If Amy hadn’t been up to her neck in painting, she would have been quite curious as to what was going on, but she had too much to do to think of anything but getting the murals on the walls.
It was after the sketches were up and all that was needed was days of fill-in work that she was sitting with Doreen and Max, eating the pasta salad and crab cakes Charles had made for lunch, when two little girls came in with papers and handed them to Jason.
“What is he doing?” Amy asked.
“Homework,” Doreen said.
“What do you mean, homework?”
Doreen waited until she’d finished chewing. “He’s Mr. Homework. He helps the kids out with their schoolwork.”
“Doreen, so help me, if you make me beg you for every piece of information . . .”
“I think it started as a joke. At the pet store. No, at the barbershop. Yeah, that’s it. The men had nothing to do on a Saturday, so they started complaining that they didn’t understand their kids’ homework, so somebody said that if Jason really wanted to help Abernathy, he’d make the kids smart.”
“So?” Amy asked, narrowing her eyes at Doreen. “How could Jason make the kids smarter?”
“I don’t know, but the board of education says that our kids are a lot smarter now.”
Amy wanted to ask more questions, since she didn’t understand anything from what Doreen had said, but she had a feeling she wasn’t going to get much more information from this conversation. Amy turned to her son. “So how are you doing in there? Can I see what you’re painting?”
Max had his mouth full, but he gave a smile and shook his head no.
“Please,” Amy said. “Can’t I just have a peek?”
Nearly giggling, Max kept shaking his head no. This was a daily conversation, and Amy went to great lengths to think up persuasions and promises to try to get Max to let her inside the room. But he never came close to relenting.
It was the next day, when David came to the library to view the progress of the murals, that Amy managed to get David off into a corner. “What is this Mr. Homework stuff I’ve heard about?”
“Mildred didn’t tell you?” David asked. “I would have thought she’d have told you everything and then some.”
“Actually, I’m beginning to think that no one has told me anything.”
“I know the feeling well. My brother has an open door to any child in Abernathy who needs help with his homework.”
When Amy just looked at him, David continued. “It started as a joke. People in Abernathy were suspicious of Jason’s motives for helping rebuild the town, and—”
“Why? He’s a hometown boy.”
David took a moment before he answered. “I think you should ask Jason about that one. Let’s just say that they were a little concerned that he had some devious, underlying reason for what he was doing. So one day some men were talking and—”
“Gossiping in the barbershop.”
David smiled. “Exactly. They said that if Jason wanted to do some good, he could help the kids with their homework.”
“And?”
“And he did.”
Amy looked at David. “What is it that you’re holding back?”
“Would you believe, love for my brother? Jason had Cherry look into the test scores of Abernathy’s children, and I can tell you that they were appalling. A town that’s had as many out-of-work people as Abernathy has, has depression for dinner each night. Jason knew that it would do no good to give a pep talk to the people that they should help the kids with their schoolwork, so he hired tutors.”
Turning, David looked at his brother’s broad back as he helped Raphael with a painting. “My brother didn’t hire dry, scholarly professors. No, he hired out-of-work actors and dancers and writers and retired sea captains and doctors and—” Pausing, he grinned at Amy. “Jason hired a lot of people with a lot of knowledge who wanted to share that knowledge. They came here and worked at the schools for three months. And afterward, quite a few of those people decided to stay here.”
Amy was silent for a moment as she digested this information. “And he helps the children with their homework?”
“Yes. Jason said that I’d given him the idea. I’d said that there were ‘other children.’ ” David’s voice lowered. “I was talking to him about there being children other than Max.”
“I see,” Amy said, but she wasn’t sure that she did see.
It was after that conversation that she began to watch Jason more closely. Over the past two years, when she’d been in New York trying to make her own way, she’d built up an image of this man in her head. She’d read all the articles about his philanthropy and she’d applied that to her own situation in which Jason had spent a lot of money on her and her child. She had concluded that Jason and his money were one and the same.
But giving of money and giving of yourself to help children understand long division were two different things.
It was after her talk with David that Amy quit trying to entice Jason. Instead, she tried to see him as he really was and not as she’d thought he was based on a few press articles and what she assumed he was like. As secretly as she could, she began to watch him.
For one thing, he complained all the time about how much everything was costing him, but she never once saw him turn down any bill. By snooping through some papers he left lying about, she found out that he owned the local mortgage company and that he had given low-interest loans to most of the businesses and several farms in the surrounding area.
Amy also saw that the formidable Cherry Parker seemed to have changed toward him.
As nonchalantly as she could manage, as though it meant nothing to her, Amy said to Cherry, “Is it just me or has he changed?”
“From black to white,” Cherry said, then walked away.
One Saturday morning, Jason wasn’t in the library and Amy found him at the school grounds playing basketball with half a dozen boys who made Raphael look like an upstanding citizen. “So how many boys like you has Jason taken on?” she asked Raphael later that day.
Raphael grinned at her. “Lots. We used to have a gang, but . . .” He trailed off, then went back to painting. “He thinks he can get me some more work like this,” Raphael said softly. “He thinks I have talent.”
