by Susan Isaacs
The headmaster of St. Stephen’s tracked Win down nearly two hours later, and when she arrived at the emergency room what made her shudder was not so much Nicholas’s ballooned purple face as his silence. He gazed at her from his one open eye and neither wept nor moaned nor tried to say “Mummy.”
He was home by 6:00. At 6:02, Nanny held a straw to his lips and he managed a few swallows of vanilla milk, but all Nanny got for her trouble was a slight incline of the head. At 6:15, Thomas stroked Nicholas’s good left hand. At 6:30, Olivia screamed and sobbed and wiped her nose on Nicholas’s blanket and laid four of her dolls on Nicholas’s bed. Olivia and Thomas got a flutter of his left eye. At 7:00, the Tuttles arrived with their chauffeur, who lugged a complete set of Hardy Boys books into the room. Nicholas offered a single tear. At 7:15, they all decided he wanted to sleep and left his room.
“The doctor says he’ll be fine,” Win explained to her parents. She rested her elbow on the high marble fireplace mantel in the living room and let her hand support her cheek. “I mean, he looks dreadful and of course he’s in pain, but he’ll be just fine.”
“Of course he will,” Samuel said.
“He’ll have to take the pain pills for the next few days. They said they might make him a bit woozy.”
“They do,” Samuel said.
“But he’ll mend.”
“Of course.”
Maisie, who had been sitting on a couch beside Samuel, stood suddenly and marched over to Win. She grabbed her daughter’s arm from the mantel and shook it. “Where is your husband?” she demanded.
“Mama—”
“Where is he? His son has been injured and he was called at the office and they said he was at his club and he was not…naturally.”
“Mama, he must be with a client.”
“A most demanding client.”
“Maisie.”
“Really, Samuel, I do think I can speak to my own daughter. Winifred, how many times will you endure—”
“Mama, please.”
“He is so unspeakably public! Christmas Eve. Your brother’s fiftieth birthday. It is as if he takes pleasure in—Winifred, stop sniveling!”
“Maisie, now is hardly the time.”
“Samuel, the time was never more opportune. Nicholas looks as if he’d been trampled by a horse and she bears up admirably, nobly, shoulders back, chin firm, hup-two, take charge. But look at her now. One word, one single criticism of that husband, and tears enough to bathe in. It is insufferable! My grandson is battered, unable to utter a single word, and is Winifred weeping for him? Oh, no. She is weeping because I dared suggest—”
“Mama, Mama, it’s not that.”
“Then what is it, you foolish, foolish girl?”
They sat in a silence broken only by the clatter of coffee cups until eleven thirty. Then a key turned in the door and James entered the apartment and walked to the lighted living room. “What is it?” he asked. His speech was thickened, and while he was not drunk, neither was he sober.
“Your son has been hurt,” Maisie said.
“Hours ago,” Samuel added.
“Which son?”
“Nicholas. James, please, he’s fine; I mean he’ll be all right, really, but he—”
James shouldered aside his in-laws and ran down the long corridor to Nicholas’s bedroom. They pursued him.
“He’s sleeping.”
“He’s been sedated.”
“Do you think you can just—?”
James threw open Nicholas’s door and flipped on the light.
“Christ almighty!” he gasped and rushed to the edge of the bed. “Nicky. Nicky, honey,” he breathed.
“James, please don’t—”
“Look at that. He woke him.”
“His jaw is broken. Careful, for pity’s sake.”
“James, it was during the soccer game. One of the boys—”
James kneeled at the side of the bed. “Nicky, it’s Daddy.”
Nicholas peered out at James through his clear blue eye and the red, watery slit of the swollen one. He groaned, but managed to turn over onto his side. So slowly it seemed not to be happening at all, he raised his arm in its plaster cast and put it around his father’s neck. It hung there, white, heavy, motionless for a moment, and then began hugging James, drawing him closer.
James kissed his forehead. Through Nicholas’s wired jaw came high-pitched whimpers. Win and the Tuttles edged nearer to the bed. They lowered their heads to try to discern if there was meaning behind the small, pathetic sounds. What they heard was Nicholas saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.”
