“What garden?”
“The one we’re going to plant when we’re finished painting. We have the only wrought-iron garden gate. I know it won’t keep anyone out, but it’s a nice touch. Can you believe we finally did it? I can’t.” Every day she went through the same litany of satisfactions.
“Yes.” Star’s response was a notch less exuberant. “With Rashid’s money.”
“Look, when you’re that rich, you have a direct line of credit to the money vaults of the world. The bank lent him the money and we’re paying him more interest than he is paying the bank, so don’t feel sorry for Ibn Rashid.” She pronounced it Eebeen Rasheed and distinguished all four syllables. “He’s nobody’s fool, sugar.”
“I wish it were some other way. He holds the mortgage on our house in Bethesda, too.”
“That’s got nothing to do with us. That’s soul money for his daughter. Stop worrying. Your baby will come out with his forehead all creased. When this house is done and rented, it’ll be fine collateral for another one. I have my eye on the corner one. Besides, you could have cashed in that fur throw he sent as a housewarming present and bought a nice-sized lot.” She reared back and inspected the room. “What do you think? Should we leave the floors light or stain them?”
“Let’s leave them light. Some of these rooms are too dark.”
“Mmm. I guess. Some tenant will probably cover them with carpeting.”
Much of the time they worked silently, each lost in thought. Larraine talked about her life in North Carolina and then would ask Star questions about her background. Their calm, contented voices echoed in the empty rooms. One hot afternoon as she stopped sanding long enough to wipe the perspiration from under her hair and direct her face to the small fan they had brought, Star told Larraine about the day she had met James.
“I don’t find it strange that you tended sheep. I used to feed the hogs myself. You know, if you’re a girl from the Deep South, Washington is in your dreams. It’s the place to escape to and find an exciting man. I always dreamed I’d marry a senator or congressman. I wanted to start out as a secretary at the White House. I thought all you had to do was show up and they’d say, ‘Miss Reardon, come right in. We’ve been waiting for you.’ I was so dumb.” She grunted and stepped down a rung. “So when the handsome horseman rode away from you in the desert you didn’t know who he was?”
Star related how James had gone from school to school with meager information and finally found her. At this point Larraine stopped working and sat back to appreciate such a romantic act. “He held his hand over your mouth so you wouldn’t cry out and give him away?”
“Yes. Not that I would have. I was thrilled to see him. From the beginning I felt we belonged together.” She put down her sandpaper and rubbed her chin with the back of her hand. “Larraine, how could I have been so sure of him and then been so wrong? I still can’t get over that part of it. I still feel as if something isn’t resolved.”
“You’re not over that part or any other part,” Larraine said quickly and then started to run the roller furiously, fearful that she had said too much.
Star, too, got back to work. “I’m a married woman and about to be a mother,” she said flatly.
“That doesn’t mean you can stop your heart from longing.”
“He was my first love. We were so natural together. Like two halves of a whole. He used to play practical jokes on me to make me laugh. I can’t remember ever being so happy.”
“And now?”
“This is just very sane. You know . . . being married is just being settled. I guess.”
“It’s not supposed to be that sane,” said Larraine. “I was so much in love with Chuck nothing else mattered. I wouldn’t have traded places with the queen of England. But look what happened. Life’s unpredictable and there aren’t any guarantees. If some fool drops one of those A-bombs they’re testing at Yucca Flats, we’re all gone.” She came down from the ladder and refilled her pan with paint. “Of course at other times I feel damn grateful to be alive and doing something I like. I wouldn’t mind a man in my life. If you’re single too long . . . well . . . the single women I know are going to classes or taking up a sport so they can meet men. That’s what I should be doing, too.”
The next day when she had settled in with her roller, Larraine said, “Why didn’t you go looking for James? Why didn’t you shake the truth out of him? Even if you wouldn’t have liked what he had to say, he owed you an explanation.”
“My father wouldn’t have allowed me to do it.”
Larraine was dipping the roller into the paint pan and then rolling it across the wall in wide swaths. As she talked she pressed the roller harder to punctuate her words. “Sugar, you’re not going to like what I’m going to say, but there’s something basically wrong here. If the guy was nuts about you, why did he just sit around and let you get away? Why didn’t he move heaven and earth to be with you? And as for you, why did it never occur to you to stand up to your father?”
“I couldn’t. He expected certain things from me.”
“Like what? Your life? What kind of love is that? Would you expect that baby inside you to fulfill your needs? Why bring a slave into the world?”
“My father’s word was law. It didn’t matter to him how much I loved James.”
“You may have loved James, but he wasn’t the most important man in your life. Daddy was.” Star was quiet. “Mad at me?”
“No.”
“Still my friend?”
“Yes.”
“Good, then I’ll say one more thing that’s on my mind. There are some women in this world—quite a few—who don’t know who they are until some man tells them, and for this they are eternally grateful. You’ve let three men decide that for you and you’re loyal to all three.” Silence. “Now you’re mad at me for sure.”
“No comment.” A few minutes later, she said. “How about this? No man told me I could buy a piece of property and fix it up and rent it out.”
“Touché. And doesn’t it feel good?”
