The opening night happened without him — Theo, magnificent, ran it like a regatta in a storm, and the Hartwell chairman, told that Mr. Vane had been called away on a family emergency, sent word that he admired a man who knew his priorities, which only showed how little the Hartwell chairman knew about the Vane family. Alexander sat in his office above the darkening avenue with a glass he did not drink and a name written on a card in front of him, in Theo's neat hand, because he had asked Theo to write it down as if it were a stranger's.
ELENA MERCER.
By three in the morning he gave up pretending he was working and let memory do what it had been waiting twelve years to do.
Elena at eighteen, then.
She had been the beautiful accident of the Vane family — fifteen years younger than the dynasty expected, born when Reginald was already fifty and set in granite. Alexander, at twenty, home from his first year of building the company, had looked into the nursery in Greenwich and been handed a furious red person in a blanket, and had understood with a young man's absolute certainty that whatever else the Vane name came to mean, this was the part of it he personally intended to protect.
He had not, in the end, protected her. But that is ahead of the story.
At eighteen she was all velocity: dark hair, Vane grey eyes, a laugh that Reginald called unseemly in company and listened for when he thought no one was listening. She played the piano badly and passionately. She kept every book she had ever been given. She had decided, at sixteen, that she would study music in Vienna, and the family had decided, at roughly the same time and without consulting her, that she would do no such thing — that she would be presented, and polished, and in due course married as Vanes were married, as an instrument of policy.
For her eighteenth birthday he had given her the ring.
It had not been a family piece — that was the point. The Vane vaults were full of stones with histories and instructions attached. Alexander went, alone, to a jeweler on Madison Avenue, a small serious man who did not ask whose finger was being measured, and chose a plain gold band, unadorned, because Elena had once told him that everything in the house was carved or crested or initialed and she wanted one thing in her life that was simply itself. Inside the band he had the jeweler engrave the words he had composed over three evenings and never improved:
For Elena — wherever you go, come home. A.
She had laughed when she opened the box — the laugh, the unseemly one — and then, to his alarm, cried, and put it on her thumb because her fingers were slimmer than his guess, and worn it on a chain within the year, and on a cord after the chain broke, because, she said, it was not jewelry. "It's an address," she told him. "Everybody should carry one address they're always allowed back to."
Wherever you go, come home.
He had seen it last around her neck on the night she left. He had not thought of the cord in years. It had come back to him on the hotel steps complete, like a tune: braided, dark, much mended. Mended, he understood now, by other hands than hers — by smaller hands, keeping the address in repair.
The night she left was twelve years ago, in the library at Greenwich, in October.
It had not begun with Elena at all. It had begun with policy: a merger of families, the Ashworths, a son of suitable fortune and unsuitable character whom Reginald had selected the way he selected everything, by audit. Elena, twenty-one, was informed of the engagement at dinner, between the fish and the meat, as one informs a household of a change in the staff. She had put down her fork with great care. She had said, in a voice Alexander still heard in the walls of that room: "I can't marry him, Father. I'm going to have a baby."
The silence that followed had a texture. Alexander remembered the fire, the clock, his mother's photograph on the mantel seeming to lean forward.
"Whose." Not a question. Reginald had never asked questions he did not already own the answers to.
"Jonah's. Jonah Mercer. He plays music — he plays in the park, and at the — you won't know him. I love him."
"A street musician."
"He's kind. He's — Father, he doesn't have money, he has nothing, but he's the only person who has ever asked me what I wanted, and I — "
The details of the hour that followed were not confused in Alexander's memory; they were filed, which is worse. The ultimatum in its three parts, delivered quietly, which was Reginald's way of delivering weather: the marriage to Ashworth, or the Mercer boy paid off and the baby "dealt with," quietly, abroad — or the door. Elena had asked, once, very quietly, whether her mother would have let this happen, and Reginald had answered that her mother had understood what a family was, and the temperature of the room had gone to the temperature of a vault.
Alexander, twenty-four years old and newly powerful and still, that night, his father's son in every way that mattered, had sat at that table and said —
Nothing. He had said nothing. He had watched his sister stand up and put her napkin down like a person setting the table for the last time, and he had let the arithmetic of the family — the name, the company, the old man unbreakable at the head of it — do his speaking for him. She had looked at him once, on her way out of the room. Not pleading. Accounting. As if she were memorizing the exact shape of his silence so that she would never mistake it for anything else.
She left within the week, with one suitcase and the ring on its chain. The door was shut in the specific way his father shut doors: entirely, permanently, and without noise. Her name came off the accounts. Her portrait came off the staircase — actually off; Alexander had found the pale rectangle on the wallpaper himself, months later. Inquiries produced, eventually, one fact and one rumor: the fact that she had taken the name Mercer though the musician had died in a road accident before any marriage, which Reginald pronounced a fitting epitaph for the whole affair; the rumor, years on, of a woman cleaning offices at night in the city, which Alexander had investigated exactly as hard as a coward investigates — once, briefly, through an intermediary, and not again when the trail came back cold.
He remembered her at the piano the Christmas before she left, playing carols wrong on purpose to make the younger cousins shriek, and their father standing in the doorway with his brandy untasted, listening with an expression he wore for nothing else in his life — and Elena, catching sight of him, playing the next verse straight and beautiful, as a gift, without looking up. Reginald had set the glass down and left the room. Alexander had thought at the time that it was disapproval. He had had twelve years to understand that it was a man leaving before he could be seen feeling something he had decided, as a matter of policy, not to feel — and that the policy, in their family, had always been indistinguishable from the man.
Then silence. Twelve years of it. A silence so complete it became the load-bearing structure of the family: Reginald in Greenwich growing older around it, Alexander in the city building hotels on top of it. He had told himself, across those years, every available story. That she was happy. That she was proud, as he was proud, and pride was simply hereditary. That wherever you go, come home was engraved in the present tense and she knew the way.
He had never once told himself the story that turned out to be true: that she was an hour away, cleaning other people's rooms, dying by inches of a treatable heart in a city full of his hotels, while her son learned to divide bread and to keep a ring in repair.
At four in the morning Alexander stood, stiffly, like a man twice his age, and took from his desk drawer the one photograph he kept in this office. Elena at eighteen, in the garden at Greenwich, laughing, her shoes in her hand, the ring bright on its chain.
He held it up to the window, to the avenue, to the rain still coming down on the steps where a boy had stood with her eyes and her chin and her address around his neck.
"Elena Mercer," he said to the photograph. "All right. All right. I'm coming. This time I'm coming."