A Fair Maiden Page 7

  "Wine might put you to sleep, Katya. We'll save wine for another time."

  Another time. So this modeling session hadn't been a failure, Mr. Kidder would want her back.

  Thirstily Katya drank the club soda. Her mouth felt parched. It was true she'd become sleepy, as if hypnotized. What if he has put something in this? passed through her mind, but the thought was too fleeting to be retained.

  Another time gave her hope. Maybe a modeling career? What would the Spivaks think—how impressed would Katya's sisters be? And what would Roy Mraz think—Katya Spivak, whom he'd so taken for granted, an actual model...

  "Just a few more minutes, dear. We've been at an impasse—there is something clouding your mind, but I think we can banish it if we try. You are such an attractive young woman, Katya—you must tell yourself, I am Katya, I am very special, I am me. Truly, you mustn't laugh!" for Katya had begun to laugh, embarrassed. "I forbid my models to laugh, under pain of banishment." So Mr. Kidder spoke cajolingly, to soothe her, and began again sketching her, in a more playful mood, with rapid, deft strokes of his chalk. "Tell me, dear, how do you like working for the Mayflies?"—Mr. Kidder's comical name for the Engelhardts; and Katya laughed, but said yes, she liked working for them, because she liked the children and the housekeeper, Maria, was nice to her, and of course there was Bayhead Harbor, nothing like spending the summer in Vineland, where it was so damned hot. She told Mr. Kidder that sometimes she didn't feel comfortable in the Engelhardts' house, where Mrs. Engelhardt was suspicious of her, always finding fault, saying that Katya was a good nanny but then turning around and criticizing her, and from Maria she'd learned that Mrs. Engelhardt had hired and fired nannies in the past, and it was hard for her now to hire anyone who knew her. Mr. Kidder listened gravely to this and asked if Mrs. Engelhardt had actually threatened to fire Katya, and Katya hesitated and might have lied, but seated facing the artist, only a few feet away, and knowing how Mr. Kidder could read her thoughts, she said, "N-no,

  Mr. Kidder. Not yet."

  "Mrs. Mayfly disapproves of little Katya staying out late, eh? Is that it?"

  "No! Mrs. Engelhardt hasn't a clue that I'm not in bed."

  Mr. Kidder behind the easel continued to sketch Katya in quick inspired strokes, as if he hadn't heard this boastful remark. He said, "Because it would be tragic, dear, if you were sent away from Bayhead Harbor. Before we have time to become properly acquainted."

  Tragic! Katya had to smile at tragic. A big, ungainly word not common in Vineland, New Jersey.

  Mr. Kidder ceased speaking to Katya, and Katya's eyelids began to droop. She fumbled to set down the glass of club soda, and in silence the artist continued with his sketching. How abstracted he seemed, utterly absorbed. So long as Mr. Kidder sees me, I am safe.

  It had been a childish fantasy of Katya's that her father might be watching her from somewhere close by. Jude Spivak had disappeared one day from Vineland "in debt"—thousands of dollars, Katya had heard. And how scary the words in debt were, as if Katya's father were stuck in something like the soft black smothering muck of the Pine Barrens after a heavy rain. Jude Spivak hadn't left his wife and family with a hasty wet kiss for nine-year-old Katya and the careless promise Daddy will be back for your birthday, you bet! Instead, Katya liked to imagine that Daddy was watching her. He was watching over her. Maybe he was a trucker. So many trucks came through Vineland on Route 55, and it wasn't far-fetched to think that Jude Spivak might be driving one of these. And maybe Jude Spivak had kept contact with certain of his relatives, for he'd been close to his brothers and cousins; maybe he came to see them in secret. And so maybe he'd been watching Katya over the years. Seeing that she was a good girl, or tried to be a good girl. Seeing that she was good-looking, sexy; boys were attracted to her, and even men. If Katya became really beautiful, Daddy would be impressed and come to claim her. When Katya had confessed something of this fantasy to her sister Lisle, Lisle had said bluntly, Wouldn't bet on that, Katya.

  What these words meant, Katya hadn't wanted to know.

  "Katya! Wake up, dear."

  Marcus Kidder was hovering over Katya, trying not to sound agitated. As if he'd made some sort of blunder that had to be made right, and quickly. "I've exhausted my model, I'm afraid. And the hour has become unwittingly late—I mean, I have unwittingly allowed the hour to become late. I will drive you to the Mayfly residence immediately." The Mayfly joke fell flat, Mr. Kidder spoke so lamely.

