Excerpt From Jo Grant’s Journal:
…I had to meet a landscape designer at the country club at eight this morning about the gardens at White Hall, and he told me to wait for him in the maintenance yard separated from the employees’ lot by a high, thick hedge.
It was hot, and I had my windows down, and I heard a man and woman talking in a car on the other side. They both sounded vaguely familiar, and I started eavesdropping the way I usually do, and when I realized it was Richard Franklin and his wife, Lily, I still second-guessed myself, because what were the odds of that?
Then I heard her say, “Blue Grass Horse Vans is all they care about. You don’t matter in the least.”
Richard said, “That’s not true. They want me to run the company.”
Lily snorted and then laughed, as though he were a half-witted child. “I didn’t move to this hillbilly town to waste my life working as an event manager in a mediocre country club. I have taste and experience, and I don’t intend to stagnate here. If you aren’t given an opportunity soon to expand your horizons and travel for the firm, and meet the really important international competitors, I fail to understand why you would want to stay either.”
“Come on, Lily. I meet a lot of those people.”
“As an office manager.” The condescension in her voice cut like shears through the hedge. “You told me when we met that you’d own Blue Grass.”
“Spence and I will, and Martha too, when—”
“If your parents don’t see the need to take a back seat soon, I’ll be the one to make a change. I’ve got to go in to work. The Chrysler’ll be ready by five.”
“I’ll pick you up here a little after. You remember I’ll be out for dinner? I’m chairing the local meeting.”
“How could I forget? You and your toy trains!”
I heard her heels snapping across the parking lot, and I could almost see her teased honey-colored hair, the make-up applied to perfection, and the clothes chosen to make a safe statement at any country club anywhere.
I heard Richard sigh and start the engine.
And I felt sorrier for Richard Franklin right then than I had since the day I met him…
Jack didn’t come back to Alan’s that night. And Alan stayed up most of it, kicking himself from one room to another, even after walking four or five miles in the dark.
He dissected his talk with Jo and his lecture to Jack too, praying hard that he hadn’t done Jack some kind of serious damage. He’d been more blunt than he’d meant to be, because he’d been whipped up and raw himself after talking about Jane.
He’d seen the change in Jo too, the look on her face that took him by surprise. As though something young and fragile had withered away and died.
He was trying to remember when that was, and what it was he’d told her. Lying to himself like a ten-year-old. When he knew exactly what he’d said.
And if he wanted to be honest with himself – and he told himself it was time – he’d said it half deliberately.
Protecting himself?
Or her?
And why would he see the need?
Because it gave him pause that he liked the way she attacked life hard and fast and deliberate. He liked her straightforwardness too. And that she was interested in all kinds of things, and was good at a large number. He respected the way she was raising Emmy, the love and the judgment and the common sense in the consistent way she trained her.
He’d seen her do what ought to be done in other ways too, even when she’d whined first. She’d coped with a lot over the years. And apparently fairly well. Though he didn’t know much firsthand.
You do know what Tom said. Or don’t you trust him?
And you’ve seen her with Toss, and with Jack and Buddy, and with Tara and Spence too, when you think about it, as well as Emmy and Sam. There’s plenty of data there you’ve put together yourself.
So what is it you’re running from?
Getting involved, and getting left again?
That’s doing what Jack does. Fearing failure. Avoiding risk. Hiding yourself away.
Man, I hope Jack’s not getting loaded. If he is, it’s largely your fault, and you’d better think about what you could do to help him regroup.
Thursday, May 10, 1962
As it happened, Jack didn’t. He’d started to, but stopped at the last minute, after leaning and looking over the edge – arguing with himself till his throat was sore and his lips were cracked, in the parking lot of the Stirrup And Saddle, while he smoked half a pack of Camels.
He drove off, finally, scattering gravel, and found a cheap motel, where he took a shower and climbed into bed and slept better than normal.
He got to Blue Grass Horse Vans on time and worked inside, when he didn’t want to, washing walls and stripping wax off linoleum and patching cracks in concrete floors inside the plant.
