The Carousel (2 page)

“What I decided,” she had resumed, “what’s clear to me now is that I have to refuse any new commissions for a while. Or until Tina is back to normal. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Basically, Tina is fine, I’m sure.”

“With all those symptoms you say she’s ‘fine’? The hitting and biting and all the things you’ve told me before, that she won’t allow you to hug her, that she’s afraid to let you leave the house—”

“I meant—well, she’s certainly not fine, of course not. That’s why we brought her here. I feel that she needs more of my attention until she gets over the baby, and I definitely intend to—”

“You’re making a big mistake, Mrs. Grey.”

Sounding doom. And all of this doom was based on slim evidence, supposition, textbook theory. So Sally had stood up and put on her coat.

“Tell me, then,” she said concisely, “what you advise me to do.”

“I advise that you keep Tina here in treatment, or, if you’re not comfortable with me, with somebody else. And I certainly advise that you start looking very carefully into the circumstances of her life. The child has been abused, Mrs. Grey.”

It was cold in the car with the motor shut off, and she drew her scarf tightly around her neck, crossing her arms.

Abused.
How horrible.

But could it be true? Then who could have done such a thing? Some father in a house where Tina went to play? She went over the list, the possible contacts. That retarded man on the country road near her parents’ house a few months ago? Of course not. The grandmother was fanatically careful. No. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t possible.

That doctor had been so positive. Could a doctor make such an egregious mistake? Of course she could. You read the papers. Still, it’s not a thing that happens every day.

She must pull herself together and go home. Thousands of lights, electric polka dots in the looming night, had come on in the city below. It was late. She turned the key in the ignition and headed the car uphill.

On either side the road was sheltered between old stands of spruce and hemlock. Gaps in these natural walls revealed stone gateposts, long driveways, and, rarely, the glimpse of a handsome house. At a bend of the road on the left stood the imposing gates of Hawthorne, the Greys’ huge, formal family seat. Here Dan, aged seven, had gone to live with his relatives after the air crash in which his parents had died. Behind the house, hidden a quarter of a mile away from sight, there began the wilderness, the eight thousand acres, pristine and precious, that belonged to the Greys but, by their willing consent, was open to all, provided that they would do it no harm, would cut down no tree or wound no animal. So it had been, for how many generations Sally did not remember,
but so it was still. An extraordinary family, the Greys.

In a grassy clearing some few miles farther on, a square white house with green shutters and the austere simplicity of New England was home to Sally. She always thought, and thought now as she drove into the garage, that it could hardly be more different from Hawthorne or any other Grey family home. But she was a child of Maine, and Dan was not a typical Grey, so this was what they had both wanted. The dog, a lumbering Newfoundland, was sitting on the front step. His presence there made the scene almost hackneyed: the picturebook house and the family dog, she thought ironically, lacked only a child to sit beside him with her arm around him.

Actually, Tina sometimes did just that. The dog was the only “person” she would hug. The enchanting little girl with the ruffles and ribbon braids was hardly ever pleasant or affectionate anymore. Outings that they all used to look forward to were now undertaken with trepidation since they were never sure how she would behave. At night, when at last she was asleep, they could quietly read and could quietly talk to each other … although not in peace. For what had happened to the picturebook family? What was wrong with the once enchanting little girl?

Is it possible that I don’t want to believe that doctor because we didn’t take to each other, because “the chemistry wasn’t right”? A stupid reason, if so. I don’t know.…

Tina was finishing her supper in the kitchen with Mrs. Dugan, known by all as “Nanny.”

“Hello, darling. My, that pudding looks delicious.”

Tina frowned. “It isn’t. You eat it.”

“I wish I could. But Daddy and I are going out to dinner. It’s Uncle Oliver’s birthday.”

“You’re always going out.”

“No, honey. We haven’t been out all week,” Sally said, putting her arm around Tina and kissing the top of her head.

“Don’t do that. I don’t want you to hug me.”

