The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  Once, in a past life, she would have been sure. When she was playing tennis, she knew who she was. She had a ranking to measure her value. People recognized her from tennis magazines and televised tournaments. She met with her coaches every day to ensure the progression of her talent. When tennis ended, she felt as if a door had closed behind her, stranding her somewhere she didn’t recognize. There was no numerical system to quantify her life. Her coaches no longer checked in on her. She took for granted how surrounded she was when she was playing her sport. She was so alone out there on court, talking to herself about footwork and strategy, but she was at the center of a universe. After she quit, she was like a planet that had fallen out of its orbit.

  At night the other students met for drinks or worked together in the library, but Diana ran. Through neighborhood streets at first, past chain restaurants and apartment complexes, then into Shoal Creek Park, along the dry creek bed littered with pale rocks, under the arms of live oak trees draped with Spanish moss. When she got to town lake, she turned around, heading again into the world of the living, past bike shops and pet salons, home to her apartment. She never ran in loops: just straight out and straight back. The accumulations of her day could be whittled down if she ran long enough. She could almost remember the old quickness and ease. The sure trajectories. Her presence within her body, directing its forward motion.

  Now Lucy rattled back to the patio with a jar in her hands. The insect inside was iridescent, oil-slick, its wings tucked close to its body. “A Japanese beetle,” Diana told her, and Lucy tilted the jar so the beetle scuttled forward against the slope, struggling to maintain its position. “Have you found any snails?” Diana asked. “With silvery trails and little forked tails?”

  Lucy grinned. “No, but there are hundreds of whales!” She headed out into the green.

  Drawing her knees up to her chest, Diana watched as Lucy threw herself down by the compost pile. Beyond was the Schmidts’ house—its familiar squatness, the bright orange shutters, that broken screen door into the kitchen, from which Arthur suddenly stepped out. Diana froze. She considered pretending she hadn’t seen him, but she’d already caught his eye. He smiled; a polite smile, nothing more. He was wearing glasses that made him look owlish; she’d never seen him in glasses before. For some reason, Diana shrugged, and his smile grew on one side. He seemed undecided as to whether to move forward to talk to her. She, too, stayed still, watching him. Something hovered between them. Then Lucy darted from the compost heap to the dogwood tree, and whatever had been holding them in stillness was broken. Diana followed Lucy’s movement. When she turned back toward Arthur, he was gone.

  “Di Di Di!” Lucy shouted. She was jumping up and down in her urgency.

  Commanded to do so, Diana approached.

  “A moth tent!” Lucy whispered, pointing up into the branches of the dogwood tree.

  The tent was spun between three branches, pulling them closer, three wooden axes around which silk threads had been woven so densely that they were almost opaque. Inside, the ghostly forms of black eggs clustered close to the branch, swept by leafy shadows. They gathered there before they went out into the world. Diana blinked at them. She wondered if, as moths, they ever dreamed of their days in the green shade of the nest, or whether that part of their lives dropped away forever with flight. Lucy was chattering at her side, but something was welling in Diana’s eyes, blurring the nest, and she couldn’t look down. She could see how pathetic she must seem to a person like Arthur. How useless and sad, having come home at her age. Having wanted nothing more for years than to come home, to be as she was when she lived there. “Luce, I’m done now, okay?” she said. Lucy tried to cling to her arm, but Diana pulled herself roughly away. It was too much to be out there, in the space between their houses. In the place where they used to be young together, and from which he had offered to take her away.

  Chapter 9

  On Tuesday, Arthur called Adelia at work to let her know that Anita would open the carriage house for inspection. Anxious to cement this surprising alliance, Adelia invited him over to a dinner party with some of the neighbors on Friday; they settled on Monday, since he had a meeting in New York that would keep him there for the weekend. Adelia’s satisfaction over this small victory floated her through the workweek. On Monday morning, she took another personal day and woke before dawn in order to plan.

