by Cindy Jones
"I am," I said.
Inhaling deeply, she shaded her eyes, and I noticed a tremor in her little finger. "What went wrong?" she asked.
Her question implied I'd messed up the drills she'd carefully taught me. Anger released a hit of adrenaline. "It's not about anything going wrong," I said, a bit too loud, noting the crux of the problem with Vera—always insisting dissimilar things fit together, her own brand of reckless creativity. "It simply wasn't meant to be," I said. "Ever." If I was not careful, I would break down. Not about Randolph, but the whole summer, about the lost possibility of connecting with an ideal life. I tried to remember how I had planned to tell her about the house but I lost my way and then the door opened and Nigel walked in.
Vera raised her hand. "Lily's back."
"Hullo, Lily." I was sorry he was here; now I'd have to deliver the bad news to both of them.
"There's a message from John Owen on your bureau," Vera said, sitting up straight, moving her blankets to make room for Nigel on the sofa. "But come and sit now." She patted the cushion next to her. Nigel opened the little refrigerator in the tiny kitchen casting light into the room. All those years of working to build an organization; who was I to tell him it had ended? Surely, someone could find another house.
"What, Lily? Tell us what happened." Vera's arm braced the sofa. Nigel concentrated on the refrigerator's interior as I did whenever the nurse gave me a shot; don't look and it will soon be over.
"Randolph's accountant has advised him to sell Newton Priors; he has hired a broker."
Vera struck herself in the heart. "I can't believe it," she said.
"Yes," Nigel said, his face still turned away.
"We assumed"—Vera clutched her throat—"that Randolph would require changes, perhaps even major changes in funding and direction such as Magda had pushed, but I never really anticipated he'd sell the house from under us."
"I did," Nigel said, retreating to his bedroom, closing the door behind him.
Vera leaned forward. "What happened with Randolph?" she asked, her eyes narrowed, seeking a place to lay the blame. "He asked if restoring old houses was the sort of thing you wanted to do, only a few days ago." She frowned. "He seemed so interested."
"Interested yes," I said. "In one thing."
"But he invited you to dinner. What happened to make him change so quickly?"
I stared at her. "He Googled me."
"Really."
"You told him I was an actress, remember? He discovered the truth."
"So much has changed since I was your age," she said, backing off now that her share in the crime lay exposed. "I don't understand romance these days."
"No, Vera," I said. "Things have not changed. They never change. Have you read Jane Austen?" I asked. "Inheritance laws change but human nature never does. Even dead, Jane Austen understands that." My voice grew too loud as desperation crept in. Why was Vera's recklessness only now clear to me? I deserved blame for not reading her more closely. "You knew. But you fed me to him anyway, like a throw-away orphan, hoping he'd let you stay in the house a few more years."
"Lily, what are you talking about?" Vera's face became ugly. "I wanted this for you." She spoke very slowly. "I desired with all my heart that it would work out for you—somehow—this time."
Tears came and I felt hopelessly tangled in my own losses.
"Lily," Vera said, rising, coming to my side.
I held up my hand. "Don't talk to me," I said. She tried to put her arm around me but I stood.
"We're all upset," Vera said as I walked out.
* * *
The next night I had dinner with Omar. Tomorrow, he would be gone, along with Archie, Magda, Bets, and Willis. And My Jane Austen. We met in the pub, Omar looking spiffier than usual in an oxford cloth shirt, his rough hair watered down and combed.
"I brought you something." He handed a book across the table.
"Omar, how sweet," I said, regretting I had not thought of a gift for him. I read the cover. English Manor Houses. "It will remind me of our summer," I said, aware it wasn't a straightforward gift; some irony existed that I was too anxious to grasp.
"Read the inscription." Omar smiled so hard his cheeks pushed his eyes into little slits behind his glasses. He waited for the punch line to occur to me, optimistic that it would.
To Lily, Repeat often:
People live in houses, not novels.
People live in houses, not novels.
