Night of the Ice Storm

by Stout, David;

  They were interrupted by loud splashing and screams from the pool. Karen sprang to her feet. “Brendan, don’t you dare do that!” she shouted.

  “Ma, he pushed my head under.”

  “She kicked me first.”

  “Liar.”

  More splashes and louder screaming.

  “Listen, both of you,” Karen Shafer began. “That kind of behavior is going to come to a screeching halt right now.”

  Will Shafer swallowed gin, chewed ice and lime pulp, and studied his wife. She was a handsome woman, and summer was a good season for her: she looked her best with her skin medium tanned, looked good in the white slacks and terry-cloth blouse she had on now. She looked good with her sunglasses in place, looked good with the sunglasses propped up to rest pertly on her black hair so her hazel eyes could flash in the sun.

  Karen had a habit of propping up her sunglasses when she was angry, and she had just done it so she could get the kids in line. “Last chance!” she shouted toward the pool.

  The splashing subsided, turned almost sulky.

  “So, this reunion thing is going to be a pain for you.”

  “Oh, for sure. The response is underwhelming. Charlie Buck says he’ll come, but I think that’s only because his father is having a birthday. And Grant Siebert wasn’t enthusiastic.”

  “Do you have any help?”

  “I do, actually. Young Lyle is pitching in.”

  Suddenly, loud splashing and screaming from the pool.

  “Okay, that’s it!” Karen said. She was on her feet and off the porch deck in two seconds flat, striding decisively toward the end of the yard.

  Will used the opportunity to sneak another jigger of gin into his glass, topping it off with just a little tonic.

  “Mom!”

  Will Shafer felt duty bound to do something. He stood. “You two straighten up right now,” he said. “I mean, right now.”

  His wife already had the situation under control. She was as good with the children as she was with everything else.

  They were far, far from wealthy, but they were comfortable financially. Their house had four bedrooms, one of which was a study; a big kitchen, good-sized dining room, wood-burning fireplace in the living room, a basement that did not leak, a porch deck, a small pool for the kids. They had a big front yard and a backyard that offered much more than views of other backyards. From their porch deck, in fact, they could see a sliver of Lake Erie, off in the distance across the tops of the trees in the park several blocks away.

  Brendan and Cass were walking up the yard now, their diving masks still in place, both pouting.

  The wet feet of the children stomped up onto the porch deck. Under their mother’s prodding, the boy and girl dried their hair, ears, and feet, then draped the towels around them before sliding back the screen and going inside. Their mother followed, doling out instructions.

  In a few minutes, Will Shafer knew, his wife would come back to the porch deck, sit down across from him again, and chat some more.

  “Honey!” Karen’s deep, resonant voice came from way inside the house. “Check on the chicken, okay?”

  “Right.” He took the lid off the grill, turned the chicken breasts. On the shelf attached to the grill was a bowl containing Karen’s special barbecue mixture: store-bought sauce combined with a dash of honey and a little yogurt. Will Shafer painted the breasts with the stuff, knowing that in a little while the chicken would be golden glazed and delicious, the outside crisp and the inside moist with the juices sealed in by the honey and yogurt.

  She was one of the most competent people he had ever known. She moved surely, gracefully, in the world of wives, the wives of merchants and manufacturers and bankers and doctors who made up the dwindling social elite of Bessemer. And she was equally at ease with the shrinking cadre of traditional women who stayed home and tended the home and with the growing legions of ambitious, even driven women who worked outside the home. She was gracious, too, with those women who worked not for a sense of self-fulfillment but simply because they had to so their fatherless children could eat and have clothes to wear to school.

  Karen had always been a strong person, as well as a kind one, and she had a gift for sharing her strength with those who needed it most. Like her husband, Will thought.

  When she was still Karen Manning, she had majored in sociology and earned a master’s degree in social work. After their marriage, she had worked for several social agencies. She still wrote articles for sociological journals, especially on teenage pregnancy. Of all the social problems, she had written again and again, that was the saddest and most destructive, because it perpetuated just about every other problem one could think of.

