Sleeping Beauty (2 page)

Down the row of seats she saw Uncle Charles shift restlessly, crossing and recrossing his legs, and she wondered if he was feeling sick or just had to go to the bathroom. He wasn't too uncomfortable to be interested in someone, she saw; he kept turning his head to look at the side aisle. She tried to follow his gaze, but she saw no one she recognized. A group of men casually dressed, probably from Tamarack, a few corporate types, a few women who looked like secretaries, a strikingly beautiful woman in a severe dark suit, standing partly behind one of the men. No one she knew. Rose shrugged and faced the front again, putting a cautionary hand on Gretchen, who was beginning to squirm. And why wouldn't she squirm? Funerals were no place for a three-year-old. But Charles had insisted they all come. As if to convince himself they were one big happy family.

Gail Calder, sitting on the other side of her daughter, Robin, saw her father and her cousin Rose turn to look up the side aisle. She looked, too. She studied the people standing along the wall; they stood two and three deep, and she tried to make out the faces in the dim light. She stared for a long moment. And then she whispered, “Anne?”

“I don't mean to sound too solemn about Ethan,” said Ervin, gathering up his notes. “We had some rousing times together. But what I'll miss most is his affection, the way he cared about people—”

Others saw the family looking to the side aisle, and the swaying and rustling grew, with a rising hiss of whispers.

“Who're they looking at?”

“Got me.”

“Who's that?”

“—and gave them his attention and his energy . . .” Ervin looked toward the side of the chapel, then, seeing nothing untoward, he looked sternly at his audience and
raised his voice. “And his help. He was always my friend. To many of us, he was the best friend we ever had. He leaves an emptiness in our lives that no one can fill. That's what we're here to acknowledge as we say, for the last time, farewell.”

There was a brief silence. Ervin picked up his notes and returned to his seat. The minister came to the podium to close the service. And the whispers grew louder.

“I don't know who she is. She look familiar to you?”

“You know, she does. Something about her . . . I've seen her; I'd bet on it.”

“She looks a little like Gail. Wouldn't you say? But . . . sleeker. You know, like somebody took Gail and polished her up.”

“Um, could be. She looks a lot harder, though.”

“Right, but I bet she's a Chatham. Some branch of the family, anyway.”

“Leo,” said Gail to her husband, her hand clutching his arm. “I think Anne is here.”

“Where?” Leo asked, turning. “Would she show up, do you think, after all these years?”

Neighbors from Lake Forest craned to look. “I'll be damned. You know who that could be? The older sister . . . what was her name? Anne.”

“Whose older sister?”

“Gail's. But I don't know, she doesn't really
look
like Gail; there's just something . . .”

“What happened to her?”

“She ran off, oh, fifteen, twenty years ago. Maybe more.”

“Ran off?”

“Well, they said she went to boarding school, but she never came back, so . . . Anyway, that's what people were saying. She ran off.”

“So she'd be Charles' daughter. Ethan's granddaughter.”

“If it's really her.”

“Why would she run off?”

“Who knows? You know what kids were like in the sixties . . . sex, drugs, bombs, revolution. Whatever.”

“Friends,” said the minister, “the family has asked me to
make a few announcements. Interment will be at Memorial Park Cemetery. The family will be at home . . .”

At the end of the front row, Dora Chatham put her hand on her father's arm. “Everybody's looking at that woman.”

Vince, who had been reading, looked up. “What woman?”

Dora inclined her head and Vince turned. His eyes met Anne's. “For Christ's sake,” he said softly. Anne was the one who looked away.

Gail stood and moved past Leo and their son, Ned, to the side aisle. She walked up it, her stride getting longer and more determined with each step. By the time she reached Anne, her hands were outstretched. “You are Anne, aren't you? I
feel
that you're Anne. Wouldn't a sister know—?”

Their hands met, and held. “Hello, Gail,” Anne said softly.

