The Whiskey Tide (49 page)

     
"Mr. Santayna isn't interested in me that way. But if he were, he's as smart and well-mannered and capable a man as I've ever known. He's got more integrity in his little finger than most people do in their entire body. To judge him by class is preposterous."

     
"His people are fishermen, for God's sake! What kind of living is that?"

     
"An honest one, which is more than I can say for some — including me." She drew a breath. "Don't let's fight, Theo."

     
"Don't ruin your life, Kate. Or his," he said as Aggie's clicking footsteps returned.

     
"The nurse said she'd already told you it was roast beef tonight," Aggie scolded.

     
Kate slid off the bed. Aggie kissed Theo's forehead. They were nearly at the door when he spoke again, his voice weak.

     
"Promise me, Kate."

     
She didn't reply.

     
"Promise what?" Aggie asked in the car.

     
"That I wouldn't take chances."

     
Theo's unexpected words of warning troubled Kate. If she and Joe should fall in love.... But they hadn't. Wouldn't.

     
It didn't improve her spirits to see her uncle's car in the drive when they arrived home. He was standing a few cautious steps away from it, his expression livid. King Tut barred his way, still growling faintly. Apparently the dog had raised an alarm, for Mama and Rosalie had come to investigate.

     
"A dog, Ginny? Are you out of your mind?" Uncle Finney mopped at his brow.

     
"Actually, he's quite well behaved. Woody's trained him to come inside and lie on a rug in the kitchen."

     
"He'll eat you out of house and home and then bite someone." He swung around. Saw Kate. Scowled.

     
She enjoyed the outrage simmering in him, for she knew its source. The landings on their beach, which had fattened his pockets, would have to cease with King Tut running loose.

     
"Come in and we'll put on some tea," invited Mama.

     
"No, no. I can't stay." Giving the dog a wide berth, he followed them into the house. "Just wanted to make sure everything's all right. I've called three different afternoons this week and no one's answered."

     
"We've taken up walking, Rosalie and I."

     
Kate realized her mother hadn't told their uncle she was pursuing plans for her shop.

     
"You're still tutoring every afternoon, are you, Kate?"

     
"Every day except Wednesday."

     
"Have to share the car with Aggie, I expect?"

     
"I generally take the streetcar." His sudden interest puzzled her. At least it crowded out thoughts about the conversation with Theo.

     
"Wednesdays, since she's off, she volunteers at a settlement house. She drives down and drops me off where I buy my needlework thread and I help for a few hours, in return for which I get a lovely discount," said Rosalie proudly.

     
Kate noted that her sister hadn't mentioned Kate was giving her driving lessons on their Wednesday outings. Rosalie was planning it as a surprise for Arthur.

     
"How's Theo?" asked Mama. "I didn't get over today."

     
"Oh, looking much better," Uncle Finney enthused.

     
"He looks rotten," Aggie said bluntly.

***

     
Tatia had proved uncommonly stubborn. It would be too strenuous for two ladies their age to traipse around an amusement park, she declared. Undignified, too.

     
"We don't have to ride," Zenaide coaxed. "We'll watch."

     
In spite of the coaxing, Tatia dug in her heels.

     
"You will miss a lovely outing," Zenaide announced as she pinned her hat to her hair. She had awakened at dawn on Saturday and been too excited to fall back to sleep.

     
Tatia wrung her hands, still disbelieving the woman who had employed her all these years would go without her.

     
"Madame, anyone who sees you will think you
fou
!"

     
"And who do I know any more? Nice Mr. Millard, my lawyer. Mr. Brown from the factory. Eveline Whittier never goes anywhere but to church. Who of them asks us to tea anyway? Not a one." The bell at the front door sounded. "We will miss you if you don't come," Zenaide urged.

     
But Tatia, after all her years of meekness, was intractable.

     
Alarm fluttered up in Zenaide's breast. It had been twenty years, perhaps more, since she had gone anywhere without her companion. It
was
absurd what she was setting off to do. She was an old woman. She strained and couldn't hear the music of the Flying Horses. Instead she heard the front bell again. It would be her young blonde neighbor Kate, who was so much more attractive than girls who had only pretty faces because she was smart as well, and spoke what was on her mind. Or it might be Mr. Santayna. Of course it wasn't quite proper, two ladies letting themselves be squired about by a working-man, but Zenaide thought he was really more a captain than a fisherman.

     
The bell rang a third time.

     
Her last chance, perhaps.

     
"I'll be back in time for tea," she told Tatia.

     
It was Mr. Santayna ringing the bell. She had proposed he drive her automobile. They had been for scarcely a dozen rides in it, she and Tatia, before her chauffeur ran off to the war. Mechanical things got gummed up with age, so she had called a garage to come and start it this week to make sure it would run. Mr. Santayna was backing it into the driveway when Kate Hinshaw came around the hedge.

