What Constance Knew

Constance

It is a mistake to suppose that because a woman sits very straight, she is not afraid.

Constance Ashworth Wexcombe had been sitting very straight since the age of four. It had been taught to her by a governess with a ruler, in a drafty house in Camden, Maine, in the winter of 1968, and she had never found occasion to unlearn it. She had sat straight through her debut, and her wedding, and the births of her sons, and the funerals of her husband and her younger boy. She sat straight now, in the back of a black Bentley on the Eddy Street Bridge, with a bag on her knee, a pair of gloves in her lap and a knitted object in tissue paper on the seat beside her, and her heart going in her chest like a bird against a window.

"Madam," said Dell, from the front. "Would you like the window down?"

"No, thank you."

"You are a little pale."

"I am always a little pale. It is the family complexion."

"Yes, madam." He turned onto Wickenden. The street was bright with a washed spring light, the shop fronts open, a boy on a bicycle with a loaf of bread under his arm. "We shall be there in four minutes."

"Thank you, Dell."

"May I say something?"

"You may."

"I have driven you to a great many places in thirty-one years." His eyes met hers in the mirror, calm and pale blue and entirely unreadable. "I have driven you to the funeral of your husband and the funeral of your son. I have driven you, once, to a hotel in Boston where you wished to sit in the lobby and be nobody. I do not believe I have ever driven you somewhere that you wished to go so much, and feared so much, at once."

"No," said Constance after a moment. "I don't believe you have."

"I only mention it, madam, so that you will know there is no cause for shame."

"I'm not ashamed."

"No, madam."

"I am frightened," said Constance, with great precision. "It is a different thing. It requires better posture."

Dell's mouth moved under the gray mustache.

"Yes, madam," he said. "I'll slow down for the speed bumps."

…

The house was gray, and narrow, and old.

She had seen it once, from the car, in November, when she had made Dell drive past twice. She had looked at the peeling porch and the green door and the little dead garden, and had thought: my grandchild's mother lives there. She had not got out. She had told herself that it was not her place.

Now she stood on the pavement with her bag on her arm and looked up at the third-floor window, where a curtain stirred. A small round woman in a plum-colored coat stood on the porch with a broom, watching her with the unhurried contempt of a customs official. As Constance approached, the broom lowered, an inch at a time.

"Mrs. Wexcombe," said the woman.

"Madam."

"I am Ferreira."

"I know. My son has described you. Rather fully."

"He has described me as a fool?"

"He has described you as the keeper of the block." Constance paused at the foot of the steps. "I believe he said, 'she is the only person I have ever met who frightens Dell.'"

"Hm." The broom lowered another inch. "He lies. Dell is not afraid of me. He is only careful."

"That is what I tell people about myself."

A glint appeared in the small black eyes. It was the glint of a woman who had just met a peer. "You have come to see the girl."

"I have."

"You have come alone?"

"I have come with a driver. And a hat."

"A hat."

"It is not for me." She held up the tissue-wrapped parcel. "I made it."

The glint deepened. Mrs. Ferreira leaned the broom against the rail, descended two steps, and with great ceremony took the parcel in both hands, and peeled back a corner of the tissue.

It was a very small cap, of a gray-blue wool, in garter stitch. It had a pointed crown and two earflaps and a pair of ties. It was, even to the unpracticed eye, a wonky thing. The left earflap was perceptibly longer than the right. There was a hole near the crown where a stitch had been dropped and gallantly repaired. And one of the ties had been knitted in a different weight of wool, and ended, as if in despair, in a knot.

Mrs. Ferreira looked at it for a long moment.

"You made this yourself."

"Mrs. Aldrich taught me. In February. I have knitted four. This is the only one that did not unravel."

"It is crooked."

"I am aware."

"It is the most beautiful cap I have ever seen," said Mrs. Ferreira, and handed it back with a hand that, Constance noticed with astonishment, was not quite steady. "Go up. It is the third floor. There are thirty-nine steps. You will stop at the second landing; there is a small boy who will wish to show you a submarine. Do not let him make you late."

…

She stopped at the second landing.

There was a small boy. He was ten, with a high round forehead and large solemn eyes, in a striped sweater, and he was sitting on the top stair with a cardboard tube across his knees and a roll of masking tape in his hand. When he saw her, he rose, and stood in front of her with an air of enormous gravity.

