Facets Page 5

  Pam flattened her back against the wall. She knew the answer to that one. She saw the way Patricia had begun to wait for John to come home from work. She heard the discussions they often had over drinks before dinner.

  “Who else do I have to talk with?” Patricia shot back. “You’re never around.”

  “Why do you have to talk with anyone? Why can’t you just trust me?”

  “I do trust you, but I get nervous. We have all our eggs in one basket. What if something should happen up here? What if the mine caves in or there’s a flood, or you take the last piece of tourmaline out of the ground and can’t find any more? What will you do then?”

  “If that happens,” Eugene said with renewed patience, “which it won’t, but if it does, I’ll know that I’ve got all this wonderful money in the bank that I can use to keep from starving.”

  Pam pictured him grinning that broad, self-confident grin of his. Leaning against the wall, she smiled. But her smile soon faded, because Patricia wasn’t as easily reassured.

  “But why not invest it and make even more money? Why not diversify? If you branch into another field, you can be in Boston more. I need you there, Gene. When I’m alone, I start imagining things. I get very nervous.” She was speaking more quickly. Even from the distance, Pam could hear the tremor in her voice.

  Eugene must have heard it too and been touched. “Now, now, Patsy . . .” He went on, but his voice faded to a gentle murmur, too low for Pam to hear at the top of the stairs.

  Telling herself that things were in hand now that her father knew her mother’s fears, Pam went to bed. She heard no more voices, and if her parents slept together in the large master suite, she was asleep before they climbed the stairs.

  She and Patricia stayed the weekend, and by the time they headed back to Boston on Sunday afternoon, Pam felt optimistic that her parents’ differences had been ironed out. “You’ll be down to see us soon?” she asked after giving Eugene a last hug and kiss.

  “Soon, Pammy girl. Real soon.”

  He kept his word. He was back in Boston the following week, but it was for a single night. Then he was gone. Patricia was more disappointed than usual and therefore more nervous. That added to Pam’s disappointment, because when Patricia was nervous, she turned to John.

  He was, without doubt, Pam decided, one of the coolest people she’d ever known. His hair was always combed, his tie always straight, his posture just so, with one hand in a pocket so that he’d look casual even if he felt tense.

  She could forgive him that, she supposed. What she couldn’t forgive was that he always seemed to know how to put Patricia’s mind at ease, which wasn’t right at all. That was Eugene’s job.

  But Eugene wasn’t there, and the more John filled the gap, the more Patricia sought him out.

  Pam didn’t know what to do. Each time she talked with her father, she begged him to come home, but he always had an excuse. Then vacation came, and she went to Timiny Cove. Patricia joined them for several days, driving up with John when Eugene demanded he come. But when John returned to Boston, so did Patricia.

  Watching her leave, Pam felt a sense of loss. She wasn’t as close to her mother as she used to be. They didn’t talk much. They didn’t laugh together or daydream together or spend days together, just the two of them, the way they once did. Patricia seemed distanced from her, even when they were in the same room. She watched her mother drive away from her and she knew their relationship had changed.

  Unable to blame Eugene, whom she adored, or Patricia, who seemed too distracted, Pam put the responsibility on John.

  Chapter 4

  JOHN WASN’T SURE JUST WHEN his fear of his father hardened into contempt. It was a gradual process, starting in his early teen years when he formed an elite group of friends, continuing when puberty gave him the confidence of height and a physical par with Eugene, and culminating with his parents’ divorce and his mother’s subsequent death.

  He wasn’t sorry to see the fear go. Long after childhood, he could vividly remember the quaking he’d felt when Eugene’s loud bellow told him that he’d disappointed his father again. Sometimes, it had been the way he looked: “Too new, for pity’s sake.” Sometimes it had been the way he acted: “Starchy, boy, where’s your sense of adventure?” Sometimes it had to do with the business: “What do you mean you don’t want to work in the mine?” It wasn’t only the voice that made him tremble but the flashing eyes and the cheeks that grew red with temper. “You’ve got the whole summer lying out there ahead of you, with nothing better to do. Hell, by the time I was your age I’d been workin’ for three years shovelin’ manure at Grady’s farm!”

