Hale's Point (5 page)

There were innumerable model boats, planes, and cars. Three
long shelves bulged with record albums. And books— yards and yards of
them—ranged in shelves all the way up to the ceiling. She glanced at some of
the titles, wondering what the teenage Tucker liked to read.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Huckleberry
Finn, The Kama Sutra. Hmm.
She picked up the last one, a small hardcover;
its spine made a cracking sound when she opened it.

“Find anything interesting?” His voice made her jump. He
stood in the doorway, leaning on his cane.

“No.” she lied, then made a show of dusting and replacing the
book.

He came up behind her and slid it out of its place, smiling
when he saw the title. “I haven’t read
this
for a while.” He held it out to her. “You’ll like it. It’s all about control.”
She had changed into the blue spandex bike shorts and cropped white tank top
that she would run in later, and as he returned the book, she saw his quick,
appreciative glance.

She backed away. “What are you doing up here? I thought you
couldn’t walk up the stairs.”

“No, I can make it up a flight of stairs. It just…” He
shrugged.

“Hurts?”

“It’s a bit of a challenge. I try not to do it too often. I
came up ‘cause I saw you at the window.”

Oh, no.
She turned away and ran the
duster mechanically over the models.
He
wasn’t asleep. He saw me staring at him.

“Wow,” he whispered, his gaze taking in the room and its
contents. He seemed particularly interested in the poster above the bed. “Sophia!
You’re still here!
Mamma
mia
!
I’m a happy boy. Maybe I’ll sleep up here, after
all.”

Harley couldn’t help smiling. “She does have beautiful eyes.”

“Everyone’s got beautiful eyes. But Sophia has those lips!
Look at them!” He smiled at her. “I’ve always been a sucker for great lips.” He
looked at her mouth, and Harley didn’t know where to look, so she turned away,
shook some furniture polish onto a rag, and went to work on the oak bookcases.

After a minute of silence, she became curious and turned to
find him standing at his old desk, staring at the photograph of himself as an
infant in his mother’s arms, his expression solemn. When he realized Harley was
watching him, he looked away and continued examining the room.

“My guitars! Both of them! This is my favorite—the
twelve-string.” She heard the bedsprings creak as he sat. While she polished,
her back to him, he adjusted the instrument, then began to play. She didn’t
recognize the tune, but it was nice, with a kind of country-blues flavor. From
that he drifted into a bit of something very baroque and complicated and then
some lively Spanish guitar.

When he paused, she turned to face him, saying, “You’re good.
That was—” The compliment stuck in her throat when she caught sight of the shin
of his right leg, which had become badly bruised and swollen overnight. “Oh my
God. Did I do that?”

He glanced down. “Isn’t that what you were trying to do?” On
his left leg, the flesh from
midthigh
down was gouged
with ugly, barely healed wounds and surgical incisions, and the muscles were
atrophied. The right was merely insult to injury, but it had been her insult,
her responsibility, and she felt it keenly.

“I’m really sorry,” she said.

He resumed his strumming. “Forget it. You were defending
yourself.”

She tossed her polishing rag into the cleaning basket. “That
needs ice.”

“I think it’s a little late for that,” he said as she strode
out the door.

In the kitchen, she filled a plastic bag with ice cubes,
wrapped it in a clean dish-towel, and brought it back up to Tucker. He chuckled
when she knelt before him and held it gingerly on the shin.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No.”

“Liar.” The oddest expression crossed his face when she said
that. “What did I say?” she asked.

He shook his head as if to clear it. “Nothing.” He set the
guitar down on the bed next to him. “It’s kind of nice, having someone tend to
your wounds like this. I’m not used to it.”

“It’s no secret that you’ve spent time in a hospital
recently. You must have had lots of people tending to your wounds there.”

He shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m not used to people doing it
unless they’re getting paid for it. No one’s ever fixed me for free.”

She lifted the ice to check the shin; it looked the same. She
replaced it anyway. “That can’t be true. What about your mother?”

A pause. “I don’t know. I guess so. She died when I was five.”

“Five? I’m sorry.” She glanced toward the photo on the desk,
and Tucker followed her gaze. He grabbed his cane and stood, the ice pack
falling to the floor, then walked over to the desk and picked up the photo. “She
was beautiful,” Harley said, and he nodded. “I was noticing her jewelry. Very
unusual. Exquisite earrings.”

“Italian, late Renaissance.”

“Late Renaissance. So they’re what, like four hundred years
old? Your mother wore four-hundred-year-old jewelry?”

“She had pieces much older than that.” he said. “She
collected antique gold jewelry. Byzantine, Egyptian, pre-Columbian… She had
an Etruscan bracelet from the seventh century B.C.”

Harley fingered her little silver hoops and wondered what
four-hundred-year-old earrings felt like in your ears. “And the ring?”

“That was my mother’s most prized possession. Kind of an
engagement ring.”

“Kind of?”

“My parents never had any real engagement. Not much of a
courtship, either. They met and got married. It was love at first sight. After
the wedding,
R.H.
told her he wanted her to have a
proper Tiffany diamond to go with the wedding band, but she told him about this
emerald ring she knew of that was locked away in a private collection. Roman,
first century A.D. She loved it more than anything she’d ever seen. So he went
to see the collector in London and bought it for her.”

“Your father never remarried?” Tucker hesitated, and she
quickly added, rising to her feet, “If you want me to shut up, just—”

He shook his head. “No, that’s all right. Liz gave it her
best shot, in her own understated way, but he never remarried.”

“Liz
Wycliff
?”

