When Steve’s car turned in the drive, she paused long enough to check her hair and for any stray smudges on her face. She surprised herself by turning her cheek for Steve’s homecoming kiss, a habit which lately he’d dropped.
‘Say, what got into you?’ he asked, hugging her.
‘Oh, just a good day.’
‘Any reason it’s a good day? More commissions or something?’
‘No.’
‘God, you’re coy,’ he said and swatted her proprietarily on the hip, his eyes still wary.
She laughed and rolled her eyes, and he echoed her laughter.
‘It’s good to see you like this, hon. You sure you aren’t hiding something? Like an expensive new dress?’
She laughed again at that, for she was unlikely to buy expensive dresses at any time. Expensive art equipment, yes. ‘No,’ she told him, tolerant of his density, ‘just for a change, I feel right with the world.’
‘For a real change,’ Steve agreed. ‘Ohho, mail from Ma.’ He picked up the letter with an apprehensive glance at her.
‘Not even that can erase the smile from my sunny face.’
‘Well, well.’ He slit the envelope and, as he read the contents, his hand slowly rose to rub the back of his neck.
That signified bad news, Mirelle knew, as she went to put dinner on the table.
The kids came clattering up from the TV room at her call and noisily forwarded the conversational ball at the dinner table. Steve joined in easily enough, so Mirelle decided that she must have been mistaken about the import of the letter. In fact, she forgot all about it until after the children were in bed.
‘What was on your mother’s mind?’ she asked as Steve fussed with his amplifier.
‘Has one of the kids been fiddling with this?’ he demanded irritably. ‘It’s all off.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What about the maid?’
‘It was all right last night.’
‘You know how she dusts.’
‘She comes on Tuesday and this is Friday so it couldn’t be Maria.’
‘Damn it!’
‘So what was on your mother’s mind?’ Mirelle repeated, certain of the source of his aggravation.
Steve rocked back on his heels, still fiddling with the hi-fi settings. ‘We’re getting a state visit.’
‘Oh no. When?’
‘The 10th. They’ve decided to celebrate Dad’s retirement by spending the winter in Orlando, Florida. You know, where the Randolphs went for so many years.’
‘Naturally it would be Orlando then,’ Mirelle replied blandly. The Randolphs were a stuffy, pompous family, important in Allentown. Mrs. Martin Senior quoted the Randolph authorised opinion on everything from Heinz Ketchup to the state of the spring weather.
‘Oh, come off it, Mirelle,’ Steve said in a sour tone of voice.
Mirelle shrugged. ‘How long will they be here? You know the church Bazaar is the 12th and 13th. I have to be there.’
‘That’s right,’ Steve said with a heartfelt groan. They sat quietly, deep in private thought for several long minutes. Then Steve shook his head. ‘I don’t want you to renege on the Bazaar.’
A wave of relief washed over Mirelle. It wasn’t so much her realisation that she was greatly looking forward to participating in the affair as the fact that Steve was deliberately encouraging her in something they both knew that his mother would detest.
He unfolded the letter again. ‘She says “a few days”, so I guess that’ll include the 12th and 13th.’ He got to his feet abruptly. ‘Damn it, Mary Ellen, things have been so much . . . much better between us since I got off the road and you started this latest sculpting kick. I mean, like today, with you feeling in a good mood over nothing.’ He leaned over her chair. ‘You’re more like the girl I married than you’ve been since the kids started coming.’ He made a fist and gently pushed at her chin. ‘She’s my mother and all, but hell, it’s our life and our marriage.’
Mirelle reached up to put her arms around his neck and drew his head down so that their foreheads touched.
‘Steve, if you’ll back me up this time, your mother won’t be able to upset us the way she usually does.’
Steve flushed and made a move to break her hold. She pulled him back.
‘Steve, I’ve allowed your mother to crucify me and I’ve watched you standing squarely in the middle, not knowing which way to turn. You know that the only thing I’ve been able to do is shut up and put up. But I’m warning you, Steve. I’m not going to shut up this time, and I’m not going to put up.’
Steve jerked away then.
