And Be My Love

by Joyce C. Ware

  You're the only honest person over the age of ten I've ever known, Georgina once told her, but it wasn't the kind of thing Beth would dream of repeating about herself. "What did you say you do at Peabody?"

  "I was brought on board as dean of students just before Merrill Longyear left. Then when the trustees began casting around for someone with administrative experience to fill the president's slot, I was temporarily appointed. They haven't made their final decision yet. They were swamped with applications."He grinned."But at least I have no prior history, known or rumored, of hanky-panky with graduate students."

  "The stories about Merrill Longyear were true, then?"

  "Oh yes,"he said."In fact, according to my daughter, the public version was considerably bowdlerized.''

  "You don't mean your daughter—"

  "No, but she knew one of the girls the old boy fancied. According to Amity, her ambition was higher than her academic reach, so when Dr. Longyear did his 'you do this for me, I'll do that for you,' routine, she snapped at the bait like a hungry trout. She hadn't reckoned on the photographs."

  Beth grimaced."Somehow I don't expect that kind of thing from academics."

  "Every temple has its own version of the money-changers, Beth. The thing is, driving them out appeals to me a lot less than teaching. If I get the nod, I hope to fit one seminar into my schedule."

  "Teaching what?"

  "Middle Eastern studies."

  Beth gave an embarrassed little laugh."I've never been quite sure where the Middle East leaves off and the Near East begins."

  "You're hardly alone. It depends on what definition you apply. Mine includes the lands from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas to India. Iran and Afghanistan fall inside it, the Balkans outside."

  Beth closed her eyes briefly, trying to bring up a map on her mental screen."The Islamic countries?" she ventured.

  "Ye-e-ess, except that strictly speaking, Turkey isn't one."

  Beth looked astonished. "It isn't? But all those mosques and those... those..." She pulled her fingers high from her other palm.

  "Minarets?" She nodded."Well, you see, although most Turks are Muslim, Islam hasn't been the state religion since the founding of the Republic in 1923. The Armenian population is Christian, of course, but my mother's people, the Kurds, don't get on any better with the Turks than the Armenians do, even though they're Muslim, too." He laughed as Beth shook her head as if to clear it."It sounds more complicated than it really is."

  "Karim is a Kurdish name, then?" He nodded. "My father was an archaeologist. He met my mother when he was working on a dig at Catal Hiiyiik in central Turkey. She was very beautiful.…" He looked down to stir the remains of the rice on his plate. Beth, sensing what his use of the past tense signified, waited in silence. He looked up, the flash of his bright hazel eyes catching her unawares. "Fascinating place, Catal Hiiyiik. I had hoped to return there this summer, but.…" He shrugged.

  Beth leaned back, suddenly at ease. "When I was ten years old, maybe eleven, I wanted to be an archaeologist more than anything else in the world," she confided. "I was in the seventh grade. We'd been studying Egypt, and Miss Balkin told us about Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. As he approached the royal chamber, she said, someone behind him asked him what he saw." Beth leaned forward; her voice dropped. " 'I see wonderful things!' " She sat back and laughed. "The way Miss Harvey said it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

  Karim smiled. "A good teacher, your Miss Harvey. I gather your ambition was short-lived?"

  "That summer I saw Margot Fonteyn dance in New York."

  "And pick-axes were no match for pirouettes."

  "I'm afraid not." Beth leaned down to retrieve her napkin and, glancing around, realized the room was no longer full."Good heavens, why am I telling you all this? I'm sure I never told Ralph."

  "All the more reason. It was a memory waiting to be shared. Coffee?"

  Beth nodded, not trusting her voice, inhaling just as a swirl of an exotic musk-based perfume assailed her nostrils.

  "Beth? I knew it was you!"

  She looked up into turquoise-shadowed blue eyes alight with curiosity.

  "Marilyn. Good heavens. How long has it been?"

  "Ages, darling. I just got back from Florida. You see, Howard, I told you it was Beth." The last was addressed to the large, florid man behind her.

