Daybreak (5 page)

“He won’t be coming back here to settle, mark my words. It’ll be New York or Boston, more likely.”

“Well, probably. He won’t be home at all this summer. No time off, Mrs. Alcott says.”

“The Baker girl will be disappointed, that’s for sure. He’s been seeing her for the last three years whenever he’s been home.”

“They make a good-looking pair. She’s a stunning girl, don’t you think so?”

“But he’s not ready to be serious, his father says. He won’t even consider marriage until he’s finished his training.”

“She won’t wait for him. She’s twenty-six, and thirty is looming up.”

“That remains to be seen. You never know.”

She had better not wait for him, thought Laura, and scoffed:
a stunning girl
. The Baker girl with that foolish constant smile that made your cheeks ache to look at? Why ever would Francis want her?

From a group snapshot that had been taken one Fourth of July, she cut out his head and put it into her gold locket where before her aunts had been. Then she had to wear the locket day and night so that they wouldn’t find it in her room. It was not that they would be angry or hurt; no, of course not; they would be merely amused, and she could not have borne that either.

They thought she had a crush on Francis. “And why not?” Aunt Lillian said to the cook. Her voice, unlike Cecile’s, was loud enough to carry up the backstairs from the kitchen. “With his looks—those eyes of his—he can turn any woman’s head if he wants to.”

“And even if he doesn’t want to.” The cook laughed. “Any woman from eight to eighty.”

They were cheapening her love. A crush, they called it, a feeling you might have for one boy in March, for another in April, and still another in May. And opening the locket in front of the mirror, Laura studied Francis’s face, which seemed to be looking back at her with love. But then, I am only twelve, she thought. If only she were older …

Unexpectedly, one weekend he flew home from Boston. When she saw him coming across the lawn from his house, she dashed out, banging the screen door behind her, and threw her arms around his neck. She had always done so, and when she was still small enough, he had always lifted and hugged her. She was hardly small enough now; so taking her arms down from his neck, he held both of her hands and kissed her forehead.

“Oh, it’s good to be back! How are you, Princess?”

“You’re too big now to hug Francis like that,” Aunt Lillian reproved her that night. “Laura darling, you’re not a child anymore.”

Hot with humiliation and knowing what was meant, she did not answer. What was meant was:
You have breasts
. He felt them when you pressed against him.

“She may be tall for her age, but she is still a child after all,” Cecile said.

Would they never learn that she always overheard them when they were having their coffee in the sitting room?

“I sometimes think you read too much into things, Lillian.”

“And I sometimes think you don’t read at all.”

That was Lillian. Cecile was the sweeter, the romantic
one. But Lillian was the smarter of the two. And so Laura learned care and caution.

Then suddenly she was fifteen. Long ages seemed to have passed, not just three years, since she had been an impetuous girl of twelve. She had a quiet manner. The promise of height had been kept; she was slender, and her striking hair was still blond. Thanks to the aunts who, knowing how to dress, had taught her well, she had fine, subtle taste. Her clothes were simple. She wore a necklace of gold links, a small ruby ring that had belonged to her mother, and a man’s wristwatch that the army had sent home from Korea. And hidden under her collar, she wore also Francis’s picture in the locket, although it was two years since she had seen him last.

There were many parties that year, and she went to them all. People liked Laura, as people always had done. She was, in a sense, a leader, for which she was thankful, but also surprised because she could see nothing special about herself, nothing different from most other girls except that she was able to entertain people at the piano.

Dressed in red velvet for somebody’s formal dance at the country club, she was waiting to be called for one evening when Francis rang the doorbell.

“You always come home unexpectedly,” she said with her new calm smile.

“I covered for a fellow at the hospital last weekend, and this is my payback. I’m so darned glad to be here, Laura. But I’m holding you up. You’re on your way out, I see.”

Her heart was wild, and yet she was able to keep that practiced calm.

“Yes, to a dance, but not till half-past. Sit down and keep me company.”

He drew up a chair near hers so that their knees almost touched. “Do you realize it’s two years since I saw you last? You’re so changed that I almost don’t know you anymore.”

