Leah thought of herself, of the woman she was in Washington, an icon of social grace, all sleek lines and smooth responses. Was she passionate there? No. Was she passionate here? Yes. More than yes. Jesse destroyed her inhibitions. In his arms she was a creature she didn’t know. But it was emotional, too. She was involved at Star’s End in ways that she had never been involved before. At that moment her heartstrings were tied up in knots.
“What about the beach roses?” She cried, because she couldn’t stop thinking about them. They seemed as conclusive evidence as any that what Julia had told her was true. “All those years Mother special-ordered her perfume. Do you ever remember her wearing anything else?”
“No, but—”
“Once, I found a similar scent,” Leah pressed on. “It was in a really pretty bottle, so I bought it for her birthday. Years later it was still sitting, full, on her dressing table tray. I told myself that she was so pleased with it that she wanted to save it, but the truth was that she didn’t want it, period. She wanted the purest scent, the same one that permeates this place. Is it pure coincidence that she bought property that smells like her perfume? Or does she wear that perfume because it smells like the property she just bought? If she was that woman who was madly in love, but left at the end of the summer and never returned, maybe she needed something of this place to help her through life.”
Annette gasped. “Help? I’d think the constant reminder would have been agonizingly painful for her.”
“And for Daddy,” Caroline said. She was sitting forward, hands clenched hard between her knees. She looked suddenly vulnerable as Leah had never seen her. “I can deal with most anything in life. God knows, I’ve had to, what with the professional shit that’s come my way over the years, but as long as I felt I had an element of control, I was okay. This has been some day. First Chicago, now—” she screwed up her face in disbelief, “Mother?”
“What happened in Chicago?” Leah asked, and Annette explained. “Oh, Caroline, I’m sorry.” The tragedy wasn’t the loss of the case, but the betrayal of her partners. Viewing Caroline through kinder eyes now, Leah could see that.
“It’s funny,” Caroline said without cracking a smile. “Chicago happened. I’m angry. I’m hurt. But that’s there, and I’m here, and I’m finding this far more upsetting. It’s more important. It has to do with certain very basic beliefs.” She swallowed. “Suppose—just suppose—that Mother did have a passionate love affair early in her marriage. That throws other things into question.”
Leah had been too stunned by Julia’s revelation to think of those ramifications, but with Caroline’s cue, her mind began to whir. “Like her feelings for Daddy and her feelings for us—”
“And her primness,” Annette cut in, “and her preoccupation with appearances and with social position.”
“It makes you wonder,” Caroline ventured, “why she wanted us here and why she’s so late in coming, herself. It sheds new light on lots of things. Assuming it’s true.”
“We can check,” Leah said and she wasn’t thinking of Jesse. She couldn’t put her relationship with him into any kind of context until she learned more about Ginny. “If there were pictures in the paper, there must be old copies filed somewhere. The Daily still exists. The office is right in town.”
The Downlee Daily was established in 1897. Its earliest issues were little more than a single sheet of local gossip. By the 1920s it had expanded to four pages to include war news, and by the time the war was done, county news took its place. By the 1950s, the Daily was a twelve-page weekly containing a lively combination of news and sports, gossip, and cartoons.
To the publisher’s credit, the picture wasn’t on the front page, but even buried on page five, it was striking. Caroline held the opened paper, which was yellowed now and parched at the edges, and stared. There was no mistaking Virginia, but a very different Virginia this was from the one she had known. She felt betrayed.
Annette and Leah flanked her, whispering back and forth to keep their thoughts from the front room and the woman who had shown them to the archives.
“She looks so young.”
“She was.”
“But younger even than her wedding picture, and that was taken before this.”
“It’s her hair. It’s messy.”
“And long. She must have had it cut right after that and never let it grow again. Look at her face.”
“Look at his face. Mother’s lover.”
“That sounds odd.”
Caroline was suffering. She had always regarded Virginia as a dependent sort, a boring woman who lacked the courage to stand out from the crowd. This Ginny had stood out from the crowd, all right. She also had a secret life that she had never cared to share with her children.
Caroline was Ginny’s firstborn. For three years she had been her only child. Rationally, that didn’t give her any rights over Annette or Leah. Irrationally, she felt the slight. The Ginny in the picture was deeply in love. Caroline felt robbed.
“Simon called it devotion, that look,” she muttered.
“She never looked at Daddy that way.”
“She never looked at us that way.”
“He’s very good-looking.”
“Good God, they’re holding hands.”
“In the middle of town?”
“Behind the church,” Caroline said and read, “‘The Annual Downlee Harvest Festival was held last Friday in the baseball field behind the First Congregational Church. Virginia St. Clair, Star’s End’s summer mistress, was there enjoying the festivities with her groundskeeper, Will Cray.’”
Leah grabbed the paper from Caroline’s hands. “Who?”
“Jesse’s father?” Annette asked.
“Must be.” Caroline couldn’t make out the resemblance, feature by feature, though this man was attractive in the same rugged way. “The write-up wouldn’t be incriminating if it weren’t for the picture. Forget the hands. Simon was right. The way she was looking at him leaves no doubt.”
