Olivia (19 page)

None of us had much of an appetite. Dinners were quiet and short. The nightmare continued to shadow our days until I announced I was returning to work. Up until now Daddy had visited the offices briefly and kept up with important business events over the phone. Our company was in a holding pattern. No decisions were being made. Everything was languishing.

"We've got to get back to full-time work, Daddy," I finally told him one night at dinner. "Mother wouldn't want us to mourn like this any longer. You know how much she hated gray faces and sadness," I said.

"Olivia's right," Belinda said. "I'm not going to turn down another invitation."
"That's not exactly what I meant," I snapped, but she didn't want to hear me.
The next day she was off with her friends, returning to the Bubble Gum Club and her
unproductive activities. If Daddy had difficulty seeing how wasteful she was before, he was incapable of seeing it now. It was almost as if he didn't notice her existence. She needed money? He scribbled out a check to keep his ears from ringing with her pleas. She wanted to stay overnight at some friend's house, go to an all night party, take a weekend in Boston? He nodded, waved his hand, not even comprehending what she was doing or what he was allowing her to do.
I was busy filling in for him at the office when he didn't appear or left early, moving things forward again, making decisions and signing agreements and checks. I reported it all to him, but he listened with half an ear and asked few questions.
Samuel visited daily. He tried to revive our lives by bringing the architect around to discuss how he would modernize the older portion of our home and how he would expand it. Daddy sat in on some of the meetings, but offered little comment or advice. It did provide a good distraction for me, especially when I faced the realization that this would be my own home, my own little world for a long, long time.
The work began almost immediately and with it came Samuel's frequent reports of progress. Once a week I would go to the site with him and inspect the construction. Nelson Childs had been right in his prediction about Samuel. Samuel had the foreman hire more laborers and the remodeling and the new additions to the house were being completed at twice the pace normally anticipated.
"It's wasteful," I told him, "to pay people time and a half just to get into the house a month or so earlier."
"Waste is directly related to what makes you happy and unhappy," Samuel replied in an
uncharacteristic contradiction to what I had said. "I don't consider a nickel wasted if it brings me home to you one minute earlier, Olivia."
I raised my eyebrows and looked at him. How I wished I had the same intensity, the same desire and longing, and ironically I envied him for how much he seemed to love and want me. Usually, it was the woman who was impatient with the time it took to bring her to the altar. All the women I had known didn't have half the nervousness, the doubt, the insecurity as the men they were about to marry. Men, even though they did the proposing, behaved as if they were the ones who had been hooked and reeled in, not the women. It was as though marriage was the inevitable prison sentence awaiting them all.
Nelson behaved this way. Whenever I saw him and inquired as to his wedding plans, he would tell me nothing specific had been concluded yet. Why rush into what was inevitable? It wasn't going away, but, his impish smile told me, what was going away was his freedom. Soon enough he would have to behave appropriately. Why hurry it along?
Besides, he explained, the Branagans had insisted on using High Point House for the wedding reception and that had to be booked at minimum ten months to a year in advance. They were still discussing the actual date. The time in between was also necessary to get the families better acquainted. The Colonel and his wife were to be guests of the Branagans in Boston and the Branagans were to come more often to Provincetown.
They had already had a second engagement party for the Branagans' Boston friends. It was simply that there was much to do. He talked about it as if it were a campaign for the presidency of the United States, planning, planning, planning. For instance, there was the completion of the bride's trousseau, something Mrs. Branagan took quite seriously.
"Years ago, most mothers started making and embroidering linens for their daughter's trousseau almost from the day their daughters were born," Nelson explained. "Nowadays of course, women don't sew or embroider. They spend almost as much time, however, shopping, choosing, buying. Then there are the wedding plans. I swear, Olivia, cabinet meetings in the White House don't go on any longer or are treated with any more seriousness. Sometimes, our parents meet on neutral grounds!" he quipped. "Bridesmaids' dresses, my tuxedo and my
groomsmens', the guest list, the menu, the design of the invitations, the decorations and the music, all of it has to be discussed and analyzed and concluded with almost the same ceremony as the treaty to end a war. Goodness knows there's lots of diplomacy at work to keep the respective mothers from scratching each other's eyes out. Dad says luckily he and my father-inlaw have legal training. No," Nelson concluded, "ten more months is barely enough time as it is."
