The Practice House
Laura McNeal
PART ONE
1
On the April day when the Americans mounted the stone steps and pushed the door buzzer, rain had fallen for eleven of the last eleven days, and Aldine McKenna was waiting, metaphorically speaking, for her Japanese man. She and her sister, Eileen, were stuck as usual in Aunt Sedge’s house on Bellevue Crescent. The house was bigger than their father’s had been, and much closer to the shops in Ayr, but Aunt Sedge watched over them more—“As I promised your poor father,” she would say until Aldine thought she might scream. Even when Sedge went to visit a friend, she left a list of chores a mile long and told the neighbors to keep an eye out, which really meant spy, didn’t it?
Aunt Sedge was Charity Sedgewick McKenna, their father’s sister, older by nine years and his opposite in every way. When going out, she always wore a fascinator or a small rakish hat, gloves, and whichever animal-shaped brooch matched the fascinator. She had no children of her own and had tried to host the girls weekly when they were little, planning a different cultural outing every Saturday, but her ideas of fun were confining and dull: when they were four and five, she wanted them to go with her to hear chamber music, but they kicked their legs and sighed too often. Their mother told Aunt Sedge—no one ever called her Charity—that perhaps she should just try to have fun with the girls, so Sedge planned a tea party with all of her old bears and dolls sitting around a child’s antique table. Although it was a delicious tea, with three different kinds of flower-topped bakery cakes, including orange spice with four layers of the creamiest white frosting Aldine had ever tasted, Aldine and Leenie felt silly and self-conscious, because those bears and dolls belonged to a grown person and thus couldn’t possibly be alive. Adding to the awkwardness was the fact that a Japanese man sat in the corner the whole time, smiling grimly, never saying a word, just nodding now and then. Later, their father said the Japanese man was Aunt Sedge’s true love and he had come to see if she would marry him and go live in Japan, but Sedge had said no, for some reason. Perhaps it was too late for her, their father said. This had made a deep impression on both girls, and the efforts of Charity Sedgewick to keep Aldine and Leenie, now nineteen and twenty, from falling in love at the wrong time with the wrong person and their fear of waiting until it was too late made for a combustible situation.
Leenie was the most childlike but also the most dutiful. She had cut up beef for the pie and hung wash over the Aga, two things on Sedge’s chore list, and now she was knitting, which had a calming effect on some souls, but not Leenie’s. It made her peevish, complaining that Aldine had not even started her share, which was true. Aldine was drinking, as she always drank, overly sweetened Fortnum’s tea. It was 4:30. “Half past nothing,” their father used to joke, “half till nothing more.”
No man had come close to courting Aldine in a year at least unless you counted old Dr. O’Malley. She’d expected to be quizzed about her mathematical skills when she went in for the job but the doctor didn’t follow this line at all. “You’re the one who sang Mendelssohn in church, are you not?” he’d asked, a surprising question because it had been a while, months, perhaps even a year. “‘Wings of a Dove,’ wasn’t it?” She said aye, she’d been the one, and he’d asked no other questions, but just nodded and said, “Right then,” and left the room. She wasn’t sure she’d been hired until his nurse, Mrs. Terlip, told her so. Aldine liked the work. The sums weren’t difficult to add and sort, and Dr. O’Malley liked to keep the rooms warm. He talked pleasantly to everyone, old, young, rich, poor, and when no one was near, he hummed tunelessly with a funny little smile on his face, his way of thinking, or so she supposed.
In his office late one winter’s afternoon, when the clients were gone, and Mrs. Terlip, too (to Leenie, Aldine referred to the woman as Mrs. Turnip), and already the light was seeping away, the doctor had taken her arm and run his ancient fingers along the underside of her wrist and said in a low, gentle voice, “The smooth-skinned girl,” which made her draw her arm away, though she smiled so as not to offend him. When the following day he gave her a set of Bakelite bracelets and said he hoped she “took no offense,” she’d presumed he was talking about his earlier remark and said, “No offense taken at all, I’m sure,” and, having slipped the bracelets over her hand, she was surprised by the small but actual thrill that passed through her when she presented her wrist for him to admire. The old doctor was alone, after all, and she understood the wretchedness of that.
Aldine stared at Aunt Sedge’s Japanese lithograph of a huge white-fingered wave about to crush a fishing boat and thought of the Japanese man. Was he still pining for Charity Sedgewick? Did her aunt think of him when she went to bed every night alone? Is that why she had this tragic picture on her wall, where the water seemed to reach down like claws to destroy the tiny bareheaded men bowed down in the boat?
She was down to the last swallow of her second cup, the dregs of which she would sometimes, if she were alone, touch with the tip of her tongue like an anteater, when she heard the door buzzer. God, it was an irritating sound—like you were treating someone to electric shocks—but through the side window she saw two men in three-piece suits and homburgs and that seemed like fun beginning.
“It’s men,” she told Leenie.
Leenie was studying the knitting chart so she hardly looked up. “What men?” She had George Prendergast, anyway. Such as he was. Sedge had never met him and Leenie always insisted he was just a passing thing, not a type strong enough to imprint—imprint being the word Sedgewick sometimes used for seduction, as if they were baby geese.
“Strange men,” Aldine said. She checked her hair in the hall mirror and thought that even if they were selling something it would be a change.
“Pretend we’re not home.”
But of course Aldine went to the door.
The men were, as she’d hoped, young. One was homely and the other was starkly not. The tall one had very arresting sea-gray eyes, dark hair that curled in spite of how short it was cut, and a very kissable forehead. “I’m Elder Cooper,” he said in an American voice, “and this is Elder Lance.”