Her Father's House (25 page)

Chapter 21

T
hat oak you see over there by the fence,” Jim said, “is a hundred years old at least, Gilbert. We're mostly oak and pine in this part of the country. Next time you visit, we ought to take you up for a day's outing through the Great Smokies. You'll see pristine forests, over half a million acres of them. You'll see boulders big as a small house, left over from the Ice Age, things you don't see where you come from.”

“I hear you don't get up to where I come from very often, Mr. Fuller.”

“I'm afraid not. I never cared much for traveling, and there's too much work to do here, anyway.”

“But you have been in New York, haven't you? You must have visited when you lived in Philadelphia. It's only a stone's throw away.”

“Well, I have, but mostly just passing through.”

They were all sitting on the porch after supper, Laura feeling at ease with the quiet conversation and happy to be proud of her home. It was almost amusing to contrast this weekend visit to her visit with Gilbert's family in their apartment fourteen floors above an avenue crammed with cars. His were likable people, very bright, and most cordial, but so
quick
in their ways, and hence so different from the unhurried manner of her life at home.

“It's too bad Richard isn't here. He could tell you some interesting things about this part of the country. He's taking a short seminar in forestry and couldn't come home this week.”

“I'd like to meet him.”

“Why don't you take a walk to the overlook while it's still light?” Kate suggested. “That's really a spectacle, especially just before sunset. It's a bit more than two miles round trip, but worth it.”

Gilbert, always eager to see something new, got up from the rocking chair. “Good idea. Let's do it.”

“They're great people, your family,” he said as they climbed the hill. “I admire their enthusiasm. I like them, and I hope they like me.”

“Of course they do. Why shouldn't they?”

“I don't know. Your dad has mentioned Richard so often that I was wondering whether there was anything . . . well, whether he had any reason to think that you and he . . . that he was in love with you, or you with him.”

“I was when I was fifteen, but there's nothing left of that now. In fact, I was hoping you and he would meet this week,” Laura said, although that was not quite the truth. She would have been uncomfortable sitting at table with these two men at the same time. Richard had known her most intimate thoughts. . . .

She laughed. “Richard is a wonderful person, but sometimes it seems that all he thinks about are the environment, conservation, trees, and animal rights.”

“Then I'm glad. I don't want him to be thinking of you or you to be thinking about anybody but me. Those are my orders.”

Gil makes light, she thought, when his heart's full. It seemed as if with every passing day she learned something new about him. And reaching upward, she stroked his cheek.

“Your eyes, Laura. Your grave eyes that I love.”

Hand in hand they walked, scarcely speaking. The air was fragrant with pine. A fox streaked across the path and scurried into the crackling underbrush. At the final resting point they stopped and gazed, she to whom the sight was one of her first memories, and he who had never seen it before, equally in awe. Five hundred dangerous feet below them in the chasm, the waterfall plunged into the stream. In the distance between the horizon and the mountains lay a far blue haze.

“So those are the Great Smokies,” Gil whispered. “Aptly named. Beautiful. Beautiful.”

“We're miles away from them, though you wouldn't think so. This is only hill country where we live.”

“And you love your hill country.”

“It gets in your blood, as Dad says.”

“I can see how it might.”

“Let's start back. It'll be dark in ten minutes. We should have brought a flashlight. Dad put one in my hand, and I forgot to take it.”

“He's a remarkable man. Sometimes he talks like a farmer, and then when we were discussing that spy case in Washington, he sounded like a lawyer, like one of my professors.”

“People often say that about him. People on all the boards he's on, at the hospital, and the Board of Ed, and goodness knows how many others.”

“They go well together, he and your mom.”

“Oh, they do. But how can you tell after only two days?”

“I can't explain how. It's something I sense in people. I don't mean I'm some sort of nut who reads tea leaves, but I have been right a lot of times. Wrong, too, I suppose.” Gil frowned. “I think your dad is a worrier. Am I right?”

“Oh, definitely. But with a huge responsibility here—we've just added nine hundred acres to the place—I guess it's only natural.”

“He's probably worried about you, too, my lady.”

“Me? Whyever should he worry about me?”

“Because you're a treasure, and people watch over their treasures.”

   

Laura could not have explained why, when packing for these two days at home, she had put the diary into her suitcase, but there it was on the table in her room. Nor could she have explained why, after getting ready for bed and about to turn off the light, she suddenly crossed the room, unlocked the red box, and began to write.