Omar
"Very funny," I said, failing to match his mirth, turning the pages. I wouldn't be able to focus on the gift until much later, alone in Texas. We walked to Newton Priors and sat on the steps of the house in the twilight. "I once assumed Jane Austen was mistress of a grand house like this," I said. "One of my early mistaken impressions."
"Now you know," Omar said, smiling.
"Wouldn't you love to see all the letters Cassandra destroyed?" I asked. "Knowing what she really thought might solve your Jane Austen problem."
"Nah, I'd be disappointed, as usual." Omar shrugged.
"Probably," I agreed.
We were watching bats fly overhead, little black specks that surely slept in my attic during the day, when Mrs. Russell appeared. I almost missed her, dressed as she was in twenty-first-century jeans. "We're saying good-bye to the house," I said.
"Oh my dear," she said. "You'll miss the ball."
"The ball?"
"You didn't hear? Nigel called me last night and I rushed right over"—she indicated her attire—"dressed as I was"—she covered her mouth—"with a toothbrush in my purse." She laughed confidentially. "I slept upstairs last night," she said. "I've no time to turn around. The ball's Sunday and we're all pitching in to make it happen."
"I'm so glad," I said. "You've worked for it so long." Nigel's parting gift to the volunteers.
"Now or never." Mrs. Russell shrugged and I realized how alike she and I were, each of us projecting ourselves into dead Jane Austen. Mrs. Russell's need illuminated my own need to create my personal heroine. The real Jane Austen was unknowable. She was not the creature of perfection the family memoirs put forth, their lack of particulars allowing us to imagine her in our own image. I considered giving Mrs. Russell a copy of Magda's textbook.
"You know what I think I learned this summer?" I said, after Mrs. Russell left us.
"You can act," Omar said.
"Besides that."
"What?" Omar turned to face me, expecting something really interesting.
"I think I'd never make it in a Jane Austen novel; the experience might be worse than real life."
"Congratulations, Dorothy. You can tap your ruby slippers and go home now," Omar said.
"For example," I said, setting the book on the step in front of me and hugging myself in the evening chill, "Henry Crawford could crook his little finger and I would be a ruined woman before the story had a chance to begin."
"No you wouldn't," Omar said. "Not anymore."
I turned to look at Newton Priors in the waning light. How long would its details remain crisp in my mind? How would it appear from the distance of my humble gray cubicle? "I used to imagine myself as the protagonist in every novel I read," I said.
"Don't we all? Hard work being a protagonist."
"You can say that again."
"Hard work being a protagonist."
I socked him in the arm.
Omar smiled big and patted my knee. "Lily, I'm going to miss you."
"I'm going to miss you, too, Omar." My eyes filled with tears.
* * *
Omar departed for Michigan; I didn't see him again. I had hoisted my suitcase onto my bed packing everything I would not need before departure, when a knock sounded on my door.
"Can I come in?" Vera asked, her voice flowing over the transom. We had not spoken since my meltdown and I knew we needed to reconcile before I left. I'd been rehearsing potential lines in my head. Vera sat across from me on Bets's bare mattress, and from the way she leaned forward I
sensed she had an agenda.
"What will you do, Lily?"
"I'm going home peacefully," I said. "I'll probably stay with my friend Lisa until I get a job," I added.
"But what will you do there?" Vera repeated, irritation in her voice I found out of place, considering.
"I haven't figured that out yet," I said. "For starters, I'll probably gather courage to deal with my new wicked stepmother and then hope a gray cubicle offers me a paycheck and benefits." I waited. "Why are you asking?"
"I've been thinking," Vera said. "And I have a couple of ideas." I watched from my bed as Vera stared into middle space. "The first idea is rather ambitious, really." She looked at me. "Perhaps we could move this whole thing to Bibliophile Books—do it in Dallas." Vera's eternal creative optimism surprised me as she waited for my reaction, the old spark waiting to connect.
"Produce Literature Live in your bookstore?" Perhaps the problem was not Vera alone. Perhaps the combination of her eternal creative optimism with my indiscriminate hopeful longing equaled danger. She hadn't meant me harm; she was reckless and I was naive. I sat up straight. "You're right," I said, "that's very ambitious."
