Cancel All Our Vows (35 page)

Chapter Twenty

Minidoka awoke on the Fourth of July to a perfect summer day. Hot in the sun. Cool and perfect in the shade. Rain had washed the city, and everything sparkled. All the lowering mists of the heat wave were gone. The distant hills were so clear that it looked as if every leaf showed. Mud had been washed into the Glass River and it hurried busily along, the current boiling where it went by the piers of the bridges.

At the Randalora Club the golf course was crowded, and the pool was jammed. Everything had the high gay flavor of holiday. The girls looked prettier. The young men bounced high off the board in clean dives. Children raced in circles and whooped at each other. The big parking lot at the club was jammed with cars.

The Wyants arose quite late, even the kids. They had breakfast on the terrace and the feeling of strain was there, but the gloriousness of the day seemed almost to counterbalance some of it.

After the late breakfast the children began to promote the idea of going to the club early. “We’re going anyway for the fireworks and so why don’t we just go on out there, can’t we, please couldn’t we?”

There was a quick family conference and it was decided that it would be wise to go to the club for the whole day. They drove through the city and the streets looked oddly deserted, the unused parking meters standing like fence posts. Fletcher let them all off at the door and then parked the car and walked back to the club. Jane was talking to a young couple named Graves when he got back. She smiled quickly at him and said, “I shooed the kids off to put on
their suits. Bill Graves says they need me for a doubles game. Is that all right with you, darling?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Sure you don’t want to play, Mr. Wyant?”

“I don’t want to inflict my brand of tennis on you. I’ll just wander around with a tall cold drink.”

Jane kept her racket and tennis clothes in her locker in the women’s dressing room. She hurried off with Bill and Nancy Graves. Fletcher walked over and found an empty deck chair and sat and watched the turmoil in the pool for a while. He saw his kids come yelping out and hurl themselves in. Dink’s swimming was improving fast this summer. Judge was better too, but he’d never been in Dink’s class in co-ordination and athletic ability. Just as Fletch wasn’t in Jane’s class.

The young daughters of Fletcher’s friends posed on the high board and took graceful dives into the teeming pool. He watched for a long time and then wandered over to the tennis courts.

All the players were good and they were in a long volley as he approached. Both Jane and her partner had dropped well back. The man on the other side rushed the net and Jane tried to slam one by him but he caught it and hit a slanting shot toward the sideline. Jane went over for it at a full run and got her bat on it and lobbed it back high so that the man at the net had to race back for the far corner. As he was going back Jane charged the net, moving fast, and the man’s return came where she had anticipated it and she put it away.

“Lovely, Janey!” Bill Graves yelled. “Lovely!”

Fletcher heard Jane’s warm clear laugh when she thanked him, and it gave him a quick hard thrust of jealousy. Jane went striding back to serve. She double-faulted, then aced them, and another long volley started. Fletcher sat on the grass and watched her, watched the good long warm brown legs, the innate grace of her. Damn it, she looked about twenty-one. That’s what the kid had seen. That aliveness and that quickness and that grace. And wanted it. Couldn’t blame the kid. Couldn’t blame any man for wanting it.

He recognized Hud’s voice. “We speaking today, Mr. Veep? Congratulations and all that jolly old rot.”

Fletcher squinted up at him. “Hello, Hud. Thanks. We’re speaking.”

“Our wives are. Good thing, too. Martha wasn’t fit to live with until she got it straightened out.”

Hud sat down beside him. “Your lady is a bear on the court, my friend. Aside from that, a good lady to keep around the house, I imagine.”

“No advice, Hud. Please.”

“Observations, not advice. And yet another comment before I cease and desist. Had my lady’s generous amount of mouth clobbered your hearth and home, I should have personally taken it upon myself to cave in her posterior with one of our set of antique andirons.”

“Let’s skip it.”

“Just one more little thing, ducks. Females do not follow me down the street exactly, but with all my rough-hewn charm, I’ve had my moments. I warn all my friends. Lock up your wives, boys, because Huddleston can’t trust himself. During the years of our long and happy association, I have angled many a pass at your missus. Some of them have been quite carefully thought out. Most of them took place in what you might call ideal environments. A man of my inclinations hears a lot of polite refusals. It’s a percentage deal at best. And yon blondie had given me nothing but a fat no each time. Fat enough, indeed, to completely discourage a less hardy and persistent soul. It is a fact I think you should know.”

