The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (20 page)

“Here,” he said, pouring me a drink and extending his hand.

“No.” I shrank back in my chair, sitting on my hands, palms melting, sticking like wax to the seat, sweat gathering like mist at the nape of my neck. I felt as if I was being lowered naked into a hot tub of toga-clad men at the Playboy Mansion. How can I begin to describe the great divide that existed between Harry Devlin and me?

He was about as relaxed as a person can be who isn’t asleep, while I was expecting to turn into a pillar of salt.

“Come on. You could use a drink, believe me.”

“All right,” I said as I looked around to see who it was who had agreed that I would accept his offer of a drink.

“Hoffa!” Harry exclaimed as I took a sip.

“It tastes horrible.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Why would anybody want to get used to it? He’s so cute,” I croaked, pointing to Spartacus. “Is he yours?”

“He is now.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was my brother’s dog.”

“Oh,” I said. Any mention of Charlie was inevitably followed by a moment’s silence.

Embarrassed, I took another sip and called to Spartacus, who leapt from the bed into my lap. “Harry, do you know why your father hates my father?”

“No, not really. It seems to me it’s mutual, not one-sided. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the war. What else, right?”

“My parents think that your father is going to do something to hurt my father’s political career.”

Harry considered me for a moment before answering. “I don’t know. Maybe. He seems to think your father doesn’t deserve to be a congressman. My dad is a traditionalist. He thinks public service is a privilege—only the great need apply.”

“That’s not true,” I said, angry and suspicious and ready to shoot flares out the top of my skull. “What does he know about my dad? My father is the bravest and best man I know.”

“Come on,” Harry said, mildly. “Take it up with my old man.”

“You seem like you know more than you’re saying.” I took another drink.

I had suddenly become interesting to Harry. “Are you sure you haven’t done this before?”

“No! Stop trying to change the subject.”

“Look, I don’t have any interest in this stuff. Anyway, I think maybe the time has passed. He was going to do something but then my brother . . . and now, well, I think he goes back and forth about it.”

“His book . . .”

“If your dad is the man you say he is, then you have nothing to worry about, right?”

“What could it be?” I couldn’t conceal my worry.

“Forget it. It’s probably no big deal. It will blow over. These old guys and that goddamn war of theirs,” Harry said. “Everything is the war. The war. It’s like they came home from Europe and made us all prisoners of war stories.”

“I like to hear my father’s stories about the war. He’s not a windbag, talking about hokey stuff. Everything he says is so important—inspiring,” I said, feeling curiously warm as Harry looked at me with something approaching pity.

“Wow. You’re quite the little campaign manager,” he said. “You’ve really bought into this crap.”

I was trying to fend off Spartacus, who kept scratching and sniffing at my pocket. I lifted him down onto the floor, but he jumped right back up and began rooting around even more aggressively. Using his two front legs, he started to dig vigorously at my pocket.

“What is it?” Harry said.

“Nothing,” I answered, a little frazzled.

Spartacus stopped his excavation and barked. “No, no. Good boy,” I said, but he wouldn’t stop barking.

“What’s he want?” Harry said.

“I have to go,” I said, standing up, feeling dizzy, the little dog slipping off my lap and onto the floor. He jumped up on his hind legs and continued to sniff at my pant leg.

“What have you got there? The family jewelry?” Harry joked as he climbed out of bed and stood up alongside me. “Come on, let’s see. Give it up,” he said, holding out his hand.

I was too terrified to respond. I knew I was done for.

“Jesus,” he said, finally, reaching for me. I fought back a little, not much, but he pinned my arm and reached into my pocket.

“Where the hell did you get this?” he said, his mood shifting dramatically from playful to serious. “You got this from Charlie’s room, didn’t you? What are you doing with this?”

I looked at the stone in the palm of his outstretched hand. My mouth was open but nothing came out. Fight-or-flight kicked in—minus the fight part. Dropping my drink, the glass shattering on the wooden floor, I dashed from the room and down the stairs, running as if my life depended on it.

Chapter Eighteen

I
ALMOST COLLIDED WITH GIN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STAIRCASE
, his mouth firmly set as he looked out toward the house’s ocean side, so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he didn’t notice me at all until I was right next to him.

“Where are the others?” I asked him, breathless, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “I want to go home.”

He jumped, startled. “Oh, Jimmy, you scared the heck out of me! How’s Harry doing?” He took a closer look. “Are you all right?” He sniffed the air. “Heavens, have you been drinking? You smell like a distillery.”

“No! I’m fine. Harry’s fine. Can we go now?” I glanced up the stairs, but there was no sign of Harry.

“That’s good. Thank God he’s okay. It could have been so much worse. We can leave when your mother gets back.” He seemed as shaky as I did. For a moment I thought his knees would buckle, or maybe that was just projection. “Your mother and Michael are still down at the stable. I was feeling a little off so I thought I would come up to the house and make some tea.”

He continued staring in the direction of the stable.

“Would you like me to make it for you?” I asked as I eased my way past him and into the hallway. I kept expecting Harry to come bounding down the stairs after me.

