Occasion of Revenge (2 page)

I ducked my head and stared at the spot where Connie was pointing. An ordinary window. “You sure?” I chuckled. “George Washington didn’t live enough nights in his whole life to sleep everywhere attributed to him. When would he have time for Martha at Mount Vernon?” We unfolded ourselves from the vehicle, Connie and Dennis first, and entered the house.

If old George had actually stayed at Dulaney House on that cold December day in 1783, I doubt he’d ever seen it looking so beautiful. Constructed solidly of brick with generous windows and bright white trim, the central three-story house was flanked by identical one-story wings, connected to the main house by passageways called hyphens. An ornately carved doorway led into an entrance hall where a central stairway curved up and away to our right. We passed straight through into the ballroom, where a string quartet had arranged itself on a fine Oriental rug near a wall of French doors leading out into the garden. They were playing one of Vivaldi’s seasons—“Winter,” I think, appropriate to that fine November day two days after Thanksgiving. In contrast, baskets of flowers screamed spring. Arrangements of tulips, daffodils, and lilies decorated tall pedestals flanking the doors. Smaller arrangements had been placed on circular tables covered with white damask tablecloths. Servers in black pants, white shirts, and festive bow ties snaked smoothly through the crowd bearing platters of crab balls, egg rolls, and shrimps, while two bartenders near a walk-in fireplace at the far end of the ballroom efficiently mixed drinks.

Daddy was already there, standing at the bar, holding a glass of wine in one hand while the bartender handed him what looked like a super-dry martini on the rocks. While Paul disappeared into the cloakroom with our coats I hurried over to greet my father.

“Two-fisted drinker?” I forced a smile.

“No.” He kissed my cheek. “It’s for Darlene.” He gestured with the martini. “Over there.”

I sighted along his arm until I saw, at the end of it, the blond woman who had been sitting next to him in church. I pasted a smile on my face—what Paul calls my perma-grin: stretched lips, full teeth, like rigor mortis had set in. “She doesn’t look like the martini type.”

“She isn’t.” He waved the glass under my nose and I caught the unexpected odor of mouthwash.

“Yuck. What’s that?”

“Peppermint schnapps.” He raised a bushy eyebrow. “Want one?”

“Daddy, I’d rather drink battery acid.” I tipped my wineglass to my lips and took a sip of cool, crisp chardonnay, studying his lined but still handsome face over the rim.

“I’d have to agree, but Darlene says it’s not a special occasion if she can’t have her schnapps.” Daddy planted a light kiss on my forehead. “Save a dance for me, sweetheart?”

“Of course, silly.” But I was speaking to his back as Daddy turned and glided off to the lady-in-waiting, leaving me stranded by the bar, feeling like a wallflower.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

“Paul!”

Confirming my suspicions about the lemon meringue pie, Paul said, “You look good enough to eat,” and nibbled on my neck in lieu of an appetizer.

“So do you. I wish we were sailing off to the Caribbean along with the happy couple over there.” I gestured with my glass in the direction of the hallway where Paul’s sister, Connie, was standing with her new husband in the curve of the staircase, manning an informal receiving line.

“Maybe on my sabbatical next year.”

“Hah! That’ll be the day! What’s a math professor going to do on a sailboat that will count as research?”

“Think.”

“About what?”

“Patterns.”

“Like what?”

“The parabolic arcs of flying fish trajectories.”

I laughed out loud. “I can’t believe that anybody would pay you to do research like that.”

Paul led me over to the bar where we joined a short line. “Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, my dear. It’s rumored that someone’s about to offer a million-dollar prize to the first person who can prove Goldbach’s Conjecture.”

“What’s that?”

We wandered over to our table and sat down. “Goldbach stated that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes.” Paul patted the breast pocket of his tux jacket and I worried that he’d pull out a pen and start illustrating this for me on the tablecloth, but fortunately the only thing in his pocket was a decorative handkerchief.

“That seems fairly obvious,” I said, “even for a French major.”

“Ah, yes,” Paul replied. “But nobody’s ever been able to
prove
it.”

“I see.” I sipped my wine. “It’s like extracting the square root of pi. It could go on and on and on.”

He nodded.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure out something, and when you do—sweetheart, honey lamb, sugar pie”—I grinned at him, toothily—“I’ll be sure to sign on as first mate.”

