by Pamela Morsi
"Why the whole town," she said. "Were it not for you, this town would have reverted to cattle pasture years ago. And if not that, surely we'd still be slogging to church through the muddy streets five months a year. And without all those fireproof brick buildings, Main Street would have undoubtedly burned to the ground years ago, with businesses ruined and lives lost. The children wouldn't have that wonderful high school. And think of all the jobs the brickyards have brought to town. The mining men would have moved on long ago without those jobs."
He shrugged. "If I hadn't done those things, another man would have."
"You can't be sure of that, Mr. Stefanski. And besides, no other man would have done things in quite the way that you have."
He was silent for a long moment. "In truth, I am proud of my accomplishments. It was not those things I lament."
"Then what is it?"
He picked a blade of grass and ran its soft, smooth surface against his lower lip. "Lately, I think that I have let my dreams and ambitions get the better of my personal life."
Gertrude's brow furrowed. "But you have had a life, Mr. Stefanski. You had a wife and now a wonderful son."
"I love my son and am very proud of him," Mikolai said. "But had I been a less ambitious man, less driven, perhaps I could have had a half dozen sons and daughters by now."
Her cheeks were flushed at the personal nature of his words, but Gertrude's curiosity overrode her embarrassment.
"I always thought that you grieved too much for your late wife ever to remarry," she said.
Mikolai's eyes widened, clearly startled by her words. "I grieve, of course. I feel grief and guilt almost equally. I vowed never to marry again, and I won't. But that has been as much a convenience for me as an honor to her."
"I don't understand."
"I was fearful that a woman, any woman, would slow me down," Mikolai admitted. "A wife would expect more of me than I had to give her. She would expect more than my name and my money. She'd expect to have me, a thing I have never been prepared to offer. So I purposely decided not to remarry. Now that I see my son going off to live his own life, I suppose I am fearful of being left alone."
Gertrude nodded. "I understand what you are saying. Some people feel sorry for me that I never married. But, in truth, it was my choice. I think I always knew that a husband would probably never have allowed me to pursue my writing. My own father was strongly against it. And even if I had found a gentle and tolerant man to marry, children tugging at my apron would not have been conducive to creating fiction."
"But you still feel the regret," Mikolai said. "I feel it, too."
"Even knowing that I chose the right direction, I'm as guilty as Lot's wife of looking back," Gertrude said. "Given the same choices today, I would chart the same course. Still, there is a kind of sadness to my life that lately I cannot seem to dispel."
"You regret not marrying, not having children?"
"Well, I ... no, I don't suppose I do," she admitted. "It might have been nice to live life instead of writing stories about it. But I am my own woman. I wouldn't want to simply belong to some man."
Mikolai shook his head in approval. "And the world would miss your stories if you had not written them."
Gertrude shrugged his words away. "My work is rather ordinary. Everyone in publishing agrees that if the public enjoys a writer, his writing must not be of much value."
"Is that how they judge? What is good is what no one wants to read?" he said.
She laughed. "I'm afraid that is the way it has always been," Gertrude told him. "So, like the streets and buildings of town, if I hadn't written these novels, someone else undoubtedly would have."
"And like my streets and buildings," he said, "another person would not have written these the way that you have."
She smiled at him, very pleased.
"The gift of putting words upon paper in such a way that people clamor for them is not a skill that should be disreputed."
Gertrude nodded thoughtfully for a moment before agreeing with his words. "I do love writing. But my work has taken so much of my time that sometimes I think ... I think that perhaps I have missed my life."
"What do you mean? What life have you missed?"
"I suppose I've missed what Claire and Teddy have. I've missed being in love."
"Ah, love." Mikolai nodded thoughtfully. He stared silently out at the manicured perfection of the Barkley garden. "Marriage is not a guarantee of that, you know," he said. "Indeed, I have missed out on love myself, if such a thing truly exists."
"You think it might not exist?"
"Honestly, I don't know. All I have seen of love are some of its substitutes."
"Well, at least you've seen that. I'm not even acquainted with its distant relatives."
As soon as the words were out, Gertrude appeared to regret them, covering her flaming cheeks modestly.
"Surely that's not true, Miss Gertrude," he said. "Didn't you carry a torch for any of the young men who called upon you?"
Gertrude didn't answer at first. It was as if she were deciding if she should speak the truth or merely voice an acceptable lie.
He saw her swallow determinedly before she raised her head high, refusing to be cowed.
"I have been in love, Mr. Stefanski, once. But the gentleman never returned my affections."
Mikolai made no comment, but merely waited for her to offer an explanation. And she did.
"I didn't have all that many beaus. I was not interested in the young men for a very long time. Truly I never considered any man's attentions as serious ones."
"But did not your father insist that you should receive callers?" he asked.
Gertrude nodded. "My father was a very rigid and uncompromising man," she said. "He kept me very sheltered from the world for a long time."
She smiled bravely and offered her next words with a lightness that belied their meaning. "I believe the young gentlemen in town were quite daunted by him."
"I can imagine," Mikolai answered.
"By the time he realized that his behavior was likely to turn me into an old maid," she said, "it was simply too late."
