by Bill Clegg
After trying on dozens of dresses, viciously critiquing each one, they finally found two they loved and charged both to Dana’s mother’s house account. She’ll never notice, I promise, Dana assured Jackie in the dressing room. It wasn’t Mrs. Goss Jackie was worried about, it was her own mother who would be livid that Jackie took advantage of the situation, which is how she would put it. But take advantage she did and how could she not, she reasoned, after putting on the lemon cream chiffon dress that was a thousand times more beautiful than any of the ones she’d clipped from magazines over the last year. The Lemon Cream Dream, as she and Dana referred to it, had elegant cap sleeves and small white flowers embroidered along the bodice and hemline that hit a few inches below the knee. It was a dream, the dreamiest dress she’d ever seen, even if Dana thought it looked a little old-fashioned. Dana, on the other hand, picked out a sleeveless black silk cocktail-length number with what looked like crystals embroidered at the neckline and waistband. It had little knife pleats, a wired ruffle hem, and a dusty gray taffeta underdress with a silver zipper in the back. They called her dress The Razzle Dazzle which made them laugh every time they said it.
Jackie’s mother insisted she write a check for the dress and give it to Dana’s family. The price tag had been more than seventy dollars, as much as or more than, her mother claimed, some of the furniture in their house. Jackie knew Dana would rip up the check and never give it to her parents, so even though her mother’s hand actually shook while signing her name, she didn’t worry.
The dresses took a few weeks to get tailored and Dana brought them with her from the city in March. Prom was in May and in the weeks leading up to it they tried on and paraded around in their dresses every chance they could. The last time was the weekend before and Dana argued they needed to practice several dances fully dressed and in the shoes they intended to wear. Jackie said she hadn’t planned on dancing much but Dana begged her to watch American Bandstand with her on Saturday afternoon and practice all the latest dances so they wouldn’t make fools of themselves. Jackie reluctantly agreed, and they were able to approximate less coordinated versions of what the teenagers on the TV show did. For the slow dance, Dana insisted on leading as the 45 of their favorite song, “Yesterday,” played on the record player. Jackie did her best to follow, though repeatedly she felt Dana’s arm pull too tight around her waist. Loosen up, ok?, she asked once but when Dana pulled her closer, something kept her from speaking up again. A rare, awkward seriousness settled between them as they stepped in time with the bittersweet melody of the song, and for a moment she felt both the hot illogic of being trapped along with Dana’s sudden vulnerability. She wanted to pull away but she worried the consequences would be too hurtful. When the song finally ended Dana suggested they go at it again, to work out the kinks, but Jackie begged off, improvising sloppily that she had an essay to finish for her English class, that she’d left the books back at her house and should go. By Dana’s quiet reaction to the sharp change of plans, Jackie suspected she’d been caught. Still, she quickly changed in the bathroom across the hall, carefully returned her dress to its box and with a cheerful promise to call later, she carried it home. Neither mentioned the dancing practice on the phone that night when it was Dana who called, not Jackie, nor was it ever brought up again.
The Saturday night of the prom Joe Lopez drove Jackie and Dana in the Gosses’ Town Car. It seemed strange to Jackie to have him chaperoning but since Dana’s parents would be in the city for a wedding, her father had insisted.
The night of the prom, Dana picked Jackie up at her house like it was an actual date. Joe pulled the car up and she marched formally to the door with a pale pink orchid corsage wrapped in cellophane and a white ribbon. Jackie noticed her parents squirm when Dana leaned in uncomfortably close to her chest as she slid the flowered bracelet onto her wrist. She remembers how Dana handled the gesture with a solemn reverence; Jackie knew, or at least she believed she knew, that her seriousness was a performance to provoke exactly the reaction it did.
