by Flora Kidd
‘Yes. But there was nothing for you,’ said Blythe, pouring egg batter into hot melted butter. ‘By the way, Isaac called. He wants to see you as soon as possible. He’s upset about that Baker woman. It seems she quit the TV network without warning—just walked out, and now there’s a possibility that the programme of concerts won’t go on because she isn’t there to edit the films. I wonder why she left?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lenore. She wasn’t going to say anything about Valerie because that would bring Adam into the conversation again, and from now on discussion with Blythe or anyone else about Adam was taboo, strictly prohibited, because discussing him seemed somehow to desecrate what they had known together, those few hours of passionate love, the rapture that had been theirs and that no one could take away from them. Star-crossed, ill-matched she and Adam might be, but they had for a short time discovered the essence of each other and had shared a private beautiful world of their own creating. ‘I’ll go and see Isaac as soon as I’ve eaten,’ she went on. ‘I’m sure Jim Lorway could produce the programme and I’ll be more than willing to help him with the editing.’
True to her word, she walked round to Isaac’s house later and as a result of her conversation with him drove to Bangor with him that afternoon to see the programme manager of the TV network and discuss with him what could be done about continuing to film the series of concerts. When they left soon after four o’clock, Lenore had a job for the rest of the summer, to produce and co-edit with Jim Lorway.
‘I bet Isaac is ecstatic,’ remarked Blythe when Lenore told her the news.
‘Yes, he is,’ said Lenore, laughing a little. ‘All the way back from Bangor he kept clapping his hands together and saying, “It’s wonderful. I’m so happy—happy for you, happy for me.” I had to grab the steering wheel several times to keep the car on the right side of the road. These people who talk with their hands make dangerous drivers!’
‘I’m happy for you and happy for me too,’ said Blythe. ‘Happy that you’ll be staying here for the rest of the summer and happy that you’ll have something to do to . . . well, to keep your mind busy and off a certain person. How do you feel about the job?’
‘Bewildered,’ sighed Lenore. ‘But excited too. It will be a challenge, one I never expected. The experience will certainly be valuable, and if I’m any good at producing it will broaden my options when it comes to looking for jobs in the future. But I’m still hoping to be taken on by the orchestra in Caracas.’
‘When are you going to put on the next concert? People have already been asking me if there are to be more.’
‘About the first of July. Mother will be here then, won’t she?’
‘I’m not sure now. Last time I talked to her on the phone she said something about going over to Scotland instead. Apparently there’s going to be a family reunion of all the Frazers and her Scottish cousins have invited her to be there in July. Will you have the concert in the same place?’
‘We’re hoping to,’ replied Lenore coolly. ‘That was the arrangement Isaac made with Adam Jonson and there’s no reason to believe it’s been changed, but Isaac and I will be going over to the house later this week to talk to Albert Smith about it. I guess Adam has left him in charge.’
‘When you were at the TV studios in Bangor, was anything said about Valerie Baker?’ asked Blythe curiously.
‘Very little. I got the impression that she wasn’t very popular and that they were glad she’d quit. They’d been looking for ways of firing her.’
‘Didn’t she give a reason for quitting?’
‘Only that she wanted to return to New York because she found Maine too slow and un-stimulating,’ said Lenore. ‘Do you want me to help you this evening?’
‘No, thanks. Carrie is here and we don’t have many bookings for dinner.’
‘Then I think I’ll answer some letters,’ said Lenore, starting up the stairs.
‘Herzel’s letter?’ queried Blythe with a wicked glint.
‘Perhaps,’ retorted Lenore, and went on up to her room. Three days slipped by; days of mixed weather, sunshine and showers alternating; days of anxious waiting for Lenore, waiting for news of Adam, waiting to go to his house where she would see Albert Smith and could ask him whether the operation had been done or not, and if it had been done whether it had been successful or not.
