Summer on the Cape (2 page)

So, by the end of their dinner, Allie had agreed to spend the summer at Adam’s place on Cape Cod, and by the time Adam’s driver had brought her back to her apartment in the Village, her mind was racing ahead, making busy plans for the summer.

She had run up the four flights to her apartment, stopping on her way down the hall to knock on her neighbor’s door. She wanted someone with a sympathetic ear to keep her company while she packed her things, and Maria, her neighbor and best friend for the last seven years, had the most sympathetic ear in New York City.

“Come on, Maria. Come on.” Allie barely waited to explain as Marie got all the bolts and locks on her door opened, and stuck her dark, curly-topped head out into the hall. “I need some help packing. Come on!” Allie was already down the hall, unlocking the door of her own apartment. “I’ll tell you all about it.” Maria dropped everything. She told her husband, Steve, to mind the baby and joined Allie in her apartment.

Allie packed her suitcase as though she were throwing darts at a board, scooping her clothes out of dresser drawers and closets and flinging them at the suitcase. Maria smiled indulgently as she retrieved the jeans and shirts and underthings that Allie tossed about, and repacked them in neat stacks. She listened patiently while Allie told her what little she knew of the revised plans for the summer and complained about being bossed around. She made Allie a cup of tea and got her to sit down for a bit.

“You know, Allie,” she said, reassuringly, “a summer in a house on one of America’s most beautiful beaches is not exactly a bad thing.”

“But all my plants. What about all my plants?” Allie was digging under her bed, searching for her old deck shoes.

“Leave me a key. I’ll keep them watered.”

“You’re a doll.” Allie sat up, brushing at her mussed hair and tossing the retrieved shoes into the suitcase on the bed. “And in an emergency, call Adam.” She grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote on it. “Here’s his number. He’s got a key to the apartment, too. If there’s any problem, call him. He’ll know how to reach me.”

Finally, the suitcase was packed. Allie’s nervous excitement was a little bit soothed and Maria left, taking Allie’s extra key and promising to be in touch with Adam, if necessary.

And now, as she clung nervously to her seat, Allie tried to think ahead, to the summer that lay before her. She wouldn’t have to do a thing except work. The man who takes care of the house when it’s empty would meet her at the airport, and he’d keep an eye on things for her.

Allie pulled her bag out from the clutter she’d just created and rummaged around in it until she found the business card Adam had given her in the restaurant.
Here it is
, she said to herself, reading the name Adam had written on the paper.

Zachariah Eliot. Now that’s a good name for a caretaker
, she thought.
A good Yankee name. Nice and rustic. Sounds like he stepped right off the
Mayflower. Allie leaned her head back and closed her eyes again.
Well, that’s all right. If he’s got an interesting face, maybe I’ll do his portrait sometime this summer, behind Adam’s back.
She told herself obstinately that it would be a welcome change from painting the rich and powerful.

* * *

On the ground, Zach Eliot waited for the commuter flight from New York. Cindy, at the desk in the little terminal building, had told him the plane would be down soon, so he’d come outside to watch for it. Looking out over the silver tops of the scrub pine trees that surrounded the airfield, he narrowed his eyes against the sun, searching impatiently for some sign that the plane was arriving.

He looked at his watch.
Damn
, he said to himself,
I don’t have time for this.
At this time of the year, he was needed down at the harbor, and the plane had already been delayed over an hour, really messing up his plans for the day. He leaned his long frame back against the white-painted cinder block wall of the terminal and looked at his watch again, trying to control his irritation.

He knew, of course, what was really bothering him, and it wasn’t having to get back to the boats. It was having to pick up this woman who was coming on the plane. Not that he cared who Adam had in his house. That was entirely Adam’s affair, and if Adam wanted to have a girl there, it was all right with Zach.

