Mansions Of The Dead (12 page)

THE BRIDE STOOD FOR
a moment under the arched door at the end of the aisle. It may have been the way the spring light had gathered up behind her in the open church door, but she seemed, Sweeney thought, to be hovering in space, her father beside her, the strains of the Wagner wedding march rising up around the congregation. Her dress was blinding white and the voluminous veil, studded with pearls, shrouded her in mist.

They rose. When Katie and her father appeared at the end of the aisle, Sweeney couldn’t help but turn to look at her groom. He stood next to the minister, his face turned toward the sun in expectation. When he saw his bride, he smiled broadly and didn’t stop smiling.

The guests watched as Katie and her father walked slowly, arm in arm. When they reached Milan, Katie’s father lifted her veil, kissed her on the cheek, and let it fall again. She turned to her bridegroom, bravely, confidently, and stepped forward into a small pool of light on the red runner. The music stopped and they all sat down. It was very silent in the church. The minister began to speak.

Katie had met Milan in London. He was from Croatia, and his family’s home had been destroyed in the early days of the wars in the former Yugoslavia. A neighbor had died in his arms, and he had joined
the army and been responsible for more deaths. When it was all over, he had gotten a scholarship to the London School of Economics and met this American princess, working for an investment bank in London. Sweeney wondered suddenly how they’d come across each other. They seemed so entirely different that she had trouble imagining how that first spark had been fanned. But they were good together. She had been invited for dinner at their apartment in the Back Bay a few months ago and had liked their rapport—Katie a soothing, almost maternal presence, calmer and happier than Sweeney remembered her from college, making dinner and refilling their wineglasses. Milan, in his perfect but heavily accented English, had asked Sweeney about her work, talked about his wine collection, and closed his eyes when a favorite passage of classical music had come on the stereo.

Sweeney watched his face. A cloud must have crossed the path of the sun through the stained glass windows, because the shaft of light that had been illuminating the couple disappeared, leaving them standing there on the shabby carpet.

“Marriage is a leap of faith,” the minister was saying. “We go forward out of giddy love, not knowing what the road ahead holds for us. But we promise, and in promising we make real. Katie and Milan are promising themselves to each other today, not for the foreseeable future or until it’s no longer fun, but forever after, for the rest of their lives, and it is that promise that will hold them together when things get difficult, when sadness comes into their lives, as it surely will, when they are fighting, when they can no longer remember the emotions that bring them here today.”

Sweeney found herself remembering one of her parents’ almost-constant fights in the year before she and her mother had moved out. Her mother had been appearing as Lady Macbeth and she and her father had gone to the dressing room before the show. Sweeney’s parents had started to argue about something—Sweeney couldn’t remember what it was, though she remembered their words. Ivy had been wearing bloodred robes, her long, ramrod-straight reddish hair piled in elaborate braids on her head, her face pancaked and rouged.

“You’re so bloody selfish!” she’d screamed. “You don’t care about anyone but yourself ! I can’t believe you would do this to me now!” Sweeney had huddled in a corner and watched her mother, a petite, red fury, storming around the dressing room. Her father had done what her father always did, gone stony silent, staring at Ivy, egging her on.

Ivy had given one of the best performances of her life that night. She had inhabited her rage, explored it on stage in front of the audience, plumbed its depths. Six months later, she and Sweeney had left.

But then they had never gotten married. Her father had thought it bourgeois and unnecessary. Would these simple words have saved them? Would the fact of the ceremony have given her mother a reason to stay? Sweeney didn’t think so.

“I, Katherine Marie Swift, take you, Milan Simic, to be my husband,” Katie was saying, pronouncing his name lovingly the way he pronounced it, “Mee-lawn Sim-ich.”

As she spoke, the light returned. The voices went on and Sweeney found that tears were streaming down her cheeks. Toby looked at her curiously and took her hand, rubbing the top of her thumb in a comforting way.

“What God has tied together,” the minister said in a booming voice, “let no man put asunder.”

When the ceremony was over, Sweeney and Toby drove through Newport, along Bellevue Avenue toward Ocean Drive, Toby holding their gift—an ice cream maker from the gift registry that was the only one of the possible gifts that had attracted Sweeney when they’d gone shopping.

The tree-lined sidewalks passed discreetly by the big houses, the “cottages,” offering glimpses of high third-story windows. She had spent more time here than she’d spent almost anywhere else, but the sheer opulence of Newport always surprised her. It seemed incredible that there should ever have been enough money to have built The Breakers or Marble House or Rosecliff.

Or for that matter, Cliff House.

It was just as she remembered it, behind high gates toward the end of Bellevue Avenue, almost at the point where the road turned sharply.

“That’s the Putnams’ house, right?” Toby asked as they passed. Sweeney nodded, slowing the car so they could look through the black iron gates, the high turrets of the gray stone house. The sign on the gates read CLIFF HOUSE. PRIVATE. They could just see the sweeping grounds leading down to a high hedge over the ocean. The upstairs windows reflected the pinkish sky. Sweeney sped up as they passed and the house dissolved into pieces, flashing through the bars of the fence like the images in a child’s flip book.

“I always feel weird here,” Sweeney said after a few minutes. They had turned onto Ocean Drive and were passing Bailey’s Beach.

“Why?”

She glanced at the beach again. “You know, because of the way everyone treated us. My parents not being married and all that.”

“It seems hard to believe that it would have been that big a deal.” Toby, who had spent much of his childhood living on a Berkeley commune, was always surprised by Easterners and their strange sense of propriety.

“Well, it was. There were kids who weren’t allowed to play with me because of it. It always mortified my poor grandmother.”