So many times I start the page with the words,
It is all a dream.
Those are the times when everything in my life is going so well, that I feel as if I don't deserve it. I see so much suffering when I volunteer at the hospital. People are not only sick, but so often they have no love, no family, no one to care about them, which is, I think, worse than having to worry about next month's rent. But then, what can I know when I have so much love and no worries about rent or anything else?

It is so good to see how Gil and Dad get along. They seem to have so much to say to each other, as if their minds run in the same groove. Although, it did bother me a little when Dad, very tactfully it's true, made that remark in private to me about love at first sight. When I told him how that happened to Gil and me at the very same moment, he said, “I don't believe in it. Maybe sometimes it happens, but I still don't believe in it.”

Was he talking about himself? And if so, whom does he mean, Rebecca or Kate? But he is obviously so contented with Kate that he must have meant Rebecca, mustn't he?

It has always puzzled me to sense that sadness when her name is spoken. Or perhaps it is not sadness, but something else, something mysterious and vague.

Sometimes, now that medical school is only a year away, I think about my ultimate choice of a specialty and wonder about psychiatry. Often, I believe, I can tell when people are hiding their true feelings behind their ordinary, pleasant behavior, their earnestness, or their hilarity. In the library, I came across a fascinating book,
The Anatomy of Melancholy,
written by a man of the seventeenth century who says a lot of things that Freud wrote about in the twentieth century. Imagine that! Yet the whole thing comes down in a nutshell to the question: Why do we do the things we do?

I did not want to bring up the subject this week, and haven't done so in a long time, but eventually I shall tell him about the visit to Philadelphia. Actually, it was Gil's idea, on that weekend we flew to New York to visit his parents. It's only a short train ride, so we went, took a taxi to Spruce Street—or was it Pine? I thought I had the right street number, but not being sure, we tried both streets, and couldn't even find the number, so we gave up. I probably had it wrong. Someday, I'll try again. Although it isn't really that important, I want to see that house.

Richard says it's morbid to bother my father like this. He was annoyed with me when I asked Dad where Rebecca was buried. She was cremated, he said, and I shouldn't ask Dad about it. Maybe he is right. It
is
morbid.

The frogs are croaking in the pond behind the stables. It is a nostalgic sound for me, the sound of spring, of being three years old, which takes me as far back as I can remember. I probably don't even remember it then, or if I did hear the sound, I didn't know that frogs were making it. One wonders about the consciousness of a frog; obviously, it has some, but what is it?

All a mystery. Love is a mystery. At the table where we have our meals this week, there are so many kinds of love. There is Dad's love for Kate, hers for him, hers for me, mine for her, mine for my father, mine for Gil, and his for me. In time, I do believe and hope that Gil will love, and be loved by, Dad and Mom. And then there is Richard also, dear Richard, now and always.

Yes, it is a mystery and a dream. I don't know why I'm spilling this out on paper tonight. If I could go into Gil's room across the hall, I would spill it all out to him, and he would understand. But even though they certainly know that he and I sleep together, Dad and Mom wouldn't want us to do it in their house, so of course I won't go into his room.

I am so full of
emotion
tonight, that I could laugh, or cry, or both. When I look around the room, I remember Felicia my cat, long dead, and how I gave her the name of Richard's junior high school girlfriend. Really, I ought to get a cat tomorrow and name it Felicia to tease him. Every household should have a cat. Yes, that's what I'll do.

Now close the book and lock it. Good night.

Chapter 22

W
hile Laura was writing in her diary, down the hall, Jim was taking a folded newspaper from a drawer and showing it to Kate.

“Here, look. I clipped this yesterday. I wasn't going to bother you with it, and here I am doing it anyway.”

“Don't tell me. Another big event with a name you recognize?”

“Yes, in Venice this time. Well, Venice is a marvel in itself. I've been there twice. But when you add all these names, the money, the fashions of the transatlantic shoppers, and the jewelry, it's a dazzle. It's close to blinding. Look. Read.”

For a few minutes, Kate scanned the page, a thick text with half a dozen photographs of partygoers in gondolas and people standing on flowery terraces.

“So what do you think this means?” she asked.

“It's obvious, they're separated. Storm's left her. He's finally had enough, I guess.
‘. . . has taken up residence again at his home on Long Island. Lillian Storm and
her companion,
the well-known Swiss sportsman Luigi Di Something, have bought a seventeenth-century country house in Tuscany.'
Well, well. What else is new?”

