon peeked into my bedroom window and said, 'Whatever you do, M.K.'—for, from the lunar perspective, we are no more than our initials—'do not eat up all those delicious strawberries in the refrigerator,' and I asked why, and the moon winked and said, 'You will see, M.K.' And now my special visitors have arrived, I see."
This spirited little speech was delivered for Tricia's benefit, but it was Katya for whom Mr. Kidder was performing, she thought. By quick degrees he was becoming increasingly confident, like an actor now recalling lines and no longer flailing about, blinded by the spotlight.
"This way! We will have tea on the terrace."
The first thing you saw, stepping into the living room of Mr. Kidder's house, was the far wall, entirely glass, overlooking the ocean in the near distance. For at this elevation on Proxmire Street you couldn't see the beach; if anyone was on the beach below, you couldn't see them; you saw only dunes, dune grass, the choppy ocean, the distant horizon. You saw the sky, which was a faint, misty blue, and a sickle moon just visible by daylight.
Katya felt something turn in her heart: a stab of hurt, envy. "This is so beautiful, Mr...." She seemed to have forgotten Mr. Kidder's name. She could not help it that the flat nasal accent of south Jersey had an accusing tone even when meant to be admiring.
Graciously Mr. Kidder said that beauty is a matter of "seeing"—"seeing with fresh eyes, with the eyes of youth." So long he'd been spending summers at the Jersey shore in this house, as a child, as an adult, from June through Labor Day, he no longer saw what was.
He led them outside, onto a flagstone terrace. Here it was windy, much cooler than it had been on the street. And here even more beautiful: the view of the dunes, the rolling white-capped waves.
At the Bayhead Harbor Yacht Club beach there were usually so many other people around, Katya was distracted. Now she settled Tricia into a chair and saw that baby Kevin was comfortable sucking on his pacifier. She'd have to inform Mrs. Engelhardt of this visit, she supposed, since Tricia, who chattered about the least little thing encountered on their outings, would surely tell her. Shrewdly, Katya thought there might be a way—she would find a way—to suggest that there'd been other guests at Mr. Kidder's "tea-time," Mr. Kidder's housekeeper at least.
Katya helped Mr. Kidder bring things out to the terrace, for the white-haired man was obviously unaccustomed to such practical tasks as setting a table and serving food. Katya took from Mr. Kidder's uncertain hand a heavy cut-glass pitcher of lemonade, and deftly she spooned strawberries and sherbet into shallow cut-glass bowls. Out of a baker's box she took vanilla wafers and arranged them on a plate. She was amused to see that while Mr. Kidder had been out of her sight he'd tucked his shirt more firmly into the baggy khaki shorts and he'd tried to tamp down his unruly hair. And possibly he'd taken a quick sip of something that smelled sweetly tart on his breath, like red wine.
Mr. Kidder sat at the head of a heavy white wrought-iron table, beaming at his guests. "I'd about given up, you know. I'd begun to think that our little Tricia preferred those noisy old geese with their messy ways to Marcus Kidder."
Their tea-time passed in this way, Mr. Kidder addressing Tricia or the baby, all the while glancing sidelong at Katya, as if there were an intimate rapport between them that didn't require overt acknowledgment. Katya considered asking him for a glass of wine. No doubt he'd have been disapproving. Yet intrigued. Katya was what the law calls a minor—it was a felony in New Jersey to serve liquor to a minor, even unknowingly. How strange it was to be sitting close beside this stranger, at an elegant wrought-iron table that must have weighed a hundred pounds, on chairs so heavy Katya could scarcely budge them; strange, and not strange, that their knees should touch beneath the table, accidentally.
This was quite the most exciting event of Katya Spivak's summer, so far. She was feeling a thrill of pride, a wave of childlike happiness, that she was here: at this table, on this terrace at
17
Proxmire Street, overlooking the open ocean; she, whose father had been a part-owner of a garage in Vineland, with his brothers, before he'd lost his share of the property and disappeared. Katya Spivak in "historic" Bayhead Harbor, being treated so politely, so graciously, by a rich old white-haired man named Kidder.
