The walls of the structure were made of more plastic panes that could be opened, all covered on the inside by heavy wire. To keep out raccoons, Fern said.
A gentle stirring of air touched my face and I heard the purr of a fan. Three long rows of orchid plants grew in pots of various sizes set on shelves of open wooden slats, to allow for drainage. Other plants hung everywhere from supports.
Fern moved ahead of me like a yellow moth, lifting her arms as though they were wings, yet careful not to disturb any of the lovely orchids that grew on every hand in a bewildering array of color, shape, and fragrance. I hadn’t known that some orchids had a distinctive scent.
“Poppy was especially interested in raising hybrids,” she said, “and we’ve developed some unusual species. She’d register them and send them to shows all over the country. That’s the nice thing about orchids—you can grow new types quite easily and have something original and different. These are cattleyas here—there are loads of species in that family, though they’re not as popular as they used to be. They were the prom beauties that showed up at dances, and got pinned on guest speakers. I like vandas better—they’re more exciting and exotic, and they can bloom all year round. See those deep violets and blues. And those down there that run to yellow and brown. Here’s a new little beauty in pink and green—see that spray with eight blooms on it.”
I was more interested in this newly discovered half sister than I was in the flowers that so delighted her. Again she seemed to me like one of her own delicately colored orchids as she moved among the plants, stopping here to compliment, to praise, even to chide—as though they could hear her. Perhaps they could, when their caretaker seemed so gentle and kind and was so wholly involved in their well-being.
However, I found that I could grow numb from the sheer extravagance and quantity of the orchids. There was too much to take in all at once.
Fern turned to me, suddenly grave. “Have you seen Cliff yet?”
“I asked Iris when I could see him, and she said when he decided that he wanted to see me.”
“That sounds like her!” Fern tilted her head in a quick movement that set wisps of tawny curls dancing about her small gamine’s face. “We don’t have to listen, though, do we? I have you to help me now. To stand with me. If you like, I’ll take you to see him right away.”
She was moving too fast for me. I didn’t want to be used as a buffer, and this seemed too sudden. He might not be ready to see me, and I didn’t want to burst in on my father unannounced, even in the tow of this warmly generous younger sister who so wanted an ally of her own.
“First, I’ll shower and change,” I told her. “Perhaps later.”
“Of course. Iris thinks I’m too impulsive. Anyway, I want to get ready now. Derek Phillips is coming to dinner tonight, and he’s eager to meet you. Have you heard about Derek?”
“Marcus told me a little about him. And that he and Iris are going to be married.”
Fern pursed her small mouth. “I don’t see how he can stand an icicle like Iris! The trouble is, he thinks I’m just a child. Everyone does. Don’t be like that, Laurel—if we’re to be sisters.”
I smiled at her. “I’ll remember.”
She looked suddenly troubled. “Iris and I used to be close when Poppy was alive. We loved each other then. Now I can’t trust her any more.”
She came into the house with me, and up the stairs. At the door to my room she paused, shaking her head.
“They should never have put you in Poppy’s room! I told Iris it wasn’t fair.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “It really doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it? Oh, well, I suppose not. If you don’t mind, that will put Iris’s nose out of joint. Look—my room’s right here across the hall. If you want anything, let me know.” She opened her door and disappeared inside.
In her quick, light way, Fern had revealed a serious rivalry that existed between the sisters, and my sympathy was inclined toward Fern. But I must not get involved even in defense of this new sister, whom I liked. It was my father I’d come to see—my father I must face—and there was no need for taking sides when it came to the others in this house.
When I went into Poppy’s room I knew at once that something had changed. As I looked around, I saw that the center photograph of the woman in the mask was gone from the wall. Only a picture hook remained. In a way, I felt relieved not to have those eyes following me while I moved about the room. Yet at the same time I wondered why that particular picture had been taken away.
