A Father for Philip

by Gill, Judy Griffith

  But someone else had stopped her, Eleanor reflected as she sat there in the rose arbor on that cool April evening nearly eight years later. Her son... Her son and David’s, had stopped her—and then it was too late.

  She could still bring back the wonder of that late August afternoon when David had come upon her grubbing in the roots of the scraggly little rosebushes at the foot of the arbor. They had been married a four months and already she thought she knew every nuance of his voice, every expression of his face; but today there was something different, a special tenderness, a deeper timber in his tone and the suppressed excitement as he laughed at her labors, saying, “Never in a million years, sweetheart, will those roses cover that wood. You planted them at the wrong time of year.” The slats of the arbor were raw and unplaned, stark in their newness, glaring yellow again as the backdrop of leafy poplars.

  Eleanor smiled up at him. “You’ll see, my love. They’ll grow.”

  He had drawn her to her feet and kissed her then, and hand-in-hand they had ambled over the little brook, past the back of the farmhouse and into the dark forest to the little glade where they’d first met. And that day, in that glade, with all the wildly sweet passionate love between them, they had created life...

  And David Philip Jefferson had never laid eyes upon Philip David Jefferson, for that afternoon as they lay in each other’s arms on the thick, soft moss of their forest bed, David explained the excitement she’d seen in his face.

  He had been offered a year’s student-exchange position by the government of Ecuador. This would count as credits toward his doctorate in silviculture, and he wanted to accept. How did she feel about it?

  Eleanor’s excitement flared up, equal to his. Far-away places! This could just be the beginning. Of course he should take it. When did they leave?

  Though she felt grief at the thought of having to leave her father, it was only for a year, and the wonder of a life that would allow her to walk hand-in-hand with her husband through the forests of the world far outweighed that.

  “Sweetheart,” David said, there in the shade of their dogwood tree, “I leave tomorrow. All I need to do is call the program manager and let him know.”

  She hadn’t been able to hide her dismay. “Tomorrow?”

  “I know I should have told you sooner the possibility existed, but I was so afraid if there was time for discussion, your father would try to hold us back. You’ll have to stay until I can find place for us to live, but then I’ll send for you. It won’t be long,” he promised, his eyes filling with undisguised lust. “I can’t live long without you.”

  So Eleanor waved goodbye to her love the next morning, smiling for him, saving her tears for later. He had written long letters, for once there he had found that he must go far into the jungle for more training. He would send for her in three months when that phase of his training was completed. Just as his letters to her were full of love, so were hers to him and it was with joy that she wrote of her pregnancy even though it meant she was unable to travel just yet. She would be with him long before the baby was due, but if he could just be patient until the morning sickness was over...

  And there was a great deal of morning sickness, so much in fact that on the orders of Dr. Grimes, who’d delivered her and been her physician all her life, George had no difficulty moving Eleanor out of her small house and back to the farmhouse with him for the winter. “You don’t even have a phone down there,” he’d said. It was true. David hadn’t wanted one, saying they’d have a lot more privacy without one. If her dad wanted to talk to them, he’d have to walk down the hill from the farmhouse. Since she spent most of the day up there with him when David was at work, anyway, it didn’t bother her, and she liked his insistence on maintaining their life apart from her father as much as possible. The nights, after milking, other farm chores and dinner, belonged just to the two of them.

  It was there in the farmhouse kitchen that she stood as her father, with a grave face, read her the telegram that tore Eleanor’s world apart. David’s university professor in Ecuador was “sad to inform” her, David was missing with three others somewhere in the jungle. A search had been under way for more than a week, but little hope could be held for the safe return of the party. He wished her, most inexplicably, Feliz Navidad.

  At first she was inconsolable and her father grew more and more desperate as he realized at last the depth of the love his daughter had for the man who had wanted to take her from him. He tried to console her by saying “the boy” would return, that it could take weeks to travel only a short distance in the jungle, that all she had to do was have hope.

