Then your father, Barbara said, her face grim. Your father. He did nothing but work for weeks after. He sent his secretary to check in during the day—his secretary, she said. Ten weeks after the miscarriage, Dale arrived home early. “He told me that he’d looked at everything—my medical records, my medications—without my permission—and found that there was a cause for it. That a drug I was taking, pentathilinate, was problematic, and that there were other cases where women had miscarried while taking the drug. He found a doctor in Kentucky who refused to let pregnant patients near the stuff.”
Evelyn remembered reading about the case. Her father had shown her a Washington Post article about it. Thanks to his case and others like it, now women had to sign something promising they wouldn’t get pregnant if they were taking pentathilinate. Dale had cemented his reputation with the case. He’d asked the jury and onlookers to imagine what the little pea—the phrase her father used, she remembered with a wisp of nausea—would be feeling, saying, “‘Let me live. Let me hold on,’ right as she could feel that drug working against her.” The Post had said his speaking in the voice of the unborn baby had made some jurors sob, especially as he described the life the girl could be living now, toddling around and grabbing everything in sight and growing shocks of silken hair. Dale Beegan had to stop at that point, the paper said, to gather himself at the podium; the reporter could see his shoulders shaking.
“He wanted me to testify,” Barbara had said. “He thought I’d be just the ideal witness, up there serving up my past to perfect strangers so they could judge me. I didn’t know, Evelyn. I would never have taken the drug if I’d known. It was for skin, just for clear skin, and I never would’ve.”
“It’s okay,” said Evelyn, lifting her gaze from the creek to her mother.
“We didn’t know then—”
“It’s okay,” Evelyn said again.
“It wasn’t his,” her mother said, anger piercing the words.
“The baby?” Evelyn said, too loudly.
“Of course the baby was his, Evelyn. What on earth gets into your mind? It just, it wasn’t his to take. To exploit. I’m the one who lost the baby.”
Evelyn guessed her parents started sleeping in separate rooms starting then.
With Dale working, Evelyn’s youth had been mostly her and Barbara, a table for two at the Eastern Tennis Club. As a kid, on Monday mornings, Evelyn would wait until she heard the crunch of her father’s shoes on the gravel, then would slip out to the piano room and sit under the itchy navy blanket on the couch. She tried to keep her eyes open until her mother joined her minutes later, but was often dozing when she felt the cool hand stroke her hair, and then Evelyn would open her eyes, and her mother would open the piano and begin to play. Barbara started with scales, light and fluid, and then moved to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” or “Bill.” Sometimes she’d ask Evelyn what she wanted to hear. Evelyn, who’d always been thinking about this question for several days, would tell her. If her mother and father had been angry with each other, Evelyn would ask for “Waitin’ for My Dearie” or “If I Loved You,” thinking that no one could play those songs and not be in love. If her mother had been having a moody few days, Evelyn would ask for a funny song, like “Sister Suffragette.” Sometimes, when her mother had been happy for a day or two, and was making plans with friends or for Evelyn, Evelyn knew she could ask for what she really wanted: “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. There’s a place for us, she’d sing to her stuffed animals at night.
Evelyn started to play when she was five, and her large-note Clementi and Mozart workbooks were still stacked in the built-in cupboards on the side of the Sag Neck piano room, along with Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Frank Loesser from when she improved. She was surprised by how much better her pieces sounded when they moved in—the piano room was almost like a concert hall. No one bothered her in there when she was playing, but sometimes Evelyn could crane her neck over the piano and see her mother sitting outside on the patio, listening. Those were the best times, her mother there but facing away from her and watching Meetinghouse Creek list by, a window offering a firm divide between them, Evelyn’s fingers creating songs.
Evelyn used to wait up on Fridays for her father to come home from Wilmington for the weekend. That had changed after the Peg Oney case. After opening arguments, her family went out to dinner with the plaintiffs at an Italian place with plastic menus on the side of the highway, and everyone in town had come up to her father to thank him for the work he was doing. “Your father’s such a special man…” “He’s been real good to us…” “You’re so lucky…” Her father was so busy taking in adulation that he barely spoke to her and her mother, even after their long trip.
