Off Season (35 page)

“What?”

He took another swallow. This was the most difficult part: telling a daughter that her father had cheated on her mother. While her mother had still been living. While her mother was in the slow process of dying. He wondered if Carol Ann would feel he’d cheated on her, too, on their family, and if his sin might be too great for her to pardon.

She returned to the settee and folded her hands, ever the lady.

Swigging from the shot glass again, he realized it was empty. He started to set it on the roll top desk, then decided to keep it in his hand, a mini crutch, a glass accomplice.

He took a deep breath. “Jill went to England.”

“I know. You told us that on Christmas.”

“Amy’s with her, too. I couldn’t go, of course. I’ve been asked not to leave the island.”

Tiny little frown lines stretched across Carol Ann’s forehead. “This is ridiculous, Dad.”

He rolled the shot glass in his hand. “Jill didn’t want me there anyway. She’s run out of patience. I guess that’s the most tactful way to say it.”

“Good grief, Dad. She’s your wife!”

“Well, honey, there’s more—”

“There’s nothing, Dad.” She stood up and moved to the fireplace, gesturing with her hands, wringing them together. “How can she desert you?”

“She was justified, honey.”

“Justified? How much are you supposed to take? First
Mindy and her ridiculous charge, then Fern Ashenbach and
blackmail
, for God’s sake, and now Jill …”

Ben set down the glass, stood up, and went to her. He put his hand on her elbow. He lightly touched the folds of her shirt as they curved over her elbow, then he closed his eyes. “The problem with Fern goes much deeper than blackmail,” he said, praying the words would be right. “Something happened a long time ago, and it’s going to kill me to tell you. But I can’t let you find out another way. Not like you found out about Mindy.”

Carol Ann turned around. Ben opened his eyes, and she looked squarely into them.

He patted her elbow, shook his head, and walked to the window. “I had an affair, Carol Ann. With Fern.”

There was silence a moment.

“When?”

Silence again. Then he blinked. “When your mother was sick.” His words were so faint, she might not have heard them, but the quiet that followed told him that she had.

From the window, Ben could see Mrs. Warner, the old woman across the street, supervise young Teddy Lyons cleaning up the last of the driveway snow—sprucing up her property for New Year’s Eve, no doubt, when her children and grandchildren would gather and be a family like he once had. At the foot of Mrs. Warner’s white picket fence, a tangle of bittersweet still clung way past autumn, showing off its still-vibrant red-orange berries. Bittersweet, like life itself.

“Dad,” Carol Ann said softly, “I’m sorry to do this, but I’ll have to get back to you. It’s going to take me some time to understand what you’ve said.”

He stayed standing at the window, not looking back. Carol Ann left the room, walked down the hall, and let herself out.

When he heard the door latch, he gritted his teeth. Then the boil rolled inside him once again, the heated, angry agitation of losing control, of being at life’s mercy. He turned from the window, fueled by fervor, marched into the hall, and called Herb Bartlett.

He reached a secretary.

“Tell him I want to know when he’s coming to the Vineyard,” he said in a raised, exasperated voice.

“I’m sorry,” the secretary replied, “but Attorney Bartlett is vacationing in Barcelona. I’ll have him phone you when he returns.”

Ben slammed down the receiver, wondering why the whole damn world had gone to Europe, when they were needed here.

“I’m sorry Rita, but my mother doesn’t want to talk to you,” Amy said, when Rita finally got through to England on the twenty thousandth try.

“Amy,” Rita said firmly, “put her on the phone.”

“Can’t, even if I wanted to. She’s out with my father.”

“Sorry kid, I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it. She had a fight with Ben, but she won’t say about what. Did she tell you about it?”

Rita thought a moment. “Not really. But even if they had a fight, why won’t she talk to me?”

“Who knows. She won’t talk to anyone about it.”

Oh God, Rita thought, Jill was being such a fool.

She said good-bye to Amy and sat at her kitchen table. As she listened to the click-click of knitting needles from the other room, she contemplated what she should do next, and whether she could accomplish it without calling the one person in the world who could and would help her out.

When Jeff had been accepted at Oxford, Jill had assumed it was one college, the place she’d read about in Chaucer, the foundation of some of England’s greatest scholars, priests, and kings. But it was actually dozens of colleges and halls that constituted “The University City of Oxford.” None of these institutions was actually called “Oxford”—they had names like The Queen’s College, Manchester College, Trinity, St. John’s, University, Hertford, and on and on.

New College, according to alumni, was the most beautiful, with its six-centuries-old, pale stone buildings. In its sprawling gardens, through its archway, lay a respite for meditation, for gathering harmony of thought.

Jill walked through the gardens and hoped that Jeff was able to harmonize more of his thoughts there than she was capable of doing. The initial relief she’d felt at being away from Ben and the Vineyard had dissipated and left a painful hole somewhere in her heart.

It didn’t help that Richard was hovering, taking them to dinner, a performance at Exeter, an exhibition at the museum. He hadn’t returned to London but kept calling this “family time.” Jeff and Amy and Mick had begun to
dodge his invitations and take off together in other directions. She suspected that Richard’s real motive had little to do with “family time,” and more to do with distracting himself from his new-found loneliness. She wondered if he would try to get her into bed.

In a way, she was flattered. At forty-six, being pursued by a male, even an ex-husband, was good for the ego, especially hers, especially now.

Not that she would consider it. Unlike her ex and apparently current husbands, she was not ready to jump into bed with someone simply because that might solve all her problems.

Well, there were those needy moments with Christopher in New York.…

But that was different, wasn’t it? And she hadn’t gone through with it.

