The Gazebo: A Novel (10 page)

Martin arrived at the gazebo rumpled and unshaven from the long flight out of London and then the long train ride up from New York City, but he didn’t care how he looked. Everyone in Longwood Falls thought he was wild, anyway; now he simply looked the part. He stepped off the train and strode through town, feeling a strange sensation at being back here after so many months. Was it possible that the place had grown smaller, or had the vast patchwork expanse of Europe made this town seem like a miniature? He felt nostalgia ripple across him, although most of the feeling was connected to Claire; Longwood Falls had had the most meaning for him in terms of his relationship with her. He thought here is the path we used to walk, and down the road a few miles is our motel, and over this way is the tree we sat under. And, of course, he thought: there is our gazebo.

And there it was, with Claire inside it. This time she wasn’t smiling. Her expression was tight, controlled. She stood when he walked up the shallow steps. “I told you not to come,” she said.

“I guess I forgot. And besides, how could I leave you here alone?”

“But the restaurant—” she began.

“Oh, damn the restaurant,” Martin said. “This isn’t about that.”

Claire regarded him with a tired expression. He knew that she barely slept anymore, that all she did was help take care of her mother and father and run the household. “I don’t need to be taken care of, Martin,” she said. “I don’t need to be babied.”

“Of course you do,” he said. “Everyone does sometimes.”

“No,” she insisted. “I’ve gotten into this other mode, this caretaking mode. My mother has needed
me
, so I’ve made myself available. And my father needs me, too.”

“I’m not going to force myself on you,” he said evenly. “I just want to help make things easier, if that’s possible. Please,” he said, “why don’t you let me help you a little.” Then he
came forward and held his arms out to her. There was a pause, as though she was deciding what to do, and then she stepped forward into his arms, as though she and Martin were about to start dancing.

“By the way, you smell terrible,” Claire said. “And your beard is like sandpaper.”

“I’ll take a bath and shave as soon as I can,” he said. “I’m staying at the Lookout—room eighteen, of course. But first,” he added, “can I come home with you to your parents’ house?”

She drew back and looked at him. “I doubt that they’d want to see you, Martin.” She paused. “I mean, you’re not the enemy,” she said, “but they’re not thrilled, either. I guess they figure if I want to make an eccentric, living–in–sin life for myself on another continent with an inappropriate man,” Claire said, “there’s nothing they can do about it. So they’ve accepted it. Or they’ve tried, anyway.”

“So let me come to the house,” Martin said.

Claire looked at him again. “All right,” she said. “You can come.”

That evening he returned to Badger Street and stood in the Swifts’ tiny kitchen, preparing
a pot of vegetable soup for Claire’s mother. He used the best ingredients he could find at short notice, adding some herbs that he’d heard bore healing properties, and then pureeing it all so that it was smooth as baby’s gruel. Maureen, who hadn’t kept any food down in days, was somehow able to eat a small bowl of his soup. At first, when Martin walked through the door, both Claire’s parents were suspicious and stiff, but after a while, when Martin had quietly commandeered the kitchen and set to work, they softened somewhat.

He came every morning and quietly cooked for Claire’s mother, preparing dishes that were identically smooth in texture but quite different from one another in taste: soups; cereals; purees of beet, parsnip, sweet potato, leek. And he made his own ice cream for the family too. Martin spent hours in the small, inadequate kitchen, cooking for Claire’s mother, a woman who had never liked him or what he had done with her daughter, and at the end of the day he went back to the Lookout Motel and quickly fell asleep alone in the sagging bed.

One afternoon at the end of March, Maureen Swift called out to her daughter, who was at that moment carrying in a bowl of chicken consommé that Martin had just prepared. Claire set down the bowl and hurried over.

“Mother,” she said, sitting on the hard chair beside the bed. “Oh, what is it?”

Her mother turned her head and looked at her, eyes glazed. “Claire,” she said in a thickened, altered voice, “are you going to go off with him again?”