She would have liked to tell her mother, her older sisters, her brothers, and her cousins, who would envy her.
Boys she knew. One or two older boys, in Vineland.
This house! You would not believe. On the ocean, worth millions of dollars, the owner has to be a millionaire
...
"And what are you thinking about, dear Katya? You seem to have drifted off."
In the wind Mr. Kidder's hair looked as if it were being roughly caressed by agitated hands. The wind was taking their breath away. Katya said she was thinking she'd like a glass of wine. If Mr. Kidder had wine ... Seeing his startled expression, Katya laughed.
"I'm afraid—no. I don't have any wine. And if I did, my dear, I wouldn't be so reckless as to give some to
you.
"
Meaning,
You are underage. You are off-limits.
The wind! Tricia squealed as her napkin went fluttering and flying across the terrace like a live thing, and Katya jumped up to retrieve it. She saw Mr. Kidder's eyes trail over her tanned legs, the curve of her hips in the denim cutoffs. Thin streaks of cloud passed over the sun; there was a mild chill. Mr. Kidder said apologetically, "We should move inside, I think! It's one of those capricious days. Warm—now not so warm. And I have presents for you, dear Tricia and dear Katya, I dare not forget."
Presents! Tricia was thrilled. Katya smiled guardedly.
"Yes, we should go inside," Katya said. "We should be leaving soon, I think. Mrs. Engelhardt will be expecting us back..."
Was this true? Often when Katya returned to the split-level house on the channel, Mrs. Engelhardt's SUV was gone and only the Hispanic housekeeper was there.
Katya helped Mr. Kidder carry the tea things back into the house, into the largest kitchen she'd ever seen. He led her then into a room that was a kind of studio, overlooking the terrace from another angle, with lattice windows, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a sofa covered in brightly colored upholstery. The room smelled of paint and turpentine; in a corner was an easel, and on the floor a paint-splattered tarpaulin; against a wall, stacks of unframed canvases. On the walls were works of art—paintings, pastel drawings—portraits of women, girls, young children. So Mr. Kidder was an artist! When Katya complimented him on his work, which was impressive to her, with a smile he asked if she'd like to pose for him sometime.
"Pose? Like for a ... portrait?"
"Depending on the results, portraits."
Meaning more than one? Katya was made to feel confused, uncertain. Those icy blue eyes were fixed upon her so intently. "When would I have time, Mr. Kidder? You know that I'm a nanny—my work hours are dawn to dusk."
She meant to be funny. Though what she said was true, essentially. She had two half-days off, Wednesday, Sunday, and even after dusk, after feeding the Engelhardt children, bathing them, and preparing them for bed, she felt, in a far corner of the house with no view of the channel, that she was expected to remain on duty.
"What about dusk, then? Night?"
Katya laughed uneasily, supposing that Mr. Kidder must be joking and not knowing how to reply.
While Mr. Kidder turned to Tricia, Katya drifted about the studio. So much to look at! She liked it that Mr. Kidder's furniture did not resemble the stark angular sculpted things in Hilbreth Home Furnishings, and she liked it that there were so many books on the shelves (books were a comfort to her), so many small carvings, vases and urns, glass flowers. Light struck and illuminated these flowers like flame.
Mr. Kidder was presenting Tricia with a gift: a children's picture book titled
Funny Bunny's Birthday Party,
with which Tricia was delighted. Katya glanced about, still uneasy: was there a present for her?
