Free Ghost Town by Patrick McGrath Page A

From his point of view, at one stroke the futures both of his daughter and of the firm would be secured. So his partner’s visits to Waverley Place were discreetly encouraged, with the result that after some weeks the younger sisters abandoned the parlor to the couple. They would press their ears to the door but they heard nothing, and what went on in there remained a mystery. The very idea of Rinder expressing the contents of a brimming heart was enough to send them all into fits of laughter.
    As for Charlotte, she told her sisters that once they got to know Rinder—she always referred tohim by his surname, as though such a man could have no other, and pronounced it RYN-der—they would come to like him as much as she did. She allowed that there was at times a certain
chill
in his manner, but assured them it would disappear when he grew more familiar with the family, and it with him. In fact what Charlotte had to her surprise discovered in this complicated young man was, I believe, of all things—vulnerability. An intense sensitivity to pain which he concealed from everybody except her. For he had suffered much in his dramatic rise in the world of trade and commerce, and he was not thick-skinned. Every insult, every slight drew blood and caused deep hurt, and he was unable to forget such wounds. He schemed and brooded, and did not see that this was a sickness.
    But Charlotte did. Charlotte was moved by Rinder’s pride and his private suffering, and she pitied him. She offered him sympathy, and tried to deflect him from his fantasies of revenge. Rinder was not a stupid man and he responded at once to Charlotte’s overtures, for he had never known intimacy before and had no notion of the power of a woman’s comfort, his own mother having provided him none. In this he was oddly like Julius, and I believe it is probablethat Charlotte recognized in Rinder the same deep need she saw in her brother, so that in a way Rinder now became the boy’s rival, in fact his replacement. Julius did not realize this. He felt only joy that his sister should be finding happiness in love, and he welcomed his rival into the house with unfeigned warmth.
    The couple was married in the early spring of 1857. Noah escorted his daughter into the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue, Charlotte in a white satin dress with a long train and a tulle veil which fell like a mist from a headpiece of daisies and lilies. She was transformed from the Charlotte they all knew, the restless, excitable young woman so quick to argument, so intemperate in her enthusiasms. Instead she seemed demure, at peace—in love, even. Rinder himself achieved a kind of brooding glamour, for no one had ever glimpsed in him anything remotely approaching happiness before and it rendered him almost handsome, in a saturnine sort of a way. Charlotte’s sisters were her bridesmaids and the best man was a brother of Rinder’s from Long Island; there is a daguerreotype of this group too.
    Back at Waverley Place the happy couple attended a reception with family and friendsbefore leaving for a short honeymoon in Florida. As the carriage drove away one of the guests was heard to say that “poor Charlotte doesn’t realize that her doll is stuffed with sawdust.” I personally think Charlotte was quite well aware that her doll was stuffed with sawdust, but she also knew that that was not all he was stuffed with. The point, though, was that he was
her
doll, and as far as that went neither Hester nor her younger sister Sarah had a doll to call her own, sawdust-filled or otherwise.
    By the time they had returned and settled into a house in the West Twenties life in Waverley Place had changed forever. Without Charlotte the house lacked a certain feverishness. Charlotte had made the sisters’ parlor a place where gossip and laughter and lively conversation about subjects artistic and political were encouraged, but in her absence the house became almost somber. The girls read more,