Chasing endless summer, p.6
Chasing Endless Summer, page 6
“Then why did you bother to do this and risk it?”
He shrugged. “A little excitement, and I felt sure you’d listen to my instructions.”
“Well, I’m not,” I said. “But don’t worry about your precious place with Grandfather. You don’t have to deny it. I’ll say I came down here and found this on my own because my mother told me about some of it. And if Mrs. Lawson tries to convince Grandfather that I’m lying and it was you, I’ll assure him that I didn’t and don’t want to have anything to do with you. Convincing them of that won’t be difficult for me.”
He winced. “That hurt,” he said, rubbing his shoulder as if pretending I had punched him.
“And I’m taking the model jet plane my father gave me. I’ll hide it in a drawer.”
“She’ll search your drawers, Caroline. She’ll look under your bed. She’ll even check the inside of your toilet bowl. She’ll take a microscope to your room.”
“Stop it. You’re just trying to frighten me.”
He shrugged again. “It’s the one place where we’re at a disadvantage as a species,” he said in his arrogant, lecturer voice. “Put a puppy on a ledge ten stories high, and it’ll whimper and cry; put a human baby there, and he or she will giggle right off the ledge. Fear is good.”
I stared at him defiantly.
He sighed deeply. “All I can do is warn you, Caroline. I’m going up now. I have some reading to do myself.”
He went to the outside basement door and began closing it quietly.
“All right,” he said, returning. He saw how determined I was, even though what he had told me really did scare me. “I have a compromise for you.”
“What?”
“That diary is thin enough. She doesn’t know your reading assignments. We’ll cut out the inside of a biology textbook I have in the study with some of my other books and insert the diary in it. If she pops open your door and sees you reading, she’ll assume that’s what it is. But you have to leave the model plane down here. Deal?”
I thought for a moment.
“I promise to sneak you down here again and again if you want, but we have to do it when I decide, when I am confident that it’s safe.”
“You’re just like them: you’re taking over my life.”
“Self-preservation. You’ll get used to it. It’s what makes you a true Sutherland.”
I stood, still deciding about whether to get the model plane or not.
“Give me the diary,” he said. “I’ll put it under my shirt until we fix the biology textbook. She won’t dare touch me if she sees us.”
He unbuttoned his shirt.
“Well? C’mon, Caroline. If she returns to the study and you’re not there or in your room, she’ll surely get suspicious and start searching for us, for you mainly. You said so yourself.”
“Okay,” I said, and handed it to him.
“Wise choice.”
“Why do you want to spend so much time here at Sutherland anyway?” I asked. “You could have a lot more fun and less worry if you made some friends and did things together. I know I will.”
There was a small twitch in his eyes when I brought up his lack of friends. I knew Aunt Holly wished he was more social.
“I like it here. Someday all this will be mine. It will be more important to be a friend of mine then.”
“Those won’t be true friends. They’ll pretend to be so they can take advantage of you.”
“That’s all friends are: people who take advantage of each other. Some are just better at hiding it. I won’t have any illusions about it, but it won’t matter. I’ll have Sutherland.”
“That’s a long way off, Simon. Your father would inherit it first, and you’ll go to college, won’t you?”
“My father will always need me,” he said. “Maybe he won’t inherit it first.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing for you to worry about. Come on. Quietly. I’ll check the hallway first,” he said, and started for the stairway.
I looked back at it all, the trunks, the old furniture and paintings smothered in dusty gray sheets. I envisioned someone being tied, gagged, and, like my mother’s ashes, shut up in an urn, stored in the darkness, all of it a futile attempt to erase the past that surely revisited everyone in this family often in dreams and nightmares. They were the true cobwebs in Sutherland.
Simon beckoned, and I hurried up and behind him to step out of the basement and close the door softly behind us. The house was as quiet as before, maybe even quieter.
When we reached the entrance lobby and turned toward the kitchen, we heard Grandfather call, “Simon.”
Even my heart paused and then began to thump faster, the beat so loud in my ears that I was certain Grandfather could hear it, too.
“What are you two up to?” he asked. It seemed always true, but somehow even truer now, that the house grabbed the sound of his voice and echoed it through its veins, the corridors, upstairs and down. He didn’t live in this mansion; he wore it like a suit of armor.
“Oh, hi, Grandfather,” Simon said, so casually that he could have convinced even me how innocent we were. “I just helped Caroline with some of the assignments Dr. Kirkwell had left. We’re trying to occupy our thoughts to keep from thinking about poor Grandmother Judith.”
“Um,” Grandfather said. His face seemed to soften, his eyes suddenly distant. “My grandmother used to open every window in the house when someone died in it.” He was lost in a memory for a moment and then, thinking it made him less authoritative, perhaps, snapped out of it and in a louder, firmer voice said, “You two should go outside. Get some air. We’ll be confined to churches and rooms full of sorrow soon enough. Go on,” he ordered. “Just stay out of everyone’s hair today especially.”
As if she was always there to be the period or exclamation point to his statements, Mrs. Lawson appeared, stepping out of a shadow behind him.
“I’ll keep an eye on them,” she said.
