Another Eden (24 page)

He thanked her without mentioning that, according to what Michael had once confided to him, man to man and in great secrecy, that probably wasn't saying much.

"I've never eaten in bed before," she admitted, biting into a piece of toasted bread. "I can see I've been missing out on one of life's deepest pleasures." He smiled at her; she could tell he was thinking, as she was, that that wasn't the only one. They had opened the door and the windows; the sea was a soft, steady roar and the salt tang of the breeze smelled fresh and clean. "Are you sure no one ever walks by here?" she worried, a little unnerved by the well-lit spectacle they would make for anyone who did.

"Never. We might as well be on an island."

"Why do you like being an architect?" she asked directly, setting her plate aside.

"That's easy. I'm trying to achieve immortality."

She was fairly sure he was joking. "Is it because you like being rich?"

He paused in the chewing of a mouthful of toast and looked at her. Her face contained nothing but curiosity and the question wasn't weighted with any moral judgments; she honestly wanted to know. Her candor prompted him to respond in kind. "I've never been rich, so I don't know if I'd like it or not. I assume I would. But that's not why I became an architect. Anyway, most architects die poor. It's the contractor and the realtor and the building trades unionist who get rich."

"I see. What, then?"

He had to think for a second; no one had ever asked him the question in quite this way before. "I like to organize space."

He paused, and she thought he was finished. She said, "Oh."

"And I like to try to figure out how things will go—how people will act and react in a space. What they need. What they want. And then I try to give it to them in a way that's so functional and satisfying and beautiful, it makes them happy." He grinned, hearing the arrogance in his answer. But it was the truth.

Sara smiled back serenely. She heard it too, and was equally unconcerned. "I think you're going to be a great man."

"You do, huh?"

"Yes, I do." She began to peel a banana for dessert. Snuggling closer, she rubbed her cheek on the soft gray silk of his robe. "Now tell me about California."

"Not much to tell."

"Was it hard, burying your grandfather?"

"No, it was easy." He looked down at her patient face, her gray-blue eyes gone soft with sympathy. "I wish my mother could've known you, Sara. And you can believe I've never said
that
to another woman." That led her to a digression. "You've had lots of women, haven't you?" He stroked his mustache, stalling. "Sweetheart—"

"It's all right, I don't—" She gave a little laugh. "I was going to say I don't mind, but that wouldn't be quite true." He kept quiet.

"How is Constance?" she asked, forcing the words out, hating herself for them. "I don't see her anymore."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

He rolled onto his hip, facing her. "Because I'm in love with someone else." She touched his face. "Did you used to be in love with her?"

"No." He turned his head to kiss her hand. "I have known a few other women, Sara. I liked them all. I didn't love any of them."

"Why?"

He thought. "Because they weren't you."

"Oh, Alex. You don't have to take such good care of me. I won't break if you tell me the truth."

"I am telling the truth. There's no one but you." They reached for each other. She pressed her face to his throat, inhaling his clean scent. Finally she pulled away, flicking her fingers at the wetness on her eyelashes. "Tell me about your mother. When did you lose her?"

"When I was seven."

"It must have been awful." He nodded slowly. She sensed that he wanted to talk, but it was hard for him. "Do you look like her?"

"She said I look just like my father."

"But you never knew him."

"No."

"I never knew mine, either."

Alex put a hand on her stomach, fingering the buttons of his shirt as he spoke. "They met in Oakland, my parents. He was studying engineering at the college—he was going to be an architect—and she had a job as a maid in the boarding house where he lived. She'd just left home and come to the city, she had no money, and it was the only job she could get. She didn't mind it, though; she said the work was easy and the students were nice to her. If you could've seen her, Sara, you'd believe that—she was so pretty. At eighteen, she must have been beautiful."

She smiled, stroking his hand. "And your father? What was he like?"

"Oh, she said he was tall, handsome, brilliant. Charming. She fell in love with him on sight, though, so I had to take that on faith."

