The White Rose (43 page)

Barton, with sudden understanding, begins to shake his head, frantically. “Utterly untrue!” Barton tells Sophie.

“Utterly true,” Oliver says bitterly.

“You're a deceitful…!” Barton bellows. A deceitful what, he doesn't say.

“You know him?” Sophie asks Oliver quietly.

“Oh, sure,” Oliver nods. “He's the kind of guy who stops on his way to a romantic assignation to pick up
carnations
, all wrapped up in cellophane and tied with a red ribbon. What else is there to know?”

Sophie turns to face Oliver. “I don't think it's fair to hold that against him,” she says. “Not everyone's as invested in the beauty of flowers as you are.”

Barton, dazed, regards the carnations he carries. “This is…,” he says feebly. “This is…not for…” He draws himself up, recovering from his outrage. “An…
assignation
, Sophie. I was merely stopping here to see my cousin Olivia. Then I was on my way to the farm. This bouquet was intended for
you
, Sophie.”

“Bouquet,” Oliver says in disgust. “Naturally.
Bouquet!
”

“You know”—Sophie shakes her head—“some people
like
carnations.”

“Impossible,” Oliver states with repelled authority. “No one
likes
carnations. They're inherently despicable.” He stops, a matter of great significance now occurring to him. “You don't…like carnations. Do you?”

She gives this sober consideration and duly locates her answer. “No,” she sighs.

“No?” Barton asks, baffled.

“I'm afraid not,” she tells him. “It was a nice thought, though.”

“It was bullshit,” Oliver says. “There's no cousin Olivia. He only has one cousin. And her name isn't Olivia, is it, Barton?”

“You seem to know quite a bit about my cousin,” Barton says menacingly.

“I know you made a pass at her assistant, right under her nose. I know you couldn't care less about her. I know she'd be horrified if she knew what you've been up to.”

“Are you talking,” says Sophie, struggling to follow, “about Marian Kahn?”

“Marian
Warburg
,” Barton says, pausing amid the general absurdity to assert his preferred nomenclature.

“Marian
Kahn!
” Oliver shouts. “Jesus, you don't know the first thing about her, do you? You pay all this lip service to your family name, but you don't give a damn about your real family.” Then he can feel, in some detached way, Sophie's cool hand at his wrist, and the bitterness slips from him. He is here after all, with Sophie, who is here with him. The rest is noise. “I have nothing against you,” he says. “I only wish…”

But he stops. His wishes are not for the likes of Barton.

“Sophie,” Barton says. “I really think this matter is for us to discuss. Alone. Whatever this person has told you, there are genuine feelings between us.”

“There are,” Sophie agrees. “But they're not enough. Please, Bart. Let's just finish it now.”

“I—” Barton begins, already disagreeing, but then all three of them fall silent. There is a disturbance just outside: the displacement of air, a sound on the landing. Then the door opens wide, swinging into the room and against the wall, where it silently stops. Oliver looks up. What he sees makes him want to disappear.

Marian stands in the doorway, her face drawn and sad, and his first thought—before the disbelief and the humiliation and the wave of deepest regret—is that she looks so young. Like a girl, younger even than himself, wrapped up in a white bathrobe with her hair loose to her shoulders and her feet bare, as if she has just been awakened, which—Oliver now understands—she undoubtedly has been. Behind the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign, all this time. But how?

“Marian,” Oliver asks quietly, “how can you be here?”

She looks at all three of them, then only at him. “I came for the wedding,” she says simply. “I was sleeping. But then I heard someone call my name.” She seems to consider this, almost languidly. “Was it you, Oliver?”

“
Oliver!
” Barton says, outraged.

“Oliver?” Sophie says, her hand now heavy on his wrist.

Oliver shakes his head, speechless and bereft. “Marian,” he hears himself say, “this is Sophie.”

“I know who she is,” Marian says. She comes into the room, her eyes on Sophie, her hand offered. It slips from inside the thick robe: a fragile wrist, long fingers, unpolished nails. She takes Sophie's hand. Oliver can only look at her. He can't recall ever having loved her as deeply as now, when he can see so clearly what he has already lost. She is very lovely. They both are: lovely women, women he loves. He is so ashamed he can barely stand.

“It's a good thing you've come, Marian,” Barton says, rebounding. “I don't think you have any idea what your friend here has been up to.”

She turns from Sophie, but reluctantly. Along the way, Oliver watches her notice everything else: the women's clothing in the bathroom, the champagne flutes. By the time her gaze rests on Barton, nothing has eluded her.

“Does it really matter?” she asks her cousin. “I think we all end up in the same place.”

“Of course it matters!” he sputters, clenching his carnations.

“Barton,” Marian says, sighing, “isn't it time for you to leave?”

“No, no,”—he shakes his head—“no, it's all a mistake. Really, Sophie, we've been horribly abused tonight. A terrible thing has been done.”

“Barton,” Marian says wearily.

