The Winter

Julian Reyes went to the city on the twentieth of November and did not come back.

He did not come back for Thanksgiving, which he had promised. He did not come back for the festival of lights on Main Street, which Sylvie had talked about for a month. He wrote to Gil a note of thanks for his hospitality that was warm and affectionate and said nothing. He wrote to Sylvie nothing at all.

Sylvie, who had never in her life been treated unkindly and had therefore never had to develop a way of surviving it, went about her business with a face like a held breath. He was busy: that was November, and the family had gone to Palm Beach for the winter, which Camille had mentioned. In December she said that a man who had been attentive for six weeks and absent for three weeks was not absent, only occupied, and that there was a difference. She said this in December. In January she stopped saying it. She took long walks on the ridge road. She read a great deal. She answered the telephone before anyone else could get to it, and stopped doing that too. On the eleventh of January Hollis came down at six and found her at the kitchen table in her coat with the radio off, doing nothing at all; and when Hollis said her name she said, "I am only thinking," and would not say what about.

Camille Reyes wrote her one letter, in January, which Sylvie showed to Hollis on the kitchen floor with the door shut.

It was three pages. It said that the family was settled in the city for the winter; that they saw a great deal of the Wray family; that Odette Wray was with them constantly; that Odette and Julian had been thrown together in a way that everyone found delightful; and that Camille hoped, with all her heart, that her dear Miss Arden was well and that Ashford was quiet and that the winter was not too long. It closed with a postscript about a ball gown.

"She wants you to think he is engaged," Hollis said.

"She wants me to be sure of it. There is a difference."

"Do you want him to be?"

"I want," said Sylvie, and then she did something she had not done since she was eleven years old, which was to cry in front of her sister in a way that could not be stopped, "I want him to be happy. And if he is happy with Odette Wray, then I am glad, and I would like to be left alone now for a while."

Hollis sat with her on the kitchen floor and held her and thought about Roman Ashcroft in a way that was not a thought but a physical pressure, like a hand on the back of her neck. It was he who had taken Reyes away. It was he who had decided that Sylvie Arden was not good enough for his friend. Camille had practically written it out: everyone knew that Ashcroft's word was law with Julian Reyes, and everyone knew what Ashcroft thought of Ashford, and everyone knew what would happen to a girl from a failing orchard who tried to hold a man from a family with a foundation.

In February the letter came saying that the Reyes party would not return to Bellwood at all that year, and that the house was to be advertised again in the spring.

The market on Saturdays was in the Grange parking lot from November to April, and the Ardens had a table there with cider and preserves and whatever fruit was in season, and February was the worst of it: eleven degrees, four vendors, and the woman at the egg stall who had been at Bellwood's welcome party and who asked Faye, every Saturday, with the most gentle goodwill in the world, "And how is your eldest girl?"

Faye always answered. She answered the way a person answers a question they have decided to answer brightly, and the brightness was worse than silence, and by the third Saturday Hollis had begun to time it. Nine seconds. Then the preserves. Then, with the same gentle goodwill: "And the young man from Bellwood?"

On the fourth Saturday Dex Cray came to the table to buy a jar of apple butter, and Roxy came out from behind the truck where she had been pretending to arrange boxes, and the two of them stood in the cold in a conversation that lasted twenty minutes while Hollis counted change and watched and said nothing. He was not cruel to her. That was the thing. He was not cruel to anyone. He asked her what she had been reading, and he laughed at what she said, and he treated an eighteen-year-old girl in a parking lot in February as though she were the most interesting person in Dutchess County, and Roxy stood straight for the first time in her life under the weight of somebody's full attention.

Hollis said, when he had gone: "Do not let him talk to you like that."

"Like what."

"Like you are the only person in the world."

"Mother says nobody else ever will."

"Roxy."

"Nobody does," said Roxy. "Nobody ever has. Not once. You are all busy with the orchard." And she went back to the truck, and Hollis stood at a table in a parking lot in February with a jar of apple butter in her hand and understood, too late and completely, that the thing her sister was going to do was not about Dex Cray at all.

Faye said nothing about it. Gil said: "Well. That is that." And then, because he could not help himself: "Your young man has a friend, and the friend has an aunt, and the aunt has a fortune, and the fortune has a daughter. That is the whole mechanism. It has been the whole mechanism for two hundred years and it will be the whole mechanism after we are all dead."

Hollis went out and walked the ridge road in the snow for an hour and came back with her face set in a shape that Petra would describe years later, to her own children, as the shape of their aunt deciding something permanently.