My daughters resented me, I knew. They thought me cold and selfish. I wondered what they would think if they saw me now, wandering about an empty house for the fourth day in a row, trying to say goodbye to the place that harbored so much of my life, and not knowing quite how.
We assumed that with older came wiser, but it wasn’t always so. As often as not, age brought an understanding of one’s very lack of wisdom.
I hadn’t prepared myself well for this time. Perhaps I assumed that it wouldn’t come, that I would simply go to sleep one night, as Nick did, and not wake up. Perhaps I wished it. There would have been no pain in a parting like that.
But I kept waking up, a little older and slower of body each day, a little more aware that life was a double-edged sword. Those of us who were blessed with longevity were the ones who would suffer the approach of death.
I had, indeed, been blessed. These empty rooms were once rich and overflowing with people and things. Even as I sat now in the bare bay window of the living room, I felt the velvet drapes behind me, saw the grand piano at the far end of the room, heard the murmur of guests seated before the marble fireplace. The dining room was cavernous without furniture, yet it was filled with the memory of a table set for sixteen, sideboards covered with my mother’s silver service and trays bearing a sumptuous Sunday brunch.
The girls hadn’t cared much for Sunday brunch. From the time they were old enough to want to be elsewhere, they had thought it confining. I had considered it family time, and do, to this day. Sunday noon was when I most often thought of the girls. Annette would be home, serving brunch to her own family. Caroline would be either at the office or with her artist. Leah would be…wherever.
I worried about Leah. She was the most fragile of my girls, the one who always seemed a little lost. I wished I could have helped her, but that was another of the shortcomings that I had come to recognize with age. I had never been a communicator, for to be one was to open oneself to discussions one might not like. Far better, I had always thought, to tell myself that Leah was stronger than I thought, than to talk with her and learn that in fact she wasn’t.
Of course, as was a mother’s prerogative, I worried about her anyway.
She loved this house. I remember her scrunching up right here on the bottom step, at the curl of the banister, watching the comings and goings. A small, agile child, she would skip up the stairs and down the hall. She loved her room, too, all those bright, oversized flowers on the wall, their warm colors scattered like petals on the bedspread, the carpet, the chair. She never forgave me my summer of redecoration.
Ah, dear. None of them did. And I was so proud of what I’d done.
You didn’t ask us what we wanted, they cried. Well, of course I didn’t ask. My mother didn’t ask. She just did. She knew what was best, and we didn’t question it.
But the rules suddenly changed, and I was unprepared. My daughters left me behind in the dust—my fault as much as theirs. I preferred the old rules. I still do. Life under those rules was simpler. It was more clearly defined.
I dare say that had I been of my daughters’ generation, I could never have done what I did that summer in Maine. Oh, I’d have had the affair. Will always insisted that it was destined, and I agreed. But had I been of my daughters’ generation, I would never have returned to the city with Nick at summer’s end. I’d have given up everything material, lived with Will in the gardener’s shed, and had his babies.
Would my life have been happier? I don’t know. I do know that it would have been different. Had I stayed with Will, I wouldn’t have been walking these echoing halls.
Was that an echo? Or the phone?
The phone, I thought, and set off.
Foolishly, I let the movers take every phone but the one in the kitchen. I hurried in that direction, but the halls were longer than they used to be, the stairway more steeply wound. I held tightly to the banister lest I got dizzy and fell. What a terrifying thought, to lie broken at the bottom of the stairs, unable to move, unable to summon help, feeling life ebb and being helpless to stop it.
I was seventy, which was relatively young in an age of obituary pages devoted to ninety-year-olds. Still, I felt old.
The telephone was on its fourth ring. “I’m coming!” I called and in the next short breath damned my ankles for their stiffness. Like my elbows on damp mornings, they betrayed the active woman I once was.
Don’t hang up! I’m coming!
It occurred to me that I shouldn’t bother to answer. Everyone knew I’d moved. It was probably a solicitation of some sort.
No, it was probably Lillian. She had been a dear to house me and loan me her car. I had her worried, spending hours like this in my big old empty house.
Breathless, I snatched up the phone. “Hello?”
“Mother! You are there. It’s Leah!”
“Good gracious, Leah!” I pressed my heaving chest. My heart was racing—traitorous heart—from both the dash I’d made, and from a sudden, intense fear. Cautiously, I asked, “Why are you calling me here?”
“When there was no answer at Lillian’s, I played a hunch. Why are you there?”
She didn’t sound upset. Perhaps she didn’t know yet.
Telling my heart to behave just a little longer, I did my best to sound casual. “There were one or two things I had to check on. Things I promised the realtor. For the buyers.”
“Didn’t Gwen take care of everything?”
“These are last-minute things. They’re done now. I was about to leave. Two more minutes and you’d have missed me.”
“Then I’m glad I called now. We were starting to worry. When are you coming?”
So they didn’t know yet. They didn’t hate me yet. I breathed a little easier. “Didn’t Gwen give you my messages?”
“They’ve been vague.”
