by Belva Plain
Philip interrupted her thoughts. “Isn’t this what you’d call a ‘halcyon’ day? And this a perfect place for it? On this cool porch, with your cherished garden, your English perennial border—what are those blue things? I remember seeing them in England.”
“Echinops. They’re a kind of thistle.”
“This is a house you want to stay in and hand down to your children. There are wonderful houses like it in Montreal, I remember. I used to go out of my way sometimes to pass them coming back from work, just to take a look.”
He was making conversation. He had not fooled her.
“Robb isn’t satisfied with this house,” she blurted.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“He didn’t buy it himself, that’s what’s wrong. Sounds bitter, doesn’t it?”
“Bitter on his part, or on yours?”
“On both, I suppose.” And she fell still, watching a fat bee crawl up a stem. She wanted to talk, and she also wanted to keep her need for privacy.
“I’m bottled up,” she said, still watching the bee.
Philip struck a match, relit his pipe, and studied the puff of smoke.
“I guess I need to talk, Philip. Don’t you always say it’s better to speak out?”
“But don’t you and Robb always do that? It’s been my impression that you do.”
“Yes, but on this subject we always reach an impasse. You see, I don’t like the whole pattern he’s made out of his life. It’s done something to us, as if he had taken up gambling. He seems to be driven toward making money, more money, and more, and spending it. These cars, for instance, don’t fit our life. And now the house … We don’t need anything larger. It’s absurd, and I don’t want to leave this house. I won’t do it.”
“Making money is the pattern? Most people like to do that,” Philip said mildly.
“Yes, but I don’t care about the people he’s with. I told him so at the beginning. All those politicians who invest with Devlin at that club—I sense that they’re false, a slippery lot.” Now that she had gotten started, her words came rushing.
“I like Robb,” Philip said abruptly.
Ellen’s voice broke. “You’re thinking I’m disloyal to my husband to talk like this.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m hearing that you love him and you’re frightened by what you see.”
“ ‘Why do you want so much?’ I asked him. And he answered with something like, ‘Well, I guess I just can’t get enough of feeling that I’m my own man.’ He made a joke of it, but I know that in his heart it’s no joke, and I wish I could help him.”
“When was he not ‘his own man’?”
Having told this much, she might just as well tell it all. “It was because of my father. He treated Robb really badly. Sometimes it hurts to remember it and to think that I didn’t stop it, although I don’t know how I could have.”
She felt almost as if she were confessing a personal sin by exposing her dead father to blame. And yet he deserved the blame.
“I keep thinking if Dad hadn’t died,” she said sadly, “they would have come together again. I sometimes think Dad was sorry but didn’t know how to, or else simply wouldn’t, take the first step. Robb either wouldn’t or couldn’t take it, either. And it all stems from Penn, the poor innocent.”
“Give me a cookie,” Penn demanded from the doorway.
“He eats too many sweets,” Ellen said. “But he usually has a tantrum if I refuse him.”
“Distraction. Always distract if you can. Want to play ball with me, Penn?”
Finding that Penn was still unable to catch a thrown ball, Philip rolled it to and fro across the grass. From where she sat, Ellen could not hear what Penn was saying, but whatever it was, he was laughing. She could see his fine teeth. And she sat there with a lump in her throat, watching them play.
“I wouldn’t have said some of the things I said today,” she murmured when later Philip resumed his walk, “but you know us so well, that somehow it seemed natural. Anyway, thank you for listening. And thank you for making Penn happy.”
He was standing below her with one foot braced against the step and one hand on the railing. Sunlight touched yesterday’s beard along his jaw. He must not have shaved this morning. His shirt was open low enough at the throat to show the divide between whiteness and tan. She had never stood so close to him before. And a vivid sensation, a vivid picture, flashed: her inner eye undressed him in graphic detail; she was horrified at herself.
He was looking at her as if he had read her mind. Then he raised his arm in good-bye and walked rapidly down the street.
“He likes you,” Julie said.
“He likes us all. He’s our friend.”
“I didn’t mean that, Mom.”
“What did you mean?” asked Ellen.
“Oh Mom, you know. I see the way he looks at you.”
“That’s silly. He looks at you, too.”
“Not in the same way, Mom.”
“That’s utterly ridiculous!”
“I don’t think so.”
Just drop the subject and do it now, Ellen.
“You’ve been seeing too many stupid movies,” she said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1989
“I haven’t come to waste your time,” Eddy protested. “I know you’re busy.”
Robb was. He had an appointment in fifteen minutes, and he was irritated by the intrusion, so he said somewhat testily, “I have no time to talk about investments now, and here.”
“This isn’t an investment. I’m telling you about a house to live in, and all I need is a minute. You know that land out past Lambert that I told you about? Well, it’s going to foreclosure, and Dick can pick it up for less than you would believe. It’s a hundred acres on a hill, with a view of the river. It’s fantastic.” Eddy’s arm made a wide sweep across the desk. “It would be a great place for you. You get that look in your eyes whenever you mention the old farm.”
