Someone to Hold

“Back?” he said. “Up there? To Cox-Phillips’s, do you mean? Absolutely not. For what purpose? I have nothing more to say to him and I am of no further use as far as he is concerned. He will have to find someone else to whom to leave his money if he really hates his relatives so much. That is his concern, not mine. Let me walk you home.” Edgar and Marvin would be back from work soon and it might be more difficult then to smuggle her out unseen.

She did not move, and now she was the Amazon as well as the schoolmistress. She really was a disconcerting female. “He is your last surviving link with your mother,” she said. “While he is alive he can tell you more, but it does not sound as if he will be alive for long. Did he tell you her name?”

He looked at her with open hostility before turning away to stare out through the window. She was not going to let this thing go, was she? He might have known it. “Cunningham,” he said.

He heard her cluck her tongue. “Her first name,” she said.

“What does it matter?” he asked her. “A boy does not call his mother by her first name anyway.”

“But he knows it,” she said. “And you have never called her anything else either, have you? There was never anyone to call Mama.”

No. He was surprised by the shaft of pain that knifed through him. There never had been. Perhaps that was one of the worst things about growing up an orphan. There was no Mama—or Papa either. And by God, there was going to be no self-pity. No more of it, anyway. Already, after a few hours of wallowing in it, he was sick of it.

“Was she dark haired and dark eyed like you?” she asked. “Or was she blond and blue eyed, perhaps? Or—”

“If she had had dark coloring,” he said, “Cox-Phillips would not have been so sure that it was the Italian who fathered me.”

“What was his name?” she asked.

“Something long and unpronounceable that ended in vowels,” he said. “He does not remember it. He probably never tried to learn it. To a man like Cox-Phillips all foreigners are inferior beings to be despised.”

“Did your mother see you before she died?” she asked. “Was she the one who named you Joel? Why that particular name?”

He turned on her, angry now, even though he owed her everything but anger. “Do you imagine,” he asked her, “that that crusty old man in his mansion up on the hill would know the answers to such questions? Do you imagine he cares? Do you imagine I care?”

“Yes to the last question,” she said. “I think you do care or that you will care—perhaps when it is too late to get any answers at all. Just a couple of weeks ago I believe I would have said that nothing could be worse than what had happened to me—and to Abigail and Harry. But something could, I realize now. If our mother had known early on that she was not legally married, she might have left my father, and it is altogether possible we might have ended up at an orphanage, perhaps even three separate ones, and been told nothing about ourselves except our names. Perhaps not even those. Our father was not a good man. I understand now that he was incapable of loving me no matter how hard I tried. He loved only himself. But at least I know who he was. I knew and I know my mother and my brother and sister. I know who I am. I do not yet know who I will become because my circumstances have changed so drastically, but I know where I came from, and I think I realize now fully for the first time how important that is.” She paused. “I am sorry your suffering has made this clear to me.”

He gazed at her for a few moments, realizing that she had just come to a sort of epiphany of her own. She was all haughty aristocrat and stern schoolmistress and stubborn Amazon and . . . Camille. He went striding off without a word to his studio, where he grabbed a sketchbook and a piece of charcoal and went back into the living room to sit on the chair from which he had risen a few minutes ago. Without looking at her he drew the swift, rough outline of a woman with slightly untidy hair and a look of passionate intensity on her face. It was what he thought of as the Camille part of her.

“Is this always your answer to something you do not wish to talk about?” she asked. “Is this your escape from reality?”

He kept on sketching for a while. “Perhaps,” he said, “it is my way of marshaling my thoughts. Perhaps it is my escape into reality. Or perhaps it is my way of filling in time until you allow me to walk you home.”

“You think you want to be rid of me,” she said, seemingly uncowed by the petty insult. “But it is your own troubling thoughts of which you want to be rid. You know you will forever regret it if you do not go back.”

“Do you realize how incredibly fascinating you are, Camille?” he asked. And how irritating?

“Nonsense,” she said. “I have never cultivated either beauty or charm, much less womanly wiles. I have cultivated only the will to do what I believe to be right in all circumstances.”

He glanced up at her and smiled. She was looking prunish. “You will realize your own fascination,” he said, “after I have painted you.”

“Then your painting will be worthless,” she told him. “I thought you refused to flatter your subjects. Why would you make an exception of me?”

He continued looking at her for a few moments so that he would get her eyebrows right. They would look rather too heavy on most women, but they were actually just right with her dark hair and strong features. He had not noticed that before. Strangely, he was not always an observant person when he looked merely with his eyes. He often did not see people clearly unless and until he started to sketch and paint them and draw upon what his intuition had sensed about them. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">