by Jane Gentry
“Huh,” he said. He surveyed the dark, polished wood and oriental carpet and imagined the subdued click of the bone china cups against their saucers. There was the distinct odor of “old money.” It made him want to sneeze.
“I’d be more relaxed sitting at the foot of the papal throne,” he said, opening the door to the hall. “Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere else?”
She didn’t commit herself until they were standing on the wide stone porch that overlooked the green playing fields and the long, tree-lined avenue to the front gate.
“I really can’t,” she told him, with real regret. “I’m supposed to meet a client in five minutes.” She went down the broad steps to her car. “See you later,” she said over her shoulder. And smiled. An enchanting, bewitching, captivating smile, rising from the tender soft lips to shine in her eyes.
Her curls shimmered blue-black in the sun, and the emerald silk danced and swirled and floated joyously on the light warm breeze. The entire world seemed made for her beauty—the dark, cushioned grass and the high, clean sky and the great, shaggy trees with their red and gold leaves glowing like jewels in the sun.
For the third time in less than one hour, Steve found it hard to breathe.
* * *
The girls were waiting, as announced, on the Upper School steps. Cara sulked at the top, leaning against a potted tree. Melody scowled at the bottom, on the ground beside the granite banister, her face hidden in the shadow of the wall. They were silently raging and unrepentant. Every inch of each small form spoke of impassioned civil disobedience. Thoreau would have been proud to call them sister.
As soon as Cara saw her mother, she bolted down the stairs, hurled herself into the car and slammed the door.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“I have to wait for Melody’s father,” Elizabeth told her. “It’s getting dark and cold. We can’t just leave her standing out here alone.”
“I don’t see why not,” said Cara heartlessly. She folded her arms and glared at her feet. “Who would want to kidnap her?“
Elizabeth sighed and opened her door. Steve had pulled to a stop behind her and was walking toward her car.
“Where are you going?” demanded Cara, as alert as a young wolf.
“It is polite,” said Elizabeth, as she stood. “To say hello.”
God help me, she thought, as he approached. He looked better to her than he had that morning, and the mere memory of the morning made her heart race. He wore a battered, old, brown leather flight jacket against the chilly evening breeze, and his sandy blond hair was tousled by the wind. His eyes crinkled around the corners as he greeted her, and his attention was on her alone, despite the hostile scrutiny of their offspring.
He moved so that he sheltered her from the worst of the wind. “How’d it go?” he asked.
His long, shadowed form swayed toward her with his words. She longed to put her hand to the soft leather and draw the zipper down. To slide it under the denim shirt and feel the warmth of his bare skin against her palm. She threaded her nervous fingers together to keep from touching him.
“I haven’t seen any miracles,” she said.
“A miracle sometimes takes a little preparation.” He stuck his hands deep into his pockets and gave her a look that was mostly pure masculine speculation. His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed. “We’ll give it a week, and then see if we can help it along a little.”
His swift glance over her body paused for an instant on her breasts, which seemed to Elizabeth to swell burstingly against the silk of her dress. For the first time in years she felt a hot savage turgidity between her thighs. Not the usual amorphous dissatisfaction of deprivation, but the specific, focused, covetous hunger of her woman’s body for one specific man.
Perhaps that was miracle enough itself.
Grateful for the lowering dusk, she folded her light coat around herself and got into her car.
“Perhaps we will,” she said. And she didn’t know whether she meant to bring together their feuding daughters or their own desiring flesh.
* * *
A detention every day and one on Saturday. Elizabeth knew that God had rested, but she wasn’t sure Miss Westcott did; Sunday was a welcome respite. From Cara’s attitude, Elizabeth felt certain that she was in for an endless winter of hauling herself out of a warm bed before dawn every single Saturday. John Milton would have loved it, or Dante.
Cara’s opinion, which offered Elizabeth no hope for relief, was that as everything was Melody’s fault, Melody should get twice the detentions, and Cara shouldn’t get any. Every conversation they had turned inevitably either to Robert or to Mr. Salvini.
