Possessions

by Judith Michael

  "Oh, stop it!" Jennifer cried. "The worst thing of all is never seeing your father and we haven't seen ours in months and months—"

  "Yes, but then you get used to it," said Carrie. "I mean, with our dad we're always saying goodbye. We spend a weekend with him or have dinner or something and then he takes us home and he never comes in, he stays outside and we say goodbye. Every time I turn around I have to say goodbye!"

  "You say hello, too," Todd countered.

  "Yes, but I'm always thinking about later, how I'm going to have to say goodbye all over again. It's awful and I start to cry because I never get used to it."

  "Well I'd rather cry," said Jennifer flatly, "than not have a father at all."

  "You said we did have a father!" Todd yelled.

  "Not close by, like Carrie and Jon. We have a father somewhere, and he sends us money, but we never talk to him or go places with him like they do . . . they see their dad every day!"

  "Only here," said Carrie. "Not at home." Her eyes filled with tears. "And if you want to know what's really the worst

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  of all, it*s looking out your window and watching your father drive away. Seeing the back of his car."

  "You think that's bad," Todd declared. 'Try thinking you'll never see your father again."

  Silence fell. Orange peels lay on the wild grass; a bee circled over them, buzzing loudly before disappearing into the bushes nearby. 'This is silly," Jennifer said in a small voice. "We all have things that are bad. I don't want to have a contest about them."

  "I don't either," said Carrie. "Nobody would win."

  Todd was staring glumly at the Scrabble board. Suddenly he raised both hands and ftiriously rubbed his head, making his hair stand on end, as if he were vehemently washing it clean. He looked at them challengingly. "I'd win," he said. "If anybody would let me use 'bux.'"

  There was a startled pause, then a shaky laugh from Jennifer, and then they all were laughing, louder and louder, unable to stop, their screeches echoing off the cliffs and reaching the adults below, who smiled at the sound. Gradually, the laughter slowed and faded away. They wiped their eyes and smiled at each other—and were friends.

  The days fell into a rhythm that turned out, not surprisingly, to be similar to Victoria's plans. Most mornings, Katherine worked on her jeweby designs; Ross was with his children; Jennifer and Todd entertained themselves, or were with Katherine when she wasn't working, or were invited to join Victoria in the garden, where the three of them had a glorious time picking their way through vegetables and flowers and pulling a weed here and there while the gardener stood by in silent agony, waiting for the moment when he could reclaim his private kingdom.

  In the afternoons, everyone went in different directions. Victoria read in her sitting room; the children went off on whichever excursion or lesson she had scheduled for that day; and Ross and Katherine explored the countryside.

  They had begun the first night, after dinner. Ross had rented a car and they drove along the coast to Monte Carlo. "Not impressed?" he inquired when Katherine stood silently before the marble and bronze, gilt and crystal of the palace-like Casino

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  and Hotel de Paris, glaringly lit against the black Mediterranean night.

  "Very impressed," she answered. All around them, between the Casino and the hotel, a constantly shifting stream of people paraded in glittering evening dress, tuxedoes, capes, and feathered hairpieces that nodded like the palm trees above. "It's a little like a bakery," she added thoughtfully.

  It pulled him up short. Once more he surveyed the chandeliers, curliqued balconies, and decorations of plaster caryatids and exaggerated flowers. "A bakery?"

  "At Christmas. Puff pastry, meringues, and layer cakes. Iced, sprinkled, tinted, decorated, absolutely gorgeous, and festive, because they're overdone and unreal. And they look so expensive."

  "And they are." Amused, Ross surveyed the crowd as he and Katherine walked through the rooms of the Casino where bored gamblers sat at the tables or wandered in the smoky air, peering over shoulders or stopping to exchange a tidbit of gossip. Ross pointed to a croupier spinning the roulette wheel. *The chef?"

  "Or a spun sugar Santa Claus," Katherine responded and they were laughing as they walked back to the car.

  The next day at breakfast, Ross casually mentioned the hill town of Saint-Paul, an easy drive from Menton, a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. His afternoon was free; was Katherine's?