"Hello," he said. "Are you the grandmother?"

"I am."

"Of the baby?"

"Yes."

"I'm Chidi. I'm making a submarine." He held up the tube. "It's going to go to the bottom of the bathtub. My mom says it can't, it's cardboard, it'll get soggy. But I'm going to waterproof it with candle wax. Do you know about candle wax?"

"A little."

"It's very good for waterproofing. My dad says that's what they used in the old days." He considered her. "Are you very old?"

"I am sixty-two."

"That's pretty old."

"It is, yes."

"Do you have a submarine?"

"I do not." She stood on the landing in her navy coat with the tissue parcel on her arm and looked down at the small serious face. "I had a son, once, who built a boat. He built several. The first one sank. He was nine."

"What did he do?"

"He built another."

Chidi nodded slowly. It was clearly the correct answer. "Was it a good one?"

"It was a very good one," said Constance, and was dismayed to find that her voice had gone odd. "It's still in the harbor. In Newport. His brother sails it."

"Can I see it?"

"I should like that."

"Cool." He held out the tube. "You want to hold the submarine? I'm not supposed to let strangers. But you're the baby's grandmother."

She took it.

It was light and hollow and rather lumpy with tape. At one end was a periscope, made of a toilet-roll core, and at the other a propeller cut from a yogurt lid. She held it in her gloved hands, standing on a stair in a building in Providence, and felt something give way inside her, quietly, without a sound, like the first crack in ice.

"It's very good," she said.

"It's not done."

"No. But it will be."

"Thank you." He took it back with great care. "You can go up now. She's making tea. She made a pie. It's bad, but she's trying."

…

The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and scorched sugar.

It was a small yellow room with a pine table, a window over the sink and a clothesline outside it, hung with a single plain dish towel, and it was crowded. A woman with iron-gray hair and a crab brooch sat at one side, upright as a gavel, with a legal pad before her. A dark-skinned young woman in a purple hoodie leaned in the doorway, arms folded. And at the head of the table, in a long green cardigan with her hands wrapped around a mug and her feet up on a second chair, sat the girl.

She was larger than November. That was Constance's first thought. She had been small then, in the photograph Theron had shown her: a pale, clever, wary face under a dark fringe. She was not small now. She was heavy and slow and extraordinarily solid, a woman at thirty-three weeks, with a swell before her like a ship's prow and a faint bloom of fatigue under the eyes. But the eyes had not changed. They were gray-green and level and quite without fear, and they rested on Constance's face with an attention so complete that she felt, for a moment, like a document.

"Mrs. Wexcombe," said Dess.

"Miss Rourke."

"Thank you for coming."

"Thank you for having me."

"Please sit." A small motion of the hand. "Not there. That one's broken. It looks fine, but it has a mind of its own. Take the green one."

Constance took the green one.

It was a kitchen chair, painted the color of a pea, and it creaked. She sat on its edge, as she had been taught, with her bag in her lap. She was aware of the table, which was scarred and honest and covered with a clean white cloth; of the teapot, which was brown; of a plate with a pie on it, heavily browned, that had a lattice crust like a sailor's knot. She was aware of the lawyer's gaze, which was flat and gray and professional, and of the young woman in the doorway, who was looking at her with undisguised curiosity.

"This is Lorraine Beaudry," said Dess. "My attorney. And Joelle Baptiste. My friend."

"How do you do?"

"I'm fine," said Joelle. "You're shorter than I thought."

"Joelle," said Dess.

"What? I'm saying. She's got presence. I thought she'd be six feet." Joelle grinned. "It's a compliment."

"I accept it as one." Constance's mouth twitched. "I have been told that I am often taller in the telling."

There was a pause.

"Would you like tea?" said Dess.

"I should be delighted."

"It's Earl Grey. It's from a bag. I'm sorry, I don't have anything better."

"It will be perfectly adequate."

"And the pie?"

"I should be honored."

"It's bad."

"I am told so."

"Who told you?"

"A small boy on the landing," said Constance. "He said you were trying."

Dess stared at her.

Then something happened in the clever face. It was a very small thing: a loosening about the mouth, a crinkle at the corner of the eye. It was the first sign of a smile, and it was so exactly the expression that Theron wore when he had been surprised into amusement against his will that Constance felt her throat close.

