This meant two things: that he’d be harder to find.

That he’d have to be more resourceful.

II

Bear

Alice

1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975

Alice Ward, seventeen and a half years old, kept her eyes closed tightly on the way to Grand Central. It was a nervous habit: one she had had for as long as she could remember. It soothed her, allowed her to pretend, if just for an instant, that she was alone in the world. She did it only when she believed that no one was watching. In this case, she was wrong.

“Alice,” said her sister, Delphine, the elder of the two. “Are you sleeping?”

Alice opened her eyes.

•   •   •

Three weeks earlier, in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, she had made her debut. Her military escort was a West Point junior whose name she had already forgotten. Her civilian escort was supposed to have been Stuart Parker, an unpleasant boy she had known since birth, until—miracle of miracles—he had come down with measles the day before the event. Delphine had been the one to come up with a last-minute replacement: a college friend of her husband George. Someone who happened to be staying with the two of them while in Manhattan to meet with a client.

His name, said Delphine, was Peter Van Laar. And yes: he had a tuxedo.

Alice’s mother had been enthusiastic. Her father less so.

“Van Laar,” he had said. “Do we know the Van Laars?”

They did, her mother assured him. The Van Laars of Albany. (In her tone was a note of concession: Yes, Albany. Still.) Bankers, thought Mrs. Ward. Conservationists. A Roosevelt had been very lié with the grandfather.

“How old is he?” Alice had asked.

“Oh, George’s age,” Delphine had said, waving a hand in the air, as if something so trivial as age did not matter at all in a man.

The answer, Alice learned later, was twenty-nine.

•   •   •

After a week, an envelope arrived in the mail. It was addressed to Miss Ward and Chaperone, and inside it was an invitation to Peter Van Laar’s summer home in the Adirondack Mountains—the one he had spoken of, with surprising tenderness, while seated next to Alice at dinner.

I very much hope that you’ll come, Peter had written, in a steady hand. I so enjoyed meeting you.

•   •   •

Now here they were, Alice and Delphine, awaiting a platform announcement at Grand Central. It was odd, actually, to be standing side by side like this; they had not spent so much time together since they were very small.

Delphine was five years older and five inches taller than Alice. She played the piano brilliantly. She never seemed shy. She had an intellectual air about her and an interest in politics, two traits that made her stand out from the rest of the Ward family, whose main topics of conversation at the dinner table tended toward gossip. At one point, Delphine had posed to her parents the question of applying to Barnard or Radcliffe, an idea at which her father had scoffed, even though, at Brearley, she had been first in her class.

Alice, meanwhile, had barely graduated.

Now Delphine was twenty-two and married to George Barlow. It was a love match, one that almost did not happen, due to their father’s belief that George, despite his indisputable pedigree, was an eccentric. Soon she’d no doubt be expecting a baby. Alice could see Delphine’s future laid out ahead of them clearly; it was her own she couldn’t imagine. When she tried, she saw something hazy and indistinct. It gave her a knot in her stomach.

•   •   •

At North Creek they were met by an unusual car driven by a small ruddy man wearing corduroy clothes, Miss Ward on a card in an ungloved hand.

The driver, uncomfortably chatty, had asked questions of them that horrified Alice with their intimacy. Where had they come from, he wanted to know. Were they married? Did they work? She looked sideways at Delphine, waiting to see whether she would say anything, but Delphine was placid. Amused, even. She answered all his questions; asked him some in return.

“Who’ll be hosting you at the Preserve?” asked the driver, and Alice waited for Delphine to respond, but instead she said: “Go on, Alice.”

“Peter Van Laar,” said Alice.

“Father or son?” asked the driver.

And without waiting for a reply, he expounded, at length, on the son’s reputation in the town—not terrific, as it turned out—coldness being the primary criticism, which didn’t bother Alice so much. She liked the cold. Got along best with people who were tempered in their movements and speech. In fact—though she had been nervous to meet him at the Junior Assembly, afraid that the difference in their ages would leave her with nothing to say—what she noticed and appreciated straightaway about Peter Van Laar was his stillness. His height and his steady blue eyes. The impression he gave of control.

They had danced together three times. Four, if you counted a half-finished turn about the floor at the end, just before she was pulled away by a relative saying good night.

With each rotation he had held her closer. He was very handsome. He had smelled, Alice recalled, like the woods.

“There’s a story about the house,” the driver was saying.

The roads were turning serpentine, and her stomach was beginning to churn. She leaned her head against a window.

“Are there ghosts in it?” said Delphine, gaily, but the driver shook his head.

“Nothing like that. It was brought over from Switzerland. The whole house, is what I’m saying. Chalet, they call it.” And he gave a little sound that was something like a laugh.

“Fascinating,” said Delphine.

“Every part of it. The family shipped it over. Built it up again over here. This was near eighty years ago. You can imagine the manpower that took. Built a skid road just for the lumber. Dozen horses pulled every load. It’s still told about in the town. Every man and boy in Shattuck over nine years old was hired by the Van Laars to put it all back together.”

“Can you imagine, Alice?” said Delphine, and Alice pinched the back of one hand with the fingers of the other, willing the contents of her stomach to remain in place.

“Guess what they named the place,” said the driver.

He waited.

“The house, I mean. Guess what that old family named the house,” he said.

“Give me a minute. I’m thinking,” said Delphine, seriously. And then she said: “Manderley.”

“No,” said the driver. “Self-Reliance. Self-Reliance!” He slapped his knee once.

Neither of them responded; Alice because she didn’t know what was funny, and Delphine, presumably, because she was processing the joke.

“Wasn’t the Van Laars moved that lumber,” said the driver, helpfully.

“That is funny,” said Delphine, though Alice could discern that even she, at last, felt uncomfortable. They were, after all, guests of the Van Laars.