“Well, I ran off to New York right after I graduated from Draper. Just days after. Surely you already know about that from Bradley?”
I didn’t, but I nod, playing along.
“My parents didn’t speak to me at all for almost a year after I left. I was supposed to attend Sweet Briar that fall, marry your father-in-law, have his babies.” She smiles at me, her expression turning wistful. “But what could I say?” She sighs. “I wanted adventure.”
Or escape? I think, wondering about what William just told me. If my father-in-law was truly in love with Susannah, he must have been heartbroken about her leaving him—if that’s the way it really went down, and if what she’s told me about the plans they made for their future are accurate . . . Bradley has always been so open and easy with me, but we’ve rarely discussed anything particularly personal about his life. Could there be a tactful way for me to ask him?
“So off to New York I went!” she says.
“And I think I remember that you became a flight attendant shortly after you got there?”
“No, honey, I was a stewardess. That’s what they called us. For Pan Am. Fortunately, I got fired after just two months.”
“Oh no!” I say, trying to imagine her pushing a beverage cart. “Why?”
“They had ludicrous rules. I wore an unacceptable shade of lipstick once—Wine and Roses, I loved it, a gorgeous deep red—but they wanted me in demure pink. And then—get this—I had the audacity to work a flight without a girdle.”
“How did they know?” I ask.
“They checked!” she says.
“No!”
“Yes, it’s true. They employed people to fly on the planes and spy on us. I guess I leaned over to pour someone a drink! Those uniforms were so short! And the guy who figured it out—he must have been looking very closely—wrote me up. I also wore a black bra under my uniform once. A big no-no.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m not,” she says. “So I got fired, which was fine. Good riddance. And my roommate—her name was Marcy, she was from Philadelphia—she had a cousin who worked at the Oak Room at the Plaza. They needed a cocktail waitress, and I remembered reading in Life magazine that Truman Capote and Gore Vidal lunched there. That was good enough for me.”
“So you got a job there?”
“Yes. A life-changing one. When I went for the interview, I offered to make the bar manager my perfect martini. I’d been making them for my parents every night since I was thirteen. Gin, straight up, extra olives for my mother. Served daily at precisely six o’clock. In the garden if it was spring or summer, in the library in fall and winter.”
“Thirteen?” I say, imagining Max and Livvie wielding cocktail shakers.
She shrugs. From the look on her face, I can tell she’s enjoying my reaction to her story. She knows it’s a good one, and it’s obvious she’s told it many times before.
“I almost had to beg that manager to let me make him a drink. ‘We need a cocktail waitress, not a bartender,’ he said. He had a craggy face, the kind of greasy skin that almost looks plastic, you know? Anyway, it didn’t matter to me that they only really expected me to be able to balance a tray and bat my eyelashes at the customers, which was child’s play after accomplishing the same at forty thousand feet. I knew I would get the job if I could make him a drink.”
“And you did.”
“Of course,” she says. “And a week later, on my second shift, I walked across the room to deliver a bottle of Coca-Cola to a corner table.” She smiles and pauses, picking up her spoon to stir her tea. “The customer had on a beautiful navy suit. Custom-made, I knew, because my father wore custom-made suits by Georges de Paris, that legendary tailor in Washington who did all the politicians for decades?”
“I don’t . . .” I shake my head.
“Oh, he did LBJ, Gerald Ford . . . I think he even made the suit that Reagan was wearing when he got shot . . .” She stops and shakes her head, looking like she’s just remembered something she wishes she hadn’t. “My father . . .” She grimaces, like saying the word burns her mouth. “He was just the mayor of this dinky town, but he had quite the superiority complex.” She flares her nostrils, and I sneak a look at William across the room, wondering whether he’s heard her more or less confirm what he just told me about the Greyhills.
“Anyhow, I walked across that room with that Coca-Cola, the tray balanced just so on my hip, and I could tell that the customer I was serving was handsome before he even turned around. He was broad shouldered. Smelled fantastic. Like leather and money, you know what I mean?” she says, giggling. “He was a man.”
