Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (22 page)

"Sure. He didn't know," Randy said, clearly not caring if he was telling the truth. "I don't see what he's making such a big fuss about, but it certainly is within the realm of possibility that I forgot to tell him it wasn't Aunt Carrie's. I mean, if Aunt Carrie couldn't remember, what hope is there for the rest of us?"

"What do you mean Aunt Carrie couldn't remember?" Jill asked.

"Just what I said. Apparently she forgot that Grandfather Casler really owned the place. When she died, since she didn't have any kids, she left it to my dad."

"What?" Jill was gripped by a sudden, sick feeling, as if she were hearing rats' feet scurrying inside the walls of a house. "She left ft to Brad? Brad thought it was his?" She hated confrontation, confrontation of any kind. How angry Brad must have been when he found out the house belonged to this half-sister who hadn't even let him take her arm at their father's grave. How hurt he would have felt, how betrayed.

"I'm really sorry," Jill heard herself say to Randy.

But what was she apologizing for? For having been loved?

"Don't be silly." Randy's tone was still offhand. "Aunt Carrie might have been out to lunch, but Dad isn't. I know he's not the most approachable guy in the world, but he knows the lay of the land. He always knew that the house belonged to Grandfather, and he always told us that it would go to you. He never said, but he knows perfectly well that Grandma Ellen loused up his and Dave's chance for a big-time inheritance."

Jill force herself to calm down. "I'd really like to see the house in the daylight. Would that be possible?"

"Sure. We'll take you there when this breaks up. Just don't tell my mother why you want to see the place. I think she's temporarily forgotten that it's yours, and if she remembers, she'll have fits about how dirty it is."

Just as the house was not a dump, it was not truly dirty, Jill discovered two hours later. The two beds on the upstairs sleeping porch weren't made. There certainly was dog hair on the living room furniture, as whoever vacuumed the floor didn't believe in vacuuming furniture. But the floors themselves had been vacuumed within living memory. There was only one meal's worth of dishes in the sink and they had been rinsed and stacked. Nor did the bathroom look like something you'd need a tetanus shot before entering.

The house was, as Jill had noticed the night before, a white frame farmhouse. Set up on a little rise to catch the breeze, it had a wide veranda that wrapped around both sides, giving the square dwelling graceful lines. A porch swing hung in one corner of the veranda, sheltered by a white trellis covered with climbing roses. On the southern side of the house, where long hours of sun would fall, was a large flower garden.

"It was built in the 1880's," Randy told her. "There was another house here before that, but it burnt during the war, and it took people twenty years to get the money to build again. Some of the foundation is from that earlier house."

"Is that what's so special about the house?" Jill asked. "My mother said Cass would have given up everything else he owned before this place."

"It's not the house as much as the property," Randy said. "It's the one tract that's been in the family continuously. We've bought back some of the land that we lost in the thirties, and, of course, other pieces have been picked up or sold off over the years. But this we've always had."

"How long is 'always'?"

"Dad knows the exact date, but I think the Caslers first showed up here sometime around the Revolution."

"The Revolution?" Jill stared at him. "The
American
Revolution?"

"Sure." Randy was as offhand as ever. "I think this was part of what George Washington surveyed for Lord Fairfax."

George Washington. The American Revolution. This property had been in one family for more than two hundred years! It was the family's heritage, their stake in the life of their land, and the sort of property that was to be passed from eldest son to eldest son.

Aunt Carrie's husband, Willston, had been Cass's older brother. He had inherited the property, but had not been able to hold on to it. He had had to sell it to his younger brother, who no longer lived in the Valley. But as Carrie and Willston had had no children, Brad was the eldest male of his generation. In her will Aunt Carrie had tried to return the property to its rightful owner, the eldest male.

So why hadn't Cass, with his sense of tradition, his sense of being a Virginian, done the same? Why hadn't he left it to Brad, his eldest son, who could have in turn left it to Randy, his eldest son?

But he hadn't. The property belonged to her, the youngest child, the daughter of the second wife, who had been in the Valley for a total of two days now. It didn't seem right.

Jill was ready to rush back into town, shrieking for a copy of the deed, imploring someone to tell her where to sign so that she could turn the property over to Brad. But her year in therapy was teaching her to distinguish between generosity and bursts of ill-considered self-abnegation. This little fit certainly smelled of the latter. She needed to wait until her frenzy quieted. If giving the house to Brad was right today, it would still be right next week.

She turned to Randy. "Everyone's been saying that the trusts Cass set up for your generation were a surprise, but I heard you were at the bank within two weeks. Isn't that pretty fast to put together a plan for a business like yours?"

Randy shrugged. "I've always known I wanted to be my own boss, but not apples, there's enough apples in the family. I like gadgets, so I'd always figured if I ever had money, I'd really go to town with poultry."

That didn't answer her question. "So the money wasn't a surprise to you?"

"It should have been," he admitted. "Dad always told us never to expect anything."

But Randy had remembered Cass from the time he had come to the Valley for his mother's funeral—Randy's great-grandmother. "I was just a kid, but I really liked him. I don't know why, but I did. I had this impression that he was the sort who played fair, who would do the right thing. I suppose this will make me sound greedy, but once I got older, it did occur to me that the right thing would be to leave something to my generation. So I guess I wasn't surprised... although never in a million years did I think he'd give us as much as he did."

Jill could have kissed him. His impression of Cass had been so accurate. Cass did play fair; he did do the right thing. People in the Valley might not have known that about him, but she did.

That's why it was so hard to believe that he had butchered
Weary Hearts.

CHAPTER 10

Having decided to stay longer in the Valley, Jill rented a car and drove herself to the ladies' bridge luncheon that Brad's daughters, Carolyn and Stacey, were holding for her on Monday.

