Sex Between, The (3 page)

Uncle Andrew had shoehorned his little Daf in between a Cadillac and an Olds. It looked, somehow, as though it had been sitting there for a long time, waiting patiently for Rover Boy to come home. Even before she paid off the cabbie and turned around, she felt Maggie standing behind her with the door open and a frank appraisal in her eyes.

She didn't give Maggie a chance to say a word. She threw her the trench coat and pushed past her into the house.

Maggie followed out to the kitchen and brought her a cup for coffee. "I don't suppose you've had any breakfast."

"That's right," Lee said. "But I'm not hungry." She filled the cup and carried it to the table.

"I don't know what your women have against food," Maggie said seriously. "It's just as important… as other things."

Lee grinned as she pulled out a chair. "Oh, is it now, Miss Pris? And how would you know about that?"

Maggie blushed a pink that almost matched her dress and Lee was instantly sorry for the dirty crack. She had never discussed Maggie's love life with her, though she suspected that the girl clung to her virginity with a zealot's fervor. Not that she was a prude. Just old-fashioned. Saving it like a perfumed goodie in a hope chest.

"I'm sorry," Lee said. "I didn't mean to be crude."

"You weren't," Maggie said. "But I don't know how you could help but be, with the kind of women you run around with."

"How do you know what kind of women I run around with?"

"I can imagine," Maggie said innocently. "They keep you up all night and send you home without breakfast. You know very well you're supposed to take care of your stomach or you'll be flat on your back again and what good will you do any of them?"

"Sometimes they like me flat on my back," Lee said, grinning again. "I can't play strong arm all the time."

"Oh, you make me sick!" Maggie wailed.

Lee sighed. "You know something?" she said. "Sometimes you make me sick, too. Do you think I intend to spend the rest of my life taking stomach pills and sitting around letting my rear get fat? I'd be bored to death in two weeks if I lived the way you want me to. Wear your boots and eat your mush and wash behind your ears... What the hell do you think I am anyway?"

"A damned fool," Maggie said without hesitation. "You run around like a rat on a treadmill and pretend you're having a high old time. But you know something? I don't believe a word of it. And I don't think you do either." She stopped to catch her breath. "How do you like that?"

Lee didn't like it a bit. It hit a little closer to home than she cared to admit. She emptied the coffee cup and banged it down on the plank table. "Where's Andrew?"

"Upstairs," Maggie said calmly. "Reading the funnies for the tenth time."

Maggie had a triumphant gleam in her eyes that galled Lee's soul. "I wonder what would happen to him if he ever tried reading a book?" she said off-handedly.

"Now, just a minute," Maggie said defensively. "You don't have to pick on him just because I get on your nerves. He...

"Okay, okay," Lee said. "I know he is the essence of all good things and I am an old bastard with a sore head. What does he want this time, anyhow?"

Maggie's face grew serious and paler around the lips.

"Kate's had another heart attack," she said quietly. "Daddy says this one almost finished her."

Lee stood up and walked away to the window overlooking the back garden. A little purple thing with white stripes on the petals had poked its way between two stones. "When was this?" she said studying the flower, hating its vigor. Hating anything that was young and strong and healthy, while Kate was dying.

"Over a week ago," Maggie said. "She wouldn't let Daddy tell us until she was feeling better. You know how she is."

"Yeah, I know," Lee said tiredly.

"We have to be at Ravensway at three," Maggie said. "She is expecting us."

Lee remembered the last time and she and Maggie had received the summons. Two months ago—maybe three. The old lady had just sort of fallen apart, caved in—like an ancient castle crumbling in on itself.. It had sickened her to see Kate like that. Today it would be even worse.

Maggie came up behind her and put her hand on Lee's sleeve. "She's ninety, Lee. You can't expect..."

"Somehow I always did," Lee interrupted. "Somehow I thought Kate would live to bury us all." She paused, then murmured, "I think Kate thought so, too."

The thump of Uncle Andrew's stumpy legs pounding down the stairs snapped them both back from melancholy. Lee turned toward the doorway to watch the old battleship sail in.

