New Beginnings

JILL BARNETT

New Beginnings

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Jill Barnett 2008

Jill Barnett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847560254

Ebook Edition © 2008 ISBN: 9780007335039

Version: 2018-06-19

DEDICATION

March is not us, nor are her experiences ours. This story is fiction. But we know her world, because we have traveled down the same kind of unfamiliar, muddied roads, because we had to overcome the past to find a future, because of this and so much more, New Beginnings is for Jane, Meryl, Cathy, JJ, Deb, and me.

What is this really like? Never mind the conventions and the decisions we’ve all made together. What is it really like?

Mike Nichols, Inside the Actor’s Studio

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two

March

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Three

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Epilogue

Top Winter Destinations

A Winter’s Tale

About the Author

By the same author:

About the Publisher

PART ONE

San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.

Rudyard Kipling

Chapter One

March Randolph Cantrell was named for the time of year she came into the world, and had lived all of her life in a golden state. The Golden State exists deep in the bones and blood of those born there, and makes them different, natural to the land with all its mysteries and quirks. Native Californians are immanent beings who can recognize instinctively the color and stillness of earthquake weather, and are never divided by that invisible latitude/attitude that separates Northern from Southern; they understand the human geography of one whose first breath of air was in a land of gold rushes, gold hillsides and golden bridges.

A native can stand on the sandy spot where the biggest and deepest blue ocean in the world touches land and know there are more hungry sharks behind them than in front of them.

Birthright gives them ownership in the fables of California, those Disneyesque stories of El Dorado and Father Junipero Serra, who once sowed a magical trail of mustard seeds as he walked the length of the land, on leather sandals coated with brown soil in which almost anything could grow.

Come every spring, Father Serra’s yellow mustard seeds sprout up from the ground on rolling hillsides, around fresh asphalt—in spite of concrete and wood frames—as bright a gold in color as one could imagine, and there to remind those who care to notice of the way things once were.

The month of March is a time of lions and lambs, and, in California, the time of the four-leafed mustard blooms that some claim are luckier than clover, and certainly more resilient. No matter what the weather: freak snow and ice, brush fires, crackling drought or Pineapple-Express-rains that drive homes down crumbling hillsides, despite all that Mother Nature can cast down from the heavens, every year the mustard always grows back.

For March Randolph Cantrell, California native was just one of many things that defined her: woman, daughter, artist, wife, mother, friend, businesswoman, now grandmother, a title that sounded too decrepit for a baby boomer who still wore string-bikini underwear and listened to rock music.

Growing up on the West Coast in the 1950’s, March and her sister May were known as those Randolph girls with the strange springtime names. Back in Connecticut, where the Randolph family had deep roots, names like March and May were simple tradition, appropriate as Birch and Rebecca, and not uncommon to girls with a great aunt named Hester, who had pointed out during one family holiday, “California is a fine place to live if you happen to be an orange.”

One bright blue day when March was eight, someone called the Randolph girls California natives. So with the peacock feathers from her mother’s vase sticking out of her ponytail, March stood at the medicine cabinet mirror and war-painted her face with blue and white tempera paint left over from vacation Bible school.

For those few weeks during an incalescent and sullen August, she ran around with a rubber Cochise tomahawk tucked into the waist of her seersucker shorts, speaking to everyone in bad Indian dialogue from an old black and white western.

At night, in those deep, still, blue hours when girls might lie in bed with secret thoughts of silly crushes and dreams of some-day-grown-up lives, her dreams weren’t about the neighborhood boy who let her ride his new Schwinn bicycle with the baseball cards clothes-pinned to the spokes, who loaned her the rubber tomahawk and wore his hair in a flat top. She dreamed that she was inside the wild stories that came from their small-screen TV—topped with tall rabbit ear antenna (which sometimes worked better if you put a piece of aluminum foil on them).