Nanny’s puzzled gaze met Sally’s distressed one.

“But why? Mommies like to hug their little girls.”

“I don’t care. When are you going to take Susannah back to the hospital?” Never a day passed without at least one such petulant demand.

“I told you, we don’t take babies back,” Sally whispered gently. “We didn’t take you back. We love our babies.”

“I don’t love her. She’s not my baby. I want you to take her back tomorrow.”

“Here’s Mr. Grey now,” said Nanny, who had been standing near the window.

“Good heavens, and I’m not dressed yet. I’ve got to run up and change my dress, Tina.”

“Take her back tomorrow,” Tina wailed, “with her crib and her blanket and all her toys.”

You weren’t supposed to lie or evade, and Sally rarely did, but this day was different. Her energy
was spent, and she fled upstairs, leaving Nanny to cope with Tina. That’s what the trouble is, she told herself yet again. That’s all it is, simply jealousy, plain as can be. What more proof could you want? It’s just exaggerated in Tina because she’s a sensitive child. In time, with help, it will die away.

Yet that stern-eyed woman had been so sure.

March 1990

“Y
es, yes,” said Oliver Grey from his armchair at the head of the table. “I remember very well when my father had that bow window built on. I was about five years old, so it must have been in 1932. Or thereabouts,” he added precisely. “My grandfather thought it was a sacrilege. He would have kept everything unchanged from the time his own father lived here. He would have kept the horse cars in town, too, and the gaslights, if he could have. He was what they call a ‘character.’ ”

Erect and thin, with graying hair that would, like his forebears’, become a thick white plumage. He did not look sixty-three.

The little group assembled in the dining room listened respectfully to these familiar reminiscences. Ian and Clive, his sons, Dan, his nephew, along with the wives of Dan and Ian, all turned their faces toward the patriarch.

“Yes, he loved this home, this ‘Hawthorne.’ Every year he’d plant another hawthorn. The oldest must be over eighty by now, and as you see, they still come to bloom every summer. I hope you will plant more of them when I’m gone.”

He was feeling a birthday’s emotion. The champagne also helped, for he was not a frequent drinker, yet they all knew it was really the genuineness of his love that was speaking to them. And they followed his glance to the wall where, above the mantelpiece, hung a portrait of his wife, Lucille, made shortly before she was killed when her car overturned. Her smile befitted her regal pose in evening dress; yet someone had remarked—quite foolishly, it was said by those who had overheard—that she looked sorrowful, as if she might have been foreseeing the manner of her death.

Indeed, Oliver had had a fair share of sorrow. Perhaps that was some part of the reason for his very personal philanthropies, which extended far beyond the mere writing of large checks that he could well afford, beyond the mountain camp he had established for city boys, or beyond the wheelchairs in the lovely garden of his old-age home.

With a determined smile, he looked back at his fine young people, and then down the length of the room toward the diamond-paned bow window hung with heavy crimson silk. Clearly, the scene pleased him: the lavender roses clustered on the table, the tapers in vermeil candlesticks, even the pair of chocolate-colored German pointers lying obediently on the old rug in the corner. No
object in the splendid room was excessive, no person without dignity.

“Yes, yes,” he resumed, “long before a place like this could have been dreamed of, the Greys were hardscrabble farmers from the Scottish lowlands. Whatever possessed them to settle in New York State, I don’t know, unless they thought it would be like home. But I have an idea they don’t have winters like ours in Scotland. Anyway, let’s drink to them, to their courage and their honest labor.”

Dan thought, as they all raised glasses, that it never fails; people who certainly wouldn’t boast of their own rise from poverty take such pride in their ancestors’ “hardscrabble”! It was amusing, a harmless quirk of Oliver’s like his old-fashioned courtliness, which certainly had its charm.

How much he owed to Oliver, this uncle, this second kindest father! When their parents had been killed in the crash of a sight-seeing helicopter, he, aged seven, with his sister Amanda, aged twelve, had been brought to Hawthorne to live, and Hawthorne had been his home until he married Sally.

