Everlasting Read online

  And tonight even Kathryn, who tended to be absentminded and uninterested in people, actually had guests of her own, P. J. and Evienne Willington. It had just been announced that the Willingtons were bequeathing their staggeringly expansive East Hampton residence, a Gothic mansion and one hundred acres of gardens, to the state of New York, to become a museum and public garden upon their death. Their children didn’t mind, the Willingtons confessed, for they would be receiving all the money and wouldn’t have to be burdened with the upkeep of the estate. And the Willingtons were young, only sixty, so they had many years ahead in which to luxuriate in the gratitude of the state.

  Catherine, Ann, Shelly, George, and Miss Smith stood at the door to the library, gazing at the beautiful room, the shining people. Grandmother Kathryn had had this room and the dining room splendidly decorated, with laurel roping looped over all the oil paintings and mistletoe tied with red ribbon to the chandeliers. Crystal bowls of hard red and green candies were set on every surface. The room was fragrant with evergreen and expensive perfume. The guests were gathering here for predinner cocktails.

  The Willingtons were seated with Kathryn, sipping sherry, discussing the newest breeds of Dutch tulips. Marjorie and Drew Eliot were laughing in the center of a group of friends, the men elegant in tuxes, the women’s gowns swaying, as colorful as a field of flowers.

  Tonight, as on other Christmas nights, Marjorie had adorned her gown with a bit of the same material used for her children’s clothing. Her dress was full-skirted and full-sleeved, made of a vibrant rich gold satin that made the accompanying gold lights in her high-swept hair glisten. Around her waist was the matching red plaid material, tied in an enormous plump bow in the back. Her earrings were dangling, heavy and ornate, unusual for Marjorie, who usually preferred more sedate jewelry.

  Catherine knew her mother looked magnificent. She could tell by the lift of her mother’s head that Marjorie knew it and was glowing from the compliments of others. But she knew she looked beautiful, too.

  It seemed to Catherine that all eyes in the room turned on the four of them as they entered. She saw her father’s eyes widen as he looked at her. He excused himself from his group and approached Catherine and the others, his face beaming with happiness.

  “Merry Christmas, darlings,” Drew said to his children, approaching them and kissing the girls formally on each cheek, then shaking hands with his son and his son’s friend. “You all look wonderful. Come in and join us. Tonight, a special occasion, you can all have champagne. George, I don’t think your parents will object, do you? Catherine, how grown-up you look. It’s too bad there aren’t some young men here for you to dazzle.”

  Their father was leading them into the room when Marjorie came sweeping toward them, glittering but, Catherine realized with a cold shock of dismay, smiling her public smile. Marjorie’s blue eyes were cold. Fear caught in Catherine’s throat like a hard thing she could not swallow.

  “Hello, everyone,” Marjorie said smoothly. “Shelly, dear, take George over and get him something to drink. Drew”—this was to her husband, and as she spoke she touched each person lightly on the shoulder, directing—“take Ann in and show her to your mother and the Willingtons. They’ll be pleased to see such a pretty, innocent girl.” Marjorie took her younger daughter’s chin in her hand a moment and tilted Ann’s face so that Ann could see the affectionate approval in her mother’s eyes.

  Now Catherine hoped for one dreamy instant that Marjorie, having dismissed the others, would link arms with her in the smug, snug way Marjorie had of making one feel chosen, and the two of them would walk into the room, two beautiful Eliot women together.

  Marjorie bent close to Catherine and spoke directly into her face so that Catherine had to read her mother’s lips as much as hear her words.

  “Catherine,” Marjorie said, “what have you done to that dress? You look like a fool. Go to your room and stay there. I don’t want to see you again tonight.”

  Marjorie turned her back on Catherine then and swept regally back into the crowded room.

  Catherine stood for a moment, stupefied with shame. But no one else was looking at her. She turned and, with what dignity she had left, slowly walked back through the entrance hall, past the towering, glittering Christmas tree, and up the wide curving stairway, away from the party, to the solitary third floor.

  She shut herself in her room. Stunned, she sat on her bed, looking at her hands, waiting for her heart to stop thudding. It was lonely on the third floor, for even Miss Smith was down in the library. It was quiet, for the huge old house was well insulated by the thickness of its walls and floors; the party might have been a thousand miles away.

  She hugged herself; she tried to keep from crying, but the painful sobs broke forth, hurting her chest. It had happened again. It always happened. She should not have pretended she could change it. She did not belong here, she was wrong here, always wrong. Catherine wept, hating herself and her family and her life.

  She knew she had to escape, change, leave—but she didn’t know where to go, or how.

  If she didn’t belong with the family she had been born to, then where did she belong?

  * * *

  The next day her father summoned her to the library. It was a little after noon, and the adults were just rising. Even Shelly, George, and Ann were still asleep. The Christmas night revelry had lasted late into the night, as had Catherine’s tears.

  This morning Catherine thought her father looked old and tired, but handsome as always. He had a Bloody Mary, his typical morning drink, in his hand. He sat on a leather chair near the fireplace, but there was no fire lit this morning, only dead ashes as deep as the grate. Perhaps the worst and most British quality about Everly was that some rooms were impossible to heat. Catherine, in wool slacks and sweater, shivered.

