by Sally Mandel
“Once upon a time, little boy, there was this convent school called St. Theresa’s that had a really prigass student government modeled after the Gestapo. Darlene Finney was head of the Hitler Youth.” She pulled away from him for a moment to check his face. “You listening?” She could see he was, and she kissed him lightly on the mouth as a reward. “Now, Darlene Finney wore frosted lipstick that made her look like a ghoul, and she lurked around corners waiting to pounce on you with her little demerit notebook.”
“Boyohboy, I can hardly wait to meet her.”
“In eleventh grade we had all these rules, like wearing gray socks with black shoes and carrying our books in special plastic bags they sold at school for a dollar fifty. Well, I wasn’t about to spend all that money when I could use a dry-cleaner bag, which is what I did. But old eagle-eyes Finney popped out from behind my locker one day and grabbed me by the arm and started snarling at me about demerits for my dry-cleaner bag. So …” She paused.
“What?”
She smiled, pleased at the intensity of his curiosity. “So I whacked her.”
“Unconscionable!”
“But she was hurting me. She had her pointy frosted fingernails stuck in my arm. Anyway, all injured dignity, she said, ‘You can’t hit me. I’m on Student Council.’ And I said, ‘You can’t hit me. I’m a temple of the Holy Ghost.’ ”
They both laughed. He pulled her face close for a kiss, but she sat back after a modest peck on the cheek, too full of memories.
“I guess I held the record for demerits. Too many you went to school Saturdays, so I spent tenth grade with a six-day week, doing Word Wealth. Aversion: repugnance, repulsion, antipathy, allergy, don’t-stop-me-or-I’ll-forget, abomination, abhorrence, disgust, loathing.”
She took a deep breath.
“Finished?” he asked.
“Are you bored?” she asked accusingly.
“No.”
“Then, of course, there was cheerleading. I tried out every year, and every year I was always the first person chosen by the coaches—they posted our names on the bulletin board. And I was always the first person to be crossed off the list by the nuns. I was such a good kid. Why’d they give me a hard time?”
“I can’t imagine.”
She put her face half an inch from his. “I want you to come home with me.”
“I can pass meeting Darlene Finney.”
“St. Theresa’s was not administered with an even hand. We just won’t send our kids to parochial school.”
He lifted her off his lap and carried her to the bed.
“Let’s hear about Red Falls High,” she said.
He kissed her just under the left ear. “I had an affair with the principal’s wife.”
Quinn sat up abruptly. “You didn’t.”
“Tell you about it sometime.” He wrapped an arm around her chest and pulled her down again. His hand slipped under her sweater. “Not now.”
She felt his fingers move up her rib cage toward her breasts, and decided to let the subject drop for the moment. She didn’t believe him anyway.
Chapter 18
They boarded their plane at noon on Saturday. Quinn had never flown before, and was so intrigued with each element of the procedure, from baggage check to boarding, that she forgot to talk. Unaccustomed to such long periods of silence, Will kept studying her face to make sure she was all right.
She raised and lowered the shade, pressed the light button, twisted the air regulator, experimented with her seat position and the food tray. She listened with total concentration to the flight attendant’s speech about oxygen masks and emergency exits. Finally, when they were airborne, with a thick layer of clouds beneath them, she turned to Will and smiled.
“Hi there,” he said.
“How much you figure it costs to take flying lessons?”
He laughed and glanced at his watch. “Not one word for over fifteen minutes. I was afraid you ate a rusty nail for breakfast and got lockjaw.”
“I had my tetanus shot. God, I wish we could have brought Harvey with us. Wouldn’t he go nuts? I don’t understand why takeoff is so noisy outside when it’s not bad at all in here. What kind of insulation do they use? Or maybe it has something to do with pressurization. I always had this yen to be a stewardess.”
“I think you’ve found your voice again.”
“Idaho could be a great big ugly pit, and it’d still be worth the trip just for this.”
