The Mulberry Tree

  When she finished, Matt’s eyes were wide, his mouth open. “You know, I don’t think I wanted Cassandra that much.”

  Smiling, Bailey lifted her spoon from the custard and held it out to him. “Taste this.”

  As Matt tasted the creamy substance, he closed his eyes. “How?” he whispered.

  “I used a whole vanilla bean. Makes the taste stronger. Enough of that. Now tell me your story.”

  “Okay, where was I?” He gave the spoon another lick. “I’d just graduated from school with a design in architecture. Top of my class.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “And said to impress you. But don’t be,” Matt said. “Maybe if I hadn’t been given so many awards and offered so many great jobs, I wouldn’t have been so full of myself. And if I hadn’t had so many offers, I wouldn’t have been so disdainful of them, so I might have taken one in St. Louis or Minneapolis. I would have worked in an office and learned something. But I didn’t take one of those jobs, and I didn’t learn anything—not anything about architecture, anyway. No, I wanted to set the world on fire with my designs for personal houses, domestic architecture. No office buildings for Matthew Longacre. In the end, I took a job with a very rich man, old money, generations of it, on Long Island. I was to build a jewel box of a house for his only child, his daughter Cassandra, who was marrying Carter Haverford Norcott the Third the following spring. I had the idea that if I made a truly beautiful house for him, and it was seen at a huge, rich wedding, I’d get more commissions, then more and more.”

  “But you ran off with the bride instead.”

  Matt took a while to answer. “The irony is that I didn’t really want her. In fact, I never really saw her. It was that life I wanted. My . . . ” He hesitated. “My mother came from a family like that one. When she ran off with my father, her family disinherited her. Years later, even after my father left her and my mother was waitressing and taking on any job she could get to support her two kids, she—” Matt looked away, and Bailey could see the anger on his face.

  “She had class,” Bailey said.

  “Yes. My mother had class.”

  Bailey watched him as he picked up his spoon and turned it about in his hands. “And you wanted that class back.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Bailey sat down across from him, a mug of tea in her hand, and picked up a slice of whole wheat toast from the stack on the table. The bread was plain, not buttered. “So when did you meet the daughter, Cassandra?”

  “On the third day I was there. She hit me with a tennis ball, and I fell into a fishpond.”

  Bailey drank three cups of tea while she listened to Matt’s story, and she filled his cup four times. She sliced strawberries and bananas, poured cream over them, and pushed the bowl toward Matt while he talked.

  She listened to his words, but she also listened to the intensity of what he said. He’s a man who feels things deeply, she thought. He was trying to make light of what had been years of his life, but his white knuckles on his coffee mug handle and the little white line at the left corner of his mouth betrayed him.

  He was telling how a tall, slim, blonde, patrician beauty wearing a set of tennis whites had snubbed him. She’d been having words on the tennis court with her overbred fiancé, Carter Haverford Norcott the Third, when she’d slammed the tennis ball into the back of the head of the architect for their new house, knocking Matt off balance and into a fishpond.

  “If she hadn’t been arguing with Carter,” Matt said, “I doubt if any of what happened would have taken place. But there I was, sitting in a fishpond, all of twenty-five years old, wearing a wet T-shirt, and I made skinny little Carter jealous.”

  Matt said that he saw something in Cassandra’s eyes that day, something that appealed to “way down deep inside me,” he said. “Years later I decided I’d imagined it all, but for a second, I thought I saw a spark in her eye that said—”

  “Please rescue me,” Bailey said.

  “Yes! How did—”

  “Been there, done that. So she was being married off to a man of her own class, a skinny little wimp, and she saw a big gorgeous hunk like you sitting in a fishpond in a wet T-shirt, and her eyes begged you to rescue her.”

  Smiling, Matt leaned back against his chair, puffing out his chest a bit at her having called him “a big gorgeous hunk.”

  “That’s what I thought she was saying. But in the next moment, she looked down her nose and said, ‘He doesn’t matter in the least. He’ll probably steal the fish and eat them for lunch.’ ”

  “What a nasty thing to say.”

