Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (8 page)

The woman, who was around seventy, wore impenetrable round sunglasses. “‘One dollar a branch,’ ” she read. “Hmm. Interesting.
You’ve lowered your prices.”

Miss Abigail smiled. “Mrs. Riga, may I present Mrs. Sedgwick.”

Peggy didn’t understand why Mrs. Riga was watching her expectantly. Then—oh, dear—was
she
supposed to be Mrs. Sedgwick? “Call me Peggy.” She felt like a mouse under the woman’s owlish stare.

“Call me Ernestine. My husband and I live back on Market Road, in what used to be the Sedgwick carriage house.” The woman
cocked her head to one side. “Let’s see the ring.”

Oh, dear. The ring. Still holding the saw, Peggy showed Ernestine Brock’s promise ring uncomfortably.
I’m doing this for him,
she reminded herself.

“That from Star Jewelers, honey?” Ernestine listed to the left as her oversize designer handbag slid off her shoulder onto
her arm. “Remember my grandma pin, Abigail—the one with all the children’s birthstones? It took that place nearly a month
to fix the clasp. A month! It’s so New Nineveh. What else does that jeweler have to do?” She pushed the bag back up where
it belonged. “Now, Peggy, I hear you’re only here on weekends. Why?”

“Peggy has a little business in the city,” Miss Abigail explained. “She sells mops and buckets.”

“Well,
that’ll
come in handy around the Sedgwick House.” Ernestine sounded perhaps the tiniest bit contemptuous. It was hard to tell.

Peggy hesitated. She wanted to set the record straight but didn’t want to be disrespectful to Miss Abigail. “It isn’t mops
and buckets, though,” she said carefully. “It’s called ACME Cleaning Supply, but we sell bath products, like soap.”

“Well, it won’t be forever, will it, dear? You’ll be moving up to New Nineveh soon enough, I’m sure,” Miss Abigail said. Peggy
felt as if she were being interrogated.

It was Ernestine who ended the grilling. “I’m off. Peggy, you’ll come over sometime for a look at my flower stand. See you
at the party!”

Miss Abigail held on to her smile until Ernestine was well down the sidewalk. “I’ll be introducing you at a small reception,
dear, next Sunday afternoon. I presume your family is in New York? I’d like to invite them—your parents and brothers and sisters.”

Peggy imagined the look on Miss Abigail’s face when Max and Madeleine Adams parked their RV in Silas Ebenezer Sedgwick’s driveway.
“I’m an only child. We’re from Northern California, but right now my parents are traveling. They’d love to be here otherwise.”

It wasn’t entirely false. Peggy’s father had been a middle manager for a California department store chain and had moved from
town to town, assignment to assignment, when the mood struck. Peggy had spent her last two years of high school, anyway, in
Northern California. And her parents
were
traveling; a few years ago, Max had cashed in his retirement nest egg to finance his dream of crisscrossing the West in perpetuity
in a recreational vehicle. Peggy suspected her parents’ lifestyle choice would not sit well with Miss Abigail. It didn’t sit
well with Peggy, though the RV wasn’t what bothered her—it was that their future was too precarious, too uncertain.

“Let’s go inside.” Miss Abigail started toward the house, her steps short and slow across the leaf-scattered lawn.

“Who’ll watch the flower stand?” Peggy considered volunteering to stay outside. Her decision to remain married to Luke was
seeming hasty and foolish. She doubted she could keep up the charade for an hour, let alone a year. “That box isn’t locked.
Anyone could walk off with your money.”

“This isn’t New York City, dear.”

Up close, the Silas Sedgwick House front door was even more imposing than it was from the car—perhaps nine feet tall and broader
than a regular door, with a weathered brass knocker set squarely in the center, a good foot above Miss Abigail’s cotton candy
head. But it also needed a paint job. Strips of black had peeled away, revealing bare wood underneath like the glimpse of
shirt through the elbows of Luke’s shabby sweater.

