Newport, Rhode Island
October 1957
It’s a raw deal, poor thing.
Lucky sucked fiercely on her cigarette and watched the smoke curl up to dissolve against the blue sky. Around the corner, the two men kept on talking. Women were supposed to be the gossipy sex, but men were just as bad, weren’t they? Everybody covets knowledge about his neighbor, whether he admits it or not. It’s human nature.
Oh, I don’t know, said the other man. I hear she doesn’t mind so much.
A little chuckle passed between them. Lucky dropped the end of the cigarette on the chipped paving stone and ground it under her heel. A chilly autumn breeze kicked up from the cliff. Lucky wasn’t wearing her coat, only her navy tweed jacket and a dark, demure silk scarf around her neck. She wrapped her arms around her chest.
The first man said, You think he’s really dead?
Father? Or son?
Another chuckle. Both.
Who knows. Poor old Stuy. You saw him at the party. Drunk as a bum. You know what I said to Mary that night? It’s the damnedest thing. I said, Mary, that fella’s not going to live out the year. Drink himself into the grave. And I was right.
A low whistle. I’ll say. Were you ever.
Lucky levered herself away from the wall, wiped beneath her eyes with the edge of her tweed cuff, and marched around the corner of the building. “Hello, gentlemen,” she said. “Enjoying the party?
Of course it wasn’t really a party, Dudley Sprague’s memorial reception, but since nobody had really liked the man you couldn’t quite restrain the buzz of sociable satisfaction. People were a little giddy anyway at the novelty of gathering in Newport in October, seeing each other out of season. Such a good excuse to sip cocktails and trade gossip. And boy, was there gossip to trade! As Lucky wound her way between the bodies, she heard it all. Somebody was absolutely dead certain Stuy had run off to California with some girl. No, he’d been beaten up by the mob and left for dead, on account of owing the wrong people too much money. Don’t be silly, he jumped off the cliff and drowned. No, he fell. No, he jumped! Then why didn’t they ever find a body? Maybe he was pushed. Maybe he faked his own death.
Oh, she heard it all, all right. Except the truth.
They’d buried old Dudley Sprague in a private ceremony a week after his death—it was July, after all—but you couldn’t hold a funeral service while Stuyvesant Sprague remained missing, while the whole town and more than a few curious outsiders combed the cliffs and beaches of Newport and Narragansett Bay for weeks, searching for some sign of his fate. That would be unseemly. Instead Lucky had watched from the window as these strangers looked and looked for something they weren’t going to find. She’d answered all the questions from the police, who were extremely polite and not a bit suspicious, so far as she could tell. This was Newport, after all. No, they treated her with deference, with tremendous respect for her grief. You’re absolutely sure you didn’t see him again, after the party?
No, she hadn’t seen him. She’d come straight home from the hospital, where her daughter commanded all her attention. Her daughter had nearly drowned that night, it was awful. (Stick to the truth as much as possible, Nonna had advised her, as lucid as could be.) In all the excitement, she hadn’t given Stuy another thought, and she’d never forgive herself for that! (Here she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, and it wasn’t entirely an act.) Not until morning, when he hadn’t returned home, and when she phoned Mrs. Prince over at Marble House, he wasn’t there either.
So the policemen asked her if she was absolutely sure her husband hadn’t arrived back at the house. A couple of guests had seen him wander out to the Chinese teahouse around two in the morning. He never made it home at all?
No, Lucky said firmly. He never entered the house at all.
It was the truth, after all. And they believed her.
Now it was October, and people had resigned themselves to the idea that Stuyvesant Sprague—wherever he was, on earth or in heaven or possibly purgatory, depending on whom you asked—wasn’t coming back. It had become unseemly not to hold a proper service for Dudley Sprague, so here they were, milling about Sprague Hall, sipping cocktails and nibbling what Lucky and Angela had been able to scrounge out of the kitchen.
Lucky crossed the sunroom, where Louise sat on the wicker sofa in a smart suit of black tweed, dabbing her eyes, flanked by a pair of sympathetic friends. The tears were genuine. Within a week of her bereavement—around the time the state of Dudley Sprague’s finances became evident to his heirs—Reggie had left Louise for a wealthy widow in Palm Beach, twenty years his senior.
