“Good afternoon,” she said briskly, in a tone I recognized as reserved for servants and shopgirls. “Is Mrs. French in? I’m Casey Leisure, she sold my friend a pair of trousers I’d like to try, I’m very hard to fit. Long legs, you see, and a long rise as well, now that’s a gorgeous piece,” she said. She was pointing at a large polished ebony necklace in my accessories case.
“I’m Loviah French,” I said.
“Oh!” She looked at me, surprised, then extended her hand.
I shook her hand and said, “I think we met at Marta Rowland’s table at a benefit lunch; it’s so nice to see you again.” I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but if she suddenly realized she had seen me before, it would seem as if I had forgotten her, which is not good for business.
“You’re a friend of Marta’s?”
“Tell me about the pants you’re looking for.”
“Literacy Partners?”
“Women Refugees.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I remember.”
She didn’t. She had also managed to inform me of a different party at which I had not been included. “You’re a size forty?” I asked.
“Oh, I never know European sizes. Eight above the waist, ten below.”
Fortunately it was one of Mrs. Oba’s days in the shop. She brought us trousers from two of my designers who do pants for well-toned ladies of a certain age, one German, one Danish. The cut of the German designer was perfect for Casey, and she took three pairs. This was easily the best sale I’d made all month. We settled down to adjusting the fit.
“How do you know Marta?” Casey asked, once the thrill of the hunt was over and her mind returned to more usual pursuits. She was standing on the fitting block, surrounded by mirrors. Mrs. Oba was on the floor, pinning up the cuffs of the pants; Casey’s legs were not that long.
“We went to the same boarding school,” I said. This was true, though we had not known each other there; Marta had graduated before I arrived. The very fact that I’d slapped down that credential told me Casey had irked me, and I should do a better job of hiding it.
“Ethel Walker,” said Casey suddenly. She’d been trying to come up with which boarding school it was.
“Miss Pratt’s.”
“I meant Miss Pratt’s. I never can keep them straight, those eastern schools, I’m from California.”
“They’re very close to one another.”
“I know, my daughter dragged me to all of them when we were looking at high schools. And then in the end she stayed at Brearley all the way through! Do you have children?”
No. Score another for Casey.
Casey was now in her expensive underpants, standing on one foot to put on the next pair of trousers she’d chosen. These were a wool-linen mix in charcoal with a very faint lavender pinstripe, one of my favorite pieces. We only had a thirty-six and a forty-two left, but Mrs. Oba could take the forty-two in for her.
“Miss Pratt’s,” said Casey. “Then you know Avis Metcalf!”
She had just noticed the pear petals in her tawny blondish hair, and was now running her fingers through it to remove them. The hair fell perfectly back into place on its own, the sign of a very good cut. Casey raised and turned her chin slightly, admiring this effect in the mirror. I admired it too.
“I saw her two nights ago,” she went on. “She seemed so cheerful, you could tell that no one has told her about Grace.”
This landed hard. I was quiet for a moment, knowing she wanted me to ask her what she meant, knowing I’d be sorry if I did. I shouldn’t have mentioned Miss Pratt’s in the first place. Drop names in a certain company, expect to wind up with broken toes.
“Her daughter. Grace. You know her?”
“I do, yes.”
“She’s married to Nick Wainwright, the actor? You know, from that show?”
“I don’t watch much television.” I had watched every episode of that one, though, as long as Nicky was on it.
“Oh, I don’t either, but sometimes when you’ve been out every night for weeks, don’t you just love to crawl into bed with a baked potato for supper and watch a good sitcom?”
“How does that feel?” I asked, meaning the darts Mrs. Oba had pinned at the back and sides of the waist. Casey turned herself sideways, sucked in her tummy, and admired the view.
“Great.”
Mrs. Oba set to work on the hems.
“Grace and my daughter knew each other from dancing school. Peter Varnum has been in love with Grace like forever. He followed her around Nantucket like a puppy. He was devastated when she married Nick. I always knew that was a mistake, that marriage. Isn’t it ironic?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant but suspected she was misusing the word.
