“It’s taken me completely by surprise. The whole thing has,” Nell says.
“It shouldn’t. You obviously know your stuff. And she thought you wouldn’t be influenced by old family dramas. And there is the lawyer thing, of course,” he says. “I was thinking . . .” He’s leaning forward now. “I don’t know how long you’re in town, but maybe we could talk about this over dinner.”
“I don’t do working dinners,” Nell says reflexively, rising. “I think it’s so much more efficient to just make a proper appointment and get it all done in an office. Do you want me to call your assistant or something?”
He gets a strange look on his face. “Right, so much more efficient.”
It’s then that she realizes her blunder. But before she can rectify it, can protest that she’d love to go to dinner with him because it’s then she realizes she would, Baldwin and her father come back in. They both stink of smoke. Baldwin sticks his hand out to Louis and they silently shake. “Let me buy you a drink, young man,” Baldwin jokes, leading Louis off toward the flower room, and Nell recognizes that signature move for what it is—a very Quincy way to patch things up. No apology. No acknowledgment.
THE CROQUET SOIREE
Ambrose watched Ethan working his way across the lawn—shaking guests’ hands, kissing cheeks, slapping backs. Viewing him from only the right side, his brother looked unchanged. Still, there was something in the forward slope of Ethan’s neck, something in the tight set of his jaw that telegraphed the injury on his left side, well concealed in the sleeve of his tuxedo.
Ambrose walked into the early evening shade where he’d be hidden for a moment while he took his flask out of his pocket for one quick swig of rye. He needn’t have been stealthy about it. May’s bourbon punch had initially caused a scandal, but it catalyzed the guests. Tonight she’d put together a black-tie croquet soiree. Multiple courts were laid out on Ethan’s lawn in the fading early summer light. Guests had formed teams in a simultaneous elimination tournament.
After the welcome-home dinner weeks ago, Ethan had hounded Ambrose to come stay in the country. Ethan’s attempt to force normalcy into the situation only made Ambrose perversely want to thwart his brother. Yet Ambrose did understand the desire to move on, move past, to make things stable.
About a week ago a short, very proper note arrived from May, thanking Ambrose for the necklace yet again and extending an invitation to stay for the weekend, starting with the croquet tournament on Friday. A friendly gesture one might make to any new brother-in-law. Very correct. But in the end it was his father who convinced him to go out and stay at Ethan’s.
“Don’t you want to see young people?” Israel asked him, handing over the unopened invitation at the breakfast table, guessing correctly at its contents. The newspapers lay spread between them. His father smelled of talc, whiskers perfectly trimmed.
“Despite what happens at May’s parties . . .” Israel kept his eyes on the newspaper in front of him, proving that while May’s parties had become notorious indeed, Israel was not inclined to criticize a daughter-in-law who had married his injured son. “I imagine you’d find the company of people your own age more enlivening than that of an old man.”
Ambrose relented after an evening with his father during which the sole topics of conversation had been the price of smelting equipment and a gruesome story about a trolley accident two blocks away, which ended in his father’s suggestion that Ambrose become involved in civic regulation of urban railways. It was the next morning that Ambrose agreed to visit the newlyweds. Because after weeks of brooding in his father’s house, Ambrose realized he was either going to make things normal or he was going to leave. And what better way to decide his course than trial by fire?
Now, standing in the same spot on the lawn where he’d been two years ago, he wished he’d taken a train back to New York instead. The change in his brother’s house was clear.
May lived there now.
The barest hint of her violet scent greeted you at the threshold. A new Canaletto hung over the fireplace in the living room—something his brother never would have purchased. A complete set of the works of Emerson sat on the bookshelves, and Ambrose knew all the pages had been cut by May. Vases of flowers enhanced marquetry tables, scattered anywhere one could possibly anticipate needing them. Even the band setting up in the front hall for later reflected her. These were no part-timers reworking the standards, but an honest-to-God jazz band from Chicago.
A girl he didn’t know was swaying, taking practice swings with a mallet that she held like a golf putter. Lots of that dark eye stuff they all wore now, garish lips, a flat body that was unattractive but oddly appealing in her sparkling dress. She was likely some parvenu friend of May’s, Ambrose thought. Though she looked too young, even through the makeup, to be May’s contemporary.
Watching her, Ambrose felt a subtle loosening in his mind, the perpetual low-grade tension he lived with receded slightly.
He swiped a glass of iced punch off a silver tray and walked it over to her. She sloshed a bit of it as she propped herself against her mallet to take a sip. Faint echo of May as she spilled a little more down her forearm before she drank the rest in one impressive gulp.
“The famous Ambrose Quincy,” she said as she ducked her head to wipe her lips on the back of her wrist with a glitter of diamond bracelets. “So baaaad you didn’t even make it back for your own brother’s wedding.”
“Let’s see, I was in . . . Ceylon that week, I think.” He picked up an abandoned mallet and positioned a ball to start the game.
“Can’t say I blame you.” She wasn’t listening to him, but watched as he lined up a beginning shot through three wickets. “Brother marries your girl, I wouldn’t come back, either. Even if he is a hero and all.”
Ambrose’s swing and then additional shot sent the ball wide, sailing off course. “She wasn’t my girl.”
“Oh no?” Her penciled eyebrows shot up, and something in his tone must have told her to move on. “?’S good news, I guess. Tell me about where you’ve been.”
They played the game as he told her an abbreviated story of staying at a famous palace hotel in Bombay. Suddenly her eyes got wide. “You were with Dicky Cavanaugh.”
Ambrose nodded.
“I mean if the rumors are true . . . How d’you like him with your sister? I know my brothers wouldn’t let me near him.” May’s debauched punch negated prim chitchat. This was clear. What was more surprising was that she even knew about the Indian dancing girl. First his father, now her; Dicky must have been indiscreet indeed.
Ambrose could see her true age, younger than he’d imagined, and his interest cooled a few degrees. “Your brothers have you on a tight leash, do they?”
“Like a choke chain.”
“But you seem to get the punch down, don’t you? What do they think of that?”
“Why don’t you ask them?”