At first, Marian drives in silence and without thought. Retracing her route through the labyrinthine thoroughfares of Dutchess County takes a happily large portion of her attention. The roads are empty, blessedly empty. In silence Marian locates her landmarks, finding her way back, reversing herself: the big white birch tree, the great nouveau mansion with the name she’d thought was twee, only a few hours earlier, the house with the big dog who’d come charging down the driveway to bark at her when she’d slowed in indecision before making her turn. The dog isn’t there any longer.
But after she drives through Rhinebeck, it gets harder. She knows the way from here, and she finds it more difficult to hold at bay the things she has seen, and said, and the room, and the other people in the room: Oliver and Barton and the girl—Sophie. Mostly Marian thinks about Sophie, and the thought of her is far more painful than an abstract notion of a person Oliver might one day love.
So when Marian reaches the stoplight where she needs to turn right for the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge, she is perhaps especially vulnerable to a road sign she might otherwise have missed, and when she sees that sign, idling behind a Land Rover with Connecticut plates, Marian makes not a decision, really, but a gesture, and turns left, and drives south. She is sure of where she’s going, but not at all sure why.
In Rhinecliff, she drives through the little village and winds up the hill to the church, leaving her Volvo by the roadside. True to Betty Evans’s word, there is indeed an enclosed wooden case of pamphlets, offering guidance to the grave and the brief biographies of other, less celebrated inhabitants of the cemetery, and Marian carefully folds one into her coat pocket before slinging her bag over her shoulder and beginning the walk uphill. This is the third visit she’s made to the Rhinecliff Reformed Church. The first was during her initial research trip to Rhinebeck, when she had come looking for accounts of the 1757 Fort William Henry massacre, and some clue as to who had cared for the child, Charlotte Wilcox, after the death of her family, and found, instead (in the local history archives of the Rhinebeck Public Library, in a moldering box marked “Miscellaneous 1750–1850, Farewell”), seventeen precious letters from Charlotte herself. Marian had returned one year later, when her purpose had been to record a description of the grave for her book. The first time, it had taken a half hour of searching, pulling away the overgrowth and peering at the faded stones, before she had found Charlotte’s gravestone, unvisited for two centuries. The second time, she forgot the location, so the search had taken nearly as long. But this time Marian follows an actual path among the markers, the earth underfoot worn bare and the winter grass flattened on either side. The path takes her directly to the corner of the churchyard, where she can look through an iron railing down onto the little town and the train station, and even the wide Hudson, lit by a pearl-gray moon. The grave seems, somehow, crisper than she remembers, and it occurs to her to wonder just what Betty Evans and her colleagues have done to care for the site. Is it possible that someone has reset the slender blocks of granite that form a border for the grave, or cleaned the etched words on the stone? She bends forward to read it, even though there isn’t really enough light for that, and even though she knows the inscription by heart.
IN MEMORY OF CHARLOTTE WILCOX
WHO DIED APRIL 17TH, 1802
IN THE 55TH YEAR OF HER AGE
CALMLY SHE LOOKED ON EITHER LIFE, AND HERE
SAW NOTHING TO REGRET; NOTHING THERE TO FEAR
ALSO HER HUSBAND, THOMAS WILCOX
BORN IRELAND, DIED JUNE 14TH, 1804
AGED 38 YEARS
This is no longer a forgotten or neglected place. Marian, looking down, sees that the earth at her feet is covered with small tributes, mostly stones carried here and placed carefully on the spot, as in the Jewish custom, but also odd trinkets, seashells, a reproduction of the drawing by Thomas Wilcox, the sole image of Charlotte, carefully laminated and propped against the gravestone. There are bits of tape left on the stone itself, and a forgotten pencil—the remnants, thinks Marian, of attempts to make rubbings of Charlotte’s marker—and a stack of flowers in various stages of demise, wrapped in their cellophane cones and tied with fading ribbons. There are even two or three handwritten notes, which Marian refrains from reading, but it’s all overwhelming to her, and for a moment she looks out over the graveyard, over the still overgrown and unvisited memorials, and allows herself the faintest pride.
