Madison lifted herself on her toes and looked over Thomas’s head. “Isn’t someone going to save me from this satyr?”
“We’re all much too fascinated to move a muscle,” Mrs. Barnett said with what Madison had come to see was her usual honesty. “Go on, Thomas, take her outside and ravish her in the moonlight.”
“You’ve been reading romantic novels again, haven’t you, my love?” Mr. Barnett said with a smile at his plump, soft wife. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s only six o’clock and it’s summer, so there is a great deal of daylight outside.”
“It’s always moonlight to lovers,” Mrs. Barnett said, her eyes on her husband.
“Go!” Mr. Barnett said to Thomas, then walked toward his wife.
Thomas grabbed Madison’s hand and pulled her from the kitchen onto the porch.
“Aren’t you overplaying it a bit?” Madison said nervously once they were alone. Pulling her hand from his, she stepped to the porch rail, her back to him.
“I’m not playing at all,” he said softly.
Madison didn’t dare look at him. “I don’t think that we should—”
She didn’t say any more because Thomas pulled her into his arms and kissed her. And it was a kiss such as Madison had never received before. It was deep and thorough and altogether wonderful.
When he broke away, her first thought was, How very much I’ve missed in my life!
Her inclination was to fling her arms around him and kiss him more, but she forced herself to move away. “What was that for?” she asked, trying to make her voice sound angry. But if there was anger, it was at herself, not at him.
“Just to see,” Thomas said as he put his hands in his pockets.
If he starts whistling, I’ll pick up a chair and hit him, she thought. “To see what?” she snapped, this time the anger genuine.
“If you like me as much as I like you,” he said.
There was such innocent sincerity in his voice that her anger dissipated. “And what did you find out?” she asked.
“Yeah, you do.”
She couldn’t look in his eyes for fear that she’d give too much away. She wasn’t going to be the country girl who oohed and aahed and told him that no man had ever before been as nice to her as he was being. No, that would make her sound as though she were from a class where the men dragged women about by their hair.
Instead, she turned back around, put her hands on the porch rail, and looked out at the forest. There was about fifty feet of mowed grass between them and the dense trees, then beyond that was pristine forest.
“So what do we do about it?” Madison asked softly.
“Anything we want,” he answered, and she could hear the intensity in his voice.
She took a deep breath. “You don’t know me. For all you know, I—”
He didn’t let her finish the sentence. “I know all about you that I’ll ever need to know. You have a great sense of humor. You’re smart and you care more about other people than you do about yourself. That’s rare in a person. Most people—”
He didn’t finish that sentence, but took a breath and lowered his voice. “You like to fish and to walk over mountains. Although I do plan to buy you a some proper hiking boots and—”
She turned to look at him, a frown on her face. “And when do you plan to do this? Before or after I go back to my husband?”
“After,” Thomas said, not in the least perturbed by her outburst. “After you tell him that you want out.”
“You presume a lot,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height and doing her best to look intimidating.
“Yes, I do,” Thomas said softly, then he picked up her hand and kissed the palm.
“Oh, damnation!” Madison said under her breath; then she gave a great sigh as she pulled her hand away and put it back on the porch rail. “We can’t do this. This isn’t right. You’re—”
“If you start that speech about our being from two different worlds, I’ll walk away now,” Thomas said, and it was his turn to sound angry. He, too, put his hands on the porch rail, then looked out at the forest. “Look, I apologize if I’m going too fast, it’s just that I’ve always been a person who makes quick decisions. I decided in an instant that I wanted to be a doctor, and in the many years since then, I’ve never once wavered in my decision.”
“Your first impression of me was that I was a criminal, a person from a very different world than the one you live in.”
“Your beauty blinded me,” Thomas answered. “I couldn’t see you for the façade. And, for the record, criminality isn’t determined by the amount of money a person was born with or their education.”
“Shall we check statistics on the number of poor people in prison versus the number of wealthy ones?”
“How did we get onto this?” Thomas asked, turning to look at her. “Or are you just trying to get me off track?”
Madison looked away from him, then glanced down the length of the porch. “Too much is happening too fast,” she said as she turned back, but she still didn’t look at him. “Give me some time. I go for years with no excitement, then in a few days, I . . .”
“Meet the man of your dreams?” Thomas asked with hope in his voice.
Madison laughed. “I just need time.”
“Take all you need,” Thomas said, then glanced at his watch. “Is an hour enough? How about forty-five minutes?”
Madison opened her mouth to speak, but Pauli pushed open the screen door and walked onto the porch, and when Madison turned to look at her, Pauli moved to stand between them; then she gave a dramatic sigh.
“If you two also run off to bed together, I’ll jump into one of the canoes and run away and you’ll all have to spend all night trying to find me.”
Madison was sure it was her middle-class mores showing, but she was shocked at the words of this child.
Not so Thomas. “So who else is in bed together?” he asked casually.
“Everyone. Mom and Dad. Carol and Alex. And you two look like you want to.”
At that Thomas laughed, but Madison felt herself blush. “I really think that this is a subject that—”
“Is too old for me?” Pauli said with a sigh. “I know. I’m cursed with being wise beyond my years.”