The sight of her hand lying on the table made him smile to himself. The ring, the only jewel she ever wore besides the small diamond studs in her ears, had been Oliver’s idea.

“Her engagement ring must be as important as Happy’s,” he had insisted. “It will not be right any other way.”

And so Dan had bowed, not unwillingly, to
Oliver’s sense of order and equality. Sally certainly would not have minded one way or the other, nor, he suspected, would Elizabeth, known as Happy.

Under the candlelight the “important” ring threw off sparks. Whispering, “You’re very quiet,” Dan stroked his wife’s hand.

“Not really. I’ve just quietly been eating.”

“You look so beautiful in that dress. You match the red curtains.”

“Yes, isn’t she beautiful?” asked Happy, who had overheard.

Happy Grey was a large-boned blonde, pink, generous, and good-hearted. Too intelligent to live an idle country club life, and having to her deep disappointment no children, she had started a nursery school and worked hard to make it the most sought-after school in the area.

“You must be tired from all your travel these past weeks, Dan.” Oliver’s quick eyes missed nothing. “I have an idea you want to get home early. So just leave when you’re ready.”

“Thanks, but I’m fine. I sleep on planes, you know.”

“Everything went well, I take it, or you wouldn’t be looking so cheerful.”

“Yes, yes.” Dan had acquired the mannerism from Oliver. “Yes, yes. The new manager in Brussels is the best we’ve had. He’s young and smart and willing to take suggestions. You can’t want more than that.”

Oliver nodded. “I’m lucky to have three
young, smart, willing men of my own. Now that the business is all yours, I can sit back and be lazy.”

“Hardly lazy, Father,” Ian remonstrated, “with the Grey Foundation and how many charity boards? Eleven, by my last count.”

His wide-spaced eyes were as quick as Oliver’s, and he was equally attractive; but he was powerful, while his father was supple, and vigorous rather than restrained. He had in his early youth been a problem, having been expelled from two preparatory schools for shooting craps. Eventually he had straightened himself out, making Phi Beta Kappa at Yale—where Oliver had studied and sent both Clive and Dan, too—married, and lived now a conventional life, except that he spent money, Oliver tolerantly said, “like a rajah.” Also, he liked to bet on almost anything between Monte Carlo and Las Vegas.

No two brothers could have been more unlike. Clive stood barely an inch over five feet. His round face was already, owing to a fondness for sweets, sagging into a fold of fat under his chin. He consumed cigarettes. He suffered. It was said of him that he should really be teaching graduate mathematics in some university. Instead, he was lovingly called the “living computer” for Grey’s Foods, who double-checked the work of outside actuaries, watched over the company’s foreign investments, understood insurance equities and currency fluctuations.

In his cozy office, in his spare time and for recreation he worked over abstruse equations, inhabiting
the world of numbers. Numbers, being impersonal, could be mastered even by someone who mastered very little else—except horses. He was an expert rider. A man can look tall on horseback.

After having been silent all through the dinner, he now spoke up. “I have Tina’s birthday present ready. It’s a pony, a gentle, very small Shetland, and I’ll teach her to ride it. You said it would be all right,” he reminded Sally and Dan.

“You’ll be a good teacher,” Oliver said affectionately. “If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d say you must have been born on the back of a horse. Incidentally, I’ve missed Tina. You should have brought her tonight.”

“You forget she’s only five,” Dan replied. “She’s safely asleep by now.”

“Then you must take some of my birthday cake home for her. Ah, here it is.”

Two pairs of hands were needed to support the huge white edifice blazing with candles that covered the cake in a sheet of flickering flame. Inside, as everyone knew, were layers of dark chocolate interlaced with crushed strawberries and whipped cream. It was the traditional Grey family favorite; no birthday, no celebration was properly observed without it, or properly observed without somebody’s lament about calories, or some gentle joke about Clive’s ability to eat two portions, to which Clive would respond with a somewhat childish giggle.