But ever since this other thing, this damned project of Adam’s, Zach was in no mood to accommodate anything or anyone associated with Adam Talmadge. When Adam’s secretary had called to notify him that this woman—what was her name? Allie Randall—was going to be on the three o’clock plane, he’d been about to tell her that Adam could go screw himself.

But he’d held his tongue. There was going to be plenty of trouble over this development scheme of Adam’s, and the time for the real fight between them was still down the road a piece. When that time came, there would be many changes, and this old arrangement—providing transportation from the airport—would be ended, of course. In the meantime, he would continue to honor it. The Talmadges had set it up with Zach’s father when they first started to rent that house on the beach, back when Zach was just a kid, and he didn’t like to terminate an old custom.

He looked at his watch one more time.
Damn!
Well, he couldn’t do anything at this minute to stop Adam and that bunch of barracudas Adam was representing. And there was also not a damn thing he could do to bring that plane down any sooner. Zach thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, rested his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, letting the sun warm his face.

* * *

Bad weather in the New York area had delayed their takeoff, and heavy winds were still buffeting the plane as it made its way above Long Island Sound. Allie watched in fearful fascination as the plane’s wings rocked on either side of her, like a seesaw.

Pressing her forehead against the window, she stared down at the water, five thousand feet below her, the wind-whipped whitecaps visible on the waves’ surface even at this height. Through thick, swirling patches of cloud, she could see the little towns along the Connecticut coast, and, in their harbors, the bright clusters of sailboats, jerking at their moorings in the choppy water, the rough waves breaking up against the shoreline.

Abruptly, as though she’d been slapped, Allie recognized the real source of her anxiety. A wash of terrible memory clutched deep inside her body.

Of course. The recognition came with heart-wrenching clarity. Of course.

The bad weather, the rough waters below her. How could she not feel fearful? Inevitably, like cold hands over her face, it all came back.

It was down there, in one of those little seaside towns where rich people had their summer homes and where they kept their pretty sailboats in the town marinas, that she’d had to go to claim her father’s body. The Coast Guard had been holding him in a horrible little local morgue, and a union representative had been sent to her home in the Bronx to tell her of her father’s death. She was a few months short of her eighteenth birthday, barely old enough, they thought, to handle the details, so the Coast Guard officer told her only that the winds of a sudden winter storm had swept her father from the deck of the barge as it fought its way through the fierce waves. What they didn’t tell her, she already knew. Probably he’d been drinking. They thought a girl who was still in her teens should be shielded from such harsh realities. But it was too late for that. Allie Randall already had a firm grip on reality, in all its harshness.

Those men at the morgue had no way to know, but Allie had been handling “the details” ever since her mother’s death, six years earlier. While Mike Randall, bereft, sank into ever-lengthening periods of bitter self-pity, raging piteously against his fate, his daughter took on the care of their shabby little house on Etheridge Street, a sad little fringe of a decaying old neighborhood in the Bronx, only steps from the river, under a dirty network of railroad bridges and factory smokestacks. Young as she was, she quickly learned to manage the real demands of everyday life. She learned to manage the meager wages Mike earned working the barges along the Sound, and on the infrequent nights that he came home, she had a hot meal ready for him—and stayed clear of his helpless rages as he grew increasingly hard on himself and on everyone else. He drank too much and, though he never struck her, she learned to be wary around him.

In time, the little girl became glad that her father was rarely home. Mike needed comfort far more than he could give it, and so the little girl mourned the loss of her mother alone.

