Anger (3 page)

Here Mr. Thornton joined them. “Where did you meet her, Alice? She's quite a lion, isn't she?”

“I suppose she is and I was thrilled when she accepted my invitation. We met at a luncheon an old friend of her mother's gave for her and I've known Mrs. Eliot for ages. We've been on various committees—to raise money for the Museum, for instance. Anna's mother is a very vital woman, Italian, as outspoken as her daughter. I expect that's where Anna gets it from. She married Dr. Lindstrom, you know, the neurologist who died some years ago. She has the most wonderful laugh—I'd walk a mile to hear Teresa laugh! After luncheon Anna very gracefully sang for us … I liked her a lot, quite apart from her marvelous voice. And so,” Alice said, “it all seemed quite simple.”

“I gather she doesn't like going out into society,” Mr. Thornton said.

“We're not that exciting, are we?” Ambrose Upton said.

“But she has all the excitement she can use in her career … she doesn't want excitement,” Dr. Springer said. “What does she want?”

“Recognition—the real thing. Fame.” Ambrose Upton said instantly.

“And she doesn't have that? I seem to see her name rather often on concert programs these days,” Dr. Springer said.

“Not quite,” Thornton answered. “She's a tantalizing step from fame, but she's not a household word, not yet.”

“She's never married?” Dr. Springer asked.

“Oh, she's absolutely single-minded about her art. I don't believe she'll ever marry.” Alice said.

“I think she
has
to marry!” Dr. Springer said with such conviction it brought a smile.

“You?” Alice Upton teased.

“God forbid! I'm not out to marry a lion, I'm much too selfish.” He laughed and then added more soberly, “Love, a passionate encounter, might provide the missing link, lift her right out of the almost-successful into the first rank.”

“It's a physiological matter, you think?” Alice asked with a twinkle in her eye.

“In a way, yes.”

And there the subject was dropped.

Chapter III

Five months had passed since Ned Fraser had lunched at the Ritz with Ernesta Aldrich. Anna had been away on concerts, had sung in San Francisco and at Wolf Trap, and Ned had gone to Europe for a month, to the music festival in Aix-en-Provence. Autumn was in the air and he felt exhilarated by the gold in the leaves, observing that the tulips of May had now changed to chrysanthemums in the borders, thinking that soon the swan boats would be put to bed for the winter. On an impulse he turned down toward the pond to see what was what.

And there under the bridge on the other side he saw the flash of a red coat, and a woman with black hair taking bread out of a paper bag to give to a flotilla of ducks.

“Anna!” he called, surprised by the sheer joy of seeing her into using her first name.

She did not smile as she lifted her head and looked across, wondering who had called, or whether she had dreamed that her name had been spoken by a man standing on the other side, but by then Ned had run up the stairs, across the bridge, and down to her, the pent up longing of months giving him wings.

“Did you fly?” she asked. “You were over there a second ago.”

“Ned Fraser,” he introduced himself as she seemed not to recognize who he was.

“Of course!”

“Imagine finding Anna Lindstrom here feeding the ducks!”

“I'm here quite often. My hairdresser is just around the corner.” She gave him a curious glance and felt rather caught. Such an unexpected circumstance. Such a strange way to be confronted by Ned Fraser, too rich and too powerful, whom she had determined not to know.

“Well,” Ned, fumbling for something to say, uttered, “it's autumn, a fine autumn day, isn't it?”

Anna burst into laughter. She couldn't help it. It was a crazy day, so brilliant.

“What's funny?”

“You are,” she said, still laughing.

“Let's talk,” he said, “come and sit down on a bench and observe the ducks and the swan boats … there must be a ride any minute.”

“Take me on a ride!”

So they climbed the stairs and crossed the bridge, talking as they went, and down the other side to where the flat swan-boat barge waited, only a third full. They chose the back row and settled there.

“My mother used to take me on a swan-boat ride as a reward for going to the dentist,” she said, “and then for an ice cream soda at Schrafft's, but I haven't been on one for twenty years! What fun!”

