He’s not entirely sober, and the room still reeks of smoke when George knocks, but this does not derail Kelley from his mission. As soon as the door opens, Kelley punches George in the mouth as hard as he can. The punch lands squarely, with the solid, satisfying noise of flesh on flesh.
When was the last time Kelley hit someone? He comes up with a party at the Alpha Chi Rho house at Gettysburg his junior year; a brawl broke out over the honor of someone’s date, who, it was later disclosed, wasn’t very honorable at all. Punching another man in the face, especially sucker punching someone who isn’t expecting it, isn’t exactly honorable either, but to Kelley it feels good, just, and right.
George’s head snaps back, and blood gushes everywhere. George moans and spits out a tooth. Kelley feels delighted, as if a stream of quarters were flying from his slot machine.
George makes no move to retaliate. “I guess I deserved that.”
“Oh God, yes,” Kelley says. “At least that.”
George pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes up the spittle and blood. His eyes are out of focus, which pleases Kelley further; he really walloped the guy.
Twelve years! Kelley thinks.
“Can I come in and talk to you, please?” George asks.
Kelley steps out of the way, ushering George in and closing the door behind him.
If it’s awkward to have this conversation in the bedroom that Kelley and Mitzi shared for so many years, neither man acknowledges it. Kelley sits on the edge of the bed while George stands before him. Kelley is dizzy and has the beginnings of a hangover; all he wants is a drink to take the edge off his drinking binge.
“Do you have a flask?” Kelley asks George.
“Actually,” George says, “I do.” He pulls a leather flask—monogrammed, no less—out of the pocket of his parka and hands it to Kelley.
Kelley accepts it with glee and something that feels like love. For a fleeting instant, he understands what Mitzi sees in George. He takes a swig—Johnnie Walker Black. Brilliant! Kelley hands the flask to George, who takes a slug, and then George hands it back to Kelley. George is a good and generous man.
“I came to say I’m sorry,” George says.
“Sorry doesn’t begin to address it,” Kelley says. He takes another drink, savoring the burn down his throat. “You’ve been sleeping with my wife for twelve years. Is that true? Is that true, George?”
“Saying ‘twelve years’ makes it sound worse than it is,” George says. He dabs his handkerchief at his swollen lip. “It was a few times every year at Christmas. It was a holiday thing.”
“It was a holiday thing?” Kelley says. Did George really just say that sleeping with Kelley’s wife was a holiday thing—like caroling or baking gingerbread?
“It just happened,” George says. “Do you remember twelve years ago, when the snowstorm hit and Bart was at a friend’s house, and you and the olders and your ex-wife got stranded at the Bar all night? That was the year my marriage had started falling apart. Mitzi and I were here at the inn, alone, and it was late, and we started talking…” George trails off and gestures for the flask, and Kelley hands it to him. “You know how things like that sometimes happen, Kelley. Come on. That was the year you turned fifty. You were miserable, and so was Mitzi. You were at the Bar all night with your ex-wife, for God’s sake.”
“Wait,” Kelley says. “Wait a minute.” He vaguely remembers the year George is talking about, but it’s like an episode of a sitcom that has gone off the air.
The year he turned fifty… it was a bad year; he remembers that much. Bart would have been seven, in second grade, Mrs. Usbiff—the year Bart nearly got held back; she put his desk out in the hallway. Ava was seventeen, a senior in high school; she didn’t get in to Juilliard or Curtis. That had been a disaster, and Margaret blamed Kelley because he was the one who had taken Ava out of New York City and away from her piano teacher, Mr. Masahiro. Ava could have stayed in the city with Margaret, but she would have been dropped off and picked up from piano lessons by Raoul and fed her meals by Lotus. Kelley hadn’t thought that was any way to raise a child.
Kevin had dropped out of the Culinary Institute that year as well, thanks to the nefarious Norah Vale. And the inn had a bad leak that precipitated the replacement of the entire roof, to the tune of forty-five grand.
It had not been a good year. Kelley and Mitzi engaged in low-level ground fire, a baseline of incessant bickering and sarcasm. He remembers a string of three nights when Mitzi had stayed with her friend Kai the Massage Therapist out in Pocomo. Mitzi had been angry that Margaret was coming to visit for the holidays, but Margaret had insisted because it was Ava’s last year of high school and she wanted to be with her kids—and because of the traditions Kelley and Mitzi had started, the kids wanted to be at the inn.
