The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  “The performance will conclude with a slow dance,” the Diarist announced, wheeling out a coatrack laden with gray wool jackets. “Please dance with someone you do not know.” William considered staying in his seat. He did not like when artists demanded that he participate in their performances. But Margaux was standing and walking over to the jackets, and when she put one on, she looked just like a young girl wearing her beau’s coat on a cool night. Suddenly, William found that he, too, was standing, and then he was asking her if she would dance with him. The lights went out and an old waltz played. Above them, a disco ball cast flecks of light on the walls and the floor and the ceiling, and William pulled Margaux close to him so that her head was against his chest. He could almost imagine the way her hair used to smell when they were both young and flecked with a different kind of light. He held her against his chest, and after he danced with her for a while, a light mood struck him and he stepped back and twirled her away from him, the way they danced when they were young. She twirled twice in the rotating lights before her hand slipped out of his and she stopped twirling and looked at him from across a widening space.

  The music dropped off and the lights switched on, and in the normal glare of the Lee W. Greenfield Rock Harbor Arts Center, William realized that Adelia was watching him, and had probably been watching the whole time he danced with Margaux and tried to remember the scent of her hair. He moved over to say something to her, but she became livid with energetic motion and a great bustling return to her seat. William, too, returned to his chair. He sat there in the harsh light, caught between performances, ignored by Adelia, and grew irritated again that he hadn’t been able to smell the cuttings of grass. It wasn’t long before Elizabeth came out, wheeling a refrigerator on a dolly behind her. William focused on his daughter, wearing an old-fashioned dress and bright red lipstick, her hair coiled in a bun. She faced the pea-green refrigerator in silence. Neither one of them moved.

  The refrigerator became hateful as the silence deepened. It was too rectangular. His daughter was so detailed. Each feature of her face asserted itself, important, beside the bluntness of its right angles. The refrigerator glared; Elizabeth did nothing. William’s toes tensed in his shoes. Time stretched out, expanding, compressing him so that the tension spread up his legs and into his diaphragm. If no one did anything, William was going to have to stand. He would have to go outside for air. He glanced around. No one else seemed as infuriated as he was. He wanted to batter that refrigerator into the ground. How dare it hunker there, unmoved, in the presence of his child. He was going to have to stand, but just as he started to, she moved. She hit it with her palm. William breathed. Again she hit it with her hand, then took off her high-heeled shoe and hurled it at the pea-green monster. The shoe bounced off, clattering on the floor. Elizabeth left the stage and returned with a crowbar. William loved the crowbar’s sleekly evil shape. Elizabeth lifted it high above her head and let it fall on the refrigerator’s crown. She did it again and again. William breathed in and out. This was motion. This was something happening. This was his daughter fighting, beautifully.

  She was tearing into the refrigerator. One of the metal hinges on its door sprang off and flew across the stage. The door swung open like a broken wing and revealed the bare skeleton of its inner shelves. Elizabeth took to its side. She left great visible dents in its metal frame. The crowbar was coated in pea-green paint. To his right, Isabelle was laughing, and William was so relieved that he could have braved the flying crowbar to hug his daughter, whose hair had come out of its bun. She continued to fight. The refrigerator had taken new shape, as though crouching closer to the ground, cowering in fright. There was a great crack and sigh, and then it was falling backward, out of the dolly, onto the ground with a crash that caused a brief sharp pain in William’s skull and scared three audience members out of their seats. Elizabeth considered the ruins before her. Then she sighed and dropped her crowbar, but something important had been accomplished. When she faced the audience and said, “The end,” William leaped to his feet to applaud.

  He was the only one who stood. The rest of the audience stared at him, but he didn’t care. He applauded with more vigor. Elizabeth smiled directly at him, and it was the two of them alone. This was his daughter, who had fought for her place. This was his daughter, who was elegant and strong. In front of him, Elizabeth and the battered refrigerator. Behind his eyes, on the floor of his brain, the smoking carriage house, black against the unnaturally illuminated sky, and in front of it Isabelle in her white dress. And then there was Diana, half smiling in the way she did when he picked her up at the airport and she slung her racket bag into the back of the car. They were there, just beyond his reach. Daughters he couldn’t quite grasp. He locked his eyes on Elizabeth, triumphant before him. He tried to focus completely while she was there on the stage. For a long time, she looked back at him, and then she looked away. Her eyes flickered over the rest of the crowd, and after she had received her applause, she bent, collected her crowbar, and set to work on clearing the stage.

  For a long time he refused to sit. Not even his family stood with him. He was alone. Long after no one was clapping anymore, when Elizabeth had wheeled off the dolly and two strong women in dark clothes had come out to push the refrigerator off the stage, William clapped, until the inner space was empty again and the room was blank, and he knew it was time to sit but he didn’t want the feeling to fade into the shell of a memory, like those useless cuttings of grass. Even after he sat, the recollection of having been so stirred remained with him, so he was able to tolerate the sight of a dozen unattractive women chanting in a circle around an overweight person crowned with thorns, who reached into her underpants and took out a chicken egg, then held it up to the audience as though she had done something more impressive than reverse a million years of evolution. Thus should not develop the human female, thought William, refusing to applaud when the troupe finally took their oviparous bows. He felt the presence of his family on both sides of him, women all of them. They were better than that. So much better than an unwieldy person brandishing an egg. Adelia, who had no children of her own, who had loved him fiercely as a snagged tooth. Margaux, whose face had become blurred. And somewhere between the two of them, his three girls. His girls who had somehow slipped away from him but whom he would watch for, every day, as long as he lived, hoping to glimpse them even briefly as they winged their way past.

