Thinking about that gave her deep satisfaction.
Thinking about the crowds, about other questions that might come, about a renewal of media attention on her even for a short time made her queasy. But she couldn’t have one without the other.
“Something’s on your mind,” Maida remarked.
They were walking down to the house for lunch. The day was clear but cold. Lily had her hands tucked up into the sleeves of her jacket. Now she tucked the sleeves under her arms.
Maida would have to know. The press might be arriving en masse that afternoon. Or no one might come. John had said it was possible. Not probable but possible. In that case, Maida didn’t have to know.
In either case there would be a gathering at the church. Lily wanted to tell Maida about it and about the thinking behind it. She wanted Maida to say they were doing the right thing. But Maida wouldn’t do that. She didn’t want the press around. She made that clear when Lily had first returned.
“Does it have to do with John Kipling?” Maida asked now, holding open the door. The phone was ringing inside, but with Poppy to pick up, she didn’t hurry to get it.
Lily followed her into the kitchen, frantically wondering whether she’d heard or guessed, and if so, how much she knew. “Why do you ask?”
The phone rang again. Ignoring it still, Maida draped her jacket over the back of a chair. With a hand on the refrigerator door, she sent Lily a disbelieving look. “I’m not stupid, Lily. Nor am I deaf. Even if I managed not to hear the calls you make, even if you hadn’t told me yourself that you were with him the whole time Gus was dying, then again at the funeral, even if I hadn’t seen you with him at church, I’d have heard it from friends. They said you were quite a hit at Charlie’s Thursday night.”
“I didn’t plan that,” Lily said quickly. “It ww-was a spontaneous thing. Charlie came over and asked. I just did a couple of songs.”
Maida took a pot of soup from the refrigerator. She put it on the stove and lit the gas. “Are you serious about John?”
On a serious scale of one to ten, professions of love ranked up at the top. But Lily didn’t know where it would go from here, and she couldn’t get a handle on Maida’s feelings about John. So she said, “I’m not sure.”
“He’s a Kipling.”
“He didn’t have anything to do with the car business. And Donny and Gus are both gone.”
Maida lifted the lid and stirred the soup with undue force. “Did you have to go to the funeral?”
There it was. Disapproval. But at least it wasn’t outright condemnation of John. Lily was grateful, but she wasn’t cowed. She said a quiet “Yes. I did.”
When Maida didn’t respond but stayed with the soup, Lily went to the cupboard for dishes. The table was nearly set when the phone started ringing again. Her eye flew to the instrument, but Maida was already there.
“Yes,” she snapped into the receiver.
Lily heard threads of an excited voice at the other end of the line. Maida looked sharply back at her. She put her free hand on her waist and her eyes on the wall. As she listened, her shoulders grew stiff.
Lily had a sinking feeling. When Maida hung up and turned, she braced herself.
“That was Alice,” she said, looking pale, sounding worse. “She says phones are ringing all over town. Something about a press conference.”
“Yes.”
“Something about John and you. About reporters coming today?”
What could Lily say? “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because we have information on Terry Sullivan that proves—”
“I don’t care about Terry Sullivan,” Maida cried, looking betrayed. “I care about us. Everything had quieted down. The press lost interest. It was over and done.” She grew pleading. “We were doing just fine, you and I. Weren’t we?”
If Lily could have turned back the clock in that instant and vetoed the idea of a press conference, she might have. Maida was right. They were doing just fine.
But life wasn’t about doing just fine.
Softly, she said, “This isn’t about you and me.”
“It is,” Maida argued. Her hands were on her hips one minute, on the counter behind her another. “It’s about respect,” she said, raising both hands to the back of her neck. “It’s about respect, which you have never once shown me. Singing at church wasn’t good enough. You had to sing at Charlie’s. You had to sing and dance on Broadway. You knew I’d hate it, but you did it anyway.”
“It was what I did well.”
“And then the business in Boston.” Her hands were back to her hips. “Well, that was over and done, and now you’ve revived it. Couldn’t you have let it rest?”
Lily had asked herself that a dozen times. Now she sighed. “No. I couldn’t. He’s taken ss-something from me. I need to try to get it back.”
“What did he take? An apartment that was too expensive to begin with? A nightclub?”
“My name.”
“Your name is perfectly good here. Isn’t that what Thursday night at Charlie’s was about? Why do you always need more?”
“Not more, Mom. Different.”
“But you’re not different,” Maida shouted. She snatched up a dishcloth and began wiping perfectly clean, dry hands. “You’re not any different. You let people take advantage of you, just like I did—let people use you, just like I did. Donald Kipling—Terry Sullivan—John Kipling now. He’s not doing this for you,” she cried in disdain. “He’s doing it for him. So don’t you stand up there on your high horse and say we’re different. You’re not any better than me. If there’s any difference at all, it’s that I had the sense to put it behind me once and for all.”
With a cry of dismay she tossed the dishcloth on the counter and stalked out of the house.
Lily didn’t eat lunch. She turned off the flame under the soup pot and waited in the kitchen for Maida to return, but there was no sign of her when time came to go back to work. So Lily walked up to the cider house alone. As she neared, her apprehension grew, but she needn’t have worried. Maida didn’t show up for the afternoon shift.
