Chapter Mrs. Bennet #8
“Not if I can help it.” Mrs. DeMatteo laughed. “Didn’t anyone tell you that art is timeless?”
“Wouldn’t work in the plumbing business.” Joe smiled. “A burst pipe waits for no man.”
TWO SISTERS
Mary lay in bed thinking. Lizzie slept in the twin bed under the window. The sheers ruffled where the window was cracked open. The pale yellow streetlight shone through the window.
Mary sighed.
“You awake?” Lizzie asked softly.
“Yep,” Mary answered.
“This is like the old days.” Lizzie sat up in bed.
“Not really. I was with Kitty and Lydia. You were with Jane.”
“It’s never been just the two of us,” Lizzie said.
“Nope.”
“Do you think Pa can handle the stairs when he comes home?”
“I was thinking about that. We could put a bed in the back parlor.”
“But there’s no bathroom,” Lizzie said practically.
“And the stairs. Even from the street. The stoop is steep,” Mary said. “Maybe William Collins is right. Maybe it’s time to let go of this house.”
“You can’t give up, Mary.”
“I don’t know what to fight for. I couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else, but it’s untenable.
It’s all too much. The debt. The repairs.
Our parents and their bad knees and hips.
It is too late to plan for the future. Here it is.
Dad should’ve planned ahead. He should’ve thought about being eighty in an old, rickety house.
Mama has never been strong. She’s always been a mess.
And now I have a wizened father and an emotional mother, and there’s no way to hold them together along with the demands of this old house.
If we let the house go, we get nothing. There’s debt and taxes. Collins knows it.”
“I can talk to Charlotte. They’re wealthy. They could do a kind turn for our parents.”
“Lizzie, the wealthy don’t think like that.
They sit on their money and wonder why everyone else isn’t rich, too.
To them, it’s easy. But you have to start with something to be rich, and while Pa inherited this old house, it seems we won’t end with it.
What good is a house if you don’t have the money to keep it up?
We should be grateful to Collins and Charlotte; they’re patient—and certainly have helped in the past—but it has never been a fair playing field.
Collins always had money, because he was the only son in his family.
Everything—on both sides—went to him. If Pa could have seen his way through, he could have kept this place in good enough shape to sell it and pay off the Collins family for their help through the years.
But he only ever made enough money to get by. ”
“And Mom didn’t work.”
“Oh, please. Remember when she got a job in the shoe store on Eighth Avenue? They actually lost business because she talked people out of buying shoes. Said the leather wasn’t good enough. Who does that?”
“Our mother.” Lizzie laughed.
“So I don’t know what to say, or how to say it, but we have to let it go.” It was dark in the room, so Lizzie couldn’t see Mary wipe her eyes.
“You can live with us, you know. My husband adores you.”
“He wouldn’t if he lived with me.”
“Mary, you’re important to us. To Darcy. To all of us. To Jane. To Kitty. To Lydia. We love you very much.”
“I know that.”
“And we want you to have everything you dream of.” Lizzie’s voice broke.
“I know you worry about me. I’m alone. I’m interested in things no one cares about anymore. Playwriting is like whittling or glassblowing or working a loom.”
“That’s not true.”
“People don’t read. They don’t go to the theater. You know, I go to plays in preview—I get free tickets—and since I was a kid everyone in the audience was old. And now I’m grown up, and the audience is still old. I don’t understand it.”
“You enjoy playwriting, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“You work with interesting people. Donna DeMatteo—and actors and directors and designers. It sounds so exciting.”
“It can be. You know when Lady de Bourgh called me to tell me I won the prize, I cried.”
“Tears of joy!” Lizzie said.
“I don’t know. They felt like sad tears—like, I won, but did it matter? And then in a matter of hours, or days, I can’t remember, the sidewalk needed to be fixed or the city would come after us, and it was five thousand dollars.”
“We’ll help with that.”
“Don’t throw good money after bad, Lizzie. Your husband won’t allow it. It’s the first rule of banking.”
“And my husband is an excellent banker.”
“You need your savings for the kids. For your life.”
“Jane said she’d take Mama and Pa with her.”
“Jane isn’t cut out for it. They’ll drive her crazy.”
“She said she doesn’t mind.”
“We should send them to live with Lydia—that would teach them a lesson,” Mary joked. “They would learn that it’s imprudent to get old in the first place. You never want to need our sister Lydia for anything. She is incapable of putting other people first.”
