Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Twenty-Five — Camille

The first time Camille Ashcroft came to the State Street office, she stood in the lobby for eleven minutes before she would let herself be announced.

Maren knew this because the receptionist called up, and because Maren had learned, in four months, that you can tell a great deal about a meeting from the length of time between the door and the elevator. Eleven minutes is a long time. Eleven minutes in a lobby is a woman rehearsing four different sentences and throwing away all four.

She came up at two-fifteen in the afternoon in a coat the color of oatmeal and no jewelry at all, which Maren noted and did not comment on, and sat down in the chair across the desk and folded her hands, and said:

“I don’t know how to start.”

“Then don’t start anywhere,” Maren said. “Just sit there until something comes out.”

They sat there for a while. The harbor was in the window and the radiator was doing the thing it did in the afternoon, which was a low irregular knocking, and Camille looked at everything in the room except her sister. She looked at the bookshelf. She looked at the window. She looked at the folder on the desk and the little brass tray with pens and the photograph on the credenza — a photograph of a woman in her twenties at a kitchen table with a coffee cup, in a frame that had been on the credenza for three weeks.

Camille looked at the photograph for a long time.

“That’s her,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I never saw a picture of her.” Camille’s voice had gone strange. “In the house. There was not one picture of her in the house. I looked, Maren. I looked, when I was a kid, I looked through every room, I looked in the drawers in your father’s study, I looked in the hall closet where the albums were.” She was still looking at the photograph. “The albums started in 1998. You were nine. There’s nothing before 1998 and there’s nothing of her. It’s as though the family started the year you got the scar.”

“That’s because it did,” Maren said. “That’s the whole architecture. He rebuilt the record.”

Camille nodded slowly, and then she stopped nodding, and then she began to cry — not dramatically, not with sound; she simply put her hand over her mouth and her eyes spilled over and she sat there in a coat the color of oatmeal with her hand over her mouth in her sister’s office and did not make a sound at all.

Maren got up, went around the desk, and sat down in the chair beside her, and did not touch her. She had thought about this for a long time. She had decided that she was not going to touch her sister, and she had decided why: because a comfort that arrives too early is a way of shutting a person up, and she was not going to shut her sister up, and she wanted the crying to last as long as it lasted without any hand on her shoulder making it into an event with a schedule.

It lasted about four minutes.

“I said there was no such person,” Camille said, when she could speak. “To Preston. On the phone. He asked me if there was a woman named Maren Ashcroft in the family and I said there’s no such person.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “And I don’t even know why I said it. I’ve been lying there at night for four months trying to work out why I said it. It wasn’t to protect the family. It wasn’t to protect the firm. It wasn’t even to protect me — he was going to leave me anyway, he left me eleven days later, the engagement was dead the minute he asked the question and I knew it while I was saying it.” She looked at her sister. “So why did I say it. Why did I say there is no such person, Maren. Why.”

Maren sat beside her sister and thought about it honestly, because she had promised herself that she would never once in her life lie to Camille, not out of principle but out of laziness — because lying to a person is a discipline and she had better uses for the discipline.

“Because you’d been saying it your whole life,” she said. “Not you — the house. The family. The sheets. The seating charts. There’s a phrase for what happens to a person who grows up in a house where one member is not mentioned: they stop being able to see that member as real. It’s not contempt, Camille. It’s worse. It’s the absence of a category. You couldn’t say I existed to Preston, because you’d spent your whole life in a house where the wall between the two of us was load-bearing, and if you’d admitted I existed you’d have had to admit that everything you had — the school, the horses, the dress money, the allowance, the four tickets, the whole bill — was paid out of a column that had a person’s name on it, and you’d never once been told that person’s name.” Maren sat back. “You weren’t lying to him. You were reciting. Somebody put that sentence in your mouth when you were five and nobody ever took it out.”

Camille put both hands over her face.

“That’s worse,” she said, from behind her hands.

“I know.”

“I would rather you hated me.” She pulled her hands down. “Do you understand? I would much rather you hated me. Everyone hates me — the Globe hates me, Preston’s mother hates me, the girls at the club hate me, and I can take all of that, I have been taking all of that for four months, it’s the best I’ve felt in a year.” She looked at Maren with her eyes red. “What I can’t take is you sitting there explaining me to myself with a kind face. That’s the one thing I can’t take.”

“Then I’ll stop,” Maren said.

“Please.”

“Okay.” Maren got up and went back around the desk and sat down in her own chair, and looked at her sister across the blotter, and said, evenly: “You ruined seven of my years. I want to be exact about it. From fourteen to twenty-one, you did not once speak to me except to say something about my clothes or my glasses, and you did it in front of other people, on purpose, because it made you feel taller. I have a scar on my face and a family that spent fifteen years deciding I wasn’t a person, and you were the loudest voice in that decision, and you were the loudest voice because you were the one who was closest to me and you needed me to be nothing so that you could be something.” She put her hands flat on the desk. “That’s true. I’ve known it since I was fourteen. And now I’m going to tell you the second true thing, which is that I’m not going to spend my life on it.”

