“Or for good, if he stops liking the other girl kitty.”
“Yes, darling, that could happen,” Dennis said, “but don’t count on it.”
He had planned to take Sophie to the South Seas in June for their belated honeymoon. They would do nothing except swim off the reef of Mooréa and sail outrigger canoes and eat tropical fruit and make love.
The plan included leaving the children with Sophie’s parents. Taking his cue from Sophie, Dennis said, “I don’t think the kids will miss us. By June they’ll have friends.”
But by May it hadn’t happened. The children clung to him more and more. They came home from school with or without Sophie and did their homework, and played with each other and the cats, and watched television when it was allowed. After Donahue’s disappearance, they played only with Sleepy.
“Why aren’t they making friends?” Dennis asked Sophie.
“It takes time. The village kids are clubby.”
“What can we do?”
“Let it work itself out.”
“I don’t like to just do nothing. It’s not my nature.”
“Dennis, you can’t change your children’s social lives. They’ll do it themselves, when they’re ready, in their own way. Parents only stand and wait, like civilians on the home front in a protracted war. It’s difficult, it’s frustrating, but that’s the only way that makes sense in the long run.”
Sometimes he felt that Sophie had wisdom and knowledge beyond her years.
“You love them,” she said, “and they know that. Be supportive and instructive, not interfering. Let them work out their own destiny.”
“I hate to fly off to Tahiti if things are like this.”
“Air France is a friendly airline—they’ll let you change the reservations. Let’s wait until winter.”
“Life is short,” he said. “Usually when you postpone things you want to do, it’s a mistake.”
Sophie was silent for a long moment, as if she were struggling with a concept or wanted to say something but wasn’t sure it was the right time to say it. Then she sighed and said, “When you genuinely believe that good things will happen, it works out to be that way. I know. Trust me.”
All right, he decided. I can do that. And I will.
Chapter 8
Under the Full Moon
WHEN DENNIS FIRST unpacked his luggage in Springhill the locals referred to him as the new lawyer. The new lawyer had skied crosscountry to Owl Creek with Edward Brophy. Restless fellow, the new lawyer: did you see him walking through the village in the middle of the night?
As he settled in, his title changed to “Sophie’s man.” You heard?— Sophie’s man helped June Loomis in an argument with a garage owner in Glenwood Springs. Didn’t charge her a penny. Those kids of Sophie’s man had been hunting for a lost cat.
Dennis smiled at the quaintness, but it faintly annoyed him that he lacked a name. He understood there was no malice intended. People held aloof from him in some ways, but he felt they liked him. He sensed he was being tested: the villagers were waiting to get to know him better before accepting him. He had to serve his apprenticeship.
Mountain life was wholly unlike the electric and frenetic world he had known in New York. People were calm, unhurried. He was fascinated by the village, had never dreamed he would—or could—live in such a quiet, remote place, no matter how beautiful. Sometimes he wondered if after a time he would grow tired of it and yearn for the dynamism of the city he had thrived on for so many years. He realized he had cast his lot with Sophie; had accepted, at least for a while, a dependency. But it had not been out of weakness. Love had not blinded him: he’d made a clear-cut choice to change his world. To change, to grow. To learn.
But there were peculiarities about his new mountain home, and he needed to come to grips with them.
He went to Sophie with his questions and soon grasped that Sophie was not quite as forthcoming as he might have liked—indeed, as he felt he deserved—when it came to talking about her past life in Springhill and the people of the village. When he probed too deeply in either of those areas, her common answer was, “One day soon, my sweet, I’ll tell you. Not now.”
Dennis thought his questions were innocent enough. “You know,” he said one Sunday morning while he squeezed fresh orange juice, “I’ve noticed something about the people here. They seem to be in unusually good physical condition. Robust—active—cheerful.”
Sophie smiled at him from the stove, where she was cooking pancakes. “Clean mountain air does it.”
