Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (19 page)

Despite finding long johns at the Toggery, Peggy returned to the Sedgwick House discouraged by the state of the town.

Annette Fiorentino was in her front yard next door, raking leaves. She greeted Peggy. “What do you do all week? Ernestine
says you work in the city.”

“I own a little bath products shop,” Peggy answered. “Why are you picketing?”

“You own a little shop!” Annette wore a Baja pullover—a hooded Mexican jacket. Peggy hadn’t seen one since she was eleven
and had lived for eight months near the beach in Ventura. The non-Yankee garment made her like Annette that much more. “I’d
love to recruit you for our protests,” the neighbor continued. “We picket on Saturdays when the weather is good, more often
when there’s a specific threat.”

“Threat to what?”

“To our town. To its rural character, its history. To the health of our small local businesses—I’m sure you can relate.” Annette
scraped a few leaves off the tines of her rake. “We started picketing when the zoning commission approved Pilgrim Plaza out
on Route 202. We want to remind people that once you pave a place over, once you bring in the Star-bucks and the Gap and the
McDonald’s, you can’t go back. Please, join us. So far our group is mostly weekend people from New York and people like Angelo
and me who moved to New Nineveh from other places. Getting a local on board would be a big coup.”

Peggy would have loved to help Annette. “Miss Abigail would have a fit,” she told the neighbor sadly, and returned to the
Sedgwick House.

She changed into jeans, tidied her room, set her purse and tote bag at the top of the stairs, and knocked on the ballroom
door. As she’d expected, Luke was at his desk, his head bowed over his work. Probably writing poems to that redhead. For someone
who claimed never to have been consumed by love, Luke wrote some convincing verse.
Maybe he’s just in lust with her, not in love,
Peggy told herself, but felt no better.

“I thought I’d fix Miss Abigail lunch,” she said.

“She’s taking a nap,” Luke answered.

“In that case, I’m heading back to the city.”

Luke lifted his head. “Why?”

“I feel like I’m”—she didn’t know how to explain it—“in your way.”

“You’re not.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses on his shirt. Without them, his eyes had a directness that reminded Peggy of
Silas Sedgwick’s commanding gaze in the library portrait. Even more than the people in church, there was something not of
this time about Luke. It was hardly a stretch to imagine him in a high-collared eighteenth-century jacket and ruffled dress
shirt, exuding that same “my name is my destiny” confidence, presiding over generations of descendants as yet unborn. Except
that Luke, Tiffany had said, was unhappy in the world his family had created and which Miss Abigail guarded so ferociously.

“You asked why I didn’t help Milo yesterday.” Luke replaced his glasses, and the effect was gone. “This is why. When I was
ten, my mother got a second-degree burn on her thumb. We were at a clambake. She rinsed it with seawater, wrapped a towel
around it, and that was that. My father was an attackman on his lacrosse team at Yale. One time he got hit on the head so
hard that he passed out on the field and then came to, brushed himself off, and scored the winning goal on a behind-the-back
shot. There are two guiding Sedgwick family principles. Number one…” He counted them on his fingers. “‘If it’s easy, you’re
doing it wrong.’ Number two, ‘Pain builds character.’ So my parents didn’t swoop in if I stepped in a mud puddle.”

Peggy felt sorry for him. “That’s sad. And strange.”

“It’s the way I was raised.” He spun the chair so he was facing her, not the desk. “Also, I don’t talk for the sake of talking.
You need to know this if we’re going to get along. If I’m quiet, it means I have nothing to say. I’ll discuss financial concerns
affecting you, but personal issues are off the table. This has nothing to do with you. It’s simply who I am.”

“I understand.”

But she didn’t. Brock had been easy. When he was happy, he was happy, and when he wasn’t, she’d cook dinner and hand him a
beer and he’d be happy again. She’d never had to decipher the moods of her parents, who broadcast, to the point of exhaustion,
each thought, feeling, and, in her mother’s case, worry the moment it came up. Nothing in her experience had prepared Peggy
for friendship with a person so reserved.

She dropped off her rental car and arrived at the apartment to find Bex in pajamas in front of the microwave. “What are you
doing out of bed?” Peggy looked around. “Where’s Josh?”

Bex stretched. “Out with his brother. I gave him a reprieve. Meanwhile I’m so tired of resting I want to run up and down the
stairs about a thousand times. How was your weekend?” She kept her eye on the cup of instant cocoa revolving inside the microwave.

