Dark Lady (4 page)

Committee. If one of you has some problem, it will save the President from having to choose …. ” No, Caroline had answered them both, there was nothing. She checked her watch. Three forty-five. In a little more than an hour, Fards would call. She gazed up at the house. No, she decided, she was not quite ready to go inside. Jutting from the beach was a narrow wooden dock, stretching out into the ocean until it was deep enough for docking. Caroline walked barefoot across the wooden planks to where she had tied her rented sailboat, pulled a bottled beer from an ice chest in the hull, and sat with her legs dangling over the bow. She sipped the beer—tart on her tongue, cool in her hand—and idly watched the beads of condensation skitter down the sides of the bottle. The beer was left over from yesterday, when she had packed the ice chest with bread and cheese, beer and mineral water, and set sail in the cat-boat for Tarpaulin Cove in the Elizabeths, as she once had when she was fourteen. Though Caroline had not sailed the sound for years, she did not need a nautical chart: she remembered each bell and buoy precisely. The morning of her sail had been clear; the day—water and sky—was vivid shades of blue. Caroline had grinned into the wind. She was a nature sensualist, she knew—sun and sea exhilarated her, rain depressed her. In this, she was like her mother had been. She sailed for the lighthouse where Tarpaulin Cove lay. Docking the boat, Caroline swam to the beach, where she fell asleep in the sun. Only the lapping of the tide at her feet had awakened her. As she sailed back, a light skein of fog scudded along the water, and the wind shifted in the Middle Ground. Caroline had fought it a little through the choppy waters, edgy. There had been no real danger. But the pull of memory was strong …. Caroline turned to the house again. It sat near the bluff, a sprawling clapboard dwelling with

views on all sides, an amalgam of Cape architecture and gables, surrounded by roses and a white picket ‘fence. The earliest section had been built in the late 1600s, then hauled by oxen two centuries later from the middle of Edgartown to Eel Pond. Her father had added the rest of the house and, somewhat later, the roses. “They grow well near the water,” he had said to the child Caroline. “Like you.” And yet, when she had rented the house from its owners, they had associated the name Masters only with Caroline herself. They did not know her family; Caroline had said simply that she was “familiar with the house.” And every room in it, she did not say, has memories for me. When she climbed the steps to the bluff, entering the house, the grandfather clock read four-twenty. Forty minutes. She walked through the alcove past the bedroom where Betty and Larry had stayed that last summer; through the beamed dining room, where their family had dined by candlelight, her father at the head of the table; and then into the sunny bedroom she could only think of as her mother’s. Entering the master bath, she imagined a makeup mirror that was no longer there, saw once more her last, enduring image of her mother in life—striking and petite, peering intently at her reflection as she applied mascara with her left hand and imagined the evening ahead …. But the bathroom mirror reflected only Caroline, a woman six years older than the woman in the makeup mirror would ever become. A lawyer, perhaps soon a judge, who looked little like her mother. Except, Caroline allowed with a slight smile, that she had her mother’s vanity. The rest, to Caroline’s regret, seemed to come from her father. The height—at five eight, Caroline was five inches taller than her mother. The auburn-tinted’black hair, usually subdued into straightness by brush and dryer. An aquiline face that her Yankee forebears might have described as having “character”: a widow’s peak, high cheekbones, long

nose, full even mouth, her chin cleft and strong. Every feature would have been a little too emphatic, Caroline thought dryly, if they hadn’t invented television; it was the media people who began writing, much to Caroline’s public indifference and secret pleasure, about her style and aristocratic good looks. After all, Caroline had thought, it was comfortingly better than “headed straight for menopause, with cellulite lurking around the corner….” Which was not, if you please, a suitable description for a high federal judge. Four-forty. Why, Caroline asked herself, was this so very important to her? What would she be if her ambitions turned to dust? In her heart, she did not wish to know. Her ambition worked for her—it filled her life with interest and challenge. Filled her life, period. Some things should not be tampered with. Perhaps, Caroline reflected, she had been foolish to come here. Even now, she was impulsive; she had merely learned to stifle her impulses or, at worst, conceal them. Returning here had been an impulse: almost no one but her secretary knew where she was; no one at all knew that this home had once been hers. Slowly, Caroline walked to the screen porch. It faced west across the water. Outside, a sea breeze whistled through her father’s roses. Near them, on the lawn, was the smooth, flat rock—larger than a table—that her father had ordered hauled there. On his vacations from New Hampshire, he would sit at the rock, facing the water, writing his opinions in longhand …. Nearly five o’clock. Caroline sat in a wicker chair next to a glass end table with a telephone on top. Lifted the receiver, once and then twice, checking for a dial tone. Five-ten, then five-fifteen. Five-sixteen. The telephone rang.

