When he was forced to maneuver the car up the rutted dirt track known as Wallis Road, Pandy suspected he was on the verge of killing her.
But Jonny’s mood began to change as they proceeded up the mile-long driveway that ran under the linked branches of ancient maple trees. Seeing his eyes widen as they passed the old stables and the carriage house, Pandy felt that familiar sense of trepidation. She should have brought him here sooner. Or at least explained the situation to him. But she’d been so caught up in being married to him, she’d “forgotten” about her past.
It hadn’t seemed relevant. Or rather, it hadn’t seemed relevant because she was afraid that Jonny wouldn’t understand.
The driveway wound past the lovely filigreed boathouse perched on the edge of the lake—and there it was, rising up from the top of the green mountain like a white castle in a child’s picture book: Wallis House.
Jonny stomped the brake so hard, Pandy nearly hit the dashboard. He turned and stared at her accusingly, as if to say, Why didn’t you tell me you were rich?
Pandy had seen it happen a million times. She cautioned him the same way she warned everyone who came to Wallis House: “It’s not what it seems.”
Pandy got out of the car and went into the house.
And then, momentarily forgetting about Jonny, Pandy did what she always did when she entered: She walked across the black-and-white checkerboard marble floor, passed underneath a crystal chandelier the size of a small planet, and strode between the flaring flanks of the grand staircase to the grandfather clock. She opened the cabinet and wound the key.
There was the faintest whirring as the mechanism went round and round. The middle doors opened, revealing a carousel of lords and ladies going up and down on their brightly colored hobbyhorses. Several went by, until the twelfth lady passed on her miniature steed. Then the top doors flew open, and out sprang the wooden bird himself, two mechanical wings unfolding as he called out that familiar refrain: cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she heard Jonny swear behind her. “Did you really grow up here? It’s like a fucking museum.”
Pandy decided she’d better take him straight to the kitchen.
Inhaling deeply, as if he were literally absorbing the enormous bare space into his body, he then released a howl of agony. “How the hell am I supposed to cook”—he paused clownishly—“in here?”
“What do you mean?” Pandy asked nervously. She knew the counters were bare and the appliances dated. When she and Henry were there, they ate simply: fried eggs and bacon, or heated-up cream of mushroom soup. On the other hand, you could roller-skate across the linoleum floors, which was something Pandy and Hellenor had done as children.
“Where’s the garlic press? The meat grinder? The double waffle press?” Jonny demanded, determined to play out his charade. Taking in her expression, he swatted her on the butt. “Come on, babe, I’m just kidding.”
Pandy gasped out a laugh of relief. Of course he was kidding. For a moment, all she’d been able to think was that her worst fear was about to come true: Jonny was going to try to do the same thing to Wallis House that he’d done to her loft; turn it into Jonny House. But of course that was impossible. “Jonny,” she began.
But Jonny had moved on. He was circling the kitchen, holding his cell phone aloft as he searched for a signal.
“Oops,” Pandy said apologetically. “There’s no service here. Except by the boathouse. Sometimes you can get a bar or two there.”
Ugh. She hated having this conversation with guests. Some people couldn’t tolerate the lack of service and headed back to New York early, while others spent the entire weekend trooping back and forth to the boathouse. Pandy hoped that this weekend, possibly one of the most important of her life, wasn’t going to end up being one of those weekends.
“Come on, Jonny. You’re supposed to be seeing my history,” she said firmly. At the very least, she was determined to do what the shrink had suggested.
She led him past the smoking room, through the music room, and into her favorite place in the house: the library.
Pandy smiled proudly as she began the grand tour, pointing out the first editions, adding that the library also included signed books by Walt Whitman and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both of whom had been guests at the house.
With the flair of a teenage tour guide, she explained that the marble fireplace was made from local stone that had been sent to Italy, where special craftsmen had done the ornate carvings. And recalling again how the shrink had encouraged her to tell Jonny about the most important people in her life, she attempted to speak to Jonny about the woman who had been her inspiration growing up.