At the Mohawk Ski Lodge, where the prom was held, Dana stood out. Her black dress fit so perfectly on her body that the other girls—in pink, green or baby blue floor-length get-ups many of their mothers sewed from Simplicity patterns—looked childish by comparison. Her brown hair was in an updo, and wrapped in a silk scarf, like Audrey Hepburn in Charade, Jackie’s mother had noted earlier. When Dana walked through the front entrance of the lodge, into Housatonic Valley Regional High’s Spring 1967 Junior Prom, no one knew quite how to react. Her mother was right, Jackie thought, she looked like a movie star. Some stared as she took her time unwinding her long silver scarf and folding it into the small black bag slung over one of her shoulders. Jackie stood to the side and watched Dana have her fun.
Jackie was so engrossed in the little spectacle, she didn’t notice she’d slowly backed up against a short set of stairs that descended to a door that opened onto one of the porches outside. As she was already falling backward, she imagined broken bones, a trip to the hospital, and Dana furious that her evening had been ruined. But before that could happen, a jolt of arms and hands at her back, under her legs, and the piney smell of aftershave.
Whoa, the night just got started. You might want to slow down, she heard as she was actually being carried, fully carried by another person, to the bottom of the steps. She was aloft for less than a few seconds but when her kitten heels returned to the floor she felt an instant regret, like eating the last spoonful of the most perfect ice cream sundae, when the exact sensation of its magic was gone. She turned around, still within the circumference of where the boy’s arms could reach, to see who had saved her. She was neither disappointed nor surprised to see Floyd Howland, a boy who had always been in the class ahead of her, at Wells Center and at Housatonic. In elementary school, Floyd was never the brightest boy, nor the one people noticed first, but after high school began he shot up six or seven inches and was now easily one of the tallest boys in the school. Jackie had always liked him, even had a crush on him in the eighth grade, but Dana had been the only person she’d told. Since then, their paths hardly ever crossed.
You ok?, Floyd asked, leaning down in his rented tuxedo and Brilliantined hair slicked to prom perfection. This, she knew it right then, was what she wanted. She didn’t delude herself into thinking that the feeling was mutual, not then, not that night, but if Dana had taught her anything, it was that with clarity of purpose and enough perseverance, anything was possible.
* * *
Walking along the moonlit road, Jackie tries to locate what exactly she wants now, why she’s followed Dana here after succeeding at staying away for so long. Up ahead and through the trees she can see a scattering of lights. It galls her that all of Undermountain Road is now Dana’s; even more so that she’d been complicit in making it so. What was this place now but an untraveled road with a few empty houses no one entered, let alone lived in. Not a child for miles, she thinks, as if someone had whispered the words into her ear.
As she approaches the driveway, she hesitates. After all, the contents of the briefcase Dana left on her doorstep make no sense. Marriage and divorce papers for people she’s never heard of. Legal documents articulating the adoption of a child she does not know. On the pages, only Lupita’s and Dana’s names are familiar to her; the date—April 15, 1970—is not a date she has any particular association with; and the address of the law firm, Young and Berube, is in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, nowhere she has ever been or considered. But there is one stray scrap of blue paper, a piece of old hotel stationery ripped in half, with the name Floyd written in black ink next to the telephone number Jackie has had since she and Floyd rented the house on Hospital Hill Road the summer after she’d graduated from high school. Why his name and their number would be mixed in with the birth and adoption documentation of a boy named Hapworth Foster, a boy with two birthdays apparently—March 10, 1970, and July 10 of the same year—she has no idea. But along with the strange note Dana had inexpli
cably written on the torn-off title page of a book titled The History of the Moravian Church, it was enough to get her to put a coat on over the nightgown she woke up in that morning, drive over Wells Mountain, and trudge up the steps of a house she’d sworn a long time ago to never again enter.
Dana
It was love. It had never occurred to her before. Her great-great-grandfather loved his wife and would do anything for her. That she did not love him back did not deter him. Nor did it keep him from spending a fortune on this gigantic house and everything in it. Dana sits at the dining room table, a large round walnut antique at the center of a red-and-cream silk rug under a high plaster ceiling. After Philip had found her in the library to tell her he was leaving for the motel down the road, and that he would be back in the morning to take her to the city, she’d made her way to the dining room, avoiding the parts of the house she hadn’t yet entered. Enough memories had been stirred and she’d had enough surprises.
