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“If you’re sure,” Mike said doubtfully. “I don’t want to cause a fuss.”

  He looked at her intently for a moment, and then said, “My wife has an alcohol problem, Mike. I’m sure you’ve heard. She’s a pretty high-strung girl, and she never really got over our son, the one—who died. But she’s brave and a fighter, and she’s been going like gangbusters since she came home this time. I’m proud of her. I want to show her off. And she wants to meet you. She’s kept up with you, like we all have. She’s one of your greatest fans.”

  He dropped his eyes and studied the meager shag beneath his feet with absorption, and then looked back at her.

  “I’d be truly grateful if you’d come,” he said. “It would be a real favor.”

  “Of course, Bay,” Mike said warmly. “Of course I’ll come. I think it sounds lovely.”

  18

  ON THE SECOND FRIDAY EVENING THAT SHE WAS IN LYTTON, Mike walked in the twilight around the corner from her father’s house and up the street to where Bayard Sewell lived with Sally Chambers Sewell.

  There had been a fierce, brief thunderstorm earlier, and the heat and humidity had retreated momentarily, leaving Lytton washed and cool and fragrant. Leaves sparkled, and gutters foamed with muddy torrents, and earthworms wiggled in ecstasy on sidewalks, and the sweet, grassy earth breathed and sucked loudly as it drank in wetness and deliverance. Birds shouted and the wisteria and mimosa were near to heartbreaking. Mike slipped off her sandals and rolled up the cuffs of her linen pants and waded in the puddles, feeling lightheaded and on the verge of something huge and wonderful, just out of sight. She remembered the feeling from childhood. She had had it ever since DeeDee’s dinner party, but had refused to examine it.

  She had not been up this street in the week she had been home. She had not even looked in this direction from her bathroom window. She remembered that she had once been able to see the roof of the Parsons house from there, but now the chinaberry tree that had been young then was grown and full and shielding, and in any case she had not looked. Now she saw that the Parsons house and the three other old houses on the street were gone, and that the entire block was taken up with low, rambling colonials in soft, rosy brick, set on spacious green lawns and shaded by great old trees. These trees, apparently, had been undisturbed when the development was built. It was not an old development; from the look of the plantings, it might have been ten years old at the most, but it had about it the gentle, graceful patina of mellowness and maturity. On an old-brick gatepost at the beginning of the block, a simple bronze plate read, LYTTONWOOD. A SEWELL COMMUNITY. Mike walked past the post and three of the houses to Bayard Sewell’s house. It was, he had said, the last one on the block.

  It was larger than the others, but not much, and like them, it sat far back on a velvet lawn under a canopy of gnarled, mossy old oaks. It, too, was of rose-flushed old brick, long and low, with black shutters and wrought-iron trim on the low pillars that supported the deep roof overhang, and a pierced-brick serpentine wall extended from each end of the house and back toward the denser trees at the rear of the deep lot. Perfectly pruned glossy rhododendrons softened the angularity of the wall, and in front of them, symmetrical hillocks of azaleas in a lighter, rainwashed green drooped wet, heavy foliage over to meet the lush grass. It was not the burnt white of the grass at the Pomeroy Street house, but the shimmering blue-green of good emeralds. Incandescent white clematis glowed from the wrought-iron mailbox that said only 142 CHURCH STREET, and a double row of huge, vivid pink-and-green caladiums spread shining, ruffled leaves along the curving brick path to the front veranda. Mike stopped at the bottom of the path and looked at Bayard Sewell’s house, swinging her shoes in her hand.

  It might and should have looked too perfect, too suburban-symmetrical, too groomed and tended and clipped and carved. But somehow it didn’t. Closer scrutiny revealed an untidy, sprawling rock garden against the end of the brick wall, where delicate, old-fashioned flowers rioted in the last of the sun … thrift, candytuft, ragged robins, dwarf iris, the trailing white fountains of spirea. High on one of a small stand of pines a basketball hoop was fastened, and some small bird had fastened a nest in it, abandoned now. Midway up the sweep of lawn, centering a low semicircle of junipers at the base of a huge, showering old willow, a brightly painted antique carousel horse pranced and snorted and tossed his gilded mane. Mike smiled at the horse and walked up the path and rang the bell.

