Four Steps to the Altar Page 8

  She’d considered saying she went to Wellesley and her family was from Oyster Bay and her debutante ball was at the Waldorf because the Plaza had been undergoing renovations.

  Instead she told the truth and watched the woman’s jawline tighten and her red-painted lips grow pale. And any doubts that Lily might have had about marrying a man two decades her senior quickly dissipated. Instead she looked upon it as a personal challenge, her greatest triumph to be won.

  She never, however, dreamed that she’d wind up sitting on the tiny, little-girl-like sofa in her tiny, little-girl-like apartment, with the security of her entire future resting on the whims of the woman she’d provoked.

  “Lily?” Antonia Beckwith spoke as if she wanted to add, Lily who?

  Lily clutched the white, handmade, “plush” angora rabbit that she kept on the back of the sofa, her huggable alternative to a common teddy bear. She gritted her teeth. “Yes, Antonia. How are you?”

  “No different than when I saw you two days ago.”

  Two days ago? Had it only been two days?

  “Yes, well…” Lily began to stammer, hating that she’d lost her edge, her confidence, when dealing with the woman now that Reginald was gone. She cleared her throat, tried to summon her most authoritative voice. “When I saw you Monday I meant to ask you something, but it slipped my mind.” No matter how hard she tried, Lily sensed that, compared with the ancient woman, she still sounded like a little girl. “I’m sure you’re frightfully busy this season….”

  “And I’ve already selected my charities for the year.”

  Lily clutched the plush rabbit more tightly and shut her tired eyes. “Oh, Antonia, this isn’t about money!”

  “What, then? I certainly can’t help you with your business. I never married, after all, not even once.”

  Reginald used to blame himself for that, for being a burden to his older sister, her “charge” of sorts because their mother was so delicate and incompetent and Antonia never trusted the nannies to raise her brother as she could.

  “When she might have been out dating, she was reading to me instead,” he told Lily.

  Lily wanted to suggest there might be other reasons why Antonia never had a man, but it would have served no purpose, then or now.

  “Actually,” she said, hoping that her grimace would not travel through the phone lines, “I’m sure if I needed your help, you’d have a great deal to offer. Your experience with the opera and the ballet…well, it might give our brides new ideas for their weddings.”

  “Weddings do not interest me,” Antonia replied.

  Sucking in a small breath, Lily remembered Elaine’s words: “You stole her baby brother…. Maybe she needs you.” But the silence that followed Antonia’s last comment reminded Lily that Reginald’s sister was just fine without the likes of Lily or the reminder that she’d lost the only person she had loved.

  “What do you really want?” Antonia interrupted Lily’s thoughts.

  She gripped the left ear of the rabbit. “Well, as you mentioned when I saw you, it finally is spring. I thought you might enjoy a trip out to the country.” She scrunched her eyes this time, feeling her nose, her cheeks, her forehead crinkle.

  Silence again, this time laced by the faint white noise of an old person breathing. And then Antonia asked, “What country?”

  Not one in Europe, Lily wanted to say. Not one you get to by a grand ocean liner. “The Berkshires,” she said. “West Hope.”

  “Do you mean where you live?”

  “Yes. I thought you might like a vacation. It’s so beautiful up here. Reginald loved it when we came for one of my college reunions.” She wasn’t sure she should have added the part about Reginald.

  Antonia laughed. (Was that a laugh?) “I hate the country,” she said. “Bugs. Mosquitoes. Encephalitis. Lyme disease. Thank you, but I shall be most happy to decline.”

  Decline?

  Decline?

  Lily, of course, couldn’t let her do that. Partly because she needed to befriend her, partly because she couldn’t let her gain the upper hand again.

  Her stalwart resolve returned. “It’s only May, Antonia. The bugs aren’t even out yet. There’s a lovely inn on the outskirts of town that I think you’d really enjoy. It’s a magnificent Italian villa with a wonderful palazzo.”

  “I couldn’t possibly come. My calendar is very crowded.”

  Crowded, Lily knew, with those ballet nights and the opera.

