He laughed, a short, sharp laugh. “You might ask, rather, what sent me. Or who,” he said. “I’m here because my mother has a new prospect on her line, and the presence in her life right now of a twenty-three-year-old son does not, I suspect, exactly jibe with the age she’s hinted to him. He’s going to be at the villa all summer, it seems, and since I was supposed to be at home working on my senior thesis, it struck Maman that Retreat and Braebonnie might be just the place for it. Peace and quiet, you know. Isolation, healthy living, no distractions. I gather that the gentleman in question, who, I believe, drives racing cars or something, is hardly ten years older than I, and Maman’s last overhaul in Switzerland was superb; she looks younger than he does. I told her I’d say I was her little brother, but she was adamant. Adamant is Maman’s forte. So here I am, and she’s right. It’s going to be just the place to think and write; I can’t imagine that the night life is terribly distracting. It’s
really beautiful; I’ve seen pictures, but I didn’t really remember the house and the sea and all that. Very different from the sea I know.”
“Where’s that?” I said, feeling a pang in my heart for him, unwanted by his mother. I knew that feeling.
“Sardinia. Maman has a villa there from her third husband, the Yugoslavian greengrocer king. It’s beautiful too, all hot pinks and reds, and rocks and sand and blinding blue and white, but it doesn’t sit softly on your heart like this place does.”
I smiled. That was just what Retreat did.
“Where do you live in the winter? Where do you go to school?”
“We live in a flat in Trastevere, in Rome. It’s the old section, very old, very picturesque, very expensive, if you live where we do. Maman got it from her fourth and last husband, the importer of Taiwanese ‘antiques’ and perhaps a few selected controlled substances. She’s set now, as far as primary and secondary dwellings go, and can shop for more—trans-itory pleasures. I think my father’s family paid her enough to leave France—and them—so she can live as she pleases if she’s very careful. Of course, she seldom is. I’m not in school this quarter because she’s forgotten to send them my tuition again, and she’s neglected to wire me the money for the cottage and food and a servant this summer, so I’m probably going to be grazing on the lawn like a cow. But I’ll get a check from my trust fund next month—that’s done out of Paris; she can’t get her hands on that—so I’ll be fine. And I’m used to managing. I’ve lived alone since I started school.”
His words might have sounded bitter if he had not been so at ease in our kitchen and his smile had not been so quick and free. As it was, he merely sounded amused by his mother and affectionate toward her. But my heart gave another fish-like leap in my chest.
Controlled perhaps, resourceful maybe, but Warrie Villiers was like me, a child abandoned by its parents. Well, of course I had Grammaude, and she had made all the difference—but still, I had walked in that wilderness too. I wanted him to know that, but I did not know how to tell him.
“I’ve been alone a lot too, except when I’m up here,” I said.
“It’s really not so bad.”
“Not by half,” he said. “But I wish I’d had this place when I was growing up. What a difference it could have made.”
Grammaude put a plate of eggs and bacon in front of both of us and sat down. I was surprised to see a glint of tears in her eyes.
“You’ll have your dinners with us until your check comes,”
she said, “and no arguments. And I’m going to send Sukie Duschesne over with a few things for the house this afternoon. She’s the young woman who helps me out this summer; her parents have been friends for many years. I’m sure she can spare a few hours a week to help you with the cottage or will know someone who can. You can’t get any work done and keep up that huge old house by yourself.”
Most of the young men I knew would have automatically protested that Grammaude really mustn’t put herself out on his account, but Warrie Villiers didn’t. He simply said, “I would greatly appreciate that, Mrs. Chambliss. My mother said you were an extraordinary woman, and she’s right.
Unlike Tennessee Williams’s lovely Blanche, I have not always been dependent on the kindness of strangers, but I am grateful to be dependent on you for a while. You will, of course, permit me to run errands for you in return and perhaps see to your lawn, or whatever else I can do.”
“Nonsense,” Grammaude said. “I have someone to do that.
Let me feed you dinner strictly for the pleasure of your company. As I said, your grandmother was the best friend I ever had, and your mother is one of the most vivid memories I have of these summers.”
