From the darkened house, he watched her—nobody but her. The red hair and freckles that had been so distracting in their brilliance when he’d first met her took on an appropriateness lent by her fiery zeal as she dissolved into the music. Again, there were times when her eyelids drifted shut. Other times she smiled against the chin rest, and he was somehow certain she had no idea she was smiling. Her sleeves draped as she bowed the instrument, her wrist arched daintily as she occasionally plucked it, and the hem of her black skirt lifted and fell as she tapped her toe to the sprightlier songs.
The concert ended with a reprise of “Joy to the World,” and the final thunder of applause brought the orchestra members to their feet for a mass bow.
When the house lights came up, Theresa’s eyes scanned the line of familiar faces in row four, but returned to settle and stay on Brian, who had lifted his hands to praise her in the traditional way, and was wearing a smile as proud as any on the other faces. She braved a wide smile in return and hoped he knew it was not for the others but just for him. He stopped clapping and gave her the thumbs-up signal, and she felt a holiday glow such as she’d never known as she sat to tuck her instrument back into its case.
__________
THEY WERE WAITING in the hall when she came from the music room with her coat and mitts on, her case beneath an arm.
Everybody babbled at once, but Theresa finally had a chance to croon appreciatively, “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“We wanted to surprise you. Besides, we thought it might make you nervous.”
“Well, it did! No, it didn’t! Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying, except it really made the concert special, knowing you were all out there listening. Thanks, all of you, for coming.”
Jeff looped an elbow around Theresa’s neck, faked a headlock and a punch to the jaw and grunted, “You did good, sis.”
Margaret took command then. “We have a tree to decorate yet tonight, and you know how your father always has trouble with those lights. Let’s get this party moving home!”
They headed toward the parking lot, and Theresa invited, “Does anybody want to ride with me?” She could sense Amy reserving her reply until she heard what Brian answered.
“I will,” he said, moving to Theresa’s side and taking the violin case from her hands.
“I will too—” Amy began, but Margaret cut her off in midsentence.
“Amy, you come with us. I want you to run into the store for a carton of milk on our way home.”
“Jeff? Patricia?” Theresa appealed, suddenly feeling as if she’d coerced Brian into saying yes, since nobody else had.
“Patricia left her purse in the station wagon, so we might as well ride with them.”
The two groups parted, and as she walked toward her little gray Toyota, Theresa suddenly suspected that Patricia had had her purse with her all along.
In the car she and Brian settled into the low bucket seats and Theresa put a tape in the deck. Rachmaninoff seemed to envelope them. “Sorry,” she offered, and immediately pushed the eject button. Without hesitation, he reseated the tape against the heads and the dynamic Concerto in C-sharp Minor returned.
“I get the idea you think I’m some hard-rock freak. Music is music. If it’s good, I like it.”
They drove through the moonlit night with the power and might of Rachmaninoff ushering them home, followed by the much mellower poignance of Listz’s “Liebestraum.” As its flowing sweetness touched her ears, Theresa thought of its English translation, “Dream of Love.” But she kept her eyes squarely on the road, thinking herself fanciful because of the residual ebullience of the performance and the occasional scarlet, blue and gold lights that glittered from housefronts as they passed. In living-room windows Christmas trees winked cheerfully, but it wasn’t just the trees, it wasn’t just the lights, it wasn’t just the concert and not even Jeff’s being home that made this Christmas more special than most. It was Brian Scanlon.
“I saw your foot tapping,” he teased now.
“Oh?”
“Sure sign of a dancer.”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“Good. Because I never get to dance much anymore. I’m always providing the music.”
“Never fear. If I don’t go, there’ll be plenty of others.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Rhythmless clods who’ll abuse my toes and talk, talk, talk in my ear.”
“You don’t like to talk when you dance?” Somehow she’d always imagined dancers using the close proximity to exchange intimacies.
“Not particularly.”
