The Carriage House (6 page)

And now, at Adelia’s belligerent behest, the sound of axes rang in the kitchen again. “We understand,” said Elizabeth, speaking for all of them in a dramatic tone that ought to have been magnified by a sound track. “What can we do to help?”

Adelia was prepared. “Anita Schmidt is dictatorial and mean,” she announced. “She is a bully in the worst possible way. Believe me when I tell you that your father has attempted to be diplomatic. After the injunction didn’t go through, he tried to persuade them. These are good friends of his, keep in mind. Ted Cheshire. Jack Weld. In return, they signed a petition rushing the demolition. These people are ruthless.”

Izzy was aware that Adelia was propagandizing, but still, she felt it. For Jack Weld to be involved. For him to have refused her father something as simple as an ancient carriage house that stood—for William only, but still, for William!—as a guarantee of his place in the world. Jack Weld had taken enough from William already. He had witnessed William’s losses. He had lurked in the background, grinning, while Izzy refused to become the girl her father had hoped she’d become. Jack had watched as she hollowed herself out, and that had been a triumph for him. It was almost enough to make Izzy want to join Adelia’s war, if only to spite Jack. But then there was Adelia, excessively intense of eye, continuing to rally her troops. “The fact,” she said, her lips thinning, “that the injunction didn’t go through was a catastrophe. But the petition was more than a catastrophe: it was a personal assault. You’ve seen what it’s done to your father. He’s not himself. Diana, Isabelle, I’m sure you’re hurt by what happened in the hospital, but he’s not himself right now. So. What I am saying is that I can’t overemphasize the importance of regaining the carriage house. If we could only do that for him, I feel confident that he would recover. But if he wakes up one day and sees that Anita Schmidt and her cronies have bulldozed the carriage house, it will destroy him completely.”

“I agree,” Elizabeth said. “I couldn’t agree more. We have to save that carriage house.”

“Good. I need to know you girls are with me. I don’t want to do it without you. Your father wouldn’t want me to do it without you.”

“Okay,” Diana said, obliging minion that she was. “Okay, what do we do?”

“I’ve drawn up a plan. The first step is to halt the demolition. Without a court order, it will have to be a matter of persuasion.”

“Winning the hearts and minds,” Izzy said.

“You’re being sarcastic, Isabelle, but it is true. If any of this is to work, we’ll have to get the neighbors to understand that blocking the demolition is a categorical imperative.”

“What happens if we stop it?” Diana asked. She was listening as carefully as she could, straight-backed, so alert she might as well have been pinning little flags to a map.

“Then we move the carriage house onto your father’s land.”

All three of the sisters stared.

“We can do that?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes. It’s an iffy procedure, especially in the case of the carriage house, because of its condition. But it is possible.”

“If Mrs. Schmidt wouldn’t let Dad onto her property to make repairs, will she allow him onto the property with bulldozers or whatever to relocate the carriage house?”

“Jacks and timbers,” Adelia corrected her. “The process requires jacks and timbers. And I can’t necessarily speak to Anita Schmidt’s reaction. Anita Schmidt is a pill, and I can’t predict which way her pill of a mind will turn on this issue. If she’s opposed, I’m not above just taking it. It’s a quick procedure. I don’t see an enormous objection on the part of the neighbors.”

And thus,
Izzy thought, the tribal wars of American suburbs commence.

“When do we start?” Elizabeth asked, trigger-happy and emboldened.

“Tomorrow morning. None of the wives work, so they’ll all be home. And we can’t waste any time. The demolition is scheduled for Thursday. It was supposed to be the week after next, but Jack Weld called an emergency meeting—while your father was in the hospital
,
of all things
—
which resulted in a date change.”

“He’s a terrible person,” Izzy heard herself saying.

“Yes, he is.” Adelia watched her for an extra moment, and Izzy wondered, as she always had, how much Adelia knew. Isabelle glared at her until she looked away.

“How could he
do
that?” Elizabeth asked. “How could he call it an e
mer
gency?”

“Because of the rodent problem,” Adelia said, flipping through her plans.