Because I did this, Marian thinks. With work, and with care. I did this.
Except, of course, that she hadn’t. It was always Charlotte, Marian thinks, who was not just an adventuress or a woman of letters, and was not a heroine because she chewed men up or even because she had touched and reported on every stratum of English society. The bearers of these flowers and the authors of these notes had come to honor her because of what they had learned from her story, which was not a lesson restricted to Charlotte’s time or place. And a good thing too, Marian tells herself, or I couldn’t have learned it myself:
When I was twenty, I had work I loved.
When I was twenty-two, I had a husband I loved.
When I was thirty-six, I had a chance to stay alive.
When I was forty-five, I had a book, that I wrote, that changed everything.
When I was forty-eight, the very age a woman is supposed to become invisible, there was a man who actually saw me.
Marian wipes her face with her hands.
And now, Marian thinks, there is this girl, who is not my daughter, and will never be my daughter, but who might need something that I might be able to give her. And that’s a gift.
She looks across at the other graves, filling the space between Charlotte’s stone and the abandoned Rhinecliff Reformed Church. Alice Farwell is here, too, somewhere, and possibly also her daughter, who began life as a Farwell and ended it as a Wharton, giving birth to a future Danvers along the way. Some of these flowers and notes are due Alice as well, thinks Marian, for keeping those letters, for holding out the promise of friendship across an ocean and a lifetime, either of which must have felt prohibitively distant. Alice Farwell, thinks Marian, was a historian before her time, and a great woman, and this hilltop is a fitting place for both of them, a fortunate berth for eternity with the glittering Hudson below and the trains, coming in from the city. And so lovely, Marian thinks, looking west to the moonlit Catskills, but she is already distracted, now: the bridge, the thruway, the newly liberated weekend. She walks back along the tidy path and climbs into her Volvo, turning up the heat and turning on the radio. Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und Leben” floods the car. Marian smiles: not inappropriate, after all. Then she starts the engine and heads for home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The White Rose
When Oliver finally returns to the room, he waits in the doorway for a minute, as if for permission to enter. Sophie, though clearly aware of him, does not speak, and her silence is not gentle.
“I thought what you said to Barton was wonderful,” he tells her at last, both because it is true and because he needs to say something. “You were…I thought you were very brave.”
“Oh, very.” Sophie’s voice is caustic. “Put me right up there with Sophie Scholl.”
“It took courage,” he says. “You were gracious, but you were clear. I thought you were amazing.”
“Amazing would have been telling him last week,” Sophie says. “Or better yet, last month. And sparing us all…this,” she says, gesturing around the room.
“I wanted to spare you this,” he says, growing afraid. He walks over to the chair, and then, finding no graceful way to sit beside her, he sits on the floor at her feet. He is too frightened to touch her. The idea of losing her, too, is nearly unbearable. “Sophie,” he says, “I’m not going to burden you with the details, but I promise you, this wasn’t a scam. I mean, not just a scam. Barton was very, very interested in that girl. In…the person he thought I was. He has been for months.”
“I don’t want to think about
Barton,” she says and turns her head. “I don’t have to now, and I don’t want to. I want you to tell me something else.”
Oliver nods, waiting.
“I know it’s none of my business, but how long did it go on? With her.”
“It is your business. Since last spring.”
Sophie absorbs this information.
“And when did it end?”
The answer to this does not come as easily. Finally he tells her: “Five minutes ago.”
He takes her hand between his hands. Sophie doesn’t move but she doesn’t resist. “Do you need to go back to the house?” he says.
Sophie nods. “I do. It’s going to be a scene over there. We’ve got two hundred people to head off at the pass, before Saturday.”
“All right,” he says, resigned, but Sophie is shaking her head.
