The Sisters Montclair (18 page)

“I tried to call Sawyer but his phone is dead.”

“His phone goes dead when the power goes out but mine doesn’t,” Alice said, opening her packet of crackers. She slid one cracker out and popped it into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully. She pointed at the drawer of her bedside table. “There’s a flashlight in there,” she said.

Stella pulled it out and flicked it on to see if it worked. Outside the window, the two men in hardhats were setting up orange plastic cones around the downed power line. Stella set the flashlight down on the table. “Use this if you need it,” she said to Alice who was blithely munching on her snack.

“I guess that means no TV,” Alice said. “No
Wheel of Fortune
or
Jeopardy
.”

“Well, maybe the power will come back on by then.”

“Don’t count on it. Last time it was out for days.”

“We’ll be pioneer women then. We’ll live like they did in the good old days.”

Alice hooted and shook her head. She picked up her coke, sipped it, and then set it down again. “The good old days weren’t always so good,” she said.

The kitchen had a gas stove but Stella wasn’t sure how to light it, so she made a cold lunch of tuna salad, grapes, and coleslaw. Outside in the street a large power truck had arrived but Alice seemed unaware of the commotion in her driveway. Half-way through lunch Sawyer called on a cell phone to check on his mother.

“Oh, we’re fine,” Alice said. “We’re just finishing lunch.” She listened for a moment and then said, “Truck? What truck?”

Stella held out her hand to Alice. “Let me talk to him,” she said.

She explained the downed power line and Sawyer said he wasn’t too worried; he just wanted to make sure Al had plenty of canned goods because there were trees down across most of the roads and he wasn’t sure when he’d get to the grocery store again. She checked the pantry and said there was enough to last several days and it wasn’t until they’d hung up that she thought to ask him about lighting the stove. Well, perhaps Elaine would know how. She was sure Elaine would know.

She fixed Alice a scoop of Rum Raisin ice cream and then sat down beside her. The light falling through the windows was a dull gray and Stella had turned on the flashlight and left it sitting on the desk like a torch so Alice could see to eat. In the harsh light Alice’s face seemed cavernous and ghostly.

“We were snowed in once,” she said, dipping her spoon in the ice cream. “In the big house over on Hammond. And when the men came to rescue us, to get the heat going and the water turned on, I went to the library and came out carrying a big bottle of whiskey to give to them. And Bill Whittington said,
Alice, where are you going with that?
And I told him and he said,
Not with my whiskey, you’re not. Really, Alice, what’s come over you?
”

She turned her head and looked at Stella. “Being stuck for a week in a cold house with three children, a guinea pig, and Bill Whittington. That’s what had come over me.”

Stella put her head back and laughed. It was something she could picture a youthful Alice doing, grabbing a bottle of whiskey and going forth to present it to her rescuers. “Well, hopefully, it won’t take a week to get your power turned back on.”

Alice chewed thoughtfully. “Well,” she said finally. “It doesn’t make any difference, we’ll get through it one way or the other. I never have understood people running around getting upset by storms and such. You can’t do anything about it, so why get upset?” She shrugged and popped the spoon into her mouth. Alice seemed almost cheerful, contemplating the destructive power of Mother Nature.

“Well, you’d probably feel differently if your house was one of the ones with a tree lying on top of it.”

Alice chewed slowly, seeming to contemplate this. “I suppose you’re right,” she said finally. She turned her head and gave Stella a long, searching look. “Was your home damaged?”

It hadn’t occurred to Stella to wonder. Not once had she thought of picking up her cell phone and calling Josh to see if he was okay. To see if her few belongings, a suitcase full of clothes, several boxes of books, had survived the storm.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so. I think my boyfriend would have called me if something bad had happened.”

