Nell’s wishing she also had someone with her, a plus one, a partner, a human shield. Lately, she’s been accepting of her single fate, embracing of it even, and it didn’t chafe. But it’s days like today that she wishes she had an effective distraction at her side—a charming and successful husband maybe, or a cherubic and precocious child.
Glad of her little detour with Emerson, Nell has a chance to take it all in. The Canaletto over the living room mantel is hanging next to a calendar from the local arboretum Scotch-taped to the wall. The carved jade emperor’s bowl sits side by side with a plastic candy dish in the shape of a cow, which moos when anyone reaches for a treat. The two-foot high stack of National Geographics from the sixties still stands in front of the bookshelf that holds a complete set of first editions of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and poems—her cousin’s namesake and a distant Quincy relative. It’s a tableau from her childhood preserved intact—from the highball glass sweating and leaving rings on the marquetry table to the Ritz crackers and cheddar cheese on a chipped demi porcelain dish. She’s underestimated the impact of seeing it again. And the scent of the place—mildew mixed with Windex—sends her neurons firing down a wormhole that strips away decades so she is a girl again, self-conscious and bewildered and filled with a fraught desire to belong.
She’d been careful never to let on to her mother that she was intrigued by this side of the family. Since earliest remembering she has known where her loyalties should lie. Despite her mother’s efforts to impart her own reticence, Nell’s feelings for the Quincys have always been tinged with never-admitted longing and a secret pride.
As she walks into the living room now, her uncle Baldwin is sunken into one end of the loveseat listening to the preparations for tomorrow’s services, an untouched glass of something amber at his side.
“Saved a place for you right here,” he says, inclining his head without dropping a stitch as he works on a painted needlepoint canvas depicting an elaborate buckeye tree. Needlepointing allowed him all sorts of cover at family gatherings. He could sit in the corner and pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping or didn’t hear a question, or exit a conversation by concentrating on his work. And damn anyone who dared to so much as raise an eyebrow at his traditionally “feminine” hobby. It was just the sort of eccentricity born of privilege that Baldwin enjoyed flaunting.
“Why, men make the best stitchers,” he’d say, his blunt fingers flying over patterns of sailing flags or hunting dogs. There was a wink in it, an acknowledgment that unless you were a Quincy, you probably wouldn’t know about such things.
He’d sent Nell’s mother a pillow one Christmas depicting what was supposedly the family crest.
“Good Lord,” she’d said when she’d opened it, setting it aside quickly and barely looking at it. Though she’d send a gushing thank-you note, Nell knew. Nell had squirrelled away the pillow in her room, blending it in with her menagerie of stuffed animals. She has no idea where it is now.
Nell settles in next to Baldwin, glad for his rapid-fire questions about her life, which cover any awkwardness.
“Still working so hard or have you found time to hike? Isn’t that what you Oregonians do out there? Go hiking in the forest? Do you eat the salmon or have you become one of those vegans?” He is too restrained to nose around in her romantic life. Whether it’s good breeding or because his wife, her aunt Sharon, ran off with a fly-fishing instructor a decade ago and now lives in Wyoming, she couldn’t say. Pansy and the female relatives have stopped talking about their plans for tomorrow, listening in on Nell’s debriefing.
Nell can’t help but feel that Baldwin’s faux chumminess and the room’s silent spotlight marks her as the outsider, the guest. “We don’t actually belong there,” her mother would say with a little relieved sigh when they’d settle into their seats on the plane back to Portland.
When the wireless doorbell rings, a quotidian digital buzz that replaced the old chimes years ago, Nell’s relieved. A true non-Quincy has arrived.
From the formal tone of his emails inviting her to this meeting, Nell expected someone older. But the estate attorney, Louis Morrell, is about her age. His boring suit and subdued tie contrast with his shaved head and corded neck, which indicate he might spend some regular time at the gym. The effect is of a Mafia don’s right-hand man, a true consigliere, and not at all the sort of lawyer Nell imagines Loulou hiring. A homegrown boy, Nell’s guessing, but she reminds herself about books and covers.
He removes his suit coat and throws it on the long bench near the fireplace, as if he’s home from a long day at work. “Louis,” he says, pronouncing it “Louie.” “Like the song.” He walks toward Nell with an arm extended, welcoming her as if he owns the place. “Great to see you, Nell. You’re the only one I haven’t met yet.” A heavy gold link bracelet shines next to his shirt cuff.
She shakes his hand and cuts her eyes to Pansy for confirmation. (“Really? This guy?”)
Pansy’s knowing smirk gives Nell a reassuring sense of coziness—a judgment of Quincys, indeed.
Pansy doesn’t pull her punches for anyone. Even as kids, she often duped the gullible and ditched the slow, including the younger Nell. Uncle Baldwin had given her the name Pansy thinking it old-fashioned—harkening to some long-dead aunt and a flower. The name had made it a virtual certainty Pansy would grow up to be a badass. Five feet ten inches of marathon-honed control, her Patagonia fleece and practical running clothes, even at a meeting like this, convey her complete comfort in her surroundings and telegraph that she’s up for anything coming her way—a run, lifting heavy objects, combat. Next to her, Nell feels conspicuous in the tailored clothes she bought especially for this trip, hoping they’d convey an air of easy appropriateness.
Emerson stands. “Great to see you again.” They do that one-armed man-hug thing.
So, clearly Louis has been around awhile.
Baldwin manages to stop needlepointing long enough to raise three fingers and shake Louis’s hand, but he doesn’t get out of his seat. It gives Nell pause, considering her usually gregarious uncle. And then Louis makes his way around the room, greeting Pansy’s companions in order of importance, clearly in on the Quincy family hierarchy.
By unspoken cue, they leave after greeting Louis. None of them are invited to this meeting. Nell dives a hand into her purse for a piece of nicotine gum, but pauses. “Never chew gum,” Loulou would say. “You look like a cow with a cud.”
Pansy’s smile disappears as she closes the front hall door behind the exiting relatives. “I’m the only one around here who’s planning anything. I’m, like, the matriarch now, or something.” She throws herself on a low sofa and puts her feet up on the butler table, mindless of the loose hinges.
“You’re the one in town,” Emerson says. “Settle down.”