Chapter Fourteen
Saturday came up gray and mean, a perfect moving day, and Cordelia wore the good coat and the comfortable shoes and stood on Maureen Boyd's front step at ten sharp with the first of the suitcases, feeling like a woman with the best seat in the house at a play she had written herself.
She had not planned on the extra cast member.
Oliver had been at breakfast when the day's arrangements were discussed over his head, and had extracted, with a five year old's radar for the one interesting word in any adult sentence, that Aunt Sab was moving house today, and had announced that he was coming.
It had been explained to him that it was a dull errand, boxes and grown-ups.
He had gone and put his shoes on. It had been explained that Aunt Sab was tired and sad.
He had returned with his coat, reasoning aloud that sad people were exactly the people who needed visiting, and there was no answering that, and so here he was, hand in Nina's, hopping the pavement cracks outside a strange little house across the river.
And when the taxi brought Sabrina and the last suitcases to the curb, he broke from Nina and ran.
"Aunt Sab!"
Cordelia watched the collision from the step, watched Sabrina drop to her knees on the cold pavement in her good remaining coat and take the boy in with both arms, hard, her chin going down onto his shoulder, her eyes closing, one heartbeat, two, three, the first entirely unguarded thing that face had done in Cordelia's presence in five years.
A woman down to almost nothing, holding the one thing she had never been allowed to say was hers.
Well, thought Cordelia, filing the picture with all the others. Something in this street is true, at least.
Maureen opened the door in her church cardigan with her speech already lit.
"Sabrina." She said the name the way customs officers say passport.
"Well. Here we are. I want you to know, before anything else is said, that in this family we look after each other, whatever we may privately think, and I have never been one to turn away blood, whatever the circumstances, and I think you'll find the upstairs very comfortable if you keep it aired.
" One breath. "Shoes off in the hall. The runner's new. "
"It's linoleum," said Sabrina.
"The runner on the stairs is new," said Maureen, with dignity, and battle was joined before the second suitcase crossed the threshold.
The first hour was fought entirely in code.
Maureen gave the tour of the two upstairs rooms as though handing over the east wing of something, and every sentence had a second sentence inside it.
Here's the wardrobe, it's small, but then I suppose most of yours is going back where it came from.
The bathroom's at the end, we run the immersion heater six to eight, morning and evening, hot water doesn't grow on trees in this house, whatever people are used to.
The box room's for the overflow, mind my preserves, they were here first.
Sabrina took it with her chin up and her coat still on, answering in her own code, which was to look at things a half second too long and say nothing, the wallpaper, the china dog on the landing windowsill, the framed print of a harbor Maureen had never visited, and her silence walked through that house breaking more than a hammer could have.
Oliver, at least, was honest.
He had trailed the tour upstairs on the promise of seeing Aunt Sab's new room, and he stood now in the middle of it, coat still on, and turned a slow full circle, taking in the camp bed, the small wardrobe, the brown wallpaper, the window that looked at the wall of the house next door, with the frank assessing stare of the only person present who had no position to defend.
The grown-ups watched him do it. All three of them. Nobody breathed.
"It smells like jam," Oliver announced.
"That's the preserves, my love," said Sabrina, brightly, horribly. "Isn't it cozy?"
"Where's your real furniture? Where's the blue sofa?
" He frowned at the camp bed, working the sum, and the sum would not come out.
"This room is for a visit. You can't LIVE here.
Your house was better." And then, having surveyed the wreckage and found it beneath his standards, he turned to Cordelia and delivered the verdict that emptied Sabrina Boyd's face of its last defended acre. "Mum, can we go home now?"
Mum. The word crossed the little room and landed where it landed, and Sabrina kept the bright hostess smile nailed exactly in place while everything behind it took the hit, and Cordelia stood in the doorway and watched the woman absorb, in one syllable, from her own son's mouth, the entire architecture of the last five years, and thought, without one flicker of mercy, there is nothing I could ever take from you that costs what that word just cost.
