The Body in the Ivy (14 page)

“Would you mind very much if I took you straight home? I'm feeling a little tired. Must be the heat.”

Elaine looked anxious. “Are you okay to drive? I can always call Jackson.” Jackson was the Princes' butler/ chauffeur/jack-of-all-trades.

“No, I'm fine. Just kind of beat.”

The round trip to the Princes' house only took twenty minutes. Lucy retrieved her book, went into the kitchen for a cold can of TaB, and climbed the stairs. She
was
exhausted, exhausted by a lot of things, and all she wanted to do was curl up in bed with her book. She was surprised to hear voices from the end of the hall where her parents' master bedroom suite was. Her mother's car hadn't been in the garage, and besides, it was her bridge club afternoon. She'd never come home early from that—more likely late and smelling ever so slightly of a few too many gin and tonics. Her brother and Ned Stapleton were sailing with some other Elis in Newport.

She walked up the last few stairs and froze at the top. It was her father and Prin. His back was toward Lucy. He was naked. Their clothes made a trail on the hall carpet. Prin was arched against him, her eyes closed. Lucy had not made a sound, but Prin opened her eyes, looking over William Stratton's shoulder at his daughter. She slid one hand down her lover's back and grasped his buttock hard. He moaned. Still Lucy couldn't move. Prin smiled at her, a taunting triumphant smile, the smile of a winner. She moved her other hand to the back of Lucy's father's neck and pulled his face toward hers.

And Lucy fled. Noiselessly, rapidly, not stopping until she was down by the shore, where she retched in the bushes before kicking off her shoes and plunging into the cold water to try to wash away the image of Prin and her father, to try to wash away the poison that was coating her skin, seeping into her body through every pore.

As she crashed through the waves, she thought, “She's evil. Evil, evil—and I wish she was dead!” Her tears were mixing with the salt spray and she cried out loud, “Hélène Prince, I want to kill you!”

 

Max Gold finished the Chopin mazurka he was playing on the baby grand piano in the living room of his sister's dorm at Pelham College. There was a smattering of applause. It was Friday afternoon, teatime at Pelham. He'd laughed at the quaint custom at first, but had come to appreciate it. Teatime. The frantic pace of whatever you'd been doing during the week slowed and you could relax for a few hours. At the moment, he was so relaxed, he felt limp. It was usually this way when he played. His body became an extension of the instrument—the piano, the violin—and the separation, the transition back to not playing, always took a moment or two. He focused on the keyboard. His hands were still resting lightly on the ivory keys. Steinway—the piano was a good one, kept in tune, Rachel had told him, by a little man who appeared regularly and checked it out by playing Gershwin and Brahms.

He turned his head and looked about the room. Rachel was smiling at her brother. Until last fall, he'd thought there would never be another smile he'd search for at the end of a performance, but that had changed.
She
was sitting next to Rachel. He didn't have to move his gaze. She was smiling, too, and he felt a twinge of guilt at how much more her expression meant to him than Rachel's. Prin's expression. Hélène's—he preferred her given name to her nickname. He had never seen anyone so beautiful—not in person, hanging on the walls of a gallery or museum, up on the screen or on the stage. And there were many extremely beautiful women in New York City. He'd been approached by some of them for years now, the combination of his talent and good
looks apparently irresistible. Rachel teased him about his groupies and told him he was encouraging them by mimicking the appearance of the romantic composers he was interpreting—Chopin incarnate. Max's dark curls were a little long for Mr. Gold's approval, but they were ardently defended by Mrs. Gold, who also bought fitted velvet jackets and ivory silk shirts for winter concerts, a departure from the tuxedos Max wore the rest of the year.

Hélène. A musical name, although she claimed not to know Beethoven from Bartók. He'd found her confession of total ignorance endearing; her desire to be educated even more so, even though he knew that she'd been to plenty of concerts and the opera. Her family had season tickets to everything, including a box at the Met. In Boston, Max and Prin went to concerts—often with Rachel—but the evenings spent in his room at Dunster House listening to records alone together were far better. She had a good ear and her enthusiasm worked like a drug on him. Pieces he had listened to hundreds of times sounded new. By Thanksgiving, he was totally, completely in love with her. She'd become a part of him—like the instruments he played—and a fundamental part of his music. The wonder was that she loved him back.