  But Katya was awake now, and on her feet. Just slightly groggy, shaking her head. But in a minute she had revived. "No, thank you, Mr. Kidder! I can walk."

  How airless it seemed in Mr. Kidder's studio suddenly. Katya was eager to leave. Snatched up her straw bag, and at the door before Mr. Kidder could protest: "Katya, please. You must let me drive you home—it's the least I can do. My driver isn't on duty at the moment, but I am a fully licensed and fully capable driver, I promise." But Katya, in an excitable mood, insisted she wanted to walk and fended the old man off, saying she was stiff from sitting so long and wanted to walk: "But thanks for the check, and Momma thanks you, too." For the check was safely in Katya's bag, and that was the crucial thing.

  Yet Mr. Kidder would not let Katya go just yet. It was like leaving the home of an elderly relative, a female relative, who has to retain you for a few minutes, pull at your hands, kiss you; so in the doorway Marcus Kidder, who'd been so assured during the modeling session, was flustered and agitated now, for no reason Katya could understand. He took hold of her shoulders as if to embrace her or to kiss her. Katya stood very still, not wanting to ease away from him, smelling his wine breath and that odor of slightly stale cologne. Thinking, Mr. Kidder is my friend, Mr. Kidder would never hurt me. Mr. Kidder will help me. In his warm, dry hands, Mr. Kidder framed Katya's face. She could feel these hands tremble, and she could feel Mr. Kidder's excitement. How eager she was to be gone from this room. Her heart was beating in mild revulsion from the man's touch, but Katya forced herself to remain still, politely unresisting. In Mr. Kidder's eyes, which brimmed with moisture, Katya saw such tenderness for her, such desire, or love, she felt that her throat might close, she might begin to cry. Gravely Mr. Kidder lowered his face to hers. Katya held her breath, but he just brushed his lips against her forehead and did not try to kiss her on the mouth.

  "Katya, goodnight! Next time, soon, we will plan for a longer visit."

  10

  NEXT MORNING BY SPECIAL DELIVERY she sent the check to her mother: Essie Spivak, c/o The Silverado Motel, 1677 Eleventh Street, Atlantic City, NJ. Hoping that her mother would not be suspicious of who Marcus C. Kidder was and why he was providing Katya with three hundred dollars to send to her.

  She was excited, and she was relieved. She was hopeful. Thinking, Now Momma will be safe! For a while.

  Thinking, Now Momma will love me a little better.

  More reasonably thinking, as she watched three-year-old Tricia run and stumble, squealing with delight, on the sandy private beach of the Bayhead Harbor Yacht Club, Maybe this will make a difference.

  And finally, At least Momma will call me and thank me.

  11

  IT BEGAN TO HAPPEN THEN. After the check for three hundred dollars, and after she'd posed for him. Posed so casually now a part of her vocabulary. A fair maiden. Heimweh. Soul mate. Fated. Handsomely rewarded. Waking from a dream of mysterious urgency in the chilly dark before dawn when seagulls cried outside her window, hearing his voice as intimately as if he'd been lying beside her: Katya, my dear.

  It began to happen then, that she thought of him often. At first quizzically, even derisively, and then with an inexplicable and powerful yearning. The old nagging thoughts of her mother and of her lost father and of her home on County Line Road in Vineland and of Roy Mraz were thunderhead clouds, sultry with rain, but her thoughts of Marcus Kidder were high-scudding, fleecy white clouds gently blown across a fair, clear, washed-1ooking sky and made you smile to see them. A longer visit, he'd said. Next time. Her canny S
pivak instinct told her, I don't think so, old man! and yet the fact was, Marcus Kidder had been kinder to Katya Spivak, more generous and more caring, than anyone outside her immediate family had ever been. Of course she knew, or believed that she knew, that Marcus Kidder was attracted to her—that sick-melting look in his eyes—and yet she did not think it was a crude sexual attraction. He wanted to help her, he wanted to protect her. She'd been singled out by him on Ocean Avenue, he'd said. And so Katya was singular, and special. This was a secret she might bear, like the secret tattoo, a smudged, inky black, clumsily executed, inch-high spade shape on the soft flesh of the inside of her right thigh that Roy Mraz had wanted for her.

