Occasion of Revenge

by Marcia Talley

  Paul’s eyebrows did a two-step. “Like a mail-order catalog on December the first.”

  I punched him on the arm. “So where’s your Christmas spirit?”

  He fingered his tie, a conservative red with an overall pattern of minuscule Christmas wreaths. He waggled the tail of it under my nose.

  “That hardly counts, Paul. It would take a magnifying glass to distinguish those wreaths from garden-variety polka dots.”

  We rounded up Emily and Chloe (looking Baby Beautiful in a stretchy red headband bow), took our festively attired selves to the car, and were soon whizzing through the tollbooths and over the Bay Bridge. By the time we reached the fork in the road where Routes 50 and 301 split, Chloe was asleep in her car seat. Next to her, Emily sat listening to something on her CD player. If I had ever watched MTV for more than five minutes, I probably could have recognized the tune from the chee-cha-cha, chee-cha-cha noises leaking from the earphones she had clamped to her head. I had half a mind to warn her she was going to go prematurely deaf, but thought better of it.

  At the exit for Route 213, Chloe awakened, her chubby face red with the effort of producing something of significance in her diapers. A few miles later, we crossed the old-fashioned drawbridge over the Chester River into Chestertown. I consulted the map I had printed off the Internet and it was a good thing, too, because the left turn onto Queen Street came up so suddenly, we almost missed it. Paul eased the car down the street while I scanned the house numbers. “There it is!” I pointed. Paul slowed the car to a crawl. Darlene’s house stood in the middle of the first block, a two-story, double-dormered brick structure that had at one time been painted white, but the paint had softly weathered, giving the house an attractive, antiqued look.

  “Well, at least it’s not a dump,” Emily commented. “I guess she spent all her ex-husbands’ money getting into this neighborhood and now she wants Gramp’s bucks to keep her in the style to which she’s become accustomed.” When I turned to scowl at Emily she raised a hand. “Joke!”

  Signs along the street indicated that only residents should dare think about long-term parking there. “Where will we park?” I asked as we passed a turning for East Church Street.

  “Never fear!” Squinting into the dark, Paul spun the steering wheel hard right and pulled into a driveway that led to the parking lot behind the Imperial Hotel. While we waited in the car, he gathered up our overnight cases and quickly checked us in, then we walked the block or so back to Darlene’s with Paul lugging the poinsettia.

  I stepped onto the porch and mashed my finger on the bell. I heard it buzz rudely somewhere inside. The door swung open almost immediately to a whoosh of overheated air and a blast of Mannheim Steamroller Christmas. Peeping around the door were the violet eyes and the beaming cherry-cheeked face of a woman I’d never seen before.

  “Welcome! Come in!” I detected an accent. French, perhaps? When she threw the door wide, I got a full frontal view of a woman, nearly as tall as Paul’s six foot one, swathed in purple. A wide silver belt cinched her knit dress together at the waist and a fringed paisley scarf was tied and secured at her right shoulder by an antique silver brooch.

  But it was the tiara that captured my attention, an astonishing object of intricately twisted silver wire from which crystal beads dangled and slender lavender feathers trembled in the breeze.

  My husband was the first to recover his power of speech. “We’re Paul and Hannah Ives,” he stammered, extending his hand. “And this is our daughter, Emily, and her daughter, Chloe.”

  “LouElla.” She leaned down to take a closer look at Chloe. “Well, hello, precious!”

  I caught Paul with his mouth in mid-gape as he took in our superannuated prom queen’s too-black hair, parted cleanly in the middle and twisted into donuts at each ear, like Princess Leia in Star Wars.

  “Where’s Darlene?” I asked, gesturing with the bag Ruth had sent.

  “When last seen, in the kitchen.” LouElla indicated a square table set in the entrance hall on which gaily wrapped packages were piled like children’s blocks, by a not terribly well-coordinated child. “You can leave that there.”

  There was no room on the table, so I set Ruth’s gift on the floor next to a rectangular package wrapped in silver paper and decorated with multicolored hearts. Paul placed the poinsettia carefully nearby, rotating the pot until the plant’s best face was forward.

  “You can leave your coats in the upstairs bedroom, first door on the right.” LouElla clapped her hands together. “But I see you haven’t any!”

