The Three Weissmanns of Westport (26 page)

Amber knew she had a high hill to climb, and she knew, too, that the going would be tough. She squared her pretty shoulders. Might as well get started at once. She had exaggerated only slightly to Annie: there had definitely been talk of marriage, or at least living together. But it was clear to her that she would have to neutralize Gwen and Evan first.

"What a great home," she said to Gwen. "So much history. I found a picture of it from, like, over a hundred years ago. On the Internet. It took me weeks, but . . . Here."

She had actually called the town museum and talked to an archivist who e-mailed it to her a few days before. She handed Gwen the copy she had printed out on thick matte photographic paper.

Gwen looked pleased in spite of herself. "Thanks." She examined the photo. "I've never seen this one. It looks so bare, doesn't it?"

"Your family obviously did a lot with the grounds."

Gwen nodded. "The rosebushes."

"Heirlooms." Then feeling a little more comfortable, Amber said, "Speaking of heirlooms, did your dad ever get that bathtub drain fixed? I reminded him about it a thousand times. That dad of yours, head in the clouds, right? Artists, right?"

Gwen looked at her blankly.

Amber, sensing she had gone too far too fast, tried to shift into reverse. "Such a beautiful old tub. With those claws? I brought some new bath salts. Perfect for that luxurious antique tub. I got them on a professional massage-therapy website. They're organic. They even have hemp in them." She bent down and unzipped her bag, pulling out a jar. "Would you like to try them?"

"No," Gwen said, her voice cold again. "I have no interest in hemp, thank you very much."

"I do," Evan said. "Just not in my bath."

"Oh yeah?" Crystal said. "Well, I have some really good weed . . ."

And so it was Crystal, not Amber, who chiseled the first real social chink in the Barrow family wall. Amber felt the victory had practically been handed to Crystal on a silver platter, and that it wasn't such a very big victory anyway, and she watched with a mixture of pique and gratification as Crystal and Evan retired to the back porch.

The winter blew through Westport, hard and fast, as if it were a season in a hurry, ready to get the whole messy business over with and move on. There was just one big snowstorm, which dissolved in the bright yellow sun of the following morning, and one ice storm that brought with it a townwide loss of power as branches fell to the ground, hundreds of them, sheathed in frozen rain, heavy and ornate as French mirrors. Some gray skies hovered, some wind blew through, a fair amount of rain fell. And then, suddenly, in February, deep blue heavens and gentle breezes and mud.

When the Weissmanns returned from Palm Springs at the beginning of January, the snow had just come and gone and the ground was oozing. Betty decided to take up online poker in an attempt to supplement the family income. Annie and Miranda had forgiven if not forgotten what each had said to the other and were on precariously good terms, but Annie tried to spend as much time as possible at the library. Even there, however, she felt the need to escape. When she could no longer stand the part of her job that required her to speak to board members and ask bibliophilic rich people for money, she would retreat to the library's attic and putter. She told the staff she was looking for artifacts, and she did discover a discolored letter from George Washington in a frame with cracked glass, as well as the first volume of the two-volume first American edition of
Sense and Sensibility
. But the main reason she dug through piles of broken chairs and abandoned space heaters was to be alone. It had become an aching, physical need. The beach in Westport, where once she had felt so free, now seemed to her to be teeming with the presence of other human beings: they were behind her in their houses, they were across Long Island Sound in other houses, they were a mile away on I-95, whizzing past her in cars. They flew above her, back and forth, in planes in the sky. They were even buried beneath her, or close enough, deep and silent, in the earth. Wherever she went, they followed. They spoke to her on telephones and wrote to her on computers. They sang from radios and hailed cabs and demanded she hold the elevator. It was not their fault, of course, they were only doing what people were meant to do, yet she found herself despising them.

