The Vineyard

by Barbara Delinsky

  He arched a brow. “That’s a break? There’s a cold war going on there, or hadn’t you noticed?”

  She had to laugh. “It isn’t that bad.”

  “No one’s talking to anybody.”

  “Well, they’re talking about the storm.” She tightened her fingers around his and gave a little tug. “Come on. Come with me. You know more than any of them do. You can tell us what’s happening while we sit around and wait.”

  SIMON CAME, but he didn’t have to tell anyone anything. Television coverage of the storm had preempted all regular programming. An army of reporters, experts, and would-be experts were on hand to answer every question imaginable.

  Three sets were on in the Great House—the small one in the kitchen, a medium-sized one in the parlor, and a big one in the den. Dinner was served buffet style in the dining room, but no one actually sat. There was a lot of wandering—eating some here, walking to another room, eating some there. There was little chitchat, little closeness between couples who should have been close.

  No big deal, Olivia told herself. A storm’s coming. They’re moving around, trying to keep everyone calm.

  But there was more to it than that. Susanne excused herself and went to her room as soon as the last of dinner was done. Greg was already gone by then. Natalie stayed for a while but looked distracted, and finally, pleading exhaustion, went up to bed. Simon shot Olivia a dry look and left. Jill stretched out on the den sofa with her arms folded on her chest and her eyes everywhere but on the television. Mark sprawled out in a nearby chair with his chin on a fist.

  The tension rose, and still they waited.

  SUSANNE WAS LYING AWAKE in the dark when Mark finally came to bed. On her side, facing away, she listened to the pad of his footsteps and the rustle of clothing, felt the dip of the mattress and the pull of the sheet.

  All was quiet for a minute. Then came the softest whisper. “Susanne?”

  She wanted to pretend that she was sleeping, but she was too unsettled. She needed to talk with someone. “I’m awake,” she said and rolled to her back.

  “Thinking about the storm?”

  “No. About Mother. I’m in the middle of her book. She makes herself out to be quite something.”

  “She is.”

  “No, I mean, quite something,” she drawled. “To hear her tell it, Asquonset would have been lost years ago if it weren’t for her.”

  Mark turned to his side and came up on an elbow. “Is that so?” he asked, as though it wasn’t an absurd thought at all.

  “I don’t know. It’s what she says. Or implies. Did you ever hear anything about real estate holdings?”

  “Your dad’s?”

  “No. Mother’s.”

  It was a minute before he answered. “I remember talking with her once and being impressed with how much she knew about real estate. She didn’t mention specific holdings, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she had them. She knew what she was talking about.”

  That was news to Susanne. “She never talked to me about real estate.”

  “Did you ever ask her about it?”

  Susanne looked at him sharply. His face was a warm blur in the dark, but there was a distinct glint in his eyes. “Why would I do that?”

  “You wouldn’t. That’s my point. But I did have reason. I invest in real estate. I must have mentioned something that started a discussion.”

  She wanted to argue. But if Mark was anything, he was logical.

  “Okay,” she said, coming at Natalie’s premise from a different angle. “If you were to attribute the success of this vineyard to one person only, who would that be?”

  Mark returned to his back and looked at the ceiling. “The vineyard itself?” He turned his head on the pillow. “Carl.”

  “Not my mother?”

  “I give her the business. I give Carl the vines.”

  “What about my dad? What would you give him?”

  He thought for a minute. “A Clio. For best ad. He did wonders spreading the name. Mention Asquonset, and people in the know mention Al.”

  “Do you think he was smart? You know, intelligent. Shrewd. A good businessman.”

  “He was definitely smart. I always thought he should have been a playwright. He had a flair for drama and a way with words.”

  “But was he a good businessman?”

  Mark spoke lightly, fondly. “Oh, I don’t know. The investment leads he gave me never worked out. But hey, I’m not speaking ill of the dead. He’d be the first one to laugh about those, and I certainly survived.”

  Susanne stared at him in the dark. “Why did I not know about that?”

