Off Season (38 page)

I dropped it. She was right, of course. The blessings that fell on me that summer were, and remained, unseen.

Something strange happened after that, though. Something that puzzled me and made me vaguely uneasy. It seemed as though, with the mention of Peaches Davenport, a tiny drop of ink got into a still, clear basin of water and eventually stained it all with swirls. Cam was silent. Silas slept most of the warm afternoons away and did not argue with me. Where there had been magic now there was reality. I wasn’t grief stricken about Cam; I still felt him near. But the throat-tickling exultation that had floated me through the early summer was gone.

I began to get restless, without knowing why. Odd things happened in my day-to-day rounds. At the post office one day, the first time I had stopped in that summer, the elderly, sweet-faced postmistress said, “Oh, Mrs. McCall, I was so very sorry to hear about Mr. McCall. We all loved him. He always had a joke and a grin, even when the weather was at its worst and nobody else would give you the time of day. And he plowed a few of us out when the snow was deep.”

“When was he here in winter?” I asked. “I mean, I know he came up once a long time ago when a tree fell on the house, but—”

“Oh, now and again,” she said, and looked away. I knew she would say no more.

But she did say, “I’ve been meaning to ask you. He’s gotten some mail this summer, and I haven’t quite known what to do with it. He used to have me send it to his office, but I thought you might want it now. There’s not much, just two or three letters; they’re all postmarked the same place: Santa Fe, New Mexico. No address, just the postmark. I thought you might need to see them.”

She handed me three battered envelopes. They were regular drugstore number ten envelopes, with, as she had said, no return address or name. I opened one. It said, simply,
C . . . thanks so much! D.

Suddenly I did not want to know any more about D in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was unmistakably a man’s hand, but it still felt strange. Furtive.

“Thanks, Mrs. Ellis,” I said. “They’re nothing we need. Can you just toss them if any more come in? This D will hear sooner or later that Cam’s gone.”

“Of course, dear,” she said. “Stop back in before you go.”

“I will.” I smiled thinly. I went home. I sat down on the sofa in front of the empty fireplace and thought of making a fire; the room had grown a little chilly. But I didn’t. Instead I merely sat and stared at Cam’s urn. Part of him was still in my pocket, but most of him was there.

“Who is D in Santa Fe?” I said aloud to him. “When were you up here in the winter? We said there weren’t going to be any more secrets.”

He sat silent. From the end of the couch Silas lifted his head and glared at me.

“Don’t ask questions if you think you might not like the answers,”
he said.

“What did you say?” I goggled at him. It was not a Silas thing to say.

“I don’t remember.”

“It sounded like a warning of some kind.”

“Will you put a sock in it? I was sound asleep till you came barging in here. A fire wouldn’t hurt, either.”

I built a fire and sat drinking some of the scotch Cam always kept in the kitchen. I had not done that all summer. I sipped the smoky scotch and watched the flames and thought.

Then I got up and went to the kitchen phone and called Kitty Howard. We had spoken during the summer, of course, but not of anything important; mostly she was trying to coax me home, or to relate the girls’ latest laments. They knew better than to call me yet.

“I’ve decided that we’re going to have Cam’s ceremony on the weekend of September eleventh,” I said. “Will you get the word out? Just you and the girls and their husbands—no children, please, and maybe Aunt Tatty. And anybody at the firm who’s particularly close to him. I can’t remember. I can sleep about ten comfortably and any number uncomfortably.”

“Sure. But why so late? Lilly, it’s time for you to come home now. John Corbett is bitching about getting Cam’s will probated, and Betsy calls me every day to see if I’ve heard from you. Seems Deedee’s little preschool—the one she
has
to go to if she wants to get into a decent college—has raised its tuition again.”

“Her husband only makes about a gazillion dollars a year in bonds,” I said testily. “She’s just used to calling Daddy. Well, I’m coming home right after the ceremony, and I’m having it then because it’s the weekend of the most fabulous meteor showers you’ve ever seen.”
“Cam isn’t going to care about a goddamned meteor shower,” Kitty yelled, plainly thinking I had been there way too long already.

“Yes, he is. More than any of us. Don’t you remember when he taught himself celestial navigation just because the stars fascinated him so?”

