Fortune's Hand (16 page)

“It seems to agree with you.”

Indeed, Eddy appeared to be growing younger. He sparkled with energy. Even his healthy teeth, revealed by a short upper lip, were sparkling. When he raised his arm, gold cufflinks gleamed.

“Like my new watch? I treated myself. Patek Philippe.”

“Handsome. You can spend money like water, Eddy.”

“Why not? So, what's new with you?”

“Nothing much.” And then, for no reason at all, Robb mentioned the afternoon's brief encounter.

“He wants something,” Eddy said promptly, giving Robb his usual wise nod.

“What makes you think so?”

“Otherwise he wouldn't have spent an hour with you. Time is money for those guys.”

“Funny, I had a feeling he was leading up to something, only he never got to it.”

“What did you think it was?”

“I had no idea.”

“I think you're going to be offered a job. That's what I think. Why else would he say he'll be giving you a call?”

“That's ridiculous. He knows I'm Grant's son-in-law.”

“So?”

“It wouldn't be decent. Wouldn't be honorable.”

“Oh, good God, join the world, Robb. Listen to me.” A ray of sunlight glistened on the Patek Philippe as Eddy leaned forward on the desk. “You've earned a reputation as one of the best litigators in this city, and you know it. Or you should know it.”

“Well, I don't believe he's going to offer me anything, but it doesn't matter because I wouldn't accept, anyway.”

“Then you'd need to have your head examined. They'd give you half as much again as you're getting here. And that's for starters.”

“I'm doing all right, Eddy. We don't owe a nickel. We're getting along fine.”

“I hate to mention it, but what about that boy of yours?”

“I don't want to talk about him. It's Julie's birthday, I told you, and I just want to feel happy.”

“Gosh, I forgot the date. Oh damn, I always remember it, too. You know I do. How old is she? Ten now? She'll have her present tomorrow, a day late.”

“She's nine, and if you call her up this evening, she'll be perfectly happy with that.”

“No, no. From Uncle Eddy, the girl gets presents and a visit not a phone call. I'm going out now before the stores close. Does she still play with dolls?”

“Oh yes, but don't be extravagant.”

“Mind your business. I'll be over this evening. No dinner. No time.”

Together they went out to their cars and drove off in opposite directions, the one on his cheerful way to buy a little girl's dream of a doll, and the other filling now with the vague disturbances that Eddy had produced.

At home the decorations for the afternoon's party were still evident. On the foot of the drive, the wind was flinging the balloons about, and someone had dropped a pink crepe-paper basket on the walk. Mrs. Vernon was tidying the dining room.

“How did it go?” Robb inquired.

“Pretty well. Ups and downs as usual. Ellen and Julie are upstairs, angry at each other. Penn's in watching TV.”

A long sigh tried to clear the tension in Robb's chest. From the hall he could see the back of Penn's head and the flickering front of the television. He wondered what the boy really understood of the life that came and went on the screen. He would have sat there all day if they allowed him to. As it was, he spent too many hours there. Yet it gave him pleasure, so perhaps there was no harm in it.

“Hi, Penn,” he said.

Men on horseback preceded by a pack of barking hounds bounded across an open field in pursuit of a fox. Penn was hunched, unmoving, entranced. When Robb called again, Penn turned to show an expression of delight.

“Wow-wows, Daddy!”

“Dogs,” Robb said. “Say ‘dogs.' ”

“Dogs.”

“That's right.”

He sat down on the sofa and put his arm around the small shoulders. The boy looked up at him, smiling. The smile was something new; for so long, there had been only apathy or resistance on that face. Rarely had he allowed any affectionate touch, but now he was able to tolerate one. So Phil Lawson's encouraging words, and almost certainly his personal intervention with Penn, were proving themselves.

“Rich hours” Ellen called the hours he spent with Lawson. Phil had a calming effect upon the child. Whatever there was in Penn, and Phil himself conceded that there wasn't much, was ever so slowly emerging.