  It was answered presently by a massive old black woman in a print rayon dress and laced-up nurse’s oxfords. Mike knew that this was Opal, Sally Chambers Sewell’s childhood nurse and present tender, and she extended her hand and said, “I’m Mike Winship from around the corner. I think I’m expected.”

  The old woman stared impassively at Mike and made no move to take her hand; Mike remembered that, of course, you did not shake servants’ hands. That the woman wore no uniform was not unusual; no one’s maid ever had, in Lytton. She stood still while the old woman took her in, bare feet and all, and when she said briefly, “They ‘round back by the pool” and walked away, Mike followed her, pausing to slip back into her sandals.

  The inside of the house was like the outside: symmetrical, perfectly ordered, polished, substantially but not spectacularly appointed. There were the expected deep, glowing Orientals, the softly shining Chippendale and Hepplewhite, the Waterford and Rose Medallion and florals and landscapes in ornate gold frames that you would think to find in the affluent suburban home of a successful man. But like the outside, there were the grace notes, too, the artfully artless surprises: a joyously primitive Haitian seascape over a credenza in the foyer, a blazing Navaho rug thrown down in front of a fireplace, a silk banner in the Bhutanese manner in a small sitting room, a grouping of what looked at a glance to be Picasso sketches in a hall, a great bobbling scarlet mobile that might have been a Calder.

  Somehow, Mike thought, walking through the rich-smelling dimness behind the taciturn maid, Bay fits this house perfectly. He and it both are … what? Refined? Stylized? No … cultivated is the word I want. Everything about them both is well and thoughtfully cultivated.

  They came out into the blaze of late sun by the blue pool, and the maid slipped back into the shadows, leaving Mike face to face with Bay Sewell. He took her hand as he had a few evenings before, at DeeDee’s, and leaned over and kissed her cheek, and she caught the same smell of fresh cotton and gin and Bayard Sewell.

  “I’m glad you could come,” he said, smiling at her, and she smiled back at him and then laughed aloud. He was wearing, with his white duck trousers and blue summer-weight blazer, an ascot, tucked into the throat of his open blue oxford-cloth shirt. He looked in it theatrically and impossibly handsome, like an actor hired to lounge by a blue pool in a glossy, expensive, witless magazine.

  “I know.” He grimaced. “Is it awful, or is it awful? Sal brought it to me from Nashville, and even she agrees that it makes me look like Richard Gere in American Gigolo. But I’m not about to take it off. Come on, say hello. She’s been waiting with bated breath to meet the author.”

  That’s it, Mike thought. That’s his power. There are no accidents about him, or if there are, he turns them to his use. But there are surprises. Like that silly ascot.

  She smiled around him at the woman who stood just at his elbow, both hands outstretched.

  “I can’t tell you what an honor this is,” Sally Chambers Sewell said, a small bubble of something … laughter or nervousness … in her light voice. “Bay has talked of nothing and nobody for twenty years but you. We’re all so proud of you in Lytton; nobody else from here has ever had their name in a magazine, you know. Not a national one, anyway.”

  “It’s really no recommendation.” Mike smiled at her. “Some of the worst people I know have their names in magazines with astounding regularity.”

  “But not as the person who wrote the story,” Sally Sewell said. “That’s something else. Writers are really special.”

  She was a very small woman, no taller th
an a twelve-year-old child; she came only to Mike’s chin, and hardly to Bayard’s shoulder. She had a little snub nose peeling from the sun, and a soft, formless mouth innocent of lipstick, and her white-blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. Mike thought that the platinum color must have come from sun and chlorine and artful tinting, because her skin was the deep, coarse-grained mahogany of overtanned middle-aged skin, lusterless and opaque, but somehow it did not make Sally Sewell look middle-aged. She had the frail bones, small, stubby hands and feet, and shyly ducked chin of a child, and she was thin, thin to near emaciation, the sexless thinness of a prepubescent girl. She wore a bright-flowered sundress with spaghetti straps, and her shoulder blades and collarbones stood out as sharply as Mike’s own. One of the collarbones was knobbed and oddly dented, as if it had been broken and badly reset, and there were fading saffron bruises on her brown shins and ankles. Great, round black sunglasses shielded her eyes, but did not lend her any mystery or maturity; in them, she looked like a child masquerading in its mother’s sunglasses. She smelled of old-fashioned toilet water and sun oil and something else: there was about her the musty, sweet smell of fresh yeast. Mike had smelled it before, on certain doomed, talented, and wasted news-people and photographers and one or two of Derek Blessing’s friends: it was the smell of chronic alcoholism.

