Wild Heart (18 page)

There was no place left to sit in the Palace of Fine Arts, so Sydney and Camille were leaning against a bare patch of wall in the French Room, drooping with fatigue, while Michael reexamined every painting from close up and afar. If he'd had a magnifying glass, Sydney was sure he'd be using it.

"Gorgeous?" She laughed, as if the word surprised her, as if she hadn't thought the same thing herself more than once. "Do you think so?"

"Oh, my, yes. And he's not at all what I expected. He's so ...
civilized."

"Heavens, Camille. Did you think he'd wear a loincloth and swing from vines?"

"Well, yes," she admitted, giggling, and Sydney rolled her eyes. "No, but really, Syd,
look
at him. He looks like someone you'd love to meet. Not quite respectable, you know. Someone my parents would disapprove of. Just the way he
stands."

Philip, whose idol these days was Oscar Wilde, had taught him to stand like that, with his hands in his pockets and his hip cocked at an angle, shoulders slightly hunched. It made him look careless and worldly, two things he definitely was not. But Sydney loved the combination of outward sophistication and inner simplicity. They made for a unique persona, funny and touching, and to her, unbearably sweet.

"And I
love
his hair. Did you really cut it for him? I think he looks like a poet. But a dangerous one. Because of the scar."

Camille giggled some more, and Sydney couldn't help laughing with her. But it was more out of habit, a lifetime of giggling with Cam, than true amusement. The way she spoke of Michael, as if he were an object instead of a man, albeit a "gorgeous" one, didn't sit quite right with Sydney. And when Cam talked
to
Michael, she raised her voice and spoke in slow, simple sentences, as if he were deaf as well as dim-witted.

It was exactly the sort of thing Sydney had been afraid would happen, the sort of thing from which she'd wanted to protect him. He took it well, she had to admit, waiting through Cam's ponderous sentences with a courtly, puzzled politeness, letting her patronize him outrageously. He was much more gracious about it than Sydney—but she was overly sensitive where he was concerned. She'd have to work on that; it implied a lack of confidence.

On the other hand, he still had a few quirks that might reasonably shake a less protective person's confidence in him. Right now, for instance, he was carrying his shoes while he padded, in a pair of Philip's argyle socks, between paintings by Rousseau and Daumier and Renoir. But the World's Fair stretched over five hundred acres, so he wasn't the only tired sightseer who had chosen stockinged feet over blisters. He blended pretty well with the crowd, in other words; he looked a little eccentric, but his public identity as the "lost man," that wild-looking fellow whose picture the papers had stopped running only recently, was still a secret.

Camille and Sydney were in his path; otherwise Sydney doubted he would have noticed them. Dazed-looking, he stopped in front of them, blinking them into focus. "I'm taking too long," he said. "You're tired of waiting."

"It doesn't matter." Sydney smiled her forgiveness. "We've missed our meeting time with Philip and Sam, but they know where we are. They'll come and find us."

"I'm sorry."

"Never mind, you were enjoying yourself."

"I got lost."

"Lost?"

"Inside the paintings." He glanced at Camille selfconsciously, as if he knew she wouldn't understand, then back at Sydney, as if he knew she would. "When I try to see how they do it, when I get close up to the brush strokes and the shapes, I lose myself. I fall into the picture." He smiled, shrugged his shoulders. "I'm not saying it right."

"Sydney tells me you're quite the painter yourself," Cam raised her voice to say. "Were you a frustrated artist when you lived in the wild?"

He regarded her steadily. "I was," he answered, straight-faced. "After food, the thing I wanted most was a nice set of watercolors."

Philip and Sam arrived just then, and Sydney couldn't decide if she was glad or not. Michael's sense of humor was growing along with his appreciation of human absurdity, and each day it came out in a new way. It would've been fun to see how much longer he could tease Cam, who was famous for her habit of blurting out absurd things in moments of social stress.

"You're still here? You've been here the
whole time!"
Philip looked amazed. The plan had been to meet under the Columbus statue at two-thirty. The fallback plan, the one they had quizzed Sam on at least twice a day to drive the point home, was to wait twenty minutes and then return to the place where they had all been together last.