"Surely you are exaggerating," he said.
"No, I am not. By the time I was twenty, I was considered quite on the shelf. It was something he hadn't intended. Shortly before he died he said that I should marry the next man who came through the door."
"But you didn't."
"No, by then, having fixed my heart with such certainty upon a man who did not return my affection, I knew that I could never marry. I'd seen enough of other people's marriages to know that if not for love, there was truly no reason to wed. And the man I loved never came through that door. He never knew how I felt about him."
Anger, frustration, and pity flashed through Mikolai's thoughts. "He never knew?"
"Of course, I could never tell him," she said. "And he never guessed."
"Well, the gentleman was an unfortunate idiot, Miss Gertrude. I can assure you that had this fool known that you would look kindly toward him as a suitor, your father would have had to hire thugs to keep him from your front porch."
Gertrude laughed delightedly at his gallant words. "You are very kind, Mr. Stefanski."
"And I am truthful, also," he said. "A woman such as yourself is rare indeed."
"Why, thank you very much, sir," she said. 'Truthfully, I am vain enough to find it gratifying that my single state is due to the gentleman not knowing that I was looking for a husband rather than from simply being undesirable to him."
"You could never be undesirable, Miss Gertrude."
He spoke his words softly, but something in them caused her to raise her head quickly and look closely into his eyes. The moment was a strange one, an uncomfortable one. Mikolai felt uneasy, as if he had opened up a secret room that should have remained closed forever. Hurriedly he tried to shut that room once more.
"It is very sad that the man you loved never knew of it. If only this were Poland," he said.
"Poland?"
"In Poland your father would only have had to dapple your house and the gentlemen would have known his intentions."
"Dapple the house?"
"It's called tarantowate. Paint dots on the house. That's what the fathers do in Poland to tell the men in the village, as well as passersby, that there is a marriageable young woman in the house and that the father and daughter would welcome a suitor."
"Are you serious? They paint spots on the house?" Gertrude asked.
"Oh yes," Mikolai assured her. "And it works very well. It gets everyone's attention."
"It most certainly would," Gertrude agreed.
"If a man has been thinking about one of the daughters of the house, he hurries in to make his offer, before the father accepts a quicker fellow."
Gertrude laughed with delight. "Then that's exactly what my father should have done, painted Barkley House in bright polka dots."
"It's not too late," Mikolai said.
Gertrude's eyes widened. "Oh, it is very much too late," she said.
Mikolai looked skeptical. "Well, your brother George is not much of a painter, but I'm sure he could hire it done."
"I could never marry now," Gertrude said adamantly. "I am happy with my spinsterhood and my little apartment. It is not even a thing that I would consider were I alone and starving. I am far too set in my ways to take on the peculiar quirks of a grouchy old man."
"So we've come full circle," Mikolai said. "You have regrets about the life you chose, but still you would not change the one you have."
"No, I don't suppose I would change it. But I still think of what I missed."
"Love," he said.
She blushed. "Yes, love."
Mikolai studied his blade of grass even more carefully than before. Protected beneath the shelter of the hazelnut tree, it was among the last sprigs still green in the autumn. It was still smooth, but slightly dry from the chill of the season. It still lived, but not forever.
"Would you like to take a lover, Miss Gertrude?"
"What!"
Gertrude's relaxed pose disappeared completely as Mikolai watched. It was as if a rigid iron pole had suddenly replaced her backbone.
"You are insulting, Mr. Stefanski!" she said, attempting to rise.
Mikolai laid his hand on her arm. "Wait," he said.
She was silent and still as stone beside him.
"I did not wish to be offensive," he said quietly.
"Well, you certainly are!" she said. "You are no better than the rest of them. Just because I cut my hair and wear fashionable clothes you think that I am little better than scandal and would go off with some strange man in an—"
"Not some strange man, Miss Gertrude. Me."
Gertrude was struck dumb by his words. She stared at him.
"I mean no disrespect, but as we have just discussed, neither of us wish to marry, but both of us would like . . . would like another chance at youth. I thought that perhaps this would be a way."
In wide-eyed disbelief she stared at him.
"We cannot change the lives that we have lived and neither of us can go back to our youth," he said. "We have chosen what was best for us. But perhaps we can take a time out of our life. A time that none other need know about to experience things that perhaps we have not known. To have at least an interesting substitute for some things that we have cause to want."
"A time out of our lives?" Gertrude whispered the phrase over to herself.
"Yes, a special time that none should ever know about but us," he said.
"Mr. Stefanski, I—"
"When I held you in my arms the other night," he whispered, his words almost tangible in their softness, "I felt something. Something I have not felt for a long time."
He glanced up at her. His heart was in his throat and his pulse was pounding. His confidence had deserted him. He felt imprudent and very vulnerable. Beside him, Gertrude sat stiffly, her prim clothing and her pale expression the antithesis of the wanton proposal that he was making. Her silence was accusing.
"Forgive me, Miss Gertrude," he said, finally. "I thought perhaps that you felt it also. If I have offended you, I am sorry. And I will never speak of this again."
Gertrude only stared at him as if dumbstruck. He accepted her silence as horrified rejection.
