Читать книгу Tempting Fate - Carla Neggers, Carla Neggers - Страница 9

Mattie Witt could feel the high ozone levels of the summer city air in her sinuses as she sat on the front steps of her Greenwich Village town house. Her whole face ached, even her teeth. New York was so damn hot in August. She’d read that in the old days people from the southern end of Manhattan would come to Greenwich Village during the summer to escape yellow fever. At least that was no longer the case.

She neatened her skirt around her knees. Her long, loose broadcloth dress reminded her of long-ago summers in Tennessee, when the heat—there’d been no air conditioners and precious few fans—had never bothered her. The warm brick step ground into her bottom. She walked forty-five minutes every morning but at eighty-two didn’t have the muscle tone she’d once had.

Across the street a woman chatting with the mailman spotted Mattie and waved. It was an effort, but Mattie waved back. Normally by late afternoon her front steps would be crowded with friends and neighbors, indulging in the time-honored Greenwich Village tradition of stoop-sitting. Today they seemed to sense her need to be alone and stayed away.

The woman went through her courtyard to the back entrance of her building. The mailman continued on his way. In the many years since Mattie had left Hollywood and moved east, she had come to love the crooked tree-lined streets of Greenwich Village, with their brick town houses and lamplights and long history. She appreciated the variety of people there—artists, actors, writers, doctors, bankers, garbage collectors, drunks, nurses, students, secretaries—and the tradition of tolerance, independence and nonconformity. Everyone knew her, the aging movie star who’d introduced generations of Greenwich Village kids to the fun of kite flying. It was no big deal that she was a film legend. There were other legends in the neighborhood.

But in her heart, no matter what she did or where she went or how long she stayed away, home for Mattie would always be Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

She could feel the warm air on her face, the pressure of her inflamed sinuses.

Dani, Dani. What am I going to do?

Her granddaughter’s sheer, stubborn, incorrigible Pembroke nature worried Mattie. Dani would have to find out where that damn key had come from, how it had gotten onto the rocks.

But perhaps she should.

One of Dani’s friends in New York had stopped by with the article on her and Pembroke Springs and groaned as she’d handed it to Mattie. “Couldn’t she have taken a shower first?” But overall it was a good piece. Dani was as unpretentious and as totally honest as ever. Maybe she wasn’t as smooth and as prepared as she could have been, but her energy shone through every quote.

But those gate keys…

Feeling stiff and old, Mattie climbed slowly to her feet. She had to use the rail. She went back inside, where a ceiling fan, much like the one she remembered in her father’s house in Cedar Springs, helped keep her front room cool. She’d pulled the drapes to keep out the hot sun. The room seemed dark, crowded, too much like the Witt front parlor on West Main Street a thousand miles—a thousand years—away. Mattie concentrated on the roses and Prussian blue of her decor, colors her father would never have chosen. She caught her breath before going upstairs.

In her small feminine bedroom she sat on the edge of her four-poster bed. A lace-curtained window overlooked the hidden garden behind her town house, where she spent many peaceful, solitary hours among her roses, hollyhocks, morning glories and asters. She had a good life here. Few regrets.

She opened the old Bible on her bedstand. Even before she could talk, her father had taught her his favorite psalms. She remembered them all. They were a part of her. On dark nights they’d come to her, sometimes in her mother’s almost-forgotten voice, or Naomi’s, even her father’s. Never in the voice of the child she’d been. It was as if that girl had never existed.

With a trembling hand she set aside the obituary of her father from the Cedar Springs Democrat that Joe Cutler had sent her, and the letter she’d received from his commanding officer telling her of Joe’s death three years later, because Joe had asked him to. That was before Quint Skinner, that snake, had written his book.

She came to the photograph Joe had taken of Lilli and herself going up in the balloon that warm, clear August night. “I thought you’d want it,” he’d written.

Mattie switched on her clock radio, just to have something to listen to. Frank Sinatra was singing.

“There’s nothing romantic between Nick and me,” Lilli had assured her mother-in-law during their balloon ride over Saratoga. “I’m not infatuated with him or anything like that—it’s just that no one understands me the way he does.”

Mattie had known exactly how Lilli felt, and she’d tried so hard to explain. “Darling, it’s not that Nick understands you—it’s that he’s willing to let you be whoever you want to be. He demands it. He’s a rare man in that he has no expectations of you whatever.”

On the flip side, Nick had no expectations of himself, either. For a woman who’d based her goals and ideas on the expectations of others—parents, husband, society—being exposed to Nicholas Pembroke’s talent and vision and enthusiasm for life, his love of freedom without responsibility, could be an enormously liberating and intoxicating experience. But there were costs. Always there were costs.

For Mattie, those costs had been her home and family. To be free, she’d had to leave them behind all those years ago. There had been no opportunity for compromise, no possible middle ground. Yet even after six decades, the pull of home and family on her remained strong. Every day something would catch her off guard and trigger a memory of her stern father, of her dark-eyed little sister, of the people and oak-lined streets of Cedar Springs. Mattie didn’t regret her choices. She treasured her independence, her good years with Nick, their son, the work she’d done, the life she’d made for herself in New York. She’d had time to put the costs of her freedom into perspective.

Had Lilli discovered, too late, what those costs would be for herself?

Frank Sinatra stopped singing.

Mattie stared at the photograph. At Lilli’s smile. At the gold key hanging from her neck. Joe had given it to her.

How had it ended up on the Pembroke estate for Dani to find so many years later?

“Nicholas Pembroke is an extraordinary man,” Mattie had told Lilli. “I’d be a liar if I tried to tell you otherwise. The good Lord only knows where I’d be if he hadn’t decided to go fishing in Tennessee way back when. But, Lilli, Nick can’t save himself, much less anyone else. Darling, I know what it is to want to be free.”

“At my age you were already a legend.”

Mattie had tried to explain. Her acting had had its rewards, but fame was a strange thing. Mattie wasn’t famous to herself, but to other people—people she didn’t even know. She couldn’t get inside their heads. Back at the height of her fame, she’d disguised herself and sneaked into a theater playing one of her films, but still couldn’t get inside the minds of those strangers watching her and be a part of her own fame. And Mattie had realized she was only herself. She wasn’t what other people thought of her.

Lilli had shaken her head, as if at her own shattered dreams. “I’m thirty, and I’ve done nothing at all with my life.”

Which wasn’t true. Lilli Chandler Pembroke had given as much of herself to her daughter and husband as any woman could be asked to give. She was a tireless volunteer, a wonderful sister, a devoted daughter. She managed a large apartment in New York and a house in the country, and had taken over as Chandler hostess admirably since her mother’s death. But she’d wanted more. And who was Mattie to tell her she couldn’t have it?

Aching and tired, more depressed than she’d felt in years, Mattie replaced the photograph in her Bible. She’d never shown it to anyone, not even Dani. Few people knew about Joe and Zeke Cutler’s trip to Saratoga that summer. Certainly not her granddaughter. Mattie hadn’t told her. Nor had she ever sat Dani down and explained about the little sister she’d left behind in Tennessee, the half-crazy father who’d died a long, tortured death. About her own ambivalent feelings about her hometown and her childhood there.

Dani would be surprised and hurt. She thought her grandmother had no secrets from her.

The problem was, she had too many.