Lady in Waiting: A Novel Read online

  Subconsciously, I guess I knew something was different.

  Something wasn’t quite right.

  I watched Brad pack the day he left for New Hampshire.

  He’d suggested I take a walk so that I wouldn’t be in the apartment while he emptied his closet, but that’s not what I did.

  As long as I was there, watching him fold his T-shirts and socks, it was like he was just packing for a long trip. It put him on edge, my sitting on his side of the bed, arranging a shirt now and then so that it wouldn’t wrinkle. I could tell he didn’t know what to make of my wordless assistance.

  When he was nearly finished, he pulled his ties off the pegs in his closet. They dangled like long, happy snakes. I had bought nearly every one of them at one time or another. He always said I knew how to pick out a stylish tie.

  He folded the lengthy bundle in half and laid it on top of his robe and pajama pants. Brad had closed the lid on the suitcase, and the zipper made a harsh sound as he tugged it closed. He lifted the suitcase and set it next to two others that were already full. A garment bag lay over the top of one of the other suitcases, and next to that, a gym bag full of shoes.

  Then he sat down on the bed next to me. “I’ll call you after I’ve talked with Connor.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t just tell him together?” I had blushed. It embarrassed me to picture Connor finding out that Brad and I were at odds. I felt childish. Like I was in trouble.

  “I think it should be just me,” Brad replied. “He needs to know this has nothing to do with him.”

  The heat on my face had intensified, but with frustration, not shame. “Of course this has to do with him. How can this not have anything to do with him? We’re his parents.”

  “You know what I mean, Jane. I mean this is not his fault.”

  “So whose fault is it?” I looked up at him. I really wanted to know the answer.

  He looked at his suitcases. “I guess it’s mine.”

  We sat there, quiet, for several moments.

  I finally broke the silence. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do while I am waiting.”

  “This is not about waiting,” he said slowly. “It’s about figuring out where we’re headed. And if it’s where we want to go.”

  He stood and grabbed as many bags as he could to take down to the Jeep. I reached down to help him, and he simply said, “No.”

  I’d sat in silence and watched him struggle with his load through the narrow doorway.

  The woman bought the pocket watch emblazoned with Diderot’s quote. While Stacy completed the sale, I wrapped the watch in folds of tissue paper. A few feet away, the aroma of Emma’s boxes began to permeate the back corner of the shop.

  I slipped the watch into a bag, handed it to Stacy, and moved away from the fragrance of age gone wrong.

  Four

  The shop was empty of customers an hour after our lunch break, and both Stacy and Wilson headed to the back of the shop with me to open Emma’s boxes.

  I’d met Emma at an antiques show in Boston the previous summer. She was visiting a sister, a woman who’d married an American years before, and she’d come to the show to check out hats and purses for her London costume shop. She was single, though was once married, in her late fifties, and had been involved with London theater since she was five. Emma hadn’t acted since she was in her twenties, but she told me she’d always been more captivated with the costume than the role. Emma’s shop was a trove of odd and unique accoutrements, and I had the impression the professional stage costumers didn’t take her very seriously. But yet they always came to her when they needed an off-color bowler hat or a chartreuse feather boa studded with rhinestones or a size zero flapper dress, because she usually had it. I’d only been to her store once. Last fall Brad let me have his frequent flier miles so that I could visit Emma and discuss our idea that she would seek out inventory for my store and I would do the same for her. I left her place four days after I arrived, confident she and I could help each other out. Over the past ten months, she had found nearly half of my jewelry, trinkets, and book inventory, and every set of antique darts and hat pins I carried. In turn I sent her Las Vegas showgirl headdresses, poodle skirts, and Texas wrangler chaps.

  Wilson used a box cutter to slice through the packing tape while Stacy and I flung a sheet of plastic over a heavy oak table I use for acquisitions.

