Sleeping Beauty (25 page)

*   *   *

It was Ethan's picture that looked up at Anne the next morning when she read the newspaper at her desk. “Ethan Chatham, one of the century's greatest builders, died yesterday at his home in Tamarack, Colorado. He was ninety-one.”

Anne skimmed the story to the end. “Funeral services will be held in the chapel at Lake Forest, Illinois, on Wednesday.”

She sat still for a moment. Her hand was trembling. But her voice was firm as she picked up her telephone and asked her secretary to make reservations for Tuesday night, for a round-trip flight to Chicago.

G
ail slid past Leo and their son, Ned, to the side aisle. She walked past the people standing there, and by the time she reached Anne, her hands were outstretched. “You are Anne, aren't you? I
feel
that you're Anne. Wouldn't a sister know—?”

Their hands met, and held. “Hello, Gail,” Anne said softly.

With a small cry, Gail threw her arms around Anne. “I'm so glad,” she said, her words muffled. “You don't know how glad . . .”

Anne looked over her sister's shoulder at the crowded chapel. It looked like a painting: row on row of wondering faces turned to the side of the room, focused for a few seconds on the embracing women. Not a sound or breath of air broke that frozen stillness.

“Friends, we are here for Ethan,” said the minister in a gentle reproach, and the room rustled again as the crowd reluctantly turned toward him. “Now that those who cared for him have spoken, I want to talk about my friendship with Ethan, going back thirty years. And then we will go from here to lay him to rest for eternity beside his beloved Alice.”

Charles had not turned back to the minister. He still looked to the side of the room, and met Anne's eyes in a long look. As with Vince, she was the first to look away. Her hands on Gail's arms were trembling; her whole body was
trembling.
Not yet, not yet. I know it will happen: we'll sit together, and talk, and find out what bonds still connect us, but not yet. I can't face it yet.

“You're shaking,” said Gail, drawing back.

“There's a lot going on,” Anne replied with a small smile. “Like juggling emotions on a high wire. Gail, I'm getting out of here. Can you come with me?”

“You're not going to the cemetery?”

“I don't need to; I've said good-bye. I had to be here, but I don't have to drag it out. I'll wait for you, though, if you want to go with the others.”

“No, I'd rather come with you. Let me just tell Leo.”

“I'll be outside,” said Anne. She moved quietly up the aisle and slipped through the doors, almost invisibly, just as she had come in, half an hour earlier.

“Thank God,” she said, pulling off her black hat and taking a deep breath when Gail joined her outside. “It was stifling in there.”

“Probably all the people,” said Gail.

“And the memories.” Anne looked at the lake, steel gray beneath the dark, fast-moving clouds and the flashes of sunlight that broke through, then vanished, then broke through again. “I might be able to take them one at a time, but all of them at once is too much. Where shall we go to talk?”

“We're staying at Marian's,” Gail said slowly. “We could be private there.”

“No, I don't want . . .” The words trailed away. Anne's hat dangled from her black-gloved hand as she walked on the path that led to the street. She had walked on that path so many times she found herself automatically skirting a curve where tall bushes had stretched out their branches to snag the unwary. But the bushes were gone; they had been replaced by a low, neatly trimmed hedge that presented no danger to anyone. No danger, she thought. And she had come this far; why not go all the way, to the house where she grew up? “Fine; let's go there. Can we walk? I'd like that.”

They turned north from the chapel, walking beneath tall oaks and elms that entwined their leafy branches in a long
tunnel over the street. Thin shafts of light pierced the leaves, and Anne and Gail walked through them like ghosts passing through sunlit walls. On either side, tall shrubbery and iron gates set in high brick walls allowed fleeting glimpses of brick or gray-stone mansions. Except for an occasional automobile, there was no sign of life; no one else strolled on those deserted sidewalks. Anne remembered that from her childhood: almost no one walks in the suburbs.

“Where did you go?” Gail asked.

“San Francisco.” The sun had been shining, Anne remembered. It had been a beautiful April morning. “There was a neighborhood there where people went when they left home.”