  It had been worth a try, but clearly this was not going to work. Lily sighed. “Well,” she said, “perhaps next month.” Or next year. Or never.

  When Antonia did not respond, Lily simply said good-bye. Then she held on to the rabbit and looked out the window toward Frank’s antiques shop and knew she couldn’t marry him unless an unexpected miracle dropped out of the sky.

  Thursday rushed by like the spring-thaw waters of the Housatonic River. With the two impending weekend weddings, Lily barely even had a chance to gloat when Frank phoned Friday morning to say he had secured the Seranak House at Tanglewood for the kindergarten teacher’s wedding.

  Jo nodded and Sarah stifled a small groan and Elaine said she was relieved to learn that Tanglewood allowed only their caterer to do the food for private events.

  Lily didn’t take any of it personally.

  At noon their caravan conveyed the last of the people and the props to the lovely meadow Jo had found where the Gilberts’ wedding would be held. The setting overlooked the scalloped edges of the mountains that were vivid green now, with winter far behind; the perfect afternoon included a warm sun that belonged more to July than May. Lily took credit for the weather from the bride and groom.

  The tables were set up under a big white tent; the head table displayed a lavish wedding cake that Elaine had coated with a pretty yellow fondant, then painted with white sugar daisies and adorned with sugar ribbons and delicate-looking sugar-lace.

  “Has Elaine designed your cake yet?” Lily asked after their work was complete and she stood with Jo, facing Sarah’s wall of daisies, watching the early wedding guests arrive.

  “No,” Jo said. “We’ve been so busy.”

  “Make time for yourself,” Lily said. “It will be your wedding, after all.”

  “My first.”

  Lily nodded, keeping her wedding smile in view. “All the more reason to get on it.” She did not mention again that Jo shouldn’t have downscaled her nuptials to the teeny number that she had. Lily had begun to realize that she wasn’t in much of a position at this point to be handing out advice, at least not to a friend.

  “Lily?” Jo asked suddenly. “Do you think I should change my name?”

  On the other hand, if her advice was requested…

  “Change your name to what? To Andrew’s?”

  “Yes. Of course, to Andrew’s. What do you think?”

  Lily had taken each of her three husbands’ last names because that was how things always had been done. Besides, it wasn’t as if she worked or had a career or had made a name for herself as anything but someone’s wife. But Jo was different. Jo Lyons had an identity, from West Hope to Boston anyway.

  Watching as the waiters put finishing touches on the tables (Elaine had continued the yellow–white color theme by preparing entrée choices of white fish, rice, and corn, or fettuccini Alfredo with early yellow squash, both of which would have a bright contrast color of red blush from the orange loquat accents), Lily said, “It’s really up to you, Jo.”

  If Jo was surprised that Lily did not spring forth with an opinion, she didn’t say.

  “However,” Lily added, because she supposed she simply had to, “changing one’s name requires a lot of tedious paperwork.”

  “I’m not afraid of paperwork,” Jo replied, and Lily merely shrugged because she didn’t know what else to say.

  The wedding guests filled the rows of white chairs; behind the wall of daisies a harpist sat, unseen, now sending melodic tunes drifting on the air.

 
; “Today the Gilberts, Sunday the Randolph/Bartons,” Sarah said as she joined Lily and Jo. “From happy daisies to heavy Victorians.”

  “The lace you picked is hardly heavy-looking,” Jo said.

  Lily didn’t, however, say that the venue was quite dreadful. The ceremony would be held in the bride’s grandmother’s late-nineteenth-century house, replete with dried hydrangea blossoms that stood in tall vases on marble-topped, curved-footed end tables. Bulky draperies adorned tall, dark-wood-framed windows; the furniture was upholstered in a kind of deep-red velvet and looked as uncomfortable as Antonia’s horsehair.

  It was a dismal house, not unlike Antonia’s, despite that it was in the country, not the city.

  Antonia. The woman who would determine the course of Lily’s life forever, it appeared.

  Lily moved slowly from her friends. She straightened the silverware at the head table by the pretty yellow cake that Elaine had made for a bride who was not wealthy, a groom who was not rich. What was wrong with Lily that she couldn’t be content to be like others, that she couldn’t be content just to be loved?

