I looked at her. Was this going to be it? The big declaration? Obviously anticlimactic, but kind of awesome, too? See under Dyke, I remembered thinking, years ago, when I was twelve and Sally came down to the Vineyard for a couple of days. Of course they’d been throwing Gender and Sexuality in Society down our throats since third grade at the Walden School, and at least half the faculty and staff brought their same-sex partners to Founder’s Day, the annual school celebration, but I had also been taught not to make assumptions based on how a person looked, spoke, gestured, dressed, or wore their hair, which was confusing since it was ridiculous not to note the correlations. My own lesbian classmates at Walden had no discernible markers; they looked like everyone else and dressed like everyone else and in fact widely preferred newer terms like “pansexual” to the old-fashioned “gay” or even “bi.” But the lesbian teachers, mainly my siblings’ age, were all powerful women with short hair in button-down shirts and sometimes a tie, and they looked you in the eye and told you—silently!—that they’d taken far too much shit for far too long to tolerate your acting in any way like a dick about any aspect of who they were, so if you were not completely chill on the subject it was time to reconsider your decision to be a middle school student at the Walden School. Any questions?
I had no questions. I had ascertained, early on, that my own gender identity and sexuality were generally white-bread cis-hetero, and that was fine, but anything else would have been fine, too. And Sally was fine. I had never, for what it was worth, seen my sister in makeup, and only once—at our grandmother’s funeral in New Jersey—in a dress (and looking none too happy about it, either). I had also never, until now, seen Sally’s hair extend past her jawline. And I had never heard Sally so much as mention a companion of either (any) gender.
“Do tell,” I said simply. So Sally did.
Her name was Paula. She’d come to Ithaca for the vet school (large animal, Sally clarified) but turned out to hate the crack-of-dawn hours and the muck, so she’d gone into research. Now she taught at the vet school. “That’s her cat, actually,” said Sally, who seemed, for the first time, ever so slightly embarrassed.
“Nice cat.”
“Yes. His name is Pyewacket.”
“Well, that’s … unusual.”
“After the familiar in Bell, Book and Candle. You know that movie?”
I did. I had watched it with Lewyn one night the previous summer, after a long day of camp counseling. “You know,” I said, “I’m not really here to go on a tour of Cornell. I mean, I’ll do it, but it’s not why I’m here.”
“Okay,” said Sally, with caution.
“I want to talk about some things. I’m tired of us all being so … you know, nobody connected. I don’t know you enough. I don’t know Harrison at all.”
Sally smiled. “That might not be such a loss. I hate what he’s doing. Actually I hate everything he’s done since he left for college. Maybe we don’t all get an opportunity to make the world better, but can we at least not fuck it up more?”
“I don’t disagree,” I told her. “But he’s my brother, just as much as you’re my sister. I know we didn’t grow up together, but I’m an adult now. I’d kind of like us not to be this broken. I mean, if it can be helped. Maybe there’s something I’m not understanding.”
Sally was quiet. After a moment she got up and fetched the dishes from one of the cupboards and set the table. “Want to wash up before dinner?” she said.
I took my bag upstairs. I remembered the room, on the third floor, which had a massive four-poster bed (this had also, apparently, come with the house; I could hardly imagine getting it in or out!), and I dropped my things on it and went into the bathroom. The view from the window stretched down the slope of East Seneca Street, toward the main part of town. I felt something warm against my ankle and looked down to see the cat, Pyewacket, looking up at me. “Pye, Pye, Pye,” I said, remembering how Kim Novak had said something similar in the film, and reaching down to stroke the black cat’s ears. When I left to go back downstairs, Pyewacket was getting comfortable on the four-poster.
Sally had set everything out on the kitchen table: the chicken on an old ironstone platter, the vegetables still in the pan. There was a salad, too, and a jar of pickled green beans from, Sally said, the farmer’s market. I was so hungry I genuinely forgot what I’d wanted to talk about. My sister hadn’t, though.
