“You can’t. Only a man can, but we have to direct it at the one we target when we’re ready, when we have chosen him.”
“How?”
“Just concentrating on him,” she had told me, and then she’d laughed.
I had never asked Daddy or Mrs. Fennel about it. I’d thought she was just teasing me. Anyway, if she had been telling the truth, I didn’t think I had concentrated on any young man long enough or with any sort of desire yet. I did the best I could to avoid that with Liam, and I certainly didn’t feel any sexual attraction to Jim Lamb.
“When will you make up your mind about whether you will stay here or not?” Jim asked mournfully.
“I don’t know. Soon, perhaps,” I said. “I don’t want to get too involved if I think I’m not right for this place. Anyway, don’t you worry about that now, Jim. Concentrate on yourself.”
“Who else have I had to concentrate on?” he asked, angry enough to bring some heat into his face.
I couldn’t help it. Whenever any of us saw someone soaking in self-pity, we were literally nauseated. “There’s no one at school?”
“School? Oh, no. All of the women there are old enough to be my mother.”
“Maybe Quincy isn’t right for you, then,” I said, a little more harshly than I had intended, but Julia’s words still rang in my ears about how I would deal with Jim’s interest in me: “Somehow, I think you know how to handle that.”
I was doing so right now, but I couldn’t escape knowing that it was cruel to do it while he was so weak, just beginning his recuperation. I hadn’t thought I had this hard impatience and indifference in me. I guessed I was learning more about myself during this escape than I had thought I would, and I had to accept the possibility that I might not like everything I learned.
“I’m a little tired myself,” I continued. “I think I’ll do a little reading and go to sleep. You have a good night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Right,” he said. “Thanks for stopping by.”
I smiled at him and turned to leave.
“Oh, there was one other thing,” he said before I reached the door.
“What’s that?”
“At the risk of your thinking I’m crazy or still very shaken up from the accident . . .”
“What is it, Jim?”
He looked down again.
“Just say it,” I told him, now impatient with his shyness.
“I feel like such a silly teenager, having spied on you like that at the mall.”
“Yes? I’ll live. So?”
“Last night, when I was going over the accident for the hundredth time, I remembered that I had seen that elderly man before.”
I turned completely back to him. “Where?”
“In the mall. He seemed to be spying on you, too.”
I stared at him. I had felt nothing in the mall, no threat, no sense of being watched. That was unusual. “Are you sure of that?”
He shook his head. “So much of it is a blur now. It’s an image I see, but . . . maybe that is part of my nutty imagination. I mean, I see him in the mall, and then he just appears in front of the car, and then no one can find him or claims to have seen him rushing off? Sounds nuts. I know what I’m doing. No one has to tell me.”
“What are you doing?”
“Searching for a way to blame someone else for my own stupidity.”
I wanted to reassure him, but I didn’t. There was no way to do that without opening a portal to a world that would surely make a man like him afraid to take one step out of his room, much less out of the Winston House.
“Forget it,” I said. “Just get better.”
I left quickly.
Naturally, what Jim had just told me made me even more concerned. So much of what Daddy had done when he was gone and whom he knew, not only in America but in other countries, was left mysterious. No matter how close to him I had felt, there was always a line I couldn’t cross, a question I shouldn’t ask. Why wasn’t it possible that Thaddeus knew him, reported to him, and even carried out his orders? Daddy knew that I couldn’t be hurt in such a minor car accident, but he also knew that Jim Lamb could be. Anyone I knew could be. Was this a way of telling me so?
What if I had just introduced the possibility of Julia being hurt by agreeing to our date together?
I felt like someone who was afraid to turn left or right, to step forward or backward. But as I sat there worrying, I suddenly felt a surge of defiance and anger swell under my breasts. I was, after all, one of Daddy’s daughters of darkness. Looking at myself in the mirror, I saw the fire and strength in my eyes, like two tiny tunnels through which I could see banners of confidence and pride flown by my ancestors throughout the ages. I would not sit in my room trembling like some terrified child. I would not run off with my tail between my legs, limping and whining through the darkness, chased by hounds of the night gnashing their teeth. Anything worthwhile, Mrs. Fennel had once told me, was worth fighting to keep or to get. Well, I thought, living in Quincy could very well be worthwhile to me.
I went to sleep that night defiant and eager for the following morning to get up and go to work. I rose much earlier than I had the day before. Mrs. McGruder was just rising herself and was surprised to see me enter the kitchen.
“I don’t need much for breakfast today, just a little toast and jam,” I told her.
She hurried to put up the coffee. “That’s not much of a breakfast for a workin’ girl,” she told me. “My father used to say a good breakfast puts wind in your sails.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and drank some orange juice, more to satisfy her than myself. I still had my problems eating food that didn’t contain Mrs. Fennel’s miraculous herbs, which she had grown in her own garden.
Mrs. Winston was surprised to find me finishing up my toast and coffee when she stepped into the dining room. “Couldn’t you sleep?” she asked.
“I had a very good night’s sleep, thank you. I want to walk to work before someone volunteers to pick me up,” I added pointedly.
