Shower

Dess

"I want it understood," said Colleen Rourke, "that I am not wearing the hat."

"Nobody asked you to wear a hat."

"There's a hat in the bag."

"It's a fascinator. It's from Joelle's mother-in-law. It's a loan."

"It's got a feather." Colleen shifted the cake carrier on her lap and glared out at the passing landscape. "I'm fifty-four years old, Odessa. I've been to a hundred and fifty showers. At none of them was I asked to put a bird on my head."

"It's Newport."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

It was the sixth of March, a Saturday, and they were in the back of the Bentley, crossing the Jamestown Bridge in a flat gray light with a skin of ice still clinging to the rails. The sky was the color of an old nickel. Below them the bay lay wide and metallic and blank, and far out a single freighter stood on the horizon like a toy. Dell drove at a stately forty-five. In the front seat, beside him, in a camel coat and a ball cap that said FALL RIVER FIRE DEPT, Ray Dufresne rode with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the road, and did not speak.

Dess had been trying not to look at him for an hour.

"It's a lovely car," said Colleen, for the fourth time.

"It's a Bentley, Ma."

"It's got a bar."

"It's a decanter."

"It's got a little light. For the drinks." Colleen peered at it. "I didn't know a car could have a drinks light."

"Please don't touch the light."

"I'm not touching it."

"You're hovering."

"I'm admiring." Colleen sat back. She was in her good navy suit, the one she had worn to every funeral and one wedding since 2008, with the gold brooch her own mother had left her pinned to the lapel. She'd had her hair done. She'd put on lipstick, wiped it off, put it on again. Now she sat with her cake in her lap like a woman carrying a bomb to a peace conference, and her knuckles were white on the handles. "Is she going to be nice?"

"Who?"

"The mother. The dead boy's mother."

"Ma."

"I'm only asking. I've read about these people. They have a way. They say 'how interesting' and you can hear the knife."

"She's not like that."

"How do you know?"

"I've met her four times." Dess took her mother's hand, cake and all. "She cried on me in a clinic. She wrote me a letter on cream paper that took her three weeks. She gave me a baby's sailor suit, Ma, that she'd kept for thirty years in a cedar box, and she told me it was for him to be late in. I don't think she's got a knife."

"Everybody's got a knife."

"I know."

"It's just a matter of where they keep it."

"I know, Ma."

Colleen glanced at her.

There was a long pause. Then, very quietly, in the voice she used when she was most afraid and least willing to admit it, Colleen said:

"I just don't want to embarrass you."

Dess's throat closed.

"You couldn't," she said.

"I could. I'm very good at it."

"You're not."

"I wore the wrong shoes to your graduation."

"You wore flip-flops to my graduation because Ray's truck broke down and you ran the last mile." Dess squeezed her hand. "I thought it was the best thing anyone did that day. I told everyone."

"You told them your mother ran a mile in flip-flops?"

"I told them my mother ran a mile in flip-flops to see me get a diploma." She leaned her head on Colleen's shoulder. "It's the best story I have."

For a moment her mother said nothing. Then she patted Dess's knee, twice, briskly, in the manner of a woman concluding a transaction.

"Well," said Colleen. "I'll leave the bird at home."

…

The house at Ledge Point was lit from end to end.

It stood on its green hill under a low sky, white and enormous, with every window glowing amber and the great doors thrown wide, and on the gravel before them a line of cars waited in the drizzle like carriages at a ball. Dell drew up at the foot of the steps. A boy in a black waistcoat sprang forward with an umbrella. Dess stepped out, and the wind took her scarf, and she saw on the top step, in a plain navy dress with a double rope of pearls and her silver hair in a knot, the tall straight figure of Constance Wexcombe, waiting.

She came down the steps.

She came down slowly, with one hand on the rail, and Dess saw that she had been up since dawn, and that she had been crying a little, and that she had put on rouge to hide it. She stopped on the last tread. For an instant the two women simply looked at each other. Then Constance smiled, a brief, shy, startling, girlish smile, and held out both hands.

