Sleeping Beauty (15 page)

Don stopped arguing. He never talked about it again, even after Anne passed all her tests and entered Berkeley that fall. He felt she had betrayed and belittled him and everyone else who lived in the Haight, by choosing a way of life their parents had wanted for them. She even had gotten a job, as if to show them how different she was: she was waiting on tables at breakfast and lunch in a restaurant near the campus. As far as Don was concerned, she had become someone else, and it didn't make any difference that she still lived in the Haight because she stayed on the third floor and no one saw her but Eleanor.

She still slept on her mattress, and her clothes were still folded neatly in boxes, but now she had a desk. She had
found it in the basement, and cleaned and polished it, and she and some friends had carried it and an old piano stool to the third floor. She bought a lamp and notebooks and pencils at Woolworth's, placing them on the desk in precise order. Just looking at them made her feel like a student. And that was where she worked every night, until long after midnight, hunched over her books in a small circle of lamplight while the others who lived there straggled in, talked among themselves, played music, and finally went to sleep. Anne barely heard them. She heard only the words of the books she was reading.

“It's too much work,” Eleanor said at Christmas, dropping the books she had brought home for vacation on Anne's desk. “Do I really want to do this much work? Does anybody? You like it, don't you? Every bit of it.”

“Most of it,” Anne said. She felt almost apologetic. “It's exciting, putting pieces together so things make sense. That's the best of all.”

Eleanor shook her head: “I just can't get into it.” She flipped open one of her books. “All I know is I'm working my ass off learning about algorithms and revolutionary wars, and who really gives a damn?”

Anne looked at her somberly. “Are you going to drop out?”

“God, Anne, it's eerie the way you see through people. As a matter of fact . . . well, I've been thinking about it.”

“Couldn't you wait? Just finish this one year? It's only until May.”

“What's the point?”

Anne looked at her books and the pads of paper filled with her neat handwriting. “I guess the point is different for everybody.” She smiled at Eleanor. “Maybe I'm just afraid of being left alone on campus.”

“You've made lots of friends there.”

“I've made acquaintances.”

“Well, you'll make plenty of friends. And then one day at the restaurant you'll wait on a handsome, successful businessman worth megabucks who'll carry you off in his
carriage and take care of you forever and—” She stopped abruptly. Their eyes met. “I sound like my mother.”

“I think you're getting ready to go home.” Anne heard the wistfulness in her voice at the idea of home. “I'll miss you so much.”

“Hey, I'm not disappearing, you know. I haven't even made up my mind for sure.”

Anne studied her face. “You're going home for Christmas.”

“I never told you that.”

“No, it just seemed obvious.”

“God, I hate being obvious. Well, but it's just a visit. I thought I'd surprise them. Christmas is such a big deal with them, you know. Not with me; I couldn't care less. But they're really into it and I wasn't there for the last two—I didn't even send a Christmas card—and it would mean a lot to them . . .”

Anne nodded seriously. “It's very nice of you to do that for them.”

“That's what I thought. And I have a lot to think about, and maybe it's easier there than here. I mean, I don't know what I want. It seemed so simple when I came out here, but now it's all mixed up. I really love you, Anne, but you've changed, you know. It's like you don't need me very much anymore. And I feel pretty alone at Berkeley, like I'm in the wrong place. I don't know where the right place is; I guess that's what I have to figure out. Where I really want to be and what I really want to do.”

“Then I think you ought to be home, with people who can help you decide.”

“You really do? Honest to God? I don't want to run away from the Haight, you know; I ran away to come here, and it seems awfully childish to do it again in the other direction.”

“You're not running away. You're going home to formulate a plan of action for the rest of your life.”

Eleanor grinned. “What a great way to put it.
You're
great, Anne; you really are terrific. I was afraid to tell you, and now you've made me feel good.”

“Why were you afraid to tell me?”

“I thought you'd be sad.”

“I am. But I'm happy for you.”

“I'll write, you know. And phone? We'll talk all the time.”

“Where will you be?”

“I told you. Home.”

“But I don't know where home is. You never told me.”

“Oh. Well, neither did you.”

“Lake Forest, north of Chicago.”

“Saddle River. New Jersey.”

“New Jersey,” Anne echoed. “Such a long way.” She hurt inside with the pain of parting and of knowing she would be alone again.

“I'll probably end up back here,” Eleanor said. “I really love it. Just let me know where to find you, whatever you're doing.” She picked up her books. “I'll keep these. You never know.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow. I, uh, they sent me a ticket. I thought,
I
sure can't afford it, and if that's what they really want, why not let them do it.”

Anne nodded. “You'll have a wonderful time.”

They hugged each other, and Eleanor went back to her house. Anne stood beside her desk. She looked around the large bare room with five mattresses. She peered through the round window above her own mattress, just as she had when she first arrived, and gazed at the houses across the street and the streams of people below. This neighborhood had been her refuge for nearly two years. But Eleanor was right: she was changing.

And even more drastically, Haight Ashbury was changing. At first Anne barely noticed it; she spent little time there, and when she did, she was always at her desk. But after a while, she could not miss the changes, or pretend they were unimportant. They were too big, and too harsh.

The changes had been slow at first, beginning with a few television and newspaper reporters. Then, suddenly, it seemed that people with notebooks and cameras were
always on the streets and in the park, interviewing what they called “the flower children.” Pictures of girls with long hair and headbands and men with tattoos and earrings were in
Time
and
Newsweek;
psychologists wrote heavy stories analyzing why young people became hippies; camera crews who had filmed the Summer of Love came back and tried to arrange other dramatic events for the nightly news and television specials on drugs and dropouts. Gray Line buses with sealed windows began bringing tourists to the Haight, inching through the traffic of gawkers and the hippies who walked alongside, holding up mirrors for drivers and passengers to see themselves. Some of the hippies still talked about love and joy, but no one listened; the simple years of the Haight were gone.