  And he's rich...

  So she would boast to Roy, to make him jealous. So she would boast to her mother and to her sisters, to make them jealous. See? I don't need just you.

  Thinking of him during the long nanny day. Predawn, early morning, and midmorning, lunchtime and early afternoon, afternoon and early evening, exhaustion and bed. Being scolded by Mrs. Engelhardt—"Katya, where are you and Tricia? We're late"—and being stared at by Mr. Engelhardt when she wore her two-piece swimsuit at the yacht club beach or on Mr. Engelhardt's gleaming white yacht. When she was bathing the baby, such a compact, fat little gurgling-mouthed baby with shiny eyes, powerful lungs when he chose to scream but at other times wonderfully docile, a happy-seeming baby, with an amazing strong grip of his tiny fingers on Katya's single forefinger so she was provoked to think, It must be meant for me, that I will have a baby of my own, and somehow Mr. Kidder was involved in this revelation, for he saw in her such goodness, such a special soul, it was right and good that such a special soul should have a baby, or babies. She thought of him when she was with Tricia, sprinting with the eager little girl along the beach, helping her feed the geese at the park, bathing her, putting her to bed; especially when she was reading to Tricia from Funny Bunny's Birthday Party, moving her fingers beneath the words at the bottom of the page, which by now Tricia had memorized. At such times Katya could feel Mr. Kidder's presence in the room.

  Katya and Tricia had begun drawing Funny Bunny themselves, appropriating Mr. Kidder's comical white bunny in fanciful stories of their own. Katya quite enjoyed these sessions with the little girl, far more than she enjoyed hauling the Engelhardt children around in their mother's company. It was such fun drawing animals that walked upright like people but were much nicer than most people, who could have comical adventures that were resolved in a happy ending. As a little girl Katya had liked to draw, and then in middle school she'd become distracted by other things. It was like a neighbor's horse, Black Pete, a slouch-backed, good-natured horse kept in a pasture down the road that Katya had visited and petted at least once, sometimes twice a day; and then, in middle school, by degrees she'd ceased petting Black Pete and feeding him apples; over a winter she'd forgotten him, and then one day in the spring, driving with her mother, she saw the empty pasture and said, "Where's Black Pete?" and Katya's mother said, "That old horse you used to pet? It's been gone for months." Katya's mother cast her a sidelong look, squinting through a cloud of exhaled smoke, as Katya sat in stunned silence, biting her lower lip. Don't ask, she thought. She could not bear to learn what had happened to her old friend Black Pete.

  Black Pete's Birthday Party: this could be the title of Katya Spivak's book for children?

  And she began to see his name. Began to be conscious of seeing his name in unexpected places. Pushing the baby in his stroller, clutching at Tricia's moist little hand as they entered Harbor Park on their excursion to feed the geese, and there on the right was a Victorian-style pavilion to which Katya had never given more than a glance before: KIDDER MEMORIAL PAVILION. (WHEN THEY'D ENTERED THE PARK THAT MORNING WITH MARCUS KIDDER, HE'D SAID NOTHING ABOUT THE PAVILION, OUT OF MODESTY—OR INDIFFERENCE.) ANOTHER DAY SHE HAPPENED TO SEE, ON CHARITY STREET, WHICH INTERSECTED WITH OCEAN AVENUE, A DIGNIFIED OLD BRICK TOWNHOUSE BEARING A BRONZE PLAQUE: HENDRICKS, STAPLES, MANNHEIMER & KIDDER INVESTMENTS. (But this Kidder could not be Marcus, Katya thought. Must've been a younger relative.) And there was the Bayhead public library, which bore the full name Bayhead Harbor Kidder Memorial Library, in a historic gray shingleboard house to which numerous wings had been added over the decades. Katya loved this little library, just to enter the front door, to hear the hardwood floor creak just perceptibly beneath her feet, to smell the rich old-library smells. In the children's room there was a display of local authors, and predominant here were several picture books by Marcus C. Kidder, including Funny Bunny. "Look, Tricia!" Katya said, pointing. "There's Funny Bunny."

  The little girl stared, sucking at a finger. How had her special book from Mr. Kidder come to be here?

