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  She put her hand on DeeDee’s shoulder. “I won’t let anything happen to him,” she said gently. “We’ll stop the minute he looks the slightest bit tired. I guess I did get a little carried away this morning, and let things go on too long. We won’t do that again.”

  “But Mike, why?” Dee’s voice actually trembled. “You thought it was all as silly and unnecessary as we did …”

  “What can it hurt?” Mike said. She wasn’t about to go into the evening at the homeplace that still burned in her mind. In DeeDee’s present mood, she would probably think Mike was trying to secure the farm for herself and nothing could have been further from the truth. Mike did not want the old house. She simply wanted it, and her father, to be left alone.

  “I’m only doing it to keep him company and to keep an eye on him,” she said. “He was doing it anyway, you know, on that old tape recorder of Sam’s, and half the time he couldn’t make it work, and he’d lose his temper and wind up twice as tired and upset as he is now. At least this way I can monitor him. Really, Dee. It isn’t going to change anything, but if it makes him happier, why not?”

  Her sister peered at her out of tear-sheened eyes, and then let her massive shoulders slump. “I guess you’re right. It’s just that I love him, Mikie, and I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

  “Oh, Dee …” Mike’s own eyes prickled, and she covered DeeDee’s fat, ringed little hand with her own. “Something is going to happen to him, and we can’t change that. But not because of this.”

  Seeing the tears start again in the beautiful, myopic blue eyes, she said hastily, “Tell you what. Next week, let’s take off and do something together, just the two of us. Something silly and fun. I’ll send Lavinia over to stay with Duck’s mother and J.W. can sit with Daddy, and we’ll make a day of it. What would you like to do? Go to Atlanta and have lunch and go shopping, or see a movie? My treat.”

  “You know what I’d really like to do?” DeeDee said, her voice rising. “Bay’s a member of the country club, of course, and he says that anytime we want to go and swim or sun or just have lunch and lounge around the pool, he’ll leave a guest pass for us. We haven’t been yet, and I … well, I’d like it if you’d go with me. I think that would be fun. We might even join, Duck and me, if we like it …”

  Mike’s heart sank, but she said, “Of course. You name the day and we’ll do it.” Could she really bear it, DeeDee in a swim suit, sipping fruit-laden drinks around the Lytton, Georgia country club, clothed in her maddening, heartbreaking airs? She supposed she could. What difference did it make, after all?

  “We can go any time at all,” DeeDee said, her face brighter. “Bay’s already left instructions with the staff. He was president for several years before Sally got so bad.” She paused, and then said, “Do you have something that isn’t … well, you know, Mikie … so bare?”

  “I won’t embarrass you, DeeDee,” Mike said, suppressing the impulse to smack her sister. Just when you were feeling better about DeeDee, kinder, she would invariably put her elephantine foot into your goodwill.

  “I didn’t mean that,” DeeDee said, turning to leave, impervious to her effect on Mike. “It’s just that you’re so thin. You’ll be meeting a lot of the new people, and you’ll want to put your best foot forward.”

  “Oh, well, of course,” Mike said sarcastically. She could think of nothing about which she cared so little as impressing the new people of Lytton. Did DeeDee think, then, that she had changed her mind and would be staying on indefinitely? And if it came to that, would she? She did not know, had not thought about it after assuring everyone that she would be here only temporarily, until something could be decided about her father. But that was before Bayard Sewell …

  He called that afternoon, scarcely an hour before she was to have met him in her bedroom upstairs.

  “Worse luck, Mike. I’ve got to go out of town. I’m at the airport now, and I’ve only got a minute.”

  “Oh, Bay … why? It’s been almost a week …” Her heart contracted physically and painfully in her chest. She was hollow and electric with wanting him, and had already bathed and shaved her legs and smoothed her body with bath lotion.

