Top of the Hill, page 19
“Mr. Heggener likes beer, too. He always has a bottle before dinner.”
Michael was tempted to ask about Mr. Heggener, but refrained. Whatever the girl might say, however innocent, she might regret later.
“I want to thank you,” Michael said, “for remembering to leave a bottle of wine for me each night.” He had gotten into the guilty habit of rinsing out the second glass and drying it and returning it to exactly the same position it had arrived on the tray so that in the morning whoever came in to clean up would suppose that he had drunk the whole bottle himself. Better the reputation of a drunkard than of a lecher!
“With Madam Heggener around, we make sure we don’t forget anything.”
Michael got off the subject of Mrs. Heggener quickly. “You ski awfully well, you know.”
Rita shrugged. “I was bom here. I ski like all the kids.”
“I know. I met your father this morning.”
“He was whistling when he left the house at dawn,” Rita said. “At last his lifts were working.”
“He remembered me. Not too fondly. He said God protects fools and drunkards.”
“That’s Daddy.” She laughed. “He’s an outspoken man.” She had unzipped the top of her ski suit and dropped it around her waist. She was wearing a boy’s cotton shirt and he noticed that there was no sign of perspiration coming through the thin cloth. She was flat and thin and angular and he saw that he could have put his fingers easily, with something to spare, around her fine-boned wrists. “Rita,” he said, “have you ever been hurt? Skiing, I mean?”
She looked surprised. “No. Should I have?”
“I mean, you’re so slender and your bones . . .”
“Skinny, you mean.” She looked wistful. “My mama swears I’m going to develop. I’m stronger than I look. I have to be. I’ve been rassling with my brother all my life.”
“Have you ever raced?”
Rita laughed, something surprisingly condescending in the sound, as you might laugh at a child who had amused you with a silly question. In a moment she was an adult. “Have you ever heard of a black downhill racer?”
“Not really,” Michael said, sensitive to what was behind the question. “Still, before Jackie Robinson, there never was a black second baseman in the National League, either.”
“I’ve talked about it with my daddy,” she said seriously. “Give it another fifty years, my daddy says. In fifty years I’ll be sixty-six. How many sixty-six-year-old girls, black or white, do you know of in the Olympics? And I’m not even the good one in the family. You ought to see my brother. . .”
“How old is he?”
“Eighteen.”
“What does he do?”
“He works with my father.”
“Maybe we can all three of us ski together one day,” Michael said. “He gets Thursdays off.” She looked pleased with the invitation. She changed from moment to moment, child to adult, adult to child. “And you?”
“Mornings, mostly. I usually start work at lunch and go on till ten p.m.”
“Maybe we can arrange it for next Thursday,” Michael said. “One day a month with Dave Cully does it for me, thank you. And I don’t like to ski alone.”
“That would be very nice. If you’re not busy with Madam.”
“Oh,” he said, “you know about my being assigned to her?”
“News gets around. A little town . . .”
“How does she ski?”
“Very well,” Rita said. Again she sounded condescending, but this time not because of her color. “Considering her age.”
Michael laughed. “You know,” he said, “I’m older than she is.”
Rita giggled, suddenly very childish. “I did it again. I’m sorry.” “That’s all right,” Michael said, thinking that he had to get used to people Rita’s age regarding everyone over thirty as decrepit and on the brink of extinction.
They finished their drinks and went out to where the Porsche was parked, with Michael carrying the two pairs of skis and Rita not objecting now. He put the skis in the rack and the poles in the back of the car and Rita sank luxuriously into the passenger seat. “Mr. Storrs,” she said, “do me a favor, please.”
“Of course.”
“Drive slowly through town. I want everybody to see me in this car.”
