1.
THERE WAS A FOG in Fox Run Hill that morning, a thick roll of gray and black floating just an inch above the ground, like the mad scientist’s dream mist in some ancient horror movie. Patsy MacLaren Willis moved through it much too quickly. There were stones on the driveway that she couldn’t see. There were ruts in the gutters where she didn’t expect them. It was just on the edge of dawn and still very cold, in spite of its being almost summer. Patsy felt foolish and uncomfortable in her short-sleeved, thin silk blouse. Foolish and uncomfortable, she thought, dumping a load of clothes on hangers into the rear of the dull black Volvo station wagon she had parked halfway down the drive. That was the way Patsy had always felt in Fox Run Hill all the time she had lived there, more than twenty years. It was as if God had touched His finger to her forehead one morning and said, “No matter what you do with your life, you will always be out of step, out of touch, out of place.”
The clothes on hangers were her own: navy blue linen dresses from Ann Taylor with round necklines and no collars; Liz Claiborne dress pants with pleats across the front or panels under the waists; Donna Karan wrap skirts with matching cropped jackets. The clothes went with the Volvo in some odd way Patsy couldn’t define. The clothes and the Volvo went with the house too—a mock-Tudor seven thousand square feet big, set on a lot of exactly one and three-quarter acres. Fox Run Hill, Patsy thought irritably, looking up at all the other houses facing her winding street. An elegant Victorian reproduction. A massive French Provincial with a curlicue roof and stone quoins. A redbrick Federalist with too many windows. The only thing she couldn’t see from here was the fence that surrounded it all, that made Fox Run Hill what it really was. The fence was made of wrought iron and topped with electrified barbed wire. It was supposed to keep them safe. It was also supposed to remain invisible. Years ago—when the fence had just been put up, and the first foundations for the first houses had just been dug on the little circle of lots near the front gate—someone had planted a thick stand of evergreen trees along the line the fence made against the outside world. Now those trees were thick with needles and very tall, blocking out all concrete evidence of the existence of real life.
Patsy checked through the clothes again—dresses, slacks, blouses, skirts, underwear of pink satin in lightly scented bags—and then walked back up the drive and into the garage. She poked against the pins in her salt-and-pepper hair and felt fat wet strands fall against her neck. She shifted the waistband of her skirt against her skin and ended up feeling lumpy and grotesque. Three days before, she had celebrated her forty-eighth birthday with a small dinner party at the Fox Run Hill Country Club. Her husband, Stephen Willis, had reserved the window corner for her. She had been able to look out over the waterfall while she cut her cake. She had been able to look out over the candles at the people she had been closest to in this place. It should have been the perfect moment, the culmination of something important and valuable, the recognition of an achievement and a promise. Instead, the night had been ugly and flat and full of tension, like every other night Patsy could remember—but it was a tension only she had recognized. If she had tried to tell the others about it, they wouldn’t have known what she meant.
Nobody here has ever known what I meant, Patsy thought as she came up out of the garage into the mudroom. She kicked off her sandals and left them lying, tumbled together, under the built-in bench along the south wall. She padded across the fieldstone floor in her bare feet and went up the wooden stairs into the kitchen. The house was cavernous. It should have had a dozen children in it, and a dozen servants too. Instead, there was just Stephen and herself, having their dinners on trays in front of the masonry fireplace in the thirty-by-thirty-foot family room, making love in a tangle of sheets in a master bedroom so outsized, the bed in it had had to be custom-made, and all the linens had to be special-ordered from Bloomingdale’s. Patsy stopped at one of the two kitchen sinks and got herself a glass of water. Her throat felt scratchy and hard, as if she had just eaten razor blades. I hate this house, she thought. Anybody would hate this house. It was not only too large. It was fake. Even the portraits of ancestors that lined the paneled wall in the gallery were fake. Stephen had bought them at an auction at Sotheby’s, the leftover pieces of somebody else’s unremembered life.
“I paid only a thousand for the lot,” he’d told Patsy when he’d brought them home from New York. “They’re just what we’ve always needed in this place.”