“Lilly . . .”

“Bye, sweetie,” I said. “I can’t wait to see you.”

And I hung up.

CHAPTER 18

I
don’t care what he said! I don’t care what you say! I don’t want him just dumped into that damned dirty bay! Fifteen minutes later nobody will know where he is! You might as well just flush him down the toilet!”

My older daughter’s face was red and corrugated, like heated tin. It had always been so when she was a child and in the throes of grief and anger. Tears leaked from her beautiful gray eyes, swollen shut now, and scrubbed red.

She sat across the living room from me at Edgewater in the bentwood rocker my mother had always loved, rocking furiously and sobbing aloud. She still wore the elegant earth-colored linen suit she had arrived in from New York, hardly two hours ago, and her narrow feet, in towering spike heels I could not have gotten across the carpet in, were crossed at the ankles. The bottom of her looked like the fashion editor she was, and the top of her looked like the child she had been. Her husband, Gary, of the booming bond career, sat beside her sipping scotch and patting her on the knee now and then. He might as well have patted a Bengal tiger. You did not stop Betsy in full spate. You simply waited it out.

Across from her, on the sofa, Alice, my younger daughter, leaned back against the cushions with her eyes closed. She had the knack of removing herself from uncomfortable situations simply by shutting her eyes and going far away somewhere in her head. I looked at her, spilled against my sofa, long and thin and graceful, her rich red hair piled up on her head, showing small ears with amber pendants dangling from them, her thrown-back head accentuating her long, creamy neck to perfection. She looked at the moment so like Cam when he wanted to be somewhere else that I almost laughed. Alice did publicity for a line of women’s clothing and accessories the price of one of which an average family could have lived on for six months. I wondered if it was back to work she had gone. Her husband sat beside her, his hands clasped between his legs, looking at the floor and whistling absentmindedly through his teeth. Joe was a sports columnist for an august New York daily. I had always wondered at the attraction between them, but knew it was an honest one. Of my two sons-in-law I liked him best; Cam had too, even if he never said so to either of the girls.

“Feel free to jump right in,” I said to Cam in my mind.

Silent laughter made a small wind against my cheek. “Nothing doing,” I heard, deep inside me.

“They’re yours, too,” I said.

“Nope. All yours now. I did my best with them for a long time.”

“You gave them everything they wanted!”

“But they won’t expect that from you. Put your spine into it, Lil.”

“That child is spoiled rotten. I always said so
,
”
Silas muttered.

“Thanks for your input,” I said huffily to both of them.

“What did you say?” Betsy shrieked. “Were you talking to me? How could you say such a thing? My father is dead!”

“So is my husband,” I said in exasperation. “I wasn’t talking to you, Betsy. I was talking to Silas.”

Everybody stared at me.

“He was growling,” I said lamely.

“You want to hear growling? I’ll show you growling,”
Silas hissed.

“I don’t blame him,” Kitty Howard said. “You didn’t object to the plans your mother made when you first heard them, Betsy. Why now?”

“Because I saw that urn and I knew he was in there, and I wanted to keep him! I want to know where he is.”

“That would hardly be hygienic,” Kitty drawled. “And besides, you wouldn’t know where he was if he was buried. Not the part of him that was . . . him.”

“But I could go visit him!”

Betsy would not be consoled.

“Well,” I said wearily, “you can come up here any time you want to and go swimming with him.”

“I hate you!” she wailed, and got up and tottered out of the room on her looming Manolo Blahniks.

“Don’t take her seriously,” her husband muttered finally. “Of course she doesn’t hate you. She’s had a rough week. Deedee didn’t get invited to the play group Betsy wanted for her, and she had to cut a piece for spring
Vogue
in half, and we just found out that she’s pregnant again and we’ll have to move, and she just finished decorating the East Sixty-third Street place.”

“And now I’m going to scatter her dad in the drink,” I said. “Nice about the baby, though.”

“She’s not thinking rationally. Let her have a nap and some supper and she’ll come around. We all agreed it was a really good thing to do, and Cam wanted it.”

He sighed wearily, as if he knew the drill well.

“Poor baby,” I said contritely. “It’s a lot on her plate at once. I’ll talk to her after supper, when she’s rested a little. Maybe she can help with the ceremony or something.”

