| 1 |
Page Clarke was a good mother, a good wife, the kind of friend anyone would be grateful for. She cared, she loved, she worked hard at whatever she did, she was there for the people who meant something to her, she was artistic in ways that always amazed her friends, she was unconsciously beautiful, and fun to be with. |
| 2 |
It was a chance to relax and catch up with what they were all doing. It was rare for him to spend Saturday afternoons alone with her anymore. And when he did, there was always something else they had to do. Like Andy's games, or one of Allyson's swim meets, which always seemed to be held in the most godforsaken places. |
| 3 |
She had everything she wanted, a husband she adored, and who loved her, a secure life, and two wonderful children. Their house in Ross wasn't elaborate, but it was pretty and comfortable, it was in a nice area, and with her constant puttering and knack for improving things, Page had made it really lovely. |
| 4 |
For Allyson, she had done a Paris street scene the year she'd been in love with all things French, and later a string of ballerinas inspired by Degas, and more recently she had turned Allyson's room into a swimming pool with her magic touch. She had even painted the furniture in trompe l'oeil to match it. |
| 5 |
Allyson was spending the afternoon with her friends, Brad was playing golf, and Page was caught up with all her projects. She was planning another mural for the school, and she had promised to take a look at a friend's living room and see what she'd recommend, but there had been nothing really pressing. |
| 6 |
They sat outside together for a while, as Andy's ice cream got all over his face and dripped on his uniform, which Page said didn't matter. Everything had to be washed anyway, so what harm was there in a little ice cream. They watched people come and go, and enjoyed the warmth of the late afternoon sun. |
| 7 |
She was concluding some plan, and then hung up and turned to face her. She was a beautiful girl, and it still startled Page sometimes when she saw her. She was so striking looking, and she seemed so mature. She had a woman's body, and a young girl's mind, and she was always in motion, in action, in mid plan. |
| 8 |
Every now and then her common sense went astray, and occasionally she and Page would get into a roaring fight over some typically teenage mistake she'd made, but eventually Allyson usually made sense, and calmed down enough to listen to her parents. At fifteen, none of her antics were very surprising. |
| 9 |
She was trying her wings, testing her limits, trying to figure out who she was going to be, not Page, or Brad, but herself, someone entirely different. In spite of her similarities to them, she wanted to be her own woman. Unlike Andy, who wanted to be just like his dad, and was actually so much like Page. |
| 10 |
In Allyson's eyes, he was just a baby. She had been eight when he was born, and she thought he was the cutest thing she'd ever seen. She had never seen anything as tiny. Like her parents, she was scared that he would die just after he was born, but there was no one prouder than Allyson when he finally came home. |
| 11 |
Allyson had been head over heels in love with him for years. And even now, she secretly indulged her little brother, buying him little treats and baseball cards, and occasionally she even went to his baseball games, although she hated baseball. But most of the time she was even willing to admit that she loved him. |
| 12 |
But she was also glad for them, this was exactly the life she wanted for her children. Easy, safe, healthy, comfortable, secure, protected from anything that could sadden or harm them. She had done everything she could to guarantee all of that for them, and she enjoyed watching them thrive and flourish. |
| 13 |
She had long, shapely legs and a tiny waist. It was no wonder people stopped to stare at her, especially men lately. Page said to Brad sometimes that she wished she could put a sign on her that said she was only fifteen. Even thirty year old men turned to look at her in the street. She looked easily eighteen or twenty. |
| 14 |
She'd tried to tell him all along, but Trygve just didn't hear her. He wanted it to work so badly that he refused to see her anger and desperation. They'd all been pretty badly shaken up when she left, and Page was shocked at her leaving her kids, but apparently it had all been too much for her for a long time. |
| 15 |
And everyone in Ross had always been impressed by how well Trygve managed his children, and how much he did with them. He was a free lance political writer, and worked out of his home. It was a perfect setup for him, and unlike his wife, he never seemed to tire of his parental responsibilities and obligations. |
| 16 |
He had taken them on with the good humor and warmth he was so well known for. It wasn't easy, he admitted from time to time, but he was managing fine, and his kids seemed happier than they had in years. He seemed to find time for his work while the kids were in school, and late at night after they went to bed. |
| 17 |
But he was as American as apple pie now, although his friends teased him and called him the Viking. He was an attractive man, and the divorcees of Ross had been greatly encouraged by his divorce, and somewhat disappointed since then. Between his work and his kids, he seemed to have no time at all in his life for women. |
| 18 |
They had met in Hollywood while they were scarcely more than kids. He had been trying his hand briefly at writing scripts, fresh out of school, and she had been a budding actress. She loved what she did, and hated it when he asked her to move to San Francisco. But she also loved him enough to try it. |
| 19 |
The impossible dream, married to the wrong woman. He was patient, kind, always happy to include other children in their plans. He took groups of children camping and fishing with him, and was a major force in organizing the Special Olympics, at which Bjorn excelled, much to everyone's delight, except Dana's. |
| 20 |
She couldn't relate to any of them, even when she tried. And Bjorn was, in her eyes, the ultimate shame and disappointment. In the end, she was a woman whom no one liked, an angry soul, raging at a fate that others thought wasn't so bad. Her children were wonderful, even Bjorn with his special sweetness. |
| 21 |
He couldn't imagine marrying anyone again, or even a serious relationship. At first, he wouldn't even consider dating. All the women he knew in town seemed like vultures, waiting for fresh prey, and he had no intention of becoming their next victim. He was actually very happy alone, with his children, for the moment. |
| 22 |
She couldn't imagine him wanting to do anything else. For most of her life, Trygve Thorensen had made himself totally available to his children. It never occurred to her that he did it, not only because he liked them, and wanted to be with them, but also because he was avoiding the emptiness of a bad marriage. |
| 23 |
He stood six feet four inches tall, had short dark hair, big brown eyes, and powerful shoulders. He had narrow hips, long legs, and a smile that still made her legs turn to water. He had been leaning over a suitcase on the bed, and he stood up with a long slow smile, just for her, as she came through the doorway. |
| 24 |
Then she went back to the bedroom to see her husband. It was six thirty by then, he had finished packing, and he was almost dressed to leave for the airport. He was traveling in a dark blue double breasted blazer and beige slacks, the collar of his blue shirt was open, and he looked young and handsome. |
| 25 |
It just seemed so insignificant sometimes, as though she didn't really do anything. Maybe it was because she just did whatever she did for friends, or as favors. She hadn't been paid for her artwork in years, not since her days right after art school when she worked as an apprentice on Broadway. She had loved that. |
| 26 |
Her parents had a little bit of money, but his had had nothing till the day they died. And everything Brad had done, he had done himself, the hard way. He had crawled his way up, worked hard, and become successful. And one day, he would probably run the ad agency where he worked. If not, he'd run another one. |
| 27 |
It was exactly five minutes to seven. They went back into the house, hand in hand, and she felt lonely again, but tried not to. It was stupid. She was a grown woman, she didn't have to be that dependent on him. And he would be back in three days. You'd think he'd be gone for a month from the way she was feeling. |
| 28 |
She had on the tiniest bit of mascara, and a pale pink gloss on her lips that barely shimmered. She looked clean and healthy and young. Youth at its most exquisite moment. She was the same age as the models they put on the cover of Vogue, and in some ways, Page thought, she looked better than they did. |
| 29 |
He picked the rock and roll station that he knew Allyson liked. He had very odd musical tastes for a seven year old boy, and he got them mostly from his older sister. They got to the restaurant in five minutes, and Page felt better by then. Her moment of melancholy was gone, and she and Andy had a good time. |
| 30 |
They always did when they were together. He told her about all his friends, and what they did in school, and he explained to her how when he grew up he had decided to be a teacher. When she asked him why, he said it was because he liked taking care of little kids, and he liked the long summer vacations. |
| 31 |
Ten minutes later, they were home, and after his bath, he joined her in her bed to watch TV. Eventually, she let him fall asleep in her bed, and smiled as she tucked him in and kissed him. At seven he was already a big boy, but he was still her baby, and always would be. In her own way, Allyson was still her baby too. |
| 32 |
Maybe children always are, at any age. She smiled, thinking of her, in the borrowed pink cashmere, and how pretty she looked when she left to have dinner with the Thorensens. Page thought of Brad then too. And when she checked for messages on the machine, she discovered that he had called her from the airport. |
| 33 |
Page had not yet reached the point of being able to assume that she would come in. She wanted to know for sure, so she sat up and waited. At eleven o'clock she watched the news. Nothing too remarkable had happened, and Page saw with relief that there had been no disasters in the air, or at the airport. |
| 34 |
All her chickens were accounted for, thank God. It was something to be grateful for, as she glanced at the clock and waited for Allyson to come home by eleven thirty. It was eleven twenty by then, and knowing her well, Page knew she would come racing through the door at eleven twenty nine, eyes bright, hair flying. |
| 35 |
She had consulted with Allyson immediately, who said that her mother would never let her go out with a senior. She had only had a few very tentative dates by then, usually to go to movies with boys she had known all her life, or in a large group of friends, and so far always dropped off and picked up by their parents. |
| 36 |
There were parties, of course, and she had gone steady for a few weeks before Christmas, but they were sick of each other by the New Year. There had never been a real date with a real boy who picked her up in a real car and took her out for a real dinner. Until tonight. This was very real, a little too much so. |
| 37 |
Maybe if Jamie spent some time with them, came to dinner once or twice, hung around with them, maybe her father would feel different. But certainly not in time for this once in a lifetime opportunity that she had to seize now, or surely it would never come again. Carpe diem. Seize the day. And she had. |
| 38 |
He leaned across the table once, and almost brushed her lips with his own, as he bent to tell her something. It was almost as though Chloe and Jamie weren't there by then, they were so engrossed in their own conversation. There was no wine drunk at the coffeehouse, and they stood up to leave at five to eleven. |
| 39 |
They'd been outrageous tonight, and they knew it, but they were all good kids. They didn't mean any harm, it was all in good fun, and high spirits. They were more than halfway across the bridge by then, and Jamie and Chloe were whispering softly in the backseat, their murmurings dotted by an occasional silence. |
| 40 |
Phillip had pulled Allyson closer to him, as close as he could within the confines of her seat belt. She had loosened it, and started to take it off, but he wouldn't let her. He took his eyes from the road then, for just a single instant, looked at her long and hard, and then as he glanced back at the road, he saw it. |
| 41 |
But too late. It was only a flash of light, a bolt of lightning hurtling toward them, almost in their faces by then. Allyson was looking at him when it hit, and in the backseat they never saw it. It was an arc of light, a crash of thunder, a mountain of steel, an explosion of glass everywhere as it hit them. |
| 42 |
He had almost hit another car as he swerved to avoid them. There was traffic stopped everywhere, in all lanes, and no one was moving across the bridge now. It was dark in the car at first, in spite of the lights overhead, everything was so crushed and so condensed that it was hard to see who was in it. |
| 43 |
The doctor moved back to look at Jamie through the open window, and offer what encouragement he could, when they heard a deep groan from the backseat, next to him, and then a sharp cry that became a scream. It was Chloe. Jamie turned to stare at her as though unable to understand how she had gotten there beside him. |
| 44 |
But to no avail. The door was bent beyond hope of opening it, and the young girl on the front seat never moved as he reached in through the broken glass of the window and tried to touch her. He said something in an undervoice to the doctor who, glancing at her, said he suspected that she was dead like the driver. |
| 45 |
He had ridden an ambulance as part of his residency in New York ten years before, and he had seen a lot of ugly things, on the highways, in the streets, and in the ghettos. He had delivered his share of babies in back hallways too, but he had seen more scenes like this one, and frequently with no survivors. |
| 46 |
And then, finally, they came. Two fire engines, an ambulance, and three police cars. Several people had called from their car phones and reported how bad the accident was, others had approached the two cars cautiously, and learned that there were four passengers in the smaller car, two of them badly injured. |
| 47 |
They pulled his body gently from the car, and one of the firemen assisted in putting his body on a gurney. They covered him immediately with a drape, and rolled his body slowly toward the ambulance. Shocked motorists looked on, and some people cried as they realized he had been killed in the car crash. |
| 48 |
If they didn't get her to the hospital soon, she just wasn't going to make it. And then, finally, the Jaws of Life rumbled up, and the five man crew leapt out and came running. They assessed the situation within milliseconds, had a brief consultation with the people on the scene, and then moved swiftly into action. |
| 49 |
And they couldn't move her anyway until the front seat was removed, and Allyson with it. While one man stabilized the vehicle with wedges and chocks so that nothing more would move, a second man on the team deflated the tires, and two others moved with lightning speed to remove the remaining glass from all the windows. |
| 50 |
The young people within had all gently been covered by tarps, so that no random piece of falling glass would hurt them. The windshield took two of them to remove, with one man using a flathead ax around the edges. Eventually, the windshield came away, and they actually folded it almost like a blanket. |
| 51 |
She was, but barely. They removed the door entirely, and then moved swiftly to work pulling away the dashboard and the steering. They used nine foot chains and a giant hook to pull it away, and before it was even fully freed, the paramedics had slipped a backboard under Allyson to immobilize her further. |
| 52 |
But as they did, the entire car was open to the night air, the front end gone, the roof open, the doors off, and Allyson could finally be moved now. And they could see, as the paramedics bent over her, how acute her wounds were. She looked as though she'd received blows at the front of her head, and the side as well. |
| 53 |
One of the highway patrolmen had said he'd bring his car to Marin General to him. The doctor didn't feel comfortable letting her go to the hospital with only the paramedics, although he felt that what he could do for her was minimal. She needed a neurosurgeon immediately, but he wanted to be there in the meantime. |
| 54 |
But it was old and it must have collided with the Lincoln at an odd angle. If it hadn't been a Mercedes, of whatever age, they would probably all have been dead, and not just Phillip. The other driver was still sitting dazed by the roadside by then, leaning on a stranger. She was wearing a black dress and white coat. |
| 55 |
She had three children of her own, and the thought of these young people dying in an accident was almost more than she could bear to think of. The patrolman who brought her home suggested that she take a tranquilizer that night, to calm her nerves, if she had any in the house, or at least have a strong drink. |
| 56 |
For the first time in sixteen years, he had forgotten to leave the information. It was like fate playing a bad joke on them, but she didn't have time to worry about it now. She could call someone from Brad's office and figure something out later. Right now she had to get to the hospital and see her baby. |
| 57 |
She tried to talk to herself all the way, telling herself to stay calm, to breathe, alternately reassuring herself that Allyson would be okay, and begging God that she would be. She still couldn't believe it had happened. The hospital was eight minutes away, and she parked in the first space she found. |
| 58 |
She forgot her keys in the car, and ran into the building. The emergency unit was alive with lights, and people running around, dashing into rooms, and half a dozen people sat in a corridor, waiting for treatment. A woman in labor walked by looking uncomfortable, leaning heavily against her husband. |
| 59 |
She noticed the reporters then, two of them taking notes from a highway patrolman. She went to the desk and asked a nurse where she might find her, and the woman's face sobered instantly as she glanced up at Page. She had a pretty face and kind eyes, and as she looked at Page, she felt a wave of sympathy for her. |
| 60 |
He and his cameraman were in the waiting room for another hour, but they didn't bother Page again. But Trygve was still outraged by the man's attitude and his daring to pursue Page at a moment like this one. And he resented the inflammatory, sleazy style and implications that were designed to enrage them. |
| 61 |
Who would ever know? The head highway patrolman had explained to him a short while before that the force of the collision had been so monumental that it was going to be next to impossible to determine who was at fault, and from the position of the cars, they couldn't tell for sure who had slipped over the line or why. |
| 62 |
It's the first injury that has us worried. And of course, the obvious complications from both situations. She's lost a fair amount of blood, and her blood pressure would have dropped severely anyway from the trauma. She's badly weakened by the blood loss. In addition, there's a loss of oxygen to the brain. |
| 63 |
Infection, of course, and she's having quite a bit of trouble with her breathing. That's to be expected, in this type of injury, but again it could cause some catastrophic complications. We're keeping the breathing tube through her trachea that the paramedics put in and we've had her on a respirator since she got here. |
| 64 |
Her motor skills could be affected, for a time, or even indefinitely. They could be affected in minor ways, or very major ones. Her reasoning processes can be affected, her personality could change. But on the whole, yes, if she is very, very lucky, and blessed with a small miracle, she could be normal. |
| 65 |
What if this was the last time she ever saw her? Why hadn't she held her for longer that night before she went out? Why hadn't she said all the things to her she had meant to say in her brief lifetime? Without even knowing it, she found herself crying again, as the doctor leaned over and touched her shoulder. |
| 66 |
She asked if she could stay, but they said she really couldn't. She wanted to know what they were going to do to her, and they explained that they wanted to start her on some drugs, and they had to shave her head, and put a catheter in place. There was a lot for them to do, and Allyson would be aware of none of it. |
| 67 |
It was unbelievably painful knowing that she might never see her alive again, and yet, she reminded herself again and again, there was no choice. They had to operate on Allyson now, if there was any hope at all that they'd save her. She found Trygve waiting for her again in the hall, and he ached when he saw her. |
| 68 |
They were a nice looking couple in their late fifties. She had well groomed white hair, and Mr. Chapman looked like a banker. Page saw them arrive at the front desk, looking exhausted and worn. They had driven all the way from Carmel the moment they had been called, unable to believe what had happened. |
| 69 |
Phillip was their only child, they had had him late, and had never been able to have any others. He was the light of their life, which was why they hadn't wanted him to go East to college. They couldn't bear the idea of his being so far away, and now he couldn't be farther. He was gone from their life forever. |
| 70 |
Mrs. Chapman's grief turned suddenly to anger as she listened to him and the implication that Phillip might have been drinking. She asked if the other driver had been checked too, and was told that she hadn't. The patrolmen at the scene had been certain she was sober. There had been no suspicion about her at all. |
| 71 |
For a moment, the brief burst of rage had helped assuage the pain, but now it hit him again full force, and when he took his wife in his arms in the emergency room, they were both crying, and the issue of blame no longer seemed important. A photographer took their picture as they sat in a corner of the emergency room. |
| 72 |
And when they realized that the press had photographed them, they were understandably outraged by the intrusion. In the midst of their grief, they were being subjected to indignity as well, and Tom Chapman looked as though he were going to physically assault the man who had taken their picture, but of course he didn't. |
| 73 |
Or was there some malfeasance on the part of Laura Hutchinson? Were any or all of them into drugs? The fact that a seventeen year old boy had died, his parents' lives had been shattered, another child had been crippled, and a third nearly killed was merely more fodder for the press, or better yet for the tabloids. |
| 74 |
She would never see him grow old. She would see him forever as he was now, heartbreakingly still, his soul gone on to another place. For all their love for him, and his for them, in one swift unexpected moment, Phillip had left them. It made the next photographer's attack on them as they left even more repulsive. |
| 75 |
His hair was as rumpled as hers, and he had worn jeans and an old plaid shirt, bare feet and an ancient pair of sneakers. She looked down at her gardening sweater then, and remembered that she hadn't bothered to comb her hair. She didn't really care, and it made her smile to realize what they looked like. |
| 76 |
Dana hated everyone and everything, mostly me, because she didn't know who else to hate. And Bjorn, too, at first. She just couldn't accept that we hadn't had a perfect baby. She talked about him being a vegetable, and painted a grisly picture of what the future would be like. She wanted to put him in an institution. |
| 77 |
He's limited, but he has a lot of capabilities too. He's very gifted with carpentry, he's artistic in a childlike way, he loves people, he's incredibly affectionate, he's very loyal, he's a great cook, he's got a good sense of humor, he's responsible, to a point, and he's even learning to drive a car now. |
| 78 |
And it was less than an hour later when Dan called her in the emergency room. He had called the president of the company they were dealing with in Cleveland, and he did have an appointment with Brad the next day. But according to him, they had never made plans to play golf, or meet on Sunday morning. |
| 79 |
She was horrified, and blamed me, as usual. It was all my fault, why did I let her out of the house, why didn't I know who she was going with, what was wrong with me not to suspect she was up to no good. Maybe she's right. I was awfully dumb, but once in a while you have to trust them, or they drive you nuts. |
| 80 |
Or maybe it wouldn't make any difference. And before they could discuss it anymore, the orthopedic surgeon came to tell him that Chloe's operation had gone well. She had lost a lot of blood, and she would be uncomfortable for quite a while, but they felt optimistic that she would regain the use of her legs. |
| 81 |
And she still hadn't told Brad. It didn't seem fair to tell her first. She sat there for an hour, willing Brad to call her. She hadn't heard anything about Allyson since four o'clock, when they had come to tell her that she was weathering the surgery well, and her condition was as stable as could be expected. |
| 82 |
Her condition was so severe that she would not be out of danger for quite some time, and there was no way of predicting how complete her recovery would be. All they knew was that she was alive, at that precise moment, and on the scale they were forced to be satisfied with for the present, that was something. |
| 83 |
At least she had good news for Brad, but she couldn't understand how he had arrived at the hospital an hour after he had spoken to her from Cleveland. He spoke to the surgeons, and questioned everyone, but they would not allow him to see Allyson. She was going to be in the recovery room until the next morning. |
| 84 |
She didn't mention the rest of the conversation to him, and she seemed distracted as she said hello to the boys, and thanked him for all his help. She told him she was going home for a few hours, as long as Allyson was in the recovery room, and she was planning to come back again sometime before morning. |
| 85 |
Looking back, even now, she couldn't see them. Brad sat down unhappily and stared at her, hating every minute of their conversation. He hated confrontations with her, he always had. But he knew now that this one couldn't be postponed or avoided. Maybe it was just as well. She had to know sooner or later. |
| 86 |
He had spent the last months feeling unbearably guilty whenever he was with her. And yet he couldn't stop seeing Stephanie. He wasn't ready to give up either of them. He told himself that he was in love with both of them, but the truth was, he wasn't. He still loved Page, but he wasn't in love with her anymore. |
| 87 |
How long had he been cheating on her? Had there been others? And was it that she was unattractive to him, or did she just bore him? She realized then that she was still wearing her gardening sweater from the night before, and her oldest jeans, her hair was a tangled mass after her hours in the hospital. |
| 88 |
Page spent Sunday night at the hospital, curled up in a chair in the waiting room. But she didn't even notice how uncomfortable the chair was. She scarcely slept, worrying about Allie. The noises of the hospital kept her awake, the smells, and the fear that at any moment her daughter might slip away. |
| 89 |
A pretty young nurse took Page to the recovery room, and spoke pleasantly to her on the way there, about what a beautiful girl Allie was, and what lovely hair she had had. Page listened with one ear, and found her mind wandering as they walked the endless halls. She was too distracted to really listen. |
| 90 |
But what she saw when she approached the gurney Allyson was lying on was far from encouraging. If anything, she looked worse than she had before surgery. The bandage on her head looked frightening, her head had been shaved, her face was deathly pale, and she seemed to be surrounded by monitors and machines. |
| 91 |
She seemed a million miles away, in her coma. The operating room nurse had saved a long silky blond lock of hair for Page, and the recovery room nurse handed it to her as soon as she saw her. It brought tears to Page's eyes again, as she clutched the lock of hair in one hand, and gently touched Allyson with the other. |
| 92 |
Page stood quietly next to her for a long time, gently touching her hand, and thinking of how life had been only two days before. How was it possible that everything had gone so wrong so quickly? It made you no longer trust anyone or anything, surely not the fates, or destiny. How cruel they had been. |
| 93 |
As Page thought of it, she almost couldn't bear the pain of losing Allie. It reminded her of how she had felt years before when Andy was born, and they had thought they might lose him. She had spent hours staring at him, willing him to live, his tiny body filled with tubes, struggling in the incubator. |
| 94 |
He did everything he could to distract her, talking about his writing, his Norwegian relatives, and asking her about her painting. He told her how much he liked the mural at school, and she thanked him. She really appreciated his support, and the fact that he was there made the hospital seem a little less daunting. |
| 95 |
He explained that he had to take Bjorn for an evaluation for a new school that day, and she promised to look in on Chloe, which she did, but Chloe spent most of the day sleeping. She stirred uncomfortably every time the shots wore off, and the nurse would give her another shot of Demerol to keep her comfortable. |
| 96 |
She wanted to ask him if he'd be home that night, but suddenly she found she didn't want to ask him anything. She didn't want to hear the lies, didn't want to argue with him anymore, or insult him, or listen to the contempt and defensiveness in his voice. She felt totally drained by their conversation. |
| 97 |
But it certainly could have been, just as much as it could have been Phillip's. I spoke to the highway patrol again, and they still maintain that the evidence is inconclusive. If anything, the cars seemed almost equally to blame. The only difference is that Phillip was a kid, he hadn't been driving as long as she had. |
| 98 |
And intrigued by his suspicion of Laura Hutchinson. The truth was that it was probably just what it appeared. An accident. With no one to blame, and too many who had paid too dearly for a moment's distraction, a glance in the wrong direction, the merest move of the hand on the wheel, and tragedy resulting. |
| 99 |
She was definitely not a woman he admired, or even a decent mother. He could only wonder how he had stayed married to her for twenty years. Sometimes he felt like a total fool, when he thought about it, but he also knew that for the past several years he had stayed with her so as not to disrupt the children. |
| 100 |
Chloe was asleep, and Allyson was still unconscious. Trygve was thinking about going home, when the resident came out to find Page, and explained that Allyson was having complications. The brain swelling that they had feared had begun to occur, and she was experiencing a lot of pressure on the wound, and her skull. |
| 101 |
But she still didn't know where to find him. The doctors came back and talked to them again eventually. Allyson had stabilized somewhat again, but she was still clearly in danger. The swelling of her brain was not a good sign, and could have been a sign of further injury, or a result of the surgery on Sunday. |
| 102 |
The hospital knew where to reach her if there was a problem. And she needed sleep desperately, she felt as though she couldn't walk another step. She had to fight to stay awake all the way to Ross Grammar School, and she drove home by inches. The moment she got back, she checked the phone machine again. |
| 103 |
It was hard to believe that he had dared to stay out all night, without even calling. But what would he have said? Sorry, I'm spending the night with my girlfriend. But it amazed her that things had gone so far in just a few days. Their whole married life, and their relationship, seemed to have crumbled. |
| 104 |
Alexis was perfect for it. She played the same games their mother did. Everything was lovely all the time, no one ever did anything wrong, and if they did, it was never mentioned. The waters were always calm, their voices were never raised, and inside they were all drowning. Page had almost drowned. |
| 105 |
She had moved out as soon as she had started art school. They hadn't wanted her to, and refused to pay for it, but she had done free lance work, and worked as a waitress in a restaurant at night just so she could afford it. She would have done anything to get out. Her survival depended on it, and she knew it. |
| 106 |
I'd rather let her go now if that's what she's going to be. And sitting there, watching her, while her brain swells, and a respirator breathes for her, isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. We've done what we could. Now all we can do is wait. And waiting here or waiting there doesn't make any difference to her. |
| 107 |
He still wanted to run away, and Stephanie made it so easy for him to do that. She felt sorry for him, and she let him escape the horror of what was happening to his child. She let him think that he couldn't help anyway. He had told her Page was good at handling it, and she had urged him to let her. |
| 108 |
And now everything was out in the open, just as he had disappeared the night before, in spite of their needing him, or a possible emergency, or even just because of Andy's feelings. Stephanie came before all of them. The realization of that had hit Page like a ten ton stone, and she couldn't ignore it. |
| 109 |
She showered and dressed for the funeral then, and Trygve came to pick her up at exactly two fifteen. He was wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt, and dark tie, and he looked serious and very handsome. Page was wearing a black linen suit she had bought in New York the last time she visited her mother. |
| 110 |
The power of his loss was so obvious just from their faces. The minister spoke very movingly about the mysteries of God's love, and the terrible pain we feel at the loss of a loved one. He spoke of what an extraordinary young man Phillip had been, how admired by everyone, what a bright future he'd had before him. |
| 111 |
It was then that she saw Laura Hutchinson, crying softly in a pew a few feet away. She seemed to have come alone, and she seemed as moved as everyone. Page stared at her for a long time, but she could see nothing more than a deeply affected mourner. Surprisingly little was said. Everyone looked dazed. |
| 112 |
But even then, the reporters didn't leave, but they backed off slightly. It was still a hot story. There was a reception after the service, in the school auditorium, and the Chapmans had invited a few friends to go home with them after that. But Page didn't want to go to either place. She couldn't bear it. |
| 113 |
He was wearing his baseball uniform and he looked so cute, she almost cried when she saw him. He looked so normal and healthy, it reminded her of only days before when she had taken him to his game, and everything seemed so simple. Allie wasn't in a coma then, and Brad hadn't confessed that he was cheating. |
| 114 |
Page was pleased to see that he had eaten well, and he looked more relaxed than he had at the beginning of dinner. But she still didn't think he was ready to see his sister. Her condition was too frightening, the danger still too acute. And if she died, Page didn't want him to have that as his last memory of Allie. |
| 115 |
And Andy went to his room, looking forlorn, followed by Lizzie. Page cleaned up the kitchen, cleared the table, set it for breakfast, and then listened to her messages. There were at least a dozen more, inquiring about Allie. And several of the young people at the funeral had asked when they could see her. |
| 116 |
She had thought about putting a special recording on her message machine, telling everyone how Allie was, but the news was still so frightening, and the hope so slim, that Page couldn't bring herself to do it. She went in to check on Andy finally, and she found him sitting on his bed, crying and talking to Lizzie. |
| 117 |
And after his bath, she read him a story. He went to say good night to Brad, but he was on the phone, talking to someone, and he waved him away brusquely. Brad's nerves seemed to be on edge, not only with Page, but with Andy. Coming home for dinner hadn't been easy for him, and he wasn't entirely glad he'd done it. |
| 118 |
Now that things were out in the open with Page, Stephanie was less willing to be patient. Page put Andy to bed, and tucked him in, and he asked her to leave the light on in the hall, which he seldom did. Only when he was really frightened of something, or very sick, but they were all a little of both at the moment. |
| 119 |
It was ten o'clock when Brad wandered in looking anxious and unhappy. It had been another difficult day for both of them, with their earlier exchange, the Chapman funeral, and dinner together had been far from easy. She was going through the mail, which she hadn't seen in two days, and looked up to see him. |
| 120 |
She wanted to spend more time with him, to be with him constantly, to have him spend the night when she knew he shouldn't. It was as though she was trying to prove something, as though she was trying to say that he belonged to her and not Page now. But the pressure on him, from both of them, was driving him crazy. |
| 121 |
But as she looked at him pensively, the phone interrupted them, and she grabbed for it instantly in case it was about Allie. It was in fact the hospital. Allie's brain was swelling more, and the pressure was becoming too dangerous for her now. If there was no improvement, they wanted to operate in the morning. |
| 122 |
And they wanted her or Brad to sign the papers again in case they had to. They felt comfortable waiting through the night, unless something changed, but in all likelihood they felt she'd need surgery the following morning. It was her second brain surgery in four days, but Dr. Hammerman said there was no choice. |
| 123 |
He never mentioned his nightmare again, but he was quiet when she dropped him off at school. Brad had said he would meet her at the hospital later that morning. She had to be there by eight fifteen to sign the papers. They wanted to operate on her by ten, and this time Brad had promised that he'd be there. |
| 124 |
It was a long, lonely wait then, knowing that she was being prepared for surgery, and that if the operation was not successful, she clearly wouldn't make it. The pressure on her brain would cause extensive damage eventually, and the fractures and wounds could not heal with the ongoing trauma of the pressure. |
| 125 |
They told the nurse where they were going, and they ran into Trygve in the lobby. He wished them luck, and then went upstairs to see Chloe, and they didn't see him again after that. The Clarkes stayed to themselves in the small airless waiting room, watching the clock, and waiting to hear from the surgeon. |
| 126 |
Allie was doing well, but the operation might have been too much for her. She could still die at any moment. He left them after a few minutes and Brad sighed and sat down, and looked at her. They were like two people who had almost drowned and were lying breathless on the beach after the terror of it. |
| 127 |
And then she went back to her vigil in the quiet room, realizing that Brad had neither touched her nor kissed her when he left. Somehow, the connection between them had been broken. Trygve stopped in to see her briefly in the waiting room with Bjorn, but he could see she wasn't in the mood for conversation. |
| 128 |
She closed her eyes and saw herself in their house in the city. It had been a mess when they bought it, but she had fixed it up, and it was beautiful by the time they sold it. She thought about the house in Marin, and when Andy was born, so terrifyingly tiny. But again and again, her thoughts went back to Allyson. |
| 129 |
She felt strangely calm, as though now she knew what to expect. She had been waiting for this, without knowing. She had been there when Allie had been born, and now she would be there when she left. Her eyes filled with tears, but she felt calm as the nurse shook her head and walked to the elevator with her. |
| 130 |
And as the sun came up slowly over the Marin hills, Allyson seemed to almost sigh and settle into a peaceful sleep. It was as though she had been somewhere and back, and now she was very tired. Page could almost feel her move into a different space. There was no longer that ephemeral feeling of her leaving them. |
| 131 |
She had known Allie was leaving them, and yet she was happy for her, and relieved, even though it was sad for them. She had almost felt her leaving this place, and then returning to them. And as she looked at her, and kissed her daughter's fingertips, she knew that nothing would ever frighten her again. |
| 132 |
She felt more peaceful than she had in years. They had been blessed, and as Page finally left the hospital to go home, she was awestruck by the power of the blessing. She had felt the hand of God near them all night, and she had felt safer than she ever had before, and as though Allyson were safe forever. |
| 133 |
And after he left, she called her mother, and told her the latest news of Ally son. Her mother offered to come out again, and once again seemed to miss the point about everything, but for once it didn't bother Page. She still felt peaceful and happy when she hung up and promised to call again in a few days. |
| 134 |
And she felt calmer than she had before. She knew now that if this was going to be a long haul, she'd have to keep her wits about her, and her strength up. Allie was still holding her own when Page got to the hospital shortly before nine o'clock in the morning and the nurses all smiled cautiously when they saw her. |
| 135 |
But her room was filled with flowers, and a few of her closest friends had come to see her. Trygve was standing outside the room, taking a breather and leaving the kids to visit without him. It was the first time Chloe had seen friends since the accident. Until then she had only seen her father and brothers. |
| 136 |
Jamie Applegate had called and asked to see her too, and Trygve had asked him to wait another day until the weekend. Jamie had been very polite to him, very concerned, and he was very anxious to see Chloe. The largest bouquet of all, which arrived the moment she moved into her room, was from Jamie and his parents. |
| 137 |
There was the smallest tremor in her voice as she said it, but she surprised herself by how smoothly she said the words. After sixteen years, he was leaving her. In fact, for all intents and purposes he had already left her. He had called her that morning and told her not to expect him home for the weekend. |
| 138 |
He said there was a boy like him at school, but they had put him in special classes. But she and Andy were both surprised by how smoothly it all went the next day. Bjorn had helped to make lunch, he had made really good hamburgers and french fries, and Trygve had made hot dogs and potato salad, and sliced tomatoes. |
| 139 |
The boys were playing baseball on the front lawn when Page left for the hospital, and Trygve waved as she drove away. She felt happy for the first time in ages. No matter what else was happening, at least he was there for her, he had become a good friend, and her time with him was an island of calm in a sea of terror. |
| 140 |
Everything was peaceful at the hospital that day. Allie was still deep in sleep, the respirator breathing for her, and her condition listed as critical but stable. Page sat next to her as she always did, talking quietly and telling her what was going on, and reminding her of how much they loved her. |
| 141 |
It was too soon for her to have visitors and it would have been too upsetting to him. As a parent she knew that. She promised to let him know as soon as he could, and left the two young people listening to music. Page went back to pick Andy up late that afternoon, the boys were screaming with laughter playing cards. |
| 142 |
He didn't make a move toward her again, and on the way home, she decided that she'd imagined it. He was very independent, and he had his own life. And as Allyson had said the week before, and he had confirmed since, he seemed perfectly happy without a woman in his life. Dana had burned him very badly. |
| 143 |
She had never even thought of it before, but after a week of being close to him so much, she had to admit that she thought he was not only good looking, but appealing. She was thinking about him with a smile, in spite of herself, when Andy spoke up from the backseat and took her breath away with his question. |
| 144 |
In a world where everything had changed overnight, the smallest rituals brought them both comfort. And they were both surprised when Brad arrived shortly after they got home, and said he was staying for dinner. He asked how Allie was, and Page told him the truth. She was still alive, but there was still no improvement. |
| 145 |
It was becoming routine now. She had no other life, no other job, no other work, except ricocheting between Andy's needs, and her vigil at the hospital, and her fights with Brad whenever she saw him. It was incredibly claustrophobic. She felt almost numb as she sat there, watching the machine breathe for Allie. |
| 146 |
One saw things sometimes because one wanted to, but they weren't really there, they were illusions. She sat back in her uncomfortable chair for a moment and closed her eyes, when Frances came to get her. She was waiting for the physical therapist to come so she could help move Allie's arms and legs. |
| 147 |
She looked terrible, and she was shaking visibly when they got there. But Andy hadn't come in yet. Frances left Page in the care of the emergency room staff, and a moment later, Page disappeared and went to a pay phone. It was stupid of her, she knew, but for once in her life, she couldn't manage alone. |
| 148 |
She started crying the moment she saw him. All the strength she had had for Allie had suddenly left her. Trygve put an arm around her and pulled her close to him, to stop the shaking, as the teacher carried the child into an examining room where a nurse was waiting to check his vital signs and examine the damage. |
| 149 |
They put the arm in a sling afterward and gave him something for the pain. They wanted him to go home and stay in bed for a day, and after that he'd be as good as new. The cast had to be on for six weeks. It was a pretty nasty break, but at his age they didn't think it would cause any long term problems. |
| 150 |
Trygve took her breath away, and she giggled as they kissed again. It was a good thing Andy was sedated, but she also knew that neither of them was ready to do anything foolish. She had to settle her life with Brad before she started anything serious with Trygve, and he knew that. But this certainly changed things. |
| 151 |
She is completely narcissistic. She's never had kids and she's married to a plastic surgeon in New York. At forty two, she has had her eyes done twice, three noses, new breasts, liposuction everywhere, and a full face lift. Everything about her is perfect. The nails, the face, the hair, the clothes, the body. |
| 152 |
She has never taken care of a living, breathing soul in her life, and neither has my mother. Let me explain the scenario to you. They are coming out so I can take care of them, and reassure them that there's nothing wrong with Al lie, and if there is, it won't hurt, embarrass, inconvenience, or affect them. |
| 153 |
She didn't tell him not to tell Brad anything, she wouldn't have done that to him, but it was as though he sensed there was already enough trouble with his parents. She and Trygve had been very circumspect while they were there, but there was something warm and different now that passed between them. |
| 154 |
Just since that morning, things had changed, and it was suddenly very hard to deny their feelings. They had sat and talked in the living room for a long time, while the boys played quietly in Andy's room with the dog. Bjorn really liked Andy's baseball cards, and his rock collection from the previous summer. |
| 155 |
He was wearing different ties, new suits, and had had a different haircut. But no matter how far Brad went, she didn't want to go to Trygve on the rebound. She wanted more than anything to sort out her situation with Brad, and what they were going to do, before she did anything, but he wouldn't even discuss it. |
| 156 |
She didn't want their relationship to be a result of Brad's rejecting her, or the trauma of the accident either. If anything happened with him, she wanted it to be because they genuinely had something good to share, and could have a good life, or a good time, or were meant to be together. She wanted it to be right. |
| 157 |
Brad had always made her feel that it was something she should do for friends, or in their kitchen. Not something she should ever work at. Somehow he felt that what she did wasn't important. She'd promised to do another mural for the school, but spending every spare moment at the hospital, she didn't have time now. |
| 158 |
I didn't see them at all for the first few years after I came out here, and then my father died, and I felt sorry for my mother, so I invited her out. That was a mistake. She and Brad fought like cats and dogs every day, subtly of course, it's all very passive aggressive, but it gives me a stomachache to be around it. |
| 159 |
Chloe was still in a fair amount of pain, and her extensive casts and pins and contraptions looked pretty miserable, but she was handling it well, and she was happy to be alive. She was very worried about Allie. Trygve had told her pretty honestly that she still might die. She wasn't out of the woods yet. |
| 160 |
Mr. Chapman had told him he was suing the paper for the article that seemed to blame Phillip. Jamie mentioned too that a reporter had come to see him again, to ask him what it was like to be the only one who'd escaped unscathed. But for the most part, the press interest finally seemed to have faded. |
| 161 |
He had gone away overnight with Stephanie and there was no way he could call her from their hotel room. Stephanie hadn't left him for a single minute, and she had been furious on Sunday morning when he had insisted on driving back. But not as furious as Page had been when he walked in at noon, having never called her. |
| 162 |
But it was Andy she was worried about as they drove to the airport. He looked heartbroken as he stared out the window. Her mother and Alexis were among the first passengers off the plane. Her mother looked trim as usual, with beautifully done white hair, and a navy suit that showed off her slim figure. |
| 163 |
But she didn't want to discuss the demise of her marriage with her, and her mother wouldn't want to hear it. They waited for their luggage at the baggage claim, and fortunately all of it arrived safely. A porter staggered under the mountain of bags they had brought. Alexis's were all matched Gucci cases. |
| 164 |
And she always hoped that Alexis would turn out to have pigtails and freckles and a heart. But they never changed. Her mother spoke of only pleasant things, and Alexis hardly spoke at all, she was too busy being perfect and looking pretty. Page had always wondered what she and David talked about, if anything. |
| 165 |
Alexis asked her for a drink. She wanted cold Evian without ice, and her mother said that she would love a cup of coffee and a little sandwich while she unpacked her things. It was typical of Page's experience with them, and she went to the kitchen, without saying a word, and made whatever they wanted. |
| 166 |
It was four thirty by then, and Page was anxious to get to the hospital. She hadn't been all day, and she was sure that her mother and Alexis would want to see Allie. She mentioned it as the two women joined her in the living room, and her mother complimented her on the new couch, and drapes, and new paintings. |
| 167 |
She told her anything and everything that she could think of except that her marriage was falling apart, and Brad had a girlfriend. Page kissed her gently on the forehead when she left, and stood back to look at the bandages for a long time. Brad was right, she just didn't see it anymore. But it was very upsetting. |
| 168 |
She had never met Allyson, or Page, they meant nothing to her. All she wanted was Brad, and she wasn't going to let him dangle her any longer. For almost a year she had been perfectly happy sleeping with him whenever they could, having a good time on occasional business trips, and a rare stolen weekend. |
| 169 |
Brad was already up and dressed by then, he skipped breakfast and left early for the city. He said he had a breakfast meeting, and she didn't question him. At least he had been at home all night and she hadn't had to explain to her mother why he wasn't. Who knows, maybe they wouldn't even have noticed. |
| 170 |
She did some paperwork, paid some bills, but by eleven o'clock they still weren't ready. Alexis had to do her exercise routine, and her hair was still in electric rollers. By then she had bathed and put her makeup on, but it would still be another hour before they were out the door, she estimated, when Page asked her. |
| 171 |
She was wearing the same jeans and loafers she had worn off and on for two weeks. She just took them off long enough to wash the jeans, and she had worn all her old tired sweaters. They were comfortable and warm in the drafty halls of the hospital, and she hadn't cared how she looked in more than two weeks. |
| 172 |
It was almost as though the reason for their trip had been forgotten. Page made dinner for them again that night, but Brad didn't come home or call. She made an excuse for him, but later she found Andy looking forlorn and sat down on her bed to talk to him. Having her own mother there made her nervous and edgy. |
| 173 |
She was interested in how she looked, and what she wore, and very little else. And her husband understood that. There was no woman there, just a form and a beautifully made up face with perfect features. Alexis and her mother were talking about staying another week, and at the mere mention of it, Page looked frantic. |
| 174 |
It had blown them apart, and it was more and more obvious that they weren't likely to recover. She walked into the bathroom then, and when she came out, he was gone. She went to bed, and lay awake for a long time. Lately, she had more and more trouble sleeping. She thought of calling Trygve, but that didn't seem fair. |
| 175 |
She wanted to tell him that she would always love him, no matter what happened with his father, but she didn't want to say too much, so she just told him how much she loved him. She went to cook dinner after that, and Brad surprised them and came home, and it actually started out to be a very pleasant dinner. |
| 176 |
Brad did a barbecue for them, and he was very quiet and polite. He avoided Page's eyes, but he made an effort to be nice to her mother, and he had Andy help him make the hamburgers and steaks and chicken. Alexis explained that she wasn't eating meat today, and she had Andy open a bottle of Evian for her. |
| 177 |
It had been a long haul, and so far there wasn't much hope her daughter would get any better. She hated cases like that, they were so hard on everyone, especially when it involved kids. Sometimes, she thought to herself, it was simpler if you lost them. But she never would have said that to the parents. |
| 178 |
And they played it well. Despite the commotion in the house, and lights flashing outside, there was no sound whatsoever from their bedrooms. The police drove around the neighborhood, they left and came back again to see if he'd turned up, and just as they drove away again, the phone rang. It was Trygve. |
| 179 |
Page waited quietly the next morning for her mother to get up, and when she did, she made breakfast for her and Alexis, and served it to them at the kitchen table. And then she told them quietly that they had to leave, that a week had been long enough, and this was not a good time for her to have them out there. |
| 180 |
She stayed with them until they left, and then changed their beds, did two loads of wash, and vacuumed her whole house. She felt as though she was taking care of things, and doing what she could to get her life back in order. Their departure had been remarkably unemotional, considering the fireworks the night before. |
| 181 |
She has a big bandage on her head, and her arms and legs are very thin, and there's a tube in her throat that helps her breathe, attached to a big machine that breathes for her. Sometimes it all looks pretty scary, particularly if you've never seen it before. Okay? You can talk to her, but she won't answer you. |
| 182 |
She was so proud of him, and she loved him so much. And she was glad she had brought him. She hadn't realized till then how much he needed to see his sister. And even if Allie died now, he would feel he had reached out to her, and said good bye. She hadn't disappeared in the middle of the night into a vacuum. |
| 183 |
It was going to be hard for her now if Brad moved out, and hard for the boy. Trygve wanted to be there to help her pick up the pieces. He just hoped that nothing dramatic happened to Allyson now. They had all been through enough, and with everything else going on in her life, he wasn't sure that Page could take it. |
| 184 |
The door to the bedroom was closed. But she saw his car in the garage, and Andy exploded into their bedroom to see him. And then he looked around him, startled. There were two suitcases on the floor, another on the bed, and there were clothes everywhere. And as Page saw them, she felt her heart ache. |
| 185 |
It was a terrible night for all of them. Brad decided to spend the night there and he worked through the night going through his papers. And by morning, they all looked as though they were in mourning. Page made pancakes and sausages for all of them, normally their favorite, but no one could eat them. |
| 186 |
She had to be taken away, and it was all done very quietly. Very hush hush. Things like that make me wonder how often that's happened before and what really happened that night. If the rest of us get drunk, we fall on our faces and make asses of ourselves, and it doesn't matter if we don't do it very often. |
| 187 |
And he had given up his room to his sister. Page and Andy had come by to see her too, after she'd settled in. She was lying on the couch in the living room by then, not looking very comfortable, but extremely happy. She still had quite a lot of pain, but she was trying not to overdo the pain medicine. |
| 188 |
For the moment, the worst was over. She might have to be operated on again, the doctor thought it was likely that she would. But she would never be in danger again, or in as much pain, or as severely incapacitated as she still was now. Now it was a matter of repairing the damaged limbs, but not of surviving. |
| 189 |
She liked him a lot too, he had come to mean a lot to her in the past weeks. In an odd way, he had almost come to take the place of Allie. If anyone had asked, she would have said they were best friends now. In a way, they were more than that, and they both knew that too, but they didn't say it in words. |
| 190 |
And if she needed to go to the bathroom, to call him. When Jamie did call him eventually for that, it was Trygve and Page who got her there, and she was pretty independent after that. But it was obvious she was going to need a lot of help getting around the house, and managing even the smallest task. |
| 191 |
But he knew how traumatic it had been for her when Brad left, and he wanted to give her time to adjust. She had noticed it and she was grateful for it, although she'd missed him too, and the warmth of their friendship and flirtation. He was always sensitive to her needs, without her having to say anything about it. |
| 192 |
But during the trauma of the separation, he'd backed off so as not to pressure her or confuse her. But he had missed her. They left late, and Andy fell asleep in the car on the way home. It had been a nice weekend. Trygve called her after she had put Andy to bed, and she was lying in her own bed, feeling lonely. |
| 193 |
She was telling her about their lunch, and how pretty it was outside, when suddenly Allyson let out a soft moan, and moved her head slowly toward her mother. Page stopped speaking and stared, her eyes riveted by the motion. And then, Allie lay as still as she had before, as the machines purred beside her. |
| 194 |
She did not move again that day, but she did the same thing again when Page was with her the next morning. She called Brad at his office to let him know too, and they told her he was in St. Louis and finally she tracked him down in his hotel that night, and he was pleased, but not as excited as she had hoped. |
| 195 |
It might mean a lot eventually, or it could mean nothing. But Page was still excited the next day when he picked her up to take her to dinner. Andy was at Jane's and she had said she would pick him up when she got home, if it wasn't too late. And if it was, Jane had said she didn't mind keeping him until morning. |
| 196 |
They danced afterward, and she felt his body close to hers. It surprised her to realize how strong he was, and how supple. He was a terrific dancer. They left the restaurant at eleven o'clock, and Page smiled happily at him. They had hardly drunk any wine, but she felt drunk on the excitement of the evening. |
| 197 |
But he ran back for one more kiss as they both laughed, and then finally he went home. And true to his word, he was back at eight thirty in the morning. She hadn't really thought he'd meant it. She had picked up Andy and taken him to school. She was doing laundry and singing to herself when Trygve arrived. |
| 198 |
But this time she chased him out of bed. It was eleven o'clock and she had to go see Allie. Now that she had started to show some improvement, however small, Page didn't want to miss a moment with her. He stayed with her at the hospital for the first hour, and then went home to work, and to check on Chloe. |
| 199 |
He had also told her that her pants were too tight, and her chest was too small. He had announced in no uncertain terms that his mother had a much better figure, was smarter, nicer, a good cook, and Stephanie probably couldn't cook anyway, and she'd painted a mural for his school that everybody admired. |
| 200 |
He was tempted to stop and talk, but decided that would just be too difficult. He wasn't in the mood, and he was anxious to get back to Stephanie and reassure her. He knew how upset she would be about how rude Andy had been, she was childish about things like that sometimes, and he knew he'd have to make it up to her. |
| 201 |
She chased him out to the garden then, and her mother called a few minutes later. She had nothing new to say except that Alexis had developed a frightful ulcer. It didn't surprise Page at all. It was something that happened to anorexics. From starving themselves their stomach acids began eating through their stomach. |
| 202 |
He had a summer job in Tiburon, at the tennis club, and they were excited about him coming home from college. The only one missing would be Allie. After dinner, they were sitting in the dining room, talking about her, when Chloe said how much she missed her, and how much she still hoped she'd wake up from her coma. |
| 203 |
Dr. Hammerman still seemed to feel that if she didn't come out of it within three months of the accident, perhaps she never would. It was something Page tried not to think about, but late at night, as she lay in bed, she was haunted by the fear that Allyson might spend the rest of her life in a coma. |
| 204 |
And at graduation, there had been a moment of silence for him. Chloe's eyes filled with tears, and she turned away, thinking of that night, as she often did. Bits of it had come back to her. She had even gone to the therapy group with Jamie because she had a lot of guilt about talking Allie into going with her. |
| 205 |
Brad had asked her to, and Stephanie was pushing him, but Page just couldn't bring herself to do it. Trygve had offered her the name of his, but she kept saying she was too busy to call. But she knew that one of these days, she'd have to. Brad reminded her of it too the next time she saw him at the hospital. |
| 206 |
She looked less tortured than she had, and happier, but there was still something sad in her eyes when he saw her. He wasn't sure if it was because of Allyson, or him, and a part of him still wanted to take her in his arms, and hold her, but he knew he couldn't. Besides, Stephanie would have killed him if she knew. |
| 207 |
He knew how hard it was, and he didn't think it was a reflection on them, it was just very painful terminating a marriage. He gave her the name of the attorney again, and then she called and made an appointment. And when she saw the lawyer, he told her what Brad had said, that she'd be divorced by Christmas. |
| 208 |
Suddenly she was moving ahead at full steam, and Trygve was relieved to see it. She was returning to the living. She started an art project at Bjorn's new school, and everyone was in love with her, especially the students. She did papiermache with them, and sculpture in clay, pottery, watercolors and drawings. |
| 209 |
Bjorn was explaining to them what Page was doing at school, and Page beamed at him when he said how much he liked it. She had a warm relationship with him, and now when he went to bed, and she was there, he clung to her and kissed her good night, and asked her to read him a story, just as she did to Andy. |
| 210 |
It was the first any of them had known of the relationship, or the fact that Brad was gone, the first anyone had seen of Page since the accident. It was not quite three months, but it felt more like three years, and a lot had changed in a short time. But people were happy for them, everyone had always liked Trygve. |
| 211 |
He turned the TV on again, and flipped the dial, and they saw a similar report on another channel. The news was worse this time. She had killed a twenty eight year old woman, and her thirty two year old husband, their two year old little girl, and five year old boy, and the woman was eight months pregnant. |
| 212 |
Five people, not four. And her own daughter had broken an arm, had fifteen stitches in her left cheek, and had a mild concussion. There was film of ambulances, fire trucks, other cars that had been forced off the road. Six or seven other cars had been involved in lesser ways, but no one else had been seriously injured. |
| 213 |
They were paying for the funerals, of course, and a full investigation, and full disclosure would be made. He had some serious questions about his wife's car. He believed that the steering column and the brakes had been defective. Page wanted to scream as she listened. They showed him then with his injured child. |
| 214 |
But if they had been honest in dealing with Laura Hutchinson's drinking problem years before, maybe she wouldn't have been on the road, behind the wheel that fateful night in April. Page was unhappy when she saw the interview on TV, they edited it so it made her look as though she had said things she hadn't. |
| 215 |
He was not as secure as he had been before the accident, he didn't like to spend the night at friends' anymore, and sometimes he still had nightmares about Allie. The accident had been almost four months earlier. The feared three month mark had passed, without a whimper from Allie. Page had almost come to accept that. |
| 216 |
She had wanted so desperately for her to wake up, for her to be herself again, even if it took a long time to get her back on her feet or rehabilitate her. She would have done anything to bring her back. But she was slowly beginning to understand that it wasn't going to happen. Trygve called her from Tahoe every day. |
| 217 |
And pick Andy up at day camp, go home, and cook dinner. She missed Trygve terribly, more than even she expected. Once he said he was so lonely for her that he drove down one night just to spend the night with her and go back up in the morning. He was wonderful to her, and they were very happy together. |
| 218 |
There were a lot of intricate details she had done in her early sketches, and she was sitting next to Allyson thinking about them, and checking her drawings. It was a peaceful afternoon and the sun was streaming into the room, as Page felt a little movement of Allie's hand on the bed. She did that sometimes. |
| 219 |
And then, almost imperceptibly, she saw Allie's head move. She seemed to be turning it slowly toward her, as though she sensed that Page was there. Page watched her, feeling her breath catch. It was as though she knew that someone was there, as though she herself were back in the room again, and Page could feel it. |
| 220 |
The doctor asked Allyson to squeeze his hand, and to look at him, which she did. And then he asked her to speak to him, but she wouldn't. Her eyes darted back to her mother's then, and she shook her head. And afterward he explained to Page, in the hall, that she had probably lost most of her language. |
| 221 |
It was a new action for her. She could smile, but never at exactly the moment she wanted, there seemed to be a delay. Similarly, when she cried, it always seemed to come late. But Dr. Hammerman said that all of those things would eventually fall into place, with a lot of work, and tremendous effort. |
| 222 |
They finally slept in the same bedroom this time, and in spite of Bjorn and Andy's giggles the first night, everyone seemed to survive it. It was a peaceful, relaxing time. They rode and fished and went hiking together. They talked about a lot of things, and got to know each other even better than they had. |
| 223 |
She had been only too happy to let Phillip take the blame and imply that it had been his fault. For the rest of time, he would have borne the blame of the accident, when she had been the one. Someone had come forward recently and said that they thought she'd had a lot to drink when she left the party. |
| 224 |
Silver wrapped party favors were on the tables at each place. A calligrapher had written up the menus on heavy ecru stock, and they'd been clipped into little silver stands. The placecards with tiny gold angels on them had already been set down according to Sarah's carefully thought out seating chart. |
| 225 |
There was an auction of high ticket items, which included jewelry, exotic trips, sports packages, celebrity meet and greet opportunities, and a black Range Rover parked in front of the hotel with a huge gold bow tied on top. Someone was going to be very happy driving the car home at the end of the evening. |
| 226 |
The first one had netted them more than two million dollars, between seat prices, the auction, and donations. She hoped to make three million tonight. The high caliber of the entertainment they were providing would help them get to their goal. There was a dance band, which would play on and off during the night. |
| 227 |
Her father had gotten Melanie Free to perform, which allowed them to charge high prices for both individual seats and particularly the sponsor tables. Melanie had won a Grammy three months earlier, and her single performances like this one usually ran a million five. She was donating her performance. |
| 228 |
All the Smallest Angels had to pick up were her production costs, which were quite high. The cost of travel, lodgings, food, and the set up of her roadies and band was estimated to cost them three hundred thousand dollars, which was a bargain, considering who she was and the cataclysmic effect of her performance. |
| 229 |
Her recent Grammy was the icing on the cake, and Sarah was grateful she was still willing to do their benefit for free. Her greatest fear had been that Melanie would cancel at the last minute. With a donated performance, a lot of stars and singers dropped out hours before they were expected to show up. |
| 230 |
He was a delicious, chubby, gurgling nine month old now. Her children were the joy of Sarah's existence and her husband's. She was a full time mom, and her only other serious activity was putting on this benefit every year. It took a monumental amount of work and organization, which she was good at. |
| 231 |
Although she and Seth had both grown up in comfortable circumstances, neither of them had had the extravagant life they had now. It worried Sarah a little from time to time that maybe they were spending too much money, with a fabulous house in Tahoe in addition to their city house, and their own plane. |
| 232 |
It meant the world to Sarah to give back by organizing the benefit, which had been her idea. The committee turned an enormous profit over to them after the evening's expenses were paid. Seth had kicked things off for them with a two hundred thousand dollar donation in both their names. Sarah was very proud of him. |
| 233 |
She had been overwhelmed with the benefit for the past three months. They were chartering a yacht in Greece in August, and Sarah thought that would be the perfect time to get pregnant again. Sarah walked slowly around each table in the ballroom, doublechecking the names on the placecards against her list. |
| 234 |
She had wanted to be on the committee with Sarah because the benefit was such a big deal and so much fun. She'd had a ball helping Sarah put it together, and the two women got along well. Sarah's hair was as dark as Angela's was blond. Sarah had long, straight, dark brown hair, creamy skin, and huge green eyes. |
| 235 |
They had gotten an advance list of everything she required, including Calistoga bottled water, low fat yogurt, a dozen kinds of natural foods, and a case of Cristal champagne. The list was twenty six pages long, referring to all her personal needs, her mother's food preferences, even the beer her boyfriend drank. |
| 236 |
And then there were another forty pages referring to the band, and all the electrical and sound equipment they'd need on stage. The eight foot grand piano she required for her performance had been brought in at midnight the night before. She and the band were scheduled to rehearse that afternoon at two. |
| 237 |
They'd been teasing her about it, but she didn't like hearing it anyway. Earthquakes were the one thing that had worried her about the city since they'd moved there, but everyone assured her that they rarely happened, and when they did, they were small. In six years of living in the Bay Area, she hadn't felt one yet. |
| 238 |
Sarah asked them for the directions to Melanie's room, and then continued down the hall. To avoid security hassles, and fans, Melanie was registered under the name Hastings, her mother's maiden name. They did that at every hotel, as did some of the other stars, who rarely registered in their own names. |
| 239 |
Sarah gently knocked on the door of the suite number she'd been given by the woman in the lounge. She could hear music inside, and a moment later the door was opened by a short, heavy set woman in a halter top and jeans. She was carrying a yellow pad, with a pen stuck in her hair, and carrying an evening gown. |
| 240 |
Half a dozen suitcases were open on the floor, with their contents spilling everywhere. One was full of slinky gowns. Out of the others poured boots, jeans, handbags, tops, blouses, a cashmere blanket, and a teddy bear. It looked as though an entire chorus line of women had dumped their belongings on the floor. |
| 241 |
She seemed even younger than she was, with no makeup on. She looked about sixteen with long, straight golden colored hair. The boyfriend's was jet black and spiked, and before Melanie could say a word to either of them, Melanie's mother appeared from nowhere and shook Sarah's hand, until it nearly ached. |
| 242 |
She appeared to run her daughter's life, and seemed to think she was as much a part of her stardom as Melanie was herself. Melanie didn't appear to object, she was obviously used to it, and a few minutes later, her friend came back into the room, teetering on the leopard heels, in the borrowed dress. |
| 243 |
Sarah didn't want a live in, she loved taking care of her babies herself, but Parmani was there in the daytime to help her, and she stayed in the evening when Seth and Sarah went out. She was spending the night, which she seldom did, but she was more than happy to help on a special occasion like this. |
| 244 |
She wished her good luck before they hung up. Sarah had wanted to say hi to Molly, but she was still having a nap. By the time Sarah finished, checked some notes on her clipboard, and brushed her hair, which looked a mess, it was time to go back to the ballroom to meet Melanie and her crew for rehearsal. |
| 245 |
Thinking about it now, Sarah couldn't help wondering if it was her mother's edict, and not the star's. Melanie didn't look as though she'd care who was around. She seemed oblivious to what went on around her, who came in and out, or what they did. Maybe it was different when she performed, Sarah told herself. |
| 246 |
The problem had been fixed, but Sarah had nearly panicked at the prospect of her canceling at the last minute. Melanie's easy ways were a relief, whatever her mother's demands on her behalf. Sarah waited ten more minutes while they finished setting up, wondering if Melanie would come down late, but she didn't dare ask. |
| 247 |
Melanie walked in wearing flip flops, a skimpy T shirt, and cut off jeans. Her hair was lumped up on her head in a banana clip, and her best friend was at her side. Her mother marched in first, her assistant and manager brought up the rear, and there were two ominouslooking bodyguards close at hand. |
| 248 |
Melanie was the least noticeable member of the group, and nearly disappeared in their midst. Her drummer handed her a Coke, she popped it open, took a swig, hopped up on stage, and squinted as she looked into the room. Compared to the venues where she was used to performing in concert, this was tiny. |
| 249 |
She told them what she wanted to play first. They had already agreed on the order of the songs she was going to sing, including her current smash hit. Sarah realized she was no longer needed then, and started to leave. It was five after four, and she was going to be half an hour late for her hair appointment. |
| 250 |
Maybe not. She made it to just outside the ballroom door when one of the committee members stopped her with a catering manager in tow. There was a problem with the hors d'oeuvres. The Olympia oysters weren't in, what they had on hand wasn't fresh enough, and she had to pick something else. A minor decision for once. |
| 251 |
She told the committee member to make the choice, just so it wasn't caviar or something that would destroy their budget, and with that she ran into the elevator, rushed across the lobby, and claimed her car from the valet. He had left it parked nearby. The big tip she'd given him early that morning had served her well. |
| 252 |
It was fourthirty five, and she had to leave no later than six. She had hoped to be out by five forty five at the latest, which was no longer possible. They knew she was chairing her big benefit that night, and whisked her into the chair. They brought her some sparkling mineral water, followed by a cup of tea. |
| 253 |
They were old, battered, comfortable, and made of black lizard. They were his prize possession, and he had every intention of wearing them with the rented tux that the magazine had paid for him to wear that night. He showed his press pass at the desk, and they smiled and said they were expecting him. |
| 254 |
He was there to cover the benefit for Scoop, a Hollywood gossip magazine. He had spent years covering war zones for the Associated Press, and after leaving them and taking a year off, he had needed a job, so he took this one. On the night of the benefit, he had worked for the magazine for all of three weeks. |
| 255 |
He didn't want anyone complaining about him to his editors. It was too soon for him to start cutting corners. He always had, and had gotten away with it. But he was drinking then. This was a new start, and he didn't want to push the limits of the envelope just yet. He was being a good boy, conscientious, and honest. |
| 256 |
It felt like going to nursery school again for him. After taking photographs of dying soldiers in trenches, and having shellfire all around him, covering a benefit in San Francisco was pretty goddamn tame, although others would have loved it. He wasn't one of them, unfortunately. This was a hardship post for him. |
| 257 |
Several of his shots had made the cover of Time magazine. He had a name in the business, and for a time had screwed it all up by drinking, but at least that had changed. He had spent six months in rehab, and another five in an ashram figuring out his life. By now he thought he had. Booze was out of his life forever. |
| 258 |
It was only after he got there that he realized how bad things were. It was either dry out or die. So he had stayed six months and chose to dry out instead of dying the next time he went on a binge. Since then, he had gained weight, looked healthy, and went to AA meetings every day, sometimes as many as three. |
| 259 |
It wasn't as tough for him now as it had been at first, but he figured if the meetings didn't always help him, his being there would help someone else. He had a sponsor, was one, and had been sober now for just over a year. He had his one year chip in his pocket, his lucky boots on, and had forgotten to comb his hair. |
| 260 |
It was a Thursday night, and he had begged her to do the fund raiser on the weekend, so he didn't have to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning, but this was the only date that both the hotel and Melanie had given them, so they went with it. Seth looked as stressed as he always did coming home from the office. |
| 261 |
They had gotten along brilliantly since the day they met in business school. They had a happy marriage, loved their life, and were crazy about their kids. He had provided her with an incredible life in the past few years. She loved everything about their life together, and most all, she loved everything about him. |
| 262 |
She didn't bother to listen. She left a small bottle of scotch and a glass of ice beside him, and he was pouring it gratefully into a glass as the door to the suite closed behind her. She got into the elevator and rode down to the ballroom, three floors below the lobby, and everything was perfection. |
| 263 |
And Everett Carson started taking photographs of the models. Two of them were sensational looking, with high, round artificial breasts and interesting cleavage they had draped diamond necklaces on. The others were too skinny for him. He came back and took a photograph of Sarah, before she got too busy. |
| 264 |
Sarah had promised to keep speeches and acknowledgments to a minimum. After a brief speech by the doctor in charge of the neonatal unit, they ran a short film about the miracles they performed. Sarah then talked about her own personal experience with Molly. And from there, they went right into the auction. |
| 265 |
There were TV cameras waiting for Melanie to go on. The evening was turning out to be a huge success. They made over four hundred thousand in the auction, thanks to a very aggressive auctioneer. Two very expensive paintings from a local art gallery had helped, and there had been some great cruises and trips. |
| 266 |
She was well known for her work on the streets with the homeless, and her position against city government for not doing more for them was very controversial. Sarah would have loved to talk to her tonight, but she was too busy with the thousand details she had to keep an eye on to ensure the success of the event. |
| 267 |
The two women had something in common, as Sister Maggie had graduated as a nurse right before entering the convent. She found her skills useful for those she tried to help. And as they continued their heated discussion, the room went dark. The auction was over, dessert had been served, and Melanie was about to go on. |
| 268 |
Sarah had gone backstage to see her before she went on. Her mother was running interference for her, and Jake was half smashed, drinking straight gin. The songs Melanie sang mesmerized the audience. She sat down at the edge of the stage for the last one, reaching out to them, singing to them, ripping their hearts out. |
| 269 |
Melanie was a thousand times more beautiful than she had seemed to Sarah when she hung out in her suite. She had a stage presence that was electrifying and a voice that no one would ever forget. She had made the evening for everyone, and Sarah sat back in her chair with a smile of total satisfaction. |
| 270 |
The room was in total darkness, the groaning sound grew louder, people were shouting and screaming over it, and the rolling movement of the room turned into a terrifying shudder as it went from side to side. Sarah and Seth were on the floor by then, he had pulled her under their table before it overturned. |
| 271 |
All she could think of were her babies at home with Parmani. She was crying, terrified for them, and desperate to get back to them, if they all lived through what was happening to them now. The undulating of the room and the crashing sounds seemed to go on forever. It was several minutes before it stopped. |
| 272 |
They had no idea how to get out, or by what route. The noise in the room was deafening as people shouted to each other, and then hotel employees with powerful flashlights appeared beneath the exit signs. Someone with a bullhorn was telling them to stay calm and proceed with caution toward the exits and not to panic. |
| 273 |
It had been the most terrifying experience of Sarah's life. Seth grabbed her arm, and pulled her to her feet, as five hundred and sixty people pushed their way toward the exits. There were sounds of people crying, others groaning in pain, some shouting for help, saying that someone next to them was hurt. |
| 274 |
Sister Maggie told her not to even think about it until she got out of the hotel, and the pregnant woman smiled as Maggie helped her stand up and start moving out of the ballroom holding tightly to her husband's arm. Everyone was terrified of an aftershock, which might be even worse than the first quake. |
| 275 |
There was no doubt in anyone's mind that it had been greater than seven on the Richter scale, maybe even eight, and there were groaning sounds in the room all around them as the earth settled again, which was anything but reassuring. At the front of the room, Everett Carson had been next to Melanie when the quake hit. |
| 276 |
A few minutes later, he stumbled over a woman helping a man who said he'd had a heart attack. The woman moved away to help someone else, and Everett helped get the man outside. He and a man who said he was a doctor put him on a chair and lifted him up. They had to carry him up three flights of stairs. |
| 277 |
The man who had the heart attack was already on the way to the hospital in an ambulance, along with another man who had a broken leg. There were injured people lying on the street, most of whom had come out of the hotel, and others who hadn't. The stoplights were no longer functioning, and traffic had stopped. |
| 278 |
A cable car at the corner had jumped the tracks, and at least forty people were injured, as paramedics and firemen ministered to them. One woman was dead and had been covered by a tarp. It was a grisly scene, and Everett didn't even notice till he got outside and saw blood on his shirt that he had a cut on his cheek. |
| 279 |
He took a towel when a hotel employee handed it to him and wiped his face. There were dozens of them handing out towels, blankets, and bottles of water for the shocked people all around them. No one could figure out what to do next. They just stood there, staring at each other, and talking about what had happened. |
| 280 |
It was after midnight, and the quake had hit an hour before. The Ritz Carlton employees were being wonderful, wandering through the crowd, asking people what they could do to help. There wasn't much anyone could do right now, except the paramedics and firemen trying to triage those who had been hurt. |
| 281 |
Power lines were down, and there were live wires on the street. They were warned to steer a wide berth around them, and to go to the shelter rather than try to go home. The possibility of an aftershock was still frightening everyone. As the firemen told the crowd what to do, Everett continued taking pictures. |
| 282 |
This was the kind of work he loved. He wasn't preying on people's miseries, he was discreet, capturing this extraordinary moment in time that he already knew was a historical event. There was finally a shift in movement in the crowd, as they walked on shaking legs toward the earthquake shelter down the hill. |
| 283 |
One man had been in the shower in his room at the hotel, and said he thought it was some kind of vibrating feature in the tub for the first seconds. He was wearing a terrycloth robe and nothing else, and his feet were bare. One of them was cut, from glass lying in the street, but there was nothing anyone could do. |
| 284 |
It was the second biggest disaster the city had ever known. Everett took a bottle of water from a bellman handing them out. He opened it, took a long swig, and realized how dry his mouth was. There were clouds of dust coming out of the hotel from structures inside that had broken, and things that had collapsed. |
| 285 |
Everett was intrigued to note that almost everyone seemed to know Maggie. She stopped and talked to them, inquiring how everyone was doing, if people had gotten hurt, if help had come, and how the neighborhood was faring. They chatted animatedly with her, and eventually she and Everett sat down in a doorway on a stoop. |
| 286 |
The concept was totally foreign to him. He had grown up Lutheran, and had never even seen a nun until he left home. The whole idea of it had never made much sense to him. But here was this happy, contented little woman who talked about her life among hookers and drug addicts with such serenity, joy, and peace. |
| 287 |
They walked around the neighborhood for a little while after that, and everything seemed to be in surprisingly good order. Some people had gone to shelters. A few had gotten hurt, and been taken to hospitals. The rest seemed to be doing okay, although everybody was talking about the force of the quake. |
| 288 |
They had no way of getting news. They were cut off from the world, without electricity or cell phones. It was a strange feeling. The sun was coming up as he said goodbye to her, and he wondered if he'd ever see her again. It seemed unlikely. It had been an odd and unforgettable night for all of them. |
| 289 |
An evil smell had drifted toward them as she opened the door into the hallway, and he couldn't imagine how she could live there. She was truly a saintly woman, he realized as he walked away, and then laughed softly. He had spent the night of the San Francisco earthquake with a nun. He thought she was a hero. |
| 290 |
He could hardly wait to see the pictures of her. And then oddly, as he walked away from her building, back through the Tenderloin, he found himself thinking about his son, and the way Chad had looked when he was three, and for the first time in the twenty seven years since he'd last seen him, he missed him. |
| 291 |
He strode off then in his lucky boots, past the drunks and the hookers on Maggie's street. The sun was coming up, as he walked back into the heart of the city to see what stories of the earthquake he would find there. There were endless opportunities to shoot. And for him, who knew, maybe even another Pulitzer one day. |
| 292 |
They were finally able to hitch a ride from a passing car for the last dozen blocks or so, from a doctor returning from St. Mary's Hospital. It was three o'clock in the morning, and he had gone to check on his patients after the earthquake. He told them things at the hospital were relatively under control. |
| 293 |
Reports of people blocked in cars and unable to get out, screaming as they died, had been horrendous. So far, it was impossible to even guess at the death toll. But it was easy to assume there would be many, and thousands injured. The three of them listened to the car radio as they drove carefully through the streets. |
| 294 |
Sarah gave the doctor their address, and was quiet on the way home, praying for her children. There was still no way to communicate with the house or the babysitter for reassurance. All telephone lines were down, and cell phones weren't working. The badly shaken city seemed completely cut off from the outside world. |
| 295 |
All she wanted to know now was that Oliver and Molly were okay. Seth was staring out the window in a daze, and kept trying to use his cell phone, as the doctor drove them the rest of the way. They finally arrived at their large brick house perched on top of the hill on Divisadero and Broadway, overlooking the bay. |
| 296 |
Sarah ran to the front door as Seth followed behind her, looking exhausted. Sarah already had the door open when he reached her. She had kicked her impossible shoes off, and was running down the hall. There was no electricity, so the lights were off, and it was unusually dark, with not even streetlights outside. |
| 297 |
Looking around, Sarah could see that all their paintings were wildly askew, two statues had fallen down, and a small antique card table and several chairs had tipped over. The room had a severely disordered look to it, with books spilling all over the floor, and smaller objects strewn around the room. |
| 298 |
But her babies were fine, which was all that mattered. They were uninjured and alive, and then as her eyes got accustomed to the dim room, she could see that Parmani had a bump on her forehead. She explained that Oliver's bookcase had fallen on her as she ran to get him out of his crib when the quake began. |
| 299 |
Parmani went to get another flashlight, and the candles flickered as Sarah sat in her living room, thinking about Seth. It was one thing to be a workaholic and another to dash off down the peninsula, hours after a major earthquake, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves. She wasn't happy about it at all. |
| 300 |
It seemed like irrational, obsessive behavior to her. She and Parmani sat in the living room talking softly until almost sunrise. She thought about going upstairs to her bedroom, and putting the children in bed with her, but she felt safer downstairs, able to leave the house if there was another quake. |
| 301 |
Parmani said several jars of juice and bottles of wine had broken, and Sarah wasn't looking forward to cleaning up the mess. Parmani had apologized for not doing it, but she'd been too worried about the children, and didn't want to leave them for the amount of time it would have taken her to deal with it. |
| 302 |
Sarah said she would do it herself. At one point she walked into the kitchen to look, after she set Oliver down on the couch, still sleeping soundly. She was horrified at the disaster area the kitchen had turned into in a matter of hours. Most of their cupboard doors had opened, and everything had fallen out. |
| 303 |
It was barely lukewarm, but she brought it back to Sarah, and it was comforting to drink it. Parmani was peeling a banana for herself. Sarah had insisted she didn't want anything to eat, she was still too shaken and upset. She had barely finished the tea when Seth came through the door, looking grim. |
| 304 |
There had been ambulances and police everywhere. The highway patrol had turned him back and sternly told him to go home and stay there. This was no time to be going anywhere. He tried to tell them he lived in Palo Alto, and the officer had told him he would have to stay in the city until the roads were open again. |
| 305 |
She was just grateful that their children were safe. His obsession with continuing to do business, under the circumstances, seemed more than extreme to her. She realized at the same time that it was why he was such a huge success. Seth never stopped. He was on his cell phone night and day, making deals. |
| 306 |
We will eventually, of course, there's no question of it. I've done it before. Sully Markham has covered me for audits like that before. And eventually we make our money and put it in the account. But sometimes in the beginning, when we don't have it, Sully helps me pad things a little when the investors do an audit. |
| 307 |
And sixty million was no small slip. It was major. It was criminal fraud on the grandest scale. She had never for a moment thought that Seth would be corrupted by greed into doing a thing like that. It put everything between them in question, in fact their whole life, and more importantly, who he was. |
| 308 |
The timing of it is at the discretion of his investors, and they don't like giving anyone time to do fancy footwork or cook the books. And we sure cooked them. We fucking fried them. I don't know if he tried to postpone his audit once he saw we had an earthquake and I didn't transfer the funds back to him. |
| 309 |
She didn't need a home as elaborate as this one, but this was where they lived, the house their children had been born into. The prospect of losing everything frightened her. From one minute to the next, they could be destitute, if Seth got arrested and prosecuted. She started to feel frantic about it. |
| 310 |
He was the father of her children. She had trusted and loved him. She started to cry harder as she thought about it, and Seth came to put his arms around her, but she wouldn't let him. She didn't know if he was ally or foe now. Without even thinking about her and the children, he had put them all in jeopardy. |
| 311 |
She didn't look like the glamorous young socialite of the night before. She was like a very frightened woman. She was wearing a sweater over her evening gown, her feet were bare as she sat on their bed, crying. She looked like a teenager whose world had just come to an end. And it just had, thanks to her husband. |
| 312 |
There were fires burning below them, and in the morning sunshine, he could see damage to houses near them. Trees were down, balconies were hanging at odd angles, chimneys had toppled off roofs. People were walking around outside with a dazed air. But none of them were as stunned as Sarah, crying in their bedroom. |
| 313 |
She didn't have the nursing skills of Sister Mary Magdalen, but there was a level of comfort and reassurance that she could give to others. One of her band members followed her around for a while, and then finally went to join the others in the shelter. He knew she was a big girl and could take care of herself. |
| 314 |
His father was a cop, as were two of his brothers, and two more were firemen like him. His sisters had all gotten married right out of high school. Melanie Free was as far from his life as anyone could get, although watching her sip coffee and eat the doughnut, she looked just like everyone else to him. |
| 315 |
Most of the time. Especially on a night like this. You really have the feeling you're making a difference, and doing some good. It beats having beer bottles thrown at you, or having someone take potshots at you, when you show up in the Bay View to put out a fire they started themselves. But it's not always like that. |
| 316 |
It had been a long night for everyone. Melanie waved as the two little girls she'd found walked past her with their mother on the way to the shelter. Their mother looked stunned as she realized who Melanie was. Even with her long blond hair uncombed and tangled, and dirt on her face, it was easy to recognize the star. |
| 317 |
It was safer for her there. She had been helping hotel guests and random strangers all night, but the Office of Emergency Services wanted people in shelters. There was falling debris everywhere, pieces of windows along with signs and chunks of concrete off buildings. It really wasn't safe for her outside. |
| 318 |
Not to mention the live wires that were a constant danger. The youngest of the firefighters offered to walk her the two blocks to the shelter, and she reluctantly accepted. It was seven in the morning, and she knew her mother would be worried sick by then, and would probably be having a fit about where she was. |
| 319 |
The poor thing was scared to death, and had been completely traumatized by the earthquake. She had sat huddled next to Jake all night, while he ignored her, and slept off everything he'd been drinking and smoking before the quake. He opened an eye and glanced at Melanie when he heard her mother shriek. |
| 320 |
And Ashley was so panicked she'd thrown up twice. Jake was out like a light, drunk out of his mind. It had been a terrible night, but at least they were all alive. Melanie's hairdresser and manager had both been at the front of the auditorium serving sandwiches and cookies, and handing out bottles of water. |
| 321 |
Her mother complained all the way to the bus, and said the way they were being treated was disgusting, didn't anyone know who they were. Melanie assured her it didn't make any difference, and no one cared. They were just a bunch of people who had survived the earthquake, and no different from anyone else. |
| 322 |
She wasn't old enough to be that helpless, but she saw no reason to wait in line for hours for disgusting food. The band and the roadies were outside smoking, and after everyone else left, Melanie slipped quietly through the crowd to the desk at the front of the room. She spoke to the woman in charge in a soft voice. |
| 323 |
A lot of people had headaches from the dust, stress, and trauma. Pam had one herself, not only from the night, but from Janet's demands as well. Melanie left the building quietly, unnoticed, her head down, her hands in the tuxedo pockets. She was surprised to find a coin there. She hadn't noticed it before. |
| 324 |
She put it back, wishing she had different shoes on. Walking along the cement road with pebbles on it was a challenge in the platform shoes she'd worn onstage the night before. They made her feel unsteady. She was at the field hospital in less than five minutes, and there was a hum of activity there. |
| 325 |
Melanie wasn't daunted by what he said. He didn't tell her that one of them had lost a leg when a window sliced through it, but he had been taken by ambulance somewhere else. Most of what they were dealing with at the field hospital were minor injuries, but there were a lot of them, thousands in fact. |
| 326 |
Two Red Cross volunteers were in charge of checking people in. There were also social workers on hand to see if they could help in other ways. They were offering to help sign them up for city homeless programs, or permanent shelters if they qualified, and even if they did, some had no interest in signing up. |
| 327 |
People of all races, ages, and sizes. It was a typical cross section of the city and real life. Some were still wandering around in a state of shock and said their houses had fallen down, others who had broken or sprained ankles and legs were hobbling around. She saw a number of people with broken shoulders and arms. |
| 328 |
She was dying of thirst, but hadn't had time to do anything about it for hours. She hadn't eaten since noon, and wasn't even hungry. She was too tired. She was savoring the water before going back to work, when a tiny woman with red hair whizzed past her, in jeans, a sweatshirt, and pink Converse hightops. |
| 329 |
She could use some help. She'd been sewing up minor cuts for hours and sending people back to other halls to sleep. They were trying to keep the hordes in the hospital hangar moving in and out at a rapid clip, and doing triage as best they could. The worst cases were being shipped out to hospitals with life support. |
| 330 |
People were in line, waiting to get sewn up, and within minutes she had Melanie wash her hands with surgical solution, and had her handing her supplies as she did careful stitches on her patients. Most of the injuries were fairly minor, with a few rare exceptions. And the little woman with the red hair never stopped. |
| 331 |
She was such a pretty girl, and Maggie wasn't sure why, but she had the feeling she was looking for something, that some important element was missing in her life. It was hard to believe with looks and a voice like that, and the success she had. But whatever she was looking for, Maggie hoped she'd find it. |
| 332 |
It was a heavy burden for her sometimes, being her mother's dream, instead of having her own. Melanie wasn't even sure what her dreams were. All she knew was that for a few hours, more than she ever had on stage, she felt as though she'd found her dream that night on the heels of the San Francisco earthquake. |
| 333 |
Plenty of press had been there as well. They were becoming a model city within one that had been badly shattered by the earthquake nearly two days before. Considering how hard they had been hit, the local authorities were impressed by how well organized they all were, and what good sports San Franciscans were. |
| 334 |
She looked young and beautiful, and clean, although she was wearing the same clothes as the day before. She had no others, but she had gotten up at seven to line up at the shower stalls. It had felt wonderful to wash her hair and take a hot shower. And she'd had oatmeal and dry toast in the mess hall. |
| 335 |
The night of the earthquake had been terrifying, but for the first time in her life, she felt as though she was doing something important instead of just hanging out backstage in theaters, recording studios, and singing. At least here, she was doing people some good. And Maggie was very pleased with her work. |
| 336 |
Several other nuns and priests were also working at the Presidio, from a variety of orders and local churches. There were ministers who walked around, talking to people, and had set up offices where people could come for counseling. Clergy members of all denominations were visiting the injured and sick. |
| 337 |
Very few of them were identified by Roman collars or habits, or religious paraphernalia of any kind. They said who they were and readily talked to people as they wandered around. Some of them were even serving food in the mess hall. Maggie knew a lot of the priests and nuns. She seemed to know everyone. |
| 338 |
The singing is easy and what I love. That's why I do it. But concert tours are hard sometimes, because you travel a lot, and you have to work every day. We used to go on the road in a big bus, and we drove all day, and performed all night, with rehearsals as soon as we arrived. It's a lot easier now that we fly. |
| 339 |
My father was already dead by then, or it would have killed him. In my family, once you take your vows, you don't leave religious orders. To be honest, I was kind of disappointed in him myself. He's a great guy though, and I don't think he ever regretted it. He and his wife have six children, and they're very happy. |
| 340 |
The life Maggie led seemed sad to her, far from her family, never married, working on the streets with strangers, and living in poverty all her life. But it seemed to suit Maggie to perfection. You could see it in her eyes. She was a happy, totally fulfilled woman, who was obviously content with her life. |
| 341 |
They saw an endless stream of injured people all day, most of them minor injuries that could be ministered to by a nurse and not a doctor. The others, in the triage system they were using at the field hospital, went to someone else. Melanie was a good little assistant, and Sister Maggie praised her often. |
| 342 |
I've been staying at a shelter downtown, and they just had to close it. The building next to it is starting to lean badly, so they cleared us out, and suggested we come here. I thought I was going to be out of here by now, but there's no way. Nothing is leaving San Francisco, so we're all stuck here. |
| 343 |
He had missed going to meetings for the past two days, and having the chip back felt like a link to what had saved him more than a year before. He kissed it, and slipped it into the pocket of his pants, which were all that was left now of the rented suit. And the pants were too battered now to return too. |
| 344 |
He was exhausted. It had been a very long and trying two days, and truly tragic for some. Maggie and Melanie walked back to the field hospital then, and Everett went to sign up for a bed for that night. There were so many buildings in the Presidio to house people that there was no risk of their running out of room. |
| 345 |
It was only getting worse, and he knew there was no hope of banks opening or his being able to communicate with the outside world anytime soon, to cover what he'd done. His career, and maybe his life as it had been for several years, was over. And Sarah's too. In the meantime, she was worried about their baby. |
| 346 |
She had gone to the emergency room of the hospital nearest them, but they were accepting only seriously injured people for treatment. They had referred her to the field hospital in the Presidio, so she had come in Parmani's car. Melanie had spotted her at the front desk, and told Maggie who she was. |
| 347 |
She was staying with them now, as she had no way to get home. Her entire neighborhood was a shambles and had been cordoned off. They had driven by to check. And the police wouldn't let her into her apartment building, as part of the roof had fallen in. All of the city's businesses and services were still shut down. |
| 348 |
Sarah left a few minutes later with the nanny and her children. They got into Parmani's ancient car and drove off, after thanking Maggie for her help. She had given Maggie her phone number and address, and her cell phone, and she couldn't help wondering how long they'd be there, or if they'd lose their house. |
| 349 |
Maggie sent Melanie to get supplies after Sarah left, and she and Everett stood talking. Maggie knew the main supply warehouse where they were storing things was a fair distance away, so she wouldn't be back for a while. It hadn't been a ploy, she really did need the supplies. Particularly the surgical thread. |
| 350 |
It came from years of doing needlework in the convent. When she was younger, it had been a nice thing to do at night when the nuns congregated after dinner and sat and talked. In the years since she'd been living alone in the apartment, she rarely did needlework, if ever. But she still had a tidy little stitch. |
| 351 |
And I find you both again, and the head of the benefit that brought us all together walks into the field hospital with her kid with an earache, and here we are again. Old home week. In a city the size of this one, it's a goddamn miracle if two people ever meet again, and we've done nothing but for the past few days. |
| 352 |
People don't go in as early anymore. In my order, they took in two women in their forties last year, and I think one that was fifty and was a widow. Times have changed, but at least they know what they're doing when they go in now. In my day, a lot of people made mistakes, they went into the convent and shouldn't have. |
| 353 |
He had only glimpsed the building from outside when he was there. A flood of new patients came in after that, with minor problems, and Melanie and Maggie had to get back to work. Everett made a date to meet them in the mess hall that night, if they could get away. Neither of them had had dinner the night before. |
| 354 |
An emergency came in, and Maggie needed Melanie's help to get the woman sewn up. Melanie was learning a lot from her, and she was still thinking about it that night when she went back to the building where the rest of her entourage was camping out. They were sitting around bored out of their minds, with nothing to do. |
| 355 |
They had also been told that it would probably be several weeks before they could return to their homes. The bridges, freeways, airports, and many areas of the city were still not open. And there was no way of telling when the electricity would be on again, and even less when life might return to normal. |
| 356 |
She had gotten a new T shirt from one of the donation tables, and a huge man's sweater with holes in it, which made her look like an orphan. She was still wearing the camouflage pants and flip flops. Sister Maggie had changed clothes too. She had brought a few things in a bag with her, when she came to volunteer. |
| 357 |
Helicopters were continuing to patrol the entire city, usually flying low, so you could even see the pilots' faces. They landed from time to time at Crissy Field in the Presidio, and the pilots chatted with people who approached to ask further news of what was happening in the city, or outlying regions. |
| 358 |
Many of the people staying in the shelters at the Presidio actually lived in the East Bay, on the Peninsula, and Marin, and had no way of getting home for the moment with the bridges and freeways closed. Real news was scarce among them, and rumors rampant, of death, destruction, and carnage elsewhere in the city. |
| 359 |
It was always reassuring to hear from people who knew, and the helicopter pilots were the most reliable source of all. Melanie spent the day helping Maggie, as she had for the two days before. Injured people were still trickling in, and hospital emergency rooms around the city were still referring people to them. |
| 360 |
The meals in the mess hall were plentiful, and there seemed to be an abundance of surprisingly decent, creative cooks. The owner and chef of one of the city's best restaurants was living in one of the hangars with his family, and he had taken charge of the main mess hall, much to everyone's delight. |
| 361 |
Melanie was struggling to carry an enormous box, when a young man in torn jeans and a tattered sweater reached out to help just before she dropped it. It was marked fragile, and she was grateful for his help. He lifted it gently from her with a smile, and she thanked him, relieved that he had helped her avoid disaster. |
| 362 |
He thought being an engineer was really dull, and he points out regularly that working in underdeveloped countries, I won't make any money. He has a point, but with an engineering degree, I can always switch my specialty later. I would have hated law school. He wanted a doctor and a lawyer in the family. |
| 363 |
Melanie still dreamed of going to college eventually, but with her recording schedule and concert tours, she never had time, and at this rate never would. She read a lot to make up for it, and was at least well informed on what went on in the world. The show business life had never seemed like quite enough to her. |
| 364 |
It had been a very moving scene as they pulled her out, and even he had cried. It had been a very emotional few days, and in spite of his experience in war zones, he had seen a number of things at the camp that touched his heart. He was telling Maggie about it as they sat outside during her first break in hours. |
| 365 |
There was a small peaceful grove he had discovered while walking around the camp. It was the perfect spot. The camp administrator had promised to announce it the following morning over the PA system. The earthquake had brought them all there, thousands of them, each with their own problems and lives. |
| 366 |
They wandered slowly back to the field hospital then, and he left her at the front door, promising to catch up with her later. He hadn't asked if she had a boyfriend, and she had forgotten to mention Jake. He had been so unpleasant since they'd been there, and complained all the time. He wanted to go home. |
| 367 |
He hung around the hospital for an hour, while things were quiet. She had sent Melanie back to her own hall by then. And she and Everett sat and talked for a long time. Eventually she left the hospital with him, when she signed out, and he walked her back to the building where all the religious volunteers were staying. |
| 368 |
Everyone was under a lot of stress. She was even feeling it herself. The priests in her building said mass every morning, and it got her day off to a good start, just as Everett's meeting had done for him. And she prayed for at least an hour at night before she went to sleep, or as long as she could stay awake. |
| 369 |
For the first time in her life, she felt isolated from the other nuns. She wasn't sure why, but they seemed small minded to her somehow, and she found herself thinking of the conversations she'd had with Everett about how much she loved being a nun. She did, but sometimes other nuns, or even priests, got on her nerves. |
| 370 |
But what she was feeling worried her. He had asked if she had ever questioned her vocation, and she never had. She wasn't now. But suddenly she missed talking to him, their philosophical exchanges, the funny things he said. And as she thought of him, it worried her. She didn't want to get too attached to any man. |
| 371 |
She wondered if the other nun was right. Perhaps nuns needed habits to remind other people of who they were and to keep a distance. There was no distance between her and Everett. In the unusual circumstances they were all living, powerful friendships had been formed, unseverable bonds, and even budding romances. |
| 372 |
And as she prayed, with particular fervor, she finally managed to shut out the vision of Everett from her mind, and fill it only with Christ. She breathed a long sigh when she finished praying, closed her eyes, and fell peacefully to sleep. Melanie was exhausted when she went back to her own building that night. |
| 373 |
And she knew they'd be there for at least several more days. The city was still completely shut down, and there was no way to leave. They had to make the best of it, as she told Jake every time he complained. She was disappointed by how whiny he had been, and a lot of the time he took it out on her. |
| 374 |
And Ashley was no better. She cried a lot, said she was suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, and wanted to go home. Janet didn't like it there either, but at least she was making friends, and talked about her daughter constantly, in order to let everyone know how important and special she was. |
| 375 |
The hall was dimly lit with the battery operated torches that lit up the edges of the room at night. It was just dark enough to stumble over people, or fall if you weren't careful. There were people in sleeping bags in the aisles, others on cots, and all night long there seemed to be children crying. |
| 376 |
Melanie made her way to where her group was sleeping. They had more than a dozen cots all grouped together, with some of the roadies on the floor in sleeping bags. Jake's cot was right next to hers. She sat down on the edge of it, and patted his bare shoulder, which was poking out of the sleeping bag. |
| 377 |
He didn't move at first, so she assumed he was asleep, and was about to move to her own cot. Her mother wasn't there, and had wandered off somewhere. As Melanie was about to shift to her own cot, there was sudden movement in Jake's sleeping bag, and two heads popped out at once, looking startled and embarrassed. |
| 378 |
Helicopters were still buzzing overhead, flying low to check on people and report back to Emergency Services. They could still hear sirens throughout the city. And if they were able to, people stayed in their homes. The streets looked like a ghost town. And inside their home, there was a sense of impending doom. |
| 379 |
They still had their usual routines. But she and Seth hardly spoke to each other. What he had confessed to her had shocked her into silence. She fed the children breakfast, although their food supplies were dwindling. She played with them in the garden afterward and pushed them on the swingset they had there. |
| 380 |
It was four o'clock in New York, four hours past the time when he had to have the money back to Sully in time for his investors' audit. It was shit luck that their respective audits had been so close together, and even worse luck that the San Francisco earthquake had shut down all communications and the city's banks. |
| 381 |
She was more than willing to work if it would help them, but if he was convicted, what was going to happen to their life, their marriage? If he went to prison, then what, and for how long? She couldn't even get the words out to ask him, and he just sat there, shaking his head, as tears rolled slowly down his cheeks. |
| 382 |
It was inconceivable to her, and accounted now for his rapid and astonishing success. The wonder boy everyone talked about was a liar and a thief, a con man. And even more horrifying was the fact that she was married to him. He had fooled her too. She had never wanted all the extravagant luxuries he had provided. |
| 383 |
She could easily see the story being a major item on the news, even more so if he was convicted and went to prison. The newspapers were going to have a field day with it. The higher he had climbed, the harder he would hit when he fell. It was easily predictable, she realized as she stood up and walked around the room. |
| 384 |
The neighbor's window boxes had fallen, and were still lying all over the sidewalk, with dirt and flowers everywhere. They had gone to the shelter in the Presidio when their chimney fell through their roof, and no one had cleaned up any of the mess. There was going to be a lot of cleaning up to do in the city. |
| 385 |
He hadn't come near her in three days. He couldn't. She had put a wall between them ten feet high. Even in their bed at night, each of them had huddled toward their respective sides, with a vast expanse of empty space between them. He didn't touch her, and she couldn't bring herself to reach out to him. |
| 386 |
It was just too huge. She was almost grateful that the city was cut off. She needed the time to absorb it before the roof fell in on them. But then again, if the earthquake hadn't hit the city, none of this would have happened. He would have sent the money back to Sully, so he could cook his own books. |
| 387 |
He wanted her to stand by him, and she didn't look as though she would. Sarah had extremely rigid ideas about honesty and integrity. She set extremely high standards for herself and everyone else. He had violated them all. He had even put their family at risk, which he suspected would be the final straw for her. |
| 388 |
They both knew that this time of being cut off from the world was a reprieve for both of them. There was no way that they could act, or react. They just had to sit there and wait. It added immeasurably to the stress of the days after the earthquake, but she was grateful for the time it gave her to think. |
| 389 |
Halfway through the night, Oliver woke up, crying and pulling on his ears again. He was teething, and Sarah wasn't sure if his ears were hurting or his teeth. She held him in her arms for a long time, rocking him in the big comfortable rocking chair in his room, until he finally went back to sleep again. |
| 390 |
She didn't put him back in his crib, she just sat there, holding him, looking at the moon, and listening to the helicopters patrolling the city through the night. It sounded like a war zone, as she listened, and as she sat there, she realized that it was. She knew this was going to be a terrible time for them. |
| 391 |
Others had to face police barricades and yellow tape, if conditions were too dangerous to enter. The Financial District was still a disaster and off limits to everyone, which meant that many businesses could not reopen. And electricity would become available to only a small portion of the city over the weekend. |
| 392 |
The city was on all fours, but it was beginning to crawl. After being completely flattened for the past eight days, it was showing signs of life, but it would be months before San Francisco would stand fully upright again. There had been much talk in the shelters about people saying they would move away. |
| 393 |
Some were ready to quit, others were determined to stay. Old people said they wouldn't live long enough to see another one like it, so it didn't matter to them. Young people were anxious to rebuild and start again. And many in between said they had had it with the city. They had lost too much and were too frightened. |
| 394 |
Sitting with him always felt comfortable and peaceful. He had an easy way about him, of confidence and decency. It was nice being with someone who wasn't directly involved in her business, or any aspect of show business. She was tired of actors, singers, musicians, and all the crazy people she dealt with every day. |
| 395 |
Cell phones were not operating in the San Francisco area yet, and wouldn't be for a while. Computer and telephone service hadn't been restored either. There was some talk that they would be up and running in another week. They walked back to the hospital again then, and he teased her as they wandered in. |
| 396 |
He thanked Maggie again for encouraging him to do it. She assured him gracefully that he would have done it anyway. And they continued to sit and talk, after the young people left for a last stroll on their final night together. This was a time they would all long remember, some of them in poignant ways. |
| 397 |
The Red Cross had arranged it. There were others leaving later for assorted destinations. They had already been warned that they might have to get to the airport by side streets and back roads as there were a lot of detours on the freeway, and it could take them as long as two hours to get there, if not more. |
| 398 |
He gave her a hug before he did, and slipped something into her hand. She didn't look at it until he'd walked away, and then she opened her hand and saw his one year AA chip in her palm. He called it his lucky coin. She smiled as she looked at it, with tears brimming in her eyes, and slipped it in her pocket. |
| 399 |
It was the first time she was going back there since the incident with Jake and Ashley. She had seen them in the quad, but avoided them otherwise. Ashley had come to the hospital to talk to her several times, and Melanie had pretended to be busy, or slipped out the back door and asked Maggie to deal with her. |
| 400 |
He was thrilled to know that she would be delighted to take his calls. He felt like he had won the lottery, and still couldn't believe his good fortune. He didn't care who she was professionally, he thought she was the nicest girl he had ever known. And she was equally impressed with him, for the same reasons. |
| 401 |
Melanie saw that Ashley was awake, and ignored her. Jake had his back to her and didn't move when she came in, which was a relief. She wasn't anxious to see him, or to travel with him the next day. But they had no other choice. They were all flying on the same plane with about fifty other people from the camp. |
| 402 |
They were using two school buses to transport them. And they all knew it would be a long ride to the airport. The food for the travelers had been prepared and put on the buses for them. Tom and a number of other workers from the mess hall had finished putting it together at six o'clock that morning. |
| 403 |
Much to everyone's surprise, there were tearful goodbyes as they left. They had all expected to be thrilled to leave, but instead they suddenly found it hard to part from new friends. There were promises to call and write, or even visit. The people in the Presidio had shared so much grief, fear, and trauma. |
| 404 |
She and Tom stood and looked after the bus for a long time, and then went back to their respective jobs. Maggie was quiet and sad as she walked into the hospital, wondering if she would ever see Everett again, and knowing that if not, it was the will of God. She felt she had no right to ask for more right now. |
| 405 |
They took their seats on the plane, and as soon as they took off, the pilot made an announcement, welcoming them, and saying that he hoped the past nine days hadn't been too traumatic for them. As soon as he said it, several passengers burst into tears. Everett had taken a few last photos of Melanie and her group. |
| 406 |
It was a far cry from the way they'd all looked when they arrived. Melanie was wearing yet another pair of combat pants, held up with a rope, with a T shirt that must have belonged to a man ten times her size. Janet was still wearing some of her own clothes that she had worn backstage at the benefit. |
| 407 |
It wasn't a great look with the polyester pants and high heels, which she had refused to exchange for the flip flops everyone else was wearing by then. Pam was wearing a full set of army clothes that had been given to her by the National Guard. And the roadies and band looked like convicts in overalls. |
| 408 |
And the stories they told were legion, of escape and survival, injury and fear. One man had his leg in a cast and was on crutches, provided by the field hospital, and several people had broken their arms and were in casts too. Melanie recognized among them several people whom Maggie had stitched up. |
| 409 |
Melanie's next recording session was in less than a week. It took them half an hour to press through the crowd of photographers and reporters. Everett helped run interference for them, and accompanied them to several taxis at the curb. For the first time in several years, there was no waiting limousine. |
| 410 |
And the meeting was terrific. In his share, he told them all about the earthquake, the meeting he had organized in the Presidio, and then before he could stop himself, he blurted out that he had fallen in love with a nun. Since cross talk wasn't allowed at twelve step meetings, no one made any comment. |
| 411 |
It was the perfect antidote to nine days of stress and trauma. And she knew she had been far less traumatized than many others. Compared to people who had been injured, lost loved ones or their homes, she had fared very well, and even felt useful during her time working at the field hospital at the camp. |
| 412 |
Particularly given the life she led, where everyone wanted to use her, every chance they got. It went with the territory of her success and stardom. She expected it from outsiders, or even from Jake, who had turned out to be scum. But she didn't expect it, nor would she accept it, from her best friend. |
| 413 |
And her mother knew that once Melanie felt betrayed and said it was over, that was it. She had seen her do it before, about other things. A boyfriend who had cheated on her before Jake, and a manager she'd trusted who had stolen money from her. Melanie could only be pushed so far and had healthy boundaries. |
| 414 |
She had told the decorator exactly what she wanted in Melanie's room, right down to a pink fur teddy bear. All of Melanie's requests for stark simplicity had been ignored. This was what her mother said she had to have. But at least it was comfortable, Melanie acknowledged to herself, as she lay down on the bed. |
| 415 |
She felt a little guilty for it, particularly when she thought of the people in San Francisco in the shelter, and the fact that they would be there for months, for the most part, while she was at home on her satin and fur covered bed. Somehow, it felt wrong, even if in a way it felt right. But not right enough. |
| 416 |
Nothing. Zero. Zip. As a result, it was an agonizingly stressful weekend. In desperation, he finally tried to take his mind off his troubles and play with his kids. Sarah hadn't spoken to him in days. He hardly saw her, and at night as soon as she put the children to bed, she disappeared into the guest room. |
| 417 |
When he came, the lawyer stayed with Seth in his office for nearly four hours. They covered the waterfront. Seth told him everything, and when it was over, his attorney wasn't encouraging. He said as soon as they got his records from the bank, he would probably be called before the grand jury and indicted. |
| 418 |
They had gotten their electricity back over the weekend, which much of the city still hadn't. But it was coming back on here and there. They were among the lucky few, probably because of the neighborhood they were in. The mayor lived a few blocks away, which never hurt. The electricity was being turned on by grid. |
| 419 |
Sarah opened the door for him, and led him to the upstairs den where Seth was waiting, doodling nervously at his desk, and staring bleakly out the window from time to time. He had been lost in thought all day, and after his brief conversation with Sarah earlier, Seth had closed the door to the room. |
| 420 |
It had never dawned on his attorney that that was what he had in mind. It had all seemed very theoretical, and Henry had assumed that the questions had been to assure that Seth didn't do anything wrong. He had admired Seth for being so diligent and so cautious, and only now did he realize what was going on. |
| 421 |
But there's only so much we can do. It may not even make sense to push this to trial. If the evidence is rock solid, you may do better making a deal with them, and trying to plea bargain. If you plead guilty, we may be able to give them enough information to nail down their case against your friend in New York. |
| 422 |
The governing laws on hedge funds, and institutions like them, were made to protect investors from men like him. The laws on hedge funds still had some loopholes in them, but not big enough for an offense like this. And Henry's job was to protect Seth, for better or worse. In this case, possibly worse. |
| 423 |
Seth, I think you have to face the fact that you're going to have to do some time. Hopefully, not too long. But given the amount that you and Sully passed around, this is going to be a big ticket, unless we can come up with something that appeals to them to make a deal. And even then, you won't get off scot free. |
| 424 |
Even if it meant burying his friend. Sarah could see it on his face, and it made her feel sick, not that he would sell out Sully, who deserved it in her opinion, but that nothing was sacred to him, neither his investors, nor his partner in crime, nor even his wife and kids. It told her where she stood and who he was. |
| 425 |
Sarah had been too upset to even rent a car, and Seth wasn't going anywhere so he hadn't rented one either. He was locked up in their house, too terrified about his future to move or go out. They were on the way back from the park when Sarah had an idea, and asked Parmani if she could borrow her car to do an errand. |
| 426 |
It would have been inconceivable to her that Seth was about to be indicted and might go to prison, or even that they could lose their house. As far as she knew, they were young, rich, and solid, which was exactly what Sarah had thought two and a half weeks before. Now she knew they were anything but. |
| 427 |
There was no way she could tell her parents about the disaster Seth had caused. Her mother would have been hysterical, her father furious at Seth. And if things got as bad as they feared they would, her parents would read about it soon enough. She knew she'd have to tell them before it made the news, but not yet. |
| 428 |
I thought he was completely honest, and just incredibly smart and successful. I thought we spent too much money, and he kept saying we had it to spend. Now I don't even know if it was really our money or not. God only knows what else he did. Or what's going to happen now. We'll probably lose our house. |
| 429 |
Forgiveness is an entirely other story, and I'm sure in time you will. It's probably too soon for you to make any major decisions. You need to sit with it for a while and see how you feel. You may decide to stay with him in the end, and stand by him, or maybe not. You don't have to make that decision right now. |
| 430 |
You can't give him that, whatever you do. But the decision to stand by him or not is entirely yours, whatever he says. If it's better for you, and your children, you have a right to walk away. The only thing you owe him now is forgiveness. The rest is up to you. And forgiveness brings with it a state of amazing grace. |
| 431 |
I just want to tell you what I think. What you do is up to you. But it may be too soon for you to decide. If you love him, that's already a lot. But how that love manifests in the end, and how you express it, will be your choice. It may be more loving for you and your children in the end to let him go. |
| 432 |
That doesn't mean you have to stay with him, or give up your own life for him. But you do have to be merciful and kind to him and yourself, once you make your decision, whatever it is in the end. Love doesn't mean you have to stay with him, it only means you have to be compassionate. That's where the grace comes in. |
| 433 |
For the next ten days, Seth's life continued to unravel. His case was presented to the grand jury by the federal prosecutor, and they granted the indictment. Two days later federal agents came to arrest him. He was informed of his rights, taken to the federal courthouse, photographed, formally charged, and booked. |
| 434 |
He had to pay one million to the bail bondsman to be released on bail. That wiped out all the cash they had on hand. He was assessed as not being a flight risk, and he was eligible for bail because there had been no loss of life or physical violence involved. What he had done had been far subtler than that. |
| 435 |
The bail bondsman could keep ten million of it as collateral, and the other five he needed to pay his attorneys. Henry had already told him that their fee would probably be in the vicinity of three million dollars through trial. It was a complicated case. He told Sarah they had to sell the house in Tahoe too. |
| 436 |
She couldn't stand being part of the process of the unraveling of their lives, because he had chosen to be a con instead of an honest man. She had been praying a lot since seeing Maggie, and she felt comfortable about what she was doing. Sad, but it felt right, just as Maggie had said it would, she knew. |
| 437 |
It was a modern apartment building, full of small, expensive furnished apartments, heavily populated by men who had just broken up with their wives. Sarah got a small cozy flat in a Victorian on Clay Street. It had two bedrooms, one for her, and one for the children. It had parking space for one car, and a tiny garden. |
| 438 |
She went to see Maggie in the Presidio to tell her what she was doing. Maggie was sorry for her, but impressed that she was moving forward and making cautious, wise decisions. Seth went out and bought a new Porsche to replace the Ferrari he'd lost, on some sort of deal with no money down, which infuriated his lawyer. |
| 439 |
Her jewelry had gone to Los Angeles to sell. She still had said nothing to her parents, who wouldn't have been able to help her anyway, but would at least have been supportive. And so far, by some miracle, Seth's indictment hadn't appeared in the press, nor had Sully's, but she knew it wouldn't be long. |
| 440 |
He had a copy of the magazine he wanted to send to Maggie. But more than that, he had dozens of absolutely spectacular photographs of her. She looked luminous in shots of her ministering to injured people. There was one of her holding a crying child, and comforting an old man with a gash on his head in the dim light. |
| 441 |
She had returned his call twice, and then had missed him. They had been playing phone tag, and both of them were busy, but as a result, he hadn't spoken to her since he left. He was missing her terribly, and he wanted her to see how beautiful the photographs of her were, and show her some of the others. |
| 442 |
He had missed her ever since he left. The volunteer at the front desk told him that Maggie was off today. It was Sunday, and the woman who knew her well said she had probably gone to church. He thanked her and decided to check the building where the religious volunteers and assorted chaplains were living. |
| 443 |
And she was dying to see his photographs. They walked a few feet away to a bench, and sat down to look at them. Her hands were shaking when she opened the box, and when she saw them, she was moved to tears several times, and just as often laughter, as they both remembered the moments and faces, the heart rending times. |
| 444 |
She told him about what was happening in the reconstruction of the city, and her work in the hospital. He told her about the assignments he'd been on. He had brought her a copy of the earthquake edition of Scoop too, with all the photographs of Melanie, and they talked about what a nice girl she was. |
| 445 |
She watched as he walked away, and saw him leave through the main gate. He had the familiar gait she had come to recognize, in his black lizard cowboy boots. He waved once, then turned toward Lombard to find a cab to take him back to the airport, and she went upstairs to her room to look at his photographs again. |
| 446 |
He had an extraordinary talent. But more than that, there was something about his soul that drew her to him. She didn't want it to be so, but she was powerfully attracted to him, not just as a friend, but as a man. That had never happened to her, in all of her adult life, since she had entered the convent. |
| 447 |
And then she lay down and closed her eyes. She didn't want this to be happening to her. She couldn't let herself fall in love with him. It was impossible. And she told herself it was not going to happen. She lay there praying for a long time, before the other nuns came back to the room she shared with them. |
| 448 |
They wanted to hear all about it, and he had a very pleasant evening with them. He told his sister he was taking her to a concert soon, and then headed to Hollywood immediately after breakfast the next day. He mentioned as he left that he probably wouldn't be back until late that night. At least he hoped not. |
| 449 |
After having such easy access to her at the Presidio, he had missed her terribly once she was gone, and he wanted to spend all the time with her that he could now, particularly knowing she was leaving on tour in July. He had to get busy himself. It was obvious the job in San Francisco wasn't going to work out. |
| 450 |
And then they disappeared into the house, as Melanie showed him around. They had a gym, a pool table in a playroom downstairs, and a wide screen TV with comfortable chairs to watch movies, and a huge pool. Melanie had told him to bring a bathing suit. But the only thing he was interested in seeing was her. |
| 451 |
She was wearing shorts, a tank top, and sandals instead of the flip flops she'd worn in camp, but her appearance was the same. She was no more done up or starlike than she had been when he first met her. She was totally herself, as she sat next to him on a deck chair, and then at the edge of the pool dangling her feet. |
| 452 |
She had come to hate the problems she'd had with Jake. His drinking, going to rehab, winding up in the tabloids with him, and the time he'd punched someone out in a bar. Paparazzi had appeared on the scene in an instant, and he'd been taken away by the police while flashes from the photographers went off in her face. |
| 453 |
In fact, nicer, smarter, and better looking than most. He was someone with a future, Melanie could tell. Not the kind of future her mother wanted for her, but the kind Melanie wanted to be part of when she grew up, and even now. He was down to earth, and real, just as she was. There was nothing fake about him. |
| 454 |
He had gone surfing there at Easter with friends, in Kauai. Melanie went into the cabana after him, and came out in a pink bikini that showed off her dazzling figure. She had been working with her trainer again since she got back. It was part of her daily drill. As were two hours every day in the gym. |
| 455 |
They were being sold by scalpers now for five thousand dollars a ticket. She had two, with backstage passes, reserved for him and his sister. They swam together and kissed in the pool, and then drifted around on a large inflatable raft as they lay side by side in the sun. She had put tons of sunscreen on. |
| 456 |
She had just the look and sound they loved. She laughed when he asked her where she was going on tour, and started reeling off cities. She was going to be traveling all across the States. But at least they would be traveling by chartered plane. It had been agonizing during the years they did it on a bus. |
| 457 |
Her life and tours were a lot more civilized now. When she told him the dates, he said he hoped to be able to visit her once or twice on tour. It depended on how fast he found a job, but it sounded great to her. They dove back into the pool then and swam laps until they were too winded to do it anymore. |
| 458 |
Tom knew where he was going, more than most young men his age. They discovered that they both loved skiing, tennis, water sports, and a variety of other athletic pursuits, most of which she had no time for. She explained to him that she had to stay in shape, but actual sports were never on her agenda. |
| 459 |
She told him she still wanted to go to college, but for now it was only a dream for her, and not a possibility. She was away too much, so she read everything she could get her hands on. They stopped at a bookstore together and found they liked to read the same things, and had loved many of the same books. |
| 460 |
It was almost like being in a theater. When Janet came home, she seemed surprised he was still there. Tom looked mildly uncomfortable, sensing her displeasure. She made no effort to hide it. It was eleven o'clock when he left. Melanie walked him out to his van in the driveway, and they stood kissing through his window. |
| 461 |
He said he'd had a wonderful day, and so had she. It had been a very respectable and thoroughly enjoyable first date. He said he'd call her the next day, and instead called her as soon as he left the driveway. Her cell phone rang in her pocket just as she was walking back into the house, thinking of him. |
| 462 |
People recognized her everywhere. It had been fine when they went out for ice cream, but people in the bookstore had stared at her, and three people had asked her for autographs while they paid. She hated that whenever she went out on dates. It always felt like an intrusion and bothered the man she was with. |
| 463 |
He brought his sister over once to meet Melanie. The three of them barbecued at the pool, and had a great time. His sister was extremely impressed by Melanie, how simple she was, open and kind and understanding. There was nothing in her behavior to suggest she was a star. She really did act like the girl next door. |
| 464 |
He realized that she thought he was a threat, and not the kind of man Melanie should go out with, particularly if her mother wanted tabloids and mainstream press for her, which she did. Melanie apologized to him constantly for her mother, and started spending more time in Pasadena, when she wasn't in rehearsal. |
| 465 |
And Tom thought she had the voice of an angel. The day of the concert, she had told him he could come early, and he and Nancy could stay in her dressing room with her until it started. He took her at her word, and when they got there, Janet was with Melanie, hovering, and giving orders and directions. |
| 466 |
They knew Tom by name now, and thought he was a nice guy. They left her half an hour before the concert started. Melanie had to finish her makeup and put on her costume. Tom thought she was amazingly calm, considering she was about to perform in front of eighty thousand people. This was what she did best. |
| 467 |
Melanie was dwarfed beside her. Janet was a big woman, and a major presence wherever she was. And then suddenly, they came to get Melanie. The concert was about to begin. She ran backstage, hopping nimbly over the wires and equipment, said a quick hello to her band, stood just out of sight, and closed her eyes. |
| 468 |
They kissed quickly and then he went back to his seat. She had to change clothes again, and this was a tough costume change. Pam and her mother helped her into the skin tight dress. It was even tighter than the ones she'd worn before, and she looked fabulous when she stepped onstage again for the second act. |
| 469 |
This time there were dozens of people congratulating her, photographers, her assistant, her mother, friends, groupies who had somehow wormed their way in. Tom and Nancy were crushed in the crowd, and afterward they went to Spago for dinner, although they arrived late because it took a while to get there. |
| 470 |
They had the full indictment, all available details, the name of his hedge fund, and the circumstances leading up to his arrest. It said their house was on the market, mentioned that he had a house in Tahoe and a plane. And they made it sound as though everything he owned had been purchased with ill gotten gains. |
| 471 |
She realized she had to call them now. With luck, she could still explain it herself. It was simpler for Seth. His parents had been much older when he was born and both were deceased. Her parents were very much alive and would be shocked, particularly since they loved Seth, and had right from the beginning. |
| 472 |
These were the last days of their living together. They had agreed to stay in the house on Divisadero, for the kids' sake, until it sold, before they moved into their own apartments. They were expecting several offers that week. It wouldn't be long. Sarah knew it would make her sad to see the house go. |
| 473 |
If everything they had and owned was going to be swallowed up by court orders, lawsuits, and his defense fund, and he went to prison, who was going to help them? She had to rely on herself. After Seth's astonishing and utterly appalling betrayal, she trusted no one now but herself. She could no longer rely on him. |
| 474 |
And she knew she'd never trust him again. He read it easily in her eyes whenever their glance met. He had no idea how to make reparations to her, or if he ever could. He doubted it, given everything she'd said. She hadn't forgiven him, and he had come to doubt she ever would. And he wasn't sure he blamed her. |
| 475 |
He was shocked when he read the article in the paper. It made mincemeat of him and Sully and made them sound like common criminals. Nothing kind or compassionate was said. They were two bad guys who had set up fraudulent hedge funds, misrepresented the financial backing, and had cheated people out of money. |
| 476 |
She was too hurt. He had destroyed every shred of faith and confidence she'd ever had in him, and thrown her trust out the window by proving himself unworthy of it. He had put their children's future lives at risk, and heavily impacted hers. He had made her worst nightmares come true, for better or worse. |
| 477 |
Their phone had been ringing off the hook for days, and she left it on the machine. There was nothing she wanted to say to anyone, or hear from them. Sympathy would have cut through her like a knife, and she didn't want to hear the thinly veiled chortles of the jealous. She was sure there would be plenty of those. |
| 478 |
Her grandparents had either died before she was born, or of old age without catastrophic illness. The people she had loved in her life had stood staunchly by her. Her childhood had been a happy one, her parents were solid citizens. Her boyfriends had been nice to her. Seth had always been wonderful to her. |
| 479 |
This was the worst thing by far that had ever happened to her. She had never even lost a friend to a car accident or cancer. She had passed unscathed through all thirty five years of her life, and now a nuclear bomb had been dropped on her. And the person who had dropped it was the man she loved, her husband. |
| 480 |
She didn't know where to start making it better, nor did he. The truth was that there was no way they could. His lawyers would have to do their best, with the appalling set of circumstances he'd given them to work with. And in the end, Seth would have to take his medicine, no matter how bitter it was. |
| 481 |
They'd had a nice weekend together, but she had been busy with rehearsals or doing a show most of the time. They managed to get to one of the casinos the first night. And Melanie's suite was fabulous. He stayed in her suite in the second bedroom, and they were very circumspect for the first two nights. |
| 482 |
She hobbled back through the terminal then on her crutches, and crawled into the limousine at the curb. Her ankle was killing her, more than she had wanted to admit to Tom. When she got back to her suite at the Paris, she put an ice pack on it, which hardly helped, and took some Motrin to bring the swelling down. |
| 483 |
But her mother could see that she was really hurt. Melanie was always a good sport about injuries, and she never complained, but this one seemed more serious. Tom called her before she went to sleep that night, and she lied and told him the ankle was better, so he wouldn't worry. He said he already missed her. |
| 484 |
They had just enough time to pick up their bags, meet the others, and head to the airport for their flight to Phoenix. Melanie knew it would be crazy from now on. Their concert tour had begun, and she'd be all over the States for the next ten weeks. She put her leg up on a pillow in their chartered plane. |
| 485 |
She glanced over at her daughter a couple of times and tried to make her more comfortable. In the end, Melanie took a couple of pain pills and went to sleep. Pam woke her up when they got to Phoenix and one of the guys from the band carried her down the stairs. She was looking sleepy and a little pale. |
| 486 |
They had taken the rising platform out of the show because she was afraid of falling and getting hurt again. She always said she felt like the Flying Wallendas when she used it, and said she should have a net. She had fallen off it twice before, but this was the first time she had actually gotten injured. |
| 487 |
She had worn hot pants, fishnet stockings, and a red sequined bra. And even in flat shoes, she looked hot. She kept the encores short that night. She was dying to get back to her room and take another pill. She went right to sleep after she did, even before she called Tom to tell him how the show went. |
| 488 |
She was religiously wearing the boot while she was offstage, and her foot was better. They finally got two days off in Oklahoma City, which was sheer heaven. They were flying all over the country, and she was working hard. Performing with an injury was just one of the challenges she had to face while doing concerts. |
| 489 |
One of the roadies had broken an arm, and their sound man slipped a disk, carrying heavy equipment. But whatever happened, they all knew the show had to go on. It wasn't an easy life when they were on the road. The hours were exhausting, the performances were tough, and their hotel rooms were dreary. |
| 490 |
It would have been infinitely worse without their own plane. At least she could lie down on every flight. Flying commercial with all their equipment would have been nearly impossible, and would have driven them all insane. Checking luggage and equipment in would have required their spending hours boarding the flight. |
| 491 |
When Tom met her in Chicago, he was surprised at how tired and pale she looked, and she was absolutely exhausted. He was waiting for her at the hotel when they got in from the airport, and he spun her around in his arms, even with the heavy boot, and then set her down gently on a chair. She was beaming from ear to ear. |
| 492 |
He had checked in to their suite half an hour before she arrived. It was a decent hotel, and they had a giant suite. But Melanie was sick of room service, signing autographs, and performing night after night no matter how much pain she was in. Tom was shocked at how swollen and painful her ankle still was. |
| 493 |
The manager caught on to them eventually, came upstairs, and gave them a sound scolding. They were like children with nothing better to do. The roadies and guys in the band got into a fair amount of mischief when they had time off, mostly going to topless bars and strip joints, hanging out in bars, and getting drunk. |
| 494 |
And Melanie had told Pam conspiratorially that she was falling more and more in love with Tom. He was the nicest boyfriend she'd ever had, and she said she felt really lucky to have him in her life. Pam reminded her that she was one of the hottest stars in the world at the moment, and he was lucky too. |
| 495 |
They went to movies, museums, and restaurants, went shopping, and spent a lot of time in bed. When she went out, she used the crutches and wore the cumbersome black boot. Tom wanted her to. It was a terrific weekend, and Melanie was grateful that he was able to fly around to meet her as much as he did. |
| 496 |
The art was sent to auction in New York. She was saddened to see how fast their home came apart, not unlike their lives. In a matter of days, the house was empty, and looked ransacked and unloved. Watching it happen reminded her of their marriage coming apart. It was amazing how little it took to undo it. |
| 497 |
She hadn't been to see a lawyer for a divorce. There was time for that, and she had to be at the trial with him anyway. Henry Jacobs said her presence would be an unspoken but crucial positive factor in her husband's defense. They had hired two more attorneys to defend him. They and Henry would work as a team. |
| 498 |
She wanted them to feel at home the next day when they returned. She put out their favorite possessions and treasures lovingly and slowly, afraid that something might have broken in the boxes, but nothing had. So far, everything looked okay. She spent hours unpacking books, and two hours organizing linens and beds. |
| 499 |
They had gotten rid of so many things, that their lives suddenly seemed very spare. It was still hard to believe that, thanks to Seth's incredible perfidy, everything in their lives had changed. The articles that had continued to appear in the local and national press had been humiliating beyond belief. |
| 500 |
And then, while she was going through some papers for the benefit, she had an idea. It was far below her skill level, but at this point, she was going to be grateful for any job she could get. She called the head of the neonatal unit on Wednesday afternoon, while both her children were taking a nap. |
| 501 |
She had cut Parmani's hours down as much as she could, and once she found a job, she was planning to increase them again. The sweet Nepalese woman was gentle and understanding. Her heart went out to Sarah and the children, and she wanted to do everything she could to help. By then, she had read all the articles too. |
| 502 |
In order to give him time to do that, she waited until the next morning, until she got a message from him that the call had been made. The woman's name was Karen Johnson. She was the head of development at the hospital, in charge of fund raising on a major scale, and whatever investments the hospital made. |
| 503 |
It was less than she'd hoped, but still a slight improvement over the year before. Parmani came in on Friday afternoon and took the children to the park while Sarah went to her appointment at the hospital. She was nervous about it. It was the first time in ten years that she had gone to a job interview. |
| 504 |
Sarah was excited when she left the building. She liked Karen, and the scope of the job. The hospital meant a lot to her, and the kind of investment portfolio that Karen had described was right up her alley. And she liked the prospect of fund raising too. All she could do was hope now that she would get the job. |
| 505 |
Molly squealed in delight and ran to her, and Oliver crawled across the floor with a big grin for his mom. She tossed him up in the air, and sat down on the couch with him on her lap, as Molly cuddled up next to her, and Sarah realized again that whatever else had happened, the greatest blessing in her life was them. |
| 506 |
That was nothing new. She had described the tour to him, and what she did when she was on it. He had been horrified. She was still wearing the big black boot, because the ankle hadn't healed, and the boot gave her some relief and protection from further damage. The only time her ankle didn't hurt was when she wore it. |
| 507 |
It was part of her charm. And she had a flock of people around her to take care of her. In other ways, Melanie was far older and had matured from years of hard work and discipline in her career. She was both woman of the world, and enchanting child. Her mother would have preferred to convince her she was still a baby. |
| 508 |
They talked for a long, long time. And when Melanie drove back to the house in Hollywood, she was crying. They were tears of love, joy, and relief. She needed to find some answers now, and all of his suggestions had been good. And the questions he had asked her about her life had plunged her into ever deeper thought. |
| 509 |
She'd been lucky to call him when she did. He was leaving the next day. She told Tom about the work he did, mostly with abandoned children, young girls he rescued from brothels, boys who'd been selling drugs since they were seven or eight. He housed them, fed them, loved them, and turned their lives around. |
| 510 |
They just paid her better for it, and the costumes were more expensive. But he could sense that everyone, including her mother, was pumping her to do their bidding, until the well ran dry. It had started to run dry for Melanie on her last concert tour, and all she wanted now was to run away and hide. |
| 511 |
Maybe you need to take some of that control away from others. You can take some time to think about that. And take some time out of your life to help others, people who really need you, like the earthquake survivors you helped with Sister Maggie. Maybe the balance in your life would make more sense then. |
| 512 |
No one can take that away from you. You don't have to get on the rides everyone else wants you on. Get your ticket, pick your ride, and have a little fun here for a change. Life is a lot more fun than you're allowing it to be. And no one should take that ticket away from you. It's not their turn, Melanie. |
| 513 |
She knew she had no major engagements for the next three weeks. She had a few interviews lined up, a photo shoot for a fashion magazine. She was recording in September and October, and was scheduled to do a benefit sometime after that. But none of them were things that couldn't be changed or canceled. |
| 514 |
Suddenly, it was all too much. And he was offering her a way out. She wanted to take that right he was talking about. She had never done what she wanted in her whole life. She did what her mother told her, and what everyone expected her to do. She had always been the perfect little girl, and now she was sick of it. |
| 515 |
She needed to make her own decisions too. She was tired of living her mom's dreams, or being her dream. She needed her own. And this was a good place to start. She was deeply pensive when she left the meeting. Father Callaghan hugged her, and then made the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb. |
| 516 |
Tom had learned a lot about the pressures she lived with, and the heavy dues she paid for her fame. It looked like too much to him, and he thought her going to Mexico for a while sounded like just what she needed, for her soul as well as her body. What her mother would say about it was another thing. |
| 517 |
So she can't stop me. I have to see if my agent can get me out of some stuff, and my manager, without letting her know. She wants me to do everything, as long as it gets national press, major publicity, and I'm on the cover of whatever it is. She means well, she just doesn't understand that sometimes it's too much. |
| 518 |
As long as whatever guy in question didn't get too cocky, or have too much influence over Melanie, Janet was willing to tolerate his existence. Tom was smart enough to be discreet, and never face off with her. In the end, he decided to go home around two in the morning, so he could get to work early the next day. |
| 519 |
Her agent had thought it was a good thing that Melanie was trying to cut the umbilical cord a little. It had to happen sooner or later, and it was healthy for her. He had seen it coming. The problem was that Janet didn't, and she was guarding that umbilical cord with her life. No one was going to touch it. |
| 520 |
Two days later, both her agent and her manager had done what they had said they'd do. Melanie was free and clear until two weeks after Thanksgiving. Some of it had been rescheduled, and other things just had to be canceled, to be addressed at some distant, later date, if ever. None of it was a big deal. |
| 521 |
She was planning to leave the following Monday and had already made her reservations. She wanted to spend the weekend with Tom before she left. He was a hundred percent behind her. And he was planning to come down to visit her when he could. He was excited about what she was doing and wanted to volunteer some time too. |
| 522 |
Their relationship was going full speed ahead, and was turning into a great thing for both of them. They were kind, compassionate, intelligent, and supportive. They couldn't believe their good luck in having found each other. In many ways, they were so much alike and inspired each other in constructive ways. |
| 523 |
She bounced between grief and rage. She could feel the early signs of power slipping from her, and she was totally panicked. She even tried to get Tom to talk Melanie out of her plan, and he diplomatically said he thought it might do her good and thought it was noble of her, which only enraged Janet further. |
| 524 |
It felt like a getaway car to both of them, and it was. Melanie almost felt high at the prospect of leaving and what she'd be doing when she got to Mexico. Tom kissed her when he left her at the airport, and she promised to call him when she arrived. He was planning to come down in two or three weeks. |
| 525 |
But in the meantime, Melanie knew she would have lots of new adventures. Her three month sabbatical in Mexico was just what the doctor ordered. She was sitting on the plane, just before the doors closed, when she decided to call her mother. She was getting to do what she wanted, and she knew it was hard for Janet. |
| 526 |
She said she had never been happier in her life and wanted to thank Maggie for the suggestion that she call him. Maggie had heard from Sarah too. She got the job at the hospital, and was happy and busy. She still had a lot to face, adjusting to her new life, but she seemed to be doing well, and keeping busy helped her. |
| 527 |
She had promised Seth and his lawyers that she would stand by him at the trial. But Sarah was trying to make up her mind about whether or not to divorce him. The key for her was whether or not she could forgive him. She didn't have the answer to that question yet, and had talked about it to Maggie a lot. |
| 528 |
Most people had gone home by then, or made other arrangements. And Maggie was planning to move back to her apartment in the Tenderloin later in the month. She realized that she was going to miss the companionship of all the people she lived with and had met there. In a strange way, it had been a good time for her. |
| 529 |
And the studio apartment in the Tenderloin was going to seem very lonely. She told herself it would give her more time for prayer, but nonetheless she would miss the camp. She had made some wonderful new friends. Everett called her at the end of September, a few days before she was moving back home. |
| 530 |
He said he was coming to San Francisco to do a story on Sean Penn, and said he wanted to take Maggie to dinner. She hesitated, and then started to say she couldn't, desperately groping for some excuse, but couldn't find one that sounded plausible, so feeling stupid for it afterward, she accepted his invitation. |
| 531 |
But the moment she saw him, Maggie felt her heart pound. He walked toward her down the walk outside the hospital where she was waiting, and his long thin legs and cowboy boots made him look more like a cowboy than ever. He beamed as soon as he saw her, and in spite of herself, a smile lit up her face. |
| 532 |
It was Sarah he felt sorry for, and Seth's kids, who would never really know him now, if he spent the next twenty or thirty years in prison. Thinking about it reminded him of his son again. For some reason, he always thought of Chad when he was with Maggie, as though they were somehow invisibly connected. |
| 533 |
Maggie tucked her hand into his arm comfortably, as they strolled along, and continued talking about a variety of subjects. They hadn't intended to walk all the way back to the Presidio, but in the end they did. It gave them a little more time together, and was all on level ground, which was rare in San Francisco. |
| 534 |
Everything about him was so perfect. His face. His eyes, the deep soul and ancient suffering that peeked through them, along with the light of resurrection and healing. Everett had been to hell and back, but it had made him who he was. As she looked at him, she saw him gently lean his face toward her. |
| 535 |
She hadn't kissed a man since nursing school, and even then, it hadn't been often. And now suddenly she felt her whole being, heart and soul, pulled toward him, and his spirit mingling with hers. It was the sudden blending of two beings becoming one through a single kiss. She felt dizzy when they finally stopped. |
| 536 |
She could tell that her mother had forgiven her for flying away, and had somehow found it in herself to understand and accept what had happened, although during the party, she told Melanie about all the things she'd booked for her. Melanie started to object, and then they both laughed, knowing what had happened. |
| 537 |
Her parents were helping her too and had invited her to Bermuda for the holidays, but she didn't want to go. She had wanted to stay here, and keep the children near him. For all they knew, it might be his last Christmas out of prison for a long time, and she didn't want to deprive him of his children, or them of him. |
| 538 |
She still couldn't understand what had happened, or why. She realized now that once again there was a piece of him she just never knew, one that had more in common with people like Sully, and nothing in common with her. That was the scary part. There had always been a stranger living in the house with her. |
| 539 |
It was too late to meet him now, and she didn't want to. That stranger had destroyed her life. But she was rebuilding it quietly on her own. Two men had asked her out recently, and she had turned both down. As far as Sarah was concerned, she was still married, until they decided otherwise, which they hadn't yet. |
| 540 |
She was still wearing her wedding band, and Seth was too. For now, at least, they were still husband and wife, even if living apart. He handed her a Christmas present before she left, and she had one for him too. She had bought him a cashmere jacket and some sweaters, and he got her a beautiful little mink jacket. |
| 541 |
They were spending the night with him. He had bought a portable crib for Ollie, and Molly was going to sleep in his bed with him, since he only had one bedroom in the small apartment. Sarah kissed him when she left, and had a heavy heart as she drove away. The burdens they shared now were almost too much to bear. |
| 542 |
There were a lot of young people, some rough looking types, a handful of affluent Hollywood folk, and even a few homeless people who wandered in. He loved the mix, because it was so real. Some of the meetings he'd been to in Hollywood and Beverly Hills were a little too manicured and polished for him. |
| 543 |
His shares were never practiced or rehearsed. He just said whatever came to mind, or was bothering him at the time. He mentioned Maggie this time, that he loved her and she was a nun. He said she was in love with him too, was remaining faithful to her vows, and had asked him not to call her again, so he hadn't. |
| 544 |
That he loved her as he had never loved any other woman before, nun or not. That was worth something, and he suddenly wondered if he had done the right thing, or if he should have fought for her. It had never occurred to him before. He was on the way home, when he made a sharp turn and headed for the airport. |
| 545 |
He rang her bell, and no one answered. He thought of calling her cell phone, but didn't want to warn her. He sat down on the top step in his jeans and heavy sweater. It was chilly, but the sun was out and it was a pretty day. However long it took, he was going to wait. He knew she'd turn up eventually. |
| 546 |
She missed talking to Everett, their laughter and conversations, but after what had happened between them the last time, she knew she couldn't see or talk to him again. She didn't have the strength to resist him if she saw him. She had gone to confession about it, and strengthened her resolve since. |
| 547 |
But she missed him anyway. He had become a treasured friend. Sarah talked about seeing Seth, how much she missed him, and the easy days of their old life. She had never, ever dreamed that it would all come to an end. It was the farthest thing from her mind. She said she liked her job and the people she was meeting. |
| 548 |
She was still too embarrassed to go out or see friends. She knew the city was still buzzing with gossip about them, and it was going to be worse around the time of the trial in March. There had been long discussions about whether to try to get continuances to delay the proceedings, or press for a speedy trial. |
| 549 |
She smiled at two of the hookers, both of whom lived in her building. One was a pretty Mexican girl, the other was a transvestite from Kansas who was always very nice to Maggie, and respectful of the fact that she was a nun. Maggie was just about to walk up the steps, when she looked up and saw him. |
| 550 |
He had been sitting there for two hours, and he was getting cold. He didn't care if he froze to death sitting there, he wasn't going to move until she came home. And suddenly there she was. She stood looking at him, unable to believe what she was seeing, and slowly he came down the stairs to where she stood. |
| 551 |
He knew there were sites that did particular searches. He typed in some information, and a questionnaire appeared on his screen. He carefully answered all the questions, although he didn't have much information. Name, birthdate, place of birth, parents' names, last known address. That was all he had to go on. |
| 552 |
He kept it limited to Montana. If nothing turned up there, he could search other states. He sat quietly at his computer waiting to see what would come back. There was hardly a pause before a name and address were on his screen. It had all been so simple and so quick. After twenty seven years, there he was. |
| 553 |
He had another thought then and typed in the same questions for Susan, but didn't find her. She might have moved to another state, or gotten remarried. There were a number of reasons why she might not turn up on the screen. All he really wanted to do was see Chad. He wasn't even sure if he wanted to meet him. |
| 554 |
This had been a hard decision for him, and he knew that both Maggie and his recovery had a lot to do with it. Before both of those factors entered his life, he wouldn't have had the courage to do this. He had to face his own failures in this case, his inability to relate or engage, to even try to be a father. |
| 555 |
Everett was twenty one the last time he saw him, and went off to become a photographer floating around the world, like a soldier of fortune. But no matter how he dressed it up or tried to romanticize it, for all intents and purposes and from Chad's perspective, Everett had abandoned him and disappeared. |
| 556 |
He certainly had a right to. Everett was finally willing to face him now after all these years. Maggie had given him the push he needed. He was quiet and pensive on the way to the airport, bought a cup of coffee at Starbucks and took it on the plane with him, and then sat staring out the window while he drank it. |
| 557 |
Even if she was angry, or was avoiding him, they had some kind of relationship, all or most of which had been pleasant. He and Chad had nothing, except Everett's total failure to be a father. There was nothing to draw from or build on. There had been no communication and no bridge between them for twenty seven years. |
| 558 |
The plane landed in Butte and Everett asked a cabdriver to drive him past the address he had taken off the Internet. It was a small, clean, cheaply built house in a residential district of the city. It wasn't a fancy neighborhood, but it wasn't a slum either. It looked ordinary, mundane, and pleasant. |
| 559 |
The patch of grass outside was small but neatly tended. After they'd seen it, Everett asked the driver to take him to the nearest motel. It was a Ramada Inn, and had nothing distinctive about it. He asked for the smallest, cheapest room, bought a soda from a vending machine, and went back to his room. |
| 560 |
He sat there for a long time, staring at the phone, wanting to dial the number, but too afraid to, and finally he got up the guts to do it. He was feeling like he wanted to go to a meeting. He knew he could do that eventually, but first he wanted to call Chad. He could always share about it later, and probably would. |
| 561 |
It was something he wasn't proud of. There were a lot of things that still haunted him, and that was one. He hadn't hurt many people in his life, but the one he had hurt most was his son. There was no way he could make it up to him, or give him back his years without a father, but at least he was here now. |
| 562 |
They had shared a miserable three years, which finally drove him away. They were the worst possible match he could have imagined, a nightmare right from the beginning. She had threatened to shoot him once with her father's rifle. A month later, Everett walked out. He figured if he didn't, he'd kill her or himself. |
| 563 |
Everything here was spare, just like the rugged terrain. There was an incredible natural beauty to it, and he thought it was interesting that his son had stayed close to home, unlike his father, who had gone as far as he could from his roots. He had no family here now, the little he had were all dead. |
| 564 |
He had never come back again, except finally, for his son. They reached the little church then, where the meeting was, and as he followed Chad down the stairs to the basement, he realized how lucky he was to have found him, and that Chad had been willing to see him at all. It could easily have been otherwise. |
| 565 |
He gave silent thanks to Maggie as he walked into the room. It was only due to her gentle, persistent persuasion that he had come, and he was thrilled now that he had. She had asked him about his son the night they met. Everett was surprised to see that there were thirty people in the room, mostly men and a few women. |
| 566 |
He and Chad sat down next to each other on folding chairs. The meeting had just started and followed the familiar format. Everett spoke up when they asked newcomers or visitors to identify themselves. He said that his name was Everett, he was an alcoholic, and had been in recovery for twenty months. |
| 567 |
He said it was the single event in his life he most regretted, that he was there to make amends and clean up the wreckage of the past, if possible, and that he was grateful to be there. Chad sat and looked at his feet while his father spoke. He was wearing well worn cowboy boots, not unlike his father's. |
| 568 |
Chad shared that he had been in recovery for eight years, since he got married, which was interesting information for his father. He said he'd had a fight again that day with the foreman, and would have loved to quit his job but couldn't afford to, and that the baby in the spring would put additional pressure on him. |
| 569 |
But he was grateful that after all these years Chad was so willing to open up his life to him. Everett had been a piece missing from his life for too long. Both men waved at each other as Chad drove away, and Everett hurried back to his room. It was freezing outside, and there was ice on the ground. |
| 570 |
Everett turned to the children then, amazed by how sweet they were. They were as beautiful as their parents, and didn't seem to fight with each other. His granddaughter looked like an angel, and the two boys were sturdy little cowboys and big for their age. They looked like a poster family for the state of Montana. |
| 571 |
They loved the toys he gave them. Then he showed the boys card tricks, sat Amanda on his lap, and when dinner was ready, he helped Chad dish it up for the kids. Debbie couldn't sit at the table, the sight and smell of the food made her feel too sick, but she joined in the conversation from the couch. |
| 572 |
Maybe it would be good for you both, for some kind of closure. She said she always thought she'd see you again and you'd come back. I think she was angry for a long time that you never did. But she got over all that a long time ago. She doesn't talk about you much. She said she could see you tomorrow morning. |
| 573 |
Her eyes explored his and looked him over. Seeing her was like examining a piece of his own history, a place and person he remembered, but no longer felt anything for. He couldn't remember loving her, and wondered if he had. They had both been so young, confused, and angry at the situation they were in. |
| 574 |
The years had stretched ahead like a long lonely road, whenever he thought about it, and had filled him with despair then. He felt breathless again just remembering it, and recalled perfectly all the reasons why he had run away and began drinking heavily before that. An eternity with her had felt like suicide to him. |
| 575 |
But this meeting wasn't easy for her either. She looked content as she looked at Everett, as though their meeting put something to rest for her too. They were so totally different, they would have been miserable if they'd stayed together. And as their visit ended, they both knew things had happened as they should. |
| 576 |
And then she left for the dentist, and he went for a walk, and then to his AA meeting. He shared about seeing her and how it had reminded him of how desperate he had felt and how unhappy and trapped he felt when he was married to her. He felt as though he had finally closed the door on the past and double locked it. |
| 577 |
It had all happened for a reason, and now he could see what that was. He couldn't have known then that thirty years later it would all make sense, and Chad and his children would become the only family he had. She had actually brought something good into his life, and he was grateful to her for that. |
| 578 |
But it served its purpose, and he could see it was important to Chad, which made it all the more worthwhile. He promised to come back and see them again, and to stay in touch. He left them his cell phone number and told them he moved around a lot when he was on assignments. They all waved when they drove off. |
| 579 |
Her ankle was healthy, her soul was peaceful, and he could see that she was happy and strong. He stood backstage with Tom for a few minutes, and took a picture of him with Melanie. Janet was there as usual, ordering everyone around, but she seemed a little more tempered about it, and less obnoxious. |
| 580 |
He left her on her front steps, and they talked about Sarah and Seth. Maggie said she was worried about her. It was going to be such a hard time for them both. She and Everett had both expected him to plea bargain with the federal prosecutor at the last minute, and avoid the trial, but apparently he hadn't. |
| 581 |
It was hard to believe the outcome would be good for him. Maggie said she prayed for the right outcome all the time. Neither of them made any mention of their own situation, or the decision that Maggie was trying to make. Everett assumed that when she had come to some conclusion, she would tell him. |
| 582 |
Afterward she came out and chatted with Everett for a few minutes. He was busy, and Maggie had to meet with a social worker to get a homeless man she knew into a shelter. She and Everett both had busy lives, and enjoyed what they did. She had dinner with him again that night, after he finished work at the trial. |
| 583 |
The judge was warning jurors it could last a month, with detailed financial material to examine, and extensive reading to do on the matter at hand. Everett told her that night that Seth had looked grim all afternoon, and he and Sarah had hardly spoken to each other, but she was there, staunchly at his side. |
| 584 |
She couldn't imagine the defense team overcoming those arguments, as day after day, the prosecution presented evidence, witnesses, experts, all of it condemning Seth. By the third week of the trial, Seth looked exhausted, and Sarah felt like she could hardly crawl when she went home to her children at night. |
| 585 |
Maggie said she didn't want to talk about it, she was still praying, so they discussed the trial instead, which was always depressing, but obsessed them both. It was all they talked about when they saw each other. The prosecution was burying Seth daily, and Everett said he had been suicidal to go to trial. |
| 586 |
Seth's credibility and reputation were being utterly destroyed. It was upsetting for everyone who cared about them, particularly for Sarah's sake, to see where this was going. It became clearer to everyone that Seth should have plea bargained for a lesser charge or sentence, rather than go to trial. |
| 587 |
It didn't seem possible that he could be acquitted given the accusations against him, and the testimony and evidence to support it. Sarah was innocent in all this, she had been duped just as his investors had been, but in the end, she was paying just as high a price, perhaps more. Maggie was devastated for her. |
| 588 |
Sarah's parents came out for the first week of the trial, but her father had a heart condition. Her mother didn't want him wearing himself out, or sitting through the stress of the proceedings, so they went home as the case was still building against Seth, and they still had weeks ahead of them before it would be over. |
| 589 |
The problem was that Seth had given them little to work with, and their case was mostly smoke and mirrors, and it showed. The defense was about to rest the next day, as Everett and Maggie had dinner in the coffee shop across the street from her apartment, where they met often at the end of their days. |
| 590 |
She has no choice. Her parents are there for her, but they live far away. They can only help her so much. She's pretty much on her own. I don't think they have a lot of close friends, and most of them have abandoned them in this mess. I think Sarah is too proud and too embarrassed by all this to reach out for help. |
| 591 |
But she's thirty six years old. She has a right to a better life than this, if he goes to prison. If they divorce, she could start over again. If they don't, she's going to spend a lot of years visiting him in prison, and waiting for him, while life passes her by. I don't want to advise her, I can't. |
| 592 |
He knew she loved him, but didn't want to leave the convent either. This was an agonizing decision for her too. And like Sarah, she was seeking answers and a state of grace, which would allow her to finally discover the right thing to do. In Sarah's case, all solutions were onerous, and in some ways, in Maggie's too. |
| 593 |
She insisted she didn't mind and said it was much nicer and larger than any nun's cell in any convent. She took the vow of poverty seriously, just as she did the others she'd taken. He didn't say it, but he couldn't have lived in her apartment for a day. And the only decoration was a simple crucifix on one wall. |
| 594 |
Other than that, the apartment was bare, except for her bed, a chest of drawers, and a single broken chair she'd found on the street. He went to a meeting after he dropped her off, and then went back to his hotel room to write his report on the trial for the day. Scoop liked what he was sending them. |
| 595 |
Under the circumstances, they had done a fine job. But the circumstances were not good. The judge instructed the jury the next day, thanked the witnesses for their testimony, the attorneys for their excellent work, on behalf of the defendant and the government, and then the jury retired to do their job. |
| 596 |
And he went back inside to wait with the others, while the jury deliberated. Sarah sat beside Seth in two chairs at the back of the courtroom. They had gotten some air for a few minutes, but nothing really helped. Sarah felt like she was waiting for yet another bomb to hit them. They both knew it was coming. |
| 597 |
So much so that their respective information about each other had only served to confirm their respective guilt, rather than saving either of them from the consequences of their actions, or diminishing their punishment. The federal prosecutors in California and New York had made no deal with either of them. |
| 598 |
Henry had warned him that going to trial could possibly make his sentence worse, but a gambler at heart, more than anyone had realized, Seth had decided to take the chance, and now he feared the result, as they waited for the jury to make the decision. Once they did, the judge would sentence him a month later. |
| 599 |
They had too much on their plates just then to add divorce to the mess they were dealing with. She wanted to wait for the jury's decision, and Seth didn't press her. He was too afraid of what would happen if he did. He could see that Sarah was at the breaking point already, and had been for a while. |
| 600 |
The evidence was complicated, and the wait agonizing for Sarah and Seth. Night after night, they went home to their separate apartments. Seth had asked if she would come home with him one night, he was too terrified to be alone, but Molly was sick, and in truth, she didn't want to spend the night with Seth. |
| 601 |
She was trying to protect herself a little, although she felt sad to say no to him. She knew how badly he was hurting, but so was she. He went back to his apartment and got drunk instead. He called her at two in the morning, incoherent, telling her he loved her. And he was visibly hung over the next day. |
| 602 |
The entire courtroom held its breath as he responded. They had found him guilty of each charge. There was a momentary silence as spectactors in the courtroom absorbed it, and then an explosion of talk and sounds, as the judge rapped his gavel soundly, called them all to order, thanked the jury, and dismissed them. |
| 603 |
He looked up at her in desperation. The only hope they had for appeal, according to Henry Jacobs, was in the case of new evidence or some irregularity during the proceedings of the trial. He had already told Seth that, barring some unforeseen later development, he had no grounds for appeal. It was over. |
| 604 |
Seth was almost snarling as he pushed his way through the crowd, and Sarah looked as though she might faint as she followed him to their waiting car. They had a driver and town car waiting for them outside the courthouse. They were gone in minutes, as the crowd milled around. Everett saw Maggie on the courthouse steps. |
| 605 |
There was no telling how long the judge would send him away for, but it was likely to be a very long time. Particularly since he hadn't pled guilty, and had pushed for a jury trial, which wasted taxpayers' money, in the hope of having a fleet of highly paid lawyers do their fancy footwork to get him off. |
| 606 |
He was out on bail till then. And once the money was returned by the bail bondsman, it was going straight into a fund for his defense for the civil suits that had been filed against him by the investors he had defrauded. His conviction was all the evidence they needed to justify their suits, and even win them. |
| 607 |
His leaving was going to leave a terrible void in her life. She also realized that it would give her a chance to see how she felt about him. She had important decisions to make, not unlike Sarah. Sarah didn't have anything to look forward to if she stayed with Seth, except his release from prison a long time from now. |
| 608 |
It seemed like cruel and unusual punishment for her to Maggie. In her own case, there were blessings whatever she decided, although there were losses too. In each case, there was a loss and a gain woven into each other. It was impossible to separate them, which was what made the decision so difficult for Maggie. |
| 609 |
She felt her heart go out to him as he did. She clung to him for a minute, wondering how she could ever give that up, but knowing she might have to. She left the car without saying another word to him. He knew she loved him, just as she knew he loved her. There was nothing more for them to say to each other for now. |
| 610 |
He knew they would pick up on his sense of devastation and despair, even though they knew nothing about the trial. It was obvious that something terrible had happened to both their parents. In fact, it had happened months before, the first time he had defrauded his investors, thinking he would never get caught. |
| 611 |
It was all about him, it always was. But he was right in the sense that he was going to prison and she wasn't. He had a right to be upset, even if he'd done it to himself. She could still walk away from what had happened. He couldn't. And a month from now, his life as he had known it until then would be over. |
| 612 |
Hers already was. He didn't bring up divorce that night with her. He couldn't have handled hearing it from her, nor could she have said the words to him. She hadn't formed the decision or the words in her mind yet. The subject came up finally a week later, when he dropped the children off, after a visit. |
| 613 |
He had only taken them out for a few hours. He couldn't handle more than that right now. He was too stressed, and he was looking very rough. She was looking frighteningly thin. Her clothes were hanging off her now, and her features had gotten sharp. Karen Johnson at the hospital kept saying she should have a checkup. |
| 614 |
She had given up the idea as soon as his criminal activities had surfaced. The last thing she wanted now was to get pregnant, although she wanted another baby, but not with him, and not now. That told her a lot. And what he was suggesting to her, about their moving in together for the next three weeks, upset her too. |
| 615 |
She couldn't come back to him. She had suspected it for months, and had finally faced it herself in the last days of the trial, before the verdict. She just didn't have the heart to tell him, or even admit it to herself. But now she had no other choice. It had to be said, so they each knew where they stood. |
| 616 |
Seth had given up his apartment and was staying at the Ritz Carlton for the last few nights. He had explained what was happening to his children, that he was going away for a while. Molly had cried, but he had promised she could visit, which seemed to reassure her. She was only four, and she didn't really understand. |
| 617 |
Seth was sorry, but he couldn't do better than that for her. He sold his new Porsche and somewhat grandly gave her the money. Every little bit helped, and he put his belongings in storage and said he'd figure out what to do with them later. Sarah had promised to do whatever his lawyers couldn't do for him. |
| 618 |
Sarah cried when she got the notification, but she couldn't imagine staying married to him now. She didn't feel as though there was a choice. The judge had investigated Seth's financial situation, and imposed a two million dollar fine on him, which would wipe him out, after the sale of everything he still had left. |
| 619 |
He was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, as Sarah burst into a sob. He would be transferred to a federal prison in the next few days. His lawyers had asked for a minimum security facility, which was under consideration, and Sarah had promised to visit as soon as he got there, in spite of the divorce. |
| 620 |
He had forgotten to take it off that morning, and leave it with the gold watch he had put in his suitcase and asked to have delivered to her house. He had told her to give the clothes away and save the watch for Ollie. The whole thing was ghastly, and she stood there holding his wedding ring, and sobbed. |
| 621 |
She was taking the children to visit Seth in his new home in prison. It was the first time they were going to see him since he'd left, and she realized it would be a shock and adjustment for them all. Everett had asked Maggie several times how she thought Sarah was doing, and she said technically all right. |
| 622 |
She was functioning, going to work, taking care of her children, but she was understandably terribly depressed. It was going to take time, maybe even a lot of time, for her to recover from what had happened. Hiroshima had happened to her life, and her marriage. The divorce was proceeding as planned. |
| 623 |
Everett picked Maggie up at the airport, and took her to the small hotel where she was staying. She had an appointment with Father Callaghan that afternoon and said she hadn't seen him in ages. The concert wasn't until the next day. Everett dropped her off and left her to do a story he'd been assigned to. |
| 624 |
She had met a man and was having fun with him. He was in the music business, and they had a lot in common. And she seemed to have adjusted to Melanie making her own decisions, although Everett would never have thought it possible. Melanie was turning twenty one, and had come into her own in the past year. |
| 625 |
The young couple beamed and looked happy, and Everett snapped a bunch of pictures at dinner, including one of Melanie and her mother, and another of Melanie with Maggie. She credited Maggie with changing her life and helping her to grow up and be who she wanted, although she said it out of earshot of her mother. |
| 626 |
It was a little awkward with her still living with her mother, and even though Janet had mellowed a little, she was certainly no angel. She drank way too much that night, and despite the fact that she had a boyfriend now, Everett sensed that she would have made a pass at him if Maggie hadn't been there. |
| 627 |
It was time for Janet to grow up too and go into the world on her own, without hiding behind Melanie's skirts and fame. It was a growing time for them all. Everett and Maggie chatted easily on the way back to her hotel, and as always he loved being with her. They talked about the young couple, and were happy for them. |
| 628 |
Everett had told her about Melanie's concerts, and she had all of her CDs. Melanie had sent them to her after the earthquake, but she still wasn't prepared for the incredible experience of seeing her onstage and hearing her sing in such a big space. She was bowled over by it, and it was a particularly good performance. |
| 629 |
She was too old for a big white dress, she said, and the day she had taken final vows felt like a first wedding to her. The important thing was that they were getting married, and how and when they did it seemed a lot less important to her. It was the ultimate symbol of her bond to Everett, and a sacred union. |
| 630 |
She bought a simple white silk suit for the occasion, with ivory satin high heels. It was a far cry from her old habit, and the beginning of a new life for both of them. Everett was planning to take her to La Jolla for their honeymoon, to a little hotel he knew well, and they could take long walks on the beach. |
| 631 |
The transvestite she had grown fond of waved as she got into the cab. Two of the prostitutes who knew her had seen her carrying her suitcase, and waved too as she drove by. She hadn't told anyone she was leaving, or why, but it was as though they knew she wouldn't be back. She said a prayer for them as she left. |
| 632 |
The prison Seth had been sent to was a minimum security facility in northern California, and conditions there had been reported to be good. It had a forestry camp attached to it, and the inmates there served as rangers, overseeing the safety of the area, and fighting forest fires when they occurred. |
| 633 |
In fact, most of them had committed crimes similar to his, on a much smaller scale. If anything, he was considered a hero among the men. There were conjugal visits for those of them who were married, they were allowed to have packages, and the Wall Street Journal was widely read by most of the inmates. |
| 634 |
He wasn't sorry for what he'd done, but he was desperately sorry he had gotten caught. Sarah had come to see him with the children in the first institution he'd been in, in Dublin, southeast of Oakland, while he was being processed. It had been uncomfortable, frightening, and a shock for all of them. |
| 635 |
Sarah could have had conjugal visits with him, as their divorce wasn't final yet, but as far as she was concerned the marriage was over, and he regretted that too, as much as the sorrow he'd caused her. He had seen it so clearly in her eyes the last time she visited him with their children, two months before. |
| 636 |
He was nervous as he waited for them on a hot August morning. He pressed his khaki pants and shirt, and shined his regulation brown leather shoes. Among all the other things he missed, he missed his custom made British shoes. When visiting time came, he wandered down to the grassy area at the front of the camp. |
| 637 |
Sarah parked the car, and took a picnic basket out of the back. Visitors were allowed to bring food. Oliver was walking along beside her, holding on to her skirt with a cautious look, and Molly bounced along with a doll under her arm. For a moment, he felt tears sting his eyes, and then Sarah saw him. |
| 638 |
She waved, walked through the checkpoint, where they searched the basket she'd brought, and then all three of them were allowed inside. She was smiling at him as they approached him. He could see that she had put on a little weight, and looked less gaunt than she had before the summer, after the trial. |
| 639 |
It had been a while and so much had changed. He e mailed her from time to time, and she answered him, telling him about the kids. He would have liked to say more to her, but no longer dared. She had set boundaries he had no choice but to respect. He didn't tell her that he missed her, although he did. |
| 640 |
There was no longer room for that in what they shared. The anger had gone out of it for her, and all that was left was sadness, but there was also a kind of peace, as she started to move on with her life. There was nothing left to reproach him about, or regret. It had happened. It was done. It was over. |
| 641 |
She served lunch for all of them on one of the picnic tables. Seth carried chairs over, and both children took turns sitting on his lap. She had brought delicious sandwiches from a local deli, fruit, and the cheesecake she knew Seth liked. She had even thought to bring him his favorite chocolates and a cigar. |
| 642 |
It wasn't impersonal so much as different. There were things they couldn't say anymore, and never would again. He knew she loved him, the lunch she'd brought had told him that, the loving way she'd prepared it in the picnic basket, the way she had brought their children to him. And she knew he still loved her. |
| 643 |
He was the father of her children, the man she had married and loved. That would never change. She and the children stayed until the end of visiting time. A whistle blew to warn them that the end of their time together was coming. It told them to pack up their things, and throw their leftovers away. |
| 644 |
He could regret whatever he wanted to, but over the summer she had realized that she was going to be all right. This was the hand fate had dealt her, and it was the one she was going to play, without looking back, or hating him, or even wishing things were different. She knew now that they could never be. |
| 645 |
He watched as they went through the exit gate, and walked into the parking lot again. The children waved, and Sarah turned back once to smile and gave him a long look. He waved as they drove away, and walked slowly back to his cell, thinking of them. They were the family he had sacrificed, and ultimately thrown away. |
| 646 |
She didn't know how or when, but she had gotten there somehow. It was what Maggie had referred to so often and Sarah could never find. She had found it, it had found her, and she felt so light she could fly. She had forgiven Seth, and achieved the state of grace that at first she couldn't even imagine. |
| 647 |
She'd been so busy with their daughters that she didn't notice, until one day she realized that he didn't touch her when he came home anymore. She was always doing homework with the girls, or bathing one of them, when he came home at night. But it had been a long, long time since he'd been affectionate with her. |
| 648 |
In the past several months, since Zoe left for college, Faith had been spending most of her time alone, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. And Alex had a full life of his own. It seemed eons since she and Alex had sat for hours at dinner and chatted about the things that were important to them. |
| 649 |
Business took precedence over all else, and had for a long time. He had become a very successful man. It had bought them the townhouse, and their daughters' educations, an unexpected amount of ease and luxury that Faith hadn't expected to enjoy But there were other things that would have meant more to her. |
| 650 |
Comfort, laughter, warmth. She felt as though she never laughed anymore, and hadn't in a long time, except when she was with the girls. It wasn't that Alex treated her badly. It was more that he didn't treat her at all. He had other things on his mind, and he didn't hesitate to make that clear to her. |
| 651 |
There was no point anyway. Alex had a way of removing himself. He did what he wanted, usually without asking or consulting her, and had for years. He operated like a separate entity from her most of the time, and what motivated him was business and the demands it put on him, not what Faith wanted him to do. |
| 652 |
It had been different when they were young, but it had been this way for years. Being married to him was a lonely place, but she was used to it. She only felt it more now because the girls were gone. They had provided all the warmth she needed for years. It was their absence she felt now, more than his. |
| 653 |
Faith had been feeling for a while that they all had fuller lives than she, and she had been wrestling with trying to decide what to do with her own. She had thought of getting a job, but had no idea what kind of work she could do. It had been twenty five years since she'd worked at Vogue, before Eloise was born. |
| 654 |
They had rented a weekend house in Connecticut when the girls were small, but they hadn't done that in years. Alex liked to be able to go in to the office, if he needed to, on the weekends. She wanted to tell him that she would miss him at her stepfather's funeral the next day. But she knew there was no point. |
| 655 |
It never occurred to him that she might need him there. And it wasn't the nature of their relationship for her to portray herself that way. She was capable, and well able to take care of herself. She had never leaned heavily on him, even when their children were small. She made good decisions, and was sure of herself. |
| 656 |
But she was disappointed that he didn't want to be there for her. Disappointment had become a way of life for Faith now. Alex was almost never there when she needed him. He was responsible, respectable, intelligent, provided well for them. And the emotional side of him had vanished into thin air years before. |
| 657 |
Their constant displays of affection always made him uneasy, and even more distant and critical of them. Of the two girls, Zoe was the most like her, warm, affectionate, good natured, with a sense of mischief about her, reminiscent of Faith when she was young. She was a terrific student, and a bright girl. |
| 658 |
She was quieter than her sister, and always had been, and like Alex, she was often far more critical of Faith, and outspoken about it. Perhaps because he was. Zoe was always quick to come to her mother's defense, and to stand by her. She had wanted to come to Charles's funeral, although she wasn't close to him. |
| 659 |
Faith didn't expect it of them, but it would have been nice if Alex could have made the effort to be there. Faith didn't mention it to him again. As she did with a lot of other things, she let it go. She knew she wouldn't win the argument. As far as he was concerned, she was perfectly capable of going alone. |
| 660 |
He had been a very sick man. It had been so traumatic for both of them that they had never talked about it again until both of them were grown, and she was in therapy, but it had formed an unseverable bond between them, a love born of compassion, and a deep sadness in each of them that it had happened at all. |
| 661 |
It tore Jack apart, knowing what was happening and that he was helpless to turn the tides. But he was only a child. And a year after he had discovered it, their father died. Years later, Faith had tried to tell their mother about it when she was in therapy, but her mother's denial mechanisms had been insuperable. |
| 662 |
It was a painful bond they shared, and a wound they both fought valiantly to heal. And Faith had finally made her peace with it, in great part thanks to Jack. But the scars had taken a toll nonetheless. Both of them had sought out difficult relationships, with people who were cold and critical of them. |
| 663 |
Jack handled it by being a peacemaker and tolerating almost anything his wife dished out, including frequent abandonment, so as not to anger her or risk losing her. And Faith had done much the same thing. She rarely if ever argued with Alex, seldom challenged him. The lessons her father had taught her ran deep. |
| 664 |
Faith had somehow sensed, or feared, that she was to blame for that too, and it made her careful not to do anything in her marriage that would make Alex leave her. In some part of her, she had spent a lifetime trying to be the perfect little girl, to atone for the sins no one but her brother knew about. |
| 665 |
Perhaps he loved her in his own way, but it was a love based on her doing as he said and not rocking the boat. She had sensed early on that he couldn't have borne hearing the truth about what her father had done to her. Her dark secret remained with Jack and his was the only unconditional love she'd ever known. |
| 666 |
His death was an almost unbearable loss for her, particularly in light of everything she didn't have at home. It had been difficult for both of them when her mother married Charles when Faith was twelve and Jack fourteen. Faith had been suspicious of him, and fully expected him to do the same things her father had. |
| 667 |
Even his own daughter was a stranger to him. He was a military man, and he was hard on Jack, but he was at least able to demonstrate some affection for him. All he did for Faith was sign her report cards and complain about her grades, which he seemed to think was expected of him. It was his only role. |
| 668 |
That was at least a familiar style to her. Charles had won Jack over eventually by doing manly things with him, but he had never paid any attention to Faith simply because she was a girl. She had scarcely existed for him. It was Jack who had been her only male role model, her only sane bond to the masculine world. |
| 669 |
But he had been devoted to her, in spite of their difficulties, always made excuses for her personality, and saw things in her no one else did. She had stood stone faced at his funeral, and shed not a tear. And six months after his death, Debbie had remarried and moved to Palm Beach. Faith hadn't heard from her since. |
| 670 |
It made him unreachable even as he sat across a room from her. The vast distance that had grown between them over the years couldn't be bridged. Like glaciers, they had moved imperceptibly, each of them moving slowly away from the other, and now all they could do was look at each other from the distance and wave. |
| 671 |
She still hadn't found a way to fill the void, and wondered if she ever would, as she watched Alex put his papers away without saying a word to her, and then she moved silently toward the stairs. He followed her to their bedroom half an hour later. She was already in bed, reading a book Zoe had recommended to her. |
| 672 |
If she needed something more, some gesture of closeness or affection in her life, she would have to get it from the girls, and she knew that. It was what still made her miss Jack all the more. With the marriages they each had respectively, they had needed each other, for coziness and solace and warmth. |
| 673 |
Faith had loved her brother desperately, and she thought it would kill her when he died. It hadn't, but a part of her had wandered like a lost soul since that day, as though it had lost its home. She couldn't tell her daughters or anyone else the kinds of things she had shared with Jack, and always had. |
| 674 |
The funeral was at eleven, and she had promised to pick up her stepsister in the limousine. Allison was fourteen years older than Faith, and at sixty one, she seemed a thousand years old to her. She had children who were nearly Faith's age. The oldest of them was forty, and Faith scarcely knew them. |
| 675 |
Charles hadn't caught on to it, but there would have been hell to pay if he had. Their mother had never intervened on their behalf, just as she hadn't in their previous life. She avoided confrontation at all costs. All she wanted was a peaceful life. She'd had a difficult, emotionally barren first marriage. |
| 676 |
Faith and Jack had talked a lot about it the year before he died, when he and his wife had separated yet again. He and Faith had both been aware of the parallels in the relationships they had. They had married cool, aloof people, who were neither affectionate nor warm. Although Alex had seemed affectionate at first. |
| 677 |
Her mother had been long suffering. It was her defense to keep the world at bay. She managed to convey that life had disappointed her, without saying it in words, and yet she did what was expected of her, and had been married to Charles for thirty four years when she died. She never seemed happy to Jack or Faith. |
| 678 |
But he had made it clear over the years that affection was something that not only made him uncomfortable, but that he didn't need from her. He needed an orderly life, a great career, a handsome house, and a wife who was there for him, doing what he expected her to do, while he conquered the business world. |
| 679 |
Her blond hair was swept back in the same bun she had worn the day before, and the only jewelry she wore was the pair of pearl earrings that had been her mother's and that Charles had given her. Faith looked sedate and subdued and dignified, and beautiful, and despite what she wore, she looked younger than her years. |
| 680 |
She and Allison and Bertrand said little to each other on the way to church. Allison seemed quiet and composed. She and her father rarely saw each other, and had never been close. She told Faith she wanted to invite people to come back to the hotel afterward, if there was anyone she wanted to include. |
| 681 |
But many of their old friends were gone, or in convalescent homes. Charles and her mother had lived in Connecticut for many years, and had had a number of friends there, but after her mother's death, Faith had moved Charles into town, to a care facility, and he had been ill for most of the past year. |
| 682 |
But neither of them had been staunch about their faith, although Faith was, and Jack had been as well. They had often gone to mass together right up until the time he died. The sermon was brief and impersonal, as seemed appropriate. Charles wasn't the kind of man about whom one would wax poetic or tell anecdotes. |
| 683 |
They stopped in the vestibule as the pallbearers took the casket to the hearse, and Charles's three surviving relatives waited to shake hands with friends. They were halfway through the hundred or so mourners who had come, when Faith heard a voice behind her that was so familiar, all she could do was stare. |
| 684 |
It had been years since Faith had seen him when he came to her brother's funeral. They had both been devastated and spent hours talking to each other about him, as though by telling everything they remembered about Jack they could bring him back to them. Brad had come back to the house with her, and met Zoe and Eloise. |
| 685 |
She and Brad had exchanged letters for a year, and lost touch again finally. His own life seemed to devour him. She hadn't seen him since Jack's funeral, and hadn't heard from him in nearly two years. She was stunned to see him standing there, at Charles's memorial, and couldn't imagine how he had come to be there. |
| 686 |
But he had remained one of her best friends. It saddened her that they had lost contact finally, but it was hard to maintain their friendship over distance and time. All they had was history, and the enormous affection she still felt for him. They both treasured endless memories of the years they had shared growing up. |
| 687 |
The brief interlude at the cemetery was perfunctory and grim. The minister read several psalms, and Allison said a few words, while her husband stood silently by. And then each of them left a rose on Charles's casket, and walked away quietly. They had agreed not to stay while it was lowered into the ground. |
| 688 |
It would have been too sad. Only a handful of people had come, and half an hour later, they were on their way back to the city again. It was a brilliantly sunny October day, and Faith was grateful at least that it hadn't rained. It had poured the day they'd buried Jack, which made it that much worse. |
| 689 |
It made her think of Brad again, and how pleased she was that he had come. Seeing him at the hotel was something to look forward to, as she tried to turn her thoughts away from painful memories. There were far too many of them. The car pulled up outside the hotel, and Faith and Allison agreed to let it go then. |
| 690 |
As they walked into the hotel, Allison was still holding the folded flag they had taken off his casket at the cemetery. It made her look like a war widow, Faith thought, as they walked across the lobby, and took the elevator upstairs. The room Allison had rented for the afternoon was simple and elegant. |
| 691 |
And she was relieved to see that Brad was the third one there. She just stood and smiled at him for a minute as he crossed the room to her. It made her think of how gangly he had been as a kid. He had always towered over her, and when she was really young, he used to throw her in the air, or push her on the swing. |
| 692 |
I work days, nights, and weekends. She thinks I gave up a cushy job in her father's firm to hang around in county jail with a bunch of kids who are allegedly unsalvageable. The nice thing is that some of them actually do turn their lives around, if they get a break. It's interesting work. And it works better for me. |
| 693 |
We're good friends. Actually, I'm not sure what we are anymore. I think his work is his first love, and he doesn't need anyone close to him, he never has. We live in the same house, share children, go out together to business dinners, and see friends occasionally. Most of the time, we go about our own lives. |
| 694 |
I mean sure, I wouldn't want to see us starving to death. But that's not going to happen. She makes a fortune at her father's firm, she has some very, very major clients. And he's going to leave the whole shebang to her when he retires, or dies, whichever comes first. We have more than enough put away. |
| 695 |
I just knew I had to do something better with my life than estate planning, or listening to people whine about their taxes, and try to help them preserve their fortunes for their kids, who need to get out and make a living anyway, and probably never will. I think I might have killed someone if I'd stayed. |
| 696 |
That had been another thing that had isolated her from friends. Grief was a solitary thing. And she had often gone to church alone, to pray for him. It was comforting. She had tried to talk to Alex about how much she missed her brother, but it made him uncomfortable, and it was awkward discussing it with him. |
| 697 |
He had drifted out of her life several times. After law school, and again after Jack's funeral. But at least they had shared this one lovely day. And in an odd way, it had been like sharing a visit not only with him, but with Jack. She was still smiling to herself when she turned the key and walked into the house. |
| 698 |
It had been so nice talking to him all afternoon. She hadn't confided in anyone that way in such a long time. Not since the last time she had talked to him, when Jack had died. It made her feel suddenly as though someone was interested in her life, her worries, her fears, the things that mattered to her. |
| 699 |
On Tuesday night, Faith got off the plane, took a cab into Providence, and checked into the hotel. Zoe arrived half an hour later, with a small overnight bag, and the two looked more like sisters than mother and daughter as they chatted and laughed and hugged, and sprawled out comfortably in the cozy room. |
| 700 |
As far as she was concerned, her father had been a nonparticipant in their family for most of her life. She was well aware that her mother had always been there for them. She and her older sister had heated arguments over it. Eloise had always hotly defended their dad, although she loved her mother too. |
| 701 |
Faith asked her about school then, her classes, and her friends. They were the last people to leave the restaurant, and went back to the hotel and talked for hours. And that night, they slept together in the king size bed and Faith smiled at Zoe as she drifted off to sleep, thinking how lucky she was. |
| 702 |
She wouldn't be as available as she had been, and she knew it would be a big adjustment for him. She was still thinking about it when she glanced at her computer and saw that she had mail. She assumed it was from Zoe, clicked on the mailbox, and was surprised and pleased to see that it was from Brad. |
| 703 |
Fred, he cannot make your decisions for you. He has no right to stop you, if this is really what you want to do, and I think it is. He'll get used to it. If you had a job, you'd be busy and tied down too. You can't just sit there, wandering around the house, waiting for him to come home so you can wait on him. |
| 704 |
And it was too late to change that now. It had started out as mutual agreement about many things, and over the years it had become clear to everyone that Alex ran a dictatorship. Ultimately, he had the final say, and made the rules. Because of her own psychological history, she had accepted it that way. |
| 705 |
And then what? You get a job and work fourteen hours a day? You won't be able to travel, you'll never be able to go out at night. You'll be telling me that we can't entertain or go anywhere because you have exams. If that was what you wanted to do, you should have thought of it before the girls were born. |
| 706 |
And Zoe was planning to talk to him about it too. She wanted to give her mother a hand convincing him, since it was so important to her that Alex agree. She felt she needed his approval before she could allow herself to do what she wanted to. Faith retreated quietly into her study, and clicked on her e mail. |
| 707 |
He doesn't think I'll get into school, pass the exams, or the bar. Says it's a complete waste of time, and major inconvenience to him. I'm not winning any popularity contests here. And I don't think he'll agree. I'd still like to do it, but really can't if he's opposed to it, that wouldn't be fair to him. |
| 708 |
So he had made his peace with his differences with Pam. It was Pam who was nipping at his heels these days, complaining about everything he did, and arguing with him about the fact that he was never at home. And she was right. He didn't want to be. But he had no intention of leaving her, and knew he never would. |
| 709 |
Obviously, the meetings had not gone well. She cooked dinner for him in silence, and as soon as he finished his last mouthful, he got up, went upstairs, showered, and went to bed. He hadn't said a single word to her while they ate. And it was only the next morning at breakfast that he asked her how she was. |
| 710 |
Their breakfast dishes were still on the table, and all she could do was cry. Great, long, wracking sobs. She felt as though she had been put in jail. He acted as though he owned her, as though what she felt and wanted were of absolutely no consequence to him. She had never felt as powerless in her life. |
| 711 |
No one did. Not like this. Other people thought him reasonable and intelligent and thoughtful. No one but Faith and his children knew how ice cold he was, or could be. He had to have everything his way. Zoe had had countless arguments like this with him, and had eventually given up discussing anything with him. |
| 712 |
She didn't realize it while she was walking, but she was gone for two hours, and it did her a world of good. He was absolutely right. She had to take back some kind of power. Alex was treating her as though he owned her, as though she were an object he had bought. And she was no longer willing to let him do that. |
| 713 |
She mailed the forms that afternoon. As they dropped into the mailbox, she stood there in the pouring rain and smiled. There was a knot of angst in her stomach, but at the same time she had a lighter heart, and clearer head. She knew she had done the right thing. She ran back to the house and called Brad. |
| 714 |
But they both knew she'd have to face the music with Alex eventually, and there was no doubt in Brad's mind she would be accepted at law school. And then she'd have to decide. She couldn't believe how much better she felt since she sent in the forms to her classes. It had totally turned her depression around. |
| 715 |
There was no reason to. He had become her secret friend, and champion of her causes, just as he had been when they were children. It was harmless. And Alex wouldn't have been interested anyway. He never had any interest in her friends, unless their husbands were important. Her women friends were of no interest to him. |
| 716 |
And by the end of the evening, she actually felt closer to him, and had forgiven him for his attitude about her going to law school. She still had hopes of convincing him in the next few months. They went to bed early that night, and predictably when he opened up to her a little, she found herself snuggling up to him. |
| 717 |
She couldn't imagine how she would pull it off in eight weeks. And every day, after the class she was back home by one. The ensuing weeks before Thanksgiving passed without incident between her and Alex. She was being particularly careful not to irritate him, and he was pleased, and convinced she had seen the light. |
| 718 |
It was hard to believe he had disappeared from her life for so many years. It was like finding a long lost brother, and she loved talking to him. He gave her sound advice, and an enormous sense of well being. He was high on her list of things to be grateful for that Thanksgiving, along with her kids. |
| 719 |
Faith tidied up the girls' rooms that night, and put vases of fresh flowers in them. She wanted everything perfect for their homecoming, and she felt happy and relaxed when she went back to her own room. She started to say something to Alex, and then realized he'd fallen asleep with a book in his hands. |
| 720 |
But he treated Faith in very much the same way that Charles had treated her mother, as though she didn't exist some of the time, and wouldn't understand what he did with his days, as though she were somehow less competent than he was. It was a subtle form of devaluation that irked her when she was a child. |
| 721 |
She let Alex put her down, and criticize her, belittle her, and ignore her. Letting him forbid her to go to law school was something her mother would have done. And as she got into bed next to him, as he snored softly, she vowed not to let him do the same thing to her. The tides had slowly started to turn. |
| 722 |
The main difference was that her mother had whined and complained and grown bitter, and eventually long suffering. It was the last thing Faith wanted to happen to her. Her mother had seemed helpless in the face of Charles's domineering ways, which was an example Faith didn't want to set for her daughters. |
| 723 |
It had been a silent war between them for many years. The Iceman, as Zoe called him. The sad thing was that he wasn't entirely, there was a warm core in there somewhere, that Faith had known and loved in the beginning of their marriage. But the warm core had gotten covered with layers of ice over the years. |
| 724 |
She felt useful suddenly, being with them again. They needed her, or at least they used to, and they would now, if only for a few days. Just knowing they would be home made her feel happy, safe, and loved. It saddened her to realize that Alex no longer made her feel that way. The only joy she had left was her girls. |
| 725 |
And Zoe absolutely loved Brown. It was everything she had hoped it would be. She had designed a curriculum for herself in fine arts, with a minor in economics. She wanted to run an art gallery eventually, or start a service to buy art for important collectors. She already had her goals in her sights, even at eighteen. |
| 726 |
She was a beautiful girl, taller than her younger sister, though not by much. They both had Alex's height and his long, lanky looks, their mother's perfect figure, and faces like cameos. They had both been asked to model at various times, but neither had ever been interested in it, much to Faith's relief. |
| 727 |
The three of them sat in the kitchen for an hour, chatting about nothing in particular, and then finally Faith put the dishes in the sink, turned off the lights, and they went upstairs to their respective rooms. Faith got into bed next to Alex and she slept like a child that night, knowing that her girls were home. |
| 728 |
And she got up at the crack of dawn the next day, to make the dressing and put the turkey in the oven and get everything ready before the others came downstairs. They had a late breakfast, and sat reading the paper in their pajamas, as Faith checked on the turkey, and set the table in the dining room. |
| 729 |
It was noon before they all went back upstairs to dress. They usually congregated in the living room at two o'clock on Thanksgiving Day, and ate at three. And when the girls came back downstairs, dressed and made up, and looking very pretty, they sat next to their father and watched the football game with him. |
| 730 |
But she instantly regretted it, as he slammed a fist down on the table, which made all the silver and crystal jump, and both girls. They were stunned by his vehemence, as was Faith. And whether she wanted it or not the war had started again. This was a power war with him, and he did not intend to lose. |
| 731 |
It was the culmination of a lot of old battles between them. Zoe was always critical of him, and had been since she was a little girl. But this was the most outspoken she had ever been to him. She couldn't stand the way he spoke to and about their mother. And Faith had a hard time defending herself. |
| 732 |
They were beautiful, and more vulnerable than they thought. Eloise left a few minutes later, and Faith spent the next hour clearing the table and cleaning up the kitchen. The leftovers were put away, the counters were clean, the dining room table looked pristine again, and the dishwasher was going full force. |
| 733 |
He felt like a statue when she touched him, and he said not a word. She went upstairs to take a bath, and then sat in her own small study, while she waited for Zoe to come home. She checked her e mail, but there was no word from Brad. Thanksgiving had been difficult certainly, and she'd won a victory. |
| 734 |
The only difference his objections made was that she prepared better arguments to convince him. But in the end, perhaps because of lack of energy on his part, Pam prevailed. He preferred to save his energy for bigger things, like his work. He got a lot of paperwork done, and caught up on a number of things. |
| 735 |
They were working on a game preserve, tending to injured animals, and assisting animals that were somehow in trouble in the wild. And in their spare time they had volunteered at a church in the village. Dylan was teaching kids and their parents how to read, and Jason was digging trenches for a new sewer system. |
| 736 |
Their letters so far had been full of enthusiasm and excitement for everything they'd done and seen. It was an unforgettable experience for them. They were going to be there until July, and he had promised himself and Pam that he was going to take some time off from work, and visit them for a couple of weeks. |
| 737 |
They stayed in luxurious hotels, and ate at three and four star restaurants. Pam loved going to spas, when she had the time, and playing golf with business associates, or clients she was trying to woo to the firm. Almost everything Pam did was geared toward advancing herself somehow, either socially or professionally. |
| 738 |
She always had a plan. And was totally unlike Brad. He had no social ambitions, no desire to run the world, no need for enormous amounts of money, and the only real passion he had was for his work. The rest went over his head. Pam teased him about it sometimes, and had tried to show him the ropes to greed and success. |
| 739 |
They were lessons that, much to her chagrin, he had refused to learn. And since he'd gone out on his own, and left the firm, she'd given up. Most of the time, nearly always in fact, they each did their own thing, which was a relief for Brad. The work she put into her social and business life exhausted him. |
| 740 |
Somewhere in Zambia there were postal workers or customs officers who were taking her vitamins, and no longer plagued by bugs. But he figured the boys were fine. He thought of calling Faith before he left the office, but when he glanced at his watch, he realized that they were probably about to sit down and eat. |
| 741 |
It was a real bonus for him to have found her again. She was a piece of his childhood, his history, a memory of a happy time for him. Things had gotten complicated for him after college. His parents had gotten divorced, and he had always felt that the acrimoniousness of the divorce had killed them both. |
| 742 |
He wasn't ambitious enough in her eyes, or interested in the same things. By the time the boys finished college, or even when they started it, Pam and Brad had no shared interests at all, and few friends they both liked. Brad's values were entirely different from hers, and the only joy they still shared was their sons. |
| 743 |
Brad turned off the lights in the office, and got into the Jeep he used for work. He had a Mercedes parked in the garage at home, but he seldom used it anymore. It was the wrong signal to send out for a court appointed attorney, or one doing mostly pro bono work, defending indigent kids accused of violent crimes. |
| 744 |
The difference in their cars seemed symbolic, to him at least, of their differences in all else. He didn't delude himself that he was happy with her. He hadn't had any illusions about his marriage in a long time, but he was entirely clear that he wasn't going to do anything about it, and never would. |
| 745 |
Brad hadn't been involved with anyone since, and that had been three years before. He would have been lonely, if he'd thought about it, but he didn't allow himself to. He simply accepted what was, and stayed submerged in work. But talking to Faith had added another dimension to his life in the past two months. |
| 746 |
He avoided most of her social events, either intentionally, or because he couldn't get away from work. So there were certain events he appeared at religiously, Thanksgiving, her Christmas party, the opening of the opera and the ballet every year, and the symphony if she couldn't find anyone else to go with her. |
| 747 |
He was in the living room half an hour later, in his tuxedo, looking handsome and well groomed, and to anyone who knew him well, bored to death. He was talking to her father about two new clients they'd acquired. They were major corporate entities, and had been a real coup for Pam, as her father said. |
| 748 |
He was inordinately proud of her. She had learned everything from him, her business acumen, her legal skills, her values, her ambitions, and her ability to get what she wanted in almost any circumstance, whether right or wrong. Pam was not a woman one could easily say no to, or who accepted being turned down. |
| 749 |
It worked better for him that way, and had allowed their marriage to survive. His love for her had been a casualty to the way she treated him, but even after his feelings for her had died, he made every effort to keep the outer shell of their marriage intact. The inside, the soul of it, had long since died. |
| 750 |
But so far, neither of the boys had been swayed, much to Brad's relief. She was a pretty woman, though not in an overtly feminine way. She was tall, athletic, with a strong, sinewy figure. She played a lot of tennis and golf, and was in great shape. And she had brown eyes, and hair as dark as Brad's. |
| 751 |
Brad knew almost all of them, and had worked with two of them at the firm. They were nice guys and the conversation was easy and familiar, unlike the two women he sat next to, when they were finally seated at the table. Both were extremely social, and were married to men Brad had heard about and never met. |
| 752 |
The living room was full of sated, happy people, drinking brandy. And most of them looked like they were planning to stay all night. Pam was engaged in a heated debate at that point, over some recent tax law that was of no interest to him. And the kind of law he practiced was of even less interest to them. |
| 753 |
He longed for the kind of holidays they'd had when they were little, when Thanksgiving still had some meaning to him, and it wasn't an excuse to invite forty strangers to the house. Pam used every opportunity to fill the room with people who were useful to her, rather than those who had real meaning in their life. |
| 754 |
Two new kids in jail, and a third I think the county is referring to me. What happens to these kids way at the beginning? It would be nice if they didn't need me, and just had happy, ordinary lives, whatever that is. I felt so stupid tonight spending Thanksgiving with a bunch of strangers, all dressed up like waiters. |
| 755 |
He had a long day the next day. And Pam was used to his leaving parties early. He always did it discreetly, so as not to disrupt the guests, or make them feel they had to leave. He was sure that Pam and many of the others would be there till long after midnight. But he was delighted not to be in their midst. |
| 756 |
It's my fault really. He was dismissive about my going to school, and I lost my temper and snapped at him. That set him off, so he said some fairly harsh things, and Zoe leaped to my defense. I shouldn't have reacted in the first place, and then everything would have been all right. I should know better. |
| 757 |
At least he and Pam hadn't argued for once. He knew better, and did his best to avoid making scenes. He was quick to type in a response to Faith, in case she had not yet gone to bed. But knowing how quickly he normally responded, she had decided to wait up for a few more minutes to see if she heard from him again. |
| 758 |
You can't fix everything for everyone, Fred. It's okay for them to disagree sometimes, or even to defend you against him. The important thing was that you were all together, and you stood up for yourself. That's good for them to see, even if it caused some dissent among the troops. They'll get over it. |
| 759 |
It had been a long day, a boring evening for him, and a sad one for her. But at least they had each other. That was something. The cherished gift of friendship and brotherly love between two old friends. As far as Brad was concerned, it was what Thanksgiving was all about, and he was grateful for her. |
| 760 |
They all had breakfast together, and the two girls appeared to be talking to each other, but Faith couldn't help but notice that the exchanges weren't warm. And she was especially sorry that they didn't have time to patch things up further before they left. Eloise was flying back to London that night. |
| 761 |
It depressed Faith as she checked their rooms, stripped the beds, and washed the sheets. There was a cleaning person who came in three times a week, but as a motherly gesture, which still allowed her to take care of them, she preferred to do their rooms and laundry herself. It was all she could do for them. |
| 762 |
Alex said he had enjoyed himself, and he seemed slightly more pleased than usual to see Faith, which startled her. She wondered if he was lonely for the girls too. Their absence impacted everyone, even Zoe, who felt like an only child now when she came home, and didn't like it. But it was hardest of all for Faith. |
| 763 |
Faith and Alex spent a quiet evening together. He told her about the maritime museum he'd visited, and the plans he had for that week. It was the longest conversation they'd had in months, and after their argument at the end of Thanksgiving dinner, and his vehemence about her not going to school, she was stunned. |
| 764 |
And for the moment at least, he seemed to have forgiven her for wanting to go to school. Or had put his own hatred of the project on hold. For the time being at least. And his doing that created some much needed and unexpected warmth between them. For the next two weeks, Faith kept busy getting ready for Christmas. |
| 765 |
She bought presents for Alex and the girls. He took several trips, and they saw so little of each other that the topic of her going back to school didn't come up between them again. In the little she saw of him between business trips and after work at night, all he did was eat, say a few words to her, and go to bed. |
| 766 |
They hardly saw each other on Saturday. Alex worked in the office all day, trying to catch up on assorted projects he had to complete by the end of the year, and they went to a dinner party that night. They were late getting there, and he was exhausted when they got home, and went straight to bed, and fell asleep. |
| 767 |
He didn't comment further, or congratulate her for her plans. He had neither approved, nor denied. He had put the responsibility on her, and she grabbed what she got and ran. She was more than willing to take full responsibility for what she wanted to do, and make every possible effort to make it work. |
| 768 |
It wasn't in his nature to lend more support than that, or recant on what he'd said. And it was good enough for her. He didn't have to be jubilant about it, just not demand that she withdraw or forbid her to go. She made dinner for Alex after that. He never mentioned her plans again, or asked her about them. |
| 769 |
Faith was still upset, however, that Ellie had called her father first, and that he had endorsed her plans without discussing it with Faith. It made her feel shut out, and as though they were in collusion with each other, which to some extent they were. It was the nature of their relationship and who they were. |
| 770 |
For the rest of the day, Faith was busy with errands and things she had to do. She bought paper to wrap their gifts, groceries, and a list of things Zoe had asked her to pick up before she got home. Faith was home by four, and in the bathtub when Brad called. She smiled as soon as she heard his voice. |
| 771 |
But she had put Ellie out of her mind again when Brad rang the door at seven thirty She was wearing black slacks and a black cashmere sweater and a big red cashmere coat, and high heeled black suede boots. Her shimmering blond hair was pulled back in a neat pony tail and she was wearing big gold earrings. |
| 772 |
Just seeing him and being with him reminded her in a nice way of her brother. It was the best Christmas gift of all being able to see him, and not just send e mails. He had been remarkably devoted for the past two months, and this time neither of them had any intention of losing touch with the other. |
| 773 |
She had needed time to grieve Jack's death. And she had focused all her emotional energies on the girls in their last years at home. Alex hadn't enjoyed socializing with her much in recent years. He was consumed by his work. And particularly since Jack's death, she had drifted away from her friends. |
| 774 |
But she hoped that he would be there for her if she ever got sick. But failing that, he offered very little in terms of daily involvement and support. He was more interested in his own life, and had been for a long time. She couldn't even remember when it had gotten that way, or how different it had been before. |
| 775 |
I don't think there would be much point. I think the conclusion I've come to is that you get what you get, and you make the best of it. But the truth is, it leaves a lot of holes in your life to fill. You fill it with kids, with friends, with work, with dreams, with fantasies, with regrets, with whatever works. |
| 776 |
For better or worse. Until death do us part. I'm not going to make the same mistakes my parents made. I owe it to my kids, and even now that they're grown up, relatively, they don't need all the misery of parents who hate each other, won't speak to each other, and destroy everything they ever built. |
| 777 |
He nourished a deep inner part of her that had been hungry ever since Jack's death. It was a part of her that Alex had never fed. He got out of the cab and told the driver to wait when they reached her house, and he watched while she turned off the alarm and let herself into the neat little brownstone house. |
| 778 |
She felt unsteady at first, and wondered if it had been too long. But by the time she had gone around the rink twice, she was surprised by how confident she was beginning to feel. Brad was skating alongside her by then, unsteadily initially, but like her, he found his sea legs faster than he thought. |
| 779 |
She was glad she had brought gloves with her, after his warning to dress warm. She had had no idea what he had in mind, and wondered if he wanted to go for a long walk, or something equally sedate. She had never anticipated this, but was thrilled he'd thought of it. It was like a time warp into their past. |
| 780 |
The Catholic Church had always seemed more mysterious and impressive to him. And Jack dared him to go to confession once, and he was surprised by how kind the priest had been. There was a lot about Catholicism that had always appealed to him, although he had drifted away from his own church too in recent years. |
| 781 |
Faith still went to church regularly, but Alex wasn't religious, and resisted it energetically, and she had never been able to sell it to her kids. It was something she did on her own, but she had gone more frequently ever since her brother died. Instead of once or twice, she now went several times a week. |
| 782 |
It was the only way she had found consolation from his death. Brad didn't say anything as he followed her across the street to the church. It was just after ten o'clock, and the doors were still open. There were beautiful Christmas decorations and poinsettias everywhere, and the church was spectacularly lit. |
| 783 |
It was almost as though she could feel Jack walking with them. They slipped quietly into a pew, and sat there for a while, and she knelt and prayed, for Jack and her mother, and Charles, and her daughters finally, and then, still on her knees, she turned to smile at Brad. He had never seen her look more beautiful. |
| 784 |
Brad had come into the house the night before for a few minutes, when he dropped her off. And Faith had shown him the study where she kept her computer and wrote him e mails. It was a small cozy room full of photographs and what she called sentimental debris. But he liked seeing where she wrote to him. |
| 785 |
It was so comfortable talking to him. In some ways, he was even easier to talk to than Jack had been. They had always disagreed about things like their mother's marriage, Faith had seen her as lonely and unhappy all her life, while Jack thought Charlie was a decent guy and his sister was too critical of him. |
| 786 |
But there were no loyalties at issue with Brad, and they saw most things the same way, from the same side. It made her sad to realize how much he had compromised in his marriage. And she felt sorry for him. Pam sounded like the wrong woman for him, but it was obvious that he was entrenched for life. |
| 787 |
But he might have said the same thing about Alex. Neither of them were easy marriages or mates, but they were whom and what they had chosen, and had decided to stand by. She respected him for it, and at the same time, pitied him. She sent him an e mail that night, thanking him for the dinners, and the skating. |
| 788 |
Four more girls arrived, and it was another half hour before they all left. Zoe promised to be home at a decent hour, but didn't say when. And Faith stayed in the kitchen to clean up the mess. She didn't want to complain about it on Zoe's first night home. It was easier to do it herself, and it didn't take long. |
| 789 |
This was the life she had reveled in for twenty four years, and it was nice having it back again, even if only for a few weeks. She sent an e mail to Brad, although she knew he was still on the plane. He was probably almost back in San Francisco by then. It was the second e mail she'd sent him that day. |
| 790 |
Interesting too to share our views on marriage and relationships, compromises, and the way things turn out in the end. We never used to talk about stuff like that when we were kids. Can't remember what we used to talk about. I think we just laughed a lot. I used to talk about this stuff a lot with Jack. |
| 791 |
Turned my computer on, to write to you, and there you were. Send me some of that noise. I have the other side of that coin, bicycle pumps and skateboards in the front hall, single tennis shoes floating all over the house. Incredible racket from conflicting stereos and TVs, and my underwear always disappears. |
| 792 |
He would never have understood, and wouldn't have wanted to. She and Alex talked about other things, like children, and business, and his latest trip, or something she'd heard in the news. But she couldn't have shared her philosophies with him, or the dreams of her heart. That was just the way it was. |
| 793 |
It sounded exotic to her. She couldn't remember her mother ever having a close male friend, although she knew some married women did. She also didn't think her mother had affairs, even though she thought her father wasn't nice to her. Zoe thought it would have served him right, and maybe been good for Faith. |
| 794 |
Got a call from a couple, saw them a little while ago. Their fifteen year old daughter is accused of killing their six year old son. From all I can gather, she is mentally ill, though not obviously so, but clearly she is. She may be tried as a result, though I think I can get a sanity hearing for her. |
| 795 |
But at Brad's end, things weren't all smooth sailing these days either. The holidays seemed to bring out the worst in everyone. Particularly Pam. She was going from one party to another, and she wanted Brad to go with her, and he was too busy in the office, nor did he care about the social events she loved. |
| 796 |
He had long since told her that he'd prefer she went with one of her friends. But at certain times of year, she insisted that he go with her. Particularly during the opening of the social season in September, and at Christmas. Pam was going to cocktails and dinners and dances, benefits and openings and holiday parties. |
| 797 |
It was one of those sacrifices he had made, that he and Faith had talked about, although he hadn't explained that aspect of his life to her, and didn't intend to. It wasn't appropriate information to exchange. But Pam looked shocked by what he had just said. Something in his eyes made her stop and stare. |
| 798 |
He stormed back to the office half an hour later, with a severe case of indigestion and a headache. No one on the planet could make him angrier than Pam. She had a knack for driving him out of his mind. She was stubborn and unreasonable and aggressive. And if he let her, she could argue with him for hours. |
| 799 |
It struck him odd that Pam had accused him of sleeping with her, and Zoe had asked her mother the same thing. Odder still that they had each suggested they were in love with each other. As he had said to Pam, it wasn't even an option, for either of them. All they had ever been was friends, since the beginning. |
| 800 |
And Faith said nothing in response. She just hoped she could juggle all the balls she needed to, to make her home life and her school schedule work. It was going to be a challenge for her. The three of them had dinner together that night, as planned. Faith cooked duck for them, with a recipe she'd gotten from a friend. |
| 801 |
It made the holiday even harder for him, not to mention the tension that existed between him and Pam. He felt like a stranger in his own house these days. As always, she had invited people to dinner whom he didn't know well, and her father had a way of monopolizing the conversation and making it all about him. |
| 802 |
She was a handsome woman, but every time Brad looked at her he saw who she had become. She was tougher and harder and stronger than he would ever have dreamed. He had bought her a narrow gold and diamond necklace with a matching bracelet and ring, and he knew it was the kind of thing she would wear a lot. |
| 803 |
He was smarter than that. And Pam was just being territorial and defending her turf. She wanted to make it clear that she still owned him, whether she wanted him or not, or he her. Their guests all left around eleven o'clock, and Pam's father had a car and driver pick him up. He didn't like to drive at night anymore. |
| 804 |
It was a large beautiful old Gothic church, and as he walked up the steps, he could see a cluster of tall pine trees on either side of the main altar, banks of poinsettias, and the church was mostly candle lit. The shrine to Saint Jude was off to the right, and there were rows of candles there as well. |
| 805 |
He decided to go there first, and he lit candles for Faith and Jack, and he knelt for a moment, thinking of her, and his old friend. He didn't know what prayers he should say or even how, all he did was think of them, and wish them well. And he was grateful that some unseen force had brought Faith back into his life. |
| 806 |
She didn't like the idea that her family was shrinking, even for a year, although Ellie had promised that she'd be home for the holidays next year. And Brad called her right after they finished dinner, to thank her for her handsome gift. She answered the phone in the kitchen, while she was cleaning up. |
| 807 |
I can hardly wait. It's so intimate and meaningful. Really kind of touches your heart to see a hundred near strangers stampeding through your living room, shoving hors d'oeuvres down their throats and guzzling champagne. It really reminds you of the true meaning of Christmas. It's a shame you're not here. |
| 808 |
It was as hard as she had feared, and she had no idea how she'd done. In the pit of her stomach, she was afraid that she had done miserably, and Brad tried to reassure her when she called him afterward. He was the only person in her life who knew she had taken it. She didn't even tell Zoe where she'd gone. |
| 809 |
She had had fun with her friends over the holidays, and she always hated leaving her mother, although Faith had reason to be excited herself. She was starting school the next day. Alex was painfully silent at dinner after Zoe left, and Faith knew why. He was still annoyed with her for going back to school. |
| 810 |
Zoe had made a big fuss over her before she left, and Faith had her backpack and her school supplies ready for the next day. They were in her study, all ready and waiting on a chair. She went downstairs to check everything again before she went to bed. She hadn't been this excited since she was a little girl. |
| 811 |
He left at eight thirty, as he always did, and he said not a word to her. He wanted to be sure she knew he still disapproved. It was hardly a secret to her, or to anyone in the house. He simply glowered at her, and closed the front door. She made herself another cup of coffee, and kept looking at the clock. |
| 812 |
She knew it would help her for law school in the fall, and the first one seemed like a terrific class to her. She was exhausted when she finally headed home that afternoon, but it was the most interesting day she'd had in years. The professor of her Judicial Process class was a woman, and about Faith's age. |
| 813 |
But she said nothing, and afterward just cleaned up after the meal, without saying another word to him. It had been a lousy thing for him to do. He was not going to concede anything, which seemed like ridiculously childish behavior to her. Now that she was back in school, he could make the best of it, and deal with it. |
| 814 |
But apparently, he had no intention of making it easy for her. And as she put the dishes in the dishwasher, and he disappeared, she was enraged. She stormed into her study and took out her schoolbooks as soon as she was through. And she sat there until one o'clock doing the two assignments she'd been given. |
| 815 |
Just do the best you can. You can't be perfect all the time, no one is. Just do your best. But know that there will be screw ups, and exams, and nights you can't get dinner on the table and do your homework. Like it or not, he has to live with it. If you drop the ball now, or give in, you'll regret it forever. |
| 816 |
She didn't even e mail Brad or Zoe about it. The scene had been so humiliating and frustrating, she didn't want to tell anyone. She was dealing with it herself. And the morning she left, she said good bye to him, and he didn't answer her. He just continued reading his newspaper and acted as though she didn't exist. |
| 817 |
It just made her angry, and relieved to be out of the house. She felt as though she'd just been let out of jail when she walked out with her backpack, one small duffel, and her computer in its case over her arm. She was taking it with her, to work on, and so she could communicate easily with Zoe and Brad. |
| 818 |
The day when you remember someone you love, and realize they've forgotten you, or something like that. Flowers and chocolates. Hay fever and cavities. I seem to be losing my spirit of romance. I would take Pam out to dinner, except she would probably bring two hundred friends and insist I wear black tie. |
| 819 |
The rest of the trip to Washington was fascinating, and continued at a brisk pace. They went to museums, libraries, universities, gathering data and information to illustrate their course. And it was only on the last morning that they ran into a major snag. They still had a final day to complete, and a last night. |
| 820 |
It was perfect. She could get home, organize her papers, and cook him a nice dinner as a peace offering. She stopped at the market on the way home, and let herself into the house shortly after three. She was carrying two bags of groceries and set them down in the kitchen, along with all her other bags and belongings. |
| 821 |
And as she looked around the kitchen, she was surprised to see that it was admirably neat. She wondered if he had eaten out every night after all. And as she set the bags down on the floor, she noticed a pair of shoes under a chair. They were high heeled black satin pumps, and she didn't own any like them. |
| 822 |
But more surprising, as she picked one up and looked at it closely, was that it was several sizes larger than hers. Her heart began to pound when she saw it, and with a sick feeling in her stomach, she walked upstairs. The bed in their bedroom had been hastily made, with the bedspread thrown over the unmade bed. |
| 823 |
And when she pulled it back, she almost instantly spotted a black lace brassiere, and as she looked down, there was a matching pair of thong underwear, seemingly hastily discarded on the floor. She was suddenly overwhelmed by a sick feeling, and sat down on the bed, feeling faint. This couldn't be happening to her. |
| 824 |
But the worst of all was that it was her home too. He had defiled their home, and their bed. All she could think of as they drove up Madison was the sight of the brassiere and the thong. And all she wanted was to die. It was the ultimate payback for her trip to Washington, if that was what he had intended. |
| 825 |
Faith felt sick as the doorman asked her if she was checking in, and she said yes. She didn't want to confront Alex and make a scene. She was going to stay at the hotel, and go home Saturday afternoon, as planned, which meant that Alex and the woman, whoever she was, were going to be cozily ensconced in her house. |
| 826 |
All she wanted was to check into the Carlyle and throw up. She asked for a room, and was lucky they had one, since she had no reservation, and told them she would be there for one night, or at most for the weekend. They signed her in, handed her a key, and a bellman carried her Washington gear upstairs. |
| 827 |
But it was obvious to her now that he was having an affair. After all his coldness to her, all his fury and accusations over her going back to school, all the icy unkindness he had showered on her for so long, all the distance, all the silence, all the indifference to her as a woman, he was sleeping with someone else. |
| 828 |
And the worst part was that she was more devastated than angry. She was beginning to wonder if she should have stayed and confronted them both, but she didn't feel up to it, and she needed time to gather her wits. It was eight o'clock in New York when she called Brad. She was going to discuss it with him calmly. |
| 829 |
He had no right, since he had done pretty much the same thing. He'd been turning a blind eye to Pam's affairs for years. It was easier that way, for him at least. But he thought Faith deserved a better break. And he probably did too, but he preferred not to rock the boat, and maintain the status quo. |
| 830 |
It was a beautiful sunny day, and she had never felt worse. All she could think of was Alex and the woman with the long black hair sound asleep in their bed. She wasn't sure she would ever be able to sleep in it again. She ordered a pot of black coffee at seven o'clock and put on a sweater and a pair of jeans. |
| 831 |
She just knelt and stared into space. And when the mass ended, she walked back to the hotel. She didn't know what to do with herself all day. She wasn't due home till four or five, and she was afraid to go for a walk or leave the hotel, because she might run into them. Brad called her when he got up. |
| 832 |
But he was carrying his cell phone, and told Faith to use it if she called the house and he was out. He was entirely available to her, and he didn't give a damn what comments Pam made. It was easy enough to explain to her, although he didn't think he would. He had nothing to feel guilty about, and neither did Faith. |
| 833 |
But he was doing his best on her behalf. Faith languished in her room all day, and at five o'clock, she called the bellman to carry her bags, and had the doorman call her a cab. She had too much stuff with her to walk the two blocks to the house. She let herself in with a shaking hand as she turned the key. |
| 834 |
The bed was made, and everything looked impeccable. She figured he must have made the bed himself. She wondered if he had had the decency to change the sheets, but she didn't look. He was sitting in his favorite chair by their bedroom fireplace, reading a book. He was the portrait of innocence itself. |
| 835 |
She didn't say another word as he clattered down the stairs, banging his bag along the wall, and a moment later, she heard the front door slam. She knew nothing more than she had when she got home. All she knew was what she had seen in her bedroom the day before, and nothing more. He wasn't about to enlighten her. |
| 836 |
More than anything she felt dead. She moved into Zoe's room that night. She couldn't bear the thought of sleeping in her own bed, whether he had changed the sheets or not. Brad called to check on her late that night, and Pam commented when he got off the phone. She hadn't seen him look that upset in a long time. |
| 837 |
And by noon the next day, Brad had e mailed her the name of an attorney in New York. Faith called him and left a message, and was relieved when he called her back. She explained what had happened, and the attorney asked her if she wanted to hire a private investigator to see if they could find out who the woman was. |
| 838 |
It had nothing to do with her going to school. He had been cheating on her for nearly a year. And just listening to the attorney, Faith felt sick. She made an appointment to come to his office the following week, but she still had no idea what to do. She didn't know if she should divorce him, or ask him to come back. |
| 839 |
They hadn't talked all week. She didn't even know how serious he was about the girl. And not knowing what else to do, she called Alex at the office that afternoon. And was relieved when he took her call. She was afraid he wouldn't even do that, but he sounded anything but pleasant when he heard her voice. |
| 840 |
But it was all she could think of to do. In the face of his endless criticisms, she always felt as though she should make the effort and the sacrifice, no matter how unfair or unwarranted. It was her childhood haunting her again, trying to be the perfect little girl, and never quite measuring up anyway. |
| 841 |
And a photograph they'd included showed a very pretty girl. She was tall and shapely and looked like a model, and had long wavy black hair, which Faith already knew. She had a five year old daughter, the report said, and she was well liked in the office. The romance was apparently an open secret at Alex's firm. |
| 842 |
The other secretaries in the office thought they might get married, but Alex had never said as much to anyone. Faith felt as though she had been kicked in the stomach by the time she left. She was a beautiful girl certainly, and very young. She was eighteen years younger than Faith, which was yet another blow. |
| 843 |
He was worried sick about her, and he told himself he owed it to Jack. He wanted to go to New York to take a look at her and make sure she was all right. He didn't have to see anyone, but he told her he did, just so he would have the excuse to come and visit her. It seemed like the least he could do. |
| 844 |
She just looked tired, and very sad. She toasted him English muffins, made coffee, and scrambled eggs, and they sat in the kitchen and talked for a long time. And afterward they sat in the living room, and he made a fire. She was still sleeping in Zoe's room, and was beginning to think she always would. |
| 845 |
The trees were still bare, and the park looked gray, but the air and the exercise did them both good. It was midafternoon before they went back to her house, and she made him a cup of hot chocolate while he started another fire, and wondered if she was going to keep the house. He didn't want to upset her by asking her. |
| 846 |
And the one time Jack knew that Faith had lied to him, he had given her hell. She had been about ten years old, and Brad still remembered the big tears rolling down her cheeks when Jack had scolded her. She didn't look much different than that now, and it had been the vision he had had of her for the past week. |
| 847 |
We grew up with each other, and we had every opportunity to fall in love, and never did. Instead, I married Pam, whom I have absolutely nothing in common with, and you married Alex, and he treats you like dirt. It would have been so much simpler if we'd taken a good look at each other and fallen in love way back then. |
| 848 |
His own childhood had been cold and unemotional, but relatively normal otherwise, and circumspect. She didn't think he could have understood her father doing something like that, without blaming her for it, which would have broken her heart. But she felt differently about Brad. She knew she could tell him anything. |
| 849 |
She took a breath finally, and dove in. She wasn't sure why, but she wanted to share it with him. Faith wasn't even aware of the tears rolling down her cheeks, as Brad's heart nearly ripped out of his chest as he watched helplessly. He was just as helpless as Jack had been. Jack couldn't stop it at the time. |
| 850 |
Brad never let her down, unlike Alex, who never failed to disappoint her at every turn and had for so long. Somehow telling Brad and feeling his arms around her vindicated her. She had finally told someone, and he accepted her in spite of it. She was free at last from the chains that had bound her for most of her life. |
| 851 |
What she saw was the good person who was not to blame for any of it. Not a victim either, or a bad little girl. It was a proud woman who had survived, and deserved love and good things to happen to her. It was exactly the key she needed to unlock the last door to freedom. He had freed her, and she had freed herself. |
| 852 |
He didn't want to leave her after what they'd just shared. All he was going to do was lie in his hotel room for two hours, and watch a basketball game, or sleep. But he knew he had to stick to his story, and leave her for a while. He felt closer to her than he ever had, but tried to look casual as he stood up. |
| 853 |
But he looked pensive and sad as he walked into the hotel, thinking of the horrors she'd survived, the love she lavished on everyone in spite of it, and how lucky he was to be her friend. And all Faith could do was thank God she had finally had the courage to unburden herself and tell him about her father. |
| 854 |
It had been fun. They were laughing about stories from when they were kids. He reminded her of when she had played a trick on them and told their girlfriends they were out with other girls. They'd almost killed her when they found out. She'd been mad about something and did it to get even with them. |
| 855 |
It was funny to think about them again, and wonder where they went. They had both lost touch with all of them. Particularly Brad when he moved away. They strolled slowly up Third Avenue, talking about the people they had known as kids, and remembering faces and names that neither of them had thought about in years. |
| 856 |
And he allowed her to slice some oranges and peaches for both of them. He had finished the eggs by then. He put them on two plates, buttered the muffins, and added them. She set the table, and he brought the food, and they both sat down. The eggs were delicious, and he was munching on a muffin as she smiled. |
| 857 |
She took communion and he waited for her, and he noticed at one point that she was holding the rosary beads he had given her, and he smiled. And afterward, they lit a candle for Jack at the shrine of Saint Jude. It was a comforting experience for both of them, and they both looked at peace when they walked outside. |
| 858 |
Every day had been full, there had been so much joy. She never had time to think about anything except what she was doing with them, or being with Alex at night. She never worried about what the future would bring, she didn't have time to think about it. And she'd gotten up feeling happy and needed every day. |
| 859 |
He had never seen anyone as beautiful, and as he looked at her, it made his heart ache. He would have loved to turn the clock back about thirty years. But he knew with perfect clarity what he couldn't have. What he couldn't have, and never would, was Faith. And she had no idea the thought had even crossed his mind. |
| 860 |
He was beginning to feel things for her he had never felt before. And as long as she wasn't aware of it, and there were three thousand miles separating them, he knew he was safe, and so was she. He carried the groceries for her, and half an hour later, she was making lunch, while he started the fire. |
| 861 |
She was doing well, but having to struggle to concentrate. She was so distracted that the papers she was writing weren't as coherent as she would have liked them to be, and her grades reflected it. But she was hanging in. She answered the phone as she walked in the door. The attorney didn't have great news. |
| 862 |
It had been addressed to her lawyer, of course, but it said that Alex wanted her to move out, and put the house on the market as soon as possible. They had given her a few days of grace and wanted her out by the first of June. It was the cruelest thing she could think of, throwing her out of her house. |
| 863 |
Faith was in her bedroom, when Eloise came home. It had taken her a month to move back into her own room. It wasn't practical to live in Zoe's room, and she had finally decided to swallow her pride and her revulsion at sleeping in her bed again. She was lying on it, when she saw Ellie walk down the hall. |
| 864 |
It didn't say much about the way she'd brought them up, or the feelings Eloise had for her. She wasn't a child, she was an adult, and she was using nuclear weapons to destroy her mother. Alex had given them to her, but she hadn't hesitated to use them. It broke Faith's heart to think about the damage she would do. |
| 865 |
Faith felt as though she were swimming underwater as the days went by. She was trying to keep her grades up at school, and make peace with Eloise, though her efforts had no results. Ellie went back to London without seeing her again. And within two days of hearing that, Faith was in bed with the flu. |
| 866 |
And her lawyer was negotiating with Alex about the house. He was being a real bastard about it and said he still wanted her out. And in the midst of her miseries, she didn't even have the heart to write to Brad. He called her every day to see how she was, and sometimes she didn't even pick up his calls. |
| 867 |
It accounted for a lot. She had decided to make dinner for him, and said she really didn't want to go out. And that worried him too. He managed to talk her into going to Serendipity for a banana split afterward for dessert. And after she ate almost none of the dinner she'd cooked, he was happy to see her dig in. |
| 868 |
He liked knowing how she was, and being there for her. When she wasn't in a total state over the divorce, or something Alex had done to her, they talked or e mailed each other every day, and had now for five months. She was part of the furniture of his life, and he counted on communicating with her. |
| 869 |
She had always had friends over the years, women whose children had grown up with hers, or others she was on committees with to do charity work. But since Jack's death, she had become so solitary, Alex had never liked her friends, and it had become more and more difficult to explain why they didn't socialize with them. |
| 870 |
Faith made a point of calling her several times a week, just to keep the door open, but Ellie always brushed her off. The conversations were brief and to the point, if she got through at all. Most of the time, Ellie screened her calls, to avoid talking to her mother. It was rare that Faith got through. |
| 871 |
They walked back to her house afterward, and he came in for a little while. They sat in her bedroom this time, and he built a fire. He sat in the same comfortable chair Alex always had, and she sat at Brad's feet while he stroked her hair. There was something so enormously comforting about him, and so loving. |
| 872 |
And for the first time, Faith was aware of feeling something she never before had for him. It was as though she felt a dam opening, and a tidal wave of feelings rushing out toward him. She had no idea what to do about it, or what to say to him, if anything. But when she looked up at him, she looked suddenly afraid. |
| 873 |
She was so happy with him that she suddenly wanted more of him. She was falling in love with Brad. She knew he would be horrified, just as she herself was. The last thing she wanted to do was upset his peaceful life, as hers had been. Whatever it was she was feeling for him, she knew it had to be denied. |
| 874 |
He could never know. She was strangely quiet that night, and he noticed it. He was equally cautious about taking advantage of her, and not being inappropriate. He wanted her to be comfortable and feel safe with him at all times, and she did. It was nearly midnight when he left. He had to get up early the next day. |
| 875 |
Somehow when neither of them had been looking, Brad had slipped into another part of her heart, and she had to get him out of there again, without him ever knowing where he'd been. It was up to her to do the work, she knew, and she said nothing of it to him, as she kissed his cheek and waved when he left. |
| 876 |
She had to tell someone. She had done a terrible thing, and she had only just discovered it herself. She was in love with him, with her whole heart and soul, and he was married to someone else, and intended to stay that way. She had no right to jeopardize his life, his marriage, or his peace of mind. |
| 877 |
She felt certain she deserved far greater punishment for the feelings she had for him, and the pain and risk she would create for him, if he ever found out. She said the ten Hail Marys, and an entire rosary, on the beads he had given her, and as she held them in her trembling hands, all she could think of was him. |
| 878 |
And as she felt a wave of love for him wash over her as she listened to him, she closed her eyes. She was glad now that he was going to Africa, and that they couldn't talk to each other while he was gone. She needed time to turn the tides of what she felt for him, and to return to what they had once had. |
| 879 |
He was only grateful that she had no idea of the feelings he had for her. But unlike Faith, he had no desire to stamp out the feelings he had developed for her. All he wanted to do was conceal them, and cherish them. Other than what he felt for his sons, she had become what mattered most to him in his life. |
| 880 |
Brad showered and shaved, ordered something to eat from room service, read the paper, and left the hotel at noon. He went to the British Museum, as he had told Faith he would, and found a beautiful old church on Kingsway, six blocks from the museum, and lit the candles he had promised for her and Jack. |
| 881 |
She was powerful, confident, didn't hesitate to tell people what to do, and gave everyone the impression that she could have run the world, and would, given half the chance. Faith was infinitely gentler, quieter, more subtle in her approach, and whenever he was around her, Brad had a sense of peace. |
| 882 |
Respectability, limited companionship, and the convenience of not unwinding a marriage they had had for years, which it would have bothered her to give up, as much as it would him. Which was why they stayed married. It worked for both of them. But he didn't like the nature of her question, nor her tone. |
| 883 |
They managed to stay out of each other's hair for the next two hours. Pam took a bath, Brad took a nap, and they ordered sandwiches from room service before they left for the airport. It was going to be a long night. They had a twelve hour trip ahead of them, and were scheduled to land in Lusaka in Zambia. |
| 884 |
They settled into their seats on the plane, ordered dinner, and selected movies for their individual screens. Pam took out a stack of fashion magazines she'd brought, and some papers from the office. She was working on some major deals when she left, and her father had promised to baby sit them for her. |
| 885 |
He was the only one she really trusted in the firm. Other than that, she relied on herself. In spite of all the other attorneys, and capable people around her, she was a one man band. Pam didn't work well on a team. And neither did Brad. They had never trusted each other either when they were working together. |
| 886 |
He handled his own clients, as she did hers, and they had argued constantly about work. It was one of the many reasons he had left. That and the fact that he had felt like he was on a leash, with Pam and her father at the other end. It had been untenable for him. And it was part of why she was so angry when he left. |
| 887 |
She had lost control of him. Which was one of the things he loved most about working on his own. He was his own man, and no longer answered to her or her father. They said very little to each other on the trip, and they both looked exhausted when they arrived at the first airport. Neither of them had slept. |
| 888 |
There was an incredible sunrise, and a sky streaked with pink and orange as the sun hovered over the mountains, and they could see herds of animals gathered on the plains. Brad had never seen anything like it in his life. The terrain seemed to stretch out forever, and there were only a handful of roads and vehicles. |
| 889 |
She was not a woman who liked being taken out of her own environment, or the places where she felt in control. And this was far from being one of those. But Brad didn't care where they landed, or what they had to go through to get there. It had been nine months since he'd seen his sons, and that was enough for him. |
| 890 |
Brad gave a whoop the moment he saw them. They were waiting next to a van outside, and as Pam and Brad and a porter emerged, they hurried toward their parents, and embraced them both. They were handsome and tall, with blond hair bleached by the sun, and faces so darkly tanned they looked like natives. |
| 891 |
They were identical and looked like Brad, right down to their cleft chins, except for the blond hair that no one had ever been able to explain, except for some unknown distant relative. Brad had always said that there must have been a Swede in there somewhere. They had been towheads as babies and little boys. |
| 892 |
Only Brad had ever been able to tell them apart. He had always sworn that they looked distinctly different. Pam had never been sure which one she was talking to, and had solved the problem by putting them in different colored sneakers when they were little, which they had learned to switch later on. |
| 893 |
They explained sights as they saw them, named animals as they passed them, talked about tribes who lived in the bush along the road. What they were seeing was exactly what Brad had hoped, and it made him glad they had come. And he realized more than ever what an extraordinary experience it had been for the boys. |
| 894 |
They were due back in July, although they'd been talking about spending a year in London, or maybe six months traveling in Europe, before they went to graduate school or got jobs at home. Pam was determined to pressure them into law school. And after what they were seeing, Brad was no longer sure she had a chance. |
| 895 |
The experience had been priceless for them. And neither of them had expressed an interest in the law, nor for working for her later on. It took them four hours to drive over narrow highways and rutted roads to the game preserve in the national park, and by the time they got there, Pam was beginning to look unnerved. |
| 896 |
The employees of the game preserve lived in tents outside. There were two narrow buildings, one that served as a large rec room and office, the other as a mess hall, and there were two tiny cabins for guests. The boys had corralled one for them, but Brad suggested that he'd rather sleep with the boys in their tent. |
| 897 |
There was an outdoor shower, which was actually a large tent with a hose, and outhouses that served as latrines. It was actually among the more plush of the game preserves in the region, but it wasn't as fancy as some in Kenya, which Pam might have preferred. As far as she was concerned, this was as bad as it got. |
| 898 |
She was spoiled and loved her comfort, but when pressed, she was also capable of being a good sport. And she made the effort for the boys. Although she nearly fainted when she saw her first snake, and the boys warned her that there were flying bugs the size of her fist that would fly across the room at her at night. |
| 899 |
They spent their first night outdoors, sitting around a fire, listening to the sounds of the velvety African night. Brad had never seen anything like it in his life, and he loved it. And the next day, Brad went on a long drive with the boys, over sand roads, to Lukulu, a market town, and Pam stayed at the camp. |
| 900 |
The boys also took them to Ngulwana, on the opposite side of the river from the park, where they had worked digging trenches, building houses, and restoring a disintegrating church. They were currently helping to build a medical office, where a doctor came once a month to treat the ailing and injured locals. |
| 901 |
The only other option was to get there in a small plane. It was not a great place to get sick, Pam commented, and Brad agreed. But he was also impressed by how much work his sons had done for the locals. And everyone seemed to know them and love them. A number of people waved and smiled in greeting as they walked by. |
| 902 |
She had gotten a mild case of dysentery in the past two days, and was increasingly desperate to go home. She looked like she was being let out of prison the day they left. It had not been her favorite trip, except for seeing her sons. She had been nervous and on edge and ill at ease the entire time. |
| 903 |
Brad had enjoyed it for both of them, and would have loved to come back, but the boys were leaving in three months. He wished he could have come sooner, so he could have had a second trip, without Pam. It was draining having to constantly reassure her. But he was patient and sympathetic to her fears. |
| 904 |
The only miracle she needed was to stop having the feelings she did for him. She needed to find the peaceful haven of only being his friend again. She couldn't allow herself to feel more than that, and so far, Saint Jude hadn't helped. Her heart had taken a giant leap the moment she heard his voice. |
| 905 |
She had even said rosaries about it every day, but using the beads he'd given her, it only reminded her of him. It was her greatest inner battle these days. The outer ones were about the divorce. Alex was making life miserable for her. But she was getting used to it. And she had a piece of important news for Brad. |
| 906 |
She didn't want spousal support from him, although she could have had it. All she wanted was the house, outright, and some of their investments. In relation to what he had, she didn't want a lot. Her mother had left her enough to get by on. And in a few years she knew she'd be getting a decent salary as an attorney. |
| 907 |
As Brad knew only too well, she was decent to a fault. They talked for nearly an hour, and finally, in spite of how much he loved talking to her, he started to yawn, and she told him to go to bed. He was leaving for San Francisco at noon the next day, and would be back home by six in the evening Faith's time. |
| 908 |
Ellie had entrenched herself in her father's camp. And what hurt Faith most, she had told Brad, was the way Alex had simply gouged her out of his life, as though she had never existed, never mattered, and never been his wife. He had simply erased her like so much chalk on a blackboard. He had wiped her off. |
| 909 |
It made it difficult to imagine ever trusting anyone again. She couldn't even imagine a life with another man, or dating. All she wanted now was to lose herself in school, church, and her girls. And the only thing she had to do now was get her head on straight about Brad. She was determined to do it. |
| 910 |
But Zoe was startled when she saw that her father wasn't alone, when she approached the table. There was a woman sitting with him. He introduced them to each other with a broad, happy smile. And Zoe thought her father looked ridiculous. The girl sitting beside him on the banquette was nearly half his age. |
| 911 |
She apologized, she sobbed, she begged for forgiveness. She couldn't believe what her father had done. And she and Zoe had a major confrontation with him. Faith never knew exactly what transpired, but both girls stayed with her that weekend, and when Alex called, neither of the girls would talk to him. |
| 912 |
She had said a thousand prayers, and told herself a million times that no matter how wonderful he was, she could not be in love with him. And one day either the prayers, or what she told herself, would work. It had to. She had no other choice. And fortunately, as far as she knew anyway, he was not in love with her. |
| 913 |
And Faith hated to admit it, but it came as yet another blow to her. She sat and cried in her room for hours when she heard the news. She told Brad in an e mail the following day but she had been too depressed to call him. Alex was still trying to force her to sell the house, and it was easy to see why now. |
| 914 |
There's only a doctor for a few hours once a month, they're hours from the hospital. I don't even know if they can move him. We just don't know more than that. We sent a message for Dylan to call us. But he has to go to the post office to call, and even if he could get a line, he may not be able to leave his brother. |
| 915 |
He gave her the flight number, and hung up, and she sat in her study, staring into space, imagining the worst, just as he had. All she wished was that she could go with him, but she knew she couldn't. Particularly if Pam was going to meet him. And in San Francisco, the subject was under heated discussion. |
| 916 |
She looked as worried as he did, but she felt her responsibility was to her client, which to Brad seemed insane, and was an enormous statement to him. Even if Jason was all right in the end, Brad wanted her with him. It was the first time in years he had asked her for anything, and this was important to all of them. |
| 917 |
She was wearing jeans and a white shirt, and loafers. And she looked fresh and clean and pretty. But all he could think of was to hold her close to him, and they both cried as they walked to the nearest restaurant for a cup of coffee. He told her what he knew again, but he still didn't know anything of substance. |
| 918 |
He waved, and then he was gone. And Faith cried all the way back to the city in the cab. They had done something terrible, she knew that. She had allowed him to cross the line of friendship, not only allowed him, but provoked him to. There was no doubt in her mind that it was her fault it had happened. |
| 919 |
And she knew that when he came back, they would have to take back everything they had said and done, and promise not to do it again, or they could never see each other again. It was one more grief to add to their worries about Jason. All she could do for him now was pray. She got out of the cab at St. Patrick's. |
| 920 |
And he sat on the flight to Lusaka looking like a wounded man. Most of the time, all he could think of was Jason. His imagination had run wild with him since he'd heard the initial news and nothing more. And the rest of the time, he thought of Faith, and wanted to reassure her that what they had done wasn't wrong. |
| 921 |
He had known it in his soul for a very, very long time. He slept for part of the flight, and arrived in the morning, and changed planes again, to a miserable egg crate that would take him on the last leg of the trip. And this time, when he arrived in Kalabo, there was no van waiting for him, and no Jason or Dylan. |
| 922 |
He pointed to a building where the men had been taken. And as soon as he walked in, he saw women crying, and children squatting, and others shooing flies off the faces of the injured men. He found Dylan kneeling beside Jason, among them. Jason was unconscious and there was a tremendous blood soaked bandage on his head. |
| 923 |
Dylan stood up instantly and collapsed sobbing in his father's arms. Dylan was so exhausted he couldn't stop crying. The only good news from what Brad could see was that Jason was still alive. But he appeared to be close to death, and Dylan told him that one of the others had died several hours before. |
| 924 |
It took half an hour to get a local line, and then it occurred to him to radio the game preserve. There was no answer at the phone number he'd been given, and the man in the post office told him where to go to find a radio. And from there, Brad radioed the game preserve, and asked them to radio for the plane. |
| 925 |
Even with his deep tan, Brad could see that his son was gray. Dylan said he hadn't regained consciousness in two days. It took another six hours for the game preserve to get the plane. And then they sent a boy in a Jeep into town to tell Brad that it would be at the airport at eleven o'clock that night. |
| 926 |
And they got a truck for Jason, laid him carefully on a blanket, and put him in the back of the truck, with Dylan kneeling next to him, and Brad in the front seat. They were a motley crew when the plane finally arrived two hours later than they said. It took nearly an hour to get everyone settled in the plane. |
| 927 |
And shortly after that, they took off. For Brad, it was like an out of body experience, in a totally primitive place, with people who responded at their own pace. The plane was going to land in an open stretch of terrain the pilot was familiar with, and they had an ambulance standing by. Someone had radioed ahead. |
| 928 |
In normal circumstances, it was not a complicated surgery, but setting a broken arm was complicated in a place like this. Brad gave them his permission, and within seconds, Jason was wheeled away, as Brad and Dylan sat together, talking quietly, and watching other people come and go. It was an endless day. |
| 929 |
They were told hours later that the procedure had been done, and he was still alive, but there had been no visible change in his condition so far. And they knew nothing more when the sun set again. Brad and Dylan took turns sitting by his bedside, and he never stirred. They sat there, never leaving him for three days. |
| 930 |
Brad felt tired and filthy. He hadn't changed his clothes, showered, or shaved, but he never left his son for a minute. They ate whatever the nurses brought them, and on the third day, he realized that Pam had never arrived. He wondered if she was waiting for them at the game preserve, but there was no way to find out. |
| 931 |
But they had no other details. It was impossible to call her from where they were. And on the fourth day, finally, Jason moaned softly, opened his eyes, smiled at them, sighed, and drifted back to sleep. For a horrifying instant, Brad thought he had died, and he clutched Dylan's arm, with wide eyes. |
| 932 |
After checking on Jason again, Brad asked a nurse and she directed them to an outdoor shower. He had brought his only bag with him, and shared the clothes he'd brought with his son. They were clean at least by the time they went back to Jason, he was awake again and trying to talk, and the doctor was pleased. |
| 933 |
Brad had no doubt that they had made a difference, and he was desperately sorry that he couldn't call her and talk to her himself, but there was no way he could while he was there. Three days later, a nurse told them that Jason's mother had gotten a message to them. She couldn't come, but was glad that all was well. |
| 934 |
They had spent twenty five years together, and one always assumed that when the chips were down, the person you were married to would be there. Even if they didn't give much from day to day. But when they failed to stand up and be counted when it really mattered, you knew everything you had tried not to know all along. |
| 935 |
And it was a bond and a time Brad knew they would never forget. And as he walked home from his long hikes every morning, he found himself not only thinking of his children, and thanking God for them, but he also thought of Faith. He only wished that she could be there with them to see the beauty of the place. |
| 936 |
They flew Jason back to Kalabo a month after he had gone to the hospital. He was tired and wan, and had lost a considerable amount of weight. He was still too weak to travel, but the doctor thought that after a few more weeks resting at the game preserve, and eating properly, he would be able to make the trip home. |
| 937 |
The headaches he had had for weeks had finally gone away as well. It was an emotional day when they finally left the game preserve, and started the long trip home. Brad had gone to the post office twice to try to call Faith, he had waited hours for an outside, international line, and had finally given up. |
| 938 |
And much to everyone's amazement, when he did, Jason got a clean bill of health. They described the accident, and the procedure that had saved him, and showed them the chart, X rays, and paperwork that had been sent home with him. And the doctor in London said he was an incredibly fortunate young man. |
| 939 |
She wasn't going to contribute to Brad cheating on his wife, or cause a divorce, no matter how unhappy he said they were. It was a matter of respect, for all of them, and herself. She had talked about it at length with a priest, and then made up her own mind. In the end, it had been the only choice she could make. |
| 940 |
Pam asked a million questions, and she kept staring at Jason, as though to make sure he was really there. The boys were obviously happy to see their mother, as she was to see them. And Brad said very little on the ride home in the limousine. She waited until the boys had gone upstairs, and then she turned to him. |
| 941 |
You're not even there for our kids. I don't want to live a lie anymore. I watched our son nearly die in an outpost of civilization. Everyone says it's a miracle he's alive. Without that miracle, there wasn't a damn thing I could have done to save him. I was sitting there just watching him slip away. |
| 942 |
They'd gotten continuances for him on almost everything, except for one minor case that had gone well. He promised both of them he'd be back in another week. And then he had a lot of catching up to do, and he'd have to move. As Alex had done with Faith, although with less grace, Brad was giving her the house. |
| 943 |
They had lived an illusion for too many years. Now he wanted something real. He told the boys that evening that he was leaving for New York, and they seemed surprised, but not upset. He had spent the last two months with them, giving them all he had. And he hugged them both and told them he'd see them in a week. |
| 944 |
He walked up the stairs, knocked softly on the door of her room, and then opened it and walked in. He stood there as she rolled over slowly in bed with her eyes closed. He had never seen a more beautiful sight in his life. And as she opened her eyes, she saw him. For a long minute, she wasn't sure if he was a dream. |
| 945 |
His mother looked at him adoringly as she held him in her arms. His father loved to play ball with him. He was the star of his Little League team, and as he grew older, the girls swooned over him in school. He had dark hair and velvety brown eyes and a pronounced cleft in his chin, like a movie star. |
| 946 |
What would people think of him if she did? That he wasn't able to provide for her? He wanted her at home and waiting for him every night, which was what she did. And people who knew them said they were the best looking couple they had ever seen. There was never any question about who wore the pants in the family. |
| 947 |
And Christine readily revered him just as his parents had. He was a good provider, a loving husband, fun to be with, a perfect athlete, and he rose steadily in importance in the ad agency. He was friendly and charming with people, as long as they admired him and didn't criticize him. But most people had no reason to. |
| 948 |
Her father had had similar ideas, and she'd been perfectly brought up to be the devoted wife of a man like him. Their life was everything she had hoped for, and more. There were no unpleasant surprises with Jim, no strange behavior, no disappointments. He protected her and took care of her, and provided handsomely. |
| 949 |
Jim took her on weekend trips frequently, they went on fun vacations, and he took her out to dinner once or twice a week, although Christine was a good cook and had learned to make his favorite meals. Neither of them was suffering from the lack of children, although they agreed that they wanted them eventually. |
| 950 |
But five years after they got married, even Jim's parents were beginning to worry that they might be having the same difficulties that had delayed them from having a family for nearly twenty years. Jim assured them that there were no problems, they were just having fun and were in no hurry to have children. |
| 951 |
And despite her mother in law's concerns, the pregnancy was easy for Christine. When she went into labor, Jim drove her to the hospital and opted not to be in the delivery room when the baby came, which seemed like the right plan to Christine too. She didn't want him to do anything that would make him ill at ease. |
| 952 |
She wanted to get her figure back as quickly as possible, since Jim had always liked her petite, lithe shape and didn't find her attractive while she was pregnant. She had been careful with her weight during the pregnancy. Like Jim, she found it hard to believe that this chubby white blond baby was theirs. |
| 953 |
And Mother Dawson was quick to agree with Jim when she saw her, and said she looked like Jim's paternal grandmother, and said she hoped she didn't look like her later. She had been a round, heavyset woman for her entire life, who had been best known for her cooking and sewing skills and not her looks. |
| 954 |
It was no secret that Jim had wanted a son and not a daughter, almost as confirmation of his manhood and ability to father a son. And since it had never dawned on either of them that they might produce a daughter, they had no girls' names ready for the chubby blond baby that lay in Christine's arms. |
| 955 |
She walked and talked early, and people always commented on what a sweet little girl she was. She remained very fair, and the white blond fuzz she'd had when she was born turned into a crown of blond ringlets. She had big blue eyes, and pale blond hair, and the creamy white complexion that went with it. |
| 956 |
She loved her daughter, but the love of her life had always been her husband, and that hadn't changed. Unlike some women who became totally focused on their children, the central focus of her world was first Jim, and then the baby. Christine was the perfect companion for a narcissist of Jim's proportions. |
| 957 |
Mother Dawson rubbed salt in Jim's wounds by saying it was too bad they hadn't had a son, because then they wouldn't have had to consider having a second child, since only children were always brighter. And of course her son was an only child. Victoria appeared to be extremely intelligent as she got older. |
| 958 |
She was chatty and amiable, and had nearly adult conversations with them by the time she was three. She said funny things, and was alert and interested in everything around her. Christine taught her to read when she was four. And when she was five, her father told her she had been named after a queen. |
| 959 |
Victoria would smile with delight every time he said it. She knew what queens looked like. They were beautiful and wore pretty dresses in all the fairy tales she read. And sometimes they even had magic powers. She knew she had been named after Queen Victoria, but she had no idea what the queen looked like. |
| 960 |
Her father always told her that she'd been named after the queen because she looked like her. She knew that she was supposed to look like her father's grandmother, but she had never seen a picture of her either, and she wondered if she had been a queen too. Victoria was still round and chubby when she was six. |
| 961 |
Her name was written clearly under her picture. Victoria Regina, just like Victoria's own name. The queen was holding a pug dog, who looked astonishingly like the monarch herself, and the photograph had been taken late in her life. Victoria sat staring at the page for a long time and didn't say a word. |
| 962 |
She knew he meant no harm, but Jim's little joke had momentarily backfired, and Victoria looked stricken. She stared at the picture for ages, and two tears rolled slowly down her cheeks. Christine didn't say a word as they turned the page, and she hoped that Victoria would forget the image she had seen. |
| 963 |
She was an easy child who never bothered them and did as she was told. At seven years old, she gave them no problems, and her father said during the entire pregnancy that he hoped it would be a boy. Her mother seemed to want that too, but this time she decorated the nursery in neutral white instead of blue. |
| 964 |
Her parents had never explained the accident to her, but she hadn't forgotten the conversation she'd overheard. It made Victoria all the more determined to dedicate herself to the new baby, and do whatever was needed to help with it. She hoped the damage from the accident it had experienced wasn't too great. |
| 965 |
They said those were the rules, and she wondered if it was to give them time to fix whatever damage the baby had sustained in the mysterious event that no one seemed to want to discuss or explain. The day the baby was born, her father came home at six o'clock when Victoria's grandmother was preparing dinner for her. |
| 966 |
She hoped the baby was okay, and she sounded very cute. They called her mother at the hospital the next day, and she sounded very tired. It made Victoria even more determined to do everything she could to help when they got home. Grace was even prettier than they'd said when Victoria saw her for the first time. |
| 967 |
Grace was perfect, and all Victoria felt was love as she looked at her with adoration in her grandmother's arms. She couldn't wait for them to set her down so she could pick her up herself. This long awaited baby sister was hers. She had begun to love her long before she was born. And now she was here at last. |
| 968 |
Jim couldn't resist teasing his older daughter, as he always did. He was that kind of guy, and loved making jokes at the expense of someone else. His friends thought he was very funny, and he had no qualms about who he made the butt of his jokes. He turned to Victoria with a wry grin, as she gazed lovingly at the baby. |
| 969 |
It never came out right the first time, she said, so you threw the tester cake away and tried again. It made Victoria suddenly terrified that because Grace had come out so perfectly, maybe they would throw her away. But no one said anything about it, as her mother, grandmother, and new baby sister went upstairs. |
| 970 |
They changed the baby into a tiny pink nightgown, wrapped her in a blanket, and Christine gave her the bottle of formula they'd given her at the hospital. And then she burped her and laid her down in the bassinet. It was the first chance Victoria had gotten to take a good long look at the new arrival. |
| 971 |
She was so glad there had been no damage from the accident, and Grace was here at last. She thought of what her father had said then about her being the tester cake, and wondered if it was true. Maybe they had only had her to make sure they got it right with Grace. And if that was true, they certainly had. |
| 972 |
She wished that she was a victory and not a failure of the recipe or the oven temperature. And whatever their intentions had been in having her first, she just hoped they never decided to throw her away. All she wanted now was to share the rest of her life with Grace, and be the best big sister in the world. |
| 973 |
And she was glad for the baby that she hadn't gotten their great grandmother's nose too. She went downstairs to have lunch with her parents and grandmother then, while the baby slept peacefully upstairs, having just been fed and changed. Her mother had told her that she would sleep a lot for the first few weeks. |
| 974 |
Victoria got more and more responsible as she got older, and Grace got more beautiful with each passing year. She had a sunny disposition and laughed and smiled constantly, mostly at the urging of her older sister, who was the only person in the family who could make her laugh through her tears or stop a tantrum. |
| 975 |
That impression was reinforced by each person who admired Grace. Victoria's sense of being invisible became deeply entrenched. Once people had commented on how adorable and beautiful Gracie was, they had no idea what to say about Victoria, so they said nothing and ignored her. Victoria wasn't ugly, but she was plain. |
| 976 |
And their eye color was all the same, as was their hair. Hers was different. And both her parents and Grace had thin frames, her father was tall, and her mother and the baby were delicate and fine boned and had small frames. Grace and her parents were a reflection of each other. Victoria was different. |
| 977 |
She had a square look to her, a bigger frame, and broad shoulders for a child. She looked healthy, with rosy cheeks and prominent cheekbones. The one remarkable feature about her was that she had long legs, like a young colt. Her legs always seemed too long and thin for her squat body, as her grandmother had put it. |
| 978 |
Despite her wider frame, she was nonetheless quick and graceful. And even as a child, she was big for her age, not enough to be called fat, but there was nothing slight about her. Her father always made an issue that she was too heavy for him to pick her up, while he tossed Grace in the air like a feather. |
| 979 |
Christine had a tendency to be underweight even after her babies, and in great shape thanks to her trainer and exercise classes. And Jim was tall and lean, and Grace was never a really chubby baby. What Victoria was more than anything was different from the rest of them. Enough so for everyone to notice. |
| 980 |
And more than once, people had asked her parents within her hearing if she was adopted. She felt like one of those picture cards they held up at school that showed an apple, an orange, a banana, and a pair of galoshes, while the teacher asked which one was different. In her family, Victoria was always the galoshes. |
| 981 |
It was a strange feeling she'd had all her life, of being different, and not fitting in. At least if one of her parents had looked like her, she would have felt as though she belonged. But as it was, she didn't, she was the one person out of sync, and no one had ever called her a beauty, as they did Gracie. |
| 982 |
And she never liked any of Victoria's friends when she met them. She always found fault with them for one reason or another, so Victoria stopped asking to invite them. As a result, no one invited Victoria over after school, since she never reciprocated. And she wanted to get home to help with the baby. |
| 983 |
The drama of her early school years was being the only child in fourth grade who didn't get a valentine. She had come home in tears, and her mother told her not to be silly. Gracie had been her valentine, and the next year Victoria told herself she didn't care, and braced herself for disappointment. |
| 984 |
The other girl was a beanpole, and actually much taller than Victoria, who was wider. And the next drama she faced was growing breasts when she was eleven. She did everything she could to hide them, and wore baggy sweatshirts over everything she owned, lumberjack shirts eventually, and everything two sizes larger. |
| 985 |
And with her height, and her womanly body, she looked much older than her years. Her art teacher in eighth grade called her Rubenesque, and she didn't dare ask him what it meant, and didn't want to know. She was sure it was just a more artistic way of calling her big, which was a term she had come to hate. |
| 986 |
And the same was true in eighth grade, when Gracie was in first grade. But in the fall Victoria would be entering high school, at a different school, in another location, and she would no longer be there for Gracie, or see her if she walked past her classroom during the day. And she was going to miss her. |
| 987 |
Eighth grade was the end of an era for Victoria, and one she had cherished. It always made her happy knowing Gracie was nearby. The summer before Victoria entered high school she went on her first diet. She had seen an ad for an herbal tea in the back of a magazine, and sent away for it with her allowance. |
| 988 |
The ad said that it was guaranteed to make her lose ten pounds, and she wanted to enter high school looking thinner and more sophisticated than she had in middle school. With puberty and a richer figure, she had put on roughly ten pounds over what she was supposed to weigh, according to their doctor. |
| 989 |
Grace said she was green and looked really sick, and asked why she was drinking tea that smelled so bad. Her parents had no idea what was wrong with her, since she didn't tell them what she'd done. The evil brew had given her severe dysentery, and she didn't leave the house for several weeks, and said she had the flu. |
| 990 |
Jim had rented a house in Montecito, as he had before, and they went to the beach every day. He commented on Victoria's figure, and after that she wore a shirt over her bathing suit and refused to take it off. He had observed how big her bust was, and had then mitigated it by saying she had killer legs. |
| 991 |
She had heard it all before, many times. He and her mother went for long walks on the beach every day, while she helped Gracie build sand castles with flowers and rocks and Popsicle sticks on them. Gracie loved doing it with her, which made Victoria happy. Her father's comments about her looks always made her sad. |
| 992 |
They were going to visit his grandparents in Lake Tahoe before he started school. Victoria had no grandparents anymore, which she thought was a blessing sometimes, since she only had her parents to comment on her looks. Her mother thought she should cut her hair and start an exercise program in the fall. |
| 993 |
She wanted her to do gymnastics or ballet, without realizing how uncomfortable Victoria was about appearing in front of other girls in a leotard. Victoria would have died first. She'd rather keep the figure she had than lose it that way. It had been easier just making herself sick with the nasty herbal tea. |
| 994 |
She wondered if she'd hear from him once he started school. For the rest of the time in Montecito, she played with Grace. Victoria didn't mind that her sister was seven years younger, she always had fun with her. And her parents always told their friends that the seven year age difference between them really worked. |
| 995 |