“And maybe clean living. I don’t know a soul up here who smokes except Harry Parrot. And no one really carouses or whoops it up on the weekends, not even the teenagers. Remarkable. Reassuring, and delightful. But…”
Sophie looked up the stairs, where there were sounds of activity. “Dennis, you promised to take the kids biking today.”
“And I will, I will… let me finish this first. Just about everyone in town is healthy and vigorous. No invalids. No one seems gloomy or depressed. Isn’t that so?”
“I suppose it is,” Sophie said.
“Are they all on Prozac?”
Sophie laughed and set out the maple syrup and applesauce. “You’d have to ask Grace Pendergast. But I don’t think she’d breach medical ethics and tell you.”
“Jack Pendergast told me that Grace complains all the time—says she’s got hardly anything to do except give kids polio shots and treat broken bones at the quarry. And yet here’s what’s peculiar.” He had thought about this often, but shunted it aside. “There are no very old people here. Everyone seems to die off more or less in their seventies. If everyone is so healthy, which seems to be the case, then that doesn’t make sense.”
“The investigative legal mind strikes again.”
“Don’t you see what I mean?”
“I never truly noticed it,” Sophie said.
“Come on, darling. Every town always has a few ancient geezers. But here, where everyone is physically vigorous, there isn’t one old fogy sitting on a porch in a creaky rocking chair. They get to be seventy or thereabouts, and bang“—Dennis snapped his fingers—”they just go. As if by appointment.”
Sophie said nothing.
“When did your grandparents die?” he asked.
She considered for a while. “My maternal grandparents died in their mid-seventies, I guess. My paternal grandmother died young— cancer of the uterus. But my father’s father—a wonderful man—lived to be eighty-five. Dennis, you’re like a dog worrying a bone. As a matter of fact, a few months before you got here, a woman named Ellen Hapgood died at the age of ninety-one. Before that, she sat in her rocking chair talking to herself all day long and swatting imaginary bats with a broom. Scott and Bibsy, I’m sure, will live a long life. That’s Brian upstairs, knocking into chairs. He’s trying to get your attention.”
Dennis took Sophie’s arms in a firm grasp. He was not willing to be sidetracked this time.
“One more thing. What’s this second language all about?”
He had heard it the first time outside Mary Crenshaw’s house when he and the children hunted for the missing cat. Sophie had said, “She’s an old woman. She slurs her words.” But Dennis heard odd words spoken again. Oliver Cone, walking down the road from the town gym with one of his pals, had pointed to a large-breasted girl and sniggered something about her “socker muldunes.” Dennis had also learned that in Springhill a car was often a “horker,” an apple was a “babcock,” and a deer rifle was a “boshe gun.”
“I’ve begun to pick up on it,” Dennis said. “I know that when something is good quality it’s ‘bahler.’ I even know that ‘mollies and ose’ are tits and ass. So tell me, Sophie—what’s that all about?”
“It’s been around forever,” Sophie said. “It’s called Springling.”
“And you speak it, of course.”
“Since I was a child. It gets passed from one generation to another.”
“Then why is every
one secretive about it? Why did you never mention it to me?”
“I was waiting for the right time, and I guess this is it.” Sophie smiled. “It originated in California and was brought here around the turn of the century by some miners. At first it was a children’s language, so their parents wouldn’t know what they were talking about. But it caught on. We speak it… sometimes. Give me a barney,” she said.
“What’s a barney?”
“A kiss. It’s your reward for being so einy and bilchy.”
“Which means … ?”
“Smart and sexy.”
“Will you teach the language to me?”
Sophie hesitated.
“Why not?” Dennis asked. “I live here, don’t I? I’m your husband.”
“Yes, I’ll teach it to you,” she said. “But don’t let anyone know you understand it. People here are funny about some things. They like you to live here awhile before they let you in on their secrets. Will you agree to that?”
Dennis thought it was odd, but he agreed.
“Bahl. Now where’s the barney you promised me?”
He kissed her and would have done more if the children had not thundered down the stairs.
