Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  When she looked at him that way now, it was hard to believe what anyone could tell after spending ten minutes in her company, and as he had been told by the best gerontologists in Connecticut. At ninety-one, his headstrong Yankee great-aunt was losing her marbles. It was why Luke had quit his job at Hartford Mutual, why he’d taken his friend Ver Planck’s advice and committed to two years of hands-on management of the Sedgwicks’ pitiful assets—to “grow,” as Ver Planck had phrased it, what was left of the family money, in order to afford the medical care his great-aunt would soon need. It was why Luke had given up his apartment and moved into the Sedgwick House, so he could keep an eye on her. For now, Abby’s doctors had deemed her competent, but as she slipped further into dementia, someday soon she’d need more care than Luke alone could provide. And that cost money. More than he could have possibly brought in at Hartford Mutual.

  You have to take risks to reap rewards, Ver Planck always said. You can’t be risk-averse, Sedgwick.

  “Remember I told you they’re building a new assisted living development in Torrington? If we sold this place, you could afford your own condo and people to do your cleaning and check in on you twice a day,” Luke told Abby, by rote.

  Her answer, too, was predictable: “The Silas Sedgwick House shall never be sold, Luke. Ever.”

  Seymour’s Hardware had always been New Nineveh’s only such store until last year—when the area’s first minimall had sprung up a mile out of town. Pilgrim Plaza had a pristine black parking lot, an entrance right off Route 202, and an outpost of a national home supplies chain that sold the same products as Seymour’s at lower prices. This afternoon, Seymour’s was empty except for a few diehard locals who all had known Luke since he was in diapers, and loved nothing more than to remind him of it. To Luke’s surprise—not because he didn’t run into someone familiar each time he stepped outside Abby’s house, but because this time it was to his advantage—Lowell Mayhew was standing by a display of leaf blowers.

  “Nice to see you. How’s your great-aunt?” asked the lawyer.

  “Same as always. Nice to see you, too.” Luke shook Mayhew’s hand. He hesitated. “I need a word with you. Can you see me in your office tomorrow? It’s urgent.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Luke saw Emily Hinkley, president of the New Nineveh Ladies’ Auxiliary, incline her head in his direction from over by the pruning shears. He lowered his voice. “I’d prefer to come to your office.”

  “Just call Geri and she’ll make an appointment.”

  Luke thanked Mayhew and exchanged passing nods with Wesley Buckle, an old family friend who, as the recently appointed head of the town zoning commission, had been the most enthusiastic champion of the Pilgrim Plaza project. Luke wondered why Buckle wasn’t at the new home supplies store; perhaps old habits died hard. Luke headed to the back of the room. He should get more candles. And kerosene. Winter wasn’t what it used to be, but it was on its way, and there was no excuse for being unprepared.

  Mayhew followed. “Luke.” His grin had faded. “You should talk to your great-aunt about her will. I can’t say much, you understand, but she’s made significant changes I suspect you would agree are ill-advised.”

  Luke dared not hope. Abby’s long-standing will had made it clear that the Sedgwick House was to go to him—along with ironclad legal provisions preventing him, and any theoretical descendants, from ever selling it. The thought of being saddled with this burden for all eternity had kept Luke awake too many nights of his adult life. “Meaning what—she’s not leaving the house to me?”

  Mayhew scratched his pink forehead under his gray hat.

  “Hallelujah!” Luke exclaimed, a rare show of excitement. He pulled a twenty-pound sack of ice melt off a low shelf and led Mayhew to the front of the store. He couldn’t imagine what his great-aunt had in mind. For years, he’d been trying to get her to donate the mansion to the New Nineveh Historical Society to turn into a museum. “So who gets the albatross? I know you can’t tell me.”

  “Just talk to her.”

  “What makes you think she’d listen to me any more than she’d listen to you?”

  Mayhew scratched his chin. “Try.”

  Not a chance, Luke thought, suddenly lighter than air despite his troubles. “Will do,” he said, and went to get the kerosene.

  This absolutely, positively, couldn’t be happening. Peggy clenched the wheel of her rented Chevrolet and peered through the slanting rain for a sign that she hadn’t lost her way literally, even if it appeared she had done so metaphorically. Outside was nothing but wet trees. Connecticut was leafy and luxuriant—a five-thousand-square-mile Central Park—a fact Peggy would have appreciated more in other circumstances.