  Katherine looked inquiringly at Victoria. "Certainly you should go," Victoria said promptly. "Nothing else is scheduled. Stay for dinner, if you wish."

  "I'd like to be back for dinner," Katherine said.

  They left after lunch and spent the afternoon in the old village that clung to the top of a craggy peak, surrounded by the stone wall built a thousand years earlier to protect it from invading armies. "I used to come here when I was in high school," Ross recalled. "Usually alone. My grandfather was the only one who found it as fascinating as I did, but even he had enough after a while. I never tired of it." His voice echoed off the stone arches above the narrow, climbing streets. "I made up stories about the people who lived here, the battles they fought, the games they played ..."

  "And you were the hero," Katherine said.

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  His eyebrows rose. "How would you know thatT*

  "I made up my own stories. I didn't have a wonderful stone village on the top of a hill—I only had Golden Gate Park— but I had battles and games and imaginary friends, and a family ... I can't picture you being alone, with your family around you."

  "I was alone when I wanted to be; I escaped from them and came up here. I had a place like it in San Francisco, not as remote, but private enough to suit me. Special places," Ross added thoughtfully. "I loved being alone." He laughed shortly. "I seem to have lost that, as an adult. I've had to leam it all over again."

  "Did you?" Katherine looked at him curiously. It was the first time he had volunteered something about himself. "You've always seemed to me so self-sufficient and sure of yourself; I thought there was something wrong with me because I had such a terrible time getting used to being alone."

  "Probably something wrong with you if it came naturally." Ross told her about the first time Carrie and Jon had come to his house in Bericeley. "Jon still refuses to call it ours. And that reminds me that they'll leave and I'll be alone and I'm still not used to it."

  "I know," Katherine said in a low voice. "I used to talk to myself—"

  "Did you? I wondered about that. Especially when I found myself doing it."

  "—and then I'd be embarrassed and turn on the radio."

  "I didn't think of the radio. I ordered myself to get used to the silence."

  "And did you?"

  "No."

  They had walked beyond the town, and in a few minutes reached the Maeght Foundation, where they strolled through the art museum and its sun-washed sculpture gardens, pointing out the pieces they liked best, agreeing, they discovered, far more often than not. Later, they returned to Saint-Paul, for wine and cheese at La Colombe d'Or—"Also a museum," Ross said as Katherine admired the colorful L^ger mural in the courtyard where they sat. "Wait until you see the paintings inside. It all began when the owner, Monsieur Roux, allowed his poorest customers, who were also his friends, to pay for dinner

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  with their paintings when they had no money. The customers were named Picasso, Braque, Miro, Matisse, Dufy—among others."

  "A wise man," Katherine said. Mischievously, she asked, "Which would he have said endures best? Friendship or stone?"

  "Appetite," Ross rephed instantly. "It's his livelitiood." They shared a smile in the shadows lengthening across flower-filled stone urns and glossy dark ivy cascading over the walls behind them. "I thought we might drive to San Remo tomorrow," he said. "Just over the Italian border. The drive along the comiche is supposed to be worth seeing."

  Victoria confirmed it a
t dinner. "Magnificent. The most wonderful palms at Bordighera, and flower gardens covering the slopes beside the road ..." Her voice became soft. "Hugh always bought me flowers. He couldn't stop; he admitted it was like a disease—but a most benign one. Every time he saw a flower vendor he'd stop the car and buy a bunch of everything. By the end of the day people would see our car heaped with flowers and stop us to buy. When I'd tell them my husband had bought them for me, the tourists would say, 'Where will you put them all?' but the French would nod wisely and say, ToUe ou amour.' Madness or love." She laughed softly. "Folic ou amour. But they knew it was amour. Well, then." She looked contentedly at Ross and Katherine. "San Remo. I most certainly recommend it."

