The Vineyard Page 12

  She sat still as she watched him. After that first morning, she hadn’t gone outside. It was obvious she rubbed him the wrong way. Bumping into him seemed pointless. Besides, from here she didn’t have to be coy. She could look at him all she wanted.

  She would have five minutes to do it. That’s how long he would stand there drinking his coffee, looking out over his realm. Then he would leave the patio, mingle with the vines on his way to the shed, and be gone from her view. He was definitely a creature of habit.

  Sure enough, at the five-minute mark he shifted his stance in preparation for setting off. This day, though, he didn’t leave. He turned his head slightly, as though he had heard something, and stood listening. In profile, she saw the tumble of hair on his brow, the line of his nose and his chin. Then he turned back all the way and looked straight at her.

  He can’t possibly see me, she thought. But she wasn’t taking any chances. She held her breath, kept her arms around her legs and her chin on her knees, and sat perfectly still. At least, everything voluntary was still. Her heart, though, was beating faster, and there was a thrumming deep inside. Caught with my hand in the cookie jar, she mused, squelching a nervous laugh.

  He can’t possibly see me, she thought again, but it certainly felt like he had. She was trying to figure that one out when he faced forward again and set off to continue his daily ritual.

  Ten

  RAIN BEAT ON THE ROOF of the loft, where Natalie had spread out her photographs. Olivia recognized them as belonging to the very first batch Otis had received, now several months back. She didn’t see her mystery woman. These pictures were from an even earlier time. They were primitive black-and-white shots, most of empty fields and dark buildings. Looking at one of the buildings, Olivia recognized the beginnings of the Great House.

  “You have a good eye,” Natalie remarked when she commented on it, but rather than elaborating as Olivia hoped she would, she simply stood studying the group.

  Olivia followed her lead and stood beside her, doing the same. The pictures were earthy and bleak, drawing her back to the time of the Great Depression. Within minutes, she was newly arrived at Asquonset, there with Natalie’s family on that cold and rainy day in 1930.

  Turning away briefly, Natalie took a snapshot from the credenza. It was the picture of Carl, the springboard to that first distinct memory.

  He was dressed much like he is here, only that day in the rain he wore a brown wool cap and a loose wool jacket. He was standing in the field like he was planted in the ground, looking so much taller and older than me that I should have been terrified. He was a strange person in a strange place. To this day, I don’t know why I didn’t turn and run back to the house. He didn’t smile. But there was something about him … something kind. I needed kindness that day.

  “Are you lost?” he asked in a voice that didn’t sound so old.

  I shook my head.

  “Scared?”

  I shook my head again, then pushed the wet hair off my face.

  “Well, you don’t look happy.”

  I wasn’t. I was cold and wet and lonely. “I want to go home,” I said.

  Carl glanced at the farmhouse. “No one’s stopping you.”

  But that farmhouse wasn’t home to me. It was just a faraway pile of stones. “Home to New York.”

  “I was there once. Don’t care to go back. It’s better here.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s air here. There’s trees and water.”

  “All I see’s rain and mud,” I declared.

  “Know what that mud is?”

  “I do,” I cried, thinking he thought I was a baby. “It’s wet dirt!”

  Carl remained placid. “Only on top. Underneath is what makes things grow. You don’t get soil like this in other places.” He squatted down and pushed a hand through the mud. “If this was packed tight, it wouldn’t be any good. But see? It’s soft. There’s good drainage here. That’s why we can grow what we do.”

  “I don’t want to grow anything.”

  He stood and held his muddy hand out to be washed by the rain. “That’s because you want to be in New York, but you aren’t there. You’re here.”

  “My friends are in New York.”

  “You’ll make friends here.”

  “My school’s in New York.”

  “The one here’s okay.”

  “But I’m not staying! I’m going back to New York!”

  “Did your parents tell you that?”

  No. They hadn’t. As the awfulness of that realization sank in, my eyes filled with tears. Struggling to hold them back, I started to shiver. I felt miserable.

  “Those clothes are all wrong,” Carl scolded in a way that suggested concern far more than criticism. I understood that only in hindsight, however. At the time, I was too young and upset to make the distinction. All I heard was—kindness.

  “You need better things,” he said. “You need pants and real shoes and a jacket like mine.” Before I knew what he was up to, he had taken his jacket off and wrapped it around me.

  I should have been appalled. The contrast between that coarse brown jacket and my soft blue coat was everything I didn’t want. The jacket was old, and it was wet. But it smelled clean, cleaner now than I feared my muddy coat did. And it brought instant warmth.

  “Come on. I’ll take you home.” He set off for the farmhouse, gesturing me along with a hand. It was the same one he had run through the mud. That quickly, the rain had washed it clean.

  “Did you get all those things?” Olivia asked Natalie.

  “All what things?”

  “Pants. Real shoes. A jacket like Carl’s.”

  Natalie lifted one of the pictures from the desk. It showed a group of young boys pulling potatoes from the ground. At least, Olivia had thought they were young boys when she had repaired a fold in the center of the picture. But there was a smugness now on Natalie’s face that made her take a closer look.