  “I know, love. I know. It just can’t be helped. Partly it’s Sally; she’s getting sicker and sicker, and Dr. Gaddis says there’s liver involvement now, and she’ll have to be sent somewhere they can give her specialized attention. So I’m going up and check out Silver Hill, in Connecticut. It’s supposed to be tops. If they’ll take her, I’ll have Shep Watson, our lawyer, put her on a plane and I’ll meet her and admit her. Tough for poor Sal, darling, but better for us. And then, there are some people in Boston I need to see about some business. It can’t wait.”

  “How long? I don’t think I can do without you very long, Bay …”

  “Me either, or I’ll end up with one of those inflatable ladies from Japan in my hotel room. I’m sorry, Mike. A few days. No more than a week. Can you find something to do with yourself?”

  “Well, it just so happens that I have something to do with myself,” she said. She told him about the letter campaign, and about helping her father. “I know you probably think it’s silly, darling, but it keeps his mind occupied and it keeps me off the streets. Without it, I’d probably be hanging around the Red Rose Motel lounge with the good old boys, yowling around the piano bar and trying to get this itch scratched that you leave me with.”

  She expected his deep, easy laughter, but it did not come. Instead there was silence, and then he said, “I don’t like it at all that you’re egging him on, Mike. As I’ve told you, I don’t think he’s got a prayer, and this is just going to make it harder on him when he loses.”

  There was ice in his voice, and small whips.

  “You’re always telling him you’re doing the best you can to head it off in the legislature,” she said defensively. His voice cut her badly.

  “I’ve also told him that I don’t think I can do much. I really don’t have much influence in committee, and he realizes that. I’m pretty junior. I just want him to know I’m on his side, mainly. I don’t actually encourage him, and I don’t like it that you’re doing it. You’re stringing him along. It’s worse than cruel. It could be dangerous for him.”

  A curl of something alien, a faint, unborn rebelliousness, moved inside Mike, underneath the shock and pain. “I’m not going to hurt him, Bay,” she said crisply. “But I’m not stringing him along. I’ve changed my mind, I guess. I really do think he’s right. The state should not take a man’s property against his will. You know that’s wrong as well as I do. And it’s just as wrong not to try to fight it. Even if you lose. If he gets too agitated, I’ll try to get him to slack off. But I’m going to help him try.”

  There was another silence. Then he said, in the same tight, frozen voice, “I take it you know what the plan of action is, then.”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t,” Mike retorted, close to tears. She wasn’t going to tell this cold-voiced stranger what Sam Canaday had told her. Not yet, anyway. He could damn well wait. She might tell him when she chose, and then again, she might not. What possible difference could it make in the outcome of the decision, anyway?

  “Well, I want you to find out right away. And I want you to call me at the Ritz Carlton when you do. Maybe I can undo some of the damage you’re doing, if I know what’s going on. Mike, if you go on with this, you are doing it without my sanction. With my extreme disapproval, in fact.”

  “How very unfortunate,” Mike said, around a lump of agony and coldness in her throat that threatened to choke off her breath.

  He hung up.

  By dinnertime she was prowling and miserable, and could not eat the excellent fresh vegetable soup and cornbread that Lavinia had left. She felt a terrible black, lightless weight, a sadness as deep as if certain catastrophe or death waited ahead for someone she loved very much. Nothing in the entire world seemed to fit in its pattern or orbit. This is how I should be feeling about Daddy, she
thought. Bad luck for both of us that I don’t. She remembered the summer of her fifteenth year, when she had discovered the poetry of Dorothy Parker and had memorized great chunks of the brittle, brilliant doggerel. “The sun’s gone dim and the moon’s turned black / For I loved him and he didn’t love back.” She had especially loved that one, and had yearned to be the kind of sophisticated, mocking, life-used woman who could say those words out of experience. What a fool I was, Mike thought. They aren’t funny. She wasn’t a funny woman. She meant that, and this is how it feels.

  Her father seemed to catch her thoughts and lifted his head from his soup like a starved old hound.

  “Bay not coming tonight?” he asked querulously. “Hasn’t been here in quite a spell, has he?”

  “He called while you were asleep. He’s had to go to Boston to see about a clinic for Sally. I … he says she’s sick again.”