But Jonny was no longer with her. Jonny was by the bar cart in the opposite corner of the room, examining bottles.
“Yeah?” Jonny asked, looking up.
“There’s something I want to show you.”
“Sure.” With a reluctant glance back at the cart, Jonny ambled across the forty-foot Aubusson carpet to join her in front of a large oil painting. “This is a portrait by Gainsborough of Lady Wallis Wallis, painted in 1775, when she was sixteen.” Pandy gazed reverently up at the painting of a young woman dressed in a period riding costume. The cloth of her habit—a powdery grayish-blue—was cut in a military style. The girl’s skin was very white; on her cheeks were perfectly shaped pink circles. Her powdered hair, decorated with tiny flowers and silk butterflies, rose a foot and a half above her forehead.
“Weird hairstyle,” Jonny remarked.
“She was considered not only the most beautiful woman in the Colonies, but one of the best educated,” Pandy continued in a slightly schoolmarmish tone. “She was a spy for the Patriots during the American Revolution—”
“Seventeen seventy-six,” Jonny said by rote. He smirked.
Pandy suddenly felt foolish. “Well, she’s my great-great-great-something-grandmother. And she was supposedly a writer—maybe the first female novelist in the Colonies. When I was a kid…” On the verge of explaining how she used to stare up at this portrait of Lady Wallis Wallis, wishing she could magically be her instead of herself, she realized that Jonny was no longer by her side.
He was back at the drinks cart, uncorking one of the ancient bottles of alcohol.
Pandy stared in shock. No one had ever opened one of those bottles. She’d kept them for authenticity only; at close to a hundred years old, the contents must be suspect. Pandy took a step forward to stop him, but it was too late.
“Check this out,” Jonny said. He stuck his nose into the top of the bottle and took a deep sniff. His head drew back with a snap as if he’d inhaled something sharp and potent, then he cautiously took another sniff.
“It’s gin,” he said, with a sudden air of authority. At last, here was something he understood. “Possibly genuine bathtub gin.” He poured the liquid into a tumbler and took a sip, pressing his lips together to test the flavor. “Yep,” he said, with the confidence of an expert. “That’s pure 1920s bathtub gin. Maybe even made in one of the bathtubs in this place, huh?”
He took another sip and jerked his head at the painting. “Who did you say that was?”
“My inspiration. Lady Wallis Wallis.”
“Not her. The painter.”
“Gainsborough,” Pandy replied.
“What’s something like that worth?”
Pandy looked at him, sipping one ancestor’s gin while leering at another, and snapped, “I don’t know. What’s your inspiration worth?” as she walked out of the room.
Jonny caught up with her in the gallery that she and Hellenor had dubbed “the Hall of Ghouls,” due to the hundreds of portraits and photographs of the Wallis clan dating back to the early 1700s. “Pandy,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “I didn’t mean it, okay?”
“Sure,” Pandy said, accepting his apology, as the shrink had advised, while noting that Jonny had brought the tumbler of bathtub gin along with him. “Forget it. It’s not a big deal.”
> “But it is. I said I’d do this for you, and I will. Just like the shrink said. So who are all these people?”
“Well,” she began, but Jonny wasn’t listening.
Leaning forward to peer at a photograph, he laughed like a frat boy and remarked cleverly, “Must be nice to have ancestors. I’ve only got assholes in my family.”
“Oh, Jonny.” She shook her head at his silliness. “Look,” she said, pointing to an ancient black-and-white photograph of two dozen people lined up in front of the house. “All those people. All those lives. And this is all that’s left of them.”
“So?” Jonny chortled, taking another swig.
“Henry says I should turn the place into a museum when I die.”
“Great,” Jonny exclaimed sarcastically. “Another one of Henry’s ‘brilliant’ ideas.”
Pandy did her best to ignore him as she considered what to show him next. The schoolroom with the window-seat nook where she had loved to read as a child? The conservatory, with its collection of rare butterflies? Old Jay’s bedroom, she thought suddenly; that always impressed men.
