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  “I’m only concerned because I want so badly to help John,” Bayard Sewell said. “And I feel so helpless. Canaday is playing it goddamned closemouthed, and your dad seems … vague, uncertain … when I try to talk to him. I’m awfully afraid that know-nothing shyster is riding him for a bad fall. I wish he’d leave your dad the hell alone. I wish he wasn’t in the house with you.”

  “Oh, God, Bay, I don’t even see him,” she said impatiently. “I make it a point not to go near him when he’s here. I’m bored sick with Sam Canaday and I’m bored with talking about him.”

  She shook her hair back off her damp face as if tossing aside a biting insect. Even unseen, Sam Canaday was as all-pervasive and pungent as a powerful odor.

  “I only care about it because I don’t want it to touch you. I don’t want whatever’s hurting your father to hurt you, and I don’t want him to hurt you,” he said, smoothing the wild, silken mop away from her flushed face.

  “He can’t,” Mike said. “Nothing can, now.”

  Bayard Sewell spoke no more of Sam Canaday and the action against the Department of Transportation.

  Nearly two weeks went by before Mike went again to Priss Comfort’s little stone house by the ball field. She had not consciously stayed away, but the blazing reality of the few afternoon hours in her dim, enclosing cave of a room had dwarfed and distanced everything else around her in Lytton, and most of the time that she was not actually in the room and joined with Bayard Sewell, pumping with all her body and soul to turn herself inside out and into the very flesh of him, she was remembering just how it had been the last time, or waiting in pure flame for it to happen again. Mike was an abstracted automaton with quivering nerve endings on every inch of her skin. When she found occasion to do so, she mentioned Bayard Sewell to whomever was present, just to taste the roundness of his name on her tongue as she would, later that day, taste the hot, damp flesh of him. She did a few dreamlike errands in town, cooked a few perfunctory meals, slept in long, deadened drifts of time, ate little, nodded dreamily to Sam Canaday the few times she could not avoid seeing him in the house, and took a great many baths. Somehow, in the tepid water of the grainy old tub, the fires inside her cooled and softened a little. She found a box of her old childhood books in the back of the closet in her room, and after that, late into the cicada-humming nights, her lamp spilled down over the yellowed and crumbling pages of Black Beauty and The Wind in the Willows and the old Arthur Rackham edition of The Water Babies. The loved, half-remembered small worlds of the books were as real to her, in those first hot nights, as the one around her.

  “Well, I thought you’d left us for good,” Priss grumbled as Mike ambled into the little house one hot morning, eating the first of the local peaches. “Holed up in your room and starved yourself to death, or something. Sit down there and let me get you something with more heft to it than that peach. You look like Mahatma Gandhi. I feel very honored that you’d leave the inner sanctum for the likes of me.”

  “Oh, don’t be cross,” Mike grinned at her. “Who told you I was holed up in my room, as you put it?” Her words were casual, but she felt sharpened and alerted. No one must know about the afternoons in that room …

  “DeeDee said that Lavinia Lester told her you spent a lot of time up there,” Priss said. “DeeDee made a special trip last week to see if I’d heard about the charming little dinner party at the Sewells’ house. Said she thought sure you’d have told me about it, and when I said no, you hadn’t been by, she said Lavinia had said you’d taken to your bed. Proper full of it, Dee was. Absolutely sure you were stricken to the vapors with embarrassment and God knows what else. I told her most likely you were stricken with a powerful urge to avoid her. I think I may have made her mad. She turned right red.”

  “Oh, lord, Dee drives me crazy,” Mike snapped. “I’m not stricken with embarrassment, and I haven’t been hiding in my room. I’m just catching up on my sleep, like I always do when I let down after a long assignment. I told you I would. As for the dinner party, it was pretty awful, but nothing Bay couldn’t and didn’t handle. I guess he’s an old hand at it by now. It was terrible, though, Priss. I’m truly sorry for her; she’s an appealing little thing, and she obviously adores him, and he does her. But why in God’s name, if she does, can’t she control herself on the one night when he’s got an old friend back in town and wants to show his wife off? He was wonderful about the whole thing, but you could tell he was just in agony over her. It was such a godawful, ghastly shock.”