Senator Vince Chatham watched them embrace. After a moment, he hung an arm over the back of his seat and beckoned to his nephew Keith Jax, seated just behind him. “That woman,” he said when Keith leaned forward.

“The one everybody's looking at? You know her?”

“Get rid of her,” Vince said. “Find out what she wants, give it to her if it isn't a problem, and then get rid of her. And see that she doesn't come back.”

A
nne was thirteen when Vince began coming to her bedroom and opening the door without knocking. He was thirty, the handsomest man she knew, bright with charm, successful in business, her father's favorite brother. Her father's favorite.

She had always been in awe of him because of the way her father treated him: as if he were some kind of prince; as if he were the center of the family. She knew he wasn't; her grandfather Ethan ran the family and made all the rules, and Vince had to obey them just like everybody else. But still, when her father and Vince were together, her father seemed to shrink, and Vince, even though he was eleven years younger, and shorter than her father, seemed to grow taller and more handsome. Next to her father, who was always quiet, Vince was full of excitement with his travels and his business deals, and it was hard to remember that he was just one of the Chathams who lived in Lake Forest, north of Chicago, and worked in the family company, and besides, was the youngest of Ethan's five children.

They all lived within a few miles of each other, and whenever they were in town and didn't have an important engagement, they had to meet at Ethan's house for dinner, every Sunday and on birthdays and holidays. It was Ethan's rule, and everyone, even Vince, who hated rules, obeyed it. They would sit around the long table in the beautiful room Anne's mother had redecorated for Ethan shortly before she
died, and one by one, they would tell about their week. Ethan always spoke first, and Anne loved listening to him as he reported with grave courtesy about Chatham Development Corporation—new houses, new shops, entire towns rising from the cornfields surrounding Chicago—and how that day they had planned the school site or laid out the shopping center or named the streets. Every Chatham town had streets named Vince, Charles, Anne, Marian, William, Gail, and on through the whole family. Ethan was too modest to name streets for himself, but his son Charles always did it for him, and then all the Chathams were there, enshrined on metal signs that swayed in the Midwest winds and pointed the way to the houses the Chathams had built.

When Ethan finished speaking, Charles spoke, and then Vince. Anne's attention would begin to waver because she thought business was dull. She preferred watching the faces around the table, imagining what they were thinking behind their smiles and chuckles and little frowns. They all seemed to be happy that they were eating together, but Anne knew you could never be sure; you had to dig a lot deeper than a smile or a frown to know what people were really like.

All the men worked together—Charles and Vince were vice presidents, William was finance director, and Marian's husband, Fred Jax, was sales manager—but each week they had different stories to tell, and Anne always wondered if they divided up the interesting news when they got together for drinks before dinner, so everyone would be impressed with how much they did each week. The women did the same: they had their own stories to tell. Vince's wife, Rita, told them what new words Dora, who was three, had said that week, and which swimming and calisthenics classes they had gone to. Nina talked about whatever small company she was investing in, and sometimes about getting married, or divorced. It seemed to Anne that Nina got confused about beginnings and endings; she always hoped for something good, or something better, whether she was starting a marriage or saying good-bye to one. Anne's sister, Gail, who was seven, talked about school or summer camp. Rose and Keith, who were two, just ate and made a mess
with their food. Anne would have been silent if she could, but she was thirteen and had no excuse. She talked about her friends.

“Amy and I played word games by the pond.”

“Amy?” asked Ethan. “Is that a new friend?”

“Sort of. She lives a couple of blocks from here.”

“What's her last name?” Marian asked. “Do we know her family?”

“I think we should let Anne keep her friends to herself,” Ethan said as Anne flushed. “Is that all?” he asked her. “You don't have anything else to tell us about your week?”

