The Year of the Lucy Page 3

  Steve, with Jacob, Roman and Roger Overby, had gone off on two pack trips, business for the Overbys, pleasure for Steve and Roman. Steve was beginning to realise that Roman was rapidly approaching manhood. Nick was left behind, disconsolate. Unfortunately Nick tended to irritate his father with his darting shifting ways. Mirelle had always seen the similarity between Roman and his father: a preference for method, a delight in physical prowess. Nick, on the other hand, wanted to do a thing immediately, too impatient to develop necessary skill. Nick was apt to be wild to finish a project in the morning and by mid-afternoon would forget that he had started something at all, a tendency which infuriated his father and weighed against his joining a camping trip which had certain hazards. Yet Mirelle recognised, even if Steve hadn’t yet, that Nick was the more imaginative of the two boys, often providing the inspiration for many of the projects which Roman, in due course, finished. This summer was Roman’s, not Nick’s. He’d have to wait to find a basis on which he and his father could meet. And Roman needed his father’s companionship now.

  For Steve and Roman, the vacation was an unqualified success. Tonia was oblivious to everything once she was introduced to the grey pony, so Mirelle and Nick were odd-men out. If she managed to cajole Nick into a semblance of good nature, she failed to lighten her own inner discontent. She held herself sternly in check, trying not to dampen the others’ pleasure, hoping that she didn’t seem aloof. She had the most curious sense of disorientation, as if she were marking time. She was extremely careful to dissemble with Steve in the rare moments they had together in the full life of the valley.

  It wasn’t until they were driving home that Steve told her one of the department heads was retiring in October.

  ‘There’ll be a shift?’ she asked, trying not to let anxiety creep into her voice. A departmental shifting invariably meant transfers and they’d been transferred so often.

  ‘Yeah, there’ll be a shift,’ Steve said, glancing absently at the endless Kansan wheatfields through which they were speeding. ‘A big one.’

  ‘Oh! Out?’

  Steve gave her an encouraging grin.

  ‘I don’t know and I couldn’t find out a thing before I left. You know how tight security can be when they’re rearranging the T.O. You’d think it was plans for a communistic coup or a take-over of the Board of Directors. Barnhill gives you that jolly farmer slap on the back and the old coach’s go-get ’em team cheer and your guess is as good as mine. One thing is, they’ve developed a new product which they’re about ready to merchandise . . .’

  ‘The one you’ve been studying?’ Mirelle snatched at any glimmer of continuity.

  ‘. . . Don’t interrupt me,’ but Steve was only mildly irritated, ‘. . . so there may be quite a reshuffling. My record has been good, if I say so myself, and I am the senior sales rep on the isocyonates.’ He shrugged with pretended indifference which only underscored his hopefulness. ‘We’ll see what happens when the old boy retires.’

  Mirelle gave a deep sigh and Steve reached over to pat her hand reassuringly.

  ‘We could stand a little settled family life, hon, couldn’t we? The last weeks were just great. Improved the old man’s temper no end, didn’t it?’ When she laughingly agreed, he threw an arm around her shoulders and drew her closer to him on the wide front seat. She snuggled into him willingly. ‘That Jake Overby, now, he went on, ‘there’s a man who knows what settling down is.’ Steve clicked his tongue in a wistful manner.

  Carefree, relaxed, boyishly hopeful, Steve was recreated in the image which she cherished from their early months of marriage.

  ‘Fundamentally, he is just too good and honest, she thought, looking sideways at his clean-cut features in bold profile against the sulphur-blue hot sky. He should never have followed the lure of big business, big money and all its big headaches. The war had given Steve what peace would never have offered, a chance to go to college and a compulsion to produce on a higher level than his parents. But Steve worried too much, straining against management directives that shaped policies which were repellent to his basic integrity. Unable to reconcile inconsistent attitudes from his management and still represent his customers’ need to the Company, Steve took unnecessary blame on himself that other, more calloused or diffident salesmen ignored. Steve would have been happier running a small business just as he wanted to, or a ranch, like Jake Overby. Then he’d’ve been at peace with himself. But he kept insisting that he had to make something of the opportunities that he’d been given. Mirelle knew the source of that compulsion, and though she was powerless to counteract the basic fallacy, she tried her best to buffer its effects on Steve.

