Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (100 page)

“Yup.”

“I’d have recognized you anywhere.”

“Can’t say the same for you,” he said, looking her over. “You were just a skinny little kid.”

“I got over it.”

“You certainly did.”

She looked into the eyes of John’s identical twin. Smiling eyes, the same thick, dark hair, the same mouth and nose and chin. But there the resemblance ended, and she had to laugh, thinking of John’s well-cut clothes, his impeccable striped shirts with French cuffs.

Douglas wore no shirt at all. He had on denim pants and that was that. His torso was strong and muscular, though not burly; hairy but not ape-like.

“You look like Heathcliff,” she said.

He opened her car door. “Get out, you foreigner, step lively now.”

“Hello, Doug,” she said, stepping out on the grass.

“Hello, Margo. I’d have preferred seeing you again after all these years under different circumstances. Well, it can’t be helped. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

In the scented meadow he introduced her to his heifers, Jenny, Phyllis, Marianne, and Lois. “They’re good milkers, the little darlings. One of them’s ready to calve, as you can see. I worry about her; she always has a difficult labor.”

“Will it be soon?”

“Any time now.”

There were goats, in an enclosure, horned and with split-pea eyes. Fowl: chickens, hens, a rooster. “My alarm clock,” Douglas said. Two pigs, He and She, rolling in mud, and some romping dogs. Doug signaled, and the man on the tractor pulled to a stop.

“Remember little Margo?”

The man waved down.

“Shorty McLean, you worked for Doug’s father,” Margo cried.

“Sure did. Glad to see you again. Sorry about your aunt. Wonderful woman. Come ‘round again, Miss Brand.”

He revved the motor and went on. “Shorty McLean,” Margo said, looking after him. “Oh, how the past comes back!”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“I remember your father’s farm. All run down and going to seed. I knew how you felt about it.”

“I felt lousy about it,” he admitted. “I made up my mind I’d have my own acres some day, and she made it come true. I loved that woman.”

Abruptly, he said, “I read a lot of your letters, she let me. She used to laugh at me because I called you the princess with the golden hair. It was the way I thought of you. Only you kept going away, and then you went away for good. To that tony school in Switzerland.”

“I did what I was told to do.”

They went into the house, through a side door that led into a kitchen, with an enormous hearth over which hung a gigantic kettle. It appeared to be one of those houses that had started as one big room, and to which adjuncts had been added over the years. “Tell me about it, Douglas,” she prompted.

He was only too glad to, and there was pride in his voice. “A Mr. Luther Pettiford owned it; it’s a house that dates back to pre-Revolutionary days. Your Aunt Vicky liked it, knew I wanted land, and this old house was on the grounds. It wasn’t all that much when I tackled it, but I think it’s a gasser now, all the work I did on it; I nearly killed myself. How do you like my kitchen, Margo?”

It was a room about eighteen by twenty feet, warm, sunlit, with a restaurant-sized fridge, a separate freezer, a butcher’s-block table. The drapes at the window were a Williamsburg print, cheerful and spanking clean.

It was a room a woman would like to be let loose in, make omelets and fondues, broil fryers and steaks, whip up custards and pies. “I just love it,” she said.

“That’s good enough for me. How about a drink before lunch?”

“Wonderful …”

He got busy with ice and vermouth. “You live here all alone?” she asked him.

“I do. A D.H. Lawrence character.” He sent her a challenging look. “The town rake.”

“Oh. Why not?”

“Nearing thirty and never married. You can imagine my reputation.”

“I’ll ask around,” she said. “And if it’s too infamous, I won’t see you again.”

He laughed, looking over at her.

“You’re really a darling. Okay, sip a bit of this and tell me if I’ve done okay.”

She sipped. “Absolutely perfect,” she said.

He looked down at her, put the drink pitcher down on a table, and slung an arm across her shoulders. With a hand he stroked her chin, expertly, softly, affectingly. She stood there and liked it, and with his other hand he placed her head on his shoulder. “You fit nicely,” he said, and now there was a different quality to his voice. A little rough, a little breathless.

“I like your style,” he said. “I like your kind of woman. I’m not sure why I use the word, but I like your gallantry.”

“That’s a pretty corny speech,” she said.

“I guess it is. What did I mean by it?”

