The Hundred-Year House

PART II. 1955

After all, Grace had grown up with stories about attics. A Little Princess, and Jane Eyre, and a hundred campfire ghost stories. The one, for instance, about the bride trapped in the trunk on her wedding night. And that spring on the honeymoon she’d picked up Anne Frank’s diary at the English bookshop in Paris. When George disappeared on the third day, she sat in La Rotonde with her open book, a glass of Chablis and a bowl of mussels. She’d brought the book as a shield, hoping she could pass for a young art student, a girl who dined alone once a week when she tired of the French boys in her sculpture class. She still looked twenty, it was true. The waiter called her Mademoiselle.

Her water refilled as if from an underground spring. The sun turned to twilight and then streetlamps, the crowd thickened around her, but the waiter never brought the addition, just more bread and then, with a wink, more wine. By then the book had plunged her into a world so vivid that the Paris around her seemed the fiction. She was Anne Frank, and this Paris street was a dream after death. She returned to the hotel around midnight to finish the book in bed. When George banged on the door twenty minutes later, his key lost forever, it was too easy to pretend he was a Nazi ripping the bookcase from the Annex door. She lay in bed and tried not to breathe. He shouted and kicked and tried to force the handle. Only when he went silent, presumably starting down the hall to wake the night manager, did she jump up and turn the knob.

“I was asleep,” she said.

He steadied himself, his eyes swimming so fast that she knew he saw three of her. He smelled sweet and complicated — like whiskey and cigars and fifty women — and she unbuttoned his shirt. He knocked the door closed with his elbow.

She lay back across the bed. She’d bought a pale green nightgown that afternoon on the Rue de Rivoli. She pressed her white foot to his thigh. She said, “And I was alone all day thinking about you. You’ll have to make it up to me.”

—

So was it such a surprise back here, in this vast and disconsolate brick trap, when the smell of Paris had faded from her palate, when George’s disappearances left her not ensconced in a café of strangers but humiliated in front of the staff, that she’d claim the attic for her haven? She figured she loved it for the reason we always love attics, for the reason they figure in our dreams: because they are the hidden rooms where we store our pasts. Where we stick the things we can’t bear to throw away but hope we never have to see again.

And more practically — it had cooled with the fall air, and here she could sit, invisible, and see everything. The people below were tiny and featureless, dolls around a dollhouse: Max the driver, who claimed he’d been at Laurelfield twenty-five years, more than half his life. Mrs. Carmichael the housekeeper. Beatrice and Ludo in the garden. Rosamund, the cook. The mailman, coming and going. The dairy man, coming and going. Peculiar little Amy, Max’s niece, who showed up one day in July startled as a deer and just stayed and stayed. George, taking off in the Capri with Max or in the Darrin without him, or just lurking the grounds, leering at Beatrice as she bent over the squash bed, leering at Amy as she carried linens from the big house to the coach house.

Grace imagined bringing darts up here, perfecting her aim, and launching them at the unsuspecting dolls. One in Max’s tire. One in Amy’s round posterior. One right in the muscle of George’s beautiful arm. One in the koi pond, one in the milk truck. Pop.

What she brought up instead was food, just a bit, and stored it on the windowsill. A loaf of sliced bread, a pot of strawberry jam, five long and knobby carrots. She liked to calculate how long it would last her, if she decided to go missing. One week, she decided. And then down she would climb, skinny as a wraith.

—

On the tenth of October two strange things happened, and so she knew there would be a third.

The first was that a witch walked into the coach house. Not a real witch, this being the modern day and the rational world. Still, in October, to dress in flowing black like that, hunched at the waist against the wind, the woman was rather asking to be burned at the stake. She’d arrived by taxi from lord knew where, Salem perhaps, and darted into the coach house as if she belonged. Grace’s first thought was that the witch was Amy’s mother, Max’s sister, come to claim her renegade daughter at last, but when Amy walked out toward the garden ten minutes later, untroubled and unhurried, she knew it couldn’t be. Grace pulled her bird-watchers off the filing cabinet and trained them on the coach house’s second story, above the two open garage doors. She could see them through the windows of the balcony door. The witch sat at the kitchen table, her hair in a low, gray chignon. Max sat across — there was his dark hair — his hands going up and down from the table to his mouth, eating or smoking or drinking. But that was all she could tell.

The scene brought to mind the only card she remembered from her tarot reading with George in the Marais. The others had all looked like playing cards, silly queens and princes, but then the old woman had flipped up the five of pentacles, and Grace had felt she’d seen the picture before, or maybe lived it: two beggars in the cold, outside the warm church. Locked out. She couldn’t remember the woman’s explanation for the card, but she knew she’d felt it in her bones. And she felt the same thing right now, watching Max. She was only a visitor at Laurelfield.

She remembered George’s tarot better, only because it had seemed to trouble the old woman. As if it had revealed his problematic soul. She’d muttered her way through most of it, while Grace did her best to translate. George had wanted to know about the tower card, which looked terrifying: a turret struck by lightning, two naked figures jumping from the windows. The woman said, “C’est pas si grave. C’est la change, seulement, la change soudaine.” And then, as if this were just as important, the woman had explained that in the old Belgian decks, the tower had been a tree. “What’s she saying?” George demanded. And Grace said, “It means don’t go outside when it’s raining.”

Now she chose one of the tart green apples from her sill, one of the five she’d picked that morning from the trees behind the Longhouse (three adjoined artists’ studios, inhabited now by raccoons), and ate slowly around the core. All the windows were open, no screens. She’d pulled those out so birds could fly through, though her only guests had been some skittish barn swallows who hadn’t even made nests under the gable eaves as she’d hoped. She started to throw the core onto the driveway, but changed her mind and crossed the broad, loud floor to the back of the house. There were George and little Amy, near the yellowing catalpa tree. There was something odd in the way they stood — the very fact of their standing together, to begin with, but moreover the way he curved above her like a cobra — so that it wasn’t even a surprise when George grabbed one of Amy’s wrists and pinned it above her head, against the bark of the tree. Grace grabbed her birdwatchers. She held the last bite of apple in her mouth like Snow White, not chewing or spitting or choking, just watching as George undid the top buttons of Amy’s dress and yanked it down below her left breast, and her brassiere with it, so that Grace could see the pink nipple even from here. Amy’s leg rose as if she were trying to kick him away but didn’t know to aim for the groin. George lowered his head to Amy’s breast and, since he was in profile to her, Grace could see even his tongue, circling the breast and then climbing slowly up Amy’s neck. Amy pushed him away and tugged her dress back up, but she didn’t run or scream, and that was what counted, wasn’t it?

Well.

Well.

Grace, good literature major that she was, told herself this apple was a symbol of lost innocence, and that now, with the sweet pulp in her mouth still undissolved, would be the perfect time to feel shock and repulsion. And was it a failure on her part that she felt neither? Not shock, because she wasn’t an idiot. And not true repulsion, either, not in the way she ought. This was the man she’d chosen. This was the reason she’d broken things off with Gunning Burke and Stanley Langhoff and Lionel: because they weren’t the kinds of men to do anything surprising or awful or awakening. They smothered her with their patience, and she’d felt locked in a windowless, velvety room with the smell of peppermint and nowhere to vomit.

Well.

This was not the second strange thing. Because really it was not so strange.

The figures below had parted, Amy trotting across the lawn to the kitchen door. Grace supposed she was heading in there just to burn the soup. Ever since she’d shown up the food was markedly worse, and Grace suspected Rosamund was trying to teach her things, letting her chop and make salad dressings. Poor, stupid Amy, probably in love with George and not able to understand that a year from now he wouldn’t recall her name.

Grace was the only kind of woman George could ever have married, just as George was the man she’d waited twenty-eight years for, through parties and debutante balls and engagements and what everyone saw as spinsterhood. And then at the Governor’s Ball in ’53, up had walked George Grant, a pimentoed olive in his teeth, eyes like the Big Bad Wolf. He bit down so the olive split, half in his mouth, half tumbling to his palm. He walked a step closer and, right in front of Grace’s father, jammed the olive half between her lips. “It’s good for you,” he’d said, and walked on to scoop his arm around the slim waist of the mayor’s daughter.

Her mother, scurrying up: “Who was that?”

And Grace, quite drunk and melodramatic already that evening, had swallowed the olive and turned away.

—

A pleasant paralysis set over Grace as the afternoon wore on, and she watched the coach house as Max and the witch continued to talk. Amy reappeared at one point, walked to the big house, returned to the coach house with a pillow and blankets — and yes, there she appeared in the east rooms, opening the window and preparing a bed for the witch. Grace ought to have cared that yet another guest was being welcomed on her property without her consent. Her mother never would have allowed it, would have been horrified at Grace just sitting here, watching Max build a harem in that little house. Some harem: a witch and his niece. Only she wasn’t really his niece. Grace knew.

After a long while, Max and the witch strolled together out of the coach house, behind the big house, and straight into the garden shed. They emerged twenty minutes later, and so did Ludo and Beatrice, the gardeners. Max and the witch walked them to their car and kissed their cheeks before the gardeners drove off, done for the day. The witch took Max’s arm, quite formally, and they disappeared back into the coach house.

The sun was setting, and she ought to head down for dinner before they sent a search party.

Amy reappeared. She was a figurine from a cuckoo clock, circling forever in and out: coach house, big house, coach house, big house. But this time, as she crossed the lawn toward the kitchen door, the earth seemed to move behind her. No, it was rabbits. Grace counted at least seven of them, hopping along behind Amy as if out of Hamelin. She didn’t seem aware in the slightest. And what irony! Seven cottontails, and not a bit of good luck for Amy — sad little, odd little, hungry-eyed Amy, who thought she was desired because George pinned her to a tree. The kind of girl to whom misfortune clung like moss. Grace stood and brushed the attic dust from her lap.

So it was two strange things now, two omens. If she only kept watching, tomorrow and the next day and the next, the third thing would come. And the third was always biggest.

—

She felt the house waking around her in the morning before she herself was fully awake. Windows opening, Ludo’s rhythmic clippers outside, feet in the hall, wheels on the gravel drive. It was the same everywhere she’d ever lived: at home at Bealey Hall, with so many more servants than here, and her brothers shouting, and later her brothers’ children shouting; in the college dormitory, where some girls were always up and running baths at the crack of dawn; in hotels, where someone had been up all night at the desk, where the maids arrived at four in the morning. She wondered what it was like to awaken alone in a little cottage on a quiet street, where nothing would stir until she did. Maybe a sleeping cat at the foot of the bed, and that would be all. But here at Laurelfield, there was something more in the mornings, a buzzing sensation about the whole house, as if it weren’t the servants keeping it running but some other energy. As if the house had roots and leaves and was busy photosynthesizing and sending sap up and down, and the people running through were as insignificant as burrowing beetles.

She sat at the breakfast table with a book. George wasn’t there yet. He’d begun sleeping in the small bedroom with the four-poster on nights when he returned home closer to dawn than sunset. He was either up there asleep or he wasn’t, but wondering wouldn’t accomplish much. She asked for eggs and toast, no meat, and opened her book to the middle. A romance. A college friend had sent six of them as a joke wedding gift — the whole Ancient Passions set, tied with pink ribbon, a calligraphed note: For when that flame flickers! — and Grace had ripped through two just since Paris. This one was set in an English manor house in the reign of Henry VIII. The poor servant girl and the second son were madly in love with little hope of marriage. She’d have imagined it finished badly for all, were this not the type of book that guaranteed a happy ending. How funny it would have been, what a great trick on the poor lonelyheart readers, if one of these stories ended terribly. Abandonment, shame, an accidental baby with six fingers on each hand. The heroine taking to the streets.

George arrived, unshaven. His hair a mat of black curls, his eyebrows mirrored by the dark circles beneath. He was even more beautiful like this than neatly groomed. She closed the book, but didn’t bother hiding it under her napkin. He snorted at the cover and asked where the cook was. Grace forked some eggs onto her saucer and slid it across the table to him, and she poured half her coffee into his cup.

She said, “Do you know anything about Max’s new guest, in the coach house?” She’d been going to ask him last night at dinner, but he’d taken a phone call and she ended up eating alone. “A woman.”

He scratched behind his ears. “It’s your house, Duck. Tell me what you want. You want me to bark at him?”

She considered. “No. I can handle it, certainly. I just wondered if he’d cleared it with you.”

George laughed and tried to catch the cook’s attention through the open kitchen door. “I think the fellow’s smart enough to know I’m not the one to clear it.”

“Well. In any case, there’s a guest. A distinguished sort of witch, all dressed in black. Just so long as you don’t go mangling her bosom.”

George lifted a thick eyebrow, but the look on his face was all amusement. No denial, and certainly no apology. If he’d already been drunk for the day, he might have thrown his coffee cup at her face. As it was, he seemed on the verge of saying something slick and snide, but just then Rosamund, strapping, gray-eyed Rosamund, strode through the door with the coffee and a heaping plate of eggs.

Grace said, “I’ll manage it all.” Though she had no idea how to speak to Max, no desire to put her authority to the test.

George paused his bite in front of his mouth and said, “Your dear departed grandmother is staring me down. Can’t we move her?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the portrait. “She’s beautiful, I think.”

“She makes my skin crawl.”

“We can change seats.”

“I’d rather have a ghost look me in the eye than look down the back of my neck.”

“We can’t take it down. Father would be mortified.”

“You think he’s going to see? You think he’s going to visit us? Grace. They’re never going to visit. Don’t you understand that yet?”

