The Beresfords (25 page)

He couldn’t reproach me more harshly than I did myself. What was I thinking, indeed? Maligning Jonathan’s wife to him and forcing him to defend her? Had he done otherwise he would not have been Jonathan. All I managed to do was cause a breach between us. I was a child, like he said. A child and a fool. He would never confide in me again, knowing I tried to divide him from the woman he promised to love till death did them part. The confidences would all be for Caroline. As they should be. Undoubtedly. But the loss of his trust hurt, fool that I was. Fool!

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire, the apostle James writes, as he thinks about the power of words. My cousin Jonathan and I found ourselves, all in an instant, in the midst of an inferno. Anger, hurt, accusation, disillusionment, reproach.
Yes, James
, I wanted to say.
Yes, you were right
. The tongue is
untameable
. Full of deadly poison, setting on fire the entire course of life.

And yet. —Yet. A stubborn part of me rebelled against Jonathan’s words. Of course he was flesh and blood and I’d been an idiot to expect perfection or—worse—to make him think that I couldn’t accept him less than perfect. But my childhood vision wasn’t wholly
un
true, no matter what he said. Jonathan was, somewhere in all that vaunted flesh and blood, still that boy with light in his eyes who told me God called his name. The one who treated me all my life as a person, worthy of care and dignity. If the light was flickering, who knew but that I had a part in snuffing it out, with my rosy vision and heavy, heavy expectations.

“F-forgive me,” I stumbled. “It wasn’t my place to speak about your w—about Caroline like that. Of course you would be mad. You should be. I would be mad at me too. I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”

“It’s okay.” His anger had drained away as well. Leaving only—what? “I know you love her. You just… needed somewhere to pin all this, if it wasn’t going to be on me. But Frannie, I’m afraid it’s got to be on me. I’m sorry I couldn’t be all you hoped I was.”

“Don’t say that. I’m so sorry I ever made you feel like you had to live up to something. I…I hate that picture of myself. I would never want to do that to you.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

He would tell her everything, I feared. Husbands and wives told each other everything. Maybe even this moment he was imagining how he would say, “I finally told Frannie to quit making an idol of me,” and she would reply, “About time! But won’t you miss having your own fan club?” And he would put his arms around her and say, “Well, I know one person she’s
not
a fan of…”

I was wrong. His thoughts had gone down an entirely different path. “I need to ask your forgiveness, too, Frannie. It was…unacceptable for me to harangue you the way I just did. I don’t know what got into me. And on your birthday, too! ‘Like a city without walls is a man without self-control.’”

“I think,” I gulped, “that I could teach Solomon a thing or two about lack of self-control.”

Downstairs the front door opened and I heard Aunt Marie: “Frannie? Come look!”

We didn’t move.

Jonathan took a deep breath. But now I could hear a smile in his voice and nothing ever sounded sweeter. “We can move on from this, right, Frannie? We’ve been too good of friends not to. You might love me less if you have to take me warts and all, but you’ll love me, won’t you?”

My heart felt like a giant held it in his fist and was squeezing, squeezing, till it leaked between his fingers or burst altogether. I could say nothing. I could do no more than nod, but my cousin saw it.

In answer he pressed my shoulder briefly. We waited. Maybe he wanted me to say something more; maybe I wanted him to. Neither of us did.

Jonathan’s hand moved to my head where he laid it on the crown of my hair. Those silly curls. I was embarrassed. I was grief-stricken. But I didn’t shake him off.

He was blessing me.

More steps and voices downstairs. And then Caroline calling, “Jon? Where are you, Jon? Look who pulled up the same time as I did!”

His hand fell away.

“Be right there,” Jonathan called back, the smile becoming even more audible.

Turning on his heel, he left me.

I came downstairs having formed a new resolution. I would stop hating Caroline. I would even try to love her. Not in the gushing, girlfriend sense, but rather I would try to see her as God saw her. I would not refuse to see the good in her. I would pray for her. I would wish her well.