She had been thinking of this luncheon in much the same spirit with which she had undertaken some excursions in Africa: as a bizarre tribal ritual that she was fortunate to be able to observe. Once there, she discovered that her fellow guests found it equally bizarre. They were service-minded women in their late twenties and early thirties with comfortable, busy lives full of kids, station wagons, and dogs.

"My mother used to do this all the time," one guest marveled, clearly pleased to be dressed up and away from her preschoolers in the middle of the day. "I wish I knew how she pulled it off."

"Our mothers all had full-time maids who they paid about two dollars a day to," another guest named Anne pointed out. "They had time to be ladies."

"Do you remember what Grandma Ellen first said when she saw the plans for your house?" Stacey took a silver tray full of mint-trimmed mimosas from Carolyn and started passing the stemmed glasses among the guests. "You know the way the kitchen opens right into the family room so the kids aren't underfoot all the time? Grandma was horrified. 'Carolyn, dear,' "—Stacey was mimicking an elderly Southern voice—" 'You must have a door on your kitchen. Where will the maid sit?' "

"At what I pay my cleaning lady for my six little hours a week," a guest laughed, "she'd better not sit."

Usually this was not the sort of conversation Jill participated in. She wasn't going to pretend that she was worried about the cost of cleaning ladies for the sake of a camaraderie that everyone would know was false. But she hadn't made much progress with her family yesterday. She knew she needed to exert herself more. Observing without participating was her greatest vice. It was a luxury you paid for sooner or later.
Self-disclosure,
her therapist said,
is one of the building blocks of relationships.

She took a breath. "At least you—"

The room went silent. Jill broke off, startled. Apparently a new verse was needed in "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain":
And we'll all shut up and listen when she speaks.

She struggled on, trying not to laugh. There was such a disparity between the attention she was getting and the significance of her remarks. "At least you all grew up with mothers who had maids. I have friends who have no role model for how to treat household help, and now that they're in a more affluent position, they are very uncomfortable telling people what they want done."

Jill knew several people in this situation, the worst being her mother. Melody tended to cast service people in the role of authority figures whose sole purpose in life was to say "no" to her. She had gone through housekeepers, secretaries, publicists, personal assistants, and interior designers. She didn't control her employees; her employees controlled her. Finally she had given up and now did everything herself except the yardwork and her tax return.

For her own part, Jill had been taught by Alice to manage footmen and upper house parlormaids, a skill that fortunately she could apply to limo drivers, hotel clerks, and head waiters. She understood that these people were not slaves put on earth to do her bidding, but accommodating her was a job they were paid to do, and there was no reason for everyone not to be straightforward and pleasant about it.

As good as she was at dealing with the "servant problem," Jill had less confidence in her bridge skills. She had played in college—shuffling cards was one thing a hand model could do—but
little
since then. Her
fellow
guests, however, played just as badly as she did, in large part because no one was paying any attention to the cards.

During the third round the conversation took a turn so interesting that Jill passed on sixteen points so she could concentrate on what was being said. Two of the women she was seated with identified themselves as Doug's sisters, and the former Miss Ringlings were happy to talk about their brother. So when he appeared at the Best Western that evening to take Jill to meet his uncle Charles, she was wickedly well-armed.

"I met two of your sisters," she said as soon as they were on the road.

He shot her a quick, suspicious look. "Which ones?"

"Anne and Kim."

"It could have been worse. What did they tell you?"

That they had told her something—something embarrassing—was not even a question. "Mostly they talked about the love of your life."

"And just who is that supposed to be?"

"Holly."

"Holly?"
Doug abandoned all pretense of safe driving and stared at her. "Holly Wallace?"

"I don't think that's her name anymore."

"Did they happen to mention just when this great romance took place?"

"Oh, yes." Jill had not needed Doug's blank astonishment to know how unimportant his high school girlfriend was to him now. "But apparently that was the last great romance they know any details about."

"And can't you see why?"

Jill could. "Actually, what they say is that in your job you attract the wrong sort of women, which I thought was pretty interesting," she went on breezily, "as I have a good friend who always attracts the wrong sort of men. They end up copying her Rolodex and stealing her jewelry."

"It is such a problem," he agreed. "Women stealing my jewelry. I hardly know where to turn. Did my sisters have any answers?"

"They said that your problem is that, in your old job, you traveled so much and were so busy you tended to attract women who were distancers, women who weren't comfortable with emotional intimacy." These were Kim and Anne's thoughts, but not their language. Jill was translating into therap-ese. "But that's not what you wanted, so every spring, when you had some time to develop a closer relationship, everything fell apart."

"I knew that that theory was being floated around."

"Do you agree with it?"

"A man with four sisters never agrees or disagrees with any of them. Did they say anything about my looking like Uncle Bix?"

"No, they didn't," she kept her voice even. "I imagine they're so used to the way you look that they don't think about its effect on others." She took a breath. "But it can be a problem, can't it?"

"It can be."

"I certainly was a ditz about it when you were in California."

"I did catch you off guard," he admitted. "Actually, your reaction was interesting. Do you know what I liked about it?"

"Apparently not the fact that I was prepared to throw my heart at your feet."

He glanced at her sidelong as if to say that had it been
his
feet at which she was throwing her heart, that would have been fine. "It was that you didn't make your reaction my problem. Most of the time when people are surprised by how I look, I have to spend about a half hour consoling them, calming them down, telling them that it's okay. Yes, you reacted strongly, but you made it clear that you were going to take care of it yourself."

"Of course," Jill said calmly as if this emotional adulthood had been something she had been born with.

"I suppose you're in the same boat when people fall all over themselves because you have money."

He had a point there. "Then you're nicer than I am. I'm afraid I don't have much patience for those people."

"I can't imagine you being rude."