Blessing in Disguise (62 page)

He twisted himself toward her and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders, and she felt something cascade through her like champagne bubbles—a thousand tiny sparks pricking her insides.

Oh, God, it felt so good to have him holding her. His hands seemed to say that this time, even if she tried, he wasn’t letting her slip away.

Yet she found herself struggling to break free.

“Don’t,” he stopped her, his voice ragged and shaking with emotion, “don’t do this. Tell me I’m full of shit, that we’ll never learn to trust each other. I’ll even buy it if you tell me you can’t handle being a stepmother to my kids. But don’t say you don’t love me—I won’t believe it.”

“I’m afraid,” she whispered.

He gave a thin, crooked smile, and said tenderly, “You, the Fearless Young Woman on the Flying Trapeze?”

“Nothing’s changed. Not really.”

“Is that what’s stopping you? That we were never a perfect match?”

“Oh, Jack. It wouldn’t be easy.”

“What is?”

“I let you down. You let
me
down.”

“And we’ll do it again, no doubt.”

“Your kids ...”

“Back to that again, are we?” He smiled.

“Did Hannah tell you she’d come by to see me?”

He shook his head. “No, but I’m not surprised. She asks about you all the time. She’s gotten to be a real pest.”

“Chris the other day told me that, if you and I ever decided to make up, then Hannah would be his sister, and that would be pretty cool.”

“What do you think?” he asked lightly, the way people do when something matters so terribly that to let it show would be unbearable. She was aware of his hands gripping her tighter, and his eyes searching hers for an answer.

But what was the answer? Did she know?

“Jack, are you asking me to marry you?”

She waited, her heart high in her throat. Her body like foam, light, insubstantial, as if it might blow away.
Why isn’t he saying anything?

And then Jack
was
saying something ... not with words, but with his hands, his whole body. Folding her once more in his arms. Murmuring against her hair, “Yes, damnit ... if you’ll have me.” He drew back, his eyes crinkling. “In fact, I took a chance and booked us the bridal suite at the Bristol.”

“You mean we get the honeymoon before the wedding? Somehow, with us, that doesn’t surprise me.” Grace was grinning, weeping, all at the same time. And now she didn’t care one bit who was watching.

“For a man who makes his living from words, I’m not always very good at expressing myself,” he told her in a low voice, the voice of a man wonderful as a book you wish would never end. “But one thing I do know how to say. ... I love you. Grace, I love you so much I’ll go out of my mind if I have to spend the rest of my life missing you.”

Grace thought that, if the plane were to take a sudden nosedive, she probably wouldn’t even notice—she was too far over the moon.

Then she was reaching into her oversized purse, scrabbling blindly amid the little fleamarket jumbled inside—wallet, passport, sunglasses, old business cards, keys, mini-recorder, three Uniball pens, and a snapshot of Jack that she’d forgotten, or more likely purposely neglected, to throw out.

“Grace ... are you okay?” Jack asked.

The blond stewardess was staring openly now, as if she thought this weeping woman might actually be groping for a gun. Grace looked up to see that the overhead “Fasten Seatbelt” sign was off.

“I’m okay,” she told him, clutching her Visa card and the tattered address book she’d been hunting for. “I’ll be right back.”

New strength flowed into her as she squeezed past Jack and made her way to the airphone at the front of the cabin.
See,
she told herself as she inserted her Visa and began to dial,
it wasn’t so hard after all.
But maybe that was because it was the Lancaster she was calling—to cancel her single room overlooking the courtyard.

Afterwards, she felt calmer. She held Jack’s hand while Frankfurt’s high-rises dwindled to little cubes, and the surrounding green countryside gave way to the neatly stitched patchwork of the Champagne countryside. She wasn’t worried anymore about crashing. And if there was enough magic to keep this enormous plane in the air, she thought, then there had to be enough left over for a hundred-and-ten-pound female about to launch herself once again over the precipice.

Cordelia Clayborn Truscott

and the Trustees

of Latham University

cordially invite you to attend

the dedication of the

Eugene Truscott Memorial Library

on

Sunday, June 26, 1994

at

2:00 p.m.

