Off Season (28 page)

He stopped and looked pleasantly at my father, but not at me. I felt my face flame deeper; I could hardly get my breath. It was a remarkable speech. I could not imagine a young man of this time and place making it to anyone. My ears rang so that I could hardly hear my father’s reply. It was a long time in coming.

Finally he said, “I appreciate your . . . delicacy, Mr. McCall, but I’m afraid there can be no, er, dating for Lilly yet. Her studies are the most important thing for her now; she will be starting at George Washington in the fall and needs to enter with an outstanding academic record. And then her swimming takes a great deal of time. I don’t want her distracted from either just now.”

Cam looked at Dad, his eyes narrowed.

“Sir, this is the latter half of the twentieth century, and Lilly is eighteen years old. Don’t you think she should have some say in the matter?”

“Lilly is my daughter,” my father said, ice crackling in his voice. “Don’t you think I have her best interests at heart?”

“And what would those interests be, sir?” Cam asked pleasantly. But his eyes narrowed further. I saw, suddenly, two formidable adversaries, circling, circling.

“School, of course. And then a promising academic career, or perhaps an editorial or curatorial one. She has many talents. Washington has a number of fine outlets for them, and of course I am not without contacts.”

“So she would live here all that time?”

“Of course. Where else? This is her home.”

“Is that what she wants, sir?”

My father did not answer. There was a long silence. Then he said, “Well, Mr. McCall, it’s almost our dinnertime. I’m afraid Flora did not cook for a guest. Will you excuse us? Perhaps some other time you might join us?”

“I’d like that,” Cam said. He smiled and nodded to me, and then to my father, who didn’t meet his eyes.

I heard him let himself out the door, very quietly; I looked at my father. He would not meet my eyes either. I whirled and ran upstairs to my room and shut the door. For a long time I simply lay in the dark and stared at my ceiling. I cannot remember to this day what I was thinking.

He didn’t follow me, or call after me. In about half an hour Flora came up with a tray for me.

“You eat this supper, now,” she said. “He get over it. Your young man just came at him sort of sudden.”

I knew she had been listening from the kitchen. I did not care—about that or about anything. She left softly but I did not eat my supper.

A long time later Aunt Tatty came briskly into my room without knocking. She switched on the overhead lights and I sat up and blinked at her.

“Your father is very worried about you,” she said. “What on earth is going on? He won’t even talk about it.”

Sudden tears blinded me. Stammering and scrubbing at my wet cheeks, I told her. Before I could even finish she had steamed out of the room. I heard her footsteps, very fast and hard, going downstairs.
For what seemed a very long time there was only the sound of shouting from the sitting room. Both of their voices were raised. There was real anger in them, not just annoyance. I dove under the covers and stayed there, trying to hear, trying not to hear. I missed Wilma with every fiber of my being.

I did that,
I thought in horror and pain. But deep inside me, someone I did not know smiled my smile.
I did that.

My father and I were silent on the way to Cathedral the next morning, except when he asked me what time I would finish swim practice.

I had forgotten swim practice. I had not even brought my swim things with me. All of a sudden the thought of cool, chemical dimness made me sick. What I wanted now, I realized with a stab of something that was half dread and half wonder, was air. And light and the sound of voices, and the touch of other flesh. Cam’s flesh.

“Practice is canceled today,” I lied facilely, without a qualm. “Teachers’ makeup day.”

“Well, then, I’ll pick you up after school and run you home.”

“Daddy,” I said, the words thick in my mouth, “I’m going to ride home with Cornelia Royce. She lives one block over, and she gives a bunch of people rides. She’s got a new Mustang; she got it for her eighteenth birthday. She’s said lots of times she’d be glad to drop me home.”

He shot a sidewise look at me. I made myself look straight ahead and keep my face pleasant and natural. All of a horrifying sudden it seemed as if the rest of my life hung on his reply.

“Is that safe?” he said.

“She got an Excellent in driver ed and her father won’t let her drive on any of the main streets. Just around here.”

“Do we know the Royces?”

“I know Cornelia. We started Cathedral together. She’s president of Latin Club and got early acceptance to Wellesley.”

