Her Father's House (22 page)

Decide.

One way or the other, Jim thought. When he turned to where she was standing, the evening star was framed in the topmost pane above her head. And suddenly it spoke to him.

“Choose love,” it said. “Choose love.”

Yes. He went to her then and took her back into his arms.

PART

TWO

What She Was Thinking

1982

Chapter 15

A
t lunch one Saturday in the spring, Laura made an announcement. “Hansel pushed the witch into the stove so she wouldn't eat him and Gretel. Did you know that?” she demanded.

Rick scoffed, “Dope! Everybody knows that baby stuff.”

Now that he was only a few months away from the fifth grade while Laura, already in first grade, was no longer a cute baby, he had lost his sweet, amused protectiveness of her.

The parents were enjoying themselves. These weekend lunches were the only ones at which the four were together at the table.

“I'm going to Jessica's house to play,” Laura said, looking straight at her father.

“You haven't asked me whether you may,” he responded.

“Can I? I want to. I finished my milk, so can I?”

“If you mean ‘may I,' the answer is yes, you may. And have fun, honey.”

Kate gave instructions to Rick. “Since you're going that way, too, take Laura. I don't want her walking alone on the road. There's that curve where drivers can't see very well.”

“Come on, dope,” Rick said, and the two went out, he in the rear holding Laura by her collar.

“Shall we take Cappy and Pinto out for some exercise?” Kate suggested.

“No, it's going to pour soon. Look at the sky. It's a good day to tackle some paperwork, anyway. There are accounts outstanding and first-of-the-month bills.”

As business had burgeoned, the living room had been more or less turned into an office, which itself was becoming too small to accommodate two desks overflowing with papers. At the one that belonged to him, Jim sat down, took a ledger out of a drawer, and stared outside at the afternoon.

It was a lazy day, he reflected. The satisfying view of the well-kept grounds outside, the bottom line in the ledger, the sounds that Kate made as she moved about the house, the thriving children—the manly little boy and that funny little person, his Laura—all were cozy. And as his pen hovered over the page, his mind wandered through some of the past worries that could now be so thankfully dismissed.

He had worried about being a stepfather to Rick; even though he had not yet married Rick's mother, he was in fact the substitute for Clarence; to his shelves he had added books about stepfatherhood, books that brought a smile to Kate. “Because,” she said, “you are a model father to my son, as much as to your daughter. You're the last man to need a book.” He had hoped, as he watched the little boy mourn, that that was so. The boy, like Clarence, was already wedded to the farm, but unlike his father, there was nothing timid or hesitant about him, and Jim, on long rides and in long conversations, had been trying to foster his good qualities. He had worried much about giving the right companionship to a daughter, but she and he were, as Kate said, “as close as two fingers on a hand.”

Yet beneath all this, there was something else, a dark and sinister reality.

“Stop reading that newspaper,” Kate commanded from the doorway.

“I wasn't reading it. I'm figuring sales taxes, if you want to know.”

“I don't believe you. What's it doing on the desk? Jim Fuller, I wish you'd stop bringing that paper home and reading all that foul stuff.”

“You haven't read it yet, so how do you know what's in it?”

“I can tell by looking at you, so I don't want to read it.” For a moment Kate frowned. “Well, maybe I do. Maybe I should. Spread it out.”

This week in Paris, a private jet arrived delivering their socialite friends to Arthur Storm and the former Lillian Buzley. After a hard-fought divorce and an idyllic honeymoon on a yacht cruise among the Greek islands, there was a celebration, a housewarming party at their magnificent new house near the Bois de Boulogne.

The new Mrs. Storm was radiantly beautiful in the blue that she so often wears, her friends say, because it matches her remarkable eyes.

“Lillian is one of a kind,” said Chloe Sanders. “I've known her forever, and I can swear she never changes. Her energy can positively lift a roomful of people. It's like oxygen. People adore her. She's smart, and lovable, and funny. It's amazing how she can still be funny after all she's gone through, and is still going through.”

Lillian Storm, as everyone remembers, is the woman whose former husband, four years ago, absconded with their two-year-old daughter, Bettina.

