Chapter Thirty-Three

THIRTY-THREE

OCTOBER 1987

After sandwiches by the pool, Jackie wanted to go back to Augusta’s apartment.

“I want to show you the dress I brought,” said Jackie. “You should probably try it on.”

From the larger of her two suitcases, Jackie pulled a tissue-wrapped square, unwrapped it carefully on her bed, and held up the dress in front of her aunt. The afternoon sun poured through the guest-room window, illuminating the silk so that the fabric sparkled.

“What do you think?” Jackie asked.

Augusta stared. Unlike the pink dress she’d seen with Shirley, the deep and vibrant blue of Jackie’s selection made her think of Aunt Esther. In an instant, she was back in the moonlit kitchen of her youth; back to the midnight lessons; back to the piles of fragrant herbs.

As close as she’d always been to her niece, she’d never told her about such things.

“My aunt Esther had a robe that same color.”

Jackie’s eyes twinkled. “I know,” she said. “My mom saved it after Esther died. She kept it hanging in her bedroom closet until it got so moth-eaten she had to throw it away. I used to play dress-up with it sometimes. When I saw this dress, I thought of the robe, too.” Jackie sat on the edge of the guest-room bed and beckoned for Augusta to sit beside her. “You never talk about Esther.”

Hearing the name on her niece’s lips filled Augusta with indescribable longing. “She came to live with us after my mother died—arrived with a trunk full of the ugliest dresses you’ve ever seen in your life. Nothing but shapeless black and gray sacks, a couple of white aprons, some plain black boots. She wore her hair wrapped up in a babushka like some ancient crone from the middle of the forest.

“The first time I saw her in that beautiful robe, I swear I thought I was hallucinating. The way it shimmered, that gorgeous blue silk. It was like seeing a moth that had turned into a butterfly. When she let down her hair, she looked twenty years younger. It was late at night, in our kitchen. Esther wore that robe only when no one else was around to see.”

“You mean when she was mixing up her powders?”

Augusta sucked in a quiet breath and took a seat beside her niece. She wondered what else Bess had revealed to Jackie. “Your mother told you about that?” said Augusta.

“In the last few weeks before she died, yes. My mother said Esther was a remarkable woman.”

“She was,” said Augusta. “She was the most confident person I ever met—so sure of her gifts, so certain of her talents. She and my father didn’t see eye to eye. He thought Esther was a quack and I thought… well, I thought she was magical.”

“My mother said Esther made a potion for her once—to help her decide whether she should marry my father.”

“She told you about that?”

Jackie nodded. “Mom was on so many drugs at that point that I thought she might be imagining things. But she was perfectly lucid when she described it. She told me Esther made a powder for her that she stirred into a cup of wine. Mom said the love potion made her appreciate how much my father meant to her. She knew immediately after drinking it that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. You must have been there. Is that how you remember it?”

Augusta nodded. “Except Esther never would have called it a love potion. She was adamant that such a thing didn’t exist. She said there was no way to force love on people. That trying was like committing some sort of sin. She was very clear that she wanted no part in playing with people’s emotions.”

“But what about the drink she made for my mom?”

“Esther would have said that the elixir could only give your mother clarity about her feelings. It couldn’t change the feelings themselves.” Augusta shrugged. “I know it sounds crazy to modern ears, but when I was young, I believed Esther could do anything. Your mother used to think it was crazy, too—that is, until the night your father proposed.”

“And after that, she believed?”

Augusta nodded. “After that evening, yes, she did.”

“Clarity can be a wonderful gift. To see something so unambiguously, to be free of all doubt—who wouldn’t want that?”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” said Augusta. “But sometimes clarity reveals difficult truths. Not everyone is as lucky as your mother was.” Augusta stood from her seat and tried to shake off the sorrow that threatened to overtake her. She would not allow her niece’s visit to be ruined by the intrusion of those painful memories. “Let’s see that dress now, shall we?” she said.

“Are you ready to try it on? I think we’d better check the fit and see if you like the way it looks. We can’t have the guest of honor looking shabby at her own party!”

“It’s not a party,” said Augusta, scooping up the dress and taking it across the hall to her bedroom. She stepped out of her clothes and left them where they fell, in a careless pile on the carpet. Then she slipped the silk over her head and pushed her arms through the three-quarter sleeves. A lifetime of being single had made her skilled at zipping herself up on her own.

Before turning to her full-length mirror, Augusta braced herself for disappointment. She was almost eighty years old. Her breasts were deflated, her stomach was slack, her skin was like a wrinkled sheet of tinfoil that some penny-pinching housewife had used more than once. It was too much to hope for loveliness now, ridiculous to aspire to something akin to beauty. She closed her eyes, stepped sideways toward the mirror, and counted silently to three.

Jackie called out from the hallway. “How’s it going in there? Do you like it?”

“I don’t know,” said Augusta. “I haven’t looked yet.”

When Jackie entered the room, Augusta’s eyes were still shut.

Jackie’s voice swelled with admiration. “Oh my,” she said. “Oh, Aunt Augusta… look. ”

When Augusta finally opened her eyes, the woman in the mirror reminded her of someone she’d forgotten long ago. Someone spirited, girlish, and spry. As for the dress, the cut enhanced her waist and the flounce of the skirt elongated her legs. The neckline was wide—a modified boatneck that displayed her collarbones to their fullest advantage. And the way the sapphire silk showed off her coloring! Even without a stitch of makeup, the dress brought out the gray in her eyes.

“You look magnificent!” Jackie gushed. “What do you think? Do you like it?”

“I do,” said Augusta. “It’s… yes, of course I do.”

She was so flustered by the woman in the mirror that she could not put her feelings into words. Her reflection was a kaleidoscope of buried memories. The sapphire fabric was the evening sky outside her half-open Brooklyn window, it was Esther’s silk robe in the kitchen at midnight, and the bottles of Higgins inks on her father’s store shelves. The trim at the edges of her skirt and sleeves was the silver in Esther’s graying hair, the giant stockpot on the kitchen stove, and the band of her sister’s wedding ring. In the mirror, Augusta’s pewter eyes were the same as her mother’s before she got sick: filled with uncomplicated delight.

Past and present, joy and sorrow mingled together in the shining glass. Augusta wasn’t merely her eighty-year-old self—she was fourteen and sixteen, two and twelve. She was a child swimming in the ocean with her mother and a young woman watching her aunt make soup. She was a curious girl who asked too many questions. She was a grieving daughter at her mother’s funeral and a maid of honor at her sister’s wedding.

As Jackie embraced her, Augusta murmured her thanks, but she could not look away from the image in the mirror she saw over her niece’s sloping shoulder. Oh, how she wanted to be that woman again—a woman who, yes, had suffered losses, but whose heart had not yet been broken beyond repair. A woman who was curious and hopeful and who still believed in the glimmers of magic that made their way quietly into the world.