The three older kids had been excited to see Margaret. All of the Quinns, including Mitzi, had gone for dinner at the Brotherhood, where it had started really snowing, which everyone loved because it was two days before Christmas. Kevin had encouraged them all to go to the Bar for a nightcap, and everyone was game except for Mitzi. Mitzi had dropped Bart off at his friend Michael’s house, and then she went home. George had probably been sitting by the fire, drinking a tumbler of Johnnie Walker Black, and Mitzi—feeling left out, abandoned, and angry—would naturally have joined him.
“Are you suggesting that if I hadn’t gone to the Bar that night…?” Kelley says.
“With Margaret and your older kids,” George says. He shifts his weight, and Kelley realizes it’s rude to continue to make the man stand, so he scoots over and pats the edge of the bed, indicating that George should sit. George looks relieved to take a load off. “Well, you know, Mitzi has always been threatened by Margaret.”
“Who hasn’t?” Kelley says. “She’s Margaret Quinn.”
“I mean, by your relationship with Margaret,” George says. “And, to some extent, by your relationship with the olders. I think she felt they were your ‘real’ family, and she and Bart were… latecomers to the party.”
“Oh,” Kelley says. He has heard Mitzi articulate a version of this argument in the past, but he always dismissed her words as insecure and ridiculous. He had been married to Mitzi for twenty-one years, and he was married to Margaret for only nineteen. Still, Margaret came first. She is, by Kelley’s own nomenclature, the original Margaret, and they had three kids and a really cool brownstone and an enviable life in Manhattan before they self-destructed. Kelley and Margaret grew into adults and then professionals and then parents together. There was a way in which Margaret wasn’t replaceable, although Kelley had never expressed this sentiment, even to himself, and certainly never to Mitzi.
“I gave Mitzi everything she wanted,” Kelley says. “I quit my job for her, I left New York for her, I moved to Nantucket for her. I bought this inn—this inn specifically, because she had stayed here—and I restored it to her exact specifications, George, which, by the way, nearly bankrupted me.”
George nods sympathetically, as if he is well acquainted with seeing his personal fortune slowly go down the drain. Kelley realizes he doesn’t know what George does for a living. Is that possible after so many years? But the only occupation Kelley can come up with for George is professional Santa Claus. Surely that’s not all he does?
“What’s your line of work, George?” Kelley asks. “If you’ve told me before, I’ve forgotten.”
“I’m a milliner,” George says. “I make hats. Fine hats, for women. I have a shop in Lenox, and a website, which has tripled my business. Two years ago, Oprah picked my straw boater as one of her Favorite Things, and even now, demand far exceeds supply. My problem, quite honestly, is that I’d like to work less rather than more, but I don’t see that happening for quite a while.”
“You’re a milliner,” Kelley says. He finds this funny and quaint. He would have predicted that George was a salesman for a drug company or a liquor distributor.
“I learned from my father, who learned from his father,” George says. “But the skill set dies with me, since I never had children.”
Now that George is with Mitzi, he will have some kind of relationship with Bart as well. Kelley tries to imagine Bart learning the skill set of a milliner, and the mere thought puts a smile on Kelley’s face for the first time since he opened the door to room 10 the day before.
“I’ve never known Mitzi to wear hats,” Kelley says.
“She hates hats,” George says.
They sit with that statement in silence. Kelley takes a drink from the flask. George dabs his bloodied handkerchief at his swollen lip. Just outside the door, Kelley can hear the strains of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Ava must have altered the inn’s playlist since Mitzi’s departure. Mitzi prefers nonreligious carols; she is a big fan of “Silver Bells” and Andy Williams singing “Sleigh Ride.” But Ava thinks religious carols have more musical integrity. Now that Mitzi is gone, she can have her way.
Gloooooooooooooria!
“Thank you for seeing me,” George says. “I feel better.”
“I don’t,” Kelley says. This is a lie. He does feel better, but he isn’t quite ready for the conversation to be over. “Do you think Mitzi leaving me has anything to do with Bart?”
“Of course,” George says. “Her son has flown from the nest. It calls all kinds of other things into question, such as, how much does she like the nest? And, what is she doing in the nest? And, you know, she didn’t want him to go. She saw in her crystals that harm would come to him. Surely she told you that?”
“She told me that,” Kelley says. “Surely you don’t believe in… crystals?”
“No,” George says. “Not really.”
Kelley takes “not really” to mean “not at all.” He says, “You weren’t born on February twenty-ninth, too, were you?”
“June first,” George says. He clears his throat. “The point is, Kelley, that Mitzi believes in the crystals. She felt like you made Bart go to war anyway.”
“Bart wanted to go,” Kelley says.
“Mitzi feels like you forced the issue.”
