“Really?” Ingrid leaned forward. “When you were how old?”
Actually Cal had called her girl of my dreams, and he had been her only lover and the first time had been their wedding night when she was twenty-two. She couldn’t remember whether she had told Ingrid how old she was when she married, and to be safe she said, “Seventeen. We ran off together when I was seventeen and he was nineteen. It was like a honeymoon.”
“Wow! Romeo and Juliet.” Ingrid raised her eyebrows and cocked her head. “Where’d you go?”
“He had a little black Ford coupe and we drove to Vancouver and took the ferry to Victoria Island. You know: Canada.” She and Cal had driven his little Ford straight from Boise to Palo Alto and Cal’s job, but Sibyl and Ross had gone to Victoria Island on their wedding trip. “We had a cabin right on the water and we made love among the sand dunes in the moonlight.” She sighed. “It was the saddest day of my life when my father flew over from Boise and dragged me back home.”
“What does the guy look like?”
“Slender, graying wings at the temples.” She was sorry she had said that—such a cliché. She quickly added, “Still good looking but in the old days he was gorgeous.” Louise had recently seen Tyrone Power in an old movie on cable and began to describe him. “Wore his black hair kind of slicked back—men did back then—and he had enormous brown eyes with lashes an inch long and a cute ski jump nose.” Louise swooped her hand down her own nose.
“What did you say his name is?” Ingrid asked.
“Ross. Ever since then I’ve loved that name.”
“Do you think you’ll see him again?” Ingrid asked.
Louise couldn’t keep the smirk off her face. “He’s coming over this evening. The problem is, he’s married.” She drew in a breath. She hadn’t really thought she’d take it that far. “But apparently not happily.”
“My goodness, Louise, you’re about to have an illicit affair!” Ingrid opened her mouth to pretend shock and then her laugh cannoned out. “Never too old, huh? Never too old. And I thought you were a dull old stick-in-the-mud when I first came here.” She cocked her head toward the window. “Oh, damn, there’s Thomas. Well, don’t forget any of it, so you can tell me tomorrow in show and tell.” She reached over and kissed Louise on the cheek. “You’re really something, you know that? All that get up and go. Just full of beans. I’m so glad I found you.”
***
Louise was preparing her dinner that evening when she heard Ingrid and Thomas coming home. She finished sautéing the salmon and took it and her salad to the little table where she and Ingrid had their tea. It would be only a matter of moments until she would hear the sounds of their pleasure, the clanging bedsprings, the oohs and ahhs, the moans and groans, all the delicious noises of the night.
Tomorrow when Ingrid came home with a rum baba or a slice of sacher torte, Louise would tell her the exciting story of Ross’s visit. He was wearing blue jeans and a fresh light blue shirt, she would say, because that’s the way he always dressed when we were young. Yes, she would tell Ingrid, it was as if we were still seventeen and nineteen and simply burning with desire for each other. It was wonderful, just wonderful, although—she imagined shooting Ingrid a shy little look—although I was afraid you might be disturbed by the noises. As she conjured up a vision of Ingrid, leaning forward, hooked, listening intently to every word, she felt alive, vibrant, full of beans.
Her Men
They were sitting side by side in lounge chairs on the deck. Katherine had not been out on the lake in years, not since the old kayak had begun to rot, but on late summer afternoons while she drank her glass of wine, she liked to look across the smooth surface of the water to the island. But Jackie was spoiling the mood.
“You’re always telling me I ought to get my life right, Gran,” he was saying, “and here’s my big chance.”
Katharine sighed. “I thought the sixty-five thousand dollars two years ago was going to be your big chance.” It was painful to be arguing, yet she would not give in to Jackie’s latest wild scheme. “Few people get even one big chance, Jackie—almost no one gets more than one.”
“Come on,” Jackie said. “That was just bad luck.” He cocked his head and crinkled his eyes at her, grinning, flirting, pretending to think she was only teasing, knowing that teasing was never her way. “This is a sure bet.”
“A hundred thousand dollars,” she said, “is a great bit of money to bet.”
