A Lamentation of Swans

by Valerie Bronwen

  There were no swans there, of course, and I found myself blinking back unexpected tears.

  Get a hold of yourself or you’re not going to make it, I reminded myself. I got my emotions under control as the van pulled up in front of the big Victorian house.

  A swan would have been too much to hope for.

  I heard her voice saying, You know there’s a legend about the pond…that a swan will appear there whenever a Swann has found true love.

  The problem with legends was people believed in them sometimes.

  Our tour guide was one of those saccharinely happy women who thought orders given with a smile and a pleasant tone like that of a kindergarten teacher would disguise that she meant to be obeyed. I’d tuned out her incessant patter, which began as soon as everyone was safely inside the van and it had pulled away from the curb in front of the tourist information center in the historic village of Penobscot, Long Island. She wouldn’t be easy to get away from—I could tell she was one of those ruthlessly efficient women who’d do periodic head counts and had guaranteed Peggy that no tourist would ever be left behind when the van had left the premises. She had the local accent, though, and I was a little surprised her face didn’t look familiar to me. I might not have mixed much with the neighbors during my year at Sea Oats, but it surprised me she wasn’t one of the local women who’d occasionally come out to visit, with invitations to join clubs and other things I wasn’t interested in.

  Where did you come from, Karen? I wondered as the house came into view from my window and I caught my breath.

  Sea Oats was an enormous house, even for its time, when the summer cottages of the wealthy in Newport were larger than many modern hotels. The architect, Arthur Van Wyck, had done many houses up in the Hudson Valley and had also designed some of the Newport cottages. It was constructed entirely of wood, which meant many repairs over the years, due to storm damage and wood rot. It looked like it had been painted since my unceremonious departure, a fresh coat of dark green paint on the main structure and the trim done in bright yellow—green and yellow had been Arabella Swann’s favorite colors, and the house had been built for her by an older, doting husband who’d never been able to deny her anything she wanted.

  I’d always been slightly intimidated by the place. The first time I’d seen it, when I’d been invited out for a weekend to meet and get to know the rest of the family, I’d been taken aback. I’d known Charlotte Swann was a wealthy woman who lived on an estate on the Atlantic shore of Long Island, but seeing pictures of Sea Oats online didn’t prepare me at all for the reality.

  “All right, here we are!” Karen our tour guide announced brightly as the driver pulled up in front of the stairs up to the veranda and put the van into neutral. There was a hydraulic hiss as the doors opened. “Remember to stay with the group and that the upper floors are off-limits!”

  Dutifully we all climbed out of the van, like obedient children. She counted as we each passed her, going down the two steps and stepping out onto the pavement.

  I moved aside so those behind me could climb down and stared up at the house.

  It was just a house. Looking at it now, I couldn’t believe I’d been so intimidated by it.

  I’d been so young and stupid.

  Around the side of the house the pond lay, brooding.

  I hung back behind the rest of the twenty tour participants, an odd mixture of tourists from the Midwest and foreigners—I’d heard several of them speaking to each other in French—mostly couples, some small children, a couple of teenagers with their eyes glued to their phones. I wondered if I could manage to slip away when everyone else went inside. Karen the tour guide had the eyes of an eagle—she seemed like the kind of organized person who carefully made lists and crossed them off, probably covered her living room furniture in plastic. I shook my head. That wasn’t fair. I couldn’t blame her for being so attentive. The responsibility to avoid the potential liability of someone getting away from her group on the Swann estate was more than enough to put the fear of God in her, I’m sure—and so I allowed her to herd me up the front steps, across the wide, solid porch, and inside the stained-glass front door with its Swan Lake imagery.

  The enormous foyer was exactly as I remembered it. Nostalgia almost overwhelmed me as I again stood in the big round room with the heavily varnished mahogany floor, the enormous sparkling chandelier overhead, the mirrors and the door to the coatroom, the marvelous hanging staircase to the second floor. It was warm inside, but Karen made no offer to take our coats. Some of the others in the group did remove theirs, draping them over their arms, but not only did I keep mine on, I left the hood up. Karen did give me an odd look when she shepherded us into the big drawing room to the left of the foyer and I came face-to-face with the famous old painting of the old robber baron himself, over the fireplace.

  The painting was the only part of the room I’d ever been able to stand. When the house was built, the room was intended for men only, to withdraw to after dinner for brandy and cigars so they could talk about manly topics that were too much for their featherbrained women to wrap their little minds around. The room was a monument to nineteenth-century sexism and masculinity: the patriarchy displayed as a room. The dark-paneled walls were festooned with a variety of animal heads, their glassy eyes staring vacantly out, trophies of barbaric slaughter from a different time when such things were held in higher esteem. The long dead animals had always given me the creeps. I’d always wanted to redecorate the room, get rid of the grisly heads, and make it more warm and inviting than it was with its heavy, dark wooden furniture that just screamed virility and male privilege.

  You could almost smell the stale cigar smoke, hear the brandy being poured into snifters.

