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  In memory of my father, Fred Gornick—

  Scientist, Explorer, Raconteur

  1

  New York, 1935

  Shortly after Prudence’s twenty-third birthday, now more than three-quarters of a century ago, her mother told her the story of Louis C. Tiffany dynamiting the breakwater at Laurelton Hall—his fantastical Oyster Bay mansion with its columns capped by brilliant ceramic blossoms and the smokestack buried in a blue-banded minaret—so as to foil the town from reclaiming the beach for public use. Prudence’s mother was only weeks from death, and as she told the story, she wept. She wiped her nose on her bed-jacket sleeve, eyes pinpointed from the tincture of laudanum Prudence had given her.

  Prudence had been born at Laurelton Hall, her father one of a battalion of gardeners who tended the glass genius’s 588 lavishly landscaped acres, her mother one of a squadron of maids who cleaned the eighty-four rooms. They’d left when Prudence was four, her father assuming a position at the Tiffanys’ Madison Avenue mansion, but she still recalled the fountain with a color wheel engineered by Mr. T so the water could be rendered different hues, the peacocks strutting across the lawn, the totem pole with a whale atop marking the bend in the drive.

  Her mother, always tiny but by then the size of a girl, reached a frigid hand out from the bed. She rested it heavily on Prudence’s arm. “I was in the largest of the third-floor bedrooms. No one slept there, but still, every week, they made me polish and sweep. When I lifted the window to shake the duster…”

  Her mother shuddered. “Whitecaps and a terrible smell. Like bananas gone bad.”

  She retracted her hand and picked violently at the nubby coverlet.

  “Stop. You’ll make a hole.”

  “The explosion was so loud, I thought it must be the Germans come.”

  Like a faded photograph at the bottom of a box, the scene seemed to Prudence already known: The crackle of dynamite along the breakwater Mr. T had built to expand for his own family’s use the strip of sand that lay like an ermine cuff between his gardens and the sea that had once been the favored bathing spot for the residents of Oyster Bay. The plume of spewing water over the granite rocks, flooding the beach on which the town had planned to erect thirty-five cabanas on land Mr. T believed was his and his alone.

  Why was her mother telling her this?

  Because there was no one else to tell: Prudence’s brother gone now for more than a decade; Prudence’s father dead the following year.

  Her mother pulled the coverlet up to the tip of her chin. “June sixteenth, 1916. That was the cursed date.”

  2

  An April Sunday, 2013

  At Prudence’s age, three weeks past her hundred-and-first birthday, the phone rarely rings, so that when it does, a little after two, she is startled, only realizing then that she has slipped into a doze in one of the wingback chairs by the library table where she’d been drinking the Earl Grey tea Maricel leaves in a thermos, always with the strict instruction Mrs. P, you are not under any circumstances, not even Jesus showing up in this kitchen, to light that stove. A section of the paper has slid onto the rug, and as she blinks into awareness, she remembers it is Sunday, Maricel’s day off.

  The phone does not ring most days because nearly everyone she has known is no longer alive. And for those who are, as she witnesses on her outings (she remains a surprisingly strong walker, though she does accede to Maricel’s insistence on holding her arm), talking as a means of communication seems to have fallen out of fashion.

  “Hello,” she says, disarmed, as she so often is when she hears her first words of the day, by how like an old recording she sounds, scratchy and faint.

  “Hello,” she hears back. A woman’s voice. Gentle but with a backbone to it. “I’m Grace O’Connor.” The voice pauses, as though aware that Prudence’s breath has halted on the inhale. “My grandfather Randall O’Connor, I believe, was your brother.”

  Prudence does not blink, as stilled as if she’d met a black bear on a path. She stares at the knobby knuckles of what had once been, she’d been told, lovely hands, at the highway of raised blood vessels visible through her parchment skin. No. No thank you, I have no need of that are the words she hears in her head.

  “I think I am your great-niece.”

  There is no tacked-on silly laugh, and with this, Prudence senses a grown woman, which makes sense; her own grandchildren, had she had children, might have been, as she’s often calculated, grandparents themselves. But her mind is not making those idle calculations now. Rather, wild impetuous animal, it has leaped back to the day, a rare pocket of vivid memory, when they received the first letter from Randall, then only fourteen. A letter, it appeared from the postmark, that had taken three weeks to travel from his lodgings in San Francisco to Hell’s Kitchen.

  That Randall had written at all had dwarfed the content of the letter, which contained little news save that he was staying with Charlie, a boy he knew from New York, and that he’d found a job as a florist’s assistant. After her mother read the single page aloud, her father wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Well, he knows about flowers from me,” he said, and her mother sucked her lips into her mouth, holding back, Prudence imagines, Go to hell, Eddie, it’s because of you, stupid drunk, that he’s gone. Her father had not been a stupid drunk, but when he did drink, he could get sloppy and mean, as he had the night Randall left. A night when he’d shoved her mother, and Randall, who boxed at the place around the corner and had a quick right jab, made fists, and her father, who had never hit them, swung at Randall.

  Grace? Is that what the woman said?

