The Last Mrs. Harlow

CHAPTER THREE: DOROTHY

*****

Nathaniel came home on a Tuesday.

He'd been in Portland for three days - meetings about a commercial acquisition on the waterfront, the kind of deal he described in the broad strokes of someone summarizing a film rather than explaining a plot, and I had stopped asking for more detail somewhere around month four of our relationship because it became clear that the detail wasn't going to come. Not evasively. Not with any visible awareness that he was doing it. He simply operated as though certain portions of his life were self-contained rooms, and you were welcome in the common areas but the rooms had doors, and the doors were closed, and it didn't occur to him that this might be something worth acknowledging. I had decided, at the time, that this was a personality type rather than a warning sign. I was, as I have mentioned, very good at deciding things were fine.

He came home with dahlias. Deep burgundy, almost black at the center, extravagant and heavy-headed, the kind of flower that makes a statement whether you intend one or not. He set them on the kitchen island and kissed me and said he'd missed me, and I believed him, because the particular quality of the way he looked at me when he first came back from anywhere - that brief, concentrated attention, like a man checking that something valuable is still where he left it - always felt entirely real. Whatever else I am uncertain about, I don't think that was performance. I think he genuinely wanted me there. I think, in his way, he genuinely loved me.

Which is its own complicated thing, and not the comfort it sounds like.

“Your mother came by yesterday,” I said, while I found a vase for the dahlias.

“Did she.” Not a question.

“She had some thoughts about the garden. The rose beds specifically. Apparently they need to be cut back before the first hard frost or something happens to them that she described in terms usually reserved for national tragedies.”

He made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “My mother has been managing those rose beds since 1987. They'll survive.”

“She also mentioned - “ I kept my voice very easy, very light, a conversational aside rather than a loaded statement - “that she'd stored some of Eliza's things in the attic. Before the wedding. She wanted to know if I'd like her to arrange for them to be taken somewhere.”

The kitchen went quiet.

I was still dealing with the dahlias, trimming stems at the sink, not looking at him, and the silence behind me stretched about two seconds longer than normal silence. Two seconds is nothing. Two seconds is barely a pause in the way time actually operates. But I had become, by this point, something of a connoisseur of Nathaniel's silences, and this particular one had a texture I recognized - a careful, contained quality, a silence that was actively doing something rather than just occupying space.

“She doesn't need to bother with that,” he said. Perfectly even. “I'll deal with it.”

“Of course.” I arranged the dahlias. They were beautiful, genuinely beautiful, those dark blooms in the white vase against the pale kitchen counter. “She also said to tell you that the Alderson dinner is the fourteenth. She's already confirmed you're coming.”

“Is she.” That sound again. “Of course she has.”

He came up behind me and slid his arms around my waist, resting his chin on the top of my head in the particular way he had that always made me feel, very briefly, like being small wasn't a disadvantage. “I'm sorry I was gone so long,” he said. “I know it's strange here, at first, on your own.”

I rested my hands over his. “I'm fine.”

“Good.” He pressed his lips to my hair. “This is your home now, Claire. I want you to feel that.”

“I do,” I said.

I did. Or I wanted to. Some days those two things felt like the same thing, and some days there was a very definite gap between them, and lately the gap had been getting slightly wider, and I was doing what I always did, which was paper over it with good intentions and domestic routine and the firm daily decision not to look too directly at anything that might look back.

Dorothy was coming for dinner on Thursday.

*****

Dorothy Eugenia Harlow - née Cartwright, which she had not been for forty years but which somehow still felt relevant, the way origin stories always do - was a woman who had been born into considerable New England money, married into more, and spent the intervening decades administering her life with the kind of focused competence that, in another era or another context, would have made her formidable in any boardroom in the country. She had raised Nathaniel after his father's death when Nathaniel was fourteen - a coronary, swift and final, which Dorothy had apparently absorbed and moved on from with a composure that various people described with a kind of awed discomfort, as if they weren't sure whether to admire it or be disturbed by it. She managed the family's charitable interests, sat on three boards, and ran the estate and its adjacent cottage with the quiet, total authority of a woman who has never been seriously questioned and would not know quite what to do if she were.

