by Anita Shreve
Sydney tries to smile, but his rigidity is inhibiting. She descends another step, and he moves in her direction. He looks drawn and slightly pale, bluish where his five-o’clock shadow would be. Not as robust as when she spoke to him in the bar. He seems a man not in command.
“Did you really think I’d skip your wedding?” he asks when she reaches the bottom step.
Not Jeff’s wedding, but hers.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
He brushes past her, the duffel briefly touching her hip. She listens to ascending footsteps behind her. She puts her hand into the pocket of her dress and touches the blue patchwork handkerchief.
Mark Edwards generously insisted on providing the roses for the wedding. A week earlier, he took Sydney on a formal tour of the garden to pick out specific species for her bouquet. It would have to be a simple arrangement, he said; he could grow the flowers, but he had no skill at arranging them. Simple would be fine, Sydney responded, and together they settled on a series of colors that ranged from tinted ivory to a red-orange, all picked to coordinate with Sydney’s salmon silk. Mr. Edwards will wrap them so that she won’t prick her fingers. Sydney will carry them loosely, as if someone had just laid a bouquet in her arms.
Predictably, Mr. Edwards is on his knees. She notes that he wears pads now, something that wasn’t necessary the year before. He has on a sun visor and is working a pair of clippers, pruning stray shoots. It is early July, peak season for roses in New Hampshire. That he has been able to cultivate so many species so close to the ocean is something of a marvel, and those who know about gardening often stop to see the flowers. It is not unusual to notice a strange car parked on the street, a man or a woman wandering—with Mr. Edwards’s permission—the rows of blossoms.
For a time, Sydney stands at the edge of the garden. The plot is laid out in the shape of an arched rectangle and is wonderfully tended, the roses set in mounded hillocks and evenly spaced. Sydney knows the wind off the water is a constant menace; often, when she glances out the kitchen window in the mornings, so many petals have been blown off during the night that the plot resembles the aftermath of a party at which a great deal of confetti was tossed into the air.
Mr. Edwards notices her then, an expression of pleasure on his face.
“Don’t get up,” she calls, but she is too late. She watches with some concern as he stands.
“I’m filthy,” he says as she approaches. He takes off his gloves and bends and kisses her cheek. “How is the bride on the day before her wedding?”
“Very well. I just saw Ben.”
“Isn’t it terrific? I spoke to him when he pulled in. He’s up now having a shower. Quite a surprise. Anna is thrilled. Did he say much to you? How do you think he looked?”
“He didn’t say much,” Sydney answers. “He looked a bit, I don’t know, tired maybe.”
“I thought so, too. Works too hard. Has, um. . .?” Mr. Edwards claps his gardening gloves together hard. “Does Jeff. . .?”
Sydney shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
“It will be good for them both,” Mr. Edwards says firmly. “A reconciliation. Not speaking is never a good thing. Never. Tears families apart for years. Usually, it’s money that does it. Not sure what did it in this case. But there’s a kind of loyalty there, don’t you think? Perhaps you know more.”
Sydney shakes her head. “I don’t,” she says.
Mr. Edwards waves an arm to take in the entire garden. “I’ve selected all your blossoms. Won’t pick them till morning, of course.”
“We should be having the wedding here. It’s incredibly beautiful.”
“Never have a wedding in a rose garden. Wind picks up, you’re left with empty stalks.”
“I just came to thank you,” Sydney says.
“Gives me a chance to show off,” Mr. Edwards says. “Don’t you know that every gardener is at heart a braggart?”
She smiles.
“I’m glad you’re marrying here,” he says, making a gesture to take in the entire house. “Lots of history. Want to sit?”
It is clear to Sydney that Mr. Edwards needs to sit. “Yes, I do,” she says.
With a small whisk broom propped up by the side of the stone bench, he carefully brushes off its surface.
“You interested in history?” the man asks. He knocks the loose dirt from his trousers.