Still, she noticed, his voice was proud when he spoke of his father. "What was his name?"

"Brian McKie."

"Oh. So she named you—"

"I was Alexander Holyfield until the day I ran away from home. Then I took his name. They loved each other—he'd have married her if he'd lived, and then it would've been mine legally." He paused, then said bitterly, "But I'd have taken 'Smith' or 'Jones' or 'Rappaport' by then. I didn't want anything that had ever belonged to Matthew Holyfield."

"Why, Alex? What did he do to you?"

Keeping her hand, he shifted onto his back again. "You don't need to know this, Sara."

"I'd like to, though. What did he do that you can't forgive?"

Habit, not desire, prevented him from telling her, he realized. His past shamed him; he kept it a secret. Until Sara, he'd never been tempted to reveal it to anyone. "It wasn't just me," he said carefully, feeling his way. "If it had been, I could've stood it, because I was a tough little beggar. It was what he did to my mother and my grandmother. And a lot of other people in his congregation."

"His congregation? He was a minister?"

"Self-appointed. 'Preacher' is a better word—'minister' sounds too much like he cared about people. He didn't. He took their faith and used it to set himself up as their judge, their conscience. There was nothing he liked better than a sinner he could save. His specialty was leaping on some poor bastard who'd made the mistake of confiding in him, standing him up in front of the whole congregation of Blessed Brethren—that's what he called his church—and making him confess his pitiful 'sins.' But when you finished, you weren't forgiven, you were just humiliated. Then he was satisfied. There wasn't any charity in his heart, only meanness." She'd heard the change in pronouns. "Did he do that to you—make you confess?"

"Sure. I was a terrible sinner. I was up there almost every Sunday, baring my wicked soul." She shuddered; she could think of few crimes uglier than humiliating a child.

"Being a child of sin, I was doomed from the start—my vicious ways were only what you'd expect from a boy conceived in lust and born of a harlot. That's what he called his own daughter, Sara, every day until she died."

"Why did she stay there?"

"She had nowhere else to go. She didn't know she was pregnant until after my father burned to death in a fire in his boardinghouse. His people were all dead. She had no money, no skills, not much education. All she had was me. So she went back home and let my grandfather abuse her for the last seven years of her life, for my sake."

Her arms tightened around him. He put his fingers in her hair, gently massaging her scalp. "My mother's death left a big hole in Matthew's life. My grandmother didn't have any fight in her by then, so she was no good to him. That left me. Satan's spawn."

He stopped. In dread, Sara finally asked, "What did he do?"

"He believed in two roots of all evil, not one—money
and
sex. That made poverty and absolute chastity the highest moral goals. And I'll say this for him, he wasn't a hypocrite—he practiced what he preached. In our house, that meant there wasn't enough to eat, among other things."

"What other things?"

"Stupid, grinding poverty that served no purpose but to degrade us. I wasn't allowed to have shoes. The house could never be heated. My grandmother was fifty years old, and he wouldn't let her have a
coat
. God put us in California; the sun and the earth's bounty were His blessing. If you wanted more, you were selfish and ungrateful and you'd burn in hell for it."

She knew there was more; she could even guess what it was. His hand, tangled in her hair, had turned into a fist; if she moved her head, he would hurt her. Slowly, gently, she disengaged his fingers, then kissed them one by one. "Did he hurt you?"

After a long time, he said, "Yeah."

"Tell me."

"Why?"

She waited, as tense now as he.

With a defeated sigh, he told her. "I got a beating almost every day from the time I was seven years old. Usually he used his hands. He was a big, strong son of a bitch. I was faster, though, sol could outrun him. I'd sleep in the fields or hide in the barn for a night or two, but in the end I'd always have to go back. And he was always waiting. He never forgot anything."

"Alex," she whispered, horrified.

