Generation V (4 page)
For the mansions that remain in private hands, keeping
the tourists from roaming up to your front door because they bought one of the all-access passes and have now mistaken your home for the Marble House is a summer-long headache. Most privately owned mansions, therefore, are distinguishable by their massive front fences, controlled-access gates, and incredibly groomed ten-foot privet hedges. When a celebrated romance novelist moved into town, she impressed the neighbors by erecting an eight-foot solid granite wall around her entire property, and was only prevented from putting barbed wire on the top when one of the grand old dames of the Historical Society happened to stop by the day they were being installed, and through great persuasive effort convinced her that black ironwork spikes would be more visually restrained but have the same effect.
Given that Madeline is a vampire, and presumably has more unsavory peccadilloes to cover up than a romance writer, most people would probably assume that her home would have more security than Fort Knox. But for the neighborhood, her security is extremely restrained. She has the same black and gold ironwork fence between the end of her lawn and the sidewalk as the public mansions do, with batches of hydrangea planted alongside to soften the look with heavy batches of luxuriant blue flowers that curl around and through the base of the fence. There’s the obligatory tall privet hedge along the boundaries between her property and the neighbors’, but the driveway doesn’t have a gate at all. What it has is a small and comfortable little guardhouse, where an old and genial man named Wilson is employed year-round to sit and cheerfully give directions to
all of the confused tourists who end up in the driveway, or drivers who have gone just too far and need a convenient place to turn around in. He keeps stacks of maps and brochures to give out, and when I was little he never failed to greet me with a butterscotch candy.
I waved a little to Wilson, who sat at his window and gave me a cheery little two-fingered salute. Madeline’s driveway is very long, and winds a bit. She had the benefit of buying property back when she essentially had her pick of the entire island, and now she has a huge parklike estate with unimpeded views of Narragansett Bay, dotted here and there with topiary that her crack team of gardeners sculpt into horses, dogs, and, when one of them is feeling feisty, the occasional llama.
The sun was just dipping down to touch the bay when I pulled the Fiesta into the parking area beside Madeline’s Mercedes, Chivalry’s Bentley, and an unfamiliar Rolls-Royce. While Chivalry would be annoyed with me for arriving late, at least he wouldn’t have to see my car, which made it look like the gardener had pulled up to dispute his last paycheck. Little things tend to get Chivalry worked up.
Madeline has company a lot, so strange and expensive cars like the Rolls-Royce aren’t unusual, but I was grateful that Prudence’s car was nowhere in sight. As I got out I hoped briefly that the Fiesta would restrain itself from leaving an oil stain on the immaculate white gravel beneath it.
The house itself is two stories tall and made of white marble that was shipped in from Italy. While Madeline has owned the property so long that her deed has “God Save the King” written across the top, she likes to keep
the house fairly modern. When I once asked her if she wouldn’t be more comfortable living like she did when she was growing up, she said that my question showed a fundamental ignorance of fourteenth-century English plumbing. She has leveled and completely rebuilt the house at least twice, the last time to incorporate dual advances in toiletry and electricity. The only reason that the outside of the house has remained Italian marble (which, I’m told, is a real hassle to patch after winter storms) is that she doesn’t like getting into fights with the Historical Society, and so now the outside of the house remains the same while whole wings inside are periodically gutted and redone. There are local contractors whose families have worked for my mother for six generations, and they sing hymns whenever they hear that Madeline Scott would like to bring her wiring up to code. Oddly, none of those contractors (or anyone else, for that matter) ever seem to register that they are being cut a check from the same individual who hired their grandfather, and great-grandfather. I asked Chivalry about it once, but he’d been very cagey, telling me that convenient ignorance was at least ninety percent due to the wonderful influence of excessive wealth and checks that never bounced. When I’d asked about that remaining ten percent, he’d just smiled and said that I’d understand when I had finished my transition. The front door was unlocked, like it always is, and I let myself in. The main foyer is a bit of an homage to the expectations of her guests, with a mosaic-tiled floor depicting ocean waves, marble statues of Nereids cavorting along the walls, and a huge ceiling mural that depicts Neptune in all his tridenty glory. The chandelier is festooned with
handblown fish from Newport’s own Thames Glassblowers Company—a nice touch, showing that Madeline believes strongly in shopping local.
