Winter Sisters Read online

  Jakob offered Amelia, Mary, and Elizabeth each one of the large bouquets, which left him still holding three. The flowers were beautiful: white roses and baby’s breath and several sprigs of freesia against a spray of light greenery, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with black ribbons. This early in the season, he must have gone to a great deal of trouble to obtain them.

  “Please accept our sincerest sympathies,” Jakob said. “David O’Donnell taught me everything I know about handling lumber. I would have been with him that day, except that I happened to be in the office with my father, going over the books. We were able to get home, unlike—well, we are sorry.” Regret, or maybe shame, clouded his handsome features. He was apologizing for something over which he had no control, and this kindness endeared him to everyone.

  “How kind of you to come,” William said, tipping his hat. “I am William Stipp. May I introduce my wife, Dr. Mary Stipp, my mother-in-law, Mrs. Amelia Sutter, and my niece, Elizabeth Fall? And Reverend Miller, our minister.”

  There were more pleasantries all around, though Elizabeth was keeping to herself, comforted by Amelia, who had one arm around her waist.

  “It is a great shame that I never had the pleasure of meeting Bonnie,” Gerritt Van der Veer said. “Nor those girls. A tragedy, to lose those two. The blizzard was a terrible thing. But flood, you see, that’s the real danger, especially for lumbermen. It’s odd that it’s always flood danger and never fire in the district, given the inflammability of our product, but we’ve been lucky there. No fires. But when a flood comes, losses like no one’s business. We’re due for a bad one, I think, after that blizzard. My men in the Adirondacks have told me that the snowpack is deep. A few days more of warm weather and it will flood out of the mountains.

  “This won’t be a mere freshet, either,” Gerritt went on, unaware that everyone was staring at him, taken aback by his odd digression. “Not like the usual spring flood. This one will be a torrent. It will come to steal our souls. If you own anything of importance near the river, take precautions. We—”

  “We keep to higher ground,” William said, turning to go, unwilling to endure more talk of disaster. While it was true that spring freshets regularly inundated Albany, Troy, and Watervliet, too, no one wanted to talk of that now.

  Jakob, sensing William’s displeasure, said, “Of course we won’t keep you longer on this difficult day; however, if I may say one more thing? We are neighbors, are we not? Aren’t you the owners of the lovely Victorian across the park from us? On Madison Avenue?”

  “Yes,” William said. “My wife and I work out of the house, too.”

  “The famous Doctors Stipp,” Gerritt said.

  “We are hardly famous,” Mary said.

  “You are in some circles,” Gerritt said. “Dr. Stipp, with your Medal of Honor? You expect to hide?”

  William nodded stiffly. He never spoke of it. The honor had come to him after Gettysburg, and because he did not like to be reminded of the war, he kept the medal in its velvet box in a dresser drawer. He wondered how Gerritt knew.

  “And Mrs. Stipp is especially famous, or at least she was in my mother’s view,” Gerritt continued. “When Doctor Stipp— It’s difficult keeping you two separate, isn’t it? When Mrs. Stipp—Mary, if I may—left for the war, my mother thought her brilliant.”

  “And Miss Fall,” Jakob interjected, before Mary could again deny any hint of fame, “are you not the young violin prodigy? The girl who went to Paris to study?”

  Elizabeth, who had kept herself apart from the conversation, startled and looked up from her bouquet of flowers, too surprised to say anything.

  “I thought so,” Jakob said, taking her silence as acquiescence. “I read about you in the newspapers. And once, I heard you play at Tweddle Hall. You were twelve, I think. I was sixteen then, in awe of your talent. I have not heard anything as beautiful since.”

  Elizabeth ducked her head and looked away. “Thank you.”

  “Have you finished with your studies?” Jakob said.

  “I’m not certain,” she murmured, her voice hardly audible.

  Mary and William traded glances, and Jakob attempted no more compliments.

