Prospect Street (23 page)

“If you promise not to do the work yourself. You have more important things to think about. You do want a baby, don't you?”

She wondered why
he
did. Did he need someone in his home who would be forced by sheer inferior size to obey his every command?

That thought scared her. She was blowing this out of pro
portion. Joe was tired, and the house was hot. She had made a mistake choosing stroganoff for dinner, so he was also hungry. But this was the man she'd chosen. This was the man she loved.

“I promise,” she said tightly. “And yes, of course I want a baby. But maybe not right away. I want to feel settled first.”

He rubbed the tops of her arms. “Then let's get settled. Make some calls tomorrow, okay?” He forced her to turn around. “Do I see strawberries?”

“And pound cake.” She lifted her chin. “You probably don't like that, either.”

“Two of my favorite things. I can't wait.” He leaned over and kissed her.

She let him, but the joy in it was gone.

O
n Monday evening, with thunder booming in the distance and raindrops splattering the sidewalks, Faith placed the telephone receiver in its cradle and stared blankly ahead.

Alex came into the room and tapped her on the shoulder to remind her where she was. “What are you looking at? There's nothing on that wall.”

“Not even a decent paint job.” Faith snaked an arm around her son's waist and captured him for a hug. “How would you like to spend a little time showing me how to buzz around the Web? It's not storming hard enough to turn off the computer, is it?”

“You?”

She couldn't blame him. Within the family, she was notorious for her disinterest in technology. She had an e-mail address she never checked, but only because David had insisted.

“Do you know what people will pay for a history of their house? Hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of dollars.”

Alex scrunched up his nose. “That's a lot more than I make pulling ivy.”

She supposed the day was coming when her son would per
manently scrunch his nose at the thought of minimum wage. “I'm thinking maybe I ought to consider getting into the house-history business instead of looking for a clerical job. I've called four firms across the country to find out what they charge. If I was good at it, eventually I could probably support us.”

“That's why you want to check out the Web?”

“Exactly, you brilliant boy.” She squeezed one final time and released him. “I don't know even a tenth what I need to, but I can learn. Do you have time now?”

Alex looked as if she'd handed him a personal key to the pearly gates.

As the storm drew closer, she made a brief acquaintance with the Internet. With Alex and Scavenger's help, she swept from one historical site to another, discovered and ordered books on research, and perused the archives of list servers and bulletin boards.

An hour later she pushed her chair away from Alex's desk. “This is amazing. Where have I been?”

“Cooking.”

She glanced at him, hoping he was kidding, but he wasn't. “I guess not having a kitchen's been a good thing, huh?”

“Are we ever going to have one again?” He sounded as nostalgic as an eleven-year-old could.

“We're getting close. The cabinets are almost ready to install.” She saw skepticism in the twist of his lips. “Really.”

“Maybe you could make chicken and dumplings someday.”

“First thing on my list.” She got to her feet. “I'm going to have to buy a computer, but I guess I can deduct it as a business expense. And I'll need one with some zip.”

“You mean a zip drive?”

She had no idea what she meant. “Something that moves fast, like yours. The last time I used a computer everything took forever. I didn't have the patience for it.”

“If we get DSL or cable modem, I can network our computers so I can use it, too. And if you buy the biggest computer available, it won't go out of date for at least a few months.”

He
made that sound like a good thing.
She
made a face.

“I could make a list of what you need.” His stubby fingers flexed, then flexed again, over the keyboard. Nostalgia was gone. He was looking toward the future.

“Can you buy computers online?” When he nodded, she put him in charge of getting prices. He went to work. Faith figured she wouldn't hear from him again until bedtime.

Downstairs in the kitchen, she surveyed the work she'd done. The carpenter would arrive later in the week to install the cabinets. Chicken and dumplings were on the way.

“And so am I.” Faith had made valuable contacts since the days when she was a tow-headed campaign asset. She had presented bouquets of black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers to Lady Bird Johnson. She had watched
The Cat From Outer Space
and
Superman
with Amy Carter in the White House movie theater. Perhaps she was no longer on the important party lists, but the same people who might not want an everyday reminder of the so-called scandal in her life would be happy to quietly hire her for research. All she had to do was reach for the brass ring.