  That was just one of the many battles I’d lost during the year I’d lived here. I’d always thought of it as Samuel’s room, and it was dominated by his full-length portrait. He glared out from narrowed eyes with his lips curled in a bit of a sneer, the marquee of the original Swann’s Department Store on Amsterdam in Manhattan behind him, a pocket watch in his left hand. Samuel Swann had been a robber baron, made his immense fortune in gold mines and railroads, but his father had been a shopkeeper. Late in his life, Samuel opened Swann’s. The family legend held that he opened the store to honor the memory of his father, but Swann’s made his fortune even vaster than he could have ever dreamed, taking him up to the same level as the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, creating an empire that still exists today.

  Swann’s wasn’t what it once was, of course. But the chain of stores had survived the upheavals in the market and the changes in how consumers shopped, still going strong.

  But there was a twinkle in his eyes—you had to look to see it, but it was there. It softened the grim countenance, and I always liked to think Arabella, his second wife, was the reason it was there.

  The furnishings in the drawing room were, of course, priceless antiques. The pieces on the mantel below the painting were Egyptian antiquities. Samuel Swann had made his fortune during the time when wealthy Americans were looting the world of whatever treasure they could pay for and illicitly cart away. His second wife, young Arabella, also fancied herself a patroness of the arts. Samuel could deny Arabella nothing, or so the stories say, and so he allowed her to turn all three of his homes into museums. Most of the original collection was now in actual museums, of course, but there were plenty of gorgeous and valuable pieces still in the Sea Oats collection. I noted that some side tables and chairs weren’t the same ones I remembered being there. Peggy had probably moved the more fragile, valuable pieces upstairs and away from strangers’ eyes and the dangers posed by Starbucks coffee cups and Big Gulps and children’s sticky fingers.

  I managed to get away from the group sooner than I’d expected or hoped.

  I walked over to the double doors leading out to the veranda, and while Karen the cheerful tour guide was explaining about Samuel’s safaris in darkest Africa, I managed to unlatch the doors and esca
pe.

  I breathed out a sigh of relief and walked along the veranda around to the back steps. My heart was pounding and I felt almost like I was having an out-of-body experience. Being back at Sea Oats after so long…I ran my hand along the varnished railing. Nothing important had changed, from the smells of polish and varnish to the slightly dusty smell inside that no amount of work by cleaners could quite eradicate, to the undoubtedly priceless knickknacks exactly where they were the night I took my exit in a moment of what had been, to me at the time, the highest drama.

  Now, older and wiser and slightly more cynical, I knew it had been more like idiocy, French farce, melodrama straight from the script of The Young and the Restless. In a moment of youthful bravado and pride and fury, I’d thrown away my marriage, my life, everything that mattered most to me.

  Of course, I’d expected Char to come after me. I would have never left had I believed for a minute she would just let me go.

  Two years later, I was still waiting.

  But…it didn’t hurt anymore to think about it. I’d buried the pain deep, certainly, but I could be here without it hurting. I’d walked through the front door without collapsing, and the roof hadn’t caved in, either.

  The truth was I’d been too young to get married, not emotionally mature enough at twenty-three, no matter what I believed, to handle being a wife and a partner, particularly to a woman like Charlotte Swann.

  I walked down the stairs and along the paved path. Sea Oats was an enormous estate, acres and acres of land ending at the Atlantic Ocean at its own private beach. In those honeymoon days when I first came here, I’d taken walks along the beach in the morning after my coffee and sometimes at night before I went to bed, watching the lights on faraway boats out at sea and wondering where they were going. Before my immaturity began to undermine the foundation of our marriage, before my insecurities gained the upper hand in my mind.

  I’d been happy here once. I could have been happy here again.

  But now it was too late.

  I don’t know why I’d bothered to come, if I was being completely honest with myself. Peggy’s email had just been an excuse. Maybe it was just curiosity? A chance to see the place once more, to see if in the two years since I’d gone that the wounds had healed and scarred over, so I could look at the place dispassionately and not feel the hurt, the longing? I’d told myself many times that I was over Char, that my marriage was over, and I should just hire a lawyer and get it over with once and for all. But I’d never been able to bring myself to do it, had I? I’d gone so far as to look up divorce lawyers who were lesbian friendly several times, but never could quite bring myself to call any of them.

  And I could never get the thought out of the back of my mind that Char hadn’t initiated a divorce, either.

  And when I’d had too much wine and was curled up on the couch in my apartment with my cat, I couldn’t help but think the reason she hadn’t was because she, too, held out hope that maybe…just maybe…

  Hope springs eternal, doesn’t it?

  I walked past the entrance to the enormous hedge maze. I’d never liked the maze. The symmetry of it, its impenetrability, the things that made it so interesting and a tourist attraction were the very reasons I didn’t like it. I’d walked it once when I’d first come and had panicked. With the sun hidden by the eight-foot-high shrubbery and the endless turns and dead ends, it was easy to believe I might not ever find my way out again, my panic growing as I kept making wrong turns and coming to dead ends, terror that I was trapped inside forever growing until I’d finally started screaming. Old Angus, the head groundskeeper, had to come rescue me.