When he got back to the house that night, Alan apologized for being hard on him. But Jack said he’d needed to hear it, and Alan had earned the right. They went back to being careful – to making enough room for each other they could get along day-after-day.
Most of that week came and went without too much drama. Jo worked at home on the lab at Equine Pharmaceuticals, drawing plans and researching lab cabinets. She and Alan discussed what she’d done on the phone Thursday, and he told her he’d be leaving the next day to spend the weekend with his folks. It was their forty-second anniversary, and he was going home to surprise them. She told him she hoped he had a good trip and hung up before he answered – not wanting to seem too interested or be anything but businesslike.
Buddy got his mare bred at Mercer’s that day too.
And Tara came to work and avoided Spencer as much as he avoided her so he began to feel less like he was holding his breath, waiting for a knife in the night.
Friday, May 18, 1962
Alice had begun to get some strength back at home, though she still had to keep her legs up more than she liked. She wanted to start painting – to spend every minute while she recuperated working on paintings she’d been thinking about for the best part of a year.
Even so, she knew she had to rest and pace herself. She’d be taking Warfarin for quite a while too, and she had to be careful not to bruise or cut herself or fall somehow like an idiot, because internal bleeding could be deadly, especially after abdominal surgery that was only beginning to heal.
Yet she told Booker again on Friday (for maybe the twentieth time) that he and Spence should still leave for England the next day, exactly as they’d planned, because she’d be fine at home. Their cleaning lady was a friend and a neighbor, and she’d bring her groceries and stop by everyday. Her secretary would bring correspondence and be there every day as well. Jack would be working in the yard off-and-on. And Richard would be in town too. (Though for her it was harder to ask help from a son than a stranger on the street, especially when it came to anything remotely connected to nursing.)
Booker still didn’t feel right about leaving. He went over it with her till they were both exhausted, but he could see how much Alice wanted to paint with total concentration, and he finally agreed and gave in.
He and Spencer spent the day organizing the remaining details of their meetings with dealers in England and France, and clearing up as much as they could to prepare for being out of the office for two and a half weeks.
Late that afternoon, Spence met the barn hand who worked down the road, who’d be living in his house taking care of his horses, and explained what he needed to know.
Then he went to all four paddocks in the blistering sun to talk to the horses before he went in to pack, feeling freer and more himself than he had since he’d learned about Tara’s past.
He was ready to start something different. To develop a new division of the business – if they decided it actually made sense. To see the France and England he’d known in a bloodbath the way they’d healed and rebuilt. To think about something beside Tara Kruse, and why he’d believed her as much as he had, and what she might do next.
Then he saw Gigi’s face again, when he’d walked out her door two Fridays before, and asked himself for the thousandth time what he could do for her.
He knew there was nothing.
Which made him kick his paddock boots across his laundry room floor.
Packing forced him to concentrate on the minutiae that complicates leaving the country – the passport, the travelers’ checks, the electric plugs for European outlets – till he pulled his suits from the closet.
A button was missing from the jacket of the charcoal gray he’d just bought for the trip. Two were off his old navy blue. And the threads looked as though they’d been cut.
He laid both suits on the bed, and examined the new one first. First the jacket, then the pants – where he found a two-inch vertical slice on the left side of the zipper that looked as though it must’ve been made by a sharp, wide blade, something like the butcher knife he used everyday. There were slices in the back on either side of the center seam too.
And two horizontal cuts in the pants legs of the old blue suit – one in each, above the cuff. They weren’t as noticeable as the slice by the zipper, or the ones in the back of the gray. He thought he could wear the blue suit on the plane and then buy something new in England.
He sat on the bed and stared at the cuts in the charcoal pants, and said, “Bitch!” twice, in a loud hot voice, as a heavy hard stone settled deep in his chest. He was looking at what he’d been waiting for, without having called it by name.
She’s done it before. It’s not a complete shock. But how did she get in?
