Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (97 page)

They sat, in the candle-lit dining room, with Pompey alternately serving and eating along with them. There was no fuss or formality, and he had cooked a good dinner: the “slaughter in the pan” was a dish of fat, juicy pork chops, with the roast potatoes browned and bone-white at their centers, the gravy brown and buttery. The corn was small-kerneled and tender. Pompey sat and ate, cleared the table, brought out the caramel custard and coffee, and sat again.

“Everyone satisfied?” he asked, as they pushed back their dessert plates and lit cigarettes.

“You’re the best cook in the world,” Margo told him.

The candles lit their faces: John’s fine-boned, handsome face, with the thick dark hair; Norma’s pluperfect one, her eyes glittering; Pompey’s like pale ebony. Rain still lashed against the windowpanes, but inside they were cozy and warm, the house sealing out the elements.

“Let’s go on a picnic while you’re here,” Norma said. “The way we used to do. The lake, remember?”

“I remember.”

Before life caught up with us
, she thought. Lanky and uninhibited, trying to best each other in the water, turning copper under the strong rays of the sun. Playing catch, skipping stones, floating on their backs, splashing, screaming, the sun a bright globe in the sky.

And sometimes at night, giggling and aware of their misdemeanor, skinny-dipping. A quick glimpse of a boy’s body …

“Will Douglas come too?”

“I shall certainly see that he does,” Norma said emphatically. “I’ll phone him tomorrow.”

And in spite of everything, perhaps because of the dinner wine flowing freely, and the candles, the good food and friendship, Victoria Brand’s niece began to vibrate to the talk and the comfortable buzz of conversation. There was the feeling of
belonging
somewhere. She would plummet down again, once alone in her room, but right now she clung to the companionship of the moment.

So that when Pompey suggested that they get in the car and go to, “That new place that just opened up a couple of weeks ago, The Strawman, just over to Leeksville way, have a little nip and tell me what it’s like;” she thought,
Why not?
It would delay the bedtime hour, the moment of truth;

Norma said, “Would you rather not, Margo?”

And John, “I do have to keep a clear head for tomorrow.”

“I don’t mean until three in the morning,” Norma said impatiently. “I do just think Margo would as soon put off being alone. Oh, I never say anything
right!
I just meant — ”

“It’s all right, Norma,” Margo said steadily. “And you do say things right. If it’s all right with John, let’s go to The Strawman. I’d like it, and thanks, Norma.”

“I’ve found that in times of stress the best thing I can do is get myself so exhausted that I sleep like a stone,” Norma said. “And the rain’s let up a bit, for the moment, anyhow. I’ll just get my jacket, and Margo, better bring a sweater.”

• • •

The Strawman was some ten or twelve miles away. They drove along a dark road with the only illumination the misty moon and the headlights of John’s car. The air smelled like wine, fresh, cool and scented with country fragrances, sedge, harebrush and the ripe fruit hanging from trees. The rain was steady but not driving as they passed gas stations with their cold blue lights, a tavern or two with juke boxes blaring stridently, and small farmhouses with the jagged sounds of dogs barking.

At last a gambrel-roofed inn, white clapboard with shiny black shutters and the glimmering red lights of candles inside. “Here we are,” John said, and pulled the car into a driveway. The years rolled back and Margo remembered Polly Butts, when they had been young and raw and unsophisticated, a little cottage turned into an eatery, where one could sit and eat hot roast beef sandwiches with a sliver of dill pickle and sometimes cole slaw on the side. The four of them, getting money from somewhere and making it big for the evening, Doug and John and Margo and Norma.

In those days a dollar went a long way.

They got out in the cool, almost chill night and dashed in trying to beat the fattest rain drops. It was a pseudo-saltbox, Cape Cod style, with white lilac bushes framing the Dutch-blue front door and inside ceiling beams and walls stripped to the brick and a hooded fireplace at the farthest end, logs blazing merrily. Maple furniture and captain’s chairs and waiters in cherry-red jackets like hunting coats.

“This
is
rather nice, isn’t it?” Norma asked, when they were seated, a winking candle on their table.

“Yes it is,” Margo said. “Thanks for suggesting it, Norma.”

“It was Pompey’s idea.”

“But it was you who knew it would be exactly the right thing to do on this first … first difficult evening here.”

