Dream of Orchids

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Along Main Street, store lights shone in the windows. It was a very short Main Street that turned at each end into South Country Road. In March the days were longer, so it wasn’t dark yet—just a bit dusky—though there was still a snap to the air. I walked briskly down Bellport Lane toward the bay.

  An unexpected feeling of vitality flowed through me—something I’d caught from Marcus O’Neill?—and I moved fast, needing to use it up. I was still upset, but I hadn’t felt this alive since my mother had died. Maybe, if I could be honest with myself, I wanted to go to Key West.

  For too many years I’d relied on hidden dreams and make-believe—always about exotic and faraway places. I’d read my father’s books and often envied his luxurious, flamboyant style, even while I resented him. Now I had an opportunity to take a large, risky step that might result in a good deal of pain. Yet I knew that romantic “elsewhere” still drew me.

  The idea of my father drew me. There’d been times when I felt that I must be like him in some ways—because I was so different from my mother. Even while I often hated the difference, it made me want to know all that I’d missed, all that had been withheld from me.

  I walked past white clapboard houses like the one in my painting, past white picket fences that were typical of an older Long Island. These houses were more than a hundred years old, and their dignity and grace gave the area a special flavor that had attracted writers and artists and musicians since the last century. Some old families still lived in them.

  I followed the street to the edge of the bay and turned down a narrow lane, leaving the marina and dock area behind. When I reached a place near a seawall, I looked across rolling water to the long, low strip of Fire Island that stretched for thirty miles on the near horizon protecting this part of the South Shore from Atlantic storms. For the moment I didn’t want to think or feel, and the endless motion of gray water had a soothing effect.

  As the evening grew dark, the temperature dropped, and I turned to climb to a side street and the small house that I had shared with my mother. She had bought it with her savings after my father left, and she’d continued to work in a real estate office until her recent illness.

  The house seemed painfully quiet as I turned my key in the door and stepped into the hall. I’d had this feeling ever since Mother had died. Only now something new laced through the emptiness—a sense of freedom that I’d never felt before. Almost a guilty feeling. If I chose I could go anywhere I pleased, do anything I liked.

  I spoke ruefully aloud to Marcus O’Neill. “What are you doing to me? How can you come here and stir me up, make me furious, change everything?” I could imagine his smile, with that challenge behind it. A challenge I wanted to fling back in his face.

  These days I avoided the dining room where Mother and I had always eaten together. I ate instead in the generous kitchen, sitting beside a back window that looked out on a great beech tree whose branches were still bare. Lately I’d taken to reading while I ate, since that made the meal seem less lonely.

  Again I remembered Marcus O’Neill’s words. I wasn’t “so young” that I didn’t understand about the anniversaries connected with death. I’d already gone through the phase of “one week ago today …” and “one month ago,” “two months ago.” I could understand that the year’s anniversary of a death would be painful. But Marcus had used the word “dangerous.” Why? I didn’t believe his answer. I didn’t altogether believe his reason for coming to see me. That my father was troubled by a heart problem was undoubtedly true and must be considered. Yet I’d sensed there was something else worrying Marcus that he hadn’t touched on and that I didn’t in the least understand.

  Tonight oyster stew would do for my supper, and when I sat down to eat I placed the orchid from Key West beside my place. How beautiful it was in all its tiny detail, how delicate—and somehow artificial as well. Orchids had never been my favorite flower, and I found it impossible to imagine the sister named Fern who had sent this to me.

  Tonight I didn’t feel like reading. All the questions I’d been holding back had surged up, brought to the surface by Marcus O’Neill. I knew very well what I must do before another night went by. This was something I’d postponed for too long.

  When I’d rinsed my dishes, I went upstairs to Mother’s front room. Between looped organdy curtains I could see the water, though our house was not on its edge. Few lights shone on the bay, and except for a street lamp, the night was thick and dark, the sky clouding over. “Weather” blowing in.

