As I turned to leave Arch’s grave, I saw the young girl. She was inside the stone fence that surrounded the cemetery and she was pulling buds from white rose bushes that grew wild and crawled over the stones like vines. She dropped the buds into the woman’s dress hat. I watched as she filled the hat, moving casually among the bushes, stripping them. And then she began to walk among the graves, dropping a single white rosebud on each, like someone planting seeds. She glanced at me once. Her dark eyes were bright and daring. A strange, playful smile—almost superior—waved over her lips. She took a bud from the hat, held it over a grave, posed for a moment looking at me, then she released it. The bud fell into an open flower cup.

CHAPTER

16
 

THE MORE WINE THAT CARTER DRANK, THE MERRIER HE BEcame. He sat on a large, thick-cushioned sofa in his den, with Libby leaning against him, and he laughed and talked about our summer together, weaving exaggerated stories from the thin, frayed cloth of memory. Amy and I sat in armchairs facing the sofa, with a small, antique table between us. Amy had her left foot tucked under her right leg, as she had often sat in the booths at Arch’s. A weak fire burned in the fireplace, more for atmosphere than for the slight night-chill that always fell in the Catskills during the summer.

“You should have seen us, Libby,” Carter would sigh. An impish grin would wiggle into his face and he would take another sip of his wine, and then he would point the wineglass to me or to Amy and he would say, “Do you remember… ?” The question was never answered. It was not meant to be answered; it was only a prelude to another story.

He told of the morning that Mrs. Mendelson, in one of her befuddled moments, got up from the table and pulled her chair to the Lourie table and began to talk loudly of wedding plans between me and Amy, and how Nora Dowling had to leave the kitchen and come into the dining room and lead Mrs. Mendelson away, and how the occasion had embarrassed me so much that he—the busboy—had to serve the Louries their breakfast. It was a story that neither Amy nor I remembered.

He told of the swaggering, spoiled grandson of David and Judith Feinstein visiting for a weekend, and how the grandson had made advances to Amy, and how Carter had taken the grandson aside and informed him that Amy was secretly engaged to someone who worked in the Inn.