“Terrance and Marlene are already at the house, Press. I’m sure Daddy and Nonie are there by now too.” I spoke quietly, unsure of how much to say, how to balance my own grief with my concern for him. It felt awkward, as though I were relearning how to talk, how to think.
Nonie and Michael had gone ahead in my father’s Hudson Hornet so Nonie could give Michael lunch and then put him down for his nap. You might wonder that I let Michael out of my sight now that he was my only child. It’s not that I didn’t love Michael as much as Eva, or that I didn’t worry that I could easily lose him as well. Michael has a goodness about him that’s much like his sister’s. A natural smile. An eagerness to please. He was with the two people whom I trusted most in the world and, given what had happened to Eva, I trusted them far more than I trusted myself.
Press didn’t respond, but watched the road, his hands restless on the wheel.
When Rachel Carstairs—though she was just pretty Rachel Webb, my roommate at Burton Hall College in 1950—told me about the man from Old Gate she wanted me to meet, she warned me that he wasn’t exactly handsome. But I’d immediately found Hasbrouck Preston Bliss oddly charming and funny. I had met enough handsome, not-very-smart boys at college mixers. I wanted something more.
“Press is so much fun, Charlotte. You won’t believe how much fun he is, and he’s crazy for pretty blondes. The perfect person to bring you out of your shell. You deserve some happiness, darling, and you know as well as I do that you don’t want to spend your life slaving away as an art teacher or whatever it is that you think you’re going to do.” Such a speech from anyone who wasn’t Rachel would’ve sounded vapid and, perhaps, cruel, but it was the sort of thing that Rachel—her dark eyes wide and slyly innocent—could say with utter seriousness. “Plus, he’s been moaning for the past two years that he wants to get married and stop knocking around that huge house with just his mother and those creepy servants. Well, I think they’re creepy, anyway.”
I’d never thought of myself as having a shell, and was slightly offended, but then Rachel was always on me to get out and socialize and to stop studying so much. I was what well-meaning adults called “bookish.” (The teenage Michael is like me in that way.) So Rachel brought me home to Old Gate and threw Preston and me together at her mother’s Thanksgiving Saturday open house.
In the early afternoon, the younger guests gathered in the pool house where there were shuffleboard, pool and ping-pong tables, a long, mirrored bar, and a real juke box with flashing yellow and green lights. Despite all the activity around us—twenty or thirty people had already arrived, and a few couples were even dancing—Rachel wasn’t interested in anything but introducing me to Press, and led me by the hand as I followed her slight form across the room. She was even more diminutive than usual in her close-fitting Chinese silk pajamas, dramatic red and embroidered with gold chrysanthemums. Her glamorous figure, rich black hair coiffed into a sleek chignon, piquant nose and mouth beneath enormous brown eyes meant that she could get away with wearing just about anything. I’d first thought that my own dress, an ivory sheath with appliqués of dark green vines along the hem and deep décolletage, was too elegant for an open house, but Rachel had encouraged me, and now I was glad. The flat shoes felt wrong—I’d been reluctant to wear high heels because Rachel had told me Press was about my height—but overall I was pleased by the effect. Maybe I sound vain. Maybe I am vain, even still. But there is only one time in a girl’s life when she is twenty-one and confident in the knowledge that she is healthy and attractive. Confident, too, that nothing truly bad could ever happen to her. She hasn’t been tested.