by Belva Plain
“She was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Cliff was saying.
Almost every word that had been spoken since yesterday had been a reminder for Charlotte. She thought now of the times Claudia had worried that Cliff must secretly regret the marriage that had brought him so much trouble.
Cliff gazed out into the dreary day and, for the third or fourth time, repeated his story; it was as if he had to prove that it was true, not a nightmare.
“I waited and waited. It was almost suppertime. And then Roy came home alone. I thought she would be coming along behind him, although usually it was Roy who fell behind. He’s getting old.… So I went to meet her. Then I thought, but I didn’t want to think, that something might have happened. And when I got there—where she was—there were people already there, cars and people. It’s all a mystery,” he finished, in a voice so low that it was hardly audible.
“No mystery,” Bill said gently. “It was her heart.”
“I mean the other stuff. The stuff that came—was it yesterday or the day before? I’ve lost track of time.”
“Ah, yes,” murmured Charlotte, as if to herself. It was all so strange. The big brown envelope had been hand delivered. Inside it, torn in half, was the lease for the Dawes property, with a signature scribbled out and a note: Sorry about Claudia. She had guts. You can put that on her tombstone. She had heart, she was smart, and she had guts.
“What was it all about?” cried Cliff.
“There’s no use speculating,” Bill said. “We’ll never know. Yesterday, after this came, I went down to talk to ‘the boss.’ Nobody was there except a couple of young pups who pretended not to know as much as his name.” Bill gave a short laugh. “Anyway, he wasn’t there. All I learned was that they’re closing down.”
“Cleaning it before they leave?” asked Charlotte.
“Don’t be silly. Of course not.”
“I have a feeling that it has something to do with her first husband,” Cliff said. “If there were things on her mind, why didn’t she tell me? I could have helped her. But then I suppose it’s natural for a woman not to talk to her second husband about her first.”
“You’re only guessing,” Bill said.
Charlotte was feeling a great sorrow. Obviously, Claudia had had a secret, something too painful to disclose. And she remembered how often Claudia had warned her not to “let anger eat you up.” She must have suffered some terrible injustice, some betrayal, some—
“I don’t want to pull you away,” Roger said as he rose from the kitchen table. “But this rain doesn’t seem to be slowing, and we’d better start.”
The two men stood in the doorway to watch the departure. They looked forlorn, as if they had no idea what was coming next, and indeed, they had no idea.
At the river’s curve Roger stopped the car. It was Saturday, and there was no sign of life at the mill.
Looking down at a scene of abandonment, Charlotte said only, “It’s amazing.”
“Surely is.”
He got out of the car and stood as if in thought, unmindful of the rain. Then he walked around to the back of the car and observed the far view. She wondered what he might be seeing, and when he returned, she asked him.
“It’s a good level piece of property,” he told her. “And the river frontage is nice.”
“It’ll be nice when somebody buys it. If no one does, it will go to foreclosure.”
“Whoever builds on it will have to build back from the river,” Roger said, as if he had not heard her. “Of course, it would take a pile of money. You’d need a tremendous group to get behind it.” Still talking, he released the brake and turned toward the highway. “That cryptic note about Claudia’s ‘guts,’ the whole business, is an enigma, isn’t it? A riddle inside a puzzle.”
Charlotte did not want to talk about it. And deftly, she changed the subject. Later she could not have said what it was that they talked about all the way to Boston, for her head had been filled with pictures, pictures of lavender chrysanthemums on Claudia’s grave, and of the two anxious men in the doorway, waving good-bye.
One day Roger telephoned her at work. He had never done so before, and she was startled by the summons from the drafting room to the telephone.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “although I haven’t mentioned anything about what your father calls your ‘pipe dream.’ Frankly, I’ve had to agree with him. But somehow or other my thinking’s changed a bit. Maybe it isn’t a pipe dream. Maybe it’s worth looking into.”
Charlotte was stunned. She herself had given up the idea, or at least, in following Pauline’s and Rudy’s always judicious advice, had resigned herself to putting it away until some unknown distant time and place. Now she did not welcome the resurrection of hopes that must only end again in disappointment.
“You yourself said that the cost would take one’s breath away,” she argued. “So there’s the chief obstacle right at the start. After that there’d be a hundred fights over zoning and the environment and God knows what else.”
“Am I hearing right? Is this really you, disclaiming your own baby? Listen, meet me tonight at the hamburger place down the street from your house. We need to talk about this.”
Talk would be futile. What was there left to say? The thing already had been talked to death. Nevertheless, when she arrived at the restaurant, she brought with her a rolled-up copy of her precious drawing.
“You know,” Roger began, “as we drove through Kingsley on the way to the cemetery and back, I got a pretty clear bird’s-eye view of the place. And it seemed to me that it’s ready, ripe and ready for just the sort of thing you originally had in mind. Of course, I personally—if you’ll forgive me, because I’m not an architect—would make a couple of changes. I would move the inn away from the activity, putting it back here with access to the main road.” His finger moved across the paper. “And here, where you want the open-air market, I would move it—”
“Aren’t you getting way ahead of yourself?” Charlotte interrupted. “You haven’t even mentioned obstacle number one. Money. Number one.”