But to her great disappointment Albert wasn’t at the house on Pickering Point when she and Isaac arrived. Only Bertha was there, opening the door and letting them into the house reluctantly, staring at them with her large grey watery eyes, her small mouth pursed up primly.
‘Albert ain’t back yet from Boston,’ she said in her abrupt way. ‘And I dunno nothing about you using that room again. If I had my way you wouldn’t have it. A rare mess I had to clean up after the last time!’
Her remarks devastated Isaac and he apologised profusely over and over again, until Lenore, who had the measure of the forthright, unco-operative Bertha by now, cut in with,
‘When will Albert come back?’
‘Next Monday, he says. Depends.’
‘On what?’ demanded Lenore.
‘On how Adam is feeling.’
‘Oh, has Mr Jonson been ill? I didn’t know,’ said Isaac.
‘Not ill—just operated on,’ said Bertha. ‘His head, to make him see.
‘Has the operation been done?’ asked Lenore. ‘Sure has—day before yesterday. But they don’t know the results yet. That’s why Albert’s still there. Blood’s thicker than water, so they say, and Albert sure is thick with Adam. Treats him as if he was his son instead of his cousin a few times removed,’ said Bertha, and moved towards the front door to open it. ‘Reckon you won’t be staying, since Albert isn’t here, so I’ll show you out.’
About to step outside, Lenore turned back to glance appealingly at Bertha.
‘Please would you ask Albert to phone me when he comes back?’ she asked.
‘You’ll have to leave your number,’ replied Bertha grudgingly. ‘Hang on and I’ll get you a paper and pen.’
She went into the study room and returned with a small pad of paper. Lenore wrote her name and the telephone number of the Inn on it and a few words for Albert: Please let me know about Adam. Then after thanking Bertha she followed Isaac down the steps and to his car.
They made the return trip to Northport in unusual silence—unusual, because usually Isaac chattered all the time. Three more days before she would have more news of Adam, thought Lenore. Three more days of anxiety and prayer. Not that she was a praying person; she didn’t go into a church and get down on her knees and bow her head every day. Nor did she kneel by her bedside every night. But she thought of Adam constantly and hoped fervently that the operation had been a success and he would see properly again, even though the restoration of his sight would mean that he would go away from her. And that was a sort of praying, she maintained.
Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The three days dragged in spite of the business of the weekend when there were more guests staying at the Inn than ever before and she and Blythe and Carrie were rushed off their feet, cooking, waiting on tables and clearing up afterwards. Monday was the worst, and when the day ended without any call from Albert Lenore spent the night wondering if he had been delayed because the results of the operation had been negative; perhaps because Adam . . . had died.
She was practising on her clarinet the next morning, trying to immerse herself completely in the art of making music in an effort to forget her anxiety about Adam, when Carrie came up to tell her that Albert Smith was in the lounge and wanted to see her.
Long and lean in his overalls, he was studying an oil painting of a fishing schooner that was hanging on one of the walls of the lounge, and when she entered breathless from having run down the stairs he cocked a bright blue eye at her, pointed to the painting and said,
‘The Mary Day—she’s still sailing. I seen her in Camden when I came through there yesterday. She’s one of them cruise schooners
now, sails about the islands with a lot of landlubbers on board. Food’s good, they say.’ He gave her another glance. ‘Got yer note,’ he added. ‘Didn’t phone ’cos I don’t like talking on the phone, so I came over this morning.’
‘Thank you. Won’t you sit down? Can I get you something? A cup of coffee?’ asked Lenore, her voice quivering as she tried to contain her impatience.
‘No, thanks. I’ll just say what I have to say and be on my way. Adam had the operation.’
‘Yes. And?’
‘He came through pretty well, didn’t die or anything like that. But he’s low.’
‘Low?’ queried Lenore in bewilderment. ‘Depressed. That’s why I stayed on a bit. He hoped he’d be able to see right away, as soon as he’d recovered from the anaesthetic. But it weren’t that way at all, so he was mad. You know the way he gets when things don’t go his way, snarling at the surgeon, the nurses, me, everyone who went near him.’
