The Gazebo: A Novel (16 page)

E
VEN THOUGH MY
sister and I are twins, throughout our lives no one ever had trouble telling us apart. We weren’t identical in any way. It wasn’t just the lengths of our hair, or the clothes we wore, although that was part of it. Over the years she let her dark red hair grow long and wild, while I kept mine cut bluntly just above the shoulders. She preferred flowing fabrics and beads at the throat and wrist, while I ususally wore a single antique silver necklace that my mother gave me before she died.

But there was something else about us that people saw: the way that Harper had become the kind of woman who men instantaneously responded to. Unlike Harper, though, I was often overlooked by men. I’d had relationships occasionally, but I never got the sense that any man would feel about me the way most men
felt about my sister. I pretended that it didn’t really matter, but it did. It would come at me in the middle of the night, when I’d wake up from a dream in which I’d been lying in the arms of some unknown man. The dream would fall away, and I’d be left with a powerful sense of loneliness that kept me up for the rest of the night.

Then one afternoon, in the middle of a cold, terrible winter, out on a narrow strip of land, I met a man named David Fields. He looked at me for a long time, and for the next few months at least, he never stopped looking. For a while there, he made me feel, I think, the way men often made Harper feel.

Not that I ever knew exactly what my sister felt about anything. As girls, she and I were never close; as adults our coolness toward each other eventually froze over completely, for no particular reason. There hadn’t been a falling–out of some kind; it was just that we’d gone through so many awkward years of not liking each other, and now we were fully grown and on our own, and we understood that we didn’t need to force a relationship anymore.
One day I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d talked to Harper, and that I didn’t miss her at all.

And then, suddenly, she was back.

Harper returned to my life the day after New Year’s Day. It was snowing, and I’d just come home from the Water Mill, a local bar where I’d been with my friends from the Longwood Falls Library, where I was head librarian. It was–only the second day of the new year, and already it was shaping up a lot like the old year. Those of us at the library who didn’t have spouses or kids at home had gathered at one of the back tables. We were glad to have a chance to just be together and unwind, and equally glad to be away from our silent, wintry houses for just a while longer. I was still feeling warmed from a glass of red wine, and my fingers were salty from a bowl of cashews that had been refilled several times. Now I was sitting alone in my bedroom as I did most nights, getting changed into an old pink nightgown, the news of the world droning dully in the background, when my doorbell rang.

The sound was startling. It was rare for anyone to show up at the house unannounced at
night, and so I slipped on a robe, quickly belted it, and headed downstairs. Through the oblong yellow and green panes of stained glass on the front door, I could make out my elderly aunt Leatrice standing on the porch. I opened the door and saw that my aunt was crying. She hurried through the doorway, putting her arms around me, snow in her hair.

“Aunt Leatrice,” I said, alarmed. “What is it?”

My beloved aunt—my late mother’s sister, a small, birdlike woman of seventy who lived several streets away—stepped back and regarded me. “Oh, Liz,” she said, her voice choked and unfamiliar, “something has happened.”

She pulled away, shaking her head, and I followed her into the den. My aunt sat in one of the green wing chairs that faced the fire, and I perched nervously on the edge of the other, waiting for her to collect herself enough to be able to continue. I was afraid she was going to say that something had happened to Harper. Immediately, I could see my sister in a high–speed car accident on a superhighway, or in the crash of a private plane somewhere
in Europe. I took a breath and steeled myself for the news; it would be strange and terrible, but I wasn’t sure I would cry.

Instead, what my aunt said was, “It’s Doe.”

Doe: my niece. My sister’s daughter. Eight years old. A redhead.

“There was a sledding accident,” my aunt went on. “It happened this morning, in Stone Point. She was going down a hill. They don’t understand it; this was a place where children go sledding all the time. But something happened, a chunk of ice in the path, and the sled caught, and there was a tree, and she was killed.”

“Oh my God,” I heard myself say.

My aunt began crying again. I helped her out of her damp coat, poured her some brandy in one of the large snifters my father used to drink from, and built a small, clumsy fire in the hearth. The fire popped and whistled while my aunt continued to sob and drink. Eventually, the fire died down and my aunt, too tired to keep crying, fell asleep in the chair, her head fallen back, mouth open, snoring a little in the way that elderly people often do. The brandy snifter, now empty, dropped from
her hand and rolled onto the carpet, not breaking. I picked up the glass, covered my aunt with an afghan blanket I’d knitted one winter when I’d been bored and had plenty of time on my hands. Then I shut off the lights, poked at the ashes in the fireplace one last time, and went upstairs to bed.

The fact was, I didn’t know Doe. I’d seen her once, a week after she was bom, at a party her mother threw at the Stone Point house. Stone Point is a wealthy town on the Long Island Sound. All the houses there are huge and look out over the water and have names; my sister’s house is called The Eaves. Stone Point is an old town with a history; presidents have vacationed there, and a famous yacht race takes place there every August, and once, back in the 1960s, a beautiful female Olympic swimmer named Maggie Thorpe dove into the water off the Point and was never seen again. My sister’s town is a place of glamour and genteel drama, and the one time I’d visited there for her baby’s welcoming party, I’d left feeling more inadequate than ever.

