Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “It’s not gravel. It’s oyster shells.”

  She had eyes of shock. “Who eats the oysters?”

  “There’s always someone willing to eat oysters.” He nosed to the edge of the drive and flicked off the ignition. “Let’s walk a little.”

  They got out of the car. She squeezed his hand and they crossed a long lawn. It was smooth and close-trimmed as the dark velvet of a billiard table. Mark felt they were rolling backward in time. The grass stretched down a hill to a wading pool with a little bronze faun cavorting in the center.

  “This little fellow was my best friend,” Mark said. “He knows all the times I was hurt, all the times I was happy. This was my good luck place. I used to come here to dream.”

  He was stalling, hoping she wouldn’t turn, wouldn’t look and see what was behind her.

  But she turned, and a gasp came out of her.

  Till now orchards and oaks and twelve-foot boxwood hedges had blotted the house from sight. But from the little sunken pool there was no way of not seeing it on top of the hill, at the apex of all converging sightlines, a mountain of slate tile and sandstone blocks and leaded windows, crawling in four decades’ growth of ivy that had been nurtured to look like a century’s worth.

  “Jesus, Mark.”

  He knew what she was feeling. The twin turrets gave it all away: the eighteen-foot entrance hall and a dining room for thirty and two living rooms and six bedrooms and five and a half baths and a semidetached wing for servants. He felt like the son of capitalist pigs.

  “My parents named it Avalon. You know the old song? That was their song. When they were in love.”

  She wasn’t letting go of his hand. “Can I call it Avalon too? Do I approach curtsying?”

  “Let’s approach briskly and get it over with.”

  At the flagstone terrace she hesitated. “I’m dressed wrong.”

  “Don’t worry. They’re just rich, not fancy.”

  “That’s the problem.” She took off her earrings and bracelet and brooch and tucked them into her purse.

  He swung the door open. Without alerting a single servant, they made it past three carved marble fireplaces, a Hepplewhite secretary, two Carpaccio portraits and a Ruysdael still life.

  Ariana sucked in her breath and pointed to a tiny landscape hung in the shadow of a grandfather clock. “Is that a Corot?”

  “Yes, it’s an early Corot.”

  It was not Mark who answered, but a tall, powerfully built man who seemed to have popped out of the paneling. “My mother bought it in Paris in 1893.” His full gray head flicked out a bow and his blue eyes appraised Ariana with all the finesse of ice picks.

  “The man with the silent tread is my father,” Mark said. “Father, this is Ariana Kavalaris, a good friend of mine.”

  Ariana and Mark Senior shook hands.

  “Delightful to meet you,” Mark Senior said in a tone very much like a bank manager refusing a loan.

  Mark put a protective arm around Ariana and switched to loud, bright gear. “And in yon large sunny den, doubtless watering her prize azaleas, is my mother.”

  But Augusta Rutherford was not watering plants. She was seated by the window with a leather-bound book. Mark peered at the faded gold lettering on the spine. “Paradise Lost? Now, Mother, you don’t expect us to believe you’ve reached the middle of that.”

  “Why not? It’s perfectly lovely.” Augusta’s vowels came not from the throat but the jaw. She rose to her feet, a confident, well-groomed woman in her fifties with graying hair and a hint of outdoor suntan. She smiled firmly and held out a hand to Ariana. “Hello. I’m Mark’s mother.”

  Mark wondered what you could tell by looking at Augusta: that she slept with a copy of the Social Register by her bedside? bred champion poodles and champion roses? had a dealer’s eye for diamonds but never wore them before sundown? “Mother, this is Ariana Kavalaris.”

  Mark estimated that the handshake his mother gave Ariana was only a split second longer than a nod she would have given a shopgirl.

  “You have a lovely house,” Ariana said.

  Error, Mark thought. In Dutchess County, polite souls never comment on houses, diamonds, or age, except behind the back of the person concerned.

  “Thank you.” Augusta smiled, showing tolerance. “Was your drive all right? We heard the roads were slick from last night’s rain.”

