Inheritance (21 page)

"I thought you must be melting," Allison said.

"I am." Laura dropped the robe and, with Paul's arm around her, took Owen's hands as he held them out to her. "I'm so glad you were here."

Inheritance

*n

'How could I miss it? You were my pupil at home before you ever came to the university. Do you know Jules wanted to come today? I had to tell him you could only get three tickets."

"He really wanted to come?"

"He wanted to take credit for you; he thinks he*s taught you more than your professors have."

"He's right. But you've taught me more than anyone."

Owen chuckled. "I won't tell Jules you said that." He reached into his pocket and took out a small velvet drawstring bag. "Your graduation gift, my dear. With my love."

Laura pulled the tiny cord to open the bag. Her fingers felt die cool metal and the sharp point of a pin before she took out a piece of jewelry and held it in the palm of her hand. It was a single iris of blue-violet opal with a gold center. She gazed at it for a long moment, then looked up at Owen, her face glowing. "Was it Iris's?"

He nodded. "I had it made for her on our first anniversary. It was very special to her."

Laura put her arms around him and kissed him. 'Thank you, thank you . . . it's very special to m^ . . . how can I tell you—r

"You don't have to. I saw it in your face." He held her away from him. "And you looked so much like her, excited and full of wonder . . . Well, now. Time for you to go. Allison is driving me home; you and Paul go off on your honeymoon." At her startled look, he struck his fist against his fiDcehead. "Vacation. I meant to say vacation. Go on, now; you*ve worked hard; you deserve some play." He held her close. "Fm very proud of you, my dear."

Laura kissed him again. His (looping mustache was feath-ery against her cheek, and it strack her Ifaat Owen had aged. She*d been so preoccupied in the past weeks with final papers and exams and keeping up with her job that she hadn't really locdced at him; now she thought he looked almost ethereal. His cheeks were more sunken than she remembered, and his face was crinkled with webs of fine lines, like ancient pardmient. His eyes were as bright as ever, but they seemed moie deep-set. Us diick eyebrows overhanging ttusm like wild grass on bbaSs on the C^. He's eighty-three, but he*s never seemed

Judith Michael

old; he isn't old, not really; he has so much vitality. "Are you all right?" she asked him.

"I'm fine; why shouldn't I be?" He put on a scowl. "I mixed up a couple of words; that doesn't mean I'm falling apart. It's hot, that's the problem, and you're keeping me here in the sun when Allison and I could be eating lunch. I thought you were in a hurry."

"Good-bye," Laura said softly. "Don't try to be fierce with me; I'm not fooled." She took Paul's arm. "We've been dismissed."

"About time," he said with a grin, and they left Owen and Allison standing together as they walked through the tunnel beneath the stands and out onto the street. "I want to make love to you," Paul said conversationally as they reached his car in the next block.

"Here?" she asked. "Or shall we stop at a more private gas station along the way?"

He laughed and they kissed in the front seat. "If those are the only choices, I prefer your cottage at the Cape. Would you be willing to wait a couple of hours?"

"I would always wait for you," Laura said, her voice low, and he glanced at her quickly before turning onto Commonwealth Avenue and driving toward the turnpike.

They had learned to be leisurely in their lovemaking. After the storms of their first weeks together, when it seemed they could never satisfy their hunger, they began to come together more slowly. And when they could stay together for the whole night, they took even longer, talking as they caressed and laughing together, even as their passion grew. When they finally fell asleep, their hands were clasped between them, and in the first moments of waking, before opening their eyes, they turned to each other and lay fiill length together, encircled tightly in each other's arms. Their legs were twined, her lips against his chest, his on her forehead, as they slowly came awake to the ligiit in the room and the small, fluttering movements of their bodies. Each morning they held each other for a long quiet time, drifting in warm silent closeness until desire flickered and then grew, like a small ripple far out in the ocean that gathers force and becomes, at last, a thundering wave. And as desire built they moved even more slowly,

I

Inheritance

learning to hold back, to find new forms of pleasure, to draw arousal out like the long ripple moving to shore until passion overtook them, and together, one voice, one heart, they rode it to its crest, and together drifted back to the somnolent embrace in which they had begun.

