She thinks of her friends. Will they whisper that childlessness has finally caught up with her? Will the few who know about her cancer shake their heads knowingly? Will the others be critical—another career-obsessed woman who forgot to have children, and now look what she’s done? What will Caroline Lehmann, her oldest friend, make of Soriah Neal? What will Oliver Stern, her oldest friend’s son, her lover, make of Marian for taking her in, a girl he has never even heard her mention?
Marian closes her eyes. I want this, she thinks. I have been a good person, if not a good wife. I have not asked for many things.
When she opens her eyes, she is surprised to find herself utterly calm.
I can’t fix it, Marian thinks. It’s too big to fix. But I can do this.
She reaches, again, for the telephone, and presses the buttons.
“Mr. Kahn’s office,” says Jennie Phillips, his assistant.
“Hi, Jennie. This is Marian. How are you?”
“Oh, Mrs. Kahn. It’s nice to speak with you.”
“Tell me something,” Marian says evenly, “what does Marshall’s afternoon look like?”
“Ooh, let’s see,” says Jennie. “Not too bad. He’ll be out of here by six, I think.”
“Is there anything absolutely crucial?” she asks.
This question does not compute, and Jennie is silent. Marian imagines the bafflement on her sharp little face.
“Ah…”
“Anything that can’t be rescheduled?”
“Rescheduled?” Jennie asks. “For when?”
“I’m coming down,” Marian says. “I want you to cancel whatever you can. I’ll be there in half an hour, and I need some time with him. If you can’t cancel his appointments, try to put them off till after five. Okay?” she says, trying for a cheery lilt.
“Is everything all right, Mrs. Kahn?”
“Oh, fine,” she says. “And tell him that, would you? That everything’s fine. I’m on my way.”
“But—” the tiny voice erupts. Marian puts down the phone and picks up her coat, and then she is through the door, closing it behind her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Aubergine Time
On Thursday afternoon, after a solo lunch in a corner of the Beekman Arms’s dim tavern restaurant—and she does have to admit that the food is excellent—Marian addresses the ladies (and token gentleman) of the Rhinebeck Historical Society in a paneled room off the reception area. In the two years she has been giving some version of this talk, she has come to note a pattern of strained proximity in her audience, a historical version of celebrity name-dropping, in which Charlotte Wilcox’s latter-day admirers attempt to persuade Marian that they have crossed spiritual if not physical paths with their heroine. Someone hails from Brund, Derbyshire, home of the Forter family. Someone’s ancestor was a thief, incarcerated in one of the London prisons. A man once visited Northumberland House while on a walking tour of the border country. A young woman, who had detoured into a master’s degree in women’s studies before deciding to go to law school, had actually read Helena and Hariette in the rare book library at Stanford.
Marian finds these encounters pleasant, if not precisely enthralling. For someone working in the past, it is always invigorating to see people look backward and measure their own experiences against the long-ago experiences of others. In Rhinebeck, moreover, the members of the local historical society have an actual claim on Charlotte Wilcox—who after all began and ended her life on this general patch of earth, and whose bones lie buried not five miles to the north—and their interest in her is as affectionate as it is proprietary. Several members of this group, Marian is touched to learn, have taken it upon themselves to care for Charlotte’s grave in Rhinecliff, even writing and printing a pamphlet for visitors with a map of the site, including other graves of interest in the churchyard. “We did it ourselves,” says Betty Evans, the president of the group and the author—she informs Marian—of two pamphlets about the Roosevelt estate up the road. “We started to notice cars parked by the roadside. They were tramping over everything looking for the grave. We thought, Well, it’s good they’re coming, but let’s make it easier for them and try to point them to some other interesting people.”
“I hope it hasn’t caused too much trouble,” says Marian.
“Oh, not at all! Come for the past but stay for the present—that’s what we say around here,” she chortles. “Anyway, it’s wonderful for us. The chamber of commerce ought to give you a citation.”
