“Tomorrow, then,” Priscilla said cheerfully. As she walked by she extended an index finger toward Gwen’s mouth, tracing her lips in the air. Gwen took a deep breath and held it until she heard the front door close.
“Jesus,” she said as she exhaled. “What fucking nerve.”
“It’s ridiculous,” she told Sheila at lunch. “I mean, me, a baby-sitter?”
“Oh, yeah, that would be a real step down from a waitress at Mike’s place.”
Gwen frowned. “I used to own an antiques store. I had my own business.”
“That was then.”
“Anyway, I think of this job as temporary, until I figure things out.”
“And taking care of the little princess is, what, permanent?”
“It would feel like a commitment, getting to know a child. Here I feel like I can walk out at any time.”
“Commitments aren’t necessarily bad, Gwen.”
“That’s what you think.” Before Sheila could argue she left to wait on two men who’d taken the booth closest to the door.
“My advice?” Sheila said when she returned to the counter to pour coffee. “Take the money and the benefits and fuck Mike Contaldi.”
Half the restaurant turned toward them.
“Sheila!” Gwen whispered.
“I meant that figuratively,” Sheila said to the couple nearest her at the counter.
“I don’t know how you survive in this town,” Gwen said.
“The bank would fall apart without me, everybody knows that. Archie McGillicuddy may be the branch manager, but without me he’d be stuffing pennies in those little brown coin tubes.”
“Ladies?” Mike Contaldi turned from the grill, greasy spatula in hand. “And I—”
“Use the term loosely,” Gwen said.
Mike made a face and waved the spatula to indicate a roomful of people.
“Take the job,” Sheila said when Mike had walked away. “Though I’ll really miss you at lunch.”
“But I don’t like being around kids, especially babies.”
“What about Jimmy?”
“Unless they’re mine.”
“Gwen? The customers?” She turned, saw Mike glaring at them, brandishing the greasy spatula.
“I’ll miss you, too, Sheil.” Gwen leaned over the counter and kissed Sheila firmly on the lips. Behind her, she heard the spatula hit the floor.
Chapter 4
Gwen drove up to Penaquoit’s gated entrance Monday morning battling a plague of second thoughts.
In one sense the decision had been easy enough. Four hundred a week plus a health plan was just too good to pass up. But Jimmy seemed uncomfortable with the idea of her taking care of another child. He hadn’t actually said anything, and that was what worried her. Jimmy normally had an opinion about everything.
“We need the money,” she’d said.
“I guess.”
“It’s just a job, you know.” And she wouldn’t be a servant, exactly. At least, she’d be no more a servant than she had been at the diner.
But those gates—black wrought-iron, with some sort of gold crest in the middle where the two halves met. And the long, tree-lined drive leading up to the unseen house where she’d be working. No, she wouldn’t be a servant. She’d be a fucking peon.
She rolled down her window and pushed a black button on an intercom panel to the side of the gates. Jimmy was overdue for an annual checkup, and the shots alone would cost her a half week’s diner pay. So she’d swallow a little pride and watch Tess Lawrence for a while until something better turned up.
“Yes?” came a metallic voice.
“It’s Gwen Amiel,” she said into the small intercom. “I’m here to—” She heard a click, then saw the gates begin to open.
Several minutes and what felt like a mile later she finally reached the house, a three-story brick affair the size of most suburban high schools. Lush green ivy climbed obediently up the front, twisting around dozens of black-shuttered windows. It was all a bit too well tended. She’d gone to many an auction and estate sale at plenty of mansions, but none of them was as immaculate as Penaquoit. Everything looked slightly too bright, too vivid, like a colorized movie. As she walked to the front door she ran a hand along the top of a perfectly clipped juniper shrub; the gardener must have used a level to get it so even. If Disney World opened an attraction called Old Money, it would look and feel just like Penaquoit.
She stepped between two white pillars flanking a massive wood door clearly intended to withstand siege. It opened just as she reached for an immense brass knocker. A heavyset woman with her hair in a bun looked her up and down. Maybe the T-shirt and blue jeans had been a poor choice.
