Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Mo
Maureen thought about texting her friends an honest play-by-play of the weekend, including the private performance of her book, getting too high to function in front of her rival, meeting a media bigwig with her own brand of dish soap, then trash-talking that bigwig’s son constantly, mostly to his too-attractive face.
Her body had stopped making cortisone hours ago, maxed out.
Maybe that was why the reading over lunch had gone so well.
Instead of mentioning any of this, she texted them a simple Hi, I love you both.
Please send Perkins pix as she lay on her bed, digesting both her lunch and the weekend so far.
Mo had thought she would nap, but instead she stared at the ceiling.
Wes’s second reading had been good. Really good.
They hadn’t coordinated their readings from the middle of the book, but both had selected their interpretations of the dinner party scene from near the center point of the novel.
Wes finally hit on that latent sexual tension between Clive and Perkins that he’d talked about in the car, and Mo could see what he meant about the undertones in the book.
The way he wrote about Clive looking at his longtime friend and knowing he wanted him was electrifying.
The whole setup, this artifice of adulthood when the main characters were only in their early twenties.
And still—they were adults. They had been through war and parenthood, but the longing, awkward and almost adolescent, remained.
It was a potent scene, and Mo wanted to flip ahead to the next chapter after he finished.
She could picture him reading that selection on a stage in three years, accepting some major literary prize.
She knew he looked good in a tux.
During the reading, she’d focused on his fingers, watching them curl around his paper, and wanted to ask what instrument he played growing up.
She was certain, after meeting Ulla for only an hour, that he had been forced to play something.
To distract herself from his body, she had made mental guesses—maybe violin from a young age, Suzuki method.
Mo bet he’d been sat down with a bow at age two and performed for guests at the mansion.
He came from such a different universe. Mo had played the kazoo from the cereal box, the recorder in fourth grade, and a miserable rental clarinet through middle school.
Mo could tell her parents really loved her because they recorded those god-awful concerts and would probably show them off as proudly as Ulla had shown her a picture of Wes in his boarding school uniform (he had a plaid tie!).
Mo’s reading was the same party but spun forward eighty years.
An upscale patio barbecue—polo shirts for the men and wrap dresses for the women.
There was wine, and the characters were just old enough to have the right kind of matching glassware.
Mo’s Eliza—Liza—was restless, her dress itchy and her period late.
In the scene, Liza sipped her wine and thought about ultrasounds, the way they revealed things you only suspected.
Mo couldn’t look at Wes after finishing her chapter.
She hated that her first impulse was to check his face or ask him what he thought.
She thought about the way he described gelato and ice cream, how ice cream was served so cold it numbed the flavor out, and she wondered if prose could do that too—be too cold and emotionally distant to let the flavor and feeling come through.
She wanted to ask him, Could you taste it?
Could you taste my scene? Instead, she complained of a headache, thanked Estelle for lunch, and retreated to lie down.
Soon, though, the rest of the family would arrive, and Mo would have to be on her best behavior again.
She draped an arm over her eyes, wishing she could nap. She rolled to her side, then heard the tap on the door. “Who is it?” she called.
“It’s Wes.”
She sat up and smoothed down her hair. He didn’t deserve to see her ruffled. She refused to give him the satisfaction of flyaways. “Come in. It’s unlocked.”
He opened the door and stood in the hallway.
Instead of entering, he lingered near the door and stared at her.
The look wasn’t full of antipathy or calculation but instead, unless she misread it, confusion.
Confusion, as if he hadn’t been the one to knock on her door.
After a few seconds of silence, the air between them was thick enough to slather with jam and take a bite of.
“Hi,” he said. “How’s your head?”
“Better when someone isn’t asking me how it is,” she said honestly. “But it’s okay. Thanks.”
“I was taking a self-tour of the house and thought you might want to come too. You said you hadn’t been here before.”
The offer was nice, too nice to turn down. She had considered wandering around by herself. She stuffed her phone in her back pocket and nodded.
The started on the ground floor and wound through the empty rooms from one wing to the other.
