Till the End of Tom (17 page)

Sixteen

T
HAT
evening, we met friends, as planned, for a meal out and a movie.

The meal was more expensive and less tasty than hoped for, and the movie was the sort that leaves you squinting and headachy, older, and sorry to have once again learned that just because nothing whatsoever happens over the course of a film doesn’t mean it’s art. I thought I might never again attend any movie that had the word “exquisite” in its review.

Still and all, at no point in either real life or the movie did anybody tumble down a staircase, prove to have been drugged, accuse anyone else of murderous impulses, or talk about wedding preparations.

We considered it a fine and jolly outing.

Next morning, nobody phoned before we awoke, and I thought my fortunes had changed and that I was truly in control of a wide-open day. While C.K. studied, I’d get school- and housework done, the cat brushed, e-mail answered, a letter written, and then, and then . . . who knew what else? The possibilities were endless, and the day felt that way, too.

Of course that wasn’t meant to be, but before I knew that, I had settled in to mark papers, contented for once to be doing so as I sat at the oak table, a pot of coffee in front of me, the golden autumn sun flooding the loft, Macavity catching the edge of a sunbeam on the carpet next to me.

That’s when the buzzing began. It’s a sound that digs into and claws the small canals of the ear. It means somebody at ground level wants to visit, so it should be welcoming and pleasant, but it sounds instead like a warning to immediately evacuate the premises.

The only buzzees out and about at this hour would be people I didn’t want to admit or even know, so I ignored the noise until I could no longer stand it, then I left the sunny table and stomped to the door. “Who is it?” I snapped into the intercom.

“Me! Who’d you think?”

“Who’d I think? I thought a serial killer, a Sunday morning drunk or druggie, a thief, a—”

“Are you going to let me in, or are you going to leave me out here until one of those guys really does come along?”

So I let my sister in and listened as the elevator cranked its way up to the top floor of the building.

She opened the door and looked surprised. “Arms across the chest, teach? What did I do?”

“Why did you ask me who else it could have been downstairs?”

“Because it’s me! Because you said you were free and that we’d go look at The Manse.”

“I said that?”

“She said that?” The near-echo was from C.K.

“Of course!” Beth said.

“I said come over on Sunday, Beth, and we’ll go see a mansion?”

“The Manse.”

No way could I imagine wedding invitations that said anything resembling “see you at The Manse” unless it was meant as a joke.

“You didn’t say those words precisely, no,” Beth said. “But on Monday, I asked you when we were going to check the place out, and you said as soon as you had a free day.”

Monday. All I remembered of it was Tomas Severin’s body. It was possible Beth was bamboozling me, but there was no way I could remember what had or hadn’t been said, wedding-wise. And I couldn’t say what I was thinking—that I hadn’t spoken to her Monday because I’d ignored her phone message. That would be opening a separate can of worms.

“And Wednesday,” she continued, “when we were talking, I asked you what your weekend plans were, and you didn’t mention a single thing for today. Therefore—your first free day!”

“The dog that didn’t bark in the night,” I said.

C.K. chuckled. “Ever considered investigation as a sideline, Beth? You’re pretty good puttin’ clues together and noting what wasn’t said.”

“You promised Mom you’d come.” Beth sounded too much the teacher’s pet good-daughter for my liking, but I realized with a sinking sensation that she was probably telling the truth. That must have been what I’d agreed to on the stairs, when my mother had phoned me at school.

Beth’s smile had too much of an edge of self-satisfaction.

“I never realized how wily you are, Beth. How cleverly you set your trap. And if this is a potential wedding site, well, I don’t think I could get married in a place that called itself The Manse.”

“It just means lodging, a house.”

“Oh, please. It means—” But her expression stopped me. Her smile had disappeared, and a crease appeared between her eyebrows. She glanced at C.K., who seemed once again mesmerized by his book and his highlighter, and then she looked around, and back at me. “There’s no place here to be private!” she said in an irritated whisper.

“About what? What’s going on?”

“The bathroom,” she said. “Come with me.”

She reached for me, but I pulled away. “That’s beyond ridiculous. What’s the big secret, and from whom? The only other person here is the one I’m marrying.”