“No,” she settles back a bit in the armchair and turns to him. “I have a little time. And Frieda is already working on it. She’ll be in her element. She loves a crisis, especially one I’ve caused.” She considers. “You haven’t met Frieda, have you?”
“Only on the phone,” he tells her. “And when she told me to bring your roses to the service entrance.”
“Oh,” Sophie says with some embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sorry. How would I have met you, otherwise? How would I have been able to see you half undressed, with a big hole between the buttons of your shirt?”
Sophie leans forward in the armchair and swats him. “You said you couldn’t see anything!”
“I lied,” he says. “I won’t lie to you again.”
She looks at him. She smiles. Then Oliver feels it all fall away: the strain, the wondering how it will end. But there is another thing.
“Sophie,” Oliver says, “there’s something I have to tell you.”
She smiles at him and pushes her hair behind her ears. “If it’s that you like to wear women’s clothes, I already know that.”
“No, it’s not that. I didn’t like it. Much, anyway. But it isn’t about that.”
“Then it must be about why you named your shop the White Rose,” she says. “That is, if you know me well enough yet.”
Oliver nods. “I do. I mean, I think I will. But it’s not that, either. Well, that’s not true. It’s part of the same story, what I need to tell you. Not a story,” he shakes his head. “I mean,” he rolls his eyes. I am making a mess, he thinks. “Not a made-up story. It’s something that happened. In the past.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” Sophie says, looking only slightly more worried. “As a historian, I’m partial to stories about things that happened in the past. How far back in the past?”
Oliver closes his eyes. “I was six years old. So twenty years ago.”
Now, at last, Sophie seems to understand that he is serious, and she must be serious, too. “All right, Oliver,” Sophie says. “You can tell me.”
But he doesn’t, for another minute, and when he speaks again it’s only in frustration. “I don’t know how to do this,” Oliver says, shaking his head. “I’ve never done this.”
She doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t touch him. She just waits.
“I got sick when I was six. I had leukemia. Now,” Oliver says hurriedly, “I’m not trying to be dramatic, or whine about it. There’s no suspense about this, okay? You know how the story comes out. I mean, it’s twenty years later. I’m here, right?”
“Right,” Sophie agrees, but her voice is uncertain.
“And I’m not saying it was so horrible, I suffered so much, blah, blah, and I nearly died, because I don’t remember it like that. And if I did nearly die I didn’t know it at the time. Actually,” Oliver looks at her, “what I remember about it all is…almost nothing. Which is incredible. Don’t you think? Because I read the file when I was older. When I was twelve. I found it in my mother’s desk and I read the whole thing. I don’t remember the drugs or my hair falling out. I don’t remember having a spinal tap. Is that incredible?” Oliver says. “I mean, a spinal tap? How could all that have happened to me and I can’t remember?”
“Maybe you were protecting yourself,” Sophie suggests. “You…detached, I guess. For self-preservation. But you said nearly nothing. You do remember something.”
“Right. Yes,” Oliver nods. “I remember…waking up in my bed, in the hospital. I don’t remember lying in bed awake or falling asleep, only…waking up. It was like being trapped inside the same moment, over and over—waking up, then waking up again. Except it wasn’t always exactly the same. When I woke up, I might see something, or hear something someone was saying, but then I would wake up again. It just kept on like that, for weeks and months.”
Oliver sits on the floor still, facing away from her, his hands interlaced, and Sophie can see—eerily white in the growing darkness—the knuckles of his hands, tensing and tensing. She reaches down to touch them, but they don’t stop. She touches his hair, his face, but he doesn’t seem to respond to that, either. “It sounds kind of merciful, actually,” she tells him. “If I had a very sick child, I’d hope he could experience it like that.”
“I suppose,” Oliver says. “Yes, I can see that. Though it’s been hard in retrospect, like I can’t really believe any of it actually took place. But,” he says concentrating, “there was something that happened once.”
“When you woke up,” she prompts him, after a minute.