Michael drove sedately along the main street of the town. There were two people on the street whom she knew and she waved, grandly, all the time babbling excitedly. Skiing didn’t interest her all that much, she said, what she really wanted to be was a singer. She sang in the church choir and was one of its soloists, but that wasn’t what she meant. “What I want,” she said, “is to go out dressed in a crazy costume, all feathers and spangles and long stockings, red is my favorite color, maybe after purple, and see twenty thousand people out there screaming ‘Rita, Rita!’ at me and pick up a microphone and belt out one song after another and have them go crazy and rip out the chairs and travel with my own band—New York, San Francisco, London, Paris . . . with the money coming in so fast I’d have to hire three college graduates just to count it.”
Michael laughed at the girl’s dreadful vision of the good life and hoped, for her sake, that her ambition would never be fulfilled. But he didn’t have the heart to remind her of the many popular singers whose admirers had staged riots in their honor and who had wound up suicides or dead from drugs before the age of thirty. Instead he said, “There’s a friend of mine, a Frenchman, who plays the piano and sings in bars and who’s very good indeed. He’s coming up here in a few days and he’s very nice and I’m sure I can arrange to let him listen to you and give you some useful pointers.”
“You’re kidding . . .” She gasped at the grandeur of what he was offering as she said it.
“No. Honestly.”
“Mr. Storrs,” she said emotionally, “you’re just the nicest man I ever met.”
“I hope,” he said, embarrassed by her intensity, “I hope later you’ll find someone, lots of someones, a good deal nicer, Rita.”
She leaned her head back against the leather bucket seat and closed her eyes, a dreamy smile on her face as he drove the last few hundred yards to the hotel.
When he took her skis off the rack, she said, “Better take yours off, too. They steal skis around here if they’re left unlocked. Up to now it looks like heaven in Green Hollow, but when there’s snow on the ground we get some real uglies up here.”
Obediently, as Rita hurried in to begin her working day, Michael took his skis off the rack and put them and his poles in the hotel ski room. Then he went to the front desk and asked if there were any messages for him from Mrs. Heggener. There was a message. Mrs. Heggener wished to ski at two-thirty this afternoon. He hoped she wouldn’t be as active on the slopes as she was in bed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
He had his lunch, alone, with Rita serving him silently and decorously, the dining room now alive with the first thin wave of skiers, most of them dressed in garish colors with outlandish stripes that reminded him of professional football uniforms.
At two-thirty, promptly, Eva Heggener came down into the lobby, where Michael was waiting for her. She was wearing a navy blue ski outfit, tucked in at the waist, that showed off her figure and a fur hat that made her delicately colored, sharply cut face look like that of a court beauty in an old Dutch painting. She glanced up at the clock over the front desk and nodded approvingly at Michael’s promptness. He got their skis out of the ski room and put them on his car.
“We should really take my car,” she said. “The bill for gasoline can mount up over a winter.”
He didn’t know whether or not she wished to annoy him with her offer, but she had. All peasants, he remembered. “I’ll make it up in tips, perhaps,” he said, meanly.
She laughed. “My,” she said, mildly, “aren’t we touchy.”
“I fold like a flower at the slightest touch of wind,” he said, as they got into the Porsche.
“Anemones,” she said. “Famous for it. My American anemone.” She patted his hand soothingly.
At the bottom of the lift he bent and put on her skis. “Service with a smile,” he said, to get even with her.
On the way up, she asked, “How was the skiing this morning?” “Vigorous.”
“Did Cully approve of you?”
“In a way. He’s not what you call a demonstrative man.”
“By the way,” she said, as they mounted in the crystalline silent air, “do you know how to play backgammon?”
“I’ve played. Why?”
“My husband is always looking for partners. If you play with him be careful. No high stakes. He’s terribly wily.”
“I’ve been wily in my time.”
“I’ll warn him. By the way, I talked to him on the phone this morning and I spoke to him about you and he’d like us all to have dinner together tonight if he’s not too tired.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have dinner alone, his first night back?” “There are so many first nights back with him, I think he looks forward to a change. We have said just about everything there is to be said between us.”