Mrs. Oba had pinned one hem so there was a perfect little break at the ankle. She looked up at Casey in the mirror.
“Is that all right?” I asked her. “You’re not going to wear a higher heel with these?”
“Not with pants,” she said, as if I shouldn’t have had to ask. “I walk everywhere. You can’t wear heels in the daytime in New York.”
News to me. But now I had Peter Varnum in focus. He was the tall one in white ducks who had come to dinner so often last summer when we were on Hulbert Avenue. A big bluff teddy bear of a man in a well-cut blazer.
“How do you mean? Ironic?”
She was pulling on the third pair of pants.
“Oh, you know. Sometimes you have to get married in order to end a relationship. To make it clear it won’t work no matter what you do. And sometimes you have to break up to find out you can’t live without each other.”
It annoyed me that I thought this was actually a rather shrewd observation, although I was right, she was misusing ironic.
“Phyllis says Grace only broke up with Peter in the first place to annoy her mother. If I wanted a jacket to wear with these pants, what could you show me?”
I sold her a gray wool self-belted jacket with clever lapels that I happened to know would never lie quite right, and the big necklace of ebony beads she’d admired. When she had finally gone, I went upstairs and changed into loafers, now that I knew one could not wear heels in New York in the daytime, and went to the park for a long walk.
Consider the source. That was what I kept saying to myself as I quick-marched past the Temple of Dendur and up around the reservoir. I wanted to wear myself out. I didn’t want to have heard this and was determined not to believe it. I was also furious with the messenger, and had half-resolved that if Casey Leisure came to the shop again I would simply say we couldn’t serve her. But I wouldn’t really do that; I couldn’t afford it.
Nicky. Dinah! Poor trusting little Lindy. All the complicated pain to innocent bystanders that comes with divorce. Which Gil and I had been unwilling to cause. Didn’t anybody else ever exercise any self-control?
I can’t exactly explain what I did next.
I booked a rental car for Saturday morning. I had to get out of the city. To be alone, to be in motion, to be away from human voices, to see the spring in the countryside.
On the day, I dressed in slacks and walking shoes, took the subway to pick up the car, and drove to Connecticut.
I hadn’t really meant to. I didn’t have any particular plan. I’d thought I might drive up to Woodstock or maybe the Berkshires to visit The Mount and think about Edith Wharton, and a time when everyone in society understood the same manners. I could find a bed-and-breakfast and spend the night; there was nothing in New York I had to be home for. The dog was dead.
I was enjoying the classical music on the radio and the warm smell of turned earth through my open window when I realized what I’d done. As if on automatic pilot, I had chosen the route Gil and I had driven so often. I was practically in our village. Ten minutes more would bring me to our driveway. I drove into town, pulled into the library parking lot, and turned off the engine. What was I doing?
It was a heartbreaking spring day. Bright, with the light somehow golden. There w
as birdsong, there were children playing on the common, there was a soft-ice-cream truck doing good business down by the town playground. The question was, now that I was here, was I going to go through with it? Drive to the house, walk into the garden, or if someone was there, stand like a specter across the road watching who came and went?
If Meredith was there and she saw me, she might invite me in. In fact she would, I could picture it: she’d invite me in, and make me a cup of tea in my own beautiful blue-and-white Swedish teapot, put out a few cookies on my own blue-and-white porcelain plates. She might let me cut some of my own roses to take home.
If it was the other one, Clara, would she know me? If she knew me would she acknowledge me? Or leave me standing across the road, looking at the house like something inhuman from The Turn of the Screw?
I did not aspire to be a succubus. I had not lived my life, loved so much, come all this way, to become that. It was a gorgeous day. I had my health, I had my friends. One should never revisit a loved house once the life lived there was gone. I would drive to the next town, have a quiet lunch at a sidewalk table in the sun, perhaps a frisée salad with lardons and a poached egg on top with a glass of pinot grigio, drive home, go to the pound, and adopt a dog. I didn’t think I could face training a puppy, but I could certainly rescue some sweet beast who had found itself bereft through no failing of its own.
