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Charlie closed the lid on the suitcase. She didn’t turn toward her husband’s voice in the doorway. “I’m making sure she has everything she needs.”
“Tom Williamson is in the library. He’s here to go over Mother’s will.”
Charlie crossed her arms and looked out the window of her daughter’s bedroom, across the rolling, lush grounds of the Hudson Valley estate. Jenny, Charlie knew, would not miss Peter’s mother either. The woman ha
d a subtle, yet distinct way of informing Jenny that she didn’t measure up to Hobart quality. Charlie knew the feeling.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” she said.
She heard Peter’s footsteps retreat and wondered what was going through his mind. Terror, probably, mixed with mounds of insecurity. Many offspring of a matriarch such as Elizabeth Hobart might feel tremendous relief at her death. They might languish in the release of such a heavy, dark burden. They might, at last, find peace.
She wondered if Peter would. Peter had been overly dependent on his mother. After his father’s death when Peter was six, he watched as his mother lorded over the family’s textile mills with the determination and fortitude of a man, in an era when only men were allowed to show such strength. He watched, and he labored to master his legacy. Yet along the way, Peter had acquiesced, becoming another of his mother’s people-possessions, to be ruled, molded, and manipulated. Charlie feared that despite Elizabeth’s death, the woman would remain in control.
In all these years, the only time Peter had wavered from his mother’s wishes was when he married Charlie—unacceptable, undeserving Charlene O’Brien, from a working-class family of eight, from Pittsburgh, of all places. But Elizabeth apparently had determined that living with Charlie’s background was preferable to living without her son, especially when Peter and Charlie arrived at the Hobart manor from college with a marriage certificate in one hand and a crying infant in the other. Elizabeth Hobart had gritted her teeth and let them in. And Charlie—and Jenny—had been paying for it ever since.
Maybe now things would change, if not for Peter, then at least for herself. And Jenny.
Charlie turned back to the suitcase and slowly closed the lid. She was, she knew, procrastinating going downstairs. Even after all these years, Charlie still wasn’t comfortable with brandy and stiff chatter and the hard Victorian settee in Elizabeth Hobart’s library. Even after all these years Charlie would have preferred jeans and sweatshirts, and curling her legs underneath herself on lumpy, overstuffed cushions. She wondered if Peter knew that, or if he had, instead, chosen to believe that Charlie enjoyed her leading role as dutiful wife, society lady, the role she had worked so hard to win, to cultivate, then play out so well.
She stooped to check her hair in the mirror of Jenny’s dressing table, to be sure that no golden-brown loose strands had escaped the big gold clip at the nape of her neck. But as she caught her reflection, Charlie ignored her newly rinsed hair and looked instead into her eyes, eyes that had once been bright blue, but now seemed to have lost their enthusiasm, their zest. Age, she suspected, had done that. Age, motherhood, and Elizabeth Hobart. A small spark of excitement tingled through her. Now that the woman was dead, maybe Charlie would begin to live. Maybe she could stop playacting at being a woman she wasn’t. Maybe she could finally become the woman she was meant to be. Whoever that was.
She glanced at the photos inside the edge of Jenny’s mirror, neatly clipped magazine photos of scary-looking rock groups with unfamiliar names, and a photo of Jenny herself—thick-dark-haired, huge-eyed Jenny—crouched beside a shaggy beige-colored dog, Tess’s dog. In the picture, Jenny was smiling. Charlie realized it had been a long time since she saw her pensive daughter smile. Perhaps it was the company of the dog that brought out that beautiful smile; perhaps it was because the photo had been taken last summer when Jenny was with Tess.
For all her oddities, Tess was probably still the warm, comfortable woman Charlie had grown so close to in college. It was hard to know: Charlie had changed, wouldn’t Tess have, too? In the last few years, they had drifted into speaking only at Christmas and again in the spring to arrange Jenny’s schedule. Charlie touched the image of her smiling daughter in the photo and wondered if she and Tess would have bothered to stay in touch at all if it hadn’t been for Jenny. Jenny, the teenaged enigma in Charlie’s life.
Charlie knew she hadn’t spent enough time with Jenny. Years ago, she had let herself become swallowed up by a busy life of charities and gallery openings and round-robins at the tennis club—anything to pretend her life was full and happy, anything to try to gain the respect and acceptance of Elizabeth Hobart. Anything to prove to herself that she could have a better life than her own mother did. Her mother who had been tied to a drafty old house by the bondage of diapers and never-ending worries, and who, even today, clipped food coupons and bought a new dress only for special occasions.