This resolution was immediately tested when I found her with her forehead pressed to Jonathan’s, his arm around her shoulders and her hand on his chest. They were making up.

“Look, Frannie!” With uncharacteristic eagerness, my aunt Marie presented me with an enormous bouquet of Mylar balloons, like the party supply store suffered an explosion. “There are eighteen of them,” she declared, “and your uncle and I took turns picking them out.”

I thanked them both, kissing my aunt on the cheek and giving Uncle Paul an awkward side hug. After the incident upstairs, receiving kindness felt painful, and I didn’t trust myself to speak. Fortunately, before I would have to, a figure detached itself from the entry way, where Tom and Marcy had blocked it from view. It was Eric Grant, the sight of whom was a perfect cure for any lingering catch in the throat.

He strolled forward, hands in the pockets of his chinos, the same lazy grin on his face that he wore that first afternoon by the pool, so many years ago. We were exactly the same height—always had been—but I realized I might never have gotten such a good look at him before. Maybe because the two of us had probably not spoken twenty words directly to each other, ever. I remembered the dark, laughing eyes but not the faint lines at their corners; the thin mouth that curved in a perpetual joke, but not the shadow of stubble or the slight cleft in his chin.

“Well, well, well,” drawled Eric Grant. “Would you look at you. What’s it been, Frannie—a couple years? You’re all grown up.”

Something was very odd about his voice. I frowned, trying to figure it out.

“What? Don’t tell me you don’t remember me.”

“I remember you,” I muttered. Only too well.

“Glad to hear it. I confess that, if I didn’t know I was crashing Frannie Price’s birthday dinner, I would have asked Tom who the good-looking blonde was.”

That was it. Eric Grant sounded strange to me because he was flirting. He was using his Rachel-and-Julie voice. The one he used that long-ago summer to play them off against each other. The one he used to seduce Rachel at the All-Star Carnival. The one he used to string Julie along in Tahoe. The one he used at Jonathan and Caroline’s wedding to tell Rachel she didn’t love her husband. I lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t see the recognition in them.

Somehow he ended up across from me at dinner. In honor of the occasion, Paola had set my
placecard
at the farthest possible distance from my Aunt Terri, but after that she arranged the first member of each couple opposite the other down the sides. And as the only two unpaired guests, Eric Grant must be my conversation partner for the evening. With ten at table and the pre-liquored Tom and Marcy commanding the middle, the two of us were effectively cut off from the others. Jonathan, who sat to my right, fed me reassuring smiles from time to time, but we were both too sensitive from our run-in upstairs to grind out small talk with each other. Aunt
Marie, at the foot of the table to my left, smiled as warmly as my cousin and had as little to say. So it was all Eric Grant, all the time.

To be fair, if I knew nothing of him, I would have found him fine company for a while. He asked me all about what I was up to, and before the salads were cleared away I had told him about school and working at the savings and loan and, no, I didn’t think I’d apply for college right away (if at all), and, yes, I still talked to Rachel and Julie sometimes.

“I wish I did,” he sighed. “Great gals, your cousins. Too bad they both moved so far away. You must miss them a lot.” This last he addressed to Aunt Marie between us.

“Of course.”

He waited for her to say more, but when she subsided into smiling silence, he went on. “That summer was one of the best of my life, when I met all you Beresfords—and you too, Frannie. I know you’re a Price, but for all intents and purposes, you’re an honorary Beresford—I still think about that summer. In my memory it was sunny every day and we were always together.”

As I, on the other hand, dated most woes in my life from that very summer, I had no ready answer.

“If you don’t go to college, you’ll never know, Frannie,” said Eric Grant. “There’s nothing like being in college and feeling like you’ve got it all before you. I sure felt that way. And your cousins! What fun we had together.”

Paola set down the tray of fried chicken before me and served me a breast and drumstick. “Your favorite, Frannie.”