There were twelve chairs around the table, but Dana had never seen them all occupied. It had usually been just the three of them—her father with his back to the window that overlooked the lawn and the river, Dana and her mother seated to his left and right respectively. Across the room from where they sat stood a fireplace between two small alcoves. And above the fireplace, the painting of her great-great-grandfather George Willing, with the object of his adoration, Olivia.
Running her hand over the dark wood now, Dana realizes that Jackie never sat at this table. Not once. She hadn’t noticed when they were young because eating upstairs was a great relief from having to tolerate the boring and often tense silences of her parents and the tyranny of table manners they required. How did her parents get to be the age she is now without recognizing how awful they were? How outdated and idiotic their snobbery and prejudices? Her anger boils quickly and is so familiar a feeling it’s almost a comfort to indulge it.
Dana looks up at the painting again and regards her great-great-grandfather, whom until now she’d mostly ignored in favor of his delicate, nineteen-year-old wife with light red hair and green-gold eyes. Through childhood and adolescence, Dana studied Olivia Willing’s painted image, scoured the clippings of wedding announcements, obituaries, and photographs her father kept in the library with the family memorabilia. But most of what she knew about Olivia came from her Aunt Lee. During a visit the summer before she’d started at Bryn Mawr, the subject of Olivia came up. They hadn’t spoken about her in a long time, but Dana, close then to the age Olivia had been when she married George, found herself wondering again about her great-great-grandmother, surely the most beautiful and notorious member of the family. Lee seemed to share a reluctant appreciation of her, despite the choices she’d made. Apparently my grandfather despised her and didn’t like his mother’s name to be mentioned, so whatever I know comes from my grandmother’s fascination. No wonder, Olivia left her six-year-old son behind to live with her sister in Paris. Before the Civil War had even ended! It really is astonishing. You have to remember, though, she was young and newly rich and her husband had just died. But it’s true, she left her son to be raised by a governess until he went to boarding school. Of course the woman he ended up marrying would be curious about a mother-in-law capable of such decisions.
When Dana came back to New York that summer she asked her grandmother what she remembered. Your great-great-grandmother was not much of a mother, this of course we know, but we do owe her. Whatever beauty you or your father or any of the Willings or Gosses who came after had or have, all of it surely comes from her. Until she showed up, I don’t think our people were much to look at She never came back to Edgeweather after she left. She never remarried, either, though I think she lived quite a life abroad. An expensive one! It’s a good thing Father went into banking otherwise who knows how we’d have all ended up. Despite her grandmother’s spotty and ungenerous assessment, Dana still wanted very badly to align with the copper-haired, fine-featured Olivia. Beyond her surface, there was something about her choice to leave her young son behind in the middle of a war, to live in Paris, choices that would be unthinkable now but must have been even more so back then. Whether it was because she was selfish or strong-willed or unstable, she did something shocking, and in that Dana could find a hero.
* * *
In the dining room, looking at the painting now, she sees her own resemblance to her great-great-grandfather. The heavy eyelids, the brown-black eyes, the slightly exaggerated distance between them, the intensity. He was, as she has always been, whip-thin. In his dark eyes she recognizes a quality she possessed, for a while, at least. Not just arrogance rooted in privilege, the rush of boundless possibility when coming into money and freedom young, as she had, but a vulnerability, too, a contradictory awareness of money’s limits known only to those who had as much as they did. When George Willing met Olivia Henshaw, he surely spotted the coast of that limit, and in every minute that followed he must have been determined to win her.
