The room had a piano in it, an old upright that was nothing compared with the organ downstairs except that while the organ looked forlorn and forgotten, as if its notes hadn't sounded in years, the piano looked somehow as if a young girl had just slipped off its wooden bench and run outside to play.
That was why I thought of it as the girl's room, I realized. Because of the piano.
“Estella's room,” Danny whispered.
“You mean Eleanor?” That was the daughter's name.
“As in Estella and Pip,” he said, and I could see what he meant then: the old house wasn't brick, and there were no iron bars over the windows, no walled courtyard, but it was dismal in the way I imagined Miss Havisham's Satis House was. Satis House. Enough House. Whoever had this house, could want nothing else.
As we crept up to the front of the house, the light faded from the girl's room, our ghost moving to the back of the house, we thought. We waited and waited, my feet getting wetter and colder, my discomfort at leaving the children escalating. What if one of them woke and found us gone? Still the light didn't appear again.
Danny—leaving the bat with me—went around to the back to see where our ghost was. “The back of the house is dark, too,” he said when he came back.
“The servants' stairs,” I said. I'd forgotten about the worn, narrow, creaky-steep back stairs that ran down to the kitchen, behind the grand stairway in the front of the house. “They went down the servants' stairs and out the back.”
You'd have thought, from the look on Danny's face, that he was Pip himself and old Estella had just told him she was to be Bentley Drummle's wife.
I WANTED TO CALL the Wednesday Sisters every day that week, to patch up this rift, to make it all right again. It would have been easy enough to do: telephone and apologize. Bring flowers like Danny had. Lie prostrate on their front porches and beat my ridiculous breast over the foolishness, the utter wrongness of my ideas about who was supposed to marry whom and, yes, who was better than whom. I did see that. I did see, in my thinking the same thought Kath had voiced even if I hadn't voiced it myself—“But Ally is such a pretty girl”—that I was unforgivably prejudiced.
That's certainly what I would do now: I'd apologize. But I was younger then. I had entirely too much foolish pride to go with my foolish ideas. Enough that, when mixed with my insecurity, left me standing paralyzed, unable to get past the possibility that a repentant me would be rejected as surely as the unrepentant one and I'd be left without a scrap of dignity.
Dignity. How is it that it's most important to us when we're least entitled to it?
Linda drove by the park that Wednesday just as she had the week before. Brett drove by. I was sure Ally was looking out her window, as I was. But no one stopped. It was fifteen minutes after the time we usually gathered when Kath pushed her stroller into the park in the rain, Lacy protected by the stroller top but Kath herself without even a raincoat.
She looked around at the empty park, sat down, and put her face in her hands.
Lacy sat quietly watching her from under the hood of the stroller.
I grabbed Davy and an umbrella and rushed out the door, met Ally hurrying from her house, Carrie only half in her raincoat. Then Linda was there and Brett was, too, and Kath was sobbing, saying, “Her name is Kathy.”
If we were still mad at each other, we forgot it; the apologies—the self-recrimination and the I'm-such-a-jerk—would come later, along with the worries (Would our husbands mind if we invited Ally and Jim to dinner? Would we be able to treat Jim like a regular person? And what about Linda being Jewish? What did that mean?), and a newfound care for each other's emotions that wouldn't last forever, at least not with the same intensity, but would draw us closer.
“My name,” Kath wailed. “My name.”
She'd picked up the kitchen extension. Heard him call her Kathy. “Kathy, punkin,” he'd said, using the same endearment they whispered to their children.
“If he leaves me to marry her—”
“He's not going to leave you, Kath,” Linda insisted, retreating from the possibility of “platonic friendship” or “business call” now, hoping only that “Lee won't leave” would prove to be higher ground from which to fight.
“If he leaves me and marries her,” Kath insisted, “she'll have everything, even my name!”
THINGS WENT FROM bad to worse for Kath that October, culminating in what even she now refers to as, like in Gatsby, “that incident with the car”—the hospital Halloween party disaster that occurred the night after the party Danny and I threw at our house. Our party had a come-as-a-literary-character theme, a mistake in retrospect, but the Wednesday Sisters all thought it was a terrific idea before it went so bad on us. It gave people both guidance and a lot of leeway. You could dress to the nines as, say, Anna Karenina or Mr. Darcy. You could don a Chinese pigtail and carry an opium pipe for a character out of Tai-Pan. You could put on a hat and tote a violin case for The Godfather, which was all over the bestseller lists that year. Or if you really hated to wear costumes, you could dress in street clothes and claim to be Updike's Rabbit or one of his suburban-housewife flings. Danny and I did Agatha Christie: Danny, with the help of an extravagant mustache and his tuxedo, made a fairly respectable if somewhat thin and nonbalding Hercule Poirot; and I, with my glasses low on my nose and eyeliner to age my face, made a fine Jane Marple, if I do say so myself. Brett came as Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird—I swear, she nearly did look seven years old—and Chip came as Boo Radley, acting in character, too. Kath, who was the first to identify every one of us (she had an unbelievable talent for guessing who was who), came as Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, in a wispy white flapper dress with sailor collar, a white cloche hat with a gauzy scarf, and a long, long string of pearls that were clearly real, no need to run them over your teeth. She'd joined Weight Watchers (you'd offer her a cookie and she'd say no, she'd already had her free hundred calories for the day, and she could catalogue everything she'd eaten for a day or a week as a number of breads, fruits, fats, and proteins), but I hadn't realized how much weight she'd lost until she showed up in that flapper dress.