Logan 05 Olivia Page 18

  Samuel stood beside me. He gestured to embrace me, but I stood away, straight and firm. I would never depend on any man the way Mother depended on Daddy, I thought. No man would ever claim to be my rock and foundation.

  Nelson and his family were at the church and at the cemetery. His fiancee was back in Boston. I heard some excuse for her absence, but didn't pay enough attention to remember it. They returned to the house with the other mourners to comfort us. Our house was full of people, their voices low and melancholy at first and then, as the day wore on, growing louder, stronger until there was actually the sound of laughter and what had begun as a gathering of mourners turned into a strange sort of party with people wearing their smiles and finding humor as a way to drive death itself out the door. For most, it worked. It worked for Belinda, of course.

  Only an hour or so into the gathering, she was surrounded by her flock of bubble-gum friends and a number of young men. She soaked up their attention with her sponge smiles and her extra long hugs, turning her lips toward certain boys when they went to kiss her in comfort. I watched her become Scarlett O'Hara and then I fled from the scene and went to the rear of the house to just stand alone in the shadows. I could see the rain clouds in the distance turning toward us. It wouldn't be long before they dropped their tears into the wind funneling through the trees and over the knolls around our home. What could be more fitting than a night of rain, I thought and hugged myself against the chilled air.

  "Cold out here?" I heard and turned to see Nelson standing behind me. He had a glass of bourbon in his hand and swirled it before he took another sip, his eyes on me.

  "It's cold inside, too," I replied.

  "Yes, I imagine it is for you," he said. "I always liked your mother. She was always very up and happy. She made you feel good when she was in your company or you were in hers. My parents were very fond of her."

  I nodded.

  "When are you and Samuel planning on getting married?"

  "Samuel thought it would be nice if we timed it around the completion of our house. What about you?"

  "A little less than a year. You might actually beat us to the altar if I know Samuel. He'll hock his eyeteeth to hire additional workers and speed up the construction."

  "You met your fiancee rather quickly," I said, "or did you know her even when you came here?" I asked pointedly, my eyes on the boathouse. Nelson laughed.

  "You don't have any subtlety to you, do you, Olivia? You go right for the jugular?"

  "If you mean I go right for the truth, yes," I said. "We knew each other. My decision to become engaged came shortly afterward," he replied.

  "So you were just testing the waters to see if you were going to make the right decision?" I asked.

  He shrugged.

  "Something like that."

  We stared at each other a moment.

  "I wonder what it would be like being married to you," he said. "Does Samuel fully understand how strong you are, how assured and competent a woman you are? The other women he's known have all been like . . like .

  "Belinda?"

  Nelson's lips curled into a wry smile.

  "Yes," he said

  I looked out at the sea.

  "I haven't given him any other impression about myself than what I am," I said.

  "Well then, either he's accepted that or he's deluding himself into believing he can change you," Nelson said. I smiled without turning back to him.

  "You don't think I can change?"

  "No. Actually, I'm not sure I'd want you to change," he said and held his eyes on me when I turned to him again.

  I wanted to say I had thought he was coming back here to see me after he had come to dinner with his family that night to pursue me and not to have a dirty little assignation with Belinda in our boathouse. I wanted to say I thought he was a better man than that, but I didn't. I simply bit my lower lip and swallowed back my regrets and disappointments like so much stomach acid.

  "Your father's lucky to have a daughter like you, especially now," he continued. "You're going to hold your family together. You're a strong person."

  "Too strong for you?" I dared ask.

  He smiled.

  "No. I'm too frivolous a person for you. We would probably end up killing each other," he joked.

  "Yes," I said, cloaking my disappointment in a smile. He took another sip of his bourbon.

  "Can I get you anything?"

  "No. I'm coming back in," I said. "I just had to get a breath of fresh air. All those people . , ."

  "Yes," he said nodding as if he understood, as if he could ever understand. "Well, I'll be inside," he added, reached out to touch my hand and then turned and entered the house.

  I stood there trying to swallow. I felt as if the air around me had turned to ice. A few hundred yards to my right, Belinda's dead fetus lay planted like some seed of deformity, a sin pressed down into the darkness in a vain attempt to keep it forgotten. Belinda was capable of forgetting. That was her strength. She could wipe away her yesterdays like she wiped the chalk board at school and start again.

  I couldn't. Everything that happened and everything I did and thought was indelibly written on the surface of my heart. It was an organ covered with scratches and small tears already. The biggest tear came with the realization that Nelson Childs was never to be mine.

  Desire was cruel. We should want only the things we can have, I thought; otherwise, longing becomes pain and pain turns us into creatures of dissatisfaction, sitting with arthritic, curled fingers, scowling at the horizon, furious at the sun for rising and bringing us another day of disappointment.

  "There you are!" Samuel cried. "Nelson told me you were out here. My poor Olivia," he said

  sauntering over to embrace me. I smelled the odor of whiskey and onions on his breath and my stomach churned. "You shouldn't be alone at a time like this, Olivia."

  "You can only be alone at a time like this," I replied.

