Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (4 page)

Courtney clutched the girl’s arm. “They’re presents? For who?”

“For me. I like opening presents.”

“I want
mine
wrapped!” Courtney shrilled.

“I think it would be best if you called back and spoke with my partner,” Peggy said into the phone.

“This is important,” the man said. “You and I, we met in Las Vegas. You passed out in my room.”

Peggy felt her heart stop beating.

The Chanel girl drummed her fingers. “Hello, gift-wrap?”

“Why are you calling?” Peggy was untethered, careening between disbelief and alarm; anxiety wrapped itself around her chest.

“I live in Connecticut. We should meet.”

“You live in Connecticut?” This was a practical joke. Or a mistake. Or a scam. It had to be. How could a person she’d met
nearly all the way across the country possibly end up residing one state away? She didn’t bother hiding the disbelief in her
voice. “Then what were you doing in Vegas? Isn’t that a little far from home?”

His voice was aggravatingly calm. “I could ask the same of you.”

“It was my first time there. I’m not a Vegas person, believe me.”

“Rest assured, neither am I. Now, can you meet me? For coffee, maybe.”

“I can’t meet you. I’m…” She ducked her head and whispered, “Involved with someone.”

“It didn’t seem that way Saturday night.”

This couldn’t be happening. “I’m engaged. To be engaged. I’ll be getting married probably in a year or two.” Nor was she sure
why she felt the need to explain herself, especially with a trumped-up story. Brock had put no time frame on their pre-betrothal.
“I have a promise ring,” she finished lamely. “I can’t have coffee with you.”

“You can’t get married,” the caller said.

“Oh, really?” She didn’t need this. Not from Bex and not from some stranger she’d…
No, don’t think about it.
She turned to face the wall, away from the prying eyes of her customers and Padma. “Brock and I love each other, and when
people love each other, they get married. I can get married, and I will get married.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong,” he answered. “You’re already married. To me.”

L
uke!” Abigail was calling. “Luke!”

Luke Sedgwick awoke with a start at the unexpected noise. He must have dozed off. The events of the weekend, topped off by
this morning’s uncomfortable phone call, had left him with a deep weariness a good night’s sleep would go a long way toward
curing. Now sleep wasn’t in the cards tonight, either.

“Luke!”

He consulted his watch: It was Monday, one twenty-two in the afternoon. He’d been unconscious only a few minutes. He slid
his glasses onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes. If only he
had
been asleep for the past fifty-two hours. There would have been no trip to Las Vegas, no Family Asset Management Conference,
no unfortunate dalliance.

He tried again to recall what had happened Saturday night—after the point where he’d drunk so many Scotches that he’d forgotten
he was Luke Silas Sedgwick IV of the Connecticut Sedgwicks. The Connecticut Sedgwicks who, with the possible exception of
Luke’s black-sheep uncle Bink, would never have gotten into such a mess. Luke thought back and came up with the same unsatisfactory
snippets: An intoxicating fragrance. A black dress. An attraction so intense, it had seemed preordained. A piercing disappointment
at finding himself alone in the morning. Beyond that, impenetrable nothingness.

He shouldn’t have let Tom Ver Planck talk him into attending that conference. “It’s an opportunity. Don’t waste it,” his friend
had said. Ver Planck, whose name and business reputation garnered him a hundred such unsolicited invitations a year, had been
offered an all-expenses-paid trip by the conference organizers. “If anyone asks, just pretend you’re one of my associates.”
Ver Planck had practically shoved the first-class plane ticket into Luke’s hand. “And have some fun. You and Nicki called
it quits, right? You’re a free agent.”

“Luke!” his great-aunt continued to call.

Still, Ver Planck had been right; Luke had picked up some useful investing advice. And despite his weariness, he had actually
written a little today. A small miracle.

He contemplated a jagged sheet of plaster about to fall from the ceiling of his third-floor study, then reread the paper in
front of him:

They’re all so frail, these sunveined southern winds

vanishing the day dark northern chill begins;

Bright leaves imitate flowers, but soon descend

to frost-barbed, tattered ruin…

These were the first lines he’d composed in ages, arriving out of nowhere this morning as soon as he’d hung up the phone,
and not that bad, though “imitate” was all wrong and threw off the meter. “Bright leaves suggest flowers” worked better.

