The Body in the Ivy (13 page)

“Poor Bobbi. It still bothers you, doesn't it? Surely you had a better reason for getting rid of her than I might have? The green-eyed monster. And then there was your little peccadillo freshman year.”

“She told you about that?”

“She told me everything.”

“Later you came out the door; she didn't. I thought she might have stayed behind, but the next day I knew she hadn't. I don't know why you did it, but you did. Maybe it was an accident.”

“Why didn't you say something then—or later? Discretion? Or simply biding your time, perhaps. Waiting for the right moment? Waiting until you needed the money? That
is
what this is all about, isn't it?”

“Yes. It's always seemed like a kind of cushion for my old age. Knowing I could ask you for it. And now I need to buy my little house. I don't want to live anywhere else. The owner is giving me first refusal. It's not that much, but I don't have it, even with the money from this week.”

“After your little house, won't you want a little car or a little something else? Isn't that what blackmailers do?”

“I'm not a blackmailer! How could you think such a thing! This is a one-time business arrangement.”

“Don't get upset, dear. You won't have to live somewhere else. Now let's relax in the Jacuzzi and then you can give me one of your famous massages. I'll get some bubbly and glasses. We'll drink a toast to the future.”

“You're being wonderful about this. I can't thank you enough. Just a glass for you, though. I don't drink alcohol often and never before I give a massage. The toxins interfere with my centering.”

“Whatever you say. Now take off your nightgown and slip into a suit or nothing at all. I'll start the Jacuzzi and get myself some wine. Toxins have never bothered me.”

“It was an accident, wasn't it? I mean, Prin fell somehow.”

“Of course.”

The jets started pulsating, and Bobbi lowered her
nude body into the steamy, bubbling water. She was in very good shape and looked with approval at her flat abdomen. People often mistook her for a woman in her early forties, not fifties. She closed her eyes and sank down up to her neck, stretching her arms out to either side on the surface, enjoying the sensation as they bobbed about. She felt the water, her favorite element, wash away the last traces of the guilt she had about what she was doing, guilt that had almost prevented her from setting up this middle-of-the-night rendezvous. But it had worked out, worked out perfectly. The journey takes us on many roads, each in its own time. This was the right road and the right time.

She didn't hear the woman come up behind her, but she felt the blow. It wasn't a sharp pain, but it stunned her.

“Oh!”

Then there was the water—hot, foaming—in her nose, her mouth, stinging her eyes. She tried to lift her head up, but something was holding her down. She kicked her legs and flexed her arms, struggling to get out, get away. The tiles were slippery, and she was sinking farther into the froth. The sound of the pulsating jets mixed with the sound of her own blood pulsating in her ears. She gave in to the water and let it take her. It was the end of the journey.

 

Faith looked at her travel clock. It was five o'clock. Not time to get up, but she was wide awake. The wind had increased during the night and now it wailed outside her window. She got up and pulled the heavy drapes aside.
It was pitch-dark. Not even a hint of dawn's rosy fingers, unlike yesterday. She walked back and switched on the light next to her bed. The generators were still going strong. Brent would be up and was probably in the kitchen. It looked like they were in for some weather, as people around here said. She'd better talk to him about it.

She put on jeans and a heavy sweatshirt. Out in the hall, she had to switch on a light to make her way to the landing, and the view out those windows was no clearer than that from her room. It hadn't started to rain yet, but it would. No one was going to be leaving the island today—or most likely tomorrow, either.

Brent wasn't in the kitchen and hadn't been. The baked goods she'd left out for him, covered in Saran Wrap, were untouched. The coffeemaker wasn't on. She felt the kettle on the stove. It was cold. It occurred to her that she didn't know where he slept. Not in the part of the house where the women were; all but one of those rooms were filled. There was no name on that door and, in any case, she didn't see Brent, a lone male, feeling comfortable bunking down in the midst of this group. Maybe he had a room on the ground floor somewhere or in a place of his own on the island, an outbuilding like the writing cabin. It was not a day for getting up early. She didn't blame him for sleeping in. She went to the pantry for the coffee grinder and noticed that the door leading downstairs was ajar and that lights were on. He must be seeing to the generator and whatever else supplied the power for all these amenities. It was something she ought to know about, and she went down to ask him to show her what to do in case of an emergency.

