Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (21 page)

But this could turn into something quite pleasant. If they watched themselves, if they didn't take shortcuts, everything should be easy.

Hadn't it always been easy when Phillip Wayland had come down off the screen to take her in his arms?

She pulled off her crumpled shirt and showered quickly, rinsing the day's grime off her lean dancer's body. On the nightstand she had left Goren's
Rules of Bridge.
She looked at its red cover uninterestedly and pushed it aside, taking up instead her file on
Weary Hearts.
This was what she and Doug had in common, their interest in how this movie had been made. They hadn't talked at all about the baby's scenes. They needed to get back on track.

Her file included copies of John Ransome's article and Bix's original "war movie" treatment. She reread them both.

In the treatment, just as in the movie, the brothers tossed a coin. Booth joined the cavalry and Phillip stayed home to raise horses and, unlike in the movie, to ride regularly with Mosby's Rangers. Ransome admitted that the twin stories were neatly structured. The brothers' paths would cross, sometimes directly, sometimes more subtly. Swimming his men and horses across a swirling river, for example, Booth noticed that the only other cavalry unit successfully crossing was led by a man on a horse from Briar Ridge.

All the episodes in the original treatment stood up well to historical scrutiny. As a Ranger, Phillip never did anything that the Rangers didn't do, and Booth never rode anywhere that the Laurel Brigade hadn't. "This screenplay," said a Civil War historian whom Ransome had consulted, "was written by someone with the map of Virginia engraved on his heart." But the episodes were only adventures. There was no psychological struggle. Booth had no trouble adapting to command, and Phillip was content to be a guerrilla.

Nor was there a romance. The oddest thing about the story developed in the treatment, Ransome said, was Mary Deas's role. She and Phillip did not fall in love in this version; there was no baby. She had no differentiated character; she was generalized Woman, who stayed home and whined about the menfolk needing to be careful.

It made no sense, Ransome concluded, to have her be Booth's wife. The romantic tension of brother- and sister-in-law living together was never exploited. She should have been Phillip's wife. It wouldn't have added to the overall conflict, but it would have been tighter and might have added some poignancy, as she would have been cautioning her husband, not a mere brother-in-law, against risking his life with a band of irregulars.

Of course, then the casting trick—brother, brother, and brother's wife playing themselves—would not have been as neat. So Ransome wondered why Charles and Bix had not switched parts. The final version had the irony of a broad-shouldered man joining the cavalry in lieu of his lighter, wiry, born-horseman brother, but Cass had been the one to appreciate that irony. Bix's treatment had been indifferent to it. All Ransome could figure is that Bix simply didn't know how to structure a screenplay.

Jill laid down Ransome's article, knowing that there was another explanation. If Don Pleasant's scenes had been filmed in April, then the secret script did indeed develop the romance between Phillip and Mary Deas, and perhaps also developed all the ironies of the brothers' fates. But when Bix wrote the dummy treatment for the "war movie" script, he was trapped. He had to make it conform in all obvious ways to the secret one. He couldn't switch the heroine's husband without someone noticing.

But if the script filmed in April had had the romance, the irony, the psychological struggle, what had been Cass's great contribution in August?

From the nightstand Jill picked up the antique leather traveling frame, one possession that had escaped the mudslide because she always traveled with it. It was a double frame. On one side was a photograph of her father; on the other, where normally would be a photograph of one's mother, was the last stanza of his favorite poem, Yeats's "Easter 1916," written out in his own hand.

Jill looked down at the picture. It was a formal portrait of a man with a high forehead and sharp, aristocratic lines to his cheekbones and jaw. His hair had not thinned with age, but had grown white, leaving him with the look of a courtly Southern judge.

Why hadn't he told her about the secret script—not while she was still in the middle of her mad crush on Phillip, but later? Cass would have known she would be interested. It seemed odd that he should have kept it from her. What could he have had to hide?

Jill looked at her watch. It was nearly two; that meant it was only eleven in California. Her night owl of a mother would be finishing dinner. Jill dialed her number.

"Happy Mother's Day," she said when Melody answered. "I wasn't sure I'd be able to reach you tomorrow."