Peggy hit the “pause” button. “Don’t drink that. It’s all chemicals. I’ll make you real hot chocolate. Keep resting.” She
placed her hands firmly on Bex’s shoulders and steered her protesting friend back to bed. She fluffed up Bex’s pillows, smoothed
the sheets, and stood back so Bex could get in.

“You’re becoming me, all bossy and full of yourself,” grumbled Bex.

“I take that as a compliment.” Peggy tucked her in and returned to the kitchen to search the cabinets for cocoa and sugar
and cinnamon. Ten minutes later, she was back in Bex’s room with a steaming mug.

Bex sipped appreciatively. “You’re right. This is so much better. Now, how was your weekend?”

Peggy sat on the edge of the bed. “Luke and I are friends. That’s what we’re saying, anyway.”

“I don’t get it. What were you before?”

“I’m not sure. Hostile business associates, I guess.” Peggy pointed at the mug, and Bex passed it over. The hot chocolate
tasted heavenly, like comfort. She passed it back to Bex. “What do you think Luke saw in me in Las Vegas?”

“He’s your husband. Why don’t you ask him?”

“Right. He’d never say. He never says anything, really.”

“What do you expect, sweets? He’s a WASP. Withholding, unemotional, wears tweedy jackets, drinks too many gin and tonics.
That’s it!” Bex pushed away from her pillow, nearly spilling her cocoa. “Opposites attract. You’re everything he isn’t! That’s
what he sees in you.”

“I don’t think so.” Luke could be warm and funny when he wanted to be. And he had emotions—he wrote poetry.
But not to me,
Peggy reminded herself. Anyway, what was the point of dwelling on what she and Luke had or hadn’t seen in each other? This
wasn’t a relationship; it was a financial agreement.
I will not develop a crush on Luke Sedgwick.
“I’m surprised at you, using stereotypes,” she told Bex.

“All stereotypes have a basis in reality.”

“So you’re Jewish. I guess that makes you…what?”

“Oy.” Bex laughed. “Cheap, loud, and demanding. So when can I see this schmancy house of yours?”

“You don’t want to, trust me. It’s a wreck.”

“Then would you at least get me a cookie?”

This time Peggy rolled her eyes, but she returned to the kitchen just as her phone began playing its music in her purse. She
answered and was greeted with an earsplitting din punctuated by air-horn blasts and an announcer over a loudspeaker.

“Hey. I’m in Philly,” her caller shouted.

“Brock?”

“Big Eagles-Redskins game tonight. We’ve got about twenty minutes to kickoff and the crowd is going nuts. Must be a full moon.”

“Brock,” Peggy shouted back, “what are you doing?”

“How about dinner next week?”

“We’re broken up,” she bellowed, perhaps louder than necessary, just as Josh came in, taking earphones from his ears.

“Hi!” Josh hugged her. “Missed you this weekend.”

“Who’s that?” A beep from Peggy’s call waiting drowned out Brock’s question. It was typical: Either nobody paid her the slightest
notice or the entire world needed her at the same time.

Josh winked at her and went to check on Bex, faraway music still spilling out of his dangling earphones. The call waiting
beeped again.

“I just heard a guy say he missed you,” Brock persisted. “Are you with some other guy?”

“Yes.” Peggy’s heart beat faster at the half-truth. “It’s over between us, Brock.” She switched to the other call, ending
her conversation and any remnant of her former relationship with the press of one small but decisive button.

The waiting caller was, unmistakably, Miss Abigail.

“Dear? I’d like your parents’ address in California.” She would be in the den, standing, not sitting, somehow able to hold
that two-pound phone receiver to her ear. “I’d like to ask them to Thanksgiving dinner. It’s time we met.”

Peggy tried to shift mental gears. At least she could hear what Miss Abigail was saying. The Sedgwicks’ old phone got crystal-clear
reception. “That’s kind of you, Miss Abigail, but my parents can’t come for Thanksgiving.”

Thanksgiving. Peggy had not considered what she’d do on holidays. For the past seven years, while Brock worked at some football
game or another, she’d had dinner with Bex and Josh at Bex’s parents’ apartment. Peggy roasted the turkey; Bex’s dad, Allen,
baked mincemeat pie; her curly-haired whirlwind of a mom, Sue, zipped around trying to locate the gravy boat; her sister,
Rachel, who was a vegan, picked at the meal and sulked. For Christmas, Peggy generally traveled alone to Texas or Arizona,
wherever her parents had parked their RV. More often than not, Brock worked on that holiday, too, and on New Year’s Day. She
spent New Year’s Eve with Bex and Josh, or alone, with a good book.

