Beloved Stranger (4 page)

“It was a foolish quarrel,” Ricardo was saying gravely. “And it was very wrong of Susan not to have contacted me when she knew she was to have a child.” He gave her a reproachful look and sipped his lemonade. “But now we are reconciled and all will be well.” He looked serenely at Susan’s mother out of large dark eyes. “May I have some more lemonade? It’s very good.”

“Of course.” Mrs. Morgan moved to rise but Susan forestalled her.

“I’ll get it, Mother,” she said hastily, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. When she returned, after a rather longer time than was necessary, Ricardo and her mother were talking comfortably about South America. Both Susan’s parents had been anthropologists and when she was a child they had periodically disappeared for stretches of a year at a time into the jungles of the Amazon.

“I have never been to the Brazilian jungle,” Ricardo said as Susan settled down again into her chair. He had accepted his drink with a perfunctory smile. He’s used to being waited on, she thought, as she sat back and prepared to listen.

The discussion was pleasant and civilized, and from the way her mother looked at him, Susan realized that Ricardo knew what he was talking about. When they left he gave Mrs. Morgan a smile that visibly moved her. Susan was beginning to suspect that he got a lot of mileage out of that beguiling grin.

“Mother liked Ricardo,” she wrote in her journal that evening. She had been keeping it ever since she was sixteen, as a way of sifting through, assimilating and comprehending the raw material of her life. And life for Susan, daughter of two educated and brilliant super-achievers, had never been easy. She loved her parents dearly, she had admired and adored her elder sister Sara, but she was different from the rest of the family, slower, more introspective, more deeply feeling. The journal had become essential to the daily routine of her life.

She looked now at the sentence she had written and then added, “and what is perhaps more surprising, she was impressed by him. There is an extraordinary quality about him that goes beyond his looks. He simply sat there on our porch, drinking lemonade and wearing perfectly ordinary-looking clothes, and one somehow had the impression that he was conferring an honor on us by his very presence.” She frowned a little as she thought. “It’s not that he’s conceited,” she wrote then. “He’s not. But he has—perhaps presence is the best word for it. Whatever it is, it did a job on Mother. She’s coming to the wedding and she never even objected when she learned her Protestant Yankee daughter was going to be married by a Catholic priest. I suppose the fact that said Protestant daughter is also seven months pregnant had a lot to do with her compliance.”

Susan put down her pen and looked out the window of her bedroom. The stars were very bright in the moonless sky. Ricardo was playing a night game and wouldn’t be home until after midnight. She thought now that it was odd she hadn’t thought of staying with her mother until the wedding. Her mother hadn’t suggested it either. They had both simply fallen in behind Ricardo like good soldiers, nodding yes to whatever he suggested.

Extraordinary, she thought, and yawned. She was very tired. She looked one more time at her diary entry and then closed the book. She got into the wide bed in the big bedroom Ricardo had given to her and tried to get comfortable. He hadn’t even suggested that she share his room. The baby kicked, hard, and Susan smiled ruefully. In her present condition she was scarcely alluring, she thought. And then she fell asleep.

The wedding went very smoothly and afterward Ricardo took everyone out to lunch in a very expensive Greenwich restaurant. Then Joe Hutchinson, Maggie and Mrs. Morgan left and the new Mr. and Mrs. Montoya returned home. However, Ricardo only stopped long enough to drop Susan and change clothes. The Yankees were playing a twilight double header that evening at six. Ricardo had to be at the stadium by five. “Don’t wait up for me,” he told her pleasantly as he dropped a kiss on her cheek. “I’ll be late.”

“All right.” She stood at the door as he walked toward the Mercedes he had left parked in the circular drive in front of the house. “Good luck!” she called, and he gave her a grin before he slid in behind the wheel.

Susan closed the door and slowly walked back to the living room. Maria, the Colombian maid who did the cooking and cleaning for Ricardo, had been given the afternoon off in honor of the wedding, and Susan was alone. She stood silently in the middle of the living room and stared at the lovely marble fireplace. This was “home.” It didn’t feel like home, was nothing at all like the comfortable old clapboard house she had grown up in, but she was going to have to grow accustomed to it, she told herself firmly. She looked carefully around the large, high-ceilinged room. It was lovely, she admitted. The molding and wainscoting were beautiful, as was the shining wood floor. It just was far more elegant than what she was accustomed to. Far more rich.

