All of Us and Everything (10 page)

Her daughters would be home soon.

Augusta stared at the box delivered by Herc Huckley's son. It sat on the middle of her bed. Its lid still in place.

She couldn't keep it in the closet behind the quilts. It seemed to be pounding like the heart hidden under the floorboards in that Poe story.

But she couldn't quite open it either. She remembered all the things she'd given up, and all the things she'd gotten because of her chance encounter with Nick Flemming.

After the night of the snowstorm, Augusta broke things off with Max Stern, sitting side by side on a sofa in his mother's living room. She opted for the version of her speech that was less treatise and more a gentle letting-down. He didn't seem to mind being let down. In fact, she thought that Max might have even admired her a little. He said, “Well, that's okay. I think a girl like you's got bigger fish to fry.”

She assured him that she simply wasn't ready to settle down. Max surely was. Within three months, Augusta read his engagement announcement in the newspaper.

Later, on the phone, her mother said, “One day you'll be tired of that office and you'll wish you were home in a house paid for by a dentist.”

Her father, on the other hand, liked the idea of an old maid. “You'll take care of us when we're old.”

She had no intention of doing this. In fact, after the breakup she felt relief that she wasn't going to have to take care of Max Stern, as her mother had done for her father.

She didn't want to tell her parents that she was dating a law student. She knew the relationship wouldn't last. Why get her parents' hopes up?

One night walking home from seeing
West Side Story
for the third time, she told Nick what she thought of marriage.

“Interesting on a philosophical level,” Nick said. “But I still don't know what you think about marrying
me.
”

She loved him. He made her ache. She wanted to spend her life with him. But still, hadn't her parents been in love once? She said, “Are you proposing?”

“Should I?”

After that, he did propose a number of times, but never very seriously. Once she had whipped cream on her nose and as he wiped it off with his finger, he said, “I want to marry you, Augusta Rockwell.”

Another time, he curled to her back and whispered into her hair, “I want to take you for my wife,” as he was falling asleep. It reminded her of the old nursery rhyme “The Farmer in the Dell,” where the farmer takes a wife, the farmer takes a wife, hi-ho the darrio the farmer takes a wife.

Was he serious? No, she couldn't let herself believe that he was. They didn't have sex, but it was all so passionate that she had to assume this wasn't a confession as much as just getting caught up in the lustfulness of it all. Although she feared sex might burden her heart—rheumatically and romantically, she'd wanted to give in. It was Nick who said they should stop. In retrospect, she realized that he might have already been recruited.

In fact, when he talked her out of having sex with him that summer, it was an ending, though she wouldn't see that for a long time.

He was living in a large rooming house that he and his friends had rented out together. It had a shabby clay tennis court and leafy pool that they didn't know how to take care of. It had been a near-mansion at some point and now it was a rental—cheap, when split among them.

She remembered it all vividly. Herc had been the one to answer the door when she knocked. He told her to come in and get out of the heat. The old house was airy, shadowed, and cool with a wealthy dampness.

The drunken meetings of The Amateur Assassins Club were held in the dining room and weren't secret at all. In fact, the club was a point of pride. People who walked into the old house were often asked to add a target name to the list. There were great late-night drunken arguments about the best means to get in close. For patriotic reasons, there were a lot of communists on the list, but overall it wasn't personal.

As Herc took her through the dining room to the backyard where he'd last seen Nick, she passed the corkboard with magazine clippings of a few famous foreign dignitaries stuck to it. Augusta noticed that someone had added a clipping of a downtown bank.

“What's this?” she said.

“Nick's gotten bored. He wants to include fake bank robberies,” Herc told her. “He wants to make two teams. Each would case the banks, work out the details of the perfect heist, present them to the group as a whole. The one with the best chance of success would win. We'd get a panel of judges. Do you want in? You seem practical and, I don't know, more like one of us or something, not like some of the other girls.”

It was supposed to be a compliment. She knew what he meant; Augusta had never really hit it off with women. She usually just didn't know what stories to tell and when. She'd say something and the other women would stare at her. She wasn't sure if it was her timing or her content, but she was always slightly off. “You'd have to change your name—The Amateur Assassins and Bank Robbers Club.”

“Pisky's saying no to the whole thing so I don't know if it'll happen.” Joel Abbington was nicknamed Pisky because his father was an Episcopalian minister who came from family money and was the one who bankrolled their parties. “He thinks bank robberies are classless. He wants to go into high art theft, if anything.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, some of us have to study.” Herc wasn't as smart as the others—or at least didn't seem to think he was. He took everything more seriously.

He opened the back door. Nick was bent over a hose, untangling it to water the courts. “Nick!” Herc called out.

Nick looked up, saw Augusta, and waved.

Augusta's stomach flitted. She tried to smile. She'd shown up, having made the decision to give herself to him wholly.

