by Lian Dolan
The Sweeney sisters paused to consider all Cap had said. If their father was a “man of moments,” not grand plans, why wouldn’t he have wanted to see Serena? Wouldn’t he have wanted to see what had become of a moment in 1981? Liza asked the question they all were thinking. “Why didn’t he want to see her, Cap?”
Cap looked out at the three faces of the young women he cherished. “He said that seeing Serena Tucker as an adult, after having paid so little attention to her as a child, would remind him of all the ways he had failed in his life. He said talking to her now would break his heart.”
None of the Sweeney sisters had the instinct to go all “Dr. Phil” as Maggie called it, rushing to meet their long-lost sister in a tearful reunion. “That may be fine for some families, but not for us,” Liza said.
Tricia seconded, “I suggest we proceed with caution.”
Cap suggested a formal meeting with a lawyer present as a start. The sisters agreed and Cap said he’d set it up.
By the time Cap left, it was after five, or as Maggie said while pouring herself a glass of wine, “Rosé o’clock.” The sisters were drained, mentally and physically, from the last four days of grieving, planning, coping at an intense level. They’d already agreed about “next steps,” as Tricia kept saying, on “the Serena situation.” Tomorrow, they could figure out a game plan for finding the manuscript and getting the house on the market, but right now, they needed to absorb everything they had heard from Cap on their own time.
Tricia, normally the most rational of the sisters, was livid. Not even Cap’s measured responses could calm her down and once he departed, she got all riled up again. “I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe this,” Tricia said for the tenth time since they’d learned about Serena. “I am so mad at Dad for dumping this on us. ‘Here, girls, here’s an incredibly complicated financial situation. And, oh! Did I mention my love child? Yeah, she’s in for a quarter of the house, by the way.’”
“Don’t say love child. Please. Birdie Tucker is not the kind of woman who bears a love child,” Liza said. “The last time I saw her, she was berating the checker at Stop & Shop for the crème fraîche shortage. She’s awful. It makes me sick to think of her ever interacting with Mom.”
“Me, too. I can’t get past the mother to deal with the daughter. But we’re going to have to.” Tricia was pacing on the patio; she processed better when she moved.
“There’s nothing we can do. It happened a long time ago and we have to cope,” Maggie offered in her yoga teacher voice.
“Do we? It’s not our problem, really. This was between Dad and Birdie Tucker. I don’t really understand why we have to cope with the consequences. I have no desire for more relatives.”
“That’s harsh. We don’t even know this girl, really.”
“When Mom died, Birdie Tucker showed up at the front door the next day. I answered it because everyone else was asleep. And there she is in a warm-up suit standing there with a giant wheel of Brie and those thin crackers in the green tin.”
“Bremner wafers,” Liza said. “Nothing says WASP comfort food like Brie and Bremner wafers.”
“I know. She handed me this cheese and this tin and she tried to bulldoze her way into the house. She hadn’t done anything for us when Mom was sick, but now she that she was dead, Birdie needed to express her condolences. It was eight a.m. And why would she think Dad or any of us want Brie? I wouldn’t let her in. I was fifteen and she snapped at me, something about how impudent I was. She wasn’t sorry at all about Mom. Now that I know what was happening behind the scenes, I’m wondering if she was thinking that she could finally tell Dad that Serena was his,” Tricia said. “It’s all so awful.”
“I’m with Tricia. How do I explain all this to the twins? Or to my in-laws? Or to everybody else in town? You all will leave in a few days, but I live here,” Liza said. “This is going to be a real scandal. And very awkward for my family.”
“But it’s not Serena who is at fault,” Maggie said.
The sisters fell silent. They knew Liza was right; she would bear the brunt of the social fallout. And they knew Maggie was right that their resistance might be misplaced.
“At least we get to give Julia good news.” Liza said. “I’ll call her and set up a time for her to come by so we can tell her together. She’s been texting me ten times a day asking if I’m okay, but I think she’s the one who’s still in shock. I also want to put her in touch with our financial advisor so she doesn’t give all that money away to her family. She’s always bailing out her nephews who need new brakes or a cousin who lost a job. I want her to keep that money for herself and have a real safety net.”