Her arm extended. She smiled; she could feel the ring's cool, hard surface against her fingertips. But even if the ring had been real, she couldn't have seen it, because the lights had gone out.

“Mo-om!”

She heard the screech from upstairs and the sound of her son's bedroom door opening. “Mom, the power's off. Flip a switch!”

She doubted the sudden darkness had anything to do with circuit breakers. “Go in my room and look outside,” she called up to him. “I bet the lights are off all up and down the street.”

From her own vantage point she could see that the street lamp outside their window was dark. The storm hadn't seemed that close, but obviously it had caused damage somewhere in the capital.

Another door opened. Remy had been listening to music, and now the silence from her room was notable, but it didn't
last long. “I can't do anything up here without electricity! This sucks.”

“Come on down and we'll light candles. But be careful on the stairs.” Faith went back into the pantry and rummaged until she found two cinnamon scented candles in apothecary jars that Alex and Remy had given her on her last birthday. She lit them and carried them out to the dining room table. The old house looked better. The fact that she hadn't yet settled on colors for the walls was less noticeable. Scarred woodwork was hardly worth mentioning.

Alex joined her. “Hey, this is neat.”

“I'm sorry you couldn't finish what you were doing.”

“I got some information. I printed up one page. I can finish later. Can I light some more candles?”

Alex located a box of tea lights, and Faith found juice glasses to shelter them. In five minutes shadows danced along the walls. Faith settled herself on the sofa, feet tucked up for the long haul.

“You're going to burn this shack to the ground.” Remy descended the stairs to sit dejectedly on a bottom step.

Faith could almost feel her daughter's struggle. Remy had nothing to do except talk to her family, but it was an awful price to pay for entertainment.

Alex flopped down beside his mother. “Let's play charades, like we used to when Daddy—” He stopped himself, but not in time.

“Charades are stupid,” Remy said. “Trying to make people guess what you're doing when you could just tell them.”

“You don't know everything,” Alex said.

In the days when the children had depended on her to entertain them, Faith would have pulled out board games or read to them from one of the classics, candlelight flickering across the pages like it must have when Candace and Jedediah Wheelwright moved into this house.

That inspired her. “Your great-great-great-grandmother lived in this house when it was brand-new, and she probably never had electricity. She made hats. Did I tell you that before? She
had a little shop on Wisconsin. I bet in the evenings, when she closed up, she came home with boxes of feathers and tulle and beads, and all the other things good milliners needed, and sat in this very room making hats for wealthy ladies to wear. All with the help of candles and kerosene lamps.”

“Hats?” Remy's tone made it clear what she thought. Hats were something you wore in winter, and only under duress.

“In those days no self-respecting lady went outside with her head uncovered. Women had yards of hair they piled under hats with a mountain of decorations on top.”

“What kind of decorations?” Alex asked.

“Flowers and feathers. They used real birds—”

“Live ones?”

Faith was in her element. She told them how the Audubon Society had been formed to put a stop to the wholesale slaughter of herons and egrets.

“How do you know all this?” Despite herself, Remy sounded interested.

“I found a magazine article at the library.”

Alex formed birds with his hands, and the shadows fluttered along the wall. “How come she made hats? Didn't her husband work? Did everybody work in those days?”

Faith was glad to share what she was learning. The strength and resourcefulness of her ancestors made her proud of a past she had never even glimpsed. Until now, she hadn't realized she was a descendant of strong, even remarkable, women.

“Well, I'd guess she started working so they could afford to build this house. Jedediah died young. They only had one child, your great-great-grandmother Violet, so I imagine Violet had to help her mother in the shop.”

“I—” Alex's next question was cut off by knocking at the front door.

Reluctantly Faith uncurled her legs. “I hope Dottie Lee's all right. Maybe they need candles.”

“Dottie Lee has candles everywhere,” Alex said. “It set the right atmosphere when men came to visit her.”

Faith wondered if Alex might just be spending too much unsupervised time with their neighbor.