  It was still dark when she made her way down to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. The house above her was full of sleeping people. Since William’s stroke, the girls had gravitated closer, so that after Diana announced she wasn’t returning to Texas, Elizabeth started spending more and more time on Little Lane until she and her daughters arrived with sleepover bags. The house on Little Lane became, overnight, a place where lost adults retreated to find the threads of the life they were supposed to lead. Now, behind closed doors, the various wounded parts of this once-great family slept. William in his bedroom, the girls in theirs, Margaux in her studio high above them all. And downstairs, restless Adelia, hatching her schemes.

  It had been a rainy night, and there was a damp weight to the light as it rose. These earliest hours were always the worst for Adelia. They made it possible to wonder whether she had been wrong to work so hard for the carriage house. Whether she had been wrong to move into this house, or even, for that matter, to move back to Breacon. Like the spokes of an asterisk, each of these doubts fed back to the carriage house. If only it could be saved, then. But William seemed agitated about the idea of a removal. It didn’t excite him as it once had. Moreover, he didn’t want to draw the plan himself. He didn’t want to hire another architect. And he didn’t want Diana to draw it. In the early-morning dampness, Adelia faced the idea that perhaps the carriage house was a fight she was pursuing merely to keep pursuing a fight.

  She took a sip of her coffee. It smelled like coffee. This was a smell that William would never again comprehend. Since last Sunday, Adelia had started to smell things she hadn’t smelled in the past, aware that William couldn’t. She smelled the staleness of upholstery in her car. She smelled tar in her office parking lot, noodles eaten days ago in the office break room, the faint scent of metal left on her hand after turning a doorknob. These aspects of the world were lost to William for good.

  In Dr. Ravitsky’s office, Adelia asked if there had been any other damage besides the wreckage in William’s olfactory bulb. Had any other parts been changed by that moment when his brain struggled for breath? “Not that the CAT scan reveals,” Dr. Ravitsky said. “But it’s worth staying alert to these things. Keep an eye out. Let us know if anything shifts. And be aware that the emotional effects of sensory deprivation can be significant. It’s hard to lose any channel of connection with the world.” Adelia asked about getting back to work. “It’s up to you,” Dr. Ravitsky answered, addressing William. “It should be safe to go back at this point if you’re able to avoid too much stress. But again, I’d ask you to stay alert to any differences in your perception.”

  Adelia watched William carefully on the car ride home. He seemed removed. He stared out the window, and his reflection floated on the glass. Physically, he was still her William. There was the handsome line of his jaw, the youthful fullness of his hair. But something had changed. The thought of his girls gave him none of the old pleasure. Last night, before bed, he and Adelia had shared a mug of tea at the kitchen island, and he’d said, “Elizabeth was never a very good actress, was she?” “Don’t say that,” Adelia said. “And now she’s too old,” he muttered, more to himself than to Adelia. “She was the most outgoing girl, but now she’s gotten old.”

  In the car, she tried to start a productive conversation. “Will you go back to the office tomorrow?” she asked, and he shrugged. “They’ll manage without me for now,” he said. “For how long?” she asked him, and he glared at his reflection. “For now,” he repeated. “It’s my grandfather’s firm. What can they do? They won’t notice,
anyway. I haven’t been on a project in years. The secretaries can manage without me.” He sat with his hands crossed over his chest, irritated that she couldn’t understand the bleak reality of his professional life.

  Now, sitting at the kitchen table while everyone above her slept, Adelia blinked back loneliness. If she didn’t spur herself to action, she would be lost, sitting there, surrounded by gloom, excessively aware of the smell of her coffee. Getting up from the table, she found a piece of paper in what used to be Margaux’s desk. She sharpened a pencil at the ancient crank sharpener. There was the smell of wood shavings and lead as she set to work on a plan.

  A dinner party for Arthur to celebrate the truce. He had shown real character in standing up to Anita. Yes, the word was character: the willingness to engage in contentious situations for the sake of preserving your values. She would make her special chicken. Arthur was a restaurant person, so she had to make something good. This she wrote on her list: “Special Chicken Ingredients.” She underlined it twice. She might have been intimidated by the idea of making dinner for someone so involved with gourmet cooking, but Arthur had seemed eager to come. She frowned and underlined “Special Chicken Ingredients” once more. There was, of course, the question of why Arthur cared enough to help them. The thing with Diana had ended badly, and now poor Di was changed beyond recollection. Still, Isabelle was ever the charming companion when she chose to be, and Adelia could tell that Arthur enjoyed her company. At Traviata, Isabelle sat beside him, radiant in the secret way that she hid from Adelia. Several times during dinner, Adelia noticed Arthur watching Isabelle, as if remembering something.

