Wilkie smiled his precise, professional smile, perfectly calibrated to agree to everything and commit to nothing, and then he volunteered to go in search of olives. A short exit would allow him to see more of the Hill House, about which he had heard so much. He was particularly curious about the kitchen here, which Billy Quick used to describe as antediluvian.
Wilkie had been told that the Hillsingers had built the first permanent house on the island not long after the Revolution, and that some part of that structure remained in the present Hill House like a vestigial tailbone. It had been purely utilitarian and had been called the Farm House, for obvious reasons: tenant farmers lived there, and inch by inch they had cleared what land they needed for basic subsistence. While Seven Island was owned jointly by the two families from the very beginning, it was at first only the Hillsingers who braved the mosquitoes and the mud to enjoy the summer days. When they came they slept in the upper rooms of the house, as if they were honored guests—which they were. After the Civil War, the Quicks had invoked their dormant rights and cut away still more forest, hired an architect from Boston, and there on the other side of the clearing they built the New House. Its legitimate grandeur suddenly made the Hillsingers seem like second-class citizens—or, worse, the help—on an island which they had, by their own lights, created. And so began the great modernization. The Farm House was rethought and massively expanded, separate quarters were built for the actual farmers and other staff, and, at least according to Billy, the Hillsingers of the late-nineteenth century began unilaterally referring to their growing home as the Mansion House. That name, however, was so arch that even they did not use it for long, and over time brevity and utility won out and their house was uniformly called, simply, the Hill House.
They were both built in the same broad New England vernacular—Colonial/Pastoral was what Billy called it—though the New House was taller and squarer, white rather than yellow, and it had a superfluous widow’s walk on top that was thought to be bad luck. The New House had been designed rather than accumulated; it had grander volumes and modern furniture; it was renovated constantly and photographed often, but the truth was that its scale implied huge crowds, who never came. It felt eternally unlived-in, like so many of the grand Fifth Avenue living rooms that Wilkie knew from his childhood, all of them dead spaces apart from each one’s secret labyrinth of rules and obligations.
By contrast, the Hill House was a pure product of time. Its elegant facade faced the water, though any other angle revealed it as long and disproportionately narrow; it had been added onto in the back so many times and in such a haphazard way that, when seen from either side, it looked like a train built by a blind man. It had low ceilings, a chimney that smoked, old furniture that was endlessly repaired, unreliable ovens and refrigerators, and more candles than any church. More importantly, there was a genius to it, which was somehow separate from its occupants: it spoke.
Wilkie was routinely helpless when someone in New York would ask him to describe Billy Quick’s or Jim and Lila’s place up in Maine. He could say it was so many thousand acres or that the butter there was orange and the cows stood next to the ocean, but the facts alone were not sufficient. Instead, he would say this: Seven Island is impossible. It was not a description anyone ever found helpful except for Lila Hillsinger, who had heard it not from him but a mutual friend. Lila was delighted, and for a time applied it to everything. She had been raised and famously blossomed inside a world centered on Park Avenue and extending some way up and down from Eighty-third Street. Her prestige in that arena was still such that, during a lunch at the Colony Club around that time, she had single-handedly launched a fad whereby everything good was now impossible: your impossible daughter, that impossible scarf, the turtle soup is impossible today.
As Wilkie crossed the living room to fulfill the destiny of the Old Man’s martini, Lila happened to turn toward him, and she smiled. He already knew that the incandescence of Lila’s smile was a dangerous thing, but for that brief moment even Wilkie, who knew her so well, found himself believing that his search for olives had made her happiest of all. Jim Hillsinger, a man with minimal illusions about anything, was not only not immune to Lila’s smile, but Wilkie had heard him admit in public that he had surrendered unconditionally to it, to her, to the hidden order of hidden things that Lila’s smile implied.
Hillsinger had first seen Lila Blackwell (as she then was) at a formal party outside of Philadelphia, where neither of them was from or belonged in any meaningful way. Hillsinger had come down from Manhattan on a lark, the last-minute guest of a friend from college. He had seen her right away, Hillsinger had, and at one point he thought that Lila might have smiled in his direction. Later on, he found her briefly alone by the fountain near the tennis courts, and luck or boredom made him brave. They spoke. And that was it. Hillsinger had decided to marry Lila within thirty seconds. He was a man who took his own decisions very seriously, although the miracle of it, some said, was how he’d brought Lila around to his point of view. When he found out that this stunning girl’s younger sister was the wife of Billy Quick, it was already too late. Jim and Lila were married six months later.
5
Across the room, Lila Hillsinger heard Wilkie talk about birds, and she decided that his temporary expulsion, if only to find olives for the Old Man, was a fair price to pay. Neither Jim nor his father nor any of them knew anything real, anything scientific, about owls or herons or cormorants or any of the other local fauna. But by saying there were no birds on the water tonight, Wilkie had reopened, for the millionth time, the ridiculous debate on who or what was indigenous to Seven Island, and why. She had lost whole evenings to diatribes on egrets’ feeding habits, beaver dams, and the aetiology of wisteria. It could be infuriating, although Lila found it hard not to love the Old Man’s depth of conviction about the owls.
Meanwhile, her husband’s younger sister lay beached on an empty sofa. Diana Hillsinger had slowly stretched more of her body over the empty space, and she was now entirely horizontal, with eyes closed, as if awaiting triage. Everyone else talked over her, and this pantomime of fatigue or rapture was strangling what remained of the evening’s energy. Lila felt she ought to do something about it, so she knelt down at the end of the sofa by her sister-in-law’s head.
“Darling,” Lila whispered, conspiratorially.
“I already know,” Diana said.
It was Diana’s favorite game—always knowing exactly what Lila was about to say.
“You’re so clever,” Lila said.
“I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Good,” Lila said. “Then I won’t.” She had no idea what Diana was talking about.
“Catta’s a survivor,” Diana said.