The Body in the Boudoir (5 page)

She buzzed her up, and an hour later, they were still not talked out. Hope had devoured the leftovers and the croissants she'd picked up on the way. Faith wasn't hungry, but sipped at her coffee as the torrent of words came spilling out—all the reasons why she was head over heels and all the reasons why the whole thing was, to use Tom's word, “insane.” Blissfully so.

“To be continued,” Hope said. “I have a client coming into town for a breakfast meeting at the Mark, and I have to get going.” At the door, she gave her sister a big hug. “So this is what it looks like.”

“What?” Faith asked, hugging her back.

“True love.”

“P
oppy wants to give you a shower, and it has to be before we go away.”

Emma Morris was sitting at Faith's desk at work with the chair facing out, toward the kitchen. The counter was lined with trays of cooling divinity fudge, another of Josie's specialties and destined to be packed into small gold boxes as favors for an anniversary party. The significance of the name had taken on new meaning for Faith, as had pretty much everything else in her life these days. She was engaged. She was getting married. The “but”—the contingency that was her trip to Aleford—had fallen by the wayside. No time, and no inclination now. The universe was whirling madly as her emotions plunged from euphoria to fear and trembling. And here was Emma announcing that her mother wanted to give Faith a shower. A bridal shower!

Emma and Faith had been at Dalton together, but lost touch during college. Last December Emma had turned to Faith for help. She was being blackmailed, and the deadly journey the two took together had forged something more than mere friendship. They'd initially reconnected at a party she was catering, Faith recalled, looking over at Emma—startlingly beautiful, like a Pre-Raphaelite-era Rossetti painting, even in a plain gray Eileen Fisher outfit. She also recalled the look of fear on Emma's face that evening as she'd dashed into the host's kitchen, where Faith had been busy with coconut shrimp, and paused to greet her former classmate politely—Emma was very polite—before asking desperately whether there was a back way out of the apartment. Two parties: one in December, one in January; two life-changing events. Faith had had no idea catering would prove so perilous, so delirious.

And now it was March and Emma's mother, Poppy, wanted to give Faith a shower.

Poppy Morris was a legend. During the sixties she'd invented radical chic, throwing dinner parties where Bobby Seale might be seated next to Brooke Astor and across from Henry Kissinger, with Jane Fonda to his left. Far left. It was Poppy who'd first put the iconic photograph of Che on a T-shirt, pairing it with Ralph Lauren pants. She marched her way through the seventies and ever onward, while maintaining close ties to whoever sat in the Oval Office, sending Ronnie jelly beans, banning broccoli when George and Barbara dined chez Morris. Power was Power.

Never a white wine yuppie, Poppy stuck with martinis. She preferred poker to bridge and wasn't a lady who lunched. Her husband, Jason, seemed content to sit and watch the show, with a cast of characters that had changed with each decade. At the moment Poppy was devoting herself to Emma, having coming very close to losing her, and had typically decided that what her daughter needed now was to embark on a round-the-world voyage with Poppy, stopping not in Paris or Rome but in Morocco, Istanbul, and “a divine little place” Poppy had discovered while trekking in Nepal.

“She doesn't have to do this and anyway it's too soon,” Faith said.

The wedding wasn't until June. Many months away, she kept telling herself. Many, many.

Emma was nibbling on a piece of fudge Josie had handed her.

“Yum. I wish I could make things like this. No, I don't really. Anyway, Faith, you know Poppy. She's not going to take no for an answer. Check your calendar. She wants to do it the last Sunday of the month. Late afternoon. It will be fun. She has some sort of idea she read about that she says will liven things up. I don't know what it is, but we have to have at least twenty-four people.”

Poppy's idea of fun usually was, but Faith couldn't imagine what kind of shower this might be.

“You're a bride. Brides have showers given for them. Relax,” Josie said. She'd greeted Faith's news with delight and proclaimed herself the first to know, although Howard was saying the same thing. So far as Faith could tell, these claims were based on the way Tom had looked at her across the tray of
saucisson en brioche
she'd been carrying at that wedding or, Howard's contribution, the way Tom had held her when they'd danced together.