It was close to a hundred when Michael Westlake took a cab from the hospital to his impounded car. He paid the fee, drove home, and parked in front by the curb. He climbed out slowly, staring at the weathered white house, shaking his head at the toilet paper wrapped around the porch posts, and all four white wicker chairs.
He mounted the steps with the slow tread and obvious dread of climbing his own scaffold, and stepped through the front door into a hot, stuffy, sickly-smelling house where the curtains were drawn to keep the sun out.
Iris Westlake was lying on the flowered divan just where he’d expected her, a damp cloth on her forehead, while his younger sister, Bea, played in the downstairs bedroom. The Mickey Mouse record was on again, the one they’d heard thousands of times, and her hard-soled shoes stamped the floor like the crack of a repeating rifle in nothing at all like rhythm. She howled too until the record stopped, when she yelled, “Make it play!”
Iris didn’t attempt to get up. She stared at Michael for almost a minute before she said, “I’ll never recover. Not from this humiliation. Not as long as I live.”
Michael sighed, as he took off his coat and laid it on the back of a chair. “Bea’s covered the house with toilet paper plenty of times before. It’s up to you to hide the extra rolls.”
“Not the toilet paper! You know very well what I mean. That you, my only son, would be jailed like a common criminal and put in an institution for the same drunkenness your father succumbed to. Daily behavior, as you may recall, that made my life an unbearable trial.”
“I’m not going to argue with you. I’m only going to say this once. Our lives are changing today. I will not live here again, though I will continue to pay your expenses. I have arranged for a caregiver to be here with Bea, who has the know-how and experience to handle the behavior of a—”
“I will not allow a stranger in my home to observe and report the—”
“If the caregiver doesn’t work out, so that you’re both kept safe, and Bea’s temper is controlled, Bea will go to a home that takes proper care of people with her type of retardation. She is twenty years old, and too large and too strong to stay here alone with you. The Sunshine Home—”
“Don’t you even mention that name in the—”
“Does an excellent job. You’ve seen that yourself. And I believe she’d be happier where she’s not the only one with her particular challenges.”
“Do not say another word!”
“They know how to teach her what she can learn, and she’d have people to play with who are like her, which would help her not to be so frustrated by her limitations.”
“How can you even suggest such a thing? I take care of Bea! I run this household! I will not be dictated to by a man who has to be inebriated to get through the day!” She’d made no attempt to sit up. She still lay on the couch, one hand on the washcloth now, the other pointing at Michael.
“And how will you support yourself?” He spoke calmly, and turned toward the stairs at the end of the living room farthest from her couch. “I’ve paid for everything since Dad left. I’ve provided someone to clean the house. I’ve cooked a good bit of the food. I’ve done a good deal of the shopping. I am no longer willing to live in a state of siege. A caregiver arrives in an hour.”
He started up the stairs, as Iris struggled to sit up. “You? How can you pay for anything? You’ve been fired! You’re a failure, just like your father!”
Michael stopped halfway up, but didn’t turn to her before he spoke. “I’m a graduate mechanical engineer. I will find a position. Perhaps even the one I had.” He stared down at her then, her large soft body tightly corseted, trussed in flowered cotton, her short permed hair dyed a dull dark brown, her drooping jowls, her plucked and penciled eyebrows, her small eyes sunken in soft flesh staring at him with hatred.
“Mikey, Mikey, Mikey! Come play now!!” Bea had lumbered into the living room, her round face beaming as she looked at him, her short stubby body heavier than when he’d last seen her, a candy bar in her hand.
“We’ll go to the park in a few minutes. It’ll be cooler there in a little while.”
“NOW!! You play now!!”
“No, Bea. In a few minutes. You have to wait.”
“No!” Her face was red and sweaty, and she stamped a foot twice as she glared at him.
“I won’t play with you at all if you don’t behave. You know how to be patient. Then we’ll have some fun.”
“NO!”
“Yes. Somebody’s coming to see you too. A very nice lady who’ll play all kinds of new games.”