Herc ducked back into the house. Nick was wearing shorts and tennis shoes. She'd worried over whether to wear Bermuda shorts or a dress. She'd opted for the dress and now it felt too formal. He said, “Tennis later?” They'd never played together before. “I bet you have a vicious serve.”

She walked to him quickly. “Let's go to your room.”

He straightened up. “What was that?”

She smiled.

They scuttled up the butler's stairs to his room. But as he started to kiss her and then fumble with the buttons on her dress, he stopped abruptly, like a voice had shouted at him in his own head.

Already a little breathless, they lay together in the bed, still dressed. He said all the right things. “We'll get married first. I'll finish up as fast as I can here. We'll get a little place. A walk-up. Maybe out in Alexandria. I'll meet your parents. You'll meet mine—a little uptight but they'll be relieved to see me settle down. We'll have a wedding, something small…We'll start a family.”

And she said, “This is what marriage is about, really. Not love, but family.”

“It's about love,” he said. “I love you.”

She wasn't her mother. He wasn't her father. They would become a family. They could get married and still be who they were, still love each other.

But a few days later, they were supposed to meet at a little restaurant near her office just after work. And he never showed up.

As she was paying the bill at the counter, Herc Huckley appeared. He was pink from having hurried there. He wiped his forehead with a hankie that he tucked into his back pocket.

“Herc,” she said quickly, “is Nick okay?” She was afraid he'd come to deliver some tragic news.

“He's gone.”

She spread her hand on the glass countertop. “Dead?”

Herc reached out and touched her elbow. “No, no. He left.”

“What do you mean?” She started to feel a very new kind of anger.

“He packed up. Nothing's left.”

“Why are you here then?” The anger made her feel incredibly powerful.

“He left me a note. He told me to come here and tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

Herc looked around the small lunchroom—bustling waiters, people talking, eating, the clinking of silverware and glasses, all of it doubled by a bank of mirrors on one side. “He wanted me to…”

“Look, Herc. Forget it.” She folded her receipt and tucked it in her change purse, snapping it shut. “You're not his errand boy.” She walked out of the restaurant then. Her eyes stung from the sidewalk's bright glare. She was furious. She worried she might throw up. She smoothed the tight fit of her dress against her ribs.

Herc was there at her side again. “But maybe you shouldn't take it too personally. I mean, he abandoned everything important to him.”

“This is more personal than you can imagine.”

“He got a call.”

“From whom?”

“One of the biggies. CIA or FBI or NSA. I don't know which one. He made an application. He's been up for the most elite corps, I think. He told me he couldn't ever be a good husband. He fell in love with you that night, but he also fell in love with assassinating some prime minister of some country in the Western Hemisphere in the men's lavatory.”

“And he's choosing
that
over me?”

He squinted up at the sky. “You can stop him if you want.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's a series of interviews. They've called me up. I'm on the list. Only you and I know about, well, his relationship with you. His promise.”

So Nick told Herc that he'd proposed. “What promise?” She scavenged her purse for a mint.

“You can get him bounced out or maybe rerouted to something safer, I think.”

She looked at the restaurant's plate-glass window. Normal people, doing normal things. “No,” she said. “He's right. He'd be a lousy husband.”

“I want to help.” Herc pressed his lips together and nodded quickly. “Let me know if there's anything I can do,” he said. “Now or in the future. I'm here for you. I mean it. Anything.” He looked at her gravely. He was saying he'd step in, wasn't he? Was she so fragile that he thought she'd die without a husband? It was so chivalrous, she couldn't bear it.

“I have to go.”

“I hope I see you again.” He looked at her with great hope in his eyes.

“I don't know how we'd ever cross paths again,” she said. “I don't even want to know if he comes back. Okay? If you see him again, tell him that I want nothing from him. Nothing at all.”

He stepped back. “Okay.”

And with that, she started walking down the street—in the wrong direction, but she kept going, her reflection flashing beside her in a series of plate-glass storefronts. She didn't believe in marriage but still found herself thinking that she couldn't go back and renegotiate with Max Stern. He was already taken. Lloyd Bartel was dating someone in the secretarial pool. Herc wouldn't work because it felt like Nick was manipulating her life. Had he sent Herc as some kind of backup?

Her parents had been delighted when she'd told them she was getting married, so deeply relieved. She realized that she'd actually wanted to make them happy. But now she'd return to her life. Even though she came from a family of the sea-profiteers, war-profiteers, greed-profiteers and she didn't really have to work—she wanted to.

In a few blocks, she stopped at an ice cream truck, ordered an elaborate triple-scoop cone. She took two small bites then threw it in a trash can.

She would never give in to a man again. That was it. This wouldn't just be the end of Nick Flemming. It would be the end of all men in her life. She decided to close up shop, emotionally.

Of course that wasn't the end of Nick Flemming.

Not at all.

Four months later, he showed up at her apartment while she was packing to head back to New Jersey. Her father had died—an aneurysm that took him immediately. Her mother was ill.