He laughed. “I’m not going to gamble it away in Las Vegas, Gran. It’s going into this absolutely surefire marvelous deal. With Ralph. You always liked Ralph. Remember Ralph?”
She snuffled a laugh. “I’m not in my dotage yet. Of course I remember Ralph. He was the least unreliable of your friends, though far from the handsomest.”
Jackie threw himself back in his chair and slapped his thigh. “Wait’ll I tell him that. He was always scared to death of you. Called you the Iron Duchess.” He laughed briefly, then straightened up and drew his brows together. “I know you don’t know much about the Web and stuff like that, and really I don’t understand it very well myself, so I won’t try to explain it. But Ralph’s company has this genius idea, something really great, and now he and his moneymen are about to take the company public. I’d double, maybe triple, my money once that happens. Ralph is doing me a favor to let me in early.”
Who did you the favor the last time? she wanted to ask, but that would surely drive him away. “I’m no longer a rich woman, Jackie, whatever you think I might once have been.”
“But it’s just sitting there,” he said, frowning with impatience, “making three or four percent if you’re lucky.”
“My dear, I live on that three or four percent.”
“But I’ll pay you twice that. This is a business deal, Gran, not a gift.”
“Investing in some new-fangled something you don’t really understand doesn’t strike me as a very wise business deal.”
Jackie sighed with exasperation and impatiently tapped his fingers on his knee. “Look, the money will be mine some day anyway, won’t it? You can’t take it with you, Gran.”
“That’s a nice thing to say.”
He blushed and grimaced. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Oh? Well, what way did you mean it, Jackie?” She lowered her head to gaze at him over her glasses, waiting for an answer. She wanted him to be responsible for his deeds and his words. More muscle, less soft flesh. His sensible mother would have seen to that. “Say what you mean and mean what you say.”
He abruptly stood up, the look of a petulant boy spreading over his face. “Then don’t lend it to me,” he said.
Even with his face flushed and his eyes flaring, he was immensely handsome. As handsome as his father. Almost as handsome as his grandfather. The same dark blue eyes, the full lips, the gold-blond hair, the skin tanned to copper. He was handsome, charming, and, she feared, quite useless. He had lived with her since he was eleven years old, when Gail died and sweet sad Jay had gone to drink and dissolution. He was Jay’s only child. Her only grandchild. Her only kin.
“Oh, sit down, Jackie,” she said, flapping her hand at him, “and explain to me exactly what the deal is, and I’ll see what I can do.”
***
Jay had come in very late. She had heard the boat thudding against the boathouse wall. Now perhaps she could sleep.
She had never been able to sleep while he was out, even when she knew that he would be late. At midnight she had gone out to the deck and listened. It was a calm night and the water and the wind were still. When she heard the dance music, the laughter, floating across the lake, she relaxed. The party was still going on, he was still safe. She had gone back to her room and read a trashy novel for an hour or so and then lain in the dark waiting. When she heard the kayak thudding against the boathouse, she turned off the light. She could sleep.
“Are you awake?” he asked, standing in her doorway.
“Yes, I’m awake.” She sat up
and turned on the bedside lamp. “Did you have a good time?”
“I guess. Okay if I come in?”
“Of course.” She was pleased whenever he wanted to talk with her. They had always been close and had drawn closer after John had left.
The little bedroom armchair creaked with Jay’s weight. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. “Gail’s pregnant,” he said.
Katharine took a deep breath before she spoke. “Who?” she asked, though of course she knew. A local girl with black hair and almost purple eyes. Whenever Jay had brought her to the house, to pick up something, to leave something, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. Katharine had known they were lovers, but she had thought it only a summer thing, that it would go away when he went back to finish law school. “That girl at the bait shop?”
“Gail. You know her name, Mom.”
“Yes—Gail. Are you sure the baby’s yours?”
He sat up in the chair, his eyes flashing. “That’s an ugly thing to say. She’s not a tramp, you know.”
She knew no such thing. The girl was a tramp or she wouldn’t be pregnant. But Katharine knew she had been foolish to be so blunt. “You’re right to call me on that and I apologize. Pregnant. Poor little thing.”