“She won’t be staying! She’ll be turned away at the door!” Iris was standing, her arms folded across her stiffly bound stomach.
Michael Westlake walked down the stairs and stopped a foot from his mother. “No, she won’t. She will come in and stay a week. And then I’ll reevaluate. If you do not cooperate, I will give you no financial support of any kind.”
Iris reared up, her head held high, as she said, “You wouldn’t do that! Not when you know how little—”
“Yes, I would.”
“So you’re just like your father!”
“No. I haven’t abandoned you. Though I understand why he did. And I won’t, if you act in a reasonable manner. I won’t be cleaning up the porch either, by the way, so maybe you ought to get started while I pack my things.” He turned away and climbed the stairs without looking back.
Iris and Bea stood side by side and stared at the steps where he’d stood.
Saturday, May 19, 1962
Spencer picked Booker up at nine and drove him to the Lexington airport, where they were catching a puddle-jumper to Cincinnati, to connect with a flight to New York.
By the time they were in the car, Alice had started painting on the wide glassed-in gallery she and Booker had built in back between the kitchen and bedroom they’d added to the left and right of the original house. They used the gallery for eating most of their meals, and watching wildlife come out of the woods, and for Alice’s periods of concentrated painting once or twice a year.
The gallery faced west, but there were old trees shading the whole width of it, and skylights as well that flooded it with filtered light from under the overhanging branches. The floor was flagstone, and she’d laid canvas drop cloths across it now, even under the gate-legged table where they ate – where she’d laid out her paints and palette, her linseed oil and turpentine, her rags and sponges and can of soapy water on top of a heavy sheet of plastic.
It was pleasant that morning. Cooler than it’d been, and she opened the three sets of French doors that led onto a large flagstone terrace edged by a row of boxwood.
She had a three-foot-square canvas primed and set on the big wooden easel Booker had made her when they’d first married, when he’d worked for John Deere and had hoped she could have a life that allowed her to paint fulltime.
She started with a landscape that had been in her mind for months, a loose watery abstract impressionistic riverscape that had grown out of her love for Twachtman. She was painting it as an homage to him, but it was her own vision of what he did so well applied to the Kentucky River she’d walked along with Booker for years.
She’d drawn in the horizon line, and suggested the banks of the river, and the line of hills beyond too, and begun to rub them into something softer with a painter’s rolled paper pencil-like smudger – when the phone broke her concentration.
She threw the smudger on the table and thought about not answering, but finally walked down the hall to her study, thinking it could be Spencer or Booker, or a weekend emergency at the plant.
The woman’s voice, which seemed vaguely familiar, said, “Hello, Alice. I’m sorry to bother you but I thought you ought to know.”
It was when she realized who it was that she sat down in the guest chair by her desk without noticing what she’d done.
Tyler Babcock’s wife, Sandy, said she didn’t want to alarm Alice unduly, but from what she could tell, Tyler was probably on his way to see her. She couldn’t say for sure, but she thought so. He wasn’t really himself. He hadn’t been since their daughter died.
Sandy didn’t think he actually meant Alice harm, not physically, at least. But emotionally he could be very unpredictable and alarming to be around, and he still seemed to blame Alice’s father for their daughter’s death. She’d thought Alice ought to be given a chance to decide whether to see him, and how to talk to him if she did.
Alice told her how much she appreciated her calling and asked how she was coping herself. Once they were through, she sat staring at a wall, wondering what she should do.
Her neighbor, Mary Treeter, brought her mail at four, when Alice had been painting for two and a half hours, totally fixated on the oil paint – the feel of it as she blended colors, the thickness and thinness as she laid it on the canvas, the effects in texture from turpentine and linseed oil (sometimes one, sometimes both), the smell she loved that came from it all, the subtleties of tinting and shading, the chameleon changes in every color depending on what was next to it on the canvas – and what wasn’t working the way she wanted, that forced new choices that taught her too.
She sat down when Mary left and pulled her legs up on an overstuffed ottoman, then drank from a glass of iced coffee, staring hard at the start she’d made – before she glanced at the mail.
