Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

“The board isn’t pleased,” Vaughan said. “One member in particular. She feels your personal life has gotten in the way of your work performance.”

She wants Clen, Dabney thought. Hell hath no fury. What was Elizabeth doing on the board anyway? She didn’t own or work for a Nantucket business. But she had money and influence; she was a summer person who “cared” about Nantucket. She had used her charms with Vaughan Oglethorpe, batted her eyelashes, flashed her pretty manicure, and maybe promised him a back scratch.

Still, Dabney said nothing. Was he going to drop the hammer?

He said, “The board took a vote and it was decided that it’s time to ask you to step down.”

At that instant, Dabney realized that both Riley and Celerie were at their desks, quiet as church mice, staring right into the front office, listening to every word.

“Step down?” Dabney said.

“I’m asking for your resignation, Dabney,” Vaughan said.

Asking for her resignation? Asking her to step down? She, Dabney Kimball Beech, was the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce. She had, with Nina’s help, turned Nantucket into the thriving business community it now was. In 1992, the Chamber had 340 members, a budget of $175,000, and there were thirty thousand visitors annually. Twenty-two years later, under Dabney’s leadership, there were 620 members, a budget of $1.2 million, and seventy-five thousand visitors annually.

Should she quote these statistics? Surely he already knew them. But it didn’t matter, because she, Dabney Kimball Beech, had done what so many great people before her had done. She had proved to be human.

“Okay,” Dabney said. “I’ll just collect my things.” She looked around the office, wondering where to start. The desks were hers, the oriental rugs, the original Abigail Pease photographs, which every single visitor to the office commented on, the green-apple-candle smell. How could she pack up that smell?

“I’m asking Nina Mobley to take over as executive director,” Vaughan said. “I assume you approve of that choice?”

“Yes,” Dabney bleated. She couldn’t imagine that Vaughan Oglethorpe or anyone else on the board cared what she thought now. She was being discarded like a piece of trash.

Suddenly, Nina was at the top of the stairs. She said, “If you’re asking for Dabney’s resignation then you might as well ask for mine as well, because I will not work here without her.”

“Nina,” Dabney said. But Nina was already collecting things from her desk. She took down the calendar from Nantucket Auto Body, which they had each consulted a hundred times a day. Dabney realized that what Nina had said was true. She would never have been able to work in this office without her.

Vaughan clasped his hands together in front of him; the false sympathy required of a funeral director rose to the surface. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Nina. Let me encourage you to reconsider.”

“I quit, too,” Celerie said, standing in the doorway of the back office. “Dabney Beech is my idol! She is my hero! I have never known anyone like her! She inspired my love for this island! She made me appreciate its uniqueness and she made me want to serve as its advocate! She made me think of it as home, and I grew up far, far away from here! I am devoted to Nantucket, but more than that, I am devoted to Dabney Kimball Beech!”

“I’m leaving, too,” Riley said. He was holding his guitar case and a copy of The Grapes of Wrath and the framed photo he kept on his desk of Sadie, his chocolate Lab.

“Wait,” Vaughan said. “Everyone please just wait a minute. You can’t all leave.”

Just then, the phone rang, and this seemed to give Riley great joy. He smiled widely, showing off his perfect teeth.

“With all due respect, sir,” he said to Vaughan, “you’d better answer that.”

He loved Cambridge in the fall, winter, and spring, but he did not love it in the summer. He wouldn’t have liked it under the best of circumstances, but now he found it unbearable-air-conditioning instead of open windows, the campus inundated with foreign visitors. Even the Charles was a disappointment; it looked like spoiled chocolate milk and smelled even worse.

Box ate every meal out, most of the time venturing across the river into Boston proper to do so, because it stretched out his night. He walked for the same reason. Now, there was nothing more depressing than his apartment after dark. If left to his own devices, he would sit in a chair facing the window and drink an entire bottle of wine by himself while listening to Mozart’s Requiem.

What had he done wrong?

His thoughts skipped like a broken record: he had put work first, he had taken Dabney for granted, he had become complacent with their arrangement, he had not always returned her passionate advances and especially not in years of late, he had settled into contentment, he had assumed she would create her own happiness and excitement-and guess what? She had!

He couldn’t pretend to be surprised.

If he had known twenty-five years earlier that it would end this way-Dabney would return to Clendenin-would he have married her anyway?

Yes. The answer was yes.

Coming out of Grill 23 one night, Box bumped into a fellow he recognized. It was…he couldn’t quite grasp it at first. He had drunk a lot of wine. It was…

The man stuck his hand out. “Box?” he said. “Christian Bartelby.”

“Oh!” Box said. “Hello!” And then once his brain processed who exactly Christian Bartelby was, he summoned some enthusiasm. “Yes! Hello, Christian Bartelby! The good doctor!” Box was swaying on his feet. He had eaten at the bar and the comely bar maiden had enticed him into ending his evening with a glass of vintage port. Box had gazed upon the bar maiden and had wondered why it was that no other woman in the world could maintain his interest, no matter how beautiful or charming she was.

Christian held on to Box’s hand for an extra beat. “I assume you’ve heard that Miranda has gone off to New York.”

“Yes,” Box said. “She’s left us both, it seems.”

Christian Bartelby let go of Box’s hand and ran a hand through his hair. He was wearing a navy T-shirt under a navy blazer and a pair of khakis and loafers with no socks. Box wondered if Christian Bartelby was going into the restaurant to meet a date. Was everyone moving on but him?

