Fortune's Hand (25 page)

She nodded. As if she had anything more important to do! And the sadness of everything washed over her like a long, slow wave of ebb tide.

O
n the third Monday Robb telephoned home from the office to say that having been summoned into an unexpected conference, he was unable to go.

“You go with Philip and look it over. But let's not get ourselves ready for Doomsday. This is simply to have something in case. We may never have to use it, in spite of what anyone tells us.”

Like Ellen, he was thinking and saying what he believed he ought to think and say. Neither of them had even touched on the unhappy subject since the episode on that Sunday afternoon three weeks before. Neither of them had touched on the subject of the move, either. And she hoped that now, with this greater, more imminent concern over Penn, he had dropped it.

“Let's postpone the trip,” she said. “What day can you go? I'll call Philip.”

“No. Go today. I don't believe in postponements. And take your car. It needs a workout.”

So much for his optimism. Poor Robb. And so much for the pretty little car that was so seldom used, a car built for a life of cheerful, busy errands and jolly excursions. She sighed as she hung up the phone. It was a pity to feel such dreary lassitude on a day so bright with the full arrival of spring.

She wished Robb had not been so positive about this visit. It would be late afternoon before they would return. And yet again she recalled that day when she had told Philip about Robb and her father. Why had she done such a thing? What could they talk about now during all those hours? They could not talk about Penn the whole time. And there would have to be a stop for lunch someplace, where they would sit with a little table between them, having a private time together.… No, it was too uncomfortable. A couple of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee would be better. It would be quicker and businesslike.

“Do you mind going in this car?” she asked when Philip arrived. “Robb thinks the engine needs some exercise.”

“Not at all.” He ran his fingers over the smooth gray leather. “It's a kind of jewel, isn't it?”

“I suppose so. Well, yes it is.”

Although her eyes were on the road, she was aware that he was looking in her direction.

“How is Penn today?” he asked.

“I left him with some new toys. One is a maze with a tiny ball that slides around as you tilt the thing. You
should see his expression when he's absorbed in something like that. It's so delightful, so sweet.” And her father had been unable to see it. “I'll never understand my father,” she cried. “Can you explain that to me?”

“I never knew him, Ellen. I have no pieces with which to fit the puzzle together. Maybe he simply had an image of himself and his family.… Everyone has an image. I think I see myself as a source of ‘wise advice, a help to the distressed.' ” He laughed. “And sometimes I think I'm being ridiculous. Who do I think I am? How much do I really accomplish? I haven't changed your lives, yours and Robb's. You came to me years ago with a problem, and you still have the problem.”

He had, perhaps unconsciously, moved the subject from her father to himself. Plainly, he wanted to talk to her about himself. But she did not want to hear it. His hand, lying on his knee, disturbed her. Very white, with long, supple fingers, it reminded her of the contrast between the whiteness and the sunburn on his chest that she had seen that day. Was it yesterday or years ago? But she had remembered it. The mind retained things one didn't want to keep, queer, jumbled bits and pieces, even the V of a white collar and a striped tie, even the timbre of a voice.… I am losing my common sense, she said to herself with furious shame.

“Would you like some music?” she asked.

He leaned forward to the dial. “What kind?”

“You choose.”

Any kind would do, rock, classical, or country. He
chose classical, the Schubert Seventh and Eighth, which would last well over an hour.

They traveled westward with the sun behind them, dark pines in jagged rows ahead and cool air sweeping through the open windows. Driving very fast, she had to concentrate on nothing else but the road, and this concentration emptied her mind, seemed to cleanse it, so that she could willingly have gone on without stopping, with no past, no future, and no thoughts.

When the music ended, they were silent. Once they had to consult the map, but afterward silence resumed and lasted until they arrived at the Wheatley sign. There they turned through the town onto a stony road and stopped in front of a large wooden structure that had apparently not been painted in years.

Philip said suddenly, “You don't really want to go in, do you?”