The main staircase sweeps extravagantly upward in this room. It’s made out of solid marble, carved with porpoises and scantily clad mermaids that fascinated me as a child and deeply embarrassed me from puberty all the way to the present day. While the mermaids at the bottom of the staircase would be perfectly at home in a Disney film, the mermaids toward the middle steps are topless, and the ones at the top of the staircase have located some human men and are engaged in decidedly X-rated activities. When I was little Chivalry used to conceal those with newspapers and masking tape.
There was a middle-aged man standing at the top of the stairs, closely examining one of the frolicking mermaids. He was deeply involved with his study, and hadn’t noticed me yet, so I had a chance to look him over and recognize him from the last gubernatorial election. He was dressed in a nice suit, just like when I’d seen him on TV, but his shirt collar was unbuttoned, his tie was at half-mast, and there was a deep flush along his cheeks as he stared glassily at the mermaid. Even from the base of the stairs, I could see that there was a small red stain on his shirt collar.
Madeline’s interest lay in politics and power. I’d met senators, congressmen, CEOs, and three future presidents, all over her dinner table. During the downfall of Enron I’d watched C-SPAN as a whole parade of my mother’s former visitors testified before Congress. Having no desire to talk with yet another politician, I quietly walked out of the main hallway and through opulent yet
steadily more restrained rooms until I reached the family living room. It’s still expensive as all hell, but it is the difference between a Fabergé egg and a Rolex watch. With parquet floors, oriental rugs, a granite fireplace, and small clusters of comfortable armchairs and sofas, it’s a welcome retreat from the showboating that goes on in the rooms where Madeline conducts her entertainment. Tall, narrow windows give the viewer breathtaking views of the back rose garden. You have to know where to look to see the tall wooden shutters that can be easily drawn over the windows and locked in place. As a family area, it has a balance between Madeline’s comfort and her children’s desire for daytime views. In Madeline’s suite of rooms on the second floor, where many of her visitors end up, it takes a careful eye to see around the sumptuousness and notice that there isn’t a single window.
Ensconced in the chair closest to the windows was a thin woman with loose black hair that curled its way down her back, and rich brown skin that perfectly offset her bright red dress. There was a white knitted blanket draped over her lap, and someone had turned on a small lamp for her, forming a small nimbus of cheerful light in the increasing twilight. She was deeply involved in a paperback book, the turning of pages the only sound besides the distant rhythm of the ocean that drifted in through the open window.
I didn’t think I made a sound, but something alerted her, and she glanced up. Her large dark eyes widened, and she smiled.
“Fortitude!” she said, stretching out one hand to me. I crossed the room quickly to take it. I squeezed it carefully,
aware of how delicate her hand felt. There was an overall air of fragility that hadn’t been present the last time I’d seen her.
“Bhumika. It’s good to see you,” I lied. Seeing her always hurt. “Are you staying downstairs for dinner?” Over the past year, Bhumika had steadily fallen more and more into the habit of having dinner upstairs in the suite she shared with Chivalry. And to call it dinner tended to push it—most nights, she was asleep before six.
“Of course, sweetheart. It’s been so long since I saw you that I insisted. I want to hear all about what you’re doing up in Providence and how much fun you’re having.”
Bhumika was Chivalry’s wife. She was his third spouse that I’d known. When my foster parents were killed, Madeline decided that it would be too risky to put me with another set of humans, so I lived in the mansion until I finished high school. After the shock of Jill’s and Brian’s deaths, I spent weeks refusing to talk with anyone. My family tried to force me to talk again, either subtly or directly, but it was Chivalry’s then-wife Carmela who brought me out of it. She just inserted me into her everyday routine, taking me along grocery shopping, her daily walks on the beach, her soap operas, talking almost constantly the entire time, a steady monologue of her thoughts and impressions that made no demands at all on me. She didn’t try to justify the deaths to me, or tell me to forget them. She just let me grieve for them, acting as a buffer between me and the world as long as I needed it. She could never replace Jill and Brian, but I did love her. I was fifteen when she died, and it hurt like
hell. I was never really able to forgive her replacement, Linda, even though she was very nice and showed tremendous grace through the worst of my teenage angst. I was already away at college when Linda died, and I was introduced to Bhumika on my next trip home after the funeral.