  Paul chuckled. “No, it’s unseasonably warm out there.”

  “But I’d love a place to change the baby.” Emily smiled at LouElla. “May I?”

  “Of course, my dear,” she purred. “There’s a bedroom on the left and the bathroom’s at the end of the hall.”

  LouElla’s eyes followed Emily as she mounted the stairs. “Just call if you need anything, dear!” Then she turned and glided ahead of us through the hallway and into the dining room, where a tweedy gentleman was fishing with a toothpick for a Vienna sausage floating in a reddish-brown sauce over a can of Sterno. “Dr. McWaters?”

  The tweedy guy turned, eyebrows raised, the sausage now teetering precariously on the tip of his toothpick.

  “Let me introduce you to the Iveses,” LouElla said. She extended her hand in his direction, palm up. “Dr. McWaters is a general practitioner,” she announced, giving equal emphasis to every syllable.

  Dr. McWaters bent at the waist. “Guilty!” he said. “And it’s Patrick.”

  The doorbell buzzed and LouElla twitched like a startled rabbit. “Whoops! Another customer!” She twirled smartly on one Ferragamo toe and wheeled out of the room.

  “I see you’ve met LouElla Van Schuyler,” the doctor observed.

  I snagged a carrot stick. “Who is she?”

  “One-woman welcome wagon.” He dropped his used toothpick into a silver bowl, one that looked vaguely familiar. I inched my way closer to it. “Drinks table is in the kitchen.” The doctor gestured to his left with a glass of white wine.

  “And our hostess, too, I presume?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll look forward to talking to you later, then,” I said, not wanting to appear rude.

  On our way to the kitchen, Paul and I passed through a well-organized pantry with a wall of glass-fronted shelves to the right and on the left, a zinc sink which might have been used in the preparation of the extravagant flower arrangements that filled Darlene’s house. “How many silver bowls with silver dollars set into their bottoms do you know of?” I asked my husband.

  “What are you talking about, Hannah?”

  I grabbed his arm, stopping him in mid-stride. “Those toothpick holders look very much like Mom’s little silver dishes.”

  “You mean your father’s little silver dishes.”

  “Why do you have to be so logical?”

  Paul shrugged. “Occupational hazard.”

  The pantry opened out into a large kitchen that extended a dozen or so feet from the back of the original house, almost certainly a modern addition. In the daytime, a wall of windows offered a panoramic view, I would learn later, of Darlene’s colonial-style garden. A handful of guests milled around a table strewn with bottles of wine, hard liquor, and an odd assortment of glasses. Olives, slices of lemon and lime, cocktail onions, and maraschino cherries were neatly arranged on clear glass saucers. Mixed nuts filled two more of my mother’s little silver dishes.

  I located Daddy at once, lounging by the television, talking to a young woman dressed somberly in black with hair dyed to match. Darlene stood on his left, her back to him, engaged in an animated conversation with a twenty-ish guy dressed in blue jeans, high-top leather boots, and a short-sleeved University of Maryland T-shirt. As we entered Darlene looked up, smiled slightly, then returned to her conversation. Well, hello to you, too, I sneered, and welcome to my home. The only friendly face in the bunch belonged to a Chesapeake
Bay retriever who lay comfortably on a beanbag bed, his head resting heavily on his paws as if the red bow tied around his neck had grown too heavy. The dog’s eyes were moving, following the to-ing and fro-ing of the guests like a tennis match.

  I knelt in front of the dog. “Hello. You must be Speedo.” I stroked the silky blond hair between his ears. Daddy’s sob story about the harassment Darlene had been experiencing had failed to move me, but Speedo here, that was a different matter. Why would anyone want to hurt a harmless animal?

  Paul found the drinks and poured us each a glass of red wine. He watched while I took a sip. “Drink up, Hannah. I have a feeling this is going to be a long evening.”

  I gestured with my glass. “Do you suppose the girl in widow’s weeds and Biker Boy are Darlene’s kids?”

  Paul studied the tableau, his eyes darting from one face to another as if searching for a family resemblance. “Good bet,” he said at last. “Check out the noses.”

  I had been thinking the same thing. “And the chins. Well, wish me luck. Here I go!”

  Paul closed his eyes. “I’m not sure I can bear to watch.”