  Sally Sewell took off the sunglasses and looked up at Mike. Her eyes were large and blue and puffed beneath, and haunted. But her unguarded face was snub-pretty and friendly, and empty of everything except pleasure at Mike’s presence and a tinge of honest awe. She smiled again and widened her eyes, and Mike thought of a thin, undaunted mongrel puppy.

  “Lord, you’re skinny,” Sally Sewell said. “You’re almost as skinny as me. And pretty; well, Bay said you were that, but he didn’t say how skinny you were. It makes me feel a lot better. I thought you were going to look like Joan Crawford or Meryl Streep or Gloria Steinem, or one of those tough, important women with the noses and shoulder pads. I’m so relieved. “

  Mike grinned, and Sally Sewell clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh, Lord, that was an awful thing to say; Bay will kill me. But you look just so … nice, or something. Not like you’d been in riots and gone on marches and all that. Not at all tough. You know, I wanted to march once, back during the Selma thing; a girlfriend and I almost went. We really did want to. But … you’ll think this is silly, but it’s true … we finally didn’t, because we didn’t know what to wear.”

  Mike burst into laughter, liking her, and Bayard Sewell, from behind her, said, “Well, now you know Sal. What you see is what you get.”

  He ruffled his wife’s ponytail and turned toward the pool apron where DeeDee and Duck sat stiffly in wicker chairs, and his wife looked after him with her entire heart in her haunted eyes.

  As voluble and garrulous as they had been two nights before, DeeDee and Duck Wingo were stilted and stifled now. DeeDe wore a gigantic tent of rose-printed polyester and the high-heeled gold mules she had worn the other evening, and was sweating in the late sun, her short upper lip and temples and neck dewed with large drops. She crossed her legs mincingly and looked around brightly at Mike. Duck was in plaid golf pants and black T-shirt, with a white belt and loafers and a liberal dose of pomade on his thick pelt and sideburns. Brut smote the air around him. He, too, was sweating copiously, and in his huge hand he held a candy-pink concoction of shaved ice and fruit with a gardenia in it. An identical drink sat next to DeeDee on a low glass-and-wicker table. They smiled at Mike when she came in, DeeDee primly and Duck in what looked to be relief, and DeeDee gave a strange little chipmunk chirk of artificial laughter.

  “There you are in those awful pants again, Mikie,” she said. “I really don’t know why you do that to yourself. Didn’t she look pretty in her ruffles the other night, Bay?”

  “I like the pants,” Bayard said over his shoulder. “I think Mike looks terrific in pants. Suits her.” He bent over a gas grill in a corner of the pool terrace, and a jet whooshed into life.

  “They really do.” Sally Sewell smiled at Mike. “You look great. So smart. I’d wear pants all the time, but Bay says I look ridiculous in them, too thin. You don’t though. Maybe if I got some linen ones like that …” She looked at her husband, but he was bent over the grill and didn’t hear her.

  “Oh, well,” she said, with a resigned little gesture and the sweet, swift smile.

  “That’s an awfully cute sundress,” DeeDee said, speaking carefully as to a small child. “Did Bay pick it out for you?”

  “No,” Sally said. “I got this … on my trip.”

  “Oh, yes,” Dee said, and smirked. She looked significantly at Mike. Mike did not look back.

  “Oh, my manners!” Sally cried. “Letting you stand here without a drink. You just sit down anywhere that’s comfortable and I’ll be right back. I’m making strawberry daiquiris, with real strawberries, in the blender. They’re super.”

  “I think Mike might like to have a martini, Sal,” Bayard Sewell said mildly, materializing at her elbow. “Why don’t you let me do the honors? You’ve been working like a slave. Sit down and talk to your guests for a while.”

  “Oh, Bay, please!” The blue eyes pleaded with his. “I’ve got the strawberries all cut up and everything. Aren’t they good? Don’t you think they’re good, Mrs. Wingo? Mr. Wingo?” She looked importuningly from DeeDee to Duck.

  “Simply delicious,” DeeDee said, dimpling prissily and taking a butterfly sip from her daiquiri.

