The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

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  For my parents

  And for E.H.M.

  Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.

  —HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  It began with a house. It was the property next to her own, a half mile up the road. One afternoon driving to town, she noticed the blue-lettered FOR SALE sign nailed to a post, set back in the trees. When that same day her son called to say he was engaged, Cecilia Somner decided it was too lucky a coincidence to ignore. What better gift for the start of a new life? A home for George and Iris. She bought the place at asking. Later that month, at the end of an otherwise ordinary lunch in the city, she plunked the keys down among the half-emptied coffee cups in front of George, repeated the address as Iris fumbled for a pen, and concluded, “—but the wedding will be at Booth Hill. Your house is too small.”

  When the day arrived, the bright lawn rolled down to a tent beside the sea. Cecilia kissed the guests hello and sent them down to the water in twos and fours, their cars left in a jumble for the valet, the sun already flaring off the fenders and their sunglasses and off the windows of her house, a house that for a century the Somners had called the Cottage, despite its forty rooms. A dog barked from behind a downstairs window, its shoulder a red blur against the glass, startling each group of passing guests. The women laughed as they picked their way along the gravel, careful of their shoes.

  You could see even from the top of the hill how George was trying to win over the Nelsons. Iris’s grizzled uncles and aunts, the only guests already seated, squinted up at George from the first row at the lawn-edge of the Atlantic. Being so few, they had room to put their bags beside them. George stood in front of the sun asking them friendly questions, his face turned a little away. A good face, under a wave of bright copper hair tossed out of his eyes. His fingers remained loosely in his pocket, unless he was raking his hair, elbow aloft, or flicking a gnat out of his drink. Something about his easy manner and the mean, charming way his eyes—green like his mother’s, for there was no mistaking them for anything but mother and son—narrowed to some little eternity in the manner of a cologne advertisement, made those in his presence feel they were their most interesting selves.

  Still, the Nelsons could not be put at ease. When George asked how the trip from Nova Scotia had been and whether they landed at LaGuardia or JFK, they circled their chairs and argued until one answered, “No, Kennedy.” When a cousin of Cecilia’s, a Gifford, joined them and offered that his family used to vacation in Chester, and wasn’t that in Nova Scotia?—they said they’d never been. The mood didn’t improve when George snuck away and the Nelsons, finding themselves among strangers, asked, “Where do you work?” instead of “What do you do?” and the Somners’ people answered, “Oh—in the city.”

  So many violins and George had to be found. He was in an upstairs bedroom, listening to the muffled flurry of Iris being dressed on the other side of the wall. From the window he watched his mother—CeCe to all—on the lawn below, slender and silver, directing the ushers as they balanced out the aisles, moving the more peripheral of the Somners’ guests to the empty seats on the Nelson side like load on a small plane before takeoff. Then it was time—George and the minister at the long grass bordering the sea. Iris, alone down the aisle, looking neither left nor right. Beautiful, everyone said. Iris, the ceremony, the house rising above the water, dinner under the low sun.

  At dusk, the sea was gray. It made a picture, the younger people straying down as if it were a great magnet, their shoes in their hands. There was drinking and dancing into the night. Iris and George—even from the shadows leaping up the far end of the candlelit tent, you could tell it was the real thing. When the hour came for them to say goodbye, they stood and waved, not beside a car but at an opening in the trees, for a path had been cut to connect Booth Hill to the house they were to make their own. The path was lined with lanterns. Lanterns hung in the trees.

  I

  SOMNER’S REST

  (Summer)

  1

  On the same lawn, in the dark before sunrise—ink horizon, ink sea, the grass now blue in the dark—George takes his mother’s hand and leads her stumbling down the dewy slope and through her garden to a small, private dock on their private patch of beach. Holding his mother’s hot, bony hand, he misses Iris. How excellent to miss her still. Love-struck as he ever was. A year since the wedding and they’ve fallen into the pattern of their days—their new home, her new job, mornings and evenings together—and all is right with the world. At the office, he still sits and thinks of her with the childish rapture of the blessed, picturing her mouth, picturing he is inside the tiny, pink cathedral of her mouth, in one way or another, as he fiddles with the ivory letter opener or the silver box on his desk, a box engraved J. Stepney Somner, a box that on another desk might hold paper clips or stamps, but on George’s holds only a fine dust he likes to think is the residue of his great-grandfather’s snuff.

  “Almost there,” he says, tugging his mother down the last of the dank lawn to the dock. He pulls the orange life vest over her head, catching his phone as it falls from his pocket. He rolls his trousers but neglects to take off his shoes and curses as he stands in the shallows. The soles of his loafers burp in the mud as he hoists her into the motorboat. Seaweed swells around the hull. She’s easier to lift than he expected—her feather-frailty, her diminishing density, the air in her bones.

  How brave he is! Yes, brave is the word. And honest. Honesty keeping step with bravery. Brave how he doesn’t look away from his mother and honest to admit he misses Iris. Honest to see that missing his wife, missing what he has, is impossible and is the case; brave enough to follow this thought to the next—that missing Iris has something to do with his no longer being twenty. Not twenty, but forty! That each day he wakes again and sits down to breakfast again, and still he isn’t anybody. And the years are piling on. And yet, to keep hope, to have faith. What harder courage can any man possess?