“Dear architect, I’m way ahead of you. I talked to Uncle Heywood on Monday. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I thought.”
She laughed. “You actually pestered your uncle about Kingsley? A man who builds skyscrapers in Shanghai, for heaven’s sake?”
“That’s exactly the reason why I could talk to him, because the cost of your project wouldn’t make him blink an eye. It’s peanuts compared with the sums he sees.”
“Are you telling me you asked him to build it?”
“Well, not exactly. I—”
“Why would a firm like his be bothered with peanuts?”
“It wouldn’t. I asked him to help me build it. Me. Only me.”
Charlotte marveled, “Crazier and crazier, my friend.”
“Not crazy. Listen. Uncle Heywood—we call him that because there’s another uncle named James, and that gets confusing—had two sons who were killed in a car accident. They were his only children. Now all he has left are me, a nephew, and my sister and brother, who are younger. That’s why I work for him and why he helps me. What I’m asking him for now is guidance, advice, and contacts, but not money. Not a cent. I want to arrange my own loans and get everything moving. But naturally, I need to have something to show him before he’ll give me any advice.” Roger paused.
“Naturally,” she said, wondering whether there could possibly be any sense in all these words. He was such a level-headed person! But this sudden enthusiasm made her doubt. It was almost alarming. And yet …
“I told him that you worked for the Laurier firm. He knows their reputation, of course.”
“And I suppose you led him to think, without actually lying, that I was a full partner?”
Roger grinned. “No, although I didn’t say you were just graduated the day before yesterday either. But when he sees you and hears you, he’ll be impressed. No doubt of it.”
“Sees
me? What are you talking about?”
“I’m getting to the point. My idea is, if you’re willing, and I think you should be, that you and I take this drawing to him so you can explain it all in your own words.”
“You’re actually serious about this?”
“No, I only love to hear myself talk. So what about it? They have a summer house on Cape Cod. We could drive up on Saturday and get back here late Sunday.”
“I just don’t know what to say.”
Roger grinned at her again. “That’s odd. You generally have plenty to say.”
“Okay, I’ll say yes.”
“Bring a bathing suit, Uncle said.”
“He sounds like a nice guy.”
“He is. Sharp as steel, but nice. And so is my aunt Flo.”
At the office Charlotte asked Pauline what she thought of it all.
“I think the man is in love with you, that’s what.”
“I don’t know. What if he is? What’s that got to do with this?”
Pauline sighed. “You are the strangest—I can’t even find a word for you. But you’re right. It doesn’t have anything to do with this. No man would be stupid enough to suggest a worthless project to James Heywood, no matter whose project it was. So who knows? This may be the miracle you dreamed about. You’ll soon see. If nothing comes of it, you will have had a nice weekend, anyway.”
The original house, standing among locusts and pitch pines, was a hundred years old, with new wings so perfectly matched to it that only a person familiar with history would know that they had not always been there. A sandbank, plunging to a narrow beach below, lay between it and the bay, which on that late afternoon was smooth as a pond.
The two men had been working for the last hour with pencil and paper at a long table on the terrace, while the two women worked at friendly, polite conversation.
Charlotte strained to hear what the men were saying. Immersed now in the mathematics of finance and banking, they had passed beyond her ken. The business of raising capital was in other hands. But she had presented her part of the case to her own satisfaction. James Heywood had been attentive and even complimentary, which, she saw at once, was not the usual manner of this obviously laconic man.
“Roger tells me you know a good deal about land regeneration,” Heywood remarked to her.
“Trying to learn,” she said. “It’s one of the things they’re certainly stressing these days.”
He nodded. “Well, you do have a vision here. Frankly, I like it. Your people at Laurier’s firm must think they have a find in you,” he added with a smile. “However, I don’t want to give any false encouragement. This, if it’s to come about, will be my nephew’s first venture entirely on his own, and before I advise him to take on any risk, I am certainly going to have a team of experts go over every single possibility. I’ll send our chief engineer, Cooper, up before the end of the month to look over the property. If he and a few others give the okay, then the rest will be up to Roger. I don’t know where the devil you’re going to find the money, Roger, but if you can do it, I’ll take my hat off to you.”
“I believe I can do it,” Roger said quietly.
“I understand that the owners—what is your father’s name, Charlotte? Dawes? Yes. Well, with these troubles they’re having, you could be walking into a minefield, you know.”
“I’m aware of that,” Roger said.
“Not that I want to discourage you either. I’m just pointing out the facts. You’d need good lawyers right from the start. I suppose you’d be going to our old reliable Buckley?”
“No, Uncle. Since I’m on my own, I want to be on my own all the way. I’ve a couple of friends who’ve started their own firm. I have confidence in them.”
Charlotte saw a secret satisfaction in the older man’s smile. Plainly, he was pleased with Roger’s independence. And it seemed to her that this was a fine omen.
“Well, good luck to the venture,” Heywood concluded. “Now shall we go in to dinner?”
