Four Steps to the Altar Page 12

“Well. No.”

  Moving to the Sub-Zero refrigerator, Elaine took out a bottle of water and quickly drank from it. She wiped her mouth on a paper napkin that was gold-embossed Gladys and Jim. Lily wondered if they’d ever again use napkins that didn’t advertise their work.

  “You don’t know if Sarah and Sutter have any plans,” Elaine continued. “And what about Jo and Andrew? They’re hardly speaking.”

  “Maybe what they need is a night out with the rest of us. A chance to have a little fun.”

  “Oh, Lily, I don’t know. I’m so tired. Besides, where could we have it?”

  “Your house would be perfect.”

  “My house? But we’ve been so busy, Lily. I haven’t cleaned—”

  “Elaine,” Elaine’s father called out, as he stepped from the chef’s pantry Frank had built. “Shame on you. Of course we’ll do this for our Lily. In fact, Larry and I can go over now and clean your house.”

  “But Dad—” Elaine protested, and Bob McNulty put his finger to his lips to shush her.

  “No,” he said. “Lily’s family, after all.”

  Then Elaine grimaced and Lily smiled, grateful that she’d always been nice to Bob McNulty and that he’d always been one of those sweet men, like Reginald, who seemed to enjoy feeling as if they were protecting her.

  21

  It’s too bad Frank isn’t here,” Andrew said as he passed the tray of foie gras over to Sarah. Lily wanted to kick Andrew under the table, but she feared she’d nail Antonia, not him.

  “Who’s Frank?” Antonia asked. She’d worn an old (of course) tweed suit. In the buttonhole of her lapel, she sported a tiny yellow rosebud no doubt plucked from the crystal vase in her Wheatleigh room. The rosebud had moved up and down as she heaved her entire full bosom behind the words Who’s Frank.

  A hush thunked across Elaine’s dining-room table; the guests grew rigor-mortis-like, with forks and spoons and wineglasses halting in midair.

  Andrew cleared his throat. “Frank is a good friend of ours,” he said. They’d been talking about Antonia’s place on Madison Avenue, about its lineage and the fact that her building was listed in the New York City register of historic places. “He has an antiques shop. I’m sure he’d be interested in hearing about your place.”

  The guests returned to life; dinner activity resumed.

  “Antiques dealers only want to profit from what you own,” Antonia said, and Lily stood up.

  “More veal, Andrew?” she asked, because it was safer than popping him in the nose.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Why don’t you help me get it?” She narrowed her eyes into tiny blue slits, carefully drilling their meaning into him.

  “Oh,” he said, standing up. “Sure.”

  She spun on her heel and marched into Elaine’s kitchen. Once safe behind the door, she hissed, “What are you doing? I thought you were my friend.” Just because Jo had said she had a headache and didn’t show up at Elaine’s, just because Andrew seemed to have somehow screwed up his life, that didn’t give him the right to screw up Lily’s too.

  “I’m just being friendly.”

  “Friendly, my ass. You want me to tell her about Frank, don’t you?”

  Andrew sighed and leaned against the counter. “Lily,” he said, “I don’t care what you do. Though sooner or later you might realize that games are best left to the kids.”

  Her lips pulled together into a firm, pink circle. “It’s my life, Andrew.”

  He smiled, then brushed a runaway curl off her forehead. “Then you shouldn’t have invited the rest of us, Lily.” As he turned to leave, tears crowded her throat.

  “Wait,” she said with a whimper that was genuine.

  He waited.

  “I don’t know what to do. I invited her to come to West Hope to try to be her friend. And now I don’t know what to do with her, Andrew. Please don’t tell me again that I should introduce her to Frank. I’m not going to do that. But I don’t know what to do with her either. I really need your help. This is important to me.”

  With a short sigh, Andrew said, “I don’t know, Lily. Why not take her to Tanglewood? You have the kindergarten teacher’s wedding to plan out there. She might get a kick out of being part of the ordeal. She might enjoy being ‘backstage.’ ”

  Well, of course, Andrew had no way of knowing how Antonia loved the ballet and the opera and that being “backstage” might be just what the West Hope doctor ordered.

