“I finally fled to France, where I stayed for almost a year, until I learned that Darraugh had suddenly reappeared at Exeter. One of the masters inspired his confidence, it seemed. It was still years before he talked to me again, but when he married, his wife acted as a peacemaker. Elise was a lovely girl. She softened all o? us-well, she softened Darraugh and me. Certainly not Mother, who kept trying to make us despise her for having been a typist when Darraugh met her. When we lost Elise, to leukemia, Darraugh froze over again.”
I pulled over to the side of the road to clean off the headlights and the buildup of snow at the bottom of the windshield. When I got back into the car, Geraldine asked if I’d found anything else in the pond.
“Bits of Crown Derby. One of Kylie Ballantine’s masks.”
“That was my doing,” she said. “How strange it is to talk about all of this so calmly, when I held it fast inside me for five decades. We all bought masks to support Kylie after she lost her teaching position at the University of Chicago. And then, after Calvin brought Renee home, Renee made it clear to me that I had only been one of Calvin’s loves. Only one of the women who traveled this road to Eagle River with him all those years ago. I threw the mask in the pond in the middle of a night much like this one.”
She was quiet for a bit; I thought she’d gone back to sleep, but it was the past she’d journeyed to. “I don’t believe Calvin ever took Renee to the cottage. The family’s agreement with the government had expired, as I said, and Calvin wouldn’t come here if it wasn’t his private home anymore. Besides, he was busy establishing himself in political and social circles with his new wife: after the hearings, he became a public darling. I couldn’t help noticing him, you know. Even when I returned from France and found my wits again, I couldn’t help noticing his comings and goings. It was a small balm to the spirit to know that even if Kylie Ballantine and a dozen others had lain with him on the bearskin rug before the cottage fire, Renee herself never did so.”
“So Catherine doesn’t know about this cottage?” I cried out. “Have we come all this way for nothing?”
“I would much prefer it if you didn’t shout at me, young woman. Calvin didn’t have much interest in children. He didn’t care that Darraugh might be his son, and he paid little heed to his and Renee’s boy. But when Catherine was left to Renee’s care and to his, he became as proud as if he had just invented children and she was the first example ever created. He was growing old, but Renee was still young. Renee had always worked for his firm; he let her take over more responsibility. She was in her element, hiring and firing, buying and selling. Calvin devoted himself to the girl. He used to take Catherine to Wisconsin to fish and ride, until he stopped driving some four years back.”
“He told you these things?”
She gave a brittle laugh. “Good heavens, no. I kept in touch with him through servants’ gossip: it’s how the wealthy have always kept track of each other. One’s servants know everything that one does, and their friends are the servants in the other great houses. Until Renee built a thick wall of silence around his illness, I would know whatever Calvin did; Lisa could tell me. If she wanted to punish me, it was with tales of great events Renee and Calvin had taken part in, with him glowing proudly over Renee. If Lisa wanted to comfort me, she told me of their quarrels.”
I thought of my mother’s words on the worries of grand ladies. I was glad of the poverty I’d grown up in, glad of having to earn every dime I’d ever spent. You pay a high price for money, too high a price.
We fell silent while I concentrated on the road, stopping every thirty or forty miles to clean the headlights. By the time we reached Wassau, it was midnight, but the snowplows were out and the road became easier to negotiate. I pulled over at a truck stop for a cup of bitter coffee and a detail map of the north woods. Back in the car, I handed the map to Geraldine and asked her to see whether she could piece together the route to the lodge. She couldn’t read the map, she said: the print was too small, even with her glasses.
She dozed off again. I had started the journey exhausted; the cones of snow swirling into the headlights hypnotized me into drowsiness. I turned on the radio, but only picked up all-night revivals of religion. I pushed the tape player in case Marc had been listening to something.
An old man’s scratchy voice came through the speakers. “Oh, no, young man, no tape recorders. You may take some notes, but no one puts my words on tape.”
A younger, deeper voice responded, “Very well, sir.”
Several loud clicks followed, and then the young man spoke again, his voice muffled. “I’m writing a book about Kyhe Ballantine. I found a letter from her to Armand Pelletier in which she mentions a meeting with you.”
The Saturn fishtailed madly. I fought for control, spinning the steering wheel in the direction of the skid. By some miracle, we ended up in the middle of the road, facing south, but we weren’t in the ditch.