Before that?
Delphine had always, always been afforded more respect than Alice had. Even as Peter complained about her, there was a certain admiration in his voice.
Perhaps it had all been a ruse.
Perhaps they had always known: Peter’s mother and father. All of their friends.
Perhaps Peter and Delphine and McLellan and his wife all went to dinner together, in Manhattan. Perhaps it was excused. Perhaps they came here together, to Self-Reliance, in moments when Alice was in Albany—and perhaps this was the reason she knew the staff so well.
Could it be that Peter and his father had chosen Alice not in spite of her youth and inexperience—two qualities they often lamented aloud as deficits that Alice had to work to overcome—but because of them? Because she would do whatever they commanded her to do, all of the time. Because she wouldn’t be difficult.
Because it would not occur to her that a woman like Delphine was the type of person Peter really wanted.
• • •
The two of them were asleep, unclothed. Delphine had her head on Peter’s chest. His arm was curled around her shoulders. Her hair fanned out behind her on the bed.
Peter and Alice had never slept like that.
When she was eighteen years old, when she was newly married to a man more than a decade her senior, living away from her childhood home for the first time in her life, pregnant and uncomfortable and frightened: never once had Peter held her so tenderly. Instead, citing insomnia, he had rolled to the opposite side of the bed and lay straight as a pencil while she, Alice, curled onto her side and held a pillow for comfort and missed her friends back in New York City and her sister and her father and even her mother.
Alice stood there watching them a while longer. She thought for a moment of waking them—slamming the door, shouting, making certain that they knew she knew—but then it would change, all of it. Her whole life would change.
Alice personally knew only one couple who had ever gotten divorced: people her parents had been friends with.
These days the man was still in their group, with a much younger wife. The woman had all but disappeared. It was said that she no longer lived in New York; she had moved to Connecticut. From the way she was spoken about, it felt as if she had died.
Alice asked herself: Could she live this way, always pretending? Could she walk out of the room, into the hallway; could she close the door gently, and face Peter and Delphine at dinner, and pretend to have seen nothing, for the rest of her life?
Yes, and yes, and yes, she thought.
As long as she had Bear—the answer would be yes.
• • •
She closed the door as gently as she could.
She walked to the sunroom, where she found the tumbler of gin. She poured a tall glass of it and drank it in several swigs. She deserved this, she reasoned. She poured another. Drank from that.
As she drank, she let herself cry.
By the time she finished, she wasn’t standing up well.
She had had nothing at all to eat that day.
She walked out of the sunroom, the hallway spinning, the ground coming up to meet her. She walked into the great room, where the rest of the party was gathered—the senior Van Laars, and the McLellans, and the actresses, and the clients. And there, by the fireplace, Tessie Jo and Bear. All of them had been drawn to the great room by boredom; all of them were deciding what to do next.
They stopped when she entered. She swayed slightly; she caught herself with her back foot.
They looked at her, their faces masks of judgment.
None of them mattered to her. She spoke only to Bear.
“Come here,” she said, trying to smile, holding both hands in his direction.
An uncomfortable silence.
“Where are you going, Alice?” asked Peter’s father. He furrowed his brow.
“Bear’s been asking to go out in the rowboat,” she told him. Her father-in-law frowned, as if he hadn’t understood her. Surely, she thought, she hadn’t been slurring that badly.
She tried again.
This time, Bear stood up, unsteadily; his grandfather gestured for him to sit back down.
“I’m afraid Bear and I already have plans,” he said. “We’re about to set out on a walk.” He turned to his grandson. “Bear,” he said. “Are your boots on?”
Bear, tense, looked back and forth between his grandfather and his mother. Alice loved this about him: loved the care with which he handled others. The concern he had for their well-being. He thought frequently of how to make people happier; he picked her flowers from the garden. Drew love notes for her in school.
A generous impulse in Alice told her to free her son from his predicament. “It’s all right, Bear,” she said. “We’ll go boating another time.” Too late, she realized that her voice had cracked with emotion as she spoke. She turned on her heel and tottered out of the great room, then walked down the hallway and through the southern door.
• • •
Outside, the sky was darkening. A few drops of rain pattered onto her face, rousing her briefly from her stupor. Giving her permission to cry outright.
She’d go out in a boat by herself, she thought. She’d escape from the party, from her sister and husband. She pictured it: she’d row out into the middle of the lake, and lie in the belly of the boat, and simply float like that awhile, letting herself be rocked by the water in perfect solitude until she had gathered herself.
Then she’d return to the party.
