Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

  Out of Time

  A Novel by

  Deborah Truscott

  Copyright 2011 Deborah J. Truscott

  Departures

  Chapter 1

  I buried Earl shortly after Valentine’s Day. The day spat snow in fitful bursts and the earth was stiff with frost. It bothered me, laying Earl to rest in that cold dirt, so I knelt and wrapped a blanket around his percale shroud, snugging it tight against the chill. Even so, his tail slipped out and the proceedings stopped while I stuffed it back inside, my fingers lingering on his cooling fur, sleek even in death.

  Lila coughed discretely and I looked up. “Don’t be maudlin, Kathy Lee,” she murmured. “Earl would hate that.”

  What did she know. Lila was my mother, but Earl belonged to me. I looked at the cat-sized grave tucked between azalea bushes. “I can’t lay him in the dirt,” I said.

  Lila sighed. I shifted Earl’s blanketed corpse to one arm and used the fingers of my free hand to rake pine mulch from the base of the azaleas into the grave, lining the dirt with fragrant wood chips. One-handed, it was an awkward chore. I raised the blanket toward Lila, a dead-cat offering. Instead she sank down beside me, scrabbling at the pine chips, patting them efficiently into place. When she sat back on her heels, I finally laid the bundle down.

  Lila stood then, and brushed dirt from her trousered knees. She passed me down a clutch of daffodils, fresh from the grocery, which I arranged around the blanket. With my fingers, I raked in more mulch, covering the flowers, covering Earl.

  Relieved of the daffodils, Lila lifted the shovel. And spread the dirt.

  *****

  He was just a cat, I told myself. Only a cat. He came to me, a scrawny gray-striped kitten, while Lila was gone and I was living with my grandmother Mae-Mae on Charles Street in Fredericksburg. I was a kid then, not quite fifteen, as much a stray as Earl was. I carried him up the steps of the house and Mae-Mae clucked when she saw him. During the next seventeen years Earl followed me everywhere, from Charles Street to college and into marriage, our last stop together being the azaleas on Lila's lawn at River House — now that she had returned, in one fashion or another, from wherever she had been.

  I slid my gaze toward the wide back porch where Terri and Julie waited with the children. Long before Earl made his appearance on Charles Street, Terri Gannon and Julie Howell had been my closest friends. I watched as the children stood with unaccustomed patience, Sammy hand-in-hand with Julie while Blythe clung to Terri’s skirt. When he caught my eye, Sammy dropped Julie’s hand and ran to me. I waited for him, still squatting on my heels, as his four year old legs pumped across the lawn. He reached me with a bound, flinging his arms about my neck, rocking me backwards. I cupped his face between my hands, looking for trauma and tears, but saw no sign of them.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  He knew what I meant. “Yes, Mommy,” he assured me. “Lalla told me all about dying.”

  Lalla is the children’s name for Lila. I narrowed my eyes. “What exactly did Lalla tell you, Sweetpea?”

  “That Earl is in heaven and he won’t scratch me any more.”

  I shot Lila a look.

  “Let’s go to lunch!” she chirped, as if struck by thought. “A memorial lunch. We can have Earl’s favorite food.”

  By now Julie had reached Earl’s grave, her hands tucked inside the sleeves of her sweater for warmth. I heard a faint intake of breath and glanced up sharply at her heart-shaped face.

  “Fancy Feast?” she gasped, looking slightly pale beneath a tumble of coppery hair.

  “Chowder, silly,” Terri supplied, joining us by the azaleas. “That clam chowder from Symington’s.” Her smile dazzled against perfect cafe-au-lait skin. “You know how he loved it.”

  I glanced past the others and saw Blythe following in Terri’s wake, clutching Lila’s cordless landline phone tightly in both hands. We could never find it unless it actually rang because Lila carried it everywhere she went and inevitably left it behind. It was, in fact, as close as she would ever get to a cell because the use of mobile phones (she would be happy to tell you) led to Serious Health Consequences, which was to say everything from tumors to tremors.

