“She’s an old friend. I help her when she needs help. I keep my distance from her daughters so they won’t confuse me for a father figure. I have no intention of marrying Carla or anyone else.”
“Then stop letting her hang on to you. Stop loaning her money and letting her be so convenient when you’re not seeing some other woman. And yes, I do know you have your choice of women. You pick among your female tenants as if they were fish in a barrel. They’re more than willing, but then you break their hearts and they move away. Carla’s problem is that she can never make herself give up on you, the way the others do. She remembers the boy who seemed to love her, and confuses him for the man who can’t love anyone. You’re ruining her life in some misguided effort to be kind to her and to hold on to some memory of yourself you won’t admit.”
Quentin looked at her with the strained privacy a grown son affords a parent, but her mouth tightened with resolution. Over the years since his return from the Army there had been periods of time when he and Carla were together, that was true. There was a warmth there, a comfortable pattern. “I don’t sit around debating the meaning of my life, or where it’s headed. I think that’s pointless.”
“You cannot go on this way.”
He stood abruptly. “Do you still like your brownstone?” She had bought a pleasant place in a better neighborhood some years earlier, when money began to come in from the sculptures.
“What in the world does that have to do with the discussion?” she demanded. “I’m very happy in my little place. I just wish there were more room for books.”
“You could move anywhere you want. A penthouse in the city, here. A place out in the country. How about a house on Martha’s Vineyard, or in the Hamptons? With a boat dock. God, Alfonse would love that. Get rid of his old cabin cruiser and set him up with a yacht.”
Mother gazed at him as if he were a pimp asking her to sell herself, body and soul. “You see me living in luxury and forgetting that your father ever existed?”
“No,” he answered patiently, “I see you enjoying the life you earned.” He hesitated, then, with tight restraint, “The life he deserted. He told me once that his sister made him promise to live two lives for her. That’s what you have to do. Live the life he threw away.”
She shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them they glimmered with tears. “If I could only find some peace of mind. Something that I felt was more personal to accomplish in his memory. It’s not about managing the money — I can do that. I will do it well, because I keep praying my and your father’s grandchildren will have wonderful opportunities because of it.” She gazed at him pointedly. “But . . . there has to be something, something that would mean so much to him. I want to find out what that is.”
He shook his head and looked at her with a son’s grief. Don’t let her fall. A nurse came in, fussed over her obviously agitated state, and suggested a tranquilizer. “I do not want medication meant to soften my outlook,” Mother replied in short, even tones. After the nurse left Quentin took her hand. For once — this did not happen often — she let him hold it.
• • •
When he returned to the old mill that night he discovered Carla’s white Lexus parked beside the entrance he used. She’d kept a key since their last turbulent round of togetherness, more than a year before. He found her naked in his bed, which didn’t surprise him. Over the years since his return from the Army they’d played this game several times.
“How’s your mother?” she asked. “Pop says she just fainted.”
“She has high blood pressure. She was ignoring it.”
“Good. So she just needs to relax and take her pills.”
Quentin said nothing to that typically Carla view of complex situations. He pulled an upholstered armchair across the floor and sat down a safe distance from the bed. “What are you doing here?”
She smiled. “I like to fuck rich men. I’ve been waiting since January to add you to my list.”
She was tempting, he admitted it. The wild-maned Brooklyn beauty queen had become a sleek Manhattan businesswoman, running a salon that sold custom cosmetics. She lay upright against a mountain of his white pillows with seductive welcome. The bed’s dark coverlet pooled around her hips. Her short, sophisticated black hair curved artfully around her flushed face. One hand lay along her stomach, and she stroked the skin just below her navel with one long, white-tipped fingernail, occasionally raising the hand to circle a nipple. “Look how cold I am in this drafty room.”
He shrugged his leather jacket off and tossed it gently across her breasts. “Don’t freeze.”
She kept smiling, but disappointment gathered around her eyes. “I’m not engaged,” she said. “Yet.” She had been dating a banker who was crazy about her and her girls, and she’d admitted to Quentin that she liked him.
“I told you that we can’t do this anymore,” he said.
“Quentin. Please. I make the best efforts I can to find someone else, but I always come back to you.” She scrubbed her hair away from her face impatiently, annoyed with her own façade. With a flash of the old Carla, who would have punched him, she said impatiently, “Come on. When did your latest poor lovesick victim move out downstairs? A month ago? Oh, she was a smart one. Had a master’s in art history, I heard. But even the smart ones aren’t smart enough to catch you. So I just wait.” She grinned and lifted her hands. “And here I am.”
Despite himelf, he was drawn to her when she was more honest. She antagonized him, seduced him, and often made him laugh, remembering with deep longing the easy sex and friendship of their youth. He liked her sassy little daughters, who looked like each other and like miniature Carlas, though each had a different father. He liked her lusty attitude toward life and men. But that was all there was to it, and he was tired. “I think you ought to marry the banker,” he told her.
“Why?”
“Because he’d be good for you. He loves your girls. They like him a lot. They told me so. Come on. Get dressed and go see him. Get naked in his bed.”