Lucky made her way through the room, accepting condolences with the same grave expression, the same automatic responses. She was looking for her daughter. Joanie was perfectly convinced that her father would finally surprise them all and return home today—he wouldn’t miss his own father’s memorial service, not Daddy!—and in all the morass of Lucky’s emotions, guilt and terror and more guilt, grief and anger and shock and back to guilt again, always guilt, only one thing remained firm, only one idea withstood the daily churn: hold Joanie tight. As tight and as close as she possibly could.
Because nothing in the world could give Joanie back what Lucky had taken from her.
A hand clamped around her forearm. “Lucky!”
The word was part rasp, part bark—a couple of urgent syllables, emphasis on the Luck. Lucky turned. A pale, parchment face confronted her, a few inches closer than she expected, punctuated with lurid magenta lipstick and a pair of high half-circle eyebrows.
“Mrs. Potts? What can I do for you?”
Lucky found herself gripped by both hands. Mrs. Potts’s blue eyes fixed on hers. “I know,” she said, in the same intense voice, flavored with gin.
“Know? Know what?”
“How you must feel. Such a terrible loss.”
Lucky’s breath returned. She gave Mrs. Potts’s bony fingers a polite little squeeze and drew her hands away. “Thank you. He was sick for so long, it was really a release for him.”
“Old Sprague? God no. I mean your husband.”
“Stuy! What do you mean? He’s . . . there’s no evidence . . . we’re clinging to hope—”
“Mrs. Sprague, I saw him.”
“Stuy? Where? When?”
“The night he disappeared! I saw him walk out of the house—stagger, really—and head for the cliff path. I remember thinking he was in no condition to scramble along the cliffs in the middle of the night.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Mrs. Potts drew herself up. “I thought perhaps he was going to meet an amour. And I was right.”
“But that’s ridiculous!”
“I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Sprague—of course I’d never breathe a word to another living soul—but I think you should know.” She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “I saw him enter the boathouse.”
“Our boathouse?”
“What, is there another one? Such a stupid place for a boathouse, of course, right there on the edge of the cliff, next to the ocean. The water or the weather will get it, sooner or later, you mark my words—”
“But Stuy!” Lucky found herself seizing Mrs. Potts’s sharp elbows. “What did you see?”
“That’s all. He went into the boathouse. I heard a woman’s voice—it doesn’t take much imagination to guess what they were up to, Mrs. Sprague. Anyway, I thought you should know. He must have run off with her afterward, that’s all there is to it.”
Lucky found just enough breath to speak. “My goodness.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t look so surprised. History has a way of repeating itself, they say.”
“What on earth do you mean by that?”
Mrs. Potts waved her hand in the general direction of the ocean. “I mean this. A big party, a couple elopes while everybody else is busy having a good time. A broken heart left behind. Poor, poor Frank.”
“I beg your pardon. Frank?”
“My cousin. All those years ago. They were so in love, and the prince—just whisking your grandmother off like that—poor Frank. It should have been him. And then none of this would have happened, would it? Sprague Hall would have passed to Frank’s children, and of course they would have kept it up to a proper standard.” Mrs. Potts flicked an eyebrow at the paint peeling from the moldings around the French doors.
Lucky drew a long, deep breath. “Now that I think about it, Mrs. Potts, you never did say why your cousin Frank never made it to his rendezvous with my grandmother. It seems to me that a man so much in love would have moved heaven and earth to keep her from running off with another man.”
“Well! I can assure you, Mrs. Sprague, were it not for the hand of a terrible fate—fate in the form of a pair of criminal thugs, who mistook Frank for some man who owed them money . . . poor Frank, he was beaten almost to death!” Mrs. Potts choked back a sob. “So you see, he would have moved heaven and earth, if his thumbs weren’t so badly broken.”
“His thumbs, you say?”
“He was in agony for weeks.”
“I see.”
Mrs. Potts’s gaze turned dreamlike as it traveled around the sunroom and came to rest on the glimmer of blue ocean that floated in the distance, just above the cliff’s edge. She said softly, “And were it not for that dreadful mistake, all this would be ours.”
