“No. I don’t think she enjoyed Betty’s visits; frankly I think she would have preferred if Betty didn’t come to the Willows, but it was the one time Edgar put his foot down. He wouldn’t stop speaking to her.”
She looked at Benjamin in surprise. “Carolyn and Betty were friends. Why wouldn’t she want to see her?”
“Sure, Betty considered Carolyn one of her great friends. She was always grateful to her. It was Carolyn who helped get her a job in Chicago after graduation, and she never forgot it. You’d never hear Betty say a bad word about Carolyn in public.”
“But you might have something to say, in private.”
“Perhaps I might speak my mind by the time we are done looking through these items,” Hoffman said, but he did not elaborate on the subject. Instead, they looked at Betty’s yearbook. Heopened a thin volume of poetry where Betty had pressed a flower within the pages, spoke of Betty’s time with Irene and of another girlfriend whom Betty had lived with for three years in Brooklyn, before settling in an apartment on Beekman Street near what used to be the Fulton Fish Market.
She dug into the boxes again, pulled out postcards, a couple of theater programs, letters with faded ink on the envelopes. More photos.
“Well, that’s too bad,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Carolyn said you might have some of Ginny’s drawings, but I don’t see any. She has a few at home.”
“The college might have more of them in its archives. Edgar wanted them exhibited, just like he wanted to preserve Betty’s work.”
“You know, I always thought Carolyn had funded Betty’s archive, but her grandson told me the same thing: that Edgar was the one who collected her papers.”
“That’s correct.”
She found a few handwritten pages that didn’t match Betty’s handwriting. They were dated 1934. Could that be Ginny’s spiritcorrespondence? She set them aside and came upon another cache of photos.
There was a snapshot of Ginny hugging Edgar. Another of her sitting pensively at a desk. Minerva set them down on the coffee table next to the pages. Then, almost incongruously, there was a snapshot of Carolyn and Edgar together, posing for a wedding picture. His face seemed harder, older than that of the man in the previous photos.
“It must have been strange when Carolyn married Edgar, considering all of you had known Ginny.”
“I imagined how it’d go quick enough. Carolyn didn’t waste any time giving Edgar a shoulder to cry on. He married her August of 1935.”
“I guess he wanted a shoulder pretty badly.”
Hoffman frowned. He grabbed Edgar’s photo, the one where he was alone, looking merrily at the camera. “He was a wreck and Carolyn knew it. I’m not saying she took advantage of him, but it was a bit unseemly how fast she sailed into his harbor, so to speak. Yes, yes, he was a grown man. Still, I found it distasteful. I don’t know, maybe I just liked Ginny a whole lot more than her.”
He stared thoughtfully at the photo, his fingers gently gliding across its surface. “He never laughed like that again. Spent the rest of the decade drunk, stumbling home. It wasn’t until his first child was born that he sobered up, but only for a while. He cycled through sobriety and heavy drinking binges. A few years fine, a few more in a haze of booze.”
“What about Betty? How did she do?”
“Betty was anxious. Brittle. Doubts always circled in her mind. She loved Irene but was so afraid of losing her that she ended up pushing her away. Like I said, when Ginny disappeared it left a void. A black hole. Neither of them could ever hope to fill it.”
A clock struck the hour. Hoffman turned his head to look at it. “I’m afraid I need to cut our meeting short. I have another appointment. But you’re welcome to come back and visit me.”
“Thank you. Could I borrow this?” she asked, pointing to the scrapbook. “And these pages, too?”
“Of course. I hope they’ll be of some help to you.”
He walked her to the door. She shook his hand. “You haven’t spoken your mind about Carolyn, and I’m about to leave.”
Hoffman sighed and took off his glasses. “I’m afraid I don’t have a good opinion of her, although she didn’t have a high opinion of me, either. I was the Jew boy who had sneaked into her social circle and since she didn’t bother keeping up appearances with me, I got a good look at her. She was a user of people. Her father was the same, a slippery, awful man who treated his employees like dirt. I was hoping his stupid business would go under, but the Wingraves always come out all right.”
“It did go under, though.”
“Yes, even if Edgar’s money kept it on life support. But when the place closed down, Carolyn and her family were still rich. Now, I know the mills were always hard, it didn’t matter if it was in Lowell or Temperance Landing or Ludlow. Union busting, supervisors taking advantage of immigrant workers or sexually harassing the women, that’s what you’d find at many mills. The Wingrave Manufacturing Company was an excellent example of these tactics.”
“I suppose Edgar didn’t care how the place was run or how his money was spent.”
“It was Carolyn’s family business, that’s how he saw it. He wrote checks when necessary and left it at that. And he was sick, the alcohol preoccupied him more than business matters. He passed away less than a year after Betty died. I knew it would be like that.”