He set the photo back down. “Yeah, they’ve been friends since
childhood. Everyone always assumed they’d end up getting married, but then one
Christmas he came back from the Greek Islands with a bride.” He nodded toward
the picture of his mother. “
Anjelica
Koras
. The only impulsive thing he’s ever done.”

Harley picked up the polishing rag and went back to the
bookcases. “Your mother was Greek?” That explained the warm brown eyes, so
unlike his father’s.

He nodded, opened one of the desk drawers, and absently rummaged
through it. “They met at a party on her father’s yacht and they got married in
Athens a month later. Much to her father’s dismay, I’m told.”

“Much to Liz’s, too, I imagine.”

“I understand she took it well.” He leaned his cane against
the desk and sat down, then untied the twine from around a pack of letters and
flipped through them. “But that’s the Hale’s Point way, after all. Go about
your business. Mustn’t let them see you care.”

“Maybe she didn’t,” Harley offered.

“But she did.” He
retied
the letters.
“She always loved him. Everyone knew it, but it was rarely mentioned. She was
very tasteful about it, kept her distance from him until a couple of years
after my mother’s death. Even then, they never became more than friends, as far
as I knew. His choice, not hers.”

“Do you know whether she ever told him how she felt? Tried to
force the issue?”

He laughed. “Don’t you know, it’s terribly bad form to
declare yourself. Much better to spend decades hanging around waiting for the
object of your misguided affection to open his eyes and notice you. She
immersed herself in her work, got an apartment on Central Park West, got tenure
at Columbia. But she never married.” He looked at her. “Or has she? I haven’t
seen her since I moved away, and she might have kept her maiden name.”

Harley put the polishing rag back in the basket and wiped her
hands on a clean
dustcloth
. “No, it’s
Miss
Wycliff
.
She never married.” She shook her head. “She turned sixty-five last April. I
baked a cake and brought it into class. She told me she’d blow out the candles,
but she wouldn’t make a wish because, statistically speaking, they were a waste
of time.”

He looked sad, and that intensified his resemblance to his
mother. She saw that his eyes, although brown, weren’t dark and opaque, like
some brown eyes. They looked like the chunks of amber she kept in her jewelry
box—transparent and luminous, with streaks of gold and rust.

“Thoreau said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
he said. “Same goes for women.” He fanned out a stack of what looked like
report cards, then tossed them in the trash.

She rose and retrieved them. “Your father might not like you
throwing these out.”

“You got that right. He loved report cards. They take a
person and reduce him to a list of grades. What could be neater?” While Tucker
sorted through the papers in the desk, Harley moved behind him to covertly
inspect the cards. They were from the Wilmot Preparatory Academy for Boys; he
had earned straight
A’
s until the
first semester of his junior year, when his grades took a nosedive. There didn’t
appear to be any report cards after that.

She returned them to the drawer and sat on the bed. “So you
were sixteen when you ran away from home?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think of it as running away, exactly. I
think of it as extricating myself from an impossible situation.”

“That’s got a lot more syllables, but you’re saying the same
thing.”

He gave her a look, weary but amused. “Then how about
bolting? I bolted. I felt the bars close in and I got the hell out of here.”

“Like you did last night.” She didn’t smile, and neither did
he.

“Like I did last night.” he agreed. “The bolting instinct
takes over when I start to feel cornered or penned in. What’s wrong with that?
What virtue could there possibly be in putting up with a lousy situation that I
could just as easily walk away from? I know it’s the Hale’s Point way to grin
and bear it, but it’s not my way, and it never will be.” He closed the drawer
and rubbed the back of his neck.

“What impossible situation
were
you
facing at sixteen that was so bad you felt you had to—”

“Military school. He’d decided to send me to military school.”
He opened another drawer and began pawing through old photographs.

“Seriously?”

“Very seriously. Incredibly seriously. He showed me the
brochure. This granite fort up on the Hudson where you wear a uniform and get
your head shaved and do predawn maneuvers before class every day. Can’t you
just picture me there?” He laughed and shook his head.

“Why?”

“You saw the report cards.”

“I—”

“I caught you looking. The last one, the one where I started
cutting classes? I was spending too much time with the guitar and not enough
with the books, he said. He couldn’t stand my getting bad grades, because my
grades defined me in his eyes. Bad grades, bad kid.”

Harley kicked off her sandals and reclined on the bed,
leaning on one elbow. “I don’t know, it’s just… You’ll have to forgive me if
the horror of your situation kind of escapes me. To those of us who weren’t
brought up with the
avantages
you had, your complaints
come off as—”

“Whining. Poor little rich boy.” He stood and took a sailboat
model from the shelf. The word
Anjelica
had been painted in tiny, painstaking letters
across the stern. “Yeah, I know. The best schools, a beach for my backyard,
lots of toys, and lessons in everything.
R.H.
believed in a sound mind in a sound body. I can play any kind of sport there
is, or fake it with the best of them. I can talk to anyone from just about any
Western European country about any damn thing they want to talk about, in their
own language. And I can climb into just about any kind of machine that moves
and make it get from point A to point B. I learned to sail before I could read
and I had my own speedboat before I could shave. A glider license at fourteen,
a pilot’s at sixteen. I had stuff galore, my life was filled with stuff.”

“My heart goes out to you. How could you have stood it for
sixteen whole years?”

He grinned despite himself, put the sailboat back, and picked
up an airplane—a World War II bomber. “Thing is, after a while I started to
wonder if there was more to life than stuff. I started to get passionate about
things that
R.H.
couldn’t understand. It was okay if
I dug sailing and flying, ‘cause he did, too. But music didn’t mean that much
to him, so he decided it shouldn’t mean that much to me. Certainly not so much
that it would interfere with my grades.”