“Haight Ashbury.” Gail nodded. “I've read about it. I can't imagine you there; it was so weird.”

“No, it wasn't. It was the most loving place in the world. After a while it changed, and I went to Berkeley, to college. And then Harvard, for law school.”

“Law school? You're a lawyer?”

“Yes. In Los Angeles.”

“What kind of lawyer?”

“Mostly divorce.”

Gail glanced at her. “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Or divorced?”

“No. But you're married; you and Leo. And those lovely children sitting with you are yours?”

“Yes, Robin and Ned. Robin was just eight and Ned will be ten in September. You'll like them; they're wonderful. So is Leo. He was very close to Grandpa. He's president of The Tamarack Company. Grandpa trusted him—and me, too, I guess—to protect all his dreams.”

“Tell me about Leo.”

“He's very serious, very ambitious, and very protective. Here we are.” She stopped walking. “But of course you know that. Isn't this the most amazing thing? Your being here? The two of us going home together?”

“Yes,” Anne said. The years vanished and she crossed the
street as if she were coming home from school at the end of the day. They walked between the brick pillars and up the long driveway to Marian's house. Without thinking, Anne started for the side door, then pulled back as Gail went to the front door and opened it with her key. And once inside, Anne forced herself to walk steadily across the foyer and up the stairs and all the way to the end of the second-floor corridor. She opened the door and gazed at the room. Her room. Beyond the windows the clouds swirled, and the room was gray and somber, as it had been that dawn when she packed her duffel bag. Nothing had been changed from the day she left it. No, there was one change. There were no fresh roses on the table to match the roses that were everywhere else: in the drapes, the window seat, the wallpaper, the vanity skirt, the bed . . .

Abruptly, she turned away and pulled the door shut behind her. The sound exploded in the silent house. When Vince had closed that door, he had done it so carefully it had made no sound at all. A long breath broke from her like a sob.

“Come on,” said Gail. She was standing at the top of the stairs, halfway down the hall. “Let's make some tea.” She waited until Anne was beside her and they were descending the stairs. “I didn't know what you meant, when you told them that night . . . well, I was nine; I didn't know anything. I just knew it was awful, because of the way you looked, and the way everybody yelled at everybody. Marian wouldn't tell me. I kept asking her, and asking where you were, why you'd left, why nobody would talk about you—”

“They didn't?”

“Nobody talked much about anything. Daddy said it was like a tomb. It was, you know; it was terrible. I stayed after school so I'd get home as late as I could, and Marian found me a place to do arts and crafts on Saturdays, and in the summer I went to camp in Wisconsin. The whole summer. When you left, everything just fell apart. I hated it. I didn't understand anything, and nobody would tell me anything, and most of all I missed you. I can't believe you're here now;
I can't believe I'm really talking to you. I've thought about you so often, you know, and how much I missed you. I felt like I'd lost my home, and lost my family, too.”

“That makes two of us.”

As if there had been no break since the last time she had done it, Anne filled the teakettle and put it on the stove, turned on the gas burner, reached to the shelf above for mugs and the teapot, and set them on the counter. Every movement was exact; she did not have to think about any of it.

“Eerie,” she said with a little shake of her head. “I'm caught in some kind of time warp.”

“How did it happen?” Gail asked. “Did he threaten you?”

Anne's muscles tightened. She sat at the table beside the French doors that led to the backyard. It had begun to rain; there were slashes of lightning above the lake. She remembered these July thunderstorms; fierce downpours that were over within fifteen minutes, moving away on faint and then fainter rumbles of thunder, leaving behind a pall of hot, heavy air that made it hard to breathe. “I can't talk about it,” she said.

“Even now? After
twenty-four years?
Couldn't you tell me anything?”

Anne shook her head.

