Читать книгу Rising Tides - Emilie Richards - Страница 9

Cappy Gerritsen needed only one glance around the downstairs bedroom that she and Ferris always shared to set her off. “I told you we shouldn’t have come.”

Ferris didn’t raise an eyebrow or point out that she had been silent for the entire two-and-a-half-hour trip from New Orleans. Cappy frequently alternated between stony silences and passionate oratory. After twenty-some years of marriage, neither upset him greatly.

He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke spiral to the ceiling, where it was sternly disciplined by a fan. One of the few similarities between Cappy and his mother had been their mutual distaste for air-conditioning. Each spring his New Orleans home was held hostage to the heat and humidity until mid-June. The cottage, thanks to his mother’s whims, was unbearable the entire summer.

“Don’t look at me like that. You obviously feel the same way.” Cappy sucked in her bottom lip—a manner ism that had been adorably provocative on a debutante and was nothing short of irritating on a forty-seven-year-old matron.

Ferris snuffed the cigarette in a potted fern and lit an other. “I came out of respect for my mother.”

“That’s what you call driving all this way to be con fronted by these people?”

When Ferris didn’t try to soothe her, Cappy began fidgeting with the shells lined up along the top of a chest of drawers. “Surely you can’t think this makes any sense. Isn’t it bad enough that your mother ordered an immediate cremation? Everyone expected the family to announce the date and time for a funeral mass. Now this. When the word gets out, our friends will think your mother is still leading us around by our noses.”

“I doubt they’ll be that perceptive.”

She looked down at her arrangement, dissatisfied. She tried lining the shells up by size. “Dawn didn’t even call. I sent cables everywhere I could think of to tell her about your mother’s death, and she didn’t even call. Until I saw her standing on the gallery, I didn’t even know if she’d gotten the message.”

From the beginning, Ferris had understood the roots of Cappy’s little tantrum. He paid lip service to it, even as he silently tried to make sense of what his mother had done. “Dawn made it clear some time ago that she does what she wants.”

“This is ridiculous. I don’t want to stay here even one night. This can’t have any bearing on your inheritance.”

“As old as he is, Spencer St. Amant’s still a worthy adversary. He’s often done what he damned well pleased and gotten away with it. I’m sure that’s why Mother chose him to oversee this little drama.”

She moved a large conch to the center and stepped back to view it. “Well, I know the law, and the law says your mother had no choice but to leave you a third of her estate.”

“Do we want a third, or do we want it all? There’s the controlling interest in Gulf Coast to consider.”

He watched as her hands went still. Gulf Coast Ship ping was the crown jewel of the Gerritsen family, a multimillion-dollar financial empire that was synonymous with the port of New Orleans and traffic on the Mississippi. Cappy’s own family was wealthy, but Gulf Coast, and Ferris’s connection to it, gave her the power in New Orleans society that she desired.

Ferris fully appreciated that desire. Cappy was an asset he had recognized long ago. When she chose, she could radiate breeding and charm, while simultaneously extolling her husband’s political virtues. Cappy, with her River Road plantation gentility, could work a room like a southern Jackie Kennedy.

He gave her a moment to consider before he continued. “I’ll talk to Spencer and insist he get this over with quickly. If he doesn’t agree, we could always take our chances and drive back to the city. But, of course, if we leave, we won’t know exactly what transpires here, will we?”

“You don’t miss a thing.”

He strolled to her side and leaned over to kiss her cheek. “You’ll stay, then?”

“As always, my choices seem limited.”

“Go ahead and unpack a few things. I’m going to explore and see what I can find out.”

When he reached the doorway, Ferris took one last look over his shoulder. Cappy was leaning over the chest once more, compulsively rearranging the shells. The room was simple, casual and quaint, as only rooms in a summer home can be. But there was nothing there, or in the sprawling twelve-room house, for that matter, that didn’t underscore the ambience of old money and tradition.

And there was nothing that didn’t reek of family now vanished forever.

Ferris had spent all the summers of his boyhood in this place. He hoped this was the last summer he would ever see it.

Dawn unpacked the few clothes she’d brought with her, then wandered the bedroom as memories stung her. Some things were much as they had been years before. The closet still held clothes she had worn as a teenager. A pink bathing suit with a pleated skirt lay in the bottom drawer of the pine dresser, faded rubber flip-flops tucked neatly under it. The view was one she remembered. She stopped at the window and gazed outside at a gray drizzle, leftovers from the earlier shower. The Gulf was just visible here, a wedge of turbulent water that mirrored her emotions.

She turned at the sound of rapping on her door. “Come in.”