“He looks pretty old, doesn't he? Well, old for her. She looks about twenty-five.”

“Not bad for a woman of forty-eight. But she knows how to get herself in front of the cameras, and how to take the right pose.”

“Look at those bracelets. And the lace bodice. She knows how to dress.”

Hearing the scorn in his own voice, he said, “All it takes is taste and a few million dollars. She's had her lip plumped up, I notice.”

Kate gave him a look of mingled concern and curiosity. “Dear Jim, still bitter?”

“I never was bitter, just furious until I got over it. Now I'm only afraid, still afraid.”

“But think about it. Actually, you have less to fear than ever with Storm and his money and his detectives out of the picture. Not that they ever accomplished anything.” And Kate, coming close to him, laid her head against his chest. “Your heart. I can hear it pounding. Oh, damn her for coming into your life. How do you explain a woman like her? How does she explain herself?”

“She doesn't, really. She doesn't even try except to say that she gets bored, restless. Nothing and nobody is ever enough for very long.”

“I suppose one ought to feel sorry for her. In theory I do, if only because she must be suffering terribly, wanting her child.”

“I think of that. You know I do. But I also think about what kind of life Laura would be having right this minute if I hadn't done what I had done.”

“Darling, we must stop this. I ask you now to get those New York newspapers and those social columns out of your life.”

“I suppose—oh, I don't know. I suppose I'll spend the rest of my time in fear. She always gets what she wants, Kate.”

“Well, she hasn't gotten Laura after nearly twenty years of trying, and she's not about to get her. This fear doesn't make sense. There she is, floating around all over Europe, and here you are waiting for her to materialize all of a sudden like a ghost.”

A great sigh eased Jim. “I know. I'm sorry. I must admit I don't get this way very often.”

“No, only when you read this stuff. Stop thinking about it. You have so much to be thankful for, Jim. Do I need to tell you?”

Indeed, he knew that and she didn't need to tell him. Often, when riding over the flourishing land, or sitting at meals across from Laura, or fully asleep in the warm bed with Kate, he had such a sense of thankful rejoicing that he could have cried out with it.

“Laura has such a fine mind, and such charm. I hear that whenever I meet people in town. She may look like Lillian, but she's your girl. How many times have I said that to you?”

“Many, but I don't mind hearing it again.”

“She has her feet on the ground, as they say. You don't need to worry about her. She'll take care of herself.”

“I wish she wasn't applying to a medical school in New York.”

“That's only because of your bad memories of the city.”

“Ah, but they weren't all bad, not by any count.” And for a moment, he saw himself walking to the office, feeling as bright as the morning, saw himself at the long conference table with some of the best legal minds in the city, heard himself push back his chair and rise to speak. . . .

“She'll be just fine, Jim. You can't object if that's where she wants to go.”

He smiled at Kate. “Okay. You don't have to give me a pep talk.”

“All right, I won't. Just one more thing, though: It's good that she'll have a young man like Gilbert in the city. At least we've met him and know who he is.”

“Oh, she may have another boyfriend by then. Maybe two more. Who knows?”

Neither he nor Kate had ever put into words their mutual, small hope that Richard and Laura might eventually—but that was so ideal that it was unlikely to happen.

This fellow Gilbert was no Richard, although he certainly seemed to be very decent—his mind was quick and sharp; the opinion that he, as a student, had given about the insurance fraud that was in the news just now was impressive.

“Well, unless she has another boyfriend by next year, we'll have a busy commencement, Laura's from the college and Gilbert's from law school.”

“I'm not looking forward to going there in that crowd, Kate.”

“What are you talking about?” Kate cried with disbelief in her widened eyes.

“Nothing new. I don't want to go. It's too close to North Dakota. You and Richard should go.”

“For heaven's sake, it's four hundred miles from North Dakota! This is really silly, Jim.”

“It probably is. But—I don't know—I can't explain—I don't want to go. Let me have a sudden emergency here as my excuse, and when you come back, I'll have gotten a caterer in from town and all Laura's friends and our friends at a marvelous celebration. What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing, except that it's perfectly crazy. Not to go to your daughter's graduation? It's neurotic.”

“Well, maybe I am neurotic.”

“You are the least neurotic human being I've ever known, James Fuller. Except for this, and you are darn well going up there with Richard and me.”

“It's a whole year off. Why talk about it now?”