She shook her head, loving her grandfather but angry at him at the same time because he never spent as much time with her as she wanted. She loved him so much she wanted him all the time; he was the gentlest of all of them, and he seemed interested in her, and Anne hated it that so many people came between them. Of course he had his very important business and his very important friends; he had his own life. He was far too busy to spend time with Anne—and anyway, he probably wasn't that interested. Why would a sixty-five-year-old man want to hang around with a thirteen-year-old girl, even if she was his granddaughter?

It sounded sensible when she thought about it that way, but still, it made her angry. She seemed to be angry most of the time, at a lot of people. She didn't want to be; she just was. She hated people and she hated a lot of things that happened around her. She'd felt that way ever since her mother died. That was when she was seven, and Marian had come one night to take her and Gail to Ethan's house, where she was living. And then a little later she married Fred Jax and took Anne and Gail to a different house, and almost right away had Keith and then Rose. Starting with the time Marian took her from her own house, Anne never felt she belonged anywhere.

And that was when she started hating. It was something she couldn't stop, even though it made her feel different from everybody else, and always alone. It wasn't that her family didn't pay attention to her; they did. But it seemed to
her it was mostly to criticize, and mostly about dirt: she didn't wash her hair or comb it, she didn't wash her face, she didn't clean under her nails, she tracked dirt into the house. All over the world people were starving or thrown in jail for talking about freedom, or sleeping in the streets because they didn't have a house, but
her
family worried about
dirt.
They criticized her for disappearing for hours into the woods near their house, too, but Anne knew they really didn't care what she did. They just wanted her to be quiet and nice and clean, and make them feel good about doing such a great job of bringing her up. Somehow Gail could do that, but Anne was too angry; she just couldn't do anything right.

“Could I be excused?” she asked.

“Not before dessert,” her father said automatically.

“I don't want any.”

“You're not going into the forest at night,” said Aunt Marian.

“It's
sunshine,”
Anne said loudly. She stood beside her chair, rocking from one foot to the other, her body straining to dash off. They were all looking at her. “It's summer and it's only eight o'clock and the
sun
is
shining
and smart people go outside when it's warm and sunny, they don't sit around the dinner table getting soggy and fat from all that food just lying in their stomachs! That's like dying! Your life is just oozing away, puddling under the table in a pool of slime!”

“Oh, Anne, what kind of talk is that for the dinner table,” Nina said reproachfully.

Ethan chuckled. “That's the picture I'll think of every time I sit over my coffee.”

“Or you dry up,” Anne went on, emboldened. “You sit around with lights on instead of being in the sunshine and smelling the flowers and the lake and you dehydrate and your skin peels off and floats away and after a while you're all skeletons, sitting around clicking your bones—”

“That is quite enough,” Marian said firmly. “It's very clever, dear, but it's not appropriate and you know it. All we're doing is finishing dinner in a leisurely and civilized
manner, instead of gulping our food and then dashing off in all directions. We won't stop you if you insist on leaving the table, but you're not going to the forest. I've told you I don't want you there. It is not a wholesome place. You're not to go there at all. Ever.”

“I'll be back,” Anne said, and ran from the room.

She could feel them watching her through the tall French windows as she ran across the broad lawn, her figure silhouetted against the deep-blue expanse of Lake Michigan until she disappeared into the pine forest that covered the rest of Ethan's property. She kept running until she came to a clearing with a small pond bordered with grasses and daisies and wild hyssop that made the air smell of mint. Birds called to each other, but otherwise the silence was complete. Anne sat down, crossing her long, thin legs beneath the sundress she had worn for dinner. “Hi, Amy,” she said. “Sorry I'm late. There was this big blowup at the table. I think Aunt Marian's going through menopause or something. You think thirty-three is too young? Maybe with her it doesn't matter; maybe she's just
innately
old.”

She pulled a notebook and pencil from her pocket and began to write. “I'm making notes about the family; did I tell you? Someday I'm going to write a book about them. Of course nobody will believe it. I'm glad you're here, Amy; it makes everything better to have somebody to talk to.”