  And here he was, having thoroughly enjoyed his vacation, optimistically returning to what would no doubt turn into another illusion-shattering disappointment, all in the name of Big Business. Mirelle ached for him, loath to try now to temper his hopeful approach with her cynicism. Grimly she began to steel herself to cushion his inevitable disenchantment. The sane observer reminded her that Steve was a very capable man, that same honesty appealing strongly to many of his customers. There was always the chance that his abilities would be recognised by management in the fall. There was that chance, she told herself, unreassured.

  The prospect, however, remote, of remaining in one town, even Wilmington, for longer than two years was unbearably tantalising. To settle, to dig down roots, to develop continuity had assumed the proportions of discovering El Dorado to Mirelle. In their courtship, Steve’s reminiscences of his childhood, comfortably spent in the Allentown Pennsylvania house that his grandparents had built, had cast the rosy glow of happily-ever-after on her future as his wife. They’d join his parents in that huge rambling house, and she’d finally know what ‘belonging’ felt like.

  When her mother had sent Mirelle to live in America with her childhood friend, Mary Murphy, to escape the bombings in London, living and life had assumed a quality of all things good and wonderful to Mirelle the child. But Mary Murphy had lived in a succession of comfortable rented apartments. And Mirelle had never thought to discount a European-based generalisation of the American smalltown life, nor the exigencies of an increasingly transient, technological business age, and the happily-ever-after-in-the-family-home was an exploded and explosive myth. When she had unexpectedly confronted the reality of a basically conservative, narrow-minded, settled community outlook, Mirelle had bitterly discovered that transiency could be preferable to mental stagnation.

  She had also assumed that Steve’s broad-mindedness was deeper and that his cultural base had been firmer. His sophistication turned out to be a thin veneer, actually little more than contempt for every aspect of his smalltown upbringing whose limitations he had realised during two years in the occupation forces in Vienna. Close brushes with death as an infantry officer had sent him in desperate search for an anodyne to the horrors of the war. He’d found this in Vienna in the beautiful works of art, the opera, classical music, all removed from the ugliness that he had to erase from his mind.

  After his Army discharge, a return to the pattern of his youth had been abhorrent to Steve, and he had welcomed a job that took him to new places constantly. It didn’t matter to him where he lived geographically, nor how often he moved. His job was the constant, and his family the anchor: or so he thought. Mirelle had painfully come to accept that: she had no alternative. But, if they could and did stay in Wilmington . . .

  What could be, would be, Mirelle told herself. But Steve’s announcement thoroughly dampened her spirits. The sense of marking time all summer now developed the cadence of uneasy anticipation, off-beat, agitated. The coming fall assumed a gloomy aspect.

  3

  ONCE THEY WERE home, Mirelle had to clean the dusty house thoroughly. The yard required considerable work after a month’s neglect. That done, she found the kitchen had to be painted and was consequently able to push aside the tentative desire to coax Jacob Overby’s lined features from the plasticine head. Of course, by then, it was time t
o get the children’s school clothes ready and that chore made it necessary for her to reorganise the attic storage space.

  When Steve mentioned a Labor Day weekend jaunt up to Cape Cod, she enthusiastically agreed, physically tiring herself so thoroughly that she had no time left over to upbraid her sane observer.

  Then, abruptly, she was left in the quiet of a childless house, ordered, clean, painted, without a single excuse for further procrastination. Steve departed on the first of the fall business trips and the accusing anonymity of the unworked head drew her to the studio.

  Stolidly she took out her mass of sketches of Jacob Overby and arranged them on the wallclips. She stared at them. Thoroughly disgusted with her perversity, she forced her hands to the tools, digging out the eye sockets, shaping the brows above them, excavating the jawline from the material. Dutifully she worked all morning, covering the still impersonal head with unexpected relief when she heard her next-door neighbor calling her children in for lunch.