"It's because of me." Michael spoke up quickly. "I forgot about time. They waited for me."

Sam grabbed Sydney's hand and shook it to get her attention. "We heard a concert on the telephone!"

"No."

"Yes! It came all the way from New York City, and you could hear it as plain as day. Couldn't you, Flip?"

"Yep. In the Industrial Building. They hooked up loudspeakers to a telephone and broadcast a concert going on in Madison Square Garden."

They all shook their heads in wonder.

"How come you stayed here so long?" Sam dropped Sydney's hand and took Michael's. "You could've come with us and heard the concert. What were you doing?" He searched the room, looking around for something more interesting than framed pictures.

"Looking at the paintings."

"Just looking at them?"

Michael nodded, shrugged. "I like them."

"Is anybody else starving?" asked Philip.

"I am," they all answered at once, and they left the Fine Arts Palace and headed for the Midway.

Deciding where to eat at the fair was never easy. The Chinese market, the Japanese bazaar? The Irish village? The Moorish palace? Old Vienna? This time, after the requisite bickering, they decided on the Tunisian cafe, on the grounds that the service was fast and it had the shortest line. A waiter in a yellow robe and a turban took their order. "Try the coffee, Michael," Philip advised, and of course he did. When it arrived, he took one sip of the thick, treacly brew and went into a coughing fit.

"Aagh," he sputtered, eyes watering, blinking at Philip in disbelief and suspicion. "Bleck. It's awful."

"It's an acquired taste," Philip said blandly, taking a small swallow from his own cup. He crossed his legs and sat back, throwing his arm across the back of the empty chair beside him. Striking a pose, Sydney suspected, for Camille's benefit. It did him no good; Cam was too intent on smacking Michael between the shoulder blades while he choked on his coffee.

The bickering started again as soon as they finished their Tunisian tea.
We 're tired,
thought Sydney as she listened to Sam whine that he wanted to go see the ten-ton Canadian cheese and then the Wild West show, Philip insist he wanted to stand outside the Columbia Theater and wait for a glimpse of Lillian Russell, and Cam counter that she and Sydney were dying to hear the all-female orchestra at the Women's Building.

Into the sullen silence that followed, Michael said, "I want to see everything." Of them all, he was the only one who didn't look exhausted. "The whole world is here, all the things I've never seen. Everything's beautiful."

That stopped the quarrel more efficiently than a fierce look from Aunt Estelle. They all felt chastised, then galvanized. With new energy, they went off to look at the Yerkes telescope and the model apartments where a family could live on five hundred dollars a year.

There is always a long line of men who want to see the guns in the War Department exhibit. Today Philip and Sam wanted to go, so I went too. There were canons, rifles, pistols, knives, bayonets, and sords, and everybody stared and stared at them as if they were great works of art. I thought of the hunters who came to the woods in every season, even when the snow was high, to shoot guns at bears and beavers, otters, deer. They shot at me, thinking I was an animal. They caught the wolves in metal traps, and murdered fox mothers in their dens for their skins, leaving the cubs to die. They made rope traps that choke to death rabbits and squirrels and even birds. Every season they came, and they killed to slaughter, not to survive. The smell of guns, which is oil and cold metal and smoke, makes me feel sick and scared. It means death is coming.

Tonight was an illumination night, when they turn on electrical lights all over the Fair. If you stand on a bridge and look down at the black water of the Lagoon, you can see the lights twinkling like a hundred moons. It's magic. I never thought anything could be prettier than the stars coming out one by one when night fell on the woods where I lived. But this is even more beautiful.There are people to see it with. I stood next to you, Sydney, on a bridge and looked at your face while you looked at the lights and the fountains and the real stars over our heads. Just in that time, that minute, I never was so happy.

