Time After Time (2 page)

"Hey, you," said Victoria
behind her. "Have you heard a word I said?"

Victoria had an almost
spooky knack for knowing when Liz was focusing on her amnesia. Liz
was forced to back up mentally, searching her brain for the last of
her friend's lighthearted babble. "Of course I heard. You think I
should give my house a name."

"I really do. Houses sound
more important when they have names. How about 'West Gate'? Or
'Harborview'? Or — I'm quoting you, now — 'Bigenuf'?"

"I was talking about the
mortgage, not the house," Liz said, laughing. She set her wineglass
on a nearby stepstone and turned her attention yet again to the
imposing mansion to the east. Since yesterday, it had held her in
its thrall.

Privilege. Tradition.
Wealth. Elegance. Lineage. It was all there, on the other side of
the barbed wire. Everything about it was the opposite of her own
life. Liz had been born and raised in Newport's Fifth Ward, a
working-class neighborhood of mostly Irish families that — until
the yuppies began moving in recently — had changed little over the
past century. Privilege in the Fifth Ward meant getting a parking
place in front of your own house; tradition meant meeting with the
same people every Friday night for a game of cards.

"Do you think I'm being
too ambitious?" she suddenly asked Victoria. "Do you think I should
work my way up through the Point and the Hill before I go after
East Gate and the rest of the Bellevue Avenue crowd?"

"Heck, no," Victoria said
cheerfully. "This is Newport! The town has a long tradition of
society-crashing. Where would the Vanderbilts be if they'd taken
some slow-but-sure route?"

Liz turned to her friend
with a wry look. "I'm not trying to break
into
society, Tori. I just want to
be able to make a little money
off
it once in a while."

Victoria came up to Liz
and put her arm around her. "And so you shall. You'll make tons of
money. And you and your little girl will live happily ever after in
a big house of your own. If that's what you want."

Together they gazed at the
shingled and stuccoed Queen Anne style mansion, sun-washed and
golden in the evening light. After a moment Victoria said,
"Where
is
Susy,
by the way? With your folks?"

Liz nodded. "She's been
feeling ignored, what with the flurry of moving and all. My parents
have her overnight."

"Lucky for you they live
in town."

"Isn't it,
though?"

Liz was very aware that
her friend's own parents were dead. Even if they'd still been
alive, Victoria wouldn't know them. The amnesia was so bizarre, so
sad, so complete. When Liz met Victoria in the grief group, she
herself was on the ropes emotionally. For a while she convinced
herself that as she pulled out of her numb state, Victoria would,
too. Then she realized that being left by a husband — even learning
there'd be no more children— didn't come close to losing one's
whole family in a car crash.

"You're doing it again,"
said Victoria. "Drifting."

"Sorry. Did I tell you
that someone in the mansion has two kids?" asked Liz. "I saw them
playing outside. There's a little blond girl who's my Susy's age; I
think her name is Caroline. And there's a two-year-old boy that the
housekeeper has to chase after every minute."

"You're thinking they'll
be playmates for Susy?"

Liz's reaction was the dry
laugh of a working-class townie with no illusions. "Not unless I
attack this fence with cable-cutters." She turned and began walking
back to her new little home, a cozy twenty feet away from where
they stood.

She added, "I just meant,
with kids around, you're always celebrating something or other —
baptisms, bar mitzvahs, birthdays, graduations, weddings. The kids
could end up being my ticket to Bellevue Avenue. Besides," Liz said
with a musing smile, "it'd be fun to do something for those two.
They looked
so
sweet."

****

Netta Simmons was on her
hands and knees picking up pieces of a broken soup bowl when a
plate of steamed vegetables went flying over her head, smashed up
against the eighteenth-century inlaid sideboard, and came dribbling
down the polished wood not far from where she knelt.

That's it,
the housekeeper decided, tossing the soup bowl
pieces into a plastic pan.
I quit. After
thirty-eight years, to have to put up with
this?

Leaning on one knee for
support, Netta got to her feet with a painful "oof" and turned to
face her tormentor.

"Caroline
Stonebridge
—
"
Netta began, her lips trembling in
her jowly cheeks.

"Caroline, sweetheart,
that wasn't called for," said Cornelius Eastman from the head of
the table. "You could have hurt Netta. Now, come — be a good girl
and say you're sorry."

The five-year-old blonde
with the Shirley Temple curls turned her steel-blue gaze on Netta
and said, "I'm
sorry."
Under her breath she muttered, "That I
missed."

Instinctively the
housekeeper turned to Cornelius Eastman's son: handsome dark-haired
Jack, him that she had practically raised from scratch, him that
would've cut off his hand before he'd ever raise it to her in anger
— with or without a plate in it.

Jack Eastman stood up and
threw his napkin on the table in disgust. "This is impossible,
Dad!" he said angrily. "Send the brat to bed without supper — God
knows she has no use for it."

"Now, Jack —" his father
began unhappily. "I know it's not easy for you. You couldn't have
had this — situation — in mind when you took over East Gate. But
what can we do? Caroline is a fact in my life, whether
—"

"I don't
like
broccoli," said
little blond Caroline. "And Netta knows it."

Netta saw Jack clench his
jaw, a good sign. She folded her arms across her chest and waited
with a kind of grim hope: maybe the son would overrule the father
and lock the little monster in the carriage house for a year or
two.

But no. In a controlled
voice Jack said to Caroline, "When and
if
we can bribe a new nanny to take
care of you, you can go back to eating all the junk you want. Until
then, you will eat whatever Netta prepares for the rest of us. If
you
ever
throw
one morsel of food again, you will eat in the kitchen, in a high
chair, like your little brother. Now. Either finish your supper or
go to your room."