‘My birth may have been irregular,’ Mirelle went on resolutely, ‘but at least I spared us both another set of in-laws.’
Steve whirled sharply, his mouth open in angry surprise.
‘Which is just as well,’ she continued calmly, rising from her chair, ‘because, as I remember my mother, she could outmanage yours any day. And I understand that my father’s temper was usually at hurricane force. I really must be a throwback to a mild ancestor.’
‘You’re one surprise after another today,’ Steve said, wonderingly.
‘No, I just came to the conclusion that I’ve been existing in a vacuum for the last ten years. I’ll be damned if I’ll pull the hole in over my head again just because your mother’s coming.’
Steve blinked at her uncertainly. Then his face cleared. He encircled her waist, holding her tightly against him. As he began to kiss her with rough passion, she realised two things: he wasn’t thinking of his mother and he wouldn’t think about either the coming visit or Mirelle’s threat. Only it wasn’t a threat: it was a promise. How would Steve handle that? In bed?’
That night, the hands came back into her dreams, more clearly, more insistently, with the tugging and clawing, the restless fingers nipping just short of her precarious perch, wherever that was, until one strong hand grabbed her shoulder out of the threateningly vague background. She was shaken and shaken until reality overthrew the miasma of dream and the hand, accompanied by Steve’s urgent voice, woke her to the next morning.
12
THE DEPRESSION EVOKED by the nightmare stayed with her, intruding with uneasy flashbacks through the business of getting breakfast and shooing the children off to school.
Steve had come down in fine spirits, all set up after the previous night’s passion. He called her a sleepyhead, cheerfully leered at her, and failed to notice her subdued mood. He kissed her a lingering goodbye, bopping her jaw tenderly, and left her, emitting an irritatingly lively whistle.
It hadn’t been lack of satisfaction in sex last night, Mirelle thought, trying to counteract her depression. Steve had made rather inspired love and she had responded gladly. In fact, Mirelle told herself, she ought to be reassured by his passionate embraces, particularly on a day when he’d heard from his mother. Maybe, and it was just possible, this time he would align himself with his wife.
No, Mirelle decided, her depression stemmed from those damned nightmarish hands. Maybe she ought to get a book on dream interpretations, particularly since she had ones that played back all the time. She sighed and poured herself another cup of coffee.
Why couldn’t Steve have been an orphan, too? In the early days of their marriage, before they’d made that disastrous move to Allentown, they’d been so happy and she’d been able to kid with him the way she could with Jamie.
Mirelle smiled to herself, remembering those courting days. She’d been doing display figures, models of Broadway stars for a music store window, advertising record albums of the popular hit shows. Scarcely the sculpting she’d intended to do, but, after Murph had died, there hadn’t been any more money for training. She’d taken whatever work she could get, and was at least lucky to be doing some form of sculpting.
Wouldn’t Murph have made mincemeat of Mother Martin? Mirelle snickered, imagining such a confrontation. Wow! would the sparks have flown! Mary Murphy, to quote herself, was ‘knee high to a w
hiskey bottle and weaned on one’. She and Mary Margaret LeBoyne had been born and raised in Naas, had loved each other as only kindred souls could. They were as opposite as the supple birch and the hardy gorse, but they understood each other perfectly. When Mary Margaret LeBoyne had been launched in her music career, she’d sent for Mary Murphy to join her. Murph had stayed with Mary until they’d quarreled over Mary’s marriage to Edward Barthan-More.
‘Your mother made more than one mistake, m’dearie,’ Murph had once told Mirelle. ‘But she’d her heart that set on security! She’d seen the desperate mess others made of spending while the money rolled in, and dying in the gutter when the career vanished. Oh, I grant you, Edward was in love with her . . . like he was with all the things he owned. A greedy man was Edward, and desperate greedy for Mary Margaret. He bound her to him in bands of his gold respectability, you might say.
‘Now mind, your mother wasn’t the gilded cage sort. I think that’s why your own father attracted her so. The free artistic spirit, I believe he would say,’ and while Murph had not approved of Edward Barthan-More, she was even more opposed to Lajos Neagu. ‘Still, Lou had that about him would have kept your mother free, and like as not, she’d’ve been singing till she died. Real singing, not that forced social stuff. The Red Lark of Ireland she was, darlin’, and when she was happy, oh, how her voice would soar.’
