by Brian Hodge
Her smile, already growing in anticipation of theirs, froze when Paul dropped abruptly into his chair and shook his head slowly. Iris reached over to pat at his arm, pushed herself awkwardly to her feet and walked with a slight sideways limp up the drive. A hard look and she took Cyd’s arm to lead her to the front.
“Iris,” she said, her voice low to a whisper, “what is it? Did I say something wrong?”
“Hush, child, you didn’t say anything.” She stopped when she saw the blue automobile, clucked loudly and passed a hand over her chin. “Lord, ain’t you got rid of that thing yet? Should have had it condemned ten years ago.” She did not wait for a response, only opened the door and eased Cyd in, closed it and leaned over when the window was rolled down. “Wallace’s dead, child. I thought you … I would have thought your father told you about it.”
“No. God, no, Iris, I didn’t know.” She fumbled for a word. “They never said a word. I … how?”
The old woman tapped a large-knuckled finger on the steering wheel. “We don’t know for sure. Doctor claims it was his heart. He was walking back from his day in the park last … oh, last August, I think it was. You was still away, anyway. He came up to the police station and just keeled over. Just like that. There wasn’t anything anyone could do for him. Doctor claims he was dead before he hit the sidewalk, he says.”
“Come on, Iris,” she said. “His heart? Good Lord, Wallace could lift—”
“I know, I know,” Iris said. “But that’s the way of it sometimes, I suppose. You go all your natural life not a sick day to your name, and when your time comes whether you’re ready or not—” and she snapped her fingers, looked back toward the yard. “Paul, he took it hard. Still does, in fact. He keeps checking his pulse, things like that. They was the same age, you know. Seventy-two almost to the day.” She straightened suddenly. “It happens,” she said. “Now get off. We’ll be there, don’t you worry. We ain’t never let you down yet, not for twenty years. And Missy….Miss Yarrow…”
Cyd could not meet the expression that worked the old woman’s face. Instead, she switched on the ignition and raced the engine once. “Wednesday,” she said after a cough at her lap. “And Iris, thanks, really. To tell you the truth, I don’t trust those college kids, either.”
There was a brief moment when she thought Iris Lennon would release a rare laugh. But it passed, and the best the woman had was another slight curling of those thin, bloodless lips. Cyd waved then, and backed into the street.
Poor Wallace, she thought as she turned the car around.
But as she reached the corner and looked up into the mirror, she wondered for a second who was the worse off—the Lennons or Wallace McLeod.
Iris was still on the front lawn, bending over stiffly to pick up a dead branch. When she straightened, she stared at the car, tossed the branch into the gutter and vanished around the side of the house.
When she was gone the street was lifeless again, and Cyd could not repress a shudder as she made the left turn and headed back for the village center.
Who was worse off? she wondered again, and did not like the answer that came immediately to mind.
Chapter 4
“I was hoping you’d be the first, you and that dumb, beautiful white plume.”
She had been leaning against the hood of the car and staring at the shop when Bella Innes, Dale Blake’s assistant at the toy store, had hurried over to tell her she’d accepted a delivery. The cartons were in Bartlett’s storeroom. Cyd had been unable to breathe. She hadn’t expected anything to come until Monday at the earliest.
Now, suddenly, it had begun.
When she wasn’t looking, her first dreams had arrived.
Twenty minutes later she was alone in a skeleton-work forest of racks and shelves and banded brown boxes. Her hands trembled. Her eyes watered. And she thought it an augury more favorable than a vaulted soaring eagle that the first carton she’d opened carried on top a half dozen copies of her childhood lover. Setting aside the invoice sheet, she’d picked out the paper-bound book and carried it reverently to that section she had marked with a hand-lettered sign laboriously fashioned for’ the marking of the Drama.
In the center at the top.
