Winter Sisters Page 4

  Mary would have been wrong to deny Elizabeth this break for grief. The Conservatoire—the violin—could wait. In late summer, surely no later, they would return to Paris, and a refreshed Elizabeth would resume her march toward excellence. Exhausted, Amelia washed her face, snuffed the oil lamp, and settled against the pillows just as the ship entered the open sea.

  Chapter Four

  The 12:55 Express pulled into the NY Central Railroad Depot at Albany with a burst of steam, trailing soot and dirty clods of snow. Mary and William searched the windows of the cars for Amelia and Elizabeth, but all was chaos and disruption as a flurry of porters and passengers converged on the platform. William climbed on top of a crate and spied his mother-in-law and niece waiting sensibly by a pillar near one of the depot doors, calmly surveying the crowd while passersby took surreptitious note of the curved line of Elizabeth’s hat and the trim tidiness of Amelia’s bustle. Parisian finery in Albany was rarely seen, and the two had not yet donned mourning, having had no time in the haste of leaving to order a black dress from the seamstress or to dye one of theirs.

  Amelia folded Mary into her arms as if Mary were the one returning from a long trip, and Mary surrendered to the maternal affection with a convulsive shudder. Only a mother, Mary thought, could render a grown woman or man a child again, even if only for a moment.

  Mary pulled away and embraced her mother in turn. Grief had diminished Amelia. Her gray locks had escaped their pins; creases lined her pale face, and her eyes had hooded and wrinkled with age.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Mama. But I’m so glad to see you.”

  “Bonnie was as much a daughter to me as she was sister to you. And Elizabeth couldn’t stay away. What is the news?”

  Mary shook her head, unwilling to lay out the particulars at the crowded depot, or before Elizabeth, who was weeping quietly on William’s shoulder. He unbuttoned his topcoat and reached into his vest pocket for a handkerchief.

  Elizabeth broke from his embrace to turn to Mary with a defensive, questioning glance, leading Mary to wonder whether Elizabeth had overheard her admonition that they ought not to have come.

  Mary had questioned their return, and did still, for the reason that Elizabeth would suffer the same grief in Paris as in Albany, but there, she could keep up her studies, while here she would be mostly idle, and far more susceptible to the ravages of sorrow, reminded everywhere of the O’Donnells’ deaths. Still, it was lovely to see them, and she took her sister’s child into her arms. As happened from time to time, Mary, like her mother, caught sight of her twin sister’s ghost lurking in Elizabeth’s sublime features. The resemblance always startled her, but though Elizabeth’s cheeks might be more plump than her mother’s and her lashes less full, she still resembled her mother so much that Mary sometimes felt haunted.

  Elizabeth yielded only slightly to Mary’s embrace before pulling quickly away.

  “Of course you are tired,” Mary said. “Harold is waiting with the carriage.”

  That night, they took refuge around the oak dining table, long ago sandwiched into the small nook off the kitchen so that Mary could have the dining room as her clinic. They were contemplating a curl of steam rising from a soup tureen that the insistent Vera had deposited in the middle of the table next to a cobalt blue teapot. Candles flickered, lit by Vera, though outside a fine spring gloaming hovered. It was soothing to be taken care of, to bask in the shafts of evening light streaming through the window, to sip strong Russian caravan tea, and to fortify themselves with Vera’s meaty borscht. Outside, an early thrush was trilling from a leafless branch of the maple tree, while in the kitchen, the oven door screeched as it opened, a hint of cinnamon wafting in the air. Vera had baked an apple pie, from last autumn’s cellared fruit.

  Why was it, Mary thought, that beauty and horror always met side by side, magnifying one other?

  To protect Elizabeth, Mary and William blurred the specifics as they told of their search, but the hoped-for salutary effect failed.

  “I should never have gone,” Elizabeth said.

  “To Paris?” Mary said. “Of course you should have.”

  “No. I should have waited. The conservatory could have waited. Going was such a mistake.”

  “My darling girl,” William said. “You could not have known what would happen. We wanted you to go. Bonnie wanted you to go. She was so proud of you. You could not have predicted such a storm.”

