A Ruling Passion

by Judith Michael

  "At the train station," Rosemary said; her voice was subdued.

  "How much do you have?"

  Rosemary did not answer.

  "How much. Mother?"

  "Nine..."

  "Nine suitcases? You're ready for ail four seasons."

  "Don't be sarcastic, Valerie; I wasn't thinking about it. Everything was so awfiil, and I was so frightened ... I couldn't afford that apartment and I couldn't find another one and I didn't know what I was going to do, where I could go; I thought I'd end up on the street like those people you read about; I had nightmares about it. So I had to come here. I had to. I'm sixty-one years old and I couldn't imagine... I didn't know what else to do."

  Valerie put her arm around her mother. 'Tm sorry." She hesitated. She was having trouble saying the obvious words: that her mother could live with her for as long as she liked. "The tea is ready," she said at last, and poured from her white-and-gold English teapot.

  "This is from Sterling Farms," Rosemary said, running her finger over the gold scrollwork on the lid. "It's a very fine piece. Where is the rest of the set?"

  "In storage. I couldn't bear to sell it."

  "What did you sell?"

  "Most of the china; two sets of silver—I kept one; all the silver serving pieces; all the Royal Doulton and Waterford and Lladro; most of the crystal."

  "And the Russian candelabra?"

  "It didn't fit with the decor here."

  Rosemary cast another quick glance at the room, and shuddered. 'Tiow can you live here? How could you stay one night, much less— how long has it been?"

  "A little over six weeks. It's not permanent. Mother. It's just a place to stay for a while, like a hotel room."

  "A terrible hotel; we don't stay in terrible hotels."

  Valerie felt a flash of exasperation. "I remember when I used to say that. I'd rather not be reminded." She added more tea to Rosemary's cup. "Are you hungry? I have fish and salad for dinner."

  Rosemary's head shot up. "You're cooking dinner? You don't know how!"

  "I do now. And I stay in a terrible hotel room. And I have a job, and a salary that's a lot better than my last one but hardly enough to pay for a cook. How long are you going to talk as if things are the

  same, Mother? Nothing is the same: not one thing is the same as it was before the plane crash. I'm trying to get used to that, and I'm having enough trouble without you coming here and talking as if—"

  "Don't talk like that to me!" Rosemary cried. "You don't want me here! That's what you're really saying, isn't it? You want me to go back to New York and leave you alone!"

  '*Yes, but I won't let you do it."

  "Yes? You really said yes?"

  "Would you rather I lied? I'm telling you how I feel. Mother; I think we owe each other that much. In one way I'd much rather be alone. I have to figure out how to live, and how to think about myself; I don't feel like the same person I've been all my life. I have to think about Carl, try to understand—"

  "What good does it do to think about him? You married him and he ruined us!"

  "You mean I should have asked for a few references before I said yes. Well, but I didn't, and now I'm trying to understand what happened, and get used to living here, and working, and not having many friends, and no man... Mother, can't you understand that this isn't easy for me?"

  Rosemary shook her head. "You're hard and flip, you make jokes about getting references, you say you want me to go back to New York... I don't know whaf s happened to you."

  "Yes you do, a lof s happened, almost overnight, it seems, but you're too busy feeling sorry for yourself to pay attention."

  "I told you, I can't stand it when you talk to me that way! Why shouldn't I feel sorry for myself? Who's going to, if I don't? I'm sixty-one years old and I don't know what's going to happen to me! People my age, especially widows, have a right to expea that their children will take care of them!"

  "I intend to," Valerie said quiedy. She felt trapped by her own bad temper as well as by Rosemary's demands. All her life she had done what she wanted without being responsible for anyone else, and now, when she had to concentrate on building some kind of life out of the ruins Carl had left her, she had to take care of her mother. Ifs not fair; daughters ought to be able to think their mothers will take care of them.

