Chapter Fifteen
Emily
It was just on the edge of too cold to take supper in the garden, but Papa agreed to it anyway. Though all Emily wanted to do was escape to her study, dreaming about the beautiful time she’d shared with Jo and fantasizing about the next, she’d made a deal with her dear new friend. The respite from work, the wickedness, the decadence—they’d strengthened her more than she’d realized was possible. After such an intense instance of connection, it seemed silly to not just get the drudgery of this discussion over with.
Wrapped in blankets against the chill, she and her father sipped soup and buttered bread. Conversation was sparse, to begin with. She updated him on Miss Garcia’s condition and asked his opinion on her advice to change living arrangements (“Absolutely. You’re spot on, my dear, well done!”). He, on the other hand, updated her on the shift he’d covered for her, mournfully confessing another failed attempt to negotiate better pay from the founders (“They say ‘it’s fair’ no matter how many times I explain otherwise, as if simply saying it over and over makes it true! I swear, if it wasn’t lives on the line I’d never step foot in that place when they call on me.”)
At last, though, as they were mopping up the last bits of boiled vegetables and onion broth from their bowls, Emily was ready.
Apparently, however, Papa was ready for something too, because they began speaking at the same time:
“Papa, there’s something I’d like—”
“I’ve had a letter from your brother while you were away,” he said, voice heavy enough to freeze the rest of the words in Emily’s throat. While Papa had probably assumed Emily was staying with Noah, she actually had not seen him at all while she was in London.
“Oh,” she said as casually as she could. “When did he send it?”
“Dated before your departure” (thank God) “but I wish it had arrived before you left, so we could have discussed it ahead of time.”
A different worry ghosted across her mind. “Is he alright?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Papa said quickly. “But reasonably disappointed with me, I’m afraid. And he informed me that you know what he’s disappointed about.”
Emily blinked, incredulous. Did he mean that Noah had actually taken the initiative to confront Papa’s lack of equity?
“He...he wrote you? About the...about your...” She didn’t know how to say it. Your gout. Your retirement. Your silence. Her hands made a motion, vague and uncomfortable.
“He said the two of you discussed it last time you were in town, and that he was extremely shocked to learn I had not shared the same information with you as I had with him. Having not heard from either of us on the subject in several weeks, he wanted to make sure I knew what he’d told you, and his feelings on the matter of my reticence.” Papa winced. “His very strong feelings.”
Emily drew the blanket tighter around her shoulders, staring over the darkening garden and trying not to smile. So Noah was capable of stepping into the void she’d left open. She’d forgone a responsibility, forgone it so thoroughly that she’d been drinking punch and rolling around with a scandal of a woman instead, and somehow the job had gotten done without her.
“I’m sure you had your reasons for keeping it from me,” she said at last, trying to make sure Papa didn’t notice how pleased she was.
“I did,” Papa said. “Admittedly, they were not very good.”
“What were they?”
“I wanted to wait,” he said carefully, “until you’d built your own foundation. I know medicine has been tricky enough for you as it is, without the added pressure of a looming yet uncertain deadline. I knew that Noah would take the information and begin strategizing, as he should. I feared that you, however—”
“Would panic?” Emily concluded in a tone that showed what she thought of that unfair assumption. “Would break under the pressure? Flail about and make matters worse?”
“Flail about? You?” Papa shook his head and laughed. He poured more chilly tea for both of them. “Certainly not. It’s your practicality I feared. I thought that if you looked at your professional circumstances and weighed them against our current security and the future needs of our household, you’d determine that your career wasn’t worth building. That you’d let them shunt you into a nurse’s role, just to ensure better payment. Or worse, out of the field entirely because you’d say it was the correct choice, that you’d do better financially as a tutor or governess. And when you believe you are correct, there is no arguing with you, is there? I wanted to give you a little more time to change the calculus before you made any over-cautious decisions that could not be unmade.”
She’d imagined many reasons for Papa’s silence. This was not one of them. And it stung, actually, stung worse than her assumption that it had been a matter of what was owed to a son over a daughter. That was an everyday indignity. But the hard truth that she was always overly quick to act in the most practical fashion possible... It was...well, unfortunately, it was completely true.
“Whatever your reasoning, you still should have told me outright,” she said, her voice a match for the cool night air.
“I don’t deny it.” He looked at her sideways. “But on the other hand, I’m shocked to have not gotten a good scolding already. I knew Noah might mention it to you before I did, and figured that if it happened, you would have laid right into me. But it’s been weeks, now, and not a word from you. It concerns me.”
“I wanted to see if Noah would bother himself with family matters for once,” she said with a detached air she didn’t feel. “It was right of him to call you out. I’m very pleased to see that he will do what’s right, occasionally.”
Papa glanced at Noah’s debris-covered chair as if it might let him stare into his son’s sitting room. “Is that really the only reason you didn’t bring it up? It’s not like you give him the opportunity to tackle your many responsibilities. If his lack of help was such a concern, one might think you’d have given him a chance or two before this. Or. You know. Asked for help.”
The statement fell like an accusation. Was he saying that Noah had never stepped up for her, had never taken responsibility for anything in the household until this moment, simply because she’d never relaxed long enough to give him an opportunity?
