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  “Said you looked awfully pretty tonight,” he mumbled, not opening his eyes. “I’ve never seen you look so pretty.”

  “Thank you,” Mike said.

  “Welcome.”

  He was silent again for the rest of the ride, breathing deeply and regularly. He did not move his head from her shoulder. Mike drove steadily and quietly through the late-summer dark. Once she looked over at him.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  When she turned into the driveway of the Pomeroy Street house, he was still fast asleep. She started to wake him, and then, looking at him stretched across the front seat in heavy sleep, went into the house and got the afghan and covered him and shut the Toyota’s door quietly.

  The car was still there, a lighter bulk in the dark pool of shadow under the water oak, when she looked out before going to bed, but when she got up in the morning it was gone.

  25

  SHE DID NOT, AFTER ALL, CALL BAY SEWELL IN BOSTON. When she came into the Pomeroy Street house, walking softly in her stocking feet and carrying her shoes in one hand, she found her father in his wheelchair in the kitchen, drinking bourbon and watching David Letterman with J.W. Cromie. His face was pallid and pinched in the fluorescent overhead light, but his eyes were bright with their accustomed malice.

  “Well, Micah, have you taken to sneaking in my house after midnight again? Thought we got done with that a long time ago.”

  A sharp reply died on Mike’s lips as she looked more closely at his face. It looked as if the flesh had shrunk and fallen in against the brittle old bone, so drawn and desiccated was it. His nose stood out more beaklike than ever, and she saw that the pallor was not white, but the dreaded pale yellow of advancing cancer. She had not seen that promissory jaundice before. The faint flush that had crept back during the past few days was gone.

  “You two are a fine pair yourselves,” she said mildly, searching J.W.’s face. “Drinking in the kitchen in the middle of the night while I’m gone, like a couple of teenagers. Is something the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the goddamned matter,” her father said pettishly. There seemed to be no breath behind his words.

  “Mr. John been havin’ some pain,” J.W. said laconically, setting his glass down on the kitchen table and rising to go. “Them pills didn’t do no good, so we thought we’d try us some whiskey. Worked fine.”

  Mike looked at her father. He stared back at her with a sick old hawk’s belligerence. His brow was smooth and dry, though, without the terrible great oily drops of sweat that the worst pain brought. She turned to J.W.

  “You should have called Dr. Gaddis,” she said. “He said to call him if the pain came back. He could have given him a shot or something. Really, J.W., whiskey in the middle of the night …”

  “It worked, Mike,” J.W. said curtly, dropping the slow, thick speech and accent. “He don’t like the doctor and the doctor’s medicine don’t help him. He likes the whiskey and it does. What difference does it make?”

  She stared at him for a moment and then shrugged. She was very tired. She wanted only to be in bed in the heavy, total darkness of her room, drowned in the glottal underwater song of the air conditioner. What difference did it make, indeed? She’d call the doctor herself in the morning. Meanwhile, sleep.

  “If you don’t mind putting him to bed, then, I think I’ll go on up,” she said. “Thanks for staying. And by the way, Mr. Canaday’s asleep in his car out in the driveway, so be quiet going out. Though I doubt if you’ll wake him.”

  J.W. grinned at her and her father gave a startling eldritch cackle of laughter.

  “You and Sam really did get into it tonight, didn’t you?” he said gleefully. “What’d you do, drink him under the table and then drive him home and leave him to sleep it off in the car?”

  “Something like that,” Mike said, smiling back at them tiredly. She wondered fleetingly if her father and J.W. Cromie knew about Sam, about the time in Mississippi and his wife and daughter.

  “Wait’ll I see him tomorrow,” her father crowed as J.W. wheeled him out of the kitchen and toward his room. Despite the ravages of the pain, Mike had seldom seen him as cheerful. By the time she had peeled out of her clothes and turned back the bed, it was nearly 2:00 A.M., and she wanted to sleep more than she wanted to call Bayard Sewell or anything else in the world. Bay and his cold anger had waited this long. They would wait a while longer.

  Her father was cheerful and energetic the next morning, waiting impatiently with a cassette of correspondence for her to transcribe and joking clumsily with Lavinia Lester, who was putting a pot roast into the oven. He must really be better, she thought. He usually treated Lavinia as if she were not in the room, although when he was forced to address her he always did so, elaborately, as Mrs. Lester. Lavinia treated him with the same remote and gracious courtesy that she did everyone else in the household, and Mike knew that her father’s heavy-booted sarcasm bothered Lavinia not at all. They seemed, in fact, to rather enjoy each other’s company; or, at least, to tolerate it well.

