Bittersweet (15 page)

I let out an involuntary, sharp laugh, fast and nervous, breaking his open gape. I turned my eyes back to the papers until a new silence, buzzing with something electric, descended upon us.

The papers concerning Samson’s grandson Bard Winslow; his wife, Kitty; his older sisters, Pippa and Antonia; and his younger brother, Samuel (who had lived to the tender age of six), were voluminous but not particularly personal. This was less scrapbook material, more of a legal and financial nature. Ledgers, contracts, tax returns.

My eyes had started to blur by the time Galway moved to sit beside me. Instantly I felt alive again. We worked in silence for a while, handing papers back and forth, our fingers almost touching. I asked him how the Winloch board worked.

“Winloch is essentially a small country.” He laughed when I rolled my eyes but urged me to consider the metaphor. “In Samson’s direct line, the firstborn son of each firstborn son becomes ‘king’
when his father dies. Then there’s the board, a parliament of sorts. And then the general population.”

“So your father is a dictator.”

He grinned. “Not exactly. There are checks and balances. He has to get at least two-thirds approval from the board to get anything passed.”

“How often is he overturned?”

Galway conceded his point. “My father can be very convincing.”

“Could he just go into someone’s house and take ownership of whatever he wanted?”

Galway sighed. “You don’t actually think they stole Indo’s painting, do you?”

It wasn’t until he asked me like that that I realized I kind of did.

“Indo is lovely, and emotional, and has a long history of being angry at my father,” he explained. “The painting was never technically my grandmother’s to give her. It belongs to the Winloch trust.”

“A trust your father—or any of the firstborn sons who come after him to rule this little fiefdom—can use to seize other people’s property.”

“It’s not like that,” he insisted.

“What’s it like?”

“Yes, technically every bit of Winloch belongs to the trust. And, in theory, that means none of it is really ours, and, in theory, my father is the one making the major decisions, and, in theory, he could just wave his arm over everything and claim it for himself. I don’t ‘own’ Queen Anne’s Lace and Ev doesn’t ‘own’ Bittersweet. But, for that matter, my father doesn’t ‘own’ Trillium either. It was a system built to make things evensteven, while also protecting the place from turning into some failed socialist experiment. No Winslow would ever unfairly seize something from another Winslow. It’s a matter of honor.”

“Do children inherit their parents’ cottages?”

“They often do, they just don’t technically own them. Tradition is stronger than whatever is legally approved.”

“And who gets preference when inheriting? Sons or daughters?”

He sighed. “Sons.”

I was beginning to understand why Banning’s sisters had left Winloch. My heart was fluttering, but I had to ask one more question. “Say someone wanted to give their cottage to someone outside the family. Say—a friend. How would that work?”

Galway shook his head. “I think it would be up to the head of the family to approve. Where did you—”

“Oh, I read it in one of the papers.” I gestured vaguely toward one of the half-filled boxes to cover my tracks. “Some cousin or something, I have a hard time keeping you all straight.”

“Honestly”—he shook his head—“unless the inheritor had married in or something, I doubt it’d ever be approved. He’d have to be pretty convincing.” He chuckled. “Or strong-arm his way in.”

The hairs on my arm stood up. “Like by finding proof of a serious transgression?” Indo had told me to keep my eyes out for “solid evidence of anything untoward.” Was she was expecting me to blackmail my way into Winloch?

Galway frowned. “Can you find me that paper? I’ve never heard of something like that happening.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Maybe over there?” I said vaguely. “To tell you the truth, it’s all bleeding together.” He started flipping through the box I’d gestured to. As he did, I seized upon the bankruptcy papers I’d discovered earlier. This wasn’t just an effort to distract him. Something he’d said made me see the document with new eyes.

“Winloch is held in trust,” I repeated.

“That was Samson’s vision.”

“Have you seen this?” I handed him the papers detailing the bankruptcy. He examined them for a while and frowned, then looked up at me questioningly.

“This is nineteen thirty-two, I think,” I said, looking at the numbers over his shoulder. “Three years after the stock market crashed.”

He nodded.

“And this,” I said, handing him a financial statement that showed the Winslows to have hundreds of thousands in assets, “is from only two years later.”

He pored over the document.

