A Fair Maiden (2 page)

In middle school she'd begun. If you were a girl and good-looking, older boys provided you with cigarettes as with other contraband: joints, uppers, beer. Katya would not have smoked in the Engelhardt children's presence, of course. She would not have dared to smoke in any circumstances in which her employers might observe her, or in which she might be reported back to her employers, for at their interview Mrs. Engelhardt had asked if she smoked and Katya had assured her no. And she didn't drink. ("Why, I should hope not"—Mrs. Engelhardt's prim response.)

In a wistful tone, Mr. Kidder was saying that he'd smoked for many years—"Deplorable, delicious habit, like all habits that endanger us." He smiled, as if he had more to say on this intriguing subject but had thought better of it. "But, dear Katya! It pains me to think of you smoking so young. Such an attractive girl, so healthy-seeming, with all your young life before you..."

Katya shrugged. "That's why, maybe. That long way ahead."

Again Katya felt that she'd shocked this man, unsettled him. Their conversation, which appeared to be so wayward, casual, haphazard and spontaneous, like the children's cries as they tossed bread to the waterfowl, was more accurately following a deeper, more deliberate route, like an underground stream that, from the surface of the ground, you can't detect. All this while Katya was gently jiggling the stroller in which the baby was strapped, a mindless rhythmic action that made the baby smile moistly up at her, as if with love. Easy to mistake for love, Katya thought.

In Vineland, Katya frequently looked after small children, including her older sister's children, and she had come to the conclusion that she wanted no children of her own, not ever. But here in Bayhead Harbor, where the children of summer residents were so prized, and exuded an unexpected glamour, she had to reconsider.

"How old are you, my dear? If you don't mind my asking."

How old are you?
Katya bit her lower lip with a sly smile but said instead, "How old do I look?"

In her T-shirt and denim cutoffs, with her smooth, tanned bare legs and arms, streaked-blond ponytail, and calm, steely gray eyes lifted provocatively to Mr. Kidder's face, Katya knew that she looked good. She was five feet five inches tall, slender but not thin, the calves of her legs taut, hard. Mr. Kidder's eyes moved over her with appreciation. "I assume you must be at least ... sixteen? To be trusted as a nanny? Though you look younger, in fact."

"Your granddaughter's age?"

Mr. Kidder's smile tightened. Curtly he said, "I don't have a granddaughter. That is, not a blood relation."

Katya felt the sting of a rebuke. The icy blue eyes, tight fixed smile. With the tip of his cane Mr. Kidder had been tracing invisible patterns in the ground at his feet.

"Kidder. Is that a real name, or just something you made up?"

"Kidder is certainly real. Marcus Kidder is painfully real. Let me give you my card, dear Katya." Out of his wallet Mr. Kidder drew a small white printed card, and on the back of the card he scribbled his unlisted—"magic"—number.

"Come see me someday soon, Katya. Bring little Tricia and her delightful baby brother—if you wish. Tomorrow, tea-time?"

Marcus Cullen Kidder
17 Proxmire Street
Bayhead Harbor, N.J.

Katya slipped the little white card into a pocket. "Yes. Maybe." Coolly thinking,
I don't think so.

Just then the waterfowl erupted. One of the children had tossed down a large chunk of bread, provoking a skirmish among the excited birds: flapping wings, agitated squawks, an angry confrontation between Canada geese and the more audacious of the mallards. "Tricia! Come here." Katya ran to lift the frightened little girl into her arms as she began to cry. "Sweetie, you aren't hurt. These are just noisy birds. They get hungry, and they get excited. We'll leave now." Katya felt a stab of guilt, that she'd been distracted by talking with Mr. Kidder: what if one of the larger birds had pecked at Tricia's bare legs—worse yet, her arms, her face...

"Shoo! Shoo!" Mr. Kidder waved at the birds with his cane, scattering them and sending them back to the water. Like a comical yet gallant figure in a children's movie, a protector of the young. He meant to be amusing, to make the frightened children laugh, and their nannies. But Katya did not laugh.

"Tricia, come on. Let's go back to the house."