“Caroline.” The rheumy voice sounded far away. “It’s Walter Farris.” Caroline composed herself, trying to decipher his tone. “Walter, how are you?”

“Fine. Dandy, actually. Tell me, do you have a moment to speak to the President?” Caroline gave a startled laugh. “Well, I was planning to mow the lawn …”

“Just a minute. He’s right here.” Caroline felt her face flush. “Caroline,” came the familiar soft drawl. “Mr. President?”

“Walter tells me you want to go on the Appeals Court.” A moment’s pause. “I must, Mr. President. I haven’t waited this long for a man to call me since the Winter Prom.” A genuine chuckle, a sally enjoyed on two levels. “Well, Caroline … it’s yours.” Caroline felt a sigh run through her, and, with it, all pretense of lightness vanished. “It’s not easy to tell you, Mr. President, everything this means to me.” She paused, voice softening. “I’ve worked for this since law school. And I’ll work even harder to deserve it once I’m there.”

“I know you will. Anyhow, Walter wants to speak to you. Do stop by and see us when you come back for the confirmation hearings, okay?” A moment’s pause. “Congratulations, Judge Masters …. “

“Caroline?” Farris again. “You’ll need to rev up for the confirmation hearings. Jennifer Doran from the Justice Department will be in touch, to help you prepare. She’s been through it all before …. ” Putting down the telephone, Caroline barely remembered how the conversation had ended. There were tears in her eyes. So strange, Caroline thought, to want something so deeply for so long that you cannot believe you have it … She sat there, tears running down her face now, very glad that no one could see her. At a loss for what to do.

A toast, she thought. A toast to me. She went to the kitchen, buoyant now, and made herself a pitcher of martinis. The first martini, surgically crisp, went down in two swallows. To hell with dinner. At a moment like this, anyone gets to be foolish. Tomorrow, no one will know but you. At seven o’clock, she was still on the porch, watching the ocean fade to gray in evening sunlight. The bitter memories had eased away; for now, at this moment, she had no wish to be elsewhere. It was dusk when the telephone rang. She hesitated, trying to arrange her thoughts. A moment passed before she answered the phone. “Hello.”

“Caroline?” At first, her mind did not quite absorb it. But she felt it on her skin: a voice she had not heard in twenty years, yet more familiar than any other. A voice that belonged to this house. Caroline stood, suddenly alert. She found that she could not answer. “Caroline.” His voice was older now, perhaps rougher with what this call must be costing him. “There’s been trouble here, with Brett. You must come home.”

The next morning, Caroline Masters flew to Boston, rented a Jeep, and drove north. An hour later, she crossed the state line into New Hampshire and felt herself—leaden and filled with premonitions—drawn from her future into her past. Twenty-three years ago, she had left this place for good. She remembered little of that; sitting in the back seat behind Betty and her husband, Larry, as they headed toward Martha’s Vineyard and their last summer as a family, she had felt no sense of moment. By summer’s end, she had sworn never to return. And now she had done so. She had called Walter Farris before leaving the island, explaining only that she had a family emergency that might require a few days. He was gracious and understanding; perhaps Caroline had only imagined the faint undertone of caution, the unspoken question—what kind of emergency could be so serious that it distracted her at a time like this, so sensitive that she chose not to explain it. But refusal to explain herself was the defining choice of her adulthood; she was already fighting the superstition—foolish and egocentric, she chastised herself—that by visiting Martha’s Vineyard she had reopened the past, which now waited for both Caroline and a girl she did not know. But still he knew that she would come. Driving deeper into New Hampshire, she felt him. The scattered farms and small towns were remnants of the long-ago prosperity that had helped make him who he was. Climbing toward the White Mountains—sheer cliffs, winding streams, and plummeting gorges, miles of dense trees broken by granite faces hewn by time and the harshness of weather—Caroline recalled his belief that New England was a place unlike any other, his admonitions on nature and the virtues of winter: how they built resourcefulness and resolve, reminding man of the challenges ahead and the prudence needed to face them without any help but God’s. And she knew, despite all her years and all her efforts, that this man, and this place, had defined the deepest part of her. Descending from the cloud-swept summit, she drove north and west toward Vermont and into a gray, seeping rain. Yesterday seemed far behind. The towns had grown sparse, farther apart; the roads were better, some lumber mills emed to have closed, but little else had changed. It was a place where relationships mattered, Caroline remembered, where lives were private but memories were long, where respect—for a man or for the family he came from—once earned, went deep. For it was not a place where strangers came: the refugees from Massachusetts, the seekers of summer homes, tended to stop short of this corner of New Hampshire. These were the people who had always been there, dwindling a little, their sons or daughters drifting away to look for better jobs, others hanging on. So that life seemed as timeless as the pristine lakes, the rivers, the deep, silent forests. The country now was undulant valleys, streams, hills rising abruptly against a broad sky. The roads became smaller; at a crossroads by a shabby church, Caroline turned down a tar-and-gravel road where the arrow pointed to “Resolve Village.” A mile short of the town, she left the road, climbing a gravel path through woods that had once been pasture, until she reached the clearing that was still called Masters Hill.

