Inheritance (3 page)

Clay was silent. Laura knew he wasn't really angry; he worshiped Ben. It had been all she could do to keep him in school after he turned sixteen and wanted to drop out and do whatever Ben did. She didn't know what would happen now

Inheritance

that she'd graduated. If she could get enough money for college, she wanted to move out; she dreamed of a room of her own, with shelves of books and posters on the wall, and pretty furniture, and her favorite music on the radio. But then what would happen to Clay?

"See you later," Clay said as a tall woman approached them. "She's yours. I'm for the head maintenance guy at the greenhouse." He was gone as the woman reached Laura.

"Laura Fairchild? I'm Leni Salinger; let's sit on the porch and talk, shall we? The cottage belongs to Jonas—the guard, you know—and I don't like to take over his living room unless it's raining. But it's pleasant today, isn't it? June is often a little confused here, not quite spring and not quite sunmier, but today is perfect. And, of course, we do love the quiet; it all changes in July, when the tourists descend. You said on the telephone you had references from your previous jobs."

"Oh." Lulled by Leni's serene voice, Laura had almost forgotten why she was there. "I have them ..." She fumbled in her black patent purse. She'd known the purse was wrong for June the minute she saw Leni SaUnger's white straw hat; she knew everything else was wrong, too, when she pictured herself beside this tall, angular woman in perfectly pressed slacks and a cotton shirt with ivory buttons, her fingernails long and polished, her face and voice perfectly calm because she had nothing to worry about: she knew that whatever happened to her would always be wonderful.

/ could never look like that because I'm never sure of anything.

"Laura?" Leni was studying her. "You mustn't be nervous; I don't bite, you know, I don't even growl, and we do try to make our staff comfortable, but I really must find out something about you, mustn't I, before I bring you into our household."

"I'm sorry; I was thinking how beautiful you are, and how you don't have nothing to worry about. I mean, you don't have anything to . . ." Laura's voice trailed away and she bit her lip. How could she be such a baby? She blurted things out and made the same stupid mistakes her grammar teacher always had marked her down for. What would this elegant lady, who never would blurt anything, or talk wrong, think of

Judith Michael

her? TYying to look confident, she handed Leni the three reference letters Ben had typed out and signed with made-up names, then held her breath as Leni read them.

"Very impressive," Leni said. "To have done so much at eighteen. I'm not familiar with the people who wrote these, and I must say they've been very careless—all of them, how surprising—in not including their telephone numbers. O'Hara, Stone, Phillips; goodness, even with a first initial, how difficult to find the right ones in the directory. Do you recall their telephone numbers?"

"No." Laura paused, just as she and Ben had rehearsed it. "But I can find ttiem. I mean, if you want, I'll call everybody who has those initials until I get the right one and then you can talk to them. I really need this job; I'll do anything . . ."

"Well," Leni said thoughtfully, "it's only a temporary position, of course . . . and it's hard enough to find anyone, much less someone truly anxious and agreeable . . . I'll have to mull this over a bit." She gazed at Laura. 'Tell me about yourself. Where do you live?"

"New York." Ben had warned her it might get personal; she sat very straight and spoke carefully but quickly to get past this part as fast as she could. "My parents are dead, and my brother and I lived with some relatives, but they didn't really want us there, so a year ago we got our own place. I graduated high school last week."

After a moment, Leni said, "And what else? Are you going to college?"

"Oh, I'd love to. If I could get the money . . ."

Leni nodded. "So you need a job. But why not in New York? Why did you come to the Cape?"

Laura hesitated an instant; they hadn't rehearsed this part. "Just to get away, you know. We have a tiny apartment, and it gets awftjUy hot in the sunmier and sort of closed in . . . And somebody at school said it was nice here." She looked beyond the porch at the sparkle of the ocean through the trees. "It is. More beautiful than I ever thought."

Leni was watching her closely. "And how did you get here? Do you have a car?"

Laura felt a surge of impatience. Why did she keep asking questions? "A friend drove us," she said briefly.

Inheritance

"And how will you get back?*'

"I hope we don't have to." She looked at her hands. **I mean, I was hoping you'd hire us and then we could just . . . stay."

"Stay where?" Leni asked gently.

