Seating Arrangements (13 page)

Eventually he forgave his father’s rare gaffes because he knew that Tipton’s father had been the one to pull the family up and establish them in the white stone house. Tipton, then, really
was
new money, and his missteps, while unfortunate, were understandable. Winn’s mother came from genuine society stock, but she had been away for much of his childhood making her slow migration through various places of recuperation. She returned home for good only when he was fourteen and off at Deerfield.

The Ophidian Club was a brick building on a brick street, tall and narrow with black shutters and, over its door, the graven image of a snake swallowing its own tail. Though it would not have Tipton—Tipton had been a member of the slightly inferior Sobek Club for Gentlemen—the Ophidian welcomed Winn, and after his initiation (a night of equal parts revelry and good-humored humiliation), he
went home for a day to rest and to gloat. He had thought his father would ask about the secrets he was now privy to, and he looked forward to demonstrating the dignified silence all Ophidian members were sworn to adopt in the face of inquiry, even though, really, he longed to tell about the roasted rattlesnake, the Greek mottoes, the medal with the club seal he was given to wear around his neck, the bawdy recitations, the feeling of being anointed. But Tipton only sat in his chair and listened to the radio, and for dinner he went out to the Vespasian Club and did not invite Winn along. Winn ate alone beneath Tipton’s portrait and then went up to see his mother.

“Is this club any good?” she said. She was lying on a sofa beside a window, a tray of untouched dinner on a low table beside her. She seemed much older than she was. Her hair had been allowed to go gray; her hands and neck were withered, her face slack, and the rest of her was hidden in the folds of her robe and blankets.

“It’s the best one,” Winn said. “They hardly take anyone. Everyone wants to be in it.”

“That’s fine, then,” she said, gazing down at the street below.

He waited, and then he said, “Daddy wanted to join, but he wasn’t invited.”

She turned back to him, her colorless lips pursed. “Really?” she said. “How marvelous for you, Winnie, how really wonderful. What did your father say when you told him?”

“He congratulated me.”

“But was he happy? Did he seem truly happy for you? Tell your mother the truth.”

“He was happy.”

She picked at her bedclothes. She waggled her head and shrugged her shoulders as though engaged in silent conversation. A car passed outside, drawing her eyes to the window.

“Actually,” Winn said, “he wasn’t as happy as I thought he’d be. I thought he’d want to know things. I thought he’d be pleased a Van Meter got himself on the Ophidian books.”

“Do you think he’s jealous?” Her fingers clutched her blanket. “Oh, my Tipton. Jealous as can be. It was the same way with him and
his father—you couldn’t tell where the envy stopped and the disappointment began. They’d rather have you think they’re disappointed, you know. Keeps them up on their throne.”

Winn thought of the Ophidian snake with its tail in its mouth, called, like the club’s president, the Ouroboros. “I did what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to be in a club, and since he always talks about the Ophidian, I thought he’d want me to be in the Ophidian. If he wanted me to be in the Sobek, he should have said so.”

“Cold fish,” his mother said to her hands as they worried the blanket. “Cold fish.”

Beneath the Ophidian’s beamed ceiling, long days were lavished on the triangular bliss of club chair, snifter, and cigarette. His nights, whenever possible, were spent pursuing girls. Radcliffe girls were fine when he could get them, but since they tended to be serious and scholarly and lived in chaperoned fortresses, he mixed in some local girls who worked in the shops in the Square, a few Wellesley girls, and the occasional high school girl.
Youth is the best excuse you’ll ever have
, he told himself. He dated girls as varied as the dogs in a dog show—tall and studious Miranda Morse; busty Deborah Latici; Michelle Fleming, the violinist and rank bitch; Bobbie Hodgson, who worked in a bakery. All had something to contribute to either his social standing or his sexual experience, and any girl who was an asset to both he was happy to call his girlfriend for a while. These were the liaisons of youth, made lightheartedly and extinguished with a delicate touch. And when, in one memorable afternoon, Winn kissed Lily Spaulding and touched her breasts and then walked up a flight of stairs to kiss her friend Isabelle Hornor and make forays beyond the woolen frontier of her hemline, he did so in the spirit of good fun.