Robb bent to kiss his cheek, and withdrew, then looked down into a face so like his own, with the same strong cheekbones and chin faintly cleft, that it startled him. But the soft, wondering eyes trusted a world in which Penn would never compete, a world in which he had neither weapon nor armor. And for an instant, becoming his own parents who had suffered the pain he was feeling now, his parents who had died as they had, Robb was overwhelmed with the sadness of life. Those who had not known him in his youth—for he thought
of himself as a man whose youth was behind him—would not recognize the hopeful being he had once been.

The dogs were crowded, excited, and yapping. Penn laughed.

“Wow-wow,” he cried, he who should have been in the first grade learning to read.

“Dog,” Robb repeated.

“Wow-wow,” Penn said.

Robb went upstairs. It was rare for Ellen and Julie to be angry at each other. More than likely, this being a party day, their disagreement stemmed in some way from Penn. The smallest alteration in the ordinary routine of the household, a new kind of breakfast cereal in his bowl or the arrival of a party of guests at the door, held the possibility, although not the guarantee anymore, of disturbance. One never knew.

He knocked on Julie's door. When she opened it, he saw that she was still in her party dress and that she had been crying.

“What is it?” he whispered, putting his arms around her.

“Mommy is angry at me because I yelled at Penn.”

“That's all?”

“Yes.”

“There must be something special, though.” Not feeling like smiling, he smiled. “Because you do yell at Penn, and Mommy doesn't get angry. We know it's all right to feel angry at him sometimes. We all feel it. We just need to control it, that's all, my Julie. You understand what I mean.”

“I did control it some. But today I was really mad at him. He wet his pants, and it made a wet place in my room.”

“He hasn't done that in a long, long time, though.”

It was the excitement of the day that had upset him. Even though he had been taken away to Mrs. Vernon's daughter's house, he had seen all the preparations.

“And Grandpa came in with my present. He said Penn should never have been born. He always says that. And Mommy cried.”

Tears on a happy birthday! But Ellen isn't made entirely of iron, is she? Who is? She has a lot more iron in her than many of us have.…

Ellen had heard them. When she came out of their room and kissed his cheek, he thought ironically that in the midst of distress we duly expect things. A wife meets her husband with a kiss when he comes home, and he returns it. We are well brought up, or well trained, either one. And instantly he was ashamed by the thought. He grieved.

“It was a nice party,” she said brightly. “We had a little misunderstanding, but those things happen, don't they, Julie? We both know Penn didn't mean to do what he did, and anyway, I've cleaned it up.”

“That's not why you cried,” Julie said. “It was because of Grandpa.”

We look at each other, we two, Robb and Ellen, while a little girl with her wise great eyes sees more in us than we can ever guess.

“Grandpa brought you a wonderful dollhouse,” Ellen said, still brightly. “Let's go downstairs and show it
to Daddy. We'll all have to help carry it up to your room.”

She wanted to smooth things over. But they were so very complicated! The old man's generosity, both within the family and in the community, was incompatible with the rest of him. And he was Ellen's father. So be it.

They went down to dinner. Penn talked about how “men runned with wow-wow.” He had just one bad spill, and that only on his capacious bib. Julie, recovered, offered cheerful feminine gossip about her class. Ellen took Robb's hand under the tablecloth. After dinner Eddy arrived, bearing a European doll so exquisite that it belonged in a museum. Julie's new croquet set was laid out on the lawn and all through the soft May evening they played, until the dark fell and the children went to bed.

The two men walked together to Eddy's car.

“A very successful birthday, I would say,” Robb observed. “And the doll was the crowning glory of it. As always, thanks, Eddy.”

“My pleasure.” Then came a slight frown and a little hesitation, before the next words. “There's something you might want to hear, or maybe not.”

“Bad news?” Robb asked quickly.

“Not at all. It's only that I'm not sure you'd like the subject, and I don't want you to be angry with me.”

Eddy's expressions were astonishingly changeable. This evening he had, for instance, been jaunty, comical, affectionate with the children and was now hesitant,
prepared to be scolded. Very gently Robb answered, “I won't be angry. What is it?”

“It's about Lily. She's married. Got married a couple of years ago. I just found out.”

The name, not the fact, was what startled him. It had been so long since he had heard it spoken: Lily.

