Seating Arrangements (14 page)

Greyson’s brother Francis had been riding in the cargo space behind the seats, and he unfolded himself and stepped over the tailgate and onto the bumper with an air of wounded dignity. Descending to the gravel, he paused to inspect his pants (red, embroidered with white whales) for dirt, and as he did so, the other boy, Greyson’s best friend, Charlie, grabbed him and pulled him into a hammerlock. Francis, limp as kelp, accepted the assault without protest. “Did you get a headache?” Charlie asked him. “Are you in agony? Is the night ruined?”

“I won’t know for a while,” Francis replied. “It doesn’t happen right away.”

“Winn,” Greyson said, bounding up, “you remember my little
brother, Francis. And my friend Charlie.” Greyson always had a robustness about him, but he seemed even more energetic than usual. Had a football been at hand, he would have been firing passes to Charlie and Francis and to his other brothers, the older ones, who were sitting in the second Jeep having a murmured argument.

Greyson had three brothers and no sisters. Four boys born at regular two-year intervals, four Duffs in a row. To Winn, four sons in one family was an embarrassment of riches despite the uneven quality of the boys. Greyson was the pick of the litter, certainly. The eldest, Sterling, spent all his time in Asia and had a slimy reputation. The next one, Dicky Jr., was congenitally stiff—and why Dicky and Maude had decided to pin the Jr. on their second son, Winn could not guess. Then came Greyson and then this youngest, Francis, the family queer fish, who gave off an appearance of ordinary preppiness, standing on the doorstep in his horn-rimmed glasses and whale pants, but who was always on some spiritual quest or other, embracing a series of Eastern religions, professional ambitions, and artistic passions.

Winn ushered them toward the door. “You boys do me a favor and go inside and see if you can find my wife and send her out, would you?”

When Greyson and Charlie had gone jostling into the house with Francis shuffling in their wake, Winn turned to the other arrivals. The white sedan was flanked on one side by Greyson’s father, Dicky Sr., and on the other by Greyson’s mother, Maude. Dicky raised both his arms and waved them over his head. “Hello, the house!” he shouted.

“Hello, the car,” Winn returned at a lower volume.

“Thank you so much for having us, Winn,” Maude called. “Look at your lovely house. It’s just
lovely
.” She shaded her eyes with one hand in a kind of salute.

Maude and Dicky opened the car’s rear doors, stretched out their hands and, like two magicians performing identical tricks, each pulled out an old woman. Dicky’s old woman brushed him away, saying loudly, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“I was trying to be helpful,” he said.

“Well, you’re in the way.”

Tall and solid, her white hair cut short and left uncurled, she wore a blue pantsuit with pearls and, on a cord, eyeglasses as large and round as portholes. This was Oatsie, Dicky’s mother. On Maude’s side, the rubber tip of a cane emerged first, probing for the ground, followed by a pair of tiny feet in white Keds, then rickety calves in suntan nylons, and finally a frail bundle of a woman in a pink Chanel suit, topped with a cloud of Barbara Bush hair. She was Mopsy. Her trembling hands grasped indecisively at the cane and then at Maude and then at the car door. Maude passed her mother off to Dicky and went around to the trunk. “Bloodies!” she announced, lifting out a canvas bag and straining to hold it aloft so Winn could see. “I had an absolute craving. I made them at home and brought them on the plane, can you believe it? Daphne can have the recipe when I die but not a moment sooner. You can’t beat them.”

“I wouldn’t dream of trying,” Winn called back.

The two older boys had finally wrapped up their discussion, and Dicky Jr. hurried forward to take the bag from his mother, while the other, the elusive firstborn, Sterling, portly in seersucker, stood by the Jeep taking a few last drags from a cigarette. The second he dropped it to the gravel, Oatsie barked, “Sterling, pick up that butt!”

Sterling obliged, tossing it in the back of the Jeep before he ambled toward the house. Winn allowed his hand to be wrung by Dicky Sr. and pivoted through the grandmothers and Maude, kissing cheeks. He took the canvas bag of thermoses from Dicky Jr., who frowned suspiciously up at the house, and was introduced to Sterling, the only member of the Duff contingent whom he had never met.

“The best man,” Winn said. “You’ve been in Hong Kong?”

“That’s right,” said Sterling.