"Yes." Vera rested her chin on her fist. "And I'm needed here," she said, looking at her feet, clearly expecting me to understand her meaning.
"Is Nigel okay?" I asked.
"No," Vera whispered. She looked up and shook her head, eyes glistening.
"I'm sorry," I said, my voice catching, my own eyes filling with tears. Perhaps I'd used her just as much as she had used me, casting her as my new mother, expecting her to lead me to a safe place where I could belong to someone again.
"I can't keep him alive, no matter what I do, no matter how hard I wish it away," she said, clearly worn down by the resistance campaign she'd mounted over the last months.
"I'm so sorry," I repeated.
"Nigel is going to stay in Hedingham and I would like to stay with him," she said, stopping to compose herself. "You know"—Vera looked at the ceiling, wiping her tears with her hand—"our marriage wasn't ideal," she said, "but I never imagined being in the world without him. And I'm quite beside myself."
I searched my drawers for a tissue. "Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked, handing her a towel I pulled out of my suitcase.
"Well," Vera said, wiping her eyes, "that brings me to my second idea." She paused. "And that is—why don't you manage Bibliophile Books for me?"
I imagined leaving my gray cubicle to spend entire workdays in the stacks.
"You remind me so much of myself at your age," Vera said. "You know, I married Nigel with the understanding I'd never have children. But if I'd had a daughter, I'd want her to be like you."
"Thank you," I said, touched by the tribute, but still thinking about a day job surrounded by books, talking about books, touching books; freely reading through my lunch hour. Working in a bookstore would be an all-day party with a diverse guest list: Natasha Rostov and Prince Andrei, Daisy Miller and Miss Havisham, Nick Adams and Captain Wentworth. Jane Austen might join us.
She looked at her hands. "Nigel and I will be sorting through the books here, deciding which to send to the store," Vera said.
I imagined Nigel ending his days scanning the titles of hundreds of books, opening his favorites and reading a line to Vera, saying good-bye to old friends. I thought of them sharing this distraction, quite happy, in a way I didn't have the experience to understand.
"Some will be sent to Texas as inventory for the store. It would be very helpful if you could be on the other end to receive them. Chutney can't cope with large shipments."
I imagined Chutney sneaking out to the Dumpster after hours, tossing entire boxes of musty books into its pit. "I would love to," I said. "What a privilege."
"You know," Vera said, "when the books started coming in, he gave them all to me. He never said so, but I think the books are my compensation."
I would have to think about that.
"And Lily," she said, fixing my attention. "I'm sorry for the way things went with Randolph."
"Oh, Vera."
"It was a farfetched idea." She stood and reached for my hand. "And I was being very selfish."
Without considering, I used my best British accent and channeled Mary Crawford, "Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure."
"Touche," Vera said.
Twenty-Eight
Back in Texas, I drove through my former neighborhood, air-conditioning turned full blast. The changes in the season of my absence shocked me. The med student's little duplex on the left now sat vacant awaiting the bulldozer. A developer's sign in the next yard indicated imminent demolition, and a McMansion was going up where my duplex had existed, its construction begun during the summer. Gone were the casual days of twin porches offering two doors, two mailboxes, and two free neighborhood newspapers. The new regime dressed up; urgent flaming carriage lanterns and buxom petunia beds flanked solo porches whose portals could grace a temple. Titanic SUVs posed in driveways begged me to ask, What master of the universe dwelt therein? A Hispanic nanny pushed a double stroller out a front door.
I drove slowly past my dad's house, taking note of the "For Sale by Owner" sign in his yard. Dad always said doing it yourself was the way not to sell your house. Maybe he wasn't so keen to move.
I lived in Vera's apartment over the bookstore, managing the store by day, and reading from the unlimited supply of books in the evenings. Having sold my possessions before leaving for England, except for the box of keepsakes still locked in the trunk of my car, I kept remembering my things the way an amputee would remember a lost limb. It's in my closet, and then I would remember I gutted that closet and I didn't live there anymore. I had no clothes and no costume department to raid for just the right outfit.
