“Open your eyes, Ginny; you’ll like what you see. One of the most beautiful places on earth. Hear that? That’s the new launch horn over at the yacht club.”
She heard nothing. Her body seemed to be collapsing in on itself. When she opened her eyes, she and Sid were standing at the edge of the hill overlooking the cove. Sid’s hand was firm on her shoulder but not holding her there.
“What could be more peaceful than this? It makes you believe everything’s right in the world; doesn’t it?”
She heard him; notes of sincerity, like a gentle chime, had slipped through.
“Take it easy now. Just listen to your breath—in, out. That’s it—in and out. Slower, now, and a bigger exhale. Can you slow it down? That’s it. You’re doing great.”
In and out. Gina let her eyes drift from one landmark to another. In and out. She was vaguely aware of Sid’s voice, guiding her breathing as her awareness, like a rising sun, left its dark otherworld and
stretched out its rays, illuminating the scene in front of her. She fixed her eyes on the light playing on the water’s surface and breathed. She felt the skin on the back of her neck drying, heard the chatter of terns, and looked up to see their arc in the sky. The ambient sounds of her childhood gradually drowned out her breathing. Her heart began to quiet.
Sid’s hand slid off her shoulder. For several minutes they stood, silently surveying the cove.
Finally Sid said, “How long have you been having panic attacks?”
Panic attacks. For the past few months, those two words had popped in and out of her mind like gophers in a field, and she’d been plugging the holes as fast as she could.
“I had my first one when I was twenty-two,” Sid said. “Right after I graduated from college. Came on right out of the blue. My last one was about two years ago. I’m an expert at them. Grannie had them, you know. Of course, back then they just called Grannie neurotic. You feeling okay now?”
“Okay,” she said, though she still trembled.
She kept her eyes on the cove. She imagined the refreshment of the cool water and if she’d thought her legs could run, she might have bolted down the hill and jumped in.
“Sure is beautiful today. I must say I was pretty surprised neither of you Gilbert girls wanted this place. Not that I would’ve wished fighting with those idiot developers on you. I won’t even tell you what they had in mind. It was criminal.”
The image of the developers’ subdivision punched Gina so hard she had to close her eyes again.
“I’d hoped to tell you in person, but . . . Life’s full of surprises, isn’t it? No one ever thought they’d see Sid sober, but I have been, one year and counting.”
Sid was silent for a few moments. Finally he said, “That was the best damn year and a half of my life, living here.” Gina looked at him; his eyes locked with hers. “Ever wonder how it would have all turned out if Eleanor hadn’t handed me back to Mother? I dreamed of coming back to this spot all my life.”
Gina had to look away to buy time, to think of what to say. Remembering the letters in her bag, she broke out in a fresh layer of sweat.
“Well, I don’t suppose you wanna be rehashing stuff that happened years ago. What’s past is past.”
Gina turned to Sid again, realizing suddenly that he’d moved past a place where she’d been stuck. His eyes filled and for a moment, she was afraid he was going to cry. If he did, she knew she would, too. But as he scanned the cove, an expression of pure joy smoothed away his wrinkles of melancholy.
“This place . . .” he said. “This place was paradise. It is paradise. Not like . . . Lily House. I forgave your mother, you know. I forgave her for everything. I probably would have drowned at Lily House. I forgave her and never had the chance to tell her. I forgave her because . . .”
He leaned over and picked up a crab apple. Straining, he hurled it down the hill. It hit the dock with a short pop! before bouncing into the water. “Because before you even existed, Ginny Gilbert, your mother was like a mother to me.” He shifted on his feet, then turned, his eyes searching hers. “Do you understand? I couldn’t even bring myself to go to the funeral. Isn’t that pathetic? I couldn’t . . . it was just too much . . . loss.” His face crumpled, then composed itself again.
In her depleted, defenseless state, Gina experienced Sid’s every word and gesture as acutely as she had as a child. But now, she understood that his words were sincere and the pain he expressed had been theirs to share. “Sid . . .” she started.