  I left Paul to carry on alone at the drinks table and swished over to confront Darlene.

  “Hello, Darlene.”

  “Hello, Hannah.” An introduction to her companion didn’t seem in the offing, so I extended my hand to the young man. “Hello. I’m Hannah Ives, George’s daughter. And you are …?”

  “Darryl Donovan.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I thought you might be.” After a prolonged silence during which I took two sips of my wine and listened to the mourning dove on Darlene’s bird clock who-WHO-who-who-who seven, I asked, “Tell me, Darryl. What do you do?”

  He shrugged. Clearly he’d learned the niceties of social intercourse at his mother’s knee.

  “Darryl manages tables at McGarvey’s,” Darlene supplied.

  Darryl snorted. “What Mother means to say is that I’m a waiter.”

  “Really?” Another sip of wine slid down my throat. “I must have seen you there, then.”

  “I think I would have remembered.” Darryl cast a sly eye at my décolletage, which, I must admit, pleased me enormously. He was practically undressing me with his eyes. If Darryl had actually managed to charm me out of my sweater, though, he would have been in for a shock. The plastic surgeon had done a masterful job of rebuilding my breast, but I didn’t think Playboy would be renewing my centerfold contract anytime soon.

  Over Darryl’s shoulder I watched as Paul was waylaid on his way to join us by an attractive, silver-haired woman dressed in a red plaid suit. “Is your sister here tonight?” I inquired.

  Darryl grunted. “She’s the one talking to your dad.”

  “Deirdre’s working on her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland,” Darlene added. The proud mother wore a long-sleeved, scoop-neck cocktail dress in a stunning shade of turquoise with a matching pashmina artfully looped around her neck. As she reached out to touch her son’s shoulder, the pashmina shifted. What I saw nearly stopped my heart; I had to press my hand to my chest to get it going again. Knocking about in her cleavage on the end of a pure silver chain was my mother’s favorite jade-and-silver necklace. There was no mistaking it; Daddy had had it made in Japan by a jeweler working from an original design. When I could breathe again I said, “That’s a lovely necklace, Darlene.”

  She reached up to caress it. “Thank you. Your father gave it to me.” She smiled, revealing even white teeth. “An early Christmas present.”

  No wonder it was hard to breathe. Rage was taking up the space in my chest normally reserved for my lungs. Lucky for Daddy that all these people were around, because I felt like picking up one of Darlene’s country French kitchen chairs and clobbering him with it. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your conversation,” I seethed, then turned on a furious heel to seek out the moral support of my husband.

  I found he’d migrated back to the dining room, where he was hovering over the cheese board, still talking to the woman in the red plaid suit. Before I could tell him about the necklace he said, “Hannah, I’d like you to meet Darlene’s friend, Virginia Prentice.” He turned a dazzling smile on Virginia. “My wife is George’s daughter. The middle one.”

  Virginia, who I guessed must be around seventy, grinned at me with a crimson mouth carefully outlined in a darker shade of red. “Are your sisters here, Hannah?”

  “I’m afraid not. Georgina’s in Arizona with her in-laws and Ruth had to work tonight.”

  Virginia shifted her drink so that she was holding her plate and her glass in the same hand. She selected a jumbo shrimp and dredged it through a puddle of cocktail sauce. “Too bad they’re missing the party!”

  I speared a crab ball for myself. “Ruth sent along a bottle of schnapps, although it’ll never be noticed among all that loot. Honestly, Virginia, I’ve never seen so many hostess gifts!”

  Virginia wrinkled her eyebrows. “Hostess gifts?” She brightened. “Oh, you must mean the stuff on the hall table. Those aren’t hostess gifts, my dear.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “You look so surprised. Surely you know!”

  “Know what?”

  “Those are wedding gifts.”

  “Wedding?” Paul slipped a steadying arm through mine and clamped it firmly to his side.

  “Your father and Darlene are getting married at the courthouse in Annapolis a week from next Friday.”

  “New Year’s Eve?” I croaked.

  “Oh, yes. On New Year’s Eve, just before midnight.”

  Paul’s grip on my arm tightened. “Well, we knew they were thinking about it, of course, but we didn’t realize it was so …” He paused, and I could feel him staring at the side of my face as if checking to see if it would crack and explode. “… So imminent.”