Ricardo’s home was a stately Georgian colonial, built of brick and slate and set on a wooded couple of acres in north Stamford. He had bought it two years ago, he told her when she first arrived home with him, and his mother had furnished it for him. The furniture was not the style Susan would have chosen, but she found herself liking the carved Spanish pieces very much.

Perhaps it was a good sign: she would have something in common with the mother-in-law she had yet to meet. Ricardo’s mother had lived in Bogota since his father’s death and came north only once or twice a year to visit her son. Ricardo also had two sisters, both quite a bit older than he, and both married and living in Bogota. “When the season’s over we’ll go visit them,” he had told her casually.

“Ricardo, the baby is due in October,” she protested.

“We’ll go for Christmas, then, and bring him along. My mother will be thrilled. You know how women are about babies.”

It was not a visit that Susan looked forward to. Ricardo’s mother might be thrilled to see the baby, but Susan very much doubted if she’d be thrilled to see the bride her son had so hastily wedded.

Oh well, she thought, as she walked slowly about the downstairs rooms of her new home, no use borrowing trouble. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. She passed through the large dining room, which also boasted a marble fireplace, and into the two rooms she was most familiar with: the breakfast room, where they ate their meals, and the family room with its lovely french doors leading out to the slate patio. “It’s scarcely what one would call a starter home,” she said out loud with a laugh of real amusement.

There was only one room on the first floor that she hadn’t been in and that was the study. She walked in now and looked around slowly. The room was paneled and lined with bookshelves. Susan went over to one wall and looked at the titles; they were almost exclusively nonfiction. There were a number of books, both in Spanish and English, about Latin American politics. There were quite a lot of books on sports; not just baseball but soccer, tennis, golf and skiing. There was an Encyclopedia Americana and a full set of Sherlock Holmes. There was a small assortment of best-selling thriller-type novels. My God, thought Susan. There is so much I don’t know about him. She collapsed heavily into a comfortable leather armchair and stared at a photograph of Ricardo that was hanging on the wall. It looked as if it were a newspaper photo that had been blown up and framed. It showed what was clearly a moment of victory; the three men in the picture were all laughing and one of them was pouring a bottle of champagne over Ricardo’s head. His face, dark, vibrant, filled with triumph, was the dominant point of the photograph. Susan looked at that thoroughly male picture and inwardly she quaked.

How on earth were they going to build a marriage, she thought almost despairingly. If she had searched the earth over, it would have been impossible for her to find a person so utterly opposite to her. She was quiet and introspective, reserved and shy. That night in the blizzard had been completely out of character for her.

She thought of that night now and wondered with deep bewilderment how she had ever come to behave as she had. Over the last months it had become only a hazy memory, a dizzy recollection of warmth and smoke and the deep timbre of a man’s voice. Her body heavy now with child, her senses dulled by advanced pregnancy, she couldn’t begin to understand what had possessed her.

It was because of that night, however, that she was here, in the home of Ricardo Montoya, a man whose way of thinking and looking and relating to things was completely opposed to hers. It was frightening.

She left the library and went upstairs. There were five bedrooms on the second floor, each with its own bathroom. Susan had been using the one next to Ricardo’s and now she hesitated and went into the empty room that belonged to her husband. She had peeked into it swiftly during the tour of the house he took her on when first she arrived, but now she looked around more carefully.

It was a thoroughly masculine room, with large oak furniture and colorful woven material on the bed and at the windows. An oil painting hung on the wall facing the bed, a picture of a house nestled among high, green mountains and very blue sky.

There was a clutter of loose change and papers on the dresser, and on the floor, in front of the closet, lay the suit that Ricardo had just taken off. His socks and shoes were on the floor in front of the big upholstered chair. Susan, who was innately tidy, bent awkwardly to pick up the clothes. They were all creased from lying in a heap. He might have hung them up, she thought irritably. Now they would have to be sent out to the cleaners. She folded the clothes neatly and laid them on the bed. There was a book on the night table and she went to look at it. Report on El Salvador, she read. She picked it up, read the cover and then replaced it on the table. She looked one more time around the large, sunny room and then went next door to her own bedroom.