A Lexus SUV pulled into the driveway and honked. The driver, a slim man wearing white shorts and a red baseball cap, got out and pulled a ladder out of the car. As he approached them he said, “We can’t stop, Sid. We’re already gonna be late.”
Sid took the ladder from him and said, “Say hi to my cuz, Gina. Gina, this is my partner, Bart.”
Bart took off his hat and did a playful bow. “Hi, Sid’s cuz,” he said.
His smile was warm, but Gina was still too rattled to muster anything but a handshake and a hello. She froze as Sid carried the ladder into the house, terrified that he’d take it up to Cassie’s room and see the mess. But he left it inside the front door.
“Well,” he said when he came outside again. “We’re going to Ogunquit for the day. How long are you in town?”
“I leave tomorrow.”
“When tomorrow?”
“Early.”
She wondered if Sid was trying to figure out whether they could still meet. But he said, “Okay,” and for a moment his gaze slipped sideways, as if there was something more he wanted to say. “Well, have fun making the house drawings—you’ll be glad to have them.”
He and Bart climbed into the SUV, and Sid waved as it pulled out of the driveway.
Gina dashed inside and ran upstairs to Cassie’s room to grab the shovel and box. But Sid would know it was she who’d made the hole! “I was looking for my old diary in the wall,” she imagined telling him. Lying would be absurd; he’d see right through it. And wrong—the letters belonged to him, too. What should she do? She’d talk to Cassie. Would Cassie want to tell Sid?
She was hopelessly scattered, couldn’t think, and now the poor bird was banging around the attic.
Gina went downstairs to get the ladder and carried it to Cassie’s room, careful not to bang anything, realizing the silliness of worrying about minor scratches after she’d practically destroyed a whole wall. She leaned the ladder below the attic door and took the flashlight from her bag. Then she climbed the ladder and pulled herself through the tiny opening into the musty, roasting-hot space.
From the corner, a sudden fluttering of wings. She moved toward the sound, crouching low along the splintery floor, careful not to let the flashlight beam touch the already terrified bird. She pointed the light at a triangular hole in the gable end that was once a vent but was now open to the air. She hoped to steer the bird toward it.
All at once the swallow was airborne, crashing into the rough, sloped roof boards. Gina stood and moved closer to the end of the attic space, gradually confining it, and before long it was trapped in a tiny area, its only escape being the vent opening. She shined the light on the hole, still careful not to illuminate the bird. Slowly, she raised her arms. For a moment, the bird appeared frantic in the spotlight and then seemed to slip almost accidentally through the opening.
She climbed down the ladder, at first thinking she’d put it back downstairs where Sid had left it. But then she decided to leave it under the attic door to let him know that she, too, had cared about the captive bird.
In an inclusive rather than an exclusive kind of architecture, there is room for the fragment, for contradiction, for improvement, and for the tensions these produce . . . An architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality . . . It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contrad
iction in Architecture
Chapter 16
Annie wasn’t home when Gina got back to Lily House. She looked for a note that would update her about Lester, but there was none.
She took a cold shower to try to calm herself. After a bowl of yogurt, she picked up the phone to call Cassie. She put it down. She started to dial Paul’s cell, then hung up. She brewed some coffee and gulped down half a cup while staring at the Washington letters, trying to figure out when to tell Cassie and what to tell Sid. She realized she couldn’t tell Cassie until she’d decided whether to tell Sid. She didn’t want to be swayed by Cassie’s opinion—and Cassie would have a strong one. At least Sid would be in Ogunquit for the day, so she had a little time to think before he discovered the hole. She paced around the kitchen, wiping the clean counters with a sponge.
Drawing! It would help her think. She went into the study and, with her new measurement, easily resolved the lines of the second-floor plan. She constructed the north, south, east, and west elevations of the house, her hands translating her measurements into lines, lines forming house-portraits on the page.
The elevations represented the building as it had been conceived, before time had wrinkled its clapboards and tugged at its eaves. When she finished drawing, the house stared up at her, taking her aback in its poker-faced simplicity. It was considered a Victorian, like her house in San Francisco, but its austerity made it seem wholly unrelated to its fanciful West Coast cousin.