“Untrue,” Kelley says. On this, he will stand firm. He did have a come-to-Jesus with Bart after his last run-in with the Nantucket Police. Kelley told his son that he had to do something, go somewhere, try to make something of his life. He could go to Colorado and ski, he could work his way through Europe bartending, he could go to Cape Cod Community College. But he could not stay on Nantucket and sponge off Kelley and Mitzi and continue to get in trouble with the law and desecrate the family name. Bart came up with the Marines himself.
George shrugs like it’s not his place to get involved, and he’s right about that.
“What are you and Mitzi going to do?” Kelley asks. “Are you going to open an inn in Lenox?”
George laughs, then winces in pain. “No way. I’d rather eat glass. And Mitzi is all done with innkeeping. She’s been sick of it for a while.”
“She has?” Kelley says. This is news to him. Mitzi has been as gung ho about the inn this year as ever, and as disconsolate about the steady decline in guests. Because Kelley and Mitzi became so involved in their guests’ lives—they once visited the Pipers at their home in Long Beach, California, and they’ve been invited to countless weddings of the guests that became engaged at the inn—it’s hard not to take the vacancies as a personal affront.
“She wants to get trained and certified as a life coach,” George says.
Kelley barks out laughter. A life coach? That’s even funnier than picturing Bart as a milliner! Mitzi needs a life coach! She needs someone to set her straight: running off with George the Santa Claus is a terrible mistake. She should sit tight and stay with Kelley. They can sell the inn; they are going to have to sell the inn if they want to survive financially, and then they can figure out a next step.
The thought of Mitzi becoming trained and certified as a life coach is absurd. She might say that Kelley is belittling her hopes and dreams; she might say he doesn’t believe in her now and, furthermore, never has. Kelley would point to the four-thousand-dollar claw-foot bathtub as antique-porcelain proof that he has believed in her and pursued her every desire all these years.
But, Kelley thinks.
But wouldn’t Mitzi be right, in a way?
Isn’t it true that he never took Mitzi’s career aspirations, her intellect, her personhood, as seriously as he took Margaret’s?
Admit it. Yes.
It’s true. A part of him always thought Mitzi lacked gravitas. Mitzi is ditzy. In the most private, hidden corridors of his mind, Kelley might have thought Mitzi a bit silly. It’s the gold-lamé-jumpsuit-and-disco-ball persona that transmogrified into her crystal-reading-and-herbal-tea-blends-innkeeper persona that he indulges rather than reveres. He indulges her because, decades earlier, when he started dating Mitzi, his primary emotion was gratitude that Mitzi wanted him, Kelley Quinn, and not an exclusive interview with Yasser Arafat.
“Did Mitzi ever tell you how she and I met?” Kelley asks George. “It’s an interesting story.”
“I’d like to hear it,” George says, and Kelley thinks, Wow, George is a pretty evolved man if he doesn’t mind listening to this.
“Are you sure you have time?” Kelley says. “I’m not keeping you from anything?” He wants to ask George where Mitzi is… but he figures that will kill his mood and the conversation, regardless of the answer.
“Not at all,” George says. “Fire away.”
And so, Kelley tells the story of how he first saw Mitzi in Greenwich Village, standing outside the brownstone of Kelley’s brother, Avery, who was dying of AIDS.
“I noticed Mitzi because she was beautiful,” Kelley says.
“Stunning, I’m sure,” George says.
“But I talked to her because she was wearing a T-shirt from the Straight Wharf on Nantucket. You know the Straight Wharf logo, the bluefish?”
“I do, indeed,” George says.
Kelley had asked Mitzi about her connection to Nantucket. He was interested, he said, because he and his ex-wife had taken their kids to the island for a string of summers, and he really loved it.
Mitzi told Kelley that she had been to Nantucket once for a wedding, and now she went for a week every summer and stayed at the Winter Street Inn.
Kelley said he knew of the Winter Street Inn. He had passed it many times on his amblings through town.
They shared their Nantucket favorites—Kelley’s favorite beach was Cisco; Mitzi’s, Steps; Kelley’s favorite bar, 21 Federal; Mitzi’s, the Gazebo.
“The Gazebo?” Kelley said. “That’s a bar for kids in their twenties.”
Mitzi had smiled at Kelley, and he realized that Mitzi was in her twenties, which meant she was ten or fifteen years younger than he. Which meant he had a choice: he could walk away, or he could ask Mitzi out and become a clichéd divorced guy on the brink of forty asking out a twenty-something-year-old.
He walked away. His brother was expecting him upstairs, anyway.
“But then,” Kelley says, “a miraculous thing happened.”
“You bumped into her again?” George guesses.