  “So, Pudding, sorry you couldn’t be with us last night,” her father said casually.

  Catherine shrugged. She and her brother and sister knew that their father loved their mother with a slavish devotion that would prevent him from ever crossing her in the smallest thing. He would not protect his children, if it meant defying his wife.

  “Your mother’s been a bit miffed with you lately, Cathy,” he went on. “This college thing, you know. You’re really going to have to do something.”

  Catherine stared at her father. Many times she had heard her mother say to her father that he had inherited all of his famous father’s charm and good looks but none of his intelligence or common sense, and Catherine knew her mother was right about this, as she was about so many other things. Now she knew that her father would have nothing helpful or surprising to say about the matter of her college applications—or rather, her lack of them. She was not planning to apply to college. In fact, she was not planning to go to college. If she didn’t go, she’d be the only Miss Brill’s girl in the history of that school not to attend college. The school guidance counselor and the headmistress were furious with Catherine.

  It was not from rebelliousness that Catherine was not looking at colleges, but rather from apathy. As each year of her life progressed, she had less enthusiasm for it and its routines. Studying and taking tests bored her. She wanted action.

  “It’s simple,” her father went on, “you have to go to college. People like us just don’t not go to college.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be like you,” Catherine said. She was speaking truthfully, for she knew she didn’t want to be like her mother and father and their friends. The problem was that she had no idea in the world what she wanted to be instead.

  “Oh, I don’t think we have such bad lives,” Drew Eliot, Jr., said complacently, looking around him at the luxurious room.

  Catherine thought of pointing out to him that this house was his mother’s house, built by his father, that he had never built a house himself, and that as far as she knew he didn’t work at all, at anything. But she had been taught that it was vulgar to discuss money, and she had no idea what kind of m
oney her parents had. Still, it seemed to her that the inherited prerogative to sit in a room of beautiful furniture was not sufficient justification for a well-lived life.

  But Catherine remained silent. Shelly argued like a bull ox when confronted by his parents, and Ann either went into pathetic orphaned child tears or into full-blown floor-kicking tantrums, but Catherine tried to hold her tongue. She knew this irritated her parents, but she found it too difficult to break into speech. Her most eloquent pleas had never helped her before.

  “Your mother has asked me to pass on an ultimatum to you, Catherine,” her father said now, drawing himself up in his chair and trying not to look hung over. “If you apply and get into a college, any college, we will continue to support you in every way. If, however, you choose to continue this bizarre path of rebellion, we have no choice but to tell you that we will not support you. Not in any way. Once you turn eighteen, you’ll be on your own. We won’t allow you to live in the Park Avenue apartment or to summer with us on the Vineyard. You’ll have to find your own living accommodations—everything.”

  “What about money?” Catherine said. Terror made her bold. She certainly couldn’t stay at school after this May when she graduated. If she couldn’t live at her home in New York, where would she live?

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—don’t I—isn’t there some kind of trust set up for me? Don’t I have some money of my own?”

  “What money there was left for you went to pay your tuition all these years, and to buy your clothes, and pay for your traveling expenses, and so on. You’ve had an expensive childhood, Catherine.”

  “But Grandfather—”

  “All of my father’s money is in this house. And that belongs to my mother, to do with as she wishes.”

  “But if I don’t go to college, couldn’t I have the tuition money?”

  “No.”

  “But why not? If you don’t have to pay tuition, why couldn’t you give me the money instead—”

  “To do what with? To throw away? Why should we give any money to an uneducated, disobedient daughter? It’s out of the question, Catherine.”

  Catherine and her father sat staring at each other then, antagonists.

  Finally her father, weary, rose. “Well, I’ve said what I have to say. You’ve got the rest of the semester to think about it. I’m sure Mrs. Plaice will help you find some college that will admit you in spite of your grades. I don’t understand you, Catherine, nor does your mother. Testing indicates that you have superior intelligence, but your grades have been abysmal, as you know. You just have not applied yourself. We have tried to help you, and repeatedly you’ve met us with a brick wall. Quite frankly, we’re tired of battling with you. We’ve given you everything a girl could want, and in return you give us ingratitude and insubordination. If you don’t go to college, I’ll tell you in all honesty, we’ll just wash our hands of you.”

  In any other place, Catherine would have risen now, too, and gone off with these last words from her father. But the library at Everly was a comfortable place in spite of its grandeur. Perhaps it was the presence of her grandmother’s cats and the cat hair that no amount of dusting could completely remove, or the worn spots on the sofas and chairs where people had curled, reading, and that had been rubbed by countless children’s hands as they had crouched behind the furniture, playing hide-and-seek. Perhaps it was the books themselves, which reminded her of different worlds beyond her own.

  “Well, Dad, where do you think I should apply?” Catherine asked. She caught her father’s look—he was on guard, expecting some smart-aleck reply from her. But now she pitched her voice as perfectly as she could to the register of civility—even servility. “There are so many colleges. It’s confusing. And I don’t know what to major in. I don’t know how to choose.”

