Brass Ring

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Oh, yes. I can say that with absolute certainty, and it tears me up inside. And your daughter?”

  “Blissful,” she said, although a knot formed in her stomach at the memory of the fights in those last few years before Susan left for school. Normal, though. Perfectly normal in adolescence.

  “You called your mother ‘Mellie’?”

  “Yes. She said it made her feel too old to be called Mom.”

  He gave her one last dubious smile as he sat up straight again and put their empty cups in the basket. “Listen,” he said, “how would you like to see The Magician of Dassant?”

  “We’d love to,” she answered, and then quickly realized that he might not have meant to include Jon in his invitation. She colored at the presumption, but before she could say anything, Randy spoke again.

  “Fine. There’ll be two tickets for you at the window on Sunday night—is Sunday okay? Saturday’s sold out.”

  “Sunday’s fine.”

  “And be sure to come backstage afterwards. I’d like to meet…Jon, is it?”

  “Yes.” Jon. She looked at her watch. One-forty-five! They were supposed to meet with Tom Gardner at two. She would never make it. She could call Jon from the theater, but that would put her even further behind. Better to simply drive to the foundation and be late. She could have sworn she’d been in the theater no longer than an hour.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m late for a meeting.”

  She stood up slowly, alert for the dizziness. It was there, but short-lived this time, and she steadied herself easily with her hand on the pew

  Randy followed her up the aisle and into the foyer, where the sandwich-board poster beckoned her to come to the play. She pushed opened the front door and stepped outside.

  Randy caught her arm. “Thanks for this, Claire,” he said. “For talking with me.” He didn’t let go of her arm, and their bodies brushed against one another through their heavy wool coats. “How would you feel about having lunch together again sometime?” he asked.

  The question surprised her, and she was tempted to say yes, but she couldn’t. Shouldn’t. How was she going to put Margot behind her if she continued a friendship with Randy?

  Randy misread her hesitation. “Purely platonic,” he said. “I’ve become a hermit since my divorce. My life’s been made up of work and isolation and some brief, lovely moments of theater when I can pretend to be someone else.” He looked up at the spire jutting into the gray sky. “I’ve been living that way for more than a year. It feels good to talk to someone. To really talk. You’re a nice person. Kind and brave.” He smiled. “I’m only looking for friendship, though. I know you’re married. And probably very busy, and I’d understand—”

  “I’d like it,” she said, the words coming out with a life of their own. She stood on her toes to buss his cheek. Muttering a good-bye, she turned away from him quickly and headed for her car. She’d rather he didn’t see the mix of emotions in her face. Not until she’d had a chance to scrutinize them herself, a chance to understand why the comfort and safety she felt with Randy Donovan seemed somehow tinged with danger.

  12

  JEREMY, PENNSYLVANIA

  1959

  MORNINGS IN THE BIG upstairs bedroom of the farmhouse were blindingly bright and filled with the scent of coffee. The sun poured through the open windows, washing over the yellow flowered wallpaper and warming the oak floor. The two little girls slumbered in their beds, burrowed beneath airy patchwork comforters their grandmother had stitched together from a lifetime’s collection of fabric scraps. Seven-year-old Claire was usually first to open her eyes, and she would stretch, reaching her arms behind her to touch the glossy brown wicker headboard as she breathed in the scent of coffee and sunshine. Her five-year-old sister, Vanessa, rarely woke up before Claire called to her across the room, and even then she would sometimes squirm down in the bed and wrap the comforter around her like a cocoon.

  On one particular morning in July, Claire awakened later than usual. She woke up Vanessa, who was grumpy and sulky, as she always was in the morning until she’d had a chance to wash her face and brush her teeth. Claire helped the younger girl get dressed, although Vanessa was pretty good at it by then and insisted on buttoning the little round buttons on her shirt by herself. It was still early when they clattered down the wide staircase and ran into the kitchen.