"Oh, we'd find a place. We bought a newspaper and there are some rooms for rent in Osterville and Centerville ... If you'd give us a chance I know we could manage everything. You wouldn't have to worry about us; we can take care of ourselves, you know."

"Yes, I think you can," Leni murmured. She looked around. "Yes, Allison, is there something you need?"

"A tennis partner." The young woman who stood at the foot of the porch steps was about Laura's age and looked like a young Leni, as tall and angular, though her long blond hair was straight, while Leni's was short and curled, and she had a touch of arrogance that Leni lacked. "Patricia doesn't feel like playing. Would you like a game?"

"My daughter, Allison," Leni said to Laura. "This is Laura Fairchild, Allison. She's applying for the job of Rosa's assistant."

"Rosa's a sweetie," said Allison. "She's also an absolute tyrant in her kitchen; she'll wear you out in a week. Or maybe she'll take you under her wing and then you'll gain fifty pounds." She turned to her mother. "Can't you just hear her telling Laura she's too thin?"

"Am I?" Laura asked anxiously. She was ashamed of her cotton dress and black patent shoes, bought at a resale shop, and the way her hair hung lankly around her face in the salt air of the Cape, and she knew her face had a city pallor beside these two tanned women, but she hadn't thought about being thin. / won't get the job if I'm skinny and ugly; they only want pretty people working for them. Ben and Clay always told her she was pretty, but they were her brothers. Nervously she pushed her hair behind her ears, tried to look taller on the chair's slippery cushion, and kept her legs close together, her feet flat on the porch.

But it wasn't just her looks that bothered her, she was envious of the warmth between Allison and her mother. She had never known anything like that, even when her mother was

Judith Michael

alive, and she envied them and liked them at the same time. It's too bad we have to rob them, she thought.

Another one of Ben's warnings came back to her. It's better not to know the mark at all. But if it's unavoidable, don't get close; keep your distance. Laura felt a pang of regret. It might be nice to be close to Leni and Allison.

*There's nothing wrong with your figure; you mustn't worry," Leni said. "Well, perhaps a few pounds, a little rounding out . . . young girls do seem gaunt these days. They want to be willowy or sway like a reed or some such thing—it always seems to involve some damp and probably unhealthy plant. Yes, I do believe you could use a few pounds . . . Perhaps you don't eat properly. Do you have a hot breakfast every day?"

Laura and Allison looked at each other and burst out laughing. "Oh, well," Leni sighed. "I suppose you do hear that a great deal." But she wasn't really thinking of her words; she was hearing Allison's laughter and watching it banish the supercilious amusement that usually curved her daughter's perfect lips without allowing laughter to escape. Leni often worried about Alhson's cool, amused silence; and at that moment, as her daughter and this strange girl continued to smile together, and even though she was sure those reference letters were faked, she decided to hire Laura Fairchild as a kitchen helper for the Salingers' summer stay on Cape Cod.

Clay worked in the greenhouses and flower gardens shared by the whole family while Laura was at Rosa's side in the kitchen of Felix and Leni's house. It was tfie biggest in the compound, and Ben had instructed her to explore and sketch it for him. But by the end of their second week at the Cape she still had not done it, nor had she looked for Leni's jewels so Ben could go straight to them when he broke in. She knew what they looked like because Leni was frequently photographed wearing them at dinner parties and balls—she even took them to the Cape for the big parties in July and August —but Laura had to find out where she kept them.

"What are you waiting for?" Clay demanded, looking up from his own drawing of the layout of the compound. They were sitting in the tiny two-room apartment Ben had rented for

Inheritance

them over a garage in downtown Centerville before he went back to New York, and Clay had been trying to figure out the exact distance from the guardhouse to Leni's bedroom window. "How are we going to get out of here if you don't do your part?"

"Fm trying," Laura said. "But Rosa expects me to be with her all the time.'*

"Rosa's a dictator," Clay said.

"Rosa's a sweetie." Laura remembered Allison saying that and wondered why she hadn't seen her once since she started working in her parents' house.