  “You look better,” Mike said to her father. “Have you had any more pain?”

  “Not since J.W. poured me that shot of whiskey,” he said. “And I had another one just now. Lavinia gave it to me herself. I’m through with Gaddis’s damned medicine. Doesn’t do a bit of good. Whiskey’s the only thing that helps. Stops the son of bitch cold.”

  Mike was surprised. He usually denied any pain at all, no matter how evident it was that he was hurting. She looked at Lavinia Lester, who gave her back a composed, small smile. If a nurse sanctioned whiskey, it must be harmless at least. She sighed.

  “It must have been pretty bad, then,” she said.

  “Right bad,” he said. “Right bad. Okay, Micah, let’s start the TV stations today. What do you think, those fellows on the six o’clock news, or the noon ones? Or are you too hung over to do any work today?”

  “The station managers, I think, or the news directors,” she said. “And I’m not hung over at all, thank you very much. Though I can’t say the same for your friend Sam Canaday.”

  And surprised and annoyed herself profoundly by blushing to the roots of her hair when she said his name.

  Her father saw the flush and cackled his old eggshell cackle. “Look at you, Micah, redder’n a beet,” he chortled. “What else did you all get up to besides drinkin’ in some Atlanta juke joint? Not neckin’ in the car, I hope. Or worse. I’m gon’ have to get on him, I can see that much right now. Can’t have him messin’ around with my daughter and her a big-shot city journalist. Not fit-tin’ for an ol’ country boy like Sam.”

  “Oh, God, Daddy, lay off it, will you?” Mike snapped, aflame with embarrassment and something else … What? Guilt? Bayard Sewell’s dark, carved face swam before her, and she wanted to grab for it as a drowning man might a ring buoy in an empty sea. But over it drifted the image of Sam Canaday’s sleep-loosened face in the green light of the dashboard radio the night before, soft against her shoulder. She could feel again his cheek against the flesh of her upper arm, his breath warm through the thin stuff of her shirt, and smell the fleeting, musty silk of his hair. The heat in her face and chest deepened. Bayard Sewell’s face faded and was gone.

  For the rest of the afternoon they worked in near silence, John Winship sipping occasionally at the glass of whiskey beside him. Mike did not look often at her father, but from time to time she felt rather than saw his gaze on her, felt the full weight of it, probing. But he said nothing further about Sam Canaday or the night before. Mike fled upstairs to her room when Sam came by that evening after dinner, and then sat on her bed stiff with annoyance at herself. You’d think we’d gotten drunk and had an orgy or something, she thought disgustedly. I’m acting like a sixteen-year-old the morning after losing her virginity, and he didn’t even touch me. Not that he meant to, anyway. God, I don’t even like this man very much, and he probably wouldn’t have me on a platter with a kiwi in my mouth. Enough of this shit. I’m going ba
ck downstairs where it’s cool and have my coffee like I always do.

  But she did not. Instead, she called Bayard Sewell at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, and was disappointed out of all proportion when the hotel operator said that he was out and had left no messages. After all, it was eight o’clock, and the middle of the dinner hour.

  “No, no message,” she said to the hotel operator. “I’ll try again later.”

  But she didn’t do that, either. She got into bed with a tattered volume of Albert Payson Terhune’s dog stories, and lay propped against the thin old pillows alternately scanning the pages and listening to Sam Canaday’s deep voice and laughter downstairs, counterpointing her father’s frail piping. She could not make out their words. He must have stayed a long time. Her watch was on the bureau, but it felt very late when she heard his step moving toward the front door and heard it open.

  “Night, Mike,” he called up the stairs, as if he had known all along she had been lying there awake, listening to the sound of his voice. Her face burned again.

  “Night, Sam,” she yelled back.

