The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  Peter agreed to move out with an unconcealed relief that hurt Adelia to the center of her unwifely core. Injured Adelia returned to her routines. The smell of sandalwood started to fade. At night, after work, she ate her cottage cheese and olives, alone at the table that faced out over the East River toward the lights of Manhattan. In the morning she ate a bowl of muesli while standing up in the kitchen, perusing her gallery of Margaux’s girls. All these routines she performed without hope of a child. She felt this loss, strangely enough, in her gums, which became painfully sensitive to all temperatures. She started brushing with Sensodyne. She was given a promotion at the firm, and she underwent two periodontal surgeries. She took up Pilates at her local gym. Obedient Adelia was attentive to all her Pilates instructor’s instructions, and she improved quickly. Sometimes she surprised herself in the mirror, after she had showered in the ladies’ locker room. She looked like a woman young enough to have a child. But.

  On her refrigerator, Adelia collected three more years of Christmas cards, and then one arrived with a note from William. Adelia, it said. I’ve been reading the paper all these years in the hopes of finding your name in the Wimbledon finals. To no avail! Still, the Cheshires tell me they saw you on Montague Street and that you’re a partner at a law firm. I expected no less. Things here are fine. So many of the old families have moved away. I reminisce sometimes. It would be nice to have a friend from the neighborhood to talk to. Margaux has little patience for it; she’s always lived in her own world. But I do have tragic news. Anita Schmidt has taken the carriage house hostage. You remember the carriage house, don’t you? Dread Pirate Wendy’s Lair? Well, according to His Highness the County Commissioner it now belongs to Anita Schmidt. An error in the subdivision proposal that my father drew up. Nobody caught it until Anita took it upon herself to study the original plan. Anyway, we’re fighting it tooth and nail in the neighborhood association, but unfortunately many of the neighbors are assholes, as you may remember. She won’t even let me paint it. You remember how white it always was? It’s getting dingy now and there’s a crack in the owl’s nest window. You have no idea how it pains me to see. One of the foremost examples of shingle architecture in the United States! But I’m rambling. I’m sure you have little time for this kind of thing. I think of you often; I thought you should know. I hope you’ll come visit sometime. Work is blah but the girls are beautiful, and Diana has the kind of talent that hasn’t been matched on the eastern seaboard since the Adelia Lively Era. I’m attaching a clipping about her performance at this year’s junior nationals: third in the nation! She reminds me of a girl I knew when I was a kid. I send my love and I remain, Yours, William.

  Adelia pinned the card—and the clipping—to the refrigerator. In a week she’d memorized the note. After that week, she initiated divorce proceedings against her willing and helpful husband. She tried not to blame him for her losses. It was she, Adelia, who had always arrived too late. Instead, she set her mind to finding a way to relocate to the firm’s office in Philadelphia. By March she was back in Breacon, moving the furniture from her apartment into the gaping spaces of the house on Mather Street. She reassembled her gallery of Christmas cards on the new refrigerator door. She established routines that were sharpened this time by the knowledge that she might run into Margaux at the grocery store, Diana at the gym, William as he made his familiar way over the green to the courts.

  But to see them in the flesh at Easter brunch was something else. It took her breath away to find them there together, gathered around a table, eating a communal meal. They were like a still life: Family Gathered at the Easter Table. Margaux was there. She still went out with them at that time. She was the picture of a mother, with her dancer’s posture and otherworldly poise, her dark hair coiled at the nape of her neck. Elizabeth, seated at Margaux’s side, was just out of college, in full possession of the confidence that only a twenty-one-year-old actress can possess. She was wearing a cowl-neck sweater and her lips were dramatically red. At her side, Diana: broader-shouldered than she seemed in her pictures, entertaining the compliments of club members. And on Margaux’s other side, little Isabelle. Her plate was littered with cracker crumbs, and in the wake of that destruction she was drinking a Shirley Temple, lost in a dream world that Adelia saw and immediately wanted to enter. She approached them, and William stood up with such energy that the silverware rattled.

  “Adelia Lively!” he said, and she couldn’t answer because something was stuck in her throat. “I can’t believe it. Adelia! You look exactly the same as when I saw you last.” She hugged him awkwardly; they had never offered each other such a formal embrace.

  “Adelia,” Margaux murmured, smiling. Without the slightest trace of jealousy. But what did she have to be jealous of? Adelia and William had loved each other as children; Margaux was a mother, his wife, a person beyond. Adelia could only try to make her smile look less skeletal.

  “This is my family,” William said. He gestured to them. “My girls.” And how could they have been anything other than complete, backed by his pride? How could they have failed to become the talented creatures they were? She could feel William’s tenacity across every inch of her skin; the hairs stood up on her arms. It was this that made her love him first. You could be a Wimbledon champion one day, he told her when she was sixteen, the summer before he went off to college. He wasn’t even joking, just planning for the future. No one else believed in her like that. With him, a sense of her potential took shape. Her promise had texture and weight. With everyone else, she was only a girl. Her father called her Dee-Dee and bought her pearl-button cardigans from Bendel’s for Christmas. But William believed she’d be a champion, and two divorces later, having twice come up against all that she’d never accomplish, she’d returned to Breacon to find that his children had inherited the gift of his belief. She could see it in the way he looked at them, and she couldn’t help but envy them their luck.