“Well, of course they have. I can’t say exactly when I’ll be there. There’s more to moving than hiring a van. I have to meet with lawyers and accountants. I have to close up memberships and say goodbye to friends. Those things take time.”
There was a pause, then a measured, “Mother, you wrote us letters saying that you wanted to spend time with us. If your business there takes much longer, our two weeks will be up before you arrive.”
“No, no, it won’t. I’ll be there. I’ll be there very soon.”
“Tomorrow?”
“The day after.”
“Mother,” she chided, “we’re waiting for you.”
“Aren’t you having a good time?”
Leah repeated the question to her sisters. I tried to make out their response, but couldn’t. I desperately wanted them to be enjoying themselves. I desperately wanted them to be enjoying each other. It was a great sadness of mine that they weren’t close.
“We’re having a wonderful time,” she said, and while I wasn’t convinced, I didn’t push my luck.
“What do you think of Star’s End?”
“Spectacular!” she breathed, this time without consulting her sisters. I felt the loosening of a huge knot inside me. “It’s an incredibly beautiful place,” she said. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen it.”
I bit my tongue, but only for a minute. There was too much I wanted to know. “Is the house in good shape?”
“Perfect.”
“And the work in the kitchen done?”
“Completely.”
“Tell me about the porch.”
“It wraps around from the front and widens in back. That’s where we spend most of our time.” Which was precisely what I’d hoped.
“And the flower gardens?”
“Are unbelievable.”
The knot loosened a little more. I couldn’t help but smile. Leah loved the place. That was important, a first hurdle cleared. Relieved, I asked, “Have you spent much time in town?”
“Not as much as Caroline and Annette. They’re spending all your money.”
“Are they buying good things?”
Leah re
peated this question. I could hear Annette and Caroline talking at once. Over their voices, Leah said, “Very good things. There are serious artists here. Did you know that?”
“Yes. I did.”
“Caroline says that if you don’t get here soon, she’s packing up the paintings she bought and shipping them home to Chicago.”
“She likes them that much?”
“She has an appreciation for fine art, and this is fine art. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” I answered as though there were no such thing as a chest pain or palpitations. “Why do you ask?”
“You were breathless before.”
“I had to run for the phone. But I’m fine, Leah. Do me a favor, will you? It suddenly occurred to me that poor Gwen is waiting for my arrival. I had promised her some time off. Please tell her to take it now. It sounds to me as though you girls have everything in hand. Well, that’s all, Leah. I’m going to hang up now, because Lillian is having friends over. She’ll be upset if I don’t get there soon.”
“We’ll be upset if you don’t get here soon. Have you made flight reservations?”
“Not yet.”
“Mother.”
“I can get them on an hour’s notice.”
“We need more notice than that if we’re going to meet you in Portland.”
“No need to do that. I’ll take a cab.”
“Give us two hours’ notice, and we’ll be there.”
“Really, Leah. A cab will be fine. I’m hanging up the phone now. I’ll see you soon.”
I replaced the phone softly, timidly, half-expecting someone to walk out of the butler’s pantry and call me a coward. For I was that. Yes, the girls were waiting, but I wasn’t ready for Star’s End yet—and it wasn’t only that I feared for my emotional state when I saw that place again. It was this damnable goodbye that I had to face first.
The pain of it tore through me. I told myself that my decision was made, that all that remained was to walk out the door on the arm of these wonderful memories. I remembered that other goodbye. The two were similarly painful, similarly final.
“You’ll be back,” Lillian had said with a wave of dismissal, more times than I could count, and I sympathized with her intent. It was easier to think that than to think the other.
But I wouldn’t be back. I knew this, as I’d known few other things in life. Nor could I complain. I had lived long and well. Even without Will. I had, indeed, been blessed.
fourteen
CAROLINE WASN’T HERSELF.
For starters, she had just enjoyed breakfast with Leah and Annette, enjoyed being the shocker. Annette had made omelets, Leah tea and toast, Caroline fresh-squeezed orange juice. They had eaten on the deck in the morning mist without an unpleasant word exchanged.
Caroline was relaxed, relaxed being a second shocker. She had no business being relaxed. Her single call to the office the day before had been brief and uninformative, which should have made her wary, but hadn’t. She felt distant from the office, so much so that she hadn’t taken a single look at the papers she’d brought along.
She didn’t feel distant from Ben, though she hadn’t heard his voice in over a day. The sound of him was all over her thoughts, telling her that she had to make a choice. That alone should have had her tied up in knots.
And then there was Ginny. She should have been furious at Ginny. But she wasn’t.
She felt calm. She didn’t even want a cigarette. She could picture one—could mentally go through the motions of taking one between her fingers, putting it in her mouth, striking a match, and taking that first, deep draw that filled her lungs with something evil but divine. She should have been dying for that drag. But she wasn’t.
Caroline had never been superstitious. She prided herself on having a grasp of the facts—Ben was the first to say that she was grounded in reason—but something was happening to her here. Harsh thoughts couldn’t be sustained; anger fizzled; worry was mild and brief. She felt mellow.
Crazy though it sounded, she was almost willing to believe that there was indeed something powerful in the air at Star’s End, which was why she was in Downlee at ten in the morning, sitting on the stoop of Simon Fallon’s wood shop.
