Crossroads

by Belva Plain

  “That movie house I told you about is playing a Czech film,”he said to Gwen on the phone.

  “I know,” she blurted out. Then she added, stammering slightly, “I . . . just happened to see . . . the advertisement. . . .”

  Obviously, she hadn’t meant to tell him she’d been so eager to go with him that she had checked the newspaper. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to know how she felt. She probably didn’t know herself. Well, hadn’t he been sifting through the same sort of thoughts and questions?

  “I’d like to take you to see it tomorrow night,” he said. “And then would you let me take you out for a late supper afterward?” Because now he wanted to be as clear as possible. I am asking you out on a date, Gwen Wright. In the old-fashioned term, I’m courting you. Do you understand?

  She agreed to the movie and the late supper.

  * * *

  “Roses need sun,” Stanley said the next evening when he presented himself at the imposing white house with the hill behind it. Gwen had opened the door on the second ring of the bell. She must have been waiting for him, because he was pretty sure that there were servants in this mansion who usually did that kind of thing. But Gwen hadn’t played the usual game and let him cool his heels in the foyer until she made her entrance. Possibly she didn’t know that was how the game was played.

  “You can plant this bush outdoors or keep it near a sunny window in your room,” he went on, and to his amazement, he realized he was embarrassed by the words “your room.” He almost laughed. Because wasn’t it funny in these times, in this fast-moving century, to know that he still had a faintly puritan streak buried somewhere inside him? As he handed her the rosebush, he had a vague vision of her room, adorned with ruffles, all in pink. He had never had such a vision with any other girl!

  “I’ll put it on the windowsill across from my bed,” she told him. “It will be the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning.”

  She didn’t seem even slightly embarrassed to be mentioning such intimate things to him. She really was different from other girls. Or was she just so very young for her age?

  * * *

  Tyler, the town where the movie house was, was a perfect place to take a girl for a night out. Once, it had been just another of the hundreds of small New England towns that were dying because the industries that had sustained them had relocated overseas, leaving the citizens with the choice of starving or moving. But the people of Tyler were fighters. Their little community had been prosperous in its heyday, and therefore it had a remarkable number of lovely public buildings and gracious private homes built on an exceptionally pretty stretch of the river. Tyler’s citizens had chosen to trade on these assets and become a tourist attraction. The old homes were refurbished as charming bed-and-breakfasts, the nineteenth-century opera house, the town hall, and the library were all brought up to code and listed with the National Registry for Historic Landmarks, and a newly built river walk became a magnet for dozens of delightful little shops and food stalls.

  So it was that after the movie and a very good supper in a little bistro near the docks, Stan and Gwen, having opted not to have dessert, found themselves strolling by the river, eating ice cream in handmade cones—peppermint ice cream because the girl behind the counter said it was their most popular flavor. In the sky above, the clouds framed clusters of stars, and the river spread silent and silver underneath it. Stan knew he would remember for the rest of his life the sharp sweet taste of peppermint and the faraway expression Gwen wore when she was thinking about something that mattered to her. As she was at that moment.

  “I liked that movie,” she said. “Especially the ending—it must have been a big temptation for the screenwriter to just wrap up all the loose ends in a nice big bow, but he didn’t do that.”

  “You don’t like happy endings?” he asked.

  “Not when I can tell that they’ve just been tacked on to a story to sell tickets,” she said firmly. The firmness was a surprise; most of the time she was tentative when he asked her opinion about something. She was quick to say that she didn’t know about this topic, or that she hadn’t read enough about that one. But now she was very sure of herself. “Sometimes, if it’s light entertainment—and I do think there’s a place for that—it’s all right to work the plot around until you have a happy ending, even if it isn’t totally believable,” she went on eagerly. “But with a movie like the one we saw tonight, where all the characters are so real and the situation is so true, you have to stay honest. Even if your audience feels a little sad at the end. Although I must say I didn’t feel sad—it was more like being uplifted because you knew the characters had done the right thing even though it didn’t make them blissfully happy.”

  “Do you always analyze movies like this?” he asked. He loved this new intensity in her.

  “Actually, now that I think about it, it’s storytelling in general that interests me,” she said slowly. “Although I never realized it before this minute. I’ve always wondered why one book touches your heart and another one with a similar plot leaves you cold. It must be in the way it’s written—you know?”

  “I’m afraid that’s something I haven’t thought about very much.”

  “I guess when you read all the time the way I do you can’t help wondering what makes it all come together. Do you like to read?”

  “Yes. But not a lot of fiction. Mostly biographies.”

  “Of people like Benjamin Franklin? I ordered a biography of him the other day after you mentioned him.”

  He told himself it was ridiculous to be so pleased that she was following up on a name he had dropped.