“I’m fifteen now.”

“If I were fifteen, I’d bar the door to the fellow who’s taking you, and I’d take you to the dance myself.”

“Your father says you’re working too hard.”

“Oh, I’ve had a few twenty-four-hour stretches between sleeps. But that goes with the job, and I love the job.”

“Is that why you don’t come home anymore?”

“Dad says he has more free time than I have, so he’d rather visit me. He’s going to enjoy California again when I go back there for my fellowship.” Francis smiled. “He loved the ocean.”

“How long will you be there?”

“It’s a two-year fellowship. Then maybe I’ll go abroad for research. I want to specialize in rare diseases, then come back and teach.”

“Elephantiasis and stuff like that?”

“Like that. How do you know about elephantiasis?”

“I pick things up when I read, and I read everything. Ever since you taught me.”

“I’m proud of you, Laura. Glad and proud.”

And with a touch of her own pride, she told him, “I skipped a year. I’ll be sixteen and a half when I graduate.”

The dialogue came to a stop, although there ought to have been so much to say after their long separation.
Indeed, Laura’s head was crammed with questions, but she could not ask them.

After a moment, Francis asked one. “What’s been happening in the neighborhood? Anything interesting? All I’ve heard is that George Buckson’s bank has sent him to Hong Kong, and that Carol Baker’s engaged.”

“But not to you?”

His eyebrows rose. “Me? Whoever gave you that idea?”

“My aunts.”

“Of course, who else?” And they both laughed.

The laughter restored them to where they had been two years before. A light relief moved through Laura’s body, an involuntary smile touched her lips, and wanting to display her lace cuff and the pink shells of her newly manicured nails, she rested her hand on the arm of the chair. If only the doorbell would not ring, if only they might stay alone like this.

He was looking at her, eyes meeting eyes, and she saw in his that he found her beautiful.

“You—” he began when the doorbell rang.

“Oh darn, here they are,” she cried.

Francis went to open the door on the cold air and the noisy little troupe. Jeanie was with Rick, Cissy was with Fred, and Hank had a corsage—a white one, thank goodness—for Laura.

“We’re late,” Hank said in a rush. “I had to wait for the station wagon, so we all decided to meet here and save time.”

Self-conscious in their clothes, they stood waiting while she made a quick introduction to Francis and hurried herself into her coat. Suddenly they looked like such kids, such awkward kids. They had never
seemed like that before. And Laura’s feeling of elegance evaporated; she partook of their awkwardness.

Francis loomed over them, although the boys were almost as tall as he.

“Have a great time, you kids,” he said. “And Laura, tell your aunts I’m sorry I didn’t get to see them, but this is a short visit. I’m going with my parents to visit relatives in the country tomorrow, and the next day I leave. So give them my best, will you?”

They piled into the car, and Laura watched him walk away across the lawn.

“That’s a good-looking guy. Who is he?” Jeanie asked.

They were all so noisy that they didn’t even give Laura a chance to answer.

“Good-looking! For Christ’s sake, Jeanie, the guy’s
old
. An
old
guy,” mocked Fred, who had pudgy cheeks and a queer, flattened nose.

“Well, he doesn’t look old,” Jeanie said. “Who is he?” she repeated.

Laura was hot and cold. “A family friend. A neighbor,” she said dully.

Have a good time, you kids. Kids
. Yet the way he had looked at her … And he had been about to say something. Now she would never know what it was. Probably she would never know. He might not even be back here for another two years. And so much could happen while he was away.

She dreamed about him. At parties boys kissed her, but her dreams were of being kissed by Francis, and they were sorrowful dreams, filled with longing.

   Time, time, thought Laura. Her eyes followed the plaster flowers on the wall. The grandmother had ordered
the thistle and the rose, but the grandfather, being of Irish descent, had in rebellion squeezed a few shamrocks into the corners. “Old passions, old pains,” she murmured, thinking: Francis is over fifty now. I wonder what he looks like.

People said he was a famous doctor in New York, a researcher, a teacher. The neighbors said, “We got a Christmas card from Francis Alcott. Of course, we were such friends of the old doctor’s. Do you get a card, too?”