“You do,” Amy said, then wondered if Jason planned to paint the inside of every building he owned just to give these gangsters a job.
When Jason returned from playing basketball, Amy looked up at him. He was wearing gray sweatpants that were dirty, sweat-soaked, and torn. And she’d never seen any human sexier than he was at that moment.
For a moment Jason looked at her, and Amy turned away in embarrassment, but not before Jason gave her a knowing grin.
“Hey!” Raphael yelled because Amy had just drawn a camel’s face on a princess’s body.
“Sorry,” Amy murmured and refused to turn back around to look at Jason.
Just a few more days, she thought, and a thrill of excitement went through her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE OPENING OF THE LIBRARY, ALL OF them except Doreen and Max were working in the library until three A.M.
“That’s it,” Jason said, and looked up at the others. “Tell me, do I look as bad as the lot of you?” he asked, his voice hoarse from talking so much in an attempt to answer the thousands of questions fired at him that day.
They all looked around. The library was as finished as it was ever going to be.
“You look worse than we do,” Amy said, deadpan. “What do you think, Raphael?” After six weeks of daily contact, they had come to know each other well, and Amy marveled that she had ever been afraid of him. And Raphael had proven to be quite talented, both in art and in organization.
“Worse than me,” Raphael said, “but then old men always look bad.”
“Old?” Jason said. “I’ll give you old,” he said, then made a leap for the young man, but Raphael side-stepped, and Jason went down hard
on the oak floor, and he cried out in pain.
Instantly, all of them were hanging over him. “Jason! Jason!” Amy cried as she put her hands on the side of his head.
Jason kept his eyes closed and a little groan escaped his lips.
“Call a doctor,” Amy ordered, but in the next second Jason’s hand shot up, grabbed the back of Amy’s head, and pulled her mouth down to his for a long, hard kiss.
After a long moment she pulled away, although she didn’t want to. And the instant they broke contact, Jason was up and after Raphael. Tackling him, Jason soon brought the younger and much smaller man down to the floor.
“Just didn’t want to hurt you,” Raphael said when Jason finally let him up.
Amy was standing in the shadows, her back to the group. She was still shaking from Jason’s kiss, a kiss that hadn’t seemed to mean anything to him.
As he always did, Jason drove Amy home and tried not to think about how lonely his house would be once Amy and Max were gone.
“One more day,” Jason said. “And then it’s over. You’ll be glad, won’t you?”
“Oh, yes, very.”
Jason didn’t say anything, but her words hurt. “Max will be glad to get back, I’m sure,” Jason said. “He must miss his own room, one that isn’t as babyish as the one he has here.”
“Yes, of course,” she said.
“And that man . . .”
“Arnie,” she supplied.
“Yeah. No doubt he’ll be glad to see you.”
“Madly,” she said, trying to sound lighthearted and happy.
“Amy—”
“Oh, my, look at the time,” she said as Jason pulled into the driveway. “I bet Doreen is waiting up for us.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m sure she is. Look, about tonight . . .”
“Oh, that,” she said, knowing that he was talking about the kiss. “I won’t tell Arnie if you won’t. I’ll just say good night here, and I’ll see you in the morning,” she said as she made her way up the porch steps. Minutes later she tiptoed in to see Max, to make sure that he was all right. He was sleeping so soundly that he didn’t stir when she pulled the covers over him.
“I think maybe your grandmother is crazy,” she whispered to the sleeping baby. Amy had promised Mildred that she’d let Jason make the first move.
“Until he tells you that he’s not going to marry Doreen, you’re to keep on telling him about Varney.”
“Arnie,” Amy had said.
Max rolled over in his sleep, and for a moment he opened his eyes, saw his mother; then a sweet smile appeared and he closed his eyes again.
To melt the heart, she thought as she looked at him. He had a smile to melt a heart. “And I am blessed at knowing you,” she whispered as she kissed her fingertip, then touched it to Max’s lips. Standing back, she yawned. Time to go to bed because tomorrow the president of the United States was coming to visit.
“Here’s the first of them,” Amy said as she put her hand on the paper rolling out of the fax machine; then as she read it, her eyes opened wide, first in horror, then in disbelief.
“Tell us!” Raphael shouted. “What does it say?”
With a face full of disbelief, Amy handed the fax to the boy. His knife wound had healed in the last weeks, and he looked less like a murderer looking for a victim.
Raphael scanned the paper, then let out a hoot of laughter and handed the fax to Jason.
Everyone who had worked on the murals was in the library huddled around the fax machine as though they were freezing and it was a fire. This morning the president had visited Abernathy, and now they were waiting for the clipping service to send through any reviews of what the president had seen. What was in these reviews could make or break Amy’s career.
“A cross between Japanese art and Javanese shadow puppets, with a bit of Art Deco thrown in,” Jason read aloud. “Stunning, individual.” He looked up at Amy in disbelief.
“Go on,” she said, “read the rest of it.”