“Yours?”
“Well, his, of course.”
Lucky stared at the side of Mrs. Potts’s face, on which a peach-pink circle had been carefully daubed like a setting sun. Her eyes had lost focus somewhere on the horizon, drifting a half century into the past. For an instant, Lucky allowed herself some glimpse of the strange workings of the universe, the fickle breath that had blown her into existence and into Sprague Hall, instead of Prunella Potts. How many other tiny, unknown chances had added up to this moment? The two bodies buried beneath the boathouse, the rest of the world carrying on, the secret guilt on the souls of Nonna and Lucky?
Lucky reached out and patted the old woman’s arm. “What a terrible shame for you.”
She found Joanie upstairs in her room, staring out the window at the ocean. Teddy stood next to her, resting his hand on her shoulder. When Lucky said, in an overbright voice, There you are, darling—Joanie didn’t even turn her head.
“He’s not coming back, is he?” Joanie said dully.
Lucky met Teddy’s gaze for a second or two and stepped forward to Joanie’s other side. She touched her daughter’s shoulder and said, “No, darling. I don’t think he is.”
The autumn sun flickered on the water. Lucky found Teddy’s knuckles and brushed them with her own fingers, light as a feather.
“I hate him!” Joanie burst out.
“Oh, darling, don’t say that!”
“It’s true! I do! How could he leave us like this?”
“He didn’t want to leave you, Joanie! Of course he didn’t! I think he thought—he must have thought—we were better off without him.”
“Well, I guess he was right about that, wasn’t he? We don’t need him, do we? Now you can marry Mr. Winthrop, and we’ll be a family together. Won’t we? You’ll come to live with us here, won’t you? Mr. Winthrop? Won’t you?”
Lucky stared through the window. On the other side of Joanie, Teddy said, “Well, that all depends on your mother, of course.”
“Mommy?”
Lucky swallowed hard and blinked her eyes. She tried to speak, but the first word came out in a strangled croak. Joanie turned to look up at Lucky, eyes swimming.
“Joanie, honey,” said Teddy, “why don’t you go downstairs to the kitchen and have Angela give you some of those cookies she baked up? Nice cold glass of milk from the icebox?”
“Cookies don’t solve anything!”
“No, that’s true. But they sure do help.”
Joanie’s mouth screwed up. She looked at Teddy, then at Lucky. “I guess you’re trying to tell me you want to talk about grown-up stuff.”
“Say. Speaking of cookies, you’re a pretty smart one yourself.”
Joanie climbed to her feet. “See if I care,” she said, and stomped out of the room.
Teddy let out a low whistle. “Just imagine what she’ll be like when she hits her teens.”
“Oh, Teddy, stop.”
He turned and reached for her, but she stepped away and wiped her eyes with her thumbs. “Lucky, sweetheart! What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? How can you even ask? No, don’t touch me!”
“Why not? Lucky, look at me.”
He reached for her again, but this time Lucky moved to the other side of the room, next to Joanie’s bed. She picked up a book on the nightstand and set it down again. So many words choking her throat, and she couldn’t say any of them. For the past three months, she’d scrupulously avoided this—standing in the same room, alone with Teddy. To be alone with Teddy was to acknowledge what had happened, what they’d done, my God, actually done in the panic of the moment, the fear and shock—actually buried her husband—buried Stuy—right underneath the floorboards of the boathouse, in some cavity already occupied by the remains of a young woman she’d never known existed, the real Maybelle, the heiress to whom Sprague Hall rightfully belonged. Or would have belonged to, if she’d lived. Mrs. Potts was right—Lucky should never have owned this place, should never even have been born! It was too much to think about, too much to bear. So she hadn’t borne it. She’d sidestepped it, circled around it, pretended it wasn’t there. Pretended Stuy was just missing, like the papers said. Only the expression in Teddy’s eyes made it real—this truth they shared between them—so she hadn’t allowed herself to look.
Teddy cleared his throat. “I realize you’re still in shock. But when your head clears—”
“He deserved better.”
“Yes, he did. Every human being deserves some dignity.”
“We weren’t thinking straight. We should have gone to the police.”
“One of us would have gone to jail. Probably both of us.”
