Authors: Sharyn McCrumb
Elizabeth had been given the guest room next to Eileen’s bedroom. Its decor of rose and pink marked it as the one reserved for female guests. The dainty satin bedspread and matching canopy and the carved walnut furniture reflected Amanda’s view of country elegance.
Elizabeth had put her clothes in the chest of drawers and stashed her suitcase in the closet. The bridesmaid dress would probably need pressing before the rehearsal. Looking at herself in the dresser mirror, she wondered what one wore to have dinner with the king of the castle. Royal blue, she thought, smiling. In the end, she settled for a green print dress and Mexican sandals.
If he comes as a Prussian general, he’ll just have to lump it, she thought.
She had hoped to talk again with Geoffrey, to find out what to expect of this dinner, but he hadn’t reappeared. Amanda, too, had vanished about five o’clock, saying that she spent the hours before dinner resting.
Elizabeth occasionally tried to picture a Napoleonic Alban, but the image wouldn’t come. She couldn’t even remember what he looked like. Alban was ten years older than Bill, which made him twelve years her senior, and there certainly hadn’t been anything outstanding
about him that she could recall from her childhood visits to Chandler Grove. The pony she remembered with perfect clarity, but Alban’s face was a vague blur with rather short brown hair and brown or hazel eyes. He had been much too preoccupied with his own concerns to pay any attention to Elizabeth or his other cousins. Then when she was eleven and Bill thirteen, their father had been transferred to a company office six states away, and the visits stopped altogether. Her mother’s family became voices calling long distance or gloves and bath powder at Christmas time. She doubted if she would even have been asked to participate in the wedding, except for the fact that Eileen had no close friends—at least, none that her mother was prepared to see in a formal wedding ceremony.
Amanda’s seasonal letters to her sister’s family had been voluminous on the subjects of tomato plants and carpeting. She lavished great detail on her own occasional indispositions—her every headache was a migraine—but on the subject of Eileen’s illness she was consistently reticent. Therefore, Elizabeth knew very few of the details. Amanda mentioned it first as “Eileen’s sensitive nature,” or “bad dreams and other signs of a delicate temperament.” Just what symptoms were masked by these euphemisms the MacPhersons were not told. Finally Amanda announced in a letter that her daughter had been sent away to a “finishing school” that specialized in dealing with sensitive girls. The MacPhersons knew that Cherry Hill was a private and rather expensive mental institution, but they never betrayed this knowledge to Amanda, though Bill was fond of alluding to it in ambiguous jests.
Eileen had been out of Cherry Hill for a year now, during which time she had been enrolled in the university as an art major, though she had produced no works except for small sketches assigned as class projects, which she did not bring home.
Elizabeth wondered what her family felt about her engagement or her present health. Whatever she learned would not come from Amanda.
W
HEN
E
LIZABETH REACHED
the bottom of the staircase, the only person in sight was a pleasant-looking young man in a tennis outfit who was sitting in the library leafing through a copy of
Sports Illustrated
. He fit the description of Mr. Bryce’s new law partner, so Elizabeth concluded that he must have been summoned a day early. Aunt Amanda must be matchmaking in earnest, she thought. Still, he wasn’t bad-looking.
“Hi!” she said, peering over the magazine. “Are you here for dinner?”
“So they tell me,” he said. “But if Charles chose the menu, I may remember a pressing engagement. He’s into soybean casseroles.”
“Dinner is destined to be strange no matter
what
we have,” Elizabeth retorted, taking the chair across from his.
“He’s
coming, too.” She nodded in the direction of the castle.
“You mean Alban?” he asked.
“Yes. I can’t wait to see what he’s like. He’ll probably
come clanking in wearing a saber and an iron cross from the Thirty Years War.”
“Actually, they didn’t start giving out iron crosses until 1813,” he replied. “But it sounds like a very interesting sort of evening. What do you do?”
“Well, if you mean ‘What do I do’ in the sense of: do I worship oak trees or think I’m Peter Pan, the answer is nothing. I’m Elizabeth MacPherson, from a sane branch of the family. I just finished college a few weeks ago, and I haven’t started job-hunting yet, so I guess the answer to what I do is still ‘nothing.’ ”
“Enjoy it while you can,” he replied. “Because if I know Amanda, you won’t be doing nothing for long.”
