What is wrong with her? Annie thought, coloring.
What is wrong with him? Miranda wondered. Carpe diem, carpe, carpe, carpe! she wanted to cry out. She felt quite heroic, facilitating her sister's romance when she herself was so leaden and alone. She had checked her cell phone several times, retreating to the powder room to do so, but Kit had not so much as texted her. Of course, he was still on the plane, she knew that, but that did not make her sense of abandonment any less painful. She would have thought he could send her just a few words from the airport before he left, or e-mail a picture of Henry strapped into his seat. She longed to check her phone again, but would have to wait until they were sitting down. Then she would surreptitiously remove it from her jacket pocket, hold it on her lap, and glance at it, the way Annie's boys were always doing, the way she had done when she still had a real life with real work. The thought of her smashed career came back, after leaving her alone for the last few peaceful weeks, searing and bitter, rising like bile. Furious, she nudged Frederick again. If she had lost everything and everyone, then at least Annie should have her novelist.
Frederick hesitated, then murmured that he ought to stay close to his granddaughters, and slid into the nearest chair. Juliet and Ophelia, the smocking of their red velvet dresses now smeared with a layer of golden honey that was studded with yellow challah crumbs, smiled at Miranda and licked their fingers.
In the background Annie heard a man's voice, a singsong voice mottled with static. It was Rosalyn's father, Mr. Shpuntov. He was in his room now, his words reaching the dining room through the intercom that had been installed to keep track of him and was kept on at all times.
"He sold bananas," said the voice. "Hung them in the basement to ripen. Have you ever seen bananas in the Bronx, Mr. Eight-o-seven? A basement full of bananas in the Bronx . . ."
Mr. Eight-o-seven? Annie looked at her watch. Ah. Mr. Shpuntov was telling stories to the clock.
"It was wonderful seeing all of you ladies," Frederick said to Annie and Miranda and Betty at the end of the evening.
Miranda looked at him scornfully.
"Oh dear! Mother!" she then said. "Mr. Shpuntov is drinking the dregs." And she purposefully dragged her mother off to stop Rosalyn's father in his procession down one side of the table and then up the other, raising half-finished glasses of wine to his lips and draining them.
But she saw, as she relieved Mr. Shpuntov of a goblet, that Frederick had not lingered to exchange an intimate goodbye with Annie as Miranda had hoped. He had simply nodded his head, said, "Well, bye," turned on his heel, and walked out the door to wait while Gwen held up the girls, one by one, to be kissed by Cousin Lou.
"What was wrong with Frederick?" she asked Annie as they walked home.
"How do you mean?"
"How do I mean? You know perfectly well how I mean. He was so odd and cold and standoffish."
"Frederick was perfectly pleasant," Annie said. But in her room, later, she silently echoed her sister's words: What was wrong with Frederick?
11
The mornings came later, and the air grew colder. The beauty of Westport shrank and drew back from the eye. What had been lush and green was stalky and irrelevant. Where the roads had been lined with trees swaying in the breeze there were now just bare, rigid trunks. Behind them, stripped of their leafy veils, colossal facades of houses meant to look like mansions were revealed to resemble nothing so much as the better chains of New England motor inns. Annie surreptitiously phoned the professor subletting her apartment to see if he might want to leave early, which he did not. Betty stood for hours staring out her bedroom window, her widow's walk, and mused bitterly that she was neither walking nor a widow, yet there she was, in Westport, in purgatory. And Miranda? She was quiet, quieter than the other two had ever seen her.
Miranda knew she was making a sullen spectacle of herself, but she didn't seem to be able to stop. It was very much like having a tantrum--she felt that herself. There was that same fatigued momentum. But she could not talk to either her mother or her sister about Kit and Henry, and Kit and Henry were all she could think about. Sometimes she felt herself storing up affection for them, hiding it, protecting it, like a squirrel burying nuts. It was a kind of treasure, this burrowed cache of emotional heat and urgency. Other times, she felt herself losing them, as if they were long dead and she could no longer remember their features.