Chapter 29
Her phone buzzed, and Kate glanced at the screen. It was Lulu, calling for the third time since Kate had left the soup kitchen. Scotty had obviously raised the alarm. Again, Kate let it go to voice mail. In the midday sun, she walked from downtown New London past Fort Trumbull to Pequot Avenue.
Nothing revealed a person’s character like the poetics of loss.
Beth’s death had revealed the dark sides of people she’d loved and trusted.
Kate had felt guilty for not telling Lulu about the sketch, but the way she and Scotty had known everything and kept Beth’s secret felt like a much worse betrayal.
Even deeper than that, Beth herself had chosen to keep it from Kate.
When Kate got to Monte Cristo Cottage, the boyhood home of Eugene O’Neill, she slowed down.
The Victorian house was up a slight rise from the street, and she sat on the wall along the sidewalk and faced the harbor.
There was barely a breeze; two boats with sails futilely raised motored toward the Sound, looking for wind.
She felt a presence behind her—not a person, but the cottage itself.
O’Neill’s father had been an actor, the house named for his most famous role, the Count of Monte Cristo.
It had been the setting for O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night.
When Kate was a senior in high school, Mathilda had taken her and Beth to see the brilliant production in New York at the Plymouth Theater, with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy starring as Mary and James Tyrone, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jamie, and Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund—O’Neill’s autobiographical character.
The play had hit Kate hard. It was about a Connecticut family so full of love for each other yet tormented with addiction and sinking with secrets.
Mary was a morphine addict, James a liar, Jamie an alcoholic, Edmund dying of consumption.
She’d thought of her own family, of how happy she had thought they were.
In some ways, they were completely different from the Tyrones.
Her family didn’t suffer from addiction or alcoholism.
No one had a fatal disease. Instead of two sons, there were two daughters.
Her father had not been a drunk, but he had been a liar and a cheat. He had acted the role of good husband and father but was actually a different person entirely.
When they saw the play, her mother had been dead barely a year.
It was only in retrospect, after her mother’s death and father’s imprisonment, after Beth’s retreat from closeness, and after Kate’s own heart became concretized, that she realized how her father’s secrets had destroyed them.
He had had a private life unknown to the family.
He was so charming. Even Kate was charmed by him, only back then she had called it love.
She had adored her dad—he could do no wrong.
Even though he stayed out lots of nights, and her mother seemed upset about it, Kate figured he deserved to have fun.
He worked hard at the gallery that had belonged to her mother and grandmother, built it into an even more successful business because of all the collectors he befriended. Everyone wanted him to like them.
He loved to gamble. Even on family vacations, they would often go to places that had casinos—like the trip to Monte Carlo the summer Kate was thirteen.
The excuse had been to visit the Jean Cocteau murals in Villefranche-sur-Mer, to stay in Saint Paul de Vence, the medieval village above Nice, and to dine at La Colombe d’Or.
Legend had it that artists had paid for their meals with paintings.
The walls were hung with art by Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Chagall.
But the way her father had driven them back to the auberge; kissed them all good night, saying it was “for luck”; and left for the rest of the night, Kate knew he was speeding back to the casino.
“What’s he doing there?” Kate asked her mother.
“He enjoys games,” her mother said.
“What kind of games?” Kate asked.
Her mother laughed. “Why don’t you ask him that?”
So Kate did when he returned late the next morning. “Why would you rather play roulette than stay at the hotel with us?”
Her father chuckled. “Wait till you’re older. You’ll see James Bond movies and get it.” Then, just as the rest of the family was heading to èze for lunch, he went to bed to sleep through the day.
One late night during school vacation, Dr. No was on TV, and Kate made Lulu stay over and watch it with her.
James was playing baccarat at a casino. He wore a dinner jacket and looked handsome, just like her father.
Kate tried to imagine what her father had been trying to say, but to her, hanging out in a casino seemed boring.
Living in Connecticut, temptation was close for him—Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos were not far from Black Hall.
But instead of just being away from dinner till dawn, he had started not coming home for days at a time.
One day he came home just before she left for school.
He hugged her, and she smelled perfume. She was only fifteen at the time, but she knew right then that he was having an affair.
She wanted to tell Beth, but Kate took her position as older sister seriously and had to protect her.
She watched her mother, to see how she reacted.
For the longest time, her mother seemed fine.
But once in a while, her father would talk on the phone in a low voice, then leave the house.
Kate would see her mother hitting redial after her father left.
Kate figured her mother must have smelled the perfume too.
Walking down Pequot Avenue, Kate had intended to keep going to the lighthouse.
But when she stopped to sit on the wall outside Monte Cristo Cottage, she realized this was where she had wanted to come all along.
She needed to visit this house, to feel Eugene O’Neill’s spirit and bring back a moment in her life when she had sat with Beth and Mathilda in the theater, when a certain truth about her father had clicked in her mind.
Her phone rang again. This time she answered without even looking at the screen.
“You didn’t even text me back. You couldn’t bring yourself to tell me,” Kate said.
“You have no idea how much I wanted to,” Lulu said.
“But Beth made you promise not to?”
“No, she never said that. I can’t even figure it out, why I didn’t. At first I thought that, yes—that if she’d wanted you to know, she’d have told you herself.”
“Am I that terrible?” she asked. “That judgmental?”
Lulu studiously avoided answering the question. “Kate, I want to see you. We need to talk in person.”
Kate’s jaw was so tight she could barely speak.
“Where is Jed Hilliard now?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know.”
“If you had to guess.”
“Kate, we weren’t friends. I only met him once—accidentally.”
“Where?”
“On the Block Island Ferry. It was late last winter; the boat was practically empty. I had a few days off and was heading out to clear my head. I spotted Beth standing on deck—I was in the cabin; it was so cold. I remember there was ice on the lines, and it was starting to snow. I was so surprised to see her there at all—I started to go outside, when a guy walked up to her, handed her a cup of something hot—coffee, I guess. I tried to hang back, but she saw me, so I couldn’t avoid going over to talk.
She introduced him as an artist friend, said they were going to go to Mohegan Bluffs to take photos of the cliffs in the snow so they could paint the scene later. ”
“Maybe they were just friends.”
“I saw him kiss her when he handed her the cup,” Lulu said. “It was a real kiss.”
Kate stared out at the water, picturing her sister on the ferry, kissing a stranger.
So Scotty had been wrong—they were more than just friends.
And the baby? Could he have been Jed’s? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine how Beth must have felt.
It must have been exciting. She must have been happy.
Kate kept the small fat key in her pocket, and her hand closed around it now.
“Whose baby was it?” Kate asked.
“Where are you?” Lulu asked.
“New London.”
“At home?”
“On Pequot.”
“Stay there,” Lulu said. “I’m coming to get you.”