2011

He couldn’t help wondering what the others thought, Margo and Aisha, the realization dawning on them that he wasn’t just hanging about, and Tom, who was down in New York and didn’t know anything about it—what would he think when he came back, found his sister lying on the couch drinking a margarita, sighing “abus de faiblesse” from time to time like a punch line and watching a movie with her head on the lap of that tennis guy?

At the Casino, having her group doubles lesson, Margo just gave him a you-can’t-be-serious look, punched a volley right at him.

Those first few days he wondered whether he shouldn’t just come right out and tell Alice about Aisha, say that it was all part of this mixed-up summer, part of his homelessness, and let the chips fall where they may. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He didn’t want to hurt her, didn’t want to add himself to her personal injury list. In a drunken moment, in a hurt, diminished moment in his life, he had taken custody of Alice du Pont’s broken body and her breakable heart and he would do everything he could not to manhandle them.

And anyway only Aisha knew about Aisha, and she had her own reasons for keeping that under wraps, didn’t she? And the whole Heiress’s Dilemma thing? Well, there would have to be some new testimony introduced to change that. He would have to be revealed as some talented schemer thinking several moves ahead so that the original renunciation was a way of building credibility, of laying the groundwork for future maneuvers. And honestly, did anyone think that he, Sandy Alison—he who lacked (didn’t everyone know it?) the killer instinct—did anyone see him as capable of that sort of strategy, that sort of chess playing? What new development could possibly make it appear as though he had the wits to manipulate the Heiress’s Dilemma until—brilliant tactic, if he could only claim it!—until it became evidence in his favor?

In the meantime, there was Alice: funny, weird, electrocuted Alice! He still had to show up at the Casino every day, put in his time, but afterwards they went about the island like teenagers looking for places to make love. His place was too grotty, and Windermere was off-limits whenever Margo or Aisha—and now Tom—was around. (And motels were too Margo-ish, Alice said.) So it was off to the Norman Bird Sanctuary, to Rose Island, the grounds of St. George’s (the darn mosquitoes!), and once like a return to Where It All Started out at the breakwater at midnight with the land and the lights behind them, an occasional car motoring past, and nothing but the black ocean in front of them and the black breeze blowing against their bare limbs. And how in these moments—really, he’d never seen anything like it—how she gave her body away! Gave it away as if it wasn’t hers, this thing that had fought her her whole life, gave it away without reservation, as if in his arms her body could stop fighting, could stop trying to be something it wasn’t but could just be—cerebral palsy and all: loved, possessed, thrilled.

One thing he did was, as a kind of apology, he texted her to be outside her house one night—two a.m., he said—and he had come by on the Indian (no need to sell it, after all), come by and swept her up, and with her holding on for dear life had brought her down to the Point, where he’d pulled out a pint of bourbon just as she’d done that awful night, and started walking her through the squirrely streets under the gaslights, calling her Watson and pointing stuff out, asking her out on the Elm Street Pier if she could hear the tolling of the Rose Island bell, dismantled in 1912, hey?

He didn’t get everything right (“I believe, Sherlock, it’s that house where the Vicomte de Noailles lived”), but he did his best, pointed out the street where all the Newport cabinetmakers had had their shops, the houses where the British officers had been billeted during the Revolution, the Creole witch’s house, the house of the Quaker girl whose household account book was one of the Redwood Library’s prized possessions. She played beautifully along, pretended to be Sandy Alison the local dolt. It was dark and cool and deathly quiet.

In the North Burial Grounds—after they had looked over the slaves’ tombstones, read the Quaker inscriptions by moonlight—they lay down in the dewy grass and with a mourning dove moaning in a nearby tree did with each other—“I say! Holmes!”—what you were supposed to do when you were young, in the summer, in the playground of the rich.

She took his education in hand, said if he was going to join the landholding class of Newport (she was always saying stuff like that, those first couple of weeks, as if she were daring him), if he was going to join the local nobility, then he would have to acquire at least the patina of noblesse oblige, that and some V-necked sweaters, she said.

