Chapter Eighteen
The first of the month came up bright and pitiless, one of those late winter days with sun and no warmth in it, and Cordelia crossed the river at nine to keep her promise, dressed in charcoal, which she had settled on after real deliberation, as the color worn by people attending things that are funerals while everyone agrees to call them something else.
The vans were already there. So were the gray men, three of them today, the two from December and a senior one with a mustache and the master inventory, and they had set up at a folding table in the hall of the townhouse like customs officers at a small unhappy border, and everything that left the house went past that table, box by box, and was reconciled against the register.
Sabrina was upstairs when Cordelia arrived, and came down carrying a hatbox, and stopped on the landing for a moment when she saw who it was, one beat, expressionless, the bruise along her cheekbone gone yellow at the edges and dusted over with powder that did not entirely agree with it.
"They won't let me take the lamps," she said, by way of good morning. "Any of them. Did you know lamps could belong to a company? I've learned so much this week."
"I came to help," said Cordelia.
"Of course you did," said Sabrina, and went past her to the table, and put the hatbox down in front of the mustached man like a woman surrendering at that border, and opened the lid herself, unasked, and stood looking off through the wall while a stranger's fingers went through the tissue paper.
It took most of the day, and it was one of the worst things Cordelia had ever watched, and she would not have missed one minute of it.
The house came apart in reverse order of its assembly.
Her trunks of clothes went to the van for Maureen's, checked against nothing, waved through with the bored mercy officialdom reserves for things it doesn't want.
Nearly everything else was the company's.
The drawing room sofa, hers by five years of afternoons, the register's by purchase order, and she stood with her hand on its arm for a moment, actually stood there with her hand on it, before she took the hand back.
Curtains she had ordered made for the tall windows, measured and hung and argued over with two seamstresses, the company's, fixtures, the mustache was very sorry.
A dinner service for eighteen, out of which fourteen Sunday lunches a year had been served to Boyds who called the wine thin, counted piece by piece into straw at the folding table, the company's.
Clock and mirrors and the good glasses, all of it the company's.
"The books are mine." It came out of her somewhere past noon, over a box the youngest gray man had paused at, and it came out with a crack down its middle.
"The books came from my mother's house. Look.
Look at the flyleaves. That's my maiden name, that's her hand, you can. Please. The books are mine."
The mustache examined a flyleaf, gravely, and allowed the books, and Sabrina Boyd stood in the middle of her stripped drawing room holding a box of her mother's novels to her chest with both arms, the first thing anyone had let her keep all day, and breathed over the top of it like a woman coming up from underwater.
Cordelia chose that moment to bring her tea.
"You should sit. You've been on your feet since eight.
" Gentle, tireless, indispensable, she had been making tea and wrapping glasses and managing the men all day, family standing with family, and every soul in that house had seen her do it.
"The bedroom's cleared, sit on the window seat, it's still. I'll deal with the nursery things."
"The nursery things." Sabrina came back from underwater to say it. "The rocking horse."
"On the register," said Cordelia, with real regret in her voice, and watched the last piece go into the flood. "It came with the house accounts. I checked myself, first thing, I hoped."
"Two years old, and he drove it like a getaway car." Sabrina's voice had gone somewhere flat and far away. "And now it's a horse, on a list, in a ledger." She looked at the wall. "Take the tea away, Cordelia. I can't hold the cup steady, and I won't have them watching me not hold it."
The little room upstairs went last, and it was the worst of it.
It had been a nursery in everything but paperwork, kept five years for one small visitor, and the gray men did it in nine minutes.
The shelf of picture books, the company's, counted into a box.
The lamp with the sailboats on the shade, the company's.
And the rocking horse, down the stairs on a stranger's shoulder and into the van on its side, mane down, lashed to a sofa, and Sabrina stood on the landing and watched it go with her arms wrapped around herself as though the house had gone cold all at once.
"He learned to ride it before he could talk properly.
