Half of What You Hear

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  “Were the Greyhills a particularly religious family?” I ask Cindy, pointing toward the pendants.

  “In general? No, not any more or less than any other family around here. But Susannah’s mother? That’s another story. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. She was real pious. Always down at the Methodist church.”

  “Susannah herself, though?”

  Cindy looks at me and laughs. “I think the church would burst into flames if Susannah stepped foot in it.” She glances up the grand staircase, a puzzled expression on her face. “I don’t know where the hell she is. Come on.”

  She starts down the long hallway that leads from the foyer, and I attempt to get a peek at what I missed when I was here the last time. We pass by another formal sitting room full of faded furniture, and then an empty ballroom. I catch a glimpse of a massive, shimmering chandelier through the open sliver of a pocket door before I take a quick step to keep up with Cindy’s purposeful pace.

  “So are you here every day, Cindy?”

  “Yup,” she says. “Three days a week I clean, though it’s really not as much as you’d think.” (I didn’t think much, I want to say, given the state of the house.) “Susannah only uses three or four rooms. The rest of the time it’s just a little bit of cooking, helping her with her correspondence when she needs it, and driving her to her appointments, which I have a feeling I’ll be doing for a while.”

  “Why? Does she have a lot of them?”

  “No, it’s just that she’s a little skittish in the car now. I’m starting to wonder if she might have a phobia. PTSD, in a way. I have a nephew with that,” she says, turning back to me. “Was an army ranger, two tours in Iraq. Anyway, you should see the way she grips the armrest when I’m driving.”

  “How do you think she’s recuperating?” I ask. “I noticed the last time we met that she wasn’t wearing that bandage around her head. But she still needs the cane?”

  “Yes, her hip bothers her,” she says, continuing down the hall.

  “Is she seeing anyone for it? Physical therapy, or . . .”

  Cindy stops, pursing her lips for a moment before she speaks. “No, no doctors.” She takes a tiny step toward me. “Between us, I think there’s more damage here.” She taps her finger on the side of her head.

  “Her brain?” I say. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, no, not like . . . Don’t take me the wrong way. I don’t mean anything serious,” she says. “More that . . .” She bites her lip, trying to find the right words. “I think she’s fine, Bess, but I think . . . she needs some attention. She’s lonely.”

  “So you think she’s playing it up? Is that what you’re saying?”

  She holds up her hand and sticks out her thumb and index finger, leaving an inch of space between them. “Maybe just a little.”

  “I know she must feel lucky to have you, Cindy.”

  “Well, she’s enjoyed doing this with you, too. I think it’s helped. It’s hard being alone after you’ve lived with someone so long. Trust me, I know. I lost Gerald three years ago this December.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nods. “Mr. Lane loved my husband. He was . . . well, you could tell he was a harsh man. Especially the way he spoke to her. But he loved Gerald, he really did. I think he was one of those men who’s just uncomfortable talking to women, you know?”

  “I do,” I say, thinking of the president’s chief of staff, who fit that description to a T.

  “They came down to the Inn at Little Washington for dinner every couple of months—flew down to the private airport in Leesburg from New York and then drove fifty-some miles from there. And would you believe that sometimes, they turned around and went right back after dessert? Susannah called me just a few weeks after Teddy died and asked if I would come work for her full-time. I like her company, crazy as she is.” She laughs.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say. “Don’t you think it’s strange that not once, in all those times you say they came to Virginia to go to the inn, that Susannah never came to Greyhill to see her family?”

  She shrugs. “Not really. Susannah’s mother was pure evil, from what I’ve heard about her. You know a mama’s bad if her daughter spends most of her life just trying to forget about her. Anyway, it isn’t any of my business.” Or yours, either, her tone seems to say.

  She pushes open a swinging door at the end of the hall and leads me into the massive kitchen. It is industrial, the kind of room you might see in the back of a catering hall, and it occurs to me that when this house was built, its residents weren’t hanging out in the kitchen or cooking for themselves. The one bright spot in the gloomy room is a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that frames the extensive gardens and grounds behind the house. I notice the snowflake-shaped crack in one of the panes and think that it looks like it was caused by a baseball, or even (maybe? Is my imagination getting the best of me?) a bullet.

  Cindy marches to a pair of French doors on the far side of the room and pulls one open, the hinges creaking like a sound effect in a low-budget horror movie. Cindy starts down the steps and I follow, the wind still gusting around us, and as I turn the corner onto a stone patio past a boxwood hedge that I can tell was once trimmed into a sharp spiral, I see the top of a wide-brimmed hat and a hand doing its best to keep it on the owner’s head.

  “Dammit, Susannah!” says Cindy. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming out here? Didn’t you hear me calling you all over the house?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Cindy,” Susannah says and laughs. She’s sitting at a wrought-iron table with a tartan plaid blanket wrapped around her shoulders, with the gold journal that I noticed at our previous meetings. Her cane rests against her chair.