  The maze covered an entire acre of the grounds, and Angus was obsessed with it. The story was, of course, that good ole Samuel had taken Arabella on an extended honeymoon in Europe and the Middle East (so many of the Swann treasures came from that trip, when ole Sammy couldn’t deny his young bride anything), and she happened to be taken with a hedge maze on an English estate—which one being lost to the mists of time—so she had to have one at Sea Oats. And so he’d created one to make her laugh and smile and clap delightedly.

  I hated the thing even more after I’d been lost inside, and refused to ever venture back in. If it had been up to me, it would have been dug up by the roots and sod put down in its place so no one would ever know it had ever existed. I’d had horrible nightmares about the hedge maze, understandably, but I also knew it wasn’t going anywhere. It was too much of a showpiece, and Sea Oats was too well known because of it. I knew it wasn’t dangerous, and I knew it was just a hedge. But my hatred of it was irrational, and I always hurried past it.

  Just beyond was Poseidon’s Fountain, one of my favorite places on the grounds. I’d spent a lot of time there during my year at Sea Oats, perched on the edge as water burbled into the basin of the fountain covered in mosaic tiles in multiple shades of blue that supposedly mirrored the Aegean Sea. A large marble trident-clutching statue that had once graced a Grecian temple rose above the splashing waters. I’d often sat there, reading a book, my back turned to the hideous maze, the sound of the water soothing to me just as the waves at the beach were. I smiled as I walked past the just blooming flower beds of early spring and sat on the side of the fountain. Coins glinted in the sun along the blue-tiled bottom of the fountain—that was new, and I couldn’t imagine the tourists tossing coins into the water and making wishes pleased Char very much.

  Then again, nothing about opening the house to tours would please Char much, unless she’d changed and mellowed since I’d last seen her.

  “What a little coward you are, Ariel,” I said out loud as I pulled my hood back and allowed my blond hair to fall free. I’d pinned it up before leaving the inn, but since no one seemed to recognize me, letting it down didn’t seem quite so risky.

  It was almost like I’d never lived here.

  That was when I heard the voices, talking angrily.

  I panicked a bit. They couldn’t see me because I was hidden from them by the maze, but they’d come around the corner soon enough and there was no place for me to hide.

  “I don’t like it one bit, Peggy.” I’d know that voice anywhere, particularly when it was angry.

  “Are you sure someone went through your papers?” Peggy’s tone was cajoling, as always, trying to keep everyone calm and at peace the way she always did. “You keep your office in such a mess, how can you tell if something is missing or has just been moved?”

  I tried not to smile. Char’s office was always a bit of a sore spot for Peggy. It was in one of the outbuildings, what had originally been built as a dower house for Arabella’s mother. Char needed an office at Sea Oats, but thought having it in the main house wasn’t a good idea—she liked separating home and work. Char wouldn’t let anyone in the little house, not even to clean, and I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

  “I know where everything is.”

  My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. The sun went behind a cloud and I shivered—anticipation? Fear? Nerves? Some combination of all of them?

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Peggy insisted. “There’s no way you could possibly. And why would someone be going through your office? What could they possibly want?”

  “Information. You know someone is buying up our stock. And there are some other things going on that I’m concerned about. If you’d listen during board meetings, or read the minutes, you’d know these things.” Char’s voice was tense, tight.

  If something was going on with the company—something major—then this was the worst possible time for me to be here.

  I glanced around. There was nowhere to hide, and I didn’t have enough time to run to the other side of the maze and get away.

  No, I was a sitting duck out there in the open.

  I couldn’t decide whether I should stand and acknowledge I could hear them before they saw me, or to just sit there and wait for the doom coming.

  They came ar
ound the side of the maze. Char’s mouth was open. She was about to say something else when she saw me.

  She scowled and walked hurriedly across the lawn toward me, the much shorter Peggy running to keep up.

  I stayed seated and forced a smile on my face.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” were the first words my wife spoke to me in almost two years.

  Chapter Two

  She hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen her.

  There might be just a few more strands of gray in the short auburn hair, cut in a thick bob framing the strong face. There might have been more lines around the always unreadable bluish-gray eyes, and maybe a couple of extra pounds on the imposing, athletic figure. But she looked good. She was tall, nearly five-ten, and was wearing a gray silk pantsuit over black sensible flats. She’d been a competitive rower in college, and making time for the gym was still clearly important to her. She wasn’t pretty in a classic sense, but the strong chin and defiant cheekbones, combined with her unusual nose and wide mouth, were arresting, hard to look away from. She was a handsome woman who rarely bothered with makeup; she didn’t need it. When she smiled, it was like someone turned on a spotlight behind her face. She glowed when she was happy, and that was when she was most attractive.

  She wasn’t smiling now. I wasn’t sure if she’d already been scowling or if the scowl was for my benefit. In either case, she was not thrilled to see me.

  I hadn’t believed she’d spent the last two years pining for me, but her reaction was still kind of a letdown.

  So many times I’d wondered what this moment would be like that now that it was here, happening, it seemed kind of anticlimactic. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this, whatever this was. My heart was racing, and I felt like an idiot.

  I should have known. She’d made it clear she was finished with me the night I left. Wasn’t that why I left, no matter how much I tried to convince myself I’d been wrong and should have stayed, should have fought for my marriage?