Off Season (29 page)

“Actually, Lilly had a real proficiency for gymnastics,” he said, not to Cam but to Tatty. “She was light and flexible with extremely good balance, and she loved the high bar and the trapezes. She was totally without fear, if I recall.”

That sounded strange to my ears. Had I ever been without fear? I could scarcely remember a time I hadn’t attempted to drown it in water.

“Do you-all still do it?” Cam asked.

“Oh, no. I think I’m quite past it, and of course Lilly found swimming. She has little time for anything else.”

“I’d love to see it,” Cam said, smiling at my father. “Would that be possible?”

My father’s sandy brows knit. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “The place is bound to be a mess; I don’t think anyone’s been—”

“Oh, let Lilly show him, George,” Aunt Tatty said lazily, smiling at my father. “I expect he’s seen a dirty basement before.”

She looked pretty in the firelight, as she often did nowadays. I wondered how she was doing it. Charlotte was at college, and she had all day to choose dresses and practice makeup.

“I always thought basements were supposed to be dirty,” Cam said. “I’ve never seen a clean one. You should see ours. My father sometimes puts the whole pack of hunting dogs down there when it is cold.”

“Don’t be long,” my father said as we went out into the hall where the stairway from the basement opened. “Dinner in a few minutes, I think.”

As we opened the door to the stairs I heard Tatty say, “At least half an hour. Honestly, George. Sometimes I wonder why Mr. McCall bothers to call on Lilly at all.”

We could not hear my father’s reply. I looked at Cam, who was grinning evilly.

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” he said, and we went down into the dusty darkness.

The basement was pale and musty and yellow-lit by the only light fixture that still worked, the hanging bulb over the big balance bars. It could not have been more than forty watts. The room smelled of mold and dust and stale sweat that wafted from the floor mats and the pile of soiled white towels in the corner.

“Ughh,” I said. “I didn’t realize nobody had been down here in so long. I think the last time it was used my father came down here on the afternoon of my mother’s memorial service.”

I stopped. It sounded, simply, sad and tawdry. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I reached up and laid mine over it.

“It used to be bright and clean and sort of airy,” I said. “It was fun to be down here. We played records, and we worked hard, and Mother brought lemonade down.”

“If you could do these, you must have been really something. When did you give it up for swimming?”

“I don’t quite remember. Once I thought people had always been able to fly and some could still if they tried hard enough. I wanted to fly more than anything. But then, I guess I got good at underwater swimming, and it felt sort of right to be down there.”

I didn’t tell about the diving suit and the helmet, not then. My family was eccentric enough as it was.

“What were you so afraid of?” he whispered into my hair.

A great salt lump bloomed in my throat, and tears prickled behind my closed lids.

“I was afraid of everything,” I mumbled.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore,” he said, and turned my face to his and kissed me. At first it was a soft and questioning kiss, and then something turned over in my stomach like a little leaping fish, and I put my arms around him and pulled his head down to mine, and the kiss exploded.

When he let me go, I was trembling all over, and he was breathing as if he had run a race.

“Not bad for a first kiss,” he said, smoothing my hair back from my flushed face.

“Who said it was a first?” I whispered, starting to pull his face down to mine again. I wanted more, I wanted him to kiss me forever, there in that dim, rancid basement.

“I meant for us,” he said, and removed my arms from around his neck gently.

Little do you know,
I thought, and wondered where on earth my response had come from. I had assumed you had to practice kissing for a long time before you got good at it. Could it be some genetic legacy, perhaps, from my mother?

“Well, it’s apt to be the last,” he said, pointing at the heating duct that opened over our heads. Listening, I could hear Aunt Tatty’s voice in its familiar lecture mode.

“I asked Quentin Savage, you know, who handled all our affairs at the bank, what he knew about him . . . probably billions, but nobody really knows . . . private bank . . . she’s spent the fortune on primping the place up, but I think she’s got her own gardening and household account. None of it’s hers, of course. . . . Was a girl he met on the Jersey Shore when he was home on leave from the war . . . very beautiful, of course, but New Jersey?”