Faith walked into the pool room. The wind was rattling the French doors, but otherwise the room was silent. There was no sign of the handyman. She walked past the long pool, its still, deep celadon water a sharp contrast to the raging weather outside. The pool lights were on, illuminating the tiles, but nothing else. The surface of the Jacuzzi, at the far end, was also still, but one of its lights wasn't shining. There was something in the way. Bobbi Dolan was lying at the bottom, an empty champagne bottle floating above her motionless body. Faith went into the water to try to pull the woman out, but couldn't. She stepped into the warm water to check for a pulse and immediately realized there was no hope of resuscitating the masseuse. Bobbi had been having her own private party, and the party was over.

SOPHOMORE YEAR

Lucy Stratton was sitting on the front porch of her family's Long Island summer house waiting for her friends Prin and Elaine Prince to arrive. It was August and she'd be heading back to school before too long. Freshman year hadn't been as bad as she'd thought it would be. After being in school with girls her whole life, a women's college was the last thing she wanted, but it wasn't her decision, her mother had said firmly. If Lucy wanted to pay her own way, fine. She could go to the University of Chicago, and why that was her daughter's choice was completely beyond her. Jews and hippies. No, Pelham had been where the Stratton women had always gone; Lucy was a Stratton woman, ergo…

At Pelham, it had been wonderful to be out from under her mother's control—only to be manacled once again this summer. Lucy's plan to go to Kentucky as a Vista volunteer barely saw the light of day. “You'll come home with lice—or worse.” The race riots sweeping the country had put an end to her twice-weekly trips into the city to tutor in Harlem. She'd felt completely safe and the program director had even called Mrs. Stratton to reassure her, but “Burn, Baby, Burn” had etched itself in Lucy's mother's consciousness. She'd been uneasy about having her daughter associate with those people anyway and now she had an excuse to call a halt to the fraternization that might have led to something too unspeakable to utter. Lucy wished she
had
met a handsome black man, someone with an Afro and a dashiki who would take her away from her little white-bread world. They'd have beautiful café au lait children and work together, side by side, correcting centuries of oppression. At night while everyone slept, she'd write wonderful stories, weaving themes of racial injustice into a rich tapestry of timeless literature. Family sagas, tales of men and women whose love conquers the prejudice surrounding them…she could do it. If there was one thing she knew about herself, it was that she was born to be a writer, flinging the words that filled her imagination onto blank paper like seeds onto a furrowed field. Her creative-writing professor had been encouraging. Told her to spend the summer roughing out a novel. He'd especially liked a short story she'd written about a girl so different from her parents and brother that she believes she has been adopted, only to discover it's true. Lucy had been lucky to get into the
class as a freshman, and she planned to take the advanced seminar with the same professor next semester. She didn't mention the course to her parents. They weren't interested in what she was taking anyway—or how she was doing. She was there and would graduate. That was all that mattered.

Elaine and Prin were late. She hoped Daddy wouldn't be annoyed. This whole tennis thing was his idea. Last month he'd suddenly decided they had to enter the father/daughter doubles at the club and that the Prince sisters were the perfect practice partners. Their father didn't play tennis—or golf. Too busy having to make money, her father had said smugly. He'd inherited his, going into his office at the firm only a few days a week, but in the summer he didn't even do that. Instead he “devoted himself to his family.” His phrase. Until July that had meant sailing and golfing with Lucy's older brother and his friend Ned Stapleton. They both had one more year at Yale. Lucy's brother would enter the firm, as had his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him. Thank God she was female, Lucy thought. The notion of following all those footsteps made her feel as if she were about to walk into quicksand.

She'd given in to her mother on college, and on her summers, but as soon as she graduated, Lucy would be her own woman. Twenty-one and free to do as she pleased. An apartment in the Village, a job of some sort while she wrote. She wouldn't take a nickel from her parents. Waitressing. She'd had enough practice last year at Pelham. Freshmen waited on tables weeknights and Sunday dinners. The kitchen manager, a formidable lady
in a white uniform with so much starch that it crackled when she moved, conducted a mandatory training session for them during orientation week—“Raise right, lower left.” It had seemed sublimely stupid at the time, but now she realized, it might come in handy.