  “That I survived?”

  “That Dad’s leads didn’t work out.”

  Mark paused, but briefly. “Why would I have told you?” he asked. “What point was there? Why would I knock the man down in front of his daughter?”

  “Because I should have known the truth.”

  “The truth was that he was a great guy.”

  “The truth was,” Susanne argued, feeling hurt at having been kept out of the loop by her husband as well as her mother, “that he didn’t do much of anything around here.”

  “Did Natalie say that?”

  “NATALIE DID NOT SAY THAT,” Jill argued. She was lying on her back, about as far from Greg as she could get without falling off the bed.

  Bothered by the separateness of it, he sat up. “She sure as hell came close. She all but castrates the guy.”

  “Greg, I read her book. She does not. She simply makes a point that people thought he ran the vineyard, when he didn’t. I mean, you were here growing up. Did you see him making daily decisions?”

  “I saw him promoting the vineyard wherever he went.”

  “That’s right. He was wonderful at that. But he didn’t know much about the grapes themselves. He didn’t balance the books.”

  “Neither did my mother. An accountant did it.”

  “Okay,” Jill said slowly. “Let me rephrase that. He didn’t read the books that the accountant balanced.”

  “Did Natalie?”

  “Yes. If you’re reading her book closely enough, you’ll see that.”

  Greg looked off toward the window. The sheers billowed gently, but the air in the room remained warm. Suddenly needing to breathe, he jumped off the bed and opened the window as far as it would go. With his forearm on the upper sill, he put his face to the wind. It was instantly soothing, storm smell and all.

  More quietly, he said, “She tells it like she personally made this place.”

  “And you can’t accept that,” Jill said, but her edge, too, had softened. That made what she said less of a challenge and more of an observation, even a bit of a question.

  The wind continued to feel good. It carried the scent of earth and leaves, and dredged up memories that had been buried for years. Greg had helped plant many a vine. He had helped prune and harvest. Those memories were good.

  He searched them for his father, but came up empty-handed.

  “All right,” he conceded. “I can accept some of it. I can buy the part about his losing the shoe business, but he wasn’t the only soldier who came home from the war and found nothing. I can buy into Natalie making money in real estate, and into her letting Carl make decisions about the vineyard itself. Hell, she’d been in love with the guy. It’d be only natural for her to favor him.”

  Jill’s head came off the pillow. “She didn’t favor him. She let him run the vineyard because he knew what he was doing.” Her head fell back. “Love didn’t have anything to do with that. It was pure pragmatism.”

  Greg put his forehead on his arm. “Maybe she wanted to punish my father for losing the factories. Maybe she pushed him aside to make Carl look good. Maybe she pushed him aside to make herself look good.”

  “She didn’t push Alexander aside,” Jill insisted. “She put her finger on what he was good at and let him do that.”

  Greg straightened. “Let him. See? She let him do it. Like
he was an idiot who had to be spoon-fed.”

  Jill turned away. “This is pointless. You are hopelessly bullheaded.”

  He approached the bed, suddenly desperate. “I’m trying not to be. I’m trying to share my thoughts. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what this is all about, my sharing myself with you?” When she didn’t move, he gentled his tone. “Look, I’m trying to see my mother’s point of view, but it’s at odds with everything I was taught growing up. I was taught that my father was strong. I’ve always identified with that strength—always tried to emulate it. Now she’s saying he wasn’t strong at all.”

  Jill turned back. “No, she’s not. She’s not saying that. What she’s saying is that she was stronger than any of you thought. Is that so awful?”

  “No,” Greg said. “No. It’s fine. Maybe it explains some things. if she was running this place, if she was consumed by the work, it explains why she didn’t have strength left for us. I used to take trips with my dad. He’d have business to do in New York or Philly, and he made it fun for me, made me feel like he wanted me there. I always felt like … like I was a chore for Natalie. He showed me more love than she ever did.”