“There’s a
rodent
problem?”

“Yes, Elizabeth, there is a rodent problem. Because Mrs. Schmidt would rather let it be overrun by rats than allow your father onto her property to make the appropriate repairs.”

“So tomorrow we go to the neighbors to ask for a stay.”

“Yes.”

“How are we doing this?” Izzy asked. “Divide and conquer?”

“Yes. I imagine that’s the best way. Izzy, you and I will go together. We’ll head left, toward the club. We’ll speak to Ted and Mary Cheshire, Sheldon Ball, and Yusuf Uzmani. Elizabeth and Diana, you’ll speak with Jack and Elaine Weld and Suzanne Legg. And I’d like you to speak with Anita Schmidt.”

“The very Heart of Darkness itself,” Izzy said.

“We need to propose the idea of removal,” Adelia went on, ignoring Izzy. “I don’t believe it will go over well, coming from me.”

“We can do that,” Elizabeth said, without consulting Diana.

“You might not get Anita herself. She’s been sick: she had a tumor, or something awful like that. We sent her a beautiful bouquet of flowers, though little good that did. Her grandson is taking care of her. What is his name again?” Adelia pinched the bridge of her nose, attempting to remember. “I’m blanking on his name right now. Anyway, he’s the one you’ll speak to, most likely. What is his name, Di
?
”

Izzy watched Diana. She was sitting even straighter, focusing on Adelia’s battle plan, but Izzy could see that a faint flush had risen to her cheeks.
Arthur,
Izzy wanted to say. Arthur was the name of Anita Schmidt’s grandson, whom Diana was in love with once.

“Oh, God,” said Elizabeth. “
God,
what is his
name
? Di, you dated him, didn’t you?”

“Arthur,” Di said. She was a good soldier. “It’s Arthur.”

“Yes, of course,” Adelia said. There was an almost wistful tone to her voice. She made a note. “Anyway, Arthur has been caring for her for several months now. I imagine he can be talked to about these things.” She considered her pad, blinking more deliberately than usual. A surprising softness spread momentarily over her face. “He’s improved, you know,” she said. “Since he was younger. He seems more confident. He grew out of that little slouch he used to have.”

Diana sat very still.

“I saw him at the supermarket the other day,” Elizabeth said, as though she had produced a crucial piece of evidence. “He’s grown into his face. I think he owns a restaurant in New York. Maybe even two; I think he’s opening a new one. Addie Ball told me it got excellent reviews. She went on and on about the pork ribs. But anyway, I saw Arthur at the supermarket. Mrs. Cheshire was telling him how to pick good eggplants, and he was listening as if he didn’t own a
restaurant.
It was sort of adorable. I remember I used to think he was arrogant, for a kid who wasn’t overly impressive, but he was definitely different.”

“Still,” Adelia said, calling her minions back into order. “We have to remember that he is his grandmother’s child. He will not contradict her orders. If we’re going to build an alliance with him, it will be a delicate one. He clearly loves Anita, hard as that may be to believe.”

“She raised him, didn’t she, Di?” Elizabeth asked.

Diana nodded, her flush deepening.

Adelia sallied forth. “Anyway, I’d like to gauge whether he’ll be amenable to the relocation. But more immediately, we need him to agree to delay the demolition.”

“How long do we need?” Elizabeth asked.

“As long as possible. But worst-case scenario? A month. I have contacts who will help us get a building contract quickly. After that, it’s a matter of pouring the foundation and moving the structure. I’ve spoken to the contractor your father was thinking about. Wayne Construction. They have a highly advanced lifting system. They’ll need a day to survey the structure and measure the footings. Some time to prepare the machinery. Another day to dig the whole thing up.”

Izzy wanted distance from the kitchen table so she could think. She had begun to feel an unbidden desire to help. To get the carriage house for William as a tangible sign of his family’s importance. To give him one solid thing to hold before she went away to college and left this hideous town forever. One step backward so that she could move forward again. But in proportion with this desire to help, there was the sense of herself getting lost, as it had the other time. Her boundaries felt tenuous, sitting with her sisters, hatching another plan with Adelia. “We understand,” she said, wanting to leave. “We have our orders. Permission to go to bed now, Sergeant Lively.”