“We’ll have them for Christmas instead,” Miss Abigail declared. “They’ll spend the week with us. Their address, please?”

Peggy thought fast and gave Miss Abigail her parents’ last permanent address, the house they had sold years ago. She hoped
Luke’s great-aunt wouldn’t notice the location wasn’t Palo Alto but San Jose, and that the post office wouldn’t send the letter
back. Peggy would forge a note back from her mother, sending regrets, and bring it to New Nineveh, claiming Madeleine had
accidentally mailed it to her instead of the Sedgwick House. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it would have to do.

Optimism wasn’t a state of mind in which Luke often found himself. He wasn’t altogether comfortable with the sensation, though
it was interesting, almost enjoyable. He wondered at its source but came up with no answer.

An hour or two after Peggy had left Sunday afternoon, Luke had heard coughing and come upon Abby in the shut-down east addition,
trying to drag the dust covers off the furniture. “It’s gone! Lost and gone!” was his great-aunt’s familiar, distressed refrain,
but then she’d dropped the search, seeming, blessedly, to forget about it, and had been in a cheerful mood since. Luke was
still trying to decide exactly when and how to tell her he and Peggy planned to start fixing up the house without tipping
her off that they were already set on selling it. But if her mood held, it might help soften the blow.

He slept better. He made a couple of daring trades. He wrote two poems with images of bright skies and birds on the wing—poems
so sunny, he couldn’t believe they’d come from him. They weren’t any good, but he’d finished them. It was a boon he wasn’t
questioning.

He went from room to room in the Sedgwick House with a legal pad and a gimlet eye, cataloging everything that needed to be
fixed or attended to, beginning with the ruffled fungus fanning from the corners of the basement and finishing with the splintery
balustrade around the widow’s walk on the roof of the main house. He stayed on the roof awhile, looking out over the garden
and then across to the Rigas’ place on Market Road. For much of his life he’d come up here simply for the fun of it, not to
check for leaks or to clear birds’ nests from the chimneys. At eight, he’d liked to stand alone, high above it all, Zeus on
Mount Olympus with an armful of lightning bolts. He’d spent his eleventh summer at the balustrade, throwing water balloons
at passing cars. The summer he was sixteen, he’d lost his virginity up here to a tape of “Margaritaville” with Ann Marie Scoggs,
a girl from Torrington High School, she of the tenth-grade cynicism and clove cigarettes. Not surprisingly, his parents and
great-aunt hadn’t approved of her, and she couldn’t comprehend them. In August, just before he’d returned to Andover, Ann
Marie had told him, “Your conservative shit bums me out, and Jimmy Buffett sucks,” and broken up with him. It had taken him
half the year to get over her, but now he looked back on the experience with fondness. If this roof could talk.

Back on the first floor, he came across Abby in the ladies’ parlor, having a discussion with her cat. “Nonsense.” She held
out a hand so a purring Quibble could rub it with his whiskery cheeks. “I’ll find that nest egg and then the only way they’ll
be able to take me out of here is through the coffin door—” She stopped talking as Luke came in.

“Find what?” he asked.

Abby petted the cat carefully.

Luke crouched down next to her. “Is it possible you’ve hidden more jewelry around the house?”

Quibble twitched the tip of his tail and darted from the room.

Abby chuckled. “All that jewelry was sold long ago. It’s just Elizabeth’s brooch left, and…”

“And what?” Luke mentally spun through all the jewelry he remembered. There couldn’t be anything of value left. Could there?

“There’s a box,” Abigail went on. “With a star. From Charles.”

It all made sense. This was what Abigail had been so keen to find lately. This was why she’d been tearing the house apart,
for an obscure gift from her lover Luke had never before heard about. More likely, he suspected, it was Abby’s dementia talking,
and there was no box.

But this was a fortunate break for him. “I’ll tell you what.” The mystery was solved, and he could use it to his advantage:
a harmless white lie to appease his great-aunt. “Peggy and I will find the box for you. On the weekends we’ll look for it,
one room at a time. We’ll do a little tidying and patching up as we go, too.”

Abigail’s gaze gave way to her piercing look. “You’re a credit to the family, Luke.”