  “Real tasty,” Duck said. He did not sip.

  “I’d really rather have one of Sally’s daiquiris, Bay,” Mike said, smiling at the eager girl-woman, and Sally Sewell clapped her stubby little hands together and trotted off toward the kitchen.

  “Isn’t this a gorgeous house, Mike?” DeeDee said, gesturing broadly with a great, braceleted arm. “And the pool and everything, just so perfect … Bay picked it all out, I happen to know. Every little vase and pillow and chair. Just cream de cream. Duck and I have talked about putting in a pool, you know, but we’ve just never gotten around to it, and I blister so …”

  Bayard Sewell gave Mike a tiny, conspiratorial smile. DeeDee in a swimming pool behind the miniature hacienda on the edge of the trailer park hung elephantine and sun-reddened in the air between them.

  “Every bit of this is Sal’s doing,” he said. “I take credit for none of it; you’ve got your signals twisted, Dee. The walls and floors and ceilings are my department. What goes inside them is hers.”

  “That’s not what a little bird told me,” DeeDee said archly.

  Sally Sewell came back onto the terrace with a tray of daiquiris, walking very slowly and carefully, her tongue between her teeth in an effort not to spill. Mike took her drink and sipped it. It was savage and fiery with rum.

  “Good,” she said, her eyes watering.

  “I’m glad,” Sally Sewell said. “I’m sticking to orange juice. The doctor said I had to drink lots of it. My potassium level is down and my … electrodes … are out of whack. Thank God I like orange juice.”

  She drank deeply from an oversized white-frosted glass full of juice. Bayard Sewell rolled his eyes at her, smiling again.

  “You’re electrolytes, you mean,” he said. “Though with you it could well be electrodes. You’re really wired tonight, Sal. Good drinks, by the way.”

  She beamed at him.

  A small white dog pattered out onto the terrace, bell tinkling from its collar, and jumped into Sally’s lap. She kissed its silky head and fondled the thin hair over the ears. The little dog squirmed and showed its teeth foolishly.

  “This is Snicker,” she said. “Bay gave him to me when Stuart … our youngest … went away to school last year. I swear, the house was just so awfully empty, and I missed them so much … I cried all the time; it was awful. But Snicker is my bootiful baby, my lovums, isn’t he?” She buried her face in the dog’s fur and looked up at DeeDee.

  “You know how it is, don’t you, Mrs. Wingo?” she s
aid. “Didn’t Bay say your children were out of the nest and gone? I know you must miss them awfully.”

  “Oh, yes, awfully,” DeeDee said lugubriously. “But they’re doing so well I really can’t complain. Claudia is an exercise therapist and counselor at a big physiological complex in Florida, and Johnny has a new business interest in Dallas.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Sally Sewell said with unfeigned delight. “What sort of business interest?”

  “I think he said oil.” DeeDee simpered. “Lots of that in Big D, you know.”

  “I’m going to put the lamb on now, okay, Sal?” Bayard Sewell said. He did not look at DeeDee or Duck or Mike. She remembered what Priss had said about the trouble DeeDee’s son had been in at his filling station job, and how Bayard had somehow straightened it out for him. Her heart lurched with pain for her sister. Outclassed, DeeDee still flew her gallant, pretentious flags.

  The twilight deepened and the underwater pool lights came on. The oval pool shone like a jewel in the dusk, dreamlike, unreal. Mike did not like to look at it. She kept seeing, on its empty satin surface, the small, utterly limp shape of a child bobbing, face down, turning slowly and slowly around. But the pool held no ghosts for anyone else; DeeDee continued to simper and preen, and Duck to posture, and Sally Sewell to chatter artlessly. She kept the icy daiquiris coming nicely, all the while sipping obediently at her orange juice, and by the time Bay pronounced the butterflied lamb grilled to perfection, the last of the light had gone out of the evening sky and it was after nine o’clock.

  Dinner, Mike thought, was wonderful: elegant and simple, with just the pink-grilled lamb and steamed, fresh tiny vegetables and feathery hot rolls drenched in sweet butter. The rolls, Sally said, were courtesy of Opal, but she had done the vegetables herself; had gone that day to the state farmers’ market up near the airport and picked out each one, and had washed and trimmed and steamed them with herbs instead of simmering them in bacon grease.