Mikolai quickly rose to leave, too ashamed to meet her gaze. He felt foolish, loutish, uncouth. He didn't know where the words had come from. He hadn't intended to make such an ungallant proposition. He had probably permanently destroyed any hope of friendship with the one woman he most admired. If he were his best friend, he would have cheerfully kicked his teeth in. He was despicable, loathsome—
"Wait!"
Her word halted him in midstride. He hesitated a long instant before turning around. She was still seated in the shady vestiges of the last of the hazel tree's summer leaves. Her head was held high and her cheeks were prettily pink. He took in the sight of her, deliberately, as if to imprint it upon his memory so that he would always recall her so.
"Perhaps I have answered too quickly," she said, seeming not to realize that she had answered not at all.
She took a deep breath as if she were contemplating a dive into a dangerous pool. Her voice was low and controlled, as if she were measuring every word that she spoke.
"I think, Mr. Stefanski, that I never want to look back on this moment and regret my cowardice."
Chapter Twenty-Three
"IT'S GOING TO be so much fun," Claire assured her aunt as she hurried Gertrude along behind her. "Candlelight croquet is simply a different game altogether. It's terrific!"
Gertrude's very definite lack of enthusiasm went completely unnoticed, as Claire's own attention was focused more adroitly upon a very different game.
She had so much on her mind. It was, Gertrude surmised, as if her thoughts were a gallon and her mind was only a quart-size pitcher. She had hoped to spend the evening hiding away in her room, pretending that she was writing. She would have to pretend. Her real life was suddenly so much more exciting than what she had planned for her characters, she could hardly give a thought to Weston, Alexandria, and Carlisle Place. But even if she couldn't hole up another evening, alone with the thrill of her own thoughts, the last thing she wanted to do was to play a friendly game of croquet, especially not with the Stefanskis.
After their talk under the hazel tree, Gertrude honestly didn't know how she would even look the man in the face again. She had agreed to engage in some kind of scandalous "time out of life" with him. She wasn't sure exactly what sort of immorality was to be involved, but she knew that it was something shady.
"I really am quite tired this evening," she had insisted to her niece. "I think you should simply go alone."
"Unchaperoned?" Claire asked with feigned horror. "I couldn't."
"Don't be silly, Claire," her aunt replied tartly. "You and Teddy have spent time alone together since you were children."
"Yes, but we weren't getting married then," Claire said.
The young woman gave Gertrude a long hard look that her aunt couldn't interpret and was too churned up to even worry about.
"You do remember that we are getting married?"
Gertrude's expression sobered and she deliberately showed what she hoped was loving concern. "There is really no hurry."
"Oh, but I can hardly wait."
"But you must wait, dear," Gertrude insisted. “Time changes things for people. What you think you want when you are young is often not what you can live with as you grow older."
Claire's expression was unfathomable. "I don't intend to change my mind," she told her aunt emphatically. "When I set my mind on a thing, you know how I am about following through. It would take a reason of enormous proportion to get this idea out of my head."
Gertrude's face was lined with worry. But only a minuscule part of that concern was for her niece's happiness. Her own heart was pounding like a tom-tom. Dwarfing any fears for the exuberant young
woman at her side was Gertrude's anxiety at seeing Mikolai Stefanski again.
She had thought three days ago under the fading cover of the bountyless hazel tree that she was ready to reach out to life. She was ready to take chances. That she, Gertrude Barkley, was ready to engage in a grand passion. One that she had dreamed about for seventeen years.
Since that moment, however, sheer terror had overtaken craven curiosity. She didn't know if she could go through with it. How could she ever be that close, that intimate, and keep the secret that she loved him?
"Look at the yard!" Claire exclaimed beside her.
Gertrude did. And it nearly took her breath away. The backyard of the Stefanski house was lit with the glow of candles.
Candlelight croquet was one of the latest crazes of middle-class leisure. Croquet itself was a delightful game preferred by both ladies and gentlemen because of its innate equality. Tennis and golf favored those of muscled physique and athletic ability. But like its less savory cousin, billiards, croquet was a game of challenge and skill. The most tiny and delicate of the ladies could as likely play with as great a mastery as a brawny schoolboy. And furthermore, croquet did not, as many sports, induce a lady to commit the atrocity of perspiring. Candlelight croquet was especially redeeming in this respect.
"Isn't it terrific?" Claire whispered. Gertrude couldn't help but agree.
"It's beautiful," she said.
The wide expanse of the Stefanski house's backyard, unrelieved by either bedded plants or flowered borders, had always appeared stark and desolate. Tonight Gertrude could approve wholeheartedly for the first time of the rather new fashionable notion of lawn over garden.
The pattern of croquet wickets, two at either end guarding the stakes, one near each corner of the field and at the center, was brightly outlined by the glow of the slender candles that sat firmly in sockets on the side of the curved wire.
"It's like a fairyland," Claire gushed dreamily.
"Isn't it amazing," Gertrude said, "that something so familiar can be so lovely?"
"Yes, it is truly amazing."
The answering voice was low and masculine and behind her. Gertrude turned, startled, to find herself face-to-face with Mikolai Stefanski.