“Lots of families filed for bankruptcy and lost everything,” I continued. “But I bet not many came out of the crash not only keeping a place like Winloch but even richer than they were before.”

He cocked his head to one side. I noticed the particular green of his eyes, tinged with a smokiness that reminded me of the ponderosas back home. “So?” he said.

“Aren’t you curious?”

“Curious about what?”

“About what your grandfather—third king of Winloch—did to keep this place.” It wasn’t so much that I thought I would discover anything worth Indo’s time, more that my mind had finally snagged something worth pursuing. I couldn’t imagine letting it slip from my grasp. I could see him hesitating. “Oh, come on, you think I’m hatching some diabolical scheme to bring the Winslows down?”

His eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Of course not.”

“So then let’s find out what happened.” I leaned down to his ear, felt my hot exhalation pool there. I felt powerful just inches from his skin. “It’ll be fun.”

E
v finally slunk from our bedroom well past eight that night, her slender frame brittle and hunched. She was sober in body and spirit. Though I hated not confronting her right away about what a wretched position she’d put me in with Murray, I couldn’t help but take pity on her pathetic, hollow-eyed self. I served her up Masha’s leftover chili and sat with her at the kitchen table, looking down at our darkening cove as the bats darted for mosquitoes.

She finished her bowl in silence. “More?” I asked.

She shook her head as her eyes filled with tears. I reached across the table for her tight hand, but she pulled it away. “Don’t be nice to me,” she sobbed.

“Would you rather I tell you Murray is a monster and you’re a horrible friend for leaving me alone with him?”

She nodded, hiccuping through her tears. She looked like a child.

“What did you do with Eric?”

Her lips curved into a heartbroken smile. “Everything he wanted.”

“You’re better than that.”

She shook her head. “It’s like I’m infected, and everything, everyone I touch gets it. You shouldn’t—you should just stay away from me, Mabel. I mean it. Go back to your family. Go home.”

My first reaction was to rail at her. But I stopped myself. I knew
what it felt like to be Ev. To believe you were a pariah. A poison. A ruiner.

Like it or not, the memory of my mother’s voice came back to me: “Be sweet.”

I stood. Put my arms around Ev’s shoulders. Held her until her tears dried.

Like little girls, we crawled into the same bed that night, brushed each other’s hair, and made shadow puppets on the ceiling. The monkey lamp on the Hepplewhite table between our beds cast a comforting corona over the room. Ev whispered she was sorry, and awful, that she would buy me anything to make up for horrible Murray and his horrible hands. Her feet found mine. Her toes defrosted.

“Mabel Mabel Mabel,” she murmured as she drifted off to sleep, “don’t change a thing, I love you just the way you are.”

The next day was perfect for a wedding. Ev and Lu and I set out to pick wildflowers as ordered by Tilde with a pinched smile, and arrived back from the Winloch meadows with burred, laden arms—black-eyed Susans, tiger lilies, daisies—before heading into Trillium to help with the arrangements, which would be set along the pathway to the wedding tent (“Why they couldn’t hire the florist to do this is beyond me,” Tilde griped). We were all in better moods—Ev, I supposed, for being free of the Eric drama; Lu because of Owen; and me because of what I’d discovered in the Dining Hall attic and the person I’d discovered it with. In and of themselves the papers about the bankruptcy were nothing, but in contrast to the veritable wealth the Winslows had boasted only two years later, I knew they revealed a story, something secret, maybe even untoward, and my heart skipped at the thought of not having to discover that story alone.

Cousin Philip’s bride-to-be was sweet as apple pie. She took me for a servant, but I could hardly blame her for asking me to find her another pair of panty hose; the phalanx of Winslow staff
was impossible to track. In the second bedroom, the bride’s future mother-in-law hemmed and hawed over which dress to wear, while, in the meadow below us, Tilde insisted loudly that the rental company absolutely must return to move the tent ten feet to the left for the sake of the ceremony view, and, all the while, the heady smell of sandalwood incense poured across the open meadow from Indo’s downwind porch, until someone was dispensed to extinguish it. Ev and Lu rolled their eyes from the sidelines of this circus, but they and the other girl cousins, many of whom had married in, were warm to Philip’s fiancée. I staved off jealousy, even though this was the day another girl was becoming a Winslow for good.

