Where All Past Years Are

Chapter One

1954

It was chilly and threatening to snow on the night before Thanksgiving, and Pop Chadwick was snoozing in the back seat of a two-door, light green streamlined Buick that was bumping its way over a dirt road north of Plattsburgh, skirting the edge of the New York side of Lake Champlain to get to the Old Home, just a few miles from the Canadian border. He was stone deaf, so he could feel the bumps when he was awake, but he didn’t hear the tortured sound of the shock absorbers or the crunching of gravel and pebbles hitting the undercarriage of the car.

He’s out, Jane said, looking in the rear-view mirror and driving with a Lucky Strike in her right hand.

Ted grunted to acknowledge her comment, and turned around to have a look at Pop, who looked as peaceful as a baby. He cracked his window.

Don’t, Jane said, it’s too cold to have the windows down.

The smoke gets to me if I don’t have some fresh air, so if you want me to close the window, get rid of the cigarette. Makes me feel like I’m gonna throw up.

She rolled her window down with her left hand, grabbing the steering wheel with the right, and stopped the car, then flicked the cigarette out the window onto the gravel roadbed. Don’t want to start a fire, she said. Now close the window, I’m freezing.

Turn on the heater, Ted said.

It’s on, just doesn’t help much because too much air comes in through the floor.

Gonna be hard when the snow gets here.

When the snow gets here, we won’t be here, we’ll be back in Westchester.

Pop opened his eyes and looked around, then closed them again when the car started back up.

He looks forward to Thanksgiving so much, it makes all this driving worthwhile, Jane said. She had been out of college for nearly five years, but because her family was well off, she had spent her time being social, which basically didn’t leave time to be a career girl, what with all the charity work.

She was way taller than average, so her boyfriends had almost always been either shorter than she was, or at best close to the same height. She wore one-inch heels, and even in 1954 she still preferred Dior New Look to anything else she had seen at the shows. It suited her, because she was tall and slim and blonde, but she had broad hips that needed just the right cut to look normal. Having a small waist was a blessing most of the time, but it made picking out dresses very difficult; good thing she had people at Bergdorf Goodman and The Tailored Woman who knew what she liked and would put things aside for her when they came in.

Ted Semple knew a good thing when he saw one, and when he saw Jane, he knew she would be a good thing. She giggled when he fawned over her when they started to date after a party at the Aldriches, and he thought, well, she may not be very bright, but she’s good fun and rich. Rich is good. And not bad looking, kinda hippy and tall, but pretty enough, with a great sense of style. And rich.

He was taller than Jane by several inches, so she could wear real high heels when they went dancing together. Ted had spent most of his four years at Yale meeting people and getting invited to parties in New York City, because God knows his family had no connections that would help him get ahead. He was born in Niagara Falls, which was a run-down town that survived on the people who came to see the Falls, and everyone said the Canadian side was so much prettier.

The Chadwicks were an old family, had records dating back to England around Shakespeare’s time. Jane’s part of the family emigrated to Virginia, and then migrated north to New York in the 1850s, where the Grayson Chadwick who was the current paterfamilias became a partner in a law firm. Around 1900 they moved to Rye, New York, and built a big house on the Long Island Sound, with a little lagoon or small bay full of prehistoric-looking horseshoe crabs and a boat dock. After World War II they put in a swimming pool with a diving board and had to take out part of the rose garden to do it. Her father, Bryce Chadwick, had been a banker with Manufacturers Hanover, and his job, as far as anyone could tell, had been knowing people and introducing them to each other. Had that look about him: good tweeds, handmade shirts, but that straight-up thin rich look, and when he took off his gloves and threw them in his hat and handed the hat to the butler, you knew exactly who and what he was.

He looked at her driving, with Pop asleep in the back seat, and knew better than to offer to drive for her for a while. Insurance problems, since they weren’t married. The Chadwicks had always celebrated Thanksgiving at the Old Home, a huge weathered clapboard house that nobody lived in anymore. There was a caretaker in the carriage house, and everything was just as it was when Pop moved out just before World War I, when Grandma Emily died trying to have another baby.

Jane’s dad had divorced Jane’s mother, Sara, a few years after she decided to move to California with a much younger man who had been a tennis pro at the Club. Then he took off one afternoon in 1952; just took off. Ted was not clear whether Bryce Chadwick was in touch with the family’s lawyers or not. He certainly had not showed up since Ted and Jane had been an item, and Jane never mentioned his name or even referred to him. She seemed to correspond occasionally with her mother, but as far as anyone knew, Sara had never been back to New York after the day she left with her fellow. Well educated, Bryce was, and charming but he had never been able to make a real success of anything. Just being rich was not enough for someone who had lived through the Crash and the Depression that overwhelmed even some of his cousins.