  For the next few days, he was elaborately offhand with her, as heartily casual as she was with him, and she would turn her head and find his eyes on her, and he would look away quickly. She in turn jumped like a pony bitten by a horsefly when he spoke to her, and took great pains to keep someone … Lavinia or J.W. or her father … in the room with the two of them at all times. John Winship looked from one to the other, obviously enjoying the prickling discomfort in the house, but said nothing. Finally Sam Canaday followed Mike into the kitchen and cornered her there, and said, “Look. I didn’t ravish you and I didn’t proposition you, and you didn’t compromise an iota of your honor and dignity. Your panties and your virtue are safe with me, I promise. I’d like to go out and get drunk with you again sometime, but I can’t if you’re going to act like a newly fallen teenager around me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Mike said in relief. “I was getting awfully tired of being Veronica to your Archie.”

  He laughed, and everything was suddenly normal again, as it had been. But a new easiness and a loose, stretched kind of comfort spun out warmly between them. He did not hector her sarcastically anymore, and she did not cast her thin, remote webs of ice over him. He teased her frequently, in a way he had not before, and she found herself laughing often at his nonsense. Even her father seemed to enjoy the running evening banter. The querulousness left his voice, and a frail, high tension in him seemed to ease. It was a small, humming, suspended time of well-being, except for the ever-present leaden ache of the words Bay Sewell had left her with, and the hurt of Rachel’s call. She had tried a couple more times to reach Bay in Boston, but he had not answered, and she did not want to call his office to ask when they expected him back. After a day or two she did not call again. She made no attempt to telephone Rachel. There was between them too much to say, and nothing.

  A few days into the peaceful hiatus, on a Saturday, DeeDee called before breakfast.

  “I talked to Bay last night, and he said for us to use those guest passes at the country club before they expire,” she said. “Come on, Mikie. You’ve had your nose to the grindstone with Daddy for days now, and we’re not going to get a prettier day for the rest of the summer. August is just around the corner, and then it’s going to be too hot to sit in the sun. Duck’s sister is taking Mama Wingo into Atlanta to the doctor, so I’ve got almost the whole day, and Duck wants to go, too. Everybody needs a break.”

  “How is Bay?” Mike said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. But her throat filled and tightened with pain. He found time to call her troublesome sister, but not her. He must be angry indeed.

  “Oh, okay. Having some problems with a business deal, I think, but nothing he can’t work out. He said he’d be home soon, and really insisted about the club. He said he was going to call you later, and for me to make you go with us and not let Daddy monopolize you.”

  Mike’s heart zoomed and sang, and the sharp lump of submerged anguish that the estrangement from him had left in her chest melted away as if it had never been. It was, she knew, his roundabout way of apologizing. She felt giddy, light, exuberant. Even the prospect of Duck Wingo and DeeDee around a steaming surburban country club swimming pool was bearable; seemed, suddenly, rich with comic possibilities. She could tell Bay about the day, safe in the curtained gloom of the bedroom and the welter of the sheets when he got home, making a wry and funny story of it. Apparently his business in Boston was not going well, and on top of the new trouble with Sally, it would be good to see him laugh. She knew she could make him. She had always been able to.

  “You promised we’d do something together soon,” DeeDee cajoled, mistaking her silence for hesitation.

  “So I did.” Mike smiled at the telephone. “I’d love to, Dee. What time will you be by?”

  “I thought about eleven. We can have lunch there. Bay wants us to. Everybody goes for lunch. Listen, Mike … could we take Daddy’s car, do you think? Duck wants to go over earlier in the good car, and my old junker just looks so awful. Most of the people who belong to the club have nice cars.”

  “Of course,” Mike said, her heart contracting with pity for her sister, who was at the mercy of so many hungers. “I’ll tell J.W. to spit-polish it.”

  “See you then,” DeeDee caroled. Her voice sounded young and very happy.

  Mike’s heart fell when DeeDee parked in the driveway and struggled out of the Volkswagen. She was wearing a vast striped beach caftan with a thrown-back hood that made her look, with her black, opaque sunglasses and feverish scarlet mouth, like the obese emir of some impossibly rich and savage oil-producing state. She wore giant white plastic hoops in her ears, and one great arm had multicolored plastic bangles on it nearly up to her elbow. On her feet were the gold mules she had worn the night of her dinner party, and she wore a gigantic straw sun hat in a shade of fuchsia that had never bloomed in any earthly garden. It was impossible not to stare at her. Mike knew that the outfit must have been put together with infinite care from the pages of the current Vogue or Elle; women from Bar Harbor to Boca Raton would wear the same costume this summer. But chic women, rich women, thin women. DeeDee must have spent a small fortune assembling it. It couldn’t look worse if she’d tried, Mike thought in pity and annoyance. I wonder if I could talk her out of this awful expedition somehow? Everybody’s going to laugh at her. But from the flush of pure pleasure on her sister’s face and the lilt in her voice as she sang out, “Morning,” she knew she could not. At least I can keep Daddy from sniping at her, she thought, and hastily gathered up her beach bag and towel and ran down the front steps.

