“No one seemed to think I might mourn MacKenzie when he died, but
his death marked the end of many things for me,” Geraldine added for me. “To my mother, his death was one more inconvenience he had caused her: odd, when you consider that my marriage to him was her idea. Hers and MacKenzie’s father’s. Mr. Blair Graham was one of my father’s business associates, and everyone thought that marriage would settle both MacKenzie and me down, turning him from the temptations of New York City and me from those of Chicago when we started our own nursery. Children are supposed to be a woman’s greatest joy, after all. How strange that Mother would tell me that so often when I brought her no joy at all. Except perhaps the joy of exercising her will over mine.”
“Your mother didn’t think Darraugh should mourn his father’s death, either?” As always happened in talking to Geraldine, I had to struggle to keep on the subject, or to remember what the subject was. “Was that why Darraugh ran away from school when your husband died?”
Geraldine’s hands began to pleat the stiff fabric of her skirt. “My mother was still alive when Darraugh’s son was born. She took his naming the boy `MacKenzie’ as a personal insult, rather than a tribute to a well-loved parent. She thought Darraugh ought to name the boy Matthew for my father. Or even call him after her own father. Virgil Fabian Taverner-he was named during the Victorian fashion for all things Roman. Be that as it may, Mother rewrote her will a few days after MacKenzie’s baptism. None of the boy’s charms, and my grandson has always had most winning ways, could persuade Mother not to punish Darraugh through his son.”
“I know young MacKenzie; he does have a lot of charm. What was the charity your mother took such exception to?”
She didn’t understand what I was talking about at first. When I reminded her that she had written a check to one of Calvin Bayard’s charities, she again stiffened, but said, “How strange that I can’t remember. At the time it seemed of consuming importance-my action, Mother’s intrusiveness. And yet, the memory has vanished like some long-since plucked fruit.”
“It wasn’t the Committee for Social Thought and Justice? Renee Bayard said that was one that your cousin Olin was particularly determined to prove a Communist front.”
She shook her head again. “Young woman, you must be now the age I was then. Everything seems fresh and clear in your mind’s eye, but if you
live to my great age, you will find that the past becomes such a broad landscape that many memories, even precious ones, get hidden under leaves and hillocks. You will have to excuse me now. Conversation fatigues me as it didn’t formerly.”
I got up to leave; Lisa smiled in triumph.
“You’re very kind to have taken the time. How did Mr. Bayard come to be involved with Mr. Llewellyn to the extent of providing the money he needed to start his own publishing firm?” I asked.
“I was never involved in the business life of New Solway’s businessmen. When I was a young woman, we were supposed to be decorative, not to have heads for great affairs.”
I shook off Lisa’s arm as she tried to steer me to the door. “Did Mr. Llewellyn support the same charity that you did?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t know, young woman. It’s possible. But it was all a long time ago, in another country.”
Ms. Graham often dotted her speech with what sounded like quotations that I didn’t recognize. I knew this one. As I put my shoes on in the building’s foyer, I could even supply the missing second part of it: besides, the wench is dead.
I didn’t think Geraldine had forgotten anything: the name of the charity, why her mother had objected so strongly or even how Calvin Bayard came to support Llewellyn. But for whatever reason, Geraldine thought the person she’d been in those days was dead. Her mother had triumphed-her mother’s portrait hung over her head day after day to remind her.
How had she spent her days back then, while Mrs. Drummond ran Larchmont? Maybe she’d thrown herself into motherhood and amateur dramatics, or county politics. Marriage had been supposed to settle both her and MacKenzie Graham. I remembered again the articles describing her return from Europe in the early thirties, looking “interestingly thin.” She’d slept around, gotten pregnant, gone to Switzerland for an abortion? And MacKenzie? What form had his New York City peccadilloes taken?
Even with thirteen bedrooms to wander through, how had Geraldine endured all those years with her mother and a husband with whom she had nothing in common? What had she been mourning, when she said she mourned MacKenzie’s death?
CHAPTER 42
Silence Is-?