  “What beautiful daughters I have!” Mellie stood up from her seat at the table and, as she did every morning, pulled the girls into her arms, smothering them with noisy kisses. Tucker, the spotted dog, leaped around their feet. Mellie looked up from her daughters to her own mother, busy frying doughnuts at the stove. “Aren’t they beautiful, Mother?”

  Dora Siparo turned from the pan of oil to assess her grandchildren. “More beautiful every day,” she said.

  The girls plunked themselves down at the table. Claire folded her hands on the table’s edge, and Vanessa clumsily followed suit.

  “Coffee, please,” Claire said.

  “Coffee, please,” Vanessa mimicked.

  Mellie pushed Vanessa’s chair closer to the table. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. She poured them each a cup of coffee—or rather, she poured a splash of coffee into their big, wide cups, followed by a generous stream of milk. Their grandmother set plates in front of them, each bearing a doughnut coated with powdered sugar.

  Mellie sat down at the table with them. Her long, wavy blond hair was the same color as Vanessa’s, catching the sun like the facets on a diamond. Claire’s dark hair was more like her father’s, very thick and slightly coarse. It had little shine at all to it. Soon she would be at an age where that sort of thing mattered to her.

  “You know what day it is, girls, don’t you?” Mellie asked as she lit a cigarette.

  Claire wrinkled her nose at the question. “Mellie,” she protested. Claire had told her mother many times that she didn’t like to think about what day it was during the summer because counting the days would only bring her closer to September, when she would have to return to Virginia and school.

  “Friday?” Vanessa asked. Vanessa didn’t yet attend school, and she was always willing to play her mother’s guessing games.

  “And you know who comes on Friday?” Mellie’s blue eyes twinkled behind a curl of smoke.

  “Daddy!” Vanessa gave a little jump in her chair.

  Mellie leaned across the table to tap Vanessa’s nose. “That’s right, Angel. And you’re going to have so much fun with him this weekend, you won’t be able to stand it.”

  Vanessa beamed, her golden hair and tiny pearly teeth sparkling in the sunlight. Everyone knew that Len Harte liked to baby and spoil his youngest daughter. Everyone knew it, but nobody said a word about it.

  Len was able to join his family at the farm only on weekends because he had to work during the week, selling insurance in Virginia. The girls missed him, but every night Mellie told them stories about what he was doing during the day and how much he was thinking about the three of them, and it was almost like having him with them at the farm.

  When their father came on the weekends, he made up intriguing games to play with them and took them on exciting day trips. He seemed to know that it would take something really special to pull the girls away from their grandfather and his carousel.

  After breakfast, Dora filled a thermos with coffee and put a couple of doughnuts in a paper bag for the girls to take to their grandfather out in the barn.

  The barn stood alone on the far side of a broad green field. The girls ran toward it, Tucker yapping at their heels. Claire carried the thermos because she was older and the thermos was more dangerous to carry than the bag.

  The barn seemed to grow impossibly large as they neared it. It was painted a bright and beautiful red, like Mellie’s fingernails.

  The front doors were enormous, but this summer, Claire had the height and strength necessary to pull them open. She tugged on the left door, and Vanessa darted past her into the barn, clutch
ing the bag of doughtnuts to her chest.

  “Leave them open, Claire.” Vincent Siparo’s deep voice boomed from the workshop that sprouted from the side of the barn. “It’s going to be a hot one today.”

  Claire had to set down the thermos to open both doors wide. The outstretched doors left a huge gaping hole in the barn, and the carousel nearly spilled into the field. Claire’s favorite horse, the white, wild-maned Titan, was right in front, the gold of his serpentine mane glowing. If the carousel were to begin spinning, surely Titan and the other horses would simply leap off and gallop free into the field.

  Inside the workshop, Vanessa climbed onto one of the heavy wooden chairs to hand her grandfather the doughnuts across his big worktable. The bag had grown a little oily, and Vincent set it carefully to the side of the table before pulling out one of the doughnuts. He liked to keep his work space clean.