“I told Dad about Mr. Salvini,” said Cara on Monday night, while she and Elizabeth washed the dinner dishes. “I said maybe you’d talk to my class about the Civil War, and he said you knew all about it.”
“About what?”
“Civil War,” said Cara, not understanding Robert’s caustic imputation.
Maybe I shouldn’t have divorced him, Elizabeth thought. Maybe I just should have put out a contract on him. Cara saw Robert twice a year when he had business in Philadelphia, and he always agreed to whatever she wanted whenever he talked to her on the phone. He said yes to everything—and left Elizabeth to clean up the mess. It was terribly unfair to Cara and so like Robert to cause that trouble.
“So could we get the Civil War stuff out?”
Elizabeth obligingly went up the back stairs to the cedar chest in the guest room. The pictures and letters were in a box at the bottom, the sword wrapped in an old army blanket against the back edge. Cara sat cross-legged on the bed and took the lid off the box. She picked up the document on top and puzzled over it.
“‘My dear wife,’” she read. “‘Rec’d.’ R-e-c-d? What’s that?”
“Abbreviation for received,“ said Elizabeth.
“Oh,” Cara said, and continued reading:
“Received the package you sent in July. It was most timely, though it has been a-wandering these many months. The woolen stockings and the blanket are most needed now, with such terrible wind and rain as we have had. We are cold all the time. But the most welcome—he spells it wellcom—of all was the little lock of dear Baby’s hair. How I wish I could kiss his sweet face and yours. I have heard from Capt. Trilling of a new kind of daguerreotype. If you could find such there, please have a likeness of you and my little son made as soon as such is possible, and send it to me. I would like to have a remembrance of him while he is still in skirts, as it now seems likely that I shall not see him until after the little baby things are put away and he is a great grown boy. Tomorrow our company moves away from Md. to be attached perhaps to a new command. Thus are the rumors. That we are decamping, we know. Whither, we know not. I will write when I know the truth. I pray God to bless and keep you and our precious child and keep you under his constant sheltering wing. Your loving husband, Elijah Thomas.”
Cara looked up from the faded letter. “What does he mean, ‘in skirts’?”
“Babies used to wear dresses until they were about two.” Elizabeth lifted the rest of the letters gently and set them on the bed beside her. “Long ones, down to their ankles, and they had little ruffled petticoats under them.”
“Even the boys?”
Elizabeth nodded. “Even the boys. I think they looked very sweet.”
“Do you think she made the picture?” asked Cara, rooting through the box.
“Yes, here it is.” Elizabeth handed Cara the stiff old photograph, and they looked at it with a new comprehension, having read the tender letter of the father. The baby boy, about eighteen months old, stood solemnly beside his mother, his eyes wide and his fingers clutching at his mother’s sleeve. His embroidered white dress fell from a yoke to his ankles. He had one little bare foot placed slightly over the other, and its small toes curled like a fist. His young mother was hardly more than a baby herself, with her wide eyes like the child’s and her curly hair, which refused to
be permanently captured in its snood.
“What was her name?” asked Cara. “Is she related to us? She looks like us.”
Elizabeth looked at her daughter, whose face so resembled the one in the picture, and whispered a prayer: might Cara never be at home with a baby, waiting out a war, wondering where her soldier-husband was and whether he were safe.
“Her name was Elizabeth,” she said. “Like me.”
They gathered up their treasure to take downstairs. Cara, for once, was subdued.
“Mom?”
“What, honey?”
“Do you know if her husband got home okay?” Cara was worried about that small vulnerable family. “It would be terrible if she loved him a lot, and they never got to be together anymore.”
Yes, it certainly would. Unthinkable. Elizabeth sighed. The letter and small picture had touched her heart.
* * *
Cara came clattering up the stairs. “Don’t forget tonight.”
“I won’t,” said Elizabeth patiently. Cara had reminded her four times that it was Parents’ Night.
“Don’t forget I want you to meet Mr. Salvini.”
“I won’t,” said Elizabeth. “Please don’t cling to the hope that I’ll be fascinated.”