He smiled. “She says the same of you. She says you taught her a great deal. I believe she was a special friend of your son’s?”
“Yes,” Grammaude said, getting up. “Pass me your plates, you two, and I’ll give you a refill. Your father, Warrie: are you in touch with him?”
“My father is dead,” he said neutrally. “He died in an auto crash in the Dordogne when I was seven. His family—my grandparents—are not so fond of my mother, nor, I think, of me. We do not see them. They send money under the terms of my father’s will. I think it causes them great pain to do so. I don’t quite know why; it’s not a lot, and they are very rich. I do wish Maman could have gotten along better with them, but there you go. It was not necessary to please when she was that age, and now that she is…more mature, shall we say, she only cares to please adolescent racing car drivers. But I think she has not given up on the Villiers lucre; she has me studying finance and hopes that I will become a banker and be taken into both the family firm and the family bosom.”
“And do you like finance?” Grammaude said.
“About as well as I like…what do you call them? Root canals,” he said. “Finance!
Zut alors!
” It was the first French expression he had used, and he used it with such comic wryness that Grammaude and I both laughed aloud. It became a watchword with the three of us in the weeks that followed. “
Zut alors!
” we would cry when something surprised or delighted us. Much did, that summer.
I fell in love with him on that first day, of course. Looking back, it seems inevitable that I would. Untouched as my heart might be, except for the cold void where Mike Willis was not, which I simply refused
to look into, my mind and body were ripe for involvement and intensity, and my shuttered heart was hungry for it without my awareness. The time had come, had had to come, when Grammaude’s nurturing love was not enough. I had tended my tomboy persona with something near desperation that summer; I had applied for and gotten a position as assistant steward at the yacht club and spent long hours every day doing the sort of scutwork the senior steward would not touch. But all the traffic with boats and lines and tarpaulins and tide charts and kitchen trash and storm debris could not mask the kind of supple, budding greenness that clung about me. I can see it now, looking back. I could not, then. It must have been a bad time for Grammaude. Nothing had ever come easily to me. She must have known that this first love—for she could not but have known that it was—would not either. And no matter how he charmed her and made her laugh, and how much the vulnerability under his cool matter-of-factness touched her, and how deeply she felt that this estrangement from this place of his birthright was her fault—though I came to know this only much later—there was much about Warrie Villiers that troubled her. I could read it in her eyes all summer, though she spoke of it directly to me only toward the end.
It wouldn’t have mattered what she said. Older and wiser women than I would have found it nearly impossible to withstand that combination of vulnerability and sensuality.
I didn’t have a chance and didn’t want one. Physical readiness aside, Warrie Villiers did with that first conversation what no other young man of my acquaintance could have possibly done precisely because he was unlike any young man of my acquaintance. He was the very antithesis of all the boys in Retreat whose companionship I had so fiercely abjured; he brought with him from Rome no baggage of the kind I had learned to fear. When I looked at
him and listened to him I saw no ghosts and felt no frissons of recognition and heard no old resonances at all. I saw only him, Warrie, as new as morning to me, with no sharp history between us.
He was as far removed from Mike Willis as it was possible for a young man to be. None of that grief and loneliness could spill over me from Warrie. Nothing of Mike could live in his aura.
At first he talked mainly to Grammaude. He came, as she had asked, almost every evening and shared supper with us, and we talked…or they talked and I listened, content simply to sit in the fire and candle light and watch and listen. He did not stay long; he went back to Braebonnie by nine, and I went to bed in the big back bedroom and lay watching the light in the window upstairs that I knew was his, feeling his presence on my very skin, there just over the piled stone wall.
He worked late those nights, and worked the whole of the days, or I assumed he did. I never saw him down around the yacht club, and the overheard talk from the old women in the porch rockers told me that try as they might to lure Amy Potter’s handsome French grandson for cocktails or luncheons, he politely refused them, saying he was swamped with work on his thesis but expected to finish up sometime later in the summer and hoped he might accept their kind invitations then. I learned he was adjudged a catch.
“It’s too bad, Maude, that Darcy is so young,” old Mrs.
