“Luke!” Miss Abigail called. “Do you have a valise?” she asked Peggy, rubbing her hands together as if summoning a genie. “I’ll send Luke to fetch it. Luke!” The name bounced hollowly through the house.
Peggy prepared herself, but Luke didn’t appear in a billow of magical vapor—or any other way.
“Never mind, dear. Would you care to freshen up after your journey?”
Peggy couldn’t decide whether she was glad or offended at Luke’s apparent absence. She settled on glad. “I’d like to see the house, please.”
“Certainly, dear.” Miss Abigail led Peggy to the doorway to the right. “We’ll begin here, with the gentlemen’s parlor, where Silas used to retire with his guests after dinner, and his wife, Dorothy, would go with the wives across the hall to the ladies’ parlor.” The rooms were shadowy, with drawn heavy curtains, but Miss Abigail spoke as if she had memorized the contents of each parlor along with the names of her ancestors. “The ladies’ piano was a gift from Governor Wolcott in 1797. Silas’s youngest daughter, poor Temperance, was reportedly quite gifted. Do you play?”
“Only ‘Chopsticks.’ ” Peggy didn’t want to ask what had become of poor Temperance.
“Lovely. We’ll have music in the house again.”
A floorboard creaked as Miss Abigail led Peggy out and down the corridor, deeper into the house. They emerged in a vast room, its size more dramatic because there was no one in it. There were two separate groupings of sofas and armchairs with tattered upholstery and sprung springs. On the outside wall of the room, a door, as massive and imposing as the one through which Peggy had entered the house, led to a side garden ragged with weeds.
“This is the grand parlor.” Miss Abigail stopped in front of the cold fireplace. “The family has done some of its most important entertaining here. There’s also an east parlor, but we don’t use that part of the house anymore. It was built for members of the Sedgwick extended family, back when generations lived under the same roof. It’s too big for just Luke and me and the cat.”
“You have a cat?”
“Quibble,” Miss Abigail said. “You’ll likely never see him. He hides under my bed.”
The Oriental rug on which Miss Abigail stood was worn down to its backing. Against the wall behind her, a dusty grandfather clock stood silently, its delicate black hands stalled at four twenty-three.
Peggy thought the room terribly lonely. “Why does the house have this other formal entrance?”
“That’s not an entrance, dear.” Abigail walked over to the large side door and pressed her withered hands against it. “It’s to take the coffins out.”
Their tour continued into the dining room off the grand parlor and then to a library, where a man Miss Abigail identified as Silas Sedgwick glowered from an oil painting above yet another fireless fireplace. The house was damp and chilly, and Peggy would have liked a heavier sweater, but Miss Abigail, seemingly unaffected by the cold, led her down another hall and into a cluttered den populated with more painted portraits.
Everyone in these pictures is dead, Peggy thought. “I might go get my luggage now,” she said.
“Suit yourself,” said Miss Abigail.
Forcing herself to walk, not run, Peggy wound her way through the house and back out into the bright afternoon. Get in that car, a part of her whispered. In two hours she could be in the city, having dinner with Bex and Josh and laughing about her five minutes of impetuousness. She unlocked the Pontiac and slipped into the driver’s seat, fumbling for the ignition.
“Going so soon?”
She jumped, a nascent scream dying in her throat. Luke Sedgwick had caught the edge of the car door in one hand. A battered Volvo sedan she assumed was his stood in the gravel driveway in front of her rental.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Peggy lied. “I was about to pop the trunk.” She reached down, intending to open the trunk dramatically as she said “pop,” but she had to grope around. Her fingertips came into contact with a latch. She pulled up on it. The trunk stayed shut, but the car’s hood rose.
Curved lines bracketed Luke’s mouth, as if he were about to laugh at her.
“Could you close the hood?” Peggy would have liked to tell him to wipe that smirk off his face, but the most important thing was for the two of them to get along. It would be a long year otherwise.