For no clear reason the action made me faintly uneasy—so I might as well find out. I returned to the hall to tap on Fern’s door.
3
Fern was still wearing her fluttery garment, but she’d pinned her hair into a curly mass on top of her head, so that she looked taller and less childlike. She read my puzzled expression at once.
“What’s happened, Laurel?”
“Come and see,” I said.
She ran ahead of me into the room and saw the empty place on the wall. “Where has the mask picture gone?”
“That’s what I wondered. Someone seems to have moved it, though I don’t suppose it matters.”
She looked doubtful. “Perhaps it does. Perhaps we should move you to another room right away.”
“Whatever for? What do you mean?”
“Maybe Iris is playing games. Don’t let that icicle look of hers fool you. She put you in this room to torment you, and now she’s moved that picture to upset you even more. She does things like that.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not upset.”
Fern seemed to droop a little. “If only Poppy were here! She always knew what to do about Iris. Sometimes I wonder if Poppy is watching us. Sometimes I think I can catch a glimpse of her. One afternoon in the orchid house I opened the door, and she was there—tending one of her favorite crosses of Phalaenopsis. It seemed as though she was there. She looked so sad that it broke my heart. But when I blinked, she was gone—so I couldn’t be sure I really saw her. Maybe I only imagined it because I need her so badly.”
I felt sad for this younger sister who felt the loss of her mother so deeply. We had that in common, but I didn’t know how to deal with what she was telling me.
She fought back tears and went on. “The other time I saw her she was right down there in one of those white chairs where she loved to sit after sundown, when the garden grows shadowy. I just wanted to watch her, to know she was there, but that time she faded away even more quickly. Laurel, do you suppose a person can make something seem real just by imagining it?”
I ought to know, I thought ruefully, remembering my own vivid daydreams.
“I’m sure it’s possible,” I said. “Perhaps it helps us to drop back for a little while into the sort of make-believe we did as children. Sometimes it can be comforting. Just so we come back to what’s real.” That was something I was still trying to do.
“You do understand!” Fern’s small face brightened. “You really do understand.”
Emotion was too close to the surface, and I was afraid of what might happen if I ever let myself go.
Fern went to stand before the two remaining photographs. “Poppy took those pictures a few weeks before she died, and Iris had them framed and hung them here. My mother was a very good photographer.”
“What about the other picture?”
“That was taken a long time ago. Cliff took it. Poppy had dressed up for a masquerade, and she’d made that paper mask herself. I suppose it’s still around somewhere. I was only about six and the mask scared me. It covered all of her head, just leaving her eyes so she could see out. And a place to breathe, of course. When she came to show me, I cried. I didn’t think it was really my mother.”
Fern broke off and stared at me.
“What if she’s here in this room? Sometimes I can almost feel her here. Poppy used to say that I can see what other people can’t. A secret gift, she called it. I don’t know if I want
to believe that. It’s too scary. But the anniversary of her death is coming soon—and it makes me afraid.”
I remembered Marcus’s words about such anniversaries being dangerous. But he surely hadn’t meant anything psychic.
Her eyes pleaded with me, and I tried to answer. “Once in a while I have a presentiment myself—perhaps precognition. I suppose most people do at times. But I don’t know much about it. Perhaps you can teach me.”
It was the right thing to say, and she surprised me with a quick kiss on my cheek, accepting me.
“You’re not a bit like Iris,” she said, and I knew it was a special compliment.
Both touched and bewildered by this younger sister, I stood watching in the doorway as she ran across the hall.
Just as she reached the door of her room, a sudden roar of laughter came soaring up the far stairs from the front of the house. Fern stopped, her hand on the doorknob. When she turned, I saw her face light with eagerness.
“That’s Derek!” she cried. “Oh, good—he’s come early!”
She flew along the hallway in her floating gown, once more resembling a yellow moth as she ran down the stairs.