The tears were unashamed that soaked her cheeks, were absorbed into her sweater as she set Cyrano in his place. Then she stepped back to examine the Gascon’s profile, the sweep of his burgundy hat, the cloud of his plume. She began to laugh without the tears stopping, felt her legs grow weak and she sat on the floor.
With a single slash of his rapier, deBergerac had broken the spell; the waiting was done.
The papers and Angus Stone had been one thing, the laying out of cash and the purchase of the books, the shelves, the decorations in comforting gay colors; but this was different. This was the multifold calling of her account, and the danger of her not answering was distressingly evident: her name, for one—why should people patronize someone who didn’t need money? Her experience for another—how many invoices and bills and charges would she bungle, and what would the errors mean to her success? and her own strength—even in failure if failure there was, would she be able to stay away from her father, her brothers, would she be able to fall on her own without grasping for the support she knew would be there, just waiting for the asking? There was no question she had to do it, no question she must at all costs consider herself in effect disowned by her family.
She was on her own.
She had to be, or none of it now would have been worth the anguish.
The afternoon dwindled.
The counter she placed jutting out from the doorjamb, and on it a small-shaded lamp she’d used when she’d come after everyone had gone to bed. During those late nights she had stained the wall shelves and painted the walls, lay carpeting on the floor, lettered section signs, sketched through a ream of oversized paper the displays she had wanted to mark the seasons and the best sellers and the impulses to feature those books she loved that ordinarily might vanish without a trace of a read.
The afternoon faded.
The floor was littered with empty cartons and crumpled papers. Invoices were stacked haphazardly on the counter. And while she worked still another delivery came. She did not care. She wiped the perspiration from her brow and dragged the books in, stacked them and filed them and every few minutes sat down to read. She’d long since stopped laughing, long since stopped crying, and her smile became fixed, her cheeks aching delightfully with what was no effort at all. And it wasn’t until she’d counted and set the last copies of the last box that she realized the time.
Lord, she thought, Mother’s going to have a fit.
But she could not leave. Not yet. Not now. There was an irrational apprehension growing with the shadows—that if she left now the store and the books and the shelves would disappear; that when she returned Monday morning there would be a sunless gap between Bartlett’s and the Station Savings and Loan. An alley that led nowhere because whatever had been there had not existed at all.
It took her over an hour to find the courage to lock the door, another ten minutes before she relaxed and grinned. The sun was gone, and she pulled her short coat closed to her throat, walked up to the luncheonette where she ate a large salad while she worried at the logistics of the Lennons coming to work. She was glad Iris and Paul would be with her at the start; it was their support she needed more than their hands. Iris’ quick nods and Paul’s infectious smile. Even if they put up with her for only a week, it would be enough. After that … well, there was always, she thought, those damned college kids.
And it wasn’t until she’d locked the car up for the night and was staring at the drive lined with her parents’ guests’ elegance that she looked down at herself and remembered her appearance. Dust and ink smudged over her face, her sweater, the faded baggy jeans. Her loafers so scuffed the original color could have been anything at all from oxblood to brown. She considered sneaking in through the kitchen, but dismissed it at once—her grand
father had for some reason closed off the back stairs, so she would have to move into the foyer anyway. Move in, and be seen. But as long as Barton didn’t see her, she guessed it would be all right.
“For crying out loud,” she whispered harshly to herself then as she opened the front door. “Cindy, you’re not sixteen.”
She could not help it; she stopped in the middle of the hall and stared. In the sitting room were close to three dozen people, all of them her parents’ age or older, all of them dressed almost as casually as she. Slowly she crossed to the threshold and leaned against the jamb, arms folded loosely over her chest. Three dozen and quiet, drifting in and out of the dining room, standing in front of the fireplaces and watching the low dancing flames. She could see the end of a buffet in the dining room, and several of the guests were scattered over the divans and chairs, paper plates on their knees, their thighs, smiling and chatting softly with their neighbors.
Simple fare, she noted with a quick puzzled frown.
