Olivia (Logan 5)

Daddy fell deeper and deeper into his own grave of despair. His eyes remained bleak, dark, haunted. I had never understood how much he loved and needed what I had thought was only her silly little jabber. However, without it, our home became an empty music hall, every sound echoing on the previous. I realized that Mother had created all the real melodies here. Her laughter, her symphonies of gossip filled with funny, inconsequential information about this one or that apparently had provided Daddy with a very necessary contrast and respite from the more serious, dour talk of business. She had been there to greet him with a kiss and a hug, to whirl around him in her newest dress or float her hand under his nostrils to give him a whiff of her latest cologne.

He could tolerate her illness because there was always the false hope that stems the flow of nightmares, the belief that something miraculous could still happen, that medicine and science would produce a cure just in time, what the Greeks called their deus ex machina, a last minute device to save the day and restore our world to its balance and health.

However, once death came calling, all that hope died with Mother's last breath. In the beginning, right after her funeral in fact, it was still difficult to believe she was gone. The heavy truth lingered like a persistent storm overhead, the truth seeping in more deeply each day. Mother was really gone. We were never going to see her again.

Even Belinda had trouble reviving herself. Sh

e moped about with large, teary eyes, took long naps, or just curled up like a baby in her bed and stared at the wall, her thumb against her lips. Her friends called, but her conversations were far shorter than usual and none of them came to visit. She discouraged them with her tears and moans of sorrow.

None of us had much of an appetite. Dinners were quiet and short. The nightmare continued to shadow our days until I announced I was returning to work. Up until now Daddy had visited the offices briefly and kept up with important business events over the phone. Our company was in a holding pattern. No decisions were being made. Everything was languishing.

"We've got to get back to full-time work, Daddy," I finally told him one night at dinner. "Mother wouldn't want us to mourn like this any longer. You know how much she hated gray faces and sadness," I said.

He nodded. "Olivia's right," Belinda said. "I'm not going to turn down another invitation."

"That's not exactly what I meant," I snapped, but she didn't want to hear me.

The next day she was off with her friends, returning to the Bubble Gum Club and her

unproductive activities. If Daddy had difficulty seeing how wasteful she was before, he was incapable of seeing it now. It was almost as if he didn't notice her existence. She needed money? He scribbled out a check to keep his ears from ringing with her pleas. She wanted to stay overnight at some friend's house, go to an all night party, take a weekend in Boston? He nodded, waved his hand, not even comprehending what she was doing or what he was allowing her to do.

I was busy filling in for him at the office when he didn't appear or left early, moving things forward again, making decisions and signing agreements and checks. I reported it all to him, but he listened with half an ear and asked few questions.

Samuel visited daily. He tried to revive our lives by bringing the architect around to discuss how he would modernize the older portion of our home and how he would expand it. Daddy sat in on some of the meetings, but offered little comment or advice. It did provide a good distraction for me, especially when I faced the realization that this would be my own home, my own little world for a long, long time.

The work began almost immediately and with it came Samuel's frequent reports of progress. Once a week I would go to the site with him and inspect the construction. Nelson Childs had been right in his prediction about Samuel. Samuel had the foreman hire more laborers and the remodeling and the new additions to the house were being completed at twice the pace normally anticipated.

"It's wasteful," I told him, "to pay people time and a half just to get into the house a month or so earlier."

"Waste is directly related to what makes you happy and unhappy," Samuel replied in an

uncharacteristic contradiction to what I had said. "I don't consider a nickel wasted if it brings me home to you one minute earlier, Olivia."

I raised my eyebrows and looked at him. How I wished I had the same intensity, the same desire and longing, and ironically I envied him for how much he seemed to love and want me. Usually, it was the woman who was impatient with the time it took to bring her to the altar. All the women I had known didn't have half the nervousness, the doubt, the insecurity as the men they were about to marry. Men, even though they did the proposing, behaved as if they were the ones who had been hooked and reeled in, not the women. It was as though marriage was the inevitable prison sentence awaiting them all.

Nelson behaved this way. Whenever I saw him and inquired as to his wedding plans, he would tell me nothing specific had been concluded yet. Why rush into what was inevitable? It wasn't going away, but, his impish smile told me, what was going away was his freedom. Soon enough he would have to behave appropriately. Why hurry it along?

Besides, he explained, the Branagans had insisted on using High Point House for the wedding reception and that had to be booked at minimum ten months to a year in advance. They were still discussing the actual date. The time in between was also necessary to get the families better acquainted. The Colonel and his wife were to be guests of the Branagans in Boston and the Branagans were to come more often to Provincetown.

They had already had a second engagement party for the Branagans' Boston friends. It was simply that there was much to do. He talked about it as if it were a campaign for the presidency of the United States, planning, planning, planning. For instance, there was the completion of the bride's trousseau, something Mrs. Branagan took quite seriously.

"Years ago, most mothers started making and embroidering linens for their daughter's trousseau almost from the day their daughters were born," Nelson explained. "Nowadays of course, women don't sew or embroider. They spend almost as much time, however, shopping, choosing, buying. Then there are the wedding plans. I swear, Olivia, cabinet meetings in the White House don't go on any longer or are treated with any more seriousness. Sometimes, our parents meet on neutral grounds!" he quipped. "Bridesmaids' dresses, my tuxedo and my

groomsmens', the guest list, the menu, the design of the invitations, the decorations and the music, all of it has to be discussed and analyzed and concluded with almost the same ceremony as the treaty to end a war. Goodness knows there's lots of diplomacy at work to keep the respective mothers from scratching each other's eyes out. Dad says luckily he and my father-inlaw have legal training. No," Nelson concluded, "ten more months is barely enough time as it is."

I didn't want to tell him I was doing all that myself. "You're not anxious then?" I asked him.

"Admittedly, nowhere near as anxious as your fiance," he told me when he joined us up at the house site one weekend a little more than a month and a half into construction. "You have possessed Samuel Logan. Look at him prodding and cheering those laborers to work harder, faster. If he could lash them with a whip, he would. You should never have agreed to a marriage date that was tied to the house completion. I hear the invitations are already at the printers. He told me he had you deliver the copy as soon as the electricians had started."

"You're not as possessed?" I felt like a lobster fisherman dropping traps to test the waters, but I was very curious about Nelson's feelings concerning his fiancee.

"I'm someone's possession," he quipped, "but I'm not yet possessed."

He smiled at me with those beautiful eyes and made my heart go into triple beats.

"How's your father doing these days?" he asked, perhaps wisely changing the subject.

"He's still not back to 100 percent. I'm afraid he might never be," I added in a matter-of-fact tone that took Nelson by surprise.