While her sister May had a passion for movies and heart throbs like Tab Hunter and James Dean, March demanded more from her television heroes and dreamt about falling in love with someone like Cochise, a noble man with a big dream. That was 1958. Ten years later, she met him.

A year after the Summer of Love, 1968 was filled with youthful dreamers fast becoming disillusioned. The sweet legacy of Haight had suddenly become hate. San Francisco, like most of the country, reeled from shock and the frightening belief that the world was rotting from the inside out.

Every night the broadcast news about Vietnam was too bleak to watch and too important to miss. Death and destruction, the body counts, escalated daily. After a dark day in early April, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gone, too young, and along with him a dream. Now it was June, only half the year gone, and ten days ago Bobby Kennedy’s future ended horrifically with another assassin’s bullet.

The two men who stood for change and hope were senselessly stolen away from an upstart generation demanding the same change, and whose loud, chanting voices had been fueled by hope and a belief they could make a difference.

No, no, we won’t go.

Coffee-house talk and conversation in North Beach bookstores and the underground presses compared recent events to history’s anarchies. The city’s street-corner disciples (the ones who weren’t hiding in the nirvana of acid) railed at The Establishment, shaking their fists as they cried over the injustice of men killed here and overseas.

You can’t vote for the man who sends you to your death?

At home, where it was supposed to be free and safe, someone was assassinating the country’s heroes. In spite of all the shouting and ranting, most people carried a silent, dark dread down to their bones, and the youth of San Francisco sought anything available to pull away from a world so out of control they had to shout at it.

March’s father was only a single generation away, yet a continent stood between their ideas. He taught math and geography, was logical, conservative, a genius, a veteran. Her mother was a housewife who sewed from Butterick patterns, played bridge and the organ at church, and served dinner at six o’clock. March was raised to be standardized and conventional, the perfect round peg to fit in the perfectly round hole.

Her sister May fit precisely into the Randolph mold. She was stockings and white shoes. May was the one who went off to Smith some three thousand miles away and was picked as one of Glamour’s college girls, modeling in the magazine in her plaid skirt and cashmere sweater, her hair cut in precise angles and her smile as perfect as piano keys, even without braces.

March, however, was bare feet and Bernardo sandals.

She regularly forgot to wear her retainer and lost it often enough that she had to get mouth molds for new ones at least three times a year. Right after graduation, she was out of her parents’ house and living on her own near the Haight in a room cut out of the attic in an old Victorian. She worked a part-time shift in a coffee-house bookstore and attended the Art Institute, where thought was free, ungendered, and those East Coast kinds of traditions her sister May wrote home about were nowhere to be found.

San Francisco’s artists worked in loud, in-your-face-you-can’t-ignore-us colors that defined the place and time. At the Institute, among so many unique individuals, March didn’t have to be exactly like her family.

A close friend from a graphics class created psychedelic posters advertising local rock shows at the Fillmore, Winterland and Avalon ballrooms. Another designed velvet, lace and leather clothing, fringed sweaters and beaded tops for a trendy boutique frequented by local rock singers. Some poster work came to March via her graphics friend, and by connection she was soon part of the San Francisco music scene most weekends.

It was dark inside the Fillmore that night in mid-June, one of those down moments between music sets. The place was filled with three times more people than city hall permitted, because Joplin and Santana were on the bill. The cloying, sweet scent of hashish floated above the crowd in foggy clouds of contact highs, and crudely-rolled cigarettes were passed from hand to hand, glowing like red fireflies through small, compact circles of people.

As one of her friends dragged her through the crowd, she spotted a stranger a few feet away, standing alone, wearing a Nehru jacket, faded jeans and sandals. His hair was thick and dark and almost to his shoulders. His profile was noble. Even the lack of light and his close-clipped black beard couldn’t hide his dark, intense looks, the kind of guy girls noticed but only the bravest or silliest would ever approach. Within seconds, the music started again and she lost sight of him when he was engulfed by a flood of half-stoned people making for the stage.

