Everlasting (3 page)

“It’s simple,” her father went on, “you
have
to go to college. People like us just don’t not go to college.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be like you,” Catherine said. She was speaking truthfully, for she knew she didn’t want to be like her mother and father and their friends. The problem was that she had no idea in the world what she wanted to be instead.

“Oh, I don’t think we have such bad lives,” Drew Eliot, Jr., said complacently, looking around him at the luxurious room.

Catherine thought of pointing out to him that this house was his mother’s house, built by his father, that he had never built a house himself, and that as far as she knew he didn’t work at all, at anything. But she had been taught that it was vulgar to discuss money, and she had no idea what kind of money her parents had. Still, it seemed to her that the inherited prerogative to sit in a room of beautiful furniture was not sufficient justification for a well-lived life.

But Catherine remained silent. Shelly argued like a bull ox when confronted by his parents, and Ann either went into pathetic orphaned child tears or into full-blown floor-kicking tantrums, but Catherine tried to hold her tongue. She knew this irritated her parents, but she found it too difficult to break into speech. Her most eloquent pleas had never helped her before.

“Your mother has asked me to pass on an ultimatum to you, Catherine,” her father said now, drawing himself up in his chair and trying not to look hung over. “If you apply and get into a college, any college, we will continue to support you in every way. If, however, you choose to continue this bizarre path of rebellion, we have no choice but to tell you that we will not support you. Not in any way. Once you turn eighteen, you’ll be on your own. We won’t allow you to live in the Park Avenue apartment or to summer with us on the Vineyard. You’ll have to find your own living accommodations—everything.”

“What about money?” Catherine said. Terror made her bold. She certainly couldn’t stay at school after this May when she graduated. If she couldn’t live at her home in New York, where would she live?

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—don’t I—isn’t there some kind of trust set up for me? Don’t I have some money of my own?”

“What money there was left for you went to pay your tuition all these years, and to buy your clothes, and pay for your traveling expenses, and so on. You’ve had an expensive childhood, Catherine.”

“But Grandfather—”

“All of my father’s money is in this house. And that belongs to my mother, to do with as she wishes.”

“But if I don’t go to college, couldn’t I have the tuition money?”

“No.”

“But why not? If you don’t have to pay tuition, why couldn’t you give me the money instead—”

“To do what with? To throw away? Why should we give any money to an uneducated, disobedient daughter? It’s out of the question, Catherine.”

Catherine and her father sat staring at each other then, antagonists.

Finally her father, weary, rose. “Well, I’ve said what I have to say. You’ve got the rest of the semester to think about it. I’m sure Mrs. Plaice will help you find some college that will admit you in spite of your grades. I don’t understand you, Catherine, nor does your mother. Testing indicates that you have superior intelligence, but your grades have been abysmal, as you know. You just have not applied yourself. We have tried to help you, and repeatedly you’ve met us with a brick wall. Quite frankly, we’re tired of battling with you. We’ve given you everything a girl could want, and in return you give us ingratitude and insubordination. If you don’t go to college, I’ll tell you in all honesty, we’ll just wash our hands of you.”

In any other place, Catherine would have risen now, too, and gone off with these last words from her father. But the library at Everly was a comfortable place in spite of its grandeur. Perhaps it was the presence of her grandmother’s cats and the cat hair that no amount of dusting could completely remove, or the worn spots on the sofas and chairs where people had curled, reading, and that had been rubbed by countless children’s hands as they had crouched behind the furniture, playing hide-and-seek. Perhaps it was the books themselves, which reminded her of different worlds beyond her own.

“Well, Dad, where do you think I should apply?” Catherine asked. She caught her father’s look—he was on guard, expecting some smart-aleck reply from her. But now she pitched her voice as perfectly as she could to the register of civility—even servility. “There are so many colleges. It’s confusing. And I don’t know what to major in. I don’t know how to choose.”

“Isn’t that what Mrs. Plaice is there for? Isn’t she supposed to help you choose colleges?”

“Yes. But I want to know what you think.”

She could feel her father’s impatience with her. He ran his hand over his forehead.

“I’ve got a cracking headache,” he said. “If you need to talk more, let’s do it later.”