“Thank you so much, Paola.”

“The afternoons by the pool…ha! You remember that time everyone got so worked up about the volleyball game? Poor Perkins. I played a little prank on him, Mrs. Beresford,” he added to my aunt. “On Greg. Because he was being so competitive.” He waited for Aunt Marie to ask him about the prank, but when she only smiled he gave up and turned back to me. “But Greg got his chance to shine at that All-Star Carnival. He took it like a man in the dunk tank while the rest of us looked on admiringly.”

I felt my face grow hot. My own memories of the afternoon hardly tallied with his.

“And Tahoe!” he exclaimed. “To this day, I regret Tahoe!”

“You mean Aunt Terri getting hurt?” I suggested.

A hint of an expression flitted across his face, but not so quickly that I didn’t catch it. He was
amused
. “Yes, definitely,” said Eric Grant, recovering. “It was terrible, your aunt’s accident. I’m so glad it turned out to be nothing serious. But even more of a bummer was having the weekend cut short. Just the one trip to the casinos before your dear uncle showed up! Not even a single drag boat race under my belt—”

“I’m not sorry Uncle Paul came when he did,” I spoke up at last. My fork rattled against my dish and I lay it down quickly. “He was disappointed in us as it was, without adding more fuel to the fire.”

For the first time that evening, Eric Grant appeared to recall who he was talking to. Maybe it was the good-bye-to-Sandra-Dee hair that fooled him into thinking that I, like the Olivia Newton-John character, had shed my scruples along with my former appearance. After the barest pause he straightened up and resumed more seriously, “You’re right. It was more wild than wise. Things might have gotten out of hand.”

Caroline turned to him then. “Tell Tom, Eric,” she demanded, “about your last dinner with our father. What he said to you about me going to law school.”

“That it was a good thing one of us finally scraped together some ambition,” her brother supplied instantly, adopting a gruff, jocular tone. “And didn’t he just get done paying our college tuition after shelling out God-knows-how-many thousands to our mother in alimony? And what was I planning on doing with myself—living off my sister’s earnings? That’s what happens when you’ve been raised by a woman who never lifted a finger to support herself.”

“Which was completely unfair to my mother,” laughed Caroline, leaning toward Marcy. “She lifted a finger all right, and married her second husband the day the alimony dried up.”

Marcy let out a blaring laugh. “You guys kill me. That is so funny.”

I saw a glance pass between my uncle Paul and his sister Terri, and Uncle Paul made a slicing motion with his finger at Paola that meant
cut them off
.

“Know what’s even funnier?” said Tom, even then looking behind him at the sideboard for the open bottle of Chardonnay. “I knew you didn’t have any ambition, Grant, but I never would’ve guessed Jon and Caroline would be the ones choosing the high life. Can you picture them in a few years? Caroline the
bigshot
divorce lawyer and Jon jetting around the world for Core-Pro?”

“What did you picture for us?” Caroline teased. Jonathan’s jaw was set.

“Oh, you know.” Tom waved expansively, forcing Aunt Terri to duck. “I saw you in some cozy little parsonage. Jon hunched over a desk writing sermons while you tended your brood.”

“My
brood
!” she punched him in mock-anger while Marcy hooted, “Sermons?! For real you write sermons, Jon?”

“What—what—what do you do now?” I accosted Eric Grant loudly. Only my wish to spare Jonathan discomfort made me leap in, but it worked. Every head at the table swiveled my direction.

If Eric Grant was startled by my sudden interest, he didn’t show it. “I just joined a product design firm in Cupertino. Which, you can imagine, I was happy to tell my father. Caroline won’t have to support this young man.” He cast smiles up and down the table.

“A what kind of firm?” said Marcy.

“Exactly what it sounds like,” said Eric Grant. “We design products for other companies. Like a combination of studio art and engineering.”

“Do you also manufacture the products?” asked Uncle Paul from his end of the table.