Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  Then he was back in the darkness of their bedroom, and Peg, searching blindly, suicidally, for oblivion, was calling out to him from the edge of the abyss of that oblivion, "Brad —Brad—"

  ***

  Hunter Travis, during the course of his story to David and Sara about the problems of the Willis marriage, had worked his way from standing position to chair and from chair to floor, where he sat now, cross-legged, with his back against one of the fluted columns that supported the mantel.

  "That's the way it has been," he said. "And apparently that's the way it still is. Judging by that phone call a while ago."

  "Dora expressed it," said David. "It's not fair."

  "What is?" said Hunter. "If it's unfair to Brad—and what in hell do you think life is, anyway, a cricket game?—it's equally unfair to Peg. She didn't ask for her parents. Didn't handpick them. Only some chaotic, cosmic chance handed her a good man for a father and a shrew for a mother. Of different races, yet."

  He walked over to Sara, who was sitting stiff and unsmiling, still at the table, kissed her lightly on the top of her head. "And you, my jolly little crumpet, want me to write cheerful books? 'Hopeful,' wasn't it? Hopeful is the word for Hunter." He patted her shoulder, said, "Cheers, kiddies—" and was gone.

  After a long silence Sara said, "I don't like prophets of doom."

  "No," said David quietly. He did not look at her. "They're not popular. But the odds that they're right are so damned high, Sara. Too damned high to fool with."

  CHAPTER 44

  Joseph Champlin was singing, a little flat and enough off-key to have distressed his grandson, but with considerable verve. He finished "Move the Body Over" and slipped into "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" with no apparent strain. Now and then he stopped to taste the turtle stew he was cooking for dinner or to peer through the windows over the kitchen sink at darkly threatening skies, shaking his head in distress each time. Being a lawyer, he thought, hadn't put a lick of sense in that young limb of a grandson when it came to carrying an umbrella. Wouldn't do it when he was growing up, wouldn't do it now; wouldn't even do it up there in Boston when the snow had been coming down as Li'l Joe Champlin had never thought it ever could come down except in moving pictures. Hardheaded as a mule, and sure to catch a fresh cold it he didn't use some sense.

  Li'l Joe deliberately tried to keep his mind on his cooking and on his grandson's imminent danger of getting soaked to the skin if he didn't get home from the Prof's soon. He had arrived home the day before for a visit and taken off that afternoon to see the Prof. Li'l Joe's mind had been troubled ever since the boy had arrived, but now he was trying not to let his thoughts wander in the worrisome area of his grandson's evident unhappiness.

  And definitely he didn't want to let his mind dwell now on what he was sure was the reason for it. You can help a young un before something happened, he told himself, by trying to tell him about trouble; after it had happened a man couldn't do much about it, and it sure wasn't right to make it worse by saying "I told you so." God knew, he'd tried to tell David, and the boy had heard and agreed. But that had been a long while back. Li'l Joe reflected that it had been a long time since he himself had been young; he'd had a mother to help him, but no daddy. He had tried to be both to David. But a man could talk himself hoarse for all the good it would do with a young un, when the sap was just beginning to rise and a woman with the right combination came along. Only, it shouldn't have been a white woman. No, Lawd! That was all wrong; that was trouble, and there wasn't anything he had he wouldn't give to make it different. Maybe she wasn't what you'd call a woman when David had met her, but she was by the time Li'l Joe Champlin had met her, up there in the North, visiting his grandson. Just a little piece of a woman at that, no bigger'n than the twelve-year-old Timmins girl across the street, but a woman just the same, and white as the Timmins girl was black. I knew, he thought now, I knew the minute she walked through the door how things were and how they'd been. When she was just standing there, inside the door, looking at David and David looking at her, I knew. And I've been knowing ever since that there was trouble coming, trouble coming and nothing to do about it, like standing on a sidewalk watching a truck come down on someone when you couldn't stop it, like it would have been standing on the sidewalk seeing the truck coming that crushed the boy's leg.