Three men had helped shape her into the woman she had become. Ben was the third, her uncle Hugh the second. The man who appeared in her bedroom doorway was the first, and possibly the most important.

She nodded warily. “Daddy.”

Ferris smiled. “You must be my daughter. No one else calls me Daddy.”

She tapered her own smile into a warning. “If that keeps up, I’ll wish I hadn’t come home.”

“You should have called your mother, darling.”

“I know that.” She crossed the room and rose on tip toe to kiss his cheek. “I just needed some time alone to think about Grandmère’s death.”

“That’s one of your problems. You always think too much.”

She stepped away from him and shook her head. “This is the sixties. Women are allowed to think. You’d do well to remember that, if you want to be the next governor.”

“So you read, too. What do you think my chances are?”

Dawn thought his chances were good, but she thought telling him was a bad idea. The state of Louisiana would benefit from a humbler Ferris Gerritsen—but not as much as it would benefit from a more liberal man in the governor’s mansion. “What do you think?” she countered.

“I think you’d better face your mother and get it over with. She’s furious at you for not getting in touch.”

She put that aside for a moment, only too aware of the scene to come. “Daddy, do you know what this is about?”

“No, but I intend to find out. I don’t believe your grandmother really invited Nicky Reynolds and her family here.”

Dawn didn’t want to address that. Not yet. “Do you know why Ben Townsend was invited?”

His expression didn’t change, but then, his thoughts were rarely visible. “No. Are the two of you—”

She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I haven’t seen him since…in a year.”

“Apparently your grandmother had a sense of humor I never appreciated.”

She stepped back to view him better. “Don’t dredge up old scores to settle with Ben.”

His expression was still pleasant. His voice was not. “Ben Townsend doesn’t belong in this house, and he doesn’t belong with you.”

That was undoubtedly true, but she didn’t want to give her father the satisfaction of knowing he was right. “That’s over now.”

“It should never have started.”

“If we could change history, there’d probably be more significant mistakes for both of us to worry about, wouldn’t there?”

His response was interrupted by a noise on the stairs. Dawn looked beyond her father to see her mother coming toward them. She added guilt to the carousel of feelings she had experienced in the past hour, and prepared herself. “Mother.”

Cappy Gerritsen stopped on the third step from the top, her posture regal. Dawn envisioned a younger Cappy, the prewar New Orleans debutante, gliding across the floor of her family’s River Road home with a volume of Emily Post on her head.

Cappy’s body was still gracefully curved and firm, and though she was a size larger than the six she claimed, neither age nor an extra fifteen pounds could destroy her basic beauty. No silver showed in her pale gold hair, and only twin frown lines between perfectly shaped eye brows signaled her basic dissatisfaction with life.

“Don’t badger Dawn, Cappy,” Ferris warned. “Just be glad she’s home.”

Dawn went to the head of the stairs, but her mother had made it impossible to embrace her. Cappy had al ways been three impossible steps away. “You look wonderful,” Dawn said. “Daddy’s plan to become the next Huey Long must agree with you.”

Cappy didn’t attempt to be polite. “You could have called.”

“I know.”

“Your grandmother dies, and you can’t even call your father or me to tell us you’re sorry?”

“Cappy.” Ferris joined his daughter. “Dawn and I have already discussed this.”

Dawn dredged up a smile. “I’ll go on record. I’m a failure as a daughter. Okay? Now can we go on to some thing else?”

“You disappeared off the face of the earth for a year. You didn’t call. You didn’t write. You didn’t visit. What are we to you, anyway?”

The smile died. “Right now you’re a living reminder of why I didn’t do any of those things.”

“Well, your grandmother’s not a reminder anymore, is she? Where were you when she needed you here?”

“You know where I was. I was in England, trying to find out if there was anywhere in this world where I could be something more than a member of this family.”

“You don’t have to be part of this family at all!”

Ferris stepped between them. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this.” He turned to Dawn. “There’s enough happening here without you and your mother going after each other.”

She shook her head in wonder. “My God, I’m a kid again.”

“Both of you are tired,” Ferris said. “This is a difficult time. Wait until you’ve rested before you talk.”

“I found Pelichere. She has drinks out for us.” Cappy started down the steps.

Dawn accepted Ferris’s brief hug, but she didn’t re turn it. “I’ll be down in a little while,” she said. “Let me comb my hair.”

She waited until he was gone before she took up her station at the window again. A year ago she had journeyed to another continent to banish her emotions, but now she knew she hadn’t succeeded. The child who had summered in this room was still inside her. The teenager who had longed for the love of her parents dwelt there, too. And the young woman who had given herself body and soul to Ben Townsend still cried out for understanding and forgiveness.