A few weeks later, on a Saturday night in June, Dennis couldn’t sleep. He was concerned about a real estate case in Aspen that had taken a wrong turn. He went down to the kitchen, microwaved a leftover cup of coffee, and settled into a big easy chair in the living room. He made notes on a legal pad for nearly a hour. By the time he had finished he was still wide awake, and since it was a bright night with a warm breeze coming from the south, he decided to go for a walk on the path by the creek.
Mountain people retired early. At nearly midnight, under a full moon, the world at Springhill seemed sound asleep. The path along the creek led to his in-laws’ house and land. The moon cast strong shadows. Dennis strolled through the darkness, listening to water bounding over rocks—the spring meltdown reaching its zenith. A night breeze hummed overhead through the pines. He took deep breaths of the thin air.
The Hendersons’ house was a huge A-frame, and the first thing Scott showed visitors was his party-sized redwood hot tub squatting on the deck outside. Fifty yards from the house itself, Dennis saw that lights were on upstairs and downstairs. Blurred light from the patio broke through the ponderosa pines. Then he heard voices.
The blue-gray shadows of a clump of firs cloaked his presence. The roar of the creek drowned out the sound of his footsteps. He could see the hot tub now, steam rising. It was ringed with candles. Naked people moved about in the tub, and he heard throaty laughter.
Somebody’s broken into the property, he thought. Scott and Bibsy must have gone to Denver, and the kids from town decided to have a hell of a good time. But when his eyesight adjusted to the distance and the flickering light of the candles, he saw that the people in the tub were not kids from town. He heard warmer, softer, older voices.
The back door to the house opened. Rich strains of a Mozart flute concerto flowed from the living room. Bibsy stepped out of the house, a man’s arm encircling her waist. She wore a white robe half open, trailing along the dark red hand-rubbed Mexican tiles of the terrace. Under the robe Dennis could see she was naked.
The man with his arm about her waist was also naked. He was short, well built, with a silvery gray beard. It was Edward Brophy, the dentist, Sophie’s good friend whom Dennis had first met on Aspen Mountain. Dennis’s gaze shot back to the tub, where he saw Scott in the steamy water with two men and two other women.
Realizations flowed into him so rapidly that he had trouble sorting them out. He recognized the women in the tub: one was Grace Pendergast, the town doctor—a handsome, dominating woman with black hair and cool blue eyes. The other was Rose Loomis, a plump and sexy widow who ran the Springhill general store with the help of her two children.
His father-in-law, Scott Henderson, was in the hot tub, kissing the breast of Rose Loomis while with his other arm he fondled Grace Pendergast. Grace’s husband, Jack Pendergast, a retired building contractor, was behind Rose Loomis, sitting on the edge of the tub. He was grunting, rocking back and forth.
My God, Dennis realized, he’s fucking her.
Jack Pendergast had to be even older than Scott. The other man who sat on the edge of the tub, naked, clutching a bottle of vodka, was Harry Parrot, the painter.
An orgy. Decorous, well-behaved, with Mozart for background music—an orgy on a warm summer night for a select group of Springhill’s senior citizens.
Dennis chuckled, knowing he couldn’t be heard. He was seeing it; he wasn’t hallucinating. In moonlight the bodies, though far from young, had a sculpted beauty. The men were muscular. The women moved with light, quick steps. Rose Loomis looked like Botticelli’s Venus rising from the sea.
Dennis retreated. He was not a voyeur: this knowledge had come to him by accident. He walked home along the creek, still shaking his head.
Back in his kitchen he brewed coffee, then sat on the porch, drinking and watching the serene light of the stars. The night air was soft, the color of the sky somewhere between royal blue and velvety black- violet.
He decided he would not tell Sophie—after all, Scott and Bibsy were her parents.
But when he finally went to bed he was still stimulated by what he had seen. He woke Sophie and made love to her in the darkness.
The next day he mulled over what he’d seen.
They were free, he decided, and certainly old enough to choose. If I’m lucky enough to reach that age, please let me be that open-minded and physically vigorous.
Bless them!