Claire didn’t know what to say; she and Martin hadn’t been talking about the future. They had simply laid it aside for a while, concentrating on what was immediately in front of them. “I don’t know,” she answered.

“Well, would you make sure your father’s okay before you leave?” said her mother. “Would you take care of him? I’m so worried that he’ll completely fall apart on his own.” Claire nodded. And then Maureen Swift’s speech grew muted and peculiar and she talked of other subjects, one after another: a gingham dress she had worn when she was a child; the first date she’d had with Claire’s father; a rainstorm that knocked down the family’s
fence in 1932, the year Claire was born. “There was water everywhere that night,” her mother said, slow and soft, “just coming down for hours and hours. I thought it would never stop, and your father went out there in the pouring rain without a raincoat or boots or hat, and started to pick up the rails of the fence that were lying in the road. He wore a red plaid shirt, I remember.”

And then Maureen Swift’s voice died away, growing fainter and fainter, as though she were walking down a long corridor.
Oh, Mother
, Claire thought to herself, starting to sob quietly as her mother turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes,
it’s you who are leaving, not me
.

After Maureen Swift died, it was evident that Claire was still needed in her father’s house. Lucas Swift was severely changed by his wife’s death, and he had a great deal of trouble getting up in the morning and going over to his job at Swift Maintenance. Claire had to jump–start him each day, putting on the coffee for him, finding matching socks, making sure he knew exactly what equipment he needed to
bring with him when he set off to work in the morning, seeing that he actually ate supper when he came home at night. Lucas Swift was in a fog of bereavement, and he didn’t make much effort to leave it. Instead, he sat for long stretches on the tiny porch, rolling cigarettes for himself and staring off at the little square of land behind his house. He barely seemed to pay attention to anything that went on around him. Martin still hovered in the house during the day, helping Claire in any way he could, and Lucas didn’t seem to mind his presence. Martin sometimes wondered whether Claire’s father really knew he was there.

One night, when Claire was inside washing dishes and Martin was leaving the house to go back to the motel for the night, Lucas looked up at him from his spot on the porch and spoke.

“About my daughter,” he said. “What are your plans?”

Martin was startled by this comment, mostly by the fact that Lucas was thinking in such a coherent way about Claire’s life and her future. “My plans,” Martin said gently, “are to marry her when we go back to London.” Then
he added, “Of course, we’d love it if you could come to the wedding. We’d find a way to bring you over.”

Lucas Swift shook his head impatiently. “I won’t be leaving this house, and I think you know that.”

Yes, Martin did know that; Claire’s father was not the type of person to suddenly break his routine, especially not now, after his wife’s death.

“So what’s the date that you’ll be taking my girl away?” Lucas went on.

“Taking her away?” said Martin. “Mr. Swift, I’m not
taking
her; I mean, she wants to go. She’s twenty–one years old. And as far as when, well, I really can’t say. Whenever Claire feels she’s ready. When everything has been taken care of here.”

“Oh,” said Lucas Swift, “and when will that be? Will she let me know this time, or will she simply leave me a note and fly off in the night again?”

Martin looked downward. Claire’s father was still angry with him because Martin had taken Claire from the fold, from a way of life that was never supposed to have been questioned.
The only reason she was home again was because of something terrible. If it hadn’t been for her mother’s illness and death, she would still be off with Martin in a sun–filled flat in London above a small, fine restaurant, sculpting, making love, and living a kind of life that her father couldn’t even begin to imagine. “I’m very sorry that I’ve made you and your family so unhappy,” Martin said finally. “It certainly wasn’t my intention.”

After a while Lucas nodded; grudgingly he seemed to accept the apology. But Martin kept thinking about the question: when would Claire feel ready to go back to London with him? When would she feel as though everything here had been taken care of, and that she was free to go? There was always something more for her to do: a shirt of her father’s with a hole at the elbow or knee that needed repair, an invoice to help him complete for a job Lucas had done downtown, an evening to sit with him in the living room after supper, just to make the approaching night bearable, just to make sure he wasn’t too lonely and terrified to be an old man living without the woman he had married so long ago.