  Weeks passed with no word, then months, and as the time for the birth of her baby approached, George recognized the futility, not only to her, but to himself, of his preaching hope to the heartsick woman. He gave up trying to bolster her. She must begin to forget now, he told her, to live again for herself, for him, and for her unborn child. Her man was dead, and the sooner she quit moping and weeping for someone she could not bring back, the better would be for all of them.

  Eleanor pulled her grief inside herself, hid it away and got on with the business of becoming a mother. “You’re recovering, I can see,” her father had said one day when he came across her singing as she sewed clothes for her baby. “It’s for the best.”

  “I know, Dad. I don’t want to endanger David’s child.”

  “Your child,” he’d replied, his tone firm. “I reared you alone. You can raise yours the same way. You’ll be a better mother now you’ve accepted David’s death.”

  What George did not know, however, was that she had not accepted any such thing. His insistence that David was dead had lit within her a small spark of defiance of the fates. The tiny seed of hope in Eleanor’s heart had taken root, and grew daily into a strong healthy plant which, in spite of all odds, refused to die.

  Over the years, it stayed with her, day and night from every summer into each succeeding winter and grew higher every spring when the roses on the arbor spread their tendrils longer and farther. As her roses grew, determined hope filled her soul. The sweet-scented climbing roses eventually covered the entire structure as the wood grew gray with age and weather.

  Philip had been born on a gentle May morning just as the sun rose. Dr. Grimes and a midwife, for the sake of the old man more than the mother, who seem not to care, had agreed to deliver the child at home, rather than in the hospital. The nurse looked down the face of the new mother as she held her son for the first time. Tears ran down the pale cheeks and the nurse had to mop them up, asking kindly if there were something Mrs. Jefferson wanted. “I want to go home,” Eleanor had whispered.

  The other woman had patted her comfortingly. “What is this, if not your home?”

  Eleanor had no choice but to agree. The farmhouse was her home.

  It took three years and a further trauma, but not an unexpected one this time, for Eleanor to go home to her small house with her son. The day she laid her father to rest she packed up her belongings and Philip’s and carried them alone to the two-bedroom house David had built for them. She rented the farm and the house to Bill Robbins. She’d wanted only to hire him as a manager, but he wanted to be his own boss. That attitude pleased her and she agreed, knowing him to be hard-working and honest, and she truly had no interest herself in maintaining a dairy farm. She had a toddler to raise.

  Eleanor smiled, there in the dark rose arbor, as she remembered when life had been so difficult and yet so simple.

  Needing something to do, she’d returned to an old hobby—writing children’s stories. Only this time, she intended to make it more than just a pastime. She wanted not only to occupy her mind but to earn money apart from the rent Bill paid her. If she’d relied on her writing income for her living, though, she and Philip would surely have starved. It was the income from the rental of the farm, plus the fact that most of her foodstuffs were free, that had kept them going. Unfortunately, no one seemed interested in what she had to offe
r. They were good stories. This, Eleanor knew, yet she had been unable to find the one editor, the one firm of publishers out in the thousands available, who would see the value in her work. Then came Grant Appleton.

  Grant... Short, fair-haired, stocky and quick moving, a bulldog, a go-getter of a man, bought a seedy, rundown old mote; and turned it, with great determination, into a prosperous resort hotel by snapping up every available acre of land bordering it. With farming becoming less and less profitable, many farmers found their grown children moving away to make better lives for themselves and Grant cashed in on that trend. Marginal lands could be removed from the Agricultural Land Reserve if a developer went about it the right way, and Grant, apparently, did.

  Apart from the main hotel, he’d built what he advertised as honeymoon-cabins built in secluded cut-outs along narrow, winding roads through the wooded grounds, put in an artificial lake with a waterfall and meandering canals through the place, a massive swimming pool, a smaller one with waterslides, riding stables, trails, and an excellent restaurant.

  This last was where Eleanor came in.

