“I’ll make it up to you, Hazel. Whatever it was.”
Gallagher groped for Hazel’s hand and brought it to his lips. He kissed her fingers greedily. Not an erotic kiss unless you knew the desperate ways of Eros. Gallagher had not kissed Hazel that day. They had not been alone together for five minutes. He was weak with desire, and outrage mixed with desire. He would marry Hazel Jones, next time he crossed St. Mary Bridge to Grindstone Island she would be his wife.
McAlster was right, the island was beautiful in snow.
“Our property begins about here. That stone wall.”
Hazel was staring through the windshield. The child in the backseat was at last alert, watchful.
“All that is Gallagher property, too. Miles uphill. And along the river.”
The River Road had been plowed, if haphazardly. Gallagher drove very slowly. His car was equipped with chains, he was accustomed to driving on icy graveled surfaces. On the island, there were more trees covered in ice, tilted at sharp angles like drunken figures. Some of the birches had shattered and collapsed. Evergreens were tougher, not so extensively damaged. In the road there were fallen tree limbs, Gallagher drove carefully around them.
“You can tell it isn’t winter, can’t you. By the sun. Yet so much snow. Jesus!”
The river was choppy, wind-churned. Vast, and very beautiful. Before the sudden freeze, the river had thawed; now at the water’s edge amid enormous boulders there were jagged ice-spikes, jutting up vertically like stalagmites. Gallagher was conscious of the woman and her child seeing this for the first time.
“That’s the lodge, at the top of that hill. Through those evergreens. Over there are guest cabins. It looks as if McAlster has plowed us out, we’re in luck for tonight.”
The Adirondack-style lodge was the size of a small hotel, made of logs, fieldstone and stucco. Its roof was steep and shingled and it had two massive stone chimneys. Adrift in snow at the crest of a hill was a tennis court. There was a gabled three-car garage, a former stable. High overhead a hawk drifted, lazily dipped and turned on widespread wings. The sky looked like glass about to shatter. Gallagher was seeing Hazel Jones at last beginning to see He is rich. His family is rich.
That hadn’t been Gallagher’s reason for bringing them here. He didn’t think so.
18
A rough wild game! Driving her like a panicked animal along the rows of cornstalks. Drunk-looking cornstalks broken and dessicated in the heat of early autumn and the browned tassels slapping and cutting at her face. Herschel clapped his hands laughing his high-pitched heehaw laugh Git along little dawgie git along little weenie long-limbed and loose-jointed and he was breathing through his mouth as he ran, as she ran, a flame-like sensation in her belly, she too was laughing, clumsy and stumbling on her small legs so she fell to one knee, she fell more than once, scrambled to her feet before the scraped welt filled in with gritty blood, if she could make her way to the end of the row of cornstalks to the edge of the farmer’s field and to the road and to the cemetery beyond-
How the cornfield game ended, Rebecca could never recall.
19
“Momma? Are we?”
It was morning. The morning of Holy Saturday. Bright, and gusty with wind. Hazel Jones was brushing her hair in swift punishing strokes ignoring the fretting child pulling at her.
In the bureau mirror a face floated wan and indistinct as if underwater. Not her face but Hazel Jones’s young face smiling defiantly.
You! What right, to be here!
She’d gotten through the first night on Grindstone Island and she believed she would get through the second night on Grindstone Island and by that time it would be decided.
“Momma? Momma!”
The child had slept fitfully the night before. She’d heard him, in the room adjoining her own, whimpering in his sleep. Lately, he’d begun grinding his teeth, too. The wind!-the damned wind had kept him awake, unnerved him. Not a single wind but many winds blowing off the St. Lawrence River and across Lake Ontario to the west confused with human voices, muffled shouts and laughter.
You! you! such laughter seems to accuse.
Hazel had wakened early in the unfamiliar bed not knowing where she was at first and which time in her life this was and her heart pounded hotly in her chest as the voices grew bolder, jeering You! Jew-girl you have no right to be here.
She had not heard such voices in years. She had not had such a thought in years. She rose from bed shaken, frightened.
But it was Gallagher who’d brought her here. Gallagher, her friend.
Through the front windows of the room you could see another island floating in the glittery river. Beyond that the dense Canadian shore at Gananoque.
Gallagher’s family lodge was even larger than it appeared from the foot of the driveway. It had been built into a hill, three floors and a more recently constructed wing connected to the main house by a flagstone terrace, now drifted in snow.
Hazel Jones, seeing the lodge, had laughed. A private residence, of such dimensions!
For the briefest of moments seeing the Gallagher property as Jacob Schwart might see it. The man’s mocking laughter mingling with Hazel Jones’s laughter.
Embarrassed, Gallagher had said yes the place was large, but it was really very private. And most of the lodge was shut off for the winter, they’d be using only a few rooms.
Hazel understood that Gallagher was both ashamed of his family’s wealth, and vain of it. He could not help himself. He had no clear knowledge of himself. His hatred of his father was a sacred hatred, Hazel knew not to interfere. Nor would she believe in this hatred utterly.
Gallagher had brought her to this room that was more a suite than a room, with a child’s room adjoining, for Zack. His own room, he told her, was close by, down the hall. His manner was outwardly contained, exuberant. This was the first time the three of them had gone away together, he was their host and responsible for their well-being. Setting Hazel’s lightweight suitcase onto her bed-old, brass, four-poster, with a quilt coverlet in pale blues and lavenders-he stood staring at it for a long moment his breath quickened from the stairs and his face flushed and uncertain and Hazel could see him summoning the precise words he wished to speak, to impress upon her.
“Hazel. I hope you will comfortable here.”
It was a remark that carried with it a deeper meaning. At that moment Gallagher could not bring himself to look at Hazel.
If Zack had not been with them, investigating his room (a boys’ room, with bunk beds, Zack would sleep in the upper bunk), Hazel knew that Gallagher would have touched her. He would have kissed her. He would have framed her face in his large hands, and kissed her. And Hazel would have kissed him in return, not stiffening in his embrace as sometimes she did involuntarily but standing very still.
Pleading Don’t love me! Please.
As Gallagher would relent with his hurt, hopeful smile All right Hazel! I can wait.
Zack nudged against Hazel’s thigh: “Momma! Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher?”
Rudely she was wakened from her trance. She’d been brushing her hair in long swift strokes in front of the crook-backed mirror.
Overnight Zack had begun to call her “Momma”-no longer “Mommy.” Sometimes the word was a grudging syllable: “Mom” pronounced “M’m.”
By instinct the child knew that speech is music, to the ear. And speech can be a music to hurt the ear.
He’d been awake and out of bed for more than forty minutes, and was restless. Maybe he was feeling uncomfortable in this new place. Pushing against Hazel’s thigh, nudging her hard enough to bruise if she didn’t prevent him. With the back of the hairbrush she swiped playfully at him but he persisted, “I said are we, Momma? Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher?”