By now the storm seemed to be centered right over them, and rain was gusting in iron-gray sheets across the road. She peeked through the sidelight to see her mother standing under an umbrella.

She flung open the door and ushered her inside. “What are you doing out in this?” She didn't give her mother time to answer. “Alex,” Faith called, “come get your grandmother's umbrella and put it in the powder room sink.”

He did, getting a brief wet hug from his grandmother. From the staircase Remy muttered a grudging hello. Obviously she thought things had been better before Lydia arrived. Faith had to agree. For a few minutes, at least, she and her children had almost seemed like a family again.

“There's a cold front coming through. We're going to have storms for the rest of the week.” Lydia handed her raincoat to Faith and kicked off Ferragamo pumps as if they were Dollar Store mules. She was wearing a dressy green knit skirt and shell with discreet beading along the neckline.

Faith hung the raincoat in the closet. “You're all dressed up. Were you on your way to a party?”

“I was
imprisoned
at a campaign party over on Dumbarton Street. The most boring affair I've ever been to. Your father's still there, shoring up support for his assignment to the finance committee.”

“You sneaked out?”

Lydia smiled. “The lights went out and so did I. I told the hostess I had to come and see if you and the children were all right. I'd much rather spend the storm with my family.”

Faith was surprised and touched. “Does Dad know you're gone?”

“He expects me to work one half of the room while he works the other. We rarely see each other. Maybe he won't even notice.”

Faith doubted that. Joe Huston noticed everything.

“So what did I interrupt?” Lydia sounded interested.

Faith led her mother to the most comfortable armchair in the living room. “We were just talking about Candace Wheelwright. I was telling the children about her millinery shop.”

Faith expected Lydia to change the subject, as she usually did at any mention of the past, but her mother surprised her. “How do you know about that?”

Faith was stuck. She didn't want to tell her mother about her research, because the history was a surprise. She settled on a half-truth. “I was looking up that garden tour you mentioned.”

“My grandmother used to tell me stories about the hats she helped her mother make.”

“Can you remember any of them?”

Lydia curled her stockinged legs under her, much the way Faith was recurling hers on the sofa. She looked younger in the candlelight. Or maybe it was simply that she looked at home, as if she really belonged here. “I do remember one story.”

“Mom says they used real birds on the hats.” Alex hadn't moved beyond this indignity.

“The story I remember's about fruit. My grandmother was about your age, Remy, when her mother came down with some illness. Unfortunately, Candace had promised a hat to the vice president's wife.”

“Who was the vice president?” For the moment, at least, Remy forgot to sound disgruntled.

“Lord knows. We'd have to look that up. Wasn't McKinley president about then?”

“I could find out in a few seconds on the computer,” Alex said. “If we had electricity.”

Faith knew she was watching something unusual unfold here. Her mother had settled in as if she were a real part of their family life. She hadn't intruded, after all. She was enhancing what they had begun. “So what did Candace do?” Faith encouraged her.

“She told my grandmother she would have to make the hat. The vice president's wife planned to wear it at a garden party celebrating some new trade agreement with South America. I
can't remember the details. I just remember that bananas were involved, and the vice president's wife wanted a fruit salad sitting on her head.”

Remy giggled, a sound Faith hadn't heard in months. “So Violet had to design a fruit salad for her very first solo experience?” Faith said.

“Exactly. Only she was much too enthusiastic. Her mother had ordered a large selection of wax fruit, but Violet couldn't choose. So she used a little of everything. When she finished, the hat was so heavy the brim couldn't hold the weight. The vice president's wife came in for a fitting and the hat collapsed, raining fruit on her lap and poor Violet's feet.”

“That's too funny.” Remy was laughing out loud now. “I know how I'd feel.”

Lydia smiled, obviously pleased. “Of course Violet burst into tears, but after the shock wore off, the woman started to laugh. She was still laughing when she left, but she told poor Violet she would be back the next day to try on the hat again, only this time, she wanted half a helping.”

“That's wonderful.” Faith was delighted her mother had remembered the anecdote. After a little research into vice presidential wives, it would go into the history. “And the hat was finished and Candace recovered?”