At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [76]
He poured her a glass of last year’s red, which had turned out quite fine, and her eyes closed in gentle appreciation as she tasted it. “I can taste Virginia in it,” she said in a moment, and she opened her eyes, smiling at him. “It tastes like home.”
They took their glasses and sat at the wrought iron table under the shade of an oak, gazing at the mountains, talking with an ease that was rare and refreshing to Andrew. He did not find her as fatuous and boring as he did most young people; in fact when he was with her he forgot her age altogether. She had a composure and a maturity that were beyond her years, and her interests embraced the world. She told him about her childhood in Little Rock, where she had grown up with her mother and her grandparents and cousins of all descriptions, and about college and her ambitions for herself, which were straightforward and filled with modern ideas. She believed a woman could be more than a wife and mother, although certainly she wanted to be both someday. But first she wanted to travel the world, to see the Louvre and the L’Orangerie, and to touch the face of a pyramid and walk the streets of Florence, and sit in St. Mark’s Square and gaze for hours upon the horsemen that crowned the Doge’s Palace. When she spoke her face became rapt, her gaze dreamy, and Andrew was seized suddenly by a longing as intense as any he had ever known. He wanted to be the one to take her to those places, and show her those things. He wanted to see the world anew through her eyes.
Instead, he did the next best thing, which was to take her there through his eyes, and his memories. While they still sat there together, beneath the oak tree, he took her to the castles of Germany and the cathedrals of France, across the canals of Venice in a gondola against a fiery sunset, through the fine hotels of London. And then he told her of Dominique, Robert’s sister, and how she had died in his arms on a dark cobbled street and had taken a part of his heart with him. By this time the sky was turning pink behind the mountains, and the wine was long gone, and her hand, small and soft and sweet, was covering his. She leaned forward, her eyes filled with distress, and she said softly, “I’m so sorry.”
He looked at her hand, and he took it and turned it gently, ever so gently, palm up in his. He looked at her face, and he thought, I am going to kiss this exquisite creature.
It was then that Dominic called to him across the lawn, and as Andrew rose to introduce Emmy to Robert’s son, he wasn’t sure whether he was sorry or relieved.
After supper he invited Robert and Dominic up to the house, as he often did, but that night the occasion was social, not business. His mother enjoyed the company of the handsome young Dominic, who was apprenticing to take over Robert’s position at the winery when or if Robert decided to retire. Emmy seemed to enjoy speaking French with Robert, and was held rapt by the stories he told. Andrew himself was held rapt by the sound of her voice, the glint of lamplight on her hair, the curve of her wrist when she lifted her glass to sip, and her smile, which seemed to be meant only for him.
At some point, he wasn’t exactly sure how, the conversation turned to the great tasting rooms of Europe, the lush decor and the muraled walls, and how the Vanderbilts and the Fords and the Rockefellers had decorated their wine cellars similarly, and his mother said, “Well, my dear, I think we must bring someone in to paint a scene for us, don’t you think?”
Thanks to the determination and business acumen of Emily Blackwell, the small dairy operation she had started during the war had grown into Blackwell Farms Creamery, purveyor of fine cheeses to restaurants throughout the state, and her kitchen jelly operation now required its own manufacturing plant and shipped Blackwell Farms Fine Jams and Jellies all over the South. But it had taken almost twenty years for her to acknowledge that “Andrew’s little winery,” as she called it, was anything more than a hobby.