  Her phone was still out on the front seat from her call minutes ago from Bex. Against her better judgment, Peggy reached for it and dialed her parents. Someone ought to know where she was.

  “Virginia?” Madeleine Adams shouted over a bad connection; Peggy had already discovered the cell service out here was spotty. “Why are you driving to Virginia? Max, slow down!” The last command was clearly for Peggy’s father; it seemed they, too, were on the road.

  “Not Virginia, Mom, New Nineveh,” Peggy repeated. “In Connecticut—”

  “Max!” Her mother interrupted, again to her father. “You’ll kill us! Stay in the lane, please, honey!”

  Peggy had forgotten what it was like to be in a car with her mother. Madeleine’s nervousness was starting to rub off on her from all the way across the country.

  “What were you saying, Peggy? Are you all right? Is everything okay?”

  “Never mind, Mom. I’m fine.”

  Peggy hung up just in time to spot the road sign she was looking for—new nineveh, pop. 3,200, settled 1719—and make her seventh wrong turn of the morning, this time a right onto Church Street, which she quickly realized was leading her straight out of town. By the side of the road, an orange backhoe had paused in the rain, its predatory jaws poised midbite over the roof of an aged barn that sagged under the weight of its years and the vines growing across it.

  Peggy’s whole body crackled with anxiety. If only she hadn’t drunk so much coffee. All that caffeine had done nothing to calm her; nor had ninety minutes on the interstate and the last half hour of twisting, two-lane highways; nor had the crackly call from a numb-sounding Bex. Peggy hadn’t had the courage to tell her friend the real reason she was skipping work today, claiming food poisoning instead. “Well, this will really make you sick,” Bex had responded.

  Peggy doubled back on Church, past the tall-steepled, white-clapboard building for which the street must have been named and huge old Colonial and Victorian houses she would have swooned over had she not been so preoccupied. She hadn’t driven a car for two years, and she was twenty minutes late for her meeting. There it was: Number 3, a converted two-story brick house, also old. She parked the car. Bex, Brock—she’d not told them she was driving to Connecticut. For all Brock knew, she was at the store as usual. Peggy couldn’t shake the worry that this all might be an elaborate ruse to lure her up to the country, kidnap her, and sell her into white slavery.

  She could see the aftermath already—a lurid story about her mysterious disappearance on the front page of the New York Post: wayward wife goes awol. Poor Brock would learn of Peggy’s Vegas marriage from some reporter, and it would kill her mother, and…Enough, Peggy. There was no need for feverish imaginings. Her current reality was weird enough.

  “Goodness, you’re soaked. Care to warm up a bit?” The receptionist at the front desk of the Law Offices of Lowell C.

  Mayhew set down the muffin she was eating and rose from her chair as Peggy came in.

  “Thank you, that’s all right.” Peggy pushed against the inside of the door, which was still open a crack. “I’m Peggy—”

  “I know, dear. May I assume of the New Nineveh Adamses? And here I thought you’d all died out. It’s warped.”

  Peggy was shamefaced. The rece
ptionist was right: This situation with Luke was nothing short of twisted.

  The woman came around the desk. “Silly old thing always warps in the rain.” She shut the door with a bang.

  Peggy flinched. She didn’t know which had unnerved her more, yesterday’s bomb from Luke Sedgwick or this morning’s from Bex: When the store’s lease expired next May, their rent wasn’t just going up, it was doubling.

  “Before you go on in, may I say…” The woman picked up Peggy’s left hand and studied her ring. “It’s wonderful news. Miss Abigail must be over the moon!” Before Peggy could ask what was wonderful or who was Abigail, the woman was bustling her into a cluttered, wainscoted office—“Here she is!”—and its two occupants were standing, the older man clasping her cold, damp hand in his warm, pink one. The receptionist bustled out.

  “Lowell Mayhew.” The lawyer appeared to be blushing a little. “And you’ve met Luke.”

