“How are you, Miss Brighton?”
Good manners dictated that she at least look at the man, but Russ seemed determined to prevent it. “Hello, Sam,” she said, not bothering to control the grin. “I’d better get on to my room so you two can talk.”
“Nice meeting you.” Sam’s words came out almost as a question. “What was that all about?” he asked Russ as she walked off.
“What did it look like?”
She could hardly control the laughter until she was safely inside her room. Even as she laughed, one thought simmered in her head: Russ Harrington, your days as a loner are over.
She and Russ spent very little time together. Drake and Telford needed briefing about the status of and plans for the Joshua Harrington Houses in Baltimore, and the brothers discussed progress on Fisherman’s Village in Barbados. She spent Sunday morning with her sister and her niece.
She tried to make herself tell her sister that before the coming week ended, she hoped to see their father and to have a candid, soul-cleansing talk with him.
“You seem a little preoccupied,” Alexis said. “Are you all right? I can see that it’s going well with Russ. He’s a different man. Open. Brimming with laughter and…Velma, Russ is happy.”
“Yes. I love being with him when he’s this way. I realize I’ll do most anything to make him laugh. Seeing him break up gives me the biggest charge.”
“See that he stays that way.”
Tara bounded into the room with Biscuit trailing behind her. “Come hear me play, Aunt Velma. My dad is teaching me a new piece. It’s a waltz, and Chopin wrote it. If I learn that real good, he’s going to teach me some ragtime. What did he call it, Mummy?”
“Something by Scott Joplin. I forgot the name.”
She didn’t envy Alexis her happiness, but as she gazed at her niece—a beautiful, well-mannered, and intelligent child—she wondered when she would hold her own son or daughter. Fearing that she might develop melancholia, she grasped Tara’s hand.
“Let’s go to your room. I want to hear you play.”
They nearly bumped into Russ as he stepped out of his room. “I thought you and Sam were talking business,” she said to him. “And you were in your room asleep.”
“Mr. Sam is in Mr. Henry’s room,” Tara explained.
“Right. Sam’s asleep. We talked most of the night. What time are you leaving?”
“Around four, I guess.”
“If Telford and Drake get back here within the next half hour, I’ll trail you. We have to talk with Allen before I leave.”
“She has to listen to me play, Uncle Russ. She promised.”
“And she will.” He pulled Tara’s braid. “What will you play for her?
“‘Barcarole’ by Offen… What’s his name, Mummy?”
“Jacques Offenbach.”
She looked at Russ, perplexed. “That’s his name, Uncle Russ.”
After Tara played the piece several times, Alexis joined them. “Henry has sandwiches, fruit, sodas and coffee in the breakfast room. Serve yourself.”
“Can I have ice cream, Mummy?” She paused for a second. “No, thanks. I’ll ask Mr. Henry.” With that, she headed for the kitchen.
The two sisters walked down the stairs arm in arm, and as they reached the bottom, Drake and Telford entered the foyer. “Well, well,” Drake said to Velma. “I wondered whether I’d get to see you.” He favored them with a sample of his famous charm, his grin infectious and his long-lashed brown eyes sparkling. “I see you’ve been making progress.”
Both of her eyebrows went up. “You know something that I don’t?”
“No, indeed. You know this, and you know it well. Keep it up—you’ve made a brand-new man of him.”
She wished she thought it. For Drake’s ears, she decided that diffidence was better. “As long as he’s happy.”
That brought a laugh from Drake who, she had learned, was close to being the most discerning person she’d ever known. “I’m not buying that, and neither would he. If it were true, he wouldn’t even know where you live.”
“Guilty as charged,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
In the kitchen, she selected a pastrami sandwich and a Mitsu apple and took her plate to the breakfast room, where she joined Henry, Alexis and Tara. She ate most of the sandwich and went back to the kitchen for a glass of lemonade.