  “After I got to know her, I found out that that was the kind of thing Cassandra said when she thought she was being amusing. I’m not sure how she came to believe that she was funny, since no one ever laughed at what she said, and heaven knows she never laughed at anything, but if you asked Cassandra, she’d tell you that she had a marvelous sense of humor.”

  “What did you do?” Bailey asked, picking up a strawberry and eating it.

  Matt ran his hand over his face as though to clear his thoughts. “We’re our own worst enemies, you know that? Nothing anybody else can do to us is as bad as what we do to ourselves. When I graduated from school, I pursued the job with Cassandra’s father with everything I had. He wanted one of my professors to design his daughter’s house, but I flooded him with my own designs and ideas and talked my way into the job. And that’s what I did with Cassandra. I went after her.”

  Bailey ate more strawberries as Matt told his extraordinary story of how he had pursued Miss Cassandra Beaumont. Bailey paused a couple of times with a strawberry on the way to her mouth as Matt told of his escapades. Like something in a fairy tale, he’d climbed up a rose trellis and entered her bedroom. Then, like a bad TV comedy, he’d hidden under her bed when the maid entered.

  “She must have been overwhelmed,” Bailey said. “She—”

  “She was fascinated with me. She looked at me like an anthropologist would look at an undiscovered tribe of natives, and she thought everything I did was strange. She’d sit there and coolly blink at me with her big blue eyes, fascinated, but not involved.”

  “So let me guess. The cooler she was, the harder you tried.”

  “You have heard this story before,” Matt said, making Bailey smile.

  “So how did you get her to agree to marry you?”

  For a moment, Matt looked down at his hands, then back up at Bailey. “Truthfully, I think she did it to make herself more interesting in her own social set. To me, raised by a single mother, dirt-poor, Cassandra was an exotic creature, but to her own set, she was as ordinary and as bland as skimmed milk. I think she imagined that a six-week marriage to me would make her the center of attention when she returned to her daddy and the Hunt Club.”

  “And what about you? What happened after you were married?” Bailey asked softly.

  “Nothing. We had nothing in common. I vainly thought that once I got her alone with me, she’d loosen up. You know, fire beneath the ice, that sort of thing.” Matt gave Bailey a one-sided grin. “But by the end of two weeks, even the bed passion was gone. The truth is, I saw the depth of my mistake the morning after the elopement. I woke up, rolled over to her, and said, ‘Good morning, Cassie,’ and she said, ‘Don’t call me that. It’s so common-sounding.’ ”

  Matt took a couple of deep breaths before he spoke again. “She genuinely couldn’t understand that I couldn’t afford to send her to a riding stable or even buy her a membership in a country club. And her father knew what I’d done. He said, ‘You wanted her so much, so now she’s yours.’ ” Matt looked away for a moment, then smiled at Bailey. “This is hard to admit to a woman I . . . I like as much as I like you, but the truth is, I think I had some pretty mercenary reasons for going after Cassandra. When I look back on it, I think I was prepared to play the insulted hero and say that I loved his daughter and not his money. But I also envisioned myself eventually accepting, say, a house—of my design,
of course—and a few manicured acres from her father as a wedding gift. And he’d tell his rich friends, ‘Let my son-in-law design your house in Barbados. He’s family, but he’s also the best there is.’ But—” Matt smiled. “But he was a wily old man, and all I got from him was a handshake. Not so much as a toaster.”

  Matt laughed, and now that he’d confessed to Bailey, he seemed to relax.

  “Truthfully, I think Cassandra’s parents were dying to get rid of her. They’d given her everything she’d ever dreamed of having, and as a result, they’d created a beautiful monster. She seemed to have love and money mixed up. I think that instead of time and attention, her parents had bought her things, so when I married her, she expected me to buy things for her too. It’s what I was to do if I really loved her, that’s what she used to say, and no amount of showing her my bank balance made her understand.”

