Breeding Ground (27 page)

Sunday, May 20, 1962

The thunderstorm started before noon, and it came down in a solid downpour. Hail started half an hour into it and lasted five or ten minutes, ending suddenly in more rain – solid sheets that drenched the ground and rushed out the downspouts.

Alice fastened her hair up in a wide loose bun while she watched the hail bounce off the flagstones behind the gallery, and the heavy hard bullets of rain skitter across it as the ice melted, and the pellet-rattles on the roof slowed down and softened as she listened.

She'd finished the riverscape. Never satisfied, but finished. For knowing when a painting's done is as hard as anything about painting, and certainly as intuitive, so having decided came as a relief, and set her free to start another.

She'd been thinking about contemporary art critics and the faddist perspectives she'd seen come and go, and how she rarely had the urge anymore to read what was being written. Not that she didn't think there were experts – scholars who'd researched and studied the great painters, who had much to say worth listening to. And there were new artists too she really admired creating their own worlds. It was the touters of “the newest”, and the fans of the fashionable, pontificating in print – those she usually found laughable when they weren't simply tedious and irritating.

But. It was almost three o'clock, and the rain had settled in, in the sort of gentle freefall the farmers around there needed. And she told herself the time had come to do something about lunch.

She made a tomato sandwich and ate it on the gallery again, holding the plate in her lap, sitting in the off-white cotton slip-covered chair that had the wide soft footstool.

She'd finished the last half and reached for her ice tea, when her heavy brass horse-head knocker smashed against her front door.

Tyler Babcock looked soaked, his hair slithering down his neck, his newly grown salt-and-pepper beard dripping rain on his jacket, his eyes strained and squinting at Alice, as she stepped back and let him in.

“If you take off your jacket, I'll get you a towel and a dry shirt.”

“I can manage.” His hands were in his coat pockets and he looked hungry and cold.

“Oh, come on, Ty. There's no reason to be wet and miserable. Wait there a second, and I'll be right back.”

She came back as quickly as she could (walking carefully, limping slightly, feeling her guts shift up-and-down in the post-abdominal-operative insecurity that happens when your insides have been substantially rearranged), carrying two towels and a faded blue work shirt she handed on to Tyler.

He rubbed his hair and peeled off his windbreaker and dropped it on the cocoa mat to the left of the front door without looking once in her direction, or saying a single word.

“How 'bout a cup of coffee? I was already getting myself one.”

“You can stop the hostess act anytime.”

“First of all, it's not an act, and—”

“You and I are about to come to blows over what should've been confronted months ago.”

“Yes, we are. Blows, I don't know about, but I'm glad you came. It's time we got this over with. Let's go into the back.”

It was still raining, pattering on the skylights in the gallery, falling gently between the house and the woods, the sound of it soothing, the way it always was to Alice, and she opened all the French doors again so they could hear it better.

“If you'll sit in here a minute, I'll get the coffee.”

She was calmer than she'd expected to be, pouring the coffee she'd already made, putting out Mary Treeter's oatmeal cookies, thinking about Tyler when they were kids running through the woods around Williamsburg – laughing and fishing and playing in the mud, getting furious when they played chess and cards, riding their horses through his parents' woods, setting firecrackers off on the Fourth, and any other time they could. She stood still by the stove, gazing at the tray, wondering how to get back to who they'd been, and repair the damage in between.

She walked back to the gallery and set the tray on the table between the two easy chairs, while Tyler stood three feet from her easel staring at her painting. He was wearing Booker's shirt now, with the shoulder seams hanging half-way to his elbows, and the sleeves rolled back above his wrists.

They were both quiet until he turned – and she saw the misery in his eyes. “I'm so sorry about Jenny. I can't imagine what that's like.”

“You don't expect me to believe that?” He had his back to her again, by the center set of French doors, and seemed to be staring at the woods.