Neither Martin nor Claire addressed the question directly. Their home was in Kensington, near the gardens that Peter Pan had once visited in an old storybook, the little second–floor flat at 17 Dobson Mews. Both of them had felt very comfortable there, had liked the idea that this would be where they would stay, that this was where they had
landed
. But now the flat stood locked and empty; the sheets on the sleigh bed were cold. Neither of them knew when they might live there again.

Martin said good night to Claire’s father and went back to the Lookout to sleep. In the morning, when he knew Lucas would be gone, he returned to the house and banged on the door, asking Claire if he could come in. He was agitated from the conversation of the night before and needed to speak to her right away. She was ironing her father’s shirts one after the other, standing in the living room by the ironing board with the smell of soft, clean clothing scenting the air, and the hiss of the steam as the metal heel of the iron bore down on the fabric. “I’m afraid of what’s happening,” he said to her.

“What do you mean?” she asked, but of
course she knew. Still her arm kept moving back and forth, methodically pressing her father’s shirts.

“To you and me,” he went on. “I feel stupid even mentioning any of this, but I can’t help worrying a little. Our life in Europe—everything we did, everywhere we went, the foods we tried, and those train trips and how we felt, being together—it’s all starting to feel like we made it up. What’s that French expression—where two people have the same crazy thoughts?
Folie à deux
. But we didn’t make it up, and it’s not crazy.” He paused, watching her carefully. “I guess what I’m saying is that I want to know we’ll be together. I want to know that for sure.”

Claire carefully set the iron upright and looked up. She and Martin faced each other across the narrow, unsteady surface of the ironing board.

“My father needs me now,” Claire replied. “You’ve seen him, Martin; he’s like someone who’s been shipwrecked. He’d die without me.”

“Then I’ll stay here with you,” said Martin.

“Here? What are you talking about?”

“I’ll take a leave of absence from the restaurant and tell Duncan that I need to be in the States for a while,” said Martin.

“But we still won’t be able to live together here; we’re not married, as I’m sure you remember.”

Martin paused. He might have said to her in response,
Then we’ll go down to New York City this minute and get married immediately, so grab your coat
, but he didn’t. This was a grim time, not a time of celebration. They weren’t settled, as they were supposed to have been. It wasn’t the moment to marry, and both of them knew it.

“Well, I’ll stay in town and we’ll do what we can,” was all he said. “We’ll manage.”

“But what will you do for work?” asked Claire. She herself was about to start helping out around Swift Maintenance, doing some of the lighter jobs, answering the phone and sending out invoices, a few of the tasks that her father had always executed effortlessly but that now seemed far beyond him.

“Well,” said Martin, thinking quickly, “I’ll go around to the different restaurants in the area and beg for work. I’ll tell them I’m a desperate man.”

“But you’re not,” she said.

He smiled. “I know,” he said. “I just like the way it sounds.” He paused. “Someone will hire me, Claire,” he said. “I mean, I’m clean, I’m decent, I’ve got three years of a Princeton education. I can recite odes from my Introduction to Poetry class.”

“Oh, well,
odes
,” she said. “That will be a big help.”

But she wasn’t listening any longer. Instead, she walked around the front of the ironing board and swept him toward her, wrapping him in the angles of her delicate arms, gathering him in.

O
VER THE NEXT
week, Martin borrowed a truck from Swift Maintenance and approached the managers of the four good restaurants in the area one by one: Glissando, a Northern Italian place located in Bright Valley, about twenty miles from Longwood Falls; the Publick House, about thirty miles north of town; the Columbine, a small, overpriced restaurant of indeterminate cuisine, located forty–two miles up Route 9; and even, in desperation, the glassed–in restaurant overlooking the eighth hole at Longwood Golf and Country, where Martin and his parents used to eat gluey chicken pot pies for Sunday dinner. But as it turned out, no one would hire him. For everyone, it seemed, had already received telephone calls from Ash Rayfiel, who had heard from local gossip that his son was back in town and
was looking for work as a chef. Ash decided to make life difficult for Martin by either bribing the restaurant managers or threatening them. As far as he was concerned, a man simply can’t drop out of Princeton, pocket a family heirloom and sell it (even if it’s rightfully his), then run off to Europe to live illicitly with a woman from a lower social class, and expect that all will be forgiven when he returns home.