Don Santelli and his friends stayed inside, refusing to be interviewed or filmed. But the bright lights, the tantalizing lens of the camera, the gapers in the streets, and the idea of a national audience were too much for many of them to resist, and they began to create new kinds of theater meant to shock and get ever more attention. The quiet people left the Haight. Shopkeepers closed their stores and moved out as heroin replaced marijuana and drug dealers took over street corners. Litter swirled on the sidewalks where men and women had sung and danced and Anne and Eleanor had walked home from the grocery store.

It's not my place anymore, Anne thought, straightening up from the round window. It hasn't been for a long time; I just didn't pay attention. She almost never saw Don anymore; he avoided her. He was filled with anger, at Anne for being in school, at the reporters and invading tourists, at the drug dealers who had sent shopkeepers fleeing. His friends were leaving in the first wave of a mass exodus of hippies who were starting communes near Big Sur and Eureka and other rural areas. And Eleanor was leaving in the morning.

And so am I, Anne decided. If I have to begin again, I'll do it the way I did before, with no ties at all.

Friends in one of her classes had told her there was a room for rent in the house they shared near the campus. It wasn't
the Haight, with its magical love and openness, but it wasn't solitariness, either. She would have a job, a place to live, people to talk to, and her books.

And my future, she thought. The last time, she had fled in terror of her life and in anguish over her aloneness in her own family. Now she was moving on because she had a place to go and a life to make.
And no one will ever make me afraid or helpless again.

She turned away from the window and took her duffel bag from a shelf in the closet. It was time to go.

V
ince had forgotten what she looked like. At first, when he left Lake Forest and moved to Denver, he saw her face everywhere, all his rage focused on her. But Denver was a long way from Lake Forest, and as the years passed and he became the city's most powerful developer, he barely thought of her. When he did, it was with a kind of automatic anger, the kind he felt toward Rita, another bitch who never missed a chance to make things hard for him. Occasionally an image came to him, almost always when he was in bed with someone, of bits and pieces of Anne Chatham: a slender hand pushing heavy black hair away from her eyes, bony knees, thin arms, small breasts, wide eyes looking at him without emotion, the hard core of her hatred that he had loved to smash.

He had not called it hatred then; he had not given it a name. Until the night she set out to destroy him. When he thought of it, he could call up, in an instant, his mounting fury at that dinner, and his cold vow, when she had vanished, to make his father pay for the sudden collapse of everything he had planned. He would destroy Chatham Development; he would see that Ethan lost Tamarack; he would make the family lose everything.

But that remembered anger always faded, as did the image of Anne. Vince never allowed himself to be weakened by the tug of memories or emotion or remorse.

Right now, he was far too busy to dwell on the past. He
was making his reputation. And he was making Denver his own.

He had moved there because of Ray Beloit, a fast-talking, high-stakes builder who thought of Denver as one big poker hand that he knew how to play. “Get your greedy ass out here,” he told Vince on the telephone when Vince called him while cleaning out his office at Chatham Development. “There's still gold out here in the West, only now it's called climate and open space and lifestyle. This place is growing like crazy and you and me could build up a storm. Take my word for it. My word is as good as my wallet.”

Vince had been in Denver often on his way to Tamarack; he knew its possibilities. The city beckoned newcomers, as it always had, by being the last oasis on the dusty plains before the mountains rose like battlements to the west. It had been growing slowly for years, but there were still thousands of empty acres scattered between its borders and the foothills.

Downtown Denver was a tight cluster of skyscrapers standing like sentinels in the flat landscape, the tallest man-made structures between Omaha and Los Angeles. They stood shoulder to shoulder, rising from a sprawling mosaic of neighborhoods, and nearby, the gold-domed state capitol gazed serenely at the long, jagged line of the Rocky Mountains in the distance, clear as cutouts most days but occasionally blurred by a haze of yellow-brown smog that some experts were predicting was going to be the dark side of Denver's boom. Floating on the vast plain, Denver had an unfinished look compared to the granite and steel of Chicago, and as Vince walked its streets in his first weeks there, he was already envisioning the changes he would make. There were those thousands of acres on the outskirts filled only with sagebrush and wild grass; there were empty lots within the city limits; there were entire blocks of squat buildings begging to be replaced by skyscrapers. Vince walked through Denver and knew it was a city waiting to be conquered.

He had $25 million from the sale of his shares in Chatham Development—enough to set himself up as a prime developer and to live as well as he chose. He rented a duplex
apartment in a luxury building, hired a New York decorator to furnish it, and used his connections from Lake Forest to move easily into Denver society. Less than a month after he arrived, he and Ray Beloit had opened an office and were planning their first purchase of land. That was when Charles called.

“I had to get your number from the operator,” he said. “I thought we were going to keep in touch.”

“I haven't had time. Has anything happened?”

“If you mean have we heard from Anne, we haven't. We fired the detective and we've got another one; hell, we've got two of them, from different agencies, but they don't seem any better than the first; they keep telling us not to expect too much. I don't know how much time they're really putting into it; nobody seems to care much about teenage runaways. It's like a tomb around here, Vince; you're lucky to be out of it. What are you doing with yourself? You hardly need to work with what you got for your shares . . .” There was a pause. “I wanted to go with you, you know.”

Vince was silent.

“I thought we could start our own company somewhere else, away from all the pressure around here. We could have handled . . . what Anne said . . . whatever she meant by it—”

“You know what she meant. She accused me of raping her. And you stood there and let her do it; you didn't do a fucking thing for me.”