She has his smile, she thought. No. He has hers. He has caught it, as one catches a cold.

"Okay," said Dess. "Okay. I like Chidi. Let's start."

…

She told it the way she had rehearsed.

She had rehearsed it in the car for twenty-nine miles. She had rehearsed it, in fact, for forty years. She laid it out like a hand of cards, one at a time, face up, on the white tablecloth. She did not dress it. She did not apologize. And she was aware, as she spoke, of a curious lightness in her chest, as though some enormous piece of furniture she had been carrying for decades had been, without warning, set down.

"I was born Constance Ashworth," she said. "In Camden, Maine. My father was a shipbuilder. My mother kept bees. I had one sister, Lydia, three years older. We shared a room until I was fourteen."

"Lydia."

"She was the clever one. She was the one who was going to leave." Constance turned her teacup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "In the summer of 1980, when she was nineteen, she became pregnant by a young man who worked at the boatyard. He was a decent boy. He was poor. He had no prospects, and my father had a view of such things. There was a scene. Lydia refused to give him up. My father, who was not a cruel man, but who was a very frightened one, sent her to a home for unmarried girls in Portland."

Dess did not move.

"The baby was born in February of 1981. It was a girl. It was adopted at once, through the church. Lydia was told it was for the best. She was told she would forget." Constance's voice was quite level. "She came home in March. She was thin and silent, and she did not speak of it. She never spoke of it. She went to Boston that autumn and found work at a bank, and my father did not write to her, and for five years we did not see each other."

"I'm sorry."

"Thank you. I was sixteen. I did not understand what I had lost." She lifted the cup and drank, and it was lukewarm, and she set it down. "In 1985, I met Gerard Wexcombe. He was thirty-one, or near it. He was handsome and powerful and in the habit of being obeyed, and he asked me to marry him at a regatta in Newport, in front of two hundred people, in a manner I now recognize as a public acquisition. I said yes. I was twenty-one. I thought it was love." She smiled, thinly. "It was, in a sense. It was the love of a man for a thing that does not argue."

"Mrs. Wexcombe—"

"Please. I would like to finish." She raised a gloved hand. "In the autumn of 1986, a month before our wedding, Lydia wrote to say that she would like to come. She had no money. She wished to see me married. She said that she had been well, and that she did not wish to make trouble, and that she'd like to sit at the back."

Constance stopped.

It was a thing she could do. She could stop. She could sit quite still, with her hands in her lap, and let a silence stand, and not fill it. She had learned it from her husband. It was one of the few things he had taught her that she had kept.

"Gerard read the letter," she said. "He had opened my post. He was in the habit. He came to me in the library at Ledge Point, with the letter in his hand, and he said, 'Constance, I understand you have a sister.'"

"What did you say?"

"I said yes."

"And?"

"And he said, 'I understand that she has a history.'" The pale, dry voice did not change. "He said it quite kindly. He said, 'My dear, I'm afraid it's impossible. The family has a position. The press takes an interest. A scandal of this sort, even a very old one, is the kind of thing that attaches. I know you will see that it is better for everyone if there is no further contact.'" She drew a breath. "And then he gave me a necklace."

Joelle made a small noise.

"Pearls," said Constance. "Two strands. Very fine. They had belonged to his grandmother. He fastened them at my throat, with his own hands, and kissed me on the forehead, and said, 'There. A new beginning.'"

The kitchen was absolutely silent.

"I wore them to the wedding," she said. "I wore them to the births of my sons. I wore them the day I was told that Kit had been killed. I put them on this morning." Her fingers rose, without her will, to the choker at her throat. "I have never in forty years taken them off, except to sleep. I have never been able to decide whether I wear them in memory of my sister, or in penance for having obeyed."

"You were twenty-one," said Dess.

"I was a grown woman."

"You were twenty-one and he was thirty-one and he'd proposed in front of two hundred people. You didn't have a lawyer." Dess's voice was low and fierce. "You didn't have a Beaudry."

"No."

"Nobody gives you a Beaudry at twenty-one."

"No," said Constance, and found that she was close to laughing, and a good deal closer to something else. "No, my dear. They do not."

Beaudry, at the side of the table, was looking at her with an expression that had altered. It was no longer a lawyer's gaze. It was a woman's. "And Lydia?" she said.

