From outside came the sudden sound of tires on gravel.
The Blackfly Good-by began.
• • •
Delphine came up on Saturday, one day after the rest of the guests. Her arrival, in the early afternoon, was met with a funereal hush. The other guests murmured their condolences a second and third time, asking after her well-being. Within an hour, though, the crowd had resumed the day’s activity: Vic Hewitt had set up targets on the beach, and the guests—men and women alike—were shooting arrows in the direction of the southern tree line.
The strange thing, the awkward thing, was what to do with a single woman who was not there to be beautiful or to entertain. The ballerinas and actresses were there for either their looks or their outrageousness, the frisson of sex they lent to the party. Strangely, Alice had never felt insecure in their presence. She did not believe that anyone ever slept with them; she believed that they slept with one another, the young men and women who came to Self-Reliance each year, and a secret part of her applauded them for it. She wondered, sometimes, what it would be like to experience someone other than her husband—the only man she’d ever known.
Delphine, it turned out, was mainly ignored, except by her own parents, next to whom she sat at meals.
When George Barlow had been alive, they had occupied one another. They were the happiest couple Alice had ever known; they had the same sense of humor, and the same eccentricities. After marrying George, Delphine had stopped attending much to her appearance, preferring comfort to elegance. She wore pants, most of the time—unflattering ones at that. But George lavished praise on her appearance—not only to Delphine, but to those around her. Alice often caught them exchanging glances over meals, either in tenderness or in amusement.
Now that George was gone, however, Delphine’s quirks quickly lost whatever charm they might have had. Furthermore, in George’s absence, she had lost the target toward which her observations and conversation had once been directed; and she had seemingly also lost the ability to filter her thoughts.
For example: when asked after her well-being in the wake of her husband’s death, Delphine was frank. “It’s been awful,” she said. “I don’t sleep.”
What, wondered Alice, could one do with this sort of candor? What reply could one possibly give?
Widowed so young—and without children—Delphine had somehow become like a child herself. This feeling was heightened by the fact that she could often be found spending time with the actual children on the property: with her nephew Bear, but also with the McLellan children, and with Tessie Jo Hewitt—nine that summer—whom Delphine seemed to especially enjoy. She taught them cards; she taught them to gamble with toothpicks. She brought them on walks, and taught them the names of birds; she carried George’s binoculars around her neck, always, and passed them to the children to spy on a warbler or chickadee or hawk; and sometimes, when she thought no one was watching, she cradled the binoculars tenderly in her folded arms, as if they were her late husband himself.
Once or twice, Alice tried to approach her, to make small talk, but always Delphine demurred, waving Alice off.
“I know you’re busy,” said Delphine. “Go help Peter. It’s really all right, Bunny.”
And Alice complied, leaving her sister behind, experiencing as she did so a sense of guilty relief.
• • •
It was true, anyway, that their days were structured precisely: a fact about which Peter’s oldest friends teased him. Frank McLellan and Howie Southworth and Merrill Williams and—formerly—George Barlow. They, Alice knew, were the only people who were allowed to, and she relished this part of the annual gatherings, relished hearing others articulate in a cutting funny way what made her husband so difficult. “How do you manage, Alice,” she was often asked, and she laughed along with them, giddy and relieved, reassured that the parts of Peter that sometimes even scared her—well, they weren’t so bad after all.
The first meal of the day was at half past ten. Peter preferred to eat much earlier, priding himself on needing very little sleep, but years of experience had taught him that guests who had stayed up until three in the morning drinking had little hope of showing up for seven o’clock breakfast.
After breakfast, rain or shine, there was an organized outdoor activity, each one a competition of some kind. Hikes were races; fishing trips were derbies. At the end of the week the pair with the highest score between them would be awarded, with great pomp and circumstance, a trophy, which they were instructed to bring back with them the following year. The McLellans, sporty Catholic Manhattanites, were the toughest couple to beat, and they had won ten times, to Peter’s chagrin.
To Alice, the whole thing felt like one more way to let her husband down. She was decently athletic, but in any competition the pressure made her flounder, and Peter’s frustrated gaze upon her caused her hands to fumble anything in her grasp.