"Odessa."

"Constance."

"You came."

"I said I would."

"I know. But one never quite—" She stopped. Her gaze moved past Dess's shoulder, to the woman in the navy suit who was climbing out of the car with a cake carrier in her arms and an expression of grim and wary resolution. "And this must be your mother."

Colleen stood very still on the gravel.

She was five foot two. She weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. She had sat in a brass casino cage for twenty-two years, counting other people's luck, and had been a widow for twenty-six. She had raised a child alone on a cashier's wages, in a series of apartments with the heat off, and she stood now in the drizzle in front of the largest private residence she had ever seen, facing a woman who owned it, with a Stop & Shop sheet cake in her arms, and drew herself up to her full height.

"Colleen Rourke," she said.

"Constance Wexcombe."

"I brought a cake."

"So I see."

"It's chocolate. With the, the buttercream roses. They do it at the bakery. I know it isn't—" Colleen's voice caught, and steadied. "I know it isn't what you'd have. You've got people. But it's what I do. I always bring a cake."

Constance looked at it.

It was a half-sheet, in a clear plastic dome, with a rim of stiff pink piped roses and, across the middle, in a shaky blue gel, the words: WELCOME BABY CALDER. Someone had misspelled it with two L's, and someone else had scratched out the extra with a fork.

"Mrs. Rourke," said Constance, "that is the loveliest thing anyone has ever brought into this house."

"Don't."

"I mean it."

"Don't be nice. I can't bear it."

"I am not being nice." Constance held out her arms. "I am being sincere. The two are not at all the same. Come here."

And before Colleen could protest, the tall silver-haired woman in the pearls had stepped down onto the gravel in her good shoes, in the rain, and put both arms around her, cake and all.

Dess stood on the drive and watched her mother's face over Constance's shoulder.

It went through a series of expressions like a slot machine. Surprise. Outrage. Alarm. And then, slowly, helplessly, the loosening of a mouth that has held a line too long. Colleen's free hand came up. It hovered over the navy dress. It settled, awkwardly, at last, between the shoulder blades.

"I'm sorry about your boy," she said into the pearls.

"Thank you."

"I'd lose my mind."

"I did, for a while."

"I can see that you got it back."

"I got most of it back." Constance drew away, and held Colleen at arm's length, and laughed in the rain. There were tears on her face, bright as glass. "Do you know, I have not been hugged in this driveway since 1994?"

"Well, you needed it."

"Yes," said Constance. "I rather think I did."

…

The shower was to be held in the orangery.

Dess had been warned. Theron had warned her, in the car, on the phone, in three separate texts: My mother has taken certain liberties. I would ask for patience. She had pictured, vaguely, a few folding chairs. A punch bowl. Some pastel streamers.

She had not pictured a glass-roofed palace.

It lay along the south face of the house, a long vaulted hall of white iron and glass, with a tiled floor in black and white and a row of potted lemon trees in tubs. A fountain murmured in the center. Beyond the panes the gray lawn rolled down to the sea, and the rain ran in bright lines down the glass. Round tables had been set for sixty. Each wore a white cloth, a low bowl of white hyacinths, and a place card in violet ink. On a long buffet at the end stood a three-tiered stand of petits fours, a silver urn, and a champagne bucket of sparkling pear juice, in tribute to the guest of honor.

And the guests.

They were all women, and they were all sixty or more. They had silver hair and good bones and cashmere cardigans. They wore pearls and small gold watches, and they sat in clusters under the lemon trees with the poised, sharp, silent serenity of a flock of herons, waiting to see what had come in with the tide.

"Oh my God," said Colleen.

"Ma."

"They're all her."

"They're her friends."

"There are sixty of her."

"Take a breath."

"I'm taking it. I'm taking it." Colleen clutched her carrier. "Where do I put the cake?"

