The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  It wasn’t as if she’d forgotten that Arthur hadn’t forgiven her. She still remembered that William had lost his ability to smell. She knew it was in June that Margaux announced she was sick, when Isabelle stuck her fork in all those lanterns, when Elizabeth was pregnant and they were all beginning to fade. Those recollections were sad, but she was starting to sort things more clearly. Tomorrow she’d bring back the measuring tools. She could draw up a blueprint in William’s basement studio. She’d like to talk to Isabelle and tell her something that would calm her down. She could find out what happened with Jack Weld, ask her about growing up alone in the house with the absence of a mother and Adelia up the street. She’d like to talk to Elizabeth about the divorce. And she could remind herself that even if Arthur hadn’t forgiven her, he didn’t want to see her suffer. He cared enough that he wouldn’t allow her to get hurt. She could go on like this, living in this way. She could keep a straight line, clearing the floor of her mind so that corners could form in the shape of a house.

  Chapter 14

  He had been thinking, before Isabelle strode back over the lawn with an empty bottle of wine in her hand, that his family had embarrassed him tonight. In the past, William had always imagined his family was the envy of every other household on Little Lane. He had always suspected Jack Weld of jealousy, because his daughter was passive and his wife was a drip. But tonight, for the life of him, he could not see what evidence had caused him to hold such convictions.

  Before dinner, he watched them fluttering around in their various preparations, like so many frantic insects trapped in the house, and he felt sorry for them. He felt for Adelia, who had draped herself in small hard jewels in an attempt to seem more womanly. Because Elizabeth had flown to Adelia’s aid in preparing for the party, he felt intense fondness for Elizabeth, with her unkempt hair and her inexplicable jacket. He even pitied Diana and promised himself he’d be kinder the next time the topic of the carriage house came up. And when he saw Isabelle coming down the stairs in her white dress, looking like the little girl of whom he had been so proud, he felt a pang of regret for having accused her of disappointing him.

  But at dinner, with the Welds gathered at his table, he saw his family through their eyes, and he was embarrassed. He saw, from the slight lift in Elaine Weld’s eyebrows when Adelia served the chicken, that Adelia was not his wife. As she served the guests, uncomfortable with her jeweled wrists in oven mitts, he could see that Adelia was not the woman he’d married, and she had no right to assume such a familiar place in his house. Her chicken tasted like pounded rubber soaked in brine. She was not a wifely woman. Perhaps he had known this when he married Margaux. Perhaps it wasn’t only wounded pride but the knowledge that, despite her perfect topspin, Adelia Lively was the kind of woman who creates inexpensive dinner menus while dreaming of vengeance, a woman with none of Margaux’s softness, without even the decent curves of a woman such as Elaine. Understanding this made it difficult for him to look at Adelia. He tried to avoid her gaze. He could tell that no one liked her chicken.

  And his daughters. He saw them as Elaine must have seen them. Elizabeth kept running in and out of the kitchen as though her ridiculous jacket were on fire. Diana slouched the entire evening with nothing to say for herself. And Isabelle, who had looked so pretty when she first walked down the stairs in that white dress, spent the entire dinner flirting with Arthur as though she were a prostitute. Three times he caught Weld watching her while she whispered in Arthur’s ear, her cheeks glowing in a way that made William feel ashamed for her sake. Three times he imagined her as Weld did, and it nauseated him. When he compared Izzy to Abby, who ate her chicken politely and listened while Elizabeth blathered on, he wanted to grab her by the braid and drag her upstairs so she could learn how to act like a decent child again. He could see Jack Weld thinking: My daughter would never behave that way, whispering at the table, disrespecting her elders, smiling as loosely as a hussy. He could see the flush of triumph that spread itself over Weld’s face, and it dawned on him that Abby Weld, whom William had never credited with much, had grown up gracefully. She had learned to be less plain. And what had happened to Isabelle? Had she always been so flimsy in her character? Perhaps he had fooled himself. Perhaps the promise he saw in her had never existed after all.

  The only member of his family of whom he had been truly proud was Lucy, singing that song from Les Misérables. It revived his belief that there was something special about the Adairs, some quality that other people lacked. But then Elizabeth sent her upstairs, and it was as though the lights went out on the patio and everything was drained of the color it had acquired while she was spinning around in her pink nightgown under the starry sky. William was forced to remind himself that, after all, his own children had been like that when they were young, and look how they ended up. At which point he caught sight of Diana watching Isabelle and Arthur as though they were falling slowly into a black hole from which they would never emerge.

  As he was recollecting this, alone at the table in the wake of the party, Isabelle walked across the yard with an empty bottle of wine in her hand. William did not want to think where she had been, or how she had disposed of that bottle’s contents in the space of twenty minutes or less. When she sat at the table, he noticed that her feet were bare and there were little flecks of grass around her ankles, as if she had been turning cartwheels after the grass had been mowed. It was such a childish thing that he wanted to take her in his arms and demand that she remember who she was, because for the life of him, he couldn’t remember.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said. Her voice was so hard that he understood the grass on her feet had deceived him. They sat in silence for a while, and William occupied himself with counting Margaux’s irises. He was at twenty-seven when Isabelle reached for the bottle of wine left on the table. He was at forty-four when she finished her glass.

