Crossroads (2 page)

Chapter Two

A
s he drove Jewel home, Albert proved to be not only a nice man, but a talkative one. In the space of five minutes he had pointed out the stable where Mrs. Wright boarded her beloved horses, and told several stories about her prowess as a rider in her youth.

“You know Mrs. Wright very well,” Jewel said, to say something.

“I’ve been with the Wright family for twenty years” was the proud reply. “And if I wasn’t going to be seventy-eight this month I wouldn’t be retiring. Mrs. Wright is the salt of the earth, let me tell you.” He looked at Jewel in his rearview mirror, as if he was waiting for her to chime in with her own praise of the great lady. But Jewel was thinking about the beautiful white house, now gleaming in the rain, that was receding behind them. The sense of well-being and pleasure she’d felt while she was inside it was receding too—in spite of her efforts to recapture it.

When her supervisor had asked her to take the papers to Mrs. Wright, she’d felt like a schoolkid who had been given an unexpected recess. Then she’d gotten a glimpse of a paradise she’d never dreamed existed. Now the recess had been canceled; she’d been politely ushered out of paradise, and was on her way back to reality. Tomorrow she would go back to her dreary job and smile and be sweet because no one must ever know how much she hated it. That was what she had to look forward to. And behind her in the white house was a girl who complained about going to Paris and didn’t even appreciate her car enough to drive it.

Gwen Wright probably has more money in her pocket than I have
in my whole bank account. I’ll bet she doesn’t know how much she
has; she’s never even counted it. I know to the penny how much I
have. Because I have to know.

Albert broke into her reverie. “Did you see that mutt, Hank? Mrs. Wright took him in even though she has Missy, that’s her collie that wins all the awards,” he said. “Mrs. Wright can’t stand to see any animal in trouble. That little stray showed up at the back door loaded with mange, and one of its legs was full of buckshot where some farmer had shot it up. Anyone but Mrs. Wright would have had the dog put down but she told that vet to do whatever he had to, to save it. I don’t know how many operations it took, it cost the earth, but now that mutt lives in the house and it has a bed right next to Missy’s, and Mrs. Wright doesn’t make a particle of difference in the way she treats both of them. That’s the kind of person she is.” He paused, and once again, Jewel knew that was her cue to respond.

“Mmmm,” she said.

That wasn’t nearly good enough for Albert. “Look at the way Mrs. Wright took in Gwen when she was just a baby. That poor little thing was all alone in the world.”

“Babies who are put up for adoption usually are.”

“But that poor little one—”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” she cut him off. “You feel sorry for Gwen Wright? Have you looked at the bracelet she has on her arm? Gold, with diamonds in it.”

“Mrs. Wright gave it to her for her eighteenth birthday. That’s my point, she’s so good to Gwen . . . after everything that—” Suddenly he stopped short. He’d been intending to say more and he’d stopped himself.

“After what?” Jewel asked, her bad mood instantly replaced by curiosity.

“Nothing. Just . . . Mrs. Wright is a good woman, that’s all.” But that wasn’t what he’d started to say.

“Because she wanted a baby and she adopted one?” Jewel baited him. “There’s nothing wonderful about that! People do it every day.”

“But Mrs. Wright didn’t want this baby. . . . She couldn’t have!”

The words had slipped out, Jewel could tell. And there was no way she was going to let him clam up now. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s not important.”

“What do you know about Mrs. Wright and Gwen?”

“Nothing. That is . . . I don’t really know. . . .”

“But there’s something you
think
you know. What?”

“It’s not like the Wright family confides in me. . . .”

“It’s something wrong, something bad. . . .”

“It’s not bad!”

But there was something suspicious about it. Jewel could smell it.

“Just drop it!” The old man was really upset now.

“Okay. But if you won’t tell me, I’ll start asking around. And in a town like this, you know someone will know something. It would probably be better if I heard it from you instead of digging up a lot of old dirt.”

He seemed to realize the sense of that. She saw him gather his thoughts for a second, then he plunged in. “Mrs. Wright has had her own share of troubles. Life hasn’t been as easy for her as everyone thinks. Her first husband died in a car accident—”

“Yes, I know about that!” Now that he’d started to spill his secret, Jewel wanted to hurry him along. “He was on a business trip in New Orleans. Checking on a glassworks outlet down there.”

“It wasn’t like that, not quite.” Al paused. “The truth was, that man was no good. Most people didn’t know it, because he was so friendly and likeable and he was on the boards of so many charities and all . . . but some of us who saw him up close . . .we had his number.” He paused again. Would he never get on with it? Jewel bit her tongue. “Do you remember what he looked like?” he asked.

Jewel tried to dredge up an image in her mind and failed. “I was only four when he died,” she said.

“He had red hair. Not bright red, kind of dark. Like Gwen’s.”

It took Jewel a moment to grasp his meaning, then:
Oh, my
god!
she thought, as icy prickles ran up and down her spine.

“Are you saying . . . ?”

“I’m saying I don’t know for sure. But all the servants in the house knew that man cheated on Mrs. Wright. He had been doing it for years. And the outlet in New Orleans was his idea and it never made any money. . . .”