"Over here, dear," said a voice at her elbow.

It was a small brown wizened woman in a black dress and a white apron, with her gray hair in a bun and a pair of spectacles on a chain. She had materialized out of nowhere, like a good fairy. She held out both hands for the cake with the gravity of an acolyte.

"I am Mrs. Aldrich," she said. "I keep the house. I have been waiting forty years for somebody to bring a cake into this orangery. They will not touch the petits fours, you know. They are all on diets. But a cake with roses—" She lifted the dome and inhaled. "Ahh. It is a proper cake. They will eat it. I will see that they do."

"You think so?" said Colleen, dazed.

"I will stand over them with a knife."

"I like her," said Colleen, to nobody. "Dess. I like her."

"She likes you too."

"I could tell. She's got that look. The one that says she's seen everything and it didn't impress her."

"She's known about the baby since December."

"Of course she has." Colleen drew herself up again. "Everyone has. I'm the last to know about my own grandchild's godforsaken family. Lead on, Mrs. Aldrich. Show me where the real people sit."

…

By two o'clock the thing had taken on a life of its own.

Dess, enthroned in a white wicker chair at the head of the largest table, with a corsage pinned to her sweater and a plate of lemon cake on her knee, watched it happen with the helpless fascination of a woman at a train wreck in slow motion. There was a pile of gifts at her elbow. There was a game, devised by someone with a long memory and a cruel streak, involving the guessing of the circumference of her belly with a length of pink ribbon. There was a toast, delivered by a very old lady in a lavender suit, which began, "When I was expecting Winthrop—" and lasted eleven minutes.

And in the midst of it, at a round table under the lemon trees, Colleen Rourke was holding court.

She had begun, rigidly, in the chair Mrs. Aldrich had assigned her, between a retired judge and the widow of a senator. She had said, "How do you do." She had been asked, "And what does your husband do, Mrs. Rourke?" and had said, "He died," and then, with the faintest edge, "He drove a bread truck." And the table had gone still.

But the judge had said, "My father drove a bread truck."

And the senator's widow had said, "Mine was a milkman."

And someone had said, "Mine ran a tugboat, God help him," and someone else, "Mine sold shoes in Woonsocket," and in the space of about ninety seconds the table had undergone a quiet, astonishing revolution. The pearls had come off. A scarf had been loosened. A small brown hand in a diamond ring had pushed a plate of cake across the cloth.

"Tell me about the bread truck," said the judge.

"It was a Dolly Madison route," said Colleen, with her cheeks flushed. "Seven days. He got up at three. He used to bring home the day-olds, the Hostess things. We lived on Twinkies the whole of 1996."

"I adored a Twinkie."

"You did not."

"Mrs. Rourke, I assure you. I clerked for a Supreme Court justice and I hid them in my robes."

There was a shriek of laughter.

Dess put her fork down.

She had not known her mother could be like this. She had known the Colleen of the kitchen and the Colleen of the funeral parlor, the Colleen who talked back to the television. This was another woman: a quick, warm, ironic, sparkling storyteller, with her hands flying and her chin up, in the midst of a table of the richest widows in New England, and every one of them leaning in. She sat behind a brass window for twenty-two years, Dess thought. Counting other people's luck and smiling through the bars. She knows exactly how to make a stranger feel seen.

I never saw it. I was too busy being embarrassed.

"She's marvelous," said a quiet voice at her shoulder.

Constance had slipped into the chair beside her. She sat with her hands folded and her eyes on the table. A faint color had come into her cheeks. For an instant, in the gray glass light, she looked like a girl.

"She's a lot," said Dess.

"She is exactly what the room needed. They are all so frightened of me. They have been frightened of me for forty years." Constance glanced at her. "Your mother is not frightened of anything but a feather."

"How do you know about the feather?"

