Wild Heart (3 page)

"Not to mention shooting him," Sydney pointed out.

No wonder he wouldn't cooperate with them. They were lucky he hadn't eaten them.

"What are you going to do with him? What will happen to him if he never speaks?"

He sat back, folding his hands over his sunken chest. His cloudy eyes grew even vaguer. "Boy's depressed. Sighs all the time. Kicked a hole in the wall last night. Muscles weakening—needs exercise. Night vision not as keen. Smell, ditto. Used to be able to smell the paint on the wall, and newsprint, hair oil. Losing it. Retreating. Melancholia. Homesick. Doesn't care."

Amazing, thought Sydney, how sensitive he could be to the smallest details of his subjects' actions and reactions. Too bad he couldn't spare too much of that sensitivity for his family.

"Harley?" Aunt Estelle bustled into the room, pulling Philip behind her. "Harley, I would like your complete and undivided attention."

Her father looked up, pleasant-faced. "Morning, Estelle. Philip. You, too, Sam?"

Sam came in last, trying to look inconspicuous. "Hi, Daddy," he chirped, and made a beeline for Sydney. He was nervous, but he didn't want to miss anything.

"Harley, I've come to speak to you about your son."

"Hm?" He looked back and forth between Philip and Sam, smiling benignly. "Which one?"

Aunt Estelle scowled in irritation. She was four years younger than her brother, hatchet-thin and pale like him, with a graying chignon from which stray hairs never escaped. All the passionate energy Papa put into his work, Aunt Estelle put into a different kind of obsession: social climbing. The Winters weren't among the city's richest families, not by any means. And yet, due in large part to Aunt Estelle's diligence (the other part to Sydney's marriage to Spencer Winslow Darrow, III), they were beginning to join the ranks of the most influential, that privileged elite who decided who was and wasn't allowed into the highest circles of its own closed society. Her ambition was to become a human gate, in imitation of the Armours, Pullmans, Swifts, and McCormicks, established gatekeepers whose company she coveted. Calling Aunt Estelle a snob was like calling her brother a little forgetful: an understatement.

"Do you have any idea what your son was doing last night?" She had a piece of Philip's coat sleeve pinched between her fingers; a few years ago it would've been his ear. "Rather than studying the mathematics and geometry he came so close to failing last term at his expensive East Coast college? Well, Harley? What do you think he was up to?"

"Haven't a clue, Estie. What."

Had anyone but Papa ever called Aunt Estelle "Estie"? It was hard to imagine. She'd never been married, never even been rumored to have a beau. Old photographs showed a younger version of her present self, stiff-necked and narrow-eyed, rarely smiling. Her conversation was either instructive or censorious—which made her the reverse of an ideal traveling companion, Sydney had discovered. Her temperament was disapproving and unforgiving, and duty was her passion. Most people were afraid of her. She was easy to respect, a lot harder to love.

She had good qualities, too, of course. She loved her cat Wanda,
really
loved her. She did superb needlework, and she had a spectacular green thumb; indeed, she was the first female vice president of the Chicago Rose Society. It was
people
she had no facility with—and if that was a failing caused by shyness, she'd learned long ago and very well how to disguise it as a flinty heart.

"He left the house sometime in the night and did not return until dawn. Reeking of tobacco and—and worse," she finished ominously, choosing not to name, out of deference to Sam, what could possibly be worse than tobacco.

Philip slipped out of her pincer grip and slouched over to the window. During the second his back was turned to her, he made a wild, moronic face at Sydney and Sam. This, of course, caused Sam to bark out a loud guffaw. He pressed his face into Sydney's skirts, hiding, and she automatically covered the back of his head with her hand.

Papa blinked noncommittally behind his lenses. Finally he roused himself to say, "Tsk. That won't do, I suppose."

"What do you propose for a punishment?"

"Hm?"

"You're his father. Philip is twenty years old, not a boy any longer."

"No, indeed. Not a boy any longer."