That afternoon they sat in the sunroom reading. It was the only room in the house with enough light falling through the windows to read by; Alice sat in a low chair with a pillow resting on her lap, her book, a history of the wives of King Henry VIII, resting atop the pillow. Stella had found a copy of Boswell’s 1763 London Journal in the library and had instantly fallen under the spell of Boswell’s prose, shocked by the sexual explicitness of his various accounts of his mistresses. It was hard to imagine that people of the eighteenth century, with their general lack of hygiene and access to contraceptive devices, would enjoy sex as much as her generation did. She turned to the frontispiece, where someone had written
Alice Montclair Whittington
in a flowing script. Hard, too, to imagine Alice reading this book; a youthful, blushing Alice. Hard to imagine that woman at all.

She shouldn’t be reading Boswell, she should be reading
Brain and Biology
. She had put away her textbooks after the storm and hadn’t reopened them. She was so far behind in her classes that it would be better if she dropped them all. And yet it was too far into the semester to get her money back; the school loans would have to be repaid regardless of whether or not she dropped the classes. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the depressing facts of her present situation wash over her. If she quit school now, the debt hanging over her head would haunt her forever. And yet to continue on the path she was following, missing classes, turning papers in late, doing poorly on exams, would ensure that she was never accepted into graduate school. She would graduate with even more debt than she had now and she still would not be able to find a job as a counselor. Dr. Dillard had warned her that even social work would require a master’s degree. She had started college with such promise, such hope for the future and now she found herself worn down by worry and fear that she would not be able to finish, that she would not have the stamina to do what had to be done in order to change her life. Perhaps she had been a fool to even think it possible.

Boswell wrote,
The truth is with regard to me, about the age of seventeen I had a very severe illness. I became very melancholy. I imagined that I was never to get rid of it. I gave myself up as devoted to misery. I entertained a most gloomy and odd way of thinking.
The book had obviously not been read in years; the pages were musty and brittle with age.

She wanted to believe that life would get better for her eventually. That she could wipe the slate clean and begin anew. She remembered her mother’s insistence, all those years ago, that life would get better, if only. If only she could find a better job, if only a decent man would wander into their lives. Each time they moved Stella was promised a pink bedroom, a room of her own, a house with a yard and a white picket fence. Her whole childhood had been predicated on her mother’s stolid, unchangeable belief that each new man who walked into their lives would bring these things.

Moody Bates had seemed a dream come true. With his steady job, his small, neat tract house in a neighborhood of small tract houses, his new Ford F-250 and riding lawnmower, he had swept them up like a genie and dropped them into a world they had hardly dared dream of. Stella had her own room with yellow dotted Swiss curtains. Candy quit her job and stayed home and cooked dinners that didn’t come out of a box. When Candy found herself pregnant two months later, Moody married her, and the three of them settled down to a life that seemed, by all outward appearances, perfect.

Boswell was expounding on the “system” of mankind.
I can see that Great People, those who manage the fates of kingdoms, are just such beings as myself: have their hours of discontent and are not a bit happier.
Stella held the book up, fanning the pages back to the frontispiece. Without warning a letter slipped out and fell into her lap. It was frail and brown with age and picking it up and peering at the postmark, Stella could make out
March 19, 1951
. The letter was addressed to Mrs. William Whittington, care of the Commodore Hotel, New York City. She glanced at Alice, who was bent over her heavy novel and apparently had not seen the letter fall.

A sudden loud banging on the front door made them both jump.

“Goodness!” Alice said. “What was that?”

“Someone’s at the front door,” Stella said. She slid the letter back into the book.

“Well, go see who it is,” Alice said.

It was Roddy, Alice’s oldest son, and his wife, Hadley, dragging a cooler filled with ice behind them. Stella had never met either one but she’d seen photographs. He was a slight, attractive man with a full head of hair worn stylishly long, the kind of man who’d been irresistible to women his whole life and saw no reason to stop now that he was in his early seventies.

“Hey, I’m Rod,” he said. His hair was still blonde and Stella wondered if he colored it.

“Stella,” she said, smiling. “Your mom’s back in the sunroom.”

His wife, Hadley, was very pleasant and friendly, younger that he was by about fifteen years, Stella guessed. She introduced herself, glancing briefly, with an expression of detached curiosity, at Stella’s lip ring and then going on into the sunroom to say hello to Alice. Stella followed Rod into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and began to toss things into the cooler. Stella had already moved most of the food into the freezer, but she could see now that the cartons of ice cream were beginning to melt.