  Peggy shook Luke Sedgwick’s hand as briefly as she could. He mumbled, “Nice to see you,” though she was pointedly avoiding his eyes. He wore threadbare khaki pants and green rain boots and, as best as she could tell without lifting her gaze north of his knees, was long-legged and lanky. She recalled, suddenly, the way he’d looked asleep on the hotel bed in Vegas. Had at any point his legs been entwined with hers?

  She said to Mayhew, “I’d like to get started.”

  The lawyer gestured at a chair. She went toward it, nearly tripping over Luke Sedgwick. He had returned to the other chair, stretching out his legs casually, as if he were in someone’s living room enjoying a hot toddy.

  Peggy sat up straight and crossed her ankles. She looked across at Mayhew. “How long will this take?”

  The lawyer aligned his blotter with the edge of his scratched, wooden desk. “About an hour. We know you have to get back to the city.”

  “I meant the annulment.”

  She was probably coming off as rude, but she didn’t care. A brisk Manhattan efficiency was sweeping in to replace the foggy disbelief that had gripped her since yesterday morning, when this stranger now sitting next to her, who claimed to have no recollection of their night, either, had informed her they’d legally bound themselves together till death did them part. It occurred to Peggy that the service could well have been performed by an Elvis impersonator, something she imagined would be funny in a romantic comedy—which this certainly wasn’t.

  “I want to see the photo,” she said. “He told me there was a photo.”

  Mayhew slid a folder across his desk. Inside was a Nevada marriage license with her signature, Patricia Ann Adams, and his, Luke Silas Sedgwick. A heart-shaped cardboard frame stamped with “The Little White Wedding Chapel” held a picture of Peggy in her black dress, with a tousled-haired man—she snuck a sidelong glance at Luke Sedgwick’s strawberry blond head—inebriated smirks on both their faces, arms wrapped around each other, the rhinestones on her bachelorette-party tiara winking in the camera’s flash. She waited for a bolt of recognition. None came.

  Mayhew almost seemed sorry for her. “Shall we get started?”

  Annulments were rare in Connecticut, he explained, granted only in a handful of special circumstances. The difference between an annulment and a divorce was that a divorce was a decree from the court that the marriage was over. “After an annulment, however, it’s as if the marriage never happened.”

  “That’s what I want.” Peggy addressed Mayhew, still not looking directly at the man next to her, who hadn’t spoken a word. This was his lawyer. She didn’t see why she had to do all the talking.

  Mayhew rolled a fountain pen between his palms. “The process takes a little over ninety days. But the court will only grant the annulment if it finds the circumstances behind your marriage warrant it.”

  “He got me drunk to the point of blacking out and dragged me to a wedding chapel. Isn’t that enough?”

  Luke spoke. It was about time. “I didn’t drag you anywhere. My guess is you dragged me. And, forgive me, but you seemed to be doing a fine job of getting yourself drunk.”

  He might have made an effort to dress up for this meeting, Peggy thought. His sweater was so thin at the elbows that the pink of the button-down shirt underneath peeked through. Peggy knew for a fact he owned at least one suit.

  “Let’s stay focused.” Mayhew pointed his pen at each of them. “Ms. Adams, I assume you’re not already married? If so, this marriage with Luke would be void ab initio—void at its inception, an automatic annulment.”

  Peggy was unexpectedly furious at Brock. He should have married her years ago. Then none of this would have happened. She was immediately ashamed. This was her fault, not Brock’s. She dreaded telling him the trouble she’d gotten into.

  It was a topic she had no idea how to broach. She’d have to tell Bex, too. If nothing else, she’d want Josh to look over the legal documents.

  “If the two of you failed to, ahem, consummate the marriage, we can also use that,” Mayhew said.

  “We passed out with our clothes on!” Peggy sprang forward in her chair, nearly slipping off the edge. Bex had been right all along. Nothing had happened! Absolutely nothing! “Luke? Tell him nothing happened.”

  At last, she looked Luke in the face.

  He had a longish nose and ruddy cheeks, as though he’d just come inside from the cold, and thin, tortoiseshell-framed glasses. His shaggy hair needed cutting, but it gave him an appealing, boyish rumpled quality. Brock is a hundred times more handsome, Peggy corrected herself fiercely. He doesn’t dress like some aging J.Crew poster child, either.

