Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
I t was the day after Dorothy’s death, and Hilary and Sam were on the back porch of the Coleman House, listening to Estelle’s stories of Dorothy and Philip Wagner—what she remembered of them from their long-ago days of socializing on the island of Nantucket.
Theirs had been the upper echelon of wealth.
Nobody on the island had compared to Philip and Dorothy, not even with their multiple cars and numerous houses and innumerable wealth.
“They were known as one of the most famous couples on the East Coast. Certainly, they were one of the wealthiest,” Estelle was saying, her face conspiratorial, her hands clasped.
“Philip was an investment banker, but he initially made his money through the stock market and probably other less legal means. But so many people were doing things with money that had never been done before. Your father always talked about the people who kept things ‘legal’ and those who found ‘gray areas,’ and he told me that there were fewer and fewer people who remained in the legal sphere. He always said, ‘People who want to get ahead know how to get ahead.’ I always told Roland that I wanted our money to stay clean, that I didn’t want anything to taint future Coleman generations. He understood that.”
Hilary and her sister leaned forward in their chairs, feeling cozy with their mother, eager to hear her tale and how their family aligned or misaligned with the Wagners.
“Of course, I don’t know anything about Dorothy and Philip prior to their purchase of that estate here on Nantucket,” Estelle said.
“How they met is a mystery to me, and I never asked. But I had the belief that Dorothy wanted to come to Nantucket to get Philip out of the city and its many distractions.”
“Other women?” Sam suggested.
Estelle grimaced. “Yes. And his habits. He was a heavy partier. When you were that wealthy back then, especially in Manhattan, the world was your oyster. People have to be careful now, I think. Social media means that people can catch you acting a certain way and cancel you. But cancellation wasn’t really a thing back then. ”
“People were free to be terrible,” Hilary said quietly.
Estelle laughed. “That’s one way to put it, yes.”
“Like Grandpa Chuck,” Sam remembered, wrinkling her nose.
Estelle tilted her head in surprise. “Yes. Although as you know, your father and uncle caught him in the act.”
“Many years too late,” Sam said.
“I see what you mean,” Estelle offered finally, tracing a line down the hem of her dress. “We Colemans have our own skeletons in the closet. Maybe it’s better not to throw stones?”
“We’re not throwing stones,” Hilary said. “I just want to understand Dorothy better. To me, she was a magical and vivacious woman.”
Hilary didn’t know how to ask why Dorothy locked herself away for so long. What happened to her?
“There were children,” Estelle said after a dramatic pause. “Two, I think. Girls. They were born when Dorothy was a little bit older. She must have been almost thirty when she had Renée. The other one came a little bit later. Rachel.”
Hilary was surprised she’d never heard about Dorothy’s children before. “She didn’t talk about them.” She blinked. “And as far as I can remember, there aren’t any photographs hanging anywhere. There’s no proof that she has anyone.”
“And no visitors?” Sam asked.
Hilary shook her head. “It was really like the woman was all alone. When Aria and I went over, I felt like we were the daughter and granddaughter she’d never had.
It was like she craved that kind of relationship.
I thought that was why she wanted to save Aria, in a sense.
Like she saw Aria’s heartbreak and wanted to fix it. ”
“She spent much of her life heartbroken,” Estelle confirmed. “Probably she saw in Aria the same sorrow she carried for so many years of her marriage to Philip.”
“She must have felt like she wasted so much of her life,” Sam breathed.
Hilary thought Sam was maybe projecting. After all, Sam had married a heinous man who’d treated her terribly, so much so that she and her daughters no longer had any connection with him.
“But why lock yourself away like that after his death, if you felt like you’d wasted your life with him?” Hilary asked.
“Did you ever have Philip over to the house?” Sam asked their mother.
Estelle nodded. “Your father was pretty amazed by him, I regret to say. Although back then, everyone was, including myself. He was a celebrity, a moneyed celebrity, and he had a real way about him, always with a cigar in his mouth, always with that thick head of hair. He often wasn’t in Nantucket, frequently running off to Manhattan to be with his actress girlfriends and so on.
We didn’t talk about what went on in the city.
It felt like a lifetime away, especially back then.
“I think he came over to the house four or five times with Dorothy on his arm. It was the eighties. I can picture what we were all wearing, and it wasn’t pretty.
” Estelle cackled. “You kids were probably upstairs with a babysitter, none the wiser about what was going on down here. Dorothy was always with me and the other wives, drinking wine on the porch. I remember that she always gushed about Philip as though he were the greatest genius in the world. I wanted to ask her, Why do you put up with it? Why do you let yourself love him so much? But it didn’t feel appropriate.
Besides, who was I to ask a wife why she still loved her husband?
It wasn’t like I wanted to break up anyone’s marriage. ”
Hilary’s heart sank. She so wished she could go back in time and take Dorothy’s hand and tell her it was okay to want something more than your cheating husband, it was okay to want something more for yourself.
“Did their daughters ever come over?” Sam asked.
Estelle shook her head. “Not that I can remember. Probably by then, they were in boarding school. I seem to remember Dorothy not wanting them to leave the island but saying that Philip had insisted on it, insisted on them joining whatever world that boarding school offered rather than ‘lazing around in Nantucket.’ If I remember correctly, he’d gotten a boarding school education that had set him up perfectly for his undergraduate and later, his graduate career at Yale, or Harvard, or one of those.