“I’ve had other things on my mind.” Emily shrugged, not quite ready to look that possibility full in the face.
“Those letters from London?”
“Perhaps.”
He pulled his blanket tighter over his shoulders. “Tell me, Emily, how was your brother these past few days?”
Oh dear. Emily had already lied about this dalliance once. If she did it again, she would be forced to carry that dishonesty further, perhaps further than she wanted to. Jo would become wrapped in secrets and lies that might prove difficult, should their friendship continue to a point where she wanted everyone to meet each other.
Was that silly, to worry about such a thing? Part of her thought it was, but another, more steady and certain part, had a sense that it might come to matter. And an especially hopeful part that had turned out to be romantic after all was already making plans for it.
So, she straightened her shoulders. Though her voice trembled, she managed the truth: “I didn’t see him.”
Papa nodded like he’d known this from the beginning.
“The letters,” he went on. “Are you ready to tell me if they’re from anyone of particular significance?”
“They are,” she admitted, her face very warm and her hands icy cold where she’d tucked them between her crossed thighs for warmth.
“I hope,” Papa went on very tensely, “that your new understanding of our finances isn’t pushing you toward an even more desperate move than nursing.”
A more desperate move than nursing... Did he mean marriage? Is that where he thought she’d been this weekend? Meeting up with some gent she’d been writing to, looking for her future security down that avenue?
God, she was tired. She rubbed her eyes, wishing that the meaning of Papa’s words could have escaped her. “I’m not thinking of marrying anyone, Papa,” she said heavily.
He looked relieved. She wondered, not for the first time, if he was the only father on the planet who preferred his children to live as a deviant bachelor at increasing risk of legal trouble and a grim spinster whose future security would always be partially his problem. Of course, it was probably just relief that neither of them would suffer the marital fate that he and Mother did, but his worries had proven convenient in this one way.
Convenient for her, perhaps, but with her heart a bit fuller from her time with Jo and her patience restored by the knowledge that Noah wouldn’t actually let everything fall apart in her absence, she found something else under all her resentments and frustrations.
She found sadness for him. And beside it, not a little concern.
“Papa.” Emily adjusted her blanket so it fell like an overly thick shawl. “Papa, we can’t go on like this. You know we can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean...this!” She rattled Noah’s chair where it sat beside her. “This. All of this. Noah’s chair still sitting in the garden though he’s lived in London for years. Mother’s sewing basket and all her other things still right where she left them after thirty—”
“Emily,” he snapped, looking about as if she’d started a very inappropriate line of discussion. “Please, you don’t—”
“Understand? Of course I understand!” Her voice broke into something slightly more laugh than sob, but not by much. “I have lived it my whole life. There is nothing I understand better. I understand that you have a beautiful home, children to be proud of, a noble profession, and a lovely companion in the form of Mme. Baptiste. You have friends, and meaning, and...and guinea pigs!” She waved toward the hutch, where the creatures had retired for the evening as they always did, predictable and sweet as everything else in this life she was describing. “And I know that you haven’t enjoyed a minute of it—won’t let any of us enjoy a minute of it—because it’s not what you hoped it would be.
“Do you really think this obsession with how you wish things were is going to improve when you retire and find yourself here, all day, without the distraction of your work? Money is a concern. Yes. But we’re a very resourceful pair who are part of a very generous community. We will find a way to get by. But Papa, the reason Noah does not visit is because there isn’t room for him between you and me and all the ghosts you keep. And when you retire, I fear we’ll find there isn’t room for the two of us, either. As you well know, we must start thinking of that future now, before we are faced with it unprepared.”
Emily, of course, wished her mother had lived, had known Emily and loved her and been there through her life as more than someone else’s memory. But right now, she wished it for a more generous reason: so her father would not have had to be so alone in his grief.
“I know you wish we could mourn her properly with you, Papa,” she said. “But the sight of a dusty sewing basket won’t help us know her. We want you to tell us stories of her. Explain the ways we look like her. Let our understanding of who she was grow with us and move with us as we live our lives. As it is, we feel trapped in a past our very existence destroyed—”
“You didn’t destroy—”
“Intellectually, I know that,” Emily said carefully. “Perhaps Noah does too. But it certainly feels like it, sometimes. Don’t you see how we would look around this place and wonder if it would be a better one if we’d never arrived at all?”
He went quiet for a while after that, and she let him. They sipped their cold tea and looked at the moon. She didn’t think he would ever respond, had lapsed into either a sadness or anger too thick to extract himself from as the truth—the most paramount of truths she’d ever spoken—continued to echo through the garden on the wings of its owls and the year’s last crickets.
Just as she was gathering herself up to bring the tray inside, he said, with quiet kindness, “I want the house to support you and your brother as you are now.” He looked up at her, his round, familiar face looking exceptionally tired and lined in the moonlight. “But Emily, my dear, I don’t really know how. The script for my situation was to find a new wife. That’s what a man does, and maybe I should have done it. But I could not bear it, and the longer I avoided it, the harder it got. I have no guidance for what to do in this situation. How to fix what I’ve done. To all of us.”
He sounded a touch hopeless, but Emily was not.
“We are very resourceful,” she said again, gathering up the tea tray and smiling softly. “I do think we will figure it out, if we dedicate ourselves to the task.”