"If I'd been really wicked, he used a strap. My grandmother never tried to stop him. I think my mother would have. When I was sixteen, I fell in love with a girl named Shelly. She lived in Salinas; her father ran the livery. We used to sneak off to this place called Deep Creek as often as we could. It started out innocently, nothing but holding hands and a few kisses. But before long we were making love. I guess we seduced each other. It was—magic, something I'd never felt. Not just the sex, either. The cherishing. The caring. It was as if she was healing me."

"And then?"

"Salinas is a small town. No secrets. My grandfather found out." Suddenly he had no stomach for going on with this story. "I ran away that night," he finished, skipping the worst, his voice clipped. "If I hadn't, he'd have killed me, beaten me to death. Or I'd have killed him. I never went back. Once I wrote to my grandmother, but there was no answer. I found out that she died about a year later."

Aching, Sara lay still, wondering what words she could possibly say that would comfort him. "Perhaps he was unbalanced, Alex, his mind—"

"I don't care about that," he said harshly, sitting up and turning away from her. "Do you think that changes anything, whether or not he was deranged? I don't give a damn. It makes no difference to me, understand?"

"I understand that you're not ready to forgive him."

"No, and I'll never be. I haven't told you half—a
quarter
of what he did. He's rotting in hell now, there's not a doubt in my mind, and he deserves it." He stood up, cursing violently. "Son of a bitch, he can still do this to me. Christ, I wish I could let it go." He turned back. "Sara, I'm sorry. How the hell did I get started on this?"

"Let's go for a walk."

"What?"

"Do you want to?"

"Now?" She threw the sheet off and got up. "Why not?"

A lovers' moon coasted high in the blue night sky, racing the clouds, raining ghostly showers on the sea and the sandy beach. Low tide sucked monotonously at the rubble of the surf, then hurled it back shoreward with a violent slap again and again, incessantly. Sara leaned back against Alex's chest and pulled his arms tighter around her. The salt breeze was steady but warm, a late-summer gift. "I wish we lived here. You and Michael and I. I wish."

He wished it, too. He rested his chin on top of her head, blind to the moon on the water and the crashing waves.
Leave him, Sara
. He almost said it out loud. But that would lead to an argument he didn't want to, have, not yet. "I was thinking of you and Michael, how different you are from my mother and me. I was all she had—like you and Michael—but you're stronger than she was. And Michael's a bright, happy boy. Open and full of life."

"I hope he's happy." But he was too sensitive, too much like her. She was afraid her melancholy would infect him.

"My mother was miserable. And I was angry all the time, especially after she died. Sullen and rebellious, closed up. Ben never hits Michael, does he, Sara?"

"No, he never hits Michael. But Michael never gives him any reason. Michael
loves
him, and that baffles Ben, I think. He's impatient with his frailty and his ill health because they frighten him, and when he's frightened he can become aggressive. Michael's a sort of pale mystery to him, I think. He looks more English than American, and that irritates—" She broke off when he turned her around forcefully and gripped her shoulders hard. "Alex, what—?"

He'd heard nothing after, "No, he never hits Michael," because the odd inflection froze his blood. "Does he hit you, Sara? Does he?" He gave her an urgent shake when she didn't answer. "
Tell me
."

She pulled his hands away and stepped back. "Alex," she said as calmly as she could, "we're lovers for now, for this night. But you can't have my past or my future. I'd give anything to change that, but I can't. So don't ask me such questions—that part of my life isn't for you, isn't for us. Please." She turned from him and started to walk. He grabbed her back after two steps. "My God. He does, doesn't he?"

"No."

"You're lying."

"No." She wrenched away again. He was so upset, so close to violence himself, that a shrill blare of alarm sounded in her brain. "I'm not lying. You misunderstood what I said—I'm sorry! Some things are worse than hitting—oldness, absolute withdrawal. Other things. Insensitivity beyond a certain point is a kind of sadism. I have a bad marriage, Ben and I don't suit"—the understatement made her laugh—"but he doesn't hurt me physically, I swear."