  He steadies the prow and climbs in. They scrape rock. A final push takes them off the bottom, and the boat putts out into the dark, lapping water of the Sound. George points them toward the Matador, the five-masted clipper they’ve rented and staffed for the day, several hundred yards out, in deeper water.

  “I forgot this peapod belongs to me,” CeCe says, looking disapprovingly around the motorboat. The previous afternoon, George had dragged it from underneath a blue tarp in a long-neglected shed in the woods behind the house, the shed’s walls lined floor to thatch with rusted license plates, a collection of the late groundskeeper, a man known to George only as Pete; the concrete under the boat a damp ecosystem of brown leaves and slugs. He’d checked the motor and gotten oil and sweat up the white insides of his arms and decided himself the victor.

  He does want breakfast. Being awake so early doesn’t suit him, and he commends himself for doing all he has for his mother, who is saying she wil
l never again have a party up at the house. Not after the strain of the wedding. Though yes it was a great success and nothing had been stolen. She’s asking if he’s paying attention—for only she knows how George’s expression doesn’t convey his mind, how no indication of boredom will hold in the natural intensity of his face. Only she can tell when he isn’t listening.

  “This jacket stinks of mildew,” she concludes, tugging the clasp.

  “But,” he answers, adjusting the strap, “doesn’t the Cottage look nice from here? See what your guests will see?”

  The house on the shoreline has become gray and small as a photograph. The hill he’d been married on looks steeper in the indigo than by day. The house is set farther back from the shore, more splendid, but less obviously so, than its new-built neighbors. They watch as Esme—it must be Esme—passes from room to room, throwing on the lights, fading the slim morning moon. They can see the wide wrap of the stone veranda and the red glow of two of the sitting rooms and the warm shine of the coppery kitchen and the willow trees that flank the house reaching in silver assurance up to the gabled top windows, glowing from within.

  “Where are you going, please,” CeCe says. “With your navigational skills, we’ll be found bumping in the reeds down current, dead of dehydration and leathered as jerky.”

  A plane crosses the dawn sky, its green and red lights blinking; another plane soon follows. CeCe knows this should be pretty to her, and not a menace. She should also like the water on her hands. She does not. The flesh too is made of water and needs no reminder. Her mind—why, she can’t guess—finds its way to George at age eight, home early from school with a consonant-drunkening cold, singing, Glory, glory hallelujah, by teacher hid me wid a ruler, and we all began to laugh whed da ruler broke id half … Her back where it is leaned against his strong arm slips a little, and the next part of the song falls away. Something about marching, and in the inch her ribs collapse forward and will not be pulled right again, she is reminded that unless her luck turns, the next years will be a series of quotidian humiliations increasing in frequency and severity until the days blend into one ugly noon, and at that shadowless hour she will have to answer to her child. If she can answer at all.

  “You forgot to shave,” she says. “Take care of it before we start the day. Don’t forget.”

  What had she been thinking? She’d scheduled this event so long ago—was talked into it at the wedding, in fact—a fund-raiser on a boat for a youth program in oceanography, and why had she said yes? So many parties and all the same. And boat people, not her kind. “Not my kind,” she always said. Noisy. Tourists and fishermen and her arrogant new neighbors with their captain’s hats and their glowing tablets and their children screaming down to the dock to man the jib. For many summers she’s complained about these children. The penetrating problem of noise pollution—how their high choral voices skipped along the water and pierced the glass of her front windows—did they not have mothers who taught them manners? She’d written to the town’s community board to ban boat traffic past her house. Her lawyer reviewed a draft of the letter and agreed it was reasonable. When the board didn’t respond, she invited the mayor and the district’s most prominent judge over for tea. She took them out onto the veranda and handed them the binoculars and showed them how the boats might avoid the cove. The community board sent an apology attached to a basket of poppy-seed cake and Meyer lemons with the leaves still attached but said they could do no more. The mayor called in a favor at the Historical Preservation Society and had her house granted landmark status, as if she were dead.

  “Should have gotten around to it years ago, no excuse,” he said.

  She’d thanked the mayor and the board and without notice stopped payment on a check to the County Development Foundation for the restoration of the town’s second, older marina, ensuring the jetty remain a dilapidated grave of rotting posts rising out of the water, cleaved from the body of the dock by a chain-link fence, which the kids who are townbound and time idle still scale with beers jammed down their pants, to swim the water slick with oil, and after, under the idiot moon, to lie on the dock in the dark, listening for the cruiser on night patrol rolling past with its lights off.

  Thus, the Stockport locals among the sixty-five to receive the Somners’ invitation, which read A Day at Sea! in royal-blue cursive across heavy card stock, were surprised.

  CeCe lifts her feet to avoid a pool of water rolling at the bottom of the motorboat.

  “Insecure tub! George, go faster. If I drown out here, they’ll call it you-know-what.”

  He gives the cord another yank. They putt along the curve of the cove out toward the Sound. A modest blue house comes into view where the land opens to ocean, a figure by the door.

  “Mrs. Barnes, smoking,” George says.