“Isabelle, you can do whatever you like in this house.” Adelia sighed. “I’m only trying to help.”

Elizabeth gathered her bags; Diana excused herself to go outside for a walk. Adelia remained, pencil alert, at her post. And Izzy, as she had done each night since she could remember, walked up two flights of stairs to her bedroom across from Margaux’s studio. The darkness in her bedroom enveloped her. She was alone with the forms of the furniture, dark, hulking shapes that scared her when she was a little girl because she imagined them coming to life. Beside them, she felt hollow and small. A vision of William as he used to be—vibrant, sitting in her chair and reading a story about enchanted mice or families of rabbits—made her want to cry. Izzy lifted her finger to her sharp, infinitely human nose. William’s face in the hospital had looked like a paper mask. The image of that mask was more painful than the memory of him asking what had happened to her, why she had changed. To be honest, those questions, mean as they were, came as no surprise. Something
had
happened to her. She had gotten misplaced. He was as much at fault as she was, but it was too late for blame. The hopelessness of his paper face was worse. As though he were finished with fighting for the daughters he’d lost. When he came home from the hospital, he’d gotten out of the car and looked up at the house as if he didn’t recognize it. They were all adrift, the Adairs. The house was at sea, with only Adelia’s hand on the tiller.

For a while longer Isabelle sat in her desk chair, pressing the tip of her nose with her pointer finger, listening to nothing moving around her. When the stillness started to swim, she walked across the hall to her mother’s studio. “Mom?” she whispered.

There was a silence. Then, finally, a wary voice: “Come in.”

Isabelle opened the door a crack. A stripe of her mother revealed itself. Her dark hair, streaked with silver, was pulled back into a loose coil; she was facing her easel. The chair where Louise usually sat, absorbed in some crappy magazine, had been vacated for the night. Beyond the easel, the window was open wide: Isabelle caught the smell of new leaves from the yard. To the right, the single bed was neatly made, its deep red spread folded over pink floral sheets. Beside the bed was a vase of purple iris. Long ago Izzy had strung a train of paper lanterns between two corners of the room; Margaux sat beneath them, swaying gently before her wide and almost empty easel. She was like Switzerland up here, a one-woman nation of alpine air, refusing to take part in the wars. Behind her, pressed against the frame of the door, Isabelle felt bellicose and sharp. She considered stepping into the room and wondered, if she did, whether the softness of her mother would sweep up over her and settle all the edges of her bristling heart.

“I just wanted to say good night,” Isabelle said, standing outside the door.

Margaux turned. Izzy thought she could detect warmth in her mother’s face, and she was almost tempted to go sit beside her, but the expression faded to blankness.

“Good night, Mama,” Izzy said, and then gently, trying not to make too sharp a sound, closed the door again. In her own bedroom, she checked her bedside table: there was a new vase under her lamp. She touched the petals of the clematis that her mother had cut, but something in their thinness made her chest ache, so she moved over to the window that was brushed by the canopy of her coeval tree. It was a yellowwood, planted just a week after they brought her home from the hospital. Now its crown reached up to the third floor, whispering all night long in the wind. The leaves were dark green shapes rustling the blackness like moths. Through them she could see Margaux’s garden, and beyond, the rotting carriage house. Between the garden and the house, there was the shape of Diana moving forward through the night. Poor obedient Di. Izzy closed her eyes and imagined herself floating in the midst of the yellowwood leaves, a shape of cut-out cloth, brushing the darkness. She felt the sweep of leaves on her cheeks. And then there was the rasp of a branch scraping her windowpane, and Izzy opened her eyes, jagged again. She reached forward and switched on her desk lamp, and in its angry glare the outside world went blank.

Chapter 5

D
iana slid through the kitchen door and moved over the patio, past the fishpond and the rings of her mother’s garden. So Arthur was only the length of a yard away. One light in the Schmidt house was on, in the kitchen, and she could see the form of a table and the cabinets beyond it. She shivered. All around her, Margaux’s irises bloomed, purple ghosts hovering in the darkness.