  Karen Shafer was occasionally sought by high school guidance counselors on how to prevent teen pregnancies, and how best to deal with them once they occurred.

  All in all, Will Shafer knew as he swallowed his drink and snuck another half jigger of gin into his glass, one of the most confident, competent people he had ever known. And one of the kindest.

  Lord, she had seen something in him.

  As he felt the gin glow start to take effect and tried to savor the sweet smell of lawns and the fragrance of the chicken, he thought (not for the first time, or the hundredth) that she was much more sure of her universe, her self, than he was about himself.

  He belonged to the country club, belonged to a couple of other social clubs, because the publisher wanted him to and so took care of the dues. But that did not make him feel comfortable with these men, who were cut from a different cloth than he.

  Karen had told him many times over the years that his lack of self-esteem was a treatable condition, not something in his chromosomes, and that counseling might help him. Might help him personally, might help him professionally—might even help him in the bedroom, she had said at last.

  The psychiatrist had told him to take things one step at a time, one day at a time. Well, that seemed like good advice, especially since his days were going to be quite full enough, planning for the Gazette’s reunion.

  “Breaking ninety,” Will Shafer hissed into his melting gin ice. He chuckled.

  His golf game had deteriorated in recent years from lack of practice. He had gotten less joy out of golf than he had long before. Maybe that was because he was often expected to play with people at the club, people who probably wouldn’t look at him if he wasn’t editor of the Gazette.

  Or was there another reason? He felt a pain in his head, blinked hard. Too much gin? Too many memories? Too much forgetting, or trying to forget?

  What had the doctor said? We’ll get there, Will. We’ll get to where the guilt is.…

  Karen had urged him, prodded him, to see the psychiatrist. Would she be able to live with the results? Would he?

  He heard her slide open the screen; she was coming back to the porch. He would do his best to enjoy the evening, would do his best to share with her. But he would not tell her how protective he had felt toward Jenifer Hurley, how sure he had felt that she was making more of her youth than he had of his.

  No, he would keep that grief for himself.

  Eleven

  As she jogged along the road across from a reservoir, she did not mind the occasional whistles from teenage boys in passing cars. Sometimes Marlee West even waved to them and grinned.

  She did not jog fast, she did not jog particularly far—just a couple of miles at a time. But she jogged enough to keep her weight down, not to mention her blood pressure and tension.

  Marlee jogged almost every day; it had to be a mighty heavy rain to stop her. If the weather did get really bad, especially in the winter, if the pavement was slippery as glass, she went to the health spa.

  Now, fifty yards from her cottage, Marlee slowed to a walk. She had read that tapering off from a jog to a walk, instead of just standing around or slumping into a chair, was healthy because it kept the blood from pooling in the legs, thus preventing muscle aches.

  Walking those l
ast yards, Marlee savored the Saturday-morning sun on her face and exulted in the sweat that was washing the poison out of her system. Not that she had that many poisons: she was careful about her drinking, careful what she ate. Not too much fat or red meat, only occasional pizza or ice cream. No smoking. (She could hardly believe she had ever dabbled in marijuana; just the thought of putting smoke, any smoke, in her system was sickening. Well, that was long ago.)

  Yet not so long ago. Maybe coming to grips with that paradox was what getting old—no, older—was all about.

  Oh, heavy thoughts, Marlee. She laughed aloud, and her outcry was answered at once by a bark from her Airedale terrier, who had been sunning himself in his backyard pen.

  “Okay, Nigel! Good boy. Mommie’s gonna make breakfast, honey.”

  Marlee was seldom preoccupied with getting older, but she was having a party tonight, and some of the guests would be much younger than she was. Well, she hoped they would mix well. If not, too bad.

  It was really a party for herself: she had recently won a statewide press award (five hundred dollars and a plaque) for “especially sensitive and perceptive commentary on social issues over a number of years,” and she wanted to celebrate.