  John shrank back against the paneled wall of his bedroom, but the painted pine offered no protection from this man who didn’t like him. “Why do I have to work?” his small, eight-year-old voice asked.

  “To learn. And you won’t be doing anything killing. You’ll be helping out with little things like carrying water and running errands. I’m no slave driver, for pity’s sake.”

  There was no solace in that, since John had no idea what a slave driver was. The word work was enough. But the words Timiny Cove were even worse. His very first memory of the place was of being lost in the woods, and lost was what he’d felt every time he’d been there since. Timiny Cove was filled with people who didn’t dress like he did, didn’t live like he did, didn’t like what he did.

  “I want to stay here,” he protested, but his voice sounded feeble next to his father’s full boom.

  “And do what?”

  “Play with Timmy and Doug.”

  “Timmy and Doug? What for?”

  “I like Timmy and Doug.”

  “Well, that’s just fine, since they’re your cousins. But what they can teach you about business ain’t worth a tinker’s damn. With due respect for your mama’s family, the Wrights have had their money since the Pilgrims landed. They don’t work. We St. Georges do.” Under his breath he mumbled, “You wanna play with Timmy and Doug.” Then he thundered so loud that John jumped, “For pity’s sake, you do enough of that here. Your mother’s got you runnin’ around with your cousins and a whole bunch of other little boys with fancy names. Well, enough! There are some fancy names up in Timiny Cove, too, and the boys there can teach you a whole lot more about living than any Saltonstall ever could. So this summer you can do your playin’ with the Duffys and the Greenleafs and the Pelletiers, and you’ll learn a thing or two along the way.”

  Given no choice in the matter, John tried. He worked for his father that summer and hated every minute of it. He didn’t like the dirt, didn’t like the smell, didn’t like the men. Mostly he didn’t like the way Eugene kept yelling at him. In his father’s eyes, he could do no right. If he was sent for a tool, he brought the wrong one. If he was sent for the medical box, he brought it too slowly. If he was sent for water, he spilled too much along the way. John knew that Eugene yelled at other people, but never as loudly as at him.

  He did learn, though. During that summer and the ones that followed, he learned what went into the mining operation, when to use a hammer versus a chisel, how to blast open a new pocket, how to care for each crystal unearthed. He also learned that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in the family business if it meant hanging around with the men at the mine, and he certainly didn’t want it if it meant working with his father.

  His father and the miners were alike. Eugene was one of them, a local. It didn’t matter that he was the boss, that he lived in the biggest house in town, and that he had an even finer one in Boston. He could drink with the others, tell jokes with the others, spend his Saturday mornings on the bruised brown bench on the town green passing the time of day with the others. He fit into the Timiny Cove life as only a native could.

  John never would. He’d been born in Boston and had spent his earliest years in a neat little house in Brookline before his father bought the Beacon Hill home. He loved the city. He found it stately and genteel, civilized
in ways that Timiny Cove would never be. Of course, he viewed it through the eyes of a Wright, and a Wright was a person of status.

  Eugene St. George had none of that status. He may have risen a little when he married John’s mother, but when they went places as a family, even John could see that Sybil was the one who drew the respect. Not that Eugene didn’t hold his own. He looked right and talked right. John had often wondered how he did it, coming from the backwoods and all, until he found a book of etiquette lying open in the library one day. So Eugene never embarrassed them. Neither, though, did he impress the Brahmans of Boston.

  Early on, John felt the sting of being a St. George. More than once when he went to a friend’s house, the shout from the door was, “It’s that St. George boy,” in a tone of voice that made him swallow hard and hold his chin high. The name should have been regal, he thought. On a blue-blood’s tongue, it wasn’t. Even then, he knew he had an uphill battle to wage.

