A Tangled Web Read online

  “What did you say?” Madeline asked.

  “Oh, I was just talking to myself. I loved this book when I was growing up and I was thinking that I haven’t read it in years. I’m not even sure Penny and Cliff have read it. I’ll ask them.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to change and get out of here; how did it get so late?”

  “You were having fun. I like what you’ve done; it’s so cozy I could move right in.”

  Sabrina laughed. “You’re our best customer.” She heard the telephone. “I’ll get it; I’m going back there anyway.”

  At the refectory table they used as a desk in the back room she picked up the telephone.

  “Stephanie, it’s Brian.”

  “Oh.” It took her a minute to switch from Evanston to London, from Collectibles to Ambassadors. “Brian, I’m running late; can I call you back?”

  “I just wondered when you’d be coming to see us.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it; in fact, I’d planned on coming in February, but I couldn’t get away. Is anything wrong?”

  “I think it might be a good idea for you to pay us a visit. It is your shop, you know. I mean, I’m sure you’re busy with your own life, but you said you’d be able to handle both, and if you expect me to manage here and deal with Nicholas—”

  “Just a minute.” They’re not getting along, she thought, and Brian is working himself up to hysteria, and who knows what Nicholas is working himself up to? “Brian, I’ll be there; I’m just not sure when. I’ll call you tomorrow; I’m sure we can handle this over the telephone, whatever it is.”

  “Stephanie, I really would prefer it if you were here.”

  I can’t get away; I have too much to do. This had happened in February, when she had told Garth she was going to London: everything in Evanston had tugged at her and so she had canceled her plans. I’ll go in March, she had thought, but that was the month she began the Koner Building, and so March had come and gone. And now it was April and Brian said he needed her and all she felt was impatience with his demands.

  It occurred to her, as it had before, that it might be a good idea to sell Ambassadors and cut her ties to London altogether. But immediately she thought, No, not yet. Some time in the future, maybe, but not yet. It’s too soon. I want to know they’re there for me.

  She was ashamed of the thought and pushed it away. It was too soon to decide anything; there was plenty of time. But for now, with Brian’s voice rising in anguish, she could not turn her back on her shop and on Blackford’s, Nicholas’s shop. “I’ll do my best to get there, Brian. I have a project here. Can you wait a couple of weeks?”

  There was a pause. “If absolutely necessary.”

  “Good heavens, Brian, all these intimations of disaster . . . I can’t imagine that you’ll be unable to cope with Nicholas or anything else for two more weeks. I rely on you for your skill and ingenuity, you know.”

  “Well. Yes, of course. I do know that. I’ll do my best. When do you think—”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you when I’ve decided.”

  In the dressing room she and Madeline had carved out of their work space, she washed her face and hands, pulled off her blue jeans and sweatshirt and opened the small overnight bag she had brought to work that morning. In a few minutes she came out wearing a red tweed suit and a pale gray silk blouse. “I’ll be back at two,” she said as she walked past the refectory table where Madeline sat, a sandwich and a thermos in front of her.

  “Have a good lunch.”

  Sabrina caught the wistful note in her voice and turned back. “Am I keeping you from something you wanted to do?”

  “No, of course not. You told me about this date last week.”

  “But something’s bothering you.”

  “Is it that obvious? What a lousy poker player I’d make. It’s not important, Stephanie.”

  “It’s important if it bothers you. Is it my lunch date?”

  “Oh, in a way. It’s more who it’s with. In fact, it’s all the people you know. They’re so interesting and important; they do things, they make things happen. I don’t know anyone like that. I don’t have one friend who’s ever had his picture in the paper.”

  Sabrina smiled. “Criminals get their pictures in the paper.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s all right. I’m jealous, but I’m glad for you. You have fun at everything you do; you make your own excitement. That’s an art, and I guess I never learned it. I keep thinking that if I just knew how to go about it, my life would be a lot more exciting and fun. It isn’t that my life is bad, you know; it’s just that I know there are adventures out there, but I don’t know how to grab them. Well, what the hell, you shouldn’t have to listen to me complaining; go on, now, Stephanie; you don’t want to keep a college president waiting.”

  Sabrina bent down and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Claudia Beyer lived a few blocks from the campus, and as Sabrina approached her house, she saw her walking toward it from the other direction. They smiled from a distance. “Perfect timing,” Claudia said as they shook hands. “I’m glad to see you. I hope you don’t mind coming here; it’s the only place I can be sure of privacy.”

  “I like it here.” Sabrina followed her through the cool house into the bright solarium. “And it’s nice to see it in the daytime; we’ve only been here at night.”

  “For faculty functions that are too big, but absolutely necessary. I’m hoping to get you and Garth here for a small dinner party one of these nights.”

  “We’d like that.” Sabrina breathed deeply of roses and geraniums, basil, thyme, and seedlings ready to be transplanted to the garden. “This is a wonderful room.”

  “My therapy center. It always restores my soul, no matter how frustrated or furious I get at work. But it needs new furniture and I’m hoping you’ll help me with it.”

