“Don’t use that word.”
Julie’s command was a knee-jerk response. She had always been a feminist, supportive of other women’s choices, giving the benefit of the doubt to women who slept with the husbands of other women because who knew the motives that had informed their actions? Now, she felt befuddled. What was she supposed to think of a person like Laci Fox? Was she allowed to hate her, to call her names? No. She didn’t want to do either. She wanted to love and forgive because she was a good person. But she didn’t have it in her right then to love or to forgive. Not Laci. Not Scott. Not herself.
Sophie laughed harshly. “Why shouldn’t I? I’m sure it’s what you’ve been calling Laci Fox when you and Agnes talk about what happened.”
“Aggie and I don’t talk about it,” Julie said flatly.
“Why not?”
“Never mind,” Julie said. “It’s not your business.”
“Oh, really? I’m only your daughter! Does Grandma know? What about Judith? And Nicola? Did everybody but me know?”
Julie didn’t need to answer that question.
“This is unbelievable! What am I supposed to do now? Why is Dad even still here? Don’t you have any self-respect? Why haven’t you thrown him out?”
“It’s not that simple,” Julie had begun. And it wasn’t. But she couldn’t expect a fifteen-year-old to understand a tenth of what was involved in a marriage crisis.
“I’m going to—I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll be at Grandma’s. Somewhere. Anywhere but here.”
Before Julie could beg her not to leave, Sophie was gone, slamming the front door behind her. Again.
Julie remembered feeling an odd sense of relief at that moment. She had been so intent on keeping up appearances. Now she could abandon all pretense that her marriage was fine, that she hadn’t done something or failed to do something that had caused her husband to turn away from her.
But maybe it was not something she had done or not done. Maybe the problem lay with who she was. Rather, who she was not. A sufficiently interesting, beautiful, and devoted wife.
She had sent Scott a text message. Sophie knows.
A few minutes later, he responded. I’ll talk to her when I get home.
Good luck, Julie had thought. Her husband was going to need it.
Chapter 17
If Carol could just show up at Ferndean, Bonnie thought, so could she. Bonnie had no particular goal in mind. She just wanted to walk through the doors of what by all rights should be her home.
Her beloved Ferndean. It stood proudly, a symbol of continuity, of family, of tradition. She used the old knocker instead of the bell to announce her presence. It was in the shape of an anchor.
“I’ll be home soon,” Bonnie whispered to the house, her hand lingering on the knocker. “Don’t you worry.”
The door opened. Carol was wearing a gray linen tunic and matching linen pants.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she said.
Bonnie held herself taller. “I have a right to come and go as I please. I am half owner. And,” Bonnie went on, “you probably haven’t even noticed we have a vegetable and herb garden that needs tending. That’s always been my responsibility.”
Carol didn’t reply but stepped back. Bonnie followed her inside.
“The washing machine isn’t working,” Carol said. “I’ve talked to the repair service. It would be a lot more cost-effective to buy a new one.”
Bonnie frowned. Ken might have been able to fix the washing machine. Scott was handy, but Bonnie was hesitant to ask him for help. She didn’t doubt that he would comply with her request— out of guilt, if not out of goodwill—but how, exactly, was she supposed to approach Scott when his wife was barely speaking to him and his daughter professed to hate her father? Ken would know what to say to Scott. But Ken wasn’t here to fix that problem, either.
Suddenly, Bonnie was overcome with doubt. Maybe Judith had a point. Maybe she was being foolish, thinking she could manage Ferndean all on her own.
“So, do I have your consent to go ahead and buy a new washing machine?” Carol asked. She sounded impatient.
Bonnie nodded. Her consent. What did that really mean at this point?
Silently, she followed her sister into the living room.
“Look at this lampshade,” Carol said, stopping short and poking at the shade on a small marble lamp that had been in the Ascher family for generations. “It’s literally in shreds.”
“It can be fixed,” Bonnie said quickly.
“It should be thrown out. This place is like a shrine to the whole lot of Ascher ancestors. You’ve changed nothing since Mom died, have you? The furniture is almost all broken down. The rugs are threadbare. The kitchen and bathrooms are badly in need of an upgrade. How did you ever manage to rent this as a getaway?”
“All that matters is that we did rent the house,” Bonnie said stubbornly. “Ken and I never had trouble finding tenants.”
“Still, why not spruce the place up, make it feel lighter and airier, more modern,” Carol said.
“It’s a Victorian era house.”
“But it doesn’t have to feel that way,” Carol pointed out, “at least not entirely. Why do you need to cling to the past so tenaciously?”
“Why do you treat the past so cavalierly,” Bonnie snapped back, “like it’s something you can just smash up and throw away?”
Carol sighed. “Just because something is old doesn’t automatically confer value upon it. The past was not necessarily a better place. Some old stuff is horrible now because it was horrible then, back when it was made. Bad taste is as old as civilization.”
Bonnie felt as if she had received a physical wound. “Are you saying that Ferndean House is in bad taste?” she demanded.
“Some of it is.” Carol pointed. “Like that pique assiette vase. That sort of thing was never in fashion, not with people in the know.”