Where could the Prince sisters be? Daddy was down at the courts already. She picked up the book she had been reading. Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. The short story Lucy had written for her seminar had been her perfect fantasy. Of course she loved her family, but she didn't really belong. Take reading, for example. She was the only one who read. The
Times
was delivered every day and the Strattons subscribed to
Life, Time,
and
Vogue
. Not
The New Yorker
. She had to buy that herself. Communists, her mother had said when Lucy had asked for a subscription. She had to keep her copies in her closet. Her brother's
Playboys
were strewn all over his room.
It
was acceptable—a magazine devoted to women as mindless sex objects. But nobody except Lucy read the
Times
or even the magazines. They were carefully arranged on the coffee table and that was that. There were books in her father's den, his old law books and some on sailing. At some point someone had filled the bookcase in the living room with the Harvard Classics, all one needed to know, “Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf and Fifteen Minutes a Day.” No real books in the house, cherished volumes to be read and reread—except for the ones in her room. She'd have so many books in her apartment that people would have to clear them from the chairs before they could sit.

She put the Hurston down. She couldn't concentrate.
Where were they? Daddy was sure to be more than annoyed by now.

She'd roomed with Gwen Mansfield freshman year and they'd decided to stay together. Gwen was pretty high-powered—a class officer and headed for business school. She wasn't around a lot, which was fine with Lucy. It gave her the solitude she craved—to write and dream. The library was less conducive for such activities. There were always some girls whispering loudly in a nearby carrel or someone with a stuffy nose sniffing continuously. Elaine and Chris Barker were rooming together again, too. Chris was a bit quiet, but nice enough. She was majoring in botany and pretty much lived in the greenhouses. Their bio professor had practically had an orgasm over Chris's project on orchids. Everyone else had stuck with less exotic plants with noticeably less exotic results. All four were staying put in Crandall House, moving one floor higher.

At last! She could hear a car coming down the drive. Prin would be driving, as usual. Lucy wasn't even sure Elaine had a license. She'd never seen her at the wheel of the little sky-blue Karmann Ghia that seemed to be for their use only. Prin. She'd be in Crandall next year, along with a bunch of her friends from Felton. She'd grouped people with high numbers in the housing lottery with people who had low numbers, so they could all move together. She wanted to be in one of the new dorms, she'd told Lucy, wanted to hear traffic. There wasn't a whole lot of traffic to hear, but Lucy sympathized. At Felton, you were back in the horse-and-buggy era with only the lake nearby. At least at Crandall there were reminders that it was the twentieth century
outside Pelham's gates. Besides the occasional passing cars, the dorm was modern, built in the fifties—the 1950s—as unlike the ivy-covered brick dorms as, well, Jane Fonda was to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Lucy laughed inwardly at the images her thoughts conjured up.

I'll bet Prin has her eye on Crandall's penthouse, the one reserved for juniors or seniors, Lucy thought. When the leaves were off the trees you could see Boston's skyline from its windows. Prin liked to be up high. She was always dragging someone up to the tower in the middle of the campus. Lucy had gone with her a few times and the view was pretty spectacular. The penthouses in the new dorms were an architectural feature that had somehow slipped by the powers that be, and were. No one had considered what having four bedrooms, a common room, and bath—a private apartment far from a housemother's eyes—might mean. Yes, you took the same elevator, but there were also stairs from the fire door. Someone was always propping it open for a late-night return after a friend had faked a sign-in. Lucy had heard that a draft evader boyfriend of a girl in one of the other new dorm penthouses had lived there for a month before going to Canada.

The car kicked up some of the gravel on the drive as Prin braked. Mother won't like that, Lucy thought automatically.

“Sorry we're late. Is your father pissed off?” Prin said, getting out of the car.

“Don't know. He's down at the courts.”

“He's such a sweetie. I'm sure it will be okay. Prin
was taking her time getting dressed, as usual,” Elaine said. She was carrying both racquets.

Lucy had never thought to apply such a term to her father, but Elaine was probably right. Her father liked the Prince twins and, besides, he needed them to help practice for the tournament. He'd already cleared a space on the mantel for the trophy. Even without the twins to help get them in shape, Lucy knew they'd win. She had always been good at sports, especially tennis, and her father regularly swept the club's men's singles tournaments. She led the way around the house to the back, past the pool and cabana to the courts.