“It's the slowest form of locomotion ever invented and therefore the best, isn't it?” Ned asked. Inside the enormous artificial swan behind their bench a man sat and cycled them out in slow motion. It was amazingly comfortable, Anna thought, sitting there beside Ned Fraser and talking about little things, memories and pleasures. Here and there a gold leaf zigzagged down from a tree to the water. A flock of pigeons flew over and settled on the bank, waddling about on their pink feet.

“They are such ridiculous birds,” Ned said, following her glance and the way she looked at them, wholly absorbed.

Seized as he had been by the lucky chance, Ned had forgotten his luncheon appointment at the Ritz. Now he took out his watch and frowned.

“Damn it, I have a luncheon appointment! Oh, how stupid!”

Anna began to giggle, aware that once on a swan boat there was no way to get off until the long journey up to one end of the pond, past the tiny magic island, and round to the other end, past the Victorian swan house on its wooden legs, had been completed.

“It's not funny,” Ned said. “I'm going to be late.”

“So you are,” and Anna couldn't stop laughing at him, so prim suddenly and bankerish, caught on a swan boat. “Of course, you could jump off,” she suggested.

“I could at that. But then I might fall in!”

“That would never do, would it?” she said solemnly. And then Ned laughed, too. He couldn't help it.

“Look,” he said, “have dinner with me tonight … you must.” And as he felt her hesitation, he reached over and took her hand in his and held it tightly. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Anna felt the warmth, the strength of that hand in hers like an injection of life into her veins. It all came over her there in the swan boat with great clarity that here was protection, an end to anxieties about money, a wonderfully warm and loving shelter. How could she refuse its gift?

“All right,” she said.

And then they were silent, sitting a little stiffly, hand in hand on the last bench in the swan boat as it slowly, slowly reached the mooring and was made fast.

But when he had gone and she was hurrying, not to be late herself at the hairdresser, she was startled to realize what she had been thinking. What in the world made her imagine that Ned Fraser wanted to marry her? That he could have had any such thing in mind when he fastened his hand in hers with such strength? Besides, what made her think that she would ever want to marry him? “But I do,” she answered herself. “The strange thing is that I do.”

Why did she? How could she fall in love with a man she had never even talked to for more than a few minutes? And besides, did she want to marry? Why not a love affair? Why marry? She was stopped in these musings by the odd look an old woman gave her as she passed. Of course she had been talking to herself aloud! You're in a bad way, Anna, she admonished herself. But this time she did not speak aloud.

For once she, who told her mother everything, did not tell her about the swan boat ride, though she did mention quite casually that Ned Fraser was taking her out to dinner.

“I didn't know how to say no this time,” she explained with a troubled look her mother caught instantly. “How does one say no on the telephone? It's an insidious instrument … and he interrupted me as I was going over the score. I got rattled.”

Later when Anna came out, she remarked that her daughter was looking lovely.

Hours later Ned lay in bed wide awake. It had been an evening of precipitous, intimate exchanges. What was it about Anna that made it possible to talk about everything, no holds barred? God knows he was quite accustomed to the usual banter and teasing that takes place when a man and a woman are attracted to each other but have only recently met. But Anna would have none of that. So when he tried it by accusing her of putting him off for months, she answered with a straight look, those amazing blue eyes, suddenly black, “I was frightened.”

“Of what?”

“I don't know. You tell me,” she said, as though she really meant him to do so.

“Frightened of me? I was the one who had every reason to be frightened … after all, you are Anna Lindstrom, my dear. And you have made that quite clear.”

“Not because I am a little famous, but not very, but because your world and mine have so little in common, I suppose. Why begin a fugue you cannot sustain? Or play a part that is not in your range? “Yes,” she said again, “I was not about to make a fool of myself.”

“But you're not afraid now?”

Anna laughed, a loud laugh of real amusement, “I'm terrified!”