Caroline stuck out her
lower lip and said, "You wouldn't talk to me like that if my mommy
was here. When is she coming back? I want her here." The child
began a wailing refrain of "I want my mom-mee ...
mom-mee
...
mom-mee
...,"
kicking her chair leg for emphasis.

Netta sighed; the girl's
lament was a routine event by now. Caroline's mommy was a
thirty-year-old woman named Stacey Stonebridge who'd rocked the
Eastman household when she showed up seven weeks earlier with a boy
in her arms and a girl at her side. The girl, she'd announced
blithely, belonged to the elder Eastman.

No one much doubted the
truth of Stacey's story; that was the sad thing. It hardly paid to
bother with blood tests and DNA analysis. Stacey was pretty, leggy,
and young, but most of all, blond — which is how Cornelius Eastman
liked them a few years ago. Now that he was in his seventies, he
seemed to have gone back to raven-haired beauties. But a few years
ago? Oh, yes. Blondes couldn't miss.

Mrs.
Eastman had taken one look at Stacey, packed up her bags, and
removed herself to Capri for the remainder of the summer. This
time, Netta knew, the hurt went deep. It was possible that tall,
blond Stacey was the last straw. Time would tell.

Caroline's wailing
continued. Cornelius Eastman rubbed his silver temples with
manicured fingers and said fretfully, "Now, Caroline, we've been
through all that. Please don't pound. Your mother is at the clinic.
You want her to get well, don't you?"

Stacey? Not a chance.
She's much too fond of her pills and her bottle. She's not ready to
get well.
Netta knew it, Jack knew it, and
so did the elder Eastman.

Caroline pushed her plate
away with a morose look. She was getting ready for the next phase
of her tantrum: self-pity.

Cornelius turned to his
son and said, "Where's the damned breeder, anyway? Didn't you say
he'd be here at six?"

Jack glanced at his watch.
"That's what he said. Well, have fun. I can't wait any longer. I'm
off to the shipyard —"

Caroline began to sniffle.
"I just didn't want broccoli, because it's my
birthday.
I shouldn't have to eat
broccoli if I'm being five years
old."
Tears began rolling freely.
"And I
don't
even
have a
cake."
She
turned to the senior Eastman with big, glazed blue eyes. "Dada? Do
I?"

Oooh, she's good,
thought Netta. That Dada-thing that she'd come up
with: it always made Mr. Eastman melt visibly.

He was doing it now.
"Of
course
we
have a cake for you, darling," the old man said, his face creasing
into a hundred lines of happiness. "Would we forget you on your
birthday?"

"She knows we have a
cake," Netta snapped. "She's already dug a trench through the
frosting."

"Forget it, Netta," said
Jack tiredly. "It's not worth it." They were interrupted by the
ring of the doorbell. Caroline stopped sniffling at once. Cornelius
Eastman grinned broadly. Jack shook his head with wary resignation.
And in the adjacent new kitchen, installed expressly so that Netta
wouldn't have to fuss with the dumbwaiter and the old basement
cook-area anymore, Caroline's little brother Bradley let out a
welcoming shriek.

The puppy was
here.

Cornelius Eastman himself
went to get the door, with Caroline right behind him. Jack got up
to leave.

"Jack Eastman, where do
you think you're going?" said Netta.

The next sound they heard
was a high and relentless
arf-arf-arf-arf!

"Oh, lord," murmured
Netta, "your father really has gone and done it."

A white ball of fluff came
cannonballing through the dining room, hardly stopping long enough
to pause and sniff Netta's skirt, then Jack's trousers, before
racing to the nearest table leg, lifting its leg, and
peeing.

Caroline, who was in hot
pursuit, stopped short with a scandalized look. "He's a
boy
puppy! I thought I
was getting a
girl
puppy!" She dropped to all fours and began crawling under the
table after the dog.

Arf arf arf! Arf arf
arf!

"I'm sorry, honey, that's
all they had," said her amused and silver-haired father, lifting
the damask tablecloth.

Arf arf arf!

Netta thought that
Cornelius Eastman didn't look sorry as much as glad to be done with
the week-long hunt for a female Maltese. And nobody seemed sorry
about the wet stain on the Oriental rug.

"But I had a
girl's
name all picked
out," Caroline lamented as she lurched in vain after the bouncing
white mop.

At that point Netta had to
dash into the kitchen to fetch Bradley, who'd cleared his own tray
of food with one sweep of his arm and was screaming incoherently.
It was his way of saying, "I've finished dinner, thank you so much,
and now I think perhaps I'd like to join the others."

Arf arf arf! Arf arf arf
arf!

The elder Eastman was
chuckling at Caroline's distress over the puppy's gender. "What
name did you have in mind, sweetheart?"

"Snowball," said Caroline
in a pout.

Bradley, on the loose now,
went charging after the puppy and succeeded in coming away with two
clumps of long white hair, which clung like angora mittens to his
still-sticky hands.

Arf. Arf arf. Arf arf arf
arf arf arf arf!

Jack, a bachelor who had
never in his life
been surrounded by this
kind of chaos, said in a loud voice, "Will somebody
please
get that animal
under control?"

Netta wasn't sure which
animal he meant. She grabbed the one closest to her — Bradley — and
began cleaning his hands with a wet washcloth as the boy squirmed
and screamed to be let down.

Arf. Arf arf. Arf arf
arf.

"You can still name him
Snowball, honey," said Cornelius Eastman over the ongoing din.
"Snowball is for either."

"Well, I guess ... but ...
well, all right." Caroline sighed, then gave them all a sweeping
look of wide-eyed innocence. "Can we have my party now, then?" she
asked. "And my presents?"