The Towers of Love (3 page)

They came now, on the other side of the brook road, to the brook itself—to the place between three large boulders where the water ran deep and where, in summer, they had sometimes gone to swim. They had even given this place the affectionate name of the Swimming Hole, though the swimming had never been very good there. The pool had a loose and silty bottom and, after a few minutes' splashing around, the water became dark and muddy and they emerged from it with a fine, drying layer of dirt on their bodies and sometimes with shiny, welt-shaped black bloodsuckers fastened adhesively to their legs. They had swum naked there—he and Edrita. And it had been in the days when it had been fun to be naked in the woods. Oh, to be sure, there had been a predictable amount of interested examination of each other's bodies, certain inevitable comparisons. But that, at nine or ten or eleven years old, had not really been the point. He remembered one time, when they had been swimming this way, his mother and Edrita's mother had come through the woods on horses—it had been in the days when his mother still rode a lot. The mothers had found them that way but, at the time, there had been no scolding, no reproof. His mother and Mrs. Everett had simply suggested that they both put their clothes back on now and come home; it was almost time for lunch. That was all. But later he had overheard the two mothers talking about it. The encounter had disconcerted Edrita's mother more than it had his. His mother had just laughed and said, “Don't be silly, Clara! They're little children.” And when Clara Everett had said, “Yes, but they were stark naked and looking at each other,” his mother had said, “Why shouldn't they? Everybody adores nakedness. I do. Don't you?”

He stood now on one of the three round rocks, looking at the water that curled between them, and Edrita came up behind him.

“It looks so small,” she said. “Doesn't it look small? It's funny, I always remembered this as being such a
big
pool. But it's tiny, isn't it?”

“Everything looks different when you come back to it,” he said.

“How did we ever fit in it together?” she laughed.

“Remember how muddy it used to get?”

“Where did we build the little islands?” she asked. “Remember the little islands?”

He remembered. They were islands of sand and mud and twigs and brook pebbles, shaped along a sandy stretch of the brook's bank—islands that always washed away during the night and had to be built again each morning—islands with harbours and marinas and lighthouses and channels between them where paper boats could be sailed back and forth. “It was up there a little way,” he said, and pointed. “Shall we see if we can find the place?”

“Oh, I don't think I can make it, Hugh,” she said. “I've almost ruined this pair of heels already.”

“You should know better than to wear those for a walk in the woods.”

“I know. That's what happens when you become a dignified Chicago matron. You forget what walking in the woods is like.”

“What else did we do here?” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “I don't remember. But it seems as though we used to come here every day. We did—oh, everything.”

“I built a bridge out of birch logs across these rocks,” he said.

“Yes. I remember the bridge. Did we ever go all the way down the brook?”

“To where it joins the river? Of course we did.”

“
Did
we? Are you sure? I remember seeing it—where it joins the river—
from
the river. But did we ever explore the brook all the way down to its mouth? I don't think we ever did, and I wonder why we didn't.”

“I'm sure we did,” he said. “We must have. There were some big rocks you passed—remember? Like cliffs?”

“No, the cliffs are farther up,” she said. “See? My memory is better than yours.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Remember—we used to think those cliffs were higher than the Grand Canyon? But they'd look small now, wouldn't they?”

“Yes. We've seen the real Grand Canyon since,” he said.

“Oh, Hugh!” she said, and for a minute her voice sounded like a wail, as though she might be going to cry, and her eyes were so bright that he wondered if there were tears in them. “Remember it?” she said. “Remember how it was? Do you suppose any other children come here now?”

“I don't know. I guess not,” he said.

She was looking at him intently and, though he was looking at the rushing water between the rocks, he could feel her eyes on him. “I keep thinking how very odd it is,” she said slowly, “that we should both have turned up here at the same time. Isn't it the oddest thing? You had no idea I'd be here, did you?”

“None at all—till I heard about it last night.”

“I wonder—could it have been a kind of thought transference, do you think?”

He turned now and smiled at her, and she was smiling.

