Acts of Love (34 page)

“And Ted Waring was pleased at the prospect?”

“Yes, sir. He was pleased, all right. Like I said, he loved the woman. A blind man could see that.”

“And was it your opinion that Ann Waring was pleased at the prospect as well?”

“Objection. This witness has no evidence as to what was going through Ann Waring's mind at the time.”

“Sustained.”

“Let me restate the question,” Fisk said. “On the evening, just five nights before Ann Waring died, when you saw her and her husband together, can you tell us what you observed of her demeanor?”

“Well, Ann was always a quiet girl, particularly around Ted. But you could see that she was happy. Anyone could see that just by the way she looked at him. As a matter of fact, we came out behind them and saw her reaching over and kissing Ted before he got into his car.”

“Thank you, Mr. Freeman. I have no further questions.”

Reardon approached the witness stand. “Mr. Freeman, isn't it true that you tried to keep Ted Waring's negotiations with clients to a minimum because he had so much difficulty compromising on the slightest of details that it jeopardized your business?”

“I just said, clients loved him.”

“As a builder, yes. But as a negotiator? Isn't it true that Mr. Waring is somewhat, shall we say, rigid? That he loses his temper when he doesn't get his way completely?”

“I like the give and take of negotiating, he likes building. So?”

“When Ted Waring left his wife, did he sleep in the office?”

“For a while, yes.”

“Would you say he was stable at that time?”

“He got his work done.”

“Didn't one client request that Mr. Waring be replaced on a building project because they found him too mercurial and temperamental?”

“You always get clients like that. It's the nature of the beast. So Ted didn't shave one day and this guy cops an attitude. Please.”

“Refresh my memory. It was Mr. Waring who abandoned Mrs. Waring and the children, was it not?”

“I don't know if I'd use the word abandoned. They were going through a rough spell.”

“A rough spell, yes, you could certainly call it that. During that time, did he, to your knowledge, make any attempts to reconcile with his wife?”

“I don't know.”

“You said that it was your impression he still loved his wife. Did he ever actually say that to you?”

“Not in so many words.”

“In any words, Mr. Freeman?”

“Men don't talk like that to each other,” he answered.

“Did he make any efforts to improve his relationship with his daughters?”

“He saw them every weekend.”

“While he was sleeping with other women like Lucy Abrams?”

Ted grunted in disgust, and the sound distracted Freeman for a second. “I don't know about that kind of stuff,” he said dismissively.

“You don't know about Ted Waring's personal life? I thought that was precisely what you just testified about.”

Freeman flushed with confusion and anger. He pulled once at the engraved silver buckle of his cowboy belt. “You know what I mean.”

“I'm not at all sure I do,” Reardon replied. “I have no further questions.”

 

T
ED SAT AT HIS KITCHEN COUNTER
on Friday evening with a sheaf of graph paper, a new Rapidograph, a compass, and a ruler. He pushed aside the drawings he had done the night before and started again.

Increasingly now, he thought of houses. During the interminable hours in the overheated courtroom, when his entire life seemed reduced to matters of procedure, protocol, through the mornings when he rose at five and could not get back to sleep, he found his hands forming lines and angles against his thigh, rectangles, squares.

There had been a time, before they moved into the house on Sycamore Street, when Ann and Ted had spoken, in the dreamy way of young couples, of building their own home—creating from scratch the rooms and the stairs and the hallways that would suit just them. It was not simply the lack of time or money or even confidence that prevented them in the end, though all were realistic enough impediments, but a more complicated riddle than that. For it soon became clear, if never quite articulated, that as much as Ted longed for fresh plans, fresh walls, Ann hungered most for an old house, for peeling paint and porticoes, for history, even if it was not her own. The very thing that so romanced her—who do you think lived here before us? were they happy? did they love each other? did they die here?—he found stifling. He yearned for a house that he and he alone defined, a house unscarred by other people's stories.

He erased the south wall, moved it down a half-inch.

He had never had a desire for land before, for ownership or vistas, and yet he found himself thinking now of the hills above the town, the narrow roads so treacherous to navigate in winter and mud season, of neighbors too far away to see, of boundaries and of fences and of distance.

He went back to the first drafting of the evening, an overview of the front of the house. Simple lines, clean lines. No arching windows or intricate trim or molding.

He had learned much from studying the architects' plans it was his job to fulfill—there is no one quite so critical of such schemes as the builder—and disdained the frills that so often impressed no one but the architect himself.

He had come to expect, too, the spasm of excitement as he watched the bulldozer break ground on the very first day, and the brief inevitable sadness and resentment that it was not his land, his house, his beginning.

He flipped the page and started designing the downstairs area—open space, southeast exposure, the stairwell in the very center of the floor plan. Upstairs, he would put two large bedrooms on either side of his, rooms that would suit the girls as they grew, hold them, with breathing room and walk-in closets and oversized windows, and they would all learn, like a dog with three legs, to walk again.

It was past 1:00
A.M
. when he opened a can of beer and put the drawings aside. He stood up, stretched, and got out another pad and a ballpoint pen. He began to make a neatly columned list of projected costs: lumber, window casings, doors, plumbing, wiring, cement for the foundation, labor. At the end, he subtracted the price he could realistically hope to get for the house on Sycamore Street.