She arrived for dinner at exactly seven, as she always did - not seven-oh-five, not six-fifty-eight, but seven, with a precision I'd initially taken for consideration and had slowly revised toward something more like control. She was wearing dark trousers and a silk blouse the color of pewter, her silver hair pinned neatly back, a string of pearls that were not the wedding ones but were clearly their cousins. She handed me a bottle of very good Burgundy at the door, kissed the air beside my cheek, and walked into the house the way people walk into places that belong to them.

I had made coq au vin, because it was the kind of meal that could be started in the afternoon and left to do its own work for three hours while I showered and got dressed and mentally rehearsed conversational gambits. Nathaniel opened the wine. Dorothy sat at the kitchen island and watched me finish setting the table with an expression of careful pleasantness that I had come to think of, privately, as her gallery face - the expression she wore when she was looking at something she was deciding the value of.

“The dahlias are beautiful,” she said, nodding at the vase.

“Nathaniel brought them.”

“He always did know how to come home with the right thing.” She turned the stem of her wine glass slowly between her fingers. “It's a good quality in a man.”

“It is.”

“Eliza preferred peonies,” she said. Conversational, light, purely informational. “We always had peonies in this kitchen in June. Armfuls of them, from the garden. She was very particular about flowers.” A brief, fond pause. “Very particular about most things, actually.”

I put down the napkin I was folding. Not dramatically - I set it down gently, smoothed it flat against the table. I had been waiting for this. She had done it at every dinner we'd shared since I entered Nathaniel's life, this thing - the deployment of Eliza, natural as breathing, dropped into conversation with the casual ease of someone who either genuinely couldn't help it or was very good at making it appear that way. I had spent considerable energy trying to determine which. I had not yet reached a conclusion.

“She sounds like she was a remarkable woman,” I said.

Dorothy looked at me. Her eyes were the same dark shade as Nathaniel's, and they had the same quality his did - attentive, penetrating, making you feel assessed with a thoroughness that went slightly beyond ordinary social engagement. “She was,” she said. “Complicated, in the way that interesting people usually are, but remarkable. Yes.”

“Nathaniel doesn't talk about her much.”

“No,” Dorothy said. “He wouldn't.”

The way she said it. Not no, it's too painful for him or no, he's trying to move forward - the natural, compassionate explanations that I would have offered if someone gave me the space for them. Just no. Flat and precise and somehow complete in a way I couldn't quite decode, like a sentence that contains an entire unspoken paragraph within its punctuation.

“Dorothy,” I said, and I heard my own voice come out slightly steadier than I felt, which was an achievement. “I know you were close to her. I know this - all of this, me being here, must be -”

“I loved Eliza,” Dorothy said. Simply. Without performance. “I love her. I love her as a daughter, which I am aware complicates the current situation somewhat.” She picked up her wine, took a considered sip. “That's not your fault. I want you to understand that I don't hold any of this against you personally.”

“I appreciate -”

“But I also want you to understand,” she continued, in the same pleasant, even tone, as though we were discussing the rose beds or the Alderson dinner, “that there are things about this family that you don't know yet. That you perhaps haven't been told. And I think -” She paused, choosing this with visible care. “I think it would be better if you found out some of those things from the right sources rather than stumbling over them.”

The kitchen was warm. The coq au vin was doing its quiet, aromatic work on the back burner. Somewhere in the house, I could hear Nathaniel on the phone again, his voice a low murmur from behind his office door. The evening was, by every surface measurement, entirely normal - a woman having dinner with her husband's mother, navigating the natural awkwardness of a blended history.