  “So why didn’t you divorce her right away?”

  “Pride,” Matt said. “I’d bragged to every man I knew that I was going to get her. And I’ll go to my grave seeing the smirk on her father’s face when Cassandra told him we were married. That look made me push to achieve, to make more and more money, because money was the only way I could stand up to my illustrious father-in-law.

  “I—” Matt paused for a moment. “I hadn’t been consciously aware of it, but all the time I’d been pursuing Cassandra, I’d imagined myself with her at her father’s dining table. You see—” Matt looked at Bailey and gave her a smile of irony. “Because of my mother’s background, I knew certain things, like which fork is for oysters, and which knife is for fish, that sort of thing. I had this fantasy running through my head that her father would say—” Matt smiled. “I don’t know how I could have been this naive, but I imagined her father saying something like, ‘I thought my daughter had married beneath her, but now I see that you’re one of us.’ ”

  Bailey knew he meant for her to smile, but she couldn’t. She’d too often been on the receiving end of being snubbed. Jimmie treated garbagemen and kings all the same—and because they were all after his money, they didn’t dare snub him. But Bailey had often caught them looking down their noses at her. Why did a man like Jimmie Manville have a dumpy little wife like Lillian?

  “But you know what happened?” Matt asked. “The night we went to their house to inform them we’d eloped, they were at dinner—no accident on my part—and I looked behind the old man, and there was Carter sitting at the dining table. He was in; I was out; nothing had changed.”

  “But weren’t they even upset that their only child had eloped?”

  Matt shrugged. “I couldn’t tell that they were. When I look back on it, I think they thought we’d be divorced in a few weeks, then everyone could pretend it had never happened. I was as temporary as a shadow to them.”

  “But you wanted to prove them wrong,” Bailey said.

  “More or less. I think I wanted to prove to myself that I hadn’t been a complete and total fool. And if I couldn’t beat them at class, I’d try to beat them at work. I started calling companies I’d turned down for jobs, and I asked. And if that didn’t work, I begged.”

  He went on to tell how he’d worked for years, nonstop, just to make money. He’d had no home life, nothing but work. But he’d been able to give Cassandra her country club, her big house, her life of ease, while he got the bills and the stress.

  “So what made you finally come to your senses and divorce her?”

  “I had a heart attack,” Matt said, smiling. “At least that’s what I thought it was. At the hospital they told me it was just indigestion and to go home and stop wasting their time. But it’d been enough of a scare to make me want a second chance at life. I went home in the early afternoon, something I never did, and—”

  “And what?”

  “Cassandra was in the hot tub, naked. With Carter. I stood there looking at the two of them together, and all I could think was, I paid for that tub, but I’ve never had time to get into it. And it was then that I started laughing. I was so relieved. Now I could get rid of her without guilt. I said, ‘Isn’t this where we began?’ then Carter said, ‘Listen, Longacre—’

  “ ‘No, please, don’t get up,’ I told him. ‘Continue what you were doing. Be my guest.’ Then, as I turned around and walked out, behind me, I heard Cassandra say, ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be back. He adores me.’ And that’s when I was really and truly free.”

  Matt told Bailey how he quit his high-powered architectural firm, sold everything he owned, paid off his considerable debts, gave his ex-wife half of what was left, then returned to Calburn.

  “And now what?” she asked softly.

  “Now I want to find out who I am. It’s taken some soul-searching, but I realized that part of why I was drawn to Cassandra was the sense of family. I was raised without a father during a time when living in a single-parent household made my brother and me objects of pity.”

  “And now that you’re here?” Bailey asked softly.

  “I’m not sure, but I’m beginning to get some ideas,” he said, his eyes locked with hers.

  For the second time in one day, Bailey didn’t know why she pulled back, but she did. “How about another slice of Dutch baby?” she said as she got up from the table. What is wrong with me? she wondered. Why don’t I take what this beautiful man is offering? Or is it that Jimmie will always stand in my way?