“Poor little thing she isn’t. She’s about the strongest person I know.”
Yes, of course the girl was strong. Jay was the poor little thing, trapped like a rabbit, like a fish on a hook, like the stupid boy he was. “Does she know what to do, then? There’s a clinic near Boston.”
He flopped back with a sigh. “She wants to keep it.”
Keep it. Katharine waited until her heart slowed its frantic pounding and she could trust her voice, and then she said, “That’s rather foolish, isn’t it? It would ruin her life.”
“You mean mine. I guess I’d have to drop out of law school, at least for a while.”
“No,” she exclaimed. “No. You’re both far too young.”
“Twenty-three and nineteen. Age of consent. Old enough to marry.”
She knew she had to move carefully—he could be childishly stubborn. “Old enough, yes, but wise enough?” she asked.
“Who marries wisely?” He cocked his eyebrow at her. “Did you?”
That didn’t sting as badly as it once might have. Since John had moved to the other side of the world, Hong Kong, she seldom heard from him and now seldom thought of him. “I married wisely enough to get my precious son from it.”
He smiled. “And you’re afraid you’ll lose him.”
“I’m not thinking of me,” she said. “I’m thinking of you and what being saddled with a shotgun marriage would do to you.” Let him be angry—he needed to face the consequences, the ruin. “Tied to someone you don’t love would destroy you, Jay.”
“I do love her, very much, more than anything in the world. Even without this I would want to marry her, though maybe not until I got my law degree. Anyway I’m not as fragile as you think.”
But he was fragile. More John’s son than hers. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. You’ve stunned me with this news, and I need to sleep on it.”
She lay wide awake in the dark. All her hopes for Jay smashed by his raging libido, his carelessness, falling into the clutches of a conniving girl who had set out to trap him. He was the girl’s escape from summers selling worms and cut-up frogs and from cold barren winters with the Canadian wind roaring down the lake. Of course she had leaped at Jay. Kind, sweet Jay, and though the family was no longer rich, still well off, established. He was her ticket out, and she had caught him as deliberately as her father and brother caught the frogs and the worms.
Katharine awoke before seven and immediately went to the boathouse. She took down the paddle and unwound the kayak’s tethering rope and pushed out. She kept close to the shore and paddled as silently as possible until she was beyond the point and would no longer be visible should Jay be up early. The current ran her way, and she did not need much effort to move the light boat along.
The bait shop was little more than a shack with one ancient gasoline pump on the pier. When Katharine’s family had first come to the lake, there had been no need for a gasoline pump. The people who owned the summer houses had not wanted to shatter the silence with raucous noise and defile the air with noxious fumes. But now only the old-timers paddled their way around the lake. The young ones preferred motors. She had often wondered if the roar and speed made them feel virile and important.
The girl—Gail, Gail—stood in the open doorway of the shop, wiping her hands on a red cloth, watching as Katharine approached. She had on pale yellow shorts and a yellow windbreaker, and she wore a captain’s cap pulled low. Katharine threw the kayak’s rope around a post and drew closer to the pier. Gail started down the pier, but Katharine didn’t wait. She did not want help. Helping would have given the girl an advantage. She hoisted herself up onto the deck.
“Need some bait for fishing, Mrs. Crandall?” Gail asked. She was pug-nosed and a bit thin-lipped, and her hands were black with grease. If Jay had to get himself in trouble, surely he could have done better.
“Haven’t gone fishing since I was a little girl,” Katharine said, with a smile. “The fish don’t bother me, so I don’t bother them.”
“If they did bother you, I guess then you’d need bait so you could bother them back.”
And with that, and the little ironic laugh that followed, Katharine knew that the girl knew why she had come. The two of them eyed each other for a moment, hard-eyed, only their lips smiling. “Is there some place we can talk?” Katharine asked, gesturing at a motorboat roaring toward the pier.
Gail threw the greasy red cloth onto the top of the trashcan and called into the shop, “Back in a couple of minutes, Pop.”
