Off Season (27 page)
It was a foolish statement and it implied untold disastrous consequences should my father fail to do so, and I fell idiotically silent.
“Why on earth should I not, darling?” my father said, smiling the stretched smile at Cam and putting out his hand.
“George Constable, Mr. McCall. It’s a pleasure. I meet so few of Lilly’s friends.”
“It’s because I never really had any until now,” I heard myself blurt to Cam, and on my left he smiled an I-don’t-believe-that-for-a-minute smile at me and said, “The pleasure is mine, Dr. Constable. I tried and tried to get into your undergraduate English courses, but they were always full and grad school didn’t leave me any electives at all. But I surely knew who you were.”
“Well,” my father said. “That would have been nice. I’d like to have known you earlier.”
“Instead of having you shot at me like a cannonball in an Italian restaurant,” he did not say. But I thought we all heard the words anyway. Aunt Tatty dropped her eyes, and I saw the flush that meant she was upset rise from her neck and stain her face. Cam’s smile stayed in place, but he looked at my father quizzically out of his blue eyes shuttered over with thick red brows. It was, I thought, a look of pure, if polite, assessment.
Are we going to be friends, we who both want this girl? Am I going to have to fight you for her?
My father smiled at him. A difficult smile, I thought, a brave one, a smile of acknowledgment. The old warrior facing the young challenger.
I’m going to hurt him,
I thought, and felt anguish.
I’m going to hurt my father terribly. I don’t know how not to.
And in the whole of the rest of his life I sometimes felt profound sorrow for him, and guilt, but never ambivalence. Cam and I were a fact from the moment we met. I knew I could never make my father see that. Tears burned in my eyes and I looked at Cam. He looked back, and then nodded slowly. From that moment on, I think, we conspired together in the small murder of my father.
I don’t remember what we had for dinner, or what we talked about. It was like dining in the midst of a maelstrom. The unsaid dived and pecked at us ceaselessly, and by the time we finished dinner and my father had signaled for the check I was almost physically sick. My head nearly burst with the need for fresh, cool air and space. When Cam said, “If it’s all right with you, Dr. Constable, I thought Lilly and I might get a bite of gelato at Piero’s and then I’ll bring her home. By ten, at the most,” I smiled and nodded gratefully. Only then did I look at my father. His face was bleached and rigid; he was a man I did not know.
“Not tonight, I don’t think,” he said levelly. “Lilly has school tomorrow. She’s at Cathedral—did she tell you? She’s only eighteen.”
“George,” Aunt Tatty almost hissed, “will you come out to the lobby with me? I can never get a cab in this part of town—”
“We’ll take you home, of course, Tatty—” my father began.
“
George.
”
He gave us a sort of despairing look and rose and followed her out into the lobby. I stood too. I knew that the evening was over. Cam did not stir.
From the doorway I heard Aunt Tatty’s urgent whisper: “McCall! Don’t you know who they are? The McCalls of McCall’s Point! Oh, George, of course you do; don’t be dense! Best families in Virginia . . . tons of very old money, and the plantation is an original king’s grant.”
I did not hear my father’s reply. My ears were roaring with embarrassment. I looked at Cam and whispered, “I’m sorry, my father’s a little overprotective; we’ve lived alone since my mother died. Aunt Tatty’s just plain nuts.”
“Don’t apologize. My family makes them look like Ward and June Cleaver.”
He reached over and took my hand. My whole arm flamed with his touch.
“There isn’t anything or anybody who’s going to keep me from seeing you,” he said. “You don’t know me well enough to know that I always get what I want, but I get it in the nicest possible way. I’ll try my best not to upset your father, but I am going to see you again no matter what it takes.”
“I don’t even know where you live,” I said in a voice with little breath behind it.
“Pretty soon I’ll be back at the point. I’ve been sharing a place with Chris, one of the med students you saw when you came in, but he’s starting an internship in Atlanta and I don’t have the money yet for my own place. But I will soon. As soon as I pass my boards I’m going to set up an architectural practice, maybe here or maybe in the Tidewater, and then I can live where I want.”
“Won’t your parents help you out?” I asked, thinking of Aunt Tatty’s fervent whisper.
“God, no.” He laughed. “They’d see me in the gutter before they’d lend me a penny. I was supposed to go into the family law firm. I’m the only male McCall in over a century who hasn’t. But it doesn’t matter. It’s only an hour or so drive from there to your house. I’m going to lay siege to your father like a nineteenth-century swain right out of Edith Wharton.”