  “How do you feel?” she asked. He told her he was fine. When she poured herself another glass, she caused him to lose his count. Determined, he started over at forty-one, but again his counting fell apart because he couldn’t believe how quickly she polished off the second glass. She was eighteen years old. She was a little girl. Why she had chosen to act this way was beyond him. She was no longer pretty in that white dress, which was skimpy around her shoulders.

  “Daddy,” she said. It irked him that she had taken to calling him that now, after all these years. “I’m going to go over and talk to Jack Weld about the carriage house.”

  He didn’t say anything. He tried to find the black shape of the bullfrog that was making so much noise.

  “Daddy, do you want me to go over and talk to Jack Weld about the carriage house?”

  “Isabelle, I don’t care. I do not care about the carriage house. I do not care about Jack Weld. It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me whether you talk to him or not.”

  She finished the bottle of wine. The speed with which she drank it disgusted him as he counted Margaux’s irises, looking away from her, hoping she’d leave him alone.

  When she was gone, William was startled to realize that tears were coming out of his eyes. This surprised him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, and he had felt none of the warning signs that usually preceded the welling of tears. There was nothing. No building up, no intensity of sensation. Only a spontaneous effusion of water, a vestigial fatherly response that had no basis in actual emotion. He sat there, leaking tears, until he realized that Margaux had come from behind the house and was bending down in the bed of ferns that she’d planted along the edge of the property. He watched her through his leaky eyes for a while. She was wearing a pale lavender dress with fluttery sleeves and a sash around the waist, as though she had stepped out of that old photo of her as a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding. Each of her motions among the ferns—she was cutting and placing them in a square glass vase—was deliberate and fluid at once. Because her dark hair was spread over her back and her shoul
ders, whole parts of her faded into the night. In the way that he knew how, he had loved her, and she had chosen to disappear. He had never been disloyal; it was she who had left him behind. He wasn’t absolutely guiltless, of course. She had told him she didn’t want children, yes. She was firm about that. Perhaps she knew somehow that she wouldn’t last. But he had imagined a family! A family of beautiful girls. He imagined Lizzie and Di, and then he imagined Isabelle. He hadn’t known how sharply Margaux would decline.

  When she finished cutting ferns, she turned and noticed him sitting at the table. She lifted one hand to wave. He lifted his. He wondered if she could see his meaningless tears. She hesitated, holding her glass of ferns, tilting her head to one side as if trying to place him precisely, as if attempting to put a name to his face.

  Margaux, he thought. Wife, if only you were here.

  But already she had disappeared through the laundry room door, and she was no more gone than she had been when she was standing there.

  Later Adelia stuck her head through the sliding door and asked if he would come inside.

  “No,” he said, looking out at the garden.

  Her head stayed there, insistent and stuck. “William, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’d like to be alone,” he told her. He had never told her that before, he had always wanted her presence close by.

  “No,” she said. “No, you can’t be. I need you here with me.”

  “Go inside, Adelia.”

  “No,” she said again. “Not unless you come with me.”

  Her head refused to withdraw, and so he stood, and he observed that the unbidden tears had stopped welling. When he followed her inside, there was something reassuring about the brisk way she took the stairs, as though she were reminding each one of its place. He followed her. It was nice to follow someone after all. She turned down the bed and pointed him toward the pajamas she had laid out on his chair.

  “Get in bed,” she said. No, she was not a wifely woman, and yet she was right here, as important as she had always been.

  “Stay with me,” he said.

  She hesitated, focusing on his pajamas.

  “I need you here with me.”

  She folded her arms across her thin chest. She was not a wifely woman, but she was his Adelia. He had lived with the benefit of her closeness since he was a boy. Now he could feel her tumult. The close, palpable snarl of her confusion that could almost be mistaken for anger. Without speaking, without looking at him, she kept her arms folded. She was pressing her lips together very hard, blinking as she used to do when someone had insulted her but she refused to let them see her cry. He almost pitied her, but he couldn’t let her go. He remained still before the bed. He would not lie himself down until she decided to stay.

  “I need you here with me,” he said again.

  “I’ve been here with you from the start,” she said. William moved to sit with her, but she pointed once again toward the laid-out pajamas, and William, grateful to be given a plan, did as she directed him.