Past the pond, past the irises, there was the stretch of lawn that led to the Schmidts’ fence. She climbed the stack of bricks that had been hidden behind the compost pile since she was in high school and swung one leg over. Staying close to the periphery, so that no one in the Schmidt house could see, she moved toward the carriage house. The door creaked when she pushed it open: inside, the quality of darkness was different. The empty space practically dripped, as though inside its old warped beams the night had been compressed into liquefaction by the pressure of uninterrupted years. She didn’t dare climb the rotten stairs; she sat on the lowest step, feeling the wood bend and settle beneath her.

She couldn’t blame them for not remembering his name or what he meant to her. It was so long ago. Isabelle was only eight when they started dating. Adelia had just moved to Breacon, and Elizabeth was preoccupied by her dramatically hasty marriage. And anyway, even while she and Arthur were together, Diana didn’t talk to her family about him much. It was a thing she kept for herself. Now so many years had passed. Of course her connection to Arthur was less than vivid in their minds. She was probably the only remaining person who believed it was real, not some figment of adolescent imagination. When children fall in love, adults imagine that the end will be like a shed skin. Each childish breakup is meant to be a sloughing off of another potential self until the most desirable version can emerge. That had not been Diana’s experience, but her family couldn’t be expected to understand that. They couldn’t possibly know how often she still thought of him.

The thing between them lasted two short years. Their senior year of high school and her freshman year of college. In their junior year of high school, he arrived in Breacon to live with Anita. His mother had moved to Paris and left him behind. They met for the first time in the driveway, as Diana was leaving for tennis practice and Arthur was taking out the trash; when Arthur explained the story of his mother’s departure, he shrugged and squinted up toward the sky. He didn’t know, or he was waiting for rain.

When William learned that there was a boy living with Anita Schmidt, he invited him over for dinner. They ate a thawed lasagna. When William asked where Arthur intended to apply to college, Arthur explained that he wasn’t sure he would. This produced a furrow of consternation in William’s forehead. When asked what sports he played, Arthur announced that he didn’t. Conversation dried up quickly. But Arthur had a way of sitting there at the dinner table. He was sure in the shape of his frame despite its slight slouch. There was confidence in his hands as he lifted forkfuls of lasagna to his mouth.

From the start, Diana had the sense that her success didn’t impress him. He didn’t particularly care about tennis. The fact that she was class president made him laugh, without derision, but with something else that Diana couldn’t completely comprehend. Her 5 on the Calculus AP had no meaning to him. At first her inability to impress this directionless kid from across the lawn annoyed her. What had he done that was so terribly great? He had merely arrived and stayed. Then it started to fluster her. She searched around for an arrow in her distinguished quiver that would make him understand her unique impressiveness. When this failed, she settled in to watch him. He ate quietly. He asked William about architecture, to which William swatted his hands and muttered, “It’s not what it once was, I’ll tell you that. It’s a fallen discipline.” Arthur asked more questions. “Architects were once Great Men,” William explained, jabbing the air with his fork. “They built cities. They laid the bedrock of civilization. My grandfather built this town. Now we work on commission. The art of it has gotten small.” Diana watched Arthur engaging her father as though William Adair was just another man, curious and cramped.

Arthur wasn’t handsome, but he had a look that drew Diana to him. His eyes were the greenish-slate color of old hard courts. This was what Diana remembered. Other than his eyes, the details of Arthur’s face had become less clear as the years passed. Diana couldn’t remember the particular shape of his nose. At UT, during that first year when they were together, Diana fell asleep every night by imagining his face beside her, watching her as she drifted off. Even after they’d broken up, she kept imagining this. Even when they hadn’t spoken in months. One night, after a year or so, she realized that she couldn’t remember his face anymore. She couldn’t sleep. She spent the whole night feeling as though she were falling, slowly, off a steep precipice.

But if she closed her eyes, here in this house where they spent so much time, she could feel the shape of his jaw in her hand.