In fact she saw hardly anyone but Rosa and the house staff from the time she and Clay rode up in the mornings on the bicycles Ben had bought them to the time they rode away in the late afternoon. Leni was the only one of the Salingers to come to the kitchen; she came every afternoon, to plan the next day's menus with Rosa. They sat in the sun that stretched the length of the great room, from the panes of the wide breakfast bay that faced the rose garden, swimming pool and tennis courts, all the way to the brick fireplace at the other end. On the long maple table recipes were fanned out, and books of menus from past summers, and with them the two women, like generals planning a campaign, put together the schedule for the next day: usually a luncheon for a small group and then a dinner party for fifteen or more. But none of the other family members came to the kitchen, and after two weeks Laura was not even sure who was at the compound and who was away.

"In Maine," Rosa said when Laura finally worked up the courage to ask where Allison was. "You'll find this family is very big on travel. Somebody's always somewhere and just when you think you know where everybody is, somebody comes back and somebody else goes."

"They just leave their houses empty?" Laura asked casually. In her white kitchen uniform, her hair in a neat ponytail, she felt almost like a cook, almost Rosa's equal, and that made it easier to ask questions about the family. Still, as she stacked breakfast dishes in the double dishwasher, she was careful not to sound too curious.

"Some of them are empty," Rosa replied. "Some with the

Judith Michael

staff, some stuffed to the ceiling with houseguests. You'll find this family is very big on houseguests, probably because they're in the hotel business and they think something's wrong if all the bedrooms aren't full."

She chuckled and Laura smiled with her. It was easy to be comfortable with Rosa. At sixty-seven, with unflagging energy, she was short and round with small hands that were always moving, nimbly flicking pastry finom marble board to pie plate, or cutting vegetables and stirring soup almost at the same time, or knitting a vest for her nephew while she waited for bread to rise or a roast to be done. She had promised to make Laura a sweater when the vest was finished. And no matter what she was doing, she talked steadily and shrewdly about the Salingers and the other families from New York and Boston who, generations before, had come to the towns of Osterville, Centerville, and Hyannis Port on Nantucket Sound, on the south coast of Cape Cod, to build the sprawling summer estates now being used by their children and grandchildren.

"Mr. Owen built this one," Rosa said as she and Laura took salad ingredients from the wall of refrigerators and spread them on the long maple work table. It was the first time Laura realized that Rosa casually called all the Salingers, except Owen, by their first names. "In 1920 he brought Mrs. Owen here—^Ms, her name was, she was a lovely lady—and a year later Felix was bom. That's when I came; there were only the three of them, and I cooked and cleaned and took care of the baby, and Asa, too, when he was bom a year after Felix, and had time to get married myself and not too long later be a widow, and some time after that, I nursed Mrs. Owen when she got sick and died, and all that in the space of ten years. Which I suppose is why I never married again; I was so busy being a mother to Felix and Asa, and Mr. Owen, too, at least for Skost first few years when he was mourning, I just never had time."

"But who are all the others?" Laura asked. "I don't even know all their names."

Rosa reeled them off in a rhythm that matched her busy hands, chopping and slicing vegetables for the salads she was making for lunch. Owen Salinger, founder of the Salinger

Inheritance

hotel chain, had two sons, Felix and Asa; Felix had one daughter, Allison; Asa had a daughter, Patricia, by his first marriage. So Owen had only granddaughters. "Not one grandson he can count on to keep his empire going,'* Rosa said. "No nephews, either. This family is very big on women, and not one of them shows the slightest twinge of interest in running hotels. Mr. Owen's great-nephew could do it—that's Paul Janssen, the son of Leni's sister, Barbara, and her husband, Thomas—but he's something of a playboy, Paul is, and even if he does settle down, which I may not live long enough to see, it's photography that makes his eyes light up, not hotels. Who'll take over the company after Felix and Asa retire I can't imagine."

As Laura asked questions, Rosa described them all, with their foibles and eccentricities and triumphs. "Allison broke her finger on the slide when she was seven and never went near a swing set again, even though Felix offered her a hundred dollars because he wanted his daughter to have courage and said he'd buy it if he had to." She told Laura about the house Felix built for his father. "It's attached to this one; the door is at the end of the long gallery. After Mr. Owen gave this house to Felix and Leni, Leni wanted him to live with them in the summers—he has a mansion all to himself in Boston—but he said he liked being on his own and planned to build a small house for himself. Well, they argued and argued, and finally Mr. Owen said all right if he could draw the plans himself and also have a door he could lock. So everything worked out. When a man is seventy-eight, he should have people nearby, but he has a right to privacy, too."