Two If by Sea (17 page)

Kate had found and copied for him some old photos from Tura's girlhood.

It was these that made Frank pinch the inner corners of his eyes.

In the photos, Tura would have been younger than Kate was now, soft and round, not plump but certainly not the slender wintry madonna she had become by the time Frank knew her. As a young woman, Tura had not been so fashionable as the older version—just an ordinary, neat, compact country girl, her hair long and dark and glossy in the black-and-white photos. In one photo, she held a little child's hand, and, with her other hand, was waving to someone, standing in tussocky flowering grass that came up to her knees. This was, Frank supposed, the purple heather so hallowed in Brontë novels. Below Tura was a drive that looked to be made of crushed stone and a house exactly like a Monopoly building, two stories of straight-up stone walls, windows like long, doleful eyes flanking a red door of a nose. Newer wings, built later, a lighter brick, ran away to either side. Crooked rows of handmade stiles climbed gentle mountain clefts above the house, and sheep grazed like clouds on the ground. Here and there was a low stone wall and an outbuilding with a sloped roof made of something thick, like slate.

Another photo showed Tura with a young soldier who resembled her. A brother? A cousin? His shoulders were thrown back, his young lips compressed in a stiff, manly smile, hair a pale, vulnerable brush cut. Tura had turned her head and the wind had blown her own hair across her face, but Frank could see that she had been smiling. In a third photo, she was on horseback, wearing short boots and a summer dress and holding the reins low on her thighs. The tough little mare—the regal curve of its neck signaling Arabian blood, the long legs something else, as well—gathered under the saddle pad like a bundle of springs.

Frank knew, but Kate also explained that the farm had belonged entirely to Tura, not to Cedric. It had been hers and her much older brother's, but the brother sold his portion to Tura when he moved to the United States. Tura had lived there on her own into her thirties, until she met Cedric and sold him four foals, one of which grew up to be his greatest horse, The Quiet Man. Then they were partners. Marriage was inevitable.

Tura apparently made her own will shortly after Frank married Natalie, and had not amended it. Her reasons were her own. The legal process by which Frank could claim the farm was described in an enclosed note from an attorney. Two last pages were color copies of photos on plain white paper—raw earth with grass just sprouting like new hair over a low, curved stone that said
Bellingham
and, below that,
Cedric Arthur
and some dates, and
Kathleen Tura Claidy
with some dates. Cedric had been eighty-two. The quote, from Shakespeare, was “I will not jump with common spirits.”

The stone sat side by side with the much larger monument, shining bright pink in the light of what Frank quickly calculated would have been late afternoon. It read only
DONOVAN
.

For a moment, he saw Natalie as he had first seen her, opening her mouth the way an adult feeds a baby, prompting him to accept the gin-soaked stuffed olive.

Why had Tura left Frank a farm so far from Brisbane—so far from the United States? Kate could think of no practical reason; she said as much in the letter.
Mum did as she would do, Frank. Perhaps she thought you would find something there
, Kate wrote.
You should go to see it
.

Someday, Frank thought, he would. But he could not imagine it now. He lay down on the couch and dropped into a sleep thick as those stone roof slabs. When he woke, by the sun, it was late afternoon, and he almost screamed: someone was supposed to pick Ian up at preschool, hours earlier. But Ian was there, quietly building Lego bridges that arched like flying buttresses up to the gates of the castles inside the huge aquarium. They rested there, with one end against the glass, as if waiting for fish to walk.

I
'VE GOT A
customer for you,” Marty told Frank one night a few weeks later as he heaved himself to his feet and began to pass out the dinner plates. Marty's eyes swam with exhaustion. School would end soon, and though his internship at the University of Wisconsin was secure, he thought endlessly about residency, about choosing a program that would determine where he and Eden would live for the next four years.

“Why don't you worry about this after, say, your wedding?” Frank suggested. “After your final exams?” One would follow the other, in rapid succession, a month from now.

Marty ignored him. “Let me tell you about this client.”

Frank said, “I'm going to relax with the young dude here and watch Animal Planet.”