“It hardly sounds like the old farm.”
“Well, of course not. But you’d fall in love with all that space. I was out there yesterday. Take my word.”
“Not now. Ellen doesn’t want to move.”
“She would if you wanted to badly enough.”
“I really don’t know how badly I want to.”
“So why do you drop hints all the time? You’ve been doing it ever since you left Grant’s firm.”
“Eddy, I’ve got people coming in ten minutes.”
“Okay! Just thought I’d let you know. Take a ride out there one day and see for yourself. Here. Give me a piece of paper. I’ll write the directions.”
One afternoon when he had an hour or two to spare, by rummaging in the desk Robb found the slip of paper with Eddy’s directions. He went downstairs and got into his car.
Why he had chosen this particular day for the undertaking, he could not have explained, except that the choice might have had something to do with the Confederate soldier’s portrait. Ellen had retrieved it from the apartment after Wilson Grant’s death and hung it back next to the ancestors’ pictures, where it had always been. Sitting at church in front of Grant’s coffin, the awful solemnity of death had moved Robb to compassion, but the sight of that stern jaw and level, unfriendly gaze framed in heavy gilt aroused other feelings, so much so that he often moved to another chair. At any rate, the thought of that “fantastic” property had popped into his head, and now here he was.
A spread of fields and low, undulating hills plush as velvet pillows sloped toward the river. It was a slow southern river with little traffic except pleasure boats. A rowboat, or perhaps a canoe, was now creeping slowly along the shoreline as he watched. When, at the river’s curve, it disappeared from view, nothing moved anywhere except a flight of birds too high up to identify, and last summer’s tall grass, dried tassels bending with the wind. The day was softly gray, so that no dazzle confused the eye. All was clearly defined, as if etched.
Robb’s eye
told him at once that this was costly land. His brain, trained by the sum of the last few years’ experience, told him at once exactly how costly. Naturally, it would be divided into smaller plots, but each would still be large by ordinary standards. “Upscale” was the word for property like this.
“I wonder,” he said aloud.
There he stood with his hands in his pockets, as if detached from the moment and arrested by thought. He had taken giant steps throughout his life. He took no credit or blame for any of them. A fatalist would say that they had simply happened, as if a giant hand had moved the pieces on a gaming board. Had he ever planned to go to law school? Had he ever planned to leave Lily—yet here he winced—and fall in love with Ellen? And see how all these moves had been for the best, even for Lily, who had survived to marry another man.
Yet he wanted to be cautious, careful not to extend himself too far. And thinking so, he sat down in the grass, drew a pad and pencil out of his pocket, made some calculations, and tucked the paper away. Yes, he had allied himself with men of proven success. What was good enough for Dick Devlin must surely be good enough for him. A house here, a family home, would be the safest investment a man could make. A house here in the middle of all this beauty, of all this peace! A home of his own, earned and built through his own endeavors, carrying no baggage of another family’s inheritance, and he the master, beholden to no one!
Standing there with the wind playing about his face, he felt a warm rise of excitement. In it was a different kind of strength and competence from that to which he had now long been accustomed. Eddy, perhaps unable to express himself with any fluency, had yet understood with intuition what his friend would feel when he saw this place.
On the following Saturday, Robb suggested a ride into the country. “There’s a piece of land I have to see,” he explained. “It’s involved in a lawsuit.” Now why had he not told the truth?
Strip malls, gas stations, and fast food restaurants lined the highway. After a while they passed the last of these and were in the country. Now came fields, barns, orchards, and rocking chairs on front porches. A single file of geese came strutting across the road, forcing them to stop.
“Take your time,” Robb told them. “Look at them, Ellen. Don’t they look important?”
She agreed. “Isn’t this lovely? I’m glad we came.”
“Take a good look. This land is disappearing. It will all be eaten up before you know it.”
“Is that what we’re seeing today? Another development?”
“Not exactly. It’s to be an exclusive gated community.”
“Exclusive? Isolated? What’s the sense in that? You’re in the country, so why shut yourself away from the country? That would never be for me.”
“How can you say so without having seen it?”
“Because I know.”
He did not reply. He was not going to let himself feel discouraged. So he waited until the car stopped.
“Isn’t this perfect?” he asked.
“Perfect the way nature made it,” Ellen said. “But it won’t be after they cover it over with hideous, ostentatious houses.”
As if he had not heard her, he mused, “Feel the quiet. I wouldn’t at all mind living here. Not at all.”
A sudden suspicious expression crossed Ellen’s face. “You didn’t take us here with any such idea, I hope?”
“I told you. I needed to see it.”
“I don’t know why I don’t believe you,” she said, staring at him. “I think you’re up to something.”
“Mom!” Julie cried. “That’s not a nice thing to say to Daddy.”
“Why? To say somebody’s ‘up to something’? There’s nothing wrong with those words.”
“It wasn’t your words. It was the way you looked.”
“I don’t know how I looked. But I’ll tell you, Robb. You might not mind living here, but I would, very much.”