“How about chief cook and communications officer?”

“That, too.” The way he was looking at me, I thought he might have a second honeymoon on his mind—starting that night.

“Look, there’s old Mr. Schneider!” Paul kissed the air next to my cheek. “Let me say hello to the old boy.” He loped off in the direction of a tuxedoed gentleman in a wheelchair being pushed by an attendant up a ramp from the garden and into the ballroom. Mr. Schneider was the father of Dennis’s deceased first wife.

“Oh, my poor ears and whiskers!” The bride, looking flushed, materialized on my right so suddenly that I nearly spilled my wine.

“Dennis deserted you already? The cad!”

Connie flopped into a chair, removed a punishing high-heeled shoe, and began massaging her toes. “We gave up on the receiving line. Dennis is off in the library, back-slapping with his buddies. Get me a drink, would you?”

“Wine?”

“That would be lovely.”

“White or red?”

Connie indicated the pristine white landscape of her wedding outfit and made a face. “Duh!”

I returned from the bar with a glass of white wine
for Connie just as Daddy’s new friend cut loose with a high-pitched cackle that carried over the sawing of the strings launching into “Spring.”

“Who’s that?” I asked Connie, pointing toward the cackle.

She shrugged. “And Guest.”

“Huh?”

“That’s all I know. When your father RSVPed, it was for two: Captain George Alexander and Guest. I forgot to tell you.” She cast a fashion-critical eye over Darlene’s cocktail dress, a lacy froth of Pepto-Bismol pink with a flouncy skirt that hovered three inches north of her knees and a bodice that plunged a couple of inches too far south of her generous bosom.

“I hope she doesn’t sneeze,” I said. Darlene held the stem of her glass between her thumb and forefinger, laughed again, then pirouetted away toward the meats table on dainty toes stuffed into size five sling-back, open-toed stiletto heels. “That’s Daddy’s
date
?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

“But it’s only eight months since Mother died,” I managed to croak around the lump in my throat.

Connie started to say something but ended up grinning me an apology over her shoulder as she was whisked aside by a sophisticated couple in their late seventies, immaculately dressed and carrying a large, beautifully wrapped wedding package.

I looked around for Paul and found him at the antipasto table, stacking his plate with marinated mushrooms and asparagus spears while talking to my sister Ruth. Ruth wore an ankle-length, multilayered caftany thing in a sheer natural linen. I snitched an asparagus spear from Paul’s plate, bit off the bud end, then pointed the stem at Darlene. “Daddy has a date.”

Ruth turned to look where Daddy was holding forth with Darlene and another woman whom I recognized as Ellie from the nearby Country Store. Ruth’s eyes brightened. “The lady in blue?”

“I wish. No, the lady in pink. Darlene somebody-or-other.”

Ruth sputtered into her wine. “Oh, gawd! Where’d she buy that dress? Togs for Tarts?”

“Well, at least your father’s not sitting at home feeling sorry for himself.” Paul slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Nothing is going to bring your mother back,” Paul continued reasonably with a sympathetic one-armed hug that squished air audibly out of my shoulder pads. “Let the old guy have a little fun.”

It was hard to think of my father as old. A 1950 graduate of the Naval Academy, he’d given the Navy thirty years, then worked another nineteen years building airplanes in Seattle before retiring to Annapolis last year. The month Mother died, he had turned seventy.

“That doesn’t look like fun,” Ruth said. “It looks like trouble with a capital
T
and that rhymes with
D
and that stands for
fool.
”

Paul nibbled on a carrot stick and stared in Darlene’s direction. “You can’t judge a book by its cover, girls.”

I groaned. “May I write that down, Mr. Shakespeare?”

“Maybe she’s a great conversationalist. A Harvard grad running a multinational corporation. A scholar with an advanced degree in comparative literature from Yale.” He turned to Ruth. “How come you don’t know this woman, Ruth? You see your father every day.”

After Mom died, my divorced sister had given up her poky, overpriced apartment on Conduit Street in downtown Annapolis and moved into our parents’ home in the Providence community. Daddy, she discovered,
barely knew how to balance a checkbook or file his income taxes. Mother had always taken care of the bookkeeping. And cooking? Forget about it.

Ruth shook her head. “He’s never mentioned her. Probably too embarrassed.” She sipped her wine. “But he has been spending more evenings out lately.” She snorted. “He told me he was bowling.”

