By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda (17 page)

It was meant to make him feel six years old.
He didn't care. It
was
urgent. "Absolutely. I wanted to ask
Miss Marylsworth whether she'd ever tried to eat a peach that
wasn't ripe."

"What
are
you babbling about, Geoff?"
interrupted his father.

"An unripe peach is bitter, hard; you could
break a tooth on it. You have to decide: should you throw it out,
or put it in a bowl and let it ripen? Even if you decide to save
it, it may or may not ripen. But you'll never know for sure if you
chuck it. You have to wait and see. It's so simple, really. I don't
know why I never thought of it." He leaned back in his chair,
delighted, and only just stopped himself from balancing on its back
legs.

There was an exquisitely short pause before
Reverend Watchett said, "For myself, I do not see what can loosen
the strings of a donor's pocketbook more than a used-book
sale."

The broken threads of conversation got
picked up and rewoven after that, but Geoffrey contributed little
to the predictable pattern that took shape during the rest of the
meal. He had nothing more to say. Tonight he had sized up country
living and decided that perhaps he was too small to fit the bill.
He loved Seton Place, but he did not want to be a slave to it. He
loved his parents, but he did not see himself sharing the
pleasantly dull routine of their lives.

All during his convalescence after the war
he'd been aware, deep down, that he'd make a laughable country
squire. But laughing out loud was another thing altogether; he
would not hurt his parents, and so he retreated into apathy. He
realized (possibly during the fish course) that all this time he'd
been begging to be tossed out on his ear. So far that hadn't
happened—although the night was still young, no reason to give up
hope.

His parents were far too well-bred to disown
him. So, he'd have to disavow them. Not in the usual sense, of
course; he loved them far too much just to walk out of their lives.
But this elder-son business ... the practice of primogeniture was
absurd, obsolete. Everyone could see that Henry was the elder son
in everything but chronology. Henry doted on Seton Place, nagged
relentlessly about its proper maintenance—and kept a copy of
Delbert's Peerage
by his bed for light reading. Every chance
he got he came down from London to enjoy the quiet pleasures of the
old homestead. Well, Henry could have the old homestead. Geoff dug
into the sponge cake, piled high with double cream and the last of
the season's blueberries. It was prize enough.

After dessert Lady Seton rose from the
company and said to her husband, "You will want to have your coffee
here, no doubt."

The ladies all rose to withdraw, and the
gentlemen stood up. When the men were alone, cigars and coffee were
brought in. Geoff lit up, feeling utterly relaxed and comfortable
with his decision to hand his right to Seton Place over to Henry.
He wished his brother were here now; he'd drag him off to the
smoking room and make the bequest happily. Or no: he ought to
inform his father of his decision first. Tomorrow. The cigars were
excellent—new, Cuban—and did much to add to Geoff's sense of
well-being. He was free, or almost free. So. What to do with his
freedom.

Build ships. Work for that impossible
American, by God. Stranger things had happened. Geoff poured
himself another glass of Madeira, smiling at the prospect of
walking into Jim Fain's office and demanding his old job back.
Across the table, Tony Marylsworth was assuming quite logically
that the smile was for an anecdote he was telling that involved a
unicycle and a one-armed cotton spinner.

Geoff swirled the Madeira in its glass and
read its contents the way a gypsy did tea leaves. He had, at last,
a future: he would walk away from Seton Place and take up
shipbuilding. He knew where he wanted to be and what he wanted to
be doing there. Only one more aspect needed to be divined. It was
the same question that had been put to seers since time began.
Who, dear Lord, will be there with me?

The conversation around Geoff had wound
down, and Sir Walter, putting out his cigar, said, "The ladies will
be wondering what keeps us."

They rejoined the women for tea in the
drawing room. There they were, a perfect cross-section of country
gentry: a viscountess, a baroness, a minister's wife, and an
untitled but exceedingly cultivated young lady who spoke half a
dozen Mediterranean tongues. Geoff pictured Amanda among them.
Amanda: tomboy, artist, temptress, and all-around Valkyrie. Amanda,
with her slinky dresses worn over underwear or not, depending on
her mood. Amanda, with or without a gun! Amanda, with her
ever-present cigarette. Her gin and tonic. Her sprightly language.
Her gypsy eyes and red, red lips.