  Chapter 15

  The windows of the Welds’ house were brightly lit. They looked like amber lozenges, soft around the edges, melting into the night. Seeing them made Izzy remember her throat; she was thirsty. “Windows are the souls of a house,” William used to tell her, before the architecture lessons had ceased. The Welds’ house was bright with rectangular souls that she wanted to drink. She stopped by the mailbox, alone in the gaping night, watching the house. The air smelled of cigar smoke and summer; he must have walked down this driveway, smoking a cigar, under the swarming black leaves. His lingering presence caused Isabelle to pull up short, caught in the netherland between two imposing houses. She wondered why a person should feel so left out of the world in which she was meant to exist. Before her, the long screened porch was empty. Behind it, the lights in the kitchen were on. All three of the Welds were moving around one another like woven strands. Jack was vivid. Around his family, in the privacy of his illuminated kitchen, he ascended into ecstasies. She watched him laughing at something that Abigail said. He reached over and gave her a high five. What a ridiculous motion, the high five. Two needy hands, stranded together. But the Welds laughed. They moved around one another and smiled. After a while, Abby kissed them both and then went upstairs. Jack and Elaine were alone in the kitchen. The dance broke up. Jack stood at the sink, washing dishes. Elaine moved over to the door, looking out. Isabelle would have been worried that Elaine could see her—it seemed she was staring directly at Isabelle—but she knew that from inside the house she was only a part of the darkness. Elaine couldn’t see her, standing by the mailbox, all angle and stiff white dress, feeling like an angel of vengeance with her bare feet against the angry gravel of the driveway. Jack leaned away from the sink to say something to Elaine, and she responded with a single word, facing the yard. Then she turned and left the kitchen. Upstairs, a light went on. Abby moved over to the window and lowered the blinds. So be it, Isabelle thought. Let the blinds drop on Abigail Weld. Let her sleep a deep and oblivious slumber.

  Jack finished with the dishes. He dried his hands on the dish towel and moved through the glass door to the screened-in porch. He sat in one of the wicker chairs and lit a cigar, cupping the match with his hand. When he sat up, sucking in with his cheeks, Isabelle watched the cigar’s tip crumple to a rim of red ash. His body had blended into the darkness, but she could see the circular shine of his eyes moving, scanning the night. She wished she’d picked up a handle of something out of William’s liquor cabinet. She could have used its glass weight in her hands. She thought of turning around and going back home, but the idea was repulsive to her, and when she took a step forward, the gravel under the soles of her feet was pleasantly painful. She felt sharpened by the sensation as she walked, pressing her feet against the stones. When she worried he’d hear the sound of her steps on the gravel, she switched over to the lawn.

  He didn’t see her until she was close to the porch. If she hadn’t been wearing the white dress, he wouldn’t have seen her at all. She could have walked right up to the porch and draped herself across the screen like a huge luna moth, camouflaged by darkness, invisible to human eyes. But he saw her dress moving and stood up. He walked over to the screen.

  “Isabelle?”

  “Hey.”

  He glanced behind him into the house. The kitchen was empty. “What are you doing?”

  “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “You shouldn’t sneak around like this. If you want to come in, come in. I’ll get you a glass of lemonade. We can sit in the living room with Mrs. Weld.”

  “That sounds like a ball.”

  He sucked on his cigar, watching her.

  Isabelle attempted to make her voice gentler. “You wanna come outside with me?” she asked. “We could sit in those chairs.” She gestured toward the two iron lawn chairs, stripped of their cushions, that had lounged unused at the side of the Welds’ house for years.

  The rim of his cigar flared and crumpled, unfolding petals of ash. “This is ridiculous,” he said.

  Isabelle couldn’t be sure, exactly. Her brain felt hot. There was the helping of her father, the spiting of Adelia, the desire to feel something painful again. She looked up at him. She knew that, in theory, she was beautiful, her white dress shining against the darkness of her hair. She commanded her looks to reach out and wrap around him where he stood on the porch. She could see him softening. The breeze moved the hem of her dress around her legs.

  “Go home, Isabelle,” he said, but this time his voice was quieter.

  “Am I different now? Than when I was a kid with all the promise in the world?”

  “You’re still a kid. You’re Abby’s age.”

  “She’s done better than I have, hasn’t she?”

  “I never compared the two of you.”

  No, he hadn’t, had he. She’d already
had enough. Bile was rising in her throat, and she had to concentrate to keep it down. “I’ll go,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. She could feel them sharp as stones. “But can you do something about the carriage house? It seems like you owe me a favor.”

  He turned and stubbed out his cigar. When he came back around, something had changed in his face. “I said I’d see what I could do. I’ll do my best. I don’t know what you’ve imagined, but I don’t owe you any favors.”

  “What’s your best, Jack? What’s your very best?”

  He studied her, head tilted to one side. “You know what my best is, Isabelle? Nothing. I don’t owe you anything, and I won’t do anything for you now that you’re threatening me. My best is nothing. Whatever importance your father has invested in the carriage house means nothing to the outside world. That building is no more than a rat-infested dump, and to be honest, I’ll be delighted when it goes. I’ve looked forward to it for a long time. I’m going to sit here and smoke a cigar, watching, when that thing finally falls.”