“You read Edith Wharton?”
“I read everything.”
My father and Aunt Tatty and I were mainly silent on the drive to her house. As she got out of the car, she said, “I hope we see more of your young man, Lilly. I thought him very nice.”
“So did I,” I said weakly. My father said nothing at all.
When we got home he went into the sitting room and lit the fire and smiled at me. I was hovering in the doorway, not quite certain what to do next.
“Why don’t you fix us some hot chocolate,” he said. “We all skipped dessert. And you’ve had a big day. I’d like to hear about it.”
But I knew that I could not talk to him about Cameron McCall. What could I say? That I had half agreed to marry a man I knew next to nothing about? A man I’d picked up only hours before in an Italian restaurant in Georgetown? The impossibility of it hit me hard and suddenly; there was no one in the world now with whom I could talk about Cam. I could have, I knew, with my mother. But, failing that, there was simply no one. It was the loneliest feeling I had ever had. I wanted to go upstairs to bed and pull the covers over my head. I wanted Wilma.
“Daddy, I’m really tired, and I’ve still got about twenty pages of History to read. Will you excuse me? I promise we’ll have cocoa with whipped cream tomorrow night.”
“Of course, baby,” he said. “One night without you isn’t going to hurt me.”
He laughed.
I turned and went up the stairs.
It would hurt him,
I thought. I could hear the hurt in his laugh. I skinned into bed without washing my face and pulled my comforter up around my ears. I thought I would think of him downstairs alone in the sitting room with his fire and his
Washington Post
and his pain, but instead, I thought only of Cam.
W
e called it the Siege of Kalorama Circle,” Kitty told me one September afternoon when the thermometer hovered at ninety-six and iron-blue, relentlessly sunny skies pressed down on us. It had not rained in weeks. Even the ferns and reeds along the bay and rivers were shriveled and brown. Dust lay in strata in the air like fog. We were sitting on the edge of our swimming pool, at McCall’s Point, dangling our feet in the exhausted September water while my girls played listlessly in the shallow end. I knew the pool water was too tepid to be invigorating. I swam every morning, early, before the others were up, and even at five-thirty the water had seemed inert and somehow soiled. I did not swim long.
“I’ll just bet you did,” I said. We had been talking about Cam’s and my courtship, which by now, I thought sourly, was surely the stuff of legend in the Tidewater.
“Oh, not around him,” she said. “And we hardly knew you at all. But for sheer tenacity and tactical brilliance, he outshone Rommel. Every move he made, every time he went calling at your house, got back to us. Our crowd at the country club talked of nothing else. I don’t think our parents did, either. It was the hot topic of that spring and summer.”
“You people never have had enough to do,” I said grumpily. “Why did you care if we dated?”
“We cared about everything Cam did,” she said. “He was our icon, our legend. It was a pretty tame life then for kids down here in the Tidewater, you know. We hung out together because we really didn’t know many people in D.C. or even around here, except us. Heaven forbid we should socialize with the townies. When I think about it, I can see that we were all really pretty much alike. Even I was, then. I didn’t get wild till later.
“But Cam . . . Cam was something else. He did things we never quite dared to do, he said things that shocked even us, he had a real plan for his life from the very beginning. He always wanted to be an architect. Even as a kid he knew who the cutting-edge architects of the decade were, what and where they did their work. We grew up listening to him talk about Le Corbusier—Corbu, he called him—and his pilgrims’ chapel at Ronchamp. Or about Mies van der Rohe, or Frank Lloyd Wright, or Bruce Goff out west, or Eero Saarinen. I can’t remember him talking about many contemporary American architects except Paul Rudolph. He always said
he’d
be the one people talked about. And look at him. He is. With that new hotel in Costa Rica he’s on the big map we all knew he would be.
“And besides, he was just plain larger than life, even as a kid. This tall, flaming redheaded pirate, with blue eyes that could bore a hole in you and a smile that could get your panties off—and did, probably more than we knew. We called him Eric the Red sometimes. I always called him Vlad the Impaler. I think he was the only one of us who knew what that meant. He liked it.”