Daddy must have said something funny because Darlene threw her head back, open-mouthed. He would have had time to count her fillings. I was beginning to recognize her laugh, full and deep-throated, ending in a giggle.

“I think I have a very good idea where
her
talents lie,” offered Ruth, sourly.

“Take a pill, Ruth.”

Ruth smiled at Paul, sickly sweet. “I do believe I will, Mr. Ives.” She reached around him, selected a fringed toothpick from a silver cup and speared a crab ball, then dredged it through the cocktail sauce.

“Why don’t you go introduce yourselves, girls?”

I displayed my empty wineglass. “First, I’ll need another one of these.”

Ruth, still chewing, speared another crab ball and sailed off in the opposite direction. “I think it’s
his
job to introduce his girlfriend to
us,
” she called over her shoulder. “I’m going to find Georgina.”

“Last time I saw Georgina, she was in the tent in the garden fixing fruit-and-cheese plates for the kids,” Paul said.

Ruth, her mouth full of crab, nodded, waved, and disappeared outside. I watched as she weaved among the boxwood hedges, then strolled down the well-manicured lawn which sloped gently away from the historic mansion toward the Chesapeake Bay.

Paul took my elbow and steered me toward the bar. We had just refilled our glasses when the music died.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” The first chair violin, a painfully thin bleached blonde clad entirely in black, had trouble being heard over the celebration. Paul tapped a fork against his plate and after several seconds the room grew quiet and guests began drifting into the ballroom from the adjoining rooms and from the garden. The waif lifted her bow high, like a baton. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Rutherford!”

Connie and Dennis appeared from the hallway, holding hands and beaming at one another like star-struck teens. The skinny violinist, who could have put a heaping plate of crab balls to good use, set her bow to the violin and played a few introductory chords before turning to her musicians and segueing into “Mexicali Rose.” Paul leaned toward me. “ ‘Mexicali Rose’?”

With my lips close to my husband’s ear I whispered, “Maybe there’s a Mexican holiday we don’t know anything about.”

At the end of the second bar of music, Dennis swung Connie wide, twirled her into his arms, then waltzed her around the dance floor in graceful, sweeping circles. They could have been on wheels.

I turned to Paul. “Holy Toledo! It’s international ballroom on PBS.”

“Dennis told me they’ve been taking lessons.”

I watched, admiring and amazed. Tears formed in the corners of my eyes. “It’s so beautiful!” I jabbed Paul with my elbow. “I’ve been trying to get you to take lessons for years, you bum!”

“Maybe someday.”

Before I could extract a promise to that effect, our daughter, Emily, appeared. She looked beautiful, too, in a slinky, floor-length slip the color of caramel that she proudly claimed she’d bought for fifty cents at Goodwill. Since leaving home for Colorado Springs, she had let her ragged, badly dyed hair grow out. Now it hung, sleek and smooth, the color of dark molasses, just touching her shoulders. She’d applied light touches of makeup to her eyes and cheeks and exchanged the black lipstick of her rebellious years for a burgundy gloss. Dante loomed tall behind her, dressed in black slacks and a white shirt. I doubted my son-in-law owned a suit. If it hadn’t been for his colorful tie, I might have mistaken him for one of the waiters.

“I’m trying to get your father to dance,” I explained to Emily, who was balancing Chloe on her hip. The strings swung into “I Only Have Eyes for You” and the floor began to fill with other dancers. Suddenly, twenty-two pounds, all of it Chloe, was in my arms.

“C’mon, Dad,” Emily said. “Let’s dance.” Without waiting for a reply, she seized Paul’s hand and dragged him onto the floor. Smiling crookedly, he held her, stiffly at first, then with more confidence as his elbows unlocked and his arms relaxed. He began rocking from one foot to the other, leading his daughter around the ballroom with a skip, half shuffle, skip, slide.

Leaving me with Dante.

I always managed to put my foot in it where conversations with Dante were concerned. Chloe saved me the trouble of having to think of something to say by grabbing my earring, a string of dangling pearls, and yanking—hard.

“Ouch!” My hand shot to my ear. “You little imp!”

Dante, who had been watching Emily dance with
her father with a grin on his face, turned to see what all the commotion was about. “You OK, Mrs. Ives?”