Julie was taking interest in events. “Mom, I love it. Look down at the river. It winks, like an eye.”
“A poetic observation,” Robb said, thinking that he would probably have an ally in Julie. Still, considering the whole situation, it seemed best to postpone his project for today. This must be done very gradually, he saw, although if he were to wait too long, the opportunity would be lost.
“Daddy likes that place we saw in the country,” Julie said the next day, while Robb was out on the lawn playing roll ball with Penn and Ellen was paying bills at the desk.
She looked up. “He does?”
“Yes, he says it would be fun to build our own house and have a little stable where we could have our own horses.”
A clever tactic, Ellen thought. Girls her age are in love with horses.
“And how would school fit into that?” she demanded.
“Daddy says it wouldn’t hurt me to change schools, and I think it might be fun. I’ve been in this one all my life.”
“And what about you, missing all your friends?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Julie said earnestly. “I really wouldn’t. I’ll have to miss them anyway, when I go to college.”
And very probably she wouldn’t mind, Ellen thought. She’s an independent to the extreme. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. What I do know is that she adores Robb enough to agree with anything he says. But I am not going to be talked into leaving this house. It’s a half-baked idea. It’s reckless and senseless.
“What are you telling Julie?” she asked when Robb came in. “It’s not right to get her involved in our disagreement.”
“I didn’t think it such a serious disagreement that Julie, as a member of the family, isn’t entitled to an opinion.”
This reply certainly was pleasant enough, but there was a tight set to his mouth that made her uncomfortable.
“It is a disagreement, Robb, and I don’t want it to become serious. How can you even consider upsetting our lives, leaving this home for a whim? Because you fell in love with some pretty scenery?”
“It’s not a whim. I’m not happy here.”
“It’s that bad? It goes that deep?” Her husband had given her a most hurtful blow.
“You don’t understand. I would be happy in a tent on the desert with you if it were my own.”
“You never used to talk this way! I remember how thrilled we both were when my father turned this house over to us.”
“That’s true. But a great many things have happened since then,” he said soberly.
“But they’re past. Are you never going to forget them?”
“Forget?”
“Put it behind you, at least.”
“Perhaps I’ve oversimplified the way I feel. Or perhaps I’ve made it sound too complicated, too muddled up. Could it be as simple and ordinary as needing a change? Can’t that happen?” And he smiled as if pleading.
Like a child, she thought, hoping that a smile will get him another piece of candy or another half hour before being sent off to bed. She did not want to be angry at him; anger depleted her, and she had been reared in a family not given to very much anger.
She stood up and went to the window beneath which, in a wide semicircle, a bed of narcissi was showing its first shy green, as they always had, through all the springs of her life.
Behind her back Robb’s voice, his well-modulated, reasonable, courtroom voice, began to coax her.
“We’d leave the whole business to you, to your choice of everything. Decorate as you please. I’ll like whatever you like. Add a wonderful room for yourself, for your writing. Someday you’ll go back to it, you know. Add an entertainment room for Julie, where she can have parties and dances when she’s older. We could even have an indoor pool, a conservatory—you love flowers—and—”
Ellen whirled around. “Oh Robb, isn’t the way we live now enough for you? There’s nothing wrong with our basement as it is. I grew up with it. And we don’t need an indoor pool. Oh Robb,” she cried softly, “you have gotten such grandiose ideas lately that sometimes I hardl
y know you, and it worries me. It worries me terribly.”
“They’re not ‘grandiose’ as long as you can afford them. Anyway, to hear you now, a person would think I had proposed marble stairs and gilded ceilings.”
“If you ever become like Devlin and his friends, you’ll do that, too. Those people—they’re all inflated. I only hope your investments aren’t inflated, too.”
“My ‘investments,’ ” Robb mocked. “They’re a mosquito’s portion. They’re a mosquito standing on an elephant’s back. But what are we talking about? I want to move, to build a house for my family, and you’re acting as though the world were coming to an end.”
It was not as if her husband’s job and a whole future depended upon making a move. That was happening every day all over the country, and then of course people packed up in an uncomplaining, cheerful spirit no matter how it hurt inside to leave the past behind. But that was not the case here.
“Don’t you see,” she said, “what this would mean? You’d have your routine at the office; you’d be even more isolated from us all. As it is now we don’t see you enough, with the hours you have to keep. We need more time together.”
Robb interrupted. “Twenty miles from here is ‘isolated’? Dammit, Ellen, you are dramatizing this whole thing. Nobody coming in and hearing all this emotion would guess that the subject is only four walls and a roof. They would think that one of us had just been diagnosed with cancer or had caught the other in adultery. For God Almighty’s sake, Ellen—”
“Doctor Philip is here,” Julie said. “I think he heard you yelling. He’s standing on the porch.”
“I wasn’t yelling,” Robb grumbled.
Quite obviously, Philip had heard at least the final moments of the quarrel, for he was making a show of tying his shoelaces, as if they were giving him a problem.
“Your turn to be on my route,” he said, looking up. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
Robb said cordially, “Not at all. It’s always a pleasure.”
