At first the second-floor landing seemed like a perfect square. One was able to look across an empty space, two stories high and capped with a skylight, to a balustrade of heavy, dark wood and, beyond that, the entrances to the two principal bedrooms, facing the front of the house. These were assumed to have been occupied by the Judge and his wife. In one or the other, doubtless, Old Mrs. Wyman had died. Kinkaid felt no curiosity about them.
No other doors were immediately visible, but the side landings stretched backwards into hallways where there were other rooms and, in the rear, another two sets of stairs leading up to the third floor.
There were three rooms along the right hand corridor. They had the anonymous look of guest accommodations and, judging from the furniture and wallpaper, hadn’t been used in decades.
Along the left wing of the building were two more rooms. The door to one of them was locked, requiring Kinkaid to use one of his fistful of keys, and had a spare, masculine quality suggesting that its last occupant had lived through his boyhood sometime before the First World War—sure enough, in a desk drawer Kinkaid found a worn copy of Liddell’s Greek Essentials, dated “September 20, 1916” above the initials “C.W.” Judge Wyman’s elder brother, named “Christopher,” had drowned in a boating accident before he was twenty. His bedroom, apparently, had been kept all these years as a kind of shrine.
Kinkaid replaced the Greek grammar, closed the drawer and left.
In the other room the curtains were ruffled and the single bed had a canopy. There were four or five stuffed animals on the dresser—not teddy bears, not the souvenirs of childhood. A bright red gorilla with a pot belly and a black flannel face. A blue dog with a lolling tongue and button eyes that swiveled around in plastic saucers. These were the trophies of adolescence, the sort of thing won in the arcades of amusement parks and county fairs. The sort of prize you gave to a date after impressing her with your prowess at the ring toss. This was a teenage girl’s room.
For a moment Kinkaid could feel the wild beating of his heart, and then he realized his mistake. There was a portable record player on a table, with a stack of 45s beside it. He took a few out to look at: The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley singing “Heartbreak Hotel”—nothing pressed within the last thirty years. He opened the drawer of a night table and found an ashtray. This room must have belonged to the Wyman’s daughter Blanche, their only child, who had gone to live abroad as soon as she flunked out of her last private school and, like her uncle, had died young. Angel had hated cigarettes.
“Angel,” he whispered—he simply couldn’t help himself. Even here in her house, even as he searched for some trace of her, he had tried to refuse her memory. But memories will take their revenge. It was the first time in years he had allowed her name to pass his lips and the emotion he felt at hearing it squeezed his throat shut, so that he felt physical pain.
“Angela, you’ve heard me speak of the Kinkaid boy,” Mrs. Wyman had said, turning to a slender, perfect, flamelike girl with hair so blond it was almost white. The girl caught his eye and smiled without seeming to, as if she had already mastered the art of being unapproachable. “Angela is a relation of my late husband’s. She will likely be staying with me for some time.”
These last remarks were addressed not to Jim Kinkaid, who was home for the summer after his freshman year at Yale, but to his father, or perhaps to no one at all. Mrs. Wyman had a habit of not speaking to one directly, as if she found the familiarity distasteful. This was the only time Kinkaid remembered seeing her on the premises of Kinkaid & Kinkaid.
“Jimmy, perhaps you’d be good enough to offer Miss Wyman a glass of lemonade?”
Then, with a courtly sweep of his hand, Mr. Kinkaid Senior offered to show the Judge’s widow to his private office, glancing back at his son to favor him with a significant but indecipherable look.
Young Jim, for his part, was almost speechless.
“Would you like some lemonade?” he asked, rather stupidly—it was literally the only sentence he could call up.
And then she really did smile at him, until he thought perhaps his wouldn’t stand it much longer.
“Anything,” she answered. With the pink tips of her fingers she combed a strand of hair out of her face. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. “Is it always this hot here?”
For half an hour they sat together on a porch swing on the back veranda, drinking actual lemonade. They talked about school, which at least had the virtue of safety. She had never heard of Yale. She told him about the “Academy for Young Ladies” she had attended in Paris, although she did not seem particularly European. She spoke English with a certain crispness, as if she had just taken it out of the package and it was still in perfect shape.
“Will you go back at the end of the summer?”
“Oh no.” She shook her head. Her gesture betrayed nothing, not the slightest hint of regret or pleasure. Paris, one gathered, was a place of completely neutral impressions. “There isn’t any reason. I’m to interview next week at some school in Greenwich—where is that, by the way?”
“About fifteen minutes away. It’s like New Gilead, only more so.”
His little joke, if that was what it had been, went unnoticed.
That was all they were to have for the rest of that summer, a perfectly amiable conversation lasting thirty minutes. Then Mrs. Wyman’s legal business was over and her car was summoned.
“Who is she?” Jim asked that night at dinner, after Julia had cleared off to the kitchen. His father, apparently busy with teasing the bones out of a salmon steak, regarded him out of the corner of his eye and smiled, as if enjoying some secret.
“I take it you mean the girl? A relative—Mrs. Wyman’s description is quite adequate. You find her interesting?”
“She’s . . .”