I didn't want to tell him I was doing all that myself. "You're not anxious then?" I asked him.
"Admittedly, nowhere near as anxious as your fiance," he told me when he joined us up at the house site one weekend a little more than a month and a half into construction. "You have possessed Samuel Logan. Look at him prodding and cheering those laborers to work harder, faster. If he could lash them with a whip, he would. You should never have agreed to a marriage date that was tied to the house completion. I hear the invitations are already at the printers. He told me he had you deliver the copy as soon as the electricians had started."
"You're not as possessed?" I felt like a lobster fisherman dropping traps to test the waters, but I was very curious about Nelson's feelings concerning his fiancee.
"I'm someone's possession," he quipped, "but I'm not yet possessed."
He smiled at me with those beautiful eyes and made my heart go into triple beats.
"How's your father doing these days?" he asked, perhaps wisely changing the subject.
"He's still not back to 100 percent. I'm afraid he might never be," I added in a matter-of-fact tone that took Nelson by surprise.
"I'm sorry," he said. "But maybe with time . . ."
"Time doesn't heal scars, as most people commonly think," I said. "It simply makes them firmer, stiffer. One must accept it and not hope to mend and return to what he or she once was."
"That's a hard and cold lesson, Olivia," he remarked. "That's what the truth is, Nelson, hard and cold most of the time."
He stared a me and I did not shift my gaze.
"You're going to run this town one day," he predicted. "You're a natural born leader. You should have been born . ."
"A man?" I finished for him. He shrugged.
"Sorry. I know that women are supposed to be treated with equal respect these days, but I'm still a bit old-fashioned when it comes to that, I suppose."
"You're just a typical chauvinistic male," I replied and he laughed.
He held up his hands.
"Guilty," he declared.
"Of what?" Samuel asked coming over to join us.
"Of stereotyping," Nelson explained.
Samuel looked from him to me and then shook his head and returned to pointing out the changes I had suggested be made in the historic sections of the house. It was a large two-story, side-gabled house. I had suggested capping the paneled front door with a decorative crown and then adding a row of
rectangular panes of multicolored glass beneath the crown. I wanted the windows to have double-hung sashes and many small panes. Samuel complimented me on every suggestion I made. None of it came from imagination, however. I had researched the period and knew enough to make suggestions that the architect thought sensible.
Consequently, our wedding date was set with such speed it raised eyebrows. Some even had the audacity to suggest I might be pregnant. Belinda enjoyed the gossip. I did everything I could to end those rumors, but kept the date of our wedding. I was hoping it would help bring Daddy around again. Without Mother, he would have to represent my interests and I tried putting more decisions and questions on him, but his invariable response was, "Whatever you think best, Olivia. Don't worry about any expense, if that's a problem."
He even suggested I involve Belinda in some of the wedding planning, a suggestion I didn't take seriously, of course. Belinda had no taste, no real breeding, no sense of decorum. She would turn my wedding into a garish nightmare if she could. She tried to get me to invite some of the Bubble Gum Club, but I resisted.
"I'll have no one to talk to at the reception, no one to dance with. Please," she pleaded, "at least invite Kimberly and Bruce and maybe Arnold."
"It's not a party; it's a wedding," I told her.
"But I thought the reception was a party."
"Not the sort of party you attend," I said.
In the end I relented and agreed to invite Kimberly and Arnold.
"Kimberly and I will just have to share him," she moaned. "I'm sure none of Samuel's friends or Daddy's business friends will ask me to dance. I won't have a good time," she threatened.
"It's supposed to be my day, Belinda, not yours. I think you could at least consider that," I lectured. "When you get married . ."
"I'm going to have a real wedding. I'm going to get Daddy to rent a yacht that holds one hundred and fifty people and the wedding will be at sea, and there will be fireworks and the band will be on a boat beside the yacht, but playing so loud it won't matter."
"I can't wait," I said dryly.
"I can," she said with a laugh. "I'm not ready to be someone's wife just yet. I can't stand thinking about being with only one man forever and ever, just kissing the same old lips every night . . . ugh," she said shaking her shoulders as if she were shaking off a cold rain. "I don't think a woman should get married until she's at least forty."
"That's ridiculous, especially if you want to raise a family," I said.
"I don't expect to be a good mother anyway," she told me.