Andrew De Groot had seen more of trouble in his lifetime than most men might see in three. One of Kate's poor relations, he had been tucked in securely under her thumb since the day he was born. In the family firm, she had saddled him with all the dirty work she could find for him to do. He had come to her poor and wisely, she had kept him that way, putting him in his place and stifling any plan of rebellion he might have had. He had married six times, each time to a woman of Kate's selection, playing his role in the dwindling family's desperate struggle to produce sons. He had buried six wives. The last one, Maggie's mother, had given him his only child and nearly cost him his sanity. For it was his own drunken effort to deliver the child that had resulted in hemorrhage and death. He had started to go to paunch after that, his tiny frame burdened with trouble and beer.

But no one, looking at Andrew, would know these things. One would see only a little red-faced man with twinkling eyes who looked more like Santa Claus than any human had a right to. Lee had always had a weakness for Uncle Andrew. He had told the funniest stories when she and Maggie were kids and always he had had something special for her in the side pocket of his coat. But he had not aged well. He forgot things, he bumbled, he repeated himself. And he made blunders that she often had to smooth over with Kate.

She was remembering the blunders now, as he strode toward her. If Kate died, Andrew should by rights become head of the firm. And if Andrew became head of the firm, the Van Tassel Corporation would run smoothly down the drain.

"You grew an inch!" Andrew roared in his quietest tone. He grabbed her by the hand and the elbow and shook.

Lee, who had exercised for two years to reach five-four, grinned at the familiar greeting and shook back. Then she poked him in the belly and said, "You grew an inch yourself."

The old man laughed happily. The exchange had palled on Lee more years ago than she could count. But she knew that Andrew found security in the routine. When he had settled back to his usual wheezing quiet, she said, "What's this Maggie was telling me about Kate?"

"Ah Kate," he said, his gruff voice suddenly soft. "Kate." He closed his eyes for a moment, as though staring at something private, something sacred. "There's a woman, Lee. There is a real woman."

Lee sighed. Getting a straight answer from Andrew was like pulling a splinter from under a fingernail. "I know, Andrew," she said gently. "We all know."

Maggie stepped to the old man's side and took his hand. She got a funny, mushy look around her eyes when Andrew started wandering. Lee remembered seeing that look even when they were kids.

"I told Lee that Kate was ill," Maggie said gently.

"Yes," Andrew said. He looked up at Lee now and his eyes were red like his cheeks. "She doesn't want to die here, Lee. She wants me to take her home."

"What?" Lee said. "Are you crazy?"

"No," the old man said. "Not yet. Neither is Kate. She is simply very old. And she is homesick. She wants me to take her home."

"To Holland?" Lee said wearily.

"Of course, Lee," Andrew said. "We were children there."

"She wants to be buried under some smelly old windmill in a pair of wooden shoes. Is that what you're telling me?" Lee heard herself almost shouting at the old man and she stopped for a moment to calm down. Then she said, "Andrew, she hasn't been there in seventy years. There's been a war or two since then. Bombs. Flush toilets and imported tulips. If she goes back there now, she'll die of plain disappointment."

"I agree with Lee," Maggie said. "Kate's used to luxury, to..."

Andrew sighed like a wind through spruce. Both of them stopped agreeing with each other and turned to look at him.

"You forget something," Andrew said and he shook his finger scoldingly at Lee. "It's Kate we're talking about. And Kate wants to go home."

Lee shut her mouth and kept it that way.

CHAPTER THREE

Ravensway, a hundred green and wooded acres on the Hudson, seemed more like an elaborate memorial park than a place to call home. Lee remembered it best as a place where a kid was not allowed to run on the grass or have a pony or keep a dog. Dirt was an anathema to Kate, and kids and ponies and dogs made dirt. As much as she could, Lee had given the place a wide berth.

And yet, steering her black Lincoln slowly up the winding drive to the house, she realized suddenly that she had missed it. And missed Kate. The house itself was a gloomy stone mass of twenty rooms, damp and cold in summer and stuffy with fireplace smoke in the winter. Every main room had at least a two-way exposure and plenty of windows. But somehow, there was never sunlight inside, nor a feeling of coziness. In the hundred and fifty years that the house had stood, only Kate had managed to thrive in it.

