Daybreak (46 page)

“He told me,” answered Tom.

“Give me your hand, Tom.”

Arthur took it and held it for a moment in both of his. “God bless you,” he said.

Tom needed to cry, but he wouldn’t let himself. It wasn’t manly to cry. Bud had taught him that as far back as when he’d skinned his knee falling off his three-wheeler. Yet in spite of this resolve, his eyes filled with tears.

“I don’t know what to feel,” he blurted.

And suddenly Margaret rushed to him. She was so small, half a head shorter than he, so that he had to look down at her as she held him, down at the face that had been appearing in his dreams, the round, flushed cheeks, the big wet eyes, the hair curved over one cheek, and the earring, the little golden shell.

And he was struck, struck by a shaft of light that dazzled his brain, while at the same time he was aware of what was happening to him. An epiphany, he thought, like the conversions one reads about, the ancient miracles and revelations.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m sorry about what I’ve done.”

She put her fingers over his lips. “No, no. It’s all right. It’s all right now.”

Over Margaret’s head he saw Mom watching and crying, too. And with the instant comprehension that was so much a part of her, she read his fear that this scene would grieve her, after all.

“Oh, Tom,” she cried, “there’s room for more than one in your heart! We’ll all do well together. I’m not afraid.”

It was Holly who relieved the overwhelming emotion of the moment. “Goodness, there’s enough water in this place to turn all the dead brown grass out there to green.” She flapped her own damp handkerchief in the air.

Then, just as the mood broke into laughter, Earl the Third raised his leg against the veranda’s railing.

“More water!” shrieked Holly.

Timmy quickly picked him up and set him out on the lawn. “I’ll have him trained by next week, Mom,” he called back. “Don’t worry, I will.”

By now everyone was laughing, and Tom was thinking that Timmy was right and Holly really was okay.

“What about telephoning Ralph?” suggested Arthur, and asked Laura, “Do you mind?”

“Why, not at all,” she said, hoping her face would not betray her.

“He tried so hard to bring all this about,” said Margaret.

And Laura directed Tom, “Run down to the cellar closet, will you, dear? If ever a day deserved it, this one deserves champagne.”

17

F
ive after five, Laura read on the glowing dial of the bedside clock in Aunt Cecile’s old room. It would have been unthinkable to bring Ralph into the room she had shared with Bud; indeed, that room was now being dismantled, awaiting a complete renewal. In the high bird’s-eye maple bed, Ralph was still asleep. He did not stir while she got up, found her robe in the dark, and went downstairs.

Her slippered feet had not evaded the sharp ears of Earl the Third, who now came swiftly to join her in the kitchen. Most likely, he had been restless, sleeping alone in Timmy’s room this night. And as she bent down to pat him, she felt the smile that began to creep over her face. She couldn’t say she had actually planned to have Ralph stay here, when she had suggested to Timmy that it might be fun to spend election night at his best friend’s house. She hadn’t planned it, but she had definitely hoped.

The smile broadened. “Well, Earl, you never know, do you?” she said, and went to put a pot of coffee on the stove. “Not that I need waking up,” she added.

It had been a long time since she had felt this peculiar
joy, actually not since girlhood, she thought, so long a time that she had forgotten how it felt, remembering only the marvel of it. Slowly, slowly, the memory, too, had lost its color and gone gray, how gray she had not even realized until now.

And, as the sky began to lighten toward another mild November morning, and bare treetops grew distinct behind the hedge and behind the roof of the old Alcott house, she sat there sipping the good warmth and musing. Forward, back, and forward again, the film runs …

Yesterday at headquarters, watching the screen as the returns came sweeping in, and the telephones jangled without stay. Anxious faces floating, anxious feet hurrying, and rumors spreading, only to be denied.

And the evening at last, waiting and hoping until, near midnight, the hope became reality and uproarious celebration broke loose into a pandemonium of music and balloons and noise.

Then Ralph coming to her after an hour of all that. “I’ve been looking all over for you in this crowd. Enough! I’ve thanked everyone I can think of, so let’s get out of here. There’s nobody I want to be with except you.”

And the weeks before this, the last glimpse of Tom at the airport, willing to go, revivified, with his head up. His assurances over the telephone; new friends, astronomy, his first sight of a near blizzard, and more.

“Don’t worry about me, Mom. Honestly, I mean it.”

And Timmy, hopeful now, without the vague, anxious look that had always lurked even at his most cheerful moments. Please God, let the hope be warranted.

And the aunts, who took three full days and nights of talk on their way back to Florida to absorb the story of
Peter and Tom—not that they had absorbed it fully yet, or that anyone ever really could.

Figuratively, they had wrung their hands over Bud. “The Ku Klux Klan! And he such a gentleman,” mourned Cecile, who, so clever at business, could also be so naive. “Such a gentleman! I would never have believed it if anyone had told me.”

Lillian, who had been enthusiastic about Jim Johnson, assured Ralph that “If we still lived in this state, we’d all vote for you.” Ralph had given Laura a surreptitious wink. But he liked the aunts.

“I suppose you’ll be getting married someday,” Lillian said privately. “You’ll wait a year at the very least, naturally.”

“Do have it in the house,” advised Cecile. “Elegant, but small in the circumstances. He’s a very fine catch, dear.”

So women really do still talk that way, Laura thought, amused.