—

Back in the attic, she considered how to spend her day. Her favorite corner, the northwest one, was a most comfortable nest. She had covered an old, splitting Morris chair with a green blanket, and pushed it over to the file cabinets that formed a little cove by the dormer. She’d found a half-finished painting on a piece of rolled linen, and she’d carefully unrolled it and cleaned it of dust, and tacked it to the wall below the window. It was maybe meant to be an oak leaf, in intense close-up. She put a board across the arms of the Morris chair, and this became her desk for drawing and writing letters. It was exactly like an artist’s garret in Paris in the nineties, she decided, somewhere on Île Saint-Louis, and when Amy crunched by on the path Grace pretended it was a fishmonger.

Today she would plan her greenhouse. Ludo was thrilled at the idea, and he’d promised to learn orchids. She sketched it out on the back of an empty folder from the cabinets — not the architecture of it, which was already determined, but the placement of the plants — and she used a second folder as a ruler. She penciled in the neat little shelves and pots. Here, along the eastern windows, tomatoes and lettuces. How heavenly, in January, to eat a soft, ripe tomato. There should be spinach, as well. She thought of a hot vegetable pie. African violets along the inner wall by the house, unless there wasn’t shade enough. Phalaenopsis along the west, framing the view of the back lawn: white, purple, pink. Yellow lady’s slipper, the small ones. Ferns all over the middle, a jungle of ferns, and a little copper mister. Ferns hanging from the ceiling, as well, and other things that would lilt down with soft tendrils and green threads of hair.

In another life, she’d have been a botanist, or a painter of plants. In college she took a whole course on the plant kingdom. The professor, an ancient British woman, had cut an apple in half the wrong way — down its equator — and turned the halves out to face the girls, to show them the stars that had been hiding there, the carpels, the seeds cut through and leaking arsenic. Stars! In the apples she’d been eating for twenty years! Suddenly, that year, every tree had a name. When boys sent her flowers, she’d sit at her dormitory desk dissecting each one, pulling daisies apart into disc flowers and ray flowers, splitting the bases of lilies with her thumbnail to find the rows of neat, white ovules.

And what was she to do with all that information now? The French literature, too, and the appreciation for Dutch art, and the ability to write a theme on Chaucer. What were those skills but silent companions in the attic, ways to keep her mind from digesting itself over the next fifty years? She imagined her classmates amusing their husbands with their intelligence. When she’d tried talking to George in Paris about the architecture of the bridges on the Seine, he’d accused her of humiliating him.

Her boredom wasn’t his fault. What had she done with herself from college to the age of twenty-eight? Precisely nothing. She’d traveled to Italy with her mother (educational, but none of the Italian stuck), she’d answered telephones in her father’s office, she’d been engaged, or pretended to be, to two boys, which took a great deal of time and energy but little creativity. She’d been sick for an entire winter with pneumonia. She’d organized blood drives for the Canadian Red Cross. Never, in that time, had she impressed anyone with her knowledge of Chaucer.

Here came Amy, crossing the drive, arms empty for once. She walked with her nose down, as if someone had forbidden her from seeing anything beautiful in the world. Grace was not ready yet to confront Max, but she could talk to Amy. She could get her bearings.

By the time Grace got downstairs, Amy had disappeared. She looked for her in the kitchen (no Amy, but Rosamund had a question about what vegetables Mr. Grant would accept in his stew) and down by the linen closets. She finally looked out the dining room windows and spotted her standing under the catalpa tree, the same one where George had manhandled her. But she was facing the tree, staring at its bark, and George was nowhere around. So Grace walked outside despite the cold, and came up slowly beside her.

“It’s a northern catalpa,” she said, and Amy jumped and gave a rough little shriek.

“Mrs. Grant,” she said. “I’m sorry. I thought — maybe you were an animal or something.”

“Well, I suppose I am. And that’s a northern catalpa. It can’t be as impressive to you, coming from the south. But up here, it’s got the largest leaves of any tree, by quite a lot. It isn’t always so ugly.” In early summer, it had been sublime in its inflorescence: white flowers hanging like bridal trains, foot-long seed pods, leaves as big as dinner plates. But now the leaves were sickly yellow, the pods brown and distressingly phallic.

“No, it’s very pretty,” Amy said. “It is.”

“Don’t lie.”

“Oh.”

Amy looked as if she might cry. Grace was tempted to push her further, to see if she would, but instead she said, “Come sit with me a minute.” She led her to the bench by the koi pond. She’d have to ask Max soon what was to be done with the fish once the weather fully turned. She didn’t know if they’d be brought indoors, or if they continued to live here, sealed beneath a sheet of ice. They sat, and Amy immediately buried the toes of her saddle shoes in the leaves. She was a child, Grace reminded herself. Max said she was eighteen, and she looked it, but there was something much younger about her, something stuck at seven. Grace said, “Your uncle has a visitor.”

There was just the shortest flicker of confusion before Amy said “Yes.” Of course. Because Max, Grace had figured out weeks ago, was not Amy’s uncle. Max had been flawless in his story, introducing Amy back in July with a proud hand on her shoulder, including just the right number of details: “the daughter of my sister Ellen,” and “took the train all the way from Florida by herself,” and “planned to stay with friends but it’s all fallen through.” Grace had bought it completely. Why wouldn’t she? She’d said Amy could stay as long as she needed. And in August, when he’d come to her again and said that Amy would really love to work, that she could use the experience, Grace had thought of what her own mother would do, the manners and generosity she’d seen modeled for years before she learned, in history class, to call it noblesse oblige. The housekeeper, Mrs. Carmichael, was ancient and nearsighted and gouty, and Grace had been sure she wouldn’t mind the help. Amy could fill in wherever needed, Grace had said, and Amy had broken her own outpouring of gratitude only to say that she didn’t have a green thumb at all, that she could clean and help in the kitchen, but the gardeners would be better off without her.

Then certain details started to needle Grace. There was something so raw and low about Amy, a harshness to her vowels that was separate from her southern accent. Her teeth were crooked, she didn’t know what a sideboard was, she bit her nails. In asking Mrs. Carmichael how to reshelve the records in the library, she pronounced “Mozart” with a soft Z. Whereas Max was a true Brahmin. Grace had no idea of his background, besides his long attachment to the colony, but the man spoke fluent French and subscribed to Harper’s. It didn’t fit that his sister would be Amy’s mother. And so Grace had devised a test. She found Max in the garage one day in September, and said, “I’m thinking already about Christmas. I know, here we are roasting to death — but it’s my first Christmas as a married woman. How did you celebrate, Max? When you were growing up? I need inspiration.” And he’d told her about sticking cloves into oranges, about opening gifts by candlelight on the Eve, church service at nine in the morning, duck for dinner, carols and eggnog after. And then, the next day, Grace had come into the kitchen and asked the same thing of both Amy and the cook. Amy had swallowed hard and said, “Well, we always had bowls of nuts on the coffee table. That was a real treat.” Grace pressed further and heard about turkey the night before, leftovers for Christmas dinner itself, a mad rush for gifts at dawn.

Grace was certain, then: There was no way a woman who’d grown up in the house Max had described would invent Amy’s Christmas for her own children. It answered her question, but it raised many more: Who in heaven was this Amy Hall, and why did Max want her here, and what did she want from Laurelfield? There was something about her weakness that made Grace want to hurt her, to test how long she could hold herself together. Perhaps it was the same instinct that had led George to pin Amy to the tree. She and George were so similar, after all.

Grace said, “Who is she?”

Amy seemed relieved that the question was this easy. “Miss Silverman. From New York City.”

“Silverman. And she — Miss Silverman is a friend? Of your uncle’s?”

“I think so.”

“Jewish. A name like that.”

“Oh. I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”

“Had you met her before?”

“No, not before.”

“She seems quite odd. Don’t you think?” She leaned toward Amy and whispered, twelve-year-olds in the schoolyard. “She dresses like a witch.”

Amy let out a short giggle.

“Is she still here today?”

“She went down to the Art Institute,” Amy said. “On the train. I worried about her, going all alone, but I guess if she’s from New York City she can find her way around.”

“Certainly. And is she—attached to your uncle? In a romantic sense?” Even though the witch seemed older than Max. She was gray, and he was not.

“Oh, no! I mean, she hasn’t seen him in years. That’s what I gathered.”

“Amy,” she said, “one thing I admire about you is your power of observation. No one could have learned this place faster than you. I’m still learning it myself.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“I’m just trying to find out what I can, because I don’t want to make your uncle uncomfortable. The truth is that he never asked to invite a guest.”

“Oh, but he didn’t know she was coming!”

“Are you sure?”

“You’ve never seen anyone so surprised. He — well, I don’t know. He was upset that she’d come. It’s really not his fault, I think.”

Grace decided to be quiet until Amy said something else. This was one of her father’s negotiation tactics, and she rarely had reason to use it. Perhaps she was still improving her mind after all. She stared at Amy, and Amy kicked the leaves and looked generally terrified. It only took a few seconds.

“I’ll tell you what she said, though. It was after he got over his shock, and they’d sat down at the table, but I was still on the stairs. She said, ‘I had to see for myself. You have no idea what I went through to get away.’ And then they were quiet a long time, and I thought they were either laughing or crying.”

Grace was impressed, despite herself, with the old-fashioned Yankee accent Amy had put on for Miss Silverman’s voice. She was a good mimic. Why, then, did she so doggedly keep her wretched twang when she was capable of speaking properly? Grace would like to write out the ways Amy might elevate herself.

“I imagine she was referring to the colony,” Grace said. “To the colony closing. Do you suppose it’s an artist rushing here to see the damage?”

“She said — she said no one in New York knew where she was. I left that out. She said she’d told them all she was visiting her brother in Wisconsin.”

“And where does she sleep?”

“Oh, not — not with — he asked if I wouldn’t mind sleeping down on the couch in the mechanical room. And I don’t. So she’s got my quarters, and I don’t mind at all.”

“You’re very helpful, Amy. You truly are.” She hated the sound of Amy’s name in her mouth. Such horrible vowels, such an egregious mangling of the French Aimée—loved, but who loved little Amy? Not her. Not George. Probably not Max.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Part of what bothered her about this girl was how much the two of them resembled each other. Both blonde, both with long eyebrows, strong chins. Though Amy was at least twelve years younger. And prettier, even discounting age. Grace, at eighteen, had not been as pretty as Amy at eighteen. It was only fair. Amy had been luckier in looks, and Grace had been far, far luckier in breeding. If she were Amy, though, she might find it odd that this woman, this sad and tired Mrs. Grace Grant, should be elevated so far above her, in defiance of the hierarchy biology itself had bestowed. In the court of femininity, looks trump all. The gorgeous lady-in-waiting can always smirk pityingly at the plain-faced princess. And this was what enraged Grace. She’d finally pinpointed it. That Amy pitied her. Their similarities invited comparison, and Amy must be measuring herself against Grace all the time. And pitying, and gloating, and letting George claw her by the tree.

Grace stood. She didn’t want to talk to Amy anymore, even if she had more information.

Amy stood too. “Ma’am, if I might ask something.”

“Certainly.”

“Your eye.” And she reddened as soon as she’d said it. She might have no manners, no sense of propriety, but she must have seen that Grace wanted to slap her.

Grace restrained herself, though, and touched her own cheekbone with two fingers. She was about to say that she’d slipped in the bathroom. But she felt like wounding Amy, and so she told the truth. She said, “George hit me with a large salt shaker. Thank you for your assistance, Amy.”

—

She needed her coat before she walked all the way to see Max. Her mother had sent her an alpaca coat, and this was the first day it was cold enough to wear it. She walked back in through the kitchen, and was nearly to the hall closet when George (a whole herd of Georges) thundered down the front stairs and saw her and said, “You’re coming with me. We’re playing golf.”

“Now?”

“We’ve been here five months. I want to get in one round before Christmas.”

He could have gone without her, but the membership at the Chippeway Club was in her father’s name, and she knew George was secretly terrified of being turned away at the door. Grace was his human shield. She’d been making excuses for weeks.

“I’m wearing slacks. I’m not sure of the dress code—”

“Well, change.”

“I’ll freeze.”

He didn’t answer, though. He was headed for the basement to scare up the golf bags.

In the end she kept her slacks on, half hoping it would get them kicked out, though she could already imagine George screaming that she’d embarrassed him. She put on a cardigan and the alpaca coat, and she wore cat-eye sunglasses that didn’t quite cover the bruising. By the time she came down, George was already in the back of the Capri, which Max had pulled up to the front door for loading the golf bags.

“Why don’t we take the Darrin?” she said to both of them. “Max shouldn’t have to come. He has a guest, after all.”

Max looked startled, as if he’d hoped this fact had escaped her notice. He rested her bag on the lip of the trunk.

“I’m happy to drive,” he said.

“What are we paying this guy for, if he never drives us anywhere? Come on, hop in.”

Grace wanted to protest that this wasn’t done, that people didn’t need drivers to transport them one mile across town, that it wasn’t 1920, but George would think she was lecturing him on cultured behavior. And perhaps it was safer to have Max along.

She leaned her head on the window as they rode. So many pretty houses. The maple trees were still red.