Someone knocked on my window.
It was Mildred Connolly, the assistant librarian. She was bending down to smile in at me, her face inches from the window glass. They don’t name girls Mildred anymore. What is it, old English? Like Alfred and Ethelred? I lowered the window; what choice did I have?
“I thought that was you, Loviah. It’s so nice to see you back in town.”
“Thank you, Mildred. How are you? How’s Dennis?”
“Pretty good. We were sorry about Gil. I’d have written you but I didn’t have your address in the city. I read the obituary in the New York Times.”
“He was quite a guy,” I said, smiling as warmly as I could.
“We had no idea he’d done all those things. Come up to see the doings out at your house?”
“Really, I was just out for a drive. Such a pretty day.”
“Oh, you should go see what they’re up to. It’s going to be something.”
A pause.
I said, “What, exactly?”
“Two paddle tennis courts, and a spa beside it.”
“Spa.”
“A hot tub. Dennis did the bulldozing for it. Glad of the work.”
“I see. I’m trying to think where it’s flat enough to put paddle courts. Out past the garage?”
“No, right up next to the house, where you had your garden.”
I suppose you saw that coming. I didn’t.
The new dog is about eight, they thought at the shelter. Some version of a cocker spaniel. She’s cost me a fortune so far in treatments for worms, a rash, food allergies, teeth cleaning and shots, but she’s a sweetheart. So grateful and eager to please. She doesn’t bark much, and she wriggles with joy when she sees me. Tends to lose control of her bladder a little at the same time, but I’ve gotten very skillful at minimizing the damage. You could feel all her ribs when I first got her, and the pads on her paws were cut up; I think she must have been living rough quite a while before she was found. She’s afraid of men. She growls and trembles if the super has to come into the apartment, but she’s not all wrong about him. He doesn’t like dogs. She is very cheerful and good on the leash, and she loves to ride in taxis. Her name is Edith.
Chapter 17
One evening about a month after I got Edith, misled by some perversely glowing review I’d read somewhere, I bestirred myself to attend a performance of a Strindberg play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Why I thought I would like it, I cannot tell you; perhaps I thought that it would be like the lushly photographed Bergman of Fanny and Alexander. I left at intermission. That’s one of the pleasures of a single life; if you want to leave, you don’t have to negotiate with someone who wants to stay. You do, however, have to figure out the Brooklyn subways by yourself, and I made a hash of it and at first went the wrong way, deeper into Brooklyn instead of toward home. By the time I realized my mistake, I had to wait what felt like forever in a virtually empty station, all too aware of the simple but expensive watch I was wearing, and the other things about me that might encourage the wrong sort of person to see me as easy prey. The watch had been a long-ago present from Gil. It would be ironic, and I use the word advisedly, if it now got me killed. And if it did, who would take care of poor little Edith? How long would it be before someone thought of her?
Little as I relished feeling like a sitting duck, I had no idea what sort of world was overhead, whether there was a bustling brightly lit street full of taxis, or a neighborhood as dark and quiet above as the station below, so I felt I had no choice but to stay where I was and hope that a train arrived before something unpleasant did. At last a Q train arrived, not a line I understand at all, but it was brightly lit and going toward Manhattan, neither of which you could say about the bench where I’d been sitting, so I got on.
We went one stop, then halted. The subway is like that after-hours. What had possessed me to go to an outer borough at night by myself? There was an announcement, very loud, of which I understood no word. A middle-aged Muslim couple sat quietly at the other end of the car, and I decided that if anyone alarming got on, I would move down to sit near them. I wished I had something to read, but I didn’t, so I sat gazing through the window, across dark and filthy tracks to the opposite platform.