  Mark Senior suggested drinks, and Ariana asked for sherry. Mark Senior made the drinks and passed them, and Mark wondered why Peters the butler hadn’t appeared in full monkey suit to do the honors and intimidate the newcomer.

  Augusta sipped and smiled comfortably.

  Mark Senior asked what Ariana thought of Princess Elizabeth of England marrying Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.

  Mark took note of the subjects avoided in the next ten minutes. His parents did not ask where Ariana was from, who her parents were, or where she had made her social debut. He tried to imagine their reaction if he were to say, Mother and Father, seated in your drawing room is Ariana Kavalaris of the East 103rd Street Kavalarises. Her father Pete ran a greasy spoon before his untimely murder. After pursuing studies at P.S. 45 and Henry Newbolt High, Ariana made her debut as a singing maid in an amateur performance of the Domani Opera Company. Her primary residence, when she can afford one, is a rented room in Greenwich Village. She does not pal with Rockefellers or Havemeyers. Her greatest dream is one day to sing an adulterous Druid priestess on the stage of La Scala.

  And I love her.

  A uniformed maid floated in with a tray of clams individually wrapped in bacon strips. She moved like the tip of a glacier, and Mark wondered if Ariana could sense lurking beneath the Arctic waters the backup team of cook, laundress, gardener, and Norwegian couple—not to mention Peters, and by the way, where was the old corpse? Wasn’t it usually his job to pass the clam goodies?

  It was Augusta who finally, sweetly, worked around to the interrogation. “Mark has told us very little about you.” (Translation: He’s told us nothing.) “Are you a graduate student too?”

  “I’m a student,” Ariana said, “but not a graduate.”

  “Ariana studies voice,” Mark said.

  He sensed a missed beat, a ripple of hesitation before his father picked up the ball.

  “That’s admirable,” Mark Senior said.

  “I always think of Winston Churchill,” Augusta said, “when I think of voice.”

  “Are you doing original research?” Mark Senior asked.

  “Ariana sings,” Mark said.

  Augusta touched her lips to the surface of her Scotch. “Ah. That sort of voice.”

  “Music is a high and legitimate calling,” Mark Senior said, and Mark winced. His father was being democratic. “Where do you study?”

  “Ariana studies with Ricarda DiScelta,” Mark said.

  “We heard DiScelta at the Met,” Augusta said coolly.

  “Wonderful voice, just wonderful,” Mark Senior chimed in.

  “Have you been studying long?” Augusta asked.

  “One way or another, all my life.”

  “You sound admirably dedicated,” Mark Senior said. “Augusta here studied piano when she was a girl.”

  “I never got any further than the ‘Moonlight Sonata.’ I didn’t push myself. I’m sorry, now. It would be so nice to have a creative outlet.”

  “Music is a language,” Ariana said. “Not everyone is a native speaker.”

  Smoothly omitting any reaction to what was just possibly a jibe, Augusta asked, “Will we be hearing you at the Met, Ariana?”

  “Not for a few years, I’m afraid.”

  “You’ll be hearing her in two years,” Mark said. “Ariana’s going to be the leading dramatic soprano of our age.”

  “What’s a dramatic soprano?” Mark Senior said. “I thought they were all dramatic.”

  “Not all the voices are,” Ariana said. “Only the personalities.”

  “Is your teacher dramatic?” Augusta asked.
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  Ariana smiled. “I’m afraid she is—in every respect.”

  “Sounds as though she beats you,” Mark Senior said.

  “She’s capable of it.”

  Mark Senior grunted. “I don’t care much for temperament. On the stage it’s fine, but flying loose around the room—no, thank you.”

  “Luncheon is served, Mrs. Rutherford.” The maid, not Peters, made the announcement.

  “Bottoms up, everyone. Ariana?” Mark Senior offered his arm.

  It was a short stroll to the dining room. Augusta seated Ariana on her right and Mark on her left. Mark tried to gauge the impression Ariana was making. But he had too much of himself tied up in her. All he could see was a glow where she was sitting.

  “Would you care to say grace, son?” Mark Senior asked.

