Still…Oliver bends down to gather the scraps of ribbon and paper from the floor. That he lives over the shop is both the delight of his arrangement and its flaw, as he has been known to confuse work and privacy, professional contact and social contact. Disarray belowstairs has a way of rising, he has discovered, like heat, and Oliver has been known to get up in the middle of the night with a compulsion to tidy things in the wrapping area, or to pick through the stems in the refrigerators, plucking a bruised outer petal or removing a spent stem altogether (an activity that inevitably depresses him). He moves quickly now, his bags forgotten by the door, gathering, tossing, cleaning up. The soaked paper may not be salvageable, but he unfurls the roll in an attempt to dry it, anchoring the end with a pair of wire clippers. He pulls three fading dahlias from the water, cuts them midway up the stem, and inserts them in a pale blue old milk of magnesia bottle to take upstairs. Then, noting the unblinking glow of the office answering machine light, he retrieves his bags and unlocks the door to his apartment stairs.
When he first arrived in the city five years earlier, it was with a largely irrelevant degree from Brown and a far more pertinent bequest from his late father, the use of which Oliver had determined in advance and in some detail. This use involved the purchase of a building in which he would live while he established his business, the preemptively named White Rose, and for the first weeks of his city life he walked the neighborhoods, looking for the right building with the right sign affixed—a sign that he imagined would read FOR SALE. His naïveté over matters of real estate, over matters of Manhattan real estate in particular, has given him much retroactive amusement over the past years, and quite rightly, but in fact this method did yield the final result of 22 Commerce Street, even if the sign in question did not read FOR SALE but CONDEMNED BY THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
Oliver remembers the first time he saw it, having passed by the little street many, many times, mooning over a gorgeous, expensive (and, incidentally, fully inhabited) brownstone on Barrow. Commerce Street, after all, is easy to miss, and it goes nowhere that Barrow Street does not, so it was weeks into the steamy summer of 1992 when the emerging crowd of the Saturday matinee caught his eye and made him take what he imagined would be a pointless digression. And there, a few doors up from the Cherry Lane Theatre, was his place: tattered, pink-bricked, the size of a modest suburban home in an older suburb. There were planks of wood in the windows and the front steps had been hacked away (for what? he wondered), and he saw, when he peered into the alley alongside the building, the ominous scurry of a fat city rat.
It was the right place, and he felt first a flood of relief, as if its appearance confirmed every assumption he’d made.
That CONDEMNED sign would mean a delay for his project of many months, so he rented a sterile studio in a new building on Perry Street from which to do battle with the city and gain the abandoned building. There followed months of further delay as he asked permission to make improvements to his newly acquired, formally uninhabitable building. (This was a bureaucracy that only New Yorkers could create, he thought. It featured applications endlessly lost, and paid expeditors who promised to whittle years of roadblocks down to mere seasons. And when his applications were at last approved, he faced the final indignity of another two months wasted before anyone bothered to inform him of the approval.) Additional months passed as he dealt with an entirely different array of Kafkaesque city agencies, this time to obtain a zoning easement so that he could operate a business on the ground floor of his new address. Lastly, there were the months of renovation limbo as he waited in vain for contractors to call him back, contractors to materialize for appointments, contractors to do the work he had finally managed to contract them to do.
All through this period, Oliver’s mother, Caroline, rent her garments and phoned regularly to ask, Was he sure…and, Did he understand…and, Wouldn’t he at least consider…? Oliver kept his cool. He regretted that his mother did not share his sense of adventure about what he was coaxing from the glorious ruin on Commerce Street, but he wasted no effort trying to convince her. Instead, he placated her with frequent visits to Greenwich and fed her the encouraging news of his growing business, which had indeed taken root in the temporary and unlovely soil of his little Perry Street flat.