  Chapter 21

  As soon as Diana finished the plans, she went back to Breacon to start work. She had her certification from UT, awarded after her defense of a new thesis: “Reconstruction of a Nineteenth-Century Carriage House.” Her adviser, surprised by the new direction, congratulated her on having found her voice. On the plane ride back from Austin, Diana sketched memories of the woodwork in the owl’s nest. She completed the blueprints in William’s basement office; when she was done, she took the train downtown to print them at his firm. Back at the rental house in Rock Harbor, she stayed up late in her seafoam-toned bedroom, finalizing details.

  As soon as she signaled to Adelia that she was ready to begin, Adelia drove her back to Breacon, promising to secure the building permits through contacts at work. When they arrived at Little Lane, Adelia dropped her off in the driveway. “You’re not staying?” Diana asked. “I’ll stay at my house for a while,” Adelia told her. “You don’t need me here.” Then Adelia handed her a checkbook and gave her a kiss on the cheek that was so hard, Diana was certain it would leave a bruise.

  While waiting for the permits to come through, she sorted through the building materials she’d salvaged from the fire, before the neighborhood association swept in to clean up the rubble. She kicked the bricks off the tarp she’d spread over them, then lifted it up like a large blue beach towel. Sixteen glass doorknobs from the cabinets along the sidewall. Seven cedar beams that had fallen during the fire and suffered minimal damage; the rest of the wood was useless, but these could be incorporated into t
he rebuilt structure. She knelt to smell them; first there was an ashy scent, but then she caught the ancient tabernacle smell. There was a stack of the cement slabs that had covered the floor, and the iron light fixture that used to hang from the ceiling. She passed her hands over their cool surfaces, then covered them again with the tarp. She was on her way inside to call the contractor when she saw Arthur emerging from the front door of his house, carrying a bag of trash.

  She smiled as soon as she saw him. Her first instinct was to catch him before he disappeared back into the house, so she waved and shouted. He turned and smiled, the same half smile, and this time she crossed the lawn to his driveway.

  “Hey there,” he said when she reached him, and she wondered whether she should be smiling less drastically. They walked out to the plastic bins on the curb. When he’d thrown out the bag, he shoved his hands into his pockets. “How’s Isabelle?”

  “She’s okay,” Diana said. “She got her cast off a couple of weeks ago.”

  “That’s good to hear.” He hovered before her, hands in his pockets, so close she could have touched him.

  “It’s amazing how well she’s recovered. She’s a little different, I think, but I’m not sure it’s bad. She seems less prickly. A little more childish somehow, but I guess that’s not the worst that could happen. She’s postponing college for a year, to volunteer at Breckenridge.” Diana wasn’t sure why she was going on like this; there was the possibility that he had asked the question only to be polite. But she worried that if she stopped talking, he’d go back into the house, so she continued to babble. “My dad’s already talking about her reapplying to Princeton. Normally Izzy would hate that, but now she seems fine with it. She lights up when he mentions it. Which is so strange for Isabelle. Same thing with tennis. She didn’t play for years, but now they go to the courts every morning.” With this she abruptly ran out of things to say. Arthur was squinting at her in the brightness of the August sunlight. A space widened between them. Diana realized how much the Adairs had imposed on him this summer, without offering anything in return. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t need to know all this, do you.”

  “It’s fine. I asked.”

  “You’ve got enough to worry about. How’s your grandmother?”

  “Better. She finished round three of her chemo. The doctors say it went as well as possible.”

  “How’s she taking it?”

  “She’s been pretty mean,” he said, smiling. “She’s a little mean already, but she’s been a real medal winner this month. I think she’s starting to feel better. This morning she thanked me, which was a minor miracle.”

  “You’re good to be here with her,” Diana said. “Loyal.” The memory of his conversation with Isabelle on the night of the fire caused her to pull up short as soon as she said it. It seemed as though he was considering whether to say something, but she felt him decide against it.

  “Will you stay now that she’s getting better?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. It’s been hard to be here alone. I miss the city. The new restaurant opens in a month or so, and work is piling up.”

  She had to remember that he had a life in New York. The kind of life a promising young person is supposed to possess. It was possible that he had a girlfriend whom he was hoping to return to. A girlfriend who would be modern and independent, who didn’t live with her parents, struggling to rebuild a nineteenth-century house that her sister had burned to the ground. That was the kind of girlfriend who made sense for Arthur. They’d become such different people, she and Arthur, and yet she was reluctant to let him go. She wanted to keep the small place she’d regained in his life. “You could come visit us at the beach, if you want. It’s a real family circus. You’d think it was funny.”

