2011

Half an hour later Sandy and Alice were seated at one end of the big dining room table with a Blue Onion tureen between them. They were a little drunk by then, and there was around them—to be resisted! Sandy kept trying to remind himself—the urging beauty of the room itself, the rich wood, the wall sconces with their gentle light, and the long-waisted French doors that looked out onto the veranda and the darkening lawn. He didn’t quite know how he got started, but Sandy found himself talking about tennis, not so much about the woe-is-me stuff, but the good stuff, the stuff that had brought him out onto the court ever since he was eight years old. How he had loved just hitting the ball! He could do that for hours on end, never mind the points themselves. Right from the start the thing that had motivated him (why did she look so lovely? what had happened to her?), even as a little kid, he said, was he wanted to make beautiful shots. Sure, he wanted to win—who didn’t?—but more than that, what he wanted was to be beautiful on the court. Not he himself beautiful, he hastened to add. Not Sandy Alison the man do-you-want-to-sleep-with-me beautiful. (At which she rolled her eyes.) But the thing he was doing. The sound of the ball coming off his strings, the arc of the shot, the spin, the angle, the heat rising off the court, the white lines, the hush of the crowd watching: he wanted it all to be beautiful. It didn’t even matter who won the point. It just mattered that the point itself, the play, the interconnectedness of it all, that it be beautiful and right.

And that had made her talk of the beauty of Windermere—how deeply she loved the place. How her grandmother and then her mother had worked to bring it back—he should see the photos of what the place had looked like in the fifties! the fluorescent lights someone had hung in the hall!—and how now she, Alice, felt a duty toward it, toward its beauty and its perfection and toward her grandmother and her mother who had loved it too. Not just the house and the grounds, she said, but the history of the place. From when it was called Doubling Point, and the little farmhouse that had stood here during the Revolution with its rude dooryard and cowbells and sheep grazing out on the rocky point, and then the Gilded Age tearing everything down and putting up mansions all along the coast, and the tragedy of the original owners who had no sooner had the house built than the husband had died and left the wife with their two young children and a just-planted boxwood maze. They were in the house still, she said; could he feel them? And then they were back to that drunken night on the Point when he had been so dense (she said) and she so charming (she said) trying to get him to see and hear and smell the seventeenth century in the crooked streets and the little Quaker houses. But he could see now, couldn’t he? He could hear and smell and feel now, couldn’t he?

“I would love to give it to someone,” she said, reaching over and stabbing a mushroom off a platter. The sun had gone down and the wall sconces made the room—the silver on the sideboard, the china and the silk tapestry on the wall—glitter. “Windermere,” she said. “I would love to be able to give it to someone—I mean the experience of it. I think to bring kids up here, in the history and the beauty, in the idyll of the place, that would be everything to me. It would be—” and here she fixed him with a look; did he understand?—“a moral act, an aesthetic act.”

He cocked his head, hoped he looked thoughtful.

“Because being rich,” she went on, “is an inherently immoral act.” And again she looked to see if he followed. “You can do one of three things. You can just say to hell with the world and enjoy yourself, what we’ll call the Margo option. Or you can give it all away, which we’ll call the not-bloody-likely option. Or you can try to ameliorate the immorality by doing charitable work, sitting on nonprofits, raising money for the Redwood Library or whatever, which is how most people square their consciences, but really you’re only buying yourself a slightly higher circle, aren’t you?”

He shrugged, smiled: he wouldn’t know about being rich.

“It’s been a dissonance in my head for as long as I can remember. Two dissonances really, childish questions you can’t help but have: why me, why am I a cripple? And why me, why am I rich? There was a time, during college mostly, when I ducked the question by seeing one as paying for the other. Not just being rich as a compensation for the cerebral palsy. But the CP as a kind of punishment for being rich. They factored out. I was quit with the world. I could enjoy being rich because I was paying for it.”

He had an impression, again, of the range of her selves: bowling shirt, I’m-already-brain-damaged, seventeenth-century Quakers, her research, her suicides. She was always ahead of him, ready with her wit, with her irony, with her—what else to call it?—with her depth. Sometimes he felt quite lost in her presence.