She was easy to love, this almost-beautiful, stylish, sweet-natured rich woman. He had been to a Chadwick Thanksgiving at the Old Home once before, and if they got married, he clearly would again. Some things seem fated to go on forever. And there is no time of year when Lake Champlain is not pretty. Very long north-south, it is like a crooked string bean, not ever very wide, with Vermont on the east and New York on the west. It almost looks like a strong swimmer could cross it fairly fast, but the water is very cold, so maybe not.

They turned down a two-rut lane as the twilight began to fade, and the trees towered over them, most of them bare and bony looking against the darkening pastels of the sky, but there were also spruce and fir and even ghostly hemlocks that loomed like sentinels as they approached the Old Home.

There were cars in front, and lights inside, and lots of hustle and bustle. Pop woke up and yelled at Jane, They’re here!

She smiled and made a palm-down sign with her hand, slowing the car to a crawl. He knew that meant he was yelling and he grunted but stopped talking. She put her foot on the brake and turned around and smiled at Pop. He smiled back. She found a place to park and she helped Pop into the house while Ted emptied out the trunk. There were a couple of suitcases, of course, but more important there were bags of fresh bread: five loaf cakes that Jane had made herself—two pumpkin breads, two pound cakes and one banana bread. And an ice chest where a seventeen-pound fresh-killed and dressed turkey was floating in frigid water populated with chunks of ice. A large brown paper bag full of fresh bay leaves, thyme, rosemary, flat-leaf parsley and a huge bundle of gray sage tied with brown twine. The other women would be bringing many of the same things, but most years there was nothing to throw away after Thanksgiving, just leftovers to be taken home and nibbled on for a couple of days.

The Old Home had a serviceable kitchen with a nearly restaurant-size gas range that had two big ovens, but even two ovens were not enough to cook all the food that needed to be cooked, so the first turkey to be ready went in one oven, and the other oven was reserved for bread, pies and maybe even a cake.

From the number of cars and the amount of lights and noise, Jane knew they were going to have a big crowd for dinner on Thanksgiving.

Susie Q! came a man’s voice. It was her cousin Rich, the only person who called her that, and she couldn’t see him because of all the headlights, but soon enough he blocked out the glare and appeared like an angel from a cloud. Well, a fat angel.

Rich, Ted said from behind Jane. You old devil, how the heck are you doing?

Jane smiled and thought to herself how lucky she was that the men in her life got along so well. Rich was her first cousin—he and his sister, Sam, which was short for Samantha. She only had the two first cousins in spite of the fact that their fathers had three other brothers. Grandma Emily had five boys and, as she always said, No girls allowed. Her father, Bryce, was the eldest, and Rich’s father was known as Uncle Bob, although his given name was Grayson, like Pop. Uncle Leonard and Aunt Mae just didn’t have any children. She’d had polio and walked with a cane, maybe that was it. Uncle Peter—well, she barely remembered him because he’d been killed in a car crash when she was just a kid. And Uncle Frank had moved to Australia and joined the Royal Australian Navy in time to serve in World War II, but never got in touch after the war. So maybe there were cousins wherever he was, if he was still anyplace.

Ted and Rich were patting each other on the back in a semi-hug, crunching around on the gravel.

Then Lizzie strode up and gave Jane a peck on the cheek and a big smile. Lizzie came from a solid middle-class background and hadn’t been to college, but she was gorgeous—and Rich was, well, rich, like a lot of Chadwicks were. It was a matter of having the right connections. Jane smiled at Lizzie and asked after the kids. There were three of them, two girls and a boy, Gray, the eldest going on ten. The baby, Isabelle, was less than a year. Jane took Lizzie’s arm and started to walk toward the house. Ted punched Rich in the chest playfully, which was a recruiting punch to help get all the provisions from the emptied trunk to the kitchen.

Put those herbs in a pitcher of water! Jane yelled back, pronouncing the h in herbs. So they won’t be dead when we’re cooking tomorrow. Then she turned back to Lizzie, who was talking about her elder son, also named Grayson, after Pop and after Grandpa Chadwick and a few before him. So Rich and Lizzie’s elder boy was Grayson Edmund Chadwick, at least on his birth certificate. Jane thought it was a little horsey; they gave him a different middle name so he could be his own man one day, and not be faced with giving a family history every time he wrote a check. Imagine trying to go through life with a Roman numeral. A boy who’s a third can get by, but after that it looks un-American.