Holding up a restraining hand, Marty tucked into the chili like a man who wanted to drown his sorrows. Then he said, “Look, I have to tell you. Or she'll kill me. You'll like her. She's a rare case.”

Frank waited, knowing Marty would go on, no matter what he said, although whatever Marty said, Frank would refuse to do it. Since Cedric and Tura died, he had no stomach for new plans, and his head ached as if watchfulness was a cap two sizes too small.

“She's my professor. She's taking a year off to train for something. Maybe the Olympics. Actually, she's taking two years off if she makes the team, and she seems sure that she will.”

“What's she a professor of?”

“Botany,” Marty said. “No! She's a psychiatrist, obviously.”

“Is she delusional? Is that common? Because if you get to the age she must be and you haven't realized a dream in the Olympics, that's pretty far out of sight.”

“No, she's young. Edie's age. Kind of young. She . . . you know . . .” Marty made the universal hand sign of the inverse humpback
C
moving along the table to signify jumping horses. “What you do.”

“I meant does she do all-around dressage and so forth, or just jumpers?”

“In-a-ring type jumping, judging from the pictures on her wall. She's very good. Tops.”

“I'm not set up to train, pal. That's a whole business of its own.”

“Wouldn't you like to do that, though?”

You'll train your own horses
, he heard the vanished say.

“Someday. I might. But right now I have the farm to get fixed up, and Ian—”

“She's going to come over anyhow, to see the place, and she's invited to the wedding,” Marty said. “She moved here two years ago from North Carolina and she just moved her horse. She's not happy with where he is.”

Under the table, Ian was methodically kicking Frank in his bad leg, waiting peevishly for a response. As it turned out, Ian loved school and, despite his muteness, was a hit with the other kids. The only downside to school was that Ian threw himself into it like a cyclone: he fell apart every day around four, and never got any traction until the weekend, when he slept twelve hours straight both nights. Waving to Marty, Frank pointed at Ian and said, “No TV tonight, buddy. You're out of here.” He draped Ian over his shoulder, and Ian began to pinch the back of Frank's head, digging his nails in. Frank tried to see it as a sign of how much the boy trusted him, but it hurt so much he wanted to drop Ian on his face. He would not later remember what he said to Marty.

As it turned out, he didn't meet Claudia Campo until a couple of hours after he'd walked Eden down the aisle.

The wedding morning came up a bold, blue, late-May day and Frank was stunned as he lifted out his morning clothes, which had shown up in the one crate that actually did arrive, by the bruise of emotions. His suit was folded in broad sheets of tissue paper, next to Natalie's wedding dress. He thought of the last time he'd put the suit on, which also was the only time.

Natalie saying, “Well, your eyes are too deep in your head, but you're pretty when you smile, teeth like one of those horses of yours. And if you wear trousers like that every day, I'll be your genie . . .” Natalie, in her crown of white rosebuds, at the top of the aisle, shaking off her father's arm and kicking off her white pumps to run down the aisle to him
.

Frank pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, then took Natalie's wedding ring out of the child's china mug where he kept it, and warmed it in his palm. Under the clothes lay the slim album. Natalie must have had it in her office to show to friends. She had asked that all the photos be sepia tinted, so they would never look outdated. Now Frank turned to the one of him laughing, arms linked with Cedric on one side in his ancient frock coat and Tura on the other, in a floor-length pale suit. They gazed at Frank with pride. Gently, he laid the album back in the box.

Later, at the ceremony itself, those memories tucked away with the ring, he was brought up short by even older sentiments. He gazed in astonishment at his mother's straight-backed, fading beauty, and at Eden, the chubby, bookish baby, now a slim tulip of vanilla satin. A lone guitarist played Hope's favorite song, “Stardust,” which had been played at her own wedding. The couple took their simple vows under a huge catalpa tree, where a traditional chuppah stood. Hope's priest and Marty's mother's rabbi bestowed the mostly extraneous Judeo-Christian blessings. Marty stomped a lightbulb wrapped in a white handkerchief and Eden tossed her bouquet, which landed at the feet of a friend's six-year-old daughter. Taking hands, they walked proudly into the arms of their families. Everywhere, there were splashes of Eden and Marty's humor: the roses, irises, and the lady trumpet lilies that Hope said were called Pretty Woman were displayed in big zinc feed buckets. Behind the wedding canopy, they'd set up a makeshift altar, a two-tiered jump with
TENACITY
painted on it in thick bold letters. Instead of hiring a photographer, except for two or three formal portraits, they'd handed each guest, even the babies, an upscale disposable camera. A long water trough invited guests to “Dump Your Snaps Here When You Leave,” while an email guest book promised a selection of the choicest shots to everyone who signed up.