  “How do you do,” she said, regretting at once the old-fashioned awkwardness of the expression. They returned her greeting impeccably, unaware that she’d come home out of ancient love for their father. And then William turned to her again. She could feel his eyes on her; it was a sensation so old, so nearly forgotten, that she reached for a chair to keep herself steady. “Adelia Lively!” he said. “It’s been so long. What brings you back to the old stomping grounds?”

  She concocted something about missing the smell of tennis courts. He beamed. “Do you still play?”

  She forced herself to be honest. “I haven’t for something like ten years.” She registered his disappointment and took a breath before diving back in. “But I’m back for a while now, and I’d love to pick it up again.”

  And now, in William’s hospital room, those children stood by his bedside in three states of fallen grace. Isabelle, her thin shoulders thrown back, hostile and defiant. Elizabeth, washed up, playing the role of daughter as if it were her comeback to the stage. And Diana, holding the broken center, no more than a shadow of the girl she was when she was playing her sport. They were not what they used to be. Though this might have caused Adelia to pity them, it only made her angry. They should have held up better for his sake. They had allowed themselves such depths of suffering. While he summoned all the reserves of his confidence, they had done nothing but practice the art of slow drowning. Drowning and waving. Dramatically drowning. Time after time, William with his fine athlete’s shoulders dove in after them, and now, when he needed them, they came before him in this state, waiting to be saved.

  “I don’t feel very strong,” was what he finally said, and Adelia heard herself emit a sound like air hissing out of a punctured can. All three girls looked at her. She composed herself again. “I don’t feel very strong, and I don’t want to talk much right now,” he said, repeating himself. “I’ve had to think about whether to say anything at all, because I know what I’m going to say will be hurtful. But I’ve been thinking maybe I’ve damaged them
more by refusing to see the truth.” He paused to collect himself before continuing. “And the truth is, I’m disappointed in you. You’ve disappointed me.”

  “Dad,” Diana said, and Adelia looked away. Never in the past had she imagined such a thing. When he refused to acknowledge their failure, Adelia had acknowledged it for him.

  “Let me finish,” he said. “I want to say this while I can. You should know that the two of you—Isabelle and Diana—have broken my heart. You had all the potential in the world. You could have been so much.”

  The color washed out of Diana’s face, but she remained still, prepared to face the bald truth of her sentence. Elizabeth, absolved, flushed in a way that made Adelia want to exile her from the room. She had done no better than her sisters; she had not confirmed William’s consequence. Her only triumph had been that of bringing her children back home so that William could think of them as his own. In that one act she’d renewed her promise, but it was not for her to flush with exception. She’d fared no better than either one of her sisters.

  “I’m not sure how this happened,” William continued. He peered at Isabelle, as though hoping she might supply an answer. “Isabelle, for the life of me, I can’t say. What happened? What happened to make you change as much as you did?” Isabelle watched him. Her expression was flat beneath the arches of her eyebrows. He waited for her to answer him for a long time, then turned away and lifted a hand to his eye. His wrist was encircled by a blue hospital band. There was an IV tube hanging out of his vein. Adelia noticed for the first time that his eyebrows were disheveled.

  “And Diana,” he said. “For years you’ve persisted in suffering. Since the day you quit tennis, you’ve chosen over and over again to struggle.” He stopped and swallowed. “I’m not sure what it is in you. You should have seen yourself as a girl on that court. Everyone at the club would stop what they were doing and turn. They’d ask who that girl was, that brilliant girl. It breaks my heart to see what you’ve become.” He licked his lips. The vein in his arm that held the IV needle was purple under the skin.

  Adelia knew she was blinking too rapidly. The stillness was ruining her; if only they could move. If they could run, or swing, they would become themselves again. William would remember himself. She took a step forward, but as soon as she moved, Elizabeth swept over him. An exotic bird of prey, all feather and excessive wing. “Daddy,” she said, “you’re tired. Please. You should rest.”

  Isabelle surveyed her father, composed as a cruel priestess. “Dad,” she said, “that’s unfair to Diana. The only thing she ever quit was tennis, and no one can play tennis forever.”

  William focused on Adelia. “Tell them it’s time for them to leave,” he said to her.

  She shook her head, helpless and numb.

  “You’re the one who won’t let it go,” Isabelle continued. “You had one dream for her, and you won’t let it go. What was she supposed to do, play tennis until she died? Was that what you had planned?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” William said. “I’m not feeling well. I’d like to be alone now. Adelia, tell them to leave.”

  Diana hovered, caught between apology and retreat. You’re better than this, Adelia wanted to tell Diana, but she and Isabelle were already moving out of the room.

  “Me, too, Daddy?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Yes, Lizzie,” William said. “I’d like to speak with Adelia.”

  Elizabeth kissed him on the cheek and stood. She held herself regally. “I’ll wait with Lucy and Caroline. They love you, Daddy.”

  “Tell them I’m proud of them,” William said. “I’m as proud of them as a person can be.”