  Viola said, “We are aware that you are still in mourning, but couldn’t we all become better acquainted? Won’t you come to tea or dinner sometime? It needn’t be soon.”

  Her offer seemed as much plea as invitation.

  Amelia accepted for all of them, but only after a fashion, murmuring vague thanks without being specific, and expressing gratitude for the flowers.

  Gerritt lifted his hat, as did Jakob, who stole a last glance at Elizabeth before taking his mother by the elbow to follow his father, who was already striding up the hill toward the graves where the impatient gravediggers were at their work. As their driver, Harold, steered their carriage down the lane, Mary looked back again to see Viola and Jakob laying the remaining bouquets at the headstones, and Gerritt kneeling, tenderly placing one before the granite cherubs.

  —

  That night, neither William nor Mary could sleep. The wind had kicked up during dinner, and the maple tree outside was throwing haunting traces in the moonlight. William could see wisps of Mary’s silver curls falling across her face. He never tired of the miracle of Mary at his side, the nighttime soft around them, their bed warm with their love. Fourteen years after the end of the war, twelve since they’d been married, and he still could not believe his good fortune. Nothing else good had come of the war for him, except an expertise in orthopedics, but that was nothing compared to Mary. God, how he loved her. Mary Sutter. Mary Sutter Stipp. He had to remember the Stipp part, because he always thought of her as Mary Sutter.

  Mary broke the silence, speaking, as she often did, as if William had been privy to the raging conversation in her head. He never minded her habit of assuming that he understood what she had been thinking, because he often did.

  Her voice caught as she said, “What if something else happened? Something—unimaginable.”

  It was the first time she’d voiced this darker prospect. She had hedged and gone silent upon leaving every orphanage, had postulated and suggested and wondered, but she had never before mentioned any outcome besides discovery or death. He himself believed that Emma and Claire were almost certainly dead, though he, too, wondered from time to time, waking in the middle of the night to imagine terrible things, achieving sanity again only at dawn. And though Mary had remained calm in the face of Elizabeth’s continuing doubts, privately she was unable to lay to rest her own.

  “What if we are all making an assumption?” Mary said. “What if Emma and Claire are still alive?”

  Not even two granite angels had silenced the bounding unreason of hope. “Mary, where would they be? Someone would have found them.”

  Stalemate, again.

  William lifted his gaze and watched the shadows of the maple branches play on the ceiling. “That Van der Veer boy seemed to be taken with Elizabeth.”

  “I hope not. She doesn’t need another reason to stay in Albany.”

  “He seems kind enough.”

  Mary sighed. “She can’t give up.”

  “The girl is suffering,” William said. “You must keep in mind how young she is. I think we forget that sometimes.”

  “She is not that young. And she is on the cusp of greatness. Mother told me that they had rarely seen such promise.”

  To distract his persistent wife from worrying about her niece, William said, “Gerritt and Viola are odd ducks, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. So odd. And all that babbling about flooding? What was that about? It was good of them to come, though. But do you know that Bonnie never said a word to me about Viola, which is a little sad, considering that Viola seems to have been so fond of her. I liked her though, far more than I liked him. I suspect hidden depths, though I am not sure why.”

&nb
sp; From the hallway came the sound once again of Elizabeth padding down the stairs. They heard her up at least once a night, sometimes more, her tentative steps quiet on the floorboards as she endeavored not to wake them.

  “Tomorrow,” Mary said, “I’m going to reopen the downtown clinic. It’s Thursday, after all. And those women have nowhere else to go.”

  Downstairs, water ran in the sink, the copper plumbing banging softly in the walls.

  “I fear you are tempting fate with that other clinic of yours,” William said.

  “No one will find out. Oh, William, I could not bear seeing those granite angels today,” she said, her voice soft against his cheek. “I wish we knew what happened. I’d accept anything, I think, just to know.”

