Cool's Ridge

by Perrin, Ursula;

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said as Skip pulled up next to the fenced-in vegetable garden. “I suppose I might as well work on the newspaper.”

  “Sure,” he said noncommittally. “Why not? Open that, will you?”

  “The glove compartment? Why?” I touched the button, the lid fell open. On top of a pile of papers—receipts, insurance forms, an Owner’s Manual—was a small box wrapped in embossed silver paper. I looked at it. My chest felt squeezed, as if there weren’t room enough to breathe.

  “Well,” he said, “go ahead, open it. What’s the matter?”

  I was afraid to open the little silver-wrapped box, afraid that it might be a joke, a trick, a joke in the box, afraid that it might not be. I grappled with the stiff paper. My fingertips felt swollen, like polyps, or a bunch of sea grapes. Under the silver paper, the little box was purple velvet. You pressed a tiny gold button and the top shot up. “God!” I said.

  “Like it?” he asked. I felt him watching me.

  The ring was big and square and brilliant, a diamond in a white gold setting.

  “I know,” he said. “You’re going to tell me how many South African miners died for de Beers and this ring.”

  “No,” I said, “It’s just …”

  “Why, Liz,” he said. “Liz. Baby, don’t cry. It’s going to be all right. Liz, honey, my sweetest girl.” We kissed, a long engaged kiss full of tears, plastered-down hair strands, laughter, more tears and his hands on my ribcage were as light as the hands of a masterly rider holding the reins. But I couldn’t stop crying, I was crying and laughing. He kissed me and made small soothing noises and at last, in a wail, I said, “Oh Skip, I haven’t even told you, I haven’t had a chance. I feel so bad. After all these years, my parents are getting divorced.”

  II

  LEONARD

  1.

  “Good morning,” Leonard’s mother said pleasantly when he picked up the telephone and barked “Hello!” into it. “Aren’t we just the old bear this morning?”

  Leonard abruptly laughed and relaxed. He liked his mother, a small, sturdy, plump, humorous person who ran the Gannet household with unmitigated patience and fortitude, keeping (Leonard thought) a firm hold on the tiller while Dr. Gannet, a melodramatic type, yodeled and threw his weight around from starboard to port. His father, Karl, provided thrills and interest: skiing down impossible slopes, buying fast cars, continuously courting all manner of women (Leonard’s guess was that he never followed through on these flirtations; Emily Gannet had him on some sort of invisible tether and with the lightest of twitches kept him to his accustomed path, for which, Leonard thought, Karl was perhaps secretly relieved and grateful).

  Leonard’s image of his mother always came to him first as a figure in a mysterious chiaroscuro, a painterly mix of sparkling highlight and somber shade. When he was small, arriving home from school at three-thirty, he would find her waiting for him, reading a book. When the weather was warm, she liked to lie on a chaise on the shady screened sunporch. She would look up and smile and lay her book down in her lap, a breeze would riffle the rhododendron leaves, and a spatter of sunspots would shift across the page dappling her hands with freckles of light and setting off for one brief second a volley of corruscations from her diamond ring.

  Winter afternoons, she lay on the old green velvet Chesterfield sofa that stood in front of a bay window ablaze with sunshine and rimmed with fiery tinkling icicles. Behind her on the window’s broad sill a small forest of house plants breathed steadily, humidly, upon the window’s many small panes. A sweater lay across her thick nyloned legs and on the coffee table sat a silver bowl full of tangerines, which faintly scented the room. Her face, backlit by winter sun, seemed remote and dark; and yet she had never seemed to Leonard a remote or distant person, at least not more so than anyone else.

  “How’s it all going up there?” she asked in her low humorous voice.

  Even coming from two hundred miles away, there was more to this question than Leonard was willing to address. He answered cautiously. “Good … good. The first edition of The Sussex Monitor hits the stands Thursday afternoon.”

  “Terrific! I’m proud of you. My son the editor. Stick a copy in the mail for me, will you?”

  “Sure. How’s everybody?”