They had one big scare during the trip, when Grace ventured too far out at the water's edge one afternoon, at low tide. Victoria had been with her and went back to their towel for a minute to get more sunscreen to put on her sister. And then the tide came in, and the current in the water got strong. |
| 996 |
The message in her gesture was clear. High school was easier than Victoria had expected in some ways. The classes were well organized, she liked most of the teachers, and the subjects were more interesting than they'd been in middle school. Academically, she loved the school, and was excited by the work. |
| 997 |
Socially, she felt like a fish out of water, and was shocked by the other girls when she saw them on the first day. They looked a lot racier than anyone she'd gone to school with so far. Some wore provocative clothes and looked older than their years. All the girls wore makeup, and many of them looked much too thin. |
| 998 |
Once again she was out of step. She had worn the wrong thing, and looked different from the other girls. The ones she saw congregating outside school when she arrived looked like they were entering a fashion contest of some kind. They appeared to be eighteen years old, and some of them obviously were. |
| 999 |
And everyone looked like they liked it here, and had found their own niche. She just hoped that she'd find hers, whatever it was. Connie told her that there were sign up sheets on the main bulletin board outside the cafeteria, for all the clubs. She pointed it out on their way out, and Victoria stopped to look. |
| 1000 |
A chess club, a poker club, a film club, foreign language clubs, a Gothic club, a horror movie club, a literary club, a Latin club, a romance novel book club, an archaeology club, a ski club, a tennis club, a travel club. There were dozens of clubs listed. The two that interested Victoria most were film and Latin. |
| 1001 |
And neither of them required taking her clothes off or wearing a uniform that would make her look gross. She wouldn't have joined the swim club for that reason, although she was actually a decent swimmer, better than she had admitted to Connie, and she didn't relish the idea of basketball shorts either. |
| 1002 |
And in his eyes, Gracie could do no wrong. Maybe they had both just softened with age. But her being a reflection of them seemed to be part of it. They'd been in their twenties when Victoria was born, and were in their forties now. Maybe that made a difference, or maybe they just didn't like her as much. |
| 1003 |
Grace hadn't been named after an ugly queen, even as a joke. Her father asked her about school that night, and she reported on her classes, and mentioned the clubs again. He thought her choices were all good, particularly Latin, although he thought the ski club would be fun and a good way to meet boys. |
| 1004 |
Her mother thought Latin sounded too brainy and she should join something more sociable, in order to make friends. They were both aware that Victoria had had very few friends in middle school. But in high school she could meet people, and by junior year she'd be driving and wouldn't need them to chauffeur her at all. |
| 1005 |
She signed up for the three clubs that interested her the next day, but none of the sports teams. She decided to fulfill her athletic requirement with just Phys Ed, although she could have taken ballet too, which would have been her worst nightmare come true, leaping across the gym in a leotard and a tutu. |
| 1006 |
It took her a while, but in time Victoria made friends. She dropped out of the film club eventually because she didn't like the movies they picked to watch. She went on one of the ski club trips to Bear Valley, but the kids that went were stuck up and never talked to her. She signed up for the travel club instead. |
| 1007 |
She had her first date during sophomore year when a boy from her Spanish class invited her to the junior prom, which was a big deal. Connie said he was a great guy, and he was until he got drunk in the bathroom with some other boys and got kicked out of the prom, and she had to call her father for a ride home. |
| 1008 |
It was an old Honda her father had bought for her, and she was excited about it. It wasn't something she talked about to anyone, but by junior year her body had gotten bigger than it was before. She had gained ten pounds over the summer. She had a summer job at an ice cream store, and ate ice cream on all her breaks. |
| 1009 |
She lost five pounds at the beginning of senior year, by eating smaller portions and fewer calories, and promised herself she'd lose more before graduation. And she would have if she hadn't gotten mono in November, had to stay home for three weeks, and ate ice cream because it made her throat feel better. |
| 1010 |
She was the only girl in her class who gained eight pounds while she had mono. Her size was a battle she couldn't seem to win. But she was determined to beat it this time, and swam every day during Christmas vacation and for a month after. And she jogged around the track every morning before school. |
| 1011 |
She had felt different for too long, and although she knew she would miss them, and especially Gracie, she wanted a new life. This was her chance, and she was going to grab it while she could. She was tired of competing and going to school with girls who looked like starlets and models and hoped to be that one day. |
| 1012 |
Her parents said they were proud of her, although they were distressed that she was leaving California and couldn't understand why she would. They had no concept of how out of place and unwelcome they had made her feel for so long. Gracie was like their only child, and she felt like the family stray dog. |
| 1013 |
She was one of the top three students in her class, and had been asked to give a speech after the valedictorian, which stunned the audience with the seriousness and value of what she said. She talked about how different she had felt all her life, how out of step, and how hard she had tried to conform. |
| 1014 |
She had loved Latin class even though it made everyone think she was a geek. She went down the list of all the things that had made her different, without saying that she felt even more out of place in her own home. And then she thanked the school for helping her to be who she was, and find her way. |
| 1015 |
She was willing to push herself out of her comfort zone if it meant finding herself at last, and the place where she belonged. All she knew now was that it wasn't here, with them. No matter how hard she had tried, she just wasn't like them. She realized too that Gracie was growing up as one of them, and she did fit in. |
| 1016 |
Her whole childhood with them had been a curse. And now that she was leaving, they said they were going to miss her. But when they said it, she couldn't help wondering why they hadn't paid more attention to her while she was there. It was already too late. Did they really love her? She was never sure. |
| 1017 |
But what about her? And the one she hated most to leave was Gracie, the little angel in her life, who had dropped from the skies when she was seven and loved her unconditionally ever since, just as Victoria loved her. She couldn't bear to leave her and not see her every day, but she knew she had no choice. |
| 1018 |
She hated it when he said things to Victoria that hurt, or made fun of her, or pointed out how much she didn't look like them. In Gracie's eyes, Victoria was beautiful, and she didn't care how fat or thin she was. Gracie thought she was the prettiest girl in the world and she loved her more than anyone. |
| 1019 |
And the next day, all three of them took her to the airport, and the moment they got out of the car, Gracie burst into tears and threw her arms around Victoria's waist. Her father checked in her luggage, while the two girls stood crying on the sidewalk, and Christine looked at her daughter unhappily. |
| 1020 |
They didn't leave the airport until she had disappeared from sight. The last she saw of her family was Gracie leaving the airport, walking between her parents. They all looked the same, with their dark hair and slim bodies. Her mother was holding Gracie's hand, and Victoria could see that her sister was still crying. |
| 1021 |
She boarded the flight to Chicago, thinking about all of them, and as the plane took off, she looked out the window at the city she was fleeing, to find the tools she needed for a new life somewhere else. She didn't know where that would be, but the one thing she did know was that it couldn't be here, or with them. |
| 1022 |
It was lively and sophisticated, and she thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the brutally cold weather. She went home for Thanksgiving freshman year, and saw instantly that Grace had grown taller, and prettier, if that was even possible. Her mother had finally relented and let her do a commercial for Gap Kids. |
| 1023 |
He didn't have much to say when she called, except that he hoped she'd come home soon, and then he passed the phone to her mother, who asked what she was doing and if she'd lost any weight. It was the question Victoria hated most because she hadn't. And then she dieted frantically for two weeks before she went home. |
| 1024 |
She liked the idea of teaching, and working with kids. She changed the subject and they talked about how cold it was in the Midwest she hadn't even been able to imagine it until she was there. It had been well below zero for the whole week before she came home. And she was enjoying going to hockey games. |
| 1025 |
She wasn't crazy about her roommate, but she was determined to make the best of it. And she had met some people in her dorm. But mostly, she was trying to get accustomed to the school, and to being away from home. She said she missed decent food, and this time no one commented when she took three helpings of pot roast. |
| 1026 |
Her father gave her a new computer for Christmas, and her mother gave her a down coat. Gracie had made her a montage of photographs of them, starting when she was born, on a bulletin board to hang up in her dorm room. And when she left after Christmas, Victoria wasn't sure if she was coming home for spring break. |
| 1027 |
The two sisters genuinely missed each other, and her parents said they missed her too. Second semester of freshman year was hard for Victoria too. The midwestern winter was dreary and cold, she was lonely, she hadn't met many people, she had no close friends yet, and she caught a bad case of flu in January. |
| 1028 |
It was a constant battle with her weight. And even without her mother hounding her, and her father making fun of her, she was unhappy about her size, and she didn't have a date all year. She went to New York as she hoped to over spring break, and managed to get a job as a receptionist at a law firm for the summer. |
| 1029 |
Her mother would have been proud of her. It had also occurred to her that while her mother complained about what she ate, she had always kept a hefty supply of ice cream in the freezer. And she had served all the fattening things Victoria liked to eat. She had always put temptation in Victoria's way. |
| 1030 |
When it took longer than she'd planned to get dressed or do her hair, she'd have to take the subway to work, so she wouldn't be late. Victoria was considerably younger than most of the secretaries at the law firm, so she didn't make any friends. People were busy and didn't have time to socialize and chat. |
| 1031 |
Gracie was tiny like their mother, with the same lithe figure and narrow heart shaped face. But despite her skinny body, she still looked more mature. And on Victoria's first night back, Grace admitted that she had a crush on a boy. She had met him at the swim and tennis club that their mother took her to every day. |
| 1032 |
And Victoria was too embarrassed to admit to her or her parents that she hadn't had a date in over a year. When they pressed her about it repeatedly, thinking she was being coy, she finally invented a mythical boy she had gone out with at Northwestern. She said he was a hockey player and was studying to be an engineer. |
| 1033 |
She said he had spent the summer with his family in Maine. They seemed relieved to hear that she had gone out with someone, and she said she hadn't gone out with anyone in New York. But dating someone at school made her sound more normal than the reality of the nights she had spent studying alone in the dorm. |
| 1034 |
The weeks in California flew by, and they were sad again to see her leave. Gracie was more composed this time, but it was hard knowing they wouldn't see Victoria again for three months until Thanksgiving. But she would be busy with a heavy workload at school, and Gracie was going into seventh grade. |
| 1035 |
She admitted after a few days that she had been in a hospital all summer, and Victoria watched her get thinner every day. Her parents called her constantly to check on her, and she said she had a boyfriend in New York. She looked miserable at school, and Victoria tried to ignore the atmosphere of stress she created. |
| 1036 |
He was in prelaw, in his junior year, and he was in an English lit class with her. He was a tall, good looking boy with freckles and red hair, from Louisville, Kentucky, and she loved to listen to his drawl when he talked. They were in a study group together, and he invited her out to coffee afterward. |
| 1037 |
She had married someone after his father and was divorced again. He thought Victoria's life sounded a lot more stable than his own, and it was, but she didn't consider her childhood a happy one either. She had been an outsider in her own home all her life. And he had been a newcomer wherever he was. |
| 1038 |
He promised to call her from Paris. And he seemed wonderfully romantic and exotic to her. She was fascinated by him. And this time when her parents asked who she was dating, she could say a junior in pre law. It would sound respectable to them, although she couldn't imagine her father or mother liking him. |
| 1039 |
Beau called her over the holidays and had gone to Gstaad with his mother and her friend. He sounded bored and a little lost. And he texted her constantly with things that made her laugh. Gracie wanted to know if he was handsome but said she didn't like red hair. And this time Victoria watched her diet. |
| 1040 |
She was glad that she had saved herself for him. Beau would be her first, and she could easily imagine him being gentle and sensual in bed. They were kissing and laughing and cuddling when he came to her dorm room, and he said he was so jet lagged that nothing happened that night. Nor for the next many weeks. |
| 1041 |
They spent a lot of time kissing and fondling, and he loved her breasts, but it never went past that point. He told her she should wear miniskirts because she had the best legs he had ever seen. He appeared to be totally enthralled with her, and for the first time in her life, Victoria was seriously losing weight. |
| 1042 |
He looked at her for a moment from the doorway, and then he was gone, and she climbed under the covers and cried. It was frustrating and depressing all at once, but she also knew he was right. It would have been even worse if she'd slept with him, and wanted something she couldn't have. It was better this way. |
| 1043 |
But she felt horrible and rejected nonetheless. She was awake for hours, thinking about the time they'd spent together and the confidences they'd shared, the endless makeout sessions that went nowhere but titillated them both, as they were wrapped in each other's arms, aroused. It all seemed so pointless now. |
| 1044 |
Beau didn't call her that day, or for the next several days, and then she realized she would have to see him in class. She was panicked over it, and then screwed up her courage and went to class, where the teacher casually mentioned that Beau had dropped out of English lit. And Victoria felt her heart sink again. |
| 1045 |
It was snowing and bitter cold, as she walked along the frozen road, thinking about Beau, and hoping their paths wouldn't cross again. It was so cold, she didn't even feel the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. All she could do now was put him out of her mind, and try to overcome her own feelings of failure. |
| 1046 |
And she had a great time. She befriended some of the models, who were the same age as she, and the people who did the bookings were fun to be with too. All of them thought she was crazy when she said she wanted to teach school, and she had to admit that working at a modeling agency was a lot more exciting. |
| 1047 |
The girls who were successful worked like dogs, and were diligent about the modeling jobs they did. They went crazy after hours, but the good ones were on time for every shoot, and worked tirelessly until the work was done, sometimes on twelve or fourteen hour shoots. It wasn't as much fun as it looked. |
| 1048 |
Her roommates either didn't eat at all or ate aggressively dietetic food, and very little of it. They seemed to exist on next to nothing, and had tried every kind of purge and colonic to keep their weight down. Victoria had a different constitution than they did. She couldn't survive on the tiny amounts they consumed. |
| 1049 |
Gracie readily admitted she hated school. She had a booming social life, a horde of friends, and half a dozen boys calling her all the time on the cell phone her parents had finally given her. It was a far cry from Victoria's monastic life at school, although things got slightly better for her during junior year. |
| 1050 |
She wasn't even sure if he was still at school. She saw some of his friends once in a while, from the distance, but she never spoke to them. It had been an odd experience and still upset her when she thought about it. He had been like a beautiful dream. The boys she went out with after that were much more real. |
| 1051 |
She started sending out letters in the fall. She had a list of private schools where she was hoping to teach once she got her credentials. She knew the pay wasn't as good as it was in the public schools, but she thought it would be right for her. By Christmas she had sent out letters to nine schools. |
| 1052 |
She was turned down by eight schools. Only one school hadn't answered, and she wasn't optimistic when she hadn't heard from them by spring break. She was thinking about calling the modeling agency where she'd worked to see if she could work for them for a year, until a position opened up in one of the schools. |
| 1053 |
It would be better pay anyway than teaching school, and maybe she could room with some of the models again. And then the last answer came. She sat staring at the envelope the way she had when her college acceptances came. She had opened them gingerly one by one, trying to guess what was in the envelope. |
| 1054 |
And she thought it more than unlikely that she would be offered a job by this school. It was one of the more elite private schools in New York, and she couldn't imagine them hiring a teacher fresh out of college. She helped herself to a candy bar she had stashed in her desk, and came back to tear open the envelope. |
| 1055 |
Just hearing from them was cause for celebration, and she went out and got a pizza after she dropped the letter in the mailbox, and then wondered if she should have called instead. But they had her phone number now, so they could set up the meeting, and she could be on a plane to New York the next day. |
| 1056 |
Maybe a skirt and sweater with high heels, or slacks and a sweater and flats. She didn't know how fancy she should look for a job at a private school in New York, and she had no one to ask. She'd have to wing it and just guess. It was all she could do to keep from running up and down the hall screaming with excitement. |
| 1057 |
It was snowing, all the flights had been delayed by several hours, and they closed the airport right after she landed; she was grateful they hadn't been rerouted somewhere else. And people outside the airport were fighting for cabs. She had booked a room at the hotel where she'd stayed before, in Gramercy Park. |
| 1058 |
And they had recently built a state of the art gym for all sports activities in what had once been a parking lot across the street. The school offered every possible amenity and opportunity. It stood solid and silent on the snowy sunny afternoon, while a lone janitor cleared a path through the snow outside the school. |
| 1059 |
Victoria smiled at him as she stood looking up at the school, and he returned the smile. She couldn't even imagine being lucky enough to work there in her favorite city in the world. As she stood looking at it, she was wearing the thick white down coat her mother had given her, and felt like a snowman herself. |
| 1060 |
And she was wearing a white wool hat pulled down to her eyes as a wisp of her blond hair peeked out over her brow. Victoria stood for ages looking up at the school, and then she turned and walked away and went back to the subway to go to Midtown. She wanted to go shopping for something to wear on Monday. |
| 1061 |
She wanted to look perfect when she interviewed for the job, and she knew how unlikely it was that they would hire her fresh out of school, and they must have had many other applicants, but her grades and recommendations were good, and she had all the excitement and enthusiasm of youth for her first teaching job. |
| 1062 |
It looked dignified, respectable, not too dressy, and just elegant enough to make her look serious about the job. It was the look she assumed would be worn by teachers at that school. And she was happy with the outfit, when she got back on the subway with her shopping bags and rode back downtown to her hotel. |
| 1063 |
The streets were still snarled by snowplows, buried cars, and tall mounds of shoveled snow everywhere. The city was a mess. But Victoria was in great spirits with her purchases. She was going to wear a pair of small pearl earrings her mother had given her. And the well cut navy blazer hid a multitude of sins. |
| 1064 |
She had to be careful not to get splashed with it by passing cars as she made her way to the subway. She thought of taking a cab, but she knew the subway was faster. And she reached the school ten minutes before her nine o'clock interview, in time to see hundreds of young people filtering into the school. |
| 1065 |
They looked like kids in any other high school, not the offspring of the elite. And the two teachers standing at the main entrance as they filtered in were dressed the same way the kids were, in jeans and down jackets, running shoes or boots. There was a nice informal feeling to the group, and wholesome too. |
| 1066 |
Does it bother you that you'd only be four or five years older than some of your students? The opening we have will involve juniors and seniors, and we might have you cover an English class for sophomores as well. They can be a handful, especially in this school where some of them are mature for their age. |
| 1067 |
And he was touched by how much she wanted the job. After he spent forty five minutes with her, Eric Walker passed her on to his assistant, and she gave Victoria a tour of the school. It was an impressive building with well kept classrooms, full of alert students using brand new, very expensive equipment. |
| 1068 |
She packed her bag and took a cab to the airport. She had an hour to spare before her flight, and she was so anxious after the interview, wondering whether she had done well or not, that she went to the restaurant nearest her gate and ordered a cheeseburger and a hot fudge sundae, and devoured both. |
| 1069 |
She felt stupid once she had. She hadn't needed it, or the french fries that came with it. But she had been starving and nervous, and the meal she'd eaten offered some comfort and relief from her terrors. What if she didn't get the job? She told herself that if she didn't, she'd find something else. |
| 1070 |
All she could do now was wait and go back to Northwestern. All things considered, for once it hadn't been a bad Valentine's Day. And it would be the best one of all if she actually got the job in the end. She was still nervous about it, when she got on the plane, even after the cheeseburger and hot fudge sundae. |
| 1071 |
It was more than Victoria was going to make in a year. And Grace just did it for fun, and the college fund their parents had set up for her. To Gracie, modeling was like a game, for which she was highly paid, and she only did it occasionally. Victoria was going to be working hard for the money she made. |
| 1072 |
The discrepancy and dichotomy were shocking to her. But it was no secret that teaching was not a highly paid job, and she had known that when she chose it as a career. She didn't have the modeling opportunities that Gracie did anyway. They were not an option for her. And teaching was her vocation, not just her work. |
| 1073 |
Her dream of losing weight by graduation was fading fast. And it was depressing always being on a diet, some new exercise program, and spending life on a treadmill to atone for her sins. After killing herself at the gym all through April, and watching what she ate, she finally lost ten pounds. She was proud of herself. |
| 1074 |
But she was tall enough to wear it, so she didn't complain. It was huge on her at least. She was planning to wear a short red skirt, high heeled sandals, and a white blouse under it at graduation. The skirt was short, but no one would see it until she took the gown off. She loved the color, and her legs looked great. |
| 1075 |
Victoria had spent the night at the Hotel Orrington with them, sharing a room with Gracie, as she had to give up her dorm room right after graduation. The two girls chatted late into the night, until they fell asleep next to each other. They were looking forward to spending the next three months together. |
| 1076 |
Victoria hadn't told anyone, but she was planning to spend the summer following a serious weight loss program so she could look her best when she started teaching at Madison in September. Her father had commented, when she took her gown off after graduation to return it, that she looked bigger than ever. |
| 1077 |
And then he complimented her on her long legs as he always did, but the first comment was far more powerful than the second. She never heard the compliment once he hit her with the insult. She sat between her father and Grace on the flight home, and her mother was across the aisle reading a magazine. |
| 1078 |
He shrugged in answer and looked annoyed, and after that she and Gracie put their headphones on and watched the movie. She was relieved not to have to talk to him about it anymore. Her parents were only interested in two things about her, her weight and how much money she was going to make at her job. |
| 1079 |
And other girls who were overweight were happily married, engaged, or had significant others. Romance, she knew, wasn't directly tied to your weight, there were a lot of other factors. And her lack of self esteem and their constantly picking on her and criticizing her didn't help her with that problem. |
| 1080 |
Once Gracie left home, Victoria wasn't sure when she'd go home or how often. They had succeeded in driving her away and didn't even know it. She and Gracie got in the back of the car on the way home from the airport. Their parents were talking in the front seat about what they were going to do for dinner. |
| 1081 |
She saw several of the boys she'd known at school, who'd never paid particular attention to her. One of them asked her out for dinner and a movie, but they didn't have much to say to each other. He had gone into real estate and was obsessed with money. He wasn't impressed with her choice of a teaching career either. |
| 1082 |
She and Gracie shared their dreams and fears and hopes, and their private peeves about their parents. Gracie thought they babied her too much, and she hated the way they bragged about her. Victoria's main regret was that they didn't. Their experiences in the same family were diametrically different. |
| 1083 |
It was hard to believe they had the same parents. And although Gracie was the person responsible for making Victoria invisible to them and redundant, Victoria never held it against her, and she loved Grace for the little girl she was and had been, the baby who had come to her like an angel when she was seven. |
| 1084 |
They had breakfast together every morning. They laughed a lot. Victoria took Gracie out with her friends to the swim club. She played tennis with them, and they beat her every time, because they moved faster than she did. She helped Gracie shop for new clothes for school, and they decided what was hip and what wasn't. |
| 1085 |
Her father was angry about it, and told her again that she was making all the wrong decisions about her future and would never amount to anything as a teacher. She was used to hearing things like that from him, and it didn't sway her. She was the child they had never been proud of and had either ignored or made fun of. |
| 1086 |
Gracie was touched when she said it, and she told Victoria that she was beautiful anyway, even with her own nose. She didn't need a new one. Gracie thought she was perfect just the way she was. It was the unconditional love that they had given each other all their lives and that Victoria thrived on, and so did Gracie. |
| 1087 |
Their parents' love was always conditional, depending on how they looked and if their achievements were valid according to their parents' standards, and if they made their parents look good in the process. Gracie had basked in their praise all her life, because she was an accessory that enhanced them. |
| 1088 |
It was tight, but it fit. She had dropped several pounds over the summer, although her father asked her regularly if she didn't want to lose some weight before she left for New York. He didn't notice a single pound she lost; nor did her mother, who was always distressed about her daughter's size, no matter what it was. |
| 1089 |
The best part about her taking a teaching job, Gracie said, was that they would still be able to go on summer vacations together, and Victoria promised to have her come and visit in New York. She could even visit the school where she'd be teaching, and maybe sit in on one of her classes if they let her. |
| 1090 |
She hoped they would. And finally the day arrived for Victoria to leave. It was a day that she and Grace had dreaded, for all the goodbyes they didn't want to say. They were both strangely silent on the way to the airport. They had stayed awake all the night before, and lay in one bed so they could talk. |
| 1091 |
They stood hugging each other for a long time at the airport, as tears streamed down their cheeks. Despite their many assurances to each other over the summer, they both knew that it would never be the same again. Victoria was going to a grown up life in another city, and they had agreed that it was better for her. |
| 1092 |
There was nothing left for her here except painful memories and her sister Grace. Her parents had abandoned her emotionally the day she was born, when she didn't look the way they'd planned, or anything like them. It had been unacceptable to them, and a crime they could never quite forgive her, and didn't even try. |
| 1093 |
It would help with her rent or the deposit for an apartment that she had yet to find. She and Grace hugged one last time, and then she had to wrench herself away and go through the security line. When she turned back to wave, she and Gracie were both crying, and her father had his arm around their mother's shoulders. |
| 1094 |
There were already three people living in the apartment, and they were looking for a fourth. They told her that the room they were looking to fill was small, and two of them were men and one was a woman, and the price was within her budget. She made an appointment to go over that evening when they got home from work. |
| 1095 |
The hallway was dark but clean, and a young woman let her into the apartment. She was wearing workout clothes and said she was leaving for the gym. She was in good shape and looked to be about thirty. She said her name was Bunny, for Bernice, which she hated, and she worked in an art gallery uptown. |
| 1096 |
It was an ideal young people's apartment, and they said that everyone in the building was either very young or very old and had been there forever. It was perfect for Victoria, and when she asked if she could rent it, both men approved. Bunny had already given them her okay before she left for the gym. |
| 1097 |
She had a job, an apartment, and a new life. All she had to do now was buy furniture for her bedroom, and she could move in. She called her parents that night to tell them, and Gracie was delighted for her. Her father questioned her intently about where it was, and what sort of people her roommates were. |
| 1098 |
This was her first real apartment. All she'd had till then were dorm rooms, and this was considerably bigger, although it wasn't huge by any means. And she shared a bathroom with Bunny. The two men shared the other bathroom, and she had already noticed that Bunny's bathroom was immaculate and she was meticulously neat. |
| 1099 |
It looked fresh and clean and modern, and Harlan said it looked like a Malibu beach house. She had even bought a framed photograph of a long sandy beach and blue water that looked peaceful to her and hung it on one wall. There was a smell of new furniture in the room, which had recently been painted. |
| 1100 |
It was Spanish wine, and they all said they liked it, and opened it immediately. They had already killed the first bottle, which was easily done when shared by four people. Victoria had been tempted to buy ice cream on her way home, but she didn't. Moving was a little stressful, but so far everything had gone well. |
| 1101 |
They were celebrating, after all. And later she silently congratulated herself for not having a second helping, although the first portion had been large. Between the five of them, they finished the ice cream. Julie put away a healthy amount too, but none of the others looked as though they had an issue with food. |
| 1102 |
Harlan said he hated working out but felt an obligation to stay in shape. And Bunny said they'd been thinking of collectively buying a treadmill so they didn't have to go to the gym every day. Victoria said it sounded like a great idea. She couldn't avoid it if it was sitting right in the apartment. |
| 1103 |
She had envied people like them all her life. She was naturally a big girl, thanks to her paternal great grandmother, and her breasts made her seem top heavy. She had an hourglass figure that would have worked well in another era. She often wondered if her great grandmother had had long thin legs like hers. |
| 1104 |
You couldn't tell in photographs, because they had worn long skirts in those days. Now that Victoria had lost weight over the summer, she could wear shorter skirts again. But she knew she'd never get there by eating ice cream. She felt guilty about the Ben and Jerry's cookies and cream she had just consumed. |
| 1105 |
Everything about this room felt good and looked just the way she wanted it to. It was her own cozy little world in the new life she was building for herself. It was just the beginning. Soon she would have a new job, new friends, new students, and one day maybe even a boyfriend. It was hard to imagine. |
| 1106 |
Victoria had two days of meetings before the first day of school. She met the other teachers and tried to remember their departments and subjects and which age level they taught. She had a chance to study the books she'd be using, all of which had been selected by the teacher she was replacing for a year. |
| 1107 |
She knew it would be hard to get their attention after their summer vacations. And the kids she would be teaching that day were in the home stretch. They were seniors, and they'd be visiting colleges and doing their applications all through the fall. And she'd have to write recommendations for them. |
| 1108 |
That made her an important element in their lives, and gave her a direct impact on their future, so they had to be serious and diligent in her class. She knew their names, and now she would see the faces that went with them. She was staring into space, looking out the window, when she heard a voice behind her. |
| 1109 |
She looked like she was still on vacation and it was a warm day in New York. She smiled when Victoria turned around with a startled look. Victoria had worn a short black cotton skirt, a loose white linen top, and flat shoes. The baggy top hid a multitude of sins, and the reasonably short skirt showed off her legs. |
| 1110 |
What the rest of the world deals with is pretty remote to them. It's up to us to introduce them to the real world. And sometimes it's not easy. Sooner or later you can get there, with most of them. But not very often with their parents. They're past it, they don't want to know how the other half lives. |
| 1111 |
She had a casual air about her and looked as though she thought she owned the world. She had the cockiness of seniors Victoria had seen before. There were only four years separating the two young women, and Victoria felt a tremor sensing Becki's self confidence, but she reminded herself that she was the boss here. |
| 1112 |
And they didn't know exactly how young she was. She realized that she was going to have to earn their respect. As she thought about it, four boys bolted through the door, almost at the same time, and sat down. They all looked at Becki, and obviously knew her, and glanced in Victoria's direction with mild curiosity. |
| 1113 |
A flock of girls entered the room then, laughing and talking. They said hi to Becki, ignored the boys, glanced at Victoria, and took seats in a block at the back of the room. That meant to Victoria that they wanted to keep talking and exchange notes, or maybe even text each other throughout the class. |
| 1114 |
She would have to keep an eye on them. More girls then, more boys, a few stragglers who came in alone, and several in groups. And finally, after a full ten minutes, her first class had arrived. Victoria greeted them with a big smile and told them her name. She wrote it on the blackboard and then she turned to them. |
| 1115 |
You can write social commentary on the state of the world, or a story that you invent from beginning to end. But whatever you write, make it simple and clear, and make it something special that others will want to read. So in that vein, I'm going to ask you to write something that we'll all enjoy reading. |
| 1116 |
And Helen could challenge her all she wanted, for whatever reason. Victoria knew she would have to prove herself to the teachers too, not just the students. But so far she thought it had gone well. Victoria's next class came in an hour later, and this time several of them were seriously late. They were seniors too. |
| 1117 |
She had held her own with both groups. And she had met all her seniors now. They seemed like good kids and hadn't given her a hard time. But she knew they could if they wanted to, and she was very young. They didn't have any particular allegiance to her yet, but she knew it was too soon. She hoped they would in time. |
| 1118 |
It was her job to make them care. Helen stayed and talked to her for a few minutes, and then they both packed up their things and left their classrooms. Victoria checked her mailbox on the way out, and then sat in the teachers' lounge poring over a stack of memos from the headmaster and the dean of students. |
| 1119 |
And Gracie called her and asked her the same question an hour later, and she gave her the same answer. Essentially, it had gone really well, and she liked the kids. They might have been around the world with their parents, and had every lesson known to man, yet there was something innocent and endearing about them. |
| 1120 |
And she wanted them to learn to think intelligently, use good judgment, and wind up with the life they wanted, whatever and wherever that was. Her job, as she understood it, in this school or any other, was to open the door into the world for them. And she wanted to open many, many doors. They had begun. |
| 1121 |
She was seriously disheartened as they left the room, and she put the assignments that had been turned in into her briefcase. And she was even more depressed when her second class of seniors came in, and were equally disruptive. She had been identified as the teacher to play with, be rude to, and ignore. |
| 1122 |
Don't be too nice, and don't try to be their friend. Especially as young as you are. The kids at Madison can be great, and most of them are smart, but a lot of them are very manipulative and think they own the world. They'll clean the floor with you if you don't watch out, and so will their parents. |
| 1123 |
Victoria walked home from school with a heavy heart. She felt like an utter failure with her two senior classes, and the juniors and sophomores hadn't gone well either. It almost made her wonder why she had wanted to be a teacher. She had been all idealistic and starry eyed, and she wasn't doing them any good. |
| 1124 |
Victoria had been planning to go with her all week but hadn't had time, while she worked on her plans for her classes. And she was too tired at night. Bunny didn't comment when she saw her eating the ice cream, but Victoria felt guilty immediately, put the lid back on, and put it back in the freezer with the rest. |
| 1125 |
Victoria hadn't felt this miserable in a long time, and she was feeling sorry for herself. But she didn't say anything to Gracie about what a mess the week had been. After they hung up, Victoria took out the vanilla ice cream, opened it, walked into her room, turned on the TV, and got into her bed with her clothes on. |
| 1126 |
She was utterly disgusted with herself. She put her pajamas on shortly after, got back in bed, and pulled the covers over her head. She didn't wake up until the next morning. To atone for her sins of the night before, she went for a long walk in Central Park on Saturday, and jogged partway around the reservoir. |
| 1127 |
Looking around, she felt as though everyone else did, and she was the odd person out, and always had been. She was crying when she jogged to the edge of the park, and then walked home in her T shirt and gym shorts and running shoes. And she promised herself she wouldn't eat any more ice cream that night. |
| 1128 |
She spent Sunday correcting the assignments that some of the seniors had done. She was surprised by how good they were, and how creative. A few of her students had real talent, and the essays they'd written were very sophisticated. She was impressed, and said so when she faced her first class on Monday morning. |
| 1129 |
They had slouched in and sprawled in their seats with obvious uninterest. There were at least a dozen Black Berrys evident on their desks. She walked around the room and picked them up one by one, and put them on her own desk. Their owners reacted immediately and she assured them they could have them back after class. |
| 1130 |
The boy sitting next to him looked uncomfortable, and had figured out that he was getting an F too. She helped them dissect the short story, and showed them why it worked. It was a good story, and they seemed to enjoy it, they paid closer attention to her this time, and she felt better about the class. |
| 1131 |
She always ate more when she was unhappy, even though she promised herself she wouldn't. She could see an imminent return to her size fourteen and sixteen wardrobe in her future. She had brought all four sizes with her. She wanted to avoid winding up a sixteen, which could easily happen at the rate she was eating. |
| 1132 |
She knew she had to start dieting again. It was a constant merry go round she could never seem to get off. With no friends, no boyfriend, and no social life, feeling unsure of herself in her job, she was at high risk for putting on weight in New York, despite her good resolutions not to. They never lasted. |
| 1133 |
She just hoped she was bright enough to teach them and hold their interest for the entire year. She was feeling very unsure of herself. Now that she was faced with a classroom full of real people, this was much harder than she had anticipated, and it was going to take more than just discipline to keep them in line. |
| 1134 |
Helen had given her some helpful hints, and Carla Bernini had set up the syllabus before going on maternity leave, but Victoria knew that she had to infuse her classes with life and excitement in order to keep the kids hooked. And she was scared to death that she wasn't good enough to do it and would fail. |
| 1135 |
She wanted to be good at it more than anything. She didn't care how little the job paid, this was her vocation, and she wanted to be a great teacher, the kind kids remembered for years. She had no idea if she could do it, but she was trying her best. And this was only the beginning. The school year had just started. |
| 1136 |
She tried to come up with every creative idea she could, and to get to know every one of her students in all four classes, and she began to get the feeling after two months that some of them liked her. She racked her brain on the weekends searching for ideas for them, new books to read, and new projects. |
| 1137 |
And sometimes she surprised them with unexpected quizzes and assignments. There was nothing dull about her classes. And by late November, she felt like she was beginning to get somewhere with them and win their respect. Not all of her students liked her, but at least they were paying attention and responding to her. |
| 1138 |
By the time she got on the plane to go home for the Thanksgiving holiday, she had a feeling of accomplishment, until she saw her father. He looked at her with surprise when he met her at the airport with her mother and Grace, who hurled herself into Victoria's arms with glee, as her big sister kissed her. |
| 1139 |
Victoria marveled that after not seeing her for almost three months, her weight was all they could think about. Gracie just looked at her and beamed. She didn't care what size Victoria was, she just loved her. The two sisters walked off arm in arm toward the baggage claim, happy to be back together. |
| 1140 |
She was going to spend the whole vacation with them, since they had two weeks off school. And on the plane on the way back to New York, she thought again about Gracie's suggestion to have the sophomores write lyrics. She presented the idea to her sophomore class on Wednesday morning, and they looked ecstatic. |
| 1141 |
It was something they could really wrap their minds around, and for once they looked enthusiastic about an assignment. Her juniors and seniors were less thrilled with the poetry they had to write, and she was starting to help some of them with their essays for their college applications. She had her hands full. |
| 1142 |
The lyrics the sophomores wrote for her were terrific. One boy brought a guitar in, and they tried to put music to some of his words. The assignment was a huge success, and they asked if they could extend the project until Christmas vacation, and she agreed. And she gave most of them excellent grades for what they did. |
| 1143 |
She hoped so, but nothing was sure. For now, it was working, for her and the kids and the school. Eric Walker, the headmaster, had been hearing good things about her from the students. And two of the parents had commented that they liked her assignments. She really inspired the kids, and when necessary she pushed them. |
| 1144 |
She had thought about going to Weight Watchers, but she told herself she didn't have time. But for now she had eased up on the ice cream and pizza. And she was buying salads and cooked chicken breasts to eat in the kitchen with the others when she got home, and she made sure she had fruit for an afternoon snack. |
| 1145 |
Even her size upset them and made her look different. Her mother would have preferred to die than be the size she was, and would never have let that happen. And her father still couldn't resist remarks at her expense, with no awareness of how hurtful they were to her. She never believed that his cruelty was on purpose. |
| 1146 |
It was snowing when she landed in New York, tiny gentle flurries that made it look like a Christmas card as she rode into the city in a cab. She was excited to be back, although always sad to leave Gracie, and she had promised to let her come to visit for spring break. And her parents had said they might come with her. |
| 1147 |
For now anyway, it didn't get better than that. And it felt good to both of them to spend the evening with a friend. They stood there until their hair and coats were covered with snow, and then they walked a few blocks along Times Square among the bright lights and people, and hailed a cab to go home. |
| 1148 |
On the last two days in January, Victoria attended an education conference at the Javits Center with several other teachers. There were a number of panels they could sign up for, group discussions, and lectures by well known educators. She found it very interesting, and was grateful the school had let her participate. |
| 1149 |
Ardith was considerably older and said she couldn't wait to retire. She said she had done her time as a teacher for forty years and was longing to be free. Victoria and John were just starting out. The three of them talked all through lunch. John was dazzingly good looking, extremely nice, and very bright. |
| 1150 |
And after lunch they decided to drop by and see Harlan. He looked surprised to see Victoria, and was impressed by her new friend. It was impossible not to notice John's blond good looks, and his extremely athletic body, and when she saw them look at each other, her earlier impression of John was confirmed. |
| 1151 |
They never stopped talking until dinner, which was an hour later. And Harlan had set the table nicely with place mats and linen napkins, and candles on the table in the dining room. He had gone all out. And by the end of dinner, Victoria felt as though she were intruding on a date, and left them alone. |
| 1152 |
This was their story now, and their life. She just hoped it would turn out to be a loving relationship for both of them, and it looked that way for now. They appeared to be off to a terrific start. She smiled to herself as she thought about it and went to her room. As usual on the weekends, everyone was out. |
| 1153 |
She didn't go to bars. There were no single, straight, age appropriate teachers at her school. No one had introduced her to anyone, and she hadn't met anyone on her own. She thought it would have been nice if she had, but so far all she had to fill her life was her work. And this time it was Harlan's turn, and John's. |
| 1154 |
And she knew that sooner or later she would meet someone. At twenty two, it was unlikely that she would be alone for the rest of her life, no matter how overweight her father thought she was. She remembered her grandmother's old saying that there was a lid for every pot. She hoped that Harlan had found his. |
| 1155 |
They stayed for a week, and the two sisters had a ball, while their parents visited friends and kept busy on their own. And several times they had dinner together. Victoria picked the restaurants from a guide someone had given her, and they enjoyed them all. And Gracie loved being in New York with her. |
| 1156 |
They chatted for a few more minutes, and then she went back to the teachers' lounge and told everyone there. She thanked the Spanish teacher profusely when she saw him later that afternoon. He laughed when he saw how happy she was. And he was just as pleased at the prospect of being in Europe for a year. |
| 1157 |
It was something he had wanted to do for a long time. Victoria floated all the way home, she told her roommates when they came in, and they cheered. When she called her parents that night to tell them the news, their reaction was more or less what she had expected, but she wanted to tell them anyway. |
| 1158 |
It was a very specific skill, and she had talent at it. Not everyone was able to do what she did. But it meant absolutely nothing to her parents. She didn't speak to her mother since she was out playing bridge, but Victoria knew she wouldn't have been impressed. She never was, and she took her cues from her husband. |
| 1159 |
Gracie had observed it all her life. It was no wonder that she had thought Victoria was adopted, when they were younger. It was hard to believe that they would be so critical and uncharitable with their own child, but they were. Nothing she did impressed them, or was ever good enough, and this was no different. |
| 1160 |
Her father was annoyed, not proud of her. And as usual, only Gracie celebrated for her and with her when she called her about the job. Harlan and John were excited about it for her too. They both gave her a big hug to congratulate her. John was a regular feature at the apartment now, and had been for two months. |
| 1161 |
The thought of going to a therapist was really upsetting to her. And it didn't surprise either of them that without thinking, she helped herself to a bowl of ice cream after dinner, although neither of them was eating dessert. Neither of them insisted about the shrink, and Harlan didn't bring it up again. |
| 1162 |
And before the summer, Victoria lined up a summer job for June and July so she didn't have to go home. She took a job for very little pay tutoring underprivileged kids at a shelter where they lived while waiting to go into foster care. It sounded depressing to Harlan when she told him, but she was excited about it. |
| 1163 |
It was discouraging. When she got back to New York, she was disheartened by the things her parents had said, and the weight she had put back on, and she thought about Harlan's suggestion that she see a shrink. And in a dark mood one day right before school started, she called a name he had given her. |
| 1164 |
She felt stuck. And she ate half a cheesecake alone in the kitchen the night before she went. What if the woman discovered that she was crazy, or that her parents were right about her and she was a total failure as a human being? What kept her from canceling the appointment was the hope that they were wrong. |
| 1165 |
When Victoria went to the appointment with the psychiatrist, she was literally shaking, and had felt sick to her stomach all day. She couldn't remember why she had made the appointment and wished she hadn't, and her mouth was so dry when she sat down that she felt like her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. |
| 1166 |
And from then on I knew the truth. He used to laugh about it, and when my sister was born when I was seven, he said I had been their tester cake, to check the recipe, throw the tester cake away, and they got it right the second time. Gracie was always the perfect child, and she looks just like them. |
| 1167 |
And she had accepted the horrible things her parents had said about her as gospel. She had been shackled by their cruelty all her life. Victoria was embarrassed by some of the things she had said, but they were all true, and had the ring of truth to the psychiatrist as well. She didn't doubt them for a minute. |
| 1168 |
And then she glanced at a clock just beyond Victoria's shoulder and asked her if she would like to come back the following week. And before she could stop herself, Victoria nodded and then said that she would have to come in the afternoon after school since she was a teacher, which the psychiatrist said was fine. |
| 1169 |
They had said all those things to her over the years. Maybe they hadn't meant them to be as cruel as they sounded. And what if they did? What did that mean, about her and about them? It was a mystery to her now, which would have to wait another week to be solved, until she met with the shrink again. |
| 1170 |
Victoria enjoyed being part of it and sharing their final year with them. They were almost cooked. Carla Bernini came back to school after her year long maternity leave and was impressed by all that Victoria had accomplished with her students, and had a deep respect for her, however young. And they became good friends. |
| 1171 |
She was beginning to face that now. And she had taken some positive steps since she had started therapy. She was dieting again and had joined a gym. Sometimes the sessions of remembering the things her parents had done and said left her so raw that all she could do was come home and drown herself in comfort foods. |
| 1172 |
He sat down next to Victoria in the teachers' lounge one day. She was eating a salad from a nearby deli, and trying to correct the last of some papers she wanted to return to the students that day. She still had some spare time before her next class, when he unwrapped a sub sandwich at the table, sitting next to her. |
| 1173 |
She couldn't help noticing that it smelled delicious, and she felt like a rabbit eating her salad. She had sprinkled the lettuce leaves with lemon, instead of the generous portion of ranch dressing she would have preferred. She was trying to be good, and had an appointment with her shrink the next day. |
| 1174 |
They were teaching classes at the same time. He waved and disappeared in the opposite direction, to where the science labs were, and she drifted past Helen's classroom on the way to her own. She was talking to Carla Bernini, and both women looked up and smiled as she walked by. She stopped in the doorway for a minute. |
| 1175 |
Smart men like smart women. The superficial ones may not, and may be threatened by them. But you wouldn't want one of those men. Your nose looks fine to me. And weight is not a character flaw, it's something you can change. A man who really likes you and cares about you won't care about your weight one way or another. |
| 1176 |
Living with her own sense of defeat was worse. It had been her parents' legacy to her, to make her feel unlovable, because they didn't love her. It had started the day she was born. She had twenty three years of their negative messages about her to cancel out now, one by one. And finally she was ready to face it. |
| 1177 |
That her own mother didn't love her? Nor her father. And the only one who could was a child, who didn't know any better. It told her that no intelligent adult could love her, not even her parents. And she had to learn to remind herself now that it was a flaw in their psychological makeup, not her own. |
| 1178 |
She turned on her computer when she got home and checked her e mail. She had one from Gracie, telling her what was happening at school, and about a drama with a new boy she had a crush on. At sixteen she had more boys circling her at one time than Victoria had had in a lifetime, even if they were just kids. |
| 1179 |
The new chemistry teacher at lunch in the student lounge. She opened his e mail quickly, trying not to feel anxious. It could have been something about school or one of the students they shared, and she sat staring at the e mail after she read it. Hi. Nice seeing you at lunch yesterday, and having time to chat. |
| 1180 |
She offered to pay her share, since they were both poverty stricken teachers. He e mailed that it wasn't necessary, as long as she didn't mind dinner at the diner, and told her he'd pick her up on Saturday. It was done. All she had to do now, she realized as she went to tell Harlan, was figure out what to wear. |
| 1181 |
And she looked very pretty. She wore a little makeup and her long blond hair down. Harlan had said it was the perfect outfit for a first date. Sexy, young, simple, and it didn't look like she was trying too hard. He had said solemnly definitely no cleavage on a first date, although she had plenty of it. |
| 1182 |
It was equally so that he liked her. She contemplated the menu with a frown when they got to the diner. She always had a weakness for meat loaf and mashed potatoes, which reminded her of her grandmother's cooking, which had been the best thing about her, but she didn't want to overdo it and eat too much. |
| 1183 |
It was depressing, but beautifully acted and well written. She'd had a really great evening with him, and she thanked him as they stood outside her building in the warm night air. She didn't invite him to come upstairs at the end of the evening, it was too soon. But it definitely felt like a date to her. |
| 1184 |
Jack looked happy too and said he'd like to go out with her again. She thanked him, and he hugged her, and there was a spring in her step and a smile on her face when she walked into the empty apartment. For a minute she was sorry she hadn't invited him upstairs for a drink, but decided it was better this way. |
| 1185 |
Their movie date on Friday was as much fun as the other two had been. And they met again on Sunday, for a walk in the park, and he held hands with her as they strolled along. They bought ice cream from a man with a hand truck rolling through the park, but she forced herself to throw it away before she finished. |
| 1186 |
They went back to her apartment on Sunday afternoon, and he met Bunny and Harlan, and was very nice to both of them. And they both liked him. October was the most exciting, hopeful month she'd had in years as she and Jack continued to see each other every weekend, and on the third weekend they went out, he kissed her. |
| 1187 |
They talked about it, and both agreed that they wanted to wait a little while before they took the relationship to another level. They both wanted to be cautious and mature and get to know each other better before they took a major leap. It made her feel safe and comfortable with him, and not pushed beyond her limits. |
| 1188 |
And in early November things were heating up between them. They had been dating for just over a month, seeing each other once or twice a weekend, and Victoria could sense that they were going to sleep with each other soon. They were working up to it. She felt totally at ease with him, and was falling in love. |
| 1189 |
She had told her younger sister all about him, and she was thrilled, although Victoria had said nothing to her parents, and had warned Gracie not to either. She didn't want to deal with their negative comments, or their predictions of doom. It was still inconceivable to them that any man would fall in love with her. |
| 1190 |
This time there were no crash diets, no herbal teas, no purges. She was just happy, and everything else fell into place accordingly. They were both talking about their plans to go home for Thanksgiving, and were considering coming back to New York during the weekend, so they could spend part of the holiday together. |
| 1191 |
Life is really weird at times, but I've been talking to a teacher I work with at my school. I've never liked her, and she's kind of a bitch. She's very full of herself, and she's always working some guy. She's been talking a lot lately about some teacher she's having an affair with. He works at another school. |
| 1192 |
Other than that, she thinks he's a great guy, and she says he's crazy about her. They're planning to spend Thanksgiving together instead of going to their families, and he told her he would go see them on Saturday after Thanksgiving for the weekend. And then, I don't know, but it rang a bell for me. |
| 1193 |
He was lucky it was a big city and he hadn't run into either of them when he was with the other. But it was a small world anyway, and by sheer coincidence he was seeing a woman who worked with one of her best friends. The possibility of that happening was slim, but it had happened. Providence had intervened. |
| 1194 |
But they all knew it was right. She had to know. She sat with them in the kitchen for a long time, mulling it over, rehashing what they knew, and was confused, hurt, and angry about it. She managed to avoid Jack at school all the next day. She didn't feel ready to confront him. And that night he called her. |
| 1195 |
It was hard to believe that someone she cared about so much and had been so open with, and trusted so much, had been so dishonest with her. It had been a heart wrenching revelation. All her fears came back to her that she wasn't good enough to be loved. She hoped he had some reasonable explanation for it. |
| 1196 |
And with a sinking heart and a knot in her stomach the size of her head, she knew that what John had told her was true. She hadn't doubted it, but hoped he was wrong somehow. Apparently, he wasn't. She was distracted and nervous at school all day Friday and saw Jack in the teachers' lounge briefly at lunchtime. |
| 1197 |
He looked as appealing and as relaxed as ever. There was a quality about him that made him look honest and sincere. He exuded integrity in a way that suggested that he was a person you could trust. And she had, wholeheartedly. Apparently, he was not what he appeared. It was a bitter pill for her to swallow. |
| 1198 |
They were at John's place to give her space but had told her they were available if she needed them. She had no idea how to start the conversation as she poured him a glass of wine with trembling hands. She had worn slacks and an old sweater. Suddenly she didn't feel beautiful, as she often did when she was with him. |
| 1199 |
It was a terrible feeling. She hadn't bothered to wash her hair or wear makeup. The notion of competing with the other woman was foreign to her. Her spirit and her confidence in herself had folded like a house of cards. He was proving her father right, she wasn't worthy of being loved. Someone else was. |
| 1200 |
Victoria sat in her chair shaking after he left, but proud of herself for having confronted him. It had been ugly and painful, and she told herself that she was better off finding it out now, but she felt like someone had died when she walked back into her bedroom, lay down on the bed, and sobbed into her pillows. |
| 1201 |
And she heard just before Christmas that he was dating the French teacher who had been chasing him since the first day of school. She felt sorry for her, since she assumed he was still seeing the woman at John's school, and not being any more honest with the French teacher than he had been with her. |
| 1202 |
Victoria was relieved that he was leaving. It was painful every time she ran into him in the halls, and a reminder to her that somehow she had been inadequate and not enough for him to love her, and he had been dishonest and a jerk. She was thrilled to have the job for good and not have to worry about it every year. |
| 1203 |
Whatever happened, Gracie was always the apple of her father's eye and his baby, and Victoria was their tester cake. They hadn't thrown her away, but they might as well. Their lack of affection and approval for her had done just as much damage. And for Victoria, it was the reality of her relationship with them. |
| 1204 |
Whereas Victoria's graduation, even from college, had been dealt with quietly, their parents allowed Gracie to invite a hundred kids to a barbecue in the backyard, with her father at the grill, making chicken, steaks, burgers, and hot dogs. And there was catering staff in T shirts and jeans. The kids had a ball. |
| 1205 |
Victoria flew out for the party and the graduation the next day. Gracie looked adorable in her cap and gown. And their father actually cried when she got her diploma. Victoria couldn't remember his ever doing that for her, probably because he hadn't. And their mother was undone. It was an extremely emotional event. |
| 1206 |
There was much she agreed with and even admired about them. But Gracie had had a very different set of parents than Victoria did. Gracie had parents who worshipped and adored her, and supported her every move and decision. That was heady stuff. And she had no reason to rebel against them, or even separate from them. |
| 1207 |
That felt like a major move to her, although it seemed like a tiny one to her older sister and not big enough. Victoria still believed that they were toxic people, and her father a narcissist, and she would have liked to see her sister get more breathing space from their parents, but she didn't want it. |
| 1208 |
Victoria realized, as Gracie did, that now things were going to change for all of them. She had grown up, Victoria lived far away. Their parents had a chance to be more independent and do things on their own. They would all get together for holidays, but in between they all had their own lives to lead. |
| 1209 |
She was still trying to carve one out for herself. At twenty five, she still felt as though she had a long way to go. She wondered sometimes if she'd ever get there, and had started referring to herself jokingly as Gracie's spinster sister. It felt at times as though that was going to be her lot in life. |
| 1210 |
Gracie, on the other hand, had a dozen boys chasing after her at all times, some of whom she liked, some of whom she didn't, and one or two of whom she was always crazy about and couldn't decide between the two. Finding boys had never been her problem. And Victoria was proving her parents right at every turn. |
| 1211 |
Victoria felt a little like a tour guide on a high school trip, but she was really looking forward to traveling with her sister. They boarded the plane in high spirits, and Gracie was still texting frantically when the flight attendant told her to turn off her phone. Victoria was holding on to their passports. |
| 1212 |
They managed to do and see everything, and their parents checked on their progress daily, mostly, Victoria knew, because Gracie was with her, and they said they missed her. They had been gone for almost two weeks when they flew from London to Venice, and their pace slowed dramatically once they were there. |
| 1213 |
The food in Venice was fantastic, and Victoria ate risotto or pasta with delicious sauces at every meal and tiramisu for dessert. This wasn't about comfort food, it was about exquisite Italian cuisine, but its effect on her body was the same. They both hated to leave and fly to Rome for the last leg of the trip. |
| 1214 |
They were halfway to New York when Gracie handed her a small package wrapped in Italian gift paper, with a little green ribbon. She looked mysterious and excited when she gave it to her big sister, and thanked her again for the fabulous trip. She said it was the best graduation present in the world. |
| 1215 |
It seemed like only yesterday when she had graduated from high school, and now she was twenty five and her college graduation was three years behind her. And she knew it would happen just as fast for her younger sister. They talked for a long time on the flight, and then finally drifted off to sleep. |
| 1216 |
The time together had been magical, and they looked at each other and smiled nostalgically as they landed. They were both thinking that they wished they could start the trip all over again. It took them an hour to get their bags and get through customs, and another hour to get into the city in a cab. |
| 1217 |
He had left some groceries in the fridge so she could cook Gracie breakfast. And Victoria put their bags in her bedroom. It felt strange coming home. They went to bed early that night, after calling their parents to say that they had arrived safely. Gracie was always good about that, and didn't want them to worry. |
| 1218 |
It might have been healthier than being so close to their parents. She hoped that now Gracie would find some independence in college, but she had a feeling they'd be wanting her to come home all the time. It made Victoria glad that she had gone to Northwestern, but they had never been as attached to her. |
| 1219 |
She was in her bigger clothes again after the trip. She talked about her trip again then, and the hour was over. As she walked outside, she had the feeling again that she was stuck. Her life was going nowhere. And she bought herself an ice cream cone on the way home, and told herself what difference did it make anyway. |
| 1220 |
John had made a big bowl of pasta and lobster salad, both of which were irresistible. Harlan could see that she had gained weight, but he didn't say anything. They were just happy to be together again, and Bunny told her she was engaged and showed them her ring. She was getting married the following spring. |
| 1221 |
It didn't come as a surprise to any of them, and Victoria was happy for her. Gracie had texted her earlier to let her know that she had gotten home, and she called Victoria that night before she went to bed. She said their parents had taken her out to dinner, and she was going to Malibu with friends the next day. |
| 1222 |
By late afternoon, they had done everything they could, and Gracie walked outside with them. She looked as though she was about to panic, and her father looked like he was about to cry. And Victoria had a heavy heart. Gracie really was grown up now, and they had to open the door to the cage and let her fly. |
| 1223 |
Victoria liked Harry, although she thought him a little too controlling, and she wished her younger sister had been more adventurous while she was in college. She had been with Harry constantly. She had left the dorms in junior year to live in an apartment with him off campus, and they were still living together now. |
| 1224 |
And Victoria had been shocked when her parents made no objection to the two of them living together. She was sure they wouldn't have done the same for her. And when she had mentioned it to her father, he told her not to be so uptight and old fashioned, but part of that was because Harry's family had so much money. |
| 1225 |
She worried about Gracie a lot. She was always fearful that Gracie had been brainwashed by their parents into pursuing all the wrong ideals. The luncheon celebration had started late after graduation and went on until four in the afternoon. They finally left the table, and Gracie went to return her rented cap and gown. |
| 1226 |
Victoria was helping her mother load the dishwasher after dinner when Gracie came home unexpectedly. Since she was living with Harry, she didn't drop by very often, and they were all surprised to see her, and pleased. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were sparkling as she stood in the kitchen and looked at them. |
| 1227 |
They hadn't had an argument in years. And the last one had been about their parents, when Gracie had hotly defended them to her sister, and Victoria told her how wrong she was. She had finally backed down, because her sister was too young to understand, and was one of them anyway. And this time she felt the same way. |
| 1228 |
Their father clapped Harry on the back, and their mother went to get a bottle of champagne, which Jim opened immediately, and poured a glass for each of them, as Victoria looked at them and smiled nostalgically. The milestones were moving faster now. Graduation from high school, college, and now she was engaged. |
| 1229 |
She had to make an effort to get out in the world and meet men, and dress for the part. And open her life to other opportunities, people, places, things, everything she had been longing for but never had had the courage to do. This was scarier than when she'd moved to New York, and harder to organize than any wedding. |
| 1230 |
By then she wanted her dream too, not just Gracie's. She walked back from the doctor's office feeling empowered. She walked into the apartment, went straight to the kitchen, and started cleaning out the fridge. She started with the freezer and threw all the frozen pizzas and eight pints of ice cream into the garbage. |
| 1231 |
For twenty nine years she had believed her parents, that she was ugly, fat, and doomed to failure because she was unlovable. And she suddenly realized that just because they said it, or thought so, didn't mean that it was true. She was bound and determined now to shed the shackles they had put on her. |
| 1232 |
She signed up at Weight Watchers the next day, and came home with instructions and a scale for food. And she enrolled at a new gym the day after. They had beautiful machines, a weight room, a dance studio, a sauna, and a pool. Victoria went there every day. She jogged around the reservoir every morning. |
| 1233 |
She had lost nine pounds by the first day of school, and she felt good. She was in shape. She still had a long way to go. She had reached a plateau, but she was determined not to get discouraged. She'd been there before. Many times. But this time she was not going to let go, and she was seeing her shrink regularly. |
| 1234 |
She said she had no time, but Victoria knew there was more to life than just planning a wedding, and being married to a wealthy man. Her shrink told her it wasn't her problem, and to concentrate on herself, so she was. But her concern for her sister troubled her too. She only lost two pounds in September. |
| 1235 |
None of them looked right to her, although Victoria thought they were gorgeous. Gracie shifted gears then and asked to see bridesmaids' dresses. She had a list of designers and colors that she wanted to check out. And they brought everything they had to her. It was going to be a formal evening wedding. |
| 1236 |
She looked like a little general marshaling her troops as the saleswomen brought her things. Gracie was in full control, and planning what appeared to be a major national event, like a rock concert or a world's fair or a presidential campaign. This was her finest hour, and she was going to be the star of the show. |
| 1237 |
In the heat of her intense concentration on what she was doing, Gracie still hadn't noticed the weight Victoria had lost, which hurt her feelings, but she didn't want to be childish about it, and she paid attention to the gowns that Gracie was picking out. She had three maybes in mind when they left. |
| 1238 |
Gracie said that their mother had already decided to wear beige to the wedding, and emerald green to the rehearsal dinner the night before. She was all set. She had gone to Neiman Marcus, and the personal shopper had found the perfect dresses for her for both events. So Gracie could concentrate on herself. |
| 1239 |
There was no question that the dress was beautiful, but not on Victoria. She gave up trying to dissuade her, and sat silently while Gracie gave the saleswoman the sizes for most of the gowns. They were almost all size fours, except for three size twos. She was going to confirm the rest of the sizes when she got home. |
| 1240 |
It was afternoon by then, and they went to Serendipity for lunch. Gracie ordered a salad, and Victoria ordered the cheese ravioli, and a frozen mochaccino topped with whipped cream, and ate it all. Gracie saw nothing unusual in what her sister had ordered, because she was used to Victoria eating things like that. |
| 1241 |
Victoria stood on the sidewalk waving to her as the cab pulled away, and as soon as it was out of sight, Victoria burst into tears. From her perspective, the weekend had been an utter and complete disaster, and she felt like a total failure at everything. And on top of it, she was going to look awful at the wedding. |
| 1242 |
At least it was a world she understood, and where she had some control. She felt as though her sister Gracie was totally out of control with the wedding, and just being around her was depressing these days. And the effect on Victoria had been disastrous. She had gone totally berserk with everything she ate. |
| 1243 |
It was going to be a long eight months. The next day Victoria went to Weight Watchers before she went to work. She confessed her sins to one of the counselors and submitted to the weigh in. She had already lost two of the pounds she'd gained on the weekend, which was a relief, and she was back on track again. |
| 1244 |
She taught three classes back to back before lunch, and she was just leaving her classroom and heading for her office, when she saw one of her students crying in the hall. The girl had a look of despair on her face, and she darted into the ladies' room when she saw Victoria coming, which worried her. |
| 1245 |
In her seven years at the school, she had never dealt with this before. She knew other students had gotten pregnant, and she had heard about it, but she had never been in the front lines or the first to know. Those things were usually handled by the counseling staff, the dean of students, or the headmaster. |
| 1246 |
Amy looked as if she'd been crying, and her mother looked bleak. Amy smiled as soon as she saw Victoria, and her mother thanked her for coming. The headmaster was expecting them, and stood up as soon as they walked into the room. He looked surprised to see Victoria, and invited them all to sit down. |
| 1247 |
Justin was waiting for them outside, looking worried. Amy smiled at him the minute they came out, and he put his arms around her as her mother and Victoria watched. He was very sweet to her and very protective, and Victoria was hopeful for them both. Maybe things would work out, with her mother's help. |
| 1248 |
She was still thinking about them when she went home that night. Amy came to Victoria's classroom to thank her again the next day. Justin was glued to her side, as he had been for two years, and Amy looked better than she had in days. It was going to be an interesting school year with a pregnant student in their midst. |
| 1249 |
And her parents were acting as though a head of state was going to be with them. Their best everything was being used, which seemed silly to Victoria. But she helped her mother set the table as soon as she arrived. They were using her grandmother's linens and crystal, and Christine's own wedding plates. |
| 1250 |
But they were going to be sisters in law now. His sister supposedly had a nice husband and two children. And Victoria missed the days when Gracie talked about something other than the Wilkeses and the wedding. And she still hadn't accepted the fact that she had to wear the brown dress at the wedding. |
| 1251 |
She could have had Thanksgiving with Harlan and John at her apartment. They were having friends over that day, and she was sure she'd have been more welcome than she was here. She couldn't have felt less welcome and less loved after what her father had just said. She didn't mention the wedding again. |
| 1252 |
Her father served champagne instead of wine. Her mother was anxious about the turkey. Victoria was helping in the kitchen, and Harry and Gracie went outside and were whispering and giggling, while her parents made fools of themselves. And once they got to the table, her father and Harry talked politics. |
| 1253 |
She had no voice and no opinions, and none were allowed about anything but the wedding. It was no wonder she talked about it all the time, it was the only thing Harry would let her talk about. Victoria had always found him annoying while they were dating, but he was insufferable now and pompous beyond belief. |
| 1254 |
Between Harry and her father, she wanted to scream. Gracie played stupid all the time now, to please Harry, and her mother kept running back and forth to the kitchen. Victoria didn't have an intelligent conversation with anyone all afternoon. And she finally walked out into the backyard after the meal to get some air. |
| 1255 |
Victoria didn't say another word about it for the rest of the day and evening, and she tried to make peace with her sister the next day. They met for lunch at Fred Segal's, which had always been one of their favorite places, and Gracie still looked unhappy about what Victoria had said the day before. |
| 1256 |
For once, food wouldn't dull the pain. She hadn't even eaten dessert on Thanksgiving, and she usually loved pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Her father didn't notice Victoria's abstinence, but if she had eaten dessert, he would have commented on that, and the size of the portion she took. There was no winning with them. |
| 1257 |
It was a major step for her. She felt like she had lost her little sister, who had been her only ally for years, and no longer was. Her father took her to the airport, and Victoria kissed him goodbye. It was an empty feeling as she looked at him. He told her to take care of herself, and she knew he probably meant it. |
| 1258 |
With the help of the computer, she showed her several possibilities, and Victoria liked them all. Anything seemed better to her than the nose she had. When Victoria left her office, she felt as if she were walking on air. The nose she had hated all her life, and that her father had made fun of, was about to go. |
| 1259 |
He was doing a line of coke in the bathroom, and one of the other kids turned him in. His parents had to be called, and he was suspended. The headmaster handled it, and the parents agreed to put their son in rehab for a month. Victoria was glad that it wasn't one of her students, and she didn't have to get involved. |
| 1260 |
She didn't want to get out of shape while she was nursing her nose. It was starting to snow when she got to the gym, and it looked like Christmas around the city. People had their trees up, and she was planning to get one with Harlan and John that weekend. They were having friends over to help them decorate it. |
| 1261 |
The man exercising next to her had piercing blue eyes and dark hair, and a square jaw and chin with a deep cleft in it. He had broad shoulders and long legs, and she noticed that he had nice hands. She was embarrassed when he turned and smiled at her. He had sensed her staring at him, so she looked away. |
| 1262 |
And then she noticed him looking at her again, and admiring her legs when she got off the bike. She was wearing leggings and a sweatshirt, and he was wearing a T shirt and shorts. And she thought that their relationship must be very secure for the woman he was with not to get upset when he looked at her like that. |
| 1263 |
Victoria spent a quiet Christmas with Harlan and John at the apartment, and although she missed Gracie, she was happy not to have to travel during the holidays, or deal with her family's hysteria over the wedding. It was still six months away, and everyone was already nuts, particularly her parents. |
| 1264 |
The traditions hadn't changed, just the people and the venues. It was a beautiful mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, and although none of them was particularly religious, they found it very moving, and they came home and had tea in the kitchen and went to bed. And she talked to Gracie several times the next day. |
| 1265 |
They had given her pre op instructions. She couldn't eat or drink after midnight, couldn't take aspirin. She had never had surgery before and didn't know what to expect, other than a nose that she loved at the end of it, or at least not one that she hated as much as she had her present one all her life. |
| 1266 |
She couldn't wait for the change. She knew it wouldn't transform her and suddenly make her beautiful, but she knew she would feel different, and that a major irritant that had embarrassed her for years would be altered. She kept looking in the mirror and couldn't wait for it to be altered. She already felt different. |
| 1267 |
She wasn't condemned to be ugly and ridiculed by them forever. She was taking control of her life. Victoria got up early and walked around the apartment nervously before she left. The tree was sitting in a corner of the apartment, and she wondered how she'd feel when she got home. Not too bad, she hoped. |
| 1268 |
The war for her weight was not won yet. Nurses and technicians came and went, someone put an IV in her arm, and before she knew what had happened, she was on the operating table, and her surgeon was smiling at her and patting her hand, while the anesthesiologist talked to her, and seconds later she was asleep. |
| 1269 |
She fell asleep again, and then someone put a straw in her mouth and offered her a drink. She took a sip, and slowly she began to wake up. She could feel tape on her face, and it felt strange, but she wasn't in pain. They gave her oral pain killers after she woke. She spent the day in and out of sleep. |
| 1270 |
And they had given her pills to take with her in case she was in pain when she got home. Harlan left her in the lobby with the nurse while he went to get a cab and was back in less than a minute. Victoria was shocked to see that it was dark outside. It was six o'clock, and she had been there for twelve hours. |
| 1271 |
John came out of their bedroom in a bathrobe, and smiled when he saw her. She looked like an alien in the bandage that covered most of her face, with two holes for her eyes and a splint to protect her nose. She was quite a sight, but he made no comment about it to Victoria and hoped she wouldn't look in the mirror. |
| 1272 |
Victoria had several pages of post op instructions for the coming days. And a few minutes later he led her to her room, helped her undress and put her pajamas on, and five minutes later she was sound asleep propped up on pillows in bed to elevate her head, and Harlan was back in the living room with John. |
| 1273 |
She ached, she was tired, she felt as though she had been drugged. There was a dull ache in her nose. She decided to have breakfast and take a pain pill, but she wanted to eat something first so it didn't make her sick. By sheer habit, she opened the freezer and was staring at the ice cream when Harlan walked in. |
| 1274 |
She had made a point of not doing so in her bedroom, or when she went to the bathroom. She didn't want to scare herself and knew she might, and you couldn't see her nose anyway. It was all covered up under the bandages and splint. Victoria slept for the next two days and hung around the house after that. |
| 1275 |
She had called several times that week, and sent Victoria flowers, which was very sweet. Victoria had been touched by the gesture. Their parents knew nothing of the surgery, and Victoria didn't want them to. She was sure they would disapprove and make rude comments about it. Gracie had agreed to keep it secret. |
| 1276 |
She liked her own life better in some ways, and her job. At least no one was telling her what to think, do, and say. She couldn't have stood it. Gracie didn't seem to care, as long as she had Harry. It was the same pact with the devil that their mother had made, and Victoria felt sorry for them both. |
| 1277 |
It was healing nicely. Victoria had been brave enough to see her face mask bandages in the mirror by then, and she thought she looked ghoulish, though for a good cause. She didn't regret the surgery for a minute, and when she saw the result unveiled, she was thrilled, despite the bruising, and slight swelling. |
| 1278 |
And the patient was ecstatic. She said she already felt like a new person. The only shocking thing, and Victoria wasn't surprised, since she had been told to expect it, was the extent of the bruising, which was severe. She had two huge black eyes, and bluish discoloration that went down most of her face. |
| 1279 |
But the doctor assured her that it would go away soon, was normal, and she could start covering it with makeup in a few days. She said she'd be quite presentable by the time she went back to school in another week. And it would continue to improve after that as the swelling went down and the bruising disappeared. |
| 1280 |
She told her to be reasonable and not do anything where she might hit her nose, and when Victoria inquired, she said that she could go to the gym, but again be sensible about it and not overdo. No jogging, no strenuous exercise, no swimming, no extreme workouts, which Victoria didn't want to do anyway. |
| 1281 |
She put on her gym clothes after she ate the salad, and walked the several blocks to the gym, in leggings, gym shorts, an old Northwestern sweatshirt, a parka, and a pair of beat up old running shoes. Harlan and John were still skiing in Vermont, and the day was crisp and clear in New York despite predictions of snow. |
| 1282 |
She didn't open them until she'd been on the bike for ten minutes, and was startled to see the same very good looking man sitting next to her whom she'd seen there before Christmas. This time he was alone, without the beautiful woman who'd been with him, and he was looking at Victoria when she opened her eyes. |
| 1283 |
She was with me the last time I saw you. The poor thing was minding her own business and got hit by a kid out of control on a snowboard and broke her shoulder. She came out from the Midwest to spend the holidays with me, and now she goes back with a broken shoulder. It's really painful. She was a good sport about it. |
| 1284 |
It was the one luxury she always indulged in, but she hadn't gone since the surgery. She didn't want to scare anyone, explain her bandages, and she wasn't going out anyway. Now here she was next to the most gorgeous man she'd ever seen, and she hadn't combed her hair and didn't even have nail polish on. |
| 1285 |
Victoria was still thinking about him when she walked home. She felt good after some exercise at the gym, and he'd been nice to talk to. She hoped she would see him again. Her doctor was right, and by the time she went back to school, she could cover most of what was left of the bruising with makeup. |
| 1286 |
There was a faint shadow still around her eyes, but she looked pretty good, and the swelling had come down a lot around her nose. Not all the way, but close. And she loved her new nose. She felt like she had a whole new face. She couldn't wait to see her parents in June and watch their reaction, if they noticed. |
| 1287 |
She smiled broadly at Victoria. She hadn't admitted the pregnancy yet at school, and it still didn't show, although it would soon. She was young and her muscles were tight, and she was dressing carefully to conceal it. Justin was constantly with her protecting her like a security man guarding the Hope diamond. |
| 1288 |
He had heard of the school. They talked about nothing in particular, and when they got off the bikes, he surprised her and asked her if she wanted to go for a drink across the street. She looked as big a mess as she had before, and couldn't believe that he'd ask her anywhere or want to be seen with her. |
| 1289 |
Don't rule it out. Besides, I don't trust your interpretation. You don't know shit. All you know is your parents telling you that you're not deserving, you're not worthy, and no one will ever want you. Believe me, tapes like that play so loud, you can't hear anything else. Even when it's clear otherwise. |
| 1290 |
It made no sense to her. They had an interesting conversation about art, politics, history, architecture, the latest books they'd read, the music they liked, the foods they hated. Brussels sprouts for both, and cabbage. She said she had tried a cabbage soup diet with great results that reversed immediately. |
| 1291 |
And then they talked about their families, and Victoria told him more than she meant to. She told him about being named after Queen Victoria because her father thought she was so ugly and it was a great joke, and she told him about the remark that she was the tester cake and Gracie the perfect recipe. |
| 1292 |
He wanted to go into politics eventually and probably would have done well. He was kind of Kennedyesque, with a huge amount of charisma and charm. I'm just a regular guy. I lived with someone a few years ago, and it didn't work out, so now they're wondering what's wrong with me that I'm not married. |
| 1293 |
Both of them felt as though they had made important discoveries about each other by the time the evening ended. He put an arm around her on the way back in the cab, but he didn't try to kiss her, which was a plus for him. She hated being pawed by strangers who thought you owed it to them because they paid for dinner. |
| 1294 |
He had been worth waiting nearly thirty years for, although it was much too soon to know what would happen. It might go nowhere, and even if it did, it might fall apart. Real life. Collin called her right before she went to sleep that night and told her what a great time he'd had, and couldn't wait to see her again. |
| 1295 |
He always hugged her and kissed her on the cheek, but it had gone no further and she was fine with that, and liked it. For their third date, he took her to the ballet because she said she enjoyed it. They went to an exhibit at the Met on a Sunday, and brunch after. He took her to the opening of a Broadway play. |
| 1296 |
They were good looking, aristocratic people, and they were intelligent. But his mother looked depressed, and his father looked broken by life and the son he had lost. His shoulders drooped, and their faces and lives were colorless. It was as though they didn't even see Collin, and only the ghost of his brother. |
| 1297 |
Hers just didn't like her. His were mourning their son. But either way they had been unkind and unloving and rejecting to the point of being cruel, and in both cases had convinced their own children that they were unlovable. And both of them would carry the scars of it forever, as so many people did. |
| 1298 |
And he felt the same way about her. He would only tell his sister so much whenever she called. He wanted to protect Victoria too, and the budding relationship they shared. They were both respectful and discreet. The next dinner they shared after his parents' visit was an important one for both of them. |
| 1299 |
She melted into his arms, and a moment later into his bed with him. Their clothes disappeared, and all the lonely years they had lived through until then without each other. And the one thing they both knew, when the evening ended, was how much they were loved. They felt worthy of it, and lovable at last. |
| 1300 |
From then on their life together took on an everyday quality. They went out to dinner, stayed home, did laundry together, went to the gym, spent nights at his apartment or hers, went to movies, and managed to blend two real lives into one. It all worked, better than either of them could ever have dreamed. |
| 1301 |
She was lovable after all. She had never been as happy in her life, and Collin felt the same way too. He basked in the warmth of Victoria's love, approval, and admiration, and thrived. It was all he had been missing in his life for years. Their life together was a watered garden where everything grew lavishly. |
| 1302 |
The love they shared was a beautiful thing for both of them. Just before spring break, Victoria had attended a baby shower for Amy Green. She was due to have the baby any minute, and would no longer be attending classes until after it was born. It had been touching to see her so big, with her mother hovering nearby. |
| 1303 |
It had worked out perfectly for them. He had moved in with her and her mother for the last few months of the pregnancy, with his parents' approval, although they hadn't been thrilled at first. But Amy's family had been reasonable, and it was touching to see young people trying so hard to do the right thing. |
| 1304 |
They didn't take away from each other, they added all that they were. Collin surprised her with a wonderful old remodeled Connecticut farmhouse he had rented for them for spring break. It was private and lovely, and supremely comfortable. It was like playing house for both of them. It was next to a quaint village. |
| 1305 |
Maybe her father had cheated on her too at some point, and that was why he was willing to give Harry a pass. He shouldn't have otherwise, for his daughter's sake, money or not. Money wasn't going to give her happiness if Harry was a cheater or a bad guy. But he liked the prestige the alliance gave him by reflection. |
| 1306 |
But she didn't want to lose her relationship with her sister over this, and she knew she could. Harry had her sister blackmailed into silence, aided and abetted by her youth and neediness and their father's narcissism and greed. He wanted his daughter married to a Wilkes, at any price, so he could show off. |
| 1307 |
She knew there was no point arguing with him. He wasn't going to agree with her, and he fully approved of the marriage, no matter what Harry did. And Collin looked undismayed by the scene. He looked pleasant and strong, and his whole demeanor conveyed the fact that he was Victoria's ally and no one else's. |
| 1308 |
He could see what she had dealt with all her life, and the toll it took on her. She looked unhappy and uncomfortable in her own skin as they walked along. And she seemed tense and withdrawn when he kissed her on the way home. It was as though she was pulling away from him too. He could see it in her eyes. |
| 1309 |
It was a long shot, but they had a chance at making it work, especially with Amy's mother's help and support. During one of her breaks, Victoria had more calls to make on the Vegas trip, and she called her sister about it that weekend. Gracie sounded calmer than she had during the discovery of Harry's cheating. |
| 1310 |
It was only for a few weeks before summer vacation. Justin was there too, and looked like a proud papa as he held the baby while Amy chatted with Victoria. She had brought them a little blue sweater and booties, and Amy put them on him like a little doll. It was odd watching these two young kids as parents now. |
| 1311 |
Some of it was wasted on the girls, but they loved the atmosphere and had already discovered that there was good shopping in all the hotels, particularly theirs, and lots of single men roaming around the casino and hotel. Victoria felt as though she had to stay with them all evening, and she was exhausted and bored. |
| 1312 |
She was the only one who didn't have a roommate and didn't want one. Gracie was rooming with her best friend. And Victoria couldn't call Collin when she finally got to her room because it was too late in New York, although she had texted him several times and he had responded with encouraging messages to hang in. |
| 1313 |
They were doing Annie. It was a huge production, and she had promised to help backstage, with scenery and costumes, just as she had in high school. She had missed all the dress rehearsals that weekend. But she was sure someone would fill her in. From what she had seen so far, it was going to be great. |
| 1314 |
Collin had said he'd try to come. She had never been as happy to see anyone as she was to see him that night. She folded into his arms with relief. She had been anxious and felt as if she were on duty all weekend, trying to make everything go smoothly for her sister, and some of the girls weren't easy. |
| 1315 |
She stepped backward to avoid being knocked over, and before she could stop herself, she had fallen off the stage and lay flat on her back. There was a collective gasp as everyone saw it happen, and she was unconscious for a minute, and then she came to, and reassured everyone that she was fine. But she didn't look it. |
| 1316 |
He was worried about her, but relieved it wasn't worse, and she didn't say it, but she was thrilled she hadn't hurt her new nose. And after they set her leg and put the cast on it, Collin took her home and set her up on pillows on the couch. He brought her mushroom barley soup and a tuna fish sandwich to eat. |
| 1317 |
At least the cast was due to come off before the wedding, if it healed well. It was a headache she didn't need. Her mother had called her that night too, and left a message on her voice mail that she was sorry to hear about her leg. She hobbled into school the next day, and all the students helped her get around. |
| 1318 |
Everyone was happy to see her back, and they said Annie had gone fabulously. And at the end of the day she was really tired, and took a cab home. She realized on her way back to the apartment that she was not going to be able to exercise for the next month, and she was terrified she would gain weight. |
| 1319 |
No comfort foods in the next month. Or she'd look like a blimp at the wedding, and prove her father right, that she was hopeless. She shared her concerns with Collin, and he told her that whatever she gained while she was on crutches, she could lose again once she could exercise, and so what if she didn't. |
| 1320 |
She wanted to visualize herself into thinness. She had bought a pale blue chiffon dress for the rehearsal dinner, with a silver bolero and high heeled silver sandals. It was very flattering and slimming, she was happy about that, but her dress for the wedding still upset her. It was a total no win for her. |
| 1321 |
He had been expecting something like that, or an announcement of their engagement, he said with a mischievous look at Collin, who just laughed and smiled at Victoria. They hadn't talked about it yet, but it had crossed his mind. His sister had said the same thing, and she wanted to meet Victoria that summer. |
| 1322 |
They were enjoying what they had. They had both waited a lifetime for it, and were savoring every moment. And his sister had just met someone too. Collin hadn't met him yet, but he sounded perfect for her. He was a widowed doctor with two young kids, and his sister said they were really cute. Five and seven. |
| 1323 |
Life had a way of working out. The lid for every pot theory seemed to work, if you waited long enough and were patient. Victoria was now a firm believer in it. They agreed to start looking for an apartment together after her sister's wedding, when she was no longer in a cast and on crutches and could get around. |
| 1324 |
The leg felt a little weak and wobbly, but she had to do physical therapy and exercise, and they said that would strengthen it. And in the meantime, she had to be on her feet for the wedding. She could put her full weight on her leg, but it didn't feel strong. And she couldn't overdo at the gym yet. |
| 1325 |
She had been careful, but not totally. There had been some pasta on bad nights when her leg hurt and she needed comfort food, a couple of pizzas, the occasional ice cream, cheese and crackers, and there had been mashed potatoes and some delicious meat loaf Harlan had brought home from the deli. And it all added up. |
| 1326 |
So instead of losing twenty five pounds for the wedding, she'd lost eleven. She knew she might be able to knock off another three or four if she tried hard and did a regime of special herbal teas before the wedding. So now she was going to be wearing an unflattering dress that didn't suit her, and she'd be fat. |
| 1327 |
She assured him confidently that she could deal with her family on her own for three days she'd been coexisting with them for nearly thirty years. Gracie met her at the airport and drove her back to the house. She said that all her bridesmaids were in town. The dresses had been altered and tried on and were perfect. |
| 1328 |
There were piles of silver and crystal in fancy boxes. They had turned their dining room into a warehouse. Her father was at the office, and Victoria didn't see him till that night. When she did, he hugged her and commented that she looked well. With him, healthy and well were always synonyms for bigger and fatter. |
| 1329 |
The morning that Collin was due to arrive, Victoria got a few minutes alone with her sister and asked her once and for all if she wanted to go through with this and if she was sure about Harry. And if so, she promised to forever hold her peace. Gracie looked at her solemnly and said that she was sure. |
| 1330 |
And there were endless speeches at dinner, some of them clever, and most of them very boring. Victoria was going to have to say a few words too, but she was doing it at the wedding, as older sister and maid of honor. Victoria was looking beautiful in the pale blue chiffon gown she had bought for the occasion. |
| 1331 |
And Collin was so tired, he was asleep in five minutes. Victoria lay with him for a while, and then she went to find Gracie in her room. She poked her head in the door, and Gracie was sitting on her bed and looking a little lost. Victoria went in and sat down next to her, as she used to when they were kids. |
| 1332 |
All Victoria wanted was a simple French twist, so she went first. The wedding was set for seven o'clock that night, but people came and went all day. All the bridesmaids were there from lunchtime on, and Victoria couldn't get near her sister, so she left them alone, and did whatever she could to help her mother. |
| 1333 |
But everything seemed in surprisingly good control. And Gracie's wedding gown was laid out in her mother's room. Her father had been relegated to the guest room to dress, and everyone seemed to have something to do. There were a million phone calls and deliveries, and Collin volunteered to man the doors and phones. |
| 1334 |
And by five o'clock the countdown had begun. The hairdresser did Gracie's hair. All the bridesmaids had been done. And at six o'clock they all slipped into their dresses. Victoria took a deep breath and put hers on, and one of the bridesmaids zipped it up, while another one held it closed, and Victoria held her breath. |
| 1335 |
She could feel how it looked. She could hardly breathe, even with the weight she'd lost, and her breasts were tightly compressed and poured out of the strapless dress. It was excruciatingly tight, and the zipper almost didn't close. And she knew just how ugly it looked on her, but she really didn't care. |
| 1336 |
The heels were high, and she suddenly looked like a very tall woman. But a good looking woman. She felt like she had come into her own in the last year, not just because of Collin, but the efforts she'd made to free herself of the past and the damage it had done. Collin had happened because she was ready for him. |
| 1337 |
She had made the changes, and he had arrived the changes weren't because of him. She felt sure of herself suddenly even in the dress that didn't suit her. She looked beautiful, and shone from within. She put on a little more blush, and the color of the dress didn't look quite so bad with her pale skin. |
| 1338 |
And the minute the enormous white lace dress fell over Gracie's tiny body, she looked like a princess. She was wearing her engagement ring that looked like a headlight, and the diamond earrings Harry had given her. And his mother had given her a string of large pearls with a diamond clasp as a wedding gift. |
| 1339 |
She had always been his baby. And she always would be. And she was Victoria's baby too. Gracie looked around the room at her family, and she was about to cry too, but her mother warned her not to ruin her makeup. Gracie felt as though she were leaving them all forever and setting out in the world, on unfamiliar waters. |
| 1340 |
It was over. The wedding that had driven them all crazy for a year was under way. And the reception was as spectacular as her parents had wanted, and Gracie had dreamed of. She came to kiss Victoria as the reception began, after the photographs and the receiving line. She just wanted a minute with her big sister. |
| 1341 |
But if it didn't work out, they'd deal with it and know what to do. Sometimes you just couldn't figure it out beforehand, no matter how hard you tried. Collin sat next to Victoria at the reception, at a long table with all the bridesmaids and groomsmen. Victoria made her speech, and everyone applauded. |
| 1342 |
Collin had seen her mother say something to her, and the look on her face afterward, but he was too far from her now to have heard what was said. Whatever it was, he could tell that it had devastated her, and he could see her collapse inwardly, as she stood with her arms down, as Gracie got ready to toss the bouquet. |
| 1343 |
Collin made his way through the crowd to Victoria, and she was beaming at him when he got there. He still didn't know what her mother had said to her, but he knew it was hurtful, and this time he didn't want to know. All he wanted to do was shield her from those wounds forever. She was still holding the bouquet. |
| 1344 |
She had promised to take photographs of the team, as she always did, and she loved being there, watching them on a warm May afternoon in Westport. She went everywhere with her kids, soccer, baseball, swimming team, ballet, tennis. She did it not only because it was expected of her, but because she liked it. |
| 1345 |
Money wasn't something she had worried about much in the early days, not at all in fact. She had been just as happy digging irrigation ditches and living in tents in Nicaragua, Peru, and Costa Rica. She had loved those days, the excitement, the challenges, the feeling that she was doing something for the human race. |
| 1346 |
He spent most of her childhood years away, on dangerous assignments in war zones. And she loved not only his photographs, but listening to his stories. As a child, she dreamed of a life like his one day. And her dreams came true when she herself began freelancing for papers at home while she was in the Peace Corps. |
| 1347 |
When she looked back on those days later on, she realized she had been someone different then, a person she thought of sometimes now, and wondered what had happened to her. Where had that woman gone, that wild free spirit filled with passion? India still acknowledged her, yet she also realized she no longer knew her. |
| 1348 |
Some of the memories were still so vivid. She still remembered the sheer excitement of it, the sick feeling of knowing she was in danger, and the thrill of capturing the perfect moment, that explosive split second in time when everything came together in one instant in what she saw through her camera. |
| 1349 |
There had never been anything like it. If nothing else, she was glad she'd done it, and gotten it out of her system. And she knew without a doubt that what she had felt was something she had inherited from her father. He had died in Da Nang when she was fifteen, after winning a Pulitzer the year before. |
| 1350 |
He had never really had a life he cared about beyond the moments when he risked everything for the perfect shot, with bombs exploding all around him. And Doug was reminding her that if she wanted him, and any kind of normalcy, she was going to have to make a choice sooner or later, and give up what she was doing. |
| 1351 |
Doug had made it very clear to her when they got married that once they had children, she had to give up her career. And she had agreed to do it. She thought that by then she'd be ready. But she had to admit, when she left the Times and turned her attention to full time motherhood, it was harder than she expected. |
| 1352 |
In the end, she only looked back once or twice with regret, but eventually she didn't even have time for that. With four children in five years, she could barely keep her head above water or take time out to reload her camera. Driving, diapers, teething, nursing, fevers, play groups, and one pregnancy after another. |
| 1353 |
She knew she had to close the door on those early chapters of her life, and she had, no matter how many prizes she had won, or how exciting it had been, or how good she was at it. In her mind, and Doug's especially, giving it up was the price she had had to pay for having children. There was just no other way to do it. |
| 1354 |
And Doug didn't even like her doing that much. Instead, she used her camera as a kind of mothering tool, constantly making visual records of her children's early years, or taking photographs of her friends' children, or for the school, or just playing with it as she did now, watching Sam and his friends play soccer. |
| 1355 |
She was bound and chained, set in cement, rooted to her life in a thousand ways, visible and otherwise. And this was what she and Doug had agreed to. And what they had said they wanted. And she had lived up to her end of the bargain, but her camera was always in her hand, at her eye, or slung over her shoulder. |
| 1356 |
And at the Cape she could spend hours in it while the kids visited with friends, or hung out on the beach, or played volleyball or tennis. She was less of a chauffeur at the Cape, the kids could ride their bikes everywhere and it gave her more free time, especially in the last two years, since Sam was a little older. |
| 1357 |
India's life had been virtually the same for the last fourteen years, since Jessica was born. It was a life of service, sacrifice, and commitment. But the end result was tangible, she could see it. She had healthy, happy children. They lived in a safe, familiar little world that revolved entirely around them. |
| 1358 |
They had no concept of the loneliness she had felt as a child, with one constantly absent parent. They were unfailingly ministered to and cared for. And their father came home every night for dinner. That was especially important to India, as she knew only too well what it was like not to have that. |
| 1359 |
India smiled, the camera clicked again, and she walked slowly back to the bench where some of the other mothers were sitting, chatting with each other. None of them were watching the game, they were too busy talking. This was so routine to them that they rarely watched, and seldom saw what their children were doing. |
| 1360 |
Gail's oldest son was the same age as Jessica, and she had twin boys Sam's age. She had taken a five year break between them, to go back to work. She had been a litigator, but had quit finally after she had the twins, and she felt she'd been gone too long now to ever consider going back to her old law firm. |
| 1361 |
Gail was small and intense with short dark hair, and eyes that were two burning pools of fiery dark chocolate. India was long and lean, with classic features, deep blue eyes, and a long blond braid that hung down her back. She claimed she always wore it that way because she never had time to comb it. |
| 1362 |
It was one of Gail's quirks, talking about other men, and sometimes more than just talking. She had confided to India frequently that she'd had several affairs in the twenty two years she and Jeff had been married, but she had surprised India by saying that in an odd way, it had actually improved their marriage. |
| 1363 |
Maybe she was looking for something that didn't exist, or wasn't out there, not for them at least. Maybe Gail was simply unwilling to admit that, for them, that part of their lives was over. Doug didn't come home from the office with roses in his arms for her either. But India didn't expect that from him. |
| 1364 |
They provided each other with total acceptance, and India never criticized her for the men she slept with, although she didn't approve or fully understand why she did it. The only explanation was that Gail had a kind of emptiness that nothing seemed to fill, and hadn't in all the years that India had known her. |
| 1365 |
And as India started the car, she glanced at her son in the rearview mirror. He looked tired, but happy. There was dirt all over his face, and his blond hair looked as though he'd combed it with an eggbeater, and just looking at him told her once again why she wasn't climbing through bushes in Ethiopia or Kenya. |
| 1366 |
They picked up Aimee and Jason at school, and headed home. Jessica had just walked in, there were books all over the kitchen table, and the dog was going crazy wagging his tail and barking. It was life as she knew it, as she had chosen to live it. And the thought of living it with anyone but Doug depressed her. |
| 1367 |
And if it wasn't enough for Gail, then she was sorry for her. In the end, they all had to do what worked best for them. And this was the life India had chosen. Her camera could wait another five or ten years, but even then she knew she wouldn't leave Doug to go trekking halfway around the world to find adventure. |
| 1368 |
By this point in the school year, she couldn't think up any more creative dinners. It was time for barbecues and hot dogs and ribs, and time on the beach on the Cape. She settled on two frozen chickens, and stuck them in the microwave to defrost them, as she pulled out a dozen ears of corn and began to clean them. |
| 1369 |
But she was still convinced all these years later that she had made the right decision. Besides, it was a moot point anyway, she told her self, there was no way she could have continued traveling around the world as a journalist, or even working locally, and still have done the right thing for her children. |
| 1370 |
At least Doug didn't. She smiled, thinking of him, as she put the corn in a pot of water and set it on the stove, and then took the chickens out of the microwave, put butter and spices on them, and put them in the oven. All she had to do now was put some rice on the stove, make a salad, and presto magic, dinner. |
| 1371 |
Door to door, it was a twelve hour day for him, or slightly longer, but he was a good sport about the commute, and he kissed the air somewhere near her head, as he set down his briefcase and helped himself to a Coke from the refrigerator, and then looked over and smiled at her. She was happy to see him. |
| 1372 |
She was lucky, she didn't have to. She had clean, healthy, classic looks, and the braid she wore suited her. Her skin was good, and she looked about thirty five instead of forty three, with a long, slim figure that looked well in shirts and turtlenecks and jeans, which was the uniform she wore daily. |
| 1373 |
He had dark hair and brown eyes, and was given to tweeds and gray suits for work, and corduroy pants and Shetland sweaters on weekends. And in a quiet, wholesome way, India had always found him very attractive, even if Gail did think he was boring. And in many ways, he was the ideal husband for her. |
| 1374 |
He was no longer mischievous, but he was decent and reliable, and someone she knew she could count on. Much as she had loved him, she didn't want a man like her father, who was never there, and risked and eventually lost his life in the pursuit of his wild, romantic notions. War had been romance to him. |
| 1375 |
Her father had been tireless and passionately energetic. He had won a Pulitzer, for God's sake. She hated it when Doug made comments like that about him. It was as though her father's career was meaningless because he had earned his living with a camera, something that seemed childishly simple to her husband. |
| 1376 |
She didn't say another word to him until they went to bed that night, and before that, she stood for a long time in the shower, thinking it all over. He had really upset her, and hurt her feelings. But she didn't mention it to him when she got into bed. She was sure he was going to bring it up himself and apologize. |
| 1377 |
But he said not a word to her when he turned off the light, and he turned his back and went to sleep, as though nothing had happened. She didn't say goodnight to him, and she lay awake for a long time, thinking about what he had said, and what Gail had said to her, as she lay beside him, and listened to him snoring. |
| 1378 |
Doug never said anything to India about their conversation the night before, and he was gone before she could even say good bye to him. As she cleaned up the kitchen, after she got back from dropping Jessica off, she wondered if he was sorry. She was sure he would say something that night. It was unlike him not to. |
| 1379 |
And once every couple of years, she did something for him that gave him hope she might one day come back to the real world. She had done a fabulous story three years before, on abused children in Harlem. She had done it in the daytime while her own kids were in school, and managed not to miss a single car pool. |
| 1380 |
Raoul had neither a spouse nor a family, and could never quite understand why she was so determined to flush her career down the toilet for them. She had a talent like few he had known, and in her case he thought it was a sacrilege to have given up what she had been doing. And then he decided to take the plunge. |
| 1381 |
But it's a fantastic story, India. Babies are being murdered over there, and once it runs in the magazine, you can syndicate the story. Someone really has to do it, and they need your pictures to validate the story and I'd rather it be you than anyone else. I know how you love kids, and I just thought. |
| 1382 |
For the first time in a long time, she felt as though she was missing something. And she was still looking glum when she ran into Gail that afternoon at the market. Gail was looking happier than usual, wearing a skirt and high heels, and as India approached her, she noticed that Gail was wearing perfume. |
| 1383 |
She was still in a somber mood later that afternoon when she picked up the kids and drove home. Jason and Aimee had friends with them, and they all made so much noise that no one noticed that she wasn't talking. She fixed a snack for all of them, and left it on the kitchen table when she went to take a bath. |
| 1384 |
He didn't seem to understand what she was feeling. But maybe she couldn't blame him. She wasn't even sure she understood it. Suddenly she was missing something she had given up, for all intents and purposes, fourteen years before, and she expected him to know that, without having explained it to him. |
| 1385 |
She was someone he could rely on, who took care of his children. And all she could think of on the way home was that maybe she should call Raoul and take the assignment in Korea. But no matter how angry she was at him, or how disappointed she was by what he'd said, she wouldn't do that to her children. |
| 1386 |
In a single night, he had put their marriage on the line, tossed her career out the window like so much fluff, and essentially told her he didn't love her, or at least wasn't in love with her. And in light of that, she didn't know what to think or feel now, or how to go on as they were before, unaffected by it. |
| 1387 |
Her spirit was dead, and it was only a matter of time before her body followed. Somehow, with what he'd said, and the illusions he'd killed, India felt as though Doug had sucked all the life out of her. It was like letting the air out of her tires. And now, everything she did seemed like an enormous effort. |
| 1388 |
All she wanted to do was get away to Cape Cod, and try to forget what had happened. She thought maybe she'd feel better about him again with a little distance between them. She needed to regroup, rethink what he'd said, and try to feel better about him, if she was going to spend the rest of her life with him. |
| 1389 |
In the end, it was an enormous relief to her when she and the children finally left for their vacation. She had packed everything they needed in three days. They never wore anything fancy on the Cape, just shorts and jeans and bathing suits, and they left most of it there when they left at the end of the summer. |
| 1390 |
She managed to avoid Doug almost entirely the last week, as he was meeting with two sets of new clients, and spent two nights in the city. And on the morning they left, he stood on the lawn waving at them, and he almost forgot to kiss her goodbye. When he did, it was hastily, and without much emotion. |
| 1391 |
And the children were all in good spirits. They could hardly wait to get to the beach and see their friends there. As they talked about it on the way up, and what they were going to do as soon as they arrived, only Jessica noticed that her mother was distracted. She was sitting in the front seat, next to her mother. |
| 1392 |
She had no illusions about their importance to each other. And just listening to her talk about it depressed India still further. She wished her a good trip, and told her to call when she got back. Maybe she and the kids could come up to the Cape for a few days later in the summer while Jeff was working. |
| 1393 |
It was late that afternoon when they got to the house in Harwich, and India got out and stretched her legs, and looked at the clear expanse of blue ocean with a feeling of relief. Being here was just what she needed. It was a lovely place, a comfortable old Victorian house, and she always found it blissfully peaceful. |
| 1394 |
Although this year, she wanted to spend a few days by herself, with the children. She needed some time to think, and regroup, and recover from the blow of what she'd felt ever since their fateful dinner. For the first time in fourteen years, once they'd settled into the house, she didn't even want to call Doug. |
| 1395 |
She hadn't been in it in nearly a year, but she found everything in the same meticulous order she had left it. And when she turned the light on, she saw the wall of some of her father's favorite pictures. There was one she had put up there of Doug too, and she stood and stared at it for a long moment. |
| 1396 |
He had a handsome, familiar face that she knew better than any face in the world, except her children's, but she had known his for longer. And as she looked into his eyes in the photograph she saw all the coldness she had discovered there in the past three weeks, and everything that was missing in them. |
| 1397 |
Had she wanted to believe there was something else there? That he still loved her as he had in their youth? That he was still in love with her, as she had believed he was, until he told her how unimportant love was in a marriage? She could hear the words again as though he had just said them to her. |
| 1398 |
And India could remember as though it were yesterday how devastated she had been when her mother had told her what had happened. She couldn't imagine a world without her father in it somewhere. It was hard to believe he had been gone for twenty eight years now, it seemed like an entire lifetime to her. |
| 1399 |
She loved the solemnity of it, the comfort it offered her. It was one of the things she loved about being here. And as she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, she savored the fact that she was alone here this time, with only her children, her memories, and the ocean. For now at least, it was all she wanted. |
| 1400 |
Jessica had grown up with them, and loved them, and the boys were of particular interest to her now that two of them were in high school, and the third one was a freshman in college. Jason had a friend down the street too, and had called him and made plans the night before to spend the day with him. |
| 1401 |
After nearly thirty years of carrying it, it seemed like part of her body. Her children couldn't imagine seeing her without it. They had walked almost a mile down the beach before they saw anyone they knew. It was still early in the season and people were only just beginning to arrive for the summer. |
| 1402 |
She was so used to watching them through a lens, that it never dawned on her that anyone was looking at her. She told him about a new camera she'd bought then, explained it to him in detail, and promised to let him try it. She had made a point of bringing it with her. And he loved visiting her darkroom. |
| 1403 |
He had always been deeply impressed by her talent, far more so than Doug, who had long since come to take it for granted. The Parkers said they had to go back to their house then to meet some friends, and she promised to come and visit with Sam in a day or two, and encouraged them to drop by any time they wanted. |
| 1404 |
But she had always been too involved in her work to have more than their son, and he was happy to have the one they did have. Their son, Phillip, was just like his mother, and they both thought he was going to make a great physician. For the moment, he was determined to go into pediatrics, and kids seemed to love him. |
| 1405 |
Sam threw the ball for the dog, and he kept retrieving it, and when they got home, the others were still out, and India made lunch, and then they took their bikes out. They rode past friends' houses, and stopped in to say hello. It felt good just being there, in a place they loved, with familiar people. |
| 1406 |
It was the perfect spot for all of them. And at the last house, Sam ran into a whole group of his friends, and India agreed to let him stay for dinner. She rode back to the house alone, and when she got there, the phone was ringing. She thought it might be Doug, and hesitated for a moment before she answered. |
| 1407 |
She made lemonade and popcorn for them, and they sat on the deck chatting and laughing, until finally one by one they went off to bed. Doug didn't call that night, and she didn't call him either. It was a relief to have some time to herself, and after the kids were asleep, she disappeared into her darkroom. |
| 1408 |
It was impossible to miss, as it stuck out beyond the end of the dock, its mast towering seventeen stories into the air. At first glance, it almost looked bigger than the yacht club. There were a few nice sailboats there, but nothing that even remotely compared with the one moored at the end of the dock. |
| 1409 |
She looked more like Sam's big sister than his mother as she spotted the Parkers and smiled. There were a number of people sitting on deck in comfortable chairs, and on two long, elegant blue canvas covered couches, and seemingly everywhere were deckhands and crew members in navy shorts and white T shirts. |
| 1410 |
He felt an instant kinship with Sam from the moment he met him, and he was somewhat intrigued by his mother. She was a pretty woman with an intelligent air, and a look of good humored amusement. She was obviously proud of the boy, and as he chatted with him, he decided that her pride was with good reason. |
| 1411 |
Paul had made him feel entirely at home, and India was touched by what she saw. It told her something about Paul, and a few minutes later, chatting with him, she asked him if he had children. She thought he had to, to be so good with a child Sam's age. And she wasn't surprised when he nodded with a smile. |
| 1412 |
She knew from something he'd said at lunch that they had been married for eleven years, but he also talked about how intensely busy she was, writing novels, and overseeing the production of the movies made from them, in the most minute detail. She was, in fact, in LA. doing just that at that very moment. |
| 1413 |
Paul had told India at lunch that he had married while still in college the first time, had only the one son he'd mentioned earlier, and stayed married for fifteen years, and then waited another ten years before he married Serena. She had been thirty nine when they were married, and for her it had been the first time. |
| 1414 |
But she and India seemed as though they had been born on different planets and lived in different worlds. There was a softness to India, and a subtle sensuality, coupled with a sharp mind and mischievous wit, which he found inordinately attractive. And her straightforwardness and honesty were refreshing to him. |
| 1415 |
She could do one movie a year, and a book every two or three years. She didn't have to do two movies a year, four television shows, and a six book contract to complete in three years. But Serena didn't want to hear it, and even listening to him say the words had made her feel threatened and provoked a fight. |
| 1416 |
But India sensed that clearly about him. He was vulnerable, in his feelings for his wife, in the way he talked to her, in the things he shared, even in the way he reached out to Sam. There was a great deal of moral courage to him, and sincerity, and hidden tenderness. There was a lot she liked about him. |
| 1417 |
She could see him laughing and smiling and looking up at Paul from where she stood, and as she watched them, she took out her camera, and got a series of great shots with her long lens. She could see both their faces clearly, and she had never seen two happier people than her son and his new friend. |
| 1418 |
They stood for a moment, drinking their Cokes, they were tired and thirsty and happy. The breeze had come up by then, and it had been work for Paid sailing the dinghy. But it was hard to tell which of them had enjoyed it more. They glanced over at the bar, where some of his guests were playing liar's dice. |
| 1419 |
It had been a perfect afternoon in every way, and she couldn't help thinking of Paul as she pedaled behind Sam, trying to keep up with him without falling off her bike. There was something very rare and deep about the man she had met that afternoon. And she was sure there was more to him than what they'd seen. |
| 1420 |
She made pasta, and salad, and garlic bread, and put some frozen pizzas in the oven. She had a suspicion that additional mouths would appear eventually, and she wasn't wrong. At seven o'clock, when they sat down, four more children turned up, two of them friends of Jason's, and the other two friends of Aimee's. |
| 1421 |
It was casual and relaxed, and she never cared how many kids were underfoot. That was just part of their beach life, it was expected, and she liked it. Jessica helped her clear the kitchen afterward, while the others went to play, and as soon as they had finished loading the dishwasher, Doug called them. |
| 1422 |
He made it sound like the largest ocean liner in the world when he described how big it was, but he also described in great detail all the intricacies of the sails and the computer system that ran diem. It was obvious that Sam had really learned a lot about sailing from Paul, and Sam had really listened to him. |
| 1423 |
It was a destination India never wanted to arrive at. She would do anything before she started meeting men in motels, or sleeping with other women's husbands. That was not what she had come this far for. But what had she come for, she asked herself as she walked into the darkroom, lost in her own thoughts. |
| 1424 |
She took out her chemicals and began developing her film as she mused over her conversation with her husband, and then as she looked at the photographs developing in the tubs, she saw him. Paul. Smiling up at her. Laughing with Sam. Ducking his head in the dinghy, against the horizon looking incredibly handsome. |
| 1425 |
It was an endless string of striking portraits of him, and told the tale of a magical afternoon between a man and a boy. It was the portrait of a hero, and she stood for a long time, looking at the pictures, thinking about him, and Serena. He had used such an odd combination of words to describe her. |
| 1426 |
She could sense easily that he was in love with her, intrigued by her, and he claimed he was happy with her. And yet, everything he said had told India instinctively that she was anything but easy. But what they seemed to share appeared to suggest excitement. It made her wonder once again what she had with Doug. |
| 1427 |
She hung the pictures up to dry, and left her darkroom to check on the children. Sam had fallen asleep, on the couch, watching a video, and the others were playing tag outside the house, in the dark by flashlight, and Jessica and a friend, one of the Boardman boys, were eating cold pizza in the kitchen. |
| 1428 |
And as she looked down at him, she thought of Paul and the pictures she'd taken of him. But then she had an even stranger thought, as she turned off the light and walked slowly back to her bedroom. She wondered suddenly what it would be like to be doing this alone, if she and Doug were no longer married. |
| 1429 |
She would never have dared put the thoughts into words, not to anyone, not even Gail. And certainly not to Doug. She lay on her bed for a while, and picked up a book finally, but she found she couldn't read it. All she could hear were her own questions echoing through her head, and there were a thousand of them. |
| 1430 |
What did their marriage mean to her now? Now that she knew what Doug was thinking. It changed everything, like the subtle turn of a dial that changed the music from sweet melody to endless static that hurt one's eardrums. And she could no longer pretend to herself that what she heard was music. It wasn't. |
| 1431 |
She would drive car pools for the next nine years, until Sam was old enough to drive, or maybe three years before that when Jason could drive him and Aimee, and she would be off the hook then. And then what? More laundry, more meals until they left for college, and then waiting for them to come home for vacations. |
| 1432 |
That was all she felt now. Empty. Broken. Cheated. And yet she had to go on, like a piece of machinery, cranking away, producing whatever it was meant to, until it broke down completely. It didn't seem too hopeful, or too appealing. And as she thought of it, she looked out over the ocean, and saw it. |
| 1433 |
The Sea Star, in all her glory, with all the lights lit in the main saloon and the cabins, with red lights twinkling on the mast, as they went for a night sail. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, and it looked like the perfect escape. A kind of magic carpet, to wherever you wanted it to take you. |
| 1434 |
What better way to explore new places? It was like taking your house with you, your own safe little world that went everywhere with you. At the moment, India couldn't imagine anything better, and for just an instant, she would have loved to hide there, and she thought Paul Ward was lucky to have it. |
| 1435 |
She had promised to leave blueberry muffins and fruit salad for the others, and there were four boxes of cereal for them. They had all told her their plans the night before, including dinner with friends, and she knew they'd be fine without her. And if they had a problem, they could go to any of their neighbors. |
| 1436 |
And Paul had given her the satellite number on the boat, which she left for them, so they could call her in an emergency. Everything was taken care of, and at eight twenty she and Sam were on their bikes, heading for the yacht club again. Paul was on deck when they got there, and the guests were just leaving. |
| 1437 |
He had asked her about it the day before, and she told him her father had been on assignment there when she was born, and Paul had told her how much he liked it. He found it very exotic. One of the two stewardesses standing by poured India a cup of steaming coffee, in a Limoges cup with little blue stars on it. |
| 1438 |
Paul showed him which buttons to push, as the giant sails began to unfurl, and he set the genoa, then the staysail, followed by the huge mainsail, the fisherman staysail, and finally the mizzen at precisely the right angle. It took barely a minute for the sails to fill, and suddenly the enormous sailboat began moving. |
| 1439 |
And she hated me forever. She never forgave me. She felt I had ruined her life, and condemned her to a life of running after our son. She wasn't very maternal anyway. She never wanted more kids, and eventually she didn't want me either. The marriage fell apart in ugly ways that were very painful to us. |
| 1440 |
She felt as though they had known each other for ever. Two of the deckhands lowered the tender for them, and one of them stayed in it to take them to the yacht club. Paul got in first, and took India's hand as she got in, and Sam got in right behind her. They had an easy, happy lunch, talking about a variety of things. |
| 1441 |
And then, finally, when they headed back to Harwich, the wind had died down, and they decided to use the motors. Sam was a little disappointed, but he was tired after a full day anyway. It had been a long day, and he fell asleep as he lay quietly in the cockpit. Paul and India both smiled looking at him. |
| 1442 |
Paul loved watching her with him. It had been a long time since he had seen anyone as loving. Children hadn't been a part of his life in a long time, and sailing with Sam that afternoon and the day before was everything he wished he had shared with Sean, but Sean had never taken any interest in his father's sailboats. |
| 1443 |
Just telling Doug she wanted to go back to work would cause a hurricane in their marriage. She took a long walk down the beach the next day, thinking of all of it, with the dog at her heels, wondering what to do now. It would be easiest, it seemed, to retreat back into the life she'd led for fourteen years. |
| 1444 |
The next day was the Fourth of July. The kids slept late, and that afternoon, they went, as they always did, to the Parkers. The barbecue was in full swing, and all their neighbors were there. There were huge kegs of beer, and a long buffet table covered with the food the caterer had made this year. |
| 1445 |
She was every bit as glamorous and poised and magnetic as India had thought she would be. Just watching her make her way through the crowd was mesmerizing. She was wearing a short white skirt, a white halter top, a gold necklace, and high heeled white sandals. She looked right out of a magazine from Paris. |
| 1446 |
I look like death in the morning, and you'll need a good retoucher. A blowtorch will do fine. Anyway, I saw how good your work was. I can never get a decent shot of Paul and you got dozens when he wasn't even looking. Usually, he makes the most godawful faces and looks like he's about to kill someone. |
| 1447 |
Serena didn't seem in the least upset that India had been on the boat with Sam, and taken an indecent number of photographs of her husband. India was so relieved, she wanted to kiss her. Maybe he hadn't given away her secrets after all, at least she hoped not. Or maybe Serena felt too sorry for her to even care. |
| 1448 |
Two of them were playing volleyball nearby while she talked to Serena. India respected her honesty, but she also realized that they couldn't have been more different. Everything Serena was, she wasn't, and vice versa. India was far more down to earth and direct and without any kind of artifice or pretense. |
| 1449 |
She was anything but easygoing, and it didn't bother her in the least to be called difficult. She loved it. The only similarity they shared was that they were both very feminine, but in entirely different ways. India was soft in all the places Serena was hard, and strong in all the ways Serena wasn't. |
| 1450 |
He shook her hand politely, but he looked uncomfortable while he was talking to her, and it was obvious that Serena had no idea how to talk to children. She spoke to him as though he were a very short man, and the jokes she made in front of him fell on deaf ears. He had no idea whatsoever of their meaning. |
| 1451 |
Contrary to her warning the day before, India thought she looked fabulous, even at breakfast. She was wearing a starched white shirt, and immaculately pressed jeans, with rubber soled loafers, and her hair was combed to perfection. She wore it straight and long, and had pulled it back with an elastic. |
| 1452 |
She was a character, and it was easy to see why he liked her. She certainly wasn't boring. She was full of spice and vinegar, and wicked little stories about famous people. Who had said what and done what to whom. Listening to her all morning had been like listening to a gossip column about celebrities. |
| 1453 |
The pictures of Serena were fantastic. She looked gorgeous, and India was sure she would love them. There was even a nice one of her with Paul, when he came back from his ride in the dinghy. He was draped over the back of her chair, and they both looked very glamorous with the mast above and the ocean behind them. |
| 1454 |
The next few days flew by, and then finally Doug arrived for the weekend. It was nearly two weeks since she'd seen him. He seemed happy to see the kids, and he was tired after the long drive. And as he always did, he took a swim before dinner. All of the children were home for dinner that night so he could see them. |
| 1455 |
But they went back out to see their friends after dinner as soon as they could. They loved to play tag on the beach in the dark, and tell ghost stories, and visit each other's houses. The Cape was the perfect place for them, and as he watched them dash out the door, Doug smiled. He was happy to be there. |
| 1456 |
As long as she played the game the way he expected her to, it was fine. But with different needs, different ideas, different anything, it was unacceptable to him. He had made himself perfectly clear to her, clearer than he'd ever been, and she hated everything she was hearing. This was a lot worse than just boring. |
| 1457 |
He made no reference to what had happened the last time, and neither did India. But she had done a lot of thinking about her marriage, and she'd been tempted to call Raoul, her agent, to put her name at the top of the list for local work, but she had decided to wait until the end of the summer to call him. |
| 1458 |
But maybe it would do them good. She hoped so. She still couldn't believe he was willing to put their marriage on the line just because she wanted to do a few stories. It hardly seemed worth it. But she was also not willing to promise him that she wouldn't do them. That seemed too unfair to her. It all did. |
| 1459 |
It was as though they all sensed that something was wrong, although they didn't really know it. But children were like animals sometimes, without knowing things, they sensed them. She was lying in bed reading that night, when the phone rang. She wondered if it was Doug, calling to apologize for another lousy weekend. |
| 1460 |
Serena wouldn't have put up with Doug for five minutes, but she wouldn't have married him either. India had, and now she had to I've with it. But the thought of letting him threaten her depressed her. He wasn't giving her much to go on these days, no warmth, no understanding, no support and no affection. |
| 1461 |
Maybe now more than ever, with her husband threatening her. It was so rotten of him to do that. Paul hated to think of her wasting her talent, but he suspected easily that Doug was threatened. He didn't want India to have a more interesting life than he did. It would make his life seem meaningless and boring. |
| 1462 |
She didn't know what to say then. She was glad she had met him, and she valued the friendship he offered her. Enough not to jeopardize it, or say anything foolish she'd regret. But he didn't say anything more to her either. They both knew better. She thanked him for calling, and they hung up a moment later. |
| 1463 |
She was tired of the pretense that everything was all right between them. For the first time in seventeen years, it wasn't. The angry seeds that had been sown in June had grown into a tree whose branches had begun to choke them. And India didn't know whether to chop it down, or hope it would wither on its own. |
| 1464 |
If you're expecting a prize for this, or if you're expecting me to kiss your feet every time you pick the kids up at school, India, don't. I don't know what's gotten into you, but if you want to be a career woman, or a photographer floating all over the world, you're going to have to pay a price to do that. |
| 1465 |
Other women worked and traveled and still managed to take care of their children, and their kids didn't all end up in jail and on drugs as a result. It was Doug who wanted her there every moment, nailed to the floor, doing the job he had hired her on for, without offering her either compassion or love. |
| 1466 |
And as she stood there, thinking about it again, she knew it was hopeless. He was never going to come around, or agree to what she wanted. In fact, she had no choice, unless she was willing to give him up. And for now at any rate, that still seemed too high a price to pay for just a taste of freedom. |
| 1467 |
She made no announcement, she never told him she'd made up her mind. She just gave up. The dreams she had came at too high a price, and she knew it. She was very quiet that night at dinner, which was unlike her. She told the kids to pack their things the next day, and she did everything she had to, to close the house. |
| 1468 |
He wanted not only her heart, but her liver and her kidneys. It wasn't enough that she had given in to him, he wanted to drive home the point. Even though he knew he'd won. He wanted to be sure the subject would never come up again. He wanted to know he owned her. And more importantly, he wanted her to know it. |
| 1469 |
He tried caressing her for a little while, and she showed no reaction, and didn't turn toward him as she always had. And after a while, he stopped. They lay side by side in the dark, with a chasm between them the size of an ocean. It was an ocean of sorrow and pain and disappointment. He had defeated her, he had won. |
| 1470 |
All she had now was a job. She could cook for him, clean for him, drive for their children, and make sure they were warmly dressed in winter. She could ask him how his day had been at the office, when he wasn't too tired to answer. She could give him what she had promised him years before, for better or worse. |
| 1471 |
It had been the best trip they'd ever had. The two women didn't actually run into each other until the first day of school, and they finally met in the parking lot after Sam and Gail's twins had gone inside. But the moment Gail saw her, she could see that something terrible had happened to India that summer. |
| 1472 |
She had a lot of respect for her, and she was sorry to see her in such bad shape now, and she had no idea how to help her. She thought Doug was a fool, and an insensitive bastard, but if India wanted to stay married to him, there wasn't anything anyone could do about it to help her. She had to play the game his way. |
| 1473 |
She just had to put one foot in front of the other, and do just what Doug expected of her. And with that, India stood up. She had things to do at home. She hadn't even made their bed before breakfast. Lately she felt as though she had lead in her shoes, and everything seemed to take longer than usual. |
| 1474 |
But the call from Gibraltar hadn't been. He'd probably just been bored, or maybe lonely after the crossing. But he could have called Serena instead, and he didn't. India had turned it around in her head a number of times after he called her, wondering why he had, and finally decided it didn't matter. |
| 1475 |
But she felt better after seeing Gail, and unburdening herself to her. There wasn't much she could do to change her life right now. But at least talking to someone about it was something, and it had helped her. She picked the kids up after school, as usual, and took Jason and Aimee for their tennis lessons. |
| 1476 |
Serena may well have been difficult, and she may not have liked his boat, but she was an extraordinary woman and it had been obvious to Serena, as it was to everyone else, that he was crazy about her. The article said that she was fifty years old and was survived by her husband, Paul Ward, and a sister in Atlanta. |
| 1477 |
She felt as though she were moving underwater all afternoon. She just couldn't get over what had happened, and she still felt shell shocked when she picked up the children at school. She managed to get dinner on the table that night, but when Doug came home, she still hadn't combed her hair since that morning. |
| 1478 |
She had no idea what to do about it. It was easier to just sit there, grieving for Paul and Serena, instead of for herself and Doug and their crippled marriage. She took forever in the shower, and washed her hair, hoping he'd be asleep when she got out, but he was in bed reading a magazine when she got there. |
| 1479 |
And she lay there for hours, hating him, and wishing that she didn't. She knew that what she had said to him had been hurtful, but after everything he'd said and done to her, he deserved it. She closed her eyes finally, and tried to think of Paul, sending him good thoughts of sympathy and friendship. |
| 1480 |
She sat holding the paper in her hand for a long time, and she was still debating about it that night, when she and Doug went upstairs to bed. The atmosphere between them had been strained all week. There had been no way to erase the things they had said to each other three days before, and no way to forget them. |
| 1481 |
But she was free that afternoon, which ultimately made the decision simpler. The service was set for three o'clock, and at noon, she showered and put on the suit. She wound her long hair into a chignon, and put on a little makeup. She put on black stockings and high heels, and the suit looked well on her. |
| 1482 |
And a moment later, India saw a younger man, whom she assumed to be his son, join him. He looked just like him. There was no receiving line, and everyone was so upset, most of them disbanded very quickly and disappeared into the rain, as India watched the limousine that carried Paul drive away, and hailed a taxi. |
| 1483 |
But she had only gone there out of respect for both of them, and to give support to Paul. And maybe Doug was right, she could have done as much by thinking of him at home in her living room in Westport, but she had wanted to be here, and she was glad she had come. She stopped to call Doug from the station. |
| 1484 |
He seemed so devoid of emotion these days, so unable to empathize with her. She wondered if he had always been like that, and she had never noticed, or if he had gotten worse after their battles over the summer. Whatever it was, it left her feeling very lonely. But not as lonely as Paul, she was sure. |
| 1485 |
He had looked completely destroyed, and her heart had gone out to him as she watched him. All she could think about on the way home was Paul, and the conversations they'd had on the Sea Star. The rain had stopped finally when she got home, and the children were all there, and they looked happy to see her. |
| 1486 |
It was a far cry from the love she longed for, but this was all they had. She felt as though she were making friends with her fellow passengers on the Titanic. No matter how good the service was, they were still going to wind up at the bottom of the ocean. She had begun to feel that for a while now. |
| 1487 |
After their last round, he knew better. They were going to have to start small, with pizza and a movie. And after that, they could see what happened. He figured in time, with a little bit of attention, she'd come around. They went to sleep as they had for a long time now, without saying good night to each other. |
| 1488 |
He had wanted to thank her for coming, and for writing to him. But now that he was talking to her, he felt overwhelmed with emotion. He knew how kind she was, and her gentle ways, and reaching out to her somehow made him feel more vulnerable than he had in days. He still hadn't absorbed what had happened. |
| 1489 |
Whatever she felt for Paul, she had no intention of acting on it, or even letting Paul know, let alone her husband. She wasn't even sure herself exactly what she felt for him, and whatever it was, the affection she felt for him had chosen the path of friendship. And there was no reason for it ever to go any further. |
| 1490 |
If she had thought about it, she might have been flattered that he had expressed jealousy over Paul, but the way he expressed it was so offensive that it only made her angry. And what he had said to her was disgusting. Paul Ward was very certainly not her lover, and never would be. He was only a very good friend. |
| 1491 |
But what he had said to her that afternoon had doomed his efforts to failure. They scarcely said a word to each other while they ate. And the movie they went to was so depressing, India just sat and cried through the whole film, and she felt worse than ever when they got home, and Doug paid the sitter. |
| 1492 |
And she knew for sure that nothing was going to change now. Doug was who he was, and he had made himself clear about his expectations. All she had to do was continue to live with them. That was the hard part. She saw a lot of Gail at Sam's soccer games, and at parent meetings and dinners at the high school. |
| 1493 |
He had called her in September again, and twice in October so far. He always called at odd hours, usually when she was home alone, around dinnertime for him, and when he correctly assumed Doug would be at the office. He never said anything inappropriate, and so far he had always sounded desperately lonely. |
| 1494 |
He had even sounded a little drunk once, but Serena hadn't even been gone for two months, and India knew better than anyone how hard it was for him. The boat had been in Yugoslavia the last time he had called her, and he didn't sound as though he was having much fun, but he wasn't ready to come home yet either. |
| 1495 |
He had told her before that he and Serena had usually gone skiing in Switzerland for Christmas, and he had already vowed never to go to Saint Moritz again. He never wanted to see again the places he had been with her, never wanted to tread the same paths, or remember the dreams he had shared with her. |
| 1496 |
He always asked how things were going for her, and she was honest with him. She had made her peace with her situation, although she was no longer very happy. But she still refused to try rocking the boat again. She was satisfied, she claimed, taking pictures of her children, and Paul scolded her for it. |
| 1497 |
It's some kind of underground prostitution ring, somewhere in the West End, involving ten to fourteen year olds. It's an acute form of child abuse. And you'd be working with the police there. Whatever you get on it will run in all the international press, syndicated obviously. It could be a fabulous story. |
| 1498 |
She sat down on a stool to think about it, and then headed out to the market. She bought all the foods he liked best, and was going to make him a fabulous dinner that night. Even a little caviar. She was going to make all her specialties and his favorites, and serve him wine, and then they would talk. |
| 1499 |
But at least she could try it. Doug was thrilled when he came home that night, and saw what she was making. She had bought a Chateaubriand, and she was making his favorite pepper corn and mustard sauce, baked potatoes, French cut string beans, stuffed mushrooms, and smoked salmon with caviar to start with. |
| 1500 |
And then he turned and walked up the stairs and she heard the bedroom door slam. But she had done it. She had dared to reach out and grab what she wanted. She had never done it before, not with him, and she was terrified, and she felt fantastic. She realized now that he had been doing this to her for years. |
| 1501 |
But what she'd discovered seventeen years later was that it was actually worse losing herself, and she had almost done that. She didn't believe she'd lose him now, and if she did, she'd face it. But she hoped not. She waited awhile to go upstairs, and when she did, he was in bed, with the lights off. |
| 1502 |
But none of them had the reaction that Doug had thought they would about it. None of them felt abandoned or angry, or as though she was never coming back, as she had when her father went to Vietnam for six months, or equally terrifying places before that. This was pretty tame, and they all understood that. |
| 1503 |
But she refused to listen. She wasn't even sure what had finally changed, but she knew she couldn't live in a box anymore, the one he had built for her fourteen years before allowed her no wingspread. She knew better than anyone that she had to do this. No matter what it cost her. Not doing it would cost her even more. |
| 1504 |
And she picked up her suitcase and went out to the shuttle waiting to take her to the airport. It was a short ride, they stopped to pick several people up, and for the first time in years she felt independent. It was the first time she had gone anywhere without her children, and the feeling of freedom was overwhelming. |
| 1505 |
It seemed so unfair, and so unnecessary, and now when she thought about it, she wasn't angry, but sad. If he had let her go graciously, or let her grow over the years, it would have been so much kinder. But all Doug wanted was to control her, to make her do what he wanted. And thinking about it was depressing. |
| 1506 |
And as she came up the steps, she looked up and saw the extraordinary paintings all around and on the ceiling. It was a cross between Versailles and the Sistine Chapel. And there were at least four hundred people dancing, and almost the moment she walked in, she began shooting. It was easy to spot her subjects. |
| 1507 |
India took the last of her roll of film there, and then climbed into her car, and headed back to the city. They had gotten her a small room at Claridge's, which had been one of the promised perks of the job, and as she walked into the lobby with her camera, and her bag, she suddenly realized she was exhausted. |
| 1508 |
She could hardly wait to get undressed and into bed, and she was asleep almost the minute her head hit the pillow. She didn't stir until she heard the phone ringing, and she couldn't imagine why anyone would call her at that hour. But when she opened her eyes, she saw there was daylight streaming into the room. |
| 1509 |
She loved talking to him, and she hoped that one of these days she would see him. He was a terrific friend to her, even long distance. And for the rest of the afternoon, she was busy taking photographs of royals again. She had a great time, and she found that she knew one of the other photographers. |
| 1510 |
She was grateful it was the last one before the wedding. It was held in someone's home, a spectacular affair on Saint James's Place, with liveried footmen, a ballroom, and chandeliers that blazed with candles. And when she got home at midnight, she called the children. They were just sitting down to dinner. |
| 1511 |
They said that they'd had fun in Greenwich the day before, and they missed her, and on Saturday their father was taking them skating. But when India asked to say hello to him, he told the children to say he was busy. He was cooking dinner. He could have come to the phone easily, she always did while she was cooking. |
| 1512 |
They had both come a long way, over some hard places, since then. He more than she had. But her road hadn't been easy either. She was lying in bed in the dark, drifting off to sleep, when the phone rang again. She thought it might be the kids, or Doug, but it was Paul again, and she was surprised to hear his voice. |
| 1513 |
She called Paul at ten fifteen, and she had called the children just before that. They had just come back from skating and were drinking hot chocolate in the kitchen. And this time, when she asked for Doug, they said he was out, but she wasn't sure if she believed them. It was unlikely they'd be home with out him. |
| 1514 |
But Serena was so determined not to marry me, that I figured when I got her to say yes, I'd better nail her down without waiting another minute. She spent our entire wedding night telling me what she wasn't going to do for me, and how she was never going to be a proper wife, and telling me I would never own her. |
| 1515 |
There was never any talk of romance between them, and yet he talked to her sometimes like a husband. It was probably out of habit, she assumed, and because he missed Serena. He had never given India any real reason to think he was interested in her in that way, except for the fact that he kept calling. |
| 1516 |
India had taken hundreds of photographs of them, and the children. Most of the little girls didn't even speak English. They had been brought from the Middle East and other places, and had been sold by their parents. They were sent off to children's shelters and hospitals to be checked and healed and tended to. |
| 1517 |
And India knew it was going to make an incredible story, although it broke her heart to see them. She had carried one child out herself, a little girl of about Sam's age, with cigarette burns and whip marks all over her body. And she had cried piteously as India held her, and carried her to the ambulance. |
| 1518 |
And he wasn't sure yet if he was ready to see her. In fact, he was almost sure he wasn't. But he would have, if it would have helped her to forget the story. It was certainly a universe apart from the wedding. They stayed on the phone with each other for a long time, and the sun came up over London as they talked. |
| 1519 |
He felt as though he were there with her, and she was glad she had him to talk to. Doug would never have understood what she was feeling. Finally, he told her to get into a hot bath, try and get some sleep, and call him later. And after they spoke, he walked out on deck and looked out to sea, thinking of her. |
| 1520 |
And yet she knew she needed him now. He was like a drug she had become addicted to, without realizing how it had happened. But it had. They needed each other. More than either of them was willing to admit, or knew. But little by little, over time, and from a great distance, they were moving slowly toward each other. |
| 1521 |
But as she opened them again, she realized it was just one more question to which she had no answer. And on the Sea Star, thinking about her, and realizing how relieved he was that she was all right, Paul put his hands in his pockets with a thoughtful expression, and walked slowly back to his cabin. |
| 1522 |
And when India talked of her father and his work, it was obvious to Paul that she thought him a hero. But she was also well aware of what his constant absences had cost her. They had never been a real family, because he was always gone, which made her own family life now seem all that much more important. |
| 1523 |
But she also recognized that the strain his lifestyle and his work had put on them had challenged her parents' marriage. Her mother had never thought him quite the hero that she did, and a lot of the time she was very angry at him. And India knew that his long absences had caused her mother a lot of heartache. |
| 1524 |
She had finally finished the story, and she was leaving in the morning. She hadn't seen Paul while she'd been there, but in a way, she felt as though they'd spent the week together. They had discovered things about each other she had never said before, or dreamed about herself, or remotely guessed about him. |
| 1525 |
But she had rarely leaned on him herself, was leery of needing him too much, and although she'd been his closest friend, she was afraid of being too close to him or anyone, though Paul didn't seem to mind it. They had been partners, but she had never nurtured him or anyone the way India did with everyone around her. |
| 1526 |
If he did, he would have let her pursue her career, even helped her to do it. He would have cherished her, and supported her, and at least told her he loved her. Instead, he blackmailed and threatened her, and locked her up in an airless little box, for his own convenience. Paul had nothing but contempt for him. |
| 1527 |
She said she would find it incredibly boring. I know she didn't mean all that, but she would have handled this much better than I have. I think she was probably stronger than I am. But India knew he was strong too, he was just deeply attached to his wife, and the bonds were not easy to sever, not that he had to. |
| 1528 |
And in the meantime, with India, he could find a warm place to hide, a hand to hold, and a gentle soul to give him comfort. In the past week alone, he had come to need her more than he would have admitted. And the thought of not being able to call her whenever he wanted to now was beginning to upset him. |
| 1529 |
And innocent as it was, she knew she couldn't explain this to her husband. It was the first secret pact she had made with anyone, the first clandestine thing she'd ever done, and yet when she questioned herself about it, she knew that it was different than Gail meeting men in motels. This was different. |
| 1530 |
The inspectors she had worked with all week had invited her out, but she said she was too tired to go, and she was. She was happy staying in her hotel room and talking to Paul on the phone. And she was surprised the next morning when he called just before she left the hotel. She had just finished closing her suitcase. |
| 1531 |
And she suddenly wondered if they could do it. After spending so much time on the phone every day while she was there, she couldn't help wondering what it would be like not to talk to him for a few days. It made her feel lonely just thinking about it. She had to run to catch her plane then, and they hung up. |
| 1532 |
She sat staring out the window for a long time, thinking about him, and the things he had said, about himself, and Serena. He was so sure that he would never love anyone again, and a part of her didn't believe that. Another part of her wondered if he was in love with her. But that was foolish. They were only friends. |
| 1533 |
It was business as usual as she listened to them, and after ten minutes of celebrating her return, everyone went upstairs to do homework, call friends, or watch TV. By six o'clock it was as though she had never left them. She took her suitcase upstairs and sat on the bed, looking around her bedroom. |
| 1534 |
So had she. In an odd way, it made the trip seem completely unreal, and like a figment of her imagination. The only time it became a reality was when she saw Doug's face when he came home at seven. He looked like a storm cloud, and he barely managed to say hello to her before they sat down to dinner. |
| 1535 |
The babysitter had stayed to help her, and had left before Doug came in. They were having steak and mashed potatoes and string beans, and even the kitchen looked tidy, as India went to kiss him. She was still wearing her traveling clothes, black wool pants and a warm sweater so she wouldn't be cold on the plane. |
| 1536 |
Without saying another word to her, he picked up a magazine and started reading, and that was the end of the conversation. She had been dismissed. As far as Doug was concerned, it wasn't even worth discussing it with her. She unpacked her suitcase, went to bed, and wished she could have called Paul. |
| 1537 |
He seemed part of another lifetime, a distant dream that would never be a reality for her. He was a voice on the phone. And Doug was what she had to contend with, and live with. She took Sam to soccer the next day, and she and Doug successfully avoided speaking to each other for the rest of the weekend. |
| 1538 |
And on her way back from the city at four o'clock, she pulled out of the traffic and stopped at a gas station. She knew the Satcom number by heart, and had purchased twenty dollars in quarters at the airport the day before, for an opportunity like this one. A British voice answered briskly at the other end. |
| 1539 |
They were still in safe territory, but she wondered if they would stay there forever. Sometimes it was more than a little confusing sorting out her feelings. She was married to a man who didn't seem to care about her, and calling a man thousands of miles away from a phone booth, and worried about how he was sleeping. |
| 1540 |
They both hung up and stood rooted to the spot for a long moment, she thinking of what she was doing now, going to these lengths to speak to him, and he encouraging her to do it. And as they both walked away from their phones, they were equally confused, and equally happy to have spoken to each other. |
| 1541 |
And she dealt with Doug as best she could, though he hadn't warmed up to her again since before Thanksgiving, and there might as well have been a glass wall between them in their bedroom. They saw each other, but never touched, or even approached each other. They had become nothing more than roommates. |
| 1542 |
With a single gesture he was willing to throw away seventeen years of their marriage. But she had no idea what to do now to stop him, or change things. She just couldn't give up everything to please him. In the end, it would do just as much harm as what he was doing now. And she didn't entirely disagree with him. |
| 1543 |
The last six months had been a nightmare. He stomped down the stairs and out the front door without saying a word to her, or the children watching TV in the living room. And he slammed the door as hard as he could behind him. India looked out the window and saw him drive away, and she could see it had started snowing. |
| 1544 |
Tears rolled slowly down her cheeks as she picked up the magazine he had left on the floor. She sat down heavily in a chair, and looked at it, and realized as she did, that it was the best thing she'd ever done, and made the Harlem child abuse story look like a fairy tale in comparison. This one was brutal. |
| 1545 |
She felt as though a part of her had just been torn away, and she was left with a gaping wound now, no matter how unhappy he had made her. This wasn't going to be easy either. It might even have been easier to give up her career, and shrivel up and die inside, doing what he told her, she told herself. |
| 1546 |
He was sick of it on her behalf, wished he could say as much to Doug, and tell him never to come near her again. But he knew he had no right to do that. He took the tender out after a while, and went to the Cipriani, and found the magazine her photos were in. He stood and looked at them in the lobby. |
| 1547 |
She couldn't leave a seventeen year marriage for a vague fantasy she had about a man who swore he would never again have a woman in his life, and was determined to spend the rest of his life hiding on a sailboat. Whatever it was she had with Paul meant a great deal to her, but it was only a slim reed to hang on to. |
| 1548 |
But he had certainly made himself clear to her. He would not be at the end of the tunnel for her. He didn't want to be there. It was a taste of reality for her, and left her few illusions. It was not what she had been hoping for, whether she had faced it or not, but it was honest. Paul was always honest with her. |
| 1549 |
But it was something they both needed, and had too little of, except from each other. The words remained unsaid, but the gifts they had given each other, of time and caring and tenderness, spoke for themselves, whether or not they heard them, or chose to. She went back home after her call, with a heavy heart. |
| 1550 |
And in her heart of hearts, she knew he was right not to be that. She and Doug went to midnight mass, as they always did, and took all four children with them. And when they got home, she put the last presents under the tree, while Sam put out cookies for Santa, and carrots and salt for the reindeer. |
| 1551 |
What she didn't like was the continuing atmosphere of hostility between them. The cease fire between them was brief, and by that night, she could sense the tension increasing, when they retreated to their bedroom. And she was afraid that he was going to leave again now that Christmas was behind them. |
| 1552 |
She picked it up, praying it wasn't Paul, to make matters still worse, but it wasn't. It was Raoul, and he sounded excited. She told him she couldn't talk just now, but he insisted she had to, and she saw that Doug was watching, and she was afraid he would think it was Paul, so she let him tell her what he wanted. |
| 1553 |
And as painful as it was to realize, she knew it was something she had to face now. And as she saw it in his eyes, all the fight went out of her, and she turned and left him standing alone with their laundry. She grabbed her coat and went outside, and took a deep breath of the cold air, feeling it sear her lungs. |
| 1554 |
She just couldn't do it. She had to let him take it all from her, and leave her to stand alone naked. She had nothing but her children now, her camera, her life, her freedom. And the marriage she had cherished for so long, clung to and hung on to, and tried to fight for, was dead and gone. It was as dead as Serena. |
| 1555 |
It was the worst day in her life, and one she hated herself for. This was something she had never wanted to do to them, just as she had never wanted to lose her father. She knew it would change their lives, as it would hers, and yet at the same time, she knew that, because she loved them, they would survive it. |
| 1556 |
She stayed home and cried for five days after he left, mourning what she had had with him, and what she had lost. And sensing the distress she was in, Paul kept a discreet distance, and didn't call her. She finally called him a week after Doug had left, and talked to him for a long time about the children. |
| 1557 |
But from everything Doug said to her, she knew it was over. Part of her wanted it to be, wanted to get away from the constant agony of it, and part of her still mourned the good years they had had together. She knew it would take her a long time to get over it, just as it was taking Paul time to get over Serena. |
| 1558 |
But listening to her put Gail's own marriage into question. It hadn't been good for years, but she had never seriously thought about leaving her husband, even if she liked complaining about him. The weird part was that for India, everything had seemed fine, and then all of a sudden it wasn't. And it was over. |
| 1559 |
As scary as it was for her, and it had been, in a funny way, she knew it was what she wanted. And if nothing else, she had freedom. She had all the responsibility of the children, but she knew she could organize it so she could take some local assignments. Raoul sent her on one in Washington in February. |
| 1560 |
She had never worked, talked too much, had great legs, and was very pretty. Three of Gail's friends knew her and made a point to tell her everything so it would get back to India. They thought she should have the information. Paul still called her every day, and he was finally beginning to sound better. |
| 1561 |
And it indicated he hadn't entirely lost his perspective about her. But what also showed, each time they spoke, was how much he still loved her. He had been a huge support to India once Doug was gone, and he always said she was better off, and when she was down, he had trouble seeing why she missed him. |
| 1562 |
They were more like brother and sister. So she felt quite comfortable telling him about a man she had met at Sam's soccer game, who was so repulsive she had actually taken a picture of him. He was fat, bald, rude, chewed gum, picked his nose, had belched in her face, and then asked her for a date on Tuesday. |
| 1563 |
He promised to give her the details of his arrival later. And in Westport, India sat looking out the window for a long time, looking for a sign of spring. But there was none. The trees were still bare, the ground was bleak. But knowing he was coming back made her feel as though something ought to be in bloom again. |
| 1564 |
There were no prizes for despair, or tragedy, or loss, or courage. There was just more of the same. And now and then, some small flower peeking through the snow, to spur you on, and give you hope, and remind you of better days. To remind you that one day, after the winter, there would be spring, and eventually summer. |
| 1565 |
But for the moment, there was still no sign of it for her. There were long, lonely days, and nothing more to hang on to but his phone calls. And now he was coming home. But as she walked slowly upstairs with a smile, she told herself it meant nothing. But in spite of that, it would be good to see him. |
| 1566 |
But whatever his reason for calling her, she was happy to be there. She checked her watch repeatedly, and looked up at the board, to see if he'd arrived, wondering if he'd be delayed. And finally the notice to his flight was changed, and told her that he'd landed. But she knew it would still be a while. |
| 1567 |
She wasn't sure if they were from his flight, but finally she began to hear a flood of English accents, and knew this had to be the flight from London. And then suddenly, she panicked, wondering if she'd missed him. There was an enormous crowd in the terminal, and people were eddying all around her. |
| 1568 |
It wasn't extravagant, but it was acceptable, and it still left Doug enough to live on, and even remarry, if he chose to. He made fairly decent money. Not by Paul's standards, but by normal ones. And they had agreed to split their savings, which wasn't an enormous sum, but it gave her something to fall back on. |
| 1569 |
She knew about his dreams, and the trouble he had sleeping, although lately he said he was better. It was so odd to be sitting next to him now, after all their hours on the phone, for months and months, and all the secrets they had told each other. It was odder still putting the voice and the man together. |
| 1570 |
She had no idea what it meant yet, or how long he would be staying. And she thought it would be rude to ask him. Besides which, she was sure he had lots of other friends to see, and she had no idea how much time she'd be spending with him. Probably very little, and they'd be back to daily phone calls. |
| 1571 |
She knew exactly what he was thinking. She always did. And more importantly, what he was feeling. She was that way on the phone as well, and he had come to love her for it. She was a place he could always come to for comfort. And before turning the key in the lock again, he put his briefcase down and hugged her. |
| 1572 |
It was all very eclectic, and for some reason, reminded her enormously of Serena. Everything in the apartment seemed to have her stamp on it, her style, her force, her humor. There were photographs of her everywhere, from her book covers mostly, and there was a large portrait of her over the fireplace. |
| 1573 |
She wondered if he was going to move the painting eventually, or leave it there forever. It had a commanding presence, as she had. And then he walked into a smaller, paneled room, where his desk was, and set down his briefcase, as India followed. She was beginning to wonder if she was intruding, and should leave him. |
| 1574 |
That wasn't her style anyway, but she was also well aware that it was not her place to tell him what to do with his apartment. She was, as in all things, respectful of him, and he liked that. In all the months he'd talked to her, he had never felt threatened by her. Instead, she provided a safe haven for him. |
| 1575 |
Serena never set foot in it. They ate in restaurants, hired a caterer or a chef, or Paul cooked for her. In eleven years, she had never once cooked him dinner, and had been proud of it. India followed him through the dining room, with a huge antique table and silver everywhere, into the spartan black granite kitchen. |
| 1576 |
He explained what it was about, and told her something more about his business. And he asked her if she'd heard anything lately from Raoul. She hadn't mentioned him in a while, and he hadn't called her for any more assignments, which she said was just as well, since she didn't want to leave the children at the moment. |
| 1577 |
He didn't even have warm milk there to soothe him if he needed it, and on the way home, she worried about him. It was wonderful having him there, better even than talking to him on the phone, and if she'd let herself, she'd have allowed her thoughts to run wild about him, but she knew she couldn't do that. |
| 1578 |
There was a lot of traffic on the way into town, and she arrived ten minutes late, in the black suit, and new shoes, with her hair in a French twist again, and her only pair of pearl earrings. This was a new experience for her, getting dressed up at night, and driving herself into the city for dinner. |
| 1579 |
It was a liberty saying that to him, but she would have said it on the phone, and she was getting used to seeing him in person. It was nice finding him at the end of her day, dressing for dinner, and going out with him. She hadn't done that in a long time, and as she sipped her wine, he was smiling at her. |
| 1580 |
She liked his sense of humor, and his style, and she was as at ease with him now as she'd been on the phone. They had had a wonderful evening. And after dinner, they walked slowly back to the Carlyle. It was still early, and he asked her if she'd like to come up for a few minutes before she drove back to Westport. |
| 1581 |
In fact, they could do anything she wanted. The elevator stopped at nine, and he let her into a large, comfortable room that was handsomely decorated, though nothing like his apartment. It was predictably impersonal, but there were flowers everywhere, and a bar with everything they could have wanted. |
| 1582 |
India sat down on the couch, and Paul sat down next to her. He was still talking about the boat, and then he stopped and looked at her, and she felt the same electricity course through her that she had felt when she first met him. Aside from his obvious good looks, there was something irresistibly attractive about him. |
| 1583 |
All he could see were her eyes, the gentleness in them, and all he felt was what had grown between them in his months on the Sea Star. He said nothing more to her then, but leaned over very quietly, took her in his arms, and kissed her. And as she felt his lips on hers, she had the answers to all her questions. |
| 1584 |
And as she moaned softly in his arms, he brought her to places she had never known, and had only dimly realized she longed for. And when it was over, it was not an end, but a beginning. They lay quietly side by side for a long time, and then he kissed her again, and after a while she fell asleep beside him. |
| 1585 |
She always kept a piece of herself apart, as though to prove to him that he would never own her. The difference between them was that India gave herself to him completely. She opened herself to him, in all her warmth and vulnerability, and he felt as though he could disappear for a thousand years into all she gave him. |
| 1586 |
He felt safe with her, and together they shared an ecstasy that satisfied him completely. He stood in the shower with her, and then watched her dress, and then he put his own clothes on, as she looked at him, and smiled mysteriously. She was thinking that whoever had said it about him had been right. |
| 1587 |
And Paul and Jason had a very grown up conversation about sailing. Aimee cautiously flirted with him, trying out her skills; she was very pretty and looked a great deal like her mother. And only Jessica seemed to have reservations about him, and immediately after dinner, she went upstairs to do her homework. |
| 1588 |
And all he could think of was the perversity of God's sense of humor. At his age, the prospect of a woman with four children and a dog, and a house in Connecticut, was going to provide an interesting challenge. But she was also the most exciting woman he had ever slept with. That made up for something. |
| 1589 |
It was something to think about, realizing he hadn't fully considered the logistics of her situation, with everything from sitters to car pools. It had been a long time since he'd had to deal with that with Sean, who was thirty one. And he also remembered that Sean hadn't done much for his love life. |
| 1590 |
Thinking of him then reminded Paul that he was taking him to dinner that night. It meant he had a night off from the commute to Westport, and on Friday, India was spending the weekend with him in the city. They finished breakfast and got dressed, and she left with him, when he left the hotel to go to the office. |
| 1591 |
He dreamt of Serena all night, and airplanes exploding in midair. Twice he woke and heard her screaming at him about what he'd done, and then he heard her sobbing because he'd been unfaithful to her. And Paul felt ninety when he woke up in the morning. And one thing Sean had said had stuck in his mind like a cactus. |
| 1592 |
What if India got pregnant? The thought of it made him nauseous. And when she called him in the office that afternoon and left the message that she'd be at the hotel to meet him at five thirty, he had his secretary call back to say he'd be there. But the moment he saw her, he forgot his nightmares and Sean's warnings. |
| 1593 |
They loved all the same things, and she talked with great anticipation about their cruise together on the Sea Star. She shared all her dreams with him, and her fears, as she had on the phone, and by Sunday afternoon, he hated the idea of her leaving, but she had to pick up the children after dinner. |
| 1594 |
He couldn't bear to live through it. And when he called India, she sounded so sweet, and she was obviously concerned about him. He felt like a dead man himself when he left the hotel for the office. He had promised to go to Westport that night, but at six o'clock he called her and told her he couldn't. |
| 1595 |
After the months they'd shared on the phone, he knew her too well, knew how she thought and what she felt, and everything that she believed in. She believed in hope and dreams and honesty and loyalty and all the best of human emotions. She also believed in happy endings, and this one wasn't. It couldn't be. |
| 1596 |
She couldn't believe what he had done to her. It was worse than anything Doug had done. But the difference was she loved him, and she knew he loved her. As she drove home, she was so distraught, so racked with pain, that she never saw the car next to her move out of its lane and cut in front of her. |
| 1597 |
She bounced off the divider, and back again into another lane, as the car spun wildly around her and she hit her head on the steering wheel, and the car stopped finally. There was a salty taste in her mouth and there was blood everywhere, as someone opened the door, and she looked at them, and fainted. |
| 1598 |
She just wanted to go home, and die quietly, in her own bed, with her head under the covers. They left the hospital ten minutes later, with India wearing a blanket over her blood soaked clothes, and holding a metal bowl in case she threw up, which she did four times on the way home, as she continued to cry softly. |
| 1599 |
She tried to give her a cup of tea, but India didn't want it. She just lay there crying until she finally fell asleep at six o'clock in the morning. And when they got up, Gail explained to the children that their mother had had a little accident, but she was fine. She had bumped her head, and had a headache. |
| 1600 |
India was still sleeping. She left her a note, and went home to change, and promised to come back later. India woke up at noon, and begging herself not to, she dialed Paul anyway. She just wanted to hear his voice. She wasn't even sure he'd take it, and she wasn't going to tell him about the accident. |
| 1601 |
And he had done this to her. She had never seen India look like that before. She had only seen one other woman look this devastated, her own sister when she was twenty. She had committed suicide over the boy next door, and Gail had found her. It had been the tragedy of her life, and she would never forget it. |
| 1602 |
He was pleased with his handiwork when he checked her three weeks later. And the broken arm only took four weeks, and was her left arm, so she wasn't totally handicapped by it. The injury that gave her the most trouble was the whiplash, and she was still wearing a collar for it when Raoul called her in April. |
| 1603 |
He had a story for her in the city. A magazine was doing a story of the victim of a rape. It promised to be a sensational trial, and they needed photographs of it. She hesitated for two days, and then decided to take the story. She needed the distraction, and when India met her, she liked the woman. |
| 1604 |
The story took two days, and the only thing she didn't like about it was that they met at the Carlyle, and it reminded her of Paul, but other than that it went very well. And the pictures made a big splash when they were published a week later. She hadn't heard from Paul in a month by then, and she hadn't called him. |
| 1605 |
She still felt like she was in a daze a month after he had left her. It had been like getting everything she'd ever dreamed of, and then losing it. The only difference was that the model was visibly destroyed. The scars that India carried with her now were just as deep, but could not be seen. Only she could feel them. |
| 1606 |
She had to live with it now, along with her lost marriage. And for some reason, it hurt her more than losing Doug. It had hurt her more than anything ever had before, except losing her father. It was the death of hope at a time when she was already vulnerable and disappointed. But she knew this would heal in time. |
| 1607 |
The dream was gone. He had taken it with him, along with her heart and the love she had given him. And all she had left was the knowledge that he had loved her. No matter what he had said to her in the end, she still knew it was true. He had loved her, for a time, no matter how much he now denied it. |
| 1608 |
India took Gail out for her birthday every year. It was a tradition between them. India had finally bought a new car the day before, a brand new station wagon, and Gail was admiring it with her, when she looked at India strangely. There was a question she had wanted to ask her for two months, but she hadn't dared. |
| 1609 |
It was none of her business, she knew. But her curiosity had plagued her. And when they sat down to lunch, Gail asked her finally. India didn't answer for a long time, and then she sighed and looked away. And then finally, with a look of agony, she faced her. There was no point keeping the secret now. |
| 1610 |
And Gail could see easily now how wounded she was, far more than her scars or her broken arm, or still tender neck. The real wounds were deep inside, where no one could see them, or touch them. They had been left there by Paul, his final gift to her, and India was convinced they would take a lifetime to heal. |
| 1611 |
She had nothing to lose. All he could do was refuse her. She called Doug at his office, and told him about the story. She wanted to know if he would take care of the children while she was away. There was a long silence at the other end and then he asked her a question she hadn't expected, but it made sense. |
| 1612 |
She whistled when he told her. It didn't give her much time to get organized, but she knew what she had to do. She called Doug right back, and told him. He saw no problem with it, and she thanked him again. They were like strangers to each other now. It was hard to believe they had been married for seventeen years. |
| 1613 |
Their marriage had ended so abruptly and so completely. It made her wonder now how much he had ever cared, and how important she had really been to him. And she could only assume that Tanya was a lot better than she was at following his rules. She had never worked, India knew. Her husband was a doctor. |
| 1614 |
And for the next week she was sick. The shots made her violently sick to her stomach, and gave her a fever. But she was willing to do anything she had to, to make the trip and do the story. The night before she left, she took them all out to dinner, and they grudgingly agreed to be nice to Tanya, if they really had to. |
| 1615 |
But the only one who still slept with her from time to time was Sam. He was going to miss her. But she knew that, with Doug there, they'd be fine. Tanya had even called to tell her she'd take over her car pools, and it made India realize for the first time that she was probably going to stick around. |
| 1616 |
He could have wound up with some twenty two year old bimbo who hated the kids, and at least Tanya didn't. She seemed to be a good sport about them. They were moving in the day she left, and she had everything ready for them. Lists, and instructions, a week's worth of food in the refrigerator and the freezer. |
| 1617 |
She had left emergency numbers, in case they needed them, but she had warned everyone that she would be hard to reach. The field hospital had a radio of some kind, and messages to her would have to be relayed through there. More than anything, she knew it would be hard on the kids not to talk to her. |
| 1618 |
But at least she knew they were in good hands, and thanks to Doug and Tanya, they could stay home, and not have their lives disrupted. She called Gail before she left, and asked her to keep an eye on things, and Gail wished her luck. As much as she hated to see her go, she knew it would do her good. |
| 1619 |
And for all intents and purposes, she was, and felt it. Gail hoped that somehow the trip would bring her back. She would be so busy, and so far away, and so much at the opposite end of the world, that she wouldn't have anything to remind her of him. India started the first leg of the trip with a noon flight to London. |
| 1620 |
She left in blue jeans and hiking boots, with a down jacket, her old camera bag slung over her shoulder, and everything she was taking in one small tote bag. And as she left the house, she stopped for a minute, looked around, patted the dog, and prayed silently that everything would be all right till she got back. |
| 1621 |
They had to stop every half hour to fix the truck, or push other stalled vehicles out of die mud. She was becoming an expert with spark plugs and a jerry can by the time they were halfway there. They had assigned her a South African driver, and he had come with a New Zealander, who had been in the area for three years. |
| 1622 |
He was a good looking young guy, and it depressed her to realize he was probably half her age. In this part of the world, you had to be young to be willing to put up with the hardships. At forty four, she was practically an old lady compared to the other people on the team. But she was only staying for three weeks. |
| 1623 |
There was a mess tent behind the hospital, and after India brushed her teeth and washed her face and whatever else she could reach, she combed her hair and braided it, and headed there. It was a glorious morning, and it was already hot. She had left her down jacket in the tent, and she was starving. |
| 1624 |
There was an odd mixture of African food for the natives, and an unappetizing assortment of frozen food and powdered eggs for everyone else. Most people opted for a piece of fruit, and all she really needed was coffee, and then she was going to look up the list of people she had to see to get her story started. |
| 1625 |
There was something vaguely familiar about him. But he was wearing a flight jacket and a baseball cap, and she couldn't see his face. And it didn't matter anyway. She didn't know anyone here. She wondered if it was someone she knew from her old days of trekking around the world. Even that was unlikely. |
| 1626 |
There were too many risks attached to it, and most sane people were only too happy to trade it eventually for an office and a desk. She was still looking at them, when the New Zealander waved to her, and started walking toward her. And as he did, the three pilots followed. One of them was short and heavyset. |
| 1627 |
And as she left, he realized with a start, that she had a fresh scar running down one side of her face. He wanted to ask her about it but she'd already walked away. And as he went back to the others, he felt a familiar knife stab. But it wasn't Serena this time. It was India, and everything he still felt for her. |
| 1628 |
Neither of them could remove themselves. It was going to be a rough few weeks for her. And it was no easier for him. His heart ground to a stop every time he saw her. And she was everywhere. A dozen times a day, he found himself looking into her face. And every time he did, he felt even worse when their eyes met. |
| 1629 |
It was easy to see what he had done to her. And her lip trembled as she looked away. She didn't want to see him, didn't want to feel the things he had awoken in her, but they had been there since the first time they met, and she realized with chagrin now, that they still were and perhaps always would be. |
| 1630 |
It was all such a waste. He had wasted two lives, their happiness, their future. She wondered if that was why he had come here too. To escape. Just as she had come here to escape her memories of him. It was bittersweet irony that they had both come to the same place. God's little sense of humor hard at work again. |
| 1631 |
The only thing that had confused her was that, in March, he had changed his mind. But only for a few days. That brief moment was an aberration, a shattered dream, a time that would never come again. And whatever hope she had now, she knew she had to find for herself. And so did he. She could no longer give it to him. |
| 1632 |
He had preferred to close the door in her face, not to call her, or let her call him. And she had no intention of ever calling him again. But for the next three weeks, in whatever way she had to, she would be his friend. She held out her hand to shake his, but Paul refused, and kept his hand in his pocket. |
| 1633 |
He had also missed her desperately each and every day. And now, seeing her reopened all the same wounds. But he still belonged to Serena and he knew it. But he also knew that there was a lot of wisdom, and generosity of spirit, in what India had said. And now he had to absorb it, and decide how he felt about it. |
| 1634 |
The next day he went to Kinshasa for two days, and it was easier for her not to see him at the camp, and she concentrated on her work. She visited sick children and took photographs of them, and talked to orphans. She watched the doctors treat lepers with modern medicines that Paul had paid for and flown in. |
| 1635 |
And she saw deep into their souls, always looking at them with her camera. And by the time Paul came back, she had made a lot of friends, and seemed to feel a little better. On Friday night, the nurses gave a party, and they encouraged everyone to come, but India decided not to, since she was sure Paul would be there. |
| 1636 |
This wasn't a reprieve. It was just a visit, a glimpse of the past and what might have been. She slowly got out of her sleeping bag, and he saw that she still had her clothes on, a T shirt and jeans, and after checking her hiking boots for insects or snakes, she put them on and stood looking at him. |
| 1637 |
It was a beautiful night, and the sounds of Africa were all around them. Rwanda had its own special sights and smells. There were blossoms everywhere, and their heavy perfume was something India knew she would always remember. And there was always the smell of charcoal fires mixed with food in the camp. |
| 1638 |
But she found it very comforting, and good for the soul, and it was so familiar to her. The next day India was busy photographing some newly arrived orphans, and when she tried to talk to them in the little bit of Kinyarwanda dialect she'd learned, all of them laughed at her, and she laughed with them. |
| 1639 |
At least they had a little space from each other, which was rare here. For the past week, they had been constantly running into each other everywhere. And the next day, when she was getting dressed, there was a funny knock on the pole that supported her tent. She looked out the flap as she zipped up her jeans. |
| 1640 |
She had no idea what he was thinking. Probably about the supplies they were picking up, she told herself, as she picked up her camera, and hurried to the mess tent, which was a singularly appropriate name for it in this case. The food was the same every day. She knew she wouldn't gain weight on this trip. |
| 1641 |
And Paul hadn't either. They were both thinner than they had been before, but for other reasons. She grabbed a cup of coffee and drank it quickly, and a handful of damp crackers that tasted like they'd been there forever, and ran to meet him. He was standing with the black American pilot, whose name was Randy. |
| 1642 |
But they were background at least, and there was always a chance she could use them. She wasn't taking any chances. She shot everything she could get. And when Paul and Randy went to pick up supplies, she took photographs of them loading the plane, with the help of several Hutu in their native dress. |
| 1643 |
Paul had said very little to her since that morning. But at least he had invited her to come. It had been fascinating and she loved it. They headed back to their camp after they'd finished eating. It was only a short flight, and this time she just sat back quietly and looked out the window at the sights below. |
| 1644 |
At the time he had thought it was fun, and then afterward when he revisited it, he decided they had all hated him, and always would. In fact, it had only been Jessica who had been cool to him. The others had liked him. But he had chosen to repress that. And his son Sean's words hadn't fallen on deaf ears. |
| 1645 |
She wasn't in a hurry, and had been very kind to India. And at least the lines weren't down. It seemed like an absolute miracle when she heard the phone ringing in Westport. She had decided to call the house, for lack of a better idea where to call for information. She just hoped someone would be there. |
| 1646 |
Same old guilt. But it no longer hit her the way it used to. She had grown up in the past year, and although she still worried about her kids, Doug's hook on her had loosened. She no longer felt as guilty, except when something like this happened. And if it had been serious, she would have been devastated. |
| 1647 |
He has no right to do that to you. He has his own life and family, and he's not going to take care of you, or hold your hand or make you laugh, or worry about it if you have nightmares. I think he's jealous of you, and he wants to keep you locked in a closet, by yourself, and make sure that you're not too happy. |
| 1648 |
And she was even beginning to suspect, remembering things he had said to her, that there were things about her that Serena might never have measured up to. At least it was something to think of. He walked her slowly back to her tent, and then stopped and looked at her. It had been nice spending the day together. |
| 1649 |
She was glad their paths had crossed again. Maybe it was destiny. They had both come a long way since they met, and had come over arduous roads, and rough terrain. And she was finally beginning to see the sun coming up over the mountains. But she knew, after listening to him, that he still had a long journey ahead. |
| 1650 |
A final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place for her. She knew she still loved him, but she was able to let him go now. He flew her to Kigali himself the next day, instead of having to take the egg crate she had come in when she arrived. All she had to do now was catch a plane to Kampala, and then back to London. |
| 1651 |
He got back in his own plane then, and flew back to Cyangugu, and he had an odd feeling of peace as he thought about her. She didn't frighten him anymore, she didn't make him run away, and his feelings for her now, whatever they were, didn't even make him feel guilty. He just loved her, as a friend, a mother, a sister. |
| 1652 |
He knew he would miss the laughter he had shared with her, and the mischief in her eyes, and the raw outrage she expressed when she thought he had said something stupid. She was no longer hurt or angry at him or afraid of him. She wasn't desperate for him to love her anymore, nor did she expect anything from him. |
| 1653 |
She wasn't desperate for anything. She was a bird sailing through her own skies, and thinking of her that way made him feel strangely happy. And it was only when he got back to camp, and everyone was saying how much they would miss her, that he felt the full force of her absence. It hit him harder than he'd expected. |
| 1654 |
He walked past her tent later that day, and felt a physical ache as he realized he wouldn't see her. Suddenly, the distractions she had provided seemed more important than he'd realized. And in spite of the independence he claimed, he felt lost without her. Just being there without her caused him pain. |
| 1655 |
And that night, as he slept in the pilots' tent, he had the first nightmare he'd had in months. He dreamed that India was on a plane, and as he watched from the ground, it exploded in the air in a million pieces. And in his dream he looked everywhere for her, crying, sobbing, begging people to help him. |
| 1656 |
It was still a little hard for India to accept that she had been replaced so easily in Doug's eyes. It made her what she had always feared she was, or had been in the last year of their marriage, a generic wife who could be tossed out and traded for another. But she knew she didn't want to be married to Doug. |
| 1657 |
Herself. It was a piece of her life she knew she couldn't live without now. Having found it, she couldn't give that up for anyone, and knew she never should have in the first place. But her ego was still feeling a little bruised the next afternoon when she saw Gail at school, when she went to pick the kids up. |
| 1658 |
And in the fall, she said she was getting a face lift. Suddenly, everyone else's life seemed better to her than hers, and more settled, and like Noah's Ark, they all had someone they wanted to be with. All India had was her work, and her children. But it was more than some people had, she reminded herself finally. |
| 1659 |
And more than she had had a year before, when she and Doug were battling over her career, and his definition of marriage. Remembering her misery over that, and how lonely she had been married to him, brought it back into perspective. She was alone now, but not always lonely. In fact, most of the time, she wasn't. |
| 1660 |
The funny thing was, she didn't care as much now. She was getting used to climbing the mountains alone, doing things that mattered to her, and just being with her children. And whenever an assignment came up, she had her work to give her satisfaction. But she had no man to love her, and sometimes she missed that. |
| 1661 |
Over the hill, and useless. A fossil. They drove to Harwich the next day, and went through all the familiar rituals, opening the house, making the beds, checking the screens, and running across the street to see their friends. And that night as she lay in bed, India smiled as she listened to the ocean. |
| 1662 |
Thinking about it now was pointless. And as the weeks flew by, she realized that even alone there this year, with no husband to spend her weekends with, and no romance to look forward to, it was turning out to be the perfect summer. It was relaxed and easy and comfortable, and she loved being with her children. |
| 1663 |
But so far, Raoul had nothing. The oddest thing of all was remembering that only a year before, she and Doug had still been together, and doing constant battle. It seemed to her now as though they had been apart forever. It made her pensive to realize how lives changed, and how different things were. |
| 1664 |
So many lives had come and gone, and unexpectedly touched them. She wondered sometimes if Paul thought about the same things as she did. How things had changed in a year for both of them. Sam had taken sailing lessons in July, and loved them, and she had signed him up for a second session in August. |
| 1665 |
Hurricane Barbara was due in two days, and judging by the weather maps, they were directly on its path of promised destruction. The first one of the year so far, Hurricane Adam, had struck the Carolinas two weeks before and caused untold damage. And she hoped that this one wouldn't do the same to them. |
| 1666 |
And despite her reassurance to the children, she was actually a little worried. Doug called them, concerned, and gave her some helpful instructions. But basically, there wasn't much they could do. If it started to look too dangerous, and they were told to evacuate, she was going to drive them back to Westport. |
| 1667 |
Hurricane Barbara shifted just enough to unleash an incredible storm on them, but the eye of the storm was heading now toward Newport, Rhode Island. But in spite of that, the winds still managed to tear off their screens, destroy their trees, and do enough damage to the roof to cause a leak in the kitchen. |
| 1668 |
It rang again, and did the same thing, and she was sure that either some of the phone lines were down, or they were about to lose their power. And then, when she picked it up a third time, she heard a crackling on the line, and there was so much static she couldn't hear the voice on the other end clearly. |
| 1669 |
A storm window had just blown off her bedroom, and as she wrestled with it, wishing the kids were home to help her, the phone just went on ringing. She picked it up again, looking exasperated, and this time, along with the static, she could hear some words more clearly, but most of them were missing. |
| 1670 |
They were soaked to the skin, and she tried to wave him inside, but he was beckoning to her. He loved being out in the bad weather. She stuck her head out the door, fighting the wind, and shouted at him, but he was still too far away to hear her. The sky was so dark, it looked more like night than morning. |
| 1671 |
And as she held the slicker out to him, the wind blew it from her hands, and it flew away like a sheet of paper, as they watched it. But Sam was pointing out to sea, and saying something to her. And as her eyes followed the slicker floating into the sky, she saw something in the thick weather beyond it. |
| 1672 |
But whoever she was, her sails were full, and she almost looked as though she were sailing through the sky, with the speed of lightning and the wind behind her. India couldn't imagine Paul doing anything that crazy, sailing in a hurricane, even if he had been there. He was far too sensible a sailor. |
| 1673 |
But India stayed outside for another minute to watch the sailboat flying and rolling and pitching. There were huge waves pouring off her bow, and the masts were bobbing and dipping like toothpicks. The boat was still at a considerable distance from the shore, but she seemed to be heading right past them. |
| 1674 |
Were they telling her the storm was coming, which she already knew, or were they telling her something very different? The voice had said her name, but she couldn't recognize it, it was too disrupted and too broken, and then she knew as she looked at the boat again, and felt a hand squeeze her heart imperceptibly. |
| 1675 |
Only he would be crazy enough, and sailed well enough, to do this. And she knew suddenly with certainty that he had called her. But what was he doing? Instead of going back inside, she walked through the raging storm toward the water. And as she watched the boat, she saw it heading toward the yacht club. |
| 1676 |
He wouldn't do this, yet she knew he had as the boat stayed on a steady course, in spite of the heavy seas that fought her. She saw him pass the rocks on the point, and as the boat continued to battle the wind and waves, India watched it. Maybe he wasn't even on board, she told herself, so she wouldn't be disappointed. |
| 1677 |
He was standing on the deck in his foul weather gear, and there were two men with him. They were close enough to see now. She assumed the men with him were crew members, and they seemed to be moving with great speed, as he pointed to things and worked with them. But there was no doubt in her mind now it was Paul. |
| 1678 |
She stood as still as she could in the wind, her eyes never leaving him, and he waved at her. And as she squinted against the storm, she saw him smiling, and she lifted her arm and waved in answer. He was standing on deck, waving back at her, and in spite of her raincoat, she was soaked to the skin. |
| 1679 |
She didn't care if he disappointed her again, she just wanted to know now. She had to know why he had come here. She saw the whole crew come on deck then, and he stopped waving at her to give them more orders. They seemed to be struggling with things she couldn't see, and he furled their sails and turned on the motors. |
| 1680 |
But as she saw the tender approach, and saw him wrestling with it, she knew he was deadly serious about what he was doing. And she was terrified that he would capsize and drown as she watched him. It seemed like hours as he crossed the short distance to the steps of the yacht club, but it was only minutes. |
| 1681 |
And as he came closer still, she saw him watching her, as she ran down the steps to meet him. He threw the line to her and she caught and held it, as he jumped out of the tender and tied it to one of the rings. And then he took one long stride to the step where she stood, and looked at her intently. |
| 1682 |
It was like a voice calling to her from the distance. It was the voice of her dreams. The voice of hope. It was the bittersweet memory of what they had had and lost so quickly. She wanted to ask him what he was doing there, but she couldn't speak. She could only stand there looking at him, as he pulled her to him. |
| 1683 |
Often. But not always. And that irked him. More than that, it pained him. It was the cause for the lines beside his eyes, the sorrow one saw deep within him. It wasn't enough that he wrought miracles almost daily. He wanted more than that, better odds, he wanted to save them all, and there was no way he could. |
| 1684 |
He was questioning what she was thinking, feeling, who had spoken to her, who went with her. He wanted each of them to know what they were facing, how hard the team would work, how much they cared, how desperately they would all try to save each life. He wanted each patient to be ready to enter the battle with him. |
| 1685 |
Most of the time, Peter Hallam and his team did the big stuff, as they would tonight. Sally Block was a twenty two year old girl who had lived most of her adult life as an invalid, crippled by rheumatic fever as a child, and she had suffered through multiple valve replacements and a decade of medication. |
| 1686 |
Three other doctors and two residents did likewise as did a fleet of nurses. But Peter Hallam seemed not even to see them, as he walked into the operating room. His eyes immediately sought Sally, lying silent and still on the operating room table, her own eyes seemingly mesmerized by the bright lights above her. |
| 1687 |
She knew what to expect now, and their big moment had come. It was almost like giving birth. And he would be giving birth to her, almost as though she would spring from his very soul, from his fingertips as they fought to save her. The anesthetist moved closer to her head and searched Peter Hallam's eyes. |
| 1688 |
She hadn't even let him try. No matter what he said, or how hard he had tried to convince her. They had had a donor. But she had refused it. He had pounded the wall in her room that night, and driven home on the freeway at a hundred and fifteen. And when they picked him up for speeding, he didn't give a damn. |
| 1689 |
She was there a thousand times a day, as he left for work, as he walked in and out of patients' rooms, as he walked into surgery, or back out to his car in the late afternoon. And when he reached his front door, it was like a knife in his heart again every time he went home, knowing that she wouldn't be there. |
| 1690 |
She was alive. She had done well. She was going to live. He was going to do everything in his power to see to it. He sat at her bedside for another hour, watching her, and speaking to her whenever she came around, and he even won a small, weak smile from her before he left her shortly after one in the afternoon. |
| 1691 |
It was still difficult to believe that she wouldn't be there when he got home. When does one stop expecting to see her again, he had asked a friend six months before. When will I finally understand it? The pain he had come to know in the past year and a half had etched a certain vulnerability into his face. |
| 1692 |
As always, her entrance was timed to perfection. She had exactly one hundred seconds to go before they went on the air. One hundred seconds to glance at her notes again, watch the director's face to see if there was any last minute thing she should know, and count quietly to herself just to calm down. |
| 1693 |
She was nationally known, and had been for well over five years, not that it was what she had originally planned. She had been a political science major when she dropped out of school to give birth to twins at nineteen. But that seemed a lifetime ago. Television had been her life for years. That, and the twins. |
| 1694 |
Neighbors had started a special fund for Pattie Lou Jones, an endearing little black girl, and one's heart went out to her at once. And as the interview came to an end, Mel was amost sorry she had seen the film. It was just one more person to hurt for, to care about, and for whom one could do nothing at all. |
| 1695 |
In their estimation, she had been properly groomed, and they weren't far wrong. She was damn good. Powerful and interesting, and strong, and beautiful to watch on the air. She seemed to combine honesty with compassion and brains to such an extent that at times one actually forgot her striking looks. |
| 1696 |
At thirty, she broke her contract and moved to another show, and suddenly there she was. Sole anchor, delivering the evening news. The ratings soared and they hadn't stopped since. She had worked like a dog since then, and her reputation as a top newswoman was well deserved. What's more, she was well liked. |
| 1697 |
She was secure now. The hungry days were long gone, the juggling, the struggling, her parents would have been desperately proud, had they still been alive, and she wondered now and then what the twins' father thought, if he regretted what he'd done, if he even cared. She had never heard from him again. |
| 1698 |
He had known her for almost ten years. They had met while she was on the way up, and he had known then that he was watching a bright new star rise in the heavens of television news, but more than that, he cared about her, as a human being and a friend. He cared enough not to want to spoil what they had. |
| 1699 |
Once in a while she wondered what it would be like to get involved with him, but she knew it would spoil what they had, and they both wanted to avoid that. It was too good like this. And in the corridor outside her office, she looked up at him now, tired, but relieved to see his face at the end of a long day. |
| 1700 |
It was done in delicate flowered wallpaper and there was a white marble floor. From the moment one walked in, one sensed the friendly, elegant mood of the place, and from the bright colors, big bouquets of flowers, and touches of yellow and pastel everywhere, one had an instant feeling of good cheer. |
| 1701 |
It was elegant, but not too, chic but no so much so that one was afraid to sit down. It was a small house, but perfect for them, with the living room, dining room, and kitchen on the main floor, Mel's bedroom, study, and dressing room were one flight up, and above that were two big sunny bedrooms for the two girls. |
| 1702 |
She walked hurriedly up the stairs to the girls' rooms, faintly aware of an ache in her back. It had been a hell of a long day. She didn't stop in her own room, knowing already what would be there, a stack of mail she didn't want to see, mostly bills relating to the girls, and an assortment of other things. |
| 1703 |
It was only her second postoperative day, and it was still difficult to tell how she would do, but he had to admit to himself that he wasn't entirely pleased. She opened her eyes at last, and realized who he was, and she greeted him with a warm smile, as he pulled up a chair, sat down, and took her hand. |
| 1704 |
And then he went to make rounds, in each room, turning his full attention to the patient he saw, spending as much time as was needed to explain either surgical procedures that were going to be conducted soon, or what had already happened, what they felt, why they felt it, what the medications and steroids had done. |
| 1705 |
She was right; he sensed it in his gut. Her body was rejecting the donor's heart, and there was no reason why it should. It had been a good match. But he instinctively sensed that it came too late for her, and as he left the room, he had a sense of impending loss which weighed on him like a lead balloon. |
| 1706 |
She cringed inwardly at the thought, and understood again Peter Hallam's reaction to the term. She wondered too what it would be like to meet him, if he would be pleasant, easy to work with, or terribly egocentric. He didn't sound it on the phone, but she knew that most heart surgeons had that reputation. |
| 1707 |
Both of them respected her more for it, but neither of them envied what she did, or longed for the same career. Val thought she'd just like to get married, and Jess had her heart set on becoming a doctor. She went upstairs with them after dinner, packed her bag for the trip to the West Coast, and went to bed early. |
| 1708 |
The official interview would come later. But Mel found that she was grateful for the reprieve from the medical tension, and she went to her hotel and called the twins in New York, showered, changed, and walked the area around her hotel in the balmy spring air, her mind constantly returning to Peter Hall am. |
| 1709 |
He had opened himself up to an interview on network news, and as they sat in his cubicle on the sixth floor, a few minutes later, he looked with honesty at Mel and tried to explain to her the risks and dangers of transplants. He warned her that she might even come away from the story with negative feelings about them. |
| 1710 |
What we give them is a chance, and sometimes not a very good one at that. The risk is high, most of the time the odds are poor, but there is that chance, and the patient makes up his own mind. Some people just don't want to go through what they'd have to, and they opt not to take the chance. I respect that. |
| 1711 |
I'm not advocating transplant for all patients, that would be mad. But the fact is that for some it's ideal, and right now we will need to open new doors. We can't just operate with human heart donors, we need more than there are, so we're groping for new paths, and it's that process that the public resists. |
| 1712 |
Again and again, Melanie heard the names of the drugs given to heart transplant patients to allay rejection of the new heart. And she began to make a few notes herself, of questions she wanted to ask him when he had time, about the risks of these drugs, their effects on the patients' personalities and minds. |
| 1713 |
He didn't look much like a boy, he still looked tired and pale and a little wan, but after they left his room, Peter assured her that he was going to be fine, and they moved on to the next room, where suddenly Melanie felt a tug at her heart. She found herself staring down into the face of a little boy. |
| 1714 |
Given the odds and the circumstances surrounding these desperately sick people, everything was a risk or a threat or a problem. Danger lurked everywhere, within their own defeated bodies, even in the air. And infection was greatly to be feared, and almost impossible to avoid, in their weakened condition. |
| 1715 |
And what was even more real to her now was how poor the odds were. Peter answered some of her questions now, as they sat in his cubicle again. And as she looked at her watch, she was amazed to discover that it was almost noon. They had been doing rounds for four hours, had probably been to twenty rooms. |
| 1716 |
There was something more. There was a new bond of friendship between them now. He had bared his soul to her, and told her about Anne. And as a result, he felt suddenly freer than he had in a long time. He almost wanted to celebrate the lightness he felt in his heart, and Mel sensed his mood as she smiled at him. |
| 1717 |
Something about him reminded her of the instant openness she had felt when she met Grant, and yet she realized that she felt something more for this man. He was potentially enormously attractive to her, his strength, his gentleness, his vulnerability, his openness, his modesty combined with his enormous success. |
| 1718 |
End of story. And maybe in a month or so, they could do a more lengthy interview with Pattie Lou, as a follow up, about how she had felt, how she was doing by then. It was premature to think of that. The crux of the story could be done now, and it was going to be powerful stuff to show on the evening news. |
| 1719 |
The interview went very well, sketched out beforehand by Mel as she gobbled a sandwich and gulped a cup of tea. And at two o'clock they moved on, and were ready for Peter promptly at three. The office where he sat for the interview was lined with medical books on two walls, and paneled in a warm rose colored wood. |
| 1720 |
He presented well, and Mel instinctively knew that they had gotten exactly what she needed for the extended piece for the news. It was to be done as a fifteen minute special report, and she was excited now about seeing what they'd gotten on tape. Peter Hallam had been both eloquent and remarkably at ease. |
| 1721 |
She had cried and laughed, and then soberly explained what the child's life had been like for the past nine years. But if the surgery was as successful as he thought it would be, Peter's prognosis for her was very good. And viewers' hearts would undeniably go out to her as Mel's had, and Peter's too. |
| 1722 |
She already had a thick bandage on one arm, covering where they had had to cut down to reach her veins to take extensive amounts of blood, and the other arm was black and blue from an intravenous she had received only a few days before. And yet somehow one forgot about all that as one listened to her speak. |
| 1723 |
How could all these people be in such desperate need, and what was wrong with the world to strike all these people down, dying slowly with their weak hearts, while others dug ditches, climbed mountains, went dancing, skied? Why had they been so cheated, and while still so young. It didn't seem fair. |
| 1724 |
Although sometimes there was damn little he could do. Mel had wondered for days how he bore the burden of it. With so many lives with so little hope in his hands, and yet there was nothing dismal about the man. He seemed almost a vehicle of hope himself, and once again Melanie was aware of how much she admired him. |
| 1725 |
They had spent the whole day at the hospital and in the interview, he had operated on Pattie Lou, and suddenly they were talking about taking a swim, as though they'd done nothing else all day. It was mind boggling, and yet somehow everything seemed normal here. Maybe that was the way he survived it all, she thought. |
| 1726 |
It looked like a nice room to hang out in on a sunny day. And here suddenly, Melanie saw half a dozen pictures of Anne scattered around in silver frames, playing tennis, with Peter in a photograph in front of the Louvre, with a tiny baby, and one with all the children in front of the Christmas tree. |
| 1727 |
It was as though all at once everything stopped, and Melanie found herself mesmerized by her face, her blond hair, her big blue eyes. She was an attractive woman, with a long, lanky athletic frame. And in some ways she and Peter looked alike. In the photographs, she seemed like the perfect mate for him. |
| 1728 |
And here there was another smaller but equally formal sitting room done in soft blues. There were velvets and silks, and a marble fireplace, and wall sconces and a crystal chandelier, pale blue silk drapes with pale yellow and blue trim, tied back with narrow brass arms that allowed one a view of the pool. |
| 1729 |
And beyond that was a handsome library done in dark greens, which was obviously Peter's sitting room. There were walls and walls of books, a small mountain of chaos on the desk, and on one wall an oil portrait of Anne, and double French doors leading into their bedroom, which Peter now slept in alone. |
| 1730 |
She always did something to get him upset, to be rude to his friends, to make a point of not cooperating when there was no reason for her not to. Why, dammit, why? They were all unhappy that Anne had died, but why did she have to take it out on him? She had for the last year and a half, and she was worse now. |
| 1731 |
And Mark seemed like a bright easygoing boy of seventeen; there was a look of greater wisdom in his eyes than his years would suggest, and yet he seemed happy as he chatted with both Peter and Mel. He only got annoyed when Pam arrived and complained that his friends were still hanging around the pool. |
| 1732 |
And suddenly she wondered if she would go out with him on a date, if she had the chance. It was funny to think about, as they sat side by side at the pool. He was totally different from the other men she knew. The men she had chosen before were all ineligible in some subtle way. And she had liked it that way. |
| 1733 |
And at exactly that moment she happened to look up at the house, and saw Pam, standing almost hidden at her bedroom window, looking down at them. Their eyes met and held and then a moment later Pam disappeared. Melanie wondered why she didn't come back to the pool. It was almost as though she wanted to be left out. |
| 1734 |
And Mel couldn't decide if it was illusion created by working so closely side by side for two days or if it was real. There was no way to know, and by the next day she'd be gone. Maybe there was no harm in one dinner after all, and she was expected to stay. Peter looked down at her again and spoke softly to her. |
| 1735 |
She went back to the guest room, and changed her clothes, rinsed out the bathing suit and went upstairs to return it to Pam, her wet hair pulled back into a knot, and her face lightly tanned with only mascara and lipstick on. There weren't many women her age who looked as well with almost no makeup on. |
| 1736 |
Everything about her looked as though it needed some pep, some excitement, some joy. But Mel had a feeling that a woman could work wonders for the girl. Someone to love her and take her mother's place. The child was keening for Anne, and no matter how much she would resist someone new, it was what she needed most. |
| 1737 |
The brief filming of Pattie Lou in intensive care went smoothly the next day. Despite the surgery and the tubes, she already looked infinitely healthier than she had before, and Melanie was amazed. It was almost as though Peter had wrought a miracle cure, and she didn't let herself dwell on how long it would last. |
| 1738 |
They called the flight, and she waited for the first crush of passengers to get on board, and then picked up the briefcase and handbag she was carrying and got on line with her ticket and her boarding pass in her hand, and again she heard her name. But this time she was certain it was not her imagination. |
| 1739 |
The first thing she had to do was talk to the ground supervisor at the gate. She had done this before, and with any luck at all, they would hold the flight for five or ten minutes, which would give her time to call New York. She just hoped that she could reach someone of sufficient rank in New York to get clearance. |
| 1740 |
She turned away from Mel then and spoke into the small walkie talkie she carried as Mel ran back to the pay phone, and put the call on her credit card. They got her through to the newsroom right away but it took four precious minutes to find an assistant producer and a story editor, who conferred with Mel on the phone. |
| 1741 |
Melanie looked away when they made the first incision, but after that she was drawn to the intensity of the scene, and hour after hour she stood by and watched, praying silently for Marie's life, as they worked endlessly to replace her dying heart with the new one of the young woman who had died only hours before. |
| 1742 |
Mel almost shuddered at the thought, and Peter saw her grow pale, and without further ado, pushed her into the nearest chair. He'd seen the symptoms before, even before Mel herself knew she was growing faint. He gently pushed her head down toward her knees with his powerful hands and Mel was too surprised to speak. |
| 1743 |
Mel thanked her and looked around, starving and exhausted all at once, and longing for a hot bath, but too tired to do anything about any of it. She dropped her briefcase and her handbag beside the bed, wondering if she'd catch up with her suitcase again in New York, but right now she didn't really care. |
| 1744 |
She looked at her watch in shock, and jumped off the bed, but she suddenly realized there was nowhere she had to go. She wondered what Mrs. Hahn would think of her sleeping all day, and any minute the children would be home. And when she'd gone to sleep they had just been getting up to go to school. |
| 1745 |
The girls were disappointed that she hadn't come home that day, but she promised that the following morning she'd be there. And then she called the newsroom and told them that all was well. She reassured them that the transplant had been an enormous success, and they had gotten every moment of it on film. |
| 1746 |
He looked pale and tired, and she was sorry for him. There was so much for him to do here, as well, the children had such different needs, and his work used up so much of his energy and time. It was a wonder there was anything left for the children at all, but there was, whatever he could spare of himself at least. |
| 1747 |
And this time, there was no doubt in her mind. She was sad to leave, and sadder still to be going home. Tonight she didn't even try to convince herself that it wasn't true. She just sat staring out the window, thinking of him and the past four days, knowing that she liked him too much and it would get her nowhere. |
| 1748 |
It was a splendid town. And suddenly it wasn't so bad to be home again. This was where she belonged. It was her town. And as she smiled to herself, she noticed the driver watching her in his rearview mirror with a curious look. As she often did to strangers, she looked familiar to him, and he wasn't sure why. |
| 1749 |
Whatever she did, wherever she went, it was always so good to come home to them. And almost as soon as the thought crossed her mind, she found herself thinking of Pam in Los Angeles, and how different her life was from all this. How much she would have benefited from a life like the twins', and how lonely she was. |
| 1750 |
And suddenly she had an overwhelming urge to call the hospital and inquire about Marie, but she had to retreat back into her professional life now. She couldn't take on all their problems as though they were her own, Marie's heart, Peter's kids, Pam's empty, lonely life, little Matthew with the big blue eyes. |
| 1751 |
He was at the same time vulnerable and strong, humble and kind and yet so full of the miracles he wrought. It was a combination which, for Mel, had enormous appeal. She had always liked strong men, and yet too often she had shied away from them. It was easier to get involved with lesser lights than he. |
| 1752 |
It was just that her life had never been as full as his, but on the other hand maybe that had left her freer to support him. It was difficult to imagine a working wife, and yet he had always admired hard working teams, doctors married to other doctors, attorneys married to bankers, professors and scientists. |
| 1753 |
He just wished he could have been there with her, as crazy as the thought was. They were almost strangers to each other, although not nearly as much as they had been. They talked on for a little while, and then he had to go off to surgery, and Mel wanted to go to the network to watch them edit some more of her film. |
| 1754 |
The phone rang just as she was leaving the house the following Wednesday morning. She was in a hurry to get to Bloomingdale's. She desperately needed some more bathing suits, for the trip to Bermuda that week. She had looked over the ones from the summer before and they were all badly worn and stretched and faded. |
| 1755 |
It was tough at first, although it's a lot easier now, but not always. People resent it like hell when you make it. They're half glad, and half pissed. It's been interesting coping with that, and I think it's something a lot of women could relate to. It doesn't matter if you do what I do, or you do something else. |
| 1756 |
Mel's face was pale as she threw a ten dollar bill into the driver's hands and hurtled through the double doors leading into the network building. Everything was already in total chaos there from the lobby to the newsroom, and as she flew toward the bureau chief's desk, he looked at her with relief. |
| 1757 |
And Mel suddenly wondered what Peter Hallam knew about it that the press didn't, but she didn't have time to call before she went on the air. She went quickly to her desk then, and began ad libbing soberly into the camera as she went on beneath the hot lights and she delivered the news bulletins as they came on. |
| 1758 |
But she hoped for the President's sake that wouldn't happen. And she desperately wanted to see Peter in the next few days. She wondered if he'd known she was there. She woke up instantly when the operator called, all her senses alert, although her limbs ached and she felt as though she hadn't slept at all. |
| 1759 |
Mel let her speak, asked only a few questions, and assured her of the nation's prayers, and then miraculously was able to get a few moments later on with the President's surgeon. By six o'clock that night there was no additional news, and Mel was relieved by a local anchor, going on for the network. |
| 1760 |
But by then she was so wound up, she couldn't sleep when she reached her room. She lay in the dark, thinking of a thousand things, and suddenly she reached for the phone, and dialed a local number. Mrs. Hahn answered the phone, and without friendly preamble Mel asked for Peter, and he was on the line a moment later. |
| 1761 |
On Friday, Mel and the rest of the press crew spent a long anxious day in the lobby of Center City. There were half a dozen gofers assigned to bring them sandwiches and coffee, and periodically they went on the air to give their assorted news stations the latest bulletins on the President's condition. |
| 1762 |
But actually, you know, he was damn lucky. It could have been all over right away. In fact, from the X rays I saw it was damn close. He came within a hair of losing his life, or his mind, or at best his ability to ever move from the neck down. If the bullet had ricocheted a little differently than it did. |
| 1763 |
She headed for the shower after that. It was too early to even order coffee. And then she went downstairs to stand outside the hotel at twenty to six, feeling that she should have insisted the night before that Peter not pick her up. There was no reason for him to chauffeur her around. It was silly really. |
| 1764 |
And they enjoyed the dinner and the small talk, and she was amazed at how comfortable she was with him. He seemed interested in her work, and she already knew a great deal about his. It was a relaxing but stimulating conversation, and she sat back with her cup of coffee at the end, feeling content and sated. |
| 1765 |
And then half an hour later, Peter drove her back to her hotel, and dropped her outside, promising to be back at the same hour the following morning. And once again, she went inside and climbed into bed, but tonight it took her longer to fall asleep, and she was still awake when he called her half an hour later. |
| 1766 |
And Mel suspected that she had a crush on him. It was not an unnatural occurrence, given her dependence on the man, and the fact that he had saved her life by performing the transplant. But it was only when Peter himself came into the room a little while later, and blushed as he saw Mel, that she saw something more. |
| 1767 |
And she didn't see Peter again until he drove her back to the hotel that night. As she had the night before, she had a two hour break, and then she had to return to the hospital at eight o'clock to do a live report for the eleven o'clock news in New York. And it was on the way to dinner that she mentioned Marie to him. |
| 1768 |
She went back to her hotel alone in a cab, and she was surprised to find how much she missed him. She took a hot bath, and sat staring at the tile wall, sorry that she had questioned him about Marie. There had just been something in the woman's face when she said his name, and his tone with her had been so intimate. |
| 1769 |
A bulletin was due to be delivered on the air in three minutes. The President had just come off the critical list. When the news was announced, a cheer went up in the lobby. For most of the members of the press, it would mean that they would go home soon, and could stop camping in the lobby of Center City. |
| 1770 |
A response came back a little while later. The First Lady would grant Mel an exclusive interview at noon, in a private room on the third floor, which ruled out any hope of having lunch with Peter, but the interview went well and Mel was pleased, and that afternoon another encouraging bulletin was delivered. |
| 1771 |
He didn't even want to think of it as he undressed. And in her hotel room, Mel stood for a long time staring out the window, thinking of Peter, and the things they had said to each other in the past few days, and suddenly she felt an ache of loneliness well up in her, unlike any she had felt before. |
| 1772 |
At that precise moment, none of it was appealing, and she was still depressed when she went upstairs to change. The only thing that cheered her was when she saw Peter again, when he picked her up at seven thirty. He was wearing a dark gray flannel double breasted suit, and she had never seen him look as handsome. |
| 1773 |
And the headwaiter gave them a lovely table. Peter ordered their drinks, and the waiter brought the chalkboard to the table, showing them the menu. But Mel wasn't even hungry. All she wanted to do was talk and be near Peter, and she found herself wanting to cling to him numerous times during the evening. |
| 1774 |
She closed her eyes and felt her lips melt into his, and she felt as though her insides were flying through her ears. She was almost dizzy when he stopped and she clung to him for a long moment and then looked at him and let her fingers touch his face, and then his lips, as he kissed the tips of her fingers. |
| 1775 |
His condition was stable, but it was difficult to predict what might happen in the air. Nonetheless, he wanted to go back to Washington, and his physicians had approved the plan. Mel completed the interview and waited in the hallway, until forty five minutes later when the President appeared on a stretcher. |
| 1776 |
Mel fell into step at a respectful distance, and took another elevator to the lobby, where she joined up with the handful of other select reporters flying east on Air Force One. A separate limousine had been reserved for them, and she stepped into it with one glance back over her shoulder at Center City. |
| 1777 |
Other presidents had not been as lucky with assassination attempts as this one. There was the usual banter between them on the way to the airport, dirty jokes, exchanged bits of gossip and old news. No one ever gave anything away, but this was not as tense a trip as the one out had been for all of them. |
| 1778 |
Mel thought back to the week before, and to seeing Peter again for the first time. She wondered now when she would see him next. She couldn't imagine another opportunity presenting itself in the near future, and the realization of that depressed her. The reporter sitting next to her glanced her way again. |
| 1779 |
And how on earth was she going to concentrate on her work? She could barely think straight. She went home in a cab and let herself into the house. The girls were already in bed and Raquel had taken a few days off to make up for the previous week, and Mel sprawled out on the living room couch, thinking of her life. |
| 1780 |
But Grant reassured her when they went out that she had absolutely nothing to worry about, and Peter said the same when she confessed her concern to him. But nonetheless it had been on her mind, and now all of it could be packed up and put away for two months. She wouldn't think of work, or even Peter or Grant. |
| 1781 |
She was just going to Martha's Vineyard, to relax with her daughters. But not if they didn't come soon, she told herself as she waited in the front hall with Raquel, and then finally they came thundering down the stairs with assorted games and books and bags in their arms. Valerie was carrying an enormous stuffed bear. |
| 1782 |
Why was he calling? When would they see each other again? And finally, what was the point? He admitted to the same confusions as she, but they seemed unable to stop moving inexorably forward on this path toward an unseen goal that still frightened them both and that they did their best not to talk about. |
| 1783 |
It was as easy settling in as it was every year, and by nightfall the four of them looked and felt as though they had been there for a month. They had gotten pink cheeks from the few hours they spent on the beach that afternoon, they were unpacked, and the teddy bear was ensconced in the rocking chair in Val's room. |
| 1784 |
But they had only stayed for two days, and that was important. This time Mel said she'd be back on Friday afternoon, which meant four days away. They found it hard to believe that she was going, but she insisted that there was a problem with one of her features at work and she had to go back and watch them edit. |
| 1785 |
But there was a serious air about him, as he walked toward Mel and looked down at her where she stood, and then without further ado he bent to kiss her. They stood there for what seemed like a very long time as people eddied around them like a river cascading past rocks, and then he looked at her and smiled. |
| 1786 |
She hadn't expected him to be as bold, or herself to be as comfortable with it. But the endless conversations on the phone seemed to have given them an ease with each other they might otherwise not have had. They had only known each other for two months now, but it felt like two years, or twice that. |
| 1787 |
They sat at the kitchen table and talked for hours, as they had for weeks now on the phone, and it was almost two o'clock when they finally went back up and said good night outside Mel's room with another endless kiss, and then with a smile and a wave he disappeared up the stairs to her daughter's room. |
| 1788 |
He just put himself out there and held out a hand to her. As she brushed her teeth and took off her dress, she couldn't stop thinking of him and she slid into her bed, glad that he had stayed at the house. Apparently, they could handle it with ease, and she liked hearing him walking around upstairs. |
| 1789 |
He had never said that to any woman except Anne, and Mel had told herself for years that she never wanted to hear or say those words again. But this time it meant something to them both, and when he kissed her again she felt it sear her very soul, and she clung to him as though she would drown if she let go. |
| 1790 |
But she had to admit that in spite of her reservations about the trip, she was anxious to see him again, and Aspen would provide a golden opportunity, if she could convince the twins to leave Martha's Vineyard for a week or two. She frowned as she considered what she would tell them when she went back. |
| 1791 |
There was a potential which they both sensed, which still frightened them both, but Peter was bravest about pointing to it, and now he suddenly wanted to know where Mel stood, but he didn't want to scare her off. Maybe it was too soon to be asking these questions. She sensed his concern and leaned toward him. |
| 1792 |
The place was mobbed and Mel knew half the people there, even though most of the people she knew left town for the weekend in summer. One instantly sensed how much a part of her life this was; the celebrities whom she knew and who knew her, the recognition, and the whole electricity of New York seemed to suit her. |
| 1793 |
If Anne had been alive, she would have forced her to come back and clean up the mess, but he didn't have the heart to do that to her. She was a child without a mother. Instead, he sat in the dining room, staring at his plate, and then a few moments later, he left the room and closed himself in his den. |
| 1794 |
He couldn't keep up with them all these days and he was still unnerved by Pam's reaction the night before. She had yet to emerge from her room, and the door had been locked when he tried it the night before and there had been no answer when he called her name. He decided to leave her alone to cool off for a day. |
| 1795 |
But then Matthew reclaimed his attention as they landed, and they had to run to change planes, and catch the flight to Aspen. It was a short bumpy ride over the mountains and they made a spectacular landing, dipping in between the mountains to the tiny airport filled with Lear jets and small private planes. |
| 1796 |
And Val had dutifully agreed on the flight to Denver, but by the time they were all cooking dinner that night, and she and Mark were in charge of the salad and the baked potatoes, Mel was beginning to lose hope of dashing a potential romance. She only hoped they'd get good and tired of each other in the next two weeks. |
| 1797 |
She seemed like a very special girl, and he remembered much of what Mel had said about her. It was funny to see them now after hearing so much about them, but they were very much as Mel had described, especially Val, whom one could almost imagine as a centerfold in Playboy, instead of a junior in high school. |
| 1798 |
It felt so good just to be together again, and there was something nice about seeing their children together, no matter what horrors Mel predicted. They returned at last to the condo, happy, relaxed, tired from their trip and from settling in, and everyone went to their assigned rooms, apparently without problem. |
| 1799 |
Their bodies blended in exquisite pleasure for hours, and then, reluctantly, he left her. She tiptoed to the door to kiss him good night and watched him pad softly down the hall. And there was no sound from the children's rooms. They were all sound asleep, and she couldn't remember ever being so happy. |
| 1800 |
We've talked about a lot of stuff, and she opens up a lot sometimes, and other times she's all locked up. I think she really misses her mother. Maybe more than the others. Mark is older, and Matthew was pretty little when she died, but Pam feels ripped off. She gets angry at her father sometimes about it. |
| 1801 |
They all sat by the fire until late that night, even Matt, who finally fell asleep on Jessica's lap, and she put him in his bed with Pam's help. And when they all parted at last that night, it was with regret to end their happy time, and Mel and Peter lay awake for hours that night, both of them sad to be leaving. |
| 1802 |
And they had spent hours trying to work out the sleeping arrangements. They had finally decided that Mark would sleep on a sleeping bag on the living room couch. Pam would sleep on a rollaway bed in the twins' room, Matt would sleep in the twin bed in Raquel's, and when he came, Peter would have the guest room. |
| 1803 |
The boy Val had discovered at the beginning of the summer no longer held an interest for her, and there were half a dozen madly in love with Jess, who wouldn't give any of them the time of day. One or two of them thought Pam a remarkably attractive girl, and no one could believe she was only fourteen. |
| 1804 |
A young woman came in with rejection of the transplant that had been done four months before, and a severe infection. Mel heard the news with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, but she didn't press Peter about the trip, or urge him to leave the woman in the care of his very capable colleagues. |
| 1805 |
He had longed for that kind of security for years, without actually understanding what was missing. And Peter chuckled at Raquel, who obviously approved of him and spent a lot of time telling him how lucky he was to have Mel, how all she'd needed was a good man, and what she needed now was to get married. |
| 1806 |
She could leave the twins more easily than he could leave his patients, and sometimes she could bring them too. And as though to illustrate the point, he got a call late Sunday night. One of his old transplant patients had had a major heart attack, and he gave all the suggestions he could over the phone. |
| 1807 |
Suddenly in the last month he had come to feel that he couldn't live without her. He knew that was crazy, but it was how he felt. He needed her near him to share the joys and burdens of his daily life, the funny things said by Matt, the patients who died, the tears shed by Pam, the beauty, the traumas, all of it. |
| 1808 |
He had finally found the woman he wanted and he couldn't have her, not because another man did, but because a network thought they owned her, and worse yet, she liked it. And yet he knew that she loved him. It was a lousy situation, but he hoped that in time something would happen to resolve it. He smiled to himself. |
| 1809 |
It had been three and a half weeks since she'd seen him, but she just hadn't been able to come out sooner, no matter how lonely she'd been for him. And she was. There had been one emergency at the station, Jessica had gotten sick, and it had taken more time than she had thought to reorganize their life in the fall. |
| 1810 |
They were both trapped by their jobs and their lives and their children. It was crazy, it was almost like being married to separate people, and they had to take what they could while they could get it. Mel didn't even see his children again until Sunday afternoon, the night before she took the red eye. |
| 1811 |
The network was still stalling on the contract, hoping she'd give up some of what she wanted. But he reminded Mel that she didn't have to, that they'd probably give in to her demands, and if they didn't, a dozen other offers would come in a matter of moments, if she even hinted that she was open to offers. |
| 1812 |
Peter could see just from the nervous way she walked off the plane that it was all getting to her, but they would have four days together now, and he hoped she would unwind. He just prayed that the President didn't get shot and no one needed a heart transplant over Thanksgiving. And his prayers were aswered. |
| 1813 |
There were ten people in the room, and Mel was the last to arrive, dressed in a black Dior suit, with a mink coat over her arm and a black hat with a veil, which suited her humor. She looked like a widow in an old movie, going to the reading of a will. She made a dramatic entrance and the network men seemed pleased. |
| 1814 |
She cast smiles around the room like rice at a wedding, and sat down with a look at George, who nodded. He could hardly wait to call the press and announce this one. It was a knock out contract for Mel and everyone in the room knew it, including Mel herself. She glanced over the conditions, pen in hand. |
| 1815 |
The network officials had already signed it, and all that was missing was her signature on the dotted line. She picked up her pen, and held it, feeling her palms damp, her face grow white, as suddenly she seemed to see Peter's face before her. She stopped, silent, pale, thinking, and looked at George. |
| 1816 |
And when Mel put the house on the market, she thought it would kill her. It sold on the first weekend, and when she got word, she sat down on the stairs and cried. Everything was happening much too quickly. And only Raquel seemed to know what was going on, as she packed endless boxes for California. |
| 1817 |
And she cried as she put down her mike, and walked out of the studio, and outside Grant was waiting. He hugged her, and she cried in his arms, and he shook his head, like an astonished father, but he was proud of her too. She had done something good for herself, and he was glad. Peter Hallam was a fine man. |
| 1818 |
They stood on the sidewalk side by side, Raquel in the new coat they had bought her as a Christmas gift that she had decided to open early this year, and Mel walked toward the cab. Mel had also given her a check that would tide her over for a month or two, and a reference that would win her any job. |
| 1819 |
The lines had been drawn. Peter and Mel lingered downstairs for a while, talking about their wedding day. It had been a lovely party and they'd had a good time. He poured her another glass of champagne from his bar, some Cristal he had saved, and he toasted her as the clock on the mantelpiece chimed. |
| 1820 |
And then, as Mel looked around at her new home, she realized that there were still all the same pictures of Anne around, and one oil portrait over a narrow French table. Peter noticed her looking at the photos of Anne, and he tensed for a moment, wondering if she would say something. But she didn't. |
| 1821 |
When the children came to say good night a while later, she didn't say anything, not wanting to upset them. She said only that he'd gone to the hospital to check on a patient. But once they'd left the room again, she found herself thinking about Marie, and praying for her. Peter never called to give her any news. |
| 1822 |
Otherwise they would have to cancel it. She didn't want to leave without him. This was their honeymoon. She felt him slip into bed beside her just after five o'clock, and when she reached out to him he felt distant and stiff. It was so unlike him that she opened an eye, and then moved closer to him. |
| 1823 |
And Mark was right. They landed in Puerto Vallarta and piled into two Jeeps to take them to their hotel where they had three rooms reserved, which looked out over the beach and water. There was an enormous open air bar downstairs just below their windows, and three swimming pools filled with laughing, shouting people. |
| 1824 |
And suddenly she realized that she didn't even have her own home to return to when the trip was over. She suddenly missed the house in New York more than ever, and thinking of it reminded her of the photographs of Anne she wanted to put away when they returned. And she wondered what Peter would do with her portrait. |
| 1825 |
Matt was asleep in his bed with a noisemaker beside him. He wanted someone to wake him up a midnight so he could blow his horn, but Mel correctly assumed that there would be no one awake in the house by midnight to wake him up. She was half tempted to wait up for Mark and the twins but she and Peter were exhausted. |
| 1826 |
And then she remembered, as she saw the photographs of Anne in the silver frames. She began gathering them up one by one, there was a grand total of twenty three, and she put them all in a drawer in Peter's study, and as she crossed the living room with the last batch in her arms, she saw Pam standing in the doorway. |
| 1827 |
She spent the entire afternoon familiarizing herself with the people who came and went, the features and interviews recently done. She had a glass of wine with the producer and his crew, and at five thirty Paul Stevens arrived. The producer introduced them at once, and Mel smiled as they shook hands. |
| 1828 |
Maybe all she could do was ignore the man, but the following night, he was rude to her as she came on the set, and despite his charm while they were on the air, she had the feeling that he would have liked to punch her out when they went off. It was really an untenable way to work, and not what she was used to at all. |
| 1829 |
But she submitted her list of possible interviews to the producer that night, and he loved almost all of them, which was both good news and bad. It meant that she would be working overtime for the next month or two, but maybe that was one way to settle in. It was always strange working for a network at first. |
| 1830 |
She stayed noticeably away from Mark, and Jess kept her distance from her, and after a while, Peter went to his older son and gave him twenty dollars and told him to take the others to the cafeteria and get something to eat. Mark nodded and left, with the rest of the group in tow, but none of them were hungry. |
| 1831 |
She felt terrible about having done away with an unborn child, but she had decided that having a baby at sixteen would have ruined her life and Mel couldn't disagree with her. It would have changed her whole life, and forced her into a lasting relationship with Mark, which may not have been what she would want later. |
| 1832 |
But it was depressing to hear the gossip he had circulated about her, and to hear the trouble he had tried to create, by claiming she was hailed as a royal bitch in New York, and everyone there had hated her guts, that she had screwed her way to the top, and any other bit of filth he could think of. |
| 1833 |
And she was out shopping with Matt one day when she actually had to sit down and catch her breath. She was so dizzy and nauseous that she thought she was going to faint in Safeway. She made him promise not to tell his father, but he was so upset he told Jess, who immediately told Peter when he came home. |
| 1834 |
But neither of them was prepared for the news they got the next day. Mel forgot to call Dr. Jones before she left for work, and there was a message for her to call him at home when she got in. Peter saw the message first and called Sam himself, but his old colleague and friend would say nothing at all to him. |
| 1835 |
They talked about it that night for hours, and he kissed her tenderly the next morning before he left. But when she went down to breakfast and saw Matt and Pam and the twins, she felt as though she had ventured into the enemy camp. She looked around at them and felt despair wash over her. They would never adjust. |
| 1836 |
They called Mel four times in as many weeks that Pam had disappeared before her second class, and when she questioned the child about it, she shrugged and went upstairs and locked her door. And her final act of viciousness was to hang her mother's portrait boldly over the bed in Mel and Peter's room. |
| 1837 |
At five o'clock, she sauntered in with a grin on her face, amused that Mel had waited for her all day long, and when Mel took a good look at her, she could see that the girl was stoned. She sent her to her room after confronting her, then left for the newsroom. Later, she told Peter what she thought. |
| 1838 |
And the result of that was that Mel had to almost drag her there four times a week, break her neck to get to work, and run home again at night, trying to pay some attention to Matt and the twins. And all she wanted to do was sleep, between throwing up the heavy meals persistently prepared by Mrs. Hahn. |
| 1839 |
Those kids, all of them, damn well better behave, and you'd better stop treating Pam like a little wilting flower with a head of glass or she's going to wind up a junkie or some other crazy thing by the time she's sixteen. There's nothing wrong with that kid that a whole lot of discipline won't cure. |
| 1840 |
Your kids still have their own rooms, own house, pictures of their mom everywhere, their housekeeper, their dad. The only inconvenience is that now they have to put up with me. Well, if any of you expect me to stick around, maybe you'd all better start thinking about what changes you're going to make. |
| 1841 |
They had played a part in it too. They were all responsible for how she felt. He wouldn't take the blame alone, although he realized now that a good part of it was his. He had been so damn stubborn about the house, about everything. She had made all the changes required for their new life, and he had made none. |
| 1842 |
All she wanted to do was get away, from her house, her job, their kids, and him. And for the first fifty miles, all she thought of was where she was leaving from, not where she was going to. But after that, she began to relax, and suddenly after almost two hours, she stopped for gas, and grinned to herself. |
| 1843 |
She had never done anything quite as outrageous in her life, as she had done in walking out on him. But she couldn't take anymore. Everyone was pushing her, and it was time she thought of herself instead of all of them. Even as far as this baby was concerned. She didn't have to do a damn thing she didn't want to do. |
| 1844 |
His children hadn't been moved out of their home. He even had the same housekeeper. The only thing that had changed for him was the face he kissed before he left the house for work, and maybe he didn't even notice that. And as Mel pulled into Santa Barbara, she began to steam again, and she was glad she'd left. |
| 1845 |
To hell with them. She didn't care. She pulled into a motel and paid for a room, which looked like it could have been anywhere in the world, from Beirut to New Orleans, when she glanced at the rust colored shag rug on the floor, the orange vinyl chairs, the spotless white tile bathroom, the rust colored bedspread. |
| 1846 |
She lay a hand on her stomach, which had been so flat a month before, and now there was a small but distinct bulge where the hollow between her hip bones had been. And it was odd to think what would happen if she went on with the pregnancy. The baby would become real to her, she would feel it move in about six weeks. |
| 1847 |
Suddenly it was difficult to exorcise them all from her life. Her anger now was directed more at the twins, at Jess for expecting too much of her, for expecting her to be there for everyone and especially for her, at Val for resenting this baby in her mother's life because she hadn't been able to have her own. |
| 1848 |
She owed them more than that. But how much more did she have to give? No more than she had already given them, that was the tragedy of it, and it wasn't enough, she knew. And now there was one more pair of eyes to look into hers one day and tell her that she didn't have enough to give to him, or her. |
| 1849 |
She wanted her own mother back. But she understood now that that was never going to be. It was either Mel or this incredible emptiness, the same way it had been when her mom was first gone, with only Mrs. Hahn there for them, and suddenly Pam knew that wasn't what she wanted, for them, or for herself. |
| 1850 |
They hadn't gotten a heart in time, and had had to put a child's heart piggyback with her own. Sometimes the technique had worked well for him, but Iris had been so frail, in her case it had been a desperate move, and he had been expecting the worst for days. And this time, Mel wouldn't be there for him. |
| 1851 |
It didn't seem so awful now. She liked their school, and she had met a nice boy a month or so before. For the first time in her life, she had met someone she really cared about. He was twenty one, and she had a feeling that her mom was going to have a fit, especially after what had happened with Val and Mark. |
| 1852 |
Pam's hostility and ploys for attention for herself, even poor little Matt's hurt, and Peter's expectation that she would have the baby in spite of it all, as an antidote to his constant bouts with death in the operating room. It all seemed terribly unfair. She had to have it, or not have it, for all of them. |
| 1853 |
She ordered room service that night, had a hot bath, and watched a couple of hours of TV. She didn't feel like going out. There was nowhere she wanted to go, and at eleven o'clock, before the news came on, she dialed, got a long distance line, and held the phone in her hand for a long time. Maybe Raquel was right. |
| 1854 |
As she stood at the gate waiting for him, Mel felt the dampness in her palms, and the same nervousness she had felt a year before. It was like starting all over again, except that it would be better this time. He was the third one off the plane and she flew into his arms. It had been an endless week. |
| 1855 |
It was just something they had to live with for a little while. Matt thought it was fabulous, Mark was embarrassed to have to take a bodyguard to college with him, and the girls looked terrified. But as they each left for school with the policeman assigned to the task, Mrs. Hahn sought Mel out upstairs. |
| 1856 |
Suddenly all she wanted to do was run away again. She had lived with the nightmare for a month and she couldn't stand it anymore. She went to work that afternoon, and sat at her desk, her bodyguard just outside the room, and suddenly she looked up and saw the producer staring down at her with a smile. |
| 1857 |
She wanted to go to Martha's Vineyard and lie in the hot sand, but all the kids had other plans by then, Peter was tied up with his work, and she had agreed to forfeit her vacation that year, and take maternity leave instead. The baby was due around Thanksgiving, and she was leaving work on October first. |
| 1858 |
The baby felt huge now. Peter had teased her for the past two months that it was twins again, but the doctor swore that it was not. He could only hear one heart this time, and despite her age, she had opted not to have the amniotic fluid test, so they had no idea what the baby was. But whatever it was, it was large. |
| 1859 |
Mel said she wanted to push, and the obstetrician said it was too soon, but when he looked again, he saw that things had progressed by leaps and bounds in the last half hour, and he had her wheeled into the delivery room, where she turned red faced and pushed ferociously as Peter and the nurses urged her on. |
| 1860 |
It was so damn picturesque. So pretty. Everything was pretty here. It was a storybook life in a storybook town, and the people around her seemed like storybook people. They were exactly what she had never wanted to become, and now she was one of them, and had been for years. And probably always would be. |
| 1861 |
He had lots of life insurance. Madison Avenue had been good to him, and at forty four, he was the number three man at Hinkley, Burrows, and Dawson, one of the biggest ad agencies in the country. He had brought in their four biggest accounts himself and he was valuable to the firm, and respected among his peers. |
| 1862 |
She was a pretty woman, and she had been a pretty girl, long and lean, with a good figure and graceful hands, and a sense of humor that danced in her eyes. It was that that he had loved about her from the first. Her laughter and her fire, and her courage, and her rabid determination to stick by what she believed in. |
| 1863 |
There were those who thought her difficult when she was young, but not Ollie. Never Ollie. He liked the way she thought, and the things she said, and the way she said them. They had a relationship built on mutual respect and caring, and they had a very good time in bed. They always had, and they still did. |
| 1864 |
But Oliver was thrilled. He wanted four kids, he had always said so, and even if it stretched their budget just then, he was willing to face it. He was doing well, advancing rapidly in the firm, and even if they had been starving, he wouldn't have let her get an abortion. He just wouldn't. It was their baby. |
| 1865 |
When the weather was bad, as it often was that year, they couldn't get out at all, and the baby's screams seemed to echo off the walls until she thought she would go crazy. Oliver wanted to move them out of town somewhere to a home of their own, but that dream was still a long way off, they couldn't afford it. |
| 1866 |
Her own parents were no help because they were in Chicago, and for all their good intentions, his weren't much better. His mother had had one child, and the memory of how to cope with it seemed to have escaped her. Being around Benjamin only seemed to make her nervous. But not nearly as nervous as it was making Sarah. |
| 1867 |
She had never been so sick in her life. She had a cold that simply would not go away, a cough that sounded like TB, and she was nauseated from morning till night from coughing. In the end, after four weeks of battling it, she decided to go to the expense and see the doctor. She had the flu, but she had more than that. |
| 1868 |
This time there was no anger, no rages, no outrage or fury, there was simply despair, and what seemed to Oliver like hours and hours and hours of crying. She couldn't face it, she couldn't do it again. She couldn't handle another child, and Benjamin wasn't even out of diapers, and now there would be two of them. |
| 1869 |
She was an Irish girl from a family of thirteen children, and she was just what Sarah needed. Suddenly she could go out, to libraries, to meet friends, to art galleries and museums, and her disposition improved immeasurably. She even started to enjoy Benjamin, and once or twice she took him to the museum with her. |
| 1870 |
She had sworn that she would never do that when they were dating. But even she had to admit that it made more sense. The apartment on Second Avenue had been impossible to manage, and everything else they'd looked at in town seemed tiny and was ridiculously expensive. Here the children had their own rooms. |
| 1871 |
With their move to the country, she had lost the Irish girl, and it was just as well, because for the moment they couldn't afford her. Benjamin was three by then anyway, and he was in school every morning, and two years later Melissa was in school too, and Sarah told herself she would go back to writing. |
| 1872 |
She always had things to do. She was doing volunteer work at the local hospital, working one day a week at the children's school, running errands, doing car pools, keeping the house clean, ironing Ollie's shirts, and working in the garden. It was a hell of a switch for the once assistant editor of the Crimson. |
| 1873 |
Suddenly, she seemed a part of the peaceful little world around her. She met other women with children the same age, there were couples they played tennis and bridge with on the weekends, her volunteer work seemed to be constantly more demanding, and the thrashing and fighting she had done was all but forgotten. |
| 1874 |
She didn't even miss it anymore. All she wanted was what she had, a happy, busy little life with her husband and children. Benjamin's screaming babyhood began to fade into distant memory and he turned into a sweet sunny child, who not only had her looks but seemed to share all her interests and passions and values. |
| 1875 |
Oliver saw it and laughed, and although Sarah seldom admitted it to anyone, in some ways it flattered and amused her. He was so much like her. Melissa was a sweet child too, she was easier than Benjamin had been, and in some ways she was more like her father. She had an easy smile, and a happy attitude about life. |
| 1876 |
And she didn't seem to want much from either of them. She was happy following Sarah everywhere with a book or a doll or a puzzle. Sometimes, Sarah even forgot she was in the next room. She was an undemanding little girl, and she had Oliver's blond hair and green eyes, yet she didn't really look like him. |
| 1877 |
He had lived long enough to watch many of his investments, once so sound, begin to shrink and dwindle. The cost of living was astonishingly high, and he and Phyllis had to be careful. They had a pretty little house in Westchester they had bought fifteen years before, around the time when Oliver was in college. |
| 1878 |
There was no way he was going to talk her into having another baby. She was thirty one years old, and she liked her life just fine the way it was. She was swamped with committee work all day long, she spent half her life running car pools, and the rest of it going to Cub Scouts and Melissa's ballet class. |
| 1879 |
But he felt as though they had slowly become one person, with one mind, one heart, and one direction. They returned from Jamaica in a kind of haze, mellowed, slowed down from their usual pace, and the morning after they returned, Oliver sat at breakfast and admitted that he hated to leave her and go to the office. |
| 1880 |
The children left for school in their car pools, and Oliver to catch his train, and Sarah found it impossible to get going. She was disorganized all day, and she felt as though she couldn't get anything done. By dinnertime, she still hadn't left the house, and had puttered around all day, getting nothing accomplished. |
| 1881 |
Apparently one of the early signs of depression was chronic exhaustion. Whatever it was, it was nothing serious, she was sure of that. Even the doctor said she seemed to be in good health, she had even gained five pounds in three weeks since their trip to Jamaica. It was no wonder, all she did was sit around and sleep. |
| 1882 |
Never. She felt as though the unborn child, the mere knowledge of it, were threatening her very existence. And she wouldn't let it. She forced the car into reverse and shot out of the driveway, and ten minutes later she was at the tennis courts, looking pale, and feeling sick, knowing what she did now. |
| 1883 |
How could he look like that? Life was so simple for him. All he had to do was go to an office every day and deal with real people in a real world. He got to have all the fun, while she spent every waking hour with women and children. There were things about life that weren't fair, and in her eyes, that was one of them. |
| 1884 |
There were times when she wished she were a man, when she wished she had lived her life differently, when she wished she had gotten a job years before, instead of doing what she'd done. But this was so easy. She had taken the easy way out. She had had two kids, moved to the suburbs, and given up her dreams. |
| 1885 |
It had happened to a guy he knew at the office six months before. They discovered that his wife had cancer and four months later she was dead, leaving him devastated and alone with three children. Oliver knew he couldn't have lived through it if he lost Sarah. He had loved her for too long. She was everything to him. |
| 1886 |
He told her he would love it for both of them, and the children were thrilled at the prospect. Benjamin was eight by then and intrigued and excited by the whole thing, and to Melissa, at six, it was like having a live doll to play with. Only Sarah had remained unenthusiastic about the impending arrival. |
| 1887 |
They handed the baby to Oliver first and he gently gave him to Sarah, who lay with tears streaming down her cheeks, remembering all the ugly things she had said about this baby. He had black hair and Ollie's green eyes, and creamy skin, and a look in his eyes that somehow foretold great wisdom and great humor. |
| 1888 |
And amazingly, he did not become a spoiled brat, but instead, he was a remarkably pleasant child, who remained the joy of the house, and brought sunshine into everyone's life around him. The nightmare of the child that would destroy Sarah's life never materialized, but by the same token he provided her no excuses. |
| 1889 |
She couldn't blame the blank pages or the silence of the typewriter on the children. And as she sat watching the snow fall, she wondered what she would say to Ollie. She wished he wouldn't ask her how the writing was going. For almost two years now, he had evidenced sincere concern and it was driving her crazy. |
| 1890 |
As promised, and agreed, she had had her tubes tied years before, after Sam's arrival. This was something very different. This was the slow, demoralizing realization that your life is going nowhere, that the dreams you had at twenty had dissipated years before and were very likely never real in the first place. |
| 1891 |
She was never going to be a writer now. At thirty five, knowing that would have destroyed her, at thirty nine, it might have killed her. At forty one, it filled her with sadness. There was nothing left now, except the ordinariness of her life, while Ollie climbed to greatness. It was an odd feeling. |
| 1892 |
Even her children were more important than she was. Everyone had something going in their lives. Benjamin was an outstanding athlete and a terrific student. Melissa was incredibly artistic and, surprisingly, a real beauty. She talked about becoming an actress sometimes, and both she and Benjamin talked about Harvard. |
| 1893 |
She would sit here forever, watching the snow fall, while life passed her by, and Ollie brought in new clients. She had her own Mercedes now, she had two fur coats. She had three terrific children, thanks to Ollie's persistence, and one fantastic husband, and nothing of her own that mattered. No talent. |
| 1894 |
He wasn't. Maybe they should go out. But suddenly she didn't want to be alone with him. And as she tried to decide, she heard the front door slam and a voice call out, and a moment later, Benjamin strode into the cozy kitchen. At seventeen, he was six feet tall, with bright red hair, and his mother's dark blue eyes. |
| 1895 |
He was a man, and a handsome one. He had his own life, own friends, and in a few months he'd be in college. Did he really need her now? Would it make a difference to him? Suddenly she couldn't imagine that her presence there meant anything to him, as he turned to look at her, struck by the somber look in her eyes. |
| 1896 |
It was a terrible thing to admit. A terrible thing to say to them, and she knew she never could. But she wanted her own life now. She was ready for it. She wanted to be more than Agnes was, standing in the kitchen waiting for them to come home every day, and eventually waiting for them to leave forever. |
| 1897 |
He had just gotten a big promotion and a raise. The top of the ladder, at his firm, was in clear sight now. At forty four, Oliver Watson was the stuff that business legends were made of. He had it all, he knew, and he was grateful for that, a job he loved, a wife he adored, and three kids he was crazy about. |
| 1898 |
She knew that now. And as they finished their meal, he sat back and looked at her, sensing that something had changed, but not sure what it was. He usually read her well, but not tonight. There was something distant and sad about the way she looked at him, and he suddenly felt a finger of fear touch his heart. |
| 1899 |
It couldn't be that. And he had never cheated on her. But he just couldn't figure out what was going on with her, and as he ordered champagne and dessert, he looked at her in the candlelight and thought she had never looked lovelier or younger. At forty one, she was better looking than most women at thirty. |
| 1900 |
He had been good to her, he loved her, he loved their kids, he had never wanted her to work, because he wanted to take care of her, to love, honor, cherish, and protect her. And now she hated him for it and wanted to go back to school, but worse than that, if she went back to Harvard, she would have to leave them. |
| 1901 |
Maybe it was change of life. Or a brain tumor. Or a sign of a major depression. Maybe she was crazy, maybe she always had been. But he didn't care what she was. She was his wife and he loved her. He wanted her to stay, to take back the things she had said, to tell him she couldn't leave him for anything. |
| 1902 |
She meant what she had said. She was going back to Harvard. She was leaving them. And as the realization cut through to his heart like a knife, he wondered what he would do without her. He wanted to cry just thinking about it, he wanted to die as he lay in bed that night, next to her, feeling her warmth beside him. |
| 1903 |
But she was determined to go back there. He wondered at times if it was to recapture her youth, to turn the clock back to a simpler time, and yet he liked their life so much better now. And he could never understand how she would be able to leave the children. They still knew nothing of their mother's plans. |
| 1904 |
She had gone all out this year, almost as though it were their final Christmas. Ollie had bought her an emerald ring at Van Cleef the week before, it was beautiful and something he knew she had always wanted. It was a plain band set with small diamond baguettes, and in the center a beautifully cut square emerald. |
| 1905 |
She wanted to get up early to stuff the turkey. Agnes would be up early to do most of the work anyway, but Sarah wanted to do the turkey her self, another final gift to them, and it was a family tradition. She lay in bed, after they turned out the lights, thinking quietly, and listening to Ollie breathe. |
| 1906 |
Once gone, anything could happen. They lay for a long time, holding each other tight, their faces side by side, their lips meeting from time to time, and at last his hunger for her got the best of him. For the first time in two weeks, he took her with a passion and a longing that had been long since forgotten. |
| 1907 |
There was a desperation to their lovemaking that had never been there before, a thirst, a loneliness, an insatiable hunger. And she felt it, too, along with guilt, regret, and a sorrow that almost overwhelmed her as they shuddered in unison and lay side by side kissing afterward, until finally he slept in her arms. |
| 1908 |
George called to say that Phyllis wasn't quite herself, and Oliver brushed it off as his father getting too wound up again over nothing. They were expected at noon, and arrived at almost two o'clock, with armloads of gifts for everyone, including a cashmere shawl for Agnes, and a huge soup bone for Andy. |
| 1909 |
It was exactly what he had been trying to explain to Ollie. Yet sometimes she was right as rain, and he wondered if he himself was imagining her confusion. It was hard to know what to think. One day she seemed totally out of control, and the next she seemed fine again, and sometimes she changed from hour to hour. |
| 1910 |
With his grades and athletic skill, he had a host of great schools to choose from. But he still hoped that he would get into Harvard, and now so did Sarah. It would be exciting to be in school with him. Maybe if that happened, he would forgive her for leaving home eight months before he left for college. |
| 1911 |
Ollie had even suggested that she wait until Benjamin left for school, but she didn't want to postpone anything. She had waited too many years for this to be willing to wait another hour. It was the kind of reaction Phyllis had foretold years before, but now she might not even remember or understand that. |
| 1912 |
In a way, they were all so tired that it would have been better to wait another day, but she had thought about it for so long that now she wanted to tell them. Benjamin was about to ask her for the keys to the car, and Melissa wanted to call a friend, and Sam was already yawning when Agnes appeared in the doorway. |
| 1913 |
But she was the only one moving on, they were staying right here, with their safe, comfortable lives. Only she needed to sail out of port, out of the safe harbor of their lives, into unknown waters. But the thought exhilarated more than frightened her. One day she would explain that to them, but not now. |
| 1914 |
He looked shocked too. But he was too old to cry. He just kept looking at her, as though wanting to understand, sure that there was another reason for all this. Maybe they were getting divorced and didn't want to tell the kids. But then why didn't she take the kids with her? It just didn't make sense. |
| 1915 |
A father who worked all the time. And a hired woman to cook for them. Suddenly, he couldn't wait to get out in the fall. He would have left sooner if he could. He had no family anymore. Just a bunch of people he lived with. It was almost as if she'd died, only worse, because she could have stayed if she wanted to. |
| 1916 |
And it was knowing that she didn't want to that really hurt him. All that crap about how she cared about them. If she did, she'd stay, but she was going. That said it all. He looked down at his feet, and then back up at her, feeling guilty for his thoughts, and wanting to get out of the house as fast as he could. |
| 1917 |
It had been a long day, and an endless night, and he didn't want to play games with her anymore. She was ruining their lives, all for what she wanted. His mother had been right. But it was too late now. They were in it up to their necks, and if his kids were going to survive, he had to start swimming fast. |
| 1918 |
Maybe if you felt bad enough, you wouldn't do it. They're never going to trust anyone again, least of all me. If their own mother walks out on them, what do you suppose they're going to expect from the rest of the world? Just what do you think this is going to do to them, make them better people? Hell, no. |
| 1919 |
Surely Sam would, particularly if she didn't come back to stay, which Oliver realized was entirely possible, even though she denied that now, but things were going to change for her once she was at Harvard again. There were going to be other people in her life, and Oliver and the kids would be far, far from there. |
| 1920 |
Sarah lay listening to the sounds of the house as they all slept, wishing she was one of them again. But she wasn't anymore. It was as though she were someone else, and the only thing left was to get on with her new life now. She was still excited about that, in spite of what it had cost in hearts and lives. |
| 1921 |
She packed everything she wanted in three suitcases and when Oliver got up in the morning, she was through. She had showered and dressed, and made a reservation on a plane. She had called a hotel in Cambridge where she had once stayed. And she had made up her mind to leave by that afternoon at the latest. |
| 1922 |
He looked in the mirror only once, and almost felt his heart physically break as he saw her standing there, in front of the house, her arm lifted in a last wave. His whole life was gone, in one moment, the woman he loved, and everything he had built. Vanished, in exchange for the insanity she wanted. |
| 1923 |
Sam had nightmares at night, and he cried easily now, but he laughed, too, and he had a great time skiing with his father. And Benjamin even entered a downhill race before they went home, but whenever he wasn't skiing, he was calling friends, as though they alone held the solution to all his problems. |
| 1924 |
He could barely get through their evening meal, and at night he fell into bed with Sam. He had decided to share a room with him, in case the child was too lonely. And Sam wet the bed twice, which kept Oliver busy even at night, changing sheets, turning the mattress around, and finding fresh blankets. |
| 1925 |
More than once, Benjamin had called them to pick him up, even if he'd just had a beer or two with friends. Sarah had drummed that into him, that and a lot of other things. She had left her mark on all of them, and now she was gone, and Oliver wondered when she would come home for the much promised weekend. |
| 1926 |
His dark hair was damp, and eventually he settled down again. But at four o'clock, Oliver felt him slip into bed beside him. The child cuddled up next to him, and Ollie thought about carrying him back to his room, but in truth he found he was grateful to have him near him, and he turned over and went back to sleep. |
| 1927 |
At breakfast the next day, there was the usual chaos. Aggie cooked waffles and bacon for everyone, which was usually a weekend treat, saved only for special occasions. It was as though she knew they needed something special now, and she had packed an extra nice lunch for Sam, with all his favorites. |
| 1928 |
Or was it? Everything had always seemed so peaceful when she was there, so in control, and so happy when he left for the office. And once there, he was greeted by a week's stack of work and reports on pending projects. He couldn't leave until seven o'clock that night, and it was close to nine when he got home. |
| 1929 |
Like Sarah, she had divorced herself from all of them. And Oliver suddenly wondered if Benjamin was having the same reaction. He seemed to want to be out all the time, and that was going to have to stop too. He just wished he had more time with all of them, to help them cope with their reactions and their problems. |
| 1930 |
The phone rang as he was talking to her, and he almost sighed when he heard his father on the line. He was too tired to talk to him now. It was after ten o'clock, and he wanted to shower and climb into bed with Sam. It had been a brutal day at the office, and coming home at night was no longer easy either. |
| 1931 |
He felt as though he were losing her day by day, and the thought of it made him feel all the more sharply Oliver's pain over losing Sarah. But he was young enough, he'd find someone else one day. Phyllis was the only woman George had ever loved, and after forty seven years he couldn't bear the thought of losing her. |
| 1932 |
His first affair, and he was crazy about her. They were spending every minute they could in bed. Her parents were out all the time. Both her parents worked, and they seemed to go out a lot, and she was the last child at home, so they had plenty of free time to themselves, and they knew exactly what to do with it. |
| 1933 |
Sandra was his first big love. She was a pretty girl from his school. They were in the same chemistry class, and he was helping her pass it. She was on academic probation all the time, unlike him, and she didn't really care. She was a lot more interested in him, and he loved the way her body felt when he touched her. |
| 1934 |
It was ridiculous, he knew. Aggie had been cooking for them for ten years, and they loved her, but they had grown used to Sarah's breakfasts. Sam seemed to whine all the time, more than once Ollie saw him kick the dog, Mel remained sullen throughout, and Benjamin no longer graced them with his presence. |
| 1935 |
Sarah eventually called when she got her phone, two weeks later than promised, and she still hadn't come home to see them. She thought it was too soon, and now all their conversations were brief and bitter. And she seemed almost afraid of the kids, as though she couldn't bring herself to comfort them. |
| 1936 |
He was angry at everyone, at her of course, and himself as well, secretly convinced, as Mel still was, that he had done something wrong, and it was his fault. Their friends called and invited him out, word had gotten around slowly, once Aggie started driving Sarah's car pool. But he didn't want to see anyone. |
| 1937 |
They were curious, and gossipy, and just too damn nosy. And in the midst of it all, George seemed to be calling night and day, with horrifying reports of Ollie's mother's backward progress. She was even more forgetful now, a danger to herself in some ways, and George was distraught and clinging to his son for comfort. |
| 1938 |
He didn't want to hear about her classes or why she wasn't coming home again this weekend. He wanted her to come back and sleep with him, love him, cook for him, and take charge of their children. Aggie was great, but what she could offer them fell far short of all the little special things provided by their mother. |
| 1939 |
He was sitting in his office one afternoon, staring out the window, at the rain and sleet that were typical of late January in New York, and wondering if she ever would come back. Right then, he'd have settled for a weekend. She'd been gone a month by then, and he was so lonely, he almost thought he couldn't stand it. |
| 1940 |
She was well dressed in a chic, European way, everything was very spare and neat about her. And she always wore a great scarf, an expensive pair of shoes, or a piece of discreet but handsome jewelry. He liked her, she was quick and smart, discreet, hardworking, and for whatever reason she had never been married. |
| 1941 |
She had great stature in many ways, and lots of style, and he almost forgot how tiny she was. She was a terrific woman, and once again he found himself wondering why she had never married. Too busy perhaps, or too wrapped up in her work. It happened to a lot of them, and then suddenly at forty they panicked. |
| 1942 |
I'm sorry to bore you with all this. It just gets to me sometimes. It makes it hard to concentrate on work. But at least it's nice to get out of the house. It's so depressing being there at night, and weekends are worse. It's as though we've all been smashed apart and don't know how to find each other anymore. |
| 1943 |
She knew more about Benjamin than she was willing to tell. She had seen him a thousand times with Sandra, and she also knew he was cutting classes. Word got around quickly in their school, even between sophomores and seniors. And she suspected how serious he was about the girl, serious enough to defy their father. |
| 1944 |
The breakthrough with Mel had been worth the agonies of the night before, and suddenly as he got to work, and found a message on his desk, he remembered his invitation to Daphne the night before, to come out on Sunday, and for the first time in a month, he was excited at the prospect of the weekend. |
| 1945 |
Things had certainly changed around here, but after what Mrs. Watson had done, she could hardly blame him. He needed a wife, and if she was too foolish to hang on to a good thing, then someone else deserved her good fortune. The two ladies chatted easily, and Ollie could see that Melissa was carefully looking her over. |
| 1946 |
She approved of the leather pants, the shining hair, the fur jacket, and the black Hermes bag, hanging casually from her shoulder. Daphne was very chic on her own time, too, and now Oliver understood why. There was a certain aura that came from an older man buying gifts for her, and introducing her to the finer things. |
| 1947 |
She had a little accident. She took the car out alone, and hit a neighbor. No one's badly hurt. She's just shaken up, and they're going to keep her in the hospital tonight, just to watch her. Grandpa's just upset. Fortunately the guy she hit was quick, and jumped onto the hood of the car, all he got was a broken ankle. |
| 1948 |
He waited for the train with her, and gave her a brotherly hug before she left, and told her he'd see her the following day at the office. She waved as the train pulled away, and he drove slowly home, sorry that things weren't different. Maybe if she'd been free, he told himself, but he knew it was a lie. |
| 1949 |
George Watson put his wife in a convalescent home the week after that. It was one that specialized in patients with Alzheimer's and various forms of dementia. Outwardly, it was cheerful and pleasant, but a glimpse of the patients living there depressed Oliver beyond words, when he went to see his mother. |
| 1950 |
He also knew in his heart of hearts that he wanted to be near her. He was also particularly worried about Sam, and moderately so about the others. Benjamin was unenthusiastic about going, he was going to miss a game, but Oliver told him he thought he should go. Mel was excited to go, and Sam was ecstatic. |
| 1951 |
He cried as he remembered the past and walked for hours on the Harvard campus. He went to all the places they had gone to years before, and realized as he walked back to his hotel that he was still crying. He didn't understand. She had told him nothing would change between them, yet now she had shut him out. |
| 1952 |
When he picked the children up the following afternoon, his heart was pounding as the cab waited. He got out and rang the bell and then slid back into the taxi. He was anxious to see them again, to have them back with him, to not be alone for a moment longer. Sunday alone in Boston had been dismal without them. |
| 1953 |
Melissa was the first to emerge, looking confident and grown up and very pretty. She waved at her father in the cab, and he was relieved to see that she was in good spirits. It had done her good to see her mother at last. Benjamin came next, looking serious and subdued, but he was always that way now. |
| 1954 |
Or maybe he was just growing up. Oliver wasn't sure, and he worried about him. And then came Sam, dragging his feet and carrying a large, awkwardly wrapped bundle. She had given him a teddy bear, unsure if he would like the gift, but he had slept with it the night before, and clutched it now like a sacred treasure. |
| 1955 |
But he forced himself to look away, and in a hoarse voice told the driver to head for the airport. He glanced back in spite of himself as they drove away, and she looked pretty and young as she continued to wave from the doorway, and suddenly, as he watched her, he felt Melissa slip something into his hand. |
| 1956 |
And it was obvious it had done him a world of good to see their mother. They all looked well groomed, and Sam's hair was combed just the way Oliver liked it. And it was painful for him just seeing them that way, so obviously fresh from her hands, as though newly born, and only just then sprung from her. |
| 1957 |
He didn't want to hear about how wonderful it had been, how great she looked, how cute the garden was, or how hard her courses. He only wanted to hear how desperately she missed all of them, and most of all him, how soon she was coming back, how much she hated Boston, and that she'd been wrong to go there. |
| 1958 |
And he had lost her. There was no turning the clock back now, no getting away from it. She didn't love him anymore, no matter what she said on the phone. It was over. Forever. He sat there, in the dark, on his bed, for what seemed like a long time, and then he lay down in the darkness and stared up at the ceiling. |
| 1959 |
He got home at nine o'clock that night, and later every night after that. They had a rush presentation to put out for a major client. But for once, the children seemed all right. And three weeks after the first visit, Sarah invited the children back to Boston again, but this time Oliver didn't go with them. |
| 1960 |
He had dinner with his father on Saturday night, and on Sunday afternoon, he went to visit his mother. She was a depressing sight, and all she talked about was wanting to go home, to work in her garden. She wasn't fully aware of where she was, but there were moments when she seemed more lucid than others. |
| 1961 |
As he walked through the den door, Oliver gave him a ferocious slap. It was the first time in his life he had struck any of his children except for a single spanking when Benjamin was four, and had put a fork into an electrical outlet. He had wanted to make an impression on him then, and he did this time too. |
| 1962 |
He picked them up at the airport and drove them into town, telling them he had a surprise for them, but refusing to tell them what it was. They were in high spirits as they drove in, telling him everything they'd done, and seen, and how good the skiing had been with their mother. But for once, it didn't upset him. |
| 1963 |
Sam looked stunned, and Mel sat down in a chair and started to cry. Benjamin said nothing at all, but his face hardened into a block of ice as he looked at his father. He knew it was partially due to him, but that did nothing to mitigate his anger. He had no right to do this to them, no right at all. |
| 1964 |
He quietly took the car keys from the hall table, and without saying a word, a moment later, he drove away, as Oliver watched him. Mel never emerged from her room again that night, and the door was locked when he tried it. Only Sam was pleased about the move. To him it was something new and exciting. |
| 1965 |
And if it isn't, you're going to have to wait a long time before you can do anything about it. You've got to finish school, go to college, get a job, make a living to support a wife and kids. You've got a long road ahead of you, and you'd better stay on track now or you're going to be in deep shit before you know it. |
| 1966 |
You have to. I'm closing the house here, except for weekends. And I won't let you live here alone, it's as simple as that. And if you want to know the truth, we're moving there partly because of you, so you can get your act together before it's too late, and I can spend more time with all of you in the evenings. |
| 1967 |
They talked long into the night almost every night that week, and got nowhere. One night, Oliver even went to see Sandra, and he was saddened when he saw the girl. She was pretty and not too bright, frightened and alone, and from another world. She clung to Benjamin as if he were the only person who could save her. |
| 1968 |
He asked Benjamin as much when he had the chance, but the boy only looked hurt and insisted that it was his baby. He said he was sure of it. And Oliver didn't want to press him. The hardest blow of all came when the college letters began rolling in. Oliver would find them at the house on the weekend. |
| 1969 |
It almost broke Ollie's heart to think about it. Oliver answered all of the letters himself, explaining to all that because of difficult family circumstances at the time, he was unable to accept, but he would like to reapply the following year. Ollie still hoped to get him to New York to finish school. |
| 1970 |
And together we built something terrific, until you knocked it down, and walked all over it, and us, on the way out. It was a stinking thing to do, to all of us, and especially me. But at least I know what we had. We had something beautiful and worthwhile and decent. Don't denigrate it now |
| 1971 |
In the intensive care unit there was neither night nor day, there were only bright lights and the humming of machines, the pumping of respirators and the occasional whine of a computer, and a few sad, lonely groans. But his mother hadn't even stirred when he saw her. The doctor touched his arm and he woke instantly. |
| 1972 |
His wife had left him five months before, and now he was about to lose his mother. But he couldn't think of it selfishly now. He had to think of George and what it would mean to him to lose his wife of forty seven years. It was going to be brutal. But in truth she had left him months before, when she began fading. |
| 1973 |
It didn't seem fair that all of this should be happening to him, she said, and he was touched and grateful. He called Benjamin, too, and told him the news, and suggested he look in on his grandfather when he could. He told him he'd let him know when the funeral was. He thought it might be Wednesday. |
| 1974 |
It was a sweet, simple affair, with the music his mother had loved, and armfuls of lovely flowers from her own garden. And then, as they lowered the casket slowly into the ground, and left her there, he took his father home, to live alone, to face his grief, to end his days without the woman he had cherished. |
| 1975 |
It was June before they all caught their breath again. School let out, and they moved back to the country for the summer. George came to visit them from time to time, and he seemed tired and much older. And it was obvious that he was desperately lonely, more so than he had been when Phyllis was at the rest home. |
| 1976 |
She had been a nurse in her youth, and her late husband had been a doctor, and she seemed to take good care of Ollie's father. She made a point of seeing that he sat down when he should, without making an issue of it, brought him his food, and joked amiably with him and their friends and George seemed to like it. |
| 1977 |
He had filed for divorce in June, and at Daphne's constant urging, he had gone on a date, which had proven to be a disaster. He had gone out with a creative type from another agency, and afterward insisted the girl was a kook. She had wanted him to try cocaine, and her favorite sport was women's wrestling. |
| 1978 |
Benjamin and Sandra also came to the barbecue, and by then she was seven months pregnant. Ollie felt sorry for her, she wasn't bright, and her childish face looked ridiculous on the huge body. She talked about the baby a lot, and for a moment Ollie was terrified, wondering if they were going to get married too. |
| 1979 |
He was always working. He had two jobs now. One pumping gas, and the other at night as a busboy. He was trying to save enough money to get her decent maternity care, pay for the apartment they shared, and have enough on hand to support their baby. And when he had offered to help them, Benjamin had refused it. |
| 1980 |
Sandra had had to stop work finally, her ankles were swollen to the size of melons, and the doctor was afraid she was becoming toxemic. Benjamin went home at lunch time to prepare her meals, and she would lie on the couch and watch TV, while he cooked, complaining all the while that she never saw him anymore. |
| 1981 |
He came home at night as early as he could, but he usually worked till two o'clock in the morning. And just thinking about it drove Oliver wild. He kept trying to give him money to ease his burdens, and finally he found a simpler solution. He gave it to Sandra, and she was always happy to take whatever he gave. |
| 1982 |
He had had several postcards from the kids since they left, but they never called, and he was never quite sure where they were. It made him nervous from time to time, but Sarah had only said that they would stay with relatives of Jean Pierre's in France, and youth hostels in the other countries where they traveled. |
| 1983 |
And more than once he sensed her watching him, until finally he looked up and smiled, and realized that she was very attractive. She had blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles on a face that couldn't have been more than twenty five or six years old. Her hair was pulled back, and she wore no makeup. |
| 1984 |
The woman who'd left him must have been quite something. She'd never been without a man in her life for more than a month, and she was sure she didn't want to be. Her last lover had departed only three weeks before, after a comfortable six months, commuting between her penthouse and his Fifth Avenue town house. |
| 1985 |
If you have kids, you owe a lot to them, and not just to yourself. And if you don't want to live up to them, you shouldn't have them. I don't want all that responsibility, which is why I don't have them. But your wife did. I suppose the basic mistake she made was marrying you and having children in the first place. |