“There’s no reason why you people should hurry back to the city at the crack of dawn tomorrow, is there?” Roger’s aunt had inquired. “It’s Sunday, and you might as well enjoy the beach. This is probably the last warm weather of the year.”
So it was that they found themselves in midafternoon lying on warm sand after the second cold swim of the day.
“I had no idea you would show me up like that, or I wouldn’t have raced you. I thought I was a pretty good swimmer too,” said Roger, completely unself-conscious and generous in his praise.
It occurred to Charlotte that not many men would be. But then, she and Roger were always so much at ease with each other.
She was feeling a luxurious physical pleasure, the first in all the weeks since Claudia’s death. The awful grief had started to merge into the inevitable acceptance. Time was bound to do it, as everyone knew.
From the terrace above, where a few neighbors had gathered, came the friendly hum of voices. In front of and around them were the ripple of wavelets and the distant steady sound of wind. Low dark hills at either side of the cove lay curved like a whale’s back, and under the sun the bay was streaked with silver. It was almost hard to stay awake. In all that peace, speech died away into a drowsy silence.
Suddenly, after what seemed like many hours, a wind rose out of some distant, arctic corner of the sky. And without warning the water began to darken beneath a mass of rushing clouds.
“Look at the water,” Charlotte said. “It’s the color of purple grapes.”
“That’s the reflection of the hill. You’re shivering. Let me wrap you in a towel. I always bring extras. The weather changes here from one minute to the next. And can you believe it? We’ve been here almost three hours.”
They stood up, and he wrapped her in turkish toweling from neck to feet, raising the towel into a protective collar, adjusting and smoothing, as you dress a child. She was acutely conscious of his touch; it was tender and possessive. And she gazed over his shoulder toward the bay. He loves me, she thought.
But then, how can I know that? And I? And I? We have been friends, that’s all. It has been three months, it has been only yesterday, and it has been forever. Friends. How can you tell when that ends and something else begins? And do I dare? I have never known myself.…
Involuntary, unwelcome tears rose into the corner of each eye. Wiping them quickly with the back of her hand before he should be aware of them, she said, “The wind—it makes my eyes water.”
He stood still with a hand on each of her shoulders. “What are you keeping from me?” he asked.
“Nothing. Nothing.” And her eyes kept filling, so that two tears stood trembling, overflowed, and rolled down her cheeks.
“But of course you are. And I’ve been aware of it from the beginning, Charlotte.”
“Aware of what?”
“Only that you have a trouble that keeps you from living fully. Oh, you have your work, and that’s a marvelous thing, but there’s more to living than that.”
“So you have analyzed me,” she said harshly, “the way you did when your poor friend tried to kill himself.”
“Yes. Don’t be angry. It’s all right if you don’t want to tell me. But you can’t expect me to stand here seeing your tears without saying something.”
Ashamed then, almost whispering, she answered, “I’m sorry. And I’m not angry at you. How could I be angry at you?”
They looked at each other. It was the first time they had ever looked fully into each other’s eyes. What a startling instrument was an eye! The curved lid with its delicate lashes, the lustrous color, and the little round black camera in the center, the X ray, the penetrating beam with which, it seemed to Charlotte, he was reading her mind, seeing thoughts that she perhaps had not even known were there.
Something overwhelming happened. Something willed itself. Perhaps it was akin to that young man’s will to take his own life—except that there would be no rescue this time, no doctor to reverse
the deed before it should be final.
They had moved toward the water’s edge. She looked down at the sand, where a tiny crab struggled toward the water. I shall remember this crab for the rest of my life, she thought, this frail, determined mottled thing now disappearing into a wave. I shall remember the gray, wet sand, the black pebbles, and the wind in my face.…
“That boy,” she said. “Claudia’s son. Do you know?”
“What? That he attacked two girls, do you mean?”
“Three girls,” she said.
She must keep her voice flat, without drama, or else the telling would be impossible for her.
“Three?”
“Yes. Now do you understand?”
She felt his hand tighten on hers, so hard that her own nails dug into her palms. There was a long silence.
“How old were you?” he asked, very low.
“Fourteen.”
There was another silence before he spoke again. “My God, my kid sister is fourteen.”
When he put his arms around her, she clung, murmuring into his shoulder, “I’ve never talked about it with anybody. I always said I never would. I never thought I would be able to.”
He was stroking her hair, holding her so close that she tasted the salt on his damp shoulder. She felt his lips on her forehead; the rest of her face was buried. She was at the living center of a storm. Her words could never be taken back. She could hardly believe what she had done. And now, pounding in her brain, dismay and relief contended.
“Oh, Charlotte, I love you so awfully,” she heard him say.
Yes, they loved each other.… The thing that had been slowly growing had just been born. In one long look between two pairs of eyes it had blazed into life. But now, with the revelation that she had just made, how differently would he see her? As a woman in some way weakened and in need of care? That she would never be able to bear. False pride, maybe, but there it was.
Presently he spoke. “Let’s get out of here. We need to be away from all those eyes up on the terrace. I don’t give a damn about anything or anybody but you and me. Let’s go back to Boston. I’ll make an excuse.”