Jane never spent time with Lizzie that she didn’t think about the old saying that a woman who marries for money earns it. A very fat husband, but fortunately a nice guy, although quite a drinker. Cousin Rich didn’t have a driver’s license anymore, after a few episodes of drunk driving after dinner at the Westchester Country Club. He had a driver.

Anyway, Jane got an update from Lizzie, and they ran into Sam in the hallway going to the kitchen.

Well, I guess I’m later than I thought, Jane said. Everybody’s already here.

Hug, hug—but real this time. Jane and Sam were only four years apart, and Jane had hero-worshipped Sam all her childhood and adolescence. When Jane was a high school freshman at Marymount, Sam was off to Wellesley, and the most glamorous person in life, from Jane’s point of view. Sam had a fur coat and a car and a boyfriend who was on the football team. And she was naturally beautiful; one of those girls who don’t seem to be aware that men come near passing out when she walks into a room.

Tell me what’s going on, Jane said. Seems like it’s been ages. Have you seen ‘Sabrina’? or ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’?

I loved ‘Sabrina,’ and I just can’t believe that Humphrey Bogart ended up winning Audrey Hepburn when she started off being in love with William Holden! You wouldn’t catch me letting William Holden go! she said.

Anyone special these days?

Not really. I seem to attract men I don’t want to spend time with. I wish I could go out with someone really interesting, not just another boy with a lockjaw Connecticut accent and an Ivy League degree. Why can’t I meet, I don’t know, William Faulkner?

Really? A writer? Oh, excuse me—a drunk writer? And twice your age? You’d be better off with Humphrey Bogart like Sabrina, but of course you’d have to chase Lauren Bacall away first. Don’t you think she’s mannish? I always have, that baritone voice, I guess. No, Jane said without a pause to breathe, really, tell me what you’re up to. Since you moved to Boston, I feel like we’ve lost track of each other. Are you meeting a lot of famous people? I always think of advertising agencies being very glamorous.

Sam made a face, scrunched her lips together and rolled her eyes upward. Well, I’ll tell you. No, not meeting famous people, although there are some famous people around from time to time. But I’m just not high enough on the totem pole to meet them. And besides, I’m a girl, you know. Girls are supposed to take dictation, remember?

Oh, come on, Sam. You’re not just a girl, you’re in the Social Register, and you have a Smith degree, and a sorta cousin who’s the governor of Rhode Island. You’re not exactly un-connected.

I don’t want to meet people because Bud is governor of the next state over, and if you can imagine, a Smith degree just emphasizes that I’m a girl. They do everything but tell me to go get my nails done. I have a degree in English, after all, with a minor in music. I thought I’d be writing commercials for television, but no, all I get to do is run stupid errands and giggle when one of the bosses says something condescending or just plain idiotic. I think I’m going to quit and do what everyone expected anyway—teach school.

Teach school? That sounds drab. Maybe you could teach at Brearley or Masters and move back to the City. We could go to some shows. And you have such perfect taste, you could help me find some cocktail dresses that make my hips look smaller. I feel like a draft horse sometimes.

Sam laughed and jerked her head back with a guffaw. I could be a personal shopper. She kept laughing, and finally wiped her eyes and said, I need a drink. A double. What do you suppose they have here?

Jane lit a cigarette. Careful, sweetie. There’s always the possibility that you’ll meet your Galahad and have children. Look at me; for whatever reason, Ted seems to be in love with me, and I feel like I am the luckiest girl in New York State. It’s not like I have had men standing in line to date me. Let’s have a look in the kitchen. There has to be some scotch with all these guys around. They walked off arm in arm.

Rich had led Ted away from the crowd and toward the edge of the forest. He pulled a cigar out of his pocket and a lighter. You want one of these, Ted? Cuban, good.

No thanks, Rich. I stopped smoking when that study came out about cancer. And I don’t miss it. Jane smokes like a chimney, of course.

Rich lighted the cigar and puffed on it to get the ash to take hold. He threw the wrapping on the ground and steered Ted toward the back of the house. I’m kinda worried about Sam, Ted. She wouldn’t listen to anyone about moving to Boston to work at an office. I tried to get her to talk to some friends who own some of the better stores, because maybe she could be a buyer. But no deal. No, flat no. Now she’s nothing but complaints about that advertising agency. Who ever heard of an advertising agency in Boston anyway?

