It wasn’t until a rainy day in the fifth week that she decided she could bear it no longer. When the mailman retreated up the road in the rain, leaving nothing in her box, she settled herself at the telephone with a fresh pack of cigarettes beside her for courage.
She had called his office any number of times before, and always it had been a simple matter of saying “Mr. Nelson, please” to the switchboard operator, and then of hearing his secretary say “Mr. Nelson’s office,” and then of hearing Sterling. Now she didn’t quite know how to begin.
“I’d – I’d like to speak with Mr. Nelson’s secretary,” she told the switchboard girl.
“Mr. Nelson’s no longer with us.”
“No, I said his secretary. I know he’s abroad, but I’d like to speak with his secretary, please.”
“Oh; you mean Miss Breen. She’s working for Mr. Harding now. Just a moment.”
There was a buzzing and a clicking and then another voice said: “Mr. Harding’s office.” It was the same cheerful, Brooklyn-accented voice that used to answer for Sterling.
“Are you Miss Breen?”
“Yes.”
“I’m calling to inquire about Mr. Nelson.”
“Mr. Nelson’s in London. Mr. Harding’s handling all his accounts now; perhaps he can—”
“No, no; this is a personal call. I just wanted to find out when Mr. Nelson is expected to return.”
There was a pause. “Well, as far as I know he isn’t
expected
to return. I mean I believe he’s been transferred to London on a permanent basis.”
Alice was patient. “No,” she said. “I’m sure there must be some mistake. He was expected back in four to six weeks.”
“Oh. Well, as far as I – perhaps you’d like to speak with Mr. Cameron, our managing director?”
“Yes. Yes, please.”
There was more buzzing and clicking and another secretary to deal with; then at last a thunderous British voice said: “Cameron here.”
“I’m – I’m calling to inquire about Mr. Sterling Nelson. I wondered if you could tell me when—”
“If this is Gramercy Realty, I’ve nothing further to say. I’ve made it perfectly clear to you people that we are in no way responsible—”
“No,” she said. “I’m not – this isn’t – Please, I—”
“Well, if you’re another of his creditors my answer’s the same. We are in no way responsible for any debts he may’ve—”
“No, look, please. This is a personal matter. I’m a – personal friend of Mr. Nelson’s, and I simply wondered if you could tell me when he’s expected back.”
Mr. Cameron sighed audibly into the phone, and when he spoke again he was less harsh, as if beginning to sense that this might indeed be a personal matter – perhaps even a delicate one. “I see,” he said. “Well, there seems to’ve been a good deal of confusion about Mr. Nelson’s activities, to say the least. Matter of fact, you might be able to help us. Have you any knowledge of his whereabouts now?”
“His whereabouts?”
“Have you any address in England where he might be reached?”
“No. No, I don’t have—”
“And you say he told you – it was your understanding that he planned to return to this country?”
“That was – yes, that was my understanding.”
“Well, I’m afraid you were misinformed. Mr. Nelson’s American visa had expired and we chose not to arrange for its renewal. Then after he left there began to be no end of nuisance here from his creditors, so I cabled London. The London office has replied that directly after reporting there he severed his connection with the firm, and since he left no forwarding address we’re quite unable to trace him. Puts the firm in a most awkward position but there’s nothing we can …”
Alice could never afterwards remember how she managed to conclude the conversation; all she knew was that when it was over she sat paralyzed at the telephone table for a long time. Then she began walking through the house looking at Sterling’s things, touching them, not crying and not even wanting to cry, realizing in wave after wave of pain that the gift of these things had been Sterling’s way of saying goodbye. “I think the less elaborate we make our goodbyes the better, don’t you?” – and he’d known even then that it was forever. He’d known – he must have known even before the move to Scarsdale, and God
only knew how long before that – he must have known she would one day be walking alone and bereft among his gifts, and he must have hoped, in his quiet, knowledgeable way, that she would understand.
But she didn’t understand – that was what made it impossible to cry. All she could do was walk and sit and get up and walk again, with the voice of Mr. Cameron echoing in her head; all she could do was fail and fail and fail to understand.