“You're supposed to give me a list,” Emma said. “And it's not a Jack and Jill shower. She doesn't like those. Only women.”

“She should be a wedding planner. How often does she do this?”

“Oh, this is the first. My ex's sister gave me one”—Emma's divorce had possibly been the quickest, and most dramatic, in New York state history—“not Poppy and certainly not Lucy.”

Lucy was Emma's older sister, and there were adult women who still shuddered at the name when they cast their memories back to the merciless bullying they'd endured as teens at Lucy's hands. She'd had an uncanny ability to ferret out one's weak spots, which Faith believed was not due to a curse from an evil witch at birth but because Lucy was an evil witch herself at birth. She had a sudden thought.

“We won't have to have Lucy, will we?”

“No, Poppy's rather off her now after, well, all that business.”

Lucy had blamed Emma herself for almost becoming one of Manhattan's last 1989 murder statistics and, what was worse, casting off a “one of us” mate for what Lucy viewed as merely an odd peccadillo or two. Others, particularly the police, thought not.

“And of course you can't cater it yourself. She's going to make her popovers and the cook will do the rest.”

Poppy had learned to make popovers as a bride—“One did those kinds of things in the fifties before dear Betty wrote her book”—and there was no mystique about them. They were delicious. She'd taught Emma and Faith during a sleepover at the Morris's Upper East Side town house when they were in elementary school. She'd taught them how to make s'mores on another occasion, and there Poppy's culinary expertise had ground to a halt.

“So I'll tell her you're beside yourself with joy or whatever else you want me to say and will give her a list soon?”

“Look at her. She's overflowing with joy,” Josie said. “Me, too.”

Faith smiled obediently—after all, it was dear of Poppy to want to do this. Francesca was smiling, too, although her smile was the puzzled, What Are These People All About? kind.

“Won't your house already have one, a
doccia
? Why is Emma's mama giving you a shower?”

F
aith was seated in a large club chair in what Poppy called her Garden Room, a sizable solarium on the top floor of the house. She may have burned a bra or two, but when it came to interior decorating, Poppy was a traditionalist, strictly Sister Parish and Mario Buatta. The living room, dining room, and library on the main floor were straight from the set of
Brideshead Revisited
. Here the Colefax and Fowler chintzes were less formal—flowered trellises, some exotic birds with bright plumage—but the food had been set out on a Hepplewhite sideboard. The fabled popovers had been filled with a creamy mixture of asparagus and ham, a nice change from chicken. There was a green salad with pears, walnuts, and Gorgonzola. A basket of plain popovers, piping hot, was constantly replenished, as was the butter and an assortment of jams ranging from savory to sweet set out in Poppy's Royal Crown Derby next to them. They were drinking a fruity champagne punch, and whether it was the alcohol or the occasion that was producing the merriment, Faith couldn't say. She could say that she was enjoying herself very much, however.

The list had easily risen to twenty-four and then some. Besides Faith, Hope, Jane Sibley and her mother, Eleanor Lennox, Aunt Chat—Charity Sibley—several other relatives, Josie, Francesca, and Amanda from work, Poppy, Emma, and Dalton and college friends, Tom's family was represented. Faith had already received a phone call from Tom's parents welcoming her into the family and a note from Tom's mother accompanying a cameo brooch that had belonged to Tom's great-great-grandmother and was passed on to the first Fairchild bride in each generation. Faith mentioned the shower when she wrote back thanking her and also asking for the address of Tom's sister, Betsey, as well as that of any others Marian Fairchild thought should be included. Tom's two younger brothers, Robert and Craig, were single, Craig in his first year at the University of Massachusetts. Betsey, the oldest, had married Dennis Parker, her college sweetheart, immediately after graduation. Dennis was a periodontist. They had a year-old son, Scotty, whom Tom adored, as well as had proudly baptized, and lived in Hingham, the town next to Norwell.

Marian had been very sorry, but she and Tom's father, Dick, would be attending a relative's fiftieth birthday party that day. Having colonized the South Shore early in the twentieth century, arriving from Ireland by way of Boston's West End, various Fairchild branches had established Fairchild's Market, Fairchild's Realty, and later, Fairchild's Ford. Faith understood from Tom that the birthday relative was from the car dealership branch. Fairchild's Realty was Tom's father. Betsey had accepted and asked to bring a guest, “an old family friend.”

