Gossip (12 page)

B
elinda, for all she was perfectly turned out, wasn't feeling well. I told her all the news I could think of from New York, and even had the rare pleasure of being able to talk about Gil and Althea. Her interest and sympathy were balm to my soul.

When the paddlers came back, Avis was glowing with pleasure. They had gone over to the yacht club moorings and peered at the visiting boats. Lunch was vintage grandmother food: clam chowder with oyster crackers, tomato sandwiches, and applesauce with ginger snaps for dessert, cooked and served by a chatty village woman named Ella. We ate at a glass table on the porch looking up the bay toward the Bass Harbor light.

Avis noticed how little Belinda ate; I watched her eyes. When we had finished, Avis asked Grace if she would take us to visit an old friend from Miss Pratt's who had a summer place nearby. I didn't know the woman, as she had graduated before I'd arrived, so suggested a game of Honeymoon Bridge with Belinda. But Belinda wanted a rest. I went along to the house on the Salt Pond, where Avis and I sat in lawn chairs with our hostess, Eleanor Applegate, kibitzing and talking about old school friends while Grace and Nick played a jolly game of croquet with the children of the house.

It meant the world to Avis to be with Grace and Nicky, watching them, laughing with them. But I knew that Dinah would have been out on the lawn with them, whacking away with her own croquet mallet, challenging the rules and playing to win. And when we were back at The Elms, saying our good-byes, with the
Carol Ann
waiting down at the dock, the formality between Grace and Avis was unchanged by any apparent warmth shared during the visit.

Avis was made very happy by the day, though, and Brian had had a fine time as well, shooting the breeze at Olive's Lunch, stocking up on fishing gear and automotive supplies. The bay had gone glassy and there was a tinge of pink on the water as the afternoon sun moved toward the wooded horizon. We waved to yachtsmen who waved back as they slipped silently along on the bay, sails almost limp, making for Dundee Harbor. When we rounded Bass Harbor Head into Brian's home waters, we helped him pull his lobster pots. I took the helm and did whatever I was told while Avis and Brian, in heavy rubber gloves, pulled the traps up onto the stern. Brian extracted the lobsters, measured them, threw back the undersized and the roe-bearing females, and pegged the claws of the keepers. Avis meanwhile rebaited the traps and threw them back into the water, keeping the buoys and toggles well away from the propeller. By the time we got back to the village wharf, Avis smelled as fishy as Brian did. The icing on the cake was that when Brian put us down at the wharf before going out to his mooring, we found ourselves surrounded by the matrons of the Garden Club of America, all decked out in their summer finest, waiting to board the ferry.
This
Avis was a person Grace didn't even know.

A
fter I left Avis, I stopped in Ellsworth to spend a night with my parents before catching my plane in Bangor. My father's luck, which had never been great, had run out some time before, and after a year of increasingly erratic behavior he had been diagnosed with dementia the previous winter. I'd been in touch, of course, and though at a distance had made some arrangements that helped with his care, but it was my two youngest siblings who lived close to home and did all the heavy lifting, especially my sister April and my younger brother's wife, June. (You can imagine for yourself the calendar jokes they get. They're fond of each other and often together, so they've heard them all.) My brother Tim is a fisherman, and June is a hairdresser, absolutely salt of the earth and extremely bright, but that didn't stop my mother making fun of her Down East accent.

Getting my father to stop driving had been the hardest part. June had been with him one day when he'd tried to turn off the ignition with the radio knob, yet the great State of Maine had allowed him to renew his driver's license. For a week, first my sister Sally from Portland, then Tim, then June, had wrested his keys from him, explaining to him that he had Alzheimer's disease, and that if he continued to drive with a diagnosis like that and he hurt someone, he could be sued for everything he had, right down to his underpants. The light of understanding would dawn, he'd begin to weep, then shocked and exhausted he'd have a nap, and when he woke up remember no word of the conversation. It was shattering. They had to go on breaking his heart at least once a day, for weeks.