“Well—all right, Dad.” Vaguely disappointed, Catherine left her father, shutting the door carefully so as not to aggravate his headache. She climbed the stairs to the second floor. The house was still quiet. Without thinking she went down the long carpeted hall to the left wing, where her parents had their bedrooms. She knocked on her mother’s door. When there was no answer, she turned the knob quietly. The door was unlocked. She stepped inside.

“Mom?” she called. Then, remembering how her mother hated being called “Mom,” she said, “Mother?”

A wicker bed tray sat on the floor with a silver pot of coffee and several stacks of emptied plates. The bedclothes were rumpled, and the room was overheated—how had her mother managed so much warmth in any one room at Everly? The heavy brocade drapes had been pulled shut against the winter cold and light, and the room was dim. Conflicting aromas hung drowsily in the warm room like a fog: her mother’s expensive perfume, the morning’s coffee and bacon and eggs, the sharp tang of alcohol, cigarette smoke.

The bathroom door opened, and before her mother could appear another smell drifted out: the pungent, thin, familiar reek of vomit.

The loud rush of water in the flushed toilet died down, and in the following silence, Marjorie Montgomery Eliot entered her bedroom. Her bronze hair hung around her head, released from its twist but still shaped by it, the thick ends of her hair curling up. Marjorie’s skin was pale and puffy, so puffy that the skin above her eyes and beneath her eyelids stood out in balloonlike ledges. Marjorie was holding the silk wrapper of her gown closed, one hand pressed against her stomach, as if she were holding her stomach in. She walked with caution to the chaise and gingerly settled her body on it.

“What are you looking at?” she said to her daughter. “I’m just hung over.”

Now Catherine could see the other signs—the golden edge of a large gift box of gourmet nuts and candied fruits protruding from under the chaise, the wastebasket brimming with crumpled emptied sacks of smuggled-in potato chips and pretzels, the serving tray from the kitchen set on the dresser, the silver dome hiding whatever remained of Marjorie’s late night or early morning snack. Old memories of similar smells and gagging sounds, of the sight of her mother’s head hanging into the toilet, her sun-streaked hair dank with sticky vomit, lurched through Catherine’s mind.

Catherine shrugged. “Dad was telling me about your ultimatum,” she said. “About colleges. I thought I should talk it over with you.”

Marjorie, with great effort, waved her hand, as if swiping at a fly. “Not now. Later. Go away.” She covered her eyes with a trembling hand.

Catherine turned and left the room. She climbed the stairs back to the nursery. Her parents would leave for their apartment in the city today, but Miss Smith and the three Eliot children would remain here one more night, before going on up to Vermont to a lodge for a ski trip … one of their parents’ Christmas presents to them and yet another way of keeping their children away.

Catherine walked up and down the long hallway, peering into the rooms. Shelly and George had already gone outside. Miss Smith was playing a heated game of Sorry with Ann on Ann’s bedroom floor. Catherine went into her room and sank down on her bed.

If only Leslie were here. If only she were Leslie. She envied her friend because Leslie had what Catherine didn’t—Leslie had talent. Leslie wanted to be an important painter, and that mattered to her more than anything else in the world. Even better, the art teachers assured Leslie that she had talent as well. Leslie knew exactly what she wanted to do when she graduated: she was going to study at a famous art school in Paris. She would live in a garret on the Left Bank, where she would paint and have lots of artistic love affairs.

Catherine had tried painting, but although she had some skill, she had no real aptitude for it. She had tried piano and flute lessons and for a while, when she was younger, had dreamed of being a prima ballerina, until her ballet teacher sympathetically pointed out that no matter how strenuously Catherine dieted, she would always have a bust that was, well, inappropriate for a dancer. She was no good at sports, because they bored her.

Over and over again during chapel, the girls were reminded of their good fortune in life, their
exceptional
good fortune at being Miss Brill’s girls, at the quality of their education, and at the duty this imposed on them to hold the standard high when they went out into the world. But no one had anything specific to suggest to Catherine. When she asked them what she should do with her life, the teachers and counselors grew impatient: why, she could do
anything
, she didn’t have to earn a living, she was well educated, she could go where her fancy took her. “Try volunteer work,” was as specific as they got, but Catherine had the example of her mother, that famous volunteer, before her, and she knew that was not the choice for her.

“Bored people are boring people,” Mrs. Plaice, the counselor, often said, and if so, then God knew Catherine was boring. Now she twisted on her bed, healthy, well fed, energetic, lost. She didn’t want to go skiing with her siblings and Miss Smith, and she didn’t want to go to college, but what did she want to do?