I opened my mouth in anger, but Cam put his hand over it.

“. . . young man has his own trust fund from his grandmother, who I hear can’t stand Patty Ann—
Patty Ann
, did you ever?—rich in his own right, and will undoubtedly inherit. There’s only his older sister, and she married a Maryland Carroll and doesn’t need a
sou
from Papa . . .”

I snorted with fury and jerked Cam’s hand away. He put it back.

“If we can hear them they can hear us,” he said, grinning widely.

At that moment my father called loudly, “Lilly! Dinner’s ready. Come on up now.”

At dinner, Aunt Tatty chatted easily with Cam, but I was stricken to stone with embarrassment, and my father seemed lost in his own thoughts.

After dinner I walked Cam out onto the porch. The Porsche sat like a carbuncle beside Aunt Tatty’s elegant new Mercedes.

“You really want to go to that thing at the Phillips?” Cam asked, pressing a kiss on my cheek quickly and primly. “We never just sit somewhere and drink coffee and talk. Let’s skip the opening and say we saw it. I’ll take you to Martin’s.”

“Okay,” I said, agreeing to betray as easily as I might accept another piece of toast. “Do you think you might kiss me again?”

He laughed. “Don’t you know the guy is supposed to ask that? Of course I will. So much, in fact, that we may come home having not said a word, with red hickeys all over us. That ought to seal my fate with your father.”

“I’m not sure my father knows what a hickey is,” I said seriously.

“Cut the man some slack, Lilly,” Cam said. “He was young once. He isn’t old now. What do you think he and your mother did before they were married? She was spectacular, if she looked like her portrait. And he was a good-looking young man. I don’t think they played canasta all the time, do you?”

“I guess not.” At the thought of it, my chest tightened and my face burned. Why had I never thought of them that way before? I had certainly seen my mother in her Jeanne Moreau striped sailor’s jersey mode up at Edgewater when I was a child. It was easy to see, even then, that other men wanted her. Of course my father would have, too. Then he was lithe and daring and laughing. I supposed I had forgotten that. I had not seen him so in a long time.

So we skipped the Phillips. Cam ran in and got a program, and then we went to Martin’s on Wisconsin Avenue, a tavern with a storied reputation in which, I was sure, my father had never set foot. Once there, I could not imagine why. True, people were drinking and smoking and laughing, but I had often seen a lot more drinking at the Chevy Chase Club. We drank coffee and we talked. We talked endlessly. Of course we kissed, too, later—desperately, gasping, in the car before he took me home—but mostly we talked and we talked and we talked. I don’t even remember now what we talked about that first evening, but on all the following nights that summer and into the fall, we talked about almost everything we had ever done, or been, or thought, or remembered, or hoped, or loved, or hated. Talk spilled out of us like mercury from a broken thermometer. And with each evening we spent so, when we felt that we could get away with bypassing this event or that, or when I was supposed to be in the library, I came home feeling light and easy and somehow wanted, included, in a world larger than Cam’s and mine. It was as if a huge burden of unsaid words had clogged my throat and weighted me down for a very long time, and, evening after evening, the heaviness flooded away and I walked more lightly.

The humid, breath-sucking Washington summer passed, and we talked. He labored along with his crew on the new buildings he was doing for his grandmother at McCall’s Point, but at night he came and we talked. I wanted to see the house, or at least some drawings, blueprints, elevations, but he would not show them to me.

“Not till it’s done,” he said. “Probably in early October. I’ve got a good crew, and good subs, for once. I want you to see what it means, and that won’t be really clear until it’s up and comfortable in its site. Then you’ll be the first to see it—after Grandmother, of course.”

“You talk like you’ve been building forever,” I said. “And you just passed your boards in May. Does it feel, you know, strange, to be actually doing what you’ve studied so long for?”

“No,” he said. “It feels just like I knew it would. In my mind I’ve built every project we had in school, board by nail by stone. Sometimes I’m still surprised they aren’t standing somewhere so that I can go and see them, see how it is for the people who actually live in them or work in them.”

“I can’t imagine being so sure of myself,” I said honestly. “Or having some talent that I felt so sure of.”

