Mansard

Frances flew out to greet her.

“Audrey!”

They all had names like that then, out of old storybooks.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” Frances said.

“When did you call?”

“Five minutes ago.”

“Well, I was driving here, wasn’t I?” Audrey had never seen Frances so wild. Out in the gravel without shoes. The bottoms of her stockings torn, most likely. Hair in tufts in the back. “What is it?”

“I have to cancel. I’m sorry.”

Audrey looked toward Frances’s house. It was new, hideous. But inside there were framed articles about its architect hanging on the walls. Audrey’s Larry said it looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to a perfectly good house and scattered the bits.

“Is someone sick?” Audrey said.

Frances had four children, each with their own separate “module” for a bedroom. Who knew what they would get up to when they were teenagers.

“No.” Frances was holding one red shoe. “My father showed up.”

“Your father?”

“I got a hold of Elinor but I couldn’t reach— Oh.”

It was Sue, checking her lipstick in the rearview as she pulled in, veering away just in time.

“You nearly killed us!” Audrey felt a sort of wildness herself now, a hysteria she would for once like to give in to.

Sue got out of the car in a new suit, baby blue plaid.

The suit calmed Audrey. She’d helped Sue on the phone last week decide about it. “It’s darling,” she said, plucking the sleeve before they kissed.

“Bridge is off, I think, Suzie.”

“What are you talking about?”

They never canceled Friday bridge. And it had only been cut short that once, two years ago at Audrey’s house, when Larry had called home and told her the president had been shot in Dallas.

“Bridge is definitely off! Everything’s off!” Frances said. She was tearing out the grimy insole of her red pump.

“Her father’s here,” Audrey said.

Sue looked around for an unfamiliar car. “How’d he get here?”

Of all the questions to ask.

“I don’t know,” Frances said.

“The train? A lift? Did he bring luggage?”

“Sue,” Audrey said.

“No.” Frances turned toward the house. “No luggage. I have to go in now. He’ll be watching. You all should go.”

“We’re staying,” Sue said. “Aren’t we, Auds?”

Frances had spoken of him only once, three years ago at Sue’s house when their afternoon tea had bled into cocktails and Sue’s housekeeper had taken all the children up to the bath. They were talking about their parents’

marriages, how they were trying to do things differently. Upstairs the children were shrieking. Audrey worried about them getting too wound up and hitting their heads on the edge of the tub. Frances said that her parents were divorced. Audrey had never known anyone with divorced parents.

They split before the war, Frances said. In ’39, when she was three. She had no memory of them together. How awful, Elinor said. And Frances said, No, it was for the best. Her father was dangerous. He had aliases. A spy, Frances said. A double agent. Maybe a triple agent. Audrey wondered if she was making that up. A triple agent? Frances had heard him one time on the phone when she was very young, she said, speaking a foreign language. She didn’t know which one. Just that her father had turned into a different person. He had no idea I was in the room watching. His whole face changed when he spoke. My mother hadn’t let my sister and me see him again till we turned thirteen. Then we were allowed once a year to have lunch with him in a park in Maryland, an hour from our house. My mother made the lunch.

Always the same thing, tomatoes and cream cheese with chives. There was

never a scene. He came down a path and left the same way. He came to my wedding reception, briefly. Stood in the back. Didn’t make a toast or ask me to dance. I haven’t seen him since, she said.

“Papa?” Frances said in the vestibule, if you could call it that. It was more like the lobby of a small museum. Her voice echoed from all directions, magnifying the panic.

“In here,” came a voice, quiet, with a lilt of anticipation. Audrey followed it. The others—even Frances, who should have known the way sound traveled in her own house—were uncertain where it had come from.

The lobby branched off in four directions, like four legs of a spider. Audrey moved down the back right leg into a den she’d never seen before.

Frances always entertained in bright rooms, the formal living room or the dining room or the sunroom beyond the kitchen, but he had set up the bridge table in here, in this small dark room. Audrey was aware of clutching her clutch, of the two beads of the clasp boring holes in her finger and thumb. He was counting the deck. He glanced up, down, immediately up again. The cards kept flowing fast through his hands. He smiled, eyes back down, shaking his head. “You made me lose count,” he said, barely audible.

The others caught up behind her.

“What’s all this?” Frances said, the way she would to one of her children if they’d made a mess.

“Do not ever let it be said that I broke up a bridge game.”

“Oh, Papa, no.”

Audrey couldn’t get over the Papa bit. From another century, or country.