“I just had a hunch that it would … that it was more or less what you needed,” Norma said, and, toying with a muddler as their drinks were served, looked up almost shyly. “It’s been a lot of years, Margo. But you came back. After all these years, you came back. And yet, I always knew you would.”

• • •

It was just before midnight when they stopped off to drop Norma at her apartment on Rook Road. “I’m on the second story,” she said, pointing. “It’s a pretty little place, you must come visit soon. There’s a sundeck at the back, that’s where I get my tan.”

She waved, standing at the door as they drove off. “What a beauty she’s grown to be,” Margo said.

“Yes, she’s a good-looking girl.”

“Always the euphemist,” she said lightly.

“After all, the stranger sees things with a fresh eye.”

“Is that a quote, John?”

“I think so, but let’s not belabor it. Here we are, home again.” He parked the car, leaned over to open her door, and they got out. The rain was only a bleak drip drip at the moment, and they crunched over the pebbles of the driveway, then quietly walked up the four stone steps to the porticoed veranda.

“You go on up,” he said, after putting his key in the front door. “I’ll turn out the lights and lock up.”

“Well, all right.”

“And Margo …”

“Yes, John?”

“I’m sorry it had to be like this. I’m just terribly sorry. Sleep well, and try not to think. That’s what I do, try not to think. Sometimes it works.”

“Yes,” she said.

She started up the stairs, turned when he called. “Margo?”

“Yes, what?”

He hesitated, swung the keys round and round, and then said gruffly, “Get a good night’s sleep.”

“Yes, all right, John,” she said, and went on up to her room. She sat on the edge of the bed and heard the house being put to bed. Heard doors, from a distance, closing, heard shutters banging, heard the progress of John’s footsteps up the stairs. Her eyes were heavy, as if weighted down with Greek coins, like the dead of old. Without any preparation at all, just getting into a nightgown, she pulled back the coverlet and crawled into bed.

The misty moon made her blink, but as Norma had said, if you tired yourself out, you didn’t have the energy to think, you just closed your eyes and turned on your side, with a sigh and a moan, and drifted into darkness. You were too tired to think. You lay there like a side of beef, out of it, quite out of it, and when the telephone rang you tried to pull yourself together. The telephone was ringing so get up and answer it, but you were too sound asleep, and although it kept ringing, and you screwed up your face, angry and annoyed, still there was nothing you could do. You were just too weary, too unable to move even so much as a muscle, and after a while it stopped ringing and the next thing you knew it was morning.

Damn it, it was still raining. The sky was leaden, the window-sill, when Margo got out of bed and went over, was damp, with little moist bubbles. It was nine o’clock, but seemed more like a pre-dawn hour. She stood looking out at the drenched grass and then crossed the room. Opening her door, she smelled the eggs, the bacon.

Pompey was making breakfast.

She quickly showered, got into a robe and walked the length of the great hall outside, with the portraits lined up, gilt-framed. Aunt Vicky saying, “This is Aunt Doheny, this one’s Uncle Portius, isn’t he snooty-loooking? These upstate families had stiff backbones, I doubt I’d have had much in common with them.”

On good days this hall was flooded with sunlight, burnishing the chests and highboys and streaming through the windows at either end. Today it was bleak and somber, a house that smelled of the death of many generations. She went into her aunt’s room, looked around, a finger stilling her trembling lips. Bentwood rocker, four-poster bed, stained glass, afghan, milk glass and tea-caddy lamps, horsehair sofa. Aunt Vicky, springing up from a nap. “What time is it, child? Still time enough for some croquet before dinner?”

In the kitchen Pompey raised his kinky gray head. “You smelt the bacon,” he said triumphantly.

“Well yes, it got me up.”

“I made the eggs sunny-side up, the way you like, and I didn’t foul up on the bacon either. I remembered you like it burned black.”

“You have total recall,” she said, and sat down at the plank table covered with oilcloth. He brought the skillet over, dropped the scallopy eggs onto her plate and draped the charred bacon over it all. “Now you eat every bite of that,” he ordered.

“How about you?” she asked, digging in.

“I eat with Mr. John every morning. What are you going to do with yourself on another rotten day?”

“Read
Little Women
and eat an apple. How’s your sister, Pomp?”