  Key West was an island too, but it was the tropics. At this time of year the climate should be perfect. A relief from the long winter we’d had in the North. Though spring was nearly here, and I hated to miss the first budding. There would be dogwood, azaleas, lilacs, and flowering cherry. In Key West—palm trees!

  Enough, I told myself sternly. No more dreaming. I went to my mother’s desk and sat down. One side drawer held an envelope marked with my name. I hadn’t been willing to read what was inside until now. These weren’t business papers, but something more personal. I had taken the sheets out only once, to find a long letter, handwritten, the lines sometimes wavering across the pages because of her tremor. I’d put it away quickly, not ready to face the pain it would bring when I read it.

  Now I followed the words all the way through twice, and then I carried the sheets into my own room and sat down in my favorite reading chair, turning on no lights. This must be a time for quiet thinking, for reorienting. “Truths” that I’d believed in all my life might not be true, after all, and that was both shocking and hard to accept.

  My father, it seemed, had sent money for my support until I was through college. Mother had refused alimony, but she’d never told me where the fund came from. Anger began to stir in me—futile anger, because there was no outlet for it.

  Her bitterness against him had never faded, and it showed beneath every word of her letter. At least she had tried to be honest with me, even though it came too late. In words that wavered on the page she’d confessed to the terrible bargain she’d made with my father. He’d been infatuated—“bewitched” by that “awful woman from Key West”—and he had wanted a divorce so he could marry her. My mother’s marriage to Clifton York had not been a good one—probably a mistake from the first, for all that she’d loved him so deeply. Yet she would have clung to it if he had been willing to stay.

  She told him that she would divorce him on one condition. He must never try to see or get in touch with his daughter again. At that point in her writing my mother’s words had tumbled raggedly across the paper with a touch of hysteria. She saw now that this had been a cruel pact as far as I was concerned. She’d felt that she must protect me from the man my father had turned into—she had fooled herself with this argument. But with her own death so near, she had to tell me the truth, make me understand that what she had done had supposedly been for my good. Cliff had let me go when he made his choice. He had let me go deliberately, choosing the woman named Poppy over Janet, his wife, and Laurel, his flesh-and-blood daughter.

  My hand shook as I held the letter. When had either one tried to see the viewpoint of a small, abandoned daughter, who had grown into a woman who still felt rejected? I wasn’t sorry for myself—I was just angered by these two blind, stubborn people who had injured me and taken away my own birthright.

  I would forgive my mother, of course. I was already stronger than she had been. But how could I forgive my father, and why should I ever want to see him again? Why should there be this sense of yearning for something I’d never known and could never possibly have at this late date?

  Just the same, those two whom I resented had felt something that had never touched me. I had never been in love like that. Not as Mother had loved Clifton York, or as he had loved the woman named Poppy. Perhaps until such a love happened to me, I couldn’t judge either of them fairly. But I still had a right to my anger.

  There was another terrible revelation in the letter. Nearly a year ago m
y mother had gone away for a week—ostensibly to visit an old friend in Tennessee. By that time she knew she was going to die, and she went to Key West without telling me. In the end she hadn’t seen my father because he wouldn’t see her. Another score against him! Poppy had just died, and he was too depressed, too distraught to see his first wife. Alida Burch, who was my father’s secretary, had talked to my mother. Mrs. Burch had said that everything was too upset in the house, and it would be better if she came another time. The secretary was apparently a strong, determined woman, and my mother couldn’t deal with her in her own weakened state.

  I switched on a lamp beside my chair and read this part of the letter again.

  I saw no one else, but I knew there was something terribly wrong in that house. I caught several hints of it. That woman’s death—not even I could wish her such a way of dying—had shaken them all. Mrs. Burch couldn’t be rid of me fast enough.

  Of course I never tried again. I don’t have that kind of courage, and I lacked the strength to make another trip.