A little after three o’clock, still walking, she began to know what she would do. She would go to the front window and wait for Bobby – no, better still, she would put on her raincoat and go out across the Post Road to wait for him, and when he came he would say, “How come you’re here?” and she would say, “Just waiting for you.” And they would cross the road together and go into the house. Then Bobby’s eyes would get very round and he’d say, “What’s the matter, Mommy? Is something the matter, or what?”
And she wouldn’t tell him right away. She would carefully put both of their raincoats on hangers to dry, and she would inquire how his day had been at school. But when he asked her again if something was the matter, she would break: she would go down on her knees and take him in her arms. She would gather him in and press him close, and then – she knew that by then she’d be able to cry – then she would say, “Oh, Bobby, he’s gone. He’s gone from us, and he’s never coming back …”
That was how she planned it, and that was the way it happened.
If Scarsdale was, as Sterling Nelson had promised, an isolated pocket of prosperity, the town of Riverside, only a few miles away in the Hudson Valley, was an isolated pocket of grandeur. It was like no place Alice had ever seen before, and she knew at once that she wanted to live there. It would change her life.
It wasn’t really a town at all, or even a village, but a colony of handsome dwellings built as close as possible to the high-walled borders of a great private estate called Boxwood. Both the estate and its careful environs were the work of a self-made Wall Street tycoon named Walter J. Vander Meer – a man whose eagerness to erase his own beginnings on a small Missouri farm had made him seek to establish a new dynasty here, among the ghosts of the colonial Dutch whom he believed, on slender evidence, to have been his ancestors.
He had spared nothing in creating Riverside: he had equipped it with two tasteful churches, Episcopal and Presbyterian; he had made certain that its Riverside Country Club would have the finest golf course in Westchester County; and had taken considerable pains over the founding of Riverside Country Day School, on the high marble panel of whose main hall were engraved the words:
MANNERS MAKETH MAN
But the full flowering of his zeal had gone into the creation of Boxwood. Its grounds were a marvel of professional landscaping in that every vista was pleasing to the eye – wide, rolling lawns, tall trees, rich hedges, and deep gardens. In addition to a number of servants’ quarters and guest cottages, there were four substantial homes intended for the families of his four sons, and all the winding roads and pathways led eventually to the high ground on which he’d built his own mansion, which might have been named Boxwood Manor if it hadn’t always been called “The Big House.” All the tall western windows of the Big House, and the marble-flagged esplanade beneath them, commanded a majestic view of the Hudson, a view only partially blemished by another and more famous Big House less than two miles upriver in which more than a few of Walter J. Vander Meer’s early business associates had spent their final days: the squat, ugly structure of Sing Sing Penitentiary.
Vander Meer had died of old age and bewilderment soon after the Crash, but enough of his millions remained to ensure a long and sound survival for his aristocratic widow, his progeny, his Boxwood, and his Riverside.
“Isn’t it something?” Maude Larkin inquired, moving through the summer breeze of the esplanade with the proud and stately tread of a pathfinder, and Alice had to agree, in something close to reverence, that it certainly was.
They paused to rest against the balustrade, and Maude Larkin said, “See? Those are the Palisades. That big one’s High Tor, the one Max Anderson wrote the play about. And look here—” She called Alice’s attention back from the mountains and away from the intermediate hulk of Sing Sing; she was pointing to the balustrade on which their forearms rested. “All this marble was
imported from Italy, piece by piece. Can you imagine what that must have cost? And you see he never did quite finish it. He built this whole beautiful place all through the Twenties, and the esplanade was meant to be the crowning glory; but you see it was supposed to go all the way across the lawn, all the way to the poplars over there. And you see what happened instead?” She took Alice by the hand and led her out to where the esplanade came to an abrupt amputation, and with a theatrical flourish she pointed to five Italian marble columns lying corpselike in the grass. “Nineteen twenty-nine,” she said in a stage whisper. “Isn’t that something? I mean really, Alice; isn’t that something?”