There was one white envelope, postmarked North Falmouth, Massachusetts, in handwriting she didn’t want to see, and she stared at it for several minutes before she slit it open with a putty knife.
I’ve given you enough time to think about what your family has done without facing opposition.
The time has now come to force you to confront a contrary view of circumstances you would rather ignore.
I cannot forget or ignore those circumstances. Not a single day has past without a nearly overwhelming sense of what it is I’ve lost.
You have lost nothing. And the time has come for you to admit your guilt, and your father’s too.
It wasn’t signed. It didn’t need to be.
And Alice sat, and stared out the back, praying silently, as sunlight splintered by tree-shaded skylights scattered across the floor. Show me what to do when he’s here, because I don’t have any idea.
Sunday, May 20, 1962
The thunderstorm started before noon, and it came down in a solid downpour. Hail started half an hour into it and lasted five or ten minutes, ending suddenly in more rain – solid sheets that drenched the ground and rushed out the downspouts.
Alice fastened her hair up in a wide loose bun while she watched the hail bounce off the flagstones behind the gallery, and the heavy hard bullets of rain skitter across it as the ice melted, and the pellet-rattles on the roof slowed down and softened as she listened.
She’d finished the riverscape. Never satisfied, but finished. For knowing when a painting’s done is as hard as anything about painting, and certainly as intuitive, so having decided came as a relief, and set her free to start another.
She’d been thinking about contemporary art critics and the faddist perspectives she’d seen come and go, and how she rarely had the urge anymore to read what was being written. Not that she didn’t think there were experts – scholars who’d researched and studied the great painters, who had much to say worth listening to. And there were new artists too she really admired creating their own worlds. It was the touters of “the newest”, and the fans of the fashionable, pontificating in print – those she usually found laughable when they weren’t simply tedious and irritating.
But. It was almost three o’clock, and the rain had settled in, in the sort of gentle freefall the farmers around there needed. And she told herself the time had come to do something about lunch.
She made a tomato sandwich and ate it on the gallery again, holding the plate in her lap, sitting in the off-white cotton slip-covered chair that had the wide soft footstool.
She’d finished the last half and reached for her ice tea, when her heavy brass horse-head knocker smashed against her front door.
Tyler Babcock looked soaked, his hair slithering down his neck, his newly grown salt-and-pepper beard dripping rain on his jacket, his eyes strained and squinting at Alice, as she stepped back and let him in.
“If you take off your jacket, I’ll get you a towel and a dry shirt.”
“I can manage.” His hands were in his coat pockets and he looked hungry and cold.
“Oh, come on, Ty. There’s no reason to be wet and miserable. Wait there a second, and I’ll be right back.”
She came back as quickly as she could (walking carefully, limping slightly, feeling her guts shift up-and-down in the post-abdominal-operative insecurity that happens when your insides have been substantially rearranged), carrying two towels and a faded blue work shirt she handed on to Tyler.
He rubbed his hair and peeled off his windbreaker and dropped it on the cocoa mat to the left of the front door without looking once in her direction, or saying a single word.
“How ’bout a cup of coffee? I was already getting myself one.”
“You can stop the hostess act anytime.”
“First of all, it’s not an act, and—”
“You and I are about to come to blows over what should’ve been confronted months ago.”
“Yes, we are. Blows, I don’t know about, but I’m glad you came. It’s time we got this over with. Let’s go into the back.”
It was still raining, pattering on the skylights in the gallery, falling gently between the house and the woods, the sound of it soothing, the way it always was to Alice, and she opened all the French doors again so they could hear it better.
“If you’ll sit in here a minute, I’ll get the coffee.”
She was calmer than she’d expected to be, pouring the coffee she’d already made, putting out Mary Treeter’s oatmeal cookies, thinking about Tyler when they were kids running through the woods around Williamsburg – laughing and fishing and playing in the mud, getting furious when they played chess and cards, riding their horses through his parents’ woods, setting firecrackers off on the Fourth, and any other time they could. She stood still by the stove, gazing at the tray, wondering how to get back to who they’d been, and repair the damage in between.