The frame of the subway car window made the scene beyond it a little like something in a film. Which is why it seemed hardly real when a couple came down the stairs and onto the lighted platform. They looked anxious and unhappy. The young woman, who was Grace, and who had no good reason for being in Brooklyn at this time of night that I could think of, looked at her watch. Then the man, who was Peter Varnum, bent to kiss her on the mouth, a kiss she returned as a train drew toward them from the opposite direction from mine. Through the windows of two train cars I saw the doors open and Peter boarding the outbound train. The doors closed behind him, and the train began to move. By the time the last car had left the station, Grace was gone, and my own train jerked into motion again.
I didn’t intend to tell Dinah. I stayed as far away as I could from them all that summer, though Avis had taken the house in Nantucket again and invited me to join the family there.
By fall, I found I was missing Dinah. I wanted to snarl about the paddle tennis courts with someone who would make me laugh. I wanted a little fun in my life. We had a Girls’ Night Out, down in Tribeca at a jolly dive with delicious food where we wouldn’t meet anyone we knew. We had a happy time planning revenges on Gil’s daughters that we’d never carry out. It felt wonderful to join in Dinah’s great rattling warm colorful belly laugh. It was like being young again. We ordered another bottle of wine, why not? Of course, part of our being young together had always been that I found myself telling Dinah things I never meant to. Dinah felt so helpless in the face of Nicky’s sadness, his feeling that his life, so full of promise, had been derailed, and neither of them could understand how or why it had happened. And after all, Nicky was my godson, and I loved him.
For a day or two Dinah was obsessively angry at Grace. She called me multiple times and railed about how she had practically adopted her back in the day when Grace had no use for Mrs. Gotrocks. She said things about Grace, and Avis too, that were not kind or fair. Or very ladylike. She wanted to shield Nicky; she wanted to force Grace to think of her husband and her child and the vows she had made. She wanted to protect Nicky from experiencing the bad thing that had happened in her marriage. She thought of how to confront Grace. But then, as I understand it now, she moved on to another stage.
Why would it be so bad if Nicky and Grace divorced? If Nicky sued for custody, he’d win. Nicky was a blameless full-time parent. Grac
e was the unfaithful wife and absent working mother. True, in court, in a battle of who could hire the best lawyer, Nicky might lose, but what about the court of public opinion? Grace and Avis had far more to lose there than Nicky and would certainly cave in and settle long before it came to the glare of the spotlight. Shared custody and spousal support for Nick must not have sounded so bad to Dinah. Nick could get his career back on track, she and Nick could have Lindy for the summers on the Vineyard, and Dinah wouldn’t have to pretend to enjoy her losing competition with Avis for Grandmother of the Year anymore. There was a lot for Dinah to like in this new vision of the future.
Blind items began appearing on the society blogs and Web sites:
What well-heeled celebutante has been seen getting cozy with an old beau while hubby is home minding the baby?
Or:
What handsome TV actor doesn’t know what they’re saying about his schoolteacher wife and her extracurricular activities?
The Web sites would make sure to run photographs of Grace and Nicky together, smiling for a camera, at a book party for some hot new novelist, or a fund-raiser for the ballet or for the Robin Hood Foundation. Did these items have Dinah’s fingerprints on them somewhere? It certainly seemed to me that they did. And I was shocked.
On nights when Grace was going to be late getting home, Nicky often brought Lindy uptown to have supper at Dinah’s. One such evening sticks in my mind. We’d finished our meal, and Dinah was playing Ride a Cockhorse with Lindy as I cleared the table. Nicky sat staring at the candles, in another world. Each time Dinah got to the line “she shall have music wherever she goes,” she let Lindy tip all the way backward, gurgling with laughter.
“Oh, you are my little pigeon pie,” said Dinah when Lindy was right side up again. “You would make a delicious lunch.” And she’d plant her lips on Lindy’s neck and blow, making a sound that makes all small children laugh as if something naughty has happened. “And didn’t you like your mac and cheese? Wasn’t it good?” (Another rude noise vibrated against Lindy’s skin as she shouted with glee.) “Isn’t it sad poor Mommy didn’t get any? Where is Mommy? Do you want to take her a cookie? Whoopsie Daisy!” and she turned Lindy upside down to more shrieks of excitement.