Luke let go of the car door and deftly shut the hood, and Peggy located the correct latch and disengaged the trunk. She had been prepared to carry her own luggage, but Luke lifted out her suitcase and set it at the top of the driveway. Peggy brought over two totes, a shopping bag, a gift basket for Miss Abigail of bath products from the store—tea rose, always a crowd-pleaser—and a pillow.
Luke looked at her strangely. “We have linens.”
She decided not to try to explain her strange-bed phobia and followed him as he loped back toward the house with her suitcase.
At the front door, she paused. “Aren’t you supposed to carry me over the threshold?” She laughed at her own joke, but Luke looked stricken, as if she’d just suggested they swing naked from the Sedgwick maple. She turned away so he wouldn’t see her embarrassment, took a breath, and went in alone.
FIVE
Luke returned to his study, on edge. Yesterday had been a terrible day in the market. The Dow had fallen by five percent, which was bad enough, but he had managed to do even worse, losing seven percent from the already dismal Sedgwick family portfolio. At this rate, its most valuable asset would soon be the worthless few acres the family still owned out on the highway. In just the past two weeks, with his time and energy taken up by this marriage business, Luke had lost his focus completely. On top of it all, he had poetry running through his head. Phrases, lines, whole stanzas—as if a rusty tap had been reopened and water was flowing crazily every which way. All he wanted to do was sit quietly and write it all down.
“An aphrodisiac that vanishes,” he whispered. “An aphrodisiac that fades away. An aphrodisiac that disappears.”
Somebody coughed.
The sound startled him only slightly; in the back of his mind, he’d made note of footsteps clacking down the hall. He scrawled the aphrodisiac lines on the back of an envelope.
Peggy stood in the doorway. “I thought we should talk.”
A talk already? Eight minutes into their marriage of convenience? “Have a seat.” Luke sounded more genial than he felt.
“There’s nowhere to sit.”
She was right. The space was a cavernous rectangle—Luke liked to annoy his great-aunt by threatening to convert it into a squash court—running the whole front length of the house, with a high, vaulted ceiling that followed the sloping roofline. It was empty except for his desk and chair and a massive old mirror leaning against a wall. He rose and offered his seat to her, but she declined. That meant he’d have to remain on his feet, because it would be impolite to sit back down. The two stood awkwardly next to the desk.
She looked around. “What is this room for, anyway?”
“It used to be the ballroom. That’s the half-moon window you see from the street, over the big Palladian window on the second floor. I come here to work.” He waited for Peggy to get the hint. Another line came to him: Delusional, like permanence, or wealth. And another: A shimmering, as if love were a ghost. He wrote both down.
“I want a room upgrade.”
He put down his pen and laughed.
“Why is that funny?” She folded her arms across her chest.
He folded his arms over his chest, mimicking her stance. “I’m not running an inn.”
“You gave me the worst room on the whole floor, with a twin bed and old seventies furniture. I counted three empty bedrooms on my way here. They all have queen-size beds and chandeliers and fireplaces.”
“How do you know?”
“I opened the doors and looked.”
He switched on his desk lamp. As a child, she would have been one of those thin-skinned, bookish girls who were almost too e
asy to tease, and certainly not the sturdy, suntanned field hockey player, of the sort he’d never been attracted to, with whom his parents and great-aunt had always expected he’d settle down nevertheless.
But Peggy’s uneasy mix of shyness and aggression was interesting, in an anthropological sense. He studied her. “I know you’re not an Adams, but you’re not even a Yankee, are you?”
“Sure I am. I was born and raised in California.”
He laughed again. “That doesn’t count.”
“If you’re not from the South, aren’t you a Yankee?”
“Only to people in the South,” he said.
She looked out the crescent window at the waning afternoon. “Well, I’m a New Yorker now, and no self-respecting New Yorker would settle for that room.” She faced him. “Like it or not, I’m not a guest. I’ll be living here weekends until our year is up.” By the terms of Miss Abigail’s offer that would be next September, the day of their wedding anniversary. “And I’m your business partner with a legal interest in this house.”