  A young girl in a white dress put a bowl of salade niçoise on a table near a tall fig tree. Beside it she put a basket of bread and a small decanter of green olive oil. “Merci, Violette,” Claudia said. “Nous aurons notre dessert immédiatement après, s’il vous plaît, et ensuite notre café.”

  “Est-ce que madame désire du vin?”

  “Non, merci” Sabrina said, smiling, and went on, still in French: “I couldn’t work in the afternoon if I drank wine at lunch.”

  “Once again you amaze me,” Claudia said as Violette left and they sat at the table. “Your French is perfect.”

  “I grew up in Europe. It was fun to slip into it; I don’t get to speak it often. And how lucky you are to have a little bit of France in your house.”

  “And you, I understand, have a little bit of London.”

  Sabrina’s eyebrows rose. “News of Mrs. Thirkell has even reached your office?”

  “I hope I hear everything, at one time or another.”

  “And did you hear it from someone who resented it?”

  “Yes, but also from others who didn’t. There will always be those who think that it somehow dilutes the purity of research if professors have fun or indulge in luxuries. And there are those, not all of them on campus, who question where the money to pay for a housekeeper comes from.”

  “Where it comes from? I don’t understand.”

  “Well, we’ll talk about that later. Help yourself to salad, please.”

  Sabrina considered pursuing it, then let it go. She was a guest here. “Tell me about Violette.”

  “When Philip and I were first married, we lived in Paris while he studied at the Sorbonne and we made many good friends. We see them when we visit France, and all of them seem to have at least one daughter who wants to come to America and learn English and go to college and, of course, live with us. And so we’ve had several helpers over the years. I like it, you know; they’re lovely girls. Violette arrived just last week, which is why we’re still speaking French. You’d told me you grew up in Europe, but you didn’t tell me much more. You talk about yourself very little.”
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  “I’d rather listen to other people.”

  “Yes, you’re good at that. So am I, but it’s part of my job. I get the feeling you’ve cultivated it because you have a past you don’t want to discuss.”

  Sabrina smiled faintly and poured a small pool of the fragrant olive oil on her plate. “I’m very happily involved in the present; it’s quite full enough without bringing in the past. Sometimes I think the present is like walking through the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris: so many choices of where to go and how to get there, so many new sights and things to think about around every corner, with such beauty everywhere that it’s almost possible to forget there are such things as ugliness and sadness in the world, and pain and loss.”

  “I like that image. Life as the Luxembourg Gardens. And yours must be very happy indeed if that’s how you see it. But ugliness and sadness and pain do exist beyond the gardens; you can’t wish them away. And perhaps you’ve had your share.”

  Violette returned with a carafe of mineral water and two stemmed glasses, and Sabrina watched her arrange them. “We all have our share; I think the hard part is finding a way to balance them, or the memory of them, with the wonderful things around us. It seems to me we spend most of our lives searching for something to balance pain and then something else to balance happiness, because we feel just as disoriented by perfection as we do by sorrow. My work is all about balance, you know; every house I design depends upon it. And I’d like very much to help you with this room. In fact, I’ve got a glass-and-steel Italian table that would be perfect in here.”

  “You do balance your life; I’ve watched you. You’re young, but you have a strong sense of who you are and how you want to direct your life. Too many people, too many women, take a long time to discover that; some of them never do.”

  “You must have discovered it very early. Not many major universities have a woman as president. Were you always aiming for that?”

  “Not anything like it. When we married I had much more traditional goals. Did you expect to be married to a professor and have your own career?”

  “I’m not sure what any of us expected; we had so many different dreams. Did Philip go along with your traditional goals or was he the one who expected them?”

  Claudia laughed. “That’s very perceptive. He and his family expected them, and I was young and didn’t fight back. His family descends from the French nobility going back to the Crusades, and they know exactly how the world should be ordered, so they simply assumed I’d be a perfect wife and mother and fit in with their twenty-odd generations of women. I found them completely daunting. Did you and Garth agree on all your goals from the beginning?”

  “Not in the way we do now. We’ve changed, and so has everything around us. Did you get along with Philip’s parents?”

  “I was very good with them and they approved of me. I was writing poetry in my spare time, and they thought that was a sweet, rather feminine hobby. But I began to publish, you see, and then I went back to school, and then taught poetry and eventually became dean of students at Massachusetts College for Women and then president of Midwestern, and here I am.”

  “And Philip? Did he approve of all that motion on your part?”

  “Oh, I like that. All that motion. Philip would like it, too, now; in the old days he would have scowled, thinking you were being flippant about his attitudes.”

  “He would have been right.” Their eyes met and they laughed. “But now he applauds your success?”

  “More or less. It isn’t easy for a man, French or American or otherwise, to stand in the shadows, so to speak, while his wife gives the speeches and gets the attention and earns considerably more than he does.”

  “And has more power.”

  “To the extent that anyone connected with a university has power.”

  “But within the campus.”

