Season of Storm (30 page)

"A ballad, mmm?" Lew said.

"I had a sort of tuneless something in the back of my head while I was writing it, Lew," Smith said. "It's...okay, here it is. 'We didn't wait to fall in love,'" she sang, giving him rhythm without much melody, as she had for Mel. "'We loved and then we met...'"

His brown straight hair, parted at the side, flopped untidily over his forehead, and though his face was not handsome his deep blue eyes twinkled with humour, and that was very attractive. If her father had not acted like a madman that summer.... "So wake me up to say goodbye, 'cause now it's over.'"

She finished and grinned at him. "What do you think?"

He laughed. "Stop looking at me as if I were a doctor going to save your baby's life!" he protested. He ran his hands up the keys in a preparatory trill. "All right," he said, "We obviously want something with some sexual teeth in it. We want a flattened fifth or two."

He began to pick out a melody with one hand, then his left hand joined in with some dark chords. "So wake me up to say goodbye...up to say good...so wake me up to say goodbye...'cause now it's o-ver....' Bridge," he announced after a moment, breaking into a haunting series of chords that somehow brought Johnny's face before her. Her heart clenched, and tears she had never shed burned at the back of her eyes.

Lew stopped playing suddenly and slapped his ear. Smith blinked at him. "Pencil!" he demanded, patting his other ear futilely, then pointed. "Over there on the coffee table."

She fetched it and he took it from her and began to make squiggles on the paper with one hand, while still picking out chords with the other.

"Okay, now, Smith—do I have to call you Smith?—I think we need a repeat of your chorus here...listen...." He began to sing, "'Now all that's left is how to end, How to begin...' You see the shape here? Can we have another go with the chorus between these two?"

Entranced, her mind whirling with the rightness of the music, she moved around to sit beside him on the piano bench.

"Yes," she said, "I see that. 'So wake me up to say goodbye 'cause now it's over. I feel it in my heart and in your eyes...' How about...'Another place, another time, another...' what?" Smith muttered. She tried again. "'Another place, a better time, a different...
season
!' Give me your pencil a minute!" She scribbled the line as she spoke. "'But now...it's over, and...we have to say Goodbye.' Does that work?"
 

Lew was nodding his head as he played under her. "Yup. Getting there," he said.

***

"Let's call Mel!" Smith said excitedly. The song was finished. Lew had been totally inspired, and the music he had put her poem to was fabulous—haunting, aching and sexy in about equal parts. She was feeling intoxicated, as if the creative process were a potent wine. "I want him to hear it!"

Lew looked at his watch and said dryly, "If Mel is awake at this hour, it's usually because he's entertaining a lady. If he's not awake...."

"Two o'clock!" Smith looked at her watch in amazement. She shook her arm and held the watch to her ear. "Two o'clock in the
morning
? But we can't have been working so long!"
 

"What can I get you to drink?" asked Lew, getting to his feet.

"I guess one more coffee for the road can't hurt."

She must have drunk a dozen cups already tonight—at this rate she wouldn't fall asleep till noon. But she was too excited and energized to say goodnight just yet.

"Just like old times," Lew said as they sank onto the sofa, she with coffee, he with a scotch and soda. "That was quite a summer."

"Oh—Paper Creek," Smith said ruefully. "How humiliating it all was! You must have been just...outraged. I was so ashamed of my father! You know, I could hardly bear to go out on a date for ages after that. I totally wiped your name from my memory, which I guess is why I was so surprised tonight. I called you 'the boy up at Paper Creek.' And I never told anyone about it."

"Except one person?" suggested Lew.

She laughed. "Yes—just recently. How did you know?"

"You said you'd called me the boy up at Paper Creek. You must have been telling someone."

"Yes," she said, remembering how telling Johnny about that long-ago humiliation had taken the sting out of the memories.

Lew said, "I couldn't believe that summer that you were actually considering a career in your father's business, and I was more than surprised later when I learned from the paper that you had gone into that world. You seemed very unsuited to it."

"Did I?" No one had ever told her that.

"Well, you had a tendency to be tough and defensive, and I thought how much tougher and more defensive you'd have to be to survive in that industry, and what a pity it would be if you did." He touched a lock of hair back from her forehead. "But you didn't get tougher. You got softer. More vulnerable."

"I did, though," she said sadly. "I got a lot tougher. I had to have a skin so thick I—" she grimaced and broke off. "I hated every minute of it. It was like being in solitary confinement. I didn't even know how tough I was."

Lew stroked another lock of hair and moved closer along the sofa. "Well, you don't look tough anymore. You look soft and very female." He bent his head, and it was obvious he meant to kiss her. "So what caused the change?"

She couldn't let him kiss her. She didn't know why, because Lew was sensitive and intelligent, and she liked him a lot. But his lips on hers, his hands on her body, would be a betrayal of something.

"I...I fell in love," she said.

He went still. "Hmmm," he said, absorbing it. "Recently?"

"Very recently." She didn't know why she was saying it, except that she had to stop him from kissing her—but certainly not for Johnny's sake.  

"And you are still smitten?"

Of course she wasn't. It had all been a dream from the beginning. "Yes, very much," she said.

It wasn't that she didn't like Lew, sh
e did
like him—so why couldn't she let him kiss her? Why was she lying to keep him away, as though even a simple kiss would be sacrilege?
 

Lew sat back with a rueful smile and picked up his drink.

"There's always someone coming between us, Shee. Do you think I'll ever get my chance with you?"

Of course he would. Lew was a gorgeous, sensitive man any woman would count herself lucky to know. As soon as she got over this thing with Johnny, she'd be....