  After San Remo, each morning at breakfast Ross would casually mention another town, or one of the modem art museums strung along the Riviera, or a drive through the Alps. Occasionally, gingerly, Victoria would make a suggestion from the store of her memories, but usually she smiled quietly as Katherine and Ross pored over maps, making plans. On weekends, when the children had no activities, they took the four of them along, but the rest of the time they went alone, each day roaming a little farther, taking different turns in the roads that twisted through the hills to explore a chateau or a garden with a thousand tropical plants growing on cliffs and in underground caves, or a ruined olive mill with ancient wooden sprocketed wheels and grinding stones in stone troughs.

  Everywhere were the scents of Provence: herbs, olive oil, tomatoes and garhc, orange and rosemary, fruit trees and lavender, baguettes fresh from the oven. One morning Ross brought

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  a round-handled basket to the breakfast table and that day they left the villa before lunch, carrying the basket that Victoria's cook had filled with a Nicoise onion tart, cheeses and fruit, and a bottle of Provence rose wine.

  Two hours later they opened it beside a stream in an Alpine meadow, sitting beneath a tall pine on a carpet of silken wild grass. The stream was bright with hundreds of tiny waterfalls spilling over rocks and boulders in its rush down the mountain; the air was clear and warm. "I feel so lazy," Katherine said, lying on the grass. Above her, the rough branches and dark needles of the tree were silhouetted against a deep blue sky. "And not at all ashamed."

  Ross handed her a cluster of grapes. "Why should you be ashamed?"

  "Because I'm not doing anything."

  He setded back against the tree and looked down at her. "You're relaxing. Contemplating nature. Enjoying sun and shade. Giving great pleasure to your companion. Busy enough for a summer day. You can't mean you've never taken a holiday before."

  "No, of course I have. But I don't think I ever let myself feel really lazy. Part of me was always thinking ahead, msidng lists of all the things I should be doing, planning schedules . . . there were so many shoulds in my life ..."

  "And now?"

  "Mostly questions." Katherine sat up, crosslegged. "They all begin, 'Can I—?'" She looked at Ross. "Isn't that odd? I thought I had more restrictions now, because I'm responsible for the three of us. But somehow I don't. I have fewer."

  "Because you've proved what you can do."

  Katherine shook her head. "I haven't proved anything yet. But I'm finding out."

  Still not sure of herself, Ross thought. But, after all, how could she be? She'd only had a year. And a good part of that must have been spent getting used to being alone. He watched her gather pine needles into a fragrant bundle in her palm, and wondered when she would begin to take her accomplishments for granted, as well as her beauty and all the other changes of the past year. When she's convinced her life is settled, he thought. Until then, who can blame her for being uncertain and a litde tentative?

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  Without warning, Ross thought of Derek. How uncertain had she been with him? Contemplating Katherine's pensive face, asking himself the question, Ross couldn't make sense of it: the more he learned about her, the more impossible it seemed that she had been one of Derek's conquests. He started to ask her about it, then stopped himself. What would he say? Who are you, really, that you could embrace my brother? If I want to understand her, he thought, I'll do it by understanding who she is with me, not who she might have been with Derek. I owe her that much.

  But still, he could not prevent the thought from slipping through: Someday I may have to ask her.

  'Tell me about your life in New York," Katherine said, when she looked up and found Ross watching her.

  She was, as he had discovered, a good listener. Ross told her about his apartment on the West Side with its glimpse of the Hudson River between two other buildings; his friendship with Jacques Duvain; his work on urban redevelopment projects in Boston and Philadelphia that had gained national attention. "By then Victoria was calling once or twice a week, asking me to come back, not to the company—she knew I didn't want that—but to start my own firm. She said she needed me, for friendship, companionship, the family; and I knew I needed her for the same things. Besides, I was confident enough to think I was ready for my own firm. She clinched it by offering to recommend me to her friends and fellow board members—"

  Katherine laughed. "She did the same for me, with jewelry store owners."

  "One of her most lovable qualities is her consistency. You turned her down?"

  "It was important to me that I do it on my own."

  "Because you were just beginning. But I'd had those years in New York, and enough success behind me, to take her up on it. Some of my best commissions came through her contacts, and most of them came back for second homes or office buildings. My favorite is a real estate tycoon whose house I designed in Mill Valley. The second job I did for him was a shopping center he named after himself. He was so proud, he said he never wanted to leave it, so he had a mausoleum built for him and his family beneath the main store."