He was silent for a while. Then, as we turned into the grounds of National Cathedral, he said, “I hope you’ll go straight home. And call me when you get there. I don’t think Flora or Emma come until around five, do they?”

“I don’t really know. I’m hardly ever there when they get there.”

“Well, lock the door and don’t answer the doorbell. I’ll try to be home a little early tonight.”

A small flame, a thin plume of smoke, started up in the pit of my stomach. By the time I had gotten out of the car and started for classes, anger was blazing away in me as strongly as a new-laid fire. I sucked in deep gulps of sweet spring air and ran lightly up the steps. I did not look back. After a moment I heard his car start, and then move slowly away.

That afternoon I came into the empty house, feeling as timid as if I were entering a strange home uninvited. Had I ever been in this house alone? I could not remember. I walked from room to room, seeing afternoon sun flooding the kitchen and dining room, fingering small objects on desks and tables as if I’d never seen them and putting them back, seeing as if for the first time the moving explosive paintings of my mother’s, the dimmer, seemlier ancestral oils that had come to us with the house, family photographs in which Jeebs and I were blank, featureless infants and my mother and father, tanned and laughing and very young, people I had never known but had, perhaps, read about. A portrait of my mother hung over the mantelpiece in the drawing room. I think it was painted about the time of my parents’ wedding; she was younger than I had ever known her. Always before, she had, in the portrait, seemed a stranger to me. Now, in the silent sunlight, she seemed, suddenly, me. Was this what my father saw when he looked at me, across the sitting room in her chair?

I walked closer to her, leaned my forehead against the thick, ridged oil paint.

“Tell me what to do,” I whispered.

“You’re doing just fine,” she said inside my head.

When my father came home, all the doors and windows stood open and fresh April poured into the house along with the slanting sun, and I was in the sitting room arranging the huge bunch of azaleas I had plundered from the back garden. They were a small festival in the house; dust and winter gave way to spicy summer. I had pulled my rebellious hair back and bound it with my mother’s tortoiseshell headband, and I wore a pair of her coral linen slacks and my pale seashell cotton sweater. The pants fit perfectly. I had never owned anything like them.

He stood silently for a long time, watching me. Then he sighed.

“You look pretty, baby. The house does, too. I’ve always been afraid that one day you might look so exactly like her that I couldn’t bear it. But you don’t. You look like my daughter who looks very much like her mother. When did you get so grown-up, Lilly?”

“Night before last,” I wanted to say, but instead said, “I guess it just happened in such tiny little ways that you don’t notice until one day they all add up. I’ve thought about that, too—my looking like her. I was always afraid it would hurt you. I’ve tried not to.”

“No, it’s nice,” he said. “I still have her and I have you, too. It’s like having both of you in the house.”

You always did have two of us,
I thought. And I thought of all those nights by the fire when he would lift his eyes and smile over at me in my mother’s chair; whom had he seen? For a moment I felt as if I were merely visiting.

“Your Mr. McCall phoned me at the office this morning. He said he hoped he might call on you tonight. I said no”—my heart plummeted and my face closed—“that you and I had some talking to do. But he is coming to dinner tomorrow night. Tatty will join us.”

I nodded, trying to appear as if I thought this was simply an ordinary statement by an ordinary father to his daughter on an ordinary evening. But under my feet the earth cracked, and what rose up from the fissure was not the rancid breath of an abyss but sweet air, smelling of new-cut grass and, oddly, the sea.

“That will be nice,” I said.

The next night we sat out on the terrace after dinner. The air was so thick with mimosa and the big magnolia tree in our neighbor’s yard beyond the brick wall that you could get drunk on it.

Sitting in my chair at my mother’s little mosaic table, sipping coffee and nibbling at the lemon cheesecake Emma had made, I felt so intoxicated that I thought if I stood up I would stagger, fall down. There was a patchouli-scented candle in a glass pillar in the center of the table, and in its light, Cam, in a blue blazer and blue Brooks Brothers shirt, looked like some sort of red Viking god, visible only when the clouds of his Asgardian stronghold parted. My father wore a seersucker suit identical to several others he wore in the warm weather. Aunt Tatty looked exotic and pretty in a boldly printed silk sundress.