“Yes,” Kelley says. “At the moment I least expected.”
Avery, Kelley’s brother, died of pneumonia in September of 1992. Mitzi showed up at Avery’s funeral.
“You’re kidding,” George says.
“I wouldn’t kid about something like that,” Kelley says.
“Of course not,” George says. “I’m sorry for the loss of your brother.”
“He was a fine, fine human being,” Kelley says. “One of the finest.” He takes a deep breath, remembering the funeral at Grace Church. The sanctuary had been packed with men—young and old, healthy and sick. It was the early nineties in Greenwich Village; everyone was going through the same thing.
Margaret hadn’t been able to attend the funeral because it was only two months before the election, and she was on the road, following the Clinton campaign.
Kelley remembers seeing Mitzi sitting in the second pew, wearing peach instead of black, which was a welcome respite for the eyes. He knew he’d seen her before, but he couldn’t place where.
“It was she who approached me at the reception,” Kelley says. “She came up to me and said, ‘I met you outside the brownstone. We talked about Nantucket. You like Cisco Beach. I’m Mitzi Kelleher.’ ”
“Wow,” George says. “Lucky you!”
“Turned out she was a childhood friend of Avery’s partner, Marcus. And when I saw her the first time, she had just come from their apartment. She had taken the train up from Philadelphia to lend Marcus moral support.”
“Unbelievable,” George says.
“She was only twenty-four, though,” Kelley says. “But by that point, standing in my brother’s funeral reception when my brother had been only thirty-six himself, I realized life is too short to worry about being thought a cliché. So I asked her out.”
“Good man,” George says.
Kelley takes a minute to reflect on just how profoundly meeting Mitzi had changed his life. She had saved him from his misery and his self-destructive ways. It had been nothing short of amazing.
But over the years, of course, Kelley’s feelings of ecstasy settled and matured in correspondence with life’s circumstances. He and Mitzi got married and had a child. They bought the inn and started the business of running it. Meanwhile, in New York, Margaret grew more and more famous, and Kelley’s respect for her career increased. There she was, in 2000, standing in front of the Florida State House. There she was, interviewing Al Gore! But it was 9/11 that really changed things. Margaret was new to CBS, working as a “special correspondent,” which meant they were throwing her into every possible situation, night and day, and seeing how she fared. On that particular Tuesday, they were short staffed, and Margaret lived only a few blocks from the studio in Midtown and could be there in minutes. Kelley can still remember turning on the TV to see what was happening—because who, initially, understood?—and there, on his screen, was Margaret. She was at the epicenter of one of the most important news stories the world would ever know. The north tower tumbled to the ground behind her like something in a big-budget action movie, and Margaret turned around, incredulous; you could see it in her eyes. She started to weep. So many American lives have been lost, she said. Wow, she said. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Kelley wanted to reach into his television set and hold her, comfort her. Margaret Quinn was strong, but she wasn’t invincible. Their city, the city where they had raised a family and made a mess of everything, was under attack. Kelley had confided these feelings to Mitzi later that night. I wanted to offer Margaret some comfort. I tried to call her but couldn’t get through. Mitzi had stiffened in his embrace. Maybe she had thought, He still loves her. Maybe she had thought, What about me? What about our son?
Kelley is wise enough to realize that his marriage to Mitzi isn’t ending because of George. That is facile thinking. There have been fault lines ever since 9/11.
And then, the following year, when Kelley turned fifty, he agreed to let Margaret come for Christmas, and a snowstorm hit, and Kelley and Margaret ended up stuck at the Bar with the olders. The roads had been impassable, and it became clear they would be stuck at the Bar for the night. Kevin fetched pillows and blankets from the band house, and Margaret and Ava curled up on the pool tables while Kelley and Patrick and Kevin drank the night away, listening to vintage Led Zeppelin.
Kelley remembers the contentedness of that night, a feeling, as he looked at the reclining figure of Margaret, that something had been set right and the mistakes they’d made when the kids were young had been corrected—or, if not corrected, then forgiven.
He hadn’t missed Mitzi or wished she was there. He doesn’t remember thinking about Mitzi at all.
And now this.
Kelley takes a slug from George’s monogrammed flask. In the rest of the house, he hears… footsteps, voices, a new carol playing on the inn’s sound system. “Silent Night,” his all-time favorite. Ava and Kevin and Isabelle will be getting ready for the party. Kelley had expected to sit out the party in the dark, quiet, acrid-smelling cocoon of his bedroom, but now he finds he wants to be among people who believe in him. This is his family tradition: the Christmas Eve party at the Winter Street Inn.