Grandfather grunted his approval and walked off. She remained, glaring at us. Despite her being at most only two or three inches taller than I was, she always appeared to be towering over me. I had often seen how some of the maids cowered and shrank after she had snapped an order or had come upon them suddenly, probably when they least expected her. At times, she seemed to emerge from out of the walls. Was it her omnipresence, her seeming ability to appear suddenly when anything troubling happened, that gave her such authority? I wondered if the woman even slept. Simon wasn’t exaggerating when he compared her eyes to two microscopes.
I had no doubt there was no love lost between her and Simon or anyone else in this mansion except Grandfather. When it came to Sutherland, she was truly his broom and mop. It was easy to see that all he had to do was glance at someone or something, and she would leap at it with a hatchet in her hand.
“How many eyes do you have, Mrs. Lawson,” Simon quipped, “that you can afford to spend one on us?”
Her face reddened.
“We’re going to get our textbooks and notebooks and, as Grandfather said, we’re going to sit outside and read. You can follow us if you want.”
She turned away and headed for the grand ballroom, where Grandmother Judith’s funeral reception would be held.
Simon grinned at me. “Let’s go to the study. I’ll get a large enough textbook I use to carefully hide the diary. Then we’ll go to lunch on the patio just as Grandfather told us.”
He kept his left arm slightly up to press the diary closer to his body. I lowered my head, now admittedly a little nervous and frightened, and followed him. It wasn’t twenty-four hours ago that I wanted to keep at least ten feet away from him, not look at him, and not even hear his voice. Somehow, whether he had planned it cleverly or not, he had me depending on him. I always knew he was much more intelligent than I was—or anyone else in the family, maybe. How would I know when he was sincere and when he was cleverly controlling me? Was I simply another game to him, simply amusement? When I did think harder about it, I did worry.
What if he had done all this not because he really wanted me to be his friend but because he eventually could reveal everything to our grandfather and become more important and more appreciated? He could show he was better than Mrs. Lawson, even better than Dr. Kirkwell. “She fooled everyone but me, Grandfather,” he could say.
He hurried out ahead of me, not looking back once to see if I was following. We went to the study, and he found the textbook he wanted. I watched him cut a wide frame in the pages.
“It’ll fit right in here,” he said, inserting the diary and then proudly closing the book to show me. “Don’t worry. She doesn’t have X-ray eyes.”
He took a book for himself.
“Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations,” he said, showing it to me. “Grandfather loves it when I quote from it. It’s the foundation for modern economics… his Bible. Mine too, actually.”
He handed me the textbook hiding Grandmother’s diary.
“Let’s go. And don’t look back. Mrs. Lawson loves it when you show any fear.”
I followed him out and tried not to watch for her.
We went out to the patio, but Simon suddenly started away.
“Where are you going?” I called when he turned left off the patio.
“To the pool. Let’s get farther away from the house. She’ll eavesdrop on us. We’ll sit on lounge chairs and read. Actually, I’m probably just going to think.”
“About what?”
“My future. I have to make some important decisions soon.”
He kept walking. I hurried to catch up.
“What decisions?”
He paused and looked back at the house. “Just as I told you… she’s watching us. The woman is a fanatic.”
“What decisions?” I asked, glancing back.
Mrs. Lawson was standing at one of the sliding patio doors and looking at us; it was creepy how well Simon knew her.
“About my own immediate future. You’re not going to be here forever, you know.”
He walked faster. I had to jog to catch up with him.
“What are you saying?”
He didn’t respond until we reached the pool.
“Well?”
He flopped onto a lounge chair.
“What did you mean?” I asked.
He looked up at me but still didn’t answer.
“Simon?”
“Your father is going to let you visit, spend the summer, and maybe live with him and his new family,” he said quickly.
“How do you know?”
“I know,” he said.
I sat on the lounge chair beside him.
“Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?”
He stared ahead. The gardeners were trimming bushes near the pool. Off in the distance, we could hear the sound of someone’s car alarm going off, the beeping so annoying that even birds were flying away in every direction.
“Do I have to beg you to talk?” I said.
He turned to me, his eyes flashing anger. Why? “I thought if I did, you wouldn’t care that much about learning all there is to know about our family. There really isn’t anyone else with whom to share it. My mother doesn’t really care about it, and my father… my father is afraid he’ll say something I might repeat to my grandfather.”
“But how do you know about my father? No one has said anything to me.”
He looked at me so hard that I could see he was debating whether or not to tell me something I might use against him or accidentally mention and get him into trouble. What could be worse than what he had already done by showing me the urn?
“I can get into Grandfather’s email, and often I do,” he confessed.
“You spy on him?”
“Stay up-to-date, not spy. ‘Spy’ sounds too… evil.”
“But he wouldn’t like it.”
“If you tell him…”
“I’m not interested in telling him. What did my father say, exactly?”
“He said if you continued to behave appropriately, he was willing to have you visit and see for himself. Something like that. I don’t recall the exact words.”
He opened his book and started to read or look like he was. It was surely like him to leave me hanging. Then I thought of something.
“If you got me into trouble, Grandfather would tell him, and he wouldn’t invite me for the summer.”