  Not that she wasn't a fine young woman, for all she was white. There wasn't anything to fault her on as a woman, anything at all. Excepting that David loved her, she'd have been as fine and pretty a piece as a man could want, but now there wasn't anything to do but wait for the trouble the boy'd been asking for. And some of it must have come already. He could see it in the boy's eyes and hear it in his voice; smell it as he watched the boy walk down the path, just as tall and straight and fine as ever, but different, somehow. He could smell it, too, in the boy's silences around the house, and sense it in the click of a lamp being turned on, sounding loud in the dark silent hours after midnight.

  Li'l Joe sighed. He had stopped singing, had let his mind go where he didn't want it to go, and he moved quietly around the kitchen, sampling the stew, cocking his head on one side like a sparrow to listen to the rice and make sure that it was done before uncovering it. Dinner was almost ready, and he picked a saucer from a shelf, took a piece of kidney from the refrigerator and cut it expertly into small pieces. "Time to feed the stock," he said, and went to the back door, whistling softly until a black-and-white cat appeared from nowhere and bounded past him into the kitchen. "Where y'all been, Chop-bone? Seems like you old enough to be bringing something home, 'stead of having to be fed.

  Three years—that's a good age for a cat." He put the dish on the floor, grinned at the cat's soft mew, said, "You're sure welcome," and walked into his living room just as his grandson and the rain arrived simultaneously.

  "Hi, Gramp! You and Chop-bone save me some dinner?"

  "Chop-bone ain't saving nothing except for hisself. You been running ahead of that storm? Go close them windows in your room. You ain't never going to learn, is you? What you think umbrellas is for?"

  "Keep the sun off, Gramp. What else? Made it, didn't I?"

  At dinner David said, "Gramp, am I imagining things or does the Prof look bad? Thin and all?"

  Li'l Joe hesitated, then said: "No, son. I don't think you're imagining. I been seeing it. When you see a man two, three times a week you don't take so much notice. But when he come back from that trip over the water, that's when I seen it. You notice it when he stopped off there in Boston?"

  David shook his head. "No. Or at least not much. Thought he looked tired, but he'd been doing a lot of traveling. And we kept him pretty busy there."

  "He told me. He was mighty happy when he come back, seeing you there, meeting Mr. Willis and all. And seeing what was left of his folks in Denmark. Had himself a time, the Prof did. Sure glad for him."

  David grinned, remembering Knudsen's arrival in Boston several weeks before. He had burst without warning, like a summer storm, through the Abernathy, Willis and Shea door, sending Dora into a wide-eyed bolt to the cubbyhole that had been David's temporary office since receiving his degree. "David! There's a man out there twelve feet tall with a red beard and he wants you!"

  "My God, the Prof! I thought he was in Denmark—" And David had followed her into the reception hall, and for a few moments there was a loud chaos of greeting and questioning; then from behind them a voice had said, "Professor Knudsen?" and David turned to see Brad hurrying toward them from his office.

  "Ja!" said the Professor, and bowed. "This is Mr. Willis. I know him well," and their hands met, both men laughing.

  The Professor had unknowingly timed his visit for the right moment. Peg Willis was not only sober but less nervous than usual; Chuck Martin was in town for a few days, staying with David. Even Tom Evans was there, taking a summer course at Harvard, looking no older than he had at Pengard in spite of a master's degree and two years of teaching at a women's college in Vermont. And Sara. She had b
een there, and then she had been gone.

  "We all had ourselves a time," said David now. "We ate, drank, and were merry as hell for almost a week. He loved it. And I took him to the church in Roxbury the day before he left." He laughed suddenly. "He stopped the show with 'Yesus Knows My Name.' Made me mad every time I thought about you only being gone a few days before he got there."

  "Next time," said Gramp, but he said it without conviction. More than most men, more than his young grandson, he knew the look of finality, could recognize a face and eyes eternity was touching. When a man was growing older, he thought, seemed like the good Lord didn't spare him none. Seemed like his grief was multiplied, seeing his friends who'd been beside him on the road forge ahead toward the horizon, while he'd still be hearing the young uns coming up behind, stumbling, sometimes crying out in pain, and he couldn't turn back. All he could do was warn 'em of the drop of the cliff at the roadside, and the steep places waiting around the turns. He couldn't walk with them and steady them, and that was a grief.