  Rosemary was crying. Tears squeezed from her closed eyes and ran down her face, making it glisten as if she were standing in a rainstorm. Well, that's whafs happening, Valerie thought. She's standing in a storm, watching her world blow away. Valerie was caught between pity and anger; her muscles were tense and her head hurt. Every day

  she seemed to have fewer choices; with every step she took, she moved farther away from the life she had led, and still thought—though not very often anymore—she might return to. And how much farther could she be, she thought, than earning a living and organizing a life for two people?

  It didn't matter; there was nothing else she could do. She put a handkerchief into her mother's hand and put her arms around her. "I don't want you to go back to New York. You'll stay here, with me. We'll work it out."

  Rosemary's tears slowed and stopped. "Here?" she asked.

  "Wherever I decide to live," Valerie said shordy, then gave a quick sigh. She had to watch her tone of voice; why make her mother feel worse? "Right now we're going to cook dinner," she said lighdy. "Together, The Ashbrook women in the kitchen; who would have believed it? ril tell you the truth: Fm not really a cook; I'm more like a junior technician. I read the instructions and put a bunch of things together and hope I end up with something farniliar."

  A small laugh broke from Rosemary. "It sounds chancy."

  "It is, but ifs got its good points. There wouldn't be any ftm in it if we knew exactly how it would end up."

  Rosemary shook her head. "I like knowing how things end. I won't go to a movie if I know it ends in tragedy, and I always read the last chapter of a book first, to make sure it has a happy ending."

  "Do you really? I ne^er knew that. But that ruins it, doesn't it? If the writer planned it from beginning to end..."

  "I don't care. I don't want to spend my time on anything but happy endings."

  Valerie nodded. "I'll do my best," she murmured.

  The next day they began to look for a larger apartment. Rosemary made a list of addresses while Valerie was at work, and telephoned for appointments, and in the evening they drove to one after the other, swiftly appraising them with the critical gaze of women who had always had the best. Then Valerie would reappraise them in terms of their incomes: her own salary and her mother's small bank account, swelled now from selling her jewelry.

  It took two weeks to find a place they could agree on: not an apartment but a coach house left over from an estate that was being divided into small lots for tract houses. The coach house too would be torn down when its lot was sold, but meanwhile it was theirs for a rent so low it was worth it, to Valerie, to move in even though they had no idea how long they could stay. Rosemary was unhappy because, even

  though it had two floors, it was not nearly large enough for her furniture. But to Valerie the five rooms felt grand and spacious after sharing her tiny apartment with her mother and, because they were across the street from a park, the rooms were always sunny and looked out on trees and bushes instead of other buildings. The house was in Falls Church, a few blocks from Sophie, who had told Valerie about it, and they moved in a few days after renting it. Rosemary had her furniture shipped from New York and they fit what they could into the five rooms; what was left over Valerie insisted on selling.

  "It's too good to sell!" Rosemary protested. "Someday you'll want it. When you get your money back, or find someone to marry; you can ftirnish a whole house with what's here!"

  "Or we can use the money now, when we need it," Valerie said firmly, and Rosemary, as she did all the time now, subsided, letting Valerie make the decisions. She would not help with the sale, however. That weekend she sat in her room with the
door closed, trembling as she heard the footsteps of strangers and their murmured comments as they fingered her prize possessions. She sat there until the rooms were silent, and when she emerged almost everything had been sold.

  "How much did you get?" she asked Valerie.

  The money was in small piles on the mahogany coffee table. "Almost five thousand dollars."

  Rosemary gasped. "It was worth thirty! Forty!"

  Valerie nodded. She was looking at the money, fanned out before her. / used to spend five thousand dollars on one dress. Now it seems like a fi)rtune.

  "You gave it away!" Rosemary cried accusingly.

  Valerie swept the money into one pile. "I don't think so. I went to a couple of house sales and saw what people were charging. I didn't want anything left. And it isn't as if I sold it all, Mother; for heaven's sake, look around you."