She slid down on the mattress and crossed her arms behind her head, eyeing him shrewdly, taking a long, breast-lifting breath as she settled deeper between his gray flannel sheets. “I’d stop seeing him in a second, if you said the word. If you don’t do something soon, I’ll marry him.”
“I’m trying to be a good influence.”
“You haven’t always felt so honorable.”
“I know, but every time we go through this you end up hating me for a year or two. I’m thinking this time we ought to just skip the hating part. For your sake, at least.”
“Quentin, hasn’t anything changed since January?”
“Not really.”
“Your mother’s upset because you won’t take charge of your family’s future. You understand what I’m saying? For the Riconni name, Quentin. You have to get married, you have to raise children and give them a great life, be a great papa, make a great home, build up the family, hmmm? That’s what you need to do with the money, no matter how you feel about it.”
“We’ve been over this before.”
“Come on, Quentin, what’s holding you back?”
“The money doesn’t change anything.”
She slowly pushed his coat and the covers down, exposing her long, smooth belly and a wedge of dark-brown pubic hair between slender thighs. “You’re right,” she whispered. “It doesn’t change how much I want you. You’re always here when I need you. I don’t just come to you for money and sex. You know that.”
Quentin nodded. He knew how easy it would be to slide into bed with her, but he set up boundaries so he’d never lose control of his passions. His passions, Quentin told himself, were simple: a woman who didn’t really need him, the Yankees from April to October, the Knicks over the winter, a good cigar, a cold Scotch, and a well-written book. He stood. “You’re welcome to stay.”
She grinned. “Now you’re talking.”
He picked up his coat. “I’ll see you l
ater.” He bent swiftly, kissed her bare stomach just below the navel, looked into her distraught eyes, and apologized. “It’s not your problem, it’s mine,” he told her.
Then he left.
At dawn he sat on the crumbling patio of an old Tudor mansion he was tearing down, with Hammer shivering against him in the breeze off the cold gray Atlantic ocean. He could see so far out there by the ocean, and that’s what he wanted, someplace to see for miles, to have it all become clear.
He didn’t like to admit that he was at a loss to build anything in his life. He wouldn’t let the word unhappy rise in his mind, because it was self-indulgent. Hell, people were better off unhappy and knocking the joints from under buildings than following their goddamned artsy bliss at the expense of other people’s lives.
When he’d come home from the Army he’d gone to the old warehouse that still housed his father’s sculptures. He’d stood in the middle of a jungle of grotesque iron and metal, gazing up at the warehouse’s wooden beams and rusting metal roof, picturing how he’d dismantle each joist and lift off each decrepit piece of sheet metal, and then when the building was dissected he’d turn to its contents, exposed in the sun, and one by one he’d cut apart the old man’s useless creations until he’d reduced everything to neat piles of nothing — no more warehouse, no more stockpiled artwork, no more memories.
He scanned the ocean, leaning forward, looking deeply into the pinks and golds of the dawn. There had to be an answer somewhere, something or someone — someone, yes, all right, someone out there worth dying for, someone scanning the horizon for him.
There had been more women in his life than he cared to think about, always left behind at some Army base or moving out of the apartments he’d rented to them. He could barely remember their names. When he was in Iraq he’d suddenly begun wondering if there was any woman in the world he would never want to miss.
He couldn’t imagine her.
CHAPTER 9
“Your daddy’s tenants want to speak with you,” Mrs. Green whispered to me behind one liver-spotted hand. She was organizing the supply of casseroles, fried chicken, and desserts brought by a long stream of neighbors. We would have food for a month.
I looked at her grimly over piles of paperwork on the kitchen table. “Tell them I’ll speak with them after I finish these bills, please.” I had found a stack of unpaid invoices in the kitchen drawer. The electricity was about to be turned off.
“Child, that won’t do. You have to speak to ’em now.” She was firm, she was a social leader. She had retired from running our local Quik Boy grocery after she and her husband sold it to a national franchise. The Quik Boy once sold everything from ammunition and boiled pigs’ feet to whole homemade cakes and used paperbacks, thanks to an unending supply Daddy traded. Now it sold gourmet coffee and camping gear for tourists. My whole world was changing.
“They’re a-waitin’ on the front porch,” she finished, and pointed. I grudgingly pulled a sweater around my shoulders and walked outside.
Five strangers looked back at me as suspiciously as I looked at them. Oswald T. Weldon was sixtyish, lean, leathery, with a Tennessee twang and old biker’s kiss-my-ass attitude. A white handlebar mustache rode his upper lip like a furry sneer. He called himself a folk painter. His themes ran heavily to naked people cavorting through farms, fields, and flowers. His other theme, more disturbing, was abused children.
His wife, Juanita, was no more than thirty years old, and came from some tiny farm village in Mexico. She barely understood English and was very shy. Next to them were a couple as plain as fieldstone. Bartow and Fannie Ledbetter were simply old — well past seventy, maybe even eighty. She leaned on Bartow and Bartow leaned on her, aided by a heavy wooden cane, his back grotesquely twisted by an old injury, so that he always bent sideways. He and Fannie had spent their lives working in a North Carolina ceramics factory before new investors closed the plant and sent the production jobs overseas. Now they were living hand-to-mouth on what they earned from their odd-shaped bowls and dishes and mugs. When I opened Daddy’s kitchen cabinets, the Ledbetters’ strange creations seemed like colorful little aliens, looking back at me as if they might pounce.