She nodded. “Well, we’ll look after Mr. Lamb.”
“I’m sure you will,” I said. “He’s lucky to have you two. Doesn’t he have any family near?”
“In Boston, his mother, a widow. He’s an only child, but anyone could see that.”
“Why?”
She paused to smile at me. “People who have siblings are more competitive. It’s been that way since Cain and Abel.”
But as far as she knew, I realized, I was an only child. Why didn’t she think the same of me? Or did she?
She looked at me as though she could hear my thoughts. “That’s what puzzles me about you, dear,” she said. “You have strong independence.” She shrugged. “Maybe that came from the competition you had for your father’s affections.”
If you only knew, I thought.
But if you did, you’d not only chase me out of your home. You’d chase me out of your memory.
12
The rest of the week was so uneventful and ordinary that every passing day was indistinguishable from the one before or the one after. The big news at the Winston House was that Jim’s doctor gave him the green light to return to work on Monday. I didn’t visit him in his room anymore, and I tried to spend as much time talking to Mr. Brady, Mrs. Winston, and Mrs. McGruder as I did talking to him, but it was obvious to the others that he wasn’t discouraged. I avoided saying anything harsh to him, since he was still on the mend.
Meanwhile, I barely saw or spoke to Liam Dolan. He was there every day, but he was at his work with a vigor and intensity that seemed to lift a weight of worry off his father’s shoulders. When I did see him, he flashed his charming smile, gave me a “How are you doing?” or sometimes just nodded in passing through. From the paperwork I filed, I could see that he was really taking on his responsibilities.
Mr. Dolan’s only comment to me about him had all sorts of double meanings for me. “When it comes to my son, we’ve seen night, and now we se
e some day.”
I just smiled.
I looked forward to the walk to and from the company. Some of the people on Mrs. Winston’s street who were getting used to seeing me waved; some stopped whatever they were doing to say hello or ask how I was doing, as if they had known me for years. I began to feel a coziness about it all, as if I could wrap the community around myself snugly and feel myself settling into the welcoming smiles. We had never lived long enough anywhere or close enough to any people to feel a sense of neighborhood. Daddy had always said it was better to be inconspicuous except with those of our own kind. We were an island unto ourselves, no matter where we were.
Both Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder seemed to blossom under the glow I was feeling. The windows were opened wider, curtains drawn back. At dinner, they talked about changing drapes, maybe a rug here and there to bring in more color, and even possibly modernizing some of the kitchen. They were constantly asking my opinion. There was much in the house that Mrs. Winston would never replace, of course. For her, historical artifacts were as sacred as religious icons and relics.
She had an armoire filled with old clay pipes from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and could explain all of the details about them and other things such as buckles, coins, cutlery and spoons, locks, and wig curlers. There was a colonial rocking chair in the living room that was out-of-bounds for anyone. No one could sit in it. Whether he was kidding me or not, Mr. Brady told me he had stepped into the living room and seen the chair rocking to a standstill many times.
“Would you know it if you sat on a ghost’s lap? Ask about any one of these old things,” Mr. Brady warned me, “and prepare yourself for a lecture not only about the item but who used it and why whatever it is is better than the modern-day replacement.”
I took his advice, but I didn’t mind whenever Mrs. Winston went on about one of her prize antiques. It brought the big house to life by giving the furniture and the artifacts their own histories, even their own personalities. This was the grouchy chair, because Sir Isaac Caldwell, from whom it could be traced, suffered gout and took out his unhappiness on his wife and children, for example. Mrs. Winston had the letters or diaries to prove it, as she could prove that the Windsor chair in the den once belonged to William Smith, Abigail Adams’s father. Like pedigreed dogs, practically everything in the old house had papers to authenticate it.
Maybe I was living in a museum, but there was a warmth to it. I appreciated what Mrs. Winston said about modern homes being way stations, “as temporary for the families living in them as were mass-produced modular houses.” That was, after all, how I had lived and how I would have continued to live. Putting down roots anywhere for too long was not something we could do.
Was I being a silly Pollyanna, dreaming of having a life in that small city and eventually meeting someone I could love and with whom I could even have children? I could almost hear Ava laughing at the very thought and see Daddy shaking his head in pity. Would I ever forget Mrs. Fennel’s look of rage on that horrible final day? Sometimes, even now, I would stop whatever I was doing and stare at my wall of memories and think again about just packing up quietly and sneaking off in the night.
But I didn’t, and I woke on Saturday morning full of both anticipation and anxiety about my date with Julia. This would be my first night out with anyone besides Ava and Buddy.
Jim had to go get his car from the auto-body repair shop that morning. He asked me to go with him and have lunch with him, but I told him I was just going to do a little shopping nearby and wash clothes. I made sure he knew that I was going out in the evening with Julia Dolan, too.
“I don’t blame you for not wanting to ride in a car with me again,” he said bitterly. “Or even wanting to be seen with me.”
He was referring to his lingering bruises, which were healing well but remained like large spots of measles on his cheeks, chin, and forehead. I could just imagine how the girls in his classes would react when he returned on Monday. No one had to tell me how cruel teenage girls could be. They’d giggle behind his back and come up with derogatory names for him.