  * * *

  Over the weeks as he continued his careful courtship, he discovered that she hadn’t been exaggerating when she said she read all the time—one book seemed to lead her to another. After finishing the Franklin biography, she moved on to Poor Richard’s Almanac, and from that to biographies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. Then for a change of pace she returned to her beloved Tolstoy to reread Anna Karenina.

  “You put me to shame,” he told her.

  “I don’t have anything else to do with my days,” she said. “I don’t work the way you do. I’m the one who should be ashamed.”

  Finally, after several weeks, he felt the time was right to show her his electrician’s shop between the stationer’s store and the pizza parlor in Wrightstown’s commercial district. The shop was his pride and joy; he’d only been in business for a few months, but he was already turning a profit—a profit that had been big enough to allow him to leave his cramped studio apartment and move into one with two bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen in a shiny new building that had all the amenities.

  Still, he had hesitated about letting Gwen see the little place he called Stan’s Electronics. A girl who’d grown up around a multimillion-dollar enterprise like the glassworks might not understand what an accomplishment his fledgling business represented. It was not that he was worried about disappointing her, he realized; rather, if she didn’t appreciate what he’d been able to achieve, he would be disappointed in her.

  But he had to risk it. He brought her to the shop, showed her around, offered her some iced tea from the small refrigerator in his small office, and braced himself for her response.

  He need not have worried. “You do everything!” Gwen exclaimed. “You can install a new electrical system for a business complex, and you can maintain it too! And you also create your own advertising and you keep your own books. At the glassworks, there are separate departments for all of those things.”

  “With a small operation like this, I have to be a one-man band,” he’d protested. But he’d been foolishly, childishly pleased. “I’m not in the same league as the Wright Glassworks. I’m not even close.”

  “But I think if your company was as big as Mother’s, you’d still want to be hands-on. Mother is. She may have all those departments and the vice presidents who run them, but she makes sure she’s on top of all of it. She le
arned her lesson, you see, because she almost lost everything when she didn’t do that, when she turned it all over to my—” But she stopped short. Stan knew she’d been about to say something more and it upset him that she had changed her mind. You can trust me, he wanted to tell her. Whatever it was that you were about to say, it will be safe with me.

  * * *

  Gwen felt her face get red. She’d almost spilled the secret of her birth parents! That was what was so dangerous about Stan; she felt so comfortable with him that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to tell him her most intimate secret. The secret that could not be told because that would be disloyal to Cassie. And yet, it was Gwen’s secret too. Should it always be off-limits? With everyone? Gwen looked at Stan. He had brought her here to his little shop and he’d had faith that she would understand what it meant to him. His pride was tied up in this business of his, along with his hard work, his talent, and his dreams. And he had shared it with her. Because he wanted her to know him better. Wasn’t it time to return the favor?

  She sat down on a workbench—he’d told her he’d built it with his own two hands—and motioned to him to sit next to her. She said, “I have something I’d like you to know about me.”And she told him about her father and the woman who had been her birth mother. The telling didn’t take long, as she really didn’t know that much about those two figures in her life, but when it was over she felt as if she’d done something very strenuous, like running a marathon, or climbing a mountain. It took her a second to catch her breath and then she turned to Stan. And she realized that without meaning to, she’d just given him a test. There were so many things he could say that would be wrong. If he said, “Cassandra Wright was a good woman to take you in,” that would be the worst. “How lucky you were that she didn’t turn away from you,” wouldn’t be much better. Suddenly she was afraid. She didn’t want him to fail the test but she wasn’t sure herself what the right response would be.

  He looked at her for what seemed like an eternity, and then he said. “I’m sorry your mother didn’t tell you the truth years ago. It’s something you should have known.”

  He was perfect! She threw her arms around him and she hugged him. And for a second he hugged her back, but then she felt something in him change and he was pulling her to him as if he couldn’t let her go. When he took her face in his hands and brushed her hair aside with his fingertips she knew what was coming and she thought perhaps she should warn him that she’d never been kissed before—not in the way he was about to kiss her. But then something inside her began to change, too, and she didn’t have time to think or talk because her body was melting into his as if that was what it was meant to do, and her mouth was joining his and she could taste the iced tea on his tongue, and if he had wanted to, she would have kissed him all night.

  * * *

  Stan pulled back from the kiss. He told himself it was because she was so young and he didn’t want to go too fast. But he knew it wasn’t just for her that he did it. For weeks she’d been filling his thoughts. Tonight he’d been moved by her in ways he’d never been moved before. This was too serious to rush.

  “I’ll drive you home,” he said softly, and was happier than he’d ever thought he could be when she looked disappointed.

  * * *

  He sought a word for her, and couldn’t come up with anything that seemed to do her justice. I should ask her for a phrase, he thought wryly as he took her home. He had learned that she was in love with words almost as much as she was in love with stories. He had learned so much about her in such a short time. And she had learned as much about him. It was as if, after her initial reticence had melted away, she and he were in a competition to see who could reveal the most personal history. She told him about being different as a child—an odd duck, she called herself—and about her early fascination with language and strange ideas. He had countered with his own early fascination with gadgets and machinery and his later love of mathematics. He had explained how both interests seemed in his mind to be the same. A column of figures either added up or it didn’t; either an appliance could be fixed or it was past repair.