  “This is you?” she asked, pointing to one of the boys, who despite wearing the same jeans, shirt, and shoes as the others, suddenly didn’t look like a boy at all.

  Natalie confirmed it and identified each of the others. “Here’s Carl. This is my brother, Brad. Carl and Brad were the same age. These other two boys were the sons of a neighbor. We gave them potatoes and corn in exchange for milk.”

  But Olivia couldn’t take her eyes off the girl. She had already learned that Natalie’s family had lost everything before moving to Asquonset. Knowing it was one thing, though. Accepting it was another. She had spent too long painting Natalie into a life of elegance and ease not to be shocked by what she saw here. “How old were you?”

  “Maybe … seven.”

  “And you worked in the fields?” Olivia would never have imagined it.

  “We all did.”

  “Weren’t there laws against that?”

  Natalie smiled. “Tell it to the family that grows what it eats. Actually, we were among the lucky ones. We didn’t have a mortgage. In the early thirties, farmers’ incomes dropped so far that even those who could feed themselves lost their farms. The price they were getting for their crops was so low that they couldn’t pay their mortgages.” She pointed to the neighbor’s boys. “They lost theirs.”

  “What did they do?”

  “My father bought them out. They worked the dairy for him.”

  “I thought your father was broke.”

  “Compared to our assets in New York, he was, but all things are relative. He bought the farms abutting us for next to nothing.”

  “But where did he get even that?”

  Natalie picked up another of the photographs. It showed Jeremiah Burke sitting on an open wagon. The wagon carried the same barrels that Olivia had seen in the photograph of Carl.

  “Wine?” Olivia guessed, delighted.

  Natalie nodded. She studied the picture.

  Olivia prodded gently. “Wine saw you through the Depression?”

  “We did
n’t make much. We didn’t have the know-how. What you’re seeing here might have been the season’s entire yield, but prices for wine were higher than for anything else we grew. The black market saw to that. If Prohibition did nothing else, it made drinking the thing to do.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of getting caught?”

  Natalie’s eyes filled with pain. “I swear, my father half hoped that he would. He never recovered from the crash. He had natural business instincts, like buying neighboring farmland, but he never got over the guilt or the shame of what had happened in New York. You can’t see it from this picture—well, maybe you can if you look deep into those troubled eyes—but he was a broken man. Once he had been robust and outgoing, but look at how thin he is here. And we did have food. He just had trouble eating it. If he’d been punished for selling wine, he might have felt better.

  “But people weren’t getting caught,” she went on. “The government couldn’t begin to punish all the people breaking the law. The Volstead Act was designed to enforce Prohibition, but there were a ridiculously small number of agents appointed to do it, and an overwhelmingly large number of violators. So my father made his little bit of wine. The proceeds he got from selling it gave us seed money for the future. Literally. Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Our wine became less valuable then—it wasn’t very good, in the final analysis—but my father had a vision. He brought in rootstock from Europe and began planting vinifera varieties.”

  She smiled sadly. “Poor guy. He struck out over and over again. One variety failed, then another and another. He didn’t have much of a green thumb.”

  “But Jeremiah did. Didn’t he help?”

  “Jeremiah grew us potatoes and corn, carrots, beets, and parsnips. Grapes were something else, and we weren’t the only ones having trouble. The Europeans were the experts at growing grapes, but their methods didn’t work as well here. It wasn’t until the sixties that Americans devised their own methods and finally entered the game. My father was gone by then.”

  “How sad.”

  Natalie rested a hip on the edge of the desk. “Yes. He really did start it all. I’m sorry that he didn’t live to see how far we’ve come. Those times when we’ve had everyone here …”

  “Who is everyone?” Olivia asked, given the lead-in. “How large is your family?”

  “Not large. There’s Susanne and Greg and their respective spouses. Susanne and Mark have two children. Both are grown. Neither is married. Melissa is a lawyer, Brad is a business consultant. Greg and Jill don’t have any children yet. I don’t know what they’re waiting for. In my day, we had children younger. But times have changed. Jill isn’t much older than you, so they still have time, by today’s standards. That isn’t to say that I’m not impatient. I’d love to have more grandchildren. But it isn’t my decision to make.” She shot a heaven-help-me glance toward the ceiling. “It could well be that Melissa or Brad will marry and give me great-grandchildren before Greg and Jill get around to it.” Her eyes settled on Olivia. “What about you? Are your parents still living?”

  Olivia shrugged. “Not important.”

  “It is. I like to know about the people who work in my house. Are they alive?”

  “Oh yes,” Olivia said, because she wanted to believe it. She even wanted to believe they were in touch with one another.

  “Where?”

  She dipped into one of her fantasies, such a familiar one that she half believed it was true. “San Diego.” She pictured her father as a career navy man whose frequent relocation had kept him on the go. Now that he was a senior whatever, on the cusp of retirement, he didn’t travel as much. He had a place on the beach in San Diego. For all Olivia knew, Carol might be there right now.

  “Do you have siblings?” Natalie asked.

  Still in the fantasy, Olivia nodded. “Four brothers. They’re navy men, like my dad.”

