By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda (8 page)

She was looking surprisingly vulnerable, and
younger than when he'd seen her last, all dressed to the nines. "I
have to say, I'm inclined to agree with your parents. It seems like
heavy work for a g—you know, for not a man." God. One of his better
fumbles.

And yes, the effect on Amanda was
predictable and instantaneous. Her eyes lowered in that hex-look of
hers, and her words fell on him like icy slush. "A quaint if
uninspired view. But then, you
are
from a country that
regards a woman as a versatile form of plowhorse."

"Tsk. Mother wouldn't be pleased to think
so."

She tacked over to the other side. "No one's
home. May I ask why you're here?"

"Why not? I've asked myself the same
question. I have an impression—only that—that your father means to
offer me a job over dinner."

"Oh God, not that liaison shit again!"

"What liaison shit is that?" he asked
pleasantly. How she had the power to irritate!

"He has this idea that he's too gruff, too
unpolished, to deal with trans-Atlantic clients. It started with
Lipton. My father is always saying 'Howzzat?' and 'Come again?' to
the man, and he has this idea that he needs a kind of translator,
which is ridiculous. And of course, he's ashamed of his rough ways,
which is also ridiculous. He is what he is."

"Absolutely. It's absurd to be
defensive."

"Now you're making fun of
me
!" she
said instantly.

It was hard not to smile but he managed it.
The whole family was nuts. "Do you dress for dinner around here?'
he asked, changing the subject.

"No—we go in naked," she snapped, and spun
on her heel, heading for the carriage house.

****

Eight o'clock rolled around, but without Jim
Fain. To Geoff there seemed poetic justice in being stood up by a
host who'd badgered him in the first place into accepting an
invitation against his will, so he smiled as if he didn't feel in
the least like a fool and resolved to carry off the dinner
conversation, single-handedly if necessary.

He tried Mrs. Fain first. The woman clearly
would have preferred a toasted cheese sandwich in the kitchen with
her help over a game of mah-jongg, but she was holding down her end
of the table well enough, with only a soulful glance at her
husband's empty chair every once in a while.

"Your husband has quite an impressive
facility in New London," Geoff said politely.

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Fain said breathlessly. "It
frightens me to death to be there."

"Ma, everything frightens you to death,"
said David, whose mood had not improved since that afternoon.

"Well, it's so noisy. I'm sure I can't hear
myself think."

"I'm sure, too," agreed David.

"David, shut up," said his sister.

Geoff beamed a bright smile around the
table. "The pork chops are delicious."

"Why are those Bolshies hanging around the
gate, anyway? I don't suppose you had anything to do with it," said
David to Amanda. "It's made Dad hell to be around."

"Which you never are, so why do you
care?"

"Why don't you let him just do what he has
to do, without making trouble for everyone? Give the guy a break.
He's worked his ass off since MacWright died, getting the yard
right—"

"He killed Uncle Mac, and you know it."

"Come on! They had an argument over whether
to take a commission from Russia for a fleet of torpedo boats. A
mere difference of opinion! It was no reason to go off and have a
heart attack. We weren't in the war then; business is business.
MacWright never should've turned it down without checking with Dad
first. They were partners, for God's sake! At least he should've
checked!"

"Uncle Mac didn't want to be part of the war
machine. Why should he? He was the kindest, gentlest man I ever
knew. All he wanted was to build beautiful boats."

"Which he wasn't doing at the time. There
was no business and the yard was on its last legs. How do you think
Dad got in so cheap? And Mac wasn't our uncle, so cut it out. Stop
acting like a baby."

"You hated Uncle Mac, ever since the day he
showed
me
how to weld instead of you! You have this thing
about sibling rivalry, just because I'm older—"

"Rivalry! You're a
girl!
Rivalry! Why
they ever let you learn to read—someday I'm gonna go to Europe and
pull out every hair in Freud's beard. I've had it with you and
Freud and Bolshies!"

"What're you up to, David?" she asked
suspiciously. "Since when are you on the side of the work
ethic?"

"Give it a rest, Amanda," he growled.
"You're on thin ice yourself."

