“What would have?”
“I hoped that I and the life I provided could have, but I failed.” There was another pause, this one longer. “Hope, darling Vera, is the fire that keeps propelling us forward. We hope even in the face of impossibility, and that is as it should be. I think you’ve let its spark go out, haven’t you?”
I shrugged.
“You need to admit it. You’ve given up since that little girl died, haven’t you?” My father knew me better than anyone else.
“Maybe, maybe I have.”
“Sweetheart, you have to forgive yourself. Even if you can’t save everyone, you can make a difference. You have things to accomplish. I know you do. Reignite that spark, darling. And then don’t ever let it die out again… Do you promise you’ll try?”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
He always had wine with dinner and port afterward. And the doctor had said it was good for him. So when he asked me for more, I was happy to oblige. He picked up his glass and looked at it in the candlelight, studying it as if there were words in the deep ruby-amber liquid. He took a sip. And another. And then resumed talking about my mother. But as it turned out, he was really speaking of his own failure.
“I really believed I could make her happy, trying so hard to be someone I wasn’t… to be proper and conform… for your mother and your sister and you… trying not to … not to need all this so much.” He gestured to the glorious greenhouse and the rooms beyond it.
I was confused by his comment. “Need this? What? The apartment?”
My father ignored my question. “I want you to really promise you will try and find your spirit again. Not just for the sake of your work… but for your soul. I don’t want you to spend your life alone looking for perfection or wasting time avoiding hurt. To live a full life, you need a full heart. Even though a heart can break from loss, it’s worth the risk. Even with my very broken heart, I don’t regret a day.”
If I were anything other than a reporter, I would have reacted to my father’s death with sadness and grief, accepted his bequest of the apartment, and not paid much mind to the mysterious comments he’d made that night. He’d been, at that very moment, facing his mortality, after all. I would have considered his words a natural response to that.
But I am a reporter, and his cryptic confession continued to taunt me after his death. What had he really meant? It bothered me that I might never know. But with him gone, other than peppering my mother with questions—something that, based on past experience, I knew would only result in frustration—how could I find out?
And as for his plea that I not give up hope?
I tucked that away as a request that it was already too late to fill. My father was right: I had given up most of my hope the night Charlotte died. And then more of it when her mother refused help. And the paltry bit that was left? When I saw my father laid out in his coffin, his silver hair brushed back off a handsome face no longer animated, his always moving hands stilled and crossed on his chest, his aquamarine eyes closed against the light, what little hope I had left took flight.
CHAPTER 4
On Saturday morning, I woke filled with anxiety. My brother-in-law would be arriving at nine, and I dreaded our task of going through my father’s effects. I didn’t want to change how things were. Not in the apartment. Not in the curious existence I’d grown accustomed to. I spent very little time with other people, instead occupying my days reading the history books on my father’s bookshelves and only venturing out at night to attend enough events to fill my column. Usually, that required going out at least twice a week. I’d attend a Broadway show or a ball or go to the opera or a concert. And as always, with my mother. Sometimes we were joined by my sister and Jack.
They say a child, even a grown child, always yearns for her mother’s love. I wonder if another reason I continued writing Silk, Satin and Scandals was that it kept me connected to my mother in a way I was loath to give up, despite the disappointment, resentment, and pain that seethed between us. When we ventured out to events together, I knew I pleased her. During those outings, I was the daughter she’d expected me to be. Wholly and unconditionally. And while I so wished for her to be just as accepting about all the parts of my life, I decided to simply take what I could get—a glimmer of the way we once were, before I grew up and began to disappoint her.
My life was full of so many befores and afters, I realized, as I pulled an old shirtwaist over my dress to protect it from dust and cobwebs. There was my life before Radcliffe, when I was much less of a contrarian, and after, when I began to follow the path of my hero, Nellie Bly. Before my affair with the cellist, Maximilian Ritter, and after the devastating discovery that inspired me to truly go undercover. Before Charlotte died and after, when I lost faith in my ability to help those in need. And finally, before my father died and after, of which, at this moment, I had yet to know the outcome.
I hadn’t moved any of my father’s clothes or knickknacks or books. I hadn’t gone through his armoire or his desk and separated his papers. I had rarely set foot in his bedroom, which was the first place Jack and I tackled when he arrived.
“You have been keeping this room like a shrine,” my brother-in-law said as he looked around.
He walked to the closet, and as he opened the door, the scent of my father’s cologne wafted out toward me. At first, it was comforting, but a second later, it was a mean reminder of what was gone.
Jack set to work, taking a shirt off its hanger and inspecting it for wear.
As the owner of one of Manhattan’s most fashionable department stores, my father had the finest wardrobe. We decided Jack would offer the items in excellent condition to the employees, and whatever they didn’t want he’d give to the Janus Shelter, which helped men find jobs and gave them clothes to wear. It was a charity my father had helped found—named for the Greek god of beginnings, choices, and doorways.
“Are you going to stay on here in the penthouse permanently?” Jack asked as he moved on to the next item of clothing.
“Yes, I think so. Why?”
“I’m not suggesting you leave, Vera,” he said. “This is your apartment now.”
“So why were you asking?”
“I just wonder if it’s the best thing for you. You know, I only want to help.”
“I do know,” I said, because it was true.
Jack Baxter Briggs had been married to my sister for nearly ten years. He was two years older than she was, thirty-two, like me. He had become the chairman of Garland’s Emporium even before my father passed on. After his first heart attack, my father had confided in me that he planned on slowing down, perhaps traveling more, and turning over day-to-day operations of the store to Jack. And why shouldn’t he have? Jack had been his protégé. The son of one of my father’s closest friends, Jack had studied business at Yale University, like my father, and had gone to work at Garland’s after graduating. His own father was a bit chagrined that Jack didn’t want to follow in his footsteps at his bank, but Jack loved retail. And when he fell in love with my sister, my parents were overjoyed. My father never regretted not having a son, but at the same time, I knew he hated the idea that he wouldn’t be able to turn Garland’s over to someone in the family.