The Children(102)

When no one was looking she pressed her face into the green breast of one of the dresses, expecting . . . what? Rushes and fire. She’d just read Catherine, Called Birdy. The dress smelled disappointingly modern. Clean.

They circled Edith first, this coven of city women sent by Vogue to transform her, speaking an affected language of constant compliments. Her hair, her skin, her eyes, her house—and oh, right! Her books! So good. Soooo good. Spectacular.

Edith barely registered them. She sat straight-backed in a canvas chair, somber as a cold-footed bride, smudging her lipstick away on the filters of one cigarette after another. The makeup artist waved a hand between them and said, “Would you mind waiting on that? I’ve got asthma.”

Edith exhaled smoke through a wide-open mouth and said nothing. The Fiery Furnaces poured from a tinny speaker, pooling in the silence.

“Never mind,” the makeup artist said through a gritted smile. “I’ll make it work.”

She painted Edith’s shadows away, dampened her features with powder. Then she painted them all back stronger. Brows imperious, eyes circled with gold and black, her mouth as purple dark as the figs sitting on ice in the kitchen. A second woman pomaded her hair into a glossy black wing, a third looked at her critically, pulling dresses. Edith glowered like a villainous ballerina, so beautiful Guinevere couldn’t look away.

The asthmatic makeup artist turned to where she sat cross-legged on the floor, watching her mother’s transformation. She smiled and said, “Your turn.”



* * *




The photographer was a stoic woman in her fifties. She began the day impeccable—steel-cut pixie, white men’s shirt, box-fresh high-tops—and unraveled as the hours went on. By the time the family was seated around the long trestle table in the grass, her shirt was limp with sweat. She’d chucked her shoes.

The whole enterprise felt cursed. Edith was sullen, Llewellyn in a full-on brood. I’d have liked to play Oberon. Ennis had been slipped some cash by somebody in exchange for his cooperation. He radiated a stone-faced disgust.

And the sun was ruthless. It loosened their makeup and cooked the fruit. What bees were left roused themselves from their autumnal torpor and came to inspect the laden table, contributing to the general unease. A bee sting puffed above the photographer’s collar, another on the back of her hand. Then the sun levered itself beneath the tree line.

There was, at once, a perceptible cooling. The lancing relentless light settled into a gentle haze. Even the bees seemed suddenly benevolent, studding the golden air. Guinevere looked at her family. The unhappy animal in each of them had been tamed temporarily by relief.

Edith, standing at the table’s far end in a dress of sweat-stained satin. Llewellyn beside her in a carved chair, regal and nearly stout, not quite Falstaff but getting there. Guinevere and Ennis, dressed in white and daubed with silver and rose, poised among the staged feast like a pair of fairies.

The photographer smiled.





Fifty-Five

2004




It was the cover story. Vogue ran it earlier than planned, with a very different article.

The photo they chose for the cover was also unexpected. Not one of the beautiful color images of Edith in Shakespearean couture, posed around and outside of the Farmhouse. They used a black-and-white test shot, taken halfway through prep.

In the photo Edith wore a white tank top. Her neck was long and her face very young. She could almost have been that underaged girl Llewellyn Sharpe first saw by ghost light. With eyes like two holes in the ground.

She looked straight at the camera, her head slightly turned. Mouth formed into a gentle O, softened by a vaporous wash of smoke.

In poor taste, some said, considering what happened next. But what a photo.

The magazine ran one line of text on the cover, out of respect for the occasion. For the dead.

“Edith Sharpe: 1973–2004.”



* * *




The Sharpe family had never looked so enviable, so anointed by looks and talent and money, as they did in the last photo ever taken of the four of them.

In real life, the illusion passed quickly. The moment broke and the gold ran out and they were four exhausted and sweaty people, bent beneath four different kinds of disquiet.

“Alright,” the photographer said, rubbing her neck. “I think I’ve got what I need.”

The plan had been for the crew to stick around, stay for the afterparty. But they were already packing up when the first car arrived from the city.

“Goddamn, I’m ready to get out of here,” Guinevere heard one of the stylists say, zipping dresses into white shrouds.

The makeup artist half laughed and said, “For real. Those poor kids.”

She’d taken her rings off before setting to work and left them unattended on a side table. Guinevere stuck a hand in her pocket to touch her little haul of topaz and silver. Poor you, she thought sourly.

The hasty departure of the Vogue people cast a pall. Edith was miserable, Llewellyn withdrawn. Ennis wouldn’t let Guinevere catch his eye. Jonathan embarked on a manic resuscitation campaign, but the party was dead on arrival. An awkward mix of art and media people, chosen for aesthetics, not compatibility. Faced with an evening of stilted conversation, they did what grown-ups always seemed to do when meeting adversity: drank.

Years later Guinevere would be able to reel off the names and occupations of every person who was at the party that night. At the time she barely looked at them. She wanted to peel Ennis away, but he’d planted himself in the crowd. Not talking to anyone, only sitting in the middle of it all with his sketchbook, drawing people’s faces. He was using the party to avoid her.