10
With thirty-five million dollars and, some say, its corporate head resting on the shoulders of William the Conqueror, the studio has decided to continue production of the Anglo-American epic. The film’s star and executive producer, Nicholas Cobleigh, has notified them that he will not be available as long as his wife’s medical condition remains critical.
—Wall Street Journal
In the years after his smashup in soccer, Nicholas broke his leg (football), his arm (riding), separated his shoulder (lacrosse), and sustained contusions, abrasions, cuts and gouges so often he was never without a raw, unhealed patch. He was an athlete without reservation, barreling past hulking opponents, oblivious to fists, knees, and cleats. After his first year away at school, Winifred no longer cringed at his swollen fingers or purple-yellow shins.
The girls at the nearby prep schools were not at all repelled. They seemed fascinated by his bruises, reached with trembling fingers to touch the spongy flesh of his blackened eye. Other Trowbridge boys were as bloodied and broken as Nicholas, but none of them got such sweet probing.
It wasn’t that he was the handsomest boy in school, although he was, indeed, good-looking. His baby blond hair had darkened to straw color, shot with strands of copper. It was silky straight. His eyes were a brilliant blue washed with green, the color of a tropical sea, but they were his only exotic feature. His appearance was conventionally Anglo-Saxon, with clear pale skin, a longish face, and a nose so high-bridged it began between his eyebrows.
In repose his face appeared a little cold, and the young girls romanticized him. Strong, silent. Still waters run deep. A cruel, sensuous mouth. Sadness behind the eyes. The truth was that Nicholas was a fairly conventional boy, and the passionate crushes he aroused confused him. A girl he barely knew would kiss his palm or caress his legs and when he drew back—embarrassed, stimulated, a little frightened—the girl would sigh “Oh, Nicky” or “You won’t let anyone get through to you, will you?” Of course, reports of his icy control drew more girls, most of whom found in him an irresistible something that, in fact, wasn’t there.
Their desire for him was magnified when they saw Nicky at the beach, Nicky in shorts, Nicky with his shirt knotted around his neck on the ball field. He had a beautiful body, more slender than massive, with hard risings of muscle. Even the least sensuous of girls felt their fingers flexing, aching to trace the veins running up his arms. The others wanted to rub his shoulders, or press themselves against his back, or ruffle and smooth the pale hair on his calves.
Heather Smith was the first girl who got the chance. There was nothing outstanding about her, although Nicholas was attracted to her cheerfulness and her simpleness. She smiled at him a great deal and didn’t seem to expect something mysterious, the thing the other girls kept seeking and he could not find. At the mixer where they met, Heather told Nicholas he was too cute for words and demanded he make a muscle for her. He did, even though he felt silly at the request, holding his forearm tight against his waist and squeezing his bicep until it trembled. Heather felt through his blazer sleeve and said “Oooh.” By the end of the evening he was enchanted by her friendly dopiness, by her indifference to proving she was capable of an intellectual discussion. She wasn’t capable and Nicholas, a good enough student, was relieved. He didn’t like intellectual discussions with girls. They never seemed satisfied with his answers and would
say “Oh, you mean…” as they foxtrotted past the chaperones. Heather liked him just the way he was. And Nicholas fell for nice, dumb, sexy Heather Smith.
As a young boy, Nicholas had heard his Grandpa Samuel refer to a pretty grandniece as an absolute peach, but it wasn’t until he was sixteen years old that the phrase lived. Heather was truly a peach.
Winter vacations in Hobe Sound and summers in Martha’s Vineyard had warmed Heather’s fair skin to a golden pink and bleached the fuzz on her arms and legs and upper lip. Prep school athletics solidified her natural pudginess into muscle, and she looked firm and round and juicy. Her bare thighs spread slightly on the seat of her wooden lawn chair; the insides were paler and more tender looking than the burnished tops.
