Chapter Mrs. Bennet
As Mary Bennet knelt, she tried not to plunge her head too deeply into the cavern inside the cabinet under the sink because dark places in the old house gave her the creeps. She avoided the basement and crawl space under the stairs for the same reason.
Mary wore a headband with an LED light to illuminate the leak in the main pipe.
It was the same safety headband her father used when walking the dog through the streets of Greenwich Village at night.
Mrs. Bennet insisted her husband wear a light because he had taken a tumble on the cobblestones and wound up black-and-blue.
“You never look where you’re going! You’re absentminded! ” she chided her husband at the time.
When Linguini, their beloved puggle, died of old age soon after, Mrs. Bennet was less anxious about her husband falling because he no longer had to walk the dog.
She could keep an eye on her husband indoors.
(The new battery in the headband outlasted the old dog.) Mary assumed her mother would soon find something else to nag her husband about; for now, there was peace in the village.
As Mary directed the beam of light, she observed that the plumbing grid was a mess, a clutter of too many pipes, some open-ended copper tubes sticking up from the floor, others welded into weird, animal-cracker shapes.
She groaned. Typical Bennet family repairs—nothing more than patch jobs.
Decades of them. Mary unspooled a swatch of duct tape, made a tear at the top with her teeth, and ripped it from the roll.
She carefully wrapped duct tape around the hole in the pipe as if dressing a wound on a battlefield.
Mary had decided not to tell her father about the leak because he’d just feel bad that they couldn’t afford a plumber.
Besides, at thirty-three years old, she needed to be able to fix whatever was broken.
Mary had to be the adult in the family. Her four sisters and their husbands lived outside the city, close enough in case of an emergency, yet far away enough to relieve them of the day-to-day responsibilities of busted pipes, a leaky roof, and their demanding mother.
Her sisters had married and dispersed to the suburbs outside of New York City and beyond.
Lizzie and Darcy had moved to Westport, Connecticut; Jane and Bing to Montclair, New Jersey; Kitty and Clem lived in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; while Lydia recently moved to Waterford, Virginia, with her second husband, Ethan, a career army guy.
Her nieces were small (it turns out that all-girl families turn out all-girl families, at least in the Bennet crew).
They gathered together once a year during Christmas.
The holiday visits were fun but a tremendous amount of work for Mary, who prepared the house and the meals.
Mary didn’t complain; after all, she reasoned, her sisters needed a break at holiday time.
Mary was also left behind to care for her parents in the crumbling old house, but to her it was a palazzo.
She saw nothing but potential in the sun-soaked rooms with peeling plaster and cracks in the ceiling where the house had settled.
The black-and-white-checked marble floor in the foyer was a reminder of the grandeur of another era.
The chandeliers, dripping with crystal daggers and strands of beads, were antiques, and despite missing pendants here and there, the overall effect remained dazzling, especially at night.
Mary cleaned the crystals with a soft cloth and vinegar so as not to loosen the metal hooks.
The parlors were spacious, dark wooden beams on the floorboards, the rooms stuffed with a collection of mismatched styles of furniture that together somehow worked.
The Louis XIV chairs and settee were originally covered in pale green velvet, but the fabric had faded to a dull gold.
Mary imagined the current patina was every bit as lovely as it had been when it was new years ago.
A crazy-quilt hodgepodge of books, some with jackets missing, others penciled with notes, most with dog-eared corners on their pages—a canon of all genres, colors, and sizes—were jammed into a pair of glass-front chimney closets in no particular order.
The closets anchored the black marble fireplace in the back parlor.
Their beloved children’s books, including Karla Kuskin’s The Philharmonic Gets Dressed and Syd Hoff’s Danny and the Dinosaur were wedged between Montaigne’s Essays and an almanac collection that went as far back as 1942.
Mary loved nothing better than choosing a random book and taking a day off to read in the velvet chair, under a bright lamp with a pot of hot coffee and her specialty, chocolate-caramel brownies, close by to snack on.
Reading and eating à deux never disappointed Mary Bennet. It shored up her soul.
The piano, a Steinway concertina, with a veneer as shiny as black patent leather, was tucked in the front parlor, between the windows that faced the street.
Her father had acquired the piano from an ad in the Village Voice and given it to his wife on their wedding day in 1980.
The piano had a story—a Wall Street banker, addicted to cocaine, sold off his belongings in a fire sale, making Mr. Bennet the beneficiary.
The piano had a past, and Mary believed it made the music sound sweeter.
Mary left her sheet music in stacks on side tables and chairs.
She would play whenever she had a few minutes.
She taught piano lessons to students three days a week and found it exhausting.
Organizing the annual recital was so taxing it nearly put her in the hospital, but when it was over, she felt a sense of accomplishment that she experienced nowhere else in her life.
She enjoyed complaining about her students and their families, even though they were her bread and butter.
Mary had to admit, as much as she identified with her father’s calm nature, like her mother, she had bought more than one ticket to the emotional roller coaster.
Restraint was the goal, though Mary did not ever meet her own standard.
Despite her shortcomings, there were things that brought Mary joy.
A cup of sharpened pencils balanced on the nearby windowsill.
When Mary wasn’t teaching, she wrote plays.
HB Studios was a two-minute walk away, which made it convenient for Mary to take playwriting classes.
She had been trained over many years by Donna DeMatteo, a stellar playwright who encouraged Mary’s work.
Mary’s ideas were nurtured by DeMatteo, something she lacked from her upbringing.
The dark rehearsal space, lit by ghost lights, was her church.
If HB Studios was Mary’s place of worship, the family homestead was her factory.
The scent of chalk and paint were the perfume of her creativity.
Mary had everything she needed on Jane Street to teach music and write plays, with plenty of space to wander when she chose to procrastinate.
Throughout the day, she followed the sunlight up the five floors, to work and do her chores.
There were two spacious rooms per floor, front and back, and three bathrooms—one on the second floor, where her parents had a bedroom and dressing room, and one on the third floor, where she endured with the faulty pipes and used to live with her sisters.
A third powder room on the parlor floor had not been operational in fifty years.
It was on Mr. Bennet’s to-do list, but so far, renovation had not been done.
The sun rose on the front rooms and set on the back of the house.
Mary never looked at the clock—there was no need—she followed the light.
In this way, she was one with the family homestead.
Old houses were idea factories, or at least they were to Mary Bennet.
History had a way of speaking to her through wallpaper and paint, though she doubted anyone would understand her feelings.
The middle of five sisters, Mary assumed the role of the maiden aunt with an ease that can come only from resignation.
Her fate was never to marry and to be of service in a different way, one that relieved her sisters of responsibilities.
Mary was destined to take care of her aging parents and the house that went with them.
Her mother had signs of early dementia, but Mary couldn’t remember a time when her mother, even when she was young, didn’t have a version of it.
It seemed to Mary that everyone in her family was in denial about her mother’s emotional short-circuiting, fluctuating anxiety levels, and sporadic forgetfulness.
Mary assumed there was some depression afoot, because Mrs. Bennet had recently begun to take to her bed more often than she got out of it.
Mr. Bennet knew when he married his wife that he had made his bed, and until further notice, they would lie in it together until the end.
It was the kind of love that endured because of the sheer numbers.
They had five daughters together and seven granddaughters.
It was a family held together by girls and their velvet ribbons.