In Osterville, they had the sunmier compound to themselves; they almost had Cape Cod to themselves, since few visitors came in May. They spent the days out of doors, sailing on the sun-sparkled water, picnicking in cool pine forests, chmbing barefoot in the sand dunes, leaving footprints that overlapped as they walked closely, hand in hand. And they walked by moonlight along the beach, laughing at the clownish gait of sandpipers hopping just ahead of them, and speculating about the long-ago women who had paced the widow's walks atop gray shingled houses overlooking the sea, waitmg for their husbands, the whaling captains who had gone to seek the ocean's riches and instead were taken by the ocean to invisible graves.

*Two weeks," Paul said on their last day. "Not enough. Let's extend it; we need at least another month to ourselves."

Laura buttoned her shirt. "I wish we could. But what excuse do I give Jules for not being there first thing tomorrow morning?"

"I'll call and tell him his chief assistant concierge has been kidnapped." He swept her long hair to the side and kissed the back of her neck. "I'll say I need her to help me clear the dinner dishes because it's not right to leave them until morning."

Laura laughed and reached for her hiking shoes. "Jules would say you're mad. He doesn't clear the table at his house."

"And if I tell him I dry while you wash?"

"He'd say that isn't man's work."

"Well, it shouldn't be yours, either, while you're working full-time. We'll need at least two maids to run our house."

Laura's fingers stilled, then, slowly, she resumed tying her shoes. "I couldn't tell a maid what to do," she said hghtly. "I've never had one."

"I have. I'll lay down the law and all you have to do is give praise when it's due. A perfect partnership."

Judith Michael

She gave a small smile. "It sounds like it."

"Of course, it depends on where we're living." Paul was bent over, tying his boots. "If we stay in Boston, Mother or Leni will find us the perfect maids who already know everything, and we won't have to worry. Or Rosa will send over one of her dozen or so nieces to take charge of our household. If we're not in Boston, then we're on our own. Do you think we should stay in Boston?"

"But Owen— " Laura's heart was racing and the words caught in her throat. "Don't you remember I told you Owen may want me in Chicago?"

"Is that definite? When?"

"Not for a while, I think. I'll stay with Jules until . . . until something is settled."

"Well, it doesn't matter, we can live very well in Chicago. I have friends there; you'll like them. I'll be one of those husbands who happily follows his wife from job to job and greets her at the door every night with a martini. But you don't drink martinis."

"No." Laura's throat was choked. "But if yoa could find a nice red wine ..." Tears stopped her and she turned away, blindly reaching for a tissue.

"My God, what have I said?" Paul got to the box before she did and wiped her eyes. "You don't want me in Chicago? You don't want me at all? For God's sake, why would this make you cry? It all seems so natural—"

"Oh, hush," she said. "Please stop talking. Of course I want you in Chicago. I want you anywhere. I don't know why I'm crying—"

Paul kissed her, and then they held each other for a long time, while her heart slowed. And she felt his slow, too. *This was all serious," she said, drawing back to look at him.

"Did you doubt it? Of course it's serious; it's the most serious thing I've ever done. I should have done it long ago; I've loved you for so long I can't remember what it's like not loving you. But why would I want to remember? I'll never have to live that way again."

"No. We'll always be together." She put her head on his shoulder, feeling the sinewy muscles of his arms beneath her hands. It was all right now. Everything was all right.

Inheritance

She was safe.

They stood quietly until Paul tilted up her face. "Laura, my love, what arc you thinking about?"

"Owen," she said with a small smile. "I asked him once how he proposed to Iris, and he said he didn't, really; one night they just found themselves talking about where they would live."

"Did he? I never heard that. But Rosa always said they were perfect together. Now she'll have us to talk about. And she can make our wedding cake; ever since I finished college she's told me she's been waiting to make one, whenever I decide to settle down. Is next week all right—here at the Cape? There's a wonderful old church in East Dennis; I always thought I'd like to be married there. And I'd like the family to be with us. You would, too, wouldn't you? It will make it seem more official."

Laura's words were soft. "Of course I would. And next week would be wonderful."