  The workshop smelled of wood shavings and of Vincent himself. The scents had blended together over the years. There was the smell of the cream he combed through his thinning gray hair, and the soft, sweet smell of the pipe he slipped, unlit, into his mouth from time to time as he worked and that he smoked for real on the porch in the evenings. Sometimes the smell was of paint, or of the oil he used on the mechanism that made the carousel spin. They were comforting smells, all of them, and there was no place the girls would rather be than there in their grandfather’s workshop.

  Claire raced into the room and handed him the thermos. He opened it, and the aroma of coffee joined the other scents in the air. “You’re on the late side this morning, ladies,” he said. There was a white dusting of powdered sugar on his lips, and the light from the window sparkled in his blue eyes. “I couldn’t figure out where to start on my work. Made me realize I don’t know what I’d do without you two.”

  The girls giggled. He always said that. How did he ever get anything done during the part of the year they were not around?

  The workshop was nearly as wide as the barn, but narrow. Long, thick, slablike tables lined one wall, and they were often covered with carved pieces of wood, unpainted and waiting to be glued together. A horse head here, a tail there. Against the short wall at the far end of the room stood shelves covered with paint and tools. Windows lined part of the other long wall. Any wall space not covered by shelves or windows was graced with large photographs, some in color, but most in black and white, of the carousel horses the girls’ great-grandfather, Joseph Siparo, had carved. His horses were on carousels around the world. He had taught Vincent how to carve, and although no one was interested in buying handcarved horses for carousels these days, Vincent didn’t care. He carved to his heart’s delight, making a carousel for himself. And, of course, for his granddaughters.

  “May I please have the clay, Grandpa?” Vanessa asked, her little teeth flashing, and Claire covered her own mouth with her hand. She had recently lost one of her front teeth. She didn’t smile too widely these days.

  In one corner of the workshop stood a cabinet filled with playthings for them. Jacks and pick-up-sticks and a jump rope and a ball and Candyland. And clay. That was their favorite, but it was on a shelf too high for them to reach.

  “Yes, you may have the clay,” Vincent said mysteriously to Vanessa, “but now that Claire is seven, I think it’s time she had a piece of wood to work with.”

  Claire stared at him. “Wood?” She smiled. The gap in her teeth showed small and dark.

  From beneath the table, Vincent pulled a brick-sized block of pale wood and a small knife.

  “Come here, Claire.” He scooted his chair back from the table to lift her onto his lap, and he rested the wood on her knees. “This is balsa wood,” he said. “It’s very soft and easy to carve. I’ll teach you how, all right?”

  Claire stared reverently at the block of wood. “Yes.” From across the table, Vanessa watched and listened, her small mouth open and, in her eyes, a resigned jealousy. Claire shrugged at her.

  Vincent spent nearly half an hour showing Claire how to use the knife. She leaned against his chest, his gray beard softly scratching her temple. When he spoke, she could feel his voice deep inside her ribcage. Vanessa looked up from her clay from time to time, studying her sister with quiet longing.

  “You’ll be able to do this someday, too, Vannie,” Claire said to her after climbing off Vincent’s lap to take a seat at the worktable. Vanessa nodded glumly and returned her attention to the clay. She was making something unrecognizable, as usual.

  Vincent turned on the big window fan, slipped the unlit pipe into his mouth, and the three of them settled down with their projects. Tucker yipped as he dreamed, and every time he thumped his tail in his sleep, Vanessa giggled.

  When they’d first arrived at the farm this summer, the girls had been confused by Tucker’s appearance. He was smaller than he used to be. He had more dark patches on his short white coat. He licked their hands more than he used to and sometimes nipped annoyingly at their heels when they ran. As a matter of fact, he seemed like a completely different dog. But everyone was calling him Tucker.

  “Where’s the real Tucker?” Claire had asked Mellie.

  Mellie had glanced at her own mother. “This dog is really named Tucker,” she had said.

  “I mean the other Tucker.”

  Mellie knelt down to stroke the impostor’s too-small head. “They gave the other Tucker away, honey,” she said. “You know how he loved being around you kids?”