“Do you think so, Hugh?” she repeated.

He shook his head. “I'm afraid not, Edrita. Not on my part anyway. You see, I hadn't planned to come at all until the day before yesterday, until Monday. I didn't even want to come home, I—”

“You didn't? But I thought you said—”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “I don't mean that. I wanted to come, but—”

“But what?” she asked. And then, more quietly, she said, “I suppose you mean that it was really your
mother
who wanted you to come home.”

“She suggested it, yes. What's wrong with that?”

“You're trying to say that it isn't any of my business why you came here,” she said. “And you're right, of course. It isn't.”

“I didn't mean that, Edrita,” he said. “I didn't mean that at all, honestly.”

“Then you're not—you're not sorry you found me here too?”

“Of course I'm not.”

“Well,” she said, “I'm sure your mother is.”

“Edrita, can't you ever forget all that old business?”

“Why should I? Why should I forget it? Anyway, it's true, isn't it—about how she feels?”

“Of course not. She asked you for dinner, didn't she?”

“Yes. Out of courtesy. Out of politeness. Because she knew my family would think it was awfully peculiar of her, and rude, if she didn't.”

“Now, that just is not true,” he said.

“Well,” she said, smiling again, “it doesn't make any difference, does it? As long as you're glad I'm here, that's all I care about. And I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad we're both here—back at our rocks, back by our brook.”

But suddenly he didn't want to think any more about why he had come here, or about the woods, or about the days when they had been children, or about the rocks or the brook—except how they were going to get across it now, and get home. He was not sorry he had found her here, not sorry they had taken this walk. But meeting her like this was turning his homecoming into a different sort of thing, not at all what he had expected, or even wanted. She seemed to have come jabbing back into his life, making him remember things he had forgotten, asking him questions about things he had not thought about for years and to which he was not at all sure he knew the answers any more. “Come on,” he said. “Let's go. It'll be getting dark soon.” And he decided to leap, the way he used to, across the brook from one rock to another. He made it, and knew by the way he landed on the other side that he had made it, but the smooth soles of his shoes slipped for a terrifying moment on the rock's surface, and he almost fell, almost slid with a splash into the icy water. But he had an edge of rock with both hands, and managed to pull himself upright on the other side. “Hugh?” she said. “Are you all right?” And he knew that she was thinking, as people always did when he tried a thing like that, of his leg, of his lameness.

“Fine,” he said easily. “How about you? Think you can make it?”

“I'll have to take off these damn' shoes,” she said. Removing them, she handed them across the brook to him, and he placed them on the ground. “Now,” he said, “give me your hand.”

He gave her both hands, leaning across the water towards her, and she reached for them and seized them tightly. Then, for a pendulous moment, the two of them were arched across the water, balanced, suspended like a bridge themselves above it. They tottered there, and she extended one stockinged foot towards the rock on the other side where he was standing. “I've got this tight skirt!” she cried. “Oh, I don't think I can make it! Oh, I
can't
!” But he had her by the hands and he pulled her, and she jumped, awkwardly, towards him and landed beside him on the rock with a little gasp. He held her tightly as she swayed, still unsteady, and helped her up the rock's side to a flatter plane as suddenly, with a deep wrench of memory, he saw her again, tanned and long-legged and naked, leaping across the brook in the sunlight of an afternoon, her brown hair standing out in little peaks about her neck and shoulders, her body glistening with thousands of drops of water.

Apparently something of the same sort of memory had swept her too, for she said nothing more as he helped her down from the rock, helped her into her shoes again, and started with her along the wooded path that led up the other side of the valley towards their houses.

Two

As a little boy it had always struck him as queer that his family lived in a castle. Children, always more conventional than their elders, are true conformists, and the castle had embarrassed him. He had never seen why his house could not be a regular house, like everyone else's house, and the fact that his mother and father seemed genuinely fond of the castle, and liked living there, had been incomprehensible to him for a long time.