  Grant appeared at the farm one day when the tenant farmer were out. He came, instead, to the cottage. He wanted a steady source of fresh fruits and vegetables in season, plus top quality dairy products, and someone had pointed him this way. Could they provide them? They could, and did, and Grant returned again and again.

  Eleanor welcomed his friendly visits in the evenings while her small son slept. She was, she had to admit, lonely, and he did play a mean game of cribbage. Her tenant, Bill Robbins, had just married at the time Grant came into her life, and she wanted to give him and his bride, Kathy, the privacy she and David had cherished. Though they repeatedly offered her and Philip meals and hospitality, Eleanor, more often than not, refused. She remembered the time she’d had with David, remembered how short it had been, and how much she had resented, in retrospect, having to share him.

  Grant, while she was tending to Philip one evening, picked up a few of the printouts she’d been correcting, and began reading. “I like this,” he said when she returned to the living room. Though she considered his snooping an invasion of privacy, she forgave him when he added, “It’s really quite good, Ellie. Who have you sent it to, if anyone?” Eleanor explained her inability to interest anyone in her ideas and Grant said, “Let me send it to my brother. He’s publisher and editor of a house that puts out a limited number of books for schools... Not texts, but supplementary readers.”

  And at last Eleanor had her break. Frank Appleton, on Grant’s recommendation, had read her work, and Eleanor Bear, as she called herself, was launched with a short adaptation of a British Columbia First Nations legend, made suitable for and interesting to school children.

  The main difficulty in her friendship with Grant, right from the outset, had been his inability to get along with Philip. He called Philip spoiled, which he was not. A crybaby, which he was not. He frequently claimed that all the child needed was someone to teach him to act like a man.

  “What three-and-a-half-year-old child needs to act like a man?” Eleanor had asked indignantly.

  When Philip started kindergarten at the age of five, Eleanor was left on her own all morning. Grant, who by then had the hotel operating in such a manner that he could periodically leave it in the capable hands of his managers, started trying to make her see him as more than a casual friend.

  “Ellie,” he said, “you’ve got to give up on the guy. If he had been going to come back, he’d have done it years ago. It’s no good hanging onto the past. I’m here. And I want you.”

  She had to admit his kisses made her feel warm and that a few mild twinges of what could be desires rose up when he held her. She began accepting small gifts, lunch and dinner dates, and the odd antiquing trek. It was easier to do so than to argue, but she would not accept the ring he wanted to give her last Christmas.

  “I can’t, Grant. I’m married,” she pointed out gently.

  “Then get unmarried!” he’d cried. “For heaven’s sake, Ellie, neither of us is getting any younger. Grant was nearly forty—she, twenty-six at the time. “And not only that, the kid needs a father.”

  “I can’t get unmarried,” she replied, taking no notice of the rest of his speech. “If you’re talking of divorce, I have no grounds.”

  “How about desertion?”

  “Not good enough for me. I don’t know that I’ve been deserted. There could be any number of reasons David hasn’t come back.”

  “Name one,” he’d challenged, his blue eyes filled with anger.

  “Amnesia?”

  “Pfft!” he scoffed. “If he’s alive, which I doubt, he’s made a new life for himself somewhere. You need to do the same.”

  “I don’t choose to, Grant.” And that, she knew, was the crux of the matter. She kept David alive in her heart, her mind, because she chose to. Maybe if someone had come along and she’d felt more for him than she did for Grant, she’d give up what she admitted privately was surely a futile hope. But no one had..

  He rammed a blunt-fingered hand into his blond hair, sending the usually firmly controlled waves into disarray. “Dammit, I want to marry you, Ellie!” He shook her by the shoulders in his rage and frustration. “Let the past go!”

  “I can’t marry you or anyone,” she argued, wrenching herself out of his ungentle grasp, “while I have a husband.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Maybe... But my heart tells me he’s not. The law says I must wait seven years to be sure.” That law could be overridden if there was adequate reason to believe in the demise of the missing person, but she—again, she knew this was an arbitrary choice on her part—did not want to ask for an exception.