Reception to follow

From her study on the second floor, Cordelia had a clear view of Gabe on his wooden ladder securing her Crimson Glories to the trellis that arched like a bridal bower over the orchard gate.

He wasn’t wearing his khaki hat, and the early-summer sunshine thrusting through the branches of an overhanging tulip tree lay like a friendly arm across the yoke of his blue work shirt. He worked at a steady, unhurried pace, ends of twine and deadheaded blossoms gathering in a little pile at the foot of his ladder.

She saw him snip a long runner curling down like the bottom half of a question mark, and felt as if she were being cut as well.

After Eugene died she had felt utterly empty, a seashell washed ashore. But if she were to lose Gabe, the worst punishment would be knowing that it was her own doing.

Yet what else could she do? Marry him?

Cordelia, seated at her dainty desk with its inlay of tiny birds and sprigs of apple blossom, looked down at the small ivory RSVP card on the blotter in front of her. Eight days, she thought. The library for which she’d badgered half the continent for money, wrangled with steelworkers, stonemasons, plumbers, building inspectors, and over the past eighteen months watched rise from its concrete foundation to become a marvel of stone and glittering glass façades—it was to be dedicated in little more than a week!

But, as excited as she knew she ought to be feeling, what tugged at her now was the picture in her mind of Gabe’s face last night when he’d asked her to be his wife. The faintly ironic light in his tea-brown eyes, the slight crinkling about the corners of his mouth, as if he’d known what her answer would be.

I would be happy with him ...

... for a few years, maybe five or even ten. Then what? She’d be an old lady in her seventies, and Gabe still vital, a man barely past his prime. And Gabe would be trapped, maybe even reduced to wheeling her about, cutting up her food into tiny bits, lifting her into bed at night.

Bed.

The great four-poster in her room, where she and Gabe had lain in the sleepy afternoons that followed mornings of gathering, raking, planting, shearing ... the bed where he had patiently coaxed her body, like a garden long dormant, into blooming once again.

A slow heat rose in Cordelia. She was remembering Gabe undressing her for the first time, how self-conscious she’d felt at first. Apologizing for her wrinkles, the sagging flesh that would never again be firm, no matter how many sit-ups or leg raises she might force herself to do at the Lucille Roberts salon to which Sissy had dragged her on several occasions. And how Gabe, dear Gabe, had shushed her with a kiss. Not just one kiss, but many—tiny kisses sprinkled all over her face and neck and shoulders and breasts like sweet rain.

“I wish I could be young again ... for you ... for this,” she’d whispered.

“You’re more beautiful now than you’ve ever been,” he’d assured her, smiling as he smoothed her silver hair from her temple with his callused palm. “I wouldn’t trade a single wrinkle.”

And, oh, how her body had surprised her! Long past childbearing though it was, no longer the fertile place where a man could plant his seed and watch it grow. But capable still of such richness of feeling, and the courage to go new places, try new things.

But now, seated alone in her study, she wondered how long it would last, the passion, the reveling in one another’s bodies. As if a cool breeze had kicked up suddenly and was blowing in through the open window, she shivered. When she was no longer just a bit past middle-aged, but truly aged and feeble, would Gabe still love her?

And what of all the busybodies around town—their looks, wagging tongues, snide remarks? Not that she cared one fig! But Gabe, how would he feel? How many times can a man turn the other cheek?

And Sissy! Cordelia could already hear her carrying on as if she personally had been struck by some awful calamity. And, yes, Cordelia thought. Sissy
would
have to put up with the sniggers and with people whispering that she now had, in addition to two fatherless boys, a mother who was losing her marbles.

Yet Grace, the daughter she’d always felt hadn’t understood her one whit, would probably be her staunchest—possibly her
only
—support, were she to marry Gabe.
She
approved of him. She understood that such a marriage would have nothing to do with money to be gained or marbles lost.
She’d understand, too, if I decided not to marry Gabe.
It was Grace who’d written, in a letter she’d sent last year around this time, that marriage for her was more than a partnership of two people. Counting in kids, sisters, brothers, parents, it was like a corporation.