She walked back to the gallery and set the tray on the table between the two easy chairs, while Tyler stood three feet from her easel staring at her painting. He was wearing Booker’s shirt now, with the shoulder seams hanging half-way to his elbows, and the sleeves rolled back above his wrists.
They were both quiet until he turned – and she saw the misery in his eyes. “I’m so sorry about Jenny. I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that?” He had his back to her again, by the center set of French doors, and seemed to be staring at the woods.
“Yeah, I think I do. You’ve known me since I was five. How could you really believe I’d wish Jenny dead?”
He twirled around and lunged at her, then grabbed her by the neck, shoving his thumbs in her throat. “Your father killed her! Because you wanted him to!”
She could smell him – the stale breath, the damp dog odor of wet crumpled clothes, the despair and the anger that oozed up out of his skin as he trembled and she froze, holding her breath and waiting for him to come to himself.
Their eyes had locked. Her heart thundered in her ears. The blood pounding through the veins in his hands seemed to beat against her throat – before he pushed her away from him and dropped his arms at his sides.
She almost fell, but caught herself on the back of the overstuffed chair, then steadied herself and took a quick breath before she tried to speak.
“Tyler—”
“I didn’t—”
“I want to talk about this, but I need to sit down and get my legs up.”
“Why?”
“I’ve had a hysterectomy. I had a blood clot afterwards, and I need to be careful.”
Tyler didn’t say anything. He turned again toward the back lawn and stared out at the rain, his light brown hair curling as it dried, his shoulders narrow and bony, his jeans hanging on his hips, looking even narrower with the width of Booker’s shirt.
“Why don’t you eat something? You’re so thin. And you look hungry. You must’ve been on the road awhile.”
Tyler turned around and walked over toward her, then sank into the other overstuffed chair, and dropped his head in his hands.
“Why would you think I’d want Jenny dead?”
“Why! Because of what I did to you.”
“What did you do to me, but find another girlfriend, the way anybody does? That’s part of growing up.” Alice was wearing an old paint-stained man’s linen shirt over baggy tan cotton work pants, and she folded the sleeves up to her elbows while she watched Tyler slowly begin to raise his head from his hands.
“The way I treated you when—”
“I was crushed then, you know I was. But we were like brother and sister, and best friends too, long before we were anything more. And that was a lifetime ago.”
“I never gave you a reason.”
“It’s water under the bridge, Ty. It’s been over forty years, for heaven’s sake. After I met Booker, I never forgot you, you know that, you were my only real friend the whole time I was growing up. But Booker and I were meant to be married. We made a life of our own that couldn’t be more what I wanted – and needed too, when I think about it. You and I are too alike, Tyler. Booker’s different. He’s a scientist. He’s mechanical. He can help me. I can help him. You, I would’ve hurt. And we would’ve driven each other to distraction. There’re too many ways we’d fight against each other, the way we did when we were kids.”
Tyler sat back and picked up his mug and sipped while Alice watched.
“I’m sorry I did the painting years ago. I mean, when you told me what you’d seen. The little girl in the pigtails and the riding coat standing in front of the grey pony at the horse show – holding his reins and shaking a finger at him. Remember? And him with his head down, and his ears forward, listening to her and looking ashamed. The second you told me about them I had the painting in my head. A Norman Rockwell kind of illustration. Maybe N.C. Wyeth too, in a way. It was something I had to paint. For a magazine. That sort of painting.
“It never occurred to me that you’d want to paint it. You’d never done anything like that, and you hated doing portraits when you worked with Mother. If I’d known you wanted to paint it, I never would have, I promise. And I’m glad we’re finally talking about it.”
Tyler picked up an oatmeal cookie, and finished it before he spoke. “How do you explain Jenny’s death?”