“This is the place I call home,” she was saying, warmly, looking at him with meaning. “I can’t help it if it’s privileged. It’s my home. It’s where I was born. It’s where my mother used to comb my hair to calm me after we’d done my stretching exercises and I was crying. It’s where she died. It’s what I am.”

And yet, in one thing he had been ahead of her, had been ahead of them all. For he had inadvertently passed the test of the Heiress’s Dilemma, hadn’t he? He hadn’t intended to, wasn’t even aware he was taking the test, but he had passed. She could not suspect him of being after her money. He had rejected her right from the start, had turned her aside, had caused her to slide into one of her depressions. She had placed herself in his path and he had treated her—almost cruelly, he saw now—as a kind of mascot of the world he found himself in: the Casino, Windermere, cars with U-WISH license plates. The result of which was that now—he could never have planned it so!—now he was perfectly positioned to make his shot if he wanted to. He had opened up the court; there was all that green into which to hit the ball. If he wanted to.

“Because this is the thing,” she was saying. She had one elbow on the table, her chin resting on the crook of her bad hand. “The privilege is part of the beauty,” she said and leaned toward him. “It took me a while to see that. The guilt and the self-consciousness, the whispers at Miss Porter’s and college. It took me a while to realize that it isn’t just the warm brick and the seven chimneys and the leaded windows. It’s the air of privilege and leisure and fulfillment, of being there, of not struggling toward wholeness but already having it—that’s what’s beautiful. You can’t subtract the privilege from a place like Windermere without lessening its beauty, without injuring it.”

He nodded, like okay, he got that.

“That’s the paradox. If you love the place. I mean if you love the place aesthetically, you have to accept the privilege. You can’t put out the back of your hand and deny it. It’s part of the beauty. That’s why I want twenty kids.”

At which he raised his brow. She smiled, closed her eyes, let her head sway as if to admit she was a little drunk.

“That’s why Tom and Margo should be expelled from the garden. Will be expelled if I ever get married and have twenty kids. Aunt Margo and Uncle Tom will be allowed a three-day visit over the Fourth of July and that’s it.”

And she held her hand out as if to forestall his objections.

“What we’re talking about is a kind of high-level tourism,” she picked up after a minute. She opened her eyes and fixed him with a look. “Not the tourism of ogling the Eiffel Tower, but a tourism where you’re on the inside. Where the outside world, the literal world, is only a sign, an avenue, to an internal world. Like when you watch a movie or read a novel,” she said, seizing on the idea. “You’re a tourist, but if you’re reading right you’re a tourist simultaneously on the outside and the inside. You’re simultaneously yourself and someone else. Nineteenth-century Vevey, let’s say. The Dollar Princess and her exquisite clothes. Common enough when you read a novel or watch a movie. But what about life itself? Could you live your life while at the same time keeping an eye out for signs and symbols, for meaning, patterns, connections?” She sat back, smiled drunkenly at him. “To live your life and read it simultaneously. That’s what I would try to give my children if I had them. Not just Windermere here in the twenty-first century, but Windermere during the Great War and the Gilded Age. Even Windermere before it was Windermere, when John La Farge used to hike across Doubling Point looking for flowers to paint. Imagination. Empathy. That’s the moral act,” she wound up. “Not to live too simply, as if there was only this.”

And with that last word she gestured at the room around them, only this time she didn’t seem to mean Windermere and all it meant to her, but rather the literal world and all it didn’t mean. He smiled and slid his empty wineglass over to hers and clinked it where it sat.

“Show me those photos,” he found himself saying. “The house in the fifties. Your grandmother.”

At which she smiled, leaned back in her seat, and closed her eyes. And then with a funny grimace at how sated she was—food, wine, the presence of Mr. Winterbourne—she made a show of the dicey business of standing up.