“You’ll need to throw all this ice cream out,” he said, speaking in the same loud, overly-friendly voice Sawyer always used.

“Yes.”

“I see from the cones in the driveway that the fire department has already been out here. Sawyer called me and told me there was a downed power line.”

“That’s right,” she said.

He was wearing jeans and a sweater and Stella was struck again by how young he looked. Obviously, having money was like finding the Fountain of Youth. He had been married the first time around to the daughter of a man who showed up regularly on the Forbes list of billionaires, and he had worked for his father-in-law on various corporate boards until his divorce. Stella had learned all of this reading a book she had found in Alice’s library written about the first families of Chattanooga. The Whittingtons and the Montclairs had figured prominently in the book.

“I’ll do that,” Stella said, indicating that she would throw away the ice cream. “You go on in and visit with your mom.”

He turned and glanced at her, letting his eyes travel from her face to her chest and rest lightly on her hips.

“All right Stacey,” he said in his forced jovial tone. “I’ll leave you to it then.”

Stella could hear the three of them talking in the sunroom as she cleaned out the refrigerator. Rod and Hadley had just returned from Italy and they spoke at great length about the Ponte Vecchio and the San Giovanni Square. Apparently, one of the family cousins had married an Italian Count several generations back and there was a lot of talk about the “Italian branch of the family.”

“The Countess was very gracious,” Hadley said. “Very welcoming and very gracious.”

“She asked about you, Al,” Rod said. “She remembered meeting you and dad at the Palazzo Vecchio. Of course, she was just a girl then, but she remembers you being very beautiful.”

“Oh dear,” Alice said. “Well, I hope you didn’t show her any recent photographs then.”

“Now, Al,” Hadley said.

“Here are some photos of the villa,” Rod said. “And here’s our cousin, Rudolpho. You remember him, don’t you? Cousin Rudolpho?” He used the same bullying tone with Alice that Sawyer did, only with him there was a slight edge of exasperation in his voice. He spoke in the same way to his wife, and it occurred to Stella, listening, that despite his charming demeanor, Rod was one of those men who found women stupid and vaguely annoying. He was the oldest son and yet he spent a great deal of his time traveling, leaving Sawyer to buy Alice’s groceries, fill her pillbox, and write her checks. He lived only a few miles from his mother, and yet in the nearly three months that Stella had been sitting with Alice, this was the first time Rod had visited during one of her shifts.

“Oh, we forgot the lamp,” Hadley said, in her slow, sweet drawl. “It’s in the car.”

“Well, go out and get it,” Rod said.

“Lamp? What lamp?” Alice said.

“We brought you one of Billy’s Boy Scout lamps.”

“Why do I need a Boy Scout lamp? I’ve got lamps.”

Roddy said, “Not any that work when the lights go out! The Boy Scout lamp is kind of like a big flashlight.”

“Well, I’ve got flashlights, too.”

Roddy gave her a stubborn, aggrieved look. “Are you saying you don’t want it?”

Alice laughed. “Well, no. I guess I’ll take it if you brought it.”

“It’s going to get pretty dark in here tonight.”

“Well, all right then.”

Hadley brought the lamp into the kitchen and showed Stella how to use it.

As they were leaving, Roddy said, “Nice to meet you, Sara.”

Around five o’clock, the sky began to darken. Stella’s cell phone rang and when she answered it, it was Charlotte. “There’s another storm coming in and I’m going to send Elaine up early to relieve you. You need to get home before the next one hits.”

“All right,” Stella said. She walked back to the bedroom to tell Alice.

She was sitting up in bed with the flashlight shining directly onto her puzzle book. With her head bowed in serious concentration and her wispy curls standing out around her pink scalp, she looked almost childlike.

“Alice, Elaine is coming early tonight. There’s another storm coming.”

Alice jumped, startled, and put her hand on her chest. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I’m sorry. I should have warned you. I should have flicked the lights or something. Oh wait, I can’t do that.”

“You should have warned me,” Alice said.