“And this girl—I won't ask you her name. Do her people work in the mills, too?”
“No. They own a little grocery store.”
He gave me another quick look over his shoulder. “What was the fight really over, Chris? The girl?”
The truth was, I didn't really know what the fight had been over. Had it been over Marie? The pond? My coming into their part of town? What had it been about? “I don't know for sure.” I still didn't want to tell him anything about it. If I told him too much, he might do something to somebody, and it would land back on me sooner or later. “I guess he was just sore about being chased out of the pond by Durham.”
Uncle Foster was still looking out the window. “Your mother said that the boy told you to keep out of their part of town.”
I wished she hadn't told him that. I wished she hadn't said anything about it. “I guess he did. But he doesn't own the town. He can't tell me where to go.”
Uncle Foster went on looking out the window, squinting one eye and then the next, thinking. Suddenly Durham came into sight, wearing waterproof boots, a slicker, and a rain hat. He walked on into the stable and disappeared. “Now you take Durham,” Uncle Foster said. “He's valuable, because he likes his work and he takes pride in it. He's got a proprietary feeling about this place. He treats it as if it were his own, and he takes good care of it. He doesn't like to see anything amiss around here. I think he was personally affronted when he saw those kids in the pond the other day. When you find somebody who takes care of your business as if it were his own, you want to hang onto him. Durham's problem is that he goes too far with it sometimes. He figures he knows what needs to be done around here, and he doesn't like me giving directions. But I have to do it sometimes, just to remind him who's boss.”
He was trying to get something across to me—about who was on which side. “I guess Durham was afraid those guys would give me and Ernest a beating.”
“That was part of it,” Uncle Foster said. “It's his job to see that things like that don't happen around here. But there's more to it than that. Durham's got his loyalties straight. He knows that if he does right by us, we'll do right by him. He knows that if he gets sick and can't work, he'll always be taken care of. That means a lot to people.”
Suddenly Uncle Foster swiveled around to face me. “Chris, that boy was right. You don't have any business going into their part of town. We've got the mills and this place, and through our control of the bank, we hold mortgages on half the properties in town. It's only fair that we stay away from their turf.”
“But Uncle Foster, my girlfriend lives down there.”
He nodded. “Maybe you ought to stay away from their women, too.”
That was exactly what Benny had said. I stared at Uncle Foster, unable to think of what to say.
“Look, Chris, suppose you were one of those kids and you got interested in a certain girl. And then along came somebody with money and good clothes and manners and all of that, and took your girl away. You'd feel pretty sore about it, wouldn't you?”
“But I don't have a lot of money and fancy clothes.”
“I know you don't,” he said. “But Benny Briggs doesn't see it that way. As he sees it, the girl can't help preferring you to him, because your family owns the mills and his family works in them.”
I was surprised that he remembered Benny's name, and it came to me that he'd probably had somebody out investigating to find out who had poisoned poor Duchess. That made me pretty uneasy, because if he could pin it on Benny or his father, he was going to make it pretty hard for them. On top of it, I didn't like the idea that Marie liked me mainly because I was a Winchester. “But Marie knows I don't have any money.”
“Yes, but surely she thinks that someday you might. Surely she knows that no matter what happens, you're not going to end up working in the mills or running a grocery store.”
I'd never thought anything like that, and it bothered me a lot. Was it true? Did Marie believe that deep down I might end up rich? “I don't think she's after me for money. Her dad doesn't even want her to go around with me. He says like goes to like and I'll never stick with her.”
“He's a smart man, Chris.” He glanced at his watch. “Look, Chris, if you want to fool around with a girl like that, okay, that's natural for a kid your age. I did it myself, as I told you. I guess I was around fifteen, and Skipper put me to work on the assembly line in the Number Two mill, so I could get a feel of it. There was a really pretty girl working there, and I got interested in her and started dating her. When Skipper found out about it he said to me, ‘Foster, go ahead and date that girl if you want. But tell me, what are you going to say to her ten years from now, when you're in charge and every time you go down to the mill you see her on the assembly line putting lock washers on a radio chassis? What are you going to say to her when she looks over her shoulder at you as you go by? Are you going to fire her, just so you won't have to face her?'”