  “I don’t know why it should be,” Priss said coldly. Mike looked at her in surprise. Priss’s serene face was stony.

  “I don’t know what he thought would happen to her, just a few days out of a sanitarium and meeting the woman her husband almost married for the first time. I don’t know what he thought she’d do. Booze flowing like water, and her trying to be a hostess, and please him, and make a good impression on you, and deal with Duck and DeeDee, which would turn many a stronger soul to the bottle for good … I don’t know what in God’s name he expected. Maybe just what he got.”

  “Priss!” Mike was shrill with surprise and outrage.

  Priss looked at her, a long, measuring look, and then the ice-green eyes softened, and dropped.

  “Oh, God, Mike,” she said. “Don’t mind me. You just seemed so like the eight-year-old I remember for a minute … forget it, please. I never could talk to you about Bayard Sewell.”

  After that, Mike spoke no more of him, to Priss or anyone else, but he roared inside her like the sea.

  20

  DON’T TELL ME, LET ME GUESS … GIDGET GOES TO cooking school?” Sam Canaday said, coming into the kitchen on a thundery morning that June. Mike looked up from the kitchen counter, where she was stirring butter and cocoa. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail with blue yarn, and she wore cutoff blue jeans and a soft old shirt of Richard’s. Her feet were bare.

  “And who’re you this morning, Tab Hunter on date night?” She took in his blue blazer, gray slacks, and red-striped tie. She had never seen him in a coat and tie. He looked totally different; thinner, finer-featured, somehow younger. His blond hair was dark-damp, comb tracks showing clearly under the fluorescent overhead light. The high ridges of his cheekbones looked newly touched by sun.

  “Touché. You do look about fourteen, though. And I’d say you’d either gotten an A on your algebra final or broken up with your boyfriend. Is that fudge for celebration or consolation?”

  “It’s for an orgy. I’m going to eat the whole panful by myself in front of the television set this afternoon. Have a piece of that other; you’d better move fast, before it’s gone.”

  He reached for a piece of glossy fudge cooling on the old yellow Fiestaware platter that Mike had pulled out of a bottom cupboard.

  “Mmmm,” he said. “From the looks of your chin, I’d say you’ve been hitting the fudge fairly steadily. Better watch out, or you’ll come up with a crop of zits. Not to mention a real behind. Is that the beginning of a hip I see there?”

  He leered at her tight denim shorts.

  “I’m afraid so,” Mike said. “They were baggy not two weeks ago. God knows what I’ll have to wear if I don’t stop eating and get some exercise.”

  “Well, it looks good,” he said appraisingly. “Like you’ve finally gotten enough sleep. All the corners are gone. You’ve gotten a little sun, too. It’s not hard to see that you were the cutest girl at the prom.”

  “I never went to the prom,” she said. “But thanks for them kind words. I didn’t know you noticed things like hips and suntans.”

  “Good God, woman, and me a true son of the old South? I didn’t spend four years in the horniest high school in America for nothing. Of course I notice hips.”

  He was as good as his word. His gaze followed her as she moved around the kitchen, pouring the fudge onto a second buttered platter, washing the mixing bowl, putting it away. She could feel his eyes on her body and legs; she began to be almost uncomfortable i
n the short shorts and the soft-clinging shirt. She wore no bra beneath it, and she was suddenly very conscious of her nipples pushing against the thin worn oxford cloth.

  She did, she knew, look almost like a teenager. It was by design. Bayard Sewell had told her, hand deep in the tangle of her ashen hair, that he had always loved the ponytail she had worn during high school, and she had tied it back that same evening and left it that way. When he had mentioned how pale and gaunt her body looked, remembering the summers when she was lithe and golden from the constant swimming, she began lying out on the grass behind the house in the mornings, till she ran with sweat and could bear it no longer. He had an insatiable sweet tooth that he had not had when they had been together before for bland, cloying, nurserylike concoctions, and so she made it her custom to take a sweet treat up to the bedroom each afternoon that he came, and they demolished the candy and cakes and cookies as ravenously as they fed on each other’s bodies, and Mike soon began to lose the sharp edges and angles that had made her avert her head when she passed a mirror. He liked the change in her; liked the greedy, sated, knowing child she had become. With him she was a wanton prepubescent in whom appetite and impulse held sway as they never had in her actual child’s years in this house, and in whom she moved like a swimmer fathoms deep in a warm sea.