“Oh, Mom!” Cara squirmed onto the edge of the desk and leaned her face into Elizabeth’s. “Aren’t you through yet?“
“No. Please move your head. I can’t see the computer screen.”
Cara, who was unable to sit still more than fifteen minutes at a time, jumped to her feet and started a football cheer routine, leaping and swinging her arms. “Can I go to a public school next year?”
“No,” said Elizabeth, trying to concentrate on a spreadsheet. “And it’s may I.“
“Nobody says may. Not even my English teacher.”
“She’s young. Perhaps grammar will overtake her yet.”
“Why can’t I? Dad says I can.”
“Your father is two thousand miles away,” said Elizabeth. “He is hardly in a position to make informed decisions. Go away, Cara. I have to finish this before we can leave.”
This time Elizabeth put enough exasperation and impatience in her voice to propel Cara from the room. She left leaping and spinning.
“Damn Robert,” Elizabeth muttered. “Always promising her things he can’t deliver.”
There was five minutes’ peace. Elizabeth leaned back into her desk chair and sighed. Cara adored her father.
Well, Elizabeth couldn’t blame her. She had loved him once herself. He was beguiling, handsome and terminally irresponsible, and Elizabeth had married too young to be able to tell the difference between character and charm. If she hadn’t been experienced enough to understand at twenty, how could she expect Cara to do it at thirteen?
The one positive result of the union had been Cara, who was as normal an eighth-grader as any parent could desire, with a mouthful of braces, which she hourly deplored, a drawerful of makeup, which she was not allowed to wear, and a Born to Cruise bumper sticker taped to the door of her room. She was by turns exasperating and endearing and often unconsciously funny in her quest for adulthood. Elizabeth cherished her.
Elizabeth simply couldn’t bring herself to shatter Cara’s belief in Robert’s interest and concern. Robert cared about Cara only in the abstract—as long as Cara didn’t cause him any personal effort, he was perfectly happy to have a daughter. Cara was only a child; she needed to believe in a loving father, and Elizabeth wasn’t about to let her find out that all her perceptions of Robert were false. That would wait until Cara was grown, if Elizabeth could manage it, until Cara was old enough to be philosophically tolerant of Robert’s faults.
Cara bounded into the room again, waving her arms with geometric precision. She spun through an airborne maneuver Elizabeth recognized from her own cheerleading days and landed with a thump in front of Elizabeth’s desk.
“I hate the way I look,” complained Cara, who was a young duplicate of her mother. “I am absolutely gross. I have yucky black hair and a stupid short nose and my lips are fat.”
“Oh, you’re not so bad,” said Elizabeth mildly.
“I love Vonnie Chrysler’s hair,” said Cara. “All the boys are crazy about it.”
“How do you know?” Elizabeth privately considered Vonnie Chrysler’s hair to be improbably red.
“Vonnie said so. She said they like to run their fingers through it.” Another spin; the thud of sneakers. “Can I get my hair dyed?”
“May I,” said Elizabeth automatically. “No.”
“I’ve got these horrible gross green eyes,” said Cara mournfully. “At least red hair goes with green eyes. Please?”
The horrible gross green eyes were wide open, enormous in Cara’s small anxious face. Elizabeth suppressed a smile—it was so hard to be newly thirteen and convinced that everything in the world was wrong with you.
“No,” she said firmly, emphasizing her words with a gimlet look from her own green eyes. “Cara, if you want to eat next month, you will have to go away so that I can finish with these audits.”
“It’s my hair,” said Cara. “I can do anything I want to with it.”
“Fine,” said Elizabeth, who was a battle-hardened veteran. “Go ahead. You’ll have plenty of time to admire it in the mirror, because you’ll be grounded until it grows out.”
“I knew you’d say that,” Cara told her glumly. “You always say that.”
Elizabeth looked at Cara and considered surrender.
“Darling, please find something else to do!” she said. “Just for thirty minutes, then I’ll come downstairs and we can argue to your heart’s content.”
