Free Homecoming by Belva Plain

various errands around the neighborhood, marketing, walking Lucy to and from school, and taking Freddie to play in the pocket-sized park, she wore jeans as almost everyone else did. Otherwise, she wore simple clothes in vivid colors, for she loved color: aquamarine, apricot, and lapis lazuli. She wore little jewelry, inexpensive earrings that she bought in novelty shops, the plain wedding band that matched Mark’s wedding band, and, on appropriate occasions, the splendid pearl necklace that his mother had given to her. Ithad been in essence a kind of peace offering from Brenda when Lucy was born. She liked Brenda, who had, in spite of all, a fundamental tolerance and heart.
    Her own mother’s jewels, which had naturally come to her, were in a safe deposit box at the bank. They were too formal and too precious to fit into Ellen’s life as they had into Susan’s. Lately she had come to think and speak of her mother as “Susan”; it made her seem young and filled with the happiness she must once have had. People had always described her with the word
sunny
before the long illness that filled Ellen’s memory of her as “Mother” or “Mom.”
    If Susan had lived long enough to see us married, Ellen thought, I would have asked her some questions. And I believe I know what she would have answered. Or maybe, given the pressure that Dad would have put on her, she would not have answered. Yet I do think she knew what was happening and simply did not have the physical strength to take a stand for me. I really sensed that, didn’t I? And wasn’t that why we waited, Mark and I, until she died? She had enough tobear without the addition of a social scandal, absurd and minor as it was.…
    After working hours, or on a free Saturday that first year after her graduation from college with a degree in fine arts, she used to tour the art galleries from the tail end of Manhattan to the treasure houses of the Upper East Side. Sometimes she merely glanced into a window and, seeing nothing to tempt her, walked on. At other times when tempted, she went in without any intention of buying, merely of satisfying her avid eye.
    In particular she loved old landscape paintings or current works that gave the feel of a quiet world without industry—although such a fondness reflected only an impractical nostalgia—a world of greenness and space, of domestic animals, and crops and changing seasons. This nostalgia had probably to do with long summers in her childhood at Gran’s house. No matter. And so it happened one spring day that she walked into a certain gallery on Fifty-seventh Street.
    A very nice-looking young man came forward and addressed her. “May I show you anything?”
    Ellen hated that. She had simply wanted to look, and she said so.
    “Very well. I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.”
    She walked around. The walls were hung with superb paintings, sparkling out of exquisite gold frames that in themselves cost more than Ellen could afford. At home they had expensive paintings, but they were not her taste. And anyway, they belonged to her parents, not to her. Standing in front of a woodland brook under falling snow, she thought: Now, I would give my eyeteeth to own that—or better still, to be able to paint it.
    There were two rooms. After she had slowly and carefully passed around all their walls, she returned to the brook and was still standing there absorbed in the winter light and the stillness through which she seemed to be hearing the trickle of water over rocks, when a voice in back of her spoke.
    “That really talks to you, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes, and I’m answering it,” she said.
    He laughed. It was a small, discreet laugh, professional sounding as befitted his role. There was a dignity about him, a bit formal, a quality that she took to be British. She knew very little about things British except for what she had seen on heronly visit to Britain, and, naturally, what one saw on television or in the