  Or perhaps it was just that he was lonely in his grandmother’s house. Adelia wished she had a better grasp on what it was, exactly, that was drawing him to the aid of the Adairs. Perplexed, she returned to her list. She licked the tip of her pencil and tasted the metal on her tongue. In total, there would be nine people, since the Cheshires had declined her invitation. On a sticky note, glommed on to the foil-enfolded lasagna that Beebee had left on the Adairs’ front stoop. There was something morbid about the impulse to leave a casserole out on a stoop. Every time Adelia discovered one, she thought of abandoned foundlings. And the note had been a terrible blow. They could not count on the Cheshires to vote for a delay. The Welds would be there. Surely, at a dinner party, sharing a meal on the back patio where William had thrown so many successful parties, Jack Weld would remember the contours of the friendship that used to exist between the Welds and the Adairs. There would be candles. In a soft light, they would put aside their conflict and agree on a solution. There would be four Adairs. Five if Margaux decided to join them, which she would not. Plus three Welds, a Schmidt, and one Adelia Lively. Ten chicken breasts. Shallots. White wine, cream, butter, capers. She would ask Elizabeth to cut flowers for the table. Elizabeth was always excessively extravagant, but this was an important dinner. Adelia wanted it to be an elegant affair, because William had always loved elegance. He shone in those scenes. Since coming back to Breacon, Adelia had spent countless evenings on the patio watching him, vivid in a green or yellow sweater, holding a glass of wine and entertaining the entire table.

  For several years after Margaux’s diagnosis, William continued to throw dinner parties. Margaux attended, presiding at her place without engaging much in conversations. Sometimes you could catch her gazing out across her garden, evidently thinking of something worlds away from the party clamoring around her. Adelia always wondered how Margaux could tear her eyes away from William. How could she remove herself while he asked her to remain? At some point she stopped coming down for the parties. “She’s not feeling well today,” William explained to his guests, as though Alzheimer’s were a temporary affliction. Guilty Adelia was sometimes offered Margaux’s empty seat. Eventually, the guests stopped coming. Perhaps they were mortified by the idea of laughing on the patio while Margaux suffered above them. Perhaps they felt that Adelia and William had gotten too close. Maybe the excessively attractive teenage girl who sometimes wandered out and drew their husbands’ eyes caused the neighborhood women to want to stay away from the house.

  Adelia wasn’t blind to this phenomenon. She could see that Izzy was too attractive. There was something wrong with her prettiness as it had combined with solitude. She was never surrounded by friends. She occasionally developed relationships with older men—coaches, teachers, even Jack Weld for a while—that struck Adelia as inappropriate and actually rather stomach-turning, although she never found the nerve to confront Izzy about it. Izzy had never tried to fit in, and Adelia had the sense that if she were to instruct Izzy on the merits of normal relationships, a glint of unbearable scorn would appear in Izzy’s eye, so she avoided the issue completely. She watched while Isabelle distanced herself. After her brief and successful tennis career, she seemed to repel the other girls her age, but that never appeared to sadden her. In fact, she embraced her isolation. There was a brief period when she seemed inordinately close to the art instructor at school, who must have been nearly thirty at the time. Once Adelia caught him dropping her off in the driveway. And then she never saw him again, and Adelia almost regretted that, since Isabelle’s constant aloneness resumed. She applied herself minimally to her schoolwork, choosing to read for hours in the isolation of her bedroom. As a result, when she came downstairs to a dinner party, her looks seemed as if they had been sharpened to a dangerous point by the hours she spent alone. It was no wonder the wives inched closer to their husbands in a house that Isabelle moved through.

