Tales for a Stormy Night (27 page)

Amy held the phone out toward Allan. He simply stared, his head slightly to the side. I could not have been more than a second, but it did seem longer before Ginny repeated more clearly, “Hello?”

He was about to take the phone. Amy broke the connection, pressing her finger on the signal, then returning the phone to its cradle.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“It was a change of plan. That’s all.”

“And not anything to do with me?”

“My dear man, I wasn’t even sure you were real.”

“Maybe I’m not,” he said, and smiled tentatively. It seemed flirtatious.

Amy threw her head back. “There’s one way to find out.”

He gave a funny little shudder, as though a chill had run through him. Or better, something interestingly erotic. He wet a finger and held it up as to the wind. Unerringly he then pointed to the closed door of the bedroom back of the fireplace. He motioned her to move on ahead of him. Had he looked in through, say, a part of the drapes at her and Mike? Or had Virginia told him that Amy slept downstairs? There did not seem to be much Ginny had not told him. With interpretations.

“Don’t turn on the lights,” he said.

Amy was not surprised. “We can always turn them off again.”

“No.” And then: “I’m able to see you the dark.”

A good trick. She said nothing. It was beginning to irritate her that Ginny had said she did not like men. Liking sex and liking men deserved a distinction, true. But she did not think it one Ginny was likely to make. And she had loved Mike. She had. Now it was over, ended. Nothing was beginning; nothing was about to be born. Except that you couldn’t really tell. That was what was so marvelous about an encounter such as this: you couldn’t really tell.

She bent down to remove her slippers. She felt his hand running lightly over her bare shoulder, sweeping the hair before it. A jolting pain struck at the base of her skull. Then came nothingness.

She awoke to the sound of voices and with a headache worse than any she had ever suffered. A woman’s voice said that she was coming to. Like hell, she wanted to say; not if she could help it, not with all this pain. There was other pain besides that of her head, and with the awareness of it she began to realize what had happened. She tried to put her hand between her thighs. Someone gently pulled it away.

“Amy?”

She opened her eyes to the familiar ceiling beam with its ancient knot, the eye of the house. She turned her head far enough to see Virginia’s round and worried face. “What are you doing here?”

A woman in a white uniform hovered alongside Ginny. She was filling a hypodermic needle from a medicine bottle. When Ginny glanced up at her, she moved away.

“On the phone,” Ginny said, “I couldn’t hear anything except the clock, but I’d know its tick anywhere. Remember when we were kids: ‘take a
bath
, take a bath, take a
bath
, take a bath…’ I decided I’d better catch the next bus out.”

Amy gave her hand a weak squeeze. At the door of the room were two uniformed policemen, one of whom she thought she remembered having once talked out of giving her a speeding ticket. “How did
they
get in on the act?”

“I called the ambulance,” Ginny said, and leaning close, she murmured, “You were”—she couldn’t bring herself to say the exact word—“molested.”

“I guess,” Amy said.

One of the policemen said, “When you’re strong enough we need the full story, miss. Did you recognize the intruder?”

The intruder. In a way he was, of course, long time in answering. “Is there any way I can be sure he’ll get psychiatric attention?”

The cops exchanged glances. “The first thing is to identify him so we can bring him in.”

“And then I have to swear out a complaint against him?”

“If you don’t, ma’am, some other woman may not get the chance to do it.”

“To some extent it was my own fault,” she said, not much above a whisper.

The cop made a noise of assent. Neither he nor his partner seemed surprised. “All the same, we better get him in and let the shrinks decide what happens to him. Okay?”

She thought of telling them of the point at which she had been knocked out and decided against it for the time being. “Okay,” she said.

“Can you give us a description? Race, age, height, color of his eyes—”

“Ginny, I’m sorry. It was your friend Allan.”

“Oh.”

It was a little cry, scarcely more than a whimper.

“Would you give them his name and address? You won’t have to do anything else.”

“But, Amy, I can’t. I mean, actually I’ve never seen Allan. He calls me and we just talk on the telephone.

