A Sinner in Paradise Read online

  Still, she would not let the inspiration of the moment go wasted. Immediately, she phoned her sister who lived on a farm tucked into a mountain valley ten miles from the town where they had grown up. Her sister was more considerate, answering after two rings.

  “Rachel, I’ve had it in this awful city. I’m coming home.”

  Satisfied with her delivery, Geneva slipped into the kitchen and opened the cupboard door quietly. It would not do to let the cats hear her rustling around in the kitchen.

  Characteristically, Rachel did not sense the drama of the moment; she did not gasp, but merely drawled into the receiver, “Well, I wondered when you’d come to your senses. What happened? Did you finally realize that you’ve made enough of a fool of yourself over that bookie?”

  “He’s not a bookie. He’s a stock market analyst,” Geneva replied coldly. Rachel, like her whole family, had the tendency to belittle those professions that did not require the use of one’s hands, a tendency Geneva invariably thought terribly working class. “And yes, I have decided to come out of mourning. I’m coming home and I’m giving up men. Not necessarily in that order.”

  That out, she tried to think of something noble and brave to say, but after an awkward moment, she merely burst into tears and sobbed, “Oh, Rachel, I’m sick of everything here. I don’t have any friends, and the men are all either mean or gay, and I miss everybody, and it’s already hot and sticky here, and I’m so blue I feel like throwing myself in front of a train.” She continued thus for several minutes telling various lies and slandering the city which, two years earlier, had glimmered like a beacon in the wilderness. At last, when her list of miseries and wrongs petered out, she ended her final sentence with a little sob and gasp. “Where’s Mom, anyway?”

  “Geneva, you know she and Daddy went to Pennsylvania. Remember Mom has a quilt in a show there? And they’re going to visit the Jorgansonns for a while and help the Gunter’s son build his house. He’s getting married this fall. I doubt they’ll be home before July. But don’t worry, honey, come on down and stay with us. We’d love to have you, and it’s so pretty here now. The rhododendrons are really going to be fabulous this year.”

  Geneva grunted in response. What had she done with the can opener? Evangeline had followed her into the kitchen and was crazily running around her ankles in anticipation of breakfast.

  “You’ll feel a lot better once you get out of DC,” Rachel continued. “Besides, I could use you. I’m starting to get big now, and Wayne keeps threatening to hire someone to take care of me. Mom offered, of course, but she’s slowing down some. Gosh, don’t tell her I said that. And I don’t want her cutting her trip short to chase after all of us.”

  While considering the invitation, Geneva picked up Evangeline to quiet her mewing and searched through the silverware drawer for the can opener. It would be nice to spend the summer at the farm in the high meadows where Rachel, her husband Wayne, and their two small daughters made their home. It was a farm in the picturesque rather than practical sense, although they did keep a small garden, a few sheep and chickens, and a couple of horses. Since Rachel liked to weave, the sheep were not entirely for effect. But they hired the shearing and lambing done every spring because Wayne was too busy as a general surgeon to do any real farming. Both Wayne and Rachel, however, always were on hand to help with delivering the newborn lambs, for this couple reveled in fecundity. There were always babies on the farm: chicks, ducklings, goslings, lambs, puppies. It was fitting that after six years of marriage, Rachel and Wayne already had two children and were expecting twins in four more months. It was clear they planned to fill up the big, rambling farmhouse they had just built.

  No can opener. By this time the other cats had joined Evangeline and were meowing hysterically. “Get away,” she muttered, cupping her hand over the phone, “Evangeline, shut up. All of you, get way. Get away. I SAID, GET AWAY!”

  “What?” came Rachel’s voice.

  “Nothing. These cats are acting like starved alley cats and I can’t find the can opener.”

  She finally found it and succeeded in getting the cans opened, the food in the bowls, and the bowls on the floor, suffering only one scratch on her forearm in the process.

