“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.
“You all right, miss?” the driver asked Alice—noticing in the rearview mirror, perhaps, the green hue of her face.
She was, she told him. Fine.
“Look straight ahead out the front window. Try rolling your window down some,” said the driver. But she hadn’t brought a headscarf, and her hair flew wildly about her face the moment she did.
She rolled the window back up.
• • •
Alice kept her eyes closed until she felt the car slow, heard the road beneath them shift from pavement to dirt. She opened them to find they had reached a long private drive. To her left was a series of working farm buildings: a dairy barn, a granary, a slaughterhouse. A woman and child stood out front of them, staring, not waving.
And then, at last, the Preserve: stands of tall pines that threw the earth into shadow, sloping lawn where others had been felled. At the top of the lawn was, she surmised, the house the driver had described.
Self-Reliance, said a little sign that they passed as they approached. The building itself was colossal. Its central structure was three stories tall, built of rough logs. Delicate wooden carvings descended from its overhanging roof and garlanded the shutters that framed its large windows. Two wings sprouted from its sides; a portico covered the drive. Gardens abounded, brimming with cultivated flowers designed to look wild. Scattered around it were smaller outbuildings, one a sort of miniature version of the house itself.
“My word,” said Delphine.
The most shocking thing about it, thought Alice, was how far it was from anything else. How much work it would have taken to build such a compound in the middle of the woods. The Van Laars had placed the house atop a rise in the land, so that everything near Self-Reliance was also beneath it. Like Olympus, thought Alice, to whom such references did not normally occur.
The driver inched forward until the car met the grass and then rolled to a stop. It was only then that she noticed Peter, standing still as a buck in the shadow cast by the house. Waiting for them.
He stepped forward. He was even taller than she had remembered. Older-looking too. A hint of silver was in his hair, lit up brilliantly by sun as he strode across the lawn.
The driver hopped out. They waited a beat, until they realized he would not be opening their doors.
Peter was close now, and the knot inside Alice exploded into riotous pulsing nerves that threatened to chatter her teeth.
What would they say to one another, she wondered. What on earth was there to say to a grown man? Throughout her school years, she’d been surrounded only by girls. She reminded herself that dancing with Peter had been all right; the ballroom of the Waldorf had been dark and loud and there’d been little need for conversation. But here, in the broad light of day—everything was different.
Delphine rescued her.
“What a journey,” she said to him, happily, stepping out of the car. “I thought we might never make it.”
All around them, the smell of sap in sun. Beyond that, fresh water: the lake.
Peter smiled, hands in pockets, his gaze at their shoes.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. And he held out two hands for their suitcases, which the driver gladly relinquished.