“It's why I came.”

“I sense that you're feeling weak in the knees. Sit down somewhere first.”

The whole scene had come flooding back: dim halls, the smell of a greasy kitchen, the whole chill spectacle of neglected age and no money. Yet more painful than any of these was the recollection of apathetic faces.

“Wait here on the bench in the shade. I won't be long.”

How had he known that her knees were about to fail? Or that her heart had been hammering? And she sat quite still while her heart began to slow, watching two squirrels chase each other among the trees.

In a short time, Philip returned to explain that these
old buildings were gradually being emptied, and the new ones were just down the hill. He studied her face. “I see you're feeling better. Shall we walk?”

New shingled rooftops came in sight below the crest of the hill. The sounds of hammers, men's shouted voices, and pneumatic drills, all the noises of unfinished business, floated toward them. A driveway was being paved. A bulldozer was leveling ground for what most probably would be a playing field. The telephone company was laying cables. A truck loaded with spruce and hemlock was being unloaded in front of a low brick building with white trim.

A workman, seeing their hesitation, directed them. “You want the administration? That's it, the green door.” They looked toward a wide, hospitable entrance flanked by tall pots ready to be planted. “Go on in. They're already seeing people, if you're interested.”

And Ellen stared. There, carved in stately letters on a long stone panel she read, to her utter shock, these words:
The Richard and Olivia Devlin Living Center
.

“Devlin! Look, Philip! Devlin, I don't believe it!”

“Why not?”

“I don't know! He just doesn't seem—doesn't act like the kind of man who would care.”

“Well, people surprise you. Come inside and see what's going on.”

An affable woman of middle age, the kind of person who creates cheer for the troubled or unsure visitor, approached them. Philip introduced Ellen and identified himself.

“Dr. Lawson! You don't need to give me your name.
I heard you speak at the conference two years ago. So you've come to see us. Quite a change, isn't it? We've had this angel, positively an angel, give us ten million dollars. And of course that's only the start. With a gift like that, the ball gets rolling. Well, of course you know how it is. Let me show you around.”

Led by this flow of enthusiasm, they passed through a series of buildings linked by easy, airy passageways to form a united complex. The predominant impression was of light and space. And gradually it began to seem to Ellen that if the worst were to come to the worst, it wouldn't be the most fearful thing in the world to leave home and come here. Devlin, she thought again. It was astonishing.

When they had seen it all, they went back up the slope, found a weather beaten bench, and unwrapped the sandwiches. Below them lay the new rooftops, glossy in the sunlight. There was birdsong. “Listen,” Philip said, “nesting time.” Otherwise it was very quiet.

“Devlin,” Ellen repeated as if she had not heard him. “Olivia, I can understand. She's a foolish, good little woman. But the money belongs to him, and I don't see him spending it on a project like this.”

“All I know of the man is that he's phenomenally successful, that he's a name.”

“Robb says he wants to be a senator, or governor.”

“This gift will surely not hurt his chances. You don't have to be told that there's a crying need for modern, enlightened facilities like this one. The papers and magazines are filled with articles about it. This gift will be
worth a few thousand—no, make it a few hundred thousand—votes.”

“Nevertheless, I feel evil in the man.”

“That may be so, but whatever his motives, they don't make his gift any the less marvelous.”

“True, and still I feel—” Ellen's voice died away.

“Forgive my curiosity, but just what is it that you do feel?”

“I don't know exactly. I hate the way he looks at me, for one thing. He ogles.”

Philip smiled. “Annoying to you, but not unnatural of him to admire a beautiful woman.”

“Thank you, but this is different. It's hard to explain. He measure things, even people, as if he were going to buy them. I've seen his negotiations over wine at a thousand dollars a bottle. It disgusted me. Of course it's none of my business. I know that. Do I seem petulant with all this criticism? I think maybe I do. I can hear myself.”

“No. You have a right to like anyone you want. But so much for Mr. Devlin. Poor man, I hope for his sake he doesn't know what you think of him.”