"She did not come to the wedding." Constance's hands were quite still. "She did not write again. I wrote to her, twice, in secret, in the first year. The letters came back. She had moved. By the time I thought to look for her, I was a mother, and Gerard had made it very clear that the matter was closed."

"And you let it be."

"For thirty years."

"Why?"

"Because I was afraid." Constance met the clear gray-green eyes. "I do not say that as an excuse. I say it because it is the whole of it. I was afraid of him. I was afraid of the house and of the name, and of what I would be without them. I was afraid, I think, of being the sort of woman who would give up a position for a sister she had not seen since she was sixteen." A pause. "I am not proud of it."

"You wrote it into the will," said Dess.

Constance looked at her.

She had known it was coming. She had known since the hospital, since a girl in a gown with a drip in her hand had said, quite quietly, Did Mr. Pryor ever show you Article Four before Kit died? She had sat in the orange chair and said I am not prepared to say, and gone home and sat in the cupola hall in the dark with her hands in her lap and thought: she has seen it.

"How did you know?" she said.

"I didn't." Dess set down her mug. "I guessed. I read Article Four forty times. It's strange. It isn't written like the rest. The rest is Latin and whereas. Article Four's a paragraph in plain English: 'any child, however conceived.' It's like someone put a window in a wall." She leaned forward. "A man who's building a dynasty doesn't write 'however conceived.' He writes 'lawful issue.' He writes 'legitimate.' It's the first word on the page. And it isn't there."

"No," said Constance. "It is not."

"Because somebody took it out."

"Because I did."

…

She told that part more slowly.

She told it in the plain dry voice of a woman reading minutes, and the afternoon went gray in the window, and the light on the white tablecloth moved from gold to ash. She told them about the stroke. In the spring of 2013, Gerard had suffered a small one in the library at Ledge Point; it had left him weak in the left hand and impatient with detail. He had summoned Ansel, and decided to "put his house in order." He had dictated the principal articles of a new will in a single sitting, striding up and down the study, and had left the drafting to Mr. Pryor, with the instruction that the family be "protected."

"And Mr. Pryor," said Beaudry, "drafted."

"Mr. Pryor drafted. In his customary fashion. He used the old forms. The words lawful issue appeared in Article Four, as I understand, in the first draft." Constance's lips thinned. "I was shown the draft. Not by Mr. Pryor; he would never have done so. By my husband's secretary, who was fond of me, and who left it on my desk. I read it on a Tuesday. In the night. I remember the word, lawful. I remember thinking, how very many people that word has hurt."

"So you took it out."

"I did not take it out. I am not a forger." She looked at Dess with quiet severity. "I went to Mr. Pryor the next morning. I said, 'Ansel, I should like you to consider a small change.' He asked me what. I said, 'In Article Four, I should like you to say "however conceived."'"

"And he agreed?"

"He was extremely distressed. He said that my husband had not authorized it. I said that my husband had instructed him to protect the family. I said that a family which can disinherit a child on a technicality is not protected, but diminished." Her voice thinned. "He was a good man, even then. He said, 'Madam, I must tell Mr. Wexcombe.' And I said, 'You must do as you think right.' And he thought about it for a very long time. And then he said, 'I shall present both versions at the signing. If your husband reads the difference, I shall explain. If he does not, I shall regard that as his choice.'"

"And Gerard—"

"Gerard did not read it." The dry voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "He signed it on the fourteenth of May, in the library, in front of two witnesses, with a gold pen. He did not turn the page. He never read past the whereas. He said, 'Ansel, is this in order?' And Ansel said, 'It is as you instructed, sir.' And that was, in its way, quite true."

There was a pause.

"The men in my family," said Constance, "sign what is put before them. They have always done so. It is their great weakness and, I have come to think, their great charm. They trust a pen. They trust a page. They trust that someone, somewhere, has read it for them." She smiled thinly. "In my experience, that someone is generally a woman."

Beaudry made a sound that was very close to a laugh.

"I am not saying it was right," said Constance. "It was a deception. It was a small and quiet one. But I did it because I could not do anything else. I had lost a sister to a word, and I wished to be certain that, when the time came, that word could not be used against anyone of ours." She turned her gloved hand over. "I did not think there would be a child. I thought there might be a cousin, someday, a nephew's natural son, some young person nobody had planned for. I thought it was a small mercy for an unknown stranger. I never dreamed—"

She stopped.