  Her father’s eyes lost their avian glitter and his voice was gentler. “Poor Miss Sally,” he said. “She hasn’t had much luck. Hasn’t had much luck. Sometimes I think I should’ve stayed out of it. Might have had an altogether different life.”

  “Well, it’s been my experience that an alcoholic is going to drink wherever he or she winds up,” Mike said, for some reason stung by his solicitude for Sally Sewell. Then she remembered that Bay had said her father did not know about Sally’s drinking, and her hand flew involuntarily to her mouth.

  “You think I didn’t know she was a drinker?” he said, looking at her out of the corner of one filmed raven’s eye. “Knew before anybody else around her, practically. Not much I don’t know, Micah. I know why she does it, too.”

  “Well,” Mike said again. “It was awfully sad about the little boy, but it’s been … what? twelve years? … and you’d think she might start pulling herself together. You don’t see Bay soaked in gin because his son drowned.”

  “No. That’s one thing you’d never see,” her father said. “Got too much at stake, he has. Got too much going for him. But Miss Sally … not got much at all, seems to me.”

  “Oh, Pa, don’t be so damned sentimental,” Mike snapped in exasperation. “She’s got a beautiful home, and two terrific sons, and a wonderful husband. Bay couldn’t do any more for her than he has.”

  “You can say that again,” her father said. Soon he lapsed into a nodding doze in his chair in front of the television set, and Mike cleared the dishes and started the dishwasher. By the time she had wiped off the counters and hung up the cloth, it was only eight o’clock and still bright outside. The evening chorus of birds had not yet begun to chirp down toward sleep. Mike roamed from room to room, straightening an ashtray here and wiping off a film of dust there with the tail of her shirt. Her misery roamed with her, and howled and sang in her ears. If he would only call, if he would just call … she would apologize for being willful and childish. She would tell him that she would stop her part in the letter-writing project. She would beg him not to be angry with her. She knew she could make it right. She could find the words. If he would just call.

  The phone rang and she caught it up in the front hall before it could ring again. “Hello?” she said. Her breath was so faint that she could hardly get the words out.

  “Hi, it’s me,” Rachel said from California.

  Disappointment so profound that it buckled her knees flooded Mike, and she sat down on the edge of the old Jacobean table that had dominated the hall since she could remember. And then the thought registered: This is Rachel. My daughter. My first and best love. To whom I have not talked since that awful day at LaGuardia, six weeks ago.

  “Hi, darling.” She forced gladness into her voice. She heard her voice in her own ears, taking on the slightly forced and affected tone she had always used when talking to other children. But never to Rachel. Rachel was not children. Rachel was her daughter. Daughter? Mike Winship had not been, for many days now, a woman to whom children were a reality.

  “How wonderful to hear from you,” she said.

  “You, too. Hope things there are great. Is … everybody okay? You know, your father …”

  “He’s doing very well,” Mike said. Why should Rachel call him “grandfather”? She herself had choked on “father” until just recently. “How are things with you?”

  “Oh, just wonderful,” Rachel caroled across two thousand humming miles. Her voice sounded different, older, harder, brighter. “I’ve just come in from a late lunch at Spago … you know, Wolfgang Puck’s place … and we saw Warren Beatty and actually talked to Emilio Estevez … he said I was a fox; said he’d be glad to hang around a year or two until I grew up … and we had lunch with this man; he’s an independent producer and he’s reading a script by a client of Daddy’s and we think he’s going to take it and do the film in Puerto Vallarta, and actually, that’s why I called …”

  Rachel’s voice lilted on, the voice and words of a changeling without innocence, a spoiled and chiming Venus. Mike listened in simple amazement. Who was this knowing little piece who called herself Rachel Singer?

  “… so Dad said I could if I asked you first, and you’ve just got to let me, or I’ll die. I’ll kill myself.”

  “Let you do what?” Mike said stupidly. “I’m sorry, Rachel, I’m not tracking very well tonight. Slow down a little.”