But Leni declared it impossible. She needed time to make a proper wedding; it would have to be in August. In private, she told Owen she had serious doubts about the whole affair. 'They're so very different, their backgrounds are different, Laura has no money at all and Paul doesn't even know what it is to woiic, and whatever she earns will always seem like pin money next to his fortune— **

"It's the best thing that could happen," Owen said firmly, omitting all mention of his warnings to Laura the year before. "Leni, this girl has made the past years a joy for me, and she's going to make her mark in the hotels; you just wait and see what she and I are cooking up. And look at Paul; have you ever seen him stay with one woman or in one place for so long and so happily? And Allison says she feels as if they're sisters. My God, if Laura weren't marrying into the family we'd have to adopt her!"

Leni smiled. "She's delightful, I don't deny it, and I'm very fond of her; I just don't know what to predict with the two of them."

"How were your predictions when you married Felix?"

"Wrong," she said briefly. "And that reminds me. Felix is extremely angry; he says Laura is a fortune hunter. That's why I'm giving them a splendid wedding."

Judith Michael

Owen chuckled, but when she had left, his eyes grew somber. I'm eighty-three, he thought, and, no question about it, a little more shaky than I used to be. I have one of the world's great hotel chains and two sons. But—

What does a man do with the work of a lifetime when he doesn't like what his sons have become?

There was no one he could talk to; the only confidante he was comfortable with was Laura, and he couldn't bring her into this. Nor anyone else. He had to woric it out alone.

He sat in his library through the early part of June while the family prepared to leave for the Cape. Often he saw the sunrise; he slept badly and would leave his bed to sit in the high-backed leather chair in his library and watch the stars or the setting of the crescent moon. In the afternoons, he would doze in the same chair and waken when he heard Laura come in from work. But mostly those days he wrote, filling page after page with his bold, sloping handwriting, summarizing the plans for his hotels he and Laura were working on. He had thought about them for years without any sense of urgency; now he knew the project had become a way of saying he wasn't really old, wasn't anywhere near death. How could anyone be close to death when he was making such grand, far-reaching plans?

"Nearly done," he said on a Friday evening when Laura sat across from him at his desk. It was a massive two-sided piece of furniture made by Chippendale the Younger in 1804. Leni had bought it for Owen years before, envisioning Felix and his father sitting cozily across from one another, working together. But it was Laura who sat there; Felix had taken advantage of the double width only a few times and not at all after Owen retired. Owen had thought of giving the desk to Thomas, who admired it, especi^y after he discovered a flaw in it: there was a crack in the wood behind one of the drawers where papers got stuck and seemed to disappear forever when the drawer was too full. But he didn't want to hurt Leni and the crack wasn't serious; he just used other drawers. Later he was glad he had kept the desk. Some of his happiest times came when he and Laura faced each other across its gleaming mahogany, each having what amounted to a full desk with drawers and cabinet doors flanking the kneehole opening that went through from one side to the other.

Inheritance

"Nearly done," he repeated with satisfaction, handing four manila folders across the desk. "New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington. We'll keep them separate for now, for accounting purposes, so we know what each of them costs to renovate and fiimish, but we'll buy for all four when we purchase supplies."

Laura nodded, feeling little jolts of pleasure every time Owen said "we," making her part of every step in the plans for restoring his hotels.

"Of course we'll begin with Chicago," he said, "since that's the one you'll manage."

"If I'm ready."

"You will be. My dear, you learn more quickly than anyone I've ever known, and you have at least another year to prepare. You'll be far more ready than most managers; my God, Willard Payne was a bellhop straight out of high school when I bought the Philadelphia hotel fifty-odd years ago, and he got to be manager just by outliving everybody else. Of course the hotel was fading by then; we were so busy buying new ones, building new ones, expanding to other countries ... I let those old ones slip badly, I fear. And then none of the young hotshot managers wanted them; they wanted the glamorous modem ones." He paused. "You see, FeUx is right in a way. Everyone does want only the most up-to-date of the important things. We'll find guests who like my kind of antique charm, but every one of them will demand modem plumbing and television and this new beeper system I understand they're putting in some of the Hyatts. So we have to give them both. Yesterday and today."