George was worrying his trouser knee. Someone had once told her that if a man sees the line of a woman’s suntan — the strip of white peeking out beneath the strap of her bathing suit or the collar of her dress — he’ll fall in love with her. Because he will believe he’s seen her truest self, raw and pale, something no other man knows. And this was the reason she’d fallen in love with George: She could see the desperate nerves beneath the bluster. He came from nothing, and nobody, and nowhere. His parents were middle class, but they died when he was three, and he was shuttled between orphanages and aunts, and everyone robbed him till he was grown and lethally charming with no money at all. He’d survived childhood only by ingratiating himself to women, and as an adult it remained his leading skill. He showed up in Windsor at the age of twenty, and his only lie was an aristocratic British accent. Everything he said was technically true: orphan, penniless, et cetera. Once people heard that bit, they never pressed him on his background. He met a rich girl and seduced her and followed her to Toronto, where she introduced him to everyone and he dropped the accent. He went to a different party every night, spiraling up the social world, and he ended with everyone considering him a sort of relative, a crazy cousin to be endured. He’d pay a girl a lot of attention, get her father to give him a job, get her brother to loan him a bed, and then before they knew it he was on to another place. None of the girls loved him, though, so he didn’t break many hearts. To his credit, he was always careful to pick out the adventuresses. He told Grace all these things, tearful and drunk, a few nights after they met. She should have been horrified by his crying, but instead it did her in, and she put his head in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair.

A Negro in uniform nodded them through the gates of the Chippeway Club, and another opened Grace’s door at the front entrance.

She spoke before George could, before he could even get out of the car. “We’re guests of a member,” she said. “But he isn’t with us. Could you direct us, please?”

He led them to the golf office while Max gave the bags to a caddy. She watched him out the office window, standing there by the car, waiting to see if they’d be turned away, and she wanted to tell him to leave, to stop caring about them and go back home to his witch. The man in the office gave them a tee time and welcomed them cordially. He asked if they’d like a drink on the back porch. Grace nodded, figuring at least on a porch it wouldn’t be ridiculous to keep her sunglasses on. They followed the man. Max would have to figure out on his own that they were settled, that he was dismissed.

Everyone on the glassed-in porch was ancient, hunched over bowls of soup and snifters of brandy. On the weekends it must be different, businessmen and their bouncy wives. In summer, it would be full of children. She knew there were women her age in town — she’d seen them at the pharmacy and the hairdresser, even if she did turn down the invitation from the Newcomers’ Society — but they all had children, and nothing in common with her. She’d counted on neighbors, but the house to the south was vacant and the older couple to the north spent all their time in Virginia. Grace had no idea how to insinuate herself into a new town, and no pressing desire to. She was unaccustomed. Toronto society had simply flowed through her parlor, and her friends and beaux had appeared as naturally as wildflowers. George knew how to do it, but now that he had the house and the wife and no need for a job, he had no motivation to meet and charm anyone but the regulars at the Highwood bars, the men with loose and shady business ventures who could use an investor like George. Besides which, he wasn’t interested now in social climbing so much as in having a good time. One Sunday, in an aborted effort to be sociable, Grace had gone to the Presbyterian Church, but she only wound up sitting alone in the back and trying to delineate the families, putting mental dividers in the pews. Four blond children, bookended by blond parents. Two teenage girls with pageboy cuts, and their graying mother. Grace hadn’t been back. The last thing she wanted was someone who knew her name, who looked for her every Sunday, and then worried when she showed up with a purple jaw.

She looked out across the eighteenth hole to where three teepees stood in a row. It was simultaneously 1955 and 1800 out there.

George ordered them both gin and tonics, and the waiter already knew his name: “Yes, sir, Mr. Grant.”

At the next table, an old man sliced into a cylinder of pinkish aspic.

She whispered to George: “We’ve checked into the geriatric ward.”

“Your father picked a hell of a club.”

“Oh, he hardly came. It was only a way to keep friendly with the locals when the colony was open. The artists were always making such a ruckus. He’d golf with the mayor, that sort of thing. I think his parents were members, way back.”

George laughed too loudly. “That’s why Madame Violet offed herself. Too boring at the old country club.”

Their drinks arrived, with small wedges of lime.

After the waiter had gone, Grace said, “We can’t very well charge these to my father.”

“Are you going to take those ridiculous glasses off?”

“It depends if you’d like people to call the police.”

“What you need is to be better with makeup. Makeup would cover that, if you did it right.”

“Miss Georgia, the cosmetician.”

George reached a finger across the table toward Grace’s stemmed glass of ice water. He touched it as if he were about to say something about it, something important, but then he kept pushing, and the whole glass tipped slowly toward Grace, until gravity sped it up and the ice cubes and water tumbled into her lap.

She made a noise but managed to keep her lips closed. She stood and shook the ice to the floor, and the aspic-slicing man handed her a napkin and his wife rushed around the table to see if she could help. George stayed calmly in his seat, and Grace refused to look at him.

She said, to the older couple, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she said it to the waiter, who had run over with a broom and dustpan to collect the ice: “I’m so sorry.” She ran through the dining room and toward what she thought was the front door, but it was an empty banquet hall. She ran back around a corner and another corner, and yanked off her sunglasses to see better, and finally she found the door. She had no plan except to walk home, or maybe into town — but there, just a bit farther around the drive than where he’d dropped them, was Max, leaning against the Capri. He dropped his cigarette and squashed it with his toe. He opened the back door as if he’d expected her at precisely this moment.

“Mr. Grant won’t be joining us till later,” she said. Max put on his driving gloves and handed back a handkerchief.

He said, “I’ll return for him. I assume he’ll play the full eighteen?”

She couldn’t very well question him about the witch now, even though she had him alone. That could wait till she was breathing evenly, till she wasn’t riding in a vehicle he controlled.

When her father had made all the arrangements, he’d said Max would look after her. At first she worried he was meant to report back to Toronto about George’s behavior, but Max was far too tight-lipped for that, besides which he and her father didn’t seem fond of each other in the slightest. “I can’t fire the fellow,” is what her father had said, as if he wanted nothing more in the world. “He’s been there longer than the trees.” But Max seemed to be following some deeper imperative than just driving and overseeing the grounds. He acted, at times such as these, like Grace’s appointed protector. Perhaps he was fond of her. But that made little sense, seeing as she and George had usurped the estate. This wasn’t really the way it happened, but it was the narrative she knew the colony people had told one another: Old Gamby Devohr is shutting us down so he can hide his daughter and her drunken husband while her brother runs for Parliament. When really it was just a convenient confluence. The colony’s death knells had been sounding for years, and yes, they wanted George far from Ontario, and they wanted Grace to live with her mistake, here in the suburban wilderness, till she recognized the error of her ways and came crying back, divorced and wiser. And her idiot brother had as much chance of winning that seat as he had of winning the Nobel Prize in physics.

Her mother’s parting words: “You’ll see, when you can’t run him around Toronto shocking everybody. You’ll see what he’s like to live with. And you’ll see how it is when no one cares that you’re Grace Devohr.”

That last bit was true: At both the beauty parlor and the florist, she’d slipped and given her maiden name, and there wasn’t the slightest recognition. Of course, that same hairdresser, when she learned Grace was Canadian, asked, “Do you have a president up there now, or do you still believe in the queen?” This town was a vacuum. Well, she’d live with it. She’d have to live with it. And perhaps invisibility could be her great adventure.

—

Max dropped her at the front door, and she took the mail off the hall table and climbed immediately to the attic. A letter, in her mother’s elegant hand: Father was a little better, but still coping with the gout, and short of breath with the autumn air. Wallace was growing discouraged in his infant run for Parliament, and it seemed the public saw him as a lazy gadabout (true, Grace thought), but he had a year and a half to change their minds. Uncle Linus had run off again, and no one was doing much about it. The maids dusted Grace’s bedroom every day, and she’d be welcomed home on a moment’s notice. Deer had eaten all the mums.

The rest of the mail was bills and a catalogue. It was odd that she never got mail intended for the colony, from far-flung artists who hadn’t heard of its demise. But she supposed Mrs. Carmichael must sift that out. She ought to ask.

And now, again, she was facing a blank day. She couldn’t plan the greenhouse much further without Ludo. Her brother Morton, or rather his personal secretary, had sent a Paint-by-Number kit for her birthday in July, and it seemed the most tedious and pointless exercise in the world — but then today was a tedious and pointless day. She laid out all the packaged supplies. Pots and pots of little oil paints, five brushes, turpentine, a cup. Three poster boards: Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She picked Pisa: Imminent gravitational tragedy suited her mood. There were several old easels with the colony furniture, crammed along with the beds and desks and bureaus into the two front wings, and she hauled one back to her northwest corner and set the little poster board up. The unpainted picture was fascinating, an unfathomable mess of pale blue lines, shapes that weren’t shapes, full abutment, no spaces between.

She opened a pot of alluring gray-blue, and painted, with the smallest brush, a wedge of sky, until the number 8 was covered and the edges looked crisp. It was tremendously satisfying. The oak leaf painting was still tacked under the window, and Grace resisted the urge to reach down and daub some paint in the corners, to finish the job. It was perfect as it was, though, even if clearly incomplete: the frilled, fleshy edges of the leaf blade, pinkish brown, as if it were blushing, as if the artist had discovered, deep in the forest, a fallen leaf that was more vibrant after death. It ought to make her sad, to paint something segmented and prescribed so close to this delicate blurring, this confident restraint, but really she felt lovely just to be painting near it.

She worked for quite a long time, then set the brushes to soak in the turpentine. The afternoon was getting on, and she hadn’t eaten lunch, but she wasn’t ready to go down yet. She stretched, then leafed a bit through the colony files. She loved the names, and the old penmanship, and she loved the woman who, to compensate for a broken typewriter hammer, had written in all her Ds with purple ink. There was even a novel manuscript in there that she’d once tried to read, until she found it was unrewardingly dense. Today she pulled out the chunk behind that, N through P. Earl Napp would not attend for the summer of 1939 after all. Alma Nellis wondered if she had left her valise. Samantha Mays, the director, wrote back: No, she hadn’t, and they’d even checked at the train station for her, and they dearly hoped there was nothing of value inside.

A name she recognized, though she couldn’t place it: Viktor Osin, a “maître de ballet,” had stayed five times in the twenties and thirties. A recommendation glowed about his “kinetic vivacity.” Then it clicked in place like a jigsaw piece. That spring, right after they’d moved in, that strange article in the Tribune. A choreographer who’d gone missing and turned up in Grant Park, a common wino. One of his own male dancers had found him, had recognized him through the grime and the beard. The dancer had washed him off and sobered him up. There’d been a photo of him, Mr. Viktor Osin, on the front of the Arts section, attending a performance of his own work, a version of The Winter’s Tale he’d choreographed some twenty-five years earlier. But something was off about it all, and this is why Grace remembered, why she’d even read the accompanying article in the first place. Despite his suit, his shaved chin, his combed white hair, there was still something deeply wrong with the man and his hollow eyes — as if they’d reanimated his corpse just for the occasion. She remembered how she’d felt at her wedding. Everyone so falsely happy for her, congratulating her for — what? — for showing up, for existing. She wanted to climb into the newspaper, to tell Viktor Osin that she understood him, that she forgave him. And here in the letter: “kinetic vivacity”? She wondered what had gone wrong, what broke him.

A creak traveled across the attic floor, and shook her awake. She didn’t know how long she’d been staring at that file, and she became disgusted that she’d spent her afternoon painting in someone else’s version of the sky and dwelling on the minutiae of twenty years ago, when she might deal with Max. George was out of the way, and even the witch was off at the museum.

She rested the files on one of the cabinets, and got her coat from the hook at the top of the stairs. But here was Max, after all, coming to find her, knocking at the door below. Or at least someone was, and she assumed it was Max, not Mrs. Carmichael, from the quick confidence of the raps. She trotted down, but when she opened the door the whole hall was empty. She looked in the flowered bedroom on the right, and in the guest suite to the left, but there was no one. Ridiculous child, to get goose bumps on her arms. It was the acorns, of course. They’d been falling all week, pelting the windows and roof.

Without thinking she started back up, as if that had been her mission all along, and it wasn’t till she got to the top that she remembered Max. But meanwhile the files had all spilled down from the top of the cabinet, onto the Morris chair and floor. She sorted what she could: the letters, some slides, a postcard from poor, luggageless Alma Nellis. Sticking halfway out from the top of a folder that read Parfitt, Edwin, was a photograph. She pulled it out. A revolting photograph, the kind she knew existed, the kind she’d glimpsed in boxes of postcards at the bouquinistes by the Seine, but it was never men, and never so anatomical. She dangled it upside down between her thumb and finger. There was nothing else in the Edwin Parfitt file, and nothing else that seemed to belong there. She turned the photo right side up so she could properly read the expressions on the two men’s faces. The one on the left was grinning like the devil. The one on the right: Oh, oh, oh. The man on the right was her father.

—

Down in the library, she poured herself a glass of George’s scotch. She preferred to taste something harsh and stinging just then. She didn’t know what to do with herself, besides crawl out of her own skin.

She moved the little jade monkey from a bookshelf to the top of the bar, as if it were contemplating what to drink next. It was one of the few items she remembered from her childhood visits to Laurelfield, and she’d been delighted to find it still in the library. What she remembered was a plump, friendly woman pressing it into her hand, saying, “We haven’t many toys here, but this might do.”

She drank one more glass of scotch and waited till she could feel it in her cheekbones, and then she marched off to the coach house, the photograph in her coat pocket.

—

She found Max in the garage, washing the windshield of the Darrin. It was a ridiculous car, two seats only, pale yellow with a puckered grille in front, sliding doors and a sliding roof that always got stuck halfway open. And George had been one of the only saps in the world to buy the thing.

“Max,” she said. “I want to inquire about your guest.”