There was a large mirror hanging over the dresser in this room and Susan walked over to look in it.

“Some bride,” she said ironically as she regarded her own reflection.

She actually looked very nice. Her skin had tanned to a pale honey from sitting out in Elaine’s small yard and her shimmering light brown hair framed a face that had filled out a little with imminent motherhood. She looked, Susan thought, disgustingly healthy. But not even the expensive pale pink suit her mother had bought her could disguise her advanced pregnancy.

Susan kicked off her shoes and sighed with relief to stand barefoot again. She felt so small in comparison to Ricardo that she had bought much higher heels than she was accustomed to wearing. She took off her suit and hung it carefully in the closet. Then, wearing only her slip, she went over to the bed and lay down. There was a lovely breeze coming in the open window and she suddenly felt very tired. In two minutes, Susan was asleep.

When she awoke it was dark and she was feeling hungry. She showered, put on a smocked sun dress and thongs and went downstairs to the kitchen. She made herself a sandwich and then went into the family room and switched on the television. She looked at her watch. It was almost nine o’clock. The second game of the doubleheader should still be on.

It was the first time Susan had ever watched Ricardo play. Baseball had not been a sport anyone in her family ever watched and she was entirely unfamiliar with the routine of major league ball. She knew the basic rules of the game, had learned them almost by osmosis as does every American child, but the names and the tactics and the teams and the rivalries—all of these had remained obscure. She had refrained scrupulously from watching Ricardo before now; it had been almost a superstition that she should not allow him to come even that close to her. But now she sat back, munched her sandwich and prepared to watch.

It took her awhile to sort out what was happening. It took her awhile as well to sort out the strange feeling she had whenever Ricardo appeared on the screen, swinging a bat, looking relaxed and confident and surprisingly graceful.

“Montoya’s the key to the pennant,” the announcer was saying. “As long as he stays healthy, the Yankees are practically unbeatable.”

“It’s his consistency that’s so amazing,” another voice put in. “Day in, day out, always the same. It’s pulled the club together, that evenness, that reliability.”

“Yep. George was saying the other day that he doesn’t grudge Rick a penny of what he’s paying him.”

The pitcher was peering in at the plate now and then began his windup. The ball was released and Susan watched in horror as Ricardo flung himself to the ground. She pressed her hand to her stomach and held her breath as he climbed slowly to his feet. He signaled to the bench that he was all right and began to dust his clothes. The entire stadium was roaring its disapproval at the pitcher. Ricardo looked perfectly calm.

“Carter doesn’t want Rick to crowd the plate,” commented the announcer. “He’s moved him back a step with that pitch.”

The pitcher went into his windup once more. Ricardo swung, a smooth, almost elegant motion, and there was the sound of a sharp crack.

“That’s it!” the announcer cried jubilantly. “That one’s gone.” Ricardo began to jog around the bases, seemingly oblivious to the uproar of hysteria that had filled the huge stadium. When he crossed home plate there was a lineup of teammates to meet him. He shook hands, grinning that now familiar irresistible grin, and then he tipped his hat at the crowd. He never once glanced at Ben Carter, who was standing on the mound looking extremely unhappy.

“That’ll be the last time Carter tries to brush Montoya back,” the announcer said with a chuckle.

“Rick does have a way about him,” the other voice said. “And now here’s Price. The score is two-nothing, Yankees.”

* * * *

Susan sat through the remainder of the game, becoming increasingly fascinated. It was such an orderly sport, she thought; there was something very satisfying about the precision of all its movements, the way each man functioned individually yet as part of the whole. She watched the way the infield shifted as one to accommodate the different players. She watched the way Joe Hutchinson stepped out of the way to allow Ricardo, the center fielder, to take a high fly ball unimpeded. She watched the swiftness and precision of the Yankee infield effortlessly executing a double play from third to second to first. It was, she thought, an immensely satisfying spectacle. She had always understood the satisfaction of playing a sport. Now for the first time she was beginning to appreciate the pleasures of watching.