Luke returned to his computer screen, where columns of numbers taunted him. He thought he should turn on a light; the day
was already fading. Summer was over, and any of its lingering pleasures—a long afternoon, a last, unexpected blackberry from
the bush by the south fence—were understood by Luke, as by all native New Englanders, to be temporal.

Another thing Luke knew was that it was hard to be alone in a two-hundred-plus-year-old New England house, even with only
one other person living in it. It wasn’t the presence of ghosts—though Abigail insisted there were many—it was that the musty
old mausoleum couldn’t keep quiet. Luke tracked the progress of Abigail Agatha Sarah Sedgwick as she ascended the front staircase:
a sharp creak from the third step from the bottom, which had been making that same noise for as far back as he could remember.
Then a rhythmic trembling as the staircase strained to support all five feet and ninety pounds of its owner. Luke was nearly
twice Abby’s weight and over a foot taller, and when he walked, the house would vibrate with each footstep, its six-on-six
paned windows rattling in their rotting casements. The Silas Sedgwick House—erected twenty years after the Revolutionary War
by Silas Ebenezer Sedgwick, farmer, merchant, and patriot, and built grander and larger by his descendants; for over two centuries
the pride of New Nineveh, Connecticut—threatened to come crashing down around the only two remaining Sedgwicks: Abigail and
Luke, Silas’s great-great-great-grandson.

Any day now,
Luke thought. When he was having a particularly bad time in the market, which so far in his new career of Sedgwick family
financial manager was the rule rather than the exception, he would cheer himself with fantasies of the house’s demise. In
his current favorite, Abigail’s beloved black cat, Quibble, in a rare daytime foray out from under Abby’s bed, leaped onto
the mantel in the grand parlor, setting off a chain of events ending with the cat still perched calmly on the intact fireplace
surrounded by three stories of rubble.

“Luke!” The scratched crystal doorknob rasped, the double doors squeaked open, and his great-aunt stepped into what had once
been the Sedgwick ballroom and was now Luke’s study. Abigail’s faded brown eyes were fierce. Her white hair stood out from
her scalp. “It’s that Riga woman.” She stomped one foot. “Come with me.”

“What’s she done now?” Luke decided to interpret Abigail’s appearance as a sign that it was time to quit for the afternoon.
He closed out his positions and shut down the computer. He stretched his legs, which felt easily as old as the house.

Abigail led him down the new staircase—as the family still called the back steps, rebuilt after the fire of 1827—to the first
floor. She skirted the grand parlor and led him down another hallway, past the east addition, circa 1850 and now closed off
and cobwebby, and onto one of the Sedgwick House’s three porches: the screened-in one called Charity’s Porch, after the long-deceased
ancestor for whom it had been built. Charity’s Porch faced out onto the garden, which extended back three acres to Market
Road. It was toward that far end of the garden that Abigail pointed a spindly finger.

“There. Plain as day.”

Luke squinted toward the road at the new structure that had sprung up. It appeared to be a small, covered, open-sided farm
stand. Its yellow, virgin wood had not yet been battered by one of New Nineveh’s legendary nor’easters. “Go get your sweater
and we’ll have a look,” he said, thinking of Abby’s bark-colored gardening sweater, which hung on a hook in the mudroom, its
pockets always filled with crumpled Kleenex, and was older than he was.

“I don’t need a sweater.”

Luke tried to argue that it was getting cool outside. Abigail insisted she wasn’t cold, and inevitably won, and it wasn’t
until some time later that the two were walking over the uneven stone path, Luke moving aside overgrown bushes of crispy brown
roses, until they reached the structure and went around to the front, which faced the traffic on Market. A neatly hand-lettered
sign read: “Fall Color, $1.50 Per Branch.” The stand was otherwise empty; the autumn leaves wouldn’t be at their peak until
at least Columbus Day.

“It’s the spitting image of our flower stand,” Abigail said. “If I weren’t a Sedgwick, I’d march right over to Lowie’s office.
If I had stolen Ernestine Riga’s idea, instead of the other way around,
she
would prosecute to the full extent of the law.”

“Now, now…” Luke put his hand on her arm.

“Don’t you ‘now, now’ me, young man.”