  "I'll make it up to you, Olivia. I'll work like a dog to make you happy again. I'll start tomorrow. I'll dig the first shovelful for our foundation first thing. I'll . ."

  "Let's go inside, Samuel," I said sharply. "It's getting colder."

  "What? Oh, yes. Of course."

  He kept his arm around me clumsily as we approached the door and then I stepped forward and his arm slipped away.

  Just like Mother's hand, leaving me alone to face what was to come.

  10

  The Bride No One Would

  Have Believed

  .

  During the days that followed Mother's funeral,

  Daddy fell deeper and deeper into his own grave of despair. His eyes remained bleak, dark, haunted. I had never understood how much he loved and needed what I had thought was only her silly little jabber. However, without it, our home became an empty music hall, every sound echoing on the previous. I realized that Mother had created all the real melodies here. Her laughter, her symphonies of gossip filled with funny, inconsequential information about this one or that apparently had provided Daddy with a very necessary contrast and respite from the more serious, dour talk of business. She had been there to greet him with a kiss and a hug, to whirl around him in her newest dress or float her hand under his nostrils to give him a whiff of her latest cologne.

  He could tolerate her illness because there was always the false hope that stems the flow of nightmares, the belief that something miraculous could still happen, that medicine and science would produce a cure just in time, what the Greeks called their deus ex machina, a last minute device to save the day and restore our world to its balance and health.

  However, once death came calling, all that hope died with Mother's last breath. In the beginning, right after her funeral in fact, it was still difficult to believe she was gone. The heavy truth lingered like a persistent storm overhead, the truth seeping in more deeply each day. Mother was really gone. We were never going to see her again.

  Even Belinda had trouble reviving herself. Sh
e moped about with large, teary eyes, took long naps, or just curled up like a baby in her bed and stared at the wall, her thumb against her lips. Her friends called, but her conversations were far shorter than usual and none of them came to visit. She discouraged them with her tears and moans of sorrow.

  None of us had much of an appetite. Dinners were quiet and short. The nightmare continued to shadow our days until I announced I was returning to work. Up until now Daddy had visited the offices briefly and kept up with important business events over the phone. Our company was in a holding pattern. No decisions were being made. Everything was languishing.

  "We've got to get back to full-time work, Daddy," I finally told him one night at dinner. "Mother wouldn't want us to mourn like this any longer. You know how much she hated gray faces and sadness," I said.

  He nodded. "Olivia's right," Belinda said. "I'm not going to turn down another invitation."

  "That's not exactly what I meant," I snapped, but she didn't want to hear me.

  The next day she was off with her friends, returning to the Bubble Gum Club and her

  unproductive activities. If Daddy had difficulty seeing how wasteful she was before, he was incapable of seeing it now. It was almost as if he didn't notice her existence. She needed money? He scribbled out a check to keep his ears from ringing with her pleas. She wanted to stay overnight at some friend's house, go to an all night party, take a weekend in Boston? He nodded, waved his hand, not even comprehending what she was doing or what he was allowing her to do.

  I was busy filling in for him at the office when he didn't appear or left early, moving things forward again, making decisions and signing agreements and checks. I reported it all to him, but he listened with half an ear and asked few questions.

  Samuel visited daily. He tried to revive our lives by bringing the architect around to discuss how he would modernize the older portion of our home and how he would expand it. Daddy sat in on some of the meetings, but offered little comment or advice. It did provide a good distraction for me, especially when I faced the realization that this would be my own home, my own little world for a long, long time.

  The work began almost immediately and with it came Samuel's frequent reports of progress. Once a week I would go to the site with him and inspect the construction. Nelson Childs had been right in his prediction about Samuel. Samuel had the foreman hire more laborers and the remodeling and the new additions to the house were being completed at twice the pace normally anticipated.

  "It's wasteful," I told him, "to pay people time and a half just to get into the house a month or so earlier."

  "Waste is directly related to what makes you happy and unhappy," Samuel replied in an

  uncharacteristic contradiction to what I had said. "I don't consider a nickel wasted if it brings me home to you one minute earlier, Olivia."

  I raised my eyebrows and looked at him. How I wished I had the same intensity, the same desire and longing, and ironically I envied him for how much he seemed to love and want me. Usually, it was the woman who was impatient with the time it took to bring her to the altar. All the women I had known didn't have half the nervousness, the doubt, the insecurity as the men they were about to marry. Men, even though they did the proposing, behaved as if they were the ones who had been hooked and reeled in, not the women. It was as though marriage was the inevitable prison sentence awaiting them all.

  Nelson behaved this way. Whenever I saw him and inquired as to his wedding plans, he would tell me nothing specific had been concluded yet. Why rush into what was inevitable? It wasn't going away, but, his impish smile told me, what was going away was his freedom. Soon enough he would have to behave appropriately. Why hurry it along?

  Besides, he explained, the Branagans had insisted on using High Point House for the wedding reception and that had to be booked at minimum ten months to a year in advance. They were still discussing the actual date. The time in between was also necessary to get the families better acquainted. The Colonel and his wife were to be guests of the Branagans in Boston and the Branagans were to come more often to Provincetown.