He stopped and folded the rag. “I do apologize. That’s Miss Silverman. An old friend of the colony.” But he wasn’t apologizing at all, really, and his brazenness brought her up short. For such a tiny, quiet man, he was awfully sure of himself. “Are you feeling all right, Mrs. Grant? Perhaps you’ll take a seat.” He indicated the passenger side of the Darrin, but she knew she’d have to remain standing if she wanted to show any authority at all.

“So she’s an artist.”

“Just a friend of the colony.”

“Then she must hate me.”

He smiled far too kindly. “None of us bears you ill will, Mrs. Grant. You needed a place to live.”

“Do you know the irony?” she said. “I’m the only one of my family who ever loved this place. I came here several times as a child. I remember the dog. Miss Mays, the director, had a wonderful sort of walrusy dog.”

“Alfie.”

“Yes! It was Alfie!”

“He’s buried back in the woods.”

“Oh, he’s — Oh, now I’m sad and I don’t even know why. You’ll have to show me, sometime, where he is. You must have been here then yourself, but I don’t remember.”

“I was lower on the totem pole, at the time. Lawn care and such.” He gestured, again, to the seat, and she wondered if she’d really gone that pale, or if maybe she’d smeared blue paint on her face without realizing. She gave in this time, and slid the little door, and sat. Max came around so he wasn’t looking at her through the glass.

“And do you know, I always thought that when I was grown I’d come stay here. That I’d be an artist, and I’d show up with an assumed name, and no one would know. Sometimes I think it was a horrible mistake to tell my father so. What if he closed it all down just to spite me? And then sent me here to babysit the corpse. But I had to live somewhere. And I knew if I didn’t come take it, he’d put it up for sale.”

“There were offers,” Max said.

“Max, do you suppose there’s something wrong with him? With my father? I think I’ve just realized that I don’t know him at all.”

He said, “I can’t speak ill of my employer.”

“But how well do you know him? How long have you known him?”

“We were never great friends.”

She put her head down on the dashboard. “Do you know what I want? I want to start all over again with a different name. I want amnesia, I think. I’d like to wake up in some city like San Francisco with no idea who I am.”

He was quiet a moment and then quickly, as if he’d been working up the courage to ask it: “Have you heard of the poet Edwin Parfitt?”

Her blood reversed direction in her limbs. Yes, she’d heard of him not twenty minutes ago, and he was now committing an act of sodomy in her coat pocket. “Just recently,” she said.

Max made a little cluck. “I’m surprised. He’s horribly out-of-date. I have something for you. Please don’t leave.” And he scurried around the corner and up the stairs to the living quarters.

She worked out what she’d ask him when he came down, and the way she might hand the picture to him. But he was gone quite a long time, and when he finally returned the witch was behind him. When had she returned? Grace was upset with herself for missing it.

She climbed out of the car and struggled for balance.

Max said, “Allow me a belated introduction. My dear friend Zilla Silverman.”

She extended a hand. “Miss Silverman,” she said. “I do hope you enjoyed the museum.”

And she immediately took it all back about this woman looking like a witch. Her eyes were kind and pale blue, a liquid blue, and there was something noble about her, the way she held her shoulders, the way she clasped Grace’s hand. She said, “I’m absolutely taken with this little car behind you. It looks made of butter, doesn’t it?”

Grace stepped aside so Miss Silverman could view it better. “It’s pretty from the side, but from the front it has a pushed-in pig face. My husband paid far too much. It’s made of fiberglass. Doesn’t that sound like it would shatter from just a pebble?”

“What’s it called? No, don’t tell me. The Elegant Swine. The Zippy Creampuff!”

“The Gilded Lily,” Grace said, and she was thrilled when Miss Silverman laughed. She found that she very much wanted this woman to like her.

“It does have the funniest face on the front. The Pucker-Up-and-Kiss-Me-Quick. What is it called?”

“The Kaiser-Darrin.”

“Oh, it’s German!”

“No, no, George would never.” She knew what she was implying, what she’d often implied back in Toronto — that George had served — when really he’d spent the war years scooping up young widows like candy from a piñata. But she found that the implication excused his behavior somewhat. And if this Zilla Silverman planned on staying for any length of time, she was sure, sooner or later, to see George at his worst. It was true though that he’d never buy a German car.

And then, because she wanted to change the subject, and because the scotch was getting to her, she said, “You have the loveliest teeth. Like pearls. It shows you were well raised. I’ve always said, if you want to know someone’s lot in life, look at his teeth.” In fact there was a small space between Miss Silverman’s incisors, one of which was chipped, but the effect was all the more charming.

“Well, that’s a new idea. Fortune-telling by the teeth. Dentomancy!”

“Orthomancy,” Max offered.

“Yes! I was just thinking it about poor Amy, the other day, looking at her teeth. They’re horrid, and you can tell she just hasn’t had a fair chance in life. I do wish she could get them fixed.” She’d forgotten about the ruse that Amy was Max’s niece — it was clumsy of her — but she could see now by the look on Max’s face that there was something far worse wrong than that. He was looking past her shoulder, back toward the door of the mechanical room. Grace just barely avoided turning to see if Amy was standing right there in the doorway. It was where Amy had said she was sleeping, and it was surely where she was right now. Well, now there was another reason for Amy to despise her, to glare. Grace was only glad she hadn’t brought up the photograph, with Amy hiding the whole time and listening like a little rabbit. “Well,” she said. “Hadn’t you better fetch George soon from the club?”

Max handed her a small, red book. Edwin Parfitt: His Selected Verse. He said, “I’ve marked the right poem with a paper.”

She turned back, halfway to the door. “I meant to ask about the fish,” she said. “What are we to do with them in winter? Do they just freeze solid?”

“I bring them in,” Max said. His voice stayed as quiet as ever, though she was all the way across the garage. “They’ll outlive us both.” She was nearly out the door when he said, “Do you know what they like better than anything?”

“No.”

“A root beer float.”

“I don’t understand.” She thought over the words. It was like a riddle, but it made no sense.

“You don’t?” He looked almost sad.

“Oh, don’t worry, dear,” Miss Silverman said. “I’ve never understood him myself!”

Grace stuck both the book and photo in the attic so George wouldn’t come across them. Miss Silverman walked the grounds when Max took off to retrieve George, and Ludo raked leaves. Nothing else of note happened the rest of the day.

—

She was quite taken with the poem, which was about Proteus, and she was pleased that her recall of mythology and meter and rhyme were finally being tested. She appreciated certain lines, the “thickening, quickening night,” and “Daphne’s branches, sleeved in moss.” She also understood the inversion Parfitt had accomplished: In his telling, everyone wanted to pin Proteus down to make him remember the past, not to tell the future. Though what he was so loath to remember she couldn’t quite glean. Something about a lightning crash, and the bit about “paying to Charon his tongue-lidded coin,” which she took to mean a death.

Most fascinating, though, was the short introduction written in 1950 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Edwin Parfitt was not so much a giant of the poetic world,” it read, “as one of its forest elves, whose song lures us deeper into the wood — though we may neither recognize the tune nor ever find the piper.” It went on to claim that his classicism of theme and form had been horribly misread by the critics. At the end came an astonishing paragraph:

It has been five years now since Eddie Parfitt, after an insurmountable personal loss, took his own life at Lake Glinow, Wisconsin. In accordance with his wishes, he was not buried but wrapped in white cloth and burned, his ashes set loose to the wind. Those of us in attendance took some small delight in knowing those ashes would find rest on far and unsuspecting plots of earth, that they would bless and fertilize their landing places. As, too, will these poems.

Grace wondered if this paragraph was the true reason Max had given her the book: if, after her outburst, he assumed she knew more than she did, and wanted her to learn what had become of her father’s partner in sodomy. That didn’t seem right, though. She scanned it again, wishing she’d find the words fish or root beer, wishing the paragraph would tell her where Amy had come from or when Zilla Silverman would leave. Perhaps this book could read her tarot.

Really she supposed Max had only given it to her because she’d spoken of starting over, and he had recalled the poem about Proteus shifting shape. But he must have misunderstood her, then. What Grace wanted to run from wasn’t the past, or even the future as the original Proteus had, but rather the present. Here she was, crystallized in time, in a place where nothing ever really happened, at least not to her, while the world marched on without her back in Toronto. It wasn’t so much the house that she wanted to escape, or George, even as his charm faded like a suntan, but the feel of every moment being precisely now, with no cause and no consequence. She supposed a Buddhist might appreciate it. But it wasn’t for her.

On Friday morning (nothing around but sunlight and some distant sounds traveling out the kitchen windows and back in through the dormers), she sat in the attic in her robe and slippers and read the introduction for the fifth time. It struck her only then that Millay referred to Parfitt’s “small dark eyes, and dark hair, slickly parted.” She crossed the floor and pulled out the file she’d sworn she’d never open again. The grinning man on the left had pale, wavy hair. Golden or light brown. No one would call his eyes small. It couldn’t be Parfitt. But neither could the man on the right, who, she was more certain than ever, was her father. His uneven shoulders, his chin. She turned it over, to see if some perverse and helpful archivist had recorded their names for posterity, but there was nothing. Well. She’d do it herself, then. She snatched up the pencil from her greenhouse sketch and, holding the photo up to the window so she could see the image through its paper, wrote “Father” right across his backside. It felt like nailing him down, accusing him. On the reverse of the other man’s buttocks, she drew a question mark. Then she stuffed it back in the folder, and the folder back in the cabinet.

Miss Silverman was gone, had been gone since yesterday, and Grace was unduly bereft. A spectator with no spectacle. George had disappeared for a day and then returned. The leaves were gone, except on a few stubborn oaks, and the catalpa was all pods. They made music in the wind, like maracas. It was freezing now in the attic, and so she walked its perimeter, closing each of the twelve dormers, and came to the northeast one last, the one closest to the coach house. Sometimes she thought this was where her grandmother had done it. Her father would never talk about Violet, so most of the very little that Grace knew she’d learned from her mother. Violet had killed herself at Laurelfield in 1906, when Grace’s father was only two. For this, she was never to be forgiven by anyone in the family. Her name was never used for babies, her grave (they’d taken the body by train all the way back to Toronto) wasn’t visited. When Grace and George first arrived, back in May, Grace had asked Mrs. Carmichael which part of the house was supposed to be the haunted bit. “Oh, the attic!” Mrs. Carmichael had said, and then Grace had to endure fifteen minutes of ridiculous stories about flickering lights and doors that shut themselves. “So that’s where she did it, then?” Grace had asked. “Violet, I mean. It was the attic?” Mrs. Carmichael had laughed. “I wasn’t here myself, ma’am. I couldn’t tell you beyond what I’ve heard. But the artists used to say so.”

“And did she hang herself?”

Mrs. Carmichael put down her silver polish and looked puzzled. “It’s funny. I don’t know why, but I always assumed she jumped.”

Grace watched George take the Darrin out of the garage. Max waved after him, and George backed out toward the big house, then took off like a French racer through the gate. When he drove like that, when he took the Darrin, it was a sure sign he wouldn’t be home the same day. Maybe he was headed to Chicago. To a whorehouse. She wondered what it would be like to start life over as a whore, to show up on the step of a house of ill repute, to live there entertaining the men, the handsome ones only, until, one day, George would stumble in. And either recognize her, or not.

Max closed the garage door and disappeared inside, and then there was absolutely no one left in the world but Grace. She wasn’t serious about it in the slightest, but before she closed this last window for the winter, she wanted to see what it felt like, if it was even possible. She stepped out of her slippers and up onto the sill, bracing her feet against the outer edges, clinging with both hands to the bottom of the glass. She had to crouch to fit inside the small, open square, and the wind rushed straight through her dressing gown. It didn’t look far enough, really. You’d land on the grass, if you didn’t hit the pine tree on your way down. You’d at least end up in a wheelchair, but you might or might not die, and someone wanting to do herself in would undoubtedly choose something more certain. Maybe she’d poisoned herself, after all.

Below, Max came out of the coach house, out the mechanical room door right next to the stone wall. It wasn’t his usual way out, and there was something odd about the way he walked too: slowly at first, as if he were scoping things out, then very quickly, all the way along the wall to the gate. He had a leather satchel over his shoulder.

Perhaps this was the third strange thing, the one she’d been waiting for after the rabbits and the witch.

She ought to follow him. It was better than hanging out a window, and better than sitting here waiting for some five-act drama to unfold right on the lawn. She hopped inside and dressed quickly and retrieved her bicycle from the tree it had been leaning against, untouched, since July. She assumed Max must have walked toward town, and she was right: After a few blocks she saw him hurrying along the opposite sidewalk. He turned left, toward the college, and she hung back and followed as obliquely as possible.

He walked past the main gates, across a quadrangle, and through the side door of a Gothic building. Grace parked at a stand of student bikes and walked toward the same door, trying to look purposeful and collegiate. Inside, students milled and sat on hallway benches, and in all directions the classrooms were filling. The signs on the bulletin boards seemed history related. Max had vanished. She peeked tentatively through an open door, then another, and finally she spied the back of his head in a lecture hall. He took a notebook from his satchel, just as his neighbors were doing, and set it on the table in front of him. He turned and whispered something to the thin-shouldered blond boy on his right. A few more students brushed past Grace, and finally a professor strode to the front, with a ripped shopping bag instead of a briefcase.

“Have we spent every waking moment reading about the Bolsheviks?” he asked, and a laughing groan rose from the room. “Fantastic.”