“Welcome to Penaquoit, Miss Amiel,” she said. “I am Rosa Piacevic.” A streak of lightning, a couple of vampire bats, and the scene would be complete.
“Nice to meet you,” Gwen said, not quite knowing what struck her as so off about this woman.
“I will take you to the child.”
She followed Rosa Piacevic across the marble floor of the foyer and through a succession of opulently furnished rooms and hallways. Gwen tried to take it all in as she walked: the sweeping staircase, the glittering chandelier, the murky landscapes and stern-faced portraits, the acres of Kirmans and Bukharas and Aubussons, the profusion of antique furniture—predominantly English and all genuine, she guessed. Most insistent of all was the sound of a piano, louder as they reached the end of a long hall and turned right into another even longer corridor.
“Should I leave a trail of rice?” Gwen said.
Rosa Piacevic stopped and turned. “Excuse me?”
“You know, in case I get lost.” She offered a collegial smile.
“You will not get lost.”
An open doorway revealed the source of the music. Nick Lawrence was hunched over the biggest grand piano she’d ever seen, intent on a very romantic-sounding piece of music. She paused to listen and watch.
“Follow, please,” Rosa Piacevic said without stopping. Gwen saluted her backside and continued walking. She and her husband were Albanian, Priscilla Lawrence had said. Very hard workers.
They stopped at a playpen in a light-filled room at the very back of the house. Two long, plump-cushioned sofas, a large coffee table bearing neat piles of magazines, and a scattering of toys suggested a room actually used by human beings.
As they crossed the room, the playpen’s occupant stood up and began rattling the bars. Who would keep a child cooped up in three square feet of padded cage in a house this size?
“Here is Tess,” Rosa Piacevic said.
Gwen glanced at the baby, then quickly back at Rosa Piacevic. No wonder her face was so unsettling. She had no eyebrows. The skin over her dark, deep-set eyes was perfectly smooth.
“I give her breakfast an hour ago,” Rosa said. “Lunch will be at noon. Keep her away from Mr. Lawrence when he practices.” She looked down at the child, her features softening for a moment. “Good-bye, zamer,” she said, and headed for the door. Before leaving she clucked wearily and picked up several brown leaves that had fallen from a large potted ficus.
Tess rattled the cage even more insistently.
“Why don’t I spring you from this joint?” Gwen said as she scooped up Tess, who touched one of Gwen’s silver earrings and giggled. At least she had no problem with strangers—or was it rather that she knew only strangers? At Tess’s age, Jimmy had consecrated her every departure with full-throated howling.
“Moosie?” Tess pointed to the doorway, brows furrowed. Indeed, the music had stopped.
“You’re a clever one, Tess Lawrence,” she said. Tess squealed and flailed her bootied feet. Gwen had forgotten how solid babies felt, their unexpected and thoroughly satisfying density. She gave Tess’s thigh an exploratory squeeze, rubbed her back.
Enough! Any minute now she’d be cooing like a besotted grandmother. Falling for someone else’s kid had been right at the top of her list of misgivings about taking th
e job.
Tess was cute, though, with those huge brown eyes and golden-brown curls and that one shallow dimple on her right cheek.
“I see you’ve made friends.”
She turned to find Nick Lawrence watching them from the doorway, looking cool and fit in a white polo shirt and loosely fitting khakis. She tried to think of something smart to say as he crossed the room, something that would let him know from the start that she was no Mary Poppins. But her wit deserted her.
“We’d already met, remember? At the park, last weekend.”
“I’m glad you accepted Priscilla’s offer. My instincts in this area are always correct.” He smiled and reached for Tess, who eagerly toddled over to him. Without the piano music the house seemed unnaturally still; she felt the burden of its enormous size, its encompassing presence. A leaf from a sagging palm in a big terra-cotta pot fluttered slowly to the floor, as if the air had thickened.