But in the attic, there were just the things people had discarded, not the people themselves. A bulky electric typewriter. A framed diploma from Barnard College for Mildred Peacock Winship, 1927. Engravings, photographs--it was like picking up seashells. She was alone, blissfully alone. Who
was
Mildred Peacock Winship? Perhaps she had been a devoted member of the library's staff, a middle-aged unmarried person who typed and filed, collected her meager paycheck, and went home to a big frame house in the Bronx to make supper for her aging parents. Perhaps she was a trustee who had bequeathed to the library thousands of dollars as well as her treasured editions of Emerson and Hawthorne. Annie thought vaguely that she should find out. At the same time, she blessed Mildred Peacock Winship, for, whoever she had been and whatever she had done, she was now, blissfully, absent.

The attic was safe. It was quiet and remote. Like me, Annie thought. She was walking to the subway after a particularly tiring board meeting.

"Aren't you just so bwack and bwown?" a woman cooed to a dog tied to a parking meter.

When Annie emerged in Grand Central, a homeless man holding a battered coffee cup said, "Hello there, beautiful lady," and she was wondering whether to smile politely without making eye contact or just hurry past, when she realized he was talking to the woman behind her. On the train, she walked through the first couple of cars looking for a seat facing forward. She spotted a likely prospect--the back of a single well-groomed female head sticking up from the three-person bench--but when she got up to the female head and was about to heave her bag onto the middle seat, she saw it was occupied by a small child.

There was an awkward moment when, even as she drew back her bag, determined to avoid what could only be a very loud and very dull young companion on an evening when she wanted peace and solitude, she caught the mother's eye and wondered if she had already somehow committed herself to join the duo and if it would now be insulting to this doubtless doting parent to continue on her way. But even as she quickly and decisively decided in favor of insult over boredom and annoyance, the child in question spoke.

"Annie!"

And she looked down at the boy, focused, and recognized Henry.

Annie put out her arms, and Henry jumped to his feet and, standing unsteadily on his seat, gave her a hug. She saw the mother's face over his head. Henry's mother. It was instantly and unquestionably apparent. Not just the full cheeks or the set of the eyes. But that look, that proprietary mother look. "Oh, you must be Henry's mother," Annie said quickly, holding a hand out. "I'm Annie Weissmann. A friend from Westport."

Henry was looking around. "Randa?" he asked.

"Are you Randa?" the mother asked. "He talks about you quite a bit. I'm Leanne."

Annie sat down and explained that Randa was her sister, Miranda.

"Miranda's at home," she said to Henry.

The woman was blond, her hair short and straight, her narrow eyes a faded blue. She wore no makeup, and Annie could see at once why she didn't bother with it--her skin glowed, smooth as a child's. She seemed a little older than Kit, however. Well, Annie thought, returning her friendly smile, the man ran true to form in the age department, that seemed clear.

Henry climbed over his mother and pressed his face against the window. He stared at the passing lights and sang a jumbled version of the alphabet.

"You were in Africa?" Annie said, trying to make conversation that somehow did not touch on Kit Maybank.

"We're staying with Aunt Charlotte now. She needs some looking after. And the house is huge."

"Yes, I've heard that," Annie said, then fell into an uncomfortable silence, for how else would she have heard that except from Kit?

Henry unglued himself from the window to watch the conductor punch holes in his mother's ticket but not in Annie's monthly pass. Annie explained that she was a commuter, then explained what a commuter was.

"You go on the train
every day
?" he asked, his eyes wide with awe and envy.

"Two times."

"
We
saw dinosaurs," he said a little defensively.

After that, conversation flagged until they neared the station at Westport.

"We don't get off until Greens Farms," Leanne said as Annie started putting on her coat.

"Right. Of course. Your aunt's house is so much closer to the Greens Farms station. I like that station. And the little old-fashioned post office there. Kind of my favorite place in Westport."

Leanne laughed.

"I want to go to Randa's house," Henry said.

"You never met Aunt Charlotte, did you?" asked Leanne.

"I want to go to Randa's house."

Annie shook her head. "No. Never did."

"No. She and Kit are not exactly on friendly terms, so you wouldn't have."

"But you're obviously on good terms with her."

"Oh yes. She's a bit of a gorgon, but we love her, don't we, Henry?"

