My Jane Austen Summer: A Season in Mansfield Park

Someone else took the microphone and said, 'Jane Austen's own mother thought Fanny insipid.' The audience laughed. 'But seriously,' the new speaker continued, 'I think Jane Austen messed up on this one.'

Sheila was there for the discussion, sitting alone.

Sixteen

Having spent the drive to London imagining Philippa Lockwood, I now prepared to meet her in the flesh. Somewhere within the teeming warren of the hospital, Willis's beloved stood at her grandmother's bedside, dreaming of her happy future with Willis. She persisted in her mistake, oblivious to the fact he'd spent days in the attic with me, introduced me to the roof, and made love to me in the music room.

In the hospital, Vera approached the information desk while I watched people coming and going, any one of whom could be Philippa. I walked the brightly lit halls like a spy, studying the block and diamond pattern in the tile floor, breathing the mix of chemicals and sick body odors. Fortunately, I had no appetite to lose; I hadn't eaten much lately and my clothes felt loose. Vera looked nervous, too.

'Do you have the lease?' Vera asked.

'For the last time, yes.' She'd asked every five minutes, as if she had no memory.

Vera looked at the numbers on the doors and then the paper in her hand. She stopped and my stomach lurched. I'd harbored a fear of the horror behind hospital doors from my childhood service projects, delivering whatnots to elderly patients in declining stages of death and decay. Now the door concealed a new horror: my competition. A sensible person would have fled. I, on the other hand, having accepted the role of Other Woman, entered the room. At first, it seemed I had nothing to fear. A very thin young woman wearing tight jeans stood facing the bed, her back to us, coaxing Lady Weston to eat.

Nigel and Willis had been right. Lady Weston could hardly speak, so frail the part below the sheets didn't stick out in the places you would expect, no indication she had an awareness of things going on around her. She was busy getting ready to die and our festival concerns were inappropriate. I knew immediately I wouldn't press a legal document on this woman.

'Philippa,' Vera said. 'I bring greetings from Nigel.' The young woman turned at the sound of her name. I gawked at her.

'Vera,' she said. 'How thoughtful of you to come.' Outwardly gracious, I sensed something private cautioning us not to make a habit of showing up here. I studied her for what made her different from the rest of us. Her scoop-necked sweater did not come from the mall. It fit as though by magic, its shade of blue from a palette reserved for aristocrats. Every shift of her torso struck a pose; each movement released a fragrant breeze of her natural scent and revealed a new aspect of her perfection: white teeth, thin wrists, soft brown earlobes. Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked. She looked for Randolph, who spoke with a doctor in the far corner of the private room while Vera and I stood against the wall like peasants, both chairs filled with Philippa's and Randolph's things.

As hard as I tried, I couldn't imagine Willis telling her about me.

Philippa returned to her task, coaxing Lady Weston to eat applesauce. 'If you don't eat, they'll come and stick more tubes in you, Nana,' she said, in a British head voice, blatantly denying Lady Weston's prerogative to die in peace. 'You won't like that.' Philippa glanced at Randolph, still huddled with the doctor. 'Would you like me to get you a pudding, Nana? Would that be better?'

Lady Weston closed her eyes and I remembered when my mother looked like this. Close to the end, she no longer smiled at her grandchildren or listened to the details of my day, preoccupied with her inward progress away from us. And then, two days later, she stopped making sense. She left us many days before she actually died, a blessing, because how else could she bear to go?

Vera startled me. 'I'd like to introduce my colleague, Lily Berry.'

'I'm pleased to meet you,' I said, 'and so sorry about Lady Weston's illness.' I stepped forward and extended my hand but retracted when Philippa nodded to the applesauce and spoon, so obviously straining her present capacity.

'Rand,' she called; the doctor had left.

'Yes, Pippa.' Randolph stood at comic attention.

'Would you mind fetching a pudding? We must find something she'll eat.'

Sad, she thought food would bring her grandmother back at this point. As Pippa placed the applesauce on the tray table, I noticed a tiny sparkle on her left hand. I almost failed to draw the obvious conclusion but Vera, having also seen it, remarked, 'Congratulations on your engagement. Nigel told me you've set a date.'

Pippa wore an engagement ring; not flashy like Texas diamonds, but humble and serious in a way that made me ill. 'Yes, we did.' She smiled fondly, then glanced at the bed. 'But we'll just have to wait for Her Ladyship to be well enough. And Willis is finishing his thesis.'

Rand stood looking at me, waiting. I extended my hand again. 'Lily Berry,' I said, from the depths of active trauma.

'Pleased to meet you.' He took my hand, lingering over it, so that I pulled out before he loosened his grip. 'Are you with the festival?'

'Yes,' I said, not sure what festival he was talking about, or what planet I happened to be visiting at the moment, still processing the information that Pippa wanted to get married before her grandmother died and Willis was stalling until his thesis was finished. And I was playing the part of Sue. How easily I'd slipped into the role.

'An actress?' Rand asked.

But Willis had been writing a vampire novel for most of the summer.

'Yes,' Vera answered when I hesitated. 'From Texas,' Vera added meaningfully.

'Ah,' he said. I saw him connect with Philippa in a quick glance I would have called The Look except I never thought of The Look within the sibling context. His eyes rested on me longer than seemed normal and I tried to pull myself together.

'Rand,' Pippa said; a trifle pushy. 'A pudding?'

'But where should I find a pudding?'

Pippa took Rand into the hall to point the way, and I found myself alone with Vera and the dying Lady Weston. I touched Vera's shoulder and shook my head. 'Don't do it,' I whispered.

Vera frowned and reached for the lease document; I backed away, worried Philippa would see us arguing.

'Don't do what?' Philippa asked, returning.

Vera shushed us and pointed toward the bed. I turned and left the room in an act of self-preservation, the lease still in my JASNA bag.

*   *   *

Busy people in white coats and blue scrubs moved about the hall; charts and pens in their hands, ducking in and out of doors, saving people. A doctor's surgical mask dangled jauntily from one ear as if he'd just emerged from the front. He passed behind the nurse's station, the border separating medical professionals from the masses, reminding me of an altar to which the humble could approach and beg for things like pudding. It seemed to me hospitals were portals for birth and death—the place where people come into the world for the first time or leave forever. Surely this hospital had a chapel.

I couldn't believe Willis had not told me he was engaged.

I pulled the Acting book out of my bag in a desperate effort to disguise my panic. Holding it open, I stood in the hall and stared at it blankly, reeling from confusion. But even the Acting book conjured Willis. He'd taken it from my hand one day and said, 'Looks like a much-read book.' He opened it and flipped through the pages, releasing the musty paper smell of my adolescent summers: pool chlorine mixed with David Copperfield, the soothing smell of raindrops on hot concrete mingled with the desolation of the moors, lake-house mildew like musty Manderley, newly mown grass merging with longing and tragic endings. Willis had looked at me, there in the attic, his eyes smiling as if he heard everything I was thinking and agreed. 'Nothing like the smell of old paper,' he said.