  She’d had plenty of courage to go there at all. Her one hope must have been to mend some of the damage she had caused between me and my father. Probably hopeless in the first place. She had her own blame, but part of it lay with him. He hadn’t needed to hold to so cruel a pact forever. He could have broken it at any time in later years—if he had really wanted to. Nor could I forgive him the unkindness of refusing to see my mother, when she had come all that distance.

  I got up and rummaged in my desk for an album of snapshots. In one of them Clifton York held me in his arms—a far younger man than the author on the book jackets, dark-haired and smiling. My arms were wound tightly about his neck—a loving picture. While I couldn’t remember him except in the vaguest way, I had a sense of enfolding warmth when I looked at the snapshot; an illusion of security that I’d never felt in my growing-up years as the daughter of a father who had rejected me so completely.

  At the very end she had written one line that burned in my mind: Go to see him, Laurel. You’ll need him now, and perhaps he needs you.

  I slept very little that night, and sometimes in those long, tossing hours, I thought not about the father I couldn’t remember, but of the younger man, Marcus O’Neill, who had so suddenly upset my life. With my eyes closed, I could see him all too vividly. His fiery hair with a slight curl to it, the gray-blue eyes that looked through me and seemed to find me wanting, the mouth that could smile almost tenderly as he stroked the fur of a cat. The images in my mind sharpened an awareness I didn’t welcome, tantalizing and much too provocative.

  I still wasn’t sure what I would tell him in the morning, and it was nearly daylight by the time I fell asleep.

  When I opened the bookshop well ahead of Stan, I found Marcus O’Neill waiting for me on the sidewalk.

  “I won’t keep you long,” he said, following me through the door. “I have a plane to catch at LaGuardia, and friends are driving me there.” He nodded toward a car waiting at the curb. “I won’t ask you questions you aren’t ready to answer. Here’s my address, and I hope you’ll write when you make up your mind. There’s a phone number there too.”

  He was brusque, hurried, and he seemed to have a faculty for taking the wind out of my sails. Whatever I might have said flew out of my mind because he gave me no time to say it. In one sweep he’d postponed everything, and all but dismissed me.

  For a moment longer he stood looking about the shop, while Ernest, recognizing him as a friend, came and rubbed his head against a trouser leg.

  Then the same watercolor he’d noticed before seemed to catch Marcus O’Neill’s eyes, and he was suddenly in less of a hurry. He moved closer to look up at it—the painting of a Bellport house with a white picket fence. My name was in one corner, and this time he found it.

  “You painted this? Is it for sale?”

  I had sold some of my pictures through the shop, and I nodded hesitantly.

  “It strikes a chord,” he said. “You’ll understand why if you come to Key West. I’d like to buy it and take it with me.”

  I wasn’t entirely pleased. There’s always a pang when I part with work that holds so much of me. In this case, he would show it to my father—leaving me altogether vulnerable. Yet I couldn’t refuse Marcus’s request, and a small defiant voice at the back of my mind whispered, Let him take it! Let him show Clifton York that he has another daughter!

  I wrapped the framed picture for him in corrugated paper and sealed it with brown tape. When he’d tucked it under his arm, he stood for a moment at the door.

  “You could fly to Miami, and I’d meet you there with my car. There’s an airport on the island, but you’d need to change planes to reach it. Key West is pretty special, and if you come, you should get the feeling of it first by the drive over the keys. Thanks for letting me talk with you, Laurel. You may not need your father now, but he needs you more than even he realizes. So I hope you’ll come.” He looked suddenly thoughtful—not very happy—and I realized again that something he hadn’t told me was troubling him.

  When he went off, moving with a quick assurance that seemed typical, he left the shop quiet in his wake. Too quiet, too empty, too filled with books instead of life.

  I wasn’t accustomed to indecision, to wavering back and forth. I’d always been able to make up my mind to do whatever had to be done. In fact, I was better known for behaving impulsively than for waiting to make judicious moves.