  Stubbornly, Rosemary looked steadfastly out the window, at the people strolling in the park. Watching her, Valerie felt a stab of tenderness, as she would for an unhappy child. The coach house was crowded: oversized Oriental rugs covered the floors, the extra length roUed under along the walls; groups of tufted, braided, overstuffed ftirniture were jammed together to accommodate the pieces Rosemary could not bear to give up; lamps, silver-framed photographs and vases were crammed on tabletops. It all looked wrong: ftirnishings that had looked elegant on Park Avenue now looked heavy and dark, too formal for the small, plain rooms of a suburban coach house. But the pieces

  were familiar, and so, in spite of everything, the house was more Uke home, and much more comfortable, than the one Valerie had just left. For the first time since moving back to Virginia, she felt she had a place where she belonged.

  But that meant this was permanent. She felt as if the last door had closed on her other life. She looked down, at the money on the table, then once again at her new living room, the solid ftirniture lit by the golden late-afternoon sun, and her body tensed with the urge to run away. But she had nowhere to run. Nowhere but forward, wherever that went.

  She stuffed the money into her Coach bag, to be deposited the next morning on her way to work. Then she reached in and took some of it out. 'We're going out to dinner," she told Rosemary. "We'll celebrate our new house, and our brilliance in squeezing all these possessions into it, and our new life in Falls Church." She put her arm around Rosemary's shoulders. "This is where we live now." She knew she was talking to herself as much as to her mother. "We'll get to know Falls Church as well as we know New York; we'll go to Washington for excitement; we'll make lots of friends. We're going to be very happy here."

  Rosemary sighed. Valerie ignored that drawn-out expression of doubt, but later that night as she lay in bed, it echoed in her thoughts. For the first time in years, she was in the fourposter she had slept in from the time she was a child, and, gazing upward at the lace canopy, she could almost imagine she was a teenager again, living at home with her parents, everything made smooth for her, no matter what she wanted to do. She remembered the boys who had pursued her in high school, the ones she had ignored and the ones she had dreamed about; she remembered the parties she and her friends had given, where they learned about kissing, about how it felt to have a boy's hand under their skirt and inside their sweater, about dancing in erotic rhythms while rubbing against each other, scrupulously vertical since they could not imagine being horizontal with a boy, at least not then.

  She moved restlessly in bed, her body heavy and longing. She missed Carl. He had been a skillftil lover and they'd had good times together; far better than she'd had with Edgar, who was all drama and no sensuaUty. She closed her eyes and imagined Carl's hands on her breasts, holding them while his tongue moved slowly over the nipples. She sighed, her legs moving apart as she felt him bending over her, one hand still on her breast, his Hps moving lingeringly over her warm

  skin, at her waist, on her stomach... "Nick," Valerie sighed.

  Her eyes flew open. Her legs snapped together, and she stared at the lace canopy curving above her. Whose hands and lips had she been imagining? Not Nick's, it couldn't be Nick's, not after all this time. It was a shp of the tongue, no more. She had not even seen him, except at a distance, since their interview five weeks earlier. Part of the time he had been out of town, and the rest he had been exceptionally busy —Sophie had told her this—expanding E8cN through agreements with cable operators in all fifty states and in Europe. E8cN went through spurts of activity, and this was one of them, Sophie said; it might go on for weeks or months. In the meantime, Valerie was becoming a researcher: a rather lowly position that gave her no reason to have anything to do with the president of the company. And the way things were going, it could be six months before she saw him again.

  It was a slip of the tongue. She'd probably been thinking of work, and so it was his name, not Carl's, that she said aloud.

  I need something to do, she thought. It wasn't enough to shove fiirniture around, and shelve books and put away china: she needed more. "Like a teenager bursting with sexual energy," she murmured wryly. "I've got to find a way to work it off"."

  She slipped out of bed and went to the French-provincial desk in the corner: the same desk she had used for homework and love letters and poetry writing when she was young. Snapping on the porcelain lamp, she looked at the piles of clothes still to be hung in her closet and armoire and organized in bureau drawers. Thafs good for a couple of hours, she thought, and, naked in the warm night, she set to work.