Caroline was only half aware of how slowly she drove. She was more alert to landmarks—the jagged boulder she once had climbed, the distant blue-gray view of Heron Lake—

than to the feeling of the places, so familiar and yet from another life. And then, abruptly, she stopped. Stiff from driving, she stepped into the mist and rain. On a hillside, cleared from a stand of birch trees, was a white wooden church. The first Masters had built it one hundred fifty years ago, to serve his family and those nearby, and its spires and stained-glass windows were from another time. It was where he had taken first one wife and then another; where Betty and Larry had married, with Caroline as maid of honor; where Caroline herself had once imagined marrying. Caroline had spent most Sunday mornings of her youth here, seated with her parents and her sister in the first row, where the Masters family sat by tradition and by right. She could remember the plain wooden benches and sparse furnishings, the unvarnished services of a religion too established for hysteria. But although she knew that, by long practice, the church would not be locked, Caroline did not enter. Behind the church was the cemetery where the Masterses lay, generation after generation. Caroline circled the church and went there, face damp and chill. Encroaching birches blocked the light, crowded the weathered stones at the cemetery’s edge. The granite markers were worn with wind and rain and dirt. A stone—the marker of an infant long lost to memory—had toppled on its face. At the center were the markers of her own family. On the largest of them, a granite rectangle rising from their midst, were the names of its members: Channing Masters; Elizabeth Brett Masters; then Elizabeth Wells Masters. At the bottom were the words: “Caroline Clark Masters, b. June 1‘7, 1950.” Only for Elizabeth Brett Masters did the date of death appear. In front of this marker was another, set into the ground over the grave of Elizabeth Brett Masters, recording her for posterity as “Beloved wife of Channing and mother of Elizabeth.”

Turning, Caroline walked to the edge of the graveyard. The marker here was dirty, covered with leaves. Kneeling in the rain, Caroline cleared them with cold, clumsy fingertips. Saw the inscription, “Nicole Dessaliers Masters, b. 1925, d. 1964.” Then read the stark words which were painful still: “Wife of Channing, mother of Caroline.” Face wet and cold, Caroline stood there, in silent apology for things she had not then known. Only as she left the grave did she notice that the rain had ceased.

A half mile farther, Caroline stopped at the edge of the road. To her right, beyond a wood that gently sloped away, she could spot distant glimpses of the village of Resolve—a spire, a crossroads, white wooden homes from other centuries. And then only woods again. When she was a child, he would describe for her—until she could imagine it—a countryside of farms and stone walls, cross-stitched with the works of men. A time when New England throve, and the Masters who had lived here was a United States senator. Caroline turned, facing the house where she was born. Three stories and twenty rooms, it rose majestically to a domed octagonal cupola, from which the Masterses could see for miles. White-painted wood, arched windows, a massiveness unrelieved by ostentation or the fripperies of architectural fashion. The indulgences were inside: twelve-foot ceilings; seven granite fireplaces; a winding staircase; the floating ballroom. To him, it was a symbol of his birthright and the obligations that imposed: this house could not be abandoned like other houses but must be maintained and passed on, like the life of the Masterses themselves. Yet within the family he could be droll about its origins. The first Masters, Adam, had fallen deeply in love with a young woman from that cosmopolitan oasis Portland, Maine. Intent that she should marry him, Adam had built this home as a monument to his passion, hoping to surprise and dazzle her. A week after its completion, Admn had received his own surprise: a letter from the young woman, breaking their engagement. The