  When Stan came into the shop, he took one look at my face and sighed. “You’re going, aren’t you? I was afraid of that. Well—I suppose you’d better get it out of your system. Then maybe you’ll come home and we can settle a few things.”

  “I’m not burning any bridges,” I told him. “My father has a bad heart, and I’d better try to see him in time. I shouldn’t be gone very long.”

  It was a hard day to get through because of Stan’s disapproval and my own wavering state of mind.

  I waited until evening and then called the number Marcus had left with me. He had arrived back home and answered the telephone. I would come to Key West, I told him, and would let him know the date and time of my plane to Miami as soon as I made my reservations. It would be April by then.

  He said, “That’s fine, Laurel. I’ll tell Cliff you’re coming. Of course he’ll want you to stay at the house.”

  That, I felt, was something to leave open, but before I could object, Marcus had rung off. I wondered if his abruptness was a way of leaving me no choice.

  Just the same, I felt a strange exhilaration because I’d taken the first step toward meeting my father and entering a world that seemed totally new and exotic to my northern eyes. Clifton York might very well hate my coming, but I’d have to take that risk. For him I could only belong to an unhappy time that was past. For me—? How was I to know until I met him?

  Perhaps what I’d said to Stan wasn’t true. Perhaps I really would be burning my bridges. The idea brought a certain excitement in spite of my doubts. I was still angry about a lot of things—and I wanted to be. I had some debts to pay off. But I was ready now to savor as well, to taste and experience. I didn’t altogether mind the scent of smoke rising from those bridges.

  2

  On the way to Miami I felt more fully alive than I could ever remember being, and I was eager to meet head-on whatever experiences lay ahead of me. Yet there were still butterflies and a good many uneasy questions.

  Part of my uneasiness concerned Marcus O’Neill. He was the one link with my father, but I’d felt some hostility between us, and I didn’t know what to expect now. I mustn’t let my imagination take off when it came to meeting my father and two half sisters. And I must never forget the hurt to my mother, the indifference toward me. And let Marcus make what he would of that.

  He was waiting in the terminal when I came off the plane, and I saw him before he saw me. He stood apart from a group that was meeting our flight, and his height and red hair made him stand out from any crowd. He loo
ked much too somber, I thought, and his very expression added to my uncertainty.

  When I reached him he greeted me gravely. “Hello, Laurel. I was wondering if you might back out at the last minute.”

  So he meant to go right on challenging me.

  “I don’t back out of things,” I told him evenly.

  He steered me toward the baggage area, where we waited for my suitcase to come through, exchanging the usual uninspired comments about the flight down. I listened more to what he wasn’t saying than to his words, and my conviction grew that matters weren’t going well in Key West—there was some kind of trouble. So perhaps there would be no welcome for me there at all.

  When my bags appeared on the conveyor belt, Marcus picked them up and led the way outdoors into balmy Florida sunshine. Today, in light slacks and a green shirt with an open collar to accommodate the climate, he looked more easygoing.

  “This is your father’s car,” he explained as he let me into the passenger seat of a blue Mercedes. “Mine’s having problems at the moment.”

  We drove into Miami traffic, heading south, and I was sharply aware of the man beside me. I knew so little about him, and I sensed so much that was unsettling. His long, tanned hands relaxed comfortably on the wheel, and the driver’s seat had been pushed well back to allow for his stretch of long legs. I was more conscious of him than I wanted to be.

  Since I’d had lunch on the plane, there was no need to stop, and we drove toward Homestead, the last town before the keys. It would be at least an hour before we reached the first key, and I tried to formulate the questions that kept seething up in me. In the face of Marcus’s continued silence, I finally burst out with the uppermost question.

  “How does my father feel about my coming?”

  Marcus glanced at me and then back at the road. “Why don’t you just relax for now, and I’ll tell you all about everything later. We’re going to follow a pretty interesting road, and you ought to know something about it.”