  Grant ignored the part about the law and pounced again, having heard the small element of doubt in her tone. “Oh, Ellie, let your heart tell you to belong to me. Let me look after you. Nowadays most couples aren’t married. We could just move in to—”

  “Grant!” She cut him off. “I don’t want to move in with you. I don’t want you to move in with me. Even if I loved you and I don’t think I do, not enough, anyway, I couldn’t do that. I have Philip to think about. What kind of message would I be sending him morally, if I lived with a man I wasn’t married to?”

  “It would be none of his business.”

  “None of his business? How can you say that? He’s my child. He goes where I go. He lives where I live. I would not put him into the position of having to explain his mother’s living arrangements to his friends at school.”

  “Then we’ll send him away to school,” Grant said carelessly. “I mean, if he starts to ask questions.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Eleanor stared at him in disbelief. “I will never send my son to live somewhere else for any reason at all unless he wants to go, such as when he’s an adult and wants to make his own way in life.”

  To her surprise, Grant ceased arguing. “All right, all right, so that was a poor idea. I—It’s just that I want you and you haven’t really tried to get over your past love. I think if the kid wasn’t around as a constant reminder you might find it easier to forget.”

  “Forget? I don’t imagine I’ll ever forget.”

  “But you must, Ellie, because if you don’t, you’ll never give yourself a chance to move on and learn to love me. First love?” Again, he made a disparaging sound. “First love’s like a dream. It’s hard for a living man to compete with, but I know I can convince you the present, the future, will be better than any past you so fondly recall.”

  “I don’t think it’s just that first love is hard to compete with, Grant, think there should be more to what I feel for you. Maybe when the seven years are up if there’s been no word I’ll think about it again. But if you don’t want to hang around waiting, that’s okay, too. I understand. Maybe you’re the one who needs to move on. I realize it’s not fair to you, having to wait, now I know you want more than friendship.”

  He had quit pushing her fo
r an answer then, and the last year had been peaceful and companionable. They got along well on all but the subject of her son. They dined at his restaurant—he liked showing her off, he said. They drove occasionally into the city for the theater, which both enjoyed, or opera, which he loved and she tolerated. On those trips, she insisted on separate hotel rooms and Grant gave in grudgingly. They danced, skied, and rode horseback on the riding trails winding through his resort and continued the friendship she enjoyed.

  But for all that, Grant’s treatment of Philip remained a real bone of contention..

  When, in December, just four months ago, the seven years without word of David had been completed, Grant had started again. And not only did he push Eleanor for a decision, he leaned heavily on Philip, too, trying to break him in, he said, for the upcoming marriage... A marriage to which Eleanor had not agreed.

  Poor Philip, Eleanor thought, swatting a mosquito. He can’t help being afraid of horses, and Grant is so darned impatient with him. The other day, when he picked him up and flung him into the saddle, Phil was terrified! I hated Grant in that moment, even though I knew he thought he was helping Philip get over his fear as well as teaching them a lesson.

  Eleanor rose and walked into the house. She tried to close the screen door quietly but, as always, it squeaked. She tiptoed into her child’s room and stood looking down at him in the dim light from the hallway.

  His brown hair, damp with perspiration, slicked to his forehead. His left foot and leg were outside the covers and she automatically tucked them in again, knowing that they would be out once more, in two minutes. Philip frowned and muttered something which sounded like, “Hate him.” He was talking in his sleep. Eleanor thought he must be dreaming about fighting with one of his schoolmates. She smiled gently at the frowning little face crushed against the pillow.

  Philip had finally stopped having nightmares, but still talked in his sleep occasionally. Dr. Grimes said bad dreams weren’t unusual, nor was talking in his sleep. He had done it last night, and the night before, too. The scare he’d had on the horse could be blamed for that. Eleanor closed the door gently behind herself and left her son to his dreams.