Later, when we were walking beside the water, I thought about the word "lagoon" and the word "lake." They made me remember something. I used to live near a lake when I was little, before I was sent away. But we called it a lock. There were no buildings, only trees around our lock. My father took me there to fish. And we lived in a stone house that I think is called a castle. Or maybe my mind is mixing this up with one of Sam's fairy tales?

Today West came to the fair with us. We saw a rose plantation, an electrical train, and also the kineto-scope, which is a camera and a phonograph working at exactly the same time. We played a trick on West by taking him to the nudist colony. This is an exhibit on the Midway that you go to with high hopes of seeing naked people but it is a joke. You look through a hole and see your own head in a mirror, and under it is a painting of a naked body that doesn't show anything interesting. West pretended to laugh, but we knew he was really disappointed.

He reminds me of a wolf I knew a long time ago. Wolves don't have names, but to myself I called him Sneaky. He wasn't good for anything much except eating meat some other wolf caught. He wanted a mate but none of the females would have him. He especially liked a young gray wolf with black ears and paws and a white tail tip. She was beautiful and gentle and playful, and she tried to be nice to Sneaky even though he was a pest. But she never mated with him. She was strong and he was weak.

I always thought she shouldn't have been so kind to him. Then he'd have stopped bothering her and found a mate who deserved him. Some scrawny, lazy she-wolf as ugly as Sneaky.

Michael hated the Hamburg parrots. "I'd set them all free if I could," he swore, striding away from the exhibit. Sydney had to hurry to keep up with him. "But they couldn't survive here on their own," she pointed out reasonably. "They'd die."

He came to a sudden halt. "A
thousand,
Sydney. Why so many? It's crazy. I could look at one parrot and understand all parrots."

"I agree with you." She'd rarely seen him so worked up.

"They should be where they came from," he insisted, starting to walk again. "Not in cages."

"They didn't look unhappy," she ventured.

"They looked bored."

For the sake of peace, she didn't ask how an
interested
parrot would look. She changed the subject. "Tell me what else you remember about Scotland."

It worked. He said, "Scotland," reverently, and stopped scowling. "I wish I could remember something more. Anyway, we don't know for sure that I come from there."

"I'm
sure of it. Where else do they have lochs? But the real proof is your accent. My father noticed it, too—I read it in his notes."

"I don't hear any accent," he said slowly, listening to himself.

"It's faint, but it's there. A wee bit of a brogue," she said humorously. "It means you came from Scotland, I'm sure of it. This gives us something else to tell Mr. Hig-gins, the detective." When he didn't answer, she said, "Michael, don't be afraid to hope. You might have a family—think of that."

"But what if I never find them?"

"What if you do?"

He shook his head; he wouldn't smile. "Maybe they don't want me. If they sent me away—"

"They didn't."

"I think they did."

"I had no idea you were so stubborn." He looked at her, alarmed. "Or such a pessimist," she threw in.

"What's a pessimist?"

They had arrived at their destination, the spectacular McMonnies fountain. They were supposed to wait here for Philip and Sam, who had gone to look at the battleship
Illinois.
"A pessimist is someone who always expects the worst."

"I don't do that."

"He can't look on the bright side, because he's afraid of being disappointed."

He looked down at the ground. "I do that. I'm afraid. I don't want to find out that they threw me away."

"Oh, Michael." She had the strongest urge to touch him, push the black hair back from his forehead. "They
couldn 't
have done that, I know it. I wish you'd believe me."

She saw the hope and fear in his eyes, and the gratitude when he smiled at her. The tenderness. Her heart caught. "Let's sit down here, Sydney." He took her hand. "Are you tired?"

There was room for them at the end of a long bench full of exhausted sightseers. The lagoon sparkled at their backs, and the fountain splashed in front of them. Clouds were bunching overhead; it was starting to look like rain. "Not too tired," she answered. "But you are, I think."

He always told the truth. "I feel like my head is blowing up."

And he was nervous these days, restless and distracted, sometimes even irritable, although not with her—-not yet. "You need a break from all this. It's too much. You're overstimulated, you need a rest."

"No, I can't stop. I have to see it all."

"But you have time. The fair will be here for months."