Faith looked over at her future sister-in-law, sitting ramrod straight on a footstool despite Emma's urging that there was plenty of room on one of the couches. Like Tom, Betsey was tall and had an athletic build. It had already come up in conversation that she'd be running the Boston Marathon again this year. She was a brunette, like her brother, but whether she hadn't been graced by nature with the red glints he had or whether she had obliterated them, Faith couldn't tell. Her thick hair was pulled severely back from her face and anchored at the nape of her neck with a sturdy-looking tortoiseshell clip. So far, attempts at conversation had been heavy going and at first Faith had wondered why Betsey had bothered to come—like her brother, she drove, and it was a long drive.

It soon became clear that the purpose was to display the woman who should be the guest of honor at a shower for her future sister-in-law. The “old friend of the family” was a ravishing young sylphlike blonde named Sydney Jerome with the biggest, deepest blue eyes Faith had ever seen. Like Betsey, she was wearing a Talbots wool ensemble more suited to their mothers' generation, the kind of jacket dress that “could go anywhere” in New England—the Friday-afternoon concert at the Boston Symphony, the local Friends of the Library annual tea, and of course lunch at the Chilton Club. The boxy jacket and pleated skirt were, however, unsuccessful at masking the attributes underneath, a killer body crying out for something clingy.

Faith had heard all about Sydney from Tom. The Jeromes lived next door to the Fairchilds, and Sydney had been part of the tree house, raft-building gang from the start. A regular on Fairchild family ski trips and their touch football game every Sunday after church, Sydney was also part of the garage band the gang had morphed into during their adolescence. Oh yes, Faith had heard all about Sydney, starting that first evening at Michael's Pub. The only thing she hadn't heard was that “Sydney” was a girl. She looked over at her again. Quite a girl.

Just as Tom had omitted mentioning the reason he was in town that day, he'd omitted mentioning this piece of information. Faith would have to get used to it. It seemed to go along with the job, minds concentrating on higher-level subjects rather than life's more mundane details? Her own father was notorious for this sort of thing, and conversations with him were often like a sort of parlor game—Twenty Questions or Animal/Vegetable/Mineral. Over the years Faith and Hope had noticed their mother's aptitude at deciphering her husband's derailed trains of thought and Faith assumed that with time she'd also develop the skill. At the moment Sydney's presence, somewhat of a shock at first, was now striking her as funny—and raising an important question. What was behind it all? Betsey's desire to have the family chum remain in the fold? Whose idea had it been to bring Sydney to the shower, Betsey's or the “dear family friend's”?

Poppy clapped her hands.

“Time for prezzies. You all got the invitation with the explanation, but it's time to tell Faith.” She looked terribly pleased with herself.

“It's a Round-the-Clock shower. Everyone was assigned a time and had to bring something appropriate, and I hope amusing, for each hour. Let's see, we'll start with one
A.M.
, shall we?”

Pure Poppy. And it was a fun idea—or so Faith hoped. If it worked, it would be something to suggest to clients. She felt a sudden stab. Clients. She wasn't taking on any more, aside from small jobs, and everything would stop in mid-May. She'd had to return the deposits and smooth some ruffled feathers for the weddings she'd had scheduled for June. The brides had, fortunately, been understanding, swept up in bridal sisterhood, and were relieved that all the plans, and quality, would remain the same with the firm Faith was recommending.

Faith had had many a middle-of-the-night thought about what giving up the business meant. The business that she alone had created; it was a part of her now. She fully intended to start it again in Massachusetts and Tom had been adamant that she should, but at times the idea was overwhelming. And what did they eat up there? Baked beans, Indian pudding, those boiled dinners . . .

She caught Hope's eye. Her sister was having a good time catching up with various friends. Hope nodded to her as Faith took a large box from Josie, the one o'clock guest, and prepared to open it. Faith interpreted the nod as Hope's way of saying that everything was going to be fine. It wasn't that her sister was a mind reader, although often they were able to communicate quite nicely without words.