As if it had been waiting, the sheet of plaster that had been threatening for weeks to fall from the ceiling dropped resignedly into one corner.
“Um…,” Peggy faltered. “We also need to talk about your great-aunt’s party next weekend—how we’re going to behave as a, you know, couple.” She was blushing again. “Like, what we’ll do if people start tapping on their glasses. You know how people do that at wedding receptions? So the couple will”—she hesitated—“kiss?”
A reception. Just what he needed. Abigail hadn’t mentioned a thing about it. Two hours of cocktails and small talk and pretending to be married. It would take a Shakespearean actor to pull it off, and Luke was no actor. He supposed Peggy was enjoying this, that she was yet another of those women, like Nicki, who thrived on drama. “There will be no glass tapping, I assure you. Lesson one about Yankees: We don’t like public displays of affection.”
“What a relief,” Peggy said.
Luke thought of their wedding chapel photo, recalled suddenly the dress she’d worn—conservative in front, daringly low in the back. She’d knocked the breath out of him, he remembered now, this demure blonde with a smoldering sensuality lacking in any Yankee girl he’d ever met, but not overtly sexual, like Nicki. Sugar and spice. Naughty and nice. Intriguing. “Do you want people to tap their glasses?” He had to admit, the thought of kissing her wasn’t at all offputting.
“No! Absolutely not!” She crossed her arms over her chest again and glared at him.
“All right, then.” His unsavory thoughts vanished as quickly as they’d arrived. “Is there anything else?”
“I want a new room.”
He was desperate to get back to his three lines of poetry. There were still a few minutes left to work on them before dinner. Abby liked to eat promptly at five-thirty, and he knew she was preparing something celebratory. He thought about explaining that he’d given Peggy the best room available, the one with the working heat and no evidence of mice. He’d spent the past three days cleaning it. He’d aired the mattress outside and rolled back the rug to mop underneath.
“Pick any room you like,” he said.
Climbing the stairs that evening, Peggy couldn’t decide whether she’d done well at dinner or not. Miss Abigail had been welcoming, regaling her with tales of the Sedgwick family history and of Luke’s exploits as a teenager. But at one point, she’d set down her fork and beamed at Peggy. “I was fond of your grandmother Tippy, dear.”
“Tippy?” Peggy had asked, swallowing, with relief, the last bite of a bland, leaden biscuit.
Luke said, “Tippy Adams, your grandmother.”
Luckily, at least from a conversational perspective, Miss Abigail had just decided they needed more biscuits. When she’d left the room, Luke muttered, “Play along. She really believes you’re a descendant of an old Connecticut family.”
“But I’m not,” Peggy protested. “My dad’s family came over from Russia. They were named Adams at Ellis Island. I don’t want to lie to her.”
“What does it matter? It makes her happy. For all we know, there never was a Tippy Adams, and Abby’s imagining the whole thing. Besides, we’re already stretching the truth to the breaking point.”
“Then I don’t want to stretch it any more than we have to.”
Miss Abigail returned with a refilled basket of biscuits. “Now, Peggy, tell me,” she said. “How did you and my great-nephew meet?”
Peggy’s mind went blank. In their negotiations over the past two weeks, Luke had provided her with the fictional outline of their phony romance, but just then, at the dinner table, she was unable to dredge up a single detail, except that she and Luke had supposedly dated for only a month before getting married. Peggy accepted another biscuit to buy time, and racked her brain for the gist of the story.
“Oh! Through our mutual friend, Thayer Whittaker!” she exclaimed at last, like a quiz show contestant. Luke looked up at the ceiling, as if praying for patience.
“Isn’t that nice,” Miss Abigail said, then wrinkled her forehead. “Remind me, please, dear. Who is Thayer Whittaker?”
Peggy was certain of this one. “He was a classmate of Luke’s at Harvard.”
“Yale,” Luke said quietly. “She of course means Yale.”
“I’m not sure I’ve met Thayer.” Miss Abigail buttered a piece of biscuit. “Have I?”