Nicholas realized Heather had seen him staring because she was moving again. She wriggled her bottom in the chair and then raised her knee so her heel rested perpendicular to the crotch of her loose gray camp shorts. When he looked her straight in the eye to break her magic, she lowered her heavy eyelids and sucked the soft pad of flesh on her thumb. He didn’t know if she was teasing him by doing sexy calendar-girl things to get him hot or if she was an innocent who had no idea of what a peach she was. He wanted to take her big ripe thigh and bite it. Instead, he crossed his legs so her father couldn’t see the evidence of his bewitchment and accepted a vanilla wafer from her mother.
“I hear you’re captain of the lacrosse team,” Colonel Smith said. He had retired to his sprawling family home in East Hill, Massachusetts, two years earlier, but his hair was still more regulation army than patrician Yankee. Stiff bristles of gray poked out all over his scalp, like a two days’ growth of beard. The skin beneath was badly sunburned, although the colonel did not seem to be discomforted by anything more than Nicholas’s presence on a Sunday afternoon. Heather, a student at the girls’ school East Hill, lived at home. Though it was the custom for girls in her position—townies—to invite their beaux to meet their parents, the colonel did not seem pleased; he sat at the edge of his chair, as if planning an attack with his aides. “I said, I hear you’re captain of the lacrosse team.”
“Oh. Yes, sir.” Nicholas nearly stammered. It was the first week of June, but the sun was as blinding and relentless as late July. The sugar on Mrs. Smith’s frosted grapes had melted, and they lay on a glass plate, a syrupy mess, on a small white wrought-iron table that stood like a hub between them. Across from Nicholas, Heather held a grape between her thumb and index finger and was licking the melted sugar that had dripped down her forearm.
“What position do you play?” Nicholas was staring at Heather’s flicking tongue. “For Christ’s sake, Heather, get a napkin,” the colonel ordered. He turned back to Nicholas. “Did you hear my question?”
“No. Sorry, sir.”
“You have a hearing problem?”
“No, sir.”
“I said, what position do you play? Position! Lacrosse!”
“Oh. Midfield, sir.” The colonel’s face was growing brighter. Nicholas hoped it was from the heat. He knew he was making a poor impression. The colonel wanted snappy answers, not vagueness. Vagueness was fine for Heather, who had let her face drift up toward the sun. It was probably warming the peachy fuzz that ran between her cheeks and her ears down to her jaw. Nicholas whipped his head back to the colonel. “We have a pretty good team, sir.” His voice sounded reedy. He didn’t want the colonel to think the lacrosse team was the dog of Trowbridge’s athletic program. “We have an eleven-four record, sir.” He hated saying sir all the time, like an army recruit, but he wasn’t sure whether the title Colonel was correct for someone who had retired, and he didn’t want to say Mister for fear of eliciting even more contempt.
“Bad losses?”
“No, sir.”
“What were the scores?”
“I really can’t recall now, sir.” He wanted to turn and look across to Heather. She was probably doing something new, maybe running her hand over her hair or massaging the back of her neck, her arm raised so the halfmoon of sweat on her blouse showed.
“Lose to Middlesex?”
“Sorry. I didn’t hear you. Sir.”
“Mid-dle-sex.”
“Oh. No, we didn’t play Middlesex.”
“I’m Middlesex.”
“I didn’t know that, sir. I have a friend there. It’s a good school.”
“I know it’s a good school.”
“Did you go to West Point after Middlesex, sir?”
“Who told you I went to West Point?” The gash that was the colonel’s mouth grew tighter.
“Oh, well. I mean, you were in the army.”
“Do you think every officer is a West Point graduate?”
“No, sir. Of course not.”
“I went to Dartmouth. Are you thinking of Dartmouth?”
“Well, I thought I’d think about colleges this summer because I don’t have to apply until next fall and—”
“Where did your father go?”
“Brown.” The colonel did not react, as though he had received no new information. “I said, my father went to Brown, sir.”
“I heard you. Any other sports?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“You should have your hearing checked,” the colonel boomed. “I said, Any other sports? Do you play any—”
“Oh, yes.”
“—other sports?”
“Sorry. I mean, yes, I play football.”
“Varsity?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Position?”
“Back.”
“Record?”
“Seven—nine, sir.”