In response to compliments about the new house, a gift to his bride, Mr. Storm explained that his real gift to her would be the return of her child. In praising what he called her “inimitable courage,” he promised to use all his resources—of which there are many—to find Bettina and bring her back.

In the meanwhile, the new Mrs. Storm plans to go on with life in as normal a way as possible. “At least,” she says, “I know Bettina is not with some stranger who might harm her.”

Very complimentary, Jim thought. Fine words. And “normal,” also a very fine word. Let's see what Storm finds out about his new wife. Still, with a mansion and a few million dollars' worth of museum-quality art—how she loved to sound those words—she may be satisfied to leave well enough alone. Or she may not be.

“She's very, very pretty, Jim. Does she really look like the photograph?”

“I guess so.”

Buzley, the poor old man who had been so good to her and her pathetic sister, had thought she did.

“She's holding flowers, a sheaf of lilies. This must be a wedding picture.”

“Kate, I couldn't care less. Better bring the dogs and the cat in. It's starting to rain.”

The sky had opened. A cloudburst poured water as if from a spigot. Restlessly, Jim got up to stand by the window and watch the drenching, furious rain.

Would he ever forget that room in Florence? The sodden woman sprawled on the sofa?
You're such a puritan, Donald. People need to have some fun.
And that is the woman who wants to take my Laura away.

Kate broke the silence. “You need to stop worrying, Jim. You really do.”

“You're not making sense. How can I stop when I read something like this?”

“I keep telling you not to search through all these papers and magazines. It's been four years, and in spite of all this stuff, nothing's happened. And nothing will happen if it hasn't by now.”

Just then came a pounding at the front door, so that both of them ran to it. There stood Laura in a state of high excitement, and soaking wet.

“Mom! Mom! I told Jessica you're not dead. She keeps saying, ‘Your mother's dead,' and I hit her because you're not dead, and I said I have a mom. And she said, ‘You don't even live with that mom. You have a different house.' I hate Jessica.”

When Kate had suggested that they should honestly explain some facts to Laura, Jim had argued that she was still too young to understand anything. Now he looked in helplessness to Kate, who spoke boldly.

“You call me ‘Mom,' Laura, and that's fine because I love you. But a long time ago, you had another mom, who went away like Rick's daddy. You remember Rick's daddy. I tried to tell you this once, but you forgot.”

“Dead is living where all those stones are, where people put flowers?”

Kate, as she stroked Laura's hair, was cheerful. “Yes, that's what it is.”

“Rick says his daddy is never going to come back.”

“That's true.”

“Is that other mom coming back?”

“No. Listen, honey, I'm going to take you upstairs, and I'm going to wrap you in a big towel while I put your clothes in the dryer. Then how about a nice cup of cocoa and a cookie while they're drying. Okay?”

So easily had Kate met the crisis, Jim thought, while I almost had cardiac arrest. She was right, and it is time to think about how I'm going to answer when more questions are asked, as they will be.

   

“The first thing we have to do is give her a picture of her mother,” Kate began one day not long after this event. “I understand that the subject is horrible for you, but, Jim, you have to face facts. It's too queer, too unnatural, for anybody to accept that you have no photograph, no mementos at all of your dead wife, nothing. Prepare yourself as Laura gets older for all sorts of questions: Rebecca's maiden name, her family, where they came from and where they lived, and where Rebecca went to school. Had she any brothers or sisters? Does Laura have any cousins? And what did Rebecca like to eat, did she like music, did she have a job, or did she play tennis—a hundred details. How did you meet her, did you have a big wedding?”

Jim groaned. “In short, write a biography.”

“Yes. And memorize it, and never make a slip. Anybody in Laura's position would want descriptions. Laura's already sharp, and she'll grow sharper.”

Jim groaned again. “I don't know how to start inventing this life.”

“I'll help you. When I go to Atlanta next month, I'll get a photograph from some framing shop. I'll find a young woman with dark hair like Laura's.”