  “Isn’t that what Mrs. Plaice is there for? Isn’t she supposed to help you choose colleges?”

  “Yes. But I want to know what you think.”

  She could feel her father’s impatience with her. He ran his hand over his forehead.

  “I’ve got a cracking headache,” he said. “If you need to talk more, let’s do it later.”

  “Well—all right, Dad.” Vaguely disappointed, Catherine left her father, shutting the door carefully so as not to aggravate his headache. She climbed the stairs to the second floor. The house was still quiet. Without thinking she went down the long carpeted hall to the left wing, where her parents had their bedrooms. She knocked on her mother’s door. When there was no answer, she turned the knob quietly. The door was unlocked. She stepped inside.

  “Mom?” she called. Then, remembering how her mother hated being called “Mom,” she said, “Mother?”

  A wicker bed tray sat on the floor with a silver pot of coffee and several stacks of emptied plates. The bedclothes were rumpled, and the room was overheated—how had her mother managed so much warmth in any one room at Everly? The heavy brocade drapes had been pulled shut against the winter cold and light, and the room was dim. Conflicting aromas hung drowsily in the warm room like a fog: her mother’s expensive perfume, the morning’s coffee and bacon and eggs, the sharp tang of alcohol, cigarette smoke.

  The bathroom door opened, and before her mother could appear another smell drifted out: the pungent, thin, familiar reek of vomit.

  The loud rush of water in the flushed toilet died down, and in the following silence, Marjorie Montgomery Eliot entered her bedroom. Her bronze hair hung around her head, released from its twist but still shaped by it, the thick ends of her hair curling up. Marjorie’s skin was pale and puffy, so puffy that the skin above her eyes and beneath her eyelids stood out in balloonlike ledges. Marjorie was holding the silk wrapper of her gown closed, one hand pressed against her stomach, as if she were holding her stomach in. She walked with caution to the chaise and gingerly settled her body on it.

  “What are you looking at?” she said to her daughter. “I’m just hung over.”

  Now Catherine could see the other signs—the golden edge of a large gift box of gourmet nuts and candied fruits protruding from under the chaise, the wastebasket brimming with crumpled emptied sacks of smuggled-in potato chips and pretzels, the serving tray from the kitchen set on the dresser, the silver dome hiding whatever remained of Marjorie’s late night or early morning snack. Old memories of similar smells and gagging sounds, of the sight of her mother’s head hanging into the toilet, her sun-streaked hair dank with sticky vomit, lurched through Catherine’s mind.

  Catherine shrugged. “Dad was telling me about your ultimatum,” she said. “About colleges. I thought I should talk it over with you.”

  Marjorie, with great effort, waved her hand, as if swiping at a fly. “Not now. Later. Go away.” She covered her eyes with a trembling hand.

  Catherine turned and left the room. She climbed the stairs back to the nursery. Her parents would leave for their apartment in the city today, but Miss Smith and the three Eliot children would remain here one more night, before going on up to Vermont to a lodge for a ski trip … one of their parents’ Christmas presents to them and yet another way of keeping their children away.

  Catherine walked up and down the long hallway, peering into the rooms. Shelly and George had already gone outside. Miss Smith was playing a heated game of Sorry with Ann on Ann’s bedroom floor. Catherine went into her room and sank down on her bed.

  If only Leslie were here. If only she were Leslie. She envied her friend because Leslie had what Catherine didn’t—Leslie had talent. Leslie wanted to be an important painter, and that mattered to her more than anything else in the world. Even better, the art teachers assured Leslie that she had talent as well. Leslie knew exactly what she wanted to do when she graduated: she was going to study at a famous art school in Paris. She would live in a garret on the Left Bank, where she would paint and have lots of artistic love affairs.

  Catherine had tried painting, but although she had some skill, she had no real aptitude for it. Sh
e had tried piano and flute lessons and for a while, when she was younger, had dreamed of being a prima ballerina, until her ballet teacher sympathetically pointed out that no matter how strenuously Catherine dieted, she would always have a bust that was, well, inappropriate for a dancer. She was no good at sports, because they bored her.

  Over and over again during chapel, the girls were reminded of their good fortune in life, their exceptional good fortune at being Miss Brill’s girls, at the quality of their education, and at the duty this imposed on them to hold the standard high when they went out into the world. But no one had anything specific to suggest to Catherine. When she asked them what she should do with her life, the teachers and counselors grew impatient: why, she could do anything, she didn’t have to earn a living, she was well educated, she could go where her fancy took her. “Try volunteer work,” was as specific as they got, but Catherine had the example of her mother, that famous volunteer, before her, and she knew that was not the choice for her.

  “Bored people are boring people,” Mrs. Plaice, the counselor, often said, and if so, then God knew Catherine was boring. Now she twisted on her bed, healthy, well fed, energetic, lost. She didn’t want to go skiing with her siblings and Miss Smith, and she didn’t want to go to college, but what did she want to do?