Thoroughly troubled, I turned back to my room—not Poppy’s room now. There had been no way to misread the look on Fern’s face. My younger sister felt much too strongly about the man who would marry Iris. Perhaps this was a major source of the rivalry between them?
When I’d showered I put on a pleated white silk skirt, with a periwinkle top and a wide white belt that laced in front with blue thongs. As I dressed, I avoided looking at the orchid pictures. If it had really been Iris who’d moved the middle picture … But I mustn’t jump to conclusions, as Fern seemed ready to do. The answer to why someone had seen fit to remove the picture would eventually turn up, and it probably wouldn’t be anything important. People took pictures off the walls all the time.
I was about to go downstairs when someone rapped on my door. I opened it to a tall woman, probably in her mid forties, her gray hair cut close and sleek to her head—like an old John Held drawing from the twenties. Where everyone I’d seen on the streets of Key West had been brightly, casually dressed, this woman wore black. She seemed severely handsome, smooth-complexioned, with a hint of blush at her cheekbones, but no lipstick on her full mouth.
“Good evening, Miss York,” she said formally. “I’m Alida Burch, Mr. York’s secretary. Your father would like to see you, if you’ll come to him. He doesn’t plan to join the others for dinner tonight, so he can see you alone now, before you dine.”
I wanted to see him—but I still wasn’t prepared. Perhaps I never would be, so it was better to face him and get it over with.
Mrs. Burch walked with me to a flight of stairs that led to the attic floor and paused at their foot. “I was sorry to learn about your mother. I met her one time when she came to Key West nearly a year ago. I imagine she told you.” Long dark lashes came down discreetly, and I murmured that I knew. Perhaps the time would come when I could ask more about my mother’s visit.
The voices from the first floor had grown more subdued, and now I heard another sound. On the floor above, someone had started to play a piano softly, and I caught the light, quick measures of Scott Joplin.
“Your father’s workroom is on the top floor,” Mrs. Burch told me.
The stairs made a turn upward and opened into an enormous space that ran the width of the house. The pitched ceiling was probably well insulated, for the long room was cool. Portions of it had been broken into islands that simulated rooms in themselves, without being partitioned off. Near the top of the stairs stood a desk with a secretary’s chair set before it and the components of a word processor arranged at one side. A handsome Chinese screen painted with pine trees and waterfalls shielded the desk from view of the far end and gave both my father and Alida Burch their private working areas.
It was the distant reaches of this upper room, however, that drew me. Gable windows would allow light and air to come through, and one of the scuttles Marcus had mentioned was propped open in the roof. Two ceiling fans stirred and I felt their pleasant breeze.
Mrs. Burch spoke in my ear. “Please be careful what you say. He isn’t well, and this is a disturbing time.”
As we started down the long room, my attention was fixed upon the far corner, where a man sat at a small upright piano, his fingers moving lightly on the keys. As we approached, it was as if my whole life until this moment had been reaching toward whatever was about to happen.
He didn’t look around or acknowledge us. Behind him stretched a huge mahogany desk strewn with pages of yellow paper and piled with books. This was the heart of the house—the place where Clifton York had written all those wonderful suspense novels on which I’d grown up. I felt both excited and abashed, not only because this was my father, but because of the books as well.
Mrs. Burch stopped beside the piano. “Cliff, I’ve brought your daughter.” The “Mr. York” she’d used with me had been formal, but she was an old friend to my father, as well as his secretary.
As he turned I wondered if he might feel as uncertain as I did. Perhaps that was why he’d continued to play, postponing the moment of our confrontation.
Now he stared at me in silence, his expression guarded. His dress was casual—a T-shirt and jeans. He seemed as handsome as his photographs, but he looked worn and considerably older. His hair, still dark and thick, showed only a streak or two of gray, and his eyes were dark as well—like Iris’s, though the lids drooped, so that he’d lost the wide look of his younger pictures. At least the dramatic eyebrows were the same—heavily marked, with an upward curve at the outer edge. Rather dashing eyebrows, I’d always thought them. After all, they were my own as well!