By the faint glimmer of a cloud-hazed moon, Pelichere swept the cottage gallery until not one grain of sand was lodged between the weathered boards. Dawn had offered to do it for her, but Pelichere had refused.

“I doubt anyone will even notice the fine job I’m doing,” Pelichere said, “but your mama would notice if the job wasn’t so fine. Mais yeah. She’d notice, just like she noticed the water stains on her bedroom ceiling, under the spot where the shingles blew off last week.”

Dawn leaned against a pillar, not at all anxious to go inside again. After an evening that had seemed endless, the house was quiet now, as if everyone had scurried to their rooms like ghost crabs hiding from shadows. She hoped they all stayed in their individual holes, particularly her parents. “Did she give you trouble?”

“How was I to know that storm would pry off shingles that haven’t budged in a century? At fifty-seven I’m supposed to climb up on the roof and inspect, shingle by shingle, every time it rains? I’d be up on the roof more than I’d be down on the ground. So maybe your parents should make their home on Grand Isle now that your grandmother, she’s dead. What shingles would blow off with Senator and Mrs. Ferris Lee Gerritsen living here?”

“Is it going to be their house after the will’s read? Seems to me Grandmère always said she was going to leave the house to you.”

“She said that, yeah. But there was more she didn’t say.”

A shrill whistle cut through the air. Pelichere turned and raised a hand in greeting as a pickup rattled along the oak-lined drive. “Joe and Izzy Means from down the road. Do you remember them, chère?”

“A little.”

Joe and Izzy got out, and Joe went around to the back of the truck, while Izzy trundled her substantial bulk up the path to the house. “I been cooking,” Izzy said, be fore she’d even reached the steps. “And cooking, cooking, cooking. It’s not right you should have to cook for the next four days, you with guests.”

Dawn was sure Izzy knew the so-called guests weren’t Pelichere’s. She supposed that was half the reason Izzy had arrived. In South Louisiana, keeping up with neighbors was still the favored evening recreation.

Pelichere introduced Dawn, and Dawn leaned over for Izzy’s enthusiastic kiss. Then she watched Joe, one ton to Izzy’s two, stagger up the path, well behind his wife, his arms loaded with grocery bags.

“What’d you go and do, Izzy?” Pelichere asked. “Drain the Gulf and cook everything left wriggling on the bottom?”

Pelichere scolded her friend while Joe made several trips from the truck. He left when he had finished, announcing that he was going down to the water to see what the dedicated fishermen still lining the beach were pulling in.

“Pelichere, you sit out here with Izzy,” Dawn said. “I’ll bring you both some coffee.”

Pelichere demurred, but Dawn ignored her. She re turned in a moment with cups and a pot of coffee Pelichere had left to drip in the kitchen. The coffee was thick and rich, black as goddamn, just the way Pelichere and Izzy liked it. Strong dark-roast coffee was as much a part of the local culture as seagulls and fishing luggers.

“So tell me, Peli,” Izzy said, stirring three spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee—for energy, “how’s it going?”

Dawn left them to chat.

The kitchen was one of the more modern rooms in the house. The original kitchen had been built behind the house as protection against fire and summer heat. The foundation was still visible fifty feet away, and a portion of one wall remained, blanketed by an orange-flowering trumpet vine that was often alive with the frantic darting of hummingbirds.

The new kitchen was large and airy. Tonight the blue gingham curtains billowed to the opposing rhythms of the wind and two ceiling fans. More wind blew through a screen door, carrying with it the scents of the distant Gulf and a closer tangle of honeysuckle.

Dawn sorted through the bags Joe had carried in. Nothing was labeled, but she recognized much of it. There were two gallons of gumbo, thick with small crabs and okra, Tupperware containers of jambalaya with chunks of dark sausage and green pepper, pounds of cold spiced shrimp and, although it was the end of the season, several pounds of boiled crawfish, as well. There was a freshly caught redfish, inviting Pelichere’s master touches, and close to a half gallon of freshly shucked oysters. “Good news, Grandmère,” she said as she stowed the last of it in the refrigerator. “It’s hot as hell and twice as much fun at your little house party, but at least we’ll eat like royalty.”

A voice sounded behind her. “Has anything been left out?”

She didn’t turn, but she knew the voice was Ben’s. “Still one big appetite looking to be satiated, aren’t you?” She dug back into the refrigerator and took out the boiled shrimp, holding it behind her. “Cocktail sauce?”

“Please.”

She opened a jar and sniffed it after Ben took the shrimp. “Peli’s own remoulade. You’re a lucky man.” She straightened and faced him. “This is supposed to be for tomorrow and after. Peli had food on the stove for over an hour tonight. Didn’t anybody tell you?”