  “No, the time! Who smokes at dawn?”

  “Dana Barnes, I guess.”

  “Cigarettes are disgusting.”

  “Isn’t a cigarette.”

  “Ah.” CeCe laughs. “We invited her, didn’t we? Do you think she’ll be stoned on the boat? Now I’m looking forward to this brunch.” But her face bunches into sadness. “So drive already.”

  Javier sees them coming and readies himself on the metal steps, unfolded into the water.

  They board and take breakfast on the stern because the captain advises that from there they can watch the sunrise. It’s pink and blue. They descend belowdecks to change. Ridiculous, George feels, to be on board so early, to dress so early, and then do nothing for hours but bicker and look at the sky. But she’d insisted: to supervise. He does his mother the courtesy of putting on a jacket he knows she won’t like, asking her opinion, and descending again to shave and change into the poplin laid out on the bed.

  CeCe puts on a sleeveless sheath of cerulean crepe. Bending carefully, she puts on the ballet flats of soft, blue leather with white soles she had ordered for the day, dark soles and heels being unacceptable on a boat, though she doesn’t expect her guests to know the old rules. At the top of each of her flats is a gold sailor’s knot with two tiny pearls-of-the-sea, a gold anchor nestled into the knot, too much whimsy for her taste, but discreet enough. Shopping, that demoralizing endeavor. Especially once she crossed into her seventies, five years ago. With increasing regularity, her shopper at Bergdorf urges her toward items of themed exuberance, clothing with pictures, as if she were a toddler, as if older women and toddlers are alone together in having so little of interest or coherence to say that instead they might point to their shoes or their chests with cheer. She feels tired. Don’t think about it, she thinks, as she struggles to clasp the pearls at her neck. She wills herself, schools herself, so often it’s almost a mantra: she’ll not indulge the shake in her hands, the shake in her legs. They are not invited. She will not invite the most humiliating, the aerobic shake of her neck: a tiny, smiling quiver as friendless as a match fired on a hill. She’s learned to play a trick on herself this last year, which sometimes works—she imagines herself inside a kind of farmyard pen, encircled by a strong wire fence. The world outside the fence is sonic, an earthquake, but she is still.

  The shakes, when they do come, are preceded by an unnerving sensation and sound inside her ears like the metal hum of a train track before the train appears—her ties, her spine; their rattle—a minute, alien music—her neck. As if she is agreeing, agreeing forever, with some small point. And what point might this be? She will not use the wheelchair, refused George’s plea to bring it on board—the absurd comedy of a wheelchair on a boat! She pretended, and he pretended with her, that the crawl down the lawn had been easy, that she was playing a game as quaint as—what is its name? The one where you must move sideways to move forward.

  “Good morning,” says a young woman in a white apron, passing with a tray of juice glasses. Chaos, CeCe thinks, for the server’s hair is down. No time to ruminate. She must round up the staff, remind them how to comport themselves. The micromanaging one must do to have it right.
/>   * * *

  George shaves. If he were home right now, he’d be by the pool, drinking coffee and reading the paper, watching Iris swim. Across the deck he sees Javier, assembling the catering staff for CeCe. They make a checkerboard of black and white. George could mark the passage of his life in speeches he’s heard his mother give to caterers. As she surveys the brunch buffet—“Dears. You are all dear to me today—” he escapes to the other end of the boat. Still, he can hear:

  “—and you are to do more than pass around the food and keep tidy. You are in control. Do you know you must be in control? Of the very mood. The enjoyment of the guests is yours to bear. I can see from here—is there mustard somewhere to go with the lamb? Cold meat? Mustard? If I see but one wilting lily draped over the rail with nothing to drink—have these—star fruit?—been sliced neatly enough? Daisy, is it? Daisy, go get a knife and tidy them. If anyone drinks too quickly, you will forget to pour every other time, and if they look slighted, pour half as much as usual. We know how to pour for me, nothing but air or water and stand directly in front of the glass so this goes unnoticed—those oysters—that one, that one, look where I am pointing. Women do not like to swallow oysters as large as these! Your thumb, no longer than your thumb.”

  George leans as far over the water as he can. He dares himself to jump. He contemplates the authenticity of his sadness. An hour ago he was full of the courage and pleasure of Iris, of all their life to come. How is it he’s now so low? His mother, pretending to be frail, only to cause him grief. He could jump. He could! Debating an act so serious and miserable binds a dark delight to his sorrow. He waves a waiter over, requests a Bloody Mary. He doesn’t want to die. However, there is the pleasant vision of them weeping at his funeral. He checks his watch, his hand over the blue. It has a crack across its face he’s certain wasn’t there the day before—could it be from when he tugged the throttle of the motorboat? Had he not noticed, in the dark with the roar of the outboard? Next week he’ll take it to the repairman on Lexington. He can’t let his mother see—an heirloom, not John Stepney Somner’s but John’s son, CeCe’s father, Edward George, and George’s namesake. Once more he’s overcome by the child’s dream of witnessing them mourn at his funeral, and he knows, though he can’t say it to himself so directly, that for a man of middle age some other dream should long have replaced this one. His mother’s voice returns to him on the wind.