“Some,” Sydney answers.
“There’s tremendous history to this house. I’ve been to the library and the local historical society and so forth. I’ve made it quite a hobby. Of course, a house with any age is bound to have history, but this has more than most, I think. Six, seven, eight families have lived here. Did you know that it was originally built as a convent?”
Sydney is surprised and casts her eyes over the aging house, focusing on the dormers. Bedrooms for nuns?
“A French Canadian order down from Quebec. Twenty sisters. A contemplative order.”
“It’s an ideal place for it.”
“There was a scandal involving a priest and a young novitiate.” He pauses and shakes his head. “Sometimes I think nothing changes but the date.”
Sydney feels a cool, damp breeze along the backs of her arms. The rose leaves, dark and glossy, seem to vibrate in the moving air.
“After the scandal, and we can only guess at what it was,” Mr. Edwards continues, “the house was sold to a man who was the editor of a literary magazine in Boston. Don’t know much about him, but I do know that his daughter started a home for unwed mothers here, which apparently precipitated another scandal. Can’t imagine the unwed mothers would have been any trouble to anyone, but the villagers tried to evict them. They were thought to be corrupting the morals of the local young women.”
Sydney looks again at the upstairs dormers. First the sisters and then the unwed mothers. Children, probably many of them, born in those rooms.
“What happened to the babies?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I imagine they were put up for adoption. It’s a dreadful thing to contemplate, isn’t it? Taking a woman’s baby from her. Still, though, I guess in those days it was better than the alternative—being cast out onto the street.”
Sydney nods.
“The townsfolk may have been successful in ousting these unwed mothers, because in 1929, there’s mention of an abandoned property sold to a man named Beecher, who, I believe, was involved with a Marxist printing press dedicated to unionist involvement. Textile workers at the mills over in Ely Falls. I have a copy of the newsletter they put out—Lucky Strike—that I found in a rare-books store. Quite interesting. Both rabid and witty, an odd combination, like reading The Daily Worker combined with The New Yorker.” Mr. Edwards sets the gloves he has been holding on the bench. “And, again, I think this happened here, there was an attack by the Ku Klux Klan on this group of radical unionists, and one of their members was killed.”
“A murder here?”
“You wouldn’t think the KKK operated so far north, would you? Shortly after that, Beecher fled. The house was foreclosed on—this would have been in 1930—and was bought by a woman who became something of a minor playwright. She lived in New York but summered here. Did you ever hear the name Vivian Burton?”
Sydney shakes her head. Mr. Edwards bends forward and snatches a rose hip from a cane.
“She had plays on Broadway. She owned the house until her death in 1939. Then it passed to a family named Richmond. The house seems to have inspired not only scandal but also talent, because this Richmond fellow, Albert, was a trompe l’oeil painter. A fine-art painter, not the decorative kind.”
“‘Fool the eye,’” Sydney says, considerably more knowledgeable about still-life painting than she was a year ago.
“Precisely. Totally out of fashion, but very good in the manner of Harnett and Peto. There’s one hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I keep meaning to go see it, but I never seem
to find the time.”
“We’ll go together one day,” Sydney suggests. “And have lunch.”
“Wonderful idea,” Mr. Edwards says with enthusiasm.
There is a pause, during which each imagines the future. A future that might contain several lunches, the occasional walk together, many conversations, grandchildren.
“Now this painter, Richmond,” Mr. Edwards continues, “he sent three sons to World War Two. He was too old for the war himself, but he had sons. Possibly one daughter. You hear so much about the sacrifices mothers had to make, but one seldom thinks about the fathers.”
Sydney is silent, imagining a father driving first one son and then another and then another to the train station, sending them off to Europe or the Pacific, not knowing if they would return or not.
“Did the sons make it back?” Sydney asks.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Edwards says. “The house wasn’t passed on to any of them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t survive. It would be very bad luck to lose three sons, wouldn’t it?”
“Unimaginable.”