They walked up the asphalt road until they came to a little path that cut back toward the lake. Gail turned down the path, and Katharine followed her. They soon came to a rocky promontory high above the water. On the near side the rock jutted back over a patch of sandy beach. Gail pointed to where the rock met the sand. “This is our favorite place—Jay’s and mine.”
Katharine looked at the shadowed overhang of the rock. Their little love nest. How tawdry. “Well,” she said, “let’s get down to business.”
Gail cocked her head. “Is this about business?” she asked. She was small, smaller than Katharine, and wiry and quick. There was nothing shy about her, not even a tinge of that feigned subservience most of the locals showed the summer people. No wonder poor Jay had felt helpless. Katharine knew her plan would not come cheap.
“I suppose it gets rather lonesome up here in the winter,” she began.
“We don’t stay in the winter. We live in St. Cloud, where I go to the junior college.” She smiled. “Fifteen thousand students, so it’s not lonesome.”
Katharine quickly picked that up. “Jay says you’re a very smart girl. I wonder if a junior college could keep that intellect of yours occupied.”
“Just say it, Mrs. Crandall. Say what’s on your mind.”
Katharine was surprised by the girl’s impudence. Young people did not speak to their elders in that tone. Well, if blunt was what she wanted, then blunt she would get. “I’ll pay for the operation and then three years at the state university, until you graduate. All expenses.” And added, “And in the summer you could go to Europe, if you wished.”
“But without Jay? That’s the point, isn’t it? I don’t think I’d want to go to Europe or anywhere else without Jay.”
Katharine felt the heat rise in her face. “If you care about him,” she said, “you don’t want to ruin his life. Burdened with a child, a wife. He’s too young. You must see that.”
“I don’t at all. It could be the making of him, Mrs. Crandall. Taking responsibility instead of depending on his mother.” Then Gail’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time a look of uncertainty, doubt spread over her face. She leaned toward Katharine. “Did he send you? Did he tell you to say all that? To buy
me off?”
Katharine turned away. If she said, Yes, Jay sent me, this proud girl would never forgive him, and that would put an end to this whole wretched business. She gazed out at the island in the distance, a mere speck against the far shore. It would be so easy. Yes, Jay sent me. But what good had lying ever gotten her?
“No,” she said, facing the girl. “He didn’t send me.”
Gail’s shoulders visibly relaxed. “I didn’t think so, Mrs. Crandall. You see, I believe in him even if you don’t.”
“You’re a very insolent young woman,” Katharine said. “I came here in good faith with an offer to help you out of this”—she swung her arm toward the pier and the bait shop and the water glistening with oil—“awful place so you can make something of yourself.”
“But suppose what I want to make of myself is the mother of Jay’s child?”
“You’re young, you’re obviously intelligent. You surely don’t want to ruin your life. You don’t want to ruin his. What is it you really want? I’m not a rich woman, but just tell me and if it’s within my power you’ll have it.”
“I already have what I want, Mrs. Crandall. Jay. And soon our baby. The man I love and the child I want. Wasn’t that once all you wanted? It didn’t work for you, but it will for me. And Jay.” She peered closely at Katharine and then shook her head as though shaking off the encounter. “Now I need to get to work, if you’ll excuse me. Pop can’t do it all.” She started up the path, and then turned back. She held out her hands, the nails rimmed black with grease. “I know they look a mess, but if you should invite us for Thanksgiving in Boston I’ll clean them up. No one will know I’m just a grease monkey. You won’t be ashamed of me, Mrs. Crandall, I guarantee that.”
As Katherine furiously paddled back from the bait shop, her thoughts were roiled with what she would say to Jay. When she saw him standing on the deck, no doubt waiting for her, she veered off to the island. Before she spoke to him she needed to calm down, to think through an intelligent plan. She pulled the kayak onto the sandy beach and tied the rope around one of the pine trees. A cone had fallen to the base of the tree, and she kicked it as hard as she could into the lake. Then she sat down and lay back against the tree and began to take deep breaths, over and over again until her mind quieted, until reason returned.
Old Ladies Page 3