I can’t recall, and it doesn’t matter to me. Those Ivy Leagues are all the same.”
Sam’s voice wavered. “What were they like when they were together? Like at your parties, when the wives joined the husbands for dinner?”
Estelle was quiet for a moment. “You know, he put on a brilliant act. He really seemed like he loved her, somehow. I didn’t know what to make of it.”
Overhead, a seagull swooped and cawed. Hilary flinched and looked up at it, surprised to be back in the year 2025 and not decades before, waiting for the Wagners to come over.
“When did he die?” Hilary asked suddenly.
Estelle’s face grew shadowed. “That topic has been widely discussed. He died here in Nantucket, in fact. But nobody really understands how.”
Sam raised her eyebrows. “You don’t think that Dorothy had anything to do with it, do you?” She chuckled, as though that was a wild thing to say.
But Estelle’s color drained from her face. “There were whispers.”
Hilary was stricken, watching her mother’s face, waiting for her to adjust what she’d just said, to say that it was a joke. But Estelle sipped her tea and remained quiet.
Dorothy? A murderer? It was impossible. She’d been a little old lady with a big heart, who’d wanted so desperately to pick Aria up and dust her off and send her back into the world.
“I can’t wrap my mind around that,” Hilary said finally, trying to laugh. She couldn’t.
Estelle raised her shoulders. “People are capable of all kinds of things.”
At that moment, Roland interrupted their pow-wow with an admittance and a big smile. He was starving! Was there anything to eat? Hilary wondered why her dad couldn’t make his own lunch. Why did he need her mother?
As ever filled with goodwill, Estelle suggested that the four of them go out for sandwiches and a round of golf, a sport that Hilary was not entirely terrible at.
There was nothing to do but wait around for Dorothy’s lawyer to contact her, so Hilary and Sam agreed.
It would be a worthy distraction, a way to spend the surprisingly beautiful afternoon outdoors.
Privately, Hilary wanted to pester her father for more details about Philip Wagner, Dorothy’s mysterious life, and the circumstances surrounding Philip’s death.
She got the chance halfway through the eighteen-hole course, when she slid into the golf cart alongside Roland as Estelle and Sam finished their putting.
Sam wasn’t very good, a fact that she liked to laugh about and one that, she knew, contributed to Sam’s belief that she was never fully a Coleman.
Estelle wasn’t very good either, but she liked to say, I’m an artist, remember ?
They had all the time in the world and nobody behind them to push them along.
It was a gorgeous, seventy-three-degree day.
“Do you think Dorothy Wagner had anything to do with Philip Wagner’s death?” Hilary asked her father before she got too frightened.
Roland let out an ironic laugh. “Wow. I haven’t heard anything like that in ages. Did your mother tell you that?”
“She said there were whispers,” Hilary said.
Roland adjusted his hands on the steering wheel of the golf cart, watching as Estelle bent down to attempt another putt. She missed it again.
“I’ve never been keen on that story,” Roland said. “Dorothy really loved Philip despite everything. You know, he wasn’t always very kind to her. He wasn’t always a family man.”
Hilary hadn’t had a chance to look up Philip’s death online and decided to pester her father about it, to see how the stories lined up later. “How do people say he died?”
Roland hesitated and touched the back of his neck. “Well, what’s your guess?”
“How should I know?”
“We’re surrounded by one of the most dangerous things of all,” Roland pointed out, his eyes widening.
“Okay. He drowned, I guess?” Hilary suggested.
“Yes. It was a sailing accident,” Roland said.
“A beautiful summer day in Nantucket. Late nineties. Dorothy was with him when they left, and she had to pilot the boat back to shore by herself. They pulled his body out of the Sound later that week. It was a tragedy, and Dorothy disappeared sometime after the funeral. I think she wanted to get away from the press.”
“Was that when she locked herself in her estate?” Hilary said, trying to put the pieces together.
“Maybe,” Roland said. “That sounds right, doesn’t it? She was obviously broken up with grief. And so many people said she’d shoved him in the Sound for having yet another affair.”
But something about it rang false to Hilary. If she were to trust what so many had told her, Dorothy had been locked away for twenty to twenty-five years and no longer. If Philip had died in the nineties, that would have left a gap of time that wasn’t fully accounted for in Dorothy’s story.
“Do you know anything about Rachel or Renée?” She asked her father about Dorothy's daughters. “She never mentioned them.”
Roland shook his head. “I can’t recall ever meeting either of them.
Philip and Dorothy didn’t mention them either.
It was strange, given the fact that all your mother and I could ever talk about was our children.
But I think a part of Philip never really wanted to be that ‘family man,’ you know.
So he pretended to be someone else as long as he could. ”
Suddenly, Estelle managed to get the little white ball into the hole on the green. Sam erupted with cheers, and Hilary and Roland got out of the golf cart to hug Estelle.
“Don’t tease me!” Estelle said with a big grin.
“We would never, Mom.” Hilary closed her eyes as she hugged her mother, taking in the soft lavender smell of her hair.
The Wagners’ broken family made her all the more grateful for her own. Very recently, they’d been split, arguing, unable to see one another, let alone look one another in the eye. It was a tragedy that Dorothy’s family had never been able to forgive, before it was too late.