“We appreciate your making the trip. I know it means a lot to Daphne and Greyson that you came.”

“You bet.”

Sterling was only in his early thirties, but his face had a libertine
puffiness, and his belt was overhung by the settled, bankerly paunch of an older man. His eyes, though long lashed and of an unusual caramel color, betrayed no sense of fun. His gaze was oddly steady, even cold.

“Proper Dews,” Oatsie said, reading the house’s quarterboard. “Clever.”

“Oh, isn’t that funny,” said Maude. “Did you think that up, Winn? You’re so creative. You must be where Daphne got her imagination. Thank you so much for having us, really. This is a treat. And Greyson says you’re
cooking
? Really, you’re too generous.”

“Don’t overdo it, Maude,” said Oatsie.

“What a day this is. What a day,” Dicky Sr. chimed in.

“Isn’t it, though?” Maude said. “Can you believe the wedding is so soon? These two wonderful young people starting their lives together. We
are
fortunate, aren’t we? Aren’t we?”

“We are indeed,” said Dicky Sr.

“Hup,” said Dicky Jr.

Maude went on gabbling to Winn as though she’d mistaken him for a talk show host. “I have to tell you, I really do think of Daphne as a daughter. I really do. And to finally have another woman around, I can’t tell you how wonderful that is. After all these boys, I just, I can’t tell you—well,
hello
!”

Biddy had at last appeared. The kisses began again, as did Maude’s trills about her recipe for Bloodies and the generosity of the Van Meters.

“Quite a day,” said Dicky Sr.

“Come inside,” said Biddy.

Mopsy took hold of Winn’s arm from behind, surprising him with the strength of her grip. “I’m afraid I do need to—,” she said.

He bent his ear toward her. “What?”

“She needs to sit down,” said Dicky Jr. loudly. “She gets tired. Come, Gran. This way.” He detached her from Winn.

“Oh, this house,” exclaimed Maude as soon as she was through the door. “How
lovely
. And how beautifully you’ve decorated it. Look at this painting.”

“A friend painted it,” said Winn. “It’s only up because Biddy insists.”

“I should hope so,” Oatsie said, examining the canvas, an Alpine landscape, through her enormous spectacles.

Maude pressed her palms together. “Well, it’s
lovely
. And so sweet of you to hang it. Greyson is so lucky to be joining a family with a house like this.”

“Daphne says wonderful things about your Maine place,” Biddy said over her shoulder, leading the way toward the kitchen. “The pictures she’s shown us are stunning. I asked Daphne how many acres you were on, but she’s terrible with that sort of thing.”

“Bless her heart. She’s
wonderful
,” said Maude.

Dicky Sr. cleared his throat. “About fifty-five acres.”

“Must be a chunk of the island,” Winn said.

“Well, it is the island.”

“My word,” said Biddy, dropping back at the doorway. “Leave it to Daphne not to mention that.”

“You know,” Maude said, “the house is very modest, very rustic. We bought it ages ago when land was so undervalued there. But it’s our little place. We like it.”

Dicky said, “Lots of family memories.”

“Just a little family place. Very rustic.”

Dicky nodded. “It was good for the boys when they were young.”

“We can’t wait for the new baby to be there. It’s a
wonderful
place for children.”

In Winn’s imagination, a lifetime of dueling island homes took shape, campaigns waged on both sides to lure the children and sway the favor of the grandchildren. Daphne had probably been to the Duffs’ place ten times and had never thought to drop the crucial detail that the Duffs’ summer home was not
on
an island but
was
an island. In all likelihood, she had never asked, never thought anything of it.

“We got you a tuna steak,” he said to Dicky. “Daphne said lobster doesn’t agree with you.”

“It certainly doesn’t,” Dicky said. “Nor does death by asphyxiation. Such a shame because I’m always watching other people eat them.
Francis got the gene, too, poor kid. He’s worse than I am. Can’t even touch the things.”

“Daphne didn’t tell me that. Damn it, I’m afraid I only got one—”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. Francis can scavenge. If he’s lucky I’ll give him a bite of my tuna. Ah, there’s Daphne!”