I didn't say anything. Uncle Foster got up, came around the desk, and I got up out of the chair, too. He put his hand on my shoulder. “If you want to fool around with some girl like that, okay, I understand. But don't make it somebody so close to home.” He patted my shoulder. “Think about it, Chris.”
CHAPTER 9
I'd gotten an awful lot to worry about in one day. It seemed like everything I'd counted on in my life was falling apart. A week before I'd had a best friend, and a girlfriend, and a lot of other people who liked me. Now I didn't know what I had, or what was going to happen to my life. I didn't have any control over it anymore. Things were happening to me, and I couldn't find any way to stop them.
I walked back down to the gatehouse, thinking. The thing that bothered me the most was what Uncle Foster said about Marie. Did she really think that someday I would be rich and powerful? I'd never said anything like that to her. We never talked about the future very much, but anytime we did, I usually said that I'd probably go into social service, the way my dad did. I never said anything about going into the business, because it never occurred to me that I could. But maybe Marie had been smarter than I had about that. Maybe she'd realized all along that there was a good chance that Uncle Foster and Skipper would send me to college and take me into the business. Did she really dream about marrying me and ending up living in the big house with lots of servants and five cars?
Maybe I knew less about Marie than I thought I did. Uncle Foster had called her “a girl like that.” I knew what he meant—that she was the type of girl who would have sex with anyone. He thought I was going around with her for sex. Boy, was he wrong about that.
I decided to talk things over with Mom. I figured she might have a better idea of how Marie thought than Uncle Foster did. Marie had been around the gatehouse often enough. Mom knew her pretty well.
Because of the rain the twins had to stay inside all day, and they were cranky because they didn't have anything to do. There wasn't much room in the gatehouse, and they couldn't roar around on their bikes, or build big cities out of blocks the way Ernest and I did up at the big house when we were little. So I got out some cards and played Go Fish with them at the old oak table in the kitchen, while Mom cooked noodles and Swedish meatballs. After supper I washed the dishes, and then I put the twins in the bathtub and read Winnie the Pooh to them while they splashed around, supposedly washing themselves. The one thing that was big in the gatehouse was the bathtub. It was one of those old-fashioned ones with lion feet holding it off the ground. There was plenty of room in it for the twins.
Finally Mom put them to bed, and then she got herself a cup of tea and we sat at the oak table under the beaded lampshade. “So. What did Uncle Foster have to say, Chris?”
“I wish you hadn't told him so much about it, Mom. I wished you hadn't said anything to him about Marie.”
“He has to know these things, Chris.” She bent over her tea to blow on it, and her brown braids hung forward by her cheeks. I liked the idea that we both had dark hair and brown col
oring. “I told you before, he expects to know things like that. He's head of the family.”
“He isn't head of our family.”
She straightened up from her tea and sipped it, and her braids fell back behind her head. “Chris, we don't really have a family separate from them. It's different in families like the Winchesters. It isn't the same as it is with people like the Scalzos. They can have a family separate from their relatives. But we can't, because Uncle Foster and Skipper control everything. If we have any hope of getting out of the gatehouse, we have to accept their authority.”
It seemed to me that I was being given an awful lot of orders by the Winchesters. “I like living in the gatehouse.”
Mom looked around and made a face. “Sure, it has some charm. But it's dark and it's too small for four people. How much longer do you think I can go on sleeping in a living room? Pretty soon you'll be wanting to have friends over and stay up late. Where am I going to go? Sleep in the car?”
I blushed. “Well, I can see that part.”
Mom said, “I only took it because it was close to the big house. That was the reason.”
I was surprised by that. “You mean we could have lived someplace else?”