“That man at the next table is looking at you,” Ned whispered.

“I can't help it if strangers recognize me. Do you mind?”

And Ned had the wit not to insist, for what he had minded was the indiscretion of her unself-conscious laughter in the solemn candlelit, velvet-curtained room of the Somerset Club. “Besides, everyone in this room, I imagine, recognizes
you
, and no doubt wonders where on earth you met that handsome woman and who in hell
she
is!” Then with a complete change of mood, she took a sip of the
Chateau Neuf du Pape
, swallowed it thoughtfully, and said, “That is a poem of a wine, Ned.”

“You really live, don't you?” he had answered, “You appear to be aware of everything, the taste of the wine … I did order something rather special but it is quite rare to have a good wine appreciated.”

“Do I live? I sometimes think I don't … or no more than a bird who lives to sing. But that's not it, either,” she amended, again giving him that intent look he was beginning to hunger for like some food he had needed all his life and never eaten before and at the same time made him extremely afraid of being found out, so he lowered his eyes. “It is that everything matters too much.”

And for the first time, they dared to be silent for a few moments.

“Tell me about your childhood,” she said then.

“Most of the time I was bored, bored or in revolt …” It was strange, Ned thought, rehearsing the extraordinary evening, how much he told Anna, partly because she listened so intently, and asked him such probing questions, so it all poured out: the early childhood of summers in Maine, of sailing wih his father, of reading aloud around the fire, Dickens and Scott, Nils Holgersson. He told her about his father's haunting voice, about his capacity for fun … and then how all that was closed down by the tragic death. He told of the years of imposed mourning, “Dreadful,” she kept murmuring, “dreadful for you.” More than once he saw the tears in her eyes.

“I took refuge in music,” he told her. How all through college he played the piano, went to the opera whenever he could, concerts, played records, shut life out by immersing himself in music. “So when I heard you sing,” he remembered saying … what a confession! How had he dared say it? “it released something I had held back for years. It was as though a whole world were opening inside me, the world before my father died, the world where anything is possible, where it is all right to feel …”

And she had reached over the table inviting a handclasp.

“Dear Ned … that is a very great compliment.”

Then she had talked about herself and her own childhood. “In a way we are at opposite ends,” she had begun. “You lost the parent you needed most, but I was able to keep my mother. So for me everything opened when everything for you closed.” She told him about her father, stern, unable to express anything except anger, a man of tight control, “a sort of genius, they tell me, but all I saw was the
gauleiter
at home. He never understood anything about me, and of course I suffered for mother. You will love my mother,” she had added.

And he had felt he must warn her that she would hate his.

“Yet there are similarities,” she had gone on with whatever she was saying about herself, “I too took refuge in music, took refuge in a talent, I suppose.”

The bottle of wine was finished, and they had come to lemon sherbet and coffee, when she finally asked, “Why did you become a banker?”

He remembered now how that question seemed to trouble the hours of intimacy, how it stuck out, and hurt a little.

“Laziness,” he had answered, on the defensive. “Because of my grandfather the way was open. He had been president, you know, and I was a member of the tribe.” Ned felt more was demanded, more than he would have usually put into words. He was quite aware that for a person like Anna for whom art was possibly the only reality, the financial world must seem irrelevant, outside the pale. So after giving her one of his shy darting looks, he plunged in.

“Rather to my own surprise I found the Harvard Business School a very enlightened place, in some ways more enlightened than Harvard College appears to be.”

“How do you mean?”

“More aware of what is going on in the world, more ‘with it,' as they say.” He smiled his quizzical smile. “Perhaps I shall disappoint you when I say that I find my job extremely interesting, that I am never bored … and then, as I was promoted rather quickly I began to understand the fascination of power, its risks. The financial world is full of risks and guesses. You stick your neck out.”

“But you don't actually risk your neck, do you? The critics are not lying in wait with their machetes, are they?” He remembered Anna asking with an edge of antagonism in her voice.