“It’s my pleasure,” Marian says graciously. “After all, I enjoyed the time I spent in Rhinebeck doing research. Wish I’d stayed at this inn,” she says. “You were right about the food.”
“New York chef,” comments the token man, in a tone that implies this is not necessarily a good thing.
“It was finding those letters that really made her come alive for me,” Marian says. “Before that, I felt like I was following a ghost, but when I read those letters, I heard her voice…It was an amazing feeling.”
“Still,” the man goes on, homing in on his true theme, “I was hoping you’d delve more deeply into Alice Farwell’s family. It’s quite an illustrious family in its own right, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” Marian says politely. Charlotte’s correspondent of so many years, who faithfully preserved her precious letters and gave her friend a home at the end, had not gotten much of Marian’s attention, it was true. But after four hundred pages of dense historical biography, Marian had been anxious not to add more heft to her book.
“Well, her daughter married into the Wharton family. And her granddaughter married into the Danvers family. Henry Wharton Danvers was her great-grandson. You’ve heard of him, I assume?”
Marian, who has just gone numb, nods her head. “Henry Wharton Danvers? Who built The Retreat?”
The man positively glows. “Yes, precisely. He was my own ancestor, actually.”
“That’s amazing,” Marian says, floored and shaking her head. She does not care that he is, of course, misinterpreting her response, that he thinks it’s his own direct link to the Lady Charlotte story that has Marian so obviously awestruck. Let him think as much, Marian decides, as the man goes on to tell her all about his own myriad accomplishments as self-published chronicler of the Millbrook Hunt and a fly fisherman of national stature. She nods, careful to keep her gaze steady on his face, her thoughts wandering far. Oddly enough, what preoccupies her most is regret at not having made more of her connection to Barton, of all people. Might some remnant of the Farwell family have remained at The Retreat? And could she have found it? Were there descendants of Alice Farwell who might have had their own inherited stories about Alice and her lifelong friend? Marian had spent the past two years making light of her readers’ attempts at narcissistic connection with Lady Charlotte Wilcox. Was it possible that she was now grasping at her own?
When the alleged descendant of Alice Farwell and Henry Wharton Danvers has at last exhausted his litany of claims, Marian finally is able to begin disentangling herself from the group in the Beekman Arms. It is nearly four, and she has begun to feel that heaviness in her legs and arms, a signal of weariness. Between today’s lecture and the coming weekend’s ordeal, she can only hope for a wedge of sleep and privacy, and she thinks ahead to the romantically named Black Horse Inn with longing. But first there is the matter of finding the place—which, given the complexity of her driving directions, threatens not to be straightforward.
Marian thanks Betty Evans for her hospitality, and the chronicler of the Millbrook Hunt for making her day, and retrieves her car from the parking lot behind the inn. The light is beginning to sink, and there is the faintest hint of pink at the wintry edges of the sky. With one hand, she scans the radio for NPR and finally finds a station playing Mahler, but the Mahler is too lush, too soothing, so Marian cracks a window to let in the cold air, and it rushes through the interior. She has not driven the car since that day with Oliver, and she is struck by the bit
tersweet thought that her last remnants of him—of his breath, of miscellaneous, left-behind filaments—are thus being scattered away. She will call him when she gets back to the city, Marian thinks, to say all of those end-things she wants to say, and that she loves him, which will be better over the telephone, anyway. Marian can’t see him yet. She’s in too much danger for that. But there is no good in this silence between them, especially now, with Caroline coming home, and the certainty of their meeting in the future. What Marian will do is find the precise, internal location of her sadness about Oliver, and fix it to the spot with stones, like a cairn at a roadside. The sadness—she will know it’s there, but she will not visit it to peek between the rocks or listen to see if it’s stirring. It is over. With love, absolutely, but over.
Marian turns east along the rural roads, passing great estates with grazing horses and baronial entrance gates. At Rock City she pulls over to get gas and asks the attendant if he knows the way to Stanfordville, but he’s never heard of the place. The Black Horse Inn? she tries, but this, too, draws a blank. Marian squints at her scribbled directions. “What about Bangall?” she asks, and that, finally, draws a glimmer of recognition.