  What mystified him, given his mother’s family, was why they had allowed the wedding. Sybil and Eugene were from different worlds. Sybil was a lady, and while Eugene did his best to be a gentleman to match, he never quite seemed polished.

  “Earthiness,” his mother had once said, grinning at Eugene at the time. “Earthiness is very exciting in a man.”

  But John couldn’t see it. He found nothing exciting in dirt or sweat. The Wright side of the family had nothing to do with either and lived an exciting enough life shuttling between Boston and Cape Cod. In time, his mother seemed to see that too, because she had terrible arguments with Eugene about buying a summer house and joining the club. Eugene didn’t want either. He said that they had enough going for them between Boston and Timiny Cove, and that if Sybil wanted to summer on the Cape, she could just move in with her family.

  She did that for a summer or two, while John suffered in Maine with Eugene. By the time he was old enough to understand what his mother meant by the appeal of earthiness in a man, his parents had split up.

  It was inevitable. The way it happened, though, was wrong. Even at fifteen John knew that. Eugene announced one day that he wanted the divorce, that he would pay Sybil to file for it, pay for her to travel to a place where the divorce could be granted without delay. If she protested, he said, he would simply move to Maine and let her come along like a good wife or be branded the offending party. In either case, he would get his divorce. Whether it was sooner or later, more or less painful, depended on her.

  She was devastated. She didn’t want a divorce. It just wasn’t done. It represented failure.

  The Wrights, who had never cared for Eugene, argued otherwise. In their opinion, Sybil had married beneath her class and was now simply freeing herself from a man who would be nothing but a burden in the years to come.

  Such was the story they passed among their friends. John heard it more than once. Living with his mother for all but the summers, he had even greater exposure to the Wright circle than before. He wasn’t offended when people criticized Eugene. Eugene was of a lower class. The fact that John had chosen to remain in Boston with his mother was proof that he was his mother’s son, a Wright in all but name.

  That was what he kept telling himself, though the mirror told him different. At sixteen, he was becoming quite a man, tall and broad, with eyes that flashed vividly when he was angry and a voice that sounded self-assured even when he wasn’t. A handsome devil he was, and he knew it, but at sixteen he looked just like his father had at that age, if the observations of old-timers lounging on the porch of the post office in Timiny Cove were correct. John’s saving grace, as far as he was concerned, was his skin, which was less ruddy, smoother than his father’s, and his hair, which was darker, finer, and more easily groomed.

  And, of course, he had class. Physical attributes alone meant nothing. Far more important in life, he told himself, was what he did with those attributes, which was where his Wright genes took over. He believed that he had more class at sixteen than Eugene St. George would ever have. He could go anywhere, do anything, and be sure of himself, because of the exposure he’d had. He knew the right people. If some of those right people still seemed wary of him, he assured himself, it would pass with time.

  His life in Boston was rewarding. He attended the most prestigious prep school, wore the nattiest clothes, played a solid game of tennis on the clay courts at his grandparents’ club, and partied to his heart’s content. Eugene bought him a car to drive to Maine and back, but John took perverse delight in using it for all else but that. The car was shiny and new, everything Timiny Cove wasn’t, and the girls loved it. Not for a minute did John feel guilty about showing it off. After all, he was one of the privileged.

  The carefree carousing he did was some solace for the fact that, a week after Sybil obtained her divorce, Eugene remarried. It came as a surprise to John, whose mind was on his own sexuality, not on his father’s. It hadn’t occurred to him to associate Eugene with another woman.

  Before he could respond one way or another to the marriage, he had to cope with his mother’s reaction to it. She was stunned, then appalled, then furious that she hadn’t seen what was happening. Piecing things together, she realized that Eugene had been having an affair with Patricia for more than a year. The pain of that seemed her undoing more than the divorce itself. She lost something, became less enthusiastic about everything, including John.