“My dad couldn’t have been more concerned about not hurting any patient. You watched that the whole time you grew up. Sometimes it made him too hesitant. Your dad was the same way. Maybe that’s why they were best friends before they went into practice together. You saw them struggle and consult when either of them had a difficult case. They’d mull it over, and discuss possibilities. Remember?
“Dad was even more careful than usual with Jenny, because she was your daughter, and his best friend’s granddaughter. I had an appendectomy when Booker and I lived in Iowa that was hard to diagnose. I almost died with it thirty years ago. Dad got the best surgeon he knew of for Jenny, and he did the best he could too. Really, Tyler. It’s the truth. Peritonitis is tough, even with antibiotics.”
Alice watched him for a minute – the grey eyes staring at his hands, the tension pulling at his face. “You know what I wish, Ty?”
“No.”
“That we’d been talking like this since we were in college. Alone. You and me. The way we did when we were young. How long has it been? Forty years? I know we saw each other with the families, but not to really talk.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“I wondered about that. Why?” Alice glanced at him, and looked away, rubbing her right thigh. “No, don’t tell me. I probably don’t want to know.”
“Because I knew I should have married you. I knew I wanted to marry you. You know why I broke it off?”
“You met Sandy, and you—”
“I met Sandy and saw how much money she had, and how successful her dad was, and how gratifying it was to stay in good hotels, and go to the theater and the opera, and eat in great restaurants and have maitre des bow and scrape. The contrast to what we were raised with almost took my breath away. Our fathers working themselves to death, taking chickens and sweet corn in payment for house calls, and wondering how they’d get the bills paid and put their kids through school. Your mother having to teach painting to kids instead of concentrating on her own work. My mother teaching piano, half the time at night.” Tyler looked at Alice then, with something like shame on his face.
“You did your bit. You got a scholarship to Harvard.”
“Doesn’t make much difference now, does it?”
“Did you hate being a stockbroker?”
“Wouldn’t you? I threw away the two things I loved and ruined my life.”
“What about Sandy?”
“What about her?”
“It’s looked to me like she’s loved you all these years.”
“She loves the life she’s had.”
“So if you planned a new life for yourself and made a place for her, would she go with you?”
“She might say she would. She might go. But she’d whine and complain and hate every minute of it if we lived on the ocean someplace remote. Hiking, and swimming, and watching birds? It’d drive her crazy. And that’s what I need to do to paint the way I want to. Sandy’s a city girl who has to have ‘stimulation,’ and be seen to be ‘successful.’”
“I don’t know her well—”
“No.”
“But there’s one thing I do know about her.”
Tyler gazed at Alice, but didn’t ask.
“She was Jenny’s mother, and she’s devastated by her death too, and she needs you to help her.”
The silence settled, and the rain stopped, and Alice heard footsteps and something being set on a kitchen counter. She was about to say “Thanks, Mary,” to Mary Treeter, who was bringing her something for dinner, when she heard the kitchen door shut. “Tyler, why don’t I make you an early dinner, and we just sit and talk about everything we can think of?”
“Alice…”
“What?” She was watching him sort something out. Steel himself, maybe. Or face a fact he’d rather avoid.
“I’m sorry.” There were tears in his eyes when he looked away, out across the terrace.
“For what?”
“Trying to choke you. And hating you. Enjoying the hate more than anything.”
“We’ve all done it sometime.”
“I don’t know why I couldn’t see what I was doing.”
“I don’t know what I’d do if one of my children died. It’s got to be one of the hardest things anyone has to bear. And our generation, when you think about it, is the first that hasn’t expected to lose one or more children to accident or disease. Literally, expected. Based on actual statistics.”
“My parents lost one.”
“Mine lost two. I can’t imagine how hard that is.”
They ate Mary Treeter’s pot roast on the gallery, talking about all kinds of things, and as they talked they both relaxed, and Alice could see again what Tyler did for her. It’s the way all friends do it for each other. Each one stimulates some part of the other – an interest maybe, or a sense of humor, or a string of enthusiasms, that get teased out and exercised because of the other person’s way of seeing.