  Lily skipped one and a half times and threw her arms around him. “Oh, forgive me, darling Andrew, I take what I said all back. What a marvelous idea.” She planted a light kiss on his left cheek, then his right, and, with spirits lifted, she raised her head and pushed back through the door into the dining room. Just as she did, someone must have sucked the air out of the room, because standing at the far end of Elaine’s table was Frank Forbes himself.

  “My mother,” Frank said, looking at Lily. “She’s gone.”

  Well, she knew he couldn’t possibly mean that his mother had pulled herself up from her bed and left town to go to Pittsfield. Lily stood there a moment, trying to breathe in the airless room.

  Elaine was standing beside him. She put her arms around him, gave him a big hug.

  “Oh, Frank, I’m so sorry,” Elaine said, then Sarah was behind her, echoing her words, then Jo’s mother, Marion, who had known Eleanor Forbes most of her life, because they’d both been born in West Hope and it was, after all, a small town.

  The men, of course, reserved their emotion. Ted, Marion’s new husband, was the only one who’d known the extended Forbes family. He went to Frank after Marion, patted Frank on the shoulder, shook his head.

  Lily’s eyes darted from the scene to Antonia, who sat in her chair, looking somewhat bewildered and slightly annoyed.

  “I’m glad you’re all here,” Lily heard Frank say. “I stopped by the shop. Jo was working late and told me where to find you.” Apparently Jo did not tell him why they had gathered or why he hadn’t been invited.

  Lily considered that she might be angry with Jo for revealing their location but decided she couldn’t fault her friend. Frank’s mother, after all…oh, gosh, she thought, tears coming to her eyes despite the awkward silence of the situation.

  Frank’s eyes moved over to Lily, and she knew she must walk the seven or eight steps it would take to get to him, to console him, to show him that she cared. In order to reach Frank, however, she’d have to pass by Antonia’s chair.

  She tried to send him a smile but knew that was not enough. His return gaze was hopeful, wondering, waiting. Elaine’s dining room grew oddly silent once again. Then Lily sucked in her lower lip and slowly took one step with her right foot, another with her left.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your dinner,” Frank said to everyone there. Then he took a step toward Lily, then another, and soon they met right behind Antonia, who stared straight ahead as if this were someone else’s party and she were merely part of the flocking on the wallpaper.

  Finally, Lily and Frank embraced, and Lily said, “Come into the kitchen,” as if this were her house and not Elaine’s. “I’ll fix you a drink.”

  “I can’t stay,” he said. “My father’s at home with the next-door neighbors, the Hardings. They’ve been so kind through all of this.”

  Lily stroked his arm, his face, his eyes. “My poor, poor darling,” she said.

  “I would have called,” he said, “but I wanted to get out of the house. I wanted to see you. And everyone, I guess.”

  Lily remembered enough about death and dying to know that in those first few minutes, those first long hours, as reality set in—or at least tried to—no one should be accountable for the things one said or did or the things one didn’t say or do.

  “Will you come with me?” Frank asked it so abruptly that Lily wasn’t ready with an answer, did not have an excuse. Though what excuse could she possibly have?

  “Well,” she said, her mind spinning with questions and ans
wers that could or would follow, “of course. You go ahead. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  It was a small frown, but Lily noticed.

  “Or now,” she said. “Would you like me to come with you now?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I would.”

  She nodded, feeling her brain shake back and forth in her skull, rattling around in there as if trying to make some sense fall into place. Then she bit her lip again, took Frank by the hand, and led him back to the stunned crowd in Elaine’s dining room.

  “Andrew,” she called, “be a dear and see Antonia back to the hotel. I’m going to run along with Frank and help out with the arrangements.” Then she looked at Antonia and said, “Sorry to call the night short, but I’m planning to take you to Tanglewood tomorrow. I think you’ll enjoy it. Good night.”