Out in the wide hall he was struck by how large and dark and empty the house felt now with the sun going down. Even with Mary there somewhere, and up on the third floor presumably the Salve Regina girls. And who knew? Maybe Aisha was in for the night, being discreet in the bedroom that wasn’t quite hers. And yet it was so deathly quiet, and big, the ceiling so high the light from the wall sconces seemed to lose its way. He found himself strangely affected by the thought of Alice in the house all alone as she must sometimes be. What did she do with herself? Even when she wasn’t alone, what did she do? The house was simultaneously the emblem of privilege—of “being there” as she’d said—and a kind of mausoleum against which she fought with her bowling shirt and her sweetheart-of-the-rodeo clothes. Tom, Margo? One was utterly unlike her, the other actively disliked her. Even Aisha—who claimed to love her, and who he had come to see as using her—would one day leave Alice when the right opportunity presented itself.

It had, of course, been staring him in the face all along. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it: the obvious solution, the simple answer. And yet he had never considered it, had never even picked it up, turned it this way and that. He had been too . . . what, too much of a gentleman? too used to better— Well, he was about to say to better women, but what did that mean? Prettier, sexier, more athletic, okay, but better? He gazed down at her there in the dark library, at her body quick and intent beside him. She was showing him the house in the twenties, thirties, the house reclaimed by her grandmother in the fifties and sixties, her mother in these wide-cuffed dungarees surrounded by workmen. No, it was impossible. It ran too counter to the idea he had of himself. He lacked the killer instinct, after all, had documented proof of that. And yet, why not? He was a little drunk himself, he’d admit, but really: why not? She was within the circle. Their bodies touched—were they both not aware of it? Each time she reached over to turn a page of the album, or leaned forward to point out her eight-year-old self in this or that photo, she made it so that her shoulder touched his upper arm or her elbow brushed against him. Could he not turn to her, pull her fragile body into him? Make her feel what it would be like? Feel himself what it would be like?

He stole a glance at her—her sun-lightened hair, the nervous tautness of her face, the strange vitality she had in spite of her broken body. She was showing him a photo of her grandmother helping to lay out the maze with stakes and mason’s twine and someone manning a surveyor’s transit, then a photo of the hedge two feet tall, four feet tall, six feet and topped with snow. As if to camouflage his thoughts, he joined in, pointed out in the upper corner of one of the photos a 1978 Mercedes in the shadows under the porte cochere. But all the time he was feeling her beside him, allowing himself to fall under the allure of her body—her long hair, her thin arms!—the two of them alone in the dark library with its walls of books and leather chairs, and around the library the big house with its twenty-eight rooms, its banks of windows and ornate chimneys, and around the house the dusky grounds, the massive trees with their circles of bare earth surrounding the hundred-year-old trunks, and around the grounds the black wrought-iron fence tipped with gilding that told you this wasn’t yours, you weren’t invited.

Could he bend himself to it? Could he say “love”—could he feel love—not just once in the eccentricity of the moment—Alice du Pont and Sandy Alison!—but again in the light of day, and then the next day, and the next? Because there would be no “trying out” Alice as a girlfriend. That was a wrong within the other wrong that would be beyond him, fatal. The divide, once crossed, had to remain crossed. Did he understand that? Did he grasp that? There would be no going back, no return to the Florida camps, to the resorts on the Outer Banks, to the girls who showed up at the courts in their summer shorts with their bare backs and their hair dyed blond.

Or was he just playing, a little drunk, holding his hand out over the fire?

She had reached the end of the photo album and was now showing him the blank pages at the rear of the book. The blank pages on which were pasted photos of her kids, she said—here was young James trying to learn how to stand on his head, and Sarah with a croquet mallet too big for her, Judith playing in a mountain of Christmas wrappings. And look! here he was—Sandy Alison—in shorts and a tight T-shirt, reclining in one of the Adirondack chairs, a gin daisy held gingerly out over the lawn as if the naked baby tucked into the crook of his arm had just reached for it. And here he was again smiling through his sunglasses at the lovely—he could take her word for it—at the lovely photographer.

In the library window he could see their grayed-out reflection, the two of them standing before the heavy oak table with its glass-shaded lamp and the big photo album spread out before them, and at the same time, behind them the south lawn sloping darkly down to the maze, still faintly visible. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply the still, silent air. There was the sound of the front door opening, closing.

In a moment, he knew, he would kiss her. In a moment, he would turn her slender body into him, enclose her, and kiss her on the lips.