“Good idea. She’ll listen to you,” Tricia said, rising from the table. “I’m going for a run. I need to work all this out in my head.”
“Sure you don’t want to skip the run and have some wine instead?” Maggie asked, pouring another splash into her glass.
“Run first,” Tricia answered. “But save me some.”
“Oh, stop it. It’s rosé, not a tequila shot. It’s barely drinking.”
Liza declined as well. “I’m headed back to my house. I have to fill Whit in on all this before he leaves again in the morning.” She dreaded going home and facing her husband. Whit’s family led an uncluttered life with clear expectations and outcomes. There were no scandals in the Jones family, no unexpected relatives arriving on the scene after an affair, and Whit liked it that way. There was no need to control the narrative because the narrative was one long, respectable story of accumulating wealth and staying out of the headlines. Everything Cap revealed today would be an issue with Whit.
Liza was only beginning to comprehend the ways in which her life might change with her father gone, the estate a mess, and this sudden sister showing up, never mind Gray Cunningham back in the neighborhood. Liza was the oldest sister. It was a role she relished, a responsibility she took seriously. In the past, she’d handled things. Now everything about that truth seemed to be unraveling. Serena was two years older than Liza. Serena was the oldest Sweeney sister now.
Her phone pinged, a text from Whit. Because she wasn’t home at five like she said she would be, he was going golfing. Maybe she’d like to meet him at the country club for dinner? The memory of Birdie Tucker in her Ellesse sneakers and coral lipstick flashed through her brain. No, she texted back; she wasn’t up for the club tonight. Please, feel free to eat at the bar, she told Whit, because she knew that’s exactly the sort of permission he sought. They’d both be happier if she declined his invitation. Liza turned to Maggie. “You know what? I think I will have a glass of wine. I don’t need to rush home.”
Tricia’s sneakers pounded out the familiar steps. Willow to Old South to Pequot to Beachside to Burying Hill Beach and back again. She’d run this easy five-mile route hundreds of times since she started cross-country the year her mother died. At first, she ran to get out of the house, to smooth out the rough edges of anxiety she felt every day as her mother worsened. Then after, she ran to get away from the oppressive sadness, adding miles and hills and beach sprints to stay out as long as she could after school. She got faster and stronger. It was running that had taken her to prep school, along with a few strings pulled by Cap to get her in midyear, and probably some of his own money to pay the tuition. She ran competitively in college and to save her sanity in law school. Running will get me through this, Tricia thought, then she let the sound of the steps and the breathing work their magic. The ball of stress in her gut unraveled and her mind cleared more with every footfall. The first thought that popped into her clear mind: I can’t deal with another sister.
“What do you really think?” Maggie asked Liza as soon as Tricia was out of earshot.
“I don’t even know what to say to that. We have our thing, the three of us. You’re you. I’m me. Tricia is Tricia. I feel no connection to this person at all. I don’t see how we fit a fourth person in the band.” Liza poured out a swallow more wine and pette
d Jack on the head. Poor, sweet dog, lost without his owner.
“Especially one who’s tall and skinny. That pisses me off. Why didn’t I get the tall gene?”
“You’re a much better dancer.”
“That’s true.”
Liza looked out over the lawn, toward the water. The property had seen better days, for sure, but the memories made on Willow Lane were vivid, powerful. For all the sadness they had experienced here, the sweetness was stronger. “I hate to think of this house being torn down. That seems wrong. It’s not like they’re buried here, but this is where I want to come to remember them. I want to come here.”
“Don’t make me cry again. Or we’ll finish this bottle before Tricia gets back from her run,” Maggie said, pouring a smidge more wine in each of their glasses. “But you’re right. This is where the memories are.”