“We can take our coffee in the sunroom.”

“I’d like to play. I haven’t played bridge with you since you were—”

“We never played bridge, Papa. Not once.” But she took the seat to his left.

Which meant that Sue had to sit down opposite her, because they were always partners. Which put Audrey facing Frances’s father.

He gave her a slight somber bow, though he was seated.

“Papa.” She couldn’t stop saying it, as if she’d been denied a candy and was now cramming them into her mouth. “This is Audrey Pennet and Susan West.”

“Ben Yardley,” he said to Sue and put out his hand.

“Pleasure,” Sue said coolly. She liked fighting other people’s battles.

He turned to Audrey. “Partner,” he said. His hand was small and warm.

She watched it join the other to deal. Small quick hands.

She wasn’t lucky in cards. She never fanned them open and saw anything spectacular. She wasn’t that kind of person. Fortunately Elinor, her usual partner, was. So was Sue. And even Frances on occasion had a good streak.

Audrey was the B actor of bridge. She had learned to play her mediocrity well.

He dealt her an extraordinary hand.

She hardly knew how to contain herself. She quickly added up the points.

Three aces, two kings, a queen, a jack. A void in diamonds. Eight spades.

Twenty-five points. She kept her eyes down. But oh how she wanted to look up and let him see it in her face.

He bid one heart. Perfect. The only suit she didn’t have an ace in.

Sue bid one no trump. Audrey bid two spades. Frances passed, Ben passed, Sue bid two no trump.

“Five spades,” Audrey said. She hoped not too loudly.

“You’re insane,” Frances said. “Double.”

Ben was the dummy and she played the round easily, feeling his approval without having to search for it.

“That’s my girl and a half,” he said when she took the last trick. It was something her own father used to say. Girl and a half.

They played out the rubber. Each hand was like Christmas. The aces and face cards sparkling at her like jewels.

“Why don’t we take a coffee break?” Sue said. “And maybe switch things around when we come back.”

He lowered his eyebrows conspiratorially. “They’re trying to break us up, Audrey.”

The kitchen was filled with sun. They squinted at each other as Frances moved briskly about.

“I’ll get the cups,” Audrey said, opening the cupboard.

“No, I want to use the Spode.”

“Where are they?”

“I’ll get them, Audrey,” Frances said, sharp, the way she spoke to the son she didn’t like much.

Sue had gotten the sugar and was filling the little pitcher with cream. Ben had wandered down the hall past the sunroom. Audrey found him at the end

of the spider leg, in Cassie’s module. Cassie was the youngest and the farthest from her parents’ bedroom, which was down past the den.

“You passed the sunroom,” Audrey said from the doorway.

“It appears I have grandchildren,” he said, touching a copy of Madeline on Cassie’s unmade bed.

“Yes, you do.” She felt a flare of anger at him. Her own father had died a month before her first child was born. He’d written a letter to that unknown grandchild in a cursive jagged with pain. It struck her as more poignant now, that letter, than it ever had before. She had been so consumed by her own loss that she’d barely considered his. Though I will never cast an eye on you, he’d written, I will always love you, all your days. He had anticipated the end of his own ability to love anyone. When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can’t give love anymore.

She wouldn’t be able to love her children. It struck her suddenly as the very worst thing about death, worse than not being able to breathe or laugh or kiss. A kind of existential suffocation, to not be able to give her children her love anymore. She thought of Larry. There would come a day when one of them would not be able to give the other love, when one would be alive without the love of the other. But this didn’t feel as dramatic.

Ben was still touching the book. But he was watching her.

“Papa!” The panic was back in Frances’s voice. “There you are. Don’t look at Cassie’s room. It’s a mess.”

“It’s a pristine and perfect room,” he said, not even pretending to look away from Audrey.

In the sunroom they drank coffee in the white Spode cups. The sun shone through Ben’s hair to his scalp. Sue led them into silly conversations. Beach club membership rules, Bonwit’s new charge card.

They went back and played another rubber, Frances with her father. They didn’t have the cards but Sue let them win, bidding low, passing unnecessarily, making mistakes. Sue wanted Frances to have Audrey’s experience of a victory with him. But Frances was not his girl and a half.

Audrey felt him beside her, felt the heat of his arm though it never touched hers, felt his eyes on her hand when she played a card, felt they were speaking the whole time, though later she would wonder what on earth she thought they were saying.

She hoped Frances would invite them to stay for lunch as always. It was past one by the time the second rubber was finished and she was starving.