“Yes, she is that.” Having completed the dissection, Mr. Kinkaid Senior stabbed a slice of lemon with his fork and began squeezing the juice out over the scattered remains of his fish. “But a little young for you, wouldn’t you say?”
“I only asked who she was.”
“Well, to the degree I’m able without breaching the lawyer client relationship, I’ll oblige you with an answer.”
The answer was tantalizingly incomplete. Mrs. Wyman had recently returned from Europe with Miss Angela as part of her baggage. Mrs. Wyman hadn’t even known of her existence before her trip—a call on some distant connection of the Judge’s had found that person lately deceased and the daughter walled up in a Parisian convent school that seemed really to be a kind of orphanage for the inconvenient children of the rich. The inference was that the young lady had led an unsettled, nomadic life, but Mrs. Wyman intended to put a stop to that.
“‘One is obliged to do something for one’s family’ was the way she put it. It’s a little out of character, but perhaps the old darling is lonely.”
“Will Angela live at Five Miles?”
Mr. Kinkaid nodded sagely. “So I gather.”
That summer Jim Kinkaid had a job at a textbook warehouse in Stamford. He spent the first three weeks packaging orders and then graduated to working the forklift. It wasn’t very exciting work, but he earned a little more than six dollars an hour, enough to keep him in pocket money during the school year. He was on scholarship at Yale, so pocket money was all he needed.
On weekends and those evenings when he could summon the energy he would hang out with the young men who had been his friends in high school. They spent a lot of time at the public beaches in Westport, which were supposed to be the place for picking up girls although nobody ever seemed to have any luck. They also cruised around in cars, went to the movies and ate ice cream at the local Baskin Robbins. Kinkaid never saw Angela at any of these places, which didn’t surprise him. The Wymans were not as a rule very gregarious. Probably none of them had ever been to a beach they didn’t own.
By the time he went back to college he had almost
forgotten about Angela Wyman—or, to put it more accurately, if he had had a little more personal vanity he would long since have concluded that she had forgotten about him. Why not? He doubted he had made a very dazzling impression. From time to time the memory of their half-hour on the porch swing would float pleasantly through his mind, but he didn’t long for her. Neither did he long for Bo Derek, whom he regarded as not quite as beautiful and no less unattainable. He was not of a disposition to willfully break his heart.
Thus he was more than a little astonished, in the middle of the spring term, to find a letter in his campus mailbox. There was no return address on the envelope, the flap was decorated with some sort of school crest—he could just make out the name.
“They tell me you have a car. Why don’t you pick me up after school on Friday?”
It was signed “Angel”.
Angel. That was Tuesday morning. For three days he carried the little scrap of notepaper around in his pocket, taking it out from time to time just to reassure himself of its reality. He admired the handwriting, which was fluid, clear, and perfectly spaced. He even admired the color of the ink. He had an English class at two o’clock on Friday afternoon, but he wanted to be in Greenwich by three and, in any case, he wouldn’t have had any attention for the niceties of Elizabethan verse. He decided to cut it.
Her sources of information were correct. Kinkaid had owned a car since the middle of his senior year in high school. It was a ‘76 Toyota which had cost him most of the twelve hundred dollars he had saved from the summer before. Two years later it had a fresh paint job—lemon yellow—new seat covers and a rebuilt starter. Before much longer it would also need a fresh set of tires, but for the moment it was in good repair and running fine. That Friday afternoon, from about three-fifteen on, it was parked across the street from the front entrance to the Greenwich Academy. Somehow Kinkaid didn’t quite have the nerve to just drive up onto the campus.
He waited for nearly two hours. Once a patrol car drove slowly by and the policeman inside gave him a hard look, as if considering whether to run him off, but Kinkaid nodded at him and smiled his inoffensive college-boy smile and that was that.
At ten minutes before five, traffic into the entrance started to pick up. Women who drove elegant little British sports cars and looked like they were on their way to the polo matches started disappearing up the long driveway to wait in the parking lot for their daughters to be dismissed for the day. About fifteen minutes later most of them were gone again and girls in brown sweaters and dark tartan skirts started emerging onto the sidewalks. Angela was one of the last of these.
She looked odd in her uniform, with her books in a little canvas satchel she carried slung over her shoulder. There was nothing cynical or experienced about her, but the awkwardness of adolescence had vanished and her whole carriage suggested the self-mastery of adulthood. The others, hanging together in little clusters, their laughter like the screams of birds, seemed like children. Perhaps they too sensed the difference because there were no companions about her as she walked.
Kinkaid got out and stood beside his car, where she would be sure to see him. Wishing passionately that this part of it could be quickly over, he even ventured a tentative little wave.
He hadn’t succeeded in attracting her attention—she had known all along that he was there. The only difference was that now she chose to acknowledge him. As she stepped off the curb toward him, her smile could have meant no more than, “Oh, my ride is here.”
“Have you been waiting long?” she asked as he held the car door open for her.
“No.” He grinned at her, convinced she knew he was lying. “What time do you to have to be home?”
“There’s no hurry about that. Mrs. Wyman is in New York and won’t be home until after dinner.”
