The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [76]
It changed Della's approach markedly. "I'd have a shot at being wingman?"
Cass rose to go on duty. "Only if you hang on to your wings. Happy new year, Lieutenant."
One thing was leading to another more precipitously than Ben wanted to be led, all signs pointing to a celebratory kiss at midnight to start off the Adrianna era. He could wish dozens of things for the coming year, starting with Cass and him in circumstances that did not know war or inconvenient husband. All that went onto the tosspile of dreams, however, if he got involved with what was standing in front of him in snug maroon. "My father just gave me the high sign about something," he resorted to. "Let me get you a drink while I go see what's on his mind."
"I'll hold out for champagne," Adrianna said with a wink. "Hurry back."
A sign of some sort, in fact, was what Ben had spotted across the room, the back of his father as he slipped away from the party hubbub to the quiet book-lined room upstairs. Hearing Ben step in, Bill Reinking turned from the window where he was looking out at the snow sifting down. "What's this, another absconder from the merrymaking?" He smiled faintly. "You needn't take after me in that bad habit."
"The merrymaking can stagger along without us for a little while, Dad."
His father nodded. Swirling his glass, he turned back to the snow scene of the window. "Vic Rennie," he said barely above a murmur. "I owe it to Toussaint to write a little something more about him." He chugged the last of what was in the glass. "Don't worry, I'll stay away from how he died. I'll keep to the soldier-from-the-reservation peg, although I goddamn sure won't make it heartwarming." He shook his head one more time. "Poor divvied-out kid, always caught between. What was he, half-breed, quarter—?"
"I don't even know," Ben answered. "When anybody would ask, he'd say 'Enough.'"
Bill Reinking grunted and moved off from the window-well to the bookshelves that walled the room. His son followed him with his eyes, the old feel of the words in wait enwrapping the two of them. Ben never forgot the touchable value of the books in this room, his boyhood times of running his fingers across the collected spines standing on the shelves like delicately done upright bricks. All the good-nights when he would pad in to find this bespectacled man deep into Thucydides or Parkman or Tolstoy, and there would come the brief contented smile and the adage, time and again, "History writes the best yarns." As Ben watched now, his father scanned the rows of titles as if reminding himself there was this room to come back to after tonight. Thinking aloud, the older man said: "Your mother will nail both our hides to the wall if we don't pitch in at the party pretty quick."
"Mine, anyway," Ben conceded. "I'm supposed to be down there making out like mad with fair maiden Adrianna."
His father took down a book and put it back without looking at it. "Peril is not confined to the theaters of war, son."
This from the man known to have put in as the filler at the bottom of a newspaper column The matrimony vine is also called boxthorn. Ben shifted restlessly. He had pieced together the story of his father and his mother considerably beyond even the evidence he grew up around in this house. The opening scene: the glamorous set of grandparents he had never met, Clyde and Joyce Carteret, early Hollywood royalty, silent-movie producer and actress. In 1919 the Carterets had brought their film company to Glacier National Park and the adjacent Blackfoot Reservation to shoot a quickie movie full of Indians and headdresses. While there, their teenage daughter Cloyce met and fell for the young