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  "Cash registers instead of gravestones," said Katherine wryly.

  Ross laughed. "We never put it that way, but that's perfect." He lay the empty wine bottle in the basket. "We'd better get started if we want to be back for dinner. Although we don't really have to, you know ..."

  "I want to." Katherine stood up, brushing off her jeans. "It's a good time to be with the children, and I think it's important to Victoria."

  Ross picked a fragment of pine cone firom her hair. "It*s also important to Victoria that we have time together." She looked quickly at him and he smiled into her clear eyes. "She's a very wise lady."

  Katherine returned his smile but did not answer. He had talked about everything, she thought, except his wife, whom he had met and married in New York. She wondered about it through dinner, and afterward, on the terrace, while she and Ross played Chinese Checkers with the children under Victoria's critical eye, but she thought mostly about Ross and his grandparents. He had moved back to San Francisco because Victoria needed him, and because he missed her. The year before, in Vancouver, almost his first words had been that he was there because his grandmother had sent him. And he felt he was still connected to his grandfather. A continuous line — holding us all together, all the generations and ages. Katherine had never known anyone who moved comfortably across the generations, who knew where he fit within them, and it seemed to her that Ross's world was infinitely larger than hers, with more places to belong.

  But her world was growing, she thought; it was expanding, stretching ahead with more possibilities, more people to consider, so much more to think about . . .

  "Ha!" cried Jon, using his marble to leap over four others to reach the colored triangle that was his goal. "First one in."

  "Not for long," Ross responded with a wicked gleam and jumped over six marbles to his own goal. "Katherine? Are you with us?"

  "Oh. Yes. Let me see . . ."

  "Dad," said Jon as Katherine surveyed the board. 'There's a party this weekend at the Casino in Monte Carlo. We've been invited."

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  Ross raised his eyebrows. *They don't allow youngsters in the Ca
sino."

  "One of the kids' fathers rented a private room and they're putting in roulette and blackjack and everything. Really neat. It starts at eight o'—"

  "Hold on," Ross said. Jennifer, Todd and Carrie watched him, almost holding their breath. "This party is for nine- and ten-year-olds?"

  "Well . . . most of the kids are like sixteen and seventeen but they asked us 'cause we're good on the diving team. So can you drive us?"

  "No. i don't want you at the Casino, even in a private room, especially with an older crowd."

  "Dad—!"

  "I doubt that you'd even be allowed in, but we're not going to find out. You have plenty of things to keep you busy; gambling isn't one of them."

  "But, Dad—!"

  "No, Jon. That's final. It's no place for any of you. You're not going."

  "Jee-sus," muttered Jon.

  "I told you," Carrie said. "I knew he'd say no."

  At the obvious relief in her voice, Ross and Katherine exchanged an amused glance. "About the diving—" Ross began.

  "Maybe I'll just go home," Jon muttered. "If you won't let me do what I want, maybe I won't stay. Or visit you anymore on weekends, either."

  "Jon!" said Katherine sharply. Ross was frowning, his mouth tight, and for the first time she saw in practice the power of his children.

  "Jon," she said again. Jennifer, recognizing the tone in her mother's voice, became so nervous she dropped one of her glass marbles and as it rang on the flagstone terrace, she and Todd scrambled down to look for it. Katherine waited until Jon looked at her. "Blackmail," she said softly, "is a nasty means of persuasion. And when it uses love as a weapon it is disgusting. Do you understand that?"

  Ross had turned, his eyes fastened on Katherine. Victoria, too, was watching her, uncharacteristically silent.

  "Do you?" Katherine repeated.

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  "No," Jon muttered.

  "It means it is disgusting when you threaten to withhold love from people who love vou and need your love."

  "I didn't—!"

  "Yes, you did. You said if you didn't get your way you'd walk out. And your family would be left behind, missing you. Don't play hard-to-get, Jon; it hurts the rest of us, and it hurts you. Is any party worth all that?"