In the long, lonely time since Sterling Nelson’s desertion – almost three years now – Alice had found a small measure of comfort in spending two afternoons a week as a teacher of sculpture in the Arts and Crafts Guild, a community enterprise that occupied the basement of the Westchester County Center, in White Plains. The money she earned from it was scarcely worth counting most of the other teachers were volunteers – but she thought the experience would be valuable, and she hoped it might be a way of meeting people. It was: all her students were women of her own age or older, prosperously married and vaguely dissatisfied and “looking for something,” as more than a few of them put it, and they tended to make a pet of her. They would take her into their homes, in Scarsdale or in other nearby towns just like it, to meet their polite if baffled husbands; but more often than not those evenings would end with her riding home in the embarrassing silence of the husbands’ cars, her mouth dry and swollen from too much talking about “art” and “form” and “Paris” and “Greenwich Village” (and when would she ever learn not to monopolize a whole evening’s conversation?) while the husbands shifted
gears and groped for pleasantries about how “interesting” it had been.
Then toward the end of the third year Maude Larkin had enrolled in her class, and she knew from the start that Maude Larkin was going to be different. Not only did she seem more talented than the others, or at least more responsive to criticism, but everything else about her suggested the kind of person Alice really did want to know, and to have for a friend. One day Maude shyly asked her out for a drink after class and they sat for hours in a White Plains cocktail lounge. For once it wasn’t Alice who did most of the talking, and all the things Maude said revealed more and more clearly that Alice hadn’t been wrong about her: Maude Larkin
was
interesting. She didn’t live in Scarsdale or in any of its stifling vicinities; she lived in Riverside, of which Alice had never heard. And her husband wasn’t an insurance man or a lawyer or a business executive like the others, but a writer: he wrote scripts for three of the evening radio serials to which Alice had long been addicted.
“You mean you really like them?” Maude asked, her eyes as bright as a happy child’s. “Oh, I can’t
wait
to tell Jim that; he
hates
them; he’ll be absolutely delighted.” Her witty, knowledgeable talk went on through round after round of relaxing Manhattans for which she insisted on paying; Alice had to excuse herself twice to telephone Bobby with promises to be home soon, and when Maude drove her back to Scarsdale at last they lingered in the parked car for an exchange of affectionate declarations:
“Oh, it’s been so nice, Maude. Please come in and have dinner with us.”
“Dear, I’d love to, but I’ve got to get home or Jim and the kids’ll kill me. But listen: I’m not letting you out of this car until you promise me one thing. Do promise to come see us soon. Bring your little boy and spend the weekend. Next weekend.”
“Well, I’d love to, Maude, but really I—”
“Promise. You’ve got to promise. I’ll come and get you, all right? I’ll call you tomorrow. And another thing, Alice – I know this may sound drunk and foolish, but there’s one other thing I
must
say before I let you go. I simply can’t tell you how much this sculpture class has meant to me. Honestly. I feel – it’s what I’ve always – well, I just feel you’ve opened up a whole new world for me, and I want to thank you, that’s all.”
And now in return, by bringing her to Riverside and guiding her through the splendors of Boxwood, it seemed that Maude was opening up a whole new world for Alice.
“Are you sure it’s all right for us to be here, Maude?” she asked when they’d left the esplanade and started back down one of the winding paths.
“Of course it’s all right. The old lady and I are on first-name terms. Well—” and here she laughed in the candid little self-effacing way that was one of her most winning traits – “I guess that’s not
exactly
true. She calls me ‘Maude’ and I call her ‘Mrs. Vander Meer.’ I don’t think anyone in the whole world uses
her
first name. Anyway, she seems to approve of me, and I know she’d approve of you. The only one you ever have to worry about is Walter Junior, the oldest son. He can be nice sometimes, but he’s essentially a pompous ass. Jim calls him a capitalist piglet – says he isn’t big enough to be a capitalist pig. He’s the whaddyacallit of the whole business, you see – the executor? Is that what you call it? I don’t know. Anyway, he’s the man in charge, and he takes it all very seriously. But look: here’s what I’ve been dying to show you. Come along.”
And Alice followed her in pleased bewilderment. They were heading around toward the rear of one of the splendid houses Maude had pointed out earlier in the tour – the one built for Howard Vander Meer, the second son, which had been vacant
since the Howard Vander Meers’ divorce some years before – and Maude walked boldly up to one of its rear doors and opened it. “Just wait till you see this,” she said.