Who can say why it was that Allie found her own comfort in the little sketches that began to fill her notebooks? What moved her to capture the radiant beauty of the color-filled sky and the shifting tints and hues of the trees and houses around her? In the evenings, when her schoolwork and her housework were done, the lonely little girl painted pictures of everything she had seen that day: the sky and the bridges and the people on the streets. It was almost enough to make up for the loss of a normal home and family. Almost. But she could never put aside her fantasies about the others, the girls at school who, she was sure, went home to ideal families, to warm kitchens and happy laughter and loving parents. Too proud to allow anyone to know the sad circumstances of her life, she learned to move unobtrusively among her classmates, drawing little attention to herself, making no close friends, and becoming an observer rather than observed. Like so many lonely and neglected children, she watched from outside the circle of other girls’ popularity. But for Allie, this was not the sad place of isolation and resentment that it might have been. With the clear eye and the exquisite sensitivity of the skilled artist she was becoming, it brought her profound pleasure to pay close attention to the ways emotion and character were revealed in faces and body language, to feel her talent and her art as they gathered strength inside her and built a force against the demons of envy and self-doubt that are so often the result of poverty and isolation. Gradually, the pages of her sketchbooks filled with drawings of people from the world around her, faces seen in the school’s lunchroom, in homeroom, on the streets of her neighborhood, and in the shops where she bought her groceries—brilliant portraits, quickly captured.

Fortunately, her teachers recognized her talent and with their help, before her junior year, Allie was granted a full scholarship at an exclusive prep school where her talent would be properly developed. It was a prize plum, rarely awarded.

But there are no pure pleasures and the price Allie paid for her scholarship was the ostracism by some of her new classmates, rich kids who, with their privilege and a meanness of spirit, tried their best to make her miserable. Their message was clear. She should understand that despite her scholarship and her presence in their midst, she was an intruder; there were doors that would never open for her, there were worlds that would never welcome her, there were places where she would never belong. Though they couldn’t break her spirit and they couldn’t take away her talent—for that became still more powerful as her sword and her shield—they did make wounds that her later maturity and experience could only veil but never fully heal. The damage had been done.

The cool window of the plane felt good against Allie’s forehead. She lifted her gaze from the waters below, and stared straight out into the sky, empty except for misty clouds, empty except for the memories, memories of that cold night, the cold morgue, her father’s body cold on a gurney. Memories of her life after Mike Randall’s death.

Her years of managing home and finances and her obvious independence and competence made it easy for the union’s staff to provide for her legal guardianship for the few months remaining until her eighteenth birthday, so she was able to stay at home and continue at her school. There’d been a small insurance policy, enough to get her through a year or two, and, as she stood by her father’s drowned body, Allie made a truce with her many losses. She would not let self-pity hold her back. She was determined to use the grace period the insurance money provided to begin to build her own life on the twin pillars of her talent and her stubborn independence.

She rarely thought now about those hard times. Success was becoming a reality, and she was beginning to enjoy the fruits of her hard work. Adam had encouraged her to concentrate on portrait work, and she was already being recognized as one of New York’s most gifted young portrait painters. There were many blessings to count and she was grateful for each of them.

She sighed deeply once or twice, and closed the door again on the bad memories. With both hands, she brushed her ragged bangs back from her forehead and looked around her—and realized, as the plane continued on to Cape Cod, that her anxiety had disappeared.

* * *

The plane swung out over the ocean to make its approach into the windswept landing strip outside Provincetown. Allie watched, fascinated, as they flew low over the blue ocean, over white waves at the shore’s edge and then over pale yellow beach fringed by green-tipped dunes. The gray runway lay straight ahead of them, flat and bare in the bright sunlight and a strong crosswind bounced the little Cessna up and down as it made its wobbling descent onto the field. To her amazement, the pilot looked totally unconcerned, making a perfectly smooth landing and taxiing the plane up to the terminal building as gently as a grandma wheeling a baby’s stroller through the park. After the door opened, Allie let the other passengers leave ahead of her, and took a minute to catch her breath, glad to be on solid ground.

She had to scrunch down to step through the low doorway onto the steps that were suspended by a thick wire from the plane’s door opening, and she grasped the wire to steady herself as she stepped onto the tarmac. Then she stood up straight, shifting her bag by its shoulder strap to be more comfortable. A shaft of late afternoon sunlight broke through the cloud cover, and a light breeze sent a strand of her hair across her brow. She lifted her hand to brush it back. She paused and looked around her.