Barbara hauled Dale away from the adoring crowd, and Evelyn wanted to hide under the table when she saw her mother pull from her purse a handmade pink-paper valentine that Evelyn had brought home from school the week before which said “Dad” in her scrapey handwriting on the front, and shove it at Dale’s chest. It felt like that was her own pink heart beating on that rough paper as her father stared at it and then his mouth turned into a line and neither he nor her mother said anything to her about it and she couldn’t sleep well that night, imagining the valentine on top of a pile of old linguine in the restaurant’s Dumpster. Barbara and Evelyn left Cresheim three days ahead of schedule.
That was when Barbara began making Evelyn her confidante and coconspirator, which was thrilling sometimes and sometimes hugely uncomfortable. Barbara explained that Dale was free with his own purchases when he felt like it, but stingy with Barbara. So she would send Evelyn into his study to ask him if they could please have new tennis rackets or a landscaper, and he would sometimes acquiesce. As Evelyn grew older, she started to feel wringing inside when she did this, seeing his eyes lift from the page once again to see his daughter, now taller in the study’s door frame, now asking for things she wanted: money so she could travel around Europe during her term in Sarennes, the additional fee for a single room at Davidson.
As Barbara drove Evelyn to school, or the Eastern Tennis Club, Evelyn heard a steady sound track. Your father’s never here. Your father’s canceled again. Your father’s the reason I didn’t get on that committee. Your father’s a social liability. If your father hadn’t been a plaintiffs’ lawyer. If your father hadn’t been a lawyer. Then, Evelyn, then we really could have made it.
*
The affenpinscher was now springing around with a sparrow-sized bird in his mouth. Evelyn wondered if he had killed it first or if the poor bird was dying of fright as she watched. The idea that a grand jury was investigating her father was massive, pulsing, scary. It was so careless of him to put himself in this position. Her father gave her a hard time for her People Like Us job, but he had done something questionable enough to have federal investigators looking at it? She had to come begging for $450, but investigators thought he had bribed experts to get multimillion-dollar verdicts?
“Evelyn!” she heard her mother shout from down the hall, then footsteps.
“Evelyn?” Her mother opened the door without knocking. “You’re not changed.”
“Changed?”
“For the party. We’re leaving in thirty minutes.”
“You’re still going to the Channings’ party?”
“We are still going, yes. I have no interest in not going and letting that be the talk of the party. Get dressed,” Barbara said.
Evelyn continued looking out the window.
“Evelyn, I mean it. Get dressed. You have five minutes.”
Evelyn shifted around on the window seat and looked at her mother. Barbara had clearly put effort into her outfit. She had a scarf wrapped around her neck and wore her largest pearl necklace, a navy linen shift, and beige Ferragamo pumps. She was also wearing her upgraded diamond ring that she’d selected for her and Dale’s twentieth anniversary.
“I don’t want to,” Evelyn said.
To her surprise, Barbara was silen
t. To her greater surprise, Barbara crossed to the bed and sat down on it and picked at the corner of a bolster pillow. Evelyn tried to categorize this behavior—she had only seen her mother sit on her bed perhaps twice in her life, when Evelyn had been sick. Barbara plucked loose a thread from the pillow and was slowly unraveling it. Evelyn slipped over to the bed and quietly took the pillow away from her mother. Evelyn felt strange standing above her.
“This is not good, Evelyn.” Barbara was staring at where the pillow had been.
“Maybe it’s okay. We don’t know.” Evelyn awkwardly proffered the bolster back, but Barbara didn’t seem to see it.
“This is not good.”
Overhead, the fan whirred and moved the thick summer heat around the room but didn’t provide any relief.