Something scurried somewhere off in the darkness. She opened her eyes again. She was getting accustomed to the dark. She could make out the wide cement panels on the floor, the wood slats of the inside wall, the gambrel ceiling with its cedar beams. Above her was the loft, encircling three walls of the house, the place where she and Arthur had accumulated the trappings of a bedroom. She brought books; he brought an air mattress and a heap of blankets that smelled like mothballs. She brought a space heater; he brought wooden whiskey crates to use as furniture. For two years they kept a secret world up there. It was the only thing about her life that no one knew. When, after her freshman year of college, in the filtered light of the loft, Arthur asked her to marry him, it seemed completely natural. In the secret world of the carriage house, they’d been living together a long time, alone in their private universe. He bought her a slim gold ring with money from the construction job he’d worked all year. She slipped it on, and in the surge of excitement that followed the gesture, she bit his hand so hard she left a red semicircle on the web between his index finger and his thumb.

As soon as she stepped out onto the lawn wearing the ring on her wedding finger, she became aware that there would be problems. Though William knew that Diana and Arthur were dating, he was confident that Di would move on in college. Because of this, he could temper his disapproval. If asked about Arthur, he’d say, “He has no direction.” Or, more thoughtfully, “It’s not his fault, he can’t help the family he has. But he has no sense of his consequence.” Her mother wouldn’t care: she and Arthur had spent time together in the garden, and he had helped plant her bulbs. Oddly, it had seemed like the two of them got along in a way Diana couldn’t entirely understand. She’d watched them from the stone bench by the pond, their white hands darting in and out of the soil. She’d been curious about the easy way they knelt together side by side. Even before her diagnosis, Margaux seemed lost when it came to advising her children. She had ceded this ground to William long before she got sick. No, the more important thing was that William wouldn’t approve. His disapprobation would be compounded by the issue of Elizabeth’s pending marriage to Mark. After college, Elizabeth had moved out to L.A., and when she came back for Thanksgiving, she announced that she was engaged to a successful character actor who lived in Los Feliz. It took William a couple of days to recover from the shock. They’d never even met him, and William hadn’t been asked for his blessing. He had to mentally redefine the engagement as a move that was good for her career. “Things are different out there in L.A.,” he said to Diana, trying to arrange his surprise into a useful system. He sliced the air into vertical segments with his hand. “Your sister has always been smart. I’m sure what she’s doing is good for her career.” By the time Arthur gave Diana the ring, Elizabeth was three months pregnant with Caroline, and William was struggling to understand how children had become a part of Elizabeth’s plan. Diana felt his disappointment, thick and awful because he was always so proud of his girls.

That was what she was thinking about as she walked across the lawn with Arthur’s ring on her finger. William had only just wrapped his head around the idea of Elizabeth’s marriage, and now his middle girl had gotten engaged before she was twenty. There was no pride, Diana told herself, in breaking your father’s heart. He had given them so much; she would not add to his disappointment. She took the ring off before she reached the patio and put it in the pocket of her jeans. When she walked through the kitchen door, William looked up from his paper and asked how physical therapy had gone. She kissed him on the cheek before going up to her room, where she put the ring on a chain that she could wear around her neck, hidden under her clothes.

Only a week later, Margaux announced that she’d been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She was only forty-seven at the time. Precisely forty-seven, because it was her birthday when she told them. Izzy had planned a party, with Japanese lanterns and angel food cake. Adelia was there, new to Breacon but already a regular presence in the house. On the night of the party, she exuded a fever of gratitude for having been invited. At the head of the table, Margaux wore a pink crown cut out of construction paper. She made the announcement with a placid expression, right before she blew out the candles that Izzy had arranged on her cake. There was an enchanted glow to the whole suspended moment. Margaux in her pink paper crown, the girls, William, and bright-faced Adelia. They all hovered at the cusp of something, and even as the announcement unfolded, Diana somehow imagined Margaux was going to give them good news.