  “Yes. It’s interesting that you see that; so many people think only of the public position and of the fact that I make more money than he does.”

  “But you’ve worked it out; he doesn’t resent the fact that you have your own life. You’re happy together.”

  Claudia smiled slightly, as if looking into herself. “It depends on the day of the week. Men seem to need predictability more than women do. They like life to be a sheet of graph paper with clear lines showing directions and trends and everything staying close to center: as it was, as it will be. If they suddenly find those lines not so clear and not in the center—you know what Yeats wrote: ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold’—then they feel caught in something that defies the laws of nature, or at least the laws that they want to live by, and they have trouble facing it, much less accepting it.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “I think that must be a subject for another day. As it is, I’ve spent our time talking about myself, and I planned this lunch so that I could listen to you. I give up, for now; you’re too stubborn for me. Tell me about the Italian table you want to put in this room.”

  Sabrina described the table she had bought at an estate sale in Lake Forest, and then they talked of other things. Their low voices were the only sounds in the sun-washed room. Beyond the glass walls two puppies played on a flagstone terrace and robins and sparrows flew circles around each other above a broad lawn bounded by honeysuckle and lilac bushes, their branches bent low beneath the weight of their flowers. Sabrina felt a deep sense of well-being. The beauty around her, her family, her home and work, her health, the strength of her body when she played tennis and bicycled and climbed ladders at Collectibles, and her friends, including the intelligent and powerful woman sitting across from her, all buoyed her up. Our perfect time. Garth had been right. Because even her grief over Stephanie’s death, which ran like a subterranean stream beneath all her thoughts, could not drown out all that was wonderful in her life. She was too young, too resilient, too vibrant not to embrace such an exhilarating world.

  That was why she was reluctant to go to London, she thought, even though that life of freedom still called to her on occasion, like the siren’s song. She did not need London; this life was enough. Our perfect time.

  “And we treasure Garth,” Claudia said as they finished their espresso and biscotti. “He brings prestige to the university, not to mention a lot of money in research grants. Does he ever talk to you about them?”

  Sabrina heard the too-casual note behind the question and her head came up, as if a warning bell had sounded. “Sometimes. He’s very proud of them, but I think he’s just as proud of the money he’s raising for the new institute.”

  “Yes, he’s doing an extraordinary job.” There was a silence. “This is a difficult time for universities, Stephanie. I don’t know how much you and Garth talk about it, but it’s a time to be cautious. And careful.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what others think of us. A lot of people don’t understand what we do, and if some self-styled crusader says we’re wasting money on foolish projects—wasting taxpayers’ dollars, that is—they tend to believe it.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then the crusader gets more attention from television and the press and after a while Congress backpedals when it comes time to renew funding for research. Congressmen don’t know the first thing about research, of course; they can’t think further than the next election, so how can they understand projects that can take years and sometimes result in something as dramatic as a polio vaccine, and other times turn out to be a dead end with no payoff at all?”

  “You’re talking about Congressman Leglind,” Sabrina said.

  “You’ve been reading your newspapers, I see. Yes, Oliver Leglind, but he’s only one of several. He’s the worst, but without others he’d have no influence at all.”

  Sabrina set her coffee cup in its saucer. “What does this have to do with Garth?”

  “I’m not singling out Garth; it has to do with all of us. But the professors on the front line, so to speak—the most visible, the
most involved in government-funded projects—should be the most aware of what is at stake and how vulnerable the university can be.”

  “You think Garth is not aware of these dangerous times?”

  “I didn’t say dangerous; I said difficult. And I’m sure he’s aware of them.”

  “Then I don’t understand this conversation,” Sabrina said flatly. It seemed clear that there was a threat somewhere in Claudia’s remarks, but she could not identify it; it was as if shadows had closed in: a warning of something to be fought off.

  Claudia sighed. “You know, Stephanie, it isn’t only Garth we treasure; I’m very glad to count you as a friend. There aren’t many people a university president can talk to openly.”

  “But you’re not being open.”

  “I’ve told you that I’m concerned about influential congressmen who single out universities to attack when they’re looking for a hot issue dealing with money. I don’t know how serious this might be; I’m trying to be prepared, in case it is serious, so I need to talk, even though I have nothing specific to say right now.”

  “Do you talk to Philip about it?”

  “Philip is easily bored by administrative matters.”

  Sabrina felt a little jolt. So that was one of the problems between them. Either Philip was genuinely bored by administrative matters and not willing to endure boredom for his wife’s sake, or he fabricated boredom to keep his wife from discussing her work at home, because even now, after all this time, he still could not acknowledge her position, more visible than his, more powerful, robbing his world of predictability. And so, in this lovely home made by two people of intelligence and grace and sophistication, Claudia could not talk about her work or her worries, because her husband would not listen. And Claudia had to wonder who would listen sympathetically and not repeat to others what was said in the quiet of her solarium. She was taking a chance today, but she was not ready to take a bigger one and be as honest as she could be. As she might be, Sabrina thought, if our friendship grows.