Seating Arrangements (17 page)

The phone was quiet. “Livia?” said Biddy.

“There’s something else.”

Winn straightened the papers on his desk. “What?”

“The Emancipation Celebration was on Thursday, and then on Saturday there was a normal sort of party at the club. I went to it. I was pretty drunk.”

“Yes?” said Winn.

“I’m only telling you this because people were there whose parents you know. You’d find out eventually.” She sniffed. Winn wanted to tell her to blow her nose. “But I kind of lost it and told everyone I was pregnant.”

“What do you mean you told them?” Biddy said.

“I might have sort of shouted it.”

“Oh, Livia,” said Biddy, “you didn’t.”

“Obviously I did, Mom. It’s not just a fun lie I made up.”

“Don’t snap at Mommy,” Winn said. “How many people could have heard you? Not too many?”

Livia’s voice was small. “A lot. Pretty much everyone who was there. And they all told other people.”

“What other people?” Winn said.

“Like the whole Ophidian, their girlfriends, their friends. The entire world.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Winn exploded. “What in God’s name were you thinking?”

“I don’t know. I went crazy.”

“No, Livia, tell me what you were thinking.”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t. I’m sorry.” The last word was swallowed by a sob.

“This kind of behavior is unacceptable. I have been very understanding about this whole situation because I thought we agreed this would remain private. We need to get these outbursts under control. You were way out of line. Out of line. It’s bad enough that you go around acting like a floozy, but then you throw your dignity right out the window and the whole family’s with it. It’s not becoming. It’s not adult. People won’t respect you.” He stopped, his well of censure unexpectedly run dry.

“Please, Daddy. It’s done. I’m sorry. Please don’t torture me. However embarrassed you might be, I promise I feel a million times worse.”

“Everything’s always worse for you, isn’t it? As though that’s an excuse. You can’t keep your knees together, and now we see you can’t keep your mouth shut either. You need to think about other people for once. The Ophidian is something I respect, and you chose that place, of all places, to drag this family through the mud. I can forgive many things, Livia, but I’m not sure this is one of them.” He could hear her ragged breathing. “Hello?” he said. “Livia?”

“The Ophidian?” she said. There was a high tremor to her voice. “You think the worst part of this is that it happened at the Ophidian?”

“The Ophidian is very important to me.” He wanted to shout at
her that he had wanted a son who would be a member of the Ophidian, not a daughter who got knocked up by one.

“You can take your stupid club and shove it up your
ass
, Daddy. You know another thing people respect? An ounce of fucking loyalty from their own fathers.” The line clicked.

“Hello? Livia? Don’t you hang up!”

“She hung up,” said Biddy.

Winn took off his glasses and rubbed his face. Then he put his glasses back on, picked up his pen, and turned crisply back to his papers. Biddy stepped closer. “Winn?” she said.

Winn held a sheet up to the light and frowned at it. “What?”

“I think you could have handled that differently.”

“She told me to shove the Ophidian up my ass. Is that the way civilized people speak to their fathers? No. I will not indulge her with a response. She’s too worked up. She’s hormonal. I can’t get through to her when she’s like that.”

“You graduated almost forty years ago. Do you really have to put the Ophidian above your child?”

“I did no such thing.”

She came around the corner of his desk to face him, tapping at the wood to get his attention. He wanted to slap her hand. “Really?” she asked.

“No!” he said, nearly shouting. He took a deep breath. “Well look, dear. Look.” He set down his pen and folded his hands. “I was one of those boys once. I was only trying to provide her with some insight into what they were doing because I thought another perspective might be useful. You know, maybe they don’t all need to be summarily shot. One thing I don’t know, I am willing to admit, is what it’s like to be a pregnant twenty-year-old, you’re right. Especially one who goes into a crowded party full of our friends’ children and announces that she’s gotten herself”—he pushed his papers around—“in a bad way. So, if I wasn’t as diplomatic as I might have been, I apologize.”

“Livia’s suffering,” Biddy said. “What she did was wrong, but she’s obviously miserable about it.”

“She should be!” he erupted. “She deserves a little misery. I’m trying my damnedest to be reasonable here, Biddy, but she’s making it awfully difficult. What more do you want?”

