(4/10) The Julius House Read online

  The long driveway was in terrible shape, deeply rutted, the gravel almost all gone. Martin had already arranged to have more gravel hauled in.

  The huge yard was full of trees and bushes, all tall and full. An enormous clump of forsythia by the road was bursting into yellow blooms. The house was brick, painted white. The front door and the door to the screened-in porch were green, as were the shutters on the downstairs windows and the awning on the second- floor triple window overlooking the front yard.

  I went up the concrete steps to the screen door opening onto the front porch that extended the width of the house. The wrought-iron railing by the steps needed painting; I made a note on my little pad. I crossed the porch and turned my key in the front door for the first time.

  I threw down my purse on the smelly carpet and wandered happily through the house, my pad and pencil at the ready. And I found a lot to note.

  The carpet needed replacing; the walls needed new paint. Martin had told me to pick what I liked, as long as avocado green, gold, and raspberry pink weren’t included. The fireplace in the front room should be flanked by bookshelves, I decided dreamily. The dining room that lay between the front room and the kitchen had a built-in hutch to hold our silver and placemats and tablecloths, the gifts that were already accumulating in my living and dining rooms at the town house.

  There were plenty of cabinets in the kitchen, and the cream and golden-orange scheme was just right. I’d have to reline the shelves; I made another note. The Juliuses had begun renovating the downstairs bathroom, but I didn’t like the wallpaper, and the tub needed replacing. I made another note. Would we want to use the downstairs bedroom, or turn it into a smaller, less formal family room? Perhaps an office—did Martin bring work home?

  I went up the stairs to look at the size of the two upstairs bedrooms. The largest one looked out over the front of the house; it was the one with a row of three windows with an awning to keep out the afternoon sun. I was drawn to them immediately. I looked out over the ridge of the porch roof, which was separate; the porch must have been an afterthought. The impression from the front yard was of looking at a large piece of typing paper folded lengthwise—that was the roof of the house—echoed by a smaller piece of notepaper folded the same way lower down, the porch roof. However, this roof didn’t intrude on the view, which swept across the fields to a series of distant hills. No other houses in sight. The fireplace downstairs in the large front room was echoed in the fireplace up here.

  I loved it.

  This would be our bedroom.

  Closet space was a definite problem. The double closet was just not adequate. I went across the landing to the little room with no apparent use. Perhaps it had been a sewing room originally? Could we build an extra closet in here? Yes, it was possible. There was a blank wall that would make a larger closet than the one we had in the bedroom. And there was room enough for Martin’s exercise equipment. The other upstairs bedroom could be the guest bedroom.

  Books—where would I put my books? I had so many, with my library combined with Jane’s . . . I took time for fond thoughts of Jane, with her silver chignon and her little house, her Sears dresses and modest ways; rich Jane, who’d left me all that money. I sent waves of affection and gratitude toward her, wherever she was, and hoped she was in the heaven I believed in.

  I went slowly down the stairs, looking below me as I went. The stairs ended about six feet inside the front door and divided the large front room from the wide hall that gave access to the bathroom and downstairs bedroom, and another way to get to the kitchen, rather than going through the dining room.

  What a nice wide hall. Wouldn’t it look great repapered and lined with bookshelves?

  I laughed out loud. It seemed there could hardly be anything more entertaining than to have a house to redo and enough money to redo it.

  This was the happiest morning of my life, spent all alone, in the Julius house.

  Chapter Three

  I picked up Madeleine from the vet’s, where I’d boarded her while I was gone. The entire staff could hardly wait until she left; Madeleine hated everyone who worked there and let them know it. Growls issued from her carrier all the way to the town house, but I ignored her. I was riding on a happy wave and no fat marmalade cat could make me crash.

  I met Martin for lunch at Beef ’N More, and once we’d said hello to half a dozen people, we were free to talk about the house. Really, Martin listened to me talk. I set my notepad by my plate and had to keep pushing up my glasses as I referred to it.

  “You’re happy,” he said, dabbing his mouth with his napkin.

  “More than I’ve ever been.”

  “I got you the right thing.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Would you mind if I left you with the whole responsibility of seeing to the changes we need to make in the house?”

  “Is this a nice way of saying, ‘Since you’re not working, could this be your job?’ ”

  Martin looked disconcerted for a second. “I guess it is,” he admitted. “I want our house to look nice, of course, and be comfortable for us; I mean, I care what it looks like! But I have some business trips coming up—”

  I made a little sound of dismay. “Trips?”

  “I’m sorry, honey. This was totally unexpected. I promise in three weeks I won’t budge.” Three weeks from now was the wedding. “But there are a lot of things I have to tie up before I take off for the wedding and our honeymoon.”

  To tell the truth, the prospect of having free rein on the house renovation was very attractive. I felt he was dangling that as recompense for the business trips, but okay. I bit.

  “What have we got in the next three weeks that I need to be on hand for?” he said, getting his pocket calendar out.