"Darling, how sweet of you." Melody's low voice was warm with affection. "Are you in Virginia? Is the Valley as lovely as your father said? Is his family making you welcome?"

Making people welcome was important to Melody. It had to do with fresh flowers, the right amount of ice in a drink, a perfectly placed footstool.

"As welcome as they are able," Jill answered. "No, I don't mean that. Brad is stiff, and Dave is a bit too genial, but everyone else seems fine. I had a really nice talk with one of Brad's sons-in-law, and the girls—actually, they are women but everyone calls them 'the girls'—are giving me a ladies' bridge luncheon on Monday."

"A bridge luncheon? Oh, Jill..." Melody's laugh was light, silvery. "What a waste. There was a time in my life when I would have sold my soul to be invited to a ladies' bridge luncheon, and here you're probably dreading it."

"Not exactly
dreading
it, but if you wanted to go in my place, I wouldn't object."

"Ellen would love that, wouldn't she?"

"Actually, Mother, Ellen is dead." Jill was surprised Melody hadn't heard that, then remembered she had been at Hazelden when it had happened.

"Oh, dear." Melody's voice sobered. "That's why you should never say anything bad about anyone, for fear that they'll turn up dead. But that must make it easier for you to see her children."

"It does." Louise was difficult enough. "And it also helped that Cass left them all some money." Jill could see that now. It wasn't exactly that her father had bought her way into the family, but those legacies had eased any resentment the grandchildren might have felt about Jill's inheriting so very much.

"I hope you won't worry if it doesn't work out. There's nothing magic about being related. I spent the first sixteen years of my life living in a very small trailer with people I was related to, and I loathed every minute of it."

"I thought part of the Twelve Steps was learning to accept your past."

"I am," Melody told her. "I'm learning that I was absolutely right the whole time. A trailer park and I do not belong on the same planet. I want no part of any place that does not have showers with very clean ceramic tile. That's my minimum; below that I will not go. Those fiberglass enclosures are unacceptable. Thank God you were in the Peace Corps. At least no one can accuse me of inflicting pathological hygiene on subsequent generations. But enough about me, tell me about the Valley. Is it beyond-everything lovely? Your father always said that it was."

"I honestly don't know," Jill admitted sheepishly. "Yes, it's beautiful, but I've hardly had a minute to look at the scenery. It's quiet, gentle, but it's not fry-your-eyeballs-out magnificent like Mt. McKinley. I need more time... and I'm going to stay longer than I planned. Did you know that Cass left me a house here?"

"Did he?" Melody sounded pleased. "I didn't know he had property out there.... no, no, wait, now I remember. It came up during our divorce settlement. He was such a gentleman about everything, but he made it clear, in the nicest possible way, but still clear, that that house was one thing he wasn't giving up. Not that it mattered, it wasn't worth much... although it must have been worth an extraordinary amount to him. I wonder why. What's it like?"

"I don't know. I haven't see it."

"Oh, Jill..." A faint note of disapproval crept into Melody's voice. That was rare. One of the things that made Melody such a restful companion during her good periods was that she truly felt she had no right to judge other people. "Don't you think you should go look at it?"

"I will," Jill promised. "I'll do it tomorrow. Right after Brad's barbecue, I'll go. I'm sure someone there will know where it is."

Church was church, thoroughly tolerable, occasionally moving. The business of running apple orchards was interesting, the apple orchards themselves were enchanting, and the barbecue was disappointing. Jill had thought that she had made such a promising start on Saturday, but assessed in daytime's brighter light, she realized she had felt close to one child and to a doctor who was probably very good at drawing people out. The rest were still strangers. She knew their names and little else.

It didn't help that Louise was now firmly in control. Jill sensed everyone being more careful, watching what they said, where they set their glasses. It was probably an automatic adjustment for all of them, something they didn't even notice, but their cautious politeness became a screen that Jill could not seem to penetrate.