  And then Adelia was alone with him, with William, whom she had loved from the time she was a little girl without knowing it was love. Without knowing that the end of such love was marriage. William, with whom she had played pirate in the carriage house, dressed in a Tanner of North Carolina dress she pulled behind her bike for miles to get it bedraggled enough. For which act of rebellion she was later spanked, but did not weep, because One-Eyed Pirate Wendy never cried. Her ship was the Carriage House Loft; William battled his way up the stairs with a toy sword his father brought back from a trip to Mexico. “I’ve got you, wench!” he said, and she: “You’re mine, slave!” And all around them light streamed in from the owl’s nest, so that they were suspended in its glow, weightless like the dust motes that swirled in the cedary air. He played with her after he was too old to be playing pirate in the carriage house; he kept pretending because he wouldn’t let her go. Now, in his hospital bed, she went and knelt at his side, pressing her cheek against his palm.

  “You’re fine,” she said.

  “No, Adelia, I woke up lost,” he said. “I’m lost.”

  “You’re right here,” said Adelia. “Nothing has changed.”

  He closed his eyes. “Does Margaux know?”

  “I spoke with her, but I’m not sure how much she understood. She tried to comfort me. Louise said she wasn’t clear enough today to come to the hospital, unless it’s important to you.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Adelia stood before him in her cardigan. There was no place for her hands. This was not as it should be. She had hoped for this disloyalty so long, and to receive it in this state, with his forearm mapped by purple veins, his pale chest showing over his sheet.

  “I didn’t feel old,” he finally said. “I didn’t think that they were getting old.”

  “You’re still young,” she said. “Nothing’s changed. We’re all exactly the same.”

  “But they’ve sabotaged themselves.”

  “They’ll be fine,” she told him. “The girls are going to be fine.”

  “They could have been so much.”

  “They will be.”

  “It’s too late. They’re not children anymore.”

  “You’re wrong, William. It’s not too late.”

  “I’ve made so many mistakes.”

  “We all do.”

  “I should have married you.”

  Childless Adelia stared, clutching the sleeves of her cardigan in her own curled fists.

  “Move in with me,” he said.

  She caught her breath too sharply. “Wait, William. Wait before you say that. There are the girls, and Margaux. Don’t say such a thing too quickly.” He set his jaw. Because he wasn’t answering, because perhaps the idea would slink away to the place from which it came, Adelia heard herself chattering on. “You should think about this more. You might regret it. There are the girls to think about, and Izzy’s still at the house.” Adelia was ticking things off with her fingers. “We’re not children anymore. And there’s Elizabeth’s divorce, and Margaux, and the carriage house.”

  “Stop,” he said. “Stop.” Adelia stopped. The skin beneath his eyes looked bruised, and an unshaved spot of white stubble remained on his jaw. This was her William, after all these years. “Say you’ll live with me,” he said. “Just for a while. Just while I get my strength, and then you can go. But I will not go back to that house without you in it.”

  Because she was feeling too much, because there was nothing else to say and nowhere else to go, Adelia climbed into the bed with him. Her hands found him with relief. She was careful of the IV needle, careful with the contour of his body on the hospital cot. It was the first time she had lain in a bed by his side. So often, as children, they’d lain beneath the cedar beams of the carriage house. She remembered him smelling like grass. And now! How many years had passed, and only now could Adelia Lively climb into the bed of William Adair. Beside his body, pale in the hospital sheets. So much was fading around her. It was the saddest thing in the world. Blinking this away, she lay close to him, close to his face. She kissed the stubble of his hair. She kissed his eyebrows, his antiseptic shoulders. She kissed the wisps of hair on his c
hest and laid her head there, listening for the sureness of his brave competitor’s heart.

  “Is it too late?” he asked. Adelia blinked, blinked, blinked. She could feel his chest against her lashes as they moved. The chest of William Adair.

  “No, William. It’s not too late for anything at all.”

  Chapter 3

  Louise Wilson was expiring in Breacon. The boredom was literally killing her. She had applied for a job with the Philadelphia agency on a whim, after her boyfriend-if-you-can-call-it-that broke up with her and she decided it was time to get out of New York. The boyfriend, if you are calling him that, was an idiot named Bradley who did monkey work in the back office of an investment bank and dreamed of becoming a trader. The end of the relationship arrived when Brad procured himself a blond girlfriend who worked in fashion marketing. This circumstance shouldn’t have been as devastating as it was. Louise was sick of going to Irish pubs with him when all around her New York gleamed. But when he broke up with her, rather than the other way around, she found herself in the midst of a drunken tailspin that resulted in, among other things: a) a chipped tooth; b) a single night in which she was twice mistaken for a prostitute; c) the intensely regrettable decision to shag some poor girl’s boyfriend while the girl cried in the next room over; and d) the even more regrettable decision to alert her shipping-magnate boss to the fact that his mother was not actually senile but simply had no interest in his life. And so Louise was in need of a new position. Furthermore, as she was no longer in possession of her comfortable room in the shipping magnate’s Carlyle penthouse, she figured she might as well try a new city while she reorganized her life.