“I’d be delighted,” Michael said formally.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Rita told me you’d watched her ski this morning. She was all excited about what you told her—about the possibility of her taking up racing and then the thing about your friend the pianist. By the way, the manager told me he’s arranged about the two rooms. It was a squeeze, we expect a crowd this weekend. Do they really need two rooms or are they just being proper?”
“They’re just friends. At least, that’s what they tell me.”
“You never can tell about Americans.”
“He’s not American, he’s French.”
“Then I suppose they are only friends. We’ll manage.” She slapped her gloved hands together as if she were cold. “I’d be careful about what you say to the girl—Rita, I mean. It would be tragic if she turned from a charming first-rate servant into a second-rate ski bum and a third-rate singer.”
“I don’t know about the ski bum and the singer,” he said, consciously restraining his anger, “but I’m sure no matter what I say or you say, she’s not going to remain a servant.”
“Men are naive,” Eva said flatly. “They think a pretty face is a universal passport.”
What about your face and your passport, he thought, but didn’t say it.
They were at the top now and Michael saw that she slipped out of the chair deftly and made the little descent holding her poles under one arm and swinging down gracefully.
“Do you know the slopes by now?” she asked, as she ran her wrists into the thongs of the pole handles.
“Cully had me all over the place, and I’ve looked at the maps of the runs. Do you have any preferences?”
“Any run but the Black Knight,” she said. “Steep places give me vertigo. Go ahead now, I’ll follow you. I’ll tell you if you’re going too fast for me.” She was all business now.
Michael set off on the easiest of the slopes, looking back from time to time to see how Eva was doing. She skied confidently and with grace and had obviously had a great deal of expert instruction. He put on speed and she followed on the heels of his skis. Vertigo, my ass, he thought, what is she trying to prove? But he stayed away from the Black Knight.
It was getting dark when they made their last descent, this time with Michael going at about three-quarter speed and Eva having no trouble keeping up with him. When they stopped near the lodge, her face was glowing as she looked up at the mountain and said, her voice tinkling in the frozen twilight, “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” and he wanted to kiss her there and then.
“Satisfied with your instructor?” he asked.
She nodded. “More than,” she said. “Satisfied with your pupil?” “Some pupil,” he said. He hadn’t said a word about her skiing all afternoon, although there were moves she made that were unnecessary with the new equipment and the more modem refinements that were now being taught. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll say a word or two about how to improve your style.” Lean back a little more, use your knees, not your ankles, flatten your skis on the turns, the usual, ever-changing, profitable mumbo jumbo.
“I will listen to teacher with bated breath,” she said mockingly. “Maybe by the end of winter I’ll ski as well as your new friend, Rita, and you’ll advise me about taking up a new career.”
He no longer wanted to kiss her as he knelt to get her out of her skis.
Mr. Heggener turned out to be neither bent over, coughing, rheumyeyed or barely able to move. He was a slender, gentle-looking man, perhaps fifty-five years old, his skin translucent, with a full head of white hair, and a small, neat white beard. His narrow face and dark, sad eyes looked like those of an eighteenth-century Spanish grandee and his manners were exquisitely polite and formally friendly. He was wearing a beautiful dark green pressed wool loden jacket, with elaborate black embroidery around the buttonholes and a gleaming white shirt and dark silk tie. Although the table at which they were seated was in front of the fireplace in which piled logs flamed brightly, he had a Scotch-plaid lightweight blanket over his shoulders. A little nervously, Michael had dressed for the occasion, too, and wore a collar and tie and a blue blazer. Eva was wearing the same loose long black gown she had worn the night Michael had arrived, but she had on jewelry tonight, a rope of pearls and a gold brooch high on her shoulder. They had started dinner late and by the time Rita was serving the dessert they were alone in the dining room.
