At seven thirty, we met at the top of the stairs. I had bathed and repaired my hair as best I could in the available time. I had also put on a touch of lipstick and rouge, since my face was so devoid of color as to be nearly transparent, and dabbed some eau de toilette behind my ears. Ellis had nicked himself shaving, and there were comb marks in his wet hair.
“Ready?” he said.
“Absolutely not. You?”
“Courage, my dear,” he said, offering his arm. I curled my icy fingers in the crook of his elbow.
As Ellis and I entered the drawing room, my father-in-law, Colonel Whitney Hyde, raised his face and aimed it at the grandfather clock. He was leaning against the mantel, right next to a delicate cage hanging from an elaborate floor stand. The canary within was the color of orange sorbet, a plump, smooth ovoid with a short fan of a tail, chocolate spots for eyes, and a sweet beak. He was almost too perfect to be real, and not once had he sung during my four-year tenure in this house, even as his quarters were reduced to help him concentrate.
My mother-in-law, Edith Stone Hyde, sat perched on the edge of a silk jacquard chair the color of a robin’s egg, Louis XIV style. Her gray eyes latched onto us the moment we entered the room.
Ellis crossed the carpet briskly and kissed her cheek. “Happy New Year, Mother,” he said. “I hope you’re feeling better.”
“Yes, Happy New Year,” I added, stepping forward.
She turned her gaze on me and I stopped in my tracks. Her jaw was set, her eyes unblinking. Over by the mantel, the ends of the Colonel’s mustache twitched. The canary fluttered from its perch to the side of the cage and clung there, its fleshless toes and translucent claws wrapped around the bars.
Tick, tock went the clock. I thought my knees might go out from under me.
“Better…Hmmm…Am I feeling better…” She spoke slowly, clearly, mulling the words. Her brow furrowed ever so slightly. She drummed her fingers on the arm of the chair, starting with her smallest finger and going up, twice, and then reversing the order. The rhythm was that of a horse cantering. The pause felt interminable.
She looked suddenly up at Ellis. “Are you referring to my migraine?”
“Of course,” Ellis said emphatically. “We know how you suffer.”
“Do you? How kind of you. Both of you.”
Tick, tock.
Ellis straightened his spine and his tie and went to the sideboard to pour drinks. Whiskeys for the men, sherries for the ladies. He delivered his mother’s, then his father’s, and then brought ours over.
“Tell me, how was the party?” his mother said, gazing at the delicate crystal glass she held in her lap. Her voice was completely without inflection.
“It was quite an event,” Ellis said, too loudly, too enthusiastically. “The Pews certainly do things right. An orchestra, endless champagne, never-ending trays of delicious tidbits. You’d never know there was a war going on. She asked after you, by the way. Was very sorry to hear you weren’t feeling well. And the funniest thing happened at the stroke of midnight—did you hear? People will be talking about it for years.”
The Colonel harrumphed and tossed back his whiskey. The canary jumped from one side of its cage to the other.
“I’ve heard rather a lot,” my mother-in-law said coldly, still staring into her glass. Her eyes shifted deliberately to me.
The blood rose to my cheeks.
“So, there we all were,” Ellis continued bravely, “counting down to midnight, when all of a sudden there was a positively huge explosion. Well, even though we’re a continent away from the action, you can imagine what we thought! We nearly—”
“Silence!” roared the Colonel, spinning to face us. His cheeks and bulbous nose had gone purple. His jowls trembled with rage.
I recoiled and clutched Ellis’s arm. Even my mother-in-law jumped, although she regained her composure almost immediately.
In our set, battles were won by sliding a dagger coolly in the back, or by the quiet turn of a screw. People crumpled under the weight of an indrawn sigh or a carefully chosen phrase. Yelling was simply not done.
The Colonel slammed his empty glass down on the mantel. “Do you think we’re fools? Do you think we haven’t heard all about the real highlight of the party? What people will really be talking about for years? About your disgraceful, your depraved…your…contemptible behavior?”
