O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [135]
“Any profound meanings?”
“I don’t know. Only that it’s always hidden away like a secret.”
“And all secrets are found?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s kind of the way the people in Nebo live. They don’t want to be discovered.”
As they walked away she looked back several times and got a perfect bearing because she had something to talk about at the dinner table.
Back at Veda’s, Amanda drew a map of the location and a somewhat drawing of the bird and extracted a promise from Zach to back up her discovery later, at dinner.
He stroked her face and wondered what the rail bird had told her.
One of Willow’s paintings near the stairs seemed to have the same distinctive features of the field they had walked. Was that where she and Willow had found the nest earlier?
Every time Zach had looked at Willow’s gauzy brushstrokes, he thought he saw a white shading in the tall grass, perhaps a figure of a woman.
“I’ve looked at this a hundred times,” Zach said. “Is that where we were?”
“Yes, very good,” she answered.
“And is that little dot over there you?”
“Yes.”
It had been a very long time, close on two hours, since he had touched her and kissed her well. With one hand Zach managed a mug of tea. The other hand was filled with her breast. He set the cup aside, laid his head against her bosom, and she dropped her pen and unbuttoned her top buttons, let her dress slide down over her shoulders, and awarded him full access.
He was stricken with bliss and she enfolded him and they swayed ever so gently, for ever so long. Amanda opened her eyes. They were filling with mischief.
“I’ve got something to show you,” she whispered. “Light up a lamp.”
They went up to the loft, which served as an extra sleeping place and, more recently, as an adventurous bordello filled with wild things. A ladder lay on the floor, to a side. She told Zach to set it up by a trapdoor. He poked it hard and it swung open into a storage area.
Amanda went up and into the space with her lantern. In a few moments she handed him down three paintings covered with oilcloth.
Amanda dusted them and removed the covers. The paintings were in Willow’s blurry style, of three nudes. They could not be distinguished by face, but the body of the model was unmistakable.
. . . Amanda posing topless in the same grass where they had found the rail bird. And one of her stretched on her stomach drying her hair on Veda’s porch and one was the full front of a girl proud of her nakedness.
Back before the fireplace, he arrayed the pictures while she filled wine goblets.
“I’ve something to tell you, Zach.”
“Aye?”
“Willow was my first lover.”
She waited for his reaction. It was a smile.
“It’s not that hard to understand,” he said.
“I’d like to tell you, if . . .”
“Then, tell me.”
“Will and I turned sixteen. There was no boy, not in my circles, who I wanted to escort me on my debut. That’s when I ended up with that phony Scottish so-called aristocrat. There were some artist friends I couldn’t take, but no one in the old-boys’ crowd.
“I was not happy. My girlfriends were nailing down husbands as fast as their hammers could pound and I learned from them that first love could be foreign and frightening and cause a great deal of pain.
“That was the summer I had Private First Class Zachary O’Hara ordered by the commandant to attend a party at Inverness. And that was when you touched my breast in the garden and my life turned on that moment. I was livid when I realized I could not have you on demand. I’d never been challenged like that before or been walked away from. It was the wrong reason for falling in love with you and it took a long time to change into something decent.
“After her debutante ball, Willow was being courted seriously by Jefferson Templeton. We were going our separate ways. I demanded to be able to come to Nebo with her for a last summer.
“Willow was a fair artist, as you can see, and she began sketching me. A Jewish peddler, Jacob Nussbaum, made stops in Nebo. In his wagon he had pots and pans