Off Season (34 page)

It might have been a rather awkward situation, because Cam’s grandmother had left him the house and a small trust fund and the senior McCalls found themselves suddenly homeless. But they were eager to go, Cam’s father because Georgetown was closer to his banks and his clubs, and his mother because she had never really liked living on the river anyway. The bugs bit her and the humidity ruined her hair and her nail polish almost never dried, and in Georgetown she could command whole ranks of society instead of luring them in small batches out to McCall’s Point. All the beautiful, rather shabby antique furniture belonged to Cam and me, but that was apparently all right, too. Mrs. McCall bought an entire English village’s worth of antiques and proclaimed them finer and more distinguished and expensive than ours. They probably were. Neither Cam nor I minded. So McCall’s Point was, as they say, our primary residence, and I never thought of it as anything but home. My girls grew up scratching the furniture and heel-marking the priceless pine floors and burning wonderful old silk velvet chair coverings with their brief forays into smoking. Our succession of dogs contributed their own homely damage. Silas, when he came, peed on everything until he considered the house properly marked, and then he selected a Philadelphia Chippendale sofa as a scratching post. I simply tossed a gypsy shawl over it. Cam would not have let me punish Silas anyway. By that time they were all but joined at the hip.

There was little or no inherited money, except the trust fund that at least paid the taxes, but we required little, and by the time the girls discovered clothes and status and schools, Cam was making really quite a lot of money. And I was beginning to.

I did, indeed, get my degree from George Washington, though in English, not folklore, for the school offered no such. I soon got pregnant with Betsy, and after that with Alice, and working was out of the question for a long while. Cam adored the little girls, both of whom looked almost amazingly like him, except they both had my gray eyes and crops of my two-toned bronze and gilt curls. I was pleased to see a little of myself and my side of our family in them, because from the moment they were born, almost, they were Cam’s creatures and no one else’s. When he had to be away on work, as he did increasingly in those years, they were inconsolable, and when I could not accompany him as I had done through my first pregnancy, he was short-tempered and anxious, and seemed to me almost afraid.

“You know I can’t go and leave them,” I would point out, reasonably enough, I thought.

“Can’t your dad and Tatty take them for a little while?”

“Cam, Alice is still nursing. And Daddy’s just plain past having a houseful of children. I absolutely have to stay here and look after them. There’ll be plenty of trips after they’re grown-up enough to leave.”

“And who will look after you?” he said. His face was white and drawn. We really were going to have to talk about this when he got home.

“I’ll look after myself. I’m a big girl now. And there’s Daddy and Tatty and the whole staff, and the Cardins just downriver, and there’s always Kitty.”

“Kitty’s what I’m afraid of,” he said sulkily and left before I could ask him what he meant. But after that, when the girls were small and he had to go out of town, at least he did not fuss openly, though I know he was never happy about it.

CHAPTER 16

I
t was on the beach at Edgewater, when the girls were toddlers, that I found what I wanted to do, work for both my hands and my heart. We had a small crescent of sand, as well as pebbles and boulders, and the sand was where we made sand castles and filled pails with seawater. I was always shivering when the rushing tide caught my bare feet and legs, but the girls apparently never felt it. They had to be pried off the beach at twilight, purple with cold and yelling lustily.

One day I was reading on an old blanket while they piled up a castle and dribbled wet sand for its turrets. I was reading about centaurs, and almost as if my hands knew before my mind did, I scraped together a rough, primitive horse’s body and made a manikin atop it, and dribbled him a mane and tail. Tiny clamshells were his eyes, and seaweed was his beard. The girls were enchanted. I told them about centaurs, and when Cam came in from sailing the Friendship, he looked at it and laughed with pleasure.

“It’s good. It’s really good, Lil. I always thought centaurs were nasty, warring creatures, but this one is a charmer, a Disney centaur. You could make a living doing this.”

About that time Betsy launched herself onto the centaur’s back and his legs crumbled and the sea caught him, and I took her inside, howling. But I did not forget what Cam had said. The primitive little sculpture felt right. I could do other things; there was the whole pantheon of Greek gods, and then the Norse ones. And from that afternoon, slowly, the thing that I do best and love took shape.