  "One of those investigators was here," Rosemary said when Valerie returned from work a few days after they moved in. "I can't imagine what they still have to ask you; it's been nine months since the accident. I told him you'd be home at five-thirty."

  Valerie went to the kitchen to put on the teakettle. She was back in a moment. "You didn't do the breakfast dishes."

  Rosemary was looking at a magazine. "I didn't have time."

  'Tou had nothing but time. You were here all day."

  "There wasn't time! I thought about doing them, but the day just got away from me. I'll do them tomorrow."

  'Tou said that yesterday, and the day before."

  Rosemary flung the magazine down. "I just have to get used to the

  idea! You ought to be able to understand, Valerie, it's not easy to change, at my age. I'm sixty-one and I've never done dishes; I never even thought about doing them."

  'Tou never talked about your age, either, until it became an excuse." Valerie heard the bitterness in her voice and, angry at herself, retreated to the kitchen. She was so tired. She'd been sitting in front of a computer and a microfiche machine all day, reading the tiny print of newspaper stories about a series of unsolved murders over the past five years, and her back and neck hurt, her eyes hurt, and she was bored. At first the stories had been fascinating, but she had had to read dozens of them, most repeating the same information, in all the major newspapers and magazines. Then she culled the most important points from all of them and typed them up on her computer—a slow two-finger process, though she was teaching herself to type fi-om a book— in a memo for Les Braden, who might use them in planning a story for "Blow-Up." Of course, he might decide he didn't want the story after all, and her whole day's work would be for nothing. She poured a cup of tea, feeling discouraged and irritated. She gazed at the teapot, then poured a cup for her mother. She was carrying it into the living room when the doorbell rang and Rosemary opened the door.

  "Bob Hayes of the National Transportation Safety Board," the investigator said, shaking hands with Valerie. "We have our final report and I wanted to bring it to you, instead of mailing it."

  "Final?" Valerie sat down, shifting her thoughts from her job to Carl. "You've found something new?"

  Hayes shook his head. "I wish we had. We've put together everything we've got"—he took an envelope from his briefcase and handed it to her—"and this is what we've come up with. If you want to know basically whaf s in it..."

  "Yes," Valerie said.

  "The crash was c
aused by water in both auxiliary fiiel tanks, and the failure of the pilot to do a complete preflight check. If he'd done it, he would have found the water; there's no way he would have missed it. But it seems he skipped some of it. Also, the pilot didn't follow standard flight procedures: he apparendy switched to both auxiliary tanks at the same time."

  Valerie waited. "Is that all?"

  "That's it."

  'Tn this whole report?"

  "There's a lot of background: interviews, tests, analyses, the whole investigation. But that's our conclusion."

  "But that doesn't solve anything! Carl said it wasn't possible to have water in both tanks; he said it hadn't ever happened before."

  "We understand that's what he said. It's not often that water would be in both tanks, but thafs what we found; probably from condensation."

  "Carl said it was done on purpose. I told the police that, and I told your in'estigator."

  "It's in the report. But we can't make that claim without some evidence. And we have none. All we have for sure is that there was water in both tanks and the pilot didn't do a thorough check before taking off."

  Valerie stood and gave him a level look. "That's how it's worded in the report?"

  He nodded.

  "That it was Carlton's fault, and no one else was involved?"

  "On the basis of the evidence we have, that's the only conclusion we can draw."

  "But he talked about a woman. He said he would have thought she might do... something."

  "We included that in the report, but people do call planes and boats 'she,' and we've found no evidence of a woman. The mechanics at the Placid airport didn't see one; neither did anyone in the terminal. These accusations, you know... they were made at a time when you were probably in shock; you may not have heard too clearly. And your husband did admit he lost control. He apologized to you for it. And all the passengers said he was delirious. You did, too."

  "I said he was feverish and excited. I hope this report doesn't misquote me."