Promises (44 page)

Fred’s tone, still not unkind, reproved him as if to say: You should know better, should have some conception of what is fitting and what is not.

He understood. Julie was neither hurt nor ill, so there could be no reason for his intrusion into “Margaret’s house.” And still he stood there, a supplicant, a beggar, unable to take no for an answer.

“If there is anything I can do—” he began.

“Nothing. We’re taking care of things here.” Fred moved slightly, the bulk of his shoulders barring the entrance should Adam have tried to go in. “You really needn’t have come. But thank you,” he added in his gentlemanly way.

The door closed.

*  *  *

“Luckily for you,” Margaret said, “it was Mr. Larkin who was jogging around the lake. It might have been someone very different.”

“I know,” Julie said humbly. “It was stupid of me.”

“As it was, I think I scared you, jogging up out of the dark,” said Stephen.

“What were you planning to do, what would you have done if he hadn’t seen you there?”

“I was coming home.”

“We were beside ourselves. Whatever possessed you?”

Now that she’s safe, Margaret thought, I can afford to be angry—although not too angry. It’s plain that she has gone through some sort of an epiphany.

Julie opened her lips to reply and closed them again. Raising her head and looking into space beyond the circle in which they all sat, she reflected. Then she spoke.

“Well, I’ve told you, and Danny’s told you, what happened today there.”

Danny interrupted. “She said rotten things about you. You should hear—”

“I don’t want to hear, Dan.”

“She said you’re a blood—”

“Dan. I said I don’t want to hear it.”

He subsided. “Okay, but I’ll tell you one thing. She’s tough, but Nina could take care of her.”

On Fred’s face there appeared a touch of humor and muffled laughter, to which Margaret had to respond. How well they all knew Nina!

“I don’t ever want to go there again,” Julie cried. “I’ll meet Dad some other place, but never with her. I feel so
sorry for him! I felt sorry for him just now when he came to the door. And I think he’s sorry for himself too.”

Softly, Margaret asked how she could know that.

“I can’t know it, of course, but I feel it. All the way home in his car, I kept thinking: Poor Mom. Poor Dad. I understand how terrible this has been for you, Mom. Megan and I, but especially Megan because she grew up faster than I did, have worried about you so much. But now I think you’re much better, while Dad is beginning to be miserable.”

Margaret caught the two men looking at each other. They were moved. The simple sincerity of this naive, or perhaps no longer so naive, young Julie had moved them.

“You don’t have to worry,” she continued, “that I will ever do anything eccentric, Mom. I’m not crazy or even especially neurotic anymore, if I ever was. Going to Audrey has taught me a lot. I wasn’t going to run away or do anything like that.”

“None of us ever thought so for a moment,” Margaret said. “You were very disturbed, and you wanted to be alone. You needed to think.”

“That’s right. I did need to think. I started back in the direction of our old house to look at it again. I didn’t realize how long it would take to walk there, so I turned around when I was halfway and came back through the park. Then I saw that all the swans weren’t gone to their nests. There were two still floating, so I sat down to watch them, the way you do, Mom. They were so peaceful. And while I sat there, I couldn’t help thinking how, if he were here, Dad would get a book and
find out everything about swans. The way he always did, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I guess as long as I live I’ll remember things like that about him. And I suppose I’ll always remember, too, the morning he left us, and I’ll never understand how he could have done it.”

Suddenly, Stephen spoke. “No, you never will understand, so it’s best to give up trying. Put as much behind you as you can. You’ll never be able to put all of it behind you, but just try to do your best. Of course, I’m speaking to you, too, Megan and Dan.”

The room was very quiet. Now everyone watched Stephen. When he spoke again, he looked at no one. His eyes were downcast, and he seemed to be reciting the contents of a dream.

“My father was in the contingent that invaded France on D day in 1944. He fought through Normandy. And while he was there, he met a girl, a beautiful girl, my mother, and he married her. She had a good home with parents who cherished her. Understandably, they didn’t want to lose their daughter to America, so they fought against the marriage. But she was determined and insisted against all their arguments that she would be happy.

“Well, she and he seemed to be happy as far as I, up to the age of twelve, was able to judge. At least, she always told me afterward that she had been. Then one day he informed her that he had fallen in love with a girl who worked in his office. I don’t have to relate the details; the plots are all alike. He left. There wasn’t enough money for two families. There seldom is. There were four children. I was the youngest. We all worked.
Before I was old enough to get working papers, I shoveled snow for the neighbors, I ran errands for old people after school, I even did some baby-sitting. It didn’t hurt me. More likely it did me some good. What did hurt me was the knowledge of my mother’s pain. Thrown away in a foreign country after eighteen years and four children! She never informed her parents. She was too proud. Till the day she died, they thought she was having a wonderful life in America.” Abruptly, Stephen turned to Margaret. “So you see, I do know something about these things,” he said.

“Gee, you never told me all this stuff,” Danny said.

“No. I never told anybody until just now.”

“I guess that’s because it makes you feel too sick to talk about it.”

“Danny,” said Margaret.

“No, Margaret, let him be.”

“That’s why you know so much French,” Danny said.

Stephen smiled toward him. “That’s right. And that’s why you’re getting A’s. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “But not really funny.”

Now Fred asked Stephen how he had made his way into the law.

“My father had a relative, a responsible, religious man who was shocked at the whole affair. He lent me some money for law school, not all of it because I earned some myself. But he’s the reason I’m here.” Then, with a brief, cautionary gesture, Stephen raised his hand to address the three youngest, who were sitting in a row.