“He thought—I thought—it would be easier. Background seemed like it wouldn’t matter; it was the sixties. I wasn’t a hippie, but it seemed to be all changing. Something for a new generation. And it just—he just—it all fell away. Those early years were so hard. Your father just worked, and I was alone, trying to make linoleum seem like something good.” She paused, smoothing her hand over the covers. “You think it doesn’t matter how money is made. It’s always there, though. Always around, underneath it, is how he made it. A trial lawyer. Suing the people who are actually working and inventing.”
Evelyn squeezed the pillow hard. She did know, too well, that it mattered how money got made, or, more important, when. She’d seen it at Sheffield, where the girls with terrific middle names that signified old family money had sailed into and out of whatever circles they wanted to, confident they would be accepted, and she saw it now with Camilla. You couldn’t cover up the smell of new money, sharp and plastic as a vinyl shower curtain just out of its box. You could try, layering over it with old houses, old furniture, and manners that mimicked those of people who’d been living this life for centuries. But unless your fortune was generations old, too, it—you—would never count in the same way.
She loosened her grip on the bolster. The issue with her father was awful, but maybe it was allowing a new Barbara to come forward. A Barbara who was accessible, vulnerable even. A Barbara who sat on her daughter’s bed.
Barbara stood up then and brushed her hands together. “Evelyn. This mess with your father is going to hit, and it’s going to hit soon. If they charge him, if this ends up in a trial or a plea bargain, it could mean money, too. Us paying the government money. You have to cement where you are in New York before then. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Your position. Your reputation. I think your website job may be good for you, after all. You’re friendly with Camilla Rutherford now, and you’re reviving your friendship with Preston. You’ve got to keep on it. You need something solid underneath you before this all—” She let her hands drop. “Do you understand?”
Evelyn carefully replaced the pillow on the bed and tucked the loose thread behind it. “I understand.”
“Those friendships could be very, very important.” Barbara looked searchingly at her daughter. “I’d like you to come to the Channings’.”
Evelyn nodded slowly and gave her mother what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “I’ll come.”
When Evelyn went downstairs in her dress, her mother’s shoulders were back and her eyes were fierce, and on the car ride over Barbara talked about how Sally’s garden had become infested with aphids this year. Somewhere between Evelyn’s room and the front door, her mother had heard a cue, and she had remembered her lines and taken the stage. Their conversation would be left in the wings; it had nothing to do with their assigned parts.
CHAPTER EIGHT
New York, New York
Evelyn leaned toward the Amtrak window, searching for the TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES sign, which she always looked for on the ride back to New York. She knew now that Trenton was a run-down Jersey city, but she remembered the first time she’d seen it, on her first trip to New York when she was ten. Everything on that train ride up had been magical, and she had cast Trenton as some kind of Santa’s workshop after seeing that sign, a town that spun sugar candy and gossamer wings.
Even Penn Station was enchanting that first time, filled with more people than Evelyn had ever seen at once. Barbara had pulled her through the crowd and up to the street, then hailed a cab that smelled of Porta Potty fluid and had a fir-tree-shaped cardboard air freshener dangling from the window that Evelyn had to ask her mother to explain.
They were staying at the Plaza Hotel and, immediately after arrival, went to tea. At afternoon tea—never call it high tea, Barbara had said—Evelyn showed off what she and Barbara had been practicing at home. Her brow was furrowed throughout with concentration, as she didn’t want to ruin her mother’s happy mood. Napkin in lap as soon as you sit. Napkin on seat if you leave. Cream in English breakfast, fine; cream in Earl Grey, never. Cream goes in after tea. (When Evelyn asked why, Barbara could only tell her to stop asking so many questions. Later, on a Sheffield trip to Bath, Evelyn found out that the English middle class used to try to stop their teacups from staining by pouring in the milk first. The upper class either never had to get the stains out themselves or had enough backup teacups that it wasn’t a problem.) Cucumber sandwiches in elegant bites. Dab at the mouth with your napkin; don’t wipe.
When her mother went to the bathroom, Evelyn popped one of the edible flowers on the table in her mouth, chewing it with gusto; she was sure that was not on the list of appropriate behaviors.