“And where did we live? And are there any pictures of a house, or of Rebecca and me together? Or pictures of anything? There's no end to it. Don't you see how impossible it is?”

“All right. When you were practicing law, you must have tried some cases that seemed impossible. Lawyers have to twist plenty of stuff out of shape, I'm sure.”

“They have holes to patch up, that's true, but they don't invent things out of whole cloth.”

“In this situation, you'll just have to invent.”

“I feel horrible. I can't describe it. How can I look Laura in the face while I'm spewing out these lies?”

“What choice is there? Listen, I just remembered something that really did happen. I knew some people who put everything they owned in a storage warehouse while they served in the Vietnam War. The warehouse had a fire, and all their things were destroyed. So that's your story.”

Jim considered. “All right. It's far-fetched, but it happened once, so I suppose it could happen twice.”

“Let me handle it. I'm already constructing the whole thing in my head. The reason you know nothing about her parents is that Rebecca was an immigrant from Russia, or anyplace. Her family got caught up in the troubles. For all you know, they died before she did.”

When Kate had an idea, she pursued it just as she was pursuing her work in the greenhouse. There was no stopping her.

“They were educated people, so that's how she came to study English. But she wanted to perfect the language, and that's why she came here. She hoped to go home eventually and teach English there, but then she met you.”

In a pocket park, where she was eating an orange and I almost dropped my papers, he thought, and blurted, “I don't want to talk it over. I don't want to think about it.”

“Laura is already asking questions,” Kate said quietly. “She wanted to know, for instance, why we live in separate houses. Other daddies and moms live in the same house.”

He knew very well what Kate wanted. But for her inherent pride, the subject would have come up again now. However, she had made her point once and was not about to repeat it. She wanted marriage, and he owed it to her. The pattern of their lives, afternoon meetings in his cottage or a rare night in her house when Rick and Laura had both been invited to the Scofield grandchildren's for the night, were highly unsatisfactory to them both. It was well over a year since she had been widowed, and marriage now would be seemly enough. But he was afraid for her.

When he glanced at the newspaper, still spread out before them, she followed his glance. There stood Mrs. Arthur Storm in full, smiling glory. And here next to him stood Kate Benson in her own true glory, worth ten thousand Lillians.

His thoughts came and went. The debts were already half paid off. The farm belonged safely to Kate and Rick, and he would keep it so, for it was their inheritance, not his. He himself could live well enough on his salary. Then if there ever should be any penalty to be paid in his future, it would be his penalty alone. It was feasible, and yet—

“If I could only be sure that you would never suffer because of me,” he murmured, thinking aloud. Yet in being so protective of her, was he not also hurting her?

The crinkle at the corners of her eyes told him that she was smiling inside her head. “So? If you could, what would you do?”

“I'd have a little wedding next month on the lawn, right out there.”

“Then let's do it, Jim. You can't go on living in fear like this. I'm not afraid, and you shouldn't be. We'll make a proper home for the four of us. You owe it to Laura, and to hell with Mrs. Arthur Storm.”

   

Mr. and Mrs. James Fuller stood on the grass in the shade receiving the congratulations of their guests. In a lovely kind of fog, as if he had been drinking champagne—without having yet had a drop—everything blended before Jim's eyes: the day, clear green and gold, Kate in something creamy with her bright hair hanging loose to her waist, Rick important in his dark blue blazer, and Laura in a long pink dress that he had himself selected from a catalog. The guests, all obviously approving, were laughing and chattering. There was an astonishing number of them, too, mostly from the town, where as Kate said, he had made more good friends in his few years there than many people make in a lifetime.

He looked over at the freshly painted house. Indoors a reasonable prosperity had prepared it for the new united family. The cramped desks in what had been the living room had been moved to the spacious cottage, where Kate and he had separate offices. The ceiling of Laura's room had been papered like the sky, blue with summery white clouds. He had not yet looked at the bedroom where he was to sleep with Kate tonight.

She had asked him whether he wanted to have a look at it. “Soft colors,” she said, “pine green and peach. I hope you'll like it.” And she had had a worried little frown which, laughing, he had kissed away.