  “But I would have had more time with them. Instead, I wasted my time—”

  “How can you say that? You didn’t waste anything,” Mary said.

  Elizabeth ignored her. “What time do we begin looking tomorrow? I’ll help.”

  Mary glanced at William, who shook his head at her, but Mary pressed. “Looking?”

  “For Emma and Claire.”

  “But we’ve already looked everywhere. We did everything we could.”

  “But we have to keep looking. They could be anywhere.”

  Mary recalled Captain Mantel’s harsh words, his dismissive, mocking tone when she had uttered the same protestations. “I know it’s hard to accept. It was for us, too. But we—and the police—we’ve looked every single place they could be—two, three times.”

  “Bonnie and David would never stop searching,” Elizabeth said.

  The pronouncement came as a slap across Mary’s face, echoing her own vow of just a few weeks ago.

  “I know this is difficult, but when you go back to Paris,” Mary said, “you might find that—”

  “I’m never going back.”

  Mary glanced at Amelia. “That’s just the grief speaking. Don’t abandon—”

  “You don’t understand,” Elizabeth said. “You’re good at everything. But I am a failure.”

  William met Mary’s eyes, and again shook his head. But Mary couldn’t let the girl believe such an outrageous thing. “No, you’re not. Your grandmother’s letters were full of news of your achievements—”

  Elizabeth jumped from her seat and threw down her napkin. “That is always what you say. You always say, We did everything that we could. You always say, Don’t turn your back on your gift.”

  “Lizzie! What is the matter?”

  But the girl swept past Mary and up the back stairs, her footsteps clattering on the polished wood.

  Amelia reached an unsteady hand across the table to Mary.

  “Did she just say that she quit?” Mary said.

  “She told me she obtained a leave of absence.”

  “Did you verify that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Amelia said, drawing herself up. “I didn’t check up on her because I don’t check up on anyone. I am not the one enrolled in the conservatory. Something has been bothering her. She hasn’t been herself lately. When your telegram came, I was already thinking she ought to get away.”

  William looked on, loath to intervene between mother and daughter.

  “But did you know what she’d done?” Mary said.

  “I didn’t, but as Lizzie said, everyone is not you. Leave her be.”

  With a great swish of her wide skirts, Vera came clucking into the room with the fragrant pie, her hands swathed in a towel against the hot pan. She set the pastry before them and stood back. Taking in their glum faces at a glance, she muttered something indecipherable in Russian and whisked away the tureen. Returning within moments with the sherry decanter, she distributed three crystal glasses, poured far too much into each, and said, “Drink something.”

  Chapter Five

  The Sutter plot in Albany Rural Cemetery occupied a portion of Bower Hill that overlooked a sparse stand of white oaks and Indian Lake, which had been fashioned from damming Kromme Kill, one of the brooks that meandered through the burying ground. It was now six weeks since the blizzard, and still the last traces of snow had not melted, but here and there tulips and daffodils had broken through
the warming soil and unfurled their tapered greenery and hard buds. And though this late in April, ice still blocked the Hudson—another unusual circumstance in this surprising year—the cemetery had sent word that the ground had given away enough to allow burials to begin.

  Mary was moving among the graves, purging the aging tombstones of stray rhizoids of the delicate, tenacious lichen that clung to the gray slabs. The plot boasted a flowering dogwood, not yet in bloom, under which Christian’s and Jenny’s gravestones bracketed their father’s. Jenny lay beside her husband, Thomas. A granite statue of two entwined cherubs had been placed next to the two open graves into which Bonnie’s and David’s caskets had already been lowered. Last week, Mary and Amelia had cleaned out the O’Donnells’ flat and Bonnie’s shop, a bleak task that had plunged them deeper into misery. Lately, everything they did seemed to bear the mark of finality.

  The minister waited until Mary finished her tidying rounds and joined William, Amelia, and Elizabeth before the open graves. The metallic scent of the upturned dirt played on Mary’s tongue, reminding her of the smell of blood, that lingering vestige from the war that had never left her. On the other side of the plot’s low picket fence, two sweaty gravediggers were leaning on their shovels, waiting for the service to end.