I start laughing along with her, totally amused. None of my friends ever talks this way about men. In fact, now that I think about it, we usually just complain about them. You won’t believe what my idiot husband did today . . .
“As I put the drink down, bending from the knees, just as I’d been taught to at the airline,” she says, pointing a finger at the sky, “he shifted toward me and we locked eyes—he wore those big tortoiseshell glasses even then—and I knew, immediately, that my life was about to change.”
“It was Teddy Lane.”
“The one and only,” she says. “Not that his name meant a thing to me at the time.”
“That’s a great story.”
“It was meant to be,” she says, mocking a dramatic tone like the voice-overs in movie trailers.
“I would say so.”
“And the bonus,” she says, now deadpanning, “is that once my mother found out who he was, she acted as if I had just summited Mount Everest. She was so proud of me.” She lowers her chin. “She’d never been before, I can tell you that.”
“Proud of you?”
She breaks off a piece of her cookie and dunks it into her tea. “My mother was the kind of woman who considered marrying a rich man an accomplishment. A supreme accomplishment. My older sister, Margaret, was the focus of my mother’s attention up until that point, but marrying Teddy! It was the one thing I did right.”
“Tell me about your sister,” I say, remembering how I’d scrawled a reminder to myself to ask Susannah about her after I saw a brief mention of her online the other day. “Were you close?”
Susannah rolls her eyes. “She was six years older than me, did everything exactly the way my mother expected. Always had her nose stuck in a book, graduated from Hollins, enjoyed embroidery and polite conversation.” She sticks her tongue out like this disgusts her. “But then we found out she had ovarian cancer. She died shortly after I married Teddy.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, though I don’t seem to need to be. Susannah’s acting as if she’s talking about the death of a pet frog she kept in a shoebox for a few days, not her only sibling.
She shrugs. “It was a long time ago,” she says.
“She never married?”
“Margaret?” She laughs. “Oh, no!”
“What?”
“This is terrible to say,” she says, looking up at the ceiling, almost as if she’s speaking to someone up there. “But I got the looks in the family. Margaret . . .” She shakes her head. “Anyway, that’s how we met, Teddy and I. I never would have expected it. My original plan, of course, was to marry Bradley. Would have been quite a different life.” She laughs in a way that feels like a slight. Does she mean it to be?
“The money with Teddy was, of course, a nice side bonus,” she says. “Very nice. But all of that . . .” She pops the last bit of cookie in her mouth and chews quickly, like she’s trying to choke it down. “Easy come, easy go.” She busies herself brushing crumbs off her lap, and when she looks up at me, I notice that her eyes are shimmering with tears.
“You must miss him.”
“Teddy?”
“Yes,” I say, wondering who else she’d think I meant.
“I do, I do,” she says strangely, like she’s trying to convince herself. “I really do.
“Anyway, enough about me!” she says, pu
shing away her plate. “Tell me about you and Cole. I want to know how you met.”
“Oh,” I say, shifting in my seat. I don’t know how much time we have, and I’d like to get to the questions I’d prepared, or at least keep the focus on her. “Well . . . We met on the banks of the Potomac River,” I say, laughing at my half-witted attempt to make my story sound as colorful as hers.
“The banks of the river?” she says, her river sounding just slightly like rivah, the way Bradley says it. “That sounds . . . rustic. Not what I pictured for a metropolitan girl like you.”
“Ha!” I say. “You have a lot to learn about me.”
“Even better,” she says, rubbing her hands together like she’s warming them up.
“So a mutual friend—actually, as a matter of fact, the woman who assigned me this story—introduced us. She arranged for a group of us to take a kayak tour of the Potomac one night after work, for her birthday.”
“How outdoorsy,” she says, smirking.
