Lorraine Appleton, affectionately dubbed 'Lolo' by her father, friends and those others given to a fashionably casual mode of address, had never gotten along with her older sister, Margaret. Perhaps it was only natural. Their father's first marriage had not been a happy one, and most said that his often vocal and public disagreements with his wife had caused her to drink herself into an early grave. It probably didn't help that he married his mistress, and mother of his three-year-old illegitimate daughter Lorraine, less than two months after his wife's funeral.
Margaret, an overly serious girl who had developed a love of all things quiet, reserved, and peaceful -- likely because of her parents' loud quarrelling -- was both devastated and mortified that her father would flaunt his infidelities in so public a fashion. That quiet stoicism Margaret cultivated might not have allowed affection between the sisters, but it promote civility on Margaret's part, even when it was tight lipped, and the smiles she bestowed on Lolo during public functions never quite reached her eyes. Lolo had always suspected, and bitterly resented, that Margaret had considered the death of Lolo's mother to be a balancing of the universe's scales, her just desserts.
While Lolo could see that Margaret had some cause for anger, none of that had been her doing, and nor could she have prevented it by any stretch of the imagination save for not existing.
Expecting her to disappear seemed rather bushwa, and she hadn't hesitated in telling Margaret so until they'd settled into a pattern of simply sticking to superficial topics when the need to speak couldn't be avoided with good, or even adequate, grace.
Given the age difference between the two, coupled with personalities that were as different as those of their mothers had been, perhaps all would have been happier if they had quietly drifted apart and confined their animosities to those dutiful gatherings that their father demanded when his business trips allowed.
However, Margaret's desire to maintain the appearance of family, and perhaps even the desire to not give their father reason to favor Lolo in his will as he had favored her in most things, saw to it that Lolo received invitations for summers and holidays. Lolo's discovery, during the summer after her first year of Finch School, that her sister's husband Russell ... who had seemed quite ancient, almost as ancient as her father in her rather childish perspective ... suddenly seemed not so old at all as she noticed the pleasing aspects of his appearance and his character.
Lolo was smitten, and as Fate would have it, it was her first time experiencing such a fervid, all-encompassing emotion. The fact that she could not have him, the certainty that her sister has poisoned him against her and he regarded her as nothing more than a spoiled and pampered occasional annoyance, only increased her longing. Each time she left her sister's home, she would promise herself that she would refuse the next one, and yet when the time came, Lolo could not pass up the chance to be near the object of her unrequited affection.
And if she suspected, in her more introspective moments, that his appeal would have been less if he did not belong to her sister, she did not dwell on it any longer than the time that it took to shrug her shoulders.
During her second year away, she learned that the father Doreen Whitling, hor closest friend at Finch School, had a fascination with the theories and practices of Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer, a German physician who believed that all individuals possessed a certain animal magnetism that could be manipulated to restore the flow of life's balance. After a demonstration of the technique's effectiveness, she asked Mr. Whitling to teach her more, but like most passions she conceived -- save for that for her painting and her desire for the man she could not possibly have -- it was short lived, and might have stayed that way had it not been for Fate taking a hand, in the form of a parlor game at her sister's home and Lolo's realization that perhaps there was a way that she could have all that she so longed for ...
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She had not been there long when she noticed that the gild had worn of the lillies of her sister's marriage, so to speak. They did not quarrel in her presence, and, really, she couldn't imagine them quarreling at all. When Margaret was confronted, she retreated behind walls thicker than thieves, and higher than Mt. Everest in the most genteel fashion possible. Russell seemed to joke less frequently in her presence, and while he might bestow a kiss upon Margaret's pale cheek, or upon her head -- gently, so as not to muss the strands -- it seemed that he was content to leave her to her walls and seek his pleasures elsewhere.
Had he sought out Lolo's company, she would have been over the moon. He did not, though it seemed to her that his glances sought her out more when he thought she wasn't looking. Yet she supposed he still thought her a child, and her efforts to prove that she wasn't probably met with the same sort of wretched indulgence that her father showed when they visited. It was maddening, though Lolo certainly hadn't given up. With Margaret's indifference now seeming to be heaped upon the both of them, there were more opportunities.
Some woman from his office had come with papers for him to sign, and when she had admired the landscaping, Russell had offered to show her around. Lolo was not invited, though she had hung about hoping that she would be, but still she followed after -- not so close to be scolded, but close enough, she hoped, that she could suggest that Russell pose for her. While she wasn't, per se, a painter of portraits ordinarily, the opportunities should he agree were too good to pass up.
So in this leisurely, underhanded fashion, when she came upon the two of them sitting together upon a bench in the pergola near the pond, it seemed perfectly natural for her to take a circuitous route upon her walk, to come up from the side where the bushes would support her surprise at having interrupted.
Yet it was no legal discourse that occupied them. That much was obvious as Lolo drew closer, pushing aside a leafy branch so that she could see. Russell's hand was upon the woman's leg, no, not just her knee, but her thigh, above the stockings and moving higher as he kissed and nibbled at her neck. Lolo's breath caught as she stared, an ache of longing in her heart ... and ... were she honest, a certain point rather lower as she heard the woman's throaty laugh calling him incorrigible, a wolf. Her hands rose up, and for a hopeful moment, Lolo thought she was going to push him away, but instead one hand snaked through his hair, those beautiful locks, and lay atop his head, pushing upon it, as her other undid the buttons of her dress with a casual grace that Lolo envied.
And, oh, how she envied. She could hardly breathe as she watched her brother-in-law pull the woman's dress from her shoulders, kissing the flesh as he pushed up her chemise. Lolo's moan, half wounded, half lustful, was lost in the woman's own as his head pressed against her breasts, and the hand upon her leg slid higher still. Since noticing Russell, she had envied her sister all the more, but at the moment her full complement of envy, all of it, was with the strange woman who was half lying now upon the low bench, with Russell's mouth upon her breasts.
She knew, of course, what men and women did together. Hadn't she seen the art, read the books. Hadn't she even experimented just a bit herself, though such experimentation had been less appealing when she had found her thoughts more drawn to her sister's husband rather than the brothers of her schoolmates, or even the men she had met at various art functions and gathering.
It would, she thought, tear her heart out to see him make love to his woman who was neither her nor her sister, but yet she could not move away. She could do nothing but stare as feminine hands, the color of the polish upon the nails making the gesture all the more pronounced, move from head to shoulders and then reach for what could only be the waistband of his trousers ...
"Miss Lorraine! Miss Lorraine!" It was Hattie, the girl who came to do the lions share of of the housework, her voice loud as the clap of a gong. Lolo's eyes closed, the scene before her still visible against her shut lids like some beautiful, horrible still life, and then she turned and slipped quietly away, her feet as silent upon the lush grash as she could make them until she had enough distance to answer, praying that they wouldn't guess that she had seen.
And praying that he would ... and even more that perhaps, in the knowing, he would invite her to come sit with him beside the pond, to feed the ducks, to be the one his lips and hands explored.