“I’ve been addressing invitations all afternoon,” Elizabeth said.
“But the wedding is next Saturday. Surely it’s a little late to be mailing them!”
“They’re afterthoughts.”
“Friends of the bride,” her companion offered. They looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Well, if it gets too grim, you can always sneak off and amuse yourself. Do you play tennis?”
“Yes, after a fashion,” Elizabeth answered. “I mean, you haven’t seen me at Wimbledon.”
“Well, you’ll make a nice change anyway. I get tired of beating Tommy Simmons. He’s Bryce’s new law partner, so he doesn’t get much of a chance to practice.”
Elizabeth stared at her companion. “But if
he’s
Mr. Bryce’s new law partner, then who—”
Just then Amanda appeared in the doorway with her best company smile. “Oh, here you are, Elizabeth. Dinner is ready. You and Alban come along.”
When Amanda had marched away to assemble the rest of the family, Alban turned back to Elizabeth. “I gather I’m not what you expected.”
“Did I tell you I’m considering a career in the diplomatic corps?” asked Elizabeth faintly.
He laughed. “I always got along with you, Cousin Elizabeth. You were my favorite relative.”
Elizabeth was puzzled by this remark, because she could scarcely remember Alban speaking to her at all,
but she had made enough gaffes for one day, so she made no reply. It was probably an exaggerated form of Southern politeness, she decided.
Charles and Geoffrey were already in the dining room, standing stiffly behind their chairs like sentries. Even Charles had put on a coat and tie for dinner, probably because anyone more casually dressed would feel uncomfortable in the strict formality of Amanda’s dining room.
Elizabeth stole a glance at Alban, who was padding to his place in bleached sneakers and sweat socks without a flicker of self-consciousness. Of course, there’s no telling what
he’s
got, she thought. His dining room may make this look like a Dairy Queen.
It would have been hard to outdo Amanda Chandler in traditional opulence, however. The room was a careful blending of red and silver: crimson carpet and curtains; white linen tablecloth stretched across a William and Mary table with places for twelve; red roses in silver bowls for the centerpiece and on the sideboard, where more silver serving dishes gleamed. Even the huge painting on the long wall conformed to the color scheme: a bloody stag lay collapsed in the snow while wolves approached him, their red tongues lolling.
“So appropriate for our dining room, don’t you think?” asked Geoffrey, nodding toward’ the painting.
Amanda and her sister Louisa appeared in the doorway, their conversation in full swing. “… Though if we don’t get some rain soon, heaven knows what’s to be done about it …”
“Better notify the florist in case you need him, dear,” Louisa replied. “You know they cannot conjure up arrangements at the last moment.”
“Yes, but I did want to do the flowers myself from the garden. Those things from Wallers are so trite, they might as well be plastic!”
“Amanda, you don’t have any flowers to speak of,” her sister reminded her.
“Well, I was thinking of
your
garden, actually, Louisa. You know what a genius you are with growing things.
I just know that you could create something perfectly splendid—oh, good evening, everybody!”
“General Patton and Omar Bradley have arrived!” Geoffrey announced.
Amanda ignored this sally. “Elizabeth, you are over there between Alban and Charles; and, Louisa, of course you’ll be on Dad’s right, across from me. I think we can all sit down; the others are on their way.”
Louisa, a smaller, grayer version of Amanda, took her place beside her son. “Well, Alban, you are a sight!” she twittered, frowning at his tennis outfit.
“Sorry, Mother.” Alban grinned. “I considered it, and decided that being late would be the greater social crime, so I came as I was. Oh, Aunt Amanda, Simmons sent word that he’ll be around tomorrow morning on his legal errand, whatever it is.”
“Thank you, Alban, we were expecting him. Oh, Robert, here you are! You remember Elizabeth, of course? Do sit down. Where is everybody else?”
“I’m right here, my girl,” said Captain Grandfather, taking his place at the head of the table. “And don’t tell me I’m late, because you said twenty hundred hours.”
“Never in my life have I said ‘twenty hundred hours,’ ” Amanda assured him. “And it is now eight-seventeen.”
“Excuse me,” said a voice from the doorway. “Has anybody seen Eileen?”
Elizabeth later wondered whether the family’s reaction would have been the same had Eileen been an “ordinary” bride, without her particular history. Certainly they seemed unduly concerned about a grown woman who was late for dinner. When everyone jumped up from the table, apparently intending to rush outside and search for her, this realization seemed to strike them, because they stopped abruptly and began to murmur little disclaimers.