“It’s a recognized form of folk art,” Bonnie argued. “It’s not meant to be in or out of fashion. And if you ever tried it you’d see just how fun it can be.”
“Shard arts are not my thing.” A cell phone beeped. “I’ve got to take this,” Carol said, already walking out of the room. “I’ll only be a moment.”
Bonnie realized that she felt a bit light-headed. She leaned against the back of the worn maroon velvet couch. Again, she wondered if Judith was right. Was she crazy thinking she could manage the family’s legacy all on her own, without the help of Carol’s superior intellect and business acumen?
Shirley and Ronald Ascher had been so proud of Carol’s success; they had eagerly followed news of her career and never missed an opportunity to boast about every new development, from a feature in Architectural Digest or The New York Times, to an award for best small apartment redo or innovative vacation house design, or whatever someone like Carol Ascher got awards for doing.
Her parents’ unrestrained pride had taken its toll on Bonnie. In fact, it wasn’t long after Shirley Ascher fell ill that Bonnie began to question her motives for taking on the role of uncomplaining caregiver. Were they entirely pure? Or was she seeking approval, a pat on the head—even the reward of full ownership of Ferndean one day? Carol Ascher might be rich and famous, but Bonnie Ascher Elgort could administer medicines and cook tempting meals for a dying woman. Who was more valuable?
Then, Shirley Ascher had died and Bonnie learned that her mother hadn’t changed her will in favor of her younger daughter. Ferndean still went to both Carol and Bonnie.
Thirty some odd years later, the insult still stung.
Carol returned from her call.
“Thank God Mom and Dad weren’t alive to witness you abandon your daughter,” Bonnie blurted. “They would have been horrified.”
Carol crossed her arms over her chest. “I protest your choice of the term abandon,” she said. There was an unmistakable tremor in her voice. “You know that’s not what it was. But you would have liked seeing Mom and Dad turn against me, wou
ldn’t you? Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes. You like to think of yourself as beyond reproach.”
“I most certainly do not,” Bonnie protested. “I’ve made plenty of mistakes and I’ve never pretended otherwise. Look, the bottom line is that I don’t want you here, at Ferndean or in Yorktide.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Carol replied. “But everyone has a right to her opinion.”
Bonnie opened her mouth to make a smart reply—something stinging and memorable—but no words came out. She wasn’t used to argument and confrontation, let alone to name-calling. She felt the first pricking of tears and panicked. She would not cry in front of her sister. Instead, Bonnie turned and hurried toward the front door. In a moment, she was climbing into her car.
Her hands were trembling when she started the engine and pulled out of the drive. She couldn’t go far. Tears were blurring her vision. She pulled off the road only yards from Ferndean and leaned against the headrest.
Carol had come too close to the truth. Bonnie knew that by setting up Carol as the Bad Sister, she had of necessity set herself up as the Good Sister. You couldn’t have darkness without light; it made no sense. When the truth was that neither sister was all bad nor all good. Few people were entirely one or the other. That was right, wasn’t it?
Bonnie sighed. She had lied when she told Carol that she didn’t want her in Yorktide. Sort of. Once, Bonnie had wanted Carol to come home. She had wanted that badly. But not now.
Not now.
Chapter 18
Carol was wandering around Ferndean House. She was also stewing.
The incident with her sister that morning had unsettled her. Why was Bonnie so intent on keeping alive an absurd and imagined rivalry? It was maddening.
And when Bonnie had accused her sister of rejecting the past as valueless! Ridiculous. If Bonnie only knew that Carol had kept Nicola’s childhood bedroom exactly as it had been....
Not that she ever needed to know.
Carol sighed. She hadn’t expected to be welcomed with open arms and rejoicing, but neither had she expected such animosity. She didn’t think she deserved it.
An old, tooled leather box on a side table caught Carol’s attention. She hadn’t noticed it before. Then again, the house was stuffed with items; who knew where they had come from or what long-dead family member had brought them here. She should probably do a detailed inventory. The thought made Carol feel tired.
Still, she mustered the energy to make her way to the attic. She hadn’t been up there since before she left Yorktide in 1974. The attic contained even more “stuff ” than it had back then—more bits of broken furniture, more cardboard storage boxes, more old clothing piled high on random surfaces. Otherwise, it was just as she remembered it. Low ceiling. Tiny windows. Barely finished walls. And to think that once upon a time people, servants, had made their lives up here! The thought was depressing.
Carol had turned to leave the attic when she spotted a plastic storage bin with her name written on its lid in big letters. She hesitated. Was she really interested in the contents?
And then she was prying the lid off the bin and confronting evidence of her earliest days. Watercolor paintings. Crayon drawings. Most of these, done on paper, were crumbling. There were a few small canvasses that were still intact. And there were sketchbooks. Endless sketchbooks.
Carol put her hand to her heart. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling in that moment. A strange tenderness for the little girl who had been? A sense of age and of ending? A sense of loss?
One thing she was sure of. For as far back as she could remember, she had been interested in art and design. After the age of four she was rarely without a sketchpad. She made scrapbooks of images she cut from magazines. Whatever caught her fancy—a beautiful dress, a contemporary building, a picture of a famous old painting, an exotic bloom. She taught herself to sew her own clothes so that she could stand out from every other teenaged girl in Yorktide.