Miss Abigail threw her whole body against the door, and it creaked open. “Welcome,” she said, ushering Peggy inside.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know what to say. You’re a writer. Or so you claim.” Nicki brandished her cell phone at Luke. “You
know lots of words. How about these? ‘Stop. Leave me alone, bitch. I’m backing out.’ ”

The couch opposite Nicki was littered with lacy pillows. Luke shoved them to one side and sat down. “I’m not backing out.”
This scheme with Peggy was repugnant and unseemly and went against every fiber of his being. It was also the best thing to
happen to the family finances in half a century—and, to Luke himself, ever. He’d been shocked at first at Peggy’s proposal
and hung up summarily, but by morning he’d reversed his thinking and called her back. Hadn’t he dreamed his entire life of
living someplace where no one knew his business back for generations? Hadn’t he longed to pursue his poetry, to break free
of the Sedgwick name, to escape the ingrained notions of how to live, whom to be friends with, what to do? Now he could and,
more crucially, ensure his great-aunt had the kind of medical care she deserved. “It’s a winning situation for all of us,”
he told Nicki, sounding like one of the speakers at the Family Asset Management Conference.

Nicki waved the phone at him. “What’s her number? I’ll call her myself.”

“Put that down,” Luke said coolly. The third or fourth time he and Nicki had broken up, right here in her artist’s loft in
South Norwalk, with its bohemian view of the New Haven line train trestle, she’d thrown her coffee at him. It had hit the
back wall and splattered to the floor, ruining the weaving project Nicki had been working on at the time, a shawl-like garment
fashioned from what looked like pink barbed wire. Luke secretly believed he had saved the world from it.

Nicki shut the phone but didn’t put it down. “What about me? I’m supposed to stay out of your life for a year?”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“You mean if I want to sneak around, see you only during the week, and stay away from New Nineveh completely.”

“You’re at craft shows nearly every weekend anyway. And if you don’t come to New Nineveh, you won’t have to visit with my
great-aunt.”

Luke was worried about Abby. She’d returned from the hospital uncharacteristically docile, obediently following her doctor’s
orders to avoid taxing activities, like gardening, that she’d always enjoyed. She was more muddled, too; he’d tried to make
her understand Peggy Adams was not related to the extinct Adams family of New Nineveh, which had once rivaled the Sedgwicks
in importance, but she couldn’t grasp it.

He frowned. “I’m afraid Abby might not be around very long.”

“You’d better hope she isn’t. It’ll kill the old lady for sure when you dump that Vegas whore after a year.”

“Don’t call her that. It’s unbecoming to you.”

“Well, la-di-da.”

“Anyway, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” Luke was thinking, suddenly, that he and Nicki should break up once and
for all. Life would be considerably easier.

Then he thought,
Bridge.
The word brought to mind Peggy Adams. But why, he didn’t know.

“What’s she like?” Nicki asked. “The Vegas whor—”

“Her name is Peggy.”

Nicki rolled her eyes. “What’s she like?”

In a tray on the trunk Nicki used as a coffee table, scuffed nuggets of sea glass surrounded a dusty collection of candles.
“I don’t know. Nervous.” Luke poked at the candles. “Why don’t you ever light these things?”

“Is she pretty?”

He knew he should jump in with the objective truth, that given the choice between Peggy and a five-foot-ten-inch redheaded
Amazon goddess, few men would notice Peggy was in the room. He had vaguely remembered Peggy as being vivacious and intelligent,
but he’d seen none of that in Mayhew’s office. Obviously his attraction had been to the situation. The liquor, a stranger
in a strange city: The combination had proven a potent but all-too-fleeting aphrodisiac.

Aphrodisiac.
The word had great rhythm—perfectly trochaic on its own, but ideal for iambic pentameter:
An all-toofleeting aphrodisiac. An aphrodisiac that vanishes.

“Don’t think I don’t notice you aren’t answering my question. Which means you think she’s pretty. You want to fuck her. Why
else would you stay married to her?”

She was jealous. Nicole Pappas—jealous. Like a vulnerable child, she curled her legs underneath her. Her dark snake-eyes faded
back to green.

“You have nothing to worry about.” Luke, the product of a culture in which the unchecked display of feeling was proof of an
insufficiently rigorous upbringing, was surprised by an overwhelming surge of sappy, sloppy affection for his girlfriend.
Nicki was sexy, vulgar, and dangerous. She cared about him, in her own peculiar way. They understood each other. They had
never promised each other more than they were able to give.

A pillow from the pile next to him tumbled into his lap. He flipped it onto the floor. “Come over here.”

She stroked the arm of her chair. “
You
come over
here
.”

Luke’s nerves vibrated with the inevitability of what would happen next. He pointed down at the throw pillows scattered on
the rug. “I’ll meet you halfway. Right there.”