Already, Oliver was spending a few mornings a week on West Twenty-eighth Street, arriving early with the other dawn risers of the flower world, poking his fingers and nose into the crates and tubs of inventory as it got hauled off the trucks. The owners of Dutch Line and Fischer & Page got used to the sight of the kid in the old corduroys and fancy leather shoes who turned up in the darkness and stamped his feet for warmth like everyone else, puffing hot breath into the cold, blowing steam off the terrible coffee sold by the only vendor willing to sell it at that hour on that street. He spoke enough to show he knew what he was talking about, but mostly he kept quiet and listened, and he noted how many of the buckets of tulips went to the man with the shop on East Sixty-first, and how many of those buckets were red, how many yellow. He followed the famous—and famously cantankerous—florist from SoHo as he trawled the street and pointed out the white ranunculus and hot pink Daladier he wanted with a gesture so subtle it might have belonged to a bidder at an auction, yet clear enough that his assistant, a slender woman in black, always lifted the right flowers from the water. He watched with raw fascination the huge man who arrived draped in a sort of sheepskin cape and moved among the dealers, chatting, chatting, but never raising an arm, let alone a finger. Yet, when he moved on, the wholesalers would direct that very specific buckets of viburnum and hydrangea be put aside for him. The best buckets, Oliver saw, awed.
He might have apprenticed himself to one of these people, but he was impatient, so he began by dropping into restaurants in the late afternoon, casually introducing himself to managers and sometimes chefs, offering to do their flowers. Most were curt, but Oliver had charm, and often enough he found himself at a bare table with a cup of tea and a couple of serious, nodding men, showing them photographs of flowers and containers and making notes about their color preferences, heights, shapes, and prices. During this period he created his arrangements on a plastic sheet stretched on the floor of his studio, and when they were done he transported them to their destinations in a child’s red wagon, the vases wedged tightly and the flowers wrapped against the wind. After the first month, he’d accumulated eight regular clients and a host of sporadic customers. He added office lobbies, doctors’ offices, two clothing shops, and an antique store on Bleecker Street. He began to leave business cards beside his arrangements, with the new address optimistically printed and his current phone number. He began to get calls.
All of which made him ever more impatient for his own home.
When the pleasurable part of the day—the mornings on Twenty-eighth Street, the hours working with the flowers, the deliveries—was past, Oliver went to Commerce Street and confronted the creeping pace of his renovation. Termite damage had been revealed in one post, dry rot in a wall, the six-over-nine windows he’d bought by special order from a reproduction glassmaker suffered repetitive delays, meaning that plywood continued to cover the window openings. The upstairs fireplace was declared unusable, then probably unusable, then probably okay, so long as he wasn’t intending to actually light fires in it. The missing front steps continued to flummox him; he could not imagine where he might obtain an appropriate replacement. The water ran brown, earthen brown.
Caroline came by as often as she dared. She was in the city fairly often, working with the New York City Ballet Guild and meeting Oliver’s stepfather for dinner. She didn’t necessarily want Oliver in an antiseptic suburban castle, but the atmosphere of his future home, with its flying plaster and rat droppings, was more than her maternal heart could easily withstand. The choices Oliver was making daily were baffling to her, including the decision to preserve a spectacular crack in one of the original walls, or the failure to install a shower in the bathroom, where Olive
r was having the existing fixtures—a worn pedestal sink and a long, rusted, claw-foot tub—reporcelained. She despaired when it at last became clear to her that, having lifted a layer of plywood and two of rotten linoleum from the floors, her son did not intend to recover the original planks, with their scars, knots, and gaps. She assumed an air of quiet martyrdom, bringing carpeting catalogues and samples of fabric for a theoretical couch, proposing paint colors for the bedroom, which Oliver intended to fashion from one end of the open upper floor. Apart from one small victory (a particular green paint he took to so avidly that she was soon begging him to relieve the ubiquity he intended for it with some—any—other color), her failures were comprehensive. When the building was at last ready for furnishings, Oliver rented a U-Haul and went to Brimfield for the May show. He got up at five with the rest of the madmen (the early hours on Twenty-eighth Street were good preparation for this), parked at Quaker Acres, and walked the dewy, muddy fields with a large roll of bills, retracing his steps in the truck that evening to pick up the bed, the vast wooden table for arrangements and the smaller one for dining and the smaller still for his computer, the mismatched chairs, the wardrobes (he had ignored his mother’s plea to build closets), the chests, the candle stand nobody wanted because it had been refinished, the trio of luscious still lifes of pansies, a fortuitously discovered edition of Modern Roses from the 1970s, and, to his absolute amazement, a three-step block of marble that would prove to fit so perfectly it might have been stolen from his own threshold.