“Cursed with an ego that’s too big for the world,” Thomas said easily, then looked over her head to Madison. “I used to change her diapers.”
“That was when I was a boy,” Pauli said, making Madison blink at her.
Thomas snorted. “Still are from what I can see,” he said, looking at the girl’s flat chest.
Pauli looked down the front of her. “I know. It’s a tragedy, isn’t it? Do you think they’ll ever grow? You’re a doctor, what do you think?”
“I’m not a doctor yet, and when I am, I’m not going into female medicine. Why don’t you ask Madison? She’s had some experience in this area.”
Madison had to work to keep from clasping her arms across her breasts. “I think I should check on dinner.”
“It won’t be for a while,” Pauli said. “When Mother and Dad go at it, it takes them a while.”
Madison decided that she wasn’t going to continue to be a prude. “How lucky for your mother. She must tell me her secret.”
Turning, Pauli looked at her. “So what’s Thomas like in bed?”
But Pauli never got to hear Madison’s reply because he grabbed the girl by the ear and pulled while holding the screen door open. “Get inside and try to mind your manners.”
“How am I going to learn if I don’t ask?” Pauli whined after Thomas had closed the screen door, with her inside the house.
“There are some things that you have to learn from experience, not from what others tell you. Now go find your mother and tell her that we’re ready to eat.”
“Some doctor you’ll make,” Pauli muttered as she disappeared into the house.
“What an extraordinary child,” Madison said as she turned back to Thomas.
> “Spoiled. A late-in-life child and spoiled without mercy. Poor Alex got nothing but discipline, but that child has never had any discipline.”
“You love her madly, don’t you?” Madison said with a smile.
“Quite daffy about her,” Thomas said. “Now, back to you and me. I was saying that—”
But the door to the cabin opened and Mr. Barnett came out onto the porch, a beer in his hand, and soon afterward Alex came outside, and minutes later they all went in to dinner. After that she wasn’t alone with Thomas again. Even when they said good night and went to their separate rooms, there wasn’t a private moment between them. At one point during the evening, Madison thought that maybe Thomas was trying to convey a message to her to meet him outside later. But she looked through the windows at the moonlight and pretended that she had no idea that Thomas was trying to get her attention.
Thirteen
“Madison!” Ellie said in exasperation, “you’re driving me crazy! This all happened, what, fifteen, sixteen years ago and I know that you didn’t marry him, but why?! Whenever a man’s friends and relatives tell you, ‘You’re not like the other girls he dates,’ then you know you’re in. What happened?”
Looking down at her cigarette, Madison said nothing.
“Children,” Leslie said into the silence. “That was it, wasn’t it?”
When Madison looked up at Leslie, there was such pain in her eyes that Ellie had to turn away. To be a writer it helped to feel things deeply, and Ellie did. And what she was feeling now was Madison’s pain, still raw and bleeding after all these years.
“I see,” Ellie said after a while. “I thought maybe Roger had a relapse and begged you to stay. Or . . .” She trailed off, as the reality was worse than what she’d made up.
“What did you tell Thomas?” Leslie asked softly.
When Madison put her cigarette to her lips, her hand was trembling. “It was Pauli who brought up the subject of children. She said that she wasn’t going to have any, that she was going to be a free spirit and spend her life breaking men’s hearts. Then Mrs. Barnett said—”
Madison took another deep drag on her cigarette, then stubbed it out and lit another. “The consensus among Carol and Alex, Mr. and Mrs. Barnett, and . . . Thomas, was that there was nothing else in life, that only children really mattered. Thomas said something to the effect that a man could work all his life and achieve everything, but if he didn’t have children to pass it on to, then his life was without meaning. While he said this, he was giving me looks that said he wanted to have children with me.”
Neither Leslie nor Ellie could think of anything to say as they looked at Madison and thought of what she’d lost and how she’d lost it. If she hadn’t returned to Roger . . . If she’d stayed in New York . . . If . . .
“Now do I have the two of you feeling sorry for me?” Madison asked, trying to make light of what she’d just told.
But Leslie didn’t so much as smile. “What did you do? I mean, after you heard what they said, how did you hold it together?”
“Alex and Carol drove us back to Thomas’s house. I was trying to pretend that nothing had happened, but I didn’t do a very good job of it. Thomas knew that something was wrong. I told him it was difficult for me to think of breaking marriage vows. Of course it didn’t help that when we got back, it was about nine at night and Roger and Terri were skinny-dipping in the pool together.”
“Did you tell Alex and Carol that you were married?” Ellie asked.
“Thomas did. He was quite nonchalant about it as he stood by the pool and introduced Roger as my husband. I must say that neither Alex nor Carol so much as blinked. All of them had wonderful manners. Afterward, we walked back to the house and Carol took my arm and said she’d lend me all her bridal magazines so I could choose my dress to wear when I married Thomas.”