They drove past the houses built by the more recently affluent, huge modern structures made of glass, with too-symmetrical stone walls and stark landscaping surrounding them. “Okay, this it. Number 496, on the left,” Toby said. She slowed and turned into a long drive. At the top, near another huge, stone house, half a dozen teenage boys in tuxedos were parking cars. Sweeney surveyed the detritus of her life that had washed up on the floors and seats of the Rabbit—papers, books, a pair of black socks, candy bar wrappers, and empty coffee cups. Well, she supposed they’d seen everything.

The parking attendant directed them toward the white tent that sat in the middle of the sweeping lawn. The entrance to the tent had been decorated with huge pots filled with spring bulbs in shades of pink and
white and violet—tulips and grape hyacinths and pale white narcissi. They put their box on the gift table and accepted glasses of champagne from the tuxedoed waiter who greeted them.

“Toby!” A group of women who looked vaguely familiar to Sweeney set upon them, hugging Toby and looking curiously at her.

“You remember Sweeney, don’t you?” he was saying, and the women were being kind and saying that they did, though Sweeney didn’t believe them. And for her part, she had only a vague sense that she remembered them, from freshman year, she thought, before everyone had gone off into their own little groups, groups they wouldn’t emerge from until senior year, in a fit of fellowship. Yes, of course, freshman year. They had been on her hall, as had Katie. Toby had been on the boys’ hall at the other end of the dorm and they had all kind of leaned on one another that first year.

She listened to Toby’s introductions and her good memory matched the faces with the names. Lily Nakamura, from New Orleans, Sweeney had always liked. She had been a biology major, Sweeney thought, and won some kind of prestigious prize their senior year. Hallie Tyler, who had joined the Peace Corps and been taken hostage in Tanzania. Something like that, though in her robin’s egg blue strapless dress and shawl, her blond hair in a chignon, a tall, happy date on her arm, she looked none the worse for wear. And finally—the fourth woman had wandered off to greet someone else—there was a woman named Hannah Allbright, who Sweeney remembered was from Boston. From a newspaper family, she thought she recalled.

They caught up for a few minutes, discovered they were all at the same table, and then Sweeney and Toby set off to find the bar. The tent had been opened at one end to afford a view of the water and it sparkled beneath them, pure and perfect.

“You doing okay?” Toby asked as they waited for their champagne. A passing waiter offered them blinis with caviar.

“Fine. Why?” Sweeney said through a mouthful of sour cream and fish eggs.

“I don’t know. You just get weird at these things. I always feel like I have to check up on you. And you wore that weird jewelry.”

Angry, she looked down at the jet pin and beads, hardly noticeable against her black cocktail dress. “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m fine. And you don’t have to check up on me. I know people here too. Why don’t you go back and talk to your girlfriends and I’ll find someone to talk to on my own.”

She took a champagne flute from the bartender and left him.

“Christ,” she heard Toby say behind her.

It would be all right. She’d find him for dinner and things would be fine. They fought like siblings most of the time, and if in the past it had masked a more complicated relationship, she felt confident that they’d resolve this one without any of the past angst.

A little over a year ago, when Colm had died in London, Toby had dropped everything to come and care for her.

And then at the end of the year, she had been able to return the favor. After what had happened in Vermont, after all those deaths and the wounds that had been inflicted on his family, they had spent most of January acting as though Toby were terminally ill. Every night, Sweeney had brought him takeout or made him elaborate and expensive dishes from recipe books she rarely used. They had watched movies and they’d drunk too much. Then, one night in late February, Toby had called her and said that he was going out with some friends and did she want to join them. Slowly, he began to seem more like himself.

On the first anniversary of Colm’s death, Sweeney had gone to Mount Auburn by herself and found one of her favorite graves, belonging to a sailor who had died at twenty-seven. Colm’s real one was in Ireland, of course. She hadn’t ever seen it. His parents had invited her to come for the wake, but she hadn’t felt she could. She had let Toby pack up her stuff and take her home. He had even made the phone call to the department, asking if she could teach.

But on that cold January day, she had mourned in front of that substitute grave.

And now after the long winter, it was finally spring. Two weeks had passed since Brad’s death and the sun had grown stronger, the days longer. Sweeney wandered over to the edge of the tent and looked out over the water, inhaling the wet, new scent of it. Below, the lawn was a fresh green and the flower beds were full of spring bulbs. The tulips had been planted in a progression of color, pink fading to white, then to palest peach and then to yellow as they swept across the beds. Overhead, the trees that shaded the lawn were leafing enthusiastically.

She was looking for someone she knew when she caught sight of Jack Putnam across the crowd, in mid-conversation with a middle-aged man. When he saw her he gave a little wave, gestured in her direction to the man, and made his way across the grass to her.

“Hi, I thought that was you,” he said.

He looked—really looked—at her, studying her eyes, and she recognized the little flutter of something in her stomach that she’d felt the first time she’d met him. He was wearing black tie, like all the other men at the wedding, but his suit looked somehow more modern than everyone else’s, and rumpled, as though he’d slept in it. His hair looked slept in too, but his eyes—
exactly
like Brad’s, it struck her again—were alert and interested.

She hadn’t said anything yet and he looked worried. “I’m not taking you away from anything, am I?”

“No, no. Hey. I was just going to have a scotch. Want one?” She raised her eyebrows in expectation.

He grinned. “Sure,” he said, and she ordered and handed him his highball.

There was an awkward silence and then Sweeney said, “So, how are you all doing?”

“Not great,” he said honestly, but his emotions were under control. There was nothing raw about him. “I thought that coming out to this”—he gestured around him at the party—”would be healthy, but I don’t know . . . ” He nervously patted the pocket of his tuxedo jacket, then looked out across the lawn beyond the tent. “I really need a smoke. Do you . . . ?”