"Theron told me. He wrote down your mother's remarks in the car and sent them ahead, by text. He is such a dear. He seems to think I might be offended."

"Are you?"

"I should rather be offended by the fascinator," said Constance. "It was my idea. I'd have worn it myself."

Dess laughed.

"Odessa."

"Yes?"

"I wished to say something. In private. I shan't keep you." Constance's voice was low. "I did not, until today, understand what I was asking you to do."

"What do you mean?"

"When I came to your door. In the winter. I thought I wanted a grandchild. I thought I wanted a little piece of him, a face to look at. I was very selfish." She turned the ring on her finger. "And then I saw you, in the clinic, in that silly paper gown. And I saw you today, with your mother, getting out of the car. And I understood that you were not a vessel. You are a daughter. You have a family. You come with a whole bright tangled history, and a woman who runs a mile in her flip-flops." A pause. "I had not accounted for that."

"No one does."

"No. But I should have."

"Constance—"

"I only wish," said Constance, "to say that I see it. That I see what it costs, to be a person. To give a child to a house like this one." She looked up. Her eyes were shining. "And I wish to say that your mother is a very brave woman, and that I am honored to know her."

Dess opened her mouth to answer, and could not. She reached out and took the older woman's hand. It was thin, and cold, and dry as paper, and it clung.

"You're not what I thought either," she said.

"What did you think?"

"I thought you'd be the Queen."

"Oh, my dear," said Constance, and laughed, a low, delighted, unexpected peal. "I am only the widow of one."

…

Ansel Pryor found her in the library at half past three.

She had escaped there on a pretext. There had been too many pearls. Too many hands on her belly, too many voices saying how marvelous and how brave and you must be so excited, and a woman in a lilac twinset who had grabbed her wrist and said, in a hiss, "He has his grandfather's jaw, you know, I can tell from the way you carry," and she had needed a minute. The library was dim and cool and quiet, with long windows on the sea. It smelled of leather, old paper, and woodsmoke. She sank into a wing chair by the fire, with her feet up on a hassock, and breathed.

"Ah," said a mild dry voice from the door. "I beg your pardon. I had understood the room to be empty."

"It's fine."

"I shall go."

"No. Please." She sat up. "Mr. Pryor. Come in."

He came in as he did everything, with a kind of rustling, antique, apologetic grace, in his rusty black suit, with a leather folio under his arm. He lowered himself into the chair opposite with a faint grunt, and arranged his hands on the folio, and gazed at her with his pale, steady, watery eyes.

"I have a small matter," he said. "I had meant to deliver it on Monday, to your office, but Mrs. Wexcombe thought it better to do it today. A gesture. A gift."

"Another gift?"

"A modest one."

"I'm learning to be afraid of those."

"Yes," said Ansel. "I imagine you are." He unfastened the folio. "This is an education trust. A college fund. It is entirely in the child's name, irrevocable, not conditioned on any act of yours or ours. It begins with a sum I shall not mention, because it would be vulgar, and which you may regard as a tuition endowment in the manner of a christening spoon." He drew out a thin blue-backed document. "It carries no obligations. I wish to be clear about that. You may sign it or burn it. But I thought you ought to read it before the child was born."

She took it.

It was twelve pages long. It was typed in the dense, handsome, archaic style of a man who had learned law from his grandfather, and she read it as she read everything, slowly, with her finger on the margin. The Calder Rourke Education Trust. Trustee: a bank in Providence. Beneficiary: the child, born or unborn. Education defined with a generosity that made her blink. And on the fourth page, in a paragraph near the bottom, her finger stopped.

Section 4.3. Voting Rights Reserved.

Nothing in this Trust shall be construed to affect, waive, or limit the rights, powers, or privileges conferred upon the Beneficiary under Article Four of the Last Will and Testament of Christopher Calder Wexcombe, dated the 14th of August, and the Guardian of the Beneficiary shall exercise such rights as therein provided.

She read it once.

She read it again.