A few evenings later he was watching the NBA finals on television while his children played on the lawn by the creek. The June days were warm and dry. An occasional evening thunderstorm struck the back range and the nights following were always fresh. The mountains became greener every day, the grass turning from viridian toward emerald.
He heard the smooth rumble of Sophie’s car approaching on the dirt road. She had gone to the village for a joint meeting of the Water Board with the Town Council, which she chaired. These meetings, which took place at least once a week, puzzled him. Sophie always attended them. Earlier that evening he’d said, “Sweetheart, tell me— how much business does a village of three hundred and fifty people have to discuss? I don’t think the mayor of New York is as busy as you are, and he’s got nine million disgruntled city dwellers to keep in line. What goes on here? Are you worried about being reelected?”
Sophie laughed warmly. Small communities, she explained, were the worst when it came to civic matters. There were endless debates about taxes, allocation of the budget, rezoning suggestions, equipment for the gym, school repairs and change of curriculum—the quarry business, road repair—the list went on.
“How long is your term as mayor?”
“We have a peculiar system. I wasn’t elected, I was appointed by… well, I suppose you’d call it a council of elders. There’s no set term. I stay mayor as long as I want to and as long as they like the job I do. It could last a long time.”
“And you don’t get paid for it.”
“Of course not. It’s an honor. And a community obligation. Does it bother you?” Her forehead knitted in a light frown. “When I met you, you told me you were impressed.”
“I’m still impressed. I’m not suggesting you be a hausfrau. I’m just trying to figure out how things work in this village. It’s not easy, you know. It’s … different here.”
He was still thinking about that when Sophie returned from the meeting. Dennis saw right away that something was wrong. He hit the mute button on the remote.
“What is it?”
“Jack Pendergast died of a heart attack.”
“Jack? My God, I just saw him—”
He stopped. The nocturnal sighting of Jack and the others in the hot tub was something he had resolved to keep to himself.
“He was so damned healthy,” he said.
“There was
no warning.”
Two days later they attended the funeral. Almost the whole adult population of the town was at the little cemetery on the edge of the forest. Jack Pendergast had been a popular man who had helped build many of the newer homes for younger couples. Grace Pendergast was doctor and friend to everyone.
Dennis thought of Jack as he had last seen him in the tub at the Hendersons’, sharing his wife and Rose Loomis with Scott while Bibsy cavorted in an upstairs bedroom with the town dentist.
The sun shone from a blue sky surrounded by slow-moving cumulus. There was no church in Springhill. Grace, as the widow, conducted the ceremony. Hank Lovell, Oliver Cone, and two young men lowered the casket into the earth. On top of it Grace placed a stone, a handful of earth, and a small clear glass of water.
“We are here to affirm Jack’s departure,” she said. “We loved him, and we know he loved us. Jack left with full acceptance. The bond between us lives on.”
A few people murmured; everyone nodded. Grace inclined her head toward the young men, and they shoveled earth on top of the casket. No more was said.
Dennis and Sophie walked home along a road bordered by wild- flowers and unruly June grass. “What a peculiar little speech Grace made,” Dennis observed.
“I thought it was fine,” Sophie said.
“ ‘Jack left with full acceptance.’ What’s that mean? The poor guy died of a heart attack. Grace wasn’t even around when it happened. Why does she think he accepted that kind of sudden end to his life? He might well have been in pain. How old was he? Early seventies? That’s not old to go. Certainly, these days, too young to go with what she called ‘full acceptance.’ “
Sophie remained silent. After a few moments Dennis understood that she was not going to answer his question. He looked at her, and in that same instant, as they continued walking down the dirt road, her hand sought his and clasped it. Her head turned toward him. Her dark eyes, reflecting the sun, were exceptionally clear. Certainty beamed from them—beamed with such strength that Dennis felt reassured. She was answering his question; there was no doubt of it. Her smile and her whole being was saying to him: You will see. You will soon understand. Almost without realizing he was doing it, he nodded to her. He felt satisfied. He could not have explained why.
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Page 7