The oasis of calm and contentment with Murph had been shattered by Mary LeBoyne’s death in an air raid. The news had come in a very curt note from Barthan-More’s secretary, with a request that, as soon as Mary LeBoyne Barthan-More’s personal estate had been settled, no further communication would be tolerated between the house of Barthan-More and his wife’s irregular relation.
Murph had not been one for hiding from life’s more callous blows and she had not shielded the teenaged Mirelle from this one. Her indignation had been scathing and she had written a scorching reply to Barthan-More, announcing her intention of legally adopting Mary Ellen LeBoyne. A small packet of jewels and a bank draft eventually arrived with no accompanying note. After much deliberation and considerable thought, Murph and Mirelle decided to sell the more valuable pieces of jewelry, using the funds to put Mirelle through a good art school. And, when the war was over, perhaps additional training abroad.
Murph’s terminal illness took the reminder of those savings. Mirelle was only sorry that she had spent so carelessly during her schooldays.
Despite her excellent intentions and repeated promises, Murph never did set in train the legal formalities of adoption.
Mirelle was twenty-three when Steve Martin happened down Madison Avenue as she was arranging the display in the store windows. He had stood watching her until his interested stare got on her nerves. His expression was a combination of hopeful boyishness and cynical pessimism. As he was a tall, attractive young man, she’d been flattered despite her annoyance. His attempts to attract her attention had also drawn the typical New York crowd of the bored and curious.
When she had finally arranged the display according to the draft layout, he’d applauded loudly, and pressed his face against the glass, inviting her to coffee at the top of his lungs. She’d shaken her head disdainfully, all too aware of the delighted spectators. Steve had made a pantomine of a breaking heart, much like the male figure which she had just edged into a slightly more aesthetic angle. Then Steve had dropped to one knee, in full sight of the amused audience. Horrified, Mirelle had motioned him frantically to get up and go away. To her surprise he did so, shoulders drooping, expression lugubrious with rejection. He’d been so funny. However, as she stepped out of the window in the store proper, there was Steve, leaning against the wall, grinning at his deceit.
She had absolutely no intention of doing more than drink a cup of coffee with him, but he’d left with her name and phone number. She had had no idea, either, of getting serious about anyone. She’d planned her life. She was going to amount to something. Marriage had stifled her mother’s career. Marriage was not going to have a chance to ruin hers. Yes, Mirelle had had many plans, and not one of them included a phenomenon like Steven Martin. A year later they were married. While Steve went to college, Mirelle worked. She was five months pregnant with Roman when Steve, overwhelmed by his new responsibilities, took a job in his home town.
Then things started to fall apart, reflected Mirelle. All in the name of mother-love.
Her previous contacts with Steve’s family had been mercifully short, confined to long weekends when everyone had been delighted to meet Steve’s stunning, if foreign-looking, wife who was so good about working to help Steve get his degree. There had been slight doubts whether or not Mirelle should have got pregnant so soon, ‘with so many modern theories about’, as Mother Martin had sweetly put it. The crowning blow had been her inheritance and that had torn down the veil of hypocrisy. Mirelle was sourly informed that she had ‘stolen’ Steve away from Nancy Lou Randolph (whose father owned the largest hardware store in town), who was everything a wife for a young up-and-coming salesman could be (particularly one who would work in papa’s store).
Steve, insecure enough and wanting his parents’ approval, had not known how to deal with his mother’s unexpected reversals and accusations. He had been proud of Mirelle: viewed his imminent fatherhood as the outward display of his other achievements, and now Mirelle had brought shame on him and his family. He had tried to defend his wife at first, but his mother’s strong personality, her infallible belief in her own judgements, and a long habit of obedience made him a poor advocate for Mirelle.
