“Let me put some iodine on it,” she said.
“All right. But I don’t want you to tell Geraldine how I scratched myself. Just look at that, that’s quite a gouge. There’s a small bottle of tincture of iodine in the lavatory. Tiny bottle, not more than three ounces. And a roll of absorbent cotton. Will you administer to your embarrassed father’s wound? Is it administer to, or minister to? The ministering angel. Well, in future I must learn not to become so intense.”
“Better than biting your lip, which is what I do sometimes,” she said.
He tried to make light of his self-inflicted wound, but by her over-casual manner and her avoidance of his look he knew that she did not consider the scratch a trivial mutter. Nor did he. She daubed the wound with iodine—which gave them something to do, her to daub, him to pretend to exaggerate the twinge of pain. He waited to see if she would invent an excuse to leave him. She did not.
“Shall we talk about this?” he said, holding up his stained hand.
“If you like,” she said.
“I think we ought to,” he said. “I owe you something for coming home.”
“Eight hundred and some dollars,” she said.
“You’ll never have to worry about money, Tina. You must know that. I would never use money as a bludgeon. Not on you.”
“On Bing?”
“Not on him, either, and anyway it’s too late for that. I have reason to believe he’s worth more than I am, at this moment. Good for him! And I mean that. His financial independence is good for me, too, you know. He’s wanted to be free of me, and now he is. But anybody who wants to be free of me makes me want to be free of them.”
“So you two are free of each other. Yes, I knew Bing’d gotten rich. He writes to me, always has. The past few years he’s been telling me how successful he is, financially. He bought a Rolls-Royce.”
“I know,” said George Lockwood.
“And he knows all the big shots.”
“The big shots? What are they?”
“That’s slang, Father. Important people. You don’t keep up with slang, I can see that.”
“I thought I did, but big shot is a new one on me. But I knew your brother was on good terms with them. Oh, he’s doing very well indeed. In oil. Oil has always seemed to me a very risky proposition, but he hasn’t lost his head. So far. He’s provided for his wife and children, and now there’ll be no stopping him. The money you and he were left by your Uncle Pen is going to seem like small change to him.”
“Not to me, though,” she said.
“No, if you wanted to, you could live abroad for the rest of your life on the income from it. Not at the Paris Ritz, or Claridge’s, but comfortably. As it is, you’re a rich American, with your present income.”
“Yes,” she said, and she was again looking at her private valley on the floor.
He examined his hand. “I wasn’t trying to change the subject,” he said.
“You didn’t,” she said. “We digressed to Bing, but that’s part of the subject, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “So is your Uncle Pen. His legacies. Your income. And me cutting myself open with my fingernail.”
She nodded. “And me the rich American in Europe,” she said.
“Do you know very much about this family?”
“Our family?” she said. “Not as much as I ought to, I guess. I didn’t realize there was very much to know. Is there? I’ve always had the feeling that the Lockwoods had a knack for making money, but were never quite respectable. That’s strange, because after a hundred years we ought to be very respectable. Some families get there in one generation, and we’ve had three. Is that right? Yes. I’m the fourth generation—and look at Bing. He’s going to be so rich that the others will seem poor by comparison.”
“You put your finger on it. We never have seemed quite respectable. Do you know why?”
“My great-grandfather killed some people, I knew that. But the rest of you’ve been pretty well behaved—until poor Uncle Pen—”
“Excuse me. Did your trackwalker friend desert you on account of Uncle Pen?”
“It may have been coincidence,” she said.
“But you don’t really think it was?”
“No, I don’t really think so. His manner toward me changed. It was mostly the way he looked at me, as if I’d been masquerading as a fairly nice girl but was really a strumpet. And he’s very ambitious, very cagy.”
“You’re going to encounter that for the rest of your life, or at least until you marry and change your name. Is that why you want to live abroad?”
“Not the original reason, but when all that happened to Uncle Pen, I had a hunch what it was going to be like at home. My cagy gentleman friend was a clue. And then I thought, good heavens, what must it be like in Swedish Haven and Gibbsville? It was the older women in Gibbsville that first made me feel that my petticoat was showing. At dancing school, at children’s parties. They’d look at me.”
“Yes,” said her father. “And I can see them. Hands folded in their laps. Unable to find anything wrong with you, or the way your mother dressed you. And not saying anything, because your mother was a Wynne, and the Wynnes were coal money. And we had some Stokes connections. But your name wasn’t Wynne, or Stokes. It was Lockwood. How well I know that Gibbsville look, and I could have erased it in a twinkling if I’d married a Gibbsville girl and moved to Lantenengo Street. If my father had married a Gibbsville girl. Or even if your Uncle Pen had married one of their virgins and settled down there. So we never became quite respectable in their eyes, and I daresay we never felt quite respectable on account of that. The Lockwoods took Swedish Haven by brute force. The brute force otherwise known as the almighty dollar. And there was never anyone here that dared to oppose us. After all, your great-grandfather killed two men, right here in this town, and we don’t know how many others he may have killed in the Civil War. He was never without a pistol, and half the town owed him money. If one of your ancestors could have been an honest judge, you might never have seen that Gibbsville look. But even your most respectable relative murdered his mistress and killed himself.”
“You’ve been under a strain, Father,” said the girl.
He looked quickly at his hand, then at her. He smiled. “I half expected to see I’d scratched myself again,” he said. “Yes, I have been under a strain, and this is the first time I’ve admitted it.”
“Let’s not talk any more,” she said.
“Do you think I get myself all worked up, as your grandmother used to say?”
“You never used to at all,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk?”
“A walk? Where to?”
“Nowhere. This past week I’ve been doing twenty times around the deck every day, and I always ended up just where I started. The saloon bar.”
“All right, let’s walk,” said George Lockwood.
“Can I borrow a coat from you?” she said. “I’d rather not go upstairs.”
“Certainly,” he said. “There’s a nip in the air.”
She chose his army trench coat, which he kept in the hall closet. He put on a camel’s-hair polo coat, long and belted, and a cap.
“You have style, Father,” she said.
“Have I? Thanks. I’ve always spent too much money on my clothes, and encouraged your brother to. It isn’t only how you look in good clothes. It’s how you feel. But I couldn’t help noticing that your brother is economizing in that respect. Perhaps that’s part of getting free of me. Care to have a walking stick?”
“Yes,” she said. She smiled. “Boys have started carrying canes again.”