She sighed and sat down at the oak table, back toward Mackenzie, and patted the chair next to her, so that I, too, would be facing away from my intended. When I was seated, she took a deep breath, exhaled, then put her hand atop mine. “We’re sisters. I’ll understand. Be honest with me.” She was almost inaudible.

“About what?”

“Shhhh,” she whispered. “About
him.
About your feelings. It’s well and good to joke about the bride having cold feet, but your feet are frostbitten. You seem upset about so many things, lethargic about so much else, that I realized I haven’t been sufficiently sensitive to what you’re trying to say. So I want you to know that you do not have to—”

Oh joy! She’d gotten it, and it would not be necessary to go through this sea of froufrou to reach the golden shores of matrimony. She was giving me a get out of jail card.

“—marry him.” Her level of earnestness could flatten mountains.

“What?”

“You don’t have to marry him.”

I had to stop and try to rerun the tape, figure out what we’d been saying to each other. “But I want to,” I said. “I like the getting married part.”

“You don’t have to say that. There’s no shame admitting you’ve made a mistake. Even after two people have been together awhile, it can take something like setting the date to realize they’re about to make a mistake. He’s a lovely man, but other people’s opinions shouldn’t color yours in any way. This is about you, and your future, so—”

“Beth, I don’t feel that way.” She sounded as if she’d memorized something from a talk show. “I’m only—”

“Only anything but subtle about your reluctance,” she whispered. “Good Lord—I have to trick you into looking at your own wedding site. And Mom says the same thing about the gown, the invitations, about everything. You said you wanted to plan your own wedding, and yet, you plan nothing. You haven’t registered at a single store. You haven’t even thought about it, have you? What else could it mean? I phoned Sasha this week—”

“Did she mention a dead man?”

“That’s precisely it.” She pursed her mouth.

“Dead men? Wait—I’m lost now.”

“Your own life, your
wedding day—
just about the most important day of your life!—is secondary to—”

I could not believe she meant what she was saying. I mean I knew she meant it, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe she meant the subtext, that a murder was not as important as the choice of lace or satin trim on a wedding gown. Or as a visit to a place so infatuated with itself that it named itself The Manse.

She. Meant. Well. That was becoming my mantra for all of them. And I knew it was true. Beth was a professional events planner, so she couldn’t contain herself when faced with a celebration. Gabby Mackenzie created chaos while also meaning well. So did Bea Pepper, who had drawn up blueprints for my nuptials while I was still in the womb. So did Sasha, who believed in love and marriage and proved it repeatedly. They. All. Meant. Well.

That didn’t make the barrage easier to endure. “So many decisions,” I said. “I’m overwhelmed with work—two jobs, and, yes, the dead man who has become part of both my jobs, and then, to think about guest lists, and—”

“It isn’t him?” Her whisper was barely audible.

“That’s the one thing I’m sure of.”

“I’m so glad!” She smiled. “And I’m glad we cleared the air.”

Did I dare hope I’d therefore have a day or two without wedding imperatives?

“You’re stressed,” she said, “but I’m here for you. I’m here to make it easy for you. To relieve you of the burden.”

No. Nothing had changed. “I don’t see the point of all this.”

She put her hand back on mine. “It’s a cultural tradition. It’s bigger than we are.”

“As if that were the only day of my life that counted. Need I say how I feel about that concept of my existence?”

“It brings the two families together, and you get to be even more gorgeous than you usually are and there’s this huge party for you.”

I tilted my head in the general direction of the in-house student. “What about him?”

“Well, of course, him. But it’s really Your Big Day. You are the center of attention.”

I have no problem being the center of attention when it’s appropriate, but I did have a problem with the idea that finding a man willing to join you in marriage was IT. A woman’s big day, and then, if you really bought that idea, that left all the rest of her days doomed to be little. I wanted the marriage, not the ceremony, to be the big and long IT. But I knew when I was beaten. “And I only get married once, right?” My turn to speak softly.

“Absolutely,” Beth said. “Okay, then. Get a sweater—it’s brisk—and let’s go. If nothing else, it will be a beautiful ride on a positively glorious autumn day.”

