Chapter Seventeen #2
Three strikes of the knocker and then the bell held down flat, and Nina's footsteps, and then not so much an entrance as a landfall, Sabrina in the dining room doorway with the rain still on her coat and her hat in her hand like something she'd forgotten she was holding, and one look at her face told Cordelia the whole itinerary.
Preston had gone to be kind. Preston had delivered the comfort.
And Preston, being Preston, had delivered it in Cordelia's wrapping paper, and Sabrina, who could read wrapping paper better than any woman alive, had followed the string all the way back to this table.
"Sabrina." Cordelia set down her fork. "You're soaked, sit down, Nina will."
"You KNEW." It came straight past the courtesies, over the soup plates, at her hostess's face.
"He sat in my mother-in-law's parlor this afternoon, in front of the china dog, and he told me the house couldn't be helped, that it was bigger than all of us, that CORDELIA fought harder for that house than anyone, oh, Cordelia begged the committee, Cordelia was refused in writing, Cordelia is sick about it.
" Her voice was climbing registers as it went.
"And he sat there with his tea, radiating at me, Preston.
RADIATING. Like a man warming himself at some private stove.
And I know that radiance, I've seen it before.
Somebody in this marriage had just told him he was protected and precious.
And I sat there in that parlor, in my two rooms and a box room, watching him glow, and I thought, she's done something.
I don't know what and I don't know how, but this has her stitching in it somewhere, it's all too. "
"Sab." Preston was on his feet, napkin falling. "That is ENOUGH. You're in my wife's house."
"Your wife's house. Yes." Sabrina laughed, a sound with broken glass in it, and swung on him, and Cordelia, quite still at the foot of her own table, watched the wave stand all the way up.
"Everything's your wife's, isn't it, Preston.
The house I lived in, your wife's. The company, your wife's.
The chair you're standing on, the fish on your fork, your wife's, your wife's.
You know what I had? I had a house and I had a promise.
The house is gone and you gave the eulogy, and the promise, shall we discuss the promise, Preston?
Shall we tell your wife about the promise?
Five years of soon, five years of when things settle, five years of you at my table with your shoes off swearing that the minute the moment was right—"
"SAB."
"—so tell her, Preston, tell her yourself, or I swear before God I'll say the whole of it right here over her fish, you and I both know exactly what that house WAS and what I was IN it and WHY your son—"
He hit her.
Open hand, right across the face, full force from the shoulder, and the crack of it went off the dining room walls like a shot and stopped the world.
The silence afterward had a texture. Nina frozen in the doorway with the sauce boat.
The rain on the windows. Sabrina bent sideways over a chair back where the blow had put her, one hand flying up to her cheek, hat dropped, hair down across her face, absolutely motionless, and over her stood Preston Boyd with his arm still finishing the arc, chest heaving, lips gone white, a man staring at his own hand as though it had arrived by post.
"Sab." All the club had gone out of his voice. It came out cracked, tiny, appalled. "Sab. I didn't. You were going to. Christ. I didn't mean."
Sabrina straightened up slowly.
She came up like something being winched, one vertebra at a time, her hand still cupping her cheek, and when her face cleared her hair, Cordelia, connoisseur of the moment, sitting perfectly still at the foot of her table with her hands folded in her lap, watched five years of something die in it and something else entirely finish being born.
The fury was gone. That was the extraordinary thing.
The fury had burned off in the instant of the blow, and what stood there now in the wet coat was cold all the way down, a woman doing sums, and finding, for the first time in her adult life, that they came out even.
"Thank you, Preston," she said. Her voice was fascinating, level as standing water. "Five years I couldn't get one true thing out of you. And there it is."
She bent, picked up her hat, and put it on, in front of the hall mirror, taking her time, adjusting the angle, while the mark of his hand rose slowly on her cheek like something developing in a darkroom.
"I'll be out of the house by the first. Tell your committee. The keys will be with whoever comes." She said it to the mirror, to no one, to the room.
And then she stopped at the dining room door, and looked back, not at Preston.
At Cordelia. One long look, straight down the table, over the cooling fish and the crystal, cheek blazing, eyes dry, and something moved across the distance between the two women that had no name yet but had, now, all its ingredients.
"Enjoy the house," said Sabrina. "Enjoy the wife."
The front door closed behind her with no slam at all, a click, precise as a decimal point, and that was somehow worse than thunder, and in the ringing quiet Preston sank back down at his ruined dinner and put his face in his hands, and his wife rose, and came around the long table, and stood behind his chair, and laid her two cool hands on his shaking shoulders.
"She's overwrought," murmured Cordelia. "She didn't know what she was saying. Nobody will ever hear a word of it from this house."
"I've never." His voice came up out of his hands in pieces.
"In my life, Cordelia. I have never once raised my hand to.
You saw it, she was going to, the things she was saying, in front of you, in front of the staff, I had to, there wasn't any.
" He stopped assembling the sentence and sat with its parts around him.
Then, lower, the true fear finding its way out at last, the only casualty he could ever really see.
"If she talks. The state she's in. If she goes about the city saying wild things, now, this year, with everything so... "
"She won't talk." Cordelia smoothed his shoulder, slow, hypnotic, a woman gentling a horse she intended to sell.
"Talk costs, and she has Oliver to think of.
She'll be sensible by morning. They always are, when there's a child.
" She let a silence go by, exactly long enough.
"Though perhaps, when the house is handed over, it had better not be you there.
Feelings will be raw. I'll go. Somebody from the family should stand with her while it's done, and after this evening, darling, it can hardly be you. "
"You'd do that," said Preston, into his hands. "After tonight. After what she nearly."
"Family looks after each other," said Cordelia. "I'm told we're the only family we've got."
And over her husband's bowed head, in the mirror where Sabrina Boyd had just adjusted her hat, she met her own eyes, and marked the date.
The mark went into the ledger behind her eyes, where the whole city's account was kept.
And in that ledger it stood written, in her mother's neat hand, that everything, absolutely everything, would come due in April, in a bright room, in front of the exact audience.
The keys, first, though.
Friday week, the gray men would come for the keys, and somebody kind, somebody family, somebody sick about the whole affair, ought really to be there to hold Sabrina's hand while she gave her life away item by item.
And over her husband's bowed head, Cordelia gently began to plan what she would wear.