“All right.” The colonel turned away. “Heather,” he snapped. “Stop fiddling with your toes, for Christ’s sake. It’s four thirty. Walk back with him to the depot.”
Nicholas stood. His muscles were cramped after the afternoon in the low lawn chair, and he swayed on his unsteady legs and from the cumulative effect of too much sun and too little food. Heather had invited him for Sunday lunch, but Mrs. Smith had brought out only the grapes, vanilla wafers, and a pitcher of uniced lemonade. The colonel squinted at him and Nicholas knew he suspected he had been drinking. He wanted to reassure the colonel, but he couldn’t say he was just a little dizzy because he hadn’t been given any lunch. Heather walked over to him, pressed her side against his, and took his hand. The colonel’s squint narrowed. “Thank you, Mrs. Smith,” Nicholas said. Heather’s mother had said nothing more than “How do you do?” to him, and most of the time he had forgotten she was there. If Heather was a peach, her mother was a banana: skinny, bent a little, yellow. She looked ill. He would have thought she had cancer, but Heather had told him she was a terrific athlete and had won the club’s women’s cup in both golf and tennis.
“Y’ welcome,” Mrs. Smith said.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to the colonel. The man was a good deal over six feet tall, with the solidity of a wrestler. “I’ll think about Dartmouth.”
“You don’t have to,” the colonel said.
“I had a very nice time,” Nicholas said to both Smiths. “I appreciate your asking me.” They were silent. “Well, have a nice summer.” Heather pulled his hand, and he followed her around the side of the house. “Nice meeting you,” he called, but the colonel had disappeared and Mrs. Smith, bent over her sticky grapes, did not seem to hear him.
“They loved you,” Heather said.
“God, Heather.” She lay on top of him. She had unbuttoned his shirt and was running her hand over his chest and nipples. Nicholas wavered between frenzy and fear. They were right in the middle of East Hill, inside the village commons, but were hidden by a bank of junipers. The earth under him was cold and gritty. Scratchy branchlets of juniper reached out and tickled his shoulders. “I can’t take it, Heather.” She had opened her blouse and lifted up her bra. Her breasts were like two hard auxiliary peaches. She tried to squash them against his chest. “Oh, God, no. I’ll miss the bus.”
“There�
��s another at six. Come on. Put your tongue in my mouth.”
“I have to be at dining hall at six.”
“My Nicky is so cute.”
“Heather, this isn’t a good idea.” She was rocking back and forth. Actually humping him. He thought about the condom in his wallet that his roommate bought for him a year and a half before. The red foil wrapper was worn and cracked. It probably wasn’t any good. “Don’t do that, Heather.” She bent forward and stuck her tongue in his ear. “Jesus, Heather.” He’d remembered the condom when his bus pulled into East Hill, but she’d been at the depot, jumping up and waving at him, so he couldn’t exactly stop at the drugstore and ask for a couple of rubbers when the druggist probably knew her since she was a little girl and might even be a deacon at her church. He opened the button of his khaki slacks, but as he reached for the tab of the zipper Heather’s hand closed over his and pulled his away.
“Nicky, no. You’ll be too tempted.”
“Please. I swear I won’t get carried away.”
“No. Stop.” He waited for her to slide off, but instead she licked her lips and humped him harder than she had before.
“Heather, I’m not kidding. I can’t take any more of this.”
“Oh, Nicky.” She sat tall, as if riding a skittish horse in a show. Her breasts and pageboy flopped to her rhythm. He had never seen anything like it.
If she didn’t stop, he’d come and would go back to Trowbridge with the telltale dark splotch on his slacks and would have to hear, for weeks and weeks, “Cobleigh didn’t get it.” He groaned. Heather clamped her hand over his mouth and pointed with her chin under the junipers. He could make out two pairs of adult legs dangling from a park bench not more than fifteen feet away. A new wave of passion washed over him and he said “Heather” louder than he had before, as if daring them to come and stop them. Heather sat still. “Oh, Heather,” he murmured, much softer. He didn’t know which was worse, the terrible torture she was inflicting or its cessation. “Please, Heather.”