  The gilt-edge pages of the minister’s open prayer book riffled in the cool wind as he began the liturgy. They had placed a notice in the Argus that the graveside service would be private, for they had feared that all of the Lumber District would have turned out, including the society women who loved Bonnie’s hats, to say nothing of Emma’s and Claire’s schoolmates. Despite these efforts, they were not completely alone. Since the war, a new rage for cemetery visits had arisen, out of grief or curiosity or both. This funereal tourism had the unfortunate effect of intruding on the serenity of mourners everywhere, who unwittingly became part of a pastoral tableau. On any given day, an endless parade of sightseers traversed Albany Rural Cemetery’s serpentine lanes in their carriages, consulting their Appletons’ Guides on the monuments and mausoleums of distinction, and today was no exception. To the creak of passing carriages, the minister read the burial service, holding one hand aloft when he bestowed a blessing. During the last prayer, the family threw roses they had purchased at the cemetery greenhouse onto the coffins.

  In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to almighty God our brother and sister in Christ Bonnie and David O’Donnell and we commit their bodies to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  There were no bodies to commit for the girls. For a moment, the minister seemed at a loss. Elizabeth broke into tears.

  Earlier that morning, when Mary happened on Elizabeth on the veranda, where each had gone in search of a moment alone before the long carriage ride to the cemetery, Mary had suggested that Elizabeth might want to play the violin at the graveside. Since Elizabeth’s return four days earlier, her instrument had been collecting dust under her bed. Nor had Elizabeth been sleeping since she’d come back; Mary often heard her creep downstairs in the middle of the night, the rasp of the bathroom door as it shut, and an onrush of water splashing in the sink.

  “You might find solace in playing,” Mary hazarded. “You know how the girls and Bonnie loved—”

  Elizabeth’s retort was sharp, abrupt. “No, Aunt. I’m out of practice.”

  Taken aback, Mary directed her gaze across the street, where beyond a wrought iron fence Washington Park still projected itself as more of an idea than a full-fledged preserve. The land had once housed the city’s burying grounds, and at least forty thousand bodies had been exhumed in the fifties and transported to the newly established Albany Rural Cemetery. When finished, the park promised to be a long rectangle of green, its new, man-made lake a magnet for recreational boating and its numerous graveled paths a verdant refuge for a city-weary public. Several acres of the fledgling park boasted decorative parterres for flowers, and dozens of saplings had been planted in the last few years under a preexisting canopy of older elms and maples, but a good portion of it still consisted of patches of weeds and hillocks of dirt. The city was still reclaiming land. Although its eastern boundary of Willett Street was embroidered with newly built brownstones, down the street, a last line of condemned row houses within the park’s boundary awaited demolition. At that very moment, men were gathering with sledgehammers and wheelbarrows, milling about the emptied houses, laying bets on who would make the bricks fall the fastest, their deep voices echoing in the early morning air.

  “I said, I’m out of practice.”

  Mary turned, astonished. This—and last night’s—belligerence was out of character for Elizabeth; she could be temperamental, but she was rarely confrontational.

  “Lizzie, I know you’re heartbroken. I am, too. We all are. But what is this about? Did something happen to you in Paris? Is that why you don’t want to go back?”

  Elizabeth just sighed in response and swept past Mary, slamming the front door behind her as the first blows of sledgehammers dinned in the distance. This, Mary thought, was what came from decades of hearing people utter secrets during labor or the last gasps of a suffocating illness. I love another man, another woman. I can’t have another child or I’ll go mad. My father hurts me. It made Mary believe that people always wanted to confide in her.

  Now, in the cemetery, sunlight caught the rounded shoulders and wings of the granite cherubs as Elizabeth wept. The minister was frantically turning pages in search of something fitting to say, finding at last a vague prayer of dedication and benediction as they stooped to lay their last roses at the base of the statue. The gravediggers readied their shovels and the minister offered Amelia his arm to guide the group down the hillside, bearing their grief in the practiced, weary curve of his shoulders.

