Claire at Sixteen (22 page)

“They are joined at the hip,” Claire said. “I thought they'd be past that stage by now.”

“Sometimes you don't get over it,” Meg said. “Now I want all of us to be very organized on Monday. We have a wedding to plan, and not that much time to do it in.”

“Evvie and Sam,” Thea said.

“Finally,” Claire said.

“They wanted to wait until Evvie's graduation,” Sybil said.

“And they were right to,” Meg said. “Besides, it's given Sam a chance to settle in at the paper. June is the perfect time for them to get married. They'll have the summer to adjust before Evvie starts graduate school.”

“Did you want to be a June bride?” Thea asked.

Meg smiled. “I wanted to be an immediate bride,” she said. “I didn't care what month or season just as long as it was soon. Which, of course, it wasn't. Aunt Grace saw to that. And then, when Nicky and I finally did get married, it didn't matter what time of year it was. It was just the two of us. I'm glad Evvie's going to have something more formal, even if we can't afford a big affair.”

“Did I hear the word affair?” Nick asked, walking into the kitchen. “Who's having one and do I approve?”

“I was talking about weddings,” Meg said. Nick gave her a kiss, and stood with his arm around her shoulders.

“We had a perfect one,” Nick said. “You were the most beautiful bride in the world, Daisy.”

Sybil glanced at her sisters and saw they were as pleased as she was. Even Claire was smiling. There was so much love in Nick's voice, especially when he used his pet name for Meg. Only he called her Daisy. It had been a long time since Sybil could remember seeing Nick so contented.

“What are your plans for the day, Nicky?” Meg asked. “Don't forget, Clark is coming around two.”

“You had to remind me,” Nick said. “In that case, Sybil and I had better go for our walk right now.”

“Oh, Nicky, do I have to?” Sybil asked. “Can't we take the day off for once?”

“It's too nice a day to stay indoors,” Nick declared. “Come on, Sybil. Let's stroll around the block a few times, and we'll give Thea and Claire a chance to visit with Daisy.”

“You can pick me up some milk,” Meg said. “And a dozen eggs. In case any of you develop an appetite.”

“Good,” Nick said. “We now have motivation. Sybil, are you ready?”

“I guess,” Sybil said. She followed Nick to the front hallway, got her cane from the closet, and walked outside with him. Nick was right. It was a beautiful April day. Ordinarily, she enjoyed the ritual of their daily walk. It had begun when one of her physical therapists had suggested walking as a way of strengthening her legs. That had been back in Oregon, well after Nick had stopped doing her exercises with her.

At first he had insisted on doing them, wouldn't even let Meg help, but it became obvious that he couldn't handle the job. Sybil had cried easily in those days, and it hadn't helped that Nick kept pushing her past her limits. She knew why he was doing it, and she never really got angry at him, but she kept crying, and after a while Nick started joining her, and they all realized they couldn't keep on that way. So Meg had taken over the exercises and she'd proven to be very good at it. She wouldn't let Sybil quit, but she didn't push her past the point of exhaustion, either. Claire helped out, and in the beginning so did Thea, but it had mostly been Meg who did the grunt work.

Which, of course, left Nick feeling useless. So when walks were suggested, he immediately volunteered. He and Sybil got into the habit of a daily walk, except when the weather was bad. It had been a long time, she realized. When their walks first began, she was still using a walker. Now she was down to a cane, and sometimes at the beginning of their walk, she didn't even need that. But it came in handy when she tired out, which she almost always did.

“It's good having Thea and Claire home,” Nick said, as they began their stroll. “But I'm glad to have some time alone with you.”

“Me, too,” Sybil said. Their walks had become a special time for both of them. “Don't they look wonderful, though?”

Nick nodded. “Thea seems happier than she's been in a while,” he said. “Maybe she finally has Kip out of her system.”

“I think she's excited about becoming a doctor,” Sybil said. “It gives her a focus.”

Nick grinned. “You know all about focus, don't you,” he said. “You're the queen of focus.”

“I would have thought Claire was,” Sybil said. “I can't get over how successful she is.”