I knew that, to Betsy, I would forever be the one who cast her beloved father into Eggemoggin Reach. The fact was that now the event was at hand, I didn’t want to do it either. The bronze urn had become the centerpiece of my life. I didn’t think I could look at it knowing it was empty. I made a note to myself to snatch a bit more of Cam and put him in something larger and more permanent, like a locket, so that he could be with me literally as well as—what? spectrally?—all my life. Maybe if Betsy had some of the ashes . . . No, I was not going to parcel Cam out like vacuum cleaner dust for all and sundry. He wanted the bay. The bay it would be.

I looked back at Gary, who would not meet my eyes. There had been a rather nasty little scene between us when they first arrived, and I knew I was not forgiven. I had not forgiven him, either. And, as for Silas . . .

Gary had not been seated long, with a full glass of Cam’s single-malt at hand on the old rattan table beside him, when Silas lifted his head, leaped off the sofa, lumbered across the floor, and was in Gary’s lap with his nose plugged into his neck sniffing loudly, before I could stop him.

“God! Get this goddamned cat off me,” Gary cried and pushed Silas off him and kicked him across the floor. Silas gave a surprised yelp. I picked him up and held him under my chin and stroked him. The creaking, rusty purr rasped out into the room.

I stared at Gary.

“Never,” I said in a low, trembling voice, “never put your hands on Silas again. If you do, you’re out of here. He’s as much family as any of us, and more than you are, and Cam adored him. He was just trying to see if you smelled like Cam. He does that to almost every man who comes in. He wants Cam back so badly.”

“It’s disgusting! I have cat spit in my ear,” Gary snapped, and I suddenly hoped the bond market was collapsing as we spoke. “And I have scotch in the lap of a four-thousand-dollar Armani suit; that flea-bitten son of a bitch knocked my glass over!”

We all looked. Gary’s glass lay on its side on the table and twenty-year-old single-malt scotch was indeed dribbling steadily into his lap.

“Silas didn’t do it,” I snapped. “He was across the room right here in my arms. You hit it with your elbow.”

“I did not!”

“Then it turned over by itself, because Silas never touched it,” I said.

Everyone looked at Silas and me, and then at Gary and the dripping glass. He got up and stomped off into the kitchen to try to rescue his Armani. There seemed to be nothing else to say. Just at that moment we heard a car crunch up the driveway and screech to a stop, bumping the front porch smartly.

“Get the door while I pee on the jerk,”
Silas said.

“Better let well enough alone,” I said. “Scotch on your crotch is bad enough.”

“I take your point
.
”

I got up and went to the door. I hadn’t realized any more were coming.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Kitty said as I passed her. “This awful woman in Cam’s office, the office manager, I think, insisted on coming. She coyly refers to herself as his office wife. I think she thinks she’s his real one. Junie Sternhagen—we all knew her in high school. She was just as awful then. Anyway, I told her if she was driving, she’d have to pick up Tatty, and I see she did. I’m sorry, Lil, but she’d have come anyway. Walked, probably. She’s had a crush on Cam since fourth grade.”

“I’ve never met her.”

“She hides when you come, I think.”

“Great. I’ll put her in with Silas.”

“Poor Silas.”

I opened the door and greeted the two women. Junie Sternhagen was large and buxom and pinkly painted in a madras skirt and a T-shirt that said
LIFE’S A BEACH
, apparently her idea of Maine coast attire. She wore thong sandals; the brilliant pink painted toes that peered out were already blue with cold, and there were goose bumps on her ample arms. Even this early, the nights were chilly. This one, I read in the paper, would be a record for early September.

“Please come in,” I said. “I’m Lilly McCall. It was very thoughtful of you to come.”

“Oh, I know all about you,” Junie Sternhagen trilled. “Cam went on and on about you. And I’ve seen your picture on his desk. I must say you look—different—now.”

“Lilly, dear, what on earth have you done to yourself?” Tatty said fretfully. She was very frail but in full possession of her considerable faculties. She had lived on in the little house she had shared with my father until he needed a nursing home.

“How do you mean, Aunt Tatty?” I said, though I knew what she meant. I had gotten the same dismayed question from my girls and Kitty.