“I’ve been led to believe that’s when men and women whisper ... well, what’s known as sweet nothings.”
Brian turned to study her face, smiling at the old-fashioned phrase, wondering if he knew another woman who’d use it. “Sweet nothings?”
She heard the grin in his voice, but kept her eyes on the street. “I have no personal knowledge of them myself, you understand.” She gave him a quarter glance and lifted one eyebrow.
“I understand. Neither do I.”
“But I’ll give it some thought.”
“I already have. Sounds like not a half-bad idea.” She felt as if her face would light up the interior of the car, for it struck Theresa that while she had no knowledge of sweet nothings, she and Brian were exchanging them at that very moment.
They made it home before the others, and Theresa excused herself to go to her room and change into jeans, blouse and loose-thrown sweater again. From the living room she heard the soft, exploratory notes of the piano as a melody line from a current Air Supply hit was picked out with one finger. She came down the hall and paused in the living-room doorway. Brian stood before the piano, one thumb hooked in the back pocket of his pants while he lackadaisically pressed the keys with a single forefinger. He looked up. She crossed her arms. The piano strings vibrated into silence. She noticed things about him that she liked—the shape of his eyebrows, the way his expression said smile when there really was none there, his easy unhurried way of speaking, moving, shifting his eyes, that put her much more at ease the longer she was with him.
“I enjoyed the concert.”
“I’m glad.”
“My first live orchestra.”
“It’s nothing compared to the Minneapolis Orchestra. You should hear them.”
“Maybe I will sometime. Do they play Chopin?”
“Oh, they play everything! And Orchestra Hall is positively sensational. The acoustics are world acclaimed. The ceiling is made of big white cubes of all sizes that look like they’ve been thrown up there and stuck at odd angles. The notes come bouncing off the cubes and—” She had looked up, as if expecting the living-room ceiling to be composed of the same cubes she described, not realizing that she looked very girlish and appealing in her animation, or that she had thrown her arms wide.
When her eyes drifted down, she found Brian grinning in amusement.
The kitchen door burst open and the noise began again.
__________
WHEN THE BRUBAKER FAMILY decorated their Christmas tree, the scene was like a three-ring circus, with Margaret its ringmaster. She doled out commands about everything: which side of the tree should face front, who should pick up the trail of needles left scattered across the carpet, who should fill the tree stand with water. Poor Willard had trouble with the tree lights, all right, but his biggest trouble was his wife. “Willard, I want you to move that red light so it’s underneath that branch instead of on top of it. There’s a big hole here.”
Jeff caught his mother by the waist, swung her around playfully and circled her arms so she couldn’t move, then plopped a silencing kiss on her mouth. “Yes, his little turtledove. Shut up, his little turtledove,” Margaret’s tall son teased, gaining a smile in return.
“You’re not too big to spank yet, Jeffrey. Talking to your mother like that.” But her grin was as wide as a watermelon slice. “Patricia, get this boy off my back.�
�� Patricia made a lunge at Jeff and the two ended up in a heap on the sofa, teasing and tickling.
Margaret had turned on the living-room stereo, but while it played Christmas music, Amy’s bedroom was thumping with rock, and though the door was closed, the sound came through to confuse the issue. Jeff sang with one or the other in his deep, gravelly voice, and before they got to the tinsel, the phone had rung no less than four times—all for Amy.
Brian might have felt out of place but for Patricia’s being an outsider, too. When it was time to distribute the tinsel, she was given a handful, just as he was, and protesting that it was their tree would have sounded ungracious, so he found himself beside Theresa, hanging shimmering silver icicles on the high branches while she worked on the lower ones. Jeff and Patricia had taken over the other half of the tree while the two elder Brubakers sat back and watched this part of the decorations, and Amy talked on the phone, interrupting herself to offer some sage bit of direction now and then.
They ended the evening with hot apple cider and cinnamon rolls around the kitchen table. By the time they finished, it was nearing eleven o’clock. Margaret stood up and began stacking the dirty cups and saucers.