"Are you telling me the truth?"

"Yes. Alex, I would tell you if he did."

"Would you?"

"Yes." She waited, feeling the battle he was waging between what he feared and what he wanted to believe. "It's true, I swear," she said again. She put her arms around his waist and drew him close. "What kind of woman do you think I am? I would never allow Ben to hurt me. Believe it, Alex." She felt the tension draining out of him as his hands came up to hold her.
Forgive me
, she begged in silence. But she didn't regret the lie.

He sighed with relief, and an odd kind of weariness. "Why did you marry him, Sara?"

She hid a sad smile against his shoulder. "I was wondering when you would finally ask me." She took his hand and they started to walk again, bare feet sinking deep in the soft sand. "Don't you want to tell me?"

"It's nothing I'm proud of" She put her head back to stare up at the black sky. "But I suppose I've paid for it enough by now that there's no point in still feeling ashamed."

He waited.

"I was eighteen when we met. I'd been out of school for a year, living with my mother in our decaying mansion in the Blackdown Hills. She was a hopeless drunk by then, and it was my job to take care of her. I can't describe to you what it was like. There was literally nothing to hope for; I lived closer to despair in that year than at any other time in my life, before or since." That was the truth, because as wretched as the years with Ben had been, at least she'd always had Michael.

"So Ben came along and saved you," Alex guessed.

"There were moments when I thought of it like that. Not for long, but in the beginning."

"How did you meet?"

"It seemed like chance to me; later I learned it had all been rather carefully arranged. My best chum from school had taken pity and invited me up to London for her coming-out. It was my first debutante ball—but not Ben's, I found out. In fact, he'd already had marriage proposals turned down by two young titled ladies. The season was ending; desperation was setting in. He saw me as his last chance."

"He
told
you all this?"

"Later, yes. Of course, now it seems all of a piece, but at the time the coldbloodedness of it stunned me. He'd been planning it for ages, he and his protégée."

"Protégée?"

"Yes—a fancy word for mistress. She was a widow named Mrs. Russell—Minnie. He actually introduced us once."

Alex swore.

"Ben was incredibly wealthy by the time he was twenty-five. He started out in the Chicago stockyards, prodding cattle along a chute to their deaths. Sometime you must ask him to tell you about the skull-smashing device he invented to speed things along. Anyway, he had everything he'd ever dreamed of except for one thing—social respectability. He wanted to be allowed into the elite. Minnie told him how to do it—take an aristocratic wife. Her name and his money, she assured him, would open all the doors of the Fifth Avenue mansions that had been closed to him before. She'd been around the block, as Ben would say, but she must have been nearly as naive as he was to think it would be that easy. But he swallowed it whole, and went off to England to buy himself a bride. He'd decided to limit the search to Great Britain," she added as an aside, "because he couldn't stand foreigners, and if he had to marry one he at least wanted one who spoke English."

"And he's
telling
you all of this."

"Yes, I've told you. So he found me. You can believe that I was perfect. A duchess's daughter, shy and biddable, reasonably well-educated. And
refined
—that was the great thing—as only sheltered English girls can be." She laughed softly. "I must have seemed like a creature from another planet to him. At first he couldn't even understand me when I spoke. I put him on his best behavior with my intimidating foreignness and my strange formality. Can you believe he thought I was sophisticated? We spoke at cross purposes, neither of us understanding the other. Attributing qualities to each other we wanted to find but which, as we would learn later, didn't exist at all. We were abysmally, categorically mismatched."

"What did you like about him?"

"Oh, Alex." She leaned against his shoulder. "I was so young. And so ignorant. I saw his stubbornness as drive. I saw his bullying and intolerance as energy. He was an American, and that made him foreign and exciting, a little wild. A man on the frontier. Oh, I don't know, I don't know. Maybe it was our complete oppositeness that appealed to me, if only for a little while—weeks, really."