“Something I saw. I was lying on my side in the bed, and I opened my eyes. And someone had put a flower on the table next to my bed.”
“A white rose?” guesses Sophie.
“Yes. I didn’t know anything about flowers, but I knew it was a rose. I saw it was white. It was so big. It seemed bigger than me, but I couldn’t have been thinking clearly. And I remember, just…staring at it. I remember seeing every part of it. It was so…It was a living flower. Does that sound crazy? Bright white, like it was almost glowing. The petals looked like they were wet, like someone had just cut the rose in the rain and rushed to the hospital to bring it to me. It was in a plastic cup. You know, a hospital cup. I just looked at it as long as I could, and then I must have fallen asleep.”
Sophie waits. “It had to have been beautiful,” she finally says, “if you remember it so well.”
Oliver nods. “It was. Then I woke up again, and I remember, I felt excited to see the rose there. But this time it wasn’t as big. It was sort of…flagging.” He shakes his head. “I know this sounds ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t,” says Sophie.
“It had some brown at the tips of the petals. And it was smaller than I remembered.”
“Okay. And the next time?”
“Smaller. But I could sit up in bed. So maybe I just felt bigger. And the stalk looked thinner. And the leaves were getting limp.”
“It was dying, in other words.”
“Yes. Exactly. But the thing is,” Oliver says, “that’s when I started to get better. And this is the point where I start remembering more things, you know, which is strange. Isn’t that strange? I don’t remember being sick, but I remember getting better? I remember sitting up and eating. I ate an orange. I remember going to the playroom upstairs with my mother. I remember going in the elevator in my wheelchair. There was an aquarium, and a Ping-Pong table. But the rose died. And the funny thing is, I don’t think I was even that sad about it. I watched it get so withered and brown. I didn’t touch it. And then one day I woke up and it was gone. Somebody had finally thrown it away.”
“But you were cured,” says Sophie.
“Well, in remission,” Oliver tells her. “Nobody said cure, at the time. The drug they used was still pretty new. I don’t think anybody felt very confident about predicting the outcome, though after twenty years I think we’re allowed to call it a cure. So I left the hospital, went home, went back to school. I got to grow up and be healthy. And all I knew about having had leukemia was the waking up and the rose.”
It’s da
rk in the room now. There is light from under the bathroom door, light from under the bedroom door, light from under the door to the landing. But it’s still so dark, Oliver can barely see Sophie. Which is good, he thinks, because it means she can barely see him.
“Sometimes,” says Oliver, “I think that’s the rose I’m trying to make. The new rose. You know.”
“The Lady Charlotte rose,” Sophie says.
“Yes. That’s the rose in my head. I never saw it again. I want to see it again. I want…” He stops, suddenly shy. “I want to say thank you. Is that nuts?”
“I don’t think it’s nuts,” says Sophie.
“Maybe that rose wasn’t even real. Maybe I made it up. Or it was a delusion, or something. From the drugs. And if it hadn’t been a rose, it would have been something else.”
“But to you it was a rose,” she confirms.
“Yes. My white rose.”
He stops. He closes his eyes.
“I might not be able to have kids,” Oliver says softly.
He can hear her breathe. He can hear the old walls of the inn, the air in those walls, humming. “You might not be,” Sophie says.
“No,” his voice cracks.
“Because of the leukemia.”
“No. Because of one of the drugs. Cytoxan. I read the release form in my file about not being able to have children. I’ve read some other studies, too.”
“But you don’t know for sure?” Sophie says.
“No.”
“All right,” says Sophie, after a moment. “Now you’ve told me.”
“I know you want them,” Oliver says, distraught.
“I want them,” she agrees. “Do you?”
“I want them,” Oliver starts to cry again. “I really do. For years I pretended I didn’t. I even broke up with my girlfriend from college because I couldn’t tell her. I said I didn’t want to have children. But I do. I don’t know what to do.”
“All right,” she tells him. “It’s all right.”
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