“That has nothing to do with it,” I told him.
The Ava in me made my face flush with impatience and annoyance. Jim was the first man I’d known who was so whiny and meek. If Ava or Brianna had brought him home to Daddy, I was sure he’d have turned him out. Lust and virility were two ingredients in the blood he sought. Ava, in one of her moods of sick humor, had told me, “You don’t bring meat loaf home to Daddy; you bring filet mignon, or you don’t bring anything.”
“Nothing happened to me, Jim. It was a freak accident. I’m not afraid to ride in your car again, and I’m not worried about being seen with someone who’s recovering from injuries. Don’t be ridiculous,” I said more forcefully.
“I’m sorry. I just thought . . . okay. Maybe I’ll see you before you go out tonight,” he followed, and then hurried off to get his car. I’m sure my indignant look put fire in my eyes such as he had never seen.
I actually did what I had told Jim I was going to do, shopping at the small mall nearby and then washing clothes. Later, I spent a lot of time on my hair and makeup for the first time since I had arrived. I remembered how much attention Ava would give to her appearance, no matter what she was doing or where she was going. It was as if there were cameras turned on her the moment she would step out of our house. I had been just a little girl then. Sometimes I would sit in her room and watch her work on her hair and makeup. She had taught me a great deal about how to enhance my appearance, passing along her special beauty tips as if they were ancestral secrets that had been handed down for generations, if not centuries.
“Are you looking to attract someone special?” I had asked her. Her eyes had flamed as if I had criticized her for spending so much time on her appearance.
“I don’t make myself beautiful for someone else,” she’d snapped. “Women like us need to look good for ourselves. It pleases us, gives us confidence, and makes us feel worthy of our name and our heritage. You will do exactly what I do when your time comes. It will become second nature, part of who and what you are.”
She had calmed and continued to brush her hair, looking at herself in the mirror as she spoke to me.
“For us, being beautiful is being alive. We treat it the way the ordinary treat their health or are supposed to treat their health. Our beauty makes us healthy.”
“Will I be as beautiful as you, Ava?”
She had stopped and looked at me with as much love and affection for me as she was capable of showing. “In your way, you will be. None of us is more beautiful than the other. We’re each special in some way. Your way will come.”
I had no doubt that mine had. I couldn’t describe it exactly, but there was something exotic about me, something that would make me both exciting and attractive. I wasn’t as obviously sexy as Ava, but I was very sexy. What would I do with this power now that I was no longer one of Daddy’s daughters of darkness? At least, I hoped I was not. Only time would tell if it was something I could turn off.
I had made it clear to everyone in my new home that I wasn’t looking for any romance, not even for a good-time onetime date, and yet, just as Ava had predicted, it was important to me, to my well-being, that I look as beautiful as possible. Obviously, Ava had been right about this. I just hoped she hadn’t been right about everything else. I pushed it all out of my mind before I left my room and descended to wait for Julia Dolan.
Jim and Mr. Brady were in the living room. They heard Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder complimenting me on my hair, and both came hurrying out to see.
“You look great,” Jim said.
“Very beautiful, my dear,” Mr. Brady said. “I’ve taken note of how perfect your teeth are, by the way. Are you using anything special to keep them that white, because I have a new product . . .”
“No, nothing special. I’ve always had good teeth.”
“No cavities?”
“No,” I s
aid, smiling.
“I have about a dozen,” Jim said. “Ate too much candy when I was a teenager.”
“You know, we have this new mechanical toothbrush I mentioned,” Mr. Brady told him. “I can give it to you wholesale.”
Jim nodded but kept his eyes on me. His obvious longing made me uncomfortable. I was happy when Julia Dolan opened the front door. She was right on time. I thought she looked very pretty, too.
She spent a few minutes talking with her great-aunt Amelia and Mrs. McGruder, and then we left. I could feel Jim Lamb’s love-sick eyes on the back of my neck.
“How long did you plan on staying there?” Julia asked, nodding at the Winston House as soon as we got into her car. She had seen the way Jim was looking at me, too.
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“My great-aunt’s very nice, but the two of them daily would make me a little nuts. Jim Lamb was practically busting out of his skin gaping at you,” she added.
“Tell me about it. Maybe I will start looking for a small apartment.”
“Good idea. I’ll help you look when I have time,” she said. “Clifford found a very nice apartment in a complex called the Forefathers’ Gardens. Maybe there’s an opening for another. I’ll have him check.”
“Thank you.”
“So, tell me about yourself and about California. I haven’t been there yet. Is it as great as everyone claims?”
“I don’t know what they claim. We lived in a few places other than California.”
“Where?”
“Well, I lived in upstate New York and then Nashville before we moved to Los Angeles. The best thing about Los Angeles was that we weren’t far from the ocean. You can be swimming one day and drive up to Big Bear and go skiing the next. The traffic’s depressing, though.”
“It’s not bad right here, but it’s no walk in the park to drive to Boston and back during rush hour, either. And besides,” she said, “even in a smaller city with less traffic, what’s the first thing that happens to you? A car accident.”