Gail sighed. “It's just that I don't know anything about you, and I want to. All these years I've had a sister, but I haven't had a sister, and I kept wishing for you. I was too young before, but I kept thinking if you ever came back, we could be such good friends. All the time I was growing up there were things I couldn't tell my friends, and I thought if you were here, I could tell you. As if we had a head start on being close even though we never saw each other. Does that make sense? So I don't want to push you and make you miserable, but if you ever want to talk to me, I wish you would. The thing is, in some ways, I feel so far from you. Everybody said I wouldn't understand what you'd said that night, I wouldn't understand, I wouldn't understand, so finally I asked somebody at school, and she made it very
clear, in a lot more detail than I wanted, but I still didn't know anything about
you.”
There was a pause. “Could you at least tell me . . . did it go on for a long time?”

Anne gripped her hands. “Two years.”

“Two years?
My God, you were
thirteen
when he—? And you didn't tell anyone? Why didn't you tell Marian?”

Anne closed her eyes. She felt sick, and angry. But what had she expected? That Gail wouldn't ask questions? “Marian never liked hearing about problems,” she said, her voice low. “You know that. And”—she forced the words out—“he threatened to kill me.”

“Oh, no. How could anyone in our family—” The teakettle burst into a shrill shriek and Gail turned off the burner. “I can't imagine anyone saying that.” She poured the water into the teapot and added loose tea. Her movements were as exact and controlled as Anne's. She placed the mugs precisely in front of her place and Anne's, and the sugar and cream equidistant from the mugs. She took a plate of scones from the freezer, heated them for a minute in the microwave oven, and placed them on the table with a tub of butter, moving the sugar and cream so that the grouping was perfectly balanced.

“I do that, too,” Anne said. “Are you ever sloppy?”

“Never. It would keep me up all night. Are you?”

Anne shook her head and smiled. This was better: the two of them, getting acquainted. This was what she had wanted in the chapel when they embraced: to begin with today, to ignore the past. There were almost no memories attached to Gail.

And yet they were sisters. The word was strange to Anne and it gave her a little shock each time she said it to herself. She never thought of those words—
sister, father, grandfather, aunt, uncle, cousin
—in connection with herself. But now she did.
Sister,
she thought deliberately, watching Gail butter a scone. She was not sure what that meant: what they would be to each other. Like herself and Eleanor, perhaps, but much closer. In fact, Gail already seemed closer in some ways. She's like me, Anne thought. Too neat, trying to
control everything. Afraid of being sloppy because that could mean things are getting out of hand, the way they did before. And she looks like me. I like that.

“How many years did you go to camp?” she asked.

“Oh, forever. Anything was better than staying home all summer, and anyway, I liked it. I started being a counselor when I was fifteen and kept going until I went away to college. Did you ever miss us?”

“Yes. Where did you go to college?”

“Northwestern. I never got very far from home. I don't know why. Maybe I was afraid of really being on my own. I never have been, you know. I went from home to a dormitory, and I met Leo when I was eighteen, when he came to work for Grandpa, and we got married when I graduated. If you really missed us, why didn't you call?”

“I didn't think I'd ever come back.” Anne sipped her tea, Marian's jasmine tea, which she had not tasted since she left, and was swept by other memories, triggered by its steaming fragrance. “I remember once, when William was writing one of his letters—does he still do that?”

“All the time. He keeps believing he can change things he doesn't approve of, and he writes to everybody—senators, congressmen, newspapers, presidents of corporations, the White House . . . he never loses faith.”

Anne smiled. “Well, William was using Marian's typewriter, and drinking her tea and giving me advice, all at the same time. I was about ten or eleven, and I didn't pay much attention, but it's strange, I must have been listening, because I remember so clearly how he looked up suddenly and said, ‘When you grow up, young lady, you put your life together the absolute best you can, and do it all the way; don't dabble and don't hang on by your toenails to whatever's safe; plunge in, keep your eyes straight ahead, and never look back, because there's nothing there: it's all in the future.' ” Anne paused. “I've never forgotten that. He was so fierce. I thought about that when I was in the Haight. I missed you—most of you—but I couldn't come back. They made me feel too alone. So I made my own life and I did
what William said: I kept my eyes straight ahead and I didn't look back.”