“Peter Max,” she said, giggling. Peter Max? Giggling? I was not the only one drunk that evening.

“We have decided,” my father said, looking first at Tatty and then at me, and only then at Cam, “that you may call on Lilly on the conditions that you visit here most of the times, and there are no late evenings. Also, that she may accompany you to certain activities we feel would be of benefit to her: a concert here and there, a play, an art exhibition. I believe there are some outdoor performances around the mall and other places that we all might enjoy. She will need her afternoons for her studies, of course, and I believe you said you will be busy studying for your architectural boards. I will of course want to know where she is at all times.”

When did “we” become my father and Aunt Tatty? I looked from him to Tatty, who rolled her eyes and mouthed silently, “We’ll see about that!” I looked at Cam, who was smiling agreeably. When he turned his eyes to me I could see clearly in them what we would do when we could manage to be alone. My face flamed. The heat seeped down into the core of me, and I felt that I could not
wait
, could not
wait
for the time when he would touch me.

“Thank you,” I said, smiling at my father and Aunt Tatty. And for most of that endless summer, Cam and I sat serenely with my father and Aunt Tatty, talking of more things than I had known were in the world, often about architecture.

Cam burned with it. When my father asked him what he wanted to build and for whom, he said, “Anything, providing it’s around here or down on the river or bay, and for anyone who’ll see what I’m trying to do and won’t interfere with it.”

“Won’t interfere with it?” My father raised his eyebrows. “Where on earth do you intend to get your clients? Surely they’ll want some say in their own—structures.”

“We’ll talk about what they want first of all, before I even do a sketch. After that it’s my show. As a matter of fact, I’ve already got a client. My grandmother, who lives with us in the big house—it’s her house, actually—wants a little house and garden on the grounds, with the river and woods a part of it, and a little guesthouse, and a kennel. She raises Maltese dogs, for God’s sake. I’ve almost got the elevations done. I hope to break ground in early June.”

“Are you licensed for that? Where will you get the money? Is she paying you? Do you have partners in mind?”

I was appalled at my father. Tatty hissed and opened her mouth to speak.

Cam grinned. “I’ll be licensed as soon as I pass the boards, and that’s in a couple of weeks. Grandmother’s paying me. She’s got more money than God. And she’s backing me to start up my own practice. She isn’t going to lose any money on me and she knows it. We’ve been partners in crime ever since I could understand what a trust fund was. She wants me on the site till the whole thing is done, which should be early fall, if all goes well. I’m bribing my foreman well. After that I’ll be moving into D.C., I think. It’s the best place for the practice, even though I’ll keep the old house on the James. That’s hers and will be mine. It’s just as well; nobody else in the family wants it. It costs the national debt to keep that old monstrosity standing.”

For the rest of the summer we talked decorously on the terrace or at the Chevy Chase Club and kissed hungrily and hard in the cramped Porsche, and occasionally did more; soon there was not an inch of my hot flesh his hands did not know, and not an inch of his red, sharp-angled body that mine had not explored. It was as if we were both starving, both dying of thirst, and could not quite slake it with just our mouths and hands. But I knew that one day we would. I knew that a time would come when making love with him would be the only thing in the world, and that when we did, nothing in either of our worlds could keep us apart.

And so, “Not now. Not yet,” became our mantra. And “Soon. Oh, God, soon.”

And, locked against him in the Porsche, my body and heart cried, “Safety. This is safety.”

I was never once afraid, and never stopped to think that, given the past few years, I might well be. Everything we did seemed familiar, as if we had been tutored, though, of course, I had not been, and Cam had no need of tutors.

The first time he kissed me was the night, early on, when I took him downstairs to the basement, to see the gymnasium. Aunt Tatty and my father were upstairs before the fire in the sitting room, because a blustery April storm had blown in suddenly, and we had been talking about my father’s and my prowess on the bars and trapezes.

“No kidding,” Cam said. “Did you really? Were you good?”

“Not as good as my father, but not bad,” I said, shooting a look at my father where he sat in his old chair, across from Tatty.