  “Good, except for Bill, who’s just enlisted in the air force. He’s been talking about it for months but I still feel unprepared. And depressed. Meanwhile, last week his new girlfriend arrived for a visit. She’s an exchange student, Norwegian, very pretty, blonde, blushes a lot, you know the type. A little klutzy, maybe, or thick.”

  “Ma.”

  “Sorry. Of course it certainly could be the language barrier. Billy’s in pig heaven. She follows him around whisking off his jacket and straightening his tie. Next she’ll be shining his shoes.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, as long as he shines her shoes, too.”

  “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

  “Well, you are. I’ve changed. I’ve joined a consciousness-raising group.”

  He laughed. “What? My mother in a consciousness-raising group? Come on. You always know exactly what you’re doing.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. I don’t think I need any such thing. I feel completely in charge, which may be the problem. Sometimes I’d like to feel less in charge. I’d like to wear high heels and frilly blouses and glaring jewelry. But I’m not the type, am I. I’m sturdy and dependable. I wear good wool suits, I sit on the school board. The trouble is, men do respect me. No one’s taken advantage of me in simply ages.” She laughed and innocently went on, “How are you, really?”

  “Oh … all right in most ways. I like what I’m doing. It’s what I’ve been looking for.”

  “I’m so glad.” She would, he knew, avoid The Other Subject, which was to have been covered by ‘How are you, really?’ In fact, she did not much like Alice. He knew this by the look of special reserve, which, like a gauze veil, fell over her expression whenever Alice entered the room. She was unfailingly courteous to Alice and kind, but she never smiled at her and from time to time she would look at him quizzically, as if to say, ‘Why? Why her?’

  His father, on the other hand, adeptly turned on the charm when Alice was in the house. He adored pretty women, especially blondes. (Emily Gannet’s hair was dark brown, her almond-shaped eyes were brown. She wasn’t pretty, but how had Leonard’s Aunt Louise put it?—she was winsome.)

  Karl could even make Alice laugh.

  “I’m crazy about you father!” Alice had whispered to Leonard the first time he’d taken her home. She’d squeezed his arm.

  His father, when so inspired, could be grave, genial, gay, paternal, high-handed—The Duke of the Dinner Table—while his mother, with only a small sideways tuck of her pale plump mouth (she seldom wore lipstick) and a tiny, near-indiscernible lift of her smooth brown brows, signalled Leonard that she was taking it all in (His Usual Performance) but with a grain of salt, as in, ‘Oh well, it’s good for him. Keeps the old ego in trim, and all that.’

  “Anyway, Leonard,” she said, “here’s a little coincidence I want to tell you about. When I went up to Smith for reunion a couple of weeks ago I met—re-met, actually—a woman I used to know somewhat—Cassie Millar she was then, now Cassie Stillwell. I liked her back then but never knew her well, she wasn’t in my dormitory. I remembered her as bright and earnest, a little shy. A nice person, a decent person. She seems nice now, too. We sat next to each other at the class dinner and decided to meet for lunch, which we did last week, in the city. Here comes the coincidence. Have you guessed?”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said glumly.

  “Isn’t that funny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well I just thought I’d tell you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Is she nice?”

  “Who, Ma?”

  “The daughter, Cassie’s daughter. Is she nice?”

  “She’
s all right, I guess. We had a party for them Sunday night. They’ve just gotten engaged.”

  There was a silence. “Oh,” Emily said. Then, irritably, “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “She’s engaged to Skip.”

  “Skip Loomis? Well really!”

  “They’ve been going out for a long time, off and on.”

  “Off and on! Skip goes out with everybody. The litmus paper lover. I suppose he changes color according to the partner.”

  “Hey, Ma. You can tell all this about Skip after a couple of stays at our house?”

  “Would you like to bet?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think I agree. He’s an easy guy. True, he gets along with everybody, but since when is that a major character flaw?”

  “He has a character?”

  “Why are you being so hard on him?”