"I never dreamed that it would be Kit."

…

No one spoke.

The kettle had begun to sing on the stove, a thin high thread of sound, and Joelle crossed quietly and lifted it off. The curtain at the window stirred. A boy's voice rose faintly from the stairwell, counting to ten, and fell away.

"When did you know?" said Dess at last. "About me? About the baby?"

"The week he died."

Dess's head came up.

"Kit came to see me," said Constance. "On the Saturday before. He drove down to Newport on his motorbike, which I disapprove of, and sat in the morning room, and ate three scones with great concentration, and told me he had done something." She shut her eyes briefly. "He said, 'Mother, I've done a thing. It's a good thing. I'm not going to tell you what it is until it's real. But I wanted you to know that I'm happy.'"

"That's all?"

"That's all. He kissed my forehead. He said, 'Don't worry.' I did worry. He had the face." She opened her eyes. "He had the face he had at nine, when he had sunk the Beetle Cat. A face like the sun coming out. I said, 'Christopher, is it a girl?' And he said, 'It's better than that.' And he left. And on Monday night he drove into a wall."

Joelle had put a hand over her mouth.

"I did not understand it," said Constance. "I did not understand for three weeks. And then, on the twenty-seventh of November, Mrs. Aldrich, who is a person of remarkable discretion, came to me in the morning room with a face I had not seen in thirty-one years. She said, 'Madam, I believe I must tell you something about Master Theron.' And I said, 'Is it a woman?' And she said, 'It is a woman. And a child.'"

"Aldrich knew," said Dess.

"Mrs. Aldrich always knows. It is her gift." The thin mouth lifted. "She had guessed it in November, from the way he asked for the photograph album. She had said nothing. She had waited until she was certain. She had waited until she could say it to me without breaking." Constance looked at her hands. "I was very still. I said, 'Thank you, Mrs. Aldrich.' And I sent her out of the room. And I sat for two hours, in the morning room, quite alone, and I thought: Kit left a child."

Her voice failed. She did not seem to notice.

"I thought: he left a child, and I wrote the clause. I thought: I did that. In 2013, in the dark, with a pen. I did that, and it was for him. It was for him, and I never knew."

"Mrs. Wexcombe," said Dess.

"I did not tell Theron I knew. I did not tell him I had read the will. I did not tell him I was glad." She was speaking quite fast now, and the careful syllables had begun to run together. "I waited. I thought: he will tell me. He will come to me, and he will say it. He is my son, he is an honest man, he will not be able to keep a thing like this. And he did not. He came to the museum and told me a story about a lease. He stood in front of me and lied. In the shape of the truth. As his father did." She drew a shuddering breath. "And I thought, there. There it is. It is all of it, the whole inheritance. The pen and the page and the face. I have bred it into him."

"No," said Dess.

"I have."

"No. You haven't." Dess was leaning across the table now, with both hands flat on the cloth. "Mrs. Wexcombe, listen to me. I've known him five months. He lies badly. He lies like a man falling down stairs. He told me once he had no idea what he was doing, and it was the only thing in six weeks that I believed." Her voice was shaking. "He didn't get that from Gerard. He got it from you. He got it from a woman who put a window in a wall."

Constance stared at her.

It was very quiet. The light had gone nearly gray. Joelle had put the kettle down, and Beaudry had stopped writing, and in the corner the old clock on the shelf ticked, and ticked.

"You are very generous," said Constance, at last.

"I'm not. I'm furious." Dess sat back. She pressed a hand to her side and winced. "I'm furious at him. I'm furious at you. I'm furious at Hale, and the late Mr. Gerard, and the entire institution of the Wexcombes. But I'd be a fraud if I let you sit in my kitchen and take the blame for the one decent thing in that whole stinking will."

Constance put her hand over her mouth.

It was not a graceful gesture. She did it quickly, with the gloved fingers, as one stifles a cough. Her shoulders were shaking. The pearls at her throat rose and fell. And through the fingers came a sound that she had not made in forty years, a low, ragged, helpless sound, like a door long shut being forced.

Nobody moved.

Then a chair scraped. Dess had risen, slowly, with a hand on the table, and come around it; and she stood beside Constance's green chair, a large heavy young woman in a cardigan, and put her arm around her shoulders.