  The first box revealed a 1920s era tea set, wrapped in sections of an old blanket—the source of the moldy smell—a pair of heavily tarnished candlesticks, a heart-shaped box filled with delicately embroidered handkerchiefs, and an enameled globe of the world depicting when Great Britain still controlled half of it. I asked Wilson to unwrap the tea set and take the blanket pieces outside to the Dumpster at once. He was happy to oblige.

  The second box contained two broken vases—perhaps whole when Emma bought them—a lace tablecloth, eight intact Royal Doulton dessert plates covered in dust, a pair of spectacles in a leather case, a fireplace bellows that wouldn’t open but that Wilson said he could repair, and several framed photos of men and women in turn-of-the-century outfits. There was also a set of salt cellars and their tiny silver spoons.

  As we began to open the last box, the front door jangled, and Stacy rose to assist the customer. The third box was smaller than the other two and heavier. Atop the packing material was a folded note from Emma:

  Jane,

  I shall try to ring you up before these boxes arrive. I was unable to sort through them and clean anything up. I bought the lot at an outdoor jumble sale in Cardiff that was made miserable by a driving rain. I am not sure of the condition of the books in this box. They look old to me, very old. But they do not appear to have been kept very well. People can be such dolts. Sorry about the mess. You can feel free to owe me three untidy boxes.

  Yours affectionately,

  Em

  Underneath her letter was a tumble of books, all of them smelling of age and neglect. The first one I drew out was a 1902 copy of David Copperfield with the title page missing. The next four were in better shape and slightly less aromatic. One was a book of poetry by John Keats, dated 1907. Another, a slim copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and still another, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—the oldest one yet in the box, dated 1756. At the bottom of the box, wrapped in burlap, was a metal lockbox tarnished to a marbled, sooty green. It was no bigger than a toaster, with melted hinges turned gangrenous. It was locked. I shook it gently, and I could hear something moving inside. I reached into a drawer in my work desk where I had a key ring of tiny picks that Thea and Wilson had used to open many an old lock.

  I worked at it for several minutes, prying and prodding. When at last the lock sprung free, the corroded hinges clattered to the table in pieces. An audible sigh seemed to escape the box as fresh air crawled inside for the first time in who knows how long. Wilson had rejoined me, and he heard the sigh too. It was as if the box was whispering, “At last …” I lifted the lid and peeked inside. The contents were covered in filaments of straw that disintegrated at my touch.

  Inside the folds of a loosely woven bit of fabric was an onyx rosary, a small hand mirror blackened with age, and a book in such decrepit shape, its back cover hung by fibers in several places. I lifted the book from the box and gently opened it, but the pages threatened to fall away from the spine. I gently laid it on the acquisitions table, wishing I had put on a pair of gloves before attempting to pick it up.

  “Good Lord. That book must be three or four hundred years old!” Wilson squinted at the script. “Look at the lettering!”

  I peered at the first page, but the ink was too faint. I couldn’t make out anything other than its title: Book of Common Prayer. “You think so?”

  “Definitely. This should have been in a museum somewhere, instead of some farmhouse attic,” Wilson grumbled. “Where did Emma say she found it?”

  “At a jumble sale in Wales.”

  I touched the edge of the spine that
was halfway connected to the back cover and ran my finger along the inside. It felt like finely stretched leather. A bump under the lining caught my attention, and I rubbed my fingertip back over it. The raised portion was about the size of an American nickel, slightly round and lumpy. Whatever it was, I knew it would have to be removed if the book was to be repaired.

  “Think you can fix it?” I asked Wilson.

  He shrugged. “Maybe a professional could do something with it. They will charge you a pretty penny, though. And no one will likely pay what it’s worth with the shape it is in. It’s too bad, really.” He fingered the rosary. “This is in lovely shape, though. Not as old as the book, I’m sure.”

  He held up the dangling crucifix. The black beads shimmered under the recessed ceiling lights, practically calling out for hands to touch them in prayer, and I wondered how long it had been since anyone had touched them. I looked at the shiny black stones in Wilson’s hands, and I pondered for a moment what it might be like to hold them in my fingers, the tiny form of the obedient Christ dangling from my palm.

