“The truth,” Barbara was saying loudly, “is that every single person in Bibville knows about what your father has done. Leiberg Channing, champion of the tort cases, darling of the Democratic Party, finally brought to its knees by the Republican government it so hates. Or, let me be specific, not Leiberg, not Channing, but Dale Beegan, who never could manage to get his name on the plaque at 422 North Market.”
This stilled the room. Barbara was staring at her husband with eyes that had lost their light. Dale had stopped his fidgeting and was studying his locked-together hands. Evelyn felt the energy draining from her, and the orange-wax smell that Valeriya must have put on the wooden floors seemed like it was getting stronger.
It was her father who finally broke the silence by clearing his throat. He patted his knees. “Well, I’d best be returning to preparing for this deposition. Got any other questions?”
Evelyn shook her head no and raised her eyes toward her mother, who was now looking lost and distracted in the living room. Evelyn tiptoed backward and turned off the lights as she exited.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Social History
Upstairs, Evelyn sat cross-legged in the window seat of her childhood bedroom, looking out toward the creek and the bay grass, watching the neighbors’ affenpinscher tussle with a branch just outside of a clump of trees.
Peg Oney’s case. That was when her father’s career was starting to take off. He came home on weekends sometimes, but just as often he stayed in Beaumont, Texas, or Caddo, Arkansas, or Tallahassee, Florida, places Evelyn looked up in the giant atlas in the piano room. She still thought her father was glamorous then, that his double-breasted suits were fancy and his styled hair made him look like Howard Keel, not that the suits were tacky and the hair was overdone. Sometimes she wished she could still see him like that, like when she was a little girl and she’d slip into his study and pat his smooth leather briefcase as he’d pass her a butterscotch with a wink. She would stay there for a long time sometimes, quietly braiding the fringe of his rug as she listened to him scribble on his yellow pad.
Her parents had met in her mother’s sophomore fall at Hollins, a small, horsey college in Virginia. Barbara Topfer had been born in Baltimore but her family left Peabody Heights for the suburbs in the 1950s. Her father ran off with a young secretary at his shipping company when Barbara was a teenager. He sent enough money that Barbara and her mother were comfortable, but Barbara saw his absence as a shame and a judgment. Stranded with her mother in Towson, Barbara watched movies, and Barbara read books, and Barbara was pretty, and Barbara decided her destiny was greater than to stay where she was. She applied to Hollins College, and by the time she got there, she had her story all worked out: she was from old shipping money, and her father hadn’t run off with a secretary but had died young, leaving Barbara a great fortune. (Evelyn had been startled to hear this version of events from a friend of her mother’s from Hollins.)
Barbara’s sophomore fall, she’d gone to a University of North Carolina homecoming and met Dale Beegan. Dale, who’d gotten a scholarship to NC State for college and had near-perfect grades there, had made it to UNC for law school, where he was a star. Barbara’s date for the weekend was one of the preppy classmates Dale couldn’t stand, so he took great pleasure in wooing her away. Barbara was easily wooed; she thought his ambition, charm, and blue-collar roots made for a political cocktail. She once told Evelyn that she’d believed Dale was on his way to becoming an ambassador or a senator or even president. Barbara had ambition, too, raw ambition that she as a girl wasn’t allowed to admit to. In Hollins in the 1960s, that ambition was allowed to go precisely one place: wifehood. If Barbara couldn’t drive the car, she wanted to sit in the passenger seat. They married after Dale’s law-school graduation; Barbara never finished college.
It wasn’t until Evelyn was at Sheffield that Evelyn deduced that something must have happened to explain the twelve-year gap between her parents’ wedding and her birth, when Barbara was an ancient-for-Hollins-girls thirty-three. She found out what that was one afternoon on summer break from Sheffield, when Barbara, deep into a bottle of white wine, called her to the terrace to warn her that women’s fertility does not last long.
Barbara had trouble getting pregnant once she and Dale decided to try, she told Evelyn, who winced and turned toward the creek. The weeks stretched to an unbelievable length as she followed her doctor’s advice of carefully prescribed intercourse (“Mom!” Evelyn said, but that did not stop Barbara’s speech), waited, and wondered if she felt especially tired, then felt the regular cramps and disappointment return. It took a year until Barbara was finally pregnant.