There didn't seem to be. Mr. Kidder was absorbed in Tricia, turning pages of the book for her, reading aloud. Katya stared at the glass flowers. She'd never seen anything like these flowers before. None seemed to resemble real flowers, or at least flowers familiar to her; their stalks and leaves were varying degrees of green, but their petals were the most exquisite colors, flaming crimson, iridescent purple, gold-striped, grotesquely shaped. There were petals that resembled tentacles and petals that resembled nerve filaments. Stamens that resembled tongues, pistils like eyes. Katya stared at a large flesh-colored peonylike flower that mimicked a seashell, or—she didn't want to think—the smooth hairless vagina of a young girl. With a nervous laugh, she asked, "Who made these, Mr. Kidder?" and Mr. Kidder solemnly bowed, with a sad-clown smirk: "M.K.—in a lyric phase of long ago. My 'fossil flowers.'"
Katya asked what a fossil flower was, and Mr. Kidder said that they were glass replicas of "long-extinct flowers" he'd become interested in as a young man. He got to his feet and came to stand beside Katya—close beside her. "Some of these will look familiar to you—they resemble flowers living today. These orchids, for instance. And this is an early ancestor of rose pogonia." The glass flowers were displayed in clusters, in vases; they were scattered through the room, and there were more than Katya had originally thought. She asked Mr. Kidder how glass could be sculpted—wouldn't it break? And Mr. Kidder smiled at her as if she'd said something clever. "Not in its molten state, Katya. Before we are sculpted, we are pliable raw material." She'd asked a stupid question, Katya understood. Of course, she knew that glass was "molten"—liquid.
In her embarrassment she pretended to be examining a bizarrely shaped flower with fat, sawtoothed petals, very sharp to the touch, and winced when she saw that she'd actually cut herself, a fine, near-invisible wound like a paper cut, which she managed to hide from Mr. Kidder. She was noticing that many of the fossil flowers, beautiful at a short distance, were finely cracked and covered in a thin film of dust. Not what you'd call dirty, not grimy, but not clean either. Such fragile things weren't practical. Living with them at close quarters, day after day, you couldn't keep them up; finally you'd resent them. Not even Mr. Kidder's housekeeper, Mrs. Bee, could keep his fossil flowers clean.
Mr. Kidder seemed just to have made this discovery, too. He'd wet his forefinger and was wiping at petals, frowning. "Beautiful useless things! I've ruined my life with them, who knows why. I was married once—in fact, I was married twice—to beauties. Beauty is my folly, and why? Freud said, 'Beauty has no discernible use. Yet without it, life would be unbearable.'"
Katya sucked surreptitiously at her finger, where the thin cut oozed a thin sliver of blood. Mr. Kidder took no notice. Mr. Kidder was brooding over the glass flowers and had spoken with unexpected feeling, almost bitterly. Katya didn't want their comical/ dignified host to be suddenly serious, or sad. She said, to cheer the old man up, "Mr. Kidder, there isn't a thing in those stores on Ocean Avenue anything like these flowers. If I could make anything so beautiful ever in my life, I'd be so happy. I would never be unhappy or depressed again."
Mr. Kidder was smiling at her indulgently, with bemused eyes. "You, Katya, depressed, unhappy—my dear, that's hard to believe."
Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew. Katya thought,
He will give me one of the fossil flowers
—
that will be my reward.
But Mr. Kidder seemed preoccupied and did not offer Katya one of the fossil flowers. She was disappointed, and she was hurt. Suddenly she wanted to be gone from
17
Proxmire Street.
The baby had wakened from his light doze and began to fret. No doubt his diaper was soaked. Katya must get him home quickly and change his diaper. "Goodbye, Mr. Kidder! Thank you for having us for tea-time."
"Katya, dear! Wait." Mr. Kidder roused himself to protest as Katya gathered up Tricia and adjusted the baby in his stroller. "I have something for you." But then he couldn't seem to find it, opening drawers, rummaging about on a shelf, sucking at his lips in old-man agitation. And then a tinsel-wrapped package was thrust into Katya's hands: a pink box from Prim Rose Lane Lingerie & Nightwear. Katya opened the package and saw inside not the little-girl white muslin nightgown but the sexy red lace camisole and matching red lace panties.