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  FOR

  MY MOTHER

  GOLDIE V. WILLIAMS

  The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

  —L. P. Hartley

  The Go-Between

  Acknowledgments are due to Joyce and Dennis Parks for financial support near the end; to the real Charles Stickney for support both financial and otherwise; and to Shelly Reuben for her faith and for the five small words that are hers.

  And a special acknowledgment to Samuel J. Warner, an artist in his own right, who works with the most difficult and important material there is.

  Prologue

  * * *

  SOMETHING MOVED in the shadows under the eaves. Jennie paused at the head of the narrow stairwell, looking off into the dimness. She could see nothing. Afternoon light fell through the door of the skylighted studio on her left, illuminating the area near the stairs, but the rest of the attic was unfinished, with only thin slices of sky showing through a slatted air vent at the other end. It was a big house, and a big attic, and she had never explored the unfinished part of it. She had no desire to do so now, even to discover what it was she had heard. A mouse, probably—or her imagination. She hoped it was a mouse. Her imagination had troubled her enough already during the past year, before this move to the country. She turned from the stairs and went into the studio.

  Her footsteps echoed in the big, empty space. It was a very large, oblong room, with white plastered walls and bare wood floors. A big skylight slanted down almost to the floor in the north ceiling, a stark block of luminous white set against the darkness on either side. Shadows lingered around the chimney rising up from the fireplace in the living room two stories below and softened every nook and cranny along the walls. With its skylight and slanted ceilings, this room always reminded her of ancient London garrets, or of romantic ateliers in a Paris of long ago. She had always loved attics, ever since the daydreaming days of childhood summers on her grandparents’ farm in Ohio, but the emotion she felt here was due to more than that. The real estate broker had said the house was more than a hundred years old—and like all old houses, it seemed to contain still within it all the mysteries of the past.

  It was a renovated farmhouse, set on the brow of a hill, the large living-room windows looking down on a lake and the town on the other side that still bore traces of the resort it had been at the turn of the century. It was that turn-of-the-century quality that intrigued her. Always in houses like this she had seemed able to sense in the air itself the presence of all those who had lived out their lives within it, as if their emotions had seeped into the very walls, remaining forever in the atmosphere of the house even after they were gone. The high-ceilinged bedrooms on the second floor still evoked generations of births and deaths; descending the sweeping staircase into the dining room she felt on the worn railing hands that had glided down it before even her parents were born; spectral nineteenth-century women seemed to hover in the big, solid-walled kitchen, in the cool pantry, in every room—mysterious echoes of a past which, because she would never be able to experience it, seemed all the more lovely and serene.

  She went now to stand at the skylight, resting one knee on the lid of the window seat in front of it, looking out across the back yard. The sun had just set; pale reddish light lingered on the woods sloping down to the lake, which was out of sight on the left. A field stretched away to the north; between it and the woods above the lake she could see Summer House Road intermittently through the trees. Now she saw Michael emerge around the corner of the house, pushing a wheelbarrow full of rocks. He put the wheelbarrow down at the edge of the yard. Affectionately, she watched him stoop and bend—tall, graceful, and sandy-haired—placing the rocks around her new flower beds. She was glad he was beginning to like life in the country, even though it meant commuting to work in Manhattan every day. He had grown up in the city, had never lived anywhere else, and only when she convinced him it would make things right again, put an end to that depression and anxiety she had suffered during the past year, had he agreed to move.

  She turned back to look at the studio. From behind her, pale light fell in an elongated rectangle down the length of the bare wood floor. She had already made one of the second-floor bedrooms into a study for Michael, but this was to be hers, her off-by-herself room, this romantic studio at the very top of the house. It had been built, according to the real estate broker, by an artist who had lived here at the turn of the century, and it was here that she felt most of all that mysterious and lovely sense of the past. It was there in every part of the room—the rough-hewn beams in the slanted ceilings, the old chimney reaching up through the peak of the roof, the wide window seat running along beneath the skylight.

  She knelt in front of the window seat, lifting the lid to gaze into the dimness inside. It was built right into the wall and was obviously as old as the studio itself. She wondered what that turn-of-the-century artist had stored in it. Canvases? It was certainly big enough. The inner floor was lined with worn linoleum, peeling and curling up at the edges. She seized it by one ragged edge and tugged—and felt the entire floorboard come up in her hands. Beneath it, lying pale and discolored in the dust, were two thick sheets of paper. She lifted them out and held them up to the light, a vague sense of awe stealing over her.