“Oh, never. I have to be nice to him. He's too important to Robb. I wish he weren't.”

She should not have said that, either. This was the second, or was it the third time that she had revealed things too personal to be revealed? Yet she had never told them to anyone but Philip. Her words had fallen from her lips as naturally as her thoughts had come to mind.

She looked at him. He had finished eating, had
neatly discarded the remnants in a paper bag, and was gazing out into space. The rugged face with its flat cheeks and craggy nose opposed his gentle eyes; those eyes, always so astonishingly blue, were her earliest image of the man; perhaps they were everyone's vivid image of him? There was a calmness in his gestures that was very masculine, as if he possessed unlimited strength. You couldn't imagine his fussing over anything trivial, or fussing at all. Robb fussed. Calmness was a word you wouldn't use to describe Robb, although once you might have done so. But not anymore.

All this was wrong! What was she doing, even in the privacy of her mind, to make such disloyal comparisons? There was no sense in this, none at all.

And yet she cried out, “Do you know what it is about Devlin and all those people around him that frightens me so? It's that they've changed Robb. They're changing the very way we live. That's why he wants to move. He wants to show that he can afford a style, a house of his own he says, because our house is not his. Oh, I know that my father was cold to him. I've said I don't understand how he could be like that. It was wrong, stupid and narrow-minded, but still he was a good man, my father. They could have talked things over and reached some understanding, forgiveness, something! And now he's dead, so what is the use of keeping this resentment forever? It's eating away at him. I feel it. I see it. I don't want all this crazy money. I don't like those people. I'm not paranoid, Philip, in case you're thinking that I am. There are some very lovely people that he knows, of course there are, but the people
Robb's with, he and his foolish friend Eddy—oh, I like him well enough, too, but I don't trust their judgment, or Robb's either anymore. They have delusions of grandeur. And to think that it all began with the poor baby—”

“No,” Philip said. “I don't believe it. People are more complex than that. Penn was simply the weak spot. If it hadn't been he, it would eventually have been something else.”

“I don't know about that. We were so happy together.”

Philip put his hand over hers. Then the hand, firmly pressing, was almost immediately withdrawn. “Steady now,” he said. “This isn't like you. You
are
happy together now. You will be happy. This is a temporary hurdle. You will jump over it.”

Vividly to her mind came the memory of that day in the park so long ago when he had told her about the deaths of his wife and child, and about his work, and about his cats. She saw him reading in a little room; the cats would be sleeping in a basket; there would be music playing and records, shelved in alphabetical, neat order, Albeniz to Wagner.

“This visit today is upsetting you, Ellen. It's made other problems look larger than they are. You're venting, and that's good for you. It's healthy. Cry. You'll feel better.”

She wiped her eyes. “I'm sorry. You didn't come today to hear me vent.”

“Don't be sorry.”

Tears, still unshed, blurred everything, the chrome
on the car and the apples in the basket. A pair of butterflies, dark brown with yellow-fringed wings, performed a frantic chase and dance through shafts of light.

“It's early in the season for butterflies, I think,” Philip said. He was trying to divert her, and she responded quickly.

“Those come the soonest. They're called ‘Mourning Cloak.' They're not the prettiest, are they?”

“How do you happen to know a thing like that?”

“Purely accidental. I was starting to illustrate a book, and I needed butterflies.”

“Starting?”

“I gave up.”

“You must get back to your work, you know.”

“I don't have time, do I?”

“Perhaps not now. But eventually you must do it. And sooner rather than later,” he said gravely.

“You're saying we can't keep Penn much longer.”

When he did not answer at once, she said, “I suppose this is where he will eventually live. Robb is saving up for the best.”

“I admire Robb. Have I ever mentioned that I went to court one day when I read his name in the newspaper? He was defending a whistle-blower against one of the utility companies. It was a case of David against Goliath, and he was magnificent.”