" Her voice had gone somewhere flat and far away.
"He used to shout at it. Faster, he used to shout, at a wooden horse, and hold on with both hands and shout, and I used to stand in that doorway where you're standing and think, whatever else is a lie in this house, that isn't." She watched the van men rearrange their straps.
"He'll ask where the horse lives now. Next visit.
Except there isn't going to be a next visit, is there. Not here."
In the doorway, for one unbudgeted moment, Cordelia had to work at her own face.
There was another small boy and another emptied nursery in this story, five years emptied, and no war anywhere was worth confusing the two of them.
Then the moment was mastered and filed where she filed everything, and she went down to see about the tea, which was, at least, not on the register.
At four o'clock, in the blue cold coming on, it was done, and the vans were gone, one north across the river to a little house with a box room, and the others away to storage in the company's name, and the gray men folded their table and their register into a car and left the two women alone on the front step of an empty townhouse with the streetlamps coming on.
"The keys," said Sabrina.
She took them out of her coat pocket. Four keys on a worn ring, front door, area door, garden gate, and a small odd one whose lock, she said, she had never in five years found, and she did not hand them over all at once.
She stood on the step of the house turning the ring slowly in her gloved fingers, once, twice, a rosary of four beads, looking up at the dark windows.
"Five years," she said. "Bought for me the spring we buried Clark, I chose the wallpaper before the ink was dry, that's how certain I was told to be.
I know every stair that talks. I know where the sun gets in in the morning and which sash drops in the night when the wind's off the river.
Nobody else on earth knows this house, it's like knowing a person, and as of this evening I never touched it.
A line closes in a register somewhere and the whole thing never happened. "
"I'm so sorry," said Cordelia. "If it's any comfort at all, it was for something. I truly believe that."
Sabrina turned and looked at her.
"You'll understand it strangely, and you must never repeat it," Cordelia went on, low, confiding, the day's last and finest pour.
"But everything this winter, the register, the letters, this whole horror, at the bottom of it, it was all for Preston.
Protecting Preston. His name had to come through this year clean, whatever it cost the rest of us, whatever it cost you, and I know how monstrously unfair that is, I know what you gave this family.
" She held the widow's eyes, warm as a lit window.
"It wasn't for nothing, Sabrina. It was for him. Someday I hope that's a comfort."
For a long moment Sabrina said nothing at all.
The streetlamp hummed. Somewhere down the hill the river traffic sounded.
And in the yellow light Cordelia watched the sentence go all the way down, watched it reach the place where the slap lived, and the flowers he had sent this morning instead of himself, white lilies, of all the flowers in all the shops he had sent LILIES, with a card asking her to be dignified, and she watched everything in the woman anneal around a single organizing hatred the way steel takes a temper, and it was not hatred of her.
"For Preston," said Sabrina. Her voice was a marvel, level as water. "Well then. That's all right."
She put the keys into Cordelia's palm, deliberately, one ring, four beads, closed the gloved hand over them for a moment in something that was almost a handshake, almost a bequest.
"Look after the house," said Sabrina Boyd, and walked down the steps and away along the lamplit street, back straight, a box of her mother's novels under her arm, and did not look back at either of the things she was leaving, and Cordelia stood on the step of her own townhouse with the keys warm in her hand and watched her go, and thought that somewhere ahead, in a bright room already half assembled, that temper was going to hold an edge better than anything she herself could ever have ground.
Two pillars, she thought, going down to the car. And he knocked the second one down himself, with flowers.
Preston asked at dinner, three weeks later, the way he now asked about everything on the far side of the river, quickly, flinching in advance.
"It's handled." Cordelia served him the good soup.
"Settled, finished, don't carry it another day.
She's at your mother's, Oliver's enrolled for the spring term, the house is let, the committee is satisfied, and nobody is talking about anything.
You came through it, Preston. That's what matters now.