When Jason said nothing else, Amy took the paper from him. “Basically, the article dismisses my murals as ‘well executed’ and ‘appropriate,’ but Max’s work was . . .” She looked down to quote exactly. “ ‘Art with a capital A.’ ” Amy looked at her son sitting on a red bean bag chair and smiled at him. “And they are,” she said. “They are magnificent.”
They were in the Abernathy Room, the room that for six weeks had been locked against Amy as her son created in privacy. When Amy looked back on it, she knew that she had been prepared to console Max when no one was impressed with the black shapes that a two-and-a-half-year-old called monkeys. But when she’d finally seen the room, she was walking behind the president and she had been too stunned by the art on the walls to remember whom she was with.
“Holy Toledo,” she’d murmured as she looked around the room, and her words seemed to speak for all of them, as no one else could make a sound. All the walls, the ceiling, and spreading onto the wooden floor was a shadow jungle. Huge, towering bamboo plants seemed to move about in a breeze that wasn’t in the room but was in the pictures. Monkeys peeped out from the branches and stems, some eating bananas, some just staring, their eyes looking at you until you stepped back, afraid of being too close to these untamed animals.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” a short man in the back whispered, and Amy had already been told that he was an art critic for The Washington Post. “Marvelous,” he said under his breath as he craned his neck this way and that. “And you painted them?” He managed to look down his nose at Amy even though they were the same height.
“No, my son did,” Amy said quietly.
The little man turned surprised eyes toward Raphael, who was standing behind her. “This is your son?”
“My son is over there,” Amy said, pointing to where Max stood near Jason.
For a moment the art critic and the president as well looked confused. She couldn’t mean that Jason was her son, could she?
“Max, sweetheart, come here,” Amy said, holding out her hand. “I want you to meet the president.”
After that, all hell broke loose. The president’s visit to Abernathy had been undertaken half for the sake of creating some good publicity, as he was on his way to another meeting about the Middle East, and half to pass out scholarly awards to the schoolchildren of Abernathy. Because of his ultimate destination, he was surrounded by journalists. And now, when they saw that this extraordinary room had been created by a very little boy, they started firing questions. “Young man, where did you get the idea for this room?” “Come on, now, tell the truth, your mother painted this room for you, didn’t she?” “I think you’d better tell the truth about these monkeys, don’t you?” “Just tell us the truth: who painted these pictures?”
Jason picked up Max and glared at the photographers. “If you’ll excuse us, it’s the artist’s nap time. If you must badger someone with your questions, ask one of the adults.” At that, he nodded toward Amy and Doreen; then he left the building, Max held protectively to him.
The journalists started shooting questions at Amy, since they knew that she’d painted the murals in the other room, but Amy directed them toward Doreen. “She knows everything. I wasn’t even allowed inside the room to see what was going on.”
Turning, Amy expected Doreen to be shy with the press or at the very least reticent, but she wasn’t. Instead, she took to being interviewed and photographed as though she’d always lived in front of a camera.
So now, hours later, they were reading about what a triumph of achievement the “Shadow Monkeys” were, and Max was being hailed as a newly discovered genius.
“I always knew he was brilliant; it’s just nice to have the world’s verification,” Amy said proudly, and they all laughed.
“Here it is,” Jason said as the door opened and Charles entered carrying three magnums of champagne. Behind him trailed four young chefs carrying great trays of food.
“Who is all this for?” Amy murmu
red, and Jason turned to her with a broad grin.
“I invited a few people to celebrate,” he said. “I knew you’d be a triumph, so I planned ahead.”
It didn’t matter to Amy that her work had been dismissed and that in her heart she knew that she’d probably never be a great artist or achieve great success, but Max had accomplished both and would continue to do so—and that was enough for her. To have produced a child with the talent that Max obviously had was all that she could ask of life. Except, she thought as she looked Jason up and down, maybe she might like to have a father for her child.
“To us!” Jason said as he raised a glass in a salute; then his eye caught Amy’s and his smile changed to one of intimacy, as though he could read her mind.
Behind the chefs came the man who owned the general store in Abernathy, and behind him came his wife and three children. They were followed by the hardware store family and the elementary school principal, then the four teachers at the school, then—
“Did you invite the whole town?” Amy asked.
“Everyone of them,” he said. “And their kids.”
Amy laughed and knew that she’d never been happier in her life than she was at that moment. It’s too good to last, she heard a little voice say, but she took another sip of champagne and thought no more as music came from the outside garden and, to her astonishment, she found that a band had set up there and was playing dance music.
Smiling, she turned to Jason, who was watching her, and from the look on his face, he wanted her approval. She lifted her glass to him in a toast.
At one A.M. a fleet of cars arrived in front of the library to take everyone home. Jason had even given lists of addresses to the drivers so no one who’d had too much champagne had to worry about remembering where he lived. Doreen carried a sleeping Max out to one of the cars. She had already told Amy that she would put Max to bed and stay with him until Jason and Amy got home.
In an astonishingly short time, Amy and Jason were left alone in the library, and after the frivolity of the party the library seemed huge and empty. Amy sat down on one of the hard oak chairs by a reading table and looked up at Jason. The triumph of her son was still running through her veins, and it would for the rest of her life.