Rough Cider (3 page)
The hell with my suspicions. If you’re male and alone on a Saturday night and a nineteen-year-old blonde arrives on your doorstep at midnight, you don’t ask questions, you reach for the champagne. The Perrier Jouet was ready in the fridge.
I took a flashlight off the shelf and was on my way through the passage to the front door when I heard the creak of a board upstairs.
My bedroom. The nerve of the girl.
She’d broken in.
I was incensed. I’m sure it was a primitive response to my territory being invaded. If I’d had two good legs, I’d have been up those stairs and she’d have been out on her you-know-what before I’d drawn another breath. Instead, while I limped to the kitchen, my brain ran the gamut from outrage to arousal.
On reflection, I decided, I wouldn’t throw her out. I wouldn’t even register a protest.
She’d staked her colors to the mast.
I could be positive too. I took out the champagne and two glasses and put them on a tray. I’m fairly adept at balancing a tray on one arm, even when it comes to mounting the stairs.
I didn’t put on the light. I know my way around my own bedroom in the dark. I leaned against the chest of drawers to the left of the door and passed my hand across the surface, prior to resting the tray there. Good thing I did, because my fingers came into contact with a pair of glasses.
Don’t rush it, I told myself.
A trace of musk reached my nostrils and made me take a longer, stimulating breath.
I unfastened my belt and stripped. I approached the bed. As my hand touched the pillow, I felt her loosened hair lying across it. She’d unfastened the plait. I got in beside her. She was wrapped in my dressing gown for warmth. Our lips touched, and she guided my hand onto soft, yielding skin.
Coming up the stairs, I’d been thinking of the dustup if I’d brought Val home, as I’d planned. Now I stopped thinking about Val. Except that she was outclassed.
When I eventually got out of bed to uncork the champagne, Alice Ashenfelter spoke. Instead of telling me that the earth had moved, she said. “The catch on your toilet window is loose.”
“So you climbed in.”
She bit her lip. “Are you mad at me?”
“Do I look mad?”
“I can’t see without my glasses.”
I handed them to her.
She looped them over her ears and said. “A little
distrait
but not mad.”
The cork shot across the room, and 1 filled the glasses.
My turn to look at her. The light over the bed put strong shadows under her breasts, parting the strands of her incredibly long, fine hair. I liked the hair loose. For a girl of, say, nineteen, the plait was a curiously juvenile affectation. Plenty of the female students I taught grew their hair long, generally wearing it loose or as a ponytail or, in a few cases, some form of bun. Plaits were definitely out. Possibly it was an American style that hadn’t yet made the crossing, but I had the impression that it was special to Alice Ashenfelter. Her wide-eyed directness of approach went with it.
What I hadn’t worked out was whether the schoolgirlish behavior was just an act or ingrained in her personality. A case of arrested development. But not, I thought appreciatively, in all respects.
As if she’d read my thoughts, she lowered herself in the bed and pulled up the sheet to cover her breasts. Modesty seemed to be reasserting itself, so I picked the dressing gown off the floor and put it on.
Now, I thought, for the price tag.
I sat in the armchair facing the bed and said, “There’s something else you want to say?”
She raised her head and went through the motion of swallowing without having taken a sip. Then she said, with the reluctance sounding in her voice, “It’s going to be difficult for me. You’ve got to make allowances.”
I said, “The champagne is good for that.”
“Okay, only please be patient. This means more to me than I can put into words. If I tell you why I came to England and went to all this trouble to find you, maybe you’ll understand some of the dumb things I did, like letting the air out of, your tire.”
We seemed to be getting somewhere. I gave a judicious nod.
She pitched her voice lower and fingered her hair. “I want you to tell me about my daddy.”
“What?”
“My daddy.”
My skin prickled. What else could I believe but that I’d just made love to an insane woman? I tried to stay impassive, but alarm bells were jangling in my head.
“I never really knew him,” she went on in the same intense tone, “but
you
did.”
“Yes?” I said vacantly, then, collecting myself, “I think you might be mistaken.”
“No. You knew him, all right. He was hanged for murder back in 1945.”