  “You’re almost like you used to be, but about a hundred thousand times sexier,” he said. “A little girl who knows a fancy whore’s tricks. It’s an incredible combination.”

  She wondered, though, what sort of child it was he really met in her; somehow she thought perhaps it was that forlorn child of this place that he saw.

  Mike knew that the others saw a change, too, and knew that they studied her when they thought she was not aware of it. More than once she had caught long, measuring looks from Priss and Sam Canaday, and veiled ones from Dee. Her father alone of the people around her did not seem to notice a difference. There was less tension, less revived animosity, between them, but then, she saw him even less now that Lavinia Lester had established herself in the house during the days, and in her newly obsessive state, the contacts that she did have with him nettled her less. The upshot was that Mike was kinder to her father, and he, in turn, had drawn in his horns somewhat.

  “Looks like you’re settling in pretty good,” he said to her once, as she sang to herself putting away the supper dishes. “Looking less like a plucked canary that lit on a live wire.”

  “I take it that’s a compliment,” Mike said.

  Her father made the cracked sound that might mean mirth or annoyance and commented no more on her manner or appearance. But she knew that she had, somehow, pleased him a trifle.

  Well, she thought, why not? Nothing wrong with a little of this whatever it is spilling over on him. It’s certainly not like he was going to get attached to me. And I can’t just pretend nothing has changed. It has. I think I may actually be happy.

  She was, or as near it as she could remember being. She sang in the honeysuckle-freighted mornings and laughed at DeeDee’s scandalized face when her free breasts under the soft T-shirts and blouses drew stares in the A&P, that last bastion of Lycra and underwiring in Lytton. Since resuming her affair with Bayard Sewell, she had given up wearing underwear entirely, loving the feeling of her clothing rubbing her sensitized skin, imagining, with slightly caught breath, how the places that they brushed would feel when his hands touched them again. She did not care who noticed that she was naked under her clothes.

  Mike had observed early on that there was a strict social striation in the grocery shopping habits of Lytton. The industrious mornings were the province of pant-suited, boned, stockinged, and permanented middle-aged women with four-door family sedans and proper lists, while in the hot, indolent afternoons battalions of younger women in shorts and slacks and rubber flip-flops and plastic curlers boiled into the stores, towing shoals of piping, grasping children. Nighttime was when the blacks came. She saw few people she had known before. Once the phenomenon would have engaged her journalist’s sensibilities like an anthropological study. Now it merely amused her, especially when she noticed that several of the morning women seemed to be whispering together about her as she passed with DeeDee.

  “This is where old panty girdles and dress shields go to die,” she teased her sister. “Relax, Dee. I could go into purdah and it wouldn’t change anything; they’re going to talk about me anyway. Better my underwear—or lack thereof—today than my wild indiscretion of yesteryear. I think I’ll ask that lady with the face like a boiled egg where they keep the condoms. They’ll think I’m getting it on with J.W. and that should keep them happy all summer.”

  “That sorry business back then has almost died down now,” DeeDee snapped. “Why on earth you have to parade half-naked all over town and stir it up again I don’t know.”

  “Lytton has other things to do besides talk about you, Mike,” Priss Comfort told her when Mike recounted the mornings at the A&P with glee. “Half the town is newcomers these days, or kids too young to remember you. They don’t see Mike Winship, free spirit, up to her old tricks. They see a skinny middle-aged lady with hair like a gone-to-seed dandelion in the grocery store, with her tits bouncing. Sorry to disappoint you. And it’s not as if you needed a bra, anyhow. Couple of Band-Aids would do just as well.”

  “I love you, Priss,” Mike gasped through helpless laughter. “You never once let me get away with anything, not even when I was eight years old.”

  “Which is exactly how you’re acting now,” Priss said. “For God’s sake, put on some underwear so poor DeeDee can hold her head up in the produce department.”

  In the morning kitchen, now, she looked at Sam Canaday with sharpened attention.

  “What are you doing here in the middle of the day?” she said. “I’ve hardly ever seen you in the daylight.”

  “I’m going to take your dad to the doctor in East Point,” he said, “Didn’t Lavinia tell you?”