When the phone rang, I was rooting around for something to make my jeans and T-shirt look more acceptable at the sort of place that would make Beth flip.

“I’ve got it,” Beth called out. Either she assumed it was our mother, or she herself had become as meddlesome as our mother.

“Then you come, too!” I heard her say in her professionally animated voice.

Not our mother, then, I hoped. She was supposed to stay in Florida until the shower. I’d found my rust-suede shirt jacket and thought I looked sufficiently countrified to enter The Manse. “Who?” I shouted.

“Sasha. She wanted to talk to you about the shower, so I said I’d pick her up en route, and that way you won’t feel overwhelmed or harried. We’ll have lunch and go into the country and look and see and discuss—and we’ll get everything taken care of today.”

Even she knew that couldn’t happen, and Beth is, if anything, honest. She amended her promise. “We’ll get a lot done today.”

There was another pause. “We’ll get something done.” She left it at that.

T
HE
M
AIN
L
INE RECEIVED
its name by virtue of being the area along what was once the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and it runs from Overbrook to Paoli. We drove its woodsy streets—Beth avoided all expressways whenever possible—ogling the sprawls of homes, with admiration for the many elegant and understated beauties, mostly older homes, and a silent thumbs-down for the new and raw-looking pretentious temples to wealth.

The Manse was located just beyond the end of the Paoli local, in Malvern, on a vast expanse of land. Even as we entered its long drive, I knew its pedigree and credentials were as deep-rooted as the ancient trees that lined the road. I wondered what had become of its original inhabitants, and that made me think about the Severins’s homes and what would become of them. Tomas’s properties must have been in some dispute because he’d moved out of his marriage into his mother’s house. What would become of the place after Ingrid moved on? Given Tomas’s pattern of wife-shedding and child-ignoring, I wondered who, if anyone, would make a claim.

Could Carole Wallenberg stake out a right in the name of her son, Tom’s firstborn? Unless, of course, said heir did in his father, which would crimp any legal claims.

It was situations like the Severins’s that turned homes like this into rent-a-ballrooms.

“Isn’t it gorgeous? Imagine it with tiny lights all over it, and greens and holly.”

“Um.” I ummed so much I sounded like a quietly operating appliance all the way up the drive as Beth and Sasha blathered about the loveliness surrounding us. I continued umming as we walked through wide double doors, and into a perfectly splendid entryway.

Perfect, that is, if I were royalty, or marrying into it.

Glorious it was, but—I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t going to have a good time here. The scale was enormous, the ceilings too high and serious, the thick walls and stained glass panels suggesting a citadel, a cathedral to acquired wealth, not a celebration of love.

The booking agent, though surely there’s a more elegant upscale job description when booking mansions, hustled up to Beth, who’d obviously made our appointment in advance.

We were not her only guests. A rather awkward and grim couple, a sort of urban American Gothic, stood in the middle of the enormous ballroom looking as if they’d been abandoned there. They were tall and solid looking, serious, both with short gunmetal gray hair, and both slightly squinty-eyed, as if we three women might be an invading army. They were alert and wary. Then I became aware of a third person, a woman in her late thirties or early forties, pacing the perimeters of the room, as if inspecting every square inch.

“. . . waited till the last minute,” the agent whispered to Beth. Her smile, which she flashed after almost each sentence, was tight, nervous. She turned to toss another smile at the waiting couple, but when she turned back, her voice, even pitched low and confidentially, was filled with disapproval. “Literally. As you know, today was the deadline.”

She had to be talking about me. Sounded as if I’d forfeited the place. I controlled the urge to cheer.

The agent shepherded us toward the gray-haired couple. They frowned as we got near, but in puzzlement, I thought, not displeasure. The agent introduced us to the Arbussons, Philip and Meredith, and them to Beth, and she to me and finally, to Sasha.

It all took a great deal of time and I had no idea why we were being introduced to the squinting Arbussons in the first place. Furthermore, the agent said, with a weak smile, “I’ll be just a minute,” and hustled off to the woman who was still resolutely examining the room and making notes on a clipboard.