Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [53]
I remember looking in the kitchen for a glass one morning. Instead, I found vases and, attached to the inside of the white cabinet door, an unlined index card in her hand—which flowers in which vase in which room. It surprised me. When I saw a small carafe of sweet peas or a clutch of dahlias in a room, it seemed unplanned—as though they had just happened there, as though they belonged. Or there’d be a path that appeared to go nowhere, but when you reached the meandering end, you felt its purpose. What seemed happenstance was crafted, chosen by her unerring artist’s eye.
Dinners were announced in the Barn by a buzz on the intercom, and showered and changed, we’d gather in the main house. No matter how glorious the day had been, this was the time I loved best. The dining room was simple: a plank pine table with candles sheltered by hurricane glass, a framed schooner above the mantel, and Windsor chairs. She sat at one end, and Maurice, with his back to the window, sat at the other. Nothing was formal on those nights when her table was full—it was happy and festive, although she rang a small silver bell between courses and placed each of her guests with a seer’s sense of how the conversation would flow.
She was curious about John’s friends and could pry a witticism from even the most tongue-tied. Talk centered on the day’s exploits, a bird that was spotted, current events, a book read, an exhibit or play someone had seen in New York. And woven through were the family stories. Stones of remembrance for his father laid at a friend’s cattle ranch in Argentina; John’s fall into a fire pit in Hawaii when he was five and his rescue by Agent Walsh; summers on Skorpios—the Molière plays directed by Marta that John and Caroline put on for their mother’s July birthday. If the story warranted, she would mention with ease and fondness his father or Mr. Onassis, and I began to feel as if I knew them. When his cousin Anthony was there, they would tandem-tell their tales of a dreadful English camp in Plymouth and spar over who pushed whom down a glacier in the Alps when they were teenagers. One year, by force of argument, John would win. The next, it would be Anthony, winking over the candlelight when he had claimed the last word. At the end of each meal, after chocolate roll or berry pie, there was lavish praise for Marta, who appeared from the kitchen smiling.
After dinner, there might be a game—Bartlett’s or charades, maybe. John and Caroline were both fierce players and in the spirit of fairness were often relegated to different teams. But always, we moved to the living room for mint tea or coffee. Waiting were the fluffed sofas and the cashmere throws, a wall of books, a fire if it was cool, and, in the dark distance, the far-off sound of the sea.
What she wore on those evenings I imagined belonged to this place, as if the fabric and metal existed only in her Up Island sphere. Large hoop earrings, a gold snake circling her wrist, an inexpensive necklace of silver and blue stones that John had brought from India and that she treasured, long-sleeved black T-shirts with jeweled necks, and slim printed skirts that fell to her sandaled feet. She was always radiant at dinner—hair pulled back, sun-kissed by the day.
The second summer, she lent me books. Some she had edited—I especially liked The Search for Omm Sety: Reincarnation and Eternal Love by Jonathan Cott—and others she picked from the shelf: a psychology study on family constellations, a collection of poems by Cavafy, Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and a first edition of Lesley Blanch’s The Wilder Shores of Love, its cover somewhat crumpled. She smiled when she handed me the book of tales of Victorian adventuresses. “I think you will like this one.”
The next summer, John