“It would be nice if we didn’t always just have to assume you love us.” Biddy’s voice rasped, but Winn was in no mood to console any women.

“Have I or have I not been a good husband to you?” he said. “Have I provided for you? Given you freedom and support? I don’t treat you badly. I don’t complain about your family. I’ve given you free rein over this wedding. What more do you want from me, Biddy? Have I or have I not been a good husband?”

Biddy stood up straight. “I think,” she said, “you’ve been the best husband you probably could be.”

AS QUICKLY AS
Winn could dish them up, the lobsters were carried off and devoured, hollowed out into empty red armor piled high in ceramic bowls. He wondered what Biddy had done with the sick lobster—he couldn’t imagine her killing it, nor did he think she would have left it somewhere to die.

All the Adirondacks were full, so he carried a straight-backed chair out from the dining room and sat in it with a gin and tonic—the fourth and strongest of a quick succession—sweating a dark circle onto his knee. He had poured the first after Livia had flounced out of the kitchen and the second and third not long after that, as he ate his own lobster alone in the dining room, preferring to sit at a proper table and not to sprawl on the deck or lawn. In his left ear, Dicky was telling a long story about, he thought, Oliver Wendell Holmes. In his right ear, Maude laughed arpeggios at something Biddy was saying. He was tipsy. Quite tipsy. Around him, the party was gaining a pointless momentum, becoming a parade to nowhere. Night had fallen, and Biddy had gone around setting out hurricane lanterns and lighting them with a kitchen lighter. Their orange glow, extending from the murky edge of the dark lawn into the thick of the crowd, was warmer and more enticing than the wan grids of pale incandescence
that fell from the doors and windowpanes, turning people to shadows as they passed near the house. Agatha was standing and leaning over Sterling, giggling and pouring him a drink in a pose that cried out for go-go boots and a stewardess outfit in loud, groovy colors. Sterling’s eyes meandered from her face to her neck to her waist and back again.

“And we got hold of a bunch of lobster shells,” Dicky Sr. was saying, having moved on from Justice Holmes. “Bags of them, already starting to smell—I mean they were
decidedly
ripe—and we put them in the heating ducts of their building. This guy Jeffrey Whitehorse broke in; he could pick locks. He said he had an uncle who was a jewel thief. Strange guy, Jeffrey. While he was at it, he stole this club coat of arms they’d cooked up and had gotten carved somewhere, and we mailed it as a gift to the prime minister of Iceland. The next day you could smell their building from three blocks away. Terrible, terrible smell. Nothing quite like rotting shellfish for a stink.”

Winn was watching Daphne, flushed and bleary eyed from laughing, leaning against Greyson with a bottle of nonalcoholic beer balanced on her belly, but Dicky’s story, issuing with clipped precision from his thin, Rooseveltian lips, disoriented him, keelhauled him through a chaotic wash of memory, and when he came up on the other side, he had to check to see that it was indeed Dicky speaking, Dicky’s aquiline profile in the shadows and not the dark silhouette of his own father.

“No,” said Maude, pulling Winn back into the present, “you don’t mean Iceland. You mean Ireland. And his name was Whitehouse, not Whitehorse. Whitehorse makes him sound like an Indian.”

“You tell the story then, dear.”

But Maude had already lost interest. “Sterling is certainly popular with the ladies tonight,” she said sotto voce.

Agatha and Sterling had begun playing a hand-slapping game. Sterling’s reflexes were surprisingly quick. He flipped his hands out from under Agatha’s and slapped the backs of hers before she could pull them away. “Rematch!” she said, and he did it again. “How are you so fast?” she cried. Livia was watching them from across the knot
of chairs, her face without expression but her eyes dark and active, and Celeste, who sat beside her, was watching them all. Winn didn’t know if he was more distressed by the idea of Sterling sleeping with Agatha or Livia. Probably he should be most bothered by finding himself swimming in the same pool of potential partners as his daughters, but all he could summon was a fatalistic apathy.

“Girls have always liked Sterling,” Dicky said.

“Go figure,” said Winn. Maude laughed one uncertain trill.

Just then Greyson stood up, clinking two beer bottles together. “Everyone,” he said. “Everyone.”

“He’s a prince. He’s a catch,” said Maude, leaning close to Winn’s ear as though telling a secret. He did not know who she meant. She winked and nodded.