I visited Karen and her family and we worked through our grief together, sorting through what china and photos she was able to save from the wreckage. Karen helped me with my project to donate copies of all my lost books to the Pediatric Oncology Ward of the Children's Hospital. We inscribed them in honor of our mother and whenever I had a new set to deliver, I arrived with enough time to read to whatever seven-year-old child, nauseated from chemo, felt well enough to listen to a story about twelve little girls in two straight lines or a monkey calling the fire department. I would pause briefly to compose myself each time I recognized my mother's voice.
* * *
Vera and I e-mailed regularly but the flood of new inventory required overseas phone calls for guidance. Several estates had donated books over the summer, and Chutney had parked boxes wherever she could find space, stacking books in the upstairs apartment when she ran out of room in the store. And now that Vera was shipping from Literature Live, we were drowning in books. Boxes piled in the aisles required narrow canals to travel to the cash register or my office.
"How are you, Lily?" she asked.
I immediately choked up. I'd declined my friend Lisa's happy hour invitation in order to be alone with a stack of musty books culled from the boxes of new arrivals—the smell of Newton Priors in their pages. Lisa would never understand falling in love with a clergyman I met in a deserted attic where we discussed his vampire novel-in-progress while My Jane Austen took notes.
"Lily? Are you there?"
"Yes. I'm here."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," I said, knowing she could hear the sharp intake of breath, even if she couldn't see the tears, "just lonely."
Vera sighed. "Did you call any of your old friends?"
"Yes," I lied, twisting the phone cord around my finger.
"Well, I suppose it will take some time to find your way," Vera said.
* * *
Omar e-mailed as promised, attaching an application to a dual MFA/MBA degree offered by the University of Michigan. So glad to hear from him, I responded immediately, asking how Magda's seminar was going, but he must have been busy because he didn't write back. Hearing from Omar brou
ght a rush of memories from the summer. I felt homesick for Newton Priors and My Jane Austen summer. But she'd surely gone to someone who needed her presence—the reader experiencing the shock of separation after finishing Number Six for the first time, an agony I understand clearly. And regardless, her books are with me always—in my office, near my reading lamp in the apartment, and at least one in the car for those moments I need to hear her voice—timeless and sparkling, swirling in my subconscious, folded into my existence.
I was thinking of calling Omar, just to hear his voice, when his e-mail arrived. This time his message brought a far more interesting attachment: a picture from the London Times, Court and Society Pages. "Hey, what's up with your old friend?" Omar wrote, and I could almost hear the snark in his voice. I read the caption, Sheila Bates and Peter Davidson celebrate Ziva's birthday at the Tate Modern. I'd never heard of these people and puzzled that Omar sent it to me until I recognized a familiar face in the middle ground. There, in strapless splendor, posing next to a giant apple core sculpture, was none other than Philippa Lockwood. My heart raced because the tuxedoed man at her side, his hand possessing her bare arm, his mouth open to speak, was not Willis. If My Jane Austen were here she would be looking over my shoulder, suggesting Pippa might simply be chatting with a mystery man while Willis fetched drinks from the bar.
"Lucky for you, I keep up with the foreign press," Omar wrote.
Foreign gossip, I said to myself.
* * *
"Mansfield Park belongs to so many people and can be read on so many levels," I said to the Bibliophile Book Club regulars seated around the table for our January meeting. Magda loomed heroic now, so safely distant I was willing to entertain the possibility that Jane Austen might have been experimenting in Romanticism when she wrote Mansfield Park.
"Slavery, feminism, and incest?" Michael asked, tossing his girlfriend The Look as if I'd exceeded their expectations this time. Michael, formerly a drummer, spent mornings on his laptop writing a book, borrowing from the stacks for his research. He watched all of us, seeking material for his characters. Occasionally I offered him new words from the summer: mindful, knickers, and bad form.