In fact, nothing was forgiven; although Martin had not laid eyes on his father since his return, the silent war continued between them. Finally, realizing that because of his father he was not going to get a good cooking job anywhere in the vicinity of Longwood Falls, in despair Martin went to the Longwood Diner, a sagging aluminum place with a sputtering neon sign, booths made of old, worn red leatherette patched up with electrical tape, and menus encased in smudged plastic. The crowd consisted of locals and truckers and teenagers out for a spin and a malt. For the most part the quality of food was poor; in the narrow, steaming kitchen, an indifferent short–order cook flipped frozen hamburger patties onto an
irrevocably encrusted grill. Martin walked into the diner and asked to speak to the manager, reeling off his cooking experience and his desire for an immediate job. Miraculously, the manager, a heavy man with oiled hair who worked the cash register up front while listening to horse races on a radio, hired him on the spot. Ash Rayfiel had not thought to alert the manager of the diner that his son might come in and that he must not be hired. Apparently, it had never occurred to Ash that Martin would stoop so low for employment.

Martin and the manager shook hands on the deal, then Martin tied an apron around himself that was already soiled from God knows what. In the kitchen, the smell of meat and fried potatoes filled the air as Martin gratefully set to work.

Day in and day out he stood in his filthy apron at the grill in the primitive kitchen while waitresses shouted out a litany of orders. After work, Martin would drive back to the motel in the beat–up car he had bought cheaply, and quickly shower so that the smells were gone from him, and then he and Claire would meet. They would take long walks together, or sit
and kiss in the maroon seats of the Longwood Cinema, or else they would simply go to his motel room and lie down together. Martin was exhausted all the time now; it wasn’t just that he was working harder than he ever had before, it was also that the work was joyless. It was true that the diner staff turned out admirable malteds—the best Martin had ever tasted, rich and thick and flecked with vanilla bean—but their approach to cooking was rigid and uncreative. One day, when Martin tried to make the meat loaf taste better by adding a dollop of orange marmalade and some Dijon mustard to the ground meat, one of the waitresses, a sour woman with a head of blond hair as dry and stiff as a doll’s, saw him do it and complained. “Our customers like their food plain and simple,” she said. “So don’t try that again.”

He wasn’t appreciated here, and he wasn’t improving as a cook. His talents were on hold, he knew, and so were Claire’s. Instead of sculpting and learning how to improve her skills, she was running the show at Swift Maintenance, then coming home to keep her lonely father company and clean the sad little
house. By the time she and Martin were together in the evening, they were both equally tired and weary, and occasionally they snapped at each other. Once she bitterly criticized a shirt he wore, saying that its pattern was grotesquely ugly and made her dizzy just to look at it; another time he told her she was boring him to death when she talked at length about something that had happened at Swift Maintenance. They both apologized profusely after these unpleasant moments. Something had stolen over them, a dissatisfaction and a distinct sense that what was now happening to them had not been intended to happen. They ought to have been together, already married and on their own floating island in a city far from Longwood Falls, thinking of a long life together: love, babies, growing older, endless conversations before going to sleep. Flour and spices, red clay and water—these were supposed to be the ingredients of their life. What had happened? they both wondered with a sorrow and bewilderment they couldn’t express.

“This is a very strange time,” Martin whispered to her one evening as they lay in the
motel bed beneath the blue coverlet They had just made love, but Claire had seemed distant and distracted, her eyes as vague as smoke.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

“I wish,” he said, “you could just come back with me to London. Can’t your sister help out more? I mean, don’t you think you’ve done enough? You don’t have to be Saint Claire.”