Article Four.

The Guardian of the Beneficiary shall exercise such rights.

She looked up. The old lawyer sat quite motionless, with his hands on his folio, and he was watching her with an expression she could not read. It was grave and gentle, and a little fearful, and very tired.

"Mr. Pryor."

"Yes, Miss Rourke."

"What's Article Four?"

"It is a provision of the will of my late client."

"Kit's will."

"Yes."

"What does it say?"

"It says," said Ansel carefully, "a great many things which are, strictly speaking, not mine to explain."

"But you drew up this paragraph."

"I did."

"And it refers to it."

"It must. The two documents are legally interlinked. To omit the reference would have been a breach of my duty." He met her eyes. "I wished you to see it. I did not wish you to find it afterward and feel that I had hidden it."

She sat very still.

Beyond the long windows the rain had thinned. Light lay on the water in a pale pewter sheet. The fire hissed. Somewhere in the house an orchestra of ladies' voices rose in laughter.

A legal circumstance. Which concerns the child's inheritance.

Nineteen days.

Eight, now.

"He told me," she said slowly. "Theron. He told me there was a thing he'd failed to disclose. About the inheritance. He said he'd tell me on the fourteenth. I said I'd wait."

"I know."

"Is this it?"

Ansel was silent.

It was not a long silence. It was perhaps two seconds. But in it she saw a man of eighty weigh a promise against a conscience, and watched the weighing, in the lines about his mouth, with a clinical, appalled attention. His fingers moved on the leather. His pale eyes flickered to the door and back.

"Miss Rourke," he said. "I will say what I am able. Mr. Wexcombe has undertaken to explain the matter to you himself. He has given me his word. I have given mine, in turn, that I will not preempt him. I shall keep it, if I can." A pause. "But I will tell you that you are right to read the paragraph. And that you are right to be careful. And that it is a matter of which you would be well advised to take independent counsel."

"A lawyer."

"A good one. Not one of ours."

"Is there something in it that could hurt me?"

"I would not say hurt."

"Hurt the baby?"

"No."

"Take him?"

"No." He said it quickly, with a sudden fierce ring she had not expected. "No. It cannot take him. It could not. I would see to that with my last breath."

She breathed out.

"Then what?"

"It is complicated," said Ansel. He seemed, for a moment, almost distressed. "It is the sort of complication that arises when a very young man with a great deal of money attempts to do an act of love by means of a legal instrument. It has consequences. Some of them are good. Some of them are not. And one of them, I fear, is that there are people who will wish to use it." He closed his folio. "I should prefer that you heard of it from a friend."

"From Theron."

"Yes."

"On the fourteenth."

"Yes."

She looked down at the paragraph. Article Four. The words stood in the pale firelight like a name on a gravestone.

I could ask the next question, she thought. I could say: What does it give? Who gets it? How much? What does it do to the man who has been bringing me soup?

He'd tell me. He's a lawyer. It would be a breach, but he'd tell me. I can see it in his face.

And I would have broken my word.

She laid the document on her knee, squared its edges, and closed it.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For not lying." She stood, carefully, one hand on the chair. "I'll read the rest of it at home. I'll have a lawyer look at it. I'll sign it, probably. It's a very good trust."

"It is a very good trust."

"And I'll wait for Sunday."

"Miss Rourke—"

"I said I would. He asked me for nineteen days, and I've given him eleven. I can give him eight more." She tucked the folder under her arm. "I'd rather hear it from his mouth. Even if it's bad."

The old man rose, with difficulty, and stood facing her.

"I wish you to know," he said, "that in fifty-six years of practice, I have not often felt ashamed."

"You shouldn't."

"I do." His voice shook. "Not of this. Of the whole of it. Of having helped, by omission, to place a young woman in a position of such uncertainty. I told him to speak. I told him in December. I told him in February. I—" He broke off. "Forgive an old man's sentimentality. I have simply grown very fond of you."