‘I know,’ murmured Lenore. ‘But will he see?’
‘Won’t know for about six weeks to two months.’
‘That’s a long time to wait. For him, I mean.’
‘You’re darned right it is! He’s likely to go crazy,’ drawled Albert, seeming to relish the fact of Adam going mad and behaving badly as a result. ‘Wouldn’t like to be the nurses who are going to be looking after him.’
‘Oh, he isn’t coming back here, then?’ she asked.
‘Nope. Going to stay in a special convalescent place outside New York.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know.’ Lenore thought suddenly of Valerie Baker, who had returned to New York because she found Maine dull and unstimulating. Or was it because she had known Adam was going to the big city? ‘Albert, do you think I could visit him, at the convalescent home?’ she asked urgently.
‘You could, I guess,’ he drawled, chewing for a few seconds while he considered her with shrewd blue eyes, ‘but if you take my advice, you won’t go near him.’
‘Oh, why not?’
‘Adam don’t like being chased by women.’
‘But I wouldn’t be chasing him,’ she retorted. ‘I’d be going as a friend ... to cheer him up.’
‘He won’t like it.’ He chewed some more, then said, ‘You want for him to treat you like he treated that sassy New York woman?’
‘You mean Valerie Baker?’
‘That’s her. Came to see him the day after the operation. I told her to get lost. Adam wouldn’t have liked for her to have seen him with all those tubes and things stuck up his nose and into his arm. She’s got no respect for a man’s privacy, that one. But she’s persistent, I give her that. Came again, with a bouquet of flowers, when I wasn’t there to shoo her off.’
‘What happened?’ asked Lenore.
‘Adam got so mad he shouted and roared, and the nurses had to ask her to leave.’ Albert loped towards the door leading into the hallway. ‘Guess it’s time I was on my way,’ he announced.
Lenore followed him to the front door of the Inn. As he opened it he glanced down at her.
‘If you do go to see Adam don’t take him no flowers. He’ll only throw them right back at you, and that’s a waste of good flowers. Be seein’ ya!’
CHAPTER EIGHT
LENORE took Albert’s advice and didn’t go to visit Adam, because Albert was right and she didn’t want Adam to treat her as he had treated Valerie Baker. Also, she didn’t want Adam to think she was chasing him. In fact the more she thought about it the more she realised the wisdom of staying away from him while he was convalescing. If he wanted her, if he loved her, he would come to her one day. Meanwhile her life had to go on without him as it had before she had met him. There were things she wanted to do that had nothing to do with him, just as he had things he wanted to do that had nothing to do with her. They didn’t have to live in one another’s pockets all the time just because they had shared a few hours of passion. They were adults, not adolescents.
But she ached for him—oh, how she ached and hurt, deep down. And she longed to know how he was, how he looked, how he was feeling. She tried to write to him, but the thought of some nurse having to read the letter to him if he couldn’t see to read it stopped her, and in the end she sent him only a note, one of those letter notes that you can buy in a packet at a novelty store, with prints of local scenes or paintings of flowers on them. Inside she wrote simply,
‘Adam, Thinking of you always, Lenore.’
The next time she saw Albert she asked him for the address of the convalescent home where Adam was staying, and when he heard that she didn’t intend to go and see Adam, he gave it to her.
‘Have you heard how he is?’ she asked.
‘He’s pretty good,’ Albert said laconically, chewing rhythmically, looking over her head at something she couldn’t see.
‘Can he see properly yet?’
‘Nope.’
‘How much longer will he be there?’
‘No saying.’
And making his usual excuse that it was time he was on his way, Albert strode away from her.