  “It’s hard to imagine the Adairs anywhere other than Little Lane. How is everyone?”

  “Oddly enough, they seem fine. Maybe better than they were. My dad hated it at first—he’s always been suspicious of vacation—but he’s settled into a routine. He plays tennis with Izzy in the mornings. He wears clothes with embroidered nautical themes. Mom’s done a rose garden, and tomato plants, and she’s filled the whole garage with potted bulbs. Dad even helps her sometimes. It’s sweet, seeing them together, weeding side by side. They planted a vegetable garden, and it’s just sprouting. He’s pretty impressed with himself.”

  “That’s good,” Arthur said. “I wouldn’t have expected him to be so amenable to a move.”

  “To be honest, Adelia’s the one I feel for most. She’s the one who seems really out of place at the beach. She comes back here during the week to work, and when she drives back out, she prowls around in her cardigans, irritated about getting sand in her shoes.”

  Arthur laughed. “And Elizabeth?”

  “She joined a performance art group. Every week she destroys a different household appliance with a crowbar.”

  “Every week?”

  “I know, it’s crazy. But the crazier thing is, my dad loves it. He’s her biggest fan. He goes to every performance and comes home raving.”

  “He was always proud of you guys.”

  Diana caught her breath and looked down at his feet. He was wearing old gray sneakers, the same kind he used to wear as a kid. “Too proud, sometimes,” she said. “More proud than we deserved.” She could feel him watching her, but she was suddenly too ashamed to look up at his face.

  “So why are you still here?” he asked.

  “I’m rebuilding the carriage house,” she said. “I got my certification. Finally. Apparently, I’ve found my voice in renovation. I’m ‘most expressive in moments of nostalgia for the abandoned past,’ as my adviser poetically put it. It turns out I’m incapable of letting things go.” She glanced up at his face long enough to see that he was looking away, his expression so distant that it was impossible to deduce what he was thinking. She felt a lump rise in her throat. “Anyway, I finished the plans, so I’m just waiting for the permit. The contractor’s meeting me here at noon.”

  “That’s great, Diana,” he said. His tone was wistful, as if coming from somewhere far away. “I can’t say I’m surprised. But that’s really impressive, and I’m happy for you.”

  She watched his profile. He was squinting off into the space where the carriage house would go up. He seemed thoughtful and sad. Their childhood had fallen so far behind them, and now they were adults, standing in the same driveway, divorced from their previous selves. She remembered with sudden clarity William at the kitchen table, muttering, “He says you’ve changed so much he hardly recognized you.” After the night in the hospital, when she fell asleep on Arthur’s familiar shoulder, she had somehow imagined that the time dividing them had closed. That their lives had intersected again, if not romantically, still meaningfully. One disastrous night and she had imagined there was significance between them again. Now she felt herself sinking. “I’m not sure why I’m so stuck on it,” she murmured. “I can’t think about anything else but rebuilding that carriage house, just as it was, before we ruined it. It’s crazy. Even my dad seems to have forgotten about it now.”

  “Well, it’s lucky you won’t give up on it, isn’t it?” There was an edge to his voice that seemed to surprise him. He turned abruptly to look at her, as if he wished he could catch what he’d said before it reached her. She could feel the heat of a flush creeping into her outdated face and couldn’t think of anything to say in response.

  “I’m happy Isabelle’s better,” he said through the terrible silence. His words had the sound of conclusion. “I’ve been worried about her.”

  Diana nodded. He had stayed with her that night in the hospital until he knew the surgery went fine and the emergency was over. He stayed for Isabelle’s sake, not hers. Only the stupidly nostalgic side of her could have imagined an intersection in the lines of their lives after all these fragmented years.

  “I’ll se
e you, okay?” he said, touching her elbow lightly.

  “Okay,” she said, and when he had disappeared into Anita’s house, she was left in the driveway with all the things she might have said years ago, before so much time had passed that saying them would be a useless mistake.

  Chapter 22

  Adelia’s number was 131. She had been waiting in the Permits and Licensing Department of the County Commissioner’s Office for an hour and a half for her number to be called, her eyes trained on the TV monitor that summoned the citizens of Bronwyn County to their reckoning. The bag that contained her application—thick with copies of Diana’s plans—sat on the floor between her navy ballet flats. When she first sat down, the chosen number was 61; Adelia watched as a handsome young man with a cell phone attached to his belt headed toward doorway number 8. She considered taking out the work she had brought from the office, but her mind was racing, and it was difficult not to be distracted by the progression of the numbers.

  It was possible that she might lose him. He had gone off to the shore with Margaux at Adelia’s own urging, and the experience had not forced him to acknowledge how badly he wanted to return. At first, when she hatched the plan, she thought, Let him go off with her. Let him live in the place where she lives, that place she occupies beyond human relation. He’ll want to return as soon as he’s arrived. But he was happy at the shore, and Adelia was alone again, as she had been in the apartment in Brooklyn. But this time she had no dream of William to keep her company. In Brooklyn he’d hovered just beyond her grasp; now she’d come back to him. She’d gotten so close that she’d lain with him in his bed, her cheek on his chest, feeling the body that had eluded her so long.