  After the dinner dishes were washed, David stretched out on the divan, feeling lazy. Gramp came in, dressed for the street. "You going out, Gramp?"

  "Got a job of work, son. Playing at a dance."

  "Gramp, you shouldn't. Damn it, the doctor said a good night's rest every night. We don't need money that much."

  "Shucks, son, far as money goes I got no worries. 'Specially not now, you finished school and all set. How much you think me 'n' Chop-bone can eat, all by ourselves here? And the house free and clear. I puts away more'n half of what I makes every week. Been doing it. How you think I been able to come up there and see you and all? You want to know something? I ain't even applied for my social security yet."

  "Be damned. I thought you had."

  "Man can only earn so much is he getting social security. I'm doing way better than that. And that doc's O.K. and I ain't saying different, but he don't know that playing a gig a couple, three times a week's keeping me young. You ought to know that. You're a musician, too."

  "Yes," said David. "Sure. I can see it, when you put it that way. But if you're all that rich you can lay off work for a day after you've played at night. I'll settle for that."

  "I does, son. I does. When I feels like it."

  After a minute David grinned. The years hadn't changed things much. Gramp could still rile him. Hardheaded old character.

  "O.K., Gramp. O.K. Just take it easy." He raised his voice. "Wear your rubbers and take an umbrella, y'hear!"

  ***

  When Brad ordered him to take a vacation, David wondered if the older man had been motivated solely by his concern for a young junior's "rest," or if he had sensed more than the normal fatigue and letdown after intensive study and examinations. Looking back over it now, David supposed he'd been part of the firm ever since the first time he'd stopped in to pick up work, right after the evening he and Culbertson had spent at the Willis home. Yet when Brad said: "We've only got that little room where we keep the old files, David. Think you can make out in it until the firm next door moves and we can expand?" David felt his knees go rubbery, knew he was grinning like a five-year-old at the circus who's just been given a horn of cotton candy. Ever since that first student year there had been more and more work to do, and when he graduated from clerical work to precedents he had used the big law library at the office, with its rich smell of law and leather and its huge Oriental rug, a present from Mrs. Abernathy, sixty years before. Later still they moved a small desk in there for him. Now when he returned there would be—Jesus have moicy!—an office of his own. Brad had told the Prof about it. "The next time you visit us, Professor," he said, "your boy's name will be on that door."

  There had been something suspiciously like moisture in the Prof's blue eyes. Perhaps that should have tipped him off that the big man was under par. The Prof was due for a sabbatical next year. David decided to make a stab at getting him to spend some of it in Boston where he could keep an eye on him, see that he got some rest, even put him through the Sutherland Clinic.

  When David came to the office the day before the Prof left for New Orleans, he was greeted by Dora's statement: "Your Wiking is with Mr. Villis." Probably, David thought, instructing Brad on the care and feeding of David Champlin, and smiled at the knowledge of how angry he would be if it were anyone but the Professor.

  Waiting at the airport the next day for a delayed plane to New Orleans, Knudsen said: "It is a good feeling for me, David. From Li'l Joe to Knudsen to Willis—a double play. I am proud of you and at ease in my mind. I have no worries."

  "It's not from Knudsen to Willis," said David. "You're the one who started it; you and Gramp are still top dogs."

  "First the apprenticeship, eh? First you learn how to apply the law that is in your head, to make it work. After that?"

  "Well, I've been thinking for a long time, ever since my first year in law school, that sometime I'd like to take a year off and read political science and international law at Oxford. Hell, I know it sounds crazy—"

  "Did it not sound crazy when I first said you would go to college?"

  "Yes. But this sounds even crazier. And I think, I hope, the firm would keep my chair warm for. me. And I have to save enough money—"

  "International law? This I did not expect. But crazy—no —it is not crazy if you want to do it. I will help—" David remembered that he had stopped then, in midsentence.