“I reject this!” he cries. “I find this behavior reprehensible.”

“Barton,” Marian says, her voice sharp, “you are not listening. You need to know when a thing is over.” And she looks, unavoidably, but for the briefest instant, at Oliver. “It's over now.”

“Sophie,” says Barton, pointlessly.

“I'm sorry, Barton,” says Sophie.

At last he goes, taking his horrible flowers away with him, clomping loudly down the stairs. For a moment, no one speaks.

Sophie's hand isn't on his arm any longer, Oliver notes. He has failed to mark its departure, or even its absence, until now. What does that mean? he wonders. Who is with him? Who loves him?

“I take it the wedding is off,” Marian says at last.

“It's off,” says Sophie. “I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be sorry.” She gives a faint smile. “I had to be in Rhinebeck today, anyway.”

“No,” Sophie stumbles. “I didn't mean that.”

“Don't be sorry,” says Marian. Then she looks at Oliver. Then she goes, shutting the door behind her.

Sophie drifts away from him. She crosses the small room and sits, facing the fireplace, almost disappearing into the wings of the armchair. He has no idea what to say to her, or whether there is any point in explaining, or even what his explanation might be, and so he stands pointlessly, pondering and then discarding the few ideas he has. The fact that he is about to lose everything is abundantly clear to him. All that's left are details.

When he finally steps closer, when he finally gathers enough courage to crouch down beside her, he can see that her eyes are closed. From first one, then the other, single tears emerge and descend. She looks, he thinks, as bereft as that other day, the day he understood that he loved her, the day she asked for his help.

“That day at Columbia,” Sophie says, jolting suddenly into his thoughts. “You weren't there to see me at all, were you?”

Oliver considers. “I think I was,” he says. “I just didn't know I was.”

She shakes her head.

“I'm sorry,” Oliver says, reaching for her. “I don't know what to say. It wasn't a casual thing. I really loved her.”

“You don't owe me anything,” Sophie says, biting her lip. “You never lied to me. You told me you were involved with someone. And even before you told me, Bell told me, so I knew. If I convinced myself otherwise, it's entirely my fault.”

“No!” says Oliver, grabbing for her hand.

“I want you to know that I don't expect anything from you. You helped me, out of kindness. As a friend.”

“No, no!” Oliver says. “I mean, yes, as a friend. And I am your friend. But I did it for myself, too, not only out of kindness. Because of what I want for myself.”

“And what do you want, Oliver?” says Sophie. “Now would be a good moment to tell me.”

But now is the moment he hears, from across the landing, the unmistakable creak of the old floorboards, and a door shutting. Marian is there, and he needs to say something to her.

“I'll be right back,” he tells Sophie.

Outside, the landing is empty. The
DO NOT DISTURB
sign swings gently on the door handle on the opposite room. Oliver tears down the stairs, but he doesn't find her in the foyer, or in the lounge. Only the tap of a heel on stone draws him to the back door, where she stands, her suitcase at her heel, shrugging on her coat.

“Marian, wait,” Oliver calls, and she stops where she is.

At first, he can only look at her. When he finally speaks, it's to state the obvious.

“You're leaving.”

“I'm going to drive back to the city,” she says quietly. “I don't really feel like spending the night here.”

“Marian,” Oliver says desperately, “I didn't mean for this to happen. I didn't…I didn't decide to fall in love with someone else. I couldn't control it.”

“I know that,” Marian says, impassively. “But I need to go, Oliver.”

And they stand again in their mutual sadness.

“I don't regret it,” Marian suddenly says, looking surprised at her own emotion. “I wish I'd spent less time worrying about everything and more time just appreciating you.”

“I felt appreciated,” says Oliver. “I know you loved me.”

She nods. She has one hand on the door. The other holds closed the lapels of her coat.

“I think,” he says, “I'll always feel some of it.”

“All right,” she agrees. “Me too.”

“And you'll know I do, if we see each other. Even if I don't say so.”

“Okay,” Marian nods. “Good-bye, sweetheart.”

He rushes to her: one step, two steps. It takes forever to get there. Then it takes forever to let her go.

“She's very pretty,” Marian says, her face slick with tears.

“Marian,” says Oliver, who is also crying, “you're so good.”

Then, to his great surprise, she laughs. A genuine laugh.

“The last person who said that to me was Valerie Annis,” she says, shaking her head. “Isn't that funny?” Marian picks up her suitcase. “Now go back upstairs,” she tells him, and opens the door, and goes outside.

But he can't do that yet. Long minutes will pass before he can do what she says.

A
t first, Marian drives in silence and without thought. Retracing her route through the labyrinthine thoroughfares of Dutchess County takes a happily large portion of her attention. The roads are empty, blessedly empty. In silence Marian locates her landmarks, finding her way back, reversing herself: the big white birch tree, the great nouveau mansion with the name she'd thought was twee, only a few hours earlier, the house with the big dog who'd come charging down the driveway to bark at her when she'd slowed in indecision before making her turn. The dog isn't there any longer.