  Claire nodded.

  “Well, Grandpa and Grandma knew he couldn’t be very happy with just the two of them, so they gave him to a family with lots of children. And now he’s the happiest dog in the world, right, Mother?”

  Dora turned away, a small smile on her lips. “If you say so, dear.”

  So, Claire and Vanessa were getting used to this Tucker. He was skinny and yappy, and he licked too much, but he was a good fetcher and better than no dog at all.

  After an hour or so of working with her clay, Vanessa went into the barn where she could lay down for a nap. Vincent had put some old blankets on a couple of crates, and the girls napped there every day. Today, though, Claire didn’t bother with a nap. She was working on her wood with extraordinary care, and she was still working on it when Vanessa appeared again in the doorway of the workshop.

  “I think it’s time for our ride now, please, Grandpa,” she said.

  Vincent smiled and set down the tool he was using. He took the pipe from his mouth and stroked his hand across his beard. “Think you two have worked hard enough to earn a ride?” he asked.

  Claire nodded and held up her hand to show him the new blister forming on her thumb while Vanessa pointed to the clay blob she had made. Vincent lifted Vanessa into his arms and walked over to her project. He held the lump of clay into the light from the windows. “I see, Vanessa,” he said. “This is not a horse. It’s a giraffe, right?”

  Vanessa broke into a grin. “Yes!”

  “It’s a giraffe with a very odd tail.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I can see that you’ve been working every bit as hard as Claire.” He set her down on the floor again. “A ride for you both.”

  Claire raced to the carousel, hopping onto the platform and running over to Titan. It took some effort, but this summer she could reach the horse’s stirrup and pull herself onto his back without her grandfather’s help. Meanwhile, Vincent lifted his blond granddaughter onto the back of a standing gray horse. Vanessa said it was her favorite, but she had a new favorite every day, while Claire had favored Titan for several years now, ever since Vincent had first set the white stallion in place on the carousel. Claire shivered with excitement as she waited for the ride to start. The music—”The Sidewalks of New York”—began to play, the carousel turned, and Vincent waved at the girls as they swept past him on his whimsical creations.

  Each time Claire passed the brass ring chute, she held tight to Titan’s pole and reached out to try to grasp a ring, usually succeeding once during a ride.
Vanessa didn’t even bother trying. She didn’t care, she said, but the look in her eyes was wistful each time she passed the chute. It was a long reach, though. Long and scary from the top of a horse. It didn’t matter. Vincent always gave Vanessa an extra ride, too, brass ring or not.

  As they did every afternoon, the girls and their grandfather ate a big lunch with Mellie and Dora in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Everyone knew what a sacrifice it was for Dora and Mellie to make it to the table: They were missing their “stories” on the television. Vanessa had actually been named after one of the glamorous soap opera stars while Claire was the namesake of Dora’s sister, who had died many years earlier.

  Mellie still wore her satin robe at the table, and she held her hands away from the food so as not to mess the barn-red manicure she’d just given herself. She’d curled her hair and put on makeup. The girls thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  The farm was surrounded by thick forest, and after lunch, as he always did, Vincent took his granddaughters on a long walk through the woods. He showed them jack-in-the-pulpits and fungus that he claimed lit up at night, and for the second time that summer, they saw a spotted fawn. He knew everything there was to know about the woods, and they loved holding his big hands as they walked. They stayed in the cool shelter of the forest until the heat of the day had worn off a bit before returning to the barn and the workshop.

  Late in the afternoon, when the sun burned a deep bronze across the fields outside the workshop windows, they heard Len Harte’s car pull up the long drive to the house. The girls ran out of the barn and across the field. When they reached the house, their father was standing in the yard, holding Mellie, kissing her, and the girls jumped around his legs until he finally bent down to pick them up—Vanessa first, then Claire—and the four of them snuggled and laughed and giggled together in the warm golden air in front of the sun-drenched farmhouse.