1975

T
HE WINTHROPS HAD A
tremendous collection of Big Band records—Miller, Lombardo, Harry James…But then, the Winthrops had a tremendous collection of almost everything, and when they gave a party, Tom Winthrop’s measure of its success was the variety of his possessions to which his guests found their way. His hospitality was excessive: champagne, the best of liquors: the dining-room buffet—replenished throughout the evening, with monster prawns, half-lobsters, mounds of succulent beef, crisp vegetables, mousses, and soufflés, melons, cheeses, and the most delicate of pastries.

The trouble with the Winthrops’ parties was that nothing ever happened at them; paradoxically, too much was going on. There was a billiard room in the basement for those not drawn to the dance. Next to the billiard room was the gun room, with its trophies of ancestral hunts. Tom liked to tell that it was part of Sally’s inheritance. Her great-grandfather was supposed to have gone big-game hunting with Teddy Roosevelt. The younger residents of Maiden’s End had a modest reverence for
that
Roosevelt, but their politics, for the most part, were in the tradition of his cousin Franklin. Nor did they have much taste for guns or the hunt. It was generally by accident that a guest found himself—or herself—in the gun room. Or he might pass through it on his way to a room Winthrop called “The Double Entendre,” where he housed his collection of pornographic art.

It remains to be said of Winthrop—or perhaps of Maiden’s End—that since he had built Woodside, a neo-Tudor mansion that dwarfed the sedate, more modest houses, some of which were historically significant, no one in the community had ever asked him if he was related to other Winthrops of their acquaintance.

On the afternoon of what became known as the last Winthrop party, Jan Swift stopped by the Adams house to see what Nancy was going to wear. Jan, a plump, self-conscious woman, didn’t like parties, but she went to them. She’d have liked it less not to be asked, and if you didn’t go to one, you might not be asked to the next. Or so Jan feared. What it amounted to was that when the invitation came she was so relieved to have been asked—for Fred’s sake mostly, she told herself—that there was never any doubt of their accepting.

“Hello?” she called up the stairs. The Adamses still left their door unlocked in the daytime. “Nancy, it’s me.”

“Hello, you,” Nancy called down, a greeting that always gave Jan pleasure, something about the intimacy of it. Jan had never heard her say it to anyone else. “Come up if you like. Or I’ll be down in a minute. I’m doing a bed in the guest room.”

Jan climbed the stairs, a little aware of her weight, and wondered what she could wear and be comfortable to dance in that wouldn’t look like a tent. She loved to dance when she got high enough and someone besides Fred asked her. Fred danced much as he did most things, determined to succeed. She stood at the guest-room door and watched Nancy turn down one of the twin beds.

“A comforter should do him,” Nancy said. It was going to be one of those warm summer nights when people would want to go swimming after the party. Or sailing on the river.

Jan thought about the word
comforter
, the coziness of it. “Who’s coming?”

“Eddie Dorfman. He was Dick’s roommate in college. He shows up now and then on his way somewhere—generally broke, but with great expectations. Is it hot in here? I was going to put him in Ellen’s room, but I don’t like to do that.” Ellen was the oldest of the Adamses’ three daughters.

“It’ll cool off by bedtime,” Jan said. She was thinking how nice it was for Nancy, the girls of an age to take care of themselves. Her own two had to be picked up at the Swim Club anytime now. Nancy was ten years older than Jan, well up in her forties, but with a finely boned face and dark, deepset eyes that made her look more striking the older she got. She played tennis and swam and wrote poetry that Jan did her best to understand. Jan nodded at the open bed. “Is he a bachelor?”

“To all intents and purposes. He’s a charming rogue, if you want to know.”

“I don’t particularly. What are you going to wear tonight?”

“Oh, God. Something I won’t have to hang up afterward. She gave a last look around the room. Following her eyes, Jan noticed the published volume of Nancy’s poems on the bedside table. Nancy gave Jan a nudge into the hall ahead of her. “Eddie tried to seduce me the night Dick and I announced our engagement. Whenever I see him, he pretends regrets at not having succeeded.” She hooked her arm through Jan’s. “Don’t hold it against him, you puritan. He thinks he’s being
trés galant
.”

Eddie was still at it, Jan judged, by the way he danced with Nancy, cheek to cheek, abdomen to abdomen. Furthermore, Nancy was enjoying it…“Moonlight Serenade,” “Elmer’s Tune,” “Black Moonlight”…They drew away from one another, took a long look into each other’s eyes, laughed, and sailed away to the far end of the deck.