  As she walked toward the front door, Lily turned and lifted her small hand, waving to the group as if she were embarking on a long-awaited trip.

  22

  She’s quite a girl, our Lily,” Andrew said as he drove the back road that wound through the hills toward Wheatleigh. He’d lived in West Hope several years and had never known about—had never even heard of—the place, it was that exclusive, it was that divine, Lily had said.

  “Yes, well, my brother was quite fond of her.”

  “Reginald. Yes. The girls all liked him. And Lily mentions him often. I think he meant a lot to her.” He was trying to say the kinds of things Lily might want him to say, not necessarily the things that he thought should be said. But this was the least Andrew could do, after the flak he’d already created and now with the sadness of Frank’s mother’s death, which was not Lily’s fault.

  He wondered sometimes if he’d spent so much time with women that there was a small chance he’d begun to think like them.

  From the corner of his eye he noticed that Antonia was eying him suspiciously. “So who are you, anyway?”

  Andrew laughed. “Me? Just a friend. A guy who respects what the women have done with Second Chances. A lot of people say they want to have their own business, but these women have done it. In fact, they’re actually successful.”

  She turned back and looked out the windshield. “You look familiar,” she said.

  “Ah,” Andrew replied. “Well, I confess, I was once on TV. A journalist. I was known as Andrew David. I worked mostly in New York and Washington, sometimes out of the Mideast.”

  Antonia nodded knowingly. “Lily thinks all I do is go to the opera and the ballet. But I also have a passion for current events. As did my brother. That must be why I recognize you.”

  Current events? How long had it been since Andrew had watched the news? He’d become so wrapped up with the women, with Cassie, with Jo…

  “You haven’t been on for a while,” Antonia said.

  He shook his head. “No. I moved away from the rat race to raise my daughter in West Hope.”

  Antonia nodded again, as if she understood.

  Andrew kept driving, thinking it was curious that Lily didn’t like Antonia and that Antonia seemed…well, so suspicious of Lily. He wondered if they had ever given each other a real chance.

  “Well, you seem civilized enough,” Antonia continued. “Though I can’t imagine why anyone would drive one of these.” She patted the dashboard of Andrew’s old Volvo.

  Andrew laughed. “Prerequisite for a college professor. That’s what I moved here to do.” He didn’t mention that he wasn’t doing that now because Winston College didn’t seem to want him back.

  “So you gave up the television cameras for a higher, more noble purpose.”

  “That and the fact my former wife left me for another man and I was embarrassed and in pain and needed to run away.”

  Her eyes were back on him. “You’re civilized and honest too. Well, that’s unusual in a man. Did you ever marry again?”

  He didn’t expect the tightness in his throat or the twist of the muscle around his belly. “Not yet. But Jo—you didn’t meet her tonight; Marion is her mother—well, Jo and I are engaged. We’re getting married in the fall. September, I think.”

  “You might want to sound a bit more excited about your wedding date when talking with your bride.”

  “Yes,” Andrew said, “well, we haven’t set the date yet.” He drove past the red cottage that had once belonged to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Elaine had said the hotel was around the bend from there, which was a good thing, because Andrew was now eager to end this conversation. “Wheatleigh is up here on the left,” he said. “Are your accommodations okay?”

  Antonia laughed. “Lily went out of her way to be sure they were the best. As I knew she would.”

  He turned into the long road that served as a driveway.

  “I also know more about Lily than she wishes I did,” the woman continued. “For example, I know she has an ulterior motive for inviting me here, but I’ll be damned if I’ve figured it out yet. Can you give me any hints?”

  Andrew smiled and pulled into the circular, white stone driveway around the lighted fountain. “I’ve never been good at reading a woman’s mind. Especially a woman like Lily.” Or Jo, he wanted to add but did not.

  A young man appeared and the passenger door to Andrew’s car crunched open.

  “Well,” Antonia said with a wink, “I hate to admit it, but women can be sneaky. If you hear anything concrete, please keep me in mind. Otherwise, I’ll have to get to the bottom of this charade on my own.”