William and Maeve Sweeney had bought the property on Willow Lane in the early eighties when real estate values in Fairfield County were down and home-heating oil prices were up. No one wanted a sprawling three-acre piece of waterfront property with a damaged dock, a moldy boathouse, and a rundown, weathered gray, five-bedroom house from the 1930s that today’s agents would brand “Southport Shingle Style.” No one except Maeve Sweeney, a poet who saw the romantic in the mundane, and her husband, Bill Sweeney, the newest literary light in the firmament, who wanted someplace to write that was halfway between New York City and his office at Yale where he’d just accepted a teaching job. With Maeve’s inheritance from her Boston aunt and Bill’s advance for his second book after his coming-of-age debut novel had spent three years on the New York Times bestseller list, the newlyweds bought Willow Lane and made it a home and a hideout. At the end of a long drive at the end of a dead-end street, the main selling point of the Willow Lane house was privacy.
Bill’s newfound fame was something that unnerved Maeve. She had wanted him to herself for a little while longer, like when they first met. She was a new MFA student at Yale, fresh from Bennington, interviewing for a teaching assistant position in the undergrad creative writing department; he was the most-talked-about professor on the faculty because of his fame, his generous laugh, and his dark Irish looks. Their intense romance surprised classmates and colleagues who assumed Bill Sweeney had a few more years of playing the field before he settled down, and underestimated the intellect of the red-haired, well-born bohemian. The two writers connected immediately and deeply. He found someone he could trust with his talent. Maeve brought out the brilliant in Bill.
It didn’t take Maeve long to learn that her husband loved, loved, loved the limelight, but when he was on deadline, he needed to burrow so deep underground, no party or opening could tempt him. Willow Lane provided both of them with what they craved. Plus, his college roommate, best friend and lawyer Cap Richardson, was within walking distance, across from the Yacht Club so he could be close to his boat. Cap provided the young Sweeneys with an instant social circle and protection at the same time. He was always looking out for Bill, insulating him from his own worst behavior but, as importantly, Cap was always looking out for Maeve, who had bewitched him a tiny bit. The arrangement worked for years with few hitches.
Bill created a writing studio out of the boathouse where he would spend the next forty years crafting some of the seminal novels in the contemporary American literary canon, as well as dozens of essays for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review of equal importance. When he wasn’t writing, he would spend hours in the boathouse reading, grading papers, or listening to Yankees games on the radio. Even on the weekends, you could find him napping on the rattan couches or in the attic bedroom in the boathouse that had served as a guest room for some of the greatest writers of the generation.
Almost weekly, then less so as the years went by, book and magazine editors or one of his agents, first the legendary Abe Eckstein and then after Abe’s death, his protégé Lois Hopper, would make the pilgrimage by train out from the city to see Bill, trying to convince him to write a piece on this or coax him to take a look at that, then end the day with a drink while overlooking the water. Lois had cultivated a trademark fashion accessory, a bold hat for every outfit. She was a throwback, out of step with younger agents who dressed in black and had law degrees to go along with their literary sensibilities. But Bill liked Lois and her hats. Nothing about her tempted him. As he had said to Cap once, “There’s no amount of alcohol that would get me to sleep with Lois.”
To which Cap replied, “I think she feels the same way about you.”
On other days, when he worked alone from morning through late afternoon, Bill Sweeney, drink in hand, would rig up his Laser and take a sunset sail along the coastline toward Westport. Or he’d fish off the dock for blues that he’d throw back in the Sound. The boathouse was always the boathouse, never the office, because it was so much more than that.
Maeve created a comfortable haven in the main house where all felt welcome, all invited. Mostly all. She wasn’t a fan of the William Sweeney groupies, thin, well-educated young women dressed in the urban chic of black on black on navy blue, who would arrive as the plus-ones of a junior editor or a lesser writer but always seemed to have their eyes on Bill during the frequent parties in the early days of Willow Lane. But she was generous to her real friends, to her children, and to her children’s friends.
But Maeve struggled to create a writing life for herself. She wrote in flashes, as if she was storing up material in her mind’s eye until she had a few days of unscheduled time to get it all out. She would place a poem here or there in literary journals and even managed to publish a slim collection of poetry with a tiny press, but she was never sure if her work stood on its own merit or the reflected light of her husband’s reputation. The condescending tone used by Bill’s colleagues or editors when they asked about her writing chipped away at her confidence. At times, she was relieved to retreat back into motherhood and let Bill’s work shine.