Lizzie adjusted the sheers on the window and looked out onto Jane Street. “Maybe there’s a way to fix this place up and make it work.”
“An elevator costs half a million dollars, and I don’t think there’s enough space in the garden to install it.” Mary lay back on her pillow; the thought of all this exhausted her.
“Maybe we’ll get good news.” Lizzie lay back on her own pillow. “I believe when you do the right thing, and live a life of generosity and kindness, good things come to you,” Lizzie said.
“Elizabeth Bennet Darcy, you are out of your mind,” Mary said.
“I do believe it!”
“Well, something good actually happened to me.”
“Tell me.”
“I met a nice guy,” Mary said.
“You waited to tell me?”
“It’s so weird, Lizzie. I believed it would never happen. And maybe it won’t happen after all. But meeting him made me believe that maybe it could happen?”
“Of course it could,” Lizzie said.
Mary felt strange confiding in Lizzie, as though she were intruding on the family order.
Jane and Lizzie had always been the confidantes, and the truth was, Lydia and Kitty were close, too.
Mary felt she was the outsider, the thin layer of jam in the middle of the bread and butter.
Bread and butter satisfies, the jam is extra.
You don’t need it to survive. Maybe that was Mary’s role, she thought to herself. Not essential. Not at all.
“Tell me about him,” Lizzie said.
“He looks like a lumberjack. An Italian lumberjack.”
“Is he an actor?”
“Oh no. A writer.”
“Have you read his work?”
“I hope I never do. I don’t want to know if he has talent, because if he doesn’t, it will ruin the idea of him,” Mary admitted. “And right now, I very much like the idea of him.”
“Is he supportive of you?”
“Very. He sees me. He read my play.”
“Did he like it?”
“He did.”
“Well, that’s a wonderful start. A love affair that begins on the page is already timeless.”
“Lizzie, you’re such a romantic. I’m not. I’m a pragmatist. A realist. A single woman on her way to being a curmudgeon.”
“That doesn’t have to be true.”
“Well, it is. He took my hand, and I never felt so connected to a person in all my life. Is that how it was for you and Darcy?”
“We had a difficult road to love. And now that we’re married and have children, we forgot all that. For me, being married is a moment-to-moment endeavor. Every day is new, because every moment brings new challenges and problems—and, you know, joy.”
“Mama and Pa are proof of that,” Mary said.
“They love each other,” Lizzie said.
“I think when you’re married as long as they have been, the love is the least of it.”
“Mary, the love always matters. Always.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you think holds an old couple together?” Lizzie asked.
“Patience.”
Mary and Lizzie were exhausted. They had said goodbye to their sisters and calmed down their mother.
Their father was being sent to rehab for two weeks, which bought them time to make some decisions or, at the very least, gather some facts.
They wanted everything to go well. The moon was high in that rectangle of black sky over Jane Street.
Clouds moved over the light, long enough to cast a shadow in the old room.
THE PROPOSAL
Mary Bennet could barely keep up with her brother-in-law as they walked up Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Fitz Darcy was tall, with long legs, which meant he had a stride that could cover a distance twice as fast as Mary.
He moved like a shot, crisscrossing Fifth Avenue as the lights changed.
He had a technique whereby he never waited on a corner; he timed his steps so he never had to stop and wait. Impatience was a Darcy family trait.
“Come on, Mary,” he called out to her to move quickly. “We don’t want to be late.”
When Mary Bennet dreaded something, and she dreaded this meeting with William Collins, she procrastinated. Maybe if she slowed down, they’d never get there, even though there was no logic in her thinking.
Darcy turned to her. “Mary, what is the problem?”
“I’m afraid.”
“It’s just your cousin.”
“He has put the fear of God in all of us our whole lives.”
“You have nothing to fear now,” Darcy said. “I am going to get to the bottom of this, and we’ll figure out how to proceed.”
Mary wanted to believe her brother-in-law. She knew how Lizzie believed in him, trusted him. Lizzie swore she’d never marry, and the love was so all-consuming, she had to. Darcy didn’t leave her any choice in the matter.
“We’re here.” Darcy opened the door of 154 Fifth Avenue. “Come on, Mary. We’re right on time.”
Mary followed Darcy off the elevator to the conference room where the meeting would be held. The walnut table was polished. Mary took a seat and poured herself a glass of water from the crystal pitcher. She poured Darcy a glass and placed it on the table in front of him.
“Are you all right?” Darcy asked her.
“I’ll be better when this is over.” Mary sipped the water slowly.
“I understand.”