She clenched her jaw and told herself to forget it, that she was beating herself up about that incident far more than necessary. She was hardly sexually promiscuous, after all. She was not like Richard, who most likely had not changed. No one really, truly changed, she believed. Which was why she’d decided that leaving Ben was what she had to do.

She ambled through the gardens, looking up at the majestic buildings, marveling at the beveled window glass, trying to distract herself, when a voice across the courtyard called out.

“Jill! Hey!”

Oh, God, it was Richard again. He looked exceptionally debonair today, with his faded jeans and a cashmere turtleneck and a matching deerskin jacket that looked as if it had stepped off a mannequin in Harrod’s best window.

Reluctantly, she waved.

He caught up to her.

“I must return to London tonight,” he said apologetically.

Though she should have been glad, part of her felt disappointed. “Well, thank you for everything, Richard. These past days have been fun.”

They walked together along the walkway, falling into stride as two people with a past. “This is quite a place, isn’t it?” he asked, scanning the grounds.

“You can almost feel the history,” Jill replied.

“And it’s curious that it’s so close to London.”

At first she didn’t get what he was saying, didn’t “pick up what he was laying down,” as Jeff would have said.

“Catch the train with me to London,” he said. “I know a great little restaurant in Covent Garden that serves a fabulous duck. You’d enjoy it, Jill. Just the two of us. What do you say?”

Oh. A romantic train trip into the city, a late dinner, maybe a stroll through Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square. London would be wonderful, but it would probably include overnight. And there was little question as to what would happen next. She looked down at the plain gold band that encircled not only her finger but her other world, the world that she’d left. “This is so strange. I feel like you’ve been courting me. In fact, you weren’t this attentive when you did,” she said.

He smiled magnetically.

“I’m a married woman, Richard.”

“I didn’t think you were planning to stay married,” he said. “At least, that’s not what Amy said.”

She stumbled on the footpath but thankfully righted herself before he had the chance to help. “What exactly did she tell you?”
What exactly did Amy know?

“That you and your new hubby haven’t been getting along. That she thinks this trip is to give you time to think. A separation leading to—well, you know.”

Her breath grew shallow, and that familiar pain returned to her heart. “Well, thanks for the concern. But if
anything were wrong with my marriage, it’s really no one’s business.”

“Our kids included?”

She turned her face from Richard and gazed off toward one of the seminar rooms, where a dozen or so students sat at a huge round table. One of them might become a world leader, a renowned physician, a gifted peacemaker. It made her problems seem quite insignificant.

She wondered if Ben would like being here. She decided that he would, that he would marvel at the architecture and at the growth of young minds. He would not wear a deerskin coat, but it would not matter. Not to her. Not to his wife.

She realized she was thinking of him again, that she had slid back into feeling he was a part of her. How long would it take her to detach? Would she be able to stop loving Ben after the divorce?

“If you’d like to take me anywhere, Richard, I’d like to cross the street to the Bodleian Library. It may not be London, but it’s the best I can do.”

In another second, Rita was going to throw up. She was sure she’d lost her mind, to be sitting on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic.

She loosened the seat belt across her blossomed belly. Closing her eyes and trying to breathe, she reminded herself that she was there because she had to be, because she could coax Jill to come home only if she showed up in person.

But Rita hadn’t had a passport. One did not need one for a trip across Vineyard Sound once or twice a year, the less often the better because Rita had a history of motion sickness on anything that rocked or flew.

She hadn’t forgotten that when she’d phoned Charlie down in Florida and begged him to find a way to get her
one in a hurry, so she could save Jill’s marriage and maybe Ben’s life as well. She didn’t go into details, and Charlie hadn’t asked. Good old trusting Charlie.

And he had come through.

She’d had a photo taken at the carousel pavilion over in Oak Bluffs, in one of those booths with a black curtain that spat out your pictures on a strip. She brought it to the travel agent where Charlie said to go. Twenty-four hours later, a courier showed up at her door, passport in one hand, a British Airways ticket in the other. Charlie had even arranged for a car to meet her at the airport and drive her out to Oxford.

Hazel thought she was nuts, but Rita pointed to the dozen or so booties and reminded her that the apple didn’t fall … and all that.

So now Rita was trying not to throw up, wondering if she’d become a masochist for the sake of her best friend. And if her attempt to drag Jill back was even going to work.

They were laughing on the way back to Jeff’s apartment, Jill and Jeff, Amy and Mick. They’d been telling Mick about Addie Becker, and Jeff had done an imitation of her that he’d perfected back when the woman had been a daily presence in their lives.

“I can’t believe you’re going back to work with them,” Jeff said, and Jill’s laughter slowly subsided.

“Think of it as a means to an end,” she said. “A door opening for my new career.”

Jeff shrugged, and they turned the corner onto the street where he lived.

Amy put up her umbrella, though today it hadn’t rained. “Have it your way,” she mocked beneath it, twirling the handle as if it were a movie prop. “And I’ll have it mine.” Mick laughed, but then, he laughed a lot
when he was with Amy. It warmed Jill to think her daughter had that effect: to bring laughter into life, to share joy.

She also hoped that Amy’s lightheartedness indicated that she was headed toward acceptance of
Good Night, USA
.

“Oh, no,” Jeff interrupted her thoughts. “A vagrant on my step.”

Her eyes moved to Jeff’s front door stoop where a woman sat slumped. But it was not a vagrant. It was Rita.

“Rita!” Jill shrieked. “What the hell are you—” She helped her best friend to her feet, then saw how pale she looked. “Rita, are you okay?”

“No,” Rita moaned. “I’m sick as shit. And I’m not altogether sure, but I’m either in labor or in the middle of a miscarriage.”