“She can't get over it, either,” Nick said. “A little power is a dangerous thing for Claire.”

“Why don't you like her?” Sybil asked. She'd never been so direct with Nick before. But now she felt she could ask, maybe because Claire was home to protect her. Sybil had spent a lot of years being protected by Claire. It was a comfortable position.

“I like Claire,” Nick said. “I certainly love her. Why? Has she been playing unloved child again?”

“No,” Sybil said. “It's just the tone you get in your voice when you talk about her. And you don't seem to be comfortable looking at her, either. You haven't been in a long time.” Since the elopement, she thought, but she wasn't sure, since that had been a crazy time for her, and her perceptions might have been off.

Nick paused for a moment, then took Sybil's hand and put it in his. They continued to walk hand in hand. “You've always had a good eye for other people,” he declared. “I remember once, you couldn't have been more than four, you asked me why Clark didn't like me. I knew Clark had never said a negative word about me in front of any of you girls, and your sisters never seemed to realize just how much he didn't care for me, so you figured it out on your own, just based on watching him and me together.”

“What did you tell me?” Sybil asked.

“I said I married Daisy and Clark loved her, too,” Nick replied. “The simple truth. You understood that. Actually, for a while after that, you were quite cold to Clark whenever we saw him. I'm not sure he noticed, though. Clark isn't the most perceptive of men.”

Sybil looked at the trees just beginning to bud. Soon they'd be green. Her first spring in Boston. She was eager to see how many flowers there would be, how warm it would get. Winter had been beautiful, but cold and icy, and ice in particular was her enemy. She'd taken three bad falls during the winter. One had left her immobile for close to a week. She tried to remember what it had been like just to be able to walk, no big deal, one easy step after another, but it had been too many years, too many crises ago. “You still haven't answered about Claire,” she said.

“Claire's always wanted something from me that I can't give her,” Nick replied. “She feels that just because she looks like me, she is like me.”

“But she is,” Sybil declared. “Everybody knows that.”

Nick laughed. “Everybody assumes that,” he said. “And in some ways, it's true. Claire is like me at my worst. That's not to say she's bad. Just that she has all my character flaws. Just as you're like me at my best. You have all the good I have to offer.”

“Like what?” Sybil asked.

“Like determination,” Nick replied. “Ambition. The willingness to work hard to change the conditions of your life.”

Sybil thought about that. It was true Claire never expected to work. Things had a way of happening for her that she seemed to take for granted. Sybil took nothing for granted.

“What about Evvie and Thea?” she asked. “Are they like you?”

“More like Daisy,” Nick said. “Evvie has Daisy's strengths, and Thea has her weaknesses.”

“I never knew Megs had any weaknesses,” Sybil said.

“You're right,” Nick said. “Teach me to be too simplistic.”

Sybil laughed. She thought about what Thea had said about the birthday waltzes. These walks for Sybil were the times when she knew Nick loved her best of all. She couldn't imagine him talking this way to any of her sisters. Not that he didn't love them. But he was never quite as open with them as he was with Sybil.

“You said Claire expects things of you,” Sybil said. “But we all do. We all expect you to be a magician, to pull fortunes out of a hat. We expect you to make us feel beautiful and smart and important. We expect miracle cures from you.”

“Then I must constantly be letting you down,” Nick said. “Why do you put up with me?”

“You don't let us down,” Sybil said. “Well, maybe Claire, but I have a feeling that she has higher expectations than the rest of us.”

“Claire thinks if she acts the way I do, then I'll love her even more,” Nick said. “Only she doesn't realize I don't especially care for the way I act much of the time. I used to. I used to think I was quite extraordinary. Not when I was young. But after I met Daisy. I felt blessed then, as though I'd been covered in silver and gold, as though just the sound of my shoes on the pavement was music. And when you have an attitude like that, people smile on you, and the fates are kind, and you get what you want, and I did. I got Daisy. It took longer than it should have, but finally I won. And then we waited a while longer, until the fates were kind again, and we had Evvie, and then Thea, and Claire, and finally you. I couldn't believe it. With each one of you girls, I'd go into your bedroom, and watch you sleeping, and marvel that not only did I have a family at last, but I had such an extraordinary one. I hope someday you have a taste of that kind of happiness. It can't last forever, it's too perfect, but it makes everything else endurable just to have known it for a while.”