She shouldn’t hang around, even though she might have liked to audit a class herself. An art class, perhaps. She’d adore a good course on the Dutch masters. She knew what would happen, though. George would find out, and then one day he’d storm in and drag her out of the class by the arm. And she couldn’t abide the looks, the gawking undergraduates, and she’d never be able to return. So that was the end of that particular fantasy. She walked out of the building, smiling at the students: the girls in their sweater sets, the boys leaning and smoking and glancing with curiosity at Grace.

Back through town. She aimed her bicycle wheels at individual dead leaves, loving the crunch. She didn’t particularly want to go home just yet. There was a beauty parlor with a bicycle stand in front, Matilda’s House of Style, and she might as well follow her impulse inside. She had put ten dollars in her pocket, and this would at least be a place to sit down. The cycling had tired her quite a bit.

The woman at the desk told her there was a spot open in twenty minutes, and asked her name. “Amy Hall,” Grace said. And she smiled and tucked her hair behind her ears, and sat to read a copy of Vogue.

When they called Amy, she was ready — she’d prepared herself to respond to the name — and she had a shampoo and then sat in the chair while Matilda cleaned her scissors.

“I want it just below the ears,” she said. “I need a new look.” Matilda began combing, and told her she had lovely hair, just like Grace Kelly. “Oh, you’re too sweet.” She was trying out just a bit of southern accent, not a harsh one like Amy’s but a refined version. “You know, I’ve just moved here from Florida. My husband Max and I. I thought I’d like a new cut to go with the new house.”

“Oh, congratulations!”

“It’s just a little one. You know, a starter home. It used to be the coach house of an old estate, but they’ve converted it. I’ll tell you, though, I’m not used to this cold. And to think, it’s only October! I don’t know what I’ll do with myself this winter.”

“Long underwear!” Matilda said. “That’s my advice.” She raked Grace’s hair out in a straight line and chopped an inch from the end. “And maybe you’ll start a family. Some meat on the bones will keep you warm.”

To her surprise, Grace actually blushed. She’d sooner give herself a lobotomy than have a baby with George right now, but the newlywed Amy and her husband Max might indeed love to have a daughter, a little girl with soft cheeks and smocked dresses. She marveled at how readily she could feel the emotions of this invented self.

—

She was on her way through the front door when she saw rabbits. Just three this time, moving quickly along the front of the house. Not so much fleeing her footsteps as running toward a secret party. Grace wondered why on earth God or nature would put that puff of white on their rear ends, when everything else about the rabbit seemed designed for maximum camouflage. Their silence, their speed, their fur like dried grass. But then, at the back, this white target, this flash of light. And they’d never know, would they? Had any rabbit ever seen its own backside, seen the way it was trailed by its own demise?

She followed them around the house.

Outside the solarium, Ludo had marked the lines for the greenhouse with little flags. He’d made arrangements for a crew to come dig out the foundation before the ground got hard. He’d ordered the glass and cement, too, and was working with a friend who’d built greenhouses up and down the North Shore.

She couldn’t see where the rabbits had gone. The ivy on the house had shrunk back a bit for fall, as slowly as a balding man’s hair. Beneath, the bricks showed through. She found their regularity troubling, their strict overlapping. Something about the lockstep rigidity sickened her, and she thought she’d rather have the tangles of ivy back.

Back inside, she walked through the living room — she wasn’t at all sure what to do with it, but maybe paint it over in coral — and the dining room, which, when empty, was so overwhelmed by her grandmother’s portrait as to seem a shrine. Violet always looked a little surprised, as if Grace had caught her in the middle of some wildly inappropriate thought and she’d just managed to compose herself.

Grace heard someone across in the library, but when she got there it was empty. She loved this room best if only because there were still small relics of the artists who’d gathered every night for predinner drinks just a year before. Scribbled in the endpapers of an old copy of Dombey and Son, she’d found a ridiculous “List of Demands,” added to over the years in different hands: head massages, a bugle corps, Chinese footmen, better weather, lullabies, resident astrologer. She’d hidden that book deep in the shelf to protect it, and she checked now that it was safe. The jade monkey was gone from the bar, though, and she wondered where it could have gone. She checked all the shelves, and she checked under the leather couches. She’d have thought George took it, but he hated the library even more than he hated the portrait of Violet — he’d seen strange shadows there the week they moved in, and hadn’t set foot in it since. At first he had Mrs. Carmichael bring him out his drinks, but then he just began stocking his bureau as a bar. Grace would have, as a result, spent all her time in this room for the privacy, were it not for the windows between each set of shelves, on three sides of the room. It was an observation tank, and anyone walking from the driveway to the kitchen door would see right in. And perhaps that was what happened. Amy had looked in, on her walks from the coach house, envying the little monkey till she had to have it. But to make sure, Grace went first to Mrs. Carmichael, watering in the solarium, and to Rosamund in the kitchen, and even to Ludo and Beatrice, and none of them even knew what she was talking about, except Mrs. Carmichael, who was sure she had dusted it Friday.

It must be, then. Amy was a child, a greedy child. Grace had known this all along. She walked straight to the coach house, and up the stairs to the living quarters. The stairs came out in the small kitchen, and she had to orient herself to think which was Max’s apartment and which must be Amy’s. She knocked on Max’s door first, to be sure he wasn’t back, then walked into Amy’s side without knocking. The outer room had a sitting area. Well-thumbed fashion magazines on a little table. Fashion! All Amy ever wore were those three cotton dresses, in rotation.

She moved silently to the next doorway. Amy lay on her bed, on her stomach. Grace said, “Amy, I do hope you plan to return everything you’ve borrowed.”

The girl bolted up and straightened her blanket. “I’m — hello. Mrs. Grant.”

“I expect my things returned before dinner.”

“Only, I — which things?”

“Anything borrowed from the estate, including the jade monkey from the library. I don’t think you’ll be staying much longer, but you might yet salvage a letter of reference from me if you’re forthcoming.”

Amy stood and looked around the room frantically, as if checking that she’d hidden everything properly. “Ma’am, I truly don’t understand. If I’ve done something wrong it was a pure mistake.”

“Amy,” she said. “I don’t know who you are, except that you are not Max’s niece. Maybe you’re his lover, only I don’t think so. That’s not it, is it? You’re a child, but you sit in judgment and you think you know how you’d act if you were me. You think George wouldn’t hit you, that you’d tame him. Well, you couldn’t.”

“Ma’am, you’re mistaken.” There were fat tears collecting on her chin. “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.”

Grace felt Amy’s pain in her own stomach, she did. It was a convulsion, like holding back a sob. But all she could think to do was make it worse, as if that would solve everything. She imagined this was how a killer felt, halfway through the job. Finish stabbing the fellow, so there was no one left to feel it. She said, “Here’s what you don’t know yet: So often in life, you get exactly what you look for. If you want a George, you’ll get a George. The worst thing I could wish you is everything you want.”

She meant to leave Amy standing there silenced and shamed, but as she turned Amy said, quietly, “Speak for yourself.”

And Grace might have slapped her, she really might have, if she hadn’t heard Max come up to the kitchen just then. She walked out and told Max she’d been wondering where he was.

“A quick trip to the doctor,” he said, and smiled. “My old knee problem from the war. Can I drive you somewhere?”

“Oh!” she said. “No, but — what time did George take the Darrin out?”

“Around ten.”

Grace glanced around the kitchen, and tried to find something to say. “We should get that fixed,” she said, pointing at the big board patching up the wall. It was the wall shared with Amy’s bathroom and closet, and it was painted yellow, like the rest of the kitchen. “What is it?”

“It’s — I believe there was an electrical problem once. It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

“But you shouldn’t have to live someplace all stitched together.”

He set his satchel on the table. It looked so soft.

“I know there to be at least five layers of paint over that thing. Another five, and it will all come even. Really, it’s not worth the disruption.”

His ears were round, like little handles. Grace liked that about him, and she liked the way he sometimes looked almost in love with her. Perhaps he was. She felt wonderfully visible just then, as if something might happen to her, and not just in front of her.

She said, “All right, Max,” and smiled in a way she normally wouldn’t have, a way her mother never would have smiled at a servant. She trotted downstairs and waved to Ludo, who was pushing a wheelbarrow full of sticks back to the fire pile.

—

George was shaking her by the hip. He was saying, “What’s that smell? What is it?”

Grace rolled over and tried to feel where the blanket had gone. “Is something burning?”

“No, it’s you.” He turned the light on, and when Grace managed to open her eyes she saw that he hadn’t shaved all day, that the cleft in his chin was filled in with black stubble. He had a long red string tied around his neck, like an opera-length necklace, and she couldn’t think why that would be. “Why do you smell that way?” He came back to the bed, though it took him a few tries to propel himself in the right direction. Grace sat up, and George stood over her and put his fingers in her hair. “Why did you cut your hair off?”

“The hairdresser did. I needed a trim.”

“You think I want you looking like a boy?”

“George, I want to sleep.” She slid down under the blanket. “What time is it?”

He pulled the covers completely off the bed and stood over her. “You smell like sex.”

“That’s ridiculous. I smell like the outdoors. I went for a bike ride.”

He yanked her nightgown up to her stomach, and stuck his face between her legs and sniffed loudly. “You smell like you were fucking some fungus-covered hustler.”

“George.”

She meant to pull him on top of her and turn it into sex before things got worse, but he had rolled her, with one push, to the edge of the bed, and he rolled her again till she fell. Her forehead hit something on the way down. It was hard and sharp, and it must have been the corner of the nightstand. Her whole head and neck throbbed, but especially above her left eyebrow, and when she put her hand there it came away covered in blood.

“George, look!”

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, Grace, come on. Don’t — I’ll get a towel.”

And he did, one of the GGG monogrammed set from her Saville cousins, and it turned from powder blue to reddish brown in seconds.

“Please ring Max,” she said. “I want to go for stitches.”

His mouth was open, and he looked like a fish. He said, “I’ll take you.”

“The hell you will. Either ring Max or bring me the phone.”

“What will you say?”

“That I fell off the bed.”

“Grace, I love you.”

“I know that.”

“And you love me.”

“Yes. Yes.”

He sat on the ground and put his head between his knees, and started rocking like a little boy. Grace stood gingerly and went for the telephone herself.

Max took her in the Capri. There was Amy, owl-eyed at the coach house window as they crunched down the drive.

—

A hat with a little veil, combined with the sunglasses, hid the stitches and bandage quite well when she ventured out, even if she did look like an escapee from Hollywood. George disappeared for five straight days after that — he was gone by the time Grace and Max returned in the morning — and Grace passed the time by following Max on her bicycle. Now that she knew where he was headed she could hang behind quite a bit, and after he left the property he never seemed to look back.

Might she be in love with him? It was one explanation for this compulsion to follow his every move, but she doubted that was it. He wasn’t the type she’d enjoy making love to — he’d be too polite, too quiet, which had been the problem with all the boys back in Toronto. She thought of Lionel, who had kissed her wrist and wouldn’t stop asking what she wanted. “Do you like this? Tell me what to do. What do you want me to do?” The problem with George was that she could never be happy with a man who wasn’t George. She searched herself to see if she held any sort of physical longing for Max, and really she didn’t think so. But he was a nut she wanted to crack.

He was taking two classes: the one with the Bolsheviks (Grace thought for a while that it was Russian history, but one day as she listened at the door the professor talked about the Balkans, and she became less sure) and one on the novels of Thackeray and Dickens. She heard enough of that one that she became curious about Vanity Fair, which she’d never read, and scared up a copy from the Laurelfield library. Becky Sharp was a wicked heroine, and Grace loved her immediately. Becky was doomed, that was clear. No vice went unpunished in the nineteenth-century novel.

She never stayed more than ten minutes outside the classroom doors, afraid Max might one day head out to use the restroom and discover her. She found, though, that when she biked directly home, Max often didn’t return for two or three hours. Certainly the classes weren’t that long. In the English building was a smaller hallway off the main one, and she realized she could stand by the corner examining the framed map of Literary England without arousing much suspicion. She did that one Tuesday as the class let out. She was ready to run, but Max lingered by the door with the same blond boy he’d whispered to that first day in the history lecture. They walked together, shoulder to shoulder, down the stairs. Grace stayed and looked down from the window, and saw which way they walked: to the large building with ivy, talking together the whole time. After they’d passed through the double doors, she followed.

It was the library. She picked a direction and walked briskly past the front desk, only to find herself in a reference room with no one in it. She found a larger room with card catalogues, and a study area where the students sat smoking, but she didn’t see Max. Upstairs were study carrels and shelves packed thickly together. She supposed if Max saw her she could always pretend she’d been looking for some book. It wasn’t any odder for her to be here, after all, than for him to be.

A girl raced past and nearly knocked Grace over with her poodle skirt. Peering down a long aisle, Grace saw, on the far end, the blond boy, walking alone now. She went as far down the aisle as she dared, and managed to watch him through the last bit of shelf. He walked through a door and shut it. There were several such doors along the far wall, and through the open ones she could see very small rooms with desks. Her own college library had offered similar setups: for the girls who wanted no distractions, the ones with ambitious senior projects.

Not two feet in front of her, Max passed by, eyes down. He didn’t notice her. She watched as he entered the same room, and as the door once again clicked shut.

If it hadn’t been for that photograph, so fresh in her mind, it might have taken her quite a bit longer to figure it all out.

