“Or at least a shirt and tie.” Just don’t wear those ridiculous pants that hang around your ankles and show your underwear. Just don’t wear the sweatshirt with that word I can’t even repeat on it. Just comb your hair.
Scott said nothing. He turned and took the lid off the old earthenware cookie jar, the very same one that held homemade sugar cookies when Sylvie was a girl. Scott reached for a chocolate chip cookie, took a big bite, and then held the uneaten part outstretched reflectively. “Mmmm,” he decided. Crumbs fell to the floor.
He finished his cookie, laced his hands together and turned them inside out, giving each knuckle a crack. “I thought you were, like, a powerful force at that school. You can make it go away.”
She blinked at him, trembling inside. Is that what you think? she wanted to say. But now Scott had walked into the mud room—the conversation was over. A few moments later, he returned with his sneakers, loud orange and white high-tops. She watched as he sat down at the table, propped one foot up on his knee, and began to leisurely lace the shoes up. It was like he was another creature entirely, one whose actions she couldn’t begin to predict. One of those sea creatures that lived in the sunless depths of the ocean. Or maybe a carnivorous plant that ate gnats.
“Going somewhere?” she asked.
“To the city. Just for the morning.”
“How come?”
He gave her a pained look. “I’m helping out at Kevin’s shop. Someone can’t come in until one, so I said I’d cover.”
“Kevin was at the funeral, right?” Scott had come with three friends, two girls and a guy, all of them like Scott—wild, waiting for confrontation.
“Uh-huh.” Scott threaded the other shoe but left the laces untied and dangling.
“What kind of shop does he own?”
“Shoes.”
“Oh!” She knew she sounded relieved, but shoes were so … innocuous. “Well. Tell him ‘Hi’ for me.”
He sniffed. “You didn’t even speak to him that day.”
At that Sylvie shrank. She strode out of the room, found her handbag near the laundry, and walked across the driveway to her own car. She still parked outside, not yet wanting to disrupt the half of the garage that housed James’s jigsaw, lathe, and woodworking rasps. She slammed the car door hard. It felt good. Once belted in, she shut her eyes, listening to the birds and the gentle swishing sounds of the tree branches. She lifted her ring finger to her mouth, cupped her lips around the big yellow stone on the ring James had given her, and sucked.
That first night, when she just thought James wasn’t coming home in retaliation for what she’d brought up the night before, she had taken off this ring and buried it at the bottom of her jewelry box, hating what it meant. Then she’d gone into James’s office and looked carefully around the room. James’s infuriatingly clean desk, the stack of blank computer paper next to the printer, the Lucite plaques on the bookshelf. She’d walked in and touched the bare spot on the bookshelf where she’d found the little box that held the bracelet. A film of pale gray dust stuck to the pad on her finger.
The ring tasted like cold metal. Maybe it was primal, like a child sucking on a pacifier. Because only after Sylvie let the stone click against her teeth and press on her tongue did her pulse begin to settle down.
I n no time Sylvie found herself pulling up the hill to Swithin, the school resplendent at the top. The guard at the gate recognized her right away. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Bates-McAllister!” he cried. “So nice to see you!” He waved her right through.
Sylvie loved this drive up the Swithin lane, how the school rose up before her, all stone and brick, with its spires and bell tower and flags and dazzling green fields beyond. There wasn’t a tree branch out of place. The steps, windowsills, and sidewalks were all swept twice a day. One of Sylvie’s earliest memories was of her grandfather bringing her into the library and showing her the rare book collection. “These were almost lost forever,” he told her. And then he wove the tale of the fire; how it had caught in the east-wing classrooms and spread furiously into the gymnasium, burning half the school to the ground before the firefighters even arrived at the scene. When her grandfather surveyed the damage the day after, he sobbed. “It was just so sad,” he told Sylvie. “I felt like the school was calling out to me, Please don’t let me go.” Whenever he got to that part of the story, tears always welled in Sylvie’s eyes.
Since it was the Depression and no one had any money to spare, Charlie Roderick Bates financed rebuilding Swithin with his own money and resources. He used materials from the countless limestone quarries and brick foundries he owned to pour the new foundation and rebrick the walls. Rebuilding the school from scratch provided a lot of jobs, so he was a hero several times over, hiring Polish and Italian crews to do the construction, even providing jobs for people in the black neighborhoods. “But we had to make great sacrifices during that time,” he told Sylvie. “I paid everyone’s wages. I bought all the materials.”
“Did you have to move out of your house, Charlie Roderick?” Sylvie asked—her grandfather got a kick out of her calling him by both his names. He shook his head and told her that no, they were able to remain in the house, but Sylvie’s father, who was a young child at the time, wasn’t allowed new riding gear and his wife, Sylvie’s grandmother, couldn’t travel to Paris. They didn’t even have their annual Christmas party. “Did you still have a tree?” Sylvie asked. He nodded, patting her head, “Yes, of course. We still had a tree.”