He swept off. Winn stood at the edge of the kitchen. Biddy was pouring Bloody Marys from Maude’s thermos into a glass pitcher and chatting with Oatsie while Celeste hovered vampirically over her shoulder, eyeing the tomato juice. Dicky and Maude were out on the deck embracing Greyson and Daphne; the bridesmaids and groomsmen were weaving a maypole dance of cheek kisses; in the living room, Mopsy sat in a wing chair gazing out the window in the direction of Sterling, who stood on the lawn with his back to the house smoking another cigarette. Winn was glad to see Livia out there in the mix, kissing cheeks with the rest. She was wearing a blue dress that suited her, and the day’s sun had pinked her up a little, though she still looked too thin. Before Livia had dwindled into a wisp and Daphne had taken on the dirigible shape of late pregnancy, they had both been so lovely and young and ripe. The promise of fertility (preferable to its proof) had hung around them, in their large eyes and full mouths, their narrow waists and violin hips.

Where the girls’ hips had come from was a mystery. Biddy was built like a blade of grass, and Winn, too, was straight and narrow. But the girls complained that they could never find jeans that fit, that everything in their closets had felt the tailor’s needle. Biddy swore her family was populated exclusively by walking, talking yardsticks, bamboo poles, and rails, so Winn’s lineage must be the source, their hips the bequest of some long-dead woman, an anonymous Eve of the Dutch lowlands, trailed by a gaggle of children as she plodded from stove to field to barn and back again. Now that Livia had shed her hips and Daphne’s were dwarfed by breasts and belly, Winn found himself looking out through the open doors at two young women who wore his daughters’ faces and inhabited versions of their bodies but were strangers, too.

•    •    •

LIVIA KNEW
, as soon as the family Duff burst on to the scene, that the party would be one of those small, successful gatherings that effervesces from the start and continues on, buoyed by a tide of alcohol, until an unnoticed apex of high spirits passes, followed by a long, queasy slide into sloppiness, sleep, and regret. She had not dared go to any parties since the incident at the Ophidian. She had willfully humiliated herself in front of the pupating elite, whose judgment would, in all likelihood, hang over her for the rest of her life, and since then she had kept to herself. But this party, this little family shindig, seemed like a safe way to get back in the saddle.

The evening was mild. To the west, the sky was shades of sherbet, while overhead the dome was still blue and streaked with white contrails darting off like the paths of minnows. Everyone was outside except her father. After deputizing her to put out a cheese plate and trays of smoked salmon and shrimp cocktail, he had knocked back a perfunctory half glass of wine and returned to the kitchen to bustle around in his theatrical way, chopping with rat-a-tat speed and tossing and stirring and grating with the verve of someone conducting a philharmonic orchestra. Even Mopsy had been squired from the house by Dicky Jr. and sat rubbing her arms and complaining of the chill. Livia stood with a Bloody Mary and listened to Dicky Sr. rhapsodize about the Duffs’ latest batch of Labrador puppies.

“They’re wonderful, wonderful puppies,” he said. “Just wonderful.”

As best she understood, Dicky Sr. had retired while at the top of his game in an amorphous and lucrative career of doing things with money in order to write plodding historical tomes that he self-published, books with one-word titles like
Napoleon, Berlin
, or
Verdun
. He had a Rooseveltian smile, his jaws perpetually clamped around an imaginary cigarette holder. Would anyone ever write a book called
Duff
? Or
Dicky
? “Dicky” wasn’t even short for anything—Daphne said so. The name was on his birth certificate. His late father, Richard Duff IV, had not wanted to burden him with a V, but
then Dicky had gone ahead and started the cycle all over again with Dicky Jr.

“Are you working on a new book?” she asked him.

“I am indeed,” he said. “I’ve got my assistant started on the research for a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

“Do you have a title?”

“Funny story. I thought I would call it
Holmes
, but someone pointed out that people might think I meant Sherlock Holmes, so now the working title is
Justice
.”

He embarked on a detailed description of his interest in Holmes and had reached the college years in a synopsis of his life when Oatsie, who had been hovering nearby, said, “Dicky, that’s enough book talk.”

“All right, Mummer, what would you like me to talk about?”

“Why don’t you ask this young lady something about herself.”

“All right, Livia. You’re at Harvard, yes? Going to be a sophomore?”

“A senior.”

“That’s right. And do you have any plans for afterward?”

“I’m going to get a Ph.D. in marine biology,” she said.

“Oh.” He hit her with his biggest smile and swirled his wine.

“I thought your father said you were going to law school,” said Oatsie.