“Oh no, thank you. Aren’t you a doll to offer? The housekeeper is taking care of it. Anyway, Jimmy, I really do wish your mother would finish up her visit. I need to get going. I didn’t anticipate an all-day affair.”

He began to fiddle with the open neck of his shirt collar. I noticed that his hand had a slight tremor. Not wanting to stare, I watched out of the corner of my eye as his emotional state continued to degrade.

“Oh no. No,” he said. “Oh dear. Oh my.” Hand at his forehead, he walked briskly toward the living room and took up a spot at the window, where he stood and stared out at the water. Following slowly behind him, wary and wondering, I stopped inside the door.

Spinning suddenly around, his eyes darted furtively from corner to corner. “I can’t stand one more moment in this house.”

“I don’t understand . . .” I said, taking up a spot next to the fireplace, rubbing my hands together though there was no fire burning.

“That poor child. I can practically hear the beating of his heart. Don’t you feel it? It’s terrible. He’s everywhere.”

Now I was really confused. Why was Gin thinking about Charlie? Gin never thought about anyone but Gin. Appearing simultaneously distracted and single-minded, he scanned the room, spotted his keys on an occasional table and, moving quickly, grabbed them and stalked toward the door.

“Tell your mother I had to go.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said, eager to make my escape, but he ignored me.

“Apologize for me, please, Jimmy. Michael will simply have to drive you home or have his driver do it. I’m sorry. I really am.”

Through the glass door I watched him jog from the portico, accelerating into a run along the flagstone pathway. Sliding behind the wheel of the car, pausing neither to wave nor to take a final look around, he threw the car into gear and shot out onto the narrow winding roadway, quickly vanishing from view.

Holy cow. Even for him, this was kooky behavior. For that moment, I felt weirdly grateful to Gin for making me seem steady as a rock by comparison. And for giving me someone besides myself to think about.

N
OT WANTING TO STAY
in the house with Harry, I wandered woozily down to the stable where Michael kept a few of the thoroughbreds for which the Devlins were renowned. Black clouds blocked the horizon. There was a wicked wind and it was unseasonably cold. I watched my hat blow over the side of a cliff and disappear into the crashing waves below. There was a loud crack of thunder and a sudden downpour.

Inside the barn, I could hear my mother and Michael talking and laughing in the distance. Taking my time, pausing to admire the horses in their impeccably maintained box stalls, I meandered along, their voices growing louder as I approached. I rounded a corner and saw them together inside the stall of a showy thoroughbred.

For reasons I can’t entirely explain, I ducked into an empty stall where I could both hear and see them without being seen or heard myself. Speaking softly, Michael reached into his back pocket and offered the horse a cube of sugar on his outstretched palm. “Wico is a great guy,” he was explaining to my mother, “but horribly spoiled. You can’t go into his stall without having your pockets full of sugar and apples and carrots.” My mother was shaking her head.

Wico, sensing an easy mark, nudged Michael forcibly on the shoulder. Michael obligingly produced more sugar.

“So tell me more about hand rubbing,” Michael said. “I’ve been thinking about instituting it around here.”

“Oh, it’s fabulous,” my mother said, launching into an explanation of the process that she had adopted after seeing its benefits on a trip to Europe.

Our horses were hand rubbed every day as part of their grooming ritual. After you’ve combed and brushed the horse you strap him with a soft brush, lightly at first, then progressively harder. Horses enjoy a good strategic thumping. Then you begin hand rubbing for about fifteen minutes. You use both your hands and your forearm to rub, and to polish, moving your hands in a circular motion along each side of the horse from the head to the tail.

“How hard? How much pressure?” Michael asked. He was squatting down beside my mother while she showed him how to massage up and down the front and back of the cannon bone and up over the fetlocks.

“Michael, you’ve been around horses all your life—you know you can reasonably apply a fair amount of pressure. You should feel tired after fifteen minutes of hand rubbing.”

He took her hand and drew her up on her feet. They were standing side by side. He turned around so that his back was facing her and, reaching behind, he put her hands on his shoulders.

“Show me,” he said. “Demonstrate.”

She hesitated and then complied. I didn’t want to watch, but I couldn’t help myself.

“I see. You mean like this,” he said when she had finished, and he began to rub her shoulders. His hands massaged her back gently but firmly. He started at her shoulders and began to gradually work down along her spine to her lower back. “So, let me get this straight. You rub along the top of the head, behind the ears, along the belly, up and down the legs, inside the thighs . . .”

“I think you’ve got it,” she said, stepping—with some small reluctance, it seemed to me—just out of his reach.

“I could give you the full fifteen-minute treatment.” He smiled. “I don’t mind, I’ve got the time and I think Wico would appreciate it if I practiced first.”

“That’s all right. I think you know what you’re doing. You don’t need any more help from me.”

He grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “Thanks for teaching me. It’s all enough to make you wish you had four hooves instead of feet, isn’t it?”

I watched her reach out and rest her palm against the hollow of his back. He leaned in closer, his head barely touching hers. Her long blonde hair obscured his profile; its silken tassels hung down the square of his shoulder.

It was a painfully intimate gesture.