“Are you sure you want to stay?” I asked. I could feel the little shaking and tremoring in Bhumika’s hand, and how cool it was in a room that was just on the uncomfortable side of warm.
“Bhumika has made her decision,” Chivalry said from the doorway. I’d felt him in the house when I walked into the foyer, but I’ve never been very good about tracking either of my siblings’ specific locations unless I’m concentrating very hard, and I jumped a little. He was dressed for dinner in an elegant black suit, with a black shirt and a silk black tie. All that unrelieved black should’ve made him look like a lounge lizard’s undertaker, but instead he looked like he’d just come from a red carpet. He walked over to us and smoothly took Bhumika’s hand from me, bringing it up to his mouth to drop a small kiss on her palm. I shuddered at the way her face lit up at the sight of him, for a moment almost erasing the marks of illness and wear, returning her for just a second to the beautiful and lively woman she used to be.
“If she’s tired, then she should go rest,” I said stubbornly. “What does her doctor say?”
Chivalry’s face stayed immobile, even as his eyes started to gleam with temper. His pupils expanded slowly and the hazel of his irises disappeared. When a true vampire is really pissed off, his eyes can’t pass for
human anymore. Chivalry wasn’t near that point, but he was getting there. “Bhumika has made her decision,” he repeated, his lips barely moving. His eyes never left mine, and eventually I had to drop my gaze.
Bhumika lifted her other hand to pat my shoulder. “It’s okay, Fort,” she said, her tone urgent. “I’m doing just fine.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s all okay.” I pasted on a fake smile for her. I wanted to scream in her face that it wasn’t okay, and that it was obvious that she was dying, but I had no desire to either rub it in her face or get my own punched by Chivalry. Besides, she’d been dying since I met her.
Popular fiction suggests that vampires seek out innocent victims every night, accost them in the dark, and with one easy tap of an artery can drink them down in mere seconds, with just a few artistically placed drops of blood at the corner of their mouths to look sexy and dangerous. That’s fairly far from the reality. After the final transition into adulthood, vampires require human blood on a regular basis to stay healthy, but nowhere near enough to kill a person. Chivalry and Prudence only fed on humans once a week or so, and never took more than a pint or two at a sitting. But while I wasn’t entirely certain who Prudence chose to drink from, knowing only that she rarely repeated donors, Chivalry preferred monogamy. A few feedings here and there were no more damaging than a trip down to the Red Cross, but all of Chivalry’s wives invariably suffered from anemia, and despite iron supplements and regular transfusions, at our heart vampires aren’t as benign as a surgical needle. Something happens during a feeding that’s
more than just losing a pint of blood, and apparently that something is corrosive and cumulative. There were two, maybe three, years of good, almost enhanced, health and vitality, and then a long and steady decline that always ended in death.
If he’d simply fed off his wives, it would’ve been easy to dismiss Chivalry as a fashionable modern Bluebeard, but he didn’t. For Carmela, Linda, and now Bhumika, Chivalry was the model spouse: devoted, supportive, and loyal. Of course, I think in the ideal marriage your husband shouldn’t suck your blood. Or remarry the day after you die.
But I’m still mostly human, and apparently a bit of an idealist. Watching Bhumika cling to the hand of her killer, seeing Chivalry lean down and tenderly adjust her lap blanket and retrieve her book from where it had fallen, I felt that sharp fear that I always experience when I’m around my family: would I still find this horrible when I’d fully transitioned? Or would my fully vampire brain look at this and decide that I’d spent years overreacting?
My face must’ve given me away. Chivalry glared at me and Bhumika made a show of flipping through her book to find her place.
“Dinner is in twenty minutes.” Chivalry’s voice was tightly controlled. “Perhaps it would be felicitous to pay your respects to Grace and Henry before we dine.”