The Vineyard (17 page)
Authors: Barbara Delinsky
“Maybe ⦠seven.”
“And you worked in the fields?” Olivia would never have imagined it.
“We all did.”
“Weren't there laws against that?”
Natalie smiled. “Tell it to the family that grows what it eats. Actually, we were among the lucky ones. We didn't have a mortgage. In the early thirties, farmers' incomes dropped so far that even those who could feed themselves lost their farms. The price they were getting for their crops was so low that they couldn't pay their mortgages.” She pointed to the neighbor's boys. “They lost theirs.”
“What did they do?”
“My father bought them out. They worked the dairy for him.”
“I thought your father was broke.”
“Compared to our assets in New York, he was, but all things are relative. He bought the farms abutting us for next to nothing.”
“But where did he get even that?”
Natalie picked up another of the photographs. It showed Jeremiah Burke sitting on an open wagon. The wagon carried the same barrels that Olivia had seen in the photograph of Carl.
“Wine?” Olivia guessed, delighted.
Natalie nodded. She studied the picture.
Olivia prodded gently. “Wine saw you through the Depression?”
“We didn't make much. We didn't have the know-how. What you're seeing here might have been the season's entire yield, but prices for wine were higher than for anything else we grew. The black market saw to that. If Prohibition did nothing else, it made drinking the thing to do.”
“Weren't you afraid of getting caught?”
Natalie's eyes filled with pain. “I swear, my father half hoped that he would. He never recovered from the crash. He had natural business instincts, like buying neighboring farmland, but he never got over the guilt or the shame of what had happened in New York. You can't see it from this pictureâwell, maybe you can if you look deep into those troubled eyesâbut he was a broken man. Once he had been robust and outgoing, but look at how thin he is here. And
we did have food. He just had trouble eating it. If he'd been punished for selling wine, he might have felt better.
“But people weren't getting caught,” she went on. “The government couldn't begin to punish all the people breaking the law. The Volstead Act was designed to enforce Prohibition, but there were a ridiculously small number of agents appointed to do it, and an overwhelmingly large number of violators. So my father made his little bit of wine. The proceeds he got from selling it gave us seed money for the future. Literally. Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Our wine became less valuable thenâit wasn't very good, in the final analysisâbut my father had a vision. He brought in rootstock from Europe and began planting vinifera varieties.”
She smiled sadly. “Poor guy. He struck out over and over again. One variety failed, then another and another. He didn't have much of a green thumb.”
“But Jeremiah did. Didn't he help?”
“Jeremiah grew us potatoes and corn, carrots, beets, and parsnips. Grapes were something else, and we weren't the only ones having trouble. The Europeans were the experts at growing grapes, but their methods didn't work as well here. It wasn't until the sixties that Americans devised their own methods and finally entered the game. My father was gone by then.”
“How sad.”
Natalie rested a hip on the edge of the desk. “Yes. He really did start it all. I'm sorry that he didn't live to see how far we've come. Those times when we've had everyone here ⦔
“Who is everyone?” Olivia asked, given the lead-in. “How large is your family?”
“Not large. There's Susanne and Greg and their respective spouses. Susanne and Mark have two children. Both are grown. Neither is married. Melissa is a lawyer, Brad is a business consultant. Greg and Jill don't have any children yet. I don't know what they're waiting for. In my day, we had children younger. But times have changed. Jill isn't much older than you, so they still have time, by today's standards. That isn't to say that I'm not impatient. I'd love to have more grandchildren. But it isn't my decision to make.” She shot a heaven-help-me glance toward the ceiling. “It could well be that Melissa or Brad will marry and give me great-grandchildren before Greg and Jill get around to it.” Her eyes
settled on Olivia. “What about you? Are your parents still living?”
Olivia shrugged. “Not important.”
“It is. I like to know about the people who work in my house. Are they alive?”
“Oh yes,” Olivia said, because she wanted to believe it. She even wanted to believe they were in touch with one another.
“Where?”