Beyond them, I could see the gray-blue sky darkening, smoke from somewhere, someone burning something, floating over the dunes and over the ocean. There was this cessation of movement between them; it rose up like cinders from a bonfire, sailing outward in indigo ribbons of smoke and searing the air around me.

I recognized the idleness that develops between two people who are very used to each other. Seeing it that way, framed in the half-light by the bowed arch of an open stable door, there could be no mistake.

My throat ached. I closed my eyes. So that’s how it was.

I
WAS ON THE ROAD
walking, fury and upset propelling me along the gravel shoulder, when Harry pulled up next to me in a car.

“Get in,” he ordered as I briefly hesitated, slowing my pace.

“Get in the car, please,” he said, trying a softer approach. “Let me drive you home.”

“What’s with you?” he said as I slid into the seat next to him, staring straight ahead as he pulled out onto the empty road.

“Harry, I’m sorry I took the stone,” I said. “I didn’t mean to steal it. I only wanted something of Charlie’s.”

“Why? You didn’t even know him.”

“I just wanted something to make me feel as if I did know him.”

“It’s okay,” Harry said, reaching into his pocket and retrieving the stone. “Here.” He nudged my knee with his clenched hand. “Take it.”

“Thanks.” I held it for a moment and then put it in my pocket for safekeeping.

We drove along in silence. “Look, Hoffa, I’m sorry, too, about giving you the drink. I shouldn’t have done it.”

“It was my choice. Nobody forced me. Anyway, I’m paying for it. I feel horrible.”

“It was a bad thing to do. I can’t believe I did it.” Harry shook his head and glanced into the rearview mirror as if he was trying to identify the person behind the wheel.

Jesus. He was nice, he was cute, he was a wonderful rider, he was interesting. It never occurred to me that he might be good.

“What was Charlie like? Was he like you?”

“No. He’s smarter than me—you have no idea how much it pains me to admit that, by the way,” he said, laughing. “On the plus side, I’m better looking. More conventional. Charlie has a gift for getting himself in trouble. He’s more temperamental than me. He likes to tackle things head-on, is always in an uproar about something, kind of like the old man. I prefer to glide.”

Listening, I watched the countryside pass by. Sometimes I imagined that I had become one of those Russian nesting dolls, a doll within dolls, each doll growing smaller and smaller until there was only a tiny voiceless replica left of the girl that I was once. It seemed an insurmountable task to go through all those incarnations of me before unearthing the authentic version. What would I find if I looked? I felt reduced to nonexistence by the enormity of the secret I was keeping.

“So how come you took off that way? Back at the stable, I mean?” Harry asked.

Ignoring his question, I countered with one of my own.

“Did you know that your father left my mother at the altar?”

“Can you blame him?”

“Why does everyone know about this but me?”

“Don’t get all worked up. The only reason I know about it is because we were watching some old movie starring your mother, and my dad, after half a bottle of wine, told me the whole story.”

“Did Charlie know?”

“Yeah. What do you care what Charlie knows?”

I shrugged.

“Charlie and my dad are joined at the hip. They talk about everything.”

Surprised by what his tone implied, I looked at him inquiringly. “What about you and your dad?”

He shook his head and laughed knowingly. “Uh, no.”

Sensing a dead end, I pursued the original topic. “I wonder why he did it? Why didn’t he show up at the wedding?”

“Have you met your mother?”

“Well, he must have liked something about her.”

“Have you met your mother?” Harry’s eyes gleamed with deliberately exaggerated lasciviousness. “ ‘The woman men hated to love,’ that’s how my dad described her.” He seemed amused as he charted my woebegone response. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“He could have called it off.”

“He did,” Harry said, shifting his gaze momentarily away from the road.

“What do you mean?”

“He told me they got into a big fight the night before the wedding. Something stupid. She told him the wedding was off. He was shocked, started backtracking. He apologized but she wouldn’t listen, said she wanted nothing more to do with him. Told him to go to hell. The whole thing knocked him on his ass. He told her if it was over then she’d have to be the one to tell everyone and then he stormed out and took the first plane to Europe. My old man’s got a bit of a temper and he’s used to getting his own way. The next couple of days the press was full of stories about how he had dumped her at the altar. He couldn’t believe it.”

It took me a few seconds to digest Harry’s version of events.

“You’re saying that my mother pretended to be jilted?”

“Yup.”

“Why would she do that?” What was wrong with her?

“You know her better than I do. Why does anybody do anything? What the hell? She’s an actress, right? Greer strikes me as someone who likes to turn in performances, the more dramatic the circumstances the better. Being dumped at the altar is more exciting than calling off a wedding.”

“Why didn’t your father come forward and just tell the truth?”

“My dad has a serious case of manners. He’s a gentleman and old school about privacy—and he has this weakness. He likes to be entertained. I think what she did amused him. I think she still does—entertain him, that is.”

I rolled my eyes. Harry noticed and eyed me with suspicion. “What exactly did you see in that stable anyway?”

“Nothing,” I said too hastily. “I didn’t see anything in any stable.”

“Okay. I don’t know you, but even I can see that you take things way too seriously,” he opined before adding, “Makes a great story, no? The aborted wedding.”