22. Connor
CONNOR
It takes most of a week to get my mother and my uncle into the same room, and by the end of it I’m so sick of being handled that my back teeth ache.
My mother’s calendar is a fortress. Walter says yes immediately and then develops a conflict, twice. In the end I stop asking and start telling: Sunday, four o’clock, the drawing room, and if either of you isn’t there I’ll say all of it in front of the events office instead.
That works. It turns out the thing they’re most frightened of isn’t me.
The nurse fights me about Ambrose and loses, because Ambrose is the one who does the fighting.
He wants to come down. He will not be told important things in a room that smells of bleach, he says, and he wants a fire lit, and he wants his own chair, not the one they brought up for him.
So the fire gets lit at two so the room’s warm by four, and the housekeeper puts a rug over the arm of his chair and he pushes it onto the floor the moment she’s out of the room.
I set the laptop on the low table facing away from everybody and I sit where I can see all three of them. My hands have been cold all day, and it isn’t the weather.
Walter arrives first, in a jacket, pleasant, doing the voice he does. “Well, this is very grand. Are we having tea?”
“No.”
“Ah.” He sits down anyway.
My mother comes in at four exactly, because of course she does, and she doesn’t sit in the chair I’ve left nearest the fire.
She takes the hard one by the window. She has her glasses on their chain and a look on her face I’ve been watching my whole life, the one that says she has decided in advance what this will be and is waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
“Your grandfather should not be downstairs,” she says.
“Your grandfather,” Ambrose says, “is in the room.”
That’s how it starts.
“There’s a piece of footage,” I say, and my mouth has gone dry before I get to the end of the sentence. “I’m going to play the end of it. The part that never went on a screen at the fundraiser.”
“Connor,” my mother says.
“You can leave. Nobody in this room is going to stop you. But you won’t get to say afterward that you didn’t know what was on it.”
She doesn’t leave.
I turn the laptop around, hit the space bar with a hand that isn’t quite steady, and sit back before anybody can see it. I don’t look at the screen once. I’ve seen it. I want to watch the three of them.
Lena’s voice comes into that room and my whole body reacts before I’ve decided anything. My shoulders come up. My hands want the laptop back. It’s the sound of her at twenty-six, unguarded, laughing at something off camera, and it goes into my ribs like cold water.
Ambrose leans forward. The tubing pulls and he ignores it.
His face does something I’m not prepared for.
He’s been dry with me for weeks, he’s been gallows about the whole business, and now here’s my grandfather with his mouth slightly open watching a girl in a hotel robe put a necklace back in a box, and every bit of the dryness goes out of him at once.
He looks like a man watching news from a country he used to live in.
Walter’s face doesn’t move at all at first. Then he starts to shift. Small things—his thumb going on the arm of the chair, a glance at my mother, a cough that doesn’t need to happen. He is a man realizing the temperature has changed and looking for a door.
And my mother watches it with her hands folded and her chin level and does not blink.
She doesn’t look away. Not once. She sits in that chair with the fire going and my wife’s voice in the room, and she takes it like a quarterly report she wrote herself.
Then it gets to the part where Lena’s voice goes, and my grandfather says, “Stop it.”
I reach for the laptop.
“Not that.” His hand comes up, and it’s shaking, and he’s not looking at the screen at all. He’s looking at the two of them. “Stop it.”
Nobody says anything. The fire spits. I let the rest of the take run to the end because he hasn’t actually asked me to stop it, and when it finishes the room is very quiet and the machine on his trolley clicks and sighs and nobody moves.
I lay the rest of it out plainly, and I keep it short, because everyone in this room already knows their own part.
My voice stays level the whole way. Underneath the voice it’s a mess—my mouth is chalk, my heart’s going hard enough that I can feel it in my wrists, and at some point I’ve picked a pen up off the table just to give my hands a job.
The raw takes went out of the archive in September, weeks before anybody needed them for anything.
The request card says retrospective reel research in one hand and family office authorization in another.
The name signed on it is Celia Ward, who has worked for my mother for over a decade and does not take material out of an archive on her own initiative—she told me so in a conference room without ever saying the other half out loud.
The box never came back. Nobody linked the transfer on the server to the shelf.
That’s the only reason any of us heard the end of that recording tonight.
Halfway through I have to stop and swallow, and I make it look like a pause. There’s no spit in my mouth at all.
Then Walter.
“You called the property manager at Bennett House twice,” I say.
“The first time to find out whether my wife had asked for access. The second to find out the names of the people she’d brought with her, and to tell him the family would prefer the building stay closed.
Your words were an ongoing sensitivity around the marriage. ”
“That’s correct,” Walter says.
“You also called reporters in the first week. You gave my publicist names and you told me you were getting ahead of it. And you called somebody at the children’s foundation and had my wife taken off the winter committee, and then you told me about it afterward like a man reporting a chore.”
Walter looks at Ambrose, then at Diana, and finds nothing coming back from either of them. His jaw works. He’s been in this family since before I was born and he’s never once had to sit in a chair while somebody said his name out loud like that.
“Everything I did was in this family’s interest,” he says. “I’d do all of it again. I’m not going to sit here and be arraigned by a boy who has never had to make an unpopular decision in his life.”
“Nobody’s arraigning you, Walter.” It comes out quiet because my throat’s half closed and I have to push the words through. “I’m just saying what you did in a room where you have to hear it.”
Then my mother.