  “I needed some fresh air this morning, Bess, I hope you don’t mind,” she says. “It’s a little breezy, I know. Here, I’ll come inside.” She stands, and Cindy hurries down the steps to meet her. I take the opportunity to peek at the gardens, and it pains me to imagine how magnificent they could be. Rows of overgrown hedges mark gravel paths that are pocked with weeds and fan out for what feels like a football field’s length from the property. In the middle, I can just make out a marble fountain like the one in front of the house, this one stained with some type of algae or mineral deposit and encircled by a mass of weeds that must once have been flower beds.

  “Some garden, huh?” Susannah says, meeting me at the top of the steps. “You should have seen the one I had in East Hampton. I had a gardener, this gorgeous kid from Sweden.” She makes a motion like she’s fanning herself. “I loved to watch him work.”

  She looks out at the view and I wonder just how hard this is for her, to have had such a different life. She must be in a constant state of comparison. “See just beyond the fountain, to that row of hedges?”

  “Yes,” I say, looking beyond a leggy, ruffled mass of green.

  “That is where your father-in-law and I had our first kiss,” she says, chuckling. “We drank our first beer together back there. It was my first beer, anyway. I stole it out of the stash my father kept at the back of the icebox. I don’t drink beer anymore—never liked it, really—but whenever I’ve tried it, that salty, bitter taste has always reminded me of kissing Bradley. You should see the expression on your face when I mention him, by the way. You look like you want to sink right into the ground!”

  “Can you blame me?” I say, shivering, from the cold or the conversation or both.

  Susannah leads me to a room in the back of the house that she says was her father’s office, and my mood lifts at the prospect of getting to see more of Esperanza. “I know we need to get down to business,” she says, leaning her cane against a table and walking—fairly easily, it seems—across the room. “And I talked your ear off last time, so I’m ready to be a good sport and just answer your questions.”

  As we enter, I have to squint against the blinding brightness of the room. It’s more of a sunroom than an office, with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the fields
behind the house, and a worn Persian carpet that reminds me of the ones I see in design magazines, though this one doesn’t look “antiqued” in a trendy way. One of the corners actually looks like some kind of animal might have gotten to it. A side table to my left is crowded with a collection of dusty silver-framed photos, and over them there’s a painting I instantly recognize. It’s The Lovers, the Magritte painting that was mentioned in the Town & Country article I read recently, and it is every bit as tense and disarming as the author had described, especially in such a rarefied room. Inside the gold frame are a man and a woman, in an ordinary black suit and red dress, kissing through opaque white veils that cover not just their faces but their entire heads.

  “That used to hang in the Museum of Modern Art,” Susannah says. “But then Teddy made a big donation so we could borrow it.”

  “Oh?” I say.

  She laughs. “I don’t know how much he gave, but nobody’s asked for it back yet. I should try to sell it on the black market!” She begins to remove her wrap and the wool coat beneath it. “I just love the surrealists, don’t you? This one . . . it makes you feel something.”

  “Yes,” I say, remembering what Susannah said in the article. “I have to confess, I read an old Town & Country profile of you that mentioned it. The author quoted you saying the painting reminded you of somebody. Do you mind telling me who?”

  “Look at you, girl reporter!” she says. “I’m impressed! But it’s not important.”

  “All right,” I say, sneaking another look at the painting as I move behind her to help her out of her coat. Today’s ensemble is a winter white cashmere sweater and matching pants, with Ferragamo flats nearly identical to the ones I’d splurged on when I got my White House job. I’d never spent so much on a pair of shoes before—not even half as much—but I reasoned to myself that I should adhere to the old adage that you should dress as well as the people you work for, and my boss had been on the cover of Vogue four times, a record for a First Lady.

  “So how was your weekend?” she says, sitting on a saggy brocade sofa and motioning for me to join her.

  “Good,” I lie, thinking back over the past couple of days.

  “You sure?” Susannah asks, an amused expression on her face. “You don’t look like it was good.”

  “I’m probably just tired,” I say.

  “Oh, come on,” she says. “I can see it all over your face.”

  “Really,” I say, feeling myself start to flush. “It’s nothing.”

  She reaches over and pats my knee. “Bess . . .”

  I sigh. “It sounds silly when I say it out loud, but I’m just having a little trouble in town. Adjusting, I guess.”

  “Adjusting?”

  “Some of the women . . .” I wrinkle my nose.

  “Ooh!” She claps her hands together. “Now, this I can relate to! What happened?”

  “I really don’t—” Don’t lump me in with you, I want to say.

  “Come on!” she says. “It will make you feel better.”

  “All right,” I say, giving in. “I guess it’s a conflation of things. Just getting used to a new place, mostly, and I’m worried about how my kids—well, my daughter—is adjusting.”

  “You’re a wonderful mother,” she says. “I can tell by the way you speak about your kids.”

  “Thank you,” I say, warmed by her acknowledgment. “It definitely doesn’t feel that way lately.”

  “No, no! I can tell you’re one of the good ones. And Bradley has told me as much.”

  “The two of you are in touch?” I say, shocked to hear her say it.