Geoff was deep in a game of auction bridge
now, although he had no recollection of being partnered with Jane
Marylsworth, or of sitting down at the game table. He looked across
at the fair, blue-eyed Jane and saw: Amanda in white, letting her
freckles show. Amanda in a smock, her cheek smeared with clay.
Amanda exhausted and asleep in his car after a night in the
slammer.

It was a case of simple demonic possession,
and he wondered whether he'd need an exorcist to get through the
bridge game. Amanda had taken over everyone in the room, including
Geoff (she'd entered his own body with the brandy, of that he was
certain).
Go away, Amanda, and let me concentrate or I won't
make my bid. I love you but go away.

The queen of clubs was still in his hand,
poised for the toss, when it hit him. He felt himself blush like a
maiden. His heart hesitated, like a balky engine, then turned over
and began to race while his body was forced to sit in neutral. Love
Amanda? "Son of a bitch," he murmured. "I do."

"Geoffrey,
please,"
begged his mother
in a quietly shocked voice. She turned to Reverend Watchett in
apology. "Please don't mind him. It's that dreadful American
influence."

His mother was right. If ever someone was
under the influence, it was Geoffrey.
Amanda, I love you. I love
you, Amanda.
Son of a bitch.

"Geoffrey, are you going to play this hand
or not?"

Still in a daze, he grinned inanely. "Play
it? Oh, yes. For all it's worth."

Geoff was halfway across the Atlantic when
news of the bombing came over the wireless. From the first-class
cabins, filled with wealthy Americans returning from business and
vacation trips abroad, to the tourist thirds, filled with students,
artists, and tourists who'd been able to scrape together ninety
dollars for the round trip, the talk on September 17 was the same:
terror and anarchy had reached the U.S. shore. The bomb had gone
off in New York, a port of entry for every Bolshevik in Europe. And
it had gone off on Wall Street, just opposite the House of Morgan
and close by the Stock Exchange—fitting targets for angry
revolutionaries.

There was more of outrage on the upper decks
of the liner and more of sadness on the lower decks, but everywhere
there was shock, because death was involved, and terrible injury.
For Geoff there was more than outrage and sadness and shock. There
was a gut-twisting fear that Amanda—his Amanda, crazy Amanda,
idealistic Amanda—might have somehow indirectly bankrolled this
most despicable of all man's infamies to man.

Would she? As soon as the question formed in
his brain he despised himself for suspecting her; for not loving
her enough; for not knowing her inside out. Soon after the
self-loathing, a reaction set in: an irrational anger that Amanda
refused to let herself be known better; that she was not dull and
predictable, like nice Miss Marylsworth. And after that, yet
another reaction: against the Miss Marylsworths of the world, for
being so dull and predictable.

For three days Geoff tortured himself with
such idle speculations. Then, as soon as the last hawser of the
White Star liner was secured to its piling, he scrambled off,
leapfrogging over the pearl-encrusted body of at least one member
of J. P. Morgan's entourage and knocking down the lady's maid in
the process, leaving his baggage to catch up with him as best it
could. Within an hour he'd hired a car and bought up every
newspaper he could lay his hands on.

The news was bad. A huge TNT bomb had been
set to go off in a horse-drawn wagon on Wall Street. The explosion
blew the horse to pieces and rocked several buildings on the
Street, killing the chief clerk of the House of Morgan and sending
dozens of clerks, runners, stenographers, and broker's assistants
to the hospital. No one had yet taken credit for the bomb, but
feeling ran high that it was a Bolshevik plot.

And Amanda wasn't in her Greenwich Village
studio. Geoff told himself not to panic, not to doubt, but the
barbed wire that had got tangled around his heart in the
mid-Atlantic seemed to draw tighter. He found a phone and called
the house in Westport. He recognized the voice of the Fains'
impertinent maid, only it sounded far more cautious now. No, Amanda
was not there and yes, in that case she would see if Mr. or Mrs.
Fain were available, but no, he shouldn't count on it.

Mrs. Fain did come to the phone, near to
tears. "You've heard about the bombing, then," she began at once,
not at all surprised that Geoff was back in the States. "This is
all so dreadful, more like a novel than real life, or even
True
Story.
And so, so unfair."