  She had simply been writing what she thought needed writing about—often women who were doing new things (or traditional things) in a world that was changing too fast.

  She had been delighted to win the award; it was the reminder that she had been writing “over a number of years” that had bothered her for a moment. But only for a moment.

  “Hi, Nigel. Oh, slurp, slurp.” She knelt next to the gate, letting the dog lick her ear through the wire.

  The guest mix would be a risk, but she knew it was one worth taking. She had had lots of safe parties and dinners and had been to many—the kind where the guests are mostly of the same age and mind-set.

  Tonight’s party would be different. Maybe the guests would gather in little knots—people from the same age, sharing the same snotty biases. So big deal, the party might be a bore. She was not afraid of that. But if it worked, it could be a lot of fun, could even make the newsroom a happier place.

  “C’mon in, Nigel. I’m gonna cook you an egg today.”

  It could very well be, with the right mixture of food and drink, and if she herself could be the catalyst—it just might be that the party would work. The older staff people might find things to like in the younger ones, might remind themselves that they had been like that once. The younger ones might begin to discover that their elders were not so different from them, in some ways.

  “Here you go, Nigel.”

  She wondered, sometimes, why she saw things so much more clearly than other people did.

  The Airedale gulped down his microwaved egg, then munched the rest of his food. Nigel was a wonderful watchdog, wonderful companion. Seventy pounds of courage and love wrapped in a muscular tan-and-black frame. Marlee would always have a dog, whether she lived alone or hooked up with somebody.

  There had been men in her life. Whether too many or not enough she couldn’t say. Anyhow, there had never been a long-term one.

  Was that because she was a feminist? Could be, but that was what she was, and that was that. It could be that men in Bessemer were more off-put by a feminist than big-city men were. And Marlee’s column on women’s issues left no room for anyone in the world to doubt where she stood. And the award was a good reminder that she was reaching people.

  She took her orange juice and cereal to the back porch and sat in the sun while Nigel did his postbreakfast airing and sniffing. Had she forgotten anything? She thought not. She would push as much furniture as possible against the walls to create open space. Maybe the party would spill onto the back porch. That would be good; people feel at ease in the dark, on a porch. And it would keep smoke from collecting in the rooms.

  How many smokers were there? She tried to count. Not many, thank goodness. What would she do if someone lit up a joint? No, that wasn’t likely, not with Will Shafer coming. She wondered if anyone would start an argument with the executive editor. Well, he could hold his own.

  She had come to like and respect Will Shafer over the years. He had treated her just fine, professionally and personally. He had told her to take a week off, with pay, after the death of her mother two years before. He had understood her burden, had known it was ten times greater because her mother’s death came less than a year after her father’s.

  And as an editor, Will Shafer had backed her all the way—or ninety-nine percent, which was all a columnist could expect from an editor.

  She had plenty of beer, plenty of wine, plenty of soft drinks. She had chips and dips, fruit and other munchies, and she already knew where she would lay it out.

  She had placed charcoal in the grill, and she would light it an hour or so into the party, after things got going. The grill sat on the grass, a few feet from the porch. Good: it was obviously not going to rain tonight, so the hot dogs could cook down there in the yard. That way, there would be no charcoal smoke hanging under the porch roof.

  “Nigel, boy, if you’re a good fella you might get some treats tonight. That’s right, boy, company’s coming.”

  Marlee went inside, poured a cup of coffee, and took it upstairs. She undressed and stepped into the shower, pausing to study her body in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door.

  Not bad, she told herself: a couple of freckles and moles here and there, but the jogging had really trimmed her. She smiled at how her body looked; good, hard muscle was just as attractive on a woman as it was on a man.

  The water felt good as it rinsed away the poisons that the jogging had sweated out of her.

  She had plenty of music to play, sounds that would go over easy or make a lot of noise, depending on how things were going.