  Stacy returned to the back of the store. “So what did I miss?”

  “This lovely rosary. A hopeless hand mirror. And a very old prayer book that someone should’ve taken better care of.” Wilson laid the rosary next to the tattered Book of Common Prayer.

  “Wow,” Stacy rubbed a finger over the rosary’s beads. Then she leaned over the book, gently turned a page, and her eyes widened. “This thing is ancient. And it’s a Protestant volume. Look. It was printed by the Church of England. And omigosh, did you see this date?”

  Wilson and I leaned in, but the ink was too faint for me. Stacy’s young eyes were bright. “Sixteen sixty-two! It’s, like, three hundred and fifty years old!”

  I’d never owned anything as old as this. Never.

  “A Catholic rosary placed in a box with a Protestant book of prayer.” Wilson laughed.

  Stacy bent over the book again, and I saw her notice the lump in the spine. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe the remains of an insect or something. I’m sure it’s the reason the spine has started to separate. We’re going to have to find a way to get it out. I won’t be able to reattach the spine as long as that bump is there.”

  “Are you going to try and fix it yourself?”

  “Wilson said it would cost a mint to get it fixed professionally.”

  Stacy nodded. “Might be worth it, though. You could probably sell it to a collector for some good money.”

  Something about the book was comforting to me—like the clock that didn’t tick—and the thought of selling it and the rosary made me frown.

  “What?” Stacy noticed.

  “I don’t know. I just … I might hang on to these for a while.”

  Stacy smiled. “They are kind of cool, actually. Like little pieces of God from hundreds of years back. You know, when we didn’t even exist and he was who he’s always been.”

  She walked over to the tea set that Wilson unpacked. Ivory china edged in gold filigree and decorated with lavender asters. “These dishes are cool.” Her spoken thoughts on the Divine had been a mere stepping stone to a comment about dishes.

  Most of the time I could forget Stacy was the daughter of missionary parents. Then there were moments, like that one, where I would almost hear a swishing sound as I brushed up against her confident faith.

  I reached for the rosary and the prayer book and placed them gently back in the ancient box that they came in.

  Instinctively I set them by my purse to take home with me; the little pieces of God that seemed to resonate with my little broken world.

  Five

  I heard from Brad a few times after he left. He called after he broke the news to Connor, and again, two weeks later, when he phoned to make sure I had enough money to cover the bills. He made one trip back to Manhattan to pick up the canoe he had in storage and the panini sandwich grill, but he came while I was at an auction in Newark. He left a note on the breakfast bar saying he hoped I didn’t mind him taking the sandwich maker and that he was sorry he missed me.

  Sorry he missed me.

  Each of those tender intrusions—the two calls, the note—left me wavering on the edge of hope and doubt when I crept into bed at night. Brad’s voice and his handwriting, so familiar to me and so absent now from my day-to-day life, kneaded my thoughts like a masseur pressing against taut muscles. Sleep never came on those nights.

  His first phone call came on the heels of his conversation with Connor, the same day he left. He told me he and Connor had met at the Ben & Jerry’s near the Dartmouth campus. While eating ice cream, he told Connor he was trying out a new a job at a hospital in New Hampshire. And taking a little break from Manhattan.

  I had paced the quiet apartment during the hour I knew he was meeting with Connor. I thought of the things Brad had said to me when he told me he was leaving. I wondered which of any of those things he was telling Connor.

  That Brad and I needed some time away from each other to think.

  Time to ponder.

  Time to review.

  Time to decide.

  Brad had been insistent that this time away from each other wasn’t about waiting. But time is often about waiting.

  I’d thought perhaps Connor would call me after Brad left him. Surely he had questions. Was he mad? sad? confused? Was Connor disappointed in us? How much time did he need before I should talk to him?

