Maggy's Child (8 page)

“You want me to get out the Epsom salts?” Louella asked with concern, pausing on her way back into the kitchen.

“No, I’ll take care of it. It’s not that bad, really.” Maggy had a genuine smile for the white-uniformed black woman. Louella was thin and small, with graying hair that she wore secured in a severe bun at her nape. Though she was nearing sixty, she had lost none of her deft quickness or her way with a cooking pot. She and her husband Herd had been with the Forrests for forty years, and as Maggy had learned from association with her neighbors’ help, they could rightly be expected to be more exclusively clannish than members of the family. But even when Maggy had come to Windermere as a bride, knowing nothing of how to conduct herself in a household such as this and as much out of place as a monkey in a tearoom, Louella and Herd had been kind to her. Maggy possessed a soft spot for the couple as a result.

“There’s coffee and doughnuts in the kitchen,” Louella told her before disappearing through the French doors.

With a wave for the others, Maggy followed Louella inside, again turned down an offer of a basin of Epsom salts in which to soak her wrist, and escaped from the kitchen. Breakfast could wait until she came down again. At the moment, she feared that anything she swallowed would promptly come back up.

David was not in his room, and she wondered if Tipton had already driven him to his lesson. She had wanted to talk to him before he played in the tournament, but supposed it would have to wait until later. Anyway, there was nothing she could say that would erase the intensity of David’s need to please Lyle, or the pain he would feel if he didn’t succeed. No matter what David did, or how well he did it, Lyle always wanted more from him. If the boy brought home an “A” on a test, Lyle would demand to know why it wasn’t an “A-plus.”

If there had been any way to do it, Maggy would have packed up her child and run away right then and there. But it was impossible, of course, quite apart from the fact that at the moment David was nowhere to be found. Her son would fight her every step of the way if she tried to take him from the father he idolized—and Lyle would find them, sooner or later. Maggy had no doubt at all about that. And then, one way or another, she might lose David for good.

Defeated, she went to her room and shut and locked the door behind her. In her bathroom she swallowed two aspirin, then soaked a towel in cold water and wrapped it around her swollen wrist. After several such applications, it felt a little better. The first-aid kit in her linen closet contained an elastic bandage. She bound her wrist tightly with it, secured the little clips, and determinedly ignored the heated throbbing. She was heading toward her dressing room to choose an outfit for the day—anything but the yellow linen—when she saw the clumsily wrapped package on her bed.

It was from David. She knew it even before she saw the card on which he had scrawled “Happy Birthday” and his name. As she pulled the last of the gaily decorated paper away, and the gift itself was revealed to her view, her hands stilled of their own accord. During that first moment of recognition, even her breathing suspended.

It was a small, framed watercolor of herself and David
and Lyle, sitting outdoors on a bench in the rose garden, arms around each other, smiling, looking the very epitome of the happy family they had never been. It captured the three of them very credibly, feature for feature, except for the joy in their expressions and the pose which must have sprung from somewhere deep in the artist’s heart.

For David had painted it, David with his wonderful talent that Lyle ridiculed as “sissy.”

Maggy looked at the painting for a moment longer, then abruptly sat down on the edge of her bed, buried her face in her hands, and wept.

M
aggy viewed the afternoon and evening as something to be gotten through. Her wrist ached, but the pain was lessening to the point where, if she did not move her arm too rapidly, she could more or less ignore it. As sprains went, it was not so bad, as she knew from bitter experience. A few days, a little home treatment, and it would heal. And once again no one would ever know that Lyle Forrest was the kind of man who abused his wife.

The golf course at the Club was lush and green, meticulously maintained by dedicated staff and zealously used by avid members. The Club had a name, of course—Willow Creek Country Club—but to its members it was simply the Club. If the implication was that there was no other country club in town, then that was fine. To the elite of Louisville, there wasn’t. The Club did not even have to rely on its enormous initiation fee to keep out the hoi polloi. One had to be invited to join, seconded, vetted, and approved by all the members. Even one “no” vote was enough to derail an application. Not that the Forrests had ever had to do anything so embarrassing as petition for membership. They had belonged to the Club from its inception in the last century. The membership was handed down from generation to generation, world without end.

To Lyle’s oft-expressed disgust, Maggy did not like golf, was terrible at it, and, after a disastrous attempt to learn at
the beginning of her marriage to please her husband, never played. Still, she would have enjoyed standing in the sparkling sunlight drinking in the fresh, crisp spring air along with the other mothers and wives and miscellaneous family members and friends who formed the gallery, if she hadn’t known how excruciating the experience was for David. Waiting silently by the seventeenth hole, she bit her lip as her husband scowled at her son when David’s bungled putt dropped them down to sixth place.

David retrieved his ball, looked up, and met his father’s gaze. Though no one who didn’t
know
would have noticed anything out of line in Lyle’s expression, David did know and his face paled. Observing impotently from the sidelines, Maggy thought that there was no one in the world she hated as she hated Lyle at that moment. The worst part was that there was absolutely nothing she could do to help her son. Watching Lyle’s tall, spare body twist as he expertly hit the ball while David looked on with misery in his eyes, Maggy felt a rush of malevolence so intense that she almost vibrated with it. For an instant, just an instant, she wished her husband dead. All of her and David’s troubles would be over.…

“Good job!” Standing beside her, Mary Gibbons, whose husband and youngest son were currently in tenth place, flashed Maggy a congratulatory thumbs-up sign as Lyle’s ball rolled neatly into the hole.