“I was just starting my morning practice,” he said. “But I thought I’d welcome you to Penaquoit.” He arched his eyebrows as he pronounced the name of the house. She detected a flirtatious edge to his voice and immediately resolved not to encourage him in any way. She wasn’t about to repeat romantic history—which, in her case, meant falling for guys who weren’t available: men terrified of intimacy, men wedded to a career or to the bottle, men secretly attracted to men. Married men.
“It sounded great,” she said. “The music, I mean.” He just looked at her a moment, as if she’d said something perplexing. “I heard you playing when we passed by…”
“Anything but great,” he said in a deeper voice. “Some mornings I seem to bang up against my own limitations. Has that ever happened to you?”
She hoped the question was rhetorical, since she had no intention of answering it.
“It’s a kind of claustrophobia,” he said, placing his palms over both ears, as if pressing his head in a vise. “Like being trapped inside a room that’s too small for you. You want to break out, you need to break out, but you can’t. You know your talent is too big for the room you’ve been placed in, but you also know, on mornings like this, that you’ll never get out of the room.”
This decidedly odd revelation was delivered with the sunniest of smiles and no self-consciousness whatsoever. Yet it seemed more arrogant than intimate, as if he simply assumed she’d be fascinated by his inner self.
“Did Rosa give you the grand tour?” he said.
It took her a moment to shift gears. “Not exactly.”
He nodded as if she’d said yes. “This was my father-in-law’s house originally. He left a year ago so Priscilla and I could move in. He took the house next door—well, next door around here means about half a mile away. That house had been his father’s. They keep leapfrogging back and forth, the Cunninghams. I expect we’ll move next door when Tess brings home a husband.”
He looked down at his daughter wistfully.
“You probably don’t need to start packing just yet,” Gwen said.
He glanced at her, as if startled.
“Yes, of course. It’s just the…well, the inevitability of things, you know?”
Nothing in her life had been inevitable, least of all working as a nanny in Xanadu for the daughter of the most attractive man she’d laid eyes on in years. But she nodded anyway.
“Is Mrs. Lawrence home?” she said.
He looked around, squinting, as if Priscilla might be lurking behind a sofa or potted tree. No, as if the very question of his wife’s whereabouts had struck him as irrelevant.
A shrug. “Somewhere.”
“I’m sure we’ll run into each other.”
He reached down for Tess, then handed her over.
“Well, practice calls. Good-bye, beautiful.” He leaned forward, lips puckered.
Gwen held her breath. He meant his daughter, stupid. Still, she waited until he’d kissed Tess on the cheek and left the room before exhaling.
She spent another hour in the sunroom with Tess, dimly aware of the faint piano music that accompanied their play. Around ten-thirty Tess stretched her arms, fists above her head, and yawned.
“Time for a nap?” Gwen picked her up and felt the child’s head flop onto her shoulder. “Let’s go find your room, then.”
She retraced their steps as best she could. Nick Lawrence didn’t look up when they passed the music room. She watched for a few moments, Tess almost asleep in her arms. He arched over the keyboard, his face just a few inches above his hands. Chopin, she guessed, though her knowledge of classical music was rudimentary. Beethoven, perhaps.
“Pay moosie?”
Tess’s sleepy voice was almost swallowed by the music. Nick’s fists crashed on the keyboard, and when he turned his eyes shimmered with rage.
“Pay moosie?”
He turned back to the keyboard, breathing hard, then faced them again, his eyes duller, forgiving.
“I’m sorry,” Gwen said.
He shook his head. “Music it is.” He angled his right hand to the keyboard and began to tap out a melody. “There was a farmer, had a dog, and Bingo was his name, oh. B.I.N.G.O., B.I.N.G.O.”
“Nap time,” Gwen said when he was done, and left the room. In the front hallway she hesitated at the bottom of the staircase, aware again of the uncanny stillness of the house without music, as if the mansion were holding its breath inside its thick, ivied walls. Only the piano seemed to bring Penaquoit out of its coma.
She climbed the stairs and carried Tess down a long hallway that traversed the second floor. Most of the doors she passed were closed. The open ones revealed a succession of bedrooms, each furnished with antiques, each carefully made up bed topped with a profusion of pillows. Finally she reached a room with a crib and, blessedly, not a piece of mahogany in sight.