From speakers hidden in the walls drifted muted strains of semi-classical melodies too soft to really listen to, yet loud enough to obscure the fact that virtually no one at the party was talking above a whisper.
She could not believe it. While there was laughter, it was gentle; while there was movement, it was ghosting. She listened for but did not hear her mother’s braying laugh, nor her father rising Olympian in defending a political position. Yet these two things were if nothing else staples for the house parties she attended or avoided; they were expected, and they were missing. And for a moment she wondered if her parents were even there.
“Cynthia! Darling!”
She sighed. So much for Mother.
She pushed away from the frame and watched as Myrtle—in an embroidered peasant blouse down from her sharp-edged shoulders, and snug, black velvet toreador pants—moved in her direction, holding the hand of a man she dragged behind her. He was short, slender, dressed in white turtleneck and blue blazer, black trousers and white shoes. His hair was dark and brushed straight back from his forehead, his face heavily lined though it seemed more a case of natural direction than lashes of age. Not at all bad looking, she thought as she prepared a greeting smile; if he’d shave off that stupid beard, or at least grow a mustache to go with it, he might even be handsome.
“Cynthia, where have you been?” The scold was meaningless, but not the look that examined her clothing, the smears on her hands and face, the disarrangement of her hair. “Have you been toiling in the mines, dear?”
Cyd swallowed a tart comment in deference to the man. “A shipment came in unexpectedly at the store, Mother, and I lost track of time. But we needn’t talk about that now, need we?”
Myrtle accepted the statement-more-than-a-question by immediately stepping to one side and, with a regal detachment that nearly caused her daughter to break into laughter, introduced her to Doctor Calvin Kraylin, director and chief financial underwriter for the Station’s Kraylin Clinic.
“I’m afraid I don’t know where that is,” she said, taking back her hand quickly, trying not to be obvious in wiping it on her hip. “Not in town, surely.”
“Of course not,” he said politely, his voice unnaturally high. “It’s about three miles from here, out on the Pike. You may have seen the entrance if you’ve ever had the occasion to ride into the valley.”
“There are nothing but farms and unused fields out there, Doctor. I seldom go that way.”
He smiled briefly, folding his hands into his pockets. “Lovely home you have here, Miss Yarrow.”
“Well,” Myrtle said, already moving, “I’ll leave you two to get better acquainted. Have a good time, Cal. And Cynthia, please comb your hair, dear. My friend will think I’m not a good mother.”
Kraylin bowed; Cyd smiled. A few words then about nothing she could remember, then or afterward. The awkwardness of two people thrown into company for no good reason and against each other’s will, each instinctively on guard against the other. It was as though, Cyd thought, they were competing for territory, and immediately told herself the reaction was foolish. Yet she could not quite shake the unmistakable impression that the doctor would have rather been with those twice his age than with her. She nearly made a move to free him, but when he requested almost shyly a visitor’s tour of the house, she agreed readily—eager to be able to talk and keep her nervousness, and her anger, at bay for the time being.
It was as bad as she thought it would be.
He was properly appreciative of the oils done of her family, of the woodwork, the furniture, the carpeting, the paint; he exclaimed wonderment at the insertion of the television and the stereo equipment into the two fireplaces in the living room and remarked aloud at the curiously fitting juxtaposition; he nodded at the silverware, the sideboards, the wainscoting; and sidestepped politely her questions about the clinic and its functions, giving her the impression he used it primarily for those wealthy hypochondriacs whose family physicians had thrown up their hands. Yet he had saved the family, she reminded herself sternly, so he couldn’t be a quack no matter how he chose to run his practice.
Judge not, she thought, and knew it was impossible.
By the time they returned to the sitting room they were silent, and had been for five minutes. Cyd was feeling more and more gritty and wanted a hot shower; the doctor kept licking his full lower lip and stroking the beard too perfectly trimmed to seem anything but staged.
Myrtle was waiting. She grabbed both Kraylin’s hands, pumped them once and waved him past and into the nearest knot of people who were obviously expecting him.