With Tyler, for Alice, it was art, and wilderness, and the way light plays on surfaces, and the feel of weather, and the look of clouds, and the childhood they’d spent together learning what it means to grow up.
They actually laughed about what they’d once gotten up to. Which started when Alice said, “Remember how your mother thought cheese wasn’t good for you? I don’t remember why, but she did, and I was so disgusted with you because you mocked me so outrageously when I couldn’t run as fast as you did, and when I lost that day at checkers too. That when we were having dinner with the people down the street, I don’t remember what their name was, but both of our families were invited.
“Timpson? Was that it?”
“I don’t know that I’ll remember. But when your mom was off with the grownups, I offered you my piece of cheese. Which you ate. Instantly. And when she came in to check on the ‘children’s table,’ I spoke right up and said, ‘Tyler ate my cheese.’ And she yanked you out of there and did something, I don’t know what, and I sat there and gloated. You must’ve wanted to kill me.”
“I did, actually. But I got you back.”
“You certainly did! You painted over one of my paintings. What was it?”
“A small oil. A house on the river.”
“My study of Carter’s Grove.”
They both laughed and finished their salads. And then Alice took her blood thinners.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay. I’ll be better. I move slowly. I’m still sore. I get tired easily, so I go to bed early, things like that. But I can’t afford to fall, or cut myself, when I’m taking the blood thinner. I’d have internal bleeding if I fell, and with Booker gone I’m extra careful.”
“Good.” Tyler reached for the grapes on the cutting board beside the cheeses Alice had brought with crackers. “I guess I really needed to eat. There aren’t many good places on the road.”
“That’s what’s hard about road trips.”
“Yeah.”
They were both quiet for a minute. And then Alice said, “How would it be if I called a friend of mine who runs her house as a B&B, and got you a room for the night? She needs the money, and you’d really like the house. It’s way out in the country, and you’d have a kind of cottage to yourself. It’s one of the ‘traveler’ rooms the early settlers built so they could offer a stranger hospitality without having to be afraid of being attacked or robbed.”
“That’d be good. Thanks.”
“I’d offer to let you stay here, but—”
“No, that’s fine. I’d like the B&B.”
Alice walked into her study, down the side hall toward the front door, and placed the call to Jessamine Collins, who did, in fact, have that room available. When Alice got back, Tyler was on his feet, dressed in his own shirt.
“Thank you. You do know you’ve helped?”
“We should’ve kept talking all those years. Then none of this would’ve happened.”
He put his arms around her and held her softly, rocking her back and forth.
“Could I ask you one other question?”
He smiled as he let her go. “Sure. You always did ask more questions than anyone else I ever knew.”
“Do you still believe in God like you did? You said something once in Sunday School I’ve never forgotten.”
Tyler was quiet for a minute. And it looked as though he was searching for a way not to have to answer. “I’ve asked for help once or twice. Though what I believe, I don’t know. Not much of anything might be closest. I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Ah.”
He watched her while he put on his windbreaker and scratched the beard on his chin. “Why did you ask?”
“Because it’s real to me, and it helps me. And I thought maybe if you looked into it again, it might help you with Jenny.”
Tyler turned and started toward the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow before I leave.”
At eleven that night Jo Grant was reading in bed, The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy, thinking how similar the details of everyday life can be from one century to another. That the ups and downs, the hopes and despairs, the isolation and denials in Ilych’s fictional experience with cancer in Russia in the nineteenth century were painfully close to what her mother went through – when the phone rang unexpectedly.
It was Alan Munro, just home from Schenectady, asking her to have dinner with him Wednesday in the restaurant where they’d eaten the night Toss got kicked.
He said he was sorry to call so late, but he had to leave for Cincinnati early the next morning, where he’d be working with a professor in the Microbiology Department of the University of Cincinnati, and wouldn’t be home till Wednesday afternoon. Could she meet him at the restaurant about six?
Jo said, “Yes. Sure. Thank you.” And hung up wondering why his voice sounded different and how she ought to react.