  Andrew drove home, his mouth still set in a smile. It wasn’t until he let himself inside that he remembered that Frank’s mother had died.

  Mothers, he thought. Parents. He tossed his keys onto the kitchen counter and sat down at the table, wondering if he was the only one who thought about his parents more often since they’d been dead than when they were alive.

  They’d never had much time for Andrew, or he for them. They were busy physicians, after all. He was just a kid.

  He looked up at the black cat clock that graced the kitchen wall, its black eyes moving back and forth, its black tail swaying with the passing of time. No one but Cassie knew that clock had been in the kitchen of the penthouse where Andrew was raised, that it was part of a fond memory of sitting at the counter watching his mother knead the bread she baked on Saturdays, staring at the back-and-forth of the cat’s hypnotic “tail,” waiting for the time to pass, the bread to rise, then rise again.

  It wasn’t that Andrew had any bad memories of his parents; he just didn’t have many memories at all. One that remained, however, was watching his mother bake bread, smelling the warm, homey aromas, feeling the kindness emanate from her, because the bread would be delivered to their less fortunate patients.

  His mother and his father, after all, were good people.

  They’d started off “right,” buying a Manhattan penthouse when they first opened their practice. As the years went by, however, they became more caught up in saving the poor than the wealthy of the world. They mortgaged and remortgaged the penthouse several times to sustain their work from the tenements of Manhattan to the shanties of Third World countries. At one point they had Andrew, a “late in life” baby, their only child.

  Throughout his childhood Andrew somehow expected they would see him for the clever child he was. But their humor became minimal and their compassion was stretched too thin by others, and by the time Andrew was in high school, he had stopped trying to create the close-knit family that perhaps was not meant to be.

  But, yes, they were good people, respectable, respected. They had both worked until well past seventy, lived past eighty, then died less than six weeks apart.

  He’d been sad for the loss, but the truth was, they hadn’t been very close. If he’d become a doctor he might have salvaged some intimacy on some level, but the good Drs. Kennedy had little in common with a television news guy who flew under the high-profile wing of their neighbor John Benson.

  Still, they were his parents and he’d felt sad when they died, though he suppose
d Frank Forbes felt a lot sadder now.

  The clock ticked, the cat’s eyes and tail went right, then left.

  They would go to the funeral together.

  Or would they?

  He thought about Jo. Would she want to go to Brian’s mother’s funeral? Would she think that Brian’s impending trial had hastened the woman’s death? Would she feel guilty about that, as if the woman would not have died if Jo hadn’t had Brian arrested?

  He dropped his face in his hands. “Argh,” he said. Then he remembered what Frank said: “I stopped by the shop…. Jo was working late…”

  She was working late? She hadn’t gone home with the headache she’d claimed to have?

  “Women can be sneaky,” Antonia had said.

  He sighed again and stood up. Then he noticed the pink sheet of paper on the table, scribed with bright purple ink.

  Dad, Going to sleep at Marilla’s. Kisses, Cassie.

  He touched the edge of the paper, his smile returned. At least there was one person in the world that he could count on, teenage crazies notwithstanding.

  Then Andrew realized that this would be a night he could spend with Jo, with Cassie out of the house, with the big bed waiting just for them. But instead of going to her, Andrew decided that he’d go to Marilla’s. Maybe he could wrangle his daughter into coming home. She’d been spending too much time at her girlfriend’s, not enough time in the company of at least one parent who thought she was the greatest thing on earth.

  Besides, he reasoned as he took a last look at the clock, grabbed his keys, and headed out the door again, time passed much too quickly to waste it trying to make things happen that maybe weren’t meant to be.

  One of Marilla’s brothers leaned against the front doorjamb. He wore a faded T-shirt and tattered jeans. A cigarette did a slow burn between his pointer and middle finger. Andrew guessed the kid was all of sixteen.

  Andrew stood straighter, more erect. “What do you mean they’re not here?” he asked.

  “They’re supposed to be at your house.”