  "I think I can make it. But if I can't, I'll ask. Now that I've got an income and can pay back. So keep your blood pressure down, Prof. I won't refuse help if I need it. And it's still just an idea."

  But this afternoon, the first time David had seen the Prof since that day at the airport, he did not bring up the matter of Oxford. He was quieter than David had ever known him to be, his talk reminiscent, oddly gentle. Only when he was leaving did David see the old, explosive Prof. At the door, an arm around David's shoulder, Knudsen had boomed: "Ja! I know now why those who have children say death is not so bad, because there is continuity. My friend, Joseph Champlin, lives in you, and I live in your mind—and we will both live in your children: There does not have to be a blood relationship. You will name one of them Bjarne, no?"

  They had laughed together. "A brown 'Bjarne,' Prof? My God!"

  David was relieved that the Professor had not brought up the matter of Oxford and further studies in international law. He was glad to be off the hook of explanation. Because, had the Prof probed, as only he could, his probe would have opened wide a wound—and revealed Sara.

  ***

  It had been a small wound at first, a surface thing, like the initial incision of a surgeon over an operative site, made a week before Christmas the first year he was at law school. Sara was going home to spend die holiday with her father and her sister and the twin nephews. David had wanted Gramp to come to Boston, but the first heavy fall of snow had changed his mind. He could see Gramp, a small brown icicle, probably frozen immobile on a street corner, and decided to go home instead. Gramp had assured him there would be enough money if he ran short. There seemed to be some inexhaustible hoard somewhere that Gramp could always tap if it was a case of a reunion or a long-distance telephone call, but which suddenly dwindled to a few pathetic pennies at a too high gas bill or an assessment. He didn't argue about it anymore. If he refused the extra money to come home on, Gramp would just spend it on a ticket north to visit him.

  A few days before he left, he went up to Sara's studio. She was sitting on the couch, wrapping packages. "David. If there was more money you could fly to Chicago first, on the way home, and see my twins." She looked around her at the gaily wrapped gifts, and moaned. "Where am I going to put them all!"

  "I don't suppose the twins would mind."

  She was too engrossed to catch his emphasis on "twins" immediately. He wondered why in hell he had said it; he ought to steer clear of those shoals. Then, a pink-and white plush rabbit in her hand, she had looked around quickly at him.

  "What do you mean—
the twins?"

  Let it lie, Sara; for God's sake let it lie, but then he heard himself going ahead, heard his own voice say, "Only that they're young enough to be color blind." It would always be like this, always, this involuntary transference of pain. And that she could not see, or did not want to see, the existence of any problem was one of the goads that set him off. It was kind to call it naïveté, more honest to call it blindness.

  She let the rabbit drop to the couch where it lay, flop-eared and ridiculous, among the gay wrappings, the bright ribbons and rosettes. "That doesn't speak well for the rest of my family."

  "Do you think they'd hire a band to welcome me?"

  "They didn't hire a band to meet my sister's husband, either, when he was still her finance. Took a damned dim view of him, they did."

  "Oh, for God's sake, Sara! Face facts, just once."

  "David, I told you, last spring at Pengard, that my father knew I was in love with you even before you knew it."

  "You didn't tell me then when I asked you, and you won't tell me now, but I am going to ask anyhow. Was he happy about it?"

  "No, Stoopid! And I did tell you. He wasn't happy and he wouldn't have been if you'd been the Prince of Wales. No father is 'happy' about a daughter's boy friend. Especially if he thinks it's serious."

  "You begged the question then and you're begging it now. Suppose I said, 'O.K., Sara. I'll go to Chicago and be introduced to your family. I'll even spend Christmas there.' Suppose I did? What would your reaction be? Your first move? Want me to tell you?"

  "All right. You know so damned much about it. Suppose you tell me."

  "To warn them."

  "Warn them?"

  "Yes. To write a letter and say, 'Dear Daddy—'"

  "I don't call my father 'Daddy.' I call him Father—"

  "O.K., a minor point. 'Dear Father—here I come, ready or not, with my Negro boy friend, and please be nice and tell the rest of the family and the neighbors to be nice—' "