Camille was white.

“What does that mean,” she said.

“It means I don’t have a forgiveness in me, exactly, because forgiveness is a thing that happens in a room with two people and a story, and I don’t think I’m going to get there, and I’ve stopped pretending I’m a woman who’s going to get there.” Maren turned a pen a quarter turn. “What I have is arithmetic. I have sixty years of future on this earth. I can spend them on you or not. And here’s the choice I’ve made: I’m going to spend none of them hating you, because hating you is a use of me, and you’ve already had fifteen years of my life for free and you are not getting any more, one way or the other. Not in hatred. Not in resentment. Not in the interesting version of it that you’d get to be part of.”

She leaned forward.

“Which means: I called you eleven times. You answered three. That’s fine. There are things in your name at the firm — your fourteen percent, at the valuation, in a trust that pays you for the rest of your life and that you cannot touch the principal of, because you are thirty-two years old and you have never once in your life managed a dollar, and I am not going to hand you a fortune so that you can spend it and come to my office crying in four years.” She picked up a folder and pushed it across the desk. “That’s the settlement. It’s not punitive. It’s exactly what your shares are worth, and it’s yours, and the only condition is that it’s in a trust with a real trustee and that you take one year of meetings about it.”

Camille looked at the folder and did not touch it.

“And the other thing,” she said. “You said there were things in my name at the firm.”

“You mean the horses?”

“No.” Camille’s mouth twisted. “I mean — you said it in the driveway. The night you left. You stood at the bottom of the steps and told me to move the horses, and you told me why, and you said it was the last free advice I was ever going to get from you.” She looked up. “I moved them. The next morning. Before breakfast. I called the vet’s office and had them re-registered in my own name and I paid the difference in the deduction out of my own account, and I did it before breakfast, Maren, and I did it because you told me to and I didn’t understand a single word of why.” She put both hands on the folder. “That’s the only thing anybody in that house ever told me that was true and useful, and you did it in a driveway in the rain, five minutes after I stood on the portico and made a joke about you tripping on the steps.” She picked up the folder. “So. When you say you’re not going to spend your life hating me — I want you to know that I believe you, and that I have no idea why you’d be telling the truth, and that I have been sitting in an apartment on Marlborough Street for four months being unable to figure out whether I’m grateful or destroyed, and that I’ve decided it’s both, and that this is the first time in my life I’ve ever told anybody the truth about something I was feeling.”

Maren looked at her sister.

“Good,” she said. “That’s the whole thing. That’s what I’ve been waiting four months for.”

“For that?”

“For a sentence with no s’s in it,” Maren said.

Camille stared at her.

Then she laughed — a wet, ruined, entirely genuine laugh, the first real laugh Maren had heard from her sister in her whole life — and she put her hand over her face again and laughed until she had to stop, and Maren sat behind her desk and watched her and did not smile, and did not join in, and did not put a hand on her, and let her have it.

And at the door, on the way out, Camille stopped and turned around and said something Maren had not expected.

“I want a job,” she said.

Maren raised an eyebrow.

“Not here,” Camille said quickly. “Not with you. I don’t want to work for you; I’d rather die. I want — I went to see a woman in Woburn, a lawyer, about the trust, and she said something to me that I’ve been thinking about for a week, which is that I have a name in this city and no skills, and that a name with no skills is a liability for exactly about five years and then it’s nothing.” She swallowed. “I want to do something. I have no idea what. I don’t know how to do anything. I’ve never done anything. I don’t even know how to make coffee, Maren, I’ve lived on Marlborough Street for four months and I’ve eaten out every single night.” She looked at her sister. “Where do you start.”

Maren looked at her for a long moment.

Then she opened a drawer, took out a business card, and wrote a name and a number on the back of it in her tiny tight hand.

“His name is Hollis Prine,” she said. “He’s eighty-three and he lives in Naples, Florida and he knew our mother, and he is the only person in the world who still answers his phone for this family, and he has a wife in a memory facility and a dog named Beau and eleven years of boredom.” She held out the card. “Call him. Don’t ask him for a job. Ask him what our mother was like. Say you’re Estelle’s daughter and you want to know what she was like, and mean it, and then listen to him, because he has spent thirty years being the only living person who remembers her out loud, and he is going to talk for two hours and you are going to be bored and you are going to listen anyway.” She let go of the card. “That’s where you start. That’s where everybody starts. You start by finding out that the people you were raised by were not the beginning of the world.”

Camille took the card and turned it over in her fingers.

“Why are you doing this,” she said.

“Because she asked me not to be cruel,” Maren said, “and because you’re the only person alive who was in that house with me, and that makes you the only person alive who knows what the house was, and in about forty years when I’m old I’m going to want somebody to remember it with who was actually there.”

Camille stood at the door of her sister’s office with a business card in her hand.

“I’ll call him,” she said.

“Do it today,” Maren said. “He’s eighty-three.”