  “Don’t you have anything a little gayer than that?” DeeDee said, taking in Mike’s oversized white shirt and the soft old fisherman’s hat she wore in the sun. “These are all new people, and first impressions are everything in this town.”

  “Nope,” Mike said equably, getting into the driver’s seat of the old Cadillac, which gleamed with wax and J.W.’s sweat. “What you see is what you get. Relax, Dee. I didn’t wear my teeny-weeny polka dot bikini. Perfectly maidenly tank suit. Nothing shows.”

  “What’s to show?” DeeDee said, but there was no malice in her words. She was too excited. She wriggled around on the car seat and drew a mirror from her enormous tote and slicked another coat of the scarlet lipstick on her mouth. Some of it remained on her teeth, making her look as if she had been feasting on the fresh corpse of something small. The caftan slid up her arms and Mike saw, in all the dimpled, shifting whiteness, a peppering of fading old bruises and startling purple new ones, looking suspiciously like fingerprints. She said nothing, but disgust at Duck rose in her throat like gorge, and she did not know, suddenly, if she could even be civil to him. Whether the bruises were the stigmata of his passion or his anger did not matter. They nauseated her.

  “Is Duck already there?” she said.

  “He left about an hour ago,” DeeDee said. “He has a poker game in the men�
�s grill on Saturday mornings. Bay usually plays too. Duck never wins anything, but he doesn’t lose, either, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for him. The best new people in town go to the club, and most of them sit in on the game. He’s gotten to know several of them real well.”

  They pulled up in front of the Lytton Country Club, a meager, flat-roofed jumble of vaguely Spanish architecture on a road that had been largely pine woods and farmhouses when Mike had left, and a sullen young black boy ambled forward from the portico to park the car. Looking around, Mike saw other black teenagers piling golf bags into carts, carrying laden trays toward the out-of-sight pool, and scratching at the sparsely planted, sun-blasted flower beds with rakes and hoes.

  “Ah,” she said. “Lytton’s solution to blacks at the country club. I wondered.”

  “Don’t start on that, Mike,” DeeDee said. “The club has put lots of local Negroes to work. They offered Í.W. a good job on the maintenance crew; he’d have made a lot more than Daddy pays him, for doing the same thing. But he didn’t take it.”

  “Maybe J.W.’s particular about who he maintains,” Mike said.

  “Mikie …” Dee’s voice was a wail.

  “Sorry,” Mike said. She was. She did not want to spoil DeeDee’s day in the sun. She handed the keys to the boy and they followed the path around the side of the clubhouse to the pool terrace.

  It was already crowded at eleven thirty. Children and teenagers jeered and splashed in the pool, shouting something incomprehensible over and over that sounded to Mike like “Marco Polo” and seemed to have to do with a noisy water game. Young women in knots lay on chaises or sat on the edge of the pool, halfheartedly watching the children while they talked and laughed and oiled their reddening hides with lotions. All wore bright, brief, shiny scraps of suits and sun hats, and a few lay back with white cups over their eyes, stunned under the punishing fist of the sun. On an upper terrace, tables of older women in flowered and skirted suits or cover-up sunsuits played bridge and sipped at virulent pastel drinks brought by the bored young blacks. A haughty young woman in a wet T-shirt that said “Go Dawgs” and white zinc nose ointment was apparently the lifeguard; she sat staring into space atop a tall chair, ignoring the preening, jostling pack of preadolescent boys milling about the base of the platform. It was an indolent, completely banal little suburbanscape, with nothing in it that Mike could see to so charm and succor her sister. The younger women had slack bodies and snub, vacuous little faces; one or two wore pink plastic curlers under scarves. The older women all seemed to have the same swimsuit and freshly teased hairdo. The pool apron was cracked and sprouted valiant tufts of weeds here and there, and the cars in the lot beyond the pool did not run to Mercedes and Jaguars, but to compact wagons and TransAms. There were no men in sight over the age of sixteen or so. It was a little aquatic kingdom of women and children.