| 1986 |
But they've given up on me. My father keeps getting married and having kids. He had two with my mother, four with his second wife, and he's just had his seventh child. My mother just gets married, but forgets to have kids, which is fortunate, because she really doesn't like them. She's sort of an Auntie Mame. |
| 1987 |
And when he went home, he called Megan. She was out, but her answering machine was on. He left his name and just said he'd called to say hello, and reconfirmed their date for the following evening. She arrived promptly at eight, arms laden with goodies, and they unpacked them together in his kitchen. |
| 1988 |
She flew into his arms, sobbing incoherently, and a moment later, Sam was there, too, the awkward arm in a sling, as he clung to his daddy. And then Oliver looked up at the woman who had been his wife, and was no more, and he knew with full force how much she had loved the boy who had died in San Remo. |
| 1989 |
And listening to them made him realize again how distant from his life Sarah was now. He wasn't even sure anymore if he still loved her. The children went to bed right after they ate, and Sam even fell asleep at the kitchen table. The time difference had caught up with him, and they were both exhausted. |
| 1990 |
It was nice seeing him so happy again. And Oliver was relieved. Every time he saw him now, he couldn't get the picture out of his mind of his father holding his mother's hand when she died, and kissing her good bye. It broke his heart, but finally, after three months, George was looking a lot better. |
| 1991 |
After a month of orgasmic feasting, they had gone three whole days without each other. And she had the door locked and his pants down around his knees in a moment, as she licked and sucked and kissed, and he pulled off her halter, and then slid down her shorts. And as usual, she had nothing beneath them. |
| 1992 |
What the hell, he had a right to it. More power to him if he could find a woman he loved and be happy with her. He called Megan after he hung up, feeling better again, but she was out, and he felt his heart give a little tug as he left his name on the machine, and then lay on the empty bed she had left him. |
| 1993 |
They had a barbecue near the pool, as they always did, and the children invited friends, and his father came over with Margaret. They brought cookies and treats, and homemade bread, and they brought the dog, and this time Oliver congratulated them both, and let his father announce it to the children. |
| 1994 |
He hadn't seen her all week, and he was going crazy without her, but she was working late and so was he. The kids were home, and he was waiting for them to settle down again, which she seemed to think wasn't important. Benjamin and Sandra came to the barbecue, though, and this time the girl looked truly pathetic. |
| 1995 |
Her face was bloated to twice its size, she could barely walk, she was so large, and it was hard to believe she had ever been pretty. Benjamin looked thin and pale, in comparison, and he was feeling the load of his two jobs, and Sandra did nothing but complain, and sometimes he thought he would go crazy. |
| 1996 |
The rest could wait for the moment. They swam late into the night, and the children sang, and his father left eventually, and Benjamin had to get to work. Daphne helped Oliver clean up, and Aggie was back after a relaxing summer. And it felt somehow as though they'd all come a long way since the summer began. |
| 1997 |
And it hurt only briefly when he remembered the year before when Sarah was there and life had been so simple and sane. Nothing was quite as simple anymore. And nothing was sure now. But life was sweet, and he was grateful for what he had. If he never had more than this again, even that might be all right. |
| 1998 |
And he felt sad for her as he walked home that night. Sad for what she would never have, for what she didn't want, for what she was afraid to reach out for. And far above, she stood on the terrace, watching him, and she gave a silent wave. She walked back into her living room, and turned on the music. |
| 1999 |
There was no point thinking about the past. She forced them both from her heart, like furniture she no longer had room for, took a shower, brushed her teeth, turned the light out, and went to bed, knowing that it had been nice for a while, but it was over with Oliver Watson. She didn't cry, she didn't mourn. |
| 2000 |
Later that night, he was chatting with Mel, as they sat in the living room talking about the wedding, when the phone rang, and she grabbed it, convinced it was one of her friends. She looked surprised when it wasn't, and handed it to her father instead. It was Benjamin, and he had asked only for their father. |
| 2001 |
At least he was reaching out to him now, and maybe he could do something to help. He couldn't do anything to help Sandra, of course, and he was sorry for her. She had no family to take care of her, no mother to hold her hand. But at least he could be there for Benjamin, and the doctors could do the rest for Sandra. |
| 2002 |
He had had a lot of wine at the wedding, and he didn't want to get sleepy when Benjamin needed him. And as he came back with the steaming cup, there were two doctors in similar garb conferring with his son. Oliver stood at a little distance from them, and he saw Benjamin close his eyes and nod his head. |
| 2003 |
He was swaddled in a tiny bundle, and he let out a wail as the nurse put him in Benjamin's hands, and then he pulled him gently toward his chest. He stood looking down at him in total amazement, as tears slid down his cheeks and he started to grin, and turned toward Oliver, holding tightly to the baby. |
| 2004 |
He had taken two weeks off from work, and by then everything was going to be in control But whenever Oliver called them after that, the baby was screaming, and when he went to visit them the following week, Sandra looked dreadful. She was pale, with dark circles under her eyes and was in obvious pain. |
| 2005 |
And matters grew more complicated still only two weeks later. The head of Ollie's firm called him in and made a request that took him totally by surprise. The head of the Los Angeles office was dying of cancer. He was leaving within the week on permanent medical leave and someone had to take his place. |
| 2006 |
They didn't like the idea of leaving their friends, and Sam was worried about how often he would see Sarah, but Ollie said he could send them back to visit her fairly frequently, and they could spend their vacations with her. But to Ollie, it was still a hell of a thought, and a frightening prospect. |
| 2007 |
Faithful Aggie had agreed to go with them, and he had decided not to sell the house in Purchase, but to keep it until he knew everything was right for them on the West Coast. The hardest part of all was telling Benjamin they were going, but he made a deal with him that at least relieved his mind about his son. |
| 2008 |
The house was exactly what the children had drearned it would be. It was perfect for them, and Oliver was thrilled. In a matter of weeks, they had settled in, and all three of them were thriving. Even Agnes was in ecstasy over their new home, and after foraging around the local shops, she found everything she wanted. |
| 2009 |
And it seemed amazing to them they had only been there a month, when they packed their things to leave to join her in Boston for their Christmas vacation. Oliver drove them to the airport, and much as he knew he would miss them over the holidays, he was grateful to have a few weeks to work late at the office. |
| 2010 |
And suddenly as he returned to the empty house the day they left, he realized that it was going to be his first Christmas alone, the first one without them, and without Sarah. It would be easier just forgetting about it, and plunging into work. He had more than enough to occupy him in the two weeks they'd be gone. |
| 2011 |
He put it aside, and decided to see how his day went. It was four days hence, and the last thing on his mind that Friday afternoon, when he found the invitation in a stack of work on his desk, was to go to a party. He knew he wouldn't know anyone there, and he couldn't imagine that anyone would notice his absence. |
| 2012 |
It was hard to believe she was successful and famous. She was so real and so down to earth, and he liked that a lot. He liked everything he had seen so far. It almost made him forget the way she looked. Her looks seemed unimportant suddenly compared to the rest. She was beautiful inside, and he liked that even better. |
| 2013 |
There were rough hewn floors, beam ceilings, and huge fireplaces, one at each end of the room, and in front of them huge, overstuffed couches. The kitchen was almost as big as the living room, with another fireplace and a cozy table set for two. And there was a Christmas tree blinking brightly in the corner. |
| 2014 |
He had never expected this, or to be with Charlotte Sampson. It was as though she had fallen into his arms, like a gift from heaven. And as he sat down at the table, he put a small gift on the table for her. He had been so touched by her invitations that he had wanted to get her something nice for Christmas. |
| 2015 |
And they lay side by side in the sun, talking again, for a long time. There seemed to be so much to say, so much to learn, so much to explain and understand about each other. And that afternoon, he called Benjamin, and Charlotte listened to him with a tender smile, talking to his son. The baby was fine. |
| 2016 |
They hadn't had anything to eat, but they were both still full from breakfast and lunch, and all the nibbles they'd had at her friends' house. He lent her one of Mel's suits and went to change, and when he came back, she was already in the pool, swimming smooth laps, until at last she stopped at his end. |
| 2017 |
The body he saw when she emerged to dive off the diving board startled him. Her proportions were ideal, her limbs perfectly carved. She was an incredibly beautiful girl, wet or dry, morning or night, any time of day, anytime, anywhere, and he wanted her now, here, at his pool, and he knew he couldn't do that to her. |
| 2018 |
The kids came home after two weeks in Bpston, and Oliver went to pick them up, feeling happy and relaxed, and warmed by his love for Charlotte. He had missed them as much as he always did when they were away, but this time he had had a life of his own while they were gone, and the days had flown by as though by magic. |
| 2019 |
She was gentle, she was warm, she was kind and fun to be with. She cared about how he felt about things and, unlike Megan had been, she was wildly anxious to meet his children and make friends with them. Sam leapt into his arms the moment he was off the plane, and Mel was close behind with a big grin and a skier's tan. |
| 2020 |
And Charlotte was as nervous about meeting them, as he was about introducing her to them. They were like two awkward kids as he escorted her into the den, and sat at opposite ends of the room in overstuffed chairs, but they wouldn't have fooled anyone. The look that passed between them was one of pure adoration. |
| 2021 |
It was a rare thing they had found in the last two weeks, and they both knew it. And Charlotte knew it was something that had to be shared. He jumped up from the chair then, and dashed upstairs to call them, while she wandered around the room, touching things, staring into space, and staring blankly at pictures. |
| 2022 |
It was an instant attack, and the room seemed suddenly full of noise and chatter and laughter, and then they all fell silent as they saw her. Oliver was quick to step forward and introduce them. Mel shook her hand, clearly taking stock, and seemed to approve of what she saw. In fact, she was impressed. |
| 2023 |
And much to Mel's horror, she went, and returned to announce it was much better than hers had been. And Sam said proudly he'd won the science prize for it, as his sister told him again that he was revolting. At nine o'clock, Sam went to bed, and Mel stayed downstairs to talk to her about scripts and agents and acting. |
| 2024 |
And when Sam answered, thrilled to see her again, she handed him an odd shaped cage, covered by a pale blue blanket. There were odd squeaking noises from within, and a pungent smell he didn't mind, and as he pulled off the blanket, he gave a squeal of delight himself. It was a long haired guinea pig. |
| 2025 |
And Mel had already told everyone she'd ever met that her father was going out with Charlotte Sampson. Neither of the children objected to her, and they didn't even look upset when Oliver said he was going out at night, which wasn't often during the week, since she worked so hard and had to be on the set so early. |
| 2026 |
He had been absolutely heartbroken when Sandra and the baby left. He had insisted on cleaning up the house in Purchase himself, after they left, and when he got to his grandfather's house, he had just kind of fallen apart from the shock and strain of it. Apparently his parting from Sandra had been bitter and loud. |
| 2027 |
They all wondered what he was going to do about school, but no one knew yet. Ollie drove Charlotte home late that night, and he only stayed for one quick drink. All they did was talk about Benjamin, and kiss for a few minutes in the kitchen. It was certainly a far cry from his wild, unbridled fling with Megan. |
| 2028 |
But he was in no way prepared for the gaunt, pale, anguished looking boy he picked up at the airport the next night, and all he did was put his arms around him as the boy cried, while Charlotte stood at a discreet distance. He finally wiped his eyes, and looked at his father like a long lost friend. |
| 2029 |
He had driven down to Bakersfield again, and things appeared to be the same, although Sandra was out that time, but her mother was there, drinking beer, and the baby looked happy, and Benjamin played with him for an hour, and then drove back. And this time, he didn't mention the visit to his father. |
| 2030 |
He had a feeling that Oliver thought he was still too involved with the child, but he knew just as clearly that it was something he had to do, that no matter how many other children he had one day, Alex would always be his first, and an important part of his life. And he intended to stay very much in the picture. |
| 2031 |
Alex was the best thing that ever happened to her. Sandra sure knew what she was doing when she got knocked up by Benjamin Watson. The Watsons may not have been rich, but they were comfortable enough, and she knew from a little research she'd done back East that the kid's father made a hell of a good living. |
| 2032 |
And finally in late April, he got up the courage to ask her. They were having another one of their quiet, intimate dinners at Chianti, and he didn't surprise her with a ring, or ask her on bended knee. He waited until they had finished eating, and then looked at her nervously, and she giggled at him. |
| 2033 |
The next day they told the children, and they were ecstatic. Sam wanted to know if he could come on their honeymoon, as Oliver groaned, and Charlotte asked Mel if she would be the maid of honor at their wedding. It was still eight months away, but as they talked about it, they were all like excited children. |
| 2034 |
It was just before that that he got the call, late one afternoon, when he had come home to change and go out for dinner with Charlie and his dad. When the telephone rang, he thought his father was calling from the office. But he was surprised instead to hear Sandra's mother's voice, and she was calling for him. |
| 2035 |
And however much it might hurt, Oliver was willing to back him up, whatever he wanted. But Benjamin knew he had only one choice. He wanted his son back, and even if it meant never going back to school, and working at any job he had to, he was going to keep his son and bring him up, no matter what it took to do it. |
| 2036 |
If she will confirm that to us, in writing, and we've not yet been able to speak to her, then you will have sole custody of the child, and eventually her maternal rights will be terminated. That's an awesome responsibility, Benjamin, and you ought to think it over seriously before you decide to do it. |
| 2037 |
A responsibility you can never shirk, never forget, never avoid. You can't take a day off from being a father. You can't drop out, or change your mind, or decide not to be there. For the next eighteen years, if not longer, that baby would be your responsibility solely, if the court gives you full custody. |
| 2038 |
The attorney escorted them from the courtroom, as Benjamin held the boy, and Oliver patted his son on the shoulder, and then shook the attorney's hand and thanked him. Benjamin got into the back of the car and held tightly to his baby before strapping him into the safety seat they'd brought with him. |
| 2039 |
They had waited there with bated breath for most of the afternoon. At first, all Mel saw was her father alone in the front seat and she thought something had gone wrong. And then suddenly, her brother got out of the backseat, holding his baby, and she let out a yell and ran to him, as Alex stared at her with wide eyes. |
| 2040 |
Several people looked, but eventually they all decided she couldn't be Charlotte Sampson. They were just a happy couple, taking their baby to the zoo, on a September Sunday. And only the large diamond on her left hand suggested that she might be someone moneyed or important, but no one even noticed. |
| 2041 |
It was particularly a relief for her because the press had been hounding her since the Emmy nominations in August. She and the show had been nominated again this year. The awards were the following week, and everyone wanted to be prepared with stories about the nominees, but Charlotte wanted to be left alone. |
| 2042 |
She was afraid that too much press beforehand might jinx her. She was back at work, getting up at four every morning, and at the studio by five for hair and makeup. At night, Oliver picked her up and either took her out for a quiet dinner somewhere, or brought her back to his place for dinner with the children. |
| 2043 |
No guinea pigs, no kids, no babies on this honeymoon. They dealt with enough in their daily lives without dragging it all with them on their honeymoon, no matter how much he loved his children. The following week, Charlotte's big moment was approaching and there was no way she could avoid it any longer. |
| 2044 |
And she just beamed. It had been an unforgettable night. For all of them. He kissed her then, and five minutes later, she was asleep in his arms, still dressed, with the Emmy staring at them in all its glory. She looked like a child as he gazed down at her, unable to believe that this remarkable woman was almost his. |
| 2045 |
He left her at six o'clock in the morning to get ready to go to work. The kids were still asleep when he got home, and there was an aura of unreality about the night before. But it had happened. It was true. She had won the award, and in three months she would be his wife. It was incredible to think about. |
| 2046 |
The next week was wild, with press following her everywhere. She got a huge bonus from the show, and they upped her contract for the following year. But she got dozens of other offers too, for specials and mini series, and movies made for TV, three feature films, and then the offer she had waited a lifetime for. |
| 2047 |
Like begging her way out of her contract on the show that had brought her the Emmy. Or even breaking the contract, if she had to. She looked nervous when he picked her up that night after work, and they were going to have a quiet evening at her place to discuss their wedding trip. He was pushing hard for Bora Bora. |
| 2048 |
He loved her too much to try to hang on to something he could never have, just as he had discovered he had never really had Sarah. He left for the office that morning feeling like a zombie, and he almost shuddered when his secretary told him that afternoon that Charlotte was waiting in his outer office. |
| 2049 |
It wasn't fair that it was happening to him again. It wasn't fair that he was losing her. As he lay in bed alone, he wanted to hate her, but he couldn't. He loved her too much, and the irony of it struck him with full force again in the morning, after a sleepless night, as he threw out the brochures of Bora Bora. |
| 2050 |
He had to let her go, no matter how painful it was to break the bonds that had held him. He wanted to call her all day, but he forced himself not to. The papers were full of her that day, and for several days, but she never called him. And it was Thanksgiving before he could hear her name without flinching. |
| 2051 |
Sarah and the younger children left a little while later, and Benjamin's friends picked him up only moments later. Ollie was alone in the house, trying to get through a stack of bills and mail. It seemed strangely silent, and as Ollie leaned back in his chair, he sighed, as though trying to decide if he liked it. |
| 2052 |
She stood there for a long time, staring at him through the window, and he didn't know whether to open the door to her or not. He thought it was cruel of her to come to say good bye if she had. And then finally, unable to resist the pull he still felt for her, he walked to the door and pulled it slowly open. |
| 2053 |
And this time, they both knew she could do it. She had made her choice. And her choice was to be with him, and the children. But she had her show too. And an Emmy, and a guinea pig, and the man she loved, three wonderful kids, and even a built in grandchild. And children of her own, if that was what she wanted. |
| 2054 |
The weather was perfect, winter had vanished literally overnight, birds were singing, the sun was warm, and everything in the Armstrongs' Connecticut garden was in bloom. The entire week had been blessed with the kind of weather that made everyone slow down, even in New York. Couples strolled, lunch hours stretched. |
| 2055 |
Paris made sure that the table had been set properly. The caterers were reliable and had a good eye. They knew her kitchen well. She and Peter liked to entertain, and Paris used them frequently. They enjoyed their social life and over the years they had collected an eclectic assortment of interesting friends. |
| 2056 |
She had cut a profusion of multicolored peonies, the tablecloth was immaculate, and the crystal and silver gleamed. Peter probably wouldn't notice, especially if he was tired when he got home, but what he sensed more than saw was the kind of home she provided him with. Paris was impeccable about details. |
| 2057 |
It was a handsome stone house, in one of the more luxurious neighborhoods in Greenwich, Connecticut. They'd talked about hiring a decorator, but in the end she had decided to decorate it herself, and loved doing it. Peter was thrilled with the results. They also had one of the prettiest gardens in Greenwich. |
| 2058 |
And the only dilemma she had now was trying to figure out what she was going to do with herself when Wim left for Berkeley in August. She could no longer imagine a life without teenagers splashing in the pool in summer, or turning the house upside down as they overflowed the downstairs playroom on the weekends. |
| 2059 |
The only thing she had thought of doing so far was volunteer work in Stamford, working with abused kids, or on a literacy program a friend of hers had started in the public schools for underprivileged high school students who had managed to get most of the way through high school and could barely read. |
| 2060 |
She had talked to Peter about it on several occasions, and he had no useful suggestions to make. He told her she'd figure it out sooner or later, and she knew she would. At forty six, she was young enough to start a career if she wanted to, the problem was that she didn't know what she wanted to do. |
| 2061 |
Paris was slim and lithe and athletic. Once the children were older and she had more free time, she played tennis almost every day, and was in terrific shape. She wore her straight blond hair long, and most of the time wore it pulled back in a braid. She had classic Grace Kelly good looks, and green eyes. |
| 2062 |
She had even thought of starting a catering business, or investing in a nursery, since she enjoyed her garden so much. But the catering business, she knew, would interfere with her time with Peter on the weekends, and she wanted to be available to him whenever he was home, which was seldom enough these days. |
| 2063 |
She was thinking of him, when Wim stuck his head in her bedroom door while she was getting dressed. He wanted to tell her his plans, a house rule she rigidly enforced even at his age. She wanted to know where her children were at all times, and with whom. Paris was the consummate responsible mother and devoted wife. |
| 2064 |
But there were still incidents now and then when he tried to pull the wool over her eyes. As she said, it was his job to try and put one over on her, and hers to figure it out when he did. She was pretty good about sussing things out, and most of the time he was honest, and she was comfortable about where he went. |
| 2065 |
Until he left for college, Paris said, he had to follow their rules, and Peter agreed. He heartily approved of the boundaries she set for their kids, and always had. They stood united on that, as on all else. They had never disagreed about how they raised their children, or much of anything in fact. |
| 2066 |
Sitting next to him, she could feel how tense he was. He nodded, as he sipped his wine, and for once didn't volunteer any details. He was too tired to go into it with her, or so she assumed. She didn't want to ask if there was anything else bothering him, it seemed obvious to her that it was the merger. |
| 2067 |
She loved everything about all of it, and there was nothing she would have changed. It was the perfect life. When she went back upstairs to wake him half an hour later, in case he'd fallen asleep, he was in the shower. She sat down in their bedroom and waited. The guests were going to arrive in twenty minutes. |
| 2068 |
She heard the doorbell ring while he was shaving, and told him not to rush. No one was going anywhere, he had time. She wanted him to unwind and enjoy the evening. He looked at her and nodded in the mirror, with shaving foam all over his face, when she told him she was going downstairs to greet their friends. |
| 2069 |
By the time Peter came down the stairs, two of the couples had already arrived, and a third was just walking toward the patio. The night was perfect, the sun had just set, and the warm night air felt more like Mexico or Hawaii. It was a perfect night for an outdoor dinner party, and everyone was in good spirits. |
| 2070 |
And in the soft glow of the candlelight, Peter looked better to Paris when he sat down at the head of the table, and chatted with the women she had placed next to him. He knew both well, and enjoyed their company, although he seemed quieter than usual throughout the dinner. He no longer seemed so much tired as subdued. |
| 2071 |
She had enjoyed talking to the men she sat next to about business matters, as she often did. Their male friends liked that about her. She was intelligent and well informed, and enjoyed talking about more than just her kids, unlike some of the women they knew, although Virginia and Natalie were intelligent too. |
| 2072 |
She was just as nervous as Paris about what she was going to do with herself when her only son graduated in June. He was going to Princeton, so at least he'd be closer to home than Wim. But any way you looked at it, a chapter of their lives was about to end, and it left all of them feeling anxious and insecure. |
| 2073 |
As much as he cared about Paris, and felt sorry for her, and guilty about what he was doing to her, he knew that his life, his soul, his being, his future was with Rachel now. Paris was his past. She sat in silence for endless minutes, staring at him, unable to believe what she had just heard, yet believing it. |
| 2074 |
The other woman was a faceless enemy, who had won the war before Paris even knew there was a battle. Paris had lost everything without ever being warned that their life and marriage were at stake. It felt like the end of the world as she stared at him, and he shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. |
| 2075 |
But he suspected she would anyway. Paris just stared at him as she cried, while tears dripped off her chin onto the skirt she wore. She looked broken and beaten to a pulp, and he knew it would take him a long time to forgive himself for what he'd done. But there was no other way. He had to do this, for all their sakes. |
| 2076 |
He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her, but he thought he shouldn't. So instead he got up, and stood at the window, looking down at the garden, wondering what would happen to her now. She was still young and beautiful, she would find someone. But he couldn't help worrying about her after all this time. |
| 2077 |
It had never dawned on her that night when she dressed for their dinner party that this was going to be the last day and night of their marriage. She wondered if he knew he was going to tell her that night. She felt like a fool now remembering how worried she had been about him when he looked tired as he came in. |
| 2078 |
For a thirty one year old woman and two little boys. It was as though the years he had shared with Paris had vanished in the blink of an eye. He nodded and went to put his pajamas on, as she sat in the chair and stared into space. And when he came back, he got into bed, lay there stiffly, and then turned off his light. |
| 2079 |
She hadn't even thought of that. But even if she was, Paris would rather suffer the indignity of an illegitimate child of his than lose him entirely. It had happened to other men before, and their marriages managed to survive. If he wanted it to, theirs could as well. But he didn't want to preserve their marriage. |
| 2080 |
She had never felt so frightened in her entire life. Her life as she had known it had ended, and the future seemed fraught with terror and danger and misery. The last thing she wanted was to find someone else. All she wanted was him. They were married. To her, that was sacred. And apparently less so to him. |
| 2081 |
Paris wanted it to be rainy and gloomy outside, as she turned over in bed and remembered what had happened the night before. And as soon as she did, she began to cry and looked over to find Peter, but he was already in the bathroom, shaving. And she put on a bathrobe and went downstairs to make coffee for both of them. |
| 2082 |
Rachel and her sons would then vanish politely into the mists, and she and Peter would go on with their life as before. It was temporary insanity, that was all, but when Peter walked into the kitchen fully dressed and looking grim, she knew it wasn't a joke after all. Wim noticed how serious he looked too. |
| 2083 |
He was hardening himself for the ugly scene he expected when Wim left, and he wasn't far wrong. She was planning to beg him to give up Rachel and come home. There was no sense of humiliation with their shared life on the line. And it was a strain for both of them to have Wim in their midst, sharing their final moments. |
| 2084 |
He was hanging on to his affair with Rachel like the life preserver that would save him from drowning in the world that he and Paris had once shared. And right now he wanted to get as far away from her as he could. She was the one thing standing between him and the future he wanted desperately, with another woman. |
| 2085 |
There was no sign of the guilt and tenderness he had shown her the night before. The door to the magic kingdom was closing forever. And she knew as she looked at him that she would forever remember that moment, as he stood in khaki slacks and a crisply starched blue shirt, with the sunlight streaming across his face. |
| 2086 |
She just looked at him, and nodded. And without another word, he turned, and walked out the front door, as she continued to stand there, feeling her knees shaking. And seconds later she heard him drive away. She was still standing there, when Wim walked out of his room in shorts and T shirt with a baseball cap on. |
| 2087 |
Every fiber of her being knew that she had lost the only man she'd ever loved, and as she heard the front door close when Wim went out, she rolled over onto Peter's side of the bed, buried her face in his pillow, and sobbed uncontrollably. The world she had known and loved for twenty four years had just ended. |
| 2088 |
Not that she was going to tell her anything different than she had told Wim, but she didn't want an audience while she did it. Meg answered on the second ring, and she sounded in good spirits. She had just come home from a weekend in Santa Barbara, and told her mother she had a new boyfriend. She said he was an actor. |
| 2089 |
She realized now that she should have gotten a job years before and done something more interesting with her life, like Rachel. She had won him in the end because she was more exciting. And younger. Much, much younger. It cut Paris to the quick to think about it, and made her feel old and unattractive and boring. |
| 2090 |
Between her and Wim and their unfailing support, she felt a fraction better than she had all weekend. And at least neither of them had blamed her. She had been afraid that they might, thinking she had done something dreadful to their father. But Meg was very clear about her feelings, and where to put the blame. |
| 2091 |
She hadn't meant to, but she couldn't help it. And a few minutes later, they hung up. She felt as though in a single night she had lost not only her family, but all her illusions. Her father had turned out to be someone she didn't even recognize, and she was terrified that her mother would sink into a deep depression. |
| 2092 |
They had been trying all week, and were having lunch together when they called her on Virginia's cell phone. And for the first time in days, Paris answered. She sounded hoarse and groggy, and she had been sleeping. Virginia had heard the news from her husband on Monday night when he came home from the office. |
| 2093 |
Both of her friends were horrified to realize what had happened. It was a reminder to each of them that no one was exempt from lightning striking when you least expected. No one could ever know what would happen. And just when you thought you could coast forever and were safe, you discovered that you weren't. |
| 2094 |
She had gotten a message on the answering machine from the lawyer Peter had retained for her on Tuesday. And when she called him back, she had thrown up after their brief conversation. It didn't bode well for the future. He told her that Peter wanted to file the papers soon, and get the show on the road quickly. |
| 2095 |
They all agreed that it had been a rotten thing for Peter to do to her, and none of them were anxious to meet Rachel. It was going to exclude him from the group that had been his friends for years, but Jim assured his wife it didn't seem to matter to him. He had a beautiful young woman on his arm, and a new life. |
| 2096 |
But there was no sign of her distress when she saw him. She stood tall and proud and poised, said hello to him, and walked away to stand with a handful of people she knew, and left him to congratulate his son. Peter seemed to be in surprisingly good spirits. The only one not surprised by it was Paris. |
| 2097 |
It had been her first time out in public, and it had cost her. She had had to dredge up every ounce of courage she had just to be there. She couldn't even enjoy it. The strain of seeing Peter, so estranged from her, was almost too much for her, and he had barely spoken to her. He had been civil, but distant. |
| 2098 |
She no longer felt like the person she had been. Even to herself now, she felt like a stranger. She wasn't even married now, or not for long anyway, and her marriage had been such a major part of her identity. She had given up everything she once was to be Mrs. Peter Armstrong, and now she felt like no one. |
| 2099 |
She had been shocked by how thin her mother was, and teased her that it was obviously due to Wim's cooking. But at least for once he wasn't worried about her, he could leave her in Meg's hands, and celebrate his graduation. He was leaving for Europe over the weekend. Paris had insisted he stick to his plans. |
| 2100 |
She felt as though she had lost yet another huge chunk of her life as she drove back to Greenwich. And she was utterly bereft the next morning when Meg left, although she tried not to show it. She wandered around the house like a ghost afterward, and nearly jumped a foot when she heard the doorbell. |
| 2101 |
But I think you will end up that way, if you don't get out of this house, and talk to someone about what happened. You've had a hell of a shock. What Peter did to you is about as traumatic as it gets, short of having your husband drop dead in his dinner. And that's probably a lot easier to survive than what he did. |
| 2102 |
One minute you're married, think you're happy, have a husband and a life you've known and loved for twenty four years, and the next minute he's gone, he's divorcing you, and you don't know what hit you. And to make matters worse, he's living an hour from here, and dating someone twenty years younger. |
| 2103 |
She was warm, down to earth, sensible, and combined just the right amount of sympathy with all right fine now what are we going to do about this? She had gotten Virginia back on her feet and out of the doldrums after Jim's depression. After he was fine again, Virginia had suddenly felt depressed and without purpose. |
| 2104 |
She had planted a seed and was waiting for it to take hold and grow. She was counting on Paris's children to water it. And if it was the right thing for Paris, she would nurture the seed herself. And if not, there were other things she could do to climb out of the hole she'd been in since Peter left. |
| 2105 |
She didn't want to just sit around for the rest of her life, particularly if she was going to be alone, which she assumed she would. Anne Smythe tried to talk to her from time to time about going out with men, and Paris didn't want to hear about it. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was date. |
| 2106 |
She had no desire to go anywhere, except lunch with her two friends occasionally, but by August she was looking better again. She had been working in the garden, reading a lot, and sleeping less during the day, and better at night. She had a deep tan, and had never looked better, although she was still very thin. |
| 2107 |
It felt strange to come home and have his father not be there. He drove into the city to see him two days after he got home, and they went out to lunch. He introduced him to several lawyers in his office, including a girl who hardly looked older than Meg, and she had been very warm and friendly to him. |
| 2108 |
She was getting up in the morning, combing her hair, getting dressed, seeing her two best friends for lunch occasionally, and she was bracing herself for Wim to leave for college. It was all she could manage for now. He was leaving in three days, and Paris was going with him, the last time she saw Anne before the trip. |
| 2109 |
It was the only choice Peter had left her when he threw her out of the plane. And one day, maybe, if she was very lucky, and the fates were smiling on her, her parachute would open finally. She wasn't even sure yet if she was wearing one, and all she could do was pray she was. But there was no sign of a parachute yet. |
| 2110 |
They had a nice time together, as they always did, and when they got back to the hotel, they called Meg. Paris was flying down to see her in two days, after she got Wim settled in his dorm. She assumed it would take two days, and she was in no rush to leave him there. What she really dreaded now was going home. |
| 2111 |
But he had nothing else to do either, and the campus was so overwhelming in its enormity, it was a little daunting to wander off. Like her, he preferred to stay and wait, although he felt awkward being with her. He hadn't been looking forward to the trip either, and had steeled himself for it, for Wim's sake. |
| 2112 |
She couldn't go home to safe, familiar surroundings afterward to lick her wounds. All she could do was go back to a hotel, which wasn't the same. He nodded, in silent agreement with her, and all she could feel was the future stretching forever in front of them. A future in which he had Rachel, and she was alone. |
| 2113 |
He arrived like a burst of summer wind, hot and perspiring and out of breath. For an instant, Paris was sorry he had come when he had, and then just as quickly, she was relieved. She had heard all she needed to know. Peter was firm in his decision, and only sorry for her. She didn't want his pity but his heart. |
| 2114 |
Once they got into the room, Paris stationed herself in the area of Wim's bed, to unpack what they brought up, and Peter and Wim lugged boxes and bags, a trunk, a small stereo, his computer, and his bicycle up three flights of stairs. They had rented a microwave and a tiny refrigerator from the school. |
| 2115 |
They both looked tired, it had been a long day, and emotional in every way. She was not only watching her youngest child fly the nest, and helping him do it as she lovingly made his bed and put his clothes away, but she was setting Peter free at the same time, or trying to. It was a reminder of her double loss. |
| 2116 |
The attic of their hearts, and the marriage he had destroyed. She felt as though her entire life had been deposited in a dumpster like so much trash. All things that had once been cherished and loved and belonged to someone, and now had no home. And she along with it. Tossed out, forgotten, unloved. |
| 2117 |
And there were others when he knew he would miss Paris forever. She was a remarkable woman. And he hoped that one day, she would get over what he had done to her. He admired her for her dignity and courage. He knew better than anyone that she was a woman of great grace. More than he felt he deserved. |
| 2118 |
When Paris showed up at the dormitory to see Wim the next day, he was on his way out with his friends. He had a thousand things to sign up for, people to meet, worlds to discover, things to do, and she realized within minutes that if she stuck around, she would be in the way. Her job was done. It was time to go. |
| 2119 |
His father had spoken respectfully of her the night before, which almost made Wim ask him why he had left if he thought so highly of her. It was impossible to understand, but more than he wanted to know. He just wanted them both to be happy, whatever it took. Especially his mom. Sometimes she seemed so frail. |
| 2120 |
It was even longer than her mother's, and made her look like a little girl to Paris once she let it loose. She was a spectacular looking girl, every bit as beautiful as the actresses on the set, but she had no interest in that. She was wearing a halter top, flip flops, and jeans, her uniform for work. |
| 2121 |
Meg had always been reasonable and willing to talk about things, unlike most of her peers. Paris's friends said she didn't know how blessed she was, but she did, even more so now. Meg had been her greatest source of support since Peter left, almost like a mother instead of a child. But she was no longer a child. |
| 2122 |
He looks like he always did. I see him, and part of me thinks we're still married, and technically we are. It's so weird, and so hard to understand that he's not part of my life anymore. It was probably hard for him too. But this is what he wants. He made that clear again. I don't know what happened. |
| 2123 |
He was exotically beautiful, with a spectacular physique that showed to perfection in a tank top he was wearing and skin tight jeans. He rode in on a motorcycle you could hear for miles, and he wore Harley Davidson boots that left black marks all across Meg's beige carpet, which she seemed not to notice or mind. |
| 2124 |
And in response to Paris's motherly inquiries, he looked blank when she asked where he'd gone to college. He said he took physics regularly to keep his system pure, and was on a macrobiotic diet. He was a complete health nut, which was a relief at least, since he had given up drugs and alcohol as a result. |
| 2125 |
And he talked in rhapsodic terms to Paris about her daughter, which was at least something. He was crazy about her. And even Paris could sense that the physical attraction between them was powerful. It was as though all the life had been sucked out of the room when he kissed Meg passionately, and then left them. |
| 2126 |
She really didn't want to find another man, or date. If she couldn't have Peter, she would rather be alone, and spend time with her children and friends. Just the health risks of dating someone these days, and sleeping with them, seemed far too terrifying to her. She had said as much to Anne Smythe. |
| 2127 |
As loving and welcoming as her daughter was, she was a grown woman, with a demanding job and a busy life. There was no room for Paris in it, except for a few days and brief visits. She had to make her own way now, and adjust to the realities of her life. The reality was that she was alone, and would stay that way. |
| 2128 |
It was hopeless. And as she drifted off to sleep in the bed they had once shared, she felt despair engulf her until she felt as though she were about to drown. It was still hard to believe sometimes that she'd survive. At night, alone in her bed, it seemed as though everyone she had ever loved was gone. |
| 2129 |
The therapist was pushing her harder, making her look deep into herself, and bringing up a lot of painful issues. She cried in every session now, and the volunteer work she was doing in Stamford with abused kids was depressing. Her social life was nonexistent. She was relentlessly stubborn about it. |
| 2130 |
She went nowhere and saw no one, except for the occasional lunch with Natalie and Virginia. But she seemed to have less in common with them now. Although their children were the same age as hers, they both had husbands, busy lives, someone to share their days and nights with, and take care of. Paris had no one. |
| 2131 |
She skated again the following week on a Thursday morning, and amazed herself by hiring an instructor to teach her to do spins. It was becoming her favorite pastime of the week, and by the time the kids came home for Thanksgiving, she had gotten pretty good. What she hadn't done yet was go anywhere socially. |
| 2132 |
She had not been out for dinner, or an evening, or even a movie, since Peter left. She told Anne that it was too embarrassing to go out socially, with everyone knowing what had happened to her, and it was too depressing to go to the movies alone. The only place she had fun was on the ice. But at least she had that. |
| 2133 |
And then they went home to eat the turkey Paris had left in the oven while they went out. But in spite of the pleasant morning they'd shared, and the fact that she was thrilled to have them home, it was a difficult afternoon. The holiday seemed to underscore everything that had changed in the past year. |
| 2134 |
He was anxious to see them too, but had understood that they wanted to be with their mother on Thanksgiving, and hadn't pressed the point with them. Wim and Meg both looked very nice when they caught the five o'clock train into the city on Friday afternoon. It was snowing, and neither of them wanted to drive. |
| 2135 |
Peter was waiting for them at the entrance to the restaurant in a pin striped suit, and Meg thought he looked very handsome, and said as much to him. He was pleased, and happy to spend an evening with them. He had invited them both to stay at the hotel with him, and had reserved rooms for each of them. |
| 2136 |
It was hard now, with separate parents to satisfy, to fit it all in, although both of them had seen friends the night before, after Thanksgiving dinner, as well. Paris was just grateful to have them sleeping there, she didn't expect to monopolize their time, nor did Peter. And they were glad to come into the city. |
| 2137 |
Peter seemed a little tense to Meg at first, as though he didn't know what to say to her, and he seemed a little more at ease with Wim. He had never been an easy conversationalist, and he had always counted on their mother to keep the conversational ball rolling. Without her, things were a little stiffer. |
| 2138 |
Meg wondered if he had bought a new house or an apartment, or better yet, maybe he was thinking of going back to their mother. But in that case, she reasoned, he would have invited Paris to join them, and he hadn't. They waited expectantly as he put down his glass and seemed to be waiting for a drumroll. |
| 2139 |
They just said they'd had a nice dinner at Le Cirque, and were going to bed at the hotel. And that night, for the first time in years, they slept in the same bed, clinging to each other in innocent despair, just as they had when they were children. The last time they'd done that was when their dog died. |
| 2140 |
She just thought Peter should have told them a lot sooner than he did. His idea about letting the dust settle after he left their mother seemed more than foolish to her. The one thing she had done before the fateful breakfast was to warn Jason and Tommy not to say that Peter was living with them, and they had agreed. |
| 2141 |
He had married one of her classmates from Stanford the year she'd gotten out of school. And she hadn't spoken to him for three years, and very little since. It had created a permanent rift between them, particularly when her mother died five years later, officially of cancer, but presumably of grief. |
| 2142 |
It had been a tough morning for him. And all he could do now was force Paris out of his mind. He had no other choice. He told himself, as he had for six months now, that what he was doing was right, for all of them. It was an illusion he would have to cling to now, for better or worse, for the rest of his life. |
| 2143 |
And two days later, like a sign from providence, a woman she had known in her carpool days ran into her at the grocery store, and handed her the business card of a massage and aromatherapist she said she'd tried, and said was fabulous. Paris felt foolish taking it, but it couldn't do any harm, she told herself. |
| 2144 |
So massage seemed like a wholesome alternative, and when she got home that afternoon, she called the name on the card. The voice at the other end of the line was somewhat ethereal, and there was Indian music playing in the background, which Paris found irritating, but she was determined to keep an open mind. |
| 2145 |
And despite Paris's skepticism, she had to admit that the woman had a lovely, peaceful face. There was an otherworldly quality to her, and she took her shoes off the minute she came into the house. She asked where Paris's bedroom was, and went upstairs quietly to set up the table, and put flannel sheets on it. |
| 2146 |
And she wasn't interested in spirits. Just in surviving the divorce, and Pe ter's impending marriage. She would have preferred dealing with spirits. They might have been easier to get rid of. Karma had begun moving her hands again by then, and she stopped with a look of horror two inches above Paris's stomach. |
| 2147 |
And she already felt better, by the time Karma whispered to her to turn over. And what she did on Paris's tense back and shoulders was the best part. In spite of the demons and bad karma she was now lying on, she was so relaxed, she felt as though she were melting. It was exactly what she had needed. |
| 2148 |
Apparently, the demons had moved from her bowels to her upper body, and Karma was determined to get them. She kept hitting Paris's back with a hot cup, which created a suction, and then she ripped it off with a loud popping sound. It hurt like hell, and made Paris squirm, but she was embarrassed to ask her to stop it. |
| 2149 |
Paris was still lying on her stomach, and the small of her back was now on fire from the hot, oily rocks. It was agony, and yet in a funny way, both the heat and the weight of them felt good. She was beginning to understand the philosophy that led some sects to sleep on beds of nails, or swallow flames. |
| 2150 |
But Paris knew there was no way she would lie in her bed all night, covered in oil. It took Karma another half hour to wrap up, she charged one hundred dollars, which was reasonable at least, and by midnight she was gone. Paris walked back into her bedroom after letting her out, and all she could do was laugh. |
| 2151 |
He had a new wife, a new life. She didn't exist anymore, as far as he was concerned. He had blown everything they'd ever had to smithereens. And as she drifted off to sleep, she told herself she didn't care anymore, about him, or Rachel, or anything. All she wanted was to forget she had ever loved him, and go to sleep. |
| 2152 |
And it was a week after they both left before she felt human again. It was her first morning out of bed after the flu when Natalie called, and said she had had the same flu. She was having a dinner party the following Saturday, she said, just a few old friends, and she wondered if Paris would like to come. |
| 2153 |
And Natalie had said that Virginia and Jim would be there too. She put on a pair of velvet slacks and a cashmere sweater, and did her hair in a bun for the first time in months. And she was about to put on high heels when she saw that it was snowing. In the end, she stuck them in her coat pockets and put on boots. |
| 2154 |
But only four of the guests were there when she got to Natalie and Fred's. The other guests had had the same problem too. It was turning out to be a heavier snowfall than expected. And when Fred found out she'd driven herself, he told her if she had called, they would have been happy to come and get her. |
| 2155 |
But she laughed, and felt surprisingly independent. By the time the last of the guests arrived, she realized that she was the only single person there, which was more or less what she had expected. They had invited four couples, and Paris. It was what she was going to have to get used to. Being the odd man out. |
| 2156 |
She had wanted to be subtle about introducing her to this man. And he was about as subtle as a flood in a farmhouse, and considerably less attractive. He had a habit of taking his glasses on and off, and in doing so, messed up his hair. The drunker he got, the wilder he looked, and the lewder his jokes got. |
| 2157 |
The lone wolf had settled onto the couch by then, and was swilling brandy. He looked as though he was about to pass out, and Paris commented to Virginia that they were going to have to let him stay the night, or drive him back to wherever he came from. He was in no condition to drive, particularly in a snowstorm. |
| 2158 |
It had reached a point where it was no longer funny. And her friends' sympathy, however well meant, was somehow degrading, as though she couldn't take care of herself, and they had to do it for her. She had to have a consort at any price, under any circumstances, so they wouldn't feel sorry for her. |
| 2159 |
She would have walked home in the snow rather than spend another minute in their living room, with Revolting Ralph, and her friends who obviously felt sorry for her. She knew their intentions were good, but the reality of the situation was enough to bring tears to her eyes. This was what she had been reduced to. |
| 2160 |
She knew that whatever else happened in her life, she would remember Ralph forever. She was playing the evening out in her head, as she rounded a bend, and the car skidded. She stepped on the brake, which made it worse, as she hit a patch of ice, and slipped right off the road before she could stop. |
| 2161 |
She thought about calling Meg to pass the time, but she didn't want to worry her by telling her she was stuck in a snowbank at midnight. So she just sat there and waited, and the tow truck showed up forty five minutes later. She got out of the car, while they lifted it out of the ditch, and got her on the road again. |
| 2162 |
And she was home an hour and a half after she had left the dinner party. It was nearly one thirty, and she was exhausted. She walked into her house and closed the door, and leaned heavily against it. And for the first time since Peter had left she knew that she was angry. She was so angry she wanted to kill someone. |
| 2163 |
She left them strewn on her bedroom floor, and it didn't matter anymore. There was no one to see it. No one to shovel the driveway or drive her home, or keep her from skidding in her car, or sliding into the ditch, or from assholes like Ralph. She hated all of them, but more than anyone, she hated Peter. |
| 2164 |
She knew how tough the last months had been, and she didn't see a solution for her, unless she found another husband. And with candidates like Ralph afoot, it was beginning to look less than likely. But there had to be someone. She and Virginia had made a solemn vow to find a man for her, whatever it took. |
| 2165 |
And after glancing at him, she read a book, ate lunch, and then watched the movie. They were only an hour out of San Francisco by the time it was over, and by then her seatmate had put away his computer. He glanced over at her with a smile as the flight attendant offered them cheese and fruit or milk and cookies. |
| 2166 |
She had worn it until the divorce came, and taking it off had nearly killed her. But there was no point wearing it anymore. Peter was married to someone else. But she still felt naked without it. She had never taken it off since the day they were married, she'd been both sentimental and superstitious about it. |
| 2167 |
He's married, and has a wife and four kids in Stamford. Two of the women on this flight have gone out with him and he doesn't share that information. He commutes out here. I saw him talking to you, and we girls have to stick together. Of course, maybe it doesn't bother you. But it's good to know anyway. |
| 2168 |
It had the advantage of being close to the water, had a view of the bay, and the Golden Gate, and what she liked most about it was that Wim could use the mother in law apartment whenever he wanted, and still feel as though he had a certain amount of independence from her. He could even bring his friends there. |
| 2169 |
She was going to have to pick and choose among her furniture, and send the rest to storage. And the realtor told her that he could rent furniture for her until her own arrived. They settled it in one afternoon. She signed the lease, and the realtor dropped off the keys to her that night at the Ritz Carlton. |
| 2170 |
It had charm and privacy for her, and more than enough space, and would provide Wim a nest to come home to, although she didn't expect him to come often. He was having a ball in Berkeley. From everything he had told her, he had made a lot of friends, and was even enjoying his classes, and doing well. |
| 2171 |
She drove him back to Berkeley that night, and the next morning she flew back to Greenwich. Her seatmate this time was a very old woman who said she was going to see her son, and slept from takeoff to touchdown. And Paris felt as though she'd been gone for months when she walked into the house in Greenwich. |
| 2172 |
She had already called a realtor, and they were starting to show the house that weekend. They told her it might take a while to rent it. It was a dead time of year, as people were more likely to rent, move, or buy in spring or summer. She had already called movers, and was planning to start packing over the weekend. |
| 2173 |
And Natalie made the same offer the next morning. By the weekend, at least four people had called and said they wanted to see her before she left, and wanted to have her for dinner. Suddenly people weren't feeling sorry for her, they were excited about what she was doing, though sorry to see her go, and she loved it. |
| 2174 |
And much to her amazement, by Sunday afternoon, the house had been rented. They were only the second people who had seen it, and the first ones called an hour later, and were severely disappointed that it was gone. The family who were renting it wanted it for a year, with an option for a second year. |
| 2175 |
The house was perfect for them, and they were relieved that Paris didn't object to the children. On the contrary, the thought of her house coming alive again and being well lived in made her happy. And she was astounded by the rent she was able to get for it. It was going to cover the house in California and then some. |
| 2176 |
They had invited only old friends, and no more strangers to woo her. It felt like old home week. She had never realized how many people she knew and genuinely liked in Greenwich, and for a minute or two she was almost sorry she was leaving. But in her last session with Anne, she knew she had made the right decision. |
| 2177 |
There was a kind of carnival atmosphere to everything she was doing. But she knew it would have been different if she'd stayed. She would have been sitting alone in her house, depressed and in the doldrums. Although she was going to be alone in San Francisco. She still had to find a job, and meet new people. |
| 2178 |
Maybe she would one day. But for the next year, she was going to spread her wings and fly, or try to at least. And this time, she knew she had her parachute well in place. She wasn't free falling through space, and no one had pushed her out of the plane. She had jumped, and she knew what she was doing and why. |
| 2179 |
Wim had promised to come and see her that weekend. And when the plane touched down in San Francisco, she was smiling broadly to herself. She gave the cab driver the address of her new home, and the realtor had done as he'd promised. He told her he had rented enough furniture for her to tide her over until hers came. |
| 2180 |
The only thing she could think of to do was to go to a florist and buy armloads of flowers. So on Saturday, after doing some laundry, and a long conversation with Meg, she got in her rental car and drove around. She wanted the place to look as nice as possible when Wim came for dinner with a friend on Sunday night. |
| 2181 |
She was hoping to come up as soon as they wrapped the current movie, but for the moment she was still up to her neck in it. Paris was still thinking about the job situation, and her recent conversation with Meg, when she parked the car she was renting, and wandered into an antique shop on Sacramento. |
| 2182 |
She was having a great time just walking from store to store and browsing. And next to the last one, she discovered a very elegant, but small florist in an elegant little Victorian house. There were three spectacular arrangements of spring flowers in the window. She had never seen anything like them. |
| 2183 |
But it's actually a lot more now. The man who owns it is an artist and a genius. He does all the best parties in town, from soup to nuts. He provides the music, caterers, decides on the theme, or works with his clients to create the atmosphere they want, from small dinner parties to weddings for eight hundred. |
| 2184 |
The homes he worked in were spectacular, the settings more elegant than any she'd ever seen. Mansions, gardens, beautifully manicured grounds on large estates with tents specially designed to accommodate the guests in fabrics she would never have thought of using. The weddings she saw in the book were exquisite. |
| 2185 |
She realized she was unlikely to get a shot at it, she had no experience in the job market, and even less with elaborate events like the ones he did. But at least it was a place to start, and she was proud of herself for speaking up and asking about the possibility. This was a whole new world for her. |
| 2186 |
Paris spent the next two hours wandering in and out of shops on Sacramento Street. She bought a set of salad plates in a pretty store down the street, and a needlepoint to do on lonely nights. And by four o'clock she was home again, made herself a cup of tea, and sat looking at the view. It had been a nice afternoon. |
| 2187 |
You'd have to go to all the events with him, and some on your own, if he has two at the same time. He always stops in, but he can't be in two places at once, particularly if one of them is out of town, so you have to be pretty much at ease with the clients and the guests and fit in. That's important to him. |
| 2188 |
He did her wedding, and her husband says if she doesn't quit now, Bix can do their divorce. Paul says he hasn't seen Jane for more than ten minutes at a time for the last five years. He wants her at home, and she agreed. I think she's ready for it. Bix is terrific, but it's an incredible amount of work. |
| 2189 |
I think it was meant to be that you walked into the shop today. He was going to keep it closed because he didn't have anyone to be there, and I volunteered to keep it open for him, but it was just a fluke. Destiny. Now let's see what comes of it. And if this doesn't pan out, something else will. I'm sure of that. |
| 2190 |
She felt a little overdressed, but she wanted him to see that she would look proper at parties, and this was an interview after all. She hadn't wanted to underdress or overdress, and she was carrying a small black classic Chanel shoulder bag that Peter had given her for Christmas several years before. |
| 2191 |
All she had to offer him was her brain, her energy, her time, and her organizational skills. She hoped it was enough for him. A buzzer sounded, and when she pushed the door, it opened, and revealed a short flight of marble stairs leading upward, just like the staircase in the shop. The house was beautifully done. |
| 2192 |
They're about halfway here from Los Angeles, they should arrive before noon, which means we have to hustle when they get here. But they're going to knock something off the price to make up for the delay. I think we'll make it. The party isn't till seven, and if we get into the room by three, we should be fine. |
| 2193 |
You'll be lucky if you see your kids for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and probably not then either, because we'll have parties to do. I promise to run you ragged, drive you crazy, teach you everything I know, and make you wish you'd never laid eyes on me at least ninety percent of the time, if not more. |
| 2194 |
It was all she wanted to do. It would keep her busy and distracted, make her feel useful, the parties and events they did had to be exciting, she would meet new people, even if they were his clients and not her friends. She couldn't think of a better job for her, and she didn't care how hard she worked. |
| 2195 |
The key is using really good resources that don't let you down. It happens sometimes anyway, but very rarely. And Bix only lets it happen once. If they screw up, or let him down somehow, he never gives them a second chance. Our clients just won't put up with it. Perfection is the secret to his success. |
| 2196 |
Bix arrived himself about half an hour later, and he stayed until nearly dinnertime. By the time he left, everything was set up and in perfect order. He had pulled and tugged and tucked and tweaked the flowers himself, and at the last minute he changed one of the silver bowls they were in because he didn't like it. |
| 2197 |
She made sure the guests were greeted properly when they arrived, their escort cards were handed to them, the musicians were at their stations, the flowers still looked right, and the valet parkers knew what they were doing with the cars. There was not a single detail overlooked by Bixby Mason or any of his employees. |
| 2198 |
She hadn't stopped since nine o'clock that morning. And this was only the beginning. She dialed Meg quickly as she foraged for something to eat. She had less than an hour to dress and meet Jane back at the party, before the first guests came. Meg was still at the studio when she answered her cell phone. |
| 2199 |
And the hosts had been pleasant and welcoming when they met Paris. She looked every bit as elegant as the guests in a simple black cocktail dress. She had been careful to wear something covered up and distinguished. The idea was to blend in, not to draw attention to herself, which she understood completely. |
| 2200 |
Jane thought she was perfect, mature, sensible, capable, hardworking, resourceful. When one of the valet parkers had created a problem with one of the guests, Paris had told the head of the team quietly and firmly to call their base and replace him. She hadn't waited for Jane to give her directions. |
| 2201 |
This was no way to put your feet up and wait for a baby. Her schedule would have killed most women who weren't pregnant, and it was easy to see why her husband had insisted she quit and stay home with her baby. She'd done this for six years, and it was time to stop now. For her sake, and the baby's. |
| 2202 |
And she realized as she walked in, and set down her handbag, she was exhausted. It had been a long, interesting day, followed by a successful evening. She had been acutely aware during all of it that she was concentrating constantly in order to learn everything she needed to know as quickly as possible. |
| 2203 |
But nothing she had done that day seemed out of the ordinary to her, or impossible to accomplish. She knew that she could do this. And as she stretched out in her bed that night, all she wanted was to land this job as Bixby Mason's assistant. And God willing, if it was meant to be, she would do that. |
| 2204 |
They had two parties to do on Tuesday night. Bixby spearheaded one of them, the more important of the two, and Jane handled the other, for a slightly less demanding client. One was a remarkable event in an art gallery, which involved a light show and a techno band, and a lot of complicated technical details. |
| 2205 |
It was a very carefully done setup. There was a secretary who came in twice a week to type things up for them, and a bookkeeper who did the billing. But the responsibility for all the rest of it was on Bixby and Jane's shoulders, and hers if he hired her. And Paris knew she was going to really miss this, if he didn't. |
| 2206 |
It was their fortieth, and they were having a black tie dinner party for a hundred on Saturday in their home in Hillsborough. It was apparently a palatial estate on a hilltop, and Mrs. Fleischmann said she had looked forward to the event for an entire lifetime. Bixby wanted everything to be perfect for her. |
| 2207 |
Paris was standing near the buffet, watching the scene, in a simple navy blue silk evening gown, as a man walked over to her, and began chatting. The dress was pretty on her, and she'd worn her hair in a French twist, but she was being careful not to look showy, or wear bright colors when she was working. |
| 2208 |
Jane was limited to one black cocktail dress these days, and one black evening gown that was straining at the seams. But she'd been in good spirits all day, and seemed to get a second wind halfway through the evening. By then, the baby looked beyond enormous, and the doctor had said he was going to be a ten pounder. |
| 2209 |
And much to her own amazement, she followed. She caught Bix's eye along the way, and he smiled at her and winked, which seemed to suggest he had no problem with it. So she let Chandler Freeman lead her onto the floor and sweep her away. He was an expert dancer, and it was three songs later when he led her to his table. |
| 2210 |
There was a towel in the trunk, and Paris set it next to her, and got into the front seat. Bix had driven them, and he took off his tuxedo jacket, put it in the trunk, and a moment later they took off. By then Jane had called Paul, and told him what was happening. She promised to call him back in five minutes. |
| 2211 |
Paris knew that they would be lucky if they got there in time. The baby was definitely coming. And just as she thought it, Bix screeched to a halt outside the hospital, in the parking slots reserved for emergency vehicles. Without asking either of them, he jumped out of the car, and ran inside to find a doctor. |
| 2212 |
Thinking about it reminded her of Peter. And a moment later one of the emergency room nurses came out to tell them that the baby was healthy and weighed ten pounds three ounces. Half an hour later they wheeled Jane past them, as Paul followed proudly, holding the baby. They were all going upstairs to a room. |
| 2213 |
There were books everywhere, and there was a roaring fire, where Bix and an older man had been sitting and reading the Sunday paper. The older man was wearing a tweed jacket and slacks and an open blue shirt, and Bix was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The older man had white hair, but looked youthful and very rugged. |
| 2214 |
He was sixty two years old, and it was obvious that he admired Bix greatly, and they were very happy. They sat in the dining room, eating omelettes and croissants, as Bix poured them each a cappuccino. He was a fabulous cook, and informed her that it was a good thing, because Steven couldn't boil water. |
| 2215 |
I came home and found him passed out on the couch in pink hot pants and a black bra one afternoon, ripped out of his mind on Quaaludes, and I told him he had to go. That was nothing compared to the nature lover, who must have been related to the Hillside Strangler. He had five snakes and let them loose in my house. |
| 2216 |
In a funny way, it reminded her of her closeness to Peter, and when she went home that afternoon, she found that it had made her feel lonely. They were so close and at ease with each other, and so comfortable. It reminded her of how nice it was to have someone to share your life with. She called Meg and she was out. |
| 2217 |
And by eleven o'clock, she had cleaned up, and gotten into bed in her nightgown. It had been a delightful Sunday. Weekends were what she feared most, and what she had most disliked in Greenwich. It felt as though everyone else in the world had someone to be with, and she didn't. But here it seemed easier somehow. |
| 2218 |
He was so reasonable and so easy and so convincing, he was hard to resist. And although she thought about it that night, she had come to no decision. She half wanted to see him and half didn't. And when he called her on Friday morning, she was busy and distracted, and before she knew it, she'd agreed. |
| 2219 |
It was a glorious afternoon with a gentle breeze. She had worn her hair down, and he looked at her admiringly as her long blond hair flew in the wind. And when he brought her home, she invited him upstairs for a drink. She drank iced tea as usual, and he had a glass of white wine, as he admired the view. |
| 2220 |
Chandler picked Paris up in the Ferrari at eight o'clock on Friday morning, and she was ready and waiting for him. Her bag was packed, and she was carrying her dress in a garment bag. She was wearing a black pantsuit and a fur jacket, and he was wearing a dark suit. They made a handsome pair as they drove off. |
| 2221 |
She had a cup of tea and read the paper as they flew south, and by the time she was finished, they were ready to land. It had been a short flight, and she was impressed by how expertly Chandler flew the plane. He obviously took it seriously, and he paid no attention to her until they were on the ground. |
| 2222 |
She hadn't expected anything even remotely like it. They had lunch in the dining room, and admired the swans as they waddled by and swam in the pond. And afterward Chandler asked her if she'd like to shop on Rodeo Drive. He still had the limousine standing by, and she confessed shyly that she would. |
| 2223 |
She was always perfectly dressed, and impeccably organized. Chandler had already noticed that about her. He seemed to be enjoying her company considerably, and Paris was finding him easy to be with. He had a nice sense of humor, and an uncomplicated nature. And he seemed to be well versed at shopping with women. |
| 2224 |
He had bought it while she tried on some sweaters and a blouse that were on sale. In the end, the only thing she'd bought on the entire shopping spree was a pair of very simple black shoes that she thought might be good for work. And as she held the bag he had handed her, she looked up at him with hesitation. |
| 2225 |
No one had ever done anything like that for her. She scarcely knew him, and the gesture was as generous as it was spontaneous. It was a lovely gift. But Chandler was accustomed to buying the women in his life extravagant gifts, even when they hadn't slept with him yet. And he seemed to want nothing in return. |
| 2226 |
He had ordered a massage for her when they got back to the hotel. And he disappeared to his own rooms, to have one himself. She didn't see him again until shortly before seven. Until then, she relaxed with the massage, luxuriated in her bath, and admired the handbag he had given her again and again. |
| 2227 |
But as long as her mother could handle it, if she could, maybe it would be okay. Meg was no longer so sure. Chandler appeared at Paris's door at five minutes to seven in an impeccably cut tuxedo that had been made for him in London, and he looked better than any movie star, and Paris looked terrific too. |
| 2228 |
He was incredibly generous and hospitable, and acted as though he was dying to meet her. Paris had never known anyone like him. The whole experience was unforgettable, and as she walked into her room, she saw the black lizard bag again, sitting on the table. She put it on with her white gown, and looked in the mirror. |
| 2229 |
There was nothing he didn't do to spoil her. And by the time they got back to the hotel, Paris was happy and relaxed, and had had another wonderful evening. And this time, when he left her at her door, he kissed her long and hard on the mouth, and she didn't resist him. But he made no attempt to go further. |
| 2230 |
And he looked at her with tenderness and regret when he left her. And as she looked at herself in the mirror as she brushed her hair, she wondered what she was doing. She could feel herself drifting slowly away from Peter. Chandler was the first man she had kissed in twenty six years other than Peter. |
| 2231 |
I went out with a guy like that once. He spoiled the hell out of me, and I couldn't understand it. Watches, bracelets, cashmere jackets, trips. I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven, until I figured out that he was sleeping with three other guys, and was the most promiscuous sonofabitch on the planet. |
| 2232 |
Bix was smart, sensible, and he cared about her. All he wanted to do was protect her, and she appreciated it, but she thought he was wrong about Chandler. They worked as late that night as she had expected, and the following day she left the office at six o'clock, and Chandler picked her up at seven thirty. |
| 2233 |
He had thought she'd like to see it. But his apartment, when she saw it, was even better. It was a penthouse on Russian Hill with a three hundred and sixty degree view, and a terrace that nearly made her dizzy. And everything in the apartment was either white marble, black granite, or black leather. |
| 2234 |
It was very striking, and very masculine. The kitchen was a state of the art wonder. And he had everything ready. Oysters on the half shell, cold lobster, and he made a delicious capellini pasta with caviar. There was nothing for her to do, as they sat down to eat at a long granite table in his kitchen. |
| 2235 |
And he poured an excellent French white Bordeaux for her. The dinner was far more elegant than anything she would have cooked for him, and she thoroughly enjoyed it. Afterward they sat in his living room in front of the fire, admiring the view. It was chilly outside, and nice being next to him by the fire. |
| 2236 |
One wedding went until two thirty, and the other till after four in the morning, and she didn't want to call and wake him. Weddings were different than dinner parties, a lot more could go wrong. They needed to keep track of each minute detail, and they always stayed to supervise till the bitter end. |
| 2237 |
She wanted him to meet Wim, but when she called him in the dorm, he said he was busy. So she and Chandler ate alone. They spent a quiet evening at her house watching videos, and this time she cooked him dinner. She made a big bowl of pasta and a salad, far simpler fare than he served, but the wine was good. |
| 2238 |
But the anniversary of the day Peter had left her was a hard one for her. She woke up with a bleak feeling, and remembered instantly what date it was. She was quiet and solemn all day. Bix asked her about it finally, and she told him what it was. And when she got home from work, she went to bed and cried. |
| 2239 |
And when she got there Sydney was waiting at a table. Her friend was parking the car. He must have parked it in another county, because it was another half hour before he showed up. And when he came through the door wearing an Indian poncho and a cowboy hat, he seemed to be staggering, and Paris thought he was drunk. |
| 2240 |
And halfway through dinner, they started to talk. They spoke quietly while the girls caught up on old times, and laughed about their friends. And all the while, Jim was telling her about when his wife died. And before she knew it, she was telling him about Peter leaving. They were trading tragedies like baseball cards. |
| 2241 |
It wasn't exactly cheerful dinner conversation, and they didn't want to share it with their children. Sally and his son always told Jim he had to stop talking about their mother, particularly to strangers. He did it often. She'd been gone for nearly two years now. And to Jim, it seemed like minutes. |
| 2242 |
She just didn't want to hear another story about Phyllis, nor to talk about Peter yet again. She wanted to bury them both. And she was dying to make a pact with Jim that if they saw each other again, neither of them could speak of their previous spouses. But she didn't feel she knew him well enough to say that to him. |
| 2243 |
She knew what was coming before he said it, he and Phyllis had loved to cook. And Paris almost shuddered when she saw Phyllis's tired old faded straw hat hanging on a hook near the back door. It was still there after two years, and she wondered how many of her belongings were still around. Probably most or all. |
| 2244 |
But unlike other men she knew, even those like Bixby who hadn't had surgery, Jim looked older than his years. It was more than likely what grief had done to him. It was a powerful force, and even killed people sometimes, usually when they had been married forever and ever, and lost each other when they were very old. |
| 2245 |
And the next thing Paris knew, she was chronicling every trip she, Peter, and the children ever took. She was about to suggest a pact with Jim, a ban on talking about their late and ex spouses, but she didn't dare. And in spite of it, she had a nice evening with him, helped him do the dishes, and left around ten. |
| 2246 |
There was something so profoundly sad about him. And she noticed that he drank a lot of wine at dinner. Given how he was feeling, it was hardly surprising, but alcohol wasn't going to help buoy his spirits. On the contrary, the more he drank, the sadder he got, and the more he talked about his late wife. |
| 2247 |
And that night, when he took her home, he surprised her by kissing her tenderly on the front steps. She was surprised by what a passionate man he was, and she melted toward him when they kissed. He was either lonelier than even she thought, or the old adage was in fact true that still waters run deep. |
| 2248 |
Sally had had the baby by then, and the two girls had talked and agreed that things were looking good. Sally said her father was crazy about Meg's mother, and couldn't stop talking about how beautiful she was. And if he wasn't in love yet, he had a major crush. And so did Paris, although she was keeping it quiet. |
| 2249 |
Other than that piece of somewhat distressing news, they had a nice time that night, and Jim asked her if she'd like to go away for a weekend with him, to the Napa Valley. Given what had been happening between them, it was a major invitation. They had been dating for two months, and hadn't gone to bed yet. |
| 2250 |
But she had already joined them, and was settling in as Paris unpacked. He told Paris all about the final anniversary, where they'd gone, what they'd done, what they'd eaten. It was as though he did it to protect himself from his feelings for Paris. Phyllis was the shield he was using against his own emotions. |
| 2251 |
His guilt was stronger than his libido. He poured Paris a glass of champagne, and drank three himself before they went to dinner. And when they got back, he lit the fire, and turned to Paris, just as two and a half years before, he had turned to Phyllis. He could still see it, although for once he didn't say it. |
| 2252 |
Maybe he was getting ready to let Phyllis go, Paris hoped. Maybe this was going to be the epiphany he needed. She was praying it would be. It was time. Paris put on the simple white satin nightgown she had brought, which dropped easily over her lithe figure, and clung to it enticingly as she emerged from the bathroom. |
| 2253 |
She dropped her nightgown to the floor, and he peeled off his pajamas and they disappeared somewhere, as they entangled in each other's arms, and their hands and lips discovered each other. And then just as he was about to enter her, she felt everything stop, and everything but the essential part of him went rigid. |
| 2254 |
But all he wanted suddenly was to get away from her. To be as far from Paris as he could get, and as close to Phyllis. It was as though he wanted to crawl back into the womb of time and be with her, and Paris could feel it. Instead of letting her rub his back, he got up, and walked across the room naked. |
| 2255 |
The hotel had an imprint of his credit card, so he didn't need to settle accounts with them. Only with himself. They were halfway to the city before he spoke to Paris, and all he could say was that he was sorry. He was stone faced the rest of the way. And when she tried to put a hand on his, he didn't react. |
| 2256 |
It was just odd to have her daughter's boyfriend be the same age as she was. But it also allowed them to be friends, and far more candid with each other than she ever could have been with Anthony or Peace, who were mere children. Richard was a man, and a good one, and she said as much to Meg when they left. |
| 2257 |
She had finally come to accept that. It no longer felt like a life sentence to her anymore, but a simple fact of life. If she never found another man to love, she knew she'd be all right. Better alone than with the wrong one. She no longer had the energy for that, or the interest. Love at any price came too dear. |
| 2258 |
And she didn't know if it was something real she wanted to pursue, or a pipe dream she had to cheat Father Time and delude herself that she was still young. Starting out with a baby at this point would be a major challenge, and she wasn't ready to do more than think about it yet. But the idea had crossed her mind. |
| 2259 |
But it also told them that Rachel was there for good, and important to him. And even if only out of loyalty to their mother, neither of them was crazy about her. She seemed to devour their father's energies and attention, and had him wrapped around her two little boys, who never saw their own father. |
| 2260 |
Meg said he was thinking of adopting them. The landscape of their family had certainly changed in the last year and a half. There was no denying it anymore. And somehow, in spite of the two children she adored, Paris felt like the odd man out. Wim and Meg would go on to their own lives one day, and in fact already had. |
| 2261 |
And she was alone. Sometimes it was tough to swallow. And as always when she was troubled, Paris buried herself in work, with Bix's help. They did the opening of the opera and the symphony, which were the two most major social events of the year, and a slew of parties to mark the beginning of the social season. |
| 2262 |
But this guy is perfect for you. I met him last week. He's a fairly well known writer, and he hired us to do a birthday party for his mother. He's an incredibly smart guy, and has a lot of style. I think he's just what you want. He's been widowed for five years, but he talks about her sensibly, he's not obsessed. |
| 2263 |
He had salt and pepper hair and steel blue eyes, and he was wearing an old Irish sweater and jeans, and as they walked through the house, it was handsome but unpretentious. They settled into a library that was lined with first editions and rare books, and there were stacks of more current books on the floor. |
| 2264 |
He went over the details for his mother's party calmly. He wanted something elegant and nice, but not too showy. And since he didn't have a wife, he had hired them. His mother was turning ninety, and Bix knew Malcolm was sixty. He had a very distinguished look, and he chatted with them for quite a while. |
| 2265 |
Paris told him she'd read his books and enjoyed them very much, and he seemed pleased. There was a nice photo of his late wife on the desk, but he didn't talk about her. There was an equally nice one of his last girlfriend too, who was also a well known writer. And he mentioned that he had a house in England. |
| 2266 |
He didn't drive a Ferrari or have a plane, and he said he went to Sonoma on weekends, but admitted that his place there was a mess, and he liked it that way. He had absolutely everything going for him, including looks and money, and as they left his house after the meeting, Bix looked at her victoriously. |
| 2267 |
She kept wanting to laugh every time she looked at him. And the red headed boy looked like a baby, and was in fact Jean Pierre's nineteen year old cousin. Belmont himself was thirty two, Paris discovered later, but looked nowhere near it. His whole demeanor and style was that of someone infinitely younger. |
| 2268 |
There were lots of exclamations, facial expressions, and through it all he never seemed to stop moving with his big brown eyes and spiky hair. He looked like one of Meg's friends, except everything about him was so French. And at the same time, although he looked young, he seemed very much in command. |
| 2269 |
When he caught sight of Paris, he winked at her, and then went back to work, as his assistants alternated cameras, and changed film for him. He took several family portraits. And when the bride went upstairs to change into a dinner dress, to pose for a photograph with her mother, he stopped for a minute to talk to her. |
| 2270 |
There was nowhere to go at that hour, except an all night diner she knew, but he was enchanted when he saw it, and immediately started taking photographs at weird angles, including a quick roll of her. And then he settled back in the booth and ordered pancakes and scrambled eggs. He hadn't had time to eat all night. |
| 2271 |
When he talked to the others, he spoke so quickly, she didn't get it, but when he spoke to her, it was much easier. They left the diner well after three o'clock. She dropped him at his hotel, and he kissed her on both cheeks before he left, and then she drove home, peeled off her clothes, and fell into bed. |
| 2272 |
And she lay staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, thinking about Jean Pierre. It was crazy, but she was incredibly attracted to him. He was a boy, and very talented, but he was so full of life and charm. If she thought she could get away with it, she would have loved to run away with him, just for a day or two. |
| 2273 |
And even Chandler, who was so sophisticated and so smooth. There was no artifice to this boy, which was the only way she could think of him. He was totally alive, and unfailingly direct, even with his broken English. Something told her that whatever you did with him, or said, you would know where you stood. |
| 2274 |
She knew that with him, she didn't have to get dressed up. And she told herself they were doing just a little harmless tourism. It didn't hurt anything. They could have fun seeing the sights together, and he'd be gone in a few days. He hopped in her car when she picked him up, and he had a camera in his pocket. |
| 2275 |
They drove past the vineyards, and roamed around, and then went on to the Napa Valley, and were there by dinnertime, and they stopped at a little bistro for dinner where everyone spoke French, and Jean Pierre was thrilled. He and the waiter had a long conversation, and they headed back to the city around nine o'clock. |
| 2276 |
When she glanced in the rearview mirror, he was standing outside the hotel, watching her. And all that night, she was haunted by him. All she could think about were the things they had talked about, and the expressive look on his face. And the French words he had taught her seemed to dance in her head. |
| 2277 |
She could suddenly understand for the first time in her life why older women had affairs with younger men. But that wasn't going to happen to her. She and Bix worked on a number of projects, and she was aware of a sense of malaise all day, as though some part of her were causing her body to be too big for her skin. |
| 2278 |
He seemed very much at home, and he came to kiss her from time to time while she organized dinner for them. It was harder and harder to keep her mind on what she was doing. They sat down at the kitchen table, and talked about music. He had very sophisticated tastes, and was very knowledgeable about classical music. |
| 2279 |
And something passed between them, as they looked at each other, like an electrical current of industrial voltage. Neither said anything, but Bix saw it immediately. He invited Jean Pierre to stay for lunch, and the three of them ate sandwiches and drank cappuccinos in the room where they made presentations to clients. |
| 2280 |
Fortunately the first days of Paris and Jean Pierre's love affair began over a weekend, because they never got dressed or out of bed for nearly forty eight hours. All she wanted was to be with him. They ordered pizza on Saturday, and made peanut butter sandwiches, which he said were disgusting and then ate two of them. |
| 2281 |
She didn't ask Jean Pierre what they were going to do, because they weren't going to do anything. He was going to be there as long as he was there, and they would enjoy it for what it was. A brief and blissfully torrid interlude. She had never done anything like it, but she didn't expect anything more. |
| 2282 |
He still had his hotel room but hadn't been there in three days. They hadn't put on clothes since they'd come through the door on Friday. They'd been living in bathrobes and towels, and walking around naked much of the time. She had no sense of modesty with him, and they couldn't get enough of each other's bodies. |
| 2283 |
She rarely kept anything from her daughter. And what had gone on for the last five weeks was unusual for her in every way. She told her she was dating someone, and he was French. But she did not say that he was staying with her, and he was fifteen years younger. That was too much to confess at one gulp. |
| 2284 |
Seventy year old men marry thirty year olds and have babies. The world has changed. A lot of people don't even bother to get married to have kids these days. Single men and women adopt children. None of the old rules hold. I think you can do damn near anything you want. And you're not hurting anyone. |
| 2285 |
His father had left his mother and married a woman barely older than Meg, and they were having a baby, which seemed ridiculous to him, and in bad taste. And now his mother had a boyfriend nearly half her age, or close enough. Or actually the same age as his father's new wife. Young was certainly in. |
| 2286 |
And Jean Pierre himself seemed unconcerned. Whenever she brought it up, he brushed the age difference away, and she didn't feel it as a problem between them. It just sounded so bad. But in reality, it looked fine. No one ever stared at them, or seemed surprised to see them together, which was a relief for her. |
| 2287 |
Meg was with a man old enough to be her father, who should have been going out with her mother, and her mother was with a man technically young enough to be her son. She was still thinking about it when she and Jean Pierre went to bed that night. Her children were in the mother in law apartment downstairs. |
| 2288 |
She had bought him a Cartier watch. And she knew that whatever happened later, it was a Christmas she would cherish forever in her heart. They were savoring stolen moments, and living in a magic bubble. But it was becoming a little more real. The bubble included her children now, and so far at least, all was well. |
| 2289 |
It was still hard for her to believe. And she could remember all too easily how ghastly the day had been for her a year before, knowing that he was out of her life forever, and in Rachel's arms for good. As she thought about it while she dressed for the evening, Jean Pierre saw the look on her face. |
| 2290 |
She had tried to explain it to him once, and he had been upset for two days. He viewed her feelings about Peter as a disloyalty to him, and no amount of explaining changed that. She had learned that the words were better left unsaid. He didn't seem to understand what the loss of her marriage had meant to her. |
| 2291 |
He hated to think about the future or make plans. He was entirely spontaneous, and did whatever felt good at the time, with no regard for consequences, which sometimes irked her. He had called his son on Christmas Day, but he admitted that the child was almost a stranger to him, and he didn't feel the loss. |
| 2292 |
Paris always felt, when they talked about it, that his responsibilities to the child should have transcended his feelings about the mother, but they didn't. He had shut them both out years before. And ultimately it was the child's loss, which bothered Paris. But they saw it differently, and probably always would. |
| 2293 |
There were other things they saw differently too. He had a more casual work ethic than she, and the people he liked were younger, which made her uncomfortable. She preferred hanging out with people closer to her own age. And the people he brought home from the magazine were in their twenties and made her feel ancient. |
| 2294 |
She avoided it discreetly. There were times when she actually thought about it, and wondered if it could ever work with him long term, but there were subtle hints, to her, that it couldn't, that it would be too big a stretch. The people he liked, his boyishness, which translated to juvenile to her at times. |
| 2295 |
And elitism was the essence of their business. Some of his ideas she knew were because he was French. But the essence of it was that he was young. It did make a difference. And the only ancient tradition he believed in was marriage, because he was a romantic, and believed in commitment, which she admired in him. |
| 2296 |
He was an irresistible, charming, delicious boy. But nonetheless a boy. Tenderhearted and loving, but irresponsible at times. He had never had to be otherwise, but she had, for many, many years. And she also thought he should have children one day, more than just a son he had been estranged from for all his life. |
| 2297 |
But Jean Pierre's ring warmed her hand and her heart again, and made her wonder yet again if she should think seriously about spending the rest of her life with him. There were worse fates. She asked Bix what he thought of it, when they were talking about Meg's wedding one day, the week after she'd gotten engaged. |
| 2298 |
But she was about to turn forty eight in May, just over two months away. It sounded so old to her. And everything about him was young, his looks, his mind, his ideas. He was undeniably and irresistibly immature, and even if they had been the same age, their lifestyles and ideas and goals were often worlds apart. |
| 2299 |
In some ways, she wanted that too, but she couldn't help but worry about the future, and what would happen when he grew up, because he wasn't a grown up yet. He was nearly there, but not quite, and his boyishness erupted constantly. It made her feel like his mother. And she hated that. She didn't want to be his mother. |
| 2300 |
His heart felt like a rock in his chest, just as hers once had. She knew it only too well, and hated doing it to him. But it was better this way in the long run. Better now than later. Better a terrible pain now than a total disaster later on, for both of them. She silently shook her head, and he walked home alone. |
| 2301 |
It was almost beyond bearing, but she bore it, because she knew it was right. She loved him. Too much to make a mistake. And enough to set him free, which was the greatest gift of love she could give him, and the right one, she believed. She didn't go to the office all week, and when she did, she looked like death. |
| 2302 |
Her heart pounded waiting to hear him, as she wondered if she could be on a flight by that night. If he still wanted her, she knew she would go. Maybe the age difference didn't matter after all. The phone rang, and a woman's voice answered. She sounded very young. Paris didn't know who it was, and she asked for him. |
| 2303 |
Just like Peter, he was gone forever, living with this girl. He hadn't wasted any time. She wondered how it had happened, and if he really loved her, or if it was rebound. Whatever it was, it was his. Their lives had come unhooked. Their time together had been a magical moment, but that was all it was. |
| 2304 |
It was late August by the time Bix heard Paris laugh again, at a joke someone told, and he was so startled, he looked around to see who had laughed. It was she. And for the first time in four months, she looked like herself. He didn't know when it had happened, but when it had, it had happened overnight. |
| 2305 |
Bix looked sheepish, as he unlocked the door to his locked closet. He had had a dress made for her. If she liked it, she could have it, as a gift from him. If she didn't, he would give it away. It was a beautiful beige lace dress with a pale pink taffeta coat, and it looked perfect with her coloring and hair. |
| 2306 |
It had not been inflicted on her, like a prison sentence she had been given. It was a choice she had made. She had decided, after much thought, in the past four months, that she was better off alone. It wasn't what she had wanted, or how she had envisioned her life once upon a time. But it was what had happened to her. |
| 2307 |
Her destiny maybe. And she knew without a moment's doubt now that she could be happy and comfortable without a man. She had come to that conclusion once before, and then everything had gone wrong again. But it wouldn't this time. And in the last two months, she had done a lot of thinking, and she had a plan. |
| 2308 |
She wasn't sure how her children would feel about it. But it was her decision, no matter what anyone else thought. She had made quiet inquiries, and she had two names. She was going to call them after the wedding, and proceed from there. And even before she called them, she knew it was right for her. |
| 2309 |
And Paris and Bix agreed it was one of the prettiest weddings they'd ever done, which was what her mother had wanted for her. She had spoken to Peter a few times over the final details, and estimates about cost, since he was splitting it with her, but their conversations had been cursory, businesslike, and brief. |
| 2310 |
Now she had to face not only him but Rachel, her children, and their baby. Her stomach and her heart were in knots over it. She was so busy with Meg the day of the wedding that she almost didn't have time to think of it, and when she saw Peter finally, he was waiting for his daughter in the back of the church. |
| 2311 |
He didn't know what to say. He knew there was no way he could ever make up to her for all he'd done to her. It was so different knowing that at a distance than seeing her face to face again. He hadn't been prepared for the flood of emotions and regrets that would overwhelm him when he looked into her eyes. |
| 2312 |
She was such a lovely bride, it tugged at the heart, and was everything a wedding was meant to be. She was all innocence and beauty, and hope and trust. And as she looked into Richard's eyes, there was such joy on her face that Paris thought her heart would burst and she could feel tears fill her eyes. |
| 2313 |
Peter caught Paris's eye as he came back down the aisle toward her, and there was so much tenderness in his expression that she wanted to reach out and touch his hand. But she knew she couldn't. He slipped quietly into the pew behind her, beside his new wife, and Paris had to steel herself not to cry harder. |
| 2314 |
The single gesture and the reality of where he was sitting summed up the entire situation, and Wim looked down at her to make sure she was all right, just as his sister would have. Meg had warned him that morning to be extra nice to Mom, because the wedding would be hard on her, Meg knew, and Wim had understood. |
| 2315 |
And Paris was able to accept now that losing him was what was meant to be. A lesson of some mammoth proportion, a loss she had to experience of nearly everything she loved and believed in except her children. It was one of life's enormous cruelties, yet somewhere in it she knew there would be a gift one day. |
| 2316 |
She had said nothing to her children, but this was what she hungered for now, it was the path she was taking, or would soon, she hoped. And then she turned away from Rachel to greet the rest of their guests, and Meg and Richard were standing only a few feet away. Paris had never seen a happier couple in her life. |
| 2317 |
The wedding party left for the club a short time later, and they spent an hour posing for photographs while the guests had cocktails and laughed and chatted, and Bix wove expertly through the crowd, greeting people, meeting friends, introducing some guests to others, and keeping an eye on all the details. |
| 2318 |
Natalie and Virginia had come out for the wedding, and Paris had scarcely had time to see them. They were leaving in the morning, so she still wouldn't, but Meg had wanted them at other tables with a large group of Peter's friends who had come out from Greenwich, so socially it was kind of a lost day. |
| 2319 |
I just liked what I was doing, and had a great business opportunity. The political arena in the East never meant much to me, but it meant everything to her. We were always very different, and eventually we just ran out of steam. Commuting got too difficult, and our lives had gone in opposite directions. |
| 2320 |
It was a mercy for both of us, and it turned out to be a real blessing for her. I think she's a lot happier with him than she was with me, or was for the latter half of our marriage. We were one of those couples who never should have gotten married, but did anyway, and tried like hell to make it work. |
| 2321 |
He made a lot of sense and she liked him, not in a romantic sense. But he had the same kind of solid substance her new son in law did. She didn't view Andrew as a potential date, but thought he might make a nice friend, and given his close relationship with Richard, she was sure their paths would cross again. |
| 2322 |
He didn't appeal to her in any other context. He was a nice looking man, very handsome actually. But she wasn't interested in dating anymore, and he didn't seem particularly interested in her either. He was just as happy talking to Steven and Bix as he was to Paris, which was one of the things she liked about him. |
| 2323 |
Rachel wanted to go to the hotel to nurse the baby, and the boys were exhausted. So Peter went with her, although he would have liked to stay, and have a few moments' conversation with Paris, if only to thank her, but it never happened. And Paris was relieved it hadn't. She had nothing left to say to him. |
| 2324 |
And the smaller ones were easier for brides to throw at the single women. Meg had refused to move an inch till her mother was out there. And Paris felt ridiculous standing among girls half her age, or even slightly older, who were leaping and jumping to catch hope, in the form of an ancient tradition. |
| 2325 |
Her daughter had taken careful aim and hurled it at her. Paris's first instinct was to let it drop and let someone else get it, and then as though a force beyond herself took over by simple reflex, she reached up and grabbed it before it fell. She thought it might be bad luck for Meg if she let that happen. |
| 2326 |
So she stood there, holding it, with a dazed expression, and everyone cheered, as Meg looked at her lovingly from the chair she'd been standing on when she threw it. And immediately afterward Richard had tossed the garter to the bachelors, most of whom didn't want it, any more than Paris had wanted the bouquet. |
| 2327 |
By the time you figure out it's not going to work, you're up to your neck in alligators and you're drowning. I couldn't survive that again, Bix. The stakes are too high. And the chances of winning the prize at my age are so infinitesimally small. I'd rather buy a lottery ticket, I figure the odds are better. |
| 2328 |
Just as she had promised herself she would, on the Monday after Meg's wedding, she took both business cards she'd been hanging on to to the office. And when she had a break midmorning, she called them. The first one called her back in twenty minutes, or his assistant did, and said he was out of town till mid October. |
| 2329 |
She explained the entire process to Paris then. She had numerous options, a foreign adoption, a domestic one, private, or closed, the adoption of a special needs child, which Paris said she didn't want to undertake on her own, and Alice nodded, it was all a personal choice. And Paris said she wanted a domestic child. |
| 2330 |
Foreign adoption sounded too difficult and too stressful for her. And she didn't want to spend two months in a hotel room in Beijing or Moscow waiting for a lot of red tape to be cut, and forms to be filled out. She wanted to lead a normal life and go to work every day while she waited for the right baby to be found. |
| 2331 |
There had to be a home study, done by a licensed adoption agency if it was going to be a private adoption, which this was. Paris would have mountains of papers to fill out, documents to sign, fingerprints and criminal records to provide, medical exams, as well as references and information about herself. |
| 2332 |
Paris had total confidence that she was in the right hands. She had gotten the name from her gynecologist, whom Sydney had referred her to. She did a lot better with doctors and jobs than she did with blind dates. Paris gave Alice her number at the office, her home number, and the number of her cell phone. |
| 2333 |
She was totally excited about what she was about to do, and for the moment she didn't have a single doubt. The only thing she was wondering about now was if Alice was right and Meg and Wim might be upset. She didn't think they would. And it wasn't something she wanted to discuss with them on the phone. |
| 2334 |
This was much better than a date. This was forever, just like a baby of her own. It was like waiting to find out if she was pregnant, in the early days of her marriage. They had been the best years of her life. And this was a way of bringing those days back, without Peter of course. But you couldn't have everything. |
| 2335 |
She says only a little beer and wine before that, she's on the tennis team at her school, so she's pretty wholesome. She's been drug tested, and she's clean. And judging from the photographs, she's a very pretty girl, blond hair, blue eyes, she looks a little like you. I'm going to see her myself tomorrow. |
| 2336 |
Paris wanted to ask her if she was sure of what she was doing, but Alice had suggested she not do that. The girl said she was certain she didn't want the baby. She talked about her boyfriend then. She said it had been a very acrimonious breakup, and they didn't want to see each other again, for the moment. |
| 2337 |
And Wim looked horrified. His whole family was going crazy. His parents had divorced, his father had married a girl almost half his age, now they had a six month old baby, he had two stepbrothers, and now his mom wanted to adopt a baby. Neither he nor Meg was enthused by the project, and they made no bones about it. |
| 2338 |
God only knew what Peter would think of her plan when he heard of it. She wasn't counting on him to calm their children. He had his own life and problems, and his own baby they were somewhat hesitant about, because they still weren't sold on Rachel. And she had an unfailing knack for irritating them. |
| 2339 |
He said he had come to town to work on a screenplay with one of his clients, who was having trouble modifying it, and he wondered if Paris had time for lunch. She remembered her conversation with Richard and her promise to him, so she agreed to see him that week when he got in. It was a courtesy lunch, if nothing else. |
| 2340 |
He was very much like Richard, and she could see why they were partners. They were both easygoing, intelligent, unpretentious, and very good at their business. They both did a lot of hand holding for their talent, which showed they had a nurturing nature. Paris couldn't think of a better husband for her daughter. |
| 2341 |
They're very tight on money. And apparently, he's been having an affair with their neighbor. He's leaving her, or in fact he's already left. And she didn't want this baby to begin with. I gather he's been pretty abusive to her. No drugs, no alcohol, she's very religious, and she wants this baby to have a good life. |
| 2342 |
With traffic, it took her an hour and a half to get there, but she had allowed enough time, and walked into the coffee shop minutes before the birth mother. She was a tired looking blonde who looked as though she was ready to drop with exhaustion. But she was pretty, and gentle and bright when Paris talked to her. |
| 2343 |
She'd had a year of community college, and wanted to go to nursing school one day. But for now, she was going to have to do whatever she could to support her children. Her husband sounded like a real bastard. And all this woman wanted to do was get on a plane after she had the baby, and go east to get away. |
| 2344 |
Paris wanted to put her in the car and drive away with her, with the rest of her children. But she knew she couldn't. That wasn't what she was there for. They were there to talk about the baby that was due in two weeks. Paris talked about her own family, and Meg and Wim, her house, her life, her job. |
| 2345 |
Giving someone the baby she was carrying was going to allow this girl to survive and take care of her other kids. She didn't care that Paris was single, or that she was older. She felt total confidence in her the minute she saw her. And from the moment Paris laid eyes on her, she knew this was the baby for her. |
| 2346 |
They were halfway through the meal Paris had ordered for her, which neither of them barely touched, when Paris took the woman's hands in her own and held them, and as they looked at each other, there were tears rolling down their cheeks. They both knew at the same moment what had happened. The deal was done. |
| 2347 |
And they sat there, talking and planning, and exchanging photographs until nine o'clock. There were no notable medical problems in Amy's family, one of her children had hay fever, and there was no history of mental illness. No alcoholism, no drugs. And all she wanted from Paris were photographs once a year. |
| 2348 |
And tell her kids. And as she drove back to the city that night, she felt exactly the way she had the first time the doctor had told her she was pregnant. There was always that queasy little fear in the back of your mind that something could go wrong, but what you felt most of all was excitement and exultation. |
| 2349 |
If she really wasn't going to remarry, it was going to be a lonely life for her. And if this was what she wanted, Meg said she would support her. The only thing that worried her was that she thought that if her mother did want to start dating again, no man her age would want to get stuck with a baby. |
| 2350 |
The one thing she didn't have for the baby yet was a name. But she turned her attention back to Bix before she left that night. They went in to check on Steven, but he was sleeping, and Paris noticed that he seemed to have lost weight recently, and looked very thin, and in the past month or two, he seemed to have aged. |
| 2351 |
She went to a fancy little baby store to buy a bassinet and a changing table, some adorable furniture, with pink bows and butterflies painted on it. And she bought little dresses and hats and booties and sweaters, and a layette fit for a princess. And then she went to three more stores to buy all the practical things. |
| 2352 |
Her station wagon was so full, she could hardly see to drive it, and she got back just in time to unload the car, and put all of it in the guest room upstairs. She was going to put the baby in the bassinet in her own room. But she was going to put everything she needed in the guest room next to hers. |
| 2353 |
She had bought some crab on the way home, and she thought they could have cracked crab to start, and she put a bottle of white wine in the fridge. He arrived promptly at six o'clock, and looked pleased to see her. She looked comfortable and relaxed in jeans, and loafers, and a pale blue turtleneck sweater. |
| 2354 |
And for the moment, she wanted to keep it that way. She didn't want a lot of comments from people she barely knew. And as much as she liked Andrew, they didn't know each other very well. Although he seemed to be very fond of Meg, and said a number of very nice things about her, which touched Paris's heart. |
| 2355 |
It gets so tedious exchanging all that pointless information about what you do and don't do, like and don't like, where you've been and where you haven't. And then you discover she's a dominatrix who feeds rats to her pet snake, and you can't help wondering what the hell you're doing there. Maybe you have a point. |
| 2356 |
When Paris walked into the hospital, they directed her to the labor and delivery floor. She took the elevator, and two minutes later she was walking into Amy's room. By then she was already in heavy labor, and it was moving quickly. This was her fifth baby, and her other four had been fast deliveries. |
| 2357 |
She changed into hospital pajamas then, so she'd be ready for the delivery room, and took Amy's hand in hers. There was no one else with her. Her husband had been at the neighbor's when she left for the hospital in a taxi, and she had dropped off the boys at a friend's. It was a lonely way to have a baby. |
| 2358 |
From their point of view, it was going fine, but poor Amy was writhing in agony as she lay there, and she was determined to do it without medication. Paris didn't argue with her, although she herself had had an epidural and much preferred it to natural childbirth. But Amy insisted it was better for the baby. |
| 2359 |
Paris wondered if her own deliveries had been as awful. It didn't seem like it, but she couldn't remember. They had seemed easier than this one. And then finally, finally, they could see the top of the baby's head, as Amy worked harder than she ever had, and with three horrible screams, the baby finally slid out. |
| 2360 |
The baby weighed eight pounds fourteen ounces. She was a big one, though Jane's had been bigger, but this had seemed harder and longer. It was four o'clock in the morning when they left the delivery room, and went back to the room that had been assigned to Amy. It was at the far end of the hall from the nursery. |
| 2361 |
The hospital staff knew that this was an adoption, and Amy would be relinquishing her baby, and they tried to be sensitive about it. They took the baby to the nursery to clean her up, give her eyedrops, and check her Apgar scores, as Paris sat in the room with Amy while she slept off the medication. |
| 2362 |
She had found it finally. The gift. The blessing that she hadn't been able to find in the agony for two and a half years. She knew it was there somewhere, but she had never found it, and now she had. The mystery of blessings tucked away in tragedies and disasters. This was the blessing. The hope she had longed for. |
| 2363 |
They each had their role, their separate destinies to follow. It seemed so lonely to her. She called Bix then and told him too, and in spite of all his grumbling, he was happy for her. And then, feeling a little silly because she didn't know him very well, she called Andrew Warren on his cell phone. |
| 2364 |
He only stayed a few minutes, kissed the baby on the top of her downy head, and left. He promised to call Paris soon, and this time she didn't mind. He had become a friend overnight. Not a boyfriend or a lover or a suitor, or even a candidate for any of the above. Just a friend, which she valued far more. |
| 2365 |
He had told her to take two days off, but she had to be back at work on Wednesday, and she had the baby nurse she'd be using that month all lined up. And by Wednesday morning, when she went back to work, Paris was in full control. She knew the baby's schedule, which formula she liked, which position she slept in best. |
| 2366 |
And she was sure that when they saw her, it would be love at first sight. Who could possibly resist? It was an insanely busy month for her. Between her work and the baby, she felt as though she were in a relay race, and despite the baby nurse, Paris was up with the baby every night, and wanted to be. |
| 2367 |
But on Valentine's Day their chastity came to an end. He took her out for a lovely dinner. She was back at work by then, and didn't even get home that day till eight thirty. And at ten o'clock he spirited her away for a lovely meal. They came home at midnight, and he gave her a beautiful diamond bangle. |
| 2368 |
Paris felt as though she'd come home. After nearly three years of loneliness and sorrow, she had found the man she had thought she would never find. She had stopped looking for him, and had long since ceased to believe that he existed. She had found the needle in the haystack after all. And so had Andrew. |
| 2369 |
The sun blinded him in an instant, and he saw only a flash of light and smelled the flowers, as a bee hummed lazily past him, and the pastor said her name. Faye Price Thayer. There was a muffled popping sound to his left and the lightning of a camera exploded in his eyes, as the woman beside him pressed his arm. |
| 2370 |
Blinding perfection in a silver lame gown. There was an audible sigh from the men who watched her, a perfect blend of desire and ecstasy and pain. Her skin was like the palest of pink velvet in the dazzling silver gown, the long blond hair was almost the color of ripe peaches and she had worn it down. |
| 2371 |
But it wasn't the features, or the voice, or the texture of the skin on her long narrow frame that belied the softly rounded hips and full breasts, it was the warmth that lit her from within, the brilliance that exploded in her eyes, the laughter in her voice when she wasn't singing that enthralled the world. |
| 2372 |
The photographers all loved her, her face was on the cover of every major magazine in the country, but secretly she admitted to her friends that she was bored. There was so little to it, she insisted, all she had to do was stand there. She tried to explain it, and the other girls looked at her as though she were mad. |
| 2373 |
He had seen her pictures on the magazine covers and he thought she was pretty, but it was only when he met her that he realized how fabulous she was. The way she moved, the way she looked into his eyes when she talked to him, her voice, and he knew instantly that this one wasn't looking to get laid. |
| 2374 |
He felt everything within him quicken, and then he felt foolish for his reaction. This was ridiculous. What was she after all? Just another movie star, dolled up, done up, and if everything about her was so convincing, it was just that she was better than some of the others at the artistry she created. |
| 2375 |
Almost no one spoke as they left their places, and quietly went home to bed. Her words rang in their heads for hours. They had screeched and applauded, but they had been ready when she left them, and now they wanted to go back to their bunks and think about her, letting the songs roam in their heads. |
| 2376 |
Suddenly, men were sorry they hadn't been on duty, so that she would have come to see them. But all in all, everyone was pleased. And at twelve thirty she turned to the young man who had taken her around the base, and she saw something warm and friendly in his eyes. He hadn't looked that way at first. |
| 2377 |
There were a thousand things the young lieutenant wanted to say to her as the night wore on, but it was only after she had finished her rounds that she seemed to notice him at all. She turned to him with a tired smile, and for an instant he wanted to reach out and touch her hand, almost to see if she was real. |
| 2378 |
He was a tall, handsome blond man with broad shoulders and deep blue eyes, but all she could see of him now were the powerful shoulders and the wheat colored hair. There was something about him that made her want to reach out to him. There was so much pain here, they were all so damn lonely and sad and young. |
| 2379 |
They had been together for hours, and there was something about being together in a war zone. Everything was different here. Faster, more personal, more intense. It was all right to ask questions one would never have asked anywhere else, and to reach out in ways that otherwise one wouldn't have dared. |
| 2380 |
He disappeared for a moment and then returned with a small plate of fruit and a tall glass of iced tea. It was more precious than wine here, ice being almost impossible to make. But he had filled the glass with the precious ice cubes, and she had been on tour often enough to know what a rare gift this was. |
| 2381 |
But she seemed not to mind. She was used to it. She smiled casually at them, always turning her eyes back to Ward, and now she had to stifle a small yawn, as he pretended to look crushed and shook his head, mocking her. He teased a lot, and there was something funny about him. And at the same time something sad. |
| 2382 |
They cried for the agony and the waste and the sorrow that was inescapable here, and then he looked down at her, and gently smoothed a hand over her silky hair. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and it struck him odd that he didn't even feel guilty for thinking that. Maybe Kathy would understand. |
| 2383 |
She would have to be up again in less than two hours, in order to move on, to do the next show. She had been working nonstop for months now. Two months on tour, and three months before that, without a day off, on her biggest film so far. And when she went back, there was another movie waiting for her. |
| 2384 |
It was the same everywhere they went, but they needed to let off steam, and they never seemed to mind staying up all night. The crunch would come the next day when they had to get organized to leave, and then suddenly everything would be totally insane for two hours before they boarded the plane to the next base. |
| 2385 |
The CO. had suddenly arrived for a last round of thanks, and Ward saw her shaking his hand, as he watched her go, and then suddenly she was in the plane, standing in the doorway for a last instant as she waved at him, and then the red jumpsuit disappeared from his life, probably for good, he thought. |
| 2386 |
This had to be the summit, she told herself that every year. She couldn't imagine anything improving from this point on. How could it? And yet it had. The roles got better and bigger and more important, the praise more lavish, the money more unbelievable each year. The only blemish in it all came when her parents died. |
| 2387 |
Her next picture was scheduled to start in five weeks, and she was already reading the script for hours every night before she went to sleep, and now that she had just finished the movie she'd been working on, she could really get down to work. The new one was a sure Oscar for her, her agent had told her. |
| 2388 |
And there was still a certain excitement as she stepped into it, the rich smell of leather everywhere, the thick gray carpeting beneath her feet. Even the wood in the magnificent car was totally unique, and finally she had decided what the hell. At twenty five, her success no longer embarrassed her as it once had. |
| 2389 |
Faye was far more restrained in what she wore, and what she did, although she did have some beautiful clothes which she enjoyed, and two or three very beautiful fur coats. There was a white fox coat that she adored, she looked like an exquisite blond eskimo when she buried herself in it on a cold night. |
| 2390 |
They had discussed the Pacific Theater as well from time to time, but there would be no war to discuss anymore. As she walked into her study, and sat down at the little English desk to open her mail, she wondered how many of the men she had seen were still alive, how many of the hands she had shaken were no more. |
| 2391 |
Not lately. Not after her parents' deaths, and the constant demands of her career. She turned back to her desk now, glancing through a stack of mail from her agent, and assorted bills, trying to force the faces of the past from her mind, but there was so little in her present to occupy her thoughts, other than work. |
| 2392 |
She loved hearing about what he did, but after a while there wasn't much excitement left, and they had finally drifted apart, and there had been no one serious in her life since. She wasn't given to the usual Hollywood affairs, and she had never gotten involved with anyone unless she truly cared about him. |
| 2393 |
After that, she had agreed to a weekend with the Hearsts at their vast country estate, complete with wild animals and a zoo, and after that she was coming home to rest and relax and study and read. She liked nothing better than lying around her own pool, soaking in the sun, smelling the flowers, listening to the bees. |
| 2394 |
One never heard Arthur come in. For a man of his size and years, he walked with catlike grace, and now he stood before her, some eight or ten feet beyond her desk, in his tailcoat and striped pants, wing collar, and carefully starched shirt and tie, holding a silver tray, bearing a single cup of tea. |
| 2395 |
It was pure white, with a tiny blue flower here and there, as though put there almost as an afterthought, and she saw as Arthur set the cup down on her desk with one of the white linen napkins she had bought in New York, made in Italy before the war, that Elizabeth had sent in some cookies today as well. |
| 2396 |
There was a handsome living room as well, with a pink marble fireplace, and delicately shaped French chairs. She had blended English with French, a few modern pieces with the old, two lovely Impressionist paintings that had been a gift from a very, very dear friend. And a small but elegant staircase led upstairs. |
| 2397 |
A tiny, perfect gem. Just the right size for her. There were servants' quarters behind the kitchen on the main floor, and a huge garage with an apartment over it, where Bob, the gatekeeper, lived. Extensive gardens, a good sized swimming pool with a small pool house and a bar, and dressing room for her friends. |
| 2398 |
There was no doubt, it would be challenging. The leading man was said to be difficult, and a prima donna of the worst sort, everyone said. Faye had never worked with him before and wasn't looking forward to it. She hoped she hadn't made a mistake accepting the role, but Harriet insisted that she had not. |
| 2399 |
But I really don't think any of them have been right. I can have anything I want from them, orchids, gardenias, champagne, exotic evenings, fabulous nights, entree to some extraordinary parties, and in some cases expensive gifts, but that's never really been what I wanted. None of that seems real to me. |
| 2400 |
What she wanted was a slightly more sophisticated version of the men she would have met back home, in Grove City, the kind of guy who would shovel snow on a cold winter morning, and cut down a Christmas tree for the kids, and go for long walks with her and sit by a fire, or walk along beside a lake with her in summer. |
| 2401 |
She found herself missing Harriet, her old home in Pennsylvania, her parents. For the first time in years, she felt as though there were something missing in her life, though she couldn't imagine what. She tried to tell herself that she was just nervous about the new part, but it was more than that. |
| 2402 |
In the movie, she would be driven mad by the man she had married. Eventually, he would take their child from her, and she would attempt to kill herself, and then him, and slowly, slowly she would realize what he had done to her. She would prove it in the end, retrieve the child, and finally kill him. |
| 2403 |
This time they assigned a pleasant black woman to her, who had worked with her before. She was extremely capable, and Faye had enjoyed her comments and remarks before. The woman was sharp and had been working around the studio for years, and some of the stories she told made Faye laugh until she cried. |
| 2404 |
He was better looking than she remembered. And there was something very dashing about him, and yet restrained, like a magnificent stallion held in on a tight rein. She knew he would be twenty eight by now, and he had lost his boyish look. He looked every inch a man. But she had other things on her mind. |
| 2405 |
He was also terribly full of himself, which was tiresome after all. There was a fleet of valets, secretaries, and go fers to attend to his every need on the set, from cigarettes to gin. And when they had finished work for the day, Faye saw him undressing her with his eyes. And then he asked her to dinner that night. |
| 2406 |
And it actually wasn't Vance she was thinking of as she hurried back to her dressing room that night. It was already six o'clock, and she had been on the set for twelve hours, but she was used to that. After she changed her clothes she bid Pearl goodnight, and hurried out to where she had parked her car. |
| 2407 |
She drove toward Beverly Hills as quickly as she could. Bob was still at the gate when she arrived, he let her in and she raced through, leaving the car out front, and not even taking the time to put up the top. She glanced at her watch again. He had whispered eight o'clock, and it was a quarter to seven now. |
| 2408 |
Well, at least he'd survived the war. That was the important thing, she told herself, as she ran into her dressing room, pulling open all the closet doors, and then dashing into the white marble bathroom to turn on the bath. She pulled out a plain white silk dress that suited her perfectly, and wasn't too showy. |
| 2409 |
It had a gray silk coat that went over it, and she selected a pair of gray pearl earrings from her jewelry box, gray silk pumps, and a gray and white silk bag. All put together, it looked a little dressier than she thought, but she didn't want to insult him either by being too casual. He knew who she was after all. |
| 2410 |
The doorbell broke into her reverie and as Arthur went to answer it, Faye took a deep breath and tried to steady herself, and then suddenly she was looking into the deep sapphire eyes again, and she felt an exhilaration she hadn't felt in years. It was like riding a roller coaster just looking at him. |
| 2411 |
But it was a nice gesture after all, and if they had nothing in common, she wouldn't have to see him again. She was still impressed with the fact that he had bribed his way into the studio to see her, and there was a definite charm about the man. But she had felt that long before when she had met him in Guadalcanal. |
| 2412 |
At the time, it had meant everything to her. Now the objects in her life seemed less important, less real. She was more secure now. His eyes met hers, and he reached the door and opened it for her before Arthur could help them. He smiled at the English butler and seemed unperturbed by his disapproving stare. |
| 2413 |
She just felt like a girl, and she liked it, even more than she had expected. The only thing that concerned her was that she had to get up at five the next morning, and she didn't want to stay out too late. He stopped the car at Ciro's on the strip, and hopped out with ease as the doorman approached him. |
| 2414 |
It was Rita Hayworth, and she had come here as she always did, with her handsome husband. She and Orson Welles would dance around the floor so he could show her off and it was easy to see why he was so proud of her. Faye thought instantly that she was the most spectacularly beautiful woman she had ever seen. |
| 2415 |
And after two years spent dreaming of her, he desperately wanted her to have a good time when she was with him. He wanted to take her out every night, and wine her and dine her, and sweep her off her feet as never before. He didn't want to wait patiently on the sidelines while she finished her movie. |
| 2416 |
His dressing room was too hot, and when they set up fans for him, he complained that there was a draft. He didn't like the hairdresser or the makeup man they had assigned him, and he was still complaining about the lighting and the wardrobe, when in desperation the director told them all to break for lunch. |
| 2417 |
She left her makeup on, and slipped into a pair of tan slacks and a beige cashmere sweater, the honey colored hair flying loose around her face, and she started the Lincoln Continental, just as she heard an insistent horn behind her. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a familiar red car, and sighed to herself. |
| 2418 |
And Ward, but Faye didn't know that. She smiled. It was impossible to be annoyed with him. He was so ingenuous and generous and obviously happy to see her, and she had to admit that, even knowing he was a playboy, he still had enormous appeal. There was something overwhelmingly attractive about him. |
| 2419 |
And now there was Faye with all her magic and her glamour, and underlying it her keen sense of reality, and her enormous talent. He was glad Faye hadn't known who he was at first. She might have felt differently if she had, might have thought he was frivolous. And he was at times, he liked to have fun. |
| 2420 |
They had seen each other three times in three days, and something strange had happened to them in Guadalcanal so long ago. It was as though a bond had formed and strengthened silently over the years, and it was still between them now, holding them fast, bringing them closer than they might have been had they just met. |
| 2421 |
It's just that it all seemed to be going so fast, and yet she had this incredible feeling about him, as though she could have walked off into the sunset with him that night, hand in hand, and everything would have been all right for the rest of their lives. But it didn't happen like that. Did it? It couldn't. |
| 2422 |
My mother was forty three. I think she just worried herself to death about him. They never took a minute to do what they wanted to, to have a good time, hell, they never even spent any time with me. And I swore to myself that when I had kids one day, and even long before that, I wouldn't live like that. |
| 2423 |
Let them say what they want to. Let them call me what they want. I'm not going to drop dead from a heart attack at forty five, or be a stranger to my wife and kids. I'm going to be right there, enjoying life with them, knowing who they are, and letting them know me. I never even knew who my father was, Faye. |
| 2424 |
After dinner, he drove her back to her place, and this time she invited him for a glass of cognac, although she was almost afraid to. She knew his thoughts now, and she wondered if it was dangerous to let him inside. And then as she poured his drink, she laughed at herself. Hell, he wasn't going to rape her. |
| 2425 |
They kissed for what seemed like hours, his hands caressing her back, his lips seeking her mouth, her face, her eyes, her hands on his neck, and then touching his face as she kissed him, feeling relief from the fear and anger she had felt only moments before. She was crazy about this man, and she was not yet sure why. |
| 2426 |
And it was obvious that he adored her. They had to tear themselves from each other an hour later, in order to avoid an incident that neither of them wanted yet. He knew that Faye was not yet ready, and would always have regretted succumbing to him so soon. And he had to leave her, for fear that he might lose control. |
| 2427 |
There was a big party being held there, and the photographers went wild when they saw them. But this time, Faye didn't seem to resist it. In four brief days, she knew that there was no running away from Ward Thayer. She didn't know where their romance would lead, but she wasn't going to fight it anymore. |
| 2428 |
She looked absolutely exquisite as they walked in, with her hand tucked into Ward's arm. She looked up at him warmly for an instant, and he smiled at her, just as the photographers approached them, and they had a field day with Ward and Faye for the rest of the night. But as promised, he got her home early. |
| 2429 |
The delicious torture went on for weeks, until finally late one Sunday afternoon in October, a month after their courtship had begun, they were walking in her garden, talking about the war, and other subjects. She had the afternoon off from shooting, and Arthur and Elizabeth were off for the weekend. |
| 2430 |
There was a feeling of peace between them as they wandered. She had been telling him about her childhood, her parents, her desperation to leave Pennsylvania, the initial excitement of modeling in New York, and then finally the boredom, and then she confessed that at times it was still that way for her now. |
| 2431 |
She wasn't rushing to or from work, Arthur wasn't hovering in the doorway with tray in hand, and they weren't going to a party. They were growing hungry for time alone and she had offered to cook him dinner that night. They had spent a lovely afternoon, lazing around the pool, and then wandering in the garden. |
| 2432 |
It wasn't easy for her either. But she didn't want to make a mistake with Ward. He had made his intentions clear to her right from the beginning, and it was too dangerous to play games with that. He wanted everything from her, her career, her body, her children, her life. He wanted her to give everything up for him. |
| 2433 |
And as she said it, she felt a tremor, but it was more excitement than panic. She realized now that secretly, deep within, she had thought about this a great deal. She had always known what Ward wanted from her, and how much he wanted to give her. She regretted nothing now, and suspected that she never would. |
| 2434 |
She made coffee for them both, and brought it up, reminding herself to leave the empty cups in her sitting room when they left, and he drove her to work in the Duesenberg, as they both almost shouted with delight. The next two months were going to be difficult for them, but they would have a lot to do. |
| 2435 |
And his lawyers were anxious for him to get rid of it. They wanted him to reinvest the money in something that would bring in more income for him and his bride, although Ward wasn't too concerned about it. He and Faye took a stroll in the gardens that afternoon, and sat by the little lake kissing and talking. |
| 2436 |
Arthur seemed to approve of Ward, most of the time, although at times there was no denying that he behaved like a crazy boy. One day he had even bought her a coach and four white horses to drive around the estate, and there were six shiny new cars in the garage, being constantly polished by one of their two chauffeurs. |
| 2437 |
He slipped the ring on her finger, and they danced for hours, but he noticed that tonight she looked a little tired when they went back to their table. They had been up late for several nights, several months in fact, he acknowledged with a small smile, but it was the first time he had noticed it taking a toll on her. |
| 2438 |
He wanted to carry her but she insisted she could walk. And ten minutes later, she was comfortably tucked into the Duesenberg, the sable lap robe tucked around her legs, as she cautiously sat on a thick pad of towels, and ten minutes later, the driver pulled up in front of the hospital, and Ward led her out. |
| 2439 |
He wanted to shout it from the rooftops he was so pleased, and he couldn't wait to see his wife. He tossed off his drink, and poured a second one, before rushing upstairs to look at the present he had waiting for her. He knew she would be pleased with it, but more than anything he was pleased with her. |
| 2440 |
As Ward showered and shaved and dressed to go back and see Faye at the hospital, he thought of all the things he would do with him one day, the trips they'd go on, the mischief they'd get into. His father had never been willing to do anything with him, but everything was going to be different with him and his son. |
| 2441 |
They'd play tennis, polo, go on deep sea fishing trips in the South Pacific, travel together, have a grand time. He was beaming radiantly when he arrived back at the hospital at five o'clock, and asked the nurse to bring the champagne into Faye's room. But when he tiptoed in, he found her still dozing groggily. |
| 2442 |
It was the perfect holiday, and would have been even more so if on the last week of their trip, Faye hadn't begun feeling ill. She blamed it on the fish, the heat, the sun, and couldn't imagine anything else. But when she got back, Ward insisted she go to the doctor to check it out, and when she did, she was stunned. |
| 2443 |
They barely had time to make it to the hospital, the pains came so hard and fast, and Faye was clenching her teeth with tightened fists when they arrived at the hospital. The baby was born less than two hours after that, and when Ward saw her late that night, he wasn't as upset this time at how sleepy she was. |
| 2444 |
It was a wonderful trip for all of them, and Faye was as happy as could be with the husband she adored and her two sons. She was stopped for autographs once or twice, but that happened much less often now. People seldom knew who she was. She was still very beautiful, but she looked different somehow. |
| 2445 |
More matronly perhaps, slightly less glamourous, except when she went out in the evening with Ward. But she was perfectly content to wear slacks and a sweater and a scarf around her golden hair, and go out with her two little boys. She couldn't imagine a more perfect life, and Ward was so obviously proud of them. |
| 2446 |
The twins were a big success with everyone. They weren't identical technically, but they might just as well have been they looked so much alike. They called the oldest one Vanessa, and she looked incredibly like Faye. The same green eyes, the same blond hair, the same tiny perfect features, yet she was the quiet one. |
| 2447 |
At times, Faye worried that Valerie eclipsed her twin. Vanessa was so much quieter, and she seemed to accept living in the shadow of the twin sister she adored. Vanessa was a pretty child too, but quieter, more ethereal, she was happy looking at her picture books, or watching Valerie torment the boys. |
| 2448 |
Lionel was always particularly patient with her, and Greg would grab fistfuls of the bright red hair. It taught Valerie the art of self defense at an early age, if nothing else. But on the whole, the children had a good time with each other, and people said they were the prettiest lot anyone had ever seen. |
| 2449 |
At thirty two, he seemed hardly more than a boy himself, and Faye was content with her family. Four children seemed perfect to both of them. She didn't want any more, and Ward was content to stop at four, although he teased her sometimes about still wanting ten. But Faye would roll her eyes at the mention of it. |
| 2450 |
And Valerie only grew more beautiful. She was the most demanding of the four, the most aware of her own charms, and because of that, Vanessa seemed to demand nothing at all. Valerie took her dolls, her toys, her favorite clothes, and Vanessa didn't even seem to notice it. She was happy to give anything up for her twin. |
| 2451 |
And she was fun. That was important to him. His parents had never seemed to have a good time. All his father did was work, as far as Ward could see, and his mother did the same with her endless charities. He had sworn to himself long before that he would never live like that. He wanted to enjoy his life. |
| 2452 |
In fact, she was so tiny and delicate that Ward refused to take her in his arms, but he seemed pleased with her. He bought Faye an enormous emerald pendant this time, but somehow he seemed less excited than he had before, and Faye told herself that she could hardly expect him to hire a brass band for their fifth child. |
| 2453 |
Instead, he had ignored their pleas and not only allowed the shipyard to run itself into the ground, but he had bankrupted the estate as well. He had insisted that he wasn't going to ruin his life by working night and day. He wanted to be with his family. And now there was nothing left, hadn't been in almost two years. |
| 2454 |
If only she had known. She would never have had this last child. She didn't even feel guilty for the thought, no matter how sweet the new baby was. Their very lives were at stake right now, and she knew in her gut that Ward wasn't going to do a damn thing about it. He wasn't capable of it, but she was. |
| 2455 |
He felt relief sweep over him at the tone of her voice. Once or twice, between cases of champagne, he had actually contemplated suicide. And he knew exactly how weak he was. He was totally unprepared to face what he had to face now. Without Faye, he couldn't have faced it at all. And with her, it was hardly easier. |
| 2456 |
The doctor had told her not to go out yet, and she totally ignored the rules. After her fifth child, she wasn't as impressed with all that as she might have been after her first, and she was not going to let Ward squirm out of it. She stood beside him all the way, but in that sense she was merciless. |
| 2457 |
She almost fainted when she heard the words, and Ward's face as he listened was a deathly chalk white. The attorneys explained that they would have to sell everything, and if they were lucky they would have a little money left, which they could invest, but they could no longer live on it as they once had. |
| 2458 |
At the end of two hours, the lawyers stood up and shook their hands, but Ward's face looked grim. He seemed to have aged ten years in the past two hours, and he hardly spoke a word as they drove home in the Duesenberg. He almost had tears in his eyes realizing that it might be the last time they went out in it. |
| 2459 |
But it had to be done, and she was the one who was going to have to do it all. Ward couldn't cope with it. She would have to do everything, and he was grateful to her when she began tackling it the next day. She called all the real estate agents in town and made appointments for them to come to see the house. |
| 2460 |
She called the attorneys again, made appointments with several antiques dealers, and began to make lists of what they would keep and what they would sell. Ward watched her stupefied as she sat at her desk at noon the next day, businesslike, matter of fact, a frown on her face, and he shook his head, unnerved by it all. |
| 2461 |
He had been playing backgammon all afternoon and had won nine hundred dollars from one of his friends. But what if you'd lost? Faye thought the words silently and said nothing to him, as she went upstairs quietly. She didn't want to see him playing with the twins, knowing he was drunk, knowing all that she knew now. |
| 2462 |
There was no avoiding it. It was like a nightmare, or a very, very strange dream. In a mere twenty four hours, their entire life had fallen apart, she could barely allow herself to think of it. If she did, she might scream. It was so strange, only days ago, her head had been filled with other things. |
| 2463 |
But Faye had no time for the baby now. There was just too much going on. The woman in white stood at the head of the stairs looking at Faye ominously, a bottle of formula in one hand, as she clutched the newborn babe to her breast, wrapped in an embroidered pink receiving blanket Faye had bought for the twins. |
| 2464 |
Red tags for everything that went, blue for what stayed, and there wasn't much of that. She wanted to sell everything valuable they had. The simpler things they could use when they moved on. It was depressing for everyone, but it had to be faced. They were words Ward had come to hate, but she was merciless. |
| 2465 |
She shuddered at the thought. To her, it seemed better to face the music now, and then build a new life again. They were still young enough. They had each other, and the kids. Now and then, she was as terrified as Ward. It was like climbing a steep mountainside, but she rarely allowed herself to look down. |
| 2466 |
But she wouldn't allow herself to blame Ward either. He had never known any other way of life. No one had taught him to be responsible. And he had always been wonderful to her. In spite of everything, she still loved the man, but sometimes it was difficult not to blame him for what was happening now. |
| 2467 |
Most of the time, he still looked like a boy, a very handsome, debonair, carefree young man, but now suddenly, in the past two months, he seemed to have taken on the weight of the world and it was aging him. She had even noticed a few gray hairs mixed in with the blond, and there were new lines around his eyes. |
| 2468 |
That made it even harder now. He hated what he was doing to her. She walked slowly to him and sat on the arm of his chair. She was thinner than she had been before Anne, thinner than she had been for years. But she was working hard these days, up at dawn, packing boxes, sorting through mountains of things. |
| 2469 |
Eventually, Faye planned to reduce their numbers further to two, but for the moment she still needed these, to help her pack up and close the house eventually. The rest of the staff was long since gone. Arthur and Elizabeth had retired tearfully some six weeks before, leaving Faye after so many years. |
| 2470 |
She just watched his face, and she wanted to cry just looking at him. It was the end of his whole way of life, and suddenly she was frightened for him, wondering if he could survive the change. She had been poor before, although admittedly not in a very long time, but she still remembered the realities of it. |
| 2471 |
And it wasn't as terrifying to her as it was to Ward. She felt now though as if she had been running for months, and wondered if she was ever going to be able to stop, if they were ever going to be able to find each other again. It was like the worst nightmare of her life, and all their idyllic moments were gone. |
| 2472 |
But he had finally faced those thoughts tonight and the one thing he realized was that no matter how angry he was, he desperately needed her. And she didn't fail him now. She looked calm when she spoke to him, far calmer than she felt. But she wanted to give him something she knew he didn't have. Faith. |
| 2473 |
They were old enough to understand that they were leaving the house for good. It had been their childhood home, and it was beautiful and safe and warm. And there was something frightening about the look in their parents' eyes. Everything was suddenly different somehow, but the children weren't entirely sure how. |
| 2474 |
It was a perfect time for Faye to leave home. And as she thought of it on the drive to Palm Springs, she felt suddenly guilty about the baby again. The others had all spent so much time with her at the same age, but this time she hadn't had a moment to spare for her. She had barely seen the baby since she'd been born. |
| 2475 |
Ward glanced over at her several times as they drove, noticed the frown and patted her hand. He had promised her he would drink less once they got to Palm Springs, and she hoped he would keep his word. The house was smaller there and the children would have been much more aware of it if he was drunk all the time. |
| 2476 |
In bad neighborhoods, with tiny backyards and small ugly rooms. She combed the papers, and called all the agencies, and finally, desperate, by the beginning of the second week, she found a house that was not quite as ugly as the rest, and was large enough for all of them. It had four good sized bedrooms on one floor. |
| 2477 |
The room smelled of old rot, as though the beams had been damp for years, there was a musty smell about the whole house, and the curtains Faye had hung were from their old servants' quarters and didn't fit. It was like becoming servants in their own home, it was all like an incredible, surrealistic, ugly dream. |
| 2478 |
He had called her when Lionel had been born, and tried to convince her once again to pick up the threads of her career before too much time passed and it was too late. And it was surely too late now, six years after she had abandoned her career. She didn't need him to tell her that. But she needed his advice. |
| 2479 |
The house sold, their goods auctioned off, the shipyard closed. It was a quick trip down, just like for some of his stars. But it never changed the way Abe felt about the people he liked, and he felt sorry for Faye now, with no money, a husband who had never worked a day in his life, and five kids to support. |
| 2480 |
If this film turns out halfway decently, it'll be all your fault. And the guy is so lazy and drinks so much, he won't even be on the set half the time. You'll have a free hand, what you won't get is much money or much glory out of this. That comes the next time around, if you do a good job this time. |
| 2481 |
And she smiled to herself all the way home on the bus, and burst into the house the way one of her children would have. She found Ward sitting in the living room, obviously feeling the effects of another champagne lunch with one of his friends, and she dropped onto his lap and threw her arms around his neck. |
| 2482 |
Why did he have to take it all so personally? Probably because he drank too much, she told herself with a sigh, as she kissed Lionel and tousled Greg's hair, and then reached down to pick up the girls in her arms. She was strong enough to carry both of them. She was strong enough to do a lot of things. |
| 2483 |
Maybe that was the problem with Ward. He didn't like knowing that and it was getting harder and harder to keep that fact from him. She wanted to ask him why he was doing this to her, but she already knew the answer to that. He couldn't cope with what had happened to them, and his choices were to blame her or himself. |
| 2484 |
Either way she paid the price. As she did that night, lying awake until four o'clock, waiting for him to come home, praying that he hadn't smashed up the car and gotten hurt. He walked in at four fifteen, reeking of gin and barely able to crawl into bed in the darkened room. There was no point even talking to him now. |
| 2485 |
The director she was working for hated everything she did, and gave her a hard time whenever she was on the set, but fortunately he was almost never there. And she didn't give a damn what he did, there was pure magic between the actors and herself, and she got something from them that no one else could. |
| 2486 |
He wouldn't have given ten cents for the chances that their marriage would survive. Ward was apparently not adjusting to their circumstances, from the little Faye had said, and sooner or later, Faye would dig her way out and leave him behind. It was easy to read the handwriting on the wall, or at least Abe thought so. |
| 2487 |
Without family or many close friends, and having given up her old life as a star for him and the kids, she had been totally dependent on him for years and still was. She needed him, just as much as he needed her, or so she thought. And it came as an enormous shock when she saw him return from Mexico. |
| 2488 |
He was tanned, healthy, happy, with a long, thin Cuban cigar in his teeth, an alligator suitcase in his hand, and wearing one of his old white linen suits. He looked as though the Duesenberg would still have been parked outside if she'd looked. And he only looked slightly sheepish when he looked at her as he came in. |
| 2489 |
She didn't want him to know how much pain he'd caused her with this flagrant affair. And she knew too that it was his way of coping with all that had happened to them, of pretending that he was still part of the world he had just lost. But no matter how hard he pretended all that, it was over for them. |
| 2490 |
And now the list included him as well. Faye walked out of the bedroom and slammed the door, and when he came downstairs, he found that she had left to take the four older children to school. She had been spending most of her time with them for weeks, to make up for the months she'd worked and would work again now. |
| 2491 |
The second film Faye worked on was far more difficult than the first, the director was constantly there, making demands on her, giving her orders, criticizing what she did. There were times when she would have dearly loved to throttle him, but when all was said and done, he gave her a rare and very special gift. |
| 2492 |
Lionel was going into second grade, Greg into first, the twins were still in nursery school for this final year, and Anne was not yet two years old, straggling behind the others, anxious to keep up, and somehow always outrun by them. Faye always meant to spend time with her, but somehow she never had enough time. |
| 2493 |
Faye was excited about the new film, it was an opportunity she was excited about, except that day in, day out, she still thought of Ward and wondered where he was. Since the day he'd walked out, they'd never heard from him. She'd read about him in Louella Parsons once, but the piece told her nothing at all. |
| 2494 |
She had been anxious to keep her mind occupied since finishing the other film. She had asked Abe for a lawyer's name several months before, but somehow she had never gotten around to calling him, although she promised herself that she would. Something always came up, and the memories would flood her again. |
| 2495 |
The children were playing in the back, in the yard they had all so carefully planted with flowers, and the nurse had built a swing for them, proud of their accomplishment and ingenuity, and then suddenly, there he was, in a white linen suit and a blue shirt, looking more handsome than he ever had before. |
| 2496 |
Her whole world had turned upside down, and she had survived. And now this man was asking her to walk along beside him again. He had hurt her, deserted her, cheated on her, betrayed her. And yet, deep inside, she still knew that he was her friend, that he loved her, and she him, and that she always would. |
| 2497 |
She could survive anything but that, even poverty. He stood kissing her then, as the children looked on, and suddenly they all began to laugh, and Greg pointed at them, laughing the hardest of all, as Ward and Faye began laughing too. Life was sweet again, as it had been long before, only better now. |
| 2498 |
He was nicer to her than he had ever been before. And if it was no longer emerald pendants and ruby pins, it was dinners he had prepared for her with his own hands, and then kept warm until she came home, little presents he bought when he got paid, like a book, or a radio, or a warm sweater for her to wear on the set. |
| 2499 |
There was an air of quiet maturity about him now, and intelligence. Abe began to think he might just pull it off after all, and he knew she'd do everything to help. He wound up shaking hands with both of them and kissing Faye's cheek, wishing them luck, and shaking his head once they had left. You never knew. |
| 2500 |
He and Faye had worked long into the night for months, figuring it all out together for the first few years. But after the first half dozen films, Ward was really on his own. She stuck to her directing. He put the packages together long before she got involved in the directing and together they produced hit after hit. |
| 2501 |
They enjoyed their work, and the kids were almost grown up. She smiled quietly at Ward now, and glanced at her watch. She would have to interrupt him soon. And as though he had sensed her in the room, he turned and smiled at her, their eyes met and held, in the way that people still envied them after all these years. |
| 2502 |
She spent most of her time in her room, reading, or writing poetry. She always seemed separate from the rest. She always had. And it was only when she was with Lionel that a different side of her came out, that she laughed and joked and teased, but if the others pushed her too hard, she would retreat again. |
| 2503 |
She had always been so much more the star, so much more in control of everything. She had known everyone in the industry for years and they respected her. But they respected him too now, whether he admitted it to himself or not, and Faye wished he would. It was difficult to convince him of how important he was. |
| 2504 |
Somehow he was never quite sure. But in another way, that was part of his charm, the boyish ingenuousness that had followed him into middle age, and still gave him the appearance and the sweetness of youth. Their car was parked in the parking lot, a black convertible Cadillac they'd had for two years. |
| 2505 |
Faye had been even more excited than Ward when they picked it up the night before, and they had snuck it into their neighbors' garage. They could hardly wait to give it to the boy that afternoon, after they all went to lunch at the Polo Lounge to celebrate, and there was to be a party for him at the house that night. |
| 2506 |
He looked older than she did now, by quite a bit, but it was because of his white hair. His blond hair had turned early, but it suited him. It was in sharp contrast to the youthful face, and she often thought that she liked him better like this. He looked more mature. She leaned over to kiss his neck as he drove. |
| 2507 |
There was very little Faye Thayer couldn't do. The realization of that used to bother him, but he was proud of her now. She was just one of those people who could do many things well. But the odd thing was that he was too, although he didn't recognize it, and would have argued, and often did, when Faye told him that. |
| 2508 |
She was never willing to let him take the physical risks Greg took, or be exposed to as many things. He didn't have Greg's physical strength, she always said, or his ability to take hard knocks, emotionally or otherwise, but Ward was never as sure. Maybe he would have been tougher, if Faye had given him a chance. |
| 2509 |
And in other ways he was so much like her, he was as quietly stubborn as Faye herself had always been, as determined about what he wanted to do, at all costs, as certain. He even looked like her, if you squinted they could almost have been twins, and spiritually, they were, to the exclusion of everyone else sometimes. |
| 2510 |
Greg had looked nonplussed, and the twins had been none too excited at the news. But Faye had been especially pleased for him, she knew how badly he had wanted the job, and he had gotten it all on his own. She had urged Ward to congratulate him too, and he had, but he had to admit he hadn't been all that pleased. |
| 2511 |
Ward had built on to the house several years before, they had no guest room anymore, and the maid slept in a tiny apartment built over the garage, but now each of the children had their own room in the main house, even the twins, who had been relieved to finally sleep apart, although they didn't admit it at first. |
| 2512 |
It was low cut in the back, and defined her lush figure perfectly, and unlike her twin, she did not look anywhere near fifteen. She was already using makeup most of the time, her nails were freshly done, and she was wearing cute little green French heels, but Faye sighed and glanced at Ward as he stopped the car. |
| 2513 |
The baby sitters and the maids had taken her place over the years, and sometimes she wondered if this was the price she had paid for it. There were times when they were completely out of control, like now. But Ward stepped in and grabbed Val's arm, speaking to her firmly in a voice that quieted her down. |
| 2514 |
Her hair was shining clean, her eyes bright, her red shoes were freshly shined. She was a pleasure to look at, in sharp contrast to her far more flamboyant older sister. She piled into the station wagon into the farthest row of seats, not because she was angry at anyone, but it was where she liked to sit. |
| 2515 |
It was always Li who took care of her, even made her lunch for school, and made it with stuff she liked to eat, not dried up old bologna, or rotten leftover cheese. That's what Vanessa or Valerie would have done. But Lionel made her stuff like egg salad sandwiches, or roast beef, or chicken or turkey. |
| 2516 |
She even knew which boys she would like. It was really a pain how boy crazy she was, and she had been like that since seventh grade. Vanessa liked boys too, but it wasn't an obsession with her; she was more interested in writing poetry and reading books. Boys were okay, but there had been no one special yet. |
| 2517 |
She looked at him, knowing that this moment would never come again, he would never be this young, or this pure. Life was just beginning for him and she wished so many things for him as the tears poured down her cheeks and Ward silently handed her his handkerchief. She turned and looked at him with a bittersweet smile. |
| 2518 |
He had to let the boy let off some steam for a change, and if he got roaring drunk on graduation night, what harm could it do? It might dent his impeccable image for a change and that might do him good too. He just had to keep Faye busy enough not to keep an eye on him, and eventually he invited her to dance. |
| 2519 |
He wondered what she was saying to John, but she was so skittish and shy that he didn't dare approach them now, for fear that he would scare her off, and she seemed to be having a good time, and a little while later, Lionel joined them, and Ward saw John look up with a smile, his admiration for Li matching Anne's. |
| 2520 |
She was tall for her age, and she had the same ripe peach colored hair that Faye had had in her youth. One day she would be a beautiful girl, but she never quite felt like one. She thought she wasn't as pretty as Faye, or as spectacular as Val, and she thought Vanessa had quietly distinguished good looks. |
| 2521 |
It always seemed to require so much discipline to go on, to work, no matter how tired they were, especially when Faye was actually directing the film. Then she was always at the studio before six o'clock, often before the actors were there. But she had to be there, to breathe the air, to get the feel of it. |
| 2522 |
This was the fulfillment she had been looking for, and Ward loved seeing that light in her eye, that light that came only when she was thinking of her work. It made him a little jealous sometimes because he liked what he did, but not with the same determination, the same fire, as what she seemed to feel. |
| 2523 |
And he was thinking of that now. In a few weeks he was going to lose her to their new film, but they both thought it was the best one they had ever done. They were both extremely excited about it, and more than once Faye had said how sorry she was that Abe Abramson was no longer alive. He would have loved this film. |
| 2524 |
But he had died years before. He had lived long enough to see their success, to see her win the second Oscar of her life, this one for directing. But he had died after that, and she still missed him sometimes, as she did now. And she lay back against the seat, looking at Ward and thinking of the night before. |
| 2525 |
Ward knew it would go on for months that way, and he had promised her he would keep an eye on the children for her, and he tried. She had always worked that way, when she was directing a movie she was totally involved, and when she was finished she spent her life folding shirts, doing laundry, driving car pools. |
| 2526 |
He had come so far, for a man who had started out never working a day in his life until he turned thirty five. It was miraculous what he had done with himself, and she never lost sight of that. She was always proud of him, more so than he knew. Much, much more. She lay her head back on the seat again. |
| 2527 |
Everything had fallen into place, and instead of late September, they had started in June. That was unusual, and Faye didn't want to make trouble by saying that she wasn't free to start, but it meant deserting her kids for the summer, which was complicated, and Anne had steadfastly refused to go to camp. |
| 2528 |
She had the uncanny knack of listening to several conversations at once and often did. Faye went upstairs to kiss her youngest child goodnight. She already knew that Greg was out with friends, and Lionel was having dinner with some people from work a note in the kitchen had said, which accounted for everyone. |
| 2529 |
She closed the door again and walked on to her own room with Ward, telling him about the film again and sinking into a hot bath before going to bed. And a few minutes later she heard the girls come upstairs, they pounded on her door and yelled goodnight, and she didn't see Vanessa go to her younger sister's room. |
| 2530 |
He was so young, but as they talked over lunch, it was obvious that he was a bright kid. He was intelligent and sensitive, knew a great deal about his chosen field, and talked intensely with Paul until Faye said they had to get back. And once they did, Lionel seemed to linger, wanting to absorb the atmosphere. |
| 2531 |
She felt sure of that, and she wasn't upset when she saw Lionel on the set again on Friday afternoon. When he was younger, he had often dropped in to watch her work. Lately, he hadn't had as much time, but it was no secret that he loved the making of films. And now he would be making a career of it. |
| 2532 |
They were so much like hers, but deeper, more compelling, sadder and wiser in some ways, as though he were keeping some terrible secret inside him. And instinctively, Paul knew what the secret was. At his age, he had had the same secret himself. It was a lonely place to be until someone held out a hand to you. |
| 2533 |
He felt a thrill rush through him that was almost painful to refuse. But he carefully moved his leg away and forced himself to concentrate on what was on the screen, and afterwards when the lights came up, Lionel discussed what he'd seen with him, and amazingly they felt the same way about the same scenes. |
| 2534 |
The boy was brilliant about film, intelligent, intuitive, and he had an instinct for style and technique. It was hardly surprising, he had grown up with it. But Paul was still impressed. He was dying to talk about it with him some more as Faye got ready to leave the set. She had to leave early tonight. |
| 2535 |
There was no denying it, and few did. No matter what you thought of Paul Steele, he was damn good. But most of the people who had worked with him didn't have ugly things to say about him. He was a decent man, fair to work with, he kept to himself most of the time, and if you got to know him well, he could be fun. |
| 2536 |
Suddenly Lionel felt as though a thousand pound weight had been lifted from him. He knew who and what he was, and where he was going now, and suddenly it was all right. It wasn't as frightening anymore. They reached the house a few moments later, and walked back inside, feeling invigorated by the night air. |
| 2537 |
Paul poured them each another glass of wine, took a sip of his, and lit the fire, and then he disappeared into another room, and left Lionel with his own thoughts and his wine, and when he returned, the lights were dim, the room was dark, the fire was lit, and he stood naked in the center of the room, beckoning to him. |
| 2538 |
It seemed odd to be back here. So much had happened since they had eaten here. It was remarkable. Lionel felt as though he had wings. It had been the most beautiful night of his life, and he felt a relief he had never experienced before. He finally knew what he was, and Paul had made it seem all right. |
| 2539 |
And Paul recognized all the preparations as he stepped out of the car, and he was touched. He hadn't even had time to shower before leaving the set, but he didn't want to be late. He put an arm around Lionel and they hugged, and it was obvious that the boy was happy to see him again. Li was thrilled. |
| 2540 |
Lionel had the key to the Malibu house now, and sometimes he went there straight from school, or else he'd go back to his own place and meet Paul in Malibu when he finished working later on. But he hadn't spent a night in his own apartment in months, and his roommates teased him every chance they got. |
| 2541 |
They were so easy with each other sometimes they forgot there was something to hide. Paul leaned forward and they kissed. And neither of them heard the door or the single step, but Lionel was sure he heard a sharp gasp and he pulled away to see Faye standing there, with her face frozen with shock and tears in her eyes. |
| 2542 |
It was more than any man could want, Paul thought to himself as he abandoned himself to the pleasures of the flesh, and they slept late the next day. And went for a long walk on the beach. And afterwards, they talked about life. But it was in those moments that he realized again how young Lionel was. |
| 2543 |
Eleven years. And he had just met a forty two year old man who had turned his legs to mush. He had never had an older lover before, and he was anxious to spend some time with him. But he couldn't with Lionel hanging around his neck. He looked at the boy now, and he had no regrets for what they'd done. |
| 2544 |
Only Valerie had made a negative comment on what she wore, but she always did, grumbling that she looked great, if you didn't mind looking like a peppermint stick. She had chosen to look more subdued, she felt, and was also wearing a mini skirt, but hers was black, and her sweater was too tight once again this year. |
| 2545 |
She had grown breasts and softly rounded hips, was thirteen now, and mercifully hadn't gotten lost this year before they had to leave for the ceremony. But Greg's graduation gift had been no surprise. He had badgered them so badly for it, that Ward had given in and presented it with a flourish the week before. |
| 2546 |
She had promised to go whenever she could, although they'd be winding up a film in the fall, and starting another after the first of the year, but she'd do what she could. They watched Greg receive his diploma, as Lionel had last year, but Greg merely grinned sheepishly unlike his more poised brother. |
| 2547 |
Lionel was currently doing an experimental film on ballet and the dance, and there were times when Ward wondered what went through the boy's mind. He was certainly different from their youngest son, but at least he was doing well in school. And Faye seemed to see a lot of him for lunch. He hadn't had much time himself. |
| 2548 |
But the boy looked all right. At least none of their brood had gone haywire with this flower child nonsense, and none of them were into drugs, although he frequently warned Faye to keep an eye on Val. That child was too damn seductive by far, and she seemed to have a knack for hanging out with older boys. |
| 2549 |
But so far, despite the wild garb, the makeup, and the older boys, she seemed to have stayed within the bounds of some kind of propriety. The party they gave Greg that night differed radically from Lionel's the year before. By midnight everyone was not only drunk on beer, but most of them were naked in the pool. |
| 2550 |
Faye wanted to have them all thrown out, but Ward prevailed and told her to let them have their fun. He wanted her to send Anne and the twins to bed, and Faye said that was impossible. You either had to close the whole show down or let them be, but the police made the decision for them shortly after two o'clock. |
| 2551 |
But for the most part they were more interested in pushing each other into the pool and consuming as much beer as they could before they had to leave. And when the last guest left, Lionel and John Wells were still sitting a little distance from the pool, in a comfortable old double swing, under a tree. |
| 2552 |
Greg just couldn't understand his giving up an opportunity like that. He had stared at his childhood friend in disgust and disbelief, and every time they met now, John felt as though he had to explain it again, as though he had committed an unpardonable sin. And in Greg's eyes he had. But Lionel didn't seem to care. |
| 2553 |
It's a five bedroom house in Westwood, and the landlady is pretty good about staying off our backs. There's no pool, and there's only room for two cars in the garage. You'd have a good sized bedroom, looking out on the front, and you share a bath with two other guys. The room comes with a bed and a desk. |
| 2554 |
He felt something he couldn't deny, but he didn't know if it was appropriate in this case. He suspected not, and he had no intention of taking advantage of him. The offer of the room in his house was sincere. He wasn't setting John up, but he had to admit, having him so close could be difficult, or. |
| 2555 |
He had woken up twice during the night and thrown up, once on his bathroom floor, and he thought he would die when he tried to stand up at eleven o'clock the next day. But his father saw him staggering downstairs, and handed him a cup of black coffee, a piece of toast, and a glass of tomato juice with a raw egg in it. |
| 2556 |
Ward handed him two aspirins for his head and he gulped them down, and he felt almost human by noon, as he stretched out in the sun at the pool. He glanced over at Val, her lush figure poured into a bikini Faye didn't like her to wear when there was anyone else around, but with family it was all right. |
| 2557 |
And Faye had never understood that she wanted to be separate, to do things by herself, to have her own friends. She always treated them as though they were one, and Valerie had spent her whole life fighting that, making a point of how different they were, at all costs. And still nobody understood. It ruined everything. |
| 2558 |
He was still pretty shy, and Greg was almost sure he hadn't done it yet either. Poor kid. He'd better hurry up. He was probably the last guy in their class who hadn't gotten into someone's pants yet, at least that was what they said. And it was getting embarrassing for Greg to have a friend like that. |
| 2559 |
He and Greg hadn't had much in common for the last couple of years, especially in the last few months. They seemed to disagree about everything, from the football scholarship to the class whore Greg was sleeping with. John couldn't stand being around her, and as a result he had been seeing less and less of Greg. |
| 2560 |
Leave him alone, he wanted to shriek, and he was suddenly sorry he had suggested it at all. It was just going to make things difficult for him. It had been a stupid idea, but he couldn't back out now, and he had told two of the boys that morning before John arrived, and they were pleased he had found someone. |
| 2561 |
And yet with Lionel he didn't feel as though there were something wrong with him. He was so quiet and understanding, and he felt so comfortable with him. Even if he never saw him at the new house, it was nice to know that he'd be there once in a while, that their paths would cross, that he could talk to him sometimes. |
| 2562 |
It was going to be agonizing having the boy around and hiding his secret from him. Without turning, he grabbed a white terry cloth robe from a nail on the wall, struggled into it, and turned around, but he had never seen a more beautiful face than John's, there was sorrow and pain and honesty there. |
| 2563 |
He laughed until tears came to his eyes, and John looked at him nervously. Maybe he was hysterical, or maybe he just thought it was so disgusting it was ridiculous. It was a relief when he finally stopped laughing long enough to speak, and he was stunned when Lionel put his hands on his shoulders as he did. |
| 2564 |
He had suspected it for a long time, but he had always thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to him. People like Greg Thayer would never have talked to him again. But Lionel was so different, he understood it all, and he looked at the younger man sympathetically now, from his vantage point of nineteen. |
| 2565 |
It was only on the rare nights when no one was there at all, sleeping at girls' houses, or going skiing over a long weekend, that they allowed themselves a little more liberty. But they were cautious that no one should know, and for once Lionel didn't even say anything to Faye. He just said that school was going well. |
| 2566 |
And she had to admit, there had been something different about him tonight. But instinctively, she felt a need to protect him. She suspected that he was involved with John. Only Lionel still didn't look like what he was, and John was beginning to, and he had talked a lot about decorating and interior design. |
| 2567 |
They were just all very different people, who needed different things from her. She dropped Ward off at home first, and then said that she would run Lionel home, and come back in time for a drink with Ward. It gave her a few minutes to talk to her oldest son, and commiserate over the boring weekend he had had. |
| 2568 |
He was growing up, unconsciously preparing himself to face that one day, not just from his father, but from everyone. Lionel wasn't the kind of man to hide for the rest of his life. But Faye wasn't sure how Ward would survive the shock. It would destroy a part of him, she knew that, and it terrified her. |
| 2569 |
In the past few months, she had sprouted up, and she was as tall as the twins, though she hadn't come into her own yet, but she was getting there. Lionel reminded them all as he toasted her, and she blushed, that she would be fourteen in a few weeks. And after dinner, Lionel and Anne sat by the fire and talked. |
| 2570 |
He couldn't believe what he had just seen. He wanted them to take it back, to tell him it wasn't true, but it was, and there was no hiding from it now. Lionel felt physically sick as he held his father away from him, and John had begun to cry. It was a nightmarish scene and Lionel was attempting to keep calm. |
| 2571 |
John had been sobbing on the couch for hours, aghast at what had been said, the end result, and the fear that Ward would tell his parents too. Lionel had tried to calm him and had forced him to put an ice pack on his swollen cheek and nose, and he felt an anguish in his own heart that no one could soothe now. |
| 2572 |
She wanted to be home when Ward returned. When he did, she was horrified by the condition he was in. He had stopped at several bars after the first one, and he was drunk and staggering, but he still remembered having seen Lionel and John and what he now knew of them and he looked at Faye with hatred and despair. |
| 2573 |
He got in his car, and drove to Bob and Mary Wells, as Faye sat at the breakfast table staring at them all, and they stared back at her. Greg was fighting back tears, and he kept thinking of what his friends would say when they found out. It was the worst thing he could think of, and he wanted to die. |
| 2574 |
His mind was closed, and now so was his heart. He ran upstairs and slammed the door, and once he had left, Faye noticed that Anne was gone. She knew what a blow it would be to her, and she resolved to go upstairs and talk to her, but when she did, the child's door was locked and she wouldn't answer her. |
| 2575 |
And Faye went to see both boys that afternoon. She wanted Lionel to know again how strongly she supported him, and mother and son stood holding each other for a long time, and then she turned and hugged John. It wasn't easy to accept, and it wouldn't have been her choice for him, but it was what he was. |
| 2576 |
She would never see him. She had only one choice, and she was surprised at how relieved she felt. That night as they all slept, she quietly packed a small duffle bag, and slipped out her bedroom window, as she had done when she had gone to see Li. There were easy footholds all the way down the side of the house. |
| 2577 |
She hoped she'd never see them again. On the way north, she had thought seriously about changing her name, but once on the streets of the Haight Ashbury, she realized that no one would care. There were others who looked even younger than she, and no one would suspect she'd come here. She had said nothing to anyone. |
| 2578 |
And no matter, those things happened everywhere, didn't they? This was a special time in history. A time of peace and love and joy. A wave of love to counteract the useless deaths in Vietnam. Time had stopped for all of them and all that mattered was the here and now, and love and peace, and friends like this. |
| 2579 |
Here on Waller Street, with her new friends. And when they initiated her three days after she arrived, it seemed suitable and right and loving. It was a supreme act of love in a room filled with incense, as a fire blazed warmly in the hearth, and the hallucination carried her from heaven to hell and back again. |
| 2580 |
It was filled with bright colors and people that she loved, people who loved her too. There was nothing left of the lonely ugliness of her life. She had forgotten all of them. And when, in the spring, Moon felt her belly and told her she was with child, and could no longer participate in the ritual, she cried. |
| 2581 |
They all saw people they knew at times, in their minds and hearts, and occasionally in more concrete ways. His wife and child had died in a boating accident just before he had walked out of his house in Boston one day and come here. He saw them in his mind's eye, much of the time, especially during the ritual. |
| 2582 |
Moon smiled at her. Later, she would have more mushrooms and acid again, but she had to remain pure for the coming child, she could have only just enough to keep her in an enlightened state. But she could not soar too high now, or it would frighten the child. And this baby belonged to all of them after all. |
| 2583 |
They had all shared in it, the brothers and the sisters. Moon felt certain that it had been conceived during her first night, when she was the center of the ritual. The child would be specially blessed and as he reminded her of that the name John came into her mind, clearly, and then suddenly she remembered him. |
| 2584 |
It was a place and a time that would never come again, and Lionel instinctively felt that Anne was part of it. He had felt it from the first moment he'd arrived. It was just a question of finding her, if they could. He and John had combed the streets for months without success, and there wasn't much time left for them. |
| 2585 |
She would come here, to search for the love she felt she'd never had from them. And John agreed with him, and now he was certain that he'd seen her walking in a daze near Ashbury, wrapped in a purple bedsheet, with a crown of flowers on her hair, her eyes so glazed he almost wondered if she had seen him at all. |
| 2586 |
And as she came to the stairs, they parted like the Red Sea for her, helping her up the stairs through their midst, as a gray haired man waited for her in the doorway, and then carried her inside as John watched. It was the strangest sight he had ever seen and he tried to explain it to Lionel, describing her again. |
| 2587 |
Eventually, she put in a separate phone for Lionel to call her on. But she noticed that the children avoided him as well, they were afraid of what their father would do if they talked to him. The twins never answered the phone Lionel called her on, as though Ward would know if they had talked to him. |
| 2588 |
But it was as though he couldn't cope with anything more, and he left with Greg, and had a great time at the Super Bowl. He seemed surprised to learn that the police had not located Anne when he came back, and in the ensuing weeks, he began to pace the floor at night, pounce on the phone the moment it rang. |
| 2589 |
He made almost no pretense about coming home at night, and he seemed to be waiting for her to confront him about it, but she didn't have the strength. She wondered if the rumors were true, that it was serious. It seemed incredible after all these years to get divorced, except that that looked extremely likely now. |
| 2590 |
In fact, when he had come home at Easter, he had said that he thought Lionel was nuts. But Ward had glared at him instantly for speaking the forbidden name, and she had to control herself not to lash out at him in front of Greg. She had had all she could take, and maybe it would be a relief to get a divorce from him. |
| 2591 |
She lay awake long after Lionel and she hung up, thinking of Anne when she had been a little girl, the things she had done, the funny things she'd said, the way she'd hidden so much of the time, the way she'd clung to Lionel. The timing of her birth had been unfortunate, Faye realized now, but that was no one's fault. |
| 2592 |
Once in a while he came home, and she asked no questions of him. And now, when he did show up, she slept in Greg's room, and they spoke not at all. She caught a glimpse of him as she walked down the hall later that morning, but she said nothing to him. She didn't want to say anything about Anne yet. |
| 2593 |
It had been hairy getting her out of there, but the police had handled everything, and no one was hurt, not even Anne. She was a little dazed. But she didn't even seem upset to have been removed, although the old guy had been. He had waved a staff at them and said the gods would punish them for stealing his child. |
| 2594 |
But she had just let them carry her away, and she had smiled at Lionel, and now she seemed to know who he was. But she was also very high on dope, and it was possible that when she came down, she would be mad as hell. They were prepared for that. The cops were used to it and there was a doctor standing by. |
| 2595 |
She would have died if she knew what Anne had been through, although Anne looked none the worse for wear. In fact, Lionel thought she looked happier than she had in years, except that most of that was probably the drugs, and she was probably not going to be nearly as happy when she came down from them. |
| 2596 |
She was a pretty blonde with long legs and enormous tits. She played a nurse on the show, and the men loved to watch her buttons strain. But Faye looked directly at Ward as he let go of the girl's hand, and looked at his wife nervously. She never acknowledged the presence of the girl, and kept her eyes directly on his. |
| 2597 |
He was going to be fifty years old, but he looked older than that. He had been carousing with this girl, and drinking heavily for the last five months, and before that he had had two severe shocks. It had all taken a toll, but she didn't feel sorry for him. She had aged too, and he had done nothing for her. |
| 2598 |
He had deserted her, and sought solace with this girl. She was almost sorry she hadn't done something like it herself, but she had been too worried about Lionel and Anne. She would have enjoyed an affair just then. But she'd have plenty of time for one now, and at forty six she wasn't completely over the hill. |
| 2599 |
There was no doubt in Ward's mind as they boarded the plane separately, that his marriage to Faye was over. And the bitch of it was that the other girl didn't mean a damn to him. She had just been a way of confirming his own masculinity to him and soothing the pain, but it was too late to try and explain that to Faye. |
| 2600 |
They gave up a term in school, and they've gone looking for her every day. If it were up to the police, we still wouldn't know where she was. So if you say one ugly word to either of them, I am never ever going to see you again, and I will sue you for every dime you've got, just to get even with you. |
| 2601 |
But he had every intention of telling her it was over between them, whether Faye wanted to stay married to him or not. She was twenty two years old, and he was beginning to feel ridiculous with her. It was all over. It had been foolish and insane, but it was what he had needed at the time. What he needed now was Faye. |
| 2602 |
Faye looked up at it for an instant before hurrying inside with Ward on her heels. She knew that their room was on the third floor, from her last trip up, and she headed quickly up the stairs before the desk clerk could say anything to her. She didn't want to talk to anyone now. She just wanted to see Anne. |
| 2603 |
Anne had completely changed in the five months she'd been gone. She was thinner, looked more grown up, and there was something so different about her face that Faye wasn't even sure she would have recognized her. She was almost sure she would not have from a photograph and was grateful that John had. |
| 2604 |
One drama was enough, and he wanted to speak to the police now. He took out his pen and jotted the names down of the men who had cooperated in finding her, and particularly the two who had brought her in. Lionel said they would have all the details, and Ward shuddered at the prospect of hearing them. |
| 2605 |
She was a fourteen year old girl and she sounded like she was five. And Faye didn't ask who Moon was. She assumed that he was the father of the child. And as the thought came to mind, she glanced down at Anne's belly, assuming it would still be flat, and she gasped in shock as she saw it sticking out. |
| 2606 |
She refused to look at her anymore. She hated her. She always had. And she hated her even more now. It was her fault that they had taken her away, her fault they wouldn't let her go back. She had always ruined everything for all of them, pushing them all around, doing everything her way. But she wouldn't this time. |
| 2607 |
As they listened, Faye was deeply grateful they had found her at all. And she steeled herself to hear the tale they told about the sect Anne had been living with. She wanted to kill them all when she'd heard all of it, and Ward was insistent that he wanted the entire sect put in jail, but the police were discouraging. |
| 2608 |
It was hopeless, Faye and Ward finally agreed. And as wrong as it seemed, the police were right perhaps. It was best to take her home, get help for her, deliver her safely of the monstrous child, and let her forget it all, if only she'd be willing to. Lionel thought she would, in time, and John said nothing at all. |
| 2609 |
He wanted to see the police once more, and after that he talked to his attorney, who basically agreed with them. No charges were brought, and at four thirty that afternoon, they bundled Anne up in a bathrobe Faye had bought for her on Union Street, and they took a cab out to the airport, as she sobbed all the way. |
| 2610 |
They had to go back into hiding now, and it depressed them both as they put their things away. Lionel wandered into John's room, and they exchanged a look. Suddenly, they wondered if everyone knew about them. They felt as though it could be clearly seen, and Lionel wasn't even sure he cared anymore. |
| 2611 |
Her parents were afraid she was dead, and her brother was convinced she was in San Francisco too. They talked about it for a little while, and Lionel thought there was a funny look in the boy's eyes, as though he wanted to ask him something but didn't dare. And at the Thayer house, everyone was subdued. |
| 2612 |
The Haight Ashbury culture had been a real boon for them. There were dozens of babies being put up for adoption now, babies born of girls who would never have gotten pregnant a few years before. These were mostly girls from middle class homes, sleeping with boys of the same ilk, in communes that had sprung up. |
| 2613 |
They would force her to give the child up. She didn't need to drag some little mongoloid around for the rest of her life, to remind her of a nightmare they all wanted to forget. No, absolutely not. She and the doctor exchanged a speaking look. They had four and a half months to convince her of what was best for her. |
| 2614 |
If she insisted on keeping the child? The nightmare refused to end, and all the way home, Anne huddled on the far side of the car, looking out the window with tears running down her cheeks. When Faye stopped the car at home, she tried to reach for her hand, but Anne pulled it away and refused to look at her. |
| 2615 |
He knew how difficult it was for her, but there wasn't much he could do for her. He gave her his bed that night, and told her they'd figure it out the next day. He called Faye to tell her where she was. She had already called Ward, and Lionel got the impression that he was going to spend the night, but he didn't ask. |
| 2616 |
It was even better than the commune she said one night, as she learned to make roast duck from John. He was a fabulous cook, and made dinner for them every night. Lionel had gone back to school, for the summer session in cinematography, to make up for the time he had missed, and he'd be caught up by fall. |
| 2617 |
Faye dropped in on them from time to time. Ward had moved back in with her, and they were trying to put the pieces together again. She spoke to Lionel about it when they were alone, but not in front of Anne, and she inquired if he had made any progress about getting her to promise to give up the baby when it came. |
| 2618 |
She was uncomfortable in the heat, and the apartment wasn't air conditioned, but John had bought them all fans. He was insisting on paying for half of the apartment now, since he had a job and Lionel was in school, and Faye was touched by how hard he worked and what good care he took of all of them. |
| 2619 |
And in September, Faye insisted that Anne at least meet them, to give them a chance. They were very nervous and very sweet, and they almost begged the child to give her baby to them. They promised her that she could come to visit him sometimes, although the doctor and their attorney discouraged that. |
| 2620 |
Faye thought it would do them both good to get away. Anne hadn't agreed to anything by the time the baby was due. She was so enormous she looked as though she was having twins, and Lionel felt desperately sorry for her. She seemed to be having pains all the time, and he suspected that she was scared. |
| 2621 |
If not, John had promised to take a cab home from work and get her to the hospital. It was a lot easier to reach him than Lionel. She had had some crazy idea about having it at home, like they did at the commune, but they had squashed that, and Faye had made them swear that they would call her right away. |
| 2622 |
He had called the hospital what seemed like a thousand times, had even gone there for a few hours, but his mother didn't even want to come out to talk to him. She didn't want to leave Anne. He noticed a couple waiting nervously in the waiting room with the Thayers' lawyer, and he correctly guessed who they were. |
| 2623 |
Half an hour later, as she and Ward left the hospital, she saw the woman with the dark hair holding him, with tears streaming down her face and a look of love in her eyes. They had waited fourteen years for him, and they accepted him as he was, not knowing who his father was, or what damage the drugs had done. |
| 2624 |
The baby had left the hospital three days after it was born. His parents took him away in an elaborate blue and white outfit by Dior, and two blankets his new grandmother had made. They had sent an enormous arrangement of flowers to Anne, but she had them given to someone else. She wanted no reminder of them. |
| 2625 |
But it seemed so wrong to her to close the door on him. She hated Ward for it, and she looked at him angrily now. And yet, always beneath the anger, was the love she had always felt for him. Ward Thayer had been her world and her life for so long that sinner or saint, she could never imagine a life without him. |
| 2626 |
They had given her a beautiful soft pink angora sweater with a matching scarf from Li, and little pearl earrings from John. She could hardly wait to put them on and when she did, she preened in front of the mirror with a happy smile. She was so happy with the gifts that she hadn't even heard her sister come in. |
| 2627 |
He was so hysterical about John that he didn't even feel the pain from his burns. Ward stood by helplessly, watching them as Faye and the boy cried, and for the first time in months, he felt something for his son. He looked down at him gently, and suddenly he remembered him as he had been so long ago. |
| 2628 |
Ward and Faye had discussed it the night before. Lionel was coming home to stay with them for a while, and after the funeral he and Ward took a walk. Greg had escaped almost the moment they got back to the house. John had been his friend for most of his life, but he didn't seem to feel the pain so much now. |
| 2629 |
It was a quiet dinner that night, and afterwards, they all went to their own rooms. Almost everything Lionel owned had been destroyed in the fire, except a few things he had forgotten at his parents' house, some jewelry that had been darkened by the smoke, but not lost, and his car, which was parked outside now. |
| 2630 |
It was painful and difficult but it was what she had to do. Anyway it distracted her. And a few weeks later, the bandages came off Lionel's arms. The scars were there, scars they could all see, unlike those he wore deep inside. And no one had mentioned the fact that he had not gone back to school. He wasn't ready yet. |
| 2631 |
He couldn't go back to being a child again, no matter how much Ward wanted him to, and although he resisted admitting it, Ward knew it too. John's death had changed all of them, it had allowed him to form a bond with his son again. But Lionel would never be as young, or as carefree, as he had been before. |
| 2632 |
And if anyone had asked her a year before if her marriage could have been saved, she would have told them no. But now, as she looked at him, she knew she still loved the man, with all his faults, with his affairs, with the times he had failed her, even with the anguish he had inflicted on their son. |
| 2633 |
But he was right. Two weeks later, life was just as he had described; she was going totally nuts, her biggest star was giving her a rough time, two others were on drugs, another drank on the set and showed up drunk every day after lunch, an entire set had burned to the ground, the unions were threatening to walk out. |
| 2634 |
He told her that she didn't belong with him now. That he had to live his own life, and so did she, that it had been right for a time, but no more. Now she had to make a life for herself in school again, make new friends, revive old friendships if she wished. But she belonged with Ward and Faye, he told her. |
| 2635 |
She thought that Anne was too young, so she stayed home in lonely isolation, as usual, refusing to even watch the awards on TV. Faye didn't think she'd win, and she kept telling Ward all that night as she got dressed that it was ridiculous to get worked up about it, they didn't mean anything anymore. |
| 2636 |
He looked very handsome in an old tuxedo of Ward's, and he jabbered with the twins in the back seat of Faye's Jaguar, and Ward complained all the way that it wasn't driving well again, he didn't understand what she did to it. It was one of those nervous nights, when you pretend you're not thinking what you really are. |
| 2637 |
It was her way of shutting them out, of getting back at them for not including her. And, like his mother, he knew they had made a mistake by not bringing her. Long afterward, they dropped Lionel off on the way home, and he kissed his mother's cheek again. The twins were strangely silent for the rest of the drive home. |
| 2638 |
In the kitchen there were six bottles of vodka, two lemons, three bottles of soda, and no food at all in the fridge, and she hardly ever saw any of the other girls. They had their own lives, boyfriends, some of them had their own phones, and Val had never been happier in her life, she told Vanessa just before she left. |
| 2639 |
Anne thought she was beautiful, and had noticed her an hour later, eating lunch at the Daisy, sitting by herself, as Anne stopped there for a hamburger. Her mother had given her money for two new pairs of shoes, and she had been wandering along Rodeo Drive, watching the people stroll in the bright sun. |
| 2640 |
She told her that she had seen this neat skirt at Giorgio's, it was white leather, and real soft, and they had great boots too. Anne was impressed at the places where she shopped and told her about the shoes she'd seen further up the street. They discussed the Beatles, Elvis, jazz, and eventually got around to schools. |
| 2641 |
And the funniest thing of all was that the film was one of Ward and Faye's, but Anne only said that she had seen it and liked it a lot, and then they talked of other things. And all the time, she felt his eyes on her, as though he were trying to figure out who she was, but more as though he were trying to draw her out. |
| 2642 |
It was easier just to stagger up the stairs to the third floor, but as she did on a hot August afternoon, after work, she found someone staring down at her. He was tall and he had auburn hair, a pleasant face, and he was wearing a tee shirt and shorts, and carrying a stack of papers in one hand as he looked at her. |
| 2643 |
He thought Vanessa had great legs in the shorts and sandals she wore. She looked a lot like Yvette Mimieux, right down to the turned up nose, and she had fabulous green eyes, he had noticed that day on the stairs. He sauntered across the street, wearing shorts and a tee shirt again, and loafers without socks. |
| 2644 |
Instead of going downstairs with him, she invited him in to join her roommate and herself for a beer. It wasn't what he would have preferred, but since he seemed to have no choice, he accepted gracefully, put the rest of their stuff inside the hall, closed the door, and looked around at what they'd done to the place. |
| 2645 |
He liked his life the way it was. His parents were older and had retired to New Hampshire, and everything would come to him one day, not that there was much. His father was an attorney, with a small country practice now, though he wasn't really interested in pursuing it anymore, and he did as little as he could. |
| 2646 |
Vanessa just didn't want to look too anxious to him. But she liked him just as much as he liked her. And she thought of him all that night, as they ate spaghetti and clams on Houston Street, and it seemed hours before they came back uptown. And when they did, she noticed that his light was still on. |
| 2647 |
He wasn't too excited about it, but it would leave him plenty of time to write, and that was what mattered to him most. Vanessa was impressed by how serious he was. But he was serious about a lot of things, and he was developing a serious interest in her. And this time when he asked her out, she was free. |
| 2648 |
They went to a little Italian restaurant uptown, and they drank a lot of red wine, and talked until almost one o'clock, and then took a leisurely walk home, as Vanessa glanced over her shoulder now and then, hoping they wouldn't be mugged. She wasn't used to New York yet, and it was hardly a lovely neighborhood. |
| 2649 |
She even had lunch with her boss at Parker, and she could see that he had the hots for her but she couldn't even stand his touch on her arm. All she could think of was the tall boy with auburn hair on the second floor as she went home at night, and it was almost a relief when she ran straight into him that weekend. |
| 2650 |
Unlike Anne, who seemed to have come into her own finally, in the last few months. She seemed quieter, more mature, and she seemed to love her new school. She had a new friend, whom she spent time with constantly, a child whose mother had died a few years before apparently, and the two girls went everywhere as a team. |
| 2651 |
Her eyes met his, and he saw something there that broke his heart. There was a pain in her which no one could reach, and he hoped he would one day. She was like another daughter to him, and he was surprised at how much she had come to mean to them in a few months. They were deeply attached to her, and she to them. |
| 2652 |
It was just the way she was, and she didn't see anything different in her father's eyes that day. But he seemed to watch Anne a lot after that, Anne noticed it sometimes, as he sat looking at her, and one day when they were alone, waiting for Gail to come back from a friend's, she got a chance to talk to him again. |
| 2653 |
And for the next two months, Anne met him whenever she could, just to talk to him, to go for walks, to share her thoughts with him. Gail knew nothing of it, and Anne hoped she never would. It was forbidden fruit for both of them, and yet they couldn't stop. They needed each other too much now. He confided in her too. |
| 2654 |
She noticed that his parents never called, and that he rarely mentioned them. She didn't call home that often either, but she still considered herself close to all of them. But as Vanessa looked up, she saw Jason smiling at her. There was a tender side of him that she really loved and she could see it now. |
| 2655 |
But he said he'd be fine, and she promised to call every day. He kissed her long and hard before she boarded the plane, and then she was gone in the huge silver bird in the air, and he dug his hands into his pockets, and wrapped his scarf around his neck, and went back out into the cold air. It was snowing again. |
| 2656 |
And that had nothing to do with it now. He liked everything about her, she was serious, intelligent, beautiful, kind, and wonderful in bed, and his apartment seemed like a tomb as he unlocked the door, and sat down at his desk and stared. Maybe he should have gone home after all. But it was so depressing for him. |
| 2657 |
Life in their small town was so limited, and his parents always smothered him, he couldn't stand it anymore. As much as he loved them, he wanted to be free. And his father drank too much. His mother had gotten so old, he knew it would depress the hell out of him, and he was happier in New York alone. |
| 2658 |
It didn't mean that much to her. A little dope, a little booze, a terrific piece of ass in some boy's apartment or rented room. There was so much going on in Hollywood that it didn't seem so terrible to be a part of it, and all of them in her apartment passed the pill around like after dinner mints. |
| 2659 |
Anne didn't waste much time with them and disappeared quickly into her room. And she did the same thing on Christmas Day, after they ate, but they were all used to it. Anne had been hiding in her room for years, but tonight she was packing a bag. The next day she was moving in with Bill for the holidays. |
| 2660 |
Anne had explained to her mother weeks before that Gail had invited her to spend ten days with them until they went back to school, and at first Faye had balked. But Anne had preyed cunningly on her maternal sympathies, reminding her that Gail was an only child, without even a mother to keep her company. |
| 2661 |
They had planned it for months, and now suddenly they were both terrified. All morning, he had asked himself if he was insane. He was practically raping a fifteen year old girl, and he had long since resolved to take her home as soon as she arrived. He tried to explain it as they sat in his cozy den. |
| 2662 |
He was thinking only of her, as he touched every inch of her, caressing and kissing and letting his tongue dance over her, and from some distant part of her, she remembered a kind of loving she had never really known before, and she gently caressed him until he could bear it no more and their bodies joined as one. |
| 2663 |
It was the kind of fatherly love he had always had for Gail, enhanced now by the love he had once had for his wife and yet had no one to share with for several years. He poured his soul out to Anne, and she gave hers to him. And she was happier than she had ever been in her life. She cried on their last night. |
| 2664 |
Greg was having trouble with his grades, but promising to pick up, and Anne didn't seem to give anyone any trouble. She spent most of her time at her friend's, but everyone was used to it by now. They never saw her anymore. She had turned sixteen, and barely had a night to spare for her family to celebrate it. |
| 2665 |
This was no time for that. Vietnam was in full swing and it was on everyone's mind. Ward looked horrified. As much as he loved his country, he didn't want to sacrifice either of his sons for a war which stank, in a place he didn't give a damn about, and Faye's jaw almost dropped at the first thing he said. |
| 2666 |
Only Val seemed certain that he'd be fine. She was so involved in her own life, it was difficult for her to think of much else. She had just gotten a part in a monster movie being made outside Rome. It was an international cast and the whole thing was being dubbed, but she had no lines in it anyway. |
| 2667 |
In fact, she had moved in with him downstairs, and Louise had found another roommate in no time at all. And the deal they made was that if her parents called, they would cover for her, tell them to hold on, and come downstairs and bang on the door so she could run up and talk to them. But they seldom called. |
| 2668 |
How could she know if the guy was decent or not, and Vanessa was still so naive about everything. She had run into Valerie the week before with some character who looked like a hairdresser and he had been so stoned Val was practically holding him up. She was going to have to spend some time with that girl. |
| 2669 |
They let the boys do what they wanted, they couldn't control Val, and Anne wouldn't talk to them, although she suspected that all of them had deeper secrets than hers. Greg had been banging everything in skirts for the past three years, God only knew what Val was into now, and Anne had had that secret look. |
| 2670 |
They all arrived at Lake Tahoe separately. Ward wanted a few days alone with Faye, and the house they had rented was even better than they'd hoped. There was a small tower at each end, a huge living room downstairs, a dining table that seated eighteen in a paneled dining room with an enormous fireplace. |
| 2671 |
And upstairs there were twelve bedrooms, which was more than enough for all of them. The decor was rustic and cozy, with quilts and antlers and pewter plates everywhere. There were Indian baskets and bearskins on the floor, and it was exactly what Ward had had in mind he noted as he arrived with Faye. |
| 2672 |
They took over what was obviously the master suite, with a huge old fashioned bathroom and a dressing room. And they sat looking out over the lake the next day, holding hands and remembering their vacation more than a year before in Switzerland. Faye looked wistful thinking of it, and then turned to him. |
| 2673 |
There was a spectacular view of the lake, and a moment later, Faye and Ward came up from the beach in bathing suits. He with a fishing pole but not visible results and Faye teasing him all the way, in a black maillot that set off her still beautiful shape. And now he could see where the real resemblance was. |
| 2674 |
Van had obviously chosen not to compete at all, but to lead her own quiet life, and Val was still fighting her every inch of the way, but in a way that assured she would never win. She was trying to be more spectacular, more beautiful, she was trying to beat her at her own game, and she could only lose at that. |
| 2675 |
Lionel had gone into film, but in a totally different vein, and he was curious to meet the other two now. Greg arrived next, talking constantly of playing ball, drinking beer, chasing girls. It was almost exhausting to be in the same room with him, but whenever Jason watched Ward talk to him, he saw his eyes light up. |
| 2676 |
She had stayed in town as long as she could, and agreed to drive her sister up, although she wasn't in the mood to leave town just then. There was a new horror movie being cast, and she didn't want to get passed up. But she couldn't do everything, and she knew there would be another one being cast in two weeks. |
| 2677 |
It was so convincing that they all watched her, horrified, thinking she was choking at first, and then realizing what she had done. She was doing it for them, and she seemed to go on for hours and then suddenly, collapsed in a heap. The audience was thrilled and they clapped and cheered, Jason loudest of all. |
| 2678 |
He and Van had gone canoeing with her that afternoon, and she'd been funny as hell. He was rapidly becoming one of her most ardent fans. And to prove that it was mutual, she had calmly handed him a frog on the way back to the house. He had jumped, Van had screamed, and Val had accused them both of being ridiculous. |
| 2679 |
She wrote a letter, and went quietly into the house at one point, and Faye had glimpsed her on the phone. Faye suspected that she was just at the age when she didn't want to leave her friends, and she wasn't thrilled about the trip, but it was doing them all good. By the second week, they were all relaxed and brown. |
| 2680 |
She just said something nonchalant, and went off to find her much talked about, apparently popular friend. And she found him with Val, who was teasing him mercilessly about how straight he was. Ward and Faye were sitting on the porch drinking wine, and Anne was somewhere, inside, on the phone, calling a friend again. |
| 2681 |
But six weeks after that, after coming home with his tail between his legs, and seeing the heartbreak in Ward's eyes, the army had a different invitation for him. He was being drafted, which was a sure invitation to Vietnam. He sat home, all one afternoon, stupefied, and was still sitting there when Anne came home. |
| 2682 |
The only good thing about it was that he'd be going home. Dozens of other boys died, seven disappeared, which frightened everyone, and Greg himself had the opportunity to shoot two old women and a dog, which he found both frightening and exhilarating, like running across the goal line with the ball in your arms. |
| 2683 |
He disappeared in a cloud of blood as his buddies watched and most of them were wearing him as they headed back to camp. They staggered in, two of them badly maimed, all of them in shock. And the news reached Lionel later that day. He sat staring blankly at the words on the paper someone had handed him. |
| 2684 |
He was a good guy, even though people knew what he was. But he didn't bother anyone. And they felt sorry for him now. They all knew his brother had been killed that day. Someone had seen the telegram from the front lines, and news traveled fast in Saigon. Everyone knew everything that was happening. |
| 2685 |
And two boys sat up all night with Lionel, watching him drink and cry. And the next morning, they put him on the plane. He had survived a year in Vietnam, made more than four hundred short films to show in the States, many of them on the news all over the world. And his brother had only lived nineteen days. |
| 2686 |
Eventually, Ward led him inside, and together they cried for a long time. Lionel held him in his arms like a little child, as Ward keened for the boy he'd loved so much, the boy he'd pinned all his hopes on, their football star. And now he was gone. And there was nothing to send home. Nothing at all. |
| 2687 |
The minister's voice droned on, saying his name, and none of it seemed real. And afterwards, they all stood outside, shaking people's hands. It was hard to believe that Greg was gone, that they would never see him again. And Ward glanced at Lionel a thousand times, as though to be sure that he was still there. |
| 2688 |
He had left it there when he went to Vietnam. Greg's car was there too, but he didn't want to drive it now. It was sacred, and just looking at it hurt his soul. He took the red Mustang out one afternoon, a week before he was due to leave for Germany, and he decided to stop for a hamburger before he went home. |
| 2689 |
She was drinking a milk shake, and he looked as though he were teasing her. They were laughing and then he saw them kiss again. He was horrified, the man looked as old as Ward, and he wanted a better look, but he was afraid to turn around. And then suddenly he remembered who he was. It was the father of her friend. |
| 2690 |
Lionel looked as though he had just seen a ghost, but none of them looked very well these days; they were all still mourning Greg. Ward looked and felt like an old man suddenly. At fifty two, one of his brightest hopes was gone, and Faye looked tired and pale. But Lionel looked worse than either of them. |
| 2691 |
Bill recognized all the players in the piece, especially Faye. He had come alone, and he faced Anne sobbing hysterically across the room. Instantly, he went to her, smoothed her hair, dried her cheeks, and then realized that they were all staring at him. He had no excuses to make. He admitted it all. |
| 2692 |
He explained how her earliest memories of their seeming indifference went back to when she was a tiny child, and she had felt rejected by all of them all her life. He made no excuses for himself, but he explained to them who Anne Thayer was, and her parents sat there, realizing what a stranger she had been to them. |
| 2693 |
And this unknown child, who had come to reject them eventually too, had found Bill Stein, and sought everything from him, and in his own loneliness he had nurtured her. Perhaps it was wrong, he admitted with damp eyes, but it was sincere. He echoed exactly what Anne had said to them, though in a kindlier tone. |
| 2694 |
After he left, and they had lectured Anne, Ward and Faye talked quietly in their room. They didn't know what to make of him, and they had told her they didn't know if there would be charges or not. Bill had gone home to make a clean breast of it with Gail, and would be happy to speak to them at any time. |
| 2695 |
After two years of loving her, he felt he had relatively little to apologize for. He hadn't hurt her or abandoned her, used her, or done anything terribly wrong. By now she was almost eighteen, and it didn't seem shocking to the lovers anymore. He suspected Gail would be stunned at first, but she would get over it too. |
| 2696 |
Bill Stein was moderately well known in the entertainment industry. He was a respected attorney and had several well known clients, and they were sure he wasn't anxious for the publicity either. The whole idea was to keep it as quiet as possible, and then marry, as they planned to, after the first of the year. |
| 2697 |
He had no desire to in fact, and wondered secretly if that was why he was so angry at her. He couldn't understand her happiness, because his was long gone, with John, and could never come again, and her life stretched ahead of her, with promise and excitement and as much sparkle as her enormous engagement ring. |
| 2698 |
She wanted no wedding dress, no veil. It looks so barren, Faye thought to herself, remembering the magnificence of her own wedding day. Anne wore a simple white wool dress with a high neck and long sleeves, simple pumps, her blond hair in a single braid with baby's breath in it, and she carried no bouquet. |
| 2699 |
She was wearing her hair in a simple braid again, with soft wisps of blond fluff framing her face, her makeup was simple and in good taste, but everything she wore, from her jewelry to her boots looked like something out of Vogue, and Vanessa couldn't imagine her that way, as she laughed and sat down. |
| 2700 |
They had been together for two and a half years, and she wondered if she'd ever marry him. Gail asked her the same thing after dinner that night and Anne shrugged pensively. She didn't quite understand the relationship they had, she had the feeling they were just moving along parallel tracks, pursuing their own lives. |
| 2701 |
Bill wondered sometimes if she should be going to school too, she needed something more to do than get her nails done and shop and wait for him to come home at night. She needed something more than keeping her temperature chart every day. She had to think of something else, but he was afraid to tell her that. |
| 2702 |
It was as though she wanted to shut them all out of her life now. She had him, and she wanted nothing else, but he didn't think it was right. It would have broken his heart if Gail had done that to him, although he knew that the Thayers had never been as close to her as he was to Gail. Anne shrugged. |
| 2703 |
He had to interest her in something. What if a baby never came, or it took years, she couldn't spend her whole life waiting for that, and it was beginning to dim the pleasure they had shared. It was all she could think about, all she could talk about sometimes, as though she could replace the baby she'd given up. |
| 2704 |
He loved Anne just as much, but it was all different now, and once in a great while, there was still that empty ache of missing her, just as he knew that Anne would always regret that child. He would always remain a lonely void for her, which no one could fill, no husband, no child. He looked at her tenderly. |
| 2705 |
She sighed, and took the escalator downstairs, there was a riot of color everywhere, silk flowers, patent leather bags, bright suede belts in rainbow hues. She couldn't resist, and came home with bags of it, most of which she knew she'd never wear, unlike the diamond bracelet Bill gave her that night to ease the pain. |
| 2706 |
She was so stunned, she just sat there and stared at the phone, and when Bill came home she still looked dazed, and he whooped with delight. And he noticed, as she wandered around in her bathing suit, that she had already subtly changed shape. She wasn't as angular as usual, everything seemed softer and more round. |
| 2707 |
They were planning to go to New York in the next few weeks, to see Gail, and the doctor said it was all right for Anne to go, but the day before they left, she began spotting lightly, and he put her to bed to rest. She was terrified of what it meant, but the doctor insisted that it happened all the time. |
| 2708 |
They put her out and wheeled her away to do a quick D and C and when Anne woke up in the recovery room, Bill was there again, with grief stricken eyes filled with concern as he held her hand. The doctor had said there was no explanation for it, some fetuses were just wrong and the body eliminated them. |
| 2709 |
It was best that way he said. But Anne was inconsolable as she lay in bed at home for weeks. They told her she could get up, but she had no desire to at all. She lost fifteen pounds, looked like hell, and refused to talk to anyone or go anywhere. Eventually, Faye got word of it in a round about way. |
| 2710 |
He was proud of her, and they both knew it wasn't going to be easy. He was convinced that this was right, and he would do everything possible to help them. And the truth was that he was right. Val did have exactly the look she wanted for the star, but what a challenge it would be to work with her own daughter. |
| 2711 |
There was nothing in the refrigerator as usual, but three of the girls had been talking about stopping at Chicken Delight on the way home, and Val didn't feel like going out. And she was sick of the men she'd been seeing lately. All they wanted was to get laid. And after a while it was all the same. |
| 2712 |
It wasn't much of a part, but it would pay the rent and it was something to do with herself. She wasn't ready to admit defeat yet. She had been acting for four years, and she knew she'd get a big break one of these days, though not reading for her Mom. That was the funniest thing she'd heard in months. |
| 2713 |
It was the same way Faye felt when they came home late at night. But all Val could think of tonight was the mysterious part she was supposed to read for the next day. She hardly slept all night, and she was up at six o'clock the next day, washing and drying her hair, doing her face, checking her nails again. |
| 2714 |
And now here she was, reading for her. It was the strangest development of her entire career. And her mother nodded now. Val saw that she was getting old. She was only fifty one, but the last few years had taken their toll. And suddenly she wanted the part, wanted it more than anything in the world. |
| 2715 |
Val read her mother's fears clearly. This was a side of her that her children never saw, the consummate professional, the director who demanded guts and heart and flesh, the woman who had given her whole life to her work. And suddenly Val saw it all, who she was, what she did, how demanding she could be. |
| 2716 |
But it didn't frighten her. She was sure she was equal to the task. She almost went into a trance as she studied the lines, feeling the role, making it part of her. And when she walked back into the room, she looked like a different girl. Ward and the other men glanced up at her, and watched her act. |
| 2717 |
He knew how hard she had worked, and how badly she must want this now. And there were tears of joy and pride streaming down Faye's cheeks when Val finished. The two women exchanged a long glance, and suddenly Val began to cry too, and the two women hugged and laughed and cried, as Ward watched them. |
| 2718 |
She was loving it. She could barely crawl home every night, and she ended most of her days on the set in tears. At twenty two years of age, she had never worked so hard in her life, and wasn't sure she ever would again. And if she did, it would be because she wanted to. No one would ever demand so much from her. |
| 2719 |
She had been working for three weeks when her co star, George Waterston, offered her a ride home. She had seen him around Hollywood before, and she knew he hadn't been pleased when he'd heard who would be playing opposite him. He had wanted a big star, and Faye had to work hard to convince him to give her a try. |
| 2720 |
He was thirty five years old, and Val had admired him for years. It was all part of the dream that her life had become, starring in a movie with this man. People were already saying that she had gotten the part because of who her mother was. But she didn't give a damn. She was going to prove them all wrong. |
| 2721 |
And at exactly ten o'clock, he drove her home. They both needed their sleep for the next day. He waved casually at her as she let herself into her house, floating on a cloud. It was a pleasure not to be mauled by some kid, or some guy who looked like a pimp. She wondered why she had never met anyone like George before. |
| 2722 |
Half the women in the world wanted to meet a man like him, and she was working with him every day. The picture was going well, and Val had worked at his place several times. She would have had him to hers, but there was too much chaos there. He told her he thought she should move out and get a decent place. |
| 2723 |
George was wearing jeans and a tee shirt and Gucci shoes with no socks, and Danny looked like any kid anywhere, in a blue shirt and khaki slacks. He was dressing up a lot these days, ever since he had developed an interest in girls, and he had a huge crush on Val, who was wearing a red leather gypsy dress. |
| 2724 |
Faye wondered if there was a new man in his life, but she never wanted to ask, and of course neither did Ward. What he did was his own business now, he was twenty five years old after all, and they had accepted him, as they had all of them, though some of that acceptance was still unilateral, Faye knew. |
| 2725 |
She missed him now, as she so often did, that shock of red hair, the passion for sports, the girls he loved to chase. He had been closer to Ward than to her, but he was her son too, and she tightened her hand on Ward's arm, knowing that he would be thinking of him too, and it was painful for both of them. |
| 2726 |
It warmed one's heart to look at them as Ward told Faye, as they strolled slowly back to the Pierre, and then suddenly he tucked her arm in his, and pulled her to one side, spoke to a man standing next to a hansom cab, and the next thing she knew, she was driving around Central Park, with Ward holding her hand. |
| 2727 |
But the doctor found nothing wrong with her. Her glands seemed fine, her chest was clear, her blood count was all right, and then without saying anything to them, he had an idea. He did the test with the blood he had taken from her arm, and he called Bill with the results that night, and he was stunned when he heard. |
| 2728 |
She didn't tell anyone, until the ominous three month period had passed, and this time all went well. By September, the doctor was no longer concerned, and the baby was due in February, possibly on Valentine's Day. Her other child would have been five and a half years old by then, though neither of them mentioned that. |
| 2729 |
But one thing was sure, Val looked even more beautiful than before, and she was picking up a dress at Giorgio's for a party that night. Anne had just been in to pick up a few things to wear over the holidays. Bill wanted her to get out a little bit and she had outgrown everything she owned, even her maternity clothes. |
| 2730 |
But eventually, they had had to tell him, and now Val was quietly living with them in the Hollywood Hills, in a beautiful house that was entirely walled in, surrounded by thick trees. Even the paparazzi hadn't caught onto them yet, and it had been going on for three months. Val had never been so happy in her life. |
| 2731 |
She wanted the baby so much that she didn't seem to really care how big she got, or how uncomfortable she was. She just wanted to hold him in her arms and finally see his little face. She still thought it was going to be a boy, but Bill was secretly hoping for a girl. He claimed he was more used to them. |
| 2732 |
He almost wondered if he'd have to go and get the car for her, but she insisted that she could get home again. She looked so vulnerable and so huge that he felt desperately sorry for her, but she seemed to accept it as the way things were, and the next day she even got up and made him breakfast before he left for work. |
| 2733 |
She remembered her last experience only too well, when it had taken days for the baby to be born. There was no reason to rush now, and the breathing was helping her control the pain. Bill made her a little cup of soup, and sat quietly in the bedroom with her, and now and then she got up and walked around. |
| 2734 |
She was giving little sharp screams with each pain, and she said she could feel the head. He left the car doors open as he rushed her inside, and a nurse went out to lock his car up for him, as Anne panted and tried to breathe, and he tried to help, and they called for her doctor to come downstairs. |
| 2735 |
The baby was born in the emergency room, with his parents looking on. He wore a startled look and Bill thought he looked blue at first but within seconds, he was bright and pink and wailing angrily as Anne cried and laughed all at once and Bill kissed her face and her hands, and told her how wonderful she was. |
| 2736 |
And now there she was laughing and smiling, with her baby in her arms. She didn't even want to give him up to send him to the nursery for a bath, but the nurse talked her into it, and a little while later they cleaned her up too, and then she and Bill called Gail and she cried when she heard the news. |
| 2737 |
It wasn't what she had thought. The pain of the past was not completely gone, and she knew now that it never would be. But there was someone else now, someone else she could love. She would never know where that other baby was, what he was like, who he would be when he grew up, unless he sought her out. |
| 2738 |
She was wearing a pale blue and gold dress, with sapphires and diamonds on her hands and ears and throat, and he thought she had never looked more beautiful. She didn't look quite as gaunt as she once had, and she had lost that beaten look. She looked peaceful and content, and everything about her glowed. |
| 2739 |
He had never really cared about the Academy Awards before, and before Vanessa came into his life, he had never even bothered to watch. But now, they were prepared to sit there all night. They sat through the boring ones, the special effects, the humanitarian awards, the sound effects, the screenplays, the songs. |
| 2740 |
The visit with Anne was more difficult, Faye always found it so hard to talk to her, but she went to see her one afternoon, and found her happily taking care of little Max. Faye thought she didn't look terribly well, and wondered why and Anne confessed that she was pregnant again, which startled Faye. |
| 2741 |
Everyone was doing well, and after eleven years abroad, at the age of sixty four, Faye quietly died in her sleep one night. They were in Cap Ferrat for the fall, in a beautiful villa they had bought there, which they wanted to leave to their children one day. It would make a perfect place for them to come, all of them. |
| 2742 |
Annie had graduated from Columbia Architecture School six months before, and she was reveling in the excitement of her first job with an important architecture group. It was her dream come true. And the handsome pair had spotted each other across a crowded room, and it was infatuation at first sight. |
| 2743 |
They were falling in love and looking forward to good times ahead. Annie was having the time of her life: weekends with Seth, passionate lovemaking, happy times on the pretty little sailboat that he had just bought. She had it all, new man, new home, first big step in the career she had worked so hard for. |
| 2744 |
She was on top of the world, twenty six years old, tall, blond, beautiful. She had a smile that could have melted the world, and a lot to smile about. Her life these days was everything she had dreamed of. She had to force Seth to leave that afternoon after another perfect weekend on his boat, but she had work to do. |
| 2745 |
She wanted to spend some time on her first big project for a client meeting the following day. She knew she had to blow their socks off, and the plans she had been working on were meticulously done, and her immediate supervisor had shown a lot of respect for her ideas and was giving her a chance to shine. |
| 2746 |
Bill put the headphones on and talked to the tower as Jane pulled a magazine out of her bag. She loved trashy gossip magazines and reading about famous actresses and their romances and breakups, and discussing them with Annie as though the celebrities were their friends. Bill loved to tease them about it. |
| 2747 |
The air got choppy, and Jane could see that they were heading toward a storm. She didn't say anything to Bill, she didn't like to bother him when he was flying, so she looked out the window and then opened her magazine and took a sip of her coffee. A moment later, it splashed in her lap as the plane started to bounce. |
| 2748 |
He never took his hand off the controls, and he told her he loved her. They were his last words as the Cessna hit the ground and exploded in a ball of fire. Annie's cell phone rang again just as she was erasing a change she had spent an hour making on the plans. She didn't like it and was delicately changing it back. |
| 2749 |
This couldn't happen to them. But it had. She had no idea what to say next so she thanked the captain and hung up. She told him he could contact her at her sister's home in Greenwich and gave him the number. And then she grabbed her purse and walked out of the apartment without even turning out the lights. |
| 2750 |
He took her to dinner at a quiet place. He told her he was crazy about her, but he was twenty nine years old, and there was no way he could take on a woman with three children. He said he had had a terrific time with her for the past two months, but this was way, way over his head. She said she understood. |
| 2751 |
He tried to kiss her goodbye, and she turned her head away and walked into the house without a word to him. She had more important things to do now, like bring up three children. They had become a family overnight, and Seth wasn't part of it, and didn't want to be. She couldn't imagine a man who would. |
| 2752 |
And eventually she even got a promotion and a raise. Bill and Jane had left their children comfortably provided for. Bill had made some good investments, the house in Greenwich sold for an excellent price, and so did the one on Martha's Vineyard, and there had been an insurance policy for the children. |
| 2753 |
They were patient with Annie while she learned. There were some bumps and some sad times for them all at first, but in time they all got used to the hand they'd been dealt. And Magdalena stayed. In time, Annie got them through high school, through their first romances, and helped them apply to college. |
| 2754 |
She used her allowance to get her ears pierced at thirteen, and then her belly button, to Annie's horror. She dyed her hair blue and then purple, and at eighteen she got a tattoo of a unicorn on the inside of her wrist, which must have hurt like hell when she got it. And she was a talented artist like her mother. |
| 2755 |
She was tiny, fiercely independent, and very brave. She had strong beliefs about everything, including politics, and argued with anyone who didn't agree with her, and wasn't afraid to stand alone. She had been a handful in her teens but eventually settled down once she got to college and moved into the dorm. |
| 2756 |
She had no other life but theirs and her work. At thirty five, Annie had opened her own architecture office, after nine years with the same firm. She loved what she did and preferred residential jobs to the big corporate ones she had done for years. After four years in her own firm, she had found her niche. |
| 2757 |
She hadn't had a date for the first three years the children lived with her, and after that there had been some minor relationships, but never a serious one. She didn't have time. She was too busy taking care of her nieces and nephew and establishing herself as an architect. There was no room for a man in her life. |
| 2758 |
She had thought of everyone else for thirteen years. The time had moved like a bullet in the night. The early years had been a blur, but after that, Annie had truly enjoyed the children she had raised. She had lived up to the vow she had made Jane and she had gotten the children grown up, and all three were doing well. |
| 2759 |
Ted had just applied to law school and had gotten a new apartment with a friend from college, and at twenty five, Liz had just landed a job at Vogue, after working for three years at Elle. Each of them was on a career path. Annie had done her job. The only thing she didn't have was a life of her own, other than work. |
| 2760 |
She had a unique talent for combining ancient and contemporary designs and making it look both avant garde and warm, although it was hard to imagine right now. The husband was questioning her intensely about the costs, and his wife was looking anxious now that she saw the state of total chaos the house was in. |
| 2761 |
Actually, they're my nieces and nephew. My sister died in an accident sixteen years ago, and I inherited her kids. They're grown up now. The oldest is an editor at Vogue, my nephew is in his second year at law school, and the youngest is in college. I miss them like crazy, so it's a treat for me when they come home. |
| 2762 |
Harry was still looking worried, but Annie had promised him the work would come in at the price she'd quoted them, and Alicia was talking excitedly about the grand staircase when they left. Annie glanced at her watch as she hailed a cab. She had five minutes to get to Seventy ninth and Fifth to meet with a new client. |
| 2763 |
All he knew was that he wanted it to be fabulous, and he wanted Annie to make magic with it. She was meeting with him to give him some ideas. Jim was recently divorced and wanted a fantastic bachelor pad. It was a shift of mental gears as she rode uptown, and just before she got there, her cell phone rang. |
| 2764 |
He was a successful photographer and almost identical to all the men Lizzie had had in her life. They were either photographers or male models, always handsome, never too deep, and Liz never got too attached. Annie often wondered if losing her parents had made Liz gun shy about getting too close to anyone. |
| 2765 |
The men she got involved with were always selfish and spoiled, and Annie worried that she sold herself short. She was a beautiful, talented, intelligent young woman. It shocked Annie sometimes when she realized that at twenty eight, Liz was two years older than she had been when she inherited all of them. |
| 2766 |
And in some ways Liz seemed so young. And she never seemed to think about marriage or settling down. Annie realized that she hadn't set them much of an example on that score, since all she did herself was work, and take care of them when they were young. They had rarely if ever seen her with a date. |
| 2767 |
She had kept the few men in her life well away from them, and there hadn't been many anyway, and none she had cared about seriously. The last man she had been crazy about had been Seth, sixteen years before. She had run into him once a few years ago he was married, lived in Connecticut, and had four kids. |
| 2768 |
He had tried to explain to her how bad he felt that he hadn't stepped up to the plate for her when her sister died, and she had laughed and brushed it off and told him she was fine. But it had given her a little flutter to see him. He was as handsome as he'd been before, and she had told Whitney about it. |
| 2769 |
Annie had grown used to it over the years, although she would have loved to see her with a decently dressed guy with a haircut, just once. In contrast, Liz was always stylish beyond belief and gave Annie fashion tips and even occasionally brought her clothes. It was always fun to see what Liz would wear. |
| 2770 |
Annie's style was simpler and more practical than hers. She felt too old now for wild clothes, and she had to wear things she could get around her job sites in without freezing or falling on her face in stiletto heels. Liz was tall, like her late mother and her aunt, and never wore anything less than six inch heels. |
| 2771 |
She was completely oblivious to the way he was looking at her. Any other single woman her age would have been doing her best to charm him, but she was always professional with her clients. All he was to her was a job. It made no difference to her whatsoever that he had a yacht in St. Barts and his own plane. |
| 2772 |
She was interested in the apartment, not the man. Annie was friendly but totally businesslike in her manner. He suspected that she had a husband or boyfriend, but he didn't dare ask. Annie left an hour after she arrived. She promised to send him plans within two weeks and wished him a happy Thanksgiving. |
| 2773 |
The phone didn't ring. The house was empty, neat, and clean, and Annie still wasn't used to it, even three years after Kate had left for college. Annie suspected that it was a void she would never be able to fill. Her sister had given her the greatest gift in life, and time had slowly taken it from her. |
| 2774 |
And when Annie went to get the tablecloth out of a drawer in the dining room, she saw Katie's belongings spread all over the front hall. It looked good to her. The house was much too pristine without them. She loved the mess, the noise, the music, the funny hair, the silver boots. It was everything that she missed. |
| 2775 |
Katie's things were still in a heap in the front hall at midnight, when Annie finally picked them up and took them to her room. There was a time when she would have complained about it and scolded Kate for the mess she made. Now it warmed her heart to see it, and she was just happy to have them home. |
| 2776 |
She even slept better when the kids were home. She could no longer imagine what her life would have been like without them. Whitney always said that without her two nieces and nephew, Annie probably would have been married and had kids of her own. Annie wasn't as sure. She might have just concentrated on her career. |
| 2777 |
Everyone was married, except for the creeps they set her up with. And as much as she loved Whitney, and had for years, being the wife of a doctor in New Jersey didn't make for an interesting social life. Annie always wound up feeling like the odd man out at Whitney's parties, or a freak for being single at forty two. |
| 2778 |
Annie's role models for relationships were her late sister and brother in law, who had been madly in love until the end. She didn't want less than that for herself or even for their kids. She had talked about them a lot to their children over the years, and there were photos of Jane and Bill everywhere. |
| 2779 |
She had kept their memory alive for all of them. Annie got up to go check on the turkey, and Ted wandered in a few minutes later in pajama bottoms and a T shirt, looking like an overgrown boy. At twenty four, he was a handsome man, like his father. And when she checked, the turkey was looking good and turning brown. |
| 2780 |
Katie had known how to get his goat ever since she could talk, and it was no different now. A few minutes later they all disappeared to their rooms and emerged again at noon. Ted was wearing gray slacks, a blazer, and a tie and looked heartbreakingly like his father to Annie. They were almost clones. |
| 2781 |
The young photographer was only a few years older than Ted but was far more sophisticated. He had talked about his five year old son at dinner. He had never been married to the boy's mother but had lived with her for two years, and they had remained friends. And he said he saw the boy as often as he could. |
| 2782 |
She had seen enough of Liz's friends to be aware of it, and it no longer shocked her, but it didn't appeal to her either. She preferred Ted's clean cut style to Jean Louis's. The three women stood in the kitchen and talked while they cleaned up, and by the time they finished, the football game was over. |
| 2783 |
Annie came in to say goodnight to Kate a few minutes later and was surprised to find her lying on her bed, still dressed, talking on the phone. She sounded animated and looked happy, and Annie discreetly left the room. She went to say goodnight to Ted, and he kissed her and thanked her for the wonderful Thanksgiving. |
| 2784 |
She was almost too tired to miss the kids, never bothered to eat dinner, and barely noticed the darkened rooms and silence in the apartment. It was the drug she had always used to counter loneliness and pain, total immersion in work. The Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend was a busy day for Liz too. |
| 2785 |
She had an important jewelry shoot for the March issue, and she had pulled major pieces from all over the world. The theme was Spring, and all the jewelry she was using was in flower designs, leaves, and roots, from their most important jewelry advertisers, and some new designers that Liz had found herself. |
| 2786 |
There were three armed guards at the shoot, and four of the currently most important models in the world. One of them had agreed to pose naked, literally covered in jewels. And the photographer they were using was major too. They were having fun on the set, trying things on and playing with them during breaks. |
| 2787 |
She looked tired and stressed. They had been working since eight o'clock that morning, and she'd been at the photographer's studio at six to set things up. Usually she would have had an assistant do it, but the pieces they were using were of such enormous value that she felt she should be there herself. |
| 2788 |
They were both rising stars in their fields. Liz's secret dream was to be editor of Vogue one day, and she knew that getting there was still years away. She had to make her mark as an outstanding editor first. And the stories she did now were key. Jean Louis was successful but more relaxed about his work. |
| 2789 |
She wasn't, but she was standoffish with men. It was easy to understand why. She had told him she had lost her parents as a child, but she never went into detail. Her night terrors afterward, the nightmares she had had and sometimes still did, the years of therapy to get over the loss, were none of his business. |
| 2790 |
Other people didn't understand the crazy world in which she lived, and how passionate she was about her work. Her aunt Annie felt the same way about what she did and had been a role model for Liz as she grew up. Her directive to Liz had been to follow her dream and do whatever it took to do it well. |
| 2791 |
Liz had always tried to live by those rules and was highly respected in the world of fashion as a result. Her ideas were innovative, bold, and fresh. It was nearly midnight when they took the final shot. Jean Louis had gone home to his loft by then, and Lizzie promised to come by when they finished. |
| 2792 |
It took Liz and two assistants another hour to wrap up all the jewels and mark the boxes. The three armed guards accompanied her back to her office, where she put everything in the safe. She got to Jean Louis's place at two. He was listening to music and drinking a glass of wine as he waited for her. |
| 2793 |
Half the models in town knew where to find that key. But for now the key was only for her. She didn't mind how little time they spent together, but the one thing she cared about was that they were exclusive to each other and slept with no one else. And Jean Louis had agreed. He had no need for a long term commitment. |
| 2794 |
When he wanted a different woman, he left and found one. But neither of them had any desire to go elsewhere for now. However inadequate Annie thought he was for her, Lizzie was satisfied. Jean Louis fit perfectly into her high flying, fast moving, glamorous world, and he was just as comfortable with her. |
| 2795 |
His roommates had finished the coffee and not replaced it. He missed two buses and then a subway, when he tried that to get to school, and was late to class. And when the assistant professor handed back their papers on a quiz from the week before, he had gotten several answers wrong and got a miserable grade. |
| 2796 |
The apartment was small. There were two bedrooms, the living room, and a kitchen, and Pattie said it was rent controlled. The university housing office had found it for her, and she was grateful to have it. She said the babysitter she used lived downstairs, and since the divorce it was a perfect arrangement. |
| 2797 |
The questions were intelligent and made sense, and she had a clear answer for all of them. She showed him examples and flipped through the book to point out what he needed to study and learn by rote. She clarified some important points for him and an hour later Ted sat back on the couch, looking immensely relieved. |
| 2798 |
She had a lush body and seemed limber and graceful and explained to him that she had done yoga for years. She taught it privately sometimes and said that she did everything she had to to make ends meet. Her ex husband was an artist and couldn't even pay child support. She was carrying it all herself. |
| 2799 |
Ted admired her for her openness and courage. She didn't say anything nasty about her ex husband, and she seemed to accept her life as it was, and it had been kind of her to help him. He felt like he should pay her something for the tutoring help but didn't know what, and he didn't want to insult her. |
| 2800 |
They didn't say anything for a long moment and Ted was about to thank her again for her help with the contracts class, when without a word she leaned toward him, put an arm around his neck, and pulled him close to her. She kissed him then, and as she did, he felt as though his lips and soul and loins were on fire. |
| 2801 |
He had never felt anything like it before. He started to pull away and then found he couldn't stop. It was as though he had been drugged. She was the drug, and he wanted more. When they finally drifted away from each other, all he wanted was to go back, and he slipped a hand under her sweater and touched her breasts. |
| 2802 |
He had broken up with a girlfriend six months before, because he didn't want to get serious with her. Now this was a whole new world, with a woman who was much, much more experienced than he. It was a heady feeling, as she leaned over and gently rubbed the bulge in his jeans and pulled him to his feet. |
| 2803 |
He looked like he'd been on a three week drunk when he finally got home. He was grateful that none of his roommates were in. He hadn't been to school in three days. Pattie had promised to give him an A in her class no matter what he did, but that didn't feel right to him. He had to get back to school. |
| 2804 |
Ted caught up on some of his work for the next two days, and they were both miserable. But she had papers to correct too. She wanted to come over for a couple of hours, and he wouldn't let her. He knew they wouldn't be able to tear themselves away again, and he had to study for final exams in a couple of weeks. |
| 2805 |
He spun her around, gently laid her down on the carpet, and shoved her skirt up. She was begging for him as he took her right there, and then carried her to the bedroom with their clothes strewn across the floor. They didn't leave the apartment again after that for two days, until her kids came home. |
| 2806 |
But he was never too busy to call her, and she hadn't heard a word from him since the Sunday after Thanksgiving when he'd left. Kate said he hadn't called her, and Liz said the same and that she'd had a busy week herself. They all had, and things were going to be even busier before Christmas and over the holidays. |
| 2807 |
She had said she'd have to check with her ex husband about his taking the kids, and Ted was looking forward to taking a trip with her, if they could stay out of bed long enough to get on skis. Annie reminded Ted to come home for dinner anytime he wanted and suggested it for the following weekend, but he was vague. |
| 2808 |
Ted knew only too well, when he thought about it later, that not in a million years would Annie suspect that he was involved with a thirty six year old assistant law professor with two kids. And he knew for sure that he wouldn't be able to tell her for a long time. First he had to get used to the idea himself. |
| 2809 |
It snowed twice the week before Christmas, which made it nearly impossible to get around. She had Christmas shopping to do for her nieces and nephew, her assistants, and Whitney and her brood. Two new clients insisted on meetings, and she had to come up with a set of preliminary plans for one of them. |
| 2810 |
He knew that he cared about Pattie, but he hadn't figured out yet what was happening between them. And he knew without a doubt that his aunt and sisters would be extremely shaken up by her age and the fact that she had kids. Ted wasn't ready to face the hurdle of their opinions yet. And Pattie was hurt by that too. |
| 2811 |
They had only been dating for four weeks, and as much in love as Pattie said they were, it still seemed very new to Ted. There was plenty of time for a ring of some kind later. He was not thirty six years old like her, he was only twenty four, and this was only the second serious relationship he'd ever had. |
| 2812 |
She turned them around one by one, and Ted caught his breath in amazement. Sometimes he actually forgot how talented his younger sister was, just like their mother. She had done exquisite portraits of each of them to give Annie, and the likenesses were absolutely perfect, even the self portrait she had done. |
| 2813 |
Only Annie took communion, and as she did every year, they watched her light candles for Bill and Jane. She knelt at one of the smaller altars after she did it, bowed her head, and prayed, and there were tears running down her cheeks when she stood up. It always brought tears to Kate's eyes to watch her. |
| 2814 |
Her parents weren't forgotten, and Annie had been wonderful to their children ever since they'd been gone. Ted gave Annie a hug as she slipped back into the pew, and Kate gently held her hand. Liz was looking strikingly chic as usual, in a huge white fox hat and an elegant black coat with tall black leather boots. |
| 2815 |
And after they did, Annie filled their stockings with little thoughtful presents and wrote them funny notes from Santa, reminding each of them to clean their rooms and wash behind their ears, and on Kate's Santa letter she added a note that she would find coal in her stocking next year if she got any more tattoos. |
| 2816 |
A little while later Kate emerged from her bedroom, looking sleepy, in a rock star T shirt, and her spiky hair sticking up straight. Annie noticed then that she was wearing a tiny diamond in her nose, which was new. She didn't say anything to Kate about it, but she would never get used to her pierces and tattoos. |
| 2817 |
She felt very lucky as she put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher and silently thanked her sister for the three terrific children she had inherited from her. They had filled her life with love and joy ever since. Everyone went to their rooms for a while after breakfast. All of them had friends they wanted to call. |
| 2818 |
She just didn't seem to get it, or didn't want to. There was no way he would have been anywhere but here today. And after only four weeks it wasn't fair of Pattie to expect him to ditch his family for her. He was upset that she had made such a fuss about it, but he offered to come to see her late that afternoon. |
| 2819 |
She noticed a book on Katie's desk, about Muslim culture and customs. It wasn't the sort of thing that Katie usually read. She had never been much of a reader, and her taste ran more to biographies of contemporary artists and rock stars. And she'd never had an interest in other religions before, or even her own. |
| 2820 |
Liz was wearing a simple little black wool dress, although it barely reached her thighs. Annie was wearing her favorite red Christmas dress, and Katie appeared a moment later in a red leather skirt, Raggedy Ann stockings, red combat boots, a fuzzy white sweater, and Christmas balls hanging from her ears as earrings. |
| 2821 |
They were all old enough to drink, and rarely did to excess, although Ted had had his occasional sophomoric moments during his first two years in college, but now they were all adults, and reasonable about how much they drank. Liz said she was excited about going to Paris and spending time with Jean Louis. |
| 2822 |
For now it was a mystery, and he wanted it that way. And Annie respected them all too much to try and pry it out of him. Ted ran up the stairs in Pattie's building as fast as he could. He had promised her he'd try to be there by five, and it was nearly six. But he hadn't been able to get away before that. |
| 2823 |
Their traditions were important to all of them, and to him too. He rang the doorbell, and for a long moment she didn't answer, and Ted was worried that she might not let him in. She had said she'd be there. He felt suddenly like a very young boy who was in trouble. It was an unfamiliar sensation to him. |
| 2824 |
And as he took off the wrapping, he was ill at ease to see that it was some kind of jewelry box. He gasped when he opened it it was a beautiful old gold man's watch, and not at all the kind of thing he would wear. He was wearing the Cartier diver's watch from his sister, which was much more age appropriate. |
| 2825 |
He wanted to get home. He didn't know why, but tonight had made him sad. She seemed so desperate, and her father's watch had been too big a gift. It hadn't touched him, it had scared him. He had left the gold watch on the dresser in her bedroom. They weren't married or engaged, he didn't even know if he was in love. |
| 2826 |
It was so exciting and intense being with Pattie, but the white heat of her passion seared him at times. And all he could think of now was that it felt good to be home, in the apartment where he'd grown up, with the people he loved. Pattie was like a wild fantasy he couldn't get enough of. But this was real. |
| 2827 |
Annie wasn't surprised, and it didn't bother her. She didn't keep track of his every move, and at twenty four, he had to feel free to come and go when he stayed with her. Katie went out for a while too. She wanted to check out the sales at her favorite stores, and she came back to the apartment shortly before five. |
| 2828 |
He seemed very mature for his age, and he was a far cry from Kate's tattooed and pierced friends from art school who wore drooping jeans and torn T shirts with uncombed hair. In an effort to make him feel welcome, Annie offered him a glass of wine, and he smiled and said he would prefer a cup of tea. |
| 2829 |
He said he still had family there but hadn't been back to his native country for a visit in nine years, since they left, and added that he was an American citizen, as were his parents. He spoke without any trace of an accent and seemed very polished and adult and also very respectful in the way he spoke to Annie. |
| 2830 |
But the look in her niece's eyes said something very different. Annie had never seen her look like this at any boy. And Paul was not a boy, he was a man. Annie could easily see everything that Katie loved about him, but that didn't mean that a serious relationship between them at their age would be easy. |
| 2831 |
It was hard enough to make a relationship work with someone who had grown up in all the same ways. Annie was still thinking about it when she went back to her room and sat staring at the plans on her desk. She didn't know what to think it was the first time she had ever seen her in love, and she was worried for Kate. |
| 2832 |
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. He sounds terrific. And if you want to have a laugh, think of the heart attack they'll have when his parents see Tweety Bird and Tinkerbell tattooed on her arms, not to mention the ten earrings on her ears. I don't think they'll be calling you tomorrow to arrange a marriage. |
| 2833 |
Maybe one of them will marry someone you hate one day, but I don't think any of them are ready to get married yet, not even Lizzie, and she's old enough. And if they really fuck it up and do make a horrible mistake, which can happen to anyone, from any culture, you still have to sit back and watch from the sidelines. |
| 2834 |
Paul had left. She had a dreamy look on her face and smiled shyly at her aunt. Annie's heart sank when she saw her. She had never seen anyone so in love. And being that much in love put her at serious risk for a broken heart if things didn't work out as she hoped. And at twenty one, no romance was likely to be forever. |
| 2835 |
It was hard watching the three of them grow up. Annie had a headache when she woke up the next day. Ted and Katie were both already out, and neither had left her a note about their plans. She knew that at their age, they didn't owe her explanations about where they went, and she had no right to ask. |
| 2836 |
There had been very little traffic, and she made good time. She had brought a simple black evening dress and hung it in the backseat. Their three boys were playing basketball in the backyard when she arrived. They were fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen, and all three of them looked like Fred, with freckles and red hair. |
| 2837 |
Annie had always respected him for that. As she walked into their house after Whitney hugged her, Annie saw that the dining table was beautifully set with gleaming silver and crystal, and there were white flowers and silver streamers everywhere. The evening looked more elaborate than she'd expected. |
| 2838 |
She had promised herself she was going to make an effort and get into the spirit of the evening. Annie blew her hair dry and did it in a French twist. She put her makeup on carefully and stepped into the black dress. And she wore a pair of high heeled sandals with feathers on them that Lizzie had bought her in Paris. |
| 2839 |
Annie wouldn't have traded her own life for hers, but she chatted amiably with them, as other guests continued to arrive. By eight o'clock everyone was there. People arrived promptly in the suburbs, unlike big cities where everyone was late. And she hadn't figured out which one her blind date was yet. |
| 2840 |
It was five minutes before they sat down to dinner when Whitney brought him over to meet her and introduced her to Bob Graham, the man she was dying for Annie to meet, and as she saw him, Annie's heart sank. He looked like every bad blind date she'd ever had, and he looked her over like a piece of meat. |
| 2841 |
Annie would have preferred it if he were bald, and she tried to remind herself to be a good sport and give the poor guy a chance. What if he were the nicest man on the planet and had bad hair plugs? It would be worth putting up with his hair if he were a wonderful human being, and maybe he was. Or fascinating. |
| 2842 |
Whitney beamed at her from across the table. She looked as though she had had a lot to drink, and so had everyone else. The dinner had been excellent, provided by the best caterer in Far Hills, but no one seemed to care. All they talked about was the wines. Fred had brought out his best and knew a lot about wine. |
| 2843 |
Bob Graham could have talked to himself in the mirror all night and had just as much fun. She suspected he probably normally dated younger women who were impressed by his money, his boat, or his Porsche. She was impressed by none of it, and all she wanted to do was go home. And she was stuck there for the night. |
| 2844 |
Most of the time they saw each other in the city when Whitney came in to go shopping, and she was okay one on one. But here, in her natural habitat, with these smug, self satisfied, pompous people, Annie wanted to scream and run out of the room. The best part of the evening so far had been the food. |
| 2845 |
She always swore she wouldn't do it again, but Whitney had pushed her, and after what Katie had said, she thought she should at least try again. When Whitney went out to the kitchen to pay the caterers, Annie slipped quietly into her room, took off her clothes and makeup, slid into bed, and turned off the light. |
| 2846 |
He was gentle, loving, and respectful, and she knew that everything Annie was concerned about with different cultures didn't apply to him. He was as American as she was, no matter where he'd been born. And he was the kindest man in the world, and Katie was deeply and totally in love for the first time in her life. |
| 2847 |
He made Katie lock her bedroom door anyway. He didn't want anyone to walk in on them. And Katie lay peacefully in his arms as they talked late into the night, about all the things they cared about, their hopes and fears and dreams. He said he wanted to take her to Tehran one day to visit his family there. |
| 2848 |
But Katie didn't think about her aunt at all that night. Her heart and mind were full of Paul, and the life they were going to share. It was a new year, a new world, a new life with him. And the differences their families were concerned about didn't exist for them. The only world they cared about was their own. |
| 2849 |
He felt trapped when she said things like that, and he didn't want to be her hostage, no matter how exciting she was. He wanted to be with her by choice. Sometimes there was an aura of desperation about Pattie that unnerved him. Their relationship was so much more intense than any he'd been in before. |
| 2850 |
She was twenty five years old, and she looked about fifteen when she opened the door. She was even taller than Liz and stood six feet tall in bare feet, with huge green eyes, flawless skin, and a long mane of red hair. Damien's hair was the same color as his mother's, but otherwise he was the image of Jean Louis. |
| 2851 |
There were magazines, loose photographs, her modeling portfolio, half drunk bottles of wine, and shoes everywhere. Damien seemed like a happy, easygoing child as he ran to hug his father, and then kissed his mother when they left. The two women had looked each other over with interest, but said very little. |
| 2852 |
He had told Liz that she was the only woman he had promised monogamy to, and he considered it an enormous concession and a big commitment from him. Until then, monogamy, his own or his partner's, had never been important to him. He believed in living in the moment, and seizing opportunities when they arose. |
| 2853 |
Liz wasn't so sure how he'd feel later about parents who hadn't been willing to make the necessary adjustments for him and thought only of themselves. In some ways she thought they treated him like a toy. She was still grateful for the sacrifices Annie had made, which she was even more aware of now. |
| 2854 |
And Damien seemed perfectly content with that. He lived on pizza and sandwiches when he was with his mother. His father always had better things to eat. But he didn't look unhappy or malnourished, and he was easy to be with. He had learned early to adjust to the grown ups around him and not cause any trouble. |
| 2855 |
But Damien was paying the price for it. She never had. She had had a perfect childhood, under the circumstances. And even with that, she was shy of long term commitments now. She had never told a man she loved him, for fear that if she did, he might die or disappear, and she didn't think she had ever been in love. |
| 2856 |
She was attached to him, and she enjoyed him, but to her love was something much deeper than this, from which there was no turning back. She had never given up her option to end a relationship or leave. And this was the extent of the commitment she wanted for now. She couldn't even imagine having a child with him. |
| 2857 |
They talked mostly about fashion, and the editors and photographers they knew, the politics at various magazines, particularly hers, and their careers. They were comfortable and compatible, had the same interests, knew many of the same people, and worked in the same milieu. It was an ideal situation for both of them. |
| 2858 |
Jean Louis hadn't wanted to wake him by trying to take them off, and he hopped onto the bed with them and asked what they were doing that day. Jean Louis said they were taking him back to his mother after breakfast, because he and Lizzie had to get ready for work the following morning, and they had a lot to prepare. |
| 2859 |
Lizzie sat quietly in a chair at the edge of the set with her eyes closed, trying to figure it out. She was good at pulling rabbits out of hats, but this time she was coming up dry. One of the assistant stylists approached her after a few minutes, and Lizzie waved her away. She didn't want to be bothered right now. |
| 2860 |
Jean Louis called her too during his own lunch break, and she told him she was up to her ass in alligators and she'd call him back. He said his shoot was going great, which only irritated her more. She had her own problems right now. As she turned off her cell phone, the young assistant approached her again. |
| 2861 |
She knew Liz's reputation as a perfectionist, and given everything that had gone wrong that morning, she was scared to death someone would take it out on her. Fashion was a high tension business, and when things went wrong at a shoot, invariably shit rolled downhill. She was at the bottom of the hill. |
| 2862 |
And half an hour later they got back to work. Her spirits were buoyed, knowing she had what she needed, and the photographer was excited when he saw the pieces. They were much more beautiful than the ones they had been promised by the other jeweler. At six o'clock they were still working when Jean Louis dropped by. |
| 2863 |
As it turned out, it was another two hours before she was finished, and they had shot all the di Giorgio pieces. She returned them to the armed guard who'd been with her all afternoon and wrote a hasty note to Alessandro di Giorgio, thanking him again. She promised to send him tear sheets of the shoot. |
| 2864 |
Jean Louis had the following day off and was planning to spend it with friends. As Liz sank into the tub and closed her eyes, she thought back over the shots they had done, the jewelry they'd used, the models and their clothes. As she ran the film of the day through her head, she was satisfied with the work. |
| 2865 |
Few people did. Annie's first days back to work after the holidays weren't much smoother than Liz's. It seemed like there was chaos at all her construction sites, her most important contractor had quit, and there were delays on all her projects. After the first of the year, all hell had broken loose. |
| 2866 |
And she had dozens of calls to return and e mails to answer. She asked her assistant for a cup of black coffee and got to work. She decided to open the mail on her desk first. The second letter she opened was from Kate's school, and she suddenly panicked, thinking she had forgotten to pay her tuition. |
| 2867 |
Her accountant usually handled it, but the check could have gotten lost in the mail. Instead, her heart stopped when she saw what the letter said. It confirmed the fact that Kate had dropped out of school for a semester. And Annie's week had been so stressful so far that she was furious the minute she read it. |
| 2868 |
Katie was a talented artist, and Annie wanted her to go to school and get the degree she'd started. Annie finished everything on her desk in record time and took the plans she had to change with her when she went home. She'd been so distracted for the rest of the afternoon that she couldn't think straight. |
| 2869 |
She figured that right now that news could wait. And after they talked quietly for a few more minutes, Kate went back to her room. She was planning to bring home all her things from the dorm that weekend. In her own room, Annie took two aspirins for the headache she'd had since that afternoon and lay down on her bed. |
| 2870 |
She had an argument with two contractors, and a very difficult meeting with one of her more challenging clients. The weather was terrible, which was slowing everything down, and the fact that Katie had dropped out of school, without even discussing it with her first or asking her advice, had Annie on edge all day. |
| 2871 |
Annie looked like a visitor from another planet with her sleek blond hair, fashionable high heeled boots, and new black coat. She wanted to run right out the door, but she stood her ground as she waited for Kate, and a few minutes later her niece came through a back door where the private rooms were. |
| 2872 |
The construction site was another one of her trouble spots right now, and she was fiercely upset when she saw that one of the workmen had left a hose on earlier in the day, and in the freezing weather, the water had turned to ice on the ground. It was an invitation to accidents and another headache she didn't need. |
| 2873 |
It was getting late. Her mind was so full of Katie that she didn't see the last patch of ice she had complained about, and suddenly her high heeled boots flew into the air, and she came down hard on one foot with a sharp yelp. One of the construction workers had seen her fall and rushed to help her. |
| 2874 |
It was exactly what she had just warned them about. What she hadn't expected was that the accident waiting to happen was her. She had been totally distracted and distraught since her visit to Katie at the tattoo parlor, and she hadn't looked where she was going in her rush to leave and get back to the office. |
| 2875 |
And it was one of the very rare times she had worn high heels to a construction site. She hadn't planned to visit any of them that day and changed her mind once she got to work. Several of the men had gathered around her by then, and she tried standing up again, but she couldn't. She was seriously annoyed at herself. |
| 2876 |
She nodded, pretending to agree with him, but once in the cab, she gave the driver her office address. She was sure she'd be fine when she got home and took her boots off, but for now it hurt like hell. And when she got to her office, she couldn't get out of the cab. The driver turned to look at her as she struggled. |
| 2877 |
She felt sick from the pain, and she wanted to cry, more about Katie than her hurt foot. She hated her working at a tattoo parlor, and the place looked awful. It was all she could think of as the woman in blue scrubs wheeled her to the registration window in the ER, and Annie handed the clerk her insurance card. |
| 2878 |
She sat there with her eyes closed for a while, trying to tolerate the pain, and then the woman in the chair next to her started to cough. She sounded really sick, so as discreetly as she could, Annie wheeled herself away. She didn't want to catch a disease here on top of it. The ankle was bad enough. |
| 2879 |
She was feeling acutely sorry for herself as she sat there. The seven o'clock news was coming on the waiting room TV, and when it began, they announced that their anchor Tom Jefferson wouldn't be on the air that night. He had sustained an injury playing squash and was at the hospital at that very moment. |
| 2880 |
She nodded agreement, and then sat back in the wheelchair with a sigh. She tried to wiggle her toes once in a while, to see if she could, but now it hurt too much. She had seen Tom Jefferson do the same thing with his fingers, trying to assess the extent of the damage, and if it was sprained or broken. |
| 2881 |
He had a point, and he was certainly discreet. They were both completely focused on their respective injuries, and she felt as though they were shipwrecked together on a desert island. And no one seemed to know they were there, or care. She texted Katie eventually that she'd be home late, but she didn't say why. |
| 2882 |
He looked about forty five, with dark hair, just beginning to gray at the temples. His pizza arrived an hour later, and they were still waiting. He had ordered everything on it but anchovies, and he offered her a piece, but she couldn't eat. He nearly finished it himself, in spite of the injured arm. |
| 2883 |
They put a brace on it, gave her crutches, and told her to keep her weight off it, but putting weight on it wasn't an option anyway. She couldn't have stood the pain. And they told her to see her own orthopedist in a week. They said it would take four to six weeks to heal, and to wear flat shoes in the meantime. |
| 2884 |
She wondered if the arm was broken or just sprained like her ankle. It had been nice talking to him and helped pass the time. But her mind was back on Katie and her own troubles on the drive home. It had been a long, painful night. Annie hobbled unsteadily into her building on the crutches they'd given her. |
| 2885 |
She tried not to think of any of it as she crawled into bed. She took another pain pill, as they had told her to do, and by the time Annie's head hit the pillow, she was out like a light. Katie kissed her, tucked her in, and went back to Paul. They had been making some very important plans that night. |
| 2886 |
It was too hard to get around, and she sent her assistant to two job sites. Katie called to check on her and was very solicitous. And Annie finally gave up and went home early at four o'clock with two shopping bags full of work. She saw Tom on the news that night, after she took a pain pill and had a nap. |
| 2887 |
I was married for eight years. I've been divorced for five. My kind of work isn't conducive to happy marriages. I was traveling most of the time and away for a long time sometimes. We finally figured out that it wasn't going to work, and she married someone else. We're on fairly decent terms. She has two kids now. |
| 2888 |
She was full of surprises and seemed content with her life. She wasn't one of those desperate, unhappy women who felt that they'd missed the boat and were scrambling to fix it. And he liked that about her. She wasn't looking for a savior or a rescuer. She seemed very whole to him and at peace with herself. |
| 2889 |
And maybe he had a girlfriend. She hadn't asked him that. The fact that he wasn't married didn't mean he was free. Anything was possible. She wasn't counting on hearing from him again, although she liked him. But he was a celebrity, and his life could have been fuller or more complicated than he admitted. |
| 2890 |
She knew that about men too. She'd been on lots of first dates in the last twenty years. And never heard from the guys again. He helped her into a cab after lunch, and she went back to her office. Ted called her and said that he had talked to Kate and she was adamant about not going back to school until next semester. |
| 2891 |
Lizzie was still sorry for Damien that they were sending him away to live with his grandmother, which was easier for his parents, but not necessarily best for him. Lizzie had her doubts about it, but she didn't feel comfortable being too emphatic about it to Jean Louis. It was his son after all, not hers. |
| 2892 |
This was a woman he was deeply involved with, and she was visibly many years older than Ted. In harsh daylight, she looked even older than her thirty six years. And as Annie looked straight at him from a few feet away, and their eyes met, Ted looked as though he would burst into tears. There was no escape. |
| 2893 |
He hadn't yet. He was just having a good time. He was very quiet on the walk back to Pattie's apartment with the full basket of fruits and vegetables they'd bought. He set it down in the kitchen for her, and she didn't like the way he looked. He had been silent and upset ever since they ran into his aunt. |
| 2894 |
Who knew if she really would kill herself? But he didn't want to take the chance. Ted was shaking when she walked out of the kitchen and back into the living room to her kids. Her message to him had been delivered and was even more powerful than his respect for his aunt. Pattie had won this round. Again. |
| 2895 |
Everywhere she turned now, the children she loved had put themselves in difficult situations and were at risk. And she was helpless to stop them or even help them. All she could do was watch as they took chances, and they would ultimately have to learn from their own mistakes, just as Whitney had said. |
| 2896 |
She walked back into the living room on her crutches and sat down on the couch. There wasn't even anyone she could talk to about it. All she could do was worry and hope that in the end they made wise choices and everything came out all right. She had never been so sad or felt so useless in her life. |
| 2897 |
They talked about the relationship all through lunch, and Ted felt a little better when he went back to his own apartment, instead of Pattie's. Annie had given him good advice. He called and told Pattie he was going to stay at his place that night. He said he had some things to do, and some papers to write. |
| 2898 |
She was still on crutches, and his arm was still in a cast, but neither of them was hurting from their injuries anymore. He told her about a big story he was working on, and that he might have to go to California to spend time with the governor. She loved hearing about his work, and his old war stories. |
| 2899 |
But I've been concerned about her going out with someone whose background and culture are so different from her own, even if he's very American and he's lived here since he was fourteen. Ultimately their ideas might be very divergent. She's a very liberated young woman. And her ideas can be very extreme at times. |
| 2900 |
She knew it was a short trip, but she hadn't said when she'd be back, and Annie hadn't heard from her since she left. She knew Liz was too busy to call her. She was excited about inviting Tom to meet them. That night before she went to sleep, she pondered his question to her if there was room in her life for a man now. |
| 2901 |
She didn't know what she wanted, although Tom was very appealing. She wasn't completely sure either if she wanted to close that door and give up on relationships forever. That door stood ajar now, waiting for her to open it wide, or quietly close it and turn the key. Liz's trip to California went extremely well. |
| 2902 |
There wasn't a hitch, and at the end of two days of constant shooting and interviews at people's homes, she was able to pack up and take the red eye home. It helped that they had no jewelry to return to suppliers it all stayed with the current owners. She didn't even have time to call Jean Louis when she left. |
| 2903 |
She had only brought carry on, so she was out of the airport in no time and gave the cab driver her address. And then she thought better of it and decided to go to the loft. It was six in the morning and too early to call Jean Louis, but she knew where the key was and could let herself in and just slip into his bed. |
| 2904 |
She dropped her clothes on the floor next to it and slid in next to him and gently put her arms around him, and as she did, there was a sudden scream. She didn't know who it was, but it was not Jean Louis. She sat bolt upright in the bed, and so did he, as he turned on the light with a rapid gesture. |
| 2905 |
She was shocked to realize she wasn't even sad as she ran down the stairs, she was relieved. She was finished with guys like him. She was grown up. He never would be. She made a vow to herself as she hailed a cab. She was never going to settle for a guy like him again. She'd rather be alone than waste her time. |
| 2906 |
He was interesting and intelligent, he seemed to be open minded, and he wasn't dull. He'd had an exciting life and career. He wasn't full of himself, and he asked all the right questions. For now they were just friends, but he was the first man she'd met in years who seemed worthwhile to her, and she liked his looks. |
| 2907 |
He felt the same way about her. She was a rare bird amid flocks of very dull women he had met since his divorce. And unlike most men his age, he had no interest in twenty two year olds. Annie couldn't help wondering, when she invited him to dinner, if he would be taken with Lizzie. She was a beautiful girl. |
| 2908 |
Annie was philosophical about life and perfectly willing to let destiny decide her fate. Tom didn't belong to her, and you couldn't put an option on people. He was just a man she had met at a hospital by sheer happenstance. Nothing more than that. She forgot to tell the others about him until just before dinner. |
| 2909 |
And they were going to have cookies and ice cream for dessert, just the way they had on Sunday nights when they were kids. Liz was sitting on the couch, talking to Katie, trying to convince her to quit the tattoo parlor and go back to school, and Paul was reading a magazine while the two women talked. |
| 2910 |
He had told Pattie he had to go home for dinner and had left even when she had a fit. He wasn't going to let her keep him from his aunt and sisters. Although he knew he would pay for it later, dinner with them was worth it, and he was trying to take Annie's advice and take a little more space from Pattie. |
| 2911 |
And he had a lively conversation with Liz about fashion, and he asked Kate a lot of questions about tattoos, and why she felt it was an important form of graphic art. The only one he hardly talked to was Annie, but he stayed to help clean up the kitchen with her, while she dismissed the others to the living room. |
| 2912 |
It was too late to call Pattie, and he didn't want to stay there anyway. He had enjoyed the evening with his family and their friends. And he liked sleeping in his own bed for a change. He was sound asleep when Pattie called him the next morning, and it took him a few minutes to wake up and make sense. |
| 2913 |
I have no money and no job. I live off what's left of an insurance policy my parents left me, and it's almost gone. My aunt helps me out. How do you think I'm going to support a child, or even take care of one? I'm years away from making a decent living, and you can hardly support the kids you have. |
| 2914 |
He didn't take her calls or answer her texts. He never thanked Annie for dinner, which was unusual for him, and it worried her. She knew that he was in a delicate situation with an unstable woman, although she knew nothing of the pregnancy. But Annie didn't want to hound him, so she waited to hear from him. |
| 2915 |
It was the first time he had spoken to her in three days. And all she did was sob when he called. He felt terrible and tried to comfort her on the phone, and she begged him to come over. He felt as though he had to, so he dressed and went over to her apartment. She was calm when he got there and very loving. |
| 2916 |
And he was the loser in all this. And that morning before he left, she asked him about getting married. He said he didn't want to. She said it wasn't fair to the baby to have it out of wedlock. She was a decent woman, and she'd been married when she had the others. All he could do was say he would think about it. |
| 2917 |
It struck her that Tom led a very grown up life and was at the hub of world events. She was trying to get contractors to come in on time, and moving walls around to keep her clients happy. Her world was a lot smaller than his. But she loved what she did. It had given her great satisfaction for years. |
| 2918 |
She had always secretly hoped that Kate would get interested in architecture too, and she could have formed a partnership with her in later years, but her artistic talents had found other avenues. Tom promised to call her as soon as he got back to New York, and he confirmed their dinner date on Saturday night. |
| 2919 |
He didn't even want to think about it now. And she was talking marriage now a lot of the time. He had never been so miserable in his life, except when he lost his parents. Liz called him every day to see how he was, and she hated the way he sounded. He admitted to her that he was in despair and felt trapped. |
| 2920 |
She felt like a high school kid going to her first prom when Tom rang the doorbell. He was wearing a black cashmere jacket and slacks, with an open, beautifully tailored shirt. He said he was jet lagged but he didn't look it, and he admired everything Annie had on. He loved her looks and the way she was dressed. |
| 2921 |
It was fun being out with him. With his face on the news every night, he was universally known, respected, and greatly admired. Over dinner, Annie told him about the houses she was currently working on, and he told her all about China. For the first time, Annie talked about something other than the kids. |
| 2922 |
Annie followed his advice and called Paul's parents the next day. His mother wasn't enthused about the trip either. She wasn't convinced that they would be sensible once they got there, and she thought they were too young to travel together so far away. She said it was the first trip Paul had ever taken with a girl. |
| 2923 |
The two young people were willing to listen to no one's opinion but their own. They were in control of their own destiny, and their families had no choice in the matter, except to let them try their wings and hope that all went well. Annie knew when she hung up that there was no stopping them from going to Iran. |
| 2924 |
She was smart, loving, fair, and respectful of their opinions. But despite that, Katie refused to listen to her. She was going to Tehran and that was that. Tom admitted that in Annie's shoes, he would have wanted to strangle her on the spot for being too independent, headstrong, and listening to no one's advice. |
| 2925 |
They were getting to know each other better, and they laughed, talked endlessly, and seemed to enjoy many of the same things. He was a kindred spirit in many ways. And this time when he brought her home, he kissed her. It was a gentle lingering kiss that aroused feelings in her that she hadn't felt in years. |
| 2926 |
Tom made her happy, and they had a great time together. He invited her to the TV studio later that week and showed her around. It was fascinating. And she got to watch him do his show. She took him to one of her job sites with her on another day and explained what she was doing and showed him the plans. |
| 2927 |
He had gone underground again. The scene in Pattie's apartment was now one of constant battles. When she wasn't talking about the baby, she was pressuring Ted about marrying her before it was born. She accused him of thinking she wasn't good enough for him, and of being castrated by his sisters and aunt. |
| 2928 |
He knew he was trapped, whether he was married to her or not, and he realized that sooner or later he would marry her, probably right before the baby was born. But he was in no rush to tie that noose around his neck. He was trying to call Annie more often, so she wouldn't worry about him, but he hadn't seen her. |
| 2929 |
He was behind on his papers, and only Pattie was giving him straight A's. He no longer cared. With a baby to support, and a wife, he had to drop out anyway it no longer mattered to him if he failed. Pattie was winning on every front. If what she wanted was to destroy his life, she was doing a great job. |
| 2930 |
And the people at the tables on either side of them looked at her in disapproval when it rang. She glanced down at her phone and saw that it was Ted. She ducked her head down close to her purse, and with a rapid apology to Tom, she took the call. She heard from Ted so seldom now that she didn't want to miss it. |
| 2931 |
That's what abusers do. She's going to tell you that you made her angry, and that you hurt her terribly by what you said, so it justifies her stabbing you. By tomorrow, she'll paint herself as the victim, and you'll be the bad guy. Mark my words, she won't even apologize for what she did to you tonight. |
| 2932 |
They were both starving since they had never finished dinner, and she offered to make him an omelette or a sandwich. Tom thanked her but said he was too upset to even want food. They settled for ice cream instead, while they discussed what had happened. These were the things that terrified Annie now. |
| 2933 |
She could see that happening too. They sat and talked for a long time after they finished their ice cream, and Tom finally stood up to go home. He kissed her before he left and told her to call him if she needed anything. She promised that she would and thanked him for his help. He looked profoundly upset. |
| 2934 |
Annie heard Ted's cell phone ring just after midnight, and she tiptoed into his room to turn it off. It had awakened him by then, and as she left the room, Annie could tell it was Pattie on the phone. She didn't want to eavesdrop on him, but she could sense that the conversation had started just as she thought. |
| 2935 |
His eyes fluttered open for a moment, and he thanked her again. She kissed him on the forehead then and walked out of the room. It had been a long night, and she was sorry that Tom had gotten dragged into it too. He had been incredibly understanding about the whole thing and their disrupted dinner at La Grenouille. |
| 2936 |
Annie had asked him in the note to call her when he woke up. He was in the kitchen, looking ghastly, when Kate walked in to get something to eat. She had no idea he had slept there, and she looked stunned when she saw the huge bandage on his hand. It was throbbing miserably by then. The pain medication had worn off. |
| 2937 |
For now it was just an idea, which Annie viewed as a threat. She was hoping they'd change their minds. But none of it was an atmosphere conducive to her being happy and relaxed, or enjoying a new man in her life. And it couldn't be easy for him, Annie knew, trying to get to know her and figure out who was on first. |
| 2938 |
And he smiled broadly when he saw Annie. The new additions to her wardrobe were working well for her. The contractor at the flooded construction site called her just as they were walking out the door and told her that they had discovered a second painting that had been damaged. This one was a Picasso. |
| 2939 |
He tried to make things easy for her. No one else ever had before. The new restaurant he took her to was beautiful, and the food was delicious. Annie wasn't hungry after all the crises she'd been dealing with, but she was happy to be there. She picked at her food, and Tom noticed it and asked her if she didn't like it. |
| 2940 |
She had lost Seth because of her commitment to her sister's children, and she had had no choice then. But sixteen years later it wouldn't be right to give Tom up for them. She just had to figure out how to be available to them, do her work, and be there for him too. She knew she owed it to herself to try. |
| 2941 |
Katie sat staring at her and didn't say a word. She had expected a pitched battle, and hours of screaming and threats. Instead, Annie had done what she knew she had to do she had respected her niece's right to make her own decisions and let go. She thought Katie was wrong, but she didn't even try to stop her. |
| 2942 |
This was as far as you could get from the stresses and anxieties of daily life. They were planning to be there for three days, and she just prayed that no emergency would come up for either of them that would interfere. In her case, her nieces and nephew, and in his, some kind of news crisis in the world. |
| 2943 |
They could go to nearby restaurants or eat at the villa, lie in the pool, walk on the beach, swim in the translucent water, and see no other human for three days if they chose. It was like being dropped off in paradise, and he put his arms around her as she looked at everything with delight and amazement. |
| 2944 |
They walked on the beach that night before they went to bed and swam in their private pool. They both wore bathing suits since they hadn't crossed that bridge yet, and they talked for hours in the moonlight, and when they finally went to bed, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to share a bedroom. |
| 2945 |
They talked about their childhoods, their hopes, their disappointments, their dreams. They learned each other's bodies and it really was a honeymoon. It was the foundation they had needed, the time away from everything. By the end of three days their bodies had meshed together, their hearts, and their souls. |
| 2946 |
This was about something so much deeper. Annie felt as though they shared one soul. What they shared defined kindred spirit or soul mate. She never wanted to leave, and they had to tear themselves away on Sunday. Annie told him she would never be able to thank him enough for what he'd done by giving them this vacation. |
| 2947 |
The children she had raised were adults now and certainly old enough to understand his spending a night or weekend with her, although they both suspected it would be more peaceful at his place. They talked about living together at some point, and he asked her how she felt about marriage. She wasn't sure she cared. |
| 2948 |
That had stopped being a goal or even a possibility for her a long time ago, although it was an option again now. In the end, they decided to play it by ear and see how things went. And they made a vow to each other to at least try not to let everyone intrude on them, and to make their relationship a priority. |
| 2949 |
And he said he was fine with her work and the kids, as long as there was room in all of it for him too. Their relationship would start in earnest when they left the Turks and Caicos, and they left the villa hand in hand. They both looked back at it and smiled, knowing that they would never forget it. |
| 2950 |
He looked happy to be seeing her again so soon. She wrote down her address to give him, and he hailed a cab for her. As it drove away, she waved at him. He was nice to be with, kind, polite, intelligent, funny, creative, and she enjoyed talking to him. It was fun to have someone to spend time with on the weekend. |
| 2951 |
And when Alessandro arrived at her apartment at eight o'clock, the flowers looked beautiful, the music was on, and she was wearing black leather leggings and a long white Balenciaga sweater. And Alessandro was wearing a black sweater and jeans. He looked casual and a lot younger than he had over lunch. |
| 2952 |
Liz ran into a number of friends there, all from her business, and she introduced them to Alessandro. She could see that they were impressed by how good looking he was. She was much more impressed by how nice he was, and how much fun to talk to. He was the consummate well educated, sophisticated European. |
| 2953 |
Paul's family would tell her when. Annie had convinced her to leave her most radical miniskirts at home, so as not to draw attention to herself, or offend anyone when she was there, and Katie had very sensibly agreed. She didn't want to offend Paul's family or anyone else. Annie was at least comforted by that. |
| 2954 |
None of her contractors had quit, her clients had behaved, Liz was busy at the magazine, they weren't hearing much from Ted as he wrestled with his difficult situation, and Katie had been preoccupied with her preparations for her trip. And other than Annie's worries about it, things had been pretty calm. |
| 2955 |
She had almost convinced herself by then that she'd be all right, and Paul had solemnly promised to take care of her. They had looked like two innocents to Annie when they left. And she said a little prayer for them on her way home in the cab. Annie called and talked to Whitney later that afternoon. |
| 2956 |
She and Whitney shared history and a lot of years, but for an outsider, and even her, their quiet suburban life in Far Hills was incredibly boring. Their friends all drank too much and talked about their children. Most of them were doctors, and their conversations were about medicine, their latest trip, or their kids. |
| 2957 |
She felt more relaxed about everything now that she was sharing life with him. She had another adult to talk to, and his perspective on most subjects was sensible, although he'd never had children and didn't fully understand her bond to them and how close it was. But on the more practical issues, he was a big help. |
| 2958 |
He was still upset about the baby. And despite Pattie's constant pressure, he hadn't agreed to marry her before August. She said it would be humiliating to get married when she was so pregnant, but Ted wouldn't relent on that. August was the best he was willing to do, no matter how much she cried and whined about it. |
| 2959 |
But the men she had always gone out with were boys. Alessandro was a man. And she didn't sound frightened this time. For the first time in her life, Liz was willing to risk her heart. Annie was happy for her, and relieved. Liz deserved a good man, and not the flakes she'd been going out with for years. |
| 2960 |
He closed the door and turned on the light and then stared at what he saw in the bowl. He didn't understand it. It didn't belong there, and there was no one in the apartment but her. It looked like an injured mouse, but it was a bloody tampon, and there was blood in the bowl. She had forgotten to flush. |
| 2961 |
He acted like a kid sometimes. There was a Duane Reade two blocks away that stayed open all night. He bought a pregnancy kit with two tests in it, put it in his pocket, ran back to the apartment, and sprinted up the stairs. He was still shaking, and there was a look in his eyes she had never seen before. |
| 2962 |
He felt like he had escaped from prison. He had broken out. He had gotten one lucky break with the bloody tampon she'd forgotten to flush down the toilet. He wanted to shout as he ran down the street. He didn't love her. He hated her. She had tried to ruin his life, and he had tried to do the right thing. |
| 2963 |
It was strange, suddenly hating someone he was supposed to love and had even promised to marry. But she was never the person she pretended to be. He sat on the couch, watched TV with the tequila bottle between his legs, poured himself shots, and stared into space, trying to absorb what had happened to him. |
| 2964 |
A nurse's aide was sitting in the chair next to her, on suicide watch, and she offered to leave when Ted walked into the room, but he declined. He looked young and handsome and very hung over. But in spite of the excesses of the night before, he felt better than he had in months. Pattie looked considerably worse. |
| 2965 |
They had decided to keep her for another day, until the psych resident saw her. And she didn't look pleased to be there. She started to cry the minute she saw Ted, and held out her arms to him. Ted didn't move toward her. He stood just inside the doorway where she couldn't reach him, and he didn't approach the bed. |
| 2966 |
It was indiscreet of her, and Ted's stomach turned over as he listened. He wondered how many of his fellow students she had done this to, how many times she had pretended to be pregnant and faked suicide to keep them. The thought of what she'd done to him made him feel sick. Pattie was a desperate woman. |
| 2967 |
And then he called Liz and told her. He lay on his bed after that with a pounding head and a light heart, thinking about what had happened. He realized now that he had been addicted to her, she had wanted it that way, and she had used his addiction to control him. It was terrifying to think about it now. |
| 2968 |
His parents talked about going back, but they never had. They had settled into their American life, and after adjusting to new ways, they had never gone back to Iran. And time had drifted by. Paul's father had originally come to work for a few years, became more successful than he expected, and stayed. |
| 2969 |
She no longer covered her head or followed many of the old traditions, and that would have been a problem if they moved back to Tehran. They loved being Americans now, and integrated into their new life. It was Paul who most wanted to return to visit their family in Iran, and he had fond memories of his boyhood there. |
| 2970 |
He longed to see his homeland again, and all the places he had known and loved as a child, and to share his history and heritage with Kate. She was thrilled to be taking the trip with him. Paul had described Persepolis to her, the countryside outside Tehran, and the exotic look and smells of the bazaar. |
| 2971 |
He wanted to show it all to her now and was proud to be returning as a man, not a boy. His mother also hadn't wanted him to go back until his exemption from military service had been resolved, which had finally been settled the year before. Otherwise, as an Iranian, he would have been expected to serve. |
| 2972 |
It seemed highly unlikely to her and to Paul that she would ever need their help, but it was good to know. And sensibly, they had been told to stay away from political demonstrations and protests of all kinds, which would have been good advice in any country in the world. Especially since they were young. |
| 2973 |
They didn't want to get arrested by mistake for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Paul would be treated as an Iranian citizen if that was the case, and she could wind up in jail if she was mistaken for a dissident. But there was no reason for either of them to have a problem with the law in Tehran. |
| 2974 |
And his brother's home was in a wealthy residential neighborhood in the city. Katie was anxious to see the museums, the university, and the bazaar. Two of Paul's male cousins attended the university, and his uncle taught there. And his oldest female cousin would be enrolled at the university the following year. |
| 2975 |
They took their seats in coach, and were offered tea, water, and fruit juices before takeoff. No alcohol was served on the flight or anywhere in Iran. As one of the smiling flight attendants handed her a glass of fruit juice, Katie smiled at Paul and already felt as though she had entered a different world. |
| 2976 |