“You’re leaping way ahead,” she had replied. “No one said anything about a wedding.”

“Oh, but I see it coming,” had said Cecile, the romantic.

“What are you doing?” asked Ralph, coming now into the kitchen. “It’s almost the middle of the night.”

“Just thinking. I’m so grateful that you won.”

“I won the battle. But the war against the Johnsons is never won, neither here nor in Bosnia.”

“It’s as bad as that.”

“Of course it is. You know they’ve got all sorts of groups under other names, selling neo-Nazi literature, corrupting the young. They spread themselves like a disease, a virus.”

“Thank God, Tom conquered the virus.”

“Yes,” Ralph said soberly. “What do you hear from him?”

“Nice things. Holly’s college is a three-hour-ride’s distance, so he borrowed a car last weekend and went to take her to lunch. It was funny, the way he tells it. It seems some fellow he knew saw him with her and asked him later who ‘the cute girl’ was. So he simply told them the whole story, and it didn’t seem to bother him in the least to tell it. Naturally, they were amazed, and that’s all there is to it.”

“He’s a good guy. I always suspected he was. But was he ever angry at me! At one point, I didn’t see how I’d ever get to you, with all that anger directed at me.” Ralph waited a moment, searching through the past. “I’ll never forget the day I brought that terrible news to this house. My heart was racing so that I didn’t think I’d manage to get the words out.”

“You were very calm, though.”

“That was my legal training.”

“You were very kind. That isn’t legal training, it’s you.”

He squeezed her hand. “We’ve come a long way in a short time, Laura.”

He looked at her so intently, so earnestly, and yet so eagerly, that she was struck with a kind of pain.

“I told you once, or maybe I only think I did, that I believe there is something like an alter ego, the
other self
, and that’s what I was looking for. And I felt it that first day when I saw you here.”

“Had you never felt anything like it before?”

“I told you, I’ve had my full share of women, but that way—no. You have, though.”

“Once.”

“I won’t ask you about it.”

“It’s ancient history. Finished and over. Everything is. Myself as Mrs. Homer Rice—that’s all over, too. And probably was long before I realized it.”

Before I knew the extent of his deceit, she thought, knowing what I have just found out.

Later, sometime today, she would tell Ralph the rest of the story. But the whole day lay ahead, and later would do as well as now.

“You’re not going to work today, are you?” she asked him.

“No. A man’s entitled to recuperate from all his politicking on the day after he has won an election.”

“What would you like to do with the day?”

“Do you want to know? I’d like to go back upstairs.”

It was so
right
to go “back upstairs.” This night, their first night, had been completely
right
, the last step in an orderly progression from the hour when they had sat in the coffee shop at the Hotel Phoenix and she had thought, or could she possibly actually have told him, that he looked like Lincoln. A funny thought for a person born south of the Mason-Dixon Line …

“You’re laughing. At what?”

“Not really. Just smiling.”

At the bedroom door he opened his arms wide to summon her into them. His eyes were bright with his happiness. And she thought, as he held her breast to breast, I never want to lose him.

   Late in the afternoon they went to sit on the veranda. Ralph was examining an old guitar that Aunt Cecile had left on the closet shelf years before. A thin twang trembled as his fingers moved on the strings.

And suddenly Laura interrupted him. “I have something
here, a letter. It came three days ago, but I didn’t want to trouble you with it until the election was past.”

“Trouble me? Is it bad news?”

“I’ll let you decide. Will you read it? Or shall I read it to you?”

“You read it to me, please.”

She took it out of the envelope and in a strange, tense voice, unfamiliar even to herself, began to read.

“The stationery is headed: Francis Alcott, with an address in New York. Here it is.

“ ‘Dear Laura,

“ ‘When you read this, I shall be dead. Tomorrow I am to undergo surgery on my heart, and I do not believe I will survive it, but will go as my father did, at his same age. The Alcotts don’t make old bones.

“ ‘My attorney will destroy this letter if I should survive because I want now, at long last, to come to you myself and tell you, along with everyone else concerned, what you will be reading here.

“ ‘Since I left home I have gone back every two or three years with the intention of seeing you. Perhaps you will not believe me, and I cannot blame you if you do not, but it is true that I have walked around and driven past your house time and time again, trying to find courage enough to ring the doorbell. I used to visit my parents’ graves and my most distant relatives, but when the last day came, I would still not have found the courage to ring the bell.

“ ’In the past few years my heart has been having “episodes,” and after each one, I have resolved again, before it should be too late, to see you, but as with the embezzler who is determined surely to return the money “someday,” the day never came.

“ ‘Dear Laura, I have loved you, or shall I say “the
memory of you,” all my life. I know now that I must have loved you when you were still a child, perhaps only ten years old, but since it was not “right” to do so, my conscious mind did not permit me to. But when I came home that weekend after four years away, then you were twenty, and it would have been, it was “right”; and
recognition
when you came through the hedge and crossed the lawn toward me was like an explosion, like fireworks soaring into that summer night. When you played
A Little Night Music
, when you threw crumbs to the birds on the beach the next day, and when we—But you know the rest.

“ ‘So now I must get to the core of the matter. I have kept up with the news at home; I know that you are a recent widow, and I know the circumstances. Also, I have the newspaper stories about the Crawfields’ and the Rices’ babies. Dear Laura, it is at this point that my pen wants to stop, but I will not allow it to.