“I hope this warehouse is located near Reese Street,” she heard Russ say, and at the mention of the word warehouse, her antenna shot up. “I’m renovating some houses there, and your project would help raise the level of the area.” She stopped in her tracks, every nerve in her body on edge.
“Sorry I can’t accommodate you, man. It’s about ten blocks down on Bricker, between Just and Hornet.” She groped for the doorjamb and let it take her weight. Her warehouse. Sam Jenkins was bidding for her warehouse.
“I’ll stop by there tomorrow sometime,” Russ said, “and have a look at it. I’d like to get an idea of what you’d need in the way of renovation and redesign. Warehouses can be tricky. They’re not always what they look like.”
Her knees shook and perspiration poured from her, but she managed to get down the hall to her room, though she would never know how she did it. She had to calm herself and tell Russ that she had a bid in for that warehouse, that her real-estate agent had canvassed Baltimore and that warehouse was the only one that suited both her needs and her bankbook. He had to tell his friend to back off.
“Where’s Velma?” Russ asked nobody in particular as he sat down to eat his lunch. “I thought she was in here.”
“I thought she was in the kitchen,” Alexis said. “She went to get a glass of lemonade.”
She hadn’t come into the kitchen or he’d have seen her. “Excuse me.” He left the table and headed for her room. “I thought you were eating lunch,” he said when she opened the door. “What’s wrong?” He didn’t like her demeanor, slumped in the chair like a defeated person.
“Eat your lunch,” she said. “We can talk about this later.”
So there was a problem. He sat down on the chaise lounge, facing her. “We’ll talk about it now. What is it?”
He didn’t know whether she realized that she was wringing her hands, but she had to hear the unsteadiness in her voice. He braced himself for the unpleasant. And she delivered it.
“That warehouse Sam’s bidding on is the one I’m trying to get.”
He jumped up from the chaise lounge and stood over her, wanting to be certain that he heard her correctly. “What did you say?”
She looked at him with an expression of defeat in her eyes. “I said—”
He sat down. “Never mind. I heard you. This puts me between a rock and a hard place, Velma. If it wasn’t for Sam Jenkins, I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be an architect and there would be no Harrington, Inc., Architects, Engineers and Builders. One of our classmates stole my graduating term paper the night before the deadline for handing it in. If my professor hadn’t received that paper on time, I wouldn’t have graduated. The student who stole it was at the bottom of the class, and with that paper, I would graduate at the top. The guy was in a bar on Georgia Avenue around midnight that night, bragging that he knew he was going to pass. The more he drank the more he bragged. Sam was in the bar, and he knew someone had stolen my paper. He got his uncle, a judge, out of bed and asked him to issue a search warrant for the guy’s room. The campus police went in at six the next morning and found the term paper on the poor fool’s desk. I told Sam that if he ever needed me, I’d be there for him. I thought he was joking when he said, ‘I’d like you to design the first building I own,’ but I shook hands on it.”
“Where does that leave me?”
“I’ll help you find another one.”
“My real-estate agent knows Baltimore better than you or I, and this is all he could find that I can afford. If I don’t get that building—”
“Don’t say it. We’ll find something for you. I gave Sam my word, and I
have to honor it. Who knows, maybe he won’t win the bid, and you will.”
“But your design will practically guarantee that he wins it, because you will do your best.”
“Let’s not worry about it right now. Come on back and eat your lunch.”
“Just…give me a few minutes. You go on.”
He leaned over her and kissed her mouth. “All right.”
Velma sat as he’d left her, contemplating the latest turn of fate in her life. The more she thought about it, the more deeply and sharply the pain sliced through her. He wouldn’t renege on his word to his friend, but didn’t he owe her—his lover, the woman he said he loved—as much as he owed Sam?
“Damned if I’m putting up with this,” she said, grabbed her overnight bag, threw her things in it, wrote a note to Alexis and, although she felt like a sneak doing it, she slipped out of Harrington House, got into her car and headed home. The next move was his, and if he didn’t make the right one, he could forget she existed.