When it was finished, he invited his mother to dinner. He also invited his stepfather, a gesture so magnanimous on his part that it effectively offset Caroline’s residual distress. The business was kicking. (He had just done a wedding at the Puck Building, he told them, and one of the guests, a publicist for Ungaro, had called to book him for Fashion Week, which meant at least one huge, slavishly kowtowing delivery to each of the twenty or so opinion makers in the industry. A good gig.) Henry Rosenthal, himself on enforced good behavior that night, seemed actually impressed. Caroline was happy.
Home: check.
Work: check.
But there still was the little matter of his being single. Oliver would have liked to reassure his mother on that point, but anxiety of his own had set him adrift, and he was unprepared to discuss the situation with anyone, especially her. His relationship with Matilda, his girlfriend since sophomore year of college, had been petering out, though she still came to Greenwich with him occasionally and had moved to the city as he had, settling into the Upper East Side postcollegiate den of Rupert Towers, where she shared an apartment with three other initiates in the training program at Morgan Stanley. Matilda had become an aunt in the months after graduation, and now spoke fervently about children. Her intentions were unmistakable, and Oliver, who had never shared with her his own concerns, began to withdraw. He wasn’t what she needed now, he explained to her in a final, pained dinner near her apartment (he didn’t want her to have to cry through a long taxi ride), but he would always think of her with love, which was true.
Afterward, there was no one. Of course, Matilda had not been anomalous in her desire for children—children someday if not someday soon. Women wanted children—he understood that, and what right did he have to ask a woman to choose? It seemed safer to keep himself to himself, to watch his friends pair off and marry, and not to dwell on what was unavailable to him. Then he had met Marian.
Oliver turns off the light in the shop and goes upstairs, the bag of bottles clinking once, twice against the wall of the narrow stairway. In his apartment, he goes first to the kitchen and puts away the artichokes and frisée, the chocolates and orzo, for his dinner with Marian. He tips the short ribs into a stockpot and opens one of the bottles of wine, covering them by a few inches. Then he puts in some pepper and bashes a couple of garlic cloves, which he adds, and places the whole thing in the refrigerator. The apartment, long like its downstairs twin, is serene, even with the bed unmade and the morning’s newspaper on the bathroom floor. His resistance to music and the backwater quality of his street combine to produce a rare silence in a city that’s elsewhere frantic with perpetual noise. Oliver, looking around, feels again what he has felt intermittently throughout the day, that he is living the right life, in the right place, with the right people in it. It is a feeling of deep pleasure (and some guilt, because the rest of the world cannot, apparently, be so fortunate), but little security, because while he himself does not fear the future, he knows that Marian does, and he hasn’t a clue what to do about that.
CHAPTER FIVE
Who Is Charlotte?
Historians, as a rule, are not fanciful. They do not speak of inspiration in the way that fiction writers do (or at any rate, in the way that fiction readers speak of it to people who are not fiction writers). No one, for example, has ever asked a historian where he gets his ideas. At least, no one has ever asked Marian that.
Which is not to say that there is never a story. Sometimes, there is a story. Sometimes it’s even a haunting one, replete with stray breezes, the slamming of doors, the spontaneous, serendipitous appearance of a new idea. Marian, for instance, has a story about the day she became aware of Lady Charlotte Wilcox, but she has never told it, because no one has ever asked.