She dipped into one of her fantasies, such a familiar one that she half believed it was true. “San Diego.” She pictured her father as a career navy man whose frequent relocation had kept him on the go. Now that he was a senior whatever, on the cusp of retirement, he didn't travel as much. He had a place on the beach in San Diego. For all Olivia knew, Carol might be there right now.
“Do you have siblings?” Natalie asked.
Still in the fantasy, Olivia nodded. “Four brothers. They're navy men, like my dad.”
Natalie's eyes lit. “There's a navy base right here in Newport. Any chance one of them might have business there while you're here? Alexander was an old friend of the secretary of the navy. I'd be glad to make a call or two.”
Olivia backpedaled. “Oh no. No need. Thanks so much, but that wouldn't work. I mean, I'm here because they're there. We have very different lives.”
Natalie's face dropped. “You aren't close, then?”
“Well, we are,” Olivia said, because the last thing she wanted was for Natalie to think she didn't value family if it turned out by some quirk of fate that they were related. So, even when it meant extending the fib, she let the fantasy run. “The thing is, I'm the baby. You only had one older brother, but I have four. They give new meaning to the word âprotective.' I was smothered. I couldn't breathe. They finally agreed to give me space.”
“But what about Tess? Don't they want to see her?”
“They do. We go back now and again.”
“Ah,” Natalie said.
Olivia didn't know what that meant, but she wasn't waiting to find out. She needed to put distance between herself and the story she'd just told. “I want to know more about this,” she said, taking up another picture from the desk. The children were several years
older, on a tractor this time. Brad was on a fender, but Natalie was right up there in the driver's seat with Carl. She couldn't have been more than nine or ten and still looked boyish. The two boys were starting to look like men.
“You said Brad was your only brother. Did you have any sisters?” There hadn't been any in the car when the family had left New York, but that didn't mean they weren't living with another relative.
Natalie shook her head. “It was just Brad and me.”
Olivia wasn't discouraged. She had already decided that the mystery woman was either a cousin or a friend.
She was about to ask about it when Natalie took the photo of Carl, Brad, and her on the tractor and slipped mentally away. It was a while before she spoke.
My situation was different from yours. My brother and Carl were protective, but I didn't mind it at all. In turn, they didn't seem to mind when I tagged along. I was articulate, agile, and smart. What I lacked in strength, I made up for in speed and wits. The three of us went everywhere together. I was one of the guys.
I don't know what I would have done without them. Asquonset was one new experience after another, and my parents were no help. They were stoic and stern. They directed us here or there and told us what to do around the farm, but they never laughed. They rarely even smiled. The concept of pleasure had been left behind in New York, along with all sense of security. Add my father's shame to that, and things weren't good. The two of them lived each day as though they were fully expecting another crash.
They aged at double speed during those years. In no time, they were old. It was heartbreaking to see.
We were more resilientâme even more so than Brad. I was younger. My attachment to New York was more tenuous. Besides, I had found something that first day that New York didn't have. I had found Carl.
He became my idol. He was quiet and confident. Nothing ruffled him. He knew everyone and everything. No matter how new life was to me at Asquonset, being with Carl was like being in a familiar place. His confidence was contagious.
I started school and made friends, and those friends didn't know where we'd been. They only knew that we were better off than most, and we truly were. We ate three meals a day. Our clothes were more serviceable than stylish, but we never went without shoes. We went to the movies every Saturday afternoon. We could afford that. We couldn't afford to travel, but the idea of taking a train had lost its appeal. The newsreels were all about the hungry and homeless riding boxcars. We were far from hungry and homeless.
All things were relative, of course. Asquonset was a dour place that grew more oppressive the longer the Depression lasted. If our parents weren't sitting stiff and alert in front of the radio, they were poring through the tabloids in search of bad news, and there was never a lack. Banks continued to close long after the crash. More of their friends went under. My parents had been in the center of the social scene in New York, and either personally knew those people mentioned in the paper or knew of them. Unemployment continued to rise. Shanty villages called Hoovervilles sprang up to house the homeless. Soup kitchens were inundated with the hungry.