Stallings said to Grammaude at the Fourth of July tea; I heard her from the kitchen. Grammaude had gone to the yacht club as her guest; she had not kept her club membership after my grandfather had died. She would not, she said, sit on the porch and rock as a matter of policy. I learned to sail in the little Beetle Cat she bought me, but I used my Uncle Petie and Aunt Sarah’s membership. Grammaude went near the club only once or twice a summer, and then usually on the arm of old Micah Willis and in the company of his son, Caleb, and Caleb’s wife, Beth.
“How do you mean, Marjorie?” Grammaude said that afternoon.
“Well, of course I mean that with him right there it would be a match made in heaven if she weren’t too young,” Mrs.
Stallings said. “After all, you’re the only people he’ll talk to.
And such a sweet irony, him Amy’s grandson and all, and really so much more suitable than the Willis boy. We’ve all said so. Of course, I know how you’ve always felt about Elizabeth—”
“No, you don’t, Marjorie,” Grammaude said sweetly.
“You’ve really no idea. And of course Darcy is too young; she’s only seventeen, and he’s twenty-three. It’s much too big an age gap. Thank goodness he doesn’t feel that way about her at all, and I don’t think she pays any attention to him.”
By that time I paid nothing but attention to him, and my grandmother knew it. My face burned in the kitchen of the yacht club as it burned at night during dinner, when he smiled over at me. As it and my whole body burned in the nights when I lay awake watching his upstairs window.
But all his talk was for my grandmother, and most of his attention went to her. The six years’ difference in our ages and the vast gulfs of difference in our experience lay palpable between us.
Gradually, though, his talk reached out to include me, and his attention lay lightly and softly on me, and the evenings around the dinner table in Liberty became something else.
Now I was part of a circle of three that laughed together, told irreverent stories about colony people, talked of the small world of Cape Rosier and the larger one outside it. The gap in our ages narrowed. He teased me about the Irish; I teased him about the French. We both teased Grammaude
about being a southern belle. Though I changed each evening from my disreputable steward’s togs and bathed and dressed as carefully as I could, and began to experiment with makeup, I was dizzyingly careful not to reveal how I felt about him, and he gave no indication at all that he thought of me in any way except as the pleasant third person he had dinner with each evening. I really believe Grammaude came to be lulled and soothed as the nights passed and no evidence of catastrophe presented itself. Once she let us wash dishes and went upstairs to bed, and within a week or so it became standard practice. And still nothing changed between Warrie and me. And still I lay in the dark, in the nights, and burned all over.
One evening in mid-July he came for dinner with a great tawny puff of a young cat in his arms. It was wearing an enormous red bow made from yarn, and it had on its face such an expression of delighted surprise that Grammaude and I cried, together, “
Zut alors!
” And so Zut he became, later, as I have said, changed to Zoot because of his extravagant leggings.
“Is that creature for me?” Grammaude said that evening, a smile tugging at her mouth in spite of her efforts to be stern.
Nobody could be stern around Zoot when he was a teenage cat. He was simply too cheerfully, rambunctiously pleased with his world and everything in it. He never met a human being he didn’t like, and the sentiment was usually reciproc-ated. Grammaude, not a natural cat fancier, was kneading the moss-soft fur under his chin as she spoke, and Zoot was smiling in transported pleasure.
“No. That creature is for Darcy,” Warrie said. “I saw him sleeping on a shelf at the general store, and he looked so much like Darcy O’Ryan that I burst out laughing on the spot and then had to explain because Mrs. Sylvester was working up a real snit at me. I said I had a friend who looked just like that, and she said
she hoped my friend was a better mouser than that cat; he was doing such a bad job she was going to take him to the county animal shelter. I couldn’t have that. It would be like having Darcy put to sleep. So I had no recourse, don’t you see? It’s fate.”
“It’s blackmail,” Grammaude said, but she was laughing.
Zoot reached out a fat paw and patted her cheek in little butterfly pats. She held him out to me.
“Go suck up to your mommy,” Grammaude said. “I’m on to your wicked ways. Honestly, Warrie, I’m glad you didn’t get besotted with a pig or something.”