The limousine swung off the drive, smoothly catching green lights all the way to Fifty-seventh Street, where children were playing in the little riverside park. Babe smiled at the peaceful scene with its golden long-ago glow.
One block north a dense group of people stood clustered on the sidewalk, shouting and pushing and spilling over into the street. Advance copies of New York magazine, available that day, had carried a column by Gordon Dobbs reporting Babe Devens’s recovery. A white-panel truck was double-parked just ahead of Babe’s town house. The blue lettering on its side said WCBS-TV NEWS.
“Revolting,” Lucia muttered. “Hadley, you were going to see that this didn’t happen.”
“It’s a free country, my dear.”
Honking a path clear with his horn, the driver brought the limousine to the curb. The crowd surged toward the car.
The chauffeur came sprinting around to open the door. Lucia stepped out, slicing space with her handbag, holding reporters at bay.
The chauffeur quickly set up the wheelchair and then E.J. helped him load Babe into the chair. E.J. steered the chair across the pavement and Hadley, walking with a slight limp, went ahead and pushed the buzzer of number 18.
The crowd pressed in. A bearded man in fatigue trousers came dashing forward, balancing a minicam on his shoulder. Babe looked up into wild, snapping light. Mikes thrust themselves into her face.
“Looking great, Babe!”
“Did Scottie do it, Babe?”
The door of number 18 was opened by a stranger who regarded Babe with a look of extraordinary gravity.
The wrought-iron grill clanged shut and then the front door closed. Street noises were blotted out, and Babe found herself once more in the house she had left only a week ago, a week that other people called seven years.
“Beatrice,” Lucia said, “this is Wheelock, your new butler.”
The man’s face was gray, composed like a stone, and he seemed tall and cadaverous in his servant’s cutaway.
“How do you do,” Babe said.
“How do you do, ma’am. Welcome home, ma’am.”
“Where’s Methuselah?” Babe hadn’t thought of Methuselah, the highland terrier, till this moment. Suddenly she missed his running leap, his paws mauling her dress, his damp breath and warm animal smell in her face.
“Methuselah had to be put to sleep,” Lucia said.
There was a stab in Babe’s heart. She wheeled herself into the hallway. Her eyes took in the familiar framed pictures on the wall, the Sheraton table, the umbrella stand. They all told the bygone story of yesterday.
“I want to see the house,” Babe said.
“Of course,” Lucia said. “E.J. will help you.”
“Thanks, I can manage this chair myself.”
Babe rode up alone in the elevator, the same mahogany-paneled elevator she remembered, yet in some elusive way different. It took her a moment to see that the floor buttons had been replaced, black numbers on white and not the white on black she recalled.
She stopped on each floor and wheeled her chair along the corridors.
Every room, every passageway, was quiet and mysterious and changed: spotless new coverings on the chairs in Cordelia’s room, not quite the same blue as before; a firescreen in the guest room, copper where it had been brass—one by one the little shocks built up, signs that the house had been shut for years and hurriedly reopened.
A lump of mourning lodged in her throat as she wheeled to the open doorway of the master bedroom.
She hesitated at the threshold of the well-furnished, handsome room, pulling in sensation through every pore. A scent of dried-rose potpourri drifted to her. Her eyes traveled across the canopied double bed, the bentwood chairs and loveseat with their shapes that were like chamber music made visible, the shelf of Limoges figurines.
She saw herself in the mirror wall, an unfamiliar woman in an unfamiliar wheelchair, saw her own dismay at these reminders of the life she had built young and lost young.
She wheeled forward to the chest of drawers. Her mind was in motion, counting and registering and remembering. Her eyes looked down at the silver-backed hairbrush and mirror and comb, then played across the space where Scottie’s things should have been.
She felt the beginning of a spear going through her breastbone.
She wheeled to his closet and opened it, needing to persuade herself it was true. A pleasant masculine smell of well-cared-for closet floated out, gradually translating itself into darkness, emptiness.
To her right, a last pale remnant of evening fell through the window. Just one night, she thought, and everything’s gone.
In the aching stillness she felt the vibration of something more, some other absence.
She wheeled to the door that opened on the other half of the enormous closet, her side. She pulled it open and sat there, tasting coolness and enclosure and a shadow that devoured all solidity. She reached her hand out in front of her and swept the rack of gowns—that rack that should have been gowns.
Her fingers touched night.
“We gave them away,” a voice said.
Babe turned and saw her mother watching her from the hallway. A taste of betrayal flooded her. “You gave my clothes away?”
Lucia’s eyes met Babe’s carefully. Babe detected hesitation on her mother’s face, quickly giving way to decision.
“Only the gowns. It was seven years ago, dear heart—not yesterday. What were we to do? We weren’t sure you’d recover—and fashions change—and so many people need clothing.”
“I designed most of those gowns.”
“And you’ll design others.”
Lucia took charge of the wheelchair, steering Babe back down the hallway into the elevator. She looked at her daughter as though she were very anxious to play this scene well. “Times change, dear heart.”
“Why have you hired Wheelock? What happened to Banks?”
“We couldn’t keep Banks on salary for seven years.”
“And Mrs. Banks?”
“You’ll like Mrs. Wheelock every bit as well.”
The elevator hummed down the shaft toward the second floor.
“There’ve been offers for this house,” Lucia said, the brightness of her voice signaling that the subject was herewith changed. “Real estate values have shot up in this city—tenfold and more.”
“I’m not interested in selling,” Babe said.
“But you can’t live here.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve got to face facts. Scottie isn’t coming back.”
“There are other people in my life.”
The elevator stopped on the second floor. Babe took the wheels of the chair and gave it a hard push forward, out of Lucia’s grasp.
Her eyes inventoried the drawing room, sweeping familiar antiques and leather-bound books. The boiserie was hung, as always, with the Pissarro, the Sisley, the Flemish flower paintings.
But the ivory-pale wall panels were a slightly fresher ivory than she remembered, the carpets were a little brighter, and there were cut begonias in a vase on the Boesendorfer she had bought for Scottie, who had never allowed anything, not even a photograph, to be put on that piano.
On the mantelpiece above the unlit fire, the ornate ormolu clock that had never ticked before was marking time with audible tick-tocks.
The room was tidier than Babe had ever seen it. She was reminded of those rooms in her friends’ houses that were always camera-ready, in the hope that Architectural Digest or The New York Times Sunday Magazine would drop by.
As she wheeled across the Aubusson, Bill Frothingham rose from the chair by the fireplace. “The house is looking grand, Babe. As are you.”
“It’s nice of you to welcome me, Bill. Did Mama ask you here for any particular reason?”
“I asked Bill,” Hadley Vanderwalk said, and Babe turned and saw that her father was standing by the sideboard making himself a whiskey sour.
“Oh, it’s business then?” Babe said.
“Just a little something that ought to be taken care of,” Hadley said.
Babe wheeled herself to the sideboard. “I’d like a drink before I hear about this little piece of business that can’t wait till Monday.” She tonged ice into a highball glass.