At Boise they transferred to a sixteen-seater for the flight to Lewiston. The sky had cleared, and there was still a pale shimmer of light when they caught their first glimpse of the Salmon River. From two miles up it seemed like a long curl of silver Christmas ribbon draped across the forests, shiny and, Will knew, deceptively smooth. Sam was to meet them at the airport. Will felt the rush of affection that always engulfed him at the thought of his lumbering younger brother.
“There he is,” Will said. “Over by the luggage pickup.”
“God, he’s big,” Quinn remarked. “He’s like a bear.” Sam stood a full three inches taller than Will and had a bulky, meaty body.
Sam had seen them now. Grinning, he walked over and wrapped a huge paw around Will’s palm. “Not even an hour late.” His voice was a slow, deep rumble.
Quinn found it hard to believe that this hulking young man was only a high school senior. Though Sam was as dark as Will was fair, she was startled by the resemblance between them. Susan Ingraham said her two boys had inherited the same face, it was just that Sam looked as though he had the shades drawn.
Sam was reaching for Quinn’s hand. “Oh, sorry,” she said, grasping it. “I’m glad to meet you. It’s the bump on your nose. It’s just like Will’s.”
“Dad says that’s a dead giveaway of McCaffrey blood,” Will explained. He slung their suitcases off the ramp, handed one to Sam, and began walking toward the exit. “Comes from generations of brawling in bars on Saturday nights.”
Quinn squeezed into the front seat of the jeep between Sam and Will. There was a fine dusting of new snow on the road, but Sam handled the vehicle expertly. Quinn gazed out the window and enjoyed the sensation of muscular male thighs on either side of hers.
Meanwhile, Will was experiencing the swelling in his chest that occurred whenever he was deeply moved, by a poem, perhaps, or by a particular piece of music. The response always forced him to take deep breaths, as if by expanding he could accommodate the volume of his feelings. Provoking it now was the sight of the pine trees by the side of the road, with their dark trunks rising out of the snow.
He had come home from far-off places many times before, but never had he felt such a profound sense of reunion. Perhaps Quinn’s presence somehow made a difference. He put his arm around her and wished, as so often before, that he had been a pioneer like his grandfather when the territory was still practically uninhabited.
William Ingraham, two generations back, had come west from Chicago with the railroad in the 1870s, built himself a cabin in the Clearwater Mountains, and set up the first lumber yard in the region. Soon afterward he’d married Johanna Moore, extracting her from her father, the local missionary, who spent his lifetime converting the Nez Percé Indians. Will still remembered his grandfather, white beard against bright plaid shirt, striding through the mill like a young man, always the handful of sawdust in his left fist. He would hold it out for Will to smell. “White pine dust,” he said. “Like gold, only better.”
The Ingrahams sold out after Will’s father had been injured in the big fire ten years ago. A piece of the roof had collapsed, pinning Matthew Ingraham inside the inferno. The old Canadian foreman, LeChat, had pulled him out, but Matthew never used his legs again.
Will’s father now sat in his wheelchair in the shop they’d built for him at home, handcarving cabinets and furniture and fine statues of animals. He claimed the statues never came out quite right. “Wasn’t what I had in mind,” he would say. One time Susan ha
d put her favorite, the hawk, on display in the living room. When Matthew saw it perched there on the table, he wheeled over and silently removed it. The sculptures remained undisturbed thereafter, and they were not discussed unless Matthew chose to speak of them.
“You’ll be flying east too, Will tells me,” Quinn was saying to Sam.
“Yup.”
Another big talker, Quinn decided. “You guys go a long way for college. Isn’t there a veterinary school closer to home?’’
“Not like Cornell. Besides, I’ll get to live somewhere else for a few years.”
“You’ll have the rest of your life to explore the world.”
“I’ll be coming back after I graduate, to set up my practice.”
“Tell me, Sam, does anybody from Idaho ever leave the state permanently?”
“Yup. A kid in my class, the whole family just up and moved to Minneapolis.” His voice, bassoprofundo, resonated with pity.