I splashed water on my sweaty face and neck. Somehow this fugue about my husband annoyed me. I knew all that; I did not think that there was anything about himself Cam hadn’t told me. But I always did wish I’d known him as a boy. He was never anything but a man with me, even though sometimes a boyish one.
“And so whom did he impale, exactly?”
“Oh, God. Everybody. Every girl from Norfolk to D.C. and then some, I think. He was always attached to somebody: there was always some dippy girl with her hands all over him. Every one of them, we thought, would turn out to be the one because when he was with them, he was just so totally—
with
them. Sometimes you just had to look away. But in the end none of them lasted. One day they’d be there, crawling over him like kudzu, and the next day they’d just be gone. He never talked about them. He never said why. We never asked.
“And then you came along, and you
were
the one. We took bets on you for a long time. Nobody had ever heard of you. You lived at home with your daddy and never went out. You were some kind of hotshot underwater swimmer. To us, swimming was mostly something you did to show off your new Rose Marie Reid bathing suit. We were swimmers from birth, practically, but we couldn’t even imagine anybody being serious enough about it to make a—career, I guess—out of it. It wasn’t cool.
You
weren’t cool. But there you were, a year, two years later. The stories of how he finally got you away from Daddy were mythic. You can’t imagine how romantic we all thought it was.”
I suppose it might seem so. Those first few weeks did rather sound like something from Edith Wharton or Henry James. The evening after we met, he rang the doorbell on Kalorama Circle, and when my father opened it, there he was, looking, as my father said later, like Rasputin with his red beard and mustache and long hair, holding a bouquet of flowers and smiling his wide, vulpine smile. He was dressed in a tweed sport coat and gray flannel pants, and he wore a neat striped tie. The faint odor of mothballs about him testified to the fact that he had not worn the coat and slacks for a very long time, but they were just right for calling on a young woman in a big house on Kalorama Circle.
“Well, Mr. McCall, is it,” my father said formally. “And to what do we owe the honor of this visit?”
I was just behind my father, wanting desperately to kick him. He knew damned well to what we owed the honor of Cam’s visit.
“The flowers are beautiful,” I squeaked inanely.
“From my mother’s garden.” He grinned, looking at me over my father’s shoulder. “Cut them on my way out.”
“Goodness, I hope she won’t mind,” I said, wondering desolately where this stupid voice, these stupid words, were coming from.
“She won’t miss them,” Cam said. “She doesn’t do the garden herself. She’s got a guy who does it.”
Still we stood there, we three, my father and I stiff with awkwardness, Cam respectfully at ease.
Then my father said, “Well, please come in, Mr. McCall. Lilly, take the flowers and find a vase for them. Flora will know.”
Cam came in and handed me the flowers, smiling. Then he followed my father into the sitting room. I don’t think they spoke; I could not hear their voices. I went into the kitchen, where Flora was stirring something in a pot and humming contentedly to herself.
“Well, ain’t they pretty,” she said, looking at the armful of flowers, which were beginning to droop now. “Where they come from?”
“A boy—a man I met last night brought them,” I said. “He’s in the sitting room with Daddy.”
“Oh, Lord God,” Flora said. “I hope your daddy don’t run him off. It’s past time you had a beau. Emma and me talks about it all the time.”
“He’s not a beau,” I said, heat flooding my chest and face. “He’s a friend. I just met him last night.”
“Friends don’t bring no flowers,” Flora said serenely, taking the bouquet from me.
Numb, I went back to the sitting room and sank down on an ottoman before the fire. My father sat in his accustomed chair. Cam sat in mine. For what seemed a very long time, no one spoke.
Finally Cam said, in a voice as even as if he were telling someone the time, “Professor Constable, I would like your permission to call on your daughter. I know that she’s only eighteen and you know nothing about me, but I can assure you that if I could visit once in a while, I would be extremely careful of her welfare, and respect any conditions you might want to set on my visits. I believe our families must have met at one time or another, at the Chevy Chase Club, or the Metropolitan, and I believe that my mother and Lilly’s mother were both members of the Sulgrave Club. I’m just a few weeks away from taking my architectural boards, and when that’s done I hope to establish a practice, either here in D.C. or closer to home, in the Tidewater. In either case, I have no plans to relocate away from the area, or be away on long assignments. My interest is in the architectural vernacular of the region. I want to build for these people and this place. Whatever your answer, I want you to know that I have the greatest respect for you and your daughter.”