  Was it still because of Billy Sears these many, many years later?

  “Lily?” It was Jo, who had walked up behind her. Jo, who had put the past behind her and let herself be loved, whose only problem now seemed to have to do with what her name should be.

  Lily quickly wiped a tear that had formed in her eye and smiled. “I’m fine,” she lied. “Just a moment of overflowing joy for our divine little business and the happiness we bring to others.”

  Jo didn’t say a word, just slipped her arm around Lily’s small waist and guided her back to where Sarah stood, so they could witness the phenomenon called love that was out of Lily’s reach.

  15

  Saturday was as busy as Thursday and Friday, with the day before a wedding as crazy as the day itself. At least being busy left little time to foster doubts that Andrew was having second thoughts about marrying her, or that Cassie had decided she didn’t want her for a stepmother.

  He’d said everything was fine, that he’d just been feeling scared. He said Cassie would be fine too, they just needed to give her a little time. He said that he would talk to Cassie when the weekend crunch was over; he said that he would ask if maybe she was scared as well.

  If everything was fine, Jo wasn’t sure why she stood alone at her kitchen window Saturday night, staring at the cement foundation that soon would hold the new addition to the house, the new addition to her life.

  She was alone because Andrew had agreed to chaperone the May Fair festival. Jo had not been invited. He’d said he knew that she’d be too busy with the weddings.

  Jo wondered if Cassie had suggested that. She wondered if the girl was pleased her father would be there, and if she’d worn eye makeup.

  Turning on the tap water, Jo poured a glass and downed a couple of aspirin. Halfway through her swallow, she heard a car door close. Andrew?

  The knock, however, didn’t sound like his.

  She moved to the door, and drew back the sheer curtain. Instead of Andrew standing on the porch, she saw Frank Forbes.

  “Frank,” she said when she’d unlocked the dead bolt and let him come inside. “This is a surprise. Is everything okay?” She’d just left Lily at the shop, so she knew there was nothing wrong with her. Then Jo remembered Frank’s mother. “Oh,” she said. “Please. Sit down. It’s not your mother, is it?”

  He shook his head and sat at the kitchen table. “She’s still the same. Hanging on to life. I wonder why we do that?”

  When they were young Jo thought Frank was much too serious. In the last year she’d come to realize that as Brian’s older brother, Frank had taken on the role of the responsible, trustworthy son, the one who’d tried to compensate for all his brother’s screwups. She wondered if she had indirectly made Frank’s life more difficult by loving his errant brother, by enabling Brian to get away with being such a jerk. “Would you like some tea?” Jo asked. “Or a drink?”

  “I’d love a beer,” he said. “If you have any.”

  She poured him one of Andrew’s “designer” beers, the kind, he’d joked, that were made for savoring, like wine, not for swilling in front of a big-screen TV, as if he’d ever do that, unless to watch the news.

  She’d often wondered if Brian had lived like that when Jo wasn’t around. He certainly wasn’t doing it now in his eight-by-ten-foot cell.

  Hating that Frank’s presence made her think of Brian, Jo tried to sound cheery when she said, “So, to what do I owe the pleasure?” She set the beer down on the table and sat down across from him.

  Frank sipped his beer with thought-collecting slowness. Behind his glasses his eyes narrowed. It occurred to Jo that if his mother was okay, he must have come to talk about his situation with Lily. She’d have to find a way not to reveal the real reason that Lily wouldn’t say I do.

  She smiled. “It’s amazing how busy we are at the shop. And it’s so wonderful—and so hard to believe!—that Lily has become quite an astute businesswoman.” Perhaps a boost to Lily’s credibility would help, in case he’d come to share any doubts about her. “The wedding yesterday was terrific,” Jo continued, “thanks in great part to Lily. And tomorrow we’re doing Gladys Randolph and Jim Barton’s wedding. Do you remember Jim from high school? I think he was in your class.” Of course Frank hadn’t come to Jo’s to listen to wedding small talk. She shifted on the colonial-blue seat pad between her and the chair, one of four her mother had selected a dozen years ago when she’d redecorated the kitchen, more things Jo would dispense of once the renovations were fully under way, which Frank surely hadn’t come to discuss either.

