Night Train to Lisbon (14 page)

But why should she care? she reminded herself. The only advantage to knowing whether he was under arrest was that it might spare her the obligation of finally writing him the farewell letter she'd so long delayed. And write it she would, absolutely, one of these days. In the meantime, though, she was managing to distract herself through Harris Black.

If Alec Breve had stood for adventure, then Harris Black stood for its opposite. Under the circumstances, Carson didn't mind. In fact, she told herself, she preferred it. Harris would be heading off to Yale at the end of the September, but for now he and Carson had fallen into a pattern that Carson found pleasurable if unchallenging—or pleasurable precisely because it
was
unchallenging.

Nearly every morning Harris drove to her house and picked her up in his roadster, and they traveled the three miles to the Trelawny Country Club. There they played a set of tennis on the red clay courts, and then changed in the men's and women's dressing rooms and met in the grand Trelawny dining room for lunch. Under the glass atrium they sat and ate quivering little scoops of tomato aspic, and
blanquette
of chicken in a snowy white cream sauce, and for dessert they shared a tall peppermint ice cream parfait in a frosted silver cup.

Conversation did not exactly flow, but neither did it stall. Mostly, the two of them talked lightly about people they knew in common here in Marlowe, or of social events to come during the season. He'd be leaving for New Haven at the end of the month, but he'd be back often, he said, and he wanted her to be his date come December, for Yale's Winter Ball. Harris politely asked her questions about her time in Europe, and Carson noticed that if she went into any great detail while answering, he started to looked slightly bored. He would cover it as best he could, smiling and
nodding encouragingly, but she could almost hear the thoughts circulating inside his brain:
My, she's pretty, but she does prattle on. I wonder whether I could get another helping of that ice cream?

One morning they were joined by two friends of Harris's to play doubles and then have lunch. The couple, Christopher and Susan Hendrickson, were respectively seven and three years older than Harris and Carson; they had been married barely two months, and they lived one town away from Marlowe, in a Tudor house covered with vines that looked as though it ought to belong to a very old and stately couple, not to two vibrant people in their early twenties.

The Hendricksons were excellent tennis players, both of them smacking the ball with grace and precision. All four of the people on the court, in fact, had grown up playing tennis; it was a part of society life in Connecticut, though Carson had never particularly enjoyed the game. Sometimes she found herself trying to imagine Alec here among this crowd, and it was laughable. His racquet, if he even had one, would be old and slightly unstrung, and she was sure he would approach the game with his deadpan irreverence. Despite herself, she smiled at the image.

At lunch in the Trelawny Club dining room, the foursome sat under the glass and looked out over the golf course, where middle-aged men stood studiously over their five-iron clubs, patiently lining up their shots.

“So tell us,” asked Christopher Hendrickson as
the waiter filled everyone's water glasses, “how did you two meet?”

“Oh, we've known each other forever,” said Harris. “Since grade school. Carson here was always the prettiest girl in school, and the most aloof.”

“Objection,” interrupted Carson.

“Overruled,” said Harris. “But we never really got to know each other until recently, when she returned from Europe.”

“Oh, did you go?” asked Susan. “I did, too. London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, the whole shebang.”

“We stayed right near Lisbon,” said Carson. “It was wonderful.”

“Did you think so?” said Susan. “I preferred Paris. Lisbon was so…I don't know, I guess this sounds snobby, but it was unrefined. There were all these crumbling castles on hills around the edges of the city, and they looked like the failed soufflés our cook Betty used to make for us every Wednesday. Completely a shambles!”

“I liked them,” Carson said quietly.

“And how about those performers,” Susan Hendrickson went on. “I forget what they're called, but you know who I mean. Those strange men in cafés singing their love songs and hoping that some gullible Americans will put money in their hat.”

“I was one of those gullible Americans,” said Carson. “And they're called
fadistas.
They perform
fado.
It's an old tradition in Portugal.”

Susan shivered melodramatically. “Well, I for one prefer the old traditions of Paris and London. The couture and the food and the shopping. Do you know, in Lisbon we saw quite a few women who had no teeth? How could they let themselves go around like that?”

Because they're poor,
Carson wanted to say, but she said nothing. It was clear to her that this pretty and privileged young woman across the table had learned almost nothing from her trip to Europe.

“About half of the population thinks there's going to be a war,” said Carson to no one in particular. “If Hitler keeps it up, then certainly there will be.” This comment was met by a slightly puzzled silence. No one really had much to add. The two men nodded and muttered about “that damn Hitler,” but neither seemed very engaged by the subject. Susan, in particular, seemed in over her head completely, and finally she simply changed the subject without even a hint of a segue.

“We saw Millicent Garner at Bendel's in Manhattan recently,” she said in a bright voice. “We were both trying on the same dress to wear to the Diamond Ball.”

“As you might gather, Susan likes the high life,” Christopher put in with some apology and embarrassment in his voice. “Believe me, as her husband, the one who has to pay her Bendel's bills whenever she and her mother go on a shopping expedition into New York City, I'm well aware of her predilections.”

Everyone laughed, except Carson, who simply took a long drink of ice water and wished the meal were over. She remained mostly quiet for the rest of lunch, and Harris looked over at her with concern. When the meal was through, and the men had fought over the bill in that way that men do (Harris won), and the women's chairs had been pulled back in a show of chivalry, the Hendricksons insisted that the foursome must get together again for tennis and lunch at the club “very, very soon.” Then they pulled away in their baby blue MG roadster and went roaring down the road.