Geoff murmured some words of consolation and
immediately she began to cry. "It's not like the horse did anything
wrong, or even all those poor people, but at least they can
understand what was happening to them, although who can explain
such a thing? Pa says I shouldn't carry on so about a dumb animal,
but that's just it, you see—the animal didn't understand. Pa says
if I have to carry on it should be for Perry, but ... but I can't,
somehow. It's too horrible. When I think of it my mind wants to
turn away. It's easier to cry about the horse."

The barbed wire wrapped itself more tightly
around Geoff's heart; his chest seemed to be filling up with thick,
heavy blood. "What—happened to the boy?" he said in a voice
shuddering with fear.

"What do you mean what happened? A bomb blew
him up."

"But he wasn't killed, he couldn't have been
killed. I would have read—"

"I didn't say he was
killed
," she
cried, horrified. "But his head is all wrapped up like a mummy's,
and his arm is in a cast, and his poor body is one big
black-and-blue mark, and no one can see him except close kin."

"How did Amanda take it?" Geoff asked
quickly.

"Amanda?" Mrs. Fain hesitated, then said
nervously, "I ... don't know."

"Well, where is she? How can I get in touch
with her?"

"I don't know."

"What about her father? Can he help me?"

"I ... I don't know."

"Well, for God's sake—" Immediately he
reined himself in. "Mrs. Fain," he said in a voice filled with
gentle urgency. "I think you do know where your daughter is. If
she's in any trouble, I want to help her."

"No, no, she's not in trouble," Mrs. Fain
burst out. "The police have already talked to her, but that doesn't
mean anything. They talked to me, to Pa, to everyone. They said
that's just routine, you know. Routine business. That isn't why
she's—she's gone off. It's because her uncle won't let her see
Perry. Oh, it's very cruel. Amanda was devastated. She had nothing
to do with it, she told me that, but he hasn't trusted her, not
since she got arrested. He thinks she's some sort of Communist, he
says—whoever
they
are. If he was
my
brother—but of
course he's Jim's. And now I don't know what Amanda may do
...."

"Tell me where she is, Mrs. Fain," he
repeated in a steady voice, wondering whether she could even hear
him over his heart's hammering.

"I don't
know,
I said! Not—not for
sure. But maybe ... we have a lodge way up in the Adirondacks, for
hunting. No one ever uses it. There's no telephone, no lights.
Amanda was only there once, but she was very taken with it. I keep
wondering—"

Immediately he demanded and got directions.
He finished up with something that he hoped sounded soothing.

"Find her, Geoff," Mrs. Fain pleaded. "Her
father will never let on, but he's worried sick."

Before long Geoff was pressing north along
the west side of the Hudson River, following the route of trappers
and Indians into New York's still vast wilderness. He'd never
traveled upstate before. Even in the dark, even in his tired and
distracted condition, he was impressed. The rolling, wooded hills
of the southern part of the state became higher and more rugged as
he flogged his black Buick Six tourer up yet another incline. Mile
after mile rolled out from under him, leaving him limp with
frustration and anxiety. It seemed inconceivable to him that Amanda
had made the trip alone; he began to feel that he was on a
wild-goose chase.

Sometime in the middle of the night the road
signs began splitting first into two, then three images; he was
becoming punchy. Barely awake, he pulled over onto the shoulder and
nodded off into a series of short, hallucinatory nightmares. In the
last one of the sequence, Amanda was driving her Speedster down a
wooded path when suddenly it blew up, leaving nothing but a red-hot
forest fire behind. In the dream Geoff tried again and again to
penetrate the flames, but he was forced back, his hands painfully
burned. He moaned and when he awoke from the sound of his voice he
found that his arm had fallen asleep. He climbed down from the car,
shook himself free from his aches and stillness, and climbed back
in. There were still thirty-five numbing miles to go.

When the sun finally came up the odyssey
seemed suddenly more bearable. Gone were the looming giants that
swayed and hissed in the night. In their place were magnificent
pines, birches, hemlocks, cedars, and maples, and the only flames
Geoff saw were those of fall foliage. The world through which he
drove was rich, majestic, almost serene in its wildness. Here and
there a farmer had tried to tame a small patch of it for himself
and surrounded his irregular, rocky fields with crisscrossing stone
fences. There might be a few Holsteins grazing close by a weathered
barn with a tilting silo attached. But by and large this was God's
country. No one else had made the effort to share it.