“Thanks.” Maggy smiled with false pleasure in her husband’s accomplishment and turned her attention back to the game. David’s next drive was good, long and straight and hard. Maggy let out a silent sigh of relief. Lyle’s, of course, was textbook perfect. Trooping over to the eighteenth hole after them, Maggy gritted her teeth and wished that Lyle would miss his next putt as hard as she had ever wished for anything in her life.

Mary Gibbons’s son took six strokes where he should have needed no more than two for par. John Gibbons
shook his head in playful reproof at his son, who grinned back at him without repentance.

“Actually, Adam’s getting a lot better,” Mary confided in a comfortable aside to Maggy. “Anyway, he enjoys playing, and that’s what’s important to John and me.”

Maggy managed to murmur an appropriate reply while never taking her eyes from the game. It was Lyle’s turn. His ball was perhaps thirty feet from the hole, and his eyes gleamed with concentration as he plotted the route his putt would take.

Ridiculous as it might be, Maggy couldn’t help herself. She focused on him, staring at him so hard that he should have felt her eyes drilling through him, willing him to miss, miss, miss.…

Lyle positioned himself, swung—and the ball went cleanly into the hole. A cheer went up from the spectators. Maggy had to swallow a curse. She must have been the only one on the whole course who begrudged him his triumph as Lyle fished his ball out of the hole and held it high in the air, a wide grin splitting his face.

David played next. His handsome young face was grim with determination as he positioned himself over the ball. As fervently as she had tried to derail Lyle, Maggy did her best to mentally aid David, willing his ball to go into the hole with all her might.
Please, please, please …

David swung, the ball rolled toward the hole—and at the last moment it did a neat little fishhook to the left as the putt missed by inches. A sympathetic groan arose from the gallery.

So much for psychic power. Despite
Tia
Gloria’s fervent assurances to the contrary, Maggy clearly did not possess any. Maggy watched Lyle catch David’s gaze again and felt her fists clench.

How could he be so cruel to the son he claimed to love?

When the tournament was over, David and Lyle took seventh place. Lyle accepted the ribbon for participating,
which was all they won, with a grin and an arm thrown around David’s shoulders. But Maggy knew, and knew David knew, that Lyle’s good humor was strictly for show. David looked miserable, and Maggy’s heart ached for him. She knew how hard David had tried, and how bad he felt about not having been as good as Lyle wanted him to be. She knew also about the coldness Lyle would display toward his son for weeks after this, about the endless hours of golf lessons David would have to endure, about the lectures.

She had been there herself, in the early months of her marriage, when Lyle had been determined to mold her into the kind of wife he wanted and Maggy had done everything in her power to please him, to make her marriage work. Only then, as now, there was no pleasing Lyle. No one on earth was that perfect.

An hour later the children were whooping and playing on the rolling grass in front of the golf course. The adults were sitting in cushioned wrought-iron chairs on the Club’s patio and milling around the bar inside, in the informal dining room. Most of them were starting on their third round of drinks.

Maggy, who had stuck to iced tea as she always did, finally managed to excuse herself, ostensibly to visit the ladies’ room but really to find David. Lyle had joined him at the Club that morning for a practice round before the tournament, so she had never gotten the opportunity to say what she had wanted to say to him about winning and losing and how unimportant both were in the whole scheme of life. Now all she could offer her son was comfort, and perspective. Losing a golf tournament was not the end of the world.

After a lengthy search, Maggy found him. David was alone, sitting disconsolately on the grass near the parking lot, his back up against the huge iron incinerator that held the Club’s trash, his arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees. The imposing facade of the enormous turn-of-the-century
brick mansion that had been remodeled into the clubhouse forty years before made an incongruous background for the homely incinerator, which at the moment was belching smelly gray feathers of smoke.

David looked so forlorn that he broke her heart.

“Hi,” Maggy said, sitting down beside him without a second thought for the noxious odor or the grass stains that might soon adorn her cream silk shorts. Worn with a matching blazer and a white silk T-shirt, the outfit was as fragile as it was pretty. It was not made for sitting on the grass beside a stinking, smoking incinerator with one’s arms around one’s knees—but Maggy sat anyway, copying David’s posture with long-legged grace.

David glanced sideways at her. There were faint telltale stains on his cheeks and a certain puffiness around his eyes that told her he had been crying. It was something he rarely did anymore—at eleven he considered himself too old for tears—and the evidence that he had succumbed to his emotions in a way he despised made her ache inside. She longed to put her arms around him—but hugged her knees and smiled at him instead.

“What do you want?” David’s greeting was truculent.

“To say ‘thank you’ for my birthday present. It’s wonderful, and I love it.”

Another sidelong glance, less hostile this time. “Dad won’t like it. He says only sissies paint.”

Maggy hesitated, though it was an effort to bite back the words that instinctively bubbled to her tongue. It was always hard to know where to draw the line at criticizing Lyle to David. If she went too far, David would respond by leaping to his father’s defense, yet she could not let Lyle’s views go completely unchallenged.

At last she said in a mild tone, “Dad’s not always right about everything, you know, David.”

The glance he cast her this time was fierce. “He’s right about that. I am a sissy! I can’t even play golf right!”

So there they reached the heart of his current misery
without any circuitous verbal steering on her part. Maggy abandoned the tactful opening she had planned, and groped for the words she needed.

“You played very well. You and Dad came in seventh, after all, out of twenty. That’s pretty good.”

“Pretty good’s not good enough! Dad said we would have won if I hadn’t screwed up!”

It was all Maggy could do not to give vent to what she thought of Lyle for that, but she bit back the words. “You didn’t screw up, David. You missed a putt. It happens to golfers all the time, even the great ones. Believe me, your
father
has even missed putts. It’s part of the game.”