Ted stroked his chin with his right hand and stared at the ground. You know, Rich, the more you try to tell her what to do, the more she’s going to do exactly as she pleases. She’s a wealthy woman, you know. She doesn’t need your approval.

I thought you’d see my point of view, Rich said with a scowl.

I do. I’m just saying you have to be smarter about getting her straightened out. If you treat her like your kid sister, she’s not going to like it, and she’s not going to do what you say, no matter what. There’s nothing wrong with her mind, you know. She was a good student, smart, and Smith is not a finishing school; it’s a real college. She didn’t go there to learn to play the piano with her left hand while pouring tea with her right hand. But I think a lot of girls don’t really believe it’s a man’s world until they try to get a job.

Rich shook his head. If she wants to work in an office, she’s going to have to get used to making coffee. That’s just all there is to it. It’s a waste of a smart girl, but that’s the way offices are. I tried to tell her. Be a buyer for a store, be an editor for a book company, be a journalist or a teacher for heaven’s sake—just don’t try to take on the whole world at some advertising agency in Boston, of all places. Boston. Why?

"Cool down. Nothing wrong with Beantown except if you live in New York. And there’s a long history to that rivalry, back to when New York was Dutch and Boston was English. Lots of history there, lots of tradition. Lots of smart people. Not for me, but not Timbuktu, either. You gotta put your effort where it will get something done. And you know what I think? I think Sam is picking up one of the bad habits of the advertising business—martinis, lots of martinis. She’s going to end up married to some Mick who you’d never want at your house. Boston’s crawling with them, even in high places. Look at Joe Kennedy, a Mick and married to a Mick, owns all the Scotch whiskey for sale in the US. And his son is a Senator now.

Don’t get me wrong. I got nothing against the Irish, or the Italians for that matter. But almost none of them would be suitable for Sam. They wouldn’t fit in and they’re all Catholics too. It wouldn’t be fair to the children, or to the rest of the family. Imagine if some O’Keefe bartender showed up here. It just wouldn’t do, would it?

Rich shook his head. I don’t know, I just don’t know. She’s my sister, and I don’t want her to make a mistake. If Dad were still here, he’d sit her down and talk some sense into her. Now that’s my job.

You can’t send her to her room.

Rich started off to the house. C’mon, let’s get back before they think a bear got us.

Chapter Two

Ted realized Jane was getting up when he heard her staggering around in her room next door. There was a noise, a curse, and a hopping sound, and then things quieted down. He heard a door close and footsteps in the hall, and he could hear the water flowing to the shower in the bathroom. He turned the lamp on next to his bed, which accidentally woke up his temporary roommate, Stephen Egmont, a cousin of Jane’s from Vermont, in the other twin bed.

Sorry, I just heard Jane next door and I turned on the light. I’ll turn it off, go back to sleep.

Stephen, a college student, grunted and turned over.

He turned on his side away from Stephen and thought about whether he ought to get up and get dressed. The house was packed to the rafters with Thanksgiving visitors; there were people in the garage and even a few in tents. They’d all be gone in a day or so. Some would leave after Thanksgiving dinner, and almost everybody else the next morning. Then the caretakers would put sheets back over the furniture and nobody would open the doors until around Easter. What a waste, he thought. A big old house like this. Used to be a farm, used to be a home. Now it’s somewhere between a guest house and a museum.

An hour or so later, he couldn’t stay in bed any longer, so he got up, stepped back into his pants and buttoned up the shirt he’d been wearing when they drove up, and managed to get his socks and shoes on without turning on the light or making any appreciable noise. Then he tiptoed out of the room and pulled the door shut until it clicked.

If that wakes you up, screw you, he whispered to the door.

The kitchen was hopping with activity. Most of the women in the house were chatting, chopping things, cleaning things, or just pouring coffee from the largest percolator he’d ever seen.

Eeek, a man! Sam squeaked. And all the women made similar squeaking noises.

Tell him to go down to the basement and see what kind of wine there is, said one of the cousins with her back to everyone as she peeled potatoes and dropped long lines of peelings into a cardboard box. She looked over her shoulder like that famous picture of Betty Grable.

What’s her name, he thought. Jeez, lives in the City too. Maybe Lisa, yes, Lisa.

Gotcha, Lisa. I know there’s a lot of wine down there, but I bet I come back covered with spider webs, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Some giggles as he turned his back.