Paul had written to his aunt and uncle, explaining that he was bringing a friend with him. He said she was a young woman he went to school with, who was interested in visiting Iran to further her studies. They had both decided that it was best for now to say that they were friends, and not that they were in love. |
| 2977 |
The neat, orderly airport was teeming with activity when they arrived. There was only one terminal, and all the international flights from everywhere, within and without the Arab world, came through there. It took them nearly an hour to get their luggage, as Katie looked around, her head scarf neatly in place. |
| 2978 |
She knew that his two female cousins, Shirin and Soudabeh, were fourteen and eighteen, and that his male cousins were twenty one and twenty three. The cousin his age was studying to be a doctor at Tehran University, and the cousin her age was studying art history and wanted to work in a museum as a curator one day. |
| 2979 |
Once they got their luggage, they had to go through immigration. Katie presented her passport and was fingerprinted as part of the routine for all foreigners. They looked at her visa, stamped her passport, and she went through. Paul had to present his passport and his military exemption card, which were in good order. |
| 2980 |
Her head scarf was in place, and she had put the thin cotton coat in her backpack, and as they scanned the faces outside the gate at the airport, Katie recognized Paul's family immediately. His uncle looked exactly like his father, only shorter and older, and his aunt Jelveh was a small, warm, friendly looking woman. |
| 2981 |
Hearing that tugged at his heart, and he was happier than ever to be back, even if only for two weeks. As soon as they landed, he was instantly reminded of how much he loved it there, and in many ways it was still home. He wondered if that was why his parents didn't go back, because it would be too hard to leave again. |
| 2982 |
The traffic around the airport was heavy, and the roads into the city were choked with cars. It took them an hour and a half to get there, and their house was in the Pasdaran district of the opulent northern part of the city. Katie looked around in fascination as they drove into town, and she spoke very little. |
| 2983 |
She was too busy watching everything and trying to absorb it all, as the whole family chatted animatedly in Farsi around her. But all of them spoke excellent English whenever they talked to Kate. Tehran looked like a modern city, with mosques dotting the landscape; there were tall buildings, and short ones. |
| 2984 |
It was a shock for him to see them since they had been five and nine years old when he last saw them. And now they were beautiful young women, with velvety brown eyes, the same honey colored skin as his own, and Katie suspected they had dark, almost jet black hair like their brothers, under their head scarves. |
| 2985 |
The room was sparsely decorated, and Katie saw as she walked by them that the two girls had similar rooms. Shirin commented that the boys had larger bedrooms, on the upper floor, and Soudabeh said that their parents' bedroom was at the opposite side of the house, and their grandfather had a suite of rooms downstairs. |
| 2986 |
As soon as she had put her things down, the girls beckoned her back down the stairs to the kitchen, where Jelveh and the girls put the lavish meal on platters, and the three servants helped take the food to the dining room. The family was not fabulously rich, but it was obvious that this was a wealthy household. |
| 2987 |
It was the midday call to prayer, announced on loudspeakers all over the city, as the muezzin made the same haunting sound that they heard five times a day. And everything instantly stopped. There was no sound in the household as each member of the family listened to the seven verses in the call to prayer. |
| 2988 |
Katie was mesmerized by the sound. Paul had told her she would hear it at dawn, midday, midafternoon, just after sunset, and for the last time two hours after sunset. It was the reminder to the faithful to stop and pray five times a day. When the muezzin's call ended, the house sprang to life again. |
| 2989 |
Everyone took their places at the table, and Katie sat down between Shirin and Soudabeh, while the three serving girls passed the platters and the whole family chattered excitedly at once. Paul's homecoming was a major celebration for them all. The men were speaking animatedly to each other in Farsi and laughed a lot. |
| 2990 |
The boys talked to her about going to visit the university the next day, and Katie said she wanted to see it and the bazaar most of all. They promised to show her all the sights while she was there. And Katie couldn't help thinking that they were making every effort to make her feel at ease with them. |
| 2991 |
It was best if they didn't know. If they did, it would only complicate things for Paul. After lunch Jelveh suggested that all three girls go upstairs and rest. Katie followed them to the floor above, and both of Paul's girl cousins joined her in her room, where she unpacked her bags, and they admired her clothes. |
| 2992 |
She then decided to put her money and Black Berry away it seemed silly to carry them in the house. She reached in to tuck them in the pocket of her backpack, with her passport, but as soon as she unzipped the pocket, she saw that her credit card, traveler's checks, and passport were gone. The pocket was empty. |
| 2993 |
All he said in response was that Kate did not need any of it during her stay with them, and he thought it was safer to keep them locked up. They didn't intend to let her pay for anything so she didn't need her credit card or traveler's checks, and he pointed out that Katie didn't need her passport until she left. |
| 2994 |
She didn't like being without her passport at all, nor the traveler's checks and credit card, all of which were tangible signs of her freedom and independence. It was a shock to have them taken away, however benevolent their motives. It made her feel like a child instead of an adult. And Paul was unhappy as well. |
| 2995 |
Paul said he had seen his old school and visited one of his boyhood friends. He had been surprised to discover that his friend was the man betrothed to Soudabeh and would be marrying her that summer. It felt strange to think of his own friends getting married, but he knew that people got married younger here. |
| 2996 |
They didn't know them all, although they knew some, and were fascinated by everything Kate had to say. They treated her like a visiting dignitary in their midst. And Katie knew that Annie would have been relieved to see what a close knit, wholesome family they were, and how well taken care of she was. |
| 2997 |
And Kate laughed out loud at the irony that it was their cousin, which she couldn't tell them. The fact that she was not Muslim, at least not yet, made it unwise for her and Paul to admit to their relationship here. The girls went to bed long before the boys came home, and Kate wondered what they were doing. |
| 2998 |
They were all in high spirits when they left in the van right after breakfast. Kate was impressed by how enormous the university was, and they were there all day, while the boys showed them around. They stopped several times to chat with friends, and Paul's cousins introduced him to several young women students. |
| 2999 |
At breakfast with Kate the next day, both girls talked about their weddings. They were excited about them, and Shirin didn't mind at all being betrothed to a man five years older than she was. She thought he was very good looking. And both girls wanted to have babies soon. It was a culture where everyone started young. |
| 3000 |
Jelveh had told Kate that she had gotten married at fourteen and had her first son at fifteen, and her husband was considerably older than she was. Kate realized when she said it that Jelveh was three or four years younger than Annie, which seemed amazing to her, and had a twenty three year old son. |
| 3001 |
It had one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary art Kate had ever seen, and much to her delight, they stayed for hours and explored the sculpture garden afterward. At the end of the week, Kate, Paul and the others went to the enormous bazaar, and she bought a beautiful silver necklace for Annie. |
| 3002 |
The sights and sounds and smells of the bazaar seemed dizzying to Katie. There were miles of stalls, selling every kind of wares. People crowded around, and serious negotiations were being engaged in. The bazaar was far bigger than she had imagined, it was full of people, and Kate had a terrific time. |
| 3003 |
And after writing to them, she missed home even more. Despite the wonders she was discovering in Tehran, she was beginning to get seriously homesick, and when she got back to the house, she looked a little glum. Paul felt sorry for her when he saw it and admired her for being a good sport about everything so far. |
| 3004 |
And sometimes she found it exhausting trying to absorb a whole new culture, and to understand all their customs. Paul was glad they had come, and particularly to have shared the experience with Katie. Contrary to all of Annie's dire warnings, there was nothing either of them regretted about the trip so far. |
| 3005 |
Paul had shown her everything he wanted to and that Kate had been hoping to see before they arrived. It was the day of their second visit to the bazaar to buy a bracelet for Liz and a belt for Ted that Katie began to feel strange at dinner. She got very pale, said she was a little dizzy, and then broke out in a sweat. |
| 3006 |
He helped Katie into bed and went downstairs to tell his aunt that he thought Katie needed a doctor. She went upstairs to see for herself, and by then Katie was shaking violently with chills and had a raging fever. Katie was crying, said she had terrible stomach pains, and Paul was worried sick about her. |
| 3007 |
She insisted she hadn't eaten or drunk anything at the bazaar, and Jelveh said it looked like a very bad flu they'd all had earlier that winter. Katie said she'd never felt so sick in her life, and Paul bent down to kiss her forehead, just as Jelveh came back into the room to check on Kate again, and saw him do it. |
| 3008 |
The doctor examined Katie and thought she had a virus of some kind, or a bacterial infection. He thought about putting her in the hospital, but after discussing it with Jelveh, he decided to leave her at their home. The fever raged on for three days, while Jelveh nursed her, and Paul visited her every chance he got. |
| 3009 |
And he was grateful that Jelveh hadn't told anyone in the family that Katie was his girlfriend, but the sicker she got, the more obvious it was. He was out of his head with worry for her. And Katie looked like a skeleton when the fever broke after four days, two days before they were due to go home. |
| 3010 |
She was deathly pale and had dark circles under her eyes, and she hadn't contacted Annie because she didn't want to upset her. They were going home soon anyway. When the fever broke finally, Paul told Katie she had been very brave. He patted her hand as he said it but made no move to kiss her again. |
| 3011 |
Paul reconfirmed their airplane tickets that day and went to see his uncle about reclaiming their passports. His uncle listened to him, nodded, unlocked a drawer in his desk, and handed him Kate's, but neither of Paul's. He handed him Katie's credit card and traveler's checks too, but nothing of Paul's. |
| 3012 |
When he took his withdrawal slip to his adviser's office, Pattie had seen him in the hallway and said not a word. She had played all her cards and lost and knew it. He felt like a new man, and he had decided to get his own apartment. He was tired of roommates. All he wanted now was to get back to his studies. |
| 3013 |
One of Tom's friends had called the Pakistani ambassador in Washington and told him that this was a personal favor for a major journalist, and they needed two visas for Iran. Tom hadn't said anything to Annie yet, but he had made up his mind the day before and had asked for two visas instead of one. |
| 3014 |
He wanted to go with her. He knew the area, the country, and the customs, and he knew she would have a hard time alone there. She would do better with a man traveling with her, and he wanted to help. And he had the time. The ambassador had agreed to give them both visas at nine o'clock that morning. |
| 3015 |
It was a long, agonizing flight to London, followed by a longer one to Tehran. The two of them spoke quietly and tried to guess what was going on. They were both worried that Paul's family might have discovered that Katie was more than just a friend, and that they were involved in a serious romance. |
| 3016 |
Tom had booked two rooms at a hotel. He had assumed they might be there for several days and had organized everything for them. He had even booked a room for Katie, just in case. He was thinking about going to the police, but he didn't want to make things worse, and they had no legitimate claim to help Paul. |
| 3017 |
And she lay in her bed, thinking about their situation, with Paul without a passport, and no ability to leave Iran. Jelveh was still taking care of her and being motherly and kind, offering her tea, and small meals and rice, and herbs that she said would help her and give her strength, and Katie was feeling better. |
| 3018 |
He came to her room constantly to check on her. And she told him there had been no further word from her aunt, since her own phone was now dead. As Katie rested in her room, she heard the adhan that came right after sunset, as the muezzin called out the prayer. The adhan was a familiar sound now, since she'd arrived. |
| 3019 |
He took them into the living room and asked if they would like something to drink. He was extremely polite and seemed hospitable, and looked just like Paul's father, and Annie wanted to scream at them to take her to the two young people, but she remembered Tom's warning to be civil, calm, and patient. |
| 3020 |
Paul's freedom was in his hands. Ten minutes later they were both downstairs with their bags. Katie looked shaky and wan and very pale. Jelveh had come into the hall by then, and she and her husband both looked grief stricken that their nephew was leaving. Paul's grandfather was out, so he couldn't say goodbye to him. |
| 3021 |
His uncle had tears in his eyes as he turned away and refused to say goodbye, as the four Americans left the house. And Tom was touched to see that Paul was crying too when he got into the cab. He was thinking of the grandfather he would never see again. He looked longingly back at his uncle's house as they drove away. |
| 3022 |
He loved it here, and he loved his family. It had meant a lot to him to come back, and in some ways he would have liked to stay. But he knew he couldn't. It would kill his parents if he did. And Katie saw the agony on his face too. He was torn between his two worlds, and the people he loved in both. |
| 3023 |
They were both looking pensive and shaken, and as the plane took off from Tehran, Paul sat staring at the city that he loved and was so sad to leave. And after a while they both fell asleep, without saying a word. Annie covered them both with blankets and then went back to her seat and kissed Tom and thanked him again. |
| 3024 |
In truth, he felt both. He had strong feelings of loyalty to both America and Iran, and it was tearing him apart. His parents were waiting for him at the airport when they arrived, and his mother burst into tears when she saw him, and clung to him for a moment before she turned to thank Tom and Annie. |
| 3025 |
They had been catapulted into adulthood and had seen how different their cultures were and how important to each of them. Katie was entirely American in every way, and Paul had a foot in two worlds. The situation they'd been in had been frightening for both of them, and far more than they could handle on their own. |
| 3026 |
Katie kissed Paul lightly on the cheek before they left the airport. It was the first time they had kissed since the trip began, and neither of them was sure now if the kiss was hello or goodbye. They both looked sad as they left, and Annie could hear the sound of breaking hearts as they said goodbye. |
| 3027 |
The apartment was quiet an hour later. They were all in their rooms, falling asleep. Annie glanced at the clock and realized that Tom was taking off at that moment. It felt good to know that somewhere in the world, he was there, and he'd be back soon. She couldn't imagine a life without him anymore. |
| 3028 |
They both needed time to recover from the discoveries they'd made on the trip. It was a lot to digest, and she realized that neither of them was ready to be fully adults yet, and they both needed a break. Paul thought so too. It was too soon for either of them to make decisions about the rest of their lives. |
| 3029 |
They had each come through their growing pains and challenges, and so had Tom. He needed to be married to the wrong woman in order to recognize the right one, even if she didn't come packaged quite as he had expected and looked too busy for him when he got there. She didn't know it, but she'd been waiting for him. |
| 3030 |
There was a perfect symmetry to it, Annie realized, as she smiled into Tom's eyes. Even the sprained ankle and the broken arm had been part of a divine order that led them to each other. None of it had been an accident or a mistake. It hadn't been easy, but the rewards had been so great, for all of them. |
| 3031 |
He had been an all around jock when he was at Michigan, for the first two years anyway, and after that he had found his niche in Russian literature. Dostoevski had been his hero for the first half of junior year, matched only by Tolstoi, followed almost immediately by Sheila Borden, of slightly less stellar fame. |
| 3032 |
He had met her in Russian I, having decided that he couldn't do the Russian classics justice if he had to read them in translation, so he took a crash course at Berlitz, which taught him to ask for the post office and the rest rooms and find the train in an accent which impressed his teacher enormously. |
| 3033 |
And off to Freedomland he went, to date hundreds of blond blue eyed girls who had never heard of gefilte fish or kreplach or knishes, and had no idea when Passover was. It was a blissful change for him, and by then he had dated all the girls in Scarsdale that his mother was crazy about and he was tired of them. |
| 3034 |
His father was a throat surgeon and considered one of the most important men in his field. But it had never appealed to Bernie to follow in his father's footsteps, even as a child. He admired him a great deal. But he would have hated being a doctor. He wanted to do other things, in spite of his mother's dreams. |
| 3035 |
He had never been embarrassed about the way his mother looked, or his father for that matter. His father was a tall, spare man with dark eyes and gray hair, and a frequently distracted look. He loved what he did, and he was always thinking of his patients. But Bernie always knew he was there, if he needed him. |
| 3036 |
He hated being bribed. Hated the way she thought sometimes, and the over protective way she treated him, in spite of his father's more sensible attitudes. It was difficult being an only child, and when he got back to Ann Arbor and saw Sheila she agreed with him. The holidays hadn't been easy for her either. |
| 3037 |
She knew just how to get what she wanted from them. But it was exhausting having them hang all over her. She knew just what Bernie meant, and after their Easter holidays they devised a plan. They were going to meet in Europe the following summer, and travel for at least a month, without telling anyone. |
| 3038 |
As usual, his father was in surgery. His mother picked him up, despite his cable not to. Eagerly waving to him, she looked younger than her years in her new beige Ben Zuckerman suit with her hair done just for him. But whatever good feelings he had for her disappeared as she spotted his traveling companion immediately. |
| 3039 |
Back at school in the fall, the romance had flourished anyway, and this time when they came back for Thanksgiving, he drove up to Hartford to meet her family. They had been cool but polite, obviously surprised by something Sheila hadn't said, and when they flew back to school, Bernie questioned her. |
| 3040 |
He put it back in the drawer when he went to bed, and his heart felt like a rock as he lay in the dark thinking of her. And things hadn't improved much after that. She had joined a consciousness raising group, and one of the subjects they seemed to love to discuss most was her relationship with Bernie. |
| 3041 |
He was wearing the white dinner jacket he had worn to a wedding the year before. His father had gotten it at Brooks Brothers for him and it fit him perfectly, and with his auburn hair and green eyes and the beginnings of a summer tan, he looked very handsome standing there. But she looked ridiculous and he told her so. |
| 3042 |
They said very little, in fact, as she got her things out of his drawers. His parents were having dinner with friends at the hotel, and he was joining them the next day for a luncheon to celebrate his graduation before they all went back to New York. But he looked at Sheila now with an air of despair. |
| 3043 |
She lived in an old school bus, parked near the coast, with nine other people and six little kids. She had two of her own, both girls apparently, and by the time he heard from her, he didn't care anymore, although he had for a long time, and he had been grateful that his parents hadn't made too much of it. |
| 3044 |
Two of them were going to law school, and one was getting married in the fall and having a last fling, but he was in great part doing it to avoid the draft, which was something Bernie didn't have to worry about, much to his embarrassment. He had had asthma as a child, and his father had documented it carefully. |
| 3045 |
He felt like the only one left at home, and in desperation he applied for a job at Wolffs in the Christmas rush, and didn't even mind when they assigned him to the men's department and had him selling shoes. Anything would have been better than sitting home by then, and he had always liked the store. |
| 3046 |
But maybe that was only a dream. Even now, it was growing dim. He spoke to his parents that night, and even his father had been impressed. It was a marvelous opportunity, if that was what he wanted to do. And the year of training at the store beforehand would give him plenty of time to see if he liked Wolffs. |
| 3047 |
His parents came to visit him frequently, and it was obvious that his position carried with it considerable prestige. To be manager of Wolffs Chicago at thirty years of age was no small thing, but nonetheless he was dying to get back to New York, and his mother threw a huge party for him when he told her the good news. |
| 3048 |
It gave Bernie a huge amount of work to do in the next several months, but it also made him a senior vice president at thirty two. The opening night fashion show was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever seen. The clothes were absolutely staggering and the audience oohed and aahed and applauded constantly. |
| 3049 |
He had seen Paul Berman pass by a short while before. Everyone was happy these days, and Bernie began to relax a little bit as he watched the models coming down the runway in evening gowns, and he particularly noticed one slender blonde, a beautiful catlike creature with chiseled features and enormous blue eyes. |
| 3050 |
And he found himself looking over her shoulder as girls rushed past in blue jeans and their own simple street clothes with the fabulous gowns over their arms. Salesladies were dashing back and forth, grabbing armfuls of the exquisite clothes to take them to their customers to try on so they could order them. |
| 3051 |
She asked her in French what to do with it, as she was afraid to set it down, and Marianne told her who to give it to, as Bernie stood almost gaping at her. And then the department manager knew what her duty was. She introduced Bernie to her, title and all, and even explained that the new concept was all his plan. |
| 3052 |
She watched Bernie's eyes as he looked at the girl. It amused her somehow, he was always so aloof. It was obvious that he liked girls, but he never got deeply involved with anyone, from what people said. And unlike the merchandise he selected for Wolffs, in women he preferred quantity to quality every time. |
| 3053 |
He never wanted to give her up, to let her out of his arms. He had never met anyone like her before, he had never been as swept off his feet by anyone. And the armor he had built after Sheila walked out of his life melted at her hands. Her hair was so blond it was almost white, and more extraordinary, it was natural. |
| 3054 |
But all men seemed to fade from her life when Bernie appeared. It seemed like a magical time to him as he took her with him everywhere, showing her off, being photographed, dancing till dawn. It all seemed very jet set, and he laughed when he took his mother to lunch, and she leveled her most motherly gaze at him. |
| 3055 |
They were almost friends now, and he saw his parents less than he had when he first came back to New York. He didn't have much time, particularly with the arrival of Isabelle in his life. He took her to Europe with him when he went on business that fall and they made a sensation everywhere they went. |
| 3056 |
They were inseparable, and just before Christmas she moved in with him, and Bernie finally had to give in and take her to Scarsdale, much as he dreaded it. She was perfectly pleasant to his parents, although she didn't gush over them, and she made it clear to him that she wasn't interested in seeing a lot of them. |
| 3057 |
For that reason, he took her to France again in the spring, and then back out to East Hampton again, but this time they saw more people than they had before, and there was a movie producer who snagged her eye one night at a party on the beach at Quogue, and the next day Bernie couldn't find her anywhere. |
| 3058 |
There were more women on his calendar than he could handle almost, business was booming, the store was in fine shape, and when he had woken up to see the blizzard that morning, he had decided to go in anyway. He had a lot of work to do, and he wanted to talk to Paul Berman about the store's summer plans. |
| 3059 |
He had some exciting things in mind, and as he stepped off the bus at Lexington and Sixty third, wearing a heavy English overcoat and a Russian fur cap, he walked into the store with his head bent against the wind, and then looked up at the store with pride. He was married to Wolffs, and he didn't mind a bit. |
| 3060 |
They chatted informally like this from time to time, and their impromptu talks never failed to give birth to some marvelous ideas for Wolffs. The decision to hire a new fashion director for the store had come from their last session like this, and she was doing a fabulous job for them. They had stolen her from Saks. |
| 3061 |
Not at all. He stood up with a quiet sigh. It hadn't been such a great morning after all, and he was almost sorry he had come in now, even though it would have been handed to him eventually anyway. There was no avoiding it once Paul made up his mind, and it wouldn't be easy talking him out of it now. |
| 3062 |
But it had been an interesting thought for a day or two. He didn't want children desperately anyway. He was too involved in his career, and it always seemed a shame to him not to have a baby born of love. He was still idealistic about that, and there was certainly no likely candidate at the moment to fill that bill. |
| 3063 |
It almost made him want to cry as he left the office that night, on a night that was as cold and clear as an icy crystal bell. He didn't try to catch a bus this time, and the wind had finally died down. He walked straight to Madison Avenue, and then walked uptown, glancing at the shops as he strode past rapidly. |
| 3064 |
It wasn't snowing anymore, and it looked like a fairyland, as a few people skied past, and children threw snowballs. There hadn't even been any rush hour traffic to mess it all up, and he felt better as he walked into his house and rode the elevator upstairs. It was a hideous thought leaving New York now. |
| 3065 |
At least the weather was nice, that was something to be pleased about. And his room at the Huntington was extremely pleasant too. But more important than that, even in its unfinished state, the store was fabulous. And when he called Paul the next day, Paul sounded relieved just knowing he was there. |
| 3066 |
And everything was moving on schedule. The construction was going well, the decoration was all lined up and ready to be installed as soon as construction would allow. He met with the ad agency, talked to the public relations people about how they were starting to warm up, and had an interview with the Chronicle. |
| 3067 |
He rapidly rented a furnished apartment in a modern high rise on Nob Hill; it had none of the charm of the houses he saw everywhere, but it was convenient for him, and it was close to the store. The opening was fabulous. It was everything they had all wanted it to be. The press had been favorable beforehand. |
| 3068 |
And suddenly he was all alone, in the town he had been transplanted in, without a single friend, and an apartment that looked sterile and ugly to him. It was all done in brown and beige, and seemed much too dreary for the gentle northern California sun. He was sorry he hadn't rented a pretty little Victorian flat. |
| 3069 |
He was always at the store, seven days a week now, since in California they were open every day. He didn't have to come in on weekends at all, but he had nothing else to do anyway, so he did, and everyone noticed it. Bernie Fine worked like a dog, they said, and they all agreed that he was a nice man. |
| 3070 |
He wanted to see what people wore, what they did, how they shopped, what they liked. He would talk to housewives and young girls and single men, he even took a personal interest in their children's wear. He wanted to know everything, and the only way to do that, he said, was to be in the front lines. |
| 3071 |
They were used to seeing him everywhere, with his auburn hair, the well trimmed beard, warm green eyes, and well tailored English suits. He never said an unkind word, and when he wanted things done differently, he spoke calmly and quietly, explaining what he wanted done so that the employee understood. |
| 3072 |
Bernie had several fashion shows scheduled the following month, and the big event in July was the opera show, which meant a great deal. The opening of the opera was the hottest event of the San Francisco social season, and women were going to be spending five and seven and ten thousand dollars on a single dress. |
| 3073 |
The ice cream sounded good to her, and she quietly slid her hand into his, and her braids bobbed as they walked along, holding hands. He helped her up onto a stool at the bar and asked for a banana split, which was not on their menu but he felt certain they could come up with one, and for him, they did. |
| 3074 |
He stood at the top of the escalator, watching the hair ribbons disappear, and feeling as though he had lost his only friend in California. He went back to the cash register to thank the employees for their help, and as he left again, the little bikinis caught his eye, and he pulled out three in a size six. |
| 3075 |
She wasn't one of those women who hated men, or at least she didn't seem to be, and she didn't seem out to prove anything. He was really looking forward to their afternoon in Stinson Beach, and on Friday night before he went home, he went to their gourmet shop and bought two shopping bags of goodies to take to her. |
| 3076 |
He put the two shopping bags in the back of his car and got in, and ten minutes later he was on the Golden Gate Bridge, heading north. He had never been to Stinson Beach before, and he loved the intricate, winding road which rode the crest of the hills, looking down on the cliffs that jutted out over the sea. |
| 3077 |
And he noticed that she wore carefully applied red polish on her toenails, which showed a little vanity at least. But she wore nothing on her eyes, and no lipstick at all, and the nails on her hands were cut short. She was a pretty girl, more than that in fact, but she wasn't frivolous, and he liked that about her. |
| 3078 |
She figured she had nothing to lose. If he didn't like what he heard, he wouldn't call again, but at least everything would be straight between them if he did. There was something to be said for that. She was tired of the games people played, and the pretense between people from the moment they met. |
| 3079 |
He got busted for passing stolen goods, then he got arrested again for burglary. Anyway, he came back when Jane was nine months old and lived with us for a few months, and when she was a year old, he disappeared again, and when I found out he was in jail that time, I filed for divorce and that was it. |
| 3080 |
She doesn't know the rest, and we'll never see him again, so what difference does it make? God only knows where he is. He'll probably wind up in jail for the rest of his life, and he's not interested in either of us. He never was. I'd rather she have a few illusions about how she came to be at least until later. |
| 3081 |
He admired her a great deal. She was a brave girl and she'd made the best of it, and the child seemed to have suffered not at all, thanks to her mother loving her so much. And there was nothing tragic about this girl, she was all guts and heart and beautiful silky blond hair. And she had made a new life for herself. |
| 3082 |
He suspected that it wasn't always easy for them. It was difficult to be alone with a small child, but Liz didn't complain about it. She seemed to love it. He told her what his job was like, and how much he loved Wolffs, how he had wanted to teach himself, but for him the dream had become something else. |
| 3083 |
It was the only show in town, Liz explained, but fortunately the food was very good, and even Jane dove into her plate and attacked a small steak with glee. It wasn't often they ate so extravagantly. And she fell asleep in the car on the way back, and Bernie carried her inside and laid her gently on her bed. |
| 3084 |
There would be plenty of time for other things when they moved back to town, and Jane wasn't asleep in the next room, with only a paper thin wall between them. He came back that Sunday to help Liz pack up. Her friends had told her she could stay one extra day, and she and Jane were obviously unhappy to go home. |
| 3085 |
It took her two days to find a babysitter, and she announced it to Bernie over the phone that afternoon, and blushed when she mentioned it. She knew exactly what he had in mind, and it was embarrassing to be so unspontaneous about it. But with Jane in the only bedroom she had, there wasn't much else they could do. |
| 3086 |
He told her what was happening in the store, about the plans they'd made for the fall, the promotions, the fashion shows. The opera show had come and gone and been a great success and the others were under way now. She was fascinated by what he did, and even more so because he was so much a businessman. |
| 3087 |
It was the most beautiful evening she had had in a long, long time, and being with him made up for everything bad that had ever happened to her, her parents' death, the nightmare with Chandler Scott, and the long lonely years alone since Jane's birth, with no one to help her out or be there for her. |
| 3088 |
He had rented the suite himself at lunchtime, and he had come upstairs before picking her up to make sure that everything looked right. He had the maid open the bed for them, and there was a beautiful pink peignoir laid out, trimmed in marabou with pink satin slippers to match, and a pink satin nightgown. |
| 3089 |
It was the first chance they had had to sate their hunger for each other, and three weeks of desire swept over them like a tidal wave as their clothes melted into a heap on the floor, covered by the pink satin peignoir trimmed in marabou, as their bodies intertwined and her mouth covered every inch of his body. |
| 3090 |
And for the first time he enjoyed using it on her. She went to the store, and after trying on dozens of dresses, she selected one from an Italian designer he loved, a dress which hung in rich velvet folds, in a cognac colored velvet, encrusted with gold beads and little stones all of which appeared to be semiprecious. |
| 3091 |
He had seen it when it arrived from Italy, it had caused quite a stir in the designer salon and was one of the most expensive ones they had, but he didn't look disturbed about it as he watched her. He was mesmerized by how exquisite she looked in the dress, and with his discount it wouldn't be too painful for him. |
| 3092 |
She didn't want anything to spoil their magical evening. They went to the dinner at the Museum of Modern Art first, in the Rolls Bernie had rented for the occasion, and they were rapidly swept into the throng of women in dazzling gowns and ornate jewels, and photographers fighting to take their picture. |
| 3093 |
But there was an aura of excitement too. Everyone knew that they were part of an important evening. Bernie and Liz took their seats at the same table with a couple from Texas, the curator of the museum and his wife, an important customer of Wolffs and her fifth husband, and the mayor and her husband. |
| 3094 |
But Liz was by far the most beautiful in her magnificent Renaissance gown, with her hair caught up in the woven threads of gold. He found himself aching to kiss her as others looked at them admiringly, and he pressed her hand gently as the light dimmed, and they held hands through the whole first act. |
| 3095 |
It was after one when they left Trader Vic's and went on to the opera ball, which was almost anticlimactical after all the earlier events of the evening. Liz was beginning to recognize the faces she had seen earlier, at the museum, the opera, the bar, Trader Vic's, and everyone seemed to be having fun. |
| 3096 |
Even the press had begun to relax and enjoy themselves. By then they had gotten most of the photographs they needed. Although they took another of Liz and Bernie as they circled the floor easily in a graceful waltz that made her dress look even more lovely. And it was that photograph which ran the next morning. |
| 3097 |
She had come home at four thirty and had realized, as the room spun slowly around her as she tried to get to sleep, that they must have consumed at least four or five bottles of champagne that evening. It had been the most beautiful night of her life, but now just the thought of the sparkling wine made her nauseous. |
| 3098 |
Jane and Liz started buying all the bride magazines, and when they finally went to Wolffs together to pick out their dresses for the wedding, Jane was not only resigned, she was beginning to enjoy it. They spent an hour in the children's department, looking for just the right dress for Jane and they finally found it. |
| 3099 |
And he knew how anxious his mother was to see him. He had bought her a beautiful handbag that afternoon, a beige lizard with a tiger's eye clasp that was the latest from Gucci. It was a work of art more than a handbag and he hoped she'd like it. But his heart was heavy as he walked from his hotel to the restaurant. |
| 3100 |
But everything seemed alive as the taxis swirled past, and the horns honked, and even the sky looked clear as elegantly dressed women darted from cabs to restaurants, and in and out of limousines wearing fabulous suits and brilliantly hued coats, on their way to plays and concerts and dinner parties. |
| 3101 |
She and Liz had become friends when Liz had first begun to teach, and she had helped her with Jane frequently during those first difficult years when Liz was saddled with a very young child and no money. Sometimes she babysat for her just so she could scrape a few dollars together and go to a movie. |
| 3102 |
But they were so busy moving into the new house that everything seemed doubly hectic. Bernie moved into it on the twenty third, and Jane on the twenty seventh. Tracy came back that night and they picked her up at the airport, and she just beamed, and cried as she hugged all three of them and told them about the baby. |
| 3103 |
His mother had wanted to come out the week before, but with Christmas at the store, sales to plan, and moving into the new house, there just wasn't time to spend with her, and Bernie had told her not to. He stood watching the first passengers disembark, and then he saw a familiar face in a fur hat and a new mink coat. |
| 3104 |
She looked alluring and demure and very beautiful and he could see that his mother was impressed when they met her in the hotel lobby. She looked at Liz searchingly, as though wanting to find something wrong, but as they walked downstairs to the bar, and Liz took his father's arm, she whispered to her son. |
| 3105 |
She didn't think it was good for Jane, she said primly, as Liz blushed. He had told her it was only for two days and she was somewhat mollified, but everything was cause for comment that night. Not that the night was so different from any other. Ruth Fine always made comment on anything she chose to. |
| 3106 |
She had been such a pain in the ass all night, but she always was. She loved torturing him. And now she had Liz to torture too, and maybe even Jane. The very thought depressed him. He poured himself a drink before they went to bed that night, and they sat in front of the fire, talking of their wedding plans. |
| 3107 |
She looked like a little angel as she stood at the door, waiting for Liz, who took her hand and walked outside to the waiting limousine Bernie had ordered for her. She wore a white satin Dior dress, with big bell sleeves and a skirt that stopped at her ankles, so one could see the equally exquisite Dior shoes. |
| 3108 |
The reception at the Alta Mira was a great success, and everyone seemed to have a good time as they stood on the terrace and looked at the view. It wasn't as elaborate as one of the big hotels might have been but it had more charm and Liz had always loved the quaintness of it, and Bernie agreed with her. |
| 3109 |
It took them ten minutes to pack Jane's things, including all the bathing suits he'd bought her the summer before, and they made the plane on time. There was one seat left in first class, and he bought it for Jane, hoping they would be as lucky at the hotel, and Jane grinned at them as she boarded the plane. |
| 3110 |
The months after Hawaii seemed to fly, and they were busy all the time. Bernie was scheduling all the summer and fall shows for the store, planning for new merchandise, having meetings with people from New York. Liz was busy with the house, and she always seemed to be cooking, baking, or sewing for him. |
| 3111 |
She could hardly wait, and neither could Ruth, from what Bernie could gather on the phone. Their phone calls were much easier these days. Liz was constantly calling Ruth just to say hello and give her the news, which took the pressure off him, and all his mother wanted to do was talk to Jane anyway. |
| 3112 |
But Liz seemed pleased as well, and she was relieved to know that Jane would be in good hands while they were away. Tracy would have been her first choice at home, but she and Jane didn't always get along these days. Jane was becoming more sophisticated than their old friend, which made Tracy laugh. |
| 3113 |
It was as though suddenly they had become a family instead of enemies, and he realized that Liz had done that for them. She had a remarkable way of touching everyone, and he saw her smiling at his mother in the car as the two women exchanged a knowing look about something Jane had said, and then they smiled. |
| 3114 |
Liz helped his mother cook dinner, and then clean up afterwards. Their maid was sick, which was the only dismal bulletin she gave that night. But since all Hattie had were bunions she'd had operated on, even that wasn't up to her usual gruesome standards of strokes and heart attacks. And everyone was in a good mood. |
| 3115 |
She had never seen anything as beautiful as the lobby of the Ritz, with elegant women, and well dressed men, and porters walking poodles and Pekingese, and the shops on the Faubourg St. Honore were even more wonderful than she'd imagined. It was all like something in a dream, and he took her everywhere. |
| 3116 |
He also noticed the shows' effect on her. She was suddenly much more aware of fashion, and much more chic. She looked suddenly sleeker and she was more careful about selecting her accessories. She had had a natural flair when they met, and with greater resources she had quickly shown how well dressed she could be. |
| 3117 |
A bedroom for them, one for Jane, a guest room for friends, a huge spacious living room with a dining area, a sunny kitchen, and a sheltered deck where they could even sunbathe nude if they wanted to, not that they would have if Jane were at home. It was perfect for them, and Liz couldn't have been happier. |
| 3118 |
He mentioned it to his father when he called, and Lou thought it was probably her sinuses and she should see someone about starting antibiotics right away. Her head felt heavy all the time and she was nauseous at the end of the day. She was exhausted and depressed and she couldn't remember ever feeling that terrible. |
| 3119 |
Her face had gone white, and now it was bright pink, and she started to laugh at him. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him and he smiled, as the salesgirl and fitter discreetly disappeared from the fitting room. They liked working with her. She was always so pleasant to them, and they were so much in love. |
| 3120 |
But she'd been so sick she hadn't even noticed. And the doctor confirmed it to her the next day. She was six weeks pregnant, he said, and she rushed to the store to tell Bernie the news. She found him in his office, looking at some reports from New York and he looked up the minute she walked through the door. |
| 3121 |
None of it seemed disgusting to him, just a little frightening sometimes. And he knew Liz was a little nervous about it too, even though she'd had one child, but that had been six years before. But it all still seemed so far away to both of them. They still had another six months to go, and they could hardly wait. |
| 3122 |
And the next day when he left it was pouring rain. And the city still looked beautiful to him. It was blanketed in gray, and as the plane rose in the sky, he thought of his parents again. It must have been hard for them, having him so far away. He suddenly understood it differently now that he was having his own child. |
| 3123 |
This time he went to Denmark and Berlin, as well, with a round of meetings in London before he left. It was a very successful trip and he was away for almost three weeks, and when he saw Liz again he laughed at her. Her stomach had suddenly exploded while he was gone, and she couldn't wear her clothes anymore. |
| 3124 |
He faced her with a fait accompli and three days later they left. And when they returned, she was brown and healthy and relaxed, and she felt like her old self again. Or almost, except for heart burn, insomnia, back pains, swollen legs, and increasing fatigue, all of which were normal the doctor said. |
| 3125 |
And she always looked neat and well dressed. He thought she looked sweet that way, although he was aware that his desire for her was waning. But it didn't seem to be a time for that, although she complained sometimes. He was afraid he would hurt the child, especially if they got too enthusiastic, which they often did. |
| 3126 |
And this sudden reappearance of Chandler Scott didn't help. Liz brushed the hair back from Jane's face, and gave her a plate of the cookies she'd made for her that day, and a glass of milk, and when Jane sat down at her desk to do the homework she'd been given in school, Liz went quietly back to the living room. |
| 3127 |
Jane took the flowers into the other room, and Liz started cooking dinner for them. She still insisted on making dinner every night, baking bread, making everyone's favorite desserts. She wasn't sure what she'd feel like after the baby came, or how busy she would be, and it was easier to spoil them now. |
| 3128 |
And he suspects that's all he wants. After seven years, it's not very likely that he's interested in teaching Jane to ride a bicycle. I think probably he just wants a few bucks to tide him over till he winds up in jail again. The only trouble is, if we do that, he may turn up again, and again, and again. |
| 3129 |
His con man suit was in serious disrepair, and he looked like an aging preppie down on his luck as he walked to the bar and ordered a Scotch straight up, and held it with a trembling hand, eyeing the crowd. Bernie had not told him what he looked like, so he had the advantage. And he was almost certain this was his man. |
| 3130 |
At close range, he had the same blue eyes as Jane, but so did Liz, so it was difficult to say whose eyes Jane had inherited. He had a handsome face, but he looked older than his twenty nine years. He had thick blond hair which fell over one eye, and he could easily see how Liz might have fallen for him. |
| 3131 |
Bernie read Jane a story that night and took her to school the next day himself, eliminating the need for the carpool. And he had just walked into his office when his secretary buzzed him on the intercom, as he glanced over some reports from New York about their sales figures for March, which were outstanding. |
| 3132 |
It was a celebration of life, and just as they had promised, the pain was almost forgotten. The doctor cut the cord once the placenta was out, and he handed Bernie his son as Liz watched, trembling on the delivery table as she smiled, and the nurse assured her that the trembling was a normal reaction too. |
| 3133 |
He was leaving for Europe in a few weeks, and he wanted to know what was going on before he left, and if the doctors in San Francisco couldn't figure it out, he was going to take her to New York and leave her with his father, and see if he couldn't find someone to figure out what was wrong with her. |
| 3134 |
The internist who checked her out seemed to think she was all right. He did several ordinary tests. Her blood pressure was fine, the electrocardiogram looked good, her blood count was low, so he ran a few more elaborate tests, and when he listened to her chest, he suspected she might have a mild case of pleurisy. |
| 3135 |
He was a tall Nordic man with large hands and a big voice and she felt comfortable with him. He sent her to a lab for a chest X ray and at five thirty she got home, and kissed Bernie, who was reading Jane a story as they waited for her. She had left both children with a sitter that afternoon, which was rare for her. |
| 3136 |
Alexander was satisfied with the bottle and cooed happily in Bernie's arms as he smiled at the child, changed his diapers eventually, and then set him down again. He was becoming an expert at that sort of thing, and that morning it was Bernie who answered the phone when Dr. Johanssen called. Liz was still sleeping. |
| 3137 |
Tracy said she'd be over in half an hour. She'd been doing some gardening and she was a mess but she'd be happy to sit with the kids for an hour or two. She sounded as concerned as he felt, but she didn't ask any questions when she arrived. She was cheerful and business like and sped them on their way. |
| 3138 |
All he wanted was to get away from her to call his father and there was no way he could leave her. He was with her when they administered the injection. She looked gray and terrified and it was only moderately painful. But it was terrifying as they sat and waited for the doctor to talk to them about his findings. |
| 3139 |
And his findings were profoundly depressing. They believed that Liz had osteosarcoma, cancer of the bone, and it had already metastasized to her lungs. It explained the pain she had had in her back and hips for the past year, and the frequent breathlessness. But all of it had been attributed to her pregnancy. |
| 3140 |
And instead, she had cancer. A biopsy would have to confirm it, the doctors explained, as Liz and Bernie held hands tightly, and tears rolled down their cheeks. She was still wearing the green hospital gown, as Bernie reached out and took her into his arms, and held her with a feeling of desperation. |
| 3141 |
Given the nature of the cells they'd found, and the extent of it, metastasized in both lungs they discovered now, it made no sense to operate. They suggested brief and intense radiation, followed by chemotherapy as soon as possible. And Liz felt as though she had fallen into a nightmare and could not wake up. |
| 3142 |
It was something that happened to someone else, not to people like them, with a seven year old and a baby. He was calling his father five times a day these days, and he already had everything lined up for her in New York. Bernie talked to him again the following morning before he went to pick her up at the hospital. |
| 3143 |
It was a bond that laced them even tighter than before, and it was an awesome burden. Liz walked into the baby's room and Alexander woke up and let out a squeal of ecstasy when he saw her. His little legs shot out, and he waved his arms, and Liz picked him up and winced as he hit the spots where the biopsies were. |
| 3144 |
Bernie sat looking at her in the hospital bed, and she already seemed to be shrinking. The dark circles had darkened and she was losing weight. It seemed incredible, like an evil spell that had been cast on them, and he reached out and took her hand. Her lip was trembling terribly and they were both frightened. |
| 3145 |
She was going to get the chemotherapy once a week at first, for a month, and after that once every two weeks, then once every three. The first month would be horrible, but after that she would only be sick for a day or two, and Tracy could substitute for her. The school was willing to let her do that. |
| 3146 |
He held the baby in his arms and he looked so much like Liz, Bernie almost couldn't stand it. And yet, when she was back with them again, things didn't seem so tragic. She came back from the hospital two days later, and suddenly there were the same bad jokes, the throaty voice he loved, the laughs, the sense of humor. |
| 3147 |
Maybe the chemotherapy would do that for them. Grandma took Jane to Schwarz once before they left and bought her an enormous teddy bear and a doll, and she had her pick out something she thought Alexander would like. Jane selected a big clown that rolled and made music. And when they got home, he loved it. |
| 3148 |
But she was home again, and she only had to face the nightmare once every three weeks now, and the oncologist promised it would only make her sick for a day or two. After Christmas vacation she could go back to school to teach again, and Jane was like a different child once she was home, and Alexander was crawling. |
| 3149 |
She tried on the rest of the wigs, and they decided on the page boy for her first entrance. She put it on, and changed her blouse. It required something more sophisticated than what she'd been wearing and she walked into the living room, trying to look casual, as Bernie did a double take and stared at her in amazement. |
| 3150 |
He uncorked a bottle of champagne for her instead, and poured her a glass which she barely sipped as they sat by the fire and talked. It was almost as if they had made a silent vow not to talk about her sickness. She didn't want to think about that tonight, or the chemotherapy she had to go back for in a week. |
| 3151 |
They were leaving the next morning, and she wanted to cook for them. The food had been wonderful, as it always was, but it was a ghastly strain watching her struggle to do all she had done so effortlessly before. Nothing was effortless for her anymore, not even breathing. He kissed his mother good night at the hotel. |
| 3152 |
She wore them all the time now and Bernie teased her about them sometimes, secretly disappointed that he hadn't thought of buying them for her himself. She loved them. Not as much as her own hair of course, but they saved her vanity, and it was a subject of constant conversation between her and Jane. |
| 3153 |
But she had already drifted off to sleep, and he listened to the labored breathing beside him. It had been three months since they'd found out that she had cancer, and she was fighting valiantly and the doctor thought the chemotherapy was helping. But in spite of all of that, Bernie thought that she was getting worse. |
| 3154 |
Her eyes grew larger every day, they sunk deeper, her features grew sharper and she lost more weight, and there was no denying now that she was having trouble breathing. But he wanted to hang onto her anyway, for as long as he could, doing whatever they had to do, no matter how difficult it was for her. |
| 3155 |
How rapidly Liz was changing. By leaving her for only a few days, he got enough distance to realize just how bad it was. And the night he got home, he locked himself in the bathroom and cried into the big white towels she kept so immaculate for him. He was terrified she would hear him, but he just couldn't stand it. |
| 3156 |
They had been warned of that from the beginning. But there was no choice. She had to do it. She went back to sleep, and he went out to the hall and called home. He didn't want to do it from the room, for fear that he would wake her. And he had left her with a nurse watching her. He was used to the hospital by now. |
| 3157 |
It was a sudden sharp pain that had never happened before, and she reported it to Dr. Johanssen, who called the oncologist in and the bone man. And they sent her upstairs for an X ray and another bone scan before she went home. The news was not good when they got it a few hours later. The chemotherapy wasn't working. |
| 3158 |
Maybe he should take her to Mexico for laetrile, or put her on a macrobiotic diet, or go to Lourdes, or the Christian Science Church. He kept hearing remarkable tales of people who had been healed of cancer through outlandish diets, or hypnosis or faith, and what they were trying was obviously not working. |
| 3159 |
She didn't want to go haywire and run all over the world on a wild goose chase. She wanted to be home with her husband and her kids, teaching at the school where she had taught for years. She only wanted to go so far, and she wanted her life to remain as close as possible to what it had been when it was normal. |
| 3160 |
He felt as though he had barely looked at the baby since he was six months old, and he snapped at Jane constantly, only because she was there, and he loved her, and they both felt so helpless. It was a hard time for everyone, and Bernie was sorry they hadn't gone to a shrink, as Tracy had suggested. |
| 3161 |
Her mother looked wide eyed and alert and beautiful, just like she had before, only thinner, and they were moving to Stinson Beach the next day. She could hardly wait. And she scampered off to her own classroom in a pink dress and black patent leather shoes that Grandma Ruth had helped her pick out for the occasion. |
| 3162 |
She reminded each one of the fun they had had, and each Valentine was covered with cutouts and pictures and funny sayings that were important to each child, and they sat back, a little awed, holding their Valentines like rare gifts, which they were. It had taken her months and the last of her strength to make them. |
| 3163 |
Which was why she had appreciated Ruth coming by the house on the way to the airport. It was a time to say goodbyes, and she didn't want to be cheated of the chance to say them. She had a difficult time leaving the teachers when she left the school, and she was exhausted as she and Jane drove home later that morning. |
| 3164 |
Jane almost looked bigger than her mother. That afternoon Tracy came to take Jane out for an ice cream cone and a walk in the park, and she left with a lighter step than Liz had seen in months, and she herself felt better, and closer to the child than she had since it had all begun. It wasn't easier, but it was better. |
| 3165 |
They would walk down to the water, and sit looking at the surf, and sometimes Jane carried the baby. Liz hadn't wanted any help at the beach, and she was still cooking and taking care of Alexander as best she could. And Bernie was there to help her all the time, and Jane loved helping with the baby. |
| 3166 |
And it was such a difficult time to be losing her mother. Alexander was fourteen months old, and on the day Liz would have been getting chemotherapy, he began walking. He lurched forward on the beach, and teetered toward Liz squealing in the sea breeze as they all laughed. And she looked at Bernie with victory. |
| 3167 |
Liz talked to him all night that night, remembering all of it, and the next day she was in too much pain to get up, and he begged Johanssen to come and see her. Remarkably, he did, and Bernie was grateful to him. He gave her a shot of morphine, and she fell asleep with a smile, and woke again late that afternoon. |
| 3168 |
She looked as though she'd been awake all day and hadn't been sleeping or in pain. It was a relief to see her looking so well. She didn't even look as thin to him as she had before, and he suddenly wondered if this was the beginning of remission. But it was the beginning of something else and he didn't know it. |
| 3169 |
And then she fell asleep in her mother's arms and Bernie carried her back to her bed, and when he came back, Liz wasn't in bed. He looked in the bathroom and she wasn't there and then he heard her in the room next to theirs, and he found her leaning over Alexander's crib, stroking his soft blond curls. |
| 3170 |
It was as though she needed to reach out to each of them, to hang onto life, or perhaps to let go of it. She was just falling asleep when the sun came up. She and Bernie had talked almost all night, and he drifted off to sleep just as she did, holding her close to him, and feeling her warmth beside him. |
| 3171 |
And when Bernie awoke the next morning, she was gone. She had died quietly, in her sleep, in his arms. And she had said goodbye to each of them before she left them. He stood looking down at her for a long, long time, as she lay sleeping in the bed. It was difficult to believe that she wasn't sleeping. |
| 3172 |
Tracy took the children home after breakfast and the people from Halsted's funeral parlor came at noon. Bernie sat alone in the house, waiting for them, with the bedroom door still locked, and finally, he went back through the sliding doors, and sat there with her, holding her hand, waiting for them to come. |
| 3173 |
He couldn't watch while they covered her up and took her out. He spoke to the man in the living room, and told him what he wanted to arrange. He said he'd be back in town by the end of the afternoon. He had to pack up the house and go back to town. The man said he understood, and he gave Bernie his card. |
| 3174 |
He didn't want to come back to the beach again. It would have been too painful for him. There were suddenly so many details to arrange, and none of it mattered anyway. The man made such a fuss about whether the box was mahogany or metal or pine, lined in pink, blue, or green, who gave a damn anyway. |
| 3175 |
She was gone. She had left the night before, after kissing him and thanking him for the life and the baby they'd shared, and he hadn't been able to hold onto her, no matter how hard he'd tried to. He called his parents once everything was packed. It was two o'clock by then, and his mother answered the phone. |
| 3176 |
He wouldn't have been able to sit, watching her, and it was bad enough like this. He was all alone in the lonely funeral parlor. All the other mourners had gone home hours before and only two solemn men in black suits were there to open the door for the Fines when they arrived at one o'clock in the morning. |
| 3177 |
And Ruth was wearing a somber black suit, black blouse, and black shoes she had bought at Wolffs years before. His father was wearing a dark gray suit and a black tie, and Bernie was wearing a charcoal gray suit and a white shirt and black tie, and he looked suddenly older than his thirty seven years. |
| 3178 |
And now he sent his mother home to stay at the house, so she would be there when they woke up. And his father announced that he wanted to spend the night with him at Halsted's. They spoke very little, and in the morning Bernie went home to shower and change, while his father went to the hotel to do the same. |
| 3179 |
He walked into their bedroom, remembering the Bible she read once in a while, and thought about reading the Twenty third Psalm at her funeral. And as he reached for it, it was thicker than he expected it to be, and the four letters fell out at his feet. He bent down to pick them up and saw what they were. |
| 3180 |
The tears rolled down his cheeks unabashed as he read his, and he called Jane in to read hers, and then handed his mother the letter Liz had written to her. The one to Alexander he would keep for him for much, much later. He planned to keep it in a safe, until Alexander was old enough to understand it. |
| 3181 |
His father had to go back to New York, but his mother stayed for three weeks, and insisted she take the children home with her for a little while when she left. It was almost August by then, and they had nothing else to do. He had to go back to work eventually, and privately Ruth thought it would do him good. |
| 3182 |
If he had been a drinker, he would have been an alcoholic by then, but he didn't even do that, he just sat there, doing nothing, numb, and only climbing into bed at three in the morning. He hated their bed now because she wasn't in it. He barely made it to the office every day, and then he sat there too. |
| 3183 |
She had done everything for him. For all of them. She cooked, she baked, she sewed, she loved them all so well, she had even taught school right up till the end. How does one replace a woman like that with a maid or an au pair? He hated the idea, as he called the agencies the next day, and explained what he needed. |
| 3184 |
She said she could cook, and she went to the airport with him when the children came home. Jane didn't look enthused, and Alexander looked at her curiously and then smiled and clapped his hands, but she let him run loose in the airport as Bernie attempted to find their bags, and set up the stroller for him. |
| 3185 |
And Alexander and the au pair sat in the back. She had worn jeans and a purple shirt, and she had long, shaggy blond hair, and Jane didn't seem very impressed with her as they chatted on the way in. She seemed to answer mostly in monosyllables and grunts, and wasn't very interested in making friends with the kids. |
| 3186 |
It was almost like the old days, except that someone very important was missing and they all felt it. And to make matters worse, she told them she was moving to Philadelphia. Jane looked stricken. It was like losing her second mother, and she was depressed for weeks after they saw her off at the airport. |
| 3187 |
And his mother was right. It was difficult working all day, and then taking care of the children and the house and the laundry and the groceries and the cooking and the ironing and the backyard all night. Their luck changed six weeks after school began. The agency called him again and he listened to the usual tale. |
| 3188 |
Bernie opened the door and found himself staring down at a tiny woman with short white hair and bright blue eyes, in a navy hat and coat, and sensible black shoes that looked like golf shoes. And the woman at the agency was right. She did look like Mary Poppins. She was even carrying a tightly furled black umbrella. |
| 3189 |
Suddenly all of you have lost the mainstay of your existence. You need time to heal, and someone to watch over you while you do. I would be honored to be that person, thrilled if you would let me take care of your children. And whether you move to another house, an apartment, New York, or Kenya is not a problem. |
| 3190 |
He thought about it for a long time, and didn't say anything about it at dinner. It was a local number, and Chandler was obviously back for more money. Bernie was thinking of ignoring the message when the phone rang at ten o'clock that night and he had a premonition as he picked it up. And he was right. |
| 3191 |
The visits were to start on Saturday, which didn't give Bernie much time. He took Jane out to dinner after his morning in court, and he took a deep breath before he told her. He had taken her to the Hippo, which had always been a favorite with her, but she seemed quiet that night, and finally she looked at him. |
| 3192 |
But she could hear him. He had a loud voice and he sounded friendly, maybe because he was an actor, or had been. Then she saw Bernie step aside and the man walked into the living room and looked from her to Alexander, almost as though he didn't know which was which, and then he glanced at Nanny and back at Jane. |
| 3193 |
But it was an extremely awkward moment. He didn't hold out a hand to her, and he didn't approach her, and she wasn't sure she liked his eyes. They were the same color as hers, but they darted around the room a lot, and he seemed more interested in her real daddy, as she called Bernie, than he was in her. |
| 3194 |
He just walked to the door and expected her to follow, like a dog, and she looked as though she were about to cry, as Bernie smiled at her encouragingly and gave her a hug before she left, clutching a little pink sweater that matched the dress she wore. She looked as though she were dressed for a party. |
| 3195 |
Chandler Scott said something to her as he got into a beaten up old car, and as though with a premonition of doom, he wrote down the license number, as Jane got into the passenger seat gingerly, and the door slammed. And a moment later they drove off and he turned to see Mrs. Pippin frowning at him. |
| 3196 |
He puttered around the house, and he had paperwork and errands to do at home, and other projects waiting for him at the store, but he couldn't concentrate on any of it. He stayed close to home all day in case she called. And at six o'clock he was sitting in the living room, tapping his foot, waiting for her. |
| 3197 |
He opened the car door and got in, and as soon as he did he told her again to get in, and with a last look up at the window where Bernie stood, she did. The car sped away almost immediately, and Jane had to hold onto the door so as not to fall off the seat as he rounded turns and hurried south toward the freeway. |
| 3198 |
It would give her something exciting to talk about that night, but as they got to the security check, he grabbed her arm hard, and his face tightened as he told her to hurry up. And then she had a sudden idea. If she told him she had to go to the bathroom, maybe there would be a phone and she could call Bernie. |
| 3199 |
They stopped at the photo machine, took four shots for a dollar, and much to Jane's amazement Chandler Scott pulled out a passport and glued one of the photographs into it. It was a counterfeit passport which would not have borne close inspection, but he knew that children's passports were rarely inspected. |
| 3200 |
The stewardesses seemed not to notice anything amiss and Jane would never have dared speak up, after the threat they'd made against Bernie and the baby. They never bothered answering her and they both ordered a beer once the plane took off. They got her a Coke but she didn't touch it. She wasn't hungry or thirsty. |
| 3201 |
She looked extremely proper and she had a calming effect on him, which was fortunate because half an hour later the police discovered that the license plate he'd taken down was of a car that had been stolen that morning. It was serious now. At least to Bernie. To the police it was exactly what Bill had predicted. |
| 3202 |
They were no more impressed than they had been an hour before. As far as they were concerned, it was a private matter, between two men, wrestling over one child they both felt they owned, and the police didn't want to get involved. He probably didn't mean it about the money. And all through the night. |
| 3203 |
But he explained that he didn't ever keep that much cash. He would have to sell stocks, and he owned them all jointly with his wife. He would need his wife's permission to sell and he would also lose a fortune if he sold because the market was rotten. He explained that it would take time if he could even do it. |
| 3204 |
He had paced the floor, drunk more coffee, more brandy, more tea, and finally fallen into bed at ten o'clock the next morning, hysterical and exhausted. Nanny had never gone to bed at all but had taken care of Alexander all day, and was feeding him dinner when the doorbell rang and the investigators returned. |
| 3205 |
A wife he loved, a new baby, and the child she'd had before. Now suddenly Liz was gone, Jane had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom, and he was about to travel all over Mexico with two strangers he had hired to find her. And as he looked out the window, his thoughts of Jane rapidly overwhelmed him. |
| 3206 |
It was another week before, with painstaking work covering almost every bar and restaurant and store and hotel in Mazatlan, the trail continued to Guadalajara. It was only three hundred and twenty four miles from Mazatlan to Guadalajara and it had taken them eight days of painstaking work to follow Scott there. |
| 3207 |
Enough to make him never want a kid, and his wife agreed with him. They didn't even have a dog anymore, after their last one was stolen and poisoned and dropped on their doorstep by someone they'd once gotten arrested. They discovered nothing more the next day, and he left on Saturday night for San Francisco. |
| 3208 |
She had remembered the Lindbergh kidnapping too. She had been a young woman when it happened and it had impressed her all her life. Bernie held Jane in his arms for hours that day, and they reported to the police that she'd been found, but no one sounded very excited, and the court was notified too. |
| 3209 |
And she had made a huge chocolate cake for dessert, which Alexander was eyeing with lust, as Bernie stood up and went to answer the phone. The phone had rung all afternoon and all evening with calls from well wishers, thrilled and relieved that their horror was over. Tracy had even called from Philadelphia. |
| 3210 |
And as a result, there could be no parole violation. The owners of the car didn't want to press charges because, according to Winters, they were dealing drugs, and Chandler Scott came back into the country without a problem. He looked respectable and subdued as he walked into the courtroom with his attorney. |
| 3211 |
Bernie had chuckled to himself only that morning at the portrait they presented, she so tiny and white and British with her flashing blue eyes and sensible shoes, he so enormous and black and ominous looking until he smiled his startling ivory smile and tossed Alexander into the air, or played jumprope with Jane. |
| 3212 |
Well, you're not talking about a boat, you're talking about my daughter, and I know what's good for her and what isn't. One of these days that bastard is going to kill my kid, and you're all going to tell me how sorry you are. I told you he was going to kidnap her, and you thought I was crazy. Well, I was right. |
| 3213 |
He told her what he was going to do, and that he might end up in jail and she sobbed openly at the other end of the phone, half thinking about the grandchild she might never see again, and half thinking about her son as a jailbird. They had been planning to come out that Friday but Bernie thought they should wait. |
| 3214 |
He told them to hurry up, because he had a date at noon. But by lunchtime it was obvious that they were not going to get out of the bank without giving themselves up or injuring a hostage. They attempted to shoot their way out finally, and both of them had been killed before they ever reached the curb. |
| 3215 |
And while everyone was ordering lunch, Bernie slipped his hand into Jane's and smiled down at her. And without saying anything to her, he slipped a little gold ring on her finger. It was a delicate braid of gold with a single pearl. She looked down at it with wide eyes, and then looked up at him again. |
| 3216 |
It was the kind of place to let down your hair, walk in the grass, lie in the hammock under giant shade trees, looking up at the sky. There was even a little brook on the back of the property, where they could walk along the rocks and get their feet wet, as he had in the Catskills when he was a child. |
| 3217 |
In some ways, Napa reminded him of that, and it reminded Ruth of that too. She watched the children playing in the grass and the look on Bernie's face as he watched them, and she felt better about him than she had in a long time. It really was the perfect spot for them, Ruth conceded before she left. |
| 3218 |
He was still her tall, handsome son, but there was more gray in his hair than he had had the year before, the lines were deeper around his eyes, and he still looked sad. Liz had been gone almost a year now, and he was still mourning. But at least the anger was gone now. He wasn't angry at her anymore for leaving him. |
| 3219 |
He sat up on Bernie's lap and looked at her thoughtfully. And she smiled down at him, and then wrote a prescription for Bernie to have filled the next day. She put him on antibiotics to be on the safe side, and gave Bernie two small codeine pills to crush for him if the pain didn't abate before morning. |
| 3220 |
She made it kind of a game with him. And then he settled back into his father's arms with a sigh, still sucking the lollipop, a moment later, as Bernie filled out some forms, Alexander fell asleep. Bernie smiled down at him, and then looked at her appreciatively. She had the warm eyes of a deeply caring woman. |
| 3221 |
He went to her office this time. It was in a small sunny Victorian house at the edge of town. She shared the office space with another doctor, and she lived upstairs above the office. And Bernie was once again impressed with her manner with the child, and he liked her as much as he had before, maybe even more so. |
| 3222 |
She tried not to notice, but she couldn't help it. He was a good looking man. And he was noticing the same things about her. She was wearing jeans again, and an oxford shirt and red espadrilles, and her hair was so clean it shone. She was not wearing her doctor coat, and Jane couldn't figure out who she was. |
| 3223 |
But the realtor who had gotten the house for him made such a point of including him in a barbecue they were giving that night that he felt rude not going at least for a little while. And he went feeling like the new kid in town, knowing absolutely not a soul, and feeling overdressed the instant he got out of the car. |
| 3224 |
It was Megan Jones and she looked very pretty. He realized now how tan she was. Her skin was dark, in sharp contrast to her light blue eyes. And she had worn a white peasant skirt and white es padrilles with a bright red gypsy blouse. Suddenly she looked very beautiful and it made him uncomfortable. |
| 3225 |
It was easier thinking of her in blue jeans and her starched white coat. This was much too accessible, and the silky smooth shoulders caught his eye, as he forced himself to look straight into her blue eyes. But that was no easier for him. Her eyes always made him think of Liz, and yet they were different. |
| 3226 |
And she could sense that. She enjoyed chatting with him, and she liked his idea. But more than that, she liked him. He was an unusual man. Warm and strong and decent. And he had the gentleness of the very strong, and she liked that. He noticed her beeper then hooked to the back of her belt and he asked her about it. |
| 3227 |
She seldom did. She had gone to Radcliffe, and then Stanford Med School, and had graduated second in her class, a fact that mattered very little now. She was busy doing what she did, healing hot ears, and giving shots and setting bones, and curing coughs, and being there for the children she loved and took care of. |
| 3228 |
He heard the Austin Healy roaring away, and saw her hair flying out behind a moment later. He left the party and went home, a short time afterwards, thinking of Megan, wondering if he'd see her again, and surprised by how much he liked her and how pretty she had looked in the gypsy blouse with the bare shoulders. |
| 3229 |
She was wearing a long yellow slicker and red rubber boots, with a bright red scarf over her dark hair. And she looked startled as they collided, their arms full of packages, and she gave him a friendly smile. She had thought of him a number of times since they'd last met and she was obviously happy to see him. |
| 3230 |
It was extraordinary, as unadorned as she was, she was beautiful. She was one of those women who look plain at first, and then slowly one realizes that there's a great deal more to them, their features are beautiful, their eyes remarkable, their skin exceptional, and all put together it makes someone very special. |
| 3231 |
But for her it had been a long time ago. She still missed Mark, but it wasn't the same anymore. It wasn't the same sharp pain Bernie was living with, barely more than a year after Liz had died. But he felt as though she understood him better now, and he felt a special kinship for her, which hadn't been there before. |
| 3232 |
And maybe someone different would have been just as good for me, if not better. Maybe the Right Man didn't have to be another pediatrician, just like me, who wanted a rural practice just like me. Maybe I could have married a lawyer or a carpenter or a schoolteacher and been just as happy and had six kids by now. |
| 3233 |
He even told her about Nanny Pippin, and they chuckled over some of the adventures she'd had. It was a delightful afternoon and he was sorry when she said she had to go. She was driving to Calistoga to visit a friend for dinner that night and he was suddenly curious who it was, woman or man, friendship or romance. |
| 3234 |
She was attractive in any case. His secretary had noticed that, but she didn't seem to fit into any of those categories. She didn't have the stereotyped look of the Junior League, with blond streaks in her hair, gold shrimp earrings she'd had for ten years, and shoes with little gold chains running across them. |
| 3235 |
She looked wholesome and clean, and yet well put together somehow, even though her clothes were neither exciting nor overly stylish. She was wearing a navy blue suit and a beige silk blouse, pearl earrings and high heeled navy blue shoes. And she had very good legs, although she was tall. Almost as tall as Bernie. |
| 3236 |
He wanted to know more about her. He knew she was torn about having children, that she had gone to Radcliffe and Stanford, that her fiance had been killed in Vietnam, that she came from Boston and lived in Napa, but he didn't know much more than that, except that he thought she was a damn fine woman, and he liked her. |
| 3237 |
There's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted something more. And I couldn't have stood all that gentle Episcopalian, puritanical prodding. Somehow, in the end, they would have wanted me to marry someone fancy, and live in a house just like theirs, and give little social teas for friends just like theirs. |
| 3238 |
They threw things out, put food away, scraped, rinsed, and loaded the dishwasher, and when Nanny came back again, everything was done. She had been about to say that it was nice having a woman around the house and then thought better of it, and just thanked all of them for cleaning up, which was more diplomatic. |
| 3239 |
He saw immediately that the book was old, and discerned easily that it was also rare, and her note said that it had been her grandfather's and had brought her through hard times and she hoped it would do the same for him. She wished him happy things in the coming year, and a Merry Christmas to all of them. |
| 3240 |
But he couldn't think of that now. He couldn't go on celebrating anniversaries that didn't exist, and suddenly he wanted to reach out to Megan, as though to force the memories from his head, and she heard something odd in his voice and was suddenly worried about him. It was as though she knew him better than she did. |
| 3241 |
There was a physical attraction he could barely deny now, no matter how guilty it made him feel. It was still there, growing more powerful day by day. And he was thinking of how lovely she was as the limousine sped up Madison Avenue on the salt strewn street, and turned east on Seventy sixth Street. |
| 3242 |
It was incredible how much they had missed each other in such a short time, but they barely had time to say anything before her brother came bounding into the room, singing a filthy song in French, and looking precisely as she had described him. Samuel Jones looked like a very handsome, aristocratic blond jockey. |
| 3243 |
There was a regal quality about her, a quiet elegance and strength. She looked like someone one could turn to and he stood beside her at the wedding, proud to be with her. He met her cousins afterwards, and chatted with her brother and his wife for a little while, and was surprised at how much he liked them. |
| 3244 |
And it was when he was alone in the house again that he realized how empty his house and his life and his heart were without her. He wasn't sure if he missed her, or Liz, and he felt guilty about his own confusion. And it was a relief when the phone rang at eleven that night. He was in the bedroom packing for Napa. |
| 3245 |
He knew Megan had been happy lately, and now he knew why. He also suspected they'd seen each other in New York, although she hadn't said so. The three of them left the office together, and Bernie carried the groceries to his car, as she told him about her day, and he teased her that she wasn't working hard enough. |
| 3246 |
But as she looked at him something strange happened. He suddenly couldn't keep within the boundaries he had set for himself before. Just hugging her had opened doors of desire he could no longer close. And as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he took her in his arms and kissed her. |
| 3247 |
And for the entire week, he came back from the city early every day, and went to meet her at her office, bringing little presents and treasures and things to eat. It was like the early days with Liz, only it was different. They both knew it wouldn't last. One day he would go back to New York and it would be over. |
| 3248 |
But as he stood waiting for them at the airport, he felt as though he had lost something very dear to him, and he wanted to run back to her and make sure it was still there. But it was only when he went back to the house, with Nanny Pip and the children, that it hit him. He was honestly looking for something this time. |
| 3249 |
He wanted her to know where he was, in case something happened to one of the children. He didn't tell her who it was. He just gave her the number and told her only to use it in an emergency. It embarrassed him. But she never said a word. And she never seemed shocked about it. It was as though she thought it was normal. |
| 3250 |
And on the weekends they went to Napa, and Megan dropped by. She taught Jane how to make a nest for a little bird that fell out of a tree near the house, and she helped her set his leg when they discovered it was broken. She took Alex on errands with her and he squealed with delight now whenever he saw her coming. |
| 3251 |
And by the end of lunch, Bernie's eyes were in flames. Phillippa knew exactly what she wanted to do, and she was dying to do it with him. She didn't have the money to make the investment, but Bernie felt sure that he could handle that himself, with a loan from the bank and maybe even a little help from his parents. |
| 3252 |
In Napa with Megan, and the house he wished he were buying, and the store he wished he were starting. He felt guilty about his mixed emotions, and Megan sensed what was happening to him. She was very calm and quiet and supportive and she asked him no questions about his plans, and he was grateful to her for that. |
| 3253 |
They had been living on borrowed time for seven months, and sooner or later they'd have to face the music. And he didn't like it. He loved being with Megan, going for long walks, talking late at night, even going to the hospital with her when she had a late night call and she was so wonderful with the children. |
| 3254 |
Bernie and the children were living in Napa for the summer, and they settled in as they had the year before, and his parents took Jane on a trip as they had before. And when they brought her back, he introduced them to Megan. It was obvious who she was from the earlier description he had given them. |
| 3255 |
Everything was prepared for them and the local orthopedic man assisted, and so did Megan. They had brought a neurosurgeon along too, just in case, but the head injury was not as bad as they had first feared. The real damage was to her hip and the base of her spine. That was the real terror for them now. |
| 3256 |
And she and Bernie went out for a hamburger after that to discuss the mechanics of the next few months. Jane would be in the hospital for at least six weeks and a wheelchair for months after that. There was no way she could manage the stairs of their San Francisco house in a wheelchair, nor could Nanny. |
| 3257 |
He still expected to find her there, to see her pretty smiling face as she emerged from the kitchen, tossing her long blond hair over her shoulder and wiping her hands on her apron. But there was no one. Nothing. There hadn't been in two years. It was all over, along with the dreams that had gone with it. |
| 3258 |
But an hour later, everything else stood in the front hall in six enormous boxes. It took him another half hour to get them all down to his car and stowed inside, and then he walked back into the house for a last time. He was going to sell the house, but without Liz, there was nothing in it he cared about now anyway. |
| 3259 |
She had been the charm of their entire existence. He gently closed the closet door. There was nothing in it now except the two dresses he had saved in their plastic cases from Wolffs. The rest was empty. She needed no clothes now. She rested in a peaceful place in his heart, where he could always find her. |
| 3260 |
And with a last look around the silent house, he walked quietly to the door, and then outside into the sunshine. It was a short drive to the thrift shop he knew she had used before for Jane's cast off clothes. She always felt that nothing should go to waste, and someone could use the things they no longer needed. |
| 3261 |
It was going to dramatically alter maintenance programs, and the very nature of chemotherapy the world over. It would be Peter's one major contribution to the human race. For the past four years, other than his family, it was what he had lived for. And undeniably, it was going to make Wilson Donovan millions. |
| 3262 |
He hated milking cows, and stacking bales of hay, and endlessly cleaning manure out of the stables. For years, after school, he had helped his father at the dairy farm he ran, and now his father owned it. And Peter knew what that would mean. Eventually, he would have to go home, when he finished college, and help them. |
| 3263 |
He had always been a good boy, his mother said, even if it meant doing things the hard way. He was willing to work for everything he wanted. But once Peter knew who Katie was, being involved with her seemed wrong to him. No matter how sincere he was, it looked like an easy way out, a quick trip to the top, a shortcut. |
| 3264 |
And by the end of the summer, he decided to take a year off to help him get the business off the ground. They'd had a hard winter the year before, and Peter thought he could turn it around, with some new ideas and new plans he'd learned in college. He could have too, except that he got drafted and sent to Vietnam. |
| 3265 |
He had another year of college left to do, but he didn't want to go back to the University of Michigan again, he somehow felt he had outgrown it. And he was confused about Vietnam too. The country he had wanted to hate, that had so tormented him, he had come to love instead, and he was actually sorry when he left it. |
| 3266 |
He found one easily in a marketing firm, went to school at night, got his degree, and had just started his first job when he went to a party given by an old friend from Michigan, and ran into Katie. She had transferred and was living in Chicago by then too, and she was about to graduate from Northwestern. |
| 3267 |
In his eyes, she had been a threat to his integrity, and an untenable link between a past he could no longer live, and a future he wanted, but had no idea how to accomplish. Having seen so much more of the world since they had last met, looking at her now, he could barely remember what he had once been so afraid of. |
| 3268 |
It seemed so easy at first, he even told himself they could just be friends, which neither of them believed. But all he knew was that he wanted to be near her. She was bright and fun, and she understood the crazy things he felt, about how he didn't fit anywhere, and what he wanted to do with his life. |
| 3269 |
Eventually, far, far down the road, he wanted to change the world, or at the very least make a difference. She was the only person in his life then who understood that. He had had so many dreams back then, so many good intentions. And now, twenty years later, Vicotec was bringing all those old dreams to fruition. |
| 3270 |
He had worked so hard for what he had, over the years, even if some of it seemed to have come easily to him. He knew better than anyone, it hadn't. There were no freebies in life. You worked for what you got, or you wound up with nothing. He had gone out with Katie for two years, once he'd found her again. |
| 3271 |
She was crazy about him, but he was adamant that they would never be married. And he kept insisting that eventually they'd have to stop seeing each other and she should go back to New York and start dating other men. But he could never bring himself to break off with her and actually make her do it. |
| 3272 |
It was all he had to give her, and there was no way in the world he was going to drag Katie into the hard life he had grown up with. As far as he was concerned, it had killed his mother. She had died of cancer, without proper medical care, or the money to pay for it. His father didn't even have insurance. |
| 3273 |
She had married right out of high school while he was in Vietnam, and had three kids in three years with the boy who had been her high school sweetheart. By the time she was twenty one, she looked beaten and dreary. There was so much more that he wanted for her too, but just looking at her, he knew she'd never have it. |
| 3274 |
There was a lump in his throat the size of a rock when he drove away from the farm that weekend. His father and Muriel stood watching him go, and they waved until his car disappeared completely. It was as though all three of them knew this was an important moment in his life. More than college. More than Vietnam. |
| 3275 |
And he had found a brilliant new marketing man in the bargain. For all concerned, the arrangement was a good one. And for the next several months, Peter concentrated more on business than romance. It annoyed Katie at first, but when she complained to her father about it, he wisely told her to be patient. |
| 3276 |
And eventually, Peter relaxed and became less anxious about whatever unfinished projects he had at the office. But generally, he wanted to do everything perfectly, to justify Frank's faith in him, and show him how grateful he was to be there. He didn't even go home to Wisconsin anymore, he never had time to. |
| 3277 |
They went to parties, and plays, she introduced him to all her friends. And Peter was surprised to realize how much he liked them, and how at ease he felt in her life. And little by little, over the next several months, none of the things that had once terrified him about Katie seemed quite so worrisome to Peter. |
| 3278 |
His career was going well, and much to his astonishment, no one was upset by where he was, or how he got there. In fact, everyone seemed to like and accept him. And swept away by a wave of good feelings, he and Katie got engaged within the year, and it didn't come as a surprise to anyone, except maybe Peter. |
| 3279 |
But he had known her long enough, and he had come to feel so comfortable in her world, he felt he belonged there. Frank Donovan said it was meant to be, and Katie smiled. She had never doubted for an instant that Peter was right for her. She had always known it, and been absolutely sure that she wanted to be his wife. |
| 3280 |
Peter's sister, Muriel, was thrilled for him when he called her with the news, and in the end, Peter's father was the only one who objected to their union, much to Peter's disappointment. As much as his father had thought the job at Wilson Donovan was a great opportunity, he was equally opposed to the marriage. |
| 3281 |
He had grown into her world. It was his now. And his own world had begun to seem part of another life. It just didn't seem part of him anymore, it was completely foreign. It was as though he'd grown up in Wisconsin accidentally, or as though it had been someone else and he'd never really been there at all. |
| 3282 |
It seemed hard to believe sometimes that he'd actually spent more than twenty years there. In little more than a year, Peter had become a businessman, a man of the world, and a New Yorker. His family was still dear to him, and always would be. But the thought of life as a dairy farmer still gave him nightmares. |
| 3283 |
The senior Haskell was immovable in his objections, although finally he agreed to come to the wedding, but probably only because he was worn down by listening to Peter argue, and trying to convince his father that what he was doing was right. In the end, Peter was devastated when his father didn't come to the wedding. |
| 3284 |
Peter felt bereft at first, and then, like everything else in his new life, eventually he got caught up in the swirl of activity around him. They went to Europe for their honeymoon, and for months after that, they never seemed to have time to go to Wisconsin. Katie always had plans for him, or Frank did. |
| 3285 |
He was going to surprise her. He was beginning to suspect it was the only way to get there. But when his father had a heart attack and died just before Thanksgiving, Peter was overwhelmed by his own emotions. He felt guilt and grief and regret for all the things he had never done, and always meant to. |
| 3286 |
Peter took her to the funeral. It was a grim affair, in the pouring rain, as she and Peter stood to one side, looking wooden. Peter was clearly devastated, and Muriel was a good distance from him, sobbing as she stood beside her husband and babies. It seemed an odd contrast of farm folk and city slickers. |
| 3287 |
Although she was Peter's wife, she hadn't even known their father. She was expensively dressed in a black coat and a fur hat, and she seemed irritated to be there, and Muriel said so, much to Peter's chagrin. She made a pointed comment to Peter and they had argued about it, and then they'd both cried. |
| 3288 |
It was as though she wanted all his ties to be to her, all his roots and his bonds, his allegiance and affection. It was almost as if Kate was jealous of Muriel, and the piece of his life and history that she represented, and his not getting a piece of the farm was a good excuse to end it once and for all. |
| 3289 |
And as they boarded the plane in Chicago, he felt relief sweep over him. He had escaped again. At some level, he had been terrified that his father would leave him the farm and expect him to run it. But his father had been wiser than that, and knew Peter better. Peter had nothing to do with the farm now. |
| 3290 |
He was quiet on the flight home, and over the next weeks, he mourned his father in silence. He said very little about it to Kate, mostly because he had the feeling she didn't want to hear it. He called Muriel once or twice, but she was always busy with the kids, or rushing out to help Jack with the daily. |
| 3291 |
Her open criticism of his wife created a definite chasm between them, and after a while, he stopped calling. He threw himself into his work, and found solace in what happened at the office. He was completely at home there. In fact, his whole life in New York seemed like the perfect existence to him. |
| 3292 |
But they had long since ceased to argue about it, in deference to each other's conflicting opinions. The only other thing that bothered him was that Frank had bought their first house for them. Peter had tried to object to it, but he didn't want to upset Katie. And she had begged him to let her father do it. |
| 3293 |
Peter had complained, but in the end, she won. She wanted a big house so they could start a family quickly, and Peter certainly couldn't afford the kind of house she was used to, and her father thought she should live in. These were the problems Peter had been so afraid of. But the Donovans handled it all graciously. |
| 3294 |
Her father also wanted to hire someone to clean and cook for them, but there Peter drew the line, and announced that he would do the cooking himself if he had to, but he was not going to allow Frank to provide them with hired help. Eventually, Katie learned to do the cooking, for a little while at least. |
| 3295 |
The boys were involved in a thousand things, soccer, baseball, swimming teams, and recently Katie had decided to run for the Greenwich school board. She was totally involved in her community, and very concerned with world ecology, and a number of issues Peter knew he should have been interested in, but wasn't. |
| 3296 |
He was just trying to keep his head above water at work. But she knew a lot about that too. Katie's mother had died when she was three, and she had grown up being her father's constant companion. As she grew up, Katie knew everything about his business, and that never changed even after she and Peter married. |
| 3297 |
Katie's bond to him was a great deal stronger than Peter had expected, but there was no harm in it. Frank was a fair man, and he always exercised good judgment about how far to go with his opinions. At least Peter thought he did, until Frank tried to tell them where to send their son to nursery school. |
| 3298 |
It was Peter's only complaint in an otherwise happy marriage. And he had so many blessings in his life, that he didn't feel he had a right to complain over the occasional battle of wills with Frank. As far as Peter was concerned, when he examined his life, the blessings far outweighed the pains or the burdens. |
| 3299 |
And like his mother, his sister had been unable to afford decent treatment. She and her husband had been so proud, they never even called and told him. She was at death's door when Jack finally called, and Peter was heartbroken when he flew to Wisconsin and saw her. She died only a few days after that. |
| 3300 |
And he knew that when, and if, he did, they would no longer know him. They had a new mother, and a new family, and Peter knew that Jack had only called him because he needed money. He had no real sentiment for his late wife's brother, nor Peter for him, although Peter would have liked to see his nephews and nieces. |
| 3301 |
Peter would have preferred having his kids at home, but to him it was a small compromise, he said, he lost their company for a few months a year, but they were getting a great education. There was no question about that, and Frank always said they were making important friendships that would endure all their lives. |
| 3302 |
She loved living close to him. She still kept a close eye on his house for him, and on weekends, she and Peter often went over to discuss family matters, or business, or just for a friendly game of tennis. Katie went over to see him a lot. They went to Martha's Vineyard in the summer to be near him too. |
| 3303 |
And the boys loved it when Peter built them their own bunkhouse, which allowed them to invite their friends, which they did constantly. For years now, Peter and Kate had been surrounded by children, particularly at the Vineyard. There always seemed to be half a dozen extra kids staying at their house. |
| 3304 |
It had been Peter's baby from the first, and it had been his decision to pursue that line of development at the scientific end, and he had convinced Frank to go along with him. It was an enormous investment but in the long run, they both agreed, well worth it. And for Peter, there was an added bonus. |
| 3305 |
If a product like it had been available to them, their lives might have been saved, or at the very least prolonged. And now he wanted to save others like them. People on farms and in rural areas, or even in cities, but isolated by poverty or circumstances that would kill them without a drug like this one. |
| 3306 |
To Peter, it was the perfect city. It always took his breath away. There was something about Paris that made his heart race. He had come here on business for the first time fifteen years before, and at the time, he had felt as though he had been put on earth for that single moment in time when he first saw it. |
| 3307 |
He had stopped the car, gotten out, and as he stood there and looked at it, he had been embarrassed to realize that he was crying. Katie used to tease him and say that he must have been French in a past life because he loved Paris so much. It was a place that meant a great deal to him, and he was never quite sure why. |
| 3308 |
Peter loved the subtlety, the elegance, the exquisite decor of the rooms, the sumptuous beauty of the brocades on the walls, the beautiful antique fireplaces. And from the moment he stepped into the revolving door, he felt the instant undercurrent of excitement. The Ritz never disappointed him, and never failed him. |
| 3309 |
Peter loved the Ritz almost as much as he loved Paris. It was part of the magic and the charm, and as he came into the lobby from the revolving door, he was immediately greeted by a liveried concierge, and hastened up the two steps to the reception desk to register. Even being at the desk, waiting to sign in, was fun. |
| 3310 |
Her hair and nails were impeccably done and Peter noticed that she was wearing an enormous diamond on her left hand. She glanced at him and smiled as he watched her. He was an extremely attractive man, and nothing in his demeanor now suggested to the woman standing next to him that he had once been a farm boy. |
| 3311 |
He looked like exactly what he was, a wealthy, powerful man, who moved in the circles of the elite, and those who ran the empires of the world. Everything about Peter suggested power and importance, and yet there was something appealing about him too, something gentle and young and he was undeniably very good looking. |
| 3312 |
And if one took the time to look, there was something more about him too, something intriguing in his eyes, more than most people knew, or cared to see there. There was a softness about Peter, a kindness, a kind of compassion that is rare in men of power. But the woman in the red dress didn't see that. |
| 3313 |
It was the same suit, in different colors, but the women themselves looked very different. Like the Spanish woman Peter had noticed standing next to him, these women were also immaculate, with their hair impeccably done. They all wore diamonds at their necks and ears, and as a group, they made quite an impression. |
| 3314 |
The women were talking and laughing quietly, and the bodyguards kept a close watch on them, letting no one come anywhere near them. They surrounded them like a wall of stern statues, while the king walked along quietly, talking to another man, and then suddenly Peter heard a voice just behind him, and was startled. |
| 3315 |
And as they walked the long, long hall to the back elevator, they passed the block long expanse of vitrines filled with expensive wares from all the boutiques and jewelers of Paris. Halfway there, he saw a gold bracelet he thought Katie would like, and made a mental note to come back here to buy it. |
| 3316 |
Nowadays she really didn't want to travel with him, and he knew that. She enjoyed her committee meetings and her friends. With both older boys away at boarding school, and only one at home, she really could have come, but she always had an excuse, and Peter didn't press her anymore. She just didn't want to. |
| 3317 |
He turned to see what was happening, and a phalanx of men in dark suits with earpieces seemed to be coming toward them. There were four of them, and it was impossible to see who was behind them. It was easy to see that they were bodyguards, from the earpieces they wore and the walkie talkies they carried. |
| 3318 |
He was the controversial and very dynamic young senator from Virginia, Anderson Thatcher. He was forty eight years old, had been lightly touched by scandal more than once, but in each case the fearsome fumes had been quickly dispelled, and more than once, and far more importantly, he had been touched by tragedy. |
| 3319 |
Peter knew less about that, but he remembered some heartbreaking photographs in Time when the child died. There had been one photograph in particular of his wife, looking devastated as she walked away from the cemetery, surprisingly solitary, as Thatcher took his own mother's arm and led her from the service. |
| 3320 |
It was the merest hint, the quickest impression, and then suddenly he saw her standing there, the woman he had seen in the photograph. Her eyes were cast down, and the impression she gave was of incredible delicacy, she seemed very small and very frail, and almost as though she would fly away at any moment. |
| 3321 |
She was the merest wisp of a woman, with the biggest eyes he had ever seen, and something about her that made you want to stare at her in fascination. She was wearing a sky blue Chanel linen suit, and there was something very gentle about her, and very self contained as she walked behind the men in her party. |
| 3322 |
And as Peter looked down at her, she glanced suddenly up at him. He thought she had the saddest eyes he'd ever seen, and yet there was nothing pathetic about her. She was simply removed, and he noticed that her hands were delicate and graceful as she reached into her handbag and put away a pair of dark glasses. |
| 3323 |
They all pressed in ahead of her, and she followed quietly behind them. There was a startling dignity about her, as though she were in her own world, and every inch a lady. Whether or not they knew she was alive seemed to be of no importance to her. As Peter watched her, fascinated, he knew exactly who she was. |
| 3324 |
Peter thought he remembered that she was about thirty four years old, and she was one of those people who fascinates the press, and whom they can't bring themselves to leave alone, although she gave them very little to go on. Peter had seen interviews with him, of course, but he didn't recall any with Olivia Thatcher. |
| 3325 |
She had the most expressive eyes he'd ever seen, and then suddenly he wondered if he'd imagined it, if there was nothing more in her eyes than in anyone else's. She turned away almost as suddenly as she had looked at him, and she didn't look at him again as he left the elevator, feeling somewhat shaken. |
| 3326 |
It was like a dream come true, and he sank into a comfortable satin chair, and looked out at the immaculately tended garden. It was perfection. He tipped the concierge, and then walked slowly around the room, and went out and leaned against the balcony, admiring the flowers below, and thinking about Olivia Thatcher. |
| 3327 |
Peter walked around his room impatiently, decided to call Kate, and as usual, she wasn't in. It was only nine o'clock in the morning for her, and he imagined that she was out doing errands somewhere or visiting friends. Kate was rarely at home after nine o'clock, and never home before five thirty. She was always busy. |
| 3328 |
Nowadays, with even more activities, and her school board involvement, and only one child at home, she often came home even later. When Peter finally left his room, he was wildly excited about seeing Suchard. This was the moment he'd been waiting for. The final green light before they could move ahead on Vicotec. |
| 3329 |
She looked even slimmer and younger than she had in the Chanel suit, and she took her glasses off for a moment, and then glanced at him. He was sure she had recognized him too, but neither of them said anything, and he tried not to stare at her. But there was something about her that absolutely overwhelmed him. |
| 3330 |
She hurried away down the rue de la Paix, with her head down, her sunglasses on, the bodyguard following her, and in spite of himself Peter wondered where she was going. And then, forcing his eyes and his mind from her, as the cab sped off, he looked straight ahead at the streets of Paris rushing past him. |
| 3331 |
Peter sat and stared at him as he listened. He could not believe what he had just heard, could not even remotely imagine that interpretation of their product. And he had become sufficiently knowledgeable about the chemical properties involved to ask him some very pointed and technically sophisticated questions. |
| 3332 |
Even he felt sorry for Peter, when he saw his face. Peter looked as though he'd just lost his family, and all his friends, and he was only beginning to consider the ramifications. They would be endless. It was a huge disappointment, and a real shock to him as he listened to what Paul Louis had to say. |
| 3333 |
Why did it have to happen this way? His one big chance to help humanity, and instead he had backed a killer. The irony of it tasted very bitter, and as he walked back into the hotel, even the hubbub of the cocktail hour and guests coming and going in a flurry of well dressed activity didn't cheer him. |
| 3334 |
He knew he had to call his father in law, yet he wanted to wait until he had the rest of the information. He would have liked to talk to Kate about it, but he knew that whatever he said to her would have reached his father in law's ears before morning. It was one of the true weaknesses in their relationship. |
| 3335 |
It would have been nice to be able to tell her what was troubling him, but at least hearing her voice might cheer him up. He dialed the number easily, but there was no answer. It was five o'clock in the evening, and even Patrick wasn't home. He wondered if Katie might have gone to friends for dinner. |
| 3336 |
He usually liked using the Ritz pool, but this time he hadn't been sure how much time he'd have to do it. As it turned out now, while he waited for Suchard to complete his tests, he had time to do a lot of things. He just wasn't in the mood to do them. The attendant on duty seemed a little surprised when he walked in. |
| 3337 |
The single attendant had been reading a book quietly, and assigned Peter a changing room and gave him a key, and a moment later, he walked through the wading pool of disinfectant toward the main pool area. It was a large, handsome pool, and he was suddenly glad he had come here. It was just what he needed. |
| 3338 |
She was so small and lithe that she almost disappeared in the large pool. She was wearing a simple black bathing suit, and when she surfaced, her dark brown hair looked black against her head, and her huge dark eyes seemed startled when she saw him. She recognized him instantly, but made no sign of recognition to him. |
| 3339 |
She just dove under the water again and went on swimming as he watched her. It was so odd watching her, she was always so near, and yet so totally removed, in the elevator, both times, and now here. She was always tantalizingly close, and yet so far away that she might as well have been on another planet. |
| 3340 |
When he had seen her with the senator, they hadn't looked at her, or spoken to her, and she seemed perfectly content to be in her own world, just as she was now, as she continued swimming. She came up at the far end from Peter this time, and not really intending to, he began to swim slowly toward her. |
| 3341 |
She was someone one looked at, or was fascinated by, an icon of sorts, a mystery. She was not a real person. And as though to prove what he thought, just as he approached, she stepped gracefully out of the pool, and with one swift gesture, wrapped herself in a towel, and when he looked up again, she was gone. |
| 3342 |
She was so beautiful, yet so unreal, and everything about her made him somehow feel that she was desperately lonely. He wasn't sure what made him think that, if it was just what he had read about her, or what was real, or what she had conveyed to him with those brown velvet eyes that looked so full of secrets. |
| 3343 |
It was impossible to tell from looking at her, all he knew was that seeing her made him want to reach out and touch her, like a rare butterfly, just to see if he could do it, and if she would survive it. But like most rare butterflies, he suspected that if he touched her, her wings would turn to powder. |
| 3344 |
He wasn't entirely sure who the woman was, but he thought it was Olivia Thatcher. And when he woke in the morning, he was still thinking of her. It was the oddest feeling, more of a delusion than a dream. Seeing her close to him all night, in his dream, had actually given him the feeling that he knew her. |
| 3345 |
His marketing ideas had made history, and thanks to him, Wilson Donovan was the most successful pharmaceutical company in the industry. Frank himself had been responsible for growing the firm from a solid family business to a giant entity, but it was Peter who had helped it grow into an international empire. |
| 3346 |
What was he going to say to him if it all blew up in their faces? How were they going to justify the millions they had spent, the billions they wouldn't make, at least not for a while, and not until they spent still more to correct the problems? Peter couldn't help wondering if Frank would be willing to do that. |
| 3347 |
Would he be willing to pursue Vicotec as far as they had to, to make it perfect, or would he insist that they abandon the project? As chairman of the board, the decision was still his, but Peter was going to do everything he could to fight for it. He was always willing to go the long hauls for the big wins. |
| 3348 |
Her father bought her really expensive things, like diamond necklaces and rings, and knowing he couldn't compete with him, Peter usually kept his gifts to the kind of thing he knew she'd wear, or that would have special meaning. And when he went upstairs, he glanced around the empty room, and felt suddenly anxious. |
| 3349 |
He took off his jacket and his tie, and rolled his immaculate shirtsleeves up. He was one of those people who still looked impeccable at the end of the day, not just at the beginning. His sons teased him about it, and claimed he had been born wearing a tie, which made him laugh, remembering his youth in Wisconsin. |
| 3350 |
They were almost grown up, and they wouldn't even know him. Katie was right. It was too late now. There was nothing interesting on the news that night, and he got engrossed in his work as the night wore on. He was surprised by how good the dinner was, but much to the waiter's chagrin, he didn't pay much attention. |
| 3351 |
Bellmen, captains, waiters, maids, the gouvernante for their floor, housekeepers of all kinds walked sedately but quickly through the floors, knocking on doors, ringing bells, and urging everyone to come outside as quickly as possible, and non, non, madame, please do not change your gown, that will be fine. |
| 3352 |
A waiter offered Olivia another cup, but she smiled and shook her head graciously as she declined it. There was something wonderfully gentle and luminous about her, as though she had just drifted to earth and were really an angel. It was hard for Peter to accept the fact now that she was just a woman. |
| 3353 |
She was far from her husband and his entourage by then, and they couldn't have seen her at all, unless they moved back themselves and tried to find her. More guests had returned to the hotel, from late night restaurants or nightclubs like Chez Castel, or simply from dinners with friends, or the theater. |
| 3354 |
And as Peter glanced around he noticed Olivia Thatcher slowly move away entirely from the guests of the hotel, and drift nonchalantly to the other side of the square. She had turned her back on the people standing there, and then suddenly she seemed to be walking smoothly and swiftly toward the corner. |
| 3355 |
Interestingly, they never asked to speak to his wife, they felt that the senator had obviously spoken for both Thatchers, and then the crew hurried over to the dancing models and interviewed them right after Andy. They said they thought the evening was great fun, and it should happen at the Ritz more often. |
| 3356 |
It was a lively group, and despite the possible danger presented by the missing bomb, it was a festive night. But Peter was far from all of it by then, as he followed the senator's wife around the corner and out of the Place Vendome. She seemed to know where she was going, and she didn't hesitate for a moment. |
| 3357 |
She just kept walking. She walked at a good clip, and Peter took long strides to keep up with her, but he let her keep ahead, and he had no idea what he would say to her, if she stopped and turned around, and asked him what he was doing. He had no idea what he was doing, or why. He just knew that he had to be there. |
| 3358 |
But with a brother, a father, and a husband deeply entrenched in politics, she had little hope of escaping its clutches now. And then she looked at him, she hadn't introduced herself yet, and she would have liked to believe that he had no idea who she was, and she was just a woman in loafers, jeans, and a T shirt. |
| 3359 |
They had found her car crashed against a tree. And the famous author had vanished. She did not reappear until several days later. And when she did, she offered no explanation whatsoever for her absence. At the time, it had caused an enormous ruckus, and there had been headlines all over England about her disappearance. |
| 3360 |
I'm not sure that if I truly disappeared anyone would even notice, unless they had a rally to attend that day, or a campaign speech in a women's club. I'm very useful at times like that. Otherwise, I'm not very important. I'm sort of like one of those artificial trees they bring out to decorate the stage. |
| 3361 |
She needed to trust someone sometimes, and there was something incredibly warm and appealing about Peter. She had never talked to anyone as she did to him now, and she didn't want to stop, or go back to her life, or ever return to the Ritz Hotel. She wanted to stay here in Montmartre with him forever. |
| 3362 |
Everything seemed right in the beginning. We loved each other, we cared, he swore to me he would never go into politics. I saw what my father's career did to us, to my mother particularly, and Andy was just going to be a lawyer. We were going to have children, horses, and dogs, and live on a farm in Virginia. |
| 3363 |
And eventually, I think he fell in love with it. It's heady stuff, this thing called political ambition. I've come to understand that it demands more from you than any child, and seems to offer more excitement and passion than any woman. It devours everyone who gets near it. You can't love politics and survive. |
| 3364 |
Eventually, it eats everything you have inside, all the love and goodness and the decency, it eats whoever you once were, and leaves a politician in its place. It's not much of an exchange. Anyway, that's what happened. Andy went into politics, and then to make it up to me, and because he said we would, we had a baby. |
| 3365 |
And yet she had walked away from him, and had disappeared to sit in a cafe in Montmartre and empty her heart to a stranger. It was an odd life she led, and he could tell how close she was to breaking out of it as he watched her. Her hatred of politics and the pain it had brought to her was obvious and abundant. |
| 3366 |
All she really knew was that he was married, had three sons, was in business, and lived in Greenwich. But she also knew he was a good listener, and when he held her hand, and looked at her, she felt something stir deep inside her, it was a part of her she thought had died, and suddenly she could feel it breathing. |
| 3367 |
It seemed like my one contribution to the world, something important that makes up for all the frivolous, selfish things I've done. It means everything to me, and it has passed all our tests with flying colors, in every country we work in. The last tests are being conducted here, and I came to wrap things up. |
| 3368 |
Our laboratories here are going through the final steps, and until this point, the product has been flawless. But the tests here show something very different. They are not completed yet, but when I arrived here yesterday, the head of our laboratories told me that there could be serious problems with the drug. |
| 3369 |
I won't know the whole story till the end of the week, but it could be the end of a dream, or the beginning of long years of testing. And if that's the case, I have to go home, and tell the chairman of my company, who is coincidentally my father in law, that our product is either on the shelf or out the window. |
| 3370 |
He didn't want to drive her right to the hotel, and they didn't know yet if everyone had been able to go back inside, or if they were still gathered in the square, waiting. But for Olivia, Peter's last question was easy. She had been there before, and had known even then that it would always be her safe haven. |
| 3371 |
He made no attempt to make any advances to her, or to try and kiss her. He would have liked nothing in this world more, but out of respect for Olivia, and his wife, he absolutely wouldn't do it. In some ways, Olivia was a fantasy for him, and just having talked to her all night was a gift he would cherish forever. |
| 3372 |
In some ways, he was lucky because he was still so blind, but he was sincere and caring and he had worked hard, and he was willing to close his eyes to his wife's indifference to him, and her involvement in her own life, and his father in law's outrageous invasion of what should have been their life. |
| 3373 |
He was fortunate in Olivia's eyes, because he saw none of the emptiness around him. He sensed it perhaps, but he didn't really see it. And he was basically such a kind, decent, loving person. She had felt so much warmth from him that night, that even now, just before dawn, she didn't want to leave him. |
| 3374 |
Why couldn't they just disappear like Agatha Christie? They stood at the corner for what seemed like a long time, and then after he squeezed her hand for a last time, she finally walked around the corner, and swiftly across the square, a small, lithe figure in a white T shirt and a pair of blue jeans. |
| 3375 |
And when he awoke, all he could think of was Olivia. He felt quiet and sad without her, and when he looked out the window, it was raining. He sat thinking about Olivia for a long time, over croissants and coffee, and he kept wondering what had happened when she had gone back to her room early that morning. |
| 3376 |
Looking at his marriage through her eyes suddenly gave him a different perspective, and he felt uncomfortable about Katie's relationship with her father. They were so close that he actually felt shut out, and it irked him that he couldn't tell Katie about Suchard, and the reason for the delay in Paris. |
| 3377 |
She was interested in what he did, and deeply involved with anything that had to do with the business. But at other times, she had no time for him at all, and they never talked anymore about their inner thoughts, or shared their feelings. Sometimes he wondered if it frightened her to be close to anyone but her father. |
| 3378 |
Peter had been there for her too. But her father was her priority. And he expected a lot of Katie. He was very demanding of her time, her interest, and her attention. But he gave a lot too, and he expected to be acknowledged for the generosity of his gifts with an equal amount of time and affection. |
| 3379 |
But Katie needed more in her life too, she needed her husband and her sons. And yet, Peter suspected that she had never loved anyone as much as she loved Frank, not even him, or their sons, although she would never admit it. And when she thought anyone was threatening Frank, she fought like a lioness to protect him. |
| 3380 |
She was attached to her father beyond all reason. Peter worked on his computer all that afternoon, and finally at four o'clock, he decided to call Suchard, and then felt foolish once he did it. This time Paul Louis took the call from the laboratory but he was curt with him, and told Peter he had no further news. |
| 3381 |
He looked for her everywhere, but he didn't see her. He wondered where she was today, what she thought about the night before. If it was a rare interlude for her, or a kind of turning point. He found that he was haunted by everything they had said, the way she'd looked, the deeper meaning of everything she'd told him. |
| 3382 |
Even swimming didn't exorcise her from his mind, and he didn't feel much better when he went back upstairs and turned the television on. He needed something, anything, to distract him from the voices in his head, the vision of a woman he barely knew, and the worry of Vicotec going down the drain with Suchard's testing. |
| 3383 |
The thought of kidnapping worried him so much, and yet it felt so wrong to him. And the words Agatha Christie kept rolling around in his head again and again. He couldn't bear the thought that something terrible might have happened to her, but the more he thought about it, the more he suspected that it hadn't. |
| 3384 |
Maybe she really couldn't face going back to her life, although he knew that she felt she had to. But even last night she had told him that she didn't think she could do it for much longer. Peter began pacing around his room as he thought about her, and a few minutes later, he knew what he had to do. |
| 3385 |
Peter didn't waste time waiting for the elevator. He headed straight for the stairs, and ran up two flights to the floor where he knew they were staying. She had mentioned her room number the night before, and he saw instantly that there were police and secret service standing in the halls, conversing. |
| 3386 |
He was carrying his tie in his hand, and he wondered suddenly if Anderson Thatcher would see him. He didn't want to discuss this with anyone, and it was going to be embarrassing telling him that he had had coffee with his wife in Montmartre for six hours, but it seemed important to Peter to be honest with him. |
| 3387 |
And the haunted eyes which stared back at him begged him not to betray her. They interviewed an expert on depression after that, and talked about the kind of crazy things people did when they lost hope, and they suspected Olivia Thatcher had when her son died. And Peter wanted to throw something at them. |
| 3388 |
They told him they'd have everything ready for him in an hour, and he should come to the front door and pick up the car, and the maps would be in it. It was just after seven then, and at eight o'clock, when he went downstairs, a new Renault was waiting for him, with a stack of maps on the front seat. |
| 3389 |
And the doorman very obligingly explained to him how to get out of Paris. He had no bags with him, no luggage at all. All he'd brought was an apple, a bottle of Evian water, and his toothbrush in his pocket. And as he got behind the wheel of the car, it had a little bit of the flavor of a wild goose chase. |
| 3390 |
He wasn't sure why, but he felt as though he was doing the right thing for her. And for the first time in days, he felt free of all his encumbrances and all his worries. There was something about getting in a car and driving hard through the night that made him feel he had left all his troubles behind. |
| 3391 |
As he sat up and stretched, he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror and laughed. He looked a mess, definitely enough to frighten small children. He combed his hair, and brushed his teeth with the last of the Evian, and looked as respectable as he could as he got out of the car to begin his search. |
| 3392 |
The fishing boats were already out, small tugs and little sailboats were still in port, and there were clumps of old people huddled in groups, discussing the state of things, as the younger men continued their fishing. The sun was high in the sky by then, and as Peter looked around, he decided she'd been right. |
| 3393 |
It was the perfect place to escape to, peaceful, beautiful, and there was something about it that was very rare and warm, like an embrace from an old friend. And near the port was a long sandy beach. He finished his pain au chocolat, and began to walk slowly along the sand, wishing he had a cup of coffee. |
| 3394 |
She was barefoot, in T shirt and shorts, she was small and slim and her dark hair was blowing in the breeze as she looked up at him and smiled, and he could only stare. It was as it was meant to be. So effortless, so simple. She was there, smiling at him from across the beach, as though she'd been waiting for him. |
| 3395 |
In her mind, there was nothing left to go back to. She had discovered that the night before when she put her key in the door of the suite, and found she just couldn't turn it. She couldn't go back in. She would have done anything she had to, to escape him And in turn she meant nothing to him anymore. |
| 3396 |
I just can't do that. And I don't see why I should have to. I don't want to end up like my mother. She drinks too much, she gets migraines, she has nightmares, she lives in constant terror of the press, her hands shake all the time. And she's always terrified of creating a situation that will embarrass my father. |
| 3397 |
She's a mess and she has been for years. But she looks great. She's had her eyes done and her face lifted, and she covers up how scared she is. And Daddy drags her out for every single meeting, lecture, campaign speech, and rally. If she were honest, she'd admit that she hates him for it, but she'd never do that. |
| 3398 |
But at least you have a life with her, as flawed as it may be. She's there, she talks to you, she cares in her own way, even if she is limited, or too attached to her father. But she must have loyalty to you too, and to your children. You have a life together, Peter, even if it is less than perfect. |
| 3399 |
And my father always supports him. It's nice for them, rotten for the rest of us. And my father thinks Andy should run for president. I don't suppose my defection would be viewed with approval. It's bound to hurt his chances, or knock him out of the race completely. A divorced president is unthinkable. |
| 3400 |
As complicated as his own life was, particularly with Vicotec blowing in the wind, it was certainly a lot simpler than hers was. At least his life was private. But her every move was scrutinized. And no one in his family had the remotest intention of running for public office, except Katie for the school board. |
| 3401 |
There was no one there to see anything, to care what they did, or take photographs, or stop them. All they had were their consciences and the obstacles they'd brought along with them, which lay like debris from the sea, washed up on the beach all around them. Their children, their mates, their memories, their lives. |
| 3402 |
It was a lot more exciting than swimming in the Ritz pool had been. He hadn't even known her then, and she had tantalized him as she swam by him. But here, she swam very close to him, and he could hardly bear it. She said swimming in the ocean frightened her, she had never liked sailing for that reason. |
| 3403 |
He talked about how out of place he had always felt at home, and how much more he had wanted, and how lucky he had been when he found Katie. She asked about his family, and he told her about his parents and his sister. He told her of his mother and sister dying of cancer, and why Vicotec meant so much to him. |
| 3404 |
I don't know why, maybe he wanted to put it all behind him. He didn't call and tell me where they were till he and his new wife needed money. I think they had a couple of more kids by then. And I let Katie tell me that it had been too long, that they probably didn't give a damn, and the kids didn't know me. |
| 3405 |
He really was too tired to undertake the drive that night, and preferred to do it after a good night's sleep, the following morning. But when they went to rent the other single remaining room at her hotel, they found that it had already been rented. There were only four rooms in all, and she had the best one. |
| 3406 |
She didn't seem like the same person anymore. She was his friend, and the woman he was falling in love with. And there was something very sweet about the way they felt about each other physically and emotionally, and in spite of the opportunity, refused to indulge it. It was wonderfully romantic and old fashioned. |
| 3407 |
Olivia was as good as her word when they got to her room. She handed all the pillows to him and one of the blankets, and helped him make an awkward bed on the carpet next to her side of the bed. He slept in his jeans and T shirt and bare feet, and she changed into her nightgown in the tiny bathroom. |
| 3408 |
He was on his knees by then, and she was still on the bed, and suddenly his hands began to explore her breasts beneath her nightgown. She moaned softly at his touch, and wanted to remind him of their mutual promises, but in a single instant she forgot them, and reached out to him and pulled him toward her. |
| 3409 |
They lay there together for a long time, kissing each other and forgetting themselves and discovering things about each other that they had promised not to explore. As Peter kissed her, he wanted to devour her, to just swallow her whole, until she was a part of him, and he could keep her near him forever. |
| 3410 |
He knew he couldn't make any promises. He still had a life with Kate, and only an hour before, Olivia had said she understood that. She didn't want to take anything away from him. All she wanted was to cherish what they had shared for the past two days. It was more than some people had in a lifetime. |
| 3411 |
He wanted more than either of them had a right to. He pulled her close to him, as they stood looking out to sea for a last time, and told her how much he loved her. She told him the same thing, and then they kissed again, and then finally got into his rented car to begin the long drive back to Paris. |
| 3412 |
She left nothing with him, except her heart, and she looked at him for a last time, and he kissed her again, and then she ran across the square, with tears streaming down her cheeks when she left him. He sat there for a long time, thinking of her, and watching the entrance to the hotel where he had last seen her. |
| 3413 |
He couldn't just let her down now. He had to go on as if nothing had happened. What had happened with Olivia had no past, no present, no future. It was simply a moment, a dream, an instant, a diamond they had found in the sand and held between them. But they both had other obligations which took precedence. |
| 3414 |
He was back to real life, to the things that mattered to him, his wife, his sons, his business. And somewhere in the distance, receding into the mists, was the woman he had found but could never have, the woman he was so desperately in love with. He stood at his balcony as the sun came up, thinking about her. |
| 3415 |
And Olivia had gone back to her husband. It was hard to believe how miserable he felt as he stood in the shower, thinking of her, and forcing his mind back repeatedly to the business he had to deal with that morning. He called Suchard precisely at nine, and Paul Louis refused to tell him what the results were. |
| 3416 |
Peter was annoyed that he wouldn't at least give him a summary of their results on the phone, and agreed to come to his office at ten thirty. He ordered coffee and croissants, but could eat none of it, and he left the hotel at ten, and arrived ten minutes early. Suchard was waiting for him, and his face was grim. |
| 3417 |
More reasonably, the process would take about two years, which was pretty much what Peter had suspected after their first conversation. Perhaps, if they put extra teams on it, they could get Vicotec on its feet in less than a year, which wasn't the end of the world, though it was certainly disappointing. |
| 3418 |
She hated things that upset her father. But even she would have to understand this time. No one wanted a series of tragedies, or even one, they could not afford to let that happen. Peter closed his bags back at the hotel, and as he waited the last ten minutes for the car, he flipped on the news. And there she was. |
| 3419 |
King Khaled had gone to London after the bomb scare. There seemed to be a whole flock of new arrivals checking in as Peter made his way past the desk, and there was a large group of men in suits with walkie talkies and earpieces as he stepped through the revolving door, and then he saw her in the distance. |
| 3420 |
He had been furious with her at first, over the stir she'd caused, but within an hour of her safe return, he concluded that her disappearance was a bonus to him. He and his managers had worked out a series of possibilities, all of them designed to arouse sympathy, particularly in light of his current plans. |
| 3421 |
This had gone on for longer than in the past, but he had never truly had a sense that she was in danger. He knew she'd turn up eventually, he just hoped she didn't do anything stupid in the meantime. And he told her just what he thought of it before they left for the embassy, and told her what was expected of her now. |
| 3422 |
He always let her down. He hadn't been there for her in years now. And it was even more difficult now not to compare him to Peter. Peter was all she could think of, and when they left for the embassy a little while later, it almost broke her heart when she saw him. She had been afraid to make any sign to him. |
| 3423 |
They were probably suspicious of the concocted story too, and every little tidbit they could ferret out would please them. She was lost in her own thoughts, the whole time they were at the embassy. And Andy didn't ask her to join him for lunch afterwards. He had a longstanding appointment with a French politician. |
| 3424 |
Two of his assistants were with him, but when he saw her face, and how serious she was, he rapidly dismissed them. He had only seen her look that way once or twice, when his brother died, and when Alex did. The rest of the time she always seemed withdrawn from him, and removed from the world he lived in. |
| 3425 |
Who was this man she had once believed in? How could she have been so wrong about him? Listening to him, she wondered if he'd ever been human, yet deep in her heart, she knew he had been, way, way at the beginning. It was because of the person he once had been, and not the one he was now, that she stayed and listened. |
| 3426 |
I just keep wondering how we got here. I keep remembering back to the beginning. I think you were in love with me then, and I can never quite figure out what happened. I remember the events, like newsreels that I replay in my head, but I can never quite figure out the exact moment when it all went sour. |
| 3427 |
But she wouldn't have given up the two years of Alex's life for anything. But even that didn't make her want another child now. She realized, as she looked at him, that she had to put Andy out of his misery. Waiting for her to finish what she had to say, he was dying. And she decided to do it quickly. |
| 3428 |
And if you lose this time, all bets are off, and I'm gone the day after the election. And there's to be no pretense anymore. I'll pose for all the pictures you want, and go on the campaign trail, but you and I are no longer married. No one else has to know, but I want it clearly understood between us. |
| 3429 |
It was two o'clock in the morning for him, but he hadn't been home all week, and he felt more than a little guilty. He tried to kiss Kate hello once he had the apron on, but he was surprised by how cool she was, and wondered if she suspected something about Paris. The telepathy of the female race amazed him. |
| 3430 |
He remembered another room, another day, a different woman. It was hard to believe it was only two days before. It might as well have been a lifetime. And as he lay in bed, thinking of her, Katie came in and told him they were playing golf that afternoon, with her father. Olivia was gone, the dream was done. |
| 3431 |
And Peter always liked it when the boys were around, though this year they seemed to spend less and less time with their parents. Mike had a driver's license now, and he drove Paul everywhere, which lightened the load on them and also meant they didn't see them. Even Patrick seemed to spend very little time with them. |
| 3432 |
He didn't like doing it, but it wasn't worth fighting over, and it was prestigious for the firm for Peter to be seen there, He just didn't like having to defend the high prices they, and others in the industry, charged for products they didn't have to. But as Frank pointed out, they were in the business for profit. |
| 3433 |
It was a great opportunity to get a lot of work done. But it wasn't only work he had on his mind at the end of June. He had seen the announcement two weeks before that Andy Thatcher would be running for president, first in the primaries, and if he won them, in the national elections a year from November. |
| 3434 |
But they had agreed not to call each other, and as hard as it was, Peter stuck by it. And he decided that her regular appearances at Andy's side in the political arena clearly meant that she had decided not to leave him. He wondered how she felt about it, and if Andy had somehow manipulated that decision. |
| 3435 |
And even when he went to the Vineyard with them for the Fourth of July, everything irked him. He felt out of step with their friends, out of synch with her, and even here he felt as though he hardly saw the boys. It was as though, without even realizing it, everything had changed, and his life with her was over. |
| 3436 |
He wondered too if he was somehow forcing things to a showdown with her, without realizing it, as though to justify what he'd done with Olivia in the south of France. Doing that in a defunct marriage would have been more understandable, more easily forgivable, but doing it in a live one was more difficult to live with. |
| 3437 |
It had always been a good place for her and Peter too. Although this summer everything seemed slightly different. There was a lot of pressure on him, with the research being conducted on Vicotec, and all she could do was hope that it would go well and they'd get the results Peter and her father wanted. |
| 3438 |
She had lots of friends to see, gardening to do, and she was spending a lot of time at her father's place, helping him renovate, and deciding whether or not to remodel his summer kitchen. She helped him entertain his friends, and organized several dinner parties for him, which she and Peter attended. |
| 3439 |
They had been caught in a storm in treacherous waters just outside Gloucester, in Andy's hundred and ten foot sailboat. And in spite of its size and alleged stability, they had hit some rocks in a storm, and the boat had sunk in barely more than ten minutes. There had been roughly a dozen people aboard. |
| 3440 |
The boat was computerized and Thatcher had been sailing it himself with the help of only a single deckhand, and some friends. For the moment, several passengers were missing, but the senator himself had survived. His wife had been aboard, and her brother the junior congressman from Boston, Edwin Douglas. |
| 3441 |
The reporters were camped outside her parents' house in Boston as well, and they showed a few minutes of coverage of her grief stricken brother leaving the hospital, having just lost his wife and children. It was painful beyond words just seeing him, and Peter felt tears rolling down his cheeks as he watched him. |
| 3442 |
But her father had too. From what she could see, Vicotec had been disastrous for both of them, and she was sorry they had ever decided to develop it. It wasn't worth the price that any of them were paying. Katie looked down at Peter then, and she thought his eyes looked damp. She had no idea what he'd been doing. |
| 3443 |
He wanted to go to her now and open them, and kiss her again. He wanted to be there for her. And when he saw Andy on TV again, he wanted to strangle him for not being with her. He was talking about everything they'd done, how quickly the storm had come up, how tragic it had been that the children couldn't be saved. |
| 3444 |
And the next morning, Peter called the hospital again, but they wouldn't let him talk to her. He kept leaving false names, and this time said he was a cousin from Boston. There was no way of even sending a coded message to her, because he had no way of knowing who might intercept it. But she was alive, and doing well. |
| 3445 |
The nurses didn't think she should watch, but she had insisted. They were her family, and she couldn't be there, but later when she saw Andy give an interview about how brave they had all been, and what a hero he was, she wanted to kill him. And afterwards, he didn't even bother to call her to tell her how Edwin was. |
| 3446 |
The children were so young, and her sister in law had been pregnant again, although no one knew it. And in Olivia's eyes, she herself had nothing to live for. She was living an empty life, as the puppet of an egotist. It wouldn't have mattered to anyone if either of them had died, except maybe her parents. |
| 3447 |
Especially here, in the hospital. She had so much to think about, there was so much about her life now that she hated. She had promised Andy to stick by him, but it was costing her everything she had to fulfill her promise. And suddenly all she could think of was how brief and unpredictable life was, and how precious. |
| 3448 |
She disappeared under the sheets immediately, and a nurse escorted them off the floor, but Andy attracted press like blood attracted sharks, and Olivia was the little fish they wanted to feed on. But Andy had a great idea. He had arranged a press conference for her at the hospital the next day, right outside her room. |
| 3449 |
She wouldn't see the hairdresser, or the makeup man, and she never came out of her room in the wheelchair. The press thought they were playing games with them, and Andy held a press conference in the lobby without her. He explained about the trauma she'd been through, and the guilt of being one of the few survivors. |
| 3450 |
But he had needed to prove to them that she was alive and well, and that she hadn't snapped, as they were beginning to suspect, since she seemed to them to be hiding. What she was trying to preserve was her dignity, but Andy couldn't have cared less. What he was protecting was his political survival. |
| 3451 |
The abandoned look in her eyes tore his heart out. She had a hospital nightgown on, and she had intravenous tubes in both arms, and one of the reporters said she was still suffering from pneumonia. It was a dramatic glimpse of her, and sure to arouse a lot of sympathy, which was exactly what her husband had wanted. |
| 3452 |
And he did it again, when she found a fleet of reporters waiting for her in the hospital lobby when she left Addison Gilbert. Andy was the only one who knew when she was getting out, he was the only one who could have told them. And they appeared at her parents' house too, and this time her father put his foot down. |
| 3453 |
And she could see now that it had already taken something from her daughter. One paid dearly for winning, or even losing, elections. And then Olivia looked at her quietly, and wondered what her mother would say if she told her the truth. She had been thinking for days. And she knew what she had to do now. |
| 3454 |
It's too late now. It drove me to drink, it ruined my health, it destroyed our marriage, it kept me from doing everything I wanted to do, it hurt our family and made life hard for all of you. Olivia, if this isn't what you want, if you yourself don't want this desperately, get out now, while you still can. |
| 3455 |
He was grief stricken and subdued, but at least she made him laugh once or twice, and he kept up with what was happening in Washington by phone and fax every day. It was incredible to Olivia that he could even think about that now, but even in the face of such a major loss, he was still very much like their father. |
| 3456 |
It said that her husband was deeply worried about her, and although the article didn't actually come out and say it, there was the hint of an estrangement, because of her mental state. And the article was entirely slanted to sympathize with Andy for being saddled with a nutcase. He was covering his tracks nicely. |
| 3457 |
Janet Douglas put her daughter on the plane, and stood there until the plane took off. She wanted to be sure that she was safe, and truly gone. Olivia had escaped a fate worse than death as far as her mother was concerned, and she was relieved as she saw the plane swoop slowly overhead, on its way to Paris. |
| 3458 |
There was too much pain waiting for her here, too many memories, too many rotten, selfish men waiting to hurt her. Her mother was happy knowing she had gone back to France. And as the plane flew out of sight, Janet signalled to her bodyguards, and walked slowly out of the airport with a sigh. Olivia was safe now. |
| 3459 |
She had asked Peter repeatedly to go easy on him. Her father had been worked up about it all summer, and at his age, it wasn't good for him. Although even Kate had to admit that her father looked better than ever. At seventy, he still played tennis for an hour every day, and he swam a mile every morning. |
| 3460 |
The worries about Vicotec had put a damper on things to be sure, and Frank's constant pressuring hadn't helped, but neither had Katie's constant clandestine involvement in what should never have been her business. She was too involved with what happened between them, too concerned about protecting her father. |
| 3461 |
He had been so determined to come back and pick up where he had left off, but that just didn't happen. It was like opening a window and seeing a view, and then boarding up the house again. He kept standing in the same place, staring at a blank wall, and remembering what had been there, even if only briefly. |
| 3462 |
They didn't seem to do anything together anymore, except see their friends at night occasionally, and play tennis with her father. He wanted more than that. He was forty four years old, and suddenly he wanted romance. He wanted contact with her, he wanted comfort, and friendship, and even some excitement. |
| 3463 |
Even here, we're hounded constantly by the fax machine, or at least I am, it's like being in the office, with sand. I'd just like to go away with you somewhere, where there are no distractions and we can talk, and remind ourselves of what it was we were crazy about when we first met, or when we got married. |
| 3464 |
But he had gotten nowhere, which was small consolation. She had no idea what he was talking about, and the only thing she could focus on was her father, and the hearings. Frank mentioned them to him again at the party. It was like listening to a broken record, and Peter did his best to change the subject. |
| 3465 |
As soon as Peter could, he walked away from him, and a little while later he saw Frank talking to Katie. He could guess what about, and it depressed him watching them. It was obvious to him she was not discussing their proposed vacation. And he knew without a doubt that that little plan would never come to fruition. |
| 3466 |
He had everything planned, and everything worked out already. And he talked about it all the way back to New York, which left Peter feeling left out, and somehow lonely. It was strange, he'd been one of them for eighteen years, and yet sometimes he still felt like an outsider, even with his own kids now. |
| 3467 |
And he knew she still did, just as he loved her. He would always love her. She would live in his heart, and his memories, forever. He read the postcard again, thinking about it. She was so much stronger than she knew. It was leaving that had taken the real courage, not staying, as he had. He admired her. |
| 3468 |
The two men had scheduled a meeting to discuss them at length on Friday, and they met in the conference room next to Frank's office at two o'clock. Frank was waiting for him with a stern expression, already anticipating what Peter would tell him. And they wasted no time on chitchat, except to talk about Mike. |
| 3469 |
Every drug has its risks, its side effects, its downside. If we weren't willing to live with that, we'd have to close our doors and start selling cotton candy at the state fair. For chrissake, Peter, stop busting my chops on this, be sensible. I want you to understand I am going to override you on this. |
| 3470 |
He was red in the face, and agitated, and his voice had gotten louder and louder as they sat in the conference room, and as Peter watched him, he suddenly saw that Frank was shaking. Frank was in a complete state over it, he was perspiring, and gray, and he stopped for a moment and had a sip of water. |
| 3471 |
We have to treat this clinically, and address it calmly. It's a product, Frank, that's all it is. I want it more than anyone, but in the end, it'll either work, or it won't, or it may work, but maybe it'll just take longer than we wanted to get it ready. Nobody wants to get it on the market more than I do. |
| 3472 |
And he knew, just as the paramedics came, that no matter what happened afterwards, it would be impossible to forget, or forgive him. These were not just affronts conjured up in a fit of rage, these were deep, ugly weapons that he had been hiding for years, concealing from him, and keeping to use on him one day. |
| 3473 |
He kept a clean shirt in a drawer, but the rest of him was a mess. Even his shoes were covered with what Frank had vomited on him. But even more than that, Peter still felt covered by the ooze of what he'd said to him just before that. The viciousness that he had hurled at him was so vile it had almost killed him. |
| 3474 |
He reassured them as best he could, and when Mike asked, he said only that they'd been having a business meeting when it happened. Mike wanted to go into town to see his grandfather, but Peter thought it was better to wait. When Frank was feeling up to it, his oldest grandson could come in to see him from Princeton. |
| 3475 |
She said there was no change, although she thought he looked worse than he had a few hours before, but the nurse taking care of him had said that was to be expected. Peter got back to the hospital at ten, and stayed with her till after midnight, and then he went back to Greenwich to be with the boys. |
| 3476 |
Frank looked extremely pleased, and a little while later, Kate gently helped him lie down again for a nap, and she and Peter walked out into the hallway. But she didn't look nearly as animated as she had when she was spooning soup into her father. And Peter knew instantly that something had happened. |
| 3477 |
Peter was taking care of him, cooking dinner for him every night, and he really was no trouble. The two older boys were away at school, and they had already heard from Mike several times. He was crazy about Princeton. It was exactly two weeks after his heart attack that Frank brought up the hearings again. |
| 3478 |
It was premature, and it was dangerous. With approval for early clinical trials, they could administer it to humans immediately, and he didn't trust his father in law not to do that. It didn't matter to Peter that the clinical trials would involve extremely low doses of Vicotec used on a very small number of people. |
| 3479 |
The night before he went to Washington was a nightmare for Peter. He still couldn't believe what he had agreed to do for them. But Kate had been obviously grateful to him ever since he'd agreed, and her father had actually improved by leaps and bounds, and he was overflowing with warmth and praise for Peter. |
| 3480 |
It looked good actually, except for one little blip that coordinated perfectly with some of the things Suchard had said in June, but Peter was entirely sure what the latest blip meant. According to the researchers, it dealt with a relatively minor issue, and Peter didn't even bother to call Frank about it. |
| 3481 |
Katie was asleep in the bed next to him. She wasn't staying at her father's anymore, and she was actually coming to Washington with him and had bought a new suit for it. She and her father were so pleased that he'd capitulated that they'd both been in high spirits ever since he'd agreed to go to Washington for them. |
| 3482 |
He wondered if he had the number at home and then he found it. It was ten o'clock in the morning in Paris, and with any luck at all he'd be there. He asked for him by name as soon as the switchboard answered. The phone beeped twice, with the sound of a friendly robot, and then the familiar voice was on the phone. |
| 3483 |
At this stage, there is not necessarily a clear cut interpretation. It is a good thing, of course. It is a wonderful product which will change our ability to cope with cancer. But there are additional elements that must be evaluated. It is that evaluation which is so difficult to give you. Nothing is sure in life. |
| 3484 |
He could also go to the hearings, and then resign from Wilson Donovan, but that wouldn't protect the people he had tried to help and was being forced to put at risk now. The trouble was he didn't trust Frank to cancel its human trials, if their lab reports didn't improve radically in the immediate future. |
| 3485 |
There was too much money to be made here, no matter what the risk to human life. The temptation was too great now. Katie heard him stirring a little while later, and she came out to the kitchen before the alarm went off. She found Peter at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, drinking his second cup of coffee. |
| 3486 |
Kate called her father from the plane and assured him that all was going along on schedule. And in Washington, they were met by a limousine, which took them to Congress. And as soon as they got there, Peter felt much calmer. He knew what he was going to say to them more or less, and he wasn't really worried. |
| 3487 |
This time was entirely different. Peter was led to a witness table, and sworn in. The members of the subcommittee sat across from him, with microphones, and after he gave his name, and the name of his company, the questions began without further ado, as the members of Congress listened with interest. |
| 3488 |
Mothers could administer it to children, husbands to wives, or with care, one could administer it to oneself. It was going to revolutionalize the care of all patients with cancer. It was going to make the common man able to treat himself or his family, in rural or urban areas, anywhere that it was needed. |
| 3489 |
He had failed, he had not upheld the party line, promising to keep Vicotec, and all their other drugs, as expensive as possible, so they could make a huge profit on them, and please her father. He was glad he had said what he had, and he was going to fight like a dog in the next months, to keep Vicotec's price down. |
| 3490 |
Peter's palms were damp as he walked into the hearing room, and he was too nervous to notice the people attending the hearing. He said not a word to Katie as she left him and took her seat. In fact, he forgot all about her. He had important work to do, he had ideals to sacrifice, and principles to relinquish. |
| 3491 |
But at least he knew what he had to do now. And it would be over soon. He hoped that his betrayal of the very people he had hoped to help would take only a few minutes, though he feared it might take considerably longer. He felt his hands shake as he waited for the advisory committee to begin asking him questions. |
| 3492 |
But he kept telling himself that all he had to do was get through it. He couldn't allow himself to think of anyone, not Kate, not Frank, not Suchard, not even the reports he had read. He had to stand up and speak about Vicotec, and he knew everything about it, as he sat, waiting nervously at the long narrow table. |
| 3493 |
But most of all, not for himself. And he knew without a moment's doubt, that he should never have come here. Whatever it cost him, whatever they said, whatever the Donovans took from him or did to him now, he knew he could not do it. He could not lie to these people about Vicotec, or about anything. |
| 3494 |
He walked out of the room on legs that were trembling, but his back was straight, his head was held high, and he felt like a decent human being. It was the only thing left to him now and he knew that. He saw Kate waiting for him in the distance, and he walked over to her. He couldn't imagine that she'd forgive him. |
| 3495 |
Kate had just disappeared in the limo, leaving him stranded in Maryland, half an hour from Washington. But he didn't care. Not at all. It was one of the most important days of his life, and he felt as though he could fly now. He had been put to the test, and in his own mind, he had passed with flying colors. |
| 3496 |
Her brother had told her where the hearings would be, and arranged for her to attend them. And she was grateful now that she had followed her instincts. Edwin had told her about the congressional hearings too, and she had seen Peter in Congress that morning. She had been sitting quietly next to Edwin. |
| 3497 |
She had given up everything, walked out on all of it, and compromised nothing. And then suddenly he realized that he had just done the same thing. He had given up his wife, his job, everything, for what he believed in. They were both free now. At a huge price, admittedly, but to both of them it had been worth it. |
| 3498 |
We just assumed she had always been there, part of our lives, just as she was. As one does about old people, we assumed she had always been old. None of us really knew anything about her, and what lingered in my head were the unanswered questions. All I could ask myself now was why I had never thought to ask her. |
| 3499 |
She had died ten days before, at ninety. When my mother died at fifty four, I was sorry, and knew I would miss her. I would miss the stability she represented to me, the reliability, the place to come home to. My father married her best friend the year after she died, and even that didn't particularly shock me. |
| 3500 |
Reasonable to him, but not to me. I felt cheated to have lost her, even at ninety. Even at ninety, she was still pretty. She wore her long, straight white hair in a braid down her back, as she always had, and wrapped it tightly in a bun for important occasions. All her life she had worn her hair that way. |
| 3501 |
Unlike her mother, she didn't have much whimsy. Dancing was not part of my life as a child, nor music. The magic and the mystery, the grace and art, the curiosity about a broader world than mine, was brought to me by Granny Dan as I sat listening to her for hours in her kitchen. She always wore black. |
| 3502 |
He had no children and hadn't remarried, and Granny Dan always said he'd been very lonely when she met him, and very kind to her, but she never explained it. She must have been beautiful then, and in spite of himself, he must have been dazzled by her. They were married sixteen months after they met. |
| 3503 |
And she let us believe that, for all the years we knew her. In turn, we allowed her to forget about it, or forced her to, and we made her be the person it was comfortable for us to think she was. In my eyes, she had never been young. In my mother's, she had never been beautiful and glamorous and a ballerina. |
| 3504 |
It was from the nursing home where Granny Dan had spent her last year. I had already picked up all her things, when I stopped by, to thank them after the service. Most of her things had been well worn, and there had been very little worth keeping, just a lot of pictures of the kids, and a small stack of books. |
| 3505 |
He'd never been particularly generous with her, in terms of gifts or trinkets, although he had provided well for her. There was an old lace bed jacket that I had brought home with me too, and slipped into the back of my closet. But everything else was donated. So now I couldn't imagine what they had sent me. |
| 3506 |
They were her toe shoes. Just as I had seen them years before in her attic. The last pair she had worn before leaving Russia. There were other things in the box as well, a gold locket with a man's photograph in it. He had a well trimmed beard and a mustache, and in a serious, old fashioned way, he looked very handsome. |
| 3507 |
There was the program from her last Swan Lake, a photograph of a cluster of smiling ballerinas, and a young beauty at the center of them whose eyes and face had never changed in all the years since then. It was easy to see that it was Danina. She looked breath takingly beautiful and incredibly happy. |
| 3508 |
And I mused silently about the man who had written the letters to her, what he had been to her, and what had happened to him. But just from the careful way she had tied the bow, saved the letters for nearly a century, and took them to the nursing home with her, I knew without being able to read them. |
| 3509 |
He must have been important to her, and from all he had written to her, I guessed easily that he must have loved her dearly. She had had another life before she came to us, long before she came to me. A life so different from what we had seen of her, in Vermont, a life once filled with magic and excitement and glamor. |
| 3510 |
But knowing how close we had been, I hoped she wouldn't mind it. We had been kindred spirits. She had left behind a thousand memories for me, of times we had shared, things we had done, legends and fairy tales she had told me. Perhaps along with the legends, she would not mind sharing this part of her story with me. |
| 3511 |
Her father was an officer in the Litovsky Regiment, and she had four brothers. They were tall and handsome and wore uniforms, and brought her sweets when they came home to visit. The youngest of them was twelve years older than she was. And when they were at home, they sang and played with her, and made lots of noise. |
| 3512 |
What Danina remembered of her mother was that she had a lovely face and gentle ways, she wore a perfume that smelled of lilac, and she would sing Danina to sleep at night, after telling her long, wonderful stories about when she was a little girl herself. She used to laugh a lot, and Danina loved her. |
| 3513 |
Her father had absolutely no idea what to do about her. He wasn't equipped to take care of a child, particularly one so young, and a girl child. He and his sons were in the army, so he hired a woman to take care of her, a string of them, but after two years, he knew he simply couldn't do it anymore. |
| 3514 |
She was an unusually graceful little girl. Danina's father and two of her brothers took her to St. Petersburg in April, after she turned seven. There was still snow on the ground, and as she stood looking up at her new home, her entire body trembled. She was terrified and she didn't want them to leave her there. |
| 3515 |
He had told her it was a great gift to her, an opportunity that would change her life, and she would be a great ballerina one day, and be happy she had gone there. But on that fateful day, she could imagine none of it. All she could think of was not the life she was gaining, but the cherished one she had lost. |
| 3516 |
All three men kissed her, as tears streamed from Danina's eyes. And a moment later, they left her alone in the office with the woman who would now rule her life. There was a long silence in the room after they left, as neither teacher nor child spoke, and the only sound between them was Danina's stifled sobs. |
| 3517 |
The teacher signaled her class to stop, and Madame Markova introduced Danina and explained that she had come from Moscow to live at the school with the others. Now she would be the youngest student, and the most childlike. The others had a strict, disciplined quality that made them seem older than they were. |
| 3518 |
It was like having many sisters, instead of only brothers, she thought suddenly. And when they took her to see her place in the dormitory after lunch, she felt like one of them when they showed her her bed. It was small and hard and narrow. She went to sleep that night thinking of her father and her brothers. |
| 3519 |
They made it all sound so exciting that Danina listened to them intently and forgot her miseries, until at last she fell asleep while they were still talking to her about how happy she would be there. And in the morning, they woke her at five o'clock with the others, and gave her her first leotard and ballet shoes. |
| 3520 |
She saw immediately that the little bird that had flown to them from Moscow was a remarkably graceful child with the perfect body for a dancer. She was perfect for the life her father had chosen for her. And it was clear to Madame Markova, and her other teachers, in a short time, that destiny had brought her here. |
| 3521 |
Madame Markova knew that she lacked maturity in some ways, she had seen so little of the world, knew nothing of life, yet her technique and her style were so extraordinary that they took one's breath away, and put her far above the others. The Czarina was well aware of her by then, as were her daughters. |
| 3522 |
In May, she was invited to dance for them at their villa on the Peterhof estate, and dined with the family in their private quarters, with Madame Markova and several stars of the ballet in attendance. It was a treat for her, beyond any she had known, and a tribute that meant more to her than any other. |
| 3523 |
It was not surprising that the Czarevitch loved her. He was delicate, and had been ill throughout his childhood. But despite his fragility, she teased him and treated him normally, and he loved it. He was a particularly wise, soulful child, and spoke longingly of what she did. She seemed so strong to him, so healthy. |
| 3524 |
It was an enormous honor, but even then, Danina was reluctant to do it. She couldn't bear the thought of abandoning her classes and rehearsals for seven days. She was conscientious to the point of being driven. Hers was a rigid, grueling, brutally demanding monastic life, which required everything of her. |
| 3525 |
With all her discipline and the agonizingly stern life she led, she had never had time to learn anything but dancing. It was on her fifth day there that Alexei fell ill again, after a small bump he had gotten on his leg while leaving the dinner table, and he was confined to his bed for the next two days. |
| 3526 |
Danina sat with him, telling him stories she remembered from her childhood with her father and brothers, and endless tales of the ballet, the rigorous discipline, and the other dancers. He listened to her for hours, until he fell asleep holding her hand, and she tiptoed slowly away to rejoin the others. |
| 3527 |
It had been a wonderful vacation, and an unforgettable time in her life that she knew she would remember forever. She would never forget playing with the Imperial family like ordinary friends, and the beauty of the setting, and Alexei trying to teach her to swim, while explaining it to her from a deck chair. |
| 3528 |
He wrote to her once at the ballet, a little note, telling her that he missed her. It was obvious that although he was only nine, he had a crush on her. His mother acknowledged it to a friend, with genteel amusement. Alexei was having his first affair with a ballet dancer, at nine, and she was a beauty. |
| 3529 |
There was never the slightest element of disappointment in her performance, it was everything it should have been, and more. What she brought to the stage was precisely what Madame Markova had sensed she might, years before. And she had the kind of single minded dedication and purpose that was essential. |
| 3530 |
She lived and breathed and worked and existed only for dancing. She was the perfect dancer, unlike some of the others, whom Madame Markova viewed with disdain. Despite their impeccable training and whatever talent they had, too often they allowed themselves to be distracted or lured away by men and romance. |
| 3531 |
Danina was far too ill, and much too weak. And just sitting up, with Madame Markova's powerful arms supporting her, she nearly fainted. She had never felt so ill in her life, but it no longer mattered to her. By that afternoon, when the doctor came, she knew she was going to die, and she didn't mind it. |
| 3532 |
It was as though Danina felt that if she didn't dance, she might well die. The ballet was her life force. The doctor returned to see her again that morning, he applied several poultices, and gave her several drops of a bitter tasting liquid to drink, but to no avail. By late that afternoon, she was much worse. |
| 3533 |
He sat with them for a while, and took her temperature again. It had risen slightly, and Madame Markova was already applying the cool cloths he had recommended. The students were bringing them to her, and keeping them damp and cool, but she would not let them in the room with her, for fear that they would get it. |
| 3534 |
But by the time he came back with the person they sent, it might be too late for Danina. He lived beyond Tsarkoe Selo, with his wife and two children. He was still young, in his late thirties, but extremely responsible, capable and compassionate, which was why he had been entrusted with the care of the Czarevitch. |
| 3535 |
He would have liked to ease the end for her, but there was nothing he could do, except be there. He took her hand in his own, after taking her pulse again, and just stroked it gently, watching her, seeing the lovely young face so ill and so tormented. It hurt him to see it, and to be of so little use to her. |
| 3536 |
And he gently touched her forehead with his hand. She stirred again and said something. She sounded as though she were saying something to a friend, or one of her brothers. And then she said a single word and opened her eyes and looked at him. He had seen it a hundred times, it was a last surge of life before the end. |
| 3537 |
She only took one sip, but it was a vast improvement. And as he set the glass down on the table next to her, Madame Markova woke with a start, afraid that something terrible had happened while she was sleeping. But instead, she saw Danina looking weak but alive again, smiling wanly up at the doctor. |
| 3538 |
At least go for a month, and we will see how you feel then. If you hate being there, you can always come back and continue convalescing here. But at least go for a month, you can always stay longer if you want to, since they have been kind enough to invite you. And I promise I will come and visit you. |
| 3539 |
It was warm and comfortable and filled with furs and heavy blankets. The Czarina had spared nothing for her. And Dr. Obrajensky had come to accompany her. But before he came, he had checked everything for her in the guest house, which was warm and comfortable, and he knew she would be very happy in it. |
| 3540 |
He was slowly opening a door to a world she had never known or dreamed of, a world of intellectual pursuits and cerebral interests. Only that morning, she had begun reading one of the novels he had left her. And over lunch, they discussed it. Like the poetry he had brought, it was among his favorites. |
| 3541 |
He turned off the lights next to her, and walked quietly out of the room, and turned to look at her from the doorway. Her eyes were already closed, and by the time he left the little house, she was sleeping. And she slept peacefully until dinner. When she woke up she found a drawing next to her bed. |
| 3542 |
And he felt particularly comfortable with her, as she was the same age as his sisters. She had soup for dinner that night, and she was sipping tea when Dr. Obrajensky came back to see her on his way home from the Alexander Palace. He seemed to be in a lighthearted mood, and told her all about his dinner. |
| 3543 |
And her conversations with him were a new experience for her as well. Other than the boys she danced with at the ballet, she had never had men friends, been courted by anyone, or had a romance. Her only relationship with men had been with her brothers as a child, and now she seldom saw them anymore. |
| 3544 |
They were deeply involved with their responsibilities to the army. But with Nikolai Obrajensky, it was all so different. He was becoming her friend, someone she could really talk to. She said so now, and he looked pleased to hear it. He loved talking to her, sharing his books and his views and the poetry he loved. |
| 3545 |
She had nothing to say to him most of the time. They had gone through a hard patch for a while, a few years before, when she wanted to go back to England. Or at least send their sons to school there. But he had objected to it. He wanted them close to him, where he could see them. But now she wasn't even angry about it. |
| 3546 |
She was cool and aloof, and indifferent in many ways. And he was warm and open. She was bored by the life he led, and in angry moments called him the Czar's lapdog. And Nikolai was sick to death of her complaining about it. It was easy to understand why she had no friends here, she was so cold and so jealous. |
| 3547 |
Even their sons were tired of her complaints. All she really wanted was to go back to England. And she expected him to drop everything, all his responsibilities here, and come with her, which wasn't even remotely likely. If she ever went back permanently, he had warned her, she would have to do so without him. |
| 3548 |
Living in Russia had not improved her disposition. Marie had been pretty once, and interested in things. They had shared a lot of common views and interests. She had been fascinated by medicine, and his career. But she resented his position in the Imperial family, and she seemed to resent a lot of things about him. |
| 3549 |
He seemed to be trapped in a difficult situation, and she couldn't help wondering if there was anything he could do to improve it. Perhaps insist that his wife learn Russian, or travel back to England with her from time to time. It shocked her that she didn't seem to want to share his alliance with the Imperial family. |
| 3550 |
And then she found herself wondering if he was being unnecessarily gloomy about it. Maybe he was just tired, she thought to herself, as she lay in bed, thinking about him. The war was depressing everyone these days. Perhaps his comments about his wife were born of that, and other worries he hadn't mentioned. |
| 3551 |
And even if he had some complaints about his wife, surely it wasn't as bad as it sounded. To Danina, looking at the world through the tiniest of telescopes, from her small world at the ballet, it all seemed very simple to her, and marriage was sacred. She was sure he was happier with Marie than he appeared or admitted. |
| 3552 |
He had lent her volumes of poetry by then, and she had already read four of his favorite novels. And that afternoon when Alexei came to tea, Nikolai stayed and joined them. They played cards afterward, and Alexei won, much to his utter delight, and he squealed with glee when Danina accused him of cheating. |
| 3553 |
She'd had a letter from Madame Markova that afternoon, who had told her not to rush back to the ballet. But she still felt incredibly guilty not to be dancing. Madame Markova had given her all the news, and told her as well that one of the other girls had come down with influenza, but fortunately a mild case. |
| 3554 |
She'd been far luckier than Danina. The doctor lingered for a while, chatting with her, and then reluctantly left her for dinner at the palace. And as she sat quietly in bed, sipping her tea, she thought about him. He was a gentle man, with a warm, kind spirit, and she was grateful for his friendship. |
| 3555 |
Were it not for him, and his intercession for her, she would not even have been there, in the guest cottage of the Czar, living in luxury, being pampered by servants and nurses. It was extraordinary to think how kind they had all been, and how lucky she was not only to have survived, but to be there. |
| 3556 |
He didn't come to see her again that night, and she assumed it must have been late when they finished dinner. Or perhaps Alexei wasn't well, or Nikolai had simply needed to be attentive to the family he so diligently worked for. She lay in bed reading one of the books he'd given her, and stayed up late to finish it. |
| 3557 |
And now the prospect of the Czarina's little dinner party greatly intrigued her. He stayed for lunch with her that day, as he often did, and left her shortly afterward to tend to his duties at the palace, and as he so frequently did, he came back later that afternoon, and again once more after dinner. |
| 3558 |
It was a blue velvet dress, which showed her figure exceptionally well, and was trimmed in sable. It had a matching cape, and hat and muff, which would allow her to travel in the utmost warmth the short distance to the palace. And the night of the party itself, Danina was so excited she could hardly bear it. |
| 3559 |
She had stayed in bed all that afternoon, trying to regain her strength, and Nikolai came to the cottage for her while she was still dressing. He read one of the books of poetry he had shared with her, while he waited, and helped himself to a cup of steaming tea from the silver samovar on the table. |
| 3560 |
And listening to her now, he was oddly proud of her, as though she were his child, or something of his creating. He allowed her to stay for quite a while, and then finally, after eleven o'clock, when he saw her growing pale, and she seemed a trifle less animated, he decided that it was wisest to withdraw her. |
| 3561 |
It had been a very exciting first evening for her. And although she had loved every minute of it, she didn't argue with him. Though she hated to admit it to him, she was exhausted, and he could see it. But she was still smiling, as she leaned her head back and looked at the stars, as they rode back to the cottage. |
| 3562 |
She remembered all too clearly a lifetime of Madame Mar kova's dire warnings. Madame Mark ova had always told her she was different, that she didn't need a man, that she must remain pure, that she had to live for and grow through her art, her dancing had to come before anything else in her life, and it had till now. |
| 3563 |
A life with him would mean an eternity of happiness, but not if it cost him everything he held dear to have her. She couldn't let him do that. She knew she should go back to St. Petersburg, but she couldn't bear leaving him now. She couldn't think of not seeing him every day, any more than he could give up seeing her. |
| 3564 |
She had to sit down, and as she did, all she could think of were his lips on hers, and what she had felt when he had kissed her. But no matter what she felt for him now, she knew with her entire heart and soul that she could never have him. But at least, if she stayed, they could still see each other. |
| 3565 |
And it gave them both time to regain control of themselves, and try to forget what had happened. But without his visits, she paced uncomfortably around her small house, tried to sleep and found she couldn't, and by the end of the first day had a dreadful headache, and refused to take anything for it. |
| 3566 |
She wondered if he was angry at her, if he regretted what he had said and done, if he had been drunk and she didn't know it, if she would never see him again. She could bear burying their secret and never mentioning it again, but what she realized now with full force, was that she couldn't bear not seeing him. |
| 3567 |
But this time, he was not foolish enough to kiss her. He had taken her at her word two days before, and was determined not to cross that line again, unless she invited him to do so. And she herself made no move to kiss him. She went straight to the samovar, and poured him a cup of tea, and handed it to him. |
| 3568 |
She looked incredibly pretty in a pink wool dress that made her seem even younger than he remembered. She had looked very glamorous and very grown up in the blue velvet gown two nights before, and now she looked like a young girl, which more than ever made him want to kiss her. But this time, he knew he couldn't. |
| 3569 |
It was already hard to imagine leaving. They talked well into the afternoon, she returned some of his books to him, and he promised to come and see her again on his way home that evening, and everything seemed normal again when he left her. But he did not return that evening after all, and instead sent her a message. |
| 3570 |
Nikolai was growing less certain day by day that he could do it, but knew he had to do as she wished, for fear that if he didn't, he would lose her. He spoke at length of Alexei that day, and explained the nature of his illness in detail to her. And it led them into a discussion about the joys of having children. |
| 3571 |
The Czarina said there wasn't anything she'd like better, and without waiting for an answer from Danina, she sent a number of gowns over for her to try, just as she had for their far less formal dinner. But the gowns she sent this time were truly spectacular, and Danina was overwhelmed when she saw them. |
| 3572 |
There were satins and silks, and velvets and brocades, they were fit for a queen, or for a Czarina, and Danina was almost embarrassed to wear them. She chose a white satin finally, with a gold brocade bustier, which cinched her tiny waist in so tightly that she looked like a fairy queen more than just a ballerina. |
| 3573 |
The ball itself was an unusual event these days. The Imperial family had canceled all formal social occasions due to the war, with the exception of this one. And there was no way of knowing when they would give another. The Czar was coming home from the front for it, and everyone was happy he was going to be there. |
| 3574 |
She looked like a young queen, with her hair piled on her head in a little crown of loose curls, and the pearl earrings that were the only thing she had of her mother's. She was glad she had thought to bring them with her. She took Nikolai's breath away, as he looked at her, and for a long moment he said nothing. |
| 3575 |
It was a night she wanted to remember, in every impeccable detail, forever. And when Nikolai led her onto the dance floor, she felt her heart give a little flutter, but not for an instant did she allow herself to think of what he had said to her two weeks before. That chapter in their lives was already over. |
| 3576 |
It was a most successful party. And Nikolai and Danina danced half the night away. It was hard to believe she'd ever been ill, and she certainly didn't feel it as she danced with him. It was after midnight when he finally urged her to sit down for a while and rest, before she wore herself out completely. |
| 3577 |
Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bluer than ever, and her bosom tantalizing and creamy. He had to force himself to look away for a moment. But when he looked at her again, he found he couldn't resist her, and moments later, he was dancing with her again, and she looked happier and lovelier than ever. |
| 3578 |
It was a lovely night, with a sky filled with stars, fresh snow on the ground, and all she could remember now was the endless dancing. Several people had asked her to dance, and she had danced with them willingly, but most of the evening she had spent in Nikolai's arms, and had to admit she preferred it. |
| 3579 |
The secret they shared grew between them like a field of wildflowers in summer. He came to see her every day, as he had before, but now he stayed much longer, while still managing to perform his duties at the palace. And at night, when he had completed what he had to do there, he returned to her, and slept with her. |
| 3580 |
Their hopes, their dreams, their childhood fears, and the only real terror they shared was that they might one day lose each other. They had not yet sorted out what would happen when she left there. Because they both knew that eventually she'd have to. And after that, they would have to do something about their future. |
| 3581 |
They just wanted to enjoy what they had, for now, before they caused any major explosions. And once their happiness became real to them, February flew past them like an express train, and March along with it. She had been there for three months, when she finally began talking, with regret, of returning to the ballet. |
| 3582 |
And even Madame Markova had been asking her pointedly about when she planned to return for classes and training. It was going to take her months to get back what she had lost in her months of illness. Compared to her grueling daily routine at the ballet, the modest exercises she'd done here meant nothing. |
| 3583 |
But the thought of leaving Nikolai was almost more than she could bear now. They spoke of it seriously late one afternoon, three weeks before she was scheduled to leave him. He thought it was time for him to speak to Marie, and suggest that she return to England, with the children. The deception had to end now. |
| 3584 |
But despite all the promises, their last week was an agony of sorrow. They spent every moment together that they could, and for the first time, the Czarina noticed how close they were, and agreed with what her husband had noticed earlier. She was almost certain Nikolai and Danina were in love with each other. |
| 3585 |
The last hours they shared were an agony for both of them, and they both cried when he put her on the train for the short trip she had to make to return to the ballet in St. Petersburg. She didn't want him to go back with her, for fear that Madame Markova would instantly see what had happened between them. |
| 3586 |
In the past thirteen years, she had rarely been there, though others had been, and always emerged in tears, sometimes to leave the ballet within hours. Danina couldn't help wondering if this was to be her fate now. Madame Markova sat very still across the desk from her, and stared hard at her protegee before speaking. |
| 3587 |
But not hard enough. You are working without soul, without spirit. I have always told you that unless you are willing to give it every ounce of blood and soul and love and heart you have, you will be nothing. Don't bother dancing. Sell flowers on the street, clean toilets somewhere, you will be more useful. |
| 3588 |
You must choose, Danina. And if you choose him, you will be making the wrong decision. I guarantee it. He will never give you what we do. You will never feel about yourself as you do on the stage, knowing you have given a performance that no one will ever forget. That's who you were when you left here. |
| 3589 |
She didn't want to be one of the insane zealots who had no life other than the ballet. She could see that now. She didn't want to be Madame Markova when she was sixty, and have no other life, no children, no husband, no memories, except performances that strung out over the years, and eventually meant nothing. |
| 3590 |
Her soul, and her promise that she would end it with him. But she would not do that now, no matter what it cost her. And her anger over it made her work even harder, in class, and at the barre. She began warming up at four o'clock every morning, and stayed until ten o'clock at night, working after classes. |
| 3591 |
She never ate, never stopped, never slept, never did anything but drive her body beyond its utmost limits. It was what they wanted of her, and she looked thin and drawn and exhausted two weeks later when Madame Markova called her into her office once again. Danina couldn't imagine what she was going to say to her now. |
| 3592 |
He looked bereft when he left the building where she ate and slept, and worked and slaved, for eighteen hours a day. He only wished he could take her with him instead of having to leave her there. And in class once more, she was desperately trying to concentrate and not think of him, as Madame Markova watched her. |
| 3593 |
Marie had still not agreed to the divorce, but at least she had gone to visit her father in Hampshire for the summer, and taken the boys with her. Nikolai was hoping that being there would remind her of how much she loved it, and wanted to live there, but thus far he was not too optimistic about a change of heart. |
| 3594 |
She could even have her old cottage, to share with him. But that was nearly four months away, and Danina couldn't bear the thought of all she'd have to go through now to get there. It would be four months of hell at Madame Markova's hands, while she was punished for loving a man more than the ballet. |
| 3595 |
He came to all her performances after that, or as many as he was able to attend. And her father came to one as well, as he did each year, but unfortunately they were never at the same performance, so she couldn't introduce Nikolai to her father. But tragedy struck her family the week before Christmas. |
| 3596 |
Her youngest and favorite brother was killed in Molodechno on the Eastern Front during a battle, and she was in deep mourning for him during her last performance, and still in a somber mood when Nikolai came to take her back to her little guest cottage at Tsarskoe Selo, and he was deeply solicitous of her loss. |
| 3597 |
But they both knew that it would take time, perhaps even a great deal of it, before either of them could afford it. She had promised herself, and him, that she would dance through the spring now, and perhaps until the end of the year. But as soon as she returned to the ballet this time, she began feeling ill. |
| 3598 |
Her head swam constantly, she could no longer eat anything without becoming violently ill, and she was exhausted. She could barely put one foot in front of the other, yet she was dancing sixteen and eighteen hours a day, and every night when she went to bed, she felt as though she would die in her bed. |
| 3599 |
But her stomach was long since empty. She was beyond bile now. All she had were the dry heaves, as she had had for days. It was easier not to eat or drink at all, so she wouldn't be vomiting every moment. And she was still dancing sixteen hours a day, forcing herself to go on, until she could do no more. |
| 3600 |
He thought of her appendix, but there was no sign of infection to show for it, or a bleeding ulcer, but she insisted she had not been vomiting blood or anything dark and ominous, when he asked her. There were no symptoms except that she had vomited endlessly and was now barely conscious, and too weak to move. |
| 3601 |
But he didn't think so. He listened to her lungs, her heart. Her pulse was weak, but he could not understand what he was seeing. And then he asked her a question he knew she would think indelicate, but he was not only her lover, he was a doctor, and he needed to know. But her answer to that did not surprise him either. |
| 3602 |
But he couldn't think of anything sweeter than a child born of their love. Yet there seemed to be no place and no way to have it. And how would they support it once she stopped dancing? Their savings were pitifully small, and she earned more praise than money. And Marie and the boys used every penny he made. |
| 3603 |
She knew other girls in the ballet who had done it and survived it. She wanted nothing more than his baby too, but they had no hope of having it. Maybe later, but not in the circumstances they were still in. They had to face that, and she wasn't sure Nikolai was ready to admit it. In fact, she was sure he wasn't. |
| 3604 |
She just lay there miserably, crying silently, and continuing to retch and vomit. He was forcing her to eat now, and drink what she could, and she seemed a little stronger to him, but she was so violently ill, she felt worse rather than better. He was in tears too, as he sat helplessly by and watched her. |
| 3605 |
And when he left again, she went to talk to one of the other dancers. Danina knew for certain that the girl she spoke to, Valeria, had done it, twice, from what she had heard. Valeria told her where to go and who to talk to, and even offered to go with her, and Danina gratefully accepted her assistance. |
| 3606 |
There was no way they could even think about it, she had to do this for both their sakes, no matter how terrible it was, or even if it killed her in the end. And as she thought about it, and wondered if it would, the nurse told her to take her clothes off, and Danina's hands trembled mercilessly as she did so. |
| 3607 |
She was not sleeping, he realized, she was deeply unconscious. And when, out of instinct, if nothing more medical, he pulled her covers back, he saw that she was lying in a pool of blood that had spread all around her. She had been hemorrhaging for hours. And this time, he did not hesitate for an instant. |
| 3608 |
He sent one of the dancers for an ambulance, and in terror he began taking her clothes off. She was very nearly dead, and he had no idea how much blood she'd already lost but what he saw around her looked tremendous. And the rags he found between her legs told him the whole story of what had happened. |
| 3609 |
She didn't have to risk her life to solve the problem. It could all have been worked out, or so he thought. They let Nikolai into the surgery, where she was still recovering, and she still looked gray to him, in spite of the transfusions she'd been given. He sat down quietly beside her, and took her free hand in his. |
| 3610 |
He would have liked to kill whoever had done this to her. And in the waiting room, Madame Markova was looking devastated and suffering from all the same emotions as he, but they were of no use to each other. Her mentor and her lover were lost in their own thoughts and their own worlds, as Danina struggled for survival. |
| 3611 |
She loved the sweetness of their living together. But she could not abandon the ballet again to recuperate. She knew that this time Madame Markova would not take her back, or ever forgive her for deserting them, sick or not. Danina had paid a high price with her for her last recuperation, and she needed the ballet. |
| 3612 |
It will take me years to buy a house for you, and Madame Markova will never release you from the ballet. I want to be with you, Danina. I want us to have a life together, away from all of this, and all the people who want to keep us apart. I want a real life with you, far from here, where we can begin again. |
| 3613 |
She was deeply in love with him. Perhaps even enough to risk everything and follow him. Now all she could do was think about it, and look into her heart. Madame Markova left her alone after that, to her own thoughts. She had planted the seeds she wanted to, and hoped that they would grow and take hold. |
| 3614 |
Danina did not dance for a month, and began taking class again on the first of April. There was still snow on the ground outside, and once again she had to work harder than before to regain what she had lost, but this time the return to full strength was swifter. She was stronger now, and in better health. |
| 3615 |
Nikolai had little time to visit Danina. He wanted to, but he couldn't get away, and she understood. And in early July, she had another tragedy when her oldest brother was killed in Czernoivitz. She had lost two now, and she knew from his letter that her father was beside himself over the death of his son. |
| 3616 |
Dancers had lost brothers, friends, fathers, and one of their teachers had lost both her sons in April. Even in their cloistered world, it was impossible to ignore the war anymore. The only thing she had to look forward to that year was another vacation with Nikolai and the Imperial family in Livadia. |
| 3617 |
So it was only the women and children and both physicians who were there, and Danina. The Czarina and her daughters had allowed themselves to take a brief time off from nursing the soldiers, and were happy to be in Livadia again. They were all old friends now, and she and Nikolai were happier than they had ever been. |
| 3618 |
They had picnics every afternoon, went on long walks, rowed boats and swam, and Danina felt like a child again, as she played the old familiar games with Alexei. His health had been frail that year, and he didn't look well, but surrounded by his family and the people he loved, he seemed happy to be with them. |
| 3619 |
There were too many people they loved here, and too many obligations that could not be ignored or abandoned. Despite her illness of the past year, her dancing had improved even beyond where it had been before. Whenever she danced, people talked about her for days, and her name was known now all over Russia. |
| 3620 |
Her father and brother had no idea who Nikolai was to her or how much she loved him, but the three men seemed to enjoy meeting each other. Nikolai wished them luck when they left, and congratulated the colonel on his very talented and remarkable daughter, and the elderly colonel beamed proudly at her. |
| 3621 |
They did not give the grand balls they had before the war, but nonetheless managed to invite over a hundred friends. Danina shone like a bright star in a gown the Czarina had given her as a gift. It was red velvet trimmed in white ermine, and she looked every bit as regal in it as the Czarina did in hers. |
| 3622 |
It was a life she loved sharing with him, and she felt almost married to him, standing at his side at the dance. They had been together for nearly two years. The only thing that had marred the evening at all were the small groups here and there, talking quietly about the echoed rumors of revolution. |
| 3623 |
They may burn some houses, steal some horses and jewels, give the rich a spanking, and go back to the way things were. Probably nothing more serious than that. Russia is too big and too powerful to ever change. Although it could make life unpleasant for a while, and dangerous for the Czar and his family. |
| 3624 |
He wanted to leave Russia with her before something happened to all of them. It seemed hard to imagine, but it was possible. There were people in high places now who said so, even if the Czar himself would not admit it. But others that he knew were as afraid as he was, and he didn't want to terrify Danina. |
| 3625 |
His fears sounded so foolish, and all Danina knew was the ballet. She knew nothing of the world beyond it, a world that was becoming more frightening every day. They ate with the family the next day as planned, and she taught Alexei a magic trick she'd learned from a young dancer who had visited them from Paris. |
| 3626 |
Danina began exercising that afternoon as soon as she got back, and again at four o'clock the next morning, before rehearsal began at seven. She was well warmed up by then, and in good form, and she knew the role well that she was going to rehearse, so much so that she seemed not to pay much attention. |
| 3627 |
She gave a last leap on her way out, and someone gasped as she slipped and sailed across the floor with one foot at a shocking angle. There was a long silence in the room as everyone waited to see her get up, but she was very white and very still, as she simply lay there and held her ankle in silence. |
| 3628 |
She had broken, not sprained, her ankle. A death knell, if it were true, for a prima, or virtually any dancer. There was not a sound, not a word, only the occasional gasp from Danina, as they moved her, and a moment later she lay on her bed, in her leotard and the warm sweater and leg warmers she had been wearing. |
| 3629 |
He was extremely good with feet and legs and bones and he had helped them before, with good results. But what Madame Markova saw as she entered the room nearly broke her heart. In a single instant, with one swift leap, it was over for Danina. The doctor came within the hour, and confirmed the worst to them. |
| 3630 |
The ankle was badly broken, and she had to be taken to the hospital. They would have to operate in order to set it. There was no argument, nothing anyone could say. A dozen hands touched hers as they carried her away. Everyone cried, but no one harder than Danina. She had seen it happen too often before. |
| 3631 |
After fifteen years in these sacred halls, for her, at twenty two, it was over. They operated on her that night, and the entire leg was set in a huge cast. For anyone else, it would have been considered a success. The leg would be straight again, and if she had a limp from it, it would only be a small one. |
| 3632 |
And there were no words to console her. Her career had ended with that one small, foolish leap. Not only her ankle, but her life shattered in a single instant. She lay in her bed and cried that night, almost as hard as she had when she lost Nikolai's baby. The life she had lost this time was her own. |
| 3633 |
It was not in her. For her, it was simply over. The death of a dream. It took her two days to write to Nikolai, and when her letter reached him, he came at once, unable to believe what had happened, although everyone explained it to him in detail once he arrived. All the other dancers knew him and liked him. |
| 3634 |
And they told him again and again how she had fallen and how she looked as she lay on the floor. But seeing her, lying there, with her huge cast, and the look of sorrow in her eyes, said it all to him when he first saw her. But to Nikolai, as ghastly as it was for her, it seemed almost like a ray of hope. |
| 3635 |
She was in deep mourning over her career. And this time, when he insisted on taking her away with him, Madame Markova offered no objections. She knew it would be kinder for her not to be at the ballet, for a while at least, listening to the familiar bells and sounds and voices going to class or rehearsals. |
| 3636 |
Danina no longer belonged here. She could return eventually, in some other way, but for now, it was more compassionate not to have her there at all. As quickly as possible for her sake, the past had to be buried. Two thirds of her life, and the only part she had ever cared about until Nikolai, had just ended. |
| 3637 |
He took her to the train the next day, warned her to be careful and not overtax herself, handed her her cane with a kiss, and put his arms around her. He hated to see her go but understood it, and made her promise to take a taxi directly to the ballet from the station. He was sorry not to go with her. |
| 3638 |
But much to her surprise, when she reached St. Petersburg, she saw people milling about in the streets, shouting and demonstrating against the Czar, and there were soldiers everywhere around them. She had heard nothing of it in Tsarskoe Selo, and was amazed to find the atmosphere in the city unusually tense. |
| 3639 |
But she forced it from her mind as she made her way to the ballet. Her thoughts were on Madame Markova, and she hoped her mentor and old friend was not desperately ill. And she was dismayed to find that in fact she had been, and as had happened once before, she had grown very weak and very frail from her illness. |
| 3640 |
Danina sat beside her every day, fed her soup and gruel, and begged her to eat it. And within a week, she was relieved to see some slight improvement, but the older woman seemed to have aged years in a few brief weeks, and she looked intolerably fragile as Danina looked at her lovingly and held her hand. |
| 3641 |
Nursing her, the days seemed to fly past her, and Danina fell into bed at night feeling utterly exhausted. And moving around as much as she had, had caused her ankle to swell painfully again. She was sleeping on a cot in Madame Mar kova's office, her old bed having long since been assigned to another dancer. |
| 3642 |
The Revolution had started in earnest. A few of the male dancers ventured out into the street later that afternoon, but they returned very quickly, and barricaded the doors of the ballet. They were safe there, but there was shocking news from beyond their little world, and it grew more horrifying day by day. |
| 3643 |
The soldiers guarding the Imperial family had allowed him to leave, and promised he could return. But he had a look of desperation as he sat with her in the corridor outside Madame Markova's office, and told her in no uncertain terms that, as soon as they could arrange it, they would have to leave Russia. |
| 3644 |
He remembered meeting him, though he still had no idea that he was married, and told her to go to Vermont, and he would contact her there. She and Nikolai could come back to Russia again when the war was over. And in the meantime, he told her to pray for Russia, wished her godspeed, and told her he loved her. |
| 3645 |
For him, for them, for her lost brothers, for all the men who had been lost, and all of their lost dreams. So much had happened, an entire world had ended all around them. It was impossible to think of anything but that. She exchanged their tickets the next day, for a ship sailing for New York at the end of June. |
| 3646 |
She could not dance with them anymore, and the danger in St. Petersburg, and everywhere in Russia, was considerable these days. Madame Markova was relieved for her, and she finally admitted that she believed Nikolai would be good to her, whether or not they were married, although she hoped that one day they would be. |
| 3647 |
But even in the comfort of knowing she was leaving with him for safety in a month, Danina was constantly haunted by all that she was leaving behind. Her family, her friends, her homeland, and the only world she knew at the ballet. Nikolai had already told her that his cousin had offered him a job in his bank. |
| 3648 |
And Nikolai was planning to take the classes he had to, so that eventually he could practice medicine in Vermont. It all seemed carefully planned, although Danina knew that it would take a long time to achieve their goals. But just then, getting out of Russia was the only thought occupying her mind. |
| 3649 |
It seemed an eternity to her now as she continued to wait for him. By then, some of the dancers had gone home to other countries, other towns, but most of them had stayed. All their performances had been canceled months before, but once she was well again, Madame Markova insisted that classes continue as usual. |
| 3650 |
And this time, he said, the plans for the Imperial family were certain. The trip to Livadia had been vetoed by the provisional government as too dangerous for them to undertake, as they would have to pass through what were deemed hostile towns, and they were leaving for Tobolsk in Siberia on August fourteenth. |
| 3651 |
Danina, I cannot leave them now. I must see this through to the end, and see them to safety. Until they hear from their cousins in England, they will stay in exile in Tobolsk. Livadia would have been far more pleasant for them, but the government wants them as remote as possible, for their own safety, they claim. |
| 3652 |
And then he would sail to America to be with her, and their new life would begin. He had told Marie his plans before she left, and she had been surprisingly understanding about it, and promised he could visit the boys anytime. But Nikolai knew, as did she, that it might be years before he could come back to Europe. |
| 3653 |
She was watching a class with Madame Mar kova when he arrived, and one of the students came in on silent feet to find her. Danina looked up instinctively and saw Nikolai watching her from the doorway. She knew then that the goodbyes she dreaded were about to begin, and that it was time for her to leave. |
| 3654 |
Danina looked at her for a long moment, and then walked slowly to him, with no trace of her limp. Her bags were packed, in the room where she slept, and she was ready. And as she put away the last of her things, while he waited in the hall, Madame Markova came to join her, and stood looking down at her valises. |
| 3655 |
She simply touched the child's head as she walked past, and looked up at Madame Markova with tears in her eyes. She knew even less how to say good bye, after the years of sacrifice, the years of giving and loving. How did you give it all back when it was over? But for her, it was the end of the story. |
| 3656 |
And then with a last touch of Danina's hand, Madame Markova turned and walked solemnly away, so they wouldn't see her cry. Danina stood and watched her for a long moment, and then walked slowly out the door for the last time, one foot after the other, until she stood outside, like everyone else in the world. |
| 3657 |
She was no longer part of the ballet, she no longer belonged there, and never would again. This was the moment she had dreaded all her life, and it had come now. She was no longer part of their world, she was leaving them forever. There was no changing that, no turning back, as the door closed silently behind her. |
| 3658 |
There was no way they could ever have had a life here. Even less so now, with the Revolution in full progress. But without it, Marie would have stayed, and held on to him. Danina would have had nowhere to go without the ballet. They had to go thousands of miles away, to a new world, to have a life together. |
| 3659 |
In some ways, it seemed like a great adventure. But she was still desperately sad to leave him in Russia. For the moment, they were staying at a hotel, under his name, and on their way back, they bought a newspaper, and read with dismay of the war news. And all of it was distressing. It was impossible to ignore. |
| 3660 |
Her bags were all packed, her few treasures and souvenirs ready to go with her. And he was sending two bags of his with her too, as though to prove to her that he was coming later. She was even bringing the gowns the Czarina had given her, although she knew they were part of the past now, as it all was. |
| 3661 |
It would all seem like fairy tales to them, as it did to her now. Perhaps all one could do, in the end, was forget it, put the souvenirs away, the programs from the ballet, the photographs, the gowns, the toe shoes, and dust them off now and then to look at them. Or perhaps even that would be too painful. |
| 3662 |
Everything about it felt wrong to her, but she knew she had to be brave now, for his sake. They had been through so much together, she could do just a little more, let him finish his work here, give his last to the Imperial family, and then join her in Vermont, to begin their life together as man and wife. |
| 3663 |
She wasn't even sure why she was crying. He was right. They had so much to look forward to, so much to be thankful for, so much waiting for them in Vermont. It was all beginning. She had no reason to cry, except that in a place in her heart she was desperately afraid that she had just seen him for the last time. |
| 3664 |
She could not lose him now. It could not happen. And with a sigh, and a last glance at her homeland, thinking of him, she walked slowly down to her cabin. She could not lose Nikolai, she told herself. No matter what happened to them, she would always love him, there was no way they could lose each other now. |
| 3665 |
The letters explained it all very clearly. The rest I learned from two of her friends, neighbors, when I went back to Vermont the following summer to see the house, and spend a week there with my children and my husband. I found the Czarina's gowns in a trunk in the attic, and never knew they had been there. |
| 3666 |
They were still in the same trunk she had brought them in, they were all faded, and the ermine was yellow, and more than sixty years past their time, they looked like costumes. I was surprised I had never found them in my childhood forays, but the trunk was old and battered, and hidden in a corner of the attic. |
| 3667 |
Neither his, nor hers. She was destined for another life, with all of us, in a place so far from the life she had shared with him. And he was not destined to be with her. Her father and remaining brother were killed at the end of the war. And Madame Markova died of pneumonia two years after my grandmother last saw her. |
| 3668 |
A quiet man, with his own memories, his own regrets, his own losses. She must have been like a ray of sunshine to him. He was twenty five years older than she. Forty seven when she arrived at twenty two. She must have seemed like a child to him. And he must have always known how much Nikolai meant to her. |
| 3669 |
And to this day, I don't really know if she ever loved him. I assume she did. They must have been friends. He was always kind to her, although he said very little, and she spoke of him with tenderness and admiration. But I couldn't help wondering now if she had loved my grandfather as she had loved his cousin. |
| 3670 |
But not now, not as he groaned, glanced at the clock again, and let his fingers fly at the typewriter still harder. Then finally, silence, a quick fix with a pen as he leapt to his feet, and grabbed handfuls of what he had been working on for the past seven hours, since five o'clock in the morning. Nearly one now. |
| 3671 |
It happened once, twice, sometimes three or four times a month when Bill decided he didn't like the way the show was going. As the originator of the most successful daytime soap on TV, whenever he was worried about the show, he stopped, wrote a segment or two, turned everything upside down, and then he was happy. |
| 3672 |
And the baby, Adam, and the show had been born at almost the same time, one a strapping nine pound baby boy with his father's big blue eyes and a mist of golden curls, the other a tryout on the summer schedule that brought the ratings through the roof and an instant outcry when the show disappeared again in September. |
| 3673 |
Television became his lifeblood in a matter of moments. Eventually, he was offered a lot of money to sell his concept and just sit back and go home to collect residuals, and go back to writing plays for off off Broadway. But by then, almost as much as his six month old son, Life, as he called it, was his baby. |
| 3674 |
He couldn't bring himself to leave the show, much less sell it. He had to stay with it. It was real to him, it was alive, and he cared about what he was saying. He talked about the agonies of life, the disappointments, the angers, the sorrows, the triumphs, the challenges, the excitement, the love, the simple beauty. |
| 3675 |
And in those early days of the show he was constantly torn, endlessly pulled, always wanting to be with his family and yet keep an eye on the show, to make sure it was on the right track and they hadn't brought in the wrong writer or director. He viewed everyone with suspicion, and he maintained complete control. |
| 3676 |
And he'd pace the set like a nervous mother hen, going crazy inside over what might happen. He continued to write random episodes, to haunt the show much of the time, and kibitz from the sidelines. And at the end of the first year, there was no point pretending that Bill Thigpen was ever going back to Broadway. |
| 3677 |
He even stopped making excuses to his off off Broadway friends, and admitted openly that he loved what he was doing. There was no way he was going anywhere, he explained to Leslie late one night, after he'd written for hours, developing new plots, new characters, new philosophies for the coming season. |
| 3678 |
The show was shot live five times a week, and even when he had no real reason to be on the set, he ate, drank, loved, breathed, and slept it. There were daily writers who kept the show going day by day, but Bill was always watching over their shoulders. And he knew what he was doing. Everyone in the business agreed. |
| 3679 |
While he had been playing with his imaginary friends, he was losing the people he really loved, and he hadn't even known it. And yet, he couldn't promise her he'd give it up, sell his control of the show and go back to the plays he'd had to beg to get put on. How could he do that now? And he loved the show. |
| 3680 |
She knew him better. It had been the same when he was writing his early plays. He worked for two months straight without taking a break, barely eating or sleeping or thinking of anything else, but that had been only for two months and in those days she still thought it was charming. It no longer was. |
| 3681 |
For a moment, he thought of abandoning the show, staying in New York, and begging her not to leave him. But he also sensed that no matter what he did now, it was too late for her. In heart and soul and mind, she had already left him. And what he reproached himself for now was not having noticed sooner. |
| 3682 |
Maybe if he had, he could have changed things. But now, he knew her well enough to know he couldn't. It was all over, without a whimper or a wail. He had lost the war long since and never known it. His life was over. The next two months were an agony that still made him cry when he thought of it. Telling the boys. |
| 3683 |
She wanted to be free to pursue her relationship with him without guilt, or Bill Thigpen. She and her teacher friend had everything in common, she insisted, and she and Bill no longer did, except their children. Adam had been heartbroken to see him go, but at two and a half he had readjusted pretty quickly. |
| 3684 |
He had no reason to fight it anymore. He let his work become his daily passion. The boys came out to visit him on alternate holidays and for a month in the summer, and he loved them more than ever. But being three thousand miles away from them when he really wanted to see them every day remained extremely painful. |
| 3685 |
She and Bill talked on the phone now and then, particularly when the boys were coming out, or if one of them was sick or if there was a problem, but they didn't have much to say to each other anymore, except about Adam and Tommy. It was hard even to remember what it had been like when they were married. |
| 3686 |
Some of them cooked dinner for him occasionally, or he for them since he loved to cook, and the ones who were good with kids were sometimes called on to go to Disneyland with him when the boys were in town, but more often than not he enjoyed keeping the boys to himself during their visits to California. |
| 3687 |
More recently, Bill had gotten involved with one of the actresses on the show. Sylvia was a pretty girl from New York, and she had an important part on the show. And it was the first time in a long time that he had allowed himself the indulgence of getting involved with someone who actually worked for him. |
| 3688 |
He had felt that twinge since his very early days as an actor when he was in college. And in New York, he had actually felt sick for an hour every night before the curtain went up on one of his plays. And now, ten years after A Life had been born, he still felt a twinge every time they were about to go on the air. |
| 3689 |
She is a very fine actress. She disappears. The hand goes up again. Total silence. Not a sound, not a coin clanking in a pocket, or a key on a key ring, or a footstep. John has gone to the remote country home of the drug dealer, who has anonymously called Helen and told her of her husband's affair with her sister. |
| 3690 |
Fade in. Extreme close up of Vaughn, looking incredibly beautiful in a small but luxurious apartment. John has set her up as a good girl gone bad, and we see her saying good bye to a man. We sense without being told that she is a call girl. Vaughn's eyes meet the camera, troubled, beautiful, and somewhat glazed. |
| 3691 |
It was odd to look back and try to second guess it. Bill left the studio then, assured that the segment was going well and he didn't need to stay till the end. The director had it in control, and Bill walked slowly back to his office, feeling spent, relieved, and sure of the direction of the next several segments. |
| 3692 |
One of the things that he loved about the show was that he could never get lazy or complacent, he couldn't just coast, or use a formula, or follow the same old plot lines. He had to keep it fresh, moment by moment, hour by hour, or the show would simply die. And he liked the excitement of the daily challenge. |
| 3693 |
Once in a while when he'd come in at the crack of dawn, he left before five o'clock, but it was rare, and he shook his head as he walked across the room to his desk where his ancient typewriter sat on a small table just behind it. It was a Royal, and it was one of the few souvenirs he still had left from his father. |
| 3694 |
She was a terrific person and he liked her. He was still smiling to himself, thinking of Betsey, when the door opened again, and he looked up. As always when he saw her, he felt a sharp intake of breath at how she looked. It was Sylvia, still wearing her costume and makeup from the show, and she looked stunning. |
| 3695 |
He had a mountain of notes he wanted to make about the new scripts, and all the upcoming changes, and by the time he looked up from his typewriter again, it was dark outside, and he was startled to realize it was ten o'clock when he looked at his watch, and he suddenly realized tie was desperately thirsty. |
| 3696 |
He walked past his secretary's desk, with the sandwiches still sitting in a cardboard box, and walked out into the fluorescent lit hall, past half a dozen studios that were closed down now. There was a late night talk show in one, and a bunch of odd looking kids in punk clothes had just arrived to make an appearance. |
| 3697 |
And then he walked out into the fresh air, and took a deep breath of the warm spring night. The smog didn't seem so bad at that hour, and it felt good just to be alive. He loved what he did, and it made it seem somehow worthwhile to work those ridiculous hours, making up stories about imaginary people. |
| 3698 |
Now and then it was an agony, when a scene didn't go right or a character slipped out of control and became someone he had never intended, but most of the time doing it was something he loved, and there were times when he missed doing it full time, and he envied the writers. He sighed happily as he started his car. |
| 3699 |
She rented it from an aging movie star who had been in a retirement home for years but still kept the house in Malibu she had once lived in. Bill stopped at Safeway on his way home, and it was after midnight as he pulled his woody into the parking lot and slid into a space right in front of the main entrance. |
| 3700 |
There were chickens barbecuing in a nearby aisle, and he noticed that they smelled terrific. He helped himself to one of them, a six pack of beer, some potato salad from the deli area, some salami, some pickles, and then he headed to the produce section for lettuce and tomatoes and vegetables to make himself a salad. |
| 3701 |
He could no longer remember if he'd eaten lunch, or if he had, what it had been. It seemed like years suddenly since he had eaten. He remembered then that he needed paper towels, too, and toilet paper for both bathrooms, he knew he needed shaving cream, and he had a feeling that he was running out of toothpaste. |
| 3702 |
There was something so straightforward about the look she gave him, yet something quizzical about her smile, as though she had been going to ask him a question, and something friendly as though she had been going to laugh at herself. She was all he could think about as he tried to finish his shopping. |
| 3703 |
It was ridiculous. She was pretty but she wasn't that great looking after all. She had the kind of preppy good looks of a girl fresh out of an eastern college. She'd been wearing jeans, a red turtleneck, and sneakers, and his heart skipped a beat when he saw her unloading her cart at the checkout a few minutes later. |
| 3704 |
Her wedding band. Whoever she was, it didn't matter anymore. She was married. He felt his heart plummet, like a disappointed child, and he almost laughed at himself as she glanced over at him and smiled again, recognizing him from when he'd collided with her a few minutes before with the paper towels. |
| 3705 |
Steven Townsend was the bright shining star of the ad agency where he worked, and she knew that one day, if he wanted to, he would run the L. A. office. At thirty four, he had come a long, long way from humble beginnings in the Midwest, and she knew just how much his success meant to him. It meant everything to him. |
| 3706 |
There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Steven Townsend was going to succeed, no matter what it took, or cost him. He was one of those people who were determined to get where they wanted to go, who planned things out in great detail. There were no accidents in Steven Townsend's life, no mistakes, no failures. |
| 3707 |
It hadn't been easy for him. His father had been an autoworker on the assembly line in Detroit, with five kids, three daughters and two sons, of which Steven had been the youngest. His older brother had died in Vietnam, and the three girls had stayed close to home, perfectly content not to go to college. |
| 3708 |
He had never gone back to Detroit once he left, and Adrian also knew that it had been more than five years since he had communicated with his parents. He just couldn't talk to them anymore, he had explained it to her once when he'd had a little too much to drink and they'd come home after an office party. |
| 3709 |
He obviously had nothing in common with them anymore, and even talking about them was far too painful. She wondered from time to time what they would have thought of him, if they could see him now. He was handsome, athletic, outspoken, well educated, intelligent, bold, and sometimes even a little too brassy. |
| 3710 |
She had always admired his fire, his ambition, his drive, his energy, and yet from time to time she wished that it were only a little tempered. Perhaps that would come in time, with age, with love, with kindness from those who loved him. Sometimes she teased him, she said he was like a cactus plant. |
| 3711 |
He had worked in three different ad agencies over the years, and he was known in the industry as being smart, good at what he did, and more than occasionally ruthless. He had taken over clients from friends, and wooed them from other agencies in circumstances that occasionally bordered on the improper. |
| 3712 |
Most of all, she respected what he had come from. She knew, just from the little she had heard, that surviving his early beginnings must have been brutal. Her own were at the opposite extreme, from an upper middle class family in Connecticut, she had always gone to private schools, and she had one older sister. |
| 3713 |
She and Adrian didn't see eye to eye, and in recent years, Adrian had drifted away from her parents, too, although every few years they came out to California to see her. But it was too different from their comfortable life in Connecticut, and the last time they had come, her parents hadn't gotten along with Steven. |
| 3714 |
They had wanted to do a beautiful wedding at home for their youngest daughter. Instead, she and Steven flew east, and her parents had been anything but pleased to learn that they were already married. Her mother had cried, her father had scolded them both, and they had both felt like errant children. |
| 3715 |
It made Adrian sad sometimes to think of never having children of her own, and yet it was a sacrifice she was willing to make for him. She knew how important it was to him. He wanted to pursue his career without encumbrances, and he wanted her to be free to pursue hers too. He was extremely supportive of her work. |
| 3716 |
They had worked hard, done well, made some friends, he had traveled a lot in the past year, and the previous year, they had bought a really lovely condo. It was just the right size for them, a town house with a second bedroom they used as a den, a big bedroom upstairs, a living room, dining room, and a big kitchen. |
| 3717 |
He still tried to get her to sell her car, but she never would. She had bought it used when she went to Stanford thirteen years before, and she still loved it. Adrian was someone who loved to hang on to old things, and Steven was someone who was always seeking what was newest. And yet, together they were a good team. |
| 3718 |
He gave her an extra sense of drive and push that she might not have had to the same extent if she'd been on her own, and she softened his sharp edges just a little. Not enough for everyone. Her sister, Connie, and her brother in law, Charles, still hated him, and her parents had never come to love him. |
| 3719 |
She knew how tired he was going to be, but she had bought a bottle of white wine, some cheese, and the makings of a fine omelet for him. And she was smiling as she slid the car into the garage next to his Porsche. He was home and she was only sorry she hadn't been able to pick him up at the airport. |
| 3720 |
It was yet another thing that had set him apart while he was struggling to get out of Detroit and away from his parents. He had been too smart, too ambitious, and too good looking for the life he'd been born to. And Adrian was striking, too, in her own way, but it was something she never thought of. |
| 3721 |
He was thinking about two new clients he wanted to approach, and a client he was planning to take away from a slightly more senior man at the agency where he worked. It was something he had done successfully before, with other accounts, and it was a modus operandi he was neither embarrassed about nor afraid of. |
| 3722 |
And Steven Townsend was fit. In every possible way. He stood looking at Adrian for a moment, and then turned and raced upstairs to shower and change before he left for the office. She was still in the kitchen when he came back down, impeccably dressed in a khaki suit, pale blue shirt, and blue and yellow tie. |
| 3723 |
And as they left the house together, they were a handsome pair. He got in his Porsche as she climbed into the MG, and she laughed at the look on his face. It embarrassed him to be seen anywhere near her car and he had been threatening to make her use the open parking lot at the front of the complex. |
| 3724 |
With the odd hours she worked, and the constant stress, it wasn't unusual to be late, although admittedly it didn't happen to her very often. She made a mental note to think about it again in a few days, and with that, the traffic began moving again, and she stepped on the accelerator and headed for her office. |
| 3725 |
It was four o'clock before she ate lunch, and six before she even thought of calling Steven. But by then she knew he had left to play squash with his friends from work, and he knew she was working late anyway. And as she settled down for a long evening at work, she was suddenly struck by an odd feeling of loneliness. |
| 3726 |
It was actually a pretty quiet night, and she could hardly wait to get home to Steven. She knew he was having dinner out with friends, but she was pretty sure he'd be home when she finished work. He seldom stayed out very late, unless there was something to be gained from it, like some important business with a client. |
| 3727 |
She always tried never to let Steven down, and particularly not to let her work interfere with their home life. Unlike Steven, who traveled a great deal of the time, but that just made it easier for her to work late whenever she had to. Steven was back, dripping wet, at two o'clock, and beaming at his victory. |
| 3728 |
As though it were a crime to want to succeed, to get ahead. At least she didn't think so. He had a right to accomplish what he wanted to, didn't he? And he had a need to win. Sometimes she even felt sorry for him because that need was so acute in him. It really hurt him, almost physically, when he lost, even at tennis. |
| 3729 |
He was still playing when Adrian left for work, and she had promised to come back and pick him up at exactly seven. And when she did, he was waiting for her, handsome in a new blazer and white slacks, and a red tie she had bought him. He looked great and she told him so, and he told her she looked pretty too. |
| 3730 |
It was as though not having children was a kind of failure. No matter that she had an important job, and that she was only thirty one. Women who had children looked proud of themselves, and lately Adrian had been wondering if she had missed something when she and Steven had decided never to have children. |
| 3731 |
Nothing was written in stone, of course, and it wasn't as though their decision couldn't be changed, but she knew how strongly Steven felt about it, which was why she was beginning to feel a little flurry of panic each time she remembered that she was late. And day by day, she seemed to be getting later. |
| 3732 |
If she bought the test now, she could do it anytime she felt brave enough. She could even do it while Steven was in Chicago. She bought the kit and had the druggist put it in a brown paper bag that she shoved deep into her tote bag, and then she got back in the Porsche again, and drove back to their apartment. |
| 3733 |
He had very little to give the women in his life. He had too little time for them, and even less interest in getting hurt, and opening himself up to the kind of pain he'd had when he lost Leslie and his children. These arrangements were always easy, but they usually ended like this, or some similar scene. |
| 3734 |
But all he had to offer was kindness and some fun, while it lasted. He thought about her for a while, as he stood looking out at the night sky, and then toasted her with a club soda, as he went to bed, thinking about his life. He felt lonely suddenly, and sad that it had ended like this, with a phone call to Las Vegas. |
| 3735 |
And yet, all she wanted now was for Steven to leave. She wanted him to leave the state so that she could find out in peace. She had to know, but she felt sure that if she did the test while he was around, somehow he would know what had happened. She didn't even dare do it after he had left for the airport on Monday. |
| 3736 |
She thought about it all day while she was at work after Steven had left, and she rushed home after the six o'clock news, let herself into the house, ran upstairs, and set the kit up in her bathroom. She did everything it told her to do, and then she sat nervously, watching the alarm clock in her bedroom. |
| 3737 |
Surely, one small child couldn't make such a terrible difference. She had known about the pregnancy for five minutes, maybe less, and it was already a baby to her, and she was already arguing for its life, and she was praying that Steven would let her keep it. He couldn't force her to get rid of it, after all. |
| 3738 |
She sat in her bathroom and closed her eyes, as tears of fear rolled slowly down her cheeks. What was she going to do now? She was at the same time happy and sad, and terrified of what to say to her husband. He had always jokingly said that if she ever got pregnant and decided to keep it, he would leave her. |
| 3739 |
She had even done the test again, just to be absolutely certain. Tears stung her eyes as she listened to him. She wanted him to come home now, so she could tell him. She wanted to get it over with, to be honest with him, so he could tell her everything would be okay, and she could relax and have their baby. |
| 3740 |
She wanted to go to the airport to meet his plane on Friday night, but in the end she had to work late, and she didn't see him until she got back to the apartment. He was unpacking his bags and watching TV, the stereo was on, and the whole place had come to life again now that Steven was home from Chicago. |
| 3741 |
She looked all right to him now, and then suddenly, with a feeling of dismay, he wondered if she might have been fired and was embarrassed to tell him. Maybe with his own job going so well, she was just afraid to say it. And it was such a good job, too, he was really going to be sorry for her if she lost it. |
| 3742 |
My parents never had anything. My mother had one lousy pair of shoes, one pair of shoes for my entire childhood. She made everything she could and then we used it till it fell apart, or the clothes fell off our backs. We didn't have books or dolls or toys. We didn't have anything, except poverty and each other. |
| 3743 |
And asking him to keep it made it sound as though they were talking about a puppy and not their child, and it horrified her. Steven nodded miserably, and took her hand and pulled her down on the bed next to him, and suddenly she could no longer control herself as he put his arms around her, and she went on sobbing. |
| 3744 |
And I don't want to compete with a baby for your attention. I don't think my parents said more than two words to each other in twenty years. They never had the time or the energy or the emotion. They were drained. There was nothing left of them when we grew up. They were like two used, finished, old dead people. |
| 3745 |
She felt her throat go dry, and her lips seemed to stick together like dampened tissue paper. All she wanted was to get it over with and go home and try to forget about it, and she knew that for the rest of her life she would never again let herself get pregnant. And yet, part of her still wanted to keep this baby. |
| 3746 |
She started to drive home, and she decided suddenly to go to the office instead. She felt better than she had in days, and she wanted to go to work and lose herself in the piles of papers on her desk. She drove to the studio with the wind blowing in her hair, and she took a deep breath and smiled to herself. |
| 3747 |
They had written alternate scripts for the past week, but it was getting pretty desperate without her. And in a few more days they would have to replace her. And Bill had just said as much to the director. By not calling in to at least explain to them what was going on, she was in clear violation of her contract. |
| 3748 |
You're going to give me two more days, today and tomorrow, on the set, for old times' sake, and we're going to kill you off in the most dramatic scene you've ever seen on Friday. And after that, you're free to go. You can go home to Newark with Stanley and have ten babies as long as you name the first one after me. |
| 3749 |
There had been a sweetness about her he liked, a kindness, and they had had fun together. She was familiar to him, and they were good friends, and now he was alone again. But it would be easier not to be involved with someone on the show. It was a mistake he wouldn't make again, a form of extreme self indulgence. |
| 3750 |
She had done what she'd done and he bore her no malice, but he no longer wanted her either. He left his office with her, and he was sure that everyone thought they were going back to his place for a quickie. But he only laughed and drove her to his apartment and helped her throw all her things into boxes. |
| 3751 |
She would take full responsibility for it, all he had to do was sit back and relax and not let it make him completely crazy. She was still telling herself that when she drove back to work at eleven o'clock. And when she got home after midnight she played back her machine to see if he had called, but he hadn't. |
| 3752 |
Sooner or later they were going to have to make the ordinary adjustments to the fact that she was pregnant, the way other couples did, buying bassinets and building nurseries, and getting ready for their babies. Just the thought of it made her smile as she went back to work and forced herself not to think of Steven. |
| 3753 |
No omelet made by loving hands. There were no good smells, good sounds, friendly noises. There was nothing. Only silence. She was alone. And the realization hit her like a weight on her heart almost as soon as she woke up. She stirred in the bed, looking for him, and then just as suddenly she remembered. |
| 3754 |
She knew that if she gave up the baby for him, she would eventually hate him, and if she didn't, he would always resent her. In one little week, they had managed to destroy what she had always considered a fairly decent marriage. She lay in bed for a long time, thinking of him, and wondering what had made him do it. |
| 3755 |
Most of all, her mother made not so veiled comments about Adrian's many failings. She hadn't called, hadn't come home for Christmas in years, had forgotten her father's birthday, her parents' anniversary, had moved to California, married someone they didn't like, and had compounded it by failing to have children. |
| 3756 |
At least her mother had given up asking her if she and Steven had seen a doctor. Adrian assured her now that everything was fine, wished her a belated happy Mother's Day from the week before, realizing that she had failed yet again, and told her mother that she'd been working so hard, she'd forgotten what day it was. |
| 3757 |
A Mustang, and a Volvo. It was a conversation designed to irritate in every possible way, and it did. Adrian only said that everything was fine, and Steven was out playing tennis. It would have been nice having a mother she could talk to, someone whose shoulder she could cry on, someone who could bolster her spirits. |
| 3758 |
The phone rang again after that, but this time, Adrian didn't answer. She listened to her answering machine afterward, and discovered that it had been Zelda, but she wasn't sure she wanted to talk to her either. She wanted to be alone to lick her wounds, and the only person she really wanted to talk to was Steven. |
| 3759 |
She had met him several times, and been impressed by him, but in her heart of hearts, she had never liked him. There was something cold and calculating about the man. He looked right through you, as though anxious to move on to someone else, and she had never thought he was as warm and decent as Adrian. |
| 3760 |
It was just too depressing. And in the morning she woke up, as the first rays of sun streamed in through the windows. She could hear the birds chirping outside, and it was a beautiful day, but she felt as though there were an elephant sitting on her heart as she lay on the couch and thought about Steven. |
| 3761 |
She washed her face and brushed her teeth, and then she brushed her hair and put on jeans and an old sweater of Steven's. It was a way of staying close to him. She could wear his clothes if she couldn't have him. She made herself a piece of toast reluctantly, and she warmed coffee from the leftovers of the day before. |
| 3762 |
But it was something to do while she went out walking. She stopped at their mailbox and leaned against the wall, flipping through bills, and two letters for Steven. There was nothing for her, and she put it all back in the box, and walked slowly out to her car, thinking that maybe she'd go for a drive. |
| 3763 |
She had left her car at the front of the complex the day before, and she noticed an old woody station wagon parked next to it, and as she approached she saw a man taking a bicycle out of it. He was hot and damp, and he looked as though he had been out for an early morning ride, as he turned and looked at her. |
| 3764 |
She looked tired and pale, and he wondered if she'd been working too hard, or maybe she'd been sick. And she seemed subdued, like someone who'd been through a lot. She had seemed bouncier somehow at the grocery store in the middle of the night, but in any case, she was still beautiful, and he was happy to see her. |
| 3765 |
It was as though, standing near him, she would be safe for a little while, and nothing else terrible could happen to her. He had that kind of feeling about him, like someone who could take care of things, and as she spoke to him, he was intently watching her eyes. Something had happened to her in the past few weeks. |
| 3766 |
She was beginning to doubt it. She brought the razor to the office that day and the next day it was gone. He had picked it up that night and hadn't left so much as a note for her, but she didn't say anything about it to anyone. Not even Zelda. And she hadn't told anyone at work that Steven had left her. |
| 3767 |
It was quiet while Adrian knew Steven was away, and in some ways it was restful. She stopped expecting to hear from him, or to run into him. She didn't lie in bed hoping he'd come to the apartment to pick something up, or turn up in her office to tell her that he'd been a fool and he was desperately sorry. |
| 3768 |
She knew he was back in Chicago by then, and she hadn't heard from him in weeks, but maybe when he came back, they could finally sort things out and get back to the business of living. In the meantime, she felt as though everything was on hold. She worked, she ate, she slept, she didn't go anywhere, she didn't go out. |
| 3769 |
She'd been back to see the doctor once, and he told her the pregnancy was progressing well, and everything was normal. Everything except the fact that her husband had left her, she thought to herself. But she was relieved that the baby was all right. It had come to mean everything to her now, it was all she had left. |
| 3770 |
She had run into him at the apartment complex, too, and he didn't tell her he had seen her husband leaving their town house several weeks before with a staggering amount of luggage. He knew he had to be going somewhere but he didn't ask where, and Adrian didn't mention it when they saw each other at the pool. |
| 3771 |
And it was embarrassing for her just being there. She had been so happy to see him at first, but he had been cool and maintained his distance. She went out for the afternoon when they loaded the truck and she just stayed in her car and drove so she didn't have to watch, or say good bye to him again. |
| 3772 |
The chest itself was gone, as were all the lamps and the comfortable leather contour chair. All his toys and gadgets and devices. She no longer owned a television set, and when she went into the bathroom to blow her nose, she found that he had even taken her toothbrush. She started to laugh at the absurdity of it then. |
| 3773 |
All she had left was her bed and her clothes, the living room rug, a few odds and ends, which he'd carefully left on the floor, and the set of china she'd had when they were married, most of which was now broken. There had been no discussion, no argument, no conversation about what belonged to whom, or who wanted what. |
| 3774 |
He had simply taken all of it, because he had paid for most of it, and because he felt it was his and he had a right to. As she walked through the downstairs rooms again, she reached into the refrigerator for something to drink, and found that he had taken all the sodas. She started to laugh again then. |
| 3775 |
He had taken everything. But she had kept the only thing that mattered to her. Their baby. She was in surprisingly good spirits in spite of everything and it was only the next day that it hit her. She lay by the pool for a long time, thinking of him, and wondering how their life had managed to fall apart so quickly. |
| 3776 |
She thought of the parents and siblings he had walked out on years before, the friend he had betrayed, with never a look back. Maybe there was a part of him that just didn't know how to love. Otherwise it wouldn't have been possible for everything to fall apart the way it had. It just couldn't have. |
| 3777 |
In a matter of weeks, their marriage had ended. It depressed her to think about it now, but she had to face the fact that he was gone. She had to make a new life for herself, but she couldn't even begin to imagine how. She was thirty one years old, she had been married for two and a half years, and she was pregnant. |
| 3778 |
He would have come to his senses by then. He'd be mortified, apologetic, aghast at what he'd done, and they'd both laugh and go upstairs to bed and make up, and ten years hence he would tell their child how absurd he had been when she told him she was having a baby. But when she got home at night, he wasn't there. |
| 3779 |
She had thought about buying new furniture as soon as he left. But she decided not to, in case he came back, which she still thought he would. And what was the point of having two sets of furniture for one apartment? She kept the answering machine on most of the time, but she listened to the calls when they came in. |
| 3780 |
But when Adrian tried to call him, his secretary always said he was away, and Adrian wasn't sure if he was or not. There was still that panicky feeling of what would happen to her if she really needed him, but she didn't for the moment, and she knew she just had to sit tight until he came to his senses. |
| 3781 |
As a result, he hadn't been out with anyone in over a month, and he didn't really miss it. He missed having someone to talk to late at night, someone to bounce his ideas off for the show, someone to share his joys and sorrows with. But he hadn't had that with Sylvia anyway. In fact, he hadn't had that since Leslie. |
| 3782 |
The last thing she wanted was to hang around a bunch of lonely singles at the complex. She had her own life to lead, and she was not interested in cultivating new relationships, or dating. She was married, and all she had to do was wait for Steven to come to his senses. It was just a matter of time, she was sure of it. |
| 3783 |
She caught a glimpse of Bill again in the checkout line, with three carts loaded to the brim trailing behind him. She carried her own meager purchases to the car, feeling sad again. She could fit a week's groceries into two bags now. Everything about her life seemed to have shrunk, ever since Steven had left her. |
| 3784 |
It still surprised her to realize how lost she felt, how bereft and deserted. After two and a half years, she couldn't even remember what she used to do with herself to keep amused before they were married. It was almost as though she had never lived alone before, as though there had never been a life before Steven. |
| 3785 |
The doctor said it was because of the baby. The baby. The idea of it still seemed unreal. The tiny being who had cost her her marriage. And yet she still wanted it. Somehow it still seemed worth it. She got up and showered, and made herself some scrambled eggs at noon, and then she paid some bills and did her laundry. |
| 3786 |
It was certainly easy keeping house these days. There was nothing to straighten out, or dust, no spots to worry about on the couch, no plants to water, he had taken those too. All she had to do was make her bed and vacuum. And at two thirty, she went out to the pool, and saw Bill busily preparing for the barbecue. |
| 3787 |
At six o'clock people started to arrive. There were music and laughter, and she could hear what sounded like about fifty people. She went out on her deck after a while, where she could hear the noise and smell the food, but they couldn't see her, and she couldn't see them. But it all sounded very festive. |
| 3788 |
There was the clinking of glasses, and someone was playing old Beatles albums and music from the sixties. It sounded like fun, and she was sorry she hadn't gone. But it was too awkward to explain why Steven wasn't there, even though she had said he was in Chicago on business. But it was embarrassing going out alone. |
| 3789 |
She hadn't done it yet, and she wasn't ready to start. But smelling the food was making her desperately hungry. She finally went back downstairs and looked in her fridge, but nothing looked as good as what she smelled, and all of it was too much trouble to cook. She was suddenly dying for a hamburger. |
| 3790 |
She hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, and she wondered if she could just slip into the group, grab something to eat, and disappear again. She could always write Bill Thigpen a check later for what she owed for participating in the dinner. There was no harm in that. It wasn't really like going out. |
| 3791 |
What if they all had dates, or if she didn't know anyone at all? But even if he had a date, at least she knew Bill Thigpen, and he was always easygoing and friendly. She went downstairs then, and a moment later, she was hovering at the edge of the crowd near one of the big picnic tables where the food was laid out. |
| 3792 |
Adrian hesitated, watching him, he was handing out steaks with a professional air, and chatting with everyone as they came and went, but he seemed to be alone, not that it really mattered. And she realized then that she didn't even know if he had a girlfriend, not that it really made any difference. |
| 3793 |
He had always seemed so unencumbered. She walked slowly over to him, and his face broke into a broad smile as he saw her. He took it all in, the white lace dress, the shiny dark hair, her big blue eyes, she looked beautiful, and he was thrilled to see her. He felt like a kid, with a crush on a neighborhood girl. |
| 3794 |
He put the steak on her plate, offered her some wine, which she declined, and she went to sit near the pool, and he hoped she'd still be there by the time he finished cooking. It was half an hour later when he finally decided he'd done his bit, everyone had been served, and most of the guests had had seconds. |
| 3795 |
There were times when I really thought we'd starve, but we never did. And the baby was the best thing that ever happened to us. I think that's one of the few things we still agree on. Adam and the show happened at about the same time. I always felt that it was providence sending us what we needed for him, and for us. |
| 3796 |
He seemed to know everyone, and he was always friendly and pleasant. She liked being with him and was surprised by how comfortable she was with him. She could imagine herself telling him almost anything. Almost. Except maybe about Steven. In some ways, she felt like a failure because he had left her. |
| 3797 |
She left the front door unlatched, but closed so he couldn't see in. It was as though she was hiding something in her apartment. And a moment later, he heard a tremendous crash, and without thinking twice, he dashed inside to help her. She had dropped two soda bottles, and they had sprayed soda all over the kitchen. |
| 3798 |
They stayed until after five when it started to get cool, talking about theater and books, and New York and Boston, and Europe. They talked about children and politics and the philosophies behind both soap operas and news shows, the kinds of things he liked to write, and the short stories she had written in college. |
| 3799 |
And when she walked into his apartment, she saw yet another dimension. There were beautiful modern paintings on the walls, and some interesting sculptures he had collected in the course of his travels. The couches were leather and comfortable and well worn. The chairs, enormous and soft and inviting. |
| 3800 |
I want to wander in and out of the room when they're talking on the phone, doing their homework, hanging out with their friends. I want to stand there and get tears in my eyes when I watch them sleep at night. I want to be there when they're sick and throw up and have runny noses. I want to be there for the real stuff. |
| 3801 |
They sat on the floor because there was nowhere else to sit. It was a far cry from his comfortable apartment. He noticed as they sat that she didn't even have a TV or a radio, and then he noticed where there had obviously been stereo speakers. And it dawned on him suddenly that she wouldn't have sold them. |
| 3802 |
And then he opened the right one, and closed it behind him as he walked into the bathroom. He opened all the cupboards as quietly as he could, and then flushed the toilet and ran the water. And as he sat down to coffee with her again, he watched her eyes for the answers to his questions. But there were none. |
| 3803 |
She had said nothing to him. She had pretended for weeks that Steven was away on business, that he would be back in a few days, that everything was fine, although she had admitted over dinner that it wasn't always easy. She was a beautiful girl, and he knew she was married. She was still wearing her wedding ring. |
| 3804 |
But even more important, the fact that Helen was pregnant was about to be unveiled on the show that week. And the real scandal was that the baby wasn't her husband's, a blessing in this case, but it would be the cause of untold guessing games in kitchens across the country for the next several months. |
| 3805 |
And he was thinking about Adrian as he drove to work the next day, and why she hadn't told him that Steven had left her. It was not unlike one of his plots, although undoubtedly the reasons were a lot simpler. And there was always the possibility that he was wrong, he realized, but he didn't see how he could be. |
| 3806 |
He had been dumped on his parents' front steps with his throat cut. She was busy assigning editors to work on what had come in, and reporters to speak to close family friends, when someone told her there was a call holding for her, but she didn't recognize the name when she picked it up, and she had no idea who it was. |
| 3807 |
It's a highly unusual procedure. But he's adamant that that's what he wants. I've drawn up some papers in draft form, just for you to look at. They state simply that he renounces any claim to the baby. As a result, he would have no visiting rights, no claim to the child once it's born. It would not bear his name. |
| 3808 |
He felt like a complete louse telling her those things, but he had thought it would be worse if she had just opened her mail and found it all there. Steven had insisted he had no quarrel with her, she had been a good wife and they had been happy, he just didn't want the baby and she had refused to abort it. |
| 3809 |
And Larry Allman wondered if Townsend was a little less than reasonable on this issue. But it wasn't his job to argue with him. He had tried to talk him into counseling, urged him to reconsider, and not to do anything about the termination of parental rights until after the baby came and he at least saw it. |
| 3810 |
It was the worst thing she had ever heard, and she stood shaking as she thought about it, wondering what she was going to do now. In truth, nothing had really changed. She still had the town house for a while, he still had all their furniture, and she still had the baby. But everything really had changed. |
| 3811 |
It was an endless day, and it was nine o'clock before she found the dinner that Bill had sent over for her. And at midnight, as she sat in the studio, watching the show, she saw him walk in and pointed to a chair next to her own. He sat down quietly and watched with her, obviously deeply moved by the program. |
| 3812 |
He had dropped by at work, sent food over late at night, offered her a ride once or twice, but never pressed the issue of a date or an evening that she obviously couldn't have coped with. And he had even recommended a lawyer who had taken her affairs in hand and already spoken several times with Lawrence All man. |
| 3813 |
Now that Steven wouldn't be contributing anything, she wanted to be a little more careful. Bill picked her up at eight, and he was wearing khaki slacks, a white shirt, and a blue blazer, and she was wearing a dress that she'd had for years. It was a soft peachy pink silk that flowed easily from the shoulders. |
| 3814 |
They drove to Sunset chatting about work, and how hectic it had been for both of them in the past few weeks, and it was obvious how excited he was about the boys coming out on the following Wednesday. They were going to spend two days with him in town, and then they were embarking on their big adventure. |
| 3815 |
For the first time in his life, he had actually been considering putting the make on a married woman, and he had been wrestling with himself for days. She could have spared him that, but it didn't matter now. And she looked a lot better. The shock had worn off, and he hadn't seen her cry since the first day. |
| 3816 |
He was a real catch, and Zelda had never looked happier or better. She caught a glimpse of Adrian with Bill and made a circle of her thumb and forefinger, indicating her approval, as Adrian laughed and followed him to the waiting woody. She thanked him for dinner then and turned to him with a serious look. |
| 3817 |
They were still parked only a few feet from the restaurant and they hadn't moved, but he was worried about her suddenly. There were brief moments when she looked so unhappy and so worried. He knew it was probably the divorce doing it, but it made him sad for her and he wanted to help her through it. |
| 3818 |
But Adrian was a very special woman. In some ways, he was afraid of his feelings for her, and in other ways, he loved them. He took her back to her place around twelve o'clock, and he felt like a teenager standing in her doorway. He was dying to get his hands on her, but he sensed instinctively that she wasn't ready. |
| 3819 |
He wouldn't dare make a pass at her while traveling with his children. They were just going to have to wait, or he was. He didn't even know if she was attracted to him, and he was afraid to find out too soon. There was always the possibility that he would scare her off. And she was grateful that he hadn't pressed her. |
| 3820 |
Sylvia had been gone for quite a while. And ever since Adrian had walked into his life, he hadn't wanted anyone else. But dreams of her were beginning to haunt him. She appeared in his studio on Monday just before noon, with a broad grin on her face and a look of victory as he was coping with last minute changes. |
| 3821 |
And it was the first time that she heard the baby's heartbeat. The doctor put the stethoscope to her ears, and there was a small device like a microphone attached to the other end which he slid across her stomach. The first loud thumping she heard was her own, it was actually the placenta pumping blood to the baby. |
| 3822 |
She went back to the office afterward, and as usual, there was a mountain of work for her to do. And she didn't hear from Bill, but she assumed that the boys had arrived safely. He called her in the newsroom late that night, just before the eleven o'clock news, the boys were in bed, and he sounded happy and exhausted. |
| 3823 |
I sure am happy to have them. I'm bringing them to work tomorrow for a while, till they destroy the place. Adam is always fascinated by it, he thinks he wants to be a director when he grows up, but Tommy gets a little antsy. I thought maybe we could stop by and say hi, or take you to lunch if you have time. |
| 3824 |
The boys were so important to him that she was worried about what would happen if they didn't like her. Admittedly, she and Bill weren't deeply involved with each other, but she liked him a great deal, and she sensed that he liked her too. If nothing else, she hoped it was the start of a serious friendship. |
| 3825 |
Too much had gone on. Between the baby and Steven filing for divorce, she wasn't ready for a relationship. And yet, she was growing used to him. And she found that she needed him at unexpected times, and in some ways, she was afraid to need him as much as she might, if she let herself go completely. |
| 3826 |
They usually told him what they thought of them, and a couple of them had joined them on trips. But it was hard for him to explain to them that this one was different. This was a woman he respected and liked, someone he suspected he could love, but he didn't tell them any of that. He didn't want to scare them. |
| 3827 |
She went to Bill's studio again the next day, just in time to see the show air, and she watched in fascination as the woman who was supposedly pregnant sobbed, talking about her baby. Her husband was still in jail, and she was being blackmailed by a woman who allegedly knew who had fathered her baby. |
| 3828 |
Her husband's trial had just begun, and Helen was still mourning the loss of her sister. It was easy to see why people got caught up in it. It was all so absurd, and so exaggerated, and yet it wasn't. It was exaggerated in just the way real life was, with all its unexpected quirks and turns and sudden disasters. |
| 3829 |
They looked almost like twins, except that one of them was much smaller. And just looking at Tommy made you want to rim up and hug him. He had soft brown curls, and blue eyes that were even bigger than his brother's. He noticed her first, and stared at her with curiosity instead of watching the show. |
| 3830 |
She was terrific. They chatted through lunch, and Adrian hated to leave them and go back to the office. She invited them to come and visit the newsroom, but she didn't invite them to watch the show later that day. Some of the reels they had gotten in were just too grim, and she didn't want them to see that. |
| 3831 |
He wasn't even speaking to her, and he had filed for divorce, he was hardly likely to try to reach her. And if he changed his mind and decided to come home, he would certainly call her office to find her. So she left a memo with Zelda and the manager of the newsroom with a list of the hotels Bill had given her. |
| 3832 |
But she doubted very strongly that anyone would call her. And as she went back to her desk again, she thought of Adam and Tommy's questions over lunch about her wedding ring and her divorce, and whether or not she had wanted to divorce Steven. And then, as they got busy before the evening news, she forgot all about it. |
| 3833 |
They had some last minute shopping to do too. They were leaving the next morning. She packed that night when she went home after the evening news, and when she went back to do the late show, everything was ready and standing at the front door. Her two small bags looked strange in the empty apartment. |
| 3834 |
Everything would change for her then, including her relationship with Bill. She knew that there was no way he would want to go anywhere with her once it was obvious that she was pregnant. But at least for the moment, she could enjoy being with him, and she was really looking forward to the vacation. |
| 3835 |
Bill looked happy and relaxed, and he bent toward her as though he was about to kiss her when he arrived, and then remembered himself and backed away with a shy glance at her, and a look over his shoulder at the two children. He had rented a Wagoneer, and they were fully equipped for all aspects of their trip. |
| 3836 |
Adam was wearing earphones and listening to a tape, and Tommy hummed to himself as he played with an assortment of little men and soldiers. And Bill and Adrian chatted easily in the front seat. It was just like being an ordinary family, off on their summer vacation, and as she thought of it, Adrian started to giggle. |
| 3837 |
They whispered and played, and Tommy came out in tears when he couldn't find the battered rabbit that he always slept with. Adam had hidden it under the bed, and Bill looked happy and tired when the boys finally fell asleep, and he and Adrian sat in the living room and talked in whispers in front of the fireplace. |
| 3838 |
He was never quite sure. Friendship, or romance, or both. He was still being extremely cautious so he didn't lose her. She seldom mentioned her husband anymore, but he knew that he was still very much on her mind, just from little things she said. And Adam had had a good point about her wedding band. |
| 3839 |
And he didn't want to pry and embarrass her further. That would have explained a lot, and she didn't appear to want to elaborate on the matter. They chatted on for a while, and eventually they stood up and said good night, as he looked longingly at her, and smiled as she waved and closed the door to her bedroom. |
| 3840 |
She was a lot more serious than he knew. She didn't want to burden anyone with the responsibility of her baby. If Steven didn't want it, then she had no right to burden anyone else with it, certainly not Bill, who had his life and his hands full with his own children. And he had already told her he didn't want more. |
| 3841 |
He kissed her. And at first she tried to resist him, but only for a moment and then she melted into his arms again, knowing that she was falling in love with him too. But she couldn't. It wasn't fair. She was breathless and looked worried when he stopped and he only smiled and touched her lips with his fingers. |
| 3842 |
She had to give Steven a chance to come back, if he changed the mind. And she had to devote all her love and energies to the baby. And it wasn't fair to walk into Bill's life pregnant by her previous husband. It sounded too much like the bible for his show, and she almost groaned as she thought of trying to explain it. |
| 3843 |
The one thing he was sure of was that he didn't want to lose her. She was also wonderful with the boys, and they had never been happier with any of his friends. They teased her mercilessly, and Tommy loved to tickle her, and play with her hair and climb all over her just to let her know that he liked her. |
| 3844 |
They stayed at a cozy Victorian inn, visited several wineries, and drove slowly north, after a hot, sunny afternoon gliding in Calistoga. She wouldn't go gliding with them, but Bill didn't press the point, nor would she go in the hot air balloon he rented to show the boys the rest of the Napa Valley at sunrise. |
| 3845 |
They easily found the campsite they had reserved, and Bill set up their tents. He had a larger one for him and the boys, and a smaller one he had bought especially for Adrian. He set them up side by side, and Tommy announced he wanted to sleep with her, which was going to be very cozy, but she seemed very flattered. |
| 3846 |
They had all been wonderful to her, and in some ways, she felt as though she didn't deserve it. She was driving herself nuts weighing everything, thinking of what they meant to her, and yet feeling that at some point she would have to pull back. She couldn't get involved with Bill, if she was going to have the baby. |
| 3847 |
And yet, she couldn't seem to stay away from him. All she wanted to do was talk to him night and day, and look at him, and enjoy his company and feel his warmth somewhere near her. She kept finding herself standing next to him, brushing hands with him, wanting to feel his hands on her face again, and his lips on hers. |
| 3848 |
Adrian had to come to his rescue then, so Bill tickled her, while Adam assisted, and within moments they were a wild tangle of arms and legs and feet and squeals and hands that were tickling anything, anywhere on anyone, until Adrian finally begged them to stop, laughing so hard, she split the zipper on her blue jeans. |
| 3849 |
Fortunately, she knew she had another pair, so she didn't panic. But she was laughing so hard, she could hardly walk, and so were the others as they all stumbled out into the sunshine. It was a nice way to wake up, and it was certainly a lot better than waking up in the empty silence of her now unfurnished apartment. |
| 3850 |
It was almost warm enough already, and in another hour it would be. It was freezing in the lake, but there was a lively river that ran a little distance behind where they were camping. They had seen it the day before, and there was a cascade of water running out of the mountains that made a sizable current to raft on. |
| 3851 |
She called out to him, ready to scold him for leaving the swimming hole without telling her, and he didn't seem to hear her. She called him again, and then decided to get out and go get him. She asked Adam to get out and wait for her, and she got out and clambered over the rocks to go and get Tommy. |
| 3852 |
He was standing on the riverbank and leaning as far forward as he could, as three rafts came racing past him. It looked like great fun to him, and he was planning to ask his father to rent a raft and take them rafting. It was a lot more fun than renting a rowboat and fishing in the middle of Lake Tahoe. |
| 3853 |
She had seen it, too, but he didn't hear her as he began moving swiftly downstream toward the rocks that were far down the river. Adrian looked frantically for something to hold out to him, an oar, a pole, a limb from a tree, and at first there was nothing, and no one had yet seen what had happened. |
| 3854 |
He was flailing wildly with his arms, but he kept going down and Adrian realized instantly that something terrible was about to happen. Adam was crying hysterically, and he started to jump in, but she grabbed at him and pushed him roughly aside, shouting at him as she pushed him away from the water. |
| 3855 |
They had seen him now. But everyone seemed to be helpless. Two men shoved an oar at him from one of the boats, but he was too small and too stunned to grab it, and he was pushed under the surface by the currents and disappeared again as Adrian continued to run without stopping for breath or for anything. |
| 3856 |
If she didn't, it would be all over, and no matter what it took, she knew she couldn't let that happen. She was almost hit by an oar as she swam past, strong and swift and sure, battered by the currents, and in the distance she could hear people shouting, and from somewhere there was the whine of a siren. |
| 3857 |
He was sputtering and gasping, and swallowing water each time they went down, and he was fighting her with what strength he had, but she wouldn't loosen her grip on him and as the currents kept ripping at her, she kept pushing him upward, and then suddenly he was gone. She couldn't feel the weight of him anymore. |
| 3858 |
She's taken a lot of water into her lungs, and she lost a great deal of blood from the cut on her arm. She hit an artery and that alone could have been fatal. There must have been something awfully sharp under the surface of the water. In addition, she appears to have sustained a considerable blow on the head. |
| 3859 |
He owed her everything. If she lived long enough for him to repay it. He walked into the special emergency unit then, and sat down next to her. There seemed to be machines hooked to every part of her, and the oxygen mask obscured part of her face, but he gently took her hand in his own and kissed her fingers. |
| 3860 |
As she listened, she thought Adrian was awfully lucky to have a man love her the way he did. And as she watched, she saw something on the monitors that caught her attention. She frowned and walked into the room, and as she approached, Adrian turned toward Bill and opened her eyes and then closed them. |
| 3861 |
For an instant of sheer terror, he thought she had just died, and he let out an almost animal sound of grief, as he stood up and looked down at her again in anguish. But as he did, she opened her eyes again, and the nurse checked her vital signs and smiled down at her, and Bill smiled at her as he was crying. |
| 3862 |
She felt nauseated and exhausted, and Bill was looking at her, saddened by what she had just told him, grateful for the honesty. It was one of the things he loved about her. He didn't think Steven would come back, not if he was filing papers renouncing the child, and divorcing her. The guy was obviously crazy. |
| 3863 |
She dozed for a little while then, holding his hand, and he watched the monitors while she slept. The nurse came in a couple of times, and reassured him that everything was normal. He left for a little while eventually, to check on the boys. He found Tommy sleeping too. He was taking a nap, but he looked fine. |
| 3864 |
The day could have ended in tragedy for all of them, and Bill was certain that if she hadn't been so quick to react, and relentless in her efforts to save the child, Tommy would no longer be with them. It was a debt he would owe her forever. But he had to think of Adam now, too, and he looked a little shaken. |
| 3865 |
She was still asleep, and they wanted her to stay that way for a while. She still had some repairing to do, and they thought she might be able to leave the hospital the next day if there were no further problems. They wanted to be sure she didn't develop pneumonia, or have complications with the baby. |
| 3866 |
He told them he'd be back in a little while, and he went to tell Adam that, too, and then he got a ride back to their campsite, and he stood trembling as he looked around, thinking that only that morning, life had seemed so carefree and so simple. And now suddenly two of the people he loved had almost lost their lives. |
| 3867 |
He had a sense of reverence and gratitude, and he was relieved when everything was packed and he drove to the hotel. They had set aside a beautiful two bedroom suite, and he had already decided to sleep on the couch. He wanted to keep an eye on her at night, and be sure that he heard her if she called him. |
| 3868 |
The children's ward was almost empty. There was a broken leg, a broken arm, a minor car accident that had required some stitches and observation for a concussion, and Tommy, having survived his dousing in the river. And most of the other children were older, and they were talking among themselves during dinner. |
| 3869 |
So Bill had no choice but to take them to the hotel, and come back for Adrian in the morning. But she didn't seem to mind when he went back to see her. She was so exhausted from the perils of the day that she had barely woken up to talk to him before she was asleep again, and the nurse suggested that he leave her. |
| 3870 |
She was still pretty shaky when she was discharged, and they went straight to the hotel so she could rest. And Bill set her up with pillows in a chaise longue on their terrace. She was impressed by how fancy their quarters were, and she admitted to Bill confidentially that it was a lot nicer than camping. |
| 3871 |
He laughed in answer and told her that some people would do anything to avoid sleeping in a tent, and she certainly had. In one day, she had managed to almost lose her life, save Tommy's, and admit to the fact that she was pregnant. They ordered room service for lunch, and then Bill went out fishing with the boys. |
| 3872 |
It was as though they had always known her. They had called their mother long since, and told her all about Tommy's accident, and Adrian's heroics. And she had insisted on speaking to her and thanking Adrian herself. She sounded nice on the phone and she had cried copiously, just thinking of what might have happened. |
| 3873 |
I like her, too, even though we irritate the hell out of each other sometimes, when we don't agree about the boys. And her husband is kind of an uptight pain in the ass. He thinks that California is uncivilized, and devoid of culture, and he thinks pretty much the same thing about me because of the show. |
| 3874 |
But he was willing to leave an open door for her, and she couldn't ask for more than that. In fact, it was much more than she had ever dared to hope for. She had envisioned herself alone and desperately lonely until the baby was born. It had never dawned on her that all of this would happen before she had the baby. |
| 3875 |
Adam particularly loved that story, and Bill grinned at her as she told it. They were all a little sorry to be home. And she particularly, as she had to go back to work the following morning. Bill was planning to take another two weeks off, so he could hang around with the boys, but she couldn't do that. |
| 3876 |
He suggested they go to Disneyland on the weekend and it gave Adrian something to look forward to as well. She was feeling depressed at not being with them every moment. She suddenly felt left out, and she was really sad when she helped put them to bed, and had finished reading them their favorite stories. |
| 3877 |
And they wanted her to stay every night, but she said she had to get back to her own apartment. In fact, she had to go back that morning, to get dressed for work, and Adam and Tommy went with her. They were surprised to see that she had no furniture, and Tommy looked around with obvious disapproval. |
| 3878 |
And they had a wonderful time in Disneyland, and their last day together came too soon. Bill took all of them to Spago again as a special treat, but it was a mournful dinner. Bill and Adrian were so sad to see them go, and the boys were heartbroken to be leaving them. Both boys cried when they went to bed that night. |
| 3879 |
He was less affected by the seasons than the evening shows, because his show didn't go into summer reruns, and it was live all year round. But he had to make it lively, and jazz it up to keep it fresh, and he was currently working on developing new subplots, and they had spent a lot of time talking about it together. |
| 3880 |
She was working on the divorce with the attorney he'd hired for her, and in January she was going to have the baby. She had already decided to take a leave of absence, but she hadn't told the newsroom yet. But maybe instead of going back to work at the news, she could go to work for Bill after the baby. |
| 3881 |
It was remarkable but she had had no lasting ill effects from her traumatic adventure at Lake Tahoe. She had seen the doctor as soon as she got home, and eventually the stitches in her arm had come out, but the scratches and bruises were gone, the concussion healed, the baby secure. It was truly amazing. |
| 3882 |
He didn't want to give anything to anyone, which was the antithesis of everything Bill stood for. She still couldn't believe she had been lucky enough to meet him. He was putting their cups in the sink, when he turned to her with a shy smile, and their eyes met, and she felt herself pulled toward him. |
| 3883 |
He pulled her close to him instead, feeling the swell of her against him, and then holding her full breasts in his hands. He loved everything about her. It was odd getting to know her this way, in a state of transition. This was the only way he knew her, and he felt bound to the baby somehow, as though it were his too. |
| 3884 |
Her thighs already felt twice the size they had been two months before, and her breasts seemed huge compared to what they normally were. She was usually very small, and suddenly she was very full busted. All the changes seemed so strange and foreign to her, and yet at the same time, she was excited about the baby. |
| 3885 |
There was no doubt in his mind that they would still be together by then. Only then, they would have to say something to the boys about the baby. He would leave it to Adrian to decide what she wanted to tell them. And as he thought of it, he put a hand on her stomach again to see if he could feel the baby. |
| 3886 |
He felt possessive about it now that he had been closer to it, and felt her body joined to his. He had never felt closer to any woman. Adam got on the phone then and told him about the movie they'd seen on the plane. Something about the war in Vietnam, and it sounded upsetting to him, but Adam seemed to have loved it. |
| 3887 |
They showered and dressed afterward, and went for a drive in her MG, which Bill loved to drive. And they stopped in Malibu for a long walk on the beach, and at sunset they drove slowly home with the top down and the wind in their faces. They looked happy and relaxed and young, and the world seemed to be theirs. |
| 3888 |
It didn't have much appeal, not now, when she could be with him, which was all she wanted. He drove her to work the next day, and told her he'd bring her home after the six o'clock news, and then take her back for the late show. And when Zelda saw her, smiling at her desk, she knew something had happened to her. |
| 3889 |
Now that it was moving, that it was alive, that she felt it, and could see the bulge that it caused in her body, she was even less able to understand how he could push them both away. It still didn't make sense, and she wanted to talk to him about it. It had nothing to do with how much she loved Bill. |
| 3890 |
But he had no idea that she had tried to call Steven, just to talk to him, just to ask him why, it wasn't that she even wanted to change his mind anymore, she just wanted to know why he hadn't loved her, and had refused to accept their baby. There had to be a reason, something more than just a difficult childhood. |
| 3891 |
She knew that it would hurt his feelings. Instead, she just sat quietly in the living room, and suggested they call the boys after dinner. Talking to them always cheered her up. And the next day, her lawyer called her again and gave her the name of the real estate agent who would be showing the apartment. |
| 3892 |
But there was nothing else, no note, no letter, nothing jotted on the forms. He had completely removed himself from her life and he wanted to keep it that way, no matter what. It was almost as though he was afraid of her, but she couldn't understand why. It seemed so unreasonable, but maybe it no longer mattered. |
| 3893 |
She showed the papers to Bill that night and he said they looked fine, but he made a couple of suggestions, about the escrow, and how to handle the deposit, and suggested she talk to her divorce lawyer about them. And he warned her to be careful that she got her fair share out of the proceeds from the apartment. |
| 3894 |
It was all very simple, and much less emotional than she had feared. There was nothing left to hold on to, or feel sentimental about. Steven had taken it all with him five months before, even the album with their wedding pictures. She wondered what he had done with it, and figured he had probably thrown it out. |
| 3895 |
Jane Bergman was intelligent and direct and treated the entire process as though it was normal and natural, and she reassured them both that she had every reason to believe that the birth would be normal and easy. She also seemed perfectly comfortable with the fact that they were living together and not married. |
| 3896 |
But he had noticed lately that Adrian was starting to get very nervous. For seven months she had managed to avoid it and pretend she wasn't pregnant, but suddenly it was coming close, and she had to face it. She asked Bill a lot of questions, about the boys when they were born, and she had started reading the books. |
| 3897 |
And then he turned away and continued to talk to the woman he was with. She was young and sleek, and attractive, and she looked very athletic. But she wasn't half as pretty as Adrian, although she did look a few years younger. But Bill wasn't looking at the other girl, he was looking at Adrian across the table. |
| 3898 |
Bill was paying the check, and he also looked ashen. He didn't say a word, and they walked outside into the cool air, as Adrian caught her breath. She was feeling sick, after their wonderful dinner. And as they reached the street, they were just in time to see him drive away with the girl in his Porsche. |
| 3899 |
She was worried about the delivery, the labor, the pain, the baby's health, all the normal things that women worried about, and Bill also knew that the divorce was a strain on her, and so had been selling the apartment. And she had held up beautifully, but now she was starting to worry about little things. |
| 3900 |
It felt like one happy, normal family, and Tommy told her he hoped the baby was a boy, because girls were so dumb, but Adam only smiled and told her that whatever it was, they would love it. His gentleness made her cry, and she tidied the apartment up afterward when they went out for a while with their father. |
| 3901 |
But now there was a lot to do before the holidays. The newsroom was going wild, and the cast of his show always seemed to get more than a little worked up before Christmas. The pressures of their own lives and the imaginary traumas of the show seemed to combine to make them all come slightly unglued. |
| 3902 |
They were too sorry for Adrian being abandoned by her husband, and too pleased at the idea of sharing the wonder of the baby. Now every time they called, the first thing they asked was whether or not she'd had it. But Bill promised they would call immediately, and the boys would be the first to know. |
| 3903 |
Adrian managed to sign up for one at the hospital that started right after the evening news show. And they appeared with a dozen other couples, all of whom, save one, were first time parents. She felt a little strange being there, and she felt awkward about doing exercises and doing Lamaze with a roomful of strangers. |
| 3904 |
The only thing that they all had in common was their pregnancies. Even their ages were widely different. Of the two women who didn't work, one was nineteen and still in college, and her husband was only twenty. And the postal employee was forty two, her husband fifty five, and this was their first baby. |
| 3905 |
She had run into him a few times. He went to the same gym she did, but he hadn't seemed to notice her. And she had seen him there several times with different girls, always pretty, always young, and she was willing to bet that none of them knew that he had walked out on his wife because she was having a baby. |
| 3906 |
It touched him to see her like that, and more than once, it made him think of what a jerk Steven was for giving all that up. It meant so much to Bill, and absolutely nothing to Steven. Bill had wallpapered the room for her, in a white paper with little pink and blue stars and a pretty pink and blue rainbow border. |
| 3907 |
But it wouldn't be the same for him, having Christmas without them. They were coming out in February, for their spring break, and that was going to work out perfectly. If the baby came on time, it would be three weeks old by then, and Adrian would be more or less recovered, except for the sleepless nights. |
| 3908 |
She knew he was going to love it, and he hadn't wanted to be extravagant and buy it for himself. It was nice being able to spoil him. And when she was finished, she went to get the mail, and she was startled when she saw the envelope from City Hall. She opened it without thinking, and gasped when she saw the papers. |
| 3909 |
Legally; the baby was no longer his. It was Adrian's, period. The baby had no legal father. And his name would not be on the birth certificate, as the lawyer had explained to her the previous summer. She sat staring at the papers for a long time, and tears slowly filled her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. |
| 3910 |
I don't need to wait to see it, or check it out, to decide if it's cute or not, or take my emotional temperature the day it's born. It is and you are and I am, and we are exactly what I've always wanted. I'm telling you that I want to marry you, for better or worse, in sickness or in health, forever. |
| 3911 |
I've been too scared even to let myself think it. Because, as I told you before, I never wanted to care that much again, or have a woman walk out on me and take my children. This baby isn't mine, it's his, as you keep pointing out to me, but I love it as though it were mine, and I don't want to lose it. |
| 3912 |
But I'm also not going to sit here with my door open forever, waiting for him to come to his senses, or get bored with the bimbos in his life, and come back to you and the baby. As far as I'm concerned, Adrian, he can't have you. But if he does want you, and you want him, you'd both better make up your minds quick. |
| 3913 |
But sometimes Bill wasn't as sure. He still worried about it when she talked about being fair to him. And women were odd sometimes about the men who had fathered their children, they gave them more understanding, more leeway. It wasn't that way with men, who could never be entirely sure who their children were. |
| 3914 |
And he had bought her all kinds of silly little trinkets, a gold key chain, and an antique pen, and a Mickey Mouse watch that she loved, and a book of poetry that said everything she felt for him. She was crying by the time she had finished opening all of it, and he looked immensely pleased by her reaction. |
| 3915 |
And she loved him even more. He was incredible. And as she looked at the ring on her left hand, she was dazzled. She had taken her gold wedding ring off finally, two months before, because it had gotten too small for her as her hands swelled, and in spite of her condition, it no longer seemed appropriate to wear it. |
| 3916 |
But she still seemed to think he would come flying through the delivery room doors the moment she had the baby. And somehow, Bill felt sure she would come to her senses and be more realistic after she had the baby. Right now, she still seemed to need the fantasy that one day Steven would have regrets about the baby. |
| 3917 |
They wanted her collaboration in getting him there, and she was happy and excited for him. His actual birthday was on New Year's Day, and they were going to have the party that afternoon, right on the set, with a band, and past and present members of the cast, and as many of his friends as they could contact. |
| 3918 |
She was almost used to the warm up contractions now. They happened mostly on busy days, or when she was very tired, and she didn't really mind them. She lay there, thinking peacefully for a little while, and she felt another tightening, and then another. And she decided to try one of his tricks, without bothering him. |
| 3919 |
And a minute later she came out of her closet again with a look of panic. He ran to her instantly, and helped her into a chair, but she couldn't speak now when she had a contraction. And as she sat there, gasping for air, she remembered the agony of the woman in the movie. But it seemed even worse than that. |
| 3920 |
He was hoping for a police escort, in case she actually had the baby. But she didn't and no one came, and he drove into the emergency entrance and honked, praying that someone would come to help him. An attendant appeared a moment later, as Adrian gripped him, unable to breathe through the contraction. |
| 3921 |
They both were, and then suddenly as she fell back again, and then sat up and pushed again, there was a long, reedy wail, and Bill looked up in amazement. He looked at Adrian and she was smiling through her tears and then she was screaming again as she pushed the baby out, and fell back against the pillows exhausted. |
| 3922 |
And the pediatric resident had just arrived to check out the baby. But the baby looked fine. He weighed eight pounds and fourteen ounces, a healthy size, and Bill kept saying that the baby looked just like his mother, but she thought he looked like Bill, which didn't make any sense, but Bill didn't want to say that. |
| 3923 |
He helped take the baby to the nursery while they cleaned her up, and he was back again half an hour later. It was only five fifteen. For a first baby, he had come remarkably quickly. They'd only been in the hospital since four thirty. But to Adrian for those last few moments, it had seemed endless. |
| 3924 |
He was worth all the pain, the confusion, the anxiety she'd been through. He was even worth the loss of her marriage to Steven, and she was now suddenly doubly glad that she hadn't let Steven force her to abort him. It was a hideous thought, as Bill helped her unwrap him a little and put him to her breast. |
| 3925 |
But it was typical of the kind of relationship Adrian had had in recent years with her parents. Ever since she'd married Steven. And her parents made no bones about the fact that they didn't like him. They had been right, perhaps, but it had permanently marked their relationship with their daughter. |
| 3926 |
Her attorney had gotten Steven's number inadvertently, but he had suggested to Adrian that she try not to use it. She got her address book out of her bag, and holding the baby in her left arm, she dialed the number. And as she did, she looked down at Sam. He was so beautiful and so sweet and so peaceful. |
| 3927 |
But her efforts were useless. The tears slid slowly down her cheeks as he walked toward her. Suddenly she remembered how much she had once loved him, what high hopes she had had, how confident she had been that their marriage was forever, and how heartbroken and desolate she had been when he left her. |
| 3928 |
The baby was his son, after all, and this was why she had called him. To see if he cared, to give him one last chance to reach out to the child he had rejected. She settled the baby in his arms and felt a sob catch in her throat as she watched him looking down at the sleeping infant in silent wonder. |
| 3929 |
You tried it out and didn't like him? No, you don't get to rent fatherhood, Steven, to try it on. You either do it or you don't, like marriage, like love, like real life. This is not one of your tennis games, where you get to sample different partners and pick the ones who play the worst, so you can massage your ego. |
| 3930 |
And they just figured he was tired after a long night with Adrian in labor. As it turned out, he had happened on the party completely by accident. After he left Adrian, he'd gone home, and then, needing to clear his mind, he had gone to the office. And he had arrived only slightly later than he should. |
| 3931 |
She couldn't leave her room, or the hospital, and she felt trapped and helpless. She held the baby for most of the afternoon, and put him in his little bassinet next to her for the entire evening. When her dinner tray came, she sent it away, and she put the big blue bear in a chair, and sat looking sadly at his roses. |
| 3932 |
The view was peaceful, and the house silent. Her hands had barely moved over the keyboard for the past hour. It was beyond frustrating. Despite a long and successful career in films, she was trying to write her first novel. Although she had written short stories for years, she had never published any. |
| 3933 |
She was involved in a variety of causes, mostly relating to the rights of women and children, which had taken her to Europe several times, China, and underdeveloped countries around the world. She cared deeply about injustice, poverty, political persecution, and crimes against the innocent and defenseless. |
| 3934 |
She had diligently kept journals of all her trips, and a poignant one of the months before Sean died. She and Sean had talked about her writing a book, in the last days of his life. He thought it was a wonderful idea, and encouraged her to start the project. She had waited until two years after his death to do it. |
| 3935 |
She had been wrestling with writing it for the past year. The book would give her an opportunity to speak out about the things that mattered to her, and delve deep into herself in a way that acting never had. She wanted desperately to complete the book, but she couldn't seem to get it off the ground. |
| 3936 |
Something kept stopping her, and she had no idea what it was. It was a classic case of writer's block, but like a dog with a bone, she refused to give up and let it go. She wanted to go back to acting eventually, but not until she wrote the book. She felt as though she owed that to Sean and herself. |
| 3937 |
The director was excellent, the screenwriter had won several Academy Awards for his earlier work. Her costars would have been interesting to work with. But when she read the script, it did absolutely nothing for her. She felt no pull to it at all. She didn't want to act anymore unless she loved the part. |
| 3938 |
When Carole finally started the book, she insisted it wasn't about herself. It was only as she got deeper into it that she realized that in fact it was. The central character had many facets of Carole in her, and the more Carole got into it, the harder it was to write, as though she couldn't bear facing herself. |
| 3939 |
She realized now that it had everything to do with her, the life she'd led, the men she'd loved, and the decisions she had made in the course of her life. Every time she sat down at her desk to write it, she found herself staring into space, dreaming about the past, and nothing wound up on the screen of her computer. |
| 3940 |
Immensely. She could go nowhere with the book, until she came up with the answers about her own life. It was driving her insane. It was as though by deciding to write this book, she was being forced to face herself in ways she never had before, ways she had avoided for years. There was no hiding from it now. |
| 3941 |
And she wanted to prove to herself that she could do it. She was paralyzed by the fear that she couldn't, and didn't have it in her. She had had the dream for more than three years now, and needed to know if she had a book in her or not. The word that came to mind when she thought of Sean was peace. |
| 3942 |
He had brought order to her life in the beginning, and together they had built a solid foundation for their life together. He had never tried to own or overwhelm her. Their lives had never seemed intertwined or entangled, instead they had traveled side by side, at a comfortable pace together, right until the end. |
| 3943 |
But because of his powerful influence on her life, she always felt him near her. He had accepted death as one more step in the journey of his life, a transition he had to make at some point, like a wondrous opportunity. He learned from everything he did, and whatever he encountered on his path, he embraced with grace. |
| 3944 |
He had always loved her short stories and essays, and over the years she had written dozens of poems to him, which he treasured. She had had all of them bound in a leather folder several months before he died, and he had spent hours reading them over and over again. She hadn't had time to start the book before he died. |
| 3945 |
He had been valiant till the end. They had gone for a walk together the day before he died. They hadn't been able to walk far, and they had said very little to each other. They had walked side by side, holding hands, sat down frequently when he got tired, and they had both cried as they sat and watched the sunset. |
| 3946 |
He had died the following night, peacefully, in her arms. He had taken one last long look at her, sighed with a gentle smile, closed his eyes, and was gone. Because of the way he'd died, with such elegant acceptance, afterward it had been impossible to be overwhelmed with grief when she thought about him. |
| 3947 |
They both were. What she felt in his absence was an emptiness she still felt now. And she wanted to fill that void with a better understanding of herself. She knew the book would help her do that, if she could ever get a handle on it. She wanted to at least try to measure up to him, and the faith he'd had in her. |
| 3948 |
And she knew that time off for introspection would eventually bring deeper meaning to her acting as well. She had made some important movies over the years, and had been in some major commercial hits. But she wanted more than that now, she wanted to bring something to her work that she never had before. |
| 3949 |
She was free to be whoever she wanted to be. Her years of belonging to a man had been over long before she met Sean. They had been two free souls, living side by side, enjoying each other with love and mutual respect. Their lives had been parallel, and in perfect symmetry and balance, but never enmeshed. |
| 3950 |
He had assured her it wouldn't, and had kept his promise. She knew that her eight years with Sean were something that only occurred once in a lifetime. She didn't expect to find that with anyone else. Sean had been unique. She couldn't imagine herself falling in love, or wanting to be married again. |
| 3951 |
There had been no agony or pain in their love for each other, although like all couples, they'd had resounding arguments now and then, and then laughed about them afterward. Neither Sean nor Carole was the kind of person to hold a grudge, and there wasn't a shred of malice in either of them, or even in their fights. |
| 3952 |
Al though five years younger than she was, he had set an example for her in many ways, mostly in his views about life. Her career was still going strong, and she was making more movies than she wanted to at the time. For so many years before that, she had been driven to follow the path of an ever more demanding career. |
| 3953 |
There had been men she'd gone out with, usually for a brief time, some of them in her business, mostly directors or writers, others who were in different creative fields, art, architecture, or music. They had been interesting men, but she'd never fallen in love with any of them, and was convinced she never would again. |
| 3954 |
Until Sean. They had met at a conference they'd both gone to, to discuss the rights of actors in Hollywood, and had been on a panel together about the changing role of women in films. It had never bothered either of them that he was five years younger than she was. It was completely irrelevant to both of them. |
| 3955 |
He had moved in three months later, and never left. Six months after he moved in, despite Carole's reluctance and misgivings, they were married. Sean had convinced her it was the right thing for both of them. He was absolutely correct, although at first Carole had been adamant about not wanting to get married again. |
| 3956 |
Their union seemed blessed. Her children had been young then, and still at home, which was an added concern for Carole. Sean had none of his own, and they had none together. He was crazy about her two children, and they had both agreed that they were too busy and wouldn't have had time to give to another child. |
| 3957 |
Chloe was in her first job, after graduating from Stanford. She was the assistant to the assistant accessories editor for a fashion magazine in London. It was mostly prestige and fun, helping with styling, setting up shoots, doing errands, for almost no pay and the thrill of working for British Vogue. |
| 3958 |
He was as handsome as Chloe was pretty, but had always been a little shy. He went out with lots of bright, attractive girls, but no one important to him so far. His social life interested him less than his work at the office. He was diligent about his career in finance, and always kept his goals in mind. |
| 3959 |
Anthony had been easy, Chloe always a little less so, at least for Carole. Chloe thought her father walked on water, and was more than willing to point out her mother's faults. Carole told herself it was the nature of relationships between mother and daughter. It was easier to be the mother of an adoring son. |
| 3960 |
Mike Appelsohn, her agent, was getting annoyed with her. He was upset about the parts she kept turning down, and fed up with hearing about the book she didn't write. The story line was eluding her, the characters still seemed vague, the outcome and development seemed to be tied in a knot somewhere in her head. |
| 3961 |
She had run out of excuses for him, and given herself till the end of the year to start the book. She had two months left, and was getting nowhere. She was beginning to feel panicked about it every time she sat down at her desk. She heard a door open gently behind her, and turned with an anxious look. |
| 3962 |
Fifteen years later, she was thirty nine years old. She lived with a man, but had never married. He was understanding about her work and traveled a lot himself. Stephanie still wasn't sure if she ever wanted to marry, and was clear she didn't want children. She teased Carole and said she was her baby. |
| 3963 |
She was there for the kids, for Sean, and for her. She even helped Carole plan the funeral and pick the casket. Over the years, Stephanie had become more than just an employee. Despite the eleven years that separated them, the two women had become close friends, with deep affection and respect for each other. |
| 3964 |
Carole was deeply attached to her, and readily admitted that she would have been lost without her. She was the perfect assistant, and as people did in jobs like hers, it meant putting Carole's life first and her own second, or sometimes not having a life at all. Stevie loved Carole and her job, and didn't mind. |
| 3965 |