Roosevelt was swept into office with promises of a New Deal, but all my parents saw were pictures of the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Though Asquonset remained fertile and moist, they feared we were next. They read everything they could about prevention, and had us out in the most remote of our acres planting grass and trees to anchor the soil. Long after the economy began to improve, they lived with the fear of relapse.
Brad was a casualty of that fear. When the gloom got bad enough, he left. He dropped out of school when he was sixteen and lied about his age to get a job with the Works Projects Administration. He built bridges and highways. He dug tunnels. He sent money home. But that was small solace for my father, who wanted him to be educated and ready for the time when good jobs returned. Moreover, in losing Brad, he had lost one of his most able-bodied workers.
Me, I had lost one of my two best friends. Same with Carl. So he and I grew even closer. If we'd been growing up together now, the four years between us would have been insurmountable. We'd have gone to different schools with different crowds
and different activities. Back then, though, things didn't work that way. We did everything together.
Natalie stopped talking and smiled. They sat in the wing-back chairs now. Olivia was making notes on the pad of paper on her lap. Natalie's hands were folded gently.
Olivia waited for her to go on, but there was simply that sweet smile and the occasional nod. She was transported back to that long-ago world.
Olivia wanted to be there, too. “What were some of those things?”
“Oh, we went back and forth to school together.”
“On a bus?”
“No-o.” This was said with a chiding chuckle. “There were no buses. We walked.”
“How far?”
“Three miles. We picked up others as we went along. Carl was like the Pied Piper. He was the tallest and the least talkative, but he had a certain”âshe searched for the wordâ“a certain
charisma
. He never looked for attention, never wanted it, but people gravitated toward him. It was a classic case of the mystique of the one who is most aloof. Carl passed by, and people looked; and when they looked, they saw Brad and me, too. We were his sidekicks. It was because of him that we were accepted as quickly as we were.”
Olivia was smiling along with her now, picturing the daily procession to school. “That sounds so neat.”
“Neat?”
“Fun.”
“Walking three miles through driving rain wasn't fun.”
“But all of you doing itâfollowing the Pied Piperâit's a wonderful image. What else did you do?”
“Do?”
“For fun.”
“Oh, little things.”
“Like what?”
Natalie gave a half shrug. “You know. What all kids do.” She blushed. “Time hasn't changed some things.”
“Sex?”
Olivia asked in surprise, because she'd thought time
had
changed thatâat least, in terms of age and savvy. When Natalie's
cheeks remained pink, she said, “I'm sorry. That's private. I shouldn't be asking about it.”
“I hired you to ask about private things. I won't necessarily tell all, but I want you to ask.” That said, she had regained her composure. “The age factor did come into play there. When Carl was fourteen, I was only ten. When he was sixteen, I was only twelve. We weren't boyfriend and girlfriend. We didn't smooch in the back row of the movie theater.”
There was a pause.
Olivia helped her out. “But you wanted it.”
Still blushing, Natalie nodded. “Carl was the only one I could imagine being with. I used to dream about that.”
Her voice stopped, but her facial expression continued to speak of beautiful things. Olivia watched her until she couldn't bear the suspense any longer.
“Did you dream of marrying him?”
“We danced together,” Natalie said.
“You dreamed of that?”
“No. It was real. Dancing was big during the Depression. It was the cheapest form of entertainment.”
Olivia knew something of that. “Did you and Carl do
marathon
dancing?”
“No. But we knew people who did. Some of them went on and on for months, some with good reason. As long as they remained on their feet, they had a roof over their heads, food, and the promise of prize money.” She smiled. “No. Carl and I didn't do anything like that. But we'd seen enough of it on the newsreels to know some of the dance steps. Carl had a little crystal setâyou know, a little radio. We'd go back behind the shed and find a little music, and we'd dance.” Her eyes went wide. She had thought of something else, another good memory, judging from the excitement in her eyes.