The Drowning House (28 page)

I wondered how she and Henry Durand had been able to plan and carry out their escape. If someone who shared their secret had helped.

More often, I thought about Will and the marvel of his interest in
me. It was an observable fact—since the boat trip, I had been singled out. And gradually, being with him, experiencing the sense of well-being that accompanied his undivided attention, had become not just something I enjoyed when it happened but something I looked forward to, even counted on. The likelihood of a visit from him shed a kind of light over even the longest and dullest afternoon and somehow made it possible.

At the archive, I had moved my chair, so that without turning my head, I could see the elevator and know who came and went. On those days when I visited Stella’s room, I sat facing the door. I found myself listening for Will’s characteristic footsteps on the stairs and in the hall, the sound of his whistling. I pretended to be absorbed by the spread of photos, the album in my lap. I didn’t want to appear to be waiting for him. Not until I felt the air vibrate with his presence did I look up and meet his gaze.

He brought me things—a piece of fruit, a small vase of roses. “These won’t take up much room,” he said as he helped me clear a place for the flowers on the table. Then he brought me a pair of earrings.

He was smiling, holding out both closed fists. “Pick a hand,” he said. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I saw when he opened his fingers.

They were gold, antique, with curved ear loops like fish hooks. On each was an irregularly shaped pearl and a small diamond. I was stunned.

“They work like this,” Will said. He opened one of the lever backs. “Would you like to try them? I’ve seen you in earrings, and I thought you might like these.” His manner suggested that this was no different than any of his other small gifts.

I took one of the earrings from him, found the piercing in my left ear, and slid it in.

Will sat back, his pleasure evident. “What do you think?” he asked. “Take a look.” He indicated the mirror over Stella’s dresser. I stood and stepped in front of it. When I moved my head, the diamond caught the light and the pearl trembled.

“Were they hers?”

“I can’t be sure. But I like to think so.”

It never occurred to me to refuse. To disappoint him.

Often Will would sit and talk for a while about the heat or a possible water shortage. The planned Fourth of July celebration that would snarl traffic off the causeway and increase the need for beach patrols. The usual Island themes. The conversation I had heard for years growing up came back to me easily. The difference was that now those commonplaces were charged with significance.

Eventually Will would go down the hall to Mary Liz. Then to his study. I had not been invited there since the night of the party, but that didn’t prevent me from investigating.

The room had belonged to Will’s father and grandfather before him, but the things in it were his. I saw everywhere evidence of those pursuits—art, architecture, gardens—that my father had mocked. There were books, many of them old, some probably rare, in Italian as well as English, with marginal notes in brownish ink. There were portfolios of engravings tied with soft, worn strings. On one of them rested a silver magnifying glass. There was just enough disarray to suggest comfort and the absence of any desire to impress.

There were photos too among the books, including one of Catherine as a baby, before the illness that had changed her forever, and I realized that this other Catherine, whose small, perfect features were all pleasing promise, was as much lost to Will as if she had died.

Looking around, I found myself imagining a different life for him, away from the Island. As an architect or a scholar. A professor, at the center of a crowd of admiring students. Any one of them seemed possible.

His sister lived in Paris. Will could live anywhere. I thought about Mary Liz and Eleanor and the odd back-and-forth arrangement between the two houses. Surely he must dislike it. Yet it seemed fixed, permanent, as though Mary Liz’s inability to move had somehow translated into a more general paralysis.

My inspection done, I went back to Stella’s room. I picked up the little notebook of drawings. It was pocket-size, and I imagined Stella carrying it with her into the garden, to the shore, when she was able
to go there. As I turned the pages I noticed that the subject matter changed. Plants and shells gave way to designs featuring them. There were pages of decorative motifs, of carvings and borders. Were these somehow part of the lovers’ conversation? I flipped to the last few pages. The lilies were the ones in the bedroom wallpaper. With every page, they became smaller. On the last page, the pressure of the pencil had left furrows in the paper.

I opened the travel album and idly turned the stiff, oversize black pages with my left hand. There was Notre Dame, there a bridge over the Seine with a boat approaching. I flipped through quickly, looking for something interesting or personal, but it was all the same. I didn’t notice that the weight of the album had shifted until it fell off the table.

Quickly I bent over. I saw immediately that the damage was serious. The back of the album had separated from the spine. I felt something close to panic. How would I explain to Will what I’d done? What would he think? That I’d been careless with material that wasn’t mine? It wasn’t until I touched the pages, tried to close the album again, that I understood what had happened. The back had broken free, revealing a sort of pocket whose contents had spilled out.

I had seen my share of explicit period photos, plenty that were purely salacious, so I wasn’t unprepared in that way. At home I had a print from the twenties that Jules had given me when he learned I was pregnant, with a card that read:
Remember who you really are
. It showed a woman wearing nothing but a tiny apron and a pair of red high heels dusting a bookcase. Soft porn, kitschy. When Bailey saw it, her only interest was in the feather duster, a wholly unfamiliar object.

This was different. It was a picture of a child. A girl—she looked about eight—sitting on a man’s lap. He was dressed in a heavy suit of the kind wealthy men wore a hundred years ago, even in the hottest months. He wore a stand collar and a cravat with a stickpin. A watch chain hung in an arc across his waistcoat. He gazed at the camera out of one good eye. The child sat on his knee in the pose sacred to family photographers everywhere. She was naked.

I sat down slowly on the floor. I felt dizzy, and I rested my head
between my knees and closed my eyes. I was unpleasantly aware of the taste of my own mouth. Gingerly, I began to reassemble the album and its contents. I tried to think of Stella idealized and classically draped in the relief over the Carradays’ fireplace, Stella wrapped in layers of gathered and pleated fabric in the photo on the mantel. Instead I saw Stella slender and naked, her childish nipples like pips above her gently curving belly, her ankles delicately crossed.