It was all a disappointment, but Jill was determined not to give up. Perhaps her mother was right, and there wasn't anything special about people being from the same gene pool. But her father had clearly thought differently. That small leather-bound diary on his nightstand had made that clear. Each member of this family had been important to him. The bond created by blood was a mystery Jill did not feel fully initiated into, but for her father's sake she was willing to slog along a little longer.

By two o'clock everyone in the family was there except the airline pilot son-in-law and Randy. Louise and Brad were puzzled and upset by their son's absence. Brad continually apologized to Jill as if he feared that she might take Randy's behavior as a personal affront, and Louise sniffed that a person with his own business ought to be responsible.

It turned out that being responsible for his own business was precisely what Randy had been. He arrived at four, dirty and sweaty, with a tale of a cooling system gone awry. Hot chickens, Jill gathered, soon became dead chickens. He and Doug had just gotten the system working again twenty minutes before.

"But we called the barn," Louise protested. "You could have answered the phone."

"I could have," Randy answered, obviously experienced in dealing with his mother. "But I didn't."

"I hope you at least had the courtesy to invite Doug to join us after he spent all afternoon working with you."

If this was another one of Louise's digs, it failed. Randy was ahead of her. "Of course, I did. You know what he always says about your barbecued chicken. He'll be here in a bit. He wanted to clean up first."

Whether or not that pleased Louise, Jill did not know... or care. It certainly did please her.

He arrived in another twenty minutes, dressed in khaki slacks and a neat polo shirt, his hair rumpled as if it had been dried by the wind. He went directly to Louise, speaking to her first. Jill didn't mind waiting; she knew that he would come to her next.

She watched him as he talked to their hostess. Now that he was out of that romantic uniform, it was easier to see his build. His height was in his torso, just as Jill's extra inches were in her legs. The result was that you noticed how tall he was only when he was standing next to another man. He did not have the "alpine-tree" look of so many basketball players of whom "tall, tall, tall" was all you could think.

His long-dead uncle Bix had been built this way too. Bix had been notably shorter than Doug, but he had had the torso of a much taller man. That's why he—and Phillip— had looked so imposing on a horse.

Doug finished talking to Louise, then threaded his way through the clusters of people, smiling, nodding, but never stopping until he was at her side. He spoke softly. "I need to talk to you."

"Fine."

He touched her arm, directing her out to the wide, pressure-treated pine deck that spanned the back of Brad's house. The one-year-olds were splashing in a round green wading pool, watched by Dave's daughter and her boyfriend. Doug moved to the railing on the other end of the deck. Jill felt a delicious shiver of intimacy, almost as if they had made love last night.

But his tone, though low, was anything but intimate. "Why didn't you tell me you were my landlady?"

"Your landlady?" Jill stared at him. Then she understood. "Is that the house? You're kidding."

"No, I'm not. Randy told me this morning, Everybody calls it Aunt Carrie's house, but it really is Aunt Jill's."

Jill tried to remember the house. She couldn't. She hadn't gotten beyond the living room, and all she had noticed of it was Aunt Carrie's cluttered furnishings and the blanket of dog hair. But she could understand how Randy had ended up there. She had needed a caretaker; he wouldn't have wanted to take rent money out of his business. It seemed like an excellent arrangement.

"I honestly thought it belonged to Randy's father," Doug continued. "Randy and I just split the utilities, and—"

"Wait a minute," Jill interrupted. "You aren't going to offer to pay me rent, are you?"

"You better believe it. 'Offer to pay' is where we're going to start; 'cram it down your throat' is where we'll end up if we have to."

He sounded like he meant it. Fortunately, Jill had learned long ago how to get out of such discussions. "If this conversation truly interests you," she said pleasantly, "why don't you have it with my lawyer?"

He blinked, then grimaced. Here was a man who knew when he had been beaten. He groaned. "I really hate it when people say things like that."

She patted him on the arm. "That's why we say them."

She felt someone else's arm go around her shoulders. It was Randy. "What are you doing to this man?" he asked Jill cheerfully. "This is exactly how he looks when he's talking on the phone to one of his sisters."

"She's worse than my sisters. At least my sisters don't threaten to sic their lawyers on me. Would you please tell her that I didn't know the house was hers?"