"It's exactly three," Andrew said. "We're expected at three."

Lee smiled. "So we'll be approximately thirty seconds late," she said easily. "That's about ten demerits apiece."

She followed Andrew and Maggie around to the front of the house, looking up at the windows as she went and commenting to herself that the place could use a paint job. It surprised her that Kate should overlook even so minute a detail.

Miss Ida Winkle, who had answered Kate's door for close to seventy years, told them they were to wait in the library. And would they be wanting some refreshments after the long drive from the city?

Lee grinned and patted the pink, puffy cheek. "How about some of that stuff you and Kate have been bootlegging for the past fifty years?"

The little round face sank deeper into its wrinkles and the blue eyes sparkled. "I could find some down in the cellar," she whispered. "We're only drinkin' cocoa now-days."

"You do that," Lee whispered back. "But don't tell Kate."

Miss Ida Winkle scuttled away down the hall and left the three of them to wait.

"Well, I like that," Maggie said indignantly. "She didn't even ask us."

"You two settle for cocoa," Lee said. "If we can't sell the damned stuff, somebody's got to drink it."

"It's selling," Andrew said, "since we put it in the new can."

He launched into a salespitch for Dutch Boy Instant that Lee had had the privilege of hearing many times before. She turned him off in the middle of the third sentence and strolled ahead of them down the dark corridor to the library.

The largest room in the house, the library was about as comfy as the waiting room of Penn Station. Three walls were lined from floor to ceiling with leather bound volumes... thousands of them, which had never been read, but each of which was removed once a week to be carefully dusted and realigned on its shelf. These walls Lee ignored as though they didn't exist. It was to the fourth she turned her attention, as she had since she was a child.

She sat down at one end of the leather couch and, for maybe the millionth time, she took a good look at her family tree.

It was a source of endless fascination, studying the blond-haired, blue-eyed beings in those six portraits. A kind of study in human fallacy. By a careful process of selective inbreeding, the Van Tassel family had very nearly managed to reproduce itself right out of existence. And the whole story was written there, in those faces. The first of the clan, Cornelius, had been a giant of a man, well over six feet tall, and built like an oak. The second, Henrik, a little less tall, a little less sturdy. And so on down the line to Jamie, Lee's father, a washed-out, frail-looking little man with features not exactly feminine, and yet not quite masculine either. The branches growing out from the tree had fared no better, producing fragile-boned, dyspeptic males who rarely lived beyond forty, and females too delicate to survive the rigors of childbirth.

Among this diminutive, sickly crew, Kate Ten Broeck Van Tassel, a "foreigner" imported from Flanders, stood out like a giant among pygmies...

At the sound of the old lady's cane on the stairs, Lee snapped instantly back to attention and stood up, facing the arched doorway.

Kate had carried a cane as long as Lee could remember. Not to walk with, but for announcing her presence, emphasizing her points, proclaiming her authority... and occasionally, for letting an unruly granddaughter know who was boss. But even when Kate had applied that stick to her stinging behind, Lee had understood it as right, because Kate told her it was right. Just as Andrew would have put a bullet through his brain if Kate had told him it was the right thing for him to do.

Even at ninety, old and tired and worn thin with pain and time, Kate Van Tassel was a magnificent woman. Still straighter and taller than anyone else in the family, her beauty undimmed by the spray of wrinkles, she kept stylishly dressed, her cheeks rouged, her bosom padded just enough to hide the sag of age. Lee felt a swell of pride catch in her throat as she watched Kate making her way slowly across the room toward her.

"You," Kate said, jabbing the cane toward her. "Turn that chair around here."

They had not seen each other for months. But, coming from Kate, it was a comparatively warm greeting. Lee pulled Kate's favorite rocker over next to the couch and held it steady while the old lady sat down.

"You haven't been to see me," Kate said, glancing up.

The voice was a little harsher than Lee remembered it, but she knew that Kate was not
angry
with her. "I've been busy," she said. "If you'd let me put a telephone in this damned place..."

"You wouldn't use it," Kate said.

Lee smiled. "True. But it's a convenient excuse."