"I'm not like you—I can't see things just once and know them. It's all new, so I have to go back again and again."

She sighed. It was true; he really couldn't stop. He wanted to come every day, and when that wasn't feasible, he found books in her father's library about the things he'd seen at the fair the day before. He knew more about classical architecture now than she did, which wasn't saying that much, and a great deal more about electricity, agriculture, and mining. He still dutifully completed the reports she assigned—"Write a paper on what we saw at the fair today, Michael"—and she read them with fascination, especially when they revealed more about his earliest memories or the details of his life in the wilderness. Or when they sounded more like veiled love letters than "reports" . . .

A drop of water fell on her wrist. "Uh-oh. It's raining." More drops spattered on the warm concrete walkway. The crowd filing past them began to hurry, and the bench on which they were sitting started to empty. "We can't leave—they'll never find us if we move." She glanced at Michael. He had turned his face up to the sky; he was letting the rain fall on his fluttering eyelashes while he smiled gently, blandly, drawing in deep breaths of the wet, fresh air.

"We're going to get soaked," she said practically.

"Open your umbrella. This won't last."

"It won't?" He was never wrong about the weather.

"Let's just sit and look at the people."

It was his favorite thing to do. He was still too shy to enjoy speaking to strangers, but he never got tired of staring at them. He was entertaining while he did it, too. "I knew a badger who looked just like him," he would say, gesturing toward a kindly-looking, pointy-faced old gentleman with round spectacles. Or, "Look how sleek and satisfied she looks, like an otter with a bellyful of fish," about a particularly well-turned-out matron.

Sydney unfurled her umbrella and held it between them. Michael moved closer so that they were hip to hip and took hold of the umbrella, too. They sat without speaking, both absorbed in watching the parade of passersby, hurrying for the exits or for shelter.

"I dreamed about home last night."

"Home?"

"I dreamed I was lying on the side of a hill with the old wolf. I told you about him, remember? My friend."

"I remember."

"It was summer. Hot. No clouds. We weren't hungry, and there was no danger. All we could smell was the earth and the air. There was nothing but peace. And there was nothing—between me and the earth and the sky." He
frowned, choosing his words carefully. "I mean there were no borders between me and everything around me. It was as if I had no skin. I was free."

She looked at his clean profile, the intensity in his face that mirrored his struggle to tell her the truth. "It's not like that now," she murmured, guessing at the point of his dream, even though she didn't particularly want to know it. "You're not free here."

"No, I'm not free anymore. Life is complicated. Choices I don't understand. So many possibilities. Like a chess match—I have to think about what will happen three or four moves in the future."

She gave his fingers a squeeze around the handle of the umbrella. "I never thought of it that way." She waited a moment, then said casually, "Do you think about going back?"

"Yes, I think of it. When my brain is full, when it feels like it'll explode if I put one more fact in. Then I think of going away." She felt chilled until he added, "But I can't now. I've changed too much. I think I would die if I went back. Not of cold or hunger. Of loneliness."

She didn't know what to say. There was a sadness in him she wished she could ease, but alongside her own melancholy was a ferocious relief, because he couldn't leave. She had him for good.

"Most of the time I can't believe I'm here. Now, for instance—sitting with you on a bench in this place. In this city. With shoes on my feet."

They laughed. "Very nice shoes, too," she noted. Philip had taken him to Field's and had bought him the best they had, sturdy English walking balmorals in fawn-colored leather. He wore them every day, and claimed they didn't hurt his feet a bit.

"It's because of you that I am here."

"What do you mean?"

"For me, you're like ... a light when it's dark. You make me feel strong even when everything is changing and going too fast."

"Michael."

"I think it would scare you if you knew what I feel," he said softly. "It's as if there's a storm inside me. There's no peace, but it doesn't matter so much. I'm not just surviving, I'm alive. And I know what I want."

He spoke with his eyes lowered, as if to spare her the intensity that he had correctly guessed would frighten her. Once again she couldn't think of the right thing to say. Their pattern was for her to discourage him now, turn him away from these thoughts, these dangerous words. That would be rational and safe.