“Hey, Bill?” the attendant says, evidently to his boss. “Which way to Bangall?”
The boss comes over, examines Marian’s directions, pronounces them useless, and begins a litany of rights and straights, including a description of a big oak tree where she is meant to make a “hard, sharp left. Like, a hairpin turn, yeah?”
Marian nods dully. She pays for the gas and sets out, resigned.
Ten miles and forty minutes later, she finally reaches the crossroad of Stanfordville and sees, at last, the sign for the Black Horse Inn. It’s a little place, but it has about it an air of purposeful obscurity and serious wealth, from the impeccably landscaped parking area behind the building to the heavy wooden door she opens, stepping into a pretty, wood-paneled parlor. There is a rack of boots, walking sticks, and hats in one corner, an open bar on the opposite wall, and a good smell coming from somewhere. “Hello?” Marian calls, setting down her bag on the stone floor and shutting the door behind her.
“Yes!” someone says. “Just coming!”
He comes, a wiry man with receding blond hair, holding an open red ledger.
“Hello there!” He reaches immediately for her bag. Marian recognizes his voice.
“I made it,” she says. “I think we spoke on the phone.”
“Yes, probably. And you are either Ms. Kahn or Ms. Nemo.”
“Kahn,” Marian says. “But that’s funny.”
He looks up from his ledger.
“Just…Nemo. That means ‘nobody,’ doesn’t it? In Latin?”
“Does it?” The man smiles. “Well, it’s just you and Nobody tonight, though as I said, we’ll be full of wedding guests tomorrow. You’re here for the wedding, I think you mentioned.”
“The groom is my cousin,” Marian says. She looks upstairs, hungry for her bed.
He leads her up the wide stairs onto a landing furnished as a parlor. There are doors on either side, and he opens one for her, showing her into a small sitting room with a fireplace. Marian looks around, silently crediting Valerie Annis for her good taste. The only things standing between herself and utter contentment, she thinks, are a hot bath and a good nap.
When she’s alone, she sets down her bag and unpacks the toiletries, opening the taps on the long, claw-footed bathtub and turning down the bed. She carefully hangs up her dress from Bloomingdale’s in the wardrobe and takes down the inn’s white bathrobe from a hanger—Frette, she notes with guilty pleasure—and gets out of her clothes. The bathroom is full of lavender-scented steam. Marian puts up her hair. She stops the water and is about to step into the tub when something in the bathroom window catches her eye, and she steps close to look. It is not afternoon any longer, but it isn’t yet night. Marian smiles. That thing is happening outside, that sudden flush of color, so imponderably rich it seems to saturate the world. She wants to hold up her hands and catch it, but it’s so fast, she can never be quick enough, and then it’s gone and the evening floods in to replace it. Aubergine Time, thinks Marian, jubilant. Then she climbs into the bath and lets the hot water close over her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Awake, But Not Awake
Wedding central, Sophie thinks, walking into the kitchen of their Millbrook house and nodding grimly at Frieda, entrenched since the day before in full command mode. The long wooden counter is strewn with yellow legal pads, one of which is being slowly leaked over by a great chrome urn of coffee. The party urn, brought out only for large functions, like her father’s historical society meetings, or a wedding.
“No, no,” says Frieda unkindly. “I did not say that. I did not say four to park the cars. I said enough to park the cars. There are two hundred and eight guests expected.”
Lacking the physical object of her scorn, Frieda narrows her eyes at Sophie.
“No, I do not think so either. Yes. Twelve. Good. And by four o’clock sharp on Saturday, please.”
Crisply, she puts down the phone, then crisply picks it up.
“Four men! Idiots.”
“Hi, Frieda,” says Sophie.
“Your dress is upstairs,” Frieda says, dialing.