“Of course, Chris. The Winchesters own property all over Everidge. We could have lived lots of places. In fact, Uncle Foster and Skipper didn't even think of putting us in the gatehouse. Nobody had lived in it for years. During World War II they needed everybody they could get to work in the mills. They were making electrical systems for tank engines, and they could sell everything they could make. So they cut down the house staff to a minimum, and they put the gatekeeper into the mills.”
“They could order him to do that?”
“What choice did he have? So they closed the gatehouse and didn't reopen it after the war. When we came here I noticed that, and I told Uncle Foster that if he'd pay for the paint and so forth, I'd refurbish the place. I told him it would save on car expenses if I could walk to work at the big house. It suited him, because the gatehouse was just going to waste. But my real reason for wanting to live here was to be close to the family. I wanted you to grow up playing with Ernest and Anne. Why not? They're your cousins.”
I was pretty surprised by that. Shocked, kind of, because Mom hadn't seemed to me the kind of person who would scheme something out like that. But I was curious as could be about it. “How come you wanted to be part of the Winchesters? I thought Dad was dead set against that.”
She sat there looking at me for a minute, the light from the beaded lampshade throwing a crooked shadow across her forehead. “You don't remember about coming here, do you?” she said. “You were pretty young.”
“I was six.”
She nodded. “Yes. Chris, I was pretty naive about this whole Winchester business when we came here. You remember, my dad was a steelworker. We didn't have much money when my dad was alive, and after he got killed in the car accident, we were right down to rock bottom, living in little rented apartments with cracked linoleum on the floors and cardboard in windows where the glass was broken and we couldn't afford to have it fixed.” She wasn't looking at me anymore but was staring out into the shadows in the room, beyond the circle of light falling on the oak table.
“I joined the Peace Corps just to get away from all that. It was the only way I could think of. I wanted to get away from the smoke and the gray skies and the grease from the coal smoke that got onto everything. I wanted to get away from too many men coming home tired and filthy every night, with nothing for them to do but go down to the bar. So I joined the Peace Corps and got sent to Guatemala, and met your dad, and we got married. Of course he talked about his family, and how he had grown up, but he didn't really talk about it very much—he was too interested in our work, and that was what we talked about. I knew that the Winchesters owned a mill and had a lot of money, and a house with servants. But I didn't really understand what that meant. The only life I knew was the steelworker's life. And the life of an Indian peasant in the mountains of Guatemala. The Winchesters weren't real to me. They were like people out of a movie—interesting to hear about, but having nothing to do with me.”
She looked directly at me. “Do you see what I mean, Chris? The Winchesters weren't real to me. They didn't exist. My idea of a big house with servants was one of those suburban houses that I'd seen outside of Pittsburgh. You know, a house with two bathrooms, and a maid who did the cleaning and cooking. I had a couple of friends from school who lived like that, and that's what I figured the Winchesters were like. And the mills—I had the same idea about them. Your dad said his people owned a factory where they made electronic equipment. The idea I had was of a big room in a loft where a couple of dozen people were putting together radios or something.”
“You'd never met any of the Winchesters before? You'd never met Skipper or Uncle Foster?”
“No, none of them. It didn't make any sense for them to come down to Guatemala for the wedding, which was in that little chapel in the village that could hardly hold a dozen people. The idea was that when we got home leave, Dad would take me up here to meet them. But he was always so involved with some project that he kept postponing the leave, and we never came home at all the whole time.”
She turned to look out into the shadows beyond the circle of light again. “We were down in Panama, you and me and the twins, who were only a couple of weeks old, when we heard that your dad had died. I sent a telegram to Skipper, and the next thing I knew, somebody from the State Department came and told us that he had arranged for a plane to take us back to the States the next morning. He came to get us in a limo, and we were the only people on the plane. That was when I began to get some inkling of what the Winchesters were all about. When we got to Kennedy Airport, there was a man from the State Department waiting for us. He pulled us out of the line at Customs and brought us in through a special door. He put us in another limo and we were driven straight up to Everidge. We drove up that driveway in that big car, me in old jeans and a khaki shirt, with two little babies and a little boy in torn jeans and sneakers with holes in the toes. Everything we owned was in two old, scratched suitcases, one of them with a rope around it to hold it closed. The butler met us at the drive and brought us up the steps through that huge front door, and I stood in that front hall under the Winslow Homer painting in my tattered clothes, holding two dirty babies, and you clinging to my leg. I stood there and watched as your uncle and aunt came down those wide stairs in their elegant clothes. And right then I said to myself, my children are going to have some of this, too. Their father grew up in this house, and they have a right to it. And as soon as I found out that the gatehouse was empty, I grabbed it.”