Drawing room, morning room, guest room—the spaces blurred together as they walked from one to another.
As they walked, Maureen couldn’t help but show off her knowledge of the Hill, and of Morgan, finding comfort in his rebuttals with his own tidbits.
“These bas-reliefs were originally Morgan’s sketches, some of them self-portraits,” Wes said, to which Maureen could reply, “And the materials came from local quarries.”
As they passed a tapestry in an alcove, Wes paused and pointed to the intricate threadwork. “That’s E. J.,” he said, gesturing up at the woman stitched there. Her eyes were light brown, the same color as her hair, and her hands were folded in her lap on top of a notebook.
“Hello, E. J.,” she said softly, running her fingers over the coarse material.
“I love tapestries,” he said, still gazing up.
“I’m not rich enough to have an opinion on them,” she jabbed back, her tone light.
“No, look,” he said, glancing in both directions before flipping the corner of the art over. “Look at this chaos.”
The threads collided, woven in knots and bundles that barely reflected the order on the other side.
There was beauty in the chaos, but also, she couldn’t help but feel too seen by the disorder.
Her brain felt like that, competing for her life against someone she found intriguing while attempting to look respectable.
Suddenly, she heard a noise down the corridor, and Wes stepped back from the tapestry, dropping its corner.
He gave her a guilty look and waved a hand to encourage her to follow him.
They walked down another hallway until they came to the entry to the library.
In the doorway, Mo held her breath. The space looked exactly as Morgan must have experienced it.
“No tapestries here. No paintings. I’m a little surprised,” Maureen said.
“The story goes that Morgan believed that libraries should have books as their primary decoration. Books inspired by other books, I guess,” Wes said.
Maureen turned, unable to stop her smile. “Sounds familiar.”
Wes turned back to the floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves while Mo continued to explore the room.
A plaque above a rather ordinary desk near the window marked it as her desk.
Before reading it, she knew its importance.
At this desk, history was made. Mo felt the warmth of the wood and took in the scratch marks on its surface.
In a house of opulence, Morgan’s desk was simple.
When she turned around, she noticed Wes watching her. “We can move on,” she said, blushing.
“When you’re ready.”
She took another deep breath and gave the desk one more thankful pat, grateful that Wes had returned to his perusal.
They climbed the stairs into the wing opposite from their rooms. They passed closed door after closed door. “I wonder whose rooms these were when E. J. lived here,” Mo said to break the silence. “Servants?”
“Probably. Or guests.”
“This whole place is so empty. It would make a great haunted house,” Mo said, without really meaning it. Though it was mostly empty, Estelle was so generous and open that it didn’t feel isolating. It must be awkward to live in a house with plaques on the walls, ready for public consumption.
“I like it,” he said. “But it’s fun to imagine it in its heyday. I can’t imagine going to one of E. J.’s parties, can you?”
They entered a ballroom that marked the halfway point between the wings.
Soaring ceilings with a great dome above, crowned in stained glass.
The midsummer sun struck everything in pinks and greens.
Maureen could visualize this room in the late evening of a summer in the 1920s.
After sunset, with the stained glass dimmed, breezes from the open window would dance with fingertips of candlelight from holders lining the wall.
“I think I could imagine it, actually. She was famously extravagant. A modern, female Gatsby, except married. I bet Estelle has some stories.” The Great Depression wasn’t even a consideration at that point, not even an imagining on the bright spot that was the time after WWI and the flu pandemic of 1919.
People ran wild, tossing their inhibitions to the wind in a way that wouldn’t be mirrored until the seventies.
Wes kicked a foot against the marble floor.
“A little slippery. It would be hard to dance.” He ran a hand through his hair, and Mo watched its path a little too closely.
She realized her attention and turned to watch her shadow on the wall, which also turned its head.
She liked seeing Wes’s shadow next to hers, though they looked even closer together in shadow form.
Wes kept speaking, his tone musing. “I think she settled down after motherhood. It’s always amazing to me that she wrote The Proud and the Lost before having Estelle. She said it was mainly based on—”