“That’s not halfway.
That’s
halfway.” She pointed to a spot on the floor a few inches closer to her side of the rug.

Luke’s nerves began to vibrate a little less. Did everything have to be a dispute, every time?

Nicki continued pointing fixedly at her spot on the rug.

Luke glanced past her, at the rhinestone clock some artisan had given her in barter at a crafts show. He could stay and negotiate
inches, or he could leave, drive the sixty miles back to New Nineveh, and get on with the charade.

“I’ll see you next week,” he told Nicki.

He left his girlfriend sulking in her chair and headed out to meet the wife he’d never wanted.

Peggy blinked. She and Miss Abigail were standing in a dim front hall. A simple iron lamp hung from a medallion in the center
of the high ceiling; the weak flicker of its one working bulb did nothing to dispel the gloom. To the left and right, wide
door frames led into twin front parlors. In front of them, a steep staircase made a right angle as it ascended to unseen floors
above, while beyond it, on this level, a narrow corridor led farther into the house. Peggy’s impression was that it was a
beautiful entrance, if smaller than she’d expected for a house this grand. But as her eyes adjusted, she began to make out
odd details: a brown water stain on the ceiling, a monstrous cobweb in the bend in the staircase. The house smelled of ten
thousand spent fireplace fires, with notes of mildew. It occurred to her that she hadn’t checked the date of the historical
society photos. They could easily be fifty or sixty years old.

“Luke!” Miss Abigail called. “Do you have a valise?” she asked Peggy, rubbing her hands together as if summoning a genie.
“I’ll send Luke to fetch it. Luke!” The name bounced hollowly through the house.

Peggy prepared herself, but Luke didn’t appear in a billow of magical vapor—or any other way.

“Never mind, dear. Would you care to freshen up after your journey?”

Peggy couldn’t decide whether she was glad or offended at Luke’s apparent absence. She settled on glad. “I’d like to see the
house, please.”

“Certainly, dear.” Miss Abigail led Peggy to the doorway to the right. “We’ll begin here, with the gentlemen’s parlor, where
Silas used to retire with his guests after dinner, and his wife, Dorothy, would go with the wives across the hall to the ladies’
parlor.” The rooms were shadowy, with drawn heavy curtains, but Miss Abigail spoke as if she had memorized the contents of
each parlor along with the names of her ancestors. “The ladies’ piano was a gift from Governor Wolcott in 1797. Silas’s youngest
daughter, poor Temperance, was reportedly quite gifted. Do you play?”

“Only ‘Chopsticks.’ ” Peggy didn’t want to ask what had become of poor Temperance.

“Lovely. We’ll have music in the house again.”

A floorboard creaked as Miss Abigail led Peggy out and down the corridor, deeper into the house. They emerged in a vast room,
its size more dramatic because there was no one in it. There were two separate groupings of sofas and armchairs with tattered
upholstery and sprung springs. On the outside wall of the room, a door, as massive and imposing as the one through which Peggy
had entered the house, led to a side garden ragged with weeds.

“This is the grand parlor.” Miss Abigail stopped in front of the cold fireplace. “The family has done some of its most important
entertaining here. There’s also an east parlor, but we don’t use that part of the house anymore. It was built for members
of the Sedgwick extended family, back when generations lived under the same roof. It’s too big for just Luke and me and the
cat.”

“You have a cat?”

“Quibble,” Miss Abigail said. “You’ll likely never see him. He hides under my bed.”

The Oriental rug on which Miss Abigail stood was worn down to its backing. Against the wall behind her, a dusty grandfather
clock stood silently, its delicate black hands stalled at four twenty-three.

Peggy thought the room terribly lonely. “Why does the house have this other formal entrance?”

“That’s not an entrance, dear.” Abigail walked over to the large side door and pressed her withered hands against it. “It’s
to take the coffins out.”

Their tour continued into the dining room off the grand parlor and then to a library, where a man Miss Abigail identified
as Silas Sedgwick glowered from an oil painting above yet another fireless fireplace. The house was damp and chilly, and Peggy
would have liked a heavier sweater, but Miss Abigail, seemingly unaffected by the cold, led her down another hall and into
a cluttered den populated with more painted portraits.

Everyone in these pictures is dead,
Peggy thought. “I might go get my luggage now,” she said.