“It was corny but appreciated,” she admitted, and they sat down opposite each other at the butcher’s-block table. “So much for badinage,” he said. “What are you going to do about the house, Margo?”

“I’ve no idea at all.”

“It’s yours.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So?”

“What would you do?”

“Me? I’d say no, naturally. I wouldn’t leave this farm, risky as it is — because farming is risky, anyone will tell you that — for Blenheim Palace.”

“I wish I had something as affirmative.”

They had a second drink and then wandered about the farm once more. They lay, stretched out, on a grassy little hummock, watching the clouds. “That’s a dromedary,” Doug said.

“That’s a ballet dancer. See the long legs?”

“See the one over there … just beyond the big elm? It looks like my brother’s profile.”

There was indeed a face in the clouds, the outline of a strong brow and high-bridged nose. She laughed. “Your profile too,” she reminded him.

“No, we don’t look alike at all.”

“You’re twins.”

“But we look different, are different.”

“In what way?”

“He’s a sterling character. I’m an odd lot. How is John, by the way?”

“What do you mean, how is John?”

“I don’t see much of him.”

“Why not?”

“My hours are different from his. I dropped in on Aunt Vicky during the day, mostly, whenever I could get away. He’s a nine to fiver. Our paths seldom cross.”

“You were together at the funeral.”

At the word “funeral” she cringed, thinking about it All the townspeople, the minister, tradesmen, all there, in the church on Roxbury Road, with the ivy climbing over red brick walls, and the organ, thunderous.
We shall meet on that beautiful shore
… A sunny day, with flies buzzing in the summer somnolence.

The overpowering scent of flowers, massed on the casket, and on that little silken pillow Aunt Vicky’s marble face, her strong, white hair arranged just so … rouge on her cheeks …

“Don’t cry,” Douglas said, and then, “All right, cry, maybe it’s better you do.”

It wasn’t much of a cry, but she did shed tears and felt better for it. “It’s just that I don’t want her to be dead,” she said, sitting up. “I’m not accusing anyone, but they never did have much time for me, my mother and father, and she gave me so much when I needed it. I did need it when I was a kid, and she was such a marvelous person. I never thought of her as old, though I thought of my parents as old. You take so many things for granted, you’re sure someone will always be there. I mean, I can’t accept the fact that she isn’t
here.
”

Her voice sounded hoarse to her. “You see, that house … well, in a way it’s hateful to me. There it stands, safe and sound, up there on that hill, as if it were mocking the rest of us. She died and we’ll die and our children will die, but the house is still there. I think I hate that house, and I think I want nothing to do with it.”

She got up. “Am I keeping you from your duties, shall I go home?” she asked.

“If I’m needed, they’ll call me. Let’s walk a while.”

They did that, hand in hand, over the rough, coarse grass. Talking about other years. “Remember the time we nursed the sparrow with the broken wing?”

“And then it flew and left us.”

“Remember the time we got bombed on Gilby’s gin?”

“And I threw up all over the crazy-quilt Aunt Lietitia made …”

Doug, back in the sunny kitchen, fried eggs and crisp bacon, and they had another drink. “I’ve enjoyed today,” Margo said. “Oh, so much. Thanks, Doug, thanks very much.”

She drove off. Rounding the bend, going past the cross-bar fence, she looked back. He was standing there, a big, healthy man with an arm raised. She waved back. So there were men like that, men who tilled fields and loved their acres, men who lived in quiet, sun-filled farmhouses, and rose with the dawn.

• • •

When she got home there were two callers. The Reverend John Paul Jones was there, in his clerical collar, from the First Methodist Church, and Mrs. Pride, an old friend of her aunt’s. Pompey was serving them tea. The curate set his Haviland cup and saucer down on an end table and got up spryly, looking a bit like a great black crane on his pipe-stem legs.

“My dear,” he said, and held both Margo’s hands. “Needless to say — ”

“How are you, Pastor? I haven’t seen you for so many years. You still look exactly the same.”

His eyes twinkled. “Not you though, my dear child. You were a skinny little tadpole when last I laid eyes on you. Look at you now! You remember Mrs. Pride, Margo?”

“Of course I do.”

She gave the old woman her cheek, received a cackle in return to her greeting, and held a dry old claw in her hand. The veins stood out like ropes. “Sit down directly and have some tea,” Mrs. Pride ordered. “Pompey makes it good and strong. Tend to her, Pomp, that will put hair on her chest.”