“Yeah, I think I do. You've known me since I was five. How could you really believe I'd wish Jenny dead?”

He twirled around and lunged at her, then grabbed her by the neck, shoving his thumbs in her throat. “Your father killed her! Because you wanted him to!”

She could smell him – the stale breath, the damp dog odor of wet crumpled clothes, the despair and the anger that oozed up out of his skin as he trembled and she froze, holding her breath and waiting for him to come to himself.

Their eyes had locked. Her heart thundered in her ears. The blood pounding through the veins in his hands seemed to beat against her throat – before he pushed her away from him and dropped his arms at his sides.

She almost fell, but caught herself on the back of the overstuffed chair, then steadied herself and took a quick breath before she tried to speak.

“Tyler—”

“I didn't—”

“I want to talk about this, but I need to sit down and get my legs up.”

“Why?”

“I've had a hysterectomy. I had a blood clot afterwards, and I need to be careful.”

Tyler didn't say anything. He turned again toward the back lawn and stared out at the rain, his light brown hair curling as it dried, his shoulders narrow and bony, his jeans hanging on his hips, looking even narrower with the width of Booker's shirt.

“Why don't you eat something? You're so thin. And you look hungry. You must've been on the road awhile.”

Tyler turned around and walked over toward her, then sank into the other overstuffed chair, and dropped his head in his hands.

“Why would you think I'd want Jenny dead?”

“Why! Because of what I did to you.”

“What did you do to me, but find another girlfriend, the way anybody does? That's part of growing up.” Alice was wearing an old paint-stained man's linen shirt over baggy tan cotton work pants, and she folded the sleeves up to her elbows while she watched Tyler slowly begin to raise his head from his hands.

“The way I treated you when—”

“I was crushed then, you know I was. But we were like brother and sister, and best friends too, long before we were anything more. And that was a lifetime ago.”

“I never gave you a reason.”

“It's water under the bridge, Ty. It's been over forty years, for heaven's sake. After I met Booker, I never forgot you, you know that, you were my only real friend the whole time I was growing up. But Booker and I were meant to be married. We made a life of our own that couldn't be more what I wanted – and needed too, when I think about it. You and I are too alike, Tyler. Booker's different. He's a scientist. He's mechanical. He can help me. I can help him. You, I would've hurt. And we would've driven each other to distraction. There're too many ways we'd fight against each other, the way we did when we were kids.”

Tyler sat back and picked up his mug and sipped while Alice watched.

“I'm sorry I did the painting years ago. I mean, when you told me what you'd seen. The little girl in the pigtails and the riding coat standing in front of the grey pony at the horse show – holding his reins and shaking a finger at him. Remember? And him with his head down, and his ears forward, listening to her and looking ashamed. The second you told me about them I had the painting in my head. A Norman Rockwell kind of illustration. Maybe N.C. Wyeth too, in a way. It was something I had to paint. For a magazine. That sort of painting.

“It never occurred to me that you'd want to paint it. You'd never done anything like that, and you hated doing portraits when you worked with Mother. If I'd known you wanted to paint it, I never would have, I promise. And I'm glad we're finally talking about it.”

Tyler picked up an oatmeal cookie, and finished it before he spoke. “How do you explain Jenny's death?”

“My dad couldn't have been more concerned about not hurting
any
patient. You watched that the whole time you grew up. Sometimes it made him too hesitant. Your dad was the same way. Maybe that's why they were best friends before they went into practice together. You saw them struggle and consult when either of them had a difficult case. They'd mull it over, and discuss possibilities. Remember?

“Dad was even more careful than usual with Jenny, because she was your daughter, and his best friend's granddaughter. I had an appendectomy when Booker and I lived in Iowa that was hard to diagnose. I almost died with it thirty years ago. Dad got the best surgeon he knew of for Jenny, and
he
did the best he could too. Really, Tyler. It's the truth. Peritonitis is tough, even with antibiotics.”