He noticed a bottle of vodka on the buffet with the top off. Somebody’s having a Bloody Mary, he thought. Almost nipped it but thought better of it; took a big swallow though. And he lifted the trap door on the floor of the butler’s pantry and walked carefully down the steep staircase into the cellar. There was a light switch as his head got below floor level. He flicked it and a series of light bulbs came on down below him and in a hallway off to his right. Several mice scattered and disappeared.

The Chadwicks were fond of wine. They probably had it in their genes. They emigrated in two batches to America from England in 1658, after the death of Cromwell, when many Puritans realized that young Richard Cromwell was not going to be able to hold on and there was likely to be a king again—not a good omen for the religion that had beheaded Charles I. One group took ship to Virginia, tried their hands at planting, and blended into the established church by changing their Puritan names to the more traditional saints’ names. They were clustered in the area near Port Royal on the Rappahannock River. Like their northern cousins, they kept track of relatives—at least the ones named Chadwick. Most of them moved north to New York nearly two hundred years later when it was obvious that there would be a war over slavery. Just as well, because John Wilkes Booth was killed in a barn less than a mile from one of the Chadwick homes.

The second group went to Plymouth and Boston, stayed Puritan as long as they could, and then moved west, settling at the confluence of two rivers in the rolling hills that led to the Berkshires. That town was called Deerfield by the English colonists, but the local Algonquins called it Pocumtuck.

After a particularly nasty raid by the French-allied Mohawks in 1704, when one hundred twenty women and children were kidnapped and force-marched to Quebec, the family moved into the newly English territory of New York and acquired a massive land holding on the west bank of Lake Champlain, starting the house that everyone in the family called the Old Home, which had grown like Topsy, never had any symmetry, but managed to keep up with the times as long as there were Chadwicks living in it.

The name, Chadwick, is a mash-up of Anglo-Saxon and Norse, with the wick part the same as the first syllable in Viking, meaning wanderer or traveler. This means they would have lived in the Danelaw—the part of England that Alfred the Great sectioned off for the Norsemen to settle. At some point, though, they traded their mead for the good red wines of Bordeaux and Languedoc that fell under English control when Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, almost an even eight hundred years earlier. Puritans had nothing against drinking, and neither did the Chadwicks, although as they gentrified they honed their taste buds and developed a wine cellar that would have made a fancy restaurant proud. So extensive it was, that even years after no one lived there, and restocking was sporadic at best, there was still enough wine that all the people there for Thanksgiving, numbering more than 75, could drink the same wine of at least approximately the same vintage. Provided, that is, that Ted could find one that would work with turkey, and that had good corks. There was plenty of vinegar there, still masquerading as red wine.

As he headed back up the stairs from the basement with the first of three cases of a good St. Estephe, he could smell biscuits cooking, and chattering women’s voices. When he got to the top of the stairs he could smell coffee too, and in the warm hallway with the excited sound of voices in the kitchen, he thought to himself that it was at moments like this that he really loved being who he was and being there in the Old Home with the genially snobby but sweet-natured Chadwicks; even Pop, who had a sour side, but looked forward to holidays with the eagerness of a child waiting for Santa. It was as though he pumped himself back up and lost at least ten years driving up from Manhattan—which was a long, boring drive for most people.

He put the wine by the door to the dining room and went back and hauled the other two up, one at a time. Then he went back downstairs and finally found a case of Puligny Montrachet; a dry white for those who didn’t drink the hearty reds, especially the meaty, chewy St. Estephe. Then he staggered exaggeratedly into the kitchen and the women handed him a basket of biscuits and a mug of hot coffee. There were three kinds of jam open on the butcher-block table: marmalade, a reddish berry that was probably raspberry, and a dark one that almost had to be grape jelly. All home-made. There was something about Thanksgiving that dictated home-cooking and homemade everything.

It couldn’t last, he thought with a touch of sadness. This house, this time, this group, had more in common with the past than with Ike’s America. All but the children had been through the Depression and at least one World War, maybe two. There was actually a surprising mix of political opinions in the family (mostly Republican, spanning the spectrum), but everyone was agreed that Ike was the right man at the wheel. They learned from Truman, who couldn’t resist a war in Korea, that no one could keep the United States out of war better than Ike, who commanded the troops in World War II. And, he thought with the beginning of a smirk, Ike and the Chadwicks had one thing in common—a wife who at least seemed to be slightly tipsy a lot of the time.

There were no Christmas decorations, because usually there was no one here at Christmas other than the caretaker’s family. The winter around