“You’re welcome,” said Marge.
Gwen turned to her masseur—“Do you have time to do us all?”—and gestured toward Bridget and Marge. “My treat.”
“Hell, no,” said Marge, as if Gwen had suggested something lewd.
Bridget stood up. “Me neither.”
“Tony, this is my big sister.” And Gwen came over to put her arm across Bridget’s shoulders. Gwen always, always had to mention that she was younger.
“Cool,” he said. “So where do I set up?”
“Sunroom?” Gwen asked.
“Fine,” said Marge.
Tony backed out of the door, bumping the table into the doorjamb, and before following him, Marge pulled a cloth from her apron pocket and leaned over to inspect the damage. She rubbed the spot vigorously.
Just as she straightened up, the door swung open again, narrowly missing her head. Edward, his wild gray hair standing out in cheeky contrast to his dignified cardigan sweater and slacks, entered the room in search of Marge.
He acknowledged Bridget’s greeting, giving her a quick kiss on her cheek, but then turned to Marge, saying, “You didn’t hear me.”
“I didn’t hear you what?” she asked.
“You didn’t hear me… madam.” He smiled at his own humor.
“Funny,” said Marge without expression.
“I was calling for you,” he said.
Marge sighed. “What can’t you find now?”
“A photo album.” He had an elegant scarf draped around his neck and his old pair of worn embroidered house shoes on his feet, the overall effect being elegant, aristocratic even. Bridget felt proud of him and simultaneously grateful that he was too preoccupied to notice how slovenly she looked in comparison.
“Narrow it down,” Marge said.
“Circa 1972.”
“I’ll bring it to you,” said Marge.
He bowed in mock seriousness, straightened his glasses, and said, “I just saw a man wandering about who appears to be a stripper.”
“He’s a masseur,” said Gwen.
“Well, he’s loose in the house, in case anyone’s looking for him.” He then turned to Bridget. “Are you ill?”
“No, I—”
“You have the look of Mimì in La Bohème right before she dies of consumption.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, and instead pushed open the door and exited before Bridget could ask who he was with in the living room.
Marge started to follow him out but turned back, pointing at each of the girls in turn. “I like having my girls under the same roof.” She winked and left them alone.
Gwen put the glasses in the dishwasher. “When’s Will coming?”
“I’m not sure.” Bridget was sort of hoping Will would wait a few weeks before coming so she and Sterling could establish a routine together and have a chance to be alone. For the first time ever, Will would be staying in the guesthouse.
“Does he like Sterling?”
“Of course.” Will hadn’t said much about him, but they seemed to enjoy their man-banter when they saw each other. “How often are you coming up this summer?”
“I’ll get here when I can. My job is crazy right now.”
The music coming from the living room got louder for a moment, and over the orchestra, they could hear the intensity of their dad’s voice. “He’s on overdrive,” said Gwen, “and I’m finding it unnerving.”
Bridget thought of the reaction she’d gotten in the emergency room at the mere mention of her father’s name. “If we’re half as popular and youthful as he is at that age, I’ll throw us a party.”
“Liar,” said Gwen. “You never have parties.” Smiling, she went off to the sunroom for her massage.
* * *
Before leaving, Bridget’s curiosity got the best of her, and she decided to find out who was visiting her father. She went to the library and leaned into the adjacent living room, catching sight of the back of her dad’s wing chair. His foot was tapping the floor like a metronome. Sitting beside him was a dignified-looking man whose head was tilted upward in profile, eyes closed, fingers laced together over a Moleskine notebook, lips in a smile, one gray-socked foot resting on the opposite knee. Bridget recognized him right away: Nicholas Donahue, a musicologist from Oxford. They’d met a couple of times over the years, at parties and events, but one time stood out in particular when she, Jacques, and Will were at a music festival in Salzburg. They went to a cocktail reception and were getting a lot of praise for the Brahms piano trio they’d performed earlier in the day when Nicholas and his wife, Miriam, approached them. Nicholas seemed interested in only one thing: what it was like to be the daughter of the great Edward Stratton. Bridget, wanting to celebrate her trio’s performance rather than her dad’s accomplishments, had excused herself as soon as she could do so politely, taking Will’s hand and fleeing to the bar.
It seemed now from the blissful look she saw on Nicholas’s face that there was no place on earth he would rather be. She could imagine what he was thinking: Someone take a picture! I’m at Edward Stratton’s country estate, listening to Mahler with the master. He opened his eyes suddenly, and Bridget quickly stepped out of his sight line.
Behind where Nicholas was sitting and in front of the bay window was her father’s seven-foot Bösendorfer piano, moved to this spot thirty years earlier after Edward sold their beautiful tenth-floor home on Park Avenue and bought a smaller apartment on Central Park West, where he’d lived ever since with a baby grand. But in the prewar apartment Bridget grew up in, her mother, Sophia Stratton, and her father hosted an annual winter party, during which she and Gwen would slip away from Marge so they could get a better view of Edward when he made his annual toast, a presentation really, from his seat at that piano. Past the Christmas tree and the roaring fire, Gwen and Bridget would sneak through the crowd to watch their father improvise off Christmas songs as their mother, dressed in dark green or burgundy velvet, stood nearby, smiling when he asked their guests to raise their glasses to her. Then he would tell stories (as his rapt audience listened, forgetting even to sip their champagne) about his celebrity encounters, his travels, or, Bridget’s favorite, about the origin of the piano itself. He’d bought it at auction in London from the great-grandson of a wealthy socialite, pianist, and singer named Elizabeth Vogel, who had shocked British society when she took off with a Venezuelan businessman, leaving her husband and four children behind. Months later, she’d written her husband, telling him he could keep the kids but asking him to send the piano to her in Caracas. It had been his wedding gift to her, after all. Her husband agreed, a shocking concession given the circumstances, but when the time came for the instrument to be sent across the ocean on a Blohm und Voss ship, the movers found letters from past lovers stashed in the body. One of the letters detailed an encounter that happened on the very instrument itself. The piano never made it onto the boat. Edward would end the story by saying it was no wonder the keyboard had such excellent “action.” Bridget hadn’t understood the joke until many years later, but that line always went over well with the audience, including with her mom, who would laugh as if she were trying not to, shaking her head at him in a way that said, You’re incorrigible, but go on.