And last, there was her. Her, a mystery every time I saw her, and a threat I hadn’t yet fully defined. I had noticed her crying at Daddy’s funeral, and had seen her from a distance later, alone at his grave. With all seriousness she called herself by the New Age Native American moniker Liza Deerwoman, an absurd choice since she was a thickening, middle-aged, green-eyed, platinum-white blonde. She must have been beautiful not that many years ago. Liza Deerwoman made glass. The shelves outside her front door were filled with perfume bottles, vases, and hanging ornaments.
She was colorful, herself. Today she was dressed in startling green chiffon — some kind of jumper — with a baggy green coat over it. She wore white silk ankle socks with loafers, and the socks were embroidered with tiny pearls. Her eyes were covered by green-rimmed sunglasses. “How are you?” she asked in a cultured, coastal voice that always surprised me. “Have you talked to your father in any of your dreams?”
What bullshit. I stared at her. “No, but I’m sure he’ll call me when he gets time.”
“Please don’t be annoyed. I have a duty to tell you, even if you won’t believe me. I’ve had glimmers of him. Feelings, really, nothing visual. A sense of deep peace. I believe he is at peace with the work he did, here, and he’s gone on to — ” her voice broke — “to prepare to do fine work in other realms. The fact that he left you in charge tells me he knew this was best for you. He knew you needed this chance to come home.”
“Stop it. I don’t know you, you don’t know me, and if my father had something to tell me, he would have written it in his will.” I couldn’t take any more of her poignant babble.
The old couple shuffled forward. “All she’s sayin’ is that Mr. Tom was a fine, kind man,” Mrs. Ledbetter said. Her gnomelike husband nodded, the movement reflected in his twisted body. “A good soul,” he said in graveled tones.
Oswald Weldon snorted. He grimaced at me. “Let’s get to the point, here. You plan to kick us out?” His deep, sarcastic truckdriver’s drawl raked my ears. “You wanted to get the hell rid of us a couple of years ago,” he went on, “and now you got your chance. Just say so.”
“As long as you’re honest with me, and trustworthy, you pay your bills and keep up your apartments, I’m not planning to make any changes anytime soon.”
“Thank you,” Liza Deerwoman said softly. “I’m sure your father is pleased.”
I looked at her with barely concealed disgust. You New Age Blanche du Bois. “As I said, I’m not planning to change anything around here. Not right away.”
“People burn in hell on words like that,” Oswald informed me.
“You can always leave, if you don’t believe me.”
“We wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”
“Oswald, that’s enough,” Liza said, very quietly and with cool warning. He clamped his mouth shut and stomped down the porch steps. The others filed after him. I watched them go with amazement and dread. I controlled these people’s homes, their businesses, their lives at Bear Creek. I was fairly certain that none of them could afford to move anyplace else.
What am I going to do with them? I thought desperately.
* * *
Arthur had rarely left the general vicinity of the farm and Tiberville during the course of his first twenty-two years, and almost never crossed the county line. Travel terrified him. His phobia was the reason Daddy never brought him to visit me in Atlanta. Arthur grew stone silent and rigid with alarm when forced to pass some invisible psychic boundary point.
Nest, he would say loudly in the car, a habit from boyhood when he’d gone through long phases of pretending to be a bird. Nest. He had to get back to his safe roost. And besides, he couldn’t leave the Iron Bear. It was his surrogate mother.
Now, I lied to him. “Mama Bear started talking to me las
t night. She wants you to come live with me,” I said. “She told me you’d be happy in my house in Atlanta. Mama Bear said she’ll be fine here at the farm, and we’ll visit her every weekend. I promise. But for now, I really need for you to come stay with me.”
“Nest,” Arthur said, wringing his hands.
I explained my plans for Arthur to my tenants the next morning, facing them crisply in a circle of straight-backed chairs set around the farmhouse’s living room. I couldn’t live at Bear Creek. My bookstore, my home, and my possibly future husband remained in Atlanta.
“Ursula, please don’t take Arthur away,” Liza begged. She held out her hands. “Arthur loves it here. This is his home. He’ll be miserable in the city. He’s accustomed to us, and we’ll take care of him. I swear to you, if you’ll just let Arthur stay you won’t be sorry.”
“It’s out of the question. He needs supervision. I’m his sister. I’ll take care of him.”
“But Miss Ursula, you’re not gonna help him by caging him up in Atlanter,” Fannie Ledbetter said tearfully. “He’s a sweet, wild child in his heart. He’s got to wander the woods with the other creatures. He needs that Bear out in the yard. It talks to him, keeps him calm. I do believe it does. Liza’s right. We’re his people, now. You can leave him be.”
I stood, furious. “You people are not his ‘people,’ you’re not his family, and you’re not my family, and you need to keep that fact straight. Go on about your business, and I won’t interfere. But listen to me — I’m letting you stay on the farm out of the goodness of my heart, and because my father would want it that way. Don’t ever forget that you’re tenants here.”