But she didn’t. She was ushering them out. She had two hours alone with her father now before the kids came home. They left the den and moved toward the light. Audrey would be expected to say her goodbyes and drive away. It was like discovering a sun and being expected to move in the opposite direction. She wanted at least to have her own goodbye. She said at the very last moment, just as Sue went out the door, that she had to use the ladies’ room. There was one just off the kitchen but she went to another one, the one near Molly’s module. It smelled of middle school perfume, lemon and lilies. She took her time.

He was still in the lobby when she returned, looking at an article on the wall, “Modern Magnificence,” about the house. She could hear Frances in the kitchen, washing the cups by hand.

“Goodbye,” Audrey said, without conviction.

He took her arm and brought her to the glass windows that looked out at the pool, already covered for winter, where Frances could not see them from the kitchen. His lips were like his hands, plump and warm, wetter than she had imagined. He took her lower lip in his teeth and tugged gently. He moved to her cheek and let out a moan in her ear. She felt him grow hard against her.

“Papa?” Frances called from the kitchen.

They pulled away.

“Is it a secret, where you live?” she said quickly.

His grin blossomed. “Of course not. Graham Street. Portland, Maine.”

Frances had taken off her shoes again and she came around the corner without sound. “What’s in Portland, Maine?”

“Just a place I lived once. I was on the second floor, above a sort of grimy hair salon. It was an old sea captain’s house that had been broken up into apartments. Not a very wealthy sea captain, I don’t think, no view of the sea. But a pretty mansard roof.” He’d stuck his hands in his front pockets, pulling out the fabric casually, reminding Audrey of boys in her youth after close dancing.

“I didn’t know you’d lived in Maine,” Frances said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Thank you for today,” Audrey said and kissed Frances on the cheek. She glanced briefly at him. “Nice to meet you.” She tried to make it as flat and bland as she could, as if they were really saying goodbye.

It wasn’t easy to drive two hours north and two hours home while her kids were at school without anyone noticing her absence. The first time she did it, Becky threw up at recess and had to go to Elinor’s house because no one could reach Audrey. She said she’d been shopping and lost track of time.

Another time, Russell hit his head against a desk and had to stay on the cot in the school office for hours. “Where were you?” he wailed all the way home. And then in December, Larry came in from the garage and asked how in the heck the new Mustang had gone nine thousand miles already.

She felt the blood drain, but he laughed and said, You head down to Atlantic City every time you drop the kids off? And she saw he didn’t expect an answer.

That first time, she didn’t even know what she was looking for. She just drove up and down Graham Street, two and seven-tenths miles, believing she would just know it. Had he said a number when he’d said Graham Street and she’d forgotten it? Old sea captain’s house, he’d said. Not wealthy. No view of the sea. Hairdresser on the bottom floor.

It was only driving home that she had remembered the roof. A kind of roof. It began with an m. She didn’t know roofs. She casually asked Larry one night coming home from a dinner party about the kinds of roofs there were.

“Well, you can make a roof out of slate or asphalt shingles or tile . . . or even grass like in Sweden.”

“No, styles of roofs.” Her arms burned in impatience. “Use the technical term. Be technical.”

“Do you need to take another tranquilizer, Auds?”

“A kind of roof that begins with an m.” She was nearly crying.

But he didn’t know.

She went to the library. It took all of five minutes.

Mansard.

Not one mansard roof on Graham Street in Portland, Maine. Mansard. It sounded French. It seemed French, like the houses in Madeline.

At a New Year’s Eve party, Frances said her father had been with them for a few days over Christmas.

“What a riot that man is,” Elinor said. “Why weren’t you there that night? Were you out of town?”

“Yes, we were visiting my mother,” Audrey said, low so Larry wouldn’t hear.

“I gave him the new Greene novel,” Frances said. “He loves Graham Greene.”

Madeline. Mansard. Graham Greene. It was clearly a puzzle she was meant to solve. She tried. That winter she drove up and down Green Street, Greenleaf Street, Greenwood Lane, Madeline Street, French Street, Queen’s Court. She had a babysitter with a license who could pick up the kids at school now, so she didn’t have to worry about time. She found a few mansard roofs, but they were mostly single-family houses. The two that weren’t had women’s names above the second-floor buzzers, no hairdressers on the bottom floor.

But she liked driving through the neighborhoods at dusk. She could see it so vividly at that hour, the tall house with the French roof, the hair salon closed for the evening, everything dark save the band of light around its middle, the second floor all lit up and glowing, waiting for her arrival.