Her first screen test at eighteen had blown everyone away. The rest was history. Her history. Now she was one of the most famous actresses in the world, and successful beyond her wildest dreams. So what was she doing trying to write a book? She couldn't help but ask herself the same question over and over again. |
| 3966 |
She was looking for a piece of herself, a piece she had hidden in a drawer somewhere, a part of her she wanted and needed to find, in order for the rest of her life to make sense. Her last birthday had affected her deeply. Turning fifty had been an important landmark for her, particularly now that she was alone. |
| 3967 |
She had decided that she wanted to weave all the pieces of her together, in ways she never had before, to solder them into a whole, instead of having bits and pieces of herself drifting in space. She wanted her life to make sense, to herself if no one else. She wanted to go back to the beginning and figure it all out. |
| 3968 |
So many things she'd done had been reactions to circumstances or other people, rather than decisions she'd actively made. It seemed important now to know if the choices she'd made had been the right ones. And then what? She kept asking herself what difference it would make. It wouldn't change the past. |
| 3969 |
She wanted to write a book. That was all she knew. And maybe after that, the rest would come. Maybe then she'd have a better sense of what parts she wanted to play in movies, what impact she wanted to have on the world, what causes she wanted to support, and who she wanted to be for the rest of her life. |
| 3970 |
She was slim, lithe, with a still beautiful figure. She worked out, but not enough to justify the way she looked. She had great genes, good bone structure, a body that defied her years, and a face that willingly lied about her age, and she had had no surgery to help it. Carole Barber was just a beautiful woman. |
| 3971 |
Hairdressers on the set had been having a ball with her silky blond hair since she was eighteen. Her eyes were enormous and green, her cheekbones high, her features delicate and perfect. She had the face and figure of a model, not just a star. And the way she carried herself spoke of confidence, poise, and grace. |
| 3972 |
The studio that had signed her first had made her take ballet. She still moved like a dancer today, with perfect posture. She was a spectacular looking woman, and rarely wore makeup. She had a simplicity of style that made her even more striking. Stevie had been in awe of her when she first came to work. |
| 3973 |
She looked easily ten years younger than she was. Even though he'd been five years younger, Sean had always looked older than she did. He was handsome, but bald, and tended to put on weight. Carole still had the same figure she'd had at twenty. She was careful about what she ate, but mostly she was just lucky. |
| 3974 |
She had that same kind of elegant, aristocratic ease, although Carole seemed warmer. There was nothing austere about Carole, and considering who she was, and the fame she'd enjoyed for all of her adult life, she was surprisingly humble. Like everyone else, Stevie loved that about her. Carole was never full of herself. |
| 3975 |
She was back two hours later, while Stevie was eating a sandwich in the kitchen. There was an office nook for her, where she worked, and her main complaint was that it was much too close to the fridge, which she visited too often. She worked out at the gym every night to compensate for what she ate at work. |
| 3976 |
Two hours later she was finished. She was taking very little. Some slacks, some jeans, one skirt, sweaters, comfortable shoes to walk in, and one pair of high heels. She packed one jacket and a raincoat, and took out a warm hooded wool coat to wear on the plane. The most important thing she was taking was her laptop. |
| 3977 |
Carole was all set for her odyssey to find herself, in Paris, or wherever else she went. Whatever other cities she decided to travel to, she could make the reservations once she was in Europe. Carole was excited now at the thought of going. It was going to be wonderful being in Paris after all these years. |
| 3978 |
They had been eight and four when they first went there, when Carole was making a movie in Paris. The film had taken eight months, and they had stayed on for two years after that. It seemed like a big chunk of time then, especially in young lives, and even to her. And now she was going back, on a pilgrimage of sorts. |
| 3979 |
She could hardly wait to leave. She realized now that it was an important step in writing the book. Maybe going back would free her, and open the doors that were sealed so tightly. Sit ting at her computer in Bel Air, she couldn't pry them open. But maybe there the doors would swing wide open on their own. |
| 3980 |
She signed them, waved at Stevie one last time, and then disappeared into the terminal in jeans, her heavy dark gray coat, and a large traveling bag on her arm. Her blond hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail, and she slipped dark glasses on as she went inside. No one noticed her as she walked by. |
| 3981 |
She had brought a three week supply of her own vanilla tea with her. It was coals to Newcastle since it came from Paris, but this way she didn't have to go out and buy it. Stevie had handed it to her as she packed. The e mail said that she had arrived safely, the suite was gorgeous, and the flight had been fine. |
| 3982 |
She said it was raining in Paris, but she didn't mind. And she mentioned that she was turning off her computer and wouldn't be writing to Stevie again for a while, if at all. If she had a problem, she'd call on her assistant's cell. She thought about calling her children after that, but decided not to. |
| 3983 |
The croissants and tea arrived, delivered by a liveried waiter. He put the silver tray on the coffee table, already laden with small pastries, a box of chocolates, and a bowl of fruit, with a bottle of champagne from the manager of the hotel. They took good care of her. She had always loved the Ritz. |
| 3984 |
It was one o'clock by then. She had the whole afternoon to wander around and see familiar landmarks in the rain. She still had no idea where she was going after Paris, but for the moment she was happy. She was beginning to think she wouldn't go anywhere, just stay in Paris, and enjoy the time there. |
| 3985 |
She unpacked the few things she'd brought with her, and hung them in the closet. She bathed in the enormous tub, and reveled in the thick pink towels, and then put on warm clothes. At two thirty she was walking across the lobby, with a handful of euros in her pocket. She left her key at the front desk. |
| 3986 |
She didn't even mind the light November rain, or the chill in the air. Her heavy coat kept her warm, and the rubber soled shoes she'd worn kept her feet dry on the wet ground. She looked up at the sky then, took a deep breath, and smiled. There was no more spectacular city than Paris, no matter what the weather. |
| 3987 |
She had always thought the sky there was the most beautiful in the world. It looked like a luminous gray pearl now, as she looked past the rooftops as she walked along. She walked past the Hotel Crillon and into the Place de la Concorde, with the fountains and statues, and traffic whizzing past them. |
| 3988 |
In the end, it had been hard to convince him that life was more exciting in Paris. It wasn't, for him, although both children had learned French, and so had she. Anthony still spoke a little, Chloe none at all, and Carole had been pleased to find on the plane that she could still manage fairly well. |
| 3989 |
She rarely had a chance to speak it anymore. She had applied herself while they lived there, and became completely fluent. She no longer was, but she still spoke it very well, with the expected le and la mistakes that Americans made. It was hard for anyone who hadn't grown up in the language to speak it flawlessly. |
| 3990 |
She had enrolled the kids in an American school, and after the film was finished, when she decided to move to Paris, she had found this house, just off the rue Jacob. It had been a little gem, on a private courtyard, with a lovely garden behind it. The house had been just big enough for them, and had endless charm. |
| 3991 |
It was an absolute beauty of a house, built in the eighteenth century for some courtesan or other. She had never learned its full history, but one could easily imagine it being very romantic. And it had been for her as well. She found the house easily, and walked into the courtyard, as the doors were open. |
| 3992 |
It had been a hard decision to make, and a sad time for her. She still wondered at times if she had made the right decision, if things would have been different if they'd stayed. But standing here now, she somehow felt she had done the right thing, for her kids, if nothing else. And maybe even for herself. |
| 3993 |
Even if the book was fictionalized, she needed to know the truth first, before she could spin it into a tale. She knew too that she had avoided these answers for a long time, but she was feeling braver now. She walked slowly out of the courtyard with her head down, and bumped into a man walking through the gates. |
| 3994 |
The neighborhood was filled with bittersweet memories for her, which rushed over her like an ocean at high tide, but it wasn't a bad feeling. It reminded her of so much, and suddenly she wanted to go back to the hotel and write. She knew what direction the book should take now, and where she should start. |
| 3995 |
She gave the driver the address of the Ritz, and they headed toward the Right Bank, as she sat back in the cab, thinking about her old house, and the things she'd seen that afternoon as she walked. This was the first time she had wandered around Paris and allowed herself to think of those things since she left. |
| 3996 |
Carole was in no hurry to go anywhere. She was tired from the trip, the time difference, and her long walk. She was planning to eat an early dinner in her room, and work on her book before she went to bed. She was thinking about the book as they advanced in the tunnel a few feet, and then came to a dead stop. |
| 3997 |
It was rush hour traffic, with people going home, others going out. At that hour Paris traffic was always bad. She glanced into the car next to her, and saw two young men in the front seat, laughing, and honking their horn at the car in front. Another young man stuck his head out of that car, and waved back at them. |
| 3998 |
It was almost as though he was frightened, and she felt sorry for him. The traffic in her own lane stayed stationary, but the lane next to her moved forward finally. The boys in the front seat were still laughing, and as they pulled away, the boy in the backseat jumped out of the car and began running. |
| 3999 |
It was a total nightmare, as news teams arrived for coverage of the scene, and to interview survivors. Most were in a state of shock. As yet, no known terrorist group had taken responsibility for it, but from everything people who'd been in the tunnel had described, it had clearly been a bomb, and more likely several. |
| 4000 |
The rescue efforts had been extraordinary and impressively coordinated, as one of the newscasters said, but there was only so much they could do in the wake of an attack of that nature. It had presumably been done by terrorists, and the force of the bombs used had even taken out sections of the walls of the tunnel. |
| 4001 |
In the end, Carole had landed in a little alcove of the tunnel, which, by sheer luck, had protected her as the fire advanced. She had been one of the first to be found by the firefighters who went in. She had a gash on one cheek, a broken arm, burns on both arms and near the cut on her cheek, and a major head injury. |
| 4002 |
She was in a deep coma. They checked her for some kind of identification, and found none. She had nothing in her pockets, not even money. But her pockets would have been emptied by the force of her flight through the air. And if she'd had a handbag, she'd lost it when she was blown out of whatever vehicle she was in. |
| 4003 |
There was absolutely nothing on her to identify her, not even a key to her room at the Ritz. And her passport was on her desk at the hotel. She left the scene in an ambulance, code blue, with another unconscious survivor who had come out of the tunnel naked, with third degree burns across his entire body. |
| 4004 |
Carole was still alive, though barely, when they rushed her inside to the trauma unit. A team was standing by, waiting for the first casualties to arrive. The first two ambulances had already shown up with dead bodies. The female doctor in charge of the trauma unit looked grim as she examined Carole. |
| 4005 |
They were getting the best possible care the city could provide, no matter who they were. They were bodies that had been shattered by a bomb. He had already seen three children die that night, within moments of being brought in, all three burned beyond recognition. The terrorists had done a dastardly thing. |
| 4006 |
The gash on her cheek had been stitched up, and as the neurosurgeon looked at her, he commented to the doctor checking her that she was a good looking woman. He knew he'd never seen her before, but there was something familiar about her face. He guessed her to be about forty or forty five years old at most. |
| 4007 |
Their worst concern for her continued to be her brain. They were keeping her sedated, due to the respirator, but even without sedation, she was still in a deep coma. There was no way to assess how great the damage would be to her brain long term, or if she would even live. She wasn't out of the woods yet by any means. |
| 4008 |
On the same day, the day maid who cleaned her room made a comment to the head housekeeper at the Ritz. She said that the woman in Carole's suite hadn't slept there all week. Her handbag and passport were there, and her clothes, but the bed had never been used. She had obviously checked in, and then vanished. |
| 4009 |
They made note of the fact, but she had booked the room for two weeks, and they had a credit card to guarantee it. Past her reservation date, they would have been concerned. They were well aware of who she was, and perhaps she never intended to use the room, but just keep it available for some unexplained purpose. |
| 4010 |
He was Carole's first husband, and the father of her children. They were on good terms, but didn't speak often. He told Stevie he had tried for a week to reach Carole on her cell phone, and had gotten no response to the messages he left her. And he had had no better luck when he tried her at the house over the weekend. |
| 4011 |
They put him on hold, while they called her room to announce the call. She always had her calls screened by any hotel she was in. They came back on the line then, said she wasn't in her room, and referred him to the front desk, which was unusual. He decided to stay on the line and see what they had to say. |
| 4012 |
She was, after all, single again now, since Sean's death. But then why hadn't she used her room, or at least taken her passport and handbag? These things didn't happen, he told himself. But sometimes they did. He hoped she was shacked up somewhere, with a new romance, and not in a hospital, or worse. |
| 4013 |
It was two o'clock, and he had to leave the city at three for a six o'clock plane. The next hour was agony as he waited to leave. And it was worse once he got to the airport. There was a surreal quality to all of it, he was going to see a woman in a coma in a Paris hospital, and praying it wouldn't be his ex wife. |
| 4014 |
They had been divorced for eighteen years, and he had known for the last fourteen that leaving her had been the biggest mistake of his life. He had left her for a twenty one year old Russian model, who had turned out to be the biggest gold digger on the planet. He had been madly in love with her at the time. |
| 4015 |
Carole had been at the height of her career, doing two and three movies a year. She was always on location somewhere, or promoting a film. He was the whiz kid of Wall Street then, but his success was small potatoes compared to hers. She had won two Oscars in the two years before he left her, and it got to him. |
| 4016 |
He needed to feel like a big deal himself, and in the face of Carole's stardom, he never did. So he fell in love with Natalya, who appeared to worship him, and then took him to the cleaners, and left him for someone else. The Russian model was the worst thing that had ever happened to them, and to him surely. |
| 4017 |
She was staggeringly beautiful, and she'd gotten pregnant weeks after they started their affair. He'd left Carole for her, and married Natalya before the ink was dry on the divorce. She'd had another baby the following year, and then left him for a man with a lot more money than Jason had at the time. |
| 4018 |
But it was too late. She wanted nothing to do with him by then. He'd been forty one when he fell in love with Natalya, and having some kind of insane midlife crisis. And at forty five, when he realized what a mistake he'd made, and what a mess he'd made of his life and Carole's, it was way too late. |
| 4019 |
She was happy finally. And Jason had never married again. At fifty nine, he was successful, and alone, and considered Carole one of his best friends. And never in his life would he forget the look on her face when he told her he was leaving her, eighteen years before. She looked as though he had shot her. |
| 4020 |
As he boarded the plane that night, he knew he loved her more than ever. He actually prayed on the flight over, something he hadn't done since he was a boy. He was willing to make any deal he could with God, just so the woman in the Paris hospital wasn't Carole. And if it was, that she would survive. |
| 4021 |
It was unthinkable unless something had rendered her unrecognizable. A thousand terrifying thoughts were running through his head, as the cab finally pulled up in front of the hospital. Jason paid the fare with a generous tip, and got out. He looked like exactly what he was, a distinguished American businessman. |
| 4022 |
Jason strode into the hospital carrying his bag, hoping someone spoke enough English to help him out. The assistant manager at the Ritz had given him the name of the head of the trauma unit, and Jason stopped to speak to a young woman at the front desk, and showed her the slip of paper where he'd written her name. |
| 4023 |
A doctor in a white coat appeared, a woman in hospital pajamas with a shower cap on and a stethoscope around her neck. She was about Jason's age, and her English was good, which was a relief. He was suddenly afraid that no one would understand what he said, and worse yet, he wouldn't understand them. |
| 4024 |
He asked for the woman who was the head of the trauma unit, and the doctor at hand said she wasn't there, but offered her assistance instead. Jason explained why he had come, and forgot to add the ex before the word wife. She looked him over carefully. He was well dressed, and looked like a respectable man. |
| 4025 |
She opened the door to the room, and he couldn't see the patient in the bed. She was surrounded by machines, and there were two nurses standing next to her, blocking his view. He could hear the whoosh of the respirator and the whir of machines. There seemed to be a ton of apparatus in the room as the doctor led him in. |
| 4026 |
He owed this to her, and their kids, even if it seemed like a crazy thing to do. It did, even to him, like the far extremes of paranoia, or maybe just guilt. He walked behind the doctor, and saw a still figure lying there, with a respirator in her mouth, her nose taped shut, and her head tilted back. |
| 4027 |
She was completely still, and her face was deathly pale. The bandage on her head looked huge, there was another on her face, and a cast on her arm, and at the angle he approached her, it was hard to see her face. He took another step forward to get a better look, and then caught his breath as tears filled his eyes. |
| 4028 |
His worst nightmare had just come true. He stepped up close to her, and touched the fingers sticking out of the cast, which were black and blue. Nothing moved. She was in another world, far from them, and looked as though she would never return. There were tears running down his cheeks as he stood and looked at her. |
| 4029 |
The worst had happened. She was the unidentified victim from the tunnel bombing. The woman he had once loved and still did was fighting for her life in Paris, and had been there, alone, for almost two weeks, while none of them had any idea what had happened to her. Jason looked stricken as he turned to the doctor. |
| 4030 |
The swelling is going down. But we cannot tell how damaged she will be until she wakes up. If she continues to do well, we will take her off the respirator soon. Then she must breathe for herself, and she must awaken from the coma. Until then, we cannot know how much damage there is, or the long term effects. |
| 4031 |
Carole Waterman. She had a husband and children. But she also had a famous identity that was bound to leak out. The doctor said she would only tell the head of the trauma unit who Carole really was, but they both knew that it was only a matter of time before the press found out. They always did, with things like this. |
| 4032 |
Her hair was fanned out behind her on the bed under the bandage. One of the nurses had brushed it for her, and commented on how beautiful it was, like pale yellow silk. Seeing her brought back so many memories, all of them good. The bad ones were forgotten now, and had been for a long time. For him anyway. |
| 4033 |
They only referred to the kids, or their current lives. He had been very kind to her when Sean died, he felt sorry for her. It was a tough break for her. She had married a man five years younger than she was, and he had died a young man. Jason had come out for the funeral, and been very supportive to her and the kids. |
| 4034 |
He looked as grim as he felt, as though he'd aged a hundred years in one day. She didn't deserve what had happened to her. No one did. And Carole least of all. She was a good woman, a nice person, a great mother, and had been a good wife to two men. One had left her for a tart and the other one had died. |
| 4035 |
Stevie answered on the first ring. She was wide awake and had been waiting for his call. It had taken too long, in her opinion, unless his plane had arrived late. She should have heard from him by then if it wasn't Carole. She had been sick with fear for the last hour, and her voice shook when she said hello. |
| 4036 |
The prospect of what might happen was too devastating to both of them. His next call was to Chloe, which was infinitely worse. She burst into tears and got hysterical as soon as he told her. The good news was that she was only an hour away. When she finally stopped crying, she said she'd be on the next plane. |
| 4037 |
Chloe stood clutching her father's arm, as she looked at her mother and cried when she saw her. It was upsetting for both of them, but at least they had each other. And at nine that night, after talking to the doctor again, they went back to the hotel. There was no change in Carole's condition, but she was holding on. |
| 4038 |
He fell asleep on his bed, fully dressed, that night, and woke up at six o'clock the next morning. He showered, shaved, and dressed, and was sitting quietly in the living room of the suite, when Chloe woke up, and came out to find him with her eyes swollen. He could tell that she felt even worse than she looked. |
| 4039 |
Chloe stood crying quietly with Stevie's arm around her, and all four of them were crying when they left the room. The only comfort they had was hearing that Carole's condition had improved slightly during the night. They were going to take the respirator out that evening, and see how she managed, breathing on her own. |
| 4040 |
If she failed to breathe without the respirator, they would intubate her again, but if that was the case, it didn't bode well for what lay ahead. Her brain had to be alive enough to tell her body to breathe, and that remained to be seen. Jason looked gray when the doctor mentioned it, and both children looked panicked. |
| 4041 |
Stevie quietly said that she would be there when they took her off the respirator, and both children said they would too. Jason nodded and agreed. It was going to be a crucial moment for Carole, to see if she was able to breathe on her own. They had dinner at the hotel, though none of them could eat. |
| 4042 |
They were all dreading the moment when the doctor would turn the respirator off. Just thinking about it made Chloe want to scream. They got out of the car at the hospital, and Stevie followed silently behind them. She had been through a similar experience once before, when her father had open heart surgery. |
| 4043 |
It was a first step back toward life. The doctor said that they would be watching her closely through the night to be sure that she continued breathing without assistance, but there was no reason to think that her independent respiration would stop again. With every passing moment, her condition was more stable. |
| 4044 |
And then Jason finally suggested they go back to the hotel. They had all had enough stress for one day, and he could see that his children needed to rest. Watching the respirator being turned off had been traumatic for each of them. They walked out quietly, and Stevie was the last to leave the room. |
| 4045 |
She stopped for a moment next to the bed and touched Carole's fingers. She was still deep in her coma, and her fingers were cold. Her face looked more familiar now without the breathing tube in her mouth and the tape on her nose. It was the face Stevie had seen so often, and that all her fans knew and loved. |
| 4046 |
The inevitable happened two days after they had all gathered in Paris. Someone, either at the hotel or the hospital, tipped off the press. Within hours there were dozens of photographers outside the hospital, and half a dozen of the most enterprising ones sneaked upstairs and were stopped at the door to her room. |
| 4047 |
But it complicated things for all of them, and made things even harder for the family. Photographers lay in wait for them at the hotel, and stood outside the hospital. There were TV cameras in both places, and flashes in their faces whenever they went in or out. It was a familiar scene for all of them. |
| 4048 |
Carole had always shielded her children from the public, but Carole Barber in a coma, as the victim of a terrorist attack, was world news. There was no hiding from the press this time. They just had to live with it, and make the best of it. The best news of all was that Carole was breathing on her own. |
| 4049 |
They were getting used to going to the hospital together every day, talking to the doctors, and sitting with Carole for as long as they could. Afterward they came back to the hotel, and sat in the living room of their suite, waiting for news. Night visits were discouraged, and she was still in a deep sleep. |
| 4050 |
He opened it as he always did, smoothed out the creases, and glanced at the front page. His hands shook as he stared at the photograph. It was a picture taken of Carole while she'd been making a movie in France years before. The man staring at it knew it instantly, he'd been with her on that day, watching the shoot. |
| 4051 |
It seemed unlikely to him that her children would remember him, they had been very young at the time. He assumed that her current husband would be there with her. He was hoping they would be out, taking a break. The director stopped at the nursing desk, and said a few hushed words to the head nurse. |
| 4052 |
Anthony was trying to be brave, but could never get past a few words before breaking down. And Jason stood behind them, looking distraught. They kept trying to talk to her, because there was always the remote possibility that she could hear them. And they were praying that might bring her back. Nothing else had so far. |
| 4053 |
Her children and Jason were looking exhausted, jet lagged and grief stricken, and Stevie tried valiantly to keep their spirits buoyed, although she was in no better shape than they. But she was determined to do all she could to help, for Carole's sake and theirs. But at heart, she was as devastated as they. |
| 4054 |
So she made it her responsibility to take care of them. It took forever to get them to the elevator. Chloe had forgotten her sweater, and Anthony his coat. They went back one by one, and then finally got into the elevator, promising each other that they would be back in a few hours. They hated leaving her alone. |
| 4055 |
She sensed that she was seeing something deeply private to both of them. He stood for a long time, watching her, as though waiting for her to open her eyes, and then finally, his head bowed, with damp eyes, he left the room. She was as beautiful as he had remembered her, and appeared untouched by age. |
| 4056 |
She had known it too, which was why she had left. He didn't blame her for leaving him, and never had. He had too many other responsibilities at the time. He only wished he could speak to her about it now, as she lay in her deep sleep. She had taken his heart with her when she left, and owned it still. |
| 4057 |
She was no closer to consciousness than she had been in nearly three weeks. The possibility that she would never wake up again was terrifying all of them. The doctors were kind, but blunt. If she didn't regain consciousness soon, she would be brain damaged forever. Even now it was an ever greater possibility. |
| 4058 |
Nothing could be done medically to alter her situation. It was in the hands of God. People had woken up from comas after even longer, but with time her chances of recovering normal brain function were diminishing. The entire group was in tears when the doctors left the waiting room where they'd met. |
| 4059 |
There were plenty of shoes there, and even stores for the men. And as if they were children, she shooed them out of the hospital twenty minutes later and sent them on their way. They were grateful to her when they went. And she went back to sit quietly in Carole's room. The nurse on duty nodded to her. |
| 4060 |
If there was any, she was banking on it. She sat and talked to her employer all afternoon, in a normal voice, about ordinary things, as though Carole could hear her. The nurse went about her business, but looked sorry for her. By then the nursing staff had lost hope, and the doctors were right behind them. |
| 4061 |
The possibility of her recovering was dwindling by the hour. Stevie was well aware of it, but refused to be daunted by it. At six o'clock, after eight hours at her bedside, Stevie left her to go back to the hotel and check on the others. They had been gone all day, and she hoped it had done them good. |
| 4062 |
He had turned seventy that year, and was still going strong. And now this had happened. He had no children of his own, just her. He had begged to come to Paris, but Jason had asked him to wait, a few more days at least. This was hard enough as it was, without others joining them, however well intentioned. |
| 4063 |
She felt totally drained when she left. She had been talking to Carole all day. She hadn't dared do that when the others were around, other than a few words of endearment here and there. She hadn't planned this, but once they were gone, she decided to try it. They had nothing to lose. It couldn't do any harm. |
| 4064 |
So was Carole's family, and depressed about it, given the tragic reason they were there. Stevie had already spoken to the head caterer, to organize a real Thanksgiving dinner for them in a private dining room. It seemed like the least she could do. The marshmallows for the sweet potatoes were impossible to find here. |
| 4065 |
The others were in much better spirits that night, and at Carole's urging, they had dinner downstairs at the Espadon, the hotel's main restaurant. It was bright and cheerful and busy, and the food was fabulous. Stevie didn't join them. She had a massage, ordered soup from room service, and went to bed. |
| 4066 |
When he did, she was wearing jeans and a sweater, and carrying the heavy coat she had brought. She was wearing the cowboy boots she often wore to work. She had found them in a thrift shop and loved them. She said they were her lucky boots. They sure were now. She had been wearing them the day before too. |
| 4067 |
They chatted excitedly on their way back to the hospital, and passed all the landmarks that were all too familiar to them now. They could hardly wait to see her, and Jason reminded Stevie that the doctor said she wasn't talking yet. That might take a while. But she was awake. Everything had turned around overnight. |
| 4068 |
The pressure was slight, and she shifted her eyes to her two visitors when she heard them, but didn't smile at them either. Her face was expressionless, like a mask. Stevie spoke to her as though she were the same person she always had been, and Jason leaned down to kiss her cheek. Carole didn't react to that either. |
| 4069 |
We can't be sure what's left, or how easy it will be for her to access them again. With luck, her memory and normal brain function will come back to her. But it will take time. She has to remember everything now. How to move, how to speak, how to walk. Her brain had a tremendous shock. But we have a chance now. |
| 4070 |
None of them knew how okay yet, but she was alive, and no longer in a coma. It was definitely a start, and a huge relief for them. Chloe threw her arms around her father's neck and laughed and cried all at once, like a child, and then she jumped out of bed and did a little dance. And then ran over to give Stevie a hug. |
| 4071 |
But even her facial expressions were limited now. The bandage had been off her cheek for several days, but the gash she'd gotten had left a nasty scar, which was the least of her problems. They were all used to it by now, although Stevie knew Carole would be upset when she saw it, but that wouldn't be for a while. |
| 4072 |
And as Jason had said, a good plastic surgeon could deal with it when they got home. Carole lay on her bed, watching them, and turned her head several times to follow them with her eyes. Anthony kissed her too, and her eyes were filled with questions, and then Jason came to stand beside her and held her hand. |
| 4073 |
But at least they were headed in the right direction now. Carole said nothing directly to any of them, and said none of their names. She just watched them. They stayed with her till noon, and then they left her. Carole looked exhausted, and her voice, the two times she spoke, didn't sound like her own. |
| 4074 |
It was of no apparent interest to her. And the nurse said that when they called her by name, she didn't respond. And since she didn't know her own name, it was unlikely that she remembered theirs. More important, the doctor was fairly certain that for the moment Carole had no recollection of who they were. |
| 4075 |
She still remained a hot news item. And it was obvious to Stevie that someone at the hospital was getting paid for news about Carole. It wouldn't have been unusual, even in the States, but it seemed disgusting to her anyway. It came with the territory of being a star, but seemed like a high price to pay. |
| 4076 |
But the photograph they ran with the story was gorgeous. It had been taken ten years before, in her prime, although she still looked damn good now, before the bombing anyway. And all things considered, she looked pretty good for a woman with a brain injury and who had survived a bomb at close range. |
| 4077 |
The doctor let them speak to her briefly but within minutes, it was evident to them that she had no memory of the bombing or anything else. They left with no further information from her. Jason and the children continued to visit Carole, as did Stevie, and she continued to add words to her repertoire. |
| 4078 |
It was palpable in the room. They chatted with her for a while, and a few more words came back to her, most of them related to the holiday. The words mince pie and pumpkin pie sprang out of nowhere, but she had no idea what they were. Stevie had only mentioned apple pie to her, because the hotel couldn't do the others. |
| 4079 |
He didn't want to run into them. He still felt awkward about that, whatever the circumstances now. And things had been so desperate at first, he didn't want to intrude on them in the midst of their shock and grief. But he had read in the newspaper that she was awake and doing better, so he had come again. |
| 4080 |
He couldn't resist. He walked slowly into the room and looked at her, drinking her in. It was the first time he had seen her awake. And his heart leaped as he saw her. There wasn't even a flicker of recognition in her eyes. He wasn't sure at first if it was due to the distance of time, or the blow to her head. |
| 4081 |
It was difficult to believe that, in her normal state, she wouldn't do the same, or at least recall his face. She turned toward him with surprise and curiosity as he walked into the room, and didn't remember ever seeing him before. He was a tall, handsome white haired man with piercing blue eyes and a serious face. |
| 4082 |
There was something in his eyes that rattled her, it was like something she couldn't reach, but could see in the distance. Carole wasn't sure what it was, if it was good or bad. There was something about him that was very intense. She wasn't frightened by it, but she felt it, and couldn't identify the feeling by name. |
| 4083 |
The others came back that evening after their dinner. They were in good spirits, and Stevie had brought her a sample of everything that had been on their plates, and identified all of it to her. Carole tasted it with interest, said she didn't like the turkey, but thought the marshmallows were very good. |
| 4084 |
Chloe had done that with her usual honesty and bluntness. It had worried all of them at first, but Stevie suddenly thought it might be for the best. Carole was responding well. She wanted to know everything about herself, and them, both good and bad. She needed to fill in the blanks, there were so many of them. |
| 4085 |
And then Jason and Anthony went back to their rooms to call their office and do some work. They were both falling behind on deals they were working on. But the circumstances were extraordinary, and their clients understood. Several of Jason's partners were standing in for them with various accounts. |
| 4086 |
She had taken a leave from her own job, and they'd been nice about it. They told her to stay in Paris with her mother as long as she needed to. She even had time, that afternoon, and was finally in the mood to call a boy she had recently met in London. They chatted for half an hour, and Chloe liked him. |
| 4087 |
The doctors had told her to tell Carole everything she could about her life. They were hoping that hearing the details would jog her memory and bring back the rest. Stevie was willing to do that, but didn't want to upset Carole by reminding her of unhappy things, and she'd had her fair share of them. |
| 4088 |
Stevie brought a sandwich with her, and sat down across from Carole to chat. She had nothing particular in mind, and Carole had been asking a lot of questions, like about her parents the day before. She was starting from scratch. Stevie was halfway through her sandwich when Carole asked her about her divorce. |
| 4089 |
You were twenty eight when she was born, and at the height of your career. I didn't know you then. I came along seven years later. But she was already angry at you. I think you took the kids on location to most of your movies, when you could, with a tutor, unless they were in crazy places, like Kenya. |
| 4090 |
But if it was civilized, you took them, even when I was first working for you. Eventually Anthony didn't want to go, and when they got to high school, you couldn't take them out of school. But before that they went most of the time, and their schools bitched like crazy. But so did Chloe, when you didn't. |
| 4091 |
Chloe takes advantage of it sometimes, trying to make you feel guilty, although some of the time I think she genuinely feels she got cheated as a child. I think what she wanted was a mother who was a regular suburban housewife who picked her up and dropped her off all day, and had nothing else to do. |
| 4092 |
You married him when you were forty and he was thirty five. He was a very successful producer, although you never worked on a movie together. He was an incredibly kind man, and I think you were both very happy. Your kids loved him. He didn't have any kids of his own, nor with you. Anyway, he got sick three years ago. |
| 4093 |
A year after he got sick. That was two years ago. It's been a big adjustment. You've done a lot of writing, some traveling, spent time with the kids. You've turned a number of parts down, although you've said you'll go back to work after you write the book. And I believe you will, write the book, and go back to movies. |
| 4094 |
If he doesn't like that, then he can go. I never lied to him and said I wanted kids. I told him in the beginning that I didn't want to get married and my job meant everything to me. Nothing's changed for me. If he can't live with that, or doesn't like me for it, then he has to go out and find what he wants. |
| 4095 |
I think you could have taken Jason back, when he came back to you after Paris, and for whatever reason, you didn't. I think you're more willing to compromise than I am, which is why marriage works for you. But I've never known you to sacrifice your values or your principles, or who you are, for anything or anyone. |
| 4096 |
What a mess that was. Both my parents were alcoholics. My sister got pregnant at fifteen and wound up in a home for wayward girls. She gave the baby away, had two more she gave away, had a nervous breakdown, and wound up in an institution by the time she was twenty one. She committed suicide at twenty three. |
| 4097 |
It sounded like fun to her, and Jason had mentioned to her that he wanted some time alone with Carole. She was feeling better again after resting the day before. And she was happy to have Jason to herself. There was much she wanted to know from him too, so many details of the life they had once shared. |
| 4098 |
He went to one of them ten times, and took all his friends. We showed your latest picture at his birthday party every year. That's what he wanted. I don't think he's ever had a minute of resentment in his life. He just takes things as they come, and if something bad happens, he makes the best of it. |
| 4099 |
Meeting her needs is a full time project, if you let it. No one can stop everything they're doing and focus all their attention on a child. When we were married, I'd have wanted some of that myself. Yes, you were busy when they were small, but you paid a lot of attention to both of them, especially between films. |
| 4100 |
You're way up there, Carole. It would have been a shame for you to give up a career like that. It's an incredible accomplishment to achieve what you have, and you even manage to support causes that are important to you, and the world, and put your name to good use. And you still managed to be a good mother. |
| 4101 |
She couldn't recapture the past or rewrite history, but she could at least try to do things better in the future. It was clear that Chloe felt she had been cheated as a child. And maybe this was Carole's chance to make it up to her, and give her what she felt she'd never had. She was willing to do that. |
| 4102 |
She had nothing more important on her agenda. The book she'd been trying to write, if she could ever get back to it, could wait. Her priorities were different, since the bomb. It had been one hell of a wake up call, and a last chance to do things right. She wanted to seize that opportunity while there was still time. |
| 4103 |
She needed to know who they had been, what had happened to them, and why they had gotten divorced, as well as what had happened since. She knew about Sean now, from Stevie, but she knew very little about her life with Jason, except that they had been married for ten years, lived in New York, and had two kids. |
| 4104 |
And still very southern then. You had been in Hollywood for four years, and you were still this adorable, innocent kid, and already a big star. It was like all that stardom and fame hadn't touched you. You were the same decent, warm, honest person you must have been growing up on your dad's farm in Mississippi. |
| 4105 |
At first you said you were too young to get married, and you probably were. I talked you into it, and you were honest. You said you weren't ready to give up your career. You wanted to make movies. You were having a ball, and so was I being with you. I've never had so much fun in my life as we did then. |
| 4106 |
That's a hell of a lot. The studios had you cranking them out one after the other, with big stars, big names, major producers, and turning down scripts as fast as they came in. You were an industry unto yourself. I've never seen anything like it. You were the hottest star in the world, and I was married to you. |
| 4107 |
We talked about having babies, but there was no time. There was always another film to do. And then Anthony came along. He was kind of a surprise, and we'd been married for two years by then. You took about six months off, as soon as it started to show, and went back to work when he was three weeks old. |
| 4108 |
You were over there for five months, and I came over every couple of weeks. It was a crazy way to live, but your career was too hot to put a damper on, and you were too young to want to quit. I totally understood. You actually took a few months off when you were pregnant with Chloe. Anthony was three years old. |
| 4109 |
You were devastated, and I actually was too. I'd gotten used to the idea by then of a third child. You'd been on a set in Africa doing your own stunt work, which seemed crazy, and had a miscarriage. They made you go back to work four weeks later. You had a miserable contract, and two pictures backed up behind it. |
| 4110 |
I should have told you, but I didn't. I don't think you knew what was going on with me. You were too busy to think about it, and I never told you how upset I was. You were making movies, trying to keep our kids with you on the set, and flying around to see me whenever you had a couple of days off to do it. |
| 4111 |
I wound up in the tabloids more than once, and you never complained about it. You asked me what was going on a couple of times, and I said I was just playing, which was true. You tried to come home more often, but once you started the movie in Paris, you were stuck there, you were shooting six days a week. |
| 4112 |
It was a shame they hadn't done something about it then, but neither of them had. She had been oblivious, wrapped up in the excitement of her career, and he had been resentful and concealed it from her, eaten up inside, and eventually took it out on her. It had taken years for him to acknowledge that, even to himself. |
| 4113 |
You were always decent, kind, and sincere, and good to me. You worked constantly, and you were gone a lot, but you were a good woman, Carole. You always have been. These girls were a different breed. Cheap gold diggers, pros some of them, wannabe starlets, models, tramps. I was married to the real thing. |
| 4114 |
She told me she loved me, and wanted to give up everything for me, her career, modeling, her country, her life, and stay home and raise our kids. Music to my ears. I was ready for a full time wife by then, and you weren't ready to do that, or likely to, from what I could see. Who knew? I never asked you. |
| 4115 |
You wouldn't speak to me, understandably. I came over a couple of times to see the kids, and you had them delivered to me at the Ritz by the nanny. It was total blackout from you. In fact, you didn't speak to me directly for two years, only through lawyers, secretaries, and nannies. You had a lot of all three. |
| 4116 |
She gave up her modeling career for those two years, and then told me she was bored to death. She left me and went back to modeling. She left the kids with me for a while, and then took them. She met some fabulously rich playboy, divorced me, and married him, and took me to the cleaners in the process. |
| 4117 |
I've never had the feeling you regretted not coming back to me and giving me another chance, particularly once you met Sean. You don't need me, Carole. You have your own money, which I invested pretty well for you a long time ago, and you still ask me for advice now. We love each other in an odd way. |
| 4118 |
The only one who had been lambasted in the tale was the Russian supermodel, but it sounded as though she deserved it. He had picked himself a major lemon, and he knew it. She was a dangerous young woman. Carole never had been, and had always tried to be loving and honest with him. He had made that clear to her. |
| 4119 |
There was nothing anyone could do for Carole, and they all knew she was out of danger. The rest of her recovery process was liable to be slow, and was a matter of time. The children were coming to Los Angeles for Christmas, and she was expected to be out of the hospital and able to fly home by then, in another month. |
| 4120 |
She was still too fragile, and it was confusing for her. She wasn't walking yet, and with no memory, everything she did was harder work. She wanted to stay home once she got there. But she didn't want to deprive her children of the trip with their father. They had all been through so much since Carole's accident. |
| 4121 |
Jason spent an hour alone with Carole on his last night in Paris, and said he knew it was too soon to talk about it, but he wondered if, once she recovered, she would be open to trying things with him again. She hesitated, still remembering none of their history, and she knew she had feelings of deep affection for him. |
| 4122 |
She didn't want to lead him on, or encourage him to hope for something she couldn't give him. She had to concentrate on getting well now, becoming whole again, and she wanted to spend time with her children. She was in no condition to think about a man. And it sounded like their history was too complicated. |
| 4123 |
There were times when Alan really was a good guy, no matter how different their needs and goals were, or their views about marriage. Anthony came to see his mother at the hospital before he left for New York, spent an hour with her, and told her, as Jason had, how grateful he was that she'd survived. |
| 4124 |
And his love for his mother shone brightly in his eyes, as did hers for him. They both cried when they hugged for the last time, even though she knew she'd be seeing him again soon. She cried easily now, and everything seemed more emotional to her. She had so much to learn and absorb. It was truly like being reborn. |
| 4125 |
She was speaking well now, but speaking French was still beyond her. Anthony seemed to freeze where he stood, and the Frenchman looked at Anthony with a small smile and a nod. She could see that her son recognized him, as Anthony's whole body appeared to stiffen and the look in his eyes was one of ice. |
| 4126 |
He had played soccer with him, but he hated him when he watched his mother cry, and she told him why. It was Matthieu who had made her cry. And he remembered now that there had been tears before that. For many months. He had been happy to go back to the States, but not to see his mother so distraught when they left. |
| 4127 |
There wasn't much he could do to her, she didn't remember him, and there was a nurse with her at all times. But Anthony didn't like it anyway. He had left her life years before, after causing her immense pain. There was no reason for him to come back, at least in her son's eyes. And she was so vulnerable now. |
| 4128 |
She admired him for that, and knew it had been hard. Matthieu looked far more guarded and less inclined to expose himself to her. She had the feeling that he was being cautious when he came to visit her. She had also seen the nurses react. It was obvious they knew this man, and more than ever, she wondered who he was. |
| 4129 |
There was an air of mystery to him, and smoldering passion. Whatever had existed between them years before, the embers had not yet gone out for him, and it stirred something in her as well. She couldn't remember him. But she felt something for him and couldn't identify what it was, if it was fear, or love. |
| 4130 |
And like the others, she remembered him not at all. She had no sense of who he was, neither good nor bad. All she had were the unidentifiable feelings he aroused in her, which made her feel uncomfortable, but she had no idea why. None at all. Everything she had ever known or felt for him was beyond her reach. |
| 4131 |
Not just an admirer, but a man she had obviously been committed to. No one had told her about him. Perhaps they didn't know. But clearly, Anthony did, and his reaction was not good, which said a lot to her. This had not been a happy story, and since they were not together, obviously had not ended well. |
| 4132 |
He stood up then, and promised to come back. She wasn't sure she wanted him to. Perhaps this was a story she would rather not know. The room seemed filled with sadness and regret as he spoke, and then he smiled. He had eyes that dug down deep into her, and she remembered something about him, but she had no idea what. |
| 4133 |
She didn't want him to come back, but didn't have the courage to say it. If he did, she was going to keep Stevie with her, to protect her. She felt as though she needed someone to shield her from him. He frightened her. There was something incredibly powerful about him. He stooped to kiss her hand as she watched. |
| 4134 |
He was formal in his manner, very proper, and yet at the same time very bold. He was in the room of a woman who didn't remember him, and yet he told her that they had loved each other, lived together, and wanted to get married. And when he watched her, she could sense the desire he still felt for her. |
| 4135 |
That was her first priority for now. Jason was no longer an issue although she loved him, Sean was gone, and whoever the French man was, she had no interest in him, other than curiosity about what he'd meant to her. But she somehow suspected she was better off not knowing. It didn't sound good to her. |
| 4136 |
She didn't want painful memories to add to the rest. The story Jason had told her of their life was enough. She could well imagine that she had been devastated at the time. And then the Frenchman had made her unhappy too. It must have been an awful time in her life, it was easy to figure that much out. |
| 4137 |
And she'd lost him too. It didn't sound to her as though she'd been lucky with the men in her life, only her kids. Stevie got her out of bed then, with the help of the nurse. They wanted her to practice walking. She was amazed at how hard it was. It was as though her legs had forgotten how to do their job. |
| 4138 |
The rest was Hollywood history. The screen test had been perfect, and she shot to stardom like a rocket, thanks to him. He got her into her first movies and watched over her like a mother hen. He had been there when she met Jason, and introduced them, although he hadn't realized the impact it would have. |
| 4139 |
And he had acted as her agent since he launched her career. She had discussed every movie she'd ever made with him, before signing the contracts, and had never done a single project without his approval and wise advice. When he heard about the accident, and the condition she'd been in, he was devastated. |
| 4140 |
It was frustrating for Carole most of all. But in spite of Stevie's warnings, Mike Appelsohn wasn't prepared for her complete lack of recognition when he walked into her room. He had expected something to be there at least, a memory of his face, of some part of their involvement with each other over the years. |
| 4141 |
He didn't say it, but it killed him to see her so hampered. He just prayed her memory would come back, and she'd go back to being the bright, busy, intelligent, talented woman she'd once been. It was frightening to think that she might not, that she might be forever limited, with no memory of anything beyond last week. |
| 4142 |
It would be the end of an important career, and a lovely woman. The others had been concerned about the same thing, and in her own way, so was Carole. She was fighting for every scrap of memory she could get. Her visit with Mike had been a major victory of sorts. It was the most she had remembered so far. |
| 4143 |
And he wanted to get Carole back there too, to doctors he knew. He had already lined up some of the city's best. As a self declared, devoted hypochondriac, he was on the board of two hospitals and a medical school. He hated to leave her that night to go back to the hotel, but he could see that she was tired. |
| 4144 |
An American journalist had recognized him and asked how Carole was doing, and if he had come to see her. He said that he had, and she was doing fine. He had told the reporter that her memory was coming back, in fact she remembered almost everything. He didn't want the word staying out there that she had lost her mind. |
| 4145 |
She had caught a terrible cold. She was still prey to ordinary human miseries, just like everyone else, in addition to the neurological damage she was trying to overcome, and learning to walk with ease again. Her doctor had two physical therapists working with her and a speech therapist who came every day. |
| 4146 |
She couldn't concentrate well enough yet to read a book. Reading was still hard for her. And writing was worse. Her handwriting had suffered too. Stevie had long since realized that she wouldn't be writing her book anytime soon, although she hadn't said as much to Carole. There was no way she could write it now anyway. |
| 4147 |
With the sound from the TV, Carole didn't hear the door of the room open, and was startled to see someone standing near the foot of her bed. When she turned her head, he was there, watching her. He was a young boy, in jeans, and looked about sixteen years old. He was dark skinned, and had big almond shaped eyes. |
| 4148 |
She had no idea what he was doing in her room, and his eyes never left hers. She assumed the security guard outside her door had let him in. He was probably a delivery boy come to deliver flowers, but she saw no evidence of a bouquet. She tried to speak to him in halting French, but he didn't understand. |
| 4149 |
He had a loose jacket on over a dark blue sweater. The jacket looked like it belonged to someone else, twice his size, and he was wearing running shoes with holes, like the ones Anthony wore. Her son said they were his lucky shoes, and he had brought them to Paris. This boy looked like he owned nothing better. |
| 4150 |
And then she knew. She had seen him in the tunnel, in the car next to hers, before the bombs went off. He had jumped out and run away, and then everything exploded into fire and seconds later went black for her. At the same time she saw the vision in her head, she saw him take a knife out of his jacket. |
| 4151 |
She threw her lunch tray at him, which caught him off balance, and at the same instant four nurses and two doctors charged into the room, expecting to find a code blue, and saw the boy with the knife instead. He was swinging wildly at them, still trying to reach Carole, hoping to kill her before he could be stopped. |
| 4152 |
He was going to slit her throat so she couldn't identify him. The only thing she didn't know was how he had gotten past the guard outside. Her doctor was in the room within minutes, to examine her, and help her into bed. She was enormously relieved to find her unharmed, although traumatized, and shaking in terror. |
| 4153 |
He had been coming to visit her. And he had raised hell when he discovered what the boy had almost done. If she hadn't been able to reach the bell, she would have been dead. The head of the hospital asked Carole if she was all right, in broken English, and he bustled out again a minute later to bang some heads. |
| 4154 |
The doctor left again then, with a warm smile at Carole, and a cool glance at Matthieu. She didn't like being told what to do by laymen, whether retired ministers or not, although in this case she knew he was right. Carole had very nearly been killed. It was a miracle that the boy hadn't succeeded in his mission. |
| 4155 |
Matthieu sat down in the chair next to her bed and patted her hand, and then he looked at her with a gentle expression that had nothing to do with the way he had spoken to the hospital personnel. He had been outraged at how badly they had protected her. She could so easily have been killed. He thanked God she hadn't. |
| 4156 |
They were eyes she had once loved. She didn't remember the details of what had happened between them, and she wasn't sure she wanted to, but she remembered both tenderness and pain, and a feeling of intense passion. She was still shaking from the shock of the incident that had just occurred. She had been terrified. |
| 4157 |
There was a thermos of hot water in the room, and a box of the teabags she liked. Stevie had brought them from the hotel and left them for her. He made it just the way she liked it, not too strong and not too weak. He handed the mug to her, and she took it, sitting up on one elbow. They were alone in the room. |
| 4158 |
She couldn't remember the events, only the feelings. She had the sense that it was a magical time. Thinking about it made her feel warm, but there had been something else too, something that was wrong. There had been a problem of some kind. Her eyes searched his and then she remembered, and said it out loud. |
| 4159 |
It came back to her now. There was so much she didn't recall about her own life, but she remembered that. They had sailed the boat into the harbor, and left for the airport in a cab. He had left her minutes later, and she had watched him take off in the military plane, and gone back to Paris on her own. |
| 4160 |
It was the incident that had brought him to his senses and reminded him that he couldn't leave his job, and he belonged to France. They owned him, no matter how much he loved her, and wanted to leave everything for her. He couldn't in the end. They had had a little more time after that, but not much. |
| 4161 |
She was very compassionate about it. I was planning to leave my job in the government that year, it would have been the perfect time to end it with her, and then I got named for another term. You and I had been together for a year by then, the happiest year of my life. You agreed to give it another six months. |
| 4162 |
You said your marriage to her was over, but it wasn't. You always felt you owed something more to her. She always wanted another six months, and you gave it to her. You always protected her, and not me. I remember it now. I was always waiting for you to divorce her. You lived with me, but you were married to her. |
| 4163 |
His country would have forgiven his having a mistress and cheating on his wife, it had been perfectly acceptable in France. Her country, or her industry at least, wouldn't have forgiven her an affair with a married man, and being his mistress, involved in a public scandal with a high government official. |
| 4164 |
The morals clause in her contracts had been rigid. Over night she would have become a pariah. She had risked it because he had insisted that he would get divorced, but he had never even gone to see an attorney. His wife had begged him not to, so he never did. He just kept buying time with Carole. Always more. |
| 4165 |
We explained it to him. He asked me if we were going to get married, and I said we would. And then my daughter died and Arlette had a nervous breakdown and begged me not to. She threatened suicide, and you had lost the baby by then, so our getting married wasn't as pressing. I begged you to understand. |
| 4166 |
But it was only now that she knew it was the right decision. He had confirmed it to her, which was a gift of sorts, long after the fact. A lot of it had come back now, some of the events, and too many of the feelings. She could almost taste her disappointment and despair when she had finally given up and left him. |
| 4167 |
He had even disappointed her children. Whatever his intentions had been in the beginning, or his love for her, he hadn't been honorable with her. At least what Jason had done, no matter how awful it had been for her, had been up front and honest. He had divorced her and married the other woman. Matthieu never had. |
| 4168 |
Jason had offered to come back to Paris, but she assured them the police had the matter well in hand. She was still shaken, but told them she was safe. All of them were horrified that she had been the victim of a terrorist incident on the heels of the first one. And Anthony warned her about Matthieu again. |
| 4169 |
She lay in bed thinking about all of it in the middle of the night. The terrorist, Matthieu, and the pieces of their history he'd shared. It all left her feeling anxious and unnerved. She called Stevie then at the hotel, feeling foolish for bothering her, but desperate for a familiar voice, despite the late hour. |
| 4170 |
They won't let something like that happen again. Matthieu was here, and he raised hell. He must still have some clout. The head of the hospital was up here bowing and scraping in about five minutes. And the police were around for hours. They won't let anything happen now. It just scared me to death. |
| 4171 |
She tried not to let herself think of Matthieu, or the boy who had come to kill her with the terrifying knife. She lay in bed with her eyes closed, taking deep breaths. But no matter what she did, she kept seeing the boy with the knife in her head, and then her mind would race to the safety and protection of Matthieu. |
| 4172 |
Other memories were returning too. Often they were out of sequence and made no sense to her. She could see her father's barn in her mind's eye, and she remembered milking the cows as though it were yesterday. She could hear her father's laughter, but no amount of concentration could help her recall his face. |
| 4173 |
About some things she remembered too much. About others far too little. And all of it was jumbled in her head. Sometimes it took hours to identify a scene, face, or name, and it was a real victory for her when she did. She felt triumphant every time, and then would lie silent and drained of energy for a long time. |
| 4174 |
And many of the other victims they'd spoken to recalled even less than she did. They hadn't been paying attention when they'd been sitting in the tunnel, talking to other passengers, playing with the radio, or the shock of the event and their resulting injuries had wiped all recollection from their minds. |
| 4175 |
The police and a special intelligence unit had been interviewing people for weeks. And until then they had been told that Carole would be unable to contribute anything to their search. Suddenly that had changed, and they were grateful for her help. They were providing additional security for her at the hospital. |
| 4176 |
She had given up all hope of a life with him by then. Knowing all that, it was odd being in a room with him now. Not frightening, but unsettling. He had an austere, unhappy look about him, which was what had seemed ominous to her at first, but now that she recalled their history, his somber air was familiar to her. |
| 4177 |
The protests of the hospital about their machine guns had been overridden. Carole's protection was paramount and took precedence over hospital rules. The machine guns stayed. Carole had seen them herself when she took a walk down the corridor with her nurse, before the interrogation unit arrived to debrief her. |
| 4178 |
She was shaking all over. It had been an upsetting morning, but less so than the day before, when the boy with the knife entered her room. It was an event and a sensation she knew she would never forget. She had been certain she was going to die, even more than when she was flying through the tunnel. |
| 4179 |
He seemed very gentle as he sat there. There was a kind side to him she had not forgotten. It was in full evidence as he sat beside her bed, and his love for her shone in his eyes. She wasn't sure if it was the memory of it for him, or a fire that had never gone out, and she had no desire to ask him. |
| 4180 |
It's a harder job today, it's not as clean. Terrorism has changed many things, in all countries. No leader has an easy time of it now. It was simpler when I was in government. You knew who the bad guys were. Now they have no face, and you don't see them until after the damage is done, like what happened to you. |
| 4181 |
Her children were much younger than his. She knew his oldest son must be well into his forties, and not much younger than she. He had married young and had children early, so he wasn't tied to relatively young children, as she was. But even hers were out of college, allegedly grown up, and lived in other cities. |
| 4182 |
Without Stevie to keep her company every day, her house would have been a tomb. There was no man in her life, no children at home, no one to answer to or spend time with, or take care of, no one who cared what time she ate dinner, or if. She was nearly twenty years younger than he was, but she was unfettered now too. |
| 4183 |
It was a subject they no longer touched on in the last years of their life together. She accepted his love for Carole, and the fact that he had never loved her in the same way, and never would. His feelings for his wife had been very different. They were about duty, responsibility, companionship, and respect. |
| 4184 |
They were his forever, and he kept them locked in his heart, like a rare, precious jewel in a safe, out of harm's way, and out of sight. Carole could feel the emotions he still had for her, as they sat in her hospital room and talked. The room was alive with all that was unsaid, and still felt, by him at least. |
| 4185 |
Otherwise, I want to do roles that are meaningful to me and make a difference to the people who see the films. I can't see the point of just keeping my face on screen, so people don't forget who I am. I want to be really careful about what parts I accept. The role has to matter to me, or it's not worth doing. |
| 4186 |
I've had about a dozen false starts on it. I've written several chapters, from different angles, and I always get stuck at the same place. I can't figure out what the purpose of her life is, once he's gone. She's a brilliant neurosurgeon, and she couldn't save him from a brain tumor, in spite of all her knowledge. |
| 4187 |
And she remembered almost nothing of Sean, except what she'd been told, and a few high points of their eight years. Even the memory of his death was vague. And she was able to recall Jason least of all, although she knew she loved him in a kind, brotherly way. She had different feelings about Matthieu. |
| 4188 |
Until then she had blamed herself for leaving Matthieu too soon, but two and a half years seemed long enough for him to do what he had promised, and she had become convinced he never would. There had always been some excuse, which wasn't believable after a while. He believed them, but Carole no longer could. |
| 4189 |
She had given up. And his gift to her, when they spoke of it since her accident, was to tell her she had been right. Even with her scrambled memory, it was an enormous relief to hear him finally admit that to her. Before, in conversations on the phone the year after she left, he always blamed her for leaving too soon. |
| 4190 |
It was right. Even fifteen years later she was grateful to know that, just as she was for the things Jason had told her about their marriage. She was beginning to wonder if, in some odd way, the tunnel bombing had been a gift. All of these people had come to her from her past, and opened their hearts. |
| 4191 |
She was still fragile after everything that had happened to her, and so much time had passed since their affair. It was probably too late, much as he hated to admit it to himself. He had lost the love of his life. But she had come back now, in a different guise. Perhaps, as she said, it would be enough. |
| 4192 |
It had kept her from loving anyone till Sean. But Carole said nothing and only nodded. Stevie made herself comfortable on the cot they brought in, and later in the evening put on pajamas, and said they were having a slumber party. Carole felt guilty for having her assistant stay with her instead of at the Ritz. |
| 4193 |
Carole's children had called her too. They had guards with machine guns outside the room now, and Stevie to protect her inside. It touched Carole that Stevie cared that much about her. And they giggled and chatted like two kids late into the night, while the nurse stood outside and talked to the guards. |
| 4194 |
The room was almost dark, which lent itself to confidences and questions they might not have dared ask each other otherwise, although they were always fairly candid with each other. But some topics were taboo, even between them. This was a question Carole had never asked her before, and hesitated even now. |
| 4195 |
She wanted to invite her to come to California a few days before the others, so they'd have some time alone. She thought it would be good for both of them. She lay in the dark for a few minutes, thinking about what Matthieu had said about her, and how difficult and needy Chloe had been even as a little girl. |
| 4196 |
It absolved Carole a little, and relieved her, but she still wanted to try to make up to her for what Chloe felt she had missed. Neither of them had anything to lose, and both had everything to win. She was nearly asleep when Stevie spoke to her again. It was another of those easier in the dark questions. |
| 4197 |
Some things may never come back, small things probably. You can do things to push yourself, photographs, letters, rely on friends to tell you things. Your children will fill you in. Your brain had a tremendous shock, now it's doing its job again. Give it some time to recover. It's like when a film breaks at a movie. |
| 4198 |
It jumps and skips for a while, the picture is blurry, the sound is too fast or too slow, and then the film rolls on again. You must be patient during this process. Stamping your feet or throwing popcorn at the screen won't make it go any faster. And the more impatient you get, the harder it will be for you. |
| 4199 |
In each case, you have to remember what you once knew without a second thought. The dishwasher, the washing machine, your car, your computer. Everything you've ever learned has to be entered into the computer in your head again, or brought back if it was saved. I think more of it has been saved than you know. |
| 4200 |
She was a sensible woman. Carole had been far more worried about her brain than her face. She hadn't decided yet whether to have surgery, to get rid of the scar, or live with it for a while and decide how she felt about it later. She was worried about the possible effect of anesthesia on her brain and so were they. |
| 4201 |
It was an eleven hour flight, a long time to worry about her, and have no medical advice or support after all she'd been through. They had talked about chartering a plane, but Carole wanted to go commercial. Chartering seemed an unnecessary expense to her, and she was ambulatory after all, just frail. |
| 4202 |
And Carole wanted to spend time with him too. She wanted to share the gift that had been given to her, her life. They were her children after all, even if adults with their own lives. Whatever they needed from her now, she wanted to try to give them, in honor not only of the past, but the present, and future. |
| 4203 |
If nothing else, Chloe appreciated the effort her mother was making. Maybe she always had made the effort, Carole told herself, and maybe her daughter had never noticed it before, or been old enough to understand it and be grateful. They were both making an effort now, and aware enough to be kind to each other. |
| 4204 |
He was at the office and sounded busy, but he was pleased to hear her. She told him about going back to the hotel, and how much she was looking forward to seeing him at Christmas. He sounded in good spirits, although he warned her about befriending Matthieu again. It was a recurring theme in every call. |
| 4205 |
So people lived that way. I wanted him to get divorced, but his daughter died, and then his wife threatened suicide. He was too high up in the government to get out of his marriage without it causing a major incident in the press. It sounds crazy, but it was considered less shocking to do what we did. |
| 4206 |
He was her children's father, a man she had loved and been married to for ten years, and who was forever woven into the fabric of her heart, but in a different way than he once had been. Their relationship and attachment to each other had changed over the years. For her anyway. It was different with Matthieu. |
| 4207 |
Stevie wanted to give her time to get on her feet, before the press attacked her. Carole Barber getting out of the hospital in Paris was going to make the front page in newspapers all over the world. There was nothing easy about being a star. And certainly no privacy. Dead or alive, the public thought they owned her. |
| 4208 |
Being away from the doctors who had saved her life was frightening. She was relieved to be taking a nurse to the hotel, and Stevie had gotten an adjoining room to her suite, so she'd be sleeping nearby if Carole had a problem, which no one expected. But they worried anyway, and Matthieu sounded concerned as well. |
| 4209 |
She had to turn from caterpillar into butterfly once again. Stevie helped her wash her hair, Carole put on makeup for the first time, and covered the scar on her cheek surprisingly well. Stevie helped her put on jeans, a black sweater, a pea jacket she'd had at the hotel, and a pair of flat black suede loafers. |
| 4210 |
They made their way down in the elevator and across the lobby with hospital security surrounding them, and the head of the hospital came out to shake her hand and wish her well. It was a touching departure. Her own doctor saw them to the car, which the Ritz had sent for her, a long Mercedes limousine. |
| 4211 |
It would have been nice if no one had known she'd made the move from hospital to hotel. That was too much to hope for, with maids cleaning her room, room service waiters bringing her food, and all the internal gossip in a big hotel, even a great one like the Ritz. Someone had been bound to tell the press. |
| 4212 |
Carole said regretfully that her skiing days were over. The last thing she needed was another bump on her head, and he agreed. It reminded them both of the fun they'd had skiing together during her time in France. They had gone several times, and taken her kids. He had been a fabulous skier, and so was she. |
| 4213 |
She remembered his humor now too. She had had fun with him, as well as grief. She was still annoyed at herself for kissing him the night before. They wouldn't do it again. She had made up her mind. She asked Stevie to make the arrangements for her, for the car, and they had lunch on trays in her room. |
| 4214 |
But she wouldn't allow herself to think of it now. He could see in her eyes that her guard was up, and she wanted to keep him at a distance, although she had kissed his cheek when she got in. Old habits died hard, even after fifteen years. She had a habit patterned in her somewhere of intimacy with him. |
| 4215 |
They drove to Bagatelle, and the sun was shining. It was cold and windy, but they were both warmly dressed, and she was surprised at how good it felt to be out in the air. She tucked her hand in his arm to steady herself, and they walked slowly for a long time. She was winded when they got back to his car. |
| 4216 |
A moment later there were a series of flashes in her face, and she looked surprised at first, and then smiled and waved. As long as they had her, there was no point looking unpleasant. She had learned that years before. She walked quickly into the hotel, through the lobby, and took the elevator up to her room. |
| 4217 |
She looked tired but happy as she stretched her legs out and they talked, as they always did, about a variety of things, philosophical as well as practical. In the old days, he had loved talking politics with her, and valued her opinions. She wasn't up to that yet, nor was she current on French politics. |
| 4218 |
The snow of the night before had brought back an avalanche of memories, and with them feelings that had surprised her and lowered her guard. Her boundaries were back in place now, and he respected her for it. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her. She was vulnerable and frail, and only newly returned to life. |
| 4219 |
They walked for an hour, and then drove till six. They parked for a while in the Bois de Boulogne, and talked about their old house. He said he hadn't seen it in years, and they agreed to drive by on the way back to the hotel. It was a pilgrimage she had already made, but now they would make it together. |
| 4220 |
The door to the courtyard was open again, and with the guards waiting discreetly outside, they walked inside side by side. Instinctively, they both looked up to where their bedroom had been, looked at each other, and held hands. They had shared so much here, hoped for so many things, and then lost their dreams. |
| 4221 |
In the scheme of a lifetime, two and a half years was nothing, but at the time it had been their entire world. This time it was Carole who turned her face to his, and kissed him first. He was startled, and hesitated, and then let his own resolve dissolve as he kissed her back, and then kissed her again. |
| 4222 |
She wanted to go back to the Luxembourg Gardens, where she had gone so often with Anthony and Chloe while they lived there. All he could think about was her lips on his, as he drove back to his house. He let himself in with his key, walked through the hallway into his study, and sat down in the dark. |
| 4223 |
They were still chatting easily and laughing, when they got out of his car at the Ritz. She had invited him up for dinner in her suite, and he had agreed to come. He was handing his car keys to the voiturier, with her arm tucked into his, when a photographer snapped their picture with a flash of light in their faces. |
| 4224 |
He didn't like having his photograph taken at the best of times, but particularly not by paparazzi for the gossip press. They had always been careful when they lived together, but now they had far less at risk. They had nothing to hide. It was just unpleasant to be photographed and talked about, and not his style. |
| 4225 |
They were using the front door these days, it was easier than having the rue Cambon side opened for her every time. She had been wearing gray slacks and Stevie's coat when they photographed her, with her dark glasses in her hand. They recognized her, obviously, but seemed not to know who Matthieu was. |
| 4226 |
And more than that, Stevie realized that she looked happy. Matthieu stayed, talking to her, until ten o'clock that night. They always had a lot to say to each other, and never ran out of topics that interested them both. She had been contacted by the police again, for a further statement about the tunnel bombing. |
| 4227 |
They wanted to know if she remembered anything more, but she didn't. She had been unconscious very quickly, as soon as the car next to her exploded. But they had a mountain of statements from others. The police seemed to feel that, with the exception of the boy who'd come to the hospital, all of the bombers had died. |
| 4228 |
He was beginning to fill her head day and night. She was trying to resist it. She didn't want to become obsessed by him, just enjoy him until she left. She realized it was a good thing she was leaving soon, before things got out of hand between them, as they had before. They kissed again before he left that night. |
| 4229 |
The rest of the time they talked of his work, her book, her career, their respective children, and whatever else came to mind. They never seemed to stop talking, and both of them loved their exchanges of ideas. It challenged her to speak intelligently to him, and forced her to stretch her mind to what it once had been. |
| 4230 |
And she had not yet figured out how to work her computer. The secrets to her book were still locked in it. Stevie had offered to help her, but she insisted she wasn't ready. It required too much concentration. Stevie brought her the newspapers the next morning over breakfast. She had a stack of them. |
| 4231 |
It would have been different if she'd had his baby, if he'd left Arlette for her, filed for divorce, or resigned from the ministry, but none of that had happened. And now they were just two people walking into a hotel, old friends perhaps, or more. He was retired from the ministry, and they were both widowed. |
| 4232 |
They'd had a fight afterward, which was the first of many. He had given her a thousand excuses by then, and she was accusing him of stalling. Their life together began to unravel over the next months, particularly after she lost the baby. She had had a rotten evening the night the photograph at Versailles was taken. |
| 4233 |
They both knew they could have turned into a full blown scandal at any moment. It was a miracle that they hadn't. They talked about other things over dinner, and the food was delicious. He waited until dessert to open a delicate subject with her. Their future. He had been awake the night before, thinking about it. |
| 4234 |
I realized then that I didn't belong here. That was part of the trouble with us. Cultural differences, you used to call them. That made it okay for you to live with me and be married to her, and even have our baby out of wedlock. I don't want to live somewhere where they think that differently than I do. |
| 4235 |
All she wanted was to go home, and live out the rest of her years alone in peace. He wondered how Sean had convinced her to marry him. And then she was abandoned again when he died. Now she had closed the doors to her heart. They talked about it all the way back to the hotel, and said goodnight in his car. |
| 4236 |
The doctor said she'd come back to see her again in a few days, and told her to continue what she was doing. She said a few words to the nurse, and then left to go back to the hospital. Stevie ordered lunch for Carole after the doctor left, but she left her alone at the table, and ate lunch in her own room. |
| 4237 |
Love didn't come along every day, and if it had landed in Carole's lap again, Stevie thought it was a crime to waste it. Worse yet, to run away because she was afraid to get hurt again. Carole got bored alone at the lunch table. Stevie had said she had a headache, which Carole suspected wasn't true. |
| 4238 |
She thought he might be out to lunch, but called him anyway. His secretary put her through to him immediately. He was eating a sandwich at his desk, and had been in a rotten mood all day. He had bitten his secretary's head off twice, and slammed the door to his office after talking to a client who had annoyed him. |
| 4239 |
Maybe we don't need the paperwork or titles now, if that's too restricting for you. What if you live with me in Paris for six months, and I live with you in California for the other six months a year? You could come and go as you please, travel, do your projects, make movies, write, see your children. |
| 4240 |
Things were going much better than they had the night before. He realized now that he had moved too fast. After all the pain he'd caused her before, he knew now that he had to move slowly, and win her confidence in him again. He also knew how important it was to her to respect herself. It had always been that way. |
| 4241 |
The timing was ideal for him. He was finishing most of his projects in the next few weeks, and hadn't taken on any new ones. It was as though he had sensed she was coming back into his life. He paid the check for dinner, and they were the last to leave the restaurant. It was late, but they had covered a lot of ground. |
| 4242 |
He drove her back to the hotel, with her car following them. He almost drove her through the fateful tunnel near the Louvre, and then swerved away at the last minute. It was open again, but he didn't want to take her through it. He had almost forgotten, but she hadn't. Her eyes were wide with terror as he turned away. |
| 4243 |
When dessert arrived, he pulled something out of his pocket and handed her a Cartier box. It was a Christmas gift that he'd had made for her. She opened the box carefully, relieved to see that it wasn't a ring box. There was nothing formal about their arrangement yet. They were trying it on for size. |
| 4244 |
It was his way of saying that he approved of what she was doing and loved her just as she was. It was a sign of respect as well as love. She had brought him a present too, and he smiled when he saw that it came from the same store. He opened it as cautiously as she had hers, and saw that it was an elegant gold watch. |
| 4245 |
They didn't care if they were in the papers. They had nothing to hide. He walked her back to her room and kissed her again in the living room of her suite. Stevie had already gone to bed, after packing up the last of their things. Carole's computer was still on the desk, but she wasn't planning to work that night. |
| 4246 |
She didn't want the craziness of what they'd shared in the past. She wanted something peaceful and warm, not the agonizing passion they had experienced before. But looking at him, she was reminded that this wasn't Sean. It was Matthieu. He was a powerful, passionate man, always had been, and still was, despite his age. |
| 4247 |
Matthieu was a driving force, and a perfect match for her. Together their energy could light the world. It was what had frightened her at first, but she was growing used to it again. They were both wearing their Christmas presents from each other, and they sat in the living room of the suite for a long time and talked. |
| 4248 |
They were leaving at seven, and she had to check in by eight o'clock for a ten o'clock flight. The neurosurgeon who was traveling with them had promised to be at the Ritz at six thirty, to check her before they left. He had made the arrangements with Stevie and told her that he was excited about the trip. |
| 4249 |
Carole looked peaceful and happy as she brushed her teeth and put her nightgown on. She was excited about his coming to California, and everything she was planning to do before he arrived. She had a lot to look forward to in the weeks to come. It was a whole new life. Stevie woke her at six the next morning. |
| 4250 |
Carole was already dressed and at breakfast when the young doctor arrived. He looked like a kid. She had said goodbye to her own neurologist the day before, and given her a Cartier watch as well, a practical one in white gold, with a second hand. The doctor had been thrilled. Matthieu arrived promptly at seven. |
| 4251 |
He was wearing a suit and tie as always, and commented that Carole looked like a young girl in jeans and a loose gray sweater. She wanted to be comfortable for the flight. And in case photographers caught her, she had put makeup on. She was wearing his bracelet, and the diamonds on it sparkled on her arm. |
| 4252 |
No one would ever have imagined that she'd been injured or sick. And Matthieu could hardly see the fading scar on her cheek, with artful makeup. They chatted easily on the way to the airport, and Carole couldn't help thinking of the last time he had gone to the airport with her, fifteen years before. |
| 4253 |
She believed then she'd never see him again. In spite of vague assurances she made, she knew she wasn't coming back, and so did he. This time she was all smiles when she got out of the car at the airport, went through security, and went to the first class lounge with Matthieu, while Stevie checked their bags. |
| 4254 |
She ate two meals, watched a movie, and then turned her seat into a bed, cuddled up under the blanket and comforter, and slept the rest of the way. Stevie woke her up before they landed, so she could do her makeup and brush her teeth and hair. There was a strong possibility that there would be press to meet the plane. |
| 4255 |
She didn't need medical care, but it seemed wiser for her not to be alone right at first. Carole had suggested letting her go as soon as the kids arrived, or at least when Matthieu came out. It was just comforting to have someone there at night, and Stevie was going home to her own man, life, and bed. |
| 4256 |
She looked out at the garden, and then walked into her office, and sat down at her desk. Stevie had already set her computer up for her. And the nurse went to make lunch. Stevie had asked the cleaning person to order groceries for them. As usual, she had thought of everything, down to the last detail. |
| 4257 |
The nurse helped her unpack, and then she went to sit in her office and stared out the window. The computer was waiting for her, but she was too tired to touch it. By then it was three o'clock, which was midnight in Paris. She was wiped out. She walked out into her garden that afternoon, and called both her children. |
| 4258 |
It made Carole smile just looking at her, as the doctor hopped up on the table like a sprite in her white coat, and smiled at the two women sitting across from her in chairs. Stevie had been in the examining room with Carole for moral support and to help fill in details she might have forgotten or didn't know. |
| 4259 |
She felt relieved as she left the office that she had a doctor she could talk to, in case she felt the effects of the accident differently now that she was home. But so far she was doing well and felt fine. She was looking forward to the holidays with her family and to Stevie's wedding, both of which sounded like fun. |
| 4260 |
She was getting married in white. They had found a dark green dress for Carole. It was short, strapless, and the color of emeralds. She said she felt like the mother of the bride. Chloe wasn't arriving till seven that night, so they had the afternoon to putter around the house and get things ready for her. |
| 4261 |
She had been out of his life for fifteen years, and now that she was back, each day seemed interminable without her. He could hardly wait to come. He was leaving the next day to go skiing with his children, and promised to call her from there. He wished that she could join them on the trip, even if she couldn't ski. |
| 4262 |
Chloe was thrilled for her too. She had known Stevie almost all her life, and loved her like a big sister. Stevie left them when they got home, and Chloe and her mother sat in the kitchen. She had slept on the flight so she was wide awake. Carole made her scrambled eggs, and they ate ice cream afterward. |
| 4263 |
She was happy to have him back in her life. He was an unexpected gift. She sat down at her desk, glanced at her computer, and saw the last entries she'd made on her book. She had it sorted out in her head now, and knew what she wanted to write. She looked out into the garden, with the fountain all lit up, and the pond. |
| 4264 |
Stevie was getting married in a week. She had survived a terrorist bombing, and she had her memory back. Carole closed her eyes and silently thanked God for the blessings she had, and then opened them again and smiled. She had everything she had ever wanted and more. And best of all, she had herself. |
| 4265 |
She hadn't told her family about Matthieu yet. But when the time was right she would. She knew Anthony would probably object at first, but hopefully he would calm down with time. He had a right to his opinions and concerns for her. And she had a right to her own life, and to make the choices that seemed best for her. |
| 4266 |
In his youth, he was too busy establishing his business to waste time on romance. At forty he had married the daughter of an important American collector. It had been a successful and happy union. Marjorie de Suvery had never involved herself directly in the gallery, which was well established before Simon married her. |
| 4267 |
She loved him profoundly and had taken a passionate interest in everything he did. Marjorie had been an artist but never felt comfortable showing her work. She did genteel landscapes and portraits, and often gave them as gifts to friends. In truth, Simon had been affected but never impressed by her work. |
| 4268 |
He was fair to his employees, honest with his clients, and relentless in his pursuit of whatever he felt the gallery should have. Sometimes it took him years to acquire a particular painting or sculpture, but he never rested until it was his. He had pursued his wife, before their marriage, in much the same way. |
| 4269 |
Marjorie spent hours with her, chortling and cooing, playing with her in the garden. She nearly went into mourning when Sasha began school, and they had to be apart. She was a beautiful and loving child. Sasha was an interesting blend of her parents. She had her father's dark looks and her mother's ethereal softness. |
| 4270 |
But there was nothing small about Sasha's soul. She had the strength and iron will of her father, the warmth and gentle kindness of her mother, and the directness she learned early on from her father. She was four or five before he took serious notice of her, and once he did, all he spoke to her about was art. |
| 4271 |
Sasha and Simon had both grown accustomed to Marjorie being interested in all they did, and participating in their lives, even while in bed. The sudden realization that she had disappeared from their world hit them both like a bomb, and fused Sasha and her father closer together than they had ever been. |
| 4272 |
At first, Simon was horrified at her marrying so young, and the only thing that mollified him, and made him consent to the marriage, was that Arthur assured his father in law that when Sasha was finished with her studies and apprenticeship in New York, he would move to Paris with her and live there. |
| 4273 |
Miraculously, both her babies managed to arrive in the summer, right after she finished her classes. She hired a nanny to help her with them while she was in school and working at the museum. She had learned how to keep many balls in the air, while watching her father run the gallery when she was a child. |
| 4274 |
The investment bank was literally giving him the Paris office to run, at thirty six, and had full confidence in him, as did Sasha. She was going to be even busier there than she had been in New York, where she'd been working only part time at the museum, and spent the rest of her time caring for her children. |
| 4275 |
He still appeared as stern as he had when she was a child, but even Arthur noticed, once they moved to Paris, that Simon was softening almost imperceptibly with age. He even chatted with his grandchildren from time to time, although most of the time, when he visited, he preferred to just sit and observe them. |
| 4276 |
He quickly set to work remodeling it with charming oeil de boeuf windows under a mansard roof, and put in a funny little motorized seat, which sped up and down the stairs, and delighted his grandchildren, when he let them ride it. He walked up the stairs beside them while they squealed with excitement. |
| 4277 |
Not one he liked at first. It was a plan she'd had for years, and had dreamed of all her life. She wanted to expand the gallery to include contemporary artists. The wing that had previously been used for storage was perfect for her plan. It was across the courtyard from their offices and her father's new home. |
| 4278 |
She was knowledgeable about what he sold so competently and brilliant about newer work. By the time she was thirty, three years after she had opened Suvery Contemporary on his premises, it was the most important contemporary gallery in Paris, and perhaps in Europe. And she'd never had so much fun in her life. |
| 4279 |
Nor had Arthur. He loved what she did, and supported her in every move, every decision, every investment, even more than her father, who remained reluctant though ultimately respectful of what she'd accomplished with contemporary work. In fact, she had brought his gallery into the present with a bang. |
| 4280 |
Arthur loved the contrast between her business life and his own. He loved the playfulness of the art she showed, and the zaniness of her artists, in contrast to the bankers he dealt with. He traveled with her frequently to other cities when she went to see new artists, and loved going to art fairs with her. |
| 4281 |
Two of the partners had died in a private plane crash, and everyone insisted Arthur was the obvious choice to run the bank at home. In fact he was the only choice. There was no way for Arthur to refuse to do it, in good conscience. His career was important to him too, and the bank was not letting him off the hook. |
| 4282 |
Sasha cried copiously when she explained the situation to her father, and there had been tears in his eyes as well. For all the thirteen years of their marriage, Arthur had fully supported her and every aspect of her career, and now she knew she had to do the same for him, and move back to New York. |
| 4283 |
He was totally opposed to it, just as he had been when she suggested selling contemporary art. But this time she didn't threaten him, she begged him. What Sasha wanted was to open a branch of their gallery in New York, for both traditional and contemporary work. Her father thought the idea was insane. |
| 4284 |
Americans contacted them daily for important purchases, as well as museums around the world. They had absolutely no need to open a branch in New York, except now Sasha would be there, and she wanted to work for her father, and the gallery she loved, as she had for nine years. It was a turning point for them. |
| 4285 |
He was eighty seven, and little by little, he was slowing down. With great regret, they had talked about what she would do when she would be alone running the business. She couldn't imagine it, but he could. He had led a long life, and had no fears about moving on. And he had trained his people well. |
| 4286 |
She would have to spend time in both galleries, of course, and commute regularly, but the choice of where to live was hers, thanks to her father's competence and foresight. They had excellent managers in both places. But Paris still felt like home to her, although she enjoyed living and working in New York. |
| 4287 |
She was just lucky that her father was still running his end of the business at eighty seven years of age. He was remarkable, although he had slowed down almost imperceptibly. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, Sasha was stunned when he died suddenly at eighty nine. She had expected him to live forever. |
| 4288 |
The doctors said he didn't suffer. He was gone in an instant, having just concluded an enormous deal with a collector from Holland. Sasha flew to Paris in a state of shock that night, and moved around the gallery aimlessly, unable to believe that he was gone. The funeral was dignified and important. |
| 4289 |
For the first time since she had left Paris, she wanted to stay home, and be near where her father had lived and worked. She felt like an orphan a month later, when she finally flew home to New York. The stores and streets decorated for Christmas seemed like an affront after the loss she had just sustained. |
| 4290 |
The ensuing years were peaceful, happy, and productive. She missed her father, but slowly put down roots in New York, as her children grew up. And she still returned to Paris twice a month, to continue to oversee the gallery there. Eight years after her father's death, both galleries were strong and equally successful. |
| 4291 |
Xavier was twenty four, living and painting in London, and showing at a small gallery in Soho. And although Sasha loved his paintings, he was not ready for her to show. Her love for him did not blind her to the progress he still needed to make. He was talented, but as an artist not yet fully mature. |
| 4292 |
But snow was still two months away, as she picked up her bulging briefcase. She was going to be out of the gallery the following week. She was leaving on Sunday morning for Paris, to check on things there. She still made a routine visit every two weeks, as she had since her father's death eight years before. |
| 4293 |
There had always been something hard and judgmental about her, and she was less inclined to bend and compromise than her older brother. Xavier and his mother were soul mates in many ways, equally gentle, equally kind, always willing to forgive a loved one or a friend. Tatianna had a harder line about people and life. |
| 4294 |
I think he'd forgotten it himself by then, until he got out on the dance floor in his jockey shorts, and some old woman hit him with her purse. So he asked her to dance and swung her around a few times. It was the funniest damn thing I've ever seen. She was about four feet tall, and she kept hitting him with her purse. |
| 4295 |
She was always rushing, and when she went to London, she had artists to visit whom she already represented, and wanted to see Xavier. She had told him to tell Liam to send her slides of his work, but he never had, which suggested to her that he was either not serious about it, or didn't feel ready to show it to her. |
| 4296 |
She waved at everyone as she left the office in a hurry, and hailed a cab for the short ride to the apartment, still thinking of Xavier. She knew Arthur would be waiting for her, and anxious to leave town. The traffic was always awful on Fridays, though slightly better if they waited until after dinner. |
| 4297 |
It had seemed that way to her since Tatianna graduated and moved to her own place. Sasha's life felt empty at times now with the children gone. Arthur teased her about it whenever she said it, and reminded her that she was one of the busiest women in New York, or anywhere else. But she missed the children anyway. |
| 4298 |
They had been an integral and vital part of her life, and she felt sad at times, diminished and less useful now that they were gone. She was grateful that she and Arthur enjoyed traveling and spending time together. If possible, they were even closer now than they had ever been, and even more in love. |
| 4299 |
If anything, familiarity and time had added a bond to them that attached them more and more to each other with age. Arthur was waiting for her at the apartment when she got home, and smiled the moment he saw her. He was still wearing the white shirt he had worn to the office, with his sleeves rolled up. |
| 4300 |
She loved wearing old clothes, jeans, tattered sweaters, or faded T shirts. It was a relief not to have to be dressed as she was in the gallery every day. Arthur loved to play golf and walk on the beach. He had been an avid sailor in his youth, as their children were, and he loved playing tennis with her. |
| 4301 |
She tried not to work on weekends, although she brought papers with her sometimes. Like the city apartment, the house in the Hamptons was too large for them now, but it bothered her less there. She could easily imagine grandchildren there one day, and the children often came to stay and brought their friends. |
| 4302 |
She told him about a new artist they'd signed, a very talented young painter from Brazil. And she mentioned that Xavier had said he'd try to come to Paris to see her the following week. He was good about doing that, and made his own schedule, unlike Tatianna, who was at the mercy of the photographer she worked for. |
| 4303 |
He knew his son well, as did Sasha. And as she looked over at Arthur with a smile, she noticed, as she often did, how handsome he still was. Tall, lean, fit, with chiseled features and a strong chin. She had been in love with him since the moment he walked into her life. More so now than ever, in fact. |
| 4304 |
They were in Southampton at ten o'clock, and Sasha was surprised to realize she was tired. As always, Arthur had done the driving, and she had dozed off on the trip out, and was happy to climb into bed with him before midnight. They sat on the deck before that, and looked at the ocean in the moonlight. |
| 4305 |
She loved their lazy Southampton mornings. Afterward, they went down to the kitchen together, she made breakfast, and they took a long walk on the beach. It was a glorious day, hot and sunny, with barely even a breeze. It was the first week in October, and fall would put a chill in the air soon, but not just yet. |
| 4306 |
They sat on the deck at the house afterward, drinking wine and talking. Life seemed easy and peaceful. They went to bed early that night, as Sasha had to get up early the next morning to go to the airport and catch the flight to Paris. She hated to leave him, but it was an ordinary occurrence in their lives. |
| 4307 |
Sasha had lunch, watched a movie, slept for three hours, and woke up as they landed at Charles de Gaulle airport. She knew most of the attendants on the flight, and the chief purser, and knowing her habits, they left her alone. She was an easy passenger and pleasant person, who drank nothing but water on the flight. |
| 4308 |
Although it was Indian summer in New York, it was winter here. She had brought a cashmere shawl to put over her jacket when she landed, and as always, a car and driver were waiting for her. They chatted about the weather and the flight on the drive in to Paris, and the house was quiet when she got home. |
| 4309 |
Sasha picked up the phone with a smile, anticipating more complaints about the photographer Tatianna worked for. She just hoped Tatianna hadn't quit. She was headstrong at times, and didn't like being subservient to other people, or treated unfairly, and Sasha knew she thought her new boss wasn't treating her well. |
| 4310 |
Her trip to Brussels would have to wait. Her whole life had just been destroyed in a single moment. Sasha couldn't even get her mind around it, and didn't want to try. Her secretary and her gallery manager drove her to the airport, and after hovering over her like worried parents, they put her on the plane. |
| 4311 |
But she had never before lost her husband, either. She hadn't even felt this way when her father died, which was bad enough. But he had been eighty nine years old, and he himself had warned her frequently that it would happen one day, and she knew it would. She had been prepared for it, more or less. |
| 4312 |
He had told her he loved her only the day before. She had left him asleep in bed in Southampton, and now he was gone. It wasn't possible. It wasn't happening. Except it was. The only time she remembered feeling this way, totally out of control and frightened, was when her mother had died when she was nine. |
| 4313 |
And at two in the morning Xavier arrived from London. He had called a friend to pick him up. One of his young artist friends was right behind him as he came through the door and went straight to his mother. He put his arms around her and Tatianna, and the three of them just stood there hugging and crying. |
| 4314 |
The only one who ate the food Marcie made was Xavier's friend. The others ate and drank nothing. And in the morning, reality set in. Sasha went to the hospital, and insisted on seeing her husband. She wanted to be alone with him, and when she came out of the room, she looked like a ghost, but she wasn't crying. |
| 4315 |
They got through the day, with Sasha looking and feeling like a zombie, and trying to comfort her children. They finally ate pizza that night, and nothing else. Tatianna went to sleep in her old bedroom, Xavier went out with friends and came home drunk. Sasha sat in the living room staring into space. |
| 4316 |
And when she finally went to bed that night, too exhausted to sleep, she could smell his aftershave on his pillow, and burrowed her face in it and sobbed. Marcie stayed and slept on the couch, faithful friend that she was. She spent hours that night calling their friends and telling them about the funeral. |
| 4317 |
Ushers were chosen from among Arthur's partners and best friends. Sasha felt as though she would die when she had to pick his clothes. And somehow they all got to the funeral dressed, and on time. People came to the house afterward. And long after, Sasha admitted that she remembered absolutely nothing. |
| 4318 |
She was forty five years old, had been widowed at forty two, and said there just were no decent men available, all the good ones were married. The others were idiots, or worse. She insisted she was happier alone. But Sasha was acutely aware that in the past year or two, she had started drinking too much. |
| 4319 |
They didn't have intolerable grief to live with, and they could hide behind their hatred of their ex husbands, particularly if they'd been left for other, younger women. It was frightening listening to all of them. As a result, Sasha avoided them, isolated herself, and tried to get lost in her work. |
| 4320 |
All she had done since then was travel to Paris once a month, where she sat huddled and freezing in the house at night, finished her work as quickly as possible, and flew back to New York. She delegated as much as possible to both her gallery managers during those months, and she was grateful for their help. |
| 4321 |
Sundays were the worst days of all for her, in either city, because she couldn't go to work. She hadn't been to the house in the Hamptons since he died. She didn't want to go back without him, nor did she want to sell it. She just let it sit there, and told her children to use it whenever they wanted. |
| 4322 |
She wasn't going to. She had absolutely no idea what to do with the rest of her life. Other than work, which was now completely devoid of joy for her, but it was the only saving grace she had. The rest looked like a wasteland of despair. She had never felt as lost or without hope in her entire life. |
| 4323 |
He was intelligent and might have been interesting, except that he proceeded to interview Sasha, as though she had signed up for computer dating, which she hadn't, and had no intention of doing, now or ever. She knew that Alana had met men on Internet dating services more than once. The thought of it horrified Sasha. |
| 4324 |
He spoke in an undertone, and her eyes were filled with tears as she nodded. The man on her left had been not only insulting but depressing. This was what she had to look forward to now as a widow. She was beginning to wonder if in the future she should just tell people she met that she was married. |
| 4325 |
For the rest of the meal, she picked at what was on her plate, and disappeared with as much aplomb as she could muster while the others were moving into the living room for coffee. She didn't even have the strength to tell Alana, and promised herself she'd call her the next morning. She didn't have to. |
| 4326 |
He was in much better spirits, and producing some very interesting new work. She was impressed when she saw it. She gave him the name of a gallery she thought he should talk to, and he was pleased. He didn't want to show at Suvery. It reeked of nepotism to him, and he was determined to make it on his own. |
| 4327 |
Although sometimes people with his energy and personality had enormous talent. What artists like Liam needed, according to Sasha, was to be harnessed, scolded severely, and whipped into shape, or they forgot to get to work. Although Xavier claimed Liam was diligent and conscientious about his painting. |
| 4328 |
The memories were overpowering here, and she spent hours thinking of him and walking on the beach. But here, finally, she felt the healing begin. She went back to the gallery looking better after the Labor Day weekend. For nearly a month now, she had been toying with an idea. She hadn't made a decision yet. |
| 4329 |
Being in New York without him was too hard for her. September sped by with an opening for a new artist, which she curated, and another solo show. She curated all their shows, choosing which work to hang, and where to hang it, seeking contrasts and combinations that would set each painting off to its best advantage. |
| 4330 |
She had an instinctive knack for it and always loved it. She also met with several old, familiar clients, sat on her museum boards, and was planning a memorial service for Arthur, to mark the first year since his death. Xavier had promised to fly in for it. The service was, predictably, a somber moment for all of them. |
| 4331 |
As they left the church, it was hard to believe it had been a year. Tatianna told her that night, after the memorial, that she had quit her job, and was going to travel in India for several months with friends. She wanted to take photographs, and when she got back, she was going to look for a job on a magazine. |
| 4332 |
He was Arthur's age, and they hadn't seen him in years. He told Sasha discreetly over dinner that his wife had become an alcoholic, and had had severe mental problems for the last twenty years of their marriage. He was sad, but relieved, to be out of it, and sorry to hear that Sasha was moving away. |
| 4333 |
She didn't really care. He wished her luck, and the next morning, she took a cab to the airport. By nine o'clock she was in the air, and half an hour later, she was sound asleep. It had been a crisp sunny day in New York when she left, and when she arrived in Paris, it was bitter cold and pouring rain. |
| 4334 |
When she awoke on Sunday morning, the fog was so low it was nearly sitting on the rooftops. It was cold and gray and the house was damp. And when she slipped into her bed that night, even her sheets felt uncomfortable, and she was chilled to the bone. Just for a moment, she missed the warm, cozy apartment in New York. |
| 4335 |
In Paris, there were certain social lines drawn that were more typical of Europe. Her major clients came from aristocratic, often titled, backgrounds, or fortunes that had been established for generations, like the Rothschilds, and others who entertained lavishly, many of whom had been her father's friends as well. |
| 4336 |
The parties she was invited to were infinitely dressier and more elaborate than those she went to in New York, or did when Arthur was alive. And here the invitations were harder to turn down, since many of the people who invited her had bought important pieces of work from her. She felt obliged to go. |
| 4337 |
In mid December, working in her office on yet another gray foggy day, her secretary told her that a client had come to see her. She had met him at a dinner party the night before. He was interested in buying an important piece of Flemish work, and she was pleased that he had followed up on their conversation. |
| 4338 |
She left her office to see him, and showed him several paintings that he seemed to like. It was obvious to everyone except Sasha, in the course of his two and a half hour visit, that he liked the gallery owner as well. He invited her to dinner at Alain Ducasse the next day to discuss his eventual purchase with her. |
| 4339 |
She had been far more liberal than other people's mothers when he had gone to school in New York and had American friends. She had made a habit of buying condoms for him and all his friends, and leaving them in a giant mason jar in his room. She asked no questions, but kept the jar filled regularly. |
| 4340 |
She would far rather have had a simple but elegant dinner at Le Voltaire, but this was business, and she had to go where the client wanted. It was easy to figure out that he was trying to impress her, but she had never been particularly fascinated by complicated, rich food, however many stars the chef had. |
| 4341 |
He had been married twice, had five children he spoke about and acknowledged, and three she knew he didn't. In matters of that nature, France was a small country, and Paris a small city. His affairs were legendary, his mistresses well taken care of, and his illegitimate children the talk of the town. |
| 4342 |
But by then, his eyes were blazing. They had both made themselves clear. And he didn't like what he was hearing. Women never said no to him, particularly not women Sasha's age. As far as he was concerned, he'd have been doing her a favor to sleep with her. She looked like a sad, lonely woman to him. |
| 4343 |
The bastard had tried to buy her along with the painting, and thought she was so hungry for the sale that she would sleep with him. It was beyond insulting. No one would ever have dared treat her that way when Arthur was alive. She was still shaking when she called Xavier and told him the story moments later. |
| 4344 |
She was glad to see her friends, but tired of explaining to them that there was no man in her life. It seemed to be the only question anyone asked her anymore. As though she didn't exist unless she was attached to a man. It made her feel like a failure, in an odd way, that her husband had died, and she was now alone. |
| 4345 |
Tatianna had brought her mother a beautiful sari from India, and some lovely gold sandals to go with it. And Xavier had bought her a gold bracelet from an antique shop in London. It was the sort of thing his father would have given her, and it warmed his heart to see her face light up when she put it on. |
| 4346 |
She enjoyed spoiling them once in a while, particularly on vacations. She and Arthur always had. They felt fortunate to be able to, and the trips they had taken were memories they all cherished. St. Moritz that year was one of them. She skied with the children some of the time, and the rest of the time on her own. |
| 4347 |
She fitted him into her schedule on her last afternoon in London, with some trepidation. The adventures and bad behavior Xavier had described to her did not make her anxious to represent him, but his talent was impossible to ignore. She felt she had to see him. And once in his studio, she was glad she'd come. |
| 4348 |
He knew that whatever she said, or thought, about his work would have an impact on his life forever. If she dismissed it as inadequate, or decided it wasn't worthy of being represented by her gallery, he would feel it almost like a physical blow. As he watched her cross the studio, he felt vulnerable and afraid. |
| 4349 |
She thanked him politely for inviting her to come. He had no way of knowing, despite everything Xavier had said, that what appeared to be coolness to him was in fact that she herself was shy. What interested her was the art, even more than the person. But undeniably, Liam himself was hard to ignore. |
| 4350 |
Apparently, his wife was willing to do that. Sasha wasn't, no matter how handsome or charming he was. If he was serious about his work, to some extent at least, she expected him to act like an adult, or at least pretend to be one. Given all she'd heard, she wasn't at all sure that Liam was prepared to grow up. |
| 4351 |
Xavier also knew that was a good sign, and promised himself to tell Liam later. He didn't want to give away all his mother's secrets while she was standing there. He was thrilled he had made the introduction. He too had been convinced that Liam's work was great, and was relieved and thrilled that his mother agreed. |
| 4352 |
As she looked at him, he hardly looked older than her son. She knew from the bio he had sent her with the slides that he was thirty nine. Looking at him, she would never have believed it. He had studied with some very important artists, and had had a few minor shows at small galleries. But he looked like a kid. |
| 4353 |
He had straight blond hair that hung down his back most of the time. He had tied it in a ponytail to meet her. But his face was smooth and youthful. He had powerful shoulders, long graceful hands, and he bounced around his studio like a teenager in sneakers, blue jeans, and T shirt, all covered with paint. |
| 4354 |
He said this was one of the defining moments of his life. She didn't think it was, but she was happy it meant so much to him. That was what she loved best about showing emerging artists. She was able to give them a chance. She had always loved that about that side of the business, working with young artists like him. |
| 4355 |
Although Xavier was right, he wasn't that young, but he looked it. Everything about him was boyish. He was only nine years younger than she was, but he acted about fourteen, and looked somewhere in his mid twenties, not thirty nine. He seemed no older than Xavier to her, and made her feel maternal toward him. |
| 4356 |
There was a quiet shyness and stability he liked. Everything about Sasha seemed reliable and solid, and he liked her. At first, he had been terrified of her. But beneath the cool, professional exterior, he sensed that she was warm. Her reputation daunted him, but her persona didn't. She wondered if he owned a suit. |
| 4357 |
There was something innocent and enchanting about him, and if he got out of line, or loud and boisterous, she would tell him to behave. Her artists were like children to her, sometimes even the old ones. She felt like their surrogate mother, which was a lot of work, but it was part of what she loved about her job. |
| 4358 |
And however badly he allowed himself to behave in his private life, or on his evenings out with Xavier, Liam had always been serious about his work. He had known from his childhood that he had been born to paint. It had set him apart and isolated him even as a child, and later as a teenager and young man. |
| 4359 |
His mother had always encouraged him, and told him he had to follow his dreams. The rest of his family hadn't been nearly as enthused, and even his own father had treated him like a freak. It had created a chasm between them forever. It was as though only his mother was able to see his special genius. |
| 4360 |
The others, his father, brothers, and even their friends, had just thought he was weird, and his early paintings meant nothing to them. His father called them junk, and his brothers referred to them as scribbles. They shut him out from everything they did, and in his isolation, he had sought solace in painting. |
| 4361 |
Like all people who had suffered early on, Liam was much deeper than he looked. Sasha didn't know that yet, but she sensed it. All of the artists she knew had had some private grief or hell to live through. In the end, it made their lives more painful perhaps, but strengthened their work and commitment to art. |
| 4362 |
She put him through school working as a maid in summer and winter resorts. She worked as a secretary here. She pretty much supports him and the kids, and she puts up with all his crazy artist bullshit. I don't think he'd ever divorce her, but I don't think it's been easy for her with all five of them to support. |
| 4363 |
Particularly with a boy going to college. Liam didn't look old enough to have a child in his late teens. He seemed like a teenager himself. Xavier hugged his mother then, and promised to have breakfast with her the next morning. They agreed to meet at ten, as she knew she'd have business calls to make in the morning. |
| 4364 |
As promised, she was waiting downstairs, and slipped into the car next to Liam when they arrived. He was wearing a decent looking black suit, and a red shirt he had painted himself that had once been white. He had forgotten that was what he had done with his other good shirt, the one he had not used to wax his car. |
| 4365 |
Liam didn't follow the rules, and never had. He saw no reason to follow anyone else's rules but his own, which was partly why his wife had stayed in Vermont, and hadn't seen him since July. In spite of the painted red shirt and ponytail, there was something distinctly handsome and aristocratic about him. |
| 4366 |
She didn't notice the lack of shoelaces until they were standing in Harry's Bar. And as he hopped onto a stool at the bar, she saw that he wasn't wearing socks either. The headwaiter knew her well, and without saying a word, he handed Liam a long black tie, which actually looked fine with his shirt, once he put it on. |
| 4367 |
It made Liam almost giddy to walk beside her, and he felt like Picasso when he sat down. He had already asked her about the contract twice in the car. To spare his nerves and her own, she handed it to him at the table. He signed it without looking at it, despite her warnings to do otherwise, and then he beamed at her. |
| 4368 |
Then, without batting an eye, Liam finished the rest. By then, he had told her that he was the black sheep of his family. His father was a banker and lived in San Francisco, his two brothers were a doctor and a lawyer, and they had both married debutantes. Liam said he had always been different right from the start. |
| 4369 |
But right from the beginning, he'd been different. He hated all the things they loved, hated sports, didn't do well in school, while they were brilliant students. They were both captains of the varsity teams they played on, in football, basketball, and hockey. Instead, he had sat alone in his room, painting. |
| 4370 |
He had snuck into the cafeteria one night, and painted caricatures of all the teachers on the wall, some of them pornographic, which had been his clever plan to get expelled, which, he told Sasha with a broad grin, had been very effective. And once he got home, the torture at the hands of his family continued. |
| 4371 |
Since he didn't fit in, or comply with their rules and plans for him, they completely shut him out. More than once, he had heard his father say he had two sons, instead of three. Liam didn't conform to the way his family did things, so they shunned him. And eventually, he acted out his outcast role in school as well. |
| 4372 |
Only sports and academics mattered, and he didn't qualify in either, or even attempt to. Sasha wondered if he had had an undetected learning disability to be so resistant to school. Many of her artists did, and it had been a source of deep unhappiness for them, compensated for by their artistic talent. |
| 4373 |
His father had spanked him, and in a somewhat disconnected but emotional recital, he explained that after that, his mother had gotten very sick. She died the following summer, and from then on, his life was a nightmare. His only protector, and the only person who loved and accepted him, had vanished. |
| 4374 |
Some nights, they didn't even bother to feed him. It was as though he had died with her. And art became his only comfort, and outlet, his only remaining bond with her, since she loved all that he did. He told Sasha that for years and sometimes even now, he felt as though he was painting for his mother. |
| 4375 |
They hated him for his lack of responsibility and inability to support their daughter. He and Beth had three children, two boys who were seventeen and eleven, and a little girl who was five. They were the light of his life, and so was Beth, until she went back to Vermont, to her family, the previous July. |
| 4376 |
His relationship with his family sounded as though it was beyond salvation, and probably not even worth trying. But it tugged at her heart when she listened to him talk about the lonely childhood he'd had and then about his wife and kids. He seemed lost without them, and Sasha sensed much left unsaid. |
| 4377 |
He was hard to resist. Even after hearing his confession of adultery, it was hard to be angry at him. He was right. It was just plain stupid. And in spite of it, there was something innocent and likable about him. She couldn't explain it rationally, she felt drawn to him as a person, and even as a man. |
| 4378 |
She said she's always been in love with me. Some weird shit happens sometimes with twins. Or at least it did with them. Beth says that Becky has resented her all her life. She's a gorgeous woman, and no guy has ever wanted to marry her. She got pregnant at fifteen and her parents made her give the baby up for adoption. |
| 4379 |
She says they're getting married as soon as our divorce comes through. His wife died last year and left him with four kids. He has some money, he runs a ski resort, and he's willing to support Beth and my kids. Sounds like a better deal to me than being married to a wacky artist. She seems to think so too. |
| 4380 |
Most of all, he seemed immature, but kind. It was incredible to think that a man as good looking as he was had only slept with one woman in his life, other than a one night stand with his wife's twin. There was a sordid side to it, but he seemed like a nice guy, and Xavier said he was. She trusted him. |
| 4381 |
After all he'd told her about his family and marriage, there was a connection between them, beyond what she had expected, and almost surely beyond what she wanted. For the first time with one of her artists, she realized she was attracted to him, and there was absolutely no way she would allow herself to indulge it. |
| 4382 |
They were two lonely people who had suffered major losses in their childhoods, and had lost their childhoods as a result, and had lost people they loved in their adult lives too, but she would never allow the bond between them to go further than that. She had no intention of acting on her attraction to him. |
| 4383 |
A lot, in fact. Too much. Way, way too much. He picked up the key then, and gently pushed open the door to her room. He stood looking at her, and without saying a word, she walked into the room and he followed. Within seconds, two feet into the room, he was kissing her again, and pushed the door closed with his foot. |
| 4384 |
She meant to. She had every intention of stopping him, but she couldn't. The worst of it was that she didn't want to stop, and neither did he. He just went on kissing her until he picked her up in his arms, and put her gently on the bed. There was one light on in the room, and he reached over and turned it off. |
| 4385 |
Besides, this was ridiculous. She was his art dealer, not his girlfriend. They had been total strangers until today, and still were. What was happening to her? She felt totally adrift in an unfamiliar sea, swept toward him by a current that was much stronger than she was, and that she couldn't resist. |
| 4386 |
She felt as though she was losing her mind over him. This time, she didn't even try to stop him. She wanted him even more than the first time, and afterward she lay in his arms and cried. This time they were tears of relief. He pulled her closer to him and put his arms around her and held her tight until she stopped. |
| 4387 |
Daylight streaming into Sasha's room at Claridge's awakened her and Liam at nine the next morning. He woke first, and lay holding her. And then, as though she sensed him watching her, she stirred. She could feel his arms around her, as he lay behind her, and for a minute, she didn't know who it was. |
| 4388 |
Even if she refused to represent him, he would still be too young, in her opinion. The age difference was more a matter of his state of mind and boyishness than the dates on their passports. And she couldn't refuse to represent him just because she'd been a fool. And an old fool at that. She felt like one now. |
| 4389 |
She'd never done that before and didn't want to start now. He kissed her, and left without saying another word. She stood staring at the door for a long moment, fearing what could happen, and determined to put walls up between them. From that moment on, she told herself, she was his art dealer and nothing more. |
| 4390 |
Liam was incapable of it. She threw what she had brought to London into a bag, dressed hastily, brushed her hair, and put on makeup. And fifteen minutes later, she was in the lobby when her son walked in, looking handsome and young. His stride and confidence and the way he dressed reminded her instantly of Liam. |
| 4391 |
But Liam was different. None of them had ever made her feel the way he did, just looking at him from across the room. She had felt the pull between them the moment they met, and had told herself she was imagining it. She had tried to deny it, but couldn't. As it turned out, it was a lot more than imagination. |
| 4392 |
She couldn't concentrate on a single word she read. She sat staring at his contract with his signature on it, hastily signed at Harry's Bar, and for a moment thought of tearing it up. But she couldn't do that to him. He had given her back both copies, and she reminded herself to send him his copy from Paris. |
| 4393 |
He had left her with his cell phone number, but nothing in the world could have induced her to call him. She hadn't given him hers. Nor her home number. All he had was the gallery number in Paris, and she prayed he wouldn't call to talk to her. If he did, she would refer him to someone else. Anyone. |
| 4394 |
She had noticed it right from the first. Now she loved his voice, and damn near everything else about him, except the way he behaved. The last thing she needed at her age was to be involved with a self proclaimed wacky artist who acted like a juvenile delinquent. What she had said to him that morning was true. |
| 4395 |
She was acutely aware of it, as she boarded the plane at Heathrow. It had been an outrageous incident, a one time only, totally insane out of body experience, and there was absolutely no way she would ever let it happen again. Ever. As the plane took off for Paris, she promised herself to get and stay sane. |
| 4396 |
She was touched, and tempted to call him, but she forced herself not to. She had made a vow of silence and she intended to keep it, no matter what it cost her. Instead of calling him to thank him for the flowers, she wrote him a polite note that could have been written by his grandmother, or art dealer. |
| 4397 |
She made herself a cup of tea and some soup. She took a hot bath, and tried not to think of him, which was far from easy. The night before at the same time she had been having dinner with him at Harry's Bar. She fought even harder not to remember what had come later when they went back to the hotel. |
| 4398 |
The children had grown up. Arthur was gone. She had nothing to look forward to, except work, and one day grandchildren, which didn't interest her particularly. She felt like a very old woman after she said good bye to her daughter and lay on her bed. As she did, she couldn't help thinking about Liam. |
| 4399 |
She wondered what Liam was doing, and if he would try to call her. It was Saturday, and she didn't need to be at work, but she had nothing else to do. She had turned down several invitations to dinner parties and luncheons for that weekend. The weather was terrible, and it was too depressing just sitting in her house. |
| 4400 |
He called her at four o'clock that afternoon, and she didn't take it. She asked the young woman working in the gallery to tell him she was out, and to call Bernard on Monday. Bernard, very sensibly, did not work on weekends. He had a wife, three children, and a house in Normandy where he took them on the weekends. |
| 4401 |
Now it was all she had to fill her days and distract her. Ever since Arthur's death, the weekends were brutal. They closed the gallery at six, and she went back to her house at seven. She had brought a stack of art magazines home with her, and turned on the lights. It was dinnertime, and she wasn't hungry. |
| 4402 |
It rang endlessly, which told her that the guardian was out. She ran across the courtyard to the big bronze outer door, with no idea who it could be. No one ever rang their doorbell at night. She looked through the peephole and could see no one there, and then hit the buzzer to open one side of the big bronze door. |
| 4403 |
They walked through the living room, past the dining room, and straight into the kitchen, which was a big cozy room with French provincial furniture, an enormous marble table, and paintings by emerging artists on every wall. The predominant colors were yellow and orange, which conveyed an illusion of sunshine. |
| 4404 |
But he needed a lot more than socks to be a grown up, and he just wasn't. Everything about him shrieked of boyhood and wacky artist. And as he had told her so proudly before, no one was ever going to control him. His father had tried, and his brothers, and Liam had defied them. Sasha didn't want to. |
| 4405 |
There was nothing in it but ice. She never ate desserts or ice cream. All she had in the refrigerator was what the housekeeper left her for dinner. Some salad, a few vegetables, homemade soup, and now and then some cold cuts, cheese, or chicken. She didn't eat much. Liam ate like the healthy young man he was. |
| 4406 |
She was still wearing the serious black pantsuit she had worn to the office. A moment later, they were outside. She led him to the garage, and got behind the wheel of her tiny Renault. He nearly had to be a contortionist to get in it with her. His legs were too long for her small car, but for Sasha it was perfect. |
| 4407 |
They walked past the Deux Magots as they walked to retrieve the car, and it was ten o'clock when they walked into the house again. He decided to try the other flavors of the ice cream they'd bought. This time they sat in the living room, and he lit the candles. It had turned into a delightful evening after all. |
| 4408 |
But with Liam, it all worked, and they had fun. It was the conversation and the political arguments that made it work, the discussions about art, the exchange of opinions, the laughter at his stories and jokes, his irrepressible exuberance and enthusiasm about life that made it fun, for both of them. |
| 4409 |
He may have been boyish, but he was smart, and entertaining to be with. She was beginning to wonder if they could be friends. It was one in the morning when they stopped talking and she yawned. He asked if he could use her phone then, to call the artists' hostel. He had meant to call them from the airport but hadn't. |
| 4410 |
She had lived here with her husband and children. The house was not a clean slate for her, unlike the hotel room in London. He didn't want to upset her, or frighten her, and he knew he would if he made a move on her here. He followed her respectfully as she led him to Xavier's room, on the floor above her own. |
| 4411 |
The room had oeil de boeuf round windows that looked out onto the garden. Liam liked knowing he was near her, as she kissed him goodnight on both cheeks, and he managed to resist her. He was in no hurry. What he felt for her could wait, if it had to. He lay in bed that night, thinking of her, as she did about him. |
| 4412 |
It was one of those perfect afternoons of ease and comfort, shared confidences and friendship, and love that was unspoken but powerfully felt by both of them, no matter how much she was resisting. He gave her what she had missed for the past fifteen months, companionship, and someone of her own to talk to. |
| 4413 |
They took the puppy out of the cage, and she came to life instantly while Liam played with her. Sasha stood back and watched, as the puppy licked his face and he let her. She was black and white, with a pretty head, black legs, and four white feet. He told her the dog he had had as a boy had been a cocker spaniel, too. |
| 4414 |
She and Arthur had had a totally adult life, a life of responsible equal partners doing serious things. There was something wonderful and playful and young about Liam. He was part man, part boy, would be lover, if she let him, and in some ways because of his youthful ways, almost like an adopted son. |
| 4415 |
As he kissed her, she felt everything she had felt for him in London, and had managed to resist all weekend. It would have been impossible for her to do so if he had kissed her before the end. And even more impossible for him. They sat kissing each other for a long time, and then they sat looking at each other. |
| 4416 |
Everything about him was appealing, even and especially the childlike quality that frightened her so much. She followed him in silence to the gate. He was the last one to board. Part of her wanted him to miss the plane and stay with her. Another part of her wanted him to leave and never come back to see her again. |
| 4417 |
Complicated in her rigid ideas about how she felt she should behave in society, and wanted to be perceived. A grande dame and painfully ladylike one minute, and whimsical and mischievous the next. He knew from Xavier that she was a terrific mother, and could sense himself that she was a great friend. |
| 4418 |
She was thinking about Liam, the fun she'd had with him over the weekend, and the sheer stupidity of allowing herself to be with him at all. If she continued doing this, there was absolutely no doubt in her mind, someone would get hurt. And more than likely it would be her. Or maybe him. But she had far more at stake. |
| 4419 |
Her secretary disappeared rapidly, and backed into the room moments later, carrying something. She seemed to be cradling it in her arms, and then turned to face Sasha, who stared at her with a look of amazement. It was the cocker spaniel puppy she and Liam had played with in the pet shop on the quai the day before. |
| 4420 |
He hadn't sent the puppy to pressure her, it had been an outpouring of love for her. Now that he'd been to Paris to visit her, he realized how lonely her life really was. The silence and solitude in her house had made him sad for her. He thought the little dog might help. And if she let him, he wanted to help, too. |
| 4421 |
I represent you. If this goes sour, it could screw up our whole working relationship. You're not divorced. You could go back to Beth any day. I'm nine years older than you are, you should be with a woman half my age. You want to be a wacky artist, and my life is so conservative and boring, it would drive you insane. |
| 4422 |
The weather was awful in Paris again that weekend, gray wintry days that seemed relentless. Foggy mornings, rainy nights, and depressing afternoons with bitter winds that chilled you to the bone. She worked late on Friday, went to bed early, and was at her desk at the gallery by nine the next morning, with the dog. |
| 4423 |
She was crazy about him, but in every way that mattered, he was forbidden fruit. A fruit she was determined not to touch or eat, whatever it cost her. He was a sacrifice she had to make. It was nine o'clock on Saturday night when her doorbell rang. It wasn't the outer door, but the one to her house. |
| 4424 |
Sasha assumed it was the guardian, since she hadn't heard the bell ring on the big bronze outer door. She was carrying the puppy and wearing her nightgown when she opened it. She expected to look into the ancient face of Madame Barboutier, and instead found herself looking up at Liam. He had shown up after all. |
| 4425 |
He had finally understood, and in the morning he'd be gone. The whole miserable episode of temptation, indulgence, and torture would be over. She could hardly wait for him to leave. She was standing in her bathroom, brushing her teeth, in her nightgown, when she looked up and saw Liam in the mirror. |
| 4426 |
And as she held him, she could feel him aroused. Their bodies were glued to each other, and then suddenly they were kissing. The rest happened without either of them willing it after that, and he was terrified when they stopped. He knew that this time she would never forgive him, and he would never see her again. |
| 4427 |
They stayed in bed together all day Sunday. They shared a bath in her bathtub and went downstairs long enough to eat dinner, and then hurried back to bed, like children running from their parents. There was no one to run from. Nowhere to hide. Sometime during the weekend, Sasha stepped over the line into his arms. |
| 4428 |
Sasha looked even more respectable than usual when she, Liam, and Socks walked across the courtyard to her offices on Monday morning. The gallery was closed on Monday, but the offices were open, and it was a good chance for all of them to catch up on deskwork. Sasha was wearing black slacks and a black sweater. |
| 4429 |
He was wearing cowboy boots, a leather jacket, white T shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap. They were planning to go out to buy him more T shirts and some underwear that afternoon. He hadn't brought enough to last the week, since he only planned to be there for the weekend. Sasha introduced him to all her employees. |
| 4430 |
They all seemed to like him, which was at least something. She'd been worried about how he would fit in, but so far he did. Liam spent the rest of the week wandering around Paris, looking up artist friends in the Marais, and Sasha did her best to lighten her workload so she could spend time with him whenever possible. |
| 4431 |
He was wearing a T shirt, leather motorcycle jacket, baseball cap, jeans, and his cowboy boots. And, unbeknownst to anyone but Sasha, socks and underwear. He was determined to be proper and civilized that week. She introduced him to the clients she was meeting with as soon as he walked in, looking for her. |
| 4432 |
He hadn't hesitated to interrupt her, which upset her. And she was looking stern and somewhat irritated, as he leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. Sasha was furious with him. Her clients were in their seventies, the wife was an Italian princess, and the husband the head of an important French bank. |
| 4433 |
She looked as respectable as they did. Liam looked like James Dean with long blond hair, which was definitely not their thing. She introduced him as one of their artists, and was somewhat unnerved when he sat down, uninvited, to have tea with them, and then changed his mind and poured himself a drink. |
| 4434 |
He made himself totally at home, which didn't go unnoticed by her clients either. The princess looked shocked, and the banker was obviously annoyed. All Sasha could do was hope they thought him an eccentric artist, although his kissing her on the mouth certainly tipped their hand, and would have been hard to explain. |
| 4435 |
That's all they need to know. I'm not going to parade around here in a suit and drink tea because you're selling two rotten paintings that you shouldn't be selling anyway. If that's what they wanted, then educate them, find them something better, and charge them more. But those two paintings were shit, and you know it. |
| 4436 |
But he had to learn to behave. This wasn't going to be easy, just as she had feared. She loved being with him privately, but he made her nervous when he strolled around the gallery, doing and saying whatever came into his head. Sometimes he just didn't think. And he was obviously allergic to any kind of rules. |
| 4437 |
He was in a much better mood after a great bottle of wine. But she was still uneasy after their brief but heated quarrel that afternoon. He had felt disrespected, and she had been outraged at his cavalier behavior while she was conducting business. He was going to have to learn the ground rules very soon. |
| 4438 |
If not, they were going to run aground very quickly. It took her the rest of the evening to calm down, and by the next day she did. For the rest of the week, everything went smoothly between them. Bernard commented to Sasha that Liam seemed to be staying in Paris for a long time, but she didn't think he suspected why. |
| 4439 |
His were about being decent and kind and affectionate, not about behaving properly. And he was always loving to her. There was no doubt in her mind that she loved him, but she was nonetheless worried that he would do something alarming to expose their situation, and she wasn't ready for that to happen yet. |
| 4440 |
She didn't mind, as she loved being with him, but she was also aware that his continuing presence was going to become harder to explain, at the gallery, if nowhere else. They were the only ones who knew he was staying with her. He suggested they have dinner the following night with some of his friends in the Marais. |
| 4441 |
They won't. If you want to go places like that with me, then you have to play their game. So do I. Those are the rules of the road. I can't take you with me this time, because it's too short notice. But if you're serious about this, we'll buy you a dinner jacket, and you can come with me next time, to something else. |
| 4442 |
It confirmed her worst fears that this wasn't going to work. There were many things she loved about him, his kindness, his warm, open affection toward her, his sense of humor, his intelligence, his talent, how fabulous he was in bed. But his temper tantrums and immaturity were definitely not on that list. |
| 4443 |
This is the problem we are always going to have, unless you want to give up being a wacky artist and walk into my world like a man. If you want to continue playing wacky artist, or wild young man who can't be tamed or controlled, then you have to let me go into that world by myself. It's as simple as that. |
| 4444 |
If I wanted to do that, I'd still be living in California with my father, and taking shit from him. I'm not taking shit from anyone anymore, and sure as hell not from you. If you want me in your life, then take me, but don't tell me how to behave by whose rules. If you love me, there are no rules, or shouldn't be. |
| 4445 |
You can behave any way you want. But if that's what you want, then you have to play on your side of the fence, and stay in your own world, or in our private world, which is fine with me too. But if you want to cross over to the other side of the fence, and go there with me, then you have to play by their rules. |
| 4446 |
If you want to come downstairs and eat with the grown ups, then be one. That's all it takes, for chrissake. You can't play wacky artist forever, unless you want to hang out with other children who are as badly behaved as you are. If you want to do that, then don't whine because I can't take you out. |
| 4447 |
For the first time since he had been there, they each stayed on their side of the bed, with a vast chasm between them. Liam was deeply wounded by what he viewed as her disloyalty, and everything she'd said. And she was furious at the tantrum he had thrown. He was acting like a very badly behaved child. |
| 4448 |
She sat and waited for the phone to ring at night, once Liam went back to London. It never did. He never called, nor did she. They had come to an impasse over his ridiculous demands and childish behavior. She hadn't expected their affair to last forever, but she had expected it to last longer than it had. |
| 4449 |
There was no point calling him, since he had made his terms clear to her. Either she would take him out in public in the circles that she moved in, no matter how proper, and no matter how he behaved, or the deal was off. The conditions he had set were impossible for her, whether or not she loved him. |
| 4450 |
She had no compromise to offer him, other than what she had said to him before he left Paris. At the end of the month, she stopped waiting for the phone to ring. She knew he was gone. And as he sat waiting to hear from her in London, he knew the same. It had taken weeks, instead of years, but they had parted ways. |
| 4451 |
But as she waited for the call that never came, she was sad anyway. As childish as he was at times, there was an appealing side of him, and she truly missed him. It took two months for Sasha to make her peace with it, and even then she was still sad about his disappearance from her life. But there was no one to tell. |
| 4452 |
She couldn't mourn him with others, or speak to anyone about him. She just had to accept the fact that he was gone. She knew it would never have worked anyway. He was too immature, too difficult, too unreasonable, too determined not to grow up. He had proven all that to her when he had a tantrum and vanished. |
| 4453 |
Although she had believed herself to be in love with him for about a minute, he had put her off forever with the way he'd behaved. He had pulled an incredibly childish move on her. She was tired of self indulgent artists, who were not so young, but pretended to be, and still behaved like teenagers well into middle age. |
| 4454 |
His absence now would have been embarrassing to explain. The dinner party she was going to that night was being given by the American ambassador to Paris. He had invited several important artists and dealers, an American writer who was visiting Paris, and someone had told her there was a famous actor coming, too. |
| 4455 |
She had known right from the beginning that their affair was doomed. She felt stupid for having allowed him to convince her to try it. But in private moments, she admitted to herself that she had wanted it as much as he said he did, and in her heart of hearts she had hoped it would work. It was too bad it didn't. |
| 4456 |
He was a talented artist, but a totally immature man. It was no surprise to her now that Beth had left him, and taken their kids. Being married to him for twenty years must have been a nightmare for her. She forced him from her head, as she had for two months, as she walked into the ambassador's residence that night. |
| 4457 |
In its own way, Paris was a very small town. The whole world was these days. At the dinner table, Sasha was seated next to one of the actors, who was completely self involved, and had nothing to say to her. He was far more interested in the woman on his right, who was married to a Hollywood producer. |
| 4458 |
She was just disappointed and sad, and finally philosophical about it. She was surprised, as she left the ambassador's residence, when Phillip Henshaw asked her if she would like to have dinner with him the following night in London. She told herself that maybe she could sell him some art for his houses. |
| 4459 |
She didn't like driving herself at night, when she was dressed up and went to parties. He walked her to her car, and told her he'd pick her up at Claridge's the following night at seven. She thought about him on the way home. There was nothing exciting about him, but at least he was intelligent, polite, and pleasant. |
| 4460 |
And it might be nice to have dinner with a friend in London. She didn't know what Xavier's plans were, but she was planning to spend the afternoon with him, and if he was free, she could have dinner with him the following evening. She still had to figure out what to do about seeing Liam. Maybe nothing. |
| 4461 |
My mother goes to parties given by the most boring people on the planet, that no one in their right mind wants to go to. And you're a wacky artist, and shouldn't go to places like that, with people like she knows. My mother's fine, the people she hangs out with aren't. People like us need to hang out with each other. |
| 4462 |
They ordered lunch, and both men talked about their work, while Sasha listened. She was never happier than when talking to artists, particularly these two. After lunch, they went to Liam's studio and looked at his recent paintings. They were even better than his last ones. She beamed at him when she saw them. |
| 4463 |
The last two months had been painful for her without him. She wished she could spend time alone with him now, but she had to see another artist. She was glad she had seen Liam's work though. And maybe now it would be better for both of them, if she was only his dealer. Their brief affair had obviously been a disaster. |
| 4464 |
She could have breakfast alone with Xavier the next morning, before she went back to Paris. Sasha agreed to pick them both up the following night with her car and driver, although being in a noisy pub was not how she liked to spend her evenings. She was doing it for both of them, and maybe a little more for Liam. |
| 4465 |
Maybe he needed mothering more than romance. But with the difference in their ages, it made her feel even older. Maybe as his dealer, and not his lover, she could give him more of what he needed from her. Most of her artists needed mothers, and expected her to be one. Part of her role with them was nurturing them. |
| 4466 |
She didn't mind doing that, at least with Liam. Maybe it would help him. Not that there was anything in it for her now, except her commission on his paintings. She was still attracted to him, and she still felt the same electrical charge when she looked at him, but what she felt for him now was different. |
| 4467 |
Polite, courteous, interesting, intelligent, and amusing. He was a nice man and good company. He'd had an interesting career, loved to travel, and had friends in many places. He played tennis and golf, read voraciously, had a serious interest in art, and was obviously deeply attached to his children and grandchildren. |
| 4468 |
There was none of the excitement or torture she had been through with Liam. She slept peacefully that night, saw an artist the next day, visited two galleries, and went shopping. She got back to the hotel in time to change into jeans to meet Xavier and Liam. She felt as though she were going out with her two boys. |
| 4469 |
They could hardly hear each other as they shouted across the table during dinner. Afterward, they went to the bar, where Xavier flirted with assorted women, and Liam tried to have an intelligent conversation with Sasha. She couldn't wait for the evening to end, and instead it seemed to go on forever. |
| 4470 |
She didn't know why, but it had depressed her to see Liam. This was the price she had to pay for her foolishness in getting involved with him. Now, each time she saw him, she would have to remember what had happened, and why it ended. Because Liam was not an option for her. It could never have worked. |
| 4471 |
It was weird to think now that he had once been hers, and now he was available to all those young, excited, and faceless women. She believed, as she always had, that he should be with women closer to his age, and younger than she was. The one thing she didn't know, and maybe never would, was who she belonged with. |
| 4472 |
There was a sense of humor about their relationship now, a kind of wonderment, an ease and sense of goodwill about it that they hadn't had before it ended in Paris. She wanted more than anything to believe it was possible. But with the difference in their lifestyle and age, she was still afraid it wasn't. |
| 4473 |
It all depended on how tolerant they could be of each other. In her opinion, therein lay the key to their success: an ability for each of them to let the other be who they were. She had no idea if either of them was capable of that. This time it was going to take skill, luck, and magic for it to work. |
| 4474 |
Standing in the doorway in her bathrobe, she watched him saunter down the hall. She was terrified that it was still impossible, but she was unable to resist him. He turned and smiled at her, and as their eyes met, everything inside her melted. She loved him more than ever before, this time for who he was. |
| 4475 |
But now that Liam was back, Phillip had flown right out the window, and didn't even know it. She knew what she was doing with Liam was insane, but she felt compelled to try it again. She reminded herself that doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result, was the definition of insanity. |
| 4476 |
They never ran into anyone she knew, and she turned down all invitations on weekends. Not because she was hiding him, but because she wanted to savor every moment she could spend with him. And once or twice, they dined with his artist friends in the Marais, who nearly fainted when they found out who she was. |
| 4477 |
Most of them were half her age, which made her uncomfortable, but she knew being with them was something she had to tolerate for his sake. They told them they were friends. She knew he needed to see his friends. She saw hers, and the clients she entertained during the week, while he worked in London. |
| 4478 |
She was uncertain about the third, and said she needed to think about it. They were unusual sculptures and possibly too big for her space. And the fourth artist was charming, but she disliked his work immediately. She told him kindly that she couldn't do him justice, and their gallery wasn't worthy of his work. |
| 4479 |
They were both sad at the prospect of going back to real life, and their own worlds. She loved waking up with him in the morning, going to sleep in his arms at night, discovering things together, meeting people, and sometimes just walking around while they shared pieces of their history, or laughed. |
| 4480 |
Liam's family never had, and he still paid a high price for the ridicule and rejection he had suffered at their hands. They had both been shortchanged by not having their mothers present as they grew up. Liam remembered his as a warm, wonderful woman who adored him, and in whose eyes he could do no wrong. |
| 4481 |
Love between adults and lovers was always somewhat conditional, and often fell short of expectations, particularly when not all needs were reciprocally met. She had similar memories of her own mother, and she sometimes wondered if people always believed that those who had died had loved unconditionally. |
| 4482 |
Perhaps they hadn't, or wouldn't have later on. But her memories of her mother were as sweet and gentle as his recollections of his. She wondered sometimes what it would be like if her mother were alive now, although she would have been very elderly, eighty eight years old. Sasha had turned forty nine on their trip. |
| 4483 |
Liam had woken her up that morning singing happy birthday to her, and she groaned thinking of it. He had given her a simple gold bracelet he had bought for her in Florence. She never took it off once he put it on her wrist, and knew she never would. The age difference between them still bothered her at times. |
| 4484 |
When removed from daily stresses, they were both fairly easygoing, loved traveling together, and were curious about life. They were drawn to different kinds of people. She gravitated toward venerable elders, perhaps because of her much older father and the people she'd been exposed to with him all her life. |
| 4485 |
Liam always gravitated toward youth and within minutes had met every young person in the place. He was most comfortable with people in their twenties and thirties, she preferred people her own age, or older, which created a gap of many decades between the people they wanted to meet and spend time with. |
| 4486 |
She felt she had nothing to say to them, and wasn't interested in their juvenile ideas. Liam felt there was much to learn from the young, and he identified with them to an unusual degree, for a man his age. Watching him with them, Sasha felt like he was one of them. Liam seemed to feel that way too. |
| 4487 |
They seemed equal at times, and not at others. In truth, they were not equal. She was older, more successful, more powerful in the art world than he was, she was respected and important, she had more money. But he was just as talented and smart. He could hold his own, even in her world, if she let him. |
| 4488 |
People paid more attention to her than to him, which she knew would annoy him. Liam liked being the center of attention, which he always was with young girls. People her age expected more of him than great paintings, good looks, and blond hair. They expected him to be a serious person, and at times he wasn't. |
| 4489 |
When they saw him, Liam had been having an off day. He acted like a bored schoolboy while they sat in his office. Liam had been sitting there pouting, swinging his foot, and kicking the desk, until Sasha turned to him quietly and asked him to stop. He was so furious over the reprimand that he had stormed out. |
| 4490 |
When he was bored or felt left out or unimportant, he almost always acted out, more often than not, like a child. Sometimes it was hard to believe that he was forty years old. At times, he seemed half his age, and looked it, which was part of his appeal, but also his greatest downside in Sasha's life. |
| 4491 |
But all in all, their trip to Italy was a huge success. Sasha called her children several times while she and Liam traveled. They both had her itinerary, as they always did, but rarely called her. It was almost always Sasha who called them, because she was harder to find, and she often turned off her cell phone. |
| 4492 |
It was overwhelming, but the price she had to pay for her trip. Bernard had stopped in her office for a minute, sat down across the desk from her, and looked at her cautiously, wondering if it was the wrong time to broach it, or if he even should. But he was always concerned about her, like an older brother. |
| 4493 |
He had started there before she moved back to New York and opened the gallery there. He was ten years older than Sasha, but in an odd way, she had always felt as though they had grown up together, and they had, in the art world. He sat looking at her across the desk for a long minute, as she glanced at some slides. |
| 4494 |
He always worried about her, and always had. Ever since Arthur's death, there was no one to take care of her. She took care of everyone else, even him. She was an extraordinary employer and friend, just as her father had been before her. Bernard had deep loyalties to them both, and trusted no one else, except his wife. |
| 4495 |
Most of the time he called on her cell phone. And she was not planning to tell her children for a long time. She and Liam had agreed on that, and thought it was a wise decision. Telling her kids could complicate things, and they had enough to adjust to and deal with as it was. But so far so good. This time. |
| 4496 |
Liam came to Paris for the next two weekends. The weather was beautiful, they had a great time together, and they were both in good spirits. They spent all of their time together when he was there, and saw none of their friends. There was too much they wanted to do together, and they had little enough time as it was. |
| 4497 |
He called them infrequently, and when he did, the conversations were difficult. They blamed him openly for the demise of the marriage. Beth had told them enough to upset them, without the gory details, but none of them had forgiven him. It made calling them hard, and the distance had taken its toll as well. |
| 4498 |
After only one year, there was still time. His children were young. His oldest son was eighteen and leaving for college in September, his middle child, also a son, was twelve now, and his daughter had just turned six. They were young enough for him to rebuild a relationship with them, but only if he made an effort. |
| 4499 |
They both hoped it would improve after his show. But in the meantime, his financial situation was still tough. And as a result, so was Beth's. She'd been dealing with that with him for twenty years, and she was sick of it. Liam didn't blame her. She was going to be much better off with her new husband. |
| 4500 |
At six, Charlotte was just excited to see Daddy. He had talked to them a few days before on the phone. He hadn't even called them in months. Sometimes it just slipped his mind. Beth had always made excuses for him, and covered for him in his paternal lapses, but she wasn't willing to do that anymore. |
| 4501 |
She had treated him to the ticket, and they settled into first class seats side by side. He looked like a kid at a birthday party, and took advantage of everything they offered. Caviar, champagne, he ate his lunch and most of hers, reclined the seat into a bed, covered himself with the duvet, and took a nap. |
| 4502 |
He even changed into the pajamas, and for a moment, wearing the plastic bag on his head like a hat, he showed distinct signs of slipping into his previous unruly behavior. He watched two movies, ate a snack, used everything in the toiletry kit, and invited Sasha to join the mile high club in the bathroom. |
| 4503 |
In many ways, her apartment in New York was far more formal than her wing of the house in Paris, which she had kept simpler and more modern when she redid it. New York showed the evidence of a lifetime of collecting important artists, most of which had been purchased by her father and given to her as gifts. |
| 4504 |
She was ready to open her doors and her life to Liam. She asked him to put his things in the guest room, just in case one of her children turned up at some point, and she didn't want to shock the maid who came to clean daily, and had during most of her marriage. Liam didn't seem put off by her asking him to do that. |
| 4505 |
She suggested they go to a nearby restaurant that night. She checked in with Tatianna before they left, and as she had suspected, Tatianna was busy with friends, had a thousand plans that week, and told her mother she'd stop in to see her at the gallery when she had a free moment, more than likely on her lunch break. |
| 4506 |
And for all anyone would know, if discovered, Liam was nothing more exotic than a houseguest. Liam won her heart forever when he put an arm around her that night in bed and pulled her closer to him. Despite his own excitement to be there, he had seen her face earlier that day when they entered the room. |
| 4507 |
He kissed her just as gently and held her close to him, as they did nothing more than cuddle that night. She took him to the gallery the next day, and he was impressed by the space and the way they had used it. He liked the artist's work that they were showing, and squinted, imagining his own work in the same place. |
| 4508 |
It was perfect for him, and now he had a better idea of how many pieces he'd need, how many horizontals and verticals. It was inspiring to him just being there. She introduced him to all her employees. Marcie, her assistant, nearly fainted when he sauntered in, and rolled her eyes in awe at Sasha behind his back. |
| 4509 |
She had already idealized him after knowing him for five minutes. Sasha knew him better and was a little less dazzled by him than Marcie. She just loved him, clay feet and all. And like anyone else, he had them. So did she. He spent the morning at the gallery with her, meeting everyone, and looking around. |
| 4510 |
She was on her way to pick up something from a photographer, and stopped in to see her mother. She looked happy and pretty as she always did and, as Sasha looked at her with new eyes now, extremely young. She was exactly the age of the women Liam always chatted with and admired. She had just turned twenty four. |
| 4511 |
He loved the electricity and excitement, and the Yankees best of all. Sasha tried to look enthusiastic for his sake, and went to change. Once in a while, she wondered what she was doing with a man his age, who acted half his age. He needed someone like Tatianna, and instead he had wound up with her. |
| 4512 |
The jet lag seemed to have receded again, he bought her a hot dog and a beer, and told her about both teams and the best players. He was a total fanatic about baseball, which Sasha thought was cute. It was a far cry from the stuffy dinner parties she didn't take him to in Paris. And actually, she liked this better. |
| 4513 |
While they waited for the game to start, she told him she had seen Tatianna briefly that day, and he said he was looking forward to meeting her. Sasha couldn't help wondering how they'd get along. She hoped they would. It would make a difference in their relationship, she knew, if eventually her kids accepted him. |
| 4514 |
She worried about her daughter. Tatianna was unpredictable as to whom she liked, and whom she didn't. It was never an easy call, and she had stronger and far more critical opinions than her more easygoing brother. Liam explained everything that happened at the game to her, and the Yankees won, six to nothing. |
| 4515 |
Yet. Or maybe ever. She needed to feel her way along on that one, and was in no rush to decide. She was busier than she expected all week, went to several cocktail parties, had lunch with Alana, who was now happily married and spending every penny she could of her new husband's money, and saw Tatianna for dinner. |
| 4516 |
But she thought he understood it better now that he had seen them. They loved and needed him in their life. He was their father. Even if their new soon to be stepfather could provide better for them, they loved and needed Liam, and he had seen that. He had hated leaving them at the end of the four days. |
| 4517 |
She had been thinking about it all week, and hadn't mentioned it to him, because she wanted to be sure she felt she could do it. But as she made breakfast for him, she thought it was a good idea, and Liam was thrilled. It was a hot sunny day and he couldn't think of anything he'd rather do than go to the beach. |
| 4518 |
Liam drove, and he looked relaxed as they chatted from time to time, mostly about his kids and the time he'd spent with them in Vermont. He was still slightly concerned about his oldest son, Tom, having discovered that since the last time he'd seen him a year before, he had turned into a very angry young man. |
| 4519 |
There seemed to be no important art, just pretty things, big inviting leather chairs, and two canvas covered couches. And then he saw the painting by Andrew Wyeth over the mantel. It was stark and bleak and beautiful, and one of his most famous paintings. It looked just like the beach outside, on a winter day. |
| 4520 |
It was a huge old country kitchen, with a giant butcher block table in the middle of the room, and worn counters. The house looked well used, and much loved, because it was. He made both of them turkey sandwiches, and opened two cans of soda, which he drank out of the can and Sasha poured into a glass. |
| 4521 |
He found the wet suit in the garage, while she unpacked their things upstairs, and came down looking pale. Every time she saw her bedroom and the huge four poster bed, she thought of the last time she had seen Arthur, when he told her he loved her, the morning she left for Paris. And the next day he was dead. |
| 4522 |
But she didn't mention it to Liam. It was her private cross to bear, and she didn't want to spoil the weekend for him, or make him feel uneasy in her bed. He was already wearing the wet suit when she came downstairs. He looked like a very tall, blond seal, and he had tied his long wheat colored mane into a ponytail. |
| 4523 |
They walked back to the house then, and she took him upstairs. She had unpacked his things and hung them in the closet next to hers. She had had a lock put on Arthur's closet the year before. Everything was still there. She hadn't cleared it out yet, and had no idea when she would, if ever. This was his house, too. |
| 4524 |
In some ways, it always would be. Liam was a guest here. He was well aware of it as he looked around the room. There was a strong male influence in the decor. There were a lot of paintings of birds and fish, and a large one of a sailing ship over the bed. She hadn't brought any of her contemporary pieces here. |
| 4525 |
They just lay in bed and cuddled. And in the morning, she didn't tell him that she dreamed of Arthur that night. It was a peaceful dream. He was walking away from her on the beach, she didn't try to catch up to him. And when he turned to smile and wave at her, he looked happy, and then he disappeared. |
| 4526 |
They had a big well used waffle iron in the kitchen. Liam made coffee. They walked on the beach, lay on the porch, and Liam took a nap in the hammock. By late afternoon, as the sun started to go down, they decided to spend another night. Their time together there had been absolutely perfect, and just what they needed. |
| 4527 |
She stopped and listened as one of them mentioned her gallery over dessert. She was a pretty young woman who said she was going to drop some slides off the next day, as Sasha glanced at Liam, and he smiled. He didn't explain who Sasha was, and on the way back uptown in a cab, she asked him if the girl was any good. |
| 4528 |
Beach, friends, artists, baseball games for him, work for her. It seemed magical and easy to both of them, and she was grateful for his presence. Without meaning to, he had changed her life, and added something she'd never had. A youthful side of life that had eluded her when she married young and had babies. |
| 4529 |
Liam did, but his were being taken care of by someone else, his ex wife and her future husband. She would have liked to meet his children. Maybe one day that would happen. And in the meantime, he still seemed like a child to her. Sasha was busy at the gallery that week, preparing for the opening the following week. |
| 4530 |
She curated all the shows herself, and sometimes even hung the paintings, working late into the night. By Friday, she was exhausted and ready for another weekend at the beach. This time they left on Friday, just as she and Arthur used to. They got to the house by nine, sat on the porch, and went to bed early. |
| 4531 |
In the end, he didn't, and they both fit right in. They made a striking couple, and Liam admitted to her in a whisper that it was impressive meeting their movie star hostess and her famous friends. There were at least a dozen faces there that anyone in the world would have recognized at first glance. |
| 4532 |
He had been a perfect gentleman all night, and she had felt totally comfortable with him. Several of the women there had been with much younger men, with far greater age differences than hers and Liam's. It was the rage in Hollywood for older women to date younger men. She commented on it to Liam as they got into bed. |
| 4533 |
He was a young man from Minnesota whom Sasha had discovered at the art fair in Chicago the year before. He did powerful, provoking work. She had been at the gallery till two in the morning the night before, hanging his paintings, standing back and looking at them, then moving them around again, until she liked it. |
| 4534 |
She was so lost in thought and concentration, she hardly talked to him, and finally he left. He was sound asleep in her bed when she got home. The next day Sasha was at the gallery all day. She showered and changed her clothes there, and was greeting guests when Liam walked in for the party at six o'clock. |
| 4535 |
She smiled at him the moment she saw him walk in. She introduced him to the artist, and several more people, and then left him to greet others. He was wearing black slacks, a white shirt, his loafers, no socks, no jacket or tie. But in the uptown arty group, what he had worn seemed appropriate and didn't stand out. |
| 4536 |
The artists wore all manner of dress, her clients wore suits and ties. There were several well known models there, a famous photographer, who bought her work frequently. Writers, playwrights, art critics, museum people, and others who just came for the free ride and the champagne and hors d'oeuvres. |
| 4537 |
He could tell from looking at her that she was used to men admiring her. At twenty four, striking in her youth and beauty, she was at the height of her game. Her mother was much humbler, and although she was striking too, part of her charm was that she was unaware of her beauty, and always had been. |
| 4538 |
Sasha had tremendous charisma and charm. Liam found Tatianna daunting, just watching her from the distance. He kept his eyes on her as people came to talk to her, and then as though sensing him, she turned her head and her eyes met his. He had the feeling she didn't like him, even from across the room. |
| 4539 |
He didn't want to appear anxious, or as though he were pursuing her. He nearly bumped into her as he walked by her, and helped himself to an hors d'oeuvre from a passing tray. She was standing, looking aloof, while three young men crowded around her, and she sipped a glass of champagne. He decided to join the group. |
| 4540 |
She was far too cool and snooty for him. And he was far too old and arty looking for her. The men she went out with were preppy and traditional, and most of them worked on Wall Street. She thought the men she met in the art scene, even at her mother's gallery, were self centered jerks. She assumed the same about him. |
| 4541 |
A few minutes later, Sasha arrived to join them. She had seen them circling each other, and was worried. Tatianna looked annoyed, never a good sign. Liam looked curious about her, and Sasha was afraid he would give it away if he asked her too many questions, or was too friendly. Tatianna seemed to suspect nothing. |
| 4542 |
Tatianna respected her a great deal, even if she didn't like meeting her artists. She was impressed by what her mother did, and proud of her for expanding the empire her grandfather had built. Tatianna still remembered him. He had always scared her when they lived in Paris. Xavier had liked him better. |
| 4543 |
She seemed like a spoiled brat to him. Xavier was a whole different kind of being. But even their friendship had done nothing to impress her. Liam was convinced nothing would. They left for dinner after that. Sasha had invited a number of people she thought he'd enjoy, along with the artist whose show it was. |
| 4544 |
Her caring manner defined what Liam loved about her. She was warm and nurturing and attentive to everyone. Girls like her daughter were only interested in themselves. Sasha made a real effort to make Liam feel important, comfortable, and welcome, and he loved her for it. It was what he needed most from her. |
| 4545 |
She was every bit as kind to the others as she was to him. He complimented her on it when they got back to her apartment, where he felt totally at home now. Tatianna would have been incensed to see him sprawled out, smoking a cigar, in her father's favorite chair in their bedroom. But fortunately, she couldn't see it. |
| 4546 |
She's very cool. She was very attached to her father, and she's very possessive about me. I told you, she's very black and white about things. But her glare is worse than her bite. She probably thought you were just another horny artist, lusting after her. I wish she didn't wear those dresses, though. |
| 4547 |
She went to the gallery the next day, was pleased with the reviews for the show, and they left for Southampton after dinner. They bought groceries on the way and got there at ten o'clock. They sat on the porch, talking for a while, while Liam ate ice cream, and they chatted about nothing in particular. |
| 4548 |
They were settling into an easy, comfortable way of life. And that afternoon, sitting on the beach, he talked about moving his studio to Paris, maybe in the fall. It would be easier than commuting from London every weekend, which was tiring, and expensive for him. And he wanted to be close to her during the week. |
| 4549 |
They both knew that sooner or later, people would find out about them. Bernard already had. But Liam was not trying to shove his way into her life. He accepted that their lives and lifestyles were different, but what they had shared so far felt great to him. This was definitely possible, for both of them. |
| 4550 |
It was a scene beyond belief. The young man with her took a step toward him, as Sasha leaped out of bed and came to stand right behind Liam. She was also naked, and astounded to see her daughter. Tatianna had said nothing about using the house that weekend. She thought her mother no longer went there at all. |
| 4551 |
They finally fell asleep when the sun came up, after talking about it for hours, ad nauseam. She cried herself to sleep in his arms, and they both woke up to the sound of the phone at nine thirty. It was Xavier, calling from London. His sister had called him the night before, and told all. Her version was pretty ugly. |
| 4552 |
She had said that Liam was strutting around the house naked when she walked in, and had obviously been screwing their mother. Xavier had been startled at first, particularly by the picture she painted. But when he calmed down, and thought about it for several hours after that, he wasn't entirely opposed to the match. |
| 4553 |
They had talked for hours. He had assured her that Liam was a nice guy, a good friend of his, and he had introduced them, although he hadn't expected this to happen. In fact, it had never occurred to him. But he thought their mother had a right to happiness, with whomever she chose. It was not up to them. |
| 4554 |
Liam handed her back the phone then and went outside to stand on the porch and look at the beach. It was a foggy day, which seemed appropriate to him. Xavier tried to calm his mother when she got back on the phone. She was crying softly, and he felt sorry for her. He could easily sense how awful it had been for her. |
| 4555 |
Neither did he. They spent the rest of the weekend quietly, and went back to the city Sunday night. She had tried to get through to Tatianna several times on her cell phone, and it was always on voice mail. At her apartment, all Sasha got was the answering machine, and left several loving messages for her. |
| 4556 |
She hates him. She doesn't like artists, she's met so many crazy artists over the years, she thinks they're all flaky, and most of the time she's right. So is he sometimes. But I'm in love with him, and he says he's in love with me. And now Tatianna wants to kill him, and she'll probably never speak to me again. |
| 4557 |
Marcie was a wonderful woman, not beautiful, but nice looking, decently dressed, a dozen pounds overweight, though nothing one couldn't live with. She was intelligent, well educated, and well paid, and one of the nicest people Sasha had ever known. She also knew that Marcie hadn't had a man in her life in years. |
| 4558 |
He's legal, he's grown up. He's got kids. You two look the same age. And besides, these days lots of people seem to be doing it. After a certain age, it seems to make sense. You've had a respectable marriage, you've had your kids. You're not looking for the same things now that you were twenty five years ago. |
| 4559 |
And you two certainly do. You don't have to be together every minute, you don't have to live together if you don't want to. Or you can, if you do. You can have your own lives, your own friends, and get the best out of what you share in between. It sounds great to me. And listen, if you don't want him, I'll take him. |
| 4560 |
She was smiling. Marcie had made her feel that everything was okay, and would be. It made her realize how lucky she was to have him, and how little it was probably going to shock most people. Everything Marcie said made sense. To hell with the nine years. If he was a wacky artist, she could deal with that. |
| 4561 |
Just let her cool down. She obviously felt you betrayed her father. You know how crazy she was about him. She thought he walked on water. He was a wonderful man, but let's face it, Sasha, he's gone, sad as that is, and he isn't coming back. I have a feeling that he'd be relieved to know you're happy, if you are. |
| 4562 |
It was a barbecue given by people she knew, but not well, and they both agreed it sounded like fun. She had accepted, and at six o'clock that night they went, in jeans and T shirts and sandals, just as the invitation said. She had bought them both red, white, and blue bandanas, and they tied them around their necks. |
| 4563 |
Halfway through dinner, he said he was hot, took off his shirt, and threw it in the fire, with a grin at Sasha. The uncontrollable boy in him began to emerge, and as the night wore on, it got worse. Much worse. She tried to get him to go home with her, but he insisted he was having fun and wanted to stay. |
| 4564 |
By then he was too drunk to notice she wasn't enjoying herself at all. He had started out with rum punch, switched to beer, and then wine with dinner. Afterward someone suggested he try a mojito, and she was horrified to watch him down three of them, without pausing for breath. By then, he was truly smashed. |
| 4565 |
She could see the looks of amusement and disapproval all around her, and when he walked back to her afterward, he zipped up his jeans, kissed her hard on the mouth in front of everyone, and grabbed her bottom in both hands, which left nothing to anyone's imagination as to what their relationship was. |
| 4566 |
She found him again, sitting astride the horse they were using to pull the hayride. The horse was getting skittish, and the handler was asking him to get off, to no avail. He had completely stopped the ride, as people around them watched. It finally took three men from the catering staff and the host to get him off. |
| 4567 |
Their host helped her get him back to the car. He passed out in the front seat, and she drove him home. She couldn't wake him up when they got there, and she left him to sleep it off in her car. She felt him slip into bed with her at seven o'clock the next morning. When she got up at nine, he was dead to the world. |
| 4568 |
The night before had been awful. The worst part was, they were both going back to Europe the next day, she to Paris and he to London. They had no time left to bridge the gap and repair the damage if they got into an argument on their last day. He was still sulking when they drove back to town that night. |
| 4569 |
If they stayed together, he wanted to know he had the freedom to be himself. All she wanted from him was to grow up. It was the one thing he didn't want to do and never had. And underlying all of it was her concern about her daughter's reaction to him. Undeniably, Tatianna and Liam were off to a bad start. |
| 4570 |
He had dinner with Xavier that week, and discussed it with him, but Xavier had had an easier childhood and youth than he had. He had had wonderful parents who he knew loved him. Liam didn't, and had the scars to prove it. They were costing Sasha now, just as whatever she had suffered in her youth inevitably cost him. |
| 4571 |
She said as little as possible about it to Liam, so as not to rub salt in his wounds about not being invited. Tatianna was finally speaking to her again, though barely. Sasha had talked to Xavier, and he had agreed with her that it was probably a better idea if Liam didn't join them on their vacation. |
| 4572 |
She wanted him along too, but it was out of the question. As it turned out, he had been waiting for her to change her mind, or Tatianna's. The fact that she hadn't, he interpreted and felt as the ultimate betrayal by Sasha. She was failing to defend him and stand by him. It seemed childish and unreasonable to her. |
| 4573 |
He hadn't seen her look like that since the awful time twenty two months before, when his father died. Xavier had suspected as much when he ran into Liam in a pub the night before he left, with a beautiful young girl. Liam had been kissing her, and was extremely drunk. Xavier felt his heart drop into his stomach. |
| 4574 |
Neither of them ever mentioned Liam. And Xavier didn't dare bring him up again. He could see how miserable his mother was from the look in her eyes, even when she tried to be a good sport and pretend otherwise, which she did most of the time. And when she went to her room at night, she cried herself to sleep. |
| 4575 |
Tatianna would have walked out. Sasha didn't want to risk it. They were invited out by friends several times, and Sasha agreed to go when they had children the age of her own, or were clients. But having to sit there and talk to people made her want to crawl out of her skin. She had never felt like that in her life. |
| 4576 |
Xavier and Tatianna had both invited friends, at her suggestion. They all enjoyed each other. She didn't need to entertain them. She could lie on deck with her eyes closed, near the bow of the boat, thinking of him, and aching with grief. She stayed on board when the young people went ashore at night. |
| 4577 |
She has a right to have a life, whether you approve or not. The reason they broke up is because she didn't want to upset you, and invite him here. You owe her an apology. Maybe it's not too late for her to fix it. They love each other. They have a right to that. And you don't have a right to interfere. |
| 4578 |
Xavier was even nicer to his mother after that, and Tatianna was more pleasant. She was relieved to know that Liam was out of the picture, and considered it a blessing. She never said anything about him to her mother, and Sasha had decided not to bring it up and upset her again. There was no point now. |
| 4579 |
It had been a long three weeks for her. She had enjoyed her children, but she was relieved to go home, and crawl into bed with Socks. The house in Paris seemed incredibly quiet and lonely when she got back. She had nothing to look forward to now, except work, which had kept her going before, after Arthur died. |
| 4580 |
There was always the remote chance that he might call her, or come back again, except she knew he wouldn't. He was far too stubborn, and she knew how betrayed he felt over her refusing to confront her daughter. It opened too many old wounds of abandonment and betrayal for him, and she knew he wouldn't get over it. |
| 4581 |
She knew him better than that, and she was right. She had mentioned to Bernard on her first day back to work that if Liam called, she wanted him to handle it for her. She wasn't going to take his calls. She knew he might call the gallery about his upcoming show at some point, and she couldn't face talking to him. |
| 4582 |
It would kill his mother if he did, and he hoped Liam had the good taste not to do that to her, although they both had the right to pursue their own lives now, in whatever ways worked for them. But Xavier knew how painful it would be for his mother to see Liam with another woman. She wasn't seeing anyone. |
| 4583 |
Xavier had asked her over dinner at Le Voltaire, her eyes had filled with tears, and she just shook her head. He didn't mention it again. He had the frightening feeling she had just given up. At forty nine, it seemed an incredible waste to him, but she seemed to have withdrawn into herself, except when she was at work. |
| 4584 |
She was still there late on Sunday night, trying to decide which of two spectacular pieces she wanted to hang in the front, so people saw it the moment they entered. She didn't even hear him come in. The door to the gallery was unlocked. Xavier had come by briefly, and Sasha had forgotten to lock it behind him. |
| 4585 |
She was too busy hanging Liam's paintings. She was staring at the two largest paintings, and heard a familiar voice behind her that made her heart pound. It was Liam, fresh off the plane, in a black turtleneck sweater and jeans, the familiar baseball cap, motorcycle boots, and battered black leather jacket. |
| 4586 |
She often worked late at night, hanging paintings on her own, battling with the painting, the ladder, her tape measure, a level, nails, and her hammer. He smiled as she banged the nail into the wall, and then grabbed the painting, as he lifted it up for her. She was as stubborn and determined as ever. |
| 4587 |
Tatianna kissed her goodnight shortly after that, and left with the dress she'd borrowed, as Sasha thought about what had happened between them that night. Tatianna had started in on her again about Liam, and this time she had called her on it. It was what Liam had wanted from her in July, and she couldn't do then. |
| 4588 |
But she was glad she had done it anyway. Tatianna needed to hear it. And she had needed to say it. As her last gift to him, and to herself, she had finally settled the score for him. It no longer mattered now, but it had been long overdue, and had done her good to say it, and tell Tatianna how much she loved him. |
| 4589 |
The snow stopped in the morning, the streets were swept, and the night was crystal clear and icy cold as Sasha dressed for Liam's opening. As she always did, she wore something dark and simple. A plain black cocktail dress this time, with no frills or ruffles. She wanted the emphasis on the paintings, not on her. |
| 4590 |
Sasha didn't have a chance to speak to him again all night. She had Marcie standing by to introduce him to people, keep him happy, and make sure he behaved, just in case. There were no problems, no misadventures, no surprises. The only surprise, and it wasn't to Sasha, was that they sold all but two pieces of his work. |
| 4591 |
She had surrounded him with his friends. For Sasha, it was awkward being there with him. But she had to do her job now, and do it well, no matter how she felt about him. Several of the artists he'd asked her to invite were women, she had met most of them before, and then, at least, they had only been friends. |
| 4592 |
There was no reason for them to now. He was back in his own familiar world. He no longer needed to make adjustments for her, or even behave himself. But he was very circumspect that night, either because he wanted to be, or in deference to her. This was an important night, and a huge victory for him. |
| 4593 |
One of the clients seated at her end of the table had just decided to buy his two remaining paintings. On the opening night, they had sold out his show. Standing at her end of the table, sharing the news with everyone, she toasted Liam again. And this time, he just sat where he was, and looked at her. |
| 4594 |
The dinner went on until after midnight, and as she always did, Sasha stayed until the last guest left. She paid the bill, thanked the restaurant, and walked out with Liam into the icy cold crystal clear December night. It was so cold that when she breathed, it felt like she had needles in her lungs. |
| 4595 |
They decided to go to the bar at the Carlyle, and chatted in the cab about the show. Liam wanted to know every detail, and what everyone had said. Sasha told him all she knew, everything people had said to her. He lapped it up. He ordered a brandy when they got to the Carlyle, and she ordered a cup of tea. |
| 4596 |
She had had enough wine at dinner, and the last thing she wanted was to drink too much with him. She didn't want to lose control with him. After this, it would be easier. But this trip was the first time she'd seen him after their torrid affair. She had to find a new way of seeing and dealing with him. |
| 4597 |
Their strictly professional relationship was still new to her. They chatted for a while about nothing in particular, and then she surprised him and herself by telling him about her conversation the night before with Tatianna. She hadn't intended to tell him, but somehow, before she could stop herself, she did. |
| 4598 |
We both were. It's funny how those things happen sometimes. Everything collides at once, the past, the present, the future. New people, old people, ghosts from the past. I get confused sometimes between my family and other people. It just hit a lot of buttons for me. She's just a kid, and she's your kid. |
| 4599 |
Liam. Even the children were gone. The reality of her life now was that she was alone. Probably forever. The one thing she couldn't let herself do, she reminded herself, as she took off her coat, was let herself fall for Liam again, no matter how tempting and charming he was. They had proven it was impossible twice. |
| 4600 |
They had gone there often in July. It was a popular Italian restaurant downtown, with waiters who sang when they felt like it, and the food was good. They talked about art, as usual, people they knew, friends of his she'd met, her children and his. He said Tom was doing well in college, and the others were fine, too. |
| 4601 |
Sasha was even worried about it that night, as they sat across the table from each other, eating pasta, and drinking cheap red wine. They talked about their trip to Italy then. It had been magical for both of them. And then, without thinking, he glanced at her wrist, and saw the bracelet he had bought her. |
| 4602 |
But her heart still sank when she thought of Christmas, especially without Arthur, and now him. They managed to get through the meal without hurting each other's feelings, or bringing up painful memories. They skirted around them carefully, like a minefield, and on the whole the evening was a success. |
| 4603 |
But any way they did it, it was a bad deal for her. If he was only friendly, she knew she'd feel rejected. And if he reached out to her again as a woman, she knew they'd both regret it. It was time to let it go. She gave him a hug and kissed his cheek, thanked him for dinner, and got into the cab alone. |
| 4604 |
It was nothing in the course of a lifetime, and certainly didn't compare to her twenty five years with Arthur. Her love affair with Liam had been short and sweet, exciting and passionate, full of thunder and lightning. For the long haul, she knew, one needed something simpler, easier, quieter, and more solid. |
| 4605 |
Or maybe even about her. She turned the lights on when she got home, put on her nightgown, brushed her teeth, and went to bed. She had just turned off the light when the buzzer rang. It was the doorman downstairs. She couldn't imagine why he was calling, and she got out of bed to answer it. He said she had a guest. |
| 4606 |
Very glad. So was he. Ecstatic in fact. She felt as though she had her life back, what she had back was him. The truth was that she made him grown up, and he made her young. Somewhere in the middle lay the realm of possibility they had been chasing for a year, and seemed to have found. The secret was to keep it. |
| 4607 |
She was prepared to do that now, and so was he. It had taken them a year to get in sync, which wasn't as bad as it might have been. Losing him for four months had shown her just how much he meant to her. And he had discovered the same thing. She kissed him before she left, and he leaped out of bed shortly after. |
| 4608 |
They went to Gino's for lunch, and then he walked her back to the gallery, before he went to do his errands. He came back in the late afternoon, and hung around with Marcie, while Sasha finished working with a client. She introduced Liam to him before he left, and said that he was their most promising young artist. |
| 4609 |
He couldn't wait till morning. She called to rent a car for him, and wanted to go with him, but she thought it would be hard on Beth and the other children to have a stranger there. But she wished she could be there for Liam. She knew he needed her. They were out of the house in less than ten minutes. |
| 4610 |
They were going to operate that morning when he got there. Sasha felt sick thinking of what they all had to go through. It was a nightmare. She couldn't think of anything worse than a badly injured child. Liam got there at nine in the morning, as Sasha sat, waiting to hear from him. She'd been up all night, with him. |
| 4611 |
She had talked to him every half hour all night. She hadn't left him for a minute. And when he didn't call her, she called him. She was grateful they were back together, so she could at least support him through the ordeal. She didn't hear from him then till lunchtime, while Charlotte was in surgery. |
| 4612 |
They said she wouldn't be out till evening. And Liam just sat at the other end and sobbed, when he described the condition she was in. Sasha was in tears herself as she sat at the gallery, waiting for news. The results of the surgery sounded promising. It wasn't quite as dire as they had feared, but it was very bad. |
| 4613 |
At least the family was together, or would be. Sasha was only sorry she couldn't join them. She thought of flying up to stay in a hotel near the hospital, so she could support Liam, but he said they were sleeping in Charlotte's room and on cots in the hallway. He wouldn't have been able to see her anyway. |
| 4614 |
Everyone's life was suddenly upside down, and Charlotte's still hung in the balance. She was nowhere near out of the woods yet. The days droned on interminably, and by the end of a week, they knew she wouldn't be quadriplegic, but they still weren't sure about her legs. It all depended on how her spinal cord repaired. |
| 4615 |
Sasha hated to ask, but was relieved to hear they had good insurance, otherwise it would have been a financial catastrophe for them as well. It was going to take years and cost a fortune to put the little girl back together, and she had a lot of hard times ahead of her, as did Beth, who would be taking care of her. |
| 4616 |
It broke his heart to think of her paralyzed, and hoped it wouldn't happen. He told his mother to give his best to Liam, and said he'd go to church to pray for his little girl. Sasha had lit a candle for her only that morning, and had gone to mass to pray for her, which wasn't something she did often. |
| 4617 |
It was a relentless strain for all of them. Liam was so tired he was beginning to get testy with her, and he called less often, because he was sitting with Charlotte for eight hour shifts, to relieve Beth a little. After that, sometimes he fell asleep on the cot in the hallway, before he had time to call. |
| 4618 |
She wanted to lighten his burdens for him, not add to them. Two days before Christmas, the doctors gave Charlotte and her family the best gift of all. They told them that it would take a long, long time, but she would walk again. Maybe with a halting gait, or a limp, or with braces, but she would walk. |
| 4619 |
She was going to be in the hospital for at least three months, maybe longer, but they thought she'd make a good recovery in the end, and she wouldn't be mentally impaired. She'd have to be brave to get through her surgeries, but they were optimistic. They took her off the critical list the same day. |
| 4620 |
She had a few things under it for him: a funny shirt, a new baseball cap, an art book that had been her father's, and a Cartier watch. She was waiting for him anxiously when he got in at six that night. He had made good time, since for once the roads were clear. The moment Sasha saw him, she burst into tears. |
| 4621 |
He looked so worn and anguished, and as she held him, he sobbed in her arms. He felt as though he had been drowning for the past two weeks. He had never been through such terrifying emotions in his life. He no longer looked like a boy to her, he had turned into a man, older than his years, overnight. |
| 4622 |
He looked utterly worn out. Sex was the last thing on his mind, and hers. They just wanted to be together, and lay there quietly holding hands. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning, when he rolled over and looked at her. He had been too tired to go to midnight mass, and she hadn't even suggested it. |
| 4623 |
She could see it in his eyes. It was totally absurd, but real, he loved them both. And he owed more to Beth. Sasha had to lose. She was the human sacrifice he felt he had to make for his child. They lay there crying in each other's arms for hours, mourning each other, and wishing things were different. |
| 4624 |
She wanted to be angry, furious even, she wanted to hate him, but she couldn't. She wasn't angry, she was heartbroken. This was as bad as, or worse, than losing Arthur. Because once Liam went back to her, he really would be dead to her now. This time he truly would never come back, and they both knew it. |
| 4625 |
She had never experienced such pain in her life, or at least not since Arthur died. They were still lying in each other's arms at six. And at six thirty he got up. They both looked like they'd been beaten. The worst part was that she knew he was doing the right thing. There was no wacky artist factor in this decision. |
| 4626 |
That night with Liam, they had said it all. He was leaving her, loving her as much as he had for the past year, in fact more than he ever had. She was whimpering as she walked to the elevator with him, and he pressed the button. She was standing barefoot in her nightgown, with her long dark hair hanging like a child's. |
| 4627 |
Although Xavier thought she sounded strange, and called to check on her again that night. He asked if Liam was there and she said he had been, and had just gone back to Vermont. She was in too much pain to share the news with anyone. It was so excruciating, she sat in a chair all day, and hardly moved. |
| 4628 |
Her hair was pulled straight back, she had no makeup on, and her face was an ashy white. She was sorting through some papers on her desk, and there was a rigid quality to the way she sat. As though she were in shock, and when Marcie looked at her and saw her eyes, she was sure Charlotte had died. In fact, Sasha had. |
| 4629 |
She had sobbed inconsolably for the last three hours. She knew she would never even hear his voice again. Before he left, they had promised not to call each other. It would be a cruelty to do so, to either of them. She had never done anything so difficult in her life as honor what he'd done. She did it for love of him. |
| 4630 |
But it was over two years later, and it was the second major loss she had sustained, which compounded the impact. It had just become two giant losses rolled into one. It brought back everything she had lived through when Arthur died, and in addition now there was the loss of Liam as well. This time forever. |
| 4631 |
She didn't move, she just sat there shuffling papers on her desk. She thought of killing herself, but knew she couldn't do that to Xavier and Tatianna. She had been condemned to live, which in her case now seemed far worse than being condemned to death. She had been sentenced to an eternity without him. |
| 4632 |
Driving to Vermont, he felt the same way. But he didn't call her. He knew he never could again. He had to trust her to the hands of fate, which was where he had put himself. All he could do from now on was know that there was a woman he would never see again, and whom he had once loved with his entire being. |
| 4633 |
Sasha said he was in Vermont, and he was fine. She knew it would be months or years before she could tell anyone what had happened. The hole he had left in her was filled with too much pain. Marcie left her then and made the reservations. And then she did something she had never done, even when Arthur died. |
| 4634 |
She felt invisible, untouchable, unlovable, and completely isolated from the world. She had barely said good bye to Marcie and Karen when she left. She just said goodnight to them, as she always did, and drifted out to the street. She walked home, and was halfway there before she even noticed it was raining. |
| 4635 |
When she got home, she was soaked to the skin. It didn't matter anymore. Nothing did. She took the flight to Paris the next day, spoke to no one on the plane, didn't eat, didn't watch a movie, and slept finally. It was a relatively short flight, and when she got home, she realized she hadn't eaten in days. |
| 4636 |
She was thin and pale and seemed tired, but at least the otherworldly look she'd had for months was gone. She looked unhappy, but at least human. It was no secret to anyone who knew and cared about her that she had had a terrible time. They had quietly told each other why, without discussing it with her. |
| 4637 |
All she wanted to do was spend a quiet evening with him and Tatianna. They had insisted on taking her to a restaurant at least, and she had chosen a small Italian restaurant in the village, which she said would be quiet. And in spite of her long months of mourning Liam, she had a nice time with her children. |
| 4638 |
It never left her wrist. Marcie and Karen had offered to give her a little party, which she declined. The only parties she went to anymore were openings at the gallery. In the past five months, since Liam left, she had simply folded the show. She was like a small, tired animal hibernating in deep winter. |
| 4639 |
And as she sat at a dead stop from time to time, she thought of Liam. It was a luxury she rarely allowed herself anymore. She knew she couldn't afford it. And although the others couldn't see it, she was making efforts to get better. It was a rare indulgence for her to just sit back and think of him. |
| 4640 |
Navigating the shoals of grief had become familiar to her. She knew from losing Arthur that losing someone was a process, you didn't let go all at once, you let go inch by inch, or millimeter by millimeter. It had taken her a year after Arthur to feel human again. And it had been five months now since Liam. |
| 4641 |
He had other things now to keep him busy, and she was happy to hear from Marcie that he had reported that Charlotte was so much better. She couldn't help wondering too if he was happy with Beth. There was no way for her to know, and maybe it didn't matter. He was hers now, for better or worse, whichever happened. |
| 4642 |
It had been different with them because, however much they loved each other, the commitment had never been made. Just as she had predicted in the beginning, it had been impossible for them, just not for the reasons she'd expected. It had never even remotely dawned on her that he might go back to Beth. |
| 4643 |
They were times to think, and be grateful for her life, which she was starting to be again. She knew that in spite of the losses she'd suffered, she had many blessings, and was grateful for them all. She was watching the sun go down quickly and wondered if she'd see the green flash as it hit the horizon. |
| 4644 |
She wanted nothing more than she had right then. She needed nothing, wanted no one. She felt as though she were hanging in space, weightless, without burdens. She felt at ease in her own skin for the first time since December. It was, at last, the beginning of healing, and had been a long time coming. |
| 4645 |
She couldn't see him clearly, but she saw his form and outline. She knew she was imagining it, maybe even hallucinating, and then she heard his voice. It was Liam. He was standing in front of her, with his back to the sunset, almost like a movie. She just lay there and stared at him and said nothing. |
| 4646 |
He had forgotten how piercing her eyes were, at the same time gentle and intense. She had kept her part of the bargain. She had never called him. And unlike what he was doing now, she had never shown up in Vermont. Coming back to torture her one last time seemed unfair to her, and she was sorry that he'd come. |
| 4647 |
She knew him better by then than he knew himself. But she could see how much he too had changed in the last five months. There was no boyhood left in his handsome face, only manhood. He had had his own journey of pain after he left. He had had three children and a wife to accompany him daily on his travels. |
| 4648 |
He had never forgotten what it was like kissing her and holding her. In the end, he had taken her with him. Beth knew it before he did, and out of kindness sent him back. He kissed her again and held her, and she whispered something into his chest. He felt it more than heard it, and looked down into her face. |
| 4649 |
There was an ankle deep river running through the gutter. At four in the afternoon, it seemed as though half the neighborhood was standing around in the heat, talking and watching the kids. And suddenly, at four ten, shots rang out in the noise of the talk and laughter and the sound of rushing water. |
| 4650 |
Within less than a minute, she was in an ambulance, and they pulled her mother in with her, still crying and dazed. It was a scene all of them had seen dozens of times before, if not hundreds, but one that only meant something when you knew the people at the core of the drama, the perpetrators, or the victims. |
| 4651 |
People in the neighborhood knew what it would mean for them once word got out that he had been killed. Tempers would flare, and smoldering resentments would burst into flame. Worse yet, in the deadly heat, anything could happen. This was Harlem, it was August, life was tough, and a cop had been murdered. |
| 4652 |
The little girl was gray and still and her blood was everywhere, the floor, the sheets, her arms, the gurney, her mother's face and dress and hands. It looked like a slaughter. And for what? She was another casualty in the endless war between the cops and the bad guys, gang members, drug dealers, and narcs. |
| 4653 |
But she had never met a man like that. Her kids were all she had for the moment, and she had nothing to give them but her love. She had a boyfriend who took her to dinner once in a while, with three kids of his own to support. He hadn't been able to find a job in six months, and drank too much when he took her out. |
| 4654 |
She had never felt lucky in her entire life. Her father had died when she was a child, gunned down in a street fight just like this one. Her mother had brought her and her sisters and brothers to New York, but their life here was no different. They had just taken their troubles from one place to another. |
| 4655 |
It was his second gunshot wound of the afternoon, the previous one had died at two o'clock, a fifteen year old boy who had managed to shoot three rival gang members before they shot and eventually killed him. Steve had done everything he could to save him, but it was too late. At least Dinella Washington had a chance. |
| 4656 |
But even listening to the grim recital, Steve Whitman was not willing to give up hope yet. Steve barked orders at them for an hour, as he fought to keep the child alive, and when they started losing her, he massaged her heart himself for more than ten minutes. He fought like a tiger to keep her going. |
| 4657 |
Without a word, he walked away from the operating table, and pulled his surgical mask off with a look of fury. He hated days like this, hated losing anyone, particularly a child who was nothing more than an innocent victim. He had even hated losing the boy who had shot three people before they killed him. |
| 4658 |
The uselessness of it. The waste. The despair. The pointless destruction of human life. And yet when he won, as he often did, it all seemed worthwhile, the long hours, the endless days that ran into even longer nights. He didn't care how long he stayed or how hard he worked as long as he won some of the time. |
| 4659 |
He threw away his surgical gloves, washed his hands, took off his cap, and looked in the mirror. What he saw was the fatigue of the last seventy one hours he had spent on duty. He tried to work no more than forty eight hour shifts of being on call and on duty. It was a nice thought, but it rarely worked out that way. |
| 4660 |
A muscle tensed in his jaw as he walked out of the surgical area, and headed toward where he knew the child's mother would be. He felt like the Angel of Death as he walked toward her, knowing that his was a face she would never forget, at a moment in time that would haunt her for the rest of her life. |
| 4661 |
The nurse brought it quickly, and the child's mother couldn't drink. She made terrible, airless, strangled sounds as she tried to absorb what he had told her, and Steve Whitman felt as though he had been the killer, instead of the man with the gun. He would have liked to be the savior, and sometimes he was. |
| 4662 |
He was in surgery for four hours with her, and at ten thirty he walked out of the operating room, hoping he had saved her, and finally made it to his office for the first time in hours. It was the quiet part of the night for him, usually the really bad cases didn't start to come in till after midnight. |
| 4663 |
There was already another doctor on duty to take his place. And as he heaved a long sigh, he reached for the phone. He knew Meredith would still be up, or maybe even still at the office. He knew how busy she'd been for the past few weeks, and he wasn't sure if she'd still be in meetings, or if she'd finally gone home. |
| 4664 |
They were a good balance for each other. She had always matched Steve's volcanic intensity with her own special brand of silky smoothness. No matter how crazy things got, Meredith always seemed to stay calm in the heat of crisis. She was quiet and elegant and cool. Her entire being was a contrast to her husband. |
| 4665 |
They certainly didn't have time to get bored with each other, in fact they hardly had any time at all. And with their two all consuming careers, they had never had the time or the inclination to have children, although they talked about it from time to time. It was an option neither of them had entirely ruled out yet. |
| 4666 |
Their time apart always made her miss him, even when she was busy. Theirs was an easy, comfortable relationship, and an attraction that had never dimmed, even in the fourteen years they'd been married. They were still passionately devoted to each other, despite their demanding careers and hectic lives. |
| 4667 |
He managed to hit three of them before he went down, but they killed him. And a little girl a few hours ago. She was an innocent bystander in a shootout between three kids and the cops in Harlem. They shot her in the chest. We operated, but she didn't make it. I had to tell her mother, the poor woman was devastated. |
| 4668 |
As it turned out, he walked in the door of their apartment nearly forty minutes later. The chief resident had needed a quick consultation with him before he left, about a broken hip and pelvis on a ninety two year old woman, and the fourteen year old who'd fallen out the window had developed complications. |
| 4669 |
But Steve knew better than anyone that it was time for him to go home. He was beyond exhausted. He finished the paperwork on his desk, and signed out for the weekend. He didn't have to be back on duty at the trauma unit until Monday, and he could hardly wait to get out, he'd had it. Enough was enough. |
| 4670 |
He was so tired by the time he left, he could hardly think straight. He hailed a cab just outside the hospital and was home ten minutes later, and as he let himself into the apartment, he could hear soft music playing, and smell Meredith's perfume. It was like coming home to Heaven after three days in hell. |
| 4671 |
They had both gotten through school on scholarships. Both of them were only children, and both of them had lost their parents while they were in college. Hers in a car accident in the South of France on the first real vacation her parents had taken in twenty years, and his to cancer within six months of each other. |
| 4672 |
It had been weeks since he'd had time to get a haircut and he hadn't shaved in two days. He looked younger than his forty two years, and it was hard to tell in scrubs what he would look like dressed. He was wearing mismatched athletic socks, and a battered pair of clogs that were comfortable for him to work in. |
| 4673 |
But instead, Callan had been fascinated by business and high tech inventions, and had set up his company to make high tech surgical instruments instead. Steven knew his products and had been impressed with them, but he wasn't particularly interested in the stock, no matter how impressive Meredith said the company was. |
| 4674 |
Steve went to take a shower, and a few minutes later, she turned off the lights and met him in their bedroom. It was well after midnight, and they were both tired, and he found her in bed a few minutes later. He slipped into bed next to her, and she smiled as he took her in his arms and held her close. |
| 4675 |
She could easily feel how much he wanted her, and it was entirely mutual. She kissed him, and then gave a soft moan as he began to caress her. And within minutes both the hospital, and her public offering were forgotten. All that mattered just then was the private world that they shared and thrived in. |
| 4676 |
She had to get her reading done, but she knew she could always do it later. She knew how much he needed relief and distraction after being on duty for three days. He needed a counterpoint to the misery he saw there, and he expected her to join him. She didn't have the heart to tell him that she needed to work. |
| 4677 |
He made a reservation and at noon they went out hand in hand, and were startled by how much hotter it had gotten. The heat of the New York summer was stifling, and it was so humid they could hardly breathe as they left the building. They took a cab to the restaurant and enjoyed each other's company over lunch. |
| 4678 |
He liked hearing about what she did. It was her one and only passion for the moment, but he loved that about her. She was amazingly single minded and relentlessly focused when she was working on something. It was part of why she was so good at what she did, that and the fact that she had extraordinarily good judgment. |
| 4679 |
She was respected at her firm for it, although Meredith sometimes felt she didn't get the same opportunities the men did. She'd been a partner of the firm for the past four years, but more often than not, she did the lion's share of the work, and the truly creative things, and one of the male partners got the glory. |
| 4680 |
But it was the best trauma unit in the city and he had no desire to leave. And Lucas was a good friend to him. After lunch, Steve and Meredith took a leisurely stroll through the park, listening to the Steel bands and the jazz musicians, as they wandered past the model boat pond, and watched the children play. |
| 4681 |
He was wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt, and bare feet in loafers, and Meredith thought he looked unusually handsome. He would have looked better still with a tan, but he never had the time to get one. And his pale angular face somehow made his dark hair and eyes seem even darker and more intense. |
| 4682 |
She knew he had called a friend that afternoon, and was going to play tennis with him after she left for the airport. Steve followed her sleepily into the bedroom, and a few minutes later, they were in bed, with their arms comfortably wrapped around each other. And five minutes later, he was snoring. |
| 4683 |
He never did. And with a glance at Meredith, he told them he'd be there as soon as he could. Two of the victims were children, one was a severe head injury, and the pediatric neurosurgeon was already on his way in. The parents were both in critical condition, and they weren't sure yet if the second child would make it. |
| 4684 |
He was exactly as he had been fourteen years before when they met and he was a resident. His whole life revolved around what he was doing, just as hers did. And as she lay there, she began thinking of the company she was going to be taking public, and everything she still had to do to assure that it would go smoothly. |
| 4685 |
She got up and brought a stack of papers back to bed with her, and read for two hours before she got up, and she was satisfied that she was nearly prepared for her meeting in California. She still had a few last questions to ask, and mostly she wanted to brief Callan Dow on what to expect when they went on the road. |
| 4686 |
Not much, she felt sure, which was why, so far at least, she had refused to have one. She was good at what she did, she was sure of that, and she was a lot less sure that she would be a good mother. Maybe later, which was what she always told Steve. But much later would be too late, and they both knew it. |
| 4687 |
Paul Black, the partner she was traveling with, slept for most of the trip, and they chatted for the last half hour about the next morning's meeting. He was confident that she had laid all the groundwork properly, and as always, he was sure she would impress the client with everything she had organized for him. |
| 4688 |
He was still a young man, but some fourteen years older than she was. He was fifty one years old, and he barely looked older than her husband. Callan Dow was what everyone expected men to look like in California, healthy, energetic, suntanned, and good looking. But her only fascination with him was with his business. |
| 4689 |
And after that, she took a shower and went to bed. She tried calling Steven again, but he didn't answer her page, and she assumed correctly that he was too busy with patients. And when he finally did return her call, she was sound asleep and he woke her. It was two o'clock in the morning in California. |
| 4690 |
And she was even more impressed when they got to his office. Everything was impeccably prepared, and all the information she and Paul could possibly have wanted had been analyzed for them. As she had been before, Meredith was enormously impressed with his knowledge of technology, and the way he ran his business. |
| 4691 |
He really did have a problem with her, and Callan seemed to be as aware of it as she was. Charlie blamed her for making it possible to take the company public. He had told Cal repeatedly that once they had stockholders, Cal would lose control of the company, and he saw that as a potential disaster for them. |
| 4692 |
He knew that, just as he knew everything about her. And as she sat at her desk late that night, finishing her work on Dow Tech, she glanced out the window into the New York night, and thought about her husband. He was in the trauma unit somewhere, saving a life, or comforting a child, or reassuring a mother. |
| 4693 |
She picked it up, and stared at it, and then knew what she had to do. She was still holding it in her hand, when she walked softly back into their bedroom and ever so gently touched his shoulder. He stirred after only an instant, and smiled in his half sleep, and then reached out to find her breast with his hand. |
| 4694 |
Some fucking crazies tried to blow up the Empire State Building at four o'clock, just in time to get everyone still in their offices, and all the tourists. Nearly a hundred people were killed, over a thousand injured. They're sending us somewhere between two and three hundred critically injured people. |
| 4695 |
They're splitting up the rest of the minor injuries between hospitals all over the city. I have seventy five trauma beds available, and over a hundred people in the halls now, with paramedics, and another hundred coming in, in the next hour. They're calling in medical personnel from Long Island and New Jersey. |
| 4696 |
Meredith flipped on the TV while he dressed and there were bulletins about it on every channel. There was a gaping hole in one side of the building, from what they could see, and so much smoke surrounding the building, from fires the bomb had caused and the explosion itself, that it looked like a volcano. |
| 4697 |
And for the next twenty four hours, she heard nothing from Steven. She stayed in the apartment, afraid to miss his call, if he had a free minute to call her, which he didn't. And she went over her materials for the trip again, for lack of anything better to do. He called her finally on Saturday, at midnight. |
| 4698 |
And in a case like this, she knew he'd stay at the hospital as long as he had to. He seemed to be able to stay on his feet forever, and in truth, she knew he thrived on it. He didn't like what had happened to his patients to bring them to him, but once they were his, he gave them his all, and would have died for them. |
| 4699 |
It was a zoo there. As Steve had predicted the day before, they had tightened security every step of the way, and it took her over an hour to check in for her flight to Chicago. She felt as though she were leaving a war zone. There were even armed security guards and soldiers at the airport carrying machine guns. |
| 4700 |
And at lunch time, they would start all over again and do it for another group of potential investors. She knew that by the end of the week, it would all be familiar to him, but for the moment, before it all began, she expected him to be nervous. This was the big moment they had all worked so hard for. |
| 4701 |
He always looked more like an actor or a male model than a businessman to her, but she had worked with him for long enough that she no longer paid any attention to it. And what she liked best about him was his bright mind, quick wit, and easygoing sense of humor. She always had a good time when she was with him. |
| 4702 |
And when things get crazy at work, Steve works sixty eight to seventy two hour shifts, until there's a real emergency, and then he's gone for however long he has to be. Where are we supposed to fit kids into all that? On the occasional long weekend, or for a week in the summer? It wouldn't be fair to the kids. |
| 4703 |
She commuted. It was a crazy existence. We were never in the same city at the same time, and when we were, we were either annoyed about something, out of touch with each other, or exhausted. The only surprising part of it is that that was when we decided to have children. Maybe decided isn't the right word exactly. |
| 4704 |
I still get angry about it sometimes when I think about it. It wasn't exactly fair play, but that's the way it works sometimes. I'm just not inclined to do anything as foolish as that again. I don't need to put my head on the chopping block and offer someone the opportunity to knock it off, or rip my heart out. |
| 4705 |
And when she went back to her room at the hotel, shortly after ten o'clock, she was still thinking about it. What he had said was ridiculous. She had the kind of valid reasons women used all the time not to make a terrible mistake, in having children when they didn't want them, or if they weren't ready. |
| 4706 |
Her career was as important to her as his was to Steve, and in its own way, hers was equally demanding. Unless she wanted to cut back radically, or leave the firm, there was no way she could reconcile her business life with having babies. Even Steve understood that, and she couldn't imagine why Callan Dow didn't. |
| 4707 |
Just because he had three kids didn't mean that everyone else was suited to it, or would even enjoy it. God knows his wife certainly hadn't, and what she had done seemed worse to Meredith, having them, and then giving them up and virtually abandoning them for a man, a career, and a life in another country. |
| 4708 |
She preferred not to put herself in the same bind Charlotte Dow obviously had, and then renege on her responsibilities as a mother. Meredith would have had her tubes tied before that, and had often thought about it, but she knew that Steve would be upset if she did that. He had in fact begged her not to. |
| 4709 |
And as she waited for his call, she drifted off to sleep, thinking about him, but even as she did, she had a gnawing, uneasy feeling. She knew in her heart of hearts that she was entirely committed to him, in fact very much in love with him, and she didn't give a damn who believed it, as long as Steve did. |
| 4710 |
Neither of them had ever mentioned it again, and they had fallen into an easy camaraderie as they moved from city to city. And she had spoken to Steve twice since then. He had finally gotten home for a night, and things had calmed down considerably in the trauma unit. She could hardly wait to see him. |
| 4711 |
They landed at ten fifteen, and she had a car and driver waiting for him, and another to take her to the Fairmont Hotel. Cal was planning to go home to his children and would meet her for their breakfast presentation at the Fairmont. It had been a long three days for both of them, but it had been extremely fruitful. |
| 4712 |
He loved his kids, but there obviously was no longer room in his heart to trust another woman. It was as though Charlotte had destroyed a part of him, and now, eight years later, there was a piece of him still missing. As a result, he couldn't understand the kind of bond she had with Steve, and he was suspicious of it. |
| 4713 |
It was his hometown, and people in San Francisco were familiar with what he had already accomplished in Silicon Valley. Their first presentation of the day went well, they got a brief break after that, and she got a chance to call her office. And then they went right into lunch, and their next presentation. |
| 4714 |
It's the last bastion of the gentlemen who used to run the world, and still do in some places. I think you've already carved a remarkable spot for yourself, particularly in dealing with high tech companies for them. But the reality is they're still sending guys like Paul Black out to see clients with you. |
| 4715 |
And a few minutes later, the housekeeper told them dinner was ready. And like clockwork, the kids trooped downstairs, and then stood in the door of the living room, staring at her. She felt like an animal in the zoo, as the two girls glared at her, and she couldn't help wondering what they were thinking. |
| 4716 |
And she wasn't all that at ease with children. After awhile, she had no idea what to say to them, and even Callan couldn't seem to draw them out much. They asked to be excused immediately after dessert, and ran upstairs so fast when he let them go, they almost knocked each other down in the doorway. |
| 4717 |
No one would have. But she was afraid to say too much. They were his children after all, and it was hardly her place to tell him that he wasn't bringing them up right. She suspected they probably were nice kids. They were healthy and good looking, and seemed intelligent, but they sure hadn't been friendly. |
| 4718 |
They talked about business again then, and at eight thirty, right on schedule, he drove her to the airport. He helped her check her bags in, and then walked her to the first class lounge, and she thanked him for an interesting afternoon and a pleasant evening, and told him she had enjoyed meeting his children. |
| 4719 |
She wondered if they were just pretty faces, or great minds, bimbos, or soul mates. With his aversion to marriage and long term relationships, it was hard to envision who he went out with. But she also realized, as she thought of it, that it was none of her business. It had been a long week, and she was tired. |
| 4720 |
And she could hardly wait to see Steven. As she thought of him, she drifted off to sleep, and the flight attendant woke her when they landed. She was one of the first to disembark, pick up her bags, and hail a taxi. And at ten minutes to seven on Saturday morning, she was letting herself into their apartment. |
| 4721 |
It had been more than a week, nearly eight days, much too long, and they were both starving for each other. There were no words between them after that, only the passion that had burned between them like an eternal flame since the day they met. It was something they both cherished, and wanted, and desperately needed. |
| 4722 |
And however little time they spent together, it made every moment more precious between them. It was a long time before they spoke again, and when they did, her blond hair lay tousled and silky on his pillow, and he looked down at her with a familiar smile, and she put her arms around him again, and kissed him. |
| 4723 |
They saw a film they'd both wanted to see for a long time, and then they walked home slowly in the rain, and stopped on the way for an ice cream. They talked about going out for a hamburger, but in the end, they opted to stay home, watch a video, and have Chinese food delivered. The hospital left them alone for once. |
| 4724 |
Steve wanted to talk to her about having a baby again, but there was no point until this deal was done and they had some time together to discuss it. He figured it was time now, before either of them got much older. He had always wanted to have three or four kids, but he would have been happy with one now. |
| 4725 |
He was thinking about it as he lay next to her, but he didn't say anything. He didn't want to get into a serious discussion with her, or worse yet, an argument, he just wanted to enjoy her. He thought she was scared of having kids, and once she took the leap, and actually decided to give in, he was sure she'd love it. |
| 4726 |
They were going to be incredibly busy with all of the New York presentations. This was the most important city for them, and the last one before they headed for Europe. She wanted to have their book completely sold before they left for Europe, and she thought there was a good chance that would happen. |
| 4727 |
She was finished and packed shortly after noon, and after that she wasn't sure what to do. There wasn't anything she wanted to do alone. And she didn't really feel like going to a museum. In the end, she decided she might as well get to Boston. She could always have dinner with Cal once she got there. |
| 4728 |
Even on the phone the night before, he had criticized Callan for taking the company public. He was like a dog with a bone, and he just wasn't letting go of it, no matter how ardently Callan urged him to drop it. Callan was beginning to fear that his attitude was going to cause a permanent rift between them. |
| 4729 |
It was easier just talking to her when he had a break, and he could find her. She stayed up reading late that night, brushing up on their presentation again. There were a few things she wanted to change in her brief introduction of Cal, and she had some suggestions about Charlie Macintosh's presentation. |
| 4730 |
She had hired a limousine to pick them up, and she rode with them to their hotel. They were staying at the Regency, and after that, she had the car drop her off at her apartment. She knew Steve wouldn't be home that night, but it felt good to be home anyway, and have some time to herself before they left for Europe. |
| 4731 |
It's almost as if you have to prove something to them, that you're as good or as smart or as capable as a man, and there's something wrong with that. You're a hell of a lot smarter than most of them, Paul Black certainly. He's nothing but an old windbag with good social connections. All he is is a rainmaker. |
| 4732 |
The three of them went over some papers together when they got to the airport, and by the time they boarded the plane to Edinburgh, they were all tired. The plane was making a stop on the way, in London. But as soon as they had eaten, Charlie and Cal turned off their lights and settled down under their blankets. |
| 4733 |
The jet lag and the long day and long flight had finally caught up with her, and she could hardly keep her eyes open as the porter set down her briefcase and her bag, and then let Cal into his room. Hers was handsomely done in Art Deco style. His was all done in pale blue taffeta with pastel chintz covered in flowers. |
| 4734 |
She had never even remotely for a single instant thought of being unfaithful to him. She was still very much in love with Steve, just as he was with her. When Callan picked her up shortly before eight, she was wearing a short black cocktail dress, high heeled evening sandals, and a string of pearls. |
| 4735 |
Several people seemed to know who she was, and she was with a very attractive older man. Meredith thought she looked familiar, but she couldn't figure out who she was, and finally, watching her chat and laugh from table to table, Meredith asked Cal if he recognized her. And he looked at her for a long time. |
| 4736 |
It said something about the kind of women he was attracted to. It was hard not to be somewhat dazzled by her looks, and from everything Cal had said, she was obviously smart too. It was the important things, like values, and compassion and integrity, which she seemed to lack, from what Cal had told her. |
| 4737 |
She liked all the attention, and the money, but she knew it couldn't last. So she built something for herself that would. She's actually a very fine attorney, and she loves that whole entertainment world. She adores all her little movie stars, I think she lives vicariously through them. And they're all crazy about her. |
| 4738 |
She was having a great time with him. He was a wonderful dancer, and fun to be with. And she was sorry for him that in some ways he was still so bitter. He had been badly wounded, but in every other way, he was an immensely appealing man, and she thought he deserved more than he was willing to allow himself to have. |
| 4739 |
He keeps telling me how lucky we are. I think he was pretty badly burned by his ex wife. He's been divorced for eight years, and I think he's still one of the walking wounded. You should see his ex wife, she's gorgeous, but a real piece of work. She lives here. She left him with the kids, and took off with her partner. |
| 4740 |
And at four o'clock, they were on a plane to Paris, and all three were surprisingly congenial on the trip, which led Meredith to hope that Charlie had finally begun to understand the wisdom of what they were doing. And his benevolence toward her had been considerably enhanced by two martinis on the flight to Paris. |
| 4741 |
She wanted to prepare him for their presentation in the morning. The French weren't always easy, but news of their offering had already reached the important French investors, and they were as anxious to get on Callan's bandwagon as everyone else. Meredith didn't think they'd have any problems with the French. |
| 4742 |
It was mid September by then, and a beautiful, balmy evening. And as they walked back to the hotel, she felt chilly in the thin dress, and Callan put his jacket over her shoulders. It smelled of his cologne, and they looked like a happy couple as they chatted and laughed and glanced into the jewelers' windows. |
| 4743 |
They passed down the long corridor of vitrines full of jewelry and gifts, and he left her at her room, with a look of regret, as she handed him back his jacket. It had been another lovely evening, and she had agreed to dine at Lucas Carton with him the next day, but she was charging that one to the firm. |
| 4744 |
And Charlie shook hands with her and congratulated her on how well they had succeeded. He had to leave them a few minutes later, as he was catching an eight o'clock flight that night, back to California. Cal was flying to New York with her the next day, for the final meeting with her partners at her office. |
| 4745 |
She loved what she did, and it had been fun traveling with him. She had enjoyed him more than most of her clients. They worked well together, and seemed to have a lot in common. They shared a number of views about the financial world, and she had always been excited about the high tech companies she worked with. |
| 4746 |
They chatted about it for a while, he hadn't mentioned new acquisitions to her before. He was full of good ideas, and he wanted to strive for new horizons. He wasn't a man who rested on his laurels, and she liked that about him. She wasn't one to do that either. They were both ambitious in a very similar fashion. |
| 4747 |
There was always so much to talk about and share and discuss. They agreed about a lot of things, but she also challenged him, and dared to disagree with him, which he enjoyed about her. They shared a world that few people either enjoyed or understood, and he said that to her with a look of admiration. |
| 4748 |
Paul Black made a point of telling her it had been a job well done, but most of the others were intent on talking to Callan and the other senior partners. She was used to it, and it didn't shock her. They were an old boys' society of sorts, a secret fraternity that still had trouble acknowledging women. |
| 4749 |
You could have screwed this up royally for them, or done a half assed job of it, and you didn't do that. You did a first rate job every step of the way, better than that. I don't believe for a minute that we'd have an eleven to one oversubscribed book on this if it weren't for you. The least they could do is say so. |
| 4750 |
And it felt odd after that going upstairs to her apartment. It seemed so anticlimactic now to be home, and even more so when she found the apartment empty. Steve had left her a note, he'd had to go back to the hospital that night, but he promised to be home the next day, by the time she got home from the office. |
| 4751 |
The stock price was already rising, but not so fast or so much that it made her look foolish for not having priced it higher. It was a textbook offering, and what everyone wanted to happen when they took a company public. She was sitting at her desk, feeling pleased with all of it when Cal called her. |
| 4752 |
They never got up again that night, and when she got up the next morning, she threw the remains of their dinner away and put the dishes in the dishwasher. Steve was still asleep, and when she checked The Wall Street Journal, the tombstone she had proofed the day before looked exactly as it was meant to. |
| 4753 |
She left for the office quietly, and Steve called her at the office when he woke up at noon, and for once she managed to go home early. Steve was waiting for her in the living room, he already had dinner on, and as soon as they finished, they went to the movies. In every possible way, it was an idyllic weekend. |
| 4754 |
She and Steve managed to spend uninterrupted time with each other for the first time in months. He was off call all weekend, and she lived up to her promise to him not to touch her briefcase. Everything was perfect. And on Monday morning when she left for work, he put on his scrubs and left for the hospital. |
| 4755 |
It wasn't easy to transplant two careers across a country, or maybe he was right, and it wasn't as complicated as she thought. She didn't know what to think now. The obstacles that had seemed so huge to her at first seemed to be dissolving one by one, and she really had to decide now if this was what she wanted. |
| 4756 |
It was a terrific combination, and she already knew they worked well together. But still, it was an enormous decision, and she couldn't let Steve risk his career for her either. She had to look out for his best interests, even if he was inclined to be kind to her. She wanted him to be happy too, that was vital to her. |
| 4757 |
But she was also very grateful to her husband for letting her go out there, he was being incredibly generous to encourage her to do it, especially if it represented a sacrifice to him, which was entirely possible. But for her sake, he was willing to chance that, and she loved him all the more for it. |
| 4758 |
And there was no question in either of their minds that he would be the number one man someday, and probably sooner rather than later. Harvey Lucas had been talking about retiring from trauma work and going into research for years, and Steve had been convinced recently that Lucas was getting closer to it. |
| 4759 |
She had been weighing the pros and cons all night, and she felt more confused than ever. One part of her wanted to leap at the chance, and the other told her that she owed it to Steve to stay in New York and stick with what she was doing. She felt guilty even putting the possibility out there for discussion. |
| 4760 |
And as she hung up the phone, she felt as though an irresistible force were propelling her forward, almost as though this had been meant to happen. It frightened her a little bit, but it was also incredibly stimulating. She spent all of Thursday with Cal again, following him to meetings, and talking to key employees. |
| 4761 |
She had a better sense of his organization and staff than she'd ever had before, and so far she still liked everything about it. She checked in with her office that afternoon, but nothing much was happening, and they had no idea what she was doing. She had told them that she had to go away to attend to family business. |
| 4762 |
It was never unusual to see people working till nine or ten o'clock in her office, and sometimes considerably later. But as Cal had pointed out to her from the first, the quality of life in California was considerably different. People seemed to care more about their health, their personal lives, their time off. |
| 4763 |
And they were, for the most part. Andy remembered her and shook her hand with a smile this time. He even remembered that her husband was a doctor. And Julie was cool to her, but politer this time, she even asked how their trip had gone, and told her that her father had brought her a really great sweater from Paris. |
| 4764 |
They talked about business again then and the children never reappeared. When Cal went for a swim, Meredith watched him. He had a long powerful body, and said he'd been on the swimming team in college. He looked a lot younger than his fifty one years, and there was no denying that he was very attractive. |
| 4765 |
They had a lot to talk about, and he didn't want to push it. He invited them to dinner the following night, and Meredith accepted and told him that Steve was anxious to meet him. She didn't tell him why, that Steve was minimally nervous about him, because for the most part she thought Steve was teasing about it. |
| 4766 |
She suspected, and hoped, that the two men would like each other, and she respected each of them, though for different reasons. When she met Steve at the gate, he came off in wrinkled khaki pants and a shirt that looked like it had never been ironed, and he was still wearing the clogs he wore at work. |
| 4767 |
She was going to meet clients with Cal, and Steve had rented a car to go to his assorted appointments. She had suggested he use a car and driver, which wasn't his style. He had gotten a couple of maps from the place where he'd rented the car, and said he was sure he could find the hospitals where he was going. |
| 4768 |
They visited three of his most important customers, and had a tour of one of the hospitals where his diagnostic equipment was in greatest use. It was a fascinating afternoon for her, and Cal was pleased with her reaction. And when she left him at the end of the day, he reminded her to be at his house at seven thirty. |
| 4769 |
Cal had told them that Pacific Heights would be the place for them to live, and they had driven through it, with its neat rows of pretty Victorians and brick houses and colorful stuccos. Everything looked tidy and neat and clean, and the streets were immaculate. And Steve had fallen in love with the city. |
| 4770 |
Steve had his own pet peeves in what related to medicine, and they exchanged points of view for hours, and when they left, Cal wished him luck the next day at his interview, and told Merrie he'd see her in the morning. She was in Cal's office with him when Steve called at noon, and he sounded exhilarated. |
| 4771 |
They couldn't believe it. Particularly when she told them she was leaving in three weeks for California. But after the initial shock, they were gracious about it, and gave her a very pleasant dinner the week before she left. It was hard to believe that a twelve year long chapter in her career was ending. |
| 4772 |
Lucas was particularly sorry about it, because he knew it meant that it would be at least another year before he could leave trauma for research. But they were already looking for someone to take Steve's place, although they had no prospects yet. And if they found someone soon enough, Steve had promised to train them. |
| 4773 |
The one thing he had promised them was that he wouldn't leave until they had a replacement. And the hospital in California had agreed to go along with it, even if it delayed him slightly. They had been entirely reasonable about it. Steve left for the hospital when she left for the airport the next day. |
| 4774 |
She had left her office for the last time on Friday, and she was sorry to leave her friends there. There had been some tears, some warm good byes, and a lot of good wishes. And as she turned to leave the apartment, she glanced around as though she was never coming back again, trying to remember what she'd forgotten. |
| 4775 |
She called Steve as often as she could, to let him know what was happening in her life, but as always, it wasn't easy to get him. But when they did manage to speak, he was happy for her. He was even understanding when she told him she had too much work to get away and come back to New York over the first weekend. |
| 4776 |
Cal had invited her to come to dinner the night before, and she refused his offer and ate a sandwich while working. But when he called on Sunday afternoon, having gotten more work done by then, she relented. She had an early dinner with him and the kids, and this time all of them were fairly pleasant to her. |
| 4777 |
It was sad coming home to the empty apartment at night, when he finally got off duty, and he felt like a kid who had no one to play with. It had been two weeks since he'd seen her. But the real crunch came on her third weekend in California. They had promised each other that nothing would stand in their way this time. |
| 4778 |
And the first house they saw was a disappointment. But after that, they saw two others, both of them in Pacific Heights. One needed too much work, though it was a pretty, old house and had great views, and the other seemed a little small to her, although Cal liked it. But she thought it was a little claustrophobic. |
| 4779 |
And she was so pleasant to be with. He had even enjoyed house hunting with her, and they had both laughed when the real estate agent thought he was her husband, but it had been a normal assumption. He had noticed that she hadn't been too anxious to find a house, and seemed to find fault with all of them. |
| 4780 |
And she had to tear herself away to leave him. He had promised to fly out to see her the next weekend. They only had five weeks left before he moved out, four if he could leave before Christmas. Their apartment hadn't sold yet, but there were some people who were interested and hadn't made their mind up. |
| 4781 |
But the Thanksgiving they'd shared had given each of them the strength they needed to get through the last stretch of their seemingly interminable separation. She had been living in California without him for six weeks now. And the good feelings they'd shared over the holiday carried them through the next few days. |
| 4782 |
But everything was up in the air now. All she could do was hope that a job would open up in a trauma unit somewhere quickly. December was a grueling month for both of them, as it turned out. At work, Cal was trying to tie up a lot of loose ends before the end of the year that kept them working day and night. |
| 4783 |
All she wanted was a week in New York with Steve. Their life at the moment seemed to be filled with nothing but problems and disappointments, and for the moment worrying about it was overshadowing her love for her job. Knowing they would be apart for several more months, she was beginning to worry about her marriage. |
| 4784 |
And in the end, it'll be good for him too. I'm sure he's willing to make some sacrifices for your career, Merrie. He loves you. Women do this kind of thing for their husbands all the time. They give up jobs they like, and friends, and homes, to follow their husbands when they're transferred. He just has to be patient. |
| 4785 |
And she had something for him too. She had left the orange box in the hall with her handbag, and she went to get it before she opened his present. As she handed it to him, he recognized the box and ribbon instantly. It was from Hermes, she had bought the gift for him the last time she'd been in the city. |
| 4786 |
They sat and talked for a while afterward, and at eleven o'clock, he flipped on the news, so they could see what the weather was doing in the East. There had been stories about people snowed in and stranded all week, and all the major cites and airports had been shut down one by one as the storms continued. |
| 4787 |
It was as though she belonged there, with his little family. It was a strange illusion, and she was quiet when he dropped her off that night. He took her upstairs, and walked her into the apartment, to make sure she was all right, and he said not a word to her, he simply pulled her gently into his arms and kissed her. |
| 4788 |
Enough so to wake her up. She knew that she and Steve had to do something. They couldn't live like this forever. She took a cab to the apartment when she arrived, and the city looked like a fairyland, all covered in snow. Another light snow had already begun falling when she let herself into the apartment. |
| 4789 |
The incident with Cal on Christmas Eve had told her that no one was invulnerable, and no matter how much they loved each other, living on opposite coasts presented a real danger for them. For Meredith, it had been a warning, but she had no intention of saying that to him. She didn't want to hurt him. |
| 4790 |
They eventually forced him to ditch her, but not until after she had a baby. He left her high and dry during her residency with no money and a newborn baby. The kid is five now, and she's living in some miserable walk up apartment on the West Side. She's an incredible physician. We were lucky to find her. |
| 4791 |
He had always been faithful to her, and so had she. But she also knew it would never happen again. Cal knew how upset she had been, and she also knew she wouldn't let it happen. Steve took Meredith to the airport when she left, and they looked like newlyweds as they hugged and kissed and held each other. |
| 4792 |
She was at her desk, looking busy and pleased when Cal got in, and he stood in her office doorway for a moment. He was searching her face for signs of awkwardness with him, but there were none. She looked up and smiled at him. And he could see that things were different than they had been ever so briefly. |
| 4793 |
She was a little more businesslike, a little more cautious with him, but by the end of the day, everything seemed back to normal. And when she left, she waved cheerily and said she'd see him in the morning. It was as though she had shut him out just a little bit, but he couldn't say that she was wrong to do so. |
| 4794 |
He invited her to dinner with the kids that weekend, but she said she had too much work to do. She spent the day in the office on Saturday, and on Sunday she went to look at more houses in the city, and this time he didn't offer to go with her. And when his kids asked where she was, he told them she was busy. |
| 4795 |
And by the time he came back from his week off with Meredith over the holidays, Anna had gained the respect of everyone she worked with. What's more, they liked her. She filled him in on everything she'd done the morning he returned, and she had kept careful notes for him, and when he read them, he was astonished. |
| 4796 |
The world outside, the world beyond their walls, seemed at times like it was on another planet. And all they had was this, and each other. It formed strange bonds between people. Like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean. But Steve was sad for her, she sounded hurt, and angry, and bitter, and disappointed. |
| 4797 |
He had heard too many stories. And hers didn't surprise him either. He just felt sorry for her. She was on her own, in tough circumstances, and somehow she managed. It was such a far cry from Meredith with her big job, and huge salary, the stock portfolio she had put together for them, and their comfortable apartment. |
| 4798 |
And the packaging wasn't bad either. He saw her leave in jeans and a T shirt one night, and a ski jacket, with her hair down, and she was stunning. He couldn't even begin to imagine how great she would look in real clothes, with makeup. But she never wore either, she didn't have them, and didn't want them. |
| 4799 |
By mid January they were fast friends, and he had come to rely on her. She was a person you could count on, and he did, often. She was hard on him at times, when she thought he was wrong about something, and she wasn't afraid to argue with him. But what surprised him most was that he liked that about her. |
| 4800 |
Meredith hung around the house waiting for him to get up, but it was nine o'clock that night when he finally did. They chatted for a couple of hours, and things were better than they had been earlier in the day, but there was no denying that the atmosphere between them was different than it had once been. |
| 4801 |
It was a large group, and managing the arrangements was like organizing the transport of an invading army. Meals had to be planned, activities for every night, luaus, dinner parties, hula displays, and of course meetings. By the day before they left, Meredith was ready to throw them all out the window. |
| 4802 |
But this trip was strictly for adults, although they were behaving like high school kids going on tour with the school band. Before they even left, there were squabbles about room assignments. Several people were familiar with the hotel, and had preferences about floors, corners, heights, views, and air conditioning. |
| 4803 |
But on the day they left, as they congregated in the airport wearing everything from Hawaiian shirts to white linen suits, they were all in good spirits. It looked like a traveling cocktail party, and when she finally settled into her seat on the plane next to Cal, in first class, she was exhausted. |
| 4804 |
He was someone she visited once or twice a month, like an old friend, or an old boyfriend. There were times when he no longer seemed like her husband. He was no longer part of her daily activities, never there to laugh with or talk to, or share her problems with, except when she could reach him on his pager. |
| 4805 |
More than anything, he wanted her to be happy. Because if she wasn't happy, there was always the chance that she would leave the company, and the thought of that terrified him. Dow Tech needed her now, and so did he, to run the financial end of his business. More than that, he needed her personally. |
| 4806 |
It was as though they had been destined to meet and work together, and build an empire. They were like two halves of one entity that fit perfectly, and at times, she didn't understand it. It was hard to believe they hadn't known each other all their lives. It felt that way sometimes, even more so than with Steve. |
| 4807 |
But Cal understood everything about it. In some ways, that was easier for her. The plane landed shortly after noon, local time, and she and Cal herded their charges off the plane, and managed to get everyone on the bus to the hotel. The luggage would come later, and whatever was lost would eventually be found. |
| 4808 |
A luau had been arranged for them, and afterward there was to be dancing. The meetings weren't scheduled to start until the next morning. She and Cal were going to kick them off with a short speech, and after that, there was going to be a slide show. She had it all organized, and they had talked about it on the plane. |
| 4809 |
There had never been any gossip about them, and everyone knew she was married. She talked about Steve often. Cal went to his own room then, and settled in, and their luggage arrived a few minutes later. Nothing had gotten lost apparently, which was nothing short of a miracle, with a group that size. |
| 4810 |
So did he in a bathing suit with a matching shirt and a pair of driving shoes. They made a very handsome couple, and no one would ever have suspected they weren't married. They seemed so intimate and so comfortable with each other, it would have been hard to believe that they had never slept with each other. |
| 4811 |
He did, in fact he owned several, thanks to Meredith, who bought them for him, but he never wore them. They went down to the beach, and one of the beach boys set them up on deck chairs with towels, and Meredith took off her shirt, and lay down in her bikini. And although he was tempted to, Cal made no comment. |
| 4812 |
She hated to even think about it. But she knew that if things didn't get better, and one of them didn't make a move soon, it could happen. She was just beginning to face that. After nearly four months of living apart, they seemed to be heading in different directions, and they had to do something about it soon. |
| 4813 |
He felt better after talking to her, and after they found their way back to their chairs, they discovered that some of the others had come down to the beach as well, and were lying near them. But Cal looked like himself again, and the cloud that seemed to have overshadowed him for awhile had been dispelled. |
| 4814 |
They ordered drinks on the beach, and chatted with the others. And after a couple of hours, Meredith and Cal went back upstairs to change. She took a shower and put on a white silk dress, and some turquoise beads, her hair was clean and shining, and she was wearing high heeled white sandals when he next saw her. |
| 4815 |
She looked incredible, but he could no longer forget how she had looked on the beach in her bikini. Everything about her was unforgettable, and when she smiled at him on the terrace they shared, he could feel something go weak inside him. And she knew him so well that he was worried that she'd see it. |
| 4816 |
He had a bottle of champagne in his bar, and he poured a glass for each of them. She hadn't had anything to drink since the glass of wine they'd shared at the beginning of the evening. The others had all indulged themselves on scorpions and mai tais, and she knew there'd be a few headaches in the morning. |
| 4817 |
It wasn't just desire that raged between them. It was so much more. It was as though they were part of one body, one soul. And whatever happened next, she knew that for this one moment in time, she was his right now. He took her in his arms again, and held her, and every inch of him hungered for her. |
| 4818 |
Meredith had no idea how to resolve it. There was no question in her mind anymore, she was in love with Cal, and he with her, but the question was what, if anything, to do about it. They had no right to what they shared, yet neither of them could bear to think of ending it. The dream had just begun. |
| 4819 |
But what Meredith felt when she was with him, more than anything, was a kind of unspoken intimacy and greater depth between them. It was intangible, but very real, and enhanced everything they had shared until that moment. And it was so obvious to her that it seemed incredible that no one else could see it. |
| 4820 |
And they walked into lunch side by side. For the rest of the trip, they did what they had come to do, and the retreat went extremely well from everyone's point of view. And at night, they discovered new worlds in each other's arms, and cemented the bond that had been growing for months between them. |
| 4821 |
By the time they left Hawaii, Meredith was so in love with him that in some ways, she wished the world could share their happiness with them. But there was no way for them to do that. More than ever, they had to be discreet. Cal took her to her apartment when they got home, and spent hours there with her. |
| 4822 |
But what that meant, for both of them, was that this could be finite. It was only a question of how long it would last, how they could manage it with the least potential damage for everyone, and if it was worth it. For the moment, they were both convinced it would be, no matter how limited their future. |
| 4823 |
She called Steve back that afternoon, and told him that something had come up at the office, and she had to see customers that weekend. He said he understood, but he didn't sound happy about it. And she felt like an ax murderer again when she hung up. She was doing something she had never done with him before. |
| 4824 |
She continued the affair after our marriage, and on and off while we were having children. We were married for seven years, and she was involved with him the entire time, and had been for several years before that. She never told me what was going on, and she left me for him. I'd say that's very different. |
| 4825 |
And the conversation was lively. The children teased their father about a number of things, his hair, the way he dressed, the kind of women he liked, or didn't, even the way he played golf. But it was all in relatively good humor. It was obvious that despite whatever foibles they saw, they genuinely loved him. |
| 4826 |
It was quiet in trauma unit that night, and Anna didn't need to call him for anything. She handled the unit well by herself, and the residents and nurses all liked her. She was still hoping the job would become permanent eventually, but there was no sign of it yet. Steve didn't seem to be going anywhere. |
| 4827 |
They had canceled yet another weekend, and it was worrying her that they seemed to be drifting apart so swiftly. It concerned her even more that the life that she was building with Cal was becoming more solid by the minute. They saw each other nearly every night, and he stayed over whenever he could get away with it. |
| 4828 |
She had dinner with him and the kids, and went to basketball games and movies and other places with them, every weekend. She was becoming a fixture. And he was beginning to feel like her husband. No one at work had spotted anything yet, and they were supremely careful to see that that didn't happen. |
| 4829 |
Everyone seemed to assume that they were the same friends they'd always been since she'd started working for him. But sooner or later she knew that someone might discover them, and then they would have a serious problem. It would hardly have been appropriate for people to know she was cheating on her husband. |
| 4830 |
It sounded good to both of them, and Meredith tried not to think of what they were doing. They were living a fantasy that felt good now, but it couldn't go on forever, particularly once Steve found a job and moved to California. No matter how they avoided it now, eventually they knew they'd have to face it. |
| 4831 |
She wanted to take a bath, and relax, and give him some time with his children before she joined him. She didn't want to wear out her welcome with them. She drove home to the furnished apartment she was still living in. She still hadn't found a house she liked, and she was spending less time working on it. |
| 4832 |
She sensed, more than saw anything different. There was just an eerie feeling as she walked into her living room, and set down her briefcase, and as she did, Steve walked out of her bedroom with a huge bouquet of flowers. She nearly jumped a foot when she saw him. The last thing she expected was to see Steve there. |
| 4833 |
The night before hadn't been much of a success for either of them. She had been in tears by the time it was over. They had a late dinner at the airport before he left, and she stood watching his plane after he got on the red eye. He had kissed her before he boarded, and she had held him tightly as they stood there. |
| 4834 |
And she sat crying for a while, not sure what to do now. The next call, an hour later, was from Cal. He sounded a mess, and confessed that it had been a nightmarish weekend for him. He had been going insane thinking about her. He didn't want to tell her how jealous he had been, imagining her in bed with Steve. |
| 4835 |
Anna showed him the charts, and reviewed all her cases with him, and he was impressed by everything she'd done, and grateful for her shoulder to cry on about his lost weekend. They worked together all afternoon, and did surgery together that night, and on Tuesday morning she went home to her daughter. |
| 4836 |
She looked pretty and soft, and the body that disappeared in scrubs was very much in evidence in the angora. Her jeans looked like they were wallpapered to her, and the sweater was molded to her breasts in a way that was very distracting. Her hair was down, and she was wearing a pair of comfortable old slippers. |
| 4837 |
She turned it on for a minute so they could get their bearings, and then turned it off and locked the door. He undressed her in the dark, and lay on the bed with her, and he could feel and sense her more than see her. But there was just enough light from the street lamp for him to see the silhouette of her beauty. |
| 4838 |
All he wanted was time with her, and he figured they would come to a decision later. He wasn't ready to make a commitment to her anyway. In some ways, this was perfect for both of them. And if Meredith had called Steve at home sometimes, she would have realized he was no longer sleeping in the apartment. |
| 4839 |
He had thought about it a lot lately and he was worried about what they were doing. This time, he asked her before he came out. He didn't want to surprise her. She sounded hesitant at first, but she had no grounds to refuse him. She hadn't seen him in a month, and she knew that she couldn't avoid him forever. |
| 4840 |
It told her he was a decent person, but also that he was as confused as she was. The one thing he knew was that he didn't like the idea of her spending the weekend with Steve, though he said nothing about it when she told him. He didn't want to put any pressure on her, and make the situation harder for her. |
| 4841 |
It had gotten too good between them in the last month, and it was dangerous. He wanted to bail out now before he really hurt her. He had been more or less living with her for four weeks now, and he knew that if he wasn't prepared to make a commitment to her eventually, it would be bad for her, and Felicia. |
| 4842 |
I have to try this one last time. And if it doesn't work out, we can talk about us later, if you still want to. But right now, I owe it to him to see what we've still got. I don't think there's much left, but we have a lot of history between us. You and I have two months, and a very uncertain future. |
| 4843 |
He didn't want to confuse or pressure her. He sat there stone faced. But the problem was, after barely two months, he didn't know what he wanted either. He wanted her, but he didn't know under what conditions. And commitment was a big issue, and not one he was willing to undertake based on seven weeks of passion. |
| 4844 |
She had to find a place in the city for them to live now, and she didn't want to do that either. She didn't want to do any of it. She didn't want to leave Cal. Didn't want to live with Steve. Didn't want anything except what she'd had for the past two months, but she knew she had to give that up now. |
| 4845 |
It was why he wanted to end it now, instead of later. He had realized he was falling in love with her, and because of that he had decided to press Meredith about his moving out there. He knew that if he waited, the damage to Anna would be greater. And he wanted to stop it before he hurt her too badly to recover. |
| 4846 |
What right did he have to make all the decisions, especially one that affected her so deeply? She loved him more than she had any man, and she had known the ground rules from the beginning. She just hadn't expected to fall in love with him to the extent she had, and so quickly. It made it harder to let go now. |
| 4847 |
You were always free to do what you wanted, and so was I. I knew what the deal was from the beginning. I just didn't think you'd go so soon. I figured it would take you months to find a job, or maybe longer. I didn't realize you'd be willing to go without one, or with a job that isn't worthy of you. |
| 4848 |
She never opened the door again, and after a few minutes, he walked slowly downstairs, thinking of what it had meant to him for four weeks to be there. It had been a home to him, a haven, and a refuge. And now he had cast her back into the world, and exiled himself to a life he was unsure of in California. |
| 4849 |
But she was right. She wanted a clean break, and he had to let her have it, if that was what she wanted. He wondered what she was going to say to Felicia, and what the child would think, maybe that all men deserted her and her mother. It wasn't a pretty picture. But neither was his desertion of them, and he knew that. |
| 4850 |
The realtor had a buyer for them at the end of the first week, at a lower price than they had wanted for it, but it was in the ballpark, and he and Meredith discussed it. In the end, she decided it was easier to sell it than to keep it empty or try to rent it. It was in escrow before he moved to California. |
| 4851 |
He stayed at a hotel for the last three days, and on his last day at work, the nurses gave him a party. Anna wasn't there, as usual, and most of the nurses cried when he left. No one could imagine the trauma unit without him. It was raining the day he left New York. He carried his medical bag, and one small suitcase. |
| 4852 |
And within two hours, he had made a mess of everything, his clothes were all over the bedroom floor, his shaving gear was all over her sink, and he was cooking her dinner. But nothing about his arrival felt like a celebration, and he was disappointed to hear she had rented an apartment for them in the city. |
| 4853 |
It was a relief to go to work, and at least she didn't have to commute for the moment. She got faxes from Cal all week, about potential customers and research labs he was visiting in Europe. But all of the faxes were impersonal, and she was simply part of a distribution list. And he never called her. |
| 4854 |
And suddenly it all mattered to her. In her head, she compared everything to Cal, who looked immaculate and well dressed and perfectly pressed from the moment he got up in the morning. And everything he did and touched was as orderly as she was. And predictably, their move that weekend was a nightmare. |
| 4855 |
And tensions only got worse when he started his new job. As it turned out, they had lied to him. He was the lowest man in the ER and they were using him like a paramedic. Even the nurses had more responsibility than he did. They were having him do intakes, and all he did for the first two weeks was shuffle papers. |
| 4856 |
He treated her like an enemy and a stranger. It was as though in the past four weeks, he had closed the door on her forever. She had hoped they could be friends, the way they had been in the beginning. But she realized now that too much had happened between them. Too much love and hope and loss and disappointment. |
| 4857 |
He picked on her constantly, asked for reports and projections ten times a day, and quarreled with all of her conclusions and opinions. They almost had an open fight in one of the board meetings, which had never happened to them before, and she gave him hell about it later, and felt like a shrew when she said it. |
| 4858 |
He had had three tequilas, and a brandy chaser. But she didn't say a word to him. She was lying on the futon he'd bought, and pretended to be sleeping. But she'd been crying since he left the apartment. This wasn't the way she wanted to live. There was no camaraderie, no compassion, and no friendship left between them. |
| 4859 |
They just lay in lonely misery, as the walls between them grew higher and higher. The only thing worse than April was May. Despite good weather, their lives seemed to be filled with storm clouds. And they spent most of their time avoiding each other. And when their furniture finally arrived, it was small comfort. |
| 4860 |
It was like a relic of a lost world, and none of it seemed to fit right in the apartment. And as far as Meredith was concerned, the place looked dismal. By late May, they were ready to kill each other, and she was thinking of quitting her job. It was becoming more and more impossible for her to work with Callan. |
| 4861 |
It was no longer important, and he didn't want to hurt her. For him, the marriage was over, and Anna was a thing of the past, and had never impacted on their marriage. If anything, she had inspired him to save it. But he knew now that nothing could have done that. It was a relief to finally know it. |
| 4862 |
Callan was as disagreeable to her as he always was now, and she said nothing to him. Her personal life was no longer his problem. And she had nothing to say to him, except about what concerned his business. As the shock of Steve's departure settled a little bit, she began to realize he had been right. |
| 4863 |
The respect that they had once shared seemed to be returning, if not the friendship. And three weeks after Steve left, he asked her to help him entertain some analysts from London. She wasn't anxious to go out with him at night, but he said he was taking them to dinner in the city, and it was easy for her to join them. |
| 4864 |
She said she'd rather meet him there, but he insisted. The dinner went very well, and he seemed to relax. She wore a new dress, and had her hair cut that morning, and she was finally beginning to feel like her old self, not the one who'd been in love with Cal, but the person she'd been even before she'd met him. |
| 4865 |
And she told herself she wouldn't answer the phone, thanked him for dinner again, and left him on the sidewalk, while she walked upstairs to her apartment. He was still standing there when he saw her turn on the lights, and then got in his car and drove away, and she stood at her window, thinking about him. |
| 4866 |
There was no point. For her at least, it was over. He called her the next day, as he said he would, and she told him she was busy that night, and had forgotten. And when the phone rang late that night, she didn't answer. She had nothing to say to him. And there was nothing she wanted to hear from him. |
| 4867 |
He had heard about it from a doctor he knew from med school. It was a small dingy place with a battered sign outside. And it looked as bad as the places where they sent their clients. They gave Steve a brochure, a long list of countries that they served, and a description of the kind of jobs they offered. |
| 4868 |
He thought of calling Harvey Lucas to say hello, but he wasn't ready to talk about Merrie yet, or the fiasco in California, so he decided not to. He stayed with an old med school friend, and spent most of his time walking, and going to museums. It was the first time in years that he had some leisure time. |
| 4869 |
He wanted to say goodbye to her, and to tell her that he was sorry he had been so hard on her when he left for California. He had no intention of trying to start something up with her again, he knew he had no right to do that. He just wanted to make sure she was all right, and maybe see Felicia. He had missed her. |
| 4870 |
He had missed them both, and he hated the fact that he had never said good bye to Felicia. It was the wrong way to leave a child, he knew, to simply disappear out of her life without farewell or explanation. And he felt even worse about the way he'd left her mother. It was a warm, sunny day in June. |
| 4871 |
Everyone in the building knew she was a doctor. She found him in the midst of a small crowd, and she was carrying her medical bag. They had told her someone had been wounded. She had heard the shot, but at first thought nothing of it. She thought maybe a truck had backfired. But as she looked at him, she heard sirens. |
| 4872 |
His hands were so numb he could hardly hold the cigarette butt his buddy had given him as a Christmas gift, let alone light it. The wind from the mountains went right through your bones, it was the worst winter Italy had ever seen, or so they said, and he suddenly longed for the torrid heat of the desert. |
| 4873 |
Secretly, he hated them for the tawdry lives they led, and the life they had condemned him to. He wanted so much more than that. And they hated him in return for his good grades, his bright mind, his starring roles in his high school plays, and the things he said to them, about other lives, other worlds, other people. |
| 4874 |
Even sitting quietly in the foxhole, cracking bad jokes, and talking about Harvard, one sensed that. They slept huddled side by side that night and the rain abated the next morning. The following night they slept in a barn they'd taken over in a minor skirmish, and two days later they headed for the Volturno River. |
| 4875 |
The thought of how far they had come and how much they had accomplished, and that they had freed the Paris of his dreams left him breathless. And the shouts from the people who lined the streets only made him cry more, as the troops marched from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame for a service of thanksgiving. |
| 4876 |
They stopped for a cup of coffee at a tiny bistro on a corner, and were given a small steaming cup of the chicory everyone drank, and a plate of tiny biscuits by the owner's wife as she kissed them on both cheeks. When it came time to leave she wouldn't let them pay, no matter how much they insisted. |
| 4877 |
It was less than an hour before she emerged, carrying some books in a string bag. Her hair was combed loose now, and she looked even more beautiful than she had an hour before. She saw them immediately as she stepped out of her house, started to back inside for a moment, and then decided against it. |
| 4878 |
At first she looked as though she were going to brush past, and then she stopped, the green eyes blazing, and looked at him. The look she gave him spoke volumes, but she also looked as though she understood there was no point in trying to say anything because he wouldn't understand, and what's more he didn't want to. |
| 4879 |
She called him Julien and they chatted for a moment before she ordered a cup of tea, but she refused to order anything to eat until Sam ordered for her. He ordered some cheese and bread, and in spite of herself, she devoured it. He noticed then for the first time, how thin she was when he looked at her closely. |
| 4880 |
Tutoring to make enough money to survive. She had often thought of the Resistance after her mother died, but she was too frightened, and her brother had died such a pointless death. He hadn't died for glory, he had died betrayed by one of their French neighbors. Everyone seemed to be collaborating, and a traitor. |
| 4881 |
Except for a handful of loyal Frenchmen, and they were being hunted down and slaughtered. Everything had changed. And Solange along with it. The laughing, ebullient girl she had once been, had become a smoldering, angry, distant woman. And yet this boy had somehow reached out and touched her and she knew it. |
| 4882 |
She gave him a formal little handshake and thanked him for dinner, and then with a resolute sound, the heavy door closed behind her. As Sam made his way slowly through the streets of Paris, he felt as though his whole life had changed in only a few hours. He wasn't sure how, but he knew that this woman. |
| 4883 |
In a subtler way, it was worse than what he'd been through, and she had been defenseless. She'd had to live by her wits, avoiding being arrested or tortured or merely raped by the Germans who felt they owned Paris and all the women in it. And after her father had died, she had had to support her mother. |
| 4884 |
She seemed so much more dependent on him now, more trusting and open. But two weeks later, he got his orders. They were moving on to the German front, there was a war to fight after all, and at least the end was in sight now. Everyone was certain that with the rest of Europe liberated, Germany would fall quickly. |
| 4885 |
She could not bear the thought of that. She had lost everyone in the war, and perhaps now she would lose him too. It was enough to make her fearful of loving him, and yet, like him, she was unable to stop it. It was a passion greater than both of them. Sam felt as though his soul was being torn from hers. |
| 4886 |
He couldn't bear seeing her standing there as he marched away She was sobbing the last time he saw her. When they reached the Ardennes, Sam fought with an even greater vengeance than he had before. It was as though the harder he fought the quicker he could get back to Solange and take her home with him. |
| 4887 |
There was such relief on her face when she saw him that it was easy to read what her feelings were, and the three days flew by faster than either of them could have dreamed. And she cried copiously this time when he left her at the station to return to Berlin, and from there back to the States for his discharge. |
| 4888 |
But he had to make some money first. He had already decided not to go back to Harvard, and he wanted to try his luck as an actor. But he was willing to do anything to make the money he needed to pay Solange's passage. He was going to have her come to the States on a tourist visa, and marry her the minute she arrived. |
| 4889 |
He didn't get the part, but he felt a little closer than he had before, and he knew where he had gone wrong. He discussed it at length with his acting coach, and when he auditioned a second time in late July, this time he got a walk on part in an off Broadway show, and he wrote about it to Solange as a major victory. |
| 4890 |
It was a brilliantly sunny day, and it was warm on the docks, with a gentle breeze. It was a perfect day for her to come home to him, and then suddenly she was free and she flew into his arms, her hat askew and tears pouring down her cheeks as he kissed her and held her in his powerful arms as he cried too. |
| 4891 |
And it was obvious that at twenty eight, she was terrified of never getting married. There were a lot of girls like her after the war, girls who would have gotten married years before, if all the best men hadn't been overseas, as they claimed. And she was working hard on Arthur to change her status. |
| 4892 |
Sam had seen her for what she was when he stayed with them, and he felt sorry for Arthur and the pressures he let everyone put him under. His mother wanted him to herself so she could keep a grip on him and live vicariously through him. And she saw all the women in his life, and even his male friends as competition. |
| 4893 |
Time did not prove him wrong, and he and Arthur met for lunch, sometimes with Solange, but their meetings did not include Arthur's wife, who had announced, now that she had his ring firmly on her left hand, that she wanted to go to law school, and did not intend to have any children until much later. |
| 4894 |
It was a joint effort which bore fruit, sooner than they expected. His big break came just after Christmas. He got a leading role in an off Broadway play, and got extraordinarily good reviews that won him the respect of the critics. The play closed in four and a half months, but the experience had been invaluable. |
| 4895 |
And that summer he did summer stock at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and while they were there, he decided to look up his sister. It was embarrassing to realize that in the three years since he'd been home from the war, he had never tried to find her, and Solange scolded him for his lack of family devotion. |
| 4896 |
Eileen said very little and she was probably more than a little drunk as they sat in her living room on an ugly street, in an ugly suburb of Boston. Her hair was still bleached blond, with dark roots, and her dress was so tight she might as well have worn nothing, which would obviously have pleased her husband. |
| 4897 |
He came up to see Sam in summer stock once that summer, and was greatly impressed by his performance. And of course he made all the appropriate apologies for Marjorie, who felt terrible not to be able to join them, but she had supposedly gone to visit her parents at their summer home near Philadelphia. |
| 4898 |
Everything seemed to be beginning for them. Sam was twenty six years old, and Solange was twenty three. It seemed light years from the day they had first seen her, after the liberation of Paris. She was so elegant and sleek, she was even more beautiful now, and she seemed so constantly full of life and excitement. |
| 4899 |
He only did his best to bolster Solange's spirits during their frequent lunches. It wasn't fair to hurt a woman who was so much in love with her husband. And he often found himself wishing that he had won over Sam, years before, but it was too late now. Solange was married to Sam, and she adored him. |
| 4900 |
It was the longest run he had ever had in any play, and they were both sad when it was over. He took her and the girls to Europe after that for a summer in Saint Tropez. It was something he had always talked about. He had been there during the war, though only for a day, and he had always wanted to go back there. |
| 4901 |
It was emotional for her going back. It was nine years since she had left, and there were painful memories for her there, but happy ones too. Hilary was only five years old, but Solange hoped she would enjoy the trip, and Alexandra was still only a baby. They had brought along a nurse to help them with the children. |
| 4902 |
It was a far cry from the way Solange had left France, with her steamship ticket in her pocket and barely enough money to eat. She had left owning three dresses and two pairs of shoes, and the hat on her head, and an old worn out coat that had been her mother's. And now here she was with trunks of clothes. |
| 4903 |
Solange tried to discourage him, but she knew it was hopeless, and as they sailed back to the States, she thought about what a lovely trip it had been. It had felt good to go back, and good to go home again as they returned. New York was home now. She had lived there for nine years and it meant a great deal to her. |
| 4904 |
The balance was infinitely less than he had expected. Sam spent everything he made, mainly on his life style and his girlfriends. In fact, he had already borrowed ahead against future salary in his next play, and aside from the small amount of cash in his checking account, he was in debt up to his eyeballs. |
| 4905 |
He was known to be a generous man, and he had never skimped on anything, once he could afford to. But now it left him with ten thousand dollars in the bank and ten times that in debts. It was amazing how little one knew about one's friends, and Arthur wished he had talked to him more sternly years before. |
| 4906 |
Arthur had tried to talk to Marjorie about it, bemoaning the children's fate, and hoping to stir her sympathy for them. But he was disappointed to find she only had harsh words for them, making comments about their undoubtedly being gypsies like their parents. She seemed to have no compassion whatsoever for them. |
| 4907 |
But in the next few days he barely saw his wife. He had his hands full with Sam and the girls, the press constantly badgering all of them, even the children, and he had to make the funeral arrangements for Solange. There was no one else to do it. The funeral was set for three days after Sam had gone to jail. |
| 4908 |
Hilary sat very stiff next to him, and once she walked right up to it and stared down at Solange, and then she kissed her, and returned to her seat with a wooden look of grief, as though she were numb from the immensity of her pain, but she wouldn't let Arthur touch her. In fact, she wouldn't let anyone close to her. |
| 4909 |
She stood silently, and then suddenly reached out and pulled two white roses from the heavy blanket of flowers that covered the casket, and handed one of them to Alexandra. Alexandra started to cry, and whispered that she wanted Mommy to wake up, and she couldn't breathe like that with the box closed. |
| 4910 |
It was as though she knew her mother was dead, but none of them could face it. Even little Megan had begun to cry, as though she understood too, and the nurse had to take her outside where she could wail in the winter sunshine. It seemed incongruous to bury her on such a pretty day, but perhaps not. |
| 4911 |
He brought him one white rose from the casket, like the one Hilary had given Axie. Arthur looked very tall and thin and pale, as he entered the holding cell in his dark suit with his homburg in his hand. He looked like the messenger of Death, and in a way he was, as Sam looked up at him and trembled. |
| 4912 |
Even his daughters seemed remote now. He wondered how much they would hate him in later years, when they discovered, and fully understood, that he had murdered their mother. It would make any kind of relationship with them impossible. Everything was impossible now. And life was no longer worth living. |
| 4913 |
It was an endless period of time. The nurse they had was not particularly pleasant to them, Solange had never selected her nurses with great care because she was around all the time anyway, and it was she who took care of the girls whenever possible, so the charm and skill of the nurse was never very important. |
| 4914 |
He couldn't even bear thinking of the children. Arthur had tried bringing photographs of them to Sam, but he was totally withdrawn these days, talking only of Solange and the past, and chronicling his sins and mistakes and transgressions endlessly. He was like an old man, whose entire life was behind him. |
| 4915 |
He reminded her that he was her godfather and that he loved her very much, but she stood politely listening, and never responded. She was an odd, distant girl, unusually quiet now that Solange was gone, and she spoke of her father as though she no longer knew him, as though he had died years before her mother. |
| 4916 |
But the trial itself was a nightmare. The prosecutor was swift and sure, and he had found every tramp, whore, and starlet whom Sam had ever slept with. There was a parade of women dragged through, testifying to the fact that he drank too much, was sometimes violent when he was drunk, and had no morals whatsoever. |
| 4917 |
It had been difficult to get any real feeling from him when he was on the stand, or to believe that he had actually loved his wife. But he was so far gone in his own guilt and depression that he could no longer depict any semblance of real emotion, and Arthur had feared that would hurt him terribly with the jury. |
| 4918 |
They were flesh and blood, and he loved them. And Sam and Solange had loved them too. It was desperately important to Arthur that they not lose a sense of that, or feel that they were being abandoned. The idea of putting them up for adoption sounded barbaric to him, but he just didn't know what else to do with them. |
| 4919 |
And things got even more complicated the following week when both the maid and the nurse announced that they were leaving. They had stayed long enough in terrible conditions. They both seemed outraged by the scandal that had been foisted on them and had remarkably little compassion for the children. |
| 4920 |
And the children were so adorable, he was sure she'd fall in love with them the minute she saw them. But it was something less than love at first sight when Arthur drove the three girls to Charlestown. He had explained to Hilary the day before that they were going to stay with their aunt Eileen for the summer. |
| 4921 |
And he did not tell anyone that he would be closing the apartment and selling everything as soon as the children had left it. They would be better off with whatever meager amount he could eke from the sale of the furniture, and not having their funds depleted by paying rent for a duplex on Sutton Place. |
| 4922 |
But it was easy to see what she thought when they arrived in Charlestown. The house was a small frame house on a dark street, with shutters that had fallen off in the bitter winds of the previous winters. The paint was peeling everywhere, the yard was overgrown with weeds, and two of the front steps were broken. |
| 4923 |
But this woman was a parody of all that was cheap and beaten and ugly. She looked well beyond her thirty nine years, and the ravages of booze had taken their toll on her early. She might have been attractive once, but anything pleasant in her looks was long gone. She only looked hard and bitter and ugly. |
| 4924 |
But so had Sam. They had come by when he was doing summer stock in Stockbridge after the war. It seemed light years ago, but so did everything now. Arthur looked around him with a lump in his throat, hating to leave the girls there. And for a moment he hated his wife for condemning the children to this. |
| 4925 |
A thousand bucks was a hell of a nice price for a few months of inconvenience, and with luck they wouldn't be too bad. The baby looked like kind of a pain in the ass, and the five year old looked like a whiner, but the oldest one seemed to have it all in control. With luck, she'd take care of everything. |
| 4926 |
She hated people who shouted at her, or her sisters. Their mother never had, and even their nurse didn't shout at them, even though they didn't like her much and she said ugly things about their parents. Hilary handed Eileen the beer as quickly as she could, and Eileen glared at her and asked the second question. |
| 4927 |
And it seemed aeons before they heard from Arthur. He called exactly one week after he had left them and inquired how everything was. Hilary spoke mechanically and told him they were fine, but it was obvious to anyone that they weren't. Axie had started having nightmares and Megan was waking up at night. |
| 4928 |
George Gorham was nearing retirement age, but only the year before, he had married an extremely attractive young socialite in her early twenties. Margaret Millington had been one of the prettiest debutantes of the year when she came out, and after that she had impressed everyone by doing extremely well at Vassar. |
| 4929 |
A widower, he was forty years older than she, and perfect for her in every way. Except that he was unable to have children. He had been honest with her and she insisted that it didn't matter. But he was afraid it might someday, and he didn't want to lose her. And little Alexandra would fill the only void between them. |
| 4930 |
He had discussed with Margaret adopting all of the Walker children and keeping the family intact, and although it seemed a noble deed, it seemed a little excessive to them. He didn't feel young enough to take on a child of Megan's age, and a child as old as Hilary when she was adopted could present problems. |
| 4931 |
And they had finally been told that the situation was hopeless. Rebecca was unable to have children. It had been a tremendous blow to both of them, particularly as they had hoped to have several children, but now they found they would be grateful for one, which was really all they could afford at the moment. |
| 4932 |
It was a tiny room for the three of them, particularly a baby who was not quite two yet and didn't understand that she was being confined to her quarters. But in any case, Eileen agreed to keep Hilary, as long as she got the ten thousand dollars in cash. She was becoming a very profitable little venture for Eileen. |
| 4933 |
It gave her a good feeling, in case she ever decided to walk out on her husband. And maybe she'd take the kid with her, and maybe she wouldn't. Depends if she was any use to her or not, otherwise let Jack worry about feeding her, or let the lawyer take her back. She didn't owe the kid anything. But the kid owed her. |
| 4934 |
And he asked Hilary to come outside with him so they could talk for a while. He wanted to know how she really was, but when she went outside, she told him nothing. It was as though she had put an even greater distance between them, and he didn't even suspect how much she hated him for leaving them in this hellhole. |
| 4935 |
She had washed, scrubbed, cooked, and baby sat, and constantly protected them from the threatened beatings of their aunt and uncle. And at night she sang them to sleep and held them when they cried for their mother. And Arthur knew none of that as he watched Hilary's face and wondered why she was so distant. |
| 4936 |
Her sisters were leaving, and she wasn't. They would never be together again, except on visits, if their new parents would allow it, and Arthur already knew that the Abramses wouldn't. They didn't want Megan to know anything about her past life, her parents, or even her sisters. She was disappearing into a new life. |
| 4937 |
No matter what they told her, she knew something terrible was going to happen, and as Hilary packed her things, she was sure of it. Eileen was staying out of their way. She was so excited about the fresh green bills Arthur had given her that all she could do was sit in the locked bathroom and count them. |
| 4938 |
She staggered inside to her room, and threw herself across the bed, which still smelled of the two children who had just left it. She could still smell the powder she had used only moments ago on Megan when she changed her and the shampoo on Axie's bright red curls. The agony was more than Hilary could bear. |
| 4939 |
He felt as though he had destroyed the child, and yet what choice did he have, and Eileen was her aunt after all. He told himself a thousand stories to calm his conscience as he drove home again, and it was Christmas when he called again, but this time no one answered, and after that he was busy with his own life. |
| 4940 |
It was spring before Arthur saw Hilary again, and he found her even more withdrawn, with a bleak look of despair that was frightening. The house was immaculate, which was at least some relief to him, at least Eileen was making more of an effort. He had no idea that she used Hilary as a full time maid now. |
| 4941 |
At the age of ten, it fell to her to do everything, including pull the weeds outside, wash and iron her aunt's and uncle's clothes, clean, cook, and do laundry. It was remarkable that she got decent grades in school, but somehow she always did, in spite of everything. She had no friends, and no desire to make any. |
| 4942 |
What did she have in common with them? The other kids in school had normal homes, they had mothers and fathers and sisters. She had an aunt and uncle who hated her and drank too much, and a thousand chores to do before finishing her homework and going to bed around midnight. And lately, Eileen wasn't feeling well. |
| 4943 |
She could hardly eat or walk, and by Christmas she was bedridden, and Hilary instinctively knew that she was dying. Jack seemed to take no interest in her, and he was out constantly, drinking and carousing, and sometimes she saw him around the neighborhood, coming out of someone's house, and kissing another woman. |
| 4944 |
Sometimes she didn't sleep at all. She just lay on the floor next to Eileen's bed, and tended her as she was needed. Jack didn't sleep in her room anymore anyway. He slept on a big sleeping porch at the back of the house, and came and went as it suited him, without even seeing his wife for days sometimes. |
| 4945 |
Eileen lived for another year and a half after they reached Florida, and when Hilary was twelve, she finally died, staring at Hilary as though she wanted to say something to her, but Hilary was sure it wouldn't have been anything kindly. And life was simpler in some ways after that, and more complicated in others. |
| 4946 |
But she had to steer clear of Jack, and the women he dragged in with him. He had told her bluntly the day after Eileen died that he was willing to let her stay under his roof as long as she didn't cause any trouble. He had also told her to clear out her aunt's things, keep what she wanted, and throw out the rest. |
| 4947 |
She was a beautiful girl, and it was becoming difficult to hide it. She looked years older than she was, and her eyes held the pain of a lifetime. Jack patted her on the behind, and brushed past her without needing to, and for the first time he stood by her side the entire time while she was making dinner for him. |
| 4948 |
Her ears were ringing, and her lip was split, she thought her jaw might be broken, and she had a huge gash on one breast before it was all over and she crawled away from him. He had passed out on the couch by then, still naked, totally drunk, and pleased with his night's work. She wouldn't resist him next time. |
| 4949 |
She went back to see him only once, and Mollie Archer came with her and stood uneasily in the doorway. Hilary had wanted to get her things and she was afraid of confronting Jack. It was the first time she'd seen him since the night he beat her, and she was terrified of what he'd do to her for setting the police on him. |
| 4950 |
But he only stared at her in venomous fury and dared to say very little with Mrs. Archer standing by her. She packed her few belongings in the only suitcase she owned, and tucked the little cloth pouch carefully into the lining. She knew she had to take good care of it now, it was the only friend she had in the world. |
| 4951 |
The woman opened the door wearing a warm smile and an apron, there were five other kids inside varying from about ten to fourteen from what Hilary could see, and the place instantly reminded her of the house Eileen and Jack had lived in in Boston. It had the same fetid smell, worn out furniture, and battered look. |
| 4952 |
She was told to dig a trench, and promised that some of the boys would help her, but they never showed. The boys were smoking cigarettes behind the barn, and Hilary was left to wield the shovel by herself, grunting and perspiring. She had worked hard in the last four years, but never at manual labor. |
| 4953 |
She had cleaned Eileen and Jack's house, done their laundry, cooked their meals, and nursed Eileen until she died, but this was harder than anything she'd done before, and there were tears of exhaustion in her eyes when Louise finally called them in out of the torrid heat and told them to come to dinner. |
| 4954 |
He had lost one leg in the war and the other was severely crippled. He was unable to work as a result, and Louise took these kids in to do his share of the work, and her own, and for the money it brought her. The State paid her for each child she took in, and she didn't get rich on it, but it gave her decent money. |
| 4955 |