“Why have I told you all this? Because I wanted to show you that no bad thing, barring an incurable disease,
is forever. I know it’s a cliché to compare life to a river, but, believe me, it really is a river. You have to dive in and swim. Now Megan’s about to swim to Harvard. She’s the first, and the rest of you will dive in too.”

With this tale, so clearly wrung out of painful memory, Stephen had miraculously altered the spirit of the room. Everyone sat up straighter. Megan turned on another lamp. Margaret brought out a bowl of fruit and a cake. And they all sat down around the table to this little feast. It was almost midnight before they arose and the two men left.

“Well, it was quite a night,” Fred remarked.

“All’s well that ends well. That’s Shakespeare,” Danny said importantly, so that the door closed on the men’s laughter.

“What would we do without these good friends?” Margaret murmured to herself as they cleared the table. When Megan asked what she had just said, she repeated it.

Danny scoffed. “They’re not ‘friends.’ They’ve got a thing for you.”

“For a bright boy,” said Margaret, “your brother can say the dumbest things.”

“Not always.” The two girls spoke together. “Not this time, Mom.”

A
dam drove in just as Randi, standing in the doorway, was waving the last carful of guests good-bye. As soon as it disappeared around the bend, her enthusiastic hostess’s smile also disappeared, and he saw by her very posture that she was furious.

“Well,” she said, “you surely did your best to ruin the evening, didn’t you? I was never so embarrassed, with you running out like that.”

He was overwrought, so much so that he scarcely had energy enough for ordinary speech, let alone the altercation that was coming. His reply was very quiet.

“I was frightened, Randi. I had to find out about Julie.”

“I know. If it isn’t your Julie, it’s your Danny. Or your Megan, Miss Intellectual. Well, don’t just stand there! Come into the house and sit down or go to bed. You look like something the cat dragged in.”

He had never felt the need for liquor; a drink was what you took to be hospitable or sociable. It was a
social custom. But at the moment he had a need for it. Randi, spread out on the sofa, observed him as he walked to the cabinet and poured brandy.

“So what was the big emergency?” she inquired.

“They thought—Danny told me on the phone—that something had happened to Julie. They couldn’t find her. But she had only gone out for a long walk.”

“So she’s all right.”

“Yes, thank God.”

“So for a trick like that you ruined my party.”

He wished she would stop beginning every sentence with so. Had she always done it? And it seemed to him again that he had lately been too irritated by little things like that, things he had never remarked before.

“It wasn’t a trick, and your party wasn’t ruined. People understand.”

“And I understand a lot more than you think I do. It was a trick to bring you back. That woman will never let go of you, Adam. Even after the divorce comes through, if it ever does, she’ll keep you tied because of those children.”

“You knew I had children, Randi.”

“I didn’t know you were tied to them hand and foot. She ought to manage them herself like a grown-up woman, but she doesn’t want to, and that’s the whole story.”

The lamplight glittered on the glass in Adam’s hand and the golden liquid swayed. Ancient magicians might read portents of glory in its depths, but he was seeing only time, flowing, flowing, through the liquid and the light. Days that never would return, days when his children had been growing older and he not there to see.

Randi whined, “She only wants to get you back.
That’s what this was all about. It’s all one thing. Margaret and money, they’re the same. And now that you’ve had a salary cut, it’s going to be worse. Frankly, I don’t know how we’re possibly going to manage on what’s left after she gets hers.”

“People manage on less,” he said.

“Well, I sure wasn’t planning on it at this stage in my life. I thought you had a big job and we were all set.”

“I hate it when you use that expression ‘big job.’ Besides, I never told you anything of the kind.”

“You most certainly did.”

“Randi, I did not.”

Anger began to fill him with strength, or perhaps it was the brandy, which he had drunk too fast, that was pouring through his veins.

“And what if I had?” he demanded. “What was this all for? Was it for money? I thought,” he said, aware of his own sneer, “I really thought it was about love.”

“Try living on love without money.”

Years ago, he thought, she left me for a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees.…

“What if I should lose this job, too? Would you be through with me?”

“Darling, of course not. We would simply move out of the state, and you’d surely find another job somewhere.”

“When I suggested moving nearer to Elmsford, you said you’d never give up this house.”

“I’ve thought it over, and I’ve decided it’s worth doing. We’d be rid of the noose around your neck. She’d get sick of hiring expensive lawyers to track you down in another state. She’d give up, and high time too. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to do it right now.”

“It’s a very bad idea because I’m not leaving my children,” he said.

“We always get back to that, don’t we? God, if I’d known, if I’d known …”

The brandy was boiling in his gut. I’m not drunk, he thought, but my heart is pounding, my head is pounding, and this has been one hellish day from the time we got up.

Sprawled as Randi was, one shoulder ruffle had been pulled down to expose her breast. For some reason the sight offended him, and he said irritably, “Fix your dress.”

“What’s the matter? All of a sudden you don’t like to look at me? Here.” And laughing, she pulled the other side down. “I don’t know why I’m laughing. I’m disgusted with everything. Seriously, we need to get away from here, Adam.”

“I told you,” he said, almost shouting now, “I am not going to leave my children!”

“You’ve already left them. What do you get out of them except bills?”

He did not reply because it was true. He had left them.

“I’m with you a hundred percent. I’m still your father,” he had told them. But a weekly lunch together—was that being a father? Megan knew otherwise.…

“You’re afraid. You’re a weakling, Adam, that’s your trouble. You should have married me at the start, but you were afraid of your mother and of what people would say. Look how long it took before you got up courage enough to tell Margaret you wanted a divorce.”