“Did you authorize Celia to take that footage?” I’ve had the question ready for days and it still comes out thin.
“Yes.”
Walter’s head comes around.
“Did you watch the whole take before the fundraiser?”
“Yes.”
“So you knew what she said at the end of it. All of it. And you played the part that made her look like a woman who married me for money.”
“Yes,” my mother says.
There’s no hesitation anywhere in her. She doesn’t reach for a qualification. She sits in that chair with her hands in her lap and says yes, and yes, and yes, and my heart is banging away under my shirt like it’s the one on trial.
“Why,” Ambrose says.
She turns to him, and for the first time in the whole hour something moves in her face.
“Because this family is going to be handed to him,” she says, “and it will be handed to him at a moment when a great many people are looking, and the woman standing next to him is a woman this city decided about years ago. I did not decide it. I read it correctly. I have watched them be polite to her at a hundred tables and say something else in the car.”
“So you did it for me,” I say.
“I did it for the fifty years behind you.” Her voice does not rise. “You have never once had to hold anything up. You do not know what it takes to keep a name usable. I have done it since I was thirty-four and I have never?—”
It snags. One word, a hair of a fray on never, and her hand goes to the chain of her glasses and stops there, and for the length of one breath my mother is just a woman in a hard chair by a window. Then her chin comes up and the room is colder for it.
“I have never been thanked for a single hour of it,” she says. “And I would do this again in the morning.”
And then she gives me the deadline, and she does it looking straight at me.
“You will end the marriage before the Jubilee.”
The fire pops. Walter shifts.
“If it is ended before that night, this all becomes a difficult season we do not discuss and the paperwork stays in a drawer. If it is not, then everything I described to you in that corridor happens, in full, at once, and it does not get reviewed and it does not get reversed.” She takes her glasses off and holds them in her lap.
“This is not a threat anymore, Connor. This is a deadline.”
I look at my mother across a warm room.
And I find, when I open my mouth, that I’ve had the sentence ready for weeks.
“I’d rather have nothing and have her.”
Nobody says anything. The fire shifts. My mother puts her glasses on and takes them off again. It’s the closest thing to a flinch I have ever seen out of her.
“Say it again,” Ambrose says.
“I’d rather have nothing and have her,” I say, louder, to the room, to my grandfather, to the woman by the window.
“I don’t want the house. I don’t want the plane I’ve been on twice.
If the price of my wife is every dollar and every door, then that’s the price and I’m paying it, and I’d like everyone here to have heard me say so while I’m not drunk and nobody’s shouting.
” My voice shakes on the last of it. I let it shake.
Then my grandfather starts to get up.
Nobody helps him. Nobody dares. He gets his hands onto the arms of that chair and he pushes, and it takes him a while, and the tubing pulls tight and he stops and gets a breath and pushes again, and then he is standing in the middle of his own drawing room with a line under his nose, holding onto nothing.
“Diana.”
“Sit down, Father.”
“Diana.” He says it again, and his voice fills that room in a way it has no business doing.
“You will not do this in my house. While I am alive in it.” A breath, dragged in.
“You took a private thing out of a locked room. You used it on a girl who never did you an unkindness in her life.” The machine on the trolley ticks faster and he waves at it like a fly.
“In front of every person we’ve ever asked for money.
And now you stand in front of my fire putting a price on my grandson’s marriage.
” He has to stop. The air goes into him in pieces.
“You were not raised by wolves. You were raised by me. Which is worse, and I’m the one who has to sit with it. ”
My mother’s face has gone white around the mouth.
“I’m not finished.” He turns his head to me, and here it comes.
“And you. Don’t you dare stand there feeling brave with your hand out.
” Breath. “There is no money coming from me. Not a dollar. No provision waiting. Nothing in any will of mine that mends this—if you thought there was, put it out of your head tonight.” His eyes are terrible.
“If you do this, you do it broke.” Breath. “Say it back to me.”
“I do it broke,” I say.
“Good.” He sits down, badly, and the chair takes him with a thump. “Now somebody get me a drink before that nurse comes in.”
My mother stands up.
She puts her glasses back on. She smooths her skirt, and she picks up her bag from beside the chair, and she looks around that room once, at her father in his chair and her uncle sitting very still and her son standing by a laptop.
“Very well,” she says.
That’s all. No raised voice, no closing line, nothing to hold on to. She walks out and the door closes properly behind her because she closes it properly, and we hear her heels go across the hall floor and then the stairs, and I stand there with my pulse hammering at nothing.
Walter clears his throat and starts to say something conciliatory and Ambrose says, “Go home, Walter,” and he does.
Nothing happens for a few days, and I let myself think that’s a good sign.
Then, on the Thursday, my phone goes while I’m walking a floor with the head of housekeeping.
Connor—going to have to move our dinner. Diary’s a nightmare between now and the new year. Will call. Harold.
Harold Bishop and I have had dinner on the first Thursday of the month since I was twenty-eight. He was my father’s friend before he was mine, and he stayed my friend when my father left, and he taught me to sail badly. There’s no diary in Harold Bishop’s life. The man retired in the spring.
I stand in a linen corridor with my phone in my hand and a housekeeper waiting on me, and my ears go hot the way they used to when a teacher read a grade out loud.
Then I put it in my pocket and finish the walk, because the woman beside me is telling me about a supplier and she deserves a person who’s listening.
But I know what that message is. It’s the first cold air coming under the door, and there’ll be more of it, and I’ll be finding out for a while who I actually knew.