he was always happy to. “This hall,” he would say, “was removed panel by panel and stone by stone from a Tudor house near the cathedral in Salisbury… The marble floor is part of the lobby floor of the old First National Bank. Mr. Brownlee gave Mrs. Brownlee the Venetian Salon as a birthday present, and these four columns of solid onyx came from the ruins of Herculaneum. They were floated down Lake Erie from Buffalo to Ashtabula…” Victor could also point out the scar on a tree where Spencer Brownlee had wrecked his car, and the rose garden that had been planted for Hester Brownlee when she was so sick. We have seen how helpful he was on occasions like the dance for the Girl Scout fund.
Violet was away in camps and schools. “Why do you live here?” she asked the first time she came to visit her parents in Salisbury Hall. “What a moldy old wreck! What a regular junk heap!” Mrs. Brownlee may have heard Violet laughing at her house. In any event, she took a violent dislike to the Mackenzies’ only child, and Violet’s visits were infrequent and brief. The only one of Mrs. Brownlee’s children who returned from time to time was Prescott. Then, one evening not long after the Girl Scout dance, Mrs. Brownlee got a wire from her daughter Hester, who had been living in Europe for fifteen years. She had arrived in New York and was coming on to Pittsburgh the following day.
Mrs. Brownlee told the Mackenzies the good news at dinner. She was transported. “Oh, you’ll love Hester,” she said. “You’ll both love her! She was always just like Dresden china. She was sickly when she was a child and I guess that’s why she’s always been my favorite. Oh, I hope she’ll stay! I wish there was time to have her rooms painted! You must urge her to stay, Victor. It would make me so happy. You urge her to stay. I think she’ll like you.”
Mrs. Brownlee’s words echoed through a dining room that had the proportions of a gymnasium; their small table was pushed against a window and separated from the rest of the room by a screen, and the Mackenzies liked to have dinner there. The window looked down the lawns and stairways to the ruin of a formal garden. The iron lace on the roof of the broken greenhouses, the noise of the fountains whose basins were disfigured and cracked, the rattle of the dumb-waiter that brought their tasteless dinner up from the basement kitchens, where the rats lived?the Mackenzies regarded all this foolishness with the deepest respect, as if it had some genuine significance. They may have suffered from an indiscriminate sense of the past or from an inability to understand that the past plays no part in our happiness. A few days earlier, Theresa had stumbled into a third-floor bedroom that was full of old bon-voyage baskets?gilded, and looped with dog-eared ribbons?that had been saved from Mrs. Brownlee’s many voyages.
While Mrs. Brownlee talked about Hester that evening, she kept her eye on the garden and saw, in the distance, a man climbing over one of the marble walls. Then a girl handed him down a blanket, a picnic hamper, and a bottle, and jumped into his arms. They were followed by two more couples. They settled themselves in the Temple of Love and, gathering a pile of broken latticework, built a little fire.
“Drive them away, Victor,” Mrs. Brownlee said.
Victor left the table and crossed the terrace and went down to the garden and told the party to go.
“I happen to be a very good friend of Mrs. Brownlee’s,” one of the men said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Victor said. “You’ll have to get out.”
“Who says so?”
“I say so.
“Who are you?”
Victor didn’t answer. He broke up their fire and stamped out the embers. He was outnumbered and outweighed, and he knew that if it came to a fight, he would probably get hurt, but the smoke from the extinguished fire drove the party out of the temple and gave Victor an advantage. He stood on a flight of steps above them and looked at his watch. “I’ll give you five minutes to get over the wall and out,” he said.
“But I’m a friend of Mrs. Brownlee’s!”
“If you’re a friend of Mrs. Brownlee’s,” Victor said, “come in the front way. I give you five minutes.” They started down the path toward the wall, and Victor waited until one of the girls?they were all pretty?had been hoisted over it. Then he went back to the table and finished his dinner while Mrs. Brownlee talked on and on about Little Hester.
The next day was Saturday, but Victor spent most of it in Pittsburgh, looking for work. He didn’t get out to Salisbury Hall until about four, and he was hot and dirty. When he stepped into the Great Hall, he saw that the doors onto the terrace were open and the florist’s men were unloading a truck full of tubbed orange trees. A maid came up to him excitedly. “Nils is sick and can’t drive!” she exclaimed. “Mrs. Brownlee wants you to go down to the station and meet Miss Hester. You’d better hurry. She’s coming on the four-fifteen. She doesn’t want you to take your car. She wants you to take the Rolls-Royce. She says you have permission to take the Rolls- Royce.”
The four-fifteen had come and gone by the time Victor arrived at the station. Hester Brownlee was standing in the waiting room, surrounded by her luggage. She was a middle-aged woman who had persevered with her looks, and might at a distance have seemed pretty. “How do you do, Miss Brownlee?” Victor said. “I’m Victor Mackenzie. I’m?”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve heard all about you from Prescott.” She looked past his shoulder. “You’re late.”
“I’m sorry,” Victor said, “but your mother…”