GREYSON SANG
a song, not a short one, that Livia had not heard before. It was old-fashioned and brassy and provided an abundance of opportunities for the singer to drop to one knee and mime with pumping hands the tromboning palpitations of a heart in love. He sang well enough, in a reedy tenor Livia remembered from Christmas caroling. Charlie and Francis, former Tigertones both, sang backup and provided goofy slide-whistle sound effects. Daphne beamed. Agatha, drawn to the spotlight, danced her way to a post just behind Daphne, where she shadowed her friend’s delight—clapping her hands in time with the song and shimmying from side to side. She winked at Sterling, who tipped his glass at her, and Livia felt squashed and defeated. Never before would she have argued that Daphne was more beautiful than Agatha, but the sight of joyful, radiant Daphne beside vaudevillian, showboating Agatha convinced her.

Dominique sat off to one side, a little apart, a drink in one hand, watching the action with a pained expression badly hidden under an indulgent smile. She wore white canvas sailor pants and a blouse in stiff black cotton with an asymmetrical neckline, and her legs and arms were both crossed, one foot in a silver ballet flat bouncing just off the beat of Greyson’s song. A thick silver bangle was pushed high
up on her forearm, but otherwise she wore no jewelry. For most of her life, Livia had wanted to be Dominique, and the desire returned with new strength: to be aloof, impassive, queenly with close-cropped hair, classic in a way that had nothing to do with pastels or goofy little whales but was about elegance and coolness. Did they all seem ridiculous to her? Livia longed to be more mysterious, more self-possessed, more neutral in her color palette, the kind of woman whose thoughts were the object of speculation. Dominique rubbed her biceps and then turned to retrieve a folded square of fabric that she shook out, revealing a bright yellow and orange batik, embroidered with flowers, loops, and abstract squiggles and studded with tiny mirrors that flashed in the lantern light. Wrapping it around her shoulders, she was transformed from chic, minimalist European into something more vibrant and arresting, a dark head emerging from folds of saffron and canary, a sun priestess.

Growing up, Livia had always assumed that Dominique would one day be fully integrated into their circle, married to a boy like the ones Daphne had been friends with at Deerfield, settled somewhere around New York, still cool, still exotic but also neutralized, fully adapted, a happy convert. Her differentness had seemed all the more precious because Livia had not believed it would last. But instead Dominique had gone to Michigan when she could have gone to Brown, to culinary school when she had been accepted at Wharton, to Belgium when an equally good job was on offer in Boston. She abandoned the clothes, the music, the mannerisms, and most of the friendships of her prep school self, and yet through all that shedding she seemed to become more calm and assured than ever.

Transformation captivated Livia, but she was squeamish at the thought of changing her own life. To change would be to admit that she had been going about things all wrong. Her people noticed change, discussed it, speculated about its superficiality, its vanity. The only kind of change they understood was the flickering skin of the octopus, blending in with its surroundings, or the real estate flipping of the hermit crab, always shopping for a slightly roomier prison. Dominique would probably advise her to leave, to go somewhere else
and start fresh and then come back when she had become who she wanted to be. But Livia couldn’t see the way. It was too late for her, already too late.

After the applause died down and Greyson finished kissing Daphne, there could be heard, from somewhere on the island, the sound of a bagpipe.

“What is that tune?” Oatsie said.

Winn said, “Is it ‘Amazing Grace’?”

“Dad thinks every song is ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” Livia said. “It’s like he’s color-blind but for music.”

“Tone-deaf?” posited Francis.

“No,” Livia said, “it’s that he only knows the name of one song.”

“Maybe it is ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” said Piper.

“No,” said Dicky Jr. “It’s from that movie about the
Titanic
.”

“
Titanic
?” said Dominique from her corner, tickled. “Dicky Duff Jr., I would not have expected you to come up with that.”

Dicky Jr. shrugged. “It’s what it is.”

“Everybody,” said Greyson, “my brother is a twelve-year-old girl.”

“In 1997,” put in Francis.

Daphne sighed and stretched. “I have to go lie down,” she said, rubbing her belly. “I might be back but probably not.”

Escorted by Greyson, she went inside. “Don’t neglect your cocoa butter!” Oatsie bellowed after her.