  It was as though he had said, Would you care to bring suit, counselor, or Will you perform the appendectomy, doctor?

  Mark’s eyes glided down to the mahogany dining table and its four perfect place settings. The maid had laid the plain white Wedgwood: always simple, always suitable. Two dozen Revere spoons and knives and forks sparkled like implements ready for surgery. There were fish knives, and he knew there would be finger bowls. He realized he and Ariana had never discussed finger bowls.

  He shut his eyes and tried to concentrate on gratitude.

  “Bless this food to our use, O Lord, and us to Thy service, in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

  His parents’ amens came neatly synchronized and Ariana’s came a half-beat later, musical and oddly sincere.

  The maid passed butterballs and hot sourdough rolls and then she served the clear soup that had been Sunday lunch first course since Mark’s childhood. He blew on a spoonful and asked where his parents were hiding Peters. “I want Ariana to get a look at the man I used to think was Dracula.”

  “Peters died,” Mark Senior said quietly.

  Mark set down his spoon.

  “He had a long illness,” Augusta said. “Didn’t I write you?”

  “No one wrote me.”

  “Peters was with us twenty-five years,” Augusta explained to Ariana.

  Shock hit Mark. Without warning, a part of his childhood had been amputated. He fought the water that pooled, salty and sudden, in his eyes.

  Augusta Rutherford moved on quickly to brighter topics. “Dodie Bingham married and now she owns five racing stables.”

  For an instant Mark found himself hating his mother, this cold, handsome matron who would never soil herself by expressing any family or personal sorrow in front of a guest, and who implicitly forbade his showing any. He stared down at his plate.

  Conversation went on, an hour of bringing Mark up-to-date on schoolmates and old flames he’d spent ten years trying to lose track of. Just the sort of stuff to fascinate an outsider. It occurred to him that possibly that was his mother’s point: to remind the outsider—politely, of course—just how hopelessly far outside she was.

  At the appropriate moment Augusta smiled and suggested, “Let’s have coffee in the other room.”

  She never called it the library. It was always the other room, as though library would have been vulgar or boasting.

  They sat sipping demitasse amid two tons of leather bindings and gilt lettering. Tiny spoons tinkled on bone china. Skirts and trousers were smoothed, legs were crossed. Augusta guided the small talk from the weather to roses to, “Do you sail, Ariana?”

  “I’ve never been sailing in my life.”

  “What a shame. You must.”

  It would have been the perfect moment to invite her for a sail on Chant de Mer, the family sloop. The moment passed.

  “I wish I had more time to get outdoors,” Ariana said. “But there’s so much to be done—voice lessons, theory, piano, language. I hardly have time for reading. And of course there’s my job.”

  “You work?” Mark Senior asked.

  Mark braced himself. Uh-oh, here it comes.

  “I tend counter. Part-time.”

  There was an instant’s glazed neutrality, and then Augusta managed an almost hopeful tone: “In one of the department stores?”

  No, Mother, Mark wanted to say, she’s not working in Bergdorf’s for a lark.

  “In a luncheonette. I don’t know why they call it that. It’s open for breakfast and supper too.”

  Mark’s parents did not look at each other. It wasn’t that they avoided one another’s glance, but in that instant something passed between them that was far more fundamental than any look or word.

  “You sound very busy,” Mark Senior said.

  “I may have to stop German lessons. For this year, at least.”

  “Tell me, Ariana,” Augusta said, “what are your favorite roles?”

  “I wish I had the voice for them all. I’d love to sing Violetta, Aïda, Isolde, Mimi, Turandot.”

  Augusta was smiling steadily, but Mark could see her thinking it sounded like a cotillion of very questionable young ladies.

  “And when my voice develops, I’d like to try Elektra.”

  “But Elektra’s so unpleasant!”

  “No law says opera has to be pleasant.”

  Augusta gazed at this girl who tended counter and who had contradicted her, this serene child whose hands lay in her lap as calm and soft as fresh snow. “The operas I like are all pleasant.”