She said it quite casually, not even troubling to look at him, but for Kinkaid she seemed to be defining the precise character of their relationship. It was to be their secret. If Mrs. Wyman had been at home this meeting would not have been possible.
“Then maybe you’d like a soda?”
At first, from the sudden way she turned her eyes toward him, he felt such a fool he was ready to blush to the roots of his hair. Life wasn’t an Andy Hardy movie, and who the hell did you take out for a soda anymore? The Yale girls would have laughed in his face. And Angela—Angel—for all that she was still in high school . . .
Or maybe not. Just then she gave him the sweetest smile, as if she were amused and pleased all at once.
“I would,” she answered. “Yes, I would very much.”
It was late at night when they finally made it back to New Gilead. They had their sodas on Greenwich Avenue, at possibly the last drugstore fountain in the civilized world, and then simply drove around. Around 6:15, when the light began to fail, they found a diner in Stamford and had coffee and dessert in a booth in the back.
They didn’t talk much. It didn’t seem necessary. It would have broken the spell of their perfect intimacy. Until the very end, he never even touched her. It was enough just to be there.
When the headlights of his car nosed up against the gates at the entrance to Five Miles, they were closed. They were like the doors of a prison, except that it was impossible to tell on which side lay captivity.
“I have a key,” she said. She took it from her purse and showed it to him. “It’s best if I go up to the house alone.”
“Will you be all right?”
“Yes. Mrs. Wyman won’t know or care.”
When he turned to her he discovered that she had slid over toward him, so that their legs were almost touching.
“When can I see you again?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she threw herself into his arms and kissed him with an almost savage hunger. Almost the second he began to respond he could feel her tongue sliding between his lips.
There was a girl in New Haven whom Kinkaid sometimes took to the movies and then, if he was lucky and his roommate had left for the weekend, back to his dormitory for an hour or two of breathless, exhausting sex. She went out with lots of other men and probably slept with them as well. She was of an athletic disposition and always eager for something new. She just liked it, she said. She certainly seemed to.
But nothing that had happened on Kinkaid’s narrow dormitory bed could remotely compare with the passion of that kiss. Angel’s breath came in ragged little pants and she seemed to want to crawl inside him, as if that one moment had to answer for a lifetime of longing.
When they came apart it was because they simply had to. Kinkaid’s hands were resting lightly on the tops of her shoulders, and he longed to bring them down to cover her breasts. She wouldn’t resist. She wanted him to—he knew that—and yet somehow he didn’t dare.
“When can I see you again?” he repeated. “I have to see you again . . .”
“Tomorrow night.” She kissed him again, this time taking little nips from his mouth. “Mrs. Wyman goes to her room after dinner and doesn’t come out. Come to the garden after dark.”
Then, quite suddenly, she was gone. He heard the sound of the gate lock snapping open and saw her disappear behind that curtain of wrought iron. She vanished so completely that he almost couldn’t bring himself to believe she had ever been with him at all.
He drove home. It was after eleven when he got in and the house was already asleep. At breakfast the next morning his father was more than usually roguish behind a copy of the New York Times, but he had long since stopped asking questions about his son’s love life or his hours.
The hardest part was simply getting through the day. Kinkaid spent the morning and half the afternoon in his grandfather’s old office attempting to put together a term paper on the political poetry of Andrew Marvell, but it wasn’t a success. Usually he was able to lose himself in work, but today he just couldn’t seem to find anything worth writing about. He would read the verses and they sounded in his ear like the tinkling of a wind chime. He didn’t give a damn. All he
could think about was Mrs. Wyman’s garden in the shadows of night.
In the end he gave it up and drove out to Five Miles. He parked in a little patch of trees, pulling his car off the road where it would not be seen, and walked to the wall. The gates, of course, were closed, but after twenty minutes of searching he had found a spot he was reasonably sure he would be able to climb. Then he went back to his car.
While he waited he amused himself by wondering how he would explain himself if he got caught, especially since he couldn’t possibly tell the truth. The idea that anyone might think he had come to steal something he found particularly tormenting, but it would be better to let them think that than to involve Angela.
There was a groundskeeper who lived in a cottage behind the garage, and the Wymans were not the type of people to be very tolerant of trespassers. He wondered if the groundskeeper had a gun. He decided he was probably not destined for a life of crime—burglars had to be made of sterner stuff.
Finally, around six, it got dark. He tore the knee of his trousers getting over the wall, but he made it. He wondered how he would get back.
There was a gazebo in the center of the garden and he waited inside. The moon was very bright and at least there he didn’t feel as if he were under a spotlight. It was almost eight o’clock before he saw a white shape moving up the path toward him.
“Have you been waiting long?”
The moonlight lent her beauty a touch of the unearthly, so that she seemed almost translucent. It was only with a deliberate effort that Kinkaid could answer her.
“Yes,” he said, not as a complaint but as a kind of tribute. She smiled, as if she understood that. “How long can you stay?”
“As long as I like.”
Perhaps he had voiced a doubt—at this distance of time he honestly couldn’t remember—but she shook her head.
Angel Page 10