  William believed they would never know. And he did not know how to carry that pain. How to mitigate the not knowing. Not for Mary, not for Amelia, and certainly not for Elizabeth. He lay very still, conscious of the softening rhythm of Mary’s breath, the warm cushion of her breasts. For a man who had long ago given up his belief in God, he prayed now that his love would be enough to comfort them all.

  Chapter Six

  In the bedroom across the hall from Mary and William’s, Elizabeth Fall returned from using the bathroom downstairs and slid her rosewood violin case out from underneath her bed and unlocked it. Taking care not to pop the single latch for fear of making a telltale noise, she eased it open as the pungent scent of rosin wafted up. Since her return, the violin had languished in its glossy case, the bow buttoned into its leather sheath. Had she possessed the wherewithal, she would have stuffed the cursed thing into the back of the armoire, or better yet given it away, but such action would have required the resolve that had incinerated in Monsieur Girard’s studio.

  Would you like to play the violin? Mary had asked.

  Elizabeth knew she had sounded like a petulant child this morning, and at the cemetery she had become furious with herself. Emma and Claire had loved to listen to her play—and so had Bonnie. It still seemed impossible that Bonnie and David had died, that Emma and Claire were gone.

  But what was gone? Gone was not buried. Gone was nothing.

  And she hadn’t even been able to set aside her embarrassment and shame to play for them one last time.

  In Paris, unknown to Elizabeth, the director of the Conservatoire had assigned her to Monsieur Girard without his consent. She’d been thrilled. To study under such a master! But she soon learned that Girard wasn’t happy about being assigned to “la fille américaine,” as he called her. The American girl.

  Little by little, month by month, he set about stripping her of confidence.

  In session after session, he complained of her bowing or fingering, or if he were especially irritated, her musicality: Oh for God’s sake, don’t you feel it? The warmth? The enticement? Give into it. Oh, at least try. Do this—he would say, placing his hand between her shoulder blades—Imagine my hand as the sun on the hills of Sienna, the blazing scorch of evening light on Italian stucco, the day’s lingering warmth in vineyard grapes. No. Not that way. You are failing the music, can’t you see? Play the piece again. And for God’s sake, mind the tempo. It is as if you have just begun playing. Can’t you hear the shift in tone?

  Occasionally, he dismissed her from her lesson early with a gesture of disgust. She would never achieve greatness, never communicate the warmth of Rossini, the fluidity of Verdi. She was a disgrace and would never excel. He maintained this assessment even though she was held up for admiration in her other classes, selected to play in special school concerts, and often praised by the director.

  But Girard’s was the voice she believed, and still heard.

  His criticism broke her heart, for from the moment she had first heard the instrument, it had become both love and haven. It was William who had introduced it to her, just after her father died.

  She had been young, six years old, when her father succumbed to his war wound, his bed awash with fever and infection. No one knew then that the pressure of the wooden legs on the stumps of amputees would eventually kill them. Once, Elizabeth had asked her father why half his leg was wooden. He’d knocked the golden oak of his right shin and grinned. “When I was in the war, after Antietam, your clever Aunt Mary saved my life by exchanging my old, bad leg for this new, wooden one.”

  Mary later explained to Elizabeth that her father’s wound imitated a bedsore, but Elizabeth had had no idea what stealthy trouble that innocuous-sounding ailment posed. It seemed that so many of the medical complications after the war erupted out of nowhere: fixes that suddenly betrayed, unresolved issues that lingered then pounced, infections from embedded, intractable minié balls, digestive impairments that ultimately starved their victims, deformities that hobbled and crippled. Aunt Mary and Uncle William often despaired of these outcomes.

  Later, too, they would tell her that she became inconsolable when her father died. They were living in Manhattan City then. Six years old, and she wouldn’t eat, not even for Bonnie, whose ministrations rarely failed. So one snowy night, William lifted Elizabeth into the carriage, tucked a traveling blanket around her, told her that a talented woman would play a violin and that the music would help her to forget her unhappiness. But from the moment the first taps of the kettledrums floated into the auditorium of the Academy of Music, and the violin’s strains swelled, Elizabeth began to weep and could not stop. Alarmed, her uncle carried her outside, but she cried loudly to be taken back, creating a scene. William returned with her to their seats and held her on his lap, trying to comfort her.