T
hings started to link up. With a jolt! The Old Bailey, May 1945. The Donovan murder trial. I’d been a witness. The papers had described me as “a pale eleven-year-old in a gray flannel suit who had to be repeatedly asked by the judge to speak up.” Because I was a child, my evidence had to be given in the form of an unsworn statement, and the judge had asked most of the questions. In his wig and scarlet robe, hunched forward to catch my words, black, shaggy eyebrows peaking in anticipation, that judge still haunts my dreams. You can push an experience like that to the back of your memory, block it out with a million happier events, but believe me, it will not be forgotten.
The connection with Alice Ashenfelter was not so clear. The man on trial had been an American, it was true, a GI serving in Somerset when I was evacuated there. I knew him. But his name was Donovan. Private Duke Donovan.
As if she were reading my thoughts, she explained, “My mother married a second time when I was still a baby. His name was Ashenfelter. They changed my name at the same time. That’s who I am in the records and on my ED and all the documentation: Alice, daughter of Henry Ashenfelter.”
“And he isn’t your father? You’re certain of this?”
“I have proof.”
I didn’t respond. I was trying to trace something of Duke Donovan in her features. I remembered him vividly. You see, I loved that man. Maybe there was something in the set of Alice Ashenfelter’s mouth, the way her jawline curved, but it was far from conclusive. She hadn’t convinced me yet.
She was uneasy at being scrutinized so minutely, because she filled the silence with more explanation. “I didn’t know any of this until recently. I thought I was just like all the other kids, with eyeglasses and a brace on my teeth and a mommy and daddy who had fights. When I say daddy, I mean Ashenfelter, okay? Looking back, I don’t think he ever loved me like a real father. One night they had a terrific scene over some woman he was seeing, and the next morning Ashenfelter quit. He upped and left us. I was eight years old. After that he never asked to see me or sent me a birthday card. When the divorce came through, my mother told me to forget him.” She gave a quick, ironic laugh. “But we still kept his stupid name.”
“He was one for the ladies, then?”
“You bet. The last we heard, he’d married again and gone to England.”
“And your mother?”
“Mom was through with men. She devoted herself to me. She wanted to compensate for what had happened, I guess. She bought me beautiful clothes, sent me to riding school, took me on vacations to Cape Cod. We were real close in those days.”
She paused. I was supposed to draw out the next stage in the story. Obviously the mother-daughter idyll hadn’t lasted. Instead I asked, “What’s her name?”
“My mom?”
I nodded. My memory functions on names. Ashenfelter was already fixed forever, but I needed something more evocative than “Mom.”
“You mean, her given name?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated. “If I tell you, would you use my given name sometimes? It helps my confidence.”
I grinned at the notion that after breaking into my house, stripping, and occupying my bed, she was short of confidence. “I’ll bear it in mind.”
“It’s Alice.”
“I know.”
“Hers was Eleanor. Everyone called her Elly.”
I noted the past tense.
She picked up the thread. “Like I was saying, she was turned right off men by Ashenfelter. I remember on Cape Cod, we used to have fun sitting outside a beach cafe sipping Coke and watching the guys. We tore them into small pieces. We sure hated men.”
“How old were you?”
“Maybe nine.”
“And soon, boys were taking an interest in you.”
She placed her forefinger on the bridge of her glasses and hitched them higher up her nose to stare at me through them.
“You know what Am going to say, don’t you?”
“You and Elly fell out?”
“Right. The teenage rebellion. Preteen, and not just rebellion, full-scale hostilities, if you want it straight. The guys tried to date me, she got tough, and I blew my stack. Neither of us were quitters. She tried locking me in, hiding my clothes, whaling my ass off, all that stuff. But my hormones were always going to win out in the end, and of course they did. Don’t get me wrong—I didn’t get into any kind of trouble. I just got it established that I could go on dates whenever I wanted.”
“And how did she react?”
“Badly.”
“In what way?”
“Alcohol. Sometimes when I came in, I had to put her to bed. She had a couple of bad falls. One time she broke her leg, but it didn’t stop her.” Nervously she put her thumb to her mouth and pressed it against her teeth. “I’m going to cut this short. Last fall I started in college, living away from home. One morning in February I was called to the dean’s office. Mom had been in an automobile accident. She’d driven off a straight stretch of highway into a tree.”