Henry sucked silently on his fist.

No wonder Kit had lived in the run-down boathouse. But what had he done to alienate his aunt? What had his ex-wife done to keep the confidence of her in-law? Annie wished she had time to pursue this interesting conversation. Of course, it was none of her business. But gossip so rarely was.

Henry continued to want to go to Randa's house, now in a loud singsong chant. Annie wondered if she should respond. She knew Miranda would be overjoyed to see Henry. But perhaps Henry's mother would not be overjoyed to drop her son off at the home of her ex's ex. It all seemed very complicated.

"I want--"

"Okay, okay," his mother said, clapping a hand over Henry's mouth. "Listen," she added suddenly to Annie. "You'll all come for tea. Yes. Perfect." She released Henry's mouth and dug in her purse. "Here." She thrust her card at Annie with a dazzling smile and an almost military sense of authority. "It's settled."

Annie laughed. Leanne reminded her a little of Miranda.

While Annie was rumbling home on the commuter train to Westport, Frederick was rumbling toward New York on the Amtrak train from Boston. Amber and Crystal were not with him. They had taken his car a week earlier. Amber was accompanying Crystal to Great Barrington, where they were house-sitting (Frederick could not bear to pronounce "home-sitting" even silently in his thoughts), then they would both continue on to the city to meet Frederick. They were all staying with Felicity and Joe in Joe's big apartment on Central Park West, although Felicity didn't know it. Amber and Crystal were going to be a surprise. Frederick chuckled, imagining his sister's face. They could all go to hell, he decided. He asked very little in life, really. Just to sit in his office and listen to the sea and write his books. Why was there always so much fuss?

His head back, Frederick closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on something other than the fuss. He had to write a book review and tried to compose his opening sentence, but the novel he was reviewing, a stark and painful allegory set in Las Vegas, was, finally, boring. Everything, he'd discovered, was boring as you hurtled toward the abyss. Fear, hopelessness--it turned out they were unequivocally dull. He decided to take up smoking again as soon as possible.

Amber and Crystal had spent the day shopping, starting on Fifth Avenue, ending up at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. They were meeting Frederick for drinks at Gabriel's, on the other side of Sixtieth Street. They perched on their bar stools, their shopping bags clustered around their feet. They ordered Cosmopolitans and waited.

"I feel very artistic," Crystal said.

"Don't you mean sophisticated? There's nothing artistic about shopping, or even cocktails, to be honest."

"Pardonnez-moi."
Crystal contemplated her pink drink. "Hey, should you even
be
drinking? Doesn't it cut off their placenta or oxygen or something?"

"It's
my
placenta," Amber said. But then she saw Frederick pushing open the door and slid the drink away from her.

"Hey, Daddy-o," she said, standing and embracing him.

"You really have to stop calling me that, Amber."

"Silly," she said, kissing him.

He smiled. "Ready, girls? Once more into the breach?"

They gave him a quizzical look.

"Henry the Fifth, dear friends." He was insufferable, he knew. And rather enjoying it. And entitled, too, to a little self-indulgence. Think what was ahead. My God, think what was ahead. He took out one of his brand-new Marlboros.

"No smoking, sir," said the bartender.

Ah yes. No smoking in restaurants. How could he have forgotten? But then, he hadn't smoked in thirty years, so perhaps he could be forgiven. He slid the pack back in his pocket. "Well," he said. "All ready for another stab at my children?"

Stab, Amber thought. Yes, she was ready for that all right.

They arrived just at eight. Gwen and Ron lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a brownstone on Bank Street. Frederick was a little out of breath from the stairs when Gwen answered the door. The cigarettes he'd smoked on the street had not helped.

"Oh!" she said. "Look who the cat dragged in. Amber and Crystal. I'm afraid I wasn't expecting you."

"'Unbidden guests are often welcomest when they are gone,'" Frederick said.
"Henry the Sixth."
He bowed. I'm on a roll, he thought. If only Shakespeare had written
Henry the Seventh
.