  The next morning, once the house was picked up, she took herself firmly in hand and resolutely strode into the studio. Critically she reviewed yesterday’s effort. Somehow, it was easier to start today and she hopefully assumed that it had been simply a matter of getting back into a routine which included studio time after the casual living of the summer.

  Suddenly she realised that the face which was emerging was not Jacob Overby’s at all. Surprised, she flipped through the rest of the summer’s sketches. The features were familar but she couldn’t identify the face which was emerging from the clay. She sat, hands idle in her lap, staring at the head, entreating the resemblance to assume identity. Until she knew who the man was, how could she continue? Disgusted with herself and the recalcitrant plasticine, she left her stool so abruptly that it clattered to the linoleum. She’d put some wash on, and if that head didn’t cooperate then, she’d . . .

  Her jodhpurs, hanging on the door of the laundry room since the previous spring, for she’d worn jeans like everyone else in the valley, slapped about her face as she jerked the door open. The sight of them provided her with an excuse. What she really needed right now was an outlet for her pent-up physical energy. She’d go riding, and show Boots she’d learned a thing or two over the summer on the willing, eager quarter horses of Wyoming.

  ‘Besides,’ she told herself as she collected car keys and enough money for the ride, ‘I’ll want to do a horse for Jake Overby to ride. So this is study.’

  The first fifteen minutes on Boots’ back made her laugh, for her balance had been subtly shifted by the weeks of western saddle riding and she had to reseat herself, legs in a proper position for the English saddle. She stopped slouching and sat straight, repositioned her hands and took up more contact on Boots’ bridle. No more sloppy riding now! Or Boots would dump her.

  At her favorite long stretch in the bridle path, she gave Boots the aids to canter and, settling her hips into his smooth rhythm, she allowed him slowly to increase his pace until he was at a hand gallop. Then she eased him back to a walk, with him snorting at having a bit of a blow, tossing his head. She patted his neck, soothing him to the slow pace, feeling the shift of muscle tissue as he tossed his head. Then she smelled her palm for the marvelous pungent odor of ‘horse’ lingering on her skin.

  As she rode on, the dissatisfaction of the morning faded. When they reached the crest of the hill and the natural opening in the trees, she reined him in. She looked down into the dip between the hills where the trees were still sparklingly green after the rainy weekend. The russet of the sourwood trees and the yellow of the ground honeysuckle emphasised the different tones of greens: the whole scene was composed and serene to her artist’s eye.

  ‘If I were a painter,’ she told Boots, ‘this scene would be a nice change to the mossy millstone school, But . . . that brilliance would be so hard to capture. Maybe some pure research egghead will find a way to put odors in paint and you’ll have to sniff paintings, too.’

  Dissatisfaction returned. Broodingly, she turned Boots away from the view and down the hill. He minced his way, snapping his feet into place, crunching the pebbled surface under his rear hooves. He tried, once, to break into a run again. It gave her distinct pleasure to rein him in smartly and feel that she had the strength to control something so strong and massive. She took perverse delight in the resentment she felt through the reins. With his hocks under him, he was almost bucking, to have a run up the next slope. When she did let him out, clapping her heels to his ribs, she seemed to sink into the ground as he surged forward. They were both breathless when she pulled him up.

  ‘And I take it all out on you.’ She stroked his now moist shoulder. He snorted companionably, jiggling his bit.

  The feeling of loneliness – alienation, rather, since she was used to being loney – and depression seemed to intensify. The immediate future, with the department head, Max Corli’s retirement approaching, held no prospect which might lift her spirits. If she could only get down to some solid work on that damned head. Then she remembered her chevalier.

  Boots’ ears wigwagged at her chuckle.

  ‘I’ll call it a tribute to a flathead cavalier.’ She laughed again, wishing there were someone, anyone whom she could laugh with, and talk to. Someone like Lucy.

  ‘“But she is in her grave, and oh, the difference to me.”’

  Even after seven years, thoughts of Lucy and what their relationship had meant to Mirelle brought a lump in her throat.