As graduation approached and then passed, sending him into the city to join the white-collared, steel-livered ranks of young working bachelors, he began to experience a nagging inkling that his father’s benediction was nearing its expiration date. Tipton never said so, never expressed any disapproval, but neither did he make any further mention of youth and excuses. When Winn went home, which he did with diminishing frequency, Tipton took him to the Vespasian
for long, somber meals during which father and son commented only on the news of the day and the deaths and marriages of family acquaintances.

While Winn believed that worthwhile young men must be carefree, he also believed that worthwhile grown men must bear up under the burden of respectability. He puzzled over when exactly the music should be stopped and the drunks sent home and the crepe paper swept from the floors to make room for cribs and Labradors.
Is it now?
he wondered as he set down his drink and turned from a conversation with a beautiful girl to vomit into the swimming pool of his friend Tyson Baker. When he heard some months later that Tyson Baker had died during a game of pond hockey, dropping through the ice like a lead weight, he thought,
Is it now?
Waking up to find a clammy section of his date’s stocking draped in a gauze mask across his face, breaking a champagne flute with a butter knife at a wedding when he meant only to chime for a toast, chipping a tooth on the sidewalk outside an all-night pancake house. At Christmas. Every New Year’s. Every birthday. At funerals, weddings. When he listened at the door while a girlfriend lay crying in her bathwater.
Is it now? Is it now? Is it now?

He had thought in college that the age of twenty-eight sounded like an appropriate endpoint to youth, and he resolved, as the day drew nearer, that he would indeed turn over a new leaf. He spent his twenty-eighth birthday at the house of a friend, playing croquet on a lawn that, beyond the last wicket, dropped dramatically to the sea. His partner was a silly girl who said, “I thought I had that one!” after every botched shot. She tried to turn her incompetence into a joke by saying that he didn’t like her for her croquet skills anyway, but he had, in fact, brought her along because she claimed to be good at croquet. Between her ineptitude and the rum cocktails they had invented at lunch, he managed to lose a hundred dollars on the game. He decided he could not begin his adulthood so ignominiously and postponed it yet again.

In the end, it was his father’s death that made Winn, then thirty-one, a man. At the funeral, while some school friend of Tipton’s
droned a reading from scripture, Winn felt the last grains of his youth run out. His father had kept the hourglass tilted up on one edge for him, cheating time a little, but now, with the evaporation of those paternal hands, the glass had thumped level, the sand an ash heap in the bottom. Tipton had been seventy-one, taken out by an aggressive prostate cancer that he refused to fight. His golf partner stepped up to the podium and cleared his throat. “A reading from the book of Revelation,” he said into the microphone. He looked strange in his dark suit, without his argyle vest and pom-pommed club covers. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” With his father gone, Winn was the man of the family, and since his mother was certain to be soon pulled under by the collective suction of her imagined ailments, there would not be much time before he would, in fact,
be
the family, one man with all the departed Van Meters riding on his shoulders. He had pockets of cousins and aunts and uncles around the Northeast: none on his father’s side but all drooping from the same listless Brahmin branches as his mother, all short and with overlarge Hapsburg chins, members of a dynasty that had lingered a few generations too long. He scarcely counted them as family.

While giving his eulogy, Winn noticed a girl in the fourth or fifth row, Elizabeth Hazzard, called Biddy, whom he knew but not well, only as the daughter of a distant associate of his father’s. She handed her handkerchief to the woman beside her, perhaps her mother, but she did not dab her own eyes. The sight caused him to pause, and he cleared his throat as though fighting back tears. When he continued, he found himself speaking mostly to Biddy, telling her about his father, how Tipton had been a dignified, honorable man, well respected by all who knew him, a fine role model. He liked that she was not someone who cried at funerals as though tears were a requirement like applause at a tennis match. He liked her navy blue dress, the no-nonsense cut of her hair, the lingering traces of her summer tan, the upright way she held herself. Possibly he was being untoward to cruise for a girlfriend at his own father’s funeral, but he could summon no guilt, only gratitude, for Biddy’s presence. In her tidy face
he saw hope and freshness, while all around him hung tapestries of decay.