There was laughter, in which the old woman joined. “Nice to see you, my dear, and looking so blooming. Thank the good Lord you’re bearing up well. I won’t offer you sympathy, never held with it. What happens happens, no use in crying over spilt milk.”

The metaphor was apt; at the same time she uttered the words she made a great spill down the front of her drip-dry cotton dress, dabbed at it with a serviette and then shrugged it off. “Sloppy weather, my mother used to call me, but of course that was many many years ago. I do seem to be getting on, every day a new wrinkle; can’t guess when I go to bed at night what I shall look like the next morning. One does lose one’s vanity, though, and it’s only when I look at old snapshots that I realize I was once pretty, like you, my dear. They said I was like Mary Pickford, she was a film actress, though I doubt you’ve ever heard of her. What are your legs like, my dear? I can’t see the shape of them in those pants things.”

“I’m sure they’re as lovely as the rest of her,” the minister said gallantly, and Pompey added, “Knock your eyes out, they would, that child has legs like a flapper. Here’s your tea, Miss Margo, drink up.”

“Thanks, Pomp.”

Mrs. Pride hogged the conversation shamelessly, talking about the long ago, about George, her husband, dead now, and their two sons, one killed in “the Great War,” the other (the baby) now head of a publishing firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I always say to George, at least one of them lived. I’m quite comfortable financially, but it wearies me sometimes, the way he sits silently and looks at the television. Who knows whether he even hears me?”

Suddenly realizing her lapse, she screwed up her face. “Did I say George … I’m a bit mixed up … that is to say …”

She rallied, cackled again and asked for more tea. Pompey poured it for her. “Got my memories too,” he said. “Guess we all have, us old ones.”

“And how is your dear wife, Pompey?”

“Dancing with the angels, I expect.”

“I was once the best dancer in town. I had a mean ankle. I saw them all looking at it! Dear Reverend, have some more tea. And sit down, sit down! Take a load off your feet. I always did abominate a man who paced the floor.”

“Just that I must run along now, my parishioners,” he said hastily, and Margo went to the door with him. “For heaven’s sake, don’t ask her for dinner,” he whispered in the hallway. “You’ll have her for à week. She’s senile, of course, quite harmless, but do send her home soon.”

“I’m sure Pompey will be master of the situation,” she said, smiling. “You’ll come again, I hope.”

“Yes, of course.” He fished in a pocket of his coat. “I have something for you. It’s a copy of the Service. I thought you might like to have it.”

“It’s so kind of you. I do appreciate it,” she said, and he went off, down the long walk, on his heron-like legs, getting into his nice, neat Buick and waving as he drove away. She put the mimeographed sheet on the hall table, her eyes catching a word here and there … “Whosever believeth in me … I am the Resurrection and the Life … in my Father’s house are many mansions …”

What had the organ played, in her absence? And had there been tears? Whose tears? She went back to the living room and the sound of Mrs. Pride’s gabble and cackle. “You want some more tea?” Pompey was asking, long-suffering.

“Good heavens, I’m filled to the brim with tea. As a matter of fact, I find myself beginning to have quite an appetite.”

“Guess you want to get home to make your dinner,” Pompey said kindly, but with a firm glint in his eye. “You just run along whenever you’ve a mind to, Mrs. Pride.”

The vaguely hopeful look faded from watery eyes. It had been a good try. In order to underline the fact that there was to be no forthcoming invitation to an evening meal, Pompey added, “And Miss Margo, if you intend to be ready for that
engagement
you got tonight, better be thinking of your shower and getting dressed.”

“Oh, you have an engagement?” Mrs. Pride asked, vanquished at last. “Well, then, don’t let me keep you. I must cook my asparagus anyhow.”

“No real rush,” Margo said, bleeding for age and loneliness.

“Well, then, just a few minutes more. It’s such a pleasure to see you after all these years.”

“But not for long,” Pompey said, fixing Margo with a stern eye. “You got to get ready and you know it.”

“Yes, Pomp.” She poured out more tea from the ornate Georgian service and they sipped.

“Funny she never married, isn’t it?” Mrs. Pride remarked. “She always did love children so. I never particularly cared about them myself, though I raised two sterling sons. However, ours is not to reason why. And now my dear, congratulations. Many congratulations, heartfelt congratulations.”