Alice watched him for a minute – the grey eyes staring at his hands, the tension pulling at his face. “You know what I wish, Ty?”

“No.”

“That we'd been talking like this since we were in college. Alone. You and me. The way we did when we were young. How long has it been? Forty years? I know we saw each other with the families, but not to really talk.”

“I didn't want to.”

“I wondered about that. Why?” Alice glanced at him, and looked away, rubbing her right thigh. “No, don't tell me. I probably don't want to know.”

“Because I knew I should have married you. I knew I wanted to marry you. You know why I broke it off?”

“You met Sandy, and you—”

“I met Sandy and saw how much money she had, and how successful her dad was, and how gratifying it was to stay in good hotels, and go to the theater and the opera, and eat in great restaurants and have maitre des bow and scrape. The contrast to what we were raised with almost took my breath away. Our fathers working themselves to death, taking chickens and sweet corn in payment for house calls, and wondering how they'd get the bills paid and put their kids through school. Your mother having to teach painting to kids instead of concentrating on her own work. My mother teaching piano, half the time at night.” Tyler looked at Alice then, with something like shame on his face.

“You did your bit. You got a scholarship to Harvard.”

“Doesn't make much difference now, does it?”

“Did you hate being a stockbroker?”

“Wouldn't you? I threw away the two things I loved and ruined my life.”

“What about Sandy?”

“What about her?”

“It's looked to me like she's loved you all these years.”

“She loves the life she's had.”

“So if you planned a new life for yourself and made a place for her, would she go with you?”

“She might say she would. She might go. But she'd whine and complain and hate every minute of it if we lived on the ocean someplace remote. Hiking, and swimming, and watching birds? It'd drive her crazy. And that's what I need to do to paint the way I want to. Sandy's a city girl who has to have ‘stimulation,' and be seen to be ‘successful.'”

“I don't know her well—”

“No.”

“But there's one thing I do know about her.”

Tyler gazed at Alice, but didn't ask.

“She was Jenny's mother, and she's devastated by her death too, and she needs you to help her.”

The silence settled, and the rain stopped, and Alice heard footsteps and something being set on a kitchen counter. She was about to say “Thanks, Mary,” to Mary Treeter, who was bringing her something for dinner, when she heard the kitchen door shut. “Tyler, why don't I make you an early dinner, and we just sit and talk about everything we can think of?”

“Alice…”

“What?” She was watching him sort something out. Steel himself, maybe. Or face a fact he'd rather avoid.

“I'm sorry.” There were tears in his eyes when he looked away, out across the terrace.

“For what?”

“Trying to choke you. And hating you. Enjoying the hate more than anything.”

“We've all done it sometime.”

“I don't know why I couldn't see what I was doing.”

“I don't know what I'd do if one of my children died. It's got to be one of the hardest things anyone has to bear. And our generation, when you think about it, is the first that hasn't
expected
to lose one or more children to accident or disease. Literally, expected. Based on actual statistics.”

“My parents lost one.”

“Mine lost two. I can't imagine how hard that is.”

They ate Mary Treeter's pot roast on the gallery, talking about all kinds of things, and as they talked they both relaxed, and Alice could see again what Tyler did for her. It's the way all friends do it for each other. Each one stimulates some part of the other – an interest maybe, or a sense of humor, or a string of enthusiasms, that get teased out and exercised because of the other person's way of seeing.

With Tyler, for Alice, it was art, and wilderness, and the way light plays on surfaces, and the feel of weather, and the look of clouds, and the childhood they'd spent together learning what it means to grow up.

They actually laughed about what they'd once gotten up to. Which started when Alice said, “Remember how your mother thought cheese wasn't good for you? I don't remember why, but she did, and I was so disgusted with you because you mocked me so outrageously when I couldn't run as fast as you did, and when I lost that day at checkers too. That when we were having dinner with the people down the street, I don't remember what their name was, but both of our families were invited.