Chapter 9
The label had been wrong for two years and nobody had ever said so.
She knew all three of those things on the third of March, standing in the gallery at eight in the morning with the lights half up, because she had spent six weeks of February alone in a house with a catalog on her knees.
She went and got the director.
"It's a Herreshoff," she said.
"Imogen."
"It's an 1885 Herreshoff and it's a catboat and the hull's got the tuck he stopped doing after '87, and there's a builder's mark under the mount. I want the board off it."
The director looked at her for a moment. He had known her for eleven years and he had never once heard her use that voice about anything.
"Take the board off it," he said.
She published in April. Four pages, a photograph, and a footnote that quietly took two Boston attributions apart on the way past.
She put her own name on it.
That was not a decision she made at a desk. She typed the byline the way you type a byline, half-attending, and looked at it — I. Severin — and something in her chest went sideways, and she sat back in the chair.
She had not written as a Tillinghast since she was thirty-one.
It was not that she had hidden it. There had never been a moment where anyone said you should use his name.
She had married in June and come back from Maine in July and the first thing she typed after that was a conference abstract and she had typed Severin because that was her name now and because — this was the part she made herself look at, in a cold gallery office in April at half past six — because Tillinghast was a weight.
Tillinghast was her mother's straight back and fifty-one years in a house in Wickford.
Tillinghast was every room in Newport going slightly quieter when she came into it at twenty-four with no money and a name people's grandmothers knew.
Severin had been a holiday from that. Severin had been new money and nobody's daughter, and she had put it on at thirty-one with relief, and had never once said that out loud to the man whose name it was.
She sat there for a while.
Then she deleted the byline and typed Imogen Tillinghast Severin, which was clumsy and correct and took up too much space, and sent it before she could think about it for another hour.
The effect was immediate and faintly humiliating.
That was the honest word for it and she used it, to herself, in the car.
The piece went out in the third week of April.
By the first week of May she had three invitations she had not had in eight years, a request to look at a collection in Bristol, and a note in actual handwriting from a woman in Marion who had been at school with Augusta.
Nobody had been keeping her out. That was the thing. There had been no wall. She had walked away from a door at thirty-one and stood eleven feet from it for eight years assuming it had closed behind her, and in April she put her hand on it and it swung.
She told Siobhan about it in the restaurant on a Tuesday, and Siobhan said, "Well, obviously," with a mouth full of bread.
"Don't."
"Im. Everybody on that coast has known who you are since you were eleven. You're the only person in the state who thought it wore off."
The other half took longer and was worse, and nobody congratulated her for any of it.
There were four people she had stopped ringing.
She had not decided to stop ringing them; it had happened the way a gutter blocks, one leaf at a time over six years, and by the second winter of the marriage she had a social life that consisted entirely of things she attended as one half of something.
In May she rang Thea Lorillard, who had shared a flat with her in 2011 and had two children Imogen had never met, and said, "It's Imogen. It's been four years and that's my fault and I'd like to buy you lunch."
There was a pause on the line of about two seconds.
"You absolute cow," Thea said. "Thursday."
It was not all like that. One of the four did not ring back at all, which Imogen sat with for a fortnight and then decided was fair.
One of them rang back and was so carefully, terribly kind about the break-in — we did hear, we didn't want to intrude — that the lunch was unbearable and they did not repeat it.
But there were two, and by July there were two standing arrangements in her calendar that had nothing to do with anybody's husband, and she found she looked forward to them in a way that embarrassed her slightly.
She also started going into Newport on Fridays.
That was smaller and it mattered more. There is a bar behind the Thames Street end that serves oysters until eight and is full of people who work on boats, and Imogen had gone there most weeks between 2009 and 2016 and had stopped, entirely, without one single conversation about it, because it was not a place you went with a man like Cormac and she had not wanted to be the woman who went alone.
She went alone in June and sat at the bar and nobody looked at her twice.
The second week the man behind it said, "You've been in before."