“Mmm.” She didn’t add that from the time she could talk and understand, she had been prepared to be in business. Her psyche had been methodically primed, and if there was anything to all the theories going around, nothing on God’s earth could have kept her from going into business.
“Suppose James walked in right now. Suppose there was some horrible misunderstanding that kept him away and he suddenly found you and begged you to get a divorce and go with him. Would you go?”
“That’s not going to happen, so it’s silly for me to answer,” she said stiffly.
“You never know, sugar. Life can double back on you. You just never know.”
In the spring of 1956, the nation’s children were being inoculated with the new Salk poliomyelitis vaccine and Beat the Clock made the top ten most popular TV shows.
The fortunate few who had summer homes along the Delaware shore began to air them out and bring them to life. The horsey set—including the Walker clan—had left their tidewater mansions and migrated northwest to Bowie, Maryland, for the racing season.
During the spring that he was courting the Halabys, Rashid had bought a working horse farm southwest of Baltimore that included a large farmhouse right out of Kansas. The compound was a feast for city eyes—lushly green, neat, repaired and painted and smelling of hay and horses. The main house, full of wicker and starched curtains, was both restful and gracious. Well away from the house, where it couldn’t compete with the rural scene, was an oversized natural pool that incorporated part of a lake. Rashid, too busy to make much use of it, offered it to Star during August. “Go and get away from this heat. It’s not good for you or the baby.”
She had gained thirty pounds and the baby was very high, so she couldn’t walk twenty yards without sharp rib pains. She felt the urge to urinate every fifteen minutes. Besides, she
and Larraine were ready to advertise their apartments and meet prospective tenants. The last thing she needed was an hour-and-a-half ride to a strange house, a strange bed, and a strange bathroom, but she went anyway because Paul looked awful and he had promised to come on the weekends.
Later, she would remember that summer as one when Paul would get up early and begin building something right away, sometimes still in his pajamas. She’d find him measuring shelving or planing a cabinet door. Tools would often break or malfunction just at a crucial moment when a project was going over the major hump. “Maybe I can go out and get it fixed,” she would offer. She felt sorry for him.
“I don’t think you can.”
One day she took a malfunctioning drill to three fix-it shops but none would agree to repair it in less than two weeks. It was a good idea to lure him away to a place where he had to relax.
She couldn’t have predicted that she’d feel happier at Mara Farm than she had since coming to Washington. Ned Risley, who managed the farm, was pleasantly surprised with her knowledge of horses and invited her to share in any activity that suited her.
“Paul?” He was lying so still that she assumed he was asleep. He had lain by the pool most of the morning and she was afraid he’d get too much sun. “Sleeping?”
“No. It feels so good just to lie here.”
“Mr. Risley—the manager—he wants to know if he can take us to the yearling auctions.”
“Star, I don’t want to move.” He sounded worried that she would insist. “Why don’t you go ahead? Do you mind?” He spoke without opening his eyes. He barely moved his lips or his head. She’d probably do him a favor by leaving him alone.
“All right. I’ll go. I’ll probably have lunch out. Is that OK?”
“Yes. I only hope I don’t get a call to go back. Menden’s wife has a slipped disk and he can’t cover.”
“I hope not, too. I’ll call you later, OK?”
“Mmm. Is the baby kicking?”
“Constantly.”
“Good. Have fun. ’Bye.”
“ ’Bye.”
How her mother would enjoy this, she thought as the station wagon sped to the armory. There had been letters back and forth discussing a visit, but finally Nadia had decided against it. I don’t want to leave your father just now, she’d written in explanation. There’s been a drought and he’s concerned for the grape crop.
“I’m going to sit with some trainers,” Mr. Risley said apologetically after he helped her up one of the aisles. This was an event he looked forward to all year and he wanted to enjoy it with his friends.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine here.”
The auction went quickly. Two horses were sold in the first twenty minutes for eleven thousand and eight thousand. She thought they were exorbitant sums, but the buyers had used very modest gestures and no one seemed overly excited.
She looked out across the large room and inspected the crowd. It was predominantly of one type—reserved and dressed in expensive, casual clothes. Their faces were tan but she would bet it wasn’t from lying out in the sun. Most likely they were out riding early in the morning and gardening all afternoon. They reminded her of her mother and she experienced a wave of homesickness that left her sad and desolate.
She leaned back and closed her eyes and, as always happened when she was quiet, felt the baby kick. Over the loudspeaker, the auctioneer read the biography—the sire and grandsire—of the next horse. She listened with closed eyes and even dozed off for several minutes, totally oblivious to the fact that her biological grandmother, Mary Walker, still a beauty at seventy-five, was seated not fifteen feet away.
By the end of September, Star was only comfortable standing up or sitting on the stairs and letting her legs stretch down. She couldn’t take the long ride to the farm, which was a real loss because she had come to love the peacefulness of the place.
