The Second Mrs. Astor(20)

They were holding hands. They were holding hands, and he didn’t even seem to notice, but oh, she did. His warm skin against hers. His long fingers, the slight, bony pressure of them tucked between her own. For a delirious moment, palm to palm felt even more intimate than a kiss. She hardly dared breathe; she felt swooping, silly, and had to force herself back into the moment, to listen to him still speaking, still telling his story, his voice so low and melodious beneath the shuss, shuss of the sea.

“Alice—my daughter—is only eight. She lives with her mother now, and that was the right decision, I think. Ava wanted her, and Alice wanted to go, so . . . But Vincent.” He sighed. “Vincent noticed all the unpleasantness that Alice was too little to understand. It changed him, I think. Made him . . . bilious. Resentful. He knew there were problems, and he knew he was powerless to fix them, any of them, so I fear he’s still just carrying them all bottled up inside of him.”

“How painful for him.”

“I would help him if I could. I’ve tried, I swear I have. But he’s eighteen, with a will of his own. He’s starting school soon, and I have hope that it might steady him, but the truth is he’s too old to coddle, and too young to set free.”

“A separate soul, you might say.”

“Indeed he is.”

The fly returned to flit past him and land on one of the sandwiches. Jack uncoupled their fingers to shoo it off (she leaned back again, feigning serenity), then began to break the bread apart, meticulously dividing the meat from the cheese.

Kitty, following his movements closely, gave a hard wuff! through her nose.

“So Vincent is adrift,” Madeleine said. “I’m sure it’s only temporary.”

His smile was slim. “Are you? I wish I shared your certainty. This distance with him, this unhappiness, seems to drag on and on. I cannot change our history, the divorce, everything that’s happened. I can only try—” He paused. “Try, I suppose, to be a better father to him.” His voice thinned. “And I have been trying, God knows. I have.”

Madeleine pressed her finger against a crumb on the blanket, flicked it out to the sand. “I think that . . . sometimes it’s easier to understand a problem when standing outside of it, rather than from within. So here I am, on the outside. I don’t know your son very well, but it’s clear he looks up to you. If you remain his anchor now, I bet he’ll find his way again.”

A measure of the tension hardening him lifted; his gray eyes softened. “Words of wisdom, Miss Force?”

“Oh!” she said, embarrassed. “Words, at any rate.”

The colonel examined the wrecked sandwich in his hands with an expression of vague surprise, as if he hadn’t quite realized what he’d been doing all this time. The Airedale placed a hesitant paw on the blanket, a question in her glance, and he dumped the entire mess in front of her, then whisked his palms clean.

“Thank you, Madeleine.”

“For what?”

“For listening. It’s been a long while since—well. It feels good to be heard. Truthfully, I’d forgotten how good.”

She shifted and the giving sand shifted with her, and she pushed her feet out from beneath her skirts, stretching her legs before her as he had done. The Maine summer day gleamed around them both, perfect as a postcard.

“You are most welcome, Jack.”





CHAPTER 6


Bar Harbor, you will discover, isn’t a terribly large place. First of all, you’re on an island, water on all sides, which is crackerjack in some ways but not so crackerjack in others. You’re on this island—a lovely island, yes, a bucolic island—in this little bijou of a town, and for all the summer months, everyone is as trapped as everyone else (except for the papas, those hustling businessmen who all flock back to the city on Sundays to pay heed to their various vocations, only to trickle back to the island again on Thursdays or Fridays, girded once more for their wives and offspring). So everyone knows everyone else, and where to go, and what to do, and they all do it at practically the same time, in the same way, day in and day out, until it’s time for everyone—the summer colony, at least—to trek back to their respective urban homes to hunker through the wintertide.

(No one in their right mind wants to winter on the island, not if they can help it, with the Arctic wind screaming down and the snow blowing horizontal and ice caking thick as planks over the houses and walkways and spiky dead gardens.)

Anyway, everyone knows everyone else, the locals and the cottagers alike, and everyone has their own familiar routines, from the person nibbling lobster rolls while idling in a hammock, listening to the wind stir song through the birches; to the person who brought the lobster rolls to the person in the hammock; to the person who brought the lobster to the cook; to the lobsterman himself. There really aren’t any strangers in Bar Harbor proper.

That’s why when the newspapermen began to drift in, everyone noticed.




August 1910

Bar Harbor



She wouldn’t quite remember the program of music played by the Boston Symphony that one particular evening at the Building of Arts; Madeleine had meant to keep the card detailing the program, to treasure it, preserve it between the pages of some special book, to be discovered and admired later on, but at some point during the concert she had misplaced it, and hadn’t noticed until it was too late to procure another.