And she did stand out.
After high school, Carol enrolled in Yorktide Community College. Back then, it didn’t have the good art program it eventually became known for. Frustrated, Carol quit after a year. But her education continued when she arrived in New York in late summer 1974. The city itself was her university. For the first time, she met people who had immigrated to the United States from countries other than Canada; people who had never lived in anything but apartment buildings; people who didn’t own cars or have a driver’s license because public transportation met their needs; people who worshipped in mosques or synagogues rather than churches.
And the museums! Carol would visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art once or twice a week (the museum was free in those days). She spent countless hours gazing at the living room of the Francis W. Little House, Minnesota 1912–1914, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Metropolitan had saved the Prairie School-style house when it was due to be demolished.
The first show Carol saw at the Costume Institute was The Glory of Russian Costume; it was seared in her memory. When the MMA mounted the world-famous show of treasures from the tomb of King Tutankhamun, Carol was one of those who visited several times.
She adored the Brooklyn Museum and its twenty-three period rooms. She developed a particular attachment to the famous Moorish Smoking Room from the Worsham-Rockefeller House, built circa 1864–1865 and remodeled circa 1881. It was the work of a professional interior designer, a role that was born in the mid-1870s. Learning this bit of information had made Carol realize that she was hoping to enter a field even older than she had supposed when she was a girl growing up in a small town in southern Maine.
And she read voraciously. The New York Public Library and The Strand became like second and third homes. Books. Magazines. Whatever she could get her hands on.
She was entranced by the architecture of Manhattan. The Art Deco skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building; the remaining Fifth Avenue Gilded Age mansions that had been built for the likes of the Vanderbilts, Fricks, and Carnegies; the magnificent churches and temples—Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (Gothic and English Gothic Revival), St. Bartholomew’s Church (Romanesque and Byzantine Revival); Central Synagogue (Moorish Revival).
Still, there was benefit to a formal education, so she took what courses she could afford at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design. It was a dream to attend Parsons, the first school in the United States ever to offer programs in fashion design, as well as interior design and advertising.
Suddenly, Carol came crashing back to the present. How long had she been standing in the attic of her childhood home, in a trance of reminiscing?
She put the lid back on the plastic storage box that contained the relics of her past. She wasn’t sentimental like her sister.
Well, not as sentimental as her sister, Carol thought as she turned out the light and made her way downstairs. The truth was that she felt terribly lonely for New York. It had been her home for a long time, far longer than Yorktide had been. Maybe Yorktide could never be home again.
But Yorktide was where Nicola lived. It was where Bonnie lived.
And that meant everything. It had to.
Chapter 19
Nicola sat behind the wheel of her car outside the woodland park where Sophie’s day camp met. She had arranged to pick up her cousin for a little excursion.
Suddenly, her attention was caught by the sight of a tall, skinny guy loping through the gate. He was wearing a counselor’s T-shirt; there was a gold chain around his neck. A moment later he was leaning over a much younger girl, also wearing the T-shirt of a counselor. Her back was against the fence; if she wasn’t trapped she was still cornered. Nicola frowned. She didn’t like the looks of the guy. He fairly oozed bad news.
Sophie came running through the gate just then and all thoughts of the creepy guy and the girl he had cornered fled from Nicola’s mind. Her cousin threw herself into the car. “Where are we going?” she asked. “I hope it’s somepla
ce good.”
Nicola smiled. “How about that new place on the pier at the end of Burberry Lane?”
The idea was amenable to Sophie. When they had secured a table with a perfect view of bobbing boats and swooping seagulls, Sophie ordered the most expensive cold, frothy drink on the menu. Nicola made do with a plain iced coffee.
Suddenly, Sophie let out a moan. “First Grandpa had to die,” she said, “and then my parents’ marriage is falling apart! My life sucks.”
Nicola choked on her drink. “I don’t think you should assume that your parents’ marriage is falling apart,” she said carefully.
“Why not?” Sophie demanded. “They’re always fighting. That is, when Mom isn’t sulking. Before I knew what was going on, I was annoyed. I mean, how am I supposed to grow up to be a normal person if my parents are acting crazy? Now that I know what’s behind the whole thing, I’m angry. Why is this happening to me?”
Sophie’s self-centered reaction to her family’s situation was entirely normal. As was any sense of disgust she might be feeling. The last thing a fifteen-year-old needed, smack in the middle of figuring out her own sexuality, was to learn that a parent was guilty of a sexual transgression. An affair threw in her face the fact that her parents were people who took their clothes off and did stuff to each other.
“I’m sorry,” Nicola said finally. “I know it must be really difficult.”
“It is! I mean, why are adults always so pissed off? Grandma and Great-Aunt Carol bicker like they’re in middle school. Get over it! I am so glad I don’t have a sister!”
“I don’t think all sisters bicker like they do,” Nicola said. She remembered something she had read in a college course on social anthropology. She thought it was Margaret Mead who had said that the sister relationship was the most competitive relationship in a family, but that when the sisters became adults, the relationship was the strongest.
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