“It’s called capitalism, Abby.”
And I’m hardly young,
he added silently, though currently he wasn’t convinced he’d learned anything in his forty-one years. He, unlike Abigail,
did need to talk to Lowell Mayhew, and right away. He wanted this mess over with. The sooner the better. Thankfully, it seemed
Peggy Adams did as well, though if Luke were the sort to let his emotions rule him, he might have admitted to the smallest
pang of disappointment that she’d been so quick to agree.

Abby turned her back on the flower stand. “In that case, I’ll beat Ernestine at her own game. Anyone can see the quality of
our trees. Before Bink sold off the pumpkin patch, we had the most marvelous pumpkins, too. Perhaps we should grow pumpkins
on our twenty acres, Luke.”

Pumpkins. That would cover the property tax for sure. “I’m off, Abigail. I’ve got to run to Seymour’s and do some errands
and tie up some loose ends. I’ll be home tonight, but very late.”

“Loose ends, my foot.”

You have no idea,
he wanted to say.

“Seeing that Pappas girl is more like it. Why are you still courting her when you should be out finding a wife? A wife with
proper manners and a proper name?”

Luke felt slightly ill at the word
wife
.

“There’s nothing wrong with ‘Nicole.’ It’s a perfectly fine name.” He was aware this wasn’t the half of his currently off-again
(but no doubt after tonight, if history was a reliable predictor, on-again) girlfriend’s name to which his great-aunt was
referring. Abigail wanted Luke to pair off with a nice girl from a nice old New England family with a nice old New England
pedigree; a woman worthy of providing an heir to the obsolete Sedgwick legacy and the no-longer-existent Sedgwick fortune.
Luke had never pointed out that Abby’s plans for him ran counter to her own youthful romantic past. He knew how she would
respond: that he was the last Sedgwick, and a man. That he had a duty to the family.

Nicki was neither wholesome nor pedigreed, precisely what he found most appealing about her. That, and her aversion to marriage,
which matched, if not surpassed, his own.
You don’t need to worry about Nicki. She doesn’t believe in marriage any more than I do,
he generally told Abigail.
And in case you hadn’t noticed, nice old New England families are virtually extinct.

Both statements were true. Yet here Luke was in a position he’d never considered: not only married, but married to a stranger.

“I’m not seeing Nicole tonight; I’m playing poker,” he lied, not in the mood to be scolded. “You’ll be okay. Don’t forget
to leave on the hall light in case you get up in the night. And put your cell phone near your bed. If you can’t reach me,
call the Fiorentinos, and Annette or Angelo will help you.”

Abigail drew her mouth into a frown. “Leaving lights on wastes money. And if I need to talk, I’ll talk to Quibble. I don’t
like that cellular geegaw. I don’t trust a phone without a cord.”

Though he wouldn’t admit it to Abigail, Luke shared her innate suspicion of any technology not around since he was a child.
He tolerated his computer and cell phone only because he couldn’t do his job without them. “I put Annette’s number on your
nightstand. It’s right there, so you can’t miss it.”

She wore the same keen expression she had when he was sixteen and home from school for the summer and Ernestine Riga had told
her a nighttime vandal had been running amok through town, knocking over flower boxes and throwing eggs at shop windows. Abigail
had repeated the story to Luke after his parents had sent him to mow her lawn. “I sure will be sorry for the culprit’s family
once Officer Wharton catches him. They’ll be terribly ashamed,” she’d said mildly, and pinned Luke with that look. The vandal
never struck again.

When she looked at him that way now, it was hard to believe what anyone could tell after spending ten minutes in her company,
and as he had been told by the best gerontologists in Connecticut. At ninety-one, his headstrong Yankee great-aunt was losing
her marbles. It was why Luke had quit his job at Hartford Mutual, why he’d taken his friend Ver Planck’s advice and committed
to two years of hands-on management of the Sedgwicks’ pitiful assets—to “grow,” as Ver Planck had phrased it, what was left
of the family money, in order to afford the medical care his great-aunt would soon need. It was why Luke had given up his
apartment and moved into the Sedgwick House, so he could keep an eye on her. For now, Abby’s doctors had deemed her competent,
but as she slipped further into dementia, someday soon she’d need more care than Luke alone could provide. And that cost money.
More than he could have possibly brought in at Hartford Mutual.