  “Lily is an amazing woman,” Frank said, setting down the bottle, ignoring her comment about Jim Barton. “I asked her to marry me, you know. She hasn’t said yes yet.”

  “Has she said no?”

  “Well”—he smiled—“no.”

  Jo cupped her glass and turned it to the left, then right. “Lily’s personality can be deceiving,” she said. “She looks like she’s an airhead. But she’s really not, you know. She’s methodical and caring and she always tries to do what’s right, what would please other people.”

  He nodded. “I know. Which is why I love her. She’s not at all like my first wife, Sondra. Did you know her?”

  “No.” Sondra, like Frank, had been three or four years ahead of Jo in school. “Didn’t she move to Colorado?” Jo had heard the gossip from her mother, who always wrote letters when Jo had lived in Boston, keeping her abreast of all the big and small West Hope news. When Sondra Forbes up and left her husband of ten years, it, sadly, had been front-page fodder.

  “Dumped me, that’s what she did,” Frank said. “She said this place was boring and so was I.”

  Having been dumped by Brian, Jo was sure that she knew how he’d felt. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He took another swig. “I worry that Lily might do the same. After all, Sondra was born and raised here; if she needed to escape, how can I expect that West Hope will hold Lily Beckwith?” Then he shrugged. “But I suppose we can’t go through life worrying, can we?”

  Jo shook her head.

  “And now you and Andrew are getting married, and I’m really happy for you, Jo. You certainly deserve some happiness after what Brian did to you.”

  She sipped her water, did not respond, wished he hadn’t mentioned his brother’s name.

  He cleared his throat and added, “Which is the reason that I’m here.”

  It took a second for Jo to realize what he’d said. Before she could reply, he added, “I was in Albany today or I would have come to tell you sooner. The fact is, Jo, I heard from Brian’s lawyer yesterday. The trial date’s been set. For the third week of May.”

  Jo squeezed the glass that rested in her hand. Brian’s trial. The time had come. The time she had dreaded since he was arrested. Since the detective Frank had hired found Brian hiding out in Switzerland, since he’d come back to thi
s country and she’d filed the complaint.

  The time had come. “Oh,” was all that she could say.

  And then Jo realized something else: Frank had said the trial would be held the third week of May. Days before her wedding to Andrew.

  When Lily answered the phone on Sunday morning, how was she supposed to know the caller would be Antonia? She’d thought it might be Frank, who’d been out of town yesterday at a big auction up in Albany. She thought he might be wondering how Lily was doing and if the “girls” needed his help to haul props or anything to and from the Victorian-wedding venue. She thought he might be phoning to apologize for not calling her last night, even if he hadn’t gotten home until late.

  No matter what, she didn’t really like that she was thinking like a wife.

  “I changed my mind,” Antonia said loudly before Lily was fully awake, before she could grasp that it was not Frank, before she could comprehend what the woman said. “Tomorrow will be fine, if that gives you enough time.”

  Tomorrow? Lily thought. Enough time for what?

  “We should be there by noon,” Antonia continued. “You’ll need to make a reservation for my driver. And one for Pauline.”

  Reginald used to say that Pauline was Antonia’s “faithful servant,” her “Jackie of all trades,” the number one of which was taking care of Antonia the way Antonia had taken care of Reginald. Apparently the Beckwiths never learned to take care of themselves.

  “We have a wedding today,” Lily heard herself say. “I have to work.”

  “And I said we’d be there tomorrow. I’ve decided to see if what you said is true, if spring is actually nice up there in the mountains.”

  She could have corrected Antonia and said the Berkshires were hills, not mountains, but Lily was too startled. Besides, it was too early in the day for confrontation.

  “So you’re coming for a visit?” Lily asked.

  “I was invited, wasn’t I?”

  Lily rubbed her eyes. “Yes. Yes, of course. It will be very nice.” Then she listened as Antonia rattled off her “accomodation requirements” and instructed Lily to call back with the arrangements and directions.