  I whipped out my own and went over the schedule: a supper party, a shower for me. “Then,” I went on, “we have a barbecue in our honor at Amina’s parents’ lake house, a week from Saturday. It’s informal. Amina and her husband will be driving in from Houston for that.”

  Amina would be my only attendant. The fit of her dress and the chance of her getting nauseated during the ceremony added yet another note of suspense to an already nerve-wracking rite.

  “Southern weddings,” my beloved said darkly.

  “It would be a lot worse if we weren’t so old and established,” I told him. “If I were twenty-two instead of thirty-one and you were twenty-four instead of forty-five, we’d have at least double this schedule.”

  Martin was aghast.

  “I’m not joking,” I assured him.

  “And then, at the reception, you just have cake and punch,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I know it’s hard to understand, but that’s the way we do things in Lawrenceton,” I said firmly. “I know when Barby got married she had a supper buffet and a band, but believe me, we’re stretching it by having champagne.”

  He took my hand and once again I felt that oozy, melty feeling that was disgustingly like a forties song.

  “I heard from Barby,” he said, and I kept my face smiling happily with some effort. My future sister-in-law wasn’t my favorite part of the wedding package.

  “She’s flying in two days before the wedding, and she accepted your mother’s offer of her guest bedroom. I’ll call your mother and thank her,” Martin said, making a note. “And Barrett called.”

  Martin’s son called Martin about once a month, to recount his ups and downs on the road to an acting career in California.

  “Is Barrett still going to be your best man?”

  “He can’t make it.”

  I stiffened, dropping all pretense at smiling.

  “He has a part in a movie filming then,” Martin said expressionlessly. “He’s waited a long time for this part; he has lines and is on screen for several scenes . . . the hero’s best friend.”

  We looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

  Martin looked over the heads of the
other diners. I was glad we were in one of the little alcoves that make Beef ’N More at least a tolerable place to eat.

  “There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he said after a moment. The subject of Barrett was clearly closed.

  I shifted my face around to “Expectant.”

  “The garage apartment,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows even higher.

  “I have a friend who just came into town from Florida. He lost his job. He and his wife are very capable people. I wondered—if you didn’t mind—if they could have the garage apartment.”

  “Of course,” I said. I’d never met a friend of Martin ’s, an old friend. He had made a few connections locally, mostly at the Athletic Club, upper-management men like himself. “You knew him from—?”

  “Vietnam,” he said.

  “So what’s his name?”

  “Shelby. Shelby Youngblood. I thought . . . with all the renovation . . . it might be nice to have someone else on the spot out at the house. Shelby will probably work out at Pan-Am Agra in shipping and receiving, but Angel, his wife, could be there when he’s not.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling I’d missed something important.

  “When I found out Barrett couldn’t come,” Martin said, almost as an afterthought, “I called your stepfather, and he’s agreed to be my best man.”

  I smiled with genuine pleasure. In many ways, it was easier to marry an older man who was used to fending for himself. “That was a good idea,” I said, knowing John must have been pleased to be asked.

  We parted in the parking lot. He took off back to work, and I was going to my favorite paint/carpet/ wallpaper store, Total House, to start the Julius place on its road to becoming our house. But halfway there, I pulled over to the curb and sat staring ahead, my window open for the cool fresh air.

  Martin, in his “mysterious” mode, had put one over on me.

  Who the hell was this Shelby Youngblood? What kind of woman was his wife? What sort of job in Florida had he lost, and how did he know where to find Martin? I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, wondering.

  Probably this was the downside of marrying an older man who was used to fending for himself. He also was not used to having to explain himself. And yet Martin deserved to keep his past life a secret, I thought confusedly; I was hardly telling him all . . . No! I had told him everything that might make a difference to our life together. I wasn’t wanting to know the names of his sexual partners in the past years, which of course he should keep to himself. But I had a right, didn’t I, a right to know—what? What was really frightening me?

  But we hadn’t known each other that long, I told myself. We had plenty of time for Martin to tell me whatever heavy and grim passages from his past he wanted me to know.

  I was going to marry Martin. I started my car and pulled back into the modest stream of traffic that was Lawrenceton’s lunch-hour rush.

  Because really, trickled on a tiny cold relentless voice in the very back of my mind, really, if you asked him and he told you, you might learn something that would force you to cancel the wedding.

  The prospect of being without him was so appalling, I just couldn’t risk it.

  At the second stoplight, I swept this all neatly under my mental carpet as prewedding jitters and took a right turn to Total House.

  There I made a few salesmen very, very happy.

  I met Martin at the Episcopal church, St. James, that night for our fourth premarital counseling session with Father Aubrey Scott. The two men were standing out in the churchyard talking when I arrived—Martin shorter, more muscular than Aubrey, more intense. It felt odd walking over to them under their scrutiny; Aubrey had been my escort for several months and we had been rather fond (though never more than that) of each other. If they were asked to describe me, I suddenly thought, they would describe totally different people. I stowed that thought away to chew at later.

  Martin had met me when I was dating Aubrey, and consequently always felt extra possessive when Aubrey was around, I’d noticed. Now, he slid his arm around me as I joined them, while keeping their desultory conversation going.