Simon was a carpenter. He specialized in making grandfather clocks, or so her sources said, but those sources—artists with whom she had talked the day before—hadn’t mentioned his name in the context of clocks.
Simon was in his eighties. If there was a story to be told about Star’s End, he was the one to tell it.
Or so they claimed. Caroline wanted to think they were full of hooey, but the skeptic in her didn’t have a chance against the woman who had to know more.
She sat straighter when a small old man appeared on the lane, and rose when he came toward the shop. “Are you Simon?”
He tipped a forefinger off his temple. “You must be Caroline,” he said in a voice as wrinkled as his face. “They said you’d come.”
“They knew better than me,” she mused.
He pushed at the door of his shop and motioned her to follow. Inside, like a group of friends in varying states of undress, were four clocks in the making. Caroline was enchanted.
“Figured you’d get here sooner or later,” Simon said, but she was moving from one to another of the clocks.
“These are wonderful.”
“I sell to kings.”
“Do you really?”
“And movie stars. Not many people can meet my price.”
“That steep?”
“For one-of-a-kind.”
Caroline touched the head of one, the throat of another. Ben’s thing was paint, not wood, which meant that she was no expert on the latter, but she didn’t have to be an expert to recognize the quality of Simon’s work.
Then again, her sensitivities were at a high, which was why she had sought Simon out. She turned to find him leaning against his workbench, waiting.
“I was told that you’ve lived here longer than most,” she said.
He gave a tiny nod. “Eighty-seven years.”
“And that you’re familiar with Star’s End.”
“I ride out there now ’n’ again.”
“Will you tell me the story?”
He chuckled. “Which one? Place like that’s full of stories.”
“The one about the legend. The lovers.”
“Ahhhh. That one. Why’d you want to know?”
“It seems important.”
He studied her for a minute, then shrugged. “Could be.” He fell silent.
Caroline figured that two could play the game. So she sat down on the floor amidst Simon’s clocks and scattered sawdust, and smiled. She could wait. Along with mellowness had come infinite patience.
Simon responded with another shrug. “It was always a place of fancy, always bigger than anythin’ else in town, set out there on the bluff like somethin’ in a book.”
She kept smiling.
“The stuff of dreams, they always said. It’s natural there’d be stories.”
“Is the lore pure imagination, then?”
“Some. Not all.”
Still smiling, still patient, she said, “Tell me the ‘not all’ part.”
He tucked his hands behind his overalls’ bib and warned, “If you’re looking to hear a happy story, I can’t tell it. This one’s sad.”
“That’s okay. I want to hear anyway.”
“They met one summer.”
“When?”
“Way back. B’fore you were born. She was mistress of Star’s End for those months. He worked there.”
“And they fell in love?”
“Yup. Caused one heck of a scandal.”
“Because of their social differences?”
“Because she was married.”
Caroline caught in a breath, then let it out. “Oh.”
“You’re right to say that, missy. Husband was coming here every weekend and going back to the city on Mondays. While he was gone, she
slept with the groundskeeper.”
Caroline pictured Jesse Cray. But of course, this was before Jesse’s time. “What happened?”
“Someone took a picture of them together and put it in the newspaper.”
“Was it a compromising picture?”
“Like you’d know it, no. In my day, a woman only had to look at a man with that kind of devotion, and if he wasn’t the right man, she was condemned. Her husband saw the picture.”
“What did he do?” Caroline asked.
“Said they should go home. It was the end of the summer anyway.”
“That’s all?” She had been imagining a duel at dawn on the bluff. “No confrontation?”
“He wasn’t that sort. Leastways, that’s what they said. Me, I didn’t know the husband. Knew the groundskeeper, though. Whole town did. Liked him a lot.”
“He must have been a rogue.”
“No. Just a nice fellow who fell head-over in love with a woman who was already taken. Near broke his heart when she left.”
“But why did she? If she loved him, why didn’t she stay?”
“She never told us. We never saw her again.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
Caroline thought of lovers sharing a single summer, then parting and never seeing each other again. She was no romantic. Still she was touched. “You’re right. That’s a sad story.”
And it stuck with her. More than stuck. Haunted. She figured it had to do with the fact that she loved Ben and couldn’t think of never seeing him again—which she had no intention of telling him, on principle alone, after the ultimatum he’d given her. She didn’t like ultimatums. He could sit and stew until she was good and ready to call.
Still, she thought of Simon’s lovers and felt a devastating emptiness.
“They never saw each other again?” Annette asked. She and her sisters were out on the deck again, working on iced tea and sandwiches this time. The tea had bits of orange and lemon in it, and was incredibly good, as was the lobster salad, which was mixed lightly with lemon mayonnaise and piled onto slices of broad boule bread. Tea, salad, and bread were all Leah’s doing, and would have amazed Annette even more had she not been hanging on Caroline’s every word. A gentle breeze came off the ocean and over the rocks to where they sat, carrying with it the scents of Star’s End and, in so doing, rendering the story much more real.
For My Daughters Page 17