Geoff hadn't bothered to redirect the
conversation, or look at the ceiling, or cut his food with extra
care. No, he was falling right in with the beat of things at
Mergate. After all, Mrs. Fain didn't seem put out; why should he?
He settled back in his chair and watched. Fain family living was
definitely a spectator sport. Even when a long, strained silence
ensued Geoff did not feel really uncomfortable. He had begun, like
them, to believe he was invisible.

Amanda took a long time to chew and swallow
a bite of pork chop. Then she dabbed at her mouth with a napkin,
placed it carefully back on her lap, and said clearly, "Father
killed Uncle Mac as sure as if he shot him with a gun, and I'll
never, ever forgive him."

Geoff decided that he was feeling
uncomfortable after all.

The phone rang and Mrs. Fain jumped up.
"That's your Pa."

Geoff felt glad for her. She wanted so badly
to have something to say. The silence during her absence was more
expectant than sullen; neither brother nor sister seemed to bear a
grudge. He thought of his own brother and wondered whether Henry
had ever felt he was competing against him. If so, Henry had won,
hands down: great job, beautiful fiancée, money to come. All Geoff
had was the prospect of Seton Place, and that, he hadn't
earned.

Mrs. Fain returned; her eyes, so pale, so
gentle, were filled with tears. "Your Pa is in the precinct
station, signing a statement against those picketers. He says he's
had about all he can stand."

"It's not against the law to picket!" cried
Amanda, shaken.

"It is if someone throws a stone through a
window," her mother said.

"I hope they throw away the key," added
David. "Why are you crying, Ma? Dad's not in jail."

Amanda stood up. "I've got to go."

David got up too. "I'm supposed to meet
someone, Ma. We shouldn't have started dinner so late."

Mrs. Fain sat down as her children left the
room. "Well, your Pa does call beforehand when he can't make
it."

The maid stuck her head in. "You folks done
or not?"

Mrs. Fain rose. "I'd better talk to cook
about Pa's dinner." She moved toward the kitchen door, and out.

That left Geoff, alone and apparently still
invisible, at the beautifully set table. He looked around at the
empty chairs and sighed. Then, on a whim, he lifted an exquisitely
painted, gold-trimmed plate high above his head and read the mark
underneath. As he thought: Meissen.

As it turned out, the evening ended on a
pleasant note. Mrs. Fain, so hopelessly drab when propped up beside
the other more colorful Fains, glowed like an evening star when
placed before a pot of tea with a well-mannered young Englishman to
pour for her. She loved tea, Geoff learned, and was
so
grateful to Sir Tom for introducing his tea to America that she
hoped he'd win, if not the America's Cup, then some other kind of
trophy for good fellowship.

She loved to read while she drank tea:
True Story
was her favorite magazine. Was Geoff familiar
with it? With the wonderful stories, all of them true, of girls
who'd got into the most pitiful circumstances and somehow come
through them all right?

Geoff was not, and so she lent him a
copy.

She loved motion pictures, and magazines
about motion picture actors. Had Geoff seen Mary Pickford in
Daddy Long Legs
or Douglas Fairbanks in
The Knickerbocker
Buckaroo?
But surely he had seen
Broken Blossoms
? How
she'd cried; it filled her up with tears just to think about it.
Did they have movie houses in England?

She loved shopping. Shopping she loved best
of all. When she went to New York City she was beside herself with
ecstasy; she would be heartbroken when they moved, as her husband
had plans to do, closer to the shipyard and farther from Macy's.
She had always had such great hopes that Amanda might become a
buyer at Macy's. Amanda had a real flair for fashion; probably that
came from being an artist. Or perhaps being an artist came from
dressing well. She wasn't really sure.

And so the time passed quite easily, and
Geoff at last stood up to bid his hostess good night before driving
to the city. He had no idea whether Jim Fain had let his wife know
that he'd been invited to stay. But Mrs. Fain, grateful for Geoff's
company and practically smitten with friendliness, pressed him to
stay all on her own.