On this first Maine morning I buttered a scone and went into the living room, where Laurie had opened the windows to the sea air and put another pitcher of lupine on the old coffee table.

I looked up at Cam in his urn. Silas had settled himself on Cam’s old sweater on the corner of the sofa, turned around three times, and gone to sleep.

“It’s a gorgeous day,” I said to my husband. “It’s your kind of day. You know every year about March when you always say ‘Washington is where I go to wait to come to Maine’? Well, this is the kind of day you meant.”

I thought about the morning, waking up without him, expecting to feel agony and feeling, instead, the arms of Edgewater around me. I thought about the laughter I had almost heard, the laughter of children. The laughter of that last summer, with a new laugh in the mix.

“I felt for the longest time this morning like I was ten or eleven or so,” I told him, “and breakfast was waiting for me, and everybody was downstairs waiting for me to plan the day, and I thought I heard them laughing—no, I didn’t hear it and I wasn’t remembering it. It was like I was feeling somebody else remember it. I thought it might be you, because I think I feel you close to me up here, keeping me safe. And I don’t mean I think you’re a ghost. I just think you’ve left a chunk of yourself here, and it’s your presence that was remembering. It was always your favorite place on earth. But it couldn’t have been you because you didn’t know me when I was a child up here.”

And then slowly the knowledge came.

“But you did know us, didn’t you? You found out all about us that time you came up here by yourself after the storm, and I wouldn’t come with you, and we had that horrible, stupid fight about it.

“That’s when everything changed . . .”

Though we had had other squabbles like any other couple, senseless, meaningless collisions that were forgotten almost as soon as they passed, we had never had a fight like this. It was a terrible fight, a wounding thing. It divided time.

It was early spring in our twentieth year of marriage, and Cam came in early from the office, his forehead furrowed.

“Toby called this afternoon. That last nor’easter took off the roof of the kitchen wing and a tree went down over the bedrooms at that end. They can’t be fixed; we’ll have to rebuild. I made some sketches for you to look at on the way—you always hated that kitchen anyway. We’ll do it right this time. Can you be ready to go tomorrow morning? I’ve already called Kitty and she’ll come over and stay till we get back; it shouldn’t take more than a few days.”

I was silent, and he stopped talking and looked at me.

“Cam,” I said, “I just can’t go. I’m maybe two days away from finishing the
Green Man
, and the parks department wants him in place when the children’s exhibit opens. There’s just no time.”

I was working on my first large civic commission, though I had done pieces for private homes for years. This one was to stand at the entrance of a special area set aside in Rock Creek Park for children, with exhibits and nature trails and a picnic house. They wanted figures of mythological and folklore creatures scattered about, and had come to me. The Green Man came to mind instantly, that most ancient of semi-deities who symbolized the meeting of the spirits of the forest and of man. Rock Creek Park was wild in places, and I thought a traditional Green Man, with his satyr’s face and legs and arms of green branches, might well frighten the youngest children. So I had created a chubby, smiling figure who knelt half in and half out of the woods crowned with leaves and twined around with vines. You still got the idea, but he didn’t frighten. The parks department loved him, and loved the sketches I had given them for the other figures for the park. I worked hastily and with love and total absorption. I had thought Cam knew how important this was to me.

He looked at me in silence.

“You’re saying you’re not coming with me.”

“Well, yes. I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

His face whitened and the muscles around his mouth stood out.

“I want you to come with me, Lilly. I need you with me. There’s no reason for you not to come.”

“I have a deadline!” I shouted. “You know about deadlines, don’t you? Those things you have to meet or they fire you? Lord, the whole world stops when you have one, but just let me get within spitting distance of my first one—”

“You don’t know what you’re doing to me!” he shouted back.

“I’m not doing anything except trying to finish my work on time, as per contracted. God almighty, Cam, you’ve been to Edgewater without me, and other places, too.”

“But never because you just chose not to go. There was always a
reason
.”