  He nodded. "Beth," he acknowledged, his eyes drifting beyond her toward the exit, but his wife wasn't about to be hurried. By tomorrow everyone in the hospital auxiliary would know that Marilyn Springer had seen Beth Volmar dining with a stranger—a very attractive stranger, darlings—at Polly's Place.

  "Is it true you've put that gorgeous house of yours on the market?" Marilyn's alert gaze had skated from Beth to Karim, who had risen to stand beside his chair. Marilyn's expectant smile creased her tanned cheeks into a score of mouth-bracketing lines.

  Bowing to the inevitable, Beth made the introductions and confirmed the news about her house.

  "Howard? Did you hear that Beth has—"

  "Put the house on the market. We already knew that, Marilyn, and I've got surgery scheduled for seven tomorrow morning."

  "Mr. Donovan, I—" She gave a little shriek. "For heaven's sake, Howard! I'll give you a ring, Beth," she called over her shoulder as she trotted off in a flurry of mink.

  Karim reseated himself. "I thought you weren't supposed to eat the night before surgery."

  Beth grinned. "He's performing it, not having it. My husband considered him...quite competent."

  "Tonsils and appendixes? No complications?"

  "Poor Howard!" she protested, laughing.

  "Your husband—" Karim adjusted the knot of his paisley tie. A sure sign of male uneasiness, Beth had always thought "—he was a surgeon, too?"

  She nodded. "Ralph was very gifted—everyone said so. Brilliant, really."

  "Was his illness...I mean, I hope it wasn't—"

  "There was no illness. It was all so...senseless. He was driving home, and the fog.…" Beth looked out the window, remembering. "It was early October, too early for Indian Summer, but we'd had a week of hot days followed by a drop of twenty to thirty degrees during the night, and the shortest route from the hospital to our house runs along the river."

  Karim nodded in recognition.

  "Ralph called me from the hospital. An emergency, he said." Beth glanced back at her companion. "Hardly surprising news for a surgeon's wife." A rueful smile crooked her mouth; her eyes slid away again. "I was reading a new thriller—Sue Grafton's latest, I think it was." She knew it was; not a single detail of that night had escaped her unforgiving memory. "It never occurred to me to look out the window.…"

  She shivered, rubbing her sweatered arms, then took a deep breath, straightened and turned back to meet Karim's eyes, searching them, as if seeking the understanding she seemed unable to grant herself.

  "I didn't wait up, you see, and when I opened the door to the police, the mist swirled in around them, just like one of those late night movies set in a graveyard. It was a one car accident, they said, down in the hollow near Jenkin's Nursery. My daughter told me I should have insisted he stay at the hospital. Dana adored her father," she added in a voice so low Karim had to cock an ear to hear her.

  "Most daughters do," he said.

  Detecting a note of regret, Beth opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. We're strangers, she told herself. She was not the unburdening sort: how had she allowed this man, met by accident, to become her confessor? It was unlike her, unfair to him.

  "It's getting late," she said.

  Karim nodded and beckoned for the check. When it arrived, he refrained from protesting the sharing of it, and if he was bothered by the slight rise of Polly's eyebrows at the sight of two credit cards he hid it well, concentrating instead on Beth's grateful smile.

  He preceded her out into the night, his compact body moving with easy authority, his stride assured ra
ther than graceful. He paused by her car.

  "I'll just wait until it starts," he said.

  Beth laughed."I had a new battery put in the same day you rescued me."

  He smiled and moved back, but waited. When her engine caught, he moved quickly to his own car. Beth, a cautious but considerate night driver, waved him on ahead of her. As his red taillights dipped and then were lost around a curve, she felt oddly diminished.

  She thought of his eyes—more green than hazel, really—and the broad capable hands that rested easily on the table as they talked. She wondered if the handsome signet ring he wore held any special significance. She couldn't remember if she had addressed him, as asked, by name. Karim.…

  Her foot maintained a steady pressure on the accelerator as her thoughts raced on. She found herself regretting that he had not asked if he could see her again.

  Regretted he hadn't?

  No, it was more than that. She wished, very much, that he had.

  Chapter Two

  "Grammy? I can't find my bunny shirt."