Lily called in one of the pickers to work the racks and cloths with Bub while she took Maida’s part, but she didn’t feel exhilaration or pride now. She did what she had to do, and she was distracted, but not by the prospect of the press coming to town. Her heart was heavy wondering where Maida was, what she was thinking, whether they could patch things up. She didn’t know why Maida was still so upset about things that had happened so long ago. She didn’t know why she should care so much what her mother still felt. But she did.
Tears must have come to her eyes once too often, because they were barely into the afternoon shift when Oralee shooed her off. With three hours to go until the press conference, Lily debated returning to the cottage or driving straight to the newspaper office. Maida would calm down in time. She always did.
Yes. She always did. She calmed down, the upset passed, and things were never discussed or resolved.
But things were different this time. The press conference loomed. Lily was unsettled enough about that not to want things with her mother up in the air. She had to talk with Maida. She hadn’t explained her feelings as well as she might have, and wanted to try it again.
The kitchen was empty. Likewise the office. Lily guessed that Maida might be upstairs, but she couldn’t go up there. It had been a long while since she had lived in this house, a long while since she’d had cause to climb those stairs. And to Maida’s bedroom? It seemed an invasion of her privacy.
So Lily sat at the piano and began to play. A Chopin étude, a Liszt sonata—she moved from one to the other without finishing either. At that moment in time, loose ends seemed the story of her life.
And when hadn’t they? When had she been more settled? She thought about it for a minute, before conjuring up the image of singing in church when she was ten. Life had been simpler then. Maida had been proud.
Without conscious thou
ght, she began playing the hymns she had sung. She played “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Faith of Our Fathers”—both to completion, because they did calm her. She was halfway through “Amazing Grace” when Maida appeared at the door. She looked tired, older than her years, defeated almost. Lily stopped playing.
“You think that I’m wrong,” Maida said in a reed-thin voice. “You don’t understand why I like living my quiet life here and why this whole business with the Cardinal is so upsetting to me, but there are things you don’t know.” She wrapped her arms around her waist.
Lily started to shake. It was subtle, way deep inside, but it held a foreboding. “What things?”
“Things I did before I met your father.”
Lily’s heart pounded as she waited for Maida to go on.
“Did you never wonder why I never talked about my childhood?” Maida finally asked.
“All the time. I asked you about it. You would never say. There were no pictures, nothing. When I asked Celia, she smiled and said that there was nothing worth repeating.”
“There wasn’t until now. But if they come here and see us and start digging again…” Her voice trailed off. She pushed a shaky hand into her hair.
Lily started to get up, then stopped herself and stayed put. The piano was a buffer between them. It made the unfamiliar less frightening.
“My father died early,” Maida said. “There was other family in Linsworth. Celia had four brothers.”
Lily had thought there were three—and that, only from pictures she had found in a drawer after Celia passed away. Growing up, she had assumed there was no one at all in Linsworth to contact. After finding those pictures, she had tried to remember who might have been standing at the back during Celia’s funeral, but she had been too wrapped up in her own grief at the time to notice.
Maida spoke softly. Her eyes were distant, stricken. “The brothers were all younger than Celia, the last one by twenty years. He was more my generation than hers. He was a friend, a baby-sitter, a brother, a lover.”
Lily could barely breathe.
Maida’s eyes filled with tears. “He used to sneak in at night when everyone was asleep. He taught me about my body and about love. He was handsome and sweet and smart.” She brushed at the tears with the back of her hand, and looked away. “When I was sixteen, they found out about us and sent him away.”
Sixteen was the age Lily had been when she was caught joyriding with Donny Kipling in a stolen car. Lily could only begin to imagine the sense of déjà vu Maida must have felt.
But Maida wasn’t thinking about that now. The soft light of the piano lamp picked up the tears on her cheeks, but she was looking straight at Lily, daring her to be revulsed. “They said it was all his fault, that I was too young to understand, but I understood. I wanted what happened. To this day it’s my only bright memory from those years. Call me immoral or depraved, but you didn’t live there. You didn’t know what it was like. We all lived together in a small place. Families did that then. My father worked with Celia’s brothers, and Celia had always been a mother to them, so it made even more sense. We were poor. We pooled our resources. When the men hunted, it wasn’t for sport but for food. I was the only girl, so I had my own room. There was a lumpy mattress on the floor and a little place to stand. That was all. It was cold and dark. Phillip was my warmth and my light.” Her chin trembled. “I loved him. What he did felt good to me. He was the only luxury I had.”
“Wasn’t Celia a luxury?” Lily cried, more offended by that than the other.
“You didn’t know her then,” Maida scoffed. “She was different from the person you knew. She was busy all the time, and she was hard. After my father died she had the responsibility of her brothers and me. She ran the house and earned the money.”
“Didn’t the brothers work?”
“They didn’t earn much, and most of it went for drink. Phillip went along, but not all the way. He stashed away enough for me to have when I needed to leave. There was a note saying where it was and what it was for. It was in his hand when he died.”
Lily caught her breath.