Sophie pours coffee for her father. She stirs in his low-fat milk and Equal, staring dimly out the window over the winter vineyard and the field where the horses are grazing. She can’t see Win, her own horse, but that doesn’t surprise her; Win tends to favor the shelter at the far end of the barn. The horse Barton rides when he visits is standing at the fence, nose to the ground. Barton is a fine rider, which means a great deal in Millbrook. She wonders if Oliver can ride. Oddly, it has never come up between them. Like so much else, Sophie thinks, stirring.
“Yes,” Frieda says. “I am holding for Mr. Weil. No, thank you, I need to speak with him personally.”
Mr. Weil, Sophie thinks. The cake guy? No. Millbrook Spirits.
“Well, tell him it is Miss Schaube calling. About the Klein wedding. Yes.”
Hostile silence.
“Oh, a small matter of five missing cases. Yes, that is what I said. Missing!”
Sophie closes her eyes. Surreal. Unreal. Or what is that thing people always say? That thing. That whine. It was a nightmare. They mean: a missed bus, a lost reservation at the restaurant, a canceled plane at the airport. Only once has Sophie ever heard someone use the expression and felt it was earned, it was necessary. A mother on the news one night, describing the sick, elastic feeling of turning around in the supermarket and finding her child not there, the hours that followed, the not knowing. It was a nightmare. Awake but not awake, functional but not really alive. This, Sophie thinks, her spoon clattering against the coffee mug, is a nightmare.
“That will be cold,” Frieda says. “It is for your father?”
“Oh.” She nods. “Yes. Sorry.”
“And that woman called about your hair. She would like to speak with you before Saturday. You need to phone.”
“All right.”
“You want to tell me something?” Frieda says.
Sophie stops. The coffee mug in her hand is indeed cooling.
“Something?” Sophie says.
“Why are we doing all of this?” Frieda says bluntly. “You are not happy about this. This is not a happy wedding.”
“No, it’s fine,” Sophie says, automatically.
“Fine. Is fine good enough? You would want your own daughter to be ‘fine’ two days before her marriage?”
Sophie looks at her, mildly stunned. There, secreted in the typically blunt and quite accurate observation, is the nearest Frieda has ever come to admitting a maternal sentiment for her. Sophie’s instinct is to cross the room and hug her. But this passes.
“Frieda, I know it will work out,” she says instead.
“What? What will work out?”
“Barton has never lied to me,” she hears herself say, as i
f this were the issue at hand, and not the fact that she doesn’t love Barton, she loves Oliver, who loves someone else.
“Your father would not want this, if he thought you were not happy,” Frieda says curtly.
“I know that. Look, everything’s okay. I just have that pre-wedding thing. Just…jitters. There’s no problem.”
Frieda stares at her. Then—mercifully, without signaling any more disapproval—she picks up the phone again, punches numbers on the keypad, and begins berating the rental agency for having sent the wrong covers for the chairs.
Sophie leaves the room with her cooling cup, her spirits as dull and hard as the stone floor she walks over. The farm has been as much her father’s passion as the New York house, and as faithfully restored. Unlike the Steiner mansion, though, this home had spent its entire three-hundred-year existence in the smug cocoon of the non-Jewish elite, and while Jews had inevitably penetrated the Millbrook colony (one had even been admitted into the vaunted Millbrook Golf & Tennis Club way back in 1970), a brief frisson of regret had nonetheless flowed throughout the town when one of its great architectural prizes had passed—twenty years earlier—into the hands of the Chosen. The house Mort moved into then, and brought back to its origins soon after, had been the home of Dutch farmers and English younger sons, gilded members of the Astor 400 and impoverished, downwardly mobile WASPs, thinks Sophie, passing the great staircase and moving into the beamed living room, where her father is sitting before an absolutely searing fire. But never a Jew. Till Mort.
“Wow,” says Sophie, handing him the mug. “Hot enough for you?”
“Actually, no,” Mort says, making a face. “What did you do with this coffee? Bring it by way of the Gulag?”
She sits down on the couch, taking up the Home section and effortfully starting to read an article about a house specially built from recycled materials. As if, she thinks, willing it, the day were ordinary, the wedding unconceived.
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