Christmas vacation was a whirl of parties, the city—from the tree at Rockefeller Center to the wreaths around the statues of the lions in front of the public library—decorated just for them. She wanted him to come with her family to their place in Aspen, but he was performing in several concerts. She said she wouldn't go without him, but he insisted, feeling very noble. And now it was February, the month for lovers.
He had booked a table at the Ritz for dinner on the fourteenth and bought her a heart-shaped locket at an antiques store in Harvard Square, exchanging the chain for a thin black satin ribbon back in his room. It was more suitable for his Olympia, his divine mistress, and definitely more romantic.

He walked over and sat between the two women, resolving, as he did so, to spend more time with Rachel. She hadn't said anything, but he knew she had counted on him to get her away from the confines of Pelham more than he had. He wished she would meet somebody, but his attempts to fix her up had been gently, even humorously rebuffed. Rachel did not need her little brother to get a man; she'd let him know. She went out occasionally—someone from MIT—but kept that part of her life separate, whereas he couldn't keep himself from including Hélène in everything they did, and talking about her when they were apart.

An attractive blonde approached them arm in arm with a young man. “Rachel, Prin, I'd like you to meet Andrew Scott. He spent last semester at Oxford and is back at Harvard now.”

“Hello,” Rachel said. “This is my brother, Max. You've met him, haven't you, Gwen?”

She nodded. “We enjoyed your playing very much. You're at Harvard, too, aren't you? First year?”

“Thank you and yes, I'm a freshman—Dunster House,” Max said. He covered Hélène's hand with his, moving closer to her. Andrew was very good-looking in a Nordic-god sort of way. But Hélène wasn't interested in anyone else, she'd told him repeatedly—and she could have anyone she wanted, he'd told himself.

“Well, see you around. I'm in Lowell House. Stop by. Good to meet you all,” Andrew said, and they walked off.

“Seems nice,” Rachel said. “I think he's the one Gwen met last spring; the one she kept calling ‘the hunk.'”

“Hmmm,” said Prin, as she pulled Max to his feet. “Let's go to the top of the tower. You can sing to me. Rachel?”

“Maybe another time.”

 

The smell of earth, any kind—it didn't have to be a rich loam—was headier than the most expensive perfume. What was it Prin wore? Joy—that was it. Well, joy was a synonym for dirt as far as she was concerned, Chris Barker told herself.

It was her favorite time of week—Friday afternoon. No one came to the greenhouses to work on their required Bio 101 projects, complaining about the tedium of measuring their plants, never thinking, as she did, what a miracle each millimeter was. Last year, especially in the beginning, the greenhouses were an escape, a refuge. They were the reason why she'd come to Pelham, refusing to look at any more colleges after she'd seen them: fifteen interconnected greenhouses, 7,700 square feet, with over a thousand specimens from all over the world, desert, tropical, and semitropical species as well as the more, well, garden variety. Their guide had told them that the century plant,
Agave americana,
a desert specimen from Mexico, was due to bloom the following year. Chris took it as an omen. She'd go to Pelham and be there for the historic event. There would be others for whom it would mean as
much; she'd find kindred spirits. But she hadn't. Even the fact that the plant stalk was shooting up from its spiky celadon fronds like a spear of Brobdingnagian asparagus at the rate of five inches a day didn't draw the crowds she'd assumed would come. The faithful few, mostly professors and greenhouse staff, kept watch as a hole was cut in the greenhouse roof, slowing the growth to two inches per day in the cooler air. When the plant's twelve branches burst into bloom—clusters of hundreds of glorious yellow-green flowers against the blue sky—it was over twenty feet high. At this point, the century was duly photographed for the school paper and made the
Boston Globe,
but still didn't cause the stir on campus among her peers that she'd envisioned. She had dragged her reluctant roommate, Elaine Prince, to witness the phenomenon—“Greenhouses are so moist; my hair will wilt even more”—and tried to explain why it was so special. “It only blooms once in a hundred years. We won't be here next time. It's a living time capsule!” Elaine had been marginally more impressed. She was an easy roommate; no annoying habits and she spent a lot of time at her twin sister's dorm across campus. Nice, but not a kindred spirit.