"I'm sorry," she heard herself say softly. "I'm married, Lew. We got married secretly last week."

Lew's head snapped back with surprise. "Is
that
where you were? Why—don't tell me you had to elope to escape daddy's vigilant eye?"
 

With belated caution she said, "No, well—it was rather sudden. We didn't exactly plan on....My father didn't know anything about it."

"And where's your husband now? You're not living with him, or the papers would have said so."

"No...we...Daddy's heart...."

Lew got up and strolled over to the piano and, his glass tucked in against his chest, he bent to read from the heavily annotated paper still propped up there.

 "'So wake me up to say goodbye, 'cause now it's over....We'll whisper 'maybe' to ourselves, then say goodbye."

His eyes found hers across the room. "Daddy's heart be damned," he commented softly. "What went wrong, Shee?" And it was as though he was an old friend and really wanted to know.

"Nothing. I can't explain it. It was just—" She squeezed her eyes tight as hot tears burned her. Her heart was suddenly hurting in her breast, as though...as though it really had been broken the morning after her wedding, when Johnny Winterhawk looked at her as if she were a stranger and said
My God, what have I done?
 

"It was just one of those things," she said.

***

"I'm quitting," she finally told her father the next day. "Did Rolly mention? I don't want to be in the business anymore."

"
What?
"
 

Rolly hadn't mentioned. "Sorry. I meant to tell you as soon as I told Rolly, but things got in the way. I thought maybe he'd have broken it to you."

"You're quitting St. John? Completely?"

"I have a new career. I'm going to write. I'm going to be a poet and songwriter."

He stared at her fiercely for a moment from under frowning brows.

"Hell!" he exploded. "What did the bastards do to you, girl? You love your work. You love St. John Forest Products as much as I do."

"No," she corrected gently. "I love
you,
Daddy. And you love St. John Forest Products. So to please you, I did, too. But literature—poetry was always my real love, I'm sure you remember that."
 

"I remember you've wanted to follow in my footsteps ever since you were sixteen. I never forced you. I told you at the time it would be a tough occupation for a girl."

"Did you?" she smiled sadly. "I guess I thought you wanted me to be tough. Different from other girls."

Her father's eyes kindled. "Well, you
were
different. You were as smart as a whip. You still are." His voice held pride, and she recognized it for the first time. She wondered why she had never heard that note in his voice before. Her father's voice at fault, or her own
ears?
 

"Do you remember my first summer up at Paper Creek?" she asked.

"You were too young, but you insisted on going," he said, and she wondered how the past could be so confused in memory.

"You wanted me to go." But feeling that, had she insisted on going, hoping to please him? "Do you remember the day you flew up in a helicopter and took Luther Brady back with you?"

Her father shook his head. "Brady? Was he the camp superintendent?"

"He was a university student working for the summer—a boy I was friends with."

He wrinkled his brow at a faint memory. "He was bothering you—somebody called down and told me some kid was bothering you."

"And you never troubled to ask me for the facts. No, he wasn't bothering me. He was my friend. You humiliated us both very publicly, and then you left me there alone for the rest of the summer to face all the men who'd seen it happen. I was afraid to look at a boy after that."

Her father was watching her as though he knew his world was going to crumble, but he said nothing.

"You used to tell me not to date any of your employees because they'd only be looking for a way in by marrying me," she accused him. "I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought no one could ever love me for myself. Is that true?"

"No," said her father. He looked shaken.

"Did
you
ever love me?"
 

"My God, don't you know it?" He was whiter than he had been after his heart attack, if that was possible.

For an answer, she only looked at him.

"You and your mother are the only two people in the world I've ever loved," he said hoarsely. "Of course I love you! I've loved you since the day you were born. I'll love you till the day I die."

"I thought you stopped loving me when Maman died," Smith said. "I thought you hated me. I've always thought you blamed me for her death."

"Why would I hate you?" he whispered. "Why would you think it?"

"You never spoke to me, Daddy. I thought you blamed me because she'd died and I was still alive. You never even told me she was dead. It was Madame Stubelski, from downstairs, who told me."

"
Ma pauvre enfant!"
She could hear the stream of French as though Tante Marie were behind her now.
"Ta mere, ta mere! Ah! Ah!"
She could have cried now the tears she had not known how to cry then.
 

"You never said anything to me about it. You sat in your corner in front of your easel for days and days and you never moved, never said a word. Without Tante Marie I'd have starved.

"Then one day you painted thick smears over the canvas and stood up and went out. I looked at the canvas after you left. It was a painting of mother and me. I could still see bits of mother's face under the smears, but my face was completely blotted out. And then we left Paris and came here and everything changed."

She was crying now. A flood of tears poured unchecked from her eyes and bathed her face.

"I didn't know," her father said. "Forgive me. I didn't know how to do it. I was lost. I didn't know my own name."

Smith turned her face away. "I loved Maman, too. But you never said one kind word to me. We could have comforted each other, shared the pain. When you chose to bear it alone, I had to do the same. I was too young, Daddy, I was too young to bear it alone."

"Yes, I see."

"I've told Rolly that I won't be going back to work. I'm telling you that I want to sell off my shares as soon as possible. And I'll be moving out. I'm going to buy a place in the city. I don't know how long that'll take. Depending on when you come home from the hospital, you may have to make arrangements for a nurse."

"I won't need a nurse," Cord St. John said.

"All right. I've hired a housekeeper."

"Do you intend to sever all relations with me?" her father asked gruffly.

"No, Daddy," she said tiredly. "I just intend to start living my own life."

"I love you," he said. "I thought you knew it. I thought I showed you. I'm sorry, Shulamith."

"All right," was all she could say.

Twenty-eight