The next morning, Barbara declared that she was going to show her daughter Barbara Topfer’s New York. A few of her Hollins friends had lived here, and Barbara had spent happy long weekends in the city. At the Frick, after they had spent an hour looking at the art, Barbara disappeared for some time, then returned waving a shiny booklet.
“Do you like New York, Evelyn?” Barbara said, sitting next to her daughter on a cold marble bench. “I think we ought to spend more time here, don’t you?”
Evelyn, who had seen a billboard for Cats, said she did and asked if they could go to the show. Her mother responded that Times Square was full of sexual deviants.
The next morning, Barbara woke Evelyn early, telling her that they had salon appointments and then were going for lunch with a close friend of Barbara’s from Hollins. Her friend Push, as her Hollins friends had known her, had not only married into the Van Rensselaer family, but was a Pierrepont on her father’s side and a Phipps on her mother’s.
Push? Evelyn had asked.
Don’t be rude, Barbara had replied.
Evelyn imagined a woman layered in folds of fat who knocked over china whenever she turned.
Barbara had her hair washed and set at the salon at the Plaza and had Evelyn’s hair curled into long ringlets that were already drooping by the time they left the salon. On the elevator back up, Barbara told Evelyn more about the mysteriously named Push, that Push was supposed to have attended Barbara’s wedding but had canceled at the last minute, and of course Push had other engagements in New York and would have come except that she wasn’t feeling well and it was such a long trip to Durham. Push was a well-known debutante whose coming out was covered in Life, though it wasn’t Push’s fault—Push hadn’t allowed public photographers at her debut, yet that pushy press corps had fought over getting a picture of her.
Even at ten, Evelyn didn’t quite buy her mother’s tale. All of a sudden her mother was very close friends with a Van-Something-orOther who was a Something else on her mother’s side? Also, her mother was now an expert on debutantes, whatever those were? A question flew around Evelyn’s mind like a mosquito, and she tried to bat it away, yet her ringlets were brushing annoyingly against her shoulders, and she wanted to see the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park instead of having to wear some itchy dress, so she let it out.
“Did you have fun at her wedding, Mommy?”
Barbara waited for the elevator doors to open and turned right quickly. “Oh, I couldn’t go. New York was really a ve
ry long trip at that point, and I had my own social life to tend to.”
The mosquito was buzzing louder, looking for flesh to chomp on.
“Was Push sad that you couldn’t come?”
“Oh,” said Barbara, jabbing to try to fit the key in the lock, “I’m sure she was sad that any of her friends didn’t make it.”
“Did you keep the invitation? It would be neat to see it.”
“Evelyn, you should change your clothes. That dress makes your stomach look big.”
Evelyn shimmied out of her dress. The mosquito wanted blood. “It must have been sad to miss such a huge society event.”
“Watch it, Evelyn. I don’t want to hear a word about it when we meet her. Are we clear?”
Push had grown up at Sixty-sixth and Park, and in the intervening decades had moved two blocks up and two blocks over, to Sixty-eighth and Fifth. Barbara did not want to walk there from the Plaza, as she was worried about grime from the city soiling their clothes, and had ordered a special long black car to take them there. Barbara wore a pink suit with golden buttons down the front and had Evelyn wear a seafoam flowered Laura Ashley dress with a lace bib at the front that Evelyn thought made her look like a Puritan.
The first thing Evelyn saw when they got out of the elevator was a painting of a young military drummer with bright red cheeks, hung over a gilded table with pink flowers on it. A maid led them past room after room, until they reached a room with windows on two sides, where the ceilings appeared almost as high as in the Plaza lobby, and there was a big chandelier and more vases of fresh flowers. She knew that fresh flowers were very expensive because her parents were always fighting over whether they were necessary or not.
Evelyn went to the window and watched taxis below, until her mother said, “Evelyn!” and inclined her head toward a chair, and Evelyn buried herself in a big green armchair where her feet did not meet the floor.
Everybody Rise Page 9