The house had been built on a spit of land, so there were views of the water from the front and back. It was warm, but a strong breeze kept it from being too hot. She should feel happy, she thought. A beautiful day, friends, tennis—good exercise and something to alleviate the boredom that filled her waking hours here. But she wasn't happy. With a writer's instinct she tried to find the correct word to describe how she
was
feeling. To describe the sameness of her life. Even her tennis whites never varied. Her mother simply ordered larger sizes until Lucy had stopped growing.

All three tall and slender with smooth skin lightly tanned by the summer's sun, Lucy and her friends made an attractive picture strolling together. Up close, Prin drew the most attention, as usual. She'd wound a bright purple scarf around her waist—a nonregulation act that would be forbidden at the club. The scarf intensified the color of her eyes. A light wind was blowing, arranging her hair into loose curls that swept
across her face. She didn't bother to push them away. It was as if she knew that their disarray made her look even more attractive. Elaine was pretty, too, but not like Prin. Prin had been born first and Lucy always imagined that God or genetics had used up all the coloring on the elder twin, producing a pastel version in Elaine. Same-shaped body, very similar facial features, but pale gray eyes and light brown hair that hung straight to her shoulders. It was blowing about, too—into Elaine's mouth, across her nose. She seemed to be battling it, using both hands to push the strands back in place.

Did they hate their lives, the lives that were virtual duplicates of hers, the way she did? Lucy wondered. They were close to the courts. Her father was smiling and waving. Not angry at all. He looked relieved. Had he thought they wouldn't show up? Why was this so important to him? He'd never entered this tournament before, even when the tennis pro had suggested it last summer. He'd never done anything with Lucy. She was her mother's department. As they drew closer, she blurted out, “I can't believe that when my children—if I have any—ask me what I was doing during the Summer of Love, I'll have to say ‘Nothing.' Why don't we go out to San Francisco for a week? We have time before school starts.”

“What about the tournament?” Elaine seemed bewildered at the radical suggestion. “And where would we stay? What would we do?”

“We'd put flowers in our hair, sleep in Golden Gate Park, get stoned in the Haight. That what you have in mind?” Prin said.

“Kind of, but I was thinking North Beach and Ferlinghetti. The flower part's okay and maybe the Mary Jane.”

“Who's Mary Jane?” Elaine asked.

Prin and Lucy laughed. “Mary Jane is marijuana, you wanna?” Prin said, giving her sister a hug.

“What's going on?” Mr. Stratton asked. “I thought we were going to play some tennis, not spend all day gabbing.”

“We are,” Prin answered, “but we had to explain some of the facts of life in the sixties to my wonderfully naïve sister.”

William Stratton was striding away from them. “You play with me, Prin, and we'll beat the pants off Lucy and Elaine. There's your facts of life in the sixties.”

“So are we going?” Lucy asked, walking to her side of the net.

“Sure, just as soon as your mother says you can,” Prin said.

“Guess that means the tournament for you, Luce,” Elaine said.

“Shut up and serve.”

The maid brought a pitcher of iced tea down an hour later. Mr. Stratton was crowing over his victory, although it had been a close match.

Suddenly Prin looked at her watch. “Omigod, I've got a dentist's appointment in ten minutes! Could you take Elaine home, Lucy? Check out that new boutique in East Hampton on the way. They're carrying Mary Quant, so maybe you'll find something for your trip to San Francisco.”

“What trip to San Francisco?” Mr. Stratton had been mopping his face with a towel and suddenly tuned in.

“A joke, just a joke. Don't worry,” Lucy said. She shot a look at her friend; sometimes Prin went too far.

“I'm sorry to be a bother,” Elaine said.

“Don't be silly. Give me a minute to change and we'll go. The new store sounds like fun, and we can get some ice cream afterward. We've burned up enough calories for at least a kiddie cone.”

“I'm for the showers, too. Good game, girls. Want to try to get even tomorrow?” Mr. Stratton asked.

“Sure.” Prin grinned, getting into her car. Then she was off, Sergeant Pepper blaring from the radio.

It didn't take Lucy long to shower and change. Elaine was on the porch. They walked toward the garage and Lucy realized the last thing she wanted to do was go shopping, even at this trendy new place. She'd been having one of those out-of-body experiences for the last hour, the kind where people's voices sounded as if they were coming from the end of a tunnel, the kind where she felt as if she might come to and be someplace else. Or come to and be dead. She shook her head, trying to clear away these thoughts.