She stood there at the end of the aisle, just stood there, a long time, feeling like an all-around nitwit. She was humiliated that she’d been so fascinated by Max, that she’d liked how he looked at her. She wondered if the world were full of degenerates, Max and this boy and her father and the other man in the photograph, and who knew how many others, all around her, and she in the middle of it, blind and oblivious. Or maybe there was something connecting it all. Her father had told her that Max wasn’t to be dismissed under any circumstance. And maybe it was only because Max and her father frequented the same dark bars, the same alleys and closets. Max and her father, her father and Max. Yet they didn’t seem to care for each other a bit. Perhaps that wasn’t a requisite, in these types of relations. Or maybe he was simply afraid of what Max knew about him.

She knew she ought to leave. If Max found her there now, her face would betray her. She thought about that boy, no more than twenty, and how maybe she oughtn’t leave him alone there with a man twice his age, how the boy’s mother would have preferred Grace to break down the door and send him home at once, his luggage following after.

She went back to the ground floor and sat on one of the smoking couches where she could see the stairs. She held the Tribune open in front of her face. Max came down alone, twenty minutes later, and though she expected the boy would follow a few casual paces behind, he didn’t. Grace waited another twenty minutes, and then she walked upstairs and back through the aisles. She found the boy at a regular small study carrel, hunched over a textbook. There were other students, but not terribly near. She walked around the carrel, pretending to look for something, and she glanced at his face, at his prodigious eyebrows. He didn’t seem distressed, or even guilty — just wholly immersed in his studies.

“Excuse me,” she said, and he looked up. “I’m afraid I’m lost.”

He gave a sly smile and gestured around the room. “It’s the library,” he whispered.

“Yes.” She laughed. “And I — My husband is a trustee of the college, and he’s left me to fend for myself while he meets the dean. I got here, and I don’t even know what floor this is. All I’m looking for is the powder room.”

The boy stood and nodded. “Pleased to help a damsel in distress.” If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was flirting.

She followed as slowly as she could, so she’d have time to think what to ask. “You look like a senior,” she said.

“Sophomore.” He stopped and extended his hand. “Sidney Cole of Indianapolis. Sid.”

“Amy Hall,” she said. “Of New York.” They continued walking. “And do you like it here?”

“Oh yes.” But she doubted he did at all. How could he, the poor thing? Boys like that never lasted anywhere long.

“People are friendly?”

“Enough are.”

She wanted to say something useful, but what? She had nothing to tell this boy about how to live his life. Besides, they had reached the ladies’ room door. “Well,” was all she could think of. “Thank you. Do take care of yourself, Sid.”

—

The Darrin was back, parked in the middle of the driveway and waiting for Max to store it. Grace picked up the mail and went directly to the attic, and hoped George at least wasn’t drunk enough to destroy things down below.

A letter from her college friend Harriet, tentative, curious if Grace would come home soon. Harriet had been one of the very few at the wedding, and — of those — one of the only ones not to pull Grace aside, to ask if she was sure.

She wouldn’t write back. What was there to say?

By dinnertime, the Darrin was gone again, and a hard knot that she hadn’t realized was in her stomach melted away. She’d have dinner alone, and she was getting rather used to it. She brought down Vanity Fair—Captain Osborne had just asked Becky to run away with him — and sat at the table.

After a long time, she heard a wail from the kitchen, a cry that wasn’t sudden or surprised, more like part of an ongoing tantrum. There was talking — several voices, all female — and then a low, constant sob. Grace considered heading back there, but it was on principle that she didn’t. Dinner was fourteen minutes late. The cook could apologize when she emerged.

The crying got louder before it stopped altogether. When Rosamund walked out, she didn’t have a single dish in her hands. Her face was red, but Grace could tell immediately she hadn’t been the one crying. She’d known all along, really, that it was Amy. Rosamund stood inside the door, her arms folded across her waist, and she said, “I can’t do it any longer. I’d gladly stay on for you, but I won’t work for him. I refuse.”

“He’s not even here tonight,” Grace said. “He took the Darrin out again. And you haven’t served him a meal in five days.”

“Listen.” She had lowered her voice, though she didn’t come any closer to Grace. Why didn’t she talk like a servant? None of these American ones did. “I apologize for my language. But, ma’am — he’s raped her.” Her nostrils flared and she put her hand to her earlobe, but she kept her eyes straight on Grace. All Grace could think of was throwing a plate right at Rosamund’s mouth until she stopped talking, until she vanished from the earth. “She’s been in there two hours, and she won’t stop to breathe. Beatrice is giving her tea. He took her into the Longhouse and he forced himself on her.”

“Well,” Grace said. And she spoke on instinct, or at least she said what she imagined her mother might say, even though she didn’t know what that would be till she heard it come out of her mouth. “I very much doubt that’s true. If you must know, Amy lies and steals, and she’s quite in love with George. He’s had his way with her, I do know that, I’m not blind. But I’ve seen her. She was quite willing. I’m afraid she’s played you for a fool.”

“Now why would she do that?”

Grace stood from the table and left her chair out, and pushed past the cook into the kitchen. Amy was perfectly well clothed, her dress not even ripped or stained, except that someone had draped a kitchen towel around her shoulders. She and Beatrice sat side by side on chairs, Beatrice still in her gardening boots. Grace wanted to stick all three women into the Frigidaire and lock the door.

“Amy,” she said. “Are you with child?”

Amy looked up with red, swollen little eyes. She choked out a whisper: “No, ma’am. I don’t think the timing — no.”

“Then I don’t understand the change. It’s all been fine with you up till now. Or perhaps it’s because I caught you stealing. The thing of it, Amy, is that you aren’t going to wedge us apart. If I leave George, or if George leaves me, it won’t be because of some thieving girl.”

Amy screamed into her hands and rocked forward, and Beatrice bent over her and rubbed her back. Beatrice said, “I found her outside the Longhouse.”

“But you didn’t hear her when she was in the Longhouse, did you? She must not have screamed very loudly. Beatrice, I haven’t invited you into my kitchen.”

Beatrice looked shocked, but then, as Grace had known she would, she nodded and walked slowly to the back door. She said, “Amy, I’ll be in the garden cottage.”

There was soup boiling on the stove, getting too thick, prob-ably.

Grace said, “Amy, are you quitting your job?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’m the one quitting,” Rosamund said. “And, forgive me, you ought to quit too, ma’am. You ought to leave this house and get back to Canada before he slices you to bits. And Amy ought to leave, and Beatrice ought to leave, and anyone with any sense should get out of here. But as it seems I’m the only one with a backbone, I’ll be leaving alone tonight.” She whipped her apron off, as if more drama were necessary, and left it behind her on the counter.

She was gone, and it was just Grace and Amy, alone in the kitchen.

Grace said, “You’ll have to serve the soup then.”

“Yes.”

She didn’t know what to think. How could she possibly know what to think? But she did have one clear and horrible realization, as she sat back at the dining table. The drama she had sought in George, the lust and fire, would never involve her anymore, because she was the one married to him. He might gash her face, but he wouldn’t ravish her, wouldn’t focus his whole being on her seduction. The drama would always be, from now on, about other women.

Amy brought her the soup, clattering the bowl on the saucer and hyperventilating the whole way. Cream of squash, cooked to a gelatinous mess.

Grace wanted to sob until she flowed to the floor and out of the house and into Lake Michigan.

She said, “Amy, I’ll want more water.”

And when Amy brought her more water, she sent her back for another roll.

And when she brought the roll, she told her to take the soup away because it wasn’t any good.

—

The next day there was a telegram from Toronto: FATHER GRAVELY ILL. TWO OR THREE WEEKS LEFT PLEASE COME HOME.

She wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t face him now. He’d see right through everything, he’d see that she knew about his degeneracy, and he’d see that he’d been right about George, and she’d break down screaming and she’d tear her clothes and move back to Toronto forever. And do what? And live how? And George would follow her there, and ruin everything for everyone, for her brother and her mother, and the whole city would see her as the girl who came home broken, rather than the girl who ran off for love.

And then she sat and cried all afternoon. Because if it was true that her father was dying, and if George was right that no one would ever visit her here, and if she was too stubborn to go home, then she’d never see any of them again.

—

Three days later, she went to the coach house when Amy was busy in the kitchen. Amy was cooking everything now, though Grace knew Beatrice snuck in there, whenever she could, to help. The food was dreadful: browned meat covered in sour cream and baked for an eternity; chopped celery covered in cheese and baked; sliced apples for dessert, smothered in a mash of cream cheese and powdered sugar. Grace wanted her gone, wanted her back wherever she’d come from, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not least because Amy might go to the police then, might say enough that word would spread, as word always spreads, and word could reach Canada. It could reach her father on his deathbed.

But she did have a plan, and having one made her feel better. It came together just when the greenhouse plans came together, as if she were turning out, after all, to be the architect of her own life.

She found Max in the garage and asked him to walk with her to see the digging. “I want your opinion,” she said, though it made no sense why someone would have any particular opinion about a hole in the ground. They walked to the far end of the house and stared into the rectangular hollow for the greenhouse foundation. Ludo and two Negroes and a red-haired man all stood in it, poking around the edges of the steps that currently led down from the door of the solarium. They’d have to pull out those steps like decayed teeth, and the concrete floor of the greenhouse would come even with the door. Max greeted the men and looked without great interest at their progress, and when she asked if she might speak to him on the terrace, he nodded and followed her around the corner. They sat looking out at the fountain and the paths that spread from it like rays, and the fire pile growing tall back by the woods, and the Longhouse, and the little studio behind that and, on the far side, the cottage studio that used to house composers and was now the shed for Ludo and Beatrice. Next to the cottage, Beatrice’s vegetable garden was finished and brown.

Grace said, “Max, I’m going to ask a favor of you. Amy’s been here quite a while now, and it’s time for her to move on. You know she’s become a terrible distraction to everyone. I think she’s begun stealing things, as well.”

“You’d be out a cook.”

“She’s no cook. And you’ve seen how unhappy she’s been, these past few days.” Max looked puzzled, and she wondered if Amy and Beatrice had managed to keep all the hysterics from him. “Don’t you think you can send her home now?”

He rested his hands on his legs as if he were keeping them still only through great effort. “It would be difficult.”

Grace reached into her coat pocket and brought out a key ring with four small keys. “I thought I’d offer you my keys to the artists’ studios. You could use them however you’d like. You know—” and she was glad he was gazing out at the grounds in confusion, and not at her “—sometimes I think about those boys at the college. I worry about them, so far from home. If you meet any who are in need of a good meal, or a place to rest, you could invite them to visit you here, and they might even use the daybeds in the studios. Surely there’s someone who wants a quiet space.”

She hadn’t been sure, when she’d rehearsed this, what his reaction might be. Shame, perhaps, and a grateful exchanging of favors. Or he might be angry and take it as blackmail, which would work as well. She wasn’t prepared for him to turn and grin at her. She’d never even seen such an expression on his face. All the composure, all the reserve she’d come to know as Max, fell away in that moment, and she was looking at someone she’d never met.

“I already have keys,” he said. “You should hold on to those.”

“She’s not your niece,” Grace said.

“Not technically.”

“But she’ll listen to you. I don’t imagine she’s in love with you.”

He laughed softly. “No. She’s quite naïve, I think. She’s not like you, she doesn’t realize how I am, but she’s fond of me. And Grace, I’ll say quite plainly that I won’t send her home.” Only a moment later did she realize that he’d not only defied her, he’d called her Grace. And what could she do about any of it? Threaten to tell her father, when she had no idea what history lay between them? If she couldn’t dismiss him, and he wouldn’t do what she said, then it was quite obvious that he was really the one in charge. He said, “Some fellow brought her to Chicago, is what happened. He convinced her to leave Florida with him, which, from what I understand, likely saved her life. But it turned disastrous. As those things tend to. She’s only eighteen. Do you know how she came to us? Beatrice found her outside the gate, peering in. She’d been knocking on every door down the street, looking for work. She’s remarkably resourceful. In Chicago, before she left the man, she asked around where the nicest houses were, and someone said she ought to come up here. She told me she figured that even if she failed, no one in a small town would let her sleep on the street. Whereas in the city… She’d been to a hundred houses before she met Beatrice.”

“How lucky that she found us.” She was amazed, really, at how sharp her voice was, how mean. It was exactly like her mother’s.

“This has always been a place for strays. The people who need to find Laurelfield always find it. Listen, Grace, she’s got nothing back home. A horrible family. A whole family of Georges. I can’t send her.”

“Why don’t you just marry her, then? If you care more about Amy than your employment here. Are you capable of being with a woman? It would be a happier marriage than some, even if it were a farce. And then you could keep her out of everyone else’s business, and maybe you could leave alone poor Sid Cole of Indianapolis.”

Max did look startled now, and perhaps Grace shouldn’t have let on that she had Sid’s name. He’d been impressed with her intuition, her worldliness, and now he knew she was just a snoop. He stood, and at first she thought he was stalking off, but he came instead and knelt down in front of her chair, right on the stone floor, right in the dead leaves.

He said, “You don’t look good.”

It ought to have insulted her greatly, but it didn’t. Maybe it was a relief to have someone in charge, someone who cared if she lived or died. He was trying to get her to look at him, right at him. That was why he’d gotten down so low. And she couldn’t do it. She looked over his shoulder, out at the dry fountain.

“Grace,” he said. “Aren’t you the one who needs to get out of here?”

She kept staring until the fountain became a gray blur, no closer or farther than the trees beyond.

“Grace. We’re similar, you know. Maybe it’s something I shouldn’t say, but it’s true. Did you read that poem?”

“It didn’t apply.”

“The point is to reinvent yourself.”

She felt like reaching out to touch Max’s dark hair. She might push a small dent into it with her finger, and it might stay that way. Instead she stood to leave, while she still had some small remnant of dignity.

He said, “I’d marry you myself.”

