“Another couple miles,” George said.
“Jesus!” Cornell Messenger said when they had entered the main gate and turned into the driveway. “There ought to be a drawbridge. It’s a fucking goddamn castle!”
“They’re not checking plates today,” George explained. “There’s often open house when someone dies.”
“I never expected anything like this,” Cornell said. “I’ll tell you something. I bet Sam himself ain’t ever been here.”
Messenger could have been right. It was the girls, Mary and Milly, who took them on a tour of the house — though George felt, so familiar was he with its Platonic floor plan that he might have been able to do it himself — Sam and a few others following them about like visitors shy at the White House say, told it’s their home, but knowing better of course, hanging well back of their minds’ velvet ropes, not smoking and taking no pictures, their normal speaking voices lowered decibels.
“Hey,” Messenger said, whose enjoyment of the house had been enhanced one last time before climbing out of Mills’s car, “you think there’s a gift shop?”
“Here’s where I take ballet and fencing,” Mary said. “Grandpa had the mirrors and warm-up bar put in when Mother was a little girl. It’s special wood. You can’t get splinters.” She ran to the practice bar, turned to them, and carelessly raised her leg. They could see over the tops of her stockings.
“I don’t think someone should dance after a funeral,” Milly said.
“Your sister’s right, sweetheart,” Sam said.
“Oh, Daddy,” Mary said.
“I have to speak to you,” Cornell whispered in George’s ear.
“You have a lovely home,” Louise was telling the two girls. “Really lovely. You must be so proud. I suppose in a house as big as this one each of you probably has her own room.”
“We have our own lady’s maids, too,” Mary said. “We have separate cooks and our own private gardeners. We even have our own special milkman. And a postman who does nothing but just deliver our mail. Isn’t that right, Milly?”
“Mary is teasing,” Milly said. “We don’t even live here. We come out sometimes on weekends.”
“The really amazing, astonishing, wonderful thing is that Milly isn’t even spoiled. I am, but old Milly is just like everyone else even if she does have just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in her own private savings account.”
“It’s in trust,” Milly said. “I can’t touch it till I’m twenty-one.”
“Mary,” Sam said more forcefully, “Milly. That’s enough now.”
“It’s pretty urgent,” Cornell Messenger said.
The psychiatrist, down from the catharsis in which he had taken refuge, frowned. “I’m crashing,” he said. “I’m actually crashing. I’m sorry. I had no idea I was going to say all that stuff. I made a damn fool of myself, a stupid ass.”
“Hey,” Cornell said, “hey come on. It’s what she would have wanted.”
“You shut up,” Sam said, “you just shut up.”
“We ought to start back now, Louise,” George said.
“You got it, Sammy,” Cornell said. “My lips are sealed, Dean.”
“Thank you, young ladies,” Louise said. “It was awful nice meeting you, Doctor. I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. Glazer. She was very kind to my father when he was alive.” Louise turned to go.
“I’ve got to speak to you, Mills,” Cornell said, following him.
“I’m not in this,” George said sweetly. “I’m not in any of this.”
They were descending three abreast on a widely winding staircase that circumscribed a lavish keyhole of space. George had seen nothing like this house. Greatest Grandfather Mills hadn’t, nor had most Millses in between. “Listen,” he would have told his son, “I’ve been to Architecture the way some have been to France. In rooms measured as philosophy. The furniture like pieces settled in nature, unremarkably there as trees. And the fabrics, George, the fabrics! Fabric like foliage or high husbandry’s bumper crops. And woodwork like the sounding boards on stringed instruments. Paneling from panel mines, the oldest forests, all wilderness’s concentric rings like the tracery of nerves in vitals.”
Cornell saying “I’ve got to speak to you. I’ve really got to speak to you.”
And so, it turned out, did others. The aunt, the sisters-in-law, had been emissaries, actual agents. In the manor’s great drawing room with its brackets of wing and armchair and parentheses of sofa, its Oriental carpet deep and wide as infield tarpaulin, its armoires and marquetried escritoires checkered as gameboard, they were waiting for him.
“Did you enjoy your tour, Mrs. Mills?” the aunt asked. She sat in a large, curving wing chair of upholstered silk, her long, thin forearms and mottled, arthritic hands arranged over twin tracks of tight gold fringe, her large purse open and settled beside her like a queen’s. Her fine, crossed legs were clear, firm as a dancer’s, and her expression as she waited for Louise’s answer, layered, a cool palimpsest of serenity, indifference and concern. Like several of the senior members of the family George had noticed at the funeral, she did not wear mourning. Indeed, her light woolen coat dress, exactly the color of fleshtone in a black and white photograph, seemed more the clothing of the owner of an odds-on Derby favorite in her special box than it did of someone who had just buried a niece. Mills noticed her long, misshapen, ringless fingers and wondered whether she had ever been married or if she had had her jewelry cut from her painful, blistered joints.
“Oh yes,” Louise said, “oh yes, indeed. It may not be proper etiquette to say so, but this has been a very special and exciting day for us. I never expected to be invited to a house like this. Goodness, it’s like something in picture books. Or what I imagine palaces in the old country must look like. George knows more about these things but I can tell he’s as thrilled as I am. Aren’t you, George?”
He sweltered for Louise in her black mourning dress, for himself in his dark suit. “Yes,” he said.
“I know,” his wife said. “And we want to thank you for having us. And the children are darling. I only hope that it had to be on such a sad occasion. I mean…”
“Of course,” the aunt said, smiling. “But surely you needn’t go yet, Mrs. Mills. My nieces-in-law want to show you the miniature railroad that Judith’s father built for her to ride in when she was a child.”
“You mean like the little train that takes you around the zoo?”
“Quite like that, yes. I’ll tell Grant to organize a ride for you. My nieces will go with you.”