  Folded inside the letter to her parents was a separate one for her. Pru, you’re the smartest of us all. Just stay clear of our father when he’s had a few. He’s not a bad man but the whiskey makes him, well, I don’t want to cuss. There were a few lines about how Randall would see her soon, maybe not this Christmas, but Christmas the next at the most. But then Christmas and Christmas the next had passed without Randall’s coming back and the spans between his letters grew longer and longer. When her father died the following year and her aunt sent a telegram to Randall’s rooming house, his landlady cabled back Moved. A decade later, after her mother died, Prudence did not even know where to send a telegram.

  But now the woman, Grace, is explaining that Randall, her grandfather, has been dead for nearly twenty years. That he had one child, her father, Leopold.

  A shock passes through Prudence. Of course, she’s known her brother must be gone by now, but hearing it, hearing how long it’s been … She closes her eyes so as to do the arithmetic in her head. Randall was three years older than her. Twenty years ago, he would have been eighty-four.

  “I am wondering if I might see you,” the woman says.

  See her? See a photograph of her? Pull yourself together, Prudence admonishes herself, by which she means gather up her thoughts, with their inclination of late to wander off like toddlers willy-nilly wherever they want. “Have a visit? You are wondering if we might have a visit?”

  “Yes. Would you be willing?”

  The No. No thank you returns. Dorothy Tiffany, the daughter of her parents’ employer who’d once told Prudence, “We must shoulder failing those we love,” would have come right out and said it: a firm No. But she, Prudence
Theet, née Prudence O’Connor, cannot, cannot do that.

  “When will you be in New York?” Prudence asks.

  There is a pause, and for a moment Prudence thinks perhaps the line has gone dead.

  “I’m sorry. I should have said this before. I am in New York now.”

  Prudence’s heart pounds wildly, as though the black bear has reared onto its hind legs.

  “Actually … Actually, I’m outside your building now.”

  “You’re outside my building now?”

  “Yes.”

  To Prudence’s amazement, the bear turns and saunters into the trees, leaving something she hasn’t felt in a long time. Something she would have to say is closer to elation than fear. Such a long time since she has done anything more spontaneous, more rash, than stopping with Maricel on one of their walks to buy an Italian ice from a cart.

  She hears Maricel’s scolding: Mrs. P, it could be someone come to rob you. Or worse. Worse than that. There are evil people out there, they prey on elderly persons …

  But this is not people. This is her brother’s grandchild. And if it is not, if it is someone come to do her harm, what difference will it make? She is in her final passage. There is no arguing about that. The only question is, a passage to where? Her mother, with her cries in her final days of “Eddie” and “Oliver,” had believed to heaven. The latter name, Prudence had not recognized—an early love? A late love, such as she, Prudence, once had?—but her father, Eddie … Prudence had not reminded her mother that if there was a heaven, he might or might not be there.

  “Well, then, please come up.”

  * * *

  After the doorman calls to announce a Miss O’Connor, Prudence grips the arms of the wingback chair and pushes herself to her feet. Usually, her afternoons are dotted with catnaps, the outcome of her invariable 4:53 awakenings: nature’s timepiece set in her brain stem with the exactitude her husband, Carlton, had once described to her of a school of salmon’s return to the very waters where they’d been born so as to spawn and then die.

  She rests for a moment, holding the edge of the library table and looking out at the great expanse of the Hudson, the West Side Highway hidden behind park foliage thick as bunches of broccoli. The New Jersey waterfront was largely undeveloped when she’d moved here from Park Avenue a few years after Carlton’s death. Now high-rises are visible from her fifteenth-floor window and a driving range that from this distance might be a leprechaun’s kerchief smoothed over the ground. Only the river is unchanged. In winter, there are ice floes and wind-whipped waves; in summer, skies dressed at sunset with plum and papaya stripes. A vista, it saddens her to think, that has brought her more consistent pleasure, provided a more enduring connection, than anything human or animal.

  When Carlton died, she’d been thirty-seven, childless, her parents long gone, Randall drifted so far away, it was as if he’d disappeared. A few months later, on the insistence of Harriet Masters, in whose interior-decoration firm Prudence had worked prior to her marriage, she consulted the psychiatrist Harriet had seen after her husband—presumably heartbroken from one of the torrid affairs he’d conducted with the wives of his fellow club members but, Harriet claimed, more bored than distraught—hung himself in the attic of their Tuxedo Park home. When the psychiatrist asked about Prudence’s friendships, she told him about Ella, with whom she’d briefly been intimate, and Elaine, with whom she’d worked at Harriet’s firm. On occasion, she reported, she and Carlton had socialized with Carlton’s business associates and college friends and their wives, most particularly Alfred, Carlton’s mountaineering partner. Their most regular dinner companion, however, had been CCB, for whom Carlton had become a surrogate son after his own son, married to Dorothy Tiffany, had become debilitated from manic-depressive illness. At the end of the meeting, the psychiatrist diagnosed Prudence as suffering from an overwhelming loneliness that predated the loss of Carlton. The problem, he gently explained, was not a lack of companions, but that there was not a one with whom she could talk about anything not found in a newspaper, much less, God forbid, cry.