Mr. Heggener was a perfect host and the conversation, Michael was relieved to discover, flowed easily—mostly about the lucky downfall of snow, the condition of the runs, the difficulty in finding teachers of acceptable caliber for the ski school, the inevitable growth of the town since Michael had been there before and the accompanying changes, the necessity of laying out courses for the new craze of cross-country skiing, the difficulty of finding good films for the new movie house of which Mr. Heggener was the principal owner. Mr. Heggener had a light, pleasing voice and spoke without an accent and was careful at first not to monopolize the conversation, bringing his wife and Michael into all the discussions. Mr. Heggener, Michael noticed, was interested in a rather Olympian way in his fellow townsmen and their peculiarities, but when he mentioned the names of any of them with whom he had to deal, it was always with some phrase of approval. During the meal he never touched his wife’s hand, but Michael could see that he was deeply attached to her and listened intently when she spoke, which was not often. She seemed content to listen most of the time to the two men and sat back relaxed in her chair. She ate with a good appetite and smiled when her husband complimented her on how well prepared the meal was and told Michael that the present chef had arrived after a long line of dismally incompetent journeymen cooks, who had come to them highly recommended but who, he suspected, had come straight out of diners and hamburger stands.
Over dessert, he said, “I suppose, my dear Mr. Storrs, that you, like so many of our guests, wonder how I came to be here. My settling here, if it could be called settling, might be considered ... ah . . . fortuitous. There is a clinic outside town that somebody told me was run by a professor who had performed miracles. Perhaps he had” —Mr. Heggener laughed lightly—“with others. Unfortunately, he was not in his magic phase when I visited him. But I fell in love with the town. . . . Thank you, Rita,” he said to the girl, who was putting a demitasse of coffee in front of him. He looked at it with amused distaste. “Sanka, unhappily. I am not permitted real coffee. However, yours is real, am I right, Rita?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
Mr. Heggener turned to Michael and his wife. “Shall we have a cognac?”
“Andreas . . .” Eva said warningly.
“My dear,” Mr. Heggener said, “after such a superb meal, after hospital fare. . . . There is always a choice,” he explained to Michael. “What your soul says is good for you and what some man in a white coat, who knows nothing of souls, since they have not yet described them in medical literature, although I am sure one day they will get around to it, as they undoubtedly will to everything else . . .” Michael could see that the man relished his qualifying clauses and had worked on them as a personal style. “What some man in a white coat, as I was saying, told you is bad for you. On balance, tonight, homecoming night, my soul has the better arguments. Mr. Storrs—a cognac?”
“Thank you,” Michael said. He was feeling expansive, too, his fears of the meeting dissipated with the good food and the wine.
“Three glasses, please,” Mr. Heggener said to Rita. “The Blue Ribbon.” Then, to Michael, “Would you like a cigar?”
“No, thank you,” Michael said. “Among the things the doctors and my soul agree on is that I should give up smoking.”
“Have you managed it?” Mr. Heggener asked.
“Almost,” Michael said. “I only smoked one cigarette today.” It had been in the lodge with Rita at noon, after the workout with Cully.
“Abstinence has its own pleasures. No cigars, thank you, Rita. As I was saying”—Michael noticed that Mr. Heggener had a habit of using the phrase, like a composer going back to a series of notes he had used previously, to bring back the listener to a motif he had not yet exhausted—“as I was saying, the town pleased me, the gentle mountains. The majesty of the Alps dwindles men who live in its valleys. I come from a hotelkeeping family. Generations. We have old ledgers with the names of those noble young Englishmen who made the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. If I were of an unscientific turn of mind I would be inclined to say that I have hotelkeeping in my blood. When I see a place that has a certain intangible, attractive atmosphere, a combination of geography, population, beauty . . . and . . .” he chuckled, “I must say, the lure of profit, about it, my thoughts immediately run to building, buying, landscaping, personnel, length of season, etcetera. So with Green Hollow. Do you have some similar obsession, Mr. Storrs?”
“I’m afraid not.” After a meal like the one he had eaten he would cast a pall over the table with a detailed account of the obsessions that ruled his life.