By midnight the Fillmore’s lightshow rose up from behind the band in those vibrant, poster-colored hues, pulsing with the ragged voice of Janis singing a spiritual turned into hard rock by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Near the stage rim, March danced in a circle, barefooted, her sandals stashed in the deep pockets of her long velvet dress, her arms raised high in the air and five inches of mismatched bangle bracelets rattling down toward her elbows.

Freedom rang through the notes of the music and the words of songs: there was nothing left to lose, something that felt more true lately than ever. Her loose, uncut hair hung freely, and beneath the heavy velvet dress she wore nothing—free after being held captive and rubbed raw for too many high school years of elastic garter and Kotex belts.

Even the apples in a copper pot by the Fillmore stage were free for the taking, but probably laced with something to make your mood all too free.

When she looked up, he was standing in front of her, his hand out as if they’d known each other forever. But she kept dancing, shouting over the music: “What do you want?”

“You.”

His eyes weren’t drug-shot, but clear, his manner too confident and too knowing for her. He’d caught her off-guard and she didn’t know how to react, so she shook her head and turned her back to him, cutting him dead and feeling surprisingly calm about doing so.

Earlier, in a ballroom filled with people she had looked at him and felt something she couldn’t name, then an odd sense of regret when he’d melted into the crowd. When she had thought about it a little later, she told herself the moment had been silly and Hollywood, the kind of moment that called for elevator music playing in the background.

A numb second or two passed before she felt his breath above her, the heat of his body as he came closer. Guys came on to girls all the time; three, four or more times a night someone would hit on her. But they gave up easily when she always hesitated. You couldn’t go two blocks without seeing a sign that said: make love not war; love was as free as thought, as free as speech, and as free as most girls nowadays.

But he hadn’t moved on to some other girl who would give him what he wanted. He stayed by her, but didn’t touch her, a good thing since she might have incinerated right there.

The music stopped with a loud end note from the band. In that first heartbeat of silence, he leaned in and said in her ear, “You’re a fraud.”

She faced him. “What?”

“I see a barefoot girl, dancing alone, dressed in velvet, and with ribbons in her hair. If I stand close enough, when she moves, her jewelry sounds like tambourines.” He touched the necklace she wore. “Tell me those are love beads.”

She stepped back and pulled the necklace with her. “Do I know you?”

“No. But I’m trying to fix that mistake.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You called me a fraud first. Let’s stay strangers for now and deal with that.”

He shrugged. “You disappointed me, sunshine.”

“March. My name is March.”

“That’s different.” He sounded surprised. “I like the name March.”

“My mother will be thrilled.”

“Good. You can take me home to meet her. Mothers love me. My own can talk about me for hours.”

“I don’t live at home.”

“Even better. Where do you live?”

“I’m not going to tell you where I live.” She laughed then. “I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Michael Cantrell. Don’t disappoint me, sunshine.”

Sunshine? She ignored that he called her that out of self-protection. “Okay, Michael. Look, you don’t know me so how can I disappoint you?”

He didn’t answer immediately, but studied her thoughtfully, seeming to find his words with care.

She knew she was giving him a hard time, and she had the awful thought that the word he might say next would be “Goodbye.” He could turn around and leave, when secretly that was last thing she wanted him to do.

“You look to me like the kind of girl who chooses to walk in the rain. Who stands on the breakwater, arms spread wide and laughing as a storm rages in. A girl who sings, even when there’s no music playing. And quotes poetry. Who’ll eat raw oysters and drink ouzo. The rare girl who will easily jump out of a plane or into my arms. Someone who’ll love me so long and hard I can’t stand up in the morning.”

It took a minute for his words to sink in. His words? God…his words. So far from what she’d expected. She had always thought in a visual sense, her artist’s side, believing life for her was most powerful if spoken through the eyes. Through vision, life had volume and depth, color and impression. The things you saw, you could always remember in color.