Restless, angry with herself, she rose, straightened her clothes, and went back downstairs. The guests were up and around now in the dining room, laughing at the long mahogany table, having coffee and a late breakfast. Now and then a car would start up with a roar and someone would leave, rolling down the long white-pebble driveway until it disappeared around a bend of evergreens.

No one was in the library now, but someone had made a fire that glowed and flared, warming the room. Catherine pulled her favorite old leather photograph albums from the shelf and curled up on a leather chair. The present faded as she lost herself in pictures of the past. Here was her grandfather, Andrew Matson Eliot, in a full-length beaver coat, top hat, and red mittens, waving at the camera from a group of friends, looking as if he were having more fun than any man had a right to have. He was wickedly handsome. Catherine had heard stories about him. She knew he’d been a cad and was probably responsible at least in part for her grandmother’s retreat from all others. Still, he always looked so exuberant. Catherine smiled every time she saw his face. She wished he’d lived long enough for her to know him.

Here were the pictures of Kathryn’s childhood home, the original Everly in England. Most of the photographs were blurry and curling with age, showing the house sprawling in a grand and formal dilapidation.

In contrast, the Boxworthy family, who now owned the British Everly, looked young, robust, infinitely attractive. Years ago, when Kathryn’s dissipated brother, Clifford, sold the estate to the Thorpes who then sold it to Dr. Boxworthy and his wife, Madeline Boxworthy had written to Kathryn Paxton Eliot. She wanted to revive the gardens and asked for any helpful advice Kathryn might have about how to go about it. This had resulted in a hearty correspondence between the two women, including eventually the arrival of photographs of the three Boxworthy children: splendid Ned, the eldest, and the sisters, Elizabeth and Hortense. Ned was Catherine’s age, the girls were a few years younger. They had always been Catherine’s dream family. They always looked so carefree, so jolly, as if caught in a bit of mischief. She wanted to
be
them. Or at least, someday, she wanted to meet them.

Suddenly restless, Catherine laid the albums aside and went off to search for her grandmother. Perhaps Kathryn would be in a sociable mood.

Catherine found her grandmother in the conservatory. This was a room Catherine was not fond of, for she found the plants that wintered here—the monstera and philodendron, schefflera and dracaena, the rubber plants and all the hanging plants whose tendrils brushed against her face or caught in her hair—slightly menacing, with their gnarled woody stems and far-reaching, beseeching leaves. Her grandmother’s joy was an enormous jade tree, as fat and glossy in its huge Chinese pot as a Buddha. She had been growing the thing for years.

Kathryn was watering her African violets. First she stuck her finger under each fuzzy leaf, testing the moistness of the dirt, her lips moving as she mumbled instructions about the plants to herself. At sixty-three she was still as ethereal in her beauty as an angel, and just about as approachable.

Every person in her family was a mystery to Catherine. Because her father favored daring, incorrigible Shelly, and her mother doted on baby-sweet beautiful Ann, the only living adult left to Catherine was her grandmother. She had after all been named after her.

But Kathryn was the most mysterious of all. At least Marjorie made it clear that Catherine was the embarrassment and Ann the embellishment of her life. Obviously Drew would feel closer to his male child. But Kathryn was an ambiguous woman, cool and vague, who made only one thing clear: that she preferred the company of flowers to that of people.

Catherine knew from the albums and newspaper clippings in the Everly library that her grandmother had been exquisitely beautiful as a young woman, with a delicate figure, blue eyes, blond hair, and serene, elegant manners. It was no wonder that Andrew Matson Eliot, a brash egotistical New York journalist, fell in love with her during World War I and brought her home to live with him. It was no wonder she fell in love with him—he was handsome, charismatic, infinitely charming. But he loved society and could never get enough of people, while his wife found people exhausting and became increasingly obsessed with her plants and gardens. Before the Depression—and before their divorce—he had bought her this house and the surrounding six acres. The rest of her life she had spent transforming the place into her garden, which was really several different sorts of gardens: an open meadow, which she had sprinkled with wildflowers and bulbs, the forest, the formal garden with its paths and fountains and steps down to the lily pond, the kitchen garden, the cutting garden. Kathryn had stopped pining for her English country home. She had been happy at this Everly—so happy that she hadn’t needed anything or anyone else.