  “Of course.” She’d nodded her head knowingly. “What you see is what you get. That would appeal to you.”

  Yes, they had gotten to know each other’s history in a very short time. But in those dueling histories there were differences that concerned him. She was unusually innocent for her age because she had been so sheltered. She was a child of privilege who’d grown up with great wealth, which she took for granted—far more than she knew. She’d been damaged by events that had taken place when she was very young and she was just starting to sort it all out.

  He, on the other hand, had been brought up in a working-class home, with a father who had a job at the glassworks, a mother who was the office manager for a law firm, and an older brother. His childhood had been uneventful; there had been no great damage that he was aware of. By his own choice he had been on his own since he was seventeen, and he was neither innocent nor sheltered. Since he had been supporting himself for years, he never took money—or the spending of it—for granted. His relationship with his parents was cordial but distant. They didn’t understand why he hadn’t gone to college to “make something of himself,” but they hadn’t tried to push him into it. He enjoyed their company in limited doses. Gwen’s relationship with her mother, on the other hand, was the kind he particularly disliked—convoluted, claustrophobic, and driven by love and guilt in equal measure.

  For a man like him to get involved with a girl like Gwen—and you really couldn’t say she was a woman, not yet anyway—did not make sense. But as he lay awake in bed at night—something he found himself doing more and more—he knew that she was going to be a part of his life. However, it would have to happen in spite of her formidable mother, because Cassandra Wright did not like him. And her influence over her daughter was great, no matter how much Gwen rebelled against her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Evening coffee, served in the den with a plate of cookies, was a ritual that Cassie always welcomed. There had been times in Gwen’s rebellious adolescence when she had considered it an annoyance—just another opportunity for her mother to hide behind a wall of polite ceremony and meaningless friendly chatter. This night, however, was different. Neither the coffee nor the cookies had been touched, and the atmosphere between mother and daughter was neither friendly nor polite. Unfortunately, Walter, who usually managed to lower the temperature at such times, was in Connecticut doing the initial sketches for a portrait of a client. So the argument between Gwen and Cassie had been going on for over an hour.

  “You used to complain because I had no dates,” Gwen said. “Now I have somebody who really likes me, and you don’t approve of him.”

  “I never ‘complained.’ ” Cassie corrected in that maddening way she had of picking up on a peripheral detail of what one had said and avoiding the essence. “Sometimes I did worry because I thought you might be a bit lonely. And now you’re accusing me of doing something wrong?”

  “No! That’s not—”

  “It certainly sounds that way. Forgive me for taking an interest in your happiness, Gwen. If you would have preferred to be neglected and ignored I wish I’d known.”

  They’d been going round and round in circles like this one, and it was getting them nowhere. Suddenly a small explosion occurred within Gwen and she cried out to Cassie, “Mother, that’s enough! We’re not talking about you and me. This is about Stan. You don’t approve of him.”

  “I never said that, not exactly. . . .”

  “You didn’t have to. You don’t approve of him because he has none of what you call ‘status’! You think he’s nobody.”

  “That’s unfair. I am not a snob. And I’m not so trivial that I would object to a good man just because of his position in life.”

  “Well, I seem to remember a comment once about a barmaid and your first husband going slumming,” Gwen said and then instantly
regretted opening the old wound. Now she was the one taking them in circles—and a tired rehash of old grievances.

  Cassie sighed deeply. “Again, that isn’t fair and you know it. I was angry when I said that and I apologized for it. And since then I’ve never said a word, good or bad, about your mother . . .or your father.”

  “We might be better off if you had.”

  “What would you have me say, Gwen? You know what your father did. As for your mother, I didn’t know her. I didn’t even know she existed until after she was dead. As far as I’m concerned: Let the dead rest. De mortuis nisi bonum. You know what that means; you took Latin in school. Don’t say anything about the dead unless it’s something good.”

  She pulled herself up to her full height and looked triumphant, as if somehow quoting an ancient proverb in the original language had won the argument. Gwen hated it when she did things like that.

  “And now, I believe we have had more than enough drama for one night,” Cassie went on, still in her imperial mode, and she stood up and started for the door.

  “Wait!” Gwen called out. “You still haven’t said . . . What is it that you have against Stan?”

  And why do I care so much what you think? Gwen wondered unhappily. But she did.

  Cassie came back and sat down. “Please stop putting words in my mouth. I’m not ‘against’ the man. I simply feel that you are spending too much time with him.”

  “I like to be with him.”

  “You’re only nineteen and, since you seem to want me to speak frankly, you’re very naïve, even for nineteen. And he’s naïve too. He’s totally ignorant. A babe in the woods. You both are.”