He never made it to see his family friend that day. Sylvie skipped class, ate lunch with him, and then asked him if he’d like to go on a drive in her car down the Pennsylvania country roads. He agreed. Sylvie took him by Roderick, confessing the huge and terrifying responsibility that had just been foisted upon her. “What would you do with a house like this?” she asked him. “Why would he choose me?” she went on. “I certainly don’t deserve it.” James looked at her and said, “If he gave it to you, he must have thought you deserved it.”
She was grateful to have an eager listener. Even more grateful, in a way, that he was someone she barely knew, someone who had no stake in her life; for that day she’d assumed she would never see him again. But James made sure that they did. Sylvie had never had a boyfriend before James, so she had nothing to compare him to, but she enjoyed the comforting, protective attention he gave her—doting without being grabby, respectful without being cold. After that first day’s drive, he took the train down from Boston regularly, and she sometimes went up to visit him. She met his family, a successful group, who lived in a big, rambling house in Concord that had lacy curtains in every window, rattling baseboard heat, and a dollhouse-size guest room that was always made up for Sylvie. At the time, James was helping his father run the family’s burgeoning plastering business. The hope was for James to take over once his dad retired, but James was trying to unwind himself from the responsibility. “It’s too fussy,” he said. “And messy.” Furthermore, his world would remain maddeningly small if he took over the business, as he would be buying materials from suppliers he’d known since he was little, employing the same guys or their sons, and probably repairing and restoring houses in the same smattering of neighborhoods his father had relied on for years. James wanted to be something else, something bigger and more important; he just didn’t know what that was yet.
As they got to know each other, James became increasingly enamored by Bates lore. He grilled her about Swithin, about her grandfather’s quarries, which her father now ran, and about the estate she’d inherited. A few months into dating, James told Sylvie that it seemed like a shame to have inherited that big, beautiful house and not live in it. His father had relieved him of the family business duties; he could find a different kind of job in Philadelphia … if Sylvie would answer one question first. And then he slid a small, velvet ring box across the table.
It was a relief to be engaged—Sylvie finally felt like everyone else. James doted on her joyfully and asked if she wanted children. Sylvie remembered her grandfather prodding her to have kids someday, saying that the world needed more people like her. Yes, she decided, she would live in his house; she would fulfill his wishes.
She told James she couldn’t bear to change anything at Roderick. “At least not for a while,” she backtracked, wondering if wanting to preserve a house with the exact specifications of its previous owner sounded a bit crazy, kind of like the stories she’d heard of penniless, once-aristocratic spinsters who remained for decades in filthy, unkempt estates—the clutter piling up, the cats multiplying, and the house deteriorating devastatingly fast. But James stroked her hair. “It’s okay. We won’t ever change it if you don’t want to. We’ll keep it up to the letter.” He understood, she thought. Finally, someone understood.
The next step, of course, was for James to meet Sylvie’s family. On Thanksgiving, she and James drove to Roderick, where the family had held Thanksgiving dinner for fifty years and had no intention of holding it anywhere else, despite the fact that Sylvie wasn’t yet living there. On the way there, James kept relining his lips with Chapstick, looking again and again at the label inside his suit jacket, as if there was some sort of cheat sheet inscribed there that would tell him exactly what he should say. For the most part, he got along with everyone just fine. Sylvie’s extended family shook James’s hand and talked to him about sports and cars and Boston. Sylvie’s great-uncle Clayton asked James what he did for a living, and James paused, looking expectant, and then said he was waiting for the right opportunity to come along. Sylvie’s cousin Paul, who was almost twenty years her senior, clapped James on the shoulder and told him to try finance: there was a lot of money to be made in the stock market.