“Well, I guess it’s time I get Patricia back home,” Jeff announced. “Do you two want to ride along?”
Brian and Theresa both looked up and spoke simultaneously.
“No, I’ll stay here and clean up the mess.”
“I don’t feel like going out in the cold again.” Theresa took over the task her mother had begun. “You’re tired, mom. I’ll do that.”
Margaret desisted thankfully and went off to bed with Willard, ordering Amy to retire also. When the door closed behind Jeff and Patricia, the kitchen was left to Theresa and Brian. She carried the dishes to the counter and filled the sink with sudsy water and began washing them.
“I’ll dry them for you.”
“You don’t have to. There are just a few.”
Overruling her protest, he found the dish towel and stood beside her at the sink. She was conscious that he was comfortable with silence, unlike most people. He could go through long stretches of it without searching for ways to fill it. The stereos were off. Jeff’s teasing was gone, and Margaret’s incessant orders. Only the swish of water and the clink of glassware could be heard. It took them less than five minutes to wash and dry the cups and saucers and put the room in order. But while five minutes of silence beside the wrong person can be devastating, that same five beside the right man can be totally wonderful.
When she’d hung up the wet cloths and switched out all the lights except the small one over the stove, she found a bottle of lotion beneath the sink and squirted a dollop in her palm, aware of Brian watching silently as she worked the cherry-scented cream into her hands.
“Let’s sit in the living room for a while,” he suggested.
She led the way and sat down on one end of the davenport while he sat at the other, leaning back and draping his palms across his abdomen, much as he had in the theater. Again silence fell. Again it was sustaining rather than draining. The tree lights made Theresa feel as if she was on the inside of a rainbow looking out.
“You have a wonderful family,” he said at last.
“I know.”
“But I begin to see why your dad needs to spend some quiet time with the birds.”
Theresa chuckled softly. “It gets a little raucous at times. Mostly when Jeff’s around.”
“I like it though. I don’t ever remember any happy noise around my house.”
“Don’t you have any brothers and sisters?”
“Yeah, one sister, but she’s eight years older than me, and she lives in Jamaica. Her husband’s in exporting. We were never very close.”
“And what about your mom and dad? I mean, your real dad. Were you close to them?”
He stared at the tree lights and ruminated at length. She liked that. No impulsive answers to a question that was important. “A little with my dad, but never with my mother.”
“Why?”
He rolled his head and studied her. “I don’t know. Why are some families like yours and some like mine? If I knew the answer and could bottle it, I could stop wars.”
His answer made her turn to meet his eyes directly—such stunning, spiky-lashed beauties. She was struck again by the fact that such pretty eyes somehow managed to make him even more handsome. In them the tree lights were reflected—dots of red and gold and green and blue shining from beneath chestnut eyebrows and lashes, studying her without a smile.
His steady gaze made Theresa short of breath. There were things inside this man that spoke of a depth of character she was growing surely to admire. Though he was really Jeff’s senior by only two years, he seemed much older than Jeff—much older than her, too, she thought. Perhaps losing one’s family does that to a person. It suddenly struck Theresa how awesome it must be to have no place to call home. She herself had clung to home far longer than was advisable. But she was a different matter. Brian would leave the Air Force next summer, and there would be no mother waiting with pumpkin pies in the freezer. No familiar bedroom where he could lie on his back and consider what lay ahead, while the familiar lair secured him to the past. No siblings to tease or go Christmas shopping with. No old girlfriend waiting with open arms ...
But how did she know? The thought was sobering. She suddenly wanted to ask if there was a woman somewhere who was special to him, but didn’t want to sound forward, so she veiled the question somewhat.
“Isn’t there anyone left behind in Chicago?”