“Probably forgot her watch.”
“It’s still very light outside. Doesn’t look past eight o’clock.” This from Louisa.
“She’s absorbed in her masterpiece,” Amanda announced.
“But we can’t let it ruin her health, can we now?”
“Or our dinner,” murmured Geoffrey, resuming his seat.
“She’s down by the lake. Charles, would you—”
“Aunt Amanda,” Alban cut in. “I’m dressed for a trek through the weeds. I’ll go and find her. Sit down, everybody. I’ll be back before you finish your salads.”
He was gone before anybody could protest.
Michael Satisky shied past Amanda’s benevolent smile with a nervous titter of his own and took his place between his prospective father-in-law and the empty chair reserved for the bride.
Elizabeth, ostensibly listening to Charles’s monologue on proton decay, watched Michael nibble forkfuls of salad and wondered if Geoffrey’s assessment of him were correct. He looks as though he’d forgotten his lines, she thought.
“… Because although the proton is 1,836.1 times heavier than the positron, they have identical charges, which has been explained by …”
“I’ve always thought so,” Elizabeth assured him.
“Just the slightest nuance of desperation in your voice invites me to interrupt this conversation,” said Geoffrey. “Perhaps I should introduce our new dinner guest. Elizabeth, Michael Satisky.”
Satisky started at the sound of his name and produced a stricken smile at them from across the table.
“This is my Cousin Elizabeth,” Geoffrey told him. “Her brother is in law school at your university. Bill MacPherson. Perhaps you know him?”
“I—er—no,” Satisky mumbled. “I’m in the English department. We don’t see much of the people in law school. Eileen didn’t tell me …”
“It’s a big place,” said Elizabeth. “Sixteen thousand students, I think. In fact, we didn’t even see Eileen all year. You’re in graduate school?”
Now that the conversation had become less awkward, Geoffrey lost interest in it and reentered his mother’s conversation on the relative merits of various
punch recipes. His own favorite, he insisted, was made with grain alcohol and anything.
Michael began to explain about his interest in the Brontes (Branwell was the real genius of the family), and his own modest efforts in what he called “the realm of poetry.” He seemed more relaxed as the conversation progressed.
Here at least is a chance to say something, Elizabeth decided, because in a physics conversation it is hard even to come up with a question unless you know a little about the subject. Since Michael looked less miserable when expounding on his own interests, she decided that it would be kind to encourage him.
“What did Branwell write?” she asked.
Satisky pulled up short in mid-sentence. “What?”
“I said: ‘What did Branwell write?’ Branwell Brontë.”
“Well—actually, nothing. I mean, not a novel or stories or anything. Actually, when he was a child he wrote fantasies with the girls, but his potential—”
“Oh, I see!” said Elizabeth eagerly. “He died while he was still young, and the others grew up to become writers.”
“Well … no.” Satisky rearranged a few stray peas on his plate. “Emily and Anne only outlived him by a few months.”
“But—I don’t understand. How is he the real genius of the family when he didn’t do anything?”
Geoffrey, whose attention had been recaptured by the scent of conversational blood, had followed this last exchange with lively interest. “What Michael is trying to say is that Branwell must be the genius of the family by sheer potential, Elizabeth. Because his sisters were mere girls, and look what they accomplished. Since he was the male of the family, think what a wonder he’d have been if he’d tried. Right, Michael?”
Satisky flushed and stammered that he hadn’t meant that at all, but by then Elizabeth had begun to talk to Geoffrey about something else, so he lapsed into silent contemplation of his baked ham. He professed to be something of a vegetarian himself at the university, but he told himself that there was no sense in letting
all this good food go to waste—a thought which he hastily amended to: a change of diet will be good for my system, and anyway I can’t save the creature’s life by not eating him now that he’s already here on the plate. I might as well eat, since conversing with these people is impossible.
He wished Eileen would hurry up. At least she was so besotted with him—committed to their cherishing relationship, he corrected himself—that she would listen to all his opinions in respectful silence. Eileen had thought the master’s thesis on Branwell was a good idea. Thank goodness she wasn’t a little schemer like that catty cousin of hers sitting over there talking and laughing with the Cobra-Fairy.