“And your wife?” Christian Bartelby said. “How is she?”

“Ah,” Box said. “She has left me as well.”

“Left you?” Dr. Bartelby said.

“It seems so,” Box said, but he couldn’t bring himself to say any more, so he saluted the good doctor and sidled away.

Every few days, a call came from Agnes, “checking in.”

“Daddy?” she said. “Are you working?”

“Yes.”

“Eating?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“What what?”

“What are you eating?”

“Out, mostly. The usual places. Freddy at the Russell House is sick of me.” Box cleared his throat. “How is your mother?”

“She…lost her job,” Agnes said.

“What?” Box said.

“Vaughan Oglethorpe and the board asked for her resignation.”

“For what reason?” Box said. “Certainly not over the business with Hughes. That’s hardly legal. Her personal life is private and separate.”

There was a long pause. “She missed a lot of work this summer, Daddy,” Agnes said. “It was all documented. And Elizabeth Jennings sits on that board, and Mom felt like maybe it was a personal vendetta.”

Now it was Box’s turn to be quiet. She missed a lot of work this summer. Because she was with Clendenin, because Box was around and Agnes was home and thus Dabney had to conduct her rendezvouses during the workday.

Oh, Dabney, what have you done? Your life is falling apart. It didn’t have to be this way. Was he worth it? Was he?

And still, Box felt indignation on Dabney’s behalf. Vaughan Oglethorpe was a pompous, self-important ass, and Elizabeth Jennings was petty and jealous. They had done an unconscionable thing in asking Dabney to resign. It didn’t matter how much time Dabney had missed. Box and everyone else in the world knew that Dabney could run the Chamber of Commerce in her sleep, or from an outpost on the surface of Mars.

Leave my wife alone! he thought.

“Is she there?” Box asked impulsively. Dabney had called every day with updates about the healing of Agnes’s head wound, but he hadn’t answered once, because even her voice on the message made him too upset for words. But it seemed impossible to him that Dabney would have been fired from the Chamber (the very phrase was inconceivable), and she hadn’t called him to tell him. But that, he supposed, was what their new arrangement meant. Separated.

“Um…” Agnes said. “No, she’s not home.”

Not home, he thought. Of course not.

There was only one more secret she was keeping, and it was time for that to come out as well.

Clen took the news silently, as Dabney had known he would. She waited until after they made love because their lovemaking was precious to her and she wasn’t sure how much more of it there would be. It would be one of the things she missed the most-Clen thrusting into her, his hungry mouth on her breasts, his animal moans of joy and gratitude. He was so tender that he brought her to tears every time.

She lay spent and sweating, with her head on his chest. It was astonishing the way he could encircle her with one arm, how he could make her feel safer and more protected than any man with two. She thought back to when she had believed that her symptoms-the ache in her gut, the constant exhaustion, the breathlessness, the lack of appetite-were the result of the impossible position she had put herself in. Loving two men at once.

She would give up everything-her home, her morning coffee, the sunrise and sunset, the field of flowers at Bartlett Farm, the bluebird sky, the crimson moors in fall, the bump and rumble of the Impala’s tires over the cobblestones; she would give up good books and champagne and ribbon sandwiches and lobster dipped in melted butter and the rainbow fleet sailing around Brant Point Lighthouse and her dirty tennis serve and her pearls and her penny loafers and she would give up the chance of ever holding her grandchild. She would give it all up to Death, but please, she thought, please do not take away Clendenin.

“I’m sick,” she said. The dusk was gathering, but Dabney still heard birds and bumblebees outside the screened windows of Clen’s cottage. “I have pancreatic cancer, it’s terminal, a matter of months. A few more good months.”

Clen squeezed her until she thought she would break. It genuinely hurt; her organs, already so compromised, were being crushed like soft, overripe fruit. And yet it felt good. She knew what he was doing, what he was thinking; he wanted her so close that she became him. Come live inside me, we will be one, I will keep you safe, and you will not have to die alone.

Telling Agnes, of course, was even worse. It was one thing to leave a husband or a lover behind, and another thing entirely to leave a child.

Dabney told Agnes over breakfast-French toast with fresh peaches, crispy bacon, and home fries with herbs cut from the garden. It didn’t matter how beautiful the food was; as soon as Dabney opened her mouth, neither of them would be able to eat a bite. And yet it was Dabney’s nature to feed people. She couldn’t stop now.

“Darling,” Dabney said. “I’m sick.”

Agnes suspended a perfect slice of golden-pink peach over her plate. “What?” she said. “What kind of sick?’

“Darling,” Dabney said.

Agnes dissolved into tears. They were the tears of Little Girl Agnes-Agnes when she cut her knee on the sharp stones of the jetty, Agnes when she had a bad dream-and the heartbreak of it was almost too much for Dabney to bear.

Some days were still okay. Some days Dabney made it out for her walk and said hello to the same people and petted the same dogs. She then drove out to see Clendenin, and they swam in the pool of the big house and Clendenin made sandwiches, and Dabney ate them slowly, never wanting to arrive at the last bite. Dabney napped in the afternoon, she had to nap, she was so tired now, and in pain nearly all the time. She slept in Clendenin’s large, white, luxuriously sheeted bed while Clen read his newspapers at the oak table.

Some nights Dabney stayed at his cottage and cooked for him, and some nights she went home to see Agnes. Agnes was spending a lot of time with Riley. She met him at the beach after work, and they went out for oysters at Cru, or they grabbed fish tacos at the Easy Street Cantina.