Nell put her hand in Pansy’s and squeezed. They’d stayed like that until they’d fallen asleep, neither one remembering who’d been the first to let go.
Now, Pansy overtakes her on the mown path back to the house. Pansy’s the first one through the door and lets it swing back in Nell’s face. Their girlhood gone, Nell can never pinpoint exactly when the end began. College and careers had made Pansy competitive. It’s been ages since either of them would bother to hold the door open for the other.
The kitchen is small for a house as large as the Quincy farm, because it was meant for staff. Loulou had never so much as brewed herself coffee, had always employed a cook. A housekeeper was given free rein to remodel it in the sixties and had chosen the pressboard cabinets, the harvest gold Formica counters, and the avocado linoleum floor where plywood now shows through a few scuffed holes. Today the kitchen is hot and cramped with caterers.
“I’m so sorry about your grandmother, honey.” One of the caterers offers a hand and then pulls Nell in for a surprise hug. “A great lady.”
Nell smiles, but the woman has gotten it wrong. Nell isn’t the representative of the family. Why don’t they ever hug Pansy?
“She was a handful, you know what I mean?” The caterer releases Nell and busies herself garnishing a Meissen platter with ham salad sandwiches. What was the woman’s name again? Carol, maybe? Carol wipes her eyes, actually tearing up. Nell braces herself for what’s coming.
“Got so mad at me once over something. A roast not hot enough, I believe. I thought she was going to smash the whole platter on the floor. Instead she slammed it on the counter, chipped it. Expensive thing, I think. Just like this here. Didn’t tip me that night, either. She was a stickler.”
Nell keeps her smile. She’s heard stories like this before, everyone in the family has, and she never knows how to respond. If she defends Loulou, Nell seems approving of her bad behavior. If she sympathizes with the speaker, it usually boomerangs, with the aggrieved party coming to Loulou’s defense, saying something admonishing like “With the elderly, they get a little cranky at the end. God bless, hope I live as long.”
Nell pats the woman’s arm and makes a mental note to tip her double at the end of the afternoon. As executor, she’ll be shepherding the bills for all of this.
Pansy walks Nell through the warren of rooms—kitchen, cold room, food pantry, butler’s pantry, warming room, and finally out into the main hall of the house, where the wake is in full swing.
Someone has cranked up the ancient stereo and dragged the speakers into the front hall. “Help Me Rhonda” is playing, distorted and scratchy. Children take pictures with their phones as their parents do an ironic twist, while tiny cousins jump and squeal, delighted to see adults dancing. College-aged Quincys inspect the turntable, now chic in Williamsburg and Silver Lake. One of Pansy’s boys plays a violent game on a cell phone, slingshotting birds into pigs. The young parental generation drinks gin in the corners, wondering if this sort of thing is okay for a wake. Does one dance? Rensselaers and O’Brennans, Van Alstynes and Cavanaughs from every generation have turned out, lured by old kinship and friendship connections.
“She would have hated this. Don’t you think?” A Cavanaugh aunt is standing next to Nell. She’s slim in heavy gold jewelry, with liver spots on her arms, which speak to an impressive golf handicap.
Nell hums, unsure. Loulou had loved a party, but famously hadn’t cared for California. Nell had been surprised to find the Beach Boys record in the stack. “Nothing west of the Mississippi is worth a damn,” Loulou used to say.
“I’ve met your new Van Alstyne cousin,” the golfing Cavanaugh aunt continues. Nell has only just met her, too. A lawyer who does complex transactional work at a big firm in Manhattan; at least they’d had something to talk about for a few minutes. The new bride seems nice enough, smart, and on her best behavior.
“She seems very sure of herself,” the Cavanaugh aunt says in a conspiratorial tone. “Very confident.”
It was just the sort of comment her mother would have mocked for months when they got back home.
Before she’d left Portland, Nell had vowed to be proactive, to ask someone, and directly for once, about her mother’s rift with the family. Her mother’s mother, May Quincy, had died in childbirth. Loulou had stepped in when her widowed brother had proven too grief-stricken to care for a baby. It wasn’t surprising that her mother had felt like an outsider being raised by her aunt, and then Baldwin came along. Baldwin was Loulou’s born child, a boy, and the baby. He’d been a favored prince. Nell supposes it’s a straightforward enough story of rivalry once removed and amped up by circumstance.
Nell had questioned her generation about it, but they were as clueless as she was about advanced family politics. Asking her uncle Baldwin had seemed an insurmountable task when she was younger, and her father is a dead end. She’s tried him a few times, and he gives her the same answers about the Quincys every time.
“That’s not something you need to worry about,” he says. He blocks her attempts with “That’s not something we need to get into.” And once he even started to explain, “With her gone . . .” but didn’t finish.
She sets herself the challenge of asking Baldwin about it during this trip, and she won’t wimp out. You’re a grown-ass woman, she reminds herself, and a trained lawyer at that.
Reflected in the cloudy haze of the aged front hall mirror, she sees the back of Louis Morrell talking solemnly with an elder O’Brennan in pearls the size of gumballs. The whole O’Brennan family has been longtime friends of the Quincys. She wonders what Louis knows. From the way he was talking at the meeting, he has his own views of the family. From this angle in the mirror, Nell is free to contemplate him. She’s struck by his ease, his casualness, and his complete self-possession. She’s seen men who try to win the room with backslapping and men whose air of aloof reserve hides a trembling neurosis. But she has to admit that Louis seems comfortable in his own skin, chatting with the power dowager as he sips cold coffee.
She has a perfect view of his broad shoulders, his lean runner’s build. When the woman moves off to talk to another guest, Louis looks up and catches Nell’s eye in the mirror, and she realizes he’s been watching her check him out the whole time.
“Busted,” he mouths at her in the mirror.
THE TRAVEL LETTERS
Tokio