The Visit

Constance Wray came at twenty past seven on a Thursday morning in November, in a car with a driver, and asked for Hollis by name.

Faye, who had come to the door in a housecoat, was so overcome that she would have given her the orchard. She gave her the front room and the good coffee and went out to wake the rest of the house with a whisper like a fire alarm. Hollis came down in a sweater with her hair in a tie, and Constance Wray did not sit down.

"I will be plain," she said. "There is a report. It is a report which has been brought to me from two independent sources, one of them the clergyman at the church your cousin Pell attends in Ridgefield, and it is to the effect that you are engaged to my nephew, and that the engagement is to be announced at Christmas. I have come to know the truth of it."

"There is no engagement."

"Then the report is false."

"The report is false."

Constance Wray's whole face changed into something harder. "Then you will give me the assurance I have come for. You will promise me, on your word as a gentlewoman, that you will never enter into such an engagement."

Hollis looked at her.

"No," she said.

"I beg your pardon."

"I will not promise it. I am not accountable to you for my own life, and I will not bind myself to a promise about a thing that has not been asked of me."

"You do not know what you are doing. He is engaged to my daughter. It has been the dearest wish of his mother and of mine since Odette was born. They were raised for each other. It is an arrangement of two families."

"Then let him make it," said Hollis. "I have heard it from your own table. I have heard it twice. If it is made, it is made by him and not by me, and nothing I could promise you would make it more likely or less likely." She folded her arms. "You have asked me to promise that I will refuse a man who has not asked me. I will not. And I will tell you why I will not: because I have been wrong about him in every particular for a year, and I have been wrong because I listened to what people said about him instead of what he did, and I am not going to do it a second time in the opposite direction."

"You are impertinent."

"I am impertinent. I am also the daughter of a man who cannot pay for his own heat pump and the sister of a girl your nephew pulled out of a motel in New Jersey, and I have been made to feel both of those things in this county and in your house, and I am finished being made to feel them by you."

Constance Wray said, "I shall know what to think of this."

"I am sure you will."

She went out to the car. Faye met Hollis in the hall with her hands over her mouth and said, "You have thrown away the greatest connection this family has ever had."

"Mother," said Hollis. "There is no connection. There has never been a connection."

They heard about it three days later, from Marcus Ellery, who wrote a note to Gil: Constance Wray had gone straight from the orchard to Bellwood and had told her nephew, in the course of a long and extremely detailed account, every word of it, including the part about the motel in New Jersey.