At home, she checked her answering machine and called her sister. “I’m fine, hon. I just decided the best place for me was home. I’ll call Tara tomorrow and explain. If you need to know any more, ask Russ. I’m turning off my phone.”
“I don’t like the sound of this.”
“Neither do I. I’ll talk with you when I feel more like it.” She hung up, turned off the telephone, ate a ham sandwich, drank a cup of herbal tea and went to bed.
The next morning, Monday, at eight-thirty, she telephoned her lawyer and told him that Sam Jenkins had bid on the warehouse.
“We’ll work with that. I’ll get as much information as I can about him and what he plans to do with the property. Leave it to me.” What choice did she have?
“I want the information on my father. You said you sent me a letter, but I haven’t received it.”
“I sent it certified mail, so it’ll come back to me if it isn’t delivered. Here’s the deal on your father.”
She wrote down the information and then read it back to him. “I’m leaving here tomorrow morning on the first plane I can get.”
“I don’t give personal advice, Ms. Brighton, but I’ve lived a few years, and I think you should be careful. Try not to give him too big a shock. No telling what shape his heart is in.”
She thanked him, hung up and began searching the internet for flight information and hotel reservations. The next morning found her on Air Canada en route to Montreal.
She didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t the tall but gaunt man with thinning white hair peering at her over a pair of rimless glasses.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“I know you’re not expecting me, Father,” she said in hopes of easing the shock, “I’m—”
“Oh, my God! Mildred,” he said, staring at her.
She wondered whether he was ill. Mildred was her mother’s name. She inhaled a deep breath. “Papa, this is your older daughter, Velma. May I come in?”
He flicked on the light and stepped back into the apartment. “For a minute, I thought…” He shook his head as if denying something. “She’s never far from my mind. Always, she’s with me. Yes. Yes. Come on in.”
He waited until she walked into the house, then stepped behind her and closed the door. “I…I can’t imagine… This takes some getting used to. Have a seat. I’ll make some coffee.”
She didn’t want any coffee, but she knew he had to stall, to pull himself together. While waiting for him to bring the coffee, she looked around at what she could see of the house. The foyer was neat and the living room comfortable, though without a particular personality. Functional. The years had not been kind to him. He no longer stood ramrod straight, nor was he robust with a thick chest, and his deeply lined face was that of a man seventy-five rather than sixty-one years of age.
She didn’t hear him come back into the living room. “After all these years, why have you come?”
Where should she begin? She had pictured herself telling off a younger, strapping man, and hadn’t counted on the damage that years and circumstances had inflicted. She plunged in without preliminaries.
“I don’t like myself, and I have a hard time believing that anybody other than Alexis could love me. I figured you could make me understand why I’m this way.”
He sipped his coffee—black and without sugar—seemingly glad to have an excuse not to look at her. “Is Alexis all right?”
“She fine, but I didn’t come here to talk about her. Why didn’t you and Mama love me and my sister?”
He nearly dropped the cup. “How can you ask me such a question?”
“Because you didn’t, and the way you left me to handle that funeral… I didn’t even know what one was like or why people had them.”
He put the cup in the saucer and rubbed his left hand across his forehead. “I know it was hard for you, but I couldn’t stay there another minute. She was everywhere. When I saw you at the door, I nearly fainted until you spoke. You look just like her, but your voice is soft where hers had become harsh.”
“Why, Papa?”
He inhaled deeply and blew out a long breath as if resigned. “Your mother hated intimacy, and we fought constantly about that. She wouldn’t have minded if I had taken a mistress, but it never once occurred to me to commit adultery. I loved her.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Oh, I loved that woman. I soon learned that she was more accommodating after a bitter fight, and I staged them. I know it was sick. It was a neurosis of hers, and I fueled it.
“She wanted to send you and Alexis to a boarding school, but I wouldn’t agree. A really ugly fight ensued, one that I didn’t stage. She scratched and bit me, finally telling me she was going to kill herself. Furious as I was, I told her to suit herself, that I didn’t care what she did.