"He is heading down a path toward total self-destruction."

"Is he? Hm! Can't have that."

"After two years at Dartmouth College, his academic record is undistinguished, to say the least. His deportment is worse than Samuel's. He's insolent, lazy, and disobedient. A lax hand at this point is not a kindness to the boy, Harley: it's a dereliction of your duty as a parent."

Poor Papa.
He made more humming noises, pushing the papers around on his desk, taking off his glasses and cleaning them, sticking them back on his nose and looking curiously at Philip, no doubt trying to reconcile his sister's portrait of profligacy with the handsome, mild-eyed son smiling facetiously back at him.

It was, Sydney realized, a perfect Winter family moment, everyone waiting for Papa to make up his mind, have an opinion,
do
something, while deep down each of them knew that he would never do anything. Sydney knew, too, that Philip stayed out smoking, drinking, and God knew what else for the express purpose of getting a rise out of his father, even though the impossibility of that happening ought to have been clear to him by now. She'd done something like it herself once—eloped with Spencer instead of waiting five more weeks for their elaborate formal wedding. But she had only succeeded in horrifying Aunt Estelle. Which was gratifying in its own way, but not really what she'd been looking for at the time.

"Well?" Her aunt was determined to play out this charade to the end. "What disciplinary measures do you suggest, Harley, for your son's sake?"

"Hm? Well, now. Hm. Let's see." Clueless, he tapped his pen on his ink blotter. "Disciplinary measures. Hmm." More pen tapping. "Any suggestions?"

The magic words; once spoken, the fiction that Dr. Winter was the head of his own household was allowed to die, a mercy killing, and the true commander-in-chief stepped forward.

"You should revoke his allowance for the month of June," Aunt Estelle declared without hesitation.

Sydney drew in her breath. What a harsh penalty! A glance at Philip reassured her, though. He was trying to look stricken, but she saw a twinkle in his eye and guessed the reason for it. Whatever he'd gotten up to last night, it must've included gambling.
Successful
gambling.

"Hm. Yes, that's the ticket. No money for you next month, eh? Well, Philip? Learned your lesson, have you?"

Over Aunt Estelle's scornful snort, Philip straightened from his negligent pose by the window and made his father an exaggeratedly respectful bow. "Yes, sir, I have. Thank you, sir. I'll try not to displease you again."

Even Papa smiled at that—and a warm bubble of love for him burst unexpectedly in Sydney's chest. He had a sense of humor, oh, yes, he did, drier than desert sand, lying dormant for ages, and then blowing up in your face when you least expected it.

The only person it didn't enchant was Aunt Estelle, who considered it just one more eccentricity in a man already riddled with enough of them. Duty done, she squared her shoulders, pivoted, and marched out of the room.

"Are you really flunking all your subjects, Flip?" asked Sam, patting wet sand to the ankles around his brother's bare feet.

"No, Sam, only half of 'em. Just the ones that have numbers."

"You mean like arithmetic?"

"Right. Like arithmetic."

"I can help you if you want," Sam said. "I'm really good at numbers. Want me to help you, Flip?" He still called his big brother the old nickname, the closest he'd been able to come to "Philip" when he was a baby.

Philip leaned back on his elbows and wriggled his toes, uncovering his feet. "Thanks, sport, but I think I'm past help."

Sydney brushed loose sand from the corner of the blanket, keeping quiet. Later she would ask Philip if he was failing on purpose, so that Dartmouth would throw him out and he could do what he'd always wanted to do: write novels.

Not now, though. It was a perfect afternoon, the last day of May, with cottonball clouds bouncing high over the dark blue of the lake, and puffs of bracing wind blowing in often enough to make the hot sun bearable. Sydney beamed at her brothers, content just to be with them again. Three months! It had felt like three years.

"This is the exact color my hair used to turn in the summer," she told Sam, pushing the whitish blond bangs back from his forehead. "Maybe you'll grow up to be a redhead like me. Would you like that?"