     
"Theo said if I happened to talk to you, would I ask you to see him this weekend," she told Mr. Santayna. "Aggie's gone to New York with my mother, and Theo says he wants a break from the female gender — me included."

     
"Is your mother visiting friends in New York?" Zenaide asked to make conversation, though she would have been content to watch out the window as they pulled into the street.

     
"No, she and my sister have gone to order clothes for their dress shop. The parents of the little boy who has classes with my brother have a relative there with a ladieswear store. He's going to coach them a bit about buying wholesale and introduce them at some garment factories. They'll be gone just one night, but it's quite an adventure."

     
"Oh, yes. Their dress shop." It was so amazing, two women she knew starting a business. She and Tatia would go to the shop when it opened. She stored up the idea. An excursion. For now, though, she was too excited to think about it further or to make more conversation, for already they were turning onto the street that led to the lacy iron gates of Salem Willows.

     
She had lived its neighbor all her life yet never had been here. When they drove through the gates it spilled before her like Eden, the waters of Collins Cove to her left, with grass and benches and great trees overlooking water and park. Somewhere far ahead of them, she knew, lay a pier. Swirling about them as they got out and began to walk were dizzying colors. Amusements, rides, smells of sugar and peanuts, people laughing, all of it drawn together in one cloak of enchantment by the tinny, better-than-real-world music of the Flying Horses.

     
"Wouldn't do to have the most exciting part over first," said Mr. Santayna. "But what do you say we go and look so you can be thinking which horse you'll ride?"

     
Zenaide scarcely heard. Forever ago, when she was the age of the girl beside her, she had visited the Louvre, and much later, when it was newly built, the Eiffel Tower. Those wonders paled beside this. For this was alive!

     
"Oh!" she said as her eyes beheld for the first time the wonderful carousel whose notes floated to her in the night. The wooden horses leaped and pranced. Their hooves flew by. Their nostrils flared. "Oh!" she repeated, transfixed.

     
Kate Hinshaw, watching her, turned away with tears in her eyes.

     
"Which one do you like best, Mrs. Cole?" smiled Mr. Santayna.

     
"The white," she answered dreamily. With effort she gathered her wits. Here she stood with two young friends who could easily be her grandchildren. They would think her a foolish old lady.
Friends
, she repeated to herself with wonder. "Of course if I rode, I would ride on the swans."

     
She had told Tatia they would only watch the carousel, but that had been to soothe her into coming. In her absence there was no one to scold Zenaide for being unseemly. The swans didn't prance up and down like the horses, but they went round and round in time to the music, and there was another gray-haired woman sitting on one, and young matrons with babies.

     
"We'll all three of us ride," promised Mr. Santayna. "But let's see the sights first."

     
They strolled through the long white-washed arcade and put pennies in Mr. Edison's Kinetoscopes, where figures come to life as you turned the handle. If you turned too slowly you could see the pictures were only a series of cards flipping past, but it was the closest Zenaide had come to viewing moving pictures.

     
They watched children riding on tired looking donkeys, and grown-ups on swings that hoisted them into the air and brought them down again. They drank lemonade and listened to a tenor on the stage at Gorman's Theatre. They stepped around real Indians selling blankets. The nervousness that had filled her as they came through the gates dropped behind her with each step like peanut shells discarded by her fellow revelers.

     
At last Mr. Santayna said it was time to ride the Flying Horses. He stood in line and bought them tickets. Zenaide felt proud. All her life her friends had been inanimate baubles, while she had been dutifully circumspect, avoiding what she longed to do. At last she was about to do something daring.

     
Her palms felt moist as Mr. Santayna guided her onto the worn red platform that carried the horses. Were people looking at her? Clicking their tongues?

     
"Oh, look," said Kate. "There's a white horse next to the gray one I want to ride. Do ride the white one, Mrs. Cole."

     
"Oh, I couldn't—"

     
"Even sitting sideways it's safe as can be. Joe will stand right beside you. You'll hurt the horse's feelings if you don't."

     
Zenaide laughed and brushed her hand at the silliness. They were at the horses. If she reached out she could touch the glossy wood. There was no one left to tell her what she could and couldn't do. No one to prevent her doing what she wanted except herself.

     
Mr. Santayna bent and clasped his hands together to help her step up. Her foot slipped into it as if she were mounting the pony she'd owned years ago.

     
"Gracious!" she exclaimed as she found herself high in the air. Her age-freckled hands gripped the brass pole.

     
The feeling of it took her breath away. A snow white horse caparisoned in yellow and red. Exactly like Queen Guinevere must have ridden.