“Maybe that would have been better.”
He crossed the room so quietly, she didn’t hear his footsteps until he was right there, just behind her shoulder. He didn’t try to touch her, but she felt his warm breath on her ear, stirring the hair on her head. “We’ll go away together, like we planned. The three of us. Italy, the place you were born. We’ll leave all this behind and start fresh.”
“Leave? Leave Newport?”
“Leave this crumbling old house, these memories—”
“Are you crazy?”
When he didn’t reply, she turned to face him.
“I can’t leave, Teddy. It’s impossible. Don’t you see? I’m stuck here now. I can’t leave him. I can’t leave either of them. It’s my penance, to watch over them both. To keep some kind of vigil over them.”
Teddy peered at her through his glasses like she was some faulty facade, some flaw of design or symmetry, to be put right by a few strokes of his pencil. He took off his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, replaced them on his nose, and sighed.
“Lucky, I know you feel responsible for what happened. But you’re not. He brought it on himself. You didn’t push him off that ledge. He fell. It was a tragic accident. For God’s sake, you didn’t mean for him to die!”
“Just because it’s an accident doesn’t mean I’m not responsible. He was my husband. I was committing adultery in that boathouse, and if I hadn’t, he’d still be alive.”
Teddy stepped back. “Are you serious? That’s how you see it?”
“That’s how I see it. I’m not leaving, Teddy. Joanie and Nonna and I, we’re staying in this house until they wheel us out of it.”
“How? Living on what? It’s mortgaged to the nines, don’t you know that? You saw Sprague’s will. All those mortgages Stuy took out, when his dad ran out of Maybelle’s money. You can’t possibly pay those back, let alone keep the place up and feed yourselves!”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Sure you will. Ever heard of a little thing called foreclosure?”
“What am I supposed to do, Teddy? Sell up? Nobody would buy it, nobody’s got that kind of money anymore. It’ll go to the preservation society, and then what? They’ll find those bodies for sure.”
Teddy turned away and stuck his hands in his hair. “I don’t believe this. What kind of life is that? What about us?”
“I don’t know about us. I don’t know about anything, just that this—this—” She thrust her hand toward the window, toward the ocean and the boathouse perched on its edge. “This is my penance, Teddy. My burden. This is the price I pay.”
“You can’t afford it. Don’t you see? You’re stuck, you’re dead broke. There’s nothing left but debts.”
A voice came clear and lucid from the doorway. “Yes, there is.”
Teddy and Lucky turned in the same instant to regard the willowy, white-haired woman who stood in an elegant, old-fashioned dress of cerise silk, spectacularly unsuited to an October funeral.
She closed one eye and crooked her finger. “Children. Come with me.”
Nonna hummed to herself as they crossed the damp lawn, cluttered with leaves that rose and swirled and died again in the capricious breeze of early autumn. Beneath a huge blue sky, the ocean played with the toy sailboats scudding across its surface.
For some reason—denial, maybe, or just plain inattention—Lucky didn’t realize they were headed to the boathouse until the warped gray shingles came into focus ahead of them. She hadn’t returned there since July, had scrupulously avoided going near the building. Sometimes her gaze happened to fall there as she glanced out the window or went about some business in the garden, and that mere fleeting encounter made her heart race, made her breath choke in her throat. Now she looked up and saw the walls and the worn, familiar angles of the roof, this humble structure that had formed part of her world since she was a child, and she knew it was something else—not a boathouse, but a tomb. Her legs went stiff. She stopped in the grass and listened to her heart thundering in her ears, felt the blood rush to her head.
Nonna turned. Her dress was bright red against the blue sky. The breeze made her white hair fly around her head.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “It gets better.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Lucky muttered.
“I mean you’ll get used to it. The boathouse, it’s just an old building.”
“So why are we going in there?”
Nonna glanced over her shoulder at the roofline and back again. “Because I have something to show you, darling. Something I’ve been saving for you.”
“Is it alive or dead?”
“For goodness’ sake, just come along and see for yourself.”
Teddy cupped Lucky’s elbow. “Stay here, if you want. I’ll go.”
She shrugged him off. “I’m going in. It’s got to be done, after all, and I might as well do it now.”