That day, the rooms on the first floor of Harper’s house had been crowded with guests
drinking champagne from long flutes and nibbling smoked salmon on toast points. Everyone was talking and laughing and arguing loudly about topics I knew nothing about, such as ice fishing and the restorative mud baths of Italy. Extravagant baby gifts were presented: a stuffed bear as big as a refrigerator, a child–size Fiat with a real engine and leather bucket seals. Lively rock music was playing over the speakers that hung from the upper corners of every room.

At one point, my sister’s newborn Domenica—who’d been instantly nicknamed Doe—was produced from a distant room upstairs, held aloft by a nurse, a proud Irishwoman in a white uniform, and for a moment the deafening noise of the party softened. I remember staring into the eyes of that little baby who had a sprig of red hair that was the same color as Harper’s and mine. Something caught in my throat in that moment, but after the applause and the exclamations, the nurse and baby vanished again, and the guests were free to resume their drinking and shouting.

I briefly considered retrieving the gift I’d placed on a table in the foyer when I arrived—a
simple baby doll in a red–checked outfit—and sending something more extravagant later. But in the end I hesitantly left it there, and a week later I received a cordial but impersonal thank–you note from my sister and her husband, Carlo Brico, a much older Italian businessman and art collector. I didn’t know Carlo at all, and hadn’t even been invited to their wedding, which was described in the paper as “intimate,” and had apparently taken place on a barge on a canal in Venice. When, a year after Doe’s birth, an invitation arrived for a party in honor of the birth of Harper’s second child, a boy named Nick, I declined.

My aunt Leatrice, however, was involved in all their lives, and she kept me aware of the children’s progress over the years: how Doe loved horses and ballet class and ice cream, and was as idiosyncratic as her mother; how Nick was the serious one, quiet and intelligent like Carlo but sometimes moody and unresponsive. From time to time my aunt even mentioned details of my sister’s life that she felt I should know, and I assume that when she spoke to Harper, she did the same about me. Though really, it’s not as though there was much to tell in
my case; life as the head librarian in a small–town library isn’t exactly something that would have captivated my sister.

It was Aunt Leatrice who studiously wrote letters to Harper, made phone calls, and requested school photographs of her grandniece and grandnephew, which she then religiously pasted in a photo album and showed to me. Every time I looked at pictures of those children I saw what I was missing, but there was nothing to do about it. It was Aunt Leatrice—not me—who had somehow stayed in my sister’s good graces, and who got to know the children over the years and loved them deeply. All of which made me wonder now, as I rested my head back against the pillow on my bed and closed my eyes, why exactly I was crying.

When the sun came up in the morning I felt so heavy–hearted that it was difficult to get out of bed and start my day. Once upon a time I’d lived in this room with Harper, though we’d barely spent any time in it together except to sleep. Now the place no longer bore a resemblance to that girlhood room. The striped rose wallpaper was gone, and so were the twin beds
with their nubbly chenille spreads. When I moved back into the house after my parents’ deaths, I hadn’t wanted to sleep in their bedroom; it seemed somehow just wrong. That room I turned into a big, wonderful office, with an old rolltop desk and plenty of books everywhere. The room Harper and I had shared remained mine, though now completely redecorated with a big brass bed and blond wood furniture.

The house had long ago been rid of its traces of my sister, except for one. Inside the pantry off the kitchen were the old pencil markings on the door that my mother had drawn to measure our heights over time. Always, we were head to head, Harper and I, twin sisters who were nothing alike in the ways that matter.

From the beginning we were known as “the Mallory Girls.” Or, sometimes, “
those
Mallory girls.” Longwood Falls, where we lived from the day we were born, is a small town in upstate New York. It’s the sort of place where everyone knows everyone’s business, and where people often took it upon themselves to discuss that business. “Liz Mallory is so quiet,” I’d been told they would say. “So responsible
and courteous.” Then, looking furtively around, they would add, “But, now, her
sister
, she’s a real original. Not to mention a wildcat.”

And it was true. Harper was wild, but she was also accomplished. She did everything first, before anyone else had thought of doing it. She dressed with her own self–invented style and elegance, and she attracted every male within shouting distance. She created collages out of scraps of material, machine parts, and discarded household items—things it would never have occurred to me could be used in that way. She was an artist and a rebel, and she was both infuriating and formidable. But wherever she went, people knew she was there.

Harper never confided in me, never asked me how I was doing, how I was feeling, whether I wanted to come join her and her pack of friends who seemed more sophisticated than my slightly shy, hesitant crowd. She would ride down Bridge Street in Warren Jett’s vintage convertible, drinking from a bottle of tequila, her head thrown back, hair blowing, singing old Beatles songs.

By the time high school ended, she’d been in love several times already—each relationship complete with endless phone conversations, arguments, and dramatic breakups. When we graduated, it was clear what our futures would be; everyone knew that Harper was headed for New York City, where she was going to attend art school and become a famous painter, while I was certain to stay right here and have a more average, uneventful life.

Which isn’t to say that I was a complete wallflower. Occasionally, boys were interested in me, and later on, men, and I became involved with a few of them over the years, but it was always hard for me to thoroughly enjoy myself, or to imagine that any of these relationships might last. A couple of the ones I’d gone out with had already dated Harper and been dumped by her. I was an afterthought, the sensible alternative to my exciting but maddening sister. And even when I went out with someone she hadn’t already been involved with, he always wanted to know all about her. She was the center of everyone’s attention, not me. So, in a sort of defensive stance, I never allowed myself to get too close
to any man, too intimate, because I feared he’d be disappointed by what he found. And I never really experienced pleasure.