Fletcher waited several long seconds. He knew how it was meant. He fought his anger and finally turned and said, “Okay. Thanks, Hud.”

“Want me to depart?”

“Stick around, you lecherous, unprincipled old bastard.”

“Now I know you love me again. What’s the score?”

“Jane and Bill Graves have taken four straight games.”

They watched the match. Jane and Bill lost the fifth game and the sixth and then came back and took two straight to end the set, six two. Jane came over. She was
flushed and breathing hard. Fletcher saw her recognize Hud, and saw the sudden shyness. He had a sudden realization of what it meant to her in terms of self-respect to know that Martha and Hud knew about it, and probably Ellis and Laura, and quite probably Midge and Harry. It was something they wouldn’t forget, and it was something that would inevitably be known in more or less exaggerated versions throughout their set, and it was something to have to live with.

Jane stretched out on the grass, face down. “I’m fair pooped, gentlemen,” she said. “Either old age or dissipation.”

Bill Graves sat cross-legged. “Lady, you weren’t sagging as bad as I was. Nancy wants to take you on alone.”

“Give me a five-minute break first.”

Hud got up. “I think I hear somebody rattling my dish. Strive on, silly athletes. See you anon and about.”

Jane gave Fletcher a quick, inquisitive glance and then looked away. After a time she got up and cut the air with her bat. “Okay, Nance.”

During the set with Nancy, when Jane was leading, three games to one, Fletcher wandered back toward the pool. He signed for a rum Collins at the pool bar, and carried it over and watched the golfers holing out on the eighteenth green for a while. He sat on the stone steps that led up to the terrace. He saw a girl in white walking toward him. No one in the world except Laura Corban walked that way. He stood up as she came up to him, unsmiling. “You haven’t phoned,” she said.

“No, I haven’t.”

She sat down on the steps and he sat on one above her. “By the way, congratulations, my dear.”

“Thanks.”

“It doesn’t make you nervous to have me sitting here talking to you?”

He looked down at the curve of her throat, at the dusky separation of her breasts where the round neckline of the white dress fell away from her. The memory of her was in his hands and on his lips and he felt his throat thicken. “It doesn’t make me nervous.”

“Such tremendous enthusiasm, Fletcher! Don’t strain yourself.”

“Why are you in such a filthy mood?”

“Ellis, I guess. He’s unbearable after any promotion. This is the worst one yet. He keeps looking in mirrors and twitching his mustache. He’s even harder than ever for me to bear … after our red barn.”

“Is he?”

“Like the sleeping princess, Fletcher. And the kiss awakened her. Princess isn’t too apt, is it? Sleeping what?”

“Houri? Odalesque? Daemon?”

“Those will do. But now she’s awake, and she is waiting.”

“What if she waits in vain?”

Laura looked sharply up at him and for a moment her mouth was quite ugly before it smoothed out. “I hardly think so.”

“Maybe it was enough.”

“I know you. You’re not going to go Christer on me, Fletcher. I’m not too rich for your blood. Only it might make it interesting for you to fight a little. To try to wiggle off the hook, maybe. We’re both hooked, you know.”

“Hud said you were going to explode in my face.”

She looked at him calmly. “How shrewd of Hud.”

“I have the funny feeling that it will improve my immortal soul to have none of you, Laura.”

“How do you go about taking the cure?”

“Maybe sometimes you go at it the same way those flagellantes work. Punish yourself.”

“Oh, dear. Cold showers and lots of exercise?”

“Pure bitch.”

She stood up slowly and arched her back just a bit. “Of course! And exactly what you want. What do you industrialists say? Machined for the job?”

“And doesn’t that make me an interchangeable part?”

She turned a bit white. “That’s a little too shrewd too. Think about it. Wait too long and you might find yourself obsolescent.” She walked away from him, swinging her round hips just a bit more than necessary, turning back when she was twenty feet away to give him one small
quick evil confident smile. His hands were sweaty and he took out his handkerchief and dried them.