The fact was that Chris had been overwhelmed by homesickness at Pelham, desperate to leave, and desperate to tough it out. She had never been away from home before, not even to camp. Every summer, she, her brother, and sisters left for their grandparents' farm in central Pennsylvania where they joined their cousins for weeks of total freedom. The adults came and went, but the children were a fixture, building tree houses,
swimming in the pond, tending the animals, and producing comic operas on a stage rigged up in the old barn, operas that borrowed considerably from Gilbert and Sullivan, with life in the country as their main inspiration. The Lord High Executioner became the local tax collector and Yum Yum was Chris herself, transformed into a Dorothy Gale orphan. Chris's grandmother was a self-educated horticulturalist, and every grandchild was given a garden plot at the beginning of each summer. Only Chris needed larger and larger ones as the years went by, eventually providing more vegetables for the table than the farm's vegetable garden and so many cutting flowers that the children set up a stand by the side of the road.

It was always a wrench to put on shoes again and return home to school and a mostly indoor life in the Philadelphia suburb where they lived. The Barker children attended a Quaker school, although they were Episcopalians. Chris's mother liked the school's philosophy and high caliber of instruction. Chris's brother went to Haverford, one sister to Bryn Mawr, another—the rebel in the family—to Stanford until only Chris was left at home for several years with her parents all to herself. And as the cousins grew up and scattered, her summers became similarly intimate with her grandparents. She didn't really see why she had to go to college at all; why couldn't she apprentice with a real gardener, someone who got paid for doing what Chris loved? Her parents had been quietly insistent, and when she saw the Pelham greenhouses, it had seemed college would be all right.

But it wasn't. She didn't like sitting in someone's
room—usually filled with smoke—gossiping or playing bridge or knitting. She knew how to knit. Her grandmother had taught her years ago, but Chris didn't have a beau, as some girls archly called their boyfriends, and didn't feel like making a sweater for her brother or anyone else in the family. They all had plenty of sweaters.

She had been the only cousin on the farm for most of the previous summer, and it had been idyllic. Pelham College seemed like something she'd read about in a book or dreamed. The farm was real. She loved to walk in the garden in the early evening cool when the long light that brings everything into sharp focus caught the plants she'd tended during the steamy days. Often her grandmother would come, too, moving more slowly this summer than the previous one, much to Chris's secret concern. Granny would recite the names of the flowers, the old-fashioned ones she'd grown up with and had passed down to her grandchildren: heartsease, hens and chicks, Turk's cap, cranesbill, spurge, and bachelor's buttons. She taught Chris about the herbs in her herb garden, thyme and tarragon for chicken, sweet woodruff in a May wine bowl, mint in new peas. And she'd warned her about the dangers of oxalis, digitalis, and deathly sweet lilies of the valley: “The roots, my dear—and the water. We had a cat once that used to drink from the vases and pitchers of flowers I'd have around. I'd shoo her away, but she would be up on the table the moment my back was turned. I'd put a bunch of lily of the valley in one of the spare bedrooms and she got in. It was very sad.”

At the end of August, Chris had begged to stay on
the farm for the year. She wanted to experience the change of seasons in the country, promising to go back to Pelham the following fall. Her grandparents had said no. She had to go back to college, be with young people. It hadn't been good for her to spend the summer alone; they had been selfish. “I'm the selfish one!” Chris had cried. “This is what I want!” But September found her back at Pelham, and it hadn't been as bad as the first year. Elaine's sister, Prin, and her friends had moved into Crandall. They were a fun group—and interesting. Elaine herself seemed to blossom near her sister, becoming more animated, displaying a quick wit that Chris hadn't noted the year before, even though they'd roomed together. They had stayed together and their room became a gathering place. This was what it was like to have a group of friends, Chris realized, although she slipped away to the greenhouses often. Now, looking at her watch, she put away her tools and cleaned up. She was hungry and there were always such good things for tea.