  But Blythe had found the cordless, so clearly it must have rung. She raised it up to Lila, who said hello twice, walked several feet back toward the house and said hello again, leaving the mourners clustered by the grave.

  A few minutes later she came back and extended the phone to me.

  “Cameron?” But I knew better. Cameron was busy with his patients. Et cetera.

  Lila shook her head. “Henry.”

  Henry Croft was Lila’s first husband. Currently he’s our family lawyer, not to mention an old friend. Still, I couldn’t imagine why he would want to talk to me.

  “It’s about your Uncle Bennett,” she said, reading my mind.

  “Uncle Bennett?”

  Lila took my arm and led me a little apart from the others. “He’s dead, Honey,” she said gently. “He died … well, Henry will tell you.”

  I stood, stupefied.

  “Better take it on the porch,” she said. “The reception’s better there.”

  Chapter 2

  “You are hard to track,” Henry told me the next morning as I sat across the desk from him. “Don’t you live at home any more?”

  That was a loaded question.

  “How did you learn about Bennett?” I asked.

  “His lawyer called me,” Henry said (taking the hint). “Then I called all over town trying to find you. Even Cameron didn’t know where you were.”

  He paused for a beat. Henry is a notorious gossip, but the truth is I think he was more concerned then curious. When I didn’t respond he sighed and opened a manila envelope, spilling out papers across his desk. “All right,” he said briskly. “The deal is this: You’re the last Tipton, a regular endangered species, so the family dwelling, including furnishings and contents, five-point-two-five acres, various out-buildings and one ten year old Chrysler, now belongs to you. And, oh yeah, a small trust fund to keep it all going.”

  He folded his hands on top of the papers and looked at me benignly, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned. For a moment he put me in mind of Earl: sleek, calm, and self-possessed.

  I exhaled and sat back in my chair, an elegant little Sheridan piece that Henry always saved for ladies.

  “Is there a funeral?”

  “No. He was cremated last week and his ashes interred in the family plot at … ” Henry paused, flipping though some papers. “St. Giles-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church. God, what a mouthful. Why St. Giles-in-the-Fields? Why not just St. Giles? And who the hell was St. Giles in the first place?”

  “I think he cured lepers.”

  “They all cured lepers. If you didn’t actually have leprosy, then you cured it.”

  I shrugged. “He also mended birds’ wings.”

  Henry squinted dubiously at me, then cleared his throat. “Anyway, your uncle instructed his lawyer not to contact you until after the internment,” he went on, “which, according to his wishes, was attended by no one except his attorney and the church sexton — who, I expect, was manning the shovel.”

  I was silent, imagining the lawyer and the sexton and the box containing Bennett’s ashes. And the cold earth.

  “Bennett was your father’s brother,” Henry pointed out.

  “I know exactly who Bennett is,” I retorted sharply. “I’ve known him all my life.”

  This, of course, was more than I could say for my father.

  “I wasn’t sure,” Henry went on blandly. “Considering how many husbands Lila’s gone through, I thought he might have gotten lost in the shuffle of in-laws. Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes.”

&
nbsp; Henry lit up anyway. After all, it was his office. He had asked my permission simply to be polite and I was rude mostly because that crack about Lila had been a low blow, though entirely true. Lila has, actually, been married several times, a fact which Henry never tires of pointing out.

  “How’s Whatshisname?” he went on. “You know, the new guy.”

  He meant Lila’s most recent ex, Eddie Fowler, who specialized in false papers and documents and is presently serving two to ten for illegally accessing computer files at the Social Security Administration. Lila believed he was a software entrepreneur, which in a sense I suppose he was. They were divorced before he was apprehended but she is still quite fond of him and hired another ex-husband, a criminal lawyer (unlike Henry, who specializes in estate planning), to defend him.

  In all, she has been married to two lawyers, one crook, a professor of political science at Mary Washington College here in Fredericksburg, and a farmer with five thousand very wealthy acres near Charlottesville. This, I suppose, is why she goes by Mansfield, which is her maiden name.