He considered it, wrinkling his freckled nose. Sydney had freckles too, but she lightened hers with powder. "I don't know," he answered thoughtfully, peering at Philip. "I think I'd rather have dark hair. Dark brown."

She couldn't blame him—Philip was gorgeous. He might hate Dartmouth, but two years there had turned him into a very distinguished-looking undergraduate. More and more, he resembled photographs of their father in the old days, when Dr. Harley Winter had been quite the gay young blade on the University of Chicago campus. Or so they had been told. It didn't seem possible, but their own mother—dead for seven years now—had said it often, so it must've been true.

"So you'd rather grow up to look like your big brother than your big sister." Sydney pouted. "I'm hurt."

Sam giggled and let her ruffle his hair again. He had changed, too, while she'd been gone. He'd gotten even skinnier, and she could swear he'd grown two inches. He was seven now, and hair-ruffling was something he tolerated only because she'd been away so long and he'd missed her. "Are you eating enough?" she fretted, squeezing the bony knee under his knickers.

"I eat all the time, I eat like a
horse.
Aunt Estelle says I eat like a swarm of locos." He scrambled to his feet. "I eat like a pack of jackals!" He trotted away, attracted to some nasty-looking thing Hector had just pulled out of the surf. Sydney hoped it was dead; changed her mind and hoped it was alive; changed her mind again.

Philip, before her very eyes, began to roll a cigarette. She made obligatory disapproving sounds, but she was spellbound. Spencer hadn't smoked. Except on trains and from a ladylike distance, she had never seen anyone make a cigarette before. She glanced back at Sam, but he and the dog were safely absorbed in their unsavory find thirty yards away. "Do you smoke all the time?"

"Sure. Passes the time." He stuck the cigarette in the side of his mouth, lit a match, and touched it to the end, somehow sucking in smoke and blowing it out through his nostrils at the same time.

She shook her head and tsked, imitating Aunt Estelle, but she was impressed. "How much did you win last night in your poker game?"

"Enough."

"Enough so you won't miss your allowance."

He just winked at her.

"You know you can always come to me if you're ever really strapped, don't you?" She still lived in her father's house, but her inheritance from Spencer's estate had left her financially independent. Rich, actually.

Philip's handsome face lost its look of sophisticated indifference; he flashed a quick grin. "You're a peach, Syd. What would I do without you?"

She watched the breeze flutter the fringe on her parasol. "Philip . . . It's not worth it, you know."

"What's not worth it?"

"Defying them."

He started to roll down the cuffs of his trousers, not looking at her. "I don't give a damn about them."

Such a guileless lie. He cared as much as she did. She longed to help him make his father's inattention and indifference not matter so much. But Philip was too much like her: exactly the same things hurt him. He was a man, though, and so the things he did to counter the hurt could have more disastrous consequences than the things a woman could do.

"It doesn't make any sense to throw away your education," she counseled softly. "You'll hurt yourself, not them."

He huffed out a laugh, as if he didn't know what she was talking about. "How do you like West living right here in the house?" he asked abruptly—changing the subject.

"I don't mind. Anyway, he's so busy, I hardly ever see him." She hesitated, then said, "He's asked me to marry him."

"What?"
He stubbed his cigarette out in the sand and stared at her.

"Is it such a surprise? He's been courting me for months."

"I know, but he's—" He stopped, and she could see it dawning on him that some adult tact might be called for here.

"Why do you dislike Charles?" she challenged.

"I don't dislike him. Really. I
like
him—if you like him."

"Well, I do like him."

He was silent for a second, then squinted up at her. "I still don't like him."

They burst out laughing. She reveled in it, the closeness, the gaiety, the lovely frankness between them just for this moment. Compared to this, Charles West faded into insignificance.

She was so used to the sound of Hector's deep-throated baying when he played with Sam on the beach, she barely heard it. Now she heard it change to a higher note, excited and welcoming. She looked up. Two dark-garbed
figures were walking along the water, slowly coming toward them.