  Sketches. Two sketches on paper so old it was yellow with age, brittle and crumbling at the edges. Excitement made her hands begin to tremble. Each sketch showed a woman in a long, white dress with a high collar and long, lacy sleeves. There was no background, nothing to indicate the setting; the woman herself was barely sketched in—a few quick strokes suggesting the outlines of a face, a wide-brimmed hat, hands fading fingerless into the empty expanse of paper—but the dress was very explicitly detailed. It was a summer dress, the kind of dress that made her think of long sunny afternoons, great lawns, gravel pathways stretching endlessly away between trimmed hedges. Long ago, in the twilight of its resort era, dresses like this had been worn in that town across the lake, in that long last bloom of America’s innocence, before the onrushing of the twentieth century. And in her hands she held a piece of that time, sketches that must have lain hidden for three-quarters of a century. She rose slowly to her feet, torn between an urge to rush out to show them to Michael and an almost reverent reluctance to disturb the moment. Because there could be no doubt that they were the work of that turn-of-the-century artist. Hers were quite possibly the first hands to touch them since his. Holding them to her breast, surrounded by the hush of evening, she turned in a slow full circle, examining every nebulous shadow along the walls, and the big empty studio came alive for her now in a way it hadn’t before, as if in the sketches she held some mysterious link back to the man who had put pencil to this very paper, somewhere under these slanted ceilings, before this large luminous skylight, on a day as real to him as this day was to her.

  His presence seemed almost alive in the room.

  1

  * * *

  THE DRESS SEEMED TO FLOAT down around her head, obscuring her vision in a soft blur of translucent white; then she felt Roberta pull it down over her shoulders, and she could see again: the familiar disorganization of Roberta’s workroom, the racks of clothing in various stages of alteration and repair, the dressmaker’s mannequin, the big worktable scattered with spare zippers, boxes of buttons, scissors and swatches. Outside, the skyline of upper Manhattan shimmered in the late spring haze. />
  “Now, if you had lived in those days,” Roberta said, “you’d have had a ladies’ maid to help you do this.”

  Jennie shook her hair free, sliding her arms into the long, flaring sleeves. “And a downstairs maid and a cook and a butler, too, I suppose. If I’d lived then, I’d probably have been a maid myself.”

  “Oh, no. Some rich, handsome man would have plucked you out of the crowd and married you.” Roberta tugged at the back of the dress, aligning the waist.

  Jennie braced herself against the pull, self-consciously aware of the lacy collar soft against her throat, the ruffled cuffs circling her wrists. The dress felt light as air. It reached in one long startlingly white swath to the floor, seeming to draw toward it all the light in the room. She felt Roberta’s fingers begin working their way up the tiny buttons in back.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “It makes me feel different.” She bent her head and lifted her hair to one side so that Roberta could reach the buttons at the nape of her neck. “I can almost feel how it must have been to be a woman then. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Mmm-hmmn,” Roberta said, intent on the buttons. “You’ll have to wear your hair up with it. That was the fashion then.”

  “I can’t believe what a good job you’ve done just from the sketches.”

  “It was a labor of love,” Roberta said. “It’s not often I get a chance to work on something like this. Which reminds me—I showed the sketches to that friend of mine, Rosalie. You remember I told you about her, does costumes for John Cox downtown? She said it’s a dress from the eighteen-nineties. Said there’s a dress almost exactly like it in the Metropolitan Museum. In their costume collection.”

  “The eighteen-nineties.” Jennie looked down at the long, enchanting lines of the dress, thinking of the artist who had made the sketches. Placing him definitely in the nineteenth century made them seem even more poignant and romantic. She wondered if they were preliminary sketches for a later painting, if somewhere in the world, in some museum, there was a painting based on sketches done in her own attic, by a man who had lived there more than three-quarters of a century ago. She had a sad intuition that there was no painting, anywhere—that he had never become successful. If he had, the real estate broker would surely have mentioned his name. It was possible that nothing else of his work had survived, that she possessed in the sketches the last remnants of work from a man who had never achieved the dream that, to judge from the studio, had meant very much to him.

  Roberta turned her around and circled her waist with the belt. “You wear it tied in front like this, with the tails hanging down.” She tied the belt in a bow and stepped back. “Beautiful. It’s a perfect fit. Here, take a look at yourself in the mirror.”

  Jennie hesitated. “No. No, I want to wait. I want to wait until I get home.”

  Roberta smiled. “A special occasion, is that it?”

  “I guess you could say that.” Jennie lifted the skirts in one hand, as she had seen similarly dressed women do in films and photos, and began walking down the length of the room, feeling the lush folds of lace flowing around her legs. The dress even seemed to make her walk differently—her shoulders back, her head held erect by the high collar, the hand holding the skirts up at one side—all giving her again that strange sensation of actually experiencing what it was to be a woman in the eighteen-nineties. She turned at the window, looking back toward Roberta, and her emotion seemed to give even the room a different quality, making everything seem somehow more real, more there, the way the huge movie screen deepened the colors and shadows of a room in a film, so that she felt almost like a character in a film herself. She was aware of the white light from the window falling through the white of the dress, setting her off from everything around her, surrounding her like an aura from head to foot.

  Even Roberta seemed to have caught the spell. “You look enchanted,” she said. “Even a little uncanny. If I didn’t know you, coming in here and seeing you in that light, I’d think you were a ghost, a beautiful ghost come back to haunt somebody.”