“I ate.”

“I rest my case.”

“Join me?”

She determined to be casual and beat him at his own game.

“I don’t think so. I’m going to clean the kitchen before Peli gets back in here. There’s no reason for her to be waiting on us hand and foot. She’s as much Grandmère’s guest as the rest of us.”

He pulled out a chair beside the round oak table under a trio of windows. “It’s nice of you to be concerned.”

“But then, I’m a nice person, basically.”

“That wouldn’t be the first adjective that came to mind when someone looked at you nowadays.”

She cleared the sink of dirty dishes and ran a dish cloth around it. Then she filled it with hot soapy water, rolling up the sleeves of her shirt while she waited for him to elaborate.

“Once upon a time, a lead-in like that would have had you brimming with curiosity,” Ben said.

“Once upon a time? In a fairy tale, you mean?”

“It probably was a fairy tale.”

“Without the traditional ending.”

He elaborated, since she had refused to pick up on his cue. “The adjective that comes to mind now is determined.”

“Neat choice. Not positive, not negative. Ambiguous enough to please anybody who likes to free-associate.”

“I’ll give it a whirl. Determined to get through this ordeal. Determined to be polite. Determined not to show any feelings. Determined to point out how much you’ve changed.”

“Only parts of me have changed. None of the things you condemned have changed at all.” She slid plates into the sink and began to wash. “Condemned is a strong word.”

“You’re a journalist. You know it’s important to be accurate.”

She had finished the plates and glasses and started on the serving dishes before he spoke again. When he did, she realized he was standing beside her. He held out a perfectly shelled shrimp. “These are superb.”

“You’ve forgotten. We do some things well in Louisiana.”

He dangled it inches from her lips. “And a few of them aren’t illegal or immoral.”

She took the shrimp between her teeth, sucking it slowly until it was gone. “I’m surprised you could bear to bring yourself back here to the wellspring of all evil. You must have been unbearably curious about my grandmother’s invitation to risk your soul this way.”

“I was.” He didn’t move away. He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “Aren’t you?”

“More than a little.”

“Now that you’ve had a few hours to think, you must have a theory. Tell me about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d like to hear it.”

“And that should be reason enough?” She didn’t have to turn her head far to look at him. He was a foot away. Moonlight gleamed through the window and silvered the lock of wheat-colored hair falling over his forehead. “Shall I tell you one of the ways I’ve changed? I don’t turn to butter inside anymore when a man tells me he wants something from me. Now I expect reasons before I do anything. Good ones. Then I still think it over.”

“I didn’t mean to patronize you.”

“Didn’t you? Then you’ve changed, too.”

“I have. You’re absolutely right.”

“I’ll tell you my theory because I don’t mind sharing it.” She shook her hair back over her shoulders. One strand resisted and clung to her damp cheek. “I think my grandmother had a sense of the dramatic that none of us ever appreciated. I think she must have died with a smile on her lips, imagining the scene we’re playing here, all of us, not just you and me. She cast the most unlikely people she could bring together, then she pulled strings to be sure the play hit the big time. And somewhere, she’s watching us now and clapping her hands.”

He tucked the rebellious strand over her ear so deftly that he was finished before she could protest the intimacy. “In other words, you have no more idea than the rest of us why she invited us here.”

“None.”

“And your uncle?”

She finished the last bowl before she spoke. “Well, I doubt Uncle Hugh is clapping along.”

“I don’t know. Father Hugh had a sense of the dramatic to rival your grandmother’s. The larger his audience, the more effective he was.”

“His death was particularly effective, then. His audience was worldwide, thanks to the press.”

“If effective is a synonym for tragic.”

“And some of the people who mourned him mourned more than the death of a saint. They mourned a man they’d always loved.” She pulled the stopper and let the water drain away.

“I know.”

“Do you?” She rinsed her hands and dried them, rubbing Jergens lotion into them in a final ritual. “Did you love the man or the saint, Ben? Because they weren’t the same.”

“Maybe that’s part of the reason we’re here. To discover how much of each he was.”

“Why are you here?”

“To discover how much of each I am.”

She realized she had been avoiding his eyes. She gazed into them now, searching for answers. Nothing there explained his words. “Would you mind putting the shrimp in the refrigerator when you’re finished?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I’ll see you in the morning.”

Upstairs, her room was still hot. At sixteen she had been far too reserved to sleep without clothes, no matter what the temperature. Now she peeled off everything and stretched out against the relatively cool surface of the sheet. She didn’t expect to sleep at all, but sleep came quickly. And in her dreams she heard applause.