Those afternoons with her grandfather were filled with peppermint tea and chocolate chip cookies on the estate’s enormous back porch. They watched the swans in the pond, which were probably the grandparents or great-grandparents of the swans that lived there now. They sat at the Steinway baby grand piano that is still in the music room. He played Chopin for her, his fingers kissing the keys.
When Sylvie saw her mother’s car wending up the driveway, her heart would plummet. Her own house was dark, the blinds pulled tight. Doors in different wings eased quietly shut; her parents rarely spent any time together except for meals. Sylvie hated eating with her parents most of all—they never spoke during those taut dinners, the only sounds were of the clinking forks, the scraping plates, and the chewing. When Sylvie couldn’t stand another second of silence, she’d burst out with something her grandfather told her that day, even though her parents had heard the stories plenty of times before. “Did you know Charlie Roderick let some of the people who worked on Swithin stay at his house?” she’d crow. “Did you know he worked even on his birthday?” But this just angered her mother, Clara, even more, and she often wearily snapped, “Your grandfather isn’t the messiah you think he is. Those people who rebuilt the school? The ones he let stay at his house? Fat chance he let their children go to Swithin. Even if they’d scrimped and saved all their money, he would never let them in.”
And then Clara would glance at Sylvie’s father, Theodore, as if daring him to scold her for saying such things about his family. But Sylvie’s father never took the bait, his eyes remained fixed on his Wall Street Journal, his jaw working his food.
Sylvie didn’t understand what her mother meant by those comments. It wasn’t until she was in middle school and heard similar rumors that she finally worked out what her mother was implying. But by then she refused to believe it. Everyone was jealous of the Bates family, including Sylvie’s mother, who had come from a good family, but not as good. And anyway, her mother was bitter and mean-spirited about everything and everyone. It was obvious why Sylvie’s father was around less and less, conducting most of his business out of New York. Sylvie would have escaped to New York, too, forever avoiding those crypt-quiet dinners, her mother’s inimical remarks, and those heaving sighs through her nose. Her mother had once been involved in Sylvie’s life. Sylvie still remembered the dollhouse she’d gotten for Christmas when she was six. Clara had even helped Sylvie to select furniture for it from a big, glossy dollhouse catalog. And Sylvie used to slip her hand into her mother’s when they walked through the revolving doors at the Strawbridge & Clothier department store in Philadelphia, snug and secure in her mother’s grip. But something had happened to her mother in the years between, something that seemingly couldn’t be reversed.
When she was thirteen, Sylvie called her father at the hotel he usually stayed at in New York, wanting to know if she could take the train up and visit him. She thought that once outside their dour house, her father would be more like his father, the great Charlie Roderick Bates. The hotel concierge connected Sylvie to her father’s room and a woman answered. Sylvie said she must have dialed the wrong room and went to hang up. “Are you looking for Teddy?” the woman asked. “Who?” Sylvie said. “Theodore,” the woman corrected. “He’s in the shower.”
Sylvie slammed the phone back into its cradle, her heart beating fast. Teddy. She couldn’t imagine her father being called that. It seemed childish, a stuffed bear flung on a bed.
After that, Sylvie drifted away from both her parents. Whenever anyone teased her at school, she sobbed into her grandfather’s lap, feeling like he was the only person in the world who loved her, who made time for her. “Don’t worry about any of them,” he said softly. “You’re different than everyone. You’re better. Someday, all this will be yours.”
“All what?” Sylvie had asked. But he hadn’t elaborated. Perhaps he meant the house, knowing even then that he would bequeath it to her, skipping right over his only son. Or maybe Charlie meant the school. Maybe he meant the whole world.
Now, Sylvie parked her car and turned off the engine. Her heels clicked across the parking lot. The flag in the middle of the lot was at half-staff, and there was a small, red ribbon tied around the pole, although she wasn’t sure what it signified. She looked around for other evidence of the boy’s death—a picture on one of the glass-paned doors that led to the lobby, for instance, or a collection plate in his memory on the arched, wooden sign-in desk. But there was nothing. Photographs of the class officers hung next to the flag. A large stuffed hawk, the school mascot, sat on top of the secretary’s desk. There was a big poster for an upcoming school play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Inside the auditorium, she heard a piano, then someone singing, probably a late choir practice. The song in the auditorium didn’t sound somber, either, but something Sylvie vaguely recognized from a Rogers and Hammerstein musical.
The others were already in the library. They were sitting on the leather couches, a pot of tea on the large, low coffee table. When they saw her, they stood.
“Sylvie.” Daniel Girard held out his arms. He was good-looking, tall with silver hair. He had come from work, presumably, still in his suit. Geoff Whitney stood, too, jowly and blustering, smelling a little like cigars. The other two stood as well. Jonathan Clyde, bookish and nervous-fingered, and Martha Wittig, plump and matronly, always wearing a different colored pair of glasses. Today’s frames were a warm pumpkin shade.