CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
(Matthew)
My sister’s Manhattan palace perfectly matched her public-facing image: classic beauty and grace on the outside, sterile and cold on the inside.
A resplendent mansion on a corner lot smack in the middle of the lower East Side, the house was a relic that had somehow survived, its facade untouched, since the gilded age.
I pressed the buzzer at the gate in the tall granite fence and waited for the butler to admit me.
“Matthew Ashe,” I said, and added, “Catherine’s brother?”
The gate clicked and I stepped into the exquisitely manicured garden. The place retained the overall feel of the family estate in Connecticut, despite the latter being built much later. The vibe was “too fancy to survive in the modern world.”
I’d been inside the house all of seven times, but it was as unwelcoming as I remembered.
Even if my sister had always been thrilled to see me—she was not—, I would have been put off by the changes she and her soon-to-be-ex had made to the interior.
The sheer amount of modern black metal, stark white walls, and glass anywhere one could stick it reminded me of a modern art museum. No place for children to grow up.
Then again, we used to roller skate in halls lined with priceless antiques, so what did my sister or I know about normal childhoods?
The first shock I got upon entering was the fact that the butler didn’t open the door. My sister did.
“Wow, I would never have guessed that you knew how to do that,” I said, before I remembered that I was here to make nice.
She rolled her eyes. “Do what?”
Damn, I couldn’t help it. “Open the door for yourself.”
“I’m a little busy at the moment,” she snapped. “Why are you here?”
“I come in peace, I promise.” I took a few steps so she couldn’t shove me out. “To talk.”
“I’m tired of talking to people. I’m sick to death of it.” But she looked too exhausted to fight me.
“I went to see mom. I know you two had a falling out. I thought you could use...”
“A shoulder to cry on?” She scoffed. “When have you ever known me to cry?”
“When Chester broke his knee and dad had to put him down.” Maybe invoking the memory of her cherished dead horse wasn’t the best move.
Her lip quivered and tears did rise in her eyes.
But they didn’t fall. Out of sheer force of her iron will, they defied gravity and biology and seemed to recede back into her tear ducts.
“I cared about Chester. I don’t give a flying fuck about Jackson.” She turned and walked past the open-backed, glass-railed stairs to the second floor. “Come in, if you must.”
“Oh, I must,” I taunted her cheerfully. As we walked, I noted that she was wearing blue jeans. And her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, not a twist. “What’s up with the costume? You look almost like a real person.”
“Did you come here to insult me?” she demanded, pausing at the doorway to the sitting room.
A doorway that didn’t have a wall around it. Just two tall, black-painted girders to support the second floor. They’d knocked down the wall to give everything an open floor plan, and modernized away all the railroad baron touches that should have put the house on some national register.
God, I hoped Jackson kept the house in the divorce.
“No, it’s a force of habit,” I said, still following her.
Huge moving boxes were piled in pyramids, their dull brown cardboard almost vibrant against the monochromatic decor.
Catherine went to a thick roll of bubble wrap and cut a piece off, lifting down a white, abstract ceramic cat from the mantle and started wrapping it.
“I’m in the middle of something. What do you want? ”
“To bring you this.” I reached into my jacket pocket and produced the black velvet clamshell.
Her eyes skated over the object for a moment, and her breath visibly caught. Then, recovering, she went back to packing. “I don’t know why you’d think I would want it.”
“Because it’s a family heirloom,” I said, opening the lid. “It always goes to the eldest daughter when she gets married.”
“Yes, and now I’m not going to be married anymore,” she reminded me. “Hence mother’s insistence that I return it.”
“You’re going to be married, though.” I dropped onto an oblong ottoman, leaning my cane beside it. “You know, you should have asked your crippled brother if he needed somewhere to sit.”
“Oh yes. Where are my manners. I should see to the comfort of the man who came to my home uninvited, who is set on antagonizing me.”
“You opened the door, didn’t you?”
She regarded me cooly for a long moment, thin lips pursed thinner as she summoned up more anger. I’d seen the expression before. This time, though, the fight in her deflated. She looked down at the ring in my hand. “Why would I want that? I wore it to get married. Look how that turned out.”
“It turned out fine.” My tone was a little firmer than I intended, but Catherine needed tough love now. “You deserve better.”