She put a hand on his sleeve.

"You're a good lawyer, Mr. Pryor."

"I am a fairly bad one," said Ansel. "I have a conscience."

She laughed and kissed his cheek, which was papery and smelled of camphor, and went out into the hall.

…

The party was winding down.

She came back to the orangery in time to see the cake cut. It was done with enormous ceremony by Mrs. Aldrich, who wielded a silver server like a sword. The judge received the first slice. The senator's widow, the second. A lavender lady in diamonds ate three and denied it. Colleen, flushed to the hairline, with her sleeves pushed up and a smear of buttercream on her wrist, was being photographed by six women at once.

"One more! One more with the roses!"

"I can't. My face is stuck."

"Mrs. Rourke, you've a magnificent face."

"I've a tired face."

"You've the face of a woman who knows how to run a household!"

"I've the face of a woman who's had champagne," said Colleen, "which I was told was pear juice, and I'll have a word with someone."

Dess laughed. It broke from her suddenly, and the laughter did not stop. She stood at the edge of the room, with her hand on the back of a chair, and felt the whole bright noisy glass-lit world swim, and understood that she was happier than she had been in her life. She thought: Look at them. They're making a family.

She thought: And in eight days it can all break.

Then she saw the window.

It was one of the tall panes on the east side, near the door to the terrace. Beyond it, on the wet lawn, in the silver drizzle, a man in a camel coat was walking back and forth.

It was Ray.

He had a phone to his ear. He walked briskly, in short jerks, with his head down and one hand cupped over the receiver, the way a man walks when he doesn't want to be seen. He reached the edge of the lawn, turned, came back. His mouth moved. He said something sharp and brief. He listened, nodding. At the far corner of the terrace, partly hidden by a clipped hedge of yew, a second figure was standing under an umbrella, a tall man in a gray topcoat. She could not make out the face.

Ray stopped.

He turned his head toward the house. For an instant his eyes met hers through the pane. Then he lifted a hand and gave her a bright, hearty, apologetic wave, and tapped the phone, and mimed work, work, sorry.

She waved back.

She was still waving when the man in the topcoat lowered his umbrella, turned, and walked away across the grass toward the road. The umbrella tilted. A flash of silver hair showed beneath the hat.

Hale? she thought.

No. That's absurd. He wouldn't be here. This is Constance's party. He'd never be allowed within a mile of this lawn.

And Ray doesn't know him.

She stood for a long moment, with the cold light on her face.

"Dess?" said Colleen, at her elbow. "You okay? You look like you've seen the Pope."

"I'm fine."

"You've gone white."

"It's the heat."

"It's a greenhouse, honey. Sit down." Colleen steered her to a chair. "Mrs. Aldrich! A glass of water for my daughter. And a cracker!"

Dess sat.

She let her mother fuss. She drank the water. She ate the cracker. She held up a small hand-knit yellow cardigan that a woman in a lilac twinset was thrusting at her, and said, "How lovely," and, "Thank you so much," and she smiled, and she smiled, and under the smile, in the cold small room at the back of her mind where she kept her ledger, she wrote a line.

Sat. Mar 6. Ray on the phone on the lawn. Silver-haired man under an umbrella. Dess saw: nothing. Dess did not ask.

Unclassified.

She looked across the room.

On the far side of the orangery, framed in the arch of the door, stood Theron. He had been at a business lunch, and had come in late, and was still in his overcoat, with the rain on his shoulders. He stood quite alone. He was watching her. And in his face, in the pale glass light, she saw something she had not seen in it for weeks and could not at first name.

It was fear.

It was naked, plain, and total, and it was aimed not at her but at the lawn.

He had seen Ray, too.

She raised her hand, slowly, and put it on her belly. The baby moved under her palm, a long, lazy, rolling turn, like a swimmer in a pool.

Eight days, she thought.

Whatever it is, it's already in the house.