  And he missed that. He missed Alexander’s warm smile, his slap on the back, the hugs that father had given son long into adulthood. He also missed Jill’s warm smile, her hand on his chest, the way she used to look at him as though there was no one in the world who mattered more.

  He wanted that again. But he couldn’t bring himself to reach out. Couldn’t risk rejection. Didn’t have the guts.

  When a gust of wind whipped into the room and rattled the drapery swag, he lowered the window. Then, feeling helpless—feeling impotent—he sank into the chair on the far side of the room and waited for drowsiness.

  AN HOUR LATER, he was still waiting. Caving in, he scooped up Natalie’s manuscript and went downstairs to read. By the time he finished, the wind was whistling around the corners of the house, swishing through trees, creaking through vines. The sun was barely up, and the full force of the storm had yet to hit.

  Twenty-eight

  SIMON SPENT MOST OF THE NIGHT in his office. He wanted to monitor fax updates and study the latest satellite pictures of the storm. E-mail flew from his computer to ones in Miami, Atlanta, and Charleston, but the words coming back held more sympathy than advice. There was little to say and even less to do.

  So he worried. He worried about the vines. He worried about the vintage. He worried about Asquonset ten years down the road. He worried about Olivia.

  He slept for an hour or two on the sofa in the office, and returned to his cabin in the wee hours to close the shutters and take a shower. The kittens were all over the place now. When he made coffee, he nearly tripped on a pair playing in the kitchen. He held one—Oliver, the smallest of the litter—so warm and soft, so silly with too-big ears, and so trusting with too-big eyes that he would have been tempted to keep the little bugger.

  But kittens grew into cats, and cats died. It was enough that he was attached to Buck. He didn’t want to get attached to the babies.

  Correct that. He didn’t want to get more attached to the babies.

  Attachment seemed to be a problem for him lately. He wondered about the message in that. Carl had said that he would know when the time came, but it wasn’t so simple. Fine. If he wanted to keep a kitten or two, he could. But he couldn’t keep Olivia and Tess, not if they were determined to leave.

  Outside again, the wind blew away all thoughts but those of Chloe. She was moving in on schedule. The difference was noticeable, even in the hour since he had walked this way. Overhead, the tree boughs were more agitated than they had been such a short while before. Dawn had come and gone, but the skies remained dark.

  Back in his office, he read the most recent fax with growing dismay. Quickly he pulled up radar pictures. He read two waiting e-mails.

  His sources were in agreement, and the news wasn’t good.

  “SHE’S DRY,” he announced in disbelief when he was barely into the kitchen. He had to close the door by hand against the rising wind.

  Olivia had been scooping cantaloupe into balls. She stopped, unsettled by the frantic look in his eye. “Who’s dry?”

  “Chloe. She hit another storm system and lost most of her rain.”

  Susanne stopped whisking pancake batter. “Did she lose wind?”

  “Nope. She’s strong as ever.” Swearing softly, he pushed a hand through his hair. “Dry hurricane. Hard to believe. They’re part of the local folklore, but this is a first for me. Some people call them hundred-year hurricanes, which tells you how rare they are.”

  “Is a dry hurricane better, or worse?” Olivia asked.

  “Neither. It just introduces a whole other problem. We won’t have to worry about torrential rains flooding the vines and swelling the grapes. We’ll just have to worry about the leaves suffocating.”

  “Suffocating?”

  “In a dry hurricane,” he explained in a voice with a panicky edge, “the wind whips up the ocean. Without significant rainfall to keep the salt water in place, it blows along with the wind. By the time the wind dies, our leaves will be coated with salt. Their pores will clog. They won’t be able to breathe. They’ll close up and die. But the leaves are the lifeblood of the vine. Without them, the grapes won’t get an ounce more sugar than they have right now. They won’t ripen. The growing season ends, just like that.”

  “But harvest is still a month off,” Susanne said in an echo of his panic.

  “Tell me about it,” he muttered.

  “What can you do?” Olivia asked. “There has to be something. You can’t just let it all end.”