What happened next was a blur of insults and rage. Apparently we had done more than just get drunk and make fools of ourselves, and apparently Ellis’s moment of temper had not been his worst misdeed. Apparently, he had also crowed loudly about our decision to go monster hunting and “show the old man up,” stridently proclaiming his intentions even as Hank was using a foot to shove him into the back of the car.
The Colonel and Ellis closed in on each other across the enormous silk carpet, pointing fingers and trying to outshout each other. The Colonel accused us of going out of our way to try to embarrass him, as well as being loathsome degenerates and generally useless members of society, and Ellis argued that there was nothing he could do, and for that matter the Colonel did nothing either. What exactly did his father expect him to do? Take up a trade?
My mother-in-law sat silently, serenely, with a queerly calm look on her face. Her knees and ankles were pressed together in ladylike fashion, tilted slightly to the side. She held her unsipped sherry by the stem, her eyes widening with delight at particularly good tilts. Then, without warning, she snapped.
The Colonel had just accused Ellis of conveniently coming down with color blindness the moment his country needed him, the cowardice of which had caused him—his father and a veteran—the greatest personal shame of his life, when Edith Stone Hyde swiveled to face her husband, bug-eyed with fury.
“How dare you speak of my son like that!”
To my knowledge, she had never raised her voice before in her life, and it was shocking. She continued in a strained but shrill tone that quavered with righteous indignation—Ellis could no more help being color-blind than other unfortunates could help having clubfeet, didn’t he realize, and the color blindness, by the way, hadn’t come from her side of the family. And speaking of genetics, she blamed her (and here she actually flung out an arm and pointed at me) for Ellis’s downfall. An unbalanced harlot just like her mother.
“Now see here! That’s my wife you’re talking about!” Ellis shouted.
“She was no harlot!” the Colonel boomed.
For two, maybe three seconds, there wasn’t a sound in the room but the ticking of the clock and the flapping of the canary, which had been driven to outright panic. It was a haze of pale orange, banging against the sides of its cage and sending out bursts of tiny, downy feathers.
Ellis and I looked at each other, aghast.
“Oh, really?” my mother-in-law said calmly. “Then what, exactly, was she, dear?”
The Colonel moved his mouth as though to answer, but nothing came out.
“It’s all right. I always suspected. I saw the way you used to look at her,” my mother-in-law continued. Her eyes burned brightly with the indignity of it all. “At least you weren’t foolish enough to run off with her.”
I was almost compelled to defend the Colonel, to point out that everybody had looked at my mother that way—they couldn’t help themselves—but knew better than to open my mouth.
My mother-in-law turned suddenly to Ellis.
“And you—I warned you. As embarrassing as it was, I probably could have tolerated it if you’d just wanted to carouse, to sow some wild oats, but no, despite all the other very suitable matches you could have made, you snuck off to marry”—she paused, pursing her lips and shaking her head quickly as she decided what to call me—“this. And I was right. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. It’s positively shameful the way the two of you and that beastly Boyd fellow carry on. I despair of the grandchildren. Although, frankly, I’ve nearly lost hope in that regard. Perhaps it’s just as well.” She sighed and went calm again, smoothing her forehead and staring into the distance to revel in her victory. She’d successfully dressed down every other person in the room and thought it was now over: game, set, match.
She was wrong. Had she looked, she’d have noticed that Ellis was turning a brilliant shade of crimson that rose from the base of his neck, spread beneath his blond hair, and went all the way to the tips of his ears.
“Let’s talk about shame, shall we?” he said quietly, ferociously. “There’s absolutely nothing that I—or Maddie, or anyone else—could do to bring further shame upon this family. You”—his voice rose in a crescendo until he was shouting again, pointing his glass at his father and shaking it, sloshing whiskey onto the carpet—“shamed all of us beyond redemption the moment you faked those pictures!”
The ensuing silence was horrifying. My mother-in-law’s mouth opened into a surprised O. The small crystal glass she’d been holding slipped to the floor and shattered.
Tick, tock went the clock.