I cooked supper for my parents and put the blueberry muffins into their freezer. They like to eat supper about 5:00
P.M.
, as most of their neighbors do. Dad went up to bed before it was dark, and Mother and I sat on the back porch in the twilight looking out over the unmown grass in the yard at the half-built catboat that had sat in a cradle there under a tarp since before I left for boarding school, waiting for my father to find time to finish it. The car was parked outside because the garage/shed was filled with a half-finished dollhouse, a bench strewn with tools for making picture frames he never got around to, a wooden canoe with a gash in it he'd bought but never mended, a riding mower with its engine in pieces, two no-longer-functional washing machines, and a lot of equipment for doing automotive bodywork, from a business he had half-finished starting.

I tried to talk with my mother about her trying to take all the care of my father herself, making the house a jail for both of them, and she, annoyed, made condescending remarks about my bone-dry spinster existence and how little I understood of the things in life that really matter. I thanked her for her interest and went up to bed.

B
elinda invited Avis and me to a literary luncheon at the Town Club that September. Avis and I both belonged to the Colony Club and enjoyed a gentle feigned rivalry with our Town Club friends, including Belinda. As you can imagine, this sort of thing was no part of my upbringing in Ellsworth, though I understood the Grange and the Odd Fellows. When I was young, clubs seemed to me to belong to the world of English novels, but with time one gets used to many things one never expected to. A club is a great organizing principle, a place where you have at least one thing in common with everyone you meet. It's a haven for those of us who sometimes have too much time on our hands, a party you don't have to plan. Not a home, but still a place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

I think Belinda had put together a table for this particular program more than anything else to please me, as the speaker was an author I revered. Having a half-hour gap between a medical appointment near the club and the time of the luncheon, I threw myself on the mercy of the door staff, who know me well. They allowed me to wait for Belinda upstairs where I could find a quiet corner to read my book instead of sitting in the little holding pen by the door where nonmembers are normally sequestered.

I chose a tall wing chair next to a window with my back to most of the room, thinking to be most private there. Instead, I found myself in earshot of a conversation that was certainly none of my business and was, besides, destructive of concentration. Two ladies I didn't know, who had apparently come from a club meeting of some sort, were discussing candidates for membership. Rising to change seats seemed wrong, as the talk was sufficiently indiscreet that we all would have been embarrassed, so I did my best instead to pay attention to the words on the page. I lost the battle, though, when I heard Dinah's name.

“Her proposer is a great friend of mine; believe me, I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't.”

“Well, you have to say more than that—the committee can't just table a nomination without a reason.”

“We can't say why in open meeting.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's hearsay. I can't
prove
anything.”

“Then tell
me
. If I take your point I'll vote with the rest of you, and you'll have a majority, no discussion needed.”

There was a silence.

“You have to swear you won't tell. And you can't ever say you heard it from me.”

“All right.”

“Were you in New York when she was writing that column, ‘Dinah Might'?”

“I loved that column.”

“Yes. But remember how suddenly it disappeared?”

A pause. “Did it?”

“Overnight. Yanked out of the paper by the roots.”

“All right. And . . . ? Now wait, she was going on maternity leave. My friend Elise knows her pretty well. Elise adores her.”

“She was caught extorting money from people in exchange for keeping their secrets out of the paper.”

“
Black
mail?”

Another pause.

Finally the shocked second speaker added, “
God,
that's ugly.”

“You see the point. If even here you had to worry that something you say is going to wind up in the paper or that she'd come asking to be paid not to . . .”

“Yes, but wait. Why isn't she in jail?”

“She made a deal. She's very well connected.”

“God.”

“Yes.”

I
barely heard the author's talk and was not good company at lunch. I was reeling and couldn't think what to do with what I'd heard. Should I speak to Belinda? How could I? It was so wrong of me to eavesdrop, and besides, it wasn't my club. Should I write an anonymous letter to the admissions committee? Of course not, only a bully or a coward writes an unsigned letter. I couldn't confide in Avis, in this case. It leaves such a taint in the mind to hear something like that about someone, confirmation
or
denial. Where was this coming from? Ultimately from Simon Snyder, of course. One should have expected it, though one hadn't. But how to counter such malignancy once it gets loose? No matter what, there will always be errant cells full of damage, lodged in unexpected places, not poisoning their hosts, innocent or not, but which will certainly poison
someone
as they spring unexpectedly to life and resume multiplying.