The estrangement that followed had not been all Steve’s fault. Mirelle could see that now. Because of the guilt which she’d always been made to feel over her irregular birth in the Barthan-More nursery, Mirelle had acquiesced at just the time when she should have continued to fight. In the first place, she’d been stunned by the bequest, since she’d never had any communication with Lajos Neagu, though Mary Murphy had told her that he knew of her birth. She was sick with her first pregnancy and bitterly hurt by her parents-in-laws’ violent reaction to the ‘notoriety’. Mirelle never did think that there’d been any more than the natural curiosity of people when they heard of someone inheriting money. The way Mother Martin had carried on suggested that Mirelle was going to be forced to wear a scarlet letter, or run out of Allentown on a rail.
Well, such thoughts were not clearing the breakfast table. Mirelle ruefully reflected that yesterday’s lovely mood was completely dissipated. ‘Had I felt like that today, I’d’ve overthrown the shadows of five mothers-in-law,’ she said aloud as she rose.
‘Mothers-in-law?’ asked Sylvia, whirling in the door. ‘Oh, you are lazy today. I expected to find you elbow-deep in someone’s head.’
‘No, I’m recovering from the shock of hearing that my in-laws arrive on the 10th.’
‘Eeek! What vile timing. And if your mother-in-law is anything like my mother . . . Really, I can’t blame G.F.,’ Sylvia rattled on as she helped Mirelle stack the dishes. ‘Oh, dear,’ and she nearly dropped the cups she had just nested. ‘She’s the one who doesn’t want you artistic?’
Mirelle nodded, grimacing.
‘And she’ll be here during the Bazaar?’ Sylvia made an unhappy sound against her teeth. ‘Well, coffee is indicated and we’ll kick this around a little.’
‘I know what I’d like to kick around.’
‘Naughty, naughty. Respect for the aged and decrepit, please. We will take steps. Yes. We will plan a campaign. Say, what was Steve’s reaction to the impending invasion?’
‘Well,’ and Mirelle could feel herself blushing as memories of the previous night’s bedgames came to mind.
‘That’s using your head, gal,’ Sylvia said with a bawdy laugh. ‘You’re one up on his mother right there.’
‘Sylvia, don’t be so earthy.’
‘Why not? It gets me somewhere. At any rate, Mirelle, what was his reaction? To his mother’s coming, I mean.’
Mirelle explained.
> ‘You said “in-laws”. What about Papa?’
‘Oh, Dad Martin is very nice but he gave up struggling against Marian years ago.’
‘Course of least resistance? Did he take part in holding the bar sinister over your head?’
‘No,’ Mirelle grudgingly admitted. On the other hand, Dad Martin hadn’t said anything or done anything, just stood there in the dining-room on the night of the worst vituperation, listening to his wife and daughter-in-law.
‘This will be my Cause for December,’ said Sylvia, rubbing her hands together. ‘I’ve given up putting Christ back into Christmas. They were displaying Christmas wrappings in the drugstore before Hallowe’en. That’s the end!’
‘Sylvia, I don’t want you to do anything . . .’ Mirelle stopped abruptly.
‘Now, my dear, have you ever known me to do anything,’ Sylvia began, all charm and guile.
‘Yes.’
‘All right, all right. Look, I promise I’ll be very cumspect but play along with me.’
‘Only if you tell me what you plan to do.’
Sylvia regarded her with a deceptively innocent expression. ‘“There are nine and sixty ways of singing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.” If I may quote Kipling?’
‘Not in front of my mother-in-law. She’s reactionary.’
‘I don’t doubt it. Look, I can’t stay any longer this morning. I’ve got an endless boring organisational meeting. Are you going to get in any work at all today?’
‘No, I think I’ll take the day off and get squared away for the coming invasion.’
Sylvia dashed off, leaving Mirelle feeling not only slightly breathless but considerably dubious about any confrontation between her good friend and her bad mother-in-law. However, Sylvia’s visit had dispelled the last of the nightmare’s gloom, and Mirelle finished the necessary tidying. She took down the curtains in the boys’ rooms to be cleaned for the state visit. She dropped them off in the dry cleaners in town on her way to the one fish market that she trusted and ran into a traffic jam. She took the first street and drove back-ways until she got out to the highway again.
The Year of the Lucy Page 16