Will watched the spooky light flickering against the lower branches of the forest. The woods never looked exactly the same, and yet always enchanted him. He took a breath of mountain air, fragrant with pine. Anywhere east of the Montana line was too far away.
The Ingraham house sat back fifty yards off the Mountain Road. The original structure, Grandfather’s cabin, stood at the center and was used as the living room area. Additions rambled off in three directions, reminding Will of the cardhouses he and Susan used to build as boys. Tacking on rooms each time the family expanded had eventually resulted in a dining room that was practically inaccessible to the kitchen. Over the years, helping hands had dribbled soup, fruit juice, and spaghetti sauce in an ineradicable dotted line from the stove through the living room and onto the long maple dining room table. “The Gravy Trail,” Matthew Ingraham called it. But there was never any question of tearing down the ramshackle arrangement to begin again. Tampering with Grandfather’s living room would be like disrupting the ghosts of pioneer America. Nor would the Ingrahams ever move, not with the exuberant cascades of Red Falls keeping up their end of the conversation a hundred feet beyond the back door.
They had driven nearly an hour before beginning a steep ascent up a road narrowed by towering drifts.
“I’ve never seen so much snow in my life,” Quinn said. “We’re like Moses parting the Red Sea.” She stared out the window, looking for houses in the darkness. Suddenly Sam turned off into a driveway on the right.
“We’re home,” Will said.
“Where are all your neighbors?” Quinn asked.
“We passed the Bateses about two miles back.”
Quinn thought two miles was a long way to walk to borrow sugar or chat over a cup of tea.
A chorus of deep-throated barking began the moment Sam, Will, and Quinn started up the front steps. Quinn grabbed Will’s arm.
“What’s that?”
“Sam’s wolves.”
“You’re kidding me,” Quinn said with a quaver.
“Gentle as lambs,” Sam assured her.
The door burst open and two large furry bodies flung themselves out onto the porch. A golden retriever and a Labrador, yelping wildly, leapt up on Sam, licked his face, and only then calmed enough to sniff at Will and Quinn.
Susan Ingraham stood in the doorway. “Fred! Flower! I’m sorry. What a welcome. Sam, do something with those two.”
Sam squeezed inside, and without being called, the dogs followed, weaving in and out of his legs.
Quinn watched Will bend his head to kiss his mother’s cheek. It was a formal gesture. Matthew Ingraham approached them next, braked his wheelchair, and stretched out a hand to Will. While Quinn was being introduced, she examined them: Matthew Ingraham with the blond hair faded and lank over a creased forehead, the wide gentle face that seemed younger than it should on a man who had apparently suffered such pain; Will’s mother standing beside the wheelchair, hand resting lightly on her husband’s shoulder. Her hair was dark and thick, and though she pulled it back into a knot at the nape of her neck, it sprang loose from the hairpins and softened the severe lines of her face with tendrils like tiny corkscrews.
Will took Quinn’s bag and led her to a pine-paneled cubbyhole at the rear of the house.
“I bet Abe Lincoln slept here,” Quinn said. She twisted the knob on a kerosene lamp above the bed. “Do these work?”
“They did when we were kids, but after we set fire to Sam’s room, we stuck with electricity.”
After he left, Quinn sat on the bed next to her suitcase and took a deep breath. American pioneer homes must have smelled like this room—rough wooden walls and plank floorboards. Raw wood had a cozy, welcoming scent.
Susan Ingraham knocked, waited for Quinn’s permission, and poked her head through the door.
“Dinner’s ready whenever you are. Would you like more time to get settled, or are you starving?”
Quinn hopped off the bed. “Starving, thanks. I’ll be right there.”
She was seated next to Will. Sam and Susan sat across from her, with Matthew at the head of the table. There was roast leg of lamb, crisp browned potatoes, a platter of mixed vegetables, and homemade dinner rolls. Matthew watched with satisfaction while Quinn heaped her plate.
“See you brought us a good eater,” he said to Will. “Can’t abide these skinny glamour girls that swallow one lettuce leaf and half a tomato.”