  She picks up the fallen papers and the cold cup of tea, considers going to the bathroom to tidy herself, then dismisses the thought. She has never been vain, but it is unsettling to see herself in the mirror: the voluptuousness she’d once found so embarrassing on her diminutive frame now eroded to loose skin draped over bones and sinew, her formerly pumpkin hair still thick but now stripped of color, her milky skin now too fragile for soap or cosmetics.

  Instead, she makes her way to the kitchen, where she turns on the tap and waits for the kettle to fill. How had this Grace found her? Maybe through that thing called Google, a ridiculous word, like something out of a children’s limerick. If the Google device had existed during the years when she’d still thought she wanted to find Randall, would she have used it to do so? Or would her fear about what might happen if they saw each other again have prevailed as it had with Carlton’s offer before they married to hire a private detective? “Perhaps after we’re settled,” she’d mumbled, but what she’d thought was if the detective was to locate Randall, what could she say to him? You never came home the Christmas next? You left me to bury both of our parents?

  She puts the filled kettle on the stove and lights the burner. As always, there is the guilty pleasure of defying Maricel, guilty because she knows that Maricel’s injunctions—the stove, the front door, the shower, what clothes to wear so as not to catch “the cold in your chest”—come only out of concern for her. She listens for the sound of the gas igniting, then adjusts the flame under the kettle. Well, if this is a murderer ascending now on the elevator, she can console herself that on her last day she did not add to the collection of small cowardices that have constituted her adult years. Cowardices that have seemed in their sum almost evil: the sins of someone too tepid, too bland, or perhaps simply too self-righteous for passionate crime.

  Yes, if this is a ploy, she will be at peace with having risked her life to meet Randall’s granddaughter.

  * * *

  Do not hold your breath, Prudence reminds herself as she unlocks the door. You do not want to faint.

  Before her is a wiry woman with chapped cheeks and chestnut hair pulled back into a too-short, too-severe ponytail. She smiles, tiny lines webbing out from her eyes and a mouthful of perfect teeth.

  Her brother had a son and this son had a daughter. Prudence leans on the doorjamb as she absorbs the astonishment of it. A daughter whom someone must have taken regularly to a dentist but is dressed now in pants a size too large and shoes too sensible for her age: early forties, Prudence guesses. A woman who—to Prudence’s decorator’s eye, accustomed to seeing beneath the finishes of a place to its bones—looks as if she shoos away beauty. A person for whom a renovation would be possible but who has no desire to undertake it.

  She did not kiss the girl. Should she have? But now the kettle is whistling. “Come in.” Prudence gestures toward the living room. “I’ll bring us some tea.”

  Less than a minute, but already so much roiling that it is a relief to have this retreat to the kitchen, the distraction of the transgressive thrill of pouring the steaming water into the teapot she never uses now that Maricel leaves her tea in an aluminum thermos. She places the pot and teacups on a tray and takes out the shortbread cookies Maricel keeps in the cupboard, more for herself than for Prudence, who has lost her appetite for sweets.

  The tray. Can she carry it? But the girl—she is not a girl, but with what must be nearly a sixty-year age difference between them, it’s the word that comes to mind—is now in the doorway to the kitchen. Without asking, she takes the tray.

  Prudence trails behind her guest to the living room. From the rear, with her slender hips and flat backside, she might be mistaken for a boy. A quiet is nestled in her movements. It may be that she has spent time with people who are unwell. Or old people, it occurs to Prudence, like herself.

  “By the window, if you don’t mind,” Prudence dir
ects.

  She watches Grace’s gaze alight on the vase of dahlias, the blood orange and kingly purple having called to Prudence when she spotted them a few days ago in plastic bins outside a Korean market, a touch of color in the otherwise moon-toned room. Perhaps Grace learned about flowers from her grandfather—Randall had written that he worked for a florist—and now Prudence wonders if Grace knows furniture too, if she recognizes the chrome-and-glass tables as Eileen Gray, the slipper chairs in creamy leather as Mies van der Rohe.

  Grace sets the tray on the library table. She waits for Prudence to lower herself into the wingback chair before taking the matching one.

  How strange, Prudence thinks. No more than fifteen minutes since she was napping here, and now the room so dizzyingly occupied.

  Grace reaches for the teapot.

  “Let it steep a bit longer. Another two or three minutes.” Prudence smiles to soften what she fears landed like an old-person’s bark. “So, Grace, it is Grace, yes?”

  “It is.” Grace looks at her warmly but not insistently, as though gauging her approach. “How funny that we both have virtue names.”

  Prudence must have a quizzical look on her face because Grace adds, “Prudence, Grace.”

  “I quite hated my name growing up. I thought it suggested that I was prudish or, even worse, prunelike. My brother, your grandfather, called me Pru, but that doesn’t solve the ugly prrr sound. But Grace, that is lovely. It brings to mind the graceful Grace Kelly.”

  “Thank you. My namesake, though, was Grace Slick. A very different woman.”

  “The name rings a bell, but I’m afraid I can’t say from where.”

  “A rock-and-roll singer. My mother saw her perform early in her career, with her band The Great Society. I suppose I should feel lucky she didn’t name me Great.”

  “That would not have been nearly as charming.”