But I felt a cold line move through me, the particular chill of understanding that something carefully placed is heading toward you.

“What kinds of things?” I asked.

Dorothy set her glass down. She looked at the table, then at her hands, then at me, with the expression of someone who has spent a long time arriving at a decision and is still not fully at peace with it. “Eliza was not happy here,” she said. “Toward the end. I think most people close to the situation understood that. The police understood it - it formed part of the basis of their conclusion about what happened.” A pause. “But why she was unhappy - the specifics of that - those are things I'm not sure were ever fully explored.”

“Dorothy -”

“I'm not accusing anyone of anything.” Her voice was very calm, very clear. “I want to be extremely precise about that. I'm not. I'm an old woman and I miss someone I loved very much, and sometimes missing people makes you ask questions that can't be answered, and perhaps I should leave it at that.” She picked up her wine again. “Shall we eat?”

And that was it. Nathaniel appeared from his office right on cue, as if summoned by the natural pause, and the evening resumed its surface texture - conversation about Portland and the Aldersons and a piece Dorothy had read in the Atlantic about coastal erosion that she wanted Nathaniel's view on, and the coq au vin was good, genuinely good, and the Burgundy was excellent, and by ten o'clock Dorothy had kissed the air beside my cheek again and walked back across the dark garden toward her cottage, and I stood at the kitchen window watching her light come on, small and orange against the October black.

Why she was unhappy - the specifics of that - those are things I'm not sure were ever fully explored.

I turned it over in my mind the way I'd turned the earring in my fingers - slowly, carefully, looking for the edge.

“She seems warmer with you,” Nathaniel said, coming up beside me.

“Mmm,” I said.

“She just needs time.” He slid his arm around my shoulders. “She'll come around.”

I leaned into him, the solid warmth of him, the familiar smell of his skin. Outside, the ocean made its perpetual sound - distant, rhythmic, indifferent to all of us.

“Do you think she's all right?” I asked. Carefully. “She seems - I don't know. Like she's carrying something.”

Nathaniel was quiet for a moment. “She grieves,” he said. “She'll always grieve. They were very close.” Another pause. “But she's strong. My mother is the strongest person I know, actually. She processes things in her own way.”

“Of course.” I nodded against his shoulder.

I processed things in my own way, too. I just didn't say so.

Later, when he was asleep - deeply, immediately, with the untroubled ease of someone whose conscience rests light - I lay in the dark with my eyes open and replayed Dorothy's words with the care of someone transcribing something important that might not be repeated.

It would be better if you found out some of those things from the right sources.

I thought: what are the wrong sources?

I thought: what does she know that she isn't telling me?

And below those two thoughts, quieter and more uncomfortable, a third one: what do I know that I've been pretending not to?

I didn't answer that one. Not that night.

That night, I closed my eyes and made myself breathe slowly and thought about something else entirely, which was a skill I had developed over the past year into a form of artistry. I was a master of thinking about something else. Of not looking at the thing that was sitting directly in front of me, radiating heat.

The trouble with that skill, though - and I was beginning to understand this - is that the things you refuse to look at don't disappear. They just learn to wait.

*****

Three days after Dorothy's dinner, I went into the attic.

I want to be clear about something: Nathaniel hadn't told me not to. There was no prohibition, no locked door, no warning delivered over the dahlias or across the dinner table. He had said I'll deal with it when I mentioned the stored belongings, and I had nodded, and nothing further had been said. The attic door was on the second floor landing, and it was not locked, and there was no reason I couldn't go up there, and I knew perfectly well that if I told this part of the story to any reasonable person they would point all of that out to me, reasonably.

None of that changed the feeling of crossing a line.

I went up on a Thursday morning, around ten, while Nathaniel was out on the property talking to the man who maintained the outbuildings. I went up with a cup of coffee and a fabricated purpose - I was going to look for the extra blankets Agnes had mentioned might be stored up there, because October was becoming November and the house got cold at night in ways that seemed to go beyond the purely meteorological - and if I happened to come across anything else while I was looking for the blankets, well. I was simply up there on a domestic errand.