She held up her hands and turned in a circle, indicating the spacious room.
“Better than this? Better than thirty-nine-thousand square feet in Manhattan? Better than my children’s private school, which I can’t afford on my own?
Better than membership at the yacht club?
Our box seats at the Met? Our vacation home in Rio? Or the one in Venice?”
“Yes.” Maybe it was easy for me to say, since I could still afford to have those things, but just as I would give all of it up for Charlotte, I damn sure would give it up to escape someone like Jackson.
“I’m sure that’s a very romantic and touching sentiment from someone who isn’t facing homelessness,” she snapped.
“Okay, settle down, Victorian urchin. You’re not gonna be homeless.” I couldn’t help myself and added, “You’re better off getting out of this ugly ass interior designmare.”
“Once again, I must ask, before I throw you out of my house, did you come here to insult me? And if so, couldn’t it have waited until Thanksgiving?” She turned away to bubble wrap a textured black vase.
“I don’t think you’re going to be invited to Thanksgiving.” She probably already knew that, but I thought it was better for her to be prepared. “But no, I’m not here to insult you. You’re my sister, Scott is my best friend, and I need to know what’s going on.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Is this the part where I justify my behavior so that you can give me your blessing?”
I put the ring down on the horrible white lacquered coffee table. “You don’t need my blessing. But I need to know that you’re not going to cheat on him.”
She almost dropped the vase. “How dare you—”
“You did before,” I pointed out. “At mother’s birthday party? Charlotte overheard you, and what she overheard made it sound like it wasn’t a one-time thing.”
“Your little girlfriend is awfully fond of eavesdropping.”
Normally, I would chafe at any criticism of Charlotte coming from my sister, but I let it slide because the pain in Catherine’s voice was so evident. “You didn’t try to keep it much of a secret, doing that on a weekend that the house was packed with guests. I think you wanted to get caught.”
She put the vase into a box, and the sound of the bubble wrap squeaking against itself made my teeth grind.
“I didn’t want to get caught,” she said, folding down the box flaps as she reached for a roll of packing tape. “Not by Scott, anyway.”
“By Jackson?” I asked over the crunch of the tape ripping from the roll.
She nodded grimly. “It would have made this whole process so much easier.”
“Here’s the part I don’t get.” I picked up the marker on the coffee table and handed it to her.
“You’re with Scott, now. You’ve chosen to be with him, despite all of your worries about money and losing face among the Connecticut set.
So, why not get caught cheating with him, rather than cheating on him? ”
“We weren’t together at the time.” She neatly printed PARLOR across the side of the box.
“But you knew he was in love with you. You knew that it would hurt him.”
“As I said, we weren’t together. How he felt about me sleeping with another man was totally inconsequential.” She cast her gaze around the room, looking for something.
Looking for a distraction, I realized. She wanted to be doing something, to be busy, so I would feel my imposition on her and cut my visit short.
But she wasn’t getting out of this. Maybe I didn’t deserve answers, but I wanted them.
Scott had fallen hard for her, at a vulnerable time in his life.
Catherine wasn’t capricious, so this sudden change in her alarmed me.
It didn’t seem like something that could last. I needed to know how to be there for Scott when the other shoe dropped.
If it dropped at all. Maybe I wasn’t giving my sister enough credit. Maybe she did have a heart in there, somewhere.
“Everything I’ve known about you for the past three or so decades points to you... not doing any of this.” Especially not the manual labor she was engaged in now. “You’re the last person I ever imagined choosing love over status.”
“Oh, but not the last person you’d expect to have an affair?” Was that a sarcastic smile threatening the corners of her mouth?
I shrugged. “No, I could totally see you doing that. I assumed it would happen after your fiftieth birthday. And with a gardener or something.”
“That old socialite rite of passage: slumming it.” She chuckled, and though it was bitter and slightly unsettling to hear my sister express anything genuine, it made the tension in my neck loosen.
“You think that because I wear designer clothing and go to fundraising dinners, I’m incapable of loving someone? ”
“You love your children.” I assumed. In the way that one could love the reincarnated souls of stone-cold sociopaths.
She nodded. “And I never wanted them to be hurt by this. That’s why—”
I waited for her to finish. When she didn’t, I prompted, “That’s why you...?”