The maximum she could take in was seven, and they knew there would be another one coming soon, because with Hilary there were only six. There was a pale blond fifteen year old girl named Georgine, as well as Maida, and three rowdy boys in their early teens. Two of them had been leering at Hilary since dinner. |
| 4956 |
They had been sitting in their rooms, talking, complaining, exchanging stories about parents in jail, and their own experiences in juvie. It was all totally foreign to Hilary, who sat on her bed in frightened silence. The boys had their own room next door, and Georgine and Maida talked as though Hilary wasn't there. |
| 4957 |
She lay down in her bed and pulled up the sheets, trying not to think of all the terrible things that could happen. No one had ever locked her in a room before, and the experience was frightening beyond anything she'd ever thought of. She lay silently, staring at the ceiling, her breathing shallow and quick. |
| 4958 |
But Georgine put one hand firmly on her mouth and let Maida do the stroking. They seemed to fondle her endlessly and softly only at first, then harder and rougher, as she sobbed and sobbed in their arms, and finally they tired of her, but when Georgine climbed out of her bed, Hilary was bleeding profusely. |
| 4959 |
They always did. After the first time. And if she didn't, they'd rough her up a little, and she'd be scared not to. The next day, Hilary washed her sheets as soon as Louise unlocked the door and apologized when she screamed at her for making a mess. The boys even laughed at her when they saw her scrubbing. |
| 4960 |
She knew Hilary would have no weapons in her room that night, and of course she didn't. They did the same thing to her again, and the next day Hilary looked glazed. There was no escaping them, and when the social worker came back in a week she looked at Hilary and asked her if she was working too hard. |
| 4961 |
At juvenile hall, they put her in solitary, because all she did was mope and wouldn't answer anyone's questions. It took them two weeks to decide she wasn't sick. She was rail thin, and weak from refusing to get up, but they thought that once she was put in with the other kids she might cheer up again. |
| 4962 |
The woman in charge was pleasant this time, not warm but polite, religious in a serious, joyless way, and talked frequently of a God who would punish them if they did not embrace Him. They tried hard to break through her shell, and they knew she was a bright girl but eventually her icy silences discouraged them. |
| 4963 |
She had figured one thing out. She was going to get out, and get an education, and the harder she worked, the more she knew it would be her only salvation. She poured herself into her school work, and graduated at seventeen with honors, and the day afterward her caseworker called her into her office. |
| 4964 |
She had long term seniority, and in a few days she'd be leaving. She lay on her bed with a smile and stared up at the ceiling. It was all over, the agony, the pain, the humiliation, the horror of her life for the last eight years. She was going to be on her own now. She lay there smiling as she hadn't in years. |
| 4965 |
She didn't understand that it was because she was beautiful. She thought of it as some kind of punishment, something she must have done as a child that she was being tortured for now. It didn't seem fair that it happened to her all the time, and she backed slowly toward the door, never taking her eyes off his face. |
| 4966 |
She had already applied, and she was waiting to hear from them, and then she'd really be on her way. Now there was only one thing left to do, and she decided to tackle it that afternoon. After that, she didn't know when she'd have the time, and she didn't want to call him. She wanted to see him personally. |
| 4967 |
The dress was short, as was the style, but it was respectable. And she tied her hair in a simple knot that made her look older than she was. She washed her face, dried it on one of the hotel's little rough towels, and went downstairs again. And this time she didn't take a bus. She didn't want to waste time. |
| 4968 |
It was a glass building trimmed with chrome, and it seemed to stretch all the way to the sky as she looked up at it. The elevator shuddered as it rose to the thirty eighth floor, and she held her breath wondering if it would get stuck. She had never been anywhere like this before, not that she remembered anyway. |
| 4969 |
The elevator doors opened easily and she found herself in a reception area with thick green carpeting, and a young girl at a desk. She wore a pink linen suit and had short blond hair, and she had the pert look all receptionists were supposed to have. It reminded Hilary of the job she was starting the next day. |
| 4970 |
And all she knew was that he had killed her mother, as surely as if he had done it with his own hands, and her father, too, eventually. And now here he sat, and she only wanted one thing from him, and then she would leave and never see him again. She never wanted to lay eyes on him again after today. |
| 4971 |
She didn't see the desk at first, and then she saw it, a simple slab of glass and chrome, in front of a window offering a full view of New York, and there he sat, incongruous in the modern decor. He was fifty years old and he looked at least ten years older than that, tall, thin, balding, with sad eyes and a pale face. |
| 4972 |
And yet she was safe and sound, obviously, and standing in front of him in his office, fully grown and very beautiful. It was a miracle, and he walked slowly toward her, holding out a hand, with dreams of recapturing the past. It was a way of having Sam and Solange back, of sharing once more in their magic. |
| 4973 |
She was a force to be reckoned with, and he understood that fully now. He also sensed that she knew more than he had thought so long ago, but he didn't question her now. He told her the truth, his eyes filled with regret, and damp with tears for what had been and was no more. A family had died at his hands. |
| 4974 |
He had started, no family of his own, and Marjorie had left him years before. The woman he loved was gone, her children cast to the winds. And he held himself responsible for what had happened to all of them, even Sam. But there was no way to explain that to this girl, or to excuse himself, least of all to her. |
| 4975 |
There was nothing warm about this girl, nothing gentle, or kind. She was entirely made of granite and barbed wire, shafts of steel and broken glass. There were ugly things inside this girl, he could see it in her eyes, and for an instant he was afraid of her, as though, given the opportunity, she might harm him. |
| 4976 |
You never gave a damn about us, and you don't now. It's easy for you to sound pious and tell me how sorry you are. To tell you the truth, I don't give a damn. It doesn't change anything that happened to me. All I want from you are the addresses of where my sisters live, and don't tell me you don't know. |
| 4977 |
She was an attorney too, and they had had an offer from a law firm in Los Angeles that wanted both of them. They were anxious to start a new life anyway, and they made a point of telling me that they did not want to stay in touch. They wanted to give Megan a new life, far away from all that had happened to her. |
| 4978 |
He sat slumped in his chair, like an old man, remembering Solange, and crying for what he had done to her. Hilary was right, he would never be absolved of what he had done to them all. He couldn't forgive himself, and like Hilary, he wondered now where the other two girls were. But there were no answers to that. |
| 4979 |
She didn't have the resources to do more than that, she couldn't hunt them down. She couldn't do anything. She had counted on Arthur to know, and he knew nothing at all. Her sisters were gone. Forever this time. And the dream that had kept her alive slipped quietly from her heart, like a rock falling to her feet. |
| 4980 |
Marie Louise was serious and a great deal like Henri, but Axelle was just as she had been as a child, a little bit shy, totally trusting, and enormously affectionate. It was wonderful just being with her, stroking her pale red curls and looking into those huge blue eyes. Alexandra's heart sang just thinking of it. |
| 4981 |
He was fifty nine years old, and powerfully built, with strong lines in his face, and hard eyes that bore into her, as they always did, as though he were about to ask a very important question. It was a face that was not often amused, but he was a man she could trust and depend on. And she respected him. |
| 4982 |
Her father had wanted to be sure that she was not making a mistake or acting on an impulse. Henri was twenty four years older than she after all, but she had been absolutely certain. She wanted someone just like her father, the old Comte de Borne. He had been sixty when she was born, or he would have been. |
| 4983 |
He also thought him far too serious, and a difficult man in the bargain. Morigny had never married before, and the old count knew that he'd been waiting for just the right girl, with an important family, an equally important fortune, and if at all possible, a title. And Alexandra certainly had all of that to offer him. |
| 4984 |
Margaret de Borne always had a good time, something amusing to say, something outrageous and entertaining to do. She was pursued by every eligible man in Europe, and she had no desire whatever to remarry. She had been happy with George years before, and she had had everything she wanted with Pierre. |
| 4985 |
Pierre had been adamant with Margaret before he died. He did not want Alexandra's husband to know anything about either of her adoptions. But he had said nothing about it to Alexandra, not wanting to stir the memories or her conscience. She was such a decent girl, she might have felt obliged to tell her husband. |
| 4986 |
He told her she couldn't have any more children without jeopardizing her life. And she was content with the two little girls they had. Only Henri was bitterly disappointed, and resentful for a long time that she had not produced a son for him. And for years after Axelle was born, he told her so whenever he was angry. |
| 4987 |
And he thanked God every day that Alexandra was so much more restrained than her mother. Alexandra was intelligent and kind and discreet, and still very shy, and obedient, which was one of the qualities he liked most about her. He looked down at her as she sat at her desk, and smiled at her in a quiet, distant way. |
| 4988 |
The question was out of place and he nodded, as his daughters bounded into the room, not expecting him to be there. There were shrieks of delight, and Marie Louise's long, coltish legs in her short navy blue skirt, her eyes shy and admiring as she saw Henri, and then a warm hug for her mother as he watched them. |
| 4989 |
She had always done things his way. Always. And to perfection. She sat quietly in her study, after the girls left, thinking of her husband and wondering where he was going that night, and then thinking of her daughters. She heard their voices in the garden outside, and knew they were playing with the nurse. |
| 4990 |
He knew she would wait up for him as she always did, in her own room, with the light on, and if he wished, he could come to see her. In most instances, he would knock softly on the door, and come in for a visit before he went to bed, in his own bedroom next door to hers. He preferred separate bedrooms. |
| 4991 |
He had insisted on them since they were married. She had cried about it for weeks at first, and tried to change his mind on the subject for the first several months, if not years. But Henri was firm with her. He needed his own space, his own privacy, and assured her she would need hers in time as well. |
| 4992 |
And he meant it. It was just a habit he had, like so many others. Eventually, she had grown used to it. They had connecting doors which gave easy access to the rooms, and the door between them didn't keep him from appearing in her room in his dressing gown, late at night, with a frequency that always pleased her. |
| 4993 |
She was never happier than when she was with her daughters. She spent a little while in Marie Louise's room that night and discovered she had a new best friend at school, and then read stories to Axelle, and kissed them both, and said their prayers with them before retiring to her own room. It was odd. |
| 4994 |
It was easier to show her here, in the dim light of her boudoir. He loved their hours in bed, their nights side by side until he tiptoed quietly to his own room in the morning. He was deeply attached to her, and to the girls, but it was always difficult for him to show that. And he expected so much of her. |
| 4995 |
She was used to her mother's complaints about her husband. His were far worse about Margaret. And Alexandra had lived with it for fourteen years. She was only sorry they had never come to like each other, but she had given up long since. It was obvious they were never going to fall in love with each other. |
| 4996 |
They were gone forever. She began her first job the next day with an aching void in her chest, but her face was calm, her eyes cool, and no one would have known the agony of despair she was feeling. The only thing that kept her going was her determination to survive in spite of everything, and her hatred for Arthur. |
| 4997 |
There was no one to prove anything to. No one who cared. No one to love or who loved her. She only kept the job for a year, and then she got a better one. She heard about it before anyone else, at the employment agency where she worked, and she went to the interview before anyone else even knew about it. |
| 4998 |
She kept aloof and worked hard, staying late most of the time, and turning in projects deserving of the praise she won. She was a remarkable girl, and when she became one of the main producers of the evening news at twenty five, Adam Kane, the man in charge of network news invited her out to celebrate. |
| 4999 |
She lived alone, and she went to work, and other than that, she had no interest in anything. He sensed that now, and it frightened him, for her. He knew how much more there was to life. He was thirty eight years old and he had married at twenty three. And now he was discovering endless new horizons. |
| 5000 |
Most women think like you, but they're wrong. Hilary, the women who don't have children now are going to panic in ten or fifteen years, mark my words, we're going to see a whole generation of women fighting their own biology before it's too late. But now they're all cool, they figure they've got years ahead of them. |
| 5001 |
She was an odd girl, he thought, and he had never known anyone as independent as she was. He took her home that night, and hoped she would invite him upstairs but she only shook his hand with a warm smile and thanked him for the evening. And he went home so horny for her, that as soon as he got upstairs, he called her. |
| 5002 |
She became a challenge. There was a wall around her he would have done anything to climb, but he still wasn't sure how far she'd let him go. They were still circling each other carefully, but he had so much to say to her and she was such intelligent company. And he appealed to her in a way no one had before. |
| 5003 |
And as she spotted them beneath a tree, the littlest one on his lap, and the six year old sitting beside him, she felt something stir in her heart that was so long gone she almost couldn't bear it. She stopped in her tracks and wanted to run, but she couldn't do that to him. But as she approached it only grew worse. |
| 5004 |
She lay in bed all day and sobbed, and then forced herself to realize again that Megan and Alexandra were gone from her life forever. She had to make herself remember that. There was no point hanging on to them. No one knew where they were anyway and it would have been close to impossible to find them. |
| 5005 |
And they were no longer children, they were women. Alexandra would have been twenty two by then, and Megan would be seventeen. But there was no point thinking about them anymore. They were no longer lost children, and she was never going to see them again. But she didn't want to see any other children either. |
| 5006 |
The next day she acted as though nothing had happened. She was pleasant and businesslike and friendly, and distant and Adam never knew what had hit him. As planned, he was transferred on to sales the following week, and he never went out with Hilary again. She saw to it that they never even ran into each other. |
| 5007 |
She had risen to a higher production position by then and was twenty seven years old, and she had carefully kept away from all liaisons since her brush with Adam. She was too busy working her way up to want anything else in her life, and all of the men she met seemed to be divorced and have children. |
| 5008 |
It was an experience she had never had before and was sure she would never have again, but it convinced her that not everything inside her was entirely dead, and maybe one day the right man might come along and find it. But in the meantime, Bill Brock had done something to her she would never forget. |
| 5009 |
But he also didn't ask her out again. He had other fish to fry, and she was just one of a universe full of pretty women. She was disappointed but not surprised. The only surprise she got was when she went to the doctor two months later. She had had the flu for weeks, and instead of better, she was getting worse. |
| 5010 |
It had never occurred to her, she didn't have any to use. He was only the second man she'd ever slept with in her adult life, since the tragedies of her youth. And now she was pregnant. There was only one solution to the problem. And she called the doctor back within the hour and made the appointment. |
| 5011 |
She was left only with her own guilt and confusion and panic. She wanted desperately to keep the baby, but couldn't imagine how she could, but more importantly, she was terrified that one day she would lose it, that somehow, someone would take it from her, and she never wanted to love anyone that much again. |
| 5012 |
How could she ever look herself in the eye again? She had killed a baby. She crawled into her bed when she got home, without even getting undressed, and she slept until four o'clock on Saturday morning. The cramps she felt woke her up, but when she checked, nothing seemed to be out of order. She had survived it. |
| 5013 |
On Monday, she went to work looking pale and wan, but she went, and she did her work, and she went home again, with a stack of papers. She was going to bury herself in her work, she was going to do anything to numb herself, and she did. She worked like a machine for the next six months and for another year after that. |
| 5014 |
When she was thirty two years old, she became a vice president, and two years after that, she got another promotion. At thirty six, she was the most senior woman in management, and at thirty nine she was the number three person at the network, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that one day she would run it. |
| 5015 |
A passerby stopped to look, wondering if he should help, but Arthur caught his breath and got back into the car, barely speaking to the driver. He was still thinking of his doctor's words and dire prediction. He had no right to ask for more, reasonably. He was almost seventy two years old, and he had led a full life. |
| 5016 |
There was certainly no one else who would notice his absence, except possibly his secretary, who would just be reassigned to one of the other lawyers. The doorman gave him a hand as he got out of the cab, and he took the elevator upstairs, making idle conversation, as he always did, with the elevator man on duty. |
| 5017 |
The rest was all stocks and bonds. But perhaps the house in Connecticut would mean something to them. He had bought it years before, as a summer place, but seldom ever used it. It was a large, rambling old Victorian house, and he liked going there, but he had kept it more as a home for his sunset years. |
| 5018 |
And now the sunset was coming. There would be no time for retirement, for quiet gardening, for long walks down to the seashore. For him, it was all over. The doctor said it was too late to operate. The X rays told their own tale. The cancer had spread too far, and he was too ill now to withstand any dramatic treatment. |
| 5019 |
He was used to that. His ex wife had been a writer, and he had sat patiently for seven years while she churned out mysteries that had eventually become major best sellers. He had respected her as a woman and a friend, but it hadn't been much of a marriage. Everything had come second to her work, even her husband. |
| 5020 |
She worked from eight in the morning until midnight, every day, and then went to bed, mute with exhaustion. In the morning, she'd start again, but she didn't talk to him over coffee because she was already thinking about the book. It had been lonely being married to Eloise. She wrote under the name of Eloise Wharton. |
| 5021 |
He figured out before he asked her for a divorce that they spoke to each other on the average something like thirty hours a year, which was something less than what he needed for a happy marriage. They loved each other, but she loved her work more. And he wasn't even sure how much she understood when he left her. |
| 5022 |
Life was fine. And the only thing he regretted was that they had never had any children. He and Eloise had been divorced for five years, and he was only now starting to think about getting remarried. In fact, he had been thinking about it a great deal lately. Sasha had nodded in answer to his question about rehearsal. |
| 5023 |
Something about her always left him feeling unnerved and excited. As though he wanted more, as though he couldn't get enough, as though she would never let him possess her. It was as though she danced away from his grasp each time he reached out for her, but in some ways he liked it. He liked chasing her. |
| 5024 |
He had found more than a few, and had been crucial in several major cases. His most astounding work had been in the field of criminal law, and he was respected by attorneys and courts all over the country. Arthur Patterson had come to the right place. But John Chapman wondered if he could find the missing women. |
| 5025 |
What had the woman done to him, and who was she? In a way, he didn't need to know those things, and yet the questions intrigued him. He read reviews of several of Walker's plays, and remembered seeing him once as a little boy. All he remembered was that it was an impressive performance and he was very handsome. |
| 5026 |
Arthur had mentioned in a footnote that she had been less than cordial. He said too that she mentioned having been in juvenile hall in Jacksonville, and John wondered if she had gone afoul of the law as a young girl. If so, she may have done so again, and he might be able to find a rap sheet on her. |
| 5027 |
That would make her easier to find anyway, especially if she was sitting in prison somewhere. But at least he could tell Patterson he'd found her. The second one had gone to one of arthur's partners, who had then died, and the widow was God knows where, remarried to God knew who. That one was a healthy project. |
| 5028 |
Even Arthur didn't recognize her, and it was too sweet and easy to find her within easy reach, and successful. John had been in the business of finding people for long enough that he knew a false hope when he saw one. He'd look into it of course, but he was sure she would turn out to be a different Hilary Walker. |
| 5029 |
He grabbed his jacket off the back of a chair, and hurried down the three flights of his brownstone. He had the top floor of a lovely house on East Sixty ninth Street. And he was lucky enough to find a cab almost at once, but with posttheater traffic, he barely made it to the stage door in time to meet Sasha. |
| 5030 |
It was a Russian tradition he had come to like, and he had bought special glass mugs just for that purpose. He had been equally expert at preparing Eloise's snacks while she was working. But in return, she had cooked him some wonderful dinners between books. She loved to bake, and had a real flair for French cuisine. |
| 5031 |
Everything they had was tangible and obvious, wives who had nice sapphires or diamonds as engagement rings and anniversary presents, kids who had skinned knees and missing teeth, and in the case of his oldest nephew, even a high school diploma. It was going to be a long weekend. But he knew it would be fun too. |
| 5032 |
And so self centered. He didn't let himself think about it often, but she hadn't once asked him about his new case. The only time she noticed his life was when, for whatever reason, it enraged her. He turned off the lights in the living room, and went to bed without putting their glasses in the sink. |
| 5033 |
Good for her. It was all she had in life, and he knew how happy it made her. He envied her sometimes. He would have liked to be as fulfilled, as obsessed, as totally enthralled with what he did that it didn't matter what else happened in his life. He loved his work, but he wanted so much more than that. |
| 5034 |
And so far, he hadn't found it. It was one of the reasons why he was excited about the Patterson case. There was something about it that excited him and he hadn't been this excited about his work in aeons. The first thing he wanted to do was find the oldest one, Hilary. There was something about her that haunted him. |
| 5035 |
He had struck out. And he couldn't see the woman who sat pale and shaken at her desk across town. It was like getting a phone call from a ghost. She was sure it was Arthur looking for her, the old son of a bitch, well he'd never find her. She had no reason to reach out to him, to soothe his conscience for him. |
| 5036 |
She didn't need them. She walked into the meeting at ten o'clock and tore heads off for the rest of the day. But she was still shaken when she left the meeting and so was everyone else. She had fired three producers, and threatened everyone else in the meeting. She was merciless, but then again she was known for it. |
| 5037 |
He sighed deeply and put the clipping back in the file with a notation. Later, he would have to call and tell Arthur. But two of his associates were anxious to speak to him in the meantime. Three of their biggest cases were coming to court, and they had gotten the goods in all three. It was very rewarding. |
| 5038 |
He bought a seat on the commuter flight, arrived at three ten, and rented a car at the airport. And from there it was a thirty minute drive to Charlestown. He checked the information in the file again and made sure he had the correct address, and cringed inwardly as he began driving down the streets of Charlestown. |
| 5039 |
It was one of those areas that had been ugly forty years before, and had not improved with age. There were other sections that had been lucky in recent years, and were being restored by loving hands, but these houses were not among them. And if they had been ugly when Hilary lived there, they were worse now. |
| 5040 |
She was still a handsome woman at seventy, and even in her plain yellow linen dress, there was an innate elegance about her. She wore her hair in an elegant knot, a string of pearls around her neck that her husband had given her on her wedding day, and the rings that had been in her family for five generations. |
| 5041 |
She was one of those women who had everything and should have enjoyed it, two lovely daughters, a charming son, a handsome, successful husband, and yet she seemed to begrudge everyone everything they had, particularly John. She always felt that somehow he had done better than Charles, and it annoyed her. |
| 5042 |
Moments later, Philip arrived, looking very tan after a European vacation. He and his family lived in Connecticut, and he played tennis constantly. He had a son and a daughter and a wife with blond hair and blue eyes and freckles. She looked exactly like what she was, the childhood sweetheart he had married in college. |
| 5043 |
The hardest thing of all was that they were all such nice people, and he loved them, but they bored him to death, and by Sunday afternoon, it was a relief to be driving to the airport. He felt guilty for thinking it, but they all led such normal, suburban lives. By the end of a weekend, he always felt like a misfit. |
| 5044 |
But she seemed happy with the pin and bracelet. He returned the rented car at the airport, and flew back on the commuter with a mob of people returning from the weekend, and by eight o'clock he was back in his apartment making himself a sandwich for dinner, and going through Arthur Patterson's file again. |
| 5045 |
In Jacksonville, he went directly to the juvenile hall, asked for the senior administrator, and explained his investigation. It was unusual in cases like that to lay files open to anyone, but so many years had passed, and the girl would be thirty nine years old. There could be no harm in looking back into the past now. |
| 5046 |
The caseworkers who had known her then were all long since gone, and he imagined that both foster homes had disappeared too, but just to be sure, he went to the addresses listed in her file. The first woman was, amazingly, still alive and at the same address, and she thought she remembered her although she wasn't sure. |
| 5047 |
The girl who had been here had gone God knows where to finish her life in the same kind of misery and squalor it had started, or been condemned to at the age of eight, when her father killed her mother, and then committed suicide and their best friend had abandoned her, after taking her sisters from her. |
| 5048 |
The problem with her was that she really had no idea how totally egocentric she was. To her, it seemed perfectly normal. He waved at her from the cab, and promised to call from Paris as they rounded the corner, and a moment later, he sat lost in thought, wondering what he was going to find in Paris. |
| 5049 |
She was wearing a yellow Chanel suit, and their classic shoes, and a beautiful pair of yellow diamond earrings that had been a gift from her late husband. She smiled warmly at John and waved at one of the room's larger chairs. Most of them were extremely small and not very inviting, which always made her smile. |
| 5050 |
That's inevitable. And frankly, I still don't see why you should tell him. Your father and I talked about it when you married him, and we decided it wasn't important. We love you, you are our daughter in every possible way and what happened thirty years ago is no one's business. Perhaps not even your husband's. |
| 5051 |
She had her own reasons for not wanting Alexandra to go, it was foolish but she was afraid that in some way she would lose her, to the specter of a mother long dead, and three sisters who would help prove that blood was thicker than water. It was childish, but she wanted Alexandra to turn her back on them. |
| 5052 |
It was after five o'clock, and she was horrified. She had to get home to Henri and the children. It had been an amazing afternoon, full of unexpected admissions. And Margaret walked her to the door, and hugged her long and hard before she left, as Alexandra looked into her eyes with tears rolling down her cheeks again. |
| 5053 |
He had perfect teeth, and gentle eyes, and she liked him instantly. He looked as though he would have made a good friend, and she shook hands with him solemnly, trying not to look at the briefcase he carried in his other hand. She knew that within it lay the secrets of her past, and that of her sisters. |
| 5054 |
It was like one of the kaleidoscopes she gave to her children, you turned it just a fraction, and all of the same pieces fell into a totally different pattern. One moment they were flowers, and the next moment they were demons breathing fire. It seemed so wrong to her that Hilary would have been left to the demons. |
| 5055 |
It was not difficult to imagine Henri's reaction. Chapman was looking at her gently as they sat quietly in a corner of his hotel, and he realized that he liked her. She was gentle and shy, and she had kind eyes, the kind of eyes he had always wanted to find in a woman. She was so graceful, and so gentle. |
| 5056 |
He told himself it was so he could report back to his client, but he knew it was more than that. The pieces of the mystery were beginning to fall into place, and she was a lovely woman, and he liked her. She hesitated for only a fraction of an instant, calculating what harm it could do, and decided it could do none. |
| 5057 |
He was handsome and charming and bright, and she wondered why he wasn't married. He had said only that he was divorced and had a penchant for difficult women and had let it go at that. But she liked him so much, she couldn't imagine why someone hadn't snatched him up the moment he'd gotten divorced from his first wife. |
| 5058 |
It was all more than a little bit amazing. And she was stunned to realize as she walked in the door that it was already four o'clock. And she was giving a dinner party that evening. She hastily checked on the flowers and the wines, saw the cook, and glanced around to make sure that everything was in order. |
| 5059 |
He was looking forward to dinner at a bistro nearby, and a pleasant stroll through the streets of Paris. He said good bye to Alexandra and she hung up and walked slowly into her bathroom, unable to believe that Henri so easily thought the worst of her, and wondering what the summer would be like now. |
| 5060 |
For all their lives, they had been the classic liberals. John's assistant had explained nothing to them. John had left strict orders that once Megan was located he would make contact. He had his secretary make an appointment with Rebecca Abrams, and he was set to fly out the following afternoon, which was perfect. |
| 5061 |
She walked with a sure step, a long stride, and when he bumped into her once, she looked up at him with green eyes that pierced straight to his soul, eyes that said don't touch me, don't even come near me. She got on a bus on Madison Avenue, instead of fighting for a cab, and she got out at Seventy ninth Street. |
| 5062 |
She walked two blocks farther north, and then he realized she was going to a doctor's appointment. He waited patiently outside, and then followed her again when she took a cab and went to Elaine's where she met another woman. He sat in a booth close to theirs, and was intrigued by what might be said. |
| 5063 |
As he had when he read her file, he felt intensely sorry for her, and he felt sad as he walked the few blocks back to his own apartment. She lived so nearby, yet she seemed to exist in a universe of her own, a universe filled with work and little else, and yet it was not fair for him to make that judgment. |
| 5064 |
He had a quadruple bypass six and a half years ago, and we both decided that it was time for him to take it easy and enjoy life. So now I'm practicing solo, or rather with a group of women I enjoy very much. But it's a different kind of practice than I had with David, although some of the concepts aren't so different. |
| 5065 |
It was thirty years later, but they were still going to try to take away her baby. They were going to awake a curiosity she had never had, and bonds she never knew, and introduce her to blood relatives she had never longed for. It wasn't fair after all they had done for her, and given how much they loved her. |
| 5066 |
She told him that she would be free to see him, in Kentucky, that Sunday afternoon, between one and five. And she would be able to come to Connecticut for two days three weeks later, but no sooner. Chapman frowned as he listened to her, wondering if Arthur would live that long, and he shared his concerns with her. |
| 5067 |
He agreed to come to Kentucky the following Saturday afternoon, and would meet her at the hospital during her free time there. He thanked her for spending it with him, and he confirmed the date for the meeting with her sisters. They set it for September first, and he called Arthur as soon as he hung up. |
| 5068 |
He sat huddled in his room that night, listening to the owls outside and sounds he had never heard before, and he wondered what Megan would be like when he met her the next morning. He slept fitfully, and woke early. He walked to the town's only restaurant and ate fried eggs and grits, and a cup of truly awful coffee. |
| 5069 |
Young boys who looked like bent over old men from poor working conditions, bad health, and acute malnutrition, young women with no teeth and thin hair. Children with swollen bellies from lack of food. John wondered how she could stand working there, and walked into the hospital, not sure of what he'd find there. |
| 5070 |
They were filled with light and life and excitement. She was a girl who loved what she was doing and felt fulfilled, and it was exciting just being near her. She was so different from girls like Sasha, who were so totally wrapped up in themselves. This girl thought of no one but the needy people around her. |
| 5071 |
She was doing exactly what she wanted. And afterward she drove him back to where he was staying in the jeep her father had given her when she'd moved to the mountains. John wanted to sit in the moonlight and talk to her for hours, but she had to get back. She went back on duty at four thirty the next morning. |
| 5072 |
She was used to new faces popping in and out of her office, but not this one. And he stood staring at her quietly, as though he knew her well. It was an odd feeling as he approached her, and she was suddenly frightened as she reached for the phone to call for help. But as he smiled at her, she felt foolish. |
| 5073 |
And she had long since put the past to rest. She had given up on finding her sisters after the last time she saw Arthur. After ten years, the dream had died. And now after more than twenty, she didn't want to revive it. She didn't need them anymore. She had cut everything out of her life that might remind her of them. |
| 5074 |
She had heard enough, and she couldn't take any more. But he took a piece of paper out of his pocket. On it were the instructions of how to get to Arthur's place in Connecticut on the first of September, the phone number, the address, and he looked into her eyes as he laid it on her desk and then walked to the door. |
| 5075 |
There was an electronic gate when they arrived, and they were buzzed in by an unknown voice, but other than that bit of security the property looked simple and unimpressive. There was a long winding drive up a hill, and after a sharp turn, there was a pretty Victorian with a wide porch and widow's walk. |
| 5076 |
It was as though he had hung on, just for this, and couldn't possibly hang on much longer. He had aged twenty years in the past four months, and it was obvious that he was in great pain all the time now. But he was coherent and alert, and anxious to see the three women he'd finally brought back together. |
| 5077 |
For the time being, everything was uncertain. John showed her to a sunny room at the corner of the house; it was still hot from the afternoon sun, and the bedspread was sparkling white with lace trim, with a cozy rocking chair next to it, and the same Victorian furniture that seemed to fill the house. |
| 5078 |
He only took her hand and squeezed it hard, with the last of his strength, and then allowed her to assist him downstairs with the help of one nurse, and when they had settled him in a comfortable chair in the large sitting room, he stared up at her and spoke at last in a voice hoarse from his illness. |
| 5079 |
She sounded proud of them, and she was. It was all amazing to think about, and it silenced both of them as they took their seats on either side of Arthur. John's place was next to Megan, and there was an empty chair next to Alexandra, and it was becoming obvious now that Hilary was not going to join them. |
| 5080 |
She had had every intention of not coming, and then suddenly after work she had decided to rent a car and come up and tell Arthur once and for all what she thought of him. And then maybe she would be free of him for the rest of her life. She didn't even care if she saw the others. They were strangers to her now. |
| 5081 |
She wasn't sure if it would interfere with her career or not, but Alexandra was telling her it was her greatest joy, as Hilary sat down in the rocking chair and shook her head in amazement. It was extraordinary being back together after all these years, and talking as though they had always been there. |
| 5082 |
They went to bed amid yawns and kisses and hugs and promises to meet again in the morning. They all slept until noon, and Alexandra was the first one to get up. She called her mother and the children at the hotel, but they were out, and she left a message that all was well and she would be home on Sunday night. |
| 5083 |
The two of them chatted over coffee and hot biscuits, and one of Arthur's nurses informed them that he had had a difficult night, so Megan went upstairs to check on him, just as Hilary came downstairs in shorts and a silk shirt, her black hair pulled severely into a bun, and her feet bare as she came to breakfast. |
| 5084 |
They were traveling back in time, and burdens that had aged them were falling from their shoulders. In her case it was the fear of what Henri would do to her, and that no one would love her anymore if he divorced her. If he did, she still had Margaret, and the girls, and now she had these two women to support her. |
| 5085 |
He had opened one eye, and smiled at her, as though seeing someone else, and then drifted off again, as Hilary stood and watched from the doorway. She had nothing more to say to him, and she looked at him for a long moment, before she turned and walked downstairs, and got in the car to leave with Alexandra. |
| 5086 |
She met Margaret, and the girls, and they had another pleasant evening, although Megan was a little subdued. It had been a strange week for her, discovering a father she had never known and then watching him die in her arms only a few days later. But the greatest gift of all was that of the two sisters he had left her. |
| 5087 |
They talked about the house Arthur had left them, and what they would do with it. The housekeeper was going to stay on until everything was settled, and Arthur had left ample funds to care for it, and, the remains of his estate was to be divided among the three women. He had no other relatives of his own. |
| 5088 |
The lights in her room were on. The door was closed, and Margaret had apparently gone to bed, but Alexandra could hear someone stirring in her room as she stood outside the door, and then someone pulled it open, and she found herself staring at her husband. He had just arrived a little while before. |
| 5089 |
She lived in a safe, protected world, surrounded by people who loved her. And she particularly loved running free in the summer. She had lived at the Chateau de Marmouton for all of her eleven years, and roamed its woods and hills like a young doe, wading ankle deep in the little stream that ran through it. |
| 5090 |
She and her mother had been there alone, her father was in the Resistance, and had been out at one of the secret meetings he attended nearly every night. They had hidden John in the attic. Frangoise had been sixteen then, and more than a little dazzled by John's tall, midwestern good looks and charm. |
| 5091 |
They spent the evening together at her cousins' home, and he left for the States the following morning. They corresponded for a year after that, and then he finally returned to Paris, to stay this time. She was nineteen, and he was twenty three by then, and they were married two weeks after he got back to Paris. |
| 5092 |
It was meant to be, they always said, as they smiled at each other whenever they told their story. Marie Ange had heard the tale a thousand times, and people always said it was very romantic. Marie Ange had never met her father's relatives. His parents had died before she was born, and both his brothers. |
| 5093 |
His only surviving relative was an aunt on his father's side, but Marie Ange could tell from the way her father talked about her that he didn't like her. None of his relatives had ever come to France, and he had said more than once that they thought he was crazy when he moved to Paris to be with her mother. |
| 5094 |
Marie Ange's life was perfect in every way. She had the kind of childhood that most people dreamed of. Freedom, love, security, and she lived in a beautiful old chateau, like a little princess. And when her mother dressed her in the pretty dresses she bought in Paris for her, she even looked like one. |
| 5095 |
But she knew it would be good for him, and she would see him when he came home for holidays and vacations. John had talked briefly about sending his son to the States to study for a year, but Frangoise didn't like the idea, and Robert himself had finally admitted that he didn't want to go so far away. |
| 5096 |
John and Robert spoke about business, while Frangoise commented on various bits of local news, and made sure that Marie Ange didn't make a mess while she was eating. Although she was allowed to roam the fields, her education had been a formal one, and she had extremely good manners, when she chose to use them. |
| 5097 |
She was still holding it as the car drove away, and she and Sophie stood side by side, crying and waving. And as soon as she walked back into the kitchen, Marie Ange opened the gift, and found a tiny gold locket, with a picture of him in it. He was smiling, and she remembered the photograph from the previous Christmas. |
| 5098 |
She didn't feel like going anywhere, but once Sophie was gone, she wandered out into the garden, and found nothing to do there. And then she decided to go down to the orchards after all, and pick some apples. She knew Sophie would make a tarte tatin with them, if she brought back enough of them in her apron. |
| 5099 |
She had felt for it all afternoon, and wanted to make sure she hadn't lost it in the orchard. And as she walked farther into the room, both the officer and Sophie stopped talking. The old woman looked at her with such desolation in her eyes, that Marie Ange looked at her, and wondered what had happened. |
| 5100 |
She wondered suddenly if something had happened to Sophie's daughter. But neither adult spoke a word, they just stared at the child, as Marie Ange felt an odd ripple of fear run through her. There was an endless pause, as Sophie looked at the gendarme and then the child, and held out her arms to her. |
| 5101 |
And all Sophie could hope was that it had been painless. All she could do now was worry about Marie Ange, and what would become of her without her parents. The gendarme had no idea when she asked him that, and said that he was sure an attorney for the family would be contacting them about the arrangements. |
| 5102 |
It was dusk when she went out to find Marie Ange after he left, but it did not take her long to find her. The child was sitting next to a tree, with her face on her knees, like a small anguished ball, and she was sobbing. Sophie said nothing to her, but let herself down on the ground, to sit beside her. |
| 5103 |
The funeral was held in the chapel on the property at Marmouton, and throngs of people came from the neighboring farms, and village. Her parents' and Robert's friends were there, his entire class from school, those who had not already left for university elsewhere, and her father's business associates and employees. |
| 5104 |
She was only concerned about what would happen to Marie Ange, being sent away to strangers. Sophie was desperately worried about her. The child had barely eaten since the day her parents died, and she had been inconsolable. All she did was lie in the tall grass near the orchard, her eyes staring skyward. |
| 5105 |
She looked around desperately before they left, as though trying to take it all with her. And Sophie was still sobbing uncontrollably as they drove away, and she promised to write to Marie Ange daily. The car was already gone when the old woman fell to her knees in the courtyard, sobbing in anguish. |
| 5106 |
She had already made plans to stay with her friends at the farm for a while, and then she would have to go to Normandy to stay with her daughter. On the long drive to Paris, Marie Ange did not speak a single word to her parents' lawyer. He made a few attempts at conversation at first, and finally gave up. |
| 5107 |
And she was wearing a little matching blue sweater. She was wearing her best patent leather shoes, and the gold locket that had been her last gift from her brother. It would have been impossible to guess, from looking at her, that she had spent the entire summer running barefoot and bedraggled through the orchards. |
| 5108 |
But other than that, she ate nothing, and she said nothing to them. She sat staring out the window through most of the night, as though she could see something there, but there was nothing to see, nothing to dream of now, nothing to hope for. At eleven, she felt as though her entire life were behind her. |
| 5109 |
And when she closed her eyes at last, she could see their faces as clearly as if she had seen them in the locket. She had a photograph of Sophie with her, as well, and her daughter's address. Marie Ange had promised to write to her as soon as she reached her great aunt's farm, and Sophie had promised to answer. |
| 5110 |
She hated her already for taking her away from her home, and Sophie. Marie Ange had wanted so much to stay there. More than any of them could fathom. They rode together for an hour, and it was nearly one o'clock in the morning, when he turned off the highway onto a narrow road, and they bumped along for a few minutes. |
| 5111 |
And when they stopped in front of the house, no one came out to meet them. Instead, Tom took her bags out of the truck, and walked into the farm's old, somewhat dilapidated kitchen, and Marie Ange stood hesitantly in the doorway behind him. She seemed as though she were afraid of what she would find when she entered. |
| 5112 |
He had kids of his own, and grandchildren, and he felt sorry for the child who had come so far from home, for such tragic reasons. She was a pretty little thing, and she had looked terrified all the way from the airport, despite all his efforts to reassure her. He knew that Carole Collins was hardly a cozy woman. |
| 5113 |
Her mother had always liked to take long, leisurely baths, and when they were going out, she spent a long time doing her makeup, and Marie Ange loved to sit and watch her. But Carole Collins didn't wear makeup, and she was wearing jeans and a man's shirt, and her gray hair was cut short, as her nails were. |
| 5114 |
She wondered if the rest of the family had been like her. Carole Collins was so totally different from her mother, who was warm, and gracious, and lively, and filled with fun, and so very, very pretty. It was no wonder her father had gone to find her, particularly if the other women in Iowa were like this one. |
| 5115 |
She got up finally and made the bed, and then dug into her suitcases until she found her nightgowns, perfectly folded by Sophie. They had little embroideries on them that Sophie had done with her gnarled old hands, and they were of the finest cotton, and like everything else she owned, they were from Paris. |
| 5116 |
Robert and her parents were gone, and Sophie along with them, and she was left now with this terrifying old woman in this dismal place, and all she wished as she lay in her bed that night, listening to the unfamiliar sounds outside, was that her parents had taken her with them when they left for Paris with Robert. |
| 5117 |
They had only used a single plate each for their toast, and a cup for Carole's coffee. She went back to her room afterward, not sure what else to do, and was sitting on her bed staring at the photographs she had put on the dresser, of her parents and her brother. And her hand was touching her locket. |
| 5118 |
Marie Ange knew those things weren't beautiful, but Sophie had said they would be useful for school, and Marie Ange thought now that Carole had put them aside because they were ugly. Without saying a word to the child, she zipped the suitcases up again, and told her to put the things on the bed in the narrow closet. |
| 5119 |
They had a tiny meat loaf Carole made and some boiled vegetables that tasted awful. The big treat for dessert was green Jell O. Marie Ange did the dishes afterward, and lay awake in her bed for a long time that night, thinking about her parents, and everything that had happened to her since they died. |
| 5120 |
And suddenly, as she thought about it, she understood exactly what her father had meant when he called his aunt mean spirited and small minded. And she knew that her mother, with all her joy and love and vivaciousness, would have hated Carole even more than he did. But it did her no good to think of that now. |
| 5121 |
She was here, and they were gone, and she had no choice but to survive it. They went to church together the next day, driven by Tom again, and the service seemed long and boring to Marie Ange. The minister talked about hell and adultery and punishment, and a lot of things that either frightened or bored her. |
| 5122 |
The friendship between Billy and Marie Ange grew over the years into a solid bond that they both relied on. Through their childhood years, they became like brother and sister. And by the time he was fourteen, and she thirteen, their friends began to tease them about it, and asked if they were boyfriend and girlfriend. |
| 5123 |
She clung to him like a rock in a storm, and he called her faithfully every night at her Aunt Carole's. Marie Ange's life with her remained as bleak and as gray as it had been from the first moment she saw her. But seeing Billy in school every day, and riding home on the bus with him, was enough to keep her going. |
| 5124 |
And once again, she was startled, when he kissed her, but she didn't object quite as violently as she had the year before. Neither of them said anything, but Marie Ange was worried, and the next time they met, she told him she didn't think it was a good idea for them to do anything to change their friendship. |
| 5125 |
Everyone had always believed that they were boyfriend and girlfriend since their childhood, even Aunt Carole, who continued to make disparaging remarks about him, which always made Marie Ange angry, although she said nothing to her. Their relationship continued to flourish all the way through high school. |
| 5126 |
With the exception of a few random dates, he had never had a girlfriend, and Marie Ange continued to say she had no interest whatsoever in romance, with Billy or any other boy, all she wanted was to finish school, and go back to France one day. And her great aunt wouldn't have let her go out with boys anyway. |
| 5127 |
She had lived with her for seven years, and to Marie Ange, they had seemed endless. But college was now an unattainable dream for her, the scholarship covered tuition, but not books, or dormitory, or food, and even if she got a job, she couldn't make enough to cover her expenses while she went to school. |
| 5128 |
She knew that she had to get a job eventually, locally, so she could make enough money to go to France, but she had no idea what she'd do when she got there, probably just visit and come back. She had no way of staying in France either, nowhere to live, no one to live with, no way of making a living. |
| 5129 |
His father needed him too much on the farm to allow him to do that. He urged Marie Ange to work on her great aunt some more, and not turn the scholarship down until later in the summer. And as they drove home that night, they were in good spirits. They were both excited about graduating from high school. |
| 5130 |
He missed their school days, when he could see her every day, and have long serious talks in French at lunchtime. It was all different now. He had to work on the farm, and he knew that she would have a new life now, new friends, new ideas, professors, and students who had far different goals than he had. |
| 5131 |
They saw a lot of each other during her college days, far more than either of them had expected. The commute ate up her time, and she eventually got a job in town as a waitress in a local diner on the weekends, which helped her with expenses, and allowed her to repay the book money she'd borrowed from the foreman. |
| 5132 |
Her recovery was long and slow. And it was nearly a month before she left the hospital, and another two months before she left her bedroom. She didn't seem quite as daunting anymore. Her frailty was growing more visible, and even her meanness seemed to have less force behind it. In a way, she seemed to be shrinking. |
| 5133 |
And at twenty two, Marie Ange thought he was ready. He had been out of high school for three years, finished his extension classes the year before, and worked hard on his father's farm. And like many boys who had worked on farms since his early teens, with all its responsibilities and hardships, he had matured early. |
| 5134 |
She was going to stay there for a few days, and maybe look into classes at the Sorbonne, and then she was going to rent a car and drive to Marmouton, just to see it. And she was going to find out what had happened to Sophie. She assumed that she had died, but maybe someone could tell her how or when it had happened. |
| 5135 |
Marie Ange suspected she had died of a broken heart, but whatever had happened to her, she wanted to know it. She knew that if Sophie had been alive, she'd have written to her, and she hadn't. Not a single letter in answer to her own, or since then. She ate dinner with Billy and his family that night. |
| 5136 |
But it meant the most to Billy because Marie Ange had given it to him. He had finally stopped arguing with her about it, and agreed to accept it, although he said he shouldn't have, but he couldn't bring himself to part with it. It was his dream car, and her thank you for getting her to college in the Chevy. |
| 5137 |
They were both quiet in the car, on the way to the airport. There was so much to say, and no way to say it. They had said it to each other over the years, and been there for each other, as they still were now. But they both knew that with five thousand miles between them, it couldn't help but be different. |
| 5138 |
She hadn't been on a plane since she had come here, and she remembered how terrified she had been, how heartbroken, and how lonely. He had been her only friend for all these years, her only source of strength and comfort. Her great aunt had provided room and board, but there had never been any love between them. |
| 5139 |
But it wouldn't have been fair to her, and he knew that. She had a chance for so much more now. He stood and waved at the plane until it was a speck in the sky, and then she was gone. And he drove slowly back to the farm in his new red car, crying for all that she had been to him, and never would be. |
| 5140 |
We always talked about you. She said she wrote to you nearly a hundred times the first year, and all her letters came back unopened. She gave up after that, she thought maybe she had the wrong address, but your father's lawyer told her it was the right one. Perhaps someone didn't want you to see her letters. |
| 5141 |
And Alain Fournier was nowhere in sight. The chateau looked abandoned. The shutters were closed, the grounds were somewhat overgrown, there was a sad look to the place now, and she could see that part of the roof was in disrepair. And beyond the house, she saw the familiar fields and trees, woods and orchards. |
| 5142 |
It was as though, just seeing it, she was a child again, and Sophie would come looking for her at any moment. Her brother would still be there, and her parents would come home from their activities in time for dinner. And as she stood very still, she could hear birds, and wished that she could climb a tree again. |
| 5143 |
It was exactly as she had described it to him. She walked out into the fields, with her head bowed, thinking of the family she'd lost, the years she'd been away, the life she had loved so much and that had ended so abruptly. And now she was back, and it belonged to someone else. It made her heart ache to know that. |
| 5144 |
He was short and powerful and had the same pleasant face he had had as a child when they played together. And he recognized her immediately, although her hair was long and no longer in curls, but it was the same golden color it always had been. And although she had grown up, she hadn't changed much. |
| 5145 |
I lost my wife and son ten years ago in a fire, in a house like this. I sold the chateau, and it took me a long time to get over it, if one ever does. That's why I wanted to buy this one, because I longed to have a house like this again, but it has been hard for me. Perhaps that's why it has taken me a while to do it. |
| 5146 |
You don't know me at all, but you can lock all the doors in your wing, if you like. I actually sleep in the guest room because I like it better. I find it sunnier and more cheerful. But the entire master suite can be sealed off quite effectively, and you would be safe from me, if you're worried about it. |
| 5147 |
But in the end, they both settled for pate, the fresh baguette he had bought, and some brie. And he brought out an excellent bottle of red wine, which she declined. She set the table for him, and they chatted for a long time. He was from Paris, and had lived in England briefly as a child, and then come back to France. |
| 5148 |
And this time, when she suggested she cook dinner for them, he offered to take her out. That night he took her to a cozy bistro nearby, which hadn't been there ten years before, and they had a very good time. He had a thousand tales to tell, and an easy way of speaking to her, as though they were old friends. |
| 5149 |
And now more than ever, he was worried about her. She went back to the chateau, and that night she and Bernard went out again. And the following morning, his friends arrived. They were a lively group, the women were sophisticated and fashionable, and all of them were well dressed, and extremely nice to Marie Ange. |
| 5150 |
It was definitely time for her to leave, and she wanted to visit the Sorbonne, but she would cherish the memory of the ten days she had spent at Marmouton with him, and she thanked him profusely before she left, and was touched when he kissed her on both cheeks and told her how sad he was to see her go. |
| 5151 |
She had given up her rented car by then, and drove back down to Marmouton with him, and was amazed by how much she enjoyed his company, and how much there always was to say. They were never bored for an instant talking to each other, and when they reached Marmouton, she felt as though she had come home. |
| 5152 |
They were nothing more than friends until the night they danced at Annabel's, and after dancing with her all night, he leaned down gently and kissed her lips, as she looked up at him and wondered what it meant. She would have liked to discuss it with someone, but there was no one she could talk to about Bernard. |
| 5153 |
No one had ever done that before, except Billy, and he was only a boy. Bernard was very much a man. He was old enough to be her father, and he acted like one sometimes. But having lost her own at such an early age, she loved the protection he offered, and his obvious concern. She was totally in love with him. |
| 5154 |
And after he did, she called Billy, from the chateau this time. At first, she had no idea what to tell him, and in the end, she just blurted it out. She was worried about hurting him, although she had always discouraged him from having romantic thoughts about her. But she knew how much he cared about her. |
| 5155 |
She would be a countess now. It really was like a fairy tale. Four months before, she had been Aunt Carole's slave, and then a month later, she had become an heiress with an enormous fortune, and now she was marrying a count who adored her, and whom she adored, and returning to her family home in Marmouton. |
| 5156 |
He kept talking about how old he was, how much he wanted a child with her, and that he hoped it would be an heir for his title. He desperately wanted a son. And within days of her announcing to him that their first child was on the way, the renovation on Marmouton began, and within weeks the chateau was a shambles. |
| 5157 |
Suddenly, they were redoing everything, the roof, the walls, the long French windows were being enlarged, the height of the doorways. He had a spectacular new kitchen planned, a brand new master suite for them, a nursery that he promised her would look like a fairy tale, and a movie theater in the basement. |
| 5158 |
The entire electrical system was being revamped, along with the plumbing. It was a massive undertaking that far exceeded Marie Ange's understanding of what he'd planned, and it was easy to figure out that it was going to be staggeringly expensive. He was even planting endless acres of new vineyards and orchards. |
| 5159 |
Everything seemed to be happening to her with the speed of sound, and she told him that Bernard was anxious to start a family with her, as he was so much older than she was, and had lost his only son. She had also written to her Aunt Carole to tell her about the changes in her life, but she had had no answer. |
| 5160 |
By March, the chateau was covered with scaffolding, there were workmen everywhere, and they spent more time in Paris. And although Bernard's apartment was small for both of them, it was a splendid pied a terre, with grand reception rooms, high ceilings, and beautiful old boiseries and wood paneling. |
| 5161 |
And everyone who visited them saw how happy they were and was delighted for them. Her time with Bernard had been the happiest nine months of her life, and they were both excited about the baby. The nursery was ready when they got back to Marmouton, and Bernard had hired a local girl as a nanny for her. |
| 5162 |
And all of the other suppliers who were working for them were encountering the same problem. She wondered if Bernard simply hadn't had time to get to it, or had forgotten while they were on the Riviera. But what she discovered, as she questioned the man, was that no one had been paid since the beginning of the project. |
| 5163 |
And when she asked him if he had an idea of what was currently owed to them, he told her he wasn't sure, but that it was well over a million dollars. She stared at him in astonishment as he told her the numbers. She had never thought to ask Bernard what he was paying to restore the chateau, and even improve it. |
| 5164 |
How could it possibly cost that much to redo the chateau? She was embarrassed that Bernard was planning to spend that much on it, and felt guilty for all the changes she had approved. And she promised the contractor to discuss it with her husband that night, when he got back from a brief business trip to Paris. |
| 5165 |
He begrudged her nothing. In fact, he constantly spoiled her, with small gifts and large ones. He had bought a beautiful Jaguar for her in June, and himself a new Bentley. And he told her now that he had been waiting for some investments to clear before he paid the contractor a large balloon payment. |
| 5166 |
It still amazed her to be talking about that kind of money, and she had assured the head of the trust department at her bank, when he questioned her, that it was only a temporary transfer. She spent the next two weeks taking long walks with Bernard in the familiar woods she loved, and going out to dinner with him. |
| 5167 |
This time they amounted to roughly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. His request reminded Marie Ange that Bernard's holdings were about to mature then, and she mentioned it to him, hesitantly, but with no doubt that he would pay for the continuing work at Marmouton, which was due to be complete by Christmas. |
| 5168 |
And Bernard assured her that it was not a problem, although the maturity on his investments had been extended again, and he needed her to cover the bills just one more time, and he would pay her all of it in November. She explained it to her bank, as she had before, and the following day made the transfer. |
| 5169 |
And what she saw when she drove by, with the baby in the car with her, was an enormous eighteenth century hotelparticulier, with stables, a huge garden, and a courtyard. And Bernard was standing out front with the architect and an armload of blueprints, and before she could drive away again, they saw her. |
| 5170 |
But she could only assume that he knew what he was doing, and she trusted him completely. By Christmas, the chateau was nearly complete, and the best gift she gave him that year was telling him on Christmas Eve that she was pregnant again, and she hoped it would be a boy this time so he wouldn't be disappointed. |
| 5171 |
Heloise was three and a half months old by then, and the new baby was due in August, there would be eleven months between the two children. As always, things were moving at lightning speed between them. And this time she didn't call Billy to tell him the news, she sent him a letter with her Christmas card. |
| 5172 |
This one was far larger than the first one. It came, in the end, a week after it was due, and she and Bernard were spending a quiet weekend at the chateau. And this time she managed to fulfill his dreams. The baby was a boy, and although she didn't say it to him, she hoped that he would make up for his lost son. |
| 5173 |
Bernard had told her categorically that he wasn't buying anything for the house, until they had paid their existing bills. And the architect mentioned to her that there was a storage room near Les Halles that Bernard was filling with the things he was continuing to buy for them, mostly paintings and priceless antiques. |
| 5174 |
She had her hands full, and she was worried about their mountain of unpaid bills. She wasn't sure how to broach the subject to Bernard, and needed some time to think about it. She was sure that there was some explanation of why he had been less than honest with her about the things he had in storage. |
| 5175 |
She still hadn't broached the subject to him when they went back to Marmouton the following week, when she made a discovery there that truly shocked her. A bill had come to him for an expensive ruby ring that had been delivered to someone at a Paris address. And the woman who bought it was using Bernard's last name. |
| 5176 |
She wondered if this woman was a girlfriend of his, and had been brazen enough to use his name and pretend to be married to him. Or far more happily, maybe it was only a coincidence of last names, she was a distant relative, and her purchase had found its way onto Bernard's bill entirely by mistake. |
| 5177 |
But if something different surfaced in her investigations, then she would have to face Bernard with it, and hear his side of the story. In the meantime, she wanted to believe the best of him, but there was a gnawing fear in her heart. She had always trusted him, and thrown herself wholeheartedly into her life with him. |
| 5178 |
But the fact was that she had ended up paying entirely for the renovations at the chateau, and now at the house on the rue de Varenne. All told, they had spent three million dollars of her money to do it, they owed another two on the house in Paris, and there were more than a million dollars currently in unpaid bills. |
| 5179 |
It was small and seamy and dirty, and the investigator the bank had referred her to looked disheveled, and was unfriendly, as he jotted down some notes and asked her some very personal questions. And as she listened to herself reel off facts and houses and dollar amounts, it was easy to see why she was worried. |
| 5180 |
Marie Ange had been told by Bernard that none of his relatives were living. But as concerned as she was about it, she still believed that there was possibly a simple and innocent explanation. It was not impossible that there was another person in France, unrelated to him, who had the same last name. |
| 5181 |
It was only a fluke that she happened to buy that ring, and it was mistakenly charged to your husband's account. She showed me documents to prove his marriage to her, and clippings about the fire. He collected insurance on the chateau that burned down. It was purchased with funds from her, but it was in his name. |
| 5182 |
Now that she had children, the thought of losing a child seemed like the ultimate nightmare to her, and her heart went out to this woman, whoever she was, and whatever her tie had been to Bernard. She still did not believe her story, and wanted to get to the bottom of it. Someone was lying, but surely not Bernard. |
| 5183 |
Her mind was suddenly reeling, filled with doubts and questions, and she didn't know if she was grateful or sorry that the investigator had found Louise de Beauchamp. Odd as it seemed, she was relieved that at least she wasn't his mistress. But it was hardly comforting to think she believed he had killed her son. |
| 5184 |
It was difficult to sort it all out. And she was worried too about how they were going to pay for their bills, and despite Bernard's advice to do it, she didn't want to attempt to overturn her trust and access the rest of her funds. That sounded far too risky to her, particularly if they spent all her money. |
| 5185 |
She had put the phone number the investigator had given her in her pocket, so Bernard wouldn't find it, and she slowly pulled it out. She thought of calling Billy and talking to him about it, but even that was a disturbing thought. She didn't really know the truth yet, and she didn't want to accuse Bernard unfairly. |
| 5186 |
The investigator had told Marie Ange about the scars on her face. She had had plastic surgery for them, but she had been burned very badly, and there had only been so much the plastic surgeons could repair. The burns had occurred, the investigator told Marie Ange, while she was trying to save her son. |
| 5187 |
Her instincts told her that her faith in her husband was at risk, and part of her wanted to run away and hide, and do anything but meet with Louise de Beauchamp. But she knew she had to. She had no choice. If not, she would always harbor doubts, and she felt she owed it to Bernard to free herself of them. |
| 5188 |
But there was no choice. She had started out now on this long, lonely road, and she just hoped she would come back safely, with her faith in Bernard restored. And as she hung up the phone in Paris, Louise looked sadly at a photograph of her little boy, and he was smiling at her. So much had happened since then. |
| 5189 |
Bernard knew all of that about me, and also that my father had just died when we met. My mother died when I was a child. I had no relatives, I was alone, and I was young, although not as young as you are now. He courted me passionately and quickly, and he said that all he wanted was to marry me and have a child. |
| 5190 |
Under pressure from them, I told him eventually that I would no longer pay his bills. He would have to be responsible for them himself, and he got very angry. I discovered afterward that he was in debt for several million dollars, and in order to spare us both the scandal, I settled them quietly for him. |
| 5191 |
He told the police that I was unable to accept the hand of fate in the death of my son, and that I had to blame someone to exonerate myself. He sobbed endlessly at the inquest, and they believed him. He said I was unbalanced, and had an unusual and unnatural attachment to my son. And they believed everything he said. |
| 5192 |
You are very young, perhaps you have good attorneys, and perhaps you have been wiser than I was in protecting yourself. But if you have left him money in your will, or if you have no will at all and he will inherit automatically from you if you die intestate, you and your children are in grave danger. |
| 5193 |
Perhaps she had only imagined that the door was blocked, but there was no explaining why he had tried to lock the child's door from the outside. Perhaps he had hoped to protect him from the smoke and the fire, but even that seemed hard to believe now. Maybe he panicked. Or maybe he was truly as evil as she said. |
| 5194 |
It was nearly seven o'clock when she left her, and it was too late to drive back to Marmouton. She decided to spend the night at the apartment in Paris instead, although she knew Bernard was there. She was almost afraid to see him, and all she could hope was that he didn't sense anything different about her. |
| 5195 |
He was so sweet and so loving with her that by the time they went to bed that night, with Robert in the bassinette beside them, she was certain that Louise de Beauchamp had lied to her, perhaps in order to get even with him for leaving her. Perhaps she was only jealous of her, Marie Ange told herself. |
| 5196 |
His only sin, if he had any at all, Marie Ange decided as she fell asleep in his arms that night, was that he ran up a few debts. And the lie about his being a widower was one she could forgive. Perhaps, as a Catholic and a nobleman, it had simply seemed too great a sin to him to admit he was divorced. |
| 5197 |
And although she thought of her meeting with Louise de Beauchamp from time to time, she pushed it out of her head and said nothing to him about meeting Louise. She was sure that the woman had maligned him, and accused him unfairly. It was just too terrible to believe that she actually thought he had killed her child. |
| 5198 |
In the morning, when she called the bank and told them, her advisers were in no mood to thank Bernard, and for her sake they refused to let her borrow the money against her trust to cover the note. They flatly wouldn't allow it, and at lunch the next day she had no choice but to tell Bernard, and he was enraged. |
| 5199 |
Her trustees had told her that they were protecting her, and what was left of her fortune, for her own good. She had to think of her future, and her children. And if she couldn't restrain her husband, they were more than willing to do it for her. But Bernard was like a caged animal over it for the next several days. |
| 5200 |
They sat through meals in stony silence, and by the weekend, when Bernard came back from a brief trip to Paris, he finally sat down with Marie Ange in his study, and told her that in view of her obvious distrust of him, and her bank treating him like a gigolo, obviously at her direction, he was thinking of leaving her. |
| 5201 |
I spent a fortune restoring the chateau because it's a relic of your lost childhood. I bought the house in Paris because I thought you deserved a more exciting life than being hidden away here. I have done nothing but work for you, and for our children, since the day we met. And now I discover that you don't trust me. |
| 5202 |
She was only twenty three, and they knew how grasping Bernard would look in those circumstances, and how suspicious to the court, but they did not say that to her. And when she reported the conversation to Bernard, he said coldly that he would let her know what he decided to do. But she had been warned. |
| 5203 |
She was still beside herself over it the night of their Christmas party, and Bernard hadn't spoken to her in days. He felt humiliated and mistrusted and abused, and he was making her pay for it in spades. And she looked very nervous as she greeted their guests. He looked, as always, elegant, dignified, and cool. |
| 5204 |
He was always exquisitely dressed, and she was wearing a red satin gown he had bought her at Dior. But she felt anything but festive, and she was worried sick that he would leave her by the end of the year, when she couldn't cover his debt. He acted hurt that she didn't feel he was doing everything for her. |
| 5205 |
But just to be on the safe side, Alain wandered upstairs to look around. And on the second floor, he found a candle that had leaned too far toward the heavy new damask curtains. The tassels on the curtains had caught fire quickly, and one whole side of the curtains was on fire when he came upstairs. |
| 5206 |
She couldn't hear the voices downstairs anymore, the roar of the fire was too loud, and a moment later she heard an enormous crash, and when she looked, she saw that a beam had fallen and was blocking the stairway. And there was still no sign of Bernard coming back to them, as she sobbed, and held both her babies. |
| 5207 |
She put them in Heloise's crib for a moment, and ran to check the door to the roof, but it was locked, and Bernard had taken the key with him. And suddenly she remembered a voice in her head, and a scarred face, and everything Louise de Beauchamp had said to her. It was all true, she realized instantly. |
| 5208 |
He was describing something to the people below, and shaking his head, and she could just imagine now what he was saying, perhaps that he had seen them dead, or that there was no way for him to get to them, which was true now, but it hadn't been when he left them, and slipped the key to the roof into his pocket. |
| 5209 |
And from what she could see, there was a good likelihood that he would succeed. The firemen had put their ladders to the walls of the chateau, and found they would not reach up far enough for them to reach her. And as Bernard watched, he began to sob hysterically, just as Louise had described the night her son died. |
| 5210 |
And if they all died, Bernard would inherit everything, if they lived and Marie Ange didn't, he would have to share the estate with his children. His motive for killing all of them was a thought so disgusting and unbearable that Marie Ange felt as though her chest had been torn open and her heart ripped out. |
| 5211 |
She couldn't hear what anyone was shouting to her from below, but three of the firemen were holding a net for her, and at first it was not clear what they were saying. She watched their mouths as intently as she could, to read their lips, and finally one of the men held up a single finger. One, he was saying to her. |
| 5212 |
If nothing else, Marie Ange had to leap to save her own children from him, and to stop him. But it was so terrifying she couldn't move. She was paralyzed with terror as they watched her. She could see Bernard screaming to her, her babies were in other arms than his by then, and all eyes were turned toward her. |
| 5213 |
Their friends had long since departed, and Marie Ange was left with the caretaker, the men who had come up from the farm, the firemen, and her babies. They had given oxygen to Robert, and he was shivering, but calm by then, and Heloise was fast asleep in the arms of a fireman, as though nothing had happened. |
| 5214 |
That was all she cared about now. She stood outside for a long time, as the firemen continued to put out the last of the fire, and they stayed all night to watch the embers. She took the children into the caretaker's cottage with Alain, and in the morning two policemen came to the door and wanted to see her. |
| 5215 |
She was there for a week, to answer questions for the police and firemen, and after the fire cooled, she went back into the house to see what could be saved. Some silverware, some statues, some tools. Everything else had been destroyed or ruined, but the insurance people had already been there to see it. |
| 5216 |
The aftermath of the shock was worse than what she had felt the night it happened. She had lost not only her home, and nearly her children, but her hopes, her dreams, her husband, and her faith in him. He was being held in the local jail for further questioning, and Marie Ange hadn't been to see him. |
| 5217 |
All she wanted was to ask him why he had done it, how he could have hated her so much, and wanted to destroy their babies. It was something she knew she would never understand, but his motives were clear. He had done it for money. And when they spoke on the phone, Marie Ange thanked Louise for her warning. |
| 5218 |
And she was holding a single rose for Billy. She saw him as soon as he got off the plane, and he looked just the way he always had when they rode to school on the school bus. Except he wasn't wearing overalls, he was wearing jeans, a white shirt, and a heavy jacket, and brand new loafers his mom had got him. |
| 5219 |
But she wanted to walk the fields with him at least, and show him the orchards, and get his advice about whether or not he thought she should rebuild it. But if she did, she wasn't planning to put in any of the excessive luxuries Bernard had. She wanted it just like the old days, when her parents lived there. |
| 5220 |
And maybe in the end, it would be a good place for her and her children. She hadn't made up her mind. When Billy picked up his small bag off the turntable, she looked at him and saw that he was different. He was more grown up, more confident, more at ease with himself. He was a man now. And she had changed too. |
| 5221 |
She had been through a lot, and she had two babies. She'd been through the wars with Bernard, and come through them eventually. And now Billy was here, and in the best possible ways, nothing had changed, as he looked down and grinned at her, as he took the baby from her with one arm, and she pushed the stroller. |
| 5222 |
He liked to pick her brain, admired her style, her sharp eye for the opponent's fatal weakness. And Alex was merciless and brilliant once she found it. She seemed to have an instinctive sense for where the point of the dagger would do the most damage. She smiled at him now, and he liked what he saw in her eyes. |
| 5223 |
Alexandra Parker was a litigation attorney too, and she handled an interesting assortment of difficult cases. She was the firm's first choice when the fight was going to be hard and dirty, and you needed an attorney who knew case law and was willing to spend a million hours doing meticulous research. |
| 5224 |
But Alex Parker was a fighter, a lawyer's lawyer, someone who knew her stuff and wasn't afraid of hard work. In fact, she loved it. They broke from the deposition for a recess, and Matthew came around the table to talk to her after the defendant from the chemical company left the room with all his attorneys. |
| 5225 |
It was smaller than the firm where she'd worked before, on Wall Street, when she'd first graduated from law school, but she'd liked this a lot better. She'd worked with the antitrust team there, and she'd never really liked it. It was too dry, although it taught her to pay attention to details and do thorough research. |
| 5226 |
Two major cases had just settled. It was a staggering workload, but it wasn't unusual for her. She loved the pace and the pressure and the frenzy. That was what had kept her from having children for so long. She just couldn't imagine fitting children in, or loving them as much as she did her law work. |
| 5227 |
She did defense work primarily, she enjoyed difficult cases, and it meant a great deal to her protecting people from frivolous lawsuits. She loved everything about what she did. And it had eaten most of her life up. There was never time for anything more than that, except Sam, her wonderful husband. |
| 5228 |
Sam's firm had consulted hers on a deal they were trying to put together in California, and she'd been called in with two other associates to help a senior partner. She'd been fascinated by him then, he was so quick and so smart and so sure. It was hard to imagine Sam being afraid of anything, or anyone. |
| 5229 |
He laughed easily, and he wasn't afraid to walk a tightrope of terrifying decisions. He seemed to be unafraid of any risk, although he was fully aware of the dangers. And it wasn't his clients' money he was willing to risk, it was the whole deal. He wanted it his way, or to walk away from the deal completely. |
| 5230 |
At first, Alex thought him a brazen fool, but as the weeks went on, she began to understand what he was doing, and she liked it. He had integrity and style, and brains, and that rarest of all things, courage. Her first impression of him had been correct, he was afraid of nothing. But he was intrigued by her too. |
| 5231 |
The deal had been made, and the company had done brilliantly and been sold for an astronomical amount five years later. By the time Sam and Alex met, he had a reputation for being a young genius. But she was gaining a powerful reputation too, though she was building solidly and more slowly than Sam was. |
| 5232 |
She was more than a little in awe of Sam. She'd had one serious relationship with a boy her own age at Yale, and nothing but a series of meaningless dates during her brutally hardworking years in law school. The relationship while she was at Yale had dissipated by her junior year, and he had long since gotten married. |
| 5233 |
His parents had left him nothing. He'd gone to Harvard and done well, and he didn't say anything to Alex about being lonely when he was in college. He made it sound like a great time, though thinking about it, she knew that it must have been rough for him to have no family at all by the time he was seventeen. |
| 5234 |
It was as though she felt obligated to live up to their expectations of her, even now that they were gone. Her father had been an attorney too, and he had been so happy when she'd gone to law school. And she wanted to be the best attorney she could now, for him, even though he wasn't there to see her do it. |
| 5235 |
It was quick and casual, and in a moment the cab was gone, and Alex felt strangely let down as she walked into her apartment with her suitcase. She had had a wonderful time, but she figured that he was in a hurry to get back to his off Broadway girlfriend. It had been wonderful, but she knew it didn't mean anything. |
| 5236 |
Their romance began in earnest after that, and in spite of the heavy cases she had to prepare, she could hardly concentrate on her work during her four month courtship with Sam. He asked her to marry him on Valentine's Day, almost four months to the day of the first time he'd taken her out to dinner. |
| 5237 |
They looked at antiques, and jewelry at Garrard's, and he bought her all kinds of fun clothes in Chelsea, though she said she had no idea where she'd wear them, surely not to the office. It was the perfect honeymoon, and they had never been happier than when they got back to New York, and she moved into his apartment. |
| 5238 |
His words and smiles were directed impartially toward both of them, yet Sheldon was certain, had the two men of them been alone, that the conversation would have been along different lines. Tudor had seen the effect on Joan and deliberately continued the flow of reminiscence, netting her in the glamour of romance. |
| 5239 |
As he listened Sheldon realized, as by revelation, that that was precisely what he was doing. While they philosophized about it he was living it, placing the strong hand of his race firmly on the shoulders of the lesser breeds that laboured on Berande or menaced it from afar. But why talk about it? he asked himself. |
| 5240 |
It was sufficient to do it and be done with it. He said as much, dryly and quietly, and found himself involved in a discussion, with Joan and Tudor siding against him, in which a more astounding charge than ever he had dreamed of was made against the very English control and reserve of which he was secretly proud. |
| 5241 |
But, like any circus athlete, you trained yourself out of the face making period. You trained your face to hide your feelings, to hide the exhausting effort your muscles were making. It was, to quote Mr. Tudor, a subtler exhibition of physical prowess. And that is all our English reserve is a mere matter of training. |
| 5242 |
He was looking out over the water, and in the lantern light she noted the lines of his face strong, stern, dogged, the mouth almost chaste but firmer and thinner lipped than Tudor's. For the first time she realized the quality of his strength, the calm and quiet of it, its simple integrity and reposeful determination. |
| 5243 |
She glanced quickly at Tudor on the other side of her. It was a handsomer face, one that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. |
| 5244 |
Once again he discovered a big enthusiasm for Berande. All the bubble illusions concerning the life of the tropical planter had been pricked by the stern facts of the Solomons. Following the death of Hughie, he had resolved to muddle along somehow with the plantation; but this resolve had not been based upon desire. |
| 5245 |
His days were spent out on the plantation. He undertook more clearing of bush; and clearing and planting went on, under his personal supervision, at a faster pace than ever before. He experimented with premiums for extra work performed by the black boys, and yearned continually for more of them to put to work. |
| 5246 |
He's sore over the auction, and he sprang his recruiting contract with Munster on her. And what does she do but thank him, and read it over, and point out that while Munster was pledged to deliver all recruits to Morgan and Raff, there was no clause in the document forbidding him from chartering the Emily. |
| 5247 |
As you will agree, there was no time to be lost if the Martha was to be got off. It is a bad reef, and any considerable sea would knock her bottom out. You settle down here, skipper, and rest up and get the fever out of your bones. When the Flibberty Gibbet comes back, you'll take charge again, of course. |
| 5248 |
The reason she went ashore was because it was not working. The engineer had disconnected the feed pipes to clean out the rust. Poor business, unless at anchor or with plenty of sea room. Plant all the trees in the compound, even if you have to clean out the palms later on. And don't plant the sweet corn all at once. |
| 5249 |
He looked long at the name. Joan Lackland just an assemblage of letters, of commonplace letters, but an assemblage that generated a subtle and heady magic. It crept into his brain and twined and twisted his mental processes until all that constituted him at that moment went out in love to that scrawled signature. |
| 5250 |
There was much in her wilful conduct that caused him to wince in the heart of him. He was appalled by the thought of her shoulder to shoulder with the drunken rabble of traders and beachcombers at Guvutu. It was bad enough for a clean, fastidious man; but for a young woman, a girl at that, it was awful. |
| 5251 |
From the fact that each was attired in a new, snow white lava lava, Sheldon knew that they were recruits. Part way up the steps, one of them was just backing down into the crowd, while another, called out by name, was coming up. It was Joan's voice that had called him, and Sheldon reined in his horse and watched. |
| 5252 |
She made Kina Kina order his people to return all the gear they'd stripped from the Martha. And back it came, day after day, steering compasses, blocks and tackles, sails, coils of rope, medicine chests, ensigns, signal flags everything, in fact, except the trade goods and supplies which had already been kai kai'd. |
| 5253 |
The ready made clothes from Sydney had transformed her. A simple skirt and shirt waist of some sort of wash goods set off her trim figure with a hint of elegant womanhood that was new to him. Brown slippers peeped out as she crossed the compound, and he once caught a glimpse to the ankle of brown open work stockings. |
| 5254 |
Afraid to take advantage of a proper breeze of wind that will fetch him in in twenty hours, he'll get caught out in the calm that follows and spend a whole week in getting in. The Martha will make money with him, there's no doubt of it; but she won't make near the money that she would under a competent master. |
| 5255 |
I took her off the reef. I saved her from the grave of the sea when fifty five pounds was considered a big risk. She is mine, peculiarly mine. Without me she wouldn't exist. That big nor'wester would have finished her the first three hours it blew. And then I've sailed her, too; and she is a witch, a perfect witch. |
| 5256 |
Well, you don't have to baby her, starting head sheets, flattening mainsail, and gentling her with the wheel. Put your wheel down, and around she comes, like a colt with the bit in its teeth. And you can back her like a steamer. I did it at Langa Langa, between that shoal patch and the shore reef. It was wonderful. |
| 5257 |
But he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was the boy that returned the pressure he gave, the boy sorrowing over the lost toy. The thought chilled him. Never had he been actually nearer to her, and never had she been more convincingly remote. She was certainly not acutely aware that his hand was touching hers. |
| 5258 |
Christian Young is all right though, Munster has a slap dash style about him, and they do say old Nielsen was a crackerjack. But with the rest I've seen, there's no dash, no go, no cleverness, no real sailor's pride. It's all hum drum, and podgy, and slow going, any going so long as you get there heaven knows when. |
| 5259 |
But how to approach her? He divined the fanatical love of freedom in her, the deep seated antipathy for restraint of any sort. No man could ever put his arm around her and win her. She would flutter away like a frightened bird. Approach by contact that, he realized, was the one thing he must never do. |
| 5260 |
She appeared as unchanged as he; and while he knew that he hid his real feelings, he was firm in his belief that she hid nothing. And yet the germ he had implanted must be at work; he was confident of that, though he was without confidence as to the result. There was no forecasting this strange girl's processes. |
| 5261 |
The labour situation on Berande was improving. The Martha had carried away fifty of the blacks whose time was up, and they had been among the worst on the plantation five year men recruited by Billy Be blowed, men who had gone through the old days of terrorism when the original owners of Berande had been driven away. |
| 5262 |
Joan and Sheldon, both armed, went through the barracks, house by house, the boss boys assisting, and half a dozen messengers, in relay, shouting along the line the names of the boys wanted. Each boy brought the key to his particular box, and was permitted to look on while the contents were overhauled by the boss boys. |
| 5263 |
With glowering eyes Gogoomy looked on while Sheldon took from the tin a hundred rounds each for the two Winchesters and fully as many rounds more of nondescript cartridges of all sorts and makes and calibres. The contraband and stolen property was piled in assorted heaps on the back veranda of the bungalow. |
| 5264 |
A few paces from the bottom of the steps were grouped the forty odd culprits, with behind them, in solid array, the several hundred blacks of the plantation. At the head of the steps Joan and Sheldon were seated, while on the steps stood the gang bosses. One by one the culprits were called up and examined. |
| 5265 |
So far as he was concerned it might have dropped down from heaven for all he knew how it got there. To the cooks and boats' crews of every vessel that had dropped anchor off Berande in the past several years were ascribed the arrival of scores of the stolen articles and of the major portion of the ammunition. |
| 5266 |
A dozen of the Binu women were out, and the foremost one stepped right on a big crocodile. It was by the edge of the water, and he tumbled her over and got her by the leg. All the other women got hold of her and pulled. And in the tug of war she lost her leg, below the knee, he said. I gave him a stock of antiseptics. |
| 5267 |
There was a primitive aristocraticness about him that his fellows lacked. The lines of his figure were more rounded than theirs, the skin smooth, well oiled, and free from disease. On his chest, suspended from a single string of porpoise teeth around his throat, hung a big crescent carved out of opalescent pearl shell. |
| 5268 |
He swerved aside to avoid the horse, at the same time swinging his cane knife in a slicing blow that would have cut her in twain. She leaned forward under the flying steel, which cut through her riding skirt, through the edge of the saddle, through the saddle cloth, and even slightly into the horse itself. |
| 5269 |
They had apparently caught the creature asleep in the sun and desisted long enough from their flight to hack him to pieces. Here the wounded man had sat down and waited until they were ready to go on. An hour later, following along a wild pig trail, Sheldon suddenly halted. The bloody tracks had ceased. |
| 5270 |
But the trail still continued to bend to the right till it promised to make a loop, and the point of intersection seemed to be the edge of the plantation where the horses had been left. Crossing one of the quiet jungle spaces, where naught moved but a velvety, twelve inch butterfly, they heard the sound of shots. |
| 5271 |
Advancing toward him, Sheldon tripped on a body that lay in the grass, and as he saved himself from falling his eyes lighted on a second. Joan recognized this one. It was Cosse, one of Gogoomy's tribesmen, the one who had promised to catch at sunset the pig that was to have baited the hook for Satan. |
| 5272 |
The weeks had gone by, and no overt acts had been attempted. The bushmen swarmed in the camp in increasing numbers, and they were always making presents of yams and taro, of pig and fowl, and of wild fruits and vegetables. Whenever the gold hunters moved their camp, the bushmen volunteered to carry the luggage. |
| 5273 |
Here, hiding new trail, Binu Charley had carried him for a quarter of a mile into the heart of the deepest jungle, and hidden him in a big banyan tree. Returning to try to save the rifles and personal outfit, Binu Charley had seen a party of bushmen trotting down the trail, and had hidden in the bush. |
| 5274 |
And that was all. He had never seen the white men again, nor had he ventured near their old camp. He had gone back to Tudor, and hidden with him for a week, living on wild fruits and the few pigeons and cockatoos he had been able to shoot with bow and arrow. Then he had journeyed down to Berande to bring the news. |
| 5275 |
Joan and Sheldon heard the twanging thrum and saw Koogoo throw out his arms, at the same time dropping his rifle, stumble forward, and sink down on his hands and knees. Between his naked shoulders, low down and to the left, appeared the bone barbed head of an arrow. He had been shot through and through. |
| 5276 |
He had been foiled in his attempt to escape. He had played the game and lost. And what greater joke could there be than that the bushmen should have eaten him? It was the funniest incident that had come under their notice in many a day. And to them there was certainly nothing unusual nor bizarre in the event. |
| 5277 |
The boy was sitting down and groaning, his arms clasping his bent knees, his head drooped forward and rolling painfully back and forth. For fear of poison, Sheldon had immediately scarified the wound and injected permanganate of potash; but in spite of the precaution the shoulder was swelling rapidly. |
| 5278 |
Binu Charley led the way, by proxy, however, for, by means of the poisoned spear, he drove the captive bushman ahead. The run way still ran through the dank and rotten jungle, and they knew no villages would be encountered till rising ground was gained. They plodded on, panting and sweating in the humid, stagnant air. |
| 5279 |
His only other ornament was a necklace of human finger bones. At sight of their other prisoner he chattered in a high querulous falsetto, with puckered brows and troubled, wild animal eyes. He was disposed of along the middle of the line, one of the Poonga Poonga men leading him at the end of a length of bark rope. |
| 5280 |
Even as he spoke, from high overhead came the deep resonant boom of a village drum. But the beat was slow, there was no panic in the sound. They were directly beneath the village, and they could hear the crowing of roosters, two women's voices raised in brief dispute, and, once, the crying of a child. |
| 5281 |
On either side were rude gods, some grotesquely carved, others no more than shapeless logs swathed in rotten and indescribably filthy matting. The air was mouldy and heavy with decay, while strings of fish tails and of half cleaned dog and crocodile skulls did not add to the wholesomeness of the place. |
| 5282 |
Binu Charley, hugely interested, lent a hand, turning the heads around for identification, noting the hatchet strokes, and remarking the distorted expressions. The Poonga Poonga men gloated as usual, and as usual the Tahitians were shocked and angry, several of them cursing and muttering in undertones. |
| 5283 |
Telling Binu Charley to remove the ear rings, and directing the Poonga Poonga men to carry out the old fire tender, Sheldon cleared the devil devil house and set fire to it. Soon every house was blazing merrily, while the ancient fire tender sat upright in the sunshine blinking at the destruction of his village. |
| 5284 |
And as he opened his eyes and urged his horse onward, he would ponder for the ten thousandth time how possibly he was ever to hold her when she was so wild and bird like that she was bound to flutter out and away from under his hand. It was patent to Sheldon that Tudor had become interested in Joan. |
| 5285 |
That was where he would blunder in the catching and the holding of her. And then, in spite of all his certitude, Sheldon could not forbear wondering if his theories of Joan might not be wrong, and if Tudor was not going the right way about after all. The situation was very unsatisfactory and perplexing. |
| 5286 |
Then, again, Tudor had such an irritating way about him. It had become quite elusive and intangible, now that he had tacitly severed diplomatic relations; but Sheldon sensed what he deemed a growing antagonism and promptly magnified it through the jealous lenses of his own lover's eyes. The other was an interloper. |
| 5287 |
If it had been any woman except Joan it would have been amusing. But Joan was the last woman in the world to attempt to kiss forcibly. The thing smacked of the back stairs anyway a sordid little comedy perhaps, but to have tried it on Joan was nothing less than sacrilege. The man should have had better sense. |
| 5288 |
Then, too, Sheldon was personally aggrieved. He had been filched of something that he felt was almost his, and his lover's jealousy was rampant at thought of this forced familiarity. It was while in this mood that the screen door banged loudly behind the heels of Tudor, who strode into the room and paused before him. |
| 5289 |
No seconds, of course, and no onlookers. The two principals alone are necessary. They may use any weapons they please, from revolvers and rifles to machine guns and pompoms. They start a mile apart, and advance on each other, taking advantage of cover, retreating, circling, feinting anything and everything permissible. |
| 5290 |
They had had much to do with white men, and had learned never to question the strange ways of the strange breed. If these two saw fit to go out and kill each other, that was their business and not the business of the islanders, who took orders from them. They stepped to the gun rack, and each picked a rifle. |
| 5291 |
Because that man had blundered in his love making was no reason that he, Sheldon, should take his life. Then what was it all about? True, the fellow had insulted Joan by his subsequent remarks and been knocked down for it, but because he had knocked him down was no reason that he should now try to kill him. |
| 5292 |
It was deucedly unpleasant, he decided, this being peppered at; and nonsensical as it really was, it was none the less deadly serious. There was no avoiding the issue, no firing in the air and getting over with it as in the old fashioned duel. This mutual man hunt must keep up until one got the other. |
| 5293 |
The last bullet of all, making a double ricochet from two different trees and losing most of its momentum, struck Sheldon a sharp blow on the forehead and dropped at his feet. He was partly stunned for the moment, but on investigation found no greater harm than a nasty lump that soon rose to the size of a pigeon's egg. |
| 5294 |
The hunt went on. Once, coming to the edge of the grove near the bungalow, he saw the house boys and the cook, clustered on the back veranda and peering curiously among the trees, talking and laughing with one another in their queer falsetto voices. Another time he came upon a working gang busy at hoeing weeds. |
| 5295 |
For an hour they dodged and turned and twisted back and forth and around, and hunted each other among the orderly palms. They caught fleeting glimpses of each other and chanced flying shots which were without result. On a grassy shelter behind a tree, Sheldon came upon where Tudor had rested and smoked a cigarette. |
| 5296 |
Sheldon recognized their significance. Tudor was notching his steel jacketed bullets, or cutting them blunt, so that they would spread on striking in short, he was making them into the vicious dum dum prohibited in modern warfare. Sheldon knew now what would happen to him if a bullet struck his body. |
| 5297 |
Then Tudor came. Sheldon happened to be looking in his direction at the moment he came into view, peering quickly up and down the avenue before he stepped into the open. Midway he stopped, as if debating what course to pursue. He made a splendid mark, facing his concealed enemy at two hundred yards' distance. |
| 5298 |
A hundred feet away all anxiety on that score was relieved by Tudor, who made shift with his left hand, and from his automatic pistol hurled a rain of bullets all around Sheldon. The latter dodged behind a palm trunk, counting the shots, and when the eighth had been fired he rushed in on the wounded man. |
| 5299 |
You remember, I warned you long ago what would happen when you wanted to become a partner in Berande. Well, all the beach is gossiping about it; and Tudor persisted in repeating the gossip to me. So you see it won't do for you to stay on here under present conditions. It would be better if you went away. |
| 5300 |
He pulled out his watch. It was an hour past midnight. The northward clouds flushed bloodily, and rays of sombre red shot southward, firing the gloomy woods with a lurid radiance. The air was in breathless calm, not a needle quivered, and the least sounds of the camp were distinct and clear as trumpet calls. |
| 5301 |
At least they're honest folk and live according to their lights. And then they are amazingly simple. No complexity about them, no thousand and one subtle ramifications to every single emotion they experience. They love, fear, hate, are angered, or made happy, in common, ordinary, and unmistakable terms. |
| 5302 |
No philandering, no dallying. If a woman likes you, she'll not be backward in telling you so. If she hates you, she'll tell you so, and then, if you feel inclined, you can beat her, but the thing is, she knows precisely what you mean, and you know precisely what she means. No mistakes, no misunderstandings. |
| 5303 |
It is so ordained. You held him in your arms, but you never held his heart, this man with his blurring seasons and his dreams of a barbaric end. Dreams and dream dust, that is what he has been to you. You clutched at form and gripped shadow, gave yourself to a man and bedded with the wraith of a man. |
| 5304 |
He was quick and alert of movement, and his black eyes flashed from face to face in ceaseless scrutiny and challenge. Silence reigned in the place. Now and again camp noises penetrated, and from the distance, faint and far, like the shadows of voices, came the wrangling of boys in thin shrill tones. |
| 5305 |
A dog thrust his head into the entrance and blinked wolfishly at them for a space, the slaver dripping from his ivory white fangs. After a time he growled tentatively, and then, awed by the immobility of the human figures, lowered his head and grovelled away backward. Tantlatch glanced apathetically at his daughter. |
| 5306 |
It be known that they go away before the face of the frost to unknown places. And it be known, likewise, that always do they return when the sun is in the land and the waterways are free. Always do they return to where they were born, that new life may go forth. The land calls to them and they come. |
| 5307 |
And ever, when in doubt on strange questions, have we gone to him, that out of his wisdom he might make things clear, and ever has he made things clear. And there be questions yet to arise, and needs upon his wisdom yet to come, and we cannot bear to let him go. It is not well that we should let him go. |
| 5308 |
And when I draw the bow, so, with my full strength, and drive the arrow fierce and swift and to the heart, I am glad. And the meat of no man's kill tastes as sweet as the meat of my kill. I am glad to live, glad in my own cunning and strength, glad that I am a doer of things, a doer of things for myself. |
| 5309 |
And it is because I delight and am glad that I go forth to hunt and fish, and it is because I go forth to hunt and fish that I grow cunning and strong. The man who stays in the lodge by the fire grows not cunning and strong. He is not made happy in the eating of my kill, nor is living to him a delight. |
| 5310 |
If need arise, we go to him for his cunning. We eat the meat of his kill, and it tastes unsweet. We merit by his strength, and in it there is no delight. We do not live when he does our living for us. We grow fat and like women, and we are afraid to work, and we forget how to do things for ourselves. |
| 5311 |
But the years have chilled us, and we have learned the wisdom of the council, the shrewdness of the cool head and hand, and we know that the warm heart be over warm and prone to rashness. We know that Keen found favor in thy eyes. We know that Thom was promised him in the old days when she was yet a child. |
| 5312 |
In the fall she had heard the feathered swish of an arrow darting past, and she covered his body with hers, as with a shield, her arms holding him tightly, her face and lips pressed upon his neck. Then it was that Keen rose up from a tangled thicket a score of feet away. He looked about him with care. |
| 5313 |
Between her breast and arm the flesh of the man's side showed white. Keen bent the bow and drew back the arrow to its head. Twice he did so, calmly and for certainty, and then drove the bone barbed missile straight home to the white flesh, gleaming yet more white in the dark armed, dark breasted embrace. |
| 5314 |
Sit cum to ha was his daughter's daughter, but she was too busy to waste a thought upon her broken grandfather, sitting alone there in the snow, forlorn and helpless. Camp must be broken. The long trail waited while the short day refused to linger. Life called her, and the duties of life, not death. |
| 5315 |
And he was very close to death now. The thought made the old man panicky for the moment, and he stretched forth a palsied hand which wandered tremblingly over the small heap of dry wood beside him. Reassured that it was indeed there, his hand returned to the shelter of his mangy furs, and he again fell to listening. |
| 5316 |
They were gone. They had passed out of his life, and he faced the last bitter hour alone. No. The snow crunched beneath a moccasin; a man stood beside him; upon his head a hand rested gently. His son was good to do this thing. He remembered other old men whose sons had not waited after the tribe. But his son had. |
| 5317 |
It alone stood between him and the eternity that yawned in upon him. At last the measure of his life was a handful of fagots. One by one they would go to feed the fire, and just so, step by step, death would creep upon him. When the last stick had surrendered up its heat, the frost would begin to gather strength. |
| 5318 |
All men must die. He did not complain. It was the way of life, and it was just. He had been born close to the earth, close to the earth had he lived, and the law thereof was not new to him. It was the law of all flesh. Nature was not kindly to the flesh. She had no concern for that concrete thing called the individual. |
| 5319 |
But one task did Nature set the individual. Did he not perform it, he died. Did he perform it, it was all the same, he died. Nature did not care; there were plenty who were obedient, and it was only the obedience in this matter, not the obedient, which lived and lived always. The tribe of Koskoosh was very old. |
| 5320 |
Therefore it was true that the tribe lived, that it stood for the obedience of all its members, way down into the forgotten past, whose very resting places were unremembered. They did not count; they were episodes. They had passed away like clouds from a summer sky. He also was an episode, and would pass away. |
| 5321 |
Her task was done. But a little while, on the first pinch of famine or the first long trail, and she would be left, even as he had been left, in the snow, with a little pile of wood. Such was the law. He placed a stick carefully upon the fire and resumed his meditations. It was the same everywhere, with all things. |
| 5322 |
The mosquitoes vanished with the first frost. The little tree squirrel crawled away to die. When age settled upon the rabbit it became slow and heavy, and could no longer outfoot its enemies. Even the big bald face grew clumsy and blind and quarrelsome, in the end to be dragged down by a handful of yelping huskies. |
| 5323 |
They found him, a month afterward, just as he had crawled halfway out and frozen stiff to the ice. But the moose. Zing ha and he had gone out that day to play at hunting after the manner of their fathers. On the bed of the creek they struck the fresh track of a moose, and with it the tracks of many wolves. |
| 5324 |
Thrice the length of a grown man's body, in every direction, had the snow been stamped about and uptossed. In the midst were the deep impressions of the splay hoofed game, and all about, everywhere, were the lighter footmarks of the wolves. Some, while their brothers harried the kill, had lain to one side and rested. |
| 5325 |
Again, they ceased the uplift of their snowshoes at a second stand. Here the great animal had fought desperately. Twice had he been dragged down, as the snow attested, and twice had he shaken his assailants clear and gained footing once more. He had done his task long since, but none the less was life dear to him. |
| 5326 |
For long he pondered on the days of his youth, till the fire died down and the frost bit deeper. He replenished it with two sticks this time, and gauged his grip on life by what remained. If Sit cum to ha had only remembered her grandfather, and gathered a larger armful, his hours would have been longer. |
| 5327 |
For a while he listened to the silence. Perhaps the heart of his son might soften, and he would come back with the dogs to take his old father on with the tribe to where the caribou ran thick and the fat hung heavy upon them. He strained his ears, his restless brain for the moment stilled. Not a stir, nothing. |
| 5328 |
She stumbled over a baby lying in the sun, and the mother hushed its crying and hurled harsh words after the old woman, who took no notice. The children ran down the beach in advance of her, and as the man in the bidarka drew closer, nearly capsizing with one of his ill directed strokes, the women followed. |
| 5329 |
The men were busy fashioning spears and carving on ivory, while the women scraped the fat from the hides of the hair seal and made them pliable or sewed muclucs with threads of sinew. Nam Bok's eyes roved over the scene, but there was not the charm about it that his recollection had warranted him to expect. |
| 5330 |
During the years of his wandering he had looked forward to just this scene, and now that it had come he was disappointed. It was a bare and meagre life, he deemed, and not to be compared to the one to which he had become used. Still, he would open their eyes a bit, and his own eyes sparkled at the thought. |
| 5331 |
It was a rock bound coast, with one patch of beach in many miles, and the law was that I should dig my hands into the sand and draw myself clear of the surf. The other men must have pounded against the rocks, for none of them came ashore but the head man, and him I knew only by the ring on his finger. |
| 5332 |
Ty Kwan, of the next village but one, was a fool to have so easily parted with them. But then, she did not know they were the blankets of the murdered Englishman, because of whose take off the United States cutter nosed along the coast for a time, while its launches puffed and snorted among the secret inlets. |
| 5333 |
For death went with it, and life remained with those who watched it go; and being rejected, they watched with eager intentness. Finally, with a tremendous cry, the fateful finger rested upon La lah. He shook like an aspen, seeing himself already dead, his household goods divided, and his widow married to his brother. |
| 5334 |
He hammered on the door, beat it with his fists, and howled vile imprecations. Yet there was no response, save that in the lulls Scundoo's voice rose eerily in incantation. Klok No Ton raged about like a madman, but when he attempted to break in the door with a huge stone, murmurs arose from the men and women. |
| 5335 |
That which ye wish shall be granted, and it be already known to me. This night, when the moon has gone behind the world to look upon the mighty dead, let all the people gather in the blackness before the house of Hooniah. Then shall the evil doer stand forth and take his merited reward. I have spoken. |
| 5336 |
Hooniah let out a lament to the stars, while the rest drew back from the luckless lad. He was half dead from fright, and his legs gave under him so that he staggered on the threshold and nearly fell. Scundoo shoved him inside and closed the door. A long time went by, during which could be heard only the boy's weeping. |
| 5337 |
It is not large, and the people are peaceable, more peaceable even than those of the adjacent tribes. There are few men in Mandell, and many women; wherefore a wholesome and necessary polygamy is in practice; the women bear children with ardor, and the birth of a man child is hailed with acclamation. |
| 5338 |
Tyee and the rest scattered to either side, out of direct range, and Aab Waak hastened the men forward with the skins of oil. Avoiding the loopholes, which were making on every side of the igloo, they emptied the skins on the dry drift logs brought down by the Mandell River from the tree lands to the south. |
| 5339 |
But Tyee knelt on one knee and lined the sights of his rifle on the rearmost Sunlander. A great shout went up when he pulled the trigger and the man fell forward, struggled partly up, and fell again. Without regard for the rain of arrows, another Sunlander ran back, bent over him, and lifted him across his shoulders. |
| 5340 |
But the Mandell spearmen were crowding up into closer range, and a strong cast transfixed the wounded man. He cried out and became swiftly limp as his comrade lowered him to the ground. In the meanwhile, Bill Man and the three others had made a stand and were driving a leaden hail into the advancing spearmen. |
| 5341 |
In the twinkling of an eye, Tyee saw four of them cut down by the bullets of the Sunlanders. The fifth, as yet unhurt, seized the two rifles, but as he stood up to make off he was whirled almost completely around by the impact of a bullet in the arm, steadied by a second, and overthrown by the shock of a third. |
| 5342 |
He essayed to sling her across his shoulder, but she grappled with him, tearing and scratching at his face. Then she tripped him, and the pair fell heavily. When they regained their feet, Peelo had shifted his grip so that one arm was passed under her chin, the wrist pressing into her throat and strangling her. |
| 5343 |
He buried his face in her breast, taking the blows of her hands on his thick mat of hair, and began slowly to force her off the field. Then it was, retreating with the weapons of his fallen comrades, that Bill Man came upon them. As Mesahchie saw him, she twirled the victim around and held him steady. |
| 5344 |
Speculations upon the outcome became rife, but in the midst of it a dull boom drifted up over the land from the sea. The keen eyed ones made out a dense cloud of smoke, which quickly disappeared, and which they averred was directly over the ship of the Sunlanders. Tyee was of the opinion that it was a big gun. |
| 5345 |
Aab Waak did not know, but thought it might be a signal of some sort. Anyway, he said, it was time something happened. Five or six hours afterward a solitary man was descried coming across the wide flat from the sea, and the women and children poured out upon him in a body. It was Ounenk, naked, winded, and wounded. |
| 5346 |
The old squaw raised the wail, and one by one the women joined her as they swung in behind. The men crawled out of their trenches and ran back to gather about Tyee, and it was noticed that the Sunlanders climbed upon their barricade to see. Ounenk halted, swept the blood from his eyes, and looked about. |
| 5347 |
There was a shrinking together of the shoulders and a bending of the knees. He shook himself, as might a drowsing man, and straightened up. But the shrinking and bending began again, and he sank down slowly, quite slowly, to the ground. It was a clean mile from the pit of the Sunlanders, and death had spanned it. |
| 5348 |
The rifles in the pit rang out in solid volley; they flut flut flut flutted in ragged sequence; and still Nok rose and dipped and rose again unharmed. There was a lull in the firing, as though the Sunlanders had given over, and Nok curved less and less in his flight till he darted straight forward at every leap. |
| 5349 |
And in the dreary days that followed, and in the wild nights when they pushed the trenches closer, there was much discussion as to the wisdom of letting the Sunlanders go. But of this they were afraid, and the women raised a cry always at the thought This much they had seen of the Sunlanders; they cared to see no more. |
| 5350 |
In the golden sunrise came the faint, far crack of a rifle, and a stricken woman would throw up her hands on the distant edge of the village; in the noonday heat, men in the trenches heard the shrill sing song and knew their deaths; or in the gray afterglow of evening, the dirt kicked up in puffs by the winking fires. |
| 5351 |
But he could not get back with them, and the sun found him vainly hiding in the village. So he fought the great fight by himself, and in a narrow ring of Mandell Folk shot four with his revolver, and ere they could lay hands on him for the torture, turned it on himself and died. This threw a gloom upon the people. |
| 5352 |
The sun hurried south, the nights grew long and longer, and there was a touch of frost in the air. And still the Sunlanders held the pit. Hearts were breaking under the unending strain, and Tyee thought hard and deep. Then he sent forth word that all the skins and hides of all the tribe be collected. |
| 5353 |
In the morning, in the face of an unearthly silence from the pit, the real advance began. At first with large intervals between, the bales slowly converged as the circle drew in. At a hundred yards they were quite close together, so that Tyee's order to halt was passed along in whispers. The pit showed no sign of life. |
| 5354 |
But the order was given to go on, and go on they did, till bale touched bale and a solid rampart of skin and hide bowed out from the cliff about the pit and back to the cliff again. Tyee looked back and saw the women and children clustering blackly in the deserted trenches. He looked ahead at the silent pit. |
| 5355 |
When it touched the barricade, he waited a long while. After that he tossed unresponsive rocks over into the pit, and finally, with great care, stood up and peered in. A carpet of empty cartridges, a few white picked dog bones, and a soggy place where water dripped from a crevice, met his eyes. That was all. |
| 5356 |
It is hidden by the rocks, and there is no reason that a man should go there; wherefore it is secret, and no man knows. It is very small, and you crawl on your belly a long way, and then you are in the cave. To night we will so crawl, without noise, on our bellies, and come upon the Sunlanders from behind. |
| 5357 |
Oloof went up first, called softly for the next to come on, and disappeared inside. A man followed, a second, and a third, and so on, till only Tyee remained. He received the call of the last man, but a quick doubt assailed him and he stayed to ponder. Half an hour later he swung up to the opening and peered in. |
| 5358 |
The fear of the walled in earth chilled him and he could not venture. All the men who had died, from Neegah the first of the Mandells, to Howgah the last of the Hungry Folk, came and sat with him, but he chose the terror of their company rather than face the horror which he felt to lurk in the thick blackness. |
| 5359 |
When I walked, my legs shook under me, and when I looked at the light, my eyes became filled with tears. And when I opened my eyes, the world outside went around and around, and when I closed my eyes, my head inside went around and around, and all the things I had ever seen went around and around inside my head. |
| 5360 |
Also she laid beside me my parka of caribou hide, and my rain coat of seal gut, and my wet weather muclucs, that my soul should be warm and dry on its long journey. Further, there was mention made of a steep hill, thick with briers and devil's club, and she fetched heavy moccasins to make the way easy for my feet. |
| 5361 |
These slaves we had got in war from the Mukumuks, who live down the Yukon. On the morrow, Skolka, the shaman, would kill them, one by one, so that their souls should go questing with mine through the Unknown. Among other things, they would carry my canoe till we came to the big river, rapid with bad water. |
| 5362 |
Whereupon, when they had made a safe distance, the two warriors drew their canoes somewhat apart and waited side by side for me to come between. And I came between, spear in hand, and singing the war song of my people. Each flung a spear, but I bent my body, and the spears whistled over me, and I was unhurt. |
| 5363 |
I turned to the one on the left and drove strong with my paddle, to meet Death face to face; but the man's second spear, which was his last, but bit into the flesh of my shoulder. Then was I upon him, making no cast, but pressing the point into his breast and working it through him with both my hands. |
| 5364 |
Thy father, Keesh, was a mighty man. And he did love the song of the bowstring in battle, and these eyes have beheld him cast a spear till the head stood out beyond a man's body. But thou art unlike. Since thou left the Raven to worship the Wolf, thou art become afraid of blood, and thou makest thy people afraid. |
| 5365 |
This is not good. For behold, when I was a boy, even as Kitz noo there, there was no white man in all the land. But they came, one by one, these white men, till now they are many. And they are a restless breed, never content to rest by the fire with a full belly and let the morrow bring its own meat. |
| 5366 |
Wherefore it is meet that we fight with them till none are left. Then will we hold the passes and the land, and perhaps our children and our children's children shall flourish and grow fat. There is a great struggle to come, when Wolf and Raven shall grapple; but Keesh will not fight, nor will he let his people fight. |
| 5367 |
The white men have given us blankets and knives and guns, such as we have never made and never could make. I remember in what manner we lived before they came. I was unborn then, but I have it from my father. When we went on the hunt we must creep so close to the moose that a spear cast would cover the distance. |
| 5368 |
Then breed thou after thy kind, the kind that does not kill; but come not on such quest among the Tana naw. For it is said in the time to come, that the Raven shall grapple with the Wolf. I do not know, for this be the affair of men; but I do know that it is for me to bring forth men against that time. |
| 5369 |
After the Fishing, Gnob and his people, with great store of salmon, sun dried and smoke cured, departed for the Hunting on the head reaches of the Tana naw. Keesh watched them go, but did not fail in his attendance at Mission service, where he prayed regularly and led the singing with his deep bass voice. |
| 5370 |
Nor was there even the general stir of life about the camp; for the hunting party had run upon the flank of the caribou herd and the kill had been large. Thus, after the period of fasting had come the plenitude of feasting, and thus, in broad daylight, they slept heavily under their roofs of moosehide. |
| 5371 |
There they lay, the firelight flashing upon and playing over them, and from each of them a widening circle dyed the snow to scarlet. Thawed by the fire, the white crust gave way beneath the head of Gnob, which rolled over like a thing alive, spun around, and came to rest at her feet. But she did not move. |
| 5372 |
He paused to reconnoitre, but not being driven back, came closer. His nose shot swiftly to the side, nostrils a tremble and bristles rising along the spine; and straight and true, he followed the sudden scent to his master's head. He sniffed it gingerly at first and licked the forehead with his red lolling tongue. |
| 5373 |
Eight tribes were there; from the first and oldest man to the last and youngest babe were they there. And then there were men from far distant tribes, great travellers and seekers who had heard of the potlatch of Ligoun. And for the length of seven days they filled their bellies with his meat and drink. |
| 5374 |
I stood at Ligoun's elbow. In the middle was the barrel of quass, and by it a slave to serve the drink. First, Niblack made oration, with much show of friendship and many fine words. Then he gave a sign, and the slave dipped a gourd full of quass and passed it to Ligoun, as was fit, for his was the highest rank. |
| 5375 |
He made no movement. His withered lips trembled not into speech; nor did a nostril quiver, nor an eyelid droop. But I saw that he looked wan and gray, as I have seen old men look of bitter mornings when famine pressed, and the women wailed and the children whimpered, and there was no meat nor sign of meat. |
| 5376 |
And though none sought after me, who was a mere stripling, yet did the knives find me, and the hot bullets burn me. And still Ligoun leaned his weight on my youth, and Opitsah struck at him, and we three went forward. And when we stood by Niblack, he was afraid, and covered his head with his blanket. |
| 5377 |
And Ligoun was in no haste. Being blinded with his own blood, he swept it out of his eyes with the back of his hand, so he might see and be sure. And when he was sure that the upturned face was the face of Niblack, he drew the knife across his throat as one draws a knife across the throat of a trembling deer. |
| 5378 |
Grasping two blazing sticks by the charred ends, she faced the brutes. The one held back, but Bash sprang, and she met him in mid air with the flaming weapon. There were sharp yelps of pain and swift odors of burning hair and flesh as he rolled in the dirt and the woman ground the fiery embers into his mouth. |
| 5379 |
Then the pair retreated under a rain of firewood, and on the edge of the camp fell to licking their wounds and whimpering by turns and snarling. Li Wan blew the ashes off the meat and sat down again. Her heart had not gone up a beat, and the incident was already old, for this was the routine of life. |
| 5380 |
His first glance was to the sun, and after consulting the celestial timepiece he hunched over to the fire and fell to ravenously on the meat. He was a large Indian fully six feet in height, deep chested and heavy muscled, and his eyes were keener and vested with greater mental vigor than the average of his kind. |
| 5381 |
He is unlike real men, for he has hair on his face, much hair, and the hair of his face and head is yellow like the summer coat of the weasel. His eyes are closed, but they open and search about. They are blue like the sky, and look into mine and search no more. And his hand moves, slow, as from weakness, and I feel. |
| 5382 |
The dogs followed close at his heels, and Li Wan brought up the rear. But her thoughts were far away, across the Ice Mountains to the east, to the little corner of the earth where her childhood had been lived. Ever as a child, she remembered, she had been looked upon as strange, as one with an affliction. |
| 5383 |
She looked about her in sudden awe. How should she know that strange word before ever she heard it? What could be the matter? And then with a shock, half of fear and half of delight, she realized that for the first time in her life there had been sanity and significance in the promptings of her dreams. |
| 5384 |
But no sounds issued forth, though the door was open and smoke curling upward from the sheet iron stovepipe. They came upon a man in the bend of the creek, white of skin and blue of eye, and for a moment Li Wan saw the other man in the snow. But she saw dimly, for she was weak and tired from what she had undergone. |
| 5385 |
Then she was aware of a blinding flash, and a snap, as though something gave way; and the woman before the cabin vanished, and the cabin and the tall spruce timber, and the jagged sky line, and Li Wan saw another woman, in the shine of another sun, brushing great masses of black hair, and singing as she brushed. |
| 5386 |
When the ripples died away, she stared long at her mirrored features; but sun and weather beat had done their work, and, what of roughness and bronze, her skin was not soft and dimpled as a child's. But the thought was still splendid and the glow unabated as she crept in beside her husband under the sleeping robe. |
| 5387 |
She lay awake, staring up at the blue of the sky and waiting for Canim to sink into the first deep sleep. When this came about, she wormed slowly and carefully away, tucked the robe around him, and stood up. At her second step, Bash growled savagely. She whispered persuasively to him and glanced at the man. |
| 5388 |
Then she turned, and with swift, noiseless feet sped up the back trail. Mrs. Evelyn Van Wyck was just preparing for bed. Bored by the duties put upon her by society, her wealth, and widowed blessedness, she had journeyed into the Northland and gone to housekeeping in a cosey cabin on the edge of the diggings. |
| 5389 |
She touched Li Wan's ragged skins to indicate her choice, and poured several hundreds of gold into the blower. She stirred the dust about and trickled its yellow lustre temptingly through her fingers. But Li Wan saw only the fingers, milk white and shapely, tapering daintily to the rosy, jewel like nails. |
| 5390 |
How could she identify herself with these women? For she knew they were of the one breed, blood sisters among men and the women of men. Her eyes roved wildly about the interior, taking in the soft draperies hanging around, the feminine garments, the oval mirror, and the dainty toilet accessories beneath. |
| 5391 |
It has been the custom of the land robbing and sea robbing Anglo Saxon to give the law to conquered peoples, and ofttimes this law is harsh. But in the case of Imber the law for once seemed inadequate and weak. In the mathematical nature of things, equity did not reside in the punishment to be accorded him. |
| 5392 |
They thought the man was resting, but later, when they touched him, they found him stiff and cold, frozen to death in the midst of the busy street. To undouble him, that he might fit into a coffin, they had been forced to lug him to a fire and thaw him out a bit. Dickensen shivered at the recollection. |
| 5393 |
In the course of his circuit the pink shell of her ear came between his eye and the westering sun, and he stopped to contemplate its rosy transparency. Then he returned to her face and looked long and intently into her blue eyes. He grunted and laid a hand on her arm midway between the shoulder and elbow. |
| 5394 |
He was a stalwart young fellow, broad shouldered, deep chested, legs cleanly built and stretched wide apart, and tall though Imber was, he towered above him by half a head. His eyes were cool, and gray, and steady, and he carried himself with the peculiar confidence of power that is bred of blood and tradition. |
| 5395 |
The fatigue of hopelessness and age was in his face. His shoulders drooped depressingly, and his eyes were lack lustre. His mop of hair should have been white, but sun and weatherbeat had burned and bitten it so that it hung limp and lifeless and colorless. He took no interest in what went on around him. |
| 5396 |
The courtroom was jammed with the men of the creeks and trails, and there was an ominous note in the rumble and grumble of their low pitched voices, which came to his ears like the growl of the sea from deep caverns. He sat close by a window, and his apathetic eyes rested now and again on the dreary scene without. |
| 5397 |
It was flood time on the Yukon. The ice was gone, and the river was up in the town. Back and forth on the main street, in canoes and poling boats, passed the people that never rested. Often he saw these boats turn aside from the street and enter the flooded square that marked the Barracks' parade ground. |
| 5398 |
In his hands he held the many fine sheets from which the man had read aloud, and which had been taken down by a clerk when Imber first made confession, through the mouth of Jimmy, to Captain Alexander. Howkan began to read. Imber listened for a space, when a wonderment rose up in his face and he broke in abruptly. |
| 5399 |
The people did not hunger after strange things, nor hearken to new voices, and the ways of their fathers were their ways. The women found favor in the eyes of the young men, and the young men looked upon them with content. Babes hung at the breasts of the women, and they were heavy hipped with increase of the tribe. |
| 5400 |
And the coughing sickness came upon us, and men and women coughed and sweated through the long nights, and the hunters on trail spat blood upon the snow. And now one, and now another, bled swiftly from the mouth and died. And the women bore few children, and those they bore were weak and given to sickness. |
| 5401 |
I sat long and sleepless in the forest, wide eyed for the sign, my ears patient and keen for the word that was to come. And I wandered alone in the blackness of night to the river bank, where was wind moaning and sobbing of water, and where I sought wisdom from the ghosts of old shamans in the trees and dead and gone. |
| 5402 |
And the men of the Whitefish listened, and some said one thing, and some another, and some spoke of other and worthless things, and no man made brave talk of deeds and war. But while the young men were weak as water and afraid, I watched that the old men sat silent, and that in their eyes fires came and went. |
| 5403 |
Secretly we slew, and continued to slay, for with our years we were crafty and we had learned the swiftness of going without haste. When white men came among us with black looks and rough words, and took away six of the young men with irons binding them helpless, we knew we must slay wider and farther. |
| 5404 |
It be true, they died, but it was without worth. Ever did they come over the mountains, ever did they grow and grow, while we, being old, became less and less. I remember, by the Caribou Crossing, the camp of a white man. He was a very little white man, and three of the old men came upon him in his sleep. |
| 5405 |
As I say, I was lighted up. In my brain every thought was at home. Every thought, in its little cell, crouched ready dressed at the door, like prisoners at midnight a jail break. And every thought was a vision, bright imaged, sharp cut, unmistakable. My brain was illuminated by the clear, white light of alcohol. |
| 5406 |
There moved the multitudes of memories of my past life, all orderly arranged like soldiers in some vast review. It was mine to pick and choose. I was a lord of thought, the master of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience, unerringly capable of selecting my data and building my exposition. |
| 5407 |
That is why I voted for the amendment to day. I read back in my life and saw how the accessibility of alcohol had given me the taste for it. You see, comparatively few alcoholics are born in a generation. And by alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry craves alcohol and drives him resistlessly to it. |
| 5408 |
The women know the game. They pay for itthe wives and sisters and mothers. And when they come to vote, they will vote for prohibition. And the best of it is that there will be no hardship worked on the coming generation. Not having access to alcohol, not being predisposed toward alcohol, it will never miss alcohol. |
| 5409 |
There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. |
| 5410 |
He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers. The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. |
| 5411 |
This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for himself but one freedom namely, the anticipating of the day of his death. |
| 5412 |
They trick themselves into believing they will outwit the game and win to a future, leaving the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilating heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his white logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event happeneth to all alike. |
| 5413 |
He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. |
| 5414 |
From his calm mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friend sin the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. |
| 5415 |
I endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I remember tottering and falling against their heels in front of the shining share, and that my father hauled back on the lines so violently that the horses nearly sat down on me. He told me afterward that it was by only a matter of inches that I escaped disembowelling. |
| 5416 |
In the weeks and months that followed I had no more interest in beer than in the kitchen stove after it had burned me. The grown ups were right. Beer was not for children. The grown ups didn't mind it; but neither did they mind taking pills and castor oil. As for me, I could manage to get along quite well without beer. |
| 5417 |
A number of young people had gathered there from the nearer ranches. Besides, the oldsters had been there, drinking since early dawn, and, some of them, since the night before. The Morriseys were a huge breed, and there were many strapping great sons and uncles, heavy booted, big fisted, rough voiced. |
| 5418 |
Men hurled themselves out of the kitchen. Two giants, flush faced, with greying hair, were locked in each other's arms. One was Black Matt, who, everybody said, had killed two men in his time. The women screamed softly, crossed themselves, or prayed brokenly, hiding their eyes and peeping through their fingers. |
| 5419 |
Immediately they paired off, lad and lassie, and started down the sandy road. And each lad walked with his sweethearttrust a child of seven to listen and to know the love affairs of his countryside. And behold, I, too, was a lad with a lassie. A little Irish girl of my own age had been paired off with me. |
| 5420 |
Perhaps the oldest couple might have been twenty. There were chits of girls, quite grown up, of fourteen and sixteen, walking with their fellows. But we were uniquely young, this little Irish girl and I, and we walked hand in hand, and, sometimes, under the tutelage of our elders, with my arm around her waist. |
| 5421 |
I, too, had my girl, and was a little man. The Italian rancho was a bachelor establishment. Our visit was hailed with delight. The red wine was poured in tumblers for all, and the long dining room was partly cleared for dancing. And the young fellows drank and danced with the girls to the strains of an accordion. |
| 5422 |
All of which was very wonderful for me, who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed wide eyed at the amazingness of life. I was only a little lad, and there was so much of life for me to learn. As the time passed, the Irish lads began helping themselves to the wine, and jollity and high spirits reigned. |
| 5423 |
My beer experience had been enough for me, and I had no inclination to traffic further in the stuff, or in anything related to it. Unfortunately, one young Italian, Peter, an impish soul, seeing me sitting solitary, stirred by a whim of the moment, half filled a tumbler with wine and passed it to me. |
| 5424 |
He was sitting across the table from me. I declined. His face grew stern, and he insistently proffered the wine. And then terror descended upon mea terror which I must explain. My mother had theories. First, she steadfastly maintained that brunettes and all the tribe of dark eyed humans were deceitful. |
| 5425 |
But the wine was not. It was cheap, new wine, bitter and sour, made of the leavings and scrapings of the vineyards and the vats, and it tasted far worse than beer. There is only one way to take medicine, and that is to take it. And that is the way I took that wine. I threw my head back and gulped it down. |
| 5426 |
My memory of it is of an age long suffering of fear in the midst of a murderous crew, and of an infinite number of glasses of red wine passing across the bare boards of a wine drenched table and going down my burning throat. Bad as the wine was, a knife in the back was worse, and I must survive at any cost. |
| 5427 |
It lay inert in my fear inert stomach. I was too frightened, even, for my stomach to turn. So all that Italian crew looked on and marvelled at the infant phenomenon that downed wine with the sang froid of an automaton. It is not in the spirit of braggadocio that I dare to assert they had never seen anything like it. |
| 5428 |
The tipsy antics of the lads had led a majority of the soberer minded lassies to compel a departure. I found myself, at the door, beside my little maiden. She had not had my experience, so she was sober. She was fascinated by the titubations of the lads who strove to walk beside their girls, and began to mimic them. |
| 5429 |
Even at the start, I was more realistic than she. In several minutes I was astonishing myself. I saw one lad, after reeling half a dozen steps, pause at the side of the road, gravely peer into the ditch, and gravely, and after apparent deep thought, fall into it. To me this was excruciatingly funny. |
| 5430 |
I staggered to the edge of the ditch, fully intending to stop on the edge. I came to myself, in the ditch, in process of being hauled out by several anxious faced girls. I didn't care to play at being drunk any more. There was no more fun in me. My eyes were beginning to swim, and with wide open mouth I panted for air. |
| 5431 |
Had I been a weakling of a child, I am confident that it would have killed me. As it was, I know I was nearer death than any of the scared girls dreamed. I could hear them bickering among themselves as to whose fault it was; some were weepingfor themselves, for me, and for the disgraceful way their lads had behaved. |
| 5432 |
When I came to, it was dark. I had been carried unconscious for four miles and been put to bed. I was a sick child, and, despite the terrible strain on my heart and tissues, I continually relapsed into the madness of delirium. All the contents of the terrible and horrible in my child's mind spilled out. |
| 5433 |
All the inconceivable filth a child running at large in a primitive countryside may hear men utter was mine; and though I had never dared utter such oaths, they now poured from me, at the top of my lungs, as I cursed my father sitting there underground and gambling with long haired, long nailed Chinamen. |
| 5434 |
But my brain was seared for ever by that experience. Writing now, thirty years afterward, every vision is as distinct, as sharp cut, every pain as vital and terrible, as on that night. I was sick for days afterward, and I needed none of my mother's injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future. |
| 5435 |
Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips with the sour, bitter wine. And not until man grown did I tell her the true inwardness of that disgraceful affair. In those after days of sickness, I was confused on some points, and very clear on others. |
| 5436 |
There was no shame attached. Even the lads and lassies giggled and snickered over their part in the affair, narrating with gusto how Larry had jumped on my chest and slept under the bridge, how So and So had slept out in the sandhills that night, and what had happened to the other lad who fell in the ditch. |
| 5437 |
Besides, everybody drank. There was not a teetotaler in the community. Even the teacher of our little country school, a greying man of fifty, gave us vacations on the occasions when he wrestled with John Barleycorn and was thrown. Thus there was no spiritual deterrence. My loathing for alcohol was purely physiological. |
| 5438 |
And yet, despite my physical loathing for alcohol, the brightest spots in my child life were the saloons. Sitting on the heavy potato wagons, wrapped in fog, feet stinging from inactivity, the horses plodding slowly along the deep road through the sandhills, one bright vision made the way never too long. |
| 5439 |
I just tasted it, and went on tasting it, turning it over with my tongue, spreading it on the inside of this cheek, then on the inside of the other cheek, until, at the end, it eluded me and in tiny drops and oozelets, slipped and dribbled down my throat. Horace Fletcher had nothing on me when it came to soda crackers. |
| 5440 |
As you entered, the bar was on the left. On the right, against the wall, was the free lunch counter. It was a long, narrow room, and at the rear, beyond the beer kegs on tap, were small, round tables and chairs. The barkeeper was blue eyed, and had fair, silky hair peeping out from under a black silk skull cap. |
| 5441 |
Here was a child, forming its first judgments of the world, finding the saloon a delightful and desirable place. Stores, nor public buildings, nor all the dwellings of men ever opened their doors to me and let me warm by their fires or permitted me to eat the food of the gods from narrow shelves against the wall. |
| 5442 |
I waited and yearned for her to lend me another book. Scores of times I nerved myself almost to the point of asking her, but never quite reached the necessary pitch of effrontery. And then came the city of Oakland, and on the shelves of that free library I discovered all the great world beyond the skyline. |
| 5443 |
I had no time to read. I was busy getting exercise and learning how to fight, busy learning forwardness, and brass and bluff. I had an imagination and a curiosity about all things that made me plastic. Not least among the things I was curious about was the saloon. And I was in and out of many a one. |
| 5444 |
Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness. Here was something more than common every day where nothing happened. Here life was always very live, and, sometimes, even lurid, when blows were struck, and blood was shed, and big policemen came shouldering in. |
| 5445 |
There were no big moments when I trudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors. But in the saloons, even the sots, stupefied, sprawling across the tables or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder. And more, the saloons were right. The city fathers sanctioned them and licensed them. |
| 5446 |
Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, whose names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social approval on the saloon. They verified my own feeling of fascination in the saloon. They, too, must have found there that something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and groped after. |
| 5447 |
I was ashamed to refuse, so I drank it. But after that I watched the chance when she wasn't around so as to collect from her barkeeper. The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper, according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we had been setting up pins for several hours. |
| 5448 |
Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale. Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam beer; and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink beer. |
| 5449 |
I played the sailor and the man, fending off the skiff so that it would not mar the yacht's white paint, dropping the skiff astern on a long painter, and making the painter fast with two nonchalant half hitches. We went below. It was the first sea interior I had ever seen. The clothing on the wall smelled musty. |
| 5450 |
At last I was living. Here I sat, inside my first ship, a smuggler, accepted as a comrade by a harpooner and a runaway English sailor who said his name was Scotty. The first thing that the harpooner, aged nineteen, and the sailor, aged seventeen, did to show that they were men was to behave like men. |
| 5451 |
Then the harpooner carried away a pink flask to be filled in some blind pig, for there were no licensed saloons in that locality. We drank the cheap rotgut out of tumblers. Was I any the less strong, any the less valiant, than the harpooner and the sailor? They were men. They proved it by the way they drank. |
| 5452 |
The liquor worked its will with me; the talk of Scotty and the harpooner poured through the pent space of the Idler's cabin and through my brain like great gusts of wide, free wind; and in imagination I lived my years to come and rocked over the wild, mad, glorious world on multitudinous adventures. |
| 5453 |
He drew her last sad letter from his pocket and wept over it as he read it aloud. The harpooner and I wept with him, and swore that all three of us would ship on the whaleship Bonanza, win a big pay day, and, still together, make a pilgrimage to Edinburgh and lay our store of money in the dear lady's lap. |
| 5454 |
Further, Ior John Barleycorn, for it was the same thingtold Scotty that he might be a deep sea sailor and know the last rope on the great deep sea ships, but that when it came to small boat sailing I could beat him hands down and sail circles around him. The best of it was that my assertion and brag were true. |
| 5455 |
Here was no commonplace, no Oakland Estuary, no weary round of throwing newspapers at front doors, delivering ice, and setting up ninepins. All the world was mine, all its paths were under my feet, and John Barleycorn, tricking my fancy, enabled me to anticipate the life of adventure for which I yearned. |
| 5456 |
And John Barleycorn, mighty necromancer though he be, is as much a slave to organic chemistry as we mortals are. We pay for every nerve marathon we run, nor can John Barleycorn intercede and fend off the just payment. He can lead us to the heights, but he cannot keep us there, else would we all be devotees. |
| 5457 |
His talk grew incoherent. He groped for words and could not find them, while the ones he found his lips were unable to form. His poisoned consciousness was leaving him. The brightness went out of his eyes, and he looked as stupid as were his efforts to talk. His face and body sagged as his consciousness sagged. |
| 5458 |
Then, to my amazement, weeping bitterly, he rolled into a bunk on his back and immediately snored off to sleep. The harpooner and I drank on, grinning in a superior way to each other over Scotty's plight. The last flask was opened, and we drank it between us, to the accompaniment of Scotty's stertorous breathing. |
| 5459 |
But I wanted to demonstrate to myself how much I was a man. There lay my skiff astern. The last of a strong ebb was running out in channel in the teeth of an ocean breeze of forty miles an hour. I could see the stiff whitecaps, and the suck and run of the current was plainly visible in the face and trough of each one. |
| 5460 |
A full hundred yards of soft mud intervened between the boat wharf and the water. I pulled up my centreboard, ran full tilt into the mud, took in sail, and, standing in the stern, as I had often done at low tide, I began to shove the skiff with an oar. It was then that my correlations began to break down. |
| 5461 |
I waded through the mud, shoving the skiff before me and yammering the chant of my manhood to the world. I paid for it. I was sick for a couple of days, meanly sick, and my arms were painfully poisoned from the barnacle scratches. For a week I could not use them, and it was a torture to put on and take off my clothes. |
| 5462 |
I was afraid he would propose some more drinking, maybe have a flask full of whisky in his pocket. And yetand here enters the necromancy of John Barleycornthat afternoon's drunk on the Idler had been a purple passage flung into the monotony of my days. It was memorable. My mind dwelt on it continually. |
| 5463 |
I had caught a myriad enticing and inflammatory hints of a world beyond my world, and for which I was certainly as fitted as the two lads who had drunk with me. I had got behind men's souls. I had got behind my own soul and found unguessed potencies and greatnesses. Yes, that day stood out above all my other days. |
| 5464 |
To this day it so stands out. The memory of it is branded in my brain. But the price exacted was too high. I refused to play and pay, and returned to my cannon balls and taffy slabs. The point is that all the chemistry of my healthy, normal body drove me away from alcohol. The stuff didn't agree with me. |
| 5465 |
But, despite this, circumstance was to continue to drive me toward John Barleycorn, to drive me again and again, until, after long years, the time should come when I would look up John Barleycorn in every haunt of menlook him up and hail him gladly as benefactor and friend. And detest and hate him all the time. |
| 5466 |
Once I worked at my machine for thirty six consecutive hours. And there were weeks on end when I never knocked off work earlier than eleven o'clock, got home and in bed at half after midnight, and was called at half past five to dress, eat, walk to work, and be at my machine at seven o'clock whistle blow. |
| 5467 |
I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew. And the winds of adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San Francisco Bay, from raided oyster beds and fights at night on shoal and flat, to markets in the morning against city wharves, where peddlers and saloon keepers came down to buy. |
| 5468 |
I found myself able to miss drinks without being noticed or called to account. Also, standing in the companionway, head and shoulders out and glass in hand, I could fling the wine overboard. I reasoned something like this: It is a queerness of these people that they like this vile tasting wine. Well, let them. |
| 5469 |
And it was through John Barleycorn that I came to join this glorious company of free souls, unashamed and unafraid. And the afternoon seabreeze blew its tang into my lungs, and curled the waves in mid channel. Before it came the scow schooners, wing and wing, blowing their horns for the drawbridges to open. |
| 5470 |
Eighty centsthe equivalent of eight long hours of my toil at the machine, gone down our throats, and gone like that, in a twinkling, leaving only a bad taste in the mouth. There was no discussion that French Frank was a waster. I was anxious to be gone, out into the sunshine, out over the water to my glorious boat. |
| 5471 |
French Frank, who, unknown to me, had swallowed his chagrin since the day before, now that the money for the Razzle Dazzle was in his pocket, began to behave curiously toward me. I sensed the change in his attitude, saw the forbidding glitter in his eyes, and wondered. The more I saw of men, the queerer they became. |
| 5472 |
Unfortunately for my stomach and mucous membranes, Nelson had a strange quirk of nature that made him find happiness in treating me to beer. I had no moral disinclination for beer, and just because I didn't like the taste of it and the weight of it was no reason I should forgo the honour of his company. |
| 5473 |
My brain tingled and was very much alive. I was uplifted by my sense of manhood. I, a truly true oyster pirate, was going aboard my own boat after hob nobbing in the Last Chance with Nelson, the greatest oyster pirate of us all. Strong in my brain was the vision of us leaning against the bar and drinking beer. |
| 5474 |
And curious it was, I decided, this whim of nature that made men happy in spending good money for beer for a fellow like me who didn't want it. As I pondered this, I recollected that several times other men, in couples, had entered the Last Chance, and first one, then the other, had treated to drinks. |
| 5475 |
And the heat of my shame burned up my neck and into my cheeks and forehead. I have blushed many times in my life, but never have I experienced so terrible a blush as that one. And sitting there on the stringer piece in my shame, I did a great deal of thinking and transvaluing of values. I had been born poor. |
| 5476 |
I had never had toys nor playthings like other children. My first memories of life were pinched by poverty. The pinch of poverty had been chronic. I was eight years old when I wore my first little undershirt actually sold in a store across the counter. And then it had been only one little undershirt. |
| 5477 |
When it was soiled I had to return to the awful home made things until it was washed. I had been so proud of it that I insisted on wearing it without any outer garment. For the first time I mutinied against my mothermutinied myself into hysteria, until she let me wear the store undershirt so all the world could see. |
| 5478 |
Only a man who has undergone famine can properly value food; only sailors and desert dwellers know the meaning of fresh water. And only a child, with a child's imagination, can come to know the meaning of things it has been long denied. I early discovered that the only things I could have were those I got for myself. |
| 5479 |
Either I must throw overboard all my old values of money and look upon it as something to be flung about wastefully, or I must throw overboard my comradeship with these men whose peculiar quirks made them like strong drink. I retraced my steps up the wharf to the Last Chance, where Nelson still stood outside. |
| 5480 |
By this time I was getting nicely jingled, so such extravagance didn't hurt me much. Besides, I was learning. There was more in this buying of drinks than mere quantity. I got my finger on it. There was a stage when the beer didn't count at all, but just the spirit of comradeship of drinking together. |
| 5481 |
And I met others, including the Vigy brothers, who ran the place, and, chiefest of all, Joe Goose, with the wicked eyes, the twisted nose, and the flowered vest, who played the harmonica like a roystering angel and went on the most atrocious tears that even the Oakland water front could conceive of and admire. |
| 5482 |
In fact, it is the only thing one can do, for John Barleycorn's inhibition rises like a wall between one's immediate desires and long learned morality. I dismissed my thought of debt to Mammy Jennie and proceeded to get acquainted at the trifling expense of some trifling money and a jingle that was growing unpleasant. |
| 5483 |
So completely did I break with my parsimonious past that I sent word home to my mother to call in the boys of the neighbourhood and give to them all my collections. I never even cared to learn what boys got what collections. I was a man now, and I made a clean sweep of everything that bound me to my boyhood. |
| 5484 |
Of course, while we drank our beer, which I had paid for, it was incumbent on him to listen to me and to talk to me. And Johnny, like a true host, made the tactful remarks that enabled us to find mutual topics of conversation. And of course, having drunk my beer, Captain Nelson must now buy beer in turn. |
| 5485 |
In years and years of heavy drinking, drinking did not beget the desire. Drinking was the way of the life I led, the way of the men with whom I lived. While away on my cruises on the bay, I took no drink along; and while out on the bay the thought of the desirableness of a drink never crossed my mind. |
| 5486 |
And again, lying at the wharf disposing of my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big policemen and plain clothes men stole on board. And because we lived in the shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got stronger stuff in bottles. |
| 5487 |
And those were the only times I felt that I got my real money's worth. Dollars and dollars, across the bar, couldn't buy the satisfaction that twenty five cents did in a candy store. As my drinking grew heavier, I began to note more and more that it was in the drinking bouts the purple passages occurred. |
| 5488 |
The longshoremen all looked forward to their Saturday night drunk. We of the oyster boats waited until we had disposed of our cargoes before we got really started, though a scattering of drinks and a meeting of a chance friend sometimes precipitated an accidental drunk. In ways, the accidental drunks were the best. |
| 5489 |
Also, having quarrelled with Clam and broken partnership, Nelson had sailed the Reindeer, his arm in a sling, with a crew of two deep water sailors, and he had sailed so madly as to frighten them ashore. Such was the tale of his recklessness they spread, that no one on the water front would go out with Nelson. |
| 5490 |
He had just been fishing in his skiff in the old Alameda ferry slip. As the tide went down, he had noticed a rope tied to a pile under water and leading downward. In vain he had tried to heave up what was fast on the other end. Farther along, to another pile, was a similar rope, leading downward and unheavable. |
| 5491 |
If they be jilted, they drink for the contrary reason. And if they haven't anything to do at all, why, they take a drink, secure in the knowledge that when they have taken a sufficient number of drinks the maggots will start crawling in their brains and they will have their hands full with things to do. |
| 5492 |
And every fight was made up in more rounds of drinks, wherein the combatants, aided and abetted by the rest of us, embraced each other and pledged undying friendship. And, of all times, Soup Kennedy selected this time to come and retrieve an old shirt of his, left aboard the Reindeer from the trip he sailed with Clam. |
| 5493 |
And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial, try to think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning with the spirit of adventure, fancy filled with tales of buccaneers and sea rovers, sacks of cities and conflicts of armed men, and imagination maddened by the stuff I had drunk. |
| 5494 |
It was my intention, first, to buy me some clothes, after that, some drinks. I needed the clothes. All I possessed were on me, and they were as follows: a pair of sea boots that providentially leaked the water out as fast as it ran in, a pair of fifty cent overalls, a forty cent cotton shirt, and a sou'wester. |
| 5495 |
I possessed only the clothes I had gone ashore in, and not a cent remained of the one hundred and eighty dollars. It might well be deemed impossible, by those who have never tried it, that in twelve hours a lad can spend all of one hundred and eighty dollars for drinks. I know otherwise. And I had no regrets. |
| 5496 |
Possibly my inchoate thought was: Better to reign among booze fighters a prince than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage, then I'd like to know what is. |
| 5497 |
There were three things that enabled me to pursue this heavy drinking: first, a magnificent constitution far better than the average; second, the healthy open air life on the water; and third, the fact that I drank irregularly. While out on the water, we never carried any drink along. The world was opening up to me. |
| 5498 |
I had longer spells ashore, between fooling with salmon fishing and making raids up and down bay and rivers as a deputy fish patrolman, and I drank more and learned more about drinking. I held my own with any one, drink for drink; and often drank more than my share to show the strength of my manhood. |
| 5499 |
It was time for me to move on. For always, drunk or sober, at the back of my consciousness something whispered that this carousing and bay adventuring was not all of life. This whisper was my good fortune. I happened to be so made that I could hear it calling, always calling, out and away over the world. |
| 5500 |
At one o'clock in the morning, after a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop at the end of the wharf, intending to go to sleep. The tides sweep through Carquinez Straits as in a mill race, and the full ebb was on when I stumbled overboard. There was nobody on the wharf, nobody on the sloop. |
| 5501 |
I was not startled. I thought the misadventure delightful. I was a good swimmer, and in my inflamed condition the contact of the water with my skin soothed me like cool linen. And then John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. |
| 5502 |
I was no longer a stranger in any town the moment I had entered a saloon. And right here let me break in with experiences no later than last year. I harnessed four horses to a light trap, took Charmian along, and drove for three months and a half over the wildest mountain parts of California and Oregon. |
| 5503 |
In strange towns I made immediate acquaintances in the saloons. When I hoboed, and hadn't the price of a bed, a saloon was the only place that would receive me and give me a chair by the fire. I could go into a saloon and wash up, brush my clothes, and comb my hair. And saloons were always so damnably convenient. |
| 5504 |
And from what I didn't know I was not attracted toward them. Besides, there was no glamour about them, no haze of romance, no promise of adventure. They were the sort with whom things never happened. They lived and remained always in the one place, creatures of order and system, narrow, limited, restrained. |
| 5505 |
The result was that I was no longer reinvigorated by periods of open air abstinence and healthy toil. I drank every day, and whenever opportunity offered I drank to excess; for I still laboured under the misconception that the secret of John Barleycorn lay in drinking to bestiality and unconsciousness. |
| 5506 |
The old stings and prods of the spirit were no longer sharp. Curiosity was leaving me. What did it matter what lay on the other side of the world? Men and women, without doubt, very much like the men and women I knew; marrying and giving in marriage and all the petty run of petty human concerns; and drinks, too. |
| 5507 |
I learned there were limits to my gorgeous constitution, and that there were no limits to John Barleycorn. I learned that in a short hour or two he could master my strong head, my broad shoulders and deep chest, put me on my back, and with a devil's grip on my throat proceed to choke the life out of me. |
| 5508 |
Oh, those politicians had handled our kind before. At Haywards there were no drinks either. Parade first, and earn your booze, was the order of the night. We paraded. Then the saloons were opened. Extra barkeepers had been engaged, and the drinkers jammed six deep before every drink drenched and unwiped bar. |
| 5509 |
This method of jamming and struggling in front of the bar was too slow for us. The drink was ours. The politicians had bought it for us. We'd paraded and earned it, hadn't we? So we made a flank attack around the end of the bar, shoved the protesting barkeepers aside, and helped ourselves to bottles. |
| 5510 |
Outside, we knocked the necks of the bottles off against the concrete curbs, and drank. Now Joe Goose and Nelson had learned discretion with straight whisky, drunk in quantity. I hadn't. I still laboured under the misconception that one was to drink all he could getespecially when it didn't cost anything. |
| 5511 |
I drank it as I had drunk beer at five, and wine at seven. I mastered my qualms and downed it like so much medicine. And when we wanted more bottles, we went into other saloons where the free drink was flowing, and helped ourselves. I haven't the slightest idea of how much I drankwhether it was two quarts or five. |
| 5512 |
Now the politicians were too wise to leave the town filled with drunks from the water front of Oakland. When train time came, there was a round up of the saloons. Already I was feeling the impact of the whisky. Nelson and I were hustled out of a saloon, and found ourselves in the very last rank of a disorderly parade. |
| 5513 |
I struggled along heroically, my correlations breaking down, my legs tottering under me, my head swimming, my heart pounding, my lungs panting for air. My helplessness was coming on so rapidly that my reeling brain told me I would go down and out and never reach the train if I remained at the rear of the procession. |
| 5514 |
This being knocked cold and motionless was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. My violent struggles had only accelerated my already dangerously accelerated heart, and increased the need for oxygen in my suffocating lungs. After the fight was over and I came to, I did not come to myself. |
| 5515 |
He realised, partially, the seriousness of my condition, and held me by the waist to prevent me from crawling farther out. And for the rest of the run in to Oakland I kept my head and shoulders out, fighting like a maniac whenever he tried to draw me inside. And here my one glimmering streak of true consciousness came. |
| 5516 |
It was that or death, and I was a swimmer and diver, and I knew it; and in the most intolerable agony of prolonged suffocation, during those moments I was conscious, I faced the wind and the cinders and breathed for life. All the rest is a blank. I came to the following evening, in a water front lodging house. |
| 5517 |
I still drank and frequented saloonspractically lived in saloons. Whisky was dangerous, in my opinion, but not wrong. Whisky was dangerous like other dangerous things in the natural world. Men died of whisky; but then, too, fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains and were cut to pieces. |
| 5518 |
It was not a clear vision, however, and there were two phases of it, somewhat jumbled at the time. It struck me, from watching those with whom I associated, that the life we were living was more destructive than that lived by the average man. John Barleycorn, by inhibiting morality, incited to crime. |
| 5519 |
Everywhere I saw men doing, drunk, what they would never dream of doing sober. And this wasn't the worst of it. It was the penalty that must be paid. Crime was destructive. Saloon mates I drank with, who were good fellows and harmless, sober, did most violent and lunatic things when they were drunk. |
| 5520 |
Sometimes they were found unattended and dead in their beds; on occasion their bodies were dragged out of the water; and sometimes it was just plain accident, as when Bill Kelley, unloading cargo while drunk, had a finger jerked off, which, under the circumstances, might just as easily have been his head. |
| 5521 |
John Barleycorn did other things beside kill a man. He hadn't killed Louis. He had done much worse. He had robbed him of power and place and comfort, crucified his pride, and condemned him to the hardship of the common sailor that would last as long as his healthy breath lasted, which promised to be for a long time. |
| 5522 |
We completed our run across the Pacific, lifted the volcanic peaks, jungle clad, of the Bonin Islands, sailed in among the reefs to the land locked harbour, and let our anchor rumble down where lay a score or more of sea gypsies like ourselves. The scents of strange vegetation blew off the tropic land. |
| 5523 |
The three of us agreed to that, too. We would get a sampan, and a couple of Japanese fishermen who knew the fishing grounds, and we would have great sport. As for me, I was keen for anything. And then, our plans made, we rowed ashore over the banks of living coral and pulled our boat up the white beach of coral sand. |
| 5524 |
It was the way of life. Our teetotaler owner captain was laughed at, and sneered at, by all of us because of his teetotalism. I didn't in the least want a drink, but I did want to be a good fellow and a good comrade. Nor did Louis' case deter me, as I poured the biting, scorching stuff down my throat. |
| 5525 |
Axel and I interfered as peacemakers, were roughed and jostled in the mix ups, and finally, with infinite precaution and intoxicated cunning, succeeded in inveigling our chum down to the boat and in rowing him aboard our schooner. But no sooner did Victor's feet touch the deck than he began to clean up the ship. |
| 5526 |
He was an all round splendid type of seaman; his mates recognised his worth, and respected him and liked him. Yet John Barleycorn metamorphosed him into a violent lunatic. And that was the very point these drinkers made. They knew that drinkand drink with a sailor is always excessivemade them mad, but only mildly mad. |
| 5527 |
But to return. Ashore, snugly ensconced in a Japanese house of entertainment, Axel and I compared bruises, and over a comfortable drink talked of the afternoon's happenings. We liked the quietness of that drink and took another. A shipmate dropped in, several shipmates dropped in, and we had more quiet drinks. |
| 5528 |
Still howling, disdaining doorways, with blood shot eyes and wildly waving muscular arms, Victor burst upon us through the fragile walls. The old amuck rage was on him, and he wanted blood, anybody's blood. The orchestra fled; so did we. We went through doorways, and we went through paper wallsanything to get away. |
| 5529 |
Men who had had no intention of coming ashore climbed into the boats. The unfortunate governor's ukase had precipitated a general debauch for all hands. It was hours after sunset, and the men wanted to see anybody try to put them on board. They went around inviting the authorities to try to put them on board. |
| 5530 |
I was just human, and I was taking the path in the world that men tookmen whom I admired, if you please; full blooded men, lusty, breedy, chesty men, free spirits and anything but niggards in the way they foamed life away. And the way was open. It was like an uncovered well in a yard where children play. |
| 5531 |
Drink was flowing. Everybody had money, and everybody was treating. After the hundred days of hard toil and absolute abstinence, in the pink of physical condition, bulging with health, over spilling with spirits that had long been pent by discipline and circumstance, of course we would have a drink or two. |
| 5532 |
And after that we would see the town. It was the old story. There were so many drinks to be drunk, and as the warm magic poured through our veins and mellowed our voices and affections we knew it was no time to make invidious distinctionsto drink with this shipmate and to decline to drink with that shipmate. |
| 5533 |
It was a red letter event. It was an event to be remembered and narrated with pride. I remember it to day, twenty years afterward, with a secret glow of pride. It was a purple passage, just as Victor's wrecking of the tea house in the Bonin Islands and my being looted by the runaway apprentices were purple passages. |
| 5534 |
We took the northern passage, and with the stout west wind at our back made the run across the Pacific in thirty seven days of brave sailing. We still had a big pay day coming to us, and for thirty seven days, without a drink to addle our mental processes, we incessantly planned the spending of our money. |
| 5535 |
Put them together, and I'll have more money than ever in my life before. I'll be a prince at home. You haven't any idea how cheap everything is in Norway. I can make presents to everybody, and spend my money like what would seem to them a millionaire, and live a whole year there before I'd have to go back to sea. |
| 5536 |
Long John was not a home body. But he was tired of the forecastle. No boarding house sharks in his. He, too, would get a room in a quiet family, and he would go to a navigation school and study to be a captain. And so it went. Each man swore that for once he would be sensible and not squander his money. |
| 5537 |
As we sailed up the San Francisco water front, the moment the port doctors passed us, the boarding house runners were alongside in whitehall boats. They swarmed on board, each drumming for his own boarding house, and each with a bottle of free whisky inside his shirt. But we waved them grandly and blasphemously away. |
| 5538 |
We wanted none of their boarding houses and none of their whisky. We were sober, thrifty sailormen, with better use for our money. Came the paying off before the shipping commissioner. We emerged upon the sidewalk, each with a pocketful of money. About us, like buzzards, clustered the sharks and harpies. |
| 5539 |
There we stood at the long barthe sailing master, the mate, the six hunters, the six boat steerers, and the five boat pullers. There were only five of the last, for one of our number had been dropped overboard, with a sack of coal at his feet, between two snow squalls in a driving gale off Cape Jerimo. |
| 5540 |
The time passed, the drinks continued to come on the bar, our voices rose, and the maggots began to crawl. There were six hunters, and each insisted, in the sacred name of comradeship, that all hands drink with him just once. There were six boat steerers and five boat pullers and the same logic held with them. |
| 5541 |
Instead, and along with the rest, they were scattered on board sailing ships bound for the four quarters of the globe, where they had been placed by the boarding house masters, and where they were working out advance money which they had neither seen nor spent. What saved me was that I had a home and people to go to. |
| 5542 |
Despite my increase in strength and general efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked in the cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promise of a rise to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. And here, so far as John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period of innocence. |
| 5543 |
Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocently devilish young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was a sophisticated town boy. And I wasn't a town boy at all. Louis was handsome, and graceful, and filled with love for the girls. With him it was an exciting and all absorbing pursuit. |
| 5544 |
I didn't know anything about girls. I had been too busy being a man. This was an entirely new phase of existence which had escaped me. And when I saw Louis say good bye to me, raise his hat to a girl of his acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down the sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. |
| 5545 |
I knew none. And Louis' several girls he wanted for himself; and anyway, in the very human nature of boys' and girls' ways, he couldn't turn any of them over to me. He did persuade them to bring girl friends for me; but I found them weak sisters, pale and ineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had. |
| 5546 |
I failed of the bold front and the necessary forwardness when the crucial moment came. Then Louis would show me howa certain, eloquent glance of eye, a smile, a daring, a lifted hat, a spoken word, hesitancies, giggles, coy nervousnessesand, behold, Louis acquainted and nodding me up to be introduced. |
| 5547 |
Her little skirt reached her shoe tops. We sat side by side in a Salvation Army meeting. She was not a convert, nor was her aunt who sat on the other side of her, and who, visiting from the country where at that time the Salvation Army was not, had dropped in to the meeting for half an hour out of curiosity. |
| 5548 |
We slightly faced each other, our near elbows on the back of the bench; and once or twice our elbows just touched. And all the time, deliriously happy, talking in the gentlest and most delicate terms that might not offend her sensitive ears, I was cudgelling my brains in an effort to divine what I was expected to do. |
| 5549 |
She encouraged me in the ways a girl may. Her gloves were off and in one hand, and I remember, lightly and daringly, in mock reproof for something I had said, how she tapped my lips with a tiny flirt of those gloves. I was like to swoon with delight. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. |
| 5550 |
I do remember the first time I kissed her, on another evening, at partinga mighty moment, when I took all my heart of courage and dared. We never succeeded in managing more than a dozen stolen meetings, and we kissed perhaps a dozen timesas boys and girls kiss, briefly and innocently, and wonderingly. |
| 5551 |
Each night, after the day's work, washed up, clothes changed, and supper eaten, we met on the street corner or in the little candy store. But the warm fall weather passed, and on bitter nights of frost or damp nights of drizzle, the street corner was not a comfortable meeting place. And the candy store was unheated. |
| 5552 |
Saloons are always warm and comfortable. Now Louis and I did not go into this saloon because we wanted a drink. Yet we knew that saloons were not charitable institutions. A man could not make a lounging place of a saloon without occasionally buying something over the bar. Our dimes and nickels were few. |
| 5553 |
We voted against that saloon, and went out cast down with the knowledge that we had lost an evening and wasted twenty cents for beer that we didn't want. We made several more tries on succeeding nights, and at last found our way into the National, a saloon on Tenth and Franklin. Here was a more congenial crowd. |
| 5554 |
We decided that that was the saloon for us, and we agreed to be more circumspect thereafter in our drink buying. Also, we had to economise for the rest of the week. We didn't even have car fare. We were compelled to break an engagement with two girls from West Oakland with whom we were attempting to be in love. |
| 5555 |
Also, I still believed in the old myths which were the heritage of the American boy when I was a boy. A canal boy could become a President. Any boy who took employment with any firm could, by thrift, energy, and sobriety, learn the business and rise from position to position until he was taken in as a junior partner. |
| 5556 |
After that the senior partnership was only a matter of time. Very oftenso ran the myththe boy, by reason of his steadiness and application, married his employ's daughter. By this time I had been encouraged to such faith in myself in the matter of girls that I was quite certain I would marry my employer's daughter. |
| 5557 |
There wasn't a doubt of it. All the little boys in the myths did it as soon as they were old enough. So I bade farewell for ever to the adventure path, and went out to the power plant of one of our Oakland street railways. I saw the superintendent himself, in a private office so fine that it almost stunned me. |
| 5558 |
I told him that I wanted to begin right at the bottom and work up, that I wanted to devote my life to this one occupation and this one employment. The superintendent beamed as he listened. He told me that I was the right stuff for success, and that he believed in encouraging American youth that wanted to rise. |
| 5559 |
That will come when you have worked up to it. You will really begin at the bottom. In the car house your first employment will be sweeping up, washing the windows, keeping things clean. And after you have shown yourself satisfactory at that, then you may become a helper to the car house electricians. |
| 5560 |
Do you know that we weigh every pound of coal we burn? Thus, we learn the value of the coal we buy; we know to a tee the last penny of cost of every item of production, and we learn which firemen are the most wasteful, which firemen, out of stupidity or carelessness, get the least out of the coal they fire. |
| 5561 |
Before me, one mature able bodied labourer had done the day shift and another equally mature able bodied labourer had done the night shift. They had received forty dollars a month each. The superintendent, bent on an economical administration, had persuaded me to do the work of both men for thirty dollars a month. |
| 5562 |
On the contrary, the superintendent warned everybody not to tell me. How valiantly I went at it that first day. I worked at top speed, filling the iron wheelbarrow with coal, running it on the scales and weighing the load, then trundling it into the fire room and dumping it on the plates before the fires. |
| 5563 |
By ten o'clock in the morning, so much of my body's energy had I consumed, I felt hungry and snatched a thick double slice of bread and butter from my dinner pail. This I devoured, standing, grimed with coal dust, my knees trembling under me. By eleven o'clock, in this fashion I had consumed my whole lunch. |
| 5564 |
They undressed me and covered me up. In the morning came the agony of being awakened. I was terribly sore, and, worst of all, my wrists were swelling. But I made up for my lost supper, eating an enormous breakfast, and when I hobbled to catch my car I carried a lunch twice as big as the one the day before. |
| 5565 |
So tightly were they buckled that they were like slightly flexible plaster casts. They took the stresses and pressures which hitherto had been borne by my wrists, and they were so tight that there was no room for the inflammation to rise in the sprains. And in this fashion I continued to learn to be an electrician. |
| 5566 |
Morning after morning, always with huger lunches in my dinner pail, I limped out of the house on my way to work. I no longer read my library books. I made no dates with the girls. I was a proper work beast. I worked, and ate, and slept, while my mind slept all the time. The whole thing was a nightmare. |
| 5567 |
He began by swearing me to secrecy. He had been warned by the superintendent not to tell me, and in telling me he was risking his job. He told me of the day coal passer and the night coal passer, and of the wages they had received. I was doing for thirty dollars a month what they had received eighty dollars for doing. |
| 5568 |
I moved through a world of strangers, and the act of drinking together made one acquainted with men and opened the way to adventures. It might be in a saloon with jingled townsmen, or with a genial railroad man well lighted up and armed with pocket flasks, or with a bunch of alki stiffs in a hang out. |
| 5569 |
Always it was John Barleycorn. Even a tramp, in those halcyon days, could get most frequently drunk. I remember, inside the prison at Buffalo, how some of us got magnificently jingled, and how, on the streets of Buffalo after our release, another jingle was financed with pennies begged on the main drag. |
| 5570 |
I saw the wheels of the social machine go around, and I learned that the dignity of manual labour wasn't what I had been told it was by the teachers, preachers, and politicians. The men without trades were helpless cattle. If one learned a trade, he was compelled to belong to a union in order to work at his trade. |
| 5571 |
And his union was compelled to bully and slug the employers' unions in order to hold up wages or hold down hours. The employers' unions like wise bullied and slugged. I couldn't see any dignity at all. And when a workman got old, or had an accident, he was thrown into the scrap heap like any worn out machine. |
| 5572 |
I was received into the homes of some of the members, where I met nice girls whose skirts reached the ground. I dallied with little home clubs wherein we discussed poetry and art and the nuances of grammar. I joined the socialist local where we studied and orated political economy, philosophy, and politics. |
| 5573 |
I hadn't the time, and I certainly did not have the inclination. Between my janitor work, my studies, and innocent amusements such as chess, I hadn't a moment to spare. I was discovering a new world, and such was the passion of my exploration that the old world of John Barleycorn held no inducements for me. |
| 5574 |
And yetand here is the point, the custom, and the codein the days of my prosperity, after the lapse of years, I have gone out of my way by many a long block to spend across Johnny Heinhold's bar deferred interest on the various loans. Not that Johnny Heinhold asked me to do it, or expected me to do it. |
| 5575 |
I did it, as I have said, in obedience to the code I had learned along with all the other things connected with John Barleycorn. In distress, when a man has no other place to turn, when he hasn't the slightest bit of security which a savage hearted pawn broker would consider, he can go to some saloon keeper he knows. |
| 5576 |
Why, I recollect the early days of my writing career, when the small sums of money I earned from the magazines came with tragic irregularity, while at the same time I was staggering along with a growing familya wife, children, a mother, a nephew, and my Mammy Jennie and her old husband fallen on evil days. |
| 5577 |
That is to say, when I borrowed one hundred dollars, he handed me ninety five. The other five dollars he retained as advance interest for the first month. And on the second month I paid him five dollars more, and continued so to do each month until I made a ten strike with the editors and lifted the loan. |
| 5578 |
Nobody about me drank. If any had drunk, and had they offered it to me, I surely would have drunk. As it was, when I had spare moments I spent them playing chess, or going with nice girls who were themselves students, or in riding a bicycle whenever I was fortunate enough to have it out of the pawnbroker's possession. |
| 5579 |
For five weeks I crammed, until simultaneous quadratic equations and chemical formulas fairly oozed from my ears. And then the master of the academy took me aside. He was very sorry, but he was compelled to give me back my tuition fee and to ask me to leave the school. It wasn't a matter of scholarship. |
| 5580 |
And when I turned in my last examination paper I was in full possession of a splendid case of brain fag. I didn't want to see a book. I didn't want to think or to lay eyes on anybody who was liable to think. There was but one prescription for such a condition, and I gave it to myselfthe adventure path. |
| 5581 |
I opened the bight of Turner's Shipyard, rounded the Solano wharf, and surged along abreast of the patch of tules and the clustering fishermen's arks where in the old days I had lived and drunk deep. And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I never dreamed for many a long year to come. |
| 5582 |
The call was imperative. There was no uncertainty about it. More than anything else in the world, my frayed and frazzled mind wanted surcease from weariness in the way it knew surcease would come. And right here is the point. For the first time in my life I consciously, deliberately, desired to get drunk. |
| 5583 |
And Clam came in, Nelson's partner before me, handsome as ever, but more reckless, half insane, burning himself out with whisky. He had just had a quarrel with his partner on the sloop Gazelle, and knives had been drawn, and blows struck, and he was bent on maddening the fever of the memory with more whisky. |
| 5584 |
They cast off my painter. I put the tiller up, filled away before it, and with dizzy eyes checked and steadied the boat on her course and waved farewell. The tide had turned, and the fierce ebb, running in the teeth of a fiercer wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea. Suisun Bay was white with wrath and sea lump. |
| 5585 |
I had wanted the drink that first day, and in the days that followed I did not want it. My tired brain had recuperated. I had no moral scruples in the matter. I was not ashamed nor sorry because of that first day's orgy at Benicia, and I thought no more about it, returning gladly to my books and studies. |
| 5586 |
But the pressure from lack of money, plus a conviction that the university was not giving me all that I wanted in the time I could spare for it, forced me to leave. I was not very disappointed. For two years I had studied, and in those two years, what was far more valuable, I had done a prodigious amount of reading. |
| 5587 |
I had four preferences: first, music; second, poetry; third, the writing of philosophic, economic, and political essays; and, fourth, and last, and least, fiction writing. I resolutely cut out music as impossible, settled down in my bedroom, and tackled my second, third, and fourth choices simultaneously. |
| 5588 |
It was informed with an evil spirit. It obeyed no known laws of physics, and overthrew the hoary axiom that like things performed to like things produce like results. I'll swear that machine never did the same thing in the same way twice. Again and again it demonstrated that unlike actions produce like results. |
| 5589 |
The worst of it was that I was actually typing my manuscripts at the same time I was trying to master that machine. It was a feat of physical endurance and a brain storm combined to type a thousand words, and I was composing thousands of words every day which just had to be typed for the waiting editors. |
| 5590 |
Oh, between the writing and the typewriting I was well a weary. I had brain and nerve fag, and body fag as well, and yet the thought of drink never suggested itself. I was living too high to stand in need of an anodyne. All my waking hours, except those with that infernal typewriter, were spent in a creative heaven. |
| 5591 |
And along with this I had no desire for drink because I still believed in many thingsin the love of all men and women in the matter of man and woman love; in fatherhood; in human justice; in artin the whole host of fond illusions that keep the world turning around. But the waiting editors elected to keep on waiting. |
| 5592 |
Judging by my rate of development, I might hope before I died to be a night watchman for sixty dollars a month, or a policeman actually receiving a hundred dollars with pickings. So relentlessly did my partner and I spring into our work throughout the week that by Saturday night we were frazzled wrecks. |
| 5593 |
I fell asleep the moment I tried to read; and if I did manage to keep my eyes open for several pages, I could not remember the contents of those pages. I gave over attempts on heavy study, such as jurisprudence, political economy, and biology, and tried lighter stuff, such as history. I fell asleep. |
| 5594 |
He exchanges new lamps for old, the spangles of illusion for the drabs of reality, and in the end cheats all who traffic with him. I didn't get drunk, however, for the simple reason that it was a mile and a half to the nearest saloon. And this, in turn, was because the call to get drunk was not very loud in my ears. |
| 5595 |
My body did not cry out for alcohol. As always, alcohol was repulsive to my body. When I was bodily weary from shovelling coal the thought of taking a drink had never flickered into my consciousness. When I was brain wearied after taking the entrance examinations to the university, I promptly got drunk. |
| 5596 |
At the laundry I was suffering physical exhaustion again, and physical exhaustion that was not nearly so profound as that of the coal shovelling. But there was a difference. When I went coal shovelling my mind had not yet awakened. Between that time and the laundry my mind had found the kingdom of the mind. |
| 5597 |
Whisky went over the trail, while the flour lay cached and untouched by the trail side. As good fortune would have it, the three men in my party were not drinkers. Therefore I didn't drink save on rare occasions and disgracefully when with other men. In my personal medicine chest was a quart of whisky. |
| 5598 |
I had no thought of career. That was over and done with. I had to find food for two mouths beside my own and keep a roof over our headsyes, and buy a winter suit, my one suit being decidedly summery. I had to get some sort of work immediately. After that, when I had caught my breath, I might think about my future. |
| 5599 |
Unskilled labour is the first to feel the slackness of hard times, and I had no trades save those of sailor and laundryman. With my new responsibilities I didn't dare go to sea, and I failed to find a job at laundrying. I failed to find a job at anything. I had my name down in five employment bureaux. |
| 5600 |
I advertised in three newspapers. I sought out the few friends I knew who might be able to get me work; but they were either uninterested or unable to find anything for me. The situation was desperate. I pawned my watch, my bicycle, and a mackintosh of which my father had been very proud and which he had left to me. |
| 5601 |
And I almost became a sewing machine agent, on commission, without salary. But poor people don't buy sewing machines in hard times, so I was forced to forgo that employment. Of course, it must be remembered that along with such frivolous occupations I was trying to get work as wop, lumper, and roustabout. |
| 5602 |
The longer it held on to it the more certain I was that the thing was accepted. And here is the funny thing. Some are born to fortune, and some have fortune thrust upon them. But in my case I was clubbed into fortune, and bitter necessity wielded the club. I had long since abandoned all thought of writing as a career. |
| 5603 |
Also, I paid up the bills I owed to the several groceries that allowed me a small credit. I recall the Portuguese groceryman who never permitted my bill to go beyond four dollars. Hopkins, another grocer, could not be budged beyond five dollars. And just then came the call from the post office to go to work. |
| 5604 |
Early and late I was at itwriting, typing, studying grammar, studying writing and all the forms of writing, and studying the writers who succeeded in order to find out how they succeeded. I managed on five hours' sleep in the twenty four, and came pretty close to working the nineteen waking hours left to me. |
| 5605 |
Never seeing me in the day time, she concluded that I was a gambler, and that the light in my window was placed there by my mother to guide her erring son home. The trouble with the beginner at the writing game is the long, dry spells, when there is never an editor's cheque and everything pawnable is pawned. |
| 5606 |
I confined myself to writing and typing a thousand words a day, including Sundays and holidays; and I still studied hard, but not so hard as formerly. I allowed myself five and one half hours of actual sleep. I added this half hour because I was compelled. Financial success permitted me more time for exercise. |
| 5607 |
And still no desire to drink. I possessed too many fine faiths, was living at too keen a pitch. I was a socialist, intent on saving the world, and alcohol could not give me the fervours that were mine from my ideas and ideals. My voice, on account of my successful writing, had added weight, or so I thought. |
| 5608 |
I fought the good fight, and went on studying and writing, and was very busy. Up to this time I had had a very restricted circle of friends. But now I began to go about. I was invited out, especially to dinner, and I made many friends and acquaintances whose economic lives were easier than mine had been. |
| 5609 |
They just drank temperately, and I drank temperately with them as an act of comradeship and accepted hospitality. I did not care for it, neither wanted it nor did not want it, and so small was the impression made by it that I do not remember my first cocktail nor my first Scotch highball. Well, I had a house. |
| 5610 |
If they drank root beer or sarsaparilla, I drank root beer or sarsaparilla with them. And when there were no friends in the house, why, I didn't drink anything. Whisky decanters were always in the room where I wrote, and for months and years I never knew what it was, when by myself, to take a drink. |
| 5611 |
When out at dinner I noticed the kindly, genial glow of the preliminary cocktail. It seemed a very fitting and gracious thing. Yet so little did I stand in need of it, with my own high intensity and vitality, that I never thought it worth while to have a cocktail before my own meal when I ate alone. |
| 5612 |
On the other hand, I well remember a very brilliant man, somewhat older than I, who occasionally visited me. He liked whisky, and I recall sitting whole afternoons in my den, drinking steadily with him, drink for drink, until he was mildly lighted up and I was slightly aware that I had drunk some whisky. |
| 5613 |
It is a queer man pride that leads one to drink with men in order to show as strong a head as they. But this queer man pride is no theory. It is a fact. For instance, a wild band of young revolutionists invited me as the guest of honour to a beer bust. It is the only technical beer bust I ever attended. |
| 5614 |
I imagined that the talk would be wild and high, that some of them might drink more than they ought, and that I would drink discreetly. But it seemed these beer busts were a diversion of these high spirited young fellows whereby they whiled away the tedium of existence by making fools of their betters. |
| 5615 |
In the eagerness of youth I had made the ancient mistake of pursuing Truth too relentlessly. I had torn her veils from her, and the sight was too terrible for me to stand. In brief, I lost my fine faiths in pretty well everything except humanity, and the humanity I retained faith in was a very stark humanity indeed. |
| 5616 |
This long sickness of pessimism is too well known to most of us to be detailed here. Let it suffice to state that I had it very bad. I meditated suicide coolly, as a Greek philosopher might. My regret was that there were too many dependent directly upon me for food and shelter for me to quit living. |
| 5617 |
I boxed, swam, sailed, rode horses, lived in the open an arrantly healthful life, and passed life insurance examinations with flying colours. In its inception, now that I look back upon it, this need for alcohol was a mental need, a nerve need, a good spirits need. How can I explain? It was something like this. |
| 5618 |
Yet I was not hysterical nor in any way overwrought. My pulse was normal. My heart was an amazement of excellence to the insurance doctors. My lungs threw the said doctors into ecstasies. I wrote a thousand words every day. I was punctiliously exact in dealing with all the affairs of life that fell to my lot. |
| 5619 |
I had seen the same show too often, listened too often to the same songs and the same jokes. I knew too much about the box office receipts. I knew the cogs of the machinery behind the scenes so well that the posing on the stage, and the laughter and the song, could not drown the creaking of the wheels behind. |
| 5620 |
Nor would it have been fair, nor wise, to compel her to spend all her hours in my company. Besides, I had written a string of successful books, and society demands some portion of the recreative hours of a fellow that writes books. And any normal man, of himself and his needs, demands some hours of his fellow men. |
| 5621 |
The ever patient one had waited a quarter of a century and more for me to reach my hand out in need of him. His thousand tricks had failed, thanks to my constitution and good luck, but he had more tricks in his bag. A cocktail or two, or several, I found, cheered me up for the foolishness of foolish people. |
| 5622 |
I remember, while war corresponding in the Far East, of being irresistibly attracted to a certain home. Besides accepting all invitations to dinner, I made a point of dropping in almost every afternoon. Now, the hostess was a charming woman, but it was not for her sake that I was under her roof so frequently. |
| 5623 |
It happened that she made by far the finest cocktail procurable in that large city where drink mixing on the part of the foreign population was indeed an art. Up at the club, down at the hotels, and in other private houses, no such cocktails were created. Her cocktails were subtle. They were masterpieces. |
| 5624 |
Oh, if a white man came into my camp, I opened a bottle and we drank together according to the way of men, just as he would open a bottle and drink with me if I came into his camp. I carried that whisky for social purposes, and I so charged it up in my expense account to the newspaper for which I worked. |
| 5625 |
On previous trips Cloudesley had elected to drink beer; so I had kept the yacht supplied with beer and had drunk beer with him. But on this cruise the situation was different. Toddy was so nicknamed because of his diabolical cleverness in concocting toddies. So I brought whisky alonga couple of gallons. |
| 5626 |
There was a bit of lie in this attitude of mine, a bit of hypocrisy; but the lie and the hypocrisy were those of a man desiring to live. I deliberately blinded myself to what I took to be the savage interpretation of biological fact. After all, I was merely forswearing a bad habit, forgoing a bad frame of mind. |
| 5627 |
And I add, that in all my days, measuring them with cold, considerative judgment, this was, far and away beyond all other periods, the happiest period of my life. But the time was at hand, rhymeless and reasonless so far as I can see, when I was to begin to pay for my score of years of dallying with John Barleycorn. |
| 5628 |
The servants had been dismissed for the day, and we returned late at night to a jolly chafing dish supper. Oh, it was good to be alive that night while the supper was preparing, the two of us alone in the kitchen. I, personally, was at the top of life. Such things as the books and ultimate truth did not exist. |
| 5629 |
My body was gloriously healthy, and healthily tired from the long ride. It had been a splendid day. The night was splendid. I was with the woman who was my mate, picnicking in gleeful abandon. I had no troubles. The bills were all paid, and a surplus of money was rolling in on me. The future ever widened before me. |
| 5630 |
And right there, in the kitchen, delicious things bubbled in the chafing dish, our laughter bubbled, and my stomach was keen with a most delicious edge of appetite. I felt so good, that somehow, somewhere, in me arose an insatiable greed to feel better. I was so happy that I wanted to pitch my happiness even higher. |
| 5631 |
And what was a cocktailone cocktailto me who on so many occasions for so many years had drunk inordinate quantities of stiffer stuff and been unharmed? The programme of my ranch life was as follows: Each morning, at eight thirty, having been reading or correcting proofs in bed since four or five, I went to my desk. |
| 5632 |
One morning, at eleven thirty, before I got into the hammock, I took a cocktail. I repeated this on subsequent mornings, of course, taking another cocktail just before I ate at twelve thirty. Soon I found myself, seated at my desk in the midst of my thousand words, looking forward to that eleven thirty cocktail. |
| 5633 |
I got into the habit of crawling out of the hammock ten minutes earlier so as to find time and decency for two more cocktails ere I ate. This became schedulethree cocktails in the hour that intervened between my desk and dinner. And these are two of the deadliest drinking habits: regular drinking and solitary drinking. |
| 5634 |
After a boisterous afternoon in the swimming pool, followed by a glorious ride on horseback over the mountains or up or down the Valley of the Moon, I found myself so keyed and splendid that I desired to be more highly keyed, to feel more splendid. I knew the way. A cocktail before supper was not the way. |
| 5635 |
And, when done, the cocktails reared a wall of inhibition in my brain between the day's work done and the rest of the day of fun to come. My work ceased from my consciousness. No thought of it flickered in my brain till next morning at nine o'clock when I sat at my desk and began my next thousand words. |
| 5636 |
I glowed with health. I slept like a babe. I continued to write successful books, and in sociological controversy I saw my opponents confuted with the facts of the times that daily reared new buttresses to my intellectual position. From day's end to day's end I never knew sorrow, disappointment, nor regret. |
| 5637 |
I told the barkeeper to mix me a double cocktail. Thereafter, whenever I was in a hurry, I ordered double cocktails. It saved time. One result of this regular heavy drinking was to jade me. My mind grew so accustomed to spring and liven by artificial means that without artificial means it refused to spring and liven. |
| 5638 |
I had to get the kick and the hit of the stuff, the crawl of the maggots, the genial brain glow, the laughter tickle, the touch of devilishness and sting, the smile over the face of things, ere I could join my fellows and make one with them. Another result was that John Barleycorn was beginning to trip me up. |
| 5639 |
He was thrusting my long sickness back upon me, inveigling me into again pursuing Truth and snatching her veils away from her, tricking me into looking reality stark in the face. But this came on gradually. My thoughts were growing harsh again, though they grew harsh slowly. Sometimes warning thoughts crossed my mind. |
| 5640 |
And within a month he was dead. It was no accident. Half a dozen different bugs of long scientific names had attacked and destroyed him. The complications were astonishing and painful, and for days before he died the screams of agony of that splendid manhood could be heard for a block around. He died screaming. |
| 5641 |
It is to be remarked, in passing, that when a man begins to drink rationally and intelligently that he betrays a grave symptom of how far along the road he has travelled. But I continued to observe my rule of never taking my first drink of the day until the last word of my thousand words was written. |
| 5642 |
From Hawaii we sailed for the Marquesas. The traverse occupied sixty days. For sixty days we never raised land, a sail, nor a steamer smoke. But early in those sixty days the cook, giving an overhauling to the galley, made a find. Down in the bottom of a deep locker he found a dozen bottles of angelica and muscatel. |
| 5643 |
It warmed the cockles of my geniality and put a fairer face on the truly fair face of the sea. Each morning, below, sweating out my thousand words, I found myself looking forward to that twelve o'clock event of the day. The trouble was I had to share the stuff, and the length of the traverse was doubtful. |
| 5644 |
So it was that I reached the Marquesas the possessor of a real man's size thirst. And in the Marquesas were several white men, a lot of sickly natives, much magnificent scenery, plenty of trade rum, an immense quantity of absinthe, but neither whisky nor gin. The trade rum scorched the skin off one's mouth. |
| 5645 |
There was no drunkenness, as drunkenness is ordinarily understoodno staggering and rolling around, no befuddlement of the senses. The skilled and seasoned drinker, with a strong constitution, never descends to anything like that. He drinks to feel good, to get a pleasant jingle, and no more than that. |
| 5646 |
The things he carefully avoids are the nausea of over drinking, the after effect of over drinking, the helplessness and loss of pride of over drinking. What the skilled and seasoned drinker achieves is a discreet and canny semi intoxication. And he does it by the twelve month around without any apparent penalty. |
| 5647 |
There are hundreds of thousands of men of this sort in the United States to day, in clubs, hotels, and in their own homesmen who are never drunk, and who, though most of them will indignantly deny it, are rarely sober. And all of them fondly believe, as I fondly believed, that they are beating the game. |
| 5648 |
The ultra violet rays, and other high velocity and invisible rays from the upper end of the spectrum, rip and tear through their tissues, just as the X ray ripped and tore through the tissues of so many experimenters before they learned the danger. White men in the tropics undergo radical changes of nature. |
| 5649 |
They become nervous, irritable, and less moral. And they drink as they never drank before. Drinking is one form of the many forms of degeneration that set in when white men are exposed too long to too much white light. The increase of alcoholic consumption is automatic. The tropics is no place for a long sojourn. |
| 5650 |
They seem doomed to die anyway, and the heavy drinking expedites the process. They don't reason about it. They just do it. The sun sickness got me, despite the fact that I had been in the tropics only a couple of years. I drank heavily during this time, but right here I wish to forestall misunderstanding. |
| 5651 |
All on board suffered from malariathe real, tropical malaria that can kill in three months. All on board suffered from perforating ulcers and from the maddening itch of ngari ngari. A Japanese cook went insane from his too numerous afflictions. One of my Polynesian sailors lay at death's door with blackwater fever. |
| 5652 |
I noted its effect on my small crew, when, breaking their backs and hearts at heaving up anchor in forty fathoms, they knocked off gasping and trembling at the end of half an hour and had new life put into them by stiff jolts of rum. They caught their breaths, wiped their mouths, and went to it again with a will. |
| 5653 |
Where no strength remains he finds new strength. The wearied one rises to greater effort. For the time being there is an actual accession of strength. I remember passing coal on an ocean steamer through eight days of hell, during which time we coal passers were kept to the job by being fed with whisky. |
| 5654 |
Malaria still festered in me and put me on my back in shivering delirium at the most unexpected moments, compelling me to cancel a double lecture tour which had been arranged. So I abandoned the Snark voyage and sought a cooler climate. The day I came out of hospital I took up drinking again as a matter of course. |
| 5655 |
It gave quicker action with less quantity. Bourbon or rye, or cunningly aged blends, constituted the pre midday drinking. In the late afternoon it was Scotch and soda. My sleep, always excellent, now became not quite so excellent. I had been accustomed to read myself back asleep when I chanced to awake. |
| 5656 |
When I had read two or three of the small hours away and was as wide awake as ever, I found that a drink furnished the soporific effect. Sometimes two or three drinks were required. So short a period of sleep then intervened before early morning rising that my system did not have time to work off the alcohol. |
| 5657 |
I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. |
| 5658 |
But a new and most diabolical complication arose. The work refused to be done without drinking. It just couldn't be done. I had to drink in order to do it. I was beginning to fight now. I had the craving at last, and it was mastering me. I would sit at my desk and dally with pad and pen, but words refused to flow. |
| 5659 |
When, in despair, I took my drink, at once my brain loosened up and began to roll off the thousand words. In my town house, in Oakland, I finished the stock of liquor and wilfully refused to purchase more. It was no use, because, unfortunately, there remained in the bottom of the liquor cabinet a case of beer. |
| 5660 |
Now beer is a poor substitute for strong waters: besides, I didn't like beer, yet all I could think of was that beer so singularly accessible in the bottom of the cabinet. Not until I had drunk a pint of it did the words begin to reel off, and the thousand were reeled off to the tune of numerous pints. |
| 5661 |
At once, O untravelled reader, you see how lunatic and blasphemous is the realm I am trying to describe to you in the language of John Barleycorn's tribe. It is not the language of your tribe, all of whose members resolutely shun the roads that lead to death and tread only the roads that lead to life. |
| 5662 |
For there are roads and roads, and of truth there are orders and orders. But have patience. At least, through what seems no more than verbal yammerings, you may, perchance, glimpse faint far vistas of other lands and tribes. Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is normal is healthful. |
| 5663 |
And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed that other and truer order of truth and recoiled from it. Countless men have passed through the long sickness and lived to tell of it and deliberately to forget it to the end of their days. They lived. They realised life, for life is what they were. They did right. |
| 5664 |
John Barleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the liver live. |
| 5665 |
In my body are no aches nor pains. The good old flesh machine is running smoothly on. Neither brain nor muscle is overworked. I have land, money, power, recognition from the world, a consciousness that I do my meed of good in serving others, a mate whom I love, children that are of my own fond flesh. |
| 5666 |
I have built houses, many houses, and tilled many a hundred acres. And as for trees, have I not planted a hundred thousand? Everywhere, from any window of my house, I can gaze forth upon these trees of my planting, standing valiantly erect and aspiring toward the sun. My life has indeed fallen in pleasant places. |
| 5667 |
John Barleycorn is with me because in all the unwitting days of my youth John Barleycorn was accessible, calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on every street between the corners. The pseudo civilisation into which I was born permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul poison. |
| 5668 |
I am a king in the kingdom of sense, and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust. And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me. |
| 5669 |
These men toiled, and cleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they rested their labour stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets, at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog wisps stealing across the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too, shall some day, and soon, be gone. |
| 5670 |
I am going now. In my jaw are cunning artifices of the dentists which replace the parts of me already gone. Never again will I have the thumbs of my youth. Old fights and wrestlings have injured them irreparably. That punch on the head of a man whose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and for ever. |
| 5671 |
The joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were, when, in wild nights and days of toil and frolic, I strained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a single rope clutch in the driving blackness of storm. |
| 5672 |
Never again can I run with the sled dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail. I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton, that under the rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death's head. All of which does not shudder me. |
| 5673 |
The White Logic insists upon opening the long closed books, and by paragraph and chapter states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust. About me is murmur and hum, and I know it for the gnat swarm of the living, piping for a little space its thin plaint of troubled air. I return across the ranch. |
| 5674 |
Twilight is on, and the hunting animals are out. I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life. Here is no morality. Only in man is morality, and man created ita code of action that makes toward living and that is of the lesser order of truth. Yet all this I knew before, in the weary days of my long sickness. |
| 5675 |
Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. |
| 5676 |
You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future. |
| 5677 |
He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep strawed stalls. |
| 5678 |
From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be wellthe old, oh, ancient old, acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason. |
| 5679 |
Then you are in your consciousness these experiences. You are at any moment what you are thinking at that moment. Your I is both subject and object; it predicates things of itself and is the things predicated. The thinker is the thought, the knower is what is known, the possessor is the things possessed. |
| 5680 |
We are so made, that is all. We have with great success made a practice of not leaving arsenic and strychnine, and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying around for our children to be destroyed by. Treat John Barleycorn the same way. Stop him. Don't let him lie around, licensed and legal, to pounce upon our youth. |
| 5681 |
About man's first experiment in chemistry was the making of alcohol, and down all the generations to this day man has continued to manufacture and drink it. And there has never been a day when the women have not resented man's use of alcohol, though they have never had the power to give weight to their resentment. |
| 5682 |
The women know. They have paid an incalculable price of sweat and tears for man's use of alcohol. Ever jealous for the race, they will legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born; and for the babes of girls, too, for they must be the mothers, wives, and sisters of these boys. And it will be easy. |
| 5683 |
It chanced, some time ago, that I made a voyage of one hundred and forty eight days in a windjammer around the Horn. I took no private supply of alcohol along, and, though there was no day of those one hundred and forty eight days that I could not have got a drink from the captain, I did not take a drink. |
| 5684 |
Drinking, as I deem it, is practically entirely a habit of mind. It is unlike tobacco, or cocaine, or morphine, or all the rest of the long list of drugs. The desire for alcohol is quite peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a matter of mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social soil. |
| 5685 |
Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone. All drinkers begin socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a thousand social connotations such as I have described out of my own experience in the first part of this narrative. These social connotations are the stuff of which the drink habit is largely composed. |
| 5686 |
The part that alcohol itself plays is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the social atmosphere in which it is drunk. The human is rarely born these days, who, without long training in the social associations of drinking, feels the irresistible chemical propulsion of his system toward alcohol. |
| 5687 |
They always occurred linked together. Thus, when reading in my deck chair or when talking with others, practically any mention of any part of the world I knew instantly aroused the connotation of drinking and good fellows. Big nights and days and moments, all purple passages and freedoms, thronged my memory. |
| 5688 |
It is a habit of mind to which I have been trained all my life. It is now part of the stuff that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men, when, glass in hand, they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse. |
| 5689 |
He sat in the snow, arms tied behind him, waiting the torture. He stared curiously before him at a huge Cossack, prone in the snow, moaning in his pain. The men had finished handling the giant and turned him over to the women. That they exceeded the fiendishness of the men, the man's cries attested. |
| 5690 |
But he objected to the torture. It offended his soul. And this offence, in turn, was not due to the mere pain he must endure, but to the sorry spectacle the pain would make of him. He knew that he would pray, and beg, and entreat, even as Big Ivan and the others that had gone before. This would not be nice. |
| 5691 |
He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings slowly dying away. He strove to think of other things, and began reading back in his own life. He remembered his mother and his father, and the little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had taught him dancing and sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire. |
| 5692 |
All the years, with his heart in studios, and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery. He had purchased his life with blood. Everybody had killed. He had killed that traveller for his passports. He had proved that he was a man of parts by duelling with two Russian officers on a single day. |
| 5693 |
He could not escape that way. The only way was ahead, across the dark and icy sea of Bering to Alaska. The way had led from savagery to deeper savagery. On the scurvy rotten ships of the fur thieves, out of food and out of water, buffeted by the interminable storms of that stormy sea, men had become animals. |
| 5694 |
Thrice he had sailed east from Kamtchatka. And thrice, after all manner of hardship and suffering, the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka. There had been no outlet for escape, and he could not go back the way he had come, for the mines and the knout awaited him. Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east. |
| 5695 |
His comrades were Slavonian hunters and Russian adventurers, Mongols and Tartars and Siberian aborigines; and through the savages of the new world they had cut a path of blood. They had massacred whole villages that refused to furnish the fur tribute; and they, in turn, had been massacred by ships' companies. |
| 5696 |
They had spent a winter of solitude and starvation on a lonely Aleutian isle, and their rescue in the spring by another fur ship had been one chance in a thousand. But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in. Passing from ship to ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that explored south. |
| 5697 |
But they had met no Spaniards. Only had they encountered the same impregnable wall of savagery. The denizens of the confines of the world, painted for war, had driven them back from the shores. At last, when one boat was cut off and every man killed, the commander had abandoned the quest and sailed back to the north. |
| 5698 |
Perils unaccountable and unthinkable were mentioned, as well as wild beasts, hostile tribes, impenetrable forests, and mighty mountain ranges; but always from beyond came the rumour and the tale of white skinned men, blue of eye and fair of hair, who fought like devils and who sought always for furs. |
| 5699 |
A heavy tribute was laid upon the tribe. Blows and lashings continued, and that the tribute should be paid, the women and children were held as hostages and treated with the barbarity that only the fur thieves knew. Well, it had been a sowing of blood, and now was come the harvest. The fort was gone. |
| 5700 |
The mark of the lash was still on his face. After all, Subienkow could not blame him, but he disliked the thought of what Yakaga would do to him. He thought of appealing to Makamuk, the head chief; but his judgment told him that such appeal was useless. Then, too, he thought of bursting his bonds and dying fighting. |
| 5701 |
A little bit of this medicine rubbed on the skin makes the skin hard like a rock, hard like iron, so that no cutting weapon can cut it. The strongest blow of a cutting weapon is a vain thing against it. A bone knife becomes like a piece of mud; and it will turn the edge of the iron knives we have brought among you. |
| 5702 |
The bright steel flashed through the frosty air, poised for a perceptible instant above Makamuk's head, then descended upon Subienkow's bare neck. Clear through flesh and bone it cut its way, biting deeply into the log beneath. The amazed savages saw the head bounce a yard away from the blood spouting trunk. |
| 5703 |
He would be Lost Face; the record of his shame would be with him until he died; and whenever the tribes gathered in the spring for the salmon, or in the summer for the trading, the story would pass back and forth across the camp fires of how the fur thief died peaceably, at a single stroke, by the hand of Lost Face. |
| 5704 |
When this thought came to him, he began to hope that he would not be selected; but a man who had made a name as captain of a college football eleven, as a president of an athletic club, as a dog musher and a stampeder in the Yukon, and, moreover, who possessed such shoulders as he, had no right to avoid the honour. |
| 5705 |
So he dashed ashore with it and ran up the portage changing it often from one hand to the other, and wondering if it really did not weigh more than forty pounds. It was half past four in the afternoon when the two men started. The current of the Thirty Mile River was so strong that rarely could they use the paddles. |
| 5706 |
A crisp wind blew down the river, freezing their hands and making it imperative, from time to time, to beat the blood back into the numbed fingers. As night came on, they were compelled to trust to luck. They fell repeatedly on the untravelled banks and tore their clothing to sheds in the underbrush they could not see. |
| 5707 |
Holding on with one hand, he held the swamped canoe with the other till Antonsen dragged himself out of the water. Then they pulled the canoe out and rested. A fresh start at this crucial point took them by. They landed on the bank above and plunged immediately ashore and into the brush with the tow line. |
| 5708 |
Churchill drove him mercilessly; but when he pitched forward and bade fair to drown in three feet of water, the other dragged him into the canoe. After that, Churchill fought on alone, arriving at the police post at the head of Bennett in the early afternoon. He tried to help Antonsen out of the canoe, but failed. |
| 5709 |
It was a severe handicap. He swung it from one hand to the other, and back again. He tucked it under his arm. He threw one hand over the opposite shoulder, and the bag bumped and pounded on his back as he ran along. He could scarcely hold it in his bruised and swollen fingers, and several times he dropped it. |
| 5710 |
At the far end of the portage he bought an old set of pack straps for a dollar, and in them he swung the grip. Also, he chartered a launch to run him the six miles to the upper end of Lake Linderman, where he arrived at four in the afternoon. The Athenian was to sail from Dyea next morning at seven. |
| 5711 |
Dyea was twenty eight miles away, and between towered Chilcoot. He sat down to adjust his foot gear for the long climb, and woke up. He had dozed the instant he sat down, though he had not slept thirty seconds. He was afraid his next doze might be longer, so he finished fixing his foot gear standing up. |
| 5712 |
Then, in the early darkness, Churchill's mule brushed him against a projecting branch that laid his cheek open. To cap it, the mule blundered off the trail and fell, throwing rider and gripsack out upon the rocks. After that, Churchill walked, or stumbled rather, over the apology for a trail, leading the mule. |
| 5713 |
He crept and crawled like a crab, burdened by the weight of his limbs. A distinct and painful effort of will was required each time he lifted a foot. An hallucination came to him that he was shod with lead, like a deep sea diver, and it was all he could do to resist the desire to reach down and feel the lead. |
| 5714 |
If those loads had weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, then Bondell's grip weighed five hundred. The first rise of the divide from Crater Lake was across a small glacier. Here was a well defined trail. But above the glacier, which was also above timber line, was naught but a chaos of naked rock and enormous boulders. |
| 5715 |
He won the summit in the thick of howling wind and driving snow, providentially stumbling upon a small, deserted tent, into which he crawled. There he found and bolted some ancient fried potatoes and half a dozen raw eggs. When the snow ceased and the wind eased down, he began the almost impossible descent. |
| 5716 |
From all about him arose the stench of dead horses. The hole was handy to the trail, and the packers had made a practice of tumbling into it their broken and dying animals. The stench overpowered him, making him deadly sick, and as in a nightmare he scrambled out. Half way up, he recollected Bondell's gripsack. |
| 5717 |
Churchill drank a glass of whisky, told the barkeeper to call him in ten minutes, and sat down, his feet on the grip, his head on his knees. So badly did his misused body stiffen, that when he was called it required another ten minutes and a second glass of whisky to unbend his joints and limber up the muscles. |
| 5718 |
His revolver went off four times, and he saw the flashes and heard the explosions of their revolvers. Also, he was aware that he had been hit in the thigh. He saw one man go down, and, as the other came for him, he smashed him a straight blow with the heavy revolver full in the face. Then he turned and ran. |
| 5719 |
It was a superficial wound, but it was incontestable. He became wider awake, and kept up the lumbering run to Canyon City. He found a man, with a team of horses and a wagon, who got out of bed and harnessed up for twenty dollars. Churchill crawled in on the wagon bed and slept, the gripsack still on his back. |
| 5720 |
Any altitude of his body above the wagon bed of less than a foot did not faze him. The last mile was smooth going, and he slept soundly. He came to in the grey dawn, the driver shaking him savagely and howling into his ear that the Athenian was gone. Churchill looked blankly at the deserted harbour. |
| 5721 |
It was six miles to Skaguay, and he had a blissful thought of sleeping those six miles. But the man did not know how to row, and Churchill took the oars and toiled for a few more centuries. He never knew six longer and more excruciating miles. A snappy little breeze blew up the inlet and held him back. |
| 5722 |
There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun. |
| 5723 |
It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky line and dip immediately from view. The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. |
| 5724 |
He was bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys were already. They had come over across the divide from the Indian Creek country, while he had come the roundabout way to take a look at the possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. |
| 5725 |
It was also under his shirt, wrapped up in a handkerchief and lying against the naked skin. It was the only way to keep the biscuits from freezing. He smiled agreeably to himself as he thought of those biscuits, each cut open and sopped in bacon grease, and each enclosing a generous slice of fried bacon. |
| 5726 |
He was surprised, however, at the cold. It certainly was cold, he concluded, as he rubbed his numbed nose and cheek bones with his mittened hand. He was a warm whiskered man, but the hair on his face did not protect the high cheek bones and the eager nose that thrust itself aggressively into the frosty air. |
| 5727 |
The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy five below zero. |
| 5728 |
Since the freezing point is thirty two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man's brain. But the brute had its instinct. |
| 5729 |
The man's red beard and moustache were likewise frosted, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of ice and increasing with every warm, moist breath he exhaled. Also, the man was chewing tobacco, and the muzzle of ice held his lips so rigidly that he was unable to clear his chin when he expelled the juice. |
| 5730 |
It was ten o'clock. He was making four miles an hour, and he calculated that he would arrive at the forks at half past twelve. He decided to celebrate that event by eating his lunch there. The dog dropped in again at his heels, with a tail drooping discouragement, as the man swung along the creek bed. |
| 5731 |
He was not much given to thinking, and just then particularly he had nothing to think about save that he would eat lunch at the forks and that at six o'clock he would be in camp with the boys. There was nobody to talk to and, had there been, speech would have been impossible because of the ice muzzle on his mouth. |
| 5732 |
But it didn't matter much, after all. What were frosted cheeks? A bit painful, that was all; they were never serious. Empty as the man's mind was of thoughts, he was keenly observant, and he noticed the changes in the creek, the curves and bends and timber jams, and always he sharply noted where he placed his feet. |
| 5733 |
Sometimes a skin of ice half an inch thick covered them, and in turn was covered by the snow. Sometimes there were alternate layers of water and ice skin, so that when one broke through he kept on breaking through for a while, sometimes wetting himself to the waist. That was why he had shied in such panic. |
| 5734 |
He reflected awhile, rubbing his nose and cheeks, then skirted to the left, stepping gingerly and testing the footing for each step. Once clear of the danger, he took a fresh chew of tobacco and swung along at his four mile gait. In the course of the next two hours he came upon several similar traps. |
| 5735 |
The dog did not want to go. It hung back until the man shoved it forward, and then it went quickly across the white, unbroken surface. Suddenly it broke through, floundered to one side, and got away to firmer footing. It had wet its forefeet and legs, and almost immediately the water that clung to it turned to ice. |
| 5736 |
To permit the ice to remain would mean sore feet. It did not know this. It merely obeyed the mysterious prompting that arose from the deep crypts of its being. But the man knew, having achieved a judgment on the subject, and he removed the mitten from his right hand and helped tear out the ice particles. |
| 5737 |
The bulge of the earth intervened between it and Henderson Creek, where the man walked under a clear sky at noon and cast no shadow. At half past twelve, to the minute, he arrived at the forks of the creek. He was pleased at the speed he had made. If he kept it up, he would certainly be with the boys by six. |
| 5738 |
He did not put the mitten on, but, instead, struck the fingers a dozen sharp smashes against his leg. Then he sat down on a snow covered log to eat. The sting that followed upon the striking of his fingers against his leg ceased so quickly that he was startled, he had had no chance to take a bite of biscuit. |
| 5739 |
He had forgotten to build a fire and thaw out. He chuckled at his foolishness, and as he chuckled he noted the numbness creeping into the exposed fingers. Also, he noted that the stinging which had first come to his toes when he sat down was already passing away. He wondered whether the toes were warm or numbed. |
| 5740 |
When the man had finished, he filled his pipe and took his comfortable time over a smoke. Then he pulled on his mittens, settled the ear flaps of his cap firmly about his ears, and took the creek trail up the left fork. The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire. This man did not know cold. |
| 5741 |
So the dog made no effort to communicate its apprehension to the man. It was not concerned in the welfare of the man; it was for its own sake that it yearned back toward the fire. But the man whistled, and spoke to it with the sound of whip lashes, and the dog swung in at the man's heels and followed after. |
| 5742 |
The man took a chew of tobacco and proceeded to start a new amber beard. Also, his moist breath quickly powdered with white his moustache, eyebrows, and lashes. There did not seem to be so many springs on the left fork of the Henderson, and for half an hour the man saw no signs of any. And then it happened. |
| 5743 |
He threw down several large pieces on top of the snow. This served for a foundation and prevented the young flame from drowning itself in the snow it otherwise would melt. The flame he got by touching a match to a small shred of birch bark that he took from his pocket. This burned even more readily than paper. |
| 5744 |
He worked slowly and carefully, keenly aware of his danger. Gradually, as the flame grew stronger, he increased the size of the twigs with which he fed it. He squatted in the snow, pulling the twigs out from their entanglement in the brush and feeding directly to the flame. He knew there must be no failure. |
| 5745 |
If his feet are dry, and he fails, he can run along the trail for half a mile and restore his circulation. But the circulation of wet and freezing feet cannot be restored by running when it is seventy five below. No matter how fast he runs, the wet feet will freeze the harder. All this the man knew. |
| 5746 |
His pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the surface of his body and to all the extremities. But the instant he stopped, the action of the pump eased down. The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow. |
| 5747 |
The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his body. |
| 5748 |
He was feeding it with twigs the size of his finger. In another minute he would be able to feed it with branches the size of his wrist, and then he could remove his wet foot gear, and, while it dried, he could keep his naked feet warm by the fire, rubbing them at first, of course, with snow. The fire was a success. |
| 5749 |
Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had to look and see whether or not he had hold of it. The wires were pretty well down between him and his finger ends. All of which counted for little. |
| 5750 |
There was the fire, snapping and crackling and promising life with every dancing flame. He started to untie his moccasins. They were coated with ice; the thick German socks were like sheaths of iron half way to the knees; and the mocassin strings were like rods of steel all twisted and knotted as by some conflagration. |
| 5751 |
It was his own fault or, rather, his mistake. He should not have built the fire under the spruce tree. He should have built it in the open. But it had been easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the fire. Now the tree under which he had done this carried a weight of snow on its boughs. |
| 5752 |
Perhaps the old timer on Sulphur Creek was right. If he had only had a trail mate he would have been in no danger now. The trail mate could have built the fire. Well, it was up to him to build the fire over again, and this second time there must be no failure. Even if he succeeded, he would most likely lose some toes. |
| 5753 |
And all the time, in his consciousness, was the knowledge that each instant his feet were freezing. This thought tended to put him in a panic, but he fought against it and kept calm. He pulled on his mittens with his teeth, and threshed his arms back and forth, beating his hands with all his might against his sides. |
| 5754 |
After a time he was aware of the first far away signals of sensation in his beaten fingers. The faint tingling grew stronger till it evolved into a stinging ache that was excruciating, but which the man hailed with satisfaction. He stripped the mitten from his right hand and fetched forth the birch bark. |
| 5755 |
The exposed fingers were quickly going numb again. Next he brought out his bunch of sulphur matches. But the tremendous cold had already driven the life out of his fingers. In his effort to separate one match from the others, the whole bunch fell in the snow. He tried to pick it out of the snow, but failed. |
| 5756 |
In this fashion he carried it to his mouth. The ice crackled and snapped when by a violent effort he opened his mouth. He drew the lower jaw in, curled the upper lip out of the way, and scraped the bunch with his upper teeth in order to separate a match. He succeeded in getting one, which he dropped on his lap. |
| 5757 |
Then he devised a way. He picked it up in his teeth and scratched it on his leg. Twenty times he scratched before he succeeded in lighting it. As it flamed he held it with his teeth to the birch bark. But the burning brimstone went up his nostrils and into his lungs, causing him to cough spasmodically. |
| 5758 |
The sensation developed into pain that grew acute. And still he endured it, holding the flame of the matches clumsily to the bark that would not light readily because his own burning hands were in the way, absorbing most of the flame. At last, when he could endure no more, he jerked his hands apart. |
| 5759 |
He began laying dry grasses and the tiniest twigs on the flame. He could not pick and choose, for he had to lift the fuel between the heels of his hands. Small pieces of rotten wood and green moss clung to the twigs, and he bit them off as well as he could with his teeth. He cherished the flame carefully and awkwardly. |
| 5760 |
The fire provider had failed. As he looked apathetically about him, his eyes chanced on the dog, sitting across the ruins of the fire from him, in the snow, making restless, hunching movements, slightly lifting one forefoot and then the other, shifting its weight back and forth on them with wistful eagerness. |
| 5761 |
The sight of the dog put a wild idea into his head. He remembered the tale of the man, caught in a blizzard, who killed a steer and crawled inside the carcass, and so was saved. He would kill the dog and bury his hands in the warm body until the numbness went out of them. Then he could build another fire. |
| 5762 |
The man sat up in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness. Then he pulled on his mittens, by means of his teeth, and got upon his feet. He glanced down at first in order to assure himself that he was really standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated to the earth. |
| 5763 |
He had forgotten for the moment that they were frozen and that they were freezing more and more. All this happened quickly, and before the animal could get away, he encircled its body with his arms. He sat down in the snow, and in this fashion held the dog, while it snarled and whined and struggled. |
| 5764 |
There was no way to do it. With his helpless hands he could neither draw nor hold his sheath knife nor throttle the animal. He released it, and it plunged wildly away, with tail between its legs, and still snarling. It halted forty feet away and surveyed him curiously, with ears sharply pricked forward. |
| 5765 |
The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and found them hanging on the ends of his arms. It struck him as curious that one should have to use his eyes in order to find out where his hands were. He began threshing his arms back and forth, beating the mittened hands against his sides. |
| 5766 |
He did this for five minutes, violently, and his heart pumped enough blood up to the surface to put a stop to his shivering. But no sensation was aroused in the hands. He had an impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but when he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it. |
| 5767 |
This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek bed along the old, dim trail. |
| 5768 |
The running made him feel better. He did not shiver. Maybe, if he ran on, his feet would thaw out; and, anyway, if he ran far enough, he would reach camp and the boys. Without doubt he would lose some fingers and toes and some of his face; but the boys would take care of him, and save the rest of him when he got there. |
| 5769 |
And at the same time there was another thought in his mind that said he would never get to the camp and the boys; that it was too many miles away, that the freezing had too great a start on him, and that he would soon be stiff and dead. This thought he kept in the background and refused to consider. |
| 5770 |
He seemed to himself to skim along above the surface and to have no connection with the earth. Somewhere he had once seen a winged Mercury, and he wondered if Mercury felt as he felt when skimming over the earth. His theory of running until he reached camp and the boys had one flaw in it: he lacked the endurance. |
| 5771 |
When he tried to rise, he failed. He must sit and rest, he decided, and next time he would merely walk and keep on going. As he sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite warm and comfortable. He was not shivering, and it even seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest and trunk. |
| 5772 |
But the thought asserted itself, and persisted, until it produced a vision of his body totally frozen. This was too much, and he made another wild run along the trail. Once he slowed down to a walk, but the thought of the freezing extending itself made him run again. And all the time the dog ran with him, at his heels. |
| 5773 |
When he fell down a second time, it curled its tail over its forefeet and sat in front of him facing him curiously eager and intent. The warmth and security of the animal angered him, and he cursed it till it flattened down its ears appeasingly. This time the shivering came more quickly upon the man. |
| 5774 |
It was creeping into his body from all sides. The thought of it drove him on, but he ran no more than a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong. It was his last panic. When he had recovered his breath and control, he sat up and entertained in his mind the conception of meeting death with dignity. |
| 5775 |
Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die. He pictured the boys finding his body next day. Suddenly he found himself with them, coming along the trail and looking for himself. And, still with them, he came around a turn in the trail and found himself lying in the snow. |
| 5776 |
Maybe he could, but I never saw it. His intelligence didn't run that way. He could steal and forage to perfection; he had an instinct that was positively gruesome for divining when work was to be done and for making a sneak accordingly; and for getting lost and not staying lost he was nothing short of inspired. |
| 5777 |
He was intelligent enough for such a computation. I tell you, I've sat and looked into that dog's eyes till the shivers ran up and down my spine and the marrow crawled like yeast, what of the intelligence I saw shining out. I can't express myself about that intelligence. It is beyond mere words. I saw it, that's all. |
| 5778 |
At times it was like gazing into a human soul, to look into his eyes; and what I saw there frightened me and started all sorts of ideas in my own mind of reincarnation and all the rest. I tell you I sensed something big in that brute's eyes; there was a message there, but I wasn't big enough myself to catch it. |
| 5779 |
No; it was different from a mere expression; it was more than that. I don't know what it was, but it gave me a feeling of kinship just the same. Oh, no, not sentimental kinship. It was, rather, a kinship of equality. Those eyes never pleaded like a deer's eyes. They challenged. No, it wasn't defiance. |
| 5780 |
There it was, right before me, glimmering all around in those eyes of his. And then it was too late. I got scared. I was trembly all over, and my stomach generated a nervous palpitation that made me seasick. I just sat down and looked at the dog, and he looked at me, till I thought I was going crazy. |
| 5781 |
We paid a hundred and ten dollars for him from the bottom of our sack, and he wouldn't work. He wouldn't even tighten the traces. Steve spoke to him the first time we put him in harness, and he sort of shivered, that was all. Not an ounce on the traces. He just stood still and wobbled, like so much jelly. |
| 5782 |
I started the rest of the dogs, and they dragged him along while I threw the whip into him. He rolled over on his back and bumped along, his four legs waving in the air, himself howling as though he was going through a sausage machine. Steve came back and laughed at me, and I apologized for what I'd said. |
| 5783 |
There was no circumventing him. Many a breakfast we went without our bacon because Spot had been there first. And it was because of him that we nearly starved to death up the Stewart. He figured out the way to break into our meat cache, and what he didn't eat, the rest of the team did. But he was impartial. |
| 5784 |
The worst of it was that they always came back on us to pay his board bill, which was just, being the law of the land; but it was mighty hard on us, especially that first winter on the Chilcoot, when we were busted, paying for whole hams and sides of bacon that we never ate. He could fight, too, that Spot. |
| 5785 |
He bullied them, and there was always one or more of them fresh marked with his fangs. But he was more than a bully. He wasn't afraid of anything that walked on four legs; and I've seen him march, single handed into a strange team, without any provocation whatever, and put the kibosh on the whole outfit. |
| 5786 |
A week later we woke up in the morning to the dangdest dog fight we'd ever heard. It was that Spot come back and knocking the team into shape. We ate a pretty depressing breakfast, I can tell you; but cheered up two hours afterward when we sold him to an official courier, bound in to Dawson with government despatches. |
| 5787 |
That Spot was only three days in coming back, and, as usual, celebrated his arrival with a rough house. We spent the winter and spring, after our own outfit was across the pass, freighting other people's outfits; and we made a fat stake. Also, we made money out of Spot. If we sold him once, we sold him twenty times. |
| 5788 |
There wasn't any more meat to be killed, and meat was all we had to live on. The moose had gone back several hundred miles and the Indians with them. There we were. Spring was on, and we had to wait for the river to break. We got pretty thin before we decided to eat the dogs, and we decided to eat Spot first. |
| 5789 |
He sneaked. Now how did he know our minds were made up to eat him? We sat up nights laying for him, but he never came back, and we ate the other dogs. We ate the whole team. And now for the sequel. You know what it is when a big river breaks up and a few billion tons of ice go out, jamming and milling and grinding. |
| 5790 |
He'd got caught as he was trying to cross up above somewhere. Steve and I yelled and shouted and ran up and down the bank, tossing our hats in the air. Sometimes we'd stop and hug each other, we were that boisterous, for we saw Spot's finish. He didn't have a chance in a million. He didn't have any chance at all. |
| 5791 |
I had never heard of it before. I confess I was a bit tired. I had been looking for Lon to stop and make camp any time for an hour; but I had too much pride to suggest making camp or to ask him his intentions; and yet he was my man, lured at a handsome wage to mush my dogs for me and to obey my commands. |
| 5792 |
And when the middle of the day came, we went right on, for, as Lon explained, there was a camp of moose hunters at the forks of the Teelee, and we could make there by dark. But we didn't make there by dark, for Bright, the lead dog, broke his shoulder blade, and we lost an hour over him before we shot him. |
| 5793 |
He was twenty years old then. He was a young bull. When he was twenty five he could lift clear of the ground thirteen fifty pound sacks of flour. At first, each fall of the year, famine drove him out. It was a lone land in those days. No river steamboats, no grub, nothing but salmon bellies and rabbit tracks. |
| 5794 |
But after famine chased him out three years, he said he'd had enough of being chased; and the next year he stayed. He lived on straight meat when he was lucky enough to get it; he ate eleven dogs that winter; but he stayed. And the next winter he stayed, and the next. He never did leave the country again. |
| 5795 |
When it came to fighting Dave was the blamedest ever. He was the limit, if by that I may describe his unlimitedness when he got into action, he was easy and kind with the weak, but the strong had to give trail when he went by. And he was a man that men liked, which is the finest word of all, a man's man. |
| 5796 |
Little use. She wanted her freedom a while longer; she must have it, and she would not marry until next year. And so, on the first ice, Dave Walsh went alone down the Yukon behind his dogs, with the understanding that the marriage would take place when he arrived on the first steamboat of the next year. |
| 5797 |
She was a hummer. Being the first steamer out, she carried all the scurvy patients and hospital wrecks. Then she must have carried a couple of millions of Klondike dust and nuggets, to say nothing of a packed and jammed passenger list, deck passengers galore, and bucks and squaws and dogs without end. |
| 5798 |
I saw the box come aboard at Teelee Portage, and I knew it for what it was, though I little guessed the joker that was in it. And they piled it on top of everything else on the fore lower deck, and they didn't pile it any too securely either. The mate expected to come back to it again, and then forgot about it. |
| 5799 |
What of the sick men in the main cabin, and of the crowded condition of the Golden Rocket, the likeliest place for the ceremony was found forward, on the lower deck, in an open space next to the rail and gang plank and shaded by the mountain of freight with the big box on top and the sleeping dog beside it. |
| 5800 |
So he put some grub on the sled, harnessed the dogs, took an Indian along, and pulled out for Surprise Lake. He always had a liking for that section. Maybe you don't know how the creek turned out to be a four flusher; but the prospects were good at the time, and Dave proceeded to build his cabin and hers. |
| 5801 |
On the upper deck the hospital wrecks, with various feet in the grave, gathered and looked down to see. There were Indians all jammed in the circle, too, big bucks, and their squaws and kids, to say nothing of about twenty five snarling wolf dogs. The missionary lined the two of them up and started in with the service. |
| 5802 |
I saw the whole thing. It landed on Pee lat, and at that instant the white brute jumped him. The club caused it. Their two bodies struck the box, and it began to slide, its lower end tilting down. It was a long oblong box, and it slid down slowly until it reached the perpendicular, when it came down on the run. |
| 5803 |
Right out of the box, on his feet, he swept upon Flush of Gold. She didn't know he was dead, but it was unmistakable, after hanging up two days on a timber jam, that he was rising all right from the dead to claim her. Possibly that is what she thought. At any rate, the sight froze her. She couldn't move. |
| 5804 |
We had to drag Dave Walsh's body clear before we could get hold of her. She was in a faint, but it would have been just as well if she had never come out of that faint; for when she did, she fell to screaming the way insane people do. She kept it up for hours, till she was exhausted. Oh, yes, she recovered. |
| 5805 |
The earth bank on which he stood was ordinarily a dozen feet above the water, but the river was now growling at the top of the bank, devouring, instant by instant, tiny portions of the top standing soil. These portions went into the gaping mouths of the endless army of brown swirls and vanished away. |
| 5806 |
Those that watched on the bank could see the tiny puffs of smoke. They remained on the bank till the boat swung out of sight around the bend half a mile below. Justice had been done. The denizens of Red Cow imposed the law and executed sentences without the delays that mark the softness of civilization. |
| 5807 |
Wherefore, when a man violated the rights of property or life, he was thrown into an open boat and started down the Yukon. The quantity of grub he received was proportioned to the gravity of the offence. Thus, a common thief might get as much as two weeks' grub; an uncommon thief might get no more than half of that. |
| 5808 |
He was there to make money out of the earth, he declared with heat, and not out of his fellow men. And anyway, he didn't like faro. Besides, he appraised his strike at a whole lot more than ten thousand. The second event of moment occurred in the afternoon, when Siskiyou Pearly ran his boat into the bank and tied up. |
| 5809 |
He clung with one arm around Curly Jim's neck, and even essayed the late lamented Ferguson's song about the little birds. He considered he was quite safe in this, what of the fact that the only man in camp with artistic feelings was even then speeding down the Yukon on the breast of a five mile current. |
| 5810 |
He exhausted his last argument and sat speechless. He looked pleadingly at the friends who had deserted him. He kicked Mucluc Charley's shins under the table, but that graceless hero immediately unfolded a new and most logical reason for the sale. Curly Jim got pen and ink and paper and wrote out the bill of sale. |
| 5811 |
Before he had made more than a blot, he suddenly started up, impelled by the impact of an idea colliding with his consciousness. He stood upon his feet and swayed back and forth before them, reflecting in his startled eyes the thought process that was taking place behind. Then he reached his conclusion. |
| 5812 |
Curly Jim sweated and fumed and poured out the whisky. He found himself with a score of arguments on his hands, not one of which had anything to do with the gold mine he wanted to buy. The longer they talked the farther away they got from that gold mine, and at two in the morning Curly Jim acknowledged himself beaten. |
| 5813 |
He was a mere wobbling automaton, supported affectionately and precariously by his two business associates. They took the path down by the bank of the Yukon. Home did not lie that way, but the elusive idea did. Mucluc Charley giggled over the idea that he could not catch for the edification of Leclaire. |
| 5814 |
There were some tall bets as to what would happen to the two perpetrators when the victim arrived back. In the afternoon a lookout was set, so that they would know when he was sighted. Everybody wanted to see him come in. But he didn't come, though they sat up till midnight. Nor did he come next day, nor the next. |
| 5815 |
It was only by a severe exertion of will that he was able to open narrow slits in his face through which he could peer. He happened to move his hands, and they hurt. He squinted at them, but failed to recognize them, so puffed were they by the mosquito virus. He was lost, or rather, his identity was lost to him. |
| 5816 |
He had done it with that undoubtedly. But there must have been some reason for the killing. He opened his eyes and in a panic began to search about the boat. There was no grub, not an ounce of grub. He sat down with a groan. He had killed without provocation. The extreme rigour of the law had been visited upon him. |
| 5817 |
This would mean, daily, a hundred and twenty miles. Strike out the twenty for accidents, and there remained a hundred miles a day. In twenty days he would reach Bering Sea. And this would involve no expenditure of energy; the river did the work. He could lie down in the bottom of the boat and husband his strength. |
| 5818 |
El Soo was quick, and deft, and intelligent; but above all she was fire, the living flame of life, a blaze of personality that was compounded of will, sweetness, and daring. Her father was a chief, and his blood ran in her veins. Obedience, on the part of El Soo, was a matter of terms and arrangement. |
| 5819 |
She learned to read and write English as no girl had ever learned in the Mission. She led the girls in singing, and into song she carried her sense of equity. She was an artist, and the fire of her flowed toward creation. Had she from birth enjoyed a more favourable environment, she would have made literature or music. |
| 5820 |
She could speak English as well as she could her native tongue, and she sang English songs and ballads. The passing Indian ceremonials she knew, and the perishing traditions. The tribal dress of the daughter of a chief she knew how to wear upon occasion. But for the most part she dressed as white women dress. |
| 5821 |
It was no more than fit that Klakee Nah should die as he had lived, and none knew this better than El Soo, with her artist sympathy. The old roystering crowd was there, and, as of old, three frost bitten sailors were there, fresh from the long traverse from the Arctic, survivors of a ship's company of seventy four. |
| 5822 |
With rheumy eyes they saw to his needs, with palsied hands filling his glass or striking him on the back between the shoulders when death stirred and he coughed and gasped. It was a wild night, and as the hours passed and the fun laughed and roared along, death stirred more restlessly in Klakee Nah's throat. |
| 5823 |
And Porportuk came in from the outside frost to look with disapproving eyes upon the meat and wine on the table for which he had paid. But as he looked down the length of flushed faces to the far end and saw the face of El Soo, the light in his eyes flared up, and for a moment the disapproval vanished. |
| 5824 |
Klakee Nah sank back, panting, watching the upturned glasses at the lips of the drinkers, his own lips slightly smiling to the applause. At a sign, two slaves attempted to help him sit upright again. But they were weak, his frame was mighty, and the four old men tottered and shook as they helped him forward. |
| 5825 |
He arose and made public and solemn announcement that whosoever bought El Soo would forthwith and immediately die. He flourished the Winchester in his hand to indicate the manner of the taking off. El Soo was angered thereat; but he refused to speak with her, and went to the trading post to lay in extra ammunition. |
| 5826 |
At Tommy's request she stood upon the chair again, while he mounted the second chair and started the bidding. Surrounding El Soo stood the four old slaves of her father. They were age twisted and palsied, faithful to their meat, a generation out of the past that watched unmoved the antics of younger life. |
| 5827 |
Swallows were skimming up overhead from the placid surface of the Yukon, and robins were singing. The oblique rays of the hidden sun shot through the smoke, high dissipated from forest fires a thousand miles away, and turned the heavens to sombre red, while the earth shone red in the reflected glow. |
| 5828 |
Porportuk made it thirty five hundred, and gasped when the Eldorado king raised it a thousand dollars. Porportuk again raised it five hundred, and again gasped when the king raised a thousand more. Porportuk became angry. His pride was touched; his strength was challenged, and with him strength took the form of wealth. |
| 5829 |
The savings and scrimpings from the cold nights of all his years were ripe to be squandered. El Soo stood at six thousand. He made it seven thousand. And then, in thousand dollar bids, as fast as they could be uttered, her price went up. At fourteen thousand the two men stopped for breath. Then the unexpected happened. |
| 5830 |
Last year, and the years before, it was sixteen dollars an ounce. When my father's debt was made, it was sixteen dollars. When he spent at the store the money he got from you, for one ounce he was given sixteen dollars' worth of flour, not seventeen. Wherefore, shall you pay for me at sixteen, and not at seventeen. |
| 5831 |
El Soo seemed to balance herself against the air with her arms, now one side, now on the other, and sometimes her body, too, leaned out upon the air far from the perpendicular as she achieved her sharpest curves. And Porportuk, always a leap behind, or a leap this side or that, like a lean hound strained after her. |
| 5832 |
They crossed the open ground beyond the encampment and disappeared in the forest. Tana naw Station waited their reappearance, and long and vainly it waited. In the meantime Akoon ate and slept, and lingered much at the steamboat landing, deaf to the rising resentment of Tana naw Station in that he did nothing. |
| 5833 |
He was tired and savage. He spoke to no one but Akoon, and with him tried to pick a quarrel. But Akoon shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Porportuk did not waste time. He outfitted half a dozen of the young men, selecting the best trackers and travellers, and at their head plunged into the forest. |
| 5834 |
Next day the steamer Seattle, bound up river, pulled in to the shore and wooded up. When the lines were cast off and she churned out from the bank, Akoon was on board in the pilot house. Not many hours afterward, when it was his turn at the wheel, he saw a small birch bark canoe put off from the shore. |
| 5835 |
Akoon held the Seattle on the edge of the shoal water and waited till he saw the squaw's fingers clutch the forward rail. Then he signalled for full speed ahead and ground the wheel over. The large canoe was very near, but the gap between it and the steamer was widening. The squaw laughed and leaned over the rail. |
| 5836 |
Occasionally they struck with withered hands at the mosquitoes that braved the smoke. After such exertion they coughed hollowly and painfully. Some spat blood, and one of them sat a bit apart with head bowed forward, and bled slowly and continuously at the mouth; the coughing sickness had gripped them. |
| 5837 |
They limped painfully down the bank, and once the foremost of the two men staggered among the rough strewn rocks. They were tired and weak, and their faces had the drawn expression of patience which comes of hardship long endured. They were heavily burdened with blanket packs which were strapped to their shoulders. |
| 5838 |
This served to rouse him. He fought with his fear and pulled himself together, groping in the water and recovering the weapon. He hitched his pack farther over on his left shoulder, so as to take a portion of its weight from off the injured ankle. Then he proceeded, slowly and carefully, wincing with pain, to the bank. |
| 5839 |
And south, still south, they would go, while the winter raced vainly after them, and the ice formed in the eddies, and the days grew chill and crisp, south to some warm Hudson Bay Company post, where timber grew tall and generous and there was grub without end. These were the thoughts of the man as he strove onward. |
| 5840 |
The man knew there was no nourishment in the berries, but he chewed them patiently with a hope greater than knowledge and defying experience. At nine o'clock he stubbed his toe on a rocky ledge, and from sheer weariness and weakness staggered and fell. He lay for some time, without movement, on his side. |
| 5841 |
Then he slipped out of the pack straps and clumsily dragged himself into a sitting posture. It was not yet dark, and in the lingering twilight he groped about among the rocks for shreds of dry moss. When he had gathered a heap he built a fire, a smouldering, smudgy fire, and put a tin pot of water on to boil. |
| 5842 |
He divided them into several portions, wrapping them in oil paper, disposing of one bunch in his empty tobacco pouch, of another bunch in the inside band of his battered hat, of a third bunch under his shirt on the chest. This accomplished, a panic came upon him, and he unwrapped them all and counted them again. |
| 5843 |
It had swollen to the size of his knee. He tore a long strip from one of his two blankets and bound the ankle tightly. He tore other strips and bound them about his feet to serve for both moccasins and socks. Then he drank the pot of water, steaming hot, wound his watch, and crawled between his blankets. |
| 5844 |
He slept like a dead man. The brief darkness around midnight came and went. The sun arose in the northeast at least the day dawned in that quarter, for the sun was hidden by gray clouds. At six o'clock he awoke, quietly lying on his back. He gazed straight up into the gray sky and knew that he was hungry. |
| 5845 |
Mechanically he reached for the empty gun, drew a bead, and pulled the trigger. The bull snorted and leaped away, his hoofs rattling and clattering as he fled across the ledges. The man cursed and flung the empty gun from him. He groaned aloud as he started to drag himself to his feet. It was a slow and arduous task. |
| 5846 |
His joints were like rusty hinges. They worked harshly in their sockets, with much friction, and each bending or unbending was accomplished only through a sheer exertion of will. When he finally gained his feet, another minute or so was consumed in straightening up, so that he could stand erect as a man should stand. |
| 5847 |
There were no trees, no bushes, nothing but a gray sea of moss scarcely diversified by gray rocks, gray lakelets, and gray streamlets. The sky was gray. There was no sun nor hint of sun. He had no idea of north, and he had forgotten the way he had come to this spot the night before. But he was not lost. |
| 5848 |
Soon he would come to the land of the little sticks. He felt that it lay off to the left somewhere, not far possibly just over the next low hill. He went back to put his pack into shape for travelling. He assured himself of the existence of his three separate parcels of matches, though he did not stop to count them. |
| 5849 |
He finally set it to one side and proceeded to roll the pack. He paused to gaze at the squat moose hide sack. He picked it up hastily with a defiant glance about him, as though the desolation were trying to rob him of it; and when he rose to his feet to stagger on into the day, it was included in the pack on his back. |
| 5850 |
The muskeg berries did not allay this gnawing, while they made his tongue and the roof of his mouth sore with their irritating bite. He came upon a valley where rock ptarmigan rose on whirring wings from the ledges and muskegs. Ker ker ker was the cry they made. He threw stones at them, but could not hit them. |
| 5851 |
Once he crawled upon one that must have been asleep. He did not see it till it shot up in his face from its rocky nook. He made a clutch as startled as was the rise of the ptarmigan, and there remained in his hand three tail feathers. As he watched its flight he hated it, as though it had done him some terrible wrong. |
| 5852 |
As the day wore along he came into valleys or swales where game was more plentiful. A band of caribou passed by, twenty and odd animals, tantalizingly within rifle range. He felt a wild desire to run after them, a certitude that he could run them down. A black fox came toward him, carrying a ptarmigan in his mouth. |
| 5853 |
It was a fearful cry, but the fox, leaping away in fright, did not drop the ptarmigan. Late in the afternoon he followed a stream, milky with lime, which ran through sparse patches of rush grass. Grasping these rushes firmly near the root, he pulled up what resembled a young onion sprout no larger than a shingle nail. |
| 5854 |
He searched little ponds for frogs and dug up the earth with his nails for worms, though he knew in spite that neither frogs nor worms existed so far north. He looked into every pool of water vainly, until, as the long twilight came on, he discovered a solitary fish, the size of a minnow, in such a pool. |
| 5855 |
He reached for it with both hands and stirred up the milky mud at the bottom. In his excitement he fell in, wetting himself to the waist. Then the water was too muddy to admit of his seeing the fish, and he was compelled to wait until the sediment had settled. The pursuit was renewed, till the water was again muddied. |
| 5856 |
He unstrapped the tin bucket and began to bale the pool. He baled wildly at first, splashing himself and flinging the water so short a distance that it ran back into the pool. He worked more carefully, striving to be cool, though his heart was pounding against his chest and his hands were trembling. |
| 5857 |
At first he cried softly to himself, then he cried loudly to the pitiless desolation that ringed him around; and for a long time after he was shaken by great dry sobs. He built a fire and warmed himself by drinking quarts of hot water, and made camp on a rocky ledge in the same fashion he had the night before. |
| 5858 |
There was no sun. The gray of earth and sky had become deeper, more profound. A raw wind was blowing, and the first flurries of snow were whitening the hilltops. The air about him thickened and grew white while he made a fire and boiled more water. It was wet snow, half rain, and the flakes were large and soggy. |
| 5859 |
But it was tasteless stuff and did not satisfy. He found a weed that tasted sour and he ate all he could find of it, which was not much, for it was a creeping growth, easily hidden under the several inches of snow. He had no fire that night, nor hot water, and crawled under his blanket to sleep the broken hunger sleep. |
| 5860 |
He awakened many times to feel it falling on his upturned face. Day came a gray day and no sun. It had ceased raining. The keenness of his hunger had departed. Sensibility, as far as concerned the yearning for food, had been exhausted. There was a dull, heavy ache in his stomach, but it did not bother him so much. |
| 5861 |
In the middle of the day he found two minnows in a large pool. It was impossible to bale it, but he was calmer now and managed to catch them in his tin bucket. They were no longer than his little finger, but he was not particularly hungry. The dull ache in his stomach had been growing duller and fainter. |
| 5862 |
It seemed almost that his stomach was dozing. He ate the fish raw, masticating with painstaking care, for the eating was an act of pure reason. While he had no desire to eat, he knew that he must eat to live. In the evening he caught three more minnows, eating two and saving the third for breakfast. |
| 5863 |
The sun had dried stray shreds of moss, and he was able to warm himself with hot water. He had not covered more than ten miles that day; and the next day, travelling whenever his heart permitted him, he covered no more than five miles. But his stomach did not give him the slightest uneasiness. It had gone to sleep. |
| 5864 |
Often their yelps drifted across the desolation, and once he saw three of them slinking away before his path. Another night; and in the morning, being more rational, he untied the leather string that fastened the squat moose hide sack. From its open mouth poured a yellow stream of coarse gold dust and nuggets. |
| 5865 |
He roughly divided the gold in halves, caching one half on a prominent ledge, wrapped in a piece of blanket, and returning the other half to the sack. He also began to use strips of the one remaining blanket for his feet. He still clung to his gun, for there were cartridges in that cache by the river Dease. |
| 5866 |
The chase led him across swampy ground in the bottom of the valley, and he came upon footprints in the soggy moss. They were not his own he could see that. They must be Bill's. But he could not stop, for the mother ptarmigan was running on. He would catch her first, then he would return and investigate. |
| 5867 |
He exhausted the mother ptarmigan; but he exhausted himself. She lay panting on her side. He lay panting on his side, a dozen feet away, unable to crawl to her. And as he recovered she recovered, fluttering out of reach as his hungry hand went out to her. The chase was resumed. Night settled down and she escaped. |
| 5868 |
He felt confident that one cartridge remained to him. It was in the chamber of the rifle and he had overlooked it. On the other hand, he knew all the time that the chamber was empty. But the hallucination persisted. He fought it off for hours, then threw his rifle open and was confronted with emptiness. |
| 5869 |
But these excursions out of the real were of brief duration, for ever the pangs of the hunger bite called him back. He was jerked back abruptly once from such an excursion by a sight that caused him nearly to faint. He reeled and swayed, doddering like a drunken man to keep from falling. Before him stood a horse. |
| 5870 |
The animal was studying him with bellicose curiosity. The man had brought his gun halfway to his shoulder before he realized. He lowered it and drew his hunting knife from its beaded sheath at his hip. Before him was meat and life. He ran his thumb along the edge of his knife. It was sharp. The point was sharp. |
| 5871 |
He would fling himself upon the bear and kill it. But his heart began its warning thump, thump, thump. Then followed the wild upward leap and tattoo of flutters, the pressing as of an iron band about his forehead, the creeping of the dizziness into his brain. His desperate courage was evicted by a great surge of fear. |
| 5872 |
In his weakness, what if the animal attacked him? He drew himself up to his most imposing stature, gripping the knife and staring hard at the bear. The bear advanced clumsily a couple of steps, reared up, and gave vent to a tentative growl. If the man ran, he would run after him; but the man did not run. |
| 5873 |
He was animated now with the courage of fear. He, too, growled, savagely, terribly, voicing the fear that is to life germane and that lies twisted about life's deepest roots. The bear edged away to one side, growling menacingly, himself appalled by this mysterious creature that appeared upright and unafraid. |
| 5874 |
Back and forth across the desolation drifted their howls, weaving the very air into a fabric of menace that was so tangible that he found himself, arms in the air, pressing it back from him as it might be the walls of a wind blown tent. Now and again the wolves, in packs of two and three, crossed his path. |
| 5875 |
To die was to sleep. It meant cessation, rest. Then why was he not content to die? But he did not moralize long. He was squatting in the moss, a bone in his mouth, sucking at the shreds of life that still dyed it faintly pink. The sweet meaty taste, thin and elusive almost as a memory, maddened him. |
| 5876 |
Then he crushed the bones between rocks, pounded them to a pulp, and swallowed them. He pounded his fingers, too, in his haste, and yet found a moment in which to feel surprise at the fact that his fingers did not hurt much when caught under the descending rock. Came frightful days of snow and rain. |
| 5877 |
He did not know when he made camp, when he broke camp. He travelled in the night as much as in the day. He rested wherever he fell, crawled on whenever the dying life in him flickered up and burned less dimly. He, as a man, no longer strove. It was the life in him, unwilling to die, that drove him on. |
| 5878 |
But ever he sucked and chewed on the crushed bones of the caribou calf, the least remnants of which he had gathered up and carried with him. He crossed no more hills or divides, but automatically followed a large stream which flowed through a wide and shallow valley. He did not see this stream nor this valley. |
| 5879 |
For some time he lay without movement, the genial sunshine pouring upon him and saturating his miserable body with its warmth. A fine day, he thought. Perhaps he could manage to locate himself. By a painful effort he rolled over on his side. Below him flowed a wide and sluggish river. Its unfamiliarity puzzled him. |
| 5880 |
Slowly, deliberately, without excitement or more than the most casual interest, he followed the course of the strange stream toward the sky line and saw it emptying into a bright and shining sea. He was still unexcited. Most unusual, he thought, a vision or a mirage more likely a vision, a trick of his disordered mind. |
| 5881 |
Yet not strange. He knew there were no seas or ships in the heart of the barren lands, just as he had known there was no cartridge in the empty rifle. He heard a snuffle behind him a half choking gasp or cough. Very slowly, because of his exceeding weakness and stiffness, he rolled over on his other side. |
| 5882 |
It seemed sick. As he looked it snuffled and coughed again. This, at least, was real, he thought, and turned on the other side so that he might see the reality of the world which had been veiled from him before by the vision. But the sea still shone in the distance and the ship was plainly discernible. |
| 5883 |
He had worn through the blanket wrappings, and his feet were shapeless lumps of raw meat. His last blanket was gone. Rifle and knife were both missing. He had lost his hat somewhere, with the bunch of matches in the band, but the matches against his chest were safe and dry inside the tobacco pouch and oil paper. |
| 5884 |
He looked at his watch. It marked eleven o'clock and was still running. Evidently he had kept it wound. He was calm and collected. Though extremely weak, he had no sensation of pain. He was not hungry. The thought of food was not even pleasant to him, and whatever he did was done by his reason alone. |
| 5885 |
He would have some hot water before he began what he foresaw was to be a terrible journey to the ship. His movements were slow. He shook as with a palsy. When he started to collect dry moss, he found he could not rise to his feet. He tried again and again, then contented himself with crawling about on hands and knees. |
| 5886 |
Once he crawled near to the sick wolf. The animal dragged itself reluctantly out of his way, licking its chops with a tongue which seemed hardly to have the strength to curl. The man noticed that the tongue was not the customary healthy red. It was a yellowish brown and seemed coated with a rough and half dry mucus. |
| 5887 |
To morrow or next day it might he gone. In the afternoon the man came upon a trail. It was of another man, who did not walk, but who dragged himself on all fours. The man thought it might be Bill, but he thought in a dull, uninterested way. He had no curiosity. In fact, sensation and emotion had left him. |
| 5888 |
He turned away. Well, Bill had deserted him; but he would not take the gold, nor would he suck Bill's bones. Bill would have, though, had it been the other way around, he mused as he staggered on. He came to a pool of water. Stooping over in quest of minnows, he jerked his head back as though he had been stung. |
| 5889 |
Still the Indian Summer held on, and he continued to crawl and faint, turn and turn about; and ever the sick wolf coughed and wheezed at his heels. His knees had become raw meat like his feet, and though he padded them with the shirt from his back it was a red track he left behind him on the moss and stones. |
| 5890 |
Had it been a well wolf, it would not have mattered so much to the man; but the thought of going to feed the maw of that loathsome and all but dead thing was repugnant to him. He was finicky. His mind had begun to wander again, and to be perplexed by hallucinations, while his lucid intervals grew rarer and shorter. |
| 5891 |
He was awakened once from a faint by a wheeze close in his ear. The wolf leaped lamely back, losing its footing and falling in its weakness. It was ludicrous, but he was not amused. Nor was he even afraid. He was too far gone for that. But his mind was for the moment clear, and he lay and considered. |
| 5892 |
And, dying, he declined to die. It was stark madness, perhaps, but in the very grip of Death he defied Death and refused to die. He closed his eyes and composed himself with infinite precaution. He steeled himself to keep above the suffocating languor that lapped like a rising tide through all the wells of his being. |
| 5893 |
It was very like a sea, this deadly languor, that rose and rose and drowned his consciousness bit by bit. Sometimes he was all but submerged, swimming through oblivion with a faltering stroke; and again, by some strange alchemy of soul, he would find another shred of will and strike out more strongly. |
| 5894 |
Without movement he lay on his back, and he could hear, slowly drawing near and nearer, the wheezing intake and output of the sick wolf's breath. It drew closer, ever closer, through an infinitude of time, and he did not move. It was at his ear. The harsh dry tongue grated like sandpaper against his cheek. |
| 5895 |
Swiftness and certitude require strength, and the man had not this strength. The patience of the wolf was terrible. The man's patience was no less terrible. For half a day he lay motionless, fighting off unconsciousness and waiting for the thing that was to feed upon him and upon which he wished to feed. |
| 5896 |
Sometimes the languid sea rose over him and he dreamed long dreams; but ever through it all, waking and dreaming, he waited for the wheezing breath and the harsh caress of the tongue. He did not hear the breath, and he slipped slowly from some dream to the feel of the tongue along his hand. He waited. |
| 5897 |
There were some members of a scientific expedition on the whale ship Bedford. From the deck they remarked a strange object on the shore. It was moving down the beach toward the water. They were unable to classify it, and, being scientific men, they climbed into the whale boat alongside and went ashore to see. |
| 5898 |
He gloated over the spectacle of so much food, watching it anxiously as it went into the mouths of others. With the disappearance of each mouthful an expression of deep regret came into his eyes. He was quite sane, yet he hated those men at mealtime. He was haunted by a fear that the food would not last. |
| 5899 |
They limited the man at his meals, but still his girth increased and he swelled prodigiously under his shirt. The sailors grinned. They knew. And when the scientific men set a watch on the man, they knew too. They saw him slouch for'ard after breakfast, and, like a mendicant, with outstretched palm, accost a sailor. |
| 5900 |
The sailor grinned and passed him a fragment of sea biscuit. He clutched it avariciously, looked at it as a miser looks at gold, and thrust it into his shirt bosom. Similar were the donations from other grinning sailors. The scientific men were discreet. They let him alone. But they privily examined his bunk. |
| 5901 |
With the other mittened hand he rubbed his cheeks and nose. He rubbed his cheeks and nose every little while. In point of fact, he rarely ceased from rubbing them, and sometimes, as their numbness increased, he rubbed fiercely. His forehead was covered by the visor of his fur cap, the flaps of which went over his ears. |
| 5902 |
Behind him churned a heavily loaded Yukon sled, and before him toiled a string of five dogs. The rope by which they dragged the sled rubbed against the side of Messner's leg. When the dogs swung on a bend in the trail, he stepped over the rope. There were many bends, and he was compelled to step over it often. |
| 5903 |
He travelled on the frozen surface of a great river. Behind him it stretched away in a mighty curve of many miles, losing itself in a fantastic jumble of mountains, snow covered and silent. Ahead of him the river split into many channels to accommodate the freight of islands it carried on its breast. |
| 5904 |
The world slept, and it was like the sleep of death. John Messner seemed succumbing to the apathy of it all. The frost was benumbing his spirit. He plodded on with bowed head, unobservant, mechanically rubbing nose and cheeks, and batting his steering hand against the gee pole in the straight trail stretches. |
| 5905 |
But the dogs were observant, and suddenly they stopped, turning their heads and looking back at their master out of eyes that were wistful and questioning. Their eyelashes were frosted white, as were their muzzles, and they had all the seeming of decrepit old age, what of the frost rime and exhaustion. |
| 5906 |
The last chance wayfarer had left a supply of firewood. Messner set up his light sheet iron stove and starred a fire. He put five sun cured salmon into the oven to thaw out for the dogs, and from the water hole filled his coffee pot and cooking pail. While waiting for the water to boil, he held his face over the stove. |
| 5907 |
The moisture from his breath had collected on his beard and frozen into a great mass of ice, and this he proceeded to thaw out. As it melted and dropped upon the stove it sizzled and rose about him in steam. He helped the process with his fingers, working loose small ice chunks that fell rattling to the floor. |
| 5908 |
Removing his utensils from the stove, so as to give the newcomers a chance to cook, he proceeded to take his meal from the top of his grub box, himself sitting on his bed roll. Between mouthfuls he talked trail and dogs with the man, who, with head over the stove, was thawing the ice from his mustache. |
| 5909 |
His face was as placid as before, though he was still alert, dissatisfied with what the feeble light had shown him of the woman's face. Automatically, her first act had been to set the coffee pot back. It was not until she had done this that she glanced at Messner. But already he had composed himself. |
| 5910 |
But, as she turned casually to go about her cooking, he shot another swift look at her, and she, glancing as swiftly back, caught his look. He shifted on past her to the doctor, though the slightest smile curled his lip in appreciation of the way she had trapped him. She drew a candle from the grub box and lighted it. |
| 5911 |
One look at her illuminated face was enough for Messner. In the small cabin the widest limit was only a matter of several steps, and the next moment she was alongside of him. She deliberately held the candle close to his face and stared at him out of eyes wide with fear and recognition. He smiled quietly back at her. |
| 5912 |
I have heard, also, that he was slated for the head of the English department, only the affair happened and he resigned and went away. It quite broke his career, or so it seemed. At any rate, on our side the shield, it was considered a knock out blow to him. It was thought he cared a great deal for his wife. |
| 5913 |
He felt himself wilting under the lightly laid hand. The situation was slipping away from him, all his beautiful calmness was going. She looked at him with melting eyes, and he, too, seemed all dew and melting. He felt himself on the edge of an abyss, powerless to withstand the force that was drawing him over. |
| 5914 |
While she talked, he seemed to hear, rippling softly, the song of the Lorelei. It was as though, somewhere, a piano were playing and the actual notes were impinging on his ear drums. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, thrust her from him as her arms attempted to clasp him, and retreated backward to the door. |
| 5915 |
But he did not return immediately to the cabin. Leaving the pails standing in the trail, he walked up and down, rapidly, to keep from freezing, for the frost bit into the flesh like fire. His beard was white with his frozen breath when the perplexed and frowning brows relaxed and decision came into his face. |
| 5916 |
At the bottom of the bank, beside the water hole, he halted the sled. He worked the sack of gold out between the lashings and carried it to the water hole. Already a new skin of ice had formed. This he broke with his fist. Untying the knotted mouth with his teeth, he emptied the contents of the sack into the water. |
| 5917 |
Old Ebbits now and again pulled his tangled wits together, and hints and sparkles of intelligence came and went in his eyes. Several times during the preparation of my supper he even essayed hospitable inquiries about my health, the condition and number of my dogs, and the distance I had travelled that day. |
| 5918 |
They rocked back and forth in a slow and hopeless way, and regularly, once every five minutes, Ebbits emitted a low groan. It was not so much a groan of pain, as of pain weariness. He was oppressed by the weight and the torment of this thing called life, and still more was he oppressed by the fear of death. |
| 5919 |
Then a dampness came into Ebbits's eyes, and I knew that the sorrow of self pity was his. The search required to find their pipes told plainly that they had been without tobacco a long time, and the old man's eagerness for the narcotic rendered him helpless, so that I was compelled to light his pipe for him. |
| 5920 |
Ever was he a mighty hunter, and ever did he bring thee the good back fat and the sweet dried tongues of the moose and the caribou. I see no back fat and no sweet dried tongues. Your stomach is full with emptiness through the days, and it is for a man of a very miserable and lying people to give you to eat. |
| 5921 |
He does not do things always in the same way. And what way his next way is to be, one cannot know. Always does the Indian do the one thing in the one way. Always does the moose come down from the high mountains when the winter is here. Always does the salmon come in the spring when the ice has gone out of the river. |
| 5922 |
It be food to the hungry man. It makes the strong man stronger, and the angry man to forget that he is angry. Also is tobacco of value. It is of very great value. The Indian gives one large salmon for one leaf of tobacco, and he chews the tobacco for a long time. It is the juice of the tobacco that is good. |
| 5923 |
It is the law the man gave to the dog, and the dog must live to the law, else will it suffer the pain of the club. When man takes your meat, or your canoe, or your wife, you kill that man. That is the law, and it is a good law. It is not good to steal, wherefore it is the law that the man who steals must die. |
| 5924 |
Also is there bad water at Cambell Fort, where the Yukon goes slim like a maiden, and the water is fast, and the currents rush this way and that and come together, and there are whirls and sucks, and always are the currents changing and the face of the water changing, so at any two times it is never the same. |
| 5925 |
One way did the white man deal with him; and yet another way for the same thing did the white man deal with Yamikan. And first must I tell you of Yamikan, who was a young man of this village and who chanced to kill a white man. It is not good to kill a man of another people. Always is there great trouble. |
| 5926 |
It was not the fault of Yamikan that he killed the white man. Yamikan spoke always soft words and ran away from wrath as a dog from a stick. But this white man drank much whiskey, and in the night time came to Yamikan's house and made much fight. Yamikan cannot run away, and the white man tries to kill him. |
| 5927 |
We are much afraid that we must make large payment to the white man's people, and we hide our blankets, and our furs, and all our wealth, so that it will seem that we are poor people and can make only small payment. After long time white men come. They are soldier white men, and they take Yamikan away with them. |
| 5928 |
All the way do they take him down the river to the end, where it runs into a lake which is larger than all the land and large as the sky. I do not know the Yukon is so big river, but Yamikan has seen with his own eyes. I do not think there is a lake larger than all the land and large as the sky, but Yamikan has seen. |
| 5929 |
All the time does Yamikan eat, and all the time is there plenty more grub. The white man lives under the sun, so said Yamikan, where there be much warmth, and animals have only hair and no fur, and the green things grow large and strong and become flour, and beans, and potatoes. And under the sun there is never famine. |
| 5930 |
Only did they give him warm bed at night and plenty fine grub. They take him across the salt lake which is big as the sky. He is on white man's fire boat, what you call steamboat, only he is on boat maybe twenty times bigger than steamboat on Yukon. Also, it is made of iron, this boat, and yet does it not sink. |
| 5931 |
Also does he seek after the eggs of birds. He does not eat the eggs. All that is inside he takes out, and only does he keep the shell. Eggshell is not good to eat. Nor does he eat the eggshells, but puts them away in soft boxes where they will not break. He catch many small birds. But he does not eat the birds. |
| 5932 |
The next day he went forth along the shore line where the ice and the land met together. Those who saw him go noted that he carried his bow, with a goodly supply of bone barbed arrows, and that across his shoulder was his father's big hunting spear. And there was laughter, and much talk, at the event. |
| 5933 |
There was much doubt at first, much doubt and discussion. The killing of a polar bear is very dangerous, but thrice dangerous is it, and three times thrice, to kill a mother bear with her cubs. The men could not bring themselves to believe that the boy Keesh, single handed, had accomplished so great a marvel. |
| 5934 |
This we saw from the rocks of the shore, and the bear came toward us, and after him came Keesh, very much unafraid. And he shouted harsh words after the bear, and waved his arms about, and made much noise. Then did the bear grow angry, and rise up on his hind legs, and growl. But Keesh walked right up to the bear. |
| 5935 |
And this continued until the bear stood suddenly upright and cried aloud in pain, and thrashed his fore paws madly about. And Keesh continued to make off over the ice to a safe distance. But the bear gave him no notice, being occupied with the misfortune the little round balls had wrought within him. |
| 5936 |
The tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens. When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. |
| 5937 |
In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die. On the other hand, there are those that make toward survival, the fit individuals who escape from the rule of the obvious and the expected and adjust their lives to no matter what strange grooves they may stray into, or into which they may be forced. |
| 5938 |
One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about grewsome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away. |
| 5939 |
It was a groove that bridged the Atlantic with uneventfulness, so that the ship was not a ship in the midst of the sea, but a capacious, many corridored hotel that moved swiftly and placidly, crushing the waves into submission with its colossal bulk until the sea was a mill pond, monotonous with quietude. |
| 5940 |
The Indians landed them and their supplies in a lonely bight of land a hundred miles or so beyond Latuya Bay, and returned to Skaguay; but the three other men remained, for they were members of the organized party. Each had put an equal share of capital into the outfitting, and the profits were to be divided equally. |
| 5941 |
It was not a startling find, merely a low pay placer where long hours of severe toil earned each man between fifteen and twenty dollars a day. The brief Alaskan summer protracted itself beyond its usual length, and they took advantage of the opportunity, delaying their return to Skaguay to the last moment. |
| 5942 |
And then it was too late. Arrangements had been made to accompany the several dozen local Indians on their fall trading trip down the coast. The Siwashes had waited on the white people until the eleventh hour, and then departed. There was no course left the party but to wait for chance transportation. |
| 5943 |
It came in a single night, and the miners awoke to howling wind, driving snow, and freezing water. Storm followed storm, and between the storms there was the silence, broken only by the boom of the surf on the desolate shore, where the salt spray rimmed the beach with frozen white. All went well in the cabin. |
| 5944 |
There was no grumbling, no bickering, nor petty quarrelling in the little cabin, and they often congratulated one another on the general happiness of the party. Hans Nelson was stolid and easy going, while Edith had long before won his unbounded admiration by her capacity for getting on with people. |
| 5945 |
He was a large, powerful man, prone to sudden rushes of anger over little things, and of unfailing good humor under the stress and strain of big things. The fifth and last member, Dutchy, was the willing butt of the party. He even went out of his way to raise a laugh at his own expense in order to keep things cheerful. |
| 5946 |
His deliberate aim in life seemed to be that of a maker of laughter. No serious quarrel had ever vexed the serenity of the party; and, now that each had sixteen hundred dollars to show for a short summer's work, there reigned the well fed, contented spirit of prosperity. And then the unexpected happened. |
| 5947 |
It was the unexpected. Hans and Edith were stunned. They sat at the table with bodies tense, their eyes fixed in a fascinated gaze upon the murderer. Dimly they saw him through the smoke of the powder, and in the silence nothing was to be heard save the drip drip of Dutchy's spilled coffee on the floor. |
| 5948 |
He was thrusting the shells into the gun when Edith Nelson was aroused to action. It was patent that he intended to kill Hans and her. For a space of possibly three seconds of time she had been dazed and paralysed by the horrible and inconceivable form in which the unexpected had made its appearance. |
| 5949 |
She grappled with it concretely, making a cat like leap for the murderer and gripping his neck cloth with both her hands. The impact of her body sent him stumbling backward several steps. He tried to shake her loose and still retain his hold on the gun. This was awkward, for her firm fleshed body had become a cat's. |
| 5950 |
She threw herself to one side, and with her grip at his throat nearly jerked him to the floor. He straightened himself and whirled swiftly. Still faithful to her hold, her body followed the circle of his whirl so that her feet left the floor, and she swung through the air fastened to his throat by her hands. |
| 5951 |
The whirl culminated in a collision with a chair, and the man and woman crashed to the floor in a wild struggling fall that extended itself across half the length of the room. Hans Nelson was half a second behind his wife in rising to the unexpected. His nerve processed and mental processes were slower than hers. |
| 5952 |
Hans hurled himself upon the prostrate man, striking madly with his fists. They were sledge like blows, and when Edith felt Dennin's body relax she loosed her grip and rolled clear. She lay on the floor, panting and watching. The fury of blows continued to rain down. Dennin did not seem to mind the blows. |
| 5953 |
She could not believe that this raging beast was her Hans, and with a shock she became suddenly aware of a shrinking, instinctive fear that he might snap her hand in his teeth like any wild animal. For some seconds, unwilling to hurt her, yet dogged in his desire to return to the attack, Hans dodged back and forth. |
| 5954 |
Edith stood in the middle of the floor, wringing her hands, panting and gasping, her whole body trembling violently. Hans looked at nothing, but Edith's eyes wandered wildly from detail to detail of what had taken place. Dennin lay without movement. The overturned chair, hurled onward in the mad whirl, lay near him. |
| 5955 |
There was a peculiar ache in her throat, and her mouth was dry and furry. She could only look at Hans, who, in turn, looked at her. Suddenly the silence was broken by a sharp, metallic clang. She screamed, jerking her eyes back to the table. The plate had fallen down. Hans sighed as though awakening from sleep. |
| 5956 |
She could see no other righteous course to pursue. Hans's taking the law in his own hands was no more justifiable than Dennin's deed. Two wrongs did not make a right, she contended, and there was only one way to punish Dennin, and that was the legal way arranged by society. At last Hans gave in to her. |
| 5957 |
They first gathered wood, then scraped the snow away and on the frozen surface built a fire. When the fire had burned for an hour, several inches of dirt had thawed. This they shovelled out, and then built a fresh fire. Their descent into the earth progressed at the rate of two or three inches an hour. |
| 5958 |
The flurrying snow did not permit the fire to burn any too well, while the wind cut through their clothes and chilled their bodies. They held but little conversation. The wind interfered with speech. Beyond wondering at what could have been Dennin's motive, they remained silent, oppressed by the horror of the tragedy. |
| 5959 |
They were shallow, not more than two feet deep, but they would serve the purpose. Night had fallen. Hans got the sled, and the two dead men were dragged through the darkness and storm to their frozen sepulchre. The funeral procession was anything but a pageant. The sled sank deep into the drifted snow and pulled hard. |
| 5960 |
The man and the woman had eaten nothing since the previous day, and were weak from hunger and exhaustion. They had not the strength to resist the wind, and at times its buffets hurled them off their feet. On several occasions the sled was overturned, and they were compelled to reload it with its sombre freight. |