  He was furious. He had already decided that his father wasn’t worth much, but with his remarriage, that assessment fell even lower. John was personally affronted by what his father had done. The pain his mother felt was nothing compared to his own humiliation, because word spread quickly. Within weeks, all of Boston knew that Eugene had taken a second wife, that that wife was a good deal younger than he was, and that she was noticeably pregnant. John took his share of ribbing from his friends at school, even some from their parents, and although he swallowed it all with the good humor of the aristocrat he was determined to be, inside he seethed.

  Eugene must have seen it, because before he introduced John to Patricia he took him aside with a warning. “Don’t say it, John. Don’t say it if you know what’s good for you. I don’t mind if you feel loyalty to your mother. It’d be strange if you didn’t. But I won’t have you upsetting my wife. You’ll show her respect, even if you choke on it.”

  “I well might,” John mumbled.

  “Come again, sonny?”

  He should have known better, should have known that in the long run he couldn’t win, but he’d bottled the anger inside for too long. “You knocked her up. You got her pregnant while you were still with my mother. Is that why you married her, because she’s having your kid?”

  Eugene glared at him, red-faced and rigid. “I married her because I love her.”

  “What about my mother? What happened to the love you were supposed to be feeling for her?”

  “Things happen sometimes. Love fades.”

  “If it fades, what’s it worth? Will you love this one till it fades, then dump her, too? Will she be feeling the same kind of pain that my mother is now? This one—”

  “Her name,” Eugene stated through clenched teeth, “is Patricia.”

  “—must be really dumb—”

  “Watch it, boy!”

  “You want me to respect her, when she takes a married man away from his wife? What kind of woman does that? My mother was there. She was your wife. Were you respecting her, while you were shacking up with Patricia?”

  Man of passion and impulse though he was, Eugene had never resorted to violence as an outlet for anger. Somewhere in the back of his mind, John knew that, and it was confirmed by the fact that Eugene kept his fists locked tightly to his sides.

  “You’re treading on shaky ground, boy.”

  “What can you do to me that you haven’t already done? Yell. Go ahead. Yell all you want. I’m used to that. Face it,” he dared say, at his most rebellious, “what you are and what you’ve done don’t concern me anymore. Two more years and I�
�ll be eighteen. Then I won’t even have to come when you call.”

  But John had underestimated his father, who said in that same dangerously slow, tight-jawed way, “Don’t be so sure. I’m your future, John. St. George Mining is your future.”

  “Not if I don’t want. it.”

  “You will,” Eugene bellowed, “because the day you turn your back on it will be the day I write you off. That’ll be the end of the money, sonny. And don’t”—he raised a cautioning finger—“think you’ll be supported by the Wrights in the style you like, because there’s somethin’ you don’t know about people like that. You think they live high off the hog? Well, look close. The house on the Cape has been in the family for three generations and is shabby as hell. The membership in the country club was bought for perpetuity by the Wright who was a founding member. Do you see your aunt an’ uncle buying fancy clothes? Or flyin’ to New York for the weekend? Your cousins didn’t get new cars when they turned sixteen. The fact is, sonny, that people like that have the pedigree and the history and the money, but they don’t shell out. So if you think you’re gonna turn to them to support you while you piss away your time with your nose up in the air, you’re wrong.”

  Seeing that he’d regained the upper hand, he took a breath. “You need my money, John. Think about it, and you’ll know it’s true.”

  John wanted to argue, but his rebelliousness wouldn’t take him that far. He wasn’t sure if he believed that the Wright side of the family was a dry well, but he did know that there was money in St. George Mining. He liked nice things, and nice things cost money. Until he knew his options, he couldn’t risk disinheritance.

  So he met Patricia, and it took every bit of the social skill he’d developed in his sixteen years to be civil. The gossip hadn’t quite prepared him. Married, she was; the shining gold band on her finger confirmed that. Pregnant, she was; her protruding belly confirmed that. But John had imagined a husband stealer to be more sharp-edged. Patricia was pretty and soft, hatefully so.