  Afterward, she begged to meet the violinist. William fought his way to the proscenium where Camilla Urso, a French expatriate, stood accepting bouquet after bouquet. Elizabeth held out her hand to be touched. Impressed, Urso invited Elizabeth to visit her the next day in her suite at The Fifth Avenue Hotel. There, a steam lift carried them up six floors to a beautiful room full of opulent furnishings and windows that overlooked the avenue.

  “I was seven years old when I first attended the Conservatoire de Paris,” Mademoiselle Urso said, offering them each a cup of tea. “You are seven, yes, aren’t you, Elizabeth?”

  “Six.”

  “You are the only other little girl I have ever met who weeps at music. I am the other. But does your weeping mean that you wish to play, or that you wish only to meet the people who make the music that makes you weep?”

  “She is all of six years old,” William said. “Perhaps she is not yet certain what she wants.”

  “Ah, but I know desire.” Mademoiselle Urso set her teacup and saucer on the low table between them and coaxed Elizabeth to a corner of the room. She pulled her gleaming violin from its case, put the bow to the strings, and breathed a single thread of beauty into the echoing room: Pachelbel, the Canon in D, a tune as evocative and haunting as the night wind. Elizabeth again began to weep.

  “Do you see?” Mademoiselle Urso said. “She weeps at nuance. She knows what she wants. Don’t you, Elizabeth?”

  Elizabeth didn’t want nuance, whatever that was, she wanted her father back. But when Mademoiselle Urso played, her grief found comforting expression.

  “When Elizabeth has exhausted her teachers here, as I know she will, I suggest Paris.”

  William placed a warm hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder. “But we don’t know whether or not she has any aptitude.”

  This practical objection did not seem to matter to Mademoiselle Urso. She shrugged and said, “She will play and she will play well. Now, you must excuse me. I need to begin my practice for tonight, and if I go past two o’clock in the afternoon, the napping matrons in the hotel complain.” She kissed Elizabeth on her wet cheek and walked them to the door.

  Early the next week, Elizabeth began lessons with a teacher at the New York Academy, who, after a year, passed her on to a new instructor when Elizabeth exhausted both his repertoire and skill.

  W
ould that Monsieur Girard had recused himself, Elizabeth thought now.

  She had written Bonnie about Monsieur Girard’s disparagement, but now Bonnie was gone. And Elizabeth could never tell her accomplished Aunt Mary anything of her failure. And how would Uncle William look at her if he knew the truth about her? In Paris, Elizabeth had tried to tell Amelia, but she had been unable to form the words. Girard’s disapproval had intensified, and Elizabeth had pretended that everything was fine, and then had come the reprieve of the telegram.

  Even Jakob Van der Veer believed her to be something she wasn’t.

  She flipped shut the lid and snapped the clasp as a final hint of rosin floated in the air. Unable to even think of sleeping, she slipped out into the hallway and again padded down the stairs. Her grandmother was sitting in the dark in the parlor. She gestured to Elizabeth to join her. Her gray hair was braided down her back, and she wore a warm robe over her nightgown that felt soft as Elizabeth laid her head on her shoulder.

  “You haven’t been sleeping, have you, Lizzie?”

  “No.”

  “You weren’t toward the end in Paris, either, were you?”

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  “Do you want to tell me what the matter is?”

  She shook her head again.

  “It’s very hard,” Amelia said. “I know how much you loved Bonnie and David and the girls. I did, too. Some days I can hardly breathe, thinking of everyone we’ve lost. But you must try to live, if you can. Do you see?”

  Elizabeth felt tears welling in her eyes. “No.”

  “But, darling. You must at least try. Will you promise me?”