  Connor didn’t call until nearly ten that night. There had been a queer, disapproving tenor to his voice, the kind of tone a cop uses when aiding a stranded driver who should’ve known better than to slam on the brakes when driving on ice. I told him I was going to be okay. Everything would be fine in the end. Dad needed to check out the New Hampshire job alone for a lot of little reasons, none that he needed to worry about. We didn’t talk long. He clearly didn’t have a clue as to how to process the situation. And that actually made me feel somewhat vindicated. Connor hadn’t seen it coming either.

  I had left the shop a few minutes before six. It was Stacy’s night to close. I had just kicked off my shoes in my apartment and was sorting through the mail when my cell phone trilled. It was Molly inviting me over for dinner; Jeff was at a Yankees game, and it was just her and the girls. I declined, but she kept after me until I finally said yes. She didn’t like me eating alone every night.

  We hung up, and I changed into jeans and a sweater. Coming back through the kitchen, I sifted through the contents of the bag that I took to the store every day, looking for a tube of lipstick. My fingers brushed up against the flannel-wrapped package that contained the prayer book and the rosary. I gently removed them and placed them in the center of the table. I stared at them as I painted my lips a plummy red. Then I grabbed a bottle of wine and began to walk the seven blocks to Molly and Jeff’s apartment.

  I’d known Molly since my freshman year at Boston University. Her older brother, Tom, knew Brad before I did, and it was at a birthday party for Tom that I met Brad. Molly had often said if it wasn’t for her, I would never have met the man I married.

  She hadn’t offered any advice on my dilemma, other than to reassure me that women aren’t mind readers. I told her I felt foolish for not picking up on Brad’s signals that he was unhappy.

  “What signals?” she had said.

  What signals indeed?

  Molly and Jeff had moved to Manhattan before Brad and I did, coming here as newlyweds a few years after Brad and I got married. Jeff was an investment broker, a loyal fan of the Yankees, and had a hard time talking about anything other than stocks and baseball. Molly was the principal at the private school her twin twelve-year-old daughters attended and where Connor had graduated two years before.

  Brad and Jeff were, I suppose, as close as two men could be with few interests in common. Brad enjoyed reading biographies and preferred the water—sailing, canoeing, fishing—to any televised sport. Brad and Jeff weren’t close, but they’d s
pent time together; they’d talked. I hadn’t, to that point, asked Jeff if he knew how frustrated Brad was with our marriage. And I was glad he was going to be at a baseball game because of that. I was somewhat afraid Jeff had known Brad was leaving me before I did.

  Twilight was turning Seventy-eighth Street into an amber palette of shining colors. The evening commute was still in full swing as I stepped into the swell of pedestrians—some in suits, some in denim—as they made their way out of the heart of downtown to quieter streets and boroughs.

  Brad didn’t find any poetic charm in the human sea that is the streets of Manhattan. Embracing the persistent press of people was one of the concessions he made when we moved to Manhattan the year Connor turned thirteen. As I walked, brushing up against the elite and the ordinary, it occurred to me that the year Connor turned thirteen was the last time Brad made a decision that changed everything for us. The extended hours at Memorial and the hourlong—sometimes longer—commute home to Long Island had been keeping Brad away from Connor and me for too many hours of the day. Brad decided to move to the Upper West Side without even tossing the idea around with me. He wanted to be home more, and I wanted the same thing. It was easy for me to rationalize that he’d made that decision for me and Connor.

  As I rounded the corner to Molly and Jeff’s apartment building, I couldn’t help but wonder if Brad had been feeling a disconnect with me, even then. And had made a rather impulsive move to reverse it.

  I didn’t mind the move to Manhattan; in fact, I was excited about it—more so than Brad. But it felt strange to tell my parents that Brad and I had decided to relocate to Manhattan, when I hadn’t decided anything at all. My parents pressed me for reasons, and I listed them all as if the move had been my idea.