Read Online The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Meg Waite Clayton
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Funny, the way I dressed so damned carefully for a day in Washington, an evening in New York, only to end up on the water. Who was I dressing for, anyway? For the press cameras I imagined might capture Betts and Laney and Mia and me? For my friends?
Max helps Betts step ashore, then joins us as Mia says, “The house looks exactly the same.”
Victorian shingle-style architecture, built in 1893, Mother used to tell everyone. If the house has any flaws, she never mentioned them. It looks abandoned now, though. Haunted. Not in a ramshackle way, but in the way an old dog, left behind on his master’s death, lies prone, his face on his paws, patiently awaiting a return that will never be.
“Exactly the same,” Mia repeats with a quick glance at Max (who is looking his Max-goofiest, his hair trying to escape his head in little wisps like Mia’s).
Max, surely you’ll meet me at the Ritz at five. / Hurry up somebody’s dead, we’re still alive . The line from Anne Sexton’s “February 20th” comes to mind along with a vision of Sexton in her mother’s fur coat as she wrote the lines, the coat she wore three years later when she locked herself in her garage with the car running.
I ask Max if we couldn’t impose on him to help us get our things upto the house. He looks away just as I see echoed in his eyes my own reluctance to enter this place I’ve come to think of as Mother’s tomb.
He focuses on Mia, which she must feel because she raises her camera, hiding behind it as she takes a shot of Max. She will sleep with him, I decide. The only question is where, and perhaps whether it will mean anything. A thought which, oddly, leaves me imagining Max and Mia and Ted and me out here on the island together, boating to the Pointway Inn for dinner or playing cards in the Tea Parlor, lying out on the pier late at night identifying stars.
Mia is wrong about Chawterley, of course. It isn’t exactly the same. Max starts explaining this, in Mother’s defense or to keep Mia’s attention or in embarrassment at being photographed, I’m not sure which. He trots out the details of the library Mother added five years ago. I find myself saying, “Max designed it all,” the first time he pauses for a breath, before Mia can disparage it as not green enough. He added a whole new library wing hidden in the trees to the right, with special lighting and humidity and temperature controls. He replaced the upstairs windows with triple-pane low-emissivity ones made to match the first-floor windows he left in place because Mother wouldn’t give up the original wavy leaded glass despite how energy inefficient it is. He repaired the slate roof with new slates brought from the same quarry as the original roof, carefully cut to match the size gradations and color variations of the existing ones. He designed it all to be better while looking the same as it always has to anyone who hasn’t seen the cycle of neglect and rebirth. That’s the beauty of what Max does. His restoration work is a bit like well-done plastic surgery: things looks fresher in a way that leaves everyone marveling at how nothing has changed.
Nothing important has changed. The redwood floors inside still creak invitingly. The whole place still smells of dusty chintz, polished wood, Mother’s Chanel No. 5, and cigarettes. The chimney in the Captain’s Library still whistles on a windy night the way my great-grandfather wrote of in his journals, a low whistle that generations following him have come to call the Captain’s Ghost.
At least it did the last time I was here, before Mother died.
“It’s funny to think of this as your house now, Ginger,” Betts says, two small lines creasing between her brows. “It must feel so odd.”
I wonder, then, if Chawterley does still smell of Mother: her tobacco, her perfume, her shelves and shelves of unread books. I don’t knowwhether I want it to or not. It’s the way I feel whenever I go backwards: back home to Virginia
Max helps Betts step ashore, then joins us as Mia says, “The house looks exactly the same.”
Victorian shingle-style architecture, built in 1893, Mother used to tell everyone. If the house has any flaws, she never mentioned them. It looks abandoned now, though. Haunted. Not in a ramshackle way, but in the way an old dog, left behind on his master’s death, lies prone, his face on his paws, patiently awaiting a return that will never be.
“Exactly the same,” Mia repeats with a quick glance at Max (who is looking his Max-goofiest, his hair trying to escape his head in little wisps like Mia’s).
Max, surely you’ll meet me at the Ritz at five. / Hurry up somebody’s dead, we’re still alive . The line from Anne Sexton’s “February 20th” comes to mind along with a vision of Sexton in her mother’s fur coat as she wrote the lines, the coat she wore three years later when she locked herself in her garage with the car running.
I ask Max if we couldn’t impose on him to help us get our things upto the house. He looks away just as I see echoed in his eyes my own reluctance to enter this place I’ve come to think of as Mother’s tomb.
He focuses on Mia, which she must feel because she raises her camera, hiding behind it as she takes a shot of Max. She will sleep with him, I decide. The only question is where, and perhaps whether it will mean anything. A thought which, oddly, leaves me imagining Max and Mia and Ted and me out here on the island together, boating to the Pointway Inn for dinner or playing cards in the Tea Parlor, lying out on the pier late at night identifying stars.
Mia is wrong about Chawterley, of course. It isn’t exactly the same. Max starts explaining this, in Mother’s defense or to keep Mia’s attention or in embarrassment at being photographed, I’m not sure which. He trots out the details of the library Mother added five years ago. I find myself saying, “Max designed it all,” the first time he pauses for a breath, before Mia can disparage it as not green enough. He added a whole new library wing hidden in the trees to the right, with special lighting and humidity and temperature controls. He replaced the upstairs windows with triple-pane low-emissivity ones made to match the first-floor windows he left in place because Mother wouldn’t give up the original wavy leaded glass despite how energy inefficient it is. He repaired the slate roof with new slates brought from the same quarry as the original roof, carefully cut to match the size gradations and color variations of the existing ones. He designed it all to be better while looking the same as it always has to anyone who hasn’t seen the cycle of neglect and rebirth. That’s the beauty of what Max does. His restoration work is a bit like well-done plastic surgery: things looks fresher in a way that leaves everyone marveling at how nothing has changed.
Nothing important has changed. The redwood floors inside still creak invitingly. The whole place still smells of dusty chintz, polished wood, Mother’s Chanel No. 5, and cigarettes. The chimney in the Captain’s Library still whistles on a windy night the way my great-grandfather wrote of in his journals, a low whistle that generations following him have come to call the Captain’s Ghost.
At least it did the last time I was here, before Mother died.
“It’s funny to think of this as your house now, Ginger,” Betts says, two small lines creasing between her brows. “It must feel so odd.”
I wonder, then, if Chawterley does still smell of Mother: her tobacco, her perfume, her shelves and shelves of unread books. I don’t knowwhether I want it to or not. It’s the way I feel whenever I go backwards: back home to Virginia
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