He was sorry as soon as he had said this. She looked at him coldly, now more distant than before. “I am not Saint Claire,” she said. “You obviously don’t have any idea of what it means to have an obligation to your family,” she said. “To love them and want to help them. You have no idea of what it’s like. And to answer your question: no, I haven’t done enough. It’s never enough. Don’t you get it?” There was a pause; he didn’t know what to say. “No,” she went on, “I guess you don’t.”

They would always be different in this regard; she’d have an enormous sense of responsibility toward her family, and he’d have very little sense of responsibility toward his—or if he had such a sense, it had long been covered over by his anger. It wasn’t until they had their own children, he thought, their own
family, that they would find themselves on an even footing.

Actually, Martin admired her unwavering fidelity, a trait that colored her relationship with him as well. She was
his
; he knew that. She was a pretty girl who had caused men on the streets of Italy to look her over brazenly, as if assessing her:
Hmmm, very nice. Slender, long legs, the breasts just a bit too small, but the face is beautiful, and those eyes
… It didn’t matter to them that she was always arm in arm with Martin; they had gazed at her with a frank and pleading expression, looking right past him. But she never took notice of them, not even the handsome, skinny–hipped ones who sat in the piazzas all day, as if they had nothing better to do, ice melting in their glasses.

She was his, but he couldn’t have her fully, and she couldn’t have him. He apologized to her now in bed at the Lookout Motel, telling her that he’d been insensitive. “Of course I know you can’t come back to London with me just yet,” he said. “I get frustrated, that’s all. Please ignore it.” Then he promised her that he would be more patient, and that eventually
everything would return to the way it was supposed to be. Then they lay in silence in room 18, and he remembered the first time they had come here, and how, after making love, he had cooked her an omelette. They had eaten hungrily that day. It occurred to him now, having just made love with her again, that this time neither of them had an appetite.

As the weeks passed now, in moments of clarity it was impossible for Lucas Swift not to note how unhappy both his daughter and Martin had become. The Longwood Diner was no place for someone like Martin. If only he could find a job at a good restaurant, or perhaps could start a restaurant himself. But Martin had no money, a fact that Claire had mentioned to her father, but which Martin never brought up. It was as though he had passively accepted it and had no intention of fighting for it.

Late one Saturday afternoon in April, when Claire was out at a nearby farm overseeing Swift Maintenance’s repairs to a barn, and Martin was at the diner dipping chicken pieces into boiling oil, Lucas Swift climbed into his
truck that said
SWIFT MAINTENANCE
on the side and drove down the street, heading toward a place he had always avoided as much as possible, a place of big houses, wide lawns, and small minds: the Crest.

The maid who answered the front door at the Rayfiel home took one look at Lucas Swift and said, “Service entrance is around back.” She began to shut the door, but Lucas held out a hand to stop it.

“I’m not doing work here,” he said. “I’ve come to see Mr. Rayfiel. Tell him it’s Lucas Swift.” He paused. “Claire’s father,” he pointedly added.

The maid looked doubtful, seeming not to believe that Ash Rayfiel would have anything to do with this scrawny old laborer who had the nerve to stand at the front door of the house as though he belonged here, but Lucas insisted, and so she silently retreated along the marble hallway.

A few moments later, the two men sat tensely in Ash Rayfiel’s study. Many years earlier, long before Claire had ever met Martin, Lucas had been hired to build a garden wall for the Rayfiels, and when it came time for
him to be paid, the Rayfiels’ accountant insisted that the job was not up to par and that the payment would be half of what they had agreed upon. Lucas was astonished and outraged, for the wall was perfect, the bricks symmetrically laid and smoothly cemented along the boundary of the wide garden. He never knew for sure whether Martin’s father himself was behind the incident, but he was fairly convinced he was. All the workers in town uniformly loathed Ash Rayfiel. Years later, when Claire announced she was in love with Ash’s son, Lucas had felt an irrational anger and a burning memory of a bill for a garden wall that had remained only half paid.