Once she finished talking, she closed her eyes and leaned forward to blow out the candles. Her long hair dipped so close to the flames that Diana imagined her head engulfed in a fiery halo. Izzy stuck her knife through one of the paper lanterns. Ever so slowly, it sighed and collapsed. “Are they sure?” William asked. Through lingering smoke, Margaux nodded. “Oh, Margaux,” Adelia said, and Izzy stood up and punctured every other lantern on the chain. They deflated slowly. “I should go upstairs,” Margaux said. “I’m sorry to have ruined the party.” And then she left, and Izzy ran off somewhere, and the rest of the family, including Adelia, picked up the tinselly mess left in her wake.

After they all moved into the kitchen, Diana watched William washing the silverware, and she could see that he was perplexed but not upset. It was comforting, in one sense, to have a concrete medical excuse for the many ways that Margaux had left them all behind. It was good to know that they weren’t imagining the ebbing they’d felt for years. At the same time, Diana experienced a quickening of the fear that had been building in her throughout the year, while she was injured and anxious about her tennis career. In Texas, far away from William and Arthur and the town where she’d been a great champion, Diana felt the boundaries of herself beginning to blur. There were other athletes at UT more impressive than she. She could not define herself as the most athletic girl in her class. She was sidelined after her injury, and without matches to prove herself, she had little else of substance to produce. She struggled with sleeplessness, and only during Arthur’s visits, when she fell asleep anchored to his physical closeness, did she feel rested enough to imagine a comeback. Since returning to Breacon for summer vacation, she’d felt infinitely surer about herself. But Margaux’s announcement made her worry again about something lurking in her genes. A short-windedness. As she dried the silverware that William passed her, Diana remembered those sleepless nights at UT, listening to doors slamming shut throughout the recesses of the athletes’ dorm, and she felt as though a destroyer angel had swept past at some point and marked her forehead with its thumb.

The announcement offered new proof for the things that Diana had started suspecting existed in herself. Afterward, aspects of her daily life in Breacon came to stand as proof of the propensity for early decline. Even the carriage house, with Arthur, started to seem like evidence of a Mom-ish desire to shrink off into dark recesses, leaving a former, more successful self behind. It was these doubts that caused her to tell Elizabeth about the engagement. Elizabeth told William; William told Adelia. Elizabeth’s disapproval wouldn’t have bothered Diana much, as she was clearly preoccupied with her own romantic drama. Even William’s disapproval, Diana could have handled. There were techniques she could have used to avoid breaking his heart. She could have promised him that she would wait until she’d finished with school. She could have assured him that it would not affect her tennis, and she could have proven that to him on court. But the talk with Adelia shifted something in her.

In a short period of time, Diana had come to cherish her relationship with Adelia, this woman who had come back to her childhood home, single, with a successful career at a law firm downtown. She swept into Breacon just as Margaux was getting more distant, and she attached herself to the Adairs—to William and Diana in particular—with an enthusiasm that felt like a life raft. William admired her; by extension, Diana hoped to impress her. In a short time, Di came to want to please Adelia almost as much as she had always hoped to make her father proud.

“Di, I know I’m not your mother,” Adelia said after she found out. “And I know I have no right to talk to you about these things. But I have some experience with marriage. I’ve been through it twice. When I was young, all women
did
was get married. It was the only ambition we were given.” But Adelia was an athlete
.
She dreamed of playing in Wimbledon. She was college champion.
And when she was twenty, in her senior year, because everyone around her was getting married and she thought she was running out of time, she married her husband and dropped out of school. Every night for a year she made him a different dinner out of
The Joy of Cooking,
and then one night, over a fallen soufflé, she started to cry. She wanted to
become
something. He never understood. He couldn’t imagine that, in marrying him, she had not become the thing she dreamed of, that every day she spent in his house, she was moving farther away from herself. That she had finally come so far, she feared she would never get back to the person she’d hoped to become. After the first divorce, she returned to school, but it was too late for her tennis career. Billie Jean King was winning Wimbledon. Adelia might never have gotten quite so good as that, but she regretted her whole life not having given it more of a try. “You have so much potential,” Adelia told Diana. “I couldn’t bear to see you lose that.”