Her story began when she walked into the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale on a raw March morning some years earlier. She had removed her heavy coat and slung it over her arm, and with her other arm was holding two books from her own library—that is to say, the Nicholas Murray Butler Library at Columbia—to her chest, while simultaneously trying not to spill a take-out latte.
Marian had not been to the Beinecke in years, and if the truth were told, she didn’t want to be there now. The day trip was meant to finalize a paper she was scheduled to deliver two weeks hence at a conference of eighteenth-century scholars in Tucson. Marian’s subject, well within her habitual stomping ground of the Age of Reason, was the decline of the Society of Merchant Venturers, a happy band of Bristol-based slave traders who only faltered when the Anglican and Methodist churches began to condemn their trade in the late 1770s. She was particularly interested in the family of John Forter, whose six ships made the three-part journey from the Gold Coast to Charleston and back to Bristol hundreds of times, eventually funding the purchase of a great townhouse near the port (now a Lloyd’s Bank) and a stately pile near Brund, Derbyshire, called Charleston House (now owned by the National Trust). Manifests of a number of voyages bankrolled by Forter, and the general records of the company, were enshrined in the British Library, but the Beinecke—through a quirk of transatlantic marriage and the Yale-o-philia of one of its alumni descendants—had come into possession of some of the family’s personal papers. The official grail of Marian’s excursion was a copy of John Forter’s will, which was inexplicably absent from the British Library holding, but there was something else, too. There was a stray reference, encountered the previous summer while Marian was doing preliminary work on this paper, in London. It had been bugging her.
The reference occurred in two letters from a Forter ship’s captain, one posted from Charleston in April 1762 to his sister in Hertfordshire, the second following some three months later to the same recipient, this time from Bristol. The Charleston letter was a terse grumble. The captain, whose name was (as near as Marian could decipher his signature) George Hartwell, would not be able to take his much anticipated holiday with Anne Beckwith, née Hartwell, because orders had reached him in Charleston compelling a detour to Philadelphia, where he was expected to collect a young lady for the passage to England. Hartwell’s crew, the captain wrote, would not mind the digression—Philadelphia was held to be nearly English in its comforts and diversions—but he would miss his sister’s company and the hunting he had long been anticipating.
That was the first letter.
The second letter was all about the young lady herself—so sweetly pretty, even with her hair much more plainly arranged than that o
f the English ladies her age, so witty, so clever with the men, half of them mad in love with her enough that he had had to speak with them severely, for wasn’t she scarcely more than a child and entirely alone in the world except for strangers to whom she was bound in Derbyshire?
As in Charleston House near Brund, Derbyshire? Marian wondered.
Marian was intrigued. After all, there wasn’t much in the way of west-to-east transatlantic relocation in the 1750s, still less undertaken by a woman. And a young, unaccompanied woman? This, Marian had never encountered. The fact that Hartwell’s orders apparently came from John Forter himself was just slightly…interesting.
The young lady did not seem to have a name, Marian had noted at the time, looking up from this document and frowning. She was under the dome of the old British Library, so soaring and noble. She loved it there, loved the fishbowl feel of everyone gathered in their concentric circles of desks, as if all worshiping some central deity, which perhaps they were. Gazing up at the curving vault above her, Marian felt the insubstantial, anonymous, forgotten young lady give a little flutter, like the beating of hopeful wings at her temple. This was an instance of the long dead making a thin but eager claim on the living, a not-unprecedented sensation for her, or for any historian, she supposed. The lost person wanted to be known, and yet there was little to substantiate her claim on awareness. After all, the wisp of the unknown young lady of two and a half centuries before surely had not very much to do with the decline of the Forter family or the Society of Merchant Ventures of Bristol, England, or the Age of Reason and its cultural implications.
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