The wedding was to be held at five, followed by a cocktail hour on Flat Rocks, and then dancing under the stars. I stopped to pee at Indo’s house after I changed into my dress at Bittersweet.

“I found something,” I mentioned. “Bankruptcy papers from the thirties. Is that what you wanted?”

She was draped across the love seat in a kimono, a wet washcloth upon her brow. She lifted a finger to her lips.

I came closer. “Why don’t you just come out and tell me what you want me to find? It would save us both a lot of time.”

She pulled herself to sitting. It didn’t look easy for her. “You need to know what we’re made of, my dear. What has made us Winslows.”

I sat down. “Sure, right, you’ve pretty much already said that. I get it, you’re all very fancy and mysterious and believe this is a little country that no one else can be a citizen of, but it’s not lost on me that you Winslows aren’t exactly friendly to outsiders. I imagine your brother wouldn’t love the idea of me poking into your secrets.”

She patted my knee. “Too bad I can’t trust anyone else.”

“What makes you think you can trust me?”

She rose and drifted from the living room.

“I don’t have to help you, you know,” I called behind her. “I could just stop searching.”

I waited on her couch. It took her a good fifteen minutes before she revealed herself, wearing a dashiki I knew would make Tilde’s head explode. “Ah,” she intoned, as though the conversation hadn’t paused for even a moment, “but I know you won’t.”

We ate well: whole lobsters, peekytoe crabs, risotto balls, oysters, quail and pasta primavera and grilled artichokes and more, followed by individual molten chocolate cakes topped with freshly churned ice cream. The feast almost justified the bride’s father’s jokey thirty-minute toast, which tried, in vain, to make up for the fact that he had obviously paid for none of this. The waiters wore bow ties. The wine and spirits flowed freely. Although this was a “country” wedding (an adjective I’d heard Tilde deploy with a certain trace of disappointment more than once that day), I had never been at anything so fancy in my life.

At the first strains of music from the band, Ev and Lu and the rest of the young Winslows got up and danced to a song about lost love that I didn’t recognize but everyone else knew by heart. I stayed in my seat, and was surveying the space when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find Galway standing above me, holding out his hand.

I took it, assuming he was asking me to dance. But instead he led me across the tent, past round tables festooned with rustic floral centerpieces and pillar candles, and to a table closer to the water, where a tiny white-haired woman held court. She was surrounded by a handful of rapt older gentlemen, Birch included, and I tugged against Galway’s hand, shy to be introduced. He squeezed back in response and offered a reassuring smile.

“Gammy Pippa,” he said, crouching before the matriarch, “I’d like you to meet my friend Mabel.”

The woman looked up at me, and, a moment later, joy overtook her face, which was already warm, open, and lined with wrinkles.
Age had only enhanced her great beauty. She reached her hand up to take mine. “Hello, dear.”

The men around us watched as I crouched before the old woman. I found myself flushing as Galway placed his hand on my lower back.

“I can see you’re someone special,” she said to me, but I could tell she was really describing me to Galway, as though giving her stamp of approval.

“She’s Genevra’s roommate,” Birch cut in from above.

Gammy Pippa’s face registered a flash of irritation, but she didn’t succumb to it. Instead she placed her hands on either side of my face. It was an intimate gesture, one I was not expecting. “But we’re keeping her, right?” What on earth had Galway told her?

“Pippa,” Birch admonished sharply, “Let the poor girl go. She’s not interested in us old folks.”

The woman withdrew her fingers from my cheeks as quickly as she’d put them there, and I instantly felt woozy. The room swam. I stepped back, stumbling on Ev’s borrowed platform shoes, and Galway caught me. “Are you okay?” he asked, but I knew they were keeping track of us, and what I wanted, in that moment, was to be invisible.

I pulled myself away from him and lurched toward the outside. As I left the tent, I heard Birch remark to the gathered quorum, “Someone’s been drinking.”

My face burned. I fought back hot tears. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I felt wretchedly embarrassed. What did that mean—“keeping her”? I heard Galway call after me, but I raced ahead, nearly tripping on a root of the shade tree planted at the corner of the Trillium property. I gathered myself, and headed for the grand home.