“I suppose,” I say, remembering how Cole, whom I’d known for all of four minutes, had offered to help me clasp my life preserver, and how Noelle had rolled her eyes and laughed at him when I told him, quite pointedly, that I didn’t need any help. He redeemed himself when we started talking out on the water, and I discovered that he was actually quite sweet. He took me to dinner a week later. He was so old-fashioned—pulling out my chair, waiting for me to sit before he would—and I was smitten by his charm, sure, but also found it a little funny, because I’d never met anyone who acted that way before. Most of the guys I’d dated up to that point thought that being gentlemanly meant not spilling their beer on you. Cole was so earnest and mannered, in fact, that my girlfriends and I joked that he seemed like the kind of everyday hero Tom Hanks might someday play in a movie.
“So why did you marry him?” Susannah asks, as if reading my thoughts.
“Why did I . . . Oh.” I shrug. “Well . . . I guess it’s hard to articulate. I just knew he was the one. We were best friends . . . are best friends.”
“And how did he propose?” she says, nodding toward my left hand as I take a sip of my coffee. “I want to hear what you thought when you saw that ring! Did he tell you it was his grandmother’s right away?”
“Honestly,” I say, my mind casting back, “I don’t remember if he told me it was hers at that moment. Actually . . .” I laugh, trying to decide whether to be honest. “When he proposed, I’d just vomited on the sidewalk.”
“What?” she says, loud enough that out of the corner of my eye, I see William turn to check on us. “No!”
I nod. “We’d just eaten at a little Greek place in Old Town Alexandria and we were walking along the water. I don’t know if it was the smell of the Potomac or the souvlaki I’d just eaten that set me off.” Everything was making me throw up back then.
“Oh my!”
“He took it in stride,” I say. “In fact, he helped me clean myself up. With the sweater he was wearing, no less! And I figured, if he still wanted to marry me after that . . .”
“He sounds like he’s quite the gentleman.”
“Yes,” I say.
She gestures for my hand again, and I hold it out to her. As she examines it, studying it like an appraiser in a jewelry shop, I think back to a sweltering August night a couple of weeks before Cole proposed. Nervous doesn’t begin to explain how I felt. My legs were so jiggly that I thought I might sink into the linoleum floor outside Cole’s apartment. The hallway reeked from the Chinese place on the ground floor, and I could hear the ER theme song coming from somewhere in the building. He opened the door in a sweaty T-shirt and gym shorts. He’d just gone for a run. I hadn’t called ahead to tell him I was coming.
“I’m pregnant,” I said, the words barely out of my mouth before I started sobbing.
He didn’t say, “What?” or “How?” or anything like that. He put his shock and alarm aside, and instead, right in character, he smiled at me gently and held out his arms. “Come here,” he said, pulling me close. He brought me inside and sat me down on his saggy couch and got me a glass of water. That’s the real moment I fell in love with his Boy Scout goodness. That’s when I knew I would marry him.
Three months later, we did, in a small event space on Capitol Hill. The fear had faded, the excitement of what we were about to embark on taking over. I was barely showing (my belly was probably smaller than it is now, if I’m being honest), but all night Diane kept putting a glass of champagne in my hand, as if it might lead people off the trail. Everyone knew, of course. My dad kept telling everyone his joke about how he’d tried to convince me to put little shotguns on the invitations.
Susannah releases my hand. “I remember the first time I met your father-in-law,” she says suddenly.
“Oh?” I say.
“I was maybe five or six,” she says, smiling at the memory. “At the church? Just across the street from the inn.”
I nod.
“We were standing side by side, singing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ in a fidgety row in front of the altar. I was wearing a starched crinoline dress, my hair in waves because Margaret, my sister, had been tasked with pinning it up with rags the night before. Isn’t it funny what you remember?”
I nod.
“Anyhow, Bradley and I pretended to ignore each other all through elementary school. He was obsessed with whatever boys are obsessed with—baseball, fishing—and I was rattling around in that big silent house. But then! When I was fourteen, well . . . the world flew into high relief. Do you remember what that felt like, becoming a teenager? Children one day, and then . . .” She snaps her fingers. “It was like a bomb went off! Things were finally happening, you know?”
