This one's different, I told myself. This time, Tori, you're only moving a few miles across town, not half a world away. But the familiar sadness was still there.
“Are you crying?” Garnet asked.
“It's the iodine. It smarts.”
Sometimes Garnet shows remarkable sensitivity. This afternoon was one of those times. He took my hand in his and squeezed it gently. I studied him as he drove over Lickin Creek's cobbled streets. His straight sandy-brown hair fell forward on his forehead. He was the kind of lucky person who always looked tan, sort of like Don Johnson on the reruns of Miami Vice, which was one of my TV addictions. Today he wore what I thought of as the Lickin Creek uniform, a plaid shirt, tight jeans, and hunting boots. On him, it looked good.
Within five minutes, Garnet had driven his truck through the rusty iron gates that marked the entrance to the old resort community of Moon Lake. The lake itself marks the southern border of the borough. Great mansions, built before the turn of the century to be the summer cottages for the very rich from Baltimore and D.C., had crumbled there for years beneath ancient trees.
When the so-called cottages were first built, in the days before jet travel made the rest of the world easily accessible, women and children from those cities used to come to Moon Lake to escape the summer heat, bringing with them their servants and huge steamer trunks full of clothes for every occasion. Husbands and fathers visited on weekends. But all good things come to an end, and the “cottages” eventually fell into disrepair as World War I and, later, the stock market crash, put an end to those leisurely, elegant times.
Fortunately, the development had sprung to life again in the past few years, rescued by young professionals, mostly from the D.C. area, who were entranced by the charm of the spacious old homes and wanted to restore them to their former glory. When I'd come for my interview with Ethelind Gallant, it had been nighttime and I hadn't been able to see much. But this morning, with the trees changing from green to autumn gold, and the sun sparkling on the blue water of Moon Lake, I gasped with pleasure. I could hardly believe I was really going to live in a place like this!
While many of the grand old places had been subjected to costly renovation, not so the largest and once grandest of them all, the house owned by college professor Ethelind Gallant, who was soon leaving for mer-rie olde England to collect information about the use of contractions in medieval writings. I had gratefully agreed to house-sit while she was gone. After all, I'd be living there rent-free and I'd only be responsible for paying the utilities and making sure the house didn't collapse while she was gone. Did I think for a minute that heating a house with thirty or more rooms might strain my budget? Of course not. And now, looking at the gloomy structure in broad daylight, I realized there was a real possibility that indeed it might collapse-the front-porch roof had already been propped up with some two-by-fours. A fluttering piece of paper, tacked onto one of the two-by-fours, warned visitors to use the back door.
Garnet stopped in the circular driveway, and I jumped down. Clutching a cat carrier in each hand, I walked around to the back while Garnet followed me pulling my suitcases.
Ethelind greeted us on the enclosed back porch, which was obviously used as a laundry room and a dumping-off place for last winter's coats and boots. She was about Garnet's height, five ten, and shaped like a barrel. I guessed her measurements would be fifty-fifty-fifty. Her hair was dyed Lucille Ball red, and she'd applied her makeup with such a heavy hand that it would have looked artificial even on a stage. In one hand was a skinny brown cigarette. In the other, a half-empty sherry glass.
Her smile of greeting, which showed big yellow teeth smeared with lipstick, faded as she looked down at the cat carriers. “You didn't mention you had cats!”
“Didn't I?” I tried to look surprised, as if I couldn't believe I hadn't told her about Fred and Noel. “I'm sure I did.”
She kept staring at the carriers. “Filthy creatures,” she muttered.
I held my breath and waited. Finally, she shrugged. “Well, nothing we can do about it now. I'll be off for England in a few days, anyway. Come on in. We'll have a drink to celebrate your being here.” She turned her back on us and marched into the house.
Garnet put his hand on my shoulder and held me back. “It's not too late, Tori. You can still come to Costa Rica with me.”
The weekend went by so quickly I knew my memories of it would always be blurred. I picked one of a dozen or more bedrooms to be mine, unpacked the boxes sent to me by my next-door neighbor and best friend in New York, Murray Rosenbaum, and tried to adjust to Ethelind Gallant's constant cigarette smoke. While I had thought she was leaving for England right away, it now turned out there was a slight change of plans and she was waiting for a vacancy on the QE II. Then there was the farewell dinner for Garnet at the home of his Aunt Gladys and Uncle Zeke, where I dozed off during dinner and distantly heard someone say, “Probably into drugs. She's a New Yorker you know.”
On Sunday morning, I stood in the Gochenauer driveway with Greta and waved good-bye to Garnet until his rental car turned the corner. To hide my tears, I bent down and hugged Bear, Garnet's German shepherd, whose dark eyes looked as sad as I imagined mine must look.
“Stay for dinner?” Greta asked kindly. “I thought I'd fix a little beef heart.”
I shook my head. The thought of Greta's cooking made me cry even harder.
On the following Monday morning, I drove to Ha-gerstown, Maryland, where a young doctor replaced my plaster arm cast with a soft cast that weighed about a thousand pounds less. I'd broken my arm nearly a month ago when my car was forced off the road during the Apple Butter Festival. Feeling free and mobile without the restricting cast, I checked in at the Chronicle and was assured by Cassie that there was nothing I needed to do there. “Except for calling Doctor Washabaugh,” she added.
“I will,” I said as I left to drive to the Lickin Creek College for Women, where Janet Margolies had scheduled a meeting to introduce me to some of the people who were to be involved in Parents’ Weekend. I was glad to be kept busy. It was a lot better than sitting at home feeling lonely and sorry for myself.
From a distance, the white Victorian buildings of the campus were graceful reminders of days gone by. But as I trudged up the hill from the visitors’ parking lot, I began to notice the flaking paint, the woodwork in need of repair, and the cracked flagstones of the walkways. The Lickin Creek College for Women was in the process of redesigning itself for modern women, but it still suffered from a severely declining enrollment. Was there really a place in today's high-tech, fast-paced world, I wondered, for a small, nineteenth-century, women's liberal arts college? I hoped there was.
I was ushered into a large lounge in the administration building, filled with priceless antique furniture and a half dozen oil paintings of past college presidents. After pouring a cup of tea for me out of a silver teapot on a mahogany breakfront, Janet led me to where a handsome gray-haired gentleman was seated. He stood, smiled, and shook my hand firmly, and I knew he must be someone important even before Janet told me he was President Godlove. “Glad to have you aboard,” he said.
“Former Navy man,” Janet whispered as she guided me toward a large group of people engaged in a lively conversation. They were almost all professors, except for the campus security chief and two members of the senior class. The names whizzed over my head and out the window, but I shook hands with everybody and said “Glad to meet you,” several times.