“He killed himself,” Maida told her. “Two months after he left. Nowadays he’d have been in jail, but the law never knew about him. He had been wandering around the whole time, not knowing what to do with himself. Friends had seen him in towns as far as thirty miles away, but his body was found in the woods less than a mile from us.”
She pressed a hand to her middle, seeming in pain. Lily was up from the piano bench in a flash, but Maida held up a hand to hold her off. Her lips were as close to pursed as they could be and still allow for talk. “There’s more.” She gathered herself. “You wanted to know, you can hear it all.”
Lily felt pain and confusion. She felt shock and sorrow enough to bring tears to her eyes. But Maida wouldn’t let her close. So she leaned against the piano.
“We buried Phillip in the family plot. The people of Linsworth said he shouldn’t be anywhere near good folk, but Celia wouldn’t have him anywhere else. She had loved him, too. She blamed herself for what happened. She still had the responsibility for all of us, and then the weight of that on top of it. She and I grew closer, because we shared the grieving and I wanted to help her. So I dropped out of school and went to work in the logging office where she worked.”
Her eyes and voice grew distant again. “It wasn’t easy. Everyone in town knew what had happened. Except for Celia and me, the logging operation was all men. Whenever I walked out of the office, men stared at me. Some of them made comments. They touched me whenever they could, like it was a game to see how much they could get. They asked me out, and I refused every time, but that made it worse. If I’d paired up with one of them, there might have been protection. But I was trying to do the right thing, so I was fair game.”
She wilted a little. “It became clear to us that I couldn’t stay there. Not in that office, not in that town. We were trying to decide where to go and what to do when George showed up one day wanting to buy equipment from my boss. He spent long enough talking with me for us to know that he wasn’t married, but we figured that if he stayed around long, he’d learn enough to decide he didn’t want me at all. So Celia and I went out and bought me some nice clothes with the money Phillip had left”—her voice caught on the last thought—“and Celia managed to get me sent to Lake Henry with the deliveries. I went back to hand deliver a bill, and back again to deliver a receipt. It was a long trip, over more backroads than you’d drive in a month around here. Took the better part of a day.”
The memory lifted her some, pride showing its face. “I acted a part then, acted better than you’ve ever acted, because my life depended on it. I created a woman who was intelligent and poised, who knew how to keep house and balance books, and yes, please a man. She was a woman with a clean past, and she did things right. All the time she did things right. Your father fell in love with that woman. She’s the one I’ve been ever since.”
Jaws tight, she fixed her eyes on Lily. “I knew what it was to be stared at, and there you were, singing in public, welcoming those leering eyes. How do you think I felt when you got caught with Donny Kipling? Don’t you think a part of me worried you were getting in the same situation I’d been in? Only, you didn’t find your George. You went to New York, and that was worse. But I didn’t have to see it, until this. How do you think I felt when the newspapers started digging up dirty little things from your past? How do you think I felt wondering when they’d dig a little deeper, just a little deeper, and find out about me? No one here knows. When Celia moved here, she started new, too. We never talked about the past. We just erased it from the slate.”
“No one will find out,” Lily vowed.
“I have a life here. I have a good life here. I have friends and a business. I have a name.”
“No one will find out,” Lily repeated.
“How do you know?”
“Because this isn’t about me anymore. It’s about Terry Sulliva
n.”
Maida started to pursue the argument. She opened her mouth, closed it, then put a hand up to keep it that way. Lily’s first thought was that she was paralyzed thinking about what the town might learn. But it was horror on her face, not fear. Horror.
Because her daughter now knew.
“It’s all right,” Lily whispered, starting forward, but Maida stepped back with a frantic shake of her head.
Lily felt a greater need to touch than ever. Starting forward again, she said, “It doesn’t change my feelings—”
But Maida had turned and, with her hand on the back of a bowed head now, was hurrying up the stairs.
Lily followed her as far as the newel post, wanting to follow farther but afraid. “It was a long time ago,” she called. “You’ve mm-ade up for it ten times over. You were a good wife to Dad, and a good mother to us, and look at you nn-now. You’re running Dad’s business almost better than he did.”
But Maida was gone.
* * *
Lily knew she would carry Maida’s look of horror with her for the rest of her life. It marked the moment when parent and child changed places in the approval game, the moment when, as human beings, they became equal. It was the startling moment when she realized that her mother didn’t have any more answers to some things than she did.
She stood at the banister for what had to have been twenty minutes, then she sat down on the bottom step. She wanted to go up, wanted to thank Maida for sharing what she had, because it explained so much. She wanted to thank her for trusting her, wanted to assure her that she was worthy, that no one but her would ever know, that she would make sure nothing, absolutely nothing came even remotely close to this at the news conference. She wanted to go up but didn’t dare, and she hated herself for that. There was still that fear—always that fear of rejection.
But the clock was ticking. It was nearly four. She had to shower, change, and get to John’s office.
She drove back to Celia’s with her heart in her mouth, aching for Maida, frightened of what was coming—then positively terrified when it struck her that John might know Maida’s secret. Lily hadn’t seen Lake News. She had trusted that he would be writing about Terry. She had trusted him on that.
Lake News Page 38