It stood on a hill, and its two identical stout towers were visible from as far as five miles away across the valley. And it had, through some inadvertence of the family's, been written up as a landmark, in the
Connecticut Guide
, where it was referred to as “Pryor's Castle.” And this of course meant that sightseers often came and parked their cars by the road to gaze at it, and sometimes came up the steep drive and rang the bell to ask if the castle was open to the public. The house had actually not been always a castle. Its history, in fact, was as odd as the man who had built it, Hugh Carey's grandfather, Ogden Pryor.

Ogden Pryor had first built his house as a house. And when he had first built it he had not built it here, on this Connecticut hilltop overlooking the Rampanaug River Valley. He had built it nearly a hundred miles north of here, in a small town in western Massachusetts. Though Edrita had quoted the little verse which Hugh had heard often as a child, about the Everetts and the Careys thinking that they were the berries, the actual fact was that the Pryors, his mother's family, were considered far grander than either the Everetts or the Careys, though their name had never been attached to any mocking rhyme.

The Pryors were richer, for one thing. Also—he had heard from the family—the Pryors bore a trace of royal blood. A duke lurked somewhere distantly in the Pryor family tree. The lineage, winding elaborately back to the seventeenth century, was traced on a family document in the library. And, he had heard, if his mother's family ever returned to England, there was a good chance that they could all lay claim to hereditary titles. This heritage, both wealthy and vaguely princely, had affected his Grandfather Pryor more than any other Pryor. It was he who had assembled for himself memberships in such societies as the Sons of the American Revolution, the Colonial Lords of Manors, the Union and Knickerbocker clubs, and who had meticulously maintained the family listings in the New York
Social Register
.

Grandfather Pryor had been an only child, and he had been given the upbringing of a young nobleman in a small and feudal barony, the only difference being that the barony happened to be—except for the Pryors—an inconsequential middle-sized Massachusetts town, and not medieval Britain. He had always been privately tutored and, as a child, he had never been allowed to play with any other boys in the town of Baldwin who were not Pryors. If Pryors grew scarce in Baldwin, other Pryors were imported—sometimes from great distances—as playmates. When, at the age of about eighteen, he had evidenced an interest in Mr. Edison's invention, the incandescent bulb, tutors were imported from as far away as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in New York State, to encourage this interest of his, and to instruct him. At the age of twenty-two, with money borrowed from his father, he dammed the Baldwin River and began to generate his own electric power. His father's house was one of the first houses in Massachusetts to be lighted with electric lamps and, soon, it was heated by electricity too. Not long afterwards, Ogden Pryor began to sell electric power to the neighbours, and it wasn't long before the whole town of Baldwin was lighted by the Pryor Electric Company, one of the first private power companies in Massachusetts. (There was a slightly older one operating in Boston.) Ogden Pryor bought and sold electrical appliances to the town and, by the time he had reached his early thirties, he had paid back his debt to his father and was a millionaire himself. He had married Emily Curtis, a distant Pryor cousin, and built his great house.

Hugh had never seen the first version of the house, though he had heard plenty about it, and looked at it often enough on old stereopticon slides. It was square and massive, built of stone quarried on the property, and was fronted with four white marble columns that had been shipped from Italy. This had been in 1912. Ogden Pryor had had two daughters, Hugh's mother and his Aunt Reba, and subsequent shipments had brought for the Massachusetts house perhaps as many as a dozen rooms from as many great houses in Europe.

But shortly after the end of the First World War, Ogden Pryor had begun to have troubles in a business sense. The giant Massachusets Light and Power Company had begun sending its lines westwards from Boston and Springfield and, as the bigger company went, the prices at which it offered to sell current were considerably lower than Pryor's prices. Pryor had struggled to keep the town of Baldwin an island, away from the larger company's lines. But the citizens of Baldwin had, quite naturally, been eager to pay the lower rates that neighbouring towns were paying. There was a long dispute and, eventually, a town referendum in which the Massachusetts Light and Power Company was voted in and Ogden Pryor was voted out.