“Will Cray?” Leah repeated miserably. She handed the paper back.
“What do you think happened?” Annette murmured. “Did she make an agreement with Daddy to avoid a divorce? My God, I don’t believe this. Mother is the last person I’d have dreamed had an affair. She certainly never strayed once we were born.”
Caroline was trying to imagine her having strayed in the years before. She was having trouble reconciling the vibrant woman in the picture with the detached one who had raised her. The vibrant woman made mockery of the detached one. The vibrant woman made mockery of the emotions Caroline had grown up with.
Frustrated, she tossed the paper aside. “I still think this is a lie.”
“How can it be?” Annette cried. “It’s right here in black and white.”
But Caroline dealt with this kind of thing often in court. “Black and white can be misleading. Taken out of context, something can look totally different from how it really is.”
“You’re deluding yourself, Caroline.”
“I’m trying to see the whole picture. That photo—” she jabbed the paper, “doesn’t fit.”
“Are you saying it isn’t a picture of Mother?”
“Oh, it’s her, all right,” Caroline said, aware that their voices were rising enough to be overheard, and half-wanting that, to refute the allegations against Ginny, “but we may be misinterpreting her expression. For all we know, she was telling Will Cray about Daddy.”
“I’ve never associated that kind of look with Daddy.”
Neither had Caroline. Still. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder. He was gone five days out of every seven. She might have missed him.”
“Caroline, she’s holding hands with Will Cray.”
“So? Six months ago I tried a case whose preparation required meeting with the DA. He’s my former boss. More, he’s my friend. I was entering the lobby one day when he was returning from lunch. He said something. We laughed. He took my hand and pulled me into the e
levator. Someone might have taken a picture of us at that point and assumed we were having an affair, but we sure as hell weren’t. Why are you so ready to assume Mother was? We don’t have proof.”
“The whole town knows!”
“Did anyone catch them in bed together?” Caroline demanded. “So there’s gossip. So there’s a legend. That’s the kind of juicy stuff that keeps a small town going. It may be pure fantasy, all of it.”
“It wasn’t,” came a low voice from the door. Caroline’s first thought was that it was Leah, who was standing in that direction with her arms crossed over her middle, but it wasn’t Leah’s face beneath the doorframe.
Martha Snowe was the current editor of the Downlee Daily. She was wide, dowdy, and ruddy-cheeked. Her manner spoke of reluctance, despite the slow certainty in her voice. It struck Caroline that she hadn’t wanted to intrude but had felt bound to, which gave a certain credence to what she had to say.
“Were you living here then?”
“Yes. I was seventeen.”
“Go on.”
“Your parents’ coming here for the summer was big news. We were more provincial back then, and they were rich and attractive. My friends and I would watch your mother walking down Main Street and dream of being like her one day. She was refined. She walked just so and talked just so. And she was nice. Everyone liked her. So she was invited to town picnics and such, and it made sense that Will would drive her over.”
She paused. Caroline urged her on again.
Very quietly, she said, “He started driving her more—not only to town things, but whenever she left Star’s End.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Even more quietly. “They were seen driving through town late at night.”
“He was her chauffeur.”
In little more than a whisper. “She wasn’t sitting in back.”
Caroline began to get the picture. “How close were they, exactly?”
“Very close.”
“Who reported this?”
“Different people. At different times. And the police chief.”
Annette was looking anxious, Leah was ashen, and Caroline was running clear out of excuses. “Is that the basis for the legend? Two people sitting close in a car?”
Martha shook her head. “They were seen together in the woods at Star’s End.”
“In a compromising position?”
“Very.”
“By trespassers,” Caroline charged. “Interlopers on Mother’s property.”
“The town has always had an understanding with the owners of Star’s End. Our people can go up there long as they don’t go to party and they stay out of sight of the house. The people who were up there that night weren’t doing anything wrong.”
“Teenagers?”
“Artists.”
Caroline stuck her hands in her back pockets. The artists she had met in Downlee reminded her of Ben. While not quite eccentric, they marched to the beat of their own drummer. They wouldn’t have been shocked seeing Ginny and Will in the woods, any more than they would have returned to town to spread unfounded dirt.
It had to be true. She was stunned. She looked at her sisters. They were equally dismayed. With as much dignity as she could muster, she said, “Why don’t we go back?”
They didn’t speak, either on the way to the car or once Annette was behind the wheel and leaving Downlee behind. Caroline brooded all the way, trying to understand why she was so upset, when she was so distant from Ginny.
It wasn’t until they turned onto Hullman Road that she said, “I always thought Mother was cool by nature. I chalked her aloofness up to a personality limitation, and that made it easier to accept. It wasn’t anything personal, right? It was just her. But to believe this story is to believe that she was perfectly capable of love. She just chose not to give it to us.”
“Either that,” Annette said softly, “or it was no longer hers to give.”