“Clara? Fine. Comes in to clean, as always. Be here around eleven.”

“I’ll be happy to see her again.”

“She too. Still thinks of you as a little girl.”

“You do too, don’t you?”

“Yes, honey. It’s what you are. Me, I’m seventy-four. Hate to be hanging since I was your age.”

“Pompey, sit down with me.”

“Okay, honey.” He poured himself some coffee.

“I’d like to hear about how it happened,” she said quietly. “You can tell me now, I’m ready for it.”

He said, “All right, Miss Margo,” and draining his coffee cup, set it down in the saucer. “Like I said, it was last Tuesday. I have a few extra things to do, you know, work for some other families, here and there, and such like. Yes, and on that day it was my time to take the power mower on this here property, so around about three in the afternoon I came back here and called out to her, your aunt, and said what was going to do. Generally about that time of day she’d be in the garden, in that old Panama hat of hers, weeding around the flower beds, but when I got here she wasn’t in sight and I didn’t think much, I just did my work. Then, say at five or so, I went to the kitchen here for my drink. I like that Gatorade, and I was thirsty as could be. She wasn’t here in the kitchen neither, and I begin to get this peculiar feeling that there was something not right, not in the ordinary run of things. The house, this house, it sounded so empty.”

He coughed behind his hand. “I love this house, always have loved it, though some say it has a spook feeling to it. This is a house out of our history, colored and white, and it means the world to me. But more than that, she did. And on this day I’m talking about, there was a feeling to this house I didn’t like. I was uneasy, and seeing shadows here and there, and somehow I felt sad and upset. Maybe it was more than that, because I marched up those stairs, no reason why, but I did. She was lying there in her room, on the bed. I saw her and I backed away, but Lord, I’m a man, ain’t I? So I grit my teeth and walked up toward the bed. She was quiet, very quiet, and her eyes, they were half open. Looked to me like she suffocated, her face was all purple, and the coronor did say yes, she choked on her own excretions, meaning, when I asked him, she must have coughed up some and swallowed it and, no help handy, she just gave up the ghost.”

He coughed again and made no effort to hide the tears that glittered in his eyes. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Miss Margo,” he said. “Now you just eat up, you hear?”

She bent to her plate. “Yes, Pomp.”

He got up and blew his nose, stood at the screen door, mastering himself. When he came back he was in control. “I got some things to do,” he said matter of factly. “I gotta go.”

“I’ll see you later.”

“You won’t be alone for long; Clara be here in an hour or so.”

She finished, did up her dishes, and left the kitchen. The rain was pounding down without letup. She roamed through the lower floor of the house, smelling the ancient damp, the past that filtered through from other centuries, other times. The rain …

In Nice, one holiday on the French Riviera, she had bought an umbrella from a little shop. The price had been about eight francs or a dollar fifty. A sturdy little bumbershoot, under which she had walked the length and breadth of the Promenade des Anglais. In a small cafe, back in Beaulieu, the management had played, with broad smiles, an American record on the juke box,
Big, Bad John.
“Thanks so much,” she had said, and had dashed out to the roadway for the bus to Monte Carlo.

So much of what she had done had been done alone
, she thought. The Lido and the Estoril, lying in the sun, watching others hand in hand. She went upstairs and washed her hair, sat drying it with a Turkish towel. And then she went back to her aunt’s room, as she had known all along she would.

She sat down at the little desk, the “eskritor” as Pompey called it, and pulled down its curved top. The feel of the old wood was like silk, satiny with age, and with a faint smell of verbena, her aunt’s scent. It was at this desk that her aunt had conducted her daily business, written letters, signed checks, and from the view out of the windows, had looked onto her beloved gardens below.

She was a happy woman
, Margo reminded herself; for as long as she lived she was happy. All those decades, and the changing seasons, the lovely security of this fine old house, and Pompey to do for her.

Think only of that
, she bade herself, and opened the center drawer, where she found what Pompey had said she would find … letters, years and years of letters from a growing girl to an aging woman. Dear Aunt Vicky. Piles and piles of letters, tied neatly with blue ribbons, scattering as she untied the ribbons. Bits and pieces of her years in Switzerland stared up at her: “Some of the girls are nice, some quite dreadful. Like Lise Waldheim …”