  My father was the professor. His name was Charles Tipton, and by the time he married Lila, she had already divorced her first lawyer — that is to say Henry — who was now regarding me coolly from beneath a cloud of smoke.

  “Eddie’s fine,” I said in answer. “Life is good at Fed Med.” Henry, I knew, could care less.

  “Who’s she seeing now?” he asked, getting to his real point.

  “She has lunch sometimes with Phillip Olson. I don’t think it’s progressed to the dinner stage.”

  “Old bore,” he mused thoughtfully, though Phillip was probably not quite his own age.

  “Old well-off bore,” I corrected. Phillip invests rather shrewdly in stocks and real estate. “Not to mention that he’s an accomplished painter,” I went on.

  “A painter,” Henry snorted. “He’s got some property Lila wants. That’s his attraction.” Abruptly, he shifted gears. “I could use a martini.”

  “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” I said primly.

  “It’s cocktail time in London.”

  “I suppose we could go to lunch at Symington's,” I suggested tentatively.

  “Yes, and you can buy. You being an heiress and all these days. O-ho. Won’t Cameron be pleased.”

  “Only if someone tells him.”

  Henry paused, one arm in the sleeve of his cashmere overcoat, and eyed me sharply.

  “I know and your mother knows,” he said seriously. “Who else?”

  “Julie and Terri.”

  “Well,” he went on, shrugging into his coat, “you can swear them to silence. Actually, you can swear us all to silence, but why bother?” He paused as he wrapped a silk scarf around his neck, bundling up as if we were in Minneapolis instead of Fredericksburg, Virginia, scarcely 50 miles north of Richmond. “It’s all yours, Kathy Lee. It’s inherited property, which is separate from property-in-joint. Managed correctly, Cameron can’t touch it.” He glanced at me. “If you like, I’ll handle that for you.”

  Until this very instant I had not thought that Bennett’s property, my father’s childhood home, was really mine. I had not even thought of it as being tangible, somehow, though I had visited it many times. Suddenly, I felt as if a door had come unlatched or a window had cracked open, allowing fresh air to waft into a stuffy room. It was so unexpected that it left me feeling almost dizzy.

  Henry was busy helping me into my jacket. When I turned around, he frowned. “Are you all right, Kathy Lee?”

  “Earl died yesterday.”

  “Oh dear. I am so sorry.”

  “And then Bennett and all.”

  “They were both old, Kathy Lee.” Henry said gently. “They lived long lives. And I know from personal observation that Earl’s was a very happy one. He lived to draw blood and he drew mine every time I saw him.”

  “They were my past,” I sniffled, “and now I’ve lost them.”

  “Oh no, you haven’t,” Henry reassured me. “The past always return to haunt you.”

  “Aren’t you comforting.”

  Henry put a fatherly arm around my shoulders and herded me toward the door. “Oh, indeed I am. But then, the past is often comforting, when you think about it. So close, and yet not quite within our reach.”

  There was a Civil War cannonball lodged in the wall of Henry’s house. In fact, there were cannonballs lodged in walls all over town. A century before the cannonballs George Washington grew up at Ferry Farm, just across the river, and his brother-in-law lived in the grand house on the hill overlooking town. “You’ve lived in Fredericksburg too long,” I said.

  “Perhaps.” Henry smiled, and offered me his arm. I smiled back and slipped my hand into the crook of his cashmered elbow.

  “Lord, child,” he said. “Haven’t you any gloves?”

  *****

  At lunch, we talked about my father. Clearly Bennett’s death had stirred up Henry’s memories. “Your mother once told me that Charles seemed vaguely exotic,” he said, studying his martini as if it was a crystal ball parting the mists of time. “And I do not believe she meant to imply the least bit of irony.”

  “It was because he came from Pennsylvania and wore patches on his elbows,” I told him.