  “We’ll have to wash the grapes,” he said and reached for the phone. He punched out a number. “As soon as the wind dies enough for the ocean to settle, we’ll get out there with hoses and wash every blessed leaf.”

  Olivia and Susanne exchanged looks. There was no doubt about the scope of the job.

  “Who are you calling?” Susanne asked.

  “Fire department,” Simon answered, then bent his head and spoke into the phone. “Jack? It’s Simon Burke. They tell me the hurricane’s coming in dry. As soon as she passes, we’ll need hoses up here. Can you help?”

  THE FIRE DEPARTMENT was only one of the resources Simon tapped. While he ate pancakes as fast as Susanne could cook them, he called everyone he knew who had a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a strong back, and a hose.

  He seemed to gain strength with each call, or maybe it was the food. Olivia refilled his orange juice glass, refilled his coffee cup, even put butter and syrup on the last batch of pancakes he ate when he was too busy talking to do it. And then he was gone.

  By then, everyone else was awake, the television was on, and the wind was rattling the shutters, which were closed against flying debris.

  Tess, who was frightened by the sound and the unnatural darkness, stayed close to Olivia.

  Natalie, who was worried about Carl, who was helping Simon line up volunteers to help wash the vines once the storm passed, stayed close to the phone.

  Greg remained on the outside of the group, studying his laptop, brooding and aloof.

  Susanne cooked with a fever—and everyone ate. Breakfast was hardly over when she put out a coffee cake to tide them over until lunch, which was a Portuguese fish stew with hard-crusted bread. The dishes had barely been washed, dried, and put away when she put a chicken in the oven to roast. The smell of garlic and thyme was just beginning to waft through the house when, with a howling wind at their backs, Carl and Simon barreled in the door.

  Olivia understood the relief she saw on Natalie’s face. She’d had her own little nightmare image of the two of them out in the wind—a tree crushing the truck, an electrical wire tearing loose and frying them as they crossed a wind-whipped street in town, a ferocious wind blowing them right off the road into God knew what. With Chloe fully upon them now, she felt better knowing that they were home. She felt safer being able
to see Simon here, and when she felt safer, she could more easily convey calmness to Tess.

  Susanne brewed a fresh pot of coffee and put out a plate of oatmeal cookies that had been baked somewhere in between the fish stew and the chicken. The television screen held images of arcing trees, a wild surf, and brimming shelters. The occasional thud of a branch against the outer walls of the house sent the cats into hiding and everyone else into upstairs rooms to check for damage.

  The lights flickered and steadied. A few minutes later, they flickered again. Shortly before dinner, they flickered and died. Along with sudden darkness came the abrupt cessation of all sound but the rattle of the shutters and the howl of the wind.

  Within minutes, flashlights were distributed and the hurricane lamps lit. The kitchen became the sole gathering place then, with its battery-powered radio and its warm smells—and there was a familiarity to it for Olivia. She conjured up the photograph she had restored for Otis, the one of the Dust Bowl family whose faces she had touched, whose shack she had explored, whose closeness she had envied.

  Time and circumstance were different, but there was the same unity of spirit. The lamp flames cast a sepia glow, the smells were of sustenance and comfort. She was with people she cared about, gathered around a beautiful wood table with a small radio at its hub. Tess leaned back against her. She looped an arm around the child’s chest. Behind her, hidden by the dim light, Simon slipped a hand in hers.

  Her camera couldn’t have captured it. Only the mind could, saving it for eternity as a special memory in a gilt-edged frame. It was a moment out of time, a moment when this small slice of reality was seductive.

  But reality had more slices than this, none half as idyllic. For one thing, there was the vineyard. The wind that battered the house was doing untold damage in the fields. The fate of the grapes lay in the balance. No one in this family could forget that for long.

  For another thing, more than just Chloe was brewing here. Greg remained withdrawn. He stayed in the same room as the others but by himself, despite the fact that he could no longer use his laptop. And Susanne continued cooking with intensity, but without a drop of visible pleasure.