But what if she took the next step? What if she threw away caution and sense and went forward,
toward
him instead of away from him?

"Your brothers."

"What?" She didn't want this spell to break.

"They're here. Someone's with them."

She looked up with a pasted-on smile, which faltered slightly when she saw who Philip and Sam's companion was.

"It stopped raining," Sam greeted her. "Why do you still have your umbrella up?"

She closed it without answering, and turned her smile on Lincoln Turnbull. "Why, what a nice surprise. Twice in one week—what a coincidence." She had seen him at a party last Saturday, where, with Aunt Estelle's guidance ringing in her ears, she had made an unusually strong effort to be cordial to him. "How are you, Lincoln? Where did you find these two?"

"On board the
Illinois"
he told her, holding her gloved hand for rather a long minute. "You look wonderful, Sydney. Did I tell you that the other night? Either way, it bears repeating."

"He's been on the battleship
five times,"
Sam marveled. "He showed us stuff even the guide didn't know about. Special guns and stuff, and where they keep the ammo."

Lincoln smiled, ruffling Sam's hair. "Ships interest me."

"Especially
battleships,"
Sam specified, and Lincoln nodded, grinning.

There was a pause. With odd reluctance, Sydney turned
toward Michael, who had taken a step back from the group, and lightly touched his arm. "Lincoln, you haven't met Michael MacNeil, our—house guest. Michael, this is an old friend, Mr. Lincoln Turnbull."

"How do you do?" Michael said courteously and held out his hand.

Lincoln said "MacNeil" in a loud voice and gave his hand a powerful shake. In her charity work, Sydney had seen visitors to institutions for the mentally retarded greet residents like that, casually and too heartily, the roughness hiding either embarrassment or fascination.

"Sorry to tell you this, Syd," Philip drawled.

"What?"

"We made the mistake of telling Lincoln you've never been up in the Ferris wheel."

"Uh-oh." She smiled—then started in surprise when Lincoln slid his hand inside her elbow and began to lead her away.

"Come on, Sydney, no time like the present."

Laughing, she cried, "Wait!" He stopped when she resisted in earnest. "Why do I have to go? You all go, and I'll wave to you from the bottom."

"No, no, you said you'd go," Sam cried, trying to grab her other hand. "Come on, you promised you would someday!"

"Yes, but I didn't say today."

"The rain's made everybody go home early," Philip pointed out, "so there won't be much of a line."

Michael was watching her interestedly. "Why don't you want to go?"

"Why don't
youT
she countered.

"Because I'm afraid."

They all laughed, even Lincoln, amused by his candor.

"Well," said Sydney, "the thing is, I'm not very fond of heights. I avoid them whenever possible."

"But this is history," Lincoln wheedled, pulling on her arm again. "Something to tell your grandchildren you did, way back in ninety-three."

"Come on, don't be a chicken," Sam taunted. "I've been on it, and I'm just a kid. I wasn't scared at all."

She groaned, vacillating between excitement and curiosity on one hand and real fear on the other.

"If you like, I'll go with you," Michael said in a low voice.

"Ha! There!" Sam started jumping up and down. "Now you
have
to go!"

It seemed that she did. Resigning herself to her fate, she let them tow her away to the Ferris wheel.

The crowds really had thinned, warned away by heavy clouds that hinted at a downpour and by a cold, gusty wind blowing in off the lake.The Midway was as close to deserted as it ever got. "Have you really been on the
Illinois
five times?" she asked Lincoln as they strode along. He had maneuvered her ahead of the others, taking it for granted that they were a couple.

"Six, counting today. I've always been a bit of a naval artillery buff, you know. Say, Sydney."

"Hm?"

He leaned close to speak in her ear. "Is it all right for you to be alone with him?" He jerked his chin sideways, over his shoulder.

"With Michael? Yes, of course, why wouldn't it be?"

"Well, I mean ..." He smiled, showing his teeth. "You know."

"No."

"Well, it's just that some might say he's not quite ..."

"Civilized?"