The days of June passed by, sometimes gloriously sunny, with the water in the estuary blue and sparkling, sometimes shrouded in thick down-east fog, grey and wet, always shifting and swirling, blotting out view of hills and islands. Life in Northport followed its usual routine. At Josh Kyd’s boatyard sailing yachts were launched and swung at their moorings in the estuary awaiting the arrival of their owners who would come when most summer vacations began on July the first. Guests, mostly elderly or childless couples taking their vacations before the annual rush of families from New York and Boston to the coast, arrived at the Inn. They stayed a few days or a week exploring the local countryside and the many small seaports, then moved on.
The music group met regularly and rehearsed for the next concert, which was planned for the first of July and not the middle of the month as had been arranged originally. The first concert had attracted new members, both amateur and professional performers, including several wind instrumentalists.
‘Now we can extend our repertoire,’ announced Isaac enthusiastically. ‘We can at last perform some of Mozart’s divertimenti. I propose for the next concert we play the Divertimento in B flat for two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns, to be followed by Beethoven’s Trio No. 6 in B flat for piano, violin and cello. It will make a good evening, you’ll see.’
Having to practise and rehearse for the Divertimento as well as having to help produce the programme for TV made Lenore extremely busy. But she enjoyed the involvement with so many new acquaintances, and of course there was always the great and serene pleasure of performing Mozart’s beautiful music. Jim Lorway was easy to work with and fell in with her suggestions about where the cameras should be placed during the concert. She learned that in the production of a film timing was all-important and had to plan with Jim at rehearsals when the camera should zoom in on a particular performer.
After seeing the films of Valerie’s interviews with herself and Isaac, Jack, Willa and Jane, she and Jim decided to scrap them and to start all over again. Jim persuaded her to do the interviewing of the other musicians herself.
‘It’s better for you to ask the questions because you know so much about the music as well as what it’s like to be a performer,’ he said. ‘And then you have a good presence on film. You photograph well and you convey a sincerity that Valerie lacked.’ He grinned at her. ‘It’s those big golden eyes,’ he mocked.
‘Really?’ exclaimed Lenore, amazed by this view of herself.
‘Sure. You’re natural and spontaneous. You don’t hold anything back or hide your feelings, and you come over on film as someone who’s warm and genuinely interested in and excited by what you’re doing. And that’s what TV viewers like. They can soon spot a phoney. That’s why Valerie didn’t have much success as an interviewer. She was too wrapped up in herself, in the projection of her own image on the screen, and not interested enough in the people she was interviewing. She wasn’t all that good as a
producer either. Not enough imagination and not enough respect for the intelligence of the people out there watching the TV. I’m not surprised she’s never been able to hold a job down with a network.’
The second concert was even more of a success than the first. It was attended not only by local people but also by many summer residents of the area, and tourists. Every seat was sold and many people had to stand or sit on the stairs in the hallway. It received good reviews in the local press.
Afterwards the music group met as usual to evaluate the concert and to plan the next one. Once again the suggestion was made that on the strength of the success of the concerts Northport ought to have its own music and arts festival every summer.
‘The town council is interested because it will attract more summer visitors and tourists to the area,’ said Fred Caplan, who was a member of the council. ‘If we could only be sure of getting the Jonson house.’ He gave Lenore a glance. ‘Did you ever mention the idea of a festival to Adam Jonson?’
‘No, I didn’t. At the time I thought it was enough that he agreed to let us use the big room for this summer’s concerts,’ she replied cautiously.
‘Anyone else bring up the matter with him?’ asked Fred, looking round the group. ‘What about you, Isaac? You seemed to click with Jonson.’
‘Yes, I talked about a festival,’ replied Isaac. ‘But I didn’t push it too much. Like Lenore, I thought we ought to step carefully, wait and see how the concerts went over before doing anything else.’
‘Well, they’re going over great,’ said Jack. ‘And I think we ought to approach Jonson now as a group. We could write a letter to him setting out exactly what it is we want to do and send it to him. I think Lenore knows where he is, don’t you?’ He turned to her enquiringly.