Grace. Cordelia felt the patch of sunshine that was creeping up the faded primrose wallpaper cast its warm glow over her. She found herself awash, too, in memories of Grace’s wedding the Christmas before last. She’d flown up for the occasion, knowing only that it was going to be small, but not having been told what else to expect ... and, oh, how lovely it had been! Even the synagogue Grace and Jack had chosen for the ceremony, a glorious old Lower East Side landmark in the process of being restored, drafty, a bit decrepit, but the perfect setting for her forever-bucking-the-tide older daughter. Even Grace’s dress was nothing like what one would have expected—at least not on this continent—a simple, ankle-length sheath of brilliant turquoise with an overlay of whisper-sheer silk, the material for which, Grace later confided, had been purchased in an Indian sari shop on Lexington Avenue.

There had been no bridesmaids, no best man. Just Grace and Jack’s children, gathered about them like the bouquet of out-of-season roses Grace clutched. Cordelia smiled, recalling how uncomfortable Chris had seemed in his suit and tie—and yet not entirely displeased by the whole affair. Jack’s daughter, Hannah, in a dark-green velvet dress, with all that marvelous hair piled atop her head, had made Cordelia think of a girl straight out of an E. M. Forster novel. And that son of Jack’s—he’d looked handsome enough to be the groom himself, except for the fact that he wasn’t smiling. Hadn’t Grace told her that Ben was the troubled one of Jack’s two children? Something about Ben seeing a therapist, and Jack accompanying him fairly often to his appointments. Yet it had been clear from the tender way Jack had clasped his children about him at the end of the ceremony—after kissing Grace—that he loved them both dearly.

At the small reception afterwards in Grace’s loft, the handful of guests had gathered to watch Grace and Jack dance the first dance. And then Jack, as the jazz duo launched into “Tennessee Waltz,” had scooped Hannah into his arms. Seeing them together, father and daughter—Hannah, at one point, laughingly kicking off her patent leather pumps and delicately planting her stockinged feet atop Jack’s as he whirled her across the floor—had brought tears to Cordelia’s eyes. If only Gene could have lived to see this! Grace, so entranced with her new husband, embraced by his family. It would have made him happy, too, to see Nola, looking as if she belonged there, chatting comfortably with Grace’s friends and moving about the loft with the ease of a frequent visitor. Though Cordelia, still not quite sure how to act around Nola, had kept her distance, she had often found her gaze drawn to the sight of Nola and Grace, standing together, quietly talking or laughing over some shared joke.
Like sisters,
Cordelia had thought, with a twinge of pain, regretting that Sissy, her nose out of joint, had declined Grace’s invitation.

Cordelia, caught up in the whirlwind of the library’s construction, had not seen Grace since her visit to New York. Now, with the dedication ceremony little more than a week away, Grace, with her family, would be coming to stay—her first visit to Blessing in nearly four years.

She’d had Netta get Grace’s old room ready and make up the fold-out bed in the rumpus room for Chris. Hannah could sleep in Sissy’s room, which would probably rankle Sissy, who still nurtured a slight grudge over having been “turned out into the cold,” as she called her mother’s refusal to let her move back in. Oh well. Cordelia gave in to a tiny smile, thinking that it was high time Sissy realized the entire universe did not revolve around her.

Besides, Sissy would get over it. Look how she’d progressed since her divorce—taking that paying job as a teacher’s assistant at the elementary school, and now running a remedial-reading program for its poor, mostly black students. Eugene, she thought, would have been proud. And Sissy had lost at least ten pounds. It was a start.

Cordelia, glancing out the window again, saw that Gabe and the ladder were gone; only a neatly contained pile of clippings on the grass marked his having been there. It struck her then that she hadn’t yet received Gabe’s RSVP. Had he actually told her whether he was coming ... or had she merely assumed he was?

But after she’d told him she couldn’t marry him, would he still want to come?

A lump formed in her throat, and she seemed to be hearing a rustling noise in her ears that made her think of the little sachet bags full of dried lilac and rose petals tucked in each of her dresser drawers ... only this one was made up of whispers. Voices whispering all the reasons why she
should
go ahead and marry Gabe ...