In the dimming, muggy stillness, she looked at the house and knew that her time with it was finished and that Sid’s had begun. Until today, the notion of her cousin ending up with the house had seemed abstract, almost farcical. But seeing him in the flesh and hearing the emotion in his voice made it real. Now, she noticed with surprise that the feelings gripping her didn’t include resentment or regret. And, she knew what she needed to do about the letters. She steeled herself and dialed Cassie’s number.
“What’s the asshole going to do to the house?” Cassie sputtered when Gina told her about running into Sid.
Gina spoke slowly to compensate for her sister’s agitation. “I didn’t ask—I was too freaked out. But Cassie, he fought off developers to buy it. He assumed we knew; I’m sure he was trying to get in touch with us because he wanted to tell us. He’d thought we’d want the house. But we didn’t.”
“Are you defending Sid now? That’s not the point, that we didn’t want the house! The point is . . . the point is he just had to have it. Because he didn’t get Lily House! Mom must be rolling over in her grave!”
“No, Cass, he’s really attached to the place. The landscape . . . the cove. The way Mom was, and we are.” Gina hurriedly related Sid’s revelations, ignoring Cassie’s gasps of disbelief. “He’s not the nasty train wreck we remember from our childhood,” Gina said. “He seems to have made peace with the world.”
Cassie wouldn’t hear her. “It feels like he stole our house! He’s a psycho!” She wailed. “Like the rest of the Bantons! If my kids have their genes . . .”
Her anxiety still reverberating, Gina felt the sting of Cassie’s lumping her in with the “psycho” Bantons, and it reminded her too much of their mother’s dismissal of Fran’s misery. “Cassie, at the house, I had a panic attack.”
“Who wouldn’t have, running into Sid? Why’d you go to Whit’s Point alone, anyway? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Gina ignored her questions, determined to make her listen. “I mean a full-blown I’m-gonna-die panic attack, Cassie. I had one earlier this summer, too, but never told anyone. Except my doctor.”
“Gina, you’re stressed out and—”
“I want you to listen!” Gina said. She described everything she’d felt and all that Sid had done to help her, sparing no detail.
Cassie was silent for a few moments. Finally, when she said sadly, “Oh, Gina,” Gina knew she’d gotten through to her big-hearted sister.
Then, she told her about finding the Washington letters.
Cassie gasped. When Gina finished telling about hiding the letters, they both fell silent. Gina imagined that Cassie, too, was trying to make sense of the events leading up to the canceled Christmas.
Finally, Cassie said, “If Mom and Fran hadn’t always been at war with each other, you wouldn’t have felt you had to hide the package. And if Mom had gotten the letters . . . ugh! So many ifs! Do you realize how close we came to losing them? I can’t believe it, Gina. Imagine what they must be worth! I’m dying to see them!”
“Is there any chance you could come up here tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Cassie sighed. “Oh, Gina. I wish you’d told me you were coming; we could’ve had a birthday party! Let’s see. Umm . . . So I have to be at a job in Brockton in the afternoon, but if I came up really early, yeah. I could, I guess—I could get there between eight-thirty and nine. Where should we meet?”
“At our house.”
“You think that’s a good idea?”
“Yes, I do.”
When she and Cassie had hung up, Gina searched for Sid’s phone number in Cassie’s old email, took a deep breath, and called him. Sid didn’t answer, so she left a message that she had something important to discuss and asked him to meet her at the house at nine-thirty the next morning.
In the morning, Gina sat on the front steps of the old house waiting for Cassie. Lester had been kept at the hospital overnight; he’d had a slight fever in the afternoon. But this morning it was gone, and Lester’s doctor felt confident that he’d be able to come home at the end of the day. Gina decided to delay her trip to meet Paul and the kids until tomorrow so she could help Annie bring Lester back to Lily House and get him settled.
Now, she was restless with anticipation. Sid had left her a message after dinner agreeing to meet her at the house, and she was hoping that Cassie would get there before him so she’d have time to warn her Sid was coming.