Harris and Carson sat for a few moments on the tufted moss stone wall that fronted the club.

“You weren't too happy at lunch,” he finally said.

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. I'm sorry about my friends,” said Harris. “They're good people, really they are. Maybe not as exciting as you are.”

“I wasn't aware that I was particularly ‘exciting,'” Carson replied.

“Oh, yes,” said Harris, and his face took on a sudden flush. “You can talk circles around me, Carson. I never knew that about you. I mean, as I told Christopher and Susan, you and I never really knew each other before. But ever since you came back from Europe, you seem somehow…different. Even more compelling.”

She was surprised by his remark, and for a moment it made her less guarded. “I think I am different,” she admitted.

“Seeing the world probably does that to you,” he said. “I've traveled to Europe with my parents before, but to tell you the truth, I didn't really take all that much of it in. I was too young, I think, and my basic position was that if you've seen one headless or armless statue, you've seen them all.”

Carson smiled. “It wasn't so much what I
saw
there, as what
happened
to me when I was there,” she said, and she suddenly felt exposed. “I fell in love,” she added simply, shocked that she'd revealed this to him, when just a moment before she'd had absolutely no wish to tell him or anyone this.

Harris looked down into his lap. He appeared vulnerable then, rather than shallow. “Oh,” was all he said.

The old Carson, she realized, might have enjoyed his discomfort, might have seen it as part of a courtship ritual. Now, though, Carson felt the need to protect him, and without thinking, she said, “But it's over now.”

He looked up at her in relief.
“Oh,”
he said again, and then, as if involuntarily, he smiled. “I mean, I'm sorry for you and everything, and if you ever want to talk about it—”

“No,” Carson interrupted. “I don't think I will. But thank you, Harris.”

“You don't have to thank me, Carson,” he said.

They sat there awhile longer, listening to the leaves of the trees rustle and taking in the perfection of the day. It was nearly autumn now and the
colors were starting their long, slow ceremonial fade along the autumn spectrum.

Carson understood, in that moment, that it was possible to get over a trauma in one's life and move on. The leaves changed every season because they were constantly in flux, never really one thing or another, and Carson supposed that this was a reasonable way to view her own life. You could fall in love with a man on a train traveling across Europe, only to find out that you had been misled. And instead of spending the rest of your life grieving about this painful episode, you simply let yourself move through it and into the next episode. You experienced the pain, you endured it; but in the end you moved past it, too. The leaf changed color slightly; one day it was yellow, and the next time you looked, it was red.

When Harris turned to her and touched her shoulder now, she knew what was going to happen, and she felt strangely passive, yet willing, too. This was so different from the kiss on the back of a train, with the night rushing by. She and Harris sat now in daylight, on a perfect fall afternoon, and he leaned forward and gently kissed her lips. She let him kiss her, didn't try to stop him, not because she felt overly aroused, but because she didn't want to disappoint him and was curious. His mouth tasted sweet and slightly cool from the peppermint parfait he'd eaten earlier, and she closed her eyes, trying as hard as she could to forget about that other mouth, that other kiss.

 

The next morning, Carson made the decision to write to Alec. The timing finally felt right—not for Alec, but for her. She had been able to prove to her own satisfaction that she really could move on. The next step was proving this to him so that he might, once and forever, leave her in peace.

“Dear Alec,” she wrote in her careful, curlicued handwriting, though there was a slight tremor to her hand:

When she was done, she sat and cried for a moment. It was a brief, strong cry, a needed release, and then she stood up and went to her bureau. Rooting quickly through the top drawer, she found what she was looking for: the thin bracelet with the tiny blue beads that Alec had given her in Portugal. She dropped it into the letter and quickly sealed it.

Carson placed the letter on the front hall table of her family's house, in the silver tray that contained outgoing mail. Later in the day, the housekeeper would take the mail to the post office in town while on her shopping rounds.

There.
It was done. Carson felt relief, really, and when Harris picked her up that night to go out to
a dinner dance at the Hendricksons', she was grateful to turn her thoughts away from Alec Breve, perhaps for good.

“For good,” however, was a ridiculous assumption. The more you tried not to think about someone or something, the more you could not get it out of your mind. There had been a game she and her friends had once played at Miss Purslane's school. Don't think of the word
elephant,
one of the other girls had instructed everyone, and the girls had obediently closed their eyes and desperately attempted to let their thoughts land elsewhere. But elephants invariably appeared, trunks swaying. Right now Alec was that elephant. Perhaps he couldn't be banished, but at least over time, Carson hoped, his image would start to fade.

Harris helped. Sitting beside him in the front seat of his white roadster, driving down country lanes to the Hendricksons' party, Carson felt what it would be like to marry someone like him. You'd feel safe, she knew. Well, maybe not
entirely
safe, for some part of you would always be aware that Harris was really no stronger emotionally or intellectually than you were, and that he would need to be tended to and coddled over the years. Carson had never felt that way with Alec. He had seemed strong and selfless and unpitying, all qualities that she'd admired, but which, in retrospect, had turned out to be illusory.