  Natalie’s eyes lit. “There’s a navy base right here in Newport. Any chance one of them might have business there while you’re here? Alexander was an old friend of the secretary of the navy. I’d be glad to make a call or two.”

  Olivia backpedaled. “Oh no. No need. Thanks so much, but that wouldn’t work. I mean, I’m here because they’re there. We have very different lives.”

  Natalie’s face dropped. “You aren’t close, then?”

  “Well, we are,” Olivia said, because the last thing she wanted was for Natalie to think she didn’t value family if it turned out by some quirk of fate that they were related. So, even when it meant extending the fib, she let the fantasy run. “The thing is, I’m the baby. You only had one older brother, but I have four. They give new meaning to the word ‘protective.’ I was smothered. I couldn’t breathe. They finally agreed to give me space.”

  “But what about Tess? Don’t they want to see her?”

  “They do. We go back now and again.”

  “Ah,” Natalie said.

  Olivia didn’t know what that meant, but she wasn’t waiting to find out. She needed to put distance between herself and the story she’d just told. “I want to know more about this,” she said, taking up another picture from the desk. The children were several years older, on a tractor this time. Brad was on a fender, but Natalie was right up there in the driver’s seat with Carl. She couldn’t have been more than nine or ten and still looked boyish. The two boys were starting to look like men.

  “You said Brad was your only brother. Did you have any sisters?” There hadn’t been any in the car when the family had left New York, but that didn’t mean they weren’t living with another relative.

  Natalie shook her head. “It was just Brad and me.”

  Olivia wasn’t discouraged. She had already decided that the mystery woman was either a cousin or a friend.

  She was about to ask about it when Natalie took the photo of Carl, Brad, and her on the tractor and slipped mentally away. It was a while before she spoke.

  My situation was different from yours. My brother and Carl were protective, but I didn’t mind it at all. In turn, they didn’t seem to mind when I tagged along. I was articulate, agile, and smart. What I lacked in strength, I made up for in speed and wits. The three of us went everywhere together. I was one of the guys.

  I don’t know what I would have done without them. Asquonset was one new experience after another, and my parents were no help. They were stoic and stern. They directed us here or there and told us what to do around the farm, but they never laughed. They rarely even smiled. The concept of pleasure had been left behind in New York, along with all sense of security. Add my father’s shame to that, and things weren’t good. The two of them lived each day as though they were fully expecting another crash.

  They aged at double speed during those years. In no time, they were old. It was heartbreaking to see.

  We were more resilient—me even more so than Brad. I was younger. My attachment to New York was more tenuous. Besides, I had found something that first day that New York didn’t have. I had found Carl.

  He became my idol. He was quiet and confident. Nothing ruffled him. He knew everyone and everything. No matter how new life was to me at Asquonset, being with Carl was like being in a familiar place. His confidence was contagious.

  I started school and made friends, and those friends didn’t know where we’d been. They only knew that we were better off than most, and we truly were. We ate three meals a day. Our clothes were more serviceable than stylish, but we never went without shoes. We went to the movies every Saturday afternoon. We could afford that. We couldn’t afford to travel, but the idea of taking a train had lost its appeal. The newsreels were all about the hungry and homeless riding boxcars. We were far from hungry and homeless.

  All things were relative, of course. Asquonset was a dour place that grew more oppressive the longer the Depression lasted. If our parents weren’t sitting stiff and alert in front of the radio, they were poring through the tabloids in search of bad news, and there was never a lack. Banks continued to close lon
g after the crash. More of their friends went under. My parents had been in the center of the social scene in New York, and either personally knew those people mentioned in the paper or knew of them. Unemployment continued to rise. Shanty villages called Hoovervilles sprang up to house the homeless. Soup kitchens were inundated with the hungry.

  Roosevelt was swept into office with promises of a New Deal, but all my parents saw were pictures of the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Though Asquonset remained fertile and moist, they feared we were next. They read everything they could about prevention, and had us out in the most remote of our acres planting grass and trees to anchor the soil. Long after the economy began to improve, they lived with the fear of relapse.

  Brad was a casualty of that fear. When the gloom got bad enough, he left. He dropped out of school when he was sixteen and lied about his age to get a job with the Works Projects Administration. He built bridges and highways. He dug tunnels. He sent money home. But that was small solace for my father, who wanted him to be educated and ready for the time when good jobs returned. Moreover, in losing Brad, he had lost one of his most able-bodied workers.

  Me, I had lost one of my two best friends. Same with Carl. So he and I grew even closer. If we’d been growing up together now, the four years between us would have been insurmountable. We’d have gone to different schools with different crowds and different activities. Back then, though, things didn’t work that way. We did everything together.

  Natalie stopped talking and smiled. They sat in the wing-back chairs now. Olivia was making notes on the pad of paper on her lap. Natalie’s hands were folded gently.

  Olivia waited for her to go on, but there was simply that sweet smile and the occasional nod. She was transported back to that long-ago world.

  Olivia wanted to be there, too. “What were some of those things?”

  “Oh, we went back and forth to school together.”

  “On a bus?”

  “No-o.” This was said with a chiding chuckle. “There were no buses. We walked.”