She'd had enough of the park, and she'd had enough of her white-haired gentleman friend. She'd had enough of Katya Spivak preening for his benefit and felt a wave of revulsion and dread, that she'd made a mistake in spending so much time with him and in having taken his card. As she hurried away with the Engelhardt children, Mr. Kidder called urgently after her, offering to summon a taxi for them or, if they walked over to his house—"Close by, a five-minute walk"—to drive them back himself. But Katya called over her shoulder, "No! No thanks! That isn't a good idea right now."

My darling, I thought then that I had lost you. Before I even knew you.

2

"A
ROLL OF THE DICE
. Let the dice decide."

Smiling, recalling her father's words from long ago. When she'd been a little girl who'd adored her daddy, not knowing how her daddy was a compulsive gambler, which was a bad habit in the Spivak family only when you lost big. So long as Jude Spivak's losses were reasonably small, only just interspersed with wins, maybe gambling wasn't a bad habit at all.

As Katya remembered, her mother had liked it just fine when Katya's daddy had won. No furious condemnations of "compulsive gambling" so long as he brought money home. In fact, hugs and kisses. In fact, celebrating by getting drunk.

Let the dice decide
was a cool way of saying
Take a chance, see what happens, why the hell not?

Not a good idea, maybe! But Katya was going to execute it.

He was an elderly man, with an eye for her. He was a rich man, and he was (shrewdly, she knew) a lonely man. In Atlantic City, such men were
marks.
Such men were asking to be
exploited, duped.

She would return to him. Quite deliberately—consciously—shrewdly she would return to Mr. Kidder in that mansion of his.

Not the day after they'd met—that would be too soon. Let him wait a while, and worry that pretty blond sixteen-year-old Katya wasn't coming back.

Nor the day following, either (an exhausting day spent on Mr. Engelhardt's showy thirty-foot Chris-Craft powerboat bucking the waves to Cape May and back—an "outing" providing as much pleasure for the harassed nanny as being taken for a jarring ride on a lawn mower across corrugated ground). Next day was a Monday—by which day Katya reckoned that Mr. Kidder would have given up expecting visitors.

Just a roll of the dice. She was risking nothing. No danger in upscale Bayhead Harbor, which was very different from Atlantic City, fifty miles to the south, where Katya Spivak would never have been so naive as to go to a man's house, no matter how harmless he appeared, how gentlemanly or how rich.

Of course, she wasn't going alone: she wasn't that naive. She would take little Tricia with her, and the baby in his stroller. Not really risky by Spivak family standards.

So on Monday, after they'd fed the noisy waterfowl in the park, as if she'd just thought of it, Katya squatted before three-year-old Tricia and asked if she'd like to visit that "nice funny old white-haired man with the cane, who was so friendly the other day," and predictably Tricia cried
Yes!,
and so Katya saw no harm in taking Tricia and Tricia's little brother in his stroller to Mr. Kidder's house a few blocks away.

If Mrs. Engelhardt found out and asked about the visit, Katya might say that Tricia had wanted to return, Tricia had
insisted.
She could not have reasonably argued that
17
Proxmire Street was on her way back to the Engelhardts' house on New Liberty Street. For Mr. Kidder lived in the much-revered "historic"—"landmark"—section of Bayhead Harbor, near picturesque Bayhead Lighthouse and the open ocean. As the open ocean was very different from the narrow boat channels in the Engelhardts' newly developed neighborhood, so the air nearer the ocean was distinctly cooler and fresher and smelled bracingly of water, sand, sun.

Money too,
Katya thought.
A special kind of money-smell,
which had nothing to do with grubby paper bills you might actually hold in your hand and count. Nothing to do with coins sweating in the palm of a hand. This was money that was invisible, the money of true wealth.

The Engelhardts and their friends spoke enviously of these older, spacious oceanfront properties that so rarely came on the market or, if they did, sold overnight for several million dollars. Katya felt a stab of satisfaction; the Engelhardts would envy
her,
a visitor in Mr. Kidder's house.

I am special. Mr. Kidder wants
me.

She laughed, this was so delicious. She was feeling very good.

On Proxmire Street, pushing the baby's stroller and staring at the enormous houses. And not just the houses—"properties," as they were called—several times the size of the crowded lots in the Engelhardts' neighborhood of showy split-levels and A-frames. And the stately ten-foot privet hedges that shielded the houses here from the street and the curious stares of sightseers hoping to gaze at the homes of the wealthy as you might gaze into the dazzling shop windows of Ocean Avenue.

