Last to Know: A Novel(8)

She could remember the look of love and pride on Wally’s face even now, as he waited for her at the end of that long white-carpeted aisle. Rose had chosen white carpet rather than red because of the contrast with her dress, and Wally was drop-dead handsome in the pinstripes and tails her mother had insisted on. Even rented, Wally made them look good, a red carnation in his buttonhole, one of the old-fashioned kind that were so hard to find especially at Christmas time, flown in to a pricey Manhattan florist. Malmaison, now Rose remembered the name. She had thought it odd to call such a beautifully scented flower “bad house,” which was the literal translation from the French. Anyhow, it was beautiful, it smelled divine, and Wally was hers. Later, she even managed to grow some Malmaisons, out at the lake house; a permanent souvenir.

The champagne reception, the dinner, the party, the dancing till all hours, then slipping away to a hotel room and the next morning to a honeymoon in Barbados courtesy of Wally’s parents. Ten days of pure blue: sea, sky, and sunshine. Then back to reality and the two rooms in Greenwich Village with Wally writing at the kitchen table under the single window while she picked up her diploma and got fatter with the baby growing at the rate of knots, as her yacht-club father said.

Either the gods were kind or Wally was really good because his first book of horror stories was accepted by a reputable publisher, a modest advance handed over and they moved, just in time, to a small cottage near Rose’s parents, with two bedrooms and a proper kitchen and a bathroom with a real bath, important when you were about to have a baby.

Their first child was born, and named Roman because they decided Rome was the first place they would take him when Wally had a big success and made enough to afford it. Show him Italy young, Wally said. He was a very proud father, adored his son, found beauty in his every squall. Wally could not have been a better dad.

Then suddenly he made all that money and they did take Roman to Rome. He was all of two years old and they sat late into the night with him dozing on Wally’s knee while they dined on scampi and porcini pasta and foi gras ravioli and sipped soft dark-red wine, gazing awed at the ancient buildings around the tiny piazza glowing under the scattered lamplight of trattorias, enlivened by the Italian voices speaking a language Rose longed to know, and the violins and accordions of strolling players who smiled at their baby and nodded thanks for the small donation slipped into the extended tricorne hat.

*

Memories, Rose thought, alone now in bed at the lake house, were what held lives together. Without memories to share you had only the present, perhaps not even a future.

Rose loved her husband, she loved her children: eighteen-year-old Roman and the twin girls Madison and Frazer who were sixteen and full of themselves, into hair-flicking and texting and keeping secrets from her. Rose worried they were heading for teenage trouble. And then there was eleven-year-old Diz, named for a great-uncle Disraeli and known as “the afterthought” because the boy was an unexpected surprise, just when Rose thought she had completed her family.

Diz was different from the others, a small, skinny, gingery-haired kid; he looked nothing like his mother or father. Wally said he must be a throwback to his Irish ancestors, though Rose had no idea who those might be. “Don’t worry, it’ll only be a long line of peasants,” Wally had told her, laughing.

With her lavish overblown looks Rose radiated “earth mother” and, anchored as she always seemed to be in her cluttered kitchen with its long table where mostly you had to shove stuff aside in order to find a place to put your coffee cup, she looked the role. She was a good if messy cook; there was always soup on the go, always a bottle of wine on hand for whoever dropped by, always kids running in and out though not so much her own these days, since hers had grown up. Why, she wondered, was it that kids got more secretive as they got older. They shrank from confidences though she did her best not to pry. Even Diz kept to himself, but then Diz was different, a loner the way children coming late and last into a family often were.

Lying back against the pillows in her white satin nightshirt—she’d chosen white because it was virginal, satin because it was sexy, and a nightshirt because somehow these days she never slept naked—Rose thought about her marriage. Where, she wondered, had it gone wrong? And where was Wally anyway?

Wally was a successful writer of, of all things, horror stories, two of which had been made into movies. Rose did not like his stories; she found them sinister and wondered how they could have come out of the mind of a man so handsome he could be a poster boy for clean living and good health. Which, she guessed, just went to show how you could not judge a book by its cover, especially the ones Wally wrote. He was supposed to be writing now, getting on with his next “epic,” but all he seemed to have done for the last few weeks, here at the lake, was take the sailboat out when the wind was up, and if not then he would row himself out of sight of the house, fishing rod in hand, and be gone all day, returning late with nothing to show for it and nothing to say for himself.

Of course, the thought of another woman crossed Rose’s mind. This was a resort community with plenty of vacationers like themselves whose families had been coming here for decades. In fact now she thought about it the place was probably full of bored wives drinking too many martinis and looking for a spot of trouble. A man like Wally was a prime target; successful, good-looking, and undoubtedly sexy. At least he used to be and she was sure things had not changed in this department. Was it simply that boredom had set in?