The attic was large, running the full width of the east section of the house, floored with old pine boards and lit by a single bulb on a pull cord and two small windows at either end. It smelled of heat and time - the particular concentrated smell of accumulated decades, dry and slightly sweet, like old paper and cedar and summer pressed flat. There were the usual attic things: boxes of Christmas decorations, stacked neatly in labeled containers. A rolled carpet leaning against the wall. Furniture in various states of retirement - a chair with a broken leg, a side table with a ring-stained top that was clearly a casualty of some earlier version of the house's décor.

And along the far left wall, separate from everything else, marked with a precision that made it clear someone had organized this recently and deliberately: six large plastic storage boxes, each labeled in neat handwriting I didn't recognize. The labels were simple, functional:

ELIZA - CLOTHING (WINTER)ELIZA - CLOTHING (SUMMER/OTHER)ELIZA - BOOKSELIZA - PERSONAL ITEMSELIZA - STUDY/DESKELIZA - MISCELLANEOUS

I stood in front of them for a long moment, holding my coffee.

Then I sat down cross-legged on the attic floor, set my mug on the boards beside me, and opened the box labeled PERSONAL ITEMS.

*****

Here is what I found in that box, and I'm going to be precise because the precision matters: a small collection of perfume bottles, mostly empty, the lingering ghost of a scent that was floral and a little sharp. A leather jewelry roll, unsnapped to reveal earrings and necklaces arranged in their loops - and I noted, with a sensation that was entirely unpleasant, that there were several crescent moon pieces among the earrings, a matching set, one earring missing from its pair. A handful of photographs, loose, not in an album - mostly candid shots, a woman I understood immediately to be Eliza, laughing at something off-camera, squinting into sun on what looked like a boat, standing at the kitchen island in this very house in a posture of easy comfort, home in a way I had not yet managed to feel. She was lovely - not conventionally so, but in the particular way of women who are fully, carelessly inhabiting themselves, dark-haired like me, which I registered with a small twist of something I decided not to examine. A travel journal from what appeared to be a trip to Portugal, half-filled with neat, small handwriting. A pressed flower, taped carefully to a notecard with no other inscription. And at the bottom of the box, beneath everything else, a hardcover notebook, the kind with a cloth cover, midnight blue, with an elastic closure.

I picked it up. I should not have. I picked it up.

The elastic was stiff - not completely new, but not worn soft either, the elastic of something that hadn't been opened very many times. I slipped it off.

On the inside front cover, in the same neat small handwriting as the travel journal: E.H. - Private. If found, please return to Eliza Harlow, Harlow Estate, Kessler Point, Maine.

Below that, a date. Fourteen months ago. And below that, a single line that seemed, at the time, like the most ordinary thing in the world and would later seem like the most important:

I have decided to start writing things down. Everything. Every detail. Because I am beginning to think that if I don't, there will be nothing left to prove that I was here.

I read it twice.

Then I heard the back door of the house open and close, and Nathaniel's voice carrying from the ground floor - just a word or two, something to one of the outdoor workers - and I closed the notebook, wrapped the elastic back around it, and did something I'm not proud of.

I took it with me.

I put it in the pocket of my cardigan, flat against my side, and I collected my coffee and I went back down to the second floor, pulling the attic door shut behind me, and I went to the bathroom and locked the door and sat on the edge of the tub for ninety seconds reminding myself to look normal, feel normal, be normal.

Then I wrapped the journal in a spare hand towel, put it in the back of the bathroom cabinet behind my makeup bag, and went downstairs to greet my husband.

“Find the blankets?” he asked, from the kitchen.

“Not yet,” I said. “I'll look again tomorrow.”

He handed me a cup of tea.

I wrapped both hands around it and smiled at him.

*****