  “You don’t think it’s too . . . pretentious? For a garden party, I mean?”

  “It’s perfect for a garden party. Are you going to get a parasol? A dress like that, you should have a parasol.”

  “Do you think I could get one?”

  “Ought to somewhere. In New York you can get anything. You should have a cameo, too. They always wore a cameo right at the base of the throat.”

  Jennie crossed the room again, feeling the light receding at her back, the full lacy sleeves rustling against her sides, the frothy skirts sweeping along the floor. She couldn’t get over how the dress made her feel. She was reluctant to take it off, to lose the feeling it gave her, but it was getting on toward noon. She undid the belt and turned, so that Roberta could get at the buttons. “I suppose you’d better help me out of it. I have a lunch date at twelve-thirty.”

  “You’ll be surprised when you see yourself in the mirror,” Roberta said, unfastening the buttons. “With the sleeves and collar finished, it looks a lot different from when you were here for the first fitting. You’ll have to give me a picture of you in it.”

  “I’ll send you one the first chance I get,” Jennie said.

  She changed back into her street clothes and wrote out a check while Roberta cushioned the dress in soft tissue and folded it into a large cardboard box. Roberta accompanied her to the door and unfastened the chain-lock.

  “Your husband seen the sketches? He knows what it looks like?”

  “He’s seen the sketches. I don’t know if he can imagine how it will look.”

  “He’ll love this dress. Take my word for it.”

  “Thank you, Roberta.” Jennie suddenly snapped her fingers and went back into the workroom.

  “What is it?” Roberta said.

  “My sketches,” Jennie said, retrieving them from the cluttered worktable. “I want to keep those. I think they’re very special.”

  • • •

  She had lunch with Beverly at Prospero’s, on East 52nd Street. She was early and was seated at a corner table from which she could see through the slatted divider to the bar and the cloakroom near the door. Beverly breezed in at a quarter to one, wearing a chic tweed suit and a scarlet blouse. She pressed a chilled cheek to Jennie’s and sat down, pulling off her gloves.

  “Boy, it may be spring out there, but that wind feels like football weather. How are you, kid? You look good. The country must be agreeing with you. Did you order drinks?”

  “Bloody Marys. That’s still your drink, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely. Perfect for the weather, too. How was the new garden party dress? Finished?”

  “It’s in a box in the cloakroom. Wait till you see it—it’s beautiful.”

  The drinks arrived, two Bloody Marys in large goblet glasses. Beverly stirred, tapped the swizzle stick dry against the rim, and raised the glass in a toast. “To your new life in the country.”

  “Thank you,” Jennie said.

  “So how are you really? No more down-in-the-dumps? No more headaches? This past year you could have taken the prize for grumpiness, kid.”

  “I know. I was a real pain, wasn’t I?”

  “Understandable, given the circumstances. And—speaking of the circumstances—how’s Michael?”

  “Michael’s fine.”

  Beverly eyed her sympathetically. “It’s working out, huh?”

  “I think so. I think it’s just what we needed.” She was a little sorry now that she had made this lunch date. Beverly had been her best friend ever since they had shared an apartment five years ago, but you could always count on her to pursue an unpleasant subject. She remembered Roberta’s remark about Michael liking the dress and wondered if that was why she had had it made. She remembered a girl in college who had spent a small fortune on clothes trying to attract a boy she was wildly infatuated with. She didn’t like to think she was like that. But there was a grain of truth there. It was a natural
reaction, she supposed: to try to make yourself more attractive to your husband when you’ve discovered he’s been unfaithful.

  The maître d’ took their orders, collected the menus and departed. Beverly opened a new pack of Trues and lit one with a slim gas lighter.

  “I meant to ask you. Did you ever find out who the woman was? What kind of thing it was?”

  “I don’t want to know. It’s over now, and I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Men,” Beverly said. “Such schmucks.”

  “How are you and Don getting along?”

  “We see each other once a week or so. We have a good time together—the man knows his place. Why?”

  “I have a vested interest. After all, he’s Michael’s friend, and I introduced you. When are you getting married?”

  “Kid, I may never get married.”

  “You always say that, but I never believe you.”

  “Why should I get married? I have a career, I enjoy my work, I have a good time. And the marriages I see around me hardly make the institution look attractive.”

  Jennie winced.

  “Sorry, kid. I didn’t mean you. But how many marriages do you know that are any good? I like my life just the way it is.”

  Jennie had heard all this before. Beverly wasn’t the only friend she had in the city who seemed to mistrust the idea of marriage. And it wasn’t only marriage; they seemed to shy away from a serious relationship of any kind, as if they had lost faith in any workable commitment to the opposite sex. She couldn’t understand it. She couldn’t imagine being involved on a casual basis, relating from an emotional distance, perennial strangers.

  “You’ll get married some day,” she said.

  Beverly smiled. “You’re a romantic, kid. You’re a throwback to an earlier age.”