Dana knew they’d met in Newport, where his parents had a summer cottage and her father was rector at the Episcopalian church. She tried to picture the fair-haired sons of robber barons who must have courted her, how mightily they must have competed for her attention. But few were as wealthy as good old George’s family who had, almost a century before, turned a shipbuilding company in colonial Rhode Island into a real estate fortune. And even fewer would have been as willing or as able to lure her with the promise of a wedding gift as significant as Edgeweather. She suspected there was no length to which he wouldn’t go. He probably went to war because he thought it was something that would at last earn him her respect, if not her love. But it never could. The painting didn’t lie. It was clear to Dana, even across a century and a half, that the woman had no interest in him beyond what he could buy or build for her and though he may have known it then, it never stopped him from trying to prove himself worthy. One glance at his narrow shoulders and delicate hands, there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that George Willing was not meant for the battlefield. If his wife had loved him she would have never let him go. And surely with senators and governors and a fortune at their disposal his family could have easily cut a respectable path for him away from the front lines. But to Hoke’s Run, Virginia, he went. With a rank beyond his experience and a coffin waiting. He lasted less than one full day.
Until now, Dana only ever had contempt for her great-great-grandfather; she’d judged him for the wedding cake house he built and all the extravagances he filled it with. But as she sits in the dusty consequence of his obsession, it surprises her to feel a shift. Yes, he was a pampered fool. An only child, a needy showoff. But he was also determined, and he acted sincerely, spent his late youth and early adulthood single-mindedly attempting to win the love of a woman who was at best indifferent to him and at worst disdainful. He went to war and died for her, Dana decides. The more she thinks about it the more it makes sense. He’d won her hand with jewels and the promise of a great house. They had a son in the first year. The war with the South was on and likely he could feel her tolerance for him was fading. So he went to war and he never saw her again. Was his wife relieved? Embarrassed? Or was she exultant? Did she feel the heavy tax on the wealth and position she’d secured lift forever?
A car door slams outside. Dana barely hears it. She looks up at George’s flimsy frame and dark eyes and recognizes something else there. Why it makes her feel strangely relieved she does not know. He was led by his heart, she thinks defensively, made a spectacle of his love, sacrificed everything, and when he died he had no regrets. She scans Olivia’s pale features. Even from where she sits she can appreciate how delicately painted and lifelike Olivia’s slender neck and décolletage are. What a pair, Dana thinks and sees the once-upon-a-time Willings as both doomed and oddly heroic. Two children of a new country born with assets and liabilities—one money, the other beauty—and in not so original an equation, they each used what they had like weapons and bagged big game. She looks at them stand
ing side by side, the river behind them. Olivia’s hands are folded tidily below the high-cinched waist of her gown, George’s left hand on her far shoulder, his right on the one that seems to pull away from him. He is holding her not like a trophy or a possession or even the way Dana has seen most husbands touch their wives with affection. He is holding her like someone who must. Someone who accepts his wife, forgives her—for despising him, even—who would fight for her, whose fate is bound to hers beyond the point of choice. He loves her. When that might have happened no one will ever know, but by the time this painting was created (according to her grandmother soon after they’d married), he was already determined to do whatever it took to be in her company, make her happy, and win her love.
Good for you, George, Dana whispers, apologizing in her way for having had only contempt for him until now. You got what you wanted, even if it didn’t last very long. She thought of her parents’ marriage. When she was old enough to begin to see them as people, more than only stern punctuation to her heavily scheduled hours, she saw them as disappointed colleagues who were stuck together. Her mother’s nervousness didn’t help, nor did the erratic medications her psychiatrist prescribed which would make her sleepy and detached one week and frantically making plans she’d soon abandon the next. Her father stayed cordial, for the most part, and aloof, perpetually annoyed. There were never displays of affection, and few words between them outside the necessary sentences required to schedule and coordinate their day-to-day movements. Her father had a low threshold for more and if too many questions were asked, or too many anecdotes from the day were told at dinner, for example, he had a way of raising his hand slowly and successfully shutting down whatever was being said. That ordinary hand—open-palmed, un-calloused, and smooth, with long fingers and meticulously trimmed nails—never hit anything except the dinner table on rare occasion, nor had it harmed her, nor anyone else that she knew of, but she knew that it could. His open palm had the promise of a fist. It was nothing she’d ever said out loud or shared with anyone, not even Jackie, but it was something she knew. And by her mother’s unblinking and swift compliance, she recognized that she did, too.