The Southport neighbors loved that William Sweeney brought a touch of genuine literary celebrity to their little village filled with old money, card-carrying Daughters of the American Revolution, titans of business, publishing, and media, lawyers from white-shoe firms, and bankers who played by the rules and some who didn’t. But Maeve brought an unexpected touch of the suburban hippie with her long, curly red hair, flowing skirts, and poet’s sensibilities. She once heard one matron at a garden party fundraiser comment, “Someone got lost on the way home from Woodstock.” Maeve stopped going to garden party fundraisers.
She rode a Vespa around town in the summer, shared her homegrown tomatoes and blueberry muffins with the local firefighters in exchange for cutting rights of the magnificent hydrangeas they had cultivated outside the firehouse, and created a haunted house for Halloween that made the long walk down the driveway worth every creepy step. And while other houses in Southport, fit for the National Register of Historic Places, were stiff and formal, filled with uncomfortable but period-appropriate Early American furniture, Willow Lane was more like a year-round beach house: nothing fancy, everything could be replaced. As Maeve used to explain to guests, “Shabby and chic before Shabby Chic was chic.”
In her healthy years, Maeve wrote in her own studio, a glass-roofed conservatory that capped the far wing of the house. When the breast cancer metastasized and it was clear there would be no miracle cure, the conservatory became her sanctuary, filled with plants, music, and artwork, her chemo brain too addled for books.
Life wasn’t perfect on Willow Lane; no childhood ever is. There were rumors and some truth to the stories of their father’s drinking and gambling, and their mother’s illness hung over the family like a dark veil, but the Sweeney sisters couldn’t have imagined a better place to grow up. The water, the dock, the rolling lawn, the wraparound slate patio that served as everything from childhood playhouse to wedding dance floor when Liza married Whit. The giant trampoline that all the kids in the neighborhood used at will. The hedge of hydrangeas, the lilies
of the valley tucked in along the stone wall.
For the sisters, Willow Lane would always evoke the echoes of their father’s laughter, their mother’s singing, the glamorous parties, and the raucous poker games. But sitting on the patio, Liza could also hear the fights in her head. The battles between the sisters over clothes or boys. The muffled fights between their parents over money or whatever else married couples argued over. Suddenly, as Liza sipped her wine, she had a thought. “Do you think that’s what Mom and Dad were always fighting about—Birdie Tucker?”
“I hope not,” Maggie answered. “I hope Mom never knew.”
Chapter 7
Serena Tucker was not a good dancer. She could play the flute, hit a decent forehand, and write a strong opening paragraph, but any trip out onto the dance floor required a substantial amount of alcohol. That was certainly the case tonight. She had arrived at William Sweeney’s wake filled with confidence and curiosity, determined to make a statement, but about halfway through the second eulogy, after hearing the laundry list of William Sweeney’s literary awards and achievements, the praise from other writers, her bravado crumbled. By the time the toasts started and Willem Dafoe offered her a shot of whiskey, she accepted gratefully, followed by another. Then, the dancing seemed like a really solid idea, maybe the only way to get through the rest of the night, to try to blend into the wild mess instead of standing to the side observing, which was her usual habit.
Now, Serena sat at the bar at the Delamar Hotel, hoping a cranberry with seltzer would dissipate the remains of her hangover and the giant ball of stress in her gut ever since she’d arrived in Southport. The wake. The whiskey. Willem Dafoe. She was glad she made it back to the hotel, catching a ride with the mourners headed to the train station. She walked the half mile beyond the station to the hotel and promptly passed out in the four-poster bed. The luxury hotel was a splurge, an indulgence she allowed herself on occasion because that’s what trust funds were for, and the high-quality sheets and steam shower had been worth the extra money. She’d spent the morning in bed, popping ibuprofen and researching everybody from the night before to make sure no embarrassing photos of her had emerged on social media. They hadn’t. Apparently, no one wanted to share their night memorializing with the general public. That’s what real friends are for, thought Serena.