  Was that a brand name or a description? Beth wondered."I'm sorry, Clara, I don't seem to remember—"

  "You know, the yellow one," Clara said, helpfully pointing approximations of rabbit ears up beside her own.

  "How long since you've seen it, sweetie?"

  Clara thought, her small brow puckering with the effort."A hundred weeks," she stated solemnly.

  When will I ever learn? "Maybe Mommy washed it," Beth said, winding her way to the laundry closet through an obstacle course made up of pull toys, blocks, stuffed animals and a dozen or more brightly colored plastic vehicles scattered and overturned as if by some miniaturized highway catastrophe.

  The narrow floor space between the double doors and the commercial size washer and dryer was entirely filled by stacked plastic baskets overflowing with towels, sheets and garments of every description. The bottom basket, judging from the shorts and sleeveless T-shirts seen through the latticed sides, had been languishing there since the previous summer.

  Beth, who rarely allowed more than twenty-four hours to elapse between doing a laundry and neatly folding it away, surveyed the mountainous accumulation with bemusement. How did anyone find anything to wear? She couldn't remember her son presenting anything other than a neat appearance when he greeted his patients at the clinic—not pristine perhaps, but perfectly acceptable by today's casual standards. The old tale about the shoemaker and the elves flitted through her mind. An unlikely scenario, true, but was it any more likely that Andy did his own sorting and ironing? Ralph's son? Beth shrugged, and resignedly continued the search for the errant bunny shirt.

  It was Clara who found it.

  "It's all wrinkly," she wailed as she pulled from the dryer a tangled mass of sheets and towels with which her yellow shirt had become entangled.

  Beth patiently unwound the rope of fabric. It was indeed wrinkly, and the all-cotton fabric her daughter-in-law insisted upon refused to relinquish its creases no matter how briskly Beth shook it. Clara's lower lip began to tremble.

  "We'll press them out," Beth promised. She reached for an iron she spied lurking in a welter of detergent boxes, but her reassuring smile faltered as the end of its cord came into view. She stared at the stub of mangled wire and plastic. "What on earth!”

  "Fuzzy bit it," Clara said, giggling."He bites everything."

  Chews was a more accurate term, Beth thought. The big golden poodle-retriever mix was far too benign to bite anything, save the occasional flea. "It's what psychologists call a displacement activity, Mom," Andy had claimed. "Living with three children under seven isn't easy for him, you know."

  Beth wound the truncated cord around the iron. Next stop, Jim O'Hanlon's repair shop. If she didn't take it there, she doubted anyone would, although she doubted even more if repair would encourage its use. She dampened Clara's shirt, put it in the dryer and pressed the de-wrinkle command—a popular one in this household, she imagined. When she returned the improved garment to her grateful granddaughter, she caught sight of a newly scalloped section along the border of the Heriz carpet under their feet. She sighed. At least small appliances were cheaper to repair than oriental rugs.

  The front door flew open, admitting Housa, her daughter-in-law. "Oh, Beth, I'm so awfully sorry!" Sixteen-month old Jamie gurgled happily at his grandmother from his perch under his mother's arm."I thought Jamie's appointment was for two. I didn't remember it'd been changed to three until I was pulling in to the parking lot." Her huge dark eyes became moist with contrition. "And then, wouldn't you know it? Dr. Dwyer was held up at the hospital—Janet Brodie had twins, can you imagine?—and on the way back we saw a new colt in the Parley's meadow and—”

  "Housa," Beth protested gently. The flow of apology faltered for a brief moment before resuming, undiminished. Beth felt like a small rock in the middle of an onrushing stream.

  "Housa!" she said again, louder. "It's all right. It's only a few minutes after four. I told you, Mother's not expecting me until five."

  Housa's wide mouth curved in a smile that kindled dancing lights in her chocolate brown eyes. She looks good enough to eat with a spoon, Beth thought, disarmed as always by the sweet-natured, other-worldly creature her capable, industrious son had chosen for his wife.

