Bill’s manic schedule was designed, in part, to ease his father’s workload. Willis, Sr., hadn’t asked for a lighter workload, but Bill wasn’t convinced that his father knew what was best for him. My sixty-five-year-old father-in-law was usually in blooming good health, but he had a history of heart trouble, and Bill dreaded the thought of losing him. Gradually, Bill took over much of the day-today running of the firm, in order to reassure his father that all would be well with Willis & Willis should the old man decide to retire.
I suspected that Bill was trying to prove something to himself, as well. It wasn’t always easy being the son of the great William Willis, Sr. It wasn’t always easy being a Willis, period. Bill’s predecessors had been bringing glory to the Willis name since they’d come over from England; some had been judges, others had been congressmen, but all had done something remarkable. It was a weighty tradition to uphold, and Bill had reached an age, in his mid-thirties, when he felt the need to demonstrate that he was worthy of wearing the Willis mantle.
So my husband had good and understandable reasons for working himself into an early grave, and I had good and understandable reasons for tearing my hair out. The Handsome Prince Handbook is mute on the subject of chronic workaholism—Prince Charming, apparently, knew how to delegate—and I didn’t know where else to turn for help. What do you do when life begins to go wrong and you’ve used up all three wishes?
I refused to sit around the mansion, pining. My friend and former boss, Dr. Stanford J. Finderman, had plenty of jobs for me to do. Stan was the curator of the rare-book collection at my alma mater’s library, and he was more than happy to stretch his tight academic budget by dispatching me to England—at my own expense—to attend auctions or evaluate private collections.
For two long years, I threw myself into my work. I met scores of fascinating people and visited hundreds of beautiful places, and each assignment served to distract me from the low-pitched, incessant, and wholly irrational voice that murmured insidiously in the back of my mind: It’s you. You’re why Bill’s keeping such long hours. He’s wondering why on earth he married you.
It was an absurd, ridiculous thought, yet it wouldn’t go away, and as months flew by in which a dent in Bill’s pillow was the only sign I had that he’d been to bed at all, I began to think it might contain a tiny germ of truth.
However much we had in common, Bill and I didn’t share the same background. He’d been raised in a national historic landmark, for pity’s sake, whereas I’d grown up in a nondescript apartment building on Chicago’s west side. He came from a long line of distinguished men and women who’d sailed first-class from England before the United States was united. I came from Joe and Beth Shepherd, an overworked businessman and a schoolteacher, whose ancestors had probably paid for their passage to America by scrubbing decks. I’d gone to a good college, but it was Bill who wore the Harvard crimson, and if it hadn’t been for Aunt Dimity, my net worth wouldn’t have equaled what my husband spent annually on shoelaces.
I’d lost all the family I had when my mother died, but Bill still had his father, several cousins out on the West Coast, and two aunts who lived nearby in Boston. I hadn’t met Bill’s cousins, but his father was an absolute peach, and we got along famously.
His aunts, however, were a different kettle of fish. Honoria and Charlotte were pencil-thin, silver-haired widows in their late fifties, and the moment I met them I understood why Bill’s cousins had fled to California and never returned. My aunts-in-law were as thin-lipped as they were slim-hipped, and they’d welcomed me into the family with all the warmth you’d expect from two women whose hopes of finding a suitable match for their favorite nephew had been dashed when he’d proposed to me.
They objected to me on any number of grounds, but the front-runner seemed to be that, although I was thirty-two years old and had been married once before, I still had no track record as a potential brood mare for the Willis stables. They didn’t put it quite so baldly, but if looks could impregnate, I‘d’ve had twins every Christmas.
The galling truth was that, as a brood mare, I wasn’t likely to win any prizes. I was the only child of two only children who’d taken a decade to produce me, so my chances in the fertility sweepstakes weren’t overwhelmingly favorable.
It didn’t worry me. Much. I won’t deny that I spent more than a few mornings staring at Bill’s dented pillow and wondering if I’d ever hear the patter of his big feet, let alone little ones, but I never admitted it to anyone except to my friend Emma Harris, in England, once, in a moment of abysmal weakness, and she’d promised never to mention it again. But Honoria and Charlotte mentioned it, often. “Have you any happy news for us today, Lori?” was a question I’d come to loathe, because I’d had no happy news for anyone for two long years.