“I don’t think so,” Peggy said. She knew for a fact that there was no such person.
The meal was a grayish roast with boiled potatoes and mushy green beans. Miss Abigail hadn’t turned on the overhead light but had set a single candle on the long dining room table, and Peggy had used the near darkness to her advantage, shuttling the food back and forth across her plate instead of eating it. It had been too early for dinner anyway; she hadn’t had much of an appetite. Now it was eight o’clock, and Peggy’s stomach was growling. A small triumph—she had packed an energy bar in one of her tote bags.
She had chosen a new room a few doors up from her old one, with light blue floral wallpaper that, though peeling at the corners, was attractive and feminine. She ran her hand along the wall until she located the light switch, saw Luke had left linens on top of the bare bureau, and turned to the making of the bed. The mattress had no cover, and Peggy shuddered a little as she lifted it to tuck the sheet under a corner. When she dropped the mattress back down, it exhaled a cloud of dust.
She coughed and made the bed quickly, glad she’d thought to bring her own pillow. At last, she spread out the comforter. It was a hideous masculine plaid that didn’t go with the room, but, Peggy thought, at least she’d busted out of her jail cell. Bex would be proud.
Something wasn’t right.
Peggy awoke in pitch darkness, straining her ears for the noise. She heard nothing. She’d been dreaming. Sleep tugged at her, and she closed her eyes again.
There it was—a faint, sibilant whisper. A ghost, gossiping. A thing in her room.
She ought to flip on the light, to surprise it in its tracks, but doing so would mean getting up and putting her feet on the floor, where the Thing could grab her ankles and drag her under the bed. Don’t be an idiot. Get up and turn on the light. She poked a foot out from under the covers.
Wait—was that it again?
Peggy jerked her foot back, her useless eyes stretched wide. It could be a burglar. Who knew if Luke bothered to lock the front door. On the way in with her luggage, when she’d relocked the car, he’d looked at her and said, just as his great-aunt had, “This isn’t New York City.”
The room was freezing. If the light were on, she’d probably be able to see her breath—quick, shallow gulps she was trying hard to silence. She strained to listen while noiselessly counting sixty one-one-thousands. She counted out another sixty seconds, and another. Surely, if the Thing was a burglar or murderer, he would have made himself known by now. Count for five more minutes, and if nothing happens, it was your imagination. One, one thousand…t
wo, one thousand…
But the numbers tangled up in themselves, and she was back in Manhattan, in front of Brattie’s Sports Pub on Amsterdam Avenue, which she’d been passing by on the rainy November afternoon she’d first met Brock. And then she was on their first date at Undine’s, the warm, solid pressure of Brock’s hand on her back as he escorted her to their table, making her forget how nervous she was. She thought about the wedding they’d have with the money she’d earn from sticking it out until next September twenty-sixth in this strange, cold house with a man she didn’t know and didn’t especially like. This was the deal she’d made. She pulled the ugly comforter up to her chin. One weekend down, she thought. Only four dozen or so more to go.
It wasn’t a sound that woke Luke; it was the quality of the light. New Nineveh nights were black, especially when there was no moon, but tonight the darkness outside his window seemed illuminated artificially, as if a New York City streetlamp had sprung up among the trees that lined the sidewalk. He got up to look out the window. Below him, the side yard shone with bright streaks he knew were coming from the ladies’ parlor windows. Odd, to be sure; he’d been the last to go to bed, and the house had been dark.
He tiptoed downstairs.
The entire first floor was lit up. Luke went to each deserted room, turning off the lights, knowing his great-aunt had turned them on for her own mysterious reasons. He called her name softly, searching for her, until at last he came to the library.
It had been ransacked. Objects from cabinet drawers were scattered in all directions. Shelves’ worth of books had been flung onto chairs and carpets. In the middle of the chaos, Abigail drifted in bare feet and a flannel nightgown. “Gone!” she wailed. “Lost and gone!”
Mating Rituals of the North American WASP Page 7