I covered my eyes with my hand. But there was no unseeing it. What did the photo mean? Was there an explanation that would somehow make it right? An explanation that had been lost?
The baby is sleeping, the cloth keeps the flies away
. I wanted to believe it. I did not want to have discovered what Will would cringe to see. I didn’t want to be the one to show it to him.

I looked again at the photo. I had to look, even though I hated what I saw. I wished I hadn’t been the one to find it. It was none of my business. Wasn’t that what I had always been told? Hadn’t I been ordered to keep out of other people’s things, other people’s lives? If I stared too long at someone, Eleanor would put her hands on either side of my head and forcibly turn it away.

I don’t know how long I stayed there. My head ached. The light, even through the lace curtain, was painfully bright. The window hung over me, enormous, surrounded by a fuzzy halo.

I thought then that perhaps I could reassemble the album and put it where it would never be seen. Keep the knowledge of it to myself. The possibility made itself felt with special strength there, in the house whose past I knew so well, where generations passed and nothing changed. Certainly there was no reason to act right away. The bed was nearby and I pushed the album under it.

But I thought about Stella’s real life, in the Carraday house. With her mother, the invalid, lying in a darkened room.

She’d been just sixteen when Ward Carraday married her. Now she is older, and there are brown spots on the back of her hands. Her bedroom smells of medicine, there are piles of discarded clothes, unopened letters. Ward Carraday stays away.

Stella visits him at his office and lunches with him in the dining
room at the Tremont Hotel. They have done this since she was a child. It is one of his few indulgences—their time together. Stella is the only person in the world who has never been shocked by his appearance. Ward Carraday rests his ringed hand on hers and thinks that this is his real fortune, this young woman who belongs to him alone. Her even features, her large eyes set perfectly beneath black arching brows. The skin that is without any kind of blemish.

When she begs to come more often to his place of business, he doesn’t know it is because she hopes to encounter the young architect with the curly hair and white cuffs. That they have already had several quick talks in the passageway outside his door. Ward Carraday doesn’t know that Stella finds his hand heavy and hot, that his knuckles make her think of barnacles. He doesn’t notice when she pulls away from him and hides her hand under the tablecloth where she wipes it over and over on her skirt.

Ward Carraday has ordered lilies, her favorites, for the table, but someone has misunderstood. The vase holds the wrong kind—stargazers, they are called, vulgar spotted flowers. With a backward gesture he dismisses them. When a fresh arrangement appears—white, luminous—and Stella smiles, he feels that her happiness is worth any trouble.

After lunch she will break off a stem and tuck it in the waistband of her dress. As they pass out under the porte cochere, Henry Durand, who has been waiting near the cab rank, balancing on one foot, rubbing the tops of his boots against the back of his trouser legs to remove the inevitable sandy dust, will step up to greet them, mark the flower, and begin his elaborate, largely silent courtship. Lilies along the walls, carved into the woodwork. Lilies crushed beneath Stella’s feet.

Chapter 25

I STOOD UP AND WENT TO THE DOOR
. I could hear Faline in the kitchen downstairs. I imagined Will arriving home, greeting me, seeing my face, and knowing right away that something was wrong. There wasn’t much time. I gathered my things and left the Carraday house.

When Eleanor saw me coming across the lawn, she waved and called out. If she sensed the turmoil in my mind, she didn’t let on. Her creamy linen dress set off the color of her arms—not tan, nothing as obvious as that, or pale like mine, but the golden buff color of Island sand on a clear day.

“Did you call your friend?” she asked. She was wearing the gold cuff bracelet I’d seen before, and as she spoke, she turned it around and around her wrist.

“What friend?”

“The one who wanted to know about the show?” I realized she meant Jules, and it occurred to me that I had never thought of him as a friend. We had a history together, he knew things about me no one else did, but his manner had always been, in its peculiar way, entirely professional.

“You mean Jules.”

“I suppose.” She looked at me brightly, eyebrows raised in a show of animation, like a grown-up offering a small child a treat, something sweet and sticky that she wouldn’t want for herself. “I think he mentioned a gallery. The Corcoran? Something like that.”

Jules must have been serious. “He called again?”

“I left you a note.”

I hurried upstairs and found it under some clothes I had taken off and thrown on a chair. When I returned his call, Jules confirmed what Eleanor had told me. His manner was casual at first. “Of course they love your work, they would have offered it to you eventually. But they’ve had a cancellation, they need something right away.” He paused, then gave up all pretense. “It’s an amazing opportunity.”

It was.

“When?” I asked.

“September.”

“That soon?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s no rush. You can finish what you’re doing there. It’s all about quality.”

I hung up the phone. I felt oddly flat. I thought about what Harriet Kinkaid had said. Was it that I’d imagined this moment too many times, so that it now seemed unreal? Was part of me afraid to take what I had worked for, what I wanted? Or was it Eleanor’s reaction?

I went slowly up the stairs and lay down on the big, white bed. I stayed there listening to the murmur of a dove on the windowsill. I wondered what it felt like to fly into a pane of glass. When the dove flew away, I turned my face into the pillow.

One thing was perfectly clear. Frankie was right, Eleanor wanted me gone. I could see that the idea delighted her. I saw her again, fresh and happy in her linen dress, beckoning to me as I came in the door, and it seemed to me then that she had always done that—called me to her only to send me away. I thought of her in the garden, the kitchen, at the piano. When had she ever wanted me near her?