  Geneva turned her attention back to Rachel, magnanimously accepting the job of caring for her during the last part of her pregnancy. As she hung up the phone, she felt her sister’s calming influence steal over her like a rosy twilight. She breathed deeply, then, feeling profoundly selfless and resolute, she immediately set about preparing for her departure.

  The first thing she did was to pull out her financial records to determine how long she could live without working, and decided that thanks to Howard’s genius concerning the intricacies of Wall Street, she could practically retire, provided she could rent her apartment to cover the mortgage and her car held out. Screw Howard. She would have bought herself a new car if he hadn’t made those noises about the BMW. She considered having the ancient Mazda serviced, but decided that it could wait until she returned home. Her experience had taught her that big city mechanics were all wolves, bent on fleecing unsuspecting women. A mechanic at home would cost about half, she reasoned in her economical way.

  Mentally arranging her list of priorities, she began calling friends to see how many of them wanted a cat or two. Nobody wanted a cat, but several offered to take over her apartment, which Geneva found a little disquieting, despite the fact that she had hoped she would find a renter quickly. Of course, it pleased her that she was well known for her splendid decorating prowess. She had found this apartment a year earlier—a gutted horror just a block away from the most fashionable side of Georgetown—and had bought and refurbished it with the money and antiques Granny Morgan had left her. She had always loved showing it off, but now she was piqued that everyone seemed more enchanted by her dwelling than with her person. Although nearly all of them protested that they would hate to see her leave, they were just a shade too quick to offer to move in. She began to wonder if she could stipulate that the cats came with the apartment.

  By Monday morning, she was chafing to get on the road, but she thought that the least she should do would be to give the store where she worked as a display designer a month’s notice since she knew it would be next to impossible to find someone qualified enough to do her job. When she placed her resignation on her boss’ desk with just a hint of a flourish, her thrilling heart expanded in anticipation of Sally’s anguish over her departure. But Sally’s polite speech about how much Geneva would be missed but that she would not dream of standing in her way, did not quite measure up to Geneva’s expectation. Then Sally further irritated her by ending the speech with a too casual, “By the way, are you going to sell your apartment?”

  Geneva suffered greater disappointment when faced with the chore of interviewing for her replacement, she found a pile of applications on her desk for a dozen or so hopefuls who displayed an eagerness for her job that she personally found excessive and downright tacky. Then, as she discovered that some of the applicants were surprisingly talented, with excellent resumes, she secretly began to feel a little deflated, even harboring the slightest suspicion that she might have been lucky to have landed the job in the first place. The thoughts nibbled like little minnows. Would it be wise to leave after all?

  She chased them away with a restless gesture. Yes. She needed this vacation. She would not abandon her resolve because of a few tremors of unfounded doubt.

  That evening, she mentally checked off her list the considerable number of people she had called about relocating her cats. Joyce, a friend of her friend Carlos, who had once attended a party at Geneva’s place, would surely take one. Carlos had informed her that Joyce usually kept a menagerie. Now Geneva remembered that Joyce had made a point to compliment her on her cats’ exceptional beauty (they had all been extraordinarily well behaved that evening), so Geneva tracked down the number and prayed as she waited for Joyce to answer. Fleetingly, she hoped that all of Joyce’s
cats had died during the last few weeks.

  “Joyce! This is Geneva… Geneva LeNoir.” She spelled and pronounced her name in the proper French way, Le-noir, unlike everyone else in her family who always had made it one word and said “len-or.” Leave it to a bunch of hillbillies to mutilate a perfectly good French name. “Carlos’ friend… You came to a party at my place last fall? Geneva, on Taylor Street…”

  There was a long pause, and then, “Oh, Yes!”

  Relief washed over her and she rushed on. “Well! However have you been? Isn’t it awful the way we haven’t gotten together recently?” Well, they never actually had, but they’d said they meant to.

  Joyce was equally appalled that they had let their friendship lapse for so long and (after Geneva prompted her) asked about Howard, which led to a lengthy discussion about the flawed nature of men in general and wound up some forty five minutes later with Geneva announcing her departure and asking Joyce to take a cat or two. Or several.