  “I think it’s sweet, don’t you?” Virginia waggled her fingers in the air. “Then they’ll slip away on their honeymoon, driving into the next millennium together.”

  I was sorry that I had eaten that crab ball because I was in grave danger of throwing it up all over Darlene’s clean oak floor and tasseled Oriental carpet.

  “Have you met our daughter, Emily?” Paul asked.

  “I may have.” She sipped her drink, something clear on the rocks with a twist of lime. “What does she look like?”

  “She’s not hard to spot,” Paul offered. “Not with our granddaughter grafted to her hip.”

  “My, yes! Cute little thing,” Virginia burbled. “They’re in the living room, I think, looking at the tree.”

  I certainly didn’t have an overwhelming desire to look at Darlene’s tree, but at least if I did I knew I wouldn’t see anything of my mother’s on it. As far as I knew, all the family Christmas decorations were either hanging on our tree or still packed away in boxes at my house. I decided to find Emily, if only to get out of that dining room, which was suddenly filled to overflowing with Darlene’s laughter as she swanned in on Daddy’s arm. It was either that manic cackling or me.

  But Paul had other ideas. “It’s time,” he said, “to greet the happy couple.” His teeth flashed shark white in the candlelight. “Shall we?” He tipped an imaginary hat to Virginia, then dragged me across the room to a table where Daddy was fixing three cups of eggnog, one each for himself and Darlene and another for a white-haired guy on his right. The Bobbsey Twins, Darryl and Deirdre, had wandered off somewhere.

  Paul came straight to the point. “I understand congratulations are in order, Captain.”

  Daddy refused to look at me directly and the lobes of his ears changed from pink to red, almost as red as the white-headed guy’s sweater. The left side of his mouth turned up in a crooked grin. “Yes.” His arm snaked around Darlene’s shoulders. “We both realized rather suddenly that we weren’t getting any younger, and with the millennium almost upon us, we thought it might be fun to start out the new century together.”

  Perma-grin firmly in place, like Br’er Rabbit, I lay low.<
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  Daddy shifted his weight from one foot to another and said, “Have you met Darlene’s neighbor, Marty O’Malley?”

  Mr. O’Malley raised a hand. “No relation.”

  My laugh was forced, but I welcomed the change of topic. “You must get that all the time!”

  Although they were approximately the same height, the man whose hand I was shaking bore absolutely no resemblance to Baltimore’s newly elected mayor, Martin O’Malley. Marty O’Malley the mayor was broad-shouldered, muscular, and dark-haired, while Marty O’Malley the neighbor was slim, solid, and straight as a tree, with a generous head of pure white hair and an infectious grin. I’d doubt we’d catch Baltimore’s new mayor wearing red-and-green striped suspenders, either.

  “Oh, I do, I do,” Marty said. “All the time. And when I show up at restaurants, I get all kinds of grief, as if I’d gotten my reservations under false pretenses!” He waved a Heineken at me. “I can’t help what my parents named me. Besides”—he leaned closer, until his mouth was almost touching my ear—“the mayor’s thirty years my junior, so it’s he who should be apologizing to me for the inconvenience!”

  “What do you do, Mr. O’Malley?”

  “Nothing, my dear. Absolutely nothing.” He cackled. “I’m retired.”

  Virginia Prentice, accompanied by a youngish woman in a silver, bead-encrusted sheath, joined the growing knot of people clustered in front of the drinks table. “Nonsense! You’re the busiest person I know, Marty.”

  Marty ran his thumbs up and down the inside of his suspenders. “Not during the winter, I’m not. Been reading a lot, though, Virginia.”

  “Have you read The Perfect Storm?” Virginia wanted to know.

  The young woman, who was introduced as Eileen, shivered inside her silver sheath. “No, and I don’t intend to. I might never go sailing again! No, I’m reading that new book by Phyllis Talmadge, Flex Your Psychic Muscles.”

  Marty puffed air noisily out through his lips. “Who believes in all that crap? Might as well waste your money on the psychic hot line.”

  Eileen bristled. “I believe in it.”

  “I looked for that Talmadge book in the Compleat Bookseller the other day, but they were all sold out,” Darlene complained.