No, she never did. Not a card or anything else.

   At the other end of the state was the university at which Laura was to major in music. The aunts were probably relieved that she was not a fitting candidate for a conservatory, for any one of these would have taken her too far away. They made mild lament over even this much distance from home.

“You promise, Laura, to call home twice a week? It’s easier for you to reach us than for us to reach you in that enormous place. Call collect at dinnertime, hear?”

Their possessiveness could have been a burden, and to many girls away for the first time to savor independence, it would have been. But Laura had treasured love since the age of three, and she made allowances.

As always, the aunts were eager for news and eager to spread it.

“Carol Baker had a huge wedding. Ten bridesmaids, imagine! A good thing she didn’t count on Francis Alcott, isn’t it, or she’d still be waiting. It doesn’t look as if he’ll ever marry and stay in one place.”

For a pair of single women past middle age, they
were fascinated by marriage, Laura thought with affectionate amusement.

“The Alcotts just came back from California. They say Francis is doing well. But he was always outstanding, so it’s only to be expected. He may be traveling to India with some medical group in a year or two, did we tell you? And he wants your address, Laura. I think he has a present for you. Books, Dr. Alcott said.”

And books did arrive, the lives of Mozart and Beethoven, with a note enclosed.

Foraging in a bookstore as usual, I saw these and thought you might like them. So you see how you people at home are always in my mind. But I have to admit it’s wonderful here. I’ve made great friends, the work’s going well, and of course the climate is perfect. Dear Laura, I hope you’re just as pleased with where you are
.

His handwriting looked like him, the letters orderly and even until a capital appeared, tall and swooping like the punctuation of his sudden laughter. And as always, she remembered his hands, the narrow, pale tan hands with the Greek lettering on the seal ring. Now in the California sun, she supposed his hands must be brown.

“I’ll be coming home in July for a couple of weeks,” he wrote. “I’ll want to hear all about your freshman year.”

That was the summer the aunts arranged a trip to Alaska. Laura’s protests were useless.

Aunt Lillian exclaimed, “Summer courses! What on earth for? With your grade average, you deserve a vacation, Laura. It’s all planned anyway, from Anchorage to Nome. Bears, eagles, ice fields—we’ll take our time and see it all.”

So they went, and indeed it was as marvelous as
promised. But when they got home, Francis had been there and gone.

And the same thing happened the next year, when they went to Montreal, down the St. Lawrence River and into Nova Scotia.

“It’s too bad we missed Francis,” said Aunt Cecile when they arrived home. “He went back just three days ago.”

If she had not known Cecile so well, known that she was utterly incapable of dissembling, Laura might have thought that the dates had been planned to turn out that way.

Occasional letters came to her from Francis. Since she saved them all, she was able to compare and so to discover how often he wrote about “thinking of” or “missing all you people at home.” Who were “all you people”? Did he possibly mean: “I miss
you
”? But if he did, he should have said so.

And one afternoon on a solitary walk, Laura had a sudden astonishing sense of herself as she might appear to an analytical observer: a foolish adolescent obsessed with an imagined romance. Seen so, she was a figure of embarrassment. This picture was so startling that it brought her to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk. My God, she must bring her mind under control! Must make a strict, enormous effort! She was letting Francis Alcott rule her life.…

At Christmastime, Dr. and Mrs. Alcott joined their son on a trip to the Yucatán. From there came a letter from Francis with a snapshot of the three standing before the pyramid at Chichén Itzá. The letter was cordial and as vivid as a travel brochure. No, there is nothing here for you, Laura said to herself; you are beginning to see that, aren’t you? This will fade, you
are an adult woman now, at eighteen. You are getting over this.

And still there was not a day, even if only for a moment, when she did not think of Francis.

In her junior year she met a man who stood apart from the crowd of her peers, the Freds and Joes who had gone through high school with her, the fraternity men, the jocks, the scholars, the whole assortment with whom she went to football games or chamber music concerts with equal enjoyment. She was adaptable, and she liked being adaptable. One had a wide choice that way, and it was challenging.