Coming through is the whole art this year. "
"Coming through." He turned his glass. He had aged this winter, she noted, with the tempered interest of a project manager reviewing schedule, gone gray at the temple and gone soft at the jaw, and then March had put something new in him, a flickering want she had been feeding for a fortnight like a draft feeding a fire.
"You know what Farrander said Tuesday. He said the story this spring can't be survival, survival's a beggar's story. The story has to be return."
"Return," said Cordelia, and refilled his glass.
"And he's right, that's what I keep telling you, it's what I've been saying all winter.
The trust squeezes because they think I'm down.
The committee dictates because they think I'm down.
The whole apparatus only has power over this family while I'm DOWN.
The day this city decides Preston Boyd is back, the leash just, dissolves.
Leverage. It's all leverage, and the only leverage I've ever needed is a room deciding I'm winning. "
"Then we'll give them the room," said Cordelia.
He looked up.
"Your birthday's in April." She said it as though it had only now occurred to her, the thing she had been walking him toward since the first of the month.
"Thirty-five. A milestone year, and we'll treat it like one.
We'll open the estate, the good rooms, the long table, the Metropole caterers.
Not a survival party, a return. Let them all come out and see for themselves what's standing.
" She smiled down the table at her husband and gave him the whole of the warmth, both barrels.
"Write your list tonight. Not the people we owe, Preston.
The list you'd write if nobody was watching you write it.
Your room. Your night. Exactly the audience you'd choose. "
For a moment he only looked at her down the table, and she watched the idea take him the way drink used to, color first, then light.
"A return." He said it slowly, tasting it.
"That's it. That's the exact word, that's what Farrander keeps circling and never lands on.
God, Cordelia. You see it. Nobody else in this family has ever once seen it.
" He laughed, half a beat from something wetter.
"And the list. You mean the real one? Not the obligations. Mine?"
"Yours," said Cordelia. "Every name."
Preston Boyd put down his glass, and his eyes went bright, and for the rest of dinner he was the boy on the spring lawn again, naming names, seating tables, building in the air the one evening of his entire life at which everybody who mattered would finally be watching.
His wife watched him build it, and passed the salt when asked, and made, from time to time, a small excellent suggestion.
He wrote the list that night, and it took him three drafts and two whiskies, and reading it over his shoulder with her hands resting light on him, Cordelia thought a man's dream guest list might be the most honest document he would ever produce.
Farrander and the bank men. The exchange crowd from the club that had flagged him, every one of whom he intended to forgive in person, from a height.
Two councilmen. The business editor. Bridget Halloran, underlined twice, the client of his life, the name he carried into every room like a passport.
Vivian Pembroke, because one did. And at the bottom, added small, in the guilty hand of a man who cannot help himself, the trade press, both papers, the ones that had run BOYD CREATIVE LANDS HALLORAN back in the autumn of the world.
"Too much?" He looked up at her, boyish, the list under his hands. "Mother will say it's too much. The spending, the committee."
"Let me worry about the committee," said Cordelia, and kissed the top of his graying head, tenderly, the way you kiss things goodbye. "It's your birthday, darling. I intend to give you exactly what you deserve."
The phone rang in the hall at ten to nine.
"For madam," said Nina. "The lawyer."
She took it in the study with the door half open, because the household was long used to the lawyer, boring evening business of a family with its name on buildings, and Preston barely looked up from his guest list as she went.
"It's me." Adrian's voice, and she could hear it arriving already, some enormous thing standing just behind his composure, crowding it. "Are you somewhere you can smile?"
"The study. Door's open, but yes." Her heart had started without her. "Tell me."
"It's done." Two words, and the courtroom went out of his voice entirely and what was under it was bare and young.
"Sealed this afternoon, all of it, order and record both.
No appeal window, no residual claim, nothing left standing anywhere on earth with the power to move him one inch, ever again.
Do you understand what I'm telling you, Cordelia?
It's DONE. Saturday you don't visit. Saturday we go and get your son. "