"Soon, my love. Go down with Nina and wait in the car, there's a good man. We'll be quick." She smoothed his hair as he passed. "Say goodbye to your aunt."
"Bye, Aunt Sab." Already at the stairs, already elsewhere. "I hope you get your good house back."
They heard the front door, and the little upstairs room was very quiet, and Sabrina turned away to the window that looked at the wall next door and stood there for a moment, doing something with her face that she declined to do in company.
"He didn't mean anything by it," said Cordelia, gently. It was true. It was also precisely the point, and both women knew it.
Cordelia carried boxes and poured tea and contrived to be everywhere and nowhere at once, oil and match both. It wanted so little. She had only to be kind to each of them within the other's hearing.
"Maureen, this soup is a marvel, no wonder Preston never rates my cook. Sabrina, where will you hang the blue dress, it deserves better than a hook." Small coins of warmth, dropped one at a time into a machine built to grind them, and by noon the machine was audibly grinding.
It came apart, in the end, over the parlor.
Sabrina had carried down one of her own things, a lamp, a good one, silk shade, the sole survivor she'd been allowed because it predated the townhouse, and she set it on the parlor table where the doily was, moving the doily, and turned it on against the gray afternoon, and it did what good lamps do, it made everything else in the room look exactly like what it was.
Maureen came in with the tea tray and stopped as though the lamp had said something about her mother.
"That doesn't go there."
"It's just while we're."
"That table is where the photographs go.
That doily was worked by my sister, God rest her, and that table is where she is remembered, and I'll thank you not to come into a house that's opened its doors to you and start rearranging the dead.
" The tray went down hard enough to rattle.
"Upstairs is yours. I said upstairs is yours and I meant it generously. Down here is mine."
"Generously." Sabrina said the word alone, the way she'd said procedure in the townhouse hall.
Something had been fraying in her for four days, and Cordelia watched it part, strand by strand, right there between the tea tray and the lamp.
"You've mentioned the generosity six times since ten o'clock.
Shall I tell you about generosity, Maureen?
I kept your son's house as an open door for you for five years.
Sunday lunches. Christmases. You sat under my chandelier calling the wine thin and you never once. "
"YOUR chandelier." Maureen's voice went up through the ceiling of the code, and the code died, and what came out from under it had been waiting years.
"Nothing in that house was yours, madam, we've all had the letter about it, haven't we.
Five years queening it over this family on borrowed rooms and a dead man's name, and everyone in this city knowing exactly what was keeping the arrangement warm, don't think I don't, don't you dare think I don't, I'm his MOTHER. "
The clock on the mantel ticked twice in the silence, and Cordelia, in the doorway with a stack of folded linens in her arms, held her breath the way you hold your breath at the theater when the knife comes out. Say it, she thought, with the purest scientific interest. One of you say it out loud.
"Mother." Preston filled the doorway behind her, a hall table wedged in his arms, sweating, catastrophic, too late and exactly on time. "Sab. Come on now. Come on. It's been a long day, everyone's tired, nobody means..."
They turned on him together, and for one glorious moment the two women were allies, perfectly synchronized, a duet, and Cordelia arranged her face into deep familial concern and settled in behind it, and inside, where she lived, she was applauding until her hands hurt.
"Don't you dare come on now me, Preston, this was YOUR idea of a solution."
"She moved Vera's table, Preston, tell her about Vera's table."
"Where were you when the men were counting the chairs? Procedure. PROCEDURE."
"Six to eight the immersion runs, I told her, and it went on at NOON today, I heard it."
"I am not living six months under a woman who polices hot water like the mint."
"And I'm not dying in a house where I'm spoken to like staff by my own son's."
"ENOUGH."
The word came out of Preston Boyd from somewhere nobody in that parlor had ever been shown, a full roar, both hands still gripping the hall table so that he shook it as he shouted and the whole thing boomed like a drum, and the room stopped dead.