  “Leonard, he agrees with everybody. You can’t tell what he things or feels, what he is.”

  “You told me you thought he was so—let’s see, what was your word—affable.”

  “What’s terrific about affable? Oh. Speaking of affable reminds me of your grandmother.”

  “It does? That’s astonishing.”

  “I was thinking of opposites, actually. She wants you to call her. ‘Wo ist Leonard?’ Brush up your German, English seems to have dropped out.”

  “Is she okay physically?”

  “Who knows? She’d rather croak than tell us. But I think she’s all right. My main concern is a mugging. It’s the mugger I’m worried about, he’d never survive her umbrella. I guess her health is pretty good, it just worries me that she won’t speak English anymore. She knows I hate that other language.”

  “She’s forcing you to confront the unreasonable side of your nature.”

  “What’s unreasonable about hating German?”

  “You shouldn’t hate a language, it’s never done anything to you.”

  “The language of Goethe! So it’s silly, I can be silly if I want. I’ve got to go. How’s Alice?”

  “Fine.”

  “Will you call your grandmother? And call me sometimes, too, bud. And listen, Leonard, tell that girl Liz ‘hello.’”

  When Leonard was very small he’d been afraid of his grandmother. And then at age eleven or twelve, as he grew taller and stronger, she’d flatteringly begun talking to him as if he were all grown up. (His mother listened to him. With his mother, he always felt as if he were “on” at center stage, but Emily had been the family’s appreciative audience for so long that without really meaning to, one took the corresponding role of entertainer.)

  With his grandmother, the relationship was more quid pro quo. She was tall and thin, with perfectly waved white hair, piercing blue eyes, a bony nose, an iron tongue. A dressmaker made her clothes. Of whatever fabric—silk or linen or tweed—there was always a long narrow skirt that fell from her knobby hips to just above her elegant ankles, and a long narrow jacket, sometimes with revers, sometimes with only a simple vee neck. She wore with this outfit a long rope of pearls. Her hats were all of one familiar style, variations on the toque that had been popular in 1914. It was as if she’d formulated a Basic Costume and merely waited in her iron way for another fashion cycle to coincide with her own.

  She had an apartment on East 83rd Street off Park Avenue that seemed exotic to Leonard because of the goose-down comforter on his bed, the Meissen figurines in the lit-up curio cabinet, the strong smell of “4711” cologne in her bedroom, the smell of coffee—freshly ground—that permeated her apartment every afternoon at four o’clock (and without which she claimed there would be no point to life) and the Russian cigarette she allowed herself daily after the coffee hour. Most times when he visited, his Aunt Louise would come by at six-thirty after a day of seeing patients. Still in her trench coat, Louise would sink wearily into an armchair and smoke a cigarette, her mass of dark blond hair unraveling from its heavy coiled bun and her voice low with fatigue. Her lips were pale and chapped—she had a habit of biting her lower lip.

  Louise was not at all like her mother, she was softer, more pliable and yielding. At an early age, Leonard had thought himself in love with Louise. She was a psychiatrist. She had been married and divorced. Almost every summer she’d visit the Gannets in upstate New York, arriving in her own dark red convertible with her tennis racket in the back seat.

  “It’s nice here,” she said once to Leonard as they sat on some garden furniture near the Gannets’ tennis court. She said it with such simple wan gratitude that Leonard remembered the little phrase an inordinately long time, as if it had had some special meaning, which most likely wasn’t the case; it was perhaps only the kind of trifling thing that is said to round out a silence. Louise had had a whole series of lovers who did not resemble each other except in this way—they were all, one after another, improvident—actors, writers, poets, sculptors. Leonard’s mother said that if you knew Louise long enough you’d get to see the entire male population of the New York quasi-artistic set pass in review before your very eyes.

  What Leonard had liked best about his grandmother’s New York apartment were the leather-bound books displayed in the shelves on either side of the gray and white marble fireplace. When he was small, Leonard would take these books down and stack them in giant towers as if they were large building blocks. When he was grown, he thought it odd that his grandmother had allowed him this game—the books must have been valuable. In fact, she had encouraged it. She would sit at a table near the window writing letters (she seemed always to be writing letters) and would look at him over her glasses, smile and nod and go on writing.