  At nineteen, when Housa and Andy were married, her glossy shoulder-length mane of mahogany hair threatened to overwhelm her tall reedy slimness; at twenty-eight it gloriously complemented the womanly fleshiness developed in the course of three pregnancies. Wherever she went, male heads turned to follow that cascading bounce of hair and easy hip-swinging stride, but Housa never took notice. Her senses were perennially attuned to the subtle seasonal changes in the natural world around her, whose details later flowed with stylish ease from her brush into the watercolor tablets left here and there on the cluttered tops of tables and chests or jammed into crowded bookshelves. Once, when Beth suggested she put her talent to good use, Housa blinked and smiled as Andy proudly protested that she found the doing of it reward enough.

  As Housa leaned over to kiss Clara's uplifted laughing face, the gentle sway of her untethered breasts beneath her cotton knit tunic reminded Beth of the last dance she and Ralph had attended at the club before his death.

  The Eastbury Country Club dinner dances held on the Fourth of July and at Halloween were not only the biggest social events on the club's yearly calendar, but the invariable occasion for grumbles from Ralph concerning his son's continuing failure to apply for membership. The Volmars were seated, as usual, with what Andy later told her was known as the cut-and-shut brigade: three surgeons—Ralph, Howard Springer and Bruce MacDonald—and tubby little Everett Deeping, the director of the grandest funeral home in the county.

  Their wives were spaced among them—No, Beth, not next to Ralph, that's not fair!—like accessories. Attractive accessories, Beth liked to think, providing their distinguished menfolk with reasonably intelligent company, except perhaps for little Evvy MacDonald who was too browbeaten to do much more than smile and nod agreement no matter the subject under discussion.

  Bruce MacDonald had just finished boasting—his deprecating smile fooled no one—of his most recent real estate coup, accomplished at the height of Connecticut's real estate boom when outrageously overpriced properties received multiple bids as a matter of course. Ralph had told Beth that Bruce's investments had dangerously outrun his resources, but she was happy enough to grant him his moment of preening. Marilyn Springer, however, took it upon herself to remark that anyone who couldn't make money in a market like that was a certifiable idiot. Bruce's pudding cheeks had stiffened like cement;

  Evvy, serenely unaware of the slight to her husband's financial acumen, continued nodding and smiling. It was an awkward moment.

  Just then, Andy and Housa glided by, moving in smooth concert to the easy rhythms of a ballad already considered a golden oldie when Beth herself was young. She smilingly returned Housa's flutter of fingers.

  "Did
you know they were going to be here, Beth?" Ralph had demanded.

  "It wasn't certain, darling. I knew Housa wanted to see the fireworks, but they weren't sure if they could get a sitter. You know how it is."

  "I know we could have made room for them at our table if anyone had seen fit to tell me."

  "They're with the younger set, dear. The Leons asked them."

  "Dan Leon is younger than Andy. Why is he able to afford the fee?"

  Beth recalled the effort it had been to keep her smile from slipping. "Affording the fee isn't the point, Ralph—it's a question of priorities. Andy loves his family; he enjoys being with them on the weekends."

  The other men exchanged looks of incomprehension. They loved their families too, but what did that have to do with the way a man spent his weekends?

  "If I were Andy," his father declared, "I'd want to spend as little time as possible in that trash heap of a house."

  Beth had fallen silent, addressing her attention to the lobster on her plate. Her companions, rarely vouchsafed a glimpse into the private life of the Volmars and well aware this one was unintended, followed suit. After the scouring of lobster claws and tails for lingering bits of the succulent meat, their conversation resumed, this time focusing safely on plans for the Labor Day weekend golf tournaments and the proposed, shocking rise in the town's property taxes.

  When Andy and Housa reentered the table's field of vision, their elders were just finishing dessert, a creamy confection greeted by the women with obligatory regrets followed by eager wielding of spoons. The music was slower now, and as the young couple swayed past—eyes closed, cheek pressed to cheek—Housa's full lips parted, and her long swell of thigh, to which her skirt's filmy fabric clung, seemed to mold itself to her husband's. All eyes, both male and female, followed them.

  Howard Springer took a long pull at his scotch and water. "With a woman like that beside you in bed," he rasped, "who'd give a shit what the friggin' house looked like."