Kate a successful writer in New York made a promise that never should have been kept. A story of there friends with a surprise ending.
The Hourglass
By Elizabeth Gage
Mira Books
Copyright © 2000
Elizabeth Gage
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781552041987
Chapter One
It is a beautiful day in early June, many years
ago. We are standing in the sewing room of
Lily's house. It is a modest house near the
center of town, a couple of miles from
the fancy places along the shore. Like most of
the other local people, the Frances live in the
shadow of the fine old county families whose
forebears settled the Maine town two hundred
years ago, and of the millionaires who discovered
it in the last generation and built their
mansions on the heights overlooking the
ocean.
It is called Summer Harbor. In the summer
it is home to wealthy tourists who come here
to enjoy the crisp air, the chilly ocean and
each other. For the rest of the year it is home
to lobstermen, truck farmers, a few town residents
who don't seem to do much of anything—and to me.
Lily's father runs a dry-goods business in
town which was founded by his grandfather
at the turn of the century. He likes to say he
is "poor but happy," and he looks with
amusement rather than envy at the huge shore
places of the millionaires.
Outside the window the heavy green hills
of late spring are visible. Beyond them, lending
an odd breathlessness to the friendly sky,
is the ocean. Inside the room there are several
watercolor paintings on easels, one of which
represents the view from the window. They
were all done by Lily, whose talent attracted
the attention of her art teacher in junior high
school, and who uses this room as a makeshift
studio in her spare time.
I turn to Lily. She is standing with her arms
held up while I stick pins in the seams of the
dress she has on.
"Come on," she says. "My shoulders are
killing me."
"Hang on another second."
I made the dress myself, from a pattern I
saw in a fashion magazine. It would have been
much too mature for anyone else her age, but
Lily is tall and precociously shaped. She has
always been slim, thanks to her youthful metabolism
and terrific energy. But lately she has
been having a growth spurt which has softened
her tomboy shape. Her eyes are a burning
blue, willful, impatient, beautiful when at
rest.
"Okay," I say through the pins between
my lips. "Now let's look."
She puts her arms down with a sigh and
turns slightly to look at herself in the mirror.
"Oh, Kate!" she exclaims. "You're a wizard."
I am pleased. The dress is going to work
out. Her breasts are just big enough to support
the low-cut bodice. Her bare shoulders look
alert and pretty. The hemline shows off
strong, shapely calves. It is a race against
time, but her rapid growth allows her to make
the dress her own.
She is thirteen years old. So am I.
"Do you think Jordan will like it?" she
asks.
"Of course he'll like it," I say. "He has
eyes, doesn't he? You look like a princess."
The metaphor seems particularly apt. Lily
has always had a fresh naturalness that makes
people like her—even those who might otherwise
have been put off by her willful and
slightly wild personality. But now adolescence
is giving her the delicacy of a princess,
the quiet sparkling desirability. The dress
brings that out.
I glance at myself in the mirror and look
quickly away. I am too ugly to look at.
Lumpy, freckled, misshapen. If Lily is leaping
gracefully into adolescence, I am caught at the
clumsiest thirteen. My face is too wide, my
limbs too heavy. Unlike my friend, I have
only pimples to remind me of the new stage
of life upon which I am embarking.
"You should come," Lily says. "Jordan
will miss you."
I shake my head. "I don't want to come."
"Kate, don't be a poop!" she cries.
"You've got to come! I can't be all alone with
all those people I don't know. Say yes. Come
on."
"No."
She turns back to the mirror. She realizes I
am going to stick to my guns. There was a
time when she would not have taken no for
an answer. But she is growing up. I even sense
the tact of an adult in her insistence that I
come to the ball. She is making a show of
insisting, because she doesn't want me to feel
left out.
As I step back to look at the dress, I feel a
familiar catch in my throat. Lily is everything
I want to be, and never will be. This would
make me unbearably jealous if I didn't feel so
strongly that she is part of me. We have been
best friends for so long that I have no real
existence outside my closeness with her.
There is a knock at the door. Lily's younger
brother, Eric, sticks his face into the room.
"Lily, Mom wants to see you," he says.
"What about?" Lily asks.
"Search me." Eric is a man of few words,
and by far the least "useful" of any member
of the France family. Every time I see him he
is charging out the front door with a baseball
glove or a basketball or football in his hand.
"Don't go away mad!" his father sometimes
calls affably after him, but Eric never acknowledges
the joke.
He is slight of build, almost pretty with his
long eyelashes and fair complexion, but he is
a fierce competitor in sports, and often comes
home with cuts and bruises, which Mrs.
France is glad to cleanse and bandage because
it is almost her only contact with him. I see
him tearing along the streets of town on his
bicycle more often than I see him at home.
Mr. France likes to observe that Eric's metabolism
is excessive, which explains both his
slenderness and his hyperactivity. I think there
is something pent up in Eric that keeps him
on the run. I have never figured out what it is,
because he rarely deigns to speak to me.
"Tell her I'll be there as soon as Kate finishes
with this dress," Lily says.
He doesn't answer. We hear his feet on the
stairs and then the bang of the screen door
downstairs. We know he has not taken Lily's
message.