“Oh, you’ll go broke trying to feed Quinn just for the weekend,” Will said amiably.
“Thanks,” Quinn responded.
“Jed Ryan’s building a mile up,” Sam said to Will. “Bought five acres near the mill.”
“Yup,” Matthew said. “Getting to be a regular housing development around here.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Matthew,” Susan protested. “I don’t know why you bother living in civilization at all.”
“Will’s just as bad,” Sam remarked.
“We had an awful time keeping track of him when he was little,” Susan told Quinn. “Always disappearing into the woods where he could be by himself.”
So it had started early, Quinn thought.
“Will’s birthday one year,” Sam explained to Quinn, “they had a dozen ten-year-old kids here and no birthday boy. By the time we found him up by Flat Rock, there wasn’t any birthday cake left.”
“I didn’t mind,” Will said.
“Rude antisocial bastard, my brother,” Sam commented.
“Maybe I should be a social butterfly like you and spend my entire life with animals. Anyway, I do all right.” Will rested his arm on Quinn’s shoulder for a moment.
“Not bad at all,” Matthew agreed, and reached for Quinn’s plate. “Here, have another slice.”
There followed a prolonged silence. Quinn made a furtive check, but none of the others appeared to be at all uncomfortable. The click of knives and forks echoed in Quinn’s ears until she could bear it no longer.
“I never saw such enormous pine trees. On the drive from the airport,” she blurted.
“That so?” Matthew said. “Well, I hear fir trees don’t get much more’n knee-high back east. It’s the air.”
It took a moment for Quinn to realize that she was being teased. Now she understood the origin of Will’s deadpan expression.
“We stretch them for Christmas,” Quinn replied. “That tree in Rockefeller Plaza’s been on the rack for days.”
“Hm,” Matthew said appreciatively.
Meanwhile Will’s eyes kept flickering back and forth from Quinn to his family. There had been no important girl in his life since Marianne, and she had always been so much a part of the Ingraham clan that the interplay was long established by the time Will began to think of her with sexual interest. But even back at college Will found Quinn a member of an alien species. The feeling was exaggerated in the familiar atmosphere of his home. He was surprised that everyone wasn’t studying her as they might a rare acquisition on display in the zoo. On the contrary, they were react
ing as if she were a legitimate member of the human race. He felt gratified, and yet vaguely disappointed.
Soon after dinner Will and Quinn were left alone by the fire in the living room.
“So?” Will prompted.
“I like them. God, it’s weird. I must have been thinking you existed in a vacuum, as if you didn’t get born and raised in a regular family like everybody else.”
“Sprang fully grown from the forehead of a god, no doubt.”
“Your father is so much like you, your expressions, your speech. It’s peculiar.”
“Well, you and I’ve been living in a pretty rarified atmosphere. It must be a jolt coming here—new family, new place. Culture shock.”
“I could eat you up, starting with your toes.”
“I’m surprised you’ve got any room in your stomach after what you put away.”
“That was just to impress your father.”
Will laughed. “Do you want to go out, or are you tired?”
“I couldn’t sleep if you hit me over the head with a mallet. Is there any place to go out to?”
“We can visit Edward.”
“Edward French, the famous literary light of Red Falls High?”
“That’s the one.”
“Let’s go.”
Will drove them up the Hot Springs Road toward Edward’s house. When they slowed at an intersection, Will felt Quinn smiling at him.
“What?” he asked.
“I’ve never been in a car with you driving before.”
Will cranked the jeep into third gear. “Is there some significance I’m missing?”
“You’re a good driver. It’s sexy.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Will had been making this trip since he and Marianne were freshmen in high school. Edward, with his L.L. Bean safari jacket and climbing boots, had appeared that year to teach the ninth grade American Literature course. For Will, French’s class was like flinging open a great many windows simultaneously. The light was dazzling, the rush of air made him dizzy. The second week of class, in the midst of a lecture on Melville’s Billy Budd, Will found himself holding on to the sides of his chair to keep from being blown over.