  Katya was intrigued to see that there were three other children's books by Marcus C. Kidder as author and illustrator: Duncan Skunk's First Day at School, The Little Leopard Who Changed His Spots, and Elgar the Flying Elephant. Tricia clamored for these books, which Katya checked out of the library, using Mrs. Engelhardt's card. "This author—Marcus Kidder—lives in Bayhead Harbor, I guess?" Katya asked the librarian, a middle-aged woman with red harlequin glasses and a cordial smile, who said, "Mr. Kidder certainly does! He's our most generous donor. He used to come in here all the time, but we haven't seen much of him lately." Katya asked who the Kidders were and was told that they were an "old, distinguished family" who lived in New York City and spent summers in Bayhead Harbor. "The older generation has died out—now there's mostly just Mr. Kidder. If he has young relatives, we don't see them in Bayhead. Mr. Kidder is on our board of trustees, and he's on the board of the Historic Society, which keeps up the Bayhead Lighthouse. He's a musician, too, and a composer—there've been evenings in the park where music of his was performed..." The woman spoke so warmly of Marcus Kidder, yet with an air of regret, or longing, that you could see she'd have liked Mr. Kidder to be her friend, but that hadn't happened. Trying not to sound overcurious, Katya asked her how many books Mr. Kidder had written, and the librarian said, "That I know of, just these. Four children's books." Katya checked the publication dates, which ranged from 1955 to 1962. Funny Bunny had been published in 1961. So long ago! "Mr. Kidder didn't write anything after this?" Katya asked, and now the librarian squinted at her through the red-framed harlequin glasses, not smiling so cordially now: "No. I don't think he did." Katya heard herself asking, "Why not?" and the librarian said coolly, as if Katya were an outsider prying into a private local matter, "I really don't know. Why don't you ask him yourself?" The remark was intended to be dismissive, but Katya said, clutching the books to her chest, "I might just do that."

  That evening, when Katya opened Duncan Skunk's First Day at School to read to Tricia at her bedtime, she discovered the dedication: To My Lost Naomi (1939-1956).

  The girl in the portrait: Naomi. Young, possibly younger than Katya, with wavy blond hair, a smile to break your heart, large hazel eyes rendered by the artist beautiful but, Katya had thought, vacant. The smile was sweetly hopeful; here was a girl eager to please. Or so the artist had rendered her. Around her neck was a dark velvet ribbon affixed with a pearl pin. The lost Naomi was prettier than Katya Spivak, for it was clear that she was much nicer, and richer. Certainly she was richer! Maybe she'd even been a Kidder, bound to Marcus Kidder by blood. The cruel thought came to Katya: But Naomi is dead, and I am alive.

  12

  WAITING FOR HER MOTHER TO CALL. Why, Katya, thank you! You have saved my life, honey...She was excited and she was apprehensive and she was cunningly rehearsing what she would say when her mother asked who this Marcus C. Kidder was who'd been such a friend, who'd lent a stranger three hundred dollars. But her mother didn't call, and so didn't thank Katya. And didn't interrogate her about Mr. Kidder.

  And when Katya called home, there was no answer, not even the familiar recording of Essie Spivak's bemused nasal voice: Sorry, Essie must not be here or she'd take this call so please leave a message at the sound of the beep. Instead the phone rang, rang in w
hat must have been an empty house. When Katya called her sister Lisle, there was at least a recorded message, but Lisle never called Katya back, and so Katya called her other sister, Tracey, whose U.S. Army sergeant husband was stationed in Fort Dix, fifty miles north of Vineland. This older sister had never seemed to care much for Katya, for no reason Katya could guess, and said flatly to her, as soon as she heard Katya's hesitant voice, "If it's Mom you're calling me about, tell her no."

  Katya asked, No what? and Tracey said, raising her voice to be heard over a shrieking child, "No, I will not lend that woman any more money. She owes Dwight and me six hundred dollars she promised she would repay, with interest back in June, and we haven't heard from her since, and can't get hold of her, and Lisle says she's drinking again, and probably using, living with some guy in Atlantic City, and Dwight says, 'That's it,' and I am in one hundred percent agreement. So, no."

  Meekly Katya apologized, and hung up.

  13

  SHE WOULD TELL HIM, Sure it hurts—my mother never called. My sister never asked about me at Bayhead Harbor living with a rich family where I am a hired girl, a nanny. Where I do as my employers instruct, with a smile.