  “So what do you want to do today?” Matt asked. “It’s Sunday, no work, so what’s your pleasure?”

  “Fly over to India and see the Taj again,” Bailey said, trying to make a joke, but Matt didn’t laugh. Instead, he just looked at her, and Bailey turned her face away. “I want to work on the porch more,” she said. “And I want to get this kitchen into decent shape.”

  “Can do,” Matt said, but he was still looking at her hard.

  Eleven

  SIX WEEKS LATER

  Bailey moved the salad around in the big wooden bowl and frowned at it. Not that it wasn’t good. It had mandarin orange segments from a can, and hard little slivered almonds, but the lettuce was fresh. Her drink was iced tea with a squirt of bottled raspberry juice added. All in all, it wasn’t a bad lunch, but she wasn’t interested in it.

  Instead, she kept looking at the real estate brochure on the table beside her. “That place sold two days ago,” the realtor told her when she’d inquired an hour ago.

  She was sitting alone in a booth in a cute little restaurant in Welborn, having a late lunch by herself and trying to figure out what was wrong with her. Jimmie used to say, “You’re restless again, aren’t you, Frecks?” then he’d sweep her away to somewhere wonderful. But now Jimmie was gone, and there was no money to go sweeping away to anywhere.

  She looked again at the brochure. Actually, it was just a single piece of paper, but it had a nice color photo of the shop that was three doors down from this restaurant. It wasn’t a big shop or especially impressive, but she and Janice and Patsy had liked the place. In fact, they’d liked it very much. So what had happened? she wondered, picking up the paper and looking at it.

  Five and a half weeks ago, Patsy had called Bailey and said she had to go to Welborn, would Bailey like to go with her? Since it was a weekday and Matt was out working, and since Bailey had already filled her entire pantry with bottles and jars of homemade preserves, pickles, and cordials, she had nothing whatsoever else to do. Even her search into Jimmie’s past had been halted. Matt’s search on the title to her property had come up empty. Any buying and selling of the house had been done earlier than the records that were put into the computer data banks.

  When Patsy drove into Bailey’s driveway, she hadn’t been surprised to see Janice sitting in the backseat. It was on the tip of Bailey’s tongue to ask how Patsy had asked Janice to go with her, but she didn’t ask.

  On the thirty-minute drive into Welborn, Bailey chatted with both Patsy and Janice, finding out more about their lives while trying her best not to give away anything about herself.

/>   Welborn was what Bailey had expected it to be: a thriving tourist town with the usual shops that catered to the rich. As the three of them walked along the streets and looked in the windows, Bailey was glad that the highway had bypassed Calburn. For all that Calburn looked abandoned, there was something real about it that Welborn didn’t have.

  “People should work here and live in Calburn,” Bailey had said, looking into the window of a shop that sold New Age books and crystals.

  “Then they could afford to rebuild the old houses,” Patsy said.

  “Calburn needs a business, a place where the women could work,” Janice said, and there was such bitterness in her voice that Bailey had looked at her sharply.

  Maybe it was these words that set them to thinking, and ten minutes later, when they saw a gift shop that had a small For Sale sign in the corner of the window, none of them commented. But when they went to lunch, at the same restaurant where Bailey was today, they could talk of nothing else. Janice and Patsy sat on one side of the booth so they weren’t facing each other, and Bailey on the other.

  It was Janice who started it. She was looking down at her big, plastic-coated menu when she said, “If we owned a shop, we could sell all those pickles and jams you make.”

  In the next instant, all three of them were talking on top of each other, and, although Janice and Patsy didn’t make eye contact with each other, everyone was talking to everyone else.

  “Crafts,” Patsy said. “I can sew anything.”

  “Gift baskets!” Janice said. “We’d have a shop for gift baskets. They’d be full of your homemade jams and jellies and—”

  “And Patsy’s sewn things,” Bailey said. “One time a rich woman I knew got a little dragon with her name on it from her husband, and I swear she liked it better than the diamonds he gave her.”