“That’s very kind.”

—

Saturday was Guy Fawkes Day. No one in the States seemed to celebrate it, but when George showed up at breakfast — Grace was mildly surprised to see him, as he hadn’t slept in their bed — she suggested they do a bonfire that night. The burn pile was so tall.

George said, “That’s a fine plan.”

He was lit by the sun, black curls in every direction, eyes bright green and unclouded. She loved him at breakfast. If she kissed him she would taste like Listerine, and when he stretched his arms and back she could hear the cracks. In the morning he was like a small, clean snowball — one that would roll downhill all day, picking up rocks and darkness and growing enormous and sharp.

A shaking Amy brought coffee without looking at either of them. It smelled terrible, acrid and offensive, and Grace thought she might retch. She said, “Amy, can you take this away? There’s something wrong with it.”

George tasted his. “It’s perfectly fine.”

But Grace handed her cup to Amy, who hurried it back to the kitchen.

“If you drop dead from poison, I’ll know who did it,” Grace said.

—

Grace asked Ludo to plan the bonfire, and she thought she and George might even have dinner on the inner terrace, after the blaze was going. But by three in the afternoon George was roaring drunk, and he found her sitting on the bed with the telegram that had just arrived from Toronto. All it said was FATHER WORSENING, PLEASE ADVISE IF COMING, but she couldn’t keep from staring at it, as if it would update itself every time there was a change, every time her father sat up to eat a bite of soup. George yanked it from her and she told him what was happening, but that she didn’t think she’d go.

“They’re lying to you,” he said. “He’s not sick. They want to get you up there and lock you in a closet.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No. Exactly.”

“That isn’t — George, what are you doing?”

Because now George was shredding the telegram, pouring the shreds into the ashtray on his bureau, and lighting them with a match. She thought of yelling or grabbing it, but then he might throw the whole thing, still on fire. So she waited till it had smoldered to nothing. Then she said, “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Ha! What do you do, all day long? You sit in that attic, mooning over your grandfather’s precious files, then you sit at dinner staring at your lunatic grandmother.”

“They aren’t my grandfather’s files.”

“And where the hell are we? We’re in a — we’re on an altar. This place is an altar to your family. How is this supposed to be my house when it’s the Devohr International Museum?”

She hooked her finger through his belt and pulled him toward the bed. “I’ll make it up to you,” she said.

But he pushed her onto the mattress and left her there, and then she listened for quite a long time as he stormed through the house opening and shutting doors, until it turned from storming to crashing. He must have drunk more in the meantime. And the sun was already going down.

She stood in the bedroom doorway and watched him come up the stairs, then stumble all the way down the hall to the open door of the attic steps. He disappeared, and came back a minute later with his arms full of file folders. The Parfitt book was balanced on top.

He saw her, but he didn’t stop except to call out “Remember, remember the fifth of November!” And then, from halfway down: “What do you say, Duck? Fall cleaning!”

Grace ran to the attic door and thought of locking it, but the key was all the way down in the kitchen. She might have gone in and locked it from the inside, only George would just kick the door in, and what would that accomplish? She went into the flowered bedroom and watched from the window as he strode across the lawn, papers flying from the files. He rolled up the folders and stuck each into a space between sticks. Ludo stood by the cottage, keeping quite a distance. Beatrice, she assumed, was in the kitchen helping Amy.

He was coming back, and she ran, while she still could, up the stairs to think what she might hide. He hadn’t gotten to the middle of the alphabet yet, and so she scooped out the whole section that would contain the Edwin Parfitt file and its photographic contents and stuffed it all far back in the jungle of office furniture, between the mimeograph machine and the postage meter. She might have liked that photo burned, but she couldn’t run the risk of George seeing it. He would do something horrible, she was sure, something that would finish off her father. Besides which she hadn’t solved its mystery yet. She wasn’t done with it yet. George was back, before she could get more files. She considered hiding, but when he appeared she was just standing by the cabinets, unable to move.

He saw her and said, “What.”

“I was curious.”

She ducked before he could push her aside, and he snatched the oak leaf painting from under the window, the tacks flying from its corners and skittering across the floor. He said, “Whose vagina is this?”

“It’s — first of all it’s an oak leaf.”

He held it at arm’s length. “That is a vagina.”

“It might be valuable.”

“Sure. What you need, Grace Devohr, is more money. All your problems will be solved.” He rolled it and tucked it under his arm and scooped more files out. His hands were massive — it was the first thing she loved about him, that his hands were like bear paws — and he grabbed up six inches of folders in each hand. He stacked them against his chest, held them down with his chin, and Grace thought they might all fall, but only a few did.

She said, “Here, I’ll carry the painting.”

“The hell you will.”

He went past her, and down the stairs, and this time she followed him all the way out, watched him strip to his undershirt to stuff things into the pile. Ludo, when he saw her, retreated into the cottage. Max stood on the path by the catalpa, watching, hands in his pockets. She wondered if he recognized what was being burned today, if he cared as much as she did about these last relics of the colony. There were two faces as well in the kitchen window: Beatrice, Amy. Three gas cans near the pile, but it didn’t smell like he’d used them yet.

She knew something right then. She saw George pushing those files into the sticks, saw him bent on destroying something. And not because he loved it but because he didn’t. Because he didn’t care at all. And she knew then that Amy had told the truth, that she hadn’t offered herself to him.

George said, “I’m not leaving you out here alone,” and he pulled her by the arm back to the house. They passed not five feet from Max, and she looked straight at him and tried to send him a message to rescue the painting, at least the painting, but he looked like a man trapped in stone.

In through the terrace to the living room, up the stairs, down the hall, letting go of her at last, and up the attic stairs.

And when he was halfway up, when she was still on the bottom step, he fell. He seemed to fall forward and then, mid-pitch, his body jackknifed and it turned to a headfirst backward dive. The stairs were steep. He landed above her and slid down and came to rest with his head, face up, at her feet.

Grace surprised herself by not screaming. She just stood there looking down, her heart a kettle drum, and a thousand different futures flashed in front of her.

But no: He was still breathing. Great, deep breaths, like a child asleep.

Even so. What if she just left him here? What would be the effect of staying at this downward angle after a blow to the head? What were the odds of his drowning in his own vomit?

All the tension had gone from his face, and all the anger. His forehead was smooth and unfurrowed. Grace crouched and ran a finger from his eyebrow to his hairline. It was an odd moment to think it, but what she found herself contemplating was how the forehead is one of the more sexual parts of the body, the texture of smooth skin over hard bone. She kissed his eye, his closed and upside-down eye. And then she ran to get Max.

—

Max, surprisingly strong for his size, got George splayed out on the bed in the flowered room. He asked if Grace wanted him to call an ambulance, but by now George was stirring, moaning a bit and reaching for his head. Max fetched an ice pack from the kitchen instead. Then he whispered, “What can we do?”

If she hadn’t guessed already that he was talking about the files, she’d have known by the way he faced the window, ready to dive right through it and reclaim everything.

“He’ll remember,” she said. “He rarely forgets what he was doing.”

“Can we restuff them? Can we put other things in the files?”

Grace scanned the room: the pretty old washbasin, the glass-shaded lamp. “There are the two phone books in the hall,” she said, “but it won’t be enough.” Then she remembered the unreadable novel, still hidden with its neighboring files upstairs. She told Max to wait, and she ran to get it. “This isn’t important, is it?”

Max looked at the name on the two files, and at the six hundred pages crammed inside. “Good lord. No, this is nothing. It’s perfect.”

Grace stayed with George, stroking his hand and making sure he stayed put, while Max ran to the burn pile. She craned to watch from the window as he worked first alone and then with Ludo, collecting the folders, yanking out the contents into one huge stack, and systematically restuffing each with a few pages of phone book or failed novel.

He put the rescued papers into Ludo’s wheelbarrow, and Ludo wheeled it all into the gardener’s cottage. Max met her in the hallway with just the painting and a bit of the novel (“I couldn’t bear burning it all,” he said). He told her Ludo would shelter the other papers in the cottage till Max had time to sort it. He said, “I remember most of these people. It shouldn’t be hard to refile. He’ll miss the painting, though.”

Grace ran the novel remnants back to the attic, and stowed the painting behind a pile of colony mattresses. There was nothing to replace it. She looked at her poster board with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and laughed. It would never roll. And it was the wrong size.

George rested till dinner, groaning and stirring and eventually sitting up to ask for food. Grace intended for Amy to bring him his dinner on a tray while she ate in peace downstairs, but she stopped just short. She wouldn’t send the girl to be alone with him in that room. She wouldn’t send the lamb to the lion. So Grace brought him a tray herself, bread and butter, whiskey and water. Then she sat alone at the dining table. Amy smiled so kindly at Grace as she put the baked carrots and cheese in front of her that Grace wanted to scream. She wanted to gouge the girl’s eyes out for knowing what she knew, for seeing Grace dragged back to the house like a child. And at the same time she wanted to fold Amy up in her sweater, to rock her to sleep.

Soon after, George went out to the pile himself and came raging back to where Grace sat in the solarium. “Where did the painting go?” he said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He seemed to be summoning the strength to fly across the room at her, but Max and Ludo had followed him, and here they came through the terrace doors.

“The painting!” he said. “Your painting. You think I don’t know what you’re doing up there?”

“I didn’t paint it.”

“Mr. Grant,” Ludo said. “The painting is blown away. I am sorry. It — puff! — across the lawn while you sleep. I see it go.”

“Ha!”

“Let’s start the fire,” Max said. “While the night is young.”

Before he followed the men back out, George pointed at her. “If I see that painting again. If I find that you — I don’t like to be lied to.”

“I wouldn’t, George.”

“If I see that painting again, I’ll burn the whole place down. The whole house.”

She watched as Ludo poured gasoline on the pile. George threw the match, and everything went up in a glorious blaze.

—

The next morning, as soon as George took off, Max came into the dining room where Grace still sat at breakfast. The oak leaf painting was in his hands, rolled. “Can’t you give it to the college?” she said. “I’d put it in the bank vault, but George has a key.”

Without waiting for an invitation, Max sat in George’s seat. He unrolled the linen and touched his finger to the paint. “This ought to stay at Laurelfield,” he finally said.

“We can’t afford that.”

“The artist would want this to stay at Laurelfield. There are simply some things that you don’t remove from their natural habitats.” Amy opened the door from the kitchen, saw Max, and turned back. Now she’d be eavesdropping, but Grace didn’t have the energy to care.

“Even if we hid it in your personal effects — it’s just that George—”

Max said, “I know what George is capable of.”

“I imagine it’s valuable.”

“Yes. This is a very good artist.”

“I do love it. I love the edges of the leaves.”

“We could reconfigure it,” Max said. “It would be a great joke.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We could paint over it. And hide it in plain view.”

“I couldn’t destroy it!”

“You’d be preserving it, really.” The idea seemed to tickle him tremendously.

Really, the thought of George seeing it every day, walking past it, having no idea — it was appealing. It was a modicum of revenge. And when they were both seventy, and she needed to trump him in some battle, she’d point to the thing and say, It’s been there the whole time. You’ve been taking your coffee beneath the vagina for forty years.

“Would oil paint work?”

“It’s all that would do.”

That afternoon, using an advertisement for another kit from the back of the Paint-by-Numbers box as a guide, Grace painted it over with a farmhouse scene. It ended up not terrible for a rank amateur, and there was quite enough paint in the combined pots of Paint-by-Number oils that it covered the canvas thoroughly. She and Max carried it from the big house to the coach house together, each holding two corners of canvas.

Max knew where to get it framed, as soon as it was dry enough. Six days later, it was hanging in the library.

—

In the next week, Grace found herself struggling to rise from bed. The room would spin, and she’d lie back to sleep for another half hour, and eventually her hunger would bring her downstairs, if the smell of Amy’s horrible coffee didn’t keep her from the dining room.

Then she’d walk down by the little hill of ash where the fire pile had stood. She’d follow the paths in the woods.

George was sweet for a few days, until he wasn’t.

She realized she ought to move the portrait of Violet, just to be safe. Max stored it in his own room. When George saw it was gone, he wasn’t happy at all. He asked if she sold it, and even though she said she hadn’t, he asked how much she’d gotten for it, and what she’d done with the money. He threw his glass past her head, and it shattered on the spot where the painting had hung, and for a moment water streamed in a thousand little rivers down the wallpaper. Beatrice served the rest of the meal, and said that Amy had gone to bed with a sudden bug.

—

She saw Max enter the Longhouse, and two minutes later Sid Cole of Indianapolis followed. They stayed in there an hour. It happened again the next day, and then three days after that.

—

She didn’t want to sit in the attic now that it had been defiled, and so she tried perching herself on the huge, decaying tree stump between the coach house and the big house, her legs crossed. But she felt so strange and dizzy there. It might turn to a sinkhole and swallow her. She thought of the studios, but she couldn’t go into the Longhouse. She walked to the little one behind that. It had been a darkroom, Max said. And indeed there were both blinds and shutters inside the windows, and when she closed them it was dark as death. She sat on the daybed and tried not to feel her limbs. She opened the shutters and stared at the floor. Five dead bees. A dead ladybug, its body bleached pink by the sun. A 1939 penny. Someone was happy here once. Someone sang to herself and made her prints and didn’t notice when she dropped a penny.

—

A telegram from home: COME IMMEDIATELY OR NOT AT ALL.

