Before Eve left with Sam’s new address in a town called Raven Lake, Greta took her arm. “A word of advice, Eve. You look like a truck hit you, and my son loves you. If he sees you looking like that he’ll come around. He could say no on the phone, but not to your face.”
“But he did say no to your face,” Frances said. “He walked out to your face.” They were in the breakfast room, eating tuna salad with a casserole of noodles and cheese that Mrs. Knapp had left for them.
“I’m going, Frances. I’m packed and going.”
“Raven Lake’s in the Adirondacks, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“The family—the Tildens that is, not the Dodds—had a camp on some lake up there. I forget the name. We went summer, winter, and fall until our mother died. Never this time of year though, because of the flies.”
Eve picked at the tuna salad, then forced herself to eat a forkful of the noodles.
“Good,” Frances said. “Eat as much as you can. You’ve got a long drive ahead of you. Must be three, four hours.”
“Four,” Eve said. “But it’s late. I’ll find a motel halfway.”
“No motels open this time of year... flies.”
Eve put her fork down. “Forget the fucking flies, Frances. I’m going.”
Frances looked down at her own uneaten food.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not really flies I’m worried about—you know that.”
“I know.”
Frances raised her head. She was a handsome woman somewhere in her fifties. She never celebrated her birthday; Eve wasn’t even sure when it was. She did know that her aunt was... had been... a year or two younger than her mother. Eve had seen many pictures of them, of course, and of their mother, Olivia Dodd Tilden, who had been, to use Greta Klein’s phrase, drop-dead gorgeous.
The sisters claimed an accident had killed Eve’s grandmother, but Eve heard rumors from other kids and from Meg’s mother that the beautiful Olivia Dodd Tilden had killed herself.
The sisters refused to talk about it, and Eve had given up asking years ago.
Frances had never married, never claimed a lost love, never talked about herself at all except for a few reminiscences about her victories in swimming races in the fifties. Eve reached across the table and took her aunt’s hand, but Frances eased it away. Her aunt had never hugged or kissed her that she could remember; neither had her mother. Of course her mother had been afraid that she’d see something about her daughter if she touched her.
“Listen to me, Frances,” Eve said gently. “I tried to do it, really tried because poor Meg was so miserable. She had Tim’s scarf and I put it on, hugged it, stroked my cheek with it, practically ate it. And I got as much about Tim Carpenter from that scarf as I would from probing the entrails of a goat. It’s over.”
“It was never over for your mother.”
“Maybe she liked it, wanted to hang on to it. It could be...” Eve searched for a word and came up with useful.
“Not for her,” Frances said. “It cost her her husband too. She hated it...” Frances paused, then mumbled, “I think she hated it.” They finished eating. Frances filled a thermos with coffee and took it out to Eve’s car in the front of the driveway, then insisted on putting Eve’s weekender in the trunk.
“Wish me luck, Auntie,” Eve said.
Frances slammed the trunk lid. “You know I do,” she said, then cleared her throat and stared critically at Eve’s new little red LeBaron. “Can’t imagine what possessed you to buy a car like that. It looks like a jelly bean on wheels.”
“It’s got an air bag,” Eve said. “I might be driving for two now.”
“Yes...”
“I read that two LeBarons collided at sixty, and the drivers walked away because of air bags.”
Frances seemed to find the crushed stone of the driveway fascinating.
“I prefer the Town Car, of course,” she said.
“Of course, Auntie.”
“You don’t need an air bag with a Town Car—whatever you run into is bound to be demolished.”
“Yes, Auntie.”
“Keep the doors locked, especially at stoplights.”
“No stoplights on the Thruway.”
“And call me.”
“I will.”
“And good luck, Eve,” Frances said softly, then turned and went into the house, shutting the door firmly behind her. She was not the kind to stand on the terrace until Eve was out of sight. A few downstairs lights were on, but the rest of the vast, sprawling Tilden mansion was dark. Then Eve saw that Larry Simms’s lights were on in his quarters over the garage. If Frances got lonely or frightened in the huge house she’d beep, and he’d come to her.
Eve climbed into her new little car, which did look like a jelly bean and smelled like new leather. She drove down the first curve in the drive and stopped to look back at the house. One end was now hidden by the trees, but most was still visible. The first time she’d brought Sam here, five years ago, they’d rounded this curve and he’d cried, “You live there?”
“Of course.”
“In all of it?”
“We don’t rent any out,” she’d said tightly.
“Holy shit,” he groaned, and she’d slammed on the brakes of one of Frances’s cast-off “personal-sized” Lincolns. “Don’t carry on like that,” she snapped at Sam, afraid that the opulence of the house would put him off. “You’re our banker, you know we’re rich.”
“Yeah,” he had said softly, staring at the house through bare branches (it had been late November), “but seeing it on paper’s one thing, seeing it in stone, brick, glass, and whatever else they used to make that pile’s something else.”
Frances rinsed the dishes and put them in the industrial-sized dishwasher, but didn’t start it. Mrs. Knapp would do it after dinner tomorrow. Even then the washer would be more than half empty, since Eve would be in Raven Lake. Frances remembered the name from those summers in the mountains, but not the town itself. It was probably like most Adirondack towns, with shops that sold Swiss woolens and skis, sleeping bags and freeze-dried camping food, and mugs with the four circles, and LAKE PLACID OLYMPICS: 1933, 19—whatever on them.
Sam had gotten a bank job there like he’d had here, according to his mother.
He hadn’t even stuck it out as long as her poor lost brother-in-law. No one had heard from him since 1963 except for a lacy card on Eve’s twenty-first birthday in which the Hallmark bard had written, “Today’s the day you’re all grown up, but you’ll always be the child of my heart,” and Will had signed it, “Your loving father, T. William Leigh,” as if he’d expected his daughter to forget his name. Or maybe he thought she’d never known it. But they were not the kind of people to try to expunge his memory or pretend that he was a bounder.
Bounder? Old age was making her positively Victorian.
They dealt with Will Leigh by not mentioning him. Eve asked questions, the subject was changed. She’d try to insist, but she had the Tilden-Dodd nonconfrontational genes and never forced an issue.
That was, until Sam left; that was one issue Eve was forcing. Frances didn’t blame Sam. Living with someone who knew what you were going to do before you knew it must be agony. A whole new definition of intimacy, but not the kind anyone coveted or wrote about in self-help books on how to get closer to your spouse. Now Eve thought it was gone, and maybe it was. Maybe it slipped away as suddenly as it had materialized, and Eve would get her husband back.