| 5961 |
All his splendid initiative had vanished. She had elected to deal with Dennin in her way, and so he left the whole matter in her hands. The murderer was a constant menace. At all times there was the chance that he might free himself from his bonds, and they were compelled to guard him day and night. |
| 5962 |
These were distinct nervous shocks, and their effect was not good on her. Such was her fear of the man, that even though she were wide awake, if he moved under the bedclothes she could not repress the start and the quick reach for the gun. She was preparing herself for a nervous break down, and she knew it. |
| 5963 |
Hans was affected differently. He became obsessed by the idea that it was his duty to kill Dennin; and whenever he waited upon the bound man or watched by him, Edith was troubled by the fear that Hans would add another red entry to the cabin's record. Always he cursed Dennin savagely and handled him roughly. |
| 5964 |
So Hans became another factor in the problem the unexpected had given Edith Nelson to solve. At first it had been merely a question of right conduct in dealing with Dennin, and right conduct, as she conceived it, lay in keeping him a prisoner until he could be turned over for trial before a proper tribunal. |
| 5965 |
At such times she cocked both triggers of the gun, prepared to meet him with leaden death if he should burst loose, herself trembling and palpitating and dizzy from the tension and shock. But in time Dennin grew more tractable. It seemed to her that he was growing weary of his unchanging recumbent position. |
| 5966 |
He began to beg and plead to be released. He made wild promises. He would do them no harm. He would himself go down the coast and give himself up to the officers of the law. He would give them his share of the gold. He would go away into the heart of the wilderness, and never again appear in civilization. |
| 5967 |
At a little later period he began to make impassioned pleas for death, to beg her to kill him, to beg Hans to put him our of his misery so that he might at least rest comfortably. The situation was fast becoming impossible. Edith's nervousness was increasing, and she knew her break down might come any time. |
| 5968 |
Also, they had not expected to winter in the cabin, and the food was running low; nor could Hans add to the supply by hunting. They were chained to the cabin by the necessity of guarding their prisoner. Something must be done, and she knew it. She forced herself to go back into a reconsideration of the problem. |
| 5969 |
There were little groups, she reasoned, like Switzerland, and there were big groups like the United States. Also, she reasoned, it did not matter how small was the group of people. There might be only ten thousand people in a country, yet their collective judgment and will would be the law of that country. |
| 5970 |
There might be only ten or fifteen men altogether, he said, but the will of the majority became the law for the whole ten or fifteen, and whoever violated that will was punished. Edith saw her way clear at last. Dennin must hang. Hans agreed with her. Between them they constituted the majority of this particular group. |
| 5971 |
All sullenness and defiance disappeared, and he talked sociably with his captors, and even with flashes of his old time wit. Also, he found great satisfaction in Edith's reading to him from the Bible. She read from the New Testament, and he took keen interest in the prodigal son and the thief on the cross. |
| 5972 |
Edith and Hans walked on either side of him and supported him, the while he cracked jokes and tried to keep them cheerful, breaking off, once, long enough to arrange the forwarding of his share of the gold to his mother in Ireland. They climbed a slight hill and came out into an open space among the trees. |
| 5973 |
Also, Hans was feeling very sick. He had not realized the enormousness of the task of putting a fellow man out of the world. Edith, on the other hand, had realized; but the realization did not make the task any easier. She was filled with doubt as to whether she could hold herself together long enough to finish it. |
| 5974 |
Then she began to laugh, harshly, sharply, metallically; and Hans was shocked as he had not been shocked through the whole tragedy. Edith Nelson's break down had come. Even in her hysteria she knew it, and she was glad that she had been able to hold up under the strain until everything had been accomplished. |
| 5975 |
Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower crowned cottage, a sweet mountain meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty seven trees, one long row of blackberries and two short rows of strawberries, to say nothing of a quarter of a mile of gurgling brook. |
| 5976 |
A pat and a rub around the ears from the man, and a more prolonged caressing from the woman, and he was away down the trail in front of them, gliding effortlessly over the ground in true wolf fashion. In build and coat and brush he was a huge timber wolf; but the lie was given to his wolfhood by his color and marking. |
| 5977 |
A most unsociable dog he proved to be, resenting all their advances, refusing to let them lay hands on him, menacing them with bared fangs and bristling hair. Nevertheless he remained, sleeping and resting by the spring, and eating the food they gave him after they set it down at a safe distance and retreated. |
| 5978 |
His wretched physical condition explained why he lingered; and when he had recuperated, after several days' sojourn, he disappeared. And this would have been the end of him, so far as Irvine and his wife were concerned, had not Irvine at that particular time been called away into the northern part of the state. |
| 5979 |
Riding along on the train, near to the line between California and Oregon, he chanced to look out of the window and saw his unsociable guest sliding along the wagon road, brown and wolfish, tired yet tireless, dust covered and soiled with two hundred miles of travel. Now Irvine was a man of impulse, a poet. |
| 5980 |
That the northland still drew him, they knew; for at night they sometimes heard him crying softly; and when the north wind blew and the bite of frost was in the air, a great restlessness would come upon him and he would lift a mournful lament which they knew to be the long wolf howl. Yet he never barked. |
| 5981 |
No provocation was great enough to draw from him that canine cry. Long discussion they had, during the time of winning him, as to whose dog he was. Each claimed him, and each proclaimed loudly any expression of affection made by him. But the man had the better of it at first, chiefly because he was a man. |
| 5982 |
The swish of them was enough to set him a bristle with suspicion, and on a windy day she could not approach him at all. On the other hand, it was Madge who fed him; also it was she who ruled the kitchen, and it was by her favor, and her favor alone, that he was permitted to come within that sacred precinct. |
| 5983 |
He forgot his embarrassment in his admiration, and it was her turn to flush and feel uncomfortable. It was at this juncture, when Walt had just decided it was time for him to be saying something to relieve the strain, that Wolf, who had been away nosing through the brush, trotted wolf like into view. |
| 5984 |
For the distance of twenty feet Wolf watched him go, himself all eagerness and expectancy, as though waiting for the man to turn and retrace his steps. Then, with a quick low whine, Wolf sprang after him, overtook him, caught his hand between his teeth with reluctant tenderness, and strove gently to make him pause. |
| 5985 |
Suddenly Wolf turned his head, and over his shoulder just as steadily regarded Walt. The appeal was unanswered. Not a word nor a sign did the dog receive, no suggestion and no clew as to what his conduct should be. A glance ahead to where the old master was nearing the curve of the trail excited him again. |
| 5986 |
He sprang to his feet with a whine, and then, struck by a new idea, turned his attention to Madge. Hitherto he had ignored her, but now, both masters failing him, she alone was left. He went over to her and snuggled his head in her lap, nudging her arm with his nose an old trick of his when begging for favors. |
| 5987 |
He backed away from her and began writhing and twisting playfully, curvetting and prancing, half rearing and striking his fore paws to the earth, struggling with all his body, from the wheedling eyes and flattening ears to the wagging tail, to express the thought that was in him and that was denied him utterance. |
| 5988 |
They were as dead. He turned and silently gazed after the old master. Skiff Miller was rounding the curve. In a moment he would be gone from view. Yet he never turned his head, plodding straight onward, slowly and methodically, as though possessed of no interest in what was occurring behind his back. |
| 5989 |
He barked once, and waited. Then he turned and trotted back to Walt Irvine. He sniffed his hand and dropped down heavily at his feet, watching the trail where it curved emptily from view. The tiny stream slipping down the mossy lipped stone seemed suddenly to increase the volume of its gurgling noise. |
| 5990 |
The great yellow butterflies drifted silently through the sunshine and lost themselves in the drowsy shadows. Madge gazed triumphantly at her husband. A few minutes later Wolf got upon his feet. Decision and deliberation marked his movements. He did not glance at the man and woman. His eyes were fixed up the trail. |
| 5991 |
He broke into a trot, and Madge's lips pursed, forming an avenue for the caressing sound that it was the will of her to send forth. But the caressing sound was not made. She was impelled to look at her husband, and she saw the sternness with which he watched her. The pursed lips relaxed, and she sighed inaudibly. |
| 5992 |
It was his desire to understand all things that white men understand, and here, in this matter, he failed. I felt, also, that there was challenge in his attitude. He was bent upon compelling me to show him the wisdom of pictures. Besides, he had remarkable powers of visualization. I had long since learned this. |
| 5993 |
You look through the window for one second, or for two seconds, you see something, and you go on your way. You saw maybe a man writing a letter. You saw something without beginning or end. Nothing happened. Yet it was a bit of life you saw. You remember it afterward. It is like a picture in your memory. |
| 5994 |
That means the roof is the limit. One man play yellow markers maybe one yellow marker worth one thousand dollars, maybe two thousand dollars. One man play red markers. Maybe they are worth five hundred dollars, maybe one thousand dollars. It is a very big game. Everybody play very high, up to the roof. |
| 5995 |
Last water, snow in the air, snow on the ground, ice on the lake, on the river ice in the eddies. Every day more snow, more ice. Maybe one day, maybe three days, maybe six days, any day maybe freeze up come, then no more water, all ice, everybody walk, Dawson six hundred miles, long time walk. Boat go very quick. |
| 5996 |
She fix hair. There is much hair, and it is brown, also sometimes it is like gold in the firelight, when she turn her head, so, and flashes come from it like golden fire. The eyes are large and brown, sometimes warm like a candle behind a curtain, sometimes very hard and bright like broken ice when sun shines upon it. |
| 5997 |
When bacon is frying they must run away from the fire and cough half an hour in the snow. They freeze their cheeks a little bit, so that the skin turns black and is very sore. Also, the man freezes his thumb till the end is like to come off, and he must wear a large thumb on his mitten to keep it warm. |
| 5998 |
But they are funny wolves, soft wolves, baby wolves who do not understand the way of the trail. They cry aloud in their sleep at night. In their sleep they moan and groan with the pain of their weariness. And in the day, as they stagger along the trail, they cry under their breaths. They are funny wolves. |
| 5999 |
We start earlier in the morning, we travel later at night. I look sometimes to see them die, these two baby wolves, but they will not die. They go on and on. When the dry cough take hold of them hard, they hold their hands against their stomach and double up in the snow, and cough, and cough, and cough. |
| 6000 |
Because of the leg he has made a poor camp, and has been lying on his blankets for three days and keeping a fire going. When we find him he is swearing. He swears like hell. Never have I heard a man swear like that man. I am glad. Now that they have found that for which they look, we will have rest. |
| 6001 |
Sometimes two or three months and nobody goes by. The snow had covered the trail, and there was no sign that men had ever come or gone that way. All day the wind blew and the snow fell, and all day we travelled, while our stomachs gnawed their desire and our bodies grew weaker with every step they took. |
| 6002 |
I kill three ptarmigan with the woman's revolver, and we are made somewhat strong again. But the dogs have nothing to eat. They try to eat their harness, which is of leather and walrus hide, and I must fight them off with a club and hang all the harness in a tree. And all night they howl and fight around that tree. |
| 6003 |
It is clear weather, and cold. The sun stay longer in the sky, and there are sun dogs flashing on either side, and the air is bright with frost dust. The snow falls no more upon the trail, and I see the fresh sign of dogs and sled. There is one man with that outfit, and I see in the snow that he is not strong. |
| 6004 |
And after that never again do I care for money. For that day a large wisdom came to me. There was a great light, and I saw clear, and I knew that it was not for money that a man must live, but for a happiness that no man can give, or buy, or sell, and that is beyond all value of all money in the world. |
| 6005 |
On the snow there are pieces of blanket and of canvas, and I know what has happened. His dogs have eaten their harness, and he has made new harness out of his blankets. The man and woman stare hard at what is to be seen, and as I look at them my back feels the chill as of a cold wind against the skin. |
| 6006 |
The man who is before us, his blanket harness breaks often, and he must stop and mend it. Our harness is good, for I have hung it in trees each night. At eleven o'clock the man is half a mile away. At one o'clock he is a quarter of a mile away. He is very weak. We see him fall down many times in the snow. |
| 6007 |
All the time we fall down. We stand up and stagger two steps, maybe three steps, then we fall down again. And all the time I must help up the man and woman. Sometimes they rise to their knees and fall forward, maybe four or five times before they can get to their feet again and stagger two or three steps and fall. |
| 6008 |
The frost dust is like the dust of diamonds, and all the air is filled with it. Now the woman coughs, and lies still in the snow until the fit has passed, when she crawls on again. Now the man looks ahead, and he is blear eyed as with old age and must rub his eyes so that he can see the stranger man. |
| 6009 |
Also does he take off one mitten and wait with revolver in his hand, rocking back and forth as he waits. His face is skin and bones and frozen black. It is a hungry face. The eyes are deep sunk in his head, and the lips are snarling. The man and woman, too, get upon their feet and they go toward him very slowly. |
| 6010 |
Also does he rock to and fro, his shoulders drooping, his knees bent, and his legs wide apart so that he does not fall down. The man and the woman stop maybe fifty feet away. Their legs, too, are wide apart so that they do not fall down, and their bodies rock to and fro. The stranger man is very weak. |
| 6011 |
The stranger man shoots at him again, and this time the bullet goes by in the air. Then the man takes the mitten in his teeth and pulls it off. But his hand is frozen and he cannot hold the revolver, and it fails in the snow. I look at the woman. Her mitten is off, and the big Colt's revolver is in her hand. |
| 6012 |
It was in the old days of the Russian occupancy of Alaska, when the nineteenth century had run but half its course, that Negore fled after his fleeing tribe and came upon it this summer night by the head waters of the Pee lat. Though near the midnight hour, it was bright day as he passed through the weary camp. |
| 6013 |
The young woman pressed and prodded the wasted muscles, resting her body on her knees, her bowed head hidden as in a cloud by her black wealth of hair. Negore watched the supple body, bending at the hips as a lynx's body might bend, pliant as a young willow stalk, and, withal, strong as only youth is strong. |
| 6014 |
He was an old man then, and his hair was white; but he was unafraid. And he was cunning, for he took the ship to where the sea sucks in to the land and the waves beat white on the mountain called Romanoff. The sea sucked the ship in to where the waves beat white, and it ground upon the rocks and broke open its sides. |
| 6015 |
Then will we destroy them, even Ivan. When they cling like flies to the wall, and top is no less near than bottom, our men shall fall upon them from above and either side, with spears, and arrows, and guns. And the women and children, from above, shall loosen the great rocks and hurl them down upon them. |
| 6016 |
Negore looked upon them with satisfaction, and in his mind's eye he saw them crushed and lifeless at the passage up the rocks. And ever he saw, waiting for him at the passage up the rocks, the face and the form of Oona, and ever he heard her voice in his ears and felt the soft, warm glow of her eyes. |
| 6017 |
But never did he forget to shiver, nor to stumble where the footing was rough, nor to cry aloud at the bite of the lash. Also, he was afraid of Karduk, for he knew him for no true man. His was a false eye, and an easy tongue a tongue too easy, he judged, for the awkwardness of honest speech. All that day they marched. |
| 6018 |
The two Slavonian hunters toiled upward till they grew small and smaller, and when they reached the top and waved their hats that all was well, they were like black specks against the sky. The guns were lowered from Negore's breast and Ivan gave the order for his men to go forward. Ivan was silent, lost in thought. |
| 6019 |
For he was thinking, likewise, of another passage up the rocks, to which they would soon come, and where the little birds would all be gone. And he was glad that Karduk came from the Great Fog Sea, where there were no trees or bushes, and where men learned water craft instead of land craft and wood craft. |
| 6020 |
And when the great Ivan fell across his legs, hurled there lifeless and crushed by a down rushing rock, he remembered the blind eyes of Old Kinoos and was glad. Then the sounds died down, and the rocks no longer thundered past, and he saw his tribespeople creeping close and closer, spearing the wounded as they came. |
| 6021 |
And near to him he heard the scuffle of a mighty Slavonian hunter, loath to die, and, half uprisen, borne back and down by the thirsty spears. Then he saw above him the face of Oona, and felt about him the arms of Oona; and for a moment the sun steadied and stood still, and the great walls were upright and moved not. |
| 6022 |
I have witnessed the deaths of old and young, and even infants, from sheer starvation. I have seen men and women beaten by whips and clubs and fists, and I have seen the rhinoceros hide whips laid around the naked torsos of black boys so heartily that each stroke stripped away the skin in full circle. |
| 6023 |
I have such a stomach and head. But what turns my head and makes my gorge rise, is the cold blooded, conscious, deliberate cruelty and torment that is manifest behind ninety nine of every hundred trained animal turns. Cruelty, as a fine art, has attained its perfect flower in the trained animal world. |
| 6024 |
Second, I suggest that all men and women, and boys and girls, who have so acquainted themselves with the essentials of the fine art of animal training, should become members of, and ally themselves with, the local and national organizations of humane societies and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. |
| 6025 |
Nothing of this was missed by Dag Daughtry, who knew a dog when he saw one, as he studied Michael in the light of the lanterns held by black boys where the whaleboats were landing cargo. Two estimates the steward quickly made of Michael: he was a likable dog, genial natured on the face of it, and he was a valuable dog. |
| 6026 |
The dog had liked him from the start, and had followed him. For Dag Daughtry had a way with him, as Michael was quickly to learn, when the man's hand reached out and clutched him, half by the jowl, half by the slack of the neck under the ear. There was no threat in that reach, nothing tentative nor timorous. |
| 6027 |
By nature there was no cruelty in him. He never exceeded in peremptoriness, nor in petting. He did not overbid for Michael's friendliness. He did bid, but in a manner that conveyed no sense of bidding. Scarcely had he given Michael that introductory jowl shake, when he released him and apparently forgot all about him. |
| 6028 |
Michael looked after him, but did not follow. He was eager to, but had received no invitation. At last Daughtry made a low kissing sound with his lips. So low was it that he scarcely heard it himself and almost took it on faith, or on the testimony of his lips rather than of his ears, that he had made it. |
| 6029 |
For Daughtry did not care to be seen on such dog stealing enterprises and was planning how to get on board the steamer unobserved. He edged around outside the lantern shine and went on along the beach to the native village. As he had foreseen, all the able bodied men were down at the boat landing working cargo. |
| 6030 |
From a small bag of twisted coconut hanging from his neck upon his withered and sunken chest, he drew out flint and steel and tinder, and, even while the impatient steward was proffering him a box of matches, struck a spark, caught it in the tinder, blew it into strength and quantity, and lighted his pipe from it. |
| 6031 |
Michael remained on the beach, waiting invitation, his mind not quite made up, but so nearly so that all that was required was that lip noise. Dag Daughtry made the lip noise so low that the old man did not hear, and Michael, springing clear from sand to canoe, was on board without wetting his feet. |
| 6032 |
Three fives he found in all, and two sticks over; and thus, at the end of it, he possessed as definite a knowledge of the number of sticks as would be possessed by the average white man by means of the single number seventeen. More it was, far more, than his avarice had demanded. Yet he was unsurprised. |
| 6033 |
Almost, at that part of his anatomy, he seemed builded in two dimensions. Thin his arms were as his legs, and, as Michael first beheld him, he had all the seeming of a big bellied black spider. He proceeded to dress, a matter of moments, slipping into duck trousers and blouse, dirty and frayed from long usage. |
| 6034 |
And he had picked him up in extremity. Pursued by two very active young men armed with fire hardened spears, tottering along with incredible swiftness on his two spindle legs, Kwaque had fallen exhausted at Daughtry's feet and looked up at him with the beseeching eyes of a deer fleeing from the hounds. |
| 6035 |
When he turned to depart from the active young men, who, back to consciousness, were observing him with bright, quick, wild animal eyes, Kwaque followed so close at his heels as to step upon them and make him stumble. Whereupon he loaded Kwaque with his trove and put him in front to lead along the runway to the beach. |
| 6036 |
But what of that? It did not concern Kwaque, who was as unaware of their love for the pig as he was unaware of the pig itself. The first he knew, he averred, was the gossip of the village that the pig was dead, and that somebody would have to die for it. It was all right, he said, in reply to a query from the steward. |
| 6037 |
It carried him back to his boyhood when he had been excited by tales of wild cannibals in far lands and dreamed some day to see them for himself. And here he was, he would chuckle to himself, with a real true cannibal for a slave. A slave Kwaque was, as much as if Daughtry had bought him on the auction block. |
| 6038 |
For that matter, Kwaque had little desire to leave his master, who, after all, was kindly and just, and never lifted a hand to him. Having survived sea sickness at the first, and never setting foot upon the land so that he never again knew sea sickness, Kwaque was certain he lived in an earthly paradise. |
| 6039 |
Also, it is admitted, when consciousness suffused his brain with a thought, that the thought was dimmer, vaguer than a similar thought in a human brain. Furthermore, it is admitted that never, never, in a million lifetimes, could Michael have demonstrated a proposition in Euclid or solved a quadratic equation. |
| 6040 |
The next evening after he came on board, Dag Daughtry talked it over with him. Michael sat on his haunches, the length of his lower jaw resting on Daughtry's knee, the while his eyes dilated, contracted and glowed, his ears ever pricking and repricking to listen, his stump tail thumping ecstatically on the floor. |
| 6041 |
And why not? He had the wit to grasp what Steward desired of him; he had the heart that made it a happiness for him to serve. Steward was a god who was kind, who loved him with voice and lip, who loved him with touch of hand, rub of nose, or enfolding arm. As all service flourishes in the soil of love, so with Michael. |
| 6042 |
All of which was no personal vice of Kwaque or virtue of Michael. Michael's heredity, rigidly selected for ages by man, was chiefly composed of fierceness and faithfulness. And fierceness and faithfulness, together, invariably produce pride. And pride cannot exist without honour, nor can honour without poise. |
| 6043 |
For he had to learn, first, the spoken numerals; second, to see with his eyes and in his brain differentiate between one object, and all other groups of objects up to and including the group of five; and, third, in his mind, to relate an object, or any group of objects, with its numerical name as uttered by Steward. |
| 6044 |
But Michael knew nothing of this. And the big Persian knew of his existence before he did of hers. In fact, the first he knew was when she launched herself upon him out of the open wheel house doorway. Even as he glimpsed this abrupt danger, and before he could know what it was, he leaped sideways and saved himself. |
| 6045 |
From his point of view, the assault was unprovoked. He was staring at her with bristling hair, recognizing her for what she was, a cat, when she sprang again, her tail the size of a large man's arm, all claws and spitting fury and vindictiveness. This was too much for a self respecting Irish terrier. |
| 6046 |
The next moment she lay sprawling and struggling on the deck with a broken back. But for Michael this was only the beginning. A shrill yelling, rather than yelping, of more enemies made him whirl half about, but not quick enough. Struck in flank by two full grown fox terriers, he was slashed and rolled on the deck. |
| 6047 |
Such abrupt arrest in mid flight by the heavier dog brought the fox terrier down on deck with, a heavy thump. Simultaneous with this, Captain Duncan's second kick landed, communicating such propulsion to Michael as to tear his clenched teeth through the flesh and out of the flesh of the fox terrier. |
| 6048 |
Besides, it was a strange white god upon whom he had never before laid eyes. At the beginning he had snarled and growled. But it was a more serious affair to attack a god, and no sound came from him as he leaped to meet the leg flying toward him in another kick. As with the cat, he did not leap straight at it. |
| 6049 |
Too high it was for him to reach it, but his teeth closed on the flowing black scarf and tore it to tatters as his weight drew him back to deck. It was not this so much that turned Captain Duncan to the pure defensive and started him retreating backward, as it was the silence of Michael. Ominous as death it was. |
| 6050 |
A roar of laughter from the passengers greeted the capsizing of the fox terrier and the good natured gravity of Michael. But not alone at this did they laugh, for at the moment of the snap and the turning over, Captain Duncan's unstrung nerves had exploded, causing him to jump as he tensed his whole body. |
| 6051 |
Not with the smouldering, smothering, choking hysteria that still worked in the fox terriers did he listen, nor with quivering of muscles and jumps of over wrought nerves, but coolly, composedly, as if no battle royal had just taken place and no rips of teeth and kicks of feet still burned and ached his body. |
| 6052 |
At that moment Michael was lying squirming on his back a dozen feet away, his legs straight up in the air, both fox terriers worrying with well stimulated ferociousness. With a quick out thrust of his four legs, he rolled over on his side and with questioning eyes and pricked ears looked and listened. |
| 6053 |
He was slender to emaciation, cavernously checked, roll after roll of skin, no longer encasing flesh or muscle, hanging grotesquely down his neck and swathing the Adam's apple so that only occasionally, with queer swallowing motions, did it peep out of the mummy wrappings of skin and sink back again from view. |
| 6054 |
Might be seventy five, might just as well be a hundred and five, or a hundred and seventy five. Beginning at the right temple, a ghastly scar split the cheek bone, sank into the depths of the hollow cheek, notched across the lower jaw, and plunged to disappearance among the prodigious skin folds of the neck. |
| 6055 |
On the left hand were no rings, for there were no fingers to wear them. Only was there a thumb; and, for that matter, most of the hand was missing as well, as if it had been cut off by the same slicing edge that had cleaved him from temple to jaw and heaven alone knew how far down that skin draped neck. |
| 6056 |
Likewise, the affair occurred at night, and it was Kwaque's hands that received him. It had been quick work, and daring, in the dark of early evening. From the boat deck, with a bowline under Kwaque's arms and a turn of the rope around a pin, Dag Daughtry had lowered his leprous servitor into the waiting launch. |
| 6057 |
Once, polishing the brass work on the hand rails of the cabin companionway, Daughtry overheard the ancient one explaining his terrible scar and missing fingers to Grimshaw and the Armenian Jew. The pair of them had plied him with extra drinks in the hope of getting more out of him by way of his loosened tongue. |
| 6058 |
The third officer was a lad, only eighteen, a brave and charming boy. He shared with the second officer the starboard stern sheet plank. They drew a line to mark the division, and neither, lapping up what scant moisture fell during the night hours, ever dreamed of trespassing across the line. They were too honourable. |
| 6059 |
No; so little moisture was there in my system that I didn't bleed much. And the amazing thing, under the circumstances, was the quickness with which I healed. The second officer sewed me up next day with a needle he'd made out of an ivory toothpick and with twine he twisted out of the threads from a frayed tarpaulin. |
| 6060 |
He knew the thing as a thing that occasionally happened to human creatures. It bothered him, from the pain standpoint, scarcely at all, and it never entered his kinky head that his master did not know about it. For the same reason he never suspected why Ah Moy kept him so at a distance. Nor had Kwaque other worries. |
| 6061 |
So strong was the play instinct in him, as well as was his constitution strong, that he continually outplayed Scraps to abject weariness, so that he could only lie on the deck and pant and laugh through air draughty lips and dab futilely in the air with weak forepaws at Michael's continued ferocious acted onslaughts. |
| 6062 |
Came a stretch of ocean that to Daughtry was like all other stretches of ocean and unidentifiable from them. No land broke the sea rim. The ship the centre, the horizon was the invariable and eternal circle of the world. The magnetic needle in the binnacle was the point on which the Mary Turner ever pivoted. |
| 6063 |
Nor was this due entirely to Dag Daughtry, despite the fact that his own intention and act would have been sufficient to spoil their chance for longer staring. Down in the lazarette, under the main cabin floor, it chanced that he took toll of the cases of beer which had been shipped for his especial benefit. |
| 6064 |
The clock marked a quarter before twelve when he climbed up out of the lazarette, replaced the trapdoor, and hurried to set the table. He served the company through the noon meal, although it was all he could do to refrain from capsizing the big tureen of split pea soup over the head of Simon Nishikanta. |
| 6065 |
Listening closely, he could have sworn he heard the sounds of a bit biting into hard wood. A minute later, his own brace and bit carefully secreted, his hand was descending on the shoulder of a man he could not recognize in the gloom, but who, on his knees and wheezing, was steadily boring into the head of a cask. |
| 6066 |
I'll join you down in the cabin, say in ten minutes, and we can have a real gam. But anyway, whatever your game is, I'm with you. Because it happens to be my game to get quick into port, and because, sir, I have a great liking and respect for you. Now shoot along. I'll be with you inside ten minutes. |
| 6067 |
I was an old man then. We were coming up from Florida. It was a collision on a high trestle. The train crumpled up, and some of the cars fell over sideways and fell off, ninety feet into the bottom of a dry creek. It was dry, though there was a pool of water just ten feet in diameter and eighteen inches deep. |
| 6068 |
I was the only survivor of my car. It struck forty feet away from me, off to the side. And they took only the dead out of it. When they took me out of the pool I wasn't dead by any means. And when the surgeons got done with me, there were the fingers gone from my hand, that scar down the side of my face. |
| 6069 |
Lepers are treated that way. So are the insane. I know it. When I was young and on the sea, a brother lieutenant went mad. Sometimes he was violent, and we struggled with him, twisting his arms, bruising his flesh, tying him helpless while we sat and panted on him that he might not do harm to us, himself, or the ship. |
| 6070 |
I cadged tobacco, poor cheap tobacco, from poor doddering old chaps trembling on the edge of dissolution. Ay, and when Samuel Merrivale I found dead in the morning, next cot to mine, I first rummaged his poor old trousers' pocket for the half plug of tobacco I knew was the total estate he left, then announced the news. |
| 6071 |
But one trouble was on his mind. He was not quite sure, in such an out of the way place as Taiohae, that good beer could be procured. As he prepared to make the first stroke of the razor, most of his face white with lather, he noticed a dark patch of skin on his forehead just between the eyebrows and above. |
| 6072 |
For'ard, all were happy. Being only seamen, on seamen's wages, they hailed with delight the news that they were bound in for a tropic isle to fill their water barrels. Aft, the three partners were in bad temper, and Nishikanta openly sneered at Captain Doane and doubted his ability to find the Marquesas. |
| 6073 |
In truth, it was the lost pack, the pack of the primeval world before the dog ever came in to the fires of men, and, for that matter, before men built fires and before men were men. He had been born only the other day and had lived but two years in the world, so that, of himself, he had no knowledge of the lost pack. |
| 6074 |
For many thousands of generations he had been away from it; yet, deep down in the crypts of being, tied about and wrapped up in every muscle and nerve of him, was the indelible record of the days in the wild when dim ancestors had run with the pack and at the same time developed the pack and themselves. |
| 6075 |
This was because man observed that man passed and was lost out of the tribe, or family, or whatever name he gave to his group, which was, after all, the human pack. And man did not want to be lost out of the pack. So, of his imagination, he devised a new pack that would be eternal and with which he might for ever run. |
| 6076 |
The mother was beside it the moment after it was struck, and to those on board, looking almost directly down upon her, her dismay and alarm were very patent. She would nudge the calf with her huge shoulder, circle around and around it, then range up alongside and repeat her nudgings and shoulderings. |
| 6077 |
Nor was this unintentional, gentle impact all. The instant after her shoulder had touched, startled by the contact, she flailed out with her tail. The blow smote the rail just for'ard of the fore shrouds, splintering a gap through it as if it were no more than a cigar box and cracking the covering board. |
| 6078 |
A sailor, in the main rigging, carried away a ratline in both hands, fell head downward, and was clutched by an ankle and saved head downward by a comrade, as the schooner cracked and shuddered, uplifted on the port side, and was flung down on her starboard side till the ocean poured level over her rail. |
| 6079 |
The starboard boat, cluttered with men, provisions, and property and being rapidly rowed away from the danger centre, which was the Mary Turner, was scarcely a hundred yards away, when the whale, missing the schooner clean, turned at full speed and close range, churning the water, and all but collided with the boat. |
| 6080 |
Humorous half columns in the local papers, written in the customary silly way by unlicked cub reporters just out of grammar school, tickled the fancy of San Francisco for a fleeting moment in that the steamship Mariposa had rescued some sea waifs possessed of a cock and bull story that not even the reporters believed. |
| 6081 |
The unemployed problem was bulking bigger than usual to the citizens of San Francisco. And, as regarded steamships and sailing vessels, there were three stewards for every Steward's position. Nothing steady could Daughtry procure, while his occasional odd jobs did not balance his various running expenses. |
| 6082 |
He was in a parlous predicament. Harder than ever had it been to secure odd jobs, and he had reached the end of his savings. Earlier in the evening he had had a telephone conference with the Ancient Mariner, who had reported only progress with an exceptionally strong nibble that very day from a retired quack doctor. |
| 6083 |
When Steward placed a chair for him at the table and invited him into it, he began to key up. Steward expected something of him, wanted him to show off. And it was not because of the showing off that he was eager, but because of his love for Steward. Love and service were one in the simple processes of Michael's mind. |
| 6084 |
Ah Moy, had he not long since been delivered back to China by the immigration authorities, could have told him the meaning of that swelling, just as he could have told Dag Daughtry the meaning of the increasing area of numbness between his eyes where the tiny, vertical, lion lines were cutting more conspicuously. |
| 6085 |
Later, he had decided it was chronic rheumatism brought on by the damp and foggy Sun Francisco climate. It was one of his reasons for desiring to get away again to sea where the tropic sun would warm the rheumatism out of him. As a steward, Daughtry had been accustomed to contact with men and women of the upper world. |
| 6086 |
But for the first time in his life, here in the underworld of San Francisco, in all equality he met such persons from above. Nay, more, they were eager to meet him. They sought him. They fawned upon him for an invitation to sit at his table and buy beer for him in whatever garish cabaret Michael was performing. |
| 6087 |
Daughtry extended his left hand, with a little wiggle of the little finger advertising the seat of the affliction. Walter Merritt Emory saw, with seeming careless look out from under careless drooping eyelids, the little finger slightly swollen, slightly twisted, with a smooth, almost shiny, silkiness of skin texture. |
| 6088 |
I have diagnosed it as pyorrhea which has infected the stomach from the mouth, and have suggested emetine treatment of the mouth as a cure for the stomach disorder. Of course, you don't understand, but the point is that I've persuaded Doctor Hadley to bring in Doctor Granville, who is a dentist and a pyorrhea expert. |
| 6089 |
I've saved him, not merely the risk of an operation for appendicitis, but the cost of it, and the hospital expenses. I shall charge him nothing for what I did. Hadley's charge will be merely nominal. Doctor Granville, at the outside, will cure his pyorrhea with emetine for no more than a paltry fifty dollars. |
| 6090 |
Instead, they backed farther away, drew their clubs, and glared intimidatingly at him. More convincing than anything else to Daughtry was the conduct of the policemen. They were manifestly afraid of contact with him. As he started forward, they poked the ends of their extended clubs towards his ribs to ward him off. |
| 6091 |
But Milliken, captain of detectives, was too well known to her, and she yielded to the law of which he was the symbol and of which she was credulously ignorant. As Michael started out of the room on the end of a rope, a plaintive call of reminder came from the window sill, where perched a tiny, snow white cockatoo. |
| 6092 |
Alert, dilating and contracting, as swift as cautious, and infinitely apprehensive, the pupils vertically slitted in jet into the midmost of amazing opals of greenish yellow, the eyes roved the room. They alighted on Cocky. Instantly the head portrayed that the cat had stiffened, crouched, and frozen. |
| 6093 |
He drew no film across his one eye that showed his head cocked sideways, nor did the passion of apprehension that whelmed him manifest itself in the quiver of a single feather. Both creatures were petrified into the mutual stare that is of the hunter and the hunted, the preyer and the prey, the meat eater and the meat. |
| 6094 |
And Cocky, who could not know death with the clearness of concept of a human, nevertheless was not altogether unaware that the end of all things was terribly impending. As he watched the cat deliberately crouch for the spring, Cocky, gallant mote of life that he was, betrayed his one and forgivable panic. |
| 6095 |
Picnicking parties never came there, nor did small boys hunting birds' nests or playing at being wild Indians. The only class of frequenters was the suicides, who, sad of life, sought the saddest landscape as a fitting scene in which to end. And, because they so ended, they never repeated their visits. |
| 6096 |
Scrub of growth they were, expending the major portion of their meagre nourishment in their roots that crawled seaward through the insufficient sand for anchorage against the prevailing gales. Not even so far as the sentry boxes were Daughtry and Kwaque permitted to stroll. A hundred yards inside was the dead line. |
| 6097 |
Here, the guards came hastily to deposit food supplies, medicines, and written doctors' instructions, retreating as hastily as they came. Here, also, was a blackboard upon which Daughtry was instructed to chalk up his needs and requests in letters of such size that they could be read from a distance. |
| 6098 |
Because, in a basket of fruit, stated to have been sent by the young ladies of Miss Foote's Seminary, Daughtry had read a note artfully concealed in the heart of an apple, telling him on the forthcoming Friday night to keep a light burning in his window. Daughtry received a visitor at five in the morning. |
| 6099 |
This man he had met, more than once, in the company of Steward. Amity had existed between him and Steward, for they had sat at table, and drunk together. Steward was lost. Michael knew not where to find him, and was himself a prisoner in the back yard of a strange place. What had once happened, could again happen. |
| 6100 |
The patience of waiting, when he wanted to go home and when Steward continued to sit at table and talk and drink beer, was his, as was the patience of the rope around the neck, the fence too high to scale, the narrowed walled room with the closed door which he could never unlatch but which humans unlatched so easily. |
| 6101 |
Immured in a tiny between decks cubby which was filled mostly with boxes and bales, tied as well by the rope around his neck, he waited from moment to moment for the door to open and admit, realised in the flesh, the resplendent vision of Steward which blazed through the totality of his consciousness. |
| 6102 |
This man was two faced, two mannered. No thoroughbred was anything but single faced and single mannered. A thoroughbred, hot blooded as it might be, was always sincere. But in this scrub was no sincerity, only a positive insincerity. A thoroughbred had passion, because of its hot blood; but this scrub had no passion. |
| 6103 |
Its blood was cold as its deliberateness, and it did nothing save deliberately. These things he did not think. He merely realized them, as any creature realizes itself in liking and in not liking. To cap it all, the last night on board, Michael lost his thoroughbred temper with this man who had no temper. |
| 6104 |
His throat was gripped, the thumbs shut off the blood from his brain, and darkness smote him. Had he been more than a normal thoroughbred dog, he would have continued to assail his impregnable enemy until he burst his heart or fell in a fit. But he was normal. Here was something unassailable, adamantine. |
| 6105 |
Del Mar invited him to go into the crate, and he declined. With a quick deft clutch on the collar at the back of his neck, Del Mar jerked him off his footing and thrust him in, or partly in, rather, because he had managed to get a hold on the edge of the crate with his two forepaws. The animal trainer wasted no time. |
| 6106 |
And Michael, at the pain, relaxed both holds. The next instant he was thrust inside, snarling his indignation and rage as he vainly flung himself at the open bars, while Del Mar was locking the stout door. Next, the crate was carried out to an express wagon and loaded in along with a number of trunks. |
| 6107 |
There was no brake to stop him, unless the soft end of his nose be considered the brake, for it was his nose that brought his body to rest inside the crate. He tried lying down, confined as the space was, and made out better, although his lips were cut and bleeding by having been forced so sharply against his teeth. |
| 6108 |
One of his forepaws slipped out through the slats or bars and rested on the bottom of the wagon where the trunks were squeaking, screeching, and jigging. A rut in the roadway made the nearest trunk tilt one edge in the air and shift position, so that when it tilted back again it rested on Michael's paw. |
| 6109 |
And Michael, back in the box and raging, was one toe short of the number which he had brought into the world. The blood ran freely from the crude but effective surgery, and he lay and licked the wound and was depressed with apprehension of he knew not what terrible fate awaited him and was close at hand. |
| 6110 |
In truth, there were thirty five dogs, of every sort of breed and mostly mongrel, and that they were far from happy was attested by their actions. Some howled, some whimpered, others growled and raged at one another through the slots, and many maintained a silence of misery. Several licked and nursed bruised feet. |
| 6111 |
Since mongrel dogs were cheap, it was cheaper to replace them when they died than so to care for them as to keep them from dying. What the baggageman did not know, and what Peterson did know, was that of these thirty five dogs not one was a surviving original of the troupe when it first started out four years before. |
| 6112 |
And for a day and a part of two nights, travelling eastward, he remained in the dog inferno. Then they were loaded off in some large city, and Michael continued on in greater quietness and comfort, although his injured foot still hurt and was bruised afresh whenever his crate was moved about in the car. |
| 6113 |
A collision on the elevated, a panic scramble of the uninjured out upon the trestle over the street, a step on the third rail, and Harry Del Mar was engulfed in the Nothingness which men know as death and which is nothingness in so far as such engulfed ones never reappear nor walk the ways of life again. |
| 6114 |
Never, however, were they permitted to see the actual training. On occasion, performances were given them by the finished products which verified all their other delightful and charming conclusions about the school. But had they seen the training of raw novices, it would have been a different story. |
| 6115 |
Yet his wife and children, and those in his small social circle, thought otherwise. They, never seeing him at work, were convinced that no softer hearted, more sentimental man had ever been born. His voice was low and gentle, his gestures were delicate, his views on life, the world, religion and politics, the mildest. |
| 6116 |
In addition to his fear that she might do it again, he loved her sincerely and devotedly, as he loved his children, seven of them, for whom nothing was too good or too expensive. So well did he love them, that the four boys from the beginning he forbade from seeing him work, and planned gentler careers for them. |
| 6117 |
His assistants were almost invariably youths from the reform schools, and he picked them with skilful eye and intuition. Control of them, under their paroles, with intelligence and coldness on their part, were the conditions and qualities he sought, and such combination, as a matter of course, carried with it cruelty. |
| 6118 |
On top of all he had already experienced, not even knowing executioners and execution chambers, for all he knew this bare room of cement and chemical smell might well be the place of the ultimate life disaster and this youth the god who was to send him into the dark which had engulfed all he had known and loved. |
| 6119 |
It lay on the ground. A man sat on it. And ever and anon it lifted its head from the sawdust and kissed the man. This was all Michael saw, yet he sensed something wrong about it. He knew not why, had no evidence why, but he felt cruelty and power and unfairness. What he did not see was the long pin in the man's hand. |
| 6120 |
Each time he thrust this in the pony's shoulder, the pony, stung by the pain and reflex action, lifted its head, and the man was deftly ready to meet the pony's mouth with his own mouth. To an audience the impression would be that in such fashion the pony was expressing its affection for the master. |
| 6121 |
Not a dozen feet away another Shetland, a coal black one, was behaving as peculiarly as it was being treated. Ropes were attached to its forelegs, each rope held by an assistant, who jerked on the same stoutly when a third man, standing in front of the pony, tapped it on the knees with a short, stiff whip of rattan. |
| 6122 |
And, at the same time, whirled violently into the air, he fell on the back of his head in the sawdust. Out of the sawdust he soared in rage, neck hair erect, throat a snarl, teeth bared to bite, and he would have sunk his teeth into the flesh of the master god had he not been the slave of cunning formula. |
| 6123 |
The lashes fell on the horses' rumps, and they leaped, and surged, and plunged, with their huge steel shod hoofs, the size of soup plates, tearing up the sawdust into smoke. And Billikens forgot himself. The terribleness of the sight painted the honest anxiety for the woman on his face. And her face was a kaleidoscope. |
| 6124 |
Jump in and out of nail kegs, on her hind legs, without ever touching with her front ones. She used to do eight kegs, in one and out into the next. Remember when she was boarded here and rehearsed. She was a gold mine, but Carson didn't know how to treat her, and she croaked off with penumonia at Cripple Creek. |
| 6125 |
After several falls and painful injuries, it was rejected for the feat and tried out as a plate balancer. Failing in this, it was made into a see saw dog who, for the rest of the turn, filled into the background of a troupe of twenty dogs. Number Nineteen was a place of perpetual quarrelling and pain. |
| 6126 |
They spiked his collar in some of the attempted tricks to keep him from lurching from side to side or from falling forward or backward. They used the whip and the rattan stick; and twisted his nose. They attempted to make a goal keeper of him in a football game between two teams of pain driven and pain bitten mongrels. |
| 6127 |
He learned, by bitter lessons, that he must follow Collins around; and follow him he did, hating him perpetually and in his own body slowly and subtly poisoning himself by the juices of his glands that did not secrete and flow in quite their normal way because of the pressure put upon them by his hatred. |
| 6128 |
All of which was spiritually unhealthful. He, who had been so merry hearted, even merrier hearted than his brother Jerry, began to grow saturnine, and peevish, and ill tempered. He no longer experienced impulses to play, to romp around, to run about. His body became as quiet and controlled as his brain. |
| 6129 |
Human convicts, in prisons, attain this quietude. He could stand by the hour, to heel to Collins, uninterested, infinitely bored, while Collins tortured some mongrel creature into the performance of a trick. And much of this torturing Michael witnessed. There were the greyhounds, the high jumpers and wide leapers. |
| 6130 |
It had been a pet mule in a family of children until Collins's keen eyes rested on it; and it had known only love and kindness and much laughter for its foolish mulishness. But Collins's eyes had read health, vigour, and long life, as well as laughableness of appearance and action in the long eared hybrid. |
| 6131 |
Barney Barnato he was renamed that first day in the arena, when, also, he received the surprise of his life. He did not dream of the spike in the saddle, nor, while the saddle was empty, did it press against him. But the moment Samuel Bacon, a negro tumbler, got into the saddle, the spike sank home. |
| 6132 |
Half a dozen attempts, quickly repeated, were scarcely better, the last one permitting him to remain on Barney's back nearly ten seconds, and culminating in a ludicrous fall over Barney's head. Sam withdrew from the ring, shaking his head dubiously and holding his side as if in pain. The other lads followed. |
| 6133 |
Expert tumblers, they executed most amazing and side splitting fails. Sam recovered and came back. Toward the last, all three made a combined attack on Barney, striving to mount him simultaneously from different slants of approach. They were scattered and flung like chaff, sometimes falling heaped together. |
| 6134 |
He must live in fear of the spike. Never let him slow up on it. Never let him forget it. If you lay off any time for a few days, rehearse him with the spike a couple of times just before you begin again, or else he might forget it and queer the turn by ambling around with the first outside rube that mounts him. |
| 6135 |
What are you going to do? Apologize to the audience? Besides, on the stage, the programme runs like clockwork. Got to start performing on the tick of the clock, and anywhere from one to seven turns a day, all depending what kind of time you've got. The point is, your dogs have got to get right up and perform. |
| 6136 |
He'll kiss your hand, and be obedient, and crawl on his belly to do what you want him to do. They're slave dogs, that's what mongrels are. They ain't got courage, and you don't want courage in a performing dog. You want fear. Now you give a thoroughbred a licking and see what happens. Sometimes they die. |
| 6137 |
I've never given him a real licking, and I never will. It would be a waste of time. He'll fight if you press him too hard. And he'll die fighting you. He's too sensible to fight if you don't press him too hard. And if you don't press him too hard, he'll just stay as he is, and refuse to learn anything. |
| 6138 |
But Collins, knowing ahead of the lion what the lion was going to do, struck first, with the broom handle rapping the beast on its tender nose. Hannibal recoiled with a flash of snarl and flashed back a second sweeping stroke of his mighty paw. Again he was anticipated, and the rap on his nose sent him into recoil. |
| 6139 |
And the great lion lay and roared in helplessness, and at each prod exposed his nose more and lifted it higher, until, at the end, his red tongue ran out between his fangs and licked the boot resting none too gently on his neck, and, after that, licked the broomstick that had administered all the punishment. |
| 6140 |
This gave her pause. Had he sprung at her, or snarled, or shown any anger or resentment such as did the other dogs when so treated by her, she would have screamed and screeched and raised a hubbub of expostulation, crying for help and calling all men to witness how she was being unwarrantably attacked. |
| 6141 |
Day after day, catching him at odd times in the ring, she would cling closely to him and in a low voice, running on and on, never pausing for breath, tell him, for all he knew, the story of her life. At any rate, it sounded like the story of her woes and of all the indignities which had been wreaked upon her. |
| 6142 |
Sometimes she fell crumpled; several times she all but struck the ground: and once, she did strike, on her side and so hard as to knock the breath out of her. Her master, taking advantage of the moment to wipe the sweat from his streaming face, nudged her about with his toe till she staggered weakly to her feet. |
| 6143 |
That's about all it's good for, yet it's a good stunt. Audiences like to believe that the animals enjoy doing their tricks, and that they are treated like pampered darlings, and that they just love their masters to death. But God help all of us and our meal tickets if the audiences could see behind the scenes. |
| 6144 |
She loved them to death right before everybody, especially if a trick wasn't going good. What'd she do? She'd take that cat right up in her arms and kiss it. And when she put it down it'd perform the trick all right all right, while the audience applauded its silly head off for the kindness and humaneness she'd shown. |
| 6145 |
The doctors took over forty stitches in him and shot him full of that Pasteur dope for hydrophobia. And he always will limp with his right leg from what the dogs did to him. I tell you, they were the limit. And yet, every time the curtain went up, Captain Roberts brought the house down with the first stunt. |
| 6146 |
They hated him. I've seen him, right here in the cage at Cedarwild, wade into them with a club and whale the stuffing impartially out of all of them. Sure, they loved him not. Just a bit of the same old aniseed was what he used. He'd soak small pieces of meat in aniseed oil and stick them in his pockets. |
| 6147 |
One of his assistants told me a nasty one about him afterwards. They had an off month in Los Angeles, and Captain Roberts got it into his head he was going to make a dog balance a silver dollar on the neck of a champagne bottle. Now just think that over and try to see yourself loving a dog into doing it. |
| 6148 |
Their turn was an exciting and even terrifying one, when viewed from the audience; for, jumping about and roaring, they were made to appear as if about to destroy the slender little lady who performed with them and seemed to hold them in subjection only by her indomitable courage and a small riding switch in her hand. |
| 6149 |
Selim was sulky and took a swipe at him with his paw, and he whopped it to him full in the mouth just as he opened it to let out a roar. He told me about it himself. Said Selim's teeth rattled on the floor like dominoes. But he shouldn't have done it. It was destroying valuable property. Anyway, they fired him for it. |
| 6150 |
At the same instant the trainer spoke with sharp imperativeness and raised his whip, while the men on the outside lifted their irons and advanced them intimidatingly into the cage. And the leopards, bitter wise of the taste of the iron, remained crouched, although they still spat and whipped their tails angrily. |
| 6151 |
One of them, Alphonso, spat suddenly at him. He did not startle, though his hair rippled erect and he bared his fangs in a silent snarl. At the same moment the nearest iron bar was shoved in threateningly close to Alphonso, who shifted his yellow eyes from Michael to the bar and back again and did not strike out. |
| 6152 |
Either he had never learned to play or had already forgotten how. On the other hand, he was sweet tempered and equable, and he did not resent the early shows of crustiness which Michael made. And Michael quickly ceased from being crusty and took pleasure in their quiet companionship. There were no demonstrations. |
| 6153 |
When her hold was broken, she sprang at the man in a fury, and, before he could throttle her to subjection, sank her teeth into his thumb and wrist. All of which was provocative of great hilarity to the onlookers, while her squalls and cries excited the leopards to spitting and leaping against their bars. |
| 6154 |
The excitement, starting with revolver shots, was communicated everywhere. The various lions raised a great roaring, and the many dogs barked frantically. All tricks in the arena stopped, the animals temporarily unstrung and unable to continue. Several men, among them Collins, ran in the direction of the cages. |
| 6155 |
Castlemon was just being dragged out, and as Collins ran he could see the two men drop him to the ground so that they might slam the cage door shut. Inside, in so wildly struggling a tangle on the floor that it was difficult to discern what animals composed it, were Alphonso, Jack, and Michael looked together. |
| 6156 |
Sara's arrival and what followed was a matter of seconds. Trailing her chain behind her, the little green monkey, the tailed female who knew love and hysteria and was remote cousin to human women, flashed up to the narrow cage bars and squeezed through. Simultaneously the tangle underwent a violent upheaval. |
| 6157 |
He struck at the weapon with his paw, and, when it was poked into him again, flung himself upon it, biting the naked iron with his teeth. With a second fling he was against the cage bars, with a single slash of paw ripping down the forearm of the man who had poked him. The crowbar was dropped as the man leaped away. |
| 6158 |
This time he went straight at the man, fetching up against the cage bars with such fierceness as to shake the structure. More men began thrusting with more rods, but Alphonso was not to be balked. Sara saw him coming and screamed her shrillest and savagest at him. Collins snatched a revolver from one of the men. |
| 6159 |
With one last scream of utmost fury, she sprang full into the face of the monstrous cat, tearing and scratching with hands and feet, her mouth buried into the roots of one of its stubby ears. The astounded leopard upreared, with his forepaws striking and ripping at the little demon that would not let go. |
| 6160 |
Some care he might take of a particular dog with a particularly valuable trick, but mere fillers in came too cheaply. They cost from three to five dollars apiece. Worse than that, so far as he was concerned, Michael had cost nothing. And if he died it meant nothing to Davis except the trouble of finding another dog. |
| 6161 |
No care was taken of these sores, and they were not improved by the whitening that was put on them for concealment whenever they performed. Some of them howled lamentably at times, and every little while, as if it were all that remained for them to do in their narrow cells, all of them would break out into barking. |
| 6162 |
Long since, as one feature of his developing moroseness, he had ceased from barking. He had become too unsociable for any such demonstrations; nor did he pattern after the example of some of the sourer tempered dogs in the room, who were for ever bickering and snarling through the slats of their cages. |
| 6163 |
And it would seem to Michael that on one side, clinging to him, Cocky talked farrago in his ear, and on the other side Sara clung to him and chattered an interminable and incommunicable tale. And then, deep about the roots of his ears would seem to prod the magic, caressing fingers of Steward the beloved. |
| 6164 |
Some tried to lick his hands with their swollen tongues as he dragged them roughly out of their cages. The weaker ones crawled and bellied toward the tub, and were over trod by the stronger ones. There was not room for all, and the stronger ones drank first, with much fighting and squabbling and slashing of fangs. |
| 6165 |
His wife took a hand, laying about her with a mop. It was a pandemonium of pain, for, their parched throats softened by the water, they were again able to yelp and cry out loudly all their hurt and woe. Several were too weak to get to the water, so it was carried to them and doused and splashed into their mouths. |
| 6166 |
Reaching out for the dogs nearest him, he flung them in turn into the tub from which they had drunk. When they were frightened, or when they objected in any way, he rapped them on the head with the scrubbing brush or the bar of yellow laundry soap with which he was lathering them. Several minutes sufficed for a dog. |
| 6167 |
He recognized that baths were necessary and compulsory, although they were administered in much better fashion at Cedarwild, while Kwaque and Steward had made a sort of love function of it when they bathed him. So he did his best to endure the scrubbing, and all might have been well had not Davis soused him under. |
| 6168 |
Because, while they were being thus arranged, the preceding turn was taking place in front of the drop curtain, it was imperative that rigid silence should be kept. Next, when the curtain rose on full stage, the dogs were trained to make a great barking. As a filler in, Michael had nothing to do but sit on a chair. |
| 6169 |
Bruised and bleeding, he sat on the chair, taking no part in the performance and only sullenly engendering a deeper and bitterer sourness. To keep silent before the curtain went up was no hardship for him. But when the curtain did go up, he declined to join the rest of the dogs in their frantic barking and yelping. |
| 6170 |
The curtain down, with a gleeful audience in front and with the dogs back in the room over the stage, Wilton Davis descended to look for Michael, who, instead of cowering in some corner, stood between the legs of the stage hand, quivering yet from his mishandling and threatening to fight as hard as ever if attacked. |
| 6171 |
Frightened and mutinous, nevertheless the monkeys were compelled to perform by being tied to their seats and instruments and by being pulled and jerked from off stage by wires fastened to their bodies. The leader of the orchestra, an irascible elderly monkey, sat on a revolving stool to which he was securely attached. |
| 6172 |
When poked from off the stage by means of long poles, he flew into ecstasies of rage. At the same time, by a rope arrangement, his chair was whirled around and around. To an audience the effect would be that he was angered by the blunders of his fellow musicians. And to an audience such anger would be highly ludicrous. |
| 6173 |
It fetches the laugh, and the money's in the laugh. Humans just have to laugh at monkeys because they're so similar and because the human has the advantage and feels himself superior. Suppose we're walking along the street, you and me, and you slip and fall down. Of course I laugh. That's because I'm superior to you. |
| 6174 |
Silence fell. The monkey leader ceased revolving and chattering. The men who had poked him held poles and wires suspended in their hands. The rest of the monkey orchestra merely shivered in apprehension of what next atrocity should be perpetrated. The violinist stared. Johnny still heaved from his laughter. |
| 6175 |
Michael was as dead to him as he was himself dead to all things. Yet Jacob Henderson was fair and square, business like and methodical. Once each day, when not travelling on the interminable trains, he gave Michael a thorough bath and thoroughly dried him afterward. He was never harsh nor hasty in the bathing. |
| 6176 |
Leaving out the eternal travelling, the never ending jumps from town to town and from city to city, he appeared on the stage once each night for seven nights in the week and for two afternoon performances in the week. The curtain went up, leaving him alone on the stage in the full set that befitted a bill topper. |
| 6177 |
And yet Michael was a prisoner, a life prisoner. Fed well, bathed well, exercised well, he never knew a moment of freedom. When travelling, days and nights he spent in the cage, which, however, was generous enough to allow him to stand at full height and to turn around without too uncomfortable squirming. |
| 6178 |
Sometimes, in hotels in country towns, out of the crate he shared Henderson's room with him. Otherwise, unless other animals were hewing on the same circuit time, he had, outside his cage, the freedom of the animal room attached to the particular theatre where he performed for from three days to a week. |
| 6179 |
But always it was at the end of a chain. And almost always the way led to some park, where Henderson fastened the other end of the chain to the bench on which he sat and browsed Swedenborg. Not one act of free agency was left to Michael. Other dogs ran free, playing with one another, or behaving bellicosely. |
| 6180 |
He slept much, brooded much, and suffered unprotestingly a great loneliness. Had Henderson made a bid for his heart, he would surely have responded; but Henderson had a heart only for the fantastic mental gyrations of Swedenborg, and merely made his living out of Michael. Sometimes there were hardships. |
| 6181 |
There was a night on a station platform in Minnesota, when two dogs of a troupe, on the next truck to his, froze to death. He was himself well frosted, and the cold bit abominably into his shoulder wounded by the leopard; but a better constitution and better general care of him enabled him to survive. |
| 6182 |
To the audience it was a side splitting, playful encounter between four legged creatures who thus displayed a ridiculous resemblance to superior, two legged man. But it was not playful to the cats. They were always excited into starting a real fight with each other off stage just before they were brought on. |
| 6183 |
There was nothing he dared not tackle, and, when he gave up an animal, the last word was said. For it, remained nothing but to be a cage animal, in solitary confinement, pacing ever up and down, embittered with all the world of man and roaring its bitterness to the most delicious enthrillment of the pay spectators. |
| 6184 |
But the two cases that were exceptional, put a mood of depression and fear into all the listening animals, such as humans might experience in an ante room of hell, listening to the flailing and the flaying of their fellows who had preceded them into the torture chamber. The first was of the big Indian tiger. |
| 6185 |
He leaped, he roared, he was a maniac of ferocity. Again and again, almost burning their palms, he tore the rope smoking through their hands. But ever they took in the slack and paid it out again, until, ere he was aware, a similar noose tightened on his foreleg. What he had done was nothing to what he now did. |
| 6186 |
He struck at the trailing rope that offended his nerves, clawed at the trap of the collar that encased his neck, fell, rolled over, offended his body nerves more and more by entangling contacts with the rope, and for half an hour exhausted himself in the futile battle with the inanimate thing. Thus tigers are broken. |
| 6187 |
Then, a hooked iron rod, thrust through the bars, caught and drew the bight of his trailing rope into the hands of the men outside. Immediately ten of them had hold of it, and he would have charged up to the bars at them had not, at that moment, Mulcachy entered the arena through a door on the opposite side. |
| 6188 |
Ben Bolt never reached him. First, with an access of caution, he craftily ceased from his charge, and, crouching, with lashing tail, studied the man who seemed so easily his. Mulcachy was equipped with a long lashed whip and a sharp pronged fork of iron. In his belt, loaded with blank cartridges, was a revolver. |
| 6189 |
The place was enveloped in fire, a roaring mass of flames shooting up fifty feet into the night sky. I wondered if it was Schouten's funeral pyre, and whether he had been mercifully dead when the fires started. I ran round the house to see what it was like at the back and stumbled across a woman sitting in the path. |
| 6190 |
As the two ships passed one another there was a fusillade of shots from Pearl and an answering staccato rattle from our ship. I wondered who had guns and who was using them. Then Pearl was safely out of reach, heading across the lagoon for the pass in the reef, lights springing up on board as she went. |
| 6191 |
We made a quick passage and all went well until we were within about two hours of Papeete, and longing to be ashore. I planned to take Ian, Campbell and one or two members of the crew to the police as soon as we landed, leaving the others to guard the ship, especially Geordie and the girls, zealously. |
| 6192 |
It was devastatingly bleak. A good couple of hours passed and then I was let out once more, this time to be escorted to a large business like office, and to confront an angry looking, mottle faced man behind the inevitable desk. I stood in front of it with my escort, and another man behind us at the door. |
| 6193 |
I thought that made it all far too complicated. I said only that Hadley, once chartering a boat for my brother and Norgaard, had quarrelled with them for reasons unknown, had murdered both of them and had implicated the Dutch doctor in his crime. I had come to seek the truth and had run into a hornet's nest. |
| 6194 |
At the end of the terrible business on Tanakabu I had felt sickened of the whole search and had wanted nothing more to do with it. The nodules could lie on the seabed forever as far as I was concerned, and with the murder of Mark more or less exposed even the urge to lay that ghost had died away to a dull resignation. |
| 6195 |
Apparently a patrol boat had gone to Tanakabu and returned three days later, during which time things had got a little easier for us, but not much. All the crew members had been allowed to go ashore in batches, but Ian, the Campbells and I were still confined, as was Geordie for slightly different reasons. |
| 6196 |
I note that M. Trevelyan called off the search as soon as he found that the man Kane was armed, which is a point in your favour. I also found that you saved many lives at the hospital, and it is known that you were all aboard your ship when the doctor was shot and the fires started. Also your photographs were helpful. |
| 6197 |
While Geordie and one team were checking the winch and its auxiliary equipment, aided by Campbell, Ian set another group to stripping Esmerelda. They took down all the rigging, both running and standing, and inspected everything. They found nothing wrong and we were sure we were fit for sea when they had finished. |
| 6198 |
No more of Kane's sabotage came to light. He had carefully selected the two things which could do us the most damage doctored grease and sugar in the fuel. If he hadn't been watched he might have got away with a lot more, and as it was he'd done more than enough. Campbell was Napoleonic about the food stores. |
| 6199 |
I thought a guard was all very well in its way, but a bit negative, if you know what I mean. So I sent a couple of boys ashore to scout around. They found a lot of the crew of that hooker in a pub, drinking themselves silly. A tough looking mob, true, but they're almost out of it already. All dagoes. |
| 6200 |
The forecastle was dimly lit by a single lamp and appeared full of shadowy shapes. When I got to the bottom of the steps I found Geordie fastening the door which led to the midships accommodation by means of a small wooden wedge which he took from his pocket. The door fastened, he turned to look round the forecastle. |
| 6201 |
They pack the bastards in like sardines, I thought. There was a snoring noise and Geordie looked round quickly, put his fingers to his lips for my benefit and crept forward very gently, and then waved me forward. He was looking at a middle berth upon which was sleeping a villainously unshaven seaman. |
| 6202 |
Kane walked forward along the deck and just as he passed me I straightened up and gave him a tap on the shoulder. He turned and I let him have it, as hard as I could to the jaw. Ian tapped him on the head with something as he started to collapse and all in one movement, as it seemed, rolled him into a piece of canvas. |
| 6203 |
He conned us out past the sleeping vessels and the marker buoys and Ramirez's splashing progress fell astern. As we drew level with Sirena, anchored in the harbour, there was a dull thump, not very loud, which carried over the water. At the same time there was a flicker of lights from a dinghy arriving alongside. |
| 6204 |
That would do her engine a bit of no good. Silence held us until we were well past all the shipping and abreast of one of the openings in the fringing reef, and then a babble of noise got up as everyone's tongue was loosened. Ian had to shout to make himself heard, giving orders to get some sail on her. |
| 6205 |
Working in a sailing ship heeled over under canvas wasn't anything I'd been trained for but it was surprising how much I'd learned, and I had rigged up some interesting systems to cope with the movement. We couldn't afford to stay hove to while I assayed each time, and in fact we'd tried it and that motion was worse. |
| 6206 |
Not that she hadn't been before, but the depression caused by a fruitless search had lifted and everyone was keen and cheerful. There was a lot of skylarking among the crew, although it always stopped when there was serious work to be done. Once, when I was having a breather on deck, Paula joined me. |
| 6207 |
I reckon the overall average density over the entire area of two thousand square miles is about eight pounds to the square foot. The overall richness is about six per cent. Considering some of the higher figures, though, you're in for a very fine haul wherever you begin, so systematic mining will pay off. |
| 6208 |
It was calm, quiet and peaceful as we gathered on deck to watch for any telltale breakers while Geordie brought the ship gently back to her last night's position, and then motored slowly ahead. Presently he throttled the engine back to less than three knots. The echo sounder showed a hundred fathoms. |
| 6209 |
Bill was in the dinghy now, with Jim and Rex Larkin to row it a few yards off from Esmerelda. He sat on the thwart, gave the traditional thumbs up sign as he made a final adjustment to his mask, and toppled backwards into the sea. For a few moments we could see his body sinking away from the dinghy. |
| 6210 |
Geordie guessed it too, and a ripple of awareness ran through the crew. Campbell's mouth hung open and his hand fell away from my arm. Eyes were scanning the water near us, looking anxiously for our diver's reappearance, and glances over our shoulders kept us in touch with the increasing activity away on the horizon. |
| 6211 |
But there wasn't enough time. Sirena was on us, slewing and with her speed falling off at the last possible moment to lay alongside us with a minimum of seamanship, relying totally on surprise to aid her terrible attack. She didn't quite make the turn and her bowsprit stabbed at us like a monstrous rapier. |
| 6212 |
There was an almighty crash and Esmerelda shuddered violently and moved bodily sideways in the water. I was thrown against Geordie and we both went down in a tangle of arms and legs. I scrambled to my feet, all the breath knocked out of my body, and saw hazily that Esmerelda's yardarm was locked in Sirena's shrouds. |
| 6213 |
I saw the knife coming down, grasped his wrist and pulled. This unexpected assistance sent him off balance. I did a neat sidestep, more suited to the dance floor than the battlefield, twisted his arm and pushed. He reeled into the scuppers and his knife clattered on the deck. I looked around and all was confusion. |
| 6214 |
I felt the burning ache along my rib case as only the most minor of distractions as I looked hastily around the deck. There seemed to be Spaniards everywhere, far more of them than of us, and three men lay on the deck without moving. Ramirez stepped delicately across the deck with two armed men at his back. |
| 6215 |
I thanked God that we kept small first aid kits all over the ship. As she worked I felt her hands shaking just a little, and I grasped them to try and reassure her, but it was a wretched attempt. There was a lot of movement on deck and a great deal of shouting. Ian looked up at the deckhead speculatively. |
| 6216 |
The longer they took to separate the two ships the more time we would have to think of a way out of this mess. I looked at the guards and felt very depressed. They looked as though they'd murder their grandmothers for two pesetas, and they'd certainly have no qualms about shooting us if we tried anything. |
| 6217 |
I looked round at the others. Their expressions were a mixture of amazement and slowly dawning comprehension. Clare gave Mark one long, measured look, then made a small contemptuous sound and turned back to her father. Campbell took her by the wrist protectively, never taking his eyes off Mark. He said nothing. |
| 6218 |
The meaning was unmistakable. Paula stopped dead and looked at Mark with the comprehension of horror. His eyes flickered and he looked away from her and she slowly fell back into a chair and buried her face in her hands. I heard the racking sobs that shook her, and saw Clare move to put her arms round her shoulders. |
| 6219 |
Campbell was still speaking, desperately searching for arguments to persuade Ramirez not to go ahead with whatever plans he had for us. Again there was that vibrancy in my ears, a curious beat in Campbell's voice as though there were some sort of aural interference, some note so low as to be inaudible. |
| 6220 |
It was as if we could all recognise that where Ramirez had real authority and total amorality, Mark had only his ego and his self seeking veneer of toughness over a very insecure personality. As Geordie started to rise Mark snapped out a command in Spanish and the guards' rifles lifted to the ready. |
| 6221 |
I risked a glance at the port, and saw that the face had gone, to be replaced with a hand. The middle finger and thumb were joined in a circle. Bill had got my message. Whatever happened now I had to give him time to act on it. Now he knew where the rest of us were and might be able to do something about it. |
| 6222 |
Even when the first plan went wrong and Hadley was implicated in your so called murder Ramirez wasn't worried. That's why he laughed his damn head off when I accused him. He knew that all he ever had to do to clear himself and Hadley was to produce you, and you can be sure he'd do it in such a way that would earn. |
| 6223 |
I slithered helplessly towards the side of the saloon and jarred my head against the table as I fell. There were sounds of bedlam above decks. The ship righted herself and we fell back in a jumble of bodies. I heard Campbell groan; it must have been hell for him in his condition. Geordie was up first. |
| 6224 |
He grasped the ashtray and hurled it at the guard, and then leapt the length of the saloon. The guard tried frantically to retrieve his rifle from the deck where it had fallen. He had his fingers on the butt when Geordie kicked him with precision in the jaw and his face disappeared into a bloody ruin. |
| 6225 |
His face was a mask of rage. Geordie had grabbed the rifle and turned it on Mark. They converged on him, but Mark managed to evade them both and scrambled towards the saloon door. There was a curious flicker in the air and he slumped, his hand clapped to his right hip, and I saw blood welling between his fingers. |
| 6226 |
I looked anxiously out to sea. There was a haze of steam in the near distance and beyond it the swell of sullen black clouds still rolled skywards. The sea was choppy, with little eddies swirling here and there, and around the fringe of the steam there was a white roil of froth. The smell was fitful and nasty. |
| 6227 |
Geordie opened the door and slipped out. One by one we followed him cautiously into the passageway. He hadn't gone more than a few feet when he stopped, stepped over something and then moved on. It was the body of our second guard. He must have been on his way back to the saloon when he met up with Taffy. |
| 6228 |
Clare swayed a little as she looked down and I took her firmly by the arm and pushed her past. We moved ahead to Campbell's cabin and went inside to find that it hadn't been searched. Campbell took his valise from the bottom of the wardrobe and unrolled it, looking satisfied and stronger with every movement. |
| 6229 |
The diversion was well timed and I slid along the deck, clutching for the edge of the hatch, and pulled myself to lie close alongside. Groping for the catches, I saw that my companion was Bill Hunter. I had released one catch and was attacking the other when there was the sharp crackle of gunfire and a thunder of feet. |
| 6230 |
He looked drawn and white and near the end of his endurance. In the passageway Clare was standing with her pistol held in a steady hand. The alarm in her face subsided when she saw us. I caught and held her briefly. The men gathered below and there was a swift redistribution of weapons. Nick lifted a brawny fist. |
| 6231 |
Jim reached the yardarm, paused, then swung the satchel in front of him and put his hand inside. He'd have to clip his way through some of the tangle first. On board Sirena there was no one in sight; like us, they were staying in cover. There was a sudden lurch of the two ships as an eddy caught us. |
| 6232 |
Swiftly he raised it and fired a burst at the foremast. Jim toppled from the yardarm, falling with limbs awry to slam with a dull thud across the starboard bulkhead. If the bullets hadn't killed him, then that fall would surely have done so. There was an angry roar from Esmerelda and guns began firing. |
| 6233 |
Splinters flew on deck at the madman's feet but he seemed to dance away from the bullets and vanished into cover. Hadley's blast had shattered the rest of the wheelhouse windows. I catapulted myself out of there towards Geordie and Campbell. Geordie was speechless with rage and grief. Campbell was snarling. |
| 6234 |
I had a brief glimpse of our motor launch, still attached and dancing wildly astern, of the litter strewn on deck, of Jim's body being passed below. I started to go forward and make myself useful. And then Falcon blew. There was a mighty roar as thousands of tons of water exploded into superheated steam. |
| 6235 |
As I staggered, grabbing for support, I saw it racing down towards Esmerelda, silhouetted against the raging furnace. It was a monstrous wave, rearing mast high, creamed with dirty grey spume and coming with the speed of an express train. I crouched on the open deck, trying to flatten myself into the planking. |
| 6236 |
There were four more huge waves, but none as high as the first. I staggered to my feet, feeling the ships' curious writhing motion on the water. The waves had done what we had failed to do. Sirena was dipping and bobbing in the water about fifty yards away from us. Esmerelda was free, and she had no foremast at all. |
| 6237 |
I stumbled to the side and looked down into the water. Our foremast hung there, still tethered to Sirena's mast by a cat's cradle of lines and spars. As I watched a surge of water sent it slamming against her hull like a battering ram and she shivered from stem to stern. She wouldn't stand much more of that treatment. |
| 6238 |
I fell over a body lying in the scuppers. Nick lay there with blood oozing from a wound in his forehead, but as I turned him over he groaned and stirred and opened his eyes. He must have had a constitution like an ox because, in spite of the massive contusion, he began to struggle to his feet at once. |
| 6239 |
Mighty columns of tephra, all the pent up material that Falcon could fling into the air from its huge maw, seethed and erupted in spasms, hurling ash, magma and boulders high into the sky. A hazy brown cloud of fragmentary pumice hung over all, obscuring the sun. Esmerelda was pitching as helplessly as Sirena. |
| 6240 |
He breathed deeply and then led the way across the littered deck. On Sirena a ship's boat dangled from one davit. Clearly some of the crew had tried to get away, but those terrible waves would have made nothing of their chances. One of the falls had parted and the men must all have been tipped into the sea. |
| 6241 |
As we made our way forward, incongruously, it began to snow. The flakes came drifting from the sky, featherlike, to settle everywhere. I brushed one from my shoulder; it was a flake of ash. The air was becoming poisonous with fumes, the increased stink of sulphur and the worse stench of sulphuretted hydrogen. |
| 6242 |
It was bubbling like a mud pool. Great fat bubbles were coming up from the sea bed and breaking on the surface, adding a dangerous smoke to the haze of steam. I realised with sick horror that we were not drifting closer to the source of the eruption it was expanding under the sea, coming to meet us. |
| 6243 |
We clung to handholds during the first swamping rush of hot steamy water and then emerged gasping into the foetid air. Nick was nursing one arm and my rib cage was alive with pain, but we'd survived. Figures struggled to their feet on our foredeck, and I recognised Ian's bulk among them, and then Geordie. |
| 6244 |
Then she began to spin as Esmerelda had done when we first reached Falcon. The eddy that caught her moved on and after a few turns she steadied up again, still dragging the wreckage of our mast. A plume of water suddenly shot up from the sea not ten feet to starboard and drops of warm gritty water fell on my head. |
| 6245 |
It was for all the world as if we were under shell fire. The whole angry sea was pock marked as though by a mighty rain. It was a welter of spouting water as rocks from Falcon's second vent, hurled high in the air, fell vertically and straddled the two ships. Smoke wreathed about us and steam coiled every where. |
| 6246 |
The falling tephra didn't straddle for long. There was a crash from midships. Splinters of wood leapt into the air to mix with the hail of ash and burning magma. As we stumbled forward we found a ragged hole on the galley roof and a huge glowing ember beginning to eat its way through the deck planking inside. |
| 6247 |
We emerged miraculously still intact to find the embryo fire completely doused at the cost of a drenched and sodden galley. At last we managed to join some of the others. By clinging to anything stable enough we were able to steady ourselves. Of cuts and bruises there were plenty, but everyone was on their feet again. |
| 6248 |
A warm rain, condensing steam mixed with the slippery and treacherous ash, was falling all around us. The acrid stench was still heavy in my nostrils and the banshee sounds of the ships' timbers mingled with the high pitched whistlings and rumbling from Falcon's new orifice, threatening to pierce our eardrums. |
| 6249 |
Then another wave poured down across both of us, tipping Esmerelda the other way and doing what I couldn't manage, forcing Nick's body back inboard. We slid away from the railings together, half submerged in the gritty water that cascaded down over the deck. I landed spitting and spewing up sickly warm sea water. |
| 6250 |
With consummate skill and an astonishing use of gear and throttle he edged Esmerelda nearer and nearer to the doomed Sirena, to aid the stricken men. As we closed in we saw that one of Falcon's barrages must have sheared through the rigging and brought down the main gaff. Struggling men lay pinned to the deck. |
| 6251 |
His torn clothing appeared scorched and blood stained, and his face was a mask of smoke, blood and fury. He had crawled like a deadly spider from its crevice to use its poison for the last time. I don't know if he had given up all hope of surviving and was bent only on revenge, or if his mind had given way. |
| 6252 |
It was followed almost instantly by a terrible grinding roar, louder than anything we had heard before. We staggered to our feet in time to see Falcon play its most horrible trick. It was Geordie, intent on his delicate steering, who first saw the danger. I don't know if he'd even been aware of Ramirez. |
| 6253 |
Then he pushed the throttle in until the engine was pounding at maximum speed, to carry us away from the arena. Behind us I saw Sirena jar to a sudden halt and Ramirez flung across the deck. The ship rose grotesquely in the air and tipped over on her side, looking like a small sailing boat stranded by the tide. |
| 6254 |
An exhausted and shell shocked crew was kept busy dousing fires, using the hoses for the biggest, buckets for the rest, and praying that we would not run out of fuel. The hoses worked only as long as the engine continued to run. And we knew that there wasn't the slightest possibility of rigging sail. |
| 6255 |
Some parts of Esmerelda were in better shape than others. By a strange miracle the launch still clung to our coat tails, though we had no time to stop and haul her up on davits. I found to my great relief that my notes and the bulk of the lab files were in order, though most of the apparatus was wrecked. |
| 6256 |
Hadley had been one of the two men who had leapt to our deck, and was being held in the brig with the other men from Sirena. It was dismaying to know that he was with us, but for me the most serious problem was Mark. He and Paula had stayed together in the saloon during the, whole of the encounter with Falcon. |
| 6257 |
He had said nothing as yet. I led the way on deck and they followed in silence, numbed by the sight of so much damage. Nobody spoke to Mark, but more than one of the crew reached to pat Paula's arm or give her a quick smile as she went by. We stopped outside the deckhouse, a shattered and burnt out shell. |
| 6258 |
For answer there was a crash from below, and Hadley burst into view through the burnt out galley and onto the deck where we were standing. He had a kitchen knife in his hand. I backed away from his red rimmed crazy eyes as he came at me like a bull. I booted him on the shin but it was like trying to stop a truck. |
| 6259 |
He leapt on me in a bear hug that jarred excruciatingly on the knife graze in my side. His knife hovered near my throat. Desperately I clawed at his face as we fell. Hadley landed on me with all his weight but thank God his knife arm was pinned beneath us. I chopped viciously at his throat and he choked. |
| 6260 |
He pinned my arms and I felt the breath being squeezed from my lungs and a rib cracked agonizingly. Blackness surged in front of my eyes. Suddenly he lost his balance and we both crashed to the deck. Nick, crawling up from behind, had seized Hadley's ankle and had yanked his foot out from under him. |
| 6261 |
Astonishingly he regained his feet and swooped for the knife which lay on the deck. For a near fatal instant we all stood paralysed. With an unearthly bubbling scream of rage and agony he plunged towards Mark and the knife flashed viciously in the sunlight. Mark flung Paula aside and met the attack full on. |
| 6262 |
Geordie had done his work well. I could find nothing else to say. Mark gave a short hard cough and his head drooped, and for an instant I thought that he had already died, sitting there. And then he raised his head and looked me in the eye. For the only time in my adult life our gazes locked without antagonism. |
| 6263 |
That may be a bit misleading because it wasn't the kind of party that gets thrown very far; no spiked punch or pot, and no wife swapping or indiscriminate necking in the bedrooms at two in the morning. Just a few people who got together over a civilized dinner with a fair amount of laughter and a hell of a lot of talk. |
| 6264 |
She was a tall, dark woman, quiet and composed in manner and not very forthcoming. She was no raving beauty, but few women are; Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships but no one was going to push the boat out for Penny Ashton, at least not at first sight. Not that she was ugly or anything like that. |
| 6265 |
As was usual with Tom's friends, the talk ranged far and wide; Tom was a rising star in the upper reaches of the medical establishment and he was eclectic in his choice of dining companions and so the talk was good. Penny joined in but she tended to listen rather than talk and her interjections were infrequent. |
| 6266 |
Not unexpectedly he wanted to know something about me and was willing to trade information, so I learned how he earned his pennies among other things. He ran a couple of manufacturing firms in Slough producing something abstruse in the chemical line and another which specialized in high impact plastics. |
| 6267 |
The only incongruity in the whole scene was Benson, the general factotum, who did not look like anyone's idea of a servant in a rich household. Rather, he looked like a retired pugilist and an unsuccessful one at that. His nose had been broken more than once in my judgement, and his ears were swollen with battering. |
| 6268 |
Penny came down for afternoon tea, refreshed and more animated than she had been, and from then on the weekend took its normal course. Put down baldly on paper, as I have done here, such a life may be considered pointless and boring, but it wasn't really; it was a relief from the stresses of the working week. |
| 6269 |
It was nearer this time and seemed to be coming from the other side of the house. By this time we were on our feet and moving, but then Gillian came into sight, stumbling around the corner of the house, her hands to her face. She screamed again, a bubbling, wordless screech, and collapsed on the lawn. |
| 6270 |
I showed them the tracks and one of them stayed to guard them while the other used his car radio. When I looked from the window a few minutes later I saw he had moved the police car so he could survey the back of the house. Twenty minutes later a bigger police car arrived in the person of a plain clothes man. |
| 6271 |
There was a nasty incident one of the daughters of the house had acid thrown in her face. She was taken to hospital and, when the police pitched up, I was alone in the house and they started to get off on the wrong foot. I didn't want them wasting time on me, so I disclosed myself to the officer in charge. |
| 6272 |
Knowing the organization that employed me, and knowing a little of what was in the monster's guts, I'd say it wa s tended by white coated acolytes in a limestone cavern in Derbyshire, or at the bottom of a Mendip mineshaft; anywhere reasonably safe from an atomic burst. But, as I say, I didn't really know. |
| 6273 |
He wasn't a bad chap but his ideals tended to get in the way of his job. His view of the world didn't exactly coincide with things as they are, which can be a bit hampering because a man can make mistakes that way. A spell of fieldwork would have straightened him out but he'd never been given the chance. |
| 6274 |
They were of ornamental wrought iron, about ten feet high, very spiky on top, and hung on two massive stone pillars. They barred an opening in an equally high chain mesh fence, unobtrusive because concealed by trees, which evidently circled the estate. All very good, but the gates hadn't been closed the day before. |
| 6275 |
She thought he was someone who had broken down so she approached with the intention of offering assistance. As she drew near the man turned and smiled at her. He was no one she knew. She was about to speak when he slammed down the bonnet with one hand and simultaneously threw the acid into her face with the other. |
| 6276 |
It was very thin. The names and addresses of his firms were given, but his other associations were few, mostly professional men lawyers, accountants and the like. He was a member of no club, whether social, sporting or intellectual. A millionaire hermit. The team assembled and I switched on the tape recorder. |
| 6277 |
I might add that this is an important one. You can judge its importance by the fact that Ogilvie raised the team from six to eight on his own initiative and without me having to needle him. In the light of our staff position that says a lot. So don't lose any of these people and keep your own heads down. |
| 6278 |
I put down the telephone and looked thoughtfully at the letter addressed to Penny, then crossed to the safe. It had a combination lock and the door didn't open when I turned the handle. I went back to the desk and gave it a quick once over lightly in the hope of finding something useful immediately. |
| 6279 |
I do not know for how long I shall have to be away. You will be doing me a great service if you make no attempt at all to find me and, above all, I do not wish the police to be brought into this matter if that can be avoided. I assure you again that my reasons for leaving in this manner are purely private and personal. |
| 6280 |
And that was all. Ashton's own quarters were a bit more productive. He had a suite bedroom, bathroom, dressing room and sitting room which were as clean as a whistle. He seemed to live somewhat spartanly, there was less than the usual amount of junk which a man tends to accumulate and it was all very clean and tidy. |
| 6281 |
The walls, floor and ceiling would be very thick concrete, well reinforced with toughened steel, and the whole package would weigh a lot even when empty. It was on the second floor which meant that a special underpinning structure must have been built to support it. I made a note to look up Ashton's architect. |
| 6282 |
You might have found a more complicated system in an international model engineering exhibition but I doubted it. There were about ten levels of track and a complexity of points and sidings which was baffling, and the whole lot was controlled from a central console which looked like the flight deck of a Concorde. |
| 6283 |
Back in Marlow I had an interesting lecture on trust which has soured me to the belly, and this job has already interfered too much with my private life. Now you either trust me or you don't and the crunch comes here. I get clearance for Code Purple or my resignation will be on your desk at nine tomorrow morning. |
| 6284 |
Although Dmitri Ivanovich Chelyuskin was a teacher of mathematics he was not a good mathematician himself in the sense that he produced original work. His role in life was to teach small boys the elements of arithmetic, algebra and geometry, which he did largely by rote, a sarcastic tongue and a heavy hand. |
| 6285 |
But he was good enough at his job to notice that he did not have to tell young Aleksandr anything twice, and when the time came that he found he did not have to tell the boy once and that his son was beginning to ask unanswerable questions it was then that he thought he might have an infant prodigy on his hands. |
| 6286 |
He liked it. He had the cast of mind which loves grappling with the abstruse and difficult, and he found much to his liking in pure mathematics. Now, mathematics at its purest is a game for adults and need have no relationship at all to the real physical world, and the fact that it sometimes does is a bit of luck. |
| 6287 |
This, then, is the man who extended his influence over Aleksandr Chelyuskin. Perhaps he looked at the youth and was reminded of himself at the age of seventeen. At any rate, he diverted Aleksandr from his playground of pure mathematics and showed him that there were real problems to be solved in the world. |
| 6288 |
Stalin had just come back from the Yalta Conference where he had been informed of the existence of the atomic bomb. In the period immediately following the war Chelyuskin became increasingly dissatisfied, mainly because, although the war was over, he was still constrained to involve himself in weapons research. |
| 6289 |
He did not like what he was doing and deliberately slowed his pace. But a mind cannot stop thinking and he turned to other things than physics to sociology, for example. In short, he stopped thinking about things and began to think about people. He looked at the world immediately about him and did not like what he saw. |
| 6290 |
But he was equally determined not to end up in a forced labour camp as some of his colleagues had done, so he was presented with quite a problem which he solved with characteristic neatness and economy. He killed himself. It took him three months to plan his death and he was ruthless in the way he went about it. |
| 6291 |
He needed the body of a man about his own age and with the same physical characteristics. More complicatedly, he needed the body before it had died so that certain surgical and dental work could be done and given time to age. This could not be done on a corpse. He found what he wanted on a visit to Aprelevka. |
| 6292 |
Chelyuskin pulled strings and had him transferred to another hospital where he had the co operation of a doctor. File entries were fudged, papers were lost and bureaucracy was baffled; it was all very efficiently inefficient and ended up with the fact that Chelyuskin's friend was effectively dead as far as anyone knew. |
| 6293 |
We were only too glad to oblige, even on his terms. To wave a defecting Russian scientist like a flag is not necessarily a good ploy, and we were quite happy to respect his terms of secrecy as long as we got him. The necessary arrangements were made. It took a long time for Chelyuskin's friend to die. |
| 6294 |
He said he had left Russia because he did not want to work on atomics, and that to communicate his knowledge would be to negate the action he had taken. Conversations on atomic theory were barred. The irritation grew and pressure was applied, but authority found that it could neither bend nor break this man. |
| 6295 |
By now Chelyuskin was wary of the British and their motives. I suppose, in a way, he had been naive to expect any other treatment, but naivety in a genius is comparatively normal. He found himself surrounded, not by scientists whom he understood, but by calculating men, the power brokers of Whitehall. |
| 6296 |
He was twenty seven and had been brought up in a foundling home. Unmarried and with neither kith nor kin to mourn him, he was the perfect answer. Chelyuskin was flown to Germany, put in the uniform of a private in the British Army, and brought back to England by train and sea, accompanied discreetly at all times. |
| 6297 |
Because of the necessity for scientific study he had learned English in his youth and read it fluently. But he never had occasion to speak it, which might have been an advantage when he was put through a six months' total immersion course in conversational English, because he had no bad habits to unlearn. |
| 6298 |
Even so, George Ashton knew he must conserve his resources; he put most of it in a bank deposit account, and lived very simply while he explored this strange new world. He was no longer an honoured man, an Academician with a car and a dacha at his disposal, and he had to find a way of earning a living. |
| 6299 |
He took a job as a bookkeeper in the stores department of a small engineering firm in Luton. This was in the days before computers when bookkeeping was done by hand as in the days of Dickens, and a good bookkeeper could add a triple column of pounds, shillings and pence in one practised sweep of the eye. |
| 6300 |
We know he's not been keeping up with the scientific literature in any field except catalytic chemistry, and no one thinks in a vacuum. Atomic theory has made great strides since Ashton came out of Russia. To do any original work a man would have to work hard to keep ahead of the pack attend seminars and so on. |
| 6301 |
I didn't blame her for blowing her top and I wondered how I could retrieve the situation. I felt very bad about it. Most people, when they have had a burglary, are not so much concerned about the articles stolen as about the intrusion into the heart of their lives, the home which is so peculiarly their own. |
| 6302 |
It is the thought that strange hands have been delving among their innermost secrets, rummaging in drawers, opening doors in the private parts of the house all this is profoundly shocking. I knew all that and ought to have applied it to Penny. At last I sat up in bed, checked the time, then stretched for the telephone. |
| 6303 |
The boffins had nothing much to report. The computer tapes showed nothing out of the ordinary except some very clever program designing, but what the programs did was nothing special. The prototype whatsit Ashton had been tinkering with caused a flood of speculation which left a thin sediment of hard fact. |
| 6304 |
I steered clear of the reasons she was there, and asked no questions about it. Honnister was probably a better interrogator than I and would have sucked her dry. Instead I stuck to trivialities and told her a couple of funny items I had read in the papers that morning, and brought her up to date on the news of the day. |
| 6305 |
I'm one of those. There are the engineering types who insist their stuff should be exact from the engineering aspect; that's expensive. I know a chap who has modelled Paddington Station; and all he's interested in is getting the trains in and out according to the timetable. He's a schedules man like Ashton. |
| 6306 |
Lumsden was much younger than I expected, not as old as I was; pioneering on the frontiers of science is a young man's game. Penny looked up. A look of astonishment chased across her face and then she became expressionless, but I noted the tightening of muscles at the angle of her jaw and the firmly compressed lips. |
| 6307 |
Her shoulders shook convulsively and she sobbed stormily. I located a hand basin in the corner of the office and filled a glass with water and returned quickly to the desk, but there wasn't much I could do until the first shock had abated. Her sobbing lessened in intensity and I put my arm around her. |
| 6308 |
He ranged quite widely and sometimes I had to interrupt and bring him back on to the main track. At other times I had him explain what he meant in simpler terms. The basic concepts were rather simple but I gathered that execution in the laboratory was not as easy as all that. What it boiled down to was this. |
| 6309 |
Supposing we take the Rhizobium bacterium, isolate the gene that controls this nitrogen changing property, and transfer it into a bacterium that is specific to wheat. Then, if it bred true, we'd have self fertilizing wheat. In these days of world food shortages that seems to me to be a good thing to have around. |
| 6310 |
The shock of Mayberry's error had been shattering and I stuck around and helped her pick up the pieces; from then on propinquity did the rest. She was persuaded by Lumsden to stay with her work and her life took a triangular course her home, her work, and whatever hospital Gillian happened to be in at the time. |
| 6311 |
Microbiol ogy isn't like atomics; you don't need a particle accelerator costing a hundred million and a power plant capable of supplying energy for a fair sized city. The physical plant and investment are both relatively small, and Cregar may have a dozen laboratories scattered about for all I know. |
| 6312 |
There were swans on the Strommen, walking uneasily on the ice and cuddling in clusters as though to keep warm. One was on an ice floe and drifting towards Riddarfjarden; I watched it until it went out of sight under the Strom bridge, then turned away feeling suddenly cold in spite of the central heating. |
| 6313 |
There were not many people in the halls on the cold winter's afternoon, which was a pity because there was no crowd to get lost in. On the other hand there were long unobstructed views. I took out my handkerchief, ready to muffle my face in case of emergency, turned a corner and saw Ashton in the distance. |
| 6314 |
He did the household shopping, attended to the laundry and dry cleaning, and did a spot of cooking on those occasions when Ashton did not eat out. He had found himself a favourite drinking hole which he attended three or four times a week, an olstuga more intellectual than most because it had a chess circle. |
| 6315 |
Benson would play a couple of games and leave relatively early. Neither of them wrote or received any letters. Neither appeared to have any associates other than the small change encounters of everyday life. Neither did a single damned thing out of the ordinary with one large and overriding exception. |
| 6316 |
Early next morning I gave Cutler the spools of film and requested negatives and two sets of prints. I got them within the hour and spent quite a time checking them before my prearranged telephone call from Ogilvie. It had to be prearranged because he had to have a scrambler compatible with that at the Embassy. |
| 6317 |
That would be about the time a bank account was opened here in the name of Koslov. The apartment was rented a year later, also in the name of Koslov; it was sublet until four months ago when Ashton moved in. Our friend had everything prepared. I've gone through cheque stubs covering nearly two months. |
| 6318 |
I do know that he was in some form of military intelligence because he left for a week and went north to Lapland where the Swedish Army was holding winter manoeuvres. When he came back I saw him briefly and he said he'd be busy writing a report. Four days later he came to see me with disturbing information. |
| 6319 |
He bobbed back and forth, letting the distance lengthen and then closing up, disappearing into shop entrances and reappearing in unexpected places and, in general, doing his best not to be there at all. Two or three times he was even in front of the man he was shadowing. It was one of Ashton's book mornings. |
| 6320 |
It was pretty funny. The coffeehouse was on the corner of a block. Askrigg waited outside while, kitty corner across the street, his follower stamped his feet to keep warm while ostensibly looking into a shop window. The third corner held Henty, doing pretty much the same, while I occupied the fourth corner. |
| 6321 |
He left the shop and walked up the street while I followed on the other side. A hundred yards up the street he crossed, so I did the same; then he reversed direction. He was doing what he hoped was an unobtrusive patrol outside Ashton's flat. Fifteen minutes later came the event we'd waited for his relief arrived. |
| 6322 |
The snow came down steadily and, as darkness fell, a raw mist swept over Gamla Stan from the Riddarfjarden, haloing the street lights and cutting down visibility. I spent the time running over and over in my mind the avenues of escape open to Ashton and wondering if my contingency planning was good enough. |
| 6323 |
As the mist thickened I thought of the possibility of taking Ashton there and then, but thought better of it. A quiet kidnapping in a major city is hard enough at the best of times and certainly not the subject for improvisation. Better to follow the plan and isolate Ashton. It happened at ten to nine. |
| 6324 |
We came to the outskirts of Strangnas and coasted gently through snow covered streets towards the lake edge and the centre of town. A few turns around the town centre proved one thing there was only one hotel so we pulled up on the other side of the street from the Hotel Rogge and I seat Henty in to find out the form. |
| 6325 |
Strangnas began to wake up and there was movement in the streets, and we occasioned a couple of curious glances from passers by. I suppose it was strange for a couple of men to be sitting in a parked car so early in the morning so I told Larry to drive into the hotel car park which was more secluded. |
| 6326 |
The hotel breakfast started at seven thirty. I knew that because Jack Brent came on the air with a description of the breakfast he was eating. He described the herring and the boiled eggs and the cheese and the coffee and all the trimmings until I began to salivate. He was doing it deliberately, the bastard. |
| 6327 |
Ashton and Benson were walking away quickly in the direction of the railway station. After that it all became a little sick because we literally herded them out of town. They found the railway station blocked by Brent, and when they tried to duck back to the town centre they were confronted by Larry and Henty. |
| 6328 |
There were no more streets or houses on the other side just an infinity of pine trees. I had Michaelis go back and pick up the van, and sent the other three into the forest while I parked my car before following. It seemed as though the chase was nearly over you can't be more private than in a Swedish forest. |
| 6329 |
They made better time over rough country than I would have expected of two elderly men. Ashton had already proved his fitness to me, but I hadn't expected Benson to have the stamina because he was a few years older than Ashton. Once in the trees you couldn't see far and they kept foxing us by changing direction. |
| 6330 |
Henty was at the valley bottom below me, and Brent and Larry were together, bounding down the hillside, closing in on our quarry from an angle. Again came firing and, by God, this time it was machinegun fire, and from more than one machinegun. Then there came some deeper coughs, followed by thumping explosions. |
| 6331 |
His eyes widened in surprise and he hesitated in his upward climb, then stopped and turned around. Brent and Larry were coming in on my left and Henty on the right. I was about to call out to him again when there was another single shot, this time from quite close, and Ashton stumbled forward as though he had tripped. |
| 6332 |
At least, that's the impression I had judging by the rumble of voices from the office next door. Then an army colonel and a civilian came in to see me and, having seen me, went away without saying a word, and I was transferred into a cell in which I spent the next three weeks apart from an hour's exercise each day. |
| 6333 |
Both men died instantaneously when they were caught in a shell explosion. A Swedish army spokesman said that the area was adequately cordoned and that all roads leading into it were signposted. Announcements of the proposed firing of live ammunition were routinely made in the local newspapers and on the radio. |
| 6334 |
There he ran into the Peter Principle; he was all right is long as the firm remained small but, with expansion, it became too much for him. Remember he never rose to be more than a sergeant he was a small scale man. So Ashton converted him into a general factotum which would seem to be ideal for Benson. |
| 6335 |
But this department is now under extreme pressure. There's an inter departmental meeting tomorrow morning at eleven at which the screws will begin to turn. You will be required to attend. So you will go away now and come back here at ten fifteen tomorrow, rested and refreshed, and prepared to have a hard time. |
| 6336 |
I intended to shepherd them along and, if they took ship from Goteborg to find out where they were going. The important thing was to get them out from under the Russians in Sweden. But when they gave us the slip and went to Strangnas it became something more complex than a discreet escort operation. |
| 6337 |
She has been tactfully informed that you have been away on some mysterious job that has debarred you from writing to her. Knowing what she thinks she knows about your work it should seem feasible to her. However, you were informed of her father's death through the department, and you sent this cable. |
| 6338 |
The receipt from the flower shop is in this file together with other bits and pieces which a man might expect to pick up on a visit and still retain. There are theatre ticket stubs for current shows in Los Angeles, some small denomination American bills, book matches from hotels, and so on. Empty your pockets. |
| 6339 |
I talked to her a lot in hospital, about her father at the beginning, but one thing led to another. She was lonely, you know, being all bandaged up like that. I used to read books and newspapers for her. Anyway, I talked about the model railway and she found I was interested so she said I could come and play. |
| 6340 |
Her face was puckered and drawn with scar tissue and her right eyelid was pulled almost closed. The first few moments were not at all easy; there was the double embarrassment of condoling on the death of her father and coping with her dreadful appearance, and I hoped my face did not reflect what I felt. |
| 6341 |
That's not our pigeon and we're not interested in the latest toothpaste additive, either. But if an engineering firm has ploughed a couple of millions into research and come up with something revolutionary, then we don't want some foreign Johnny nicking it and going into competition with a head start. |
| 6342 |
The really big stuff isn't patented, especially in electronics. If you produce a new electronic chip which does the work of eleventy thousand transistors the opposition can put the thing under a microscope and see what you've done, but how the hell you've done it is quite another thing, and our boys aren't telling. |
| 6343 |
He pointed out some of them. It seems that the favourite laboratory animal of the geneticists is a bacterium called Escherichia coli and it is the most studied organism on earth more is known about E. coli than about any other living thing. It was natural that this creature be used for genetic experimentation. |
| 6344 |
I said we'd have to be careful not to transfer another, more dangerous, gene. Now, consider this. Supposing you incorporated into E. coli, accidentally or on purpose, the gene specifying the male hormone, testosterone. And supposing that strain of E. coli escaped from the laboratory and entered the human population. |
| 6345 |
If they were working with recognized pathogens then, yes there are regulations. But they'll be working with good old E. coli, a harmless bacterium. You have about a couple of hundred million of them in your digestive tract right now. They'll stay harmless, too, until some fool transfers the wrong gene. |
| 6346 |
Looked at en masse it appeared alarming, but closer inspection revealed just the normal ailments which might plague a man over a period of years. There were a couple of tooth extractions, two periods of hospitalisation one for a bout of influenza and the other when he dropped a six inch shell on his left foot. |
| 6347 |
At least we had seen the common linkage and he was confident that by probing hard enough and long enough we or rather I would come up with the truth. All the same he coppered his bet by having me do an intensive investigation into the life of Sergeant Benson before he joined the army. Ogilvie was a belt and braces man. |
| 6348 |
The unformed young face of that thirteen year old gazing solemnly at the camera told me nothing. Some time in the ensuing years Benson had had his features considerably rearranged. There were no photographs of an older Benson to be found in Plymouth, but I did talk to a couple of people who knew him before the war. |
| 6349 |
I walked up the stairs and stood where I could easily be seen. The auctioneer was in mid spate, selling an eighteen place Crown Derby dinner service; he took the card which was thrust under his nose, turned it over, looked up at me and nodded, and then continued with hardly a break in his chant. Michaelis came back. |
| 6350 |
He took the job more seriously than most of the others but even that was only half serious. He installed a computer terminal in the warehouse and had it connected to a computer by post office land lines; not the big chap Nellie was hooked up to, but an ordinary commercial timesharing computer in the City. |
| 6351 |
Things began to happen. Trains whizzed about the system, twenty or thirty on the move at once. Some travelled faster than others, and once I thought there was going to be a collision as two trains headed simultaneously for a junction; but one slowed just enough to let the other through and then picked up speed again. |
| 6352 |
Apart from that there is a total of sixty three types of rolling stock; I rather think some of those represent letters of the alphabet to give the system alphanumeric capability. Identification may be difficult. It should be reasonably easy to work out the numbers; all that it takes is logic. But letters are different. |
| 6353 |
An empty marshalling yard appeared on the screen, viewed from above. A train came into view and the engine stopped and uncoupled, then trundled off. Another train came in and the same thing happened; and yet again until the marshalling yard was nearly full. Harrington pressed a button and froze the picture. |
| 6354 |
They contain reiterative loops. I estimate that to run these five pages on the system would take six days, at twenty four hours a day. To run through the whole program would take about a month and a half and this is one of the smaller programs. To put all twelve of them through would take about two years. |
| 6355 |
I took her to the hotel where I had booked her a room; she appreciated that, not wanting to move into an empty flat with nothing in the refrigerator. I joined her in a coffee before she retired to her room, and she told me that the operation on Gillian was going well and would I pass that message on to Michaelis. |
| 6356 |
The department had bought it, but whether the information it held came under the Copyright Act or not was something to keep the lawyers happy for years. In any case it was for Ogilvie to make the decision. But she had just said something that had jerked little man Hunch out of bed and he was yelling his head off. |
| 6357 |
I checked with Harrington to find how he was doing and to see if any genetics experts had been brought in not by hiking outright but by tactful skating around the edges. No new boffins were on the job and certainly no biologists of any kind. That worried me, too, and I wondered why Ogilvie was dragging his heels. |
| 6358 |
Tuesday came and at seven in the evening I was at Penny's flat ringing the bell. There was no answer. I sat in my car outside the building for over an hour but she didn't arrive. She had stood me up without so much as a word. I didn't use the tickets for the show but went home feeling unhappy and depressed. |
| 6359 |
I think even then I had an inkling that there was something terribly wrong. Little bits of a complicated jigsaw were fitting themselves together at the back of my mind but still out of reach of conscious reasoning power. The mental itch was intolerable. The next morning, as early as was decent, I rang Lumsden again. |
| 6360 |
I didn't trouble with lock picking but sprung open the catches with a knife. The first case was Ashton's and contained the little he had taken with him on the run from Stockholm. It also contained the clothes he had been wearing; the overcoat, jacket and shirt were torn bullet holes but there was no trace of blood. |
| 6361 |
I gave everything a thorough going over, aware that Captain Morelius would have done the same, and found nothing no microfilm, beloved of the thriller writers, no hidden pockets in the clothing, nothing at all out of the usual. There was a handful of Swedish coins and a slim sheaf of currency in a wallet. |
| 6362 |
At the bottom of the letter was an address and a telephone number; the address was in Mayfair and the number was in the old style with both letters and digits, long since defunct. The letter was signed by James Pallson. The itch at the back of my mind was now assuaged, the jigsaw puzzle was almost complete. |
| 6363 |
Well, long ago there was a fisherman out of Coigach and his boat sank in a storm on the other side of the island out there. So he swam and he swam and he finally got ashore and thought he was safe. But he was drowned all the same, poor man, because the shore was Cladach Duillich. The water came right over. |
| 6364 |
The sky was slate grey and so was the loch, stippled with whitecaps whipped up by the wind. Below me Robbie Ferguson's boat pitched violently, the rubber tyre fenders squealing as they were compressed and rubbed on the stone wall. It looked much too fragile to be taken out on such a day, but Robbie seemed unconcerned. |
| 6365 |
He cast off the forward line, then walked back, seemingly unconcerned that the bow was swinging in a great arc. As he passed the engine he pushed over a lever with his boot, then dexterously cast off the stern line. The throbbing note of the engine deepened and we began to move away from the pier wall. |
| 6366 |
Robbie was standing with the tiller between his knees, looking forward and steering by swaying motions of his body while he coiled the stern line into a neat skein. The wind strengthened as we got out into the loch and the waves were bigger. The wind was from the north west and we plunged into the teeth of it. |
| 6367 |
At his shout I jumped and went sprawling as my feet skidded from under me on the weed covered surface. When I picked myself up the boat was thirty yards off shore and moving away fast. Robbie waved and I waved back, and then he applied himself to the task of avoiding rocks. I looked at my surroundings. |
| 6368 |
A path led from the concrete platform up the ravine, so I followed it. It climbed steeply and led to a plateau, sparsely grassed, in the centre of which was a group of buildings. They were low concrete structures which had the appearance of military blockhouses, probably because they were windowless. |
| 6369 |
The seabirds appeared to like it, though; the rocks were white with their droppings and they wheeled overhead screaming at our movements below. There were three buildings, all identical, and I noted they were connected by enclosed passages. To one side, on a level bit of ground, was a helicopter pad, empty. |
| 6370 |
I was conducted around the corner to one of the buildings and ushered through the doorway, bidden to wait, and then taken through another doorway. I looked back and realized I had gone through an airlock. We turned sharply left and into a room where a man in a white coat was sitting at a desk and writing on a pad. |
| 6371 |
I thought of all the odd things that had happened, such as why a gentleman's gentleman should carry a gun, and why you tried to discount the fact he had shot Ashton when we had the meeting on my return from Sweden. It seemed hard to believe he was still your man after thirty years, but I was forced into it. |
| 6372 |
The first thing I did was to explore my prison and arrived at the conclusion that it was an unused refrigerated room. The walls were thick and solid, as was the door, and I soon came to the conclusion that the only way out was to be let out. I sat on the floor in a corner and contemplated possibilities. |
| 6373 |
It appeared to have been wise to tell Cregar of the letter. Up to then he had primarily been interested in discussing ways and means of transforming me into a corpse safely, but my disclosure that Ogilvie had the letter had put a stopper on that line of thought. But what a ruthless bastard he had turned out to be. |
| 6374 |
To do that required a deliberate intellectual effort and a high degree of technical training, and why a man should put his brain to such a use is beyond me. Supervising that chemist would be an American Cregar whose motives are equally baffling, and at the top are the politicians ultimately responsible. |
| 6375 |
Is it the Lumsdens of the world who know what is going on but turn a blind eye, or is it the rest of us who don't know and don't take the trouble to find out? Sometimes I think the world is like a huge ant heap full of insects all busily manufacturing insecticide. I was in the black room for a long time. |
| 6376 |
I got up and began to walk around the room, keeping to the walls; it was one way of taking exercise. The silence was solid except for the sound of my own movements and a new fear came upon me. What if Cladach Duillich had been abandoned evacuated? I could stay in that room until the flesh rotted from my bones. |
| 6377 |
Penny had described the elaborate precautions which were taken to prevent the escape of dangerous organisms from laboratories and, according to her, the lab I was now in wasn't up to snuff for what Carter had been doing. The cultures could have been ordinary E. coli and, as such, perfectly harmless. |
| 6378 |
There's one serious case of infection and two suspected. The organism causing it is new to medicine and probably man made; it's also highly infectious. I don't know if it's a killer but it's highly likely. You'll have to set the alarm ringing and probably Lumsden, Penny's boss, is the best man to do it. |
| 6379 |
What you do is this. You open the outer door of the laboratory and put the food on the floor just inside. Tell me when you've closed the door and I'll come out and get it. It can be done once only because I can't risk contamination through the airlock, so you'd better give us enough for three meals. |
| 6380 |
I got Benson to panic Ashton, talking of threats to the other girl, and so on. Benson told him my department couldn't cope with that sort of thing unless Ashton got out, that we were prepared to help, and that we had a safe hideaway for him, which of course we had. And after all that the damned vault was empty. |
| 6381 |
They put us in plastic envelopes whole and entire, plugged in an air supply and sealed us up. We stopped in the airlock and the envelopes and themselves were drenched with a liquid, then we were carried out to the helicopter where I found Penny already installed in her own envelops. She was still unconscious. |
| 6382 |
The bug she had was different from the one I'd caught, and it was a real frightener. It got the medical world into a dizzy tizzy and, although they were able to cure her, they wanted to make sure that the bug, whatever it was, was completely eradicated. So I came out of Porton Down a month before her. |
| 6383 |
Penny and Gillian were dashing about London denuding the better stores of dresses and frillies for their trousseaux, while I scouted around for a house, introduced it to Penny, and then secured it with a cash deposit against the time the lawyers had finished their expensive wrangling over the deeds. |
| 6384 |
Described as a faithful public servant who had served his country with no thought of self for many years, he was lauded as an example for coming generations to follow. I threw the paper out of the train window and was immediately sorry; that sort of stuff could pollute the countryside very seriously. |
| 6385 |
She has typed it all herself. We live here very simply if you discount the resident medical staff of a doctor and three nurses which Penny insisted upon. The doctor is a mild young American who plays bad chess and the nurses are pretty which Penny doesn't mind. It helps to have a wealthy woman for a mistress. |
| 6386 |
But I stopped that because it wasn't doing any good. Now time is becoming short. This account and myself are coming to an end. I have written it for publication, partly because I think people ought to know what is done in their names, and partly because the work of Ashton on genetics has not yet been released. |
| 6387 |
He said that he had a boatyard a little way outside Cape Town towards Milnerton, and that he specialized in building the fishing boats used by the Malay fishermen. I'd noticed these already; sturdy unlovely craft with high bows and a wheelhouse stuck on top like a chicken coop, but they looked very seaworthy. |
| 6388 |
I liked the boat so much that I asked Tom if he would build one for me, which he did, charging a rock bottom price and letting me pay it off over a couple of years. Having a design office gave the business a fillip. The news got around and people started to come to me instead of using British and American designs. |
| 6389 |
The yard prospered and it seemed that my reputation as a designer was firm, because I got lots of commissions. Jean took over the management of the office, and as I was tied to the drawing board for a large proportion of my time I promoted Harry Marshall to yard manager and he handled it very capably. |
| 6390 |
Walker was a drinking member, one of those crafty people who joined the club to have somewhere to drink when the pubs were closed on Sunday. He was never in the club house during the week, but turned up every Sunday, played his one game of tennis for the sake of appearances, then spent the rest of the day in the bar. |
| 6391 |
Again Coertze threw and this time the grenade burst on the bank. Walker felt something slam his leg and he turned in a twisting fall and found himself gasping in the water. His free arm thrashed out and caught on a rock and he hung on desperately. Coertze threw another grenade and the machine gun stopped. |
| 6392 |
His leg was hurting and it was very cold. They stayed in the ravine all the next day and as night fell Walker became delirious and Donato had trouble in keeping him quiet. When the rescuers finally came Walker had passed out. He woke up much later and found himself in a bed in a room with whitewashed walls. |
| 6393 |
Walker said that four minutes in those conditions could seem like four hours. He crouched there, looking back along the silent road, hearing nothing except his own heart beating. After what seemed a long time he heard the growl of engines and the clash of gears and then the revving of the motor cycle. |
| 6394 |
The noise of the motor cycle now blanked out all other sounds and he snapped off the safety catch. He saw the motor cycle pass, the goggled driver looking like a gargoyle and the trooper in the sidecar turning his head to scan the road, hands clutching the grips of the machine gun mounted in front of him. |
| 6395 |
As in a dream he saw Coertze's hand come into view, apparently in slow motion, and toss a grenade casually into the sidecar. It lodged between the gunner's back and the coaming of the sidecar and the gunner turned in surprise. With his sudden movement the grenade disappeared into the interior of the sidecar. |
| 6396 |
Then it exploded. The sidecar disintegrated and the gunner must have had his legs blown off. The cycle wheeled drunkenly across the road and Walker saw Coertze step out of cover, his sub machine gun pumping bullets into the driver. Then he had stepped out himself and his own gun was blazing at the staff car. |
| 6397 |
Then Coertze was shouting at him, waving him on to the trucks. He ran up the road following Coertze and saw that the first truck was stopped. He fired a burst into the cab just to be on the safe side, then took shelter, leaning against the hot radiator to reload. By the time he had reloaded the battle was over. |
| 6398 |
After that, he couldn't seem to keep away from me. It was as though he had delivered a part of himself into my keeping and he had to watch me to see that I kept it safe. He acted as though we were partners in a conspiracy, with many a nod and wink and a sudden change of subject if he thought we were being overheard. |
| 6399 |
I could see nothing ahead but a botched job with a probably lengthy spell in an Italian jail. The night before he was to go to the lawyer's office to sign the final papers and receive his inheritance I went to see him at his hotel. He was half drunk, lying on his bed with a bottle conveniently near. |
| 6400 |
Even when I knew him ten years earlier I was aware of the fatal weakness in him, and now one could see that the bitterness of defeat had been too much. I wondered how Coertze was standing up to the strain. At least he seemed to be doing something about it, even if only keeping an eye on the situation. |
| 6401 |
As I poured the drinks I glanced at him. He was a bulky man, broad of chest and heavy in the body. His hair was black and rather coarse and he had a shaggy look about him. I'd bet that when stripped he'd look like a grizzly bear. His eyebrows were black and straight over eyes of a snapping electric blue. |
| 6402 |
He had looked after himself better than Walker; his belly was flat and there was a sheen of health about him. I handed him a drink and we sat down facing each other. He was tense and wary, although he tried to disguise it by over relaxing in his chair. We were like a couple of duellists who have just engaged blades. |
| 6403 |
He had a queasy stomach and couldn't stand the motion, so he turned out to be pretty useless at boat handling. But he was hero enough to be our cook on the longer voyages, a thankless job for a sea sick man. I would hear him swearing below when the weather was rough and a pot of hot coffee was tossed in his lap. |
| 6404 |
I was thinking of expanding into the lucrative Mediterranean market and might buy a boatyard if the price and conditions were right. This story had the advantage of not departing too far from the truth and would serve if we really had to buy a yard to cast the golden keel. Coertze was a mining man with medical trouble. |
| 6405 |
He had money but disliked work and was willing to go a long way to avoid it. He had come on this Mediterranean trip because he was bored with South Africa and wanted a change. It was to be his job to set things up in Tangier; to acquire a secluded house where we could complete the last stages of the operation. |
| 6406 |
He had seen the point when we ran into heavy weather off the Azores, and it galled him that the despised Walker was the better seaman. Now we were in Tangier, he had recovered his form and was a bit more inclined to throw his weight around. I could see that I'd have to step on him again before long. |
| 6407 |
They followed us a long way while I was taking it nice and easy, cruising at about ten knots so they wouldn't lose me. They hung on to my tail for about thirty miles, waiting for the bang and laughing to themselves fit to bust, I suppose. But they didn't laugh when the bang came and blew the arse off their own boat. |
| 6408 |
You ought to have seen the faces of the Security boys when I pitched up. Of course, they had to go through the motions of thanking me for rescuing those lousy, shipwrecked mariners. I kept a straight face and said I thought it must have been one of the antisubmarine depth charges in the stern that had gone off. |
| 6409 |
It was a good story and he had told it well. I was in two minds about Metcalfe; he had his advantages and his disadvantages. On the one hand, he could give us a lot of help in Tangier; he knew the ropes and had the contacts. On the other hand, we had to be careful he didn't get wind of what we were doing. |
| 6410 |
They were not armoured or anything like that, being built of wood, and when a few of them went into St Nazaire with the Campbelltown they got shot up very badly. After the war you could buy a surplus Fairmile for about five thousand quid and they had become a favourite with the smugglers of Tangier. |
| 6411 |
I think that Metcalfe was unobtrusively passing the word that we were friends of his, and so immune to any of the usual tricks played on passing yachtsmen. Metcalfe was not a bad man to have around if he was your friend and you were a yachtsman. But I was not a yachtsman and that made Metcalfe a potential bomb. |
| 6412 |
But that didn't matter if it could give us what we wanted. We went into the house and looked cursorily over the worm eaten panelling and viewed the lack of sanitation. The kitchen was primitive and there was a shaggy garden at the back of the house. Beyond was the sea and we looked over a low cliff to the beach. |
| 6413 |
Aristide opened the vault door, which was over two feet thick, and led us inside. There was a lot of gold in that vault. Not four tons of it, but still a lot of gold. It was stacked up neatly in piles of bars of various sizes; it was boxed in the form of coins; it was a hell of a lot of gold. Aristide indicated a bar. |
| 6414 |
It was then that this whole crazy, mad expedition ceased to be just an adventure to me. The heavy, fatty feel of that gold coin turned something in my guts and I understood what people meant when they referred to gold lust. I understood why prospectors would slave in arid, barren lands looking for gold. |
| 6415 |
I thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion that even if Walker hadn't told Metcalfe about the gold he had probably blown his cover sky high. Under the influence, the character he had built up would have been irrevocably smashed and he would have reverted to his alcoholic and unpleasant self. |
| 6416 |
It would be a certain clue that we were up to no good. A check over the boat showed that everything was in order. Apart from the furnaces, and the spare graphite mats which lined the interior of the double coach roof, there was nothing on board to distinguish us from any other cruising yacht in these waters. |
| 6417 |
I hired a watchman who looked as though he would sell his grandmother for ten pesetas and we all went to the bullfight. Before I left I was careful to set the stage. I had made a lot of phoney notes concerning the costs of setting up a boatyard in Spain, together with a lot of technical stuff I had picked up. |
| 6418 |
Anyone whose product was used six thousand miles from where it was made must obviously be someone to be reckoned with. They didn't know much about local conditions but they gave me some useful addresses. I was well satisfied. If I had to impress people with my integrity I might as well start with the Customs. |
| 6419 |
This international brotherhood, together with the fact that the law of the sea doesn't demand a licence to operate a small boat, makes deep sea cruising one of the most enjoyable experiences in the world. I chatted with the secretary of the club, who spoke very good English, and talked largely of my plans. |
| 6420 |
Her hair was raven black and swept up into smooth wings on each side of her head as though to match the winged eyebrows which were dark over cool, hazel eyes. Her cheekbones were high, giving a trace of hollow in the cheeks, but she didn't look like one of the fashionably emaciated models one sees in Vogue. |
| 6421 |
Apparently the only thing he didn't know was where the treasure was hidden. This girl was quite right when she said that it couldn't be lifted if we were under observation, so he was coming right out and asking for a cut. Walker really must have talked in Tangier if Metcalfe could pinpoint it as close as Rapallo. |
| 6422 |
To locate you, I mean. She seems to have a circle of pretty useful friends and apparently they're not the crowd you'd think a girl like that would mix with. She picked up Metcalfe's signals to the Mediterranean ports and interpreted them correctly, so it looks as though she has brains as well as beauty. |
| 6423 |
Yes, the milord was indeed wise to look at everything, but in spite of that he was sure that the milord would unfailingly return to the boatyard Palmerini because it was certainly the best in the whole Mediterranean. Pah, what did the Greeks know of fine building? All they knew were their clumsy caiques. |
| 6424 |
Coertze stopped the car and Walker got out. This was the first time he had seen the place in fifteen years. He walked a little way up the road to a large rock on the right, then turned and looked back. I guessed it was by that rock that he had stood while he poured bullets into the driver of the staff car. |
| 6425 |
After lunch, which Francesca made in the little galley of the caravan, we sat about and talked desultorily and waited for the sun to go down. Francesca stayed in the caravan most of the time keeping Morese company; Walker fidgeted; Coertze was apparently lost in contemplating his navel; I tried to sleep, but couldn't. |
| 6426 |
He must have planned this excavating problem many times and spent hours sorting out this timber in readiness for a job which might never have happened. No wonder he was so touchy. It took us about an hour to transfer all the timber and by that time Coertze and Walker had penetrated three feet into the rockfall. |
| 6427 |
Coertze began to select his timbers for the shoring and Piero and I helped Francesca to distribute the spoil. Coertze was right. The shoring of the roof took a long time but it had to be done. It would be bad if the whole thing collapsed and we had to begin all over again; besides, someone might get hurt. |
| 6428 |
She opened the box and gasped. There was a shimmer of coruscating light, the pure white of diamonds, the bright green of emeralds and the dull red of rubies. She stretched forth her hand and picked out the first thing she encountered. It was a diamond and emerald necklace. She ran it through her fingers. |
| 6429 |
Lying in the back, half hidden by the motor cycle, was a Schmeisser machine pistol. I picked it up and hefted it thoughtfully in my hand. I was thinking more of Coertze than of Metcalfe and my thoughts weren't pleasant. Coertze was suspected of having killed at least three men in order to get this treasure to himself. |
| 6430 |
With the long magazine in place and the gun switched to rapid fire you have a very handy submachinegun, most effective at close range. I had not fired a gun since the war and the thought of something which would make up for my lack of marksmanship by its ability to squirt out bullets was very appealing. |
| 6431 |
I had the holster and belt, stiff with neglect, but containing the shoulder rest, four long clips and four short clips. There was another machine pistol, but I left that. I put the gun in the holster and left it resting in a niche in the tunnel wall together with the clips of ammunition. Then I went back to Francesca. |
| 6432 |
Besides, I wanted to get Walker dead tired so that he would be heavily asleep, when I went to retrieve the Schmeisser. The first thing we did was to clear the fallen rock from in front of the first truck. This would be our working space when we had to disguise the bullion boxes and recrate the other stuff. |
| 6433 |
We worked quickly without chatting. There was no sound except our heavy breathing, the subdued roar of the Tilley lamp and the occasional clatter of a rock. After an hour we had a clear space and began to bring the gold to the front. Those bullion boxes were damnably heavy and needed careful handling. |
| 6434 |
We went up to the front of the tunnel and checked everything again, then settled to wait for nightfall. It could have been night then, if my watch hadn't told us otherwise, because there was no light in the tunnel except for the bright circle cast by the lamp, which quickly faded into darkness. Walker was nervous. |
| 6435 |
Twice he asked me if I heard a noise, not from the entance but from back in the tunnel. The bodies of the men he had killed were worrying him. I told him to go back and look at them, thinking the shock treatment might do him good, but he refused to go. At last I heard a faint noise from the entrance. |
| 6436 |
Tell them to keep a watch on the road and to warn us if anyone comes up. The other two must go into the hills overlooking the mine, one to the left, the other to the right. They must watch for anyone coming across country. This is the tricky part and we don't want anyone surprising us when the gold is in the open. |
| 6437 |
The boxes were heavy but Coertze and Piero had the muscle to hoist them vertically into the trucks and to stow them neatly. Walker and I used the chain again to pull the boxes through the narrow entrance. Francesca produced some flasks of coffee and a pile of cut sandwiches and we ate and drank while we worked. |
| 6438 |
The journey back to Rapallo was no joy ride for me. The truck was uncomfortable as only trucks can be at the best of times, and for me it was purgatory because I was unable to lean back in the seat. I was very tired, my limbs were sore and aching, and my back was raw. Altogether I was not feeling too bright. |
| 6439 |
Francesca spoke to Palmerini and soon a procession of Italians slipped into the yard to make their reports. They spoke seriously to Francesca and ducked out again, obviously delighting in their return to the role of partisans. When she had absorbed all they could tell her, Francesca came to me with a set face. |
| 6440 |
The tunnel had been dry and the gun hadn't taken much harm. I was more dubious about the ammunition; wondering if the charges behind the bullets had suffered chemical deterioration over the past fifteen years. That was something I would find out when the shooting started. But perhaps there would be no shooting. |
| 6441 |
It had to be done because we could only melt a couple of pounds of gold at a time, and it was Walker's job to cut up the ingots into nice handy pieces. The gold dust was a problem which I solved by sending out for a small vacuum cleaner which Walker used assiduously, sucking up every particle of gold he could find. |
| 6442 |
Towards midday I went up to the Yacht Club for a drink. The bar seemed noisier than usual and I traced the disturbance to an argumentative and semi drunken group at the far end of the room. Most members were pointedly ignoring this demonstration but there were raised eyebrows at the more raucous shouts. |
| 6443 |
We melted and poured gold for sixteen hours a day, until our arms were weary and our eyes sore from the flash of the furnaces. We dropped into our berths at night, asleep before we hit the pillows, and it would seem only a matter of minutes before we were called again to that damned assembly line I had devised. |
| 6444 |
He was sitting in an armchair with a blanket across his knees and he looked up sharply when we appeared. He looked tired and old; his hair was white and his beard no longer bristled, as I had heard it described, but had turned wispy and soft. His eyes were those of a beaten man and had no fight in them. |
| 6445 |
The money is not for you. There will be a lot of money and you must take a little for yourself if you need it, but most of it must be given away. Give some to Mario Pradelli for his youngest child who was born spastic; give some to Pietro Morelli for his son whom he cannot afford to send to university. |
| 6446 |
The gate was of wood, old, unpainted and warped by the sun; there were plenty of cracks through which we could see. I knelt down and through one of the cracks saw a man on the other side of the road, illuminated by the street lamp. He was standing there, idly smoking a cigarette, with one hand in his trouser pocket. |
| 6447 |
We didn't wait for Torloni's men to recover but piled in immediately. I scrambled over the ruined car and got on to the bonnet of the lorry, whirling round to the passenger side. The man in the passenger seat was shaking his head groggily; he had smashed it against the windscreen, unready for such a fierce impact. |
| 6448 |
The driver was frantically trying to restart his stalled engine and I saw Coertze haul him out bodily and toss him away into the darkness. Then things got confused. Someone from the back of the lorry booted me on the head and I slipped from the running board conscious of a wave of our men going in to the attack. |
| 6449 |
We had caught them off balance and the flank attacks quickly rolled them up into the centre and there was a confused mob of shouting, fighting men. But more of the enemy were coming over the wall fast, and I was just going to move my little group into battle when I heard more shouting. It came from behind me. |
| 6450 |
I saw the small figure of old Palmerini; he had a rope with a block on the end of it which he whirled round his head like a medieval ball and chain. He whirled it once again and the block caught the attacker under the jaw and he toppled from the ladder he was climbing and fell senseless to the ground. |
| 6451 |
He screamed shrilly and fell away, the boat hook still sucking out of his leg. I saw the look of horror on Francesca's face and then drove home my little attack. It was futile. We managed to relieve the beleaguered garrison on Sanford, but then we were outnumbered three to one and had to retreat up the yard. |
| 6452 |
I raised my arm and hit him hard with the edge of my hand; I felt his collarbone break and he screamed and dropped the pistol. With Torloni's scream a curious hush came over the yard. There was an uncertainty in his men as they looked back to see what was happening. I picked up the gun and held it to Torloni's head. |
| 6453 |
We soon fell into our normal watchkeeping routine, modified by the presence of Francesca, who took over the cooking from Coertze. During small boat voyages one sees very little of the other members of the crew apart from the times when the watch is changed, but Walker was keeping more to himself than ever. |
| 6454 |
Coertze's shoulder was not so bad; it was a clean flesh wound and Francesca kept it well tended. I insisted that he sleep in the quarter berth where the motion was least violent, and this led to a general post. I moved to the port pilot berth in the main cabin while Francesca had the starboard pilot berth. |
| 6455 |
She rigged up a sailcloth curtain in front of it to give her a modicum of privacy. This meant that Walker was banished to the forecastle to sleep on the hitherto unused pipe berth. This was intended for a guest in port and not for use at sea; it was uncomfortable and right in the bows where the motion is most felt. |
| 6456 |
On the evening of the fifth day the wind dropped and the next day it kept fluctuating as though it didn't know what to do next. The strength varied between force three and dead calm and we had a lot of sail work to do. That day we only logged seventy miles. At dawn the next day there was a dead calm. |
| 6457 |
Our tempers tended to fray during the afternoon when there was nothing to do but watch the mast making lazy circles against the sky, while the precious hours passed and we made no way towards Tangier. I got tired of hearing the squeak of the boom in the gooseneck so I put up the crutch and we lashed down the boom. |
| 6458 |
Tattered clouds fled across the sky, making a baffling alteration of light and shade as they crossed the moon. The seas were coming up in lumps and the crests were being blown away in streaks of foam. Sanford was plunging her head into the seas and every time this happened she would stop with a jerk, losing speed. |
| 6459 |
Francesca was watching me from her berth and when the coffee was ready I beckoned to her. If she came to the coffee instead of vice versa there was less chance of it spilling. We wedged ourselves in between the galley bench and the companionway, sipping hot coffee and talking about the weather. She smiled at me. |
| 6460 |
I gave orders that no one should go on deck but the man on watch and that he should wear a safety line at all times. For myself, I got into my berth, put up the bunkboards so that I wouldn't be thrown out, and tried unsuccessfully to read a magazine. But I kept wondering if Metcalfe was out in this sea. |
| 6461 |
Coertze helped me take away the batten boards from the companion entrance and I climbed into the cockpit. It was knee deep in swirling water despite the three two inch drains I had built into it; and as I stood there, gripping a stanchion, another boiling wave swept across the deck and filled the cockpit. |
| 6462 |
He slithered aft and I got up from my seat and hoisted myself out of the cockpit until I could sit on his legs. In the violent motion of the storm it was only my weight that kept Coertze from being hurled bodily into the sea. Coertze grasped the rope and heaved, his shoulders writhing with the effort. |
| 6463 |
I hoped to God that Walker could hold on. If he let go then, not only would he be lost himself but the sudden release of tension would throw Coertze off balance and he would not have a hope of saving himself. Walker's hands appeared above the taffrail and Coertze took a grip on the cuff of his coat. |
| 6464 |
Her engines were fine for twenty six knots in calm water but if she was driven at much more than eight knots now she would be in danger of falling apart. Metcalfe might risk a lot for the gold, but he wouldn't risk that. As I heard the engine start I opened the throttle wide and turned Sanford away from the Fairmile. |
| 6465 |
There was a thud forward and I knew the bullet must have gone through the main cabin. I had brought Francesca up just in time. I was beginning to worry about Krupke. In spite of the difficulties of aiming, his shooting was getting better, and even if it didn't, then sooner or later he would get in a lucky shot. |
| 6466 |
By the time he had recovered enough to shout to the helmsman and for the helmsman to respond, we were alongside. Krupke fired again when he saw us coming but the bullet went wild. I saw him aim at me and looked right into the muzzle of his gun. Then I cut loose with the Schmeisser. I had only time to fire two bursts. |
| 6467 |
I throttled back the engine until it was merely ticking over; it would be suicide to try to butt our way through this. It was an angry bit of weather, all right, but it didn't have the sustained ferocity of the earlier storm and I knew it would be over in an hour or so. In that short time we had to lose Metcalfe. |
| 6468 |
It was like riding a horse with a loose saddle and I couldn't understand it. I had a sudden and dreadful thought and looked over the side. It was difficult to make out in the swirl of water but her boot topping seemed to be much higher out of the water than it should have been, and I knew what had happened. |
| 6469 |
I looked over the side again, trying to estimate how much higher she was in the water. As near as I could judge three parts of the keel were gone. Sanford had lost three tons of ballast and she was in danger of capsizing at any moment. I hammered on the cabin hatch and yelled at the top of my voice. |
| 6470 |
Coertze came aft and started to cut away the backstays; it was easier to cut them on the deck and within five minutes he had done it, and the mast drifted away and was lost to sight amid the sea spray. Coertze dropped heavily into the cockpit, his face streaming with salt water, and Francesca gave him a life jacket. |
| 6471 |
I slid down the side and gave him a hand, and soon the three of us were uneasily huddled on the unprotected hull, wondering what the hell to do next. That last flailing gust of wind had been the squall's final crack of the whip and the wind dropped within minutes to leave the hulk of Sanford tossing on an uneasy sea. |
| 6472 |
Then Walker disappeared as the force of the water pushed him back into the cabin. If he had come out by the fore hatch he would have been safe, but even in death he had to make one of his inevitable mistakes. The main hatch was open, water was pouring into the hull and Sanford was sinking. Metcalfe was in a rage. |
| 6473 |
The towing cable tightened as she sank lower in the water and the Fairmile went down by the stern as the pull on the cable became greater. Sanford gave a lurch as compressed air in the fo'c'sle blew out the forehatch and she began to settle faster as more water poured in through this new opening in her hull. |
| 6474 |
It parted with a twang, the loose end snaked away across the sea and the Fairmile bobbed up her stern. Sanford lurched again and turned over. As she went down and out of sight amid swirling waters a vagrant sunbeam touched her keel and we saw the glint of imperishable gold. Then there was nothing but the sea. |
| 6475 |
On the occasion of the latest reiteration of his wish he was beset by water. The rain poured from the sky, not in drops but in a steady sheet. It swirled along the gutters a foot or more deep because the drains were unable to cope, and Hardin had the impression that his car was in imminent danger of being swept away. |
| 6476 |
It was still raining; not so hard as before but still enough to drench him before he reached the shelter of his car. He was wet and gloomy as he drove away. His motel room was standard issue and dry. He took off his wet suit and hung it over the bath, regarded it critically, and decided it needed pressing. |
| 6477 |
No longer buoyed by patriotism he became increasingly dissatisfied with the work he was doing which in his view fulfilled no more elevating a function than to increase the dividends of shareholders and buttress the positions of corporate fatcats. And he was uneasy because a lot of it was downright illegal. |
| 6478 |
He fell down on a couple of jobs and Gunnarsson turned frosty and from then on he noted that he had been down graded as a field agent and was relegated to the minor investigations about which no one gave a damn. Like the Hendrix case. Hardin lay on the bed in the motel and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. |
| 6479 |
Biggie was well known but no one had seen him around. Hendrix was less known and no one had seen him, either. Hardin looked gloomily at the offshore oil rigs which periodically sprang leaks to poison the fish and kill the seabirds, and he cursed Gunnarsson. On the evening of the second day he checked again at Bernie's. |
| 6480 |
He unlocked it and returned to his car where he sat with a good view of the front entrance and lit a cigarette. Biggie and Hendrix showed up halfway through the third cigarette. Biggie was unmistakable; tall and broad he looked like a circus strong man, and there was a glint of gold on his bare chest. |
| 6481 |
Hendrix, who walked next to him, was no lightweight but next to Biggie he looked like a midget. They went into the warehouse and Hardin finished his cigarette before getting out of the car and crossing the road. He entered the warehouse and found Biggie sitting on a irate. Hendrix was nowhere to be seen. |
| 6482 |
It was only by a deliberate act of will that he restrained himself from the final deadly blow that would have killed. Breathing heavily he bent down and reached for the pulse it the side of Biggie's neck and sighed with relief as he felt it beating strongly. Then he straightened and turned to see Hendrix watching him. |
| 6483 |
Gunnarson's idea of severance pay made Hardin madder than ever. He tried to complain but could not get past the acidulated spinster who guarded Gunnarsson's office, and neither could he get through on the phone. Gunnarsson's castle was impregnable. But Richardson came up with the information he needed next day. |
| 6484 |
Nearly a month had passed and he knew he had to get a job. His resentment at Gunnarsson had fuelled him thus far but an eroding bank account was a stronger argument. He had set aside enough for Annette's next payment and that he would not touch, but his own reserves were melting. Then he got a wire from Annette. |
| 6485 |
He enjoyed the walk. The sun was shining and he felt oddly contented and in a holiday mood as he strolled by the lake. It was true that it had been some years since he had taken a real vacation. Perhaps he had been getting in a rut and the split with Gunnarsson was to be good for him in the long run. |
| 6486 |
The rate of the dollar to the pound sterling had been volatile of late but had settled at about two to one. That made twelve million bucks to split between two if there were no other heirs and he knew of none, unless Dirk Hendriks had children. That dope smuggling drop out, Hank Hendrix, was a multi millionaire. |
| 6487 |
He was a widower, his wife Amy having died five years before of cancer; and his only daughter was married, living in Australia, and about to present him with a third grandchild. When Stafford had divorced his wife he had stayed at his club before moving into a smaller flat more suitable for a bachelor. |
| 6488 |
The weakest part of any organization is the people in it, from the boss at the top down to the charwomen who scrub the floors. A Managing Director making an indiscreet remark at his golf club could blow a secret worth millions. A charwoman suborned can find lots of interesting items in waste paper baskets. |
| 6489 |
Defence is difficult because the espionage boys go for the jugular. All the security guards in creation are of no avail against human weakness. So Stafford Security Consultants investigated the personnel of their clients, weeding out doubtful characters, and if that was an offence against human rights it was too bad. |
| 6490 |
The thriller had a hero who always knew when he was being followed by a prickling at the nape of his neck; this handy accomplishment helped the plot along on no fewer than four occasions. Curtis slept like a baby. They landed just after eight in the morning and, even at that early hour, the sun was like a hammer. |
| 6491 |
The drop was precipitous and the road wound tortuously round hairpin bends. They were stuck behind a petrol tanker and in front of that was a big truck and trailer loaded with Tusker beer. The Nissan ground down in low gear, unable to overtake in safety, until Nair made a sound of exasperation and pulled off the road. |
| 6492 |
There were sports facilities including a swimming pool, tennis courts and a football field. There was also a large area devoted to experimental plots, something like British garden allotments but more scientific. Stafford flipped a few pages and found a list of the faculty and caught the name of Alan Hunt. |
| 6493 |
I don't think they'd be any problem to our thieves. But Brice is too sharp. He's no figurehead; he's proved that while he's been Director. Our trio have hardly got their hands into the cash register before he's really taken charge. He's got his hands on the accounts and they can't do a damned thing about it. |
| 6494 |
He found the College under the slopes of brooding Longonot. There was a heavy meshed high fence and a gatehouse with closed gates, which surprised him. A toot on the horn brought a man running, and he wound the window right down as the man approached. He stooped and brought a gnarled, lined face to Stafford's level. |
| 6495 |
Most of the buildings were long, low structures but there was a two storey building ahead. The grounds were kept in good condition with mown lawns, and flowering trees were everywhere, bougainvillea and jacaranda. Outside the big building he put the car into a slot between neatly painted white lines. |
| 6496 |
When he got out he felt the hammer blow of the sun striking vertically on to his head. Because the elevation cut the heat one tended to forget that this was equatorial Africa, with the Equator not very far away. Hunt was waiting in the shade under the portico at the entrance and came forward. They shook hands. |
| 6497 |
It was overturned by the side of the road and burnt out. They crossed a narrow bridge and Stafford checked the map. There were only two bridges marked and, after the second, the road changed status from being a main road to a secondary road. He commented on this with feeling and Nair burst out laughing. |
| 6498 |
It was a pleasant sprawling place with an unbuttoned air about it, a place to relax and be comfortable. There was a patio with a bar overlooking a wide lawn and that evening Stafford and Chip sat over drinks chatting desultorily while watching vervet monkeys scamper about in the fading light of sunset. |
| 6499 |
Gunnarsson looked to be in his mid fifties and his hair was turning iron grey. He was a hard looking man with a flat belly and appeared to be in good physical condition. His height was an even six feet and what there was on his bones was muscle and not fat. His eyes were pale blue and watchful, constantly on the move. |
| 6500 |
He looked formidable. The fake Hendrix was in his late twenties, a gangling and loose jointed young man with a fresh face and innocent expression, and stood about five feet, nine inches. He was blond with a fair complexion and if he missed shaving one day no one would notice, unlike Gunnarsson who had a blue chin. |
| 6501 |
That was not difficult because Adam Muliro co operated, never getting too far away. If Gunnarsson spotted them they would just be another group in the distance, and they were careful never to get too close. Stafford did not know why he was taking the trouble because it was a pretty pointless exercise. |
| 6502 |
It is well named. Chip and Nair knew enough to avoid them while Stafford, trailing in the rear, did not. He found it was like being trapped in barbed wire and his temper suffered, as did his suit and his skin. After a while he got the hang of it and learned to travel in the master's footsteps and then it became better. |
| 6503 |
The terrain consisted of rolling plains with an occasional outcrop of rock. The trees, mostly flat topped acacias, were scattered except where they tended to grow more thickly in the now dry watercourses, and the grass was waist high. The ground was so open that anyone looking back would surely see a long way. |
| 6504 |
Now it was dusty and dry although if one dug deep enough one would find dampness, enough to keep the acacias green in the dry season. The force of rushing water during the rains had carved into the soft soil making a channel which averaged a couple of feet deep. It would provide cover of a minimal kind. |
| 6505 |
So they went down on their bellies, following the winding of the watercourse. It was something Stafford had not done since his early days in the Army and he was out of practice. Once he jerked his hand up as he was about to put it on something which moved. It scuttled away and he saw it was a scorpion. |
| 6506 |
He sweated and it was not all because of the African heat. It took a long time but finally they got down to the shelter of the trees which fringed the Losemai and were able to stand up. Chip put his fingers to his lips and cautiously they made their way to the river and lay close to the bank, hidden by tall grass. |
| 6507 |
It was not a big river by any standards; the depth at that time of year was minimal and Stafford supposed one could cross dry shod by jumping from sandbank to sandbank. The flow of water was turgidly slow and muddy brown. In a clearing on the other side a giraffe was at the water's edge, legs astraddle and drinking. |
| 6508 |
It was very slow and very sweaty work. The river bank was full of noises; the croaking of frogs and the chirping of grasshoppers and cicadas. Occasionally Stafford jerked as he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye but always it was the quick flash of a brightly coloured bird crossing the river. |
| 6509 |
If, as had happened before, the prisoners were turned loose to walk back to Keekorok, the only discomfort they would suffer would be sunburn and cut and sore feet. Under the circumstances a shooting match was out of the question. They were outnumbered and outgunned and the safety of the prisoners could not be risked. |
| 6510 |
Then he looked back to see Chip running towards him at a crouch. Chip waved his arm wildly as he passed and then flung himself headlong into a thick patch of long grass and vanished from sight. Stafford got the message and picked himself up and ran for the nearest tree. Just as he got there he heard voices. |
| 6511 |
As they went by he risked a glance. Hendrix was hobbling by the river bank, walking painfully because of his bare feet. He was clad only in his underpants and behind him came two Tanzanians, one of them prodding him in the back with a rifle. They disappeared from view. Chip's head came out of the grass. |
| 6512 |
He waved him to follow Chip and then took off, making a wide circle. Chip was still at the point, Stafford was now flanker and Nair was rearguard. Stafford stayed about fifty or sixty yards from the river and kept parallel with it, occasionally going in as closely as he dared to keep track of Hendrix and his captors. |
| 6513 |
He was the first man Stafford had ever killed as far as he knew and he felt a little sick. His soldiering had been mostly in peacetime and even in those faraway days in Korea it was surprising how rarely you saw the enemy you were shooting at. And later they did not go too much for bodies in Military Intelligence. |
| 6514 |
Chip was brushing the ground with a leafy branch, scattering dust over the few bloodstains and eliminating all signs of their presence. He walked over to where he had fired the submachine gun and picked up all the cartridge cases he could find, then he tossed them and the two Kalashnikovs into the river. |
| 6515 |
He was silenced by Nair who produced a knife; it was the kirpan, the ceremonial knife carried by all Sikhs, but by no means purely ornamental, and the sight of it silenced Hendrix as effectively as if Nair had cut out his tongue with it. They stopped as the last of the light was ebbing from the sky. |
| 6516 |
It got to Hendrix; his eyes rolled and he shivered violently. He'd had a hard time that day. He'd been kidnapped, nearly murdered, and now he was being interrogated by armed strangers who apparently knew everything about him except his name and in a place where animals were murdering each other. No wonder he cracked. |
| 6517 |
And it would get worse when the others came back; having tourists kidnapped was not good for the image of Keekorok Lodge. It would get still worse when one tourist didn't come back at all, and even worse than that when the tourist was identified as an American millionaire. The manager wouldn't know what had hit him. |
| 6518 |
They did not walk well, but their feet had been bandaged and clothing had been issued, ill fitting and incongruous but necessary. The crowd pressed around, shouting questions, and the police kept them back, linking arms. A senior police officer held up his hands in one of which he held a swagger stick. |
| 6519 |
The kidnapping of the tour group and the disappearance of Hendrix had made headlines in both the Standard and the Nation. Perhaps, if it had not been for Hendrix, the story would have been played down; Stafford suspected that government pressure would suppress anything that made for a bad public image. |
| 6520 |
It would be useful in the future. He parked outside the Administration Block and went inside. In the cool hall he approached the reception desk behind which sat a muscular young black who was dressed neatly in white shirt and shorts. Another young Kenyan was sitting at a side desk hammering a typewriter. |
| 6521 |
They were thin on the ground and could not possibly undertake the detailed work Stafford guaranteed when he took on a contract. Consequently they were distantly pleased and recognized that Stafford Security was largely on their side. But Stafford could see that they would want to guarantee he was safe. |
| 6522 |
As he paid off the driver he wondered if he had made a rod for his own back. Stafford had always deemed it a virtue not to make unnecessary enemies and he had been hard on Abercrombie Smith. Still, the man had been nauseating with his casual assumption that he had but to crook a finger and Stafford would come to heel. |
| 6523 |
He drove to the Administration Block, parked the Nissan, and went inside where he gave his name to the black Kenyan behind the counter in the hall. He looked around and saw what he had not noticed on his first visit. Chip was right; security was tighter than one would expect in such an innocent organization. |
| 6524 |
He did not mind; there was nothing unusual to be found. He inspected the room with a experienced eye, looking not for comfort but for bugs, the electronic kind. He had no doubt that the room would be bugged; Brice would be interested in the private conversations of the Trustees and government officials. |
| 6525 |
The table lamp was clean as was the reading lamp over the bed. There were no strange objects attached beneath the coffee table, the dressing table or the bed. He looked at the telephone doubtfully. It would probably be tapped but that did not matter; any conversation he used it for would definitely be innocuous. |
| 6526 |
He examined it more closely paying attention, not to the picture itself, but to the frame which was of unpainted white wood and which seemed unusually thick. Near the bottom of the frame he found a small knot hole and he smiled. From his jacket pocket he took a pen torch and examined the hole more carefully. |
| 6527 |
Better to leave it alone and say nothing of consequence in the room or, indeed, anywhere in Ol Njorowa. Before leaving the room he took a small pair of field glasses from his suitcase and went to the window. In the distance he could see a section of the chain link fence which indicated the perimeter of the college. |
| 6528 |
At the top were three strands of barbed wire. Somewhere on the other side Curtis was making an examination of the fence from the outside, and his briefing had been to make a complete reconnaissance of the perimeter. Stafford put the field glasses away and walked to the staff room with a light heart. |
| 6529 |
He had his own ideas about where the worm in this rosy apple lay. Hunt announced he had work to do, finished his beer and went off. Stafford and Hendriks continued to chat, a curious conversation in which both probed but neither wanted to give anything away. A duel with words ending at honours even. |
| 6530 |
So something had to be done about that and, again, Gunnarsson saw to it personally. He smiled grimly as he reflected that Hardin had told him how to do it in his report. If a pottery kiln had blown up once it could blow up again, this time with more serious consequences. Exit Biggie and the commune. |
| 6531 |
He wrenched it loose and withdrew it to find he was holding a small anonymous looking grey metal box from which two stiff wires protruded. He tested it on the bumper and it adhered with a click as the magnet on the bottom caught hold. Gunnarsson straightened, his lips compressed, and looked across at the taxi. |
| 6532 |
He wondered how he was going to acquit himself during the next couple of hours. The edge of the basket was padded with suede, and from each corner rose a pillar, the pillars supporting a complicated contraption of stainless steel piping in two coils which was, Stafford supposed, the burner which heated the air. |
| 6533 |
This envelope is nearly new; the old one became too porous and I was losing air and efficiency. It's the ultraviolet that does it, of course. Even though the fabric is specially treated the sun gets it in the end. A balloon doesn't last nearly as long here as it would in England. I'll give the boys a hand. |
| 6534 |
Two Kenyans were flapping the nylon, driving air into the envelope. It billowed enormously in slow waves and visibly expanded. Lucas came behind with the fan; it was like an over sized electric fan but driven by a small Honda petrol engine. The engine sputtered and then caught with a roar, driving air into the balloon. |
| 6535 |
The balloon was filling rapidly and suddenly there was a growling, deep throated roar and a blue flame, six feet long and nearly a foot in diameter, shot into the open throat of the balloon. It took Stafford by surprise and he started, then looked towards Judy. She was laughing so he grinned back weakly. |
| 6536 |
Hunt occasionally reached up to the burner controls and gave a short blast. Apart from that it was quiet and Stafford could hear cicadas chirping and the twittering of birds. The smoke from his cigarette ascended lazily in a spiral and he realized that was because they were moving at; the same speed as the wind. |
| 6537 |
The basket made contact with the ground and he twisted his head to see Hunt yanking on a line. Above him the whole top of the envelope seemed to tear apart and he could see blue sky. Then the basket tipped on to its side and he was thrown on to his back alongside Judy. Everything was still and they had stopped moving. |
| 6538 |
Stafford rolled out and stood up. Behind were the lava flows and steam clouds; ahead was the balloon envelope, looking very much as it had when he had first seen it, inert and dead upon the ground. In the distance the Land Rover was driving towards them over the grass. Hunt was standing by the basket. |
| 6539 |
He came to a few conclusions, the first of which was that Hunt was probably not in Brice's pocket. All the time he was in Hunt's company he noted that they were under discreet surveillance by three men, two blacks and a white, who apparently had nothing better to do than potter about in the middle distance. |
| 6540 |
They would be wandering all over the place and could quite easily stumble across something illicit and wonder what it was. No, thought Stafford; hiding something at Ol Njorowa would not be as easy as all that. They went into the dining room and threaded their way among the tables to where Brice sat. |
| 6541 |
But that was now. In the days when it seemed that Rhodesia could be saved for white civilization Hendriks had enjoyed his work until he stopped a bullet fired not by a black guerilla but, ironically, by a trigger happy white farmer. He was pulled back to South Africa, hospitalized, and then given a month's leave. |
| 6542 |
He also kept a check on certain members of the staffs of other Embassies in London as and when he was told. Intelligence outfits have their own way of doing things. The governments of two countries may be publicly cold towards each other while their respective intelligence agencies can be quite fraternal. |
| 6543 |
Mandeville had insisted upon that, saying that the will had to look good. They responded by killing him, a not too difficult task considering he was senile and expected to die any moment, even though he was inconsiderately hanging on to life tenaciously. Pretoria bungled in Los Angeles and Hendrix got away. |
| 6544 |
They lugged the supplies to the other side of the island, a matter of half a mile, and then made camp. Nair was meticulous about the setting up of the mosquito nets which were hung on wire frames over the sleeping bags, and fiddled for a long time in a finicky manner until he was sure he had got it right. |
| 6545 |
He was out of breath when he cast himself down next to Curtis and thought that this was a job for a younger man. Nair and Hunt were with him, but Hardin was still trailing behind. Curtis pointed to a boat half way across the narrow strait between the island and the mainland, and passed the binoculars to Stafford. |
| 6546 |
A waterbuck exploded out of a thicket, panicked by their sudden presence, and went galloping across a glade ahead of them. As they went by it stopped and stared and then, reassured, resumed its browsing. Stafford slowed his pace as he neared the jetty close enough to hear the puttering of an, outboard engine. |
| 6547 |
Hardin had seized an oar and was pushing the boat away from the jetty and from Hunt's boat there came a splutter as the engine balked. Stafford left Curtis gasping on the floor boards and was just in time to grab the painter of the third boat. He fastened it to a cleat and then had time to look around. |
| 6548 |
He stood there with his chest heaving and became aware of shouting from offshore. He looked out at the lake and saw three boats coming in with Stafford in the bows of the leading boat waving vigorously. Behind, Hardin was pointing with urgency and he turned his head and saw Brice and Hendriks just rounding the point. |
| 6549 |
He slowed as they came alongside and Hunt jumped for it. Even as he jumped Curtis was opening the throttle again and swinging to head out into the lake away from shore. Stafford looked back just in time to see the boat Hunt had abandoned rise bow first and then capsize as the hippopotamus attacked it. |
| 6550 |
The gate opened and he drove through, keeping his speed down, past the Admin Block and onward to the building surmounted by the dish antenna which lay a little over half a mile further. Ahead there was a car driving equally slowly and, as he watched, it stopped outside the animal migration laboratory. |
| 6551 |
There was no one in the room but there were two doors, one in the wall opposite and another to the right. There were tables and chairs and, in one corner a water cooler and a coffee machine together with an assortment of crockery. On the walls were large photographs of animals; wildebeest, hippopotamus, elephant. |
| 6552 |
It was an office complete with all the usual equipment one might expect; a desk and swivel chair, a telephone, a reading lamp, a photocopier on a side desk. Total normality. There were maps on the wall which were covered with a spiderweb of red lines. He inspected one and could make nothing of the cryptic notations. |
| 6553 |
Stafford plunged forward and the man slammed the door in his face and it took him a moment to open it as his feet slipped from under him. He yanked it open and then lost his footing completely and fell on his back just as there was the sharp report of a shot. He rolled over and looked around. The room was empty. |
| 6554 |
Stafford flinched and was about to drop the trap door when Hunt cut loose with the burner. The room was lit by an acid blue light as a six foot long flame stabbed down into the basement. The shooting stopped and all that could be heard was the pulsating roar of the burner which seemed to go on interminably. |
| 6555 |
Hardin dropped as though pole axed as someone hit him from behind. He dropped the pistol which went off as it hit the ground and the bullet screamed past Stafford so close that he ducked involuntarily. When he looked up suddenly Hendriks and Brice were in the room and Hendriks held the pistol with the silencer. |
| 6556 |
He had a young looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other. There was a girl beside him. |
| 6557 |
It didn't bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality. A low swung foreign speedster with no top drifted into the parking lot and a man got out of it and used the dash lighter on a long cigarette. |
| 6558 |
It was furnished, and it belonged to a woman who had gone to Idaho to live with her widowed daughter for a while. The rent was low, partly because the owner wanted to be able to come back on short notice, and partly because of the steps. She was getting too old to face them every time she came home. |
| 6559 |
Then he came awake all of a sudden and wanted to go to the bathroom. When he came back he looked at me peeringly, squinting his eyes, and wanted to know where the hell he was. I told him. He said his name was Terry Lennox and that he lived in an apartment in Westwood and no one was waiting up for him. |
| 6560 |
His apartment was small and stuffy and impersonal. He might have moved in that afternoon. On a coffee table in front of a hard green davenport there was a half empty Scotch bottle and melted ice in a bowl and three empty fizzwater bottles and two glasses and a glass ash tray loaded with stubs with and without lipstick. |
| 6561 |
There wasn't a photograph or a personal artide of any kind in the place. It might have been a hotel room rented for a meeting or a farewell, for a few drinks and a talk, for a roll in the hay. It didn't look like a place where anyone lived. He offered me a drink. I said no thanks. I didn't sit down. |
| 6562 |
They always find a way to get it if they have to have it. I drove home chewing my lip. I'm supposed to be tough but there was something about the guy that got me. I didn't know what it was unless it was the white hair and the scarred face and the clear voice and the politeness. Maybe that was enough. |
| 6563 |
It would be terrible anyway; it always is. It was about three blocks from my office building that I saw a cop car double parked and the two buttons in it staring at something over by a shop window on the sidewalk. The something was Terry Lennox or what was left of him and that little was not too attractive. |
| 6564 |
We went to a drive in where they made hamburgers that didn't taste like something the dog wouldn't eat. I fed Terry Lennox a couple and a bottle of beer and drove him home. The steps were still tough on him but he grinned and panted and made the dimb. An hour later he was shaved and bathed and he looked human again. |
| 6565 |
We ate in the breakfast nook. The house belonged to the period that always had one. I said I had to go to the office and would pick up his suitcase on the way back. He gave me the check ticket. His face now had a little color and the eyes were not so far back in his head that you had to grope for them. |
| 6566 |
I was still sore going down the steps. I didn't know why, any more than I knew why a man would starve and walk the streets rather than pawn his wardrobe. Whatever his rules were he played by them. The suitcase was the damndest thing you ever saw. It was bleached pigskin and when new had been a pale cream color. |
| 6567 |
I locked the suitcase up empty and tied the key to the handle and put it on the high shelf on my dothes doset. It didn't feel quite empty, but what was in it was no business of mine. It was a quiet night and the house seemed emptier than usual. I set out the chessmen and played a French defense against Steinitz. |
| 6568 |
After the society page dog vomit even the wrestlers looked good. But the facts were probably right. On the society page they better be. I had a mental picture of the kind of eighteen room shack that would go with a few of the Potter millions, not to mention decorations by Duhaux in the last subphallic symbolism. |
| 6569 |
But after a while the lushes will fill the place up and talk loud and laugh and the goddain women will start waving their hands and screwing up their faces and tinkling their goddam bracelets and making with the packaged charm which will later on in the evening have a slight but unmistakable odor of sweat. |
| 6570 |
The persistent ringing of the doorbell yanked me out of bed. I plowed down the hall and across the living room and opened up. He stood there looking as if he hadn't slept for a week. He had a light topcoat on with the collar turned up and he seemed to be shivering. A dark felt hat was pulled down over his eyes. |
| 6571 |
Light breeze. You can hear those tough old eucalyptus trees across the street whispering to each other. Talking about old times in Australia when the wallabies hopped about underneath the branches and the koala bears rode piggyback on each other. Yes, I got the general idea you were in some trouble. |
| 6572 |
I turned the flame up just enough to get it over the hump and then turned it low again quickly. I stirred the coffee and covered it. I set my tinier for three minutes. Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character. |
| 6573 |
I did a fast wash up in the bathroom and the bell of the timer went just as I got back. I cut the flame and set the coffee maker on a straw mat on the table. Why did I go into such detail? Because the charged atmosphere made every little thing stand out as a performance, a movement distinct and vastly important. |
| 6574 |
You are like a man learning to walk after polio. You take nothing for granted, absolutely nothing at all. The coffee was all down and the air rushed in with its usual fuss and the coffee bubbled and then became quiet. I removed the top of the maker and set it on the drainboard in the socket of the cover. |
| 6575 |
You came to me this morning in a highly emotional condition and wanted to be driven to Tijuana to catch an early plane. You had a gun in your pocket, but I needn't have seen it. You told me you had stood things as long as you could but last night you blew up. You found your wife dead drunk and a man had been with her. |
| 6576 |
I haven't finished. You took nothing but the clothes you stood up in and some money you had from your father in law, You left everything she had given you, including that beautiful piece of machinery you parked at La Brea and Fountain. You wanted to go away as clean as it was possible for you to go and still go. |
| 6577 |
I climbed down with the suitcase, dusted it off, and shoved some things into it, a pair of pajamas never worn, toothpaste, an extra toothbrush, a couple of cheap towels and washcloths, a package of cotton handkerchiefs, a fifteen cent tube of shaving cream, and one of the razors they give away with a package of blades. |
| 6578 |
I added a pint of bourbon still in its wrapping paper. I locked the suitcase and left the key in one of the locks and carried it up front. He had gone to sleep again. I opened the door without waking him and carried the suitcase down to the garage and put it in the convertible behind the front seat. |
| 6579 |
He reached down and patted the pigskin suitcase and grinned at Terry. Then he stood aside and Terry went through the door. In a little while Terry came out through the door on the other side, where the customs people are when you're coming in. He walked, still slowly, across the gravel to the steps. |
| 6580 |
It began to move forward picking up speed slowly. The dust rose in douds behind it. Then it was airborne. I watched it lift slowly into the gusty air and fade off into the naked blue sky to the southeast. Then I left. Nobody at the border gate looked at me as if my face meant as much as the hands on a dock. |
| 6581 |
At night it is fairyland. The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns. But Marlowe has to get home and count the spoons. The road north is as monotonous as a sailor's chantey. You go through a town, down a hill, along a stretch of beach, through a town, down a hill, along a stretch of beach. |
| 6582 |
He was gray blond and looked sticky. His partner was tall, good looking, neat, and had a precise nastiness about him, a goon with an education. They had watching and waiting eyes, patient and careful eyes, cool disdainful eyes, cops' eyes. They get them at the passing out parade at the police school. |
| 6583 |
I've got a reasonable amount of sentiment invested in him. Enough not to spoil it just because a cop says come through, You've got a case against him, maybe far more than I hear from you. Motive, opportunity, and the fact that he skipped out. The motive is old stuff, long neutralized, almost part of the deal. |
| 6584 |
I don't admire that kind of deal, but that's the kind of guy he is a little weak and very gentle. The rest of it means nothing except that if he knew she was dead he knew he was a sitting duck for you. At the inquest if they have one and if they call me, I'll have to answer questions. I don't have to answer yours. |
| 6585 |
Dayton turned and went back and picked up his pad. Green crossed to the phone and lifted it slowly, his plain face creased with the long slow thankless grind. That's the trouble with cops. You're all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you. The Captain said to bring me in, and rough. |
| 6586 |
Because if they had made any kind of job of it they would have found Terry Lennox's car keys. And when the car was found, as it would be sooner or later, they would fit the keys to it and know he had been in my company. Actually, as it turned out, that meant nothing. The car was never found by any police. |
| 6587 |
The homicide skipper that year was a Captain Gregorius, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the fist to the solar plexus, the night stick to the base of the spine. |
| 6588 |
He sat behind his desk with his coat off and his sleeves rolled almost to his shoulders. He was as bald as a brick and getting heavy around the waist like all hard musded men in middle age. His eyes were fish gray. His big nose was a network of burst capillaries. He was drinking coffee and not quietly. |
| 6589 |
You connect with him. Guy catches his wife cheating and beats her head to raw flesh and bone and bloodsoaked hair. Our old friend the bronze statuette. Not original but it works. You think any goddam private eye is going to quote law at me over this, mister, you got a hell of a tough time coming your way. |
| 6590 |
It was over very soon. He got up slowly and walked around the desk. He leaned down dose to me, one big hand on the wood, and smiled. Then without change of expression he hit me on the side of the neck with a fist like a piece of iron The blow traveled eight or ten inches, no more. It nearly took my head off. |
| 6591 |
You're not only a gorilla, you're an incompetent. You don't know how to operate a simple investigation. I was balanced on a knife edge and you could have swung me either way. But you had to abuse me, throw coffee in my face, and use your fists on me when I was in a spot where all I could do was take it. |
| 6592 |
The supply of trusties is always ample. The jail deputies look you over and they have wise eyes. Unless you are a drunk or a psycho or act like one you get to keep your matches and cigarettes. Until preliminary you wear your own clothes. After that you wear the jail denim, no tie, no belt, no shoelaces. |
| 6593 |
You sit on the toilet and vomit in your own lap. That is the depth of misery. I've seen it. Although it was still daylight the lights were on in the ceiling. Inside the steel door of the cell block was a basket of steel bars around the Judas window. The lights were controlled from outside the steel door. |
| 6594 |
Without any sound of a click or any warning darkness. And there you were until the summer dawn with nothing to do but sleep if you could, smoke if you had anything to smoke, and think if you had anything to think about that didn't make you feel worse than not thinking at all, In jail a man has no personality. |
| 6595 |
He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. |
| 6596 |
He looks at you or you look at him. He says nothing and you say nothing. There is nothing to communicate. In the corner of the cell block there may be a second steel door that leads to the show up box. One of its walls is wire mesh painted black. On the back wall are ruled lines for height. Overhead are floodlights. |
| 6597 |
You don't see or hear them. You hear the voice of the night aptain. You receive him loud and clear. He puts you through your paces as if you were a performing dog. He is tired and cynical and competent. He is the stage manager of a play that has had the longest run in history, but it no longer interests him. |
| 6598 |
I got it playing football, Captain, a slight miscalculation in an attempt to block a punt. I blocked the guy's foot instead after he kicked the ball. Fifteen yards penalty, and that's about how much stiff bloody tape they pulled out of my nose an inch at a time the day after the operation. I'm not bragging, Captain. |
| 6599 |
There was a fat brown briefcase on the table. He turned. He waited for the door to close. Then he sat down near his briefcase on the far side of a scarred oak table that came out of the Ark. Noah bought it secondhand. The lawyer opened a hammered silver cigarette case and put it in front of him and looked me over. |
| 6600 |
It's bailable in any case. Of course what you really are is a material witness. But a man can't be held in prison as a material witness in this state except by court order. He's not a material witness unless a judge so declares. But the law enforcement people can always find a way to do what they want to do. |
| 6601 |
If you had had a grain of sense you'd have told the police you hadn't seen Lennox for a week. It didn't have to be true. Under oath you could always have told the real story. There's no law against lying to the cops. They expect it. They feel much happier when you lie to them than when you refuse to talk to them. |
| 6602 |
A man like you who is supposed to know his way around, The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. I guess you're not in any mood to be helped. |
| 6603 |
The switchboard was dead, with lines plugged in for the night. There was nobody in the waiting chairs. Lights were on in a couple of offices. Spranklin opened the door of a small lighted room which contained a desk, a filing case, a hard chair or two, and a thick set man with a hard chin and stupid eyes. |
| 6604 |
And what was he trying to prove by locking me up? Not a damn thing except that he had the power to do it. Now you're on the same pitch trying to make me feel what a lot of power you generate in this cigar box you call your office. You send this scared baby sitter over late at night to bring me in here. |
| 6605 |
I dug out the carbon of my property slip and turned it over and receipted on the original. I put my belongings back in my pockets. There was a man draped over the end of the booking desk and as I turned away he straightened up and spoke to me. He was about six feet four inches tall and as thin as a wire. |
| 6606 |
Rich men all belong to the same dub. Sure, there's competition hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn't damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners. If it does, down comes the lid. The lid, my friend, is down on the Lennox case. |
| 6607 |
It was pseudo English with a lot of peaked roof and it would have cost a hundred bucks to wash the windows. It stood on a knoll in a big two acres, which is a lot of real estate for the Los Angeles area. There was a photo of the guest house, which was a miniature of the main building. It was hedged in with trees. |
| 6608 |
So the influence had started to work very early. The crime beat boys must have gnashed their teeth and gnashed them in vain. It figured. If Terry talked to his father in law in Pasadena the very night she was killed, there would have been a dozen guards on the estate before the police were even notified. |
| 6609 |
In the morning I shaved again and dressed and drove downtown in the usual way and parked in the usual place and if the parking lot attendant happened to know that I I was an important public character he did a top job in hiding it. I went upstairs and along the corridor and got keys out to unlock my door. |
| 6610 |
I slit the envelopes after I opened windows, and threw away what I didn't want, which was practically all of it. I switched on the buzzer to the other door and filled a pipe and lit it and then just sat there waiting for somebody to scream for help. I thought about Terry Lennox in a detached sort of way. |
| 6611 |
He was gone like the same fellow when he says goodbye at the pier and let's keep in touch, old man, and you know you won't and he won't. Likely enough you'll never even see the guy again. If you do he will be an entirely different person, just another Rotarian in a dub car. How's business? Oh, not too bad. |
| 6612 |
I had invested time and money in him, and three days in the icehouse, not to mention a slug on the jaw and a punch in the neck that I felt every time I swallowed. Now he was dead and I couldn't even give him back his five hundred bucks. That made me sore. It is always the little things that make you sore. |
| 6613 |
I put the phone back in its cradle carefully. I sat for a moment with my hand on it, scowling. Then I wiped the scowl off my face and got up to open the communicating door into my waiting room. A man was sitting by the window ruffling a magazine, He wore a bluish gray suit with an almost invisible pale blue check. |
| 6614 |
On his crossed feet were black moccasin type ties, the kind with two eyelets that are almost as comfortable as strollers and don't wear your socks out every time you walk a block. His white handkerchief was folded square and the end of a pair of sunglasses showed behind it. He had thick dark wavy hair. |
| 6615 |
You pal around with a guy, eat a few drinks, talk a few gags, slip him a little dough when he's strapped, and you're sold out to him. Just like some school kid that read Frank Merriwell. You got no guts, no brains, noconnections, no savvy, so you throw out a phony attitude and expect people to cry over you. |
| 6616 |
A mortar shell plops right in the middle of us and for some reason it don't go off. Those jerries have a lot of tricks. They got a twisted sense of humor. Sometimes you think it's a dud and three seconds later it ain't a dud. Terry grabs it and he's out of the foxhole before Randy and me can even start to get unstuck. |
| 6617 |
But I mean quick, brother. Like a good ball handler. He throws himself face down and throws the thing away from him and it goes off in the air. Most of it goes over his head but a hunk gets the side of his face. Right then the krauts mount an attack and the next thing we know we ain't there any more. |
| 6618 |
For a long, time we figured he was dead but he wasn't. The krauts got him. They worked him over for about a year and a half. They did a goad job but they hurt him too much. It cost us money to find out, and it cost us money to find him. But we made plenty in the black market after the war. We could afford it. |
| 6619 |
All Terry gets out of saving our lives is half of a new face, white hair, and a bad case of nerves. Back east he hits the bottle, gets picked up here and there, kind of goes to pieces. There's something on his mind but we never know what. The next thing we know he's married to this rich dame and riding high. |
| 6620 |
Randy and me can't do a thing for him. He won't let us except for that short job in Vegas. And when he gets in a real jam he don't come to us, he goes to a cheapie like you, a guy that cops can push around. So then he gets dead, and without telling us goodbye, and without giving us a chance to pay off. |
| 6621 |
The cigarette case fell to the floor. He backed against the wall and his hands jerked back and forth convulsively. His breath fought to get into his lungs. He was sweating. Very slowly and with an intense effort he straightened up and we were eye to eye again. I reached out and ran a finger along the bone of his jaw. |
| 6622 |
Nobody slugged me or shot at me or called me up on the phone and warned me to keep my nose clean. Nobody hired me to find the wandering daughters the erring wife, the lost pearl necklace, or the missing will. I just sat there and looked at the wall. The Lennox case died almost as suddenly as it had been born. |
| 6623 |
Presumably they eat, sleep, get their hair cut, and wear clothes. But you never know for sure. Everything you read or hear about them has been processed by a public relations gang of guys who are paid big money to create and maintain a usable personality, something simple and dean and sharp, like a sterilized needle. |
| 6624 |
I couldn't read the postmark. It was hand stamped and the ink pad was pretty far gone. The letter was thick. I climbed my steps and sat down in the living room to read it. The evening seemed very silent. Perhaps a letter from a dead man brings its own silence with it. It began without date and without preamble. |
| 6625 |
I want you to have this money because I don't need it and the local gendarmerie would swipe it for sure. It is not intended to buy anything. Call it an apology for making you so much trouble and a token of esteem for a pretty decent guy. I've done everything wrong as usual, but I still have the gun. |
| 6626 |
The main thing now is to save an unnecessary and useless scandal. Her father and her sister never did me any harm. They have their lives to live and I'm up to here in disgust with mine. Sylvia didn't make a bum out of me, I was one already. I can't give you any very clean answer about why she married me. |
| 6627 |
I suppose it was just a whim. At least she died young and beautiful. They say lust makes a man old, but keeps a woman young. They say a lot of nonsense. They say the rich can always protect themselves and that in their world it is always summer. I've lived with them and they are bored and lonely people. |
| 6628 |
You read about these situations in books, but you don't read the truth. When it happens to you, when all you have left is the gun in your pocket, when you are cornered in a dirty little hotel in a strange country, and have only one way out believe me, pal, there is nothing elevating or dramatic about it. |
| 6629 |
I poured two cups and added some bourbon to his and set it down on the side of the table where he had sat the morning I took him to the plane. I lit a cigarette for him and set it in an ash tray beside the cup. I watched the steam rise from the coffee and the thin thread of smoke rise from the cigarette. |
| 6630 |
Outside in the tecoma a bird was gassing around, talking to himself in low chirps, with an occasional brief flutter of wings. Then the coffee didn't steam any more and the cigarette stopped smoking and was just a dead butt on the edge of an ash tray. I dropped it into the garbage can under the sink. |
| 6631 |
It was a clear morning, no smog, no high fog even, and the sun dazzled the surface of the swimming pool which began just outside the plateglass wall of the bar and stretched to the far end of the dining room. A girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure was climbing the ladder to the high board. |
| 6632 |
Then she was out of sight, cut off by the deep overhang of the roof. A moment later I saw her flash down in a one and a half. Spray came high enough to catch the sun and make rainbows that were almost as pretty as the girl. Then she came up the ladder and unstrapped her white helmet and shook her bleach job loose. |
| 6633 |
They put as much muscular activity into a telephone conversation as I would put into carrying a fat man up four flights of stairs. There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream. |
| 6634 |
He would be like that for the rest of his life and that was what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world. |
| 6635 |
She sat down and slipped the gloves under the strap of her bag and thanked him with a smile so gentle, so exquisitely pure, that he was damn near paralyzed by it. She said something to him in a very low voice. He hurried away, bending forward. There was a guy who really had a mission in life. I stared. |
| 6636 |
Partly the thousand to one chance all publishers live for. But mostly you're at a cocktail party and get introduced to all sorts of people, and some of them have novels written and you are just liquored up enough to be benevolent and full of love for the human race, so you say you'd love to see the script. |
| 6637 |
We want to save a very able writer who is capable of much better things than he has ever done. Something is very wrong. This trip he won't even see me. I realize this sounds like a job for a psychiatrist. Mrs. Wade disagrees. She is convinced that he is perfectly sane but that something is worrying him to death. |
| 6638 |
Something from his past may have caught up with him. It might even be just as a wild guess a fatal hit and run accident and someone has the goods on him. We don't know what it is. We want to know. And we are willing to pay well to correct the trouble. If it turns out to be a medical matter, well that's that. |
| 6639 |
She was getting ready to leave. The whitehaired waiter was hovering over her with the check. She gave him some money and a lovely smile and he looked as if he had shaken hands with God. She touched up her lips and put her white gauntlets on and the waiter pulled the table halfway across the room for her to stroll out. |
| 6640 |
I watched her out of the bar, down the glassed in annex to the dining room. She carried herself beautifully. I watched her turn under the archway that led to the lobby. I saw the last flicker of her white linen skirt as she turned the corner. Then I eased myself down into the booth and grabbed the gin and orange. |
| 6641 |
They knew the two hotshots in the booth farther on. The air began to be spattered with darlings and crimson fingernails. I smoked half of my cigarette, scowling at nothing, and then got up to leave. I turned to reach back for my cigarettes and something bumped into me hard from behind. It was just what I needed. |
| 6642 |
I knew a good deal about Idle Valley, and I knew it had changed a great deal from the days when they had the gatehouse at the entrance and the private police force, and the gambling casino on the lake, and the fifty dollar joy girls. Quiet money had taken over the tract after the casino was closed out. |
| 6643 |
That's her problem. Nobody could protect her twentyfour hours a day from her own husband. There isn't that much protection in the world. But that's not all you want. You want to know why and how and when the guy jumped the rails, and then fix it so that he doesn't do it again at least until he finishes the book. |
| 6644 |
All they did was jab and bob up and down and feint one another off balance. Not one of them could hit hard enough to wake his grandmother out of a light doze. The crowd was booing and the referee kept clapping his hands for action, but they went right on swaying and jittering and jabbing long lefts. |
| 6645 |
The dialogue was stuff even Monogram wouldn't have used. The dick had a colored houseboy for comic relief. He didn't need it, he was plenty comical all by himself. And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles. I cut it off and smoked a long cool tightly packed cigarette. |
| 6646 |
The case is dosed, finalized, and laid away in mothballs. Damn lucky for you it is. Accessory after the fact is good for five years in this state. And let me tell you something else. I've been a cop a long time and one thing I've learned for sure is it ain't always what you do that gets you sent up. |
| 6647 |
I came here to ask you to find him and bring him home. Oh, it has happened before. One time he drove himself all the way to Portland and got sick in a hotel there and had to get a doctor to sober him up. It's a wonder how he ever got that far without getting into trouble. He hadn't eaten anything for three days. |
| 6648 |
I knew he had been drinking and I knew he hadn't come upstairs. About two o'clock I went down to see if he was all right or comparatively all right, passed out on the floor or the couch or something. He was gone. The other paper was in the wastebasket or rather caught on the edge, so that it hadn't fallen in. |
| 6649 |
It might have been an investment trust. Inside was a small and ugly reception room, but the ugliness was deliberate and expensive. The furniture was scarlet and dark green, the walls were a flat Brunswick green, and the pictures hung on them were framed in a green about three shades darker than that. |
| 6650 |
The pictures were guys in red coats on big horses that were just crazy to jump over high fences. There were two frameless mirrors tinted a slight but disgusting shade of rose pink. The magazines on the table of polished primavera were of the latest issue and each one was enclosed in a dear plastic cover. |
| 6651 |
He probably wore a pimento shirt, mulberry slacks, zebra shoes, and vermilion drawers with his initials on them in a nice Mandarin orange. The whole thing was just window dressing. The clients of The Carne Organization were charged a minimum of one hundred fish per diem and they expected service in their homes. |
| 6652 |
Carne was an ex colonel of military police, a big pink and white guy as hard as a board. He had offered me a job once, but I never got desperate enough to take it. There are one hundred and ninety ways of being a bastard and Came knew all of them. A rubbed glass partition slid open and a receptionist looked out at me. |
| 6653 |
His skin had the worn weathered look of a man who has been out of doors a great deal, in all kinds of weather. He had deep set eyes and an upper lip almost as long as his nose. When he grinned the bottom half of his face disappeared into two enormous ditches that ran from his nostrils to the ends of his wide mouth. |
| 6654 |
Office practice mostly, and seems to sort of specialize in chronic sinus infections. Rather a neat routine. You go in and complain of a sinus headache and he washes out your antrums for you. First of course he has to anesthetize with Novocain. But if he likes your looks it don't have to be Novocain. |
| 6655 |
Those I could see had that desolate out of season look. Their doors were shut, their windows were blanked by drawn curtains of monk's cloth or something on that order. You could almost feel the thick dust on their sills. I switched off the ignition and sat there with my hands on the wheel listening. |
| 6656 |
There was no sound. The place seemed to be as dead as Pharaoh, except that the doors behind the double screens were open and something moved in the dimness of the room beyond. Then I heard a light accurate whistling and a man's figure showed against the screen, pushed it open and strolled down the steps. |
| 6657 |
He wore a flat black gaucho hat with the woven strap under his thin. He wore a white silk shirt, spotlessly dean, open at the throat, with tight wristlets and loose puffed sleeves above. Around his neck a black fringed scarf was knotted unevenly so that one end was short and the other dropped almost to his waist. |
| 6658 |
A crack on the back of the head with those and I would be a sick man. If I pulled he would catch me on the side of the face or on the upper arm below the point of the shoulder, It would have been a dead arm or a dead face; whichever it happened to be. In a spot like that there is only one thing to do. |
| 6659 |
I provided meals, lodging, facilities for exercise and entertainment, and above all seclusion. And for moderate fees, Artists, as you probably know, are seldom wealthy people. In the term artists I of course include writers, musicians, and so on. It was a rewarding occupation for me while it lasted. |
| 6660 |
I came out through the gates and drove far enough around the curve of the highway to park out of sight of the entrance. I got out and walked back along the edge of the paving to where I could just see the gates from the barbed wire boundary fence. I stood there under a eucalyptus and waited. Five minutes or. |
| 6661 |
I paid my check, left my car where it was, and walked the north side of the street to the Stockwell Building. It was an antique with a cigar counter in the entrance and a manually operated elevator that lurched and hated to level off. The corridor of the sixth floor was narrow and the doors had frosted glass panels. |
| 6662 |
Dope pushers posing as urologists, dermatologists, or any branch of medicine in which the treatment can be frequent, and the regular use of local anesthetics is normal. Dr. Lester Vukanich had a small and ill furnished waiting room in which there were a dozen people, all uncomfortable. They looked like anybody else. |
| 6663 |
I had to wait three quarters of an hour. The patients went in through two doors. An active ear, nose, and throat man can handle four sufferers at once, if he has enough room. Finally I got in. I got to sit in a brown leather chair beside a table covered with a white towel on which was a set of tools. |
| 6664 |
The gates were still locked with the chain and padlock. I drove on past and parked well off the highway. There was still some light under the trees but it wouldn't last long. I climbed the gate and went up the side of the hill looking for a hiking path. Far back in the valley I thought I heard a quail. |
| 6665 |
There were small dark cabins dotted all over the place in the trees. I went along a path now and suddenly a floodlight went on at the back of the main cabin. I stopped dead. The floodlight was not looking for anything. It pointed straight down and made a wide pool of light on the back porch and the ground beyond. |
| 6666 |
He wore a dark shirt stitched with white and a polka dot scarf knotted loosely around his neck. He wore a wide leather belt with a load of silver on it and a pair of tooled leather holsters with ivory handled guns in them. He wore elegant riding pants and boots cross stitched in white and glistening new. |
| 6667 |
But the floodlight had blinded him and he didn't see anything. He slipped his guns back in the holsters, picked up the rope and gathered it loosely, went back into the house. The light went off, and so did I. I moved around through the trees and got close to the small lighted cabin on the slope. No sound came from it. |
| 6668 |
A man lay flat on his back in the bed, his body relaxed, his arms in pajama sleeves outside the covers, his eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling. He looked big. His face was partly shadowed, but I could see that he was pale and that he needed a shave and had needed one for just about the right length of time. |
| 6669 |
I reached the door and yanked it open. Earl spun around, leaning forward a little, staring at me without recognition. There was a bubbling sound behind his lips. He started for me fast. I jerked the gun out and showed it to him. It meant nothing. Either his own guns were not loaded or he had forgotten all about them. |
| 6670 |
He kept coming. I fired through the open window across the bed. The crash of the gun in the small room seemed much louder than it should have been. Earl stopped dead. His head slewed around and he looked at the hole in the window screen. He looked back at me. Slowly his face came alive and he grinned. |
| 6671 |
When you start something with a type like Earl you have to finish it. Keep it simple and don't change your mind. He did it at last, quite amiably. Then, holding the belt, he walked over to the table and got his other gun and put it in the holster and put the belt right back on again. I let him do it. |
| 6672 |
I hit the office about ten, picked up some odds and ends of mail, slit the envelopes and let the stuff lie on the desk. I opened the windows wide to let out the smell of dust and dinginess that collected in the night and hung in the still air, in the corners of the room, in the slats of the venetian blinds. |
| 6673 |
On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn't any use, she was finished, she had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again. I knew it was going to be one of those crazy days. Everyone has them. |
| 6674 |
The girl she roomed with in her set any woman who works Out is a girl was taking money out of her purse. A dollar here, four bits there, but it added up. She figured she was out dose to twenty dollars in all. She couldn't afford it. She couldn't afford to move either. She couldn't afford a detective. |
| 6675 |
He sat on the edge of the chair without fidgeting and looked at me out of sad black eyes. His hair was black too and thick and rough without a sign of gray in it that I could see. He had a clipped mustache with a reddish tone. He could have passed for thirty five if you didn't look at the backs of his hands. |
| 6676 |
She drank, she played around, she wasn't a very good wife by his standards, but he could have been brought up too strict. She had a heart as big as a house, he said, and he loved her. He didn't kid himself he was any dreamboat, just a steady worker bringing home the pay check. They had a joint bank account. |
| 6677 |
Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money. |
| 6678 |
It reminded me that I had never gone to Victor's for that gimlet he asked me to drink for him. It was just about the right time of day for the bar to be quiet, the way he would have liked it himself, if he had been around to go with me. I thought of him with a vague sadness and with a puckering bitterness too. |
| 6679 |
Let's keep this in the family. I know my daughter is a tramp and that any one of a dozen drunken bastards might have blown his top and pushed her pretty face down her throat for her, But that's incidental, old boy. The guy will be sorry when he sobers up. You've had it soft and now is the time you pay back. |
| 6680 |
A low swung Jaguar swept around the hill in front of me and slowed down so as not to bathe me in the granite dust from the half mile of neglected paving at the entrance to Idle Valley, It seemed they wanted it left that way to discourage the Sunday drivers spoiled by drifting along on superhighways. |
| 6681 |
Live oaks clustered towards the road, as if they were curious to see who went by, and sparrows with rosy heads hopped about pecking at things only a sparrow would think worth pecking at. Then there were a few cottonwoods but no eucalyptus. Then a thick growth of Carolina poplars screening a white house. |
| 6682 |
Then all this wheeled away and the glisten of the lake showed hot and bright and I began to watch numbers on gateposts. I had seen the Wades' house only once and in the dark. It wasn't as big as it had looked by night. The driveway was full of cars, so I parked on the side of the road and walked in. |
| 6683 |
He opened a door, I went through, he shut it behind me, and a lot of the noise was dimmed. It was a corner room, big and cool and quiet, with french windows and roses outside and an airconditioner set in a window to one side. I could see the lake, and I could see Wade lying flat out on a long blond leather couch. |
| 6684 |
When he opened the door the buzz from the living room exploded into our faces. It seemed louder than before, if possible. About two drinks louder. Wade said hello here and there and people seemed glad to see him. But by that time they would have been glad to see Pittsburgh Phil with his custom built icepick. |
| 6685 |
If be went after Wade, he would look sillier than he looked now. There was nothing for him to do but leave, and he did it. He marched quiddy across the room staring straight in front of him to where Candy was holding the door open. He went out, Candy shut the door, wooden faced, and went back to the bar. |
| 6686 |
I stepped around them and got out of there. Every cocktail party is the same, even the dialogue. The house was leaking guests out into the evening air now. Voices were fading, cars were starting, goodbyes were bouncing around like rubber balls. I went to the french windows and out onto a flagged terrace. |
| 6687 |
The ground sloped towards the lake which was as motionless as a sleeping cat. There was a short wooden pier down there with a rowboat tied to it by a white painter. Towards the far shore, which wasn't very far, a black waterhen was doing lazy curves, like a skater. They didn't seem to cause as much as a shallow ripple. |
| 6688 |
I didn't even know that he was an alcoholic, There's a big difference. A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before. |
| 6689 |
It may be a guilty secret about himself, it may be about someone else. He thinks that's what makes him drink, because be can't get at this thing. He probably thinks that whatever happened, happened while he was drunk and he ought to find it wherever people go when they're drunk really bad drunk, the way he gets. |
| 6690 |
It wasn't like that at all. When I swung the Olds into their driveway lights were on all over the house and she was standing in the open doorway with a cigarette in her mouth. I got out and walked over the flagstones to her. She had slacks on and a shirt with an open collar. She looked at me calmly. |
| 6691 |
About a yard inside the door she just crumpled to the floor and lay there. I scooped her up and spread her out on one of the two big davenports that faced each other across a long blond cocktail table. I felt her pulse. It didn't seem very weak or unsteady. Her eyes were closed and the lids were blue. |
| 6692 |
I spoke to him and shook him a little. I slapped his face a couple of times, He mumbled but didn't come to. I dragged him up into a sitting position and dragged one of his arms over my shoulder and heaved him up with my back turned to him and grabbed for a leg. I lost. He was as heavy as a block of cement. |
| 6693 |
We both sat down on the grass and I took a short breather and tried again, Finally I got him hoisted into a fireman's lift position and plowed across the lawn in the direction of the open front door. It seemed about the same distance as a round trip to Siam. The two steps of the porch were ten feet high. |
| 6694 |
I thought it was damn nice of her. But I wasn't thinking very intelligently. I was too bushed from carrying him. We spread a steamer rug over him and in fifteen minutes Dr. Loring came, complete with starched collar and rimless cheaters and the expression of a man who has been asked to clean up after the dog got sick. |
| 6695 |
Then I turned him on his back and washed his face. I guess that was a mistake. He opened his eyes. They were vague and unfocused at first, then they cleared and he saw me standing beside the bed. His hand moved and went up to his head and felt the adhesive. His lips mumbled something, then his voice cleared up also. |
| 6696 |
From over near the front door I looked up at the balcony. The middle part of the living room rose to the full height of the house walls and was crossed by open beams that also supported the balcony. The balcony was wide and edged on two sides by a solid railing which looked to be about three and a half feet high. |
| 6697 |
The dining room was through a square arch dosed off by double louvered doors. Above it I guessed there were servants' quarters. This part of the second floor was walled off so there would be another stairway reaching it from the kitchen part of the house. Wade's room was in the corner over his study. |
| 6698 |
I could see the light from his open door reflected against the high ceiling and I could see the top foot of his doorway. I cut all the lights except in one standing lamp and crossed to the study. The door was shut but two lamps were lit, a standing lamp at the end of the leather couch and a cowled desk lamp. |
| 6699 |
The typewriter was on a heavy stand under this and beside it on the desk there was a disorderly mess of yellow paper. I sat in a padded chair and studied the layout. What I wanted to know was how he had cut his head. I sat in his desk chair with the phone at my left hand. The spring was set very weak. |
| 6700 |
If I tilted back and went over, my head might have caught the corner of the desk. I moistened my handkerchief and rubbed the wood. No blood, nothing there. There was a lot of stuff on the desk, including a row of books between bronze elephants, and an old fashioned square glass inkwell. I tried that without result. |
| 6701 |
No mystery at all. Wade had fallen over and struck his head on the sharp corner of the wastebasket a glancing blow most likely picked himself up and booted the damn thing across the room. Easy. Then he would have another quick drink. The drinking liquor was on the cocktail table in front of the couch. |
| 6702 |
Having taken his drink he felt a little better. He noticed the phone off the hook in a bleary sort of way and very likely didn't remember any more what he had been doing with it. So he just walked across and put it back in its cradle. The time had been just about right. There is something compulsive about a telephone. |
| 6703 |
The telephone is a fetish. Any normal man would have said hello into the mouthpiece before hanging up, just to be sure. But not necessarily a man who was bleary with drink and had just taken a fall. It didn't matter anyhow. His wife might have done it, she might have heard the fall and the bang as the wastebas. |
| 6704 |
I had to assume that when she had been up against the situation often enough to know there was nothing she could do about it except to let it ride, then that would be what she would do. Just that. Let it ride. Let him lie out there on the ground until somebody came around with the physical equipment to handle him. |
| 6705 |
Drunk, he was something else, something to stay away from because he was dangerous. All right, forget it. But somehow it still bothered me. If she was really scared, she wouldn't have been standing there in the open door smoking a cigarette. If she was just bitter and withdrawn and disgusted, she wouldn't have fainted. |
| 6706 |
I stopped thinking about it and took the cover off the typewriter. The stuff was there, several loose sheets of typed yellow paper that I was supposed to destroy so Eileen wouldn't see them. I took them over to the couch and decided I deserved a drink to go with the reading matter. There was a half bath off the study. |
| 6707 |
The wbrms in my solar plexus crawl and crawl and crawl. I would be better off in bed but there would be a dark animal underneath the bed and the dark animal would crawl around rustling and hump himself and bump the underside of the bed, then I would let out a yell that wouldn't make any sound except to me. |
| 6708 |
More. It's all right for the first two or three days and then it is negative. You suffer and you take a drink and for a little while it is better, but the price keeps getting higher and higher and what you get for it is less and less and then there is always the point where you get nothing but nausea. |
| 6709 |
If a well man prays, that's faith. A sick man prays and he is just scared. Nuts to prayer. This is the world you made and you make it all by yourself and what little outside help you got well you made that too. Stop praying, you jerk. Get up on your feet and take that drink. It's too late for anything else now. |
| 6710 |
No variety about the moon. It comes and goes like the milkman and the moon's milk is always the same. The milk's moon is always hold it, chum. You've got your feet crossed. This is no time to get involved in the case history of the moon. You got enough case history to take care of the whole damn valley. |
| 6711 |
No. Would have sat up and said, Are you sick, darling? Yes, I am sick, darling. But don't give it a thought, darling, because this sick is my sick and not your sick, and let you sleep still and lovely and never remember and no slime from me to you and nothing come near you that is grim and gray and ugly. |
| 6712 |
She stood there leaning against me, holding the gun with both hands pressed hard against her body. She was racked with panting sobs. I reached around her body and put my hand on the gun. She spun around as if it took that to make her realize I was there. Her eyes widened and her body sagged against me. |
| 6713 |
You meant to kill yourself. You didn't have any nightmare. You were swimming in a sea of self pity. You didn't have any gun in the drawer or under your pillow either. You got up and got the gun and got back into bed and there you were all ready to wipe out the whole messy business. But I don't think you had the nerve. |
| 6714 |
You don't get that sort of invitation from that sort of woman very often anywhere. Candy saved me. There was a thin squeak and I swudg around to see the doorknob moving. I jerked loose and jumted for the door. I got it open and barged out through it and the Mex was tearing along the hall and down the stairs. |
| 6715 |
I went down the stairs fast and crossed into the study and grabbed the bottle of Scotch and tilted it; When I couldn't swallow any more I leaned against the wall and panted and let the stuff burn in me until the fumes reached my brain. It was a long time since dinner. It was a long time since anything that was normal. |
| 6716 |
The whiskey hit me hard and fast and I kept guzzling it until the room started to get hazy and the furniture was all in the wrong places and the lamplight was like widlfire or summer lightning. Then I was flat out on the leather couch, trying to balance the bottle on my chest. It seemed to be empty. |
| 6717 |
I plowed across to the half bath and stripped off my tie and shirt and sloshed cold water in my face with both hands and sloshed it on my head. When I was dripping wet I toweled myself off savagely. I put my shirt and tie back on and reached for my jacket and the gun in the pocket banged against the wall. |
| 6718 |
It was too far from the city to get any smog and cut off by the low mountains from the dampness of the ocean. It was going to be hot later, but in a nice refined exclusive sort of way, nothing brutal like the heat of the desert, not sticky and rank like the heat of the city. Idle Valley was a perfect place to live. |
| 6719 |
There would be nothing there but another dead moth and another layer of dust. In the safe would be my portrait of Madison. I could go down and play with that, and with the five crisp hundred dollar bills that still smelled of coffee. I could do that, but I didn't want to. Something inside me had gone sour. |
| 6720 |
I was slow getting down there because I stopped on the way for a sandwich. I aired out the office and switched on the buzzer and poked my head through the communicating door and she was there already, sitting in the same chair where Mendy Menendez had sat and looking through what could have been the same magazine. |
| 6721 |
I got out first and helped him hold it. I helped her get out. She had hardly spoken to me since we got into the car in front of my building. She looked tired and nervous. Maybe this idiotic hunk of architecture depressed her. It would have depressed a laughing jackass and made it coo like a mourning dove. |
| 6722 |
I don't know how it feels to be worth a hundred million or so, but he didn't look as if he was having any fun. He was an enormous man, all of six feet five and built to scale. He wore a gray tweed suit with no padding. His shoulders didn't need any. He wore a white shirt and a dark tie and no display handkerchief. |
| 6723 |
He had ample motive from the rather limited police point of view. But he also had an excellent defense that it was her gun in her possession and that he tried to take it away from her and failed and she shot herself with it. A good trial lawyer could have done a lot with that. He would probably have been acquitted. |
| 6724 |
Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don't like them. |
| 6725 |
You can't have quality with mass production. You don't want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn't sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. |
| 6726 |
You don't like the way the world is going so you use what power you have to close off a private corner to live in as near as possible to the way you remember people lived fifty years ago before the age of mass production. You've got a hundred million dollars and all it has bought you is a pain in the neck. |
| 6727 |
When you were in it you could taste it and smell it and it made your eyes smart. Everybody was griping about it. In Pasadena, where the stuffy millionaires holed up after Beverly Hills was spoiled for them by the movie crowd, the city fathers screamed with rage. Everything was the fault of the smog. |
| 6728 |
A tethered horse dozed wearily under a dump of live oaks. A brown Mexican sat on the ground and ate something out of a newspaper. A tumbleweed rolled lazily across the road and came to rest against a piece of granite outcrop, and a lizard that had been there an instant before disappeared without seeming to move at all. |
| 6729 |
Then I was around the hill on the blacktop and in another country. In five minutes I turned into the driveway of the Wades' house, parked and walked across the flagstones and rang the bell. Wade answered the door himself, in a brown and white checked shirt with short sleeves, pale blue denim slacks, and house slippers. |
| 6730 |
I lay there for half hour trying to make up my mind what to do. Part of me wanted to let him get good and drunk and see if anything came out. I didn't think any thing much would happen to him in his own study in his own house. He might fall down again but it would be a long time. The guy had capacity. |
| 6731 |
He bothered me sitting there waiting for me to create. Mistake. Ought to have kept him. Word would have got around I was a homo. The dever boys that write book reviews because they can't write anything else would have caught on and started giving me the buildup. Have to take care of their own, you know. |
| 6732 |
Too fast, the speedboat almost turned over. The surfboard rider danced on one foot trying to hold, his balance, ihen went shooting off into the water. The speedboat drifted to a stop and the man in the water came up to it in a lazy crawl, then went back along the tow rope and rolled himself on to the surfboard. |
| 6733 |
A glass on the table had about two inches in it and the other bottle was about three quarters full. I put the empty on the tea wagon and rolled it out of the room, then went back to close the french windows and turn the slats of the blinds. The speedboat might come back and wake him. I shut the study door. |
| 6734 |
I wheeled the tea wagon out to the kitchen, which was blue and white and large and airy and empty, I was still hungry. I ate another sandwich and drank what was left of the beer, then poured a cup of coffee and drank that. The beer was flat but the coffee was still hot. Then I went back to the patio. |
| 6735 |
Probably was and the guy in the speedboat didn't give a damn. He enjoyed making a nuisance of himself, like other people I was meeting. I walked down to the edge of the lake. He made it this time. The driver slowed just enough on the turn and the brown lad on the surfboard leaned far out against the centrifugal pull. |
| 6736 |
Otherwise everything looked natural enough. Suicides prepare themselves in all sorts of ways, some with liquor, some with elaborate champagne dinners. Some in evening clothes, some in no clothes. People have killed themselves on the tops of walls, in ditches, in bathrooms, in the water, over the water, on the water. |
| 6737 |
The basket was almost empty, which made it easy. No use wondering where the gun had been. There were too many places to hide it in. It could have been in a chair or in the couch, under one of the cushions. It could have been on the floor, behind the books, anywhere. I went out and shut the door. I listened. |
| 6738 |
And when you have worked your way through it you haven't saved anybody a thing. Often enough you have made it worse. I got up and followed her into the study. She was kneeling beside the couch with his head pulled against her breast, smearing herself with his blood. She wasn't making a sound of any kind. |
| 6739 |
I went back out and found a telephone and a book. I called the sheriff's substation that seemed to be nearest. Didn't matter, they'd relay it by radio in any case. Then I went out to the kitchen and turned the water on and fed the strips of yellow paper from my pocket down the electric garbage grinder. |
| 6740 |
I dumped the tea leaves from the other pot after it. In a matter of seconds the stuff was gone. I shut off the water and switched off the motor. I went back to the living room and opened the front door and stepped outside. There must have been a deputy cruising close by because he was there in about six minutes. |
| 6741 |
He had stiff white eyebrows and in the days before he stopped wearing a hat you were always a little surprised when he took it off there was so much more head than you expected. He was a hard tough cop with a grim outlook on life but a very decent guy underneath. He ought to have made captain years ago. |
| 6742 |
He came down the stairs rubbing the side of his jaw. Flashlights had been going off in the study for a long time. Men had gone in and out. I had just sat in the living room with a plain clothes dick and waited. Ohls sat down on the edge of a chair and dangled his hands. He was chewing on an unlit cigarette. |
| 6743 |
So it must have been somebody that just happened to drop by. That somebody had to know where Wade's gun was, had to find him drunk enough to be asleep or passed out, and had to pull the trigger when that speedboat was making enough noise to drown the shot, and had to get away before you came back into the house. |
| 6744 |
His inkwell was a mounted polished horse's hoof and his pens were planted in the mate to it filled with white sand. A gold plate on each of these said something or other about a date. In the middle of a spotless desk blotter lay a bag of Bull Durham and a pack of brown cigarette papers. Petersen rolled his own. |
| 6745 |
The Sheriff had a good act. He had a handsome hawklike profile, getting a little saggy under the chin by now, but he knew how to hold his head so it wouldn't show too much. He put a lot of hard work into having his picture taken. He was in his middle fifties and his father, a Dane, had left him a lot of money. |
| 6746 |
There had been crooks in his department and they had fooled him as well as they had fooled the public, but none of the crookedness rubbed off on Sheriff Petersen. He just went right on getting elected without even trying, riding white horses at the head of parades, and questioning suspects in front of cameras. |
| 6747 |
He just sat at his desk looking sternly at the suspect, showing his profile to the camera. The flash bulbs would go off, the camera men woukl thank the Sheriff deferentially, and the suspect would be removed not having opened his mouth, and the Sheriff would go home to his ranch in the San Fernando Valley. |
| 6748 |
Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office forever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face, and a dose mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable. |
| 6749 |
He said goodnight and went out. A deadpan character with hard black eyes went with him, his personal bodyguard. The door dosed. When he was gone Captain Hernandez moved to the desk and sat in the Sheriff's enormous chair and a stenotype operator in the corner moved his stand out from the wall to get elbow room. |
| 6750 |
Candy told his story in a quiet savage voice with very little accent. It seemed as if he could turn that on and off at will. His story was that he had hung around downstairs in case he was wanted again, part of the time in the kitchen where he got himself some food, part of the time in the living room. |
| 6751 |
He had seen her put a robe on with nothing under it and he had seen me go into her room and I shut the door and stayed in there a long time, a couple of hours he thought. He had gone up the stairs and listened. He had heard the bedsprings making sounds. He had heard whispering. He made his meaning very obvious. |
| 6752 |
Didn't seem to impress him much. It's obvious what's eating him, An old fashioned case of hot pants, If he'd been around and we had any reason to suspect murder, he'd make a pretty good pigeon except that he would have used a knife. I got the impression earlier that he felt pretty bad about Wade's death. |
| 6753 |
People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. |
| 6754 |
The inquest was a flop. The coroner sailed into It before the medical evidence was complete, for fear the publicity would die on him. He needn't have worried. The death of a writer even a loud writer is not news for long, and that summer there was too much to compete. A king abdicated and another was assassinated. |
| 6755 |
He had a bright malicious grin on his face I had no idea why and as usual he was dressed just a little too well, in a cocoa brown gabardine suit with a white nylon shirt and midnight blue bow tie. On the witness stand he was quiet and made a good impression. Yes, the boss had been pretty drunk lately a lot of times. |
| 6756 |
She almost passed me without a glance on the way out, then at the last moment turned her head a couple of inches and nodded very slightly, as if I was somebody she must have met somewhere a long time ago, but couldn't quite place in her memory. Qutside on the steps when it was all over I ran into Ohls. |
| 6757 |
The boys had been very careful about that. They wanted him to live. After all he was a cop. In our town the mobs don't kill a cop. They leave that to the juveniles. And a live cop who has been put through the meat grinder is a much better advertisement. He gets well eventually and goes back to work. |
| 6758 |
I put the chessboard on the coffee table and set out a problem called The Sphynx. It is printed on the end papers of a book on chess by Blackburn, the English chess wizard, probably the most dynamic chess player who ever lived, although he wouldn't get to first base in the cold war type of chess they play nowadays. |
| 6759 |
She seems quite resigned. She has read the script Roger left and says she thinks it can be finished off very easily. It will be a good deal shorter than his other books, but that is balanced by the publicity value. I guess you think we publishers are a pretty callous bunch. Eileen will be home all afternoon. |
| 6760 |
He was alone in the house, although you were not far away. The servants were away, Candy and the cook, and Eileen had been uptown shopping and arrived home just after it happened. At the moment it happened a very noisy motorboat on the lake drowned the sound of the shot, so that even you didn't hear it. |
| 6761 |
Roger was already dead. She looked into the study from the doorway, thought he was asleep on the couch, went up to her room, then out to the kitchen to make some tea. A little later than she did I also looked into the study, noticed there was no sound of breathing, and found out why. In due course I called the law. |
| 6762 |
High sprinklers revolved over the big smooth lawns and the water made a swishing sound as it licked at the grass. By this time most of the well heeled people were away somewhere else. You could tell by the shuttered look of the houses and the way the gardener's truck was parked smack in the middle of the driveway. |
| 6763 |
I went in and shut the door. She was standing at the end of one of the facing davenports, and Spencer was standing beside her. She looked like a million. She had white slacks on, very high waisted, and a white sport shirt with half sleeves, and a lilac colored handkerchief budding from the pocket over her left breast. |
| 6764 |
But there is a kind of silence that is almost as loud as a shout. I had it. I had it all around me, thick and hard. In the kitchen I could hear water run. Outside on the road I could hear the dull thump of a folded newspaper hit the driveway, then the light inaccurate whistling of a boy wheeling away on his bicycle. |
| 6765 |
And when she spoke her voice had the lucid emptiness of that mechanical voice on the telephone that tells you the time and if you keep on listening, which people don't because they have no reason to, it will keep on telling you the passing seconds forever, without the slightest change of inflection. |
| 6766 |
Roger didn't know he had killed her. He had blacked out completely. He knew something was wrong and he tried to bring it to the surface, but he couldn't. The shock had destroyed his memory of it. Perhaps it would have come back and perhaps in the last moments of his life it did come back. But not until then. |
| 6767 |
He was living with a rich pervert, the kind that collects first editions and does fancy cooking and has a very expensive secret library behind a panel in the wall. The two of them had a fight. They fought all over the house, from room to room, the place was a shambles and the rich guy eventually got the low score. |
| 6768 |
I am ashamed of nothing. I saw the whole nasty scene. The guest house she used for her amours happens to be a nice secluded affair with its own garage and entrance on a side street, a dead end, shaded by big trees. The time came, as it must to people like Roger, when he was no longer a satisfactory lover. |
| 6769 |
You are both men and you must know that nothing shocks a man quite so much as to hear a supposedly refined woman use the language of the gutter and the public urinal. He was drunk, he had had sudden spells of violence, and he had one then. He tore the statuette out of her hand. You can guess the rest. |
| 6770 |
When I ran for my car to get away he was just standing there looking down at her. Then he bent and picked her up in his arms and carried her into the guest house. I knew then that the shock had partially sobered him. He got home in about an hour. He was very quiet. It shook him when he saw me waiting. |
| 6771 |
And Sylvia Lennox wasn't killed outside the guest house, but inside it on the bed. And there was practically no blood, because she was already dead shot dead with a gun and when the statuette was used to beat her face to a pulp, it was beating a dead woman, And the dead, Mrs. Wade, bleed very little. |
| 6772 |
They fouled it up so bad that they couldn't straighten it out now if they wanted to. And they don't want to. They'd blast a confession out of you so quickly you wouldn't even have time to tell them your full name. And you'd be sitting on your fanny up in San Quentin with a life sentence three weeks from Tuesday. |
| 6773 |
They write the laws for other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers called judges so that other judges can say the first judges were wrong and the Supreme Court can say the second lot were wrong. Sure there's such a thing as law. We're up to our necks in it. About all it does is make business for lawyers. |
| 6774 |
In a sense they are all insane, but not in the way Spencer meant it. It was almost daylight when I finally went to bed. The jangle of the telephone dragged me up out of a black well of sleep. I rolled over on the bed, fumbled for slippers, and realized that I hadn't been asleep for more than a couple of hours. |
| 6775 |
Her skin was cold and respiration would not be noticed without close examination, The houseboy thought she was dead. She died approxi mately an hour after that. I understand the lady was subject to occasional violent attacks of bronchial asthma. The demerol was prescribed by Dr. Loring as an emergency measure. |
| 6776 |
You've got a background of emotional exhaustion, bereavement, some use of drugs, the strain of wartime life in England under bombing, this clandestine marriage, the man coming back here, and so on. Undoubtedly she developed a feeling of guilt and tried to purge herself of it by a sort of transference. |
| 6777 |
The poor unfortunate bastard either thought he had killed Sylvia Lennox or he actually had killed her or else he bad some reason to know his wife had. Either way he was going to lay it on the line eventually. Sure, he'd been hitting the hooch long before, but he was a guy married to a beautiful nothing. |
| 6778 |
Every cop has run into it a hundred times. You were the loose end, the guy that helped Lennox escape, his friend, and probably to some extent his confidant. What did he know and what did he tell you? He took the gun that had killed her and he knew it had been fired. She could have thought he did it for her. |
| 6779 |
This ain't police business any more. It's getting to be a branch of the medical racket. They're in and out of jail, the courts, the interrogation rooms. They write reports fifteen pages long on why some punk of a juvenile held up a liquor store or raped a schoolgirl or peddled ter to the senior class. |
| 6780 |
It was detailed enough and reasonable enough to satisfy any open mind. Eileen Wade had killed Terry's wife in a fit of jealous fury and later when the opportunity was set up she had killed Roger because she was sure he knew. The gun fired into the ceiling of his room that night had been part of the setup. |
| 6781 |
Then I did and he knew me at once. He should have died young in the snow of Norway, my lover that I gave to death. He came back a friend of gamblers, the husband of a rich whore, a spoiled and ruined man, and probably some kind of crook in his past life. Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. |
| 6782 |
If they did, their taxes would go up fast and their police co operation would go down the same way. Then the top guys back East would decide some changes were necessary. An operator who can't get along with Chris Mady ain't operating correctly. Get him the hell out of there and put somebody else in. |
| 6783 |
Either I would get really stiff or stay sober. After a while I had another of the same. It was just past six when the kid with the papers came into the bar. One of the barkeeps yelled at him to beat it, but he managed one quick round of the customers before a waiter got hold of him and threw him out. |
| 6784 |
Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make a note never to buy any. |
| 6785 |
I unlocked the door and pushed it part way open and then stopped. The door was about ten inches open from the frame. It was dark inside, there was no sound. But I had the feeling that the room beyond was not empty. Perhaps a spring squeaked faintly or I caught the gleam of a white jacket across the room. |
| 6786 |
Perhaps on a warm still night like this one the room beyond the door was not warm enough, not still enough. Perhaps there was a drifting smell of man on the air. And perhaps I was just on edge. I stepped sideways off the porch on to the ground and leaned down against the shrubbery. Nothing happened. |
| 6787 |
Nobody opened a door and the windows on my side were all shut tight. I waited and listened, crouched against the bush, and there was nothing to listen to and nothing to wait for. Just a dark car motionless at the foot of my redwood steps, with the windows closed. If its motor was still running I couldn't hear it. |
| 6788 |
Still the car door didn't open, still the house was silent and without light. Then a siren growled in low pitch just for a second or two and stopped. And then at last the house was full of lights and a man in a white dinner jacket came out to the head of the steps and looked sideways along the wall and the shrubbery. |
| 6789 |
I stepped up onto the small redwood landing and went in through the door and stopped just inside. A man was sitting across the room with his legs crossed and a gun resting sideways on his thigh. He looked rangy and tough and his skin had that dried out look of people who live in sun bleached cilmates. |
| 6790 |
He got buried like a dog without even a name over the dirt where they put his body. And I had a little something to do with proving him innocent. So that makes you look bad, huh? He saved your life and he lost his, and that didn't mean a thing to you. All that means anything to you is playing the big shot. |
| 6791 |
Then he crossed himself quickly and walked out of the front door. The tough Mex followed him. Then the other one, the dried out desert type, picked up the gun and the knife and went out too. He shut the door. Ohls waited motionless. There was a sound of doors banging shut, then a car wnet off into the night. |
| 6792 |
We told him we couldn't stop gambling in the county, but we could make it tough enough to cut way into the take. No mobster beats up a cop, not even a bad cop, and gets away with it in our territory. Starr convinced us he had nothing to do with it, that the outfit was sore about it and Menendez was going to get told. |
| 6793 |
The big steal is in dimes and quarters and half dollars and once in a while a buck or even a five spot. The big racket money comes in like water from the pipe in your bathroom, a steady stream that never stops flowing. Any time anybody wants to knock off a professional gambler, that's for me. I like it. |
| 6794 |
There's only one way a jock can win a race, but there's twenty ways he can lose one, with a steward at every eighth pole watching, and not able to do a damn thing about it if the jock knows his stuff. That's legal gambling, pal, clean honest business, state approved. So it's right, is it? Not by my book, it ain't. |
| 6795 |
We don't have mobs and crime syndicates and goon squads because we have crooked politicians and their stooges in the City Hall and the legislatures. Crime isn't a disease, it's a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumor, except that the cop would rather cure it with a blackjack. |
| 6796 |
Back doors are a soft touch if they open out and are old enough for the wood to have dried and shrunk. You knock the pins out of the hinges and the rest is easy. Ohls showed me a dent in the frame when he left to go back over the hill to where he had left his car on the next street. He could have opened. |
| 6797 |
I hadn't the least idea of getting you drunk. You don't want to go to bed with me. I understand perfectly. No reason why you should. But we can still have a glass or two of champagne, can't we? This doesn't have to be a wrangle about who is going to get seduced and when and where and on how much champagne. |
| 6798 |
It's no disgrace to have money and no disgrace to marry it. Most of those who have it don't deserve it and don't know how to behave with it. But it won't be long. We'll have another war and at the end of that nobody will have any money except the crooks and the chiselers. We'll all be taxed to nothing, the rest of us. |
| 6799 |
I called a cab and carried her overnight case down the steps. We said goodbye. I watched the cab out of sight. I went back up the steps and into the bedroom and pulled the bed to pieces and remade it. There was a long dark hair on one of the pillows. There was a lump of lead at the pit of my stomach. |
| 6800 |
He had a corner office with a blue carpet, a red mahogany desk with carved corners, very old and obviously very valuable, the usual glass front bookshelves of mustardyellow legal books, the usual cartoons by Spy of famous English judges, and a large portrait of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the south wall, alone. |
| 6801 |
It was an office no decorator had had a chance to pansy up. He was in his shirtsleeves and he looked tired, but he had that kind of face. He was smoking one of his tasteless cigarettes. Ashes from it had fallen on his loosened tie. His limp black hair was all over the place. He stared at me silently after I sat down. |
| 6802 |
He was a well dressed Mexican or Suramericano of some sort. He sat by the open window smoking a brown cigarette that smelled strong. He was tall and very slender and very elegant, with a neat dark mustache and dark hair, rather longer than we wear it, and a fawn colored suit of some loosely woven material. |
| 6803 |
I wouldn't know. Lennox knew they were there. He knew why. He wrote me that letter because he had a guilty conscience. He had played me for a sucker and he was too nice a guy for that to rest easy on him. He put the bill five thousand dollars it was in the letter because he had a lot of money and he knew I hadn't. |
| 6804 |
Then he took the Mauser pistol and opened up one of the cartridges and took out the bullet and put the cartridge back in the breech. Then he put this gun to Lennox's temple and pulled the trigger. It made a nasty looking wound, but it did not kilt him. Then he was carried out on a stretcher covered up and well hidden. |
| 6805 |
Then when the American lawyer arrived, Lennox was doped and packed in ice and kept in a dark corner of the carpinterla where the man was making a coffin. The American lawyer saw Lennox there, he was ice cold, in a deep stupor, and there was a bloody blackened wound in his temple. He looked plenty dead. |
| 6806 |
They couldn't make Terry's face perfect, but they had done plenty. They had even changed his nose, taken out some bone and made it look flatter, less Nordic. They couldn't eliminate every trace of a scar, so they had put a couple on the other side of his face too. Knife scars are not uncommon in Latin countries. |
| 6807 |
A few details wrong, but they are not important. It was a quick deal and some of it was improvised and I didn't know myself just what was going to happen. I was told to do certain things and to leave a dear trail. Mendy didn't like my writing to you, but I held out for that. He undersold you a little. |
| 6808 |
You're just that kind of guy. For a long time I couldn't figure you at all. You had nice ways and nice qualities, but there was something wrong. You had standards and you lived up to them, but they were personal. They had no relation to any kind of ethics or scruples. You were a nice guy because you had a nice nature. |
| 6809 |
We were sitting in the garden listening to the intoxicated hum of late autumnal wasps, talking quietly and for a long time of Lajos and the children, as well as of Vilma, my dead sister. Our seat was in front of the house, under the window behind whose shutters Mother had died twenty five years before. |
| 6810 |
He never wrote about his feelings, not even his plans, instead he described the town where he happened to be staying so vividly the reader could immediately see the streets and the room where Lajos was writing the letter, could hear the voices of people who had said something clever or amusing the day before. |
| 6811 |
His description of the town was as scrupulously accurate as any topographer's, but it was a lunar town, pure moonshine. He took extraordinary care to bring this false truth alive. It was the same with people and scenery. Everything was described with the utmost attention to detail. I read the letters and was moved. |
| 6812 |
Around midnight a fierce warm wind played around the house; I got out of bed and closed the windows. I would not want to excuse my feminine frailty, I have no time for it, really, but that midnight I stood in front of the long mirror that used to hang above my mother's dressing table and took good stock of myself. |
| 6813 |
It was respect and a kind of timid languishing that I inspired in them. Thanks to gardening and possibly my own metabolism I had not put on weight: I was tall, straight, and well proportioned. I had a few gray hairs now, but they were imperceptible among the light blond of the rest, my most characteristic feature. |
| 6814 |
I had passed forty five. Lajos had long been living with someone else, he might even be married. I hadn't heard anything from him for years. Occasionally I saw his name in the papers, once with regard to some political scandal. It would not have surprised me if one day Lajos had become famous, or, indeed infamous. |
| 6815 |
And this was all very much in keeping with his character, both the duel and the being uninjured. I have no idea whether he has ever been seriously ill, either. His fate lay elsewhere, I thought. And I got back into bed, together with my letters and memories and the sour sweet consciousness of my lost youth. |
| 6816 |
I would be lying if I claimed to have felt particularly unfortunate in those hours. Oh yes, there was a time some twenty or twenty two years ago when I was unfortunate. But the feeling gradually melted away, the wound scabbed over. It was an unfamiliar strength that enabled me to suppress the upwelling of pain. |
| 6817 |
And later she stayed because everyone else in the family had died off before her, so Nunu was left, decade on decade, step by step, to ascend the ladder of family hierarchy, until she finally took Grandmother's place, moved into the room upstairs, and inherited her sphere of influence. Then Mama died, and then Vilma. |
| 6818 |
She always dressed the same, summer and winter, in a dress of some smooth material that was not silk but was not taffeta either and which struck strangers, and even me, as a little too Sunday best. In recent years she spoke just as much as was necessary and no more. She never told me anything of her previous life. |
| 6819 |
I wondered, then put the question aside, because it was perfectly natural that Nunu should know everything that pertained to the house, to the family, to my person, indeed to my life, including everything my dead sister had hidden away in the cellar or in the attic, so she would have known of the ring too. |
| 6820 |
I had never held the ring in my hands. I was frightened of it. I feared the knowledge I had never put into words. I couldn't help but know that everything Lajos touched lost its original meaning and value, broke down into its elements, changed as did the noble metals once the alchemists got them into their retorts. |
| 6821 |
Lajos was not a schemer of that kind. Lajos has never once committed a criminal act. And he loved you. I don't think he would have used the ring to drag your name through the dirt. It simply happened that he had to sell the ring because he needed the money, but lacked the courage to admit he had sold it. |
| 6822 |
Maybe he just wanted to be generous. It was such a wonderful moment, everyone arriving fresh from Vilma's funeral, his first gesture being to hand over to you the family's only valuable heirloom. I suspected it as soon as you described the grand moment. That's why I had it looked at later. It's a fake. |
| 6823 |
I put on the ring and gazed at it. The stone sparkled with a cold vacant light. It was a perfect copy, created by a master. We remained sitting on the edge of the bed gazing at the ring. Then Nunu kissed me, gave a sigh, and went off without a word. I carried on sitting there for a long time staring at the fake stone. |
| 6824 |
A terrible constitution, I thought, and started shivering. That's how I fell asleep, all goose flesh, the fake ring on my finger, my senses dulled. I was like someone who has spent too long in a stuffy room then suddenly feels dizzy in the pitiless sharp air of truth that roars about her like a gale. |
| 6825 |
I went out into the garden in the early morning and cut three dahlias for the vase. Our garden is not particularly big, but it does completely surround the house. I don't think it had passed eight o'clock yet. I was standing in the dew, in the great silence, when I heard conversation on the veranda. |
| 6826 |
Even a blind man could see that Laci was ridiculously possessive of Lajos, doing everything he possibly could to make his friend part of the family while at the same time disapproving of Lajos's courtship, interrupting our clumsy moments of togetherness, mocking the uncertain signs of our increasing mutual attraction. |
| 6827 |
We urgently started reading his high and somewhat cloudy meditations on life and death. Father too was pulling himself together. He drank less and was particularly careful when we had guests to hide his sad patchwork life from Lajos's all seeing eye. Every weekend my brother and Lajos would arrive with guests. |
| 6828 |
This declaration shook me and upset me. I felt that Lajos was abandoning his vocation for some great, somewhat obscure project in order to enter a struggle on behalf of somebody or for a whole lot of somebodies, in which he should be armed not with the weapons of knowledge but with those of guile and pragmatism. |
| 6829 |
Tibor, whom I often consulted on this kind of issue, shrugged and said Lajos had no political convictions at all, that he sailed with the prevailing wind and simply wanted to be involved wherever power was being distributed. It might have been fair criticism, and yet it wasn't quite accurate enough. |
| 6830 |
My experience of Lajos is that he is the kind of man who begins with lies but then in the middle of his lying grows passionate and weeps, going on to lie more, this time with tears in his eyes, until eventually, to everyone's utter surprise, he tells the truth as eloquently as he had been telling the opposite. |
| 6831 |
Every year they brought good produce that Nunu managed, in her own secretive way, quite ceremonially, to put a price on, and it was from that sale that we managed to live, and, indeed, clear our debts, sometimes even to the extent of being able to help Laci. For a long time I did not understand how this was done. |
| 6832 |
There were times when life in the house and the garden was like real life that has a purpose, a project, some inner meaning. It was just that it had no meaning; we could have gone on for years on end just as we were, but if someone had ordered us to leave the very next day I would have put up no resistance. |
| 6833 |
Lajos's past was compounded of such easy come, easy go schemes and promises. Now they seemed merely acts of childish irresponsibility. We had been through some difficult times since then. Lajos had passed fifty and no longer told fibs. He would take responsibility for what he had done and was already on his way to us. |
| 6834 |
He always reddened when there was a conflict with his role as a magistrate, the role that calls for guardedness and judgment, where he had to give the right verdict knowing that this verdict did not accord with the general sense of justice in which most people believed, and which he had sworn to uphold. |
| 6835 |
I had a vision. I saw the past so clearly it seemed to be the present. I saw the garden, the same garden where we were just now waiting for Lajos, waiting under the great ash, but then we were twenty years younger, our hearts full of despair and anger. Harsh, passionate words buzzed like flies in the autumn air. |
| 6836 |
The air was scented and damp. We were twenty years younger then, relatives, friends, and vague acquaintances, and Lajos was standing in our midst like a thief caught red handed. I see him there as he stands, unflummoxed, blinking a little, occasionally removing his glasses and carefully wiping them. |
| 6837 |
He is alone at the center of the agitated circle, as calm as anyone can be when they know the game is up, that all is discovered and there is nothing left to do except stand patiently and listen while judgment is pronounced. Then suddenly he is gone, and we are living on in our mechanical way, like wax dolls. |
| 6838 |
We all belonged to him, had combined against him, and now that he was on his way to us, we were living different lives, more exciting, more dangerous lives. I stood before the mirror in my room, in my old dress, feeling all this. Lajos was bringing back both the past and the timeless experience of being alive. |
| 6839 |
But reality, that miraculous ice cold shower, woke me from my dream. Lajos had arrived and the day had begun, the day of Lajos's visit, the day of which Tibor, Laci, and Endre would speak until their dying day, confusing his words, correcting each other, conjuring and refuting various images of the truth. |
| 6840 |
Lajos wouldn't have the effect he does if it were deliberate, since ordinary braggarts and amoral buffoons who provide some brief amusement or rouse fierce debate in their social circle grow tiresome eventually and find that people turn away from them, precisely because everything they do is calculated and predictable. |
| 6841 |
Even now, in the very moment of his arrival, he was directing, presenting, and speechifying with transparent pleasure. He introduced his children with a gesture that was hard to classify but was unmistakably melodramatic, as though they were orphans. His first words were accusing, accusing and pleading. |
| 6842 |
He worked feverishly. It was clear this was going to be a bigger and better show than any before, the very acme of his art; his whole heart was in it, the tears were real, the kisses hot, and the feats of memory involved in compiling the various tricks were astonishing: his talent dazzled everyone. Even Nunu. |
| 6843 |
And it was obvious that everyone was happy that Lajos was here, happy to be present at this reunion. I would not have been surprised to see a small crowd gather behind the garden palings and sing something. But the general confusion was so much like a deluge that individual details were lost in the flood of well being. |
| 6844 |
He was an animal tamer past his prime, of whom the animals are no longer afraid. His clothes, too, were peculiarly old fashioned: as if he were wanting to keep up with the fashions at all costs but some inner demon prevented him from being elegant or fashionable in the way he thought was necessary and which he liked. |
| 6845 |
His tie, for example, was just a shade louder than was right for the rest of his outfit, his character and age, so he had the air of a gigolo. His suit was of a light color, fashionable in that it was loose and made for traveling, the kind you see movie moguls in magazines wear when they are globe trotting. |
| 6846 |
But at the same time I noticed that the excitement of this first conversation was far from indifference; the passion with which I spoke was a sign that there still existed a relationship that was far from fanciful, affected, or imagined, a relationship that was not mere moonshine, memory, or nostalgia. |
| 6847 |
Everything that was serious and heavy in his appearance and nature, the mysterious resistance to the world that never let anyone get close to him, the priestly air and the silent watchfulness that was characteristic of him from his earliest youth, sometimes made it hard, even for a stranger, to connect with him. |
| 6848 |
I carried on deceiving myself to the last. Endre knew, so did Tibor. Later we were astonished at how cheaply and easily we surrendered to Lajos and accepted the fact that in life there are no halfway solutions, and the process having begun fifteen years ago simply had to be finished. Lajos knew it too. |
| 6849 |
The woman, whom the children addressed as Olga, was, if anything, rather melancholy and embarrassed. She made no effort to press her company on us and, after the introductions, sat quietly at the breakfast table fiddling with her parasol and gazing at her plate. I took her for an adventuress at first. |
| 6850 |
But my later impression was that if she was an adventuress she was a tired and ill tempered one, someone who no longer believed in the adventure and would happily give it all up to settle in some quiet occupation like crochet or embroidery. Occasionally she gave a bitter smile that bared her yellow, masculine teeth. |
| 6851 |
The unknown woman sat down in a corner and talked in a flat voice. She told me how she had first met Lajos eight years before when she left her husband. Her son worked in an office; she did not say precisely where or what kind. I had never in my life seen people like the woman and her son at close quarters. |
| 6852 |
There was something unusual about the boy; he might have been the hero of a novel, most likely a detective story. He said little, and when he spoke he stared at the ceiling and pronounced each syllable distinctly, almost singing the words. He was as melancholy as his mother; both exuded a dreary sadness. |
| 6853 |
It meant nothing to me. I always have a strong reaction to names, liking or hating them. It is an unjustified, crude feeling. But it is just such feelings that determine our relationship to the world, our loves and hates. I couldn't give him very much attention, since his mother completely occupied mine. |
| 6854 |
Everyone had deceived her, everyone was against her, and, in the end, they had all left her; that, at least, was what I gathered from her philippics. I occasionally shuddered: it was like being addressed by a lunatic. Then, without pausing, she got on to the subject of Lajos. She spoke cynically and confidentially. |
| 6855 |
I don't think Father has ever written a more sincere letter. He writes that he is a crushed, injured man, that he trusts only you, that only you can give him back his self respect and sanity. He begs you to elope with him, to abandon all else, to go abroad with him; that he puts his life into your hands. |
| 6856 |
We put aside the excuses. There remained the fury, the hot thick feeling that floods every inch of the human landscape with its muddy slime, and when Vilma died there were no family ties left, only a blank floodplain of hatred. I held the picture close to my nearsighted eyes and examined it carefully. |
| 6857 |
Vilma was always asking me for my things, anything I had been given: clothes, books, musical scores, anything at all she thought might be treasured or of value to me. That's how she got the rosewood box. I protested for a while, then grew tired and gave in; I had to give it to her because she was simply stronger. |
| 6858 |
I think he's right. You may think a great deal has happened since you left us, and indeed a great deal has happened, not always for the best. I don't remember the earliest days. Then we went to school and life became exciting. We moved apartments yearly, not just apartments but schools and nannies too. |
| 6859 |
It was such an interesting life. The headwaiter dressed us, we shared lessons with the elevator boy, and when Father disappeared for a few days the chambermaids would look after us and see to our education. There were times when we ate sea crab day after day and other times when we hardly ate anything. |
| 6860 |
And, when it comes down to it, this is what we love in Father, and what you too love, Esther. Father is capable of discarding a piano or a decent job the way other people throw away used gloves; he has no respect for objects and market value, you know. This is something we, as women, cannot understand. |
| 6861 |
The sky had grown gray since lunch, and through the window I could see dense dark September clouds gathering above the garden. The room floated in a half light. I went over to the window and closed one of the open casements, afraid that someone might overhear us in the heavy silence before the rain. |
| 6862 |
It wouldn't have surprised me if he had rubbed his hands together at that point, like a satisfied businessman left to meet his family after a particularly good deal, contemplating ever new deals and ever more tempting offers in the exhilaration of the moment. There was not a trace of shame or doubt on his face. |
| 6863 |
It was you: you were what I was missing, you were my character, my being. One recognizes this sort of thing. A man without character, or with an imperfect character, is morally something of a cripple. There are people like that, people who in every other respect are perfectly normal but for a missing arm or leg. |
| 6864 |
That's the truth. That is the terrible immoral truth. One can't throw a woman away the way one does a matchbox simply because one has passions, because that happens to be one's nature, because one finds it impossible being tied to a woman or because one is ambitious, or because everything and everyone is merely useful. |
| 6865 |
I am old. We are at the end of life, as you yourself so grandly declared. Yes, it is the end, and you are the reason that this is the way it has passed, so empty, so false; it is why I stayed here, living alone like an old maid who is thrifty with her feelings but eventually buys a cat and a dog as pets. |
| 6866 |
He gazed at the picture fully absorbed, as though I was not in the room, wagging his head, then giving a low whistle of appreciation, the way one burglar might admire the work of another. He stood there, legs widely spaced, one hand in his coat pocket, the other with the smoking cigar, a satisfied professional. |
| 6867 |
You should know that it is not only words, vows, and promises that bind people together, nor is it feelings or sympathies that determine the true nature of their relationship. There's something else, a law that is firmer and more severe, that determines whether one person is bound to another or not. |
| 6868 |
And that is your fault, because a man's courage in love is ridiculous. Love is of your making. It is the only respect in which you achieve greatness. That is where, somehow, you fell short, and as you failed so did everything else, everything that might have been, all that was obligation, mission, the meaning of life. |
| 6869 |
Maybe it wasn't even his words or feelings that had lied, it might have been just his very being, the fact that he, Lajos, could not do anything else, not before and not now. Suddenly I was aware of myself laughing; I had burst into laughter, not a mocking laughter but a sincere, good humored laughter. |
| 6870 |
Now, when he breaks in on you and, to all intents and purposes, seems determined to rob you of everything that remains, to rob this modest little island with its crew of shipwrecked castaways of their peace and tranquility, it is my duty to warn you that that is the case. It is true that Lajos works more carefully now. |
| 6871 |
She closed the windows and brought over the letters, then she tucked me up and sat back down beside me, her arms folded, a touch ceremonially in her ceremonial dress, as if appearing at some peculiar, grotesque occasion, an occasion unlike others, one that was neither wedding nor funeral. She sat and listened. |
| 6872 |
The servant was singing and ironing in the kitchen. In the pane of the partly open window sputtered a ring of sparks from the iron: it was like the striking of a match in the darkness. The girl in the hallway was swinging the fiery metal box above her head. He lay in a cramp, stared straight ahead, lost in thought. |
| 6873 |
The gang had gone by three o'clock. Without transition it seemed to him that he had woken from some terrible nightmare and that everything would be all right now, he just had to be fully awake, step back into life, and, exercising his best charm and desire to please, make something of it. He gave a painful grin. |
| 6874 |
Seven o'clock; he was expected. He had been lying there for four hours, cramped, unmoving. He turned his head like a man with a tight collar, inserting his finger trying to adjust it for comfort. He found it hard to swallow. He went to the basin, washed his hands, rinsed his mouth, swilled the mouthwash round, gargled. |
| 6875 |
Having stopped singing, the girl in the kitchen doorway noticed the light in the student's room. The boy buttoned his collar and took a few steps round the room. His aunt would not be back before eight. A long time ago, in his childhood, his aunt had told him that she would leave her treasure to him. |
| 6876 |
In the child's imagination the stock exchange remained a dark cave at whose mouth Ali Baba and the forty thieves were grappling with a few powerful, armed men determined to guard their treasure. The bad luck associated with Fridays also played a part in the aunt's account whenever she spoke of treasure. |
| 6877 |
He sat before the desk. He pulled open the drawer where notebooks and sheets scribbled over with writing lay in a heap, picked up a poem, and read it. Forgetting all else he read it in an undertone, craning over it. The poem was about a dog lying in the sun. When had he written it? He couldn't remember. |
| 6878 |
It was as if the change he had lived through had trapped everything he had experienced on the surface of his memory, so he could see his childhood, his father, and hear the lost voice of his mother, experience it all in individual movements of Aunt Etelka as she bowed before him. He looked around him amazed. |
| 6879 |
The room was in a sorry state. The gang had wreaked havoc in it: torn books and magazines lay under the bed, one volume, Fidibus, was soaking in a pool of liqueur from an upturned bottle that gave out a hideous sweet sickly stench. A muddy footprint was smeared across the plush cover of one of the chairs. |
| 6880 |
This was such an insignificant matter for the time being, it counted for so little, they didn't even mention it. In six weeks' time they would be in uniform and, with one great effort, even if the training dragged on, they'd be out at the front by the end of August. He sat down on the bed. He looked at the girl. |
| 6881 |
Pity she smells of the kitchen, as I can't stand kitchen smells, but that's because I've had an upper middle class upbringing: my grandfather was a landowner and my father is a practicing doctor. There's a reason for everything. It may not reflect well on me but sometimes a smell is more powerful than reason. |
| 6882 |
The girl had been working there a year and the thought of her full body sometimes haunted his dreams and worked on his fantasy, and often, at moments of adolescent boyish regression, he imagined her as a model. She had a nice face, pale and soft, a blond pigtail amusingly perched on the crown of her head. |
| 6883 |
Searching his various pockets he found just three crowns, and couldn't understand it at first for his aunt had handed him twenty crowns in the morning before he set off for his exams. Under normal circumstances this would have constituted a healthy sum and he had to stop for a moment and recall what he had spent it on. |
| 6884 |
The two aces looked equally greasy, spotty, and well used, inviting confidence, both with similar blue backs. He sat down at the table and sorted the pack into its four suits. He discovered two acorn aces as well, and two tens, one of leaves and one of bells. The four cards represented four winners at vingt etun. |
| 6885 |
After Ramsli they would often go on to play vingt etun. The doubled cards were exactly like all the others in the pack. The cheat had been careful: they might have been using the pack for months by now. In any case the cards were foolproof. He himself had fished out the pack from a drawer in his father's writing desk. |
| 6886 |
His mother had spent a very short time, perhaps only some three years, in the house, but all those highly potent oriental scents, so powerful that it was enough to leave one bottle unstoppered for a day for the room to be saturated with them for years, like the memory of her own presence, completely filling the house. |
| 6887 |
He couldn't think of his mother as anything but a very frail, much younger elder sister, and he knew that this early departed woman lived in his father's memory the same way. He looked back at the room where he had spent his childhood, where he had been born, where his mother had died. He switched off the light. |
| 6888 |
In the low light of the streetlamp his father's current room felt like someone had been buried there, quite recently, someone whose memory the survivors did not dare disturb. There was something trancelike about the condition of the objects, the way the belongings of the dead remain frozen, rather as in a museum. |
| 6889 |
Or maybe he was smoking a cigarette in his room, tugging at his beard with one hand, taking off his glasses. For the sake of piety and tidiness Etelka had covered the operating table in the room with a crocheted cloth, and the old surgical chair had taken on the appearance of an unfashionable rocking chair. |
| 6890 |
He didn't light the lamp. He stood in the doorway, his hands deep in his pockets, his perspiring fingers toying with the cards. A great tide of heat rolled through him. The card parties had started at Christmas when the gang first broke out in a fever of ungovernable anxiety that had dominated their lives ever since. |
| 6891 |
His tutorial fees, the aunt's little contributions, the sums his father occasionally sent, everything. Was it the winning individual who was the cheat? Perhaps it was precisely the opposite, the loser who had started cheating, now, near the end? He saw their three faces before him and closed his eyes. |
| 6892 |
Finally one mouth would bend over another mouth and the eyes close, then faint away. The room was chilly. The surgical instruments sparkled in the glazed cupboard. In one of those drawers Father kept his slides, sections of diseased brain tissue he had once written a book about and published at his own expense. |
| 6893 |
It's an early afternoon in winter. The boy stops in the half light but the father extends his hands towards him and invites him to come closer. There is some dry blue matter between the two sheets of glass, something with blotches and lines on it, like the map of the country he sees in his geography book. |
| 6894 |
The father's bony finger is following the lines of this peculiar map, moving along its branches, its curves, carefully tracing every kink of one particularly sinuous line, and where the line, somewhere near the edge of the slide, breaks, he taps at the glass. It is my most beautiful slide, says his father. |
| 6895 |
His parents, his wife, and his two children. It is my most beautiful slide. He bends over the dried up blue substance. His father's face clears: it is no longer full of painful tense curiosity, it empties, loses expression, the bony hand pushes away the slide and two pairs of eyes look blankly in front of them. |
| 6896 |
His playing was riddled with errors, and entailed, or so the boy felt, a kind of bad faith. He himself knew his efforts were a hopeless, obstinate experiment, and he couldn't bear it if anyone made a pointed remark about it in his presence. Nevertheless the tortured sounds of his violin filled the house. |
| 6897 |
The awareness of his father's increasing embitterment as night after night, alone in his room, he struggled with the instrument, made him feel as if his father were engaged in some ugly, shameful habit in the solitude of his room while being overheard by the other gleefully malevolent dwellers in the house. |
| 6898 |
At such times he too would lock himself in his room, sitting in the dark, his hands over his ears, biting his lips, staring and waiting. It was as if his father were doing something low and treacherous. Now the violin lay on top of the cupboard. When he imagined his father's death it was like an avalanche. |
| 6899 |
She encouraged him to put a coat on and not be back too late. For a second he entertained the possibility of sinking to his knees and telling her everything. The stairwell curved in a half circle with wide steps, and with its engravings of the town's old public buildings gave an impression of grandeur. |
| 6900 |
She was carrying her booty of two kilos of starch, rice, and freshly roasted coffee in her crocheted shopping bag. Her black hat, with its short veil in permanent mourning for some unknown deceased acquaintance, was perched on the topknot of her hair. Her sharp yellow nose felt cold against the boy's face. |
| 6901 |
It was a long time since they had been able to bring themselves to talk to each other. With each day that passed that low, oppressive, one story dwelling was becoming ever more like a hothouse. There was something steamed up, close, and damp about it. Its yellow walls sank under the weight of its double roof. |
| 6902 |
He too only recalled it the way one remembers something that has failed to happen, like some mood before a potential shower in childhood, when the room darkens for a moment but no downpour follows the vexed dark that is immediately dispelled by the sun. Only the sensation of waiting remains embedded in the nerves. |
| 6903 |
Everything changed. That which had hitherto been sweet was now bitter, that which had been sour was now like gall. The hothouse became a primeval forest. And his aunt like a corpse, or less than that. He slammed the glazed door, the bell swung and rang, the sound swam through the air and penetrated the silent house. |
| 6904 |
A long mustache dripped from his wasted, bony face, adhering to his tousled beard and uncut hair that would not lie flat, but covered his skull like a wire wig, a shrub full of thistles. His great black eyes shone and turned with a confused light deep beneath his brow, the whites as large as a Negro's. |
| 6905 |
It is utterly certain that the hour has come when the ruling social order must demand bloody sacrifices. Millions are lying dead in the ditches of the world and, insignificant as I am, I have been allowed to survive while the ruling classes offer involuntary sacrifices unto the earth and its waters. |
| 6906 |
We have been used to there being two classes in the world, one living in close proximity to the other, but having less to do with it than do locusts with bears. Please be so gracious as to remember that the last days are here. The sons of the ruling class are lying in the same lime pits as the sons of the low. |
| 6907 |
He knew he had to wait until the cobbler had had his say. The Bible lay on a shelf on the wall among a few old mugs and pots, with a child sized meter high crucifix on the wall beside it. The cobbler swayed as he walked, very much dependent on his stick. After he had finished coughing he continued in a cracked voice. |
| 6908 |
Even in the lower years at school he allowed my son to take home books belonging to his father, the colonel. And later, when the young gentleman was, with perfectly excusable carelessness, neglecting his studies, the colonel's boy bestowed on my son the distinction of allowing him to be of help to him. |
| 6909 |
He immediately regretted asking the question. The cobbler's eyes roved round the room then suddenly found and buried themselves in his own, the feeling hot and sharp. It was like looking into dazzling light. He closed his eyes. The condition of Tibor's mother had been giving cause for concern for several days. |
| 6910 |
The colonel's wife had been bed bound for three years: her condition changed but she didn't rise from her bed. Her elder son, who had returned a few months previously as an ensign, having lost an arm at the front, stubbornly kept repeating that she was perfectly capable of getting up and simply didn't want to. |
| 6911 |
It could be that the one armed invalid had imagined it all. The elder of the Prockauer boys was given to strange behavior at times. Once he had avoided and laughed at his younger brother's circle of friends and their amusements: now he was forever seeking them out. Little by little they included him in everything. |
| 6912 |
He talked with the cobbler about Tibor's anxieties, anxieties that resulted in him betraying their common secret. It would be good to know how far Lajos had taken the cobbler into his confidence. The cobbler was inclined to talk, admittedly in his own peculiar way, though much depended on whom he was addressing. |
| 6913 |
In its proper context, in its own way, everything he said was sober and to the point. When he thought about it he couldn't quite free himself of the uncomfortable feeling that there was something attractive in the cobbler's obsession, something he couldn't just skip over, get on with his life, and ignore. |
| 6914 |
They didn't have time to bother with what the adults were doing. Their fathers went away, their elder brothers were called up, but these obscure and, as far as they were concerned, far from terrible but boring and everyday occurrences, indeed anything anyone did in those faraway places, were of no interest to them. |
| 6915 |
One heard of other things like that. The world he had known had smashed and he felt he was walking on its shards. It might be that in a few weeks or a few months he too would have to hang people. If Mr. Zakarka regarded this as a form of cleansing, that was his business. People cleanse themselves as best they can. |
| 6916 |
Sometimes he had the feeling that the cobbler knew everything about them. He knew some surprising things about the town. He rarely left his miserable room, yet it was as though he had invisible emissaries: with a word here and a word there he let slip that he knew what was going on and kept his eyes on everything. |
| 6917 |
Each time he came he had to restrain himself from pouring his heart out to him. Sometimes, just now in fact, as he was walking down the street, he felt an irresistible temptation to call on the cobbler and tell him everything. Perhaps I should ask him to turn the light off, he thought. It would be easier in the dark. |
| 6918 |
The cobbler seemed to be of no particular age. He felt closer to him than he did any ordinary adult. It was as if the cobbler, like the gang, was living in that transitional state between childhood and adulthood. The cobbler was neither adult nor child. Like them he seemed to hover in a world between good and evil. |
| 6919 |
He wondered how he himself would look if he grew a beard or a mustache. Thinking that, he gave a bitter grin. It was unlikely he would get that far because his face was still completely smooth and white, lacking any sign of whiskers, lacking even the ghost of a mustache. His hands were small too, like a child's. |
| 6920 |
One day he wrote something. He was fifteen. When he saw the piece of paper with his writing on it he got a fright and hid it in his drawer. The next day he took it out and read it. It wasn't poetry but it didn't seem to be quite prose either. It scared him so he tore it up. His fear persisted for days. |
| 6921 |
The author was anonymous. He could not help but feel shaken when he thought of it. Somewhere in Russia there lived this anonymous figure conjuring characters, events, and entire tragedies out of nothing, committing them to paper, a spirit floating over an immense distance, and here he was holding it in his hands. |
| 6922 |
Not even the gang believed this though they eagerly swallowed everything else he told them. He tended to play comic, dancing roles but referred to himself as a ballet instructor. The contract laid down that the company was obliged to supply divas and leading men each season for a few highlights from popular operettas. |
| 6923 |
It was the comedian dancer's task to teach them the appropriate elements of ballet. He had put on weight, developing a proper paunch and jowls, a rare thing in the world of comedians and dancers. The audience liked him because he included a lot of current gossip in his act. He wore a wig of light chestnut color. |
| 6924 |
Now, four years later, only seventeen remained to graduate. Many of them simply failed to reappear. The peasant boys went home to take their fathers' places. Many couldn't afford the school fees. Many more just failed to attend without telling anyone why. Perhaps they were sick. Perhaps they had died. |
| 6925 |
Indeed, his first response was indifference and he decided to shift his attention elsewhere. But what he found, astonishingly, was that he couldn't look away for long. His eyes wandered over the room, aware of the sleepy hum of fat autumnal bluebottles trailing their gross little bodies over the window. |
| 6926 |
He couldn't look away. Once he had convinced himself that it was Tibor's head that was demanding his attention, he turned round to regard him with renewed interest. Was there something about Tibor he had failed to notice before? Maybe he had combed his hair a little differently today or was wearing a strange new tie. |
| 6927 |
It was so strong that his whole body ached as he shifted: it reared up at him as he bent over the desk. He is beautiful, he cried out, half audibly. It was a wholly intangible feeling. It was a kind of happiness he had never even dreamt of. There was a sweetness to it, a taste that brought tears to his eyes. |
| 6928 |
He is beautiful: Tibor is beautiful, he repeated with bloodless lips, feeling a touch chilly. His hand was cold too, bloodless and trembling. He stood up and ran about the room a little, avoiding the furniture. There were tears in his eyes: he felt dizzy and would have liked to hold on to something. |
| 6929 |
I was four. The girl three. Etelka was forty. Once she left the door open to the cupboard full of underwear and I pulled out a shred of cloth and played with it, tying it round my head the way the maid does her headscarf. Etelka grew quite red when she saw me, snatched the cloth from me, and smacked my hand. |
| 6930 |
He was holding cards in his hand, his bald head glistening with drops of perspiration. Now and then he dipped his hand into his pocket and wiped his brow with a red handkerchief. The man who used to run the mill, now the owner of the town pawnbroker's shop, declared, Three card run, two aces, game, as they passed him. |
| 6931 |
While we were weighing things up he dropped a ten instead of an ace, or picked up three cards including a ten and didn't ask for more, but secretly added an ace. Have a look at the cards: their backs resemble those of the ones we are using. It is impossible to tell the difference between our cards and the cheat's. |
| 6932 |
You can treat me as a suspect too if you want. It is true that I was the one who discovered the cheating but it might be that I get a kick out of flirting with danger. I might have cheated then made a deliberate point of launching the accusation and taking pleasure in seeing all of you torturing yourselves. |
| 6933 |
The strange thing is that we could imagine any one of us cheating so the cap fits all. It seems everyone that may be suspected might be guilty. That's an exaggeration, said the one armed one. The actor ordered ham with pickled cucumber, a softboiled egg, and tea with lemon. They didn't look at each other. |
| 6934 |
He looked around him in a dreamy fashion, surprised by the rapt attention he noted on their faces. He had got used to the fact that people never took serious note of what he said, that they heard him with mocking or indifferent expressions. In this company each word of his hit home. He gave a smirk of satisfaction. |
| 6935 |
The proprietor of the town pawnbroker's shop. Why has he been dreaming about him for weeks on end now? He dreams that Havas enters the room, wipes his walrus mustache with the back of his hand, and unbuttons his collar in leisurely fashion. He is laughing so hard his eyes are quite lost in the folds of fat. |
| 6936 |
His breath is like the stink of a kitchen: it smells of lard and dishwater. Tibor's mouth assumes that defiant suffering look. He has put the cards in his pocket. They watched each other carefully, bent over the table again, made eye contact with one brief last look, and immediately shifted their gaze. |
| 6937 |
The one armed one had had a very productive afternoon in town. Everything was ready. He had ordered lanterns, had spoken with the teaching staff and got most of the alumni to agree. The Peculiar was already green and leafy. They could always go inside if they needed to at night. Cost of ticket, five crowns. |
| 6938 |
Their affairs would not bear close examination. It was a private matter. All that had happened in the last six months was their business and no one else's. If only Havas would grant them a few weeks' grace. Just until they had finished their training. True, the matter of the silverware would have to be faced even so. |
| 6939 |
He could smile so stiffly while looking straight ahead that one would think he had a glass eye. His bluish jowls sat stolidly in the vent of his collar. His brow practically shone. It was like precious china. He smiled, a toothpick dangling from his lips, and looked fixedly into the distance with his glass eyes. |
| 6940 |
Closing time. An endless sequence of barely noticed trains passes through town. One rumbles past now: it measures at least two or three hundred meters but the platform guard doesn't even look up and the trains roll on carrying holidaymakers and the wounded, for here is the resort and here is the station. |
| 6941 |
Big buckets of lime wait on the platform, for it sometimes happens that certain passengers have to be carried from the train and need to be sprinkled with it. But this is the fourth year of hostilities and the town has gotten used to it, especially those people whose job it is to sprinkle lime. They are very quiet now. |
| 6942 |
The town has become accustomed to the war in the way one can get used to old age, the thought of death, to anything at all. The roads are a little neglected, a lot of people go about in mourning dress, some familiar faces have disappeared, but you can't deny that a few sprigs of well being are blossoming in the ruins. |
| 6943 |
There is a lot of litter everywhere now, houses are not repaired, old notices in groceries inform the public that salted fish are expected, but that's about all. Red, blue, and yellow advertisements on street columns. And, here too, those who are doing well can find opportunities for helping themselves. |
| 6944 |
There are tennis courts. The town happens to be asleep right now, the mayor has problems with his heart and lies spread eagled in his bed, his dentures in the glass of water beside him; in musty rooms omnipotent fathers sleep in nightshirts beside their wives. In the woods above town animals are waking. |
| 6945 |
He bought the shoes, brought them over to Tibor's, tried them on, and walked about in the room for half an hour. He didn't dare go out into the street wearing them because he was terrified at the thought of meeting his father who would notice the shoes on his feet and might get to asking where they were from. |
| 6946 |
The extraordinary story that developed out of the meeting with the captain had to be built up, detail by detail, out of facts that could be checked or were thought to be at least credible, complete with witnesses who actually lived in town a few streets away and could testify to the truth of the narrator's account. |
| 6947 |
They were aware that they were partaking of far higher amusements than these other blockheads who hadn't got beyond age old idiotic pranks and the crude taunting of teachers: they could be polite, appear to be infinitely conscientious, and could lull and eventually disarm their suspicious, tortured superiors. |
| 6948 |
Their rebellion regarding the function and use of various objects and matters extended to include some peculiar sacrifices. For example it was regarded as correct and admirable to spend days fretting in the attempt to learn some ten lines of text from a Swedish book, a language no one in the region could speak. |
| 6949 |
The hoard grew and grew. Everything was shoved into Tibor's room for the time being. It was only the arrival of the bicycle that rendered the space too narrow. The Prockauers lived in a single story building, and one could only get into the boy's room by passing through the room where his sick mother lay. |
| 6950 |
This was all just a game for now, a test of skill and courage. Tibor would wake some nights with sweat pouring off him to gaze astounded at the crowded room: he dreamt his father had arrived home unexpectedly and ordered him to account for the bicycle, the canvas tailcoat, the medical pliers and pincers. |
| 6951 |
There was no immediate danger since at the beginning of every season Mrs. Prockauer tended to forewarn the world of her imminent emergence, predicting that she would soon be up and walking, but nothing had come of it in all these years. One fall afternoon they hired a cab and drove out to The Peculiar. |
| 6952 |
The Peculiar was built on a gentle slope, a half hour's coach ride from town, in the middle of a partially cleared forest. Behind it loomed a dense bristling wall of pines, with the bare crags of the mountain rising to a peak above it, a peak whose glittering cap of snow might make anyone think they were in the Alps. |
| 6953 |
Had they done so earlier, having one would have prevented them sneaking about and relieved them of the constant sense of shame. They proceeded silently up the rotting wooden stairs, in single file. Years of unattended rubbish and gloom had gathered in the room. The windows opened onto the pine forest. |
| 6954 |
Had he not known that he was dealing with students he might have felt rather uneasy. But seeing it was the son of Colonel Prockauer and his school friends what was there to worry about? Each arrival vanished into one of the rooms, locked the door, and spent a long time in there fiddling with things. |
| 6955 |
They spent entire afternoons in their foul smelling lair by the sweating iron stove, swimming in demonic cigarette smoke, arguing, making up pointless games, and refining their rules. This was the time of proper games. It was a second childhood, guiltier than the first but less restrained, more exciting, more sweet. |
| 6956 |
The hideaway served all their purposes. It offered a shelter unknown to fathers, teachers, and the powers that be. It was somewhere real life could finally begin. That life resembled nothing they had hitherto known. It wasn't like their fathers' lives, lives that did not appeal to them in the least. |
| 6957 |
The gang was all the more surprised by this sudden shyness regarding his memory, especially since, as it turned out after extended interrogation, there was nothing salacious in it. It was more comical than anything but it was only after a prolonged period of agonizing that he could bring himself to tell them. |
| 6958 |
Suddenly he stopped, stood up, and as if I were not there at all went over to the chest of drawers, lifted the mirror off the wall, brought it over to the table, and looked at himself. I stared at him, speechless, nursing the crow in my lap. My father grasped his nose between finger and thumb and pulled it upwards. |
| 6959 |
At first I felt like laughing, but I quickly realized it was nothing to laugh about. My father's expressions when he swiveled his eyes and twisted his lips were so strange that I began to be afraid. He took a step backward as if preparing to burst into laughter and opened his mouth monstrously wide. |
| 6960 |
