In the morning I informed Winston and Mommy that I had changed my plans and would be going with them to Europe after all. Winston was delighted, but. ironically. Mommy, who at first was worried about my staying home alone most of the summer, looked disappointed.
"What happened with that boy?" she asked. "Walker?"
&nbs
p; "Nothing," I said. "Nothing was supposed to happen." I refused to talk about it anymore.
Winston bought a sailboat for me in Cannes. and I was back at it again-- the wind, the water, the sea gulls, and me. I did a great deal of reading, went with them on most of their excursions, and took tennis lessons. Before the summer ended Winston and I were playing doubles against other couples or just playing with each other. Mommy wasn't into it and after one or two lessons gave up trying. She said she preferred golf, and soon it became a strange competition for Winston's time. He would have to play golf with her or tennis with me. Sometimes he tried to do both.
"Keeping two vigorous women happy is proving to be challenging," he confessed. He also confessed sotto voce that he preferred tennis. Golf, especially with Mommy, was like watching paint dry, he said, but never once showed it in front of her. He was a jewel of a man. I thought.
Once I had believed I shouldn't settle down until I found a man exactly like Daddy. Now I was looking for one exactly like Winston Montgomery.
.
Walker did not return to college in the fall. When I inquired about him I learned he had
transferred to the University of West Florida in Pensacola. I found out from one of our sailing teammates that he was going there because his girlfriend from Marco Island was going there. Somehow it all took the spirit out of my sailing activity, too, and eventually I left the team, using the pressure of my studies as an excuse. The truth was, my interest in school itself was dwindling, shrinking and diminishing like some star fading into the night. Solitude became my best friend again, and before the semester ended Celia asked to be transferred from our room in the dormitory, claiming I was too dark and depressing a roommate, never talking, never listening to music, never wanting to do anything socially with her. I didn't blame her or argue about it. After she moved out I anticipated someone new, but word about me seemed to spread like a virus, and no one asked to be transferred into my room, even any of the girls who were tripled.
When I returned home for the holidays I seriously debated continuing with caller. Maybe I needed a year off. I didn't bring it up with Mommy, but I did with Winston. and I could see he was very troubled by the suggestion. He was silent for a long moment and then nodded slowly.
'Perhaps I have really been the one with my head in the sand when it comes to you. Grace," he said. "Maybe I have been ignoring your difficulties or trying too hard to distract you. Wrapping Jaya del Mar around you and withdrawing from the world isn't going to solve anything," he said. "Give it all a second and a third thought. Please," he pleaded.
As it turned out. I didn't have to give it any more thought. Fate, that creature Mommy had been so confident about defeating, had only been waiting in the shadows, waiting and watching for it's
opportunity. When it arose, it slipped out quietly and tiptoed up the stairs of our elegant home. It did so sometime during the night, glancing once perhaps my way and smiling and then continuing down the hallway, past all the magnificent and beautiful art, until it reached Mommy and Winston's door.
There it paused and glanced over its shoulder, gesturing toward another shadow that is always ready and waiting to be beckoned like an obedient servant. They entered together and left together.
Mommy's screams rode on the wave of morning sunlight that lifted the night off of Jaya del Mar and replaced it with a different sort of darkness, a blanket of gloom woven with the mournful cries. shrouds. and dust of centuries. My eyes snapped open, and my heart stopped and started. I was trembling so hard I could barely move one foot ahead of the other. When I stepped into the hallway the servants were rushing up the stairs, coming from every direction.
Mommy saw me standing there, my hands clutched between my breasts.
"I keep shaking him and shaking him, but he won't wake up!" she cried, "He won't wake up!"
Somewhere outside another sea gull turned and went screaming out to sea on its wings of panic.
In my mind I heard the roar of helicopters.
16
None So Blind
.
I didn't want to wallow in self-pity after
Winston's death. It seemed to me a selfish way to be. but I was more convinced than ever that everyone I cared for or who cared for me suffered some cruel fate. Surely this proved it was some sort of curse I brought along into every relationship. I was a Typhoid Mary. I carried the disease. but I didn't get it.
There was still my mother, of course, but that didn't mean she was exempt. In time I couldn't help believing that something terrible would happen to her, too, and all because of me. I didn't tell anyone about these thoughts. They came to me again and again, especially during Winston's funeral. In church. when I looked around at the people in attendance. I was sure I saw the accusations in their granite faces. They were staring at me too hard and too angrily: and nodding at me. I imagined a wave of long, sharp forefingers pointed in my direction.
Maybe they believed I had taken up too much of his time, had given him too much to worry about. or had exhausted him. Why else would a man who had been so fit and such a great athlete have a fatal heart attack when men fifteen, twenty years older were still active and alive and not half as healthylooking?
The mourners looked at Mommy in a different way, too. Almost no one but Dallas and Warren gazed at her with any sympathy. Most had wry smiles writhing over their lips.
Everyone knew that as Winston's wife Mommy had inherited a considerable fortune. She was just another jeweled fruit ripe for plucking. I overheard comments to that effect at Joya del Mar after the funeral when most of these people came to pay their respects. Some unmarried men and widowers even stood around adding up the value of everything as if they were deciding whether she was worth the trouble. They were nothing more than a different form of buzzard disguised as eagles with gilded wings, especially the lawyers and financial managers who descended with their plastic smiles and air kisses, clicking their lips around her face and around each other so much it sounded like an invasion of crickets.
I was glad when it all ended. Like some very young girl I harbored the hope that it had all been a dream, that I would walk out onto the rear loggia the next morning and find Winston sitting there, comfortably reading his Wall Street Journal. He would look up at me and smile warmly, and we'd have coffee and talk about the condition of the sea and the winds while the sailboat bobbed invitingly at the dock.