She gently lowered Tess into the crib and looked around. Matching floral curtains and wallpaper, two antique pine corner cupboards overflowing with stuffed animals, a rich needlepoint carpet, two floor-to-ceiling shelf units filled with books. Tess slept in someone’s fantasy of a little girl’s room, she thought, a fantasy brought to reality—if not life—by the unstinting application of money. The stuffed animals, she saw on closer inspection, were all Stieff. Every single one looked new, untouched.
Jimmy had just one toy animal, his beloved panda, the only thing she’d brought with them from the city. She’d left the rest for Barry—which was all he’d ever have of Jimmy, toys and stuffed animals and the clothes he’d outgrown. They were untraceable, she and Jimmy. Vanished.
“I see you’ve found the nursery.”
She spun around. Priscilla Lawrence stepped into the room and smiled. She had on a floor-length cotton bathrobe cinched around the waist. She looked startled, but it could be only that her hair was so tightly pulled back.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d been given the official tour,” she said.
Gwen put a finger to her lips. Priscilla covered her mouth with one hand and followed Gwen out into the hallway.
“Is everything going all right?” Priscilla asked.
“Everything’s fine.”
“Excellent.” She offered a tight smile and headed toward the stairway at the other end of the long hallway. “Now that Tess is sleeping,” she said over her shoulder, “you’ve got at least an hour to yourself.”
Gwen followed a few steps behind. Was she supposed to be grateful for the time off? If so, was she supposed to express that gratitude?
At the top of the stairs Priscilla stopped abruptly and cocked her head. From the second-floor landing the piano sounded muted and vaguely melancholy, but then the music had traveled a long distance to reach them.
Priscilla was beautiful, Gwen decided, if unfashionably robust; pampered, aristocratic, and extraordinarily self-possessed, with the sexy purr of money in her voice. Rich girls, if they had any brains at all, got that way somehow, no matter what genetic hand they were dealt. Gwen had met a lot of rich girls in the antiques business.
“That dam
n Beethoven sonata again,” Priscilla said. “Honest to God, I hear it in my sleep.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Priscilla sighed. “Not the five thousandth time it’s not. It’s the Lebewohl Sonata, means farewell or something. I think it’s his anthem.”
Again Gwen felt unsure of her role; should she pursue this rather intriguing line of conversation or stick to banalities?
Banalities were always safer. “I suppose you need to practice to get it right.”
“For what?” Scorn drained Priscilla’s face of its healthy glow. “It’s not as if he’s preparing for a concert. Let alone a recording.”
“I think I’ll take a walk outside,” Gwen said.
Priscilla shrugged. “I have to get ready,” she said. Gwen watched her pad to the end of the hallway, where she opened a door to a dimly lit room, entered, and closed it behind her.
Ready for what? Gwen wondered, feeling a bit shaken. First Nick’s odd confession concerning his self-doubts, then Priscilla’s venomous attack on his talent. If that’s what the help got to hear on the first day…
Finally she headed back to the nursery to get the baby monitor she remembered seeing on the changing table. Priscilla had said Tess would sleep for an hour, but she didn’t seem particularly involved in her daughter’s day-to-day routine. She’d take the monitor along in case Tess woke up while she was outside.
The grounds were spectacular. Flawless green lawns extended in every direction, ending in rows of tall, elegant hemlock trees shaped like giant exclamation points and topped by views of distant hills. She found a pool and pool house, a tennis court, an elaborate swing set, various small sheds, and a cottage. Everything was painstakingly clipped, shaped, painted. She walked to the end of the back lawn and turned toward the house, which looked suitably secure in its fabricated landscape. From the front, at the end of that long drive, Penaquoit was certainly imposing. But literally imposing, as if it had been inflicted on the terrain. From the back it seemed more in sync with its surroundings, still grand but no more out of place than the massive oaks that provided intermittent shade on the vast, verdant lawns.
Disillusions Page 3