“There
is
a reason!” I shouted again. “What’s the matter with you? You sound like I’m letting you march into the valley of the shadow of death all by yourself. You said yourself it’s just a few days!”

He stood looking at me for a long time. The fury came off him in waves; I had never seen him like this. He was trembling. And I could have sworn there were tears standing in his eyes.

I opened my mouth to say that of course I would go, something, anything, but he made a motion at me that meant shut up.

“I’m going tonight,” he said levelly. “There’s a plane out of National to Boston at nine. I can make it if I hurry.”

He turned and went upstairs toward our bedroom, and I started to go after him, and then stopped. I had nothing to apologize for. My reason for staying was as logical as his for going.

But I felt tears start in my eyes, too.

In a few minutes he came back down. I was in the kitchen starting dinner for myself and the girls, a dinner I knew I would not eat, and I did not see him. But I heard him. He went straight through the kitchen and hall and to the front door. I heard it open.

“Cam, call me, please,” I called after him. “I don’t know what this means, but I can’t stand all this anger.”

The door slammed shut. I waited until I heard his sleek BMW purr into life and glide away, and then I ran to the phone and called Kitty.

She let me spill it all out to her before she said anything, and then she said, “Well, he’s acting like a horse’s ass, of course. A spoiled horse’s ass. I expect it has a lot to do with his sister, don’t you? He probably doesn’t even realize it.”

I was silent, and then said, stupidly, “His sister? We don’t ever see Deirdre; she and her husband cast their lot with Cam’s folks, and we hardly speak. He doesn’t even
like
her.”

She took a long breath and let it out slowly.

“He hasn’t told you about his little sister, has he?”

“Little . . . no. He hasn’t. Nobody has. I didn’t even know he had one.”

“He doesn’t, now,” she said. Her voice was thick and dead, not at all the vibrant shout I was used to.

“You’re going to have to tell me,” I quavered. “You know you are, Kitty.”

“Yes. I know. I’ll tell you. And when he gets back and out of his snit I’m going to wring his neck. Cam’s mother had a little girl when he was about five. She was a beautiful little thing; like a doll. Mrs. McCall played with her exactly like a doll. Dressed her up in frilly clothes, painted her nails, took her everywhere, like a toy poodle. Deirdre was old enough so that she had her own crowd and her own activities, and Cam was all boy and had his own pack, too. I don’t imagine they were jealous of all the attention the little sister got, but they had to have noticed. Carrie—her name was Caroline—was just as spoiled and headstrong as you might imagine, growing up with all that attention and adulation. Even the old man paraded her around at parties and things, though I’ve never been sure he knew he had two other children besides her. Well, one afternoon Madame McCall was late to have her nails done, and she called Cam in from the river, where he and some of the little black kids from downriver were crabbing, and shoved Sister Carrie at him in her little yellow sundress and matching sandals and told him to watch her till she got home, not to take his eyes off her, not to leave her alone for an instant. So of course, because he wasn’t quite eight at the time, Cam did take his eyes off her for a minute, just long enough for her to run straight down into the river. The boys dived for her as long as they could, but the current is strong there, and she was found way downstream.”

“Oh, my God,” I breathed.

“Of course, his mother had hysterics that lasted about two years,” she said, “and his father was so angry at him that he sent him off to Episcopal and boarded him there. He didn’t really come back home until he started architecture school, and he lived away from home then, too. I think he saw his grandmother quite often, but to his mother and father he was the little bastard who let their darling drown. We all knew it; he was our playmate on his holiday breaks, and we simply and completely loved him, and hated his parents. Even our families felt sorry for him. But he never said a word about it. There simply isn’t anything you can do about a thing like that. I can’t imagine why he hasn’t told you. It’s the thing that’s shaped his life.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve told you that whenever he had a girl before he met you, he would never let her out of his sight. He was with her every second he could be. Then she’d fade away and another one would come along and it was the same thing. When you finally appeared, we watched like hawks to see if you were going to make the cut—you know he never wanted you to be anywhere but with him—and when you did, we all cheered. We thought now that he had someone he could really be with all the time.”