“So if he did have a mistress down there . . .” Jewel’s mind was reeling. “Did Mrs. Wright know her husband was running around on her?”

“I’m sure she suspected it, but I don’t think she would have stayed married to him if she’d known for a fact.”

“So she found out about the baby after his death.”

“And she took it in. Her husband’s illegitimate child.”

“And she never told anyone.”

“Just Gwen’s nursemaid Mavis, and Mavis told me in strictest confidence. Mrs. Wright wanted to protect Gwen from the humiliation—”

“She wanted to protect herself!” Jewel said. And it was astonishing how much she liked the idea of proud, regal Cassandra Wright forced to confide in the hired help and lie to the rest of the world.

“If she had really wanted to protect herself, she would have left Gwen with no one to care for her,” Albert said hotly. “But taking her in was the right thing to do, and Mrs. Wright—”

“Yes, yes. She’s a saint!” Jewel said, but her mind was racing. “Does Gwen know?” she asked Albert. “About her father?”

“Of course not. I told you, Mrs. Wright protects her. And you can’t say a word about any of this. Like I said, I’m the only one Mavis told, and . . .”

She gave him an injured look. “Albert, I’m not that kind of person.”

He seemed reassured—but only a little. “I wouldn’t want anything to hurt Gwen.”

“Of course not.”

“You see, she’s a good kid. But she’s . . . well, she’s different. Yes, that’s it. Different.”

*                           *                           *         

Different.
The word kept repeating itself in Jewel’s head for the rest of the ride home.
Yes, Gwen Wright is different. From me,
anyway. She’s eighteen and I am twenty-two. Her mother was a
tramp who slept with a married man, and mine was a decent woman
who got married and took care of five kids until she was so worn out
she died. Now the tramp’s daughter has everything a person could
ever want, and I have to scrape by.

So she was adopted. And there’s a nasty story about it. And it’s
been kept from her so she doesn’t know where she came from or who
she was. Tough. But no tougher than the way I had it after Ma died
and a half a year later Pop found another wife and then scooted off as
far as you can go without dropping into an ocean.

Albert said Gwen’s different, but what he means is she’s special. So
she shouldn’t have to face life like the rest of us do. Well, who the hell
decided that?

*                           *                           *         

“Duffy Street—is this the place?” Albert asked. Jewel had been so busy with her thoughts she hadn’t even noticed that they’d reached the city.

“Yes, here. Stop in front of the delicatessen. I live over it, on the third floor.”

“Then here you go.”

“Thank you. Good night, Albert.”

“Uh . . . Jewel . . . ?”

“Mum’s the word, Albert. I promise.”

“Well then, good night.”

Chapter Three

J
ewel got out of the gardener’s car and watched as the last vestige of her visit to paradise drove off.
Now you’re back in your
world, Jewel,
she told herself.
Here it is in all its glory—two flights
of rickety old stairs up to the third floor and the owners are too cheap
to have brighter lights. Be careful not to stumble and break your
leg. Now you’re in the apartment—so called—two rooms and a
kitchenette—so called. Compare that with what you’ve just seen.
The rugs like dark blue velvet, the fern plant in the cut-glass bowl on
that little table. It looked like mahogany. It had to be mahogany, so
dark and shining. . . . But now you’d better stop comparing, because
if you don’t it’ll drive you crazy. Still, you will never forget the home
where Gwen Wright lives, not until the day you die. You’ll think
about it before you go to sleep at night, and you’ll daydream about it
when you’re awake. You’ll dream about that house the way other
women dream about finding their true love.

There was a rocking chair in Jewel’s living room—so called—the one new piece of furniture she’d bought for herself. She sat in it now, closed her eyes, and tried to let the back-and-forth motion soothe her. But it didn’t work. Not tonight. She looked around her room in the darkness. She’d been so pleased with herself when she’d moved to Wrightstown; she’d been sure she was moving up in the world.

Wrightstown had been built on a river, like so many New England towns. The township had been founded before the Wrights had established their world-famous glassworks—no one could remember what it had been called in those pre-glassworks days—but it was because of the glassworks that it had grown and remained vibrant while other small communities in the area had withered away. There were jobs to be had in Wrightsville, and because of that, other smaller businesses flourished there too. There were restaurants and movie theaters and a shiny new mall just a few miles away from the center of the thriving city. There were doctors and lawyers and dentists and teachers. There was even a theater that showed the occasional road show from New York as well as rock concerts and other special events. There were rich neighborhoods, full of gracious homes, that climbed up the hills that surrounded the city, and poorer neighborhoods with meager but tidy bungalows crowded near the railroad tracks. These were the homes that had been built for the employees of the glassworks a century earlier. Some of these old areas had fallen into disrepair in the seventies and the eighties and were now being rediscovered by smart young people who had graduated from college and were rehabilitating them. Wrightstown had its own college too.