Apparently a spark of empathy somehow glowed in Cara’s still-flat adolescent breast, because she grinned and bounced around the desk, her good humor miraculously restored.
“Okay,” she said. “We have to be at the school at seven, don’t forget.” Then off she went, to rattle and thump down to the kitchen from Elizabeth’s second-floor office.
Elizabeth bent over her work again, trying to block out the noise from the TV and the two radios that were playing downstairs. Since she both needed to make a living and wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, she had started an accounting business with her office in the house. CPAs always had plenty of work, even the bad ones, and Elizabeth knew she was very, very good.
The only thing she lacked, she thought, was the ability to ignore the outside world. Noise rammed its way up the stairs and bounced off her office walls. China shattered; she heard Cara moan, “Oh, God!” Glass tinkled. Cara said, “Oh, God,” again.
Elizabeth knew when she was beat. With a sigh she shut down her computer and went to the kitchen.
“What broke?” she asked her daughter.
“Only a glass,” said Cara. Then she added, “That’s the good news.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“It had grape juice in it.”
I will not, Elizabeth told herself, ask how it happened.
“I cleaned it up.” Cara adroitly changed the subject. “I have to be at school by seven so I can help with the name tags. May we,” she said carefully, “go get pizza first?”
* * *
By seven-fifteen Elizabeth had been provided with a name tag, by Cara, and a cup of coffee, by Melody. Then she was rushed through a truncated version of Cara’s daily schedule, from the Pledge of Allegiance to the final subject of the afternoon.
There was no sign of Steve.
At eight forty-five she sat in Cara’s history class and tried to pay close attention to the charms of Joe Salvini, figuring that Cara would give her the third degree once they were in the car and on the way home.
He certainly was attractive, she thought. No wonder all the Form II girls were swooning. Very dark—dark hair, dark eyes. His hair was wonderful—hers should look so good. If the man hadn’t been so frankly masculine, she’d have thought he spent a lot of time on it. His nose was wonderful, too. It was large and hooked and Rom
an, and it made him look different and interesting. Yet there was something—something vaguely familiar about him. She looked at him more carefully and realized what it was.
Except for the nose and the eyes, which were brown instead of blue, Joe Salvini looked very much like Robert.
That explained why Cara was so taken with him.
“This is a two-semester class of the history of the United States,” said Mr. Salvini. “And it’s a subject I love. I hope to get the girls to love it, too, although the anonymous survey I took at the beginning of school indicated that most of your daughters would rather take penicillin than history.”
Every parent in the room brightened up—a good speaker; maybe they’d listen with both ears.
“My name,” said the teacher, “is actually Guiseppe Salvini. My dad changed it to Joe as soon as we emigrated to the U.S. thirty years ago, when I was six. That accounts for the slight but fascinating touch of Italian underlying my Philadelphian accent.”
He continued to speak and was witty and funny. Several times there were bursts of laughter and applause.
“Since I am an immigrant,” he said, “I am very interested in the United States and the way it developed from families like all of ours. This year, all the girls are going to do a personal history telling about the immigrants in their own families. Even—” he grinned “—if they got here in 1621.”
Elizabeth glanced around the room. No Steve. She considered having her feelings hurt—he’d acted so interested. They’d spoken every day when they collected the girls from school. But he hadn’t called her, even once.
She’d acted interested, too. Maybe she’d acted too interested.
Impossible. She and Steve were both too old to play silly adolescent games. So why hadn’t he called?
There was another eruption of laughter. Elizabeth wrenched her attention back to the front of the room.
“Before we wrap this up,” Joe concluded, “I have to tell you that when we study nineteenth-century immigration to the United States—probably early next semester—we’ll make a trip to the Italian Market and buy all the ingredients for a real Italian dinner. Then we’ll go to my family’s restaurant, where my father and mother will show the kids how to cook the food they’ve bought. We will need chaperones. I made the mistake of telling the girls, and you have all been volunteered. Please go and initial your name on the sign-up sheet if you’re willing to go, and then I’ll see you in the cafeteria for cake and coffee.”