He saw Jane and Nancy heading for the locker rooms. Jane seemed to be just a little too engrossed in conversation, and he wondered if she had seen Laura sitting with him. Jane glanced his way and her smile was a little too gay. When she was out of sight he wandered over to the pool again and Jane found him there after she had showered and changed. “Let’s round up the kids and get a sandwich,” she said. “It will be a long time until dinner.”

They sat at one of the picnic tables out in the small grove. Midge and Harry Van Wirt moved in and ate with them, Ellis Corban stopped by to chat, and Jane congratulated him gravely and with beautiful sincerity. The kids were told how long they had to wait before going back into the pool.

Fletcher stopped drinking during the long afternoon. He wandered around, feeling strangely apart from the laughing holiday people. Jane got into a bridge game on the terrace and for a time he sat near her, watching her play of the hands until he realized that he was making her nervous.

As the day began to fade, as the children grew noisier, as the drunks began to laugh louder at their own wit, Fletcher felt the slow increase within him of morose depression. It was depression without anger, without resentment. A vast grey dullness inside of him. Yet he made himself smile at the right moments and say the right things.

The traditional Fourth of July buffet dinner was served. The long buffet was set up in the main lounge. People were eating in the dining room, on the big porch, on the terrace, out by the pool, over in the grove. Talk and lights and laughter, as the day faded. By the time the Wyant family had finished eating, people were already going out with blankets and car robes to pick vantage spots on the long slope of the eighteenth fairway where they would get a good view of the fireworks. The children had raced through their meal and they were itching to be off. To keep them busy, Fletcher gave Judge the car keys and sent them to get the robe out of the back end of the car.

They were back before Jane had finished her coffee. They went out and it was grey dusk. It was not yet dark enough to begin, and down on the flats the fireworks scaffolding had been erected, the wood pale yellow and raw in the dusk. Men moved about down there on mysterious errands. The children picked a spot and Judge spread the robe with much advice from Dink. Jane and Fletcher sat down side by side, the children in front of them.

Slowly it grew darker while the children complained about were they never going to start, for gosh sakes? “When do they start, Dad?”

He saw the Corbans come and find a place a little way down the slope from them. He was barely able to make them out in the gathering darkness, and he saw that Ellis was spreading a blanket, and he wondered if it was the same one, if it held the odor of musty hay, of barn dampness.

Jane had turned a bit, hugging her knees, and her arm touched his, and he felt her move quickly away from the contact.

There was rhythmic clapping which stopped suddenly as a high wild red rocket whooshed high, and banged and dropped a wide silver spray. There was a long slow Aah! of pleasure, and sudden applause.

There were more rockets and Fletcher ceased watching them, watched instead the reflected glow on upturned faces. He felt himself a stranger in this place, among all the people he had known most of his life. A stranger sitting with the small family of some person named Fletcher Wyant. He moved back a bit and turned almost furtively to see the explosive reflections against Jane’s face, as though by looking at her he would see an answer to this feeling of apartness. Her lips were parted. There was a small moist highlight on her underlip. He could see the sheen of her eyes.

And she was a stranger beside him. A living, breathing creature of tissue and muscle and nerves and bone. A creature taut in its firm brown skin, with the tendons cleverly sheated, muscles awaiting the messages of the clever little white threads of the nerves. Bride of a stranger. Person forever unknowable. And maybe that was it. You
knew so little of yourself. And so any other person was but a deeper mystery. This stranger beside him had been born in pain, and had conceived, and would die and rot and be forgotten. Even as he.

He felt that he was close to an answer, close to something rare and good. He closed his hand hard on her arm, felt rather than heard her small gasp of surprise. She turned toward him with eyes he did not know. A rounded wetness of membrane. Eyes of a stranger and they were aware of him.

The children were oblivious. He stood up and tugged her arm and she rose silently and obediently. She had been looking at the fireworks and they had blinded her. He guided her between the groups of people, took her across the wide yard to the pool, still holding her arm tightly.