Simon had taken his time, but the trap he'd devised for Dinah was brilliant. She'd done a good thing for principled reasons, and she'd paid a high price at the time—she lost a job she really loved. If she tried to defend herself now, the only way to do it would be to expose the only people who knew for sure what had really happened. The gossip press would be on Serena Tate and the others like flies on a fresh kill, undoing the good thing she'd done in the first place. You can't get into an ink fight with the people who own the inkwell; it was Dinah who first told me that. I couldn't tell her, or anyone. By which, of course, I mean I told only Gil.

Chapter 13

T
hat was a terrible week, in spite of 2003 being one of the mildest and loveliest New York falls on record. The trees turned their leaves yellow and flipped them gently so they sparkled in the autumn sun, which delighted the eye and warmed the spirit. It stayed almost shirtsleeve weather, wonderful walking weather in a city of walkers, until deep into October. Central Park was in glory and I managed to have almost daily rambles there with Gil, in spite of the fact that Althea had not returned to Paris but instead had resumed residence in the Fifth Avenue apartment she had not shared with her husband since George left for boarding school. It was reckless of us to be so much together in public, virtually in Althea's front yard, but I was busy in the shop during business hours, and Gil was out escorting his wife in the evenings, so combining our constitutionals seemed the only way to manage. We could always claim to have fallen in together by chance.

We were so accustomed to talk over everything, to debrief each other on the mundane events of our days, that neither of us felt we could think clearly or quite fill our lungs if we were deprived of it. The summer had been a desert in that regard, and it had changed something in Gil. He was no longer willing to be hostage to appearances. What were the consequences at home, and there surely were some, we didn't discuss. Althea had the part of Gil she wanted, and I had the part I wanted. Not enough of it, but still. So many people have nothing.

There are few unmixed blessings in this wicked world, and the deep sorrow of that gorgeous fall, in addition to the ugly cloud of rumor shadowing Dinah, was that I finally understood that Belinda was beginning to die. We had grown close over the years, sharing talk about books and friends, Gil and Avis, and now Grace and Nicky. A mother is one thing, but a true friend of your parents' generation is something else, rare and enriching. I admired her and enjoyed her and felt privileged more than anything else when she called on me as if I were family. But I knew it boded ill.

Though she never telephoned me at the shop except to make or change an appointment, she called one morning in October on a cell phone, an appliance she had always deplored. She must have borrowed one from a nurse. She said, “Oh, Lovie, I am so sorry to bother you at work.” She talked as if my being at work was the same as it was for the head of a Fortune 500 company. “I'm not interrupting? I know how busy you are.”

“Things are very quiet this morning. How are you?”

“Well, that's the thing.” She paused, and in that gap I could hear how little she liked making this call. “I had a little procedure this morning, quite unexpectedly. It was nothing much, but they gave me quite a lot of”—here I heard her asking a question of someone else, then she resumed—“Demerol, it's called, and now they won't just hail a taxi and send me home to Ursula. They say I must have someone go with me.”

“I'd be delighted to see you home,” I said.

“Oh, Lovie. Really? I'm sure your schedule is chockablock.”

“There's nothing at all that Stephanie can't handle. Are you ready to leave now?”

There was another conference before she said, “They're just waiting for some blessed event in my lower intestines it seems, but they think I'll be ready in an hour.”

“An hour will be perfect. Are you sure you don't want me to come now, to keep you company?”

“No, it really is so good of you. Are you
sure
this isn't a terrible imposition?”

“Absolutely sure. Are you at New York Hospital?” I knew her internist practiced there, because he was mine as well.

“No, MSK. It's right across the street . . .”

I knew where it was, and my heart went cold. Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Cancer, of course. Belinda was giving me her room number.

M
rs. Binney's care partner is here,” said the nurse at the desk to another, who showed me to the curtained cubicle where Belinda, half upright in her hospital bed, was dozing. She looked beautiful in spite of wearing no makeup, but how had I failed to notice how thin she was? I took a chair by her side and removed my book from my handbag. Beside Belinda a screen monitored things I didn't want to think about. She woke when a nurse came in to check her readings and ask if she'd like something to eat. She wouldn't.