“The drinking
“The autopsy confirmed it.”
We observed a moment’s silence.
I asked, “Did she ever tell you that Ashenfelter wasn’t your natural father?”
She shook her head.
“In that case, how… ?”
“I’m coming to that. I had to go through her papers to see if she made a will. She kept everything like that in an ebony needlework box that once belonged to her grandmother. I found a sealed envelope in there. When I opened it, there was just a marriage certificate, some press clippings, and a few old letters sent by Forces’ Mail. I glanced at the certificate and saw something unbelievable. My mother, Eleanor Louisa Beech, had gotten married in New York City, April 5, 1943, to a guy by the name of Duke Donovan! It really knocked me out. I mean, I was born the following February, for God’s sake!”
She appealed to me with wide eyes, as if she had just made the discovery afresh. I muttered something inaudible, wanting to move on to other things. I’sm uncomfortable with raw emotion.
“You think that was bad!” she said, inventing dialogue for me. “I took a look at the press clippings next, and they were really bizarre. Something about a trial in England. ‘The Skull in the Cider.’ Creepy. I didn’t know why she kept them. I was about to put them aside when I noticed a name: ‘Private Donovan, the accused.’ Can you imagine how I felt? Jesus, one minute I found a new daddy and the next he was on a murder rap.”
I smiled. Insensitive. I suppose I was as keyed up as she was, in my way.
Anyway, it didn’t upset her. She looked at me with a glazed expression and then unexpectedly smiled back and said, “Do you mind if I call you Theo?”
I answered flatly, “You just have.”
“Thanks. Well, I did plenty of thinking during the week of the funeral. I was very confused. I had one giant identity crisis. Either my daddy had been hanged for murder or I was Ashenfelter’s love child. Someone had obviously faked my records. I could understand my mom doing a thing like that to give me a clean start, but I figured she ought to have let me know when I was old enough to understand. Theo, she never even hinted at the possibility.”
“But you said you have proof.”
“Right. It was in the letters I found with the other things. I didn’t open them right off. I was scared. After the funeral I took them back to college. They waited on the shelf beside the clock, staring at me for over a week. I was extremely depressed, and I couldn’t take much more. Then one morning I came back from a wonderful lecture on William Wordsworth that lifted my spirits. The sun was shining and I went straight to the shelf and opened the first letter. I want you to read it, Theo. Would you hand me my pants?”
Her clothes were folded over the back of the chair I was sitting in. I passed the jeans to her. She took her wallet from the back pocket and extracted a ragged envelope, which she held out to me.
I hesitated.
She said, “Please.”
I took it from her and withdrew the letter. My own inner feelings were in turmoil. As I mentioned, I loved the man who had written it, loved him as a lonely child loves an adult who understands and offers support. I wanted to tap that source of strength again. His words—even to someone else—would be like a contact. But it was also a contact with a nightmare.
He had written in pencil on coarse, war-economy note-paper.
Elly, my dearest,
Another halt for the convoy, another chance to pen a few words to my sweet wife and our baby, trusting that somehow, sometime, you’ll read them. As ever, I’m not permitted to say where we are, except someplace in Europe, “On the road to victory” is, I guess, a description that won’t land me in trouble. I’m also at liberty to tell you that I still haven’t been wounded, thank God. Weary, so weary, but not wounded. I’m going to make it, baby, don’t you ever doubt it.
Enough about me. Can little Alice say “Daddy” yet? I guess that’s asking too much. There are kids here, would you believe? In the firing zone some kid in a bombed-out ruin asked me for gum. I always carry some. What’ll we do together, the three of us, when I’ m back? How’s about a picnic in Central Park? Coney Island? And someday I want to take you both to Washington, show you the White House.
Stay brave, my darling. This comes with all the love in the world and kisses for you both.
Your own Duke
I folded it and handed it back. To be frank, it hadn’t touched me as I had expected. It was a simple, dignified message from man to wife, and I had no part in that area of his life. Actually, it wasn’t disappointing to feel uninvolved. It was a relief.