“Then what happened?” Sybil asked. She could remember when Meg would tell them the story of the day she and Nick first met. It was their favorite story, even Claire's, when they were little.

“Then reality set in,” Nick said. “My magic cloak got tattered. My shoes no longer made music. The fates grew bored with me, and rightly so. Sometimes I scored, sometimes I didn't. Daisy kept loving me, and grew even more beautiful, and you girls grew up and became not just creatures for me to love, but individuals with your own needs and desires, and Evvie went off to Eastgate and came back with Sam, and then Thea fell in love with Kip, and Claire decided she could run the world very well on her own, and things were never quite the same.”

“And I had my accident,” Sybil said.

“Yes,” Nick said. “That happened also.”

Sybil stared into the window of a well-kept brownstone. People on Beacon Hill knew how to maintain appearances. Nick used to be that way. No matter how his life might be going, he always shone. When had he lost that?

“Maybe I'm wrong,” she said, almost shyly. “But I thought things went bad when I had the accident. The way you're telling it, there were problems before then.”

“Of course there were problems,” Nick said. “We had our share of problems before you were hurt.”

“It never seemed that way to me,” Sybil said. “Oh, I know sometimes we had less money than others. I remember a couple of middle-of-the-night moves when I was a kid. But it all seemed like a game to me. Was that because I was so young?”

“A little bit,” Nick replied. “And a little bit because no matter how bad things were then, it never seemed real. It certainly never seemed important. We could live in a dump for a year or so, and our first dinner there was almost always champagne and caviar, frequently courtesy of Clark, to give him his due, and we knew, at least Daisy and I did, that the dump was temporary, and the next place would be a castle. So what difference did it make that it was a dump. And of course while we were waiting for a change of fortunes, Daisy would turn the dump into something so special it might as well have been a castle. And she would laugh, and you girls would join her, and I couldn't help laughing myself then, and soon things would be better again and deals would get made and I'd be paying for the champagne and caviar. I think sometimes I preferred life that way, uncertain, with the ever possible risk of failure, to a life like Clark had, all wealthy and secure. In that way, Claire is like me. She loves risk. You can see it excites her.”

“Maybe now you can start taking risks again,” Sybil said. “Now that you have Aunt Grace's house to live in. And Evvie'll be married soon, and Claire's already earning good money. You'll just have Thea and me to worry about.”

“I'll worry about all of you until the day I die,” Nick declared. “But you're right. If I could only get a stake, I might make something of myself yet. The problem is raising the money. This is Boston. In some ways it's a big city, and in others it's a very small town. Daisy has position, or at least she had in her days as a Winslow. Grace, Clark, they represent the old money, the right clubs, the places that never accepted me. My only ins are there, and they don't do me any good. I'll always be the upstart that stole Grace Winslow's niece away from her, away from Clark. And I don't have the money or the connections to get in with the new crowd. So I'm stuck with a mansion that costs a fortune in taxes, and if I can't think of something soon, I don't know what we're going to do.”

“You must have some ideas,” Sybil said. Even at the worst times, Nick always had something cooking.

“We can't sell the house,” Nick said. “Grace saw to that. But we could probably rent it for a good amount. More than enough to cover taxes at least. Then we could scrape up some money somehow, and go to a more open community. I had good luck in Pennsylvania. Maybe we could try there.”

“When?” Sybil asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. Nick was very sensitive to her moods, and this was one time she didn't want him to know what she was feeling.

“During the summer, I think,” Nick said. “I haven't spoken to Daisy about it yet, because I know how happy she is to be in Boston. It's funny. She hated the house when she was growing up here. The summer house in Eastgate she loved, which is probably why Grace didn't leave that to her instead. But she was miserable in Boston. So you'd think it would be easy for me to convince her to move. But it won't be. She finally has some security, and God knows she's entitled to it after all we've been through. She thought we were getting that back in Briarton when we bought the house. But that didn't work out, and we've been on the move ever since.”