Caroline felt a catch deep inside, and in its wake an incipient sadness. She didn’t have time to give it more than a cursory examination before they arrived at Star’s End, and then the most important thing seemed to be locating Ginny.
No one answered at Lillian’s house, or at the big empty house the St. Clairs had called home. The golf pro at the club hadn’t seen her, nor had the maître d’ in the dining room.
“She could be anywhere,” Caroline said and, thinking that Leah might have more of a clue than either she or Annette, turned to her.
But Leah was already out the French doors and halfway past the pool.
seventeen
LEAH WAS BEYOND THE POINT OF CARING IF her sisters saw where she was headed. She had to see Jesse.
Leaving the pool behind, she ran past the gardens and across the lawn toward the woods. When she didn’t see anything resembling human form through the thick greenhouse glass, she swung open the screen door. He wasn’t inside, or in the back mudroom, or out by his truck, which stood hot and idle in the afternoon sun.
Frantic, needing to find him fast, half-fearing that he had been nothing more than a figment of her imagination, planted in her mind by the ghost of Will Cray, she ran back in the direction of the house. She crossed the front drive and continued on, past the heather garden and its sculpted wildness, past the beach roses and their poignant scent. Jesse was nowhere in sight.
Fighting tears now, she ran into the woods on an old path, a bald swath through white birch, spruce, and pine. His presence was an eerie certainty here, a woodsy familiarity. She followed twists and turns, over pine needles and exposed roots until the woods opened abruptly to sun, grass, and the untamed beauty of wildflowers. Jesse was weeding in their midst.
With the sight of him came the same melting deep inside, a craving so intense she thought she’d die of it. Pulled in every direction at once, she stood at the meadow’s edge, taking short, shallow breaths. He looked up, started to smile, but stopped. In the next instant, he was striding toward her through the flowers, and she was suddenly frightened. Her feelings for him were too strong. The whole of her thirty-four years seemed funneled into this moment.
Instinctively, she backed up, but he broke into a run and caught her up before she made it into the woods.
“Don’t,” she pleaded when he wrapped his arms around her.
“I couldn’t say anything, Leah,” he said against her hair. “It wasn’t my place.”
“But you knew!” she cried, trying to pull away.
He held her fast. “Since I was nine, when my father explained why my mother left.”
Leah barely heard. “The whole time I was asking about the legend, you knew the truth!”
“I never lied.”
“You didn’t tell me everything!”
“Because she hadn’t told you!” he said. He shifted his arms to gentle his hold, though he wasn’t letting her go. His voice was rough, urgent, vibrating through his chest by her ear. “I thought you’d have known, especially when she bought Star’s End, then I started talking to you and realized you didn’t. I figured she was planning to tell you, since she got you up here, but I didn’t think it was my right to do the telling. I figured she had a reason for waiting so long.”
“We had to hear it through the grapevine,” Leah cried and felt his soft oath.
“I’m sorry.” This time, when he shifted his arms, there was a soothing in his touch. The warmth of him crossed between her breasts, wound around her waist, cushioned her shoulders to calves. “If I’d known that would happen, I’d have told you myself, but you kept thinking your mother would be arriving any day.”
She recalled the very first time she had seen Jesse. “You knew who I was even before I said my name that first day!”
“Hell, yes! Looking at you was like taking a body blow, like being hit in the gut, which was what my father told me he felt when he first saw your mother, and even if that hadn’t been so, I’d have seen the resemblance. I have pictures, Leah, a stack of them that I only
found after my father died.”
She heard pain in his voice and realized with a start that he had suffered, too. She tried to remember what he had said about his childhood, about his mother, about his relationship with his father, and realized that it hadn’t been much. She looked up at him, over her shoulder, with the question in her eyes. His face was dappled by the sun as it darted between pine boughs on the edge of the woods, but that did little to mute the anguish there.
“Oh God,” she breathed in an expulsion of air. She couldn’t be angry at him. He was a victim, too. Closing her eyes, she turned and put her forehead to his chest.
He let her stay that way for a minute, then drew her in closer and hugged her hard. When her legs began to tremble, he lowered her to the ground so that they sat Indian-style, facing each other, hands and knees touching. He spoke in a low voice.
“My mother stayed until I was old enough to go to school, then she left, just packed up and vanished one day. My father didn’t tell me much, only that they had differences and that a son should grow up with his father. I took my cue from him, and because he wasn’t upset, I wasn’t either. One year passed, then a second. I started to miss her, but he didn’t. He wasn’t an emotional person. He got up in the morning, did his job, and went to bed at night. He never yelled, never cried.”
“Oh God,” Leah breathed. She knew how that was.
“But I was a child,” Jesse went on, “and I did cry sometimes, especially when my mother sent me letters. She told me that she had remarried and had two more children. She kept saying that I’d visit her some day. She even sent me plane tickets for my ninth birthday. I wanted to go, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave my father alone. There was something about him—he was a tragic figure—sad in his lack of emotion. I was a child, sensing something I couldn’t possibly understand.”
For My Daughters Page 21