Simon lowered his book and gave me his wry smile. “You think I’m that desperate that I would get you into a trap to keep you here?”
Yes, I thought, but didn’t say it.
I lay back and started to read Grandmother’s diary again. For a man who was supposedly so formal and stiff, coldly analytical about women to the point where he would make a list of positives and negatives about one, Grandfather surely sounded more like a romantic man in these early diary pages. He always brought her flowers, took her to beautiful places, and began buying her jewelry. There were always love notes attached to the flowers and gifts. How could she not fall in love with him?
But was his love for her really nothing more than his putting on a new set of clothes? If not, what had changed him? Grandmother Judith described his proposal of marriage taking place here at Sutherland, and it seemed like such a beautiful love scene. It was a beautiful day, and he held her hand and had her look at the mountains while he spoke what sounded more like poetry. Grandfather Sutherland?
“Did you really read this?” I asked Simon.
He lowered his book. “Just skimmed it, I suppose. I saw that it was a girlie thing. Hard facts about our family were what I was after. Why?”
I stared at him so hard that he had to smile.
“What?”
“Maybe you don’t really know who Grandfather is,” I said.
A frightened bird couldn’t leap off his face as quickly as did that smug smile.
“There is no one who knows Grandfather better than I do.”
He snapped open his book and, I’m sure, pretended to return to his reading, but I could feel him watching me out of the corner of his eye.
I read on. Grandmother Judith was very excited to become the mistress of Sutherland. They also had their wedding right here, and from the way she described it in detail, it was probably one of the biggest weddings in upstate New York. Even the governor attended. Her subtle comments about Great-grandfather and Abigail Sutherland suggested she wasn’t terribly fond of either of them. She clearly understood the rivalry between our grandfather and his father, but what Simon surely missed was how jealous Abigail was of Grandmother Judith. From her description, it seemed clear to me that she was constantly looking for ways to diminish her. After a while, I wondered how they all lived with each other, even in this mansion in which you could avoid seeing someone for days.
I don’t know how much time actually passed, but Simon suddenly said, “Close the book. She’s descending on us like some vulture.”
I glanced back and saw Mrs. Lawson walking toward us at a surprisingly fast pace. I didn’t think she was capable of moving that quickly. I closed the book, sipped what was left of my drink, and looked at Simon. Had she somehow discovered that we had been in the basement and I had Grandmother Judith’s diary?
“Get up and go directly to the Sutherland Room,” she said as soon as she was close enough.
“Why?” Simon asked, not even giving her the respect to look at her when he spoke.
“Reverend Vance is here to discuss the church service with the family. Your father asked me to fetch you.”
“Fetch?” Simon said, smiling. “Who says ‘fetch’ anymore?”
Mrs. Lawson drew her shoulders back and widened her eyes to the point where I thought they would burst. Delight and laughter were sizzling so quickly inside me that I thought I wouldn’t be able to smother even a giggle. She fixed her stone-cold eyes on me as if she knew how much I wanted to laugh. It had been so long since I had a good reason to or an opportunity.
“ ‘A good thrashing’ are some other words not often used today but are obviously in dire need here,” she said in her familiar icy voice, and then spun on her heels so hard that they nearly caught in the grass and sent her sprawling. “You’ve been told,” she declared, like someone staking a flag in the ground, and started for the house.
Simon stretched and stood.
“Let’s go before she riles everyone up,” he said. “Keep the textbook closed, and get it up to your room as soon as you can.”
“I think you really enjoy teasing and poking at her.”
He smiled. “Well, you can’t, so I have to do it for you.” His eyes were lit with delight. “Let’s go.”
He turned to walk to the house. Whether I liked it or not, he was going to be my guardian. He waited, and I walked with him. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw how his hand seemed to float toward and then away from mine. Maybe it was because I had just read Grandmother Judith’s romantic feelings toward Grandfather, but I almost wished he had taken my hand. Was it wrong to want to feel wanted, to accept some token of affection? Or would all the Sutherland ancestors captured in portraits on all the walls glare down in a rainfall of rage and somehow send me back to the bedroom of darkness?
There was no question about what Mrs. Lawson would do.
She was waiting gleefully at the entrance to the Sutherland Room and nodded to Grandfather as we arrived. I looked into her face and saw the pleasure it gave her to do his bidding. It wasn’t such a big accomplishment to “fetch” us, but her look of self-satisfaction made it seem so.
Aunt Holly and Uncle Martin, dressed more formally, both turned to watch us take our seats. Franklin Butler was standing in his usual place.
Reverend Vance sat on a black folding chair beside Grandfather, who, in his ruby-red heavy-cushioned chair, looked a foot taller. The reverend was a heavy man who looked like he was poured over the folding chair.
“I’m sorry that we all have to meet on such a solemn and sad occasion,” he began in a rather thin, high-pitched voice that sounded more like a woman’s. He then went on to describe how the religious ceremony would proceed, glancing at Grandfather after almost every step to be sure he wasn’t saying anything that would displease him. Then he paused and asked what we would like included in his description of Grandmother Judith.