But now, as he sat across the desk from Martin’s father, he wasn’t thinking about that wall or that bill. He was thinking only about Claire.

“What can I get you to drink?” Ash asked him.

Lucas shook his head. “Nothing, thank you,” he said stiffly. Ash shrugged and reached for his pear–shaped decanter, pouring himself a tall drink of whiskey without water or ice, and taking a long swallow.

“Martin says you stole his money,” Lucas began with difficulty.

Ash looked up over his glass, his eyebrows arching. “Oh, is that what he says?” he replied. “Well, it was my money to give, and it was mine to take back.”

“He’s having a hard time of it now,” Lucas went on. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t care. Ordinarily I’d say good, he deserves it. He’s been living with my daughter in Europe—without the benefit of marriage—for half a year. But I believe he’s decent, Mr. Rayfiel. Both of them are. They’re young; they just want a little piece of happiness.”

“Don’t we all,” said Ash.

“No one would hire him at any of the local restaurants,” Lucas continued. “He felt that you were somehow behind it.” Ash didn’t comment, so Lucas went on. “If he could find some work that would challenge him, or else have his money back so that he could finance his own restaurant—”

“I had an unspoken deal with Martin,” Ash interrupted Lucas. “I provided that certain money would be waiting for him when he reached twenty–one not because he was my son, but because he would be running my business. Hats. I didn’t give it to him so he
would have a head start in life, but so that he would be up to speed.” He paused. “But Martin chose not to go into hats. He thinks hats are a ridiculous thing to spend your life on. He thinks I’m a ridiculous, spiteful man, I guess.” Ash Rayfiel drew in a hard breath. “No, I didn’t steal his money. I simply withdrew it.”

“And if the money makes the difference between misery and happiness?” asked Lucas.

Ash Rayfiel played with his glass. He moved it to the left, then to the right. Finally he replaced it precisely on its original ring of sweat, and said, “You do understand
he
stole from
me
.”

Lucas Swift didn’t answer.

“He took the family crest,” Ash said. “An object that had been in my family for a century. Fortunately, just this month I received a report from an alert jeweler in Amsterdam who’s had some experience with objects that have wandered from their rightful owner. He did the research into who the rightful owner of this particular object might be, and he and I came to mutually acceptable terms. The money doesn’t matter to me, and the sentiment
doesn’t matter to me either. But the dishonesty does.”

“He says it was his,” cut in Lucas.

“Oh, yes, in a generous moment his grandfather gave it to him at birth,” said Ash, “but again that was with an understanding that he keep it That he display it That he act like a goddamn proud member of the Rayfiel family.” Ash finished his drink and smiled thinly. “I don’t enjoy this, you know,” he said. “I wish my son were different. I miss the adoring little boy in gray flannel knickers and a cap who used to follow me around the factory and ask about the `bims.’” He glanced up at Lucas.
“Brims.”
He smiled to himself, and then the smile turned into something hard and immovable. “I wish my son were different,” he said again. “I wish my wife didn’t drink before lunch. I wish the hat business were more interesting. But you play the cards you’re dealt, and if you don’t like the rules, then you get out of the game and you don’t look back. But that’s not what Martin’s done, and there’s nothing I can do about that or about who he is or who I am—or, for that matter, about how interesting or uninteresting hats are.”

Ash Rayfiel’s glass of whiskey had been like a kind of hourglass; now that the drink was finished, the meeting was over. Ash stood. Lucas stood. The two men didn’t shake hands. Ash simply opened the door, and Lucas walked out, and as he walked through the long hall, he felt sorry for Martin for having grown up here amid such splendor and indifference.

That night, when Claire was folding her clothing in the bedroom of her father’s house and getting ready for sleep, Lucas Swift came and stood in the doorway. “Claire,” he said, “I need to speak with you.”