After the new-minted couple greeted the guests, everyone sat down at one of the long trestle tables on a hilltop patio to drink Spotted Cow Ale and eat picnic food—hamburgers and hotdogs and chicken kebabs passed among vats of potato salad and baked beans. The bridal dessert was almost as tall as Eden, a tower of crenellated carrot cake cauled in a hive of fly netting, with rubber horses that Ian clearly coveted racing around each layer.

Frank had jotted down ideas for the toast he would make as surrogate father of the bride. But when he stood, he said, instead, “I've never seen you two even be rude to each other. You guys have perfect sympathy, or at least you have the class to let everyone think you do. It seems like bad luck to wish you good luck. I can't believe that Eden is grown up. What I really can't believe is that you two won't be coming home tonight.”

“It's okay, Frank. We'll be home tomorrow night,” Marty said.

Although they were spending their wedding night at a pricey bed-and-breakfast inn in Madison, their honeymoon was not set until July: they were going for a month to Australia, the tickets long since purchased. Brisbane was no longer on the itinerary. Their wedding-night treat was a gift from Frank, who had known the innkeepers since a night in Chicago a decade before when he had saved their then-teenage son from a robbery and a bad beating or worse. Several times over the years, visiting his mother, he'd opted to stay at the expansive lakeside mansion, where one whole floor with three luxe bedrooms was the honeymoon suite.

After the couple was drawn away to change for the dance—driven by Hope in the pony cart, with its canopy of blooms—there came a lull. Patrick took off to feed the horses. Hope phoned to say she was going to lie down for an hour, leaving Frank to greet an endless stream of people he hadn't seen in ten years, if ever. Finally, in a cabin on the grounds cleaned up for the purpose, Frank changed into black pants and a cream-colored silk shirt Natalie had given him. He tried in vain to coax Ian out of his tuxedo, which he realized he would be buying tomorrow from Salvatore Rose Formal Wear.

The woman was standing alone near a circle of stone benches when Frank came out, and he noticed immediately that she was standing with no apparent expectation of any kind of reward or amusement or any sort of busyness—thinking, gazing around her, a skill Frank did not himself possess.

When she saw Frank, she said, “I'm Claudia Campo, Marty Fisher's friend. And I know you're Frank.”

“Hello,” Frank said. “You're the rider.”

“That's what I want to talk to you about. Not today, of course. There are enough splendors today. But could we talk, sometime?” The woman didn't look as though she expected an answer in the negative. Frank wondered how old she was. Younger than he was, maybe Eden's age or a little older, thirty-three, thirty-five, she was the kind of expensive dark blonde who had been told all her life that she was beautiful. A few lines around her lips said she'd become impatient with hearing that and wanted to move on to other things. Her eyes were big and brown and the makeup that emphasized them was cursory. She wore loose and drapey wide-legged black pants and a sleeveless coat. No necklace, no purse, Frank noticed. The only other woman Frank had known who never bothered with a necklace or a purse was his wife, although Natalie was vain in other ways.

“Sure,” Frank said. “Someday.” But the woman had shifted her attention to Ian.

She held out her hand, and Ian took it.

“I'm Claudia,” she said. “Hello.”

Ian said, “Hi.”

Heat that had nothing to do with the growing mugginess of the blue May evening flooded Frank's face. Miles off in a cloudless sky, lightning winked.

“Are you okay?” said Claudia.

“I'm fine,” said Frank, sitting down on one of the benches. He asked Ian, “What did you say?”