Indeed, you couldn’t get more manly than Old Jay’s bedroom. The entire suite—bathroom, dressing room, smoking room, and the bedroom itself—was paneled in dark mahogany. The enormous four-poster bed sat squarely in the middle of the room; Old Jay had apparently liked to sit in his bed in the mornings and watch the comings and goings from the French windows that faced out in three directions. Besides being somewhat of a busybody, Old Jay had also been a great traveler. His room was filled with astonishing souvenirs from his trips, like a Zulu spear and what was supposedly an actual shrunken head from a real, once-living human.
But Jonny wasn’t interested in any of that.
He strode into the room, took a spin around the bed, and then, as if he’d already decided to take possession of the space, went into the bathroom. He shut the door with a proprietary click; when it remained shut for several minutes, Pandy began to fret. That particular toilet hadn’t been flushed for years; it was highly likely to clog. No one, including Henry, had even stayed in Old Jay’s bedroom. No one slept in his bed, much less took advantage of the facilities.
Jonny using Old Jay’s bathroom? Pandy couldn’t even think about it. She reminded herself that she must never tell Henry, either.
Henry would be mortified.
When he came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on Old Jay’s black monogrammed hand towel and then dropping it to the floor, she’d had enough. She reached her hand out to take his. “Come on. I want to show you my room.”
Tugging him across the hall, she pushed open the door. And there it was: Her room! With its tall French windows and heavy lined drapes. And her bed! With the tattered pink silk canopy. It had been ages since she’d been there—not since before she’d married Jonny. She ran across the room and threw herself onto the bed, hitting the old feather mattress with a thump and rolling into the dip in the middle. The same dip that had held generations of little girls. You lay down, and the feathers embraced you. And you slept without tossing or turning, and woke up refreshed.
She suddenly remembered Jonny and sat straight up. She’d forgotten about him for a second, and, as with a baby, that probably wasn’t a good idea.
Sure enough, he was standing in front of her desk, tapping absentmindedly on one of the keys of the large metal Smith Corona typewriter.
Pandy cleared her throat, hoping to get his attention. Not only was that the desk where Monica was born, but scattered around the typewriter were more of her youthful “creative works.” There were drawings and bits of short stories, little-girl diaries with latches and tiny keys, and the black leather journals with unlined pages that she’d asked for every year at Christmas. But mostly, there were dozens and dozens of school notebooks—the type with that blank space on the front where you were supposed to write in the subject.
Jonny picked one up and read the label. “Monica?” he asked.
Pandy leaped off the bed and snatched it out of his hand. “That’s private.”
“If it’s private, why do you leave it lying around where everyone can see it?”
Jonny picked up another Monica book and pointedly put it back down. “Why do you keep these, anyway?”
Pandy shrugged, carefully straightening the notebooks. She laughed, trying to make a joke of it. “Henry always tells me I can put them in my museum—”
Pandy broke off, embarrassed again. She was being juvenile, and Jonny didn’t like it. “That little-girl stuff is not sexy,” he’d once said dismissively when she’d accidentally squealed about something she was excited about. This time, she needn’t have worried. Jonny had just finished off his gin and, carefully putting down the glass, he began swaying his hips slightly from side to side. Then he put his arms around her. He turned her around and ground his pelvis into her bottom. He lowered his head and began kissing her neck.
Pandy tried to stifle her instinct to swat him away, as one would an annoying insect.
“Jonny.” Smiling, she disentangled herself, knowing, nonetheless, that she was going to have to have sex with him. If only because she had promised herself she would, knowing it was the only way she and Jonny could ever truly get back together. Indeed, she’d even considered bringing a piece or two of the sexy lingerie she used to wear for him. But when she’d found the garments in the back of her drawer, they’d looked like something a cheap hooker would wear.
Jonny had his pants around his ankles and was hopping up and down, trying to get out of them. With a sigh, Pandy went to her bureau, opened the top drawer, and grabbed a vintage silk negligee.
Jonny got out of his pants. He saw the piece of old silk in her hand and pulled it away, waving it over his head. “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s do it in Old Jay’s bed,” he leered.