Jewel had not come from Wrightstown. Her home was farther up the river, a smaller, meaner little community that had surrounded a textile mill in the days when Americans still manufactured their own fabrics, yarns, and threads. Jewel’s father had come there from his family’s failing dairy farm, a smart, angry boy whose anger came from the fact that he was smart and had wanted to go to college but he hadn’t had the money. Instead he’d had to rely on his clever hands. The only work he’d been able to find in the dying textile town had been with a cabinetmaker. The shop where he worked was not a place that did the kind of custom work with fine wood that might have satisfied his soul. He built ugly, boxlike cabinets with cheap hardware to be sold to people whose kitchens and bathrooms were as drab as his own. He came home at night smelling of wood and sweat and machine oil. Jewel couldn’t remember seeing him without sawdust in his hair, not even on Sunday.

Her mother had not been as smart as her father, but she had been a beauty. It was from her ma that Jewel had gotten her spectacular eyes, mouth, and hair. As a child, Jewel had watched her mother’s beauty disappear as lines brought on by stress and worry etched themselves on her lovely face, first between the eyes, then under them; then finally the lines became trenches along the sides of her mouth, pulling it down until the smile that had once been radiant was a grimace. It was money, or the lack of it, that had robbed Ma of her youth and her pretty smile. Money made all the difference—always.

Jewel shifted in the rocker. A picture had come into her mind, one she didn’t want but she couldn’t push it away. It was just a snapshot of a moment that was over in a second—but it was one of those moments that can put a life on a certain course forever. It had happened at the end of the day, when her father had come home. As usual he was tired and out of sorts. Ma had served the dinner that had been cooked with an eye to a dwindling paycheck rather than taste and pleasure, and she had watched Pop’s bad temper mount. And Jewel had watched her. Ma had looked at the children gathered around her table—more mouths than they could feed—and then she looked again at Pop. And her eyes were full of the kind of exhaustion that reaches down into the bones. It was as if she was carrying some burden that was so heavy that she was going to sink under its weight. And Jewel, who was way too young to know anything about the ways of men and women, nevertheless understood it. Because Pop’s fatigue and bad temper had never interfered with his . . . well, Ma would have called them his needs. If anything, the urgency of them seemed to increase with his weariness—and his bad temper. And his needs meant more kids—nothing had ever interfered with that. Ma knew this was going to be another night of needs and as she looked at Pop and the children, she was beaten. Jewel jumped up to take the bowl out of her mother’s hands and started serving the potatoes herself. That was how it had begun. That was how Jewel became one of those girls for whom the carefree years of childhood are a myth because they have taken on the job of helping.

Over the years, there was a lot of helping to be done, for, added to the usual household chores, there was always at least one person in the overcrowded little house who had some kind of physical ailment: a broken arm, or measles, or a bloody nose resulting from a boyish fistfight in somebody’s backyard.

What Jewel remembered most was the ugliness of it all, the turmoil of clothing ready for the wash, of unmade beds and a cluttered kitchen where meals were eaten while everybody was in a hurry, going or coming and going again. Everyone in town seemed to have more money than Jewel’s family had. Their houses had nice curtains on the windows and their girls went to school wearing nice clothes. Jewel wanted to be well dressed and well groomed. She never was. Her hands were rough from washing and cleaning; her beautiful hair was cut bluntly with scissors at home. There was no time for a trip to a beauty shop, no money for a carefully styled coiffure or manicured nails tinted a shining pink.

One bright day, when she was eighteen, Jewel went walking alone beyond the town. She kept on going until she reached the farm country where cornfields bordered the road on either side, and as the wind rushed, the cornstalks swung. Clouds overhead clove the blue. She had heard in school the words “lapis lazuli.” Was this it? And suddenly before her eyes, Jewel saw how the ocean must look as the sky arches over it. She saw enormous waves plunge through the vastness. Everything was alive. Everywhere and everything, from the ocean to the growing corn, to the birds that passed high overhead, all moving things going, going somewhere. Somewhere!

*                           *                           *         

Jewel opened her eyes and stopped rocking. Now she was no longer eighteen, and she was going nowhere. Her life was empty and she had no idea how to fill it. Of course a man would be a solution, and she’d met quite a few attractive men who were attracted to her. But she hadn’t loved any of them. Because the men who came her way were in the same predicament she was: working hard and not having enough to show for it. And she wasn’t going to risk winding up like Ma.

She got up to pull down the shade. The rain and wind were bending back a scrawny tree that was just beyond her window. Beyond the tree was the endless dark. She turned away from the window; she was going to bed. One way to get rid of the pictures in her mind was to sleep.

*                           *                           *         

Sleep was coming slowly. Too slowly. Jewel twisted and turned in the bed sheets, kicking them off and pulling them back. This didn’t happen to her often—thank heaven—but tonight the pictures were stronger than her will; they kept on coming. Now she was back to that wonderful house and that nobody of a girl who didn’t seem to belong there. Then she was in the car with Albert and he was telling her about Cassandra Wright’s great secret. The secret from which Gwen Wright had been so carefully, lovingly protected. Protected as Jewel had never been. A thought joined the pictures racketing around in Jewel’s brain.
I
wonder what would happen if Gwen were to find out.
She tried to push the thought aside, but like the pictures it just kept coming back.