When he’d stared long enough, while I tried not to blink, he left the piano and came toward me. I didn’t know what to expect, but he merely gestured toward his desk, where a visitor’s chair of red morocco stood near his own chair. When he’d seated me, he went to stand at one of the gable windows that looked out at the dark sky, his back to me.
All my early eagerness, even my doubts, had disappeared. I felt only a blank emptiness. What was happening was like none of the young fantasies I’d played out about meeting my father. Some had been angry fantasies, but all had been dramatic and not like this numbing reality.
Mrs. Burch went quietly away, and after a moment I heard the chatter of the word processor from behind the oriental screen at the far end of the room. The silence grew oppressive, embarrassing, but I wouldn’t be the one to break it. He had asked me to come upstairs—so let him lead the way!
Pretending casual interest, I looked around this end of the big room and saw that it was lined with packed bookcases and shelves of art objects he must have collected in his research for many books. I recognized a vicious-looking spiked shell from the Caribbean that he’d chosen for a murder weapon in one novel, and a grinning little Chinese god from another. This would be a room to explore, if I ever were permitted—which didn’t seem likely right now.
Among several framed pictures on the walls I was surprised to find the watercolor I’d painted of a white clapboard house in Bellport. Behind its picket fence the yard was orderly, and I’d painted the scene at azalea time, so red and pink blossoms flowered among the neatly trimmed green shrubs. Very different from the lush and tangled overgrowth of the tropics. I felt a twinge of homesickness that I shrugged away. I was here. This was the “elsewhere” I’d wanted, and I didn’t mean to turn and run because this meeting with my father disappointed me. There were accounts to settle before I left, and I was relieved to find that his very silence could strengthen my resentment of everything he stood for in my life.
After a moment at the window, he returned to the chair behind his desk, moving as though he’d come to a decision. Three white envelopes lay beside an old-fashioned typewriter, and he picked them up and handed them to me.
This was becoming a bit weird—his silence and odd actions—
so that I took the envelopes reluctantly, not knowing what to expect. They had been postmarked and were still sealed. As I examined them my heart fell in dismay. The return address on each was Key West, and they were all addressed to me, the postmarks old. Across the face of each was written neatly in my mother’s hand: Return to sender.
“You wrote to me?” I said, and my words sounded like a challenge.
“I tried. There were other letters I didn’t keep. You can see what happened.”
My hand shook as I set the envelopes on his desk. I didn’t want to read his letters—it was too late. And far too late to be angry with my mother, though what she’d done made me feel a little sick.
“You know that she has died?” I managed.
He bent his head in assent. “Yes, I know. Were you very close? It’s always hard to lose someone you love.”
Sympathy? But I suspected that he was thinking of Poppy, not Janet, and I found myself resisting.
“I still have a few snapshots of you,” he went on. “Taken when you were little—before I went away.”
I had looked at those same pictures recently, and it hurt me to see them. How harsh and cruel divorce could be to the children suddenly left behind. Both parents had removed so much from my life—so what was left for him to give back to me now?
He went on, almost as if to himself. “We weren’t right for each other—your mother and I. It was one of those young things that happened too fast. We were only the beginnings of people then. I knew sooner than she did that we’d made a mistake.”
At least there was one question I could hint at. “I’ve never heard how you met.”
His smile was for something in the past. “I expect that always embarrassed Janet, so she’d never tell you. She was rather a proper young lady when I knew her. We met on a train—the Twentieth Century out of Chicago. I was going to New York and so was she. It was wartime, and the dining car was crowded when I went in for dinner. We both had to wait in line—at opposite ends of the car. When our turn came, the head-waiter saw we were two singles and he put us at the same table. It was as fortuitous as that. Six months later we were married. Totally out of character for your mother. You were born the next year.”
Dream of Orchids Page 5
