She slid backward down the years and sat beside Violet Ashcroft in her fawn Mercedes. A roadster out of Gatsby, the dashboard made of lacquered, burled wood the color of strong tea. A Winston dangled off the driver’s lip, and she smelled of the car’s buttery leather and jasmine and sweat. She nervily sideslipped cars, shot ahead, abruptly downshifted, deaf to the honking; yakking and gesturing, a highway menace. See those starry white blossoms? They’re called shadblow. . . .
Thirty weekends a year, Maddy reflected, she drove to Conscience Point without revisiting that fateful trip. She’d turned unpredictable to herself. Since the holiday in France. Nick’s nonsense about babies, Laila acting out, her imperiled job—it was like three doors slamming, jarring loose memories, shuffling the coordinates of her known world.
She slowed, cursing, for a stretch of road work. A sign marked “Detour” with a flashing arrow directed all cars off the Northern State. She followed a thinning stream of cars along an unfamiliar road. Where were they hiding the signs for the expressway? She made a U-turn into a street abutting a stretch of tract houses, semibuilt and uninhabited; the builder must have lost his financing. The road ended squarely, eerily, against a grass embankment. As if the world it led to had evaporated.
On her right a ramshackle farm stand. She could make out faded white letters: “F—sh Straw—ies.” Her skin prickled. She had been here before, at this very spot. Over twenty-five, thirty years ago.
On that first drive out Violet had stopped at this stand—the farm itself long since plowed under. They bought a quart of the season’s first strawberries and ate them from the wooden box, the berries’ juice rouging their fingertips. Why did everything taste sweeter then? How foolish she and Vi would sound now, conjuring their lives as artists, disdaining marriage, frightened by their own bravado. For Laila and friends those battles would seem as ancient as the sacking of Troy.
Maddy sat with the motor idling, gazing at the ghost farmstand, and the past lay heavy upon her.
Come home with me this weekend. Violet’s cracked voice, a smoker’s voice, with odd catches.
Come with her just like that? The girl was nuts. “I’m preparing a concert.” Embarrassed by her status of music grind.
“You can practice at my place. Just come for one night—it’s only Long Island, for heaven’s sake. I’ll put you on the train Sunday. Or lend you a car.”
A car?
“You’ll play on the Bösendorfer! There’s one in the music room.”
In truth, she disliked the small sound of this pretentious Cadillac of pianos. But she was also drawn to this world where someone lent a car, to the danger surrounding Violet. . . . Could she break her routine this once? “I’d be a lousy guest, with my nose in the piano.”
“I would forbid anyone to disturb you. I’ll lock you in the music room, like Colette’s husband. And I’ll paint upstairs in my studio. We’ll be ruthless! Work all night if we like, and meet for breakfast.”
It astonished Maddy that this arrangement might appeal to anyone besides herself. She barely knew Violet Ashcroft, this only their second encounter. Of course everyone on campus knew Violet by reputation and sight. She was easily the most alluring girl of any class. She hadn’t much competition from the coeds populating Barnard in 1966: psych majors with pale, meaty thighs above knee socks, white cotton Lollipop underpants, Breck-girl pageboys. Rack up the As, then, to everything its season, land a Columbia premed with horn-rims from the other side of Broadway.
Maddy first sighted Violet on a crisp September afternoon of junior year by the dry fountain in front of Atkins. A new girl, a transfer student. She was arguing with a boy wearing chinos and a pink Oxford shirt, a preppy with the cameo profile of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Intrigued, Maddy stationed herself on the far side of the fountain. Sneaking looks at the chopped silver-blond hair, dark brows, scalded cheeks. She had a myopic stare that Maddy would later translate as unfettered self-absorption. She wore a yellow painter’s smock, green skirt, lavender stockings—like the Brangwen sisters in Women in Love. Her fingernails daubed a mortuary blue.
“Oh, for godssake, Christian, maybe you did leave Oxford on my account,” came her raspy voice. “Doesn’t make me your indentured slave, does it? And who asked you to leave anyway?”
“You did. You asked me.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
Maddy’s cautious soul thrilled to the arrogance. She must find a way to meet this girl. . . . And now here she sat, amazingly, admiring the shad-blow from Violet’s snazzy car. Watching Violet’s hand, ringed in antique amethysts and sapphires, work the gear shift like a racer at Le Mans.
“I’m taking you to my favorite place in the world,” Violet announced as they careened off the highway. “I’ve brought us a picnic,” she added, shrugging toward a wicker basket on the back seat.
They drove into Islesford past a glassy pond patrolled by swans, past a white steeple and a row of elegant shops. A stop at Islesford Spirits for two chilled bottles of wine from Violet’s “old buddy.”
They turned down a road past a grey windmill. “Peniston Way’s more direct, but we’re taking the scenic route,” Violet said. “What a glorious spring. Look at that palette of greens.” She gestured around her, the car drifting out of its lane, terrorizing an oncoming pickup truck. Sunlight gilded pistachio-green leaves, boughs were festooned with parasols of celadon or pink. Along the road bloomed some kind of furze the color of dried blood. A roller-coaster rise—and there in the distance stretched Weymouth Bay, a dancing hive of light.
They dipped to a hollow and screeched to a stop. Violet’s hand with its gnawed nails cupped the vibrating gearshift.
“Green Glen Cemetery,” she announced moodily. Did the place actually radiate a moss-colored light? “Jackson Pollock’s buried here. Cracked up his car driving around sloshed. These roads have no shoulder. Best drive them sober.”
A moment. “My good brother is buried here.” Violet got out and disappeared over a hill. Maddy found her gazing up at a stone angel with a sweet, sightless smile. “Linton Ashcroft died in a tragic accident,” Violet said in a stagy monotone. “Went for an ocean swim and never returned. Till someone found a pelvic bone washed up on shore.”
“How horrible for him, for your family.”
“For some more than others,” she said oddly.
THEY WOUND DOWN Beldover Drive, its sides banked high with white dogwood. Turned right at a sign half-smothered in poison ivy: “Conscience Point,” and, in larger letters, “PRIVATE, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.” The scrub oak bordering Wildmoor Road melted into a pine forest, a melancholy woods from Grimm; amazing to see towering trees hard by the sea. The afternoon sun angled a shaft of amber dust through the tall black boughs. Maddy sucked the resiny scent into her lungs.
“Over there’s the cabin where Mother keeps her true children—all thirty of them.” Violet waved carelessly toward a carriage road in the scrub oak.
“Thirty?”
“Her bird-children. Cockatiels. When she’s pissed she threatens to leave all her money to Audubon.” She downshifted with a vroom vroom. “Father died of a heart attack ten years ago—in the act, the clever man. With the carpenter’s son. After that Mother went to the birds. The rest of the infamous Ashcrofts you’ve probably heard about.”
Maddy vaguely remembered some Gothic tale about an Ashcroft fore-bear murdering his bride for her money.
“What about your people.”
Her people. After her