"Just tell me whether the separation's gone through."
"I signed the agreement a few days ago and sent it back to my lawyer."
"Who's that?"
"A simple island lawyer who does wills and divorces."
"That's not like you, Sophy."
"I wanted out. That's all."
"If the papers aren't filed with the court yet, your separation agreement may be moot. You may be entitled to half of his estate."
He saw me turn away and look out the window. "The body is still warm, Evan." I was pretty sure that wasn't true, but I hoped it would tilt the conversation in another direction. Or badger him into silence for what was left of the ride. We were almost at the end of the island, almost there. The sharp scents of salt and lilac through the open windows. A smattering of weathered gray-shingled houses, a grove of tall trees hugging the road, a break in the trees and the vast pond in the clearing back-lit by the moon. The proportions of things on Swansea are different, scaled down, miniature, like the world described in The Wind in the Willows, a place for water rats, toads, badgers, and moles.
"Aside from all of this, Mrs. Lincoln," Evan finally said, "how do you like being single again?" It surprised me that I could laugh. "Fun, isn't it?"
"How would you know about the phenomenon of being single again?"
"I have a good imagination."
"What about you and Mavis?"
"What about us?"
"Are you happy these days?"
"Sure, we're happy. Driver, you're going to make a left immediately after the next telephone pole. She's been doing extremely well the last year or so. The dean picked her to chair the university's committee on sexual harassment. She's filled with purpose and authority and occasional righteousness that does wonders for her complexion. Her entire spirit. She leads three distinct lives: the queen of cultural studies in Harvard's English department; the hearty PTA mom and occasional Beacon Hill hostess; and now a political bulldog in bed with the PC police. She comes down here for the summer and collapses with a stack of novels by a bunch of very un-PC dead white men."
We turned onto dirt, and the cab wobbled and lurched over ruts in the narrow, woodsy road, and I was surprised at the gust of envy I felt for the fullness and certainties of Mavis's life. Or maybe surprised simply that I could feel anything besides grief. Suddenly, stupidly, I envied all those lives she got to live, with titles that could be smartly rattled off like military medals: star professor, wife, mother, hostess, member in good standing of the Swansea summer set. But how could I not envy her, living the way I was-homeless, childless, bookless, staging an elaborate show for Daniel that I was perfectly content? Even Mavis's intellectual hypocrisy struck me as a great luxury, deconstructing Lassie Come Home for a living and taking Anna Karenina to bed.
"At the fork, bear right," Evan said to the driver, reminding me of the time Will and I came here after a week of rain and took a left at the fork instead. We got stuck in a gully of mud a mile down the deserted dirt road and tromped to Evan's house to get him to rescue our car with a rope. Will was angry because I'd insisted that he bear left at the fork, his anger the public face of his humiliation at getting stuck in what he called "Evan's mud." Translation: I have the peevish right to envy your rich, famous ex-boyfriend, and the righteous right to despise him, because he defends famous killers for a living and makes millions.
I never defended what Evan did for a living-how could I? All I could defend to Will was our history and his and Mavis's easy generosity toward us. Evan was something of a parlor game to me, a study in a kind of shameless ambition laced with enough charm to succeed in making his way into Boston society from his working-class Irish-Catholic roots. He was Jack Kennedy marrying Jacqueline Bouvier, and because the name Lambert straddled the fence between Ireland and England, he often passed for a Wasp, which is precisely what he wanted. He was abhorred by liberal, left-leaning pundits, exploited by talk-show hosts, admired by his peers-of whom there were only a handful in the entire country-and envied, grudgingly, by my husband, another poor Irishman with quite a different sense of his own destiny.
Coming down the dirt road through the dense woods, I always forgot there was a clearing, a lawn big enough for croquet, an immense Queen Anne-style shingled house with a front porch larger than my apartment in Manhattan, a circular driveway that could be a running track.
"Evan, is that you? My God, I was about to call the Coast Guard. Weren't you supposed to be on the six o'clock?" I heard Mavis's marvelous throaty voice before I saw her outline in the doorway-unless that was a house guest, a long-necked, tall young man? A large black shape low to the ground bounded down the steps, swished past me, and began to bark.
"I've got Sophy Chase with me," Evan called out. "I found her on the plane from Logan. Didn't I, Flossie? Yes, I surely did, as surely as you are a good dog." I thought of poor hideous, hybrid Henry, mangy, funny-looking, and suddenly homeless. It was much too late to call Ben Gibbs to make sure he'd been taken in. I could see now that the shadowy figure holding open the screen door was Mavis, with a close-cropped, Jean Seberg haircut.
"Sophy, welcome. You're our first visitor of the season." She leaned down to hold her cheek against mine for the briefest instant, stopping short of a kiss. When she stepped back, I saw her shorn head anew in the light and wondered if Evan might have neglected to tell me that she'd had chemo and her hair was just growing back. She had lovely green eyes, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a long neck that always reminded me of Audrey Hepburn's. "We drove past your house the other morning, and I reminded the boys of that sail we took when-"
"I'm afraid I'm not here under very festive circumstances."
"What's happened?"
"It's about Will," I heard Evan say behind me, and hoped he would explain so that I would not have to.
They had gutted the first two floors of the house, so although it looked from the outside like an enormous Queen Anne, an ornate summer house, circa 1880, its interior was bold and spacious, more like an artist's loft in SoHo than a Swansea getaway. Even in the state I was in, I was startled, as I always was, by the wide-open living and dining room, by the dramatic, comfortable splendor of their surroundings. The high, sloped ceiling, the bleached wood staircase leading up to the second-floor balcony hung with antique Amish quilts, the deep blues and greens of the couch and love seats, the pair of Rauschenberg prints over the fireplace. What I'd remembered as sliding glass doors overlooking the deck was actually an entire wall of glass, including two sets of sliding doors, the length of it now-with the darkness outside and all the light within-like a blackened mirror, like a still pond in moonlight, in which the contents of the entire room were reflected. On the long oak dining room table was a tall vase of wildflowers, fluorescent in their brightness. On end tables and a coffee table were little piles of books, scattered around the museum-like room, the way people used to set out ashtrays. Jane Austen, Vasari, C. S. Lewis for the children, Lewis Thomas for the grown-ups, Thoreau's Cape Cod, and an array of books about the island-picture books, histories, a cookbook-a most self-congratulatory collection.
They offered me food, drink, company, and for fifteen or twenty minutes I luxuriated in their affection, their concern, their sympathy. Mavis fixed us plates of leftovers, grilled bluefish, sliced tomatoes, cornbread. Then telephones started to ring, different lines in different rooms, and both Evan and Mavis became utterly preoccupied, separately, privately, in some complex choreography that I had stumbled into, though they returned to the living-dining room to check up on me between calls. It was, by then, well after eleven. It was also, by then, clear that I was on my own here, so I moved to a couch with a pad and pencil and was writing the obituary Daniel had told me to write when Mavis came out of the kitchen and said, "There's a phone call for you."