It always amazed me how Belinda could face her failings and weaknesses so easily and just as easily accept them. She was beyond feeling unhappy about herself. I despised and envied her for it simultaneously. It embarrassed me to think we had come from the same mother and yet she probably wouldn't ever develop a wrinkle from worry. She would go through life on those damnable bubbles, laughing and content.
She proved that in the way she recovered from Mother's death, returning to her philandering lifestyle with zest. Her wan, pale face of sorrow returned to that radiant visage that caused her to stand out like a vibrant, blossomed rose in a garden full of mediocre flowers. Even Samuel commented about it. The house reverberated with her giggles, her quick footsteps on the stairway, her telephone calls. At times Daddy looked shocked and surprised by her lack of sorrow. However, she was the only thing that brought a small smile back to those pressed tight lips and lifted the weight from his brooding forehead. I began to think she would replace Mother in his eyes. She would restore the music and the lightness and I was actually jealous.
For her part Belinda seemed no longer jealous of the attention my impending wedding to Samuel had continued to bring to our home. She was too happy again. I was filled with suspicions and trepidations. Surely, somehow, someway she would do something that would damage the family name just before my wedding, I thought. As always, I felt like someone staring up at the ceiling, waiting to hear the sound of the second shoe dropping.
Our wedding wasn't to be held on a yacht as Belinda dreamed hers would be, but Samuel surprised me one day with plans for our honeymoon.
"I've rented a yacht for us," he said. "We'll sail down to Hilton Head. What better place to be after our wedding than on the sea, don't you agree, Olivia?" he asked hopefully.
Samuel had come to my office, something he had begun to do more and more as our wedding date drew closer. I had actually been the one to work out a merger of his father's company with ours. It was more like a whale swallowing a minnow. Our appraisers fixed a value of just under a million dollars for the Logans' company, which was mostly tied up in their boats. I negotiated directly with Samuel's father and settled on three quarters of a million as the value and then made him take 90 percent of that in our company's stock.
"Oh well," he concluded, "it's all in the family now anyway."
Regardless of my marriage, I did not have documents written to that effect. Our financial interests remained separate and clear, but I did agree to give Samuel some managerial duties at our company and he was assigned an office. He complained that it wasn't side by side with mine, but he didn't complain very vigorously.
"One day the wall between us would come down anyway," he said. "I know it's what your father would like."
"We'll see," I said.
I knew it was always in Daddy's mind that someone would marry me and evenutally take the reins of our company. It was difficult for Daddy to envision a woman running his business, despite the amount of work I did and the decisions I made. He saw me as a temporary fix to be moved-eut and relegated to the house and child rearing.
It was during this dark period of his depression and despair that I worried about his capacity to make the right decisions concerning our company. Consequently, I had our lawyers draw up documents that in effect gave me the power of attorney and once I had that, I wrote bylaws that left me with control. No man, not even my own father, who I now knew to be my stepfather, would send me home to wipe the mouths of babies and change diapers. The sooner Samuel understood that, I thought, the better off he and I would be.
"That's fine with me," I said regarding the yacht, "as long as we have good weather."
"Oh, of course, of course," he replied beaming over my agreement. "I knew you'd like the idea. It's unique.
We're not just going off to some island hotel to languish in the sun. We'll sail and fish and explore together. I'm more excited about this than the actual wedding ceremony," he admitted.
I was too, but I didn't say so. Belinda was my maid of honor and some of our cousins participated as bridesmaids. The actual event did bring some life back to Daddy. His one big decision for me was to rent the Fisherman's Club for the reception.
The week of the wedding, the detailing of our new home was being completed. Since we would go directly there after our honeymoon, I began to have my things moved to the house. For the last few months, I had been ordering furniture. Most of it had already been delivered and set up. Everyone who visited claimed it would be a showplace. Nelson jokingly referred to it as "The Cape Cod Castle." He said he even envisioned me building a moat around it someday.
"To keep the riffraff away," he added.
"Too bad you won't be able to visit then," Samuel responded and they had a good laugh about it. I was beginning to wonder if Nelson had believed I thought too much of myself to ever consider him, not that Samuel was anyone more special, and not that he had ever really given me reason to believe there was even a shred of romantic interest. I was simply always looking for a reason why the man I could have loved as passionately as a woman should love a man never gave me a chance, even the chance he had given Belinda. Irony of ironies now: he was to be my future husband's best man and would be at the altar with me, but alas, only to hand Samuel Logan the ring I wished he himself would put on my finger.