It surprised Lucky that the boathouse was exactly as she remembered it, exactly as it had always been—dinghy on its horse, ropes and tackle and tools occupying their proper places. You would never guess what had happened here, or what lay buried in the rocks beneath the floorboards. Lucky paused in the doorway. The sun streamed through the western window and the air smelled of damp and tar and salt. Maybe this was a fitting tomb for Stuy, after all. His favorite place, his favorite smells—the one place he could be himself, as he really was.
Nonna marched without pause across the floorboards to the ladder.
“What are you doing?” Lucky exclaimed. “You can’t go up there!”
But Nonna was already climbing nimbly to the loft. Her feet were bare and curled around the rungs like an orangutan’s. Teddy swore and hurried after her. “Nonna, come down! You’ll fall!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She swung herself up to the loft and stood, smoothing her dress. Teddy sprang up behind her, all stiff and formal in his dark funeral suit, hair slicked back. He pushed his eyeglasses into place and looked down at Lucky, one eyebrow raised.
Lucky’s throat was dry. She stared up at Nonna, avoiding the telltale floorboards to the left, near the dinghy on its horse. “Nonna,” she said, “please come down. This is no time for a lark.”
“A lark? You think I’ve come up here for a lark?” Nonna made a noise of contempt and turned away. She pulled a chain free from around her neck, hidden underneath her dress, and walked to the opposite side of the loft.
“Nonna, what’s up there? What are you doing?”
“You’ll see! Come on, Sonny. I’ll need a hand.”
Lucky called up desperately, “It’s Teddy! Not Sonny!”
“Like the bear,” Teddy grumbled. He made a helpless gesture with his shoulders and followed Nonna across the loft. She was humming again, some aria, inserting a few Italian words here and there. Lucky realized she was biting her nails. Nonna now stood in the exact spot where Lucky had kissed Teddy, where they had undressed each other, pulled the cushions and blankets from the old sofa. Where Stuy had lurched forward and fallen—
“Here it is!” Nonna said. She bent over something and made some rattling noises.
“Teddy! What’s going on up there?”
“It’s the chest,” he said. “She’s unlocking the chest.”
“The chest?”
“You know, that old footlocker against the wall. The one we tried to open up. Come on, Nonna, let me help you with that.”
Lucky kicked off her shoes and headed for the ladder. Her silk stockings made her feet slip on the rungs, but her damp hands gripped better. She thrummed with alarm now. Her heart smacked, her blood sang, her brain seemed to pick up every little detail of noise and sight and touch, all at once.
The footlocker, she thought.
Nonna’s footlocker.
Some memory flashed across her mind—an old, heavy, odd-shaped chest that sat in their second-class cabin across the Atlantic, and how her quiet, grieved, preoccupied Nonna barked at the steward when he loaded it a little too carelessly on the rack, to be wheeled down to the Brooklyn dock. For God’s sake, be careful! she’d snapped. That’s priceless!
Priceless.
Lucky climbed from the ladder to the floor of the loft and stood, regaining her balance. With Teddy’s help, Nonna was raising the heavy lid of the locker until they rested it, ever so carefully, against the wooden wall.
Teddy gasped.
“It’s lined with lead, to keep out the damp,” said Nonna. “Looks like it’s done its job.”
Teddy lifted his head and turned to Lucky. The blood had drained from his face.
“Darling,” he said, “I think you need to see this.”
Lucky stepped across the floor and came to stand between Nonna and Teddy, peering over the edge of the locker. Inside, rolls of canvas lay packed together, each tied with a bright red silk ribbon, the exact shade of Nonna’s dress.
She lifted one out and untied the ribbon. Carefully she unrolled the section at the bottom to reveal a rich, luminous scene in oil paint.
Lucky put her hand to her throat.
“Good Lord,” whispered Teddy. “It’s a Caravaggio. It’s the Caravaggio from the lost di Conti collection.”
“Some are more valuable than others,” Nonna said modestly, “but your grandfather didn’t want any of them to fall into the hands of the fascists. And I didn’t want any of them to fall into the hands of the Spragues. So here you are, darling. They’re all yours. Your inheritance.”