She took him to the Coggeshall House and the Hunter House, to the King’s Arms Tavern, where the lowlifes hung out during the Revolution. He had to survive quizzes on wainscot and carved shells, follow her pointing finger through a slanting rain and name a gambrel roof, a hip roof, a fanlight. True or false: The whale oil chandeliers in the Touro Synagogue were financed from profits in the slave trade. True or false: The cowrie shells uncovered during the restoration of the Selwyn-Lyman House were of a type found not in New England but in Senegal. True or false: Sandifer was a dim bulb.

(She had taken to calling him Sandifer, having asked once whether Sandy was a nickname, was it short for something? Sanford? Sandifer? Sandcrab? Surely his parents hadn’t been so déclassé as to name him just plain Sandy! Again, if he was going to join the moneyed class, he would have to have a highborn name. Sandstone? Sandpiper? Sandweasel?)

One of the places she took him for his education was a funeral home on Spring Street where Henry James had lived as a teenager. They had gone inside and when the funeral director approached them with his clasped funeral director’s hands she had lit into him for having removed the magnificent stairway that had once led to the second floor. Did he have no sense of history? she asked the bewildered man. This was Henry James’s house, William James’s house.

Back outside, she told him Henry James had had a sister named Alice, and that William James had married an Alice. Which made for two Alice Jameses in the same family.

“Which,” she wound up, “is too many damn Alices.”

She was, she said, a Manic-Depressive, jg. (“Junior Grade,” she explained. “That’s military talk, son.”) Bipolar disorder nowadays, though she preferred the whiff of the antiquarian, the name Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton knew their illness by. She had at various times over the last twelve years taken lithium, Stavzor, Depakote, alprazolam, Abilify (great name, eh, son?), and for the last eighteen months Symbyax. Sometimes she took her meds and sometimes she didn’t, she said.

And indeed she still had moments when the Mad Heiress peeked out. They might be in the dark of the White Horse Tavern or leaning against a ferry railing or sitting on Da Silva’s Terrace, sunlight on the bobbing masts, pennants flapping in the wind, and her spirits growing more and more elated until some point was passed and a kind of hysteria crept in. And then it would all collapse on itself—the giddiness, the fun, the blending of their moods—and she would start to watch him as if from a distance, as if she were looking out a back window at some trespasser on the edge of her territory, moving from tree to bush to gate. She would grow quiet, and her hair would fall about her face in that way she had, and the old, reckless, lacerating tone would emerge. She would throw her hair aside and make some cutting remark—What did he think he was doing? Amusing himself with the Plastics Princess? Did he think she didn’t know?—as if she wanted him to hit back, to hurt her, as if the dissonance between what he professed her to be and what she knew herself to be was too much for her to bear up under.

He would try in these moments to keep steady, to reassure her, to talk her down off what she had once called the ledge of self-hatred. Or not even talk really, but just be there, big and male, Sandy Alison with his sun-bleached hair and the muscles in his forearms, those absurd quads emerging out of his shorts. Let the shrapnel hit him. It wouldn’t hurt. It wouldn’t do damage. Show her that he wasn’t going away, that, hey, he was still there, until the second collapse came—the little volleys of viciousness spent, the fight in her drained away—and she would let him hold her, half crying, half laughing, kissing him, calling him her Clutch Cargo.

Winterbourne, Sandifer, Clutch Cargo: okay, he could be whoever she needed.

(Though sometimes when he was alone, back in his asphalt-shingled, cigarette-smelling, bathroom-down-the-hall boardinghouse, he found that the shrapnel had hit. Was he serious? Did he mean to go through with it? Margo as his sister-in-law? Aisha with her knowing looks? The world with its knowing looks? Was he just proving to himself that he had the killer instinct after all? Or had he—almost while he wasn’t looking—actually fallen in love with the strange creature?)