  “Oh, some . . . ,” she says, smiling like she has a secret. “I call him every once in a while, just to say hello.” She leans toward me, lowering her voice. “I’ll confess, sometimes when I call the house and Diane answers? I hang up! Once, though . . .” She starts to laugh. “I pretended to be a telemarketer! I went on and on. To tell you the truth, I was surprised by how polite she was!”

  “Did you really?” I say, completely alarmed.

  She nods.

  But Diane and Bradley have a landline with caller ID, which I know because when I call them for something, not that it’s often, I’ve noticed that Diane likes to let my calls go to voice mail, even though I can look right out my front window and see that she’s home. I wonder why she’d answer Susannah’s calls and play along . . . “What do you . . .” I’m almost afraid to ask. “What do you and Bradley talk about?”

  “First of all, don’t worry. I’m not trying to break up anyone’s marriage. Believe me, the last thing I need or want is another husband!”

  “Okay,” I say, thinking that it’s funny how she assumes it would be that easy.

  “Even though we were out of touch for all those years, Bradley still knows me better than anyone around here,” she says. “I know how much people love him in town. I feel like . . . given my reputation . . . or lack of one . . .” I notice how her voice sounds suddenly tinged with irritation. “His word could go a long way in terms of helping how people see me around here.”

  “Well, I can relate to that,” I say, thinking of Cole’s reticence with Mindy and Eva the other night.

  “How so?” she asks, tucking her fist under her chin.

  I wave a hand at her. “You’ve heard enough about me.”

  “Oh, come on,” she says.

  “All right, all right,” I say. “Well, like I said, there are some women in town . . .”

  “That’s not a good start, you know,” she says, though with the way her mouth is hanging open in delight, as if I’m about to pop a treat into it, I can tell she’s very pleased by the turn our conversation is taking.

  “Well, it’s one woman,” I say, and then tell her what happened at the Herringbone the other night. Susannah’s right—by the time I get to the end, to when Eva started criticizing Livvie, I do feel better.

  “If this Ava is draping herself all over your husband—”

  “Eva.”

  “Whatever!” she laughs. “I know who you’re talking about, of course. She’s so tall!” She makes a face like the fact offends her. “Bess, you have to do something about it!” she says. “Take it from someone who knows.”

  I sigh. “I’m hoping if I just ignore her long enough, she’ll stop,” I say. “Or I’ll just get used to it.”

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “No, no, no! Trust me, if there is something I know about, it’s how to deal with other women.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Try being married to a billionaire! The women were everywhere, circling around Teddy like surgically enhanced sharks, looking for any ‘in’ they could find! They were in the obvious places—openly fawning over him at parties, coddling him at work—and the less obvious ones, too. I always had suspicions about his dermatologist, for instance, who seemed like she was always making house calls to his office. It was quite an education, learning how money could make people behave.”

  “Huh,” I say. “I guess I never thought about what that might be like.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t believe it! It amazed me how women—even my ostensible friends—would abandon any sense of propriety they had around him, all in an effort to get their hands in the proverbial cookie jar!”

  “Did you have any reason to worry?” I ask.

  “Of course I worried! I never let on, but I worried all the time. I kept my ears and eyes open, you can be sure of that, because the vultures were everywhere. But here’s what you should know: It actually gave me deep satisfaction to find them and winnow them out. As excruciating as it was, you can be sure I made them pay.”

  “Made them pay?” I ask, noticing the way she seems to be getting more and more animated as she talks. She’s hinted plenty about how her marriage wasn’t how the press portrayed it, but this vengefulness . . . surely she’s playing this up for my benefit . . .

  “Oh, yes. I should’ve written a book! Getting Back!: How to Root Out the Social Climbers Who Are Trying to
Steal Your Husband! Ha! Can you imagine? I could have been on Steve Harvey. That’s Cindy’s favorite, I watch it with her sometimes.”

  “It couldn’t have been that bad, though,” I say. “You don’t really mean it, do you?”

  “Oh, I really mean it!” She closes her eyes, a smile on her face like she’s recounting some delicious memory. “I’ll give you an example, but you have to promise not to hold this story against me.”

  “Of course not!” I say. What on earth could she possibly be about to say?

  “All right,” she says with a smile. “I trust you.

  “Teddy had a hairdresser come to his office to cut his hair on the second Monday of every month, and I discovered that she had slipped a note with her phone number into his pocket. I had long sensed that she was somebody I needed to watch out for. Teddy told me how she pressed her torso against his back while she cut his hair, about her low-cut shirts and how she’d lean over to give him a peek.”

  “At least he told you.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Please. He was just trying to keep me on my toes.”

  “Oh,” I say, thinking that I like Teddy less and less every time she speaks of him.

  “When I found that note—I won’t tell you what it said, but it was graphic—I could have just had her fired. It would have been a cinch. Teddy, for all his wonderful qualities, was quite vain, and all I would have had to do was tell him I didn’t like his latest haircut. But—this is what I’m trying to tell you, this is why you have to do something about that Eva: It’s one thing to send a message to your husband, but nothing will end if you don’t get to the source of the problem. It’s like pest control, Bess. If you want to get rid of her, you’ve got to go for the big guns. Use the off-label toxic stuff! Make the problem go away so you never have to deal with it again.”