The smile was absent, but why did it feel as if he was charming her with the twinkle in his eye? “Since we’ve already eliminated parents and sisters and brothers, you must mean girlfriends.” She dropped her eyes and hoped the red tree lights camouflaged the heat she felt creeping up her neck. “No, there are no girlfriends waiting in Chicago.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Whether you did or not doesn’t matter. Maybe I just wanted you to know.”
The silence that followed was scarcely comfortable, quite unlike that which had passed earlier. It was filled with a new, tingling two-way awareness and a thousand other unasked questions.
“I think I’ll say good-night now,” he announced quietly, surprising Theresa. She wasn’t totally naive. She’d sat on living-room davenports with those of the opposite sex before, and after a lead-in like Brian’s, the groping always followed.
But he rose, stretched and stood with his fingers in his hip pockets while he studied the tree a minute longer. Then he studied her an equal length of time before raising a palm and murmuring softly, “Good night, Theresa.”
Chapter Four
BRIAN SCANLON LAY IN BED, thinking about Theresa Brubaker, considering what it was that attracted him to her. He’d never cared much for redheads. Yet her hair was as orange as that of a Raggedy Ann doll, and her freckles were the color of overripe fruit. When she blushed—and she blushed often—she tended to glow like the Christmas tree.
Brian had been playing in a band since high school. In every dance crowd there were women who couldn’t resist a guitar man when he stepped down from the stage at break time. They flocked around like chickens to scattered corn. He’d had his share. But he’d always gone for the blondes and brunettes, the prettiest ones with artful makeup and hair down to the middle of their backs, swinging like silk—women who knew their way around men.
But Theresa Brubaker was totally different from them. Not only did she look different, she acted different. She was honest and interesting, intelligent and loving. And totally naive, Brian was sure.
Yet so much heart lay beneath that naivety. It surfaced whenever she was around her family, particularly Jeff, and whenever she was around music. Brian recalled her voice, when the three of them had been harmonizing in the car, and the verve she radiated when playing the violin and the piano. Why, she even had him listening to classical music with a new, tolerant ear. The poignant strains of th
e Chopin Nocturne came back to him as he crossed his wrists behind his head in the dark and thought of how she’d looked in the long black skirt and white blouse. The blouse had, for once, been covered by no sweater.
He wondered how a man ever got up the nerve to touch breasts like hers. When they were that big, they weren’t really ... sexy. Just intimidating. He’d been scared to death the first time he’d felt a girl’s breasts, but since then he’d touched countless others, and still the idea of caressing Theresa’s breasts gave him serious qualms. There’d been times when he’d managed to study them covertly, but Theresa allowed few such opportunities, covered as she usually was with her cardigans. But when she’d been playing the piano, he’d stood behind her and looked down at the mountainous orbs beneath her blouse, and his mouth had gone dry instead of watering.
Forget it, Scanlon. She’s not your type.
__________
THE NEXT MORNING, when Brian arose at his usual wake-up hour and crept barefoot upstairs to the bathroom, he came face to face with Theresa in the hall.
They both stopped short and stared at each other. He wore a pair of blue denim jeans, nothing else. She wore a mint green bathrobe, nothing else. There wasn’t a sound in the house. Everyone else was still asleep, for it was Christmas Eve day so neither of her parents had to go to work.
“Good morning,” she whispered. The bathroom door was right beside them.
“Good morning,” he whispered back. Her feet were bare, and it was obvious even without a glance that her breasts were untethered beneath the velour robe, for they drooped nearly to her waist while she lifted her arms and pretended the zipper needed closing at her throat.
“You can go first,” she offered, gesturing toward the doorway.
“No, no, you go ahead. I’ll wait.”
“No, I ... really, I was just going to put on a pot of coffee first.”
He was about to raise another objection when she swept past him toward the kitchen, so he hurried into the bathroom, taking care of necessities without wasting time, then heading for the kitchen to tell her the room was free. She was standing before the stove waiting for the coffee to start perking when he padded up silently beside her.