"Little punk," Lily murmurs. "I could kill
him." There is affection in her voice as well
as reproach. She likes Eric despite his secrecy
and his undependability. They fought angrily
when they were younger, perhaps because in
their nervous energy they were much alike.
Stubborn, excitable, sometimes uncommunicative.
But now Lily is the only one besides
his mother who seems to know anything about
Eric's friends or his doings at school.
Once, when he was a little boy—right in
the middle of the fighting period, as a matter
of fact—I chanced to pass the door to Lily's
room, and saw him lying with his head in her
lap, his face covered with tears. She was
stroking his hair and murmuring, "Now,
now." I never found out what that was about.
It would have seemed intrusive to speak to
either Lily or Eric about it.
Lily looks at me through the mirror and
sighs. "By this time Sunday Jordan will be
gone," she says. "What will we do for the
rest of our lives, Kate?"
Jordan is leaving for Groton the morning
after the ball. This is a pivotal moment for us.
We have been a trio all through our childhood,
and now we are to be torn apart by the march
of time and the claims of the future. At least,
we two girls are to be torn from Jordan. I
sense behind Lily's excitement about the dress
a genuine worry about losing Jordan.
"We'll survive," I say. "And he'll be back
for Christmas, anyway. There's nothing to be
morbid about."
"Really, Kate. Come with me," she insists.
"I'll be nervous on my own."
"I'm not going, and that's final," I say.
"But I'll meet you afterward."
It was I who insisted that, as far as the ball
itself was concerned, Lily alone was to go as
our representative. She and Jordan both protested
against this, but I was adamant. I
agreed, however, that I would see them later
that night.
You may be wondering why such an odd
arrangement should have been made by three
such close friends, with me as the one insisting
on it. A word of explanation is in order.
I was an orphan, my father having died
when I was an infant and my mother having
later remarried a man who did not wish to be
encumbered with a daughter. I was passed
from relative to relative until I ended up with
an eccentric aunt who lived here in town.
When my aunt grew senile enough to need the
help of a nurse-companion, there was a hiatus
in the availability of relatives able to take me
in. Lily's mother, who had always liked me,
offered to make room for me in her family. I
spent three years with the Frances, until my
old aunt died and another set of relatives
moved into her house, taking me with them.
I was more of a sister to Lily than her own
sisters, because we were identical in age.
Though I no longer lived with Lily, I spent at
least three or four hours a day with her, doing
homework, playing, gossiping, hanging
around town—and I had long since given up
seeing myself as a lone individual outside our
friendship. We breathed as one. At least I had
no interest in breathing unless it was part of
my relationship with her.
And this is where Jordan comes in.
Lily and I met Jordan at the funeral of a
schoolmate who had died of leukemia, a little
boy named Peter Gracian. Though Jordan did
not go to our school, his mother knew the
boy's parents somehow, and brought Jordan
to the funeral. Jordan was a very quiet little
boy, handsome in an unusual way, with sad
eyes and a sweet, winning smile that came out
when you encouraged him enough.
Lily and I adopted Jordan on the basis of
that first meeting. We did not know at the time
that Mrs. France was the only friend Jordan's
mother had in the world.
Jordan's mother came from a wealthy and
successful local family. Great things had been
expected of her, but she made a bad marriage
that alienated her from her family and friends
before it ended in disaster. When her husband
went on a European business trip and disappeared
without a trace, he left her with her
little son Jordan, then an infant. Lily's mother
was the only old friend of Elizabeth's who
remained in contact with her.
Jordan fit naturally into the fervid alliance
that joined me to Lily. Having lost his father,
Jordan understood my orphan status. He was
lonely and isolated, and we two girls, however
self-sufficient we might have seemed until that
time, now felt we needed a third.
I am brutally summarizing something very
complicated—in all my later years I have
never really understood the early chemistry of
that trio, that "threeness" that was to have so
important an influence on my whole life. But
my lack of clarity corresponds rather well to
the friendship itself. We met Jordan, he became
part of us without our really knowing
why, and the die was cast.
Jordan was the quiet one of the group—shamed
by his father's stormy role in the community
(of which more later), worried that he
would lose us if he made a false move, protective
of his exiled mother. I was the ugly
duckling, the orphan without a home, eager to
feel I belonged somewhere and already
fiercely devoted to Lily. As for Lily herself,
she completely lacked the chariness about life
that affected Jordan and me. She was a free
spirit, willful and beholden to no one. Yet she
needed us.
She was the leader of our games, the glue
that stuck us together, the energy that kept us
moving. Throughout our years together Jordan
and I always felt we were following in her
trail, playing Sancho Panza to her tremendous
initiative, her recklessness into which we
tapped like famished travelers in a spiritual
desert.
But now it has ended. We are to be separated,
as Jordan goes off to prep school and
we girls stay behind. Adolescence looms over
us at the same moment as parting, and so we
feel romantic about each other and about our
friendship. The ball is to us a deeply symbolic
occasion.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Hourglass
by Elizabeth Gage
Copyright © 2000 by Elizabeth Gage.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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