“After that, ownership passes to a family named Simmons, who used the property exclusively as a summer cottage. They let the place go, I’m afraid to say. Then it was bought in the nineteen eighties by the Vision pilot and his wife. You know about the crash.”
“I do.”
“And I—well, we, Anna and I—bought it from the widow. I don’t like to profit from someone else’s tragedy, but the house was going to go to somebody. I like to think we’ve kept it up as best as can be.”
“It’s lovely,” Sydney says. “I’ve always liked it. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to think of it the same way again.”
“And now you’ll be a part of the house’s history,” Mr. Edwards says with what appears to be great satisfaction.
“Well, you, too,” Sydney points out.
“Sydney, are you happy?” he asks suddenly.
Sydney is taken aback by the question. “Yes,” she answers, putting a hand to her chest. “I was hoping that it showed.”
“I’m glad, then. I was afraid that the Ben and Jeff situation would have put a damper on your happiness. And I’ve wondered at times if you wouldn’t be a bit gun-shy about marrying again. I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it.”
“No,” she says. “It’s a fact. I don’t feel gun-shy. Maybe I should, but I don’t.”
“My son is a good man,” Mr. Edwards says, a strange declaration under the circumstances.
“I know he is,” Sydney responds, moved by this father’s endorsement.
The vibration of the glossy rose leaves has turned to a flutter. The sky, gray and dull before, has become dramatic, both threatening and promising: dark clouds to the west, slashes of blue to the east.
Sydney gazes up at the house. The nuns and the priest. The unwed mothers. The Marxists and the murder victim. The playwright and the artist. Did the man eat alone, looking at maps each evening, placing markers where he thought his sons had been sent? And then the pilot’s widow, dealing with the crush of press. Sydney remembers the faces of the pilots on television. How ordinary they looked.
She follows the roofline of the house with her eyes and then settles on the front porch. She wonders if there have been other weddings in the house. There must have been, she guesses, multiple weddings and births and deaths. She hopes on balance there has been more joy than pain in the building.
“They came here for the beauty,” Mr. Edwards says.
Sydney moves through the house, admiring its fancy dress. Julie and Hélène are engaged in decorating the stairway with ribbons and white bows. Bowls of white roses have been set upon the dining room table and the coffee table in the living room. In the kitchen, there is bustle, Mrs. Edwards animated and directing traffic. Sydney walks to one of the long floor-to-ceiling windows and looks out over the beach. No sign of Jeff. Perhaps he is even now up in the boys’ dorm dressing for the rehearsal dinner. She hopes that he and Ben have met and spoken. Jeff, despite everything, will be moved that Ben has finally come. If nothing else, his brother has capitulated. No man could refuse that gesture.
Sydney glances about for Ivers. She thinks her father may have gone for a walk. Her mother, she knows, is lying down in her room. Periodically, the porch is aglow with sudden sun and then is cast in shadow.
Jeff, who has moved all of his belongings into Sydney’s room, is sitting on the spare bed next to her suitcase. Piles of clothing have been dropped onto the chair and the floor. Jeff still has on his bathing suit and his T-shirt. He seems oblivious to his sandy feet. “You might have warned me,” he says.
There is no answer to this. Sydney shuts the door. Yes, she might have warned her fiancé that his estranged brother was in the house. Instead, she sought refuge in the garden with the patriarch.
“This is your doing, isn’t it?” he asks. “He as much as said so.”
Sydney notes that Jeff does not say Ben’s name.
“I thought it would make you happy,” she answers.
Jeff raises his eyebrows.
“Have you spoken to each other?” she asks.
“Of course we’ve spoken to each other.”
Sydney doesn’t ask what was said. Right now, she isn’t certain she wants to know.
“It cast a pall,” she argues in her defense. “I could feel it. Everyone could feel it. It was something that we would never forget. That could never be made right again.”
“You should have asked me first.”
She leans against the closet. “Jeff,” she says.