Pandy shrieked. “What?” She snatched back the negligee. “Old Jay’s bed has an old horsehair mattress. It’s infested. With bugs.”
She hurried to the bathroom door and then turned to Jonny. “I’ll be right back,” she said, watching him until he shuffled over to her bed. When she finally closed the door, she was quite sure he was on top of it.
When she opened the door, he wasn’t.
She stepped into the room to look for him, but Jonny had vanished. And Pandy had a very good idea where.
“Why can’t we do it in the old man’s room? I want to do it in his bed,” Jonny whined, standing in front of the massive wooden structure.
“No,” Pandy said firmly, her voice once again taking on the cast of the reluctant schoolmarm. “I’m not going to ‘do it’ in Old Jay’s bed. It isn’t proper.”
“You think I’m not good enough!” Jonny shouted.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She reached out for him, but he slapped her hand away.
Then he put his hands over his head. Swaying back and forth with his head tucked under his arms like a petulant child, he said, “Listen, babe. I fucked up.”
Pandy froze.
And suddenly, it all somehow made sense: He was going to ask her for a divorce. That’s why he’d agreed to go to the shrink; why he’d agreed to come to Wallis House. To tell her in a place where no one was around, so if she freaked out, she wouldn’t embarrass him. Because that was what men like Jonny and PP did.
PP. And then she had a far worse thought.
“You lost all the money,” Pandy said.
“The money?” Jonny waved this away. “That was gone long ago. But the restaurant…”
“You lost the restaurant? You lost all our money?” Pandy’s heart was so constricted that her voice came out in a high, glass-breaking shriek.
For a second, they locked eyes. Pandy sensed a change in the atmosphere, as if Jonny was suddenly sizing her up as an opponent.
The hatred she felt for him at that moment was so intense, she felt as if she had turned to stone.
“Come on, babe.” He strutted toward her. “This is why I so don’t want to talk to you about busines
s. I don’t want you all over my fucking back. Let me take care of the money stuff,” he pleaded, rocking from side to side. “You’ve got this beautiful house. We could do something amazing with the place…Remember Architectural Digest? It could be just like that.”
“Jonny—”
“I’m going to convince you. Just the way I always do,” he said playfully, lifting one finger in the air for emphasis as he took another step forward.
Pandy found she was unable to move. Jonny took another step and fell on top of her, pinning her to the bed.
He lifted his head, looked around, and then looked down into her face. This time his eyes were unfocused. In that same silly, faux-warning voice, he repeated, “I’m gonna convince you…”
And then he blacked out. Too much ancient gin.
Pandy put her hands under Jonny’s chest and shoved him off. He rolled to the edge of the bed.
Pandy got up and doubled over, trying to push down what the convulsions from her stomach were trying to push up.
Jonny belched. He opened his eyes and stared at her, still on his stomach. He smiled. “I’m so happy we worked everything out,” he slurred. His mouth involuntarily pursed, and he raised his palm to cover it. “Oh, and by the way?” He swallowed like a guilty child and sat up. “I don’t know if your friends have mentioned it, but people think Lala and I are having an affair. We’re not. I did have sex with her, but only twice. I’m sorry, babe,” he said with a wave as he slowly fell backward. “It won’t happen again. She respects you too much for that. And don’t worry, she’s discreet.”
* * *
Sometime later, Pandy stood in the Hall of Ghouls, scratching her head as she peered at a photograph of a dark-haired man with a large handlebar mustache: Captain Rarebit Welsh. He had supposedly tried to extort money from his wife, but the Wallis men had soon set him straight.
Pandy shook her head with a laugh. Unfortunately, there were no Wallis men left to help her. But there, on the walls, were plenty of women. Generations of them.
It was said that Wallis women stood up straight and would talk back to any person. Meaning a man, of course. She thought briefly of Jonny, asleep and snoring off Old Jay’s gin in Old Jay’s bed. She had trusted him with both her love and her money, and he’d casually frittered both away.