Chapter Thirteen
When Astrid turned twelve, she went off to boarding school on the East Coast, and Verity followed her two years later, leaving Florence back at Cliffhaven to attend public school in the nearby town.
Without Charles, Verity, and Astrid, the house felt, for the first time since her mother died, too big and lonely.
Florence tried her best to make friends at the local school she attended, but she was shy and awkward.
She ate her lunches alone in the school library, arrived right before the first bell in the morning, and left promptly after the last bell rang so she wouldn’t have to hang about the halls by herself.
She felt her aloneness like a presence, heavy and shameful, an embarrassing stench that followed her that everyone could smell as soon as she entered the room.
One afternoon when Florence was feeling particularly despondent, she allowed herself to cry.
She made sure she was alone first, without any witnesses, and climbed into the window seat in the parlor.
She pulled her knees to her chest and let the tears come, like she was opening a spigot slowly.
She buried her face in her knees and felt her salty tears dampen the thin cotton of her dress.
“Florence.”
She looked up at the sound of her name. She was no longer alone—Doris Oppenheimer Towers was standing there, her purse over her shoulder, clearly on her way out somewhere. She glanced at Florence curiously.
Florence opened her mouth to say something—to apologize, perhaps, for the inconvenience of her public display of emotion—but no words came out.
Doris sat next to her on the window seat, setting her purse in her lap.
“Well, what’s the matter?” Doris asked matter-of-factly.
“Nothing,” Florence said. “I’m sorry. I just—I had something in my eye.”
“If you’re going to lie, you have to do it better than that,” Doris said. She glanced down at her watch. “I have a hair appointment to get to, so out with it. Why the tears?”
Florence shifted in her seat and took a deep breath. “I suppose it’s because . . . well, at school, I don’t—I don’t have any friends,” Florence said sheepishly.
Doris blinked at her. “Well, of course you don’t, darling—you have elevated tastes,” Doris said, as if it should be obvious.
Florence had never thought of it that way, as if there were something lacking in her classmates, rather than something lacking in herself.
“I recognized a kindred spirit in you the first time we met,” Doris said.
“We’re a rare breed, Florence, you and I, and not everybody understands us.
And we certainly don’t want to bother ourselves with them if they don’t.
Listen to me: we don’t take guff from anyone.
We do things our own way, which is how they should be done. ”
Florence didn’t see anything in herself that resembled Doris, but she was delighted that Doris did.
Doris handed Florence her kerchief. “Now, dry your eyes, dear,” Doris said.
“If you’re going to cry over someone or something, make sure they’re really worth it.
Tears dry out the skin terribly.” Doris stood up.
“Grab your purse, Florence. Nothing soothes the spirit quite like having your hair set.”
On weekends, Doris took Florence to the nail salon to get their nails done, to the fortune teller to have their palms read, to the antique store to get an eighteenth-century tufted ottoman that no one was ever allowed to rest their feet on.
Doris instructed Florence in the ways of the world.
Never trust a man who doesn’t marry. Always wear gloves when leaving the house.
Be generous with your maid and stern with your children.
Doris Oppenheimer Towers was the most glamorous person Florence had ever met.
Doris adored fashion and was an advocate for Dior’s “new look”: the boned girdles, the dresses with full skirts that nipped in at the waist. “A woman should look like a woman,” Doris said, eschewing the shapeless shift dresses that had dominated the previous decades.
Twice a year, she went to Paris to order her wardrobe for the new season.
Dior, Balenciaga, Givenchy. She wore bold colors—poppy red, canary yellow, bright persimmon—in delicious fabrics: lace and taffeta, twill and tulle.
She always wore gloves and a silk scarf in her hair.
Scarlet insisted that everyone in the house, including the staff, attend church on Sunday, but Doris never did.
When Florence asked her about this, Doris said, “If God has a problem with my absence in the pew on Sunday morning, he knows where to find me.” And when Florence asked her why Scarlet never said a thing about it, Doris laughed and said, “Darling, make no mistake—this is my house, not hers.”
For it was Doris’s house, Florence learned.
It had been built for her by her late husband, Remington Towers, as a wedding gift back when they were married in 1897.
Doris loved to regale Florence with the family history on weekday afternoons while Florence sat at the writing desk in Doris’s room and did her homework.
Remington Towers was a cowboy in every sense of the word, Doris told her, flush with money his family had made in the Gold Rush of ’49.
He had come east to find a bride, and he had fallen head over heels for Doris from the very first time he laid eyes on her across the way at the opera house on Dudley Street in Boston.
He’d brazenly shown up at her parents’ house the next afternoon to call on her without an introduction.
For her part, Doris did not much care for Remington.
He was forty-nine years old to her seventeen; he was unshaven and wore leather cowboy boots and a Stetson hat instead of the black pointed shoes and top hat that were the fashion among gentlemen.
But he had money. Lots of money. And Doris—the daughter of the respected Oppenheimer family, who had helped settle the city of Boston, and heiress to a now-dilapidated oil fortune—did not. So she married him.
As his wedding gift to his young bride, Remington purchased one hundred acres of land on the Pacific Coast and started building a house for her.
Cliffhaven, he christened it. Every year, Doris would make the long trek out west to see the house, and every year, Doris would proclaim it wasn’t finished yet, and she’d return east, to her family home in Boston.
There, she birthed their sons, Augustus and Sebastian, and raised them, as out west, Cliffhaven grew steadily bigger and grander as the years wore on.
It wasn’t until Augustus had graduated from school and his father had grown ill that Augustus moved west to care for him.
Doris didn’t immediately follow. But when Augustus’s wife died in childbirth, Doris stepped in to mother her grandchild.
She doted on Charles and couldn’t bring herself to part with him.
It was Charles’s arrival that finally satiated Doris’s appetite for building, the final piece that allowed her to proclaim—finally—that the house was indeed complete.
When Doris died at the age of seventy-eight, it was not something quick and dignified, as it should have been, but a cancer that drained her slowly.
Florence took leave from school to care for her, sitting stalwartly by her bed when Doris could no longer leave it.
Florence read to her from her favorite gossip magazines, and she did the things that Doris was no longer able to do herself: pinning up her hair—which Doris still insisted must be done—putting on her lipstick in the morning, applying her Pond’s Cold Cream at night.
When, one morning, Florence found Doris in particularly bad shape, she begged her to let her call the doctor.
“Don’t you dare,” Doris said. “I’m in such a state. I’d rather die than have a stranger see me like this—my hair uncurled, my nose unpowdered.”
And so Florence was the only one in the room with her when Doris took her last rasping breath.
Florence held on tightly to Doris’s cold hand, and she sat there long after she knew that Doris was gone, alone in the room with the weight of her grief.
She felt the loss more keenly than she had that of her own mother.
Afterward, there was the funeral, which the whole family attended, the girls back from school and Charles home from DC.
Florence sat in the front pew with the Towers family and, at the lectern, read a poem she had written.
At the reading of the will, Florence learned that Doris had left her her favorite pendant necklace—a canary yellow diamond, surrounded by pearls.
Astrid gasped aloud when she heard this.
“Why would Granny leave the necklace to her?” Astrid hissed under her breath. “She knew it was my favorite.”
In the privacy of her own room, Florence slipped the necklace on over her head and clasped it with both hands to her chest. She lay down on her bed and wept.
The house should have been in mourning. Florence wanted nothing more than to be left alone to wallow.
To dress in all black, to sleep until noon, to have the space and quiet to feel her own wretchedness.
But it was summer, and Astrid had just finished school and returned to Cliffhaven with all the destructive energy of a hurricane.