So he did. He was exhausted. He thought it
must be the salt air, but his subconscious knew better: his dreams
that night were a jumbled mess of the Fain family, shouting,
weeping, laughing, sniping. The Fains wore him out that way until
just after dawn, when the piercing ring of a telephone dragged him
back to their real world. He tried to fall back asleep but
couldn't. He got up and began to dress, with some vague plan of
scrounging a cup of coffee from the kitchen. When the knock on the
door came he was nearly dressed. It was Mrs. Fain, deeply
upset.

"Would you go see my husband, please, Mr.
Seton? Right now? I haven't been able to get a word in edgewise and
he doesn't listen to me anyhow and I'm just so afraid that he'll do
something rash—" she said, all in a rush.

"What's happened?"

"Who knows? He won't say, but he's throwing
on clothes left and right and it's got to do with Amanda. All he
keeps saying is, 'I will kill her when I see her.'"

Geoff followed Mrs. Fain downstairs to the
drawing room, where Jim Fain was writing down directions over the
telephone. He hung up and turned to his wife and Geoff.

"That idiot has got herself arrested. She's
in jail. My daughter's in jail.
My
daughter! I want you to
do something for me, Geoff. Get her out. If I go I'll probably hang
her after I spring her. I know it's asking a lot. There will be
reporters at the station. You have a way with, well, I don't know,
you just sound better when you open your mouth. Go. Please.
Consider yourself on my payroll as of this morning."

Geoff, dumbfounded, opened his mouth, and
nothing came out at all.

Fain scribbled a number on a piece of paper
and handed it to Geoff. "This is my New York office. I'll be here
all day. Call me after you clean this up. And keep her out of my
way for a while. This is a good time for her to work in the
Greenwich Village studio. Tell her that."

"I'd like very much to oblige you, sir, but
I'm afraid it's quite impossible," Geoff said at last.

"See? Now see, Mother? When he says no it
don't sound like no." He took both Geoff's shoulders in his
ham-sized hands. "I'm begging you, Geoff," he said plaintively.
"Don't make me have to pluck my own flesh and blood from a jail
cell."

Geoff uttered a very compressed, very silent
oath and said, "All right, Mr. Fain. I'll fetch Amanda for you. But
please don't take the trouble to make out a time card for me at the
Ironworks. I won't be staying."

"I like the way you put that, Geoff. You
slap a person back, but first you lay out a feather pillow for him
to fall on. We'll talk later. Let me see you to your car."

Minutes later Geoff was driving east,
feeling like a shuttlecock in an ongoing match between Amanda and
her father. No doubt Jim Fain knew an easy mark when he saw one,
but Geoff had his own reason for going: simple curiosity. No one
seemed to know why, exactly, Amanda had been arrested. Geoff's own
guess was that she'd dabbled in some form of nonviolent protest,
but then again, one never knew. He'd have to drive there to see for
himself.

He wasn't sure why he cared. Presumably it
had to do with his fascination with a family utterly different from
his own. Amanda was right: his upper lip
was
stiff, and so
was his brother's, his father's—even his mother's. He thought of
Mrs. Fain, whose upper lip trembled at the drop of a hat. He
thought of Jim Fain, who was as optimistic as Geoff's father was
bleak. And of David—thin, nervous, scheming—who had nothing in
common with Geoff's determined, far-sighted brother Henry. Then
there was Amanda, filled to the brim with untested ideals:
overeager, overbearing, overconfident, oversensitive Amanda.

His polar opposite, Amanda.

****

"What exactly were the charges,
sergeant?"

The desk sergeant looked over the list.
"Resisting arrest, assaulting a uniformed officer, speeding,
parking in a restricted zone, disorderly conduct, driving without a
license, driving an unregistered vehicle, and being a pain in the
ass." He looked up. "Get her outta here."

"I think that would be best," replied Geoff,
wincing. "I have a car."

"Hers has been towed. Here's the name of the
garage." He handed Geoff a business card.

Geoff turned to see Amanda, trailed by two
or three men from the press, being delivered to his care. She was
being bombarded with questions, which she ignored. When she saw
that it was Geoff waiting to receive her, she blushed to the roots
of her black bobbed hair.

I should think you would, you little
reprobate,
he mused as he folded a receipt for bail into his
pocket. The reporters surged around them both.