The outside of the North Capitol Street house was still unpainted, but Larraine had managed to uproot all the scraggly bushes, beef up the soil with bags of fertilizer, and plant flowers and ground cover. The brick walks all around the house were sprouting weeds and needed repair. The outside trim paint was peeling. There was a bad water spot where a gutter had failed over the front windows and part of the frame had rotted away. They had splurged on one holly bush to cover part of the foundation and, after a month of advertising, managed to attract three tenants for the units. The rents they settled on were less than expected, but still eighty-nine dollars over expenses. Each month, a time payment of thirty dollars went to Mr. Heath and another thirty to the electrician. The other twenty-nine dollars went into a repair fund. Larraine was making a small weekly salary plus commission working as an agent for Fred McKay—and he was after Star, too.
“You think anyone’s going to buy a house from a pregnant woman?” she had asked.
“Yes, I do. You’ll get the sympathy business.”
“He’s joking, of course,” said Larraine firmly. “You cannot go traipsing around in the ninth month. Stay home.”
“But you’re doing everything. I feel I should help you.”
“Honey, this is the last free time you’re going to have. Babies get up in the middle of the night. They cry for no reason. They can’t tell you what’s wrong with them. Please! Enjoy these last few days.”
“There must be something nice about it.” Larraine adored babies and would stop carriage-pushing mothers in the street to ooh and ah over even the homeliest infant. Yet true to her word, after that first time she had never again mentioned her dead child.
“You get a lot of smiles and a lot of babbling that occasionally—accidentally, I’m sure—sounds like mamamama.”
“I wish it could have happened some other way. If I’d only known. I think sometimes . . . what an awful way to repay you for your friendship to me.” Nadia still brought it up when Julia asked for news from America. She hadn’t even known that Paul Halaby had been courting Delal before he married Nijmeh. Even now, she could feel Peter’s bitterness, but Julia had never blamed them.
Julia hunched her shoulders, resigned. “It was Paul’s decision. If he wasn’t one hundred percent certain of Delal, it wasn’t meant to be. Delal is very happy in Scotland. She’s determined to be a broadcaster, whatever that is. To please Peter, she’s also taking international politics. She wants to be a political commentator. Again, I’m only spouting words that she feeds me in her letters. I have no idea what she’ll actually work at. I can’t say that things worked out for the best, because who knows what’s in store for any of us, but Delal is all right. What about Nijmeh?”
“The baby should come within the next two weeks. She and Paul might come next summer.”
Julia played with a string of pearls around her neck and stuck out her lower lip. She wanted to bring up the subject. Nadia had planned to bring it up herself. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Even after all these years, it’s on my mind.”
“Right now it’s on my mind, too, because Samir and I are going to Beirut for our anniversary and I want to leave something with you. It’s the locket and ring I took from the parents. If someone comes in while I’m gone . . . I wouldn’t want them found.” She reached into her pocket and brought out a small velvet pouch. “Keep this for me until I come back.”
“Of course.” Julia opened the pouch. She took the ring in her hand and the locket, then put them back and drew the string. “What about your jewelry?”
“I’ll take it with me.”
“Where will you stay? At the Commodore?”
“No. There’s a wine growers’ convention at the Mediterranée. Did you think Samir would go for a simple vacation?”
“I suppose not.” Julia sighed as if the vagaries of human personality made her spiritually weary. “Both our daughters are across the ocean,” she said. “The way things turn out . . . it’s out of
our hands.”
“Why don’t you come with us? Samir would love to have Peter along.”
“He can’t go. I know he won’t admit it, but he’s got gout. It’s almost impossible for him to walk some days. I won’t mention it. I’d hate to embarrass him and make him admit that he can’t walk comfortably.”
“Julia, I’m sorry. You’ve been such a good friend to me over the years. The best.”
“Oh . . . posh. I’ve done very little. Have a good time. Buy some expensive clothes, and if you’re thinking of bringing me something, I could use a nice piece of lingerie.”
“Oh . . . yes. Nightgowns? Slips?”
“Either would be fine.” Julia rose, smoothed her skirt, and dropped the velvet pouch into her pocketbook. “Have a lovely trip.”
Nadia went to her sister-in-law and embraced her. “I love you.”
“And I love you,” said Julia, somewhat surprised but with not the slightest premonition that it would be their last moment together.
She had never looked so beautiful to him. Lying there, with the welcome scalding warmth of the Mediterranean midday sun, he watched her test the blue-green water and felt a resurgence of his teenage longing. He had forgotten how appealing were her firm long legs. Her shoulders were broad and her back gently muscled and tapered with the hips flaring out just enough. He knew her skin would be sun warmed and smooth and he wanted to stand behind her and run his hand from her neck to the little hollow in her back and feel the thrill of a woman’s well-made body. The years had slipped by and he hadn’t really seen her.
There was another thought that he had pushed away for several weeks, the truth of which made him sad and uncomfortable. They were closer and happier since Nijmeh had left. Instead of watching each other warily over the child’s head, they relaxed. They laughed together. Often he held her hand or draped an arm over her shoulder. He was reconciled to the facts of his life and he still loved his wife. She had a permanent hold on his imagination just by being herself—the sum and substance of her existence. I love her, he admitted simply. If she were gone from me, I couldn’t bear it. She hadn’t given him the thing he had wanted most—a son and heir—but he couldn’t imagine life without her.
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