When the nurse had gone, Belinda said, “She's the most amazing woman. She's in the new production of
La Sonnambula
at the Met, which everyone is going to hate, very stark and modern. She's in the chorus. I can't wait to see it, she's going to take me backstage. Show me what you're reading.”

I showed her my book, a memoir by Mina Curtiss I'd tracked down with some difficulty. “I haven't read that in donkey's years,” she exclaimed, making it clear that she approved, and then somewhat inevitably, “Of course I knew Mina. They don't make them like that anymore.”

I helped her to gather her belongings and get her shoes on. She was wearing slacks, a surprise. I didn't know she owned any. In her tote bag she had books, a shawl, her makeup case, and her needlepoint, as if she'd grown accustomed to finding herself suddenly trapped here for days. As we walked gingerly to the elevator, three people we passed in the hall greeted her by name. “Good-bye, be good—we don't want to see you back here!” they cried affectionately.

Trust Belinda.

I
n the taxi, I was tongue-tied. I wanted to know what was wrong, how long she'd known, what the prognosis was. Did Avis know she was ill? I couldn't think of a way to ask any of this, a sure sign that Belinda didn't want to have that conversation.

“Hasn't it been the most marvelous weather,” she said, looking out the window with a kind of joy, and what could I do but agree? We talked about the golden light, about how we wished we could paint so we could capture it. Photographs of beauty are somehow
too
real; the more beautiful they are, the more they seemed clichéd or sentimental. “There was a book I used to read to Grace when she was small, about a squirrel who was scolded for not storing nuts in the fall like all the others. He just sat solemnly looking at the world, saying he was storing all the colors. And, of course, in the dead of winter, that turned out to be what was needed most.”

I insisted on seeing her up to her apartment, to be sure Ursula was ready for her. Then I went back to my own flat to call Avis. She was relieved that I knew at last.

A
vis asked me to talk to Grace. “You'll know what note to strike. I always get it wrong with her,” she said and seemed only to be expressing gratitude that I was willing, though she must have felt more than that. What could it be like to know you were the one person who couldn't seem to communicate with your only child, whom everyone else found so easy?

Grace met me at the zoo in Central Park, in the penguin house. Delight at the comedy and innocence of the world seemed the right base coat to lay down before the picture I had to paint for her. As we stood on the darkened walkway, looking into the lighted water world behind the glass, I couldn't help noticing that Grace took as much notice of the little boy beside her on his father's hip as she did of the animals. How well I remembered that time of life, when all strollers filled me with longing. I waited until we were out in the sun and walking toward the boat basin to ask her if she remembered the book about storing the colors.

“I
loved
that book,” she said. “I always wanted to take it home, but Belinda said it was important to have treasures you could only visit. Maybe she'll give it to me when
I
have children.”

“And will that be anytime soon?”

We walked in silence until she said, “That's the question, isn't it?”

“And what is the answer?”

“Well . . . your godson.”

“My godson. Yes?”

She bent to pick up a perfect yellow maple leaf that had been lying on the path like an upturned palm. “He's a bit of a Peter Pan, isn't he?”

“Nobody does it better.”

“True. But is he planning on making a career of it?”

“You tell me.”

“We love being together. We adore being together. We love all the same things, we make each other laugh, there's hardly ever a cross word between us.”

The way she said this last made me suddenly doubt that was quite the truth. That and the fact that only Dinah might have denied that Nicky's temper could take you by surprise.

“Hardly ever?”

We walked in quiet for a bit.

“What's the worst fight you ever had?” I asked her.

She didn't have to think very hard. “I threw out his old moccasins because I'd bought him new ones.” She didn't look as if it was an experience she wished to repeat.

“He said I shouldn't try to change him. He was enraged. But I wasn't trying to change him, I was trying to please him!”

“He's always hated change,” I said carefully. “It's why his parents' breakup was so hard on him.” Which it had been, much more than for RJ, who had his sports and his cheerful mob of friends who were somehow less complicated than the people and things that interested Nicky. I once had quite a quarrel with Nick myself about whether or not divorce should be illegal. I couldn't get him to see it from any point of view except his own. He was about fourteen at the time.