It was pretty much the older crowd that turned on to the music of the Big Bands, and you couldn’t say the deck was jammed. The noise would start at midnight with the arrival of a rock group. Jan thought of another drink, which she didn’t need but wanted. She didn’t even want it. What in hell did she want? Fred and Dick were probably shooting pool in the basement. Billiards: a fine distinction. She did not like Eddie Dorfman. Or did she? Maybe that was the trouble. Baby blue eyes and black hair with a streak of gray, a whispery lower lip. The women kept asking Jan who he was, as though she was Nancy’s keeper. It wasn’t hard to guess the speculation. Maiden’s End (named after a family called Maiden) was by no means famous for marital stability. Jan thought of the switched couples at the party—the Eckstroms and the Bellows. What a mix-up for the kids. And there were at least three grass widows, as her mother called them. She’d have been willing to bet that Liz Tooney would make a play for Eddie Dorfman before the night was over. She emptied her glass and thought of shifting to champagne rather than having to go back to the bar again alone.

Tom Winthrop came up and took the glass from her hand and dropped it over the deck. “Come on, Jan. They’re playing our song.”

Our song indeed. Neither in nor out of step, he took her with him on a cruise of his guests, wanting to know if everyone was happy and assuming she was, just to be in on the trip. Not a word did he say to her, or she to him, for that matter. When they came alongside Nancy and Dorfman, Jan broke away from Tom and said, “May we cut in?” You could almost say she plucked Eddie out of Nancy’s arms.

“What fun!” Dorfman cried, though he cast Nancy a wistful glance. After that he gave Jan his complete attention. He even hummed “Sentimental Journey” in her ear. She had never felt lighter on her feet. He was a good dancer.

“I wonder,” she said breathlessly between tunes, “if they have ‘Flatfoot Floogie with the Floy Floy.’”

“If they do, I hope it’s not contagious.”

She laughed too loudly and explained, “My mother used to play all her old records for me on a rainy day and we’d dance up in the attic.”

“What fun,” he said again. “No wonder you dance so well.”

“I do with the right partner.” She tossed her head and sang, a bit off tune, but urgently, “‘He danced divinely and I loved him so, but there I go…’ That was another of my mother’s favorites.”

The music started again, another set of records. “Glenn Miller,” Jan said, “oh, boy.”

“‘I saw those harbor lights,’” he crooned, and held her close. He said after a few bars, “I’ll be in London this time tomorrow.”

“Will you? I wish I were.”

He drew back and looked at her.

“I mean just that I love to travel.”

He held her close again. “Perhaps we’ll meet in some exotic port some day,” he said. His cheek, soft, freshly shaven, was scented with lavender. A tango then. They dipped and glided a backward dip for Jan, something she had never risked before in her life, and then a waltz that dissolved into a seductive whine.

“Salomé,” her partner said.

“I forgot my veils,” Jan said; she tried to repress the impulse to lead.

“Let’s pretend.” He disengaged himself and with provocative little gestures coaxed her into letting go. Jan shed veil after imaginary veil, clownish at first, but with a growing feeling that she was actually graceful. Eddie posed as a macho Herod; he demanded more and more letting go. For a few seconds Jan danced with utter abandon, every pound of her a quiver.

“Help!” she cried finally, and collapsed in self-conscious laughter, sinking to the floor.

Eddie mimed the removal of his own head and brought it to her in cupped hands, which rather thoroughly distorted the story line, to say nothing of de-sanctifying John the Baptist.

Everyone, having given Jan space, now applauded, laughed, and slipped away into the next dance.

She blushed and got to her feet. “I need a drink,” she said.

“I’ll get it for you.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said and caught his hand. Then: “I’ll meet you at the bar. I’ve got to make some repairs first.”

Nancy was waiting for her when she came out of the bathroom, a look of pure disgust on her face.

“Hey,” Jan said, “What’s the matter?”

“It wasn’t funny, kiddo.”

“I thought it was fun.”

“It was pretty undignified, if you want the truth.”

If it was the truth, it was the last thing she wanted. “That wasn’t exactly a minuet the two of you were dancing when I pulled you apart,” she said. “You wouldn’t be jealous, would you?”