“She ran out of the house wearing a nightgown, raincoat and bedroom slippers. I thought she was going to drive somewhere, but she didn’t get in the car. You know the rest.
“I loved my daughters, but the older you got, the more ashamed I was. I knew you listened to the unsavory things that went on between your mother and me. I couldn’t change that, so I withdrew and saw as little of my children as possible.”
Velma wanted to cover her ears, to stop him and save him the embarrassment of telling his daughter such personal things. But he continued talking, and she could see that, the more he spoke, the less pain the revelations appeared to cause him.
“I had to leave there, Velma. She was everywhere, all over the house. And I knew she was dead before they found her. I couldn’t stand the guilt, knowing I could have stopped her. I had to go. I knew you would take care of Alexis. You always had.”
His eyes pleaded with her. “If I had stayed there, I would have killed myself. You may say that I deserted you, but don’t ever say that I didn’t love you.”
She stood, but realizing that she was unsteady, she sat down again. “Thanks for talking to me. I…uh…I’d better leave now.”
He held out his hand to her and then quickly withdrew it. “Don’t ever say I didn’t love you,” he croaked out. “A hundred nights I walked the floor with you when you were a baby. And you were so smart, and I was so proud of you.”
“Then how could you do what you did?”
He closed his eyes as tears rolled down his face. “Guilt. Yes, and fear. She was everything to me, young and beautiful like you are now, and I was so scared she’d leave me. She was always threatening to leave me.
“It was an awful environment for two girls. She…she walked out that night in twelve-degree temperature, knowing she would freeze. And she did. Guilt. Not an hour has passed in the last fourteen years that I didn’t think of her. Right in the middle of a lecture, she’s there before me. I live in hell.”
“I’m so sorry, Papa. Terribly sorry.” And she was; she hurt for him.
“Are you?” She nodded. “Well, thanks for that redemption. Do you have a picture of Alexis?”
“No, sir, but I have one o
f her daughter, Tara. She’s five and precious.”
He looked at the picture of his granddaughter. “She’s beautiful. I’ve missed so much. Do you have children?”
“No, sir. I’ve never married.”
“I don’t ask the two of you to forgive me, but please try to understand.”
If she didn’t get out of there, she would come apart, and she didn’t want him to see her crumble. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll try, and I’ll tell Alexis.”
He thanked her for coming to see him, though he hadn’t once asked her how she found him. They said goodbye, and she stepped out into the twilight. So much to digest, piled on her like wood on a woodpile. She hadn’t guessed what a miserable family they had been, and as she blinked back the tears, she almost wished she hadn’t found out. A glance at her watch confirmed that it was a quarter of six. With luck… She phoned the airline, got a reservation on a seven-forty flight to Baltimore, canceled her hotel reservation and walked into her house at midnight.
She got ready for bed, slid under the covers and began to shake as tremors plowed through her. She tried to hold back the tears, but they came, escalating into sobs.
“Russ. Russ, I need you,” she whispered, but for her, there was no Russ, and she cried herself to sleep.
“I can’t believe she just walked out without a word,” Russ said to Alexis after he’d searched the house, the grounds and the banks of the Monacacy River.
He’d never known Alexis to appear dumbfounded, but nothing else would explain her demeanor. “She called a minute ago,” Alexis said. “I hadn’t seen the note she left, but I found it after I talked with her.”
“Why did she leave?” It was a rhetorical question, because he was increasingly certain that he knew the answer and that Alexis didn’t.
“It’ll sort itself out, Russ. You’re bound to have little misunderstandings,” Telford said in an obvious attempt to reassure him.
He didn’t want to be consoled, because it wouldn’t help. “There’s nothing little about this, Telford. I’ve hurt her. I couldn’t help it, and I don’t see how I can repair it.”
After the Loving Page 27