I nod my head again, but I’m thinking that I was never enthusiastic about the transition into my teen years, particularly once Tilly Robertson entered my life. The sandwich incident was the beginning of four long years of her treating me like a second-class citizen. I’d put my head down and prayed to get through it as quickly as possible.
“On the day that Bradley and I began,” she says, her voice more animated than it’s been all morning, which throws me off a little, “he was walking out of the inn. I had been at the library all afternoon with Henrietta, and I was carrying my shoes in my hand. They were new—patent-leather Mary Janes that my mother made me wear—and I had angry blisters all over my heels. He asked me if I was okay. I was crying.”
“Crying?”
“Who knows why, but he was a gentleman, too—your Cole, he learned from one of the best—and he offered to drive me home. He had his father’s car—some big boat, an Oldsmobile, something like that—and I remember waiting for him to come around the car and get in, smoothing my skirt over my knees and placing my shoes on top of my satchel in the space on the seat between us.”
“It sounds like it’s still very vivid for you,” I say, wondering if it’s the same at all for Bradley.
“Oh, yes!” she says. “How could I forget my first love? I asked him where he wanted to go as he started to pull away from the curb, and the question surprised him. He thought he was driving me home, of course, and said something about it being five o’clock. Wouldn’t my mother wonder why I wasn’t home for dinner?” She laughs. “I told him that my mother never wondered about me at all, for dinner or anything else.
“Well, he didn’t know what to say to that! His own mother slapped him on the top of the head with her kitchen towel if he wasn’t sitting at the table, his hands and fingernails scrubbed, ready to receive his plate when she set it down in front of him. I learned that soon enough. We were often late for his mother’s dinners.”
She laughs again, leaning across the table toward me like we’re two gossiping girlfriends. I don’t know what to think—it is awkward and, I’ll admit, a little fascinating to listen to her talk about my father-in-law like this.
“On that first day, though, I told him to take me to the swinging bridge. He looked across the seat at me, and I could tell he was wei
ghing his options. He flipped the car around and took that right onto Church Street. He’s never been able to tell me no. Never, never could.” She pauses now, looking at me with a steadiness that suggests that this is something she wants me to remember.
“So after that first day, Bradley and I were together every day, usually going to the bridge at first, wading in the creek, catching tadpoles and peeling those slick, loathsome leeches off each other’s calves. The first several times he took me there, we hardly talked at all. We just walked across the bridge, over and over, me first and then him, back and forth, back and forth. I could tell he liked being with me. I certainly liked being with him. He was all I thought about from the moment my eyes popped open in the morning until I put my head on my pillow at night.”
“Ugh.” I can’t help it, I shiver, and she laughs.
“Oh, don’t be so childish!” she says. “These are some of the best memories of my life! We were so in love. It was like something out of a fairy tale! It really was.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, amused by her doggedness about this. “It’s delightful to hear about, but it’s just hard to picture my father-in-law . . .”
“Oh, I know,” she says, putting her hand over mine. “I get it. Especially with a wife like Diane.” She widens her eyes. I keep a straight face, though there’s a part of me that wants to shake my head along with her. “Anyhow, I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” she says. “But it’s important for you to understand, Bess, if you’re going to write about me and my relationship to Greyhill, that I had a very strange upbringing.”
I nod. Now we’re getting somewhere. “How so?”
“Well . . . I was the mayor’s daughter, so people in town were always watching me. At least, that’s the feeling I had. I’m sure I was made more insecure by the way my mother treated me. My hair was so white, even lighter than this thing I do now with a bottle,” she says, pulling at the ends. “And my eyes were so dark. My grandmother in Richmond was always saying, ‘Those eyes are not from our side! Is that girl part Gypsy?’ What a bitch she was. No wonder my mother became who she did.”
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