Chapter 13 #2
* * *
The second conversation was better and ended badly, which she had not expected in that order.
Forty minutes. The boathouse, and a store room in the north wing with nine years of things in it that had to be dealt with before a family with three children moved in.
They were good at it. That was the surprise.
Give two people a list of objects and a deadline and something old comes back on line: he remembered where the drawings were, she remembered which of the boxes were his mother’s, and for about twenty-five minutes they worked, properly, the way they had once worked a room at a party — economically, without finishing sentences, each of them about half a step ahead.
At one point he said, “The blue crate goes to Margaret,” and Celia said, “The blue crate goes to Margaret unopened,” and he laughed — a real one, out loud, in a café with four tables — and she caught herself smiling at the window and put it away so fast it made her neck hurt.
Then she said, “And the boathouse goes in the sale.”
He picked up his water and put it down again.
“The boathouse is — I’ve asked them to deal with that separately.”
“Separately how?”
“It’s a title thing. There’s a survey issue with the water frontage that’s been sitting there since your renovation and it has to be resolved before anything can transfer, so they’ve severed it out.” He said it evenly. “It’ll be resolved.”
Celia looked at him.
She had been married to this man for nine years and she had watched him give perfectly accurate answers to questions in boardrooms for most of them, and she knew — with total, unarguable certainty, the way you know a stair tread is an inch shallow — that every individual word of that was true and that the whole of it was not.
“You’re doing the thing,” she said.
“What thing?”
“The Ambler Street thing. Where you answer completely and I come away knowing less.”
He was quiet.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because if I tell you, it becomes a thing you have to have a position about,” Lawrence said, “and I’d rather it wasn’t.”
“That’s not your call.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t. And I’m still not going to.”
Celia sat back in the chair.
Six months ago that would have been the whole argument — you don’t get to decide what I can handle — and she would have made it, and she would have been right, and she was aware of the shape of it sitting there fully formed and available.
She looked at the clock on the wall instead.
“Four minutes,” she said. “Do you want to spend them on this?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.” She put her pen down on the list. “The store room’s Tuesday, then. Frankie’s bringing a van.”
And at the exact minute he stood up and left, and she sat there in a café in the river town with a list of objects, furious, and could not have said for certain whether it was at him.
* * *
The third conversation she nearly canceled.
She was thirty-six weeks by then and had reached the stage of it where sitting in a chair was a negotiation, and she had a roof inspection at two and a swollen ankle and a night with about three hours in it.
She went anyway. She had set the terms and she was not going to be the one who broke them, which she recognized, from about the Wednesday, as a slightly ridiculous position to be taking with herself.
Subject: the foundation.
That was hers, and she had chosen it deliberately, and it was the first one that was not logistics.
“You gave it away,” she said.
“I stepped down in April.”
“You gave the whole thing away, Lawrence. Roslyn’s had the papers. The Ambler Street building, the endowment, the name off the letterhead — it’s a public charity now with a board and none of the board is you.” She watched him. “Why?”
He turned the glass a quarter turn.
“Because I set it up to have somewhere to be generous,” he said, “and it turned out to be somewhere to be admired, and the whole of the last nine months came out of a building you designed and I took credit for. So I gave it to people who’ll run it properly and I took my name off it.”
“That building is the only thing of mine anybody’s ever seen.”
“I know. That’s why the deed of gift has your name in the recitals as the architect.” He said it without any weight on it at all. “Three lines. It’s in the public record. That’s the whole reason I did it as a gift instead of a sale.”
The café was very quiet. A woman came in and shook out an umbrella.
“You didn’t tell me that,” Celia said.
“No.”
“You could have told me that in April. In a conference room. In front of two lawyers.”
“Yes.”
“You’d have gotten something for it.”
“That’s why I didn’t,” Lawrence said.
Celia sat with both hands flat on the table.
And she understood, distinctly, that she was in trouble — not because he had done a generous thing, since he had been doing generous things since November and she had been refusing them successfully for months.
She was in trouble because he had done a generous thing and then hidden it, and had gone on hiding it, and had only told her because she had walked directly into it with a question.
There was no version of that she could push back across the table.
“Time,” she said, ten minutes early, and he stood up without a word of protest and went.
* * *
She sat in the car outside the café for a while.
Then she rang Roslyn’s office, and got Lydia, and dictated a message with her eyes shut.
Next Thursday. Not the café. The mill, the loading dock, two o’clock. Sixty minutes.
Lydia read it back.
“And the subject, Mrs. Hollister?”
Celia opened her eyes and looked through the windshield at a wet street in a river town.
“No subject,” she said.