“Yeow!” Ellie said. “I can’t imagine how you must have felt, knowing what you did. Did you ever think of talking to Thomas about—”
“No!” Madison half shouted. “I did not consider talking to Thomas about my . . . my lack of a uterus. I couldn’t put him in the position of having to make a choice like that! Nor did I think of telling him that we could adopt. He was a whole man and I was only half of a woman. I wasn’t going to punish him for what had happened to me. He was a wonderful man, and I knew that he could—”
Madison broke off and calmed herself down. “It’s amazing how fresh this seems. It’s as though all these intervening years didn’t happen. But they did and it was all done a long, long time ago.”
There was silence for a moment as Madison drew on her cigarette and looked down at her hands. “Thomas had to leave the next morning, and I . . . I hid so I wouldn’t have to say good-bye to him. For the rest of our stay, I walked. Miles and miles I walked, and Roger . . .” She drew on her cigarette. “I really don’t know what Roger did.”
After Madison stopped talking, Leslie asked softly, “What happened between you and Roger?”
“He divorced me about four months later. The first step he took without his canes, he walked straight to a lawyer. He married Terri, but it lasted only about three years. I think he was sick of getting money from his parents, so he thought he’d get himself a rich wife. But all Terri’s money was tied up in trust funds, so Roger couldn’t get his hands on a penny of it.”
Madison gave a little smile. “I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard that the minute Terri’s family told him he had to get a job, he filed for a divorce.”
For a moment she looked away, then back again. “But in the end, it all worked out all right, as two years later, his parents drowned in a boating accident and left him everything. Roger sold the house, sent his parents’ art collection to Sotheby’s, where it was called ‘important,’ and so it sold for over a million. Roger turned the money over to one of his college buddies, who invested it, and, the last I heard, Roger was a multimillionaire and—” She took a deep breath. “And he married well and has three children. The youngest is only five.”
“Bastard!” Ellie said under her breath.
“Ditto,” Leslie echoed, and the room filled with their unspoken thoughts of the injustice of what had been done to Madison.
“And Thomas?” Ellie asked. “What happened to him?”
Madison had just lit a cigarette, but now she turned the pack over and shook out a new one, then lit it. She now had two of them going at once, but she didn’t seem to be aware of this.
“Thomas . . .” Madison said slowly, “didn’t fare as well. Years later, after Roger and Terri had divorced, I saw Dr. Oliver again. She and I hadn’t had much contact after Roger and I split up, but I was up at the ski basin with my veterinarian boss and there she was. My first inclination was to run the other way, but she insisted that I stay and have dinner with her, just her, without her husband or children.”
Madison picked up the second cigarette. She now had one in her mouth and one in her hand. “I tried to stop myself, but I wanted to hear about Thomas, so I asked. She told me that he finished medical school, but he didn’t go into rehabilitation medicine as he’d talked about. Instead, he studied tropical diseases. She said he’d decided to go into research rather than hands-on care.”
Madison stubbed out one of the cigarettes. “I’m not sure if anyone in Thomas’s family knew about Thomas and me—not that anything had actually happened for them to know about—but Dorothy told me that that summer at the cabin had changed Thomas. After that he’d become even more reclusive than he had been in the past. ‘More morose,’ is what she said.”
For a few moments Madison concentrated on smoking, not looking at either of the two women across from her. But they were waiting and she knew it.
“It was a long time ago,” Madison said so quietly that they could barely hear her. “But I don’t think that any amount of time can lessen the pain.”
She lifted her head and looked at them, and when she did, Ellie gasped. Madison, beautiful woman that she’d once bee
n, looked as though she were a hundred years old. She looked as though she were a corpse that by some freak of nature just happened to be still moving.
“Thomas was in a small plane that was taking medicines into the rain forest in Brazil when the plane went down. They think it might have been struck by lightning. All three passengers died instantly.”
There was nothing either of the two women could reply to that.
“What a waste!” Ellie said after a few minutes. “What a horrible, horrible waste of lives. And that a low-life like Roger came out on top makes me . . .” She couldn’t think of a word that was strong enough to describe what she was feeling.
Abruptly, Madison stood up. “Do you mind if we go to bed? It’s been a long day and I’d like to get some sleep.”
Ellie wanted to stay up and talk. After three years of living alone and having no stories in her head, she was starving for stories. Famished. But Leslie also stood, so Ellie knew that she had to quit listening.
“Beds?” Ellie said as she got off the couch. “Who sleeps where?”
It was Leslie, the peacemaker, who came up with a schedule so they alternated beds and couch. Leslie took the couch for the first night, and fifteen minutes later, the three women were asleep. And Madison slept the most soundly that she had in years. It was as though, by telling her story to sympathetic listeners, she had released something inside of her.
Fourteen
Ellie woke to a heavenly smell, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. Had the deli delivered early? she wondered, in her half-awake state. But then, nothing from the deli had ever smelled that good.
Grabbing her clothes off the back of a chair, she left the bedroom and went to the bathroom, where she made a token application of makeup and pulled on black sweatpants and a huge, concealing shirt. With every pound she had gained, her clothes had become bigger, until now she could hardly keep them on her body. She knew it was an illusion, but she hoped that if she covered herself completely, no one could see how big she had become.