It was an extraordinarily awkward embrace. Dess was too round, and Constance too stiff, and the chair back was in the way. She smelled of cinnamon and chamomile and something faintly sour that was nerves. Her arm was warm. It held on.

"There," said Dess, into the silver hair. "There. It's okay. I've got you."

"I am so sorry."

"I know."

"I am so sorry that I did not come sooner."

"I know." The arm tightened. "You came."

…

It was some time before she could speak.

When she did, she found that someone had put a fresh cup of tea in front of her, and a handkerchief, a plain cotton one, white, with a blue border, in her lap. She wiped her face. She straightened her back. She put away the handkerchief, and Dess, who had gone back to her own chair, regarded her with a gravity so exactly like her son's that Constance almost laughed.

"There is one more thing," she said.

"Okay."

"It concerns the date."

Beaudry, who had been quiet, turned a page.

"My brother-in-law, I think, has been trying to persuade Theron that I changed a date on a certificate." Constance's voice was entirely steady now. "I did not. I have never touched a document of the company's in my life. But I think I know what he meant. And I think it is something that Mr. Brandt will wish to hear."

"Go on."

"On the twelfth of November, a Thursday, the week after my son's funeral, I was in the house at Ledge Point. I was in the morning room. I had a headache. Theron was in the library with Hale, who had come to discuss, he said, 'a few matters of insurance.'" Her gaze went to the window. "I have a habit. I am not proud of it. When I was a young wife, my husband's study was a room I was not permitted to enter. I learned that there is a place in the corridor, by the second door, where a person standing quite still can hear everything said in the library. It is a bad habit. I have kept it for thirty years."

"Madam," said Beaudry softly. "Are you telling me you overheard something?"

"I am telling you that on the twelfth of November, at approximately four in the afternoon, I heard my brother-in-law on the telephone." Constance's chin lifted. "He was alone in the library. Theron had gone out to the terrace to make a call. I heard Hale say, quite clearly, in the voice he uses to discuss the weather: 'It is only a date, Hargreaves. A date is a number. It is the signature that matters. The boy will sign what I put in front of him; he always has. See that the PDF is uploaded by five.'"

The room was dead silent.

"Hargreaves," said Beaudry. "His butler."

"His butler, yes. And I believe his clerk. Mr. Hargreaves has served my brother-in-law for twenty-six years in a capacity that has never, to my knowledge, involved the butlering of anything." The pale voice was dry. "I did not understand it. I thought it was some matter of the insurance. I was in grief. I had a headache. I went upstairs and lay down. And I did not think of it again until January, when the policy was in the newspapers, and Theron said, in my presence, the word attestation."

"And you said nothing."

"I said nothing for three months." Constance looked at her hands. "I told myself that it was nothing. I told myself I had misheard. I told myself that a woman listening at a keyhole is not a competent witness." She raised her eyes. "But I have been thinking, Miss Rourke, for some time, about what it is I should like to be. And I find that I should like to be the sort of woman who says what she heard."

"Would you say it to Mr. Brandt?" said Beaudry.

"Yes."

"Under oath?"

"Certainly."

"It will mean testifying against your brother-in-law."

"I know."

"It will be in the newspapers."

"I am aware." The corner of Constance's mouth moved. "I understand that it is a Wexcombe tradition to confess to the weather. I am prepared to confess to the corridor."

Joelle laughed. It came out helpless and sudden, a small explosive snort, and she clapped a hand over it. Beaudry's pen scratched. Dess had her eyes closed, and was smiling, a slow, wet, incredulous smile, with the tears running down.

"Lorraine," she said.

"Yes."

"Is that admissible?"

"It is hearsay from a party's own agent," said Beaudry, "overheard by a disinterested witness, in a context that corroborates the PDF metadata, the user account, the foreman's statement and the physical log." She laid down her pen. "It is the best piece of evidence I have heard in this case. It is the best I have heard in some years. And I shall be very much obliged, Mrs. Wexcombe, if you will let me sit in the room when you give it."

"I shall be glad of it."

"I don't generally say this to a witness."

"Say what?"

"That I like you." Beaudry's face did not soften. But her voice did. "I like you very much."

…

The hat came last.