  Joyce thought briefly, then replied, “Er… Jenny—”

  “Geneva,” corrected Geneva.

  “Geneva, you know I’d love to, but I just can’t take another animal. The ones I have are eating me out of house and home. I sure hate it that you’re leaving, though.” She paused one infinitesimal fraction of a second. “By the way, I might be willing to take over your apartment while you’re gone.”

  For the rest of the month, Geneva packed and interviewed applicants. In her spare time she read feminist literature and shopped for new clothes—all black. She rented her apartment to a stranger at nearly twice the monthly mortgage rate, made arrangements to store her furniture, and placed ads for free cats. She called friends of friends who might be interested in having a nice cat. There were no takers.

  She thought about leaving a basketful of kittens on Howard’s doorstep but reconsidered when she remembered he had thrown his shoe at Petrarch after he discovered the cat poop in it. She knew that Dr. Zhivago had been the culprit, for he had always shown a distinct dislike for Howard, and she was outraged that Howard could be so stupid and callous as to pick on poor, gentle Petrarch who was nothing but a gentleman all the time. Howard had known he was her favorite when he threw that shoe. That was an insult to her directly! No, Howard would probably drown them or something. So she sighed and resignedly named them. The female names she lingered over lovingly, and after days of pondering, finally settled on Simone (after deBouvier) and Scarlet (after O’Hara). The males’ names sprang, like Venus, full blown from her lips: Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe.

  The next day she loaded her car and said farewell to the city as she tore up the ticket she had gotten for parking beside a fire hydrant while she ran in for one last check. “Who needs it?” she shouted defiantly, then she cranked up the car, headed for the interstate, and floored it, mindful of the fact that she was running away, sans fast-track career opportunity, sans chic apartment, sans fair-weather friends and lovers, but with nine cats. Her mind seethed with the turmoil of a woman scorned and, in general, dumped on.

  But as she cleared the perimeter of the city noise and exhaust fumes, heading into the clear blue and silver June morning, her heart gave a little leap. She felt freer and happier than she had since the day Howard had finally overcome his reluctance and had asked her to marry him. And suddenly she found herself singing about freedom and pressing her small, delicate foot mercilessly down on the accelerator, saying goodbye to her sophisticated life in the city without a regret. She suddenly liked her cats again, laughing out loud when Petrarch perched on the back of her seat, draped his forelegs over her shoulder, and purred louder than the little Mazda’s engine.

  As she caught sight of the first line of hazy blue mountains, Geneva repeated over and over again, “Home at last! Why did I ever leave?” And when she began the long ascent into the high country and felt the temperature drop, she breathed the air in deep gulps, as one thirsty from long labor in the fields drinks from a sweet well.

  She arrived at the rich meadowland where Rachel and her family lived just as the sun was beginning its initial descent and spreading gentle fire over the warm, green land. It all looked just as she remembered: the crystalline light swirling under the big, sapphire sky; sheep grazing in the field; the horses in the pasture who were stunning examples of bad offspring of champion bloodlines. Because they were slow out of the gate and adamantly refused to jump anything higher than a gopher hill, Wayne had gotten them for a relative bargain at auction. A horse breeder would have scorned them as lazy and virtually worthless, but they were beautiful, perfect for cantering through the rolling fields Rachel had sown with wildflowers, and serving the family as beloved, pampered pets.

  Geneva saw her sister as soon as she turned into the drive. Beautifully pregnant and carrying a basket of strawberries and roses from the garden, Rachel was shading her eyes and laughing at her children as they romped across the wide expanse of lawn with Sammy, their gleaming Irish setter. With their red and gold hair, the four of them looked like jewels in the gilded air. Geneva roared into the drive and leaned on the horn, scattering chickens that flurried and fussed. She bounded out of the car to catch her sister in a tremendous hug, marveling at how perfect she looked with her hair and skin glowing in the rich sun.