  “Oh, God, Mother, don’t be obtuse! Let me go with them to Puerto Vallarta and do a part in the movie. It’s just a little part; just a teensy cameo, but it’s a starmaker, Paul says … that’s the producer. A kind of now Lolita, very young, very sensuous. He wants the contrast of the innocence in all the depravity and excess of the rich, jaded resort crowd.” Rachel might have been reading aloud from a bad paperback. “He says I have just the right quality, a kind of mocking prepubescent angel. There wouldn’t be any sex or violence in my sequence, and no real nudity …”

  “Absolutely not,” Mike said, her blood seeming to thicken and run cold.

  “Oh, God, I told him and Daddy you’d be stupid about it,” her daughter shrilled. “I told them you wouldn’t have the slightest inkling on earth what it meant to me, and what they were trying to accomplish with the film …”

  “Rachel, I am not going to give you my blessing to go traipsing off to Mexico with some cokehead artyfarty producer and make a soft-porn movie, not at age twelve and not at any age. You must be out of your mind, and your father must be simply and irrevocably insane. Put it right out of your mind, and put him on, please.”

  “He isn’t here. He’s out … with Lacey Schiller. The one who just finished Lush Life and is probably the hottest property in the country right now. He’s been sleeping with her for months, and he’ll probably marry her. And then she’ll be my mother, because if you don’t say I can go I’m going to stay out here forever, and I’ll never come home, and you can bet your ass she’ll let me make films if I want to. She’d never stand in the way of an opportunity like this.”

  “Rachel, listen. Listen to me. I’m not going to forbid you to do this idiotic, awful, tasteless, sleazy thing, because I’ve always let you make your own decisions, and you know that. But I want you to remember who you are and what a wonderful potential you have; remember all the advantages you’ve been given. Do you want to just throw all that away?” Mike felt as if she were in a movie herself, one in which the speed and sound had been slowed down.

  “Oh, God, that’s really good,” spat Rachel. “That’s just really too super-wonderful for words. What potential? What advantages? A stupid roach house in Greenwich Village and a mother who can’t even keep a job or a man or a roof over our heads? Who isn’t ever, ever, ever home, even? Some potential. Some advantages. And you’re right, you’re not going to forbid me to do it, because I’m going to do it anyway. And the bloody hell with you!”

  Rachel slammed down the telephone, but not before Mike could tell that she was crying hard. Where was Richard? Had he even the faintest notion of what he was doing to his daughter? Was he past caring? Was there anyone there who could put strong, sure a
rms around Rachel and comfort her? Like Mike herself, Rachel almost never wept, and when she did, the loss of control upset and frightened her badly and for a long time. Those were the only times that she permitted Mike to hold her and rock her and croon to her. She could still feel the wildly trembling little shoulders, and the frail bird’s bones. Mike felt, instead of pain and anger, an abrupt onset of the great white emptiness and fatigue that had nearly drowned her on her first evening in this house. She put her head down on her arms and closed her eyes.

  Sam Canaday, coming into the hall from the front porch with a fresh stack of stationery and new tapes for the recorder, found her there. She did not know how long he had stood looking at her in the failing twilight of the hall, for she had not heard his step on the porch.

  “Want to talk about it?” he said, switching on the old brass library lamp on the table and settling himself on its other end.

  Oddly, she did, and she repeated the conversation word for word, in a voice that held neither pain nor grief nor anger nor even regret. Mike might have been reading him a shopping list. He listened without changing his expression, and when she was finished, he was silent for a long moment, and then he said, “And so what are you going to do?”

  “What can I do?” Mike said faintly. “She says she’ll never come home if I try to stop her. He could get her for good, Sam. I’ve always known that he could. He just never wanted to. I don’t think she really interested him before. Now apparently she does, since she’s fitting so neatly into his world. He’s got all the money and all the contacts and all the big guns, and she can legally decide who she wants to live with when she’s fourteen, anyway. What options do I have? I’m not her jailer. I’ve always wanted her to be her own person.”