He leaned over me, his face deformed in a way I had never seen a face before, nor since for that matter. With one hand he grabbed the crow, squeezed the creature's neck, then threw it in front of me on the floor. Having done so he rushed out. The crow lay before me lifeless. I had been playing with it for about a year. |
| 6961 |
The pettiest things made adequate toys for them in this mood. They could amuse themselves with an idea suggested by an object or the whim of a moment as long and as intensely as a child can play with a simple bell. Now each of them discovered an aptitude for acting. The one armed one became a passionate producer. |
| 6962 |
They played out scenes in court, in close family circles, in recruitment offices, at teachers' conferences, on the bridges of sinking ships. Every child is a gifted actor. They clung to this forgotten talent, their one recompense for the world they were losing. This world glowed faintly behind the familiar world. |
| 6963 |
We won't be talking then, we will all be responsible, but until then I feel no obligation to acknowledge the rules of their world. Nor those of the music lessons I am currently missing because of a faked parental note, nor those that say it is forbidden to urinate against the walls of the theater in public. |
| 6964 |
It was hard to say what hurt most: having to offer obsequious greetings to adults they met on the street or the thought of having, in all probability, to salute some sergeant major a few months later. It was this spring that they lost all sense of proportion. It was not exactly that their games had turned more solemn. |
| 6965 |
In certain respects they regarded Lajos as an adult. He was free to do what he wanted and, just as he excused himself from adult ranks as and when he chose, so he might, at any moment, choose to rejoin the enemy. He started wearing his army uniform again and spent the day hanging around with the actor. |
| 6966 |
The gang even discussed barring him but then the one armed one turned up and just at the beginning of the season introduced the gang to the actor. The introductions took place in Tibor's room. The actor immediately won their confidence when, out of sheer good manners, he climbed in through the window. |
| 6967 |
Despite the various boyish accomplishments of running, swimming, riding, leaping, and excelling at tennis Tibor presented a somewhat soft, almost effeminate appearance. His very pale skin and the curiously wavy blond hair that kept falling over his brow covering his blue gray eyes confirmed the impression. |
| 6968 |
His face lacked the normal adolescent's state of grotesque half preparedness. It was as if the development of what was boyish in him had been suspended at a particularly fortunate moment in childhood, as if the sculptor had got so far, taken his hand away, and declared with satisfaction: let it remain as it is. |
| 6969 |
He observed other groups, other gangs, with a kind of embarrassed longing, admiring the pranks of his schoolmates who, despite the yoke the world imposed on them, seemed to bear their lot lightly with wild practical jokes, fiercely competitive sports, and, above all, by giving themselves to the cult of the body. |
| 6970 |
Fear of the war? Could it be worse than the funk before exams, the humiliating concealments, the servile subterranean life they were condemned to live as things stood? War, in all likelihood, was just another form of servitude and humiliation invented by adults to torture one another and people weaker than themselves. |
| 6971 |
The itinerant career of Colonel Prockauer had seen him stationed in various melancholy towns, and somewhere in the recesses of his mind Tibor carried childhood memories of a range of barracks and garrisons. Lajos, the one armed one, was rather like his father in many respects: pleasure seeking, greedy, and violent. |
| 6972 |
They made no distinctions and forgave nothing. They agreed on the principle that in a state of war any means might be employed to destroy the enemy. They never doubted, not for an instant, that the war they were fighting was quite distinct from the ones in which the adults were engaged. Lajos was their spy. |
| 6973 |
Lajos brought him along after long negotiations and they received him in the same suspicious manner as they would an enemy. Immediately, within the first hour, he suggested they employ the familiar tutoyer mode of address. This put them on their guard. The actor sat, walked, chattered, and held forth. |
| 6974 |
He discoursed on the life of the theater, and on the doings of the female members of the company, supplying names and specific details. One had to take proper note of these details as they offered insights into what the enemy might have up its sleeve. The actor was an object of suspicion in every respect. |
| 6975 |
They couldn't stroll down the street with him in public either. To have been seen walking with the actor would immediately have brought the wrath of teachers and relatives down on them. The actor was aware of this and sensitively adapted himself to the demands of the situation, lurking with them in a befitting manner. |
| 6976 |
His nimble, plump white fingers flopped exhausted into his lap. He'd sit there, alone, always precisely at the center of the room. If there happened to be a table there he pushed it aside, drew up a chair, and settled on it, deliberately, exactly in the middle. You also had to get used to his various fragrances. |
| 6977 |
Normally he used a cinnamon essence, but when he felt very low he would splash the stuff on wildly, mixing musk, lilac, chypre, and rosewater, and walk round as if in a trance with clouds of perfume billowing about him, every so often raising his specially perfumed necktie to his nose to take a deep sniff. |
| 6978 |
Children with two heads. I knew someone like that. He had heard of a little girl who was half covered in fur whose mother was unwilling to sell her, and of a boy with three hands. He kept a record of them. Occasionally he would get on a train and visit them, observe their development, and correspond with the parents. |
| 6979 |
The one armed one was enraptured by this and walked around the room with a complacent smile. The actor, whom he had introduced to them, was a roaring success that afternoon. The gang relaxed. By the time the visit had ended they had established an atmosphere almost as free of tension as if they had been by themselves. |
| 6980 |
Too much sincerity, confidentiality, and amiability would have seemed as suspicious to them as false intimacy. Had the actor not been sincere, he would have had to juggle halftones and quartertones in their company, and observing such fine distinctions for such a time would have been too exhausting for him. |
| 6981 |
He tried to build no artificial bridges, and neither did he try to pretend he was one of them. He talked like someone who had come home after a long day, put on his dressing gown, and felt comfortable in his own skin. He used the words they used, feeling no particular need to learn their own thieves' argot. |
| 6982 |
Be careful, my sweet one and only. Think of your father. Your father could get to the bottom of anything and knew the reason for everything. He'd be able to look into the eyes of your friend Zakarka and quickly discover what he was up to. He'd know why young Prockauer has taken to flashing smiles at people. |
| 6983 |
Sometimes he was seized by such fierce jealousy that there were afternoons and nights when he had to slip out of his room, trudge over to Tibor's house, and stand beneath the window to assure himself that Tibor was at home. Other times he would set up watch outside the actor's house when the performances were over. |
| 6984 |
He found various shy excuses to share his money with him and when, egged on by the gang, Tibor later executed the grand coup of pawning the family silver, he accompanied Tibor the entire length of the hazardous route. Perhaps if he were a direct witness to Tibor's fall from grace he might gain some power over him. |
| 6985 |
Whenever they were separated he felt lost and hurt. He prepared himself for their meetings and tried to invent something new and surprising for each occasion. Meanwhile Tibor yawned discreetly, his hand covering his mouth. He was distressed to feel so stupid, so inadequate to the honor of being Tibor's companion. |
| 6986 |
Perhaps his father would raise his hand and hurl thunderbolts at him. But it might be that he would walk up to him and there would be an anxious moment while he considered the possibility of taking him in his arms, embracing him, and kissing him. So they would stare at each other, uncertain what to do. |
| 6987 |
The giant buildings of the house of correction rose beside the road that led to The Peculiar and whenever they retired to their hidden empire they were forced to pass by its outer perimeter. The lights of the windows of the correctional institution shone directly at them as they made their way back at night. |
| 6988 |
They understood that there existed not just a cell but a whole world like theirs, a world whose laws, ethics, and structure differed sharply from that of the adults, and that this world had a dynamic that was equal to the one in which adults struggled and perished, that had its own hierarchies and mysterious coherence. |
| 6989 |
Lost in thought, they meandered back towards the town where, presumably, there were many gangs just like theirs with hiding places like the room at The Peculiar. They must be there, all over the world, in towns inhabited by adults, among barracks and churches, little robber gangs, millions and millions of them. |
| 6990 |
All there, with their own hiding places, with their own rules, all under the spell of some extraordinary imperative, the imperative to rebel. And they sensed they would not be part of this strange world for much longer, that pretty soon perhaps they too would be classed as enemies by a pre adult or two. |
| 6991 |
I was perfectly clear about its function, about who lived there and who called on them. I knew it was full of girls and I think I had even heard something about the tariff from someone. There was nothing particular in my head as I passed it, nothing either pleasant or unpleasant. I merely turned my head towards it. |
| 6992 |
There was nothing strange about this and I knew where the young man had come from and, roughly, what he had been doing in there. He had been with the girls. Not that I knew precisely what he would have done with the girls but I suspected it was that about which adults lied to us, that which they had kept a secret. |
| 6993 |
He was cursing because he had been calling for the servant. The servant having gone off somewhere, he ordered me to pull off his boots and bring him his slippers. There can't have been anything unusual about this but I don't recall him ever asking us boys to do this kind of thing and it hasn't happened since. |
| 6994 |
They laid him down on the actor's bed and sat silently at his side. The one armed one eventually stopped shivering and closed his eyes. They said nothing. Tibor held the one armed one's hand. A single teardrop ran from under the closed eyelids all the way down his face onto his jerkin. The one armed one bit his lip. |
| 6995 |
He joined her in the dance, and they twirled round in the entrance for a few moments, the actor's arms raised high above his head, the white sweet in his hand glittering temptingly while the rapt child gazed at it like a puppy, her crooked little body finding it hard to twirl and remain on point at the same time. |
| 6996 |
The actor took a few turns with her, then shook his head sadly like a talent scout who had lost faith in his latest discovery, and with a tired gesture popped the sweet in the child's mouth. A thin woman in a headscarf had stopped to watch the man and child dancing. She weighed them up with grave, close attention. |
| 6997 |
The actor greeted her amiably and drifted away under the boughs of the wayside trees. He was thinking that he should ask for an advance at the theater where they hated him. He smiled, thinking of that, and looked haughtily in front of him. He was thinking he should send his light green spring outfit to the cleaners. |
| 6998 |
He was thinking it had become impossible trying to buy a decent American Gillette blade in the monarchy, that German razors were nowhere near as good as American ones. He was thinking he should start dieting next week. He remembered the name of a masseur who once worked on him for a week and who later hanged himself. |
| 6999 |
He was just passing the pastry shop and he thought of his younger brother who once, for no discernible reason, purchased a box of honey loaf cakes and brought it over to his place in town where he was working as apprentice to a photographer, as a gift, then, next day, having finished his business, went home. |
| 7000 |
He walked on in a bad mood. After all, anyone can afford to buy camphor, even the poorest people. He only had to saunter through the door in an indifferent manner and casually ask for a pinch of camphor. No one would suspect that he wanted the camphor not as moth repellent but to sniff. He didn't have a penny on him. |
| 7001 |
He had to have a word with Havas before he got to the theater. He felt uncomfortable about this. Never, not once in his life, not for a second had he felt certain that he would not have to pack and move on at a moment's notice, in the middle of the night. He felt tense: the air he sniffed was full of menace. |
| 7002 |
Both laughed. The actor ignored them. He had delivered his major sketch about the effects of vodka on the human sensitivity to color. Now he was sitting, panting slightly, recovering. The prima donna took her place among the usual crowd at the bohemian table. The actor fixed his curious eye on the door. |
| 7003 |
Tonight was the first occasion on which they could take their place without sneaking in, without embarrassment. They couldn't help but notice in the first half hour they spent in the adult camp as equals that it was not all gaiety here. Or if gaiety there was, there was less of it than they had imagined the day before. |
| 7004 |
He was the one who had his suits made so that the collar covered half his face up to the earlobes, only so that he could creep up on groups of students unnoticed. Gurka. That's your man. He is frowning suspiciously. He doesn't know whether to sit you down or not, so you just stand there, listening, staring at him. |
| 7005 |
The air was thick with the sweet, exciting din of conversation, plates clattering, and a clumsy waltz rhythm. The actor started making preparations to leave. He checked his wig in a pocket mirror, licked his thumb and forefinger, and smoothed his eyebrows. He drew on his gloves slowly, with great care. |
| 7006 |
There they were all sitting: the actress with the director on her right, now arrived and chewing a piece of wurst, the drugstore owner on her left. The editor sat at the end of the table, waiting with bated breath for a crumb of gossip to be tossed his way. Two young officers in dress uniform were sipping champagne. |
| 7007 |
But as of noon today, this feeling of assurance, that he would see Tibor at the arranged times and talk to him without anything getting in the way, had vanished forever. He stared at the dirty ceiling, the crumbling walls, and was amazed. He had to bow his head for fear the others would see him crying. |
| 7008 |
He didn't look up, knowing it was him they were waiting for, that they were watching him closely. He was determined to say nothing. The way they competed for his affection, the passionate loyalty they radiated from every side, even more powerfully, more jealously now than before, made him all the more obstinate. |
| 7009 |
He had had enough of them all. He thought fondly of the front of which he knew nothing, only that it would mean a final break with the life he had been leading, a life whose tensions he could no longer bear. His father's face appeared before him out of the chaos, cast in bronze like some heroic statue. |
| 7010 |
He had been fair: he tolerated them all equally. He felt he had assumed a great burden he could barely support. He had to shake it off with one great effort and move on. He was fed up with the game. He couldn't stand it any longer: it agitated him so keenly that his whole nervous system rejected it. |
| 7011 |
Someone smiles at us heedlessly and immediately we are entangled in that person's friendship. He didn't know what friendship was. He had imagined friendship differently, as taking a lighthearted, pleasant walk, a kind of fellow feeling that imposed no obligations. People spend time with each other, exchanging ideas. |
| 7012 |
The problem was that he couldn't just walk out, that a man cannot simply abandon a world, a habitation he himself has shaped. They all lived on the same planet and none of them could stop inhabiting it: they were their own sun, their own atmosphere, held together by forces none of them could overcome alone. |
| 7013 |
Let them feel some pain. Somewhere at the back of his mind he wondered why it hurt when people loved you. Every nerve in his body, every sinew, bristled and protested against the demands that he felt to be radiating from the others. They all wanted him exclusively to themselves, he thought. They're jealous. |
| 7014 |
He looked straight ahead like a slave owner, disgusted by what he saw. I have to try and find the word, he thought, the word that once pronounced will blow it all to kingdom come, that will explode the whole point of the gang, or lance it like a blister that you only need to touch with a pin, just one word. |
| 7015 |
The music whose rhythm had been swept with them through the revolving doors dissolved and faded in the solemn silence. The church formed one end of the square, oppressing the nearby low houses with its enormous weight. A light was burning behind one of the great casement windows of the bishop's palace. |
| 7016 |
The air was mild, as heady as on a summer night. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere. The theater, with its high stage loft and graceless proportions, rose above the park like an abandoned barn, its dark, cobwebbed windows squinting out, half blind. The town was in the deep first phase of sleep. |
| 7017 |
The town was clearly indifferent to such reminders. Before the barracks two hard helmeted guards went on switching posts at the gate. The bishop sat by the lighted window in a high backed armchair reading the paper. A glass of water and a box containing a wafer with antipyrine stood on a little table next to him. |
| 7018 |
He tipped a number of volumes forward, then pushed them all back, picking out instead a thick black tome that took some effort to lift. The fragile figure took some time conveying the heavy volume to his bedside table, set it down beside the breviary and the prayer beads, opened it, and examined a few illustrations. |
| 7019 |
They lit cigarettes and stood quietly, without speaking. That sprinkling of houses, lacquered by the yellow light, had been the backdrop to the theater of their childhood. They knew precisely who lived in which house; they knew the sleepers behind the windows. The gilt lettering on the bookseller's sign had worn away. |
| 7020 |
The striking of the clock broke the silence so violently the air was still ringing with its music after it had stopped, as if someone had smashed a very delicate glass. They stood around the elder tree, a cigarette in one hand, the other arranging their clothes as they proceeded about their business. |
| 7021 |
The corpses swam naked and traveled great distances down from the mountains, down tiny tributaries that flowed into others greater than themselves in the complex system of connections; they floated rapidly down on the spring flood heading towards their ultimate terminus, the sea. The dead were fast swimmers. |
| 7022 |
Sometimes they got caught up on the footings of the bridge where millers fished them out the next morning, examining with curiosity the official death certificates enclosed in waterproof tin capsules hung about their necks. There must have been a lot of them because they kept turning up, every week all through spring. |
| 7023 |
On the marble counter lay a calf's head, its eyes closed, black blood dripping from its nostrils onto the slab. The old solicitor who was the last in town to go to bed each night sat in his study in a cherrywood armchair, the scarlet broadcloth of which was secured at the edges with a speckling of white enameled tacks. |
| 7024 |
He had lost two sons in the war. Their photographs stood on his desk in copper frames tied round with black ribbons of mourning. But he did not mourn for them any more because he was old, because it was already two years since they were killed, and because in two years a person can get over everything painful. |
| 7025 |
It was the smell of the stage the actor was trying to mask, for no one likes to smell of work, that was why kitchen maids used patchouli, cobblers crude pomade, greengrocers musk, and why the actor used chypre. They had never imagined a building with so many corridors. So many stairs, so many doors. |
| 7026 |
They climbed two floors, the actor pushing past ever more iron doors that creaked or swung sharply back at them. The actor was quietly whistling. He was a long way ahead of them with the flashlight. He was whistling a sweet tune in a broken, recurring rhythm. Finally he stopped at a door with a frosted glass panel. |
| 7027 |
On either side of a bald smoothly peeled scalp some scant white locks covered a pair of old man's ears that must have heard much in their time but were craftily keeping their secrets to themselves. Every hairpiece retained something of the personality of the man or woman from whose head it had been plucked. |
| 7028 |
There were times it was of a light, dreamlike blondness, sometimes red as fire, at other times pure black. But the movement with which he removed the wig racked them with a sympathetic pain, they could not have been more surprised had the actor with equal suddenness torn off his arm and begun to unscrew his head. |
| 7029 |
He ran his hand over his bare head, leaned indifferently over to the mirror, and started to examine it with proper professional attention. You have to be careful, he said, and drew the blond wig over his knuckles, gently stroking its locks with the other hand, careful you don't get water on the hair. |
| 7030 |
That's vital. You're still young so I am telling you this. Unfortunately no one told me until it was too late. There are people who duck under the waves, then try to scrub their hair with soap. It's the most dreadful carelessness anyone can be guilty of. There are others who dip their heads in water after washing. |
| 7031 |
His face looked markedly thinner. Every aspect of his face suddenly assumed a sharp angular look, somehow cruel, and his baldness took on a life of its own, like some symbol of fate, such a clear mark of a man's secret suffering that no amount of successes, victories, or triumphs could compensate for it. |
| 7032 |
They soon forgot everything else. There was a reason the actor was with them tonight. He was preparing something that was bigger and more amusing than the idiotic postgraduation larks that usually ended in drunken fistfights at the brothel. They could rely on the actor. They were enchanted by his transformations. |
| 7033 |
He sat back, he drew on his cigarette, he dangled his feet. He was a complete stranger. So unfamiliar was he that they felt shy and fell silent. This was entirely the actor's territory. All those hairpieces by the wall, all those destinies and personalities hanging in the shadows, all were part of his domain. |
| 7034 |
The one armed one was lost in the folds of his toga. He sat on the table, dangling his bare sandaled feet, a band round his head. He stared straight ahead, with a haughty, wounded look, and the pride of Mucius Scaevola who had sacrificed one arm for the state but had his own independent opinion on everything. |
| 7035 |
His arms, his neck, and chest were sticky with thick white powder. The actor's fingers had magically elongated his eyelashes, and his adolescent spots were masked by a pink blusher the actor had gently brushed and puffed across his cheeks. You couldn't really tell, not at a glance anyway, whether he was woman or girl. |
| 7036 |
They were overwhelmed by the consciousness of their utter complicity, the tremulous joy of belonging, the delight of pulling a huge ridiculous face at the sleeping world, behind its unsuspecting back, perhaps for the last time. For the last time perhaps the actor held together the ropes that bound them. |
| 7037 |
A wide terrace complete with palms and steps leading up to it descended before them, blocking their view, and some faded rose bowers followed, swirling with dust. Wait for the storm, the sailor muttered indifferently, then hurried off into the wings, setting a distant wind to screech and whinny through the bowers. |
| 7038 |
The actor knew a cure for seasickness that you should take an hour before the storm set in. They laid the lady out across the chest, fanned her, and tried to entertain her. The cabin darkened somewhat. The cabin boy left them every five minutes to increase the roar of the four winds and to provide a weather report. |
| 7039 |
They couldn't understand what he was saying as he mixed words from English, Spanish, and other languages unknown to them, in a kind of incomprehensible macaronic, then he gave a croak and fell to praising distant skies and climes while radiating regret for years of pointless roaming. The actor certainly knew his trade. |
| 7040 |
It was a fat, drunk sailor that sat at the edge of the stage singing into the dark auditorium. The rest of them wandered up and down behind him, humming along with the hypnotic rhythm while the storm continued unabated outside and the vessel with all its passengers lurched towards an unknown harbor. |
| 7041 |
As for the actor, he was absorbed in his acting and was growing ever more remote, ever less like the figure they had known, already recalling Le Havre, relating tales of amorous nights in various harbors, gazing around him as if they were all strangers. His vast half naked body shook with every gesture. |
| 7042 |
Even experienced sailors tend to lose track of time. But what does it matter, he thought with dizzy delight. It's a fine ship and we're making good progress somewhere between sky and water. We will have arrived somewhere by morning. He clambered down into the prompter's box and watched the proceedings from there. |
| 7043 |
No one the next day could remember what he actually said. He kept mentioning the names of foreign cities, made grandiloquent gestures at the dark auditorium, and shouted obscene remarks into it. There was one time when they were all speaking at once. The one armed one was weeping and staggering around. |
| 7044 |
The music was so quiet and slow that for some time the two caught up in the dance were the only ones to hear it. It was a mewling, selfpitying kind of tune, with much rubato, the rhythm broken up, and the actor was performing a hitherto unknown kind of dance to it, improvising sweeping gestures, taking Tibor with him. |
| 7045 |
The actor stopped between two bars, stopped for a second, let go of Tibor, and in a single movement pulled off his vest and disposed of his wig, throwing it high into the catwalk. He danced on half naked. His heavy breasts shook with each maneuver and his bare back shimmered like pale bacon in the spotlight. |
| 7046 |
It was as if a veil were winding about them, one that tightened with each turn, becoming so tight it was impossible to push against. It was as if it were dictating the pace of the music, so that it was the record that was speeding up with them, growing more tense and excited, clicking over the grooves. |
| 7047 |
She came on tiptoe and, still on tiptoe, stopped on swollen, unsteady feet in the half dark. The square window glimmered between the beds. She gave both beds a furious, feral glance, shifting her attention from one to the other and back. Lajos lay propped high on his pillow, as stiff and unmoving as a corpse. |
| 7048 |
The colonel's wife raised the clothes to her face with difficulty and took a good sniff. The boy's smell was detectable through that of the broadcloth and the cheap perfume that had lingered round him on his return that night. So there it is, she thought. The boy has spent the night with some woman. |
| 7049 |
But the men went straying after other women. They were robbing her, so she was jealous of every word the three men took with them when they left the house. They gave money to other women, fed them with endearments that were hers by right: their very movements, their blood and sweat, were offered up to them. |
| 7050 |
One day they all deserted her, left the island, gave false, conniving excuses for their absence, citing the call of duty, the needs of the nation, the binding oaths they had made, and when they came back they were never the same again. One came back without an arm. She looked at the empty dangling sleeve. |
| 7051 |
The little one had slept with a woman last night. She leaned forward carefully and her eyes sought out her son's mouth in the half dark of the bolsters. The mouth was open, the lips swollen with blood. His father had just such a mouth. That's how it goes, how it always goes, one is left alone on a sinking island. |
| 7052 |
This fear never left her during the period of her illness while she lay helpless in bed. She knew why the boys should not look upon her naked body, alive or dead, it made no difference. She wore high necked nightgowns that buttoned to the chin. The boys had never seen her while she was washing or lightly clad. |
| 7053 |
Now that the youngest had taken leave of the house and spent the night with a strange woman she felt she could abandon her resistance, that her death was very close. Making a great effort, she returned to her room and lay down once more in the bed she had only stolen from at night when everyone else was asleep. |
| 7054 |
That was all. The longer she existed in this state of pretended helplessness the better she understood the advantages of central control, of keeping everything hidden but close to hand. It was indeed a considerable advantage and a vital element of her strategy that she should be lying helpless in bed. |
| 7055 |
She had been lying there for three years, apparently without moving. She knew there was a war on but in her heart of hearts thought it a mere excuse, a quibble that enabled her husband to go philandering and prevented him sitting at her bed. The older boy had made off with much the same excuse a year before. |
| 7056 |
She was planning to set up some kind of trust that the orphans' court would handle, something that would allow the father and the sons the quarterly installment of a silver spoon or fork. She lay in bed with her eyes wide open, listening to the first sounds of morning. Every so often she tired and dropped off. |
| 7057 |
She had often calculated whether the rooms would be big enough and tried to estimate the cost of the evening. She would stand at the garden gate in the gray silk dress made for her on the occasion of their silver anniversary, the dress she had never worn since, with her two sons by her side welcoming the guests. |
| 7058 |
The colonel would wear all his decorations for the occasion. Whenever this frequently imagined but never realized dream came back to haunt her she began to cry, but no one was aware of this. The boys woke. There was the sound of running water. They were washing and talking quietly between themselves. |
| 7059 |
The maid came in, kissed her hand, and set the breakfast, drawing open the blinds. The mother handed over the key and watched anxiously as the maid searched out items in the sideboard. She held the box of sugar in her lap and counted out five cubes. The boys received one and a half, she and the girl one each. |
| 7060 |
Prockauer had made off to the front where he was undoubtedly carousing and getting into debt. It gave her a certain pleasure to think that Prockauer would have to be dealing with his creditors by himself. She sought out the colonel's face in the picture and glared at it from under furrowed brows, mocking and ironic. |
| 7061 |
Lajos had been wearing civilian clothes for a while now. He put on old summer outfits that he had slightly outgrown, whose waists were now a little tight so he looked like a schoolboy in them. He tucked his armless sleeve into his coat pocket. Ever since the amputation he had grown fatter and more suspicious. |
| 7062 |
In the few months since Lajos had returned from the hospital he had grown a belly and his mother suspected he was eating in secret somewhere. His mouth and his eyebrows had stopped twitching but the glazed, indifferent look in his eyes persisted, relieved only by the odd flash of curiosity or malevolence. |
| 7063 |
There were times he put on his ensign's uniform, pinned his medals on his chest, and stood staring at himself in the mirror in his mother's room, turning round like a model, talking to himself as he used to do in childhood, completely ignoring his mother's presence, as if he were playing at soldiers. |
| 7064 |
No one else could help them now. Mother would give them the money so they could pay Havas off in the afternoon, then they could smuggle the silver back into its proper place. Tibor would volunteer for military service and the gang would break up in the evening. No one mentioned the night that had just passed. |
| 7065 |
Tibor surrendered himself entirely, offering no resistance. At night he woke, went over to Lajos's bed, and, when he saw the one armed one's eyes were closed in sleep, quietly stole over to the basin and gave his face a good wash with soap and brushed his teeth. He rubbed at his face a long time, then went back to bed. |
| 7066 |
I'll go to the swimming pool in the morning, he thought. He felt he had plummeted from a great height to a deep, very deep place, the kind where one could lie flat out, quite calm, because nothing more could happen and it was only that he did not dare to move in case he discovered he had broken his arm or his leg. |
| 7067 |
It was, when you came down to it, easier with Prockauer. She understood that what wrecked a life were those unpredictable moments when a person loses courage, remains silent, fails to open his or her mouth, and allows events to take control. Maybe she should have asked Prockauer not to go to the front. |
| 7068 |
Being a high ranking officer he could, presumably, have stopped the war. Every nook and cranny of the long room was stuffed with unnecessary furniture, objects to which the foul smell of the sickroom clung, the smell of isolation and neglect. This, the room in which Mother lay, was where they had to eat. |
| 7069 |
She felt she had to engage her sons' eyes, and that once she had done so order might be restored: one flash of her own eyes would draw the boys back into her magic circle. But the boys avoided her eyes. The contact was broken. She no longer had power over them. They were silent when they entered her room nowadays. |
| 7070 |
Maybe they had already agreed that on some given signal they should seize her and pick up her thin body, though maybe Tibor could do that by himself while Lajos searched the mattress and the bed with his remaining hand. But they wouldn't dare touch the ready cash she carried on her own body, she quickly thought. |
| 7071 |
They're on the alert now, she thought. They might even be spying. Fortunately she had positioned her bed so it could not be seen through the keyhole. Whenever she was obliged to give them money she sent them out of the room. Her hand tightened on her breast and she wondered what she would feel at the very end. |
| 7072 |
She thought back to the moment of Tibor's conception, in the eighth year of their marriage, after several months of sleeping apart. Prockauer returned one afternoon from the training ground wearing his riding boots, dusty, whip in hand, his brow lightly perspiring, and threw his military cap on the table. |
| 7073 |
They were alone in the room. Little Lajos was outside, playing in the garden. They had hardly exchanged a word for several months. Prockauer slept in the dining room on a divan, while she slept with little Lajos in the double bed in the bedroom. They were past the stage of looking for excuses to loathe one another. |
| 7074 |
Never again was she to experience such a feeling. Tibor was the product of that moment. Prockauer had touched her a few more times later, but she couldn't remember those occasions. Gently, with some trepidation, she opened her nightshirt and brought out the pouch: this was what she now had to attend to. |
| 7075 |
Six hundred. She collapsed back onto her pillow and stared straight ahead of her with a frozen smile. Their father is fighting on the front. Six hundred. She let out a few faint shrieks and vigorously shook her head. Tibor sat on the bed next to her, put his hands together, and waited for her to calm down. |
| 7076 |
He gazed at her for a few seconds, listening for any noise, his curiosity taking on an officious air. Suddenly Mother looked right at him and the two pairs of eyes met with hardly any distance between them. They regarded each other, round eyed, the way people stare at each other for the first or the last time. |
| 7077 |
The maid entered and cleared the table. Mother wanted to give some instructions, she wanted to sit up, to say something. Her eyes followed the girl with undisguised anxiety but the one armed one raised his finger to his lips and indicated that she should be silent. Mother began to shiver, her teeth were chattering. |
| 7078 |
There was no severity in his voice, no hint of threat, but Mother immediately closed her eyes as if in a faint. From time to time she opened them to find the boy still there, still calm, insistent, his gaze never leaving her, and she closed her eyes again. They remained like this for a long time, unmoving. |
| 7079 |
He sat down at the window in shirtsleeves and held his face up to the sun. One could get drunk on the sun on an empty stomach. He had slept deep and remembered nothing. Such giddy happiness flooded through him that he didn't dare move in case the giddiness vanished. His body warmed through, his frozen limbs relaxed. |
| 7080 |
He hadn't gone home that night. When they parted in front of the theater he took a few steps homeward then turned and took the route leading to The Peculiar. He ran part of the way to get out of town as fast as he could, then slowed by the river. The night was warm and bright. He never considered going home. |
| 7081 |
He slept deeply, his body still. He put on his clothes and set off for town. He was hot in his black formal garments. A tuft of hair was sticking from his pocket. He drew out the wig, then, looking round to make sure no one could see, threw it away. The hairpiece lay on the road like a squashed furry animal. |
| 7082 |
He raised it with his toe and gave it a disgusted kick. Whoever once grew this tuft of hair, he said to himself, is, from this moment, dead forever. He hurried past the repairman's fence. He had lost his hat somewhere the previous night. The air was pure and clean, the sound of bells swam in it. May eighteenth. |
| 7083 |
He passed the swimming pool, then stopped on the bridge to look at the yellow colored river of his childhood, now in flood, the long grass bending over it into the water, his nose crinkling to the sharp sour smell. Judge Kikinday, the man the mandarin had condemned to death, was just crossing the bridge. |
| 7084 |
If there was any justice Kikinday would have died long ago because it was three years now since the mandarin had sentenced him, in the belief that that would be the simplest course to take. Kikinday had himself sentenced several men to death, and hanged seven, overseeing the executions personally. The last was a Gypsy. |
| 7085 |
It was the way he questioned Lajos too before he went out. There is no malice in the question, for Kikinday stops every young man between seventeen and nineteen years of age and makes the same inquiry concerning their military plans. They make their way slowly past the line of poplars, ever closer to town. |
| 7086 |
Metal shutters covered the entrance. They rang at the side door and waited, and when no one answered, Tibor turned the door handle and led the way in. The damp sour smell of cabbages greeted them in the dim stairwell, where narrow wooden steps led up to the pawnbroker's apartment. Plaster was peeling from the wall. |
| 7087 |
Havas's manner of eating, his sheer being, had overwhelmed them: it had the power of some inflated natural phenomenon. They could not have been more surprised if he had dragged a live kid into the room, dismembered it in front of them, and proceeded enthusiastically to consume it. The room was full of blackflies. |
| 7088 |
A casual visitor might have thought he had strayed into the chaos of an overcrowded junk shop, but once his eyes had gotten used to the half light and had adjusted to the mess before him, he would have noticed how everything was in its proper place. A stuffed fox stood on top of an American traveling trunk. |
| 7089 |
Lucky I still had it, I thought, now Havas, go out and show the client that you don't lose anything through carelessness in this business. I picked the little bird up, and placed it in a box, properly packaged as the contract regarding all returned articles requires. It was no bigger than a pocket watch. |
| 7090 |
He glanced pleadingly at Tibor. The pawnbroker was taking regular sips of water: the thought of the bird that had so excited him was still bothering him. His fingers drummed on the table and he kept grunting. The acrid, almost refreshing smell of mothballs triumphantly overcame the smell of rotting food. |
| 7091 |
Look around you. Then try to imagine the storeroom below, the real thing. Because all you see here is the stuff people have abandoned. People are extraordinary. They find themselves in a spot, pick up the nearest valuable thing, be it silver, a clock, or a pair of earrings, and over they come to Havas. |
| 7092 |
Be so good as to think it over. The actor, they say, was himself corrupt to the core. I take a different view. The charge is that he corrupted young boys. They say he organized orgies. The complaint has it that he dragged a lot of boys off to the theater, boys from good families, and set up an orgy there. |
| 7093 |
There must be something in it, though, or he wouldn't have left in such a hurry. He shot off as if pursued by the four winds, gentlemen. There is only ever destruction in the wake of such a man. According to the complaint one witness saw, strange to say, the actor kissing the son of a prominent family. |
| 7094 |
It's pouring out there and you have nothing better to do. I come from a humble family with no pretensions, but perhaps I may help to enlighten the young gentlemen. Things are not so simple as people imagine. I was forty before I learned anything. It is impossible to say one man is like this, another like that. |
| 7095 |
He has a thriving pawnbroker's business in some town, but the devil gets into him, he eats a lot, drinks a lot, and chases every skirt he sees. He needs money and it is as if the devil himself were guiding his hand, for everything succeeds, whatever he touches turns to gold, so much so that he grows overconfident. |
| 7096 |
He travels to Lemberg, ready to supply the regiment with soap, when, there in Lemberg, he makes a mistake. It is all too possible, alas, to make mistakes in the course of business. The devil gets into him. Four months. He sleeps on the prison mattress for four months, his diet reduced to that fit only for an invalid. |
| 7097 |
So a little bird tells me. Never mind. I must stress that the man we are talking about is a big man with big appetites. Give him a decent meal and a nip of brandy and he can't pass a skirt without chasing after it. He spends four months practically in cramp. I once saw a hunting dog out in the yard. |
| 7098 |
It was in a crate that had been misdirected so the dog had arrived a day late, but it never once messed the crate where it slept, if I may so put it, it would rather suffer cramps, and that was how it arrived. The doctor had to lift it from the box and give it a dose of salts. Now imagine a human being. |
| 7099 |
He is taken to a high quality house. There are palms in the salon. Yes, madame, he says, one, two, whatever you have available; the ladies only arrive in the evening, will a brunette do? The woman is indeed brunette, she has gold teeth and a mole at the side of her nose, but she's quite pretty. He doesn't even see her. |
| 7100 |
I am not sure if I am making myself clear. Nothing. He slowly gets dressed, his clothes are almost dry by then, the warm smell of rain and the smell of prison emanating from them. What's going on? he thinks. The girl is sitting at the mirror in her nightdress, smoking a cigarette, looking at him over her shoulder. |
| 7101 |
You are forty two years old, what's this to you? Can't you dance on the billiard table till six in the morning, drink two or three bottles of bubbly by yourself, and top it with half a bottle of cognac, plus a stick of dry salami and four or five hard boiled eggs? He turns his hat round and round in his hands. |
| 7102 |
He sits down and looks around. He feels like a fool. He understands nothing. The girl silently goes about her business, flitting here and there in the room, puts on some perfume, adjusts her hair, applies some powder, takes off her nightdress. She is wearing black stockings and red suspenders. She is very attractive. |
| 7103 |
Her body has a yellow tinge, is very cold to the touch, her body hard, in fact just as you like them, he thinks, not an ounce of fat. She comes up to him, close your eyes, she says. He closes his eyes, the girl leans over him and kisses him: flesh is simply a kind of mechanism, he thinks, and she is a good mechanic. |
| 7104 |
That's the kind of girl she is. She embraces him, kisses him while he continues shaking his head like an idiot. The girl's body is seized by a cramp: the smell of mouthwash, cigarettes, and something a touch sour emanates from her mouth, she hasn't eaten a thing all day, she's working on an empty stomach. |
| 7105 |
He removes the girl's hands from his neck, he must sit up, he feels he is drowning. The girl slowly withdraws. She is wearing lacquered shoes, little half shoes. She pulls at her stockings and sits at the edge of the bed, and never stops staring at him. How long haven't you been able to do it? asks the girl. |
| 7106 |
That's the kind of girl she is, he thinks, she's a living creature like him. She is sitting at the head of the brass bed, wrapped in a piece of scarlet silk, her hair over her forehead, slowly raising the long cigarette holder to her lips, solemnly watching his every movement, saying nothing, only staring. |
| 7107 |
In the evening he returns to the brothel. He is going nowhere for a week yet. He returns every night, calling for different girls, for the same girl. By now they are all laughing at him. The girls stand in the hallway in their chemises, waiting for him, pointing and laughing at him. He can't bear to leave. |
| 7108 |
He grinds his teeth, beats his head against the ground, weeps, gets more money. He stalks the streets like a maniac during the day, looking round, perhaps even talking to himself. He doesn't understand. It is as if suddenly, for no reason at all, he were utterly paralyzed. It is like suddenly going blind. |
| 7109 |
One night he steals out to the railway station. You had a home once, he thinks. Frida cried a lot when she was alive, because you led a riotous life, a big man with big appetites, but at least you had a home, you were somebody, you used to have visitors on winter evenings. You could have been on the town council. |
| 7110 |
The dead find a home in the bosom of Abraham. I don't know whether the young gentlemen are acquainted with the scriptures? The train moves forward in the rain, two Polish peasants at his feet, they smell of garlic and cheap spirits. He looks down and shakes his head like someone who has been knocked down, he mumbles. |
| 7111 |
People look at him. A pity his daughter ran away two weeks ago. The young gentlemen might not be aware how far everything is connected. Trouble never travels alone, they say. His only daughter has run off with a crippled Uhlan lieutenant. He tears up her clothes, won't say a word about her to anyone. |
| 7112 |
When he is alone he prays or drinks or curses. You'd hardly recognize him. You didn't have a good word to say to your Frida while she was alive, he tells himself: God gave you the cell as punishment, he has bound your strength, you feel the curse of your fathers on you when you remember what the girl in Lemberg said. |
| 7113 |
God, oh God. It's impossible to live like this, he thinks. He walks the street with his eyes on the ground, he dare not look young girls in the face, no, not the young men either. He hates young gentlemen, the healthy vigorous ones who can go with girls. One day I shall have them in the palm of my hand, he thinks. |
| 7114 |
He weeps like an old woman, blaming himself. One can live neither by the stomach nor by any other appetite, he thinks. The patriarchs were right to lay down the law, but you, you laughed at their laws. You were a lecher, a lush, a glutton, you wronged your friends and acquaintances, that is why God is punishing you. |
| 7115 |
Rejected, he slowly hobbles to the door where he stops and says: We are all sinners. The very thing you said a moment ago, he thinks. He calls the other back. The man comes over to the counter and starts preaching. Only sinners may be cleansed, he says, and mutters something about the brazen serpent. |
| 7116 |
He listens, a fool at last after all those clever people. Miss, he says, write down one cuckoo clock, but secretly he thinks, another thing connected with birds, a bad sign. The bearded man goes away but not before leaving his name and address and offering his friendship. When it comes to money he is not such a fool. |
| 7117 |
One afternoon he picks up an old pair of shoes and thinks of the fool down fishmongers' alley. He calls in. The man immediately rises from his three legged stool and as soon as he sees him hobbles over and begins a rant about the exodus from Israel and about sitting by the fleshpots in the land of Egypt. |
| 7118 |
He came often, always at the same time, after dinner, I could talk to him for hours. Oh, he was so bright, he knew everything. He listened very attentively when the talk turned to serious matters. He was an ideal listener for a serious person to talk to, to reveal his innermost thoughts and troubles to. |
| 7119 |
That was because his better off friends often took pity on him and, wanting to help him and his family, sent their shoes to his father to be resoled. He had much to learn because his lot was harsh, because he could not afford to pay school fees, and because his very body was frail and awkward, like his father's. |
| 7120 |
One day he tells him what well brought up boys they are. Everything is different with them, even now when their fathers are away. The way they greet each other, the way they talk, it is all so different from the way we do such things. Because that is how intimate the talk is now. He talks about their games. |
| 7121 |
Even on the basis of such a brief acquaintance they can tell he's a fellow spirit. There is something sorrowful about him. And when the actor calls in he tells me what interesting and well brought up boys he has befriended. Rebels, all of them, he says. They are in rebellion for some reason or other. |
| 7122 |
Until, let us say, tomorrow night. Master Prockauer can put the pawn ticket related to the family silver back in his pocket. Tomorrow, at this time, shall we say, I would be pleased to see the young gentlemen with or without the money. In the meantime I wouldn't want to spoil tonight's entertainment. |
| 7123 |
Havas is not going anywhere, he is not to be moved, he sits here like a rock. His financial circumstances, his physical condition, tie him to the place. One at least of the young gentlemen's friends can reassure them that Havas is always friendly and generous. His personal relationships are, as ever, first rate. |
| 7124 |
His teeth are chattering as he sits in the corner, the carriage bumping over the uneven cobbles, opening his eyes whenever there is a particularly violent jerk to see the wall of some house, a pile of stones, the trunk of poplar, a garden fence. It seems to him that this is the longest journey he has ever made. |
| 7125 |
Everywhere there are fruit trees devastated by the storm. In the plowed furrows there is the delicately sprinkled sparkle of ice. They make their way across the field, muddy themselves, reeling a little, pass the fence, avoid the garden by entering through the back door, and steal up the stairs to their room. |
| 7126 |
Tibor sits down at the table. There's no one in the garden. Lanterns, painted scraps of paper, hang soaked and useless on wires. Overturned tables. A shroud of mist descends from the pines. But there is a rumble and a clatter from the hall below: conversation, the clinking of glasses rise through the floorboards. |
| 7127 |
I know that now. And I prayed for you. I have a special friend you don't know about, the mandarin, who is disinterested and fair. I prayed that you should remain young, handsome, graceful, light in spirit, and that you should escape the filthy struggle in which our brothers and fathers are currently engaged. |
| 7128 |
I prayed you should always be as elegant and refined as you are now, that you should suffer no crisis of doubt, that nothing should trouble your conscience; that you should always blush when someone addressed you. And loving you was a painful feeling, agony and humiliation, but there was nothing sly about it. |
| 7129 |
If you don't lay off me I will tell them everything. You can learn one or two things from Havas. He's not alone, you don't know this yet, but there is a considerable power ranged behind him and within certain limits he can do what he likes. If he takes against someone, that person is done for. He probably lied to you. |
| 7130 |
I loathed you each time you took a knife and fork in your hands. When you greeted someone. When you smiled. When you thanked someone for some object or a piece of information. I loathed your movements, the way you looked, the way you stood up and sat down. It isn't true to say that one can learn such things. |
| 7131 |
The joy of seeing him again was enough to pull the noble lady back from death's door. I had the opportunity of overhearing the exchange between them. After the first words of warm greeting the noble lady was quick to ask a question of the noble colonel. Where have you left your gold wristwatch? she asked him. |
| 7132 |
The cobbler raised his lantern and walked steadily into the house. He went up the stairs as though they were familiar to him. The stairs groaned and creaked beneath him. He went straight to the door, leaned his big shepherd's crook against the wall, carefully put down the lantern on the threshold, and opened the door. |
| 7133 |
They stopped for a second on a bend of the slope. The cobbler was quietly talking to himself. They heard him though their teeth were chattering. He was leaning over the face whose wire wig was hanging strangely independently of the skull, talking so quietly they couldn't make out what he was saying. |
| 7134 |
That meant two dinners and no lunches, or two lunches and no dinners, according to choice. As he pondered upon this unpleasant state of affairs, he sauntered down Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, preserving his military air and carriage, and rudely jostled the people upon the streets in order to clear a path for himself. |
| 7135 |
Porters in their shirt sleeves, astride their chairs, smoked their pipes at the carriage gates, and pedestrians strolled leisurely along, hats in hand. When Georges Duroy reached the boulevard he halted again, undecided as to which road to choose. Finally he turned toward the Madeleine and followed the tide of people. |
| 7136 |
They seated themselves. To their right and left were similar boxes. On the stage three men were performing on trapezes. But Duroy paid no heed to them, his eyes finding more to interest them in the grand promenade. Forestier remarked upon the motley appearance of the throng, but Duroy did not listen to him. |
| 7137 |
He had on a new suit but he was uncomfortable. He felt that it was defective; his boots were not glossy, he had bought his shirt that same evening at the Louvre for four francs fifty, his trousers were too wide and betrayed their cheapness in their fit, or rather, misfit, and his coat was too tight. |
| 7138 |
He glanced at Mme. Forestier. She wore a gown of pale blue cashmere which clung gracefully to her supple form and rounded outlines; her arms and throat rose in, lily white purity from the mass of lace which ornamented the corsage and short sleeves. Her hair was dressed high and curled on the nape of her neck. |
| 7139 |
Duroy grew more at his ease under her glance, which recalled to him, he knew not why, that of the girl he had met the preceding evening at the Folies Bergeres. Mme. Forestier had gray eyes, a small nose, full lips, and a rather heavy chin, an irregular, attractive face, full of gentleness and yet of malice. |
| 7140 |
The conversation returned to the colonization of Algeria. M. Walter uttered several jocose remarks; Forestier alluded to the article he had prepared for the morrow; Jacques Rival declared himself in favor of a military government with grants of land to all the officers after thirty years of colonial service. |
| 7141 |
They would speak Arabic, but they would not know how to transplant beet root, and how to sow wheat. They would be strong in fencing, but weak in the art of farming. On the contrary, the new country should be opened to everyone. Intelligent men would make positions for themselves; the others would succumb. |
| 7142 |
All the men were talking at the same time; their discussion was animated. When the party left the dining room, Duroy offered his arm to the little girl. She thanked him gravely and stood upon tiptoe in order to lay her hand upon his arm. Upon entering the drawing room, the young man carefully surveyed it. |
| 7143 |
First of all, I shall give you a letter of introduction to the chief of the police, who will in turn introduce you to one of his employees. You can arrange with him for all important news, official and semiofficial. For details you can apply to Saint Potin, who is posted; you will see him to morrow. |
| 7144 |
The thought of the article he had to write that evening haunted him. Mentally he collected the material as he wended his way to the cafe at which he dined. Then he returned home and seated himself at his table to work. Before his eyes was the sheet of blank paper, but all the material he had amassed had escaped him. |
| 7145 |
It was September. The fortune which Duroy had hoped to make so rapidly seemed to him slow in coming. Above all he was dissatisfied with the mediocrity of his position; he was appreciated, but was treated according to his rank. Forestier himself no longer invited him to dinner, and treated him as an inferior. |
| 7146 |
Of what was she thinking? Suddenly she moved her foot, nervously, impatiently. That movement caused him to tremble, and turning quickly, he cast himself upon her, seeking her lips with his. She uttered a cry, attempted to repulse him and then yielded to his caresses as if she had not the strength to resist. |
| 7147 |
He walked to the mantelpiece to see what kind of an appearance he presented: he was readjusting his cravat when he saw in the mirror the young woman standing on the threshold looking at him. He pretended not to have seen her, and for several moments they gazed at one another in the mirror. Then he turned. |
| 7148 |
Duroy soon began to tire of those expeditions, for he had exhausted all his resources and all means of obtaining money. In addition to that he owed Forestier a hundred francs, Jacques Rival three hundred, and he was hampered with innumerable petty debts ranging from twenty francs to one hundred sous. |
| 7149 |
If you had confessed your fears to me sooner, I would have reassured you. My dear friend, a man in love is not only foolish but dangerous. I cease all intercourse with people who love me or pretend to; firstly, because they bore me, and secondly, because I look upon them with dread, as I would upon a mad dog. |
| 7150 |
A door opened at the end of the room, and M. Walter entered with two tall young girls of sixteen and seventeen; one plain, the other pretty. Duroy knew that the manager was a paterfamilias, but he was astonished. He had thought of the manager's daughters as one thinks of a distant country one will never see. |
| 7151 |
He was so ill at ease that at one time he thought he should feign indisposition and return home. The pictures had all been exhibited. M. Walter placed the lamp on the table and greeted the last arrival, while Duroy recommenced alone an examination of the canvas, as if he could not tear himself away. |
| 7152 |
Gradually, however, his assurance returned, and before the meal was over, he knew that their relations would be renewed. Wishing, too, to be polite to his employer's daughter, he addressed her from time to time. She responded as her mother would have done, without any hesitation as to what she should say. |
| 7153 |
I have myself seen Dame Aubert, who is sixty years old at least; she told me the particulars of her dispute with a butcher as to the weight of some cutlets, which dispute necessitated an explanation before a magistrate. That is the whole truth in a nutshell. As for the other insinuations I scorn them. |
| 7154 |
He had never heard his name. However, if he had not been a remarkable shot, he would not have accepted that dangerous weapon without hesitation. He ground his teeth to prevent his crying aloud. Suddenly he remembered that he had a bottle of brandy; he fetched it from the cupboard and soon emptied it. |
| 7155 |
On their way home along the gulf a cool breeze suddenly sprang up, and the invalid began to cough. At first it was nothing, only a slight attack, but it grew worse and turned to a sort of hiccough a rattle; Forestier choked, and every time he tried to breathe he coughed violently. Nothing quieted him. |
| 7156 |
He opened his eyes just in time to see Forestier close his. He coughed slightly, and two streams of blood issued from the corners of his mouth and flowed upon his night robe; his hands ceased their perpetual motion; he had breathed his last. His wife, perceiving it, uttered a cry and fell upon her knees by the bedside. |
| 7157 |
They did not speak, Georges's eyes seemed attracted to that emaciated face which the flickering light made more hollow. That was his friend, Charles Forestier, who the day before had spoken to him. For several years he had lived, eaten, laughed, loved, and hoped as did everyone and now all was ended for him forever. |
| 7158 |
He would have liked to know. Why that anxiety as to what she would do? Georges questioned himself, and found that it was caused by a desire to win her for himself. Why should he not succeed? He was positive that she liked him; she would have confidence in him, for she knew that he was intelligent, resolute, tenacious. |
| 7159 |
Was not that a kind of avowal? He was impatient to question her, to find out her intentions. He would soon have to leave that villa, for he could not remain alone with the young widow; therefore he must find out her plans before returning to Paris, in order that she might not yield to another's entreaties. |
| 7160 |
Certainly it was no time to speak to her on such a subject; however, he thought he might be able to express himself by means of some phrase which would have a hidden meaning and would infer what he wished to say. But that rigid corpse lay between them. The atmosphere became oppressive, almost suffocating. |
| 7161 |
Do not reply, but let me continue. This is no proposal the time and place would render it odious. I only wish to tell you that by a word you can make me happy, and that you can make of me as you will, either a friend or a husband for my heart and my body are yours. I do not want you to answer me now. |
| 7162 |
He waited. He was resolved to employ every means to marry her if she seemed to hesitate; he had faith in his good fortune, in that power of attraction which he felt within him a power so irresistible that all women yielded to it. At length a short note admonished him that the decisive moment had arrived. |
| 7163 |
He worked steadily, spent little, tried to save some money that he might not be without a sou at the time of his marriage, and became as miserly as he had once been prodigal. Summer glided by; then autumn, and no one suspected the tie existing between Duroy and Mme. Forestier, for they seldom met in public. |
| 7164 |
He awaited her impatiently, determined to confess at once and afterward to argue with her, to tell her that he could not remain a bachelor indefinitely, and that, as M. de Marelle persisted in living, he had been compelled to choose some one else as a legal companion. When the bell rang, his heart gave a bound. |
| 7165 |
She recalled her own mother, of whom she never spoke to anyone a governess who had been betrayed and who had died of grief and shame when Madeleine was twelve years old. A stranger had had the little girl educated. Her father without doubt. Who was he? She did not know positively, but she had vague suspicions. |
| 7166 |
The evening repast by candle light was more painful to Madeleine than that of the morning. Neither Father Duroy nor his wife spoke. When the meal was over, Madeleine drew her husband outside in order not to have to remain in that room, the atmosphere of which was heavy with smoke and the fumes of liquor. |
| 7167 |
Du Roy looked at his watch again. It was not yet a quarter past three. He took a seat, regretting that he could not smoke. At the end of the church near the choir; he could hear the measured tread of a corpulent man whom he had noticed when he entered. Suddenly the rustle of a gown made him start. It was she. |
| 7168 |
She would rather have died than have fallen thus; she had never been weak. She murmured several words of supplication; she knew that all was over, that the struggle was in vain. She did not however wish to yield, but she felt her weakness. Some one approached with a rapid step; she turned her head. It was a priest. |
| 7169 |
He did not find Mme. Walter in the place in which he had left her, and was surprised. She had gone. He was furious. Then he thought she might be looking for him, and he walked around the church. Not finding her, he returned and seated himself on the chair she had occupied, hoping that she would rejoin him there. |
| 7170 |
He rose to examine into it, and saw in a chapel near by, the doors of the confessionals. He drew nearer in order to see the woman whose voice he heard. He recognized Mme. Walter; she was confessing. At first he felt a desire to seize her by the arm and drag her away; then he seated himself near by and bided his time. |
| 7171 |
For six weeks he had ineffectually tried to break with Mme. Walter. At three successive meetings she had been a prey to remorse, and had overwhelmed her lover with reproaches. Angered by those scenes and already weary of the dramatic woman, he had simply avoided her, hoping that the affair would end in that way. |
| 7172 |
He was therefore obliged to either lunch or dine at her house daily, when she would clasp his hand under cover of the table or offer him her lips behind the doors. Above all, Georges enjoyed being thrown so much in contact with Suzanne; she made sport of everything and everybody with cutting appropriateness. |
| 7173 |
He ceased calling upon her, replying to her letters, and yielding to her appeals. She finally divined that he no longer loved her, and the discovery caused her unutterable anguish; but she watched him, followed him in a cab with drawn blinds to the office, to his house, in the hope of seeing him pass by. |
| 7174 |
When he found that he was alone, he cursed Mme. Walter, bathed his face, and went out vowing vengeance. That time he would not pardon. No, indeed. He strolled to the boulevard and stopped at a jeweler's to look at a chronometer he had wanted for some time and which would cost eighteen hundred francs. |
| 7175 |
He wrote it according to the minister's instructions, hinting to the readers that the expedition to Morocco would not take place. He took it, when completed, to the office, conversed several moments with M. Walter, and set out again, smoking, with a light heart, he knew not why. His wife had not returned. |
| 7176 |
The ceremony was just over; those present went out slowly, passing by the coffin, and by Count de Vaudrec's nephew, who shook hands and returned salutations. When Georges du Roy and his wife left the church, they walked along side by side on their way home. They did not speak; they were both preoccupied. |
| 7177 |
I may add that M. de Vaudrec's nephew, who was informed this morning of his uncle's last wishes, expresses himself as ready to respect them if he be given one hundred thousand francs. In my opinion the will cannot be broken, but a lawsuit would cause a sensation which you would probably like to avoid. |
| 7178 |
Everyone would talk about it and laugh at me. My fellow journalists are already too much disposed to be jealous of me and to attack me. I have to be especially careful of my honor and my reputation. I cannot permit my wife to accept a legacy of that kind from a man whom rumor has already assigned to her as her lover. |
| 7179 |
He cherished ill will toward everyone toward the Walters, even toward his wife, and above all toward the man who had deceived him, made use of him, and who dined twice a week at his house. Georges acted as his secretary, agent, mouthpiece, and when he wrote at his dictation, he felt a mad desire to strangle him. |
| 7180 |
He declared that he would not attend M. Walter's fete that he would not cross the miserable Jew's threshold. For two months Mme. Walter had written to him daily, beseeching him to come to see her, to appoint a meeting where he would, in order that she might give him the seventy thousand francs she had made for him. |
| 7181 |
Many did not know her, and walked through the rooms as if in a museum without paying any heed to the host and hostess. When Virginie perceived Du Roy, she grew livid and made a movement toward him; then she paused and waited for him to advance. He bowed ceremoniously, while Madeleine greeted her effusively. |
| 7182 |
One had to look closely at it in order to understand it. It was a grand work the work of a master one of those triumphs of art which furnishes one for years with food for thought. Du Roy gazed at it for some time, and then turned away, to make room for others. Suzanne's tiny hand still rested upon his arm. |
| 7183 |
They were talking in low tones and smiling into each other's eyes. He fancied he saw some people whisper, as they gazed at them, and he felt a desire to fall upon those two beings and smite them to the earth. His wife was making a laughing stock of him. Who was she? A shrewd little parvenue, that was all. |
| 7184 |
Why do you never come to see me? Why do you refuse to dine with me even once a week? I have no other thoughts than of you. I suffer terribly. You cannot understand that your image, always present, closes my throat, stifles me, and leaves me scarcely strength enough to move my limbs in order to walk. |
| 7185 |
Suddenly she ceased speaking, and groaned beneath his blows. Finally he desisted, paced the room several times in order to regain his self possession, entered the bedroom, filled the basin with cold water and bathed his head. Then he washed his hands and returned to see what Clotilde was doing. She had not moved. |
| 7186 |
The ceremony took place on a clear, autumn day. At ten o'clock the curious began to assemble; at eleven o'clock, detachments of officers came to disperse the crowd. Soon after, the first guests arrived; they were followed by others, women in rich costumes, men, grave and dignified. The church slowly began to fill. |
| 7187 |
At that moment he felt almost pious, for he was filled with gratitude for the blessings showered upon him. Without knowing just whom he was addressing, he offered up thanks for his success. When the ceremony was over, he rose, and, giving his arm to his wife, they passed into the sacristy. A stream of people entered. |
| 7188 |
Others approached, and she passed on. Finally the throng dispersed. Georges placed Suzanne's hand upon his arm to pass through the church with her. It was filled with people, for all had resumed their seats in order to see them leave the sacred edifice together. He walked along slowly, with a firm step, his head erect. |
| 7189 |
It was Miss Taylor's loss which first brought grief. It was on the wedding day of this beloved friend that Emma first sat in mournful thought of any continuance. The wedding over, and the bride people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening. |
| 7190 |
The backgammon table was placed; but a visitor immediately afterwards walked in and made it unnecessary. Mr. Knightley, a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but particularly connected with it, as the elder brother of Isabella's husband. |
| 7191 |
He lived about a mile from Highbury, was a frequent visitor, and always welcome, and at this time more welcome than usual, as coming directly from their mutual connexions in London. He had returned to a late dinner, after some days' absence, and now walked up to Hartfield to say that all were well in Brunswick Square. |
| 7192 |
Mr. Weston, who had been a widower so long, and who seemed so perfectly comfortable without a wife, so constantly occupied either in his business in town or among his friends here, always acceptable wherever he went, always cheerful Mr. Weston need not spend a single evening in the year alone if he did not like it. |
| 7193 |
He had received a good education, but, on succeeding early in life to a small independence, had become indisposed for any of the more homely pursuits in which his brothers were engaged, and had satisfied an active, cheerful mind and social temper by entering into the militia of his county, then embodied. |
| 7194 |
He was looked on as sufficiently belonging to the place to make his merits and prospects a kind of common concern. Mr. Frank Churchill was one of the boasts of Highbury, and a lively curiosity to see him prevailed, though the compliment was so little returned that he had never been there in his life. |
| 7195 |
The compliments of his neighbours were over; he was no longer teased by being wished joy of so sorrowful an event; and the wedding cake, which had been a great distress to him, was all eat up. His own stomach could bear nothing rich, and he could never believe other people to be different from himself. |
| 7196 |
What was unwholesome to him he regarded as unfit for any body; and he had, therefore, earnestly tried to dissuade them from having any wedding cake at all, and when that proved vain, as earnestly tried to prevent any body's eating it. He had been at the pains of consulting Mr. Perry, the apothecary, on the subject. |
| 7197 |
Not unfrequently, through Emma's persuasion, he had some of the chosen and the best to dine with him: but evening parties were what he preferred; and, unless he fancied himself at any time unequal to company, there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card table for him. |
| 7198 |
Mrs. Bates, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, was a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille. She lived with her single daughter in a very small way, and was considered with all the regard and respect which a harmless old lady, under such untoward circumstances, can excite. |
| 7199 |
She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good will. |
| 7200 |
Mrs. Goddard's school was in high repute and very deservedly; for Highbury was reckoned a particularly healthy spot: she had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter dressed their chilblains with her own hands. |
| 7201 |
She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers. |
| 7202 |
He loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth, but his conviction of suppers being very unwholesome made him rather sorry to see any thing put on it; and while his hospitality would have welcomed his visitors to every thing, his care for their health made him grieve that they would eat. |
| 7203 |
Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else; but you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see one of our small eggs will not hurt you. Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit of tart a very little bit. Ours are all apple tarts. |
| 7204 |
She had ventured once alone to Randalls, but it was not pleasant; and a Harriet Smith, therefore, one whom she could summon at any time to a walk, would be a valuable addition to her privileges. But in every respect, as she saw more of her, she approved her, and was confirmed in all her kind designs. |
| 7205 |
He had gone three miles round one day in order to bring her some walnuts, because she had said how fond she was of them, and in every thing else he was so very obliging. He had his shepherd's son into the parlour one night on purpose to sing to her. She was very fond of singing. He could sing a little himself. |
| 7206 |
His mother is perfectly right not to be in a hurry. They seem very comfortable as they are, and if she were to take any pains to marry him, she would probably repent it. Six years hence, if he could meet with a good sort of young woman in the same rank as his own, with a little money, it might be very desirable. |
| 7207 |
Whatever money he might come into when his father died, whatever his share of the family property, it is, I dare say, all afloat, all employed in his stock, and so forth; and though, with diligence and good luck, he may be rich in time, it is next to impossible that he should have realised any thing yet. |
| 7208 |
The misfortune of your birth ought to make you particularly careful as to your associates. There can be no doubt of your being a gentleman's daughter, and you must support your claim to that station by every thing within your own power, or there will be plenty of people who would take pleasure in degrading you. |
| 7209 |
He was on foot, and after looking very respectfully at her, looked with most unfeigned satisfaction at her companion. Emma was not sorry to have such an opportunity of survey; and walking a few yards forward, while they talked together, soon made her quick eye sufficiently acquainted with Mr. Robert Martin. |
| 7210 |
At Hartfield, you have had very good specimens of well educated, well bred men. I should be surprized if, after seeing them, you could be in company with Mr. Martin again without perceiving him to be a very inferior creature and rather wondering at yourself for having ever thought him at all agreeable before. |
| 7211 |
Mr. Elton was the very person fixed on by Emma for driving the young farmer out of Harriet's head. She thought it would be an excellent match; and only too palpably desirable, natural, and probable, for her to have much merit in planning it. She feared it was what every body else must think of and predict. |
| 7212 |
She had already satisfied herself that he thought Harriet a beautiful girl, which she trusted, with such frequent meetings at Hartfield, was foundation enough on his side; and on Harriet's there could be little doubt that the idea of being preferred by him would have all the usual weight and efficacy. |
| 7213 |
Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. At ten years old, she had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen. She was always quick and assured: Isabella slow and diffident. And ever since she was twelve, Emma has been mistress of the house and of you all. |
| 7214 |
She will grow just refined enough to be uncomfortable with those among whom birth and circumstances have placed her home. I am much mistaken if Emma's doctrines give any strength of mind, or tend at all to make a girl adapt herself rationally to the varieties of her situation in life. They only give a little polish. |
| 7215 |
But I have no idea that she has yet ever seen a man she cared for. It would not be a bad thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object. I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good. But there is nobody hereabouts to attach her; and she goes so seldom from home. |
| 7216 |
Her many beginnings were displayed. Miniatures, half lengths, whole lengths, pencil, crayon, and water colours had been all tried in turn. She had always wanted to do every thing, and had made more progress both in drawing and music than many might have done with so little labour as she would ever submit to. |
| 7217 |
Here is my sketch of the fourth, who was a baby. I took him as he was sleeping on the sofa, and it is as strong a likeness of his cockade as you would wish to see. He had nestled down his head most conveniently. That's very like. I am rather proud of little George. The corner of the sofa is very good. |
| 7218 |
But as she wanted to be drawing, the declaration must wait a little longer. She had soon fixed on the size and sort of portrait. It was to be a whole length in water colours, like Mr. John Knightley's, and was destined, if she could please herself, to hold a very honourable station over the mantelpiece. |
| 7219 |
She read, and was surprized. The style of the letter was much above her expectation. There were not merely no grammatical errors, but as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. |
| 7220 |
No doubt he is a sensible man, and I suppose may have a natural talent for thinks strongly and clearly and when he takes a pen in hand, his thoughts naturally find proper words. It is so with some men. Yes, I understand the sort of mind. Vigorous, decided, with sentiments to a certain point, not coarse. |
| 7221 |
Your meaning must be unequivocal; no doubts or demurs: and such expressions of gratitude and concern for the pain you are inflicting as propriety requires, will present themselves unbidden to your mind, I am persuaded. You need not be prompted to write with the appearance of sorrow for his disappointment. |
| 7222 |
I was very much pleased with all that he said. I never hear better sense from any one than Robert Martin. He always speaks to the purpose; open, straightforward, and very well judging. He told me every thing; his circumstances and plans, and what they all proposed doing in the event of his marriage. |
| 7223 |
I must think your statement by no means fair. You are not just to Harriet's claims. They would be estimated very differently by others as well as myself; Mr. Martin may be the richest of the two, but he is undoubtedly her inferior as to rank in society. The sphere in which she moves is much above his. |
| 7224 |
There can scarcely be a doubt that her father is a gentleman and a gentleman of fortune. Her allowance is very liberal; nothing has ever been grudged for her improvement or comfort. That she is a gentleman's daughter, is indubitable to me; that she associates with gentlemen's daughters, no one, I apprehend, will deny. |
| 7225 |
Robert Martin would never have proceeded so far, if he had not felt persuaded of her not being disinclined to him. I know him well. He has too much real feeling to address any woman on the haphazard of selfish passion. And as to conceit, he is the farthest from it of any man I know. Depend upon it he had encouragement. |
| 7226 |
You will puff her up with such ideas of her own beauty, and of what she has a claim to, that, in a little while, nobody within her reach will be good enough for her. Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief. Nothing so easy as for a young lady to raise her expectations too high. |
| 7227 |
Elton is a very good sort of man, and a very respectable vicar of Highbury, but not at all likely to make an imprudent match. He knows the value of a good income as well as any body. Elton may talk sentimentally, but he will act rationally. He is as well acquainted with his own claims, as you can be with Harriet's. |
| 7228 |
Mr. Knightley saw no such passion, and of course thought nothing of its effects; but she saw too much of it to feel a doubt of its overcoming any hesitations that a reasonable prudence might originally suggest; and more than a reasonable, becoming degree of prudence, she was very sure did not belong to Mr. Elton. |
| 7229 |
Emma assisted with her invention, memory and taste; and as Harriet wrote a very pretty hand, it was likely to be an arrangement of the first order, in form as well as quantity. Mr. Woodhouse was almost as much interested in the business as the girls, and tried very often to recollect something worth their putting in. |
| 7230 |
They owed to him their two or three politest puzzles; and the joy and exultation with which at last he recalled, and rather sentimentally recited, that well known charade, My first doth affliction denote, Which my second is destin'd to feel And my whole is the best antidote That affliction to soften and heal. |
| 7231 |
Granted; for private enjoyment; and for private enjoyment keep them. They are not at all the less written you know, because you divide them. The couplet does not cease to be, nor does its meaning change. But take it away, and all appropriation ceases, and a very pretty gallant charade remains, fit for any collection. |
| 7232 |
Every letter from her is read forty times over; her compliments to all friends go round and round again; and if she does but send her aunt the pattern of a stomacher, or knit a pair of garters for her grandmother, one hears of nothing else for a month. I wish Jane Fairfax very well; but she tires me to death. |
| 7233 |
She understood their ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those for whom education had done so little; entered into their troubles with ready sympathy, and always gave her assistance with as much intelligence as good will. |
| 7234 |
She was obliged to leave the door ajar as she found it; but she fully intended that Mr. Elton should close it. It was not closed, however, it still remained ajar; but by engaging the housekeeper in incessant conversation, she hoped to make it practicable for him to chuse his own subject in the adjoining room. |
| 7235 |
For ten minutes she could hear nothing but herself. It could be protracted no longer. She was then obliged to be finished, and make her appearance. The lovers were standing together at one of the windows. It had a most favourable aspect; and, for half a minute, Emma felt the glory of having schemed successfully. |
| 7236 |
He was not an ill tempered man, not so often unreasonably cross as to deserve such a reproach; but his temper was not his great perfection; and, indeed, with such a worshipping wife, it was hardly possible that any natural defects in it should not be increased. The extreme sweetness of her temper must hurt his. |
| 7237 |
He had all the clearness and quickness of mind which she wanted, and he could sometimes act an ungracious, or say a severe thing. He was not a great favourite with his fair sister in law. Nothing wrong in him escaped her. She was quick in feeling the little injuries to Isabella, which Isabella never felt herself. |
| 7238 |
Her wish of shewing you attention could not be doubted, and his being a disengaged and social man makes it all easy. I have been always telling you, my love, that I had no idea of the change being so very material to Hartfield as you apprehended; and now you have Emma's account, I hope you will be satisfied. |
| 7239 |
Emma's sense of right however had decided it; and besides the consideration of what was due to each brother, she had particular pleasure, from the circumstance of the late disagreement between Mr. Knightley and herself, in procuring him the proper invitation. She hoped they might now become friends again. |
| 7240 |
But, upon my word, Mr. Elton, in your case, I should certainly excuse myself. You appear to me a little hoarse already, and when you consider what demand of voice and what fatigues to morrow will bring, I think it would be no more than common prudence to stay at home and take care of yourself to night. |
| 7241 |
For her own sake she could not be rude; and for Harriet's, in the hope that all would yet turn out right, she was even positively civil; but it was an effort; especially as something was going on amongst the others, in the most overpowering period of Mr. Elton's nonsense, which she particularly wished to listen to. |
| 7242 |
I should like to see two more here, your pretty little friend, Miss Smith, and my son and then I should say we were quite complete. I believe you did not hear me telling the others in the drawing room that we are expecting Frank. I had a letter from him this morning, and he will be with us within a fortnight. |
| 7243 |
But I know they will, because it is a family that a certain lady, of some consequence, at Enscombe, has a particular dislike to: and though it is thought necessary to invite them once in two or three years, they always are put off when it comes to the point. I have not the smallest doubt of the issue. |
| 7244 |
But at present there was nothing more to be said. Mr. Woodhouse very soon followed them into the drawing room. To be sitting long after dinner, was a confinement that he could not endure. Neither wine nor conversation was any thing to him; and gladly did he move to those with whom he was always comfortable. |
| 7245 |
I admired your spirit; and I dare say we shall get home very well. Another hour or two's snow can hardly make the road impassable; and we are two carriages; if one is blown over in the bleak part of the common field there will be the other at hand. I dare say we shall be all safe at Hartfield before midnight. |
| 7246 |
It really was so. Without scruple without apology without much apparent diffidence, Mr. Elton, the lover of Harriet, was professing himself her lover. She tried to stop him; but vainly; he would go on, and say it all. Angry as she was, the thought of the moment made her resolve to restrain herself when she did speak. |
| 7247 |
No, upon my honour, there is no unsteadiness of character. I have thought only of you. I protest against having paid the smallest attention to any one else. Every thing that I have said or done, for many weeks past, has been with the sole view of marking my adoration of yourself. You cannot really, seriously, doubt it. |
| 7248 |
Every part of it brought pain and humiliation, of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken more in error more disgraced by mis judgment, than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself. |
| 7249 |
His professions and his proposals did him no service. She thought nothing of his attachment, and was insulted by his hopes. He wanted to marry well, and having the arrogance to raise his eyes to her, pretended to be in love; but she was perfectly easy as to his not suffering any disappointment that need be cared for. |
| 7250 |
The very want of such equality might prevent his perception of it; but he must know that in fortune and consequence she was greatly his superior. He must know that the Woodhouses had been settled for several generations at Hartfield, the younger branch of a very ancient family and that the Eltons were nobody. |
| 7251 |
There I was quite right. That was well done of me; but there I should have stopped, and left the rest to time and chance. I was introducing her into good company, and giving her the opportunity of pleasing some one worth having; I ought not to have attempted more. But now, poor girl, her peace is cut up for some time. |
| 7252 |
He was always agreeable and obliging, and speaking pleasantly of every body. But with all the hopes of cheerfulness, and all the present comfort of delay, there was still such an evil hanging over her in the hour of explanation with Harriet, as made it impossible for Emma to be ever perfectly at ease. |
| 7253 |
Mr. Elton's absence just at this time was the very thing to be desired. She admired him for contriving it, though not able to give him much credit for the manner in which it was announced. Resentment could not have been more plainly spoken than in a civility to her father, from which she was so pointedly excluded. |
| 7254 |
It was a very useful note, for it supplied them with fresh matter for thought and conversation during the rest of their lonely evening. Mr. Woodhouse talked over his alarms, and Emma was in spirits to persuade them away with all her usual promptitude. She now resolved to keep Harriet no longer in the dark. |
| 7255 |
She had to destroy all the hopes which she had been so industriously feeding to appear in the ungracious character of the one preferred and acknowledge herself grossly mistaken and mis judging in all her ideas on one subject, all her observations, all her convictions, all her prophecies for the last six weeks. |
| 7256 |
Emma was in the humour to value simplicity and modesty to the utmost; and all that was amiable, all that ought to be attaching, seemed on Harriet's side, not her own. Harriet did not consider herself as having any thing to complain of. The affection of such a man as Mr. Elton would have been too great a distinction. |
| 7257 |
For half an hour Mr. Weston was surprized and sorry; but then he began to perceive that Frank's coming two or three months later would be a much better plan; better time of year; better weather; and that he would be able, without any doubt, to stay considerably longer with them than if he had come sooner. |
| 7258 |
He cannot want money he cannot want leisure. We know, on the contrary, that he has so much of both, that he is glad to get rid of them at the idlest haunts in the kingdom. We hear of him for ever at some watering place or other. A little while ago, he was at Weymouth. This proves that he can leave the Churchills. |
| 7259 |
He would feel himself in the right; and the declaration made, of course, as a man of sense would make it, in a proper manner would do him more good, raise him higher, fix his interest stronger with the people he depended on, than all that a line of shifts and expedients can ever do. Respect would be added to affection. |
| 7260 |
The Churchills might not have a word to say in return; but then, you would have no habits of early obedience and long observance to break through. To him who has, it might not be so easy to burst forth at once into perfect independence, and set all their claims on his gratitude and regard at nought. |
| 7261 |
The marriage of Lieut. Fairfax of the regiment of infantry, and Miss Jane Bates, had had its day of fame and pleasure, hope and interest; but nothing now remained of it, save the melancholy remembrance of him dying in action abroad of his widow sinking under consumption and grief soon afterwards and this girl. |
| 7262 |
This event had very lately taken place; too lately for any thing to be yet attempted by her less fortunate friend towards entering on her path of duty; though she had now reached the age which her own judgment had fixed on for beginning. She had long resolved that one and twenty should be the period. |
| 7263 |
Perhaps they began to feel it might have been kinder and wiser to have resisted the temptation of any delay, and spared her from a taste of such enjoyments of ease and leisure as must now be relinquished. Still, however, affection was glad to catch at any reasonable excuse for not hurrying on the wretched moment. |
| 7264 |
Her caution was thrown away. Emma saw its artifice, and returned to her first surmises. There probably was something more to conceal than her own preference; Mr. Dixon, perhaps, had been very near changing one friend for the other, or been fixed only to Miss Campbell, for the sake of the future twelve thousand pounds. |
| 7265 |
I had not thought of it before, but that is the best way. They must not over salt the leg; and then, if it is not over salted, and if it is very thoroughly boiled, just as Serle boils ours, and eaten very moderately of, with a boiled turnip, and a little carrot or parsnip, I do not consider it unwholesome. |
| 7266 |
Miss Hawkins, I dare say, an excellent young woman. His extreme attention to my mother wanting her to sit in the vicarage pew, that she might hear the better, for my mother is a little deaf, you know it is not much, but she does not hear quite quick. Jane says that Colonel Campbell is a little deaf. |
| 7267 |
She was obliged to stop and think. She was not thoroughly comfortable herself. The young man's conduct, and his sister's, seemed the result of real feeling, and she could not but pity them. As Harriet described it, there had been an interesting mixture of wounded affection and genuine delicacy in their behaviour. |
| 7268 |
She brought no name, no blood, no alliance. Miss Hawkins was the youngest of the two daughters of a Bristol merchant, of course, he must be called; but, as the whole of the profits of his mercantile life appeared so very moderate, it was not unfair to guess the dignity of his line of trade had been very moderate also. |
| 7269 |
She meant to take her in the carriage, leave her at the Abbey Mill, while she drove a little farther, and call for her again so soon, as to allow no time for insidious applications or dangerous recurrences to the past, and give the most decided proof of what degree of intimacy was chosen for the future. |
| 7270 |
The quarter of an hour brought her punctually to the white gate again; and Miss Smith receiving her summons, was with her without delay, and unattended by any alarming young man. She came solitarily down the gravel walk a Miss Martin just appearing at the door, and parting with her seemingly with ceremonious civility. |
| 7271 |
She could not repent. They must be separated; but there was a great deal of pain in the process so much to herself at this time, that she soon felt the necessity of a little consolation, and resolved on going home by way of Randalls to procure it. Her mind was quite sick of Mr. Elton and the Martins. |
| 7272 |
But neither geography nor tranquillity could come all at once, and Emma was now in a humour to resolve that they should both come in time. The morning of the interesting day arrived, and Mrs. Weston's faithful pupil did not forget either at ten, or eleven, or twelve o'clock, that she was to think of her at four. |
| 7273 |
That he should never have been able to indulge so amiable a feeling before, passed suspiciously through Emma's brain; but still, if it were a falsehood, it was a pleasant one, and pleasantly handled. His manner had no air of study or exaggeration. He did really look and speak as if in a state of no common enjoyment. |
| 7274 |
Though always objecting to every marriage that was arranged, he never suffered beforehand from the apprehension of any; it seemed as if he could not think so ill of any two persons' understanding as to suppose they meant to marry till it were proved against them. She blessed the favouring blindness. |
| 7275 |
And, besides, I must give you a hint, Frank; any want of attention to her here should be carefully avoided. You saw her with the Campbells, when she was the equal of every body she mixed with, but here she is with a poor old grandmother, who has barely enough to live on. If you do not call early it will be a slight. |
| 7276 |
They walked thither directly. Emma had hardly expected them: for Mr. Weston, who had called in for half a minute, in order to hear that his son was very handsome, knew nothing of their plans; and it was an agreeable surprize to her, therefore, to perceive them walking up to the house together, arm in arm. |
| 7277 |
But on seeing them together, she became perfectly satisfied. It was not merely in fine words or hyperbolical compliment that he paid his duty; nothing could be more proper or pleasing than his whole manner to her nothing could more agreeably denote his wish of considering her as a friend and securing her affection. |
| 7278 |
He could be no judge, however, of the evil he was holding cheap. It was but an effusion of lively spirits. At last he was persuaded to move on from the front of the Crown; and being now almost facing the house where the Bateses lodged, Emma recollected his intended visit the day before, and asked him if he had paid it. |
| 7279 |
I hardly know how it has happened; a little, perhaps, from that wickedness on my side which was prone to take disgust towards a girl so idolized and so cried up as she always was, by her aunt and grandmother, and all their set. And then, her reserve I never could attach myself to any one so completely reserved. |
| 7280 |
Intimacy between Miss Fairfax and me is quite out of the question. I have no reason to think ill of her not the least except that such extreme and perpetual cautiousness of word and manner, such a dread of giving a distinct idea about any body, is apt to suggest suspicions of there being something to conceal. |
| 7281 |
No, he could not believe it a bad house; not such a house as a man was to be pitied for having. If it were to be shared with the woman he loved, he could not think any man to be pitied for having that house. There must be ample room in it for every real comfort. The man must be a blockhead who wanted more. |
| 7282 |
He might not be aware of the inroads on domestic peace to be occasioned by no housekeeper's room, or a bad butler's pantry, but no doubt he did perfectly feel that Enscombe could not make him happy, and that whenever he were attached, he would willingly give up much of wealth to be allowed an early establishment. |
| 7283 |
On their first coming into the country, they had lived in proportion to their income, quietly, keeping little company, and that little unexpensively; but the last year or two had brought them a considerable increase of means the house in town had yielded greater profits, and fortune in general had smiled on them. |
| 7284 |
Their love of society, and their new dining room, prepared every body for their keeping dinner company; and a few parties, chiefly among the single men, had already taken place. The regular and best families Emma could hardly suppose they would presume to invite neither Donwell, nor Hartfield, nor Randalls. |
| 7285 |
The dews of a summer evening are what I would not expose any body to. However, as they are so very desirous to have dear Emma dine with them, and as you will both be there, and Mr. Knightley too, to take care of her, I cannot wish to prevent it, provided the weather be what it ought, neither damp, nor cold, nor windy. |
| 7286 |
You will say that I am quite an invalid, and go no where, and therefore must decline their obliging invitation; beginning with my compliments, of course. But you will do every thing right. I need not tell you what is to be done. We must remember to let James know that the carriage will be wanted on Tuesday. |
| 7287 |
I shall have no fears for you with him. We have never been there above once since the new approach was made; but still I have no doubt that James will take you very safely. And when you get there, you must tell him at what time you would have him come for you again; and you had better name an early hour. |
| 7288 |
Emma's going away directly after tea might be giving offence. They are good natured people, and think little of their own claims; but still they must feel that any body's hurrying away is no great compliment; and Miss Woodhouse's doing it would be more thought of than any other person's in the room. |
| 7289 |
I am not afraid of your not being exceedingly comfortable with Mrs. Goddard. She loves piquet, you know; but when she is gone home, I am afraid you will be sitting up by yourself, instead of going to bed at your usual time and the idea of that would entirely destroy my comfort. You must promise me not to sit up. |
| 7290 |
If he were, he would have done this differently. He would either have gloried in the achievement, or been ashamed of it. There would have been either the ostentation of a coxcomb, or the evasions of a mind too weak to defend its own vanities. No, I am perfectly sure that he is not trifling or silly. |
| 7291 |
You think you carry it off very well, I dare say, but with you it is a sort of bravado, an air of affected unconcern; I always observe it whenever I meet you under those circumstances. Now you have nothing to try for. You are not afraid of being supposed ashamed. You are not striving to look taller than any body else. |
| 7292 |
And though the consequent shock and alarm was very great and much more durable indeed I believe it was half an hour before any of us were comfortable again yet that was too general a sensation for any thing of peculiar anxiety to be observable. I do not mean to say, however, that you might not have made discoveries. |
| 7293 |
In he walked, the first and the handsomest; and after paying his compliments en passant to Miss Bates and her niece, made his way directly to the opposite side of the circle, where sat Miss Woodhouse; and till he could find a seat by her, would not sit at all. Emma divined what every body present must be thinking. |
| 7294 |
He had wanted very much to go abroad had been very eager indeed to be allowed to travel but she would not hear of it. This had happened the year before. Now, he said, he was beginning to have no longer the same wish. The unpersuadable point, which he did not mention, Emma guessed to be good behaviour to his father. |
| 7295 |
Well, a little while ago it occurred to me how very sad it would be to have Jane Fairfax walking home again, late at night, and cold as the nights are now. And as I looked at her, though I never saw her appear to more advantage, it struck me that she was heated, and would therefore be particularly liable to take cold. |
| 7296 |
And left a name behind her that would not soon die away. Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common; and there were two points on which she was not quite easy. She doubted whether she had not transgressed the duty of woman by woman, in betraying her suspicions of Jane Fairfax's feelings to Frank Churchill. |
| 7297 |
The other circumstance of regret related also to Jane Fairfax; and there she had no doubt. She did unfeignedly and unequivocally regret the inferiority of her own playing and singing. She did most heartily grieve over the idleness of her childhood and sat down and practised vigorously an hour and a half. |
| 7298 |
Another accidental meeting with the Martins was possible, and in her present state, would be dangerous. Harriet, tempted by every thing and swayed by half a word, was always very long at a purchase; and while she was still hanging over muslins and changing her mind, Emma went to the door for amusement. |
| 7299 |
My mother says the orchard was always famous in her younger days. But I was really quite shocked the other day for Mr. Knightley called one morning, and Jane was eating these apples, and we talked about them and said how much she enjoyed them, and he asked whether we were not got to the end of our stock. |
| 7300 |
She could not bear that her master should not be able to have another apple tart this spring. He told Patty this, but bid her not mind it, and be sure not to say any thing to us about it, for Mrs. Hodges would be cross sometimes, and as long as so many sacks were sold, it did not signify who ate the remainder. |
| 7301 |
Mr. Weston entered into the idea with thorough enjoyment, and Mrs. Weston most willingly undertook to play as long as they could wish to dance; and the interesting employment had followed, of reckoning up exactly who there would be, and portioning out the indispensable division of space to every couple. |
| 7302 |
Long before he reappeared, attending the short, neat, brisk moving aunt, and her elegant niece, Mrs. Weston, like a sweet tempered woman and a good wife, had examined the passage again, and found the evils of it much less than she had supposed before indeed very trifling; and here ended the difficulties of decision. |
| 7303 |
The substance of this letter was forwarded to Emma, in a note from Mrs. Weston, instantly. As to his going, it was inevitable. He must be gone within a few hours, though without feeling any real alarm for his aunt, to lessen his repugnance. He knew her illnesses; they never occurred but for her own convenience. |
| 7304 |
Short had been the notice short their meeting; he was gone; and Emma felt so sorry to part, and foresaw so great a loss to their little society from his absence as to begin to be afraid of being too sorry, and feeling it too much. It was a sad change. They had been meeting almost every day since his arrival. |
| 7305 |
Not that I imagine he can think I have been encouraging him hitherto. No, if he had believed me at all to share his feelings, he would not have been so wretched. Could he have thought himself encouraged, his looks and language at parting would have been different. Still, however, I must be on my guard. |
| 7306 |
Gratifying, however, and stimulative as was the letter in the material part, its sentiments, she yet found, when it was folded up and returned to Mrs. Weston, that it had not added any lasting warmth, that she could still do without the writer, and that he must learn to do without her. Her intentions were unchanged. |
| 7307 |
No. Harriet undoubtedly was greatly his inferior in understanding; but he had been very much struck with the loveliness of her face and the warm simplicity of her manner; and all the probabilities of circumstance and connexion were in her favour. For Harriet, it would be advantageous and delightful indeed. |
| 7308 |
They are very important and sorry I am that you cannot feel them sufficiently to act upon them. My being saved from pain is a very secondary consideration. I want you to save yourself from greater pain. Perhaps I may sometimes have felt that Harriet would not forget what was due or rather what would be kind by me. |
| 7309 |
Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the world, for attraction, I am sure it will. It is tenderness of heart which makes my dear father so generally beloved which gives Isabella all her popularity. I have it not but I know how to prize and respect it. |
| 7310 |
She would not be in a hurry to find fault, but she suspected that there was no elegance; ease, but not elegance. She was almost sure that for a young woman, a stranger, a bride, there was too much ease. Her person was rather good; her face not unpretty; but neither feature, nor air, nor voice, nor manner, were elegant. |
| 7311 |
Emma thought at least it would turn out so. As for Mr. Elton, his manners did not appear but no, she would not permit a hasty or a witty word from herself about his manners. It was an awkward ceremony at any time to be receiving wedding visits, and a man had need be all grace to acquit himself well through it. |
| 7312 |
If not wise or refined herself, she would have connected him with those who were; but Miss Hawkins, it might be fairly supposed from her easy conceit, had been the best of her own set. The rich brother in law near Bristol was the pride of the alliance, and his place and his carriages were the pride of him. |
| 7313 |
Every body who sees it is struck by its beauty; but to me, it has been quite a home. Whenever you are transplanted, like me, Miss Woodhouse, you will understand how very delightful it is to meet with any thing at all like what one has left behind. I always say this is quite one of the evils of matrimony. |
| 7314 |
Indeed, when the time draws on, I shall decidedly recommend their bringing the barouche landau; it will be so very much preferable. When people come into a beautiful country of this sort, you know, Miss Woodhouse, one naturally wishes them to see as much as possible; and Mr. Suckling is extremely fond of exploring. |
| 7315 |
And as to its recommendations to you, I fancy I need not take much pains to dwell on them. The advantages of Bath to the young are pretty generally understood. It would be a charming introduction for you, who have lived so secluded a life; and I could immediately secure you some of the best society in the place. |
| 7316 |
Blessed with so many resources within myself, the world was not necessary to me. I could do very well without it. To those who had no resources it was a different thing; but my resources made me quite independent. And as to smaller sized rooms than I had been used to, I really could not give it a thought. |
| 7317 |
Will not it be a good plan? If we exert ourselves, I think we shall not be long in want of allies. Something of that nature would be particularly desirable for me, as an inducement to keep me in practice; for married women, you know there is a sad story against them, in general. They are but too apt to give up music. |
| 7318 |
She had a little beauty and a little accomplishment, but so little judgment that she thought herself coming with superior knowledge of the world, to enliven and improve a country neighbourhood; and conceived Miss Hawkins to have held such a place in society as Mrs. Elton's consequence only could surpass. |
| 7319 |
Her feelings altered towards Emma. Offended, probably, by the little encouragement which her proposals of intimacy met with, she drew back in her turn and gradually became much more cold and distant; and though the effect was agreeable, the ill will which produced it was necessarily increasing Emma's dislike. |
| 7320 |
It was not to be doubted that poor Harriet's attachment had been an offering to conjugal unreserve, and her own share in the story, under a colouring the least favourable to her and the most soothing to him, had in all likelihood been given also. She was, of course, the object of their joint dislike. |
| 7321 |
She is very timid and silent. One can see that she feels the want of encouragement. I like her the better for it. I must confess it is a recommendation to me. I am a great advocate for timidity and I am sure one does not often meet with it. But in those who are at all inferior, it is extremely prepossessing. |
| 7322 |
We have carriages to fetch and convey her home, and we live in a style which could not make the addition of Jane Fairfax, at any time, the least inconvenient. I should be extremely displeased if Wright were to send us up such a dinner, as could make me regret having asked more than Jane Fairfax to partake of it. |
| 7323 |
I shall certainly have her very often at my house, shall introduce her wherever I can, shall have musical parties to draw out her talents, and shall be constantly on the watch for an eligible situation. My acquaintance is so very extensive, that I have little doubt of hearing of something to suit her shortly. |
| 7324 |
I shall introduce her, of course, very particularly to my brother and sister when they come to us. I am sure they will like her extremely; and when she gets a little acquainted with them, her fears will completely wear off, for there really is nothing in the manners of either but what is highly conciliating. |
| 7325 |
A dinner there must be. After Emma had talked about it for ten minutes, Mr. Woodhouse felt no unwillingness, and only made the usual stipulation of not sitting at the bottom of the table himself, with the usual regular difficulty of deciding who should do it for him. The persons to be invited, required little thought. |
| 7326 |
Mr. Woodhouse considered eight persons at dinner together as the utmost that his nerves could bear and here would be a ninth and Emma apprehended that it would be a ninth very much out of humour at not being able to come even to Hartfield for forty eight hours without falling in with a dinner party. |
| 7327 |
I know Mr. John Knightley too well I am very sure he understands the value of friendship as well as any body. I can easily believe that letters are very little to you, much less than to me, but it is not your being ten years older than myself which makes the difference, it is not age, but situation. |
| 7328 |
I consider one as including the other. Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle but that is not the change I had in view for you. As an old friend, you will allow me to hope, Miss Fairfax, that ten years hence you may have as many concentrated objects as I have. |
| 7329 |
He had returned to a late dinner, and walked to Hartfield as soon as it was over. He had been too much expected by the best judges, for surprize but there was great joy. Mr. Woodhouse was almost as glad to see him now, as he would have been sorry to see him before. John Knightley only was in mute astonishment. |
| 7330 |
In town next week, you see at the latest, I dare say; for she is as impatient as the black gentleman when any thing is to be done; most likely they will be there to morrow or Saturday. As to her illness, all nothing of course. But it is an excellent thing to have Frank among us again, so near as town. |
| 7331 |
She was happy, she knew she was happy, and knew she ought to be happy. Her congratulations were warm and open; but Emma could not speak so fluently. She was a little occupied in weighing her own feelings, and trying to understand the degree of her agitation, which she rather thought was considerable. |
| 7332 |
This letter tells us it is a short letter written in a hurry, merely to give us notice it tells us that they are all coming up to town directly, on Mrs. Churchill's account she has not been well the whole winter, and thinks Enscombe too cold for her so they are all to move southward without loss of time. |
| 7333 |
Now will be the time. This will be complete enjoyment; and I do not know, Mrs. Elton, whether the uncertainty of our meetings, the sort of constant expectation there will be of his coming in to day or to morrow, and at any hour, may not be more friendly to happiness than having him actually in the house. |
| 7334 |
I think it is the state of mind which gives most spirit and delight. I hope you will be pleased with my son; but you must not expect a prodigy. He is generally thought a fine young man, but do not expect a prodigy. Mrs. Weston's partiality for him is very great, and, as you may suppose, most gratifying to me. |
| 7335 |
I always say there is something direful in the sound: but nothing more is positively known of the Tupmans, though a good many things I assure you are suspected; and yet by their manners they evidently think themselves equal even to my brother, Mr. Suckling, who happens to be one of their nearest neighbours. |
| 7336 |
The remaining five were left to their own powers, and Emma doubted their getting on very well; for Mr. Knightley seemed little disposed for conversation; Mrs. Elton was wanting notice, which nobody had inclination to pay, and she was herself in a worry of spirits which would have made her prefer being silent. |
| 7337 |
They met with the utmost friendliness. There could be no doubt of his great pleasure in seeing her. But she had an almost instant doubt of his caring for her as he had done, of his feeling the same tenderness in the same degree. She watched him well. It was a clear thing he was less in love than he had been. |
| 7338 |
He did not believe it to proceed from any thing that care and medicine might not remove, or at least that she might not have many years of existence before her; but he could not be prevailed on, by all his father's doubts, to say that her complaints were merely imaginary, or that she was as strong as ever. |
| 7339 |
She was told that now he wrote with the greatest confidence of being often with them, almost as often as he could even wish. Emma saw how Mr. Weston understood these joyous prospects. He was considering her as the source of all the happiness they offered. She hoped it was not so. Two months must bring it to the proof. |
| 7340 |
The difference in that respect of Richmond and London was enough to make the whole difference of seeing him always and seeing him never. Sixteen miles nay, eighteen it must be full eighteen to Manchester street was a serious obstacle. Were he ever able to get away, the day would be spent in coming and returning. |
| 7341 |
She could fancy such a man. The whole party walked about, and looked, and praised again; and then, having nothing else to do, formed a sort of half circle round the fire, to observe in their various modes, till other subjects were started, that, though May, a fire in the evening was still very pleasant. |
| 7342 |
She wished he could love a ballroom better, and could like Frank Churchill better. He seemed often observing her. She must not flatter herself that he thought of her dancing, but if he were criticising her behaviour, she did not feel afraid. There was nothing like flirtation between her and her partner. |
| 7343 |
The ball proceeded pleasantly. The anxious cares, the incessant attentions of Mrs. Weston, were not thrown away. Every body seemed happy; and the praise of being a delightful ball, which is seldom bestowed till after a ball has ceased to be, was repeatedly given in the very beginning of the existence of this. |
| 7344 |
He came to the part of the room where the sitters by were collected, spoke to some, and walked about in front of them, as if to shew his liberty, and his resolution of maintaining it. He did not omit being sometimes directly before Miss Smith, or speaking to those who were close to her. Emma saw it. |
| 7345 |
Grandmama was quite well, had a charming evening with Mr. Woodhouse, a vast deal of chat, and backgammon. Tea was made downstairs, biscuits and baked apples and wine before she came away: amazing luck in some of her throws: and she inquired a great deal about you, how you were amused, and who were your partners. |
| 7346 |
A moment sufficed to convince her that something extraordinary had happened. Harriet looked white and frightened, and he was trying to cheer her. The iron gates and the front door were not twenty yards asunder; they were all three soon in the hall, and Harriet immediately sinking into a chair fainted away. |
| 7347 |
A child on the watch, came towards them to beg; and Miss Bickerton, excessively frightened, gave a great scream, and calling on Harriet to follow her, ran up a steep bank, cleared a slight hedge at the top, and made the best of her way by a short cut back to Highbury. But poor Harriet could not follow. |
| 7348 |
There could be no harm in a scheme, a mere passive scheme. It was no more than a wish. Beyond it she would on no account proceed. Emma's first resolution was to keep her father from the knowledge of what had passed, aware of the anxiety and alarm it would occasion: but she soon felt that concealment must be impossible. |
| 7349 |
Her curiosity was greatly excited. Harriet unfolded the parcel, and she looked on with impatience. Within abundance of silver paper was a pretty little Tunbridge ware box, which Harriet opened: it was well lined with the softest cotton; but, excepting the cotton, Emma saw only a small piece of court plaister. |
| 7350 |
Perhaps Harriet might think her cold or angry if she did; or perhaps if she were totally silent, it might only drive Harriet into asking her to hear too much; and against any thing like such an unreserve as had been, such an open and frequent discussion of hopes and chances, she was perfectly resolved. |
| 7351 |
She believed it would be wiser for her to say and know at once, all that she meant to say and know. Plain dealing was always best. She had previously determined how far she would proceed, on any application of the sort; and it would be safer for both, to have the judicious law of her own brain laid down with speed. |
| 7352 |
I do not advise you to give way to it, Harriet. I do not by any means engage for its being returned. Consider what you are about. Perhaps it will be wisest in you to check your feelings while you can: at any rate do not let them carry you far, unless you are persuaded of his liking you. Be observant of him. |
| 7353 |
Let no name ever pass our lips. We were very wrong before; we will be cautious now. He is your superior, no doubt, and there do seem objections and obstacles of a very serious nature; but yet, Harriet, more wonderful things have taken place, there have been matches of greater disparity. But take care of yourself. |
| 7354 |
He began to suspect him of some double dealing in his pursuit of Emma. That Emma was his object appeared indisputable. Every thing declared it; his own attentions, his father's hints, his mother in law's guarded silence; it was all in unison; words, conduct, discretion, and indiscretion, told the same story. |
| 7355 |
He could not understand it; but there were symptoms of intelligence between them he thought so at least symptoms of admiration on his side, which, having once observed, he could not persuade himself to think entirely void of meaning, however he might wish to escape any of Emma's errors of imagination. |
| 7356 |
The two other gentlemen waited at the door to let her pass. Mr. Knightley suspected in Frank Churchill the determination of catching her eye he seemed watching her intently in vain, however, if it were so Jane passed between them into the hall, and looked at neither. There was no time for farther remark or explanation. |
| 7357 |
She gave a slight glance round the table, and applied herself to it. Frank was next to Emma, Jane opposite to them and Mr. Knightley so placed as to see them all; and it was his object to see as much as he could, with as little apparent observation. The word was discovered, and with a faint smile pushed away. |
| 7358 |
Emma's confusion, and the acknowledged intimacy, seemed to declare her affection engaged. Yet he would speak. He owed it to her, to risk any thing that might be involved in an unwelcome interference, rather than her welfare; to encounter any thing, rather than the remembrance of neglect in such a cause. |
| 7359 |
Mrs. Elton was very much disappointed. It was the delay of a great deal of pleasure and parade. Her introductions and recommendations must all wait, and every projected party be still only talked of. So she thought at first; but a little consideration convinced her that every thing need not be put off. |
| 7360 |
There is to be no form or parade a sort of gipsy party. We are to walk about your gardens, and gather the strawberries ourselves, and sit under trees; and whatever else you may like to provide, it is to be all out of doors a table spread in the shade, you know. Every thing as natural and simple as possible. |
| 7361 |
He wished to persuade Mr. Woodhouse, as well as Emma, to join the party; and he knew that to have any of them sitting down out of doors to eat would inevitably make him ill. Mr. Woodhouse must not, under the specious pretence of a morning drive, and an hour or two spent at Donwell, be tempted away to his misery. |
| 7362 |
There had been a time also when Emma would have been sorry to see Harriet in a spot so favourable for the Abbey Mill Farm; but now she feared it not. It might be safely viewed with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending. |
| 7363 |
I am going this moment. My aunt is not aware how late it is, nor how long we have been absent but I am sure we shall be wanted, and I am determined to go directly. I have said nothing about it to any body. It would only be giving trouble and distress. Some are gone to the ponds, and some to the lime walk. |
| 7364 |
He had been detained by a temporary increase of illness in her; a nervous seizure, which had lasted some hours and he had quite given up every thought of coming, till very late; and had he known how hot a ride he should have, and how late, with all his hurry, he must be, he believed he should not have come at all. |
| 7365 |
Some people were always cross when they were hot. Such might be his constitution; and as she knew that eating and drinking were often the cure of such incidental complaints, she recommended his taking some refreshment; he would find abundance of every thing in the dining room and she humanely pointed out the door. |
| 7366 |
Nothing was wanting but to be happy when they got there. Seven miles were travelled in expectation of enjoyment, and every body had a burst of admiration on first arriving; but in the general amount of the day there was deficiency. There was a languor, a want of spirits, a want of union, which could not be got over. |
| 7367 |
These kind of things are very well at Christmas, when one is sitting round the fire; but quite out of place, in my opinion, when one is exploring about the country in summer. Miss Woodhouse must excuse me. I am not one of those who have witty things at every body's service. I do not pretend to be a wit. |
| 7368 |
She has talked of it since. I wish you could have heard how she talked of it with what candour and generosity. I wish you could have heard her honouring your forbearance, in being able to pay her such attentions, as she was for ever receiving from yourself and your father, when her society must be so irksome. |
| 7369 |
She never had been so depressed. Happily it was not necessary to speak. There was only Harriet, who seemed not in spirits herself, fagged, and very willing to be silent; and Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way home, without being at any trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were. |
| 7370 |
She had been often remiss, her conscience told her so; remiss, perhaps, more in thought than fact; scornful, ungracious. But it should be so no more. In the warmth of true contrition, she would call upon her the very next morning, and it should be the beginning, on her side, of a regular, equal, kindly intercourse. |
| 7371 |
It was not unlikely, she thought, that she might see Mr. Knightley in her way; or, perhaps, he might come in while she were paying her visit. She had no objection. She would not be ashamed of the appearance of the penitence, so justly and truly hers. Her eyes were towards Donwell as she walked, but she saw him not. |
| 7372 |
She will be extremely sorry to miss seeing you, Miss Woodhouse, but your kindness will excuse her. You were kept waiting at the door I was quite ashamed but somehow there was a little bustle for it so happened that we had not heard the knock, and till you were on the stairs, we did not know any body was coming. |
| 7373 |
He would have judged better, she thought, if he had not stopped. The intention, however, was indubitable; and whether it was that his manners had in general so little gallantry, or however else it happened, but she thought nothing became him more. It was with him, of so simple, yet so dignified a nature. |
| 7374 |
Though her nephew had had no particular reason to hasten back on her account, she had not lived above six and thirty hours after his return. A sudden seizure of a different nature from any thing foreboded by her general state, had carried her off after a short struggle. The great Mrs. Churchill was no more. |
| 7375 |
Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill fame. Mrs. Churchill, after being disliked at least twenty five years, was now spoken of with compassionate allowances. |
| 7376 |
It was also a very early speculation with Emma. The character of Mrs. Churchill, the grief of her husband her mind glanced over them both with awe and compassion and then rested with lightened feelings on how Frank might be affected by the event, how benefited, how freed. She saw in a moment all the possible good. |
| 7377 |
Mr. Churchill, independent of his wife, was feared by nobody; an easy, guidable man, to be persuaded into any thing by his nephew. All that remained to be wished was, that the nephew should form the attachment, as, with all her goodwill in the cause, Emma could feel no certainty of its being already formed. |
| 7378 |
Her spirits seemed overcome. Her present home, he could not but observe, was unfavourable to a nervous disorder: confined always to one room; he could have wished it otherwise and her good aunt, though his very old friend, he must acknowledge to be not the best companion for an invalid of that description. |
| 7379 |
She asked no more questions therefore, merely employed her own fancy, and that soon pointed out to her the probability of its being some money concern something just come to light, of a disagreeable nature in the circumstances of the family, something which the late event at Richmond had brought forward. |
| 7380 |
There has been a solemn engagement between them ever since October formed at Weymouth, and kept a secret from every body. Not a creature knowing it but themselves neither the Campbells, nor her family, nor his. It is so wonderful, that though perfectly convinced of the fact, it is yet almost incredible to myself. |
| 7381 |
I thought you had lost half your property, at least. And here, instead of its being a matter of condolence, it turns out to be one of congratulation. I congratulate you, Mr. Weston, with all my heart, on the prospect of having one of the most lovely and accomplished young women in England for your daughter. |
| 7382 |
She would soon be well, and happy, and prosperous. Emma could now imagine why her own attentions had been slighted. This discovery laid many smaller matters open. No doubt it had been from jealousy. In Jane's eyes she had been a rival; and well might any thing she could offer of assistance or regard be repulsed. |
| 7383 |
Considering the very superior claims of the object, it ought; and judging by its apparently stronger effect on Harriet's mind, producing reserve and self command, it would. She must communicate the painful truth, however, and as soon as possible. An injunction of secresy had been among Mr. Weston's parting words. |
| 7384 |
I told you that I did not wonder at your attachment; that considering the service he had rendered you, it was extremely natural: and you agreed to it, expressing yourself very warmly as to your sense of that service, and mentioning even what your sensations had been in seeing him come forward to your rescue. |
| 7385 |
For her own advantage indeed, it was fit that the utmost extent of Harriet's hopes should be enquired into; and Harriet had done nothing to forfeit the regard and interest which had been so voluntarily formed and maintained or to deserve to be slighted by the person, whose counsels had never led her right. |
| 7386 |
Emma's tremblings as she asked, and as she listened, were better concealed than Harriet's, but they were not less. Her voice was not unsteady; but her mind was in all the perturbation that such a development of self, such a burst of threatening evil, such a confusion of sudden and perplexing emotions, must create. |
| 7387 |
Circumstances that might swell to half an hour's relation, and contained multiplied proofs to her who had seen them, had passed undiscerned by her who now heard them; but the two latest occurrences to be mentioned, the two of strongest promise to Harriet, were not without some degree of witness from Emma herself. |
| 7388 |
This was the conclusion of the first series of reflection. This was the knowledge of herself, on the first question of inquiry, which she reached; and without being long in reaching it. She was most sorrowfully indignant; ashamed of every sensation but the one revealed to her her affection for Mr. Knightley. |
| 7389 |
Every other part of her mind was disgusting. With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of every body's feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange every body's destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing for she had done mischief. |
| 7390 |
Were this most unequal of all connexions to take place, on her must rest all the reproach of having given it a beginning; for his attachment, she must believe to be produced only by a consciousness of Harriet's; and even were this not the case, he would never have known Harriet at all but for her folly. |
| 7391 |
In the meanwhile, she resolved against seeing Harriet. It would do neither of them good, it would do the subject no good, to be talking of it farther. She was resolved not to be convinced, as long as she could doubt, and yet had no authority for opposing Harriet's confidence. To talk would be only to irritate. |
| 7392 |
She had hardly been able to speak a word, and every look and action had shewn how deeply she was suffering from consciousness. The quiet, heart felt satisfaction of the old lady, and the rapturous delight of her daughter who proved even too joyous to talk as usual, had been a gratifying, yet almost an affecting, scene. |
| 7393 |
The evening of this day was very long, and melancholy, at Hartfield. The weather added what it could of gloom. A cold stormy rain set in, and nothing of July appeared but in the trees and shrubs, which the wind was despoiling, and the length of the day, which only made such cruel sights the longer visible. |
| 7394 |
They walked together. He was silent. She thought he was often looking at her, and trying for a fuller view of her face than it suited her to give. And this belief produced another dread. Perhaps he wanted to speak to her, of his attachment to Harriet; he might be watching for encouragement to begin. |
| 7395 |
I cannot let you continue in your error; and yet, perhaps, since my manners gave such an impression, I have as much reason to be ashamed of confessing that I never have been at all attached to the person we are speaking of, as it might be natural for a woman to feel in confessing exactly the reverse. |
| 7396 |
Latterly, however for some time, indeed I have had no idea of their meaning any thing. I thought them a habit, a trick, nothing that called for seriousness on my side. He has imposed on me, but he has not injured me. I have never been attached to him. And now I can tolerably comprehend his behaviour. |
| 7397 |
He never wished to attach me. It was merely a blind to conceal his real situation with another. It was his object to blind all about him; and no one, I am sure, could be more effectually blinded than myself except that I was not blinded that it was my good fortune that, in short, I was somehow or other safe from him. |
| 7398 |
My acquaintance with him has been but trifling. And even if I have not underrated him hitherto, he may yet turn out well. With such a woman he has a chance. I have no motive for wishing him ill and for her sake, whose happiness will be involved in his good character and conduct, I shall certainly wish him well. |
| 7399 |
Every thing turns out for his good. He meets with a young woman at a watering place, gains her affection, cannot even weary her by negligent treatment and had he and all his family sought round the world for a perfect wife for him, they could not have found her superior. His aunt is in the way. His aunt dies. |
| 7400 |
She had led her friend astray, and it would be a reproach to her for ever; but her judgment was as strong as her feelings, and as strong as it had ever been before, in reprobating any such alliance for him, as most unequal and degrading. Her way was clear, though not quite smooth. She spoke then, on being so entreated. |
| 7401 |
Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. She said enough to shew there need not be despair and to invite him to say more himself. He had despaired at one period; he had received such an injunction to caution and silence, as for the time crushed every hope; she had begun by refusing to hear him. |
| 7402 |
He had ridden home through the rain; and had walked up directly after dinner, to see how this sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults, bore the discovery. He had found her agitated and low. Frank Churchill was a villain. He heard her declare that she had never loved him. |
| 7403 |
I know what thorough justice you will do it, and have scarcely a doubt of its happy effect. I think we shall never materially disagree about the writer again; but I will not delay you by a long preface. We are quite well. This letter has been the cure of all the little nervousness I have been feeling lately. |
| 7404 |
My behaviour, during the very happy fortnight which I spent with you, did not, I hope, lay me open to reprehension, excepting on one point. And now I come to the principal, the only important part of my conduct while belonging to you, which excites my own anxiety, or requires very solicitous explanation. |
| 7405 |
Acquit me here, and procure for me, when it is allowable, the acquittal and good wishes of that said Emma Woodhouse, whom I regard with so much brotherly affection, as to long to have her as deeply and as happily in love as myself. Whatever strange things I said or did during that fortnight, you have now a key to. |
| 7406 |
Of the pianoforte so much talked of, I feel it only necessary to say, that its being ordered was absolutely unknown to Miss F, who would never have allowed me to send it, had any choice been given her. The delicacy of her mind throughout the whole engagement, my dear madam, is much beyond my power of doing justice to. |
| 7407 |
She must tell you herself what she is yet not by word, for never was there a human creature who would so designedly suppress her own merit. Since I began this letter, which will be longer than I foresaw, I have heard from her. She gives a good account of her own health; but as she never complains, I dare not depend. |
| 7408 |
I should myself have shrunk from any thing so hasty, and she would have felt every scruple of mine with multiplied strength and refinement. But I had no choice. The hasty engagement she had entered into with that woman Here, my dear madam, I was obliged to leave off abruptly, to recollect and compose myself. |
| 7409 |
While I, to blind the world to our engagement, was behaving one hour with objectionable particularity to another woman, was she to be consenting the next to a proposal which might have made every previous caution useless? Had we been met walking together between Donwell and Highbury, the truth must have been suspected. |
| 7410 |
You will observe that I have not yet indulged myself in calling her by that name, even to you. Think, then, what I must have endured in hearing it bandied between the Eltons with all the vulgarity of needless repetition, and all the insolence of imaginary superiority. Have patience with me, I shall soon have done. |
| 7411 |
I knew the name, the place, I knew all about it, and instantly saw what she had been doing. It was perfectly accordant with that resolution of character which I knew her to possess; and the secrecy she had maintained, as to any such design in her former letter, was equally descriptive of its anxious delicacy. |
| 7412 |
I reached Highbury at the time of day when, from my knowledge of their late breakfast hour, I was certain of a good chance of finding her alone. I was not disappointed; and at last I was not disappointed either in the object of my journey. A great deal of very reasonable, very just displeasure I had to persuade away. |
| 7413 |
Now, my dear madam, I will release you; but I could not conclude before. A thousand and a thousand thanks for all the kindness you have ever shewn me, and ten thousand for the attentions your heart will dictate towards her. If you think me in a way to be happier than I deserve, I am quite of your opinion. |
| 7414 |
But the plan which had arisen on the sacrifice of this, he trusted his dearest Emma would not find in any respect objectionable; it was, that he should be received at Hartfield; that so long as her father's happiness in other words his life required Hartfield to continue her home, it should be his likewise. |
| 7415 |
It might be only her own consciousness; but it seemed as if an angel only could have been quite without resentment under such a stroke. She had no difficulty in procuring Isabella's invitation; and she was fortunate in having a sufficient reason for asking it, without resorting to invention. There was a tooth amiss. |
| 7416 |
I do not believe I did you any good. The good was all to myself, by making you an object of the tenderest affection to me. I could not think about you so much without doating on you, faults and all; and by dint of fancying so many errors, have been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least. |
| 7417 |
I am not conscious of any difference in my spirits or conversation that could prepare him at this time for my marrying any more than at another. But it was so, I suppose. I dare say there was a difference when I was staying with them the other day. I believe I did not play with the children quite so much as usual. |
| 7418 |
Mr. Knightley could not be there too often; he should be glad to see him every day; but they did see him every day as it was. Why could not they go on as they had done? Mr. Woodhouse could not be soon reconciled; but the worst was overcome, the idea was given; time and continual repetition must do the rest. |
| 7419 |
Mrs. Weston was acting no part, feigning no feelings in all that she said to him in favour of the event. She had been extremely surprized, never more so, than when Emma first opened the affair to her; but she saw in it only increase of happiness to all, and had no scruple in urging him to the utmost. |
| 7420 |
If any thing could increase her delight, it was perceiving that the baby would soon have outgrown its first set of caps. The news was universally a surprize wherever it spread; and Mr. Weston had his five minutes share of it; but five minutes were enough to familiarise the idea to his quickness of mind. |
| 7421 |
It was no more than the principals were prepared for; they had calculated from the time of its being known at Randalls, how soon it would be over Highbury; and were thinking of themselves, as the evening wonder in many a family circle, with great sagacity. In general, it was a very well approved match. |
| 7422 |
She was not sorry. She wanted to be alone. Her mind was in a state of flutter and wonder, which made it impossible for her to be collected. She was in dancing, singing, exclaiming spirits; and till she had moved about, and talked to herself, and laughed and reflected, she could be fit for nothing rational. |
| 7423 |
The event, however, was most joyful; and every day was giving her fresh reason for thinking so. Harriet's parentage became known. She proved to be the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment. |
| 7424 |
No objection was raised on the father's side; the young man was treated liberally; it was all as it should be: and as Emma became acquainted with Robert Martin, who was now introduced at Hartfield, she fully acknowledged in him all the appearance of sense and worth which could bid fairest for her little friend. |
| 7425 |
In this state of suspense they were befriended, not by any sudden illumination of Mr. Woodhouse's mind, or any wonderful change of his nervous system, but by the operation of the same system in another way. Mrs. Weston's poultry house was robbed one night of all her turkeys evidently by the ingenuity of man. |
| 7426 |
He was very uneasy; and but for the sense of his son in law's protection, would have been under wretched alarm every night of his life. The strength, resolution, and presence of mind of the Mr. Knightleys, commanded his fullest dependence. While either of them protected him and his, Hartfield was safe. |
| 7427 |
But the bright sun came through the eastern window, the rays giving him a slight headache. At last he yielded, got up, and went over to the public bathhouse, a toothbrush in his mouth, a towel in his hand. It was just after ten by the bathhouse clock. All the wooden buckets in the bath area were piled on one side. |
| 7428 |
While Keitaro rubbed his soaped head, the soles of his feet, and the roots of his toes, Morimoto remained seated on the floor, showing no sign of washing any part of his anatomy. At last he flung his emaciated body into the heated water again, and at about the same time as Keitaro, he got up to dry off. |
| 7429 |
But the most extraordinary event of all was his plan to establish a company for manufacturing taps. He said he had hit on the idea out of the fact that few craftsmen in Tokyo were making these for sake casks, but to his lasting regret, a quarrel with an artisan he had summoned from Osaka had ruined the entire scheme. |
| 7430 |
When it came to stories outside his business dealings, he easily proved himself in possession of a rich stock of material. That he saw many a bear taking a nap on its back on rocks in the mountains beyond the upper part of the Chikuma River in Shinano Province was the least extraordinary part of one of his tales. |
| 7431 |
He proceeded to tell a still more unusual story concerning his having been surprised by a blind man climbing to the summit of Mount Togakushi, which is too steep even for ordinary men. A pilgrim aiming to get to the sanctuary at Togakushi Shrine is compelled, no matter how strong his legs, to spend a night on the path. |
| 7432 |
About halfway up, Morimoto was passing the night by a fire he had made to ward off the chill. Suddenly he caught the tinkling sound of a bell below. He was wondering about it as it drew nearer until all at once a blind man appeared. And, what was more, the blind man wished him a good night and went on his way. |
| 7433 |
Moreover, under his feet with its back raised like a hill would crouch a mysterious Sumatran black cat with a coat of fur smooth as velvet, eyes of pure gold, and a tail far longer than its body. With everything thus furnished to his imagined satisfaction, Keitaro had set about calculating the necessary expenses. |
| 7434 |
Ever since he had left school, however, his life consisted of merely going about on streetcars and visiting strangers with letters of introduction, so there was nothing in it particularly like a novel. He was bored to death each day to see the same face of the boardinghouse maid and to eat the meals she served him. |
| 7435 |
And so in spite of having no real desire to, he had consumed a large volume of beer the previous night and had gone to bed early. On such occasions it was a kind of stimulation for Keitaro to look at the face of a Morimoto, who could only be described as a commonplace type with an abundance of uncommon experiences. |
| 7436 |
On the other hand, Keitaro was not that sophisticated to feel that a kind hearted suggestion dropped so casually was made merely to poke fun at him. He did not know what answer to give, so he merely smiled and called the maid to tell her to bring in Morimoto's lunch together with his own and some sake too. |
| 7437 |
Keitaro called out two or three times, but the other gave no sign of moving. Good natured as Keitaro was, he was annoyed, so entering without permission, he grabbed Morimoto by the neck and shook him vigorously. Morimoto half jumped to his feet with a cry, as though he had unexpectedly been stung by a wasp. |
| 7438 |
This had occurred when the carriers had gone down to a village for rice. The route lay along the bottom of a ravine, and after the party had descended, heavy rains suddenly filled the valley with flood like torrents, making it impossible for the carriers to ascend with heavy loads of rice on their backs. |
| 7439 |
For a week or so Keitaro had no opportunity to have any long chats with Morimoto. But living in the same boardinghouse, they seldom missed seeing each other in the morning or evening. When they met at the wash stand, Keitaro invariably noticed Morimoto's padded robe with its neckband of black cloth. |
| 7440 |
Only his queer cane remained in the umbrella holder. At last the landlady came to ask Keitaro if he had received a letter from Morimoto. Keitaro replied that he himself had been thinking of going down to ask her the same thing. She left the room with an anxious look flickering in her round, owl like eyes. |
| 7441 |
But after that, he thought it better to start searching for a job again, so he was too occupied to inquire further. The truth was that he had, as Morimoto had predicted, given up the right to be an adventurer in order to seek a livelihood. One night, the landlord went up to Keitaro's room and asked if he could come in. |
| 7442 |
The landlord, his pipe apparently blocked, was using a metal charcoal stick from Keitaro's brazier to pick at tar in the bowl of the pipe. This task done, he puffed several times at the mouthpiece to see if the bamboo stem drew well. It was only after he had done these things that he set about to explain. |
| 7443 |
According to the landlord, Morimoto's rent was about six months in arrears. Because he had been a lodger in the house for nearly three years and had not idled about, the landlord had not pestered him for payment, relying on his word that he would find some means to clear everything up by the end of the year. |
| 7444 |
The misunderstanding by this fellow who, with a peculiar sort of composure, filled his pipe with tobacco scooped from an old fashioned pouch, gave Keitaro as much uneasiness as if the misconjecture had been correct. The landlord handled his pipe as deftly as if it were a part of the art of negotiating. |
| 7445 |
Presently the woman got off the streetcar and disappeared in the rain, leaving him recalling Morimoto's face and bearing and thinking of the destiny that had taken him to he knew not where. When Keitaro returned to his boardinghouse, he found on his desk a letter, the sender's name missing from the envelope. |
| 7446 |
Keitaro immediately picked up the envelope again and tried reading the postmark, scrutinizing it from various angles, but it was so thinly inked he could not make it out. Giving up, he returned to the contents of the letter, which ran as follows: My sudden disappearance must have surprised you, I dare say. |
| 7447 |
In that case, take no heed of what he says. Beware of fellows such as the Marten who attempt to prey on persons like you who have emerged into the world fresh from seats of learning. Uneducated though I am, I know how bad it is to bolt without paying one's debts. I really intend to pay up this coming spring. |
| 7448 |
It was run by a Japanese who had once been captain of a band of bandits on horseback. Hundreds of begrimed Chinese were bustling and jostling there, all with frantic eyes, all emitting some sort of stench. The place was often secretly resorted to by wealthy townspeople deliberately clad in dirty garb. |
| 7449 |
But the tree may have perished in my alcove, untended by people deficient in artistic taste. My cane at least must be in the umbrella stand on the dirt floor at the entrance. It isn't a very good cane in terms of value, but as it was one I habitually used, it's my wish that you accept it as a token from me. |
| 7450 |
Such was the drift of Keitaro's contention. Sunaga had been listening without offering a word, neither of contradiction nor of comment. To Keitaro, such behavior appeared mature, but he actually took it as mediocre. He left hating the calm way in which the other listened, seemingly unconcerned about his aspirations. |
| 7451 |
This time too, with that divided interest of these two contradictory thoughts within him, Keitaro proceeded to his friend's house. When, after following the twisting side street, he came to the corner where it crossed the street Sunaga's house was on, he saw before him a young woman just entering the gate of the house. |
| 7452 |
For a while Keitaro remained standing in front of Sunaga's gate. He wanted not so much to watch secretly from outside the wooden fence the behavior of the woman who had gone into the house as to imagine the pattern of romance being woven by her and Sunaga. But all the same he found himself listening attentively. |
| 7453 |
He heard not so much as a cough and certainly no woman's amorous voice. His fiancee? Such was Keitaro's first thought, but his imagination had not been disciplined enough to remain content with that. I bet his mother is out with the maid visiting a relative. The kitchen servant has retired to her room. |
| 7454 |
And right now Sunaga and the girl must be whispering tete a tete. If this were true, it would be out of place to clatter open the lattice door as he usually did and in a loud voice ask for admittance. Or perhaps Sunaga, his mother, and the maid have all gone out together, and the kitchen servant is taking a nap. |
| 7455 |
At one point when he suddenly heard the laughing voice of a young woman coming from the drawing room below, he felt tempted to ask if Sunaga had a visitor. Yet the very moment in which he was weighing the question became the instrument for destroying the naturalness of its utterance and making it an untimely remark. |
| 7456 |
The gist of the story was that both the master of that house and his wife were surprised to discover she was the daughter of the man he had once served as a houseboy. Sunaga next mentioned a gray haired usurer that lived with his wife, who was about twenty years old, in a back alley behind Sunaga's house. |
| 7457 |
As soon as he was out on the street, he hurried into a tobacconist's, urged on by one knew not what, and emerged with a cigar in his mouth. Smoking, he walked along to Sudacho where, just as he was about to board a streetcar, he remembered the regulations against smoking, so he moved on toward Mansei Bridge. |
| 7458 |
He thought he could not bear such a constrained life, one with everything around him so tidily ordered in trivial ways, and so glossy too. People living in such houses were, he imagined, so neat and punctual that they were even likely to be particular about the sharpness of a toothpick used after a meal. |
| 7459 |
All at once the name Morimoto came to him, and it turned Keitaro's fancy a strange hue. He had, out of curiosity, willingly sought to shake hands with this shady eccentric, the result being that he had nearly gotten involved in troubles he least expected. Fortunately. Keitaro's landlord believed in his integrity. |
| 7460 |
If the landlord had had any mistrust in him, Keitaro might have been summoned to the police, his situation open to suspicion. The moment he thought of this possibility, the romantic dream he had been building suddenly lost its warmth and broke away meaninglessly like a bank of clouds made up of ugly fancies. |
| 7461 |
But what the mouth was about to swallow, whether a frog or an egg or whatever, no one could tell, because the very tip of the handle had been carved round and smooth. Morimoto had said he had cut and carved the cane himself. On entering his boardinghouse, Keitaro turned his attention first of all to this walking stick. |
| 7462 |
When Morimoto's fate and the snakehead representing that fate were thus combined in Keitaro's thoughts, and when Keitaro realized that he had been asked by this very man about to die on the road to walk every day with the snakehead clutched in his hand, it was at just such moments that he had that queer sensation. |
| 7463 |
First he thanked him for his letter, then wanted to add a few lines to explain why he had not replied sooner. But if he were to state the reason point blank, he would have had to write that he could not bring himself to correspond due to the dishonor attached to having among his acquaintances a vagabond like him. |
| 7464 |
On rereading his words, however, he was somewhat disappointed to find them as stale as those used by common people in offering compliments of the season. But as he had known beforehand, it was only natural that they lacked the passionate warmth with which a love letter to one's sweetheart is phrased. |
| 7465 |
As for the disposal of the items Morimoto had left in the boardinghouse, Keitaro felt he ought to add something about them if only for the sake of courtesy. But he had no intention of asking the landlord what he had done with them, though without doing so Keitaro could not give Morimoto a detailed report. |
| 7466 |
He had at last reached the point where he had to mention the walking stick. He was by nature too honest to write the lie that he had gratefully accepted the gift and was carrying it on his daily walks. Still less could he write that in spite of the gratitude he owed Morimoto for his kindness, he did not want it. |
| 7467 |
But if the cousin were a woman, she was most likely the same person who had entered Sunaga's house before Keitaro had: the day, the hour, and the way she had gone into the house would prove her identity. Skillful at combining the imagined and the real, Keitaro decided the latter was true before it was proved. |
| 7468 |
So taken was he by this thought that he inadvertently rode to Sakurada Hongocho, one stop past the stop near the Kangyo Bank where he ought to have gotten off. Surprised, he went back toward the darker quarter. The street at night was deserted, but he had no difficulty in finding the house he was to visit. |
| 7469 |
Keitaro had merely been standing there idly, having no particular curiosity about the look of the servant who would usher him in. Still, he had expected a houseboy wearing a cotton haori with a splashed pattern or a maid in a cotton padded kimono to take his namecard and greet him with some show of respect. |
| 7470 |
He had ordered the maid to bring lunch at noon sharp, but it had not come at the appointed hour. As if urged on by the noisy bell from the university tower, he told her to hurry it in, and he finished as quickly as he could. On the streetcar Keitaro recalled Taguchi's attitude toward him two nights ago. |
| 7471 |
Arriving at Sunaga's house, he deliberately called his friend's name twice from the street, but whether he was in or out, the upstairs screens remained closed. The rather prim Sunaga, who had told him he hated being called in this boorish way, might have been ignoring Keitaro's shout even if it had reached him. |
| 7472 |
But it would be better and even necessary to inform the mother, even though she was not concerned in the matter, of how the interview with Taguchi had failed. Accordingly, when the question of Sunaga's visit to Uchisaiwaicho drifted into their talk, Keitaro thought it the best moment to inform her of the particulars. |
| 7473 |
When A came, Taguchi did not produce the letter at once. He diligently kept their consultation on the topic of business matters, as if these were of the utmost importance, until they sat down for dinner, whereupon, as if suddenly reminded, he took out the letter from his kimono sleeve and handed it over. |
| 7474 |
But in none of these activities could he lay hold of the world any more than he could hair on a bald head. It was as if, wanting to play go himself, he was forced to watch others at their game. And he wished, since he had to remain a mere spectator, to at least be watching a more exciting game full of critical moves. |
| 7475 |
Those words had cut short a future that was still evolving, indefinite though it was about its success or failure. And so he had brought on himself an annoying dissatisfaction with his own irresolute self. Sunaga's mother had assured him that Taguchi was of a kindlier disposition than his appearance suggested. |
| 7476 |
But it would be stupid to ask for a second interview and be scorned as someone who was deficient in common sense. Yet in order to at least take firm hold of the feeling of thoroughly proceeding toward some end, he perhaps had to push his way even to the extent of enduring the pain of being called fool. |
| 7477 |
In such ways did Keitaro's thoughts turn during those perplexing days. But Keitaro's situation was quite different from the kind that demands an immediate decision on a question of the greatest importance to a person's life. In his mind something light and buoyant was hovering in spite of his apparent worry. |
| 7478 |
As he was thinking of such a fortuneteller, he recalled the image of the retired priest from Ipponji Temple in his hometown, a man his father used to visit for consultations. Keitaro suddenly seemed to awaken from the foolish state he had been in, unable to tell exactly whether he had been meditating or merely sitting. |
| 7479 |
There was, for example, an elegant restaurant on Hirokoji, the Sumiya, famous for its rice boiled with rape leaves and bean curd baked and coated with miso, and there was another famous freshwater fish restaurant with its pretty rope curtains hanging at the entrance just opposite a shrine at Komagata. |
| 7480 |
Just some such vagary working latently in him had made him think Asakusa might hold what he wanted, involuntarily directing his steps there. But when he came out from the back of Lunar Park onto a street with a number of movie theaters, he was surprised by the congestion and felt this was hardly the place for diviners. |
| 7481 |
Having made this observation, Keitaro peered into the lean to, which looked rather like a shop specializing in bean jam rice dumplings, and discovered a small elderly woman doing needlework. Though there seemed to be no more to the living quarters than this narrow room, nothing could be seen of any fortune teller. |
| 7482 |
Keitaro thought he might be out, his wife taking care of the shop in his absence. But the construction of the shop suggested it was connected with the apothecary in back, so Keitaro could not conclude right then that the master was absent. He proceeded a few steps ahead and looked into the apothecary. |
| 7483 |
Nor did he see that old fashioned anatomical model of the human body, the abdomen hollowed out to reveal its internal organs in various colors, each set on a shelf fixed into the torso. And of course there was no elderly bearded man inside bearing any resemblance to the retired priest at Ipponji Temple. |
| 7484 |
He wondered all the more when he saw neither rods nor divining blocks nor a magnifying glass on her desk. From a long slender bag that she had placed on the desk, she jingled out nine coins, the kind with a hole in the center. Keitaro could only guess that these were the bunsen, the word he had read on the shingle. |
| 7485 |
She also made certain of the day and month of his birth. She began to count on her fingers as though she were mentally calculating something and then fell into a kind of reverie. Presently with her pretty fingers she arranged the coins. On the faces of some there was a wave pattern; others showed the character bun. |
| 7486 |
Yet he still felt something was lacking. If the words she had spoken had involved a world utterly foreign to his thought, he would not have been concerned about them in the least. But as they admitted an interpretation that made them applicable to his present situation, he felt detained by something in them. |
| 7487 |
As to whether or not he should take steps to see Taguchi again, Keitaro interpreted the old woman's advice as conclusive. Not that he was going to go because he believed in fortune telling, but simply because his fortune teller had given an impetus to what he himself had been on the point of actually doing. |
| 7488 |
If so, he would be most grateful if the uncle could spare some time from his busy schedule, since he was himself totally free and would be able to visit whatever the hour on the appointed day. The tone of the letter suggested that Keitaro had utterly forgotten his hot tempered determination of the other day. |
| 7489 |
When Keitaro mailed the letter, he expected Sunaga's reply the next day. But with two days and even three passing without a response, a slight anxiety began to trouble him, and mixed into this anxiety was a remorse for the shame he might be put to for ever being influenced by the words of a fortune teller. |
| 7490 |
Keitaro put on his hakama, thinking this time it finally looked good on him. From the rack he took down a soft felt hat he had recently purchased, and he left in cheerful spirits, his face animated by fresh hope for the future. The sun had melted the morning frost and was now shining mildly over the streets. |
| 7491 |
Unlike the other day, the entrance to Taguchi's house was very quiet. When the same hakama clad houseboy came to answer the bell, Keitaro felt somewhat awkward. He could not say, of course, that he was sorry for his previous conduct, so with a look of innocence on his face, he politely offered the purpose of his visit. |
| 7492 |
Keitaro was not so much disappointed in Taguchi's attitude as he was embarrassed at finding his own words not lasting as long as he had wanted them to. When he had said all he had prepared for his greeting, he was obliged, in spite of the awkwardness he felt, to be silent for lack of something to add. |
| 7493 |
Good humoredly he explained that even if one had fine recommendations, it was very difficult to obtain a good position right away with so many university graduates out looking for jobs nowadays. But this Keitaro had long known only too well without having Taguchi inform him of it as if it were a new fact. |
| 7494 |
His countenance was cheerful as he left Taguchi's house. A few mild winter days ensued. From his third floor window Keitaro looked out at the sky, trees, and tiled roofs, the pleasant thought occurring to him that the sun now gently warming nature in an orange tinge was streaming down upon the world just for him. |
| 7495 |
When he had asked Taguchi for a position, he had meant for it to have in it something more than an ordinary applicant would want. Not only did he wish to do those duties required by a given profession, but he also expected from Taguchi something that, while temporary, would nevertheless be filled with excitement. |
| 7496 |
It was characteristic of Keitaro to feel vaguely that if the shadow of success were to flit across his path, perhaps something peculiarly scintillating, something outside the range of common jobs, would abruptly be cast before him. Absorbed in such hopes, he spent the days basking in a sunlight he found beautiful. |
| 7497 |
He had something he wanted Keitaro to do, but as it would cause too much trouble to have him come to his house and since speaking about it over the phone would take too much time and be even more troublesome, he had decided to send a special delivery letter in which Keitaro would be given all the particulars. |
| 7498 |
It stated that between four and five that very day a man about forty years old would alight at Oga wamachi from a streetcar coming from the direction of Mita. He would be wearing a black fedora and a salt and pepper cloak. He would be tall and lean with a longish face and a mole between his eyebrows. |
| 7499 |
And there was something else. He had to take into account the streets, which would be even more congested at this time of the year end sales when shops on both sides of Ogawamachi would be trying to attract chance customers with bunting, bands, and gramaphones, not to mention the usual electric illuminations. |
| 7500 |
Of course he ought not to expect much of a clue only from the cloak, whatever its style might be. But since the man would be wearing a black fedora, he could easily be spotted because nearly all men nowadays wearing fedoras preferred colors other than black. If he looked carefully for this sign, he just might succeed. |
| 7501 |
Reasoning in this way, Keitaro came to the conclusion that successful or not, he should at least go to the streetcar stop. He looked at his pocket watch and found it was just one o'clock. To reach his destination half an hour before four, there would be plenty of time if he left at around three. He still had two hours. |
| 7502 |
He remained in his room sitting quietly, thinking about how to put those two hours to the best use. Yet before his eyes only the congested crowds at the T shaped concourse where Mitoshirocho and Ogawamachi met seemed to come and go all jumbled together without bringing him any plan conducive to success. |
| 7503 |
Keitaro, thinking he had solved the entire riddle perfectly, sprang from his desk. He secured his watch by twisting its chain around his kimono band. With hat in hand, he was about to leave without even putting on his hakama when the question of how to take out the walking stick made him pause for a moment. |
| 7504 |
Keitaro might touch it or even remove it without any fear of reproach or suspicion from the landlord, even if nothing were told to the man beforehand. But it would take some planning to make off with it at a time when the landlord's family were not nearby, or, if they were, to do so without their noticing it. |
| 7505 |
As usual, the landlord was sitting by the big round porcelain brazier in his six mat room. His wife was not present. While Keitaro was leaning over from the middle of the stairway to look into the room through the glass panes in the sliding doors, the bell above the landlord's head suddenly began its noisy ring. |
| 7506 |
He opened the closet door and took out his serge hakama, which he had thrown over the wicker trunk. As he walked about the room putting the hakama on, its backstay dragged behind him along the tatami. He then pulled off his tabi and changed into a pair of socks. With that much done, he again went downstairs. |
| 7507 |
Nor did the bell ring this time. All was quiet throughout the house. But the landlord, as earlier, was still leaning against the big round brazier, his eyes toward the entrance. Keitaro, from the angle at which he was looking before reaching the foot of the stairs, could see the landlord's bent back. |
| 7508 |
Nevertheless, he ventured down. As he feared, the landlord asked him if he was going out and at once called the maid to take his footgear out of the box in which the shoes and clogs were kept. Keitaro, with troubles enough dodging one man's notice, did not want to add to the problem by having the maid present. |
| 7509 |
In that spare moment Keitaro pulled the walking stick from the umbrella stand and held it tight against his arm under his haori. He stole out of the house before the landlord returned. He hurried to Hongo Street with a feeling of pressure under his right armpit caused by the curving angle of the snakehead. |
| 7510 |
On reaching the street, he removed the stick from under his cloak and gazed at the head of the snake. He took a handkerchief from his kimono sleeve and wiped the dust off the cane from top to bottom. This done, he held the stick in his right hand as if it were any ordinary cane and walked on wielding it vigorously. |
| 7511 |
On the streetcar he sat with hands folded over the snakehead, his chin resting on them. He sighed with relief as he looked back over the great pains he had been taking but which had now come to a brief halt. At the same time, his misgivings began again about the undertaking at the carstop he was now heading for. |
| 7512 |
A porcelain dealer's shop built in the warehouse style was directly behind him. Under the eaves a box in the shape of a framed tablet and containing many small sake cups arranged in rows had been put up. Hanging there was a metal birdcage to the outside of which were tied innumerable porcelain cups for birdseed. |
| 7513 |
At that moment he saw a streetcar which had come from behind him stop short, just opposite the pavement he was walking along. Thinking there might possibly be another streetcar stop with the same name, he cut across the street and approached a foreign goods store at the corner of a narrow side street. |
| 7514 |
Doubtful of his powers of observation in checking even one place, Keitaro felt that no matter how highly he would have liked to estimate his own resourcefulness, it was absolutely impossible to demand the skill in himself to cover two areas thoroughly even though the distance between them was not great. |
| 7515 |
He craned his neck to look again at the stop toward the east. Whether because of its location or the direction it was in or possibly out of his own habit of getting on and off at that stop, it seemed to him much livelier. He felt that the man he was searching for was more likely to get off at that spot. |
| 7516 |
Just at that moment a man suddenly ran out from the alley, brushed Keitaro aside as he rushed past him, and jumped on the platform the moment the motorman was putting his hand to the handle to start up the car. Before Keitaro had a chance to recover from his surprise, the car had already jerked forward. |
| 7517 |
He regarded the plaza within his field of vision as a wide stage and discovered on it three men whose attitude was more or less similar to his own. One of these, a policeman at the police box, was on watch as Keitaro was and was looking in the same direction. Another was a switchman in front of the Tenkado store. |
| 7518 |
Streetcars came one after another and ground to a halt before him. Passengers getting on shoved their way into the congested passageway inside the car, and those getting off bore down imperiously from above. Keitaro saw many a scene of rude struggle enacted by nameless men and women in their gathering and dispersing. |
| 7519 |
By the time he keenly felt his regret, the sky was gradually losing its light, and the colors of everything in sight began to subside into a dark bluish shade. Some electric lamps and gaslights started to brighten the glazed shop windows here and there and to disperse the gloom of the winter twilight. |
| 7520 |
She had on nothing that would attract anyone's attention except for this scarf, whose whiteness emerged all the more conspicuously in the thickening gloom of evening. Indeed, what struck Keitaro as most prominent about her was this white color, which indicated a tendency to disregard the seasonal fashion. |
| 7521 |
Since her hair had obviously been perfectly arranged, Keitaro felt that this gesture was quite useless. But the woman's hand exacted his renewed attention. She did not have on those silk gloves that women of her class would have worn. Instead, the pair of kidskin gloves snugly fit her delicate fingers. |
| 7522 |
In fact, the gloves fit so well that not a crease or even any looseness appeared anywhere, so much so that the leather seemed like a thin coat of colored wax applied evenly to the back of her hands. Keitaro had noticed when her hand was raised that the glove extended down her wrist by about three inches. |
| 7523 |
He was not that attracted to the woman to look forward to his free time just to watch her, yet in the intervals of the arrivals of streetcars, he stole observant glances in her direction, careful not to be perceived. He had first thought she was waiting to catch a streetcar either for Hongo or Kamezawacho. |
| 7524 |
She deliberately looked in the opposite direction or took a few steps away from him. Made to feel oddly constrained by such actions, Keitaro tried to keep himself from openly staring toward her. But it eventually occurred to him that she might be unfamiliar with the area and was waiting at the wrong stop. |
| 7525 |
To make up for the deficiency though, her complexion was fair, her eyes clear. The light through the glass pane of the jeweler's falling upon her nose, part of her soft, full cheek, and her brow offered to Keitaro, from the angle at which he was standing, a strangely impressive contour made up of light and shadow. |
| 7526 |
He took his watch from under his kimono sash and peered at it like a man who has abandoned all hope of success. It was long past five. He glanced at the dark sky overhead as if he were noticing it for the first time. Bitterly he clicked his tongue. The bird had escaped the net he had taken so much trouble to set up. |
| 7527 |
He decided to break that mocking reminder of his folly in two on the way back at a place where no one could see, shattering the snakehead and the iron ring of the ferrule and hurling it all into the Ochanomizu River from Mansei Bridge. About to move a step forward, he was aware of the woman's presence again. |
| 7528 |
The well shaped limbs that matched her height, limbs longer than those of ordinary women, had from the first been a pleasing sight to him. But now it was her right hand that drew his attention. She had allowed it to hang down gracefully in a natural way, hardly conscious of her being seen by others. |
| 7529 |
He was seized by the curious fancy of throwing the woman's suspected espionage back to her and for a while longer maintaining careful watch on her movements. He walked back near the police box in the hurried pace of a man trying to retrieve something he has dropped. There he hid in the dark shadows to observe her. |
| 7530 |
The low pompadour arrangement was in general use at the time among Japanese women, so it could not help him in making the distinction. But when he began observing her from his concealed position as she stood with her back half turned toward him, this question was the first thing that came to his mind. |
| 7531 |
The rest of her clothing lay concealed under the long coat that matched the bleak winter sky. Looking again at the clothing so excessively devoid of any attractive feature in keeping with the wearer's age, Keitaro judged that it was the woman's experience with a man that had made her dress in such a somber way. |
| 7532 |
He noticed that the most sensitive movement was in her eyes. At the same time, he could not help perceiving she kept trying to force those eyes, so prone to moving sensitively, not to move. He judged, therefore, that her composure was one attended by a conscious effort to suppress her own nervousness. |
| 7533 |
Keitaro went around the farther side of the police box and stepped down onto the road. Shielded by the painted booth, he fixed his gaze upon the woman's face through the gap between the box and the policeman standing in front of it. And he was again surprised, this time by the change in her expression. |
| 7534 |
Earlier he had noticed that one of her characteristic features was a mouth too large, considering how thin her lips were, but now her beautiful teeth and her large black eyes, richly luminous with the upper and lower lashes so close they almost touched one another, gave him an impression of her he hardly expected. |
| 7535 |
The woman continued to smile. Occasionally the man burst into laughter. Judging by their way of greeting, it was obvious that they knew one another quite well. Keitaro could find none of that courtesy between a polite man and a polite woman which seems to join them, but which in fact serves to separate them. |
| 7536 |
It was the woman standing before the man that barred Keitaro from such a bold undertaking. Apart from the question of whether or not she was ill disposed toward Keitaro, he had definitely perceived that she had been suspicious of him during the long period that he had been standing at the same spot alongside her. |
| 7537 |
With these thoughts in mind Keitaro concluded that he had better delay examining whether the man had a mole or not until an opportunity under more natural circumstances eventually offered itself. He decided, therefore, to follow the two at a distance and if possible overhear fragments of their talk. |
| 7538 |
It looked now as if the man was inviting the woman somewhere and the woman, laughing, was refusing. They had been standing half facing one another, but finally they began walking shoulder to shoulder toward the porcelain shop. From there they walked on eastward, so close that it was almost as if they were arm in arm. |
| 7539 |
If he didn't pass them soon, he was going to bump up against them from behind. Fearing they might turn back, he whisked himself off to the front of a confectionary shop that happened to be located there. He waited for the couple to move on, pretending he was looking at a glass jar filled with cookies. |
| 7540 |
They proceeded to Awajicho and then turned into a narrow side street leading to the foot of Surugadai Slope. Keitaro was turning too when he saw them enter a foreign style restaurant at the corner of the street. He caught a glimpse of the profile of the man and woman in the strong light streaming from the entrance. |
| 7541 |
The restaurant, the Takaratei, had recently been rebuilt. It was known to Keitaro as a place that had been catering to his university for many years. Often passing it, he had noticed its newly painted facade, half of it facing the streetcar line, the other half with its gable cutting obliquely toward the south. |
| 7542 |
Assuming the casual look of a pedestrian, he stepped across the light thrown on the street and continued walking down the dark, narrow lane about a hundred yards until it came to an end at the foot of the slope. From there he retraced his steps stealthily, almost as if his own shadow were folded back into his body. |
| 7543 |
There were no rooms for guests downstairs. Meals were served on the second and third floors, but the latter was only used on the few occasions when there were too many diners. He felt certain he would find the two of them either in the dining hall on the left near the landing or in the one to the right farther down. |
| 7544 |
He proceeded near her table and was about to sit in the row next to theirs, right behind her, back to back. At that moment the man lifted his face and looked at Keitaro, who had not yet turned to seat himself. The man's table was decorated with a bonsai, a pine and a plum tree in a Chinese style pot. |
| 7545 |
As he walked across the floor, the saber hanging from his belt rattled. The group was shown into the room on the left. Their noise had interrupted the conversation between the man and woman, and Keitaro's curiosity had accordingly been suspended until the light from the glittering sword had subsided. |
| 7546 |
He gripped the inevitable snakehead, and two or three times cut the air with it as if taking revenge on the cold. Just then the shadows of the two persons for whom he had waited so impatiently emerged at the restaurant entrance. Keitaro's eyes first went to the white scarf around the woman's slender neck. |
| 7547 |
The two walked along rather slowly, glancing into each gaily decorated shop front. Behind, Keitaro had considerable difficulty in keeping his pace attuned to their excessively slow steps. The man had an aromatic cigar in his mouth, and as he walked, slightly colored puffs of smoke were exhaled into the night air. |
| 7548 |
When they were wafted behind by the wind, they gave an agreeable stimulus to Keitaro's nose. Sniffing, he patiently traced their slow steps. The man's height when observed from the rear made him look a little like a Westerner, and the strong odor from his cigar helped somewhat in maintaining the illusion. |
| 7549 |
Then Keitaro's association of ideas transferred itself to the man's companion. He imagined the woman as the foreigner's mistress, her leather gloves a gift from the man. As he secretly amused himself with this fantasy, which he knew was quite unreasonable, the two reached the streetcar stop where they had met. |
| 7550 |
Keitaro crossed to the same side. The two walked on toward the south. About fifty yards from the corner was another of those iron poles painted red, next to which they stopped. Realizing for the first time that they were going to head southward by way of the Mita line, Keitaro decided he too should take the same car. |
| 7551 |
He turned up the brim of his hat and pulled it down forcefully. He passed his hand over his face. He went and stood as far back as he could under the eave of a house. He looked around in different directions. These were trying moments for him as he waited impatiently for the streetcar. Presently it came. |
| 7552 |
He remained stationary, his hands in his cloak pockets. Only at that moment did Keitaro realize that the man had escorted her only to see her off. Actually, Keitaro was more interested in the woman. If the two had to separate, he wished of course to abandon the man and stand by her to know her destination. |
| 7553 |
She did not take the trouble to open one and lean out. Nonetheless, the man remained motionless, waiting for the car to start. It began to move, electric power carrying the lighted windows southward as if it had recognized that there was no further occasion for an exchange of goodbyes between the two. |
| 7554 |
Then turning around, he went back to the concourse that forked into three streets, this time heading left and stopping by the foreign goods shop. The streetcar stop there was fresh in Keitaro's memory, the place where the stranger had run up against him, causing him to drop the bamboo walking stick. |
| 7555 |
The streetcar that the man seemed to be waiting for came. He laid his long hand on the iron rod at the entrance and lifted his body adroitly onto the car, which had not yet come to a complete stop. Keitaro, who had been hesitating until then, suddenly thought he hadn't a moment to lose. He jumped up into the car. |
| 7556 |
The jewelry store, the tanner's shop, and the signalman with his red and green flags were imbued with the same atmosphere. The second floor of the restaurant with its light blue paint and the gentleman with the mole between his eyebrows and the fair complexioned woman who had taken seats there, all were wrapped in it. |
| 7557 |
At that moment, when he had looked around at the wet street faintly illuminated by shop lights, at the small police box that at the top of the slope seemed smaller in the rain, and at the clump of trees to the left silhouetted dark and dim, he had wondered if this were to be the result of his day's efforts. |
| 7558 |
He remembered that he had been able to do nothing except order the rickshawman to turn the shafts around and head toward Hongo, the direction least likely to be taken by the other rickshaw. Now in bed looking up at the ceiling, Keitaro made the previous day's world rotate again and again before his eyes. |
| 7559 |
Yet he had the feeling that the two of them were actually in some faraway land from which they were reaching the pupils of his eyes with vivid colors and distant shapes as though they were right nearby. Somewhere in his mind Keitaro had the feeling that this strange influence came from the cane itself. |
| 7560 |
He seemed to feel indebted to the cane, and he also thought he wasn't indebted to it in the least. At any rate, he resolved that the first thing he had to do was to get rid of the devilish aftereffects. Flinging aside the covers, he sprang up and went down to the washroom, where he doused his head with icy water. |
| 7561 |
But he sensed a certain urgency, as if the other party were expecting an account that very day, so he telephoned Taguchi's house and asked if it would be all right to go there immediately. After being kept waiting a considerably long time, the same houseboy returned with the answer that he could come over. |
| 7562 |
He was served tea in a deep cup by the houseboy, who also brought in a small brazier hollowed out of paulownia and who offered a soft cushion as well. No woman appeared in the room. Keitaro sat formally rigid in the middle of the large room as he waited uneasily for the approach of the master's footsteps. |
| 7563 |
Keitaro proceeded with answers just satisfying the inquiries, but while this apparently meaningless talk was carried on, he was vaguely aware that it was to his behavior that Taguchi seemed to be paying secret attention. But why Taguchi should be regarding him so scrupulously was utterly beyond his comprehension. |
| 7564 |
So he reported quite simply on those events from the moment the man and woman entered the restaurant, the result being that the account, as he had feared when he left his boardinghouse, turned out as meager as if he had opened his hand before Taguchi's nose and had shown him a fistful of intangible gray cloud. |
| 7565 |
No, it would be much worse than that, since he's quite particular about receiving visitors even under ordinary circumstances. So if you speak about such matters without using discretion, it's very possible that he'll ask you to leave right then. So in return for my introducing you, I hope you'll be prudent. |
| 7566 |
He had the amused feeling of a man who the more he speculates, the deeper into a maze is he lured with each succeeding step. The game he had captured at Taguchi's that day was merely the name Matsumoto, but that name seemed to be a mysterious bag in which were tied for his benefit various intricate and knotty facts. |
| 7567 |
Keitaro's imagination persisted in placing Taguchi and Matsumoto at opposite poles. He felt ill at ease with the former, yet with Matsumoto he had the impression that he could ask any question freely without fear of offending. His way of speaking was itself so agreeable that it had already attracted Keitaro. |
| 7568 |
Matsumoto's house was in Yarai. Keitaro came to the spot below the police box, wondering what the site would look like where the other night he had felt as though he had been bewitched by a fox. There he saw that the street forked up and down a sloping piece of land, the area between irregularly bloated. |
| 7569 |
It was raining now as heavily as it had been then, and the earth under his feet was as soaked as if the lead pipes below the ground had corroded through. But some faint light of the day was now showing in the gloom around him, so his impression of the area was quite different from that of the other night. |
| 7570 |
He entered a small side street and followed it to the right and then the left, looking over the drenched hedgerows at the houses behind them until he came to the front of an enclosure, apparently a graveyard, surrounded by aged camellia trees. It seemed that Matsumoto's house was not going to be so easy to find. |
| 7571 |
Except for that sound, the house was so quiet that it seemed devoid even of human smells. At last a fifteen or sixteen year old maid appeared from the further end of the house shut in by the pouring rain, bowing with her hands on the tatami. As soon as she took the letter from him, she withdrew without a word. |
| 7572 |
He wondered if this was not what Taguchi had meant when he had told him that Matsumoto was not an easy person to see even on ordinary matters. If Keitaro returned directly to his lodging, he would be annoyed the entire day, unable to proceed in any direction, his mood forcibly rooted in a state of suspension. |
| 7573 |
But thinking again, he realized that if he went to see him at all, it would be better to wait until he had reached some conclusive stage where he could announce the plot of the story after it had sufficiently been revealed to himself, for otherwise it would not make a good tale. So he gave up the idea. |
| 7574 |
It had a single crane on it drawn in light India ink, but what attracted Keitaro's attention was its elongated shape. It was different from usual screens, shaped more like a full length mirror. As he had expected, the same maid answered his call, but behind her came two children with loud, ill mannered footsteps. |
| 7575 |
They peeped at him as though he were quite a singular phenomenon. Having recognized this much of a difference from the day before, he was at last led inside by the maid and shown into a drawing room whose glass sliding doors were all closed. In the middle of the room was a porcelain brazier as large as a fishbowl. |
| 7576 |
Then the fact came to light that the woman accompanying him all the way from his homeland was not in fact his wife but his mistress. No sooner was this known than his fame, hitherto at its most enthusiastic height, fell off at once until no one the breadth and length of the New World would so much as shake his hand. |
| 7577 |
Matsumoto put in no word of interruption. Nor did he look as if he were going to speak up immediately even after Keitaro finished. Keitaro interpreted this silence as a consequence of the offense Matsumoto had received, so before his host became angry, Keitaro was thinking it best to make a quick apology. |
| 7578 |
I'd have to say that even Taguchi, fool though he is, is not without some redeeming points. No matter what mischief he's up to, at the moment when the butt of his joke is about to be shamed, he either brings it all to a halt or shows up himself and puts a neat end to it before the person's honor is affected. |
| 7579 |
Even if a man pure as nature happened to turn up, Taguchi could not be relaxed with him. You should take it as the fate of such men. While it may sound improper to praise one's relative, I can honestly say that my brother in law was born with some good qualities. He's basically not a bad fellow at all. |
| 7580 |
And finally Sunaga began badgering Keitaro for having too much interest in women. Keitaro braved it out by telling Sunaga to keep quiet, but each time there came to his mind the image of the woman he had seen from behind at Sunaga's gate, the woman who he had realized was the same one he had seen at the streetcar stop. |
| 7581 |
Instead, he asked only that Keitaro not be angry because no harm had been intended and immediately gave an on the spot promise that he would have a considerable position available for the young man. Taguchi then clapped his hands to summon his older daughter, the one who had been waiting at the stop for Matsumoto. |
| 7582 |
It was then that Keitaro had learned her name was Chiyoko. This first opportunity for him to come in contact with Taguchi's family led to frequent visits on business and other matters. Sometimes he even entered the houseboy's room beside the entrance to gossip with the one he had once bickered with over the phone. |
| 7583 |
There were even occasions in which he had to go into the back part of the house, sometimes to talk with Taguchi's wife about something connected with the running of the household. He was frequently at a loss about questions concerning English put to him by the Taguchis' only son, a middle school student. |
| 7584 |
There was thus not enough time for any degree of intimacy to develop. Only at a New Year's poetry card party given a little after the middle of January did he have the chance to sit knee to knee with them for an unusually long time. They were up late into the night engaged in unreserved conversation. |
| 7585 |
The six year old came back from kindergarten with what looked like a war drum with a crest of three commas shaped into a circle painted on it. He led Yoiko away, promising to let her beat on it. Chiyoko gazed at the shadow of Yoiko's red woolen socks, which looked like two money pouches moving along the corridor. |
| 7586 |
Someone had already put on the electric lamps, since the daylight coming through the heavy downpour was now scant. Blue flames from the gas burning busily on two portable stoves in the kitchen indicated that supper preparations had begun. Soon the children sat down facing one another on either side of the large table. |
| 7587 |
Soon a plain wooden desk was set down, and a twig of anise, an incense burner, and white dumplings were arranged on it. When they saw the feeble light from the candles, the three adults were struck for the first time with the lonely feeling that a great distance now separated them from Yoiko, who would never awaken. |
| 7588 |
She was afraid because the room had no light. With a match Chiyoko kindled a hand lamp and turned the corner of the corridor with Sakiko. On the way back Chiyoko happened to glance into the servants' room, where in undertones the kitchen maid was talking over the brazier with a rick shawman patronized by the family. |
| 7589 |
The rain had not yet stopped, but she no longer heard the sound of the downpour striking the plantain leaves. Rather, the sound on the zinc roofed eaves sent into her ears the ceaseless drops of a desolate and lonely sadness. From time to time until the dawn broke, she took the cloth from Yoiko's face and sobbed. |
| 7590 |
The next day all the women present helped sew a hemp kimono in which to clothe Yoiko. The little sleeves and kimono skirt went round from hand to hand among the women, including Momoyoko, who had arrived from Uchisaiwaicho, and two wives from neighborhood families on friendly terms with the Matsumotos. |
| 7591 |
In the afternoon just before Yoiko's body was to be placed into the coffin, Matsumoto told Chiyoko to dress it in the newly sewn kimono. Chiyoko, so choked with tears that she was unable to reply, took off Yoiko's clothes and raised the cold naked body in her arms. All over the child's back were purple spots. |
| 7592 |
The next day the small coffin moved quietly under a clear, windless sky. People on the street gazed after it as if it were something wondrous to behold, for instead of the usual white paper lanterns and plain wooden bier, which Matsumoto said he disliked, he had the coffin placed on a wheeled hearse. |
| 7593 |
The crematory was only a few hundred yards from the Kashiwagi train station, but since they had not realized this, they had hired rickshaws all the way from Yarai. It had thus required considerably more time to get there than it would have if they had taken the train. It was Chiyoko's first experience at a crematory. |
| 7594 |
Carved characters noted that the pagoda had been erected for the repose of Saint Kobo's soul on his one thousand fiftieth anniversary. Down the slope at the foot of a bridge was a tea stall, behind which was an artesian well surrounded by a thick growth of bamboo, all lending picturesqueness to the country lane. |
| 7595 |
Small leaves of various colors fell occasionally from the nearly bare branches of tall trees. Spinning rapidly round and round in the air, they offered a vivid impression to Chiyoko's eyes; that they did not fall to the ground at once but remained whirling in the air for a long while was also a novel sight for her. |
| 7596 |
After she passed through the back part of the building, where lined on both sides were dismal looking furnaces of ordinary grade, each with a brass plate on which the name of the cremated was written, she came out into a spacious yard in one corner of which she noticed a huge pile of pine for firewood. |
| 7597 |
To Chiyoko, these seemed a memento of the heat that had burned Yoiko's flesh the previous evening. She suddenly felt as though she were suffocating. Three fire tenders appeared. The oldest requested the dead child's family to break the seal, but Sunaga replied that it would be all right if the man himself did it. |
| 7598 |
The black iron doors opened on both sides, and at the dim farther end of the cavity something gray and round was visible, something black and white, all in an amorphous mass. The cremator said they would have it out shortly and, attaching two rails, put what looked like two iron rings at the ends of the coffin rack. |
| 7599 |
As the rickshawman began his run, a chill wind crept in through the space under the blanket covering herself and the box on her lap. The slender branches of the zelkova trees, whose tall light brownish trunks lined both sides of the road, swayed as though they were welcoming them and seeing them off. |
| 7600 |
Moreover, it would have been a disgrace to Keitaro if it became known that he had pried into the family's affairs by pumping information from no more than a doorkeeper. Finally, there was little likelihood that Saeki could know as much as his words laid claim to, so Keitaro decided to let the matter stand. |
| 7601 |
Such was what Keitaro wished to ascertain. Of course, he was clearly conscious that this desire was no more than his own curiosity. He was equally aware, however, that as far as Sunaga was concerned, it was not improper for him to have his curiosity satisfied. More than that, he even believed it his right. |
| 7602 |
Sunaga praised the view too, but complained about the cold, blaming Keitaro by saying it was not yet the season for walking along such a bleak embankment. Telling Sunaga that if he'd walk faster, he'd warm up, Keitaro began to quicken his pace. Sunaga followed with somewhat of a bewildered look on his face. |
| 7603 |
Since I have no children, my affection toward those of my own flesh and blood may still be comparatively weak, but the feeling of endearment I have toward the parents who brought me into the world has developed considerably since that time. I often wish that in those days I had had the love for them I now have. |
| 7604 |
Whenever I asked myself why I had harbored such doubts about those words, words that didn't need to have any particular significance attached to them, I found myself unable to explain the reason. At times I had half a mind to question my mother directly about them, but whenever I looked at her face, my resolve failed. |
| 7605 |
Yet at the same time I'm filled with the sad thought that this desire is a bygone dream I can never recapture. My mother's character can be described most easily as that of an affectionate mother. From my point of view, she is certainly a woman who was born for the sake of those two words and who will die for them. |
| 7606 |
It seems funny, I guess, that for a boy who was keenly observant and sensitive toward his father, I didn't pay much attention to my mother. If it's true that people tend to want to know more about others than about themselves, I'd say that my father seemed more like a stranger to me than my mother did. |
| 7607 |
Actually, I remember having once been called in by a certain professor of mine, who was entrusted by some employer with the selection of a suitable job candidate, to be sounded out about my future intentions. And still I didn't make a move. You realize, of course, that I'm not telling you this to boast about it. |
| 7608 |
I don't think I was born to make a name for myself in the world. Had I majored in botany or astronomy instead of law, the fates might have bestowed on me some job suited to my personality. I think this way because while I'm extremely timid toward society, I can really persevere when it comes to myself. |
| 7609 |
I think you already know that it's the small bit of property my father left me that allows me to indulge myself as I do. When I think about the fact that if it weren't for that I'd have to use my law degree and fight the world no matter how painful it would be, I can only offer thanks to my dead father. |
| 7610 |
But she has no real understanding about what that means, whether it's done by honor, property, power, or virtue. She merely has some vague idea that if any of these fall along the way, the rest will somehow come together one after another. I myself lack the courage to talk to her about this sort of thing. |
| 7611 |
I don't believe I'd be qualified to until I've actually elevated my family's name in a way that fits in with my own view of the world. And yet I'm someone who cannot in any way whatsoever elevate his own family name. All I can do is to keep in mind some nobility of spirit not unworthy of my family's reputation. |
| 7612 |
Among the many anxieties I've given my mother, what I'd mention first is this shortcoming I've just spoken about. But she loves me enough to allow us to get along together even without mending my bad points, so without losing this feeling of being sorry for her, I believe we can push on as we are now doing. |
| 7613 |
The Taguchi of that time was neither a man of influence nor fortune, as he is now. But he was a young man of promise, so my father interceded on his behalf so that he could marry my mother's sister. Taguchi looked up to my father as his senior; he sought his advice and was given assistance in one way or another. |
| 7614 |
Such a reply, hardly applicable to the baby I was at the time, made me feel embarrassed. I pressed her further until she said with tears in her eyes that it wasn't, in fact, for my sake, but for her own. And yet she would not give me the answer to my repeated question of why it would be good for her. |
| 7615 |
With that purpose in mind, I went out of my way to visit the Taguchis even when I didn't have any real business there, merely to sound out my aunt and uncle indirectly. Neither in words nor bearing did they show any sign of shunning me as they could have if they had been anticipating my mother's hard pursuit. |
| 7616 |
But later on, their rising social status, as well as their own view of my character, with its course quite opposite their own, must have doubly deprived the engagement of its feasibility, and now only the empty slough of obligation has been left behind somewhere in their minds. That may be how the affair now stands. |
| 7617 |
And ever since she was a child, Chiyoko has regarded my home as her own, thinking nothing of coming and staying overnight. Even today, when our two families have less familiarity than they once had, she frequently visits us by herself, her face cheerful as she calls on her dear aunt as if she were her own mother. |
| 7618 |
But the image of my mother's frown was not the only reason for my abandoning the topic. I was also partly restrained toward her by the reflection that since she had not yet confided to Chiyoko her definite desire in spite of their close relationship, she might, if left alone, not do it for a considerable time. |
| 7619 |
Since we were both poor at go, it didn't take much time, so when the stones were put away, it wasn't that late. We began talking over cigarettes. I found an appropriate time to ask whether Chiyoko's marriage had been settled yet or not. I had asked simply in order to show that I had no objection to her getting married. |
| 7620 |
If only my mother hadn't been concerned about it, I might have gotten along quite well without once turning my steps toward Uchisaiwaicho. And even if she was anxious, had my concern about her been the only question, I might have persevered to the very end in having my own way. That's the kind of person I am. |
| 7621 |
In short, the time I spent with them was cheerful enough to be called uproarious. But to be honest, it was a little too cheerful for me. I was left feeling mentally exhausted by such empty endeavors. I think a sharp eye might have easily detected the deceptive light that was casting ugly colors upon my true self. |
| 7622 |
In the course of these visits I remember only one occasion in which I felt the pleasure of having my mood and my words perfectly joined, like the two sides of a sheet of paper. The incident occurred on a day when the Taguchi family was following its custom of going out together once or twice a year. |
| 7623 |
When I perceived something like a pleased, though faint, look wavering in her eyes, I regretted my injustice to her. We drifted back over a past so intimate to each of us that it seemed that we had been reared together. Reminiscent words of bygone days passed our lips to help revive those earlier times. |
| 7624 |
It surprised me to find her own recollections, vivid even in trifling details, far superior to mine. She could even remember that moment four years ago when she had stitched up a tear in my hakama as I stood by the front door of her house. She even recalled that the thread she had used was silk, not cotton. |
| 7625 |
She took out several of my drawings. They were no more than simple sketches of red camellias, purple asters, and fancy dahlias. But the careful execution of neatly painted detail, trouble taken where it was obviously not needed and without begrudging the waste of time, was almost a complete surprise to me as I now am. |
| 7626 |
Till then I had wished, as a last resort to setting my mind at ease, that she would make her wedding match as quickly as possible, but at this response my heart gave a start like a sudden dashing of waves, and I was surprised to feel a clammy sweat creeping out of the pores of my back and under my arms. |
| 7627 |
I didn't feel even the slightest vexation. For the first time I had actually been made aware of how I might be affected by her marrying or not, and I was thankful that she had given me this awareness by poking fun at me. It's possible that I might have been in love with her without realizing it until then. |
| 7628 |
At first I went at it, not minding how ridiculous and time consuming it was, but soon her questions and answers began to arouse my curiosity until, all bent over, I stretched out my hand toward her and called out for her to give me the receiver. Smiling, she shook her head. I straightened and tried to grab it from her. |
| 7629 |
Setting aside the intentions of the Taguchis and my mother's own wishes as having as little significance as the suggestions of an outsider, just the comparison of Chiyoko's personality to my own, each stripped of all it had acquired, always made me feel that the two of us had no possibility of ever being united. |
| 7630 |
As it is customary in the West to make literary figures an adornment of the entire nation, the gathering there treated him with respect and affability as a great man. And while he was sauntering here and there in the hall attracting all the attention to himself, he accidentally dropped his handkerchief. |
| 7631 |
I couldn't bear imagining for very long the two of us as man and wife. My mother would undoubtedly be astonished to hear these words. Even friends my own age would probably be unable to understand. However, since there's no need to let these solitary thoughts lie buried in silence, I'll tell them to you now. |
| 7632 |
If Chiyoko were to become my wife, she'd certainly experience a cruel disappointment. In return for lavishly bestowing on her husband so much of the beautiful feeling that she's been endowed with, she'd certainly expect him to be active in society as the one reward for the mental nourishment she's given him. |
| 7633 |
If her purity actually affected me in some way or another, it would only reveal itself in some unexpected form she'd never understand, no matter how often I explained it to her. And if she actually noticed it, she'd no more appreciate it than if I applied pomade to my hair or wrapped my feet in tabi of expensive silk. |
| 7634 |
If my mother was to go, I would have to accompany her, for it would be worrisome to have someone her age riding the train alone. As for me, unsociable as I am, I hated causing trouble by forcing ourselves on a family already in confusion in a new place, even though we might not actually be a burden to them. |
| 7635 |
Even after my father's death, when she had more free time, she unfortunately didn't have many opportunities to go when and where she liked. Without the convenience of traveling far from home or of remaining away a long time, she saw the years advance as the two of us, mother and child, remained in our house. |
| 7636 |
For that matter, it wasn't a frequent experience for me either. Our talk, under the influence of a fresh mood, was more lively than usual. We discussed what neither of us would ever remember in the least, allowing the conversation to follow its own course. Before we realized it, the train had arrived at our station. |
| 7637 |
Since we hadn't notified anyone beforehand, no one was there to meet us. But when we hired rickshaws and told the rickshawmen the name of the owner of the villa, they recognized it at once and started off down a sandy road. I noticed that the number of new houses had greatly increased since my last visit. |
| 7638 |
Chiyoko and Momoyoko offered my mother a summer yukata to change into and hung her traveling kimono out to air. A maid showed me to a bathroom where I could wash up with cold water. Although the villa was situated near a range of hills quite distant from the beach, the water was not as good as I had expected. |
| 7639 |
I looked back and saw her holding a dry white towel over my shoulder. I took it and stood up. From a drawer in the mirror stand nearby she handed me a comb. While I sat before the mirror combing my hair, she leaned against the bathroom doorpost and looked at my wet head. Since I didn't say anything, she spoke first. |
| 7640 |
I knew her face too from a photograph taken with Momoyoko, and I had seen her handwriting on a picture postcard. I had also heard that her only brother was in America or had just returned. As the son of a family that was rather well off, it was no surprise he should be spending the summer in Kamakura. |
| 7641 |
There my mother and aunt were discussing such things as the color of the sea and the direction the enormous statue of Buddha at Kamakura was in, talking as if these trivialities were of the utmost importance. Momoyoko informed Chiyoko that their father had sent a message that he'd join them by evening. |
| 7642 |
When the sisters heard me say I'd be heading back, their faces changed to surprise, and they began to try to dissuade me. Chiyoko was especially bent on detaining me. She called me eccentric. She said that it was unreasonable to leave my mother alone and that even if I wanted to go home, she wouldn't let me. |
| 7643 |
He handled himself perfectly, without reserve, and yet without lowering to any degree the dignity he possessed. From the point of view of someone who is so afraid of meeting strangers, I wanted to criticize him as a man left to the fashionable world as soon as he was born and to this day raised in that very same place. |
| 7644 |
In the course of my academic career from high school up through university, it was the general custom with students not to attach much importance to class standing, and since year after year we took more and more pride in appraising ourselves more highly, I didn't much care about the grades I received. |
| 7645 |
What prevents me from persistently following a beautiful face is nothing other than the loneliness of being abandoned by that intoxicating liquor. Whenever this hopeless feeling takes hold of me, I sink into the depths of unpleasantness, as though I had suddenly been transformed into an old man or a monk. |
| 7646 |
As the abusive words indicated, I must have looked like that to everyone. I even felt so myself. With characteristic sociability, Takagi went out to the veranda to take down for the girls some big straw hats that resembled sedge hats and, handing them to them, saw them off with the usual civilities. |
| 7647 |
Luckily or unluckily, before she said anything about it, the girls came back from the beach, the brims of their straw hats fluttering. Actually, I was glad for my mother's sake that my guesswork had not come true. But at the same time it is not a lie to say I felt irritated by the same course of events. |
| 7648 |
Toward evening I went with the sisters to the station where, as my mother had ordered, I was to greet my uncle coming from Tokyo. The sisters were dressed in yukata of the same pattern and were wearing white tabi. What pride glowed in their mother's eyes as she looked after their retreating figures. |
| 7649 |
That evening, supper was later than usual, not only because it had been put off until my uncle and cousin arrived, but also because my mother and I had joined in as late arrivals. Further, as I had privately feared, there was a scene of great confusion with rice bowls and pairs of chopsticks busily moving around. |
| 7650 |
Even now when I look at myself in the mirror, I imagine that if I had inherited more of my mother's facial features, even if they made me look more homely, it would have made me feel much better about myself, much more like I was my mother's child. Since the supper hour was delayed, we got to bed exceedingly late. |
| 7651 |
But the heat remained to keep us from sleeping. Goichi, with a boy's curiosity, asked his father one question after another about the fishing excursion. And my uncle, half in jest, told a pleasant story about the fish yielding themselves up of their own accord if only we could get ourselves into a boat. |
| 7652 |
I found it somewhat odd that not only did my uncle relate the story to his son but every so often calling my name made a listener out of me in spite of my having no interest whatever in it. However, as I had to make some response, I found myself committed before his talk ended to joining the fishing party. |
| 7653 |
Since he had probably trained himself for commands at school, his voice was so loud that it almost echoed along the cliffs and sea. My uncle and I were standing at the verge of the cliff waiting for everyone. They came up talking together without changing their slow pace even after my uncle's shout. |
| 7654 |
Near the beach was an empty white boat quietly floating on the waves. A fine rain thinner than a drizzle was still falling, obscuring the surface of the sea. The trees and rocks on the cliffs on the opposite side of the bay were almost in monochrome, unlike a typical day when they are so distinctly defined. |
| 7655 |
There was a wooden dipper nailed above the door, a charm against evil with characters written on it forbidding whooping cough to enter the house of the Heikichi Yoshino family. At last we knew the name of the owner. It was to Goichi's credit that he had been alert enough to find it and read it aloud to us. |
| 7656 |
I glanced around the yard, which hardly deserved the name, since it was a mere dozen or so square yards in front of the house. In a corner was a fig tree with only a few green leaves moving in the fishy breeze. On its branches were some unripe figs that barely testified to its ability to bear fruit. |
| 7657 |
I was attracted to two tall flagpoles, each embedded deeply in the sand for some festival that had taken place or was about to occur. From somewhere along the sandy beach Goichi had picked up a withered branch washed ashore and was drawing a series of enormous faces and large characters on the broad stretch of sand. |
| 7658 |
He shouted for Takagi to sit beside him, probably intending to treat him as the guest of the day, so Takagi had to settle there. Momoyoko and Goichi went astern with the boatman into another partitioned part. Takagi looked back to Momoyoko and told her to come and sit with him, since there was plenty of room. |
| 7659 |
That a flash of joy spread through me on hearing her reply was good evidence for the inconsistency of human speech and human feeling, and this dealt me a hard blow, so unaware was I of my own weak character. Perhaps it was my own imagination, but Takagi seemed more reserved than he had been the previous day. |
| 7660 |
My mother was detained by everyone and consented to stay another few days at Kamakura on condition that Goichi or someone else see her home. I wondered how she could settle down so good naturedly just by their persuading her, and my nerves, which were already on edge, were further irritated by her being so at home. |
| 7661 |
Sometimes it seemed to me that Chiyoko loved me as though I were the only person in the world. And even then I couldn't make a move. Yet whenever it occurred to me to close my eyes to the future and take a desperate step, she almost always escaped from my reach and assumed a look no different from a stranger's. |
| 7662 |
During the two days I stayed at Kamakura, this ebb and flow of the tide occurred a few times. And occasionally I even had the dim suspicion smoldering in me that she had voluntary control over these changes in herself, intentionally coming toward me at one time and removing herself at another. And not only that. |
| 7663 |
I felt vexed by my vain endeavor to reach a definite conclusion. During those two days I seem to have been enticed by a woman I had no intention of marrying. And as long as that Takagi kept hanging around the least bit in my sight, I was in real fear of being enticed to the very end against my will. |
| 7664 |
I imagined the state of mind I might be in after returning home, afraid that I might be even more irritated than I had been at Kamakura, where right before my eyes was the cause of my irritation. And I uselessly pictured myself in the unbearable pain of being annoyed all alone with no opponent to contend with. |
| 7665 |
I hung a mosquito net with its fresh odor of flax in the best room in the house and lay there enjoying the sound of a wind bell under the eaves. In the evening I took a walk along the streets and returned home carrying a potted flowering plant. Since my mother wasn't there, the maid, Saku, took care of everything. |
| 7666 |
Saku heard the untimely sound of the duster, and her face suddenly appeared along the stairway, her hair in the ginkgo leaf style. I had her use a dustcloth over a section of the bookshelves. But I soon made her go downstairs, since I felt sorry to have her continue helping me on a task I didn't know when I'd finish. |
| 7667 |
I was resting, smoking a cigarette, when Saku again showed her face on the staircase. She told me that she'd be glad to be of help. I wanted to have her do something for me, but unfortunately, the books I was arranging were those she could not handle, since she had no knowledge of the Western alphabet. |
| 7668 |
Accepting the slim volume from him, I again asked what the story was about. He replied that that wasn't the important thing, explaining that it would be difficult to understand the book as being about jealousy, revenge, mischief, intrigue, serious action, a madman's reasoning, or even a normal man's calculation. |
| 7669 |
I had forgotten the entire incident and, quite unaware of it, had merely pulled out the book from behind the bookshelf to wipe off the thick layer of dust on it. With my eyes on the German letters of the title, I was reminded of my friend who was so fond of literature and of what he had told me at that time. |
| 7670 |
Inside I discovered a story of real terror. A man loved a woman, but the woman ignored him and married one of his acquaintances, so with a grudge against her he plotted to kill the husband. But not merely kill him. The murderer would gain no real satisfaction unless the crime occurred before the wife's eyes. |
| 7671 |
To accomplish this he devised a scheme. The opportunity to carry it out occurred at a dinner party, where he began to feign sudden attacks of violent fits. His performance as a madman was so realistic that everyone present believed him quite insane. He secretly congratulated himself on the success of his ruse. |
| 7672 |
His intention was to perform through these elaborate preparations an act of homicide that no one would be able to do anything about. As his frequent fits began to darken the lively atmosphere of the parties he attended, many homes which until then had been on familiar terms with him cut him off completely. |
| 7673 |
He had thought no more of his friend's life than he did an insect's, and he refused to admit any contradiction or antipathy between reason and feeling. He felt no repentance whatever in using his entire intellect as fuel for revenge and letting it serve as the means for the dextrous accomplishment of a brutal murder. |
| 7674 |
I saw by the clock in the sitting room that it was past noon, just the time to have lunch. As usual, Saku waited on me. After eating a few mouthfuls of rice, I asked her all at once if there was anything unusual about my complexion. Saku's eyes opened wide in surprise, and she replied that there wasn't. |
| 7675 |
Saku's figure before me looked like a morning glory drawn with one stroke of the brush. My only regret was that the drawing was not by the hand of a master. And yet to me her mind could only have been composed as simply as that kind of drawing. You may ask what possible use it is to compare her character to a drawing. |
| 7676 |
Probably not much, but the truth was that while she waited on me, I was comparing myself, who had just read through Gedanke, with Saku, who was now sitting quietly, a black lacquer tray on her knees, and I was jolted by the thought of why my own mind was as complicated as a painting done in thick oils. |
| 7677 |
However, because something other than a simple interest in information was driving me forward, something nastily mixed with ulterior motives, each time I was about to bring up the topic, I felt I was being scolded from afar for the unfairness of the question, so that I finally thought it unworthy of me to ask. |
| 7678 |
Anyway, that was how outspoken Chiyoko was. But even late into the night when my mother finally suggested we all ought to go to bed, Chiyoko had not brought into the conversation a word about Takagi. I saw a great deal of deliberateness in that. I felt as if a dark blob of ink had dropped on a white sheet of paper. |
| 7679 |
Imagining her calmly asleep just below me, I couldn't help thinking that it was I, sleepless and wriggling, who was after all the defeated one. I even hated turning over in bed. It seemed a disgrace to have the weakness of my still being awake heard downstairs like some kind of intelligence report of her victory. |
| 7680 |
She had deliberately kept away from this topic out of sheer consideration not to offend me. When interpreted this way, it made me feel I had behaved in such an irrationally ill humored way during my Kamakura stay that it had robbed Chiyoko, who was so simple and pure, of the courage to say even Takagi's name before me. |
| 7681 |
I remained vexed at myself, defeated and sleepless. As I had turned off the electric light after the mosquito net had been hung, the darkness pervading the room oppressed me so much I felt suffocated. It grew unbearably painful keeping my eyes open, looking at what they could not see, and having only my mind working. |
| 7682 |
I had long forgotten what a morning walk was like. The colors of the street, though little different from usual, were yet untouched by heat and throngs of people and so seemed as peaceful as a Sabbath. The streetcar tracks, stretching straight ahead along the ground and giving off a burnished light, enhanced the calm. |
| 7683 |
Had I been my usual self on this sort of occasion, I would have suggested that it would be a good chance for her to have her hair done too. But just then it was difficult for me to make such an intimate request. Yet it so happened that she herself said that she somehow felt like having her hair set. |
| 7684 |
That he can keep them from outward show is due to his property, his age, and his culture, discernment, and self discipline. And lastly, it's due to the fact that he's in harmony with his home life. His relationship with society, which is seemingly in opposition to it, is actually in keeping with it. |
| 7685 |
But the moment Takagi's name fell accidentally from my lips, I felt as though that respect was lost forever. A sudden change came over her face. I don't want to admit it was necessarily an expression of triumph, but without a doubt a kind of scorn flashed in her eyes that I had never seen there before. |
| 7686 |
That's already cowardly, but that's not the point. Why, having accepted my invitation, couldn't you make yourself agreeable as you usually do? My invitation to you turned out to be the same as having invited you to disgrace myself. You insulted a guest of my family, and the result is that you insulted me too. |
| 7687 |
Probably nothing of any real importance. At least as far as one can see from the outside, their relationship up to now doesn't seem to have changed at all from the earlier days. If you ask them about it, they'll offer a variety of views on the subject, but these are governed by their state of mind at the moment. |
| 7688 |
After all, my sister has been dreaming her own impossible dream. Both my sisters, Ichizo's mother and Taguchi's wife, are surprised at the great similarity between my character and Ichizo's. I myself have wondered how two such eccentrics could have come into existence among our close knit group of relatives. |
| 7689 |
He's so worried about, it that he prays for any escape whatever from this inner activity, but he's dragged on by it as though it were a curse beyond his power to drive out. The time is going to come when he'll inevitably collapse, totally alone, under his own mental exertion. He's going to come to dread that moment. |
| 7690 |
Now, for the sake of his own happiness, he's praying with all his heart to the powers above to somehow become a wit, flippant and wanton. He already knew before I advised him that the only way in the world to save himself was by assuming a flippant pose. But he's struggling, still unable to put it into practice. |
| 7691 |
I was, in fact, ignorant of the art of guiding a man according to his own character. I was indiscreet enough to think it proper to pass on to him as many of my own tastes as I could, and I got used to moving the pliable mind of this youth wherever it pleased me to. That seems to have been the cause of all the trouble. |
| 7692 |
And so it can be turned in any direction and be made subject to any external stimulus. Putting it this way, though, may not satisfy you sufficiently. Ichizo was born to reform the established order, while I came into the world to be educated by the world as it is taken for granted by ordinary people. |
| 7693 |
He came over on a day when I was in my study dipping into the history of Japanese flower arrangement to answer an acquaintance's question on the subject. I was so absorbed in the job that when he greeted me, I merely looked over my shoulder and said hello. But I noticed that his color was quite bad. |
| 7694 |
It wasn't so much that I disliked her persistence as it was that I was moved so strangely by the pathos in her excessive perseverance. This made me willingly accept her request to at least have Ichizo over to talk about it, since, as she said, there was no one else among our relatives he had any respect for. |
| 7695 |
But in inverse proportion to his assertion about the staleness of the topic, his attitude toward the problem seemed to reveal that it had been quite an ordeal for him. The last time she had entreated him, he said, he had asked her to wait until his graduation, after which he would bring the matter to a conclusion. |
| 7696 |
He said it was. I asked if he didn't have any intention of satisfying his mother's wishes. He replied that he definitely intended to in a great many things, but he had never said he would take Chiyoko as his wife. When I asked if he wasn't refusing her just to be obstinate, he affirmed that that may have been the case. |
| 7697 |
I saw behind its loneliness something tinged with deep contempt. I confess that Ichizo's head is better than mine when it comes to intelligence. I know that only too well. So when we came in contact with one another, I was always on guard to reveal as little as possible of anything foolish that he might deride. |
| 7698 |
At that time his remarks reminded me of Ichizo, and while I felt it was a sorry thing for any Japanese to have to listen to such bitter truths, it was even more pathetic for a young man like Ichizo to fear trying to take hold of a secret relating to himself and yet again to have to try in spite of the fear. |
| 7699 |
They are so inseparably bound by nature with threads of affection that they may well despise the mere blood relationship between a parent and a child. Since this binding thread could not be cut asunder even by the edge of an axe wielded by a demon, there could be nothing to fear in disclosing any secret to Ichizo. |
| 7700 |
They were both in terror, she with the secret held in her hand, he with the expectation that he would be made to take hold of it. At last I took out the reality he had feared and simply brought it into the open for him. I don't dare recount to you each and every one of the questions and answers exchanged at the time. |
| 7701 |
From the first, the affair hadn't seemed to me so great an event, and also from the need I had to maintain my cool as best I could, I told the story as though it were, after all, a matter of little importance, but Ichizo, being under extreme tension, took the information as though it were a matter of life and death. |
| 7702 |
From my own viewpoint, they may well feel infinitely more proud than those real parents and children who so frequently in this world fail to get along. For themselves, too, how much more pleasant it would have been to know the real truth and to reflect back on all the affection they had for each other. |
| 7703 |
I also said that it would only disturb his studying for examinations if at this moment he kept being pressed for a definite answer. At the same time, I told Taguchi the situation Ichizo was now in, with the intention of trying to speed up the question of Chiyoko's marriage before Ichizo's graduation if possible. |
| 7704 |
I associate with the Taguchis as their relative, of course, but I had never actually meddled in their daughter's marriage negotiations, nor had I ever been asked for advice about it. So until that day I had not heard about any of the marriage prospects, nor had I heard even indirectly any rumors about candidates. |
| 7705 |
I asked Taguchi how it was going with the young man. With an amiable laugh he replied that from the outset Takagi hadn't come forward. But he also told me that inasmuch as any bachelor of good status and education had a claim as a suitor, it couldn't be said that he was definitely out of the running. |
| 7706 |
I suggested unhesitatingly that he might be a good match for her. Whether desiring someone better or thinking otherwise, Taguchi didn't encourage my suggestion. Knowing nothing whatever about Takagi's character, I had no right to recommend him further, so I returned home, leaving that question as it was. |
| 7707 |
I was quite worried about his having to burden himself with family problems while his graduation exams were coming up. I secretly visited my sister just to spy out his condition. She was unconcerned and said quite calmly that he seemed very busy and that such was only to be expected just before his graduation. |
| 7708 |
And what's more, she's made of purer stuff than I am because she's learned much less than I have. She's a woman worthy of anyone's love and respect. How could such a mother and so devoted a son as you ever be separated from each other for good? You can be sure that's impossible, so set your mind at ease. |
| 7709 |
Since I had branded that dark secret on his mind, I felt I should shoulder the responsibility for anything resulting from it. I felt like seeing how my sister was and hearing from her how Ichizo had been recently. I called my wife from the sitting room to tell her all that had happened and to ask her advice. |
| 7710 |
I forgot about Ichizo and had no time to think of him further until evening, when my sister unexpectedly turned up. Her visit gave me a sudden chill. As usual, she sat in the midst of our family gathering, exchanging with my wife long apologies for not calling and offering the usual compliments of the season. |
| 7711 |
Inside was a wide dirt floor extending the entire length of the building. The floor had been entirely tiled, so that it gave me an impression as tranquil as if I were in a temple in China. I was told the house had first been built as a villa but was later bought by the Asahi and turned into a clubhouse. |
| 7712 |
Only I thought that since you're versed in such matters, I'd add this superfluous detail. What I really wanted to tell you about is not this wide floor but rather about the old women who were there. There were two of them, one standing, the other sitting on a chair. Both of them had their heads shaved. |
| 7713 |
But that assumption was due to my own ignorance fostered through long habit, and once I become aware of this, I suddenly grow uneasy. Aside from the question of clothing and food, I become frightened, as I did the other day for example, when I heard about a man of great wealth who recklessly squandered his money. |
| 7714 |
Where he had rowed his boat from I didn't know, but it was very small and quite unreliable. He tried to urge the two into the boat, saying he'd row, but they were afraid and wouldn't get in, though at last they were persuaded to. The air of exaggerated surprise the younger geisha put on was ludicrous. |
| 7715 |
Yet through a gap in that mind inflated with fuzzy tales of adventure, Keitaro was able to catch sight of the image of Morimoto as a human being hovering between dream and reality. In addition to this knowledge of a form of human life, Keitaro had acquired both a sympathy and antipathy to Morimoto as a human being. |
| 7716 |
Still, the death of a beautiful child buried in a beautiful way aroused in him feelings of pity. It was the sad tale of an infant girl born on the eve of the Doll's Festival as though her fate had been that of a doll. From Sunaga, Keitaro was surprised to hear of the slight dissonance between a mother and son. |
| 7717 |
Keitaro had absolutely no doubts about how to understand the relationship with his own mother, since he was her child; at the same time he had been resigned to its prosaic quality. A more complicated relationship between parent and child, even though he could imagine it, could not really be felt by him in its reality. |
| 7718 |
True, it was through this experience that Keitaro had found a job. But as a man's experience the action proved serious only to himself; to the eyes of others it was ridiculous in its significance. In short, all the knowledge and feeling Keitaro had recently received about life came by way of his eardrum. |
| 7719 |
But the Nightingale understood the secret of the Student's sorrow, and she sat silent in the oak tree, and thought about the mystery of Love. Suddenly she spread her brown wings for flight, and soared into the air. She passed through the grove like a shadow, and like a shadow she sailed across the garden. |
| 7720 |
I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty. Flame coloured are his wings, and coloured like flame is his body. |
| 7721 |
All night long she sang with her breast against the thorn, and the cold, crystal Moon leaned down and listened. All night long she sang, and the thorn went deeper and deeper into her breast, and her life blood ebbed away from her. She sang first of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a girl. |
| 7722 |
Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb. And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart. |
| 7723 |
But the Nightingale's voice grew fainter, and her little wings began to beat, and a film came over her eyes. Fainter and fainter grew her song, and she felt something choking her in her throat. Then she gave one last burst of music. The White Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. |
| 7724 |
The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough with crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather heroic, before he gets to the top. |
| 7725 |
She was a rock. She was covered with the seaweed which pops when it is pressed. He was lost. There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when, lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole skull perhaps a cow's skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it. |
| 7726 |
Clean, white, wind swept, sand rubbed, a more unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The sea holly would grow through the eye sockets; it would turn to powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little dust No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders. |
| 7727 |
There was Rebecca at the window. The bareness of Mrs. Pearce's front room was fully displayed at ten o'clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the table. The harsh light fell on the garden; cut straight across the lawn; lit up a child's bucket and a purple aster and reached the hedge. |
| 7728 |
A daddy long legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea. Archer could not sleep. |
| 7729 |
It was but a dark patch. Every inch was rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one's back one would have seen nothing but muddle and confusion clouds turning and turning, and something yellow tinted and sulphurous in the darkness. |
| 7730 |
In the other bed by the door Jacob lay asleep, fast asleep, profoundly unconscious. The sheep's jaw with the big yellow teeth in it lay at his feet. He had kicked it against the iron bed rail. Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in the early hours of the morning. |
| 7731 |
Seabrook lay six foot beneath, dead these many years; enclosed in three shells; the crevices sealed with lead, so that, had earth and wood been glass, doubtless his very face lay visible beneath, the face of a young man whiskered, shapely, who had gone out duck shooting and refused to change his boots. |
| 7732 |
Archer and Jacob ran in front or lagged behind; but they were in the Roman fortress when she came there, and shouting out what ships were to be seen in the bay. For there was a magnificent view moors behind, sea in front, and the whole of Scarborough from one end to the other laid out flat like a puzzle. |
| 7733 |
The whole city was pink and gold; domed; mist wreathed; resonant; strident. Banjoes strummed; the parade smelt of tar which stuck to the heels; goats suddenly cantered their carriages through crowds. It was observed how well the Corporation had laid out the flower beds. Sometimes a straw hat was blown away. |
| 7734 |
But the butterflies were dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to the moor, now lost behind a furze bush, then off again helter skelter in a broiling sun. A fritillary basked on a white stone in the Roman camp. |
| 7735 |
From the valley came the sound of church bells. They were all eating roast beef in Scarborough; for it was Sunday when Jacob caught the pale clouded yellows in the clover field, eight miles from home. Rebecca had caught the death's head moth in the kitchen. A strong smell of camphor came from the butterfly boxes. |
| 7736 |
The sun beat straight upon them. The upper wings of the moth which Jacob held were undoubtedly marked with kidney shaped spots of a fulvous hue. But there was no crescent upon the underwing. The tree had fallen the night he caught it. There had been a volley of pistol shots suddenly in the depths of the wood. |
| 7737 |
Now it was clouding over. Back came the sun, dazzlingly. It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very gently rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the butterfly box stood open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the moor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover. |
| 7738 |
The fritillaries flaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying on the turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and the peacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away from home, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he had found the commas. |
| 7739 |
He dressed himself very neatly in blue serge, took his rubber shod stick for he was lame and wanted two fingers on the left hand, having served his country and set out from the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon. At three Mr. Dickens, the bath chair man, had called for Mrs. Barfoot. |
| 7740 |
She was not very unhappy, and, seeing that she was forty five, never perhaps would be very unhappy, desperately unhappy that is, and leave her husband, and ruin a good man's career, as she sometimes threatened. Still there is no need to say what risks a clergyman's wife runs when she walks on the moor. |
| 7741 |
As this was Cambridge, as she was staying there for the week end, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and round tables, this sight of her fellow traveller was completely lost in her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing well twirls in the water and disappears for ever. |
| 7742 |
One gets tired of watching them, as they amble round the lantern and blindly tap as if for admittance, one large toad being the most besotted of any and shouldering his way through the rest. Ah, but what's that? A terrifying volley of pistol shots rings out cracks sharply; ripples spread silence laps smooth over sound. |
| 7743 |
Mr. Plumer got up and stood in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Plumer laughed like a straightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything more horrible than the scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden being afflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to cross the sun, cannot be imagined. |
| 7744 |
A sense that all the rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer could only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at the ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the ladder. |
| 7745 |
Those wretched little girls The extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog. Insolent he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which the elderly of the race have built upon the skyline showed like brick suburbs, barracks, and places of discipline against a red and yellow flame. |
| 7746 |
The meadow was on a level with Jacob's eyes as he lay back; gilt with buttercups, but the grass did not run like the thin green water of the graveyard grass about to overflow the tombstones, but stood juicy and thick. Looking up, backwards, he saw the legs of children deep in the grass, and the legs of cows. |
| 7747 |
So up they went, past the island. The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow parsley in the meadows. The waiters at Trinity must have been shuffling china plates like cards, from the clatter that could be heard in the Great Court. |
| 7748 |
Then another, who raised his hand and praised the columns, the gate, the sky; another, tripping and smug. Each went up a staircase; three lights were lit in the dark windows. If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms; Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor. |
| 7749 |
Sopwith, meanwhile, advancing with a curious trip from the fire place, cut the chocolate cake into segments. Until midnight or later there would be undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve, sometimes three or four; but nobody got up when they went or when they came; Sopwith went on talking. |
| 7750 |
He loved it. Indeed to Sopwith a man could say anything, until perhaps he'd grown old, or gone under, gone deep, when the silver disks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple, and the old stamp look too pure, and the impress always the same a Greek boy's head. But he would respect still. |
| 7751 |
Her lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as those of Cowan, and the thing she might have said in elucidation of the text for ever left out. In short, face a teacher with the image of the taught and the mirror breaks. But Cowan sipped his port, his exaltation over, no longer the representative of Virgil. |
| 7752 |
Now and then there was a thud, as if some heavy piece of furniture had fallen, unexpectedly, of its own accord, not in the general stir of life after dinner. One supposed that young men raised their eyes from their books as the furniture fell. Were they reading? Certainly there was a sense of concentration in the air. |
| 7753 |
Possibly, when he had done arranging the date stones, he might find something to say to it indeed his lips opened only then there broke out a roar of laughter. The laughter died in the air. The sound of it could scarcely have reached any one standing by the Chapel, which stretched along the opposite side of the court. |
| 7754 |
Up go the elm branches, out blow the sails, the old schooners rear and plunge, the grey waves in the hot Indian Ocean tumble sultrily, and then all falls flat again. So, if the veiled lady stepped through the Courts of Trinity, she now drowsed once more, all her draperies about her, her head against a pillar. |
| 7755 |
Jacob remained standing. But intimacy the room was full of it, still, deep, like a pool. Without need of movement or speech it rose softly and washed over everything, mollifying, kindling, and coating the mind with the lustre of pearl, so that if you talk of a light, of Cambridge burning, it's not languages only. |
| 7756 |
Tinned beef is cold eating, though; and salt water spoils biscuits; and the waves tumble and lollop much the same hour after hour tumble and lollop all across the horizon. Now a spray of seaweed floats past now a log of wood. Ships have been wrecked here. One or two go past, keeping their own side of the road. |
| 7757 |
Yes, the chimneys and the coast guard stations and the little bays with the waves breaking unseen by any one make one remember the overpowering sorrow. And what can this sorrow be? It is brewed by the earth itself. It comes from the houses on the coast. We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. |
| 7758 |
Some people can follow every step of the way, and even take a little one, six inches long, by themselves at the end; others remain observant of the external signs. The eyes fix themselves upon the poker; the right hand takes the poker and lifts it; turns it slowly round, and then, very accurately, replaces it. |
| 7759 |
Although it would be possible to knock at the cottage door and ask for a glass of milk, it is only thirst that would compel the intrusion. Yet perhaps Mrs. Pascoe would welcome it. The summer's day may be wearing heavy. Washing in her little scullery, she may hear the cheap clock on the mantelpiece tick, tick, tick. |
| 7760 |
Her elder son is married too, but she does not agree with his wife. The Wesleyan minister came along and took the younger boy. She is alone in the house. A steamer, probably bound for Cardiff, now crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of a foxglove swings to and fro with a bumble bee for clapper. |
| 7761 |
In one of these, to hold, an historian conjectures, the victim's blood, a basin has been hollowed, but in our time it serves more tamely to seat those tourists who wish for an uninterrupted view of the Gurnard's Head. Not that any one objects to a blue print dress and a white apron in a cottage garden. |
| 7762 |
Mrs. Pascoe went indoors, fetched a cream pan, came out, and stood scouring it. Her face was assuredly not soft, sensual, or lecherous, but hard, wise, wholesome rather, signifying in a room full of sophisticated people the flesh and blood of life. She would tell a lie, though, as soon as the truth. |
| 7763 |
Soon the ponies attacked the swelling moor road with striving forelegs. Mrs. Durrant let the reins fall slackly, and leant backwards. Her vivacity had left her. Her hawk nose was thin as a bleached bone through which you almost see the light. Her hands, lying on the reins in her lap, were firm even in repose. |
| 7764 |
Her mind skimmed leagues where Mrs. Pascoe's mind adhered to its solitary patch. Her mind skimmed leagues as the ponies climbed the hill road. Forwards and backwards she cast her mind, as if the roofless cottages, mounds of slag, and cottage gardens overgrown with foxglove and bramble cast shade upon her mind. |
| 7765 |
And now, the world being stable, lit by candle light, the dinner jacket alone preserved him. He could not be sufficiently thankful. Even so his neck, wrists, and face were exposed without cover, and his whole person, whether exposed or not, tingled and glowed so as to make even black cloth an imperfect screen. |
| 7766 |
Behind them, again, was the grey green garden, and among the pear shaped leaves of the escallonia fishing boats seemed caught and suspended. A sailing ship slowly drew past the women's backs. Two or three figures crossed the terrace hastily in the dusk. The door opened and shut. Nothing settled or stayed unbroken. |
| 7767 |
Then Mrs. Durrant got up and passed down the room, holding herself very straight, and the girls in yellow and blue and silver gauze followed her, and elderly Miss Eliot in her velvet; and a little rosy woman, hesitating at the door, clean, scrupulous, probably a governess. All passed out at the open door. |
| 7768 |
The rashest drivers in the world are, certainly, the drivers of post office vans. Swinging down Lamb's Conduit Street, the scarlet van rounded the corner by the pillar box in such a way as to graze the kerb and make the little girl who was standing on tiptoe to post a letter look up, half frightened, half curious. |
| 7769 |
She paused with her hand in the mouth of the box; then dropped her letter and ran away. It is seldom only that we see a child on tiptoe with pity more often a dim discomfort, a grain of sand in the shoe which it's scarcely worth while to remove that's our feeling, and so Jacob turned to the bookcase. |
| 7770 |
If a boot creaks, it's awful; then the order; the discipline. The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him. Sweet and holy are the angelic choristers. And for ever round the marble shoulders, in and out of the folded fingers, go the thin high sounds of voice and organ. For ever requiem repose. |
| 7771 |
If you look closer you will see that three elderly men at a little distance from each other run spiders along the pavement as if the street were their parlour, and here, against the wall, a woman stares at nothing, boot laces extended, which she does not ask you to buy. The posters are theirs too; and the news on them. |
| 7772 |
Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribed hung empty all day in the corridors, but as the clock struck six each was exactly filled, and the little figures, split apart into trousers or moulded into a single thickness, jerked rapidly with angular forward motion along the pavement; then dropped into darkness. |
| 7773 |
In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. |
| 7774 |
And then, doffing one's own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one's any one's to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no we must choose. |
| 7775 |
Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition of Wycherley without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, or indicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent phrases. An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature. |
| 7776 |
Then somebody brought out a white and gilt chair and made him sit on it. As they passed, people hung glass grapes on his shoulders, until he looked like the figure head of a wrecked ship. Then Florinda got upon his knee and hid her face in his waistcoat. With one hand he held her; with the other, his pipe. |
| 7777 |
She had sat upon his knee. Thus did all good women in the days of the Greeks. At this moment there shook out into the air a wavering, quavering, doleful lamentation which seemed to lack strength to unfold itself, and yet flagged on; at the sound of which doors in back streets burst sullenly open; workmen stumped forth. |
| 7778 |
As for Florinda's story, her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked. Be that as it may, she was without a surname, and for parents had only the photograph of a tombstone beneath which, she said, her father lay buried. |
| 7779 |
Unless, indeed, it is the only thing of any importance at all. Jacob was restless when she left him. All night men and women seethed up and down the well known beats. Late home comers could see shadows against the blinds even in the most respectable suburbs. Not a square in snow or fog lacked its amorous couple. |
| 7780 |
All plays turned on the same subject. Bullets went through heads in hotel bedrooms almost nightly on that account. When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. Little else was talked of in theatres and popular novels. Yet we say it is a matter of no importance at all. |
| 7781 |
What with Shakespeare and Adonais, Mozart and Bishop Berkeley choose whom you like the fact is concealed and the evenings for most of us pass reputably, or with only the sort of tremor that a snake makes sliding through the grass. But then concealment by itself distracts the mind from the print and the sound. |
| 7782 |
In her face there seemed to him something horribly brainless as she sat staring. Out she swept, the black woman with the dancing feather in her hat. Yet she had to go somewhere. The night is not a tumultuous black ocean in which you sink or sail as a star. As a matter of fact it was a wet November night. |
| 7783 |
And the man? The street lamps do not carry far enough to tell us. The voices, angry, lustful, despairing, passionate, were scarcely more than the voices of caged beasts at night. Only they are not caged, nor beasts. Stop a man; ask him the way; he'll tell it you; but one's afraid to ask him the way. |
| 7784 |
There they sit, plainly illuminated, dressed like ladies and gentlemen, in bamboo chairs. The widows of business men prove laboriously that they are related to judges. The wives of coal merchants instantly retort that their fathers kept coachmen. A servant brings coffee, and the crochet basket has to be moved. |
| 7785 |
In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics; and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned life thus. Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee. |
| 7786 |
In these sheltered lakes the little coloured flowers swam and slid; surmounted smooth slippery waves, and sometimes foundered and lay like pebbles on the glass floor. Their fortunes were watched by eyes intent and lovely. It is surely a great discovery that leads to the union of hearts and foundation of homes. |
| 7787 |
If they could, human life would be a different affair altogether. For flowers fade; chrysanthemums are the worst; perfect over night; yellow and jaded next morning not fit to be seen. On the whole, though the price is sinful, carnations pay best; it's a question, however, whether it's wise to have them wired. |
| 7788 |
Some shops advise it. Certainly it's the only way to keep them at a dance; but whether it is necessary at dinner parties, unless the rooms are very hot, remains in dispute. Old Mrs. Temple used to recommend an ivy leaf just one dropped into the bowl. She said it kept the water pure for days and days. |
| 7789 |
The little cards, however, with names engraved on them, are a more serious problem than the flowers. More horses' legs have been worn out, more coachmen's lives consumed, more hours of sound afternoon time vainly lavished than served to win us the battle of Waterloo, and pay for it into the bargain. |
| 7790 |
Sometimes Mrs. Bonham has just gone out; at others she is at home. But, even if the cards should be superseded, which seems unlikely, there are unruly powers blowing life into storms, disordering sedulous mornings, and uprooting the stability of the afternoon dressmakers, that is to say, and confectioners' shops. |
| 7791 |
Six yards of silk will cover one body; but if you have to devise six hundred shapes for it, and twice as many colours? in the middle of which there is the urgent question of the pudding with tufts of green cream and battlements of almond paste. It has not arrived. The flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky. |
| 7792 |
Clara Durrant procured the stockings, played the sonata, filled the vases, fetched the pudding, left the cards, and when the great invention of paper flowers to swim in finger bowls was discovered, was one of those who most marvelled at their brief lives. Nor were there wanting poets to celebrate the theme. |
| 7793 |
The letter lay upon the hall table; Florinda coming in that night took it up with her, put it on the table as she kissed Jacob, and Jacob seeing the hand, left it there under the lamp, between the biscuit tin and the tobacco box. They shut the bedroom door behind them. The sitting room neither knew nor cared. |
| 7794 |
You could see the pattern on his trousers; the old thorns on his stick; his shoe laces; bare hands; and face. It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell. This was in his face. |
| 7795 |
The yellow canopy sinks and swells over the great four poster. Passengers in the mail coaches running into London in the eighteenth century looked through leafless branches and saw it flaring beneath them. The light burns behind yellow blinds and pink blinds, and above fanlights, and down in basement windows. |
| 7796 |
Raw meat, china mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it. Raw voices wrap themselves round the flaring gas jets. Arms akimbo, they stand on the pavement bawling Messrs. Kettle and Wilkinson; their wives sit in the shop, furs wrapped round their necks, arms folded, eyes contemptuous. Such faces as one sees. |
| 7797 |
When a child begins to read history one marvels, sorrowfully, to hear him spell out in his new voice the ancient words. The Prime Minister's speech was reported in something over five columns. Feeling in his pocket, Jacob took out a pipe and proceeded to fill it. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed. |
| 7798 |
A very cold night. The snow, which had been falling all night, lay at three o'clock in the afternoon over the fields and the hill. Clumps of withered grass stood out upon the hill top; the furze bushes were black, and now and then a black shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove flurries of frozen particles before it. |
| 7799 |
The sound was that of a broom sweeping sweeping. The stream crept along by the road unseen by any one. Sticks and leaves caught in the frozen grass. The sky was sullen grey and the trees of black iron. Uncompromising was the severity of the country. At four o'clock the snow was again falling. The day had gone out. |
| 7800 |
Hilda Thomas was mealy mouthed, all her silver frames aslant; egg cups in the drawing room; and the windows shrouded. Lady Rocksbier, whatever the deficiencies of her profile, had been a great rider to hounds. She used her knife with authority, tore her chicken bones, asking Jacob's pardon, with her own hands. |
| 7801 |
And the Lady Alice came in with three dogs on a leash, and Jackie, who ran to kiss his grandmother, while Boxall brought in a telegram, and Jacob was given a good cigar. A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself together, goes up like a monster wave, and pitches down on the further side. |
| 7802 |
The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on the mantelpiece there was a green clock guarded by Britannia leaning on her spear. As for pictures a maiden in a large hat offered roses over the garden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth century costume. A mastiff lay extended against a battered door. |
| 7803 |
The lower panes of the windows were of ground glass, and the curtains, accurately looped, were of plush and green too. Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, in two large chairs covered in green plush. Laurette's skirts were short, her legs long, thin, and transparently covered. |
| 7804 |
Such things happened to Miss Marchmont. What was she seeking through millions of pages, in her old plush dress, and her wig of claret coloured hair, with her gems and her chilblains? Sometimes one thing, sometimes another, to confirm her philosophy that colour is sound or, perhaps, it has something to do with music. |
| 7805 |
Useless to trust to the Victorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists. The flesh and blood of the future depends entirely upon six young men. And as Jacob was one of them, no doubt he looked a little regal and pompous as he turned his page, and Julia Hedge disliked him naturally enough. |
| 7806 |
She looked at them sideways, waving her hand and muttering a word or two of salutation which made Jacob and the other man turn round. She smiled at them amiably. It all came into her philosophy that colour is sound, or perhaps it has something to do with music. And having done her service, she hobbled off to tea. |
| 7807 |
But the fact leads you on all day through Macaulay, Hobbes, Gibbon; through octavos, quartos, folios; sinks deeper and deeper through ivory pages and morocco bindings into this density of thought, this conglomeration of knowledge. Jacob's walking stick was like all the others; they had muddled the pigeon holes perhaps. |
| 7808 |
Well, but a little rain hurts nobody. Jacob walked off much as if he had been in the country; and late that night there he was sitting at his table with his pipe and his book. The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain, not a quarter of a mile from him. |
| 7809 |
These words refer to the stretch of wood pavement between Hammersmith and Holborn in January between two and three in the morning. That was the ground beneath Jacob's feet. It was healthy and magnificent because one room, above a mews, somewhere near the river, contained fifty excited, talkative, friendly people. |
| 7810 |
A young man has nothing to fear. On the contrary, though he may not have said anything brilliant, he feels pretty confident he can hold his own. He was pleased to have met Mangin; he admired the young woman on the floor; he liked them all; he liked that sort of thing. In short, all the drums and trumpets were sounding. |
| 7811 |
Avalanches of coal glitter blackly. As usual, painters are slung on planks across the great riverside hotels, and the hotel windows have already points of light in them. On the other side the city is white as if with age; St. Paul's swells white above the fretted, pointed, or oblong buildings beside it. |
| 7812 |
Has this procession from the Surrey side to the Strand gone on for ever? That old man has been crossing the Bridge these six hundred years, with the rabble of little boys at his heels, for he is drunk, or blind with misery, and tied round with old clouts of clothing such as pilgrims might have worn. |
| 7813 |
The house was flat, dark, and silent. Jacob was at home engaged upon a chess problem, the board being on a stool between his knees. One hand was fingering the hair at the back of his head. He slowly brought it forward and raised the white queen from her square; then put her down again on the same spot. |
| 7814 |
Fanny's eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself. But she exaggerated. Bramham noticed nothing. And when the kettle boiled, up she scrambled, more like a colt or a puppy than a loving woman. Now Jacob walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. |
| 7815 |
Then there she was herself, whirling across the stage in white flounces, and the music was the dance and fling of her own soul, and the whole machinery, rock and gear of the world was spun smoothly into those swift eddies and falls, she felt, as she stood rigid leaning over the barrier two feet from Jacob Flanders. |
| 7816 |
A dog barked, barked, barked down in the hollow. The liquid shadows went over the plain. The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it. The tears well and fall as the dog barks in the hollow, the children skim after hoops, the country darkens and brightens. |
| 7817 |
But the dog went on barking. The motor cars hooted on the road. She heard a far away rush and humming. Agitation was at her heart. Up she got and walked. The grass was freshly green; the sun hot. All round the pond children were stooping to launch little boats; or were drawn back screaming by their nurses. |
| 7818 |
The women stand round the pond, beating off great prancing shaggy dogs. Gently the baby is rocked in the perambulator. The eyes of all the nurses, mothers, and wandering women are a little glazed, absorbed. They gently nod instead of answering when the little boys tug at their skirts, begging them to move on. |
| 7819 |
The lunchers heard their orders repeated with approval; saw the next table served with anticipation. Their own eggs on toast were at last delivered. Their eyes strayed no more. Damp cubes of pastry fell into mouths opened like triangular bags. Nelly Jenkinson, the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough. |
| 7820 |
It is curious, lying in a boat, to watch the waves. Here are three coming regularly one after another, all much of a size. Then, hurrying after them comes a fourth, very large and menacing; it lifts the boat; on it goes; somehow merges without accomplishing anything; flattens itself out with the rest. |
| 7821 |
And then we peaceably subside. For if the exaltation lasted we should be blown like foam into the air. The stars would shine through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops as sometimes happens. For the impetuous spirits will have none of this cradling. Never any swaying or aimlessly lolling for them. |
| 7822 |
In the left hand was her skirt. Twining round a pole in the middle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on Temple Bar were hats emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath deep dyed feathers. And on the carpet were her feet pointed gold, or patent leather slashed with scarlet. |
| 7823 |
Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked much better than ear rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of the corridors at the Slade and the fancy dress dance next week. |
| 7824 |
For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May. He would forget her. A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw a straw from a stack stood by a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base for a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with nests. |
| 7825 |
It is a ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold the dead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox hunting gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling the sharp cut words, which for ever slice asunder time and the broad backed moors. |
| 7826 |
There were trees laced together with vines as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous leave taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in ringed socks. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. |
| 7827 |
For one thing there is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees. Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. And there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the shadows of leaves nor eighteenth century inns with bow windows, where one eats ham and eggs. |
| 7828 |
Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness, exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange, too, how you never get away from villas. Still, to be travelling on one's own with a hundred pounds to spend is a fine affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would go on foot. |
| 7829 |
Black victorias drive in between pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once momentary and astonishingly intimate to be displayed before the eyes of a foreigner. And there is a lonely hill top where no one ever comes, and yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an omnibus. |
| 7830 |
In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows. |
| 7831 |
The whole of civilization was being condemned. The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man, carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the only arm chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there. |
| 7832 |
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray's Inn something solid, immovable, and grotesque is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. |
| 7833 |
For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things as indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing table, was aware. That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew everything, by instinct. |
| 7834 |
I like words to be hard such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can't forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature. |
| 7835 |
The inevitable compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write it down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it down. |
| 7836 |
Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places, fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea meadows half way between England and America, suit us better than cities. There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is this which is teased and twisted in society. |
| 7837 |
Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe. Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him uneasy when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral. |
| 7838 |
The comparison was all in his favour. But before she could say a single word he had gone out of the Museum and left her. Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. |
| 7839 |
There they are. The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration. |
| 7840 |
Why not rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again. No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his spirits. Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these moments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got into the way of thinking about politics. |
| 7841 |
And laying the book on the ground he began, as if inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of history upon democracy one of those scribbles upon which the work of a lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years later, and one can't remember a word of it. |
| 7842 |
It is a little painful. It had better be burnt. Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies opening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, looking at the sky, that one did not know what to expect rain or fine weather? Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. |
| 7843 |
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. Some, it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character at once. Others dally, loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. |
| 7844 |
Plated baskets contained fresh rolls. There was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise of innumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce. It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at intervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek King's monogram wrought in yellow. |
| 7845 |
Turning very slightly, Evan ordered something a bottle of wine from which he helped Jacob, with a kind of solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible. To be left alone that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a time when the country had more need of men. He sighed. |
| 7846 |
The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their interpretation of the day's meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers, resounding like gigantic tuning forks, state the old old fact how there is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. |
| 7847 |
Only here in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square each insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the indescribable agitation of life. |
| 7848 |
They had reached the site of the old Exhibition. They looked at the tulips. Stiff and curled, the little rods of waxy smoothness rose from the earth, nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral pink. Each had its shadow; each grew trimly in the diamond shaped wedge as the gardener had planned it. |
| 7849 |
Papers accumulated, inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of ricefields, the growling of hundreds of work people, plotting sedition in back streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces in the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand coloured, and bones lie unburied. |
| 7850 |
Clara's moors were fine enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piled grey rocks; the chimneys of the old mines pointed starkly; early moths blurred the heather bells; cartwheels could be heard grinding on the road far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the waves sounded gently, persistently, for ever. |
| 7851 |
Two steamers and a sailing ship crossed each other; passed each other; and in the bay the gulls kept alighting on a log, rising high, returning again to the log, while some rode in upon the waves and stood on the rim of the water until the moon blanched all to whiteness. Mrs. Pascoe had gone indoors long ago. |
| 7852 |
They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible catastrophe, for some such figure as that describes the simplicity, the humanity, startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its instincts, which Russian literature, whether it is due to translation or to some more profound cause, makes upon us. |
| 7853 |
On the other hand, the method which at first seemed so casual, inconclusive, and occupied with trifles, now appears the result of an exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing boldly, arranging infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we can find no match save among the Russians themselves. |
| 7854 |
It is formless. It has slight connection with the intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of poetry. The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. |
| 7855 |
Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading. We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of Russian generals, their step daughters and cousins, and crowds of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices about their most private affairs. |
| 7856 |
Moreover, when the speed is thus increased and the elements of the soul are seen, not separately in scenes of humour or scenes of passion as our slower English minds conceive them, but streaked, involved, inextricably confused, a new panorama of the human mind is revealed. The old divisions melt into each other. |
| 7857 |
Whether he wishes it or not, there is a constant pressure upon an English novelist to recognise these barriers, and, in consequence, order is imposed on him and some kind of form; he is inclined to satire rather than to compassion, to scrutiny of society rather than understanding of individuals themselves. |
| 7858 |
Here is a world in which the postman's knock is heard at eight o'clock, and people go to bed between ten and eleven. Here is a man, too, who is no savage, no child of nature; he is educated; he has had every sort of experience. He is one of those born aristocrats who have used their privileges to the full. |
| 7859 |
There is something proud and superb in the attack of such a mind and such a body upon life. Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so convey the excitement of sport, the beauty of horses, and all the fierce desirability of the world to the senses of a strong young man. |
| 7860 |
Thus fear mingles with our pleasure, and of the three great Russian writers, it is Tolstoi who most enthralls us and most repels. But the mind takes its bias from the place of its birth, and no doubt, when it strikes upon a literature so alien as the Russian, flies off at a tangent far from the truth. |
| 7861 |
Yet she had been in perfect health when she left the house that morning, six weeks ago; when she stepped off the kerb in Piccadilly and the car had killed her. He was waiting for Sissy Miller. He had asked her to come; he owed her, he felt, after all the years she had been with them, this token of consideration. |
| 7862 |
It was the only thing they had not shared when she was alive. But he had always taken it for granted that she would outlive him. If only she had stopped one moment and had thought what she was doing, she would be alive now. But she had stepped straight off the kerb, the driver of the car had said at the inquest. |
| 7863 |
A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. |
| 7864 |
It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. |
| 7865 |
Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. |
| 7866 |
What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases. |
| 7867 |
Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall. |
| 7868 |
Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. |
| 7869 |
I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water beetles slowly raiding domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. |
| 7870 |
Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart shaped and tongue shaped leaves. |
| 7871 |
It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antenna trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. |
| 7872 |
Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green blue atmosphere. |
| 7873 |
The contrast between the china so vivid and alert, and the glass so mute and contemplative, fascinated him, and wondering and amazed he asked himself how the two came to exist in the same world, let alone to stand upon the same narrow strip of marble in the same room. The question remained unanswered. |
| 7874 |
You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below. Broken china was to be found in plenty, but broken in some trifling domestic accident, without purpose or character. |
| 7875 |
It was almost identical with the glass in shape, massy and globular, but so cold and heavy, so black and metallic, that it was evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a moon. It weighed his pocket down; it weighed the mantelpiece down; it radiated cold. |
| 7876 |
As his standard became higher and his taste more severe the disappointments were innumerable, but always some gleam of hope, some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken lured him on. Day after day passed. He was no longer young. His career that is his political career was a thing of the past. |
| 7877 |
He looked round to find some relief for his horrible depression, but the disorderly appearance of the room depressed him still further. What was that stick, and the old carpet bag hanging against the wall? And then those stones? Looking at John, something fixed and distant in his expression alarmed him. |
| 7878 |
All she did was to take her glove and rub hard at a spot on the window pane. She rubbed as if she would rub something out for ever some stain, some indelible contamination. Indeed, the spot remained for all her rubbing, and back she sank with the shudder and the clutch of the arm I had come to expect. |
| 7879 |
But she had communicated, shared her secret, passed her poison she would speak no more. Leaning back in my corner, shielding my eyes from her eyes, seeing only the slopes and hollows, greys and purples, of the winter's landscape, I read her message, deciphered her secret, reading it beneath her gaze. |
| 7880 |
There I've hidden them all this time in the hope that somehow they'd disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story's to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travellers and a whole grove of aspidistra. |
| 7881 |
The enormous stability of the fabric; the spine tough as whalebone, straight as oaktree; the ribs radiating branches; the flesh taut tarpaulin; the red hollows; the suck and regurgitation of the heart; while from above meat falls in brown cubes and beer gushes to be churned to blood again and so we reach the eyes. |
| 7882 |
The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling what? My hands were empty. |
| 7883 |
But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. |
| 7884 |
Fallen the book; in the flame, in the smoke, in the momentary sparks or now voyaging, the marble square pendant, minarets beneath and the Indian seas, while space rushes blue and stars glint truth? content with closeness? Lazy and indifferent the heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares them. |
| 7885 |
But this city to which we travel has neither stone nor marble; hangs enduring; stands unshakable; nor does a face, nor does a flag greet or welcome. Leave then to perish your hope; droop in the desert my joy; naked advance. Bare are the pillars; auspicious to none; casting no shade; resplendent; severe. |
| 7886 |
After a time, so far as I can remember, we drew round the fire and began as usual to praise men how strong, how noble, how brilliant, how courageous, how beautiful they were how we envied those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one for life when Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. |
| 7887 |
She told us that, as we knew, she spent most of her time in the London Library, reading. She had begun, she said, with English literature on the top floor; and was steadily working her way down to the Times on the bottom. And now half, or perhaps only a quarter, way through a terrible thing had happened. |
| 7888 |
I leave you to imagine what the shock of the discovery was. Though we all cried and begged her to read no more, she persisted and read us extracts from the Lives of the Lord Chancellors. When she had finished, Jane, the eldest and wisest of us, rose to her feet and said that she for one was not convinced. |
| 7889 |
But no one, save Poll, has ever taken the trouble to do it. I, for one, have taken it for granted that it was a woman's duty to spend her youth in bearing children. I venerated my mother for bearing ten; still more my grandmother for bearing fifteen; it was, I confess, my own ambition to bear twenty. |
| 7890 |
While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They have civilized it. But now that we can read, what prevents us from judging the results? Before we bring another child into the world we must swear that we will find out what the world is like. |
| 7891 |
But more significant than the answers were the refusals to answer. Very few would reply at all to questions about morality and religion, and such answers as were given were not serious. Questions as to the value of money and power were almost invariably brushed aside, or pressed at extreme risk to the asker. |
| 7892 |
He is beautiful to look at; he gives himself no airs; he understands the meaning of art and literature instinctively; he goes about enjoying his life and making other people enjoy theirs. Then they teach him to cultivate his intellect. He becomes a barrister, a civil servant, a general, an author, a professor. |
| 7893 |
Slushing the water through mouth and nostrils he sings, heavy with water, and the blue closes over him dowsing the polished pebbles of his eyes. Thrown upon the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shedding dry blue scales. Their metallic blue stains the rusty iron on the beach. Blue are the ribs of the wrecked rowing boat. |
| 7894 |
The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face. |
| 7895 |
Mary is chopping the wood, she thought; Pearman is herding the cows; the carts are coming up from the meadows; the rider and she traced out the lines that the men, the carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside until they all seemed driven out, round, and across by the beat of her own heart. |
| 7896 |
The sky exactly fitted the leaves. When the breeze blew, the line of the boughs against the wall slanted slightly and then returned. A wagtail flew diagonally from one corner to another. Cautiously hopping, a thrush advanced towards a fallen apple; from the other wall a sparrow fluttered just above the grass. |
| 7897 |
If only people had that sort of humour, that sort of self respect now, thought Clarissa, for she remembered the broad pages; the sentences ending; the characters how one talked about them as if they were real. For all the great things one must go to the past, she thought. From the contagion of the world's slow stain. |
| 7898 |
Omnibuses joined motor cars; motor cars vans; vans taxicabs, taxicabs motor cars here was an open motor car with a girl, alone. Up till four, her feet tingling, I know, thought Clarissa, for the girl looked washed out, half asleep, in the corner of the car after the dance. And another car came; and another. |
| 7899 |
There was only one other customer, sitting sideways at the counter, her elbow poised, her bare hand drooping, vacant; like a figure on a Japanese fan, thought Clarissa, too vacant perhaps, yet some men would adore her. The lady shook her head sadly. Again the gloves were too large. She turned round the glass. |
| 7900 |
She would stand by the door. They sold stockings silk stockings. A lady is known by her gloves and her shoes, old Uncle William used to say. And through the hanging silk stockings quivering silver she looked at the lady, sloping shouldered, her hand drooping, her bag slipping, her eyes vacantly on the floor. |
| 7901 |
The cool white light withered them and starched them until it seemed as if the only purpose of all these names was to rise martially in order should there be a call on them to extinguish a fire, suppress an insurrection, or pass an examination. Such is the power of names written upon cards pinned upon doors. |
| 7902 |
Such too the resemblance, what with tiles, corridors, and bedroom doors, to dairy or nunnery, a place of seclusion or discipline, where the bowl of milk stands cool and pure and there's a great washing of linen. At that very moment soft laughter came from behind a door. A prim voiced clock struck the hour one, two. |
| 7903 |
Now if the clock were issuing his commands, they were disregarded. Fire, insurrection, examination, were all snowed under by laughter, or softly uprooted, the sound seeming to bubble up from the depths and gently waft away the hour, rules, discipline. The bed was strewn with cards. Sally was on the floor. |
| 7904 |
And then, slowly putting there her stockings, there her slippers, folding her petticoat neatly on top, Angela, her other name being Williams, realised how could she express it? that after the dark churning of myriad ages here was light at the end of the tunnel; life; the world. Beneath her it lay all good; all lovable. |
| 7905 |
Miss Milan's little workroom was really terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes and cabbage cooking; and yet, when Miss Milan put the glass in her hand, and she looked at herself with the dress on, finished, an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused with light, she sprang into existence. |
| 7906 |
She had always been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a wobbly wife, lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another, like all her brothers and sisters, except perhaps Herbert they were all the same poor water veined creatures who did nothing. |
| 7907 |
Then in the midst of this creeping, crawling life, suddenly she was on the crest of a wave. That wretched fly where had she read the story that kept coming into her mind about the fly and the saucer? struggled out. Yes, she had those moments. But now that she was forty, they might come more and more seldom. |
| 7908 |
She would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, quite by chance, a book by a clergyman, by an American no one had ever heard of; or she would walk down the Strand and drop, accidentally, into a hall where a miner was telling about the life in the pit, and suddenly she would become a new person. |
| 7909 |
Probably she scarcely knew what she meant by it. But whenever she spoke of Julius, or heard him mentioned, that was the first thing that came to mind; and it was a seductive thought; there was something odd about Julius Craye. It was so that Julia looked too, as she sat half turned on the music stool, smiling. |
| 7910 |
One was in the gardens in ten minutes in the heart of the country. One could make that yield what one liked, Fanny Wilmot thought, single out, for instance, Mr. Sherman, the painter, an old friend of hers; make him call for her, by appointment, one sunny day in June; take her to have tea under the trees. |
| 7911 |
At the critical moment, for he had determined that he must speak now it was his only chance of getting her alone he was speaking with his head turned at an absurd angle, in his great nervousness, over his shoulder at that very moment she interrupted fiercely. He would have them into the Bridge, she cried. |
| 7912 |
The very next day, perhaps, she would get up at six, put on her cloak, and walk all the way from Kensington to the river. She was so thankful that she had not sacrificed her right to go and look at things when they are at their best before people are up, that is to say she could have her breakfast in bed if she liked. |
| 7913 |
Meanwhile, since all the doors and windows were open in the heat, there was a perpetual sighing and ceasing sound, the voice of the transient and the perishing, it seemed, coming and going like human breath, while in the looking glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality. |
| 7914 |
She had gone presumably into the lower garden to pick flowers; or as it seemed more natural to suppose, to pick something light and fantastic and leafy and trailing, travellers' joy, or one of those elegant sprays of convolvulus that twine round ugly walls and burst here and there into white and violet blossoms. |
| 7915 |
Sometimes it seemed as if they knew more about her than we, who sat on them, wrote at them, and trod on them so carefully, were allowed to know. In each of these cabinets were many little drawers, and each almost certainly held letters, tied with bows of ribbon, sprinkled with sticks of lavender or rose leaves. |
| 7916 |
The thought served as a challenge. Isabella did not wish to be known but she should no longer escape. It was absurd, it was monstrous. If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prise her open with the first tool that came to hand the imagination. One must fix one's mind upon her at that very moment. |
| 7917 |
One must refuse to be put off any longer with sayings and doings such as the moment brought forth with dinners and visits and polite conversations. One must put oneself in her shoes. If one took the phrase literally, it was easy to see the shoes in which she stood, down in the lower garden, at this moment. |
| 7918 |
Those were the things she talked about at dinner certainly. But one was tired of the things that she talked about at dinner. It was her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words, the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body, what one calls happiness or unhappiness. |
| 7919 |
At last there she was, in the hall. She stopped dead. She stood by the table. She stood perfectly still. At once the lookingglass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth. It was an enthralling spectacle. |
| 7920 |
She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. As for her letters, they were all bills. Look, as she stood there, old and angular, veined and lined, with her high nose and her wrinkled neck, she did not even trouble to open them. People should not leave looking glasses hanging in their rooms. |
| 7921 |
Then she sat down in the corner. The train was rattling through the midlands, and the fog, which came in when she opened the door, seemed to enlarge the carriage and set the four travellers apart. Obviously M. M. those were the initials on the suit case had been staying the week end with a shooting party. |
| 7922 |
Obviously, for she was telling over the story now, lying back in her corner. She did not shut her eyes. But clearly she did not see the man opposite, nor the coloured photograph of York Minster. She must have heard, too, what they had been saying. For as she gazed, her lips moved; now and then she smiled. |
| 7923 |
The wind sighed. The room was draughty. The doors did not fit, nor the windows. Now and then a ripple, like a reptile, ran under the carpet. On the carpet lay panels of green and yellow, where the sun rested, and then the sun moved and pointed a finger as if in mockery at a hole in the carpet and stopped. |
| 7924 |
And then on it went, the sun's feeble but impartial finger, and lay upon the coat of arms over the fireplace gently illumined the shield, the pendant grapes, the mermaid, and the spears. Miss Antonia looked up as the light strengthened. Vast lands, so they said, the old people had owned her forefathers the Rashleighs. |
| 7925 |
Tufts of white smoke held together for a moment; then gently solved themselves, faded, and dispersed. In the deep cut road beneath the hanger, a cart stood, laid already with soft warm bodies, with limp claws, and still lustrous eyes. The birds seemed alive still, but swooning under their rich damp feathers. |
| 7926 |
Now and then a tongue of flame reached round the grey log that stretched from one bar to another across the grate, ate it greedily, then died out, leaving a white bracelet where the bark had been eaten off. Miss Antonia looked up for a moment, stared wide eyed, instinctively, as a dog stares at a flame. |
| 7927 |
They went out; they came in. They laid a cloth upon the table. They went out; they came in. They brought a green baize basket of knives and forks; and glasses; and sugar casters; and salt cellars; and bread; and a silver vase with three chrysanthemums in it. And the table was laid. Miss Antonia stitched on. |
| 7928 |
But above the mist and the smoke was an island of blue faint blue, pure blue alone in the sky. And in the innocent air, as if straying alone like a cherub, a bell from a far hidden steeple frolicked, gambolled, then faded. Then again up shot the rockets, the reddish purple pheasants. Up and up they went. |
| 7929 |
The dish with the silver cover was placed precisely there where he pointed. They waited, the butler and the footman. Miss Antonia laid her white film upon the basket; put away her silk; her thimble; stuck her needle through a piece of flannel; and hung her glasses on a hook upon her breast. Then she rose. |
| 7930 |
Both old women advanced slowly to the table; and were tucked in by the butler and the footman, one at this end, one at that. Off came the silver cover. And there was the pheasant, featherless, gleaming; the thighs tightly pressed to its side; and little mounds of breadcrumbs were heaped at either end. |
| 7931 |
The butler and the footman stood watching, like servers at a feast. The old ladies ate quietly; silently; nor did they hurry themselves; methodically they cleaned the bird. Bones only were left on their plates. Then the butler drew the decanter towards Miss Antonia, and paused for a moment with his head bent. |
| 7932 |
Light faded in their eyes, too, as they sat by the white ashes listening. Their eyes became like pebbles, taken from water; grey stones dulled and dried. And their hands gripped their hands like the claws of dead birds gripping nothing. And they shrivelled as if the bodies inside the clothes had shrunk. |
| 7933 |
Then there entered, slouching, the Squire himself in shabby gaiters. The dogs pressed round him, tossing their heads, snuffling at his pockets. Then they bounded forward. They smelt the meat. The floor of the gallery waved like a windlashed forest with the tails and backs of the great questing hounds. |
| 7934 |
The great dogs had seized the spaniel. They worried him, they mauled him with their great yellow teeth. The Squire swung a leather knotted tawse this way and that way, cursing the dogs, cursing his sisters, in the voice that sounded so loud yet so weak. With one lash he curled to the ground the vase of chrysanthemums. |
| 7935 |
The handsome, if elderly, the well dressed, if rather shabby woman, who had got into the train at some station in the midlands, seemed to have lost her shape. Her body had become all mist. Only her eyes gleamed, changed, lived all by themselves, it seemed; eyes without a body; eyes seeing something invisible. |
| 7936 |
And the eyes in the corner? They were shut. Perhaps the light was too strong. And of course in the full blaze of the station lamps it was plain she was quite an ordinary, rather elderly, woman, travelling to London on some ordinary piece of business something connected with a cat, or a horse, or a dog. |
| 7937 |
The windows, the three long windows, had the proper allowance of discreet net and figured satin. The mahogany sideboard bulged discreetly with the right brandies, whiskeys and liqueurs. And from the middle window he looked down upon the glossy roofs of fashionable cars packed in the narrow straits of Piccadilly. |
| 7938 |
They were all shapely, shining; cut from the best cloth by the best scissors in Savile Row. But he dismantled himself often and became again a little boy in a dark alley. He had once thought that the height of his ambition selling stolen dogs to fashionable women in Whitechapel. And once he had been done. |
| 7939 |
At that memory he would churckle the old Oliver remembering the young. Yes, he had done well with the three diamonds; also there was the commission on the emerald. After that he went into the private room behind the shop in Hatton Garden; the room with the scales, the safe, the thick magnifying glasses. |
| 7940 |
And he dressed better and better; and had, first a hansom cab; then a car; and first he went up to the dress circle, then down into the stalls. And he had a villa at Richmond, overlooking the river, with trellises of red roses; and Mademoiselle used to pick one every morning and stick it in his buttonhole. |
| 7941 |
As usual, he strode through the shop without speaking, though the four men, the two old men, Marshall and Spencer, and the two young men, Hammond and Wicks, stood straight and looked at him, envying him. It was only with one finger of the amber coloured glove, waggling, that he acknowledged their presence. |
| 7942 |
He twisted a key; unlocked one; then another. Each was lined with a pad of deep crimson velvet; in each lay jewels bracelets, necklaces, rings, tiaras, ducal coronets; loose stones in glass shells; rubies, emeralds, pearls, diamonds. All safe, shining, cool, yet burning, eternally, with their own compressed light. |
| 7943 |
He became that wily astute little boy, with lips like wet cherries. He dabbled his fingers in ropes of tripe; he dipped them in pans of frying fish; he dodged in and out among the crowds. He was slim, lissome, with eyes like licked stones. And now now the hands of the clock ticked on, one two, three, four. |
| 7944 |
And he waited there, flattened against the wall. And Oliver, rising, could hear the rustle of the dress of the Duchess as she came down the passage. Then she loomed up, filling the door, filling the room with the aroma, the prestige, the arrogance, the pomp, the pride of all the Dukes and Duchesses swollen in one wave. |
| 7945 |
The wedding march pealed out. The pigeons fluttered. Small boys in Eton jackets threw rice; a fox terrier sauntered across the path; and Ernest Thorburn led his bride to the car through that small inquisitive crowd of complete strangers which always collects in London to enjoy other people's happiness or unhappiness. |
| 7946 |
Perhaps she never would get used to the fact that she was Mrs. Ernest Anybody, she thought, as she sat in the bow window of the hotel looking over the lake to the mountains, and waited for her husband to come down to breakfast. Ernest was a difficult name to get used to. It was not the name she would have chosen. |
| 7947 |
She glanced at him sideways. Well, when he was eating toast he looked like a rabbit. Not that anyone else would have seen a likeness to a creature so diminutive and timid in this spruce, muscular young man with the straight nose, the blue eyes, and the very firm mouth. But that made it all the more amusing. |
| 7948 |
Under her hands she was sewing; he was readingthey became very real, very vivid, very amusing. Ernest put down the paper and helped her. There were the black rabbits and the red; there were the enemy rabbits and the friendly. There were the wood in which they lived and the outlying prairies and the swamp. |
| 7949 |
No one guessed that there was such a place, and that of course made it all the more amusing. It made them feel, more even than most young married couples, in league together against the rest of the world. Often they looked slyly at each other when people talked about rabbits and woods and traps and shooting. |
| 7950 |
The living Thorburns much resembled the painted; save that instead of painted lips they had real lips; out of which came jokes; jokes about schoolrooms, and how they had pulled the chair from under the governess; jokes about frogs and how they had put them between the virgin sheets of maiden ladies. |
| 7951 |
Not at all happy. She looked at Ernest, straight as a ramrod with a nose like all the noses in the family portraits; a nose that never twitched at all. Then they went down to dinner. She was half hidden by the great chrysanthemums that curled their red and gold petals into large tight balls. Everything was gold. |
| 7952 |
Peeping between the chrysanthemums she saw Ernest's nose twitch. It rippled, it ran with successive twitches. And at that a mysterious catastrophe befell the Thorburns. The golden table became a moor with the gorse in full bloom; the din of voices turned to one peal of lark's laughter ringing down from the sky. |
| 7953 |
It was a blue sky clouds passed slowly. And they had all been changed the Thorburns. She looked at her father in law, a furtive little man with dyed moustaches. His foible was collecting things seals, enamel boxes, trifles from eighteenth century dressing tables which he hid in the drawers of his study from his wife. |
| 7954 |
But his nose did not twitch. Her hands they turned to hands clutched the stuff she was holding; her eyes popped half out of her head. It took him five minutes at least to change from Ernest Thorburn to King Lappin; and while she waited she felt a load on the back of her neck, as if somebody were about to wring it. |
| 7955 |
She felt as if her body had shrunk; it had grown small, and black and hard. Her joints seemed stiff too, and when she looked in the glass, which she did several times as she wandered about the flat, her eyes seemed to burst out of her head, like currants in a bun. The rooms also seemed to have shrunk. |
| 7956 |
She walked along the Cromwell Road; and every room she passed and peered into seemed to be a dining room where people sat eating under steel engravings, with thick yellow lace curtains, and mahogany sideboards. At last she reached the Natural History Museum; she used to like it when she was a child. |
| 7957 |
Somehow it made her shiver all over. Perhaps it would be better when dusk fell. She went home and sat over the fire, without a light, and tried to imagine that she was out alone on a moor; and there was a stream rushing; and beyond the stream a dark wood. But she could get no further than the stream. |
| 7958 |
Now he put on his spectacles and examined the pictures. He read the titles on a line of books; for the most part poetry. He would have liked well enough to read some of his old favourites again Shakespeare, Dickens he wished he ever had time to turn into the National Gallery, but he couldn't no, one could not. |
| 7959 |
The people here would be shocked if they knew what he paid for his tobacco; how he had borrowed his clothes. His one and only extravagance was his little yacht on the Norfolk Broads. And that he did allow himself, He did like once a year to get right away from everybody and lie on his back in a field. |
| 7960 |
And it was a very disagreeable feeling. He did not feel this that he loved humanity, that he paid only fivepence an ounce for tobacco and loved nature naturally and quietly. Each of these pleasures had been turned into a protest. He felt that these people whom he despised made him stand and deliver and justify himself. |
| 7961 |
It was unpleasant that the sense of his goodness should boil within him. It was still more unpleasant that he could tell no one what people had said about him. Thank the Lord, he kept saying, I shall be back at work to morrow; and yet he was no longer satisfied simply to slip through the door and go home. |
| 7962 |
Prickett Ellis lit a pipe. That would shock her; he filled it with shag tobacco fivepence halfpenny an ounce. He thought how he would lie in his boat smoking, he could see himself, alone, at night, smoking under the stars. For always to night he kept thinking how he would look if these people here were to see him. |
| 7963 |
They'd come down in the world. They'd been gentlefolk; they'd owned land up in Yorkshire. But when he was a boy only the tower was left. The house was nothing but a little farmhouse, standing in the middle of fields. We saw it ten years ago and went over it. We had to leave the car and walk across the fields. |
| 7964 |
She wasn't his wife, or the boy's mother. She was just a farm hand, a girl the old man had taken to live with him when his wife died. Another reason perhaps why nobody visited them why the whole place was gone to rack and ruin. But I remember a coat of arms over the door; and books, old books, gone mouldy. |
| 7965 |
The woman scouring pails in the scullery. Perhaps a stone fell from the tower. It seemed as if the day would never end. And he had no one to talk to nothing whatever to do. The whole world stretched before him. The moor rising and falling; the sky meeting the moor; green and blue, green and blue, for ever and ever. |
| 7966 |
Yet she had been in perfect health when she left the house that morning, six weeks ago; when she stepped off the kerb in Piccadilly and the car had killed her. He was waiting for Sissy Miller. He had asked her to come; he owed her, he felt, after all the years she had been with them, this token of consideration. |
| 7967 |
Yes, he went on, as he sat there waiting, it was strange that Angela had left everything in such order. Every friend had been left some little token of her affection. Every ring, every necklace, every little Chinese box she had a passion for little boxes had a name on it. And each had some memory for him. |
| 7968 |
To him, of course, she had left nothing in particular, unless it were her diary. Fifteen little volumes, bound in green leather, stood behind him on her writing table. Ever since they were married, she had kept a diary. Some of their very few he could not call them quarrels, say tiffs had been about that diary. |
| 7969 |
It was the only thing they had not shared when she was alive. But he had always taken it for granted that she would outlive him. If only she had stopped one moment, and had thought what she was doing, she would be alive now. But she had stepped straight off the kerb, the driver of the car had said at the inquest. |
| 7970 |
Angela had been much more to her than an employer. She had been a friend. To himself, he thought, as he pushed a chair for her and asked her to sit down, she was scarcely distinguishable from any other woman of her kind. There were thousands of Sissy Millers drab little women in black carrying attache cases. |
| 7971 |
She wished to have some work of her own. She wanted to do something she had blushed so prettily, he remembered, as she said it, sitting in that very chair to help others. He had bantered her a little. Hadn't she enough to do looking after him, after her home? Still, if it amused her, of course he had no objection. |
| 7972 |
Their eyes met; collided rather, for each felt that behind the eyes the secluded being, who sits in darkness while his shallow agile companion does all the tumbling and beckoning, and keeps the show going, suddenly stood erect; flung off his cloak; confronted the other. It was alarming; it was terrific. |
| 7973 |
Sometimes she wished she had married. Sometimes the cool peace of middle life, with its automatic devices for shielding mind and body from bruises, seemed to her, compared with the thunder and the livid apple blossom of Canterbury, base. She could imagine something different, more like lightning, more intense. |
| 7974 |
How could one prove that he was a loyal friend and very sympathetic and but here, as so often happened, talking to Bertram Pritchard, she forgot his existence, and began to think of something else. It was the night she thought of, hitching herself together in some way, taking a look up into the sky. |
| 7975 |
It was the country she smelt suddenly, the sombre stillness of fields under the stars, but here, in Mrs. Dalloway's back garden, in Westminster, the beauty, country born and bred as she was, thrilled her because of the contrast presumably; there the smell of hay in the air and behind her the rooms full of people. |
| 7976 |
It was part of the gallant and carousing company a mast from which the flag streamed. There was a barrel of some kind against the wall, and this, too, she endowed. Suddenly Bertram, who was restless physically, wanted to explore the grounds, and, jumping on to a heap of bricks he peered over the garden wall. |
| 7977 |
She looked at the dry, thick Queen Anne House; she did her best to remember what she had read at school about the Isle of Thorney and men in coracles, oysters, and wild duck and mists, but it seemed to her a logical affair of drains and carpenters, and this party nothing but people in evening dress. |
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