  There must be someone else in this god-forsaken town who speaks and understands the same things I do. There must be. There must be some other company wife who can’t tee off on the greens and bid slams daily at the clubs because such activities revolt her. They can’t all want to be ticky-tacky. There must be someone else who doesn’t fit in. Somewhere for me to belong.

  She kicked Boots into a hand gallop on the flat stretch ahead, furious with such rampant self-pity. Boots was cool enough when she finally brought him back into the stable yard but Mac’s eye didn’t miss the sweat line of roughened hair. He ran a hand under the girth.

  ‘Yes, we motored on a bit. He was fresh,’ Mirelle said.

  ‘You’re not the kind that misuses a horse, Mrs. Martin,’ Mac replied as he took her money. ‘If you did, you wouldn’t ride here, let me tell you.’

  ‘I had a grand ride, Mac.’

  ‘Come back soon.’

  She caught herself gunning the Sprite excessively when she started it. She couldn’t spend the entire day venting herself on everything she used. She down-shifted at the stop street that fed into the highway and the Sprite stalled. When she turned the ignition key, nothing happened.

  The bloody generator brushes must be jamming. She yanked on the brake and jerked the door open. She propped up the hood and stood looking in at the engine, completely disgusted.

  ‘Anything I can do, lady?’ asked an amused voice and Mirelle stared up in amazement at her Knight of the Road.

  ‘You remember me? You had that sprained ankle?’ Embarrassed by her lack of response, he added, ‘You’d been thrown and then you had a flat tire . . .’

  ‘Oh, I remember. Very clearly and gratefully,’ she said, shaking her head at her gaucherie. ‘I still have that red handkerchief, all neatly pressed. I put it in my husband’s drawer and . . .’ She broke off, appalled at what she had been about to admit.

  ‘Tsck! Tsck! You really must keep better track of lovers’ mementoes. Complicates relations,’ he began and then stopped as he looked at her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly, no longer amused. ‘I didn’t mean that. My tongue runs away with me. But it was such a coincidence to see you in much the same spot again.’

  ‘I didn’t get tossed today,’ she said, smiling in the hope of retrieving his engaging smile, ‘but this beast won’t start. The generator brushes have a tendency to jam.’

  ‘Try starting her again.’

  ‘Nothing’ll happen,’ and her gloomy prediction came true.

  They stood side by si
de, staring at the sports car’s engine.

  ‘As you do not apply to the nearest AAA when in trouble, would a lift to the service station at the crossroads be of any assistance?’

  ‘It certainly would,’ But, as they started toward his car, she stopped. ‘Is that out of your way? I can walk up to the stable and call from there.’

  ‘It’s not out of my way and, if I’m going to make a practice of halting here to rescue you, let me finish what I start,’ he said, opening the door of the Thunderbird with a flourish. ‘Votre chevalier a votre service!’

  As they drove off, Mirelle suddenly remembered with chagrin that she had brought only a dollar above the cost of the ride.

  ‘Would you be an absolute angel and finish at the Flying A station? There’s one a little further on and I have a credit card. I was only going riding and didn’t bring much money with me.’

  He flashed her a grin. ‘I’m rarely an absolute angel but in your case I’ll make an exception.’

  ‘That is such a stupid phrase. Be an absolute angel . . . what’s absolute anyhow?’

  ‘What’s an angel for that matter?’

  ‘I think perfection would be utterly dull.’

  ‘Perfect hair with Brylcreem . . .’

  ‘Perfect teeth with Gardol . . .’

  ‘Oh, no, I’ve switched to Crest.’ He grinned in a toothy parody of commercial grins.

  They laughed together easily. Mirelle found herself contrasting the incident with the summer’s moments of easy laughter between herself and Steve. They had almost revived the sweetness of their early months of marriage. Soon, too soon, the strains and tensions of every day would dull that fragile fabric of summer respect and understanding.

  ‘Here we are, ma’am,’ and the voice of her good Samaritan broke into her speculation. They had pulled into the Flying A Station.

  The attendant sauntered over, jutting his head down to hear the dirver’s request. Her knight explained the situation, where the Sprite was located and asked how soon it could be attended to.