It was the end of the afternoon. The light had gone out of the window, and Joelle had gone to put the kettle on again, and the pie, mangled and untouched, sat between them on its plate like a small brown hill. Constance had opened her bag. She had drawn out the tissue parcel and laid it on the cloth.

"I should like you to have this," she said. "It is not a gift. It is a very small garment, made badly. You may put it in a drawer."

Dess unwrapped it.

She did it slowly, with both hands, peeling back the tissue paper layer by layer. The cap lay in her palm, gray-blue, soft, crooked, with its one long earflap and its mended hole. She turned it over. She ran a thumb along the knot.

"You made this," she said.

"Mrs. Aldrich says that my tension is unusual."

"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever been given."

"It is crooked."

"It's perfect." Dess held it to her cheek. Her eyes were wet again, and she did not wipe them. "I'm going to put it on him the minute he's born. I don't care if it falls off. I'm going to put it on his head and take a picture. And when he's fifty, I'm going to show him."

Constance could not speak.

She sat in the green chair with her hands in her lap. She watched the girl hold the cap to her face. She saw, very clearly, across the cloth and the pie and the teapot, a small gray-blue shape against a pale cheek, and behind it, as if through glass, another face: a boy of three, in the cupola hall at Ledge Point, on the afternoon of the hurricane, being lifted from the floor by his mother and held against her breast.

Kit, she thought.

My Kit. You did it. You were happy. You said so.

And you have given me the thing that I could not give you, which is a way to be forgiven.

"Miss Rourke," she said.

"Dess."

"Dess." The word was strange in her mouth. She said it again. "Dess. May I ask you one thing?"

"Anything."

"Will you let me hold him?"

"Of course."

"Not now. In June. When he is born." Her voice was low. "I should like to hold him once. And tell him about his father. Not the one who is alive. The other. I should like to tell him that he was the kindest person I have ever known, and that he built boats, and that he was unfailingly late."

"Once?" said Dess.

"Once would be sufficient."

"Twice," said Dess.

Constance looked up.

"You have to be asked twice," said Dess. "It's the rule. You should know. You made it." She smiled through her tears, the quick crooked Wexcombe smile that was not a Wexcombe's at all, and held out her hand across the table. "Mrs. Wexcombe. Constance. Would you like to hold my son?"

"Yes," said Constance. "I would like that very much."

"Then it's a deal."

"It is a deal." Constance took the hand. It was warm, and strong, and callused at the first knuckle, as of a woman who held a pen. She held it for some time. The gloved fingers and the bare ones lay together on the white cloth, and she thought, very clearly, I have not held a hand like this since Lydia's. "I shall be there."

"I know you will."

"I will be early."

"You're a Wexcombe. Of course you will."

"Yes," said Constance. "It is, I think, the one family failing I intend to keep."

…

Dell was waiting at the curb, with the engine running and the door open.

She came down the thirty-nine steps slowly, one at a time, with her hand on the rail. She paused on the second landing. The boy was gone. In his place, on the top stair, in the dusk, was a small cardboard submarine, with a periscope and a propeller, and a note in crayon taped to its side.

FOR THE GRANDMOTHER'S BOAT. —C.

She stood and looked at it.

She bent, with an effort, and picked it up. She held it in her gloved hands for a long moment. It was light, and rough, and not at all waterproof. It smelled of candle wax.

She tucked it under her arm and went down the stairs.

On the porch, Mrs. Ferreira was waiting with her broom. She said nothing. She looked at the submarine, and at Constance's face, and gave a single short nod, the nod of one general to another across a field. Then she opened her coat and brought out from its depths a small round parcel in foil.

"Pie," she said. "Mine. Not hers. It is good."

"Thank you."

"For the car."

"I shall share it with Dell."

"No. Do not share it with Dell." Mrs. Ferreira's black eyes glinted. "Dell eats too fast."

Constance Ashworth Wexcombe, widow of Gerard, mother of Kit and Theron, grandmother of an unborn boy in a crooked cap, stood on a porch in Fox Point at six o'clock on a spring evening with a cardboard submarine under one arm and a warm foil parcel under the other, and began, helplessly and with total dignity, to laugh.

She laughed all the way to the car.

And Dell, who had driven her for thirty-one years and had never once seen her do it, held the door, and looked carefully at the sky, and said nothing at all.