“I don't care if he goes around in tatters if he wants to. Lovie, he even gets along with my mother!”

“I hear a ‘but' coming.”

“But we don't seem to be going anywhere.”

“You mean he doesn't talk about marriage.”

That was what she meant. “It's not just that he doesn't propose, we don't even talk about it. If I say anything about the future, a future together, children, where we might like to live, he changes the subject. He tickles me or takes my hat and makes me chase him.” It was true, they were like a pair of puppies together, tumbling and playing. It looked adorable, but even puppies grow up.

Grace asked, “There isn't anything I don't know, is there?”

I sincerely hoped not. “Like what?”

“Some old flame he isn't really over?”

I said I didn't think so.

“Is he one of those dread ‘fear of commitment' types, then?”

“I'd put it another way. Nicky has always been committed to the way things are. A capacity to be content with what is, rather than always wanting something else, is not all bad. At least he's loving. There are worse things.”

She agreed.

“However, change is sometimes thrust upon us,” I said, and began to explain why time was entering the equation.

There had been a tumor. There had been surgery, completely successful, three years ago, followed by radiation. Belinda had been free of disease since then, but it was back now with a vengeance. Chemotherapy was an option if she could recover her strength, but for now she was subject to infections that were at least as likely to kill her as the cancer was. Grace's first reaction was to cry. But her second, predictably, was to be angry at Avis.

“Why didn't Mother tell me?”

“Belinda asked her not to.”

“She should have told me anyway!”

I thought Avis had been right to respect Belinda's wishes, but I wished she had told me as well, so I sympathized with Grace without agreeing.

“The point now though is, if you and Nicky are going to do something, wouldn't it be nice for Belinda to be able to share it?”

She agreed. It would.

N
icky must have taken it well, because two days later, he asked Dinah for the engagement ring his father had given her, which had been in a safe-deposit box since the divorce. On the weekend, in the gondola in Central Park, he asked Grace to marry him. They arrived at Dinah's apartment on foot afterward, flushed and happy, to tell their news. Finding us both there with a celebratory dinner waiting, Grace said to Nicky, “Oh, you mean thing, you told your mother before you told me?”

Nicky laughed, and Dinah opened champagne.

As we settled around the fire after dinner, I finally said, “Darling girl, you really have to call your mother.”

Grace made a face. “I know, but you know what she'll be like.”

“No, I don't.”

“She'll say how wonderful and then get out her calendar and want to set dates and call caterers.”

“If she does, you know it's only because she wants to make it perfect for you.”

“But why doesn't she just say she's happy for me, and let Nicky and me decide what
we
want?”

“She might. Give her a chance.”

Grace and Nicky were sitting together in the huge overstuffed chair by the fireplace, with Grace's legs across Nicky's and her head on his shoulder. Dinah sat across from them in her own big chair filled with pillows, and I sat beside her on a leather ottoman. It may actually have been a tuffet. I got up and brought the cordless phone from the kitchen and handed it to Grace.

Grace and Nicky looked at each other. He kissed her on the nose, and she started laughing. “Oh, all
right,
” she said.

“No, let me!” said Nicky. Grace punched in the number and handed him the phone.

“Hello, Mrs. Metcalf? This is Nicholas Wainwright . . . Yes. I'm sorry to call so late . . . Good. I would like to ask you for your daughter's hand in marriage. And her foot. All of her, really.” There was a longish pause, during which Nicky listened and beamed. Then he covered the receiver and said to us solemnly, “She says yes.” On the other end Avis was speaking again. “Yes, Mrs. Metcalf . . . well then yes, thank you, Avis. You've made me a very happy man. Yes, she's right here.” He handed the receiver to Grace.

“Hello, Mother,” she said. “This afternoon, in the park . . . In the gondola . . . Yes, very romantic . . . No, there was water in the bottom and he's wearing his good pants . . . yes . . . No. We have no idea, spring sounds lovely, or possibly winter. Or fall.”