“That's nice,” he said, waiting but not asking for more.

“That guy who still works at the gas station must have a memory like an elephant. He remembered Marchfield, and that I had used to ask about her. He heard accidentally that she got married, but that's all he knows.”

“That's nice,” Robb repeated.

“He doesn't know who or where or anything.”

Neither spoke until Eddy asked, “Do you ever think of her? Often, I mean?”

Well no, and then again, yes. Sometimes he thought, when he was feeling Wilson Grant's disapproval or when Ellen was feeling betrayed as he knew—although she never said so—she must, he thought of Lily. Would she have been more truly accepting? Would her mother have been less punitive than Ellen's father was? And then he would say to himself: Absurd! Her mother, with that sharp tongue?

And now Lily was finally married. So broken, so disillusioned she had been, to wait—how long now?—without husband or child! But then, if he had married her she might have had one like Penn …

She might have gone pleading, as Ellen had just done, to that new little school downtown for “children
with learning disabilities.” How hopeful that sounded! But Penn, after a three-day trial, didn't “fit there.” To be sure, the rejection had been most tactfully, most kindly, phrased. No one had said “he's too much trouble and we don't need your money that badly.” That's what they meant, all the same.

Do you see what you missed, Lily?

“Do you ever think of her?” Eddy repeated.

“No. Not often,” Robb said.

“Good. Water over the dam. 'Night, Robb.”

“I
t's all right,” Lily said. “I really don't mind, Walter. I'll lie here in the hammock and read.”

“I might get back early enough to have our picnic for supper instead of lunch. It depends. If it turns out to be appendicitis, and it sounds like it to me, I'll have to stay with the family and talk to the surgeon with them.”

“Go ahead, I'm fine.”

He was upset because today was the start of her two-week vacation. He would have wrapped her up in cotton wool to protect her, if he could. And she smiled to herself as she watched him walk to his six-year-old car and chug away to the hospital.

Under the oaks where the hammock was slung, the shade and the filtering sun made a pattern of filigree on the grass. The time was noon. Very still, very cool and fresh. Half sitting, half lying, she let a sense of well-being run through her veins. It seemed, as she looked
around her home, that everything in it was exactly right.

“You will like Canterbury,” Walter had assured her. “It's as convenient to live in as any other town you could name, but it has a special feel, a country feel. You'll see.”

She had seen, and she had told him so, although she had not told him that the best thing about Canterbury was its distance from Marchfield, or even from Meredith, those places to which her past still clung. Here everything was new. The streets, winding alongside a sluggish little river, were old, the outlying farms were old, and so was this house, but to her, Lily Webster—and now for the last four years Lily Blair—they were still all new.

Walter had let her do what she wanted with the house. He couldn't have cared less about its decorations; he was all doctor, and his only requirement of the home was a comfortable chair in which, during his too-few leisure hours, he might listen undisturbed to his collection of symphonics and operas. It amused her to buy some highly visible article, such as a pair of brass lamps or an etching to hang at the top of the staircase, and find that he had never even noticed it until she called it to his attention.

She looked lovingly toward the house. It was painted a soft gray with lemon yellow shutters. Uniform white curtains hung at the windows, every pair handmade by her mother. Every time Mother came to visit them, her hands were full. “Never come empty-handed” was one of her sayings. “Never wear out your welcome” was
another, so her visits were tactfully far apart. Mother was nothing if not tactful when important interests were at stake, Lily thought now, a trifle ruefully. It had, after all, taken this daughter of hers six years to find a good man and straighten out her life, as, according to Emma Webster, a life should be straightened out.

Last year they had bought a piece of land next door and built a small hen yard. There were only six Leghorn hens—and a rooster—in it, hardly producing enough eggs for a commercial venture, yet at the same time producing too many for just two people to eat. They were simply Walter's pleasure. He liked to hear the hens' peaceful cluck and the rooster's raucous welcome to the dawn. No one in the neighborhood had yet complained about this daily awakening; perhaps they all loved Walter too much to say anything. Or perhaps, Lily thought, laughing to herself, they are pleased with all the eggs we give away.