her registration papers? Finally? Good, I was getting concerned that I would have to call that Mrs. Anglethorpe woman who runs the school to see if they’d somehow lost her.”
“
“The gutter language doesn’t fit a woman of your years and figure, Jennifer. Though, come to think of it, perhaps it does suit a woman who drinks like the proverbial fish. Incidentally, I think Saddam nuking the world is more likely than your daughter becoming anything at all useful. That damned ugly weed will be around my neck until I die. Now, if Sydney told you, why haven’t you asked about it before now?”
“Because I assumed she was lying, I told you. She did it just to torment me. Tormenting has always come easy to Sydney, but you’ve always known that.”
Royce Foxe merely shrugged. “She wasn’t lying. Sydney never lies. Now, as to where I’m sending her—” Royce took the envelope from her hand. Jennifer turned quickly away and walked to the large bow window that looked over San Francisco Bay. It was foggy this morning but it would burn off by noon. That was what usually happened during the summer, she thought vaguely, trying to control her fury. She was shaking. She hated it. She hated the helplessness, the damned vulnerability. He always got the better of her, always. She had to get hold of herself.
She was turning back to face him when she heard her mother-in-law, Gates Foxe, say in her clear imperious voice from the library doorway, “Lindsay will be traveling to Connecticut to a girls’ school that I have personally selected, Jennifer. You needn’t worry. I told Royce this would be the school for her. It’s the Stamford Academy and it’s very highly regarded. The
Jennifer stared. Royce actually flushed and tried to salvage things. Good God, he was still afraid of her. It was the money, Jennifer knew, it was the money, nothing else. “Mother, I didn’t mean—”
“I know exactly what you meant, Royce. Now, enough, from both of you. You might also consider that the girl has two healthy ears and a fully inquisitive nature. I could hear the two of you myself from the foyer.”
Jennifer raised her chin. “Her name is Lindsay.”
“Yes, dear, I know that.”
Jennifer’s chin and voice rose together a bit higher. “Her middle name is Gates. After you, Mother.”
“I’ve always wondered why you named the girl after me,” Gates said. “Royce did admit to me that it was your idea. You never particularly liked me, Jennifer, you’ve hated living in this house, hated having to defer to me, an impossible old artifact. For the life of me I can’t figure out why you’ve put up with it. But I suppose it’s the status of this house and all that lovely money, not that you don’t have enough of your own for several lifetimes, Jennifer. I do wonder sometimes what Cleveland would have thought about all this—our son still here in this house. He always said that a boy should be out on his own, not living off his parents. Or just his mother, in this instance.”
Royce looked suddenly as austere as the federal judge he was. Jennifer had always marveled how quickly he could adapt to any situation. He said now, “I assumed that since you are no longer as spry and young as you once were, Mother, you would want someone here taking care of you, someone who cared what happened to you.”
“That would be nice, certainly,” Gates Foxe agreed.
Jennifer said abruptly, “All of this is nonsense. I don’t want my daughter going back east. She’s too young, she’d be miserable, she’d—”
“Actually,” Royce said calmly, “she is quite thrilled about it.”
Jennifer stopped cold. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”
“Why the hell should I lie? For one awful moment there I even thought she was going to throw her skinny arms around my neck.”
“No, no. It isn’t true. She wouldn’t want to leave me. I’m going to find Lindsay. She’ll tell me the truth, that she doesn’t want to be exiled.”
“I wouldn’t assume that to be true, dear,” Gates said, her voice suddenly gentle. “There’s no reason for Royce to lie about that. It’s too easily verified, you see. And as for you, Royce, despite what you think, the girl isn’t stupid. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that she was well aware of your plans for her long before you said anything to her, Royce. She hears things, intuits things. She reads people quite well. What Royce said is true, Jennifer. She really is quite excited about going back east to school. She’s said nothing as yet because she’s afraid of hurting you, Jennifer. But she does want to leave this house. No, Royce, she isn’t stupid. She may be homely and too tall and somewhat clumsy and boorish in her silences, but she isn’t stupid. I see a great deal of you in her, Jennifer. Unlike you, Royce, I can also see what she just might become in a few years.”
“I’m leaving,” Jennifer said.
“Don’t forget that the Moffitt Hospital committee is meeting here at four this afternoon, dear. You are expected to attend, since you are the secretary/treasurer. As for you, Royce, you will leave before any of the ladies arrive.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Gates Foxe waved both of them away. The two of them were exhausting. She walked slowly to her favorite chair that was set with its back to the magnificent windows, facing a wall on which hung an oil painting, a fairly good likeness of her long-dead husband, Cleveland, painted by Malone Gregory in 1965. He’d already gotten old, she thought, looking at the slack jaw, the loose flesh beneath his eyes. Ah, but that look in his eyes was still a flame, even though he was nearing sixty, and she wondered if perhaps when it was painted, he was thinking about that silly girl of twenty he’d been sleeping with until his heart attack. Sydney had the look of him in his younger days, that dashing sparkle that ignited people and made them fall into line trying to please her. Now Sydney was married and an Italian princess. Gates wondered if she would give up her law practice and be a wife in the traditional way. She couldn’t quite imagine it, but one never knew.
Gates thought again about the endless discord in her home. She wondered how much Lindsay had heard of her parents’ screaming match, not that it mattered. Lindsay wouldn’t let on; she’d keep everything behind that sullen homely face and not let out a single peep, even to her grandmother.
Lindsay stood very quietly in the shadows underneath the grand central staircase. She watched her mother and then her father leave the library. She still didn’t move. A weed, she thought, a weed in their garden. She touched her fingers to her curly hair. It was a mess as usual, frizzed out and oily because if she washed it too often it just looked like dry straw. She wanted to leave this mansion and everyone in it, even more than she’d realized before. She wanted to go to Connecticut to school. She wanted to be free. Just two more weeks and she would be free. Stamford, Connecticut. It sounded really distant. She felt a brief pang for her mother, then dismissed it. Her mother would have to learn to take care of herself. Lindsay left her hiding place after another fifteen minutes and escaped the Foxe mansion, walking downhill on Bayberry toward Union Street.
Dinner at the Foxe mansion was formal and elegant and followed an unvarying routine. The night before Lindsay was to leave was no exception. Dorrey, the cook, was huffing as she came into the dining room, for the two silver-covered trays she balanced on her forearms were heavy and she was stouter than she’d been just the year before. She carefully set the trays before the master. At his nod, she lifted the silver covers, watched him give the braised sirloin a gourmet’s appraisal then turn to the two small bowls of fresh vegetables, small red potatoes and green beans with French almonds and tiny Japanese pearl onions. At his look of approval, she removed the salad plates and lifted the nearly empty tureen of fresh mushroom soup from the table and took herself back to the kitchen. She’d sliced herself a good half-dozen strips of the sirloin, and her mouth watered thinking about it.
Royce sat at the head of the table and Grandmother Gates at the foot. They took turns directing the conversation. Jennifer sat on her husband’s right as she’d done for as long as she’d been in this house. She spoke only after her mother-in-law or her husband had begun a specific topic and invited her opinion. Jennifer looked across the table at her daughter, wondering not for the first time what she was thinking, for her silence was absolute. She even made no noise at all eating. Jennifer wondered if she was wise in allowing Lindsay to come to the dining room with the adults. The girl was terribly thin and at that gawky age. She was just as likely to spill the soup in her lap as to get the spoon in her mouth. She would have to improve in appearance soon; she certainly couldn’t go much further the other way.
“I had a letter from Sydney today,” Royce said after he’d carefully chewed a piece of braised sirloin. He decided it was time to offer Dorrey a raise.