It came as a relief to her, therefore, when the daily activity was over and a snack was brought out, after which people retired to their rooms for a rest and a change of clothes before cocktail hour on the lawn, which began—precisely—at five.
From there each evening grew increasingly raucous. Dinner at seven; then parlor games around a fire, either inside or out, depending on rain.
With the parlor games came further competition, more opportunity to earn points. And these games, thought Alice, were even worse than the outdoor ones. Once or twice—at charades, for example—she could feel herself on the verge of hot tears as Peter shouted guesses at her, and then commands: Christ, Alice, try something different!
The worst was a terrible game called Dictionary that involved a colossal 1930s edition of the OED. The premise was that the leader of a given round had to find a word so obscure that he discerned, via spoken poll, that nobody knew it. Wadmiltilt had been one. Absquatulate. Opsimath. The leader, on a scrap of paper, would write down the true definition; everyone else would write down an invented definition; and then every scrap of paper would be passed back to the leader of the round, who would shuffle the scraps and read the definitions aloud, and then everyone would vote on which one he thought was right, with the winner being the participant whose entry received the most guesses.
Alice was terrible at this game in every way.
She had, she thought, no creativity, and therefore her definitions were always the same: a bird of South America was one of her favorites, or to laugh merrily, if she suspected she had a verb on her hands. Worse than that: when it was her turn to be the leader, she could never find a word unknown to all. All around her she sensed disbelief when she proposed a word like melee, which she also mispronounced, and which—when she heard the correct pronunciation from an annoyed, embarrassed Peter—she realized that she knew.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Alice was Delphine, who—despite having been denied the chance even to apply to college—seemed to know both the meaning of every single word and its etymology, which she explained unselfconsciously to her unreceptive audience. Over and over again she vetoed words, confessing happily that she knew them. The fifth time this happened, there were grumbles. The tenth time, polite silence. And finally, Delphine’s expression changed: at last, she understood the social error she had been making.
They were in the middle of another round before anyone noticed she had quietly taken herself to bed.
“Where’s Delphine?” asked Katherine Southworth, and Howie Southworth said, “She absquatulated,” and everyone laughed loudly and for a long time.
“Good riddance,” said Merrill Williams, who was the drunkest of everyone, and then, upon being shushed, he said it louder, cupping his hands about his mouth as he did so.
“Good! Riddance!” he shouted.
Some of the guests gasped. And then there was more laughter, hushed this time.
“Williams,” said Peter, lowly. “That’s enough.” Merrill rolled his eyes, stood from his chair, and tottered out the door, toward the lawn.
At last, the game broke up.
• • •
For a moment, Alice considered going after her sister. But this moment—when all the games were over and everyone did what they wanted, was always Alice’s favorite of the day. It was the only time when she felt herself to be out from under the weight of Peter’s judgment. Sufficiently inebriated, she felt charitable and warm, and she could look around at the beautiful house they owned, and through its windows at the beautiful land they owned, and she could sneak down the quiet hallway and into the quiet room where her beautiful son was sleeping, and give him a kiss, and she could feel, really feel, how lucky she was to have this lot in life. Her blessings were never more evident to her than they were in those small hours of the morning, when all the guests were free to do as they pleased.
Instead of going to her sister now, as she knew she should have done, she set off in the direction of her son’s room, tiptoeing past several guests who were sleeping, full-out, on the sofa; dodging others—the artists-in-residence was Peter’s silly name for them—who were running down to the beach in the dark to strip off and go for a swim.
But on her way down the hallway, she was stopped by the sound of someone crying quietly. She froze, listening. The noises, she realized, were coming from Delphine’s room.
She was drunk enough to feel brave, and so she lay down on the floor of the hallway and peered underneath the crack in the door, and there she saw her sister, sitting on the edge of her bed, head lowered. She was shuddering with sobs, trying to quiet them with her hands.
Alice stood, horrified. Delphine must have heard their laughter, surmised correctly who its target was. Delphine was ashamed, too, thought Alice; for the opposite reason that Alice was. For knowing too much, rather than too little. For a woman, neither was an acceptable way to be. In a moment of bravery, Alice knocked gently at the door, and when no answer came, she turned the knob.
Delphine looked up, startled. She was wearing a long white nightgown, and her dark hair was falling about her face; it gave her a ghostly aspect.
