Elin Hilderbrand - Winter Street

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.