  They had already had a second engagement party for the Branagans' Boston friends. It was simply that there was much to do. He talked about it as if it were a campaign for the presidency of the United States, planning, planning, planning. For instance, there was the completion of the bride's trousseau, something Mrs. Branagan took quite seriously.

  "Years ago, most mothers started making and embroidering linens for their daughter's trousseau almost from the day their daughters were born," Nelson explained. "Nowadays of course, women don't sew or embroider. They spend almost as much time, however, shopping, choosing, buying. Then there are the wedding plans. I swear, Olivia, cabinet meetings in the White House don't go on any longer or are treated with any more seriousness. Sometimes, our parents meet on neutral grounds!" he quipped. "Bridesmaids' dresses, my tuxedo and my

  groomsmens', the guest list, the menu, the design of the invitations, the decorations and the music, all of it has to be discussed and analyzed and concluded with almost the same ceremony as the treaty to end a war. Goodness knows there's lots of diplomacy at work to keep the respective mothers from scratching each other's eyes out. Dad says luckily he and my father-inlaw have legal training. No," Nelson concluded, "ten more months is barely enough time as it is."

  I didn't want to tell him I was doing all that myself. "You're not anxious then?" I asked him.

  "Admittedly, nowhere near as anxious as your fiance," he told me when he joined us up at the house site one weekend a little more than a month and a half into construction. "You have possessed Samuel Logan. Look at him prodding and cheering those laborers to work harder, faster. If he could lash them with a whip, he would. You should never have agreed to a marriage date that was tied to the house completion. I hear the invitations are already at the printers. He told me he had you deliver the copy as soon as the electricians had started."

  "You're not as possessed?" I felt like a lobster fisherman dropping traps to test the waters, but I was very curious about Nelson's feelings concerning his fiancee.

  "I'm someone's possession," he quipped, "but I'm not yet possessed."

  He smiled at me with those beautiful eyes and made my heart go into triple beats.

  "How's your father doing these days?" he asked, perhaps wisely changing the subject.

  "He's still not back to 100 percent. I'm afraid he might never be," I added in a matter-of-fact tone that took Nelson by surprise.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "But maybe with time . . ."

  "Time doesn't heal scars, as most people commonly think," I said. "It simply makes them firmer, stiffer. One must accept it and not hope to mend and return to what he or she once was."

  "That's a hard and cold lesson, Olivia," he remarked. "That's what the truth is, Nelson, hard and cold most of the time."

  He stared a me and I did not shift my gaze.

  "You're going to run this town one day," he predicted. "You're a natural born leader. You should have been born . ."

  "A man?" I finished for him. He shrugged.

  "Sorry. I know that women are supposed to be treated with equal respect these days, but I'm still a bit old-fashioned when it comes to that, I suppose."

  "You're just a typical chauvinistic male," I replied and he laughed.

  He held up his hands.

  "Guilty," he declared.

  "Of what?" Samuel asked coming over to join us.

  "Of stereotyping," Nelson explained.

  Samuel looked from him to me and then shook his head and returned to pointing out the changes I had suggested be made in the historic sections of the house. It was a large two-story, side-gabled house. I had suggested capping the paneled front door with a decorative crown and then adding a row of

  rectangular panes of multicolored glass beneath the crown. I wanted the windows to have double-hung sashes and many small panes. Samuel complimented me on every suggestion I made. None of it came
from imagination, however. I had researched the period and knew enough to make suggestions that the architect thought sensible.

  Consequently, our wedding date was set with such speed it raised eyebrows. Some even had the audacity to suggest I might be pregnant. Belinda enjoyed the gossip. I did everything I could to end those rumors, but kept the date of our wedding. I was hoping it would help bring Daddy around again. Without Mother, he would have to represent my interests and I tried putting more decisions and questions on him, but his invariable response was, "Whatever you think best, Olivia. Don't worry about any expense, if that's a problem."

  He even suggested I involve Belinda in some of the wedding planning, a suggestion I didn't take seriously, of course. Belinda had no taste, no real breeding, no sense of decorum. She would turn my wedding into a garish nightmare if she could. She tried to get me to invite some of the Bubble Gum Club, but I resisted.

  "I'll have no one to talk to at the reception, no one to dance with. Please," she pleaded, "at least invite Kimberly and Bruce and maybe Arnold."

  "It's not a party; it's a wedding," I told her.

  "But I thought the reception was a party."

  "Not the sort of party you attend," I said.

  In the end I relented and agreed to invite Kimberly and Arnold.

  "Kimberly and I will just have to share him," she moaned. "I'm sure none of Samuel's friends or Daddy's business friends will ask me to dance. I won't have a good time," she threatened.

  "It's supposed to be my day, Belinda, not yours. I think you could at least consider that," I lectured. "When you get married . ."

  "I'm going to have a real wedding. I'm going to get Daddy to rent a yacht that holds one hundred and fifty people and the wedding will be at sea, and there will be fireworks and the band will be on a boat beside the yacht, but playing so loud it won't matter."

  "I can't wait," I said dryly.