  Ariana drew herself tall in her chair. “But opera can be so much more than that. It can stir you, it can seize you and terrify you and seduce you—it can do all the things to you that people do.”

  People did not do that sort of thing in Augusta Rutherford’s world, and Mark could feel his mother wondering about the people in Ariana Kavalaris’s set. “Well, I certainly wish you luck.”

  “I wish everybody in the world luck,” Ariana said. “I wish their dreams could all come true the way mine are going to.”

  Something uncanny reverberated in the silence. Mark felt it and he could feel his parents feeling it too. It was as though this girl with the dark eyes and wild dreams and crazy last name knew her own future, knew it the way psychics and saints are said to—innocently, completely, without doubt and without fear.

  It was Augusta who spoke. “More coffee, anyone? There’s just a little bit left in the pot.”

  That little bit left in the pot was a signal that, charming as the afternoon had been, Mr. and Mrs. Mark Rutherford Senior had given just about as much time as they intended to this particular interview.

  Mark glanced at his watch as though for the first time that day. “How did it get to be four-thirty? We’d better get a move on if we expect to beat the traffic.”

  Chatting about traffic conditions on Route 3, Augusta steered Ariana out of the library. Mark Senior stayed behind to tamp tobacco into his pipe. Mark realized the afternoon was not quite over.

  “Your Miss Kavalaris is very pleasant.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “You obviously haven’t known her very long.”

  There was a question mark at the end of his father’s statement but Mark let it dangle.

  “You know, Mark, your mother and I feel you’re treating Nita a little bit casually.”

  “Why do you and Mother insist on pretending I’m engaged to Nita Farnsworth or even want to be?”

  “She’s very fond of you.”

  “I’m very fond of Betty Grable.”

  “We think it’s a little casual of you and we’re surprised. That’s all I have to say.”

  “Wait a minute.” Ariana put her hand on Mark’s knee. “Don’t start the car yet.” She rolled down the window and looked back at the house. The wind made a sighing sound in the oak leaves. The cidery smell of October drifted across the lawn from the orchard. “This is what I want my old age to be—this light and this air and these trees.”

  “Marry me,” he said in a joking tone that wasn’t really joking at all, “and you’ll have it all.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not taking the risk.”

  “What�
��s the risk?”

  “Little things like children.”

  “I said marriage, not children.”

  “What do you think marriage is? Marriage is children.”

  “You are maddening and simplistic. There don’t have to be children.”

  “Then there doesn’t have to be a marriage.”

  “Then let’s get a place of our own and live together.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Congratulations, Mark. The parents weren’t bad enough. You had to top it by insulting her.

  He started the car and they drove in silence.

  It began raining outside of Oswick and one of the windshield wipers wasn’t working. He had to squint at the Taconic Parkway through a rippling Niagara.

  “You weren’t serious about living together,” she said. “You couldn’t be. You’re a minister.”

  “I’m not a minister yet and possibly I never will be. I know what I want now, and that’s to have a life with you. Today. While we’re here and young and alive. Before I turn into Mark Senior and before you turn into whoever you’re going to turn into.”

  “What would your parents say?”

  “Who cares what they say? What do you say?”

  “Maybe you’d better see who I’m going to turn into. Come meet my mother.”

  “She may not approve of me.”

  “She doesn’t have to. Just say hello to her. It’s an ancient Greek formality.”

  7

  AS THE CAB SLOWED to a stop on East 103rd Street, it seemed to Mark that they had landed on another planet. Ariana’s mother lived in a neighborhood of crumbling six-story tenements and storefronts and a few, very few, scrawny trees.

  Ariana stood a moment, just looking around, her eyes solemn and dark with remembering. “I used to walk up and down this street with my mother when I was a child. My brother and I played stickball over there in that vacant lot. It all seemed so big then, and now it seems…shrunken.”

  “You grew up,” Mark said. “That’s all.”

  “No. I went away. That’s a very different thing from growing up.”

  She took his hand and led him across the sidewalk to 108 East 103rd Street. The building smelled of mysterious, spicy cooking. She led him down a half-flight of stairs to the rear cellar apartment.