But after she drives through Rhinebeck, it gets harder. She knows the way from here, and she finds it more difficult to hold at bay the things she has seen, and said, and the room, and the other people in the room: Oliver and Barton and the girl—Sophie. Mostly Marian thinks about Sophie, and the thought of her is far more painful than an abstract notion of a person Oliver might one day love.

So when Marian reaches the stoplight where she needs to turn right for the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge, she is perhaps especially vulnerable to a road sign she might otherwise have missed, and when she sees that sign, idling behind a Land Rover with Connecticut plates, Marian makes not a decision, really, but a gesture, and turns left, and drives south. She is sure of where she's going, but not at all sure why.

In Rhinecliff, she drives through the little village and winds up the hill to the church, leaving her Volvo by the roadside. True to Betty Evans's word, there is indeed an enclosed wooden case of pamphlets, offering guidance to the grave and the brief biographies of other, less celebrated inhabitants of the cemetery, and Marian carefully folds one into her coat pocket before slinging her bag over her shoulder and beginning the walk uphill. This is the third visit she's made to the Rhinecliff Reformed Church. The first was during her initial research trip to Rhinebeck, when she had come looking for accounts of the 1757 Fort William Henry massacre, and some clue as to who had cared for the child, Charlotte Wilcox, after the death of her family, and found, instead (in the local history archives of the Rhinebeck Public Library, in a moldering box marked “Miscellaneous 1750–1850, Farewell”), seventeen precious letters from Charlotte herself. Marian had returned one year later, when her purpose had been to record a description of the grave for her book. The first time, it had taken a half hour of searching, pulling away the overgrowth and peering at the faded stones, before she had found Charlotte's gravestone, unvisited for two centuries. The second time, she forgot the location, so the search had taken nearly as long. But this time Marian follows an actual path among the markers, the earth underfoot worn bare and the winter grass flattened on either side. The path takes her directly to the corner of the churchyard, where she can look through an iron railing down onto the little town and the train station, and even the wide Hudson, lit by a pearl-gray moon. The grave seems, somehow, crisper than she remembers, and it occurs to her to wonder just what Betty Evans and her colleagues have done to care for the site. Is it possible that someone has reset the slender blocks of granite that form a border for the grave, or cleaned the etched words on the stone? She bends forward to read it, even though there isn't really enough light for that, and even though she knows the inscription by heart.

This is no longer a forgotten or neglected place. Marian, looking down, sees that the earth at her feet is covered with small tributes, mostly stones carried here and placed carefully on the spot, as in the Jewish custom, but also odd trinkets, seashells, a reproduction of the drawing by Thomas Wilcox, the sole image of Charlotte, carefully laminated and propped against the gravestone. There are bits of tape left on the stone itself, and a forgotten pencil—the remnants, thinks Marian, of attempts to make rubbings of Charlotte's marker—and a stack of flowers in various stages of demise, wrapped in their cellophane cones and tied with fading ribbons. There are even two or three handwritten notes, which Marian refrains from reading, but it's all overwhelming to her, and for a moment she looks out over the graveyard, over the still overgrown and unvisited memorials, and allows herself the faintest pride.

Because I did this, Marian thinks. With work, and with care. I did this.

Except, of course, that she hadn't. It was always Charlotte, Marian thinks, who was not just an adventuress or a woman of letters, and was not a heroine because she chewed men up or even because she had touched and reported on every stratum of English society. The bearers of these flowers and the authors of these notes had come to honor her because of what they had learned from her story, which was not a lesson restricted to Charlotte's time or place. And a good thing too, Marian tells herself, or I couldn't have learned it myself:

Marian wipes her face with her hands.

And now, Marian thinks, there is this girl, who is not my daughter, and will never be my daughter, but who might need something that I might be able to give her. And that's a gift.

She looks across at the other graves, filling the space between Charlotte's stone and the abandoned Rhinecliff Reformed Church. Alice Farwell is here, too, somewhere, and possibly also her daughter, who began life as a Farwell and ended it as a Wharton, giving birth to a future Danvers along the way. Some of these flowers and notes are due Alice as well, thinks Marian, for keeping those letters, for holding out the promise of friendship across an ocean and a lifetime, either of which must have felt prohibitively distant. Alice Farwell, thinks Marian, was a historian before her time, and a great woman, and this hilltop is a fitting place for both of them, a fortunate berth for eternity with the glittering Hudson below and the trains, coming in from the city.
And so lovely
, Marian thinks, looking west to the moonlit Catskills, but she is already distracted, now: the bridge, the thruway, the newly liberated weekend. She walks back along the tidy path and climbs into her Volvo, turning up the heat and turning on the radio. Schumann's “Frauenliebe und Leben” floods the car. Marian smiles: not inappropriate, after all. Then she starts the engine and heads for home.