  But the air in the office was at once steamy, and she was conscious of it, and of an animated-sounding discussion in the front room.

  “If that’s what you want to say, I’ll back you up,” Luke answered as the noise of women’s voices came up outside the office door.

  “Failure to consummate it is,” Mayhew said.

  The door opened.

  “She’s right in there!” chirped the front-desk woman, who escorted in a very small, very wet, very old lady in a yellow rain slicker.

  Mayhew was clearly surprised, but he stood up and extended his hand. “Miss Abigail. To what do we owe this pleasure?”

  The lady’s rain hat was patched with duct tape. Rain pooled under her rusty galoshes. “Lowie, is it true? My great-nephew has taken a wife?”

  Luke’s jaw tensed as he, too, got to his feet. “What are you doing here?” He sounded as if he were trying hard not to raise his voice.

  “Why, meeting your bride. And this is she? Well, well.” The lady came up to cup Peggy’s chin in one hand. “The proper question, young man, is why was it necessary for me to hear about this just now, over the telephone, from Geri? How long have you been married, Luke? Where did you two meet? How have I never heard of this young lady?”

  To his credit, Luke remained in control. “You told her, Geri?”

  “Gosh, I figured she knew! I called to say congratulations.” Geri’s round face drooped. “Did I spoil a surprise?”

  “Welcome to the family, dear,” the old lady told Peggy. “I’m sorry Luke seems to have forgotten his manners. I am Abigail Agatha Sarah Sedgwick, and I understand you are of the New Nineveh Adamses? You do plan to have children, I presume?”

  Peggy tried to dislodge her chin from the old woman’s iron grip. “Um, I—”

  Luke was still speaking to Geri. “Why do you think Peggy and I are here today?”

  “Naturally, to update your paperwork. We always advise newlyweds to come in and—”

  Peggy pried Miss Abigail’s hand away. “That’s not it.” She looked from Miss Abigail to Geri and back again. “We’re getting an annulment.”

  Miss Abigail stepped back as if she’d been slapped.

  Luke glared at Peggy. He tried to take his great-aunt’s arm. “Abby, have a seat.”

  Miss Abigail yanked her arm away and remained standing. “We’re New Nineveh’s oldest family, Luke, and our survival is at stake. You’re the only
hope. It’s your responsibility as the last surviving Sedgwick to provide an heir.”

  “Lowell, please put the paperwork through as we’ve agreed,” Luke said quietly.

  “Lowie, kindly explain to my great-nephew. We do not get divorced. When a Sedgwick marries, a Sedgwick stays married. We must set a good, moral example. And this young lady is of the New Nineveh Adamses! I didn’t know there were any left.”

  Luke’s hands were in fists. He stuck them in his pockets. “Abby, our family has no power anymore. We don’t need to set examples. It’s a brave new world out there. And technically this isn’t a divorce, it’s an annulment.”

  Miss Abigail gasped and fanned herself with her rain hat.

  “Forgive me,” Luke said evenly, “but when will it occur to you that the only person left who cares about the Sedgwick legacy is you?”

  His words were eclipsed by Geri’s shriek.

  Abigail Agatha Sarah Sedgwick was collapsing. In slow motion her knees buckled, her eyes fluttered shut, and she pitched forward onto the well-worn carpet of the Law Offices of Lowell C. Mayhew.

  Peggy had read every page of a three-year-old copy of AARP magazine and was considering moving on to Field & Stream when a man in scrubs strode into the emergency room waiting area. Luke, who had been absorbed in the sea-foam green walls for the past ninety minutes, stood up. Peggy did the same.

  Luke looked at her. “You don’t need to be here.” He sounded about as pleased at her company as she was at his.

  “I don’t have a choice.” Somehow she had ended up in the ambulance with Luke and Miss Abigail, and now she was stranded fifteen miles from New Nineveh in this hospital in Torrington, Connecticut, a place she’d never heard of. What if Brock were calling the store, looking for her? It was two o’clock; she’d been out of communication half the day. She’d forgotten her phone on the front seat of the Chevy on Church Street. If she ever got back to the car, she’d no doubt find the window smashed and the phone gone.