  “Rachel, Rachel! You look just like a Renoir! No, better than that. A Titian! How wonderful to be here! Home at last! How I have missed you all! I feel as if I have come from the wars! Oh, Phoebe! Hannah! How you have grown!” She lifted each of her small nieces high into the air and squeezed them until they shrieked and choked her with their fierce little hugs.

  Rachel, a serene madonna, glowed at her sister. “Geneva, darlin’. So good to have you here. You poor thing,” she added suddenly, holding her at arm’s length and frowning at her. “You look so sallow and sickly. Never mind. We’ll fatten you up and get some blood back in you. I bet you haven’t had anything decent to eat for weeks.”

  This was true. Mostly diet colas and granola bars, but Geneva most certainly did not enjoy the critical observation concerning the new body for which she had suffered so much.

  “Well, come on in,” Rachel continued. “You must be tired after that drive. Mama and Daddy won’t be home for a while yet, but they’re really glad about your coming home. Mam-ma can’t wait to see you, too.”

  The Mam-ma to which Rachel referred was their one surviving grandmother, Hannah Morgan Turner, the only child of Granny Morgan, whose genetic and material legacy had insured Geneva’s perfect aesthetic sense and her well-furnished apartment. Now ninety years old, Mam-ma Turner, like her mother before her, had long enjoyed health, energy, and a handsome face.

  Mam-ma Turner had borne nine children, all dead now save one, Gaynell, the mother of Rachel and Geneva. The others had died early, before they had produced heirs, lost to gaping black mines, to unfruitful childbed, to war, to the ravages of ignorance and disease, and one to the treachery of capricious weather high in the shadowed hills. Only Gaynell had survived, and for many years it appeared that she would be the last of Granny Morgan’s bloodline.

  She, too, had been—indeed still was—considered a legendary beauty, but acquainted with sorrow and death as she was, she virtually ignored that gift to live her days along the practical lines of survival and the driving need to procreate. Her beauty had helped her to marry young and happily, and although the twenty two years with her first husband, Gerald, had been pleasant ones, she had felt eternally impoverished with the absence of sons and daughters. “What good is a pert little nose and all this yeller hair if I don’t have me any younguns to pass ‘em along to?” she had often repeated as she wandered through her empty house.

  Then her husband, a union organizer among the miners, was killed during a riot over the issue of child labor practices, and two years later she remarried, not anticipating the ironic turn of events precipitated by Gerald’s death. She told herself that she might as well spin out her last years in the company of a good man and not mourn what might have been, bu
t shortly after the new union with Ray Lenoir, Gaynell had found herself suddenly and inexplicably (she thought) pregnant. At the age of forty-five she was, after all, able to pass along the pert nose and yellow hair to her first daughter, Rachel. Geneva followed three years later, just as pert and just as golden, and proclaiming her fertility at her advanced age a miracle, Gaynell threw herself into motherhood with the same surprised delight that Abraham’s Sarah surely had with the product of her late-blooming womb.

  And so, Rachel and Geneva had grown up under the wrinkled caresses of old people of the Morgan line who doted on them, who called them “little miracles,” “blessings,” “the joy of their lives.” It was no wonder that they passed through their rainbowed youths feeling they were destined to grace the world in a way that it had never seen before. They were treasures beyond price, more special than their adult cousins and their children on their father’s side. Those children had become so numerous that the Lenoir name was as familiar as redbud over the West Virginia valleys and hills.

  Not only were Rachel and Geneva loved, they were also well taught—bone bred with an abiding respect for the venerable mountains and the ways of “old timers” who gave them a love for tradition and unbroken custom. Like leggy tulips standing by a support, Rachel and Geneva never stood completely alone as long as they remained near home. Thus, they unquestioningly had given themselves to the music of the green and blue mountains around them. But in her unsettled teens, Geneva listened to another distant song, for in her restless heart, she knew she would break away from the cloying sweetness of too much family love. Sensing something shimmering over the horizon, she left to find it, and when she did, she loved it, too. It was glamour, it was independence and self-expression, it was sophisticated, articulate friends who taught her how to pretend to be sleek and polished, and it made her happy.