Family of Liars(69)

“Why are you telling me this?”

He tilts his head to look at me. “Your mother says she told you about Buddy Kopelnick.”

I nod.

“So.”

I wait.

He explains: “The way I figure it, you—unlike your sisters—might need a reminder that this family is very important to me.”

“I know it is.”

“I will do a lot to protect it. And that includes you, as well as Penny and Bess. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

He puts out his cigarette and arranges some papers on his desk. “I told your mother I only went down to the kitchen that night. That I drank a nightcap, and read for a while, and came back to bed. I am letting you know what I really did so that you can stop mooning about Buddy Kopelnick, stop messing around with my sleeping pills, and be the Sinclair I have always considered you to be.”

We stare at one another in silence for a moment.

“?‘No way out but through,’?” I say.

Harris smiles. “Robert Frost. Yes.” He clasps his hands. “We will carry on as usual. Chin up, all right?”

“All right.”

I realize then, and understand even more in retrospect, that we have gotten away with murder not only because we were clever, and not only because we were lucky, but because my father helped us. Because he has resources—an attic, a bonfire, the money for a new deck. Because the police believe a man like him is an upstanding citizen. Therefore, they assume that girls like us—educated girls from a “good family”—they assume we are telling the truth. We get the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence, conferred by our family name.

Harris stands, as if to dismiss me, so I stand, as well. “I believe your mother is planning Midsummer Ice Cream for tonight,” he says, smiling again. “The Hadleys and the Bakers arrive at four o’clock.”

“I’ll help her,” I say.

“That’s my girl.”





80.


A COUPLE HOURS later, the Hadleys and the Bakers tumble off the big boat and into Goose Cottage.

There are little kids and parents. Everyone wants to go swimming, then go on the sailboat. The adults want to drink cocktails and eat cold lobster salad on warm potato buns, cucumber salad with dill, and thick slices of cantaloupe. The children need someone to teach them croquet.

After supper, Tipper and Luda set out Midsummer Ice Cream on the porch—five kinds of homemade ice cream, custards made ahead all week and churned in the big machine. They’ve made peanut-brittle, pale green fresh-mint, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Tipper serves hot fudge, butterscotch sauce, whipped cream, and walnuts in ceramic dishes. The music is old barbershop quartets, and the tablecloths are striped red and white like peppermint sticks.

We each make our own, layering whipped cream and nuts with ice cream and sauce, holding our curved glass parfait dishes and dipping into them with long silver spoons.

When the guests are all served and my parents are gently drunk, I walk to the far end of the porch and sit in the hammock with a dish of fresh-mint and hot fudge.

My mother laughs at someone’s joke. Bess shouts as she helps the youngest Hadley with his croquet mallet. The children have all spilled off the porch onto the lawn. Some of them are spinning in the tire swing. The women sit on the steps, watching the kids; the men have gone down to the bottom of the yard, where they can look out at the sea and smoke cigars.

I spoon ice cream into my mouth and close my eyes.

I want

to escape the tyranny of this family’s expectations and make instead some new life, some city life.

I want

to stop carrying obsessive thoughts of stories I hear on the news and instead to reach out, understand, see with my own eyes.

But even more, I want

to be in this family, messed up as it is.

I want

to be my father’s daughter,

to solve my sisters’ problems,

to be the one who receives my mother’s black pearls, to be Rosemary’s favorite.

To be a Sinclair, and to have the security and good standing that all our hard work and

dirty money and

unearned privilege and

intelligence has bought us.

I see that now.

It may be my greatest weakness, this family. But I will not leave.

Penny comes and sits next to me. She has filled her parfait dish with only hot fudge. It is just the two of us, here on the hammock side of the porch. We are practically alone.

“Having fun?” I ask her.

She spoons fudge into her mouth. I wait for her to swallow.

“Did you ever find out about that picture?” she says, instead of answering me.

“What picture?” I ask—though I know what picture.

“The one you thought was Uncle Chris or whatever,” she says. “With the face scratched out. That I said was Daddy.”

I turn to look directly at her. I cannot read her expression. “Why?”

“I’m asking,” says Penny. “I kinda couldn’t stop thinking about it. That secret photo of Tipper’s. And I thought—it could be Buddy Kopelnick. The guy who wanted to take you camping and gave you all the jelly beans. Don’t you think?”

I look at her again.

She leans over and kisses my cheek, her lips warm from the fudge. “I didn’t tell Bess,” she says.