Katya liked it that the house at
17
Proxmire was old and dignified and weathered—a "shingleboard" house—with white shutters, winking lattice windows, and a steep slate roof like an illustration in a children's storybook of a tale set
once upon a time.

There was an entrance in the privet hedge. And a wonderful old wrought-iron gate, shut but not locked.

No solicitors.

All deliveries to the rear.

Katya laughed. These admonitions did not apply to
her.

"Well, Tricia! Here we are—Mr. Kidder's house."

Her heart beat in anticipation of an adventure. Katya was a girl who craved adventure. How bored she was here in Bayhead Harbor, playing the role of nanny to people she hated. Two weeks! That was more than enough.

Thinking reasonably,
If the old man isn't home, go away. Never try again.

Katya pushed the stroller along the surprisingly uneven flagstone walk to the front door, as Tricia walked shyly beside her. Were both feeling that Mr. Kidder might be watching them from one of the latticed windows, invisible behind the glittering glass? Like a scene in a movie, this seemed to Katya; she felt the man's eyes on her ... Yet she was hearing a piano being played inside the house, which didn't sound like a radio or a recording.

On the wide front flagstone step Katya dared to ring the doorbell. When Tricia began to speak, Katya put a forefinger to her lips: "Shhh!"

There was a sort of magic here. Katya felt it. She could not behave carelessly, or let the child prattle. They were both very excited.

Whoever was inside had not heard the bell, it seemed. Katya tried again, and this time the piano-playing ceased and a few seconds later the heavy oak door swung open, inward—and there stood Mr. Kidder, blinking and staring at them as if, for a moment, he didn't know who they were.

"Why, it's—Katie? I mean—Katya. My dear, you've come..."

Mr. Kidder was smiling strangely, not welcoming her exactly, a wary sort of smile, dazed and wary and not what she'd expected. And he'd almost forgotten her name! Katya's face smarted with hurt. Well, he had not forgotten
her,
at least.

The greeting was very awkward. Katya thought,
Damn
—
this is a mistake.
But she could not back away. Of course she could not back away. Nervously she laughed—there was an edge of cruelty in her laughter—for Mr. Kidder was startled to see her, and nervous; his blue eyes were not so composed now, and not so icy; in his face was a sick-sinking expression of something like abject and raw desire he hoped to disguise, as a starving dog might try to hide his terrible ravenous appetite.

"Can't stay long, Mr. Kidder! We were just walking home from the park and Tricia said..."

Mr. Kidder was fumbling to tuck his loose shirt into his baggy shorts, which were wrinkled; clumsily he made a gesture as if to smooth down his fluffy white hair, which looked as if it hadn't been combed yet that day. "You've taken me by surprise, dear Katya—but what a lovely surprise—and dear Tricia—and Tricia's baby brother, whose name is—"

Tricia giggled, providing her little brother's name as if this were a fact of supreme importance: "Ke
vin.
"

"Why of course—Ke
vin.
How could I have forgotten!"

Where was the playful dignified gentleman of the other day, who had so impressed Katya? In khaki shorts worn without a belt, in a wrinkled white cotton shirt with short silly boxy sleeves, and with sandals on his bony pale feet, Mr. Kidder could have been any older man at whom a sixteen-year-old girl wouldn't have so much as glanced. Accustomed to dark-tanned men and boys in Bayhead Harbor, as in Vineland, Katya saw with particular distaste Mr. Kidder's naked feet and thin legs, lacking in muscle and near hairless.

Quickly Mr. Kidder said, "Come in! Come in. In fact, I was eagerly awaiting you—the trio of you."

"Were you!" Katya laughed, just subtly sneering.

"I was. Indeed I was. 'Tickling the ivories'—playing piano to evoke a lyric mood. In fact"—repeating
in fact
as if he were trying to cast a spell on Katya, who continued to stare at him—"it was my magical piano-playing, the first dreamy movement of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata,' that drew the trio of you here."

Katya laughed, this was so fanciful. Very likely Tricia would believe what Mr. Kidder was telling them.

"You are just in time, my dears. Katya, do come
in.
For everyone else in my life seems to be
gone.
"