—

That afternoon, Grace walked right up into Max’s apartment and sat at the table and called his name. He appeared in his doorway, his shirt unbuttoned and untucked. He put himself together and joined her. She said, “Max, if anything happens to me, if I go missing, if I turn up drowned in the fish ponds, I need you to know that George did it.”

“That — yes, I’m afraid that would be my assumption.”

“And if that’s the case, I want you to do to him whatever you must so that he doesn’t get the house and all the money. Finger him, frame him, poison him, I don’t care.” She’d said it, and there it was, and once she heard the words out in the air, outside her own mouth, she was sure she meant them.

“You might get out of here before that happens.”

“Well. Max, my father is very ill.”

“Yes.”

She shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew.

“When George was lying there, at the bottom of the stairs, I thought for a moment he was dead. And I thought, if George is dead and my father dies, I might do what I like. And I felt a tremendous lightness. It was only the tiniest moment, though.”

Max leaned across the table with an intensity she’d have been offended at a few weeks ago, before they became complicit together in the replacement of the files and painting, and in turning the Longhouse into a refuge for fairies. He said, “What is it you’d do?”

“I didn’t think it through. Maybe I’d reopen the colony. I could, you know. If I poured my trust fund into it.”

“You’d be starting from scratch.” He looked glassy and sad. His cheeks had turned pink.

“Yes, well. But you’d help, wouldn’t you? You’ve been here longer than anyone.”

He said, “I suppose I’m the memory of the place.”

“But it’s all just fantasy, and I shouldn’t let myself get ahead of my feet. Because what am I going to do? I’m not going to murder George.”

Max laughed, a harsh little laugh. “All you’d really have to do is nothing. Not rescue him. Next time, you leave him lying there. Next time will be different. But there will be equivalents.”

“Well. And divorce is the real option. I’ve not wanted to let myself consider it. But he—” She stopped herself a moment, so she wouldn’t cry. “Max, do you know what he did to Amy?”

Max shook his head slowly, but she saw that she didn’t need to explain it. Just as well, because now she was sobbing, a big heap on the table. “I hadn’t believed it was true, or I couldn’t believe, but then when I saw him with those files, when I saw him hurting something that wasn’t me — Max, I’ve been a perfect monster. I want to do something for her. Will you find out what she needs? To get set up comfortably somewhere?”

“You need to leave him,” he said.

“I think I might. I’m at least going back to Toronto to see my father. I’ve telephoned the travel agency to see if I might fly home. I’ll know in the morning. I might be able to go in the morning, for that matter. Just to visit.”

It was true. She wasn’t lying. It just hadn’t felt real until she’d said it.

“And then you’ll leave him.”

“I — yes. I think so.”

“But you mustn’t tell him.”

“I do think he’d figure it out eventually.”

Max chuckled — when was the last time someone had laughed at her joke? — and said, “Promise you won’t get carried away and tell him so. You’ll need lawyers first.”

She nodded, but she imagined that part would really have to wait till her father was gone. If he was truly dying, the family lawyers would be tied up with the inheritances a while.

He said, “We’ll figure it all out. We will. Grace, I don’t want you alone with him.”

“I promise.”

—

That same night, George got dressed to go out. He put on his sport coat and shaved. He’d made some friends, he said, at a bar in Highwood, and they had a business opportunity for him, a solid investment. He’d said the same thing back in July about a fellow he met down in the city. George wrote him a check for two thousand dollars and never saw him again. These new friends knew someone who would take the money to Brazil and double it. George had stayed sober for the occasion, and he danced around the bedroom as he gathered his wallet and hat. Grace lay on the bed in her yellow cotton dress, a wool cardigan on top. This was what she’d pictured, when she first settled on George: the two of them together in the bedroom before the dinner hour, George happy and energized, Grace with bare feet and a book. Only she hadn’t imagined feeling like a ball of lead.

She put her forehead to the window and watched as he trotted to the coach house. Max backed up the Darrin and climbed out, holding the driver’s door open for George himself.

Max disappeared into the garage, and George backed partway out, but then two things happened: He circled the car around to the big house door and ran inside — for his warmer hat, probably, as it was quite cold and the Darrin was a poor choice even with the roof up. And, at that same moment, down by the maple trees and all along the inside of the stone wall, the earth began to move again just as it had that day a month ago: rabbits and rabbits and rabbits. A swarm of rabbits, a plague of rabbits. Grace slid on her shoes and ran down the stairs and past George, who was rifling through the coat closet. She had to see if they were real, and if they were, she wanted to know what it was they were all doing here, surrounding the property like a hex or a blessing.

She was out the front door, and George was still inside, when Sid Cole of Indianapolis walked right through the front gate. Grace ought to have told Max to have him come in the side gate at least, but here he was, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, heading straight down the drive toward the big house. The grass was wet and cold, and he probably wanted to stay off it until he reached the path to the Longhouse, but it made it look, Grace realized with horror, as if he were here to see her in George’s absence. Her young date for the evening. She didn’t have time to warn him without yelling out, and George was coming out the door behind her just now. So what she did instead was to turn and catch George by the waist and turn him toward her and the coach house at once — away from Sid, who seemed oblivious in his stride. She said, “Take me with you tonight. Let me come with you.” She pulled him hard against her.

He put his hand on her posterior and said, “I’m meeting these fellows.”

“I’ll charm them.”

He stepped back and looked her up and down, judging her presentability. It was true that for once she wasn’t hiding a bruise. The bandage was off her forehead and the stitches were out, just a clean pink mark now.

She said, “It’ll be fun.”

“All right, Duck.”

He opened the passenger door with an exaggerated bow, and as she stepped in she managed to catch Sid’s attention. He was only ten yards away, but when he saw the warning on her face he darted back among the maple trees before George came around the car. He wasn’t well hidden, but it didn’t matter.

They shot down the drive, pebbles flying up and hitting the bottom of the frame like a mortar attack. Sid was a blur out Grace’s window, his face calm and curious. He couldn’t have understood that Grace had just saved his life as well as her own.

—

They took the back corner table at Pasquali’s, and George nodded in passing to two swarthy men at the bar. “They’ll join us when their partner’s here,” he said. Grace realized she’d have to sit quietly through whatever ridiculous scam they wanted his money for — she’d watch mutely as he wrote a check from their joint account — or else the night could go unpleasantly wrong.

There was a record on: Frank Sinatra sang “Ain’tcha Ever Comin’ Back?” Everything smelled good, and Grace was ravenous. Amy would be getting dinner ready at home and wondering where Grace had gone.

Grace steeled herself to smile at George, but he wasn’t paying a bit of attention. He looked at the two men, and the door, and the bartender, and the menu, and the next table. He ordered a scotch, plus a bottle of Chianti for Grace’s benefit. The wine went right to her head, though, in a way it usually didn’t. It had been a while — since Paris, really — that she’d had any regular amount of wine. But one glass in, she felt dopey and dizzy, and her mouth felt full of cotton.

She ordered lasagna.

“You’re getting stout,” George said, when the waiter had walked away.

“It’s Amy’s cooking,” she said, though she wanted to argue, to tell him it wasn’t true at all, it was only her bust that was suddenly a bit larger. And then, wall of ice: It was November 16. She’d bled in September, back when it was warm enough to walk to the pharmacy in her blue cotton dress. And that must have been the last time. She was an idiot. A dizzy idiot, with blackness closing around her head. She’d been so distracted. Right when the witch showed up, right when George pinned Amy to the tree — that should have been the next time. She’d spent the next month watching everyone and everything but herself, and meanwhile she grew slow and slept late, and the smell of Amy’s coffee made her gag, and she began crying at the drop of a hat.

The waiter set her plate in front of her. A heap of lasagna, clots of red leaking out the frilled edges. George was talking about Quebec, about taking a motor trip in the spring.

She wanted to think to herself that she’d never go on that trip because she’d be a free woman by then, but she knew it would be the opposite. She’d be at home with a watermelon stomach or a squalling baby, and maybe he’d be there too, or maybe he’d be off without her, but she’d never get free of him now.

The room blurred, and fell to little stars, and came back together in flashing colors and shapes. The shapes locked back to reality with a sickening little click. Just like the bricks of the house — everything cemented together, everything in order. Her entire life was like those bricks, she saw it now. And every attempt at escape just locked her further in. She’d tried to marry someone wild, and ended up in a prison. She’d tried to leave him, and ended up tethered to his child, growing inside her.

George was saying, “The man eats coins. Did you know that? I saw him put a nickel in his mouth, when he thought I wasn’t looking.”

“Oh. Who?”

“Max. The driver. I said.”

“That can’t be true. Did he swallow it?”

“No idea.”

She managed to get a bite in. George was waving to the third man, who’d just entered.

Grace dropped her napkin on the floor and ran to the bathroom, and the vomit barely made it in the toilet. Look at the tiles on the floor. Look: a graph-paper grid. Her own, private, tessellated map to her appointment in Samarkand.

Why should she be so surprised by it all? By getting exactly what she’d signed on for, no more and no less? Except that we become so used to the twists of chance and fortune. Sometimes the greatest shock is getting exactly what we’ve been promised.

Back at the table, George and the men were laughing. One scooted over and patted the bench next to him. But she stayed standing and said, “George, I’m ill. I’ll call Max to bring me home in the Capri.”

George nodded. “Sure, Duck.”

She called the coach house line from the pay phone by the bar. It rang and rang and rang, and no one picked up. It was six thirty now, and they’d left the house at five. Soon Amy would give up on her for dinner, and Max would be finished with Sid Cole. She sat back at the table. The men talked about soccer. She couldn’t imagine why.

She might have slept a bit, but now she felt worse. She tried the coach house again, and the main line too, and no one picked up. She came back and waited for a pause and said, “George, why don’t I drive the Darrin home and tell Max to pick you up in the Capri?”

“We’ll be done soon,” he said to her. But she could tell that they wouldn’t, and that it would not be wise to press the issue. He wouldn’t let her drive the Darrin even under the best circumstances, and he’d never hand over the keys in front of these men. He was quite drunk now. There was another full scotch in front of him. She made her hands into a pillow on the placemat.

Finally they finished. There were papers on the table, and George took some of them, and one of the men took the rest. George said, “Okay, Duck, let’s go.” But when he stood, he caught his ankle on the table and nearly pulled the whole thing over with him. He righted the table but fell himself, and Grace propped him up by the elbow.

“He okay?” one of the men said, and another of them laughed.

“We’re calling someone to drive,” Grace told them, and George didn’t object. She led him to the pay phone and used the same dime, the same unlucky dime, to call the coach house. It was now nine o’clock, and either Amy or Max had to be home. The men, seeing she had the receiver to her ear, nodded and left the restaurant. George leaned against the wall.

The phone rang and rang and rang. Max should be home — Sid never stayed this late — but then he might be down in the garage. It might take him a while to hear the phone and get upstairs to the kitchen. And where was Amy? George grabbed her arm. “This is ridiculous. Let’s go.”

She didn’t hang up. “I’ll drive,” she said. “Or we’ll call a taxi.” She shouldn’t have raised the issue earlier — he might have remained malleable. Now he’d never give in.

“Grace, let’s go.” His voice was louder than last time, and the bartender glanced in their direction. Next time would be louder, she knew, and all these people would look up from their spaghetti in dismay.

She listened for one more ring, and one more ring, and one more ring. The rings lined themselves up like bathroom tiles. One more, one more, one more. George took the phone and hung it in its cradle.

Outside, Grace tried to catch the valet’s eye, hoping he’d figure out everything wrong, call the police or a cab, but he just sent a boy out to bring the car, and the boy opened Grace’s door for her, then struggled to slide it back. Everyone stared at the car, the strange and shiny car, and no one noticed the problem. George took off like they were being chased.

Down Sheridan Road, down the middle of it, really, with a sharp jerk to the right whenever another pair of headlights appeared. Grace hadn’t been out at night since all the leaves had fallen, and she realized with wonder that for the first time since they’d moved here in the spring, she could see the houses — see into them, even, as George tried to light a cigarette and compensated by suddenly driving too slowly. Those homes always seemed so hidden and empty, no life but for someone out on the sidewalk. Now, every illuminated room was a perfect frame of yellow. Each frame both a revelation and a further mystery. She’d forgotten that November was such a strange, unveiling time of year — not a deadening but a quickening. In the smaller houses, closer to the road, she could make out a clock, a shelf of plants, an old woman, a refrigerator. In the bigger ones, behind stone walls, just an occasional upstairs hall light. She wanted to climb into each frame, to live in each for a year. But then George picked up speed again.

She might say something about it, might see if George understood even a little bit. And if he did, she might tell him, tomorrow, about the baby too. The baby might change him. Perhaps change was possible even while staying put, staying with him, staying in the house.

They turned, and the right-side wheels went up on the curb and down with a horrible jolt. Her nausea returned, from the floor of her stomach upward in a wave, and she grabbed the door handle. She was too dizzy, too tired, to work up the appropriate anger at herself for getting into this situation, when she might have wrested the key from him or passed a note of distress to the bartender. Surely there was something she might have done. Wasn’t there always something to be done?

They turned again, and now he was going so fast that the lights in the houses were just blurs. She knew that if she asked him to slow down, he’d only speed up.

There was Laurelfield, dark and still, the gate open. George took the entry wide and fast and nearly clipped the gate. He turned toward the coach house without slowing. The gravel hitting up again, a thousand little bullets. “Look at that,” George said, meaning she should look up before they went through the open garage door, look at the bright windows of the coach house kitchen and Max’s rooms. “He’s home after all. The bastard is home.”

And she would have looked, she would have looked, but the gravel was still hitting too fast. The trees were coming too fast.