"Years ago."
"Thought so," he said, and that was the entire content of it, and Imogen drove home over the bridge that night feeling better than she had felt in seven months about a thing that had cost her eighteen dollars.
The institute offered her the directorship on the twentieth of May.
Sybil Amory did it, over lunch, in a way that was so thoroughly Newport that Imogen nearly laughed: eighty minutes of gardens, grandchildren and the harbor commission, and then, over the coffee, as an afterthought, the largest professional offer of Imogen's life.
"We've been circling you for two years," Sybil said. "You know that."
"I didn't."
"Don't be tiresome, of course you did. We didn't ask because you'd have said no, and one doesn't ask a Tillinghast twice." She stirred her coffee. "You'd have said it was too much to take on. You'd have said it in that pleasant way, and we'd all have agreed, and nothing would have happened."
Imogen sat with her hands in her lap.
"It's four days a week in Newport," Sybil said. "It's the collection, the endowment, and about ninety hours a year of being nice to people you'd rather not be nice to. It is not a sinecure and I'd be furious if you thought it was."
"I don't."
"Good. The other thing I'll say, and then I'll let you eat, is that I am not asking you because of the article.
" Sybil looked up. "I'm asking you because you took the board off a wall by yourself at eight in the morning in March, and in eleven years nobody in that building has done anything like it. "
"I'll think about it."
"Take until September," Sybil said. "But don't take until October. I'm seventy-four and I'd like to hand it over while I can still enjoy it."
Bristol was in June.
The collection was a boatyard collection — three generations of half-models, working drawings, a wall of tools, and a shed at the back with an 1898 hull in it that somebody had started restoring in 1974 and abandoned.
The man who met her at the gate had forearms like a dockworker and a pair of reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, and said, "Rhys Havilland. You're the catboat."
"I'm sorry?"
"The catboat. The Herreshoff. That was you." He was already walking. "I read it twice. You're wrong about the tuck."
Imogen stopped in the middle of a boatyard.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You're right about everything else. You're wrong about the tuck." He turned around, entirely unbothered. "He didn't stop doing it in '87, he stopped doing it on boats he was paid for in '87. There's two after that. One of them's in the shed and I'll show you at four when we've done the drawings."
And then he went on into the building, and Imogen stood in the gravel with the sun on the back of her neck and found that she was, ridiculously, grinning.
He was right about the tuck. She spent three hours in a shed in Bristol being shown she was wrong by a man who took no pleasure in it whatsoever, and it was the best afternoon she had had since before the fourteenth of November.
They ate sandwiches on the ways at four o'clock with their feet hanging over the water.
"You've got the second-best eye for this in the state," Rhys said.
"Who's got the first?"
"Me."
"You're a boatbuilder."
"Which is why," he said, and did not elaborate, and she laughed out loud, properly, for the first time in seven months.
He asked her nothing about the house.
She understood at about half past five that he knew — everybody on that coast knew, the story had gone around in November and around again in February when the Severins were seen separately at things — and that he had decided, before she arrived, that he was not going to know it in her presence.
She had been handled carefully by a great many people since the fourteenth of November.
She had not, until that day, been simply left alone with her own work.
At six she got up and brushed off her coat.
"I'd like you on the catalog," Rhys said. "Properly. Not a consult. It's two years and the money's insulting."
"I've been offered a directorship."
"Take the directorship. Do this too. You'll be bored inside a year otherwise."
"That's extremely presumptuous."
"Yes," he said.
And then, at the gate, with the light going gold off the harbor, he said the other thing — once, plainly, in exactly the tone he had used about the tuck.
"I'd like to have dinner with you at some point.
Not this year. I'm aware of the year you're having.
" He put his hands in his pockets. "I'm saying it now so that you know it's a real thing and not something that happens to you in a car park in eighteen months.
That's all. You don't have to say anything. "
Imogen looked at him.
"I'm married, Mr. Havilland."