But his words came with more feeling than any first visual impression she could ever paint in her mind. She understood clearly at that moment the color of words.

What he said to her was so different from anything anyone had ever said to her. Until that moment, standing in front of this one guy, she would have never believed a minute of conversation could affect her so completely.

She heard his voice over again in her head saying those things about her. Is that who she was? A free spirit. Or was that only who she wanted to be?

This stranger was suddenly something else altogether, and he watched her as if her reaction were the most important in his life. He was perfectly serious, waiting, and a little on edge. The way he looked at her made her feel exposed, film out in the noonday sun; vulnerable, like he could see her past and into her future; and sexually charged, naked and out of control.

The music started again, loud and vibrant, and the crowd closed in. She felt the hard edge of the stage against her shoulder. Only a few inches separated her from him—they were breathing each other’s air—like a helium balloon she felt as if she needed to be anchored to earth. The poetry of what he had just said to her, the images it created, his honesty, all deserved more than her usual smart comebacks and flip comments.

Clearly this was one of those seminal times in her life when a new door opened wide. She could choose to walk right by it, or through it. There was still enough of a good girl in her to make her pause. Her sister May would not understand and would run in the other direction. Her friends might see open possibility. But did anyone else really matter?

In a crowd of almost a thousand, at that single moment, there was only the two of them. Michael Cantrell stood in front of her and asked her to love him. So, without a word, she took his hand and left.

Chapter Two

For the six months after that night at the Fillmore, Mike Cantrell had kept a secret part of himself from March. Some days more than others, it was easier to believe the right time to tell her just never came. He told himself she was worried about making the rent when her shift at the bookstore was cut; or about a difficult project for a final exam; a friend from school who couldn’t find his muse without psychedelic drugs. Why worry her?

And those times when they were having fun—so often now—he would think, why screw it up? Other times, in his head, he couldn’t find the exact right words he could say aloud. Funny that he could find the words for justification; he could find the words for his excuses.

To hide one passion while another consumed him was not an easy existence, like straddling life between two worlds. His life was great with her in it. So great he wanted to stand on a mountain and shout. Amazing! Righteous!

But the truth was that March was fast becoming the best part of him. Yet she didn’t know one of the biggest parts of who he was; she didn’t know his dream. Some wounds just ran deeper than love and trust, and got all mixed up in his head when he tried to believe in all of it at once. Families could so simply and unknowingly cut the deepest wounds on one another.

Don Cantrell, his father, was an executive with Spreckles, the sugar company, a success, a man of few words and many expectations. Mike and his older brother, Brad, had grown up at a dinner table with only their mother on most nights, except Sundays when, in the formal dining room, his dad would sit at the head of the table set with china and dominated by a standing rib roast, smoked ham or leg of lamb, knife in hand as he tried and failed to carve some kind of relationship with his sons on one night a week during an awkward, too formal meal; being a father was the single thing at which Don Cantrell failed.

His success was a matter of Cantrell pride, driven by some hungry, innate gene that battled with the few cells his dad inherited that were gentle and understanding. He was self-made, the son of a farmer, grandson of a Swiss immigrant who relocated to America near the turn of the century to save his sons from being conscripted.

Last year Brad had torn up his draft card, stuck the pieces to the refrigerator along with his draft notice, and was now somewhere in Canada, a subject handled in whispers by the family and friends and anyone who knew the truth about his older brother. That their ancestors had come here to escape the draft was almost as ironic to Mike as the idea that his father worked for a company that produced sugar.

Since the day Brad left, everything Don Cantrell had expected from both of his sons fell on Mike’s shoulders. He’d made the mistake of telling his dad about his idea and what he wanted to do with it and his future.

His father laughed at him, until he realized Mike was perfectly serious. Don told him he was a fool who needed to grow up and stop thinking life was only about fun and games and things that weren’t important. What Mike needed was to think straight and find something he could do to make an honest living for himself or for a family, if he ever chose to become responsible enough to think of someone other than himself.