“Here’s what I want to say,” she told me, cutting into the crisp chicken skin. “I’m not very … emotional, you know. Or maybe you don’t. But I’ve never been the person running toward the big, deep discussions. It’s done me a lot of damage, I’m aware. And that’s totally self-inflicted, but it’s also what comes naturally to me. As far as what you said, before, about our being broken, you’re absolutely right. And you are absolutely entitled to have any conversation with me you want to have. But I have to tell you, I’m going to hate every minute of it.”
“Sorry,” I said, and I meant it. I’d been eating throughout this speech. I couldn’t even slow down, the food was too good.
“And at the same time I’m kind of so proud of you for putting me on the spot like this. You absolutely are a grown-up. To me you’re always that baby, you know?”
“So much younger, you mean.”
“Right.”
“And yet, exactly the same age as the rest of you.”
Sally stopped cutting her food. “Well, well,” she said. “I see somebody’s had that conversation with you. Mom?”
“As if,” I told her. “And it’s a big deal, too. I mean, what if it was you, left behind like that? How would you feel?”
Sally considered. “Existentially defrauded. Since you asked.”
“Well, there you have it. I feel existentially defrauded. I missed everything because of a random decision some doctor probably made while he was eating his lunch. I missed everything good.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You missed a ton of crap.”
“I missed having siblings. You know, around me.”
“Not such a great experience, actually.”
“I missed Dad.”
Sally held her bottle between her palms and picked at the label. She was wearing a denim shirt, open at the neck, the sleeves rolled up nearly to her bony elbows.
“Yeah,” she said. “That isn’t fair. The dad part.”
We ate in silence for a moment.
“Do you know an artist named Achilles Rizzoli?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “One of Dad’s?”
“It’s up for debate,” I said. “Lewyn’s never heard of him, but a major museum seems to feel we’re hiding most of his life’s work.”
She shrugged. “Not my field. I was more than happy to hand that stuff off to Lewyn.”
“What about someone named S. S. Western?” I asked her.
Even if she’d tried to say no, I’d have known she was lying. But she didn’t say no. She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she nodded. “I suppose you have a reason for bringing her up.”
“I do,” I said, and I told her about the letter from the museum. Then I took another piece of chicken off the platter, and waited.
“Fine. But first, I really need to ask you if this is what you want. Existentially defrauded, we said. Right?”
I nodded.
“Because this is actually a burden. If you’re asking me to share it with you, I’m willing to do it, but there are very good reasons not to want this.”
The crazy thing was that I all of a sudden didn’t want this. Whatever it was I’d suddenly crashed up against, it had to be bad, a game-changer, and did I really want a game-changer right now, in horrifying close-up? Was it too late to go back to the big house in Brooklyn, with the closed-off mom upstairs and the closed-off brother in the basement? Because how was any of it my responsibility? I’d hardly been an active participant.
But of course I said yes. I had come all this way in order to say yes. So Sally told me.
S. S. Western was a person named Stella, Sally explained, and Stella had been our father’s lover.
I stared at her. “How do you know that?”
“I saw them together. There’s no doubt in my mind. I don’t know when it started, but I am absolutely certain it never stopped. Or not till he died. They were together.”
I just looked at her. I couldn’t get the words to line up correctly.
“But … what do you mean, together?”
“I mean they had a place somewhere, I don’t know where. In Brooklyn, probably. Ever since I can remember, he said he was going out to the warehouse, where the paintings were, spending hours there almost every evening. It was normal for him not to be home with us in the evening. But after I saw them together, I started paying closer attention. Sometimes he came home late. Sometimes he came home in the morning. I could see him, from my window. Your window,” she added. Our window overlooked the Montague Terrace door.
“You’re telling me,” I said, “that he was going back and forth between our family and this … person? And you don’t even know for how long?”
“Yes.” Sally nodded. “And no, I don’t know for how long.”