I didn't say anything for a minute. This was a whole side of Mom I'd never seen, never knew about. It was kind of surprising to me. All along I'd figured she thought the same way about these things that Dad did—that you didn't want to spend your life trying to get one more dollar from somebody. But that wasn't so. She wanted us to get in on the Winchester thing, too.
“Mom, are you sore at Dad for giving all this up to go into the Peace Corps?”
She looked at me. “No. How could I be mad at him for that? If he hadn't gone to Guatemala, I'd never have met him. I'm not angry at your father for anything. He was a fine man—honest, dedicated, brave, generous. There was never a better man.”
She looked back into the shadows outside the circle of light, and her face was sad. “But now he's dead, and he's been dead for eight years. It's been eight years since I heard the sound of his voice. I can't remember what it sounded like anymore.” She looked at me again. “Can you remember him, Chris?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I remember a few things, like sitting on his lap while he talked with some of the Indians. And I remember once him putting me on a mule and holding me on while I got a ride. But most of what I remember is from the pictures in the album.”
She drank some more tea. “I don't want you to forget him. I
wish I'd taken some movies of him. I wish I even had a little bit of tape of his voice. But we didn't have electronic equipment—there wasn't any electricity up there, anyway. So I want you to remember always that your father was a wonderful man. You must always remember that.” She was looking at me very straight and serious. “But he's dead and gone. It's Uncle Foster who counts now.”
I looked down at my hands in the light on the table. “Uncle Foster doesn't think the way Dad did. He thinks about his power a lot.”
“Some people are like that,” Mom said.
“I don't think I like it,” I said slowly. “Why should I have power over other people?”
“The world has always been that way, Chris. Somebody has to be in charge.”
“I can see that,” I said. “But why should it be Uncle Foster?”
She shrugged and gave me a little smile. “No reason. That's just the way it is.”
I was thinking about another thing, too. “Mom, when you married Dad, did you ever think that maybe someday he would quit doing social service work and go back to the family, and you'd be rich.”
She hesitated. “I won't deny that it crossed my mind. But I would never have even hinted to him anything about it. Besides, I had no real idea of how rich and powerful the Winchesters were. Remember, I envisioned the whole thing on a much smaller scale.” She paused. “Why do you ask?”
I blushed. “Uncle Foster said that Marie Scalzo liked me because she thought I might be rich someday.”
Suddenly Mom laughed. “If she's got any brains she does. What girl in her right mind wouldn't want to catch a rich husband, especially a decent, good-looking boy like you.”
I blushed some more. I wasn't all that decent, for one thing. “Why would she think that? I never told her that I might be rich. I never thought I would. And maybe I won't. Uncle Foster hasn't said anything about me going into the business.”
“Chris, eight years ago, when I stood in that great hall in my shabby clothes with two dirty babies in my arms and a hot, sweaty little boy in torn sneakers clinging to my leg, I was Marie Scalzo. That was Marie Scalzo standing there. I come from the same kind of family Marie does. I grew up surrounded by people like the Scalzos. I know all about her. I know what's running through her head. She's dreaming about being Marie Winchester someday. She's dreaming about driving up to that little grocery store someday in a stretch limo and handing her dad a check for a hundred thousand dollars so he can buy a house in the suburbs. She's dreaming about standing on those steps up there at the top of the drive and saying, ‘Good afternoon, Senator Smith, it's nice to see you again.' I know what she's dreaming. There are tens of thousands of kids all over the United States dreaming like that.”
The Winchesters Page 8