  Henry shifted forward slightly and lowered his voice. “Truth is, I’ve always wondered how a tweedy forty-one year old professor managed to marry a twenty-three year old, cocktail-sipping divorcée in the first place.”

  I waited.

  “In fact, half the town wondered the same thing,” he went on.

  “Do you still wonder?”

  Henry raised his martini glass and gazed over the rim at me. “All the time. Anything to do with Lila, I wonder.”

  I smiled.

  “When she met Charles,” he went on, “I was still smarting from our divorce. Your father was a handsome man, Kathy Lee, but he was more than ten years older than I was — pushing forty and almost fossilized from my point of view. He smoked that damned pipe and all his clothes had little burn spots on them from hot ash. And he had a disheveled, cluttered look about him. His hair always needed trimming, his pockets were jammed with papers and he left a trail of books and pipe tobacco wherever he went. Worst of all, his students loved him, which infuriated me, jealous as I was. I took Lila out to dinner one night and told her she was making a mistake. She told me she was tired of boys, meaning me, even though I’m … what? Seven years her senior?”

  Henry paused, staring off into space. Then he glanced at me. “God forgive me, but when she kicked your father out I felt vindicated. Not to mention smug.”

  I had no memory of my parents’ marriage breaking up, though over time I’ve heard several versions of the story. I was only two or three when my father’s first wife, from whom he was divorced some years earlier, died in an auto accident. There was, from all accounts, unfinished business between them, and after her death my father retreated to his study in gloom and melancholy (as Lila said), turning his classes over to teaching assistants. Mae-Mae told me later that he was experiencing a Time of Trouble, which wasn’t helped any by one of Lila’s ill-timed Spells.

  So my father left. I don’t know, maybe Lila kicked him out as Henry said, or maybe he just slipped away in the night. In any event he went back North, leaving me behind and putting several states between himself and Lila. I can’t remember ever seeing him again, and within a few years of his departure from my mother’s house he, too, was killed in a car accident, leaving me and his brother Bennett as his only surviving relatives.

  For a while Henry was silent, thinking (I am sure) of boys and men and Lila. Then he cleared his throat. “When did you last see your uncle?” he asked, stirring his martini with a speared olive.

  “Last year. I spent a weekend with him. He found young children unsettling, so I left the kids at home.”

  “An interesting word. Unsettling. Not noisy?”

  “He once told me, and I quote: Children are like chimney swifts f
lying loose inside the house, swooping out of nowhere when one least expects it.” I looked at Henry. “Perhaps my father felt the same.”

  “Possibly,” Henry shrugged evasively, and made his way steadily through eggs Benedict and a third martini. Normally eggs Benedict are only on the Sunday brunch menu, but Henry has something on the chef because he is served them any time he asks, any day of the week.

  Finally he tossed down his napkin and signaled for coffee.

  “What are you going to do with the house?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s a nice old place, though. On Skippack Pike, if you know the area, maybe 18 miles out of Philadelphia.”

  “Do you have any attachment to it? Any sentimental feelings about it?” Henry was watching me carefully, probably calculating the property values of suburban Philadelphia in some busy corner of his brain.

  “Right now I have sentimental feelings about Bennett.”

  “I never knew him, of course. Your mother, however, appears to have liked him.”

  “He was quiet and gentle,” I said. “And very nice to me. He had been a science teacher but when he retired his interest was gardening and genealogy. And photography.”

  In fact, entire bookcases were filled with his photographs and family notes, and I learned the history of my father’s family more thoroughly than I ever did the Mansfields, with whom I lived every day. Bennett had no children and his wife, Ruth, died in an auto accident at the intersection of Route 202 and Skippack Pike several summers before my first visit — another victim of the Tipton Death by Car Curse, which seemed to afflict anyone connected with my father.

  Recalling this, I looked swiftly at Henry. “You didn’t tell me how Bennett died.”

  “Raking winter leaves out of his garden,” Henry told me, stirring cream into his coffee.

  “That’s it?”

  “What more is there? He was in his eighties, Kathy Lee.”

  “How do you die by raking?”