Random Winds by Belva Plain Read Free Book Online Page A

face.
    But he hardly ever saw Mary alone and the summer days were vanishing. Birds flash among dense trees; fish flick into deeper water, out of sight. So their interrupted minutes fled.
    Twice Martin took her to the movies. The third time, at the father’s suggestion, Jessie went along. Once there was a picnic, a family affair. In the evenings the family sat together in the library, Jessie and the father playing chess.
    Mr. Donald Meig was a pale tan presence. He wore impeccable pongee summer suits and his pale tan hair showed the even tracks of the comb. His smile was courteous and faintly supercilious. Clearly, Martin’s presence was not welcomed. It was tolerated because he was the doctor’s son.
    “Fancies himself an aristocrat,” Pa said.
    Meig was not a money snob—for he would despise that as vulgar—but a “family” snob. He liked to talk about “good old stock.” As if all human stock weren’t equally old! At his table he sat among a clutter of Irish silver and English porcelain, with a stuffed swordfish over the golden oak sideboard—a big fish himself in the little pond of Cyprus.
    “Your mother’s people were Scotch-Irish?” he inquired once of Martin, and without waiting for an answer, “I’ve some of that myself. It’s not the usual strain around here. Most of the Scotch-Irish went to the Appalachians. There’s a branch of my family there
still
. Went west through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky, you know.”
    Martin hadn’t known. His mother’s people had gone from Scotland to the north of Ireland and, after a couple of generations there on the farms and in the cloth mills, had come here shortly after the Revolution to work again on the farms. Pa, of course, was a much later arrival from the same part of the world. These simple histories were taken for granted at home; one neither concealed them nor boasted of them.
    Meig concluded pridefully, “People tend to settle near their own kind, naturally. Like the Dutch in the HudsonRiver Valley. We’ve some Dutch in our family, too. No landowners, no Van Cortlandts, just small farmers, poor and hardworking.”
    Well, Martin thought, everyone has his quirks. Nevertheless, he asked Mary, “Is your father the absolute authority in everything, always?”
    “I suppose you could say he is,” she told him. “I don’t want you to think he’s a tyrant, though. Aunt Milly says he ought to have got married again, it would have been better for his disposition. Only, he’s afraid to marry someone who wouldn’t be good to Jessie. So you see, he’s really a good father. I try to remember that.”
    Martin wondered what the mother could have been like. Probably she had been like the daughters, for even Jessie had gladness, with her energetic, tossing head, her opinions and her curiosity. Meig was so profoundly different! The woman must have been suffocated in that house, he thought.
    “May I ask,” Meig said to Martin, “why you call my daughter ‘Mary’?”
    “Because she likes the name,” he answered.
    “Well, I’m sure I don’t know why. She has always been called ‘Fern’ at home.”
    His mouth closed in disapproval. As if the world and all the people in it were too common, too intrusive?
    And yet, sometimes, Martin had caught him looking at Mary as though he were wondering that such radiance could have come from himself.
    “Why are you smiling?” Martin asked her once.
    “I was watching that bee,” she said. “See how greedy it is!”
    Its burrowing body was furred with gold dust, buried in the flower, in its damp and tender warmth. And Martin flushed at the parallel image which flashed into his head. He felt the tingle of heat in his neck. Could she have such thoughts too? For the first time in his experience he felt he knew too little about women.
    They walked in warm rain. He had never known anyone beside himself who didn’t mind being soaked in rain. Outside of someone’s open window they stood hiding behind awet syringa,