"I know exactly what you are," Rhys said. "I said at some point."
She drove home over the bridge with the window down.
She did not act on it. She did not intend to act on it.
But somewhere around Tiverton she noticed she had been thinking about the shed, and about the ways, and about the sandwich, and not about a log with eight lines on it, for the better part of forty minutes — and that it was the first forty minutes like that since February.
She thought: oh.
She thought: so that's what that is.
Augusta came to Winterbourne on the last Sunday in June. It was the first time she had set foot in the house since the previous September.
She walked the whole ground floor without being asked, the way she had walked every house she had ever been in, and stopped in the morning room and put her hand on the new sash and said, "They've matched the muntins badly."
"They've matched the muntins fine."
"They've matched them badly and you know it."
They had lunch on the terrace. Augusta asked about the directorship in the manner of a woman raising a small procedural matter, and then about Bristol, and then about the catalog, and Imogen heard herself talking for eleven minutes without stopping and realized her mother had not once mentioned Cormac.
She waited for it.
It came with the coffee, and it did not come the way she expected.
"You'll take the Newport post," Augusta said.
"I haven't decided."
"You'll take it. And then you'll take the boat catalog as well, because the Havilland boy will have asked you and you won't have been able to resist him." She set her cup down. "And you'll do both of those things from this house, on this road, forty minutes from me, with the gate shut. Won't you."
"Mother—"
"I want you to come home," Augusta said.
It was so plain, and so unlike her, that Imogen did not answer.
"I've been saying it since November and you've been hearing me say leave him, and that's a reasonable thing to hear, and it is not what I have been saying.
" Her mother was looking at the water. "I don't care where that man sleeps.
I have not cared where a man sleeps for forty years. I want you in the Wickford house."
"Why?"
"Because I am seventy-eight."
"That isn't it."
"No," Augusta said. "It isn't."
And then she said the true thing, at a table on a terrace on a Sunday in June, at conversational volume, and did not stop in the middle.
"If you go back to him," she said, "then it will have been possible to leave."
Imogen went completely still.
"Fifty-one years," her mother said. "I stayed, and I have been perfectly clear with myself about it for the whole of that time: I stayed because there was nowhere to go and nothing to go with.
That is the shape of my life and I made my peace with that shape in about 1981.
It is not a happy arrangement but it is an honest one. "
"Mother."
"But you have somewhere to go. You have eleven acres in your own name and a post in Newport and a boat catalog and an old friend with a bed over a kitchen and a mother with a room made up, and if you have all of that and you stay anyway—" She stopped for the first time, and then made herself go on, which Imogen had never once seen her do.
"Then it was a choice. And if it's a choice for you, then some part of it was a choice for me, and I have spent half a century being extremely careful never to find that out. "
Out past the rail, June went on, unbothered, exactly the way June does.
"That's not fair to me," Imogen said.
"No."
"You want me to leave him so you don't have to have been a woman who stayed."
"I want you at Wickford," Augusta said, "and I have just told you the ugliest reason, out loud, which I have never done about anything, so I would be grateful if you did not make me do it twice."
She drove her mother to the car at four.
At the door of it Augusta put a hand on her daughter's arm, briefly, with her cold fingers, which was the entire physical vocabulary she had.
"Take the post," she said.
"I'm going to."
"Good. That's separate. That's entirely separate and I want you to know I'd have said so if you'd married a saint." She got into the car. "The muntins are wrong. Have them back."
Imogen stood in the drive until the car turned out past the gate.
Then she went in and stood in the kitchen, in the summer light, at half past four in the afternoon, in a house on eleven acres with her own name on the deed and a directorship on the table and a man in Bristol who had said at some point.
She thought about her mother in a car going north up a road she had driven for fifty-one years.
And she understood, standing in her own kitchen with the door open to the water, that for the first time since she was thirty-one there was not one single person in her life whose advice she needed to take, and that this was what it felt like, and that nobody had warned her it would feel this much like being alone in a room.