  But there was also Margaux upstairs, and undomestic Adelia, and William entertaining while his guests edged farther away. For whichever of these reasons, the dinner parties tapered off. After that, it was just William and Adelia sharing a glass of wine on the patio, eating take-out from Traviata, talking about their days at work like an old married couple who never shared a marriage bed.

  For Adelia, it was mostly enough to spend those evenings with him, listening to anecdotes about tasteless client requests, pretending that he was the man she had chosen to marry. Since moving in, she had considered the prospect of sneaking from the guest room into his bed, though it was painful to think of sleeping with him for the first time in this state. After so many years of dreaming that he could be hers, to finally climb into his bed when he was disappointed and lost would be a sadness Adelia wasn’t sure she was ready to know. So she remained in the guest room, plotting the removal of the carriage house to its rightful position.

  Behind her, the front door creaked open. Louise, laden with a folded umbrella, a tote bag full of magazines, and a Frappuccino from Starbucks, entered the house.

  “They’re sleeping,” Adelia whispered, pointing upward, surprised by the vehemence of her desire that the girls be allowed to rest undisturbed.

  “Ah!” Louise said, lifting her eyebrows. Her whisper was shatteringly loud. “The little angels.” There was something in her tone that Adelia didn’t like. A note of conspiracy, perhaps, as though the two of them were in league against the Adairs. Adelia lifted her finger to her lips more severely this time. “Shh.” Louise nodded, that amused look clinging to her face, then repaired with a notebook and an Us Weekly magazine to the chair in the TV room, and Adelia was left alone again to await the unfolding of the day.

  • • •

  Surprisingly, the girls were helpful in planning the party. Before leaving for her job at Bed Bath & Beyond, Isabelle offered to pick up bread and cheese at the specialty shop. Adelia thanked her, gave her a twenty-dollar bill, and refrained from telling her that the Welds were coming in order to avoid an unpleasant reaction. Elizabeth was delighted at the idea of a dinner party and offered to bring votive candles for the patio. Only Diana remained reluctant. If she were honest with herself, Adelia couldn’t entirely blame her. What happened between Diana and Arthur had clearly meant more than Adelia had known. Adelia understood this increasingly, watching Diana in her faded form, quailing whenever Arth
ur’s name came up. Still, she wished Diana might summon some courage. Some energy, at least. Instead, she offered to babysit Elizabeth’s kids. Adelia assured her that they could entertain themselves upstairs. She insisted that Diana be present at the party. It was time for someone to force her to engage. To remind her that when she smiled, it used to light up rooms; she could smile that way again if she tried. Diana took it bravely, which was a pleasant surprise, then excused herself to walk the contractor around the carriage house.

  That afternoon, as Adelia returned from the ACME in Brynwood, Isabelle arrived with a bag of cheeses and a long baguette. Adelia set to work laying the chicken breasts beneath waxed paper and pounding them with the mallet she’d picked up from her house on Mather Street. When the chicken breasts were thin enough, she returned them to the refrigerator and went out to the yard to check on Diana. The contractor was gone, and Di was alone, considering the house. “The wood is worse than we thought,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot of damage when they move it. He says it’s doable, but we have to be prepared for a major renovation.”

  “We are,” Adelia said, but Diana kept looking off into the space surrounding the carriage house. By the time they got back to the kitchen, Elizabeth was slicing bread at the island. She was wearing a red bolero jacket over her flounced brown skirt. Adelia bit her tongue: for some reason Elizabeth was confident about her style sense, and there was no reason to undermine her convictions now. Diana ran upstairs to change, and Adelia joined Elizabeth to start work on the salad. When the dressing had been mixed, Isabelle came in from the back patio wearing a white sundress, her hair braided. She seemed almost like a little girl in that sundress, with that braid, and Adelia felt a pang of sympathy for her. She wasn’t heartless, though she sometimes chose to be cruel. Her father’s situation would have affected her. She had chosen that dress for his sake. Even if her youthfulness was feigned, she had feigned it for him. Adelia gestured toward a cutting board and Isabelle joined her, taking a knife from the drawer. It was a happy moment, standing side by side with Isabelle, slicing shallots while Elizabeth chattered. The three of them, working together in the kitchen to create a dinner for William Adair.