“Not even swimming?”

“I don’t even want to swim anymore, Cam. Not underwater, not competitively. I don’t need it anymore. It’s air I need now.”

“Anymore?”

So I told him about Jules Verne, and the suit, and the helmet. And, of course, the great fear, though nothing of what started it. He assumed it began with my mother’s death, and I let him. I could go no farther back than that.

“My God,” he whispered when I was done. “How could you stand being afraid for so long? Didn’t you tell your father? You should have, Lilly. He should have done something about that when it first started.”

“He was afraid too. It took me a while to see it, but he was so afraid of losing me, and I of losing him, that we just—stuck together in the house like burrs. For almost six years, that’s just what we did. It was only when I met you that I could see what else there was. And all he could see was that he might lose me. That’s what’s been the matter with him all along. He doesn’t dislike you. He’s afraid I’m going to leave him.”

“Jesus, poor man! But of course he must have known he’d lose you sooner or later. He didn’t expect that you’d just live there with him for the rest of his life, did he?”

“We didn’t get that far,” I said unhappily, because, of course, that was what he thought. And I let him think it, because in truth, it was what I thought, too. Love and safety. Love and safety forever.

I had never dreamed I could find both outside his house.

It was the source of a good bit of very real guilt and grief. But I shoved them both away from me. I would make him see. On a steaming Sunday afternoon in early September, two weeks before my father and I both were to start George Washington, we sat with my father and Tatty on the back terrace, seeking what shade could be found under the mimosas. The tips of grass and leaves were browning. Late summer flies thrummed from the end of the garden. Many natives think a Washington summer does not reach its blazing apogee until September. I remember hating the start of Cathedral because even our light uniforms were binding and stifling, and there was no unseemly air-conditioning.

But not this year,
I thought.
This year I can wear pretty much what I please, and three of my classes and the student union are air-conditioned.
I looked forward to them like a man who was dying of thirst seeing, at least, the long-promised oasis in the desert.

There were a couple of old photograph albums on the table; Tatty had insisted that Cam see what an adorable baby I had been. Because my baby pictures were a little short of moronic, I was irritated with her, and restless.

Suddenly Cam leaned in close.

“Is that a Friendship? The one anchored at your dock at—I guess that’s your Maine place, isn’t it?”

He looked over at my father. I had told him about the Maine house, but little more than that we had one and had not gone there since my mother’s death. “It just didn’t seem right after that,” I’d said.

“Yes, it is,” my father said now, bending over to look at the faded photograph. “It was my father’s.”

“Did you—do you sail it?” Cam asked eagerly.

“Yes. Yes, I did. Do you know Friendships?”

“Oh, Lord, yes. My uncle had one that he kept at our place on the river, and I loved it better than anything in the world. He taught me to sail it when I was maybe ten. My father sold it when he died, though, and I’ve always missed it. Is yours still there?”

“I assume so,” said my father. “I had it put in storage at the local boatyard when . . . we left. I get a yearly bill for its upkeep, so I suppose it’s still seaworthy.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“Well, it’s old. It came from Bremen, I think, around 1890- something. William Morse from Friendship built it. It was a lobster boat till about 1910, and I think my grandfather bought it and redid it around then. It’s always been around Edgewater, as long as I can remember.”

“Oh, man,” Cam breathed reverentially. His face, turned to my father’s, literally shone. He looked like a small child hearing a wonderful story about a miraculous treasure he had not believed existed. He turned his face to me.

“Can you sail it?”

“I could. I do when my father is with me—or did. It’s been a long time now. I don’t even know if I’d remember how.”

“But you sail, right?”

At that moment I would have told him I could take the
Queen Elizabeth
across the Atlantic under sail. I would have given him the Friendship and anything else I had.

“I—” I began, and then stopped. I had not thought of the Beetle Cat for a long time.

“Lilly and Jeebs had a little Beetle Cat when they were smaller,” my father said. “Jeebs never cared much for it, but Lilly could sail it blindfolded with one hand. It slipped its moorings in a storm and we never found it.”