  “—the Julius house?” Aubrey was saying in some surprise.

  I looked up, way up, at his mildly handsome face with its carefully groomed dark mustache.

  “Her wedding present,” Martin said simply.

  “Quite a gift,” Aubrey said. “But, Roe, won’t it bother you?”

  “What?” I asked, deliberately obtuse.

  “The missing family. I’ve been in Lawrenceton long enough to hear the story, several times. Though I’m sure it’s gotten embroidered over the years. Can there really have been hot food still on the table when the mother came over from the garage apartment?”

  “I don’t know, I hadn’t heard that particular twist,” I said.

  “And it won’t make you nervous?” Aubrey persisted.

  “It’s a wonderful house,” I said. “It makes me happy just to walk in the door.”

  “Emily would be too nervous to stay an hour.”

  Aubrey always had to drag Emily Kaye into the conversation. I figured the sexual dynamics went something like this: Aubrey and I had parted when Martin and Emily appeared on our horizons. Emily had the child Aubrey wanted and couldn’t have (he was sterile) and Martin had so much electricity for me I felt the air crackled when we were together. But Aubrey had dated me first, and perhaps a little resented my recovering from his gentle “good-bye” speech so thoroughly and quickly. So Emily Kaye, his all-but-in-name fiancée, was sure to be mentioned whenever I saw him.

  It’s stuff like that that made me so glad to be almost married. After so many years of dating and not-dating, I was heartily sick of all these little undercurrents and maneuverings. I was ready to be devastatingly straightforward. There is no telling what my reputation for eccentricity would have become if Martin hadn’t chanced to want to see a house my mother, the real estate queen of Lawrenceton, was too busy to show him. She’d sent me in her stead and we had met for the first time on the front steps.

  The phone rang in Aubrey’s office, and he excused himself to answer it. I seized the opportunity to turn Martin’s face toward mine and give him a very thorough kiss. That was certainly one of the biggest differences in my relationship with Martin; the sex was frequent, uninhibited, and absolutely wonderful. My sexual experience was not extensive, though I’d had what I thought was good sex before, but I had found a whole new dimension to the subject with Martin Bartell.

  He said, “If it’s the suit, I’ll wear it every day.”

  “I was just thinking about the first time I saw you.”

  “Can we go back and stand on the steps of that house again?”

  “No, Mother sold it last week.”

  “Well—” Martin bent to resume where we’d left off, but Aubrey came out of his office then. The churchyard was getting dark, and he called to us to come in. We went in hand and hand, and while we talked in his of fice, the darkness outside became complete.

  "I had supper tonight with Shelby Youngblood,” Martin said. He was leaning against his car, I against mine, side by side in the church parking lot. The security lights overhead made his face colorless and cast deep shadows under his eyes.

  Martin was going to spend the night at his apartment since he was leaving early in the morning to catch a plane to the Pan-Am Agra plant in Arkansas.

  “I should meet him,” I murmured.

  “That’s what I wanted to set up. Can he come out to the new house tomorrow morning? That’s where you’ll be?”

  I nodded. “Martin, what’s this man like?”

  “Shelby? He’s . . . trustworthy.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I’d expected to hear. A strange capsule biography.

  “I guess I wanted a little more than that,” I said. “Does he drink, smoke, gamble? Where does he come from? What did he do before he came here?”

  “He doesn’t talk much about himself,” Martin
said after a pause. “I guess you’ll have to find out what he’s like from his actions.”

  I’d made Martin angry. Perhaps he felt I was questioning his judgment.

  “You know what I call the way you look now?” I asked.

  Martin raised his eyebrows in polite query. He really was angry.

  “Your ‘Intruder Alert’ face.”

  He looked surprised, then irritated, and finally he began laughing.

  “Am I that bad?” he asked. “I know I have a problem talking about some things. No one ever called me on it before.”

  I waited a little while.

  “I don’t talk about Vietnam easily, because it was dirty and scary,” he said finally. “And there are some people I don’t talk about, because they’re connected with that time . . . I guess Shelby’s one of them. He’s from Tennessee, from Memphis. We were in the same platoon. We were good friends. After the war, we hung around together for a while. We kept in touch. Maybe once every three months I’d get a phone call or letter, for at least four years or so. Then I didn’t hear from Shelby for a long, long time. I thought something must have happened to him.”

  Martin turned to look at the floodlit church, the lights shining full on his face for a minute, making him look—old.

  “I got a letter from him about a year ago, and we resumed the connection. He had married Angel.”

  Martin stopped abruptly and I realized I had gotten all I was going to get.

  It was a start.

  I was at the Julius house by seven the next morning. I looked at each room, slowly and carefully, revising my room-by-room list of the changes that needed to be made. At eight fifteen the carpenters came, followed me around, took notes, and left. At nine the paint, wallpaper, and carpet people came, measured, and left. At nine forty-five the plumber showed up, trailing a miserable-looking assistant with a cigarette stuck in his mouth.