Above all, Ted prided himself on practicality.

 

H
E WAS SLEEPING
, fully clothed, on the couch when the phone rang at six the next morning. He tumbled to the floor before he found the receiver.

“Daddy?”

He grunted, dry-mouthed.

“Daddy? Where are you?”

Ali, who had some understanding of the ongoing trial but not of its finer points, was certain that Ted could be taken away at any moment, that, waking one day, she would find that he, too, had vanished without a trace. Prison loomed a vague but colossal structure in the corner of her mind, ready to swallow him whole without warning. She had memorized his phone number as soon as he had given it to her—even then her need for placement, for tangible reassurance, was overwhelming—and was surprised and relieved each time he answered, “I'm here.”

“I'm here, sweetie.” He sat against the couch and brushed his hair off his forehead. He, too, was relieved to hear her voice, to receive these calls even at such odd intervals, the only moments, he imagined, that she could sneak away unsuspected.

Their conversations, short, stolen, had a soothing sense of repetition. She asked him each time what he was wearing, what he had eaten for breakfast, where, exactly, in the room he was standing, what he would do that day, at what time, with whom. And he asked her if she was doing her homework, and if she liked her teachers. They did not speak of prison, of the trial, of Julia, or of Ann.

“I'll tell you what,” Ted whispered now, though there was no one to hear, “this is what you do…”

Ali listened intently and nodded to the empty hallway.

Later that morning, Sandy sat on the couch with two newspapers spread across her lap. Though it was almost noon, her hair was uncombed, her wan face unwashed. Ali stood before her, wondering if perhaps she was sick. There were swollen purple circles beneath her eyes. “Is it okay if I go play at my friend Jackie Gerard's house?” she asked.

Sandy looked up distractedly. “Where does she live?”

“Three blocks away.”

“Okay. If you wait a minute, I'll walk you.”

“No, it's okay. I can go myself.”

“You'll be home by three o'clock?”

Ali nodded. She went and got her coat from the front-hall rack and left the house quietly, before Julia, still upstairs writing in her new diary, her hand cupped protectively about its pages, would notice. She walked three blocks and turned left at the corner.

Ted was waiting for her by the light, crouched over the steering wheel. When he saw her face, anxious and sweet with relief and apprehension, he reached over quickly and opened the car door. She slid in, close to him. He leaned down and kissed her temple, softly pulsing with a disturbing strawberry scent.

“Where to, my lovely? The opera? Or do you prefer the ballet this afternoon?”

“Daddy.”

“Daaaadddy,” he mimicked, and she laughed.

In fact, their options were limited. His apartment, and the restaurants and playgrounds in town, were all too public, too dangerous. Hardison had lately seemed to shrink around him, pressing him further and further in with its eyes and its tongues and its prejudices. All he needed was to be caught violating the restraining order. And though Ali didn't know of the legalities, she, too, understood that their meeting was somehow forbidden, secret. “Special,” he had told her. “Just for us.”

They drove out past the town's borders and headed up into the surrounding hills. Every now and then, they spotted cars with skis attached to the roof filled with laughing vacationers anxious only for snow. Ted cursed them as he passed.

He turned to Ali. “Look under the seat.”

She reached down and squeezed her arm beneath the springs, pulling out a flat package wrapped in shiny red-and-white-striped paper.

“What is it?”

“Open it and see.”

She carefully peeled open the paper and found three velvet ribbons, black and navy and white.

“I thought they'd look pretty in your hair.”

She held them, soft and rich, to her face. “Thanks.”

“Why, you're quite welcome, my dear.” This stilted parody of courtship was new, as if he realized that he was, in fact, trying to woo his daughter, win her, but could not do it without a self-conscious irony.

Ali lay the ribbons neatly across her lap. For the rest of the drive, she stroked them tenderly, her pets.

“So how are things going at the O.K. Corral?” Ted asked. He could not call it “home,” would never accept that place as his daughters' home.

“They're okay.”

“Okay at the O.K.?”

Ali groaned.

“Are they feeding you? Giving you light and water?”

“Dad.”

“I'm serious. How have you been, sweetie?”

She didn't answer. He looked over at her as he drove. All he could see was her head, bent to the ribbons, staring out the window.

“And Julia? How is Julia?”

“She's okay.”

“Do you talk to her?”

“Of course I talk to her.”

“I mean, about what happened.”

“No,” Ali answered carefully.

Ted nodded. “You know, if you have any questions, I'd be glad to answer them for you. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

She rotated slightly toward him. “Are we ever going to live with you again?”

“I hope so, honey. But it's not up to me.”

“Who is it up to?”

“It's up to the court. If they believe that it was an accident, then we can all be together again. You understand?”

Ali nodded.

Ted slowed as they came to a gentle rise of hill. He could just make out, nestled in the pines below its crest, the peaked roof of a house with smoke twining from its chimney. “Would you like to live up there?” he asked.

“You mean in that house?”

“No, not in that house. A new house. A house just for us. Wouldn't that be nice?”

“Why can't we just go home?”

“This will be better, you'll see. It will be our new home.”

“When?”

“As soon as this is all over, honey.”

Ali pressed her face to the window as they drove. “I have to get back,” she said quietly. “I promised Sandy.”