They had reached the rocky end of the beach, where a tumble of sea boulders blocked the way between the woods and the water. They found a flat, dry rock away from the outrushing tide and sat down.

"He came to Somerset almost immediately after we met. I don't think I invited him; maybe my mother did. I can't remember that part. Anyway, he made a bargain with her with amazing speed. He offered her fifty thousand pounds right away, a sort of down payment on me, and then ten thousand a year for the rest of her life."

Alex had heard the "down payment" was twenty thousand; a part of him was glad she hadn't come so cheap. He took her hand and held it in both of his, hearing the pain underneath the cynicism in her voice.

"It was a fortune to her, a pittance to him. She told me to many him. So I did. And part of the reason was to get away from her." She paused, then sank against him, resting. He pulled her closer, not speaking.

"We were married in New York," she resumed finally. "The honeymoon was short; in fact, it really ended at the wedding ceremony, when most of the socialites he and Minnie had invited declined to attend. That was the first inkling he had that his strategy for self-advancement might have a flaw. Naturally he blamed me. We went to Italy after the wedding, Florence and Rome. That's where a lot of my girlish questions finally got answered. No, my husband didn't love me. No, I didn't love him. Our marriage was a business deal, and we'd both only begun to suspect how disastrous the deal was going to turn out to be."

"Did you become pregnant with Michael immediately?"

"Very nearly. Thank God—I truly think Michael saved me from going mad. But first there were those awful months in New York, just after we returned from our wedding trip. A few invitations turned up, but they were from parvenues Ben had never thought of cultivating anyway, social climbers no higher on the ladder than he was. So he told me to be more
aggressive
. He ordered me—his eighteen-year-old bride, friendless in a strange country—to knock on the doors of the Drexels and the Whitneys and leave cards, issue invitations to the Bradley Martins for dinner and tea, ask Mrs. Henry Phipps to play bridge or to ride with me in Central Park."

Alex rested his temple against hers. "Poor Sara."

"Yes. It was dreadful. And needless to say, it was all for nothing. When I'd confess, in tears, the snubs I'd endured, it made him furious. He honestly couldn't understand where he'd gone wrong. He'd bought and paid for an aristocratic Englishwoman, by God, so it must be
my
fault, something I was doing on purpose to sabotage him. He…"

"Punished you," Alex guessed, grim-faced.

"We punished each other. We both felt angry and cheated, and so we waged war in our separate ways. Sometimes I'd start a fight with him on purpose, because it was the only thing that made me feel alive, if only with bitterness. I was a bad wife—am a bad wife."

"Oh, please."

"It's true, I'm most of the things he calls me—cold and unfeminine, selfish, supercilious—"

"You're none of those things, don't be an idiot."

"You love me—you don't know."

"I know because I love you."

She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. She didn't want to talk about Ben anymore. Alex didn't either. He slipped his hands inside her robe—his robe, which she wore with her drawers over his shirt: a fascinating ensemble. The robe came untied and she wrapped it around his shoulders, enveloping him and her in its big gray wings. "If you knew what this is like for me, Alex, my love, my love."

"I do know."

"No, you couldn't. To tell you all of that—to be with you here, to have the freedom to touch you like this—" Stupidly, she started to cry.

Nuzzling her wind-tangled hair aside, he put his lips on her tight, aching throat, soothing her, murmuring to her. She felt the blossoming of a bittersweet happiness inside. His hands slid to the sides of her breasts; his mouth burned where he kissed her. Everything changed, so quickly she could hardly follow her body's swift, unexpected combustion. "You make me lose my mind," she observed wonderingly. "I mean—literally—" It tapered away to nothing, just as she'd predicted, and she lost the power to speak words more rational than, "Alex, please, yes, oh God—" Her trembling arms circled his neck, still sheltering them with his robe; under it, he opened the buttons on her shirt and uncovered her breasts. She arched up, gasping, and pressed closer. Lifting her knee, she draped it over one of his in blatant, wanton invitation, hazily amazed at herself.