  “Who are you writing to, Grandma?”

  “Relatives, my dear child. Relatives and relations.”

  “Like who?”

  “You see under the bookshelves those little doors? Open them and bring me what you find inside.”

  “This tin box?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it biscuits? It says biscuits on it.”

  “No.”

  He brought the box to her and she opened it. Her bony, age-spotted hands with the two rings, a diamond on her left, a fire opal on her right, delved into the piles of nineteenth century pasteboard, more recent heaps of Kodak snapshots, fading Polaroid photographs. “This is my sister, Liselotte, and here is her husband, Heinz, who was killed in the war, and here also their little boy, Gerhard. And here is a picture of my brother, Johann, also killed in the war, but I write still to his wife, Marianna.”

  “Who’s this with the mustache?”

  “Your grandfather. And his two sisters, Klara and Ilse.”

  “Do you write to them, too?”

  She put her arm around him and held him close. “No. They are dead you see. Also killed during the war, because of the Nazis.”

  “In the concentration camps?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were the others, too?”

  “The others were killed in air raids.”

  “Do you hate the Germans?”

  “I am a German. We were all at one time Germans.”

  “Why do the Germans hate the Jews?”

  She said with a mocking smile, “Ah, Homo sapiens, the Master of the Earth, delights to hate. It makes him feel strong.”

  “My mother says she hates Germans.”

  “Nonsense. Hatred is for cowards. Your mother is not a coward.”

  She took him to museums—Kultur required it—but music was her greater love. On Sunday afternoons, they went to Carnegie Hall and later they would slowly stroll home in the New York twilight, a time Leonard thought of as sad and enchanting, when the streets were colored a smoky star-struck violet. When he was seven, she insisted to Emily that he have piano lessons.

  He never played anymore, he thought, and with the tip of his ballpoint pen he drew a G clef sign on his new desk blotter. (In another month the blotter would be covered with doodles of notes, squiggles, shaded squares.) He missed music. Homer Township wasn’t exactly Manhattan and listening pleasure was
limited to rock, country, Jesus. What time was it? He had to be at the printers by eleven a.m. Now who the hell was this?

  A tall, bulky, weathered-looking man had come into the office—shambled in, while glancing alertly around. His large brown eyes were magnified by thick-lensed glasses. He wore a yellow knit polo shirt and a windbreaker—it had been cool early that morning—and the kind of tan pants that older men favor, with elastic in the waistband.

  “’lo?” Leonard inquired and raised his head up over the staked philodendron plant Shauna had placed on his desk and which, any second now, he would have to assassinate.

  “’lo,” the man answered amiably. “I’m looking for Liz Stillwell.”

  “She’s not here at the moment; we sent her out on a story.”

  “She’s doing that, is she? Well that’s good. Expect her back soon, do you?”

  “I can’t say for certain. Care to leave a message?”

  “I suppose so. You think she’ll be back at that place, The Farm, sometime tonight?”

  “She should be. Could I tell her who’s looking for her?”

  “I’m her dad.”

  “Mr. Stillwell, glad to meet you.” Leonard stood up and leaned across the desk extending his hand. “Leonard Gannet.”

  “Glad to meet you, Leonard. Calvin Stilwell. I was hoping I’d catch her about lunchtime.”

  “There’s a big barn fire up near our place. I sent her out with a photographer to cover it.”

  “No fooling! What happened?”

  “Lightning, probably. We had a bad thunderstorm last night. It’s a shame. It’s not the area’s oldest barn but it’s a pretty one, Victorian, about 1850, with a cupola. The farm hasn’t been worked in recent years. When that happens, things start to deteriorate.”

  “I imagine. I guess the area’s really changing, development and all creeping up this way.”

  “Yes,” Leonard said reluctantly.