“What?” he asks, barely looking at her.
“I think you’re being unreasonable.”
More than that, she thinks privately: petulant is a word that comes to mind.
“Ben and I have our differences,” Jeff says. “I don’t think they’ll ever be made right. I’m sorry you don’t like it. I don’t really like it either, but there it is. And believe me, he hasn’t come here out of love for me.”
“Then, what is it?” Sydney asks.
But Jeff is silent, either unwilling or unable to answer her.
“Jeff, listen.”
“What?”
“There’s a story my grandfather used to tell me about himself and his brother,” Sydney says. “One day when he was a boy, his brother came into his room and destroyed a dozen model airplanes he’d painstakingly built out of balsa wood. I don’t know why; they’d had a fight. They didn’t speak for six years.”
Jeff sits on the bed, arms crossed. She senses that he is barely listening.
“Then World War Two came,” Sydney says, “and my grandfather’s brother was being shipped off to Europe with the Army Air Corps. His parents walked the brother to the train station, but my grandfather wouldn’t go.”
Sydney wonders what has made her remember a story she hasn’t thought about in years. Mr. Edwards’s mention of World War II? The painter waiting for his sons to come home?
“At the last minute, my grandfather thought about how he might never see his brother again, about how the man might die in Europe. He sprinted all the way to the train and got there just as it was pulling out. He shook his brother’s hand and said good-bye.”
Jeff looks up from the bed. “And the brother died.”
“No, nothing that dramatic.”
“So your point is?”
“Well, I think Ben has come to the train station,” Sydney says.
Chapter 10
Ivers, as always, delivers baseball trivia at a gunner’s pace.
“Happens every year. Sox-Yankees, July Fourth. Wells on the mound for New York. Lowe for Boston. You’d be thinking to concede this one, but with Jackson’s hitters hot—forty-two homers in June, twenty in the last five games, eleven in the last two—anything can happen. Put your money on the Sox. Sydney, have I mentioned that I’m going to kill you for getting married tomorrow afternoon?”
“We’ll set up a TV on the porch,” she says.
“Ivers, no,” Sydney says, smiling.
Sahir, across from Sydney, is in earnest political discussion with Mr. Edwards. The topic is gay marriage, which Sahir seems passionately in favor of. Anna Edwards darts nervous glances in Julie’s direction. In a complex series of eye movements and hand signals that make her appear tic-plagued, she seems to be trying to tell her husband to button it; but he is either oblivious to his wife’s facial twitches or forgetful of his own daughter’s sexual orientation. Julie is not asked for her opinion on the subject.
Jeff, mindful of his responsibilities as a host, is engrossed in conversation with Sydney’s mother about the best route by car to Portsmouth from western Massachusetts, though the real reason for Jeff’s intense attention, Sydney knows, is so that when Ben finally comes down to dinner, Jeff can pretend not to notice.
The table, lovely with white linen, is awash in roses, the guests in finery a notch up from the norm. Dress shirts, sleeves rolled, no ties. Sydney notes that Jeff has on flip-flops, which might or might not be due to the fact that he left his good shoes in the boys’ dorm. He will not now enter that room.
Sydney cannot help but notice Sahir’s shoes—dark, highly polished brogues with thick soles. They remind her of men in the 1950s, when expensive shoes were a sign of good breeding.
Ben shuffles down the steps as if he’d been on an important business call and were now just minutes late for a lesser event. He has showered and dressed and is rolling his sleeves as he enters the dining room. He missed the rehearsal itself, a strangely lifeless playlet in which the principals faced a white sofa and repeated brief lines. The production lacked choreography, lights, any sense of drama. Jeff especially seemed wooden, as if none of this was his idea. Sydney, annoyed, let it go and tried to compensate with nervous laughter, Ivers helping her along. What precisely they were laughing about Sydney could not have said. From the opposite sofa, Anna Edwards sighed frequently, as though at children who were misbehaving.