They married less than a year later on the lawn of her parents’ house in Maine. The guest list was kept short because he was still mourning his father. Biddy put a cherry blossom in his lapel that later fell out unnoticed. His mother stayed inside and watched from a window, claiming she was too fragile for the sea air. Biddy’s dress was restrained, almost plain. Harry Pitton-White, Winn’s best man, had a stomach flu and swayed beside him during the vows like a nearly felled tree. In his toast, Biddy’s father said he was glad Biddy had married a man who would never do anything foolish, which Winn took as both compliment and threat. After he and Biddy departed for their oppressively floral room in a creaky bed and breakfast, the tanked-up groomsmen and bridesmaids went skinny-dipping in the frigid springtime Atlantic, a stunt that made Winn wistful and jealous when he heard about it at brunch the next day. Underneath her wedding dress Biddy wore a white garter belt and stockings that he found unbearably sexy but did not tell her so, not wanting to embarrass her by making a fuss and also incorrectly assuming she had a whole trousseau of lingerie that she would, without prompting, trot out over their first year. Silence over stockings—the first regret of his marriage.

He thought he remembered most of his wedding day, but he had no memory of the preparations for it, certainly not of anything like the hullabaloo surrounding Daphne’s. His wedding had been a wedding, not a family reunion and missile launch and state dinner all rolled into one. Possibly Biddy and her mother had gone through agonies of decision and obsession, comparisons of all the shades of white and all the flowers in the world, but he had been off doing other things, working and golfing and fulfilling the drunken rites of his last hurrahs. These days, though he could still plead work or golf, his absences did nothing to slow the flooding of his house and in-box and the entire consciousness of his wife with invitations and hairstyles and flatware and string quartets and the question of whether chocolate ganache on caramel cake would be too rich. He found himself forming
strong opinions on things he had never before contemplated—guest books and party favors, napkins and centerpieces. “Daylilies,” Biddy incanted in her sleep. “Tulips.” Painful quantities of checks, bushels of them, enough for a ticker-tape parade, flew from his desk, alit briefly on the fingertips of Biddy or Daphne, and then winged off into the ledgers of the florist or the dressmaker or any other of the gang of tradeswomen who were merrily chipping away at his bank accounts.

“Well, it’s a rush job,” Biddy said, “and that’s an additional cost, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

She was right. There was nothing to be done. Greyson was perfectly appropriate. He wore neckties and belts printed with ducks or whales and was affable at all times. He enjoyed sailing and rowing and dancing and parties. Five years out of college, he had already made headway on a fortune for himself but shied away from anything flashy or crass, choosing to wear frayed khakis and drive a Nissan remarkable for its antiquity and smallness, which Winn took as a mark of good breeding. Indeed, Winn would have felt nothing but proud pleasure about the match if not for the bump in Daphne’s wedding dress. Already her finger had swollen beyond the capacity of her carefully chosen wedding band, and a stunt ring had to be bought at the last minute for use in the ceremony.

“They both went to Princeton,” Winn had said to Biddy after the simultaneous announcements of impending birth and nuptials. “They have responsible jobs. You would think they could figure out how to use birth control.”

Biddy said, “I think they might not have cared very much. Daphne wanted a baby. They knew they were getting married eventually.”

“They should have thought of us,” Winn said.

Six · Your Shadow at Evening

T
he Duff family arrived ten minutes before they were expected. Winn was in the kitchen snipping chives when Celeste’s voice rang down from the widow’s walk. “Duffs, ho!” she called. By the time he gained the outdoors and was standing, still in his apron, by the red front door with a hand raised in greeting, a caravan of rental cars had emerged from the trees: first a plain white sedan—good old Duffs not going in for any frills—and behind it two Jeeps, tops down, roaring up the drive as though bringing General Patton to the front lines. They parked in a neat row along one edge of the clearing, and Greyson sprang out of the first Jeep, calling out a greeting to Winn and in the same breath tossing back some nonsense to the two boys with him. Winn gave a hearty, “Hi there, men!”