  She had also dug out her shoebox full of old photographs from Gazette picnics, Christmas parties, farewell parties, along with several of the tape recordings from back when. There were dozens of pictures, a dozen or so tapes. Looking at the pictures ahead of time had made her feel nostalgic: many had been taken by Arnie Schwartz, for a long time the Gazette’s chief photographer—in fact, the paper’s only photographer for many years. How many years had he been dead? Ten at least, Marlee thought.

  Marlee had decided to spread the pictures on a table, along with the tapes and her recorder. That way, people could look and listen, or they could choose not to. It was no big deal.

  One thing she saw in the pictures (besides her lost youth) was that newspaper people of yesteryear had been more eager to have a good time. God, so many of them were so … serious nowadays.

  If there was one thing that could break the ice at a party (besides the right mix of people and a little booze), it was looking at old pictures. It was invariably fun for the people who were in the pictures, and it was often fun for those who weren’t. Old pictures could narrow the gap of years in an instant. Okay, part of it was selective amnesia, but so was happiness itself.

  Will and Karen Shafer were the first to arrive. So like him, Marlee thought; always dependable.

  “Marlee, hi. Thanks for having us. And congratulations again.”

  “Amen, Marlee. Richly deserved.”

  “Thanks and double thanks,” Marlee said. And to Karen, “And I’ll never forget how generous you’ve been with what you know.”

  Marlee thought Will was as awkward as ever at kissing. He wore dress slacks and a blazer, even though Marlee had specified informal dress, and Marlee glimpsed a tie folded in his inside coat pocket just in case. What a tight ass, she thought.

  “You’ve done some decorating since we were here last,” Karen Shafer said.

  “Yup. A little paint here and there.”

  “And the rocks,” Will said. “Those rocks are, uh, nice.”

  “Thanks,” Marlee said, not bothering to tell Will that the rocks had been around awhile and that he had commented on them before. Every six months or so, Marlee spotted a rock, at the beach or i
n the country, whose shape or color or both appealed to her. If she liked the rock, she brought it home. She had several rocks, most fist-sized or a little bigger, sitting on tables, shelves, and bookcases.

  “Here’s someone else,” Karen Shafer said.

  “Ah,” Marlee said. “It’s Ed Sperl. C’mon in, Ed!”

  Ed Sperl wore wrinkled khakis, a loud sport shirt, and an insolent expression. Marlee didn’t like him all that much, but he was often good at parties: he liked to drink, and he knew a lot of juicy stories from the police beat. That alone made him good company for the younger reporters.

  But right now, there was an awkward moment. Will and Ed were trying to look congenial when everyone knew they didn’t like each other. Will, especially, looked embarrassed as he chatted with Ed Sperl. Both men paused and smiled as Marlee brought them beer; Karen Shafer said she would pour herself some white wine and soda in a few minutes.

  “Cheers,” Marlee said, sipping her wine.

  God, it was funny. Will looked as if his jaw had been wired for electricity, so that he could smile by pressing a button.

  Marlee was relieved—as much for Will Shafer as herself—when she saw a couple more guests park out front. Yes, she could feel the momentum of the party.

  Marlee had had several glasses of wine by the time she went to light the charcoal. She was happy. It was a warm night, and some of the guests were standing around on the porch, as she had hoped they would. So far, no sloppy drunks, big arguments, or broken furniture.

  She loved the sounds of a party, the sounds she was hearing now: voices and laughter from the porch, a muffled din from inside the house.

  “Marlee, does your dog like light or regular beer?”

  “Don’t you dare!” She chuckled, but anyone who offered her dog beer would never be invited to her place again.

  “Marlee.”

  Behind her, a soft, diffident voice.

  “Lyle, hi! I’m so glad you could make it.”

  “Me, too. And thanks for making the Gazette look good.”

  Lyle Glanford, Jr., hugged her gently, kissed her awkwardly. God, weren’t any men at the paper easy around women?