But Cassie didn’t pull in until nine-thirty. “The traffic on 128 was horrible!” she complained when she opened the car door. As she was getting out, Sid’s van turned into the driveway.
Gina gave her a big hug. “Sid’s meeting us,” she said quickly, still in their embrace. “I asked him to come so we could talk about what to do with the letters.”
Cassie pulled back and turned to see the car coming up the hill, her mouth gaping in disbelief. “Oh Gina, I just can’t. It’s just too much. You should’ve warned me.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Gina said. “I promise it’ll be okay. It will be. You’ll see.” She smiled and waved at Sid. “I haven’t told him I found the letters yet. But he’s had a whole career of selling this kind of stuff, and he’ll know exactly what we should do with them.”
“Why do you think you can trust him?”
“Cassie! Why should he trust us? We’re the ones who made the letters disappear.”
Cassie shuddered. “God. Okay,” she said, gritting her teeth as Sid’s car door slammed. “But I’m not going to talk to him about our house.”
“Okay. You’re allowed.”
Sid came around the corner wearing black shorts and a sky-blue polo shirt. “Well. It’s both Gilbert girls. What’s the occasion—are we going to have a passing-of-property ceremony?”
Cassie wagged her fingers hello at Sid, and when he wagged his back in imitation, Gina wondered how she was going to get through the next hour with them. She led them into the living room where the letters, rewrapped in the original Christmas paper, were sitting in the middle of the floor. “Sit here,” she ordered, pointing to the floor.
“Christmas in August!” Sid chuckled, and Gina suddenly realized the full burden of Christmas associations that she might be loading on him. Might he even remember the wrapping paper? “Is it for me or Cassie?” he asked.
“Both.” Gina told Sid to open the package. He started peeling off the Christmas paper, and when he realized what was inside, he let out a big laugh.
“What the hell . . . where have you been keeping these a
ll this time?” He handed a few of the envelopes to Cassie, who carefully extracted the letters and opened them on the floor in front of her. For the first time in a long time, she seemed speechless; Gina hoped it was because she was engrossed and not that she was furious with her.
“Before you look at them,” Gina said, “come with me, and I’ll show you where they were.”
Cassie and Sid followed her upstairs, and when Cassie saw the hole in the wall of her old room, she gasped, “Gina!” and cast a worried look at Sid.
“I’ll pay to get it fixed,” Gina said quickly.
Sid laughed. “No need. It’s not a problem,” he said. “Really. And anyway, are you kidding? Look what you found in there!”
Relieved, Gina recounted the story of how the letters traveled from Lily House in her bag to the hiding place in Cassie’s wall.
“Mother told me she’d given them to Ellie,” Sid said. “I didn’t even know Mother had them. She must’ve found them somewhere in Lily House and never told anyone. I couldn’t figure out why they never surfaced and figured Ellie was hiding them.”
Back downstairs, the three of them sat silently on the floor while reading the letters.
“Wow,” Sid finally said. “They’re really something, aren’t they? Do you know the story?”
Gina shook her head. “Only the gist.”
“They were never supposed to have seen the light of day because they would’ve been such bad PR for Jefferson. The way it got started was, Jefferson had written to this libertarian friend in Italy, calling Washington ‘Anglican’ and ‘monarchical’ and a bunch of other unflattering stuff. The letter was published overseas and then re-translated and published in the States by Noah Webster—the dictionary guy. So then Washington got pissed off, and he and Jefferson shared a few nasty rounds of correspondence, which of course our very own Sidney Banton was the messenger for. Apparently, a couple of people at Mount Vernon read the letters, and after a few drinks Banton gossiped about their content. Jefferson’s political enemies would’ve had a field day if they’d been made public—dissing the first president was totally uncool—and then suddenly the letters were nowhere to be found. Banton denied their existence. Banton’s biographer said publicly that he believed Jefferson had asked Banton to destroy them. But privately he thought Washington had brought the letters to Lily House when he visited Banton here in 1789 and that Banton had hidden them. Jefferson rewarded Banton for the rest of his life for keeping the letters private—writing recommendations for him and eventually hiring him as a consul general.”
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