  At the bottom of the rise, an open carriage had drawn next to theirs. Standing before it, a diminutive woman was framed by two men, one older and one younger. The younger man bore six enormous bouquets of flowers. As the family approached, the older man came forward, removing a gray top hat to reveal a bald pate.

  “We are sorry to intrude, but we saw the notice in the paper. We couldn’t stay away. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Gerritt Van der Veer.”

  Although the Stipps were well acquainted with Albert Van der Veer, Gerritt’s distant cousin and a surgeon at Albany Hospital, the Stipps had never met Gerritt, though of course they knew of him by reputation. In person there was nothing distinctive about the prominent man except a hoarse, gravelly voice—no doubt acquired from years of screaming orders into the vast expanse of his lumber lot—and a bulldog stature that belied his wealth. Dressed less richly, he could have been mistaken for a common laborer, but in his beautifully tailored gray frockcoat and vest, he looked every inch a gentleman.

  “I considered David O’Donnell the best man on my lot. We lost a few men in that blizzard, but we will miss David the most. I—we—are grievously sorry for your loss. Please forgive our tardiness. We would have arrived much earlier, but our horse Dolly threw a shoe. We had to leave her at that traveler’s livery on Broadway and exchange her for that sorry beast.” He gestured to a spotted mare harnessed to the polished carriage, and then to the woman at his side. “This is my wife, Viola, who has told me that Mrs. O’Donnell made the most beautiful hats in Albany. I believe my wife must have spent a fortune in her shop.”

  One could almost imagine, from the right angle, that Viola Van der Veer was a child playing dress up. Under her wrap, her shoulders were little more than the width of a pair of hands set finger to finger, and her waist could easily be encircled by one arm. A flat chest had been disguised by a flock of ruffles, meticulously placed and gathered to give the appearance of a bust. Her skin was luminous and unmarked by the sun, and her large dark eyes were framed with thick, black lashes. The doll-like woman carried a consciousness of her lingering beauty, as beautiful women al
ways did, certain of acceptance, reliant on the kind of favor that they received because of it. But in Viola, that easy, unexpected elegance combined with a hint of juvenile insecurity, making her seem less than what she was: the wife of the wealthiest man in town and the daughter of one of the richest men in Manhattan City. It was rumored in Albany circles that their engagement had been hasty and their marriage swift, at the behest of Viola’s father, a shipping magnate who was eager to marry off his youngest daughter so that he and his wife could finally withdraw from Manhattan’s tiresome social scene. It was said that he had discharged his last paternal duty with a booster’s admiration for Gerritt’s ambition while ignoring his rougher edges. Perhaps that was the reason for the hint of insecurity, but Viola Van der Veer immediately defied Mary’s assessment by floating toward them, exuding kindness and concern.

  “How do you do?” she said. “Please forgive our family’s intrusion, but I adored Bonnie. She was always so kind to me. She used to put the CLOSED sign on the door and we would gossip over tea in her back room while she sketched designs for the new season. I miss her so much. She told me how fond she was of all of you. We really ought to have written you when it happened. And we are heartbroken about Emma and Claire. I never got the chance to meet them, but Bonnie never stopped talking about them, so I feel as if I knew them a little. You have our sincerest condolences.” She extended a comforting hand to Mary’s wrist before drawing the young man beside her close with a touch to his elbow. “Have you met my son, Jakob?”

  Jakob Van der Veer was far taller than either of his parents, and his physique was that of a young man who heaved and cut and loaded lumber into ships on the Erie Canal all day long. It had recently been announced in the newspapers that he had graduated from Harvard with a law degree and was working in the yards to learn the trade before he joined his father at the helm of their prosperous endeavor. The article also said that for three summers running, starting when Jakob had been fourteen, his father had sent him deep into the Adirondacks to learn lumbering, even insisting that his workers take Jakob out onto the dangerous logjams on the rivers to teach him how to clear them. He appeared as strong as David O’Donnell had been, and his black frockcoat pulled at his wide shoulders.