“Well,” she said then, plucking a cigarette from a leather case and lighting it with gold. “Well, what do you think?”
Cyd took her time, until the doctor and his coterie had moved out of range. “He’s a creep.”
The smoke from her mother’s nostrils was a dragon’s fair warning. “Marvelous,” she said. “One of the best minds in the Station, if not the state, and you say he’s a creep. Cynthia, when are you going to grow up?”
Cyd raised her eyebrows in exasperation. “Mother, he may be all that you say, and probably is,” she added quickly to forestall an interruption, “but that doesn’t mean he has to be a saint in his personal life.”
“Are you saying he made a pass at you back there?”
“No, Mother, but he certainly doesn’t fit the picture he wants to give, does he? Dashing yachtsman, artistic beard and sweep of the hair … with a voice like somebody’s got a hand around his throat. And about as scintillating a conversationalist as a million-year rock.”
Someone dropped a glass; there was a flurry of napkins.
The music came on louder, and a woman in a bandana raised her voice in complaint.
Myrtle blew a smoke ring, watched it, blew another. “He saved our lives, you know.”
Not willing to accept the sudden thrust of guilt, Cyd clicked refusal with her tongue and turned to face the foyer. “You could have gone to the hospital, you know.”
“Cynthia, you know better than that.”
“All right, Mother, all right, so he saved your lives.” She frowned and turned back, snatched an invisible thread from the older woman’s shoulders. “I don’t get it. What do you want from me, an approval or something?” She grinned. “Seems to me I’ve already heard that once today, haven’t I? Well, okay, you’ve got it, are you satisfied? He’s a good doctor, I’ll take your word for it. But does that mean I have to trust him with my life, too?”
“Suppose you get sick?”
She lay a gentle hand on her mother’s bare shoulder, wishing at the same time she could tell her how ridiculous she looked. “There is, if you recall, someone named Foster. He’s a doctor, as I recall. And as I recall further, he dragged me bloody into his bloody world with a flat pair of forceps without my permission.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic, Cynthia.”
She sighed, loudly. “You’re right, Mother, and I’m sorry. I must be—” She scan
ned the room once more, saw there was little more animation than when she had left, though the volume was growing louder and the company more relaxed. “Look, I’ve had an unexpectedly hard day, and I’m tired and need some rest.”
Myrtle’s scowl dissolved instantly into an attitude of apology. “And I’m sorry, too, dear. I should have noticed. Why don’t you get into the shower, wash off and, if you feel like it, come back down and join us.”
Cyd shook her head. “Mother, please don’t take offense, but there doesn’t seem like much action going down here tonight. In fact, now that I mention it, I don’t even think I know half these people.”
“Friends come and go, dear. You’ve been away, remember?”
She refused to make comment, only kissed the woman’s cheek and retreated to her rooms. As she undressed, slowly, listening to the shower thunder in her bathroom, she tried to guess what phase her parents were going through this time. It seemed to her that every half-decade or so they cleaned house of their friendships, like a literally personal spring cleaning. Of course there were always the stalwarts— Doc Foster, Angus Stone, a handful of others— but the fringe group was transient, almost mercurially so. One year it had been spiritualism, another year UFOs. She recalled a time when ecology was so important to her mother that she had been driven to give away every natural fur she owned, only to replace them with synthetics that were virtually as expensive as the ones she had sacrificed. There were the manias with history, with ESP, with … she grinned. She’d stopped keeping track after the last group made her dizzy.
She washed, dried, slipped into a plaid shirt and pressed jeans, decided that nothing was going to make her revisit a party that was more like a wake.
She tried some reading, but could not get past the third page of four novels.
She thought about going for a late night walk, but a touch to the panes that were more ice than glass made her shiver and step back. November was too quickly giving way to winter; and while she enjoyed exploring the last-season woods, it was still too damp, too … dead to be comfortable.