  “I haven’t seen Lavinia this morning. She’d left for an appointment at her son’s school when I got downstairs. What’s the matter with my father?”

  “He’s been having some pain, Mrs. Lester says. Keeping him up nights. I’ve been wondering when it would start. His doctor said he might get lucky and miss the pain, but that’s bullshit; did you ever know a cancer that didn’t hurt sooner or later? It’s probably been hurting him a good bit longer than he’ll admit, and God knows how bad it really is. His regular doctor’s appointment is next week anyway, so I thought this time I’d take him and talk to the doctor myself. J.W. usually drives him, and the doctor won’t tell him anything.”

  “Why on earth didn’t he tell me if he needed to go to the doctor?” Mike said. “Or why didn’t Mrs. Lester? It’s my place to take him; it’s one of the reasons I came down here. I can’t let it take your time like this …”

  “No problem,” Sam Canaday said easily. “He wouldn’t let Lavinia tell you, so don’t jump on her about it. He said he didn’t want to disturb you. He says you’re doing some writing in your room, and he doesn’t want to bother the genius at work. I take that to mean that he’s very proud of you. I didn’t know you were working on anything—that’s good news.”

  “I … well, just fiddling around a little,” Mike mumbled, embarrassed and annoyed at her father, Lavinia Lester, and Sam Canaday. She did not like lying and did it poorly. “Who on earth told him that, anyway?”

  “I gather Sewell did, or intimated as much, I didn’t hear him. I rarely have the pleasure of Mr. South Fulton’s company these days; he’s out and gone like a scalded tomcat by the time I get here in the evenings. One would almost think he was avoiding me if one didn’t know better. Or that the Colonel was trying to keep us apart. I used to run into him some, but he’s apparently changed his visiting hours.”

  Mike glared at him. “I doubt if he cares a tinker’s damn whether he sees you or not,” she said. “He’s got a new project going, and he’s had to change his routine a little. But he still sees
Daddy when he can. He’s been very faithful.”

  “He has that,” Sam said. “Faithful is just the word for Bayard Everett Sewell. Well, if he has what it takes to get you writing again, more power to him. Let him come at noon and stay till dinnertime. May one ask what it is you’re working on?”

  “One may not,” Mike said, feeling the traitorous heat rising in her chest and neck. “It’s absolutely nothing; and it probably won’t ever turn into anything. Bay shouldn’t have … mentioned it.”

  “Maybe not.” He looked at her keenly. “Well, I won’t press you about it. I’m glad to hear it, though, Mike. I mean that. And your dad is truly proud, even though you must know he’ll never tell you so. I’ll be eager to read the finished product.”

  “Mmmm,” Mike said uncomfortably. She felt, for some reason, small and very guilty, for the first time in this house. Under the guilt she felt a crawling unease. She had been very careless; she had not known that her father was not feeling well, and she had not known that someone came into the house at least once a month to take him to the doctor. She should have made it her business to know those things.

  “Will you be coming straight back after his appointment?” she asked briskly.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It depends on how he feels. He wants to go down and take a look at the homeplace, and I see no reason not to take him, if he seems up to it. We can’t keep him away from it forever.”

  “You know that’s just going to stir him up all over again,” Mike objected.

  “For God’s sake, Mike, it’s his house,” Sam Canaday said. “Who has more right to go and see it when he wants to? Besides, what do you care? You said right off you don’t care what we did about it as long as you didn’t have to hear about it. I don’t imagine you’ve changed your mind.”

  “You’re right, I haven’t,” she said, turning to leave the kitchen in irritation. There had been real warmth and approval in his voice and eyes when he was talking about her writing, but apparently warmth and approval were two things he could not long sustain, at least not with her. Now she would have to call Bayard Sewell at his office and stop him from coming to the house that afternoon; they could not risk an encounter with Sam Canaday. With her father out of the house, there was no reason for Bayard to be in it. She did not like calling his office, and he did not like her to do it. She was in her room with the door closed when she heard them leave the house, and shortly after that she heard the Toyota start up. She waited five more minutes and then called and left a message with Bayard Sewell’s secretary that Mr. Winship was not feeling well and could not have visitors that day. It was the emergency signal they had agreed upon.