Being awarded the scholarship to Smith College and then landing a man like Peter had been Charlie’s greatest achievements, her way out. But Elizabeth had quickly tainted the dream, and instead of enjoying her success and her well-earned comforts, Charlie had found herself struggling to keep peace, struggling to live up to Elizabeth Hobart’s demands, to become the kind of woman Elizabeth wanted for a daughter-in-law: Someone more like the woman Peter’s brother John had married. Ellen was pretty and sweet and soft-spoken, and always knew how to act, what to do. The fact that she had been brought up “well-moneyed” allowed her to glide into Hobart life with seamless ease. Ellen and John’s two children were, of course, equally flawless. So Elizabeth Hobart had coddled and spoiled them. She had not coddled Charlie. And she had not spoiled Jenny.
A shiver ran through her. Charlie stood and looked back to the suitcase on the bed. No, she thought, Jenny was not like the others, any more than Charlie was, had been, or ever could be. But Jenny had been lucky enough to escape each autumn to school, and each summer to Tess. And Charlie was left behind with her guilt.
She straightened the navy straight skirt of her custom-tailored suit and prepared to go downstairs. Ellen undoubtedly had arranged for tea to be served, as Elizabeth would have expected.
The library was as silent and somber as Charlie’s mood, filled with the tense rigidity of the deceased that prevailed from beyond the grave. She stepped onto the century-old Persian carpet and swallowed a scream before it could leap from her throat. Peter rose from the sofa, his six-foot, lean frame as starched as the air in the room. He extended his hand to her, then drew her toward him and placed a polite kiss on her cheek. His brother John also stood, as did John’s twelve-year-old son, Darrin. It was all very proper, all very refined, and all very unlike the Irish wakes of Pittsburgh, where tears flowed in buckets, whiskey splashed on carpets, voices boasted old memories, and love filled the room.
Williamson was seated at the long cherry desk. He looked up from his papers and nodded at Charlie.
Ellen was poised—posed—on a Louis XIV armchair by the door. She smiled a small, pink-lipped smile. Ten-year-old Patsy, so like her mother, stood beside Ellen’s chair and flashed the identical smile.
Charlie did not have the strength to smile back. Instead, she looked toward the tall, heavily draped window where Jenny stood, her slim body stiff, her gaze fixed outside. Charlie followed her daughter’s eyes out the window to the wide, circular driveway. There was nothing there. Jenny was, Charlie suspected, daydreaming as usual, about things at which Charlie could only guess. Her horses, maybe, or boys. Had Jenny yet crossed the emotional bridge from horses to boys? Surely, at fourteen, she must have. Another unsettling wave of not knowing Jenny washed through her.
Williamson cleared his throat. Charlie sat beside Peter. Her eyes fell on the silver tea set on the cocktail table and a small plate of scones next to it that seemed untouched.
“We all know why we’re here,” Williamson began. “Despite the amount of money involved, Elizabeth’s will is relatively simple.” The attorney put on half glasses and picked up the papers in front of him.
Peter shifted beside Charlie. John coughed. Ellen held her pose, appropriately expressionless, hands folded in her lap.
“The endowment to Amherst College was finalized five years ago,” Williamson said.
Amherst College, Charlie thought. A picture of Peter’s dorm swept into her mind. It was a two-story, brick, old New England-style house, set back from the quaint town green that had turned golden with the crisp shades of autumn. T
he house had tall shuttered windows, a large wooden door, and a dark, cozy interior that whispered of history and echoed of scholars. It was there, at Amherst, alma mater for Peter, his brother John, and father Maximillian before them, that Charlie had been introduced to Peter by Tess. For an instant now, Charlie longed to feel young again—the Smith College sophomore for whom the world beyond the steel mills and soot of Pittsburgh was finally coming into focus.
Williamson interrupted her thoughts.
“To my elder son, Peter Hobart, I bequeath the manor.”
Charlie was careful to show no emotion. But inside, her heart warmed. The twenty-four-room mansion would be theirs now, theirs, to do with as they wished. Maybe she could convince Peter to sell it, to build a newer, brighter, more contemporary home … more like the one Elizabeth had given John and Ellen when they were married. Away from this mausoleum, Charlie would truly be free, the ghost of Elizabeth Hobart exorcised once and for all.
