Beauty and Attention: A Novel

  PRAISE FOR LIZ ROSENBERG

  Home Repair

  “Surprising moments of grace. . . . An absorbing tale where random acts of kindness abound. In the tradition of Jane Austen . . . Rosenberg’s Home Repair is a keeper.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Rosenberg’s prose sings in this winning novel with a fragile heroine capable of change and a cast of unique characters.”

  —Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal, Starred Review

  “A beautifully written tale of family and forging on.”

  —Malena Lott, Athena’s Bookshelf

  The Laws of Gravity

  “A heart wrenching and honest exploration of family love and betrayal. A real page turner right up to its beautiful last page.”

  —Ann Hood, author of The Red Thread and The Knitting Club

  “Drop whatever book you’re reading and pick up a copy of Liz Rosenberg’s stunning look at three Long Island families, The Laws of Gravity, told in clear-eyed, more often than not very funny prose . . . a family function/dysfunction novel melded with a legal thriller that would do justice to Scott Turow at his peak.”

  —Huntington News

  “The best book written by a woman in the last twenty years.”

  —Hakesher

  “Powerful and at the same time intensely delicate in its portrayal of the intimacies and contradictions in family life.”

  —David Park, author of The Truth Commissioner

  The Moonlight Palace

  “This sweet coming-of-age story weaves the blush of first love amid the dangers of political intrigue. Rich with historical detail and rounded out by an entertaining cast of characters, it is sure to enthrall historical fiction fans.”

  —Cortney Ophoff, Booklist

  “Fascinating and unique. . . . Aggie’s adventures in work, family, and love make for an inviting story that you will want to see through to the end.”

  —San Francisco Book Review

  “This is a story filled with marvelous, and marvelously eccentric, characters. Not just the crumbling palace, but also Agnes’s multi-generational family, built with both family of blood and family of choice into a slightly crazy whole. . . . Her world makes a terrific story.”

  —Reading Reality

  “The Moonlight Palace is a wonderful novel, and it will draw you in, and keep you there, until it finally releases you.”

  —Bibliotica

  OTHER TITLES BY LIZ ROSENBERG

  Demon Love

  Home Repair

  The Laws of Gravity

  The Moonlight Palace

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Liz Rosenberg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503940635

  ISBN-10: 1503940632

  Cover design by Laura Klynstra

  To my daughter, Lily, the most beautiful and wonderful young woman I know

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Libby Archer and her best friend, Henrietta, had put in a full day’s work by noon. They’d started at dawn—folding, selecting, discarding items, dragging corrugated boxes across the floors of a house still in mourning, its shades drawn. The brick edifice, built a century earlier, clung to the cool of the previous evening. By midafternoon the heat would be stifling, no matter how Libby and the maid, Trilby, raced around opening and closing windows. Summer came sometimes early to Rochester, New York, and sometimes not at all. This had been a very hot June.

  The two friends wore Bermuda shorts and wrinkled white blouses as they wandered about in their bare feet. Their toenails were painted a bright pinkish-red, Revlon’s bestselling shade for 1954, Fire & Ice. Libby, the slighter of the two, wore her hair tied loosely back in a black band. The tall girl, Henrietta—Henry, as she was generally known—was gawky, with a long, bony face and clear green eyes. She sported a paisley bandanna, which hid her frizzy hair. Around her neck she’d hung a few impossibly long strands of colored glass beads.

  Henry sank back on her heels with a sigh, surveying their morning’s work. She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “We’re getting there,” she said. Most of the rooms, including this once-cluttered study, held nothing but boxes and furniture swathed in sheets.

  Libby studied a photograph cradled in both hands. The man in the photo was her late father. She resembled him in the dark curves of her hair, the slimness of her figure, her susceptibility to passionate extremes of mood, her impatience, and her nearsightedness. In the photo he was grinning sardonically, looking away from the camera’s eye, holding up a large fish. “He never went fishing after my mother passed away,” said Libby. “I don’t know why. You can see he loved it.”

  “I imagine he gave up a lot of things after your mother was gone,” Henrietta said. “That is,” she added, flustered, checking her friend’s face for signs of a reaction, “one does.”

  “He did.” Libby looked positively stricken for a moment. Then she smiled at the photograph, much as she might have smiled at her father when he was alive. A sad smile with equal parts affection and distance. She wiped the photo with a white cloth, removing dust from the glass. “I wish he’d given up other things instead. I miss him.”

  “I miss him too,” Henry agreed. She had liked Mr. Archer, despite his faults. In her opinion, there had been many serious flaws. They had made Libby’s life hard. Libby had sacrificed a great deal for him. She had given up any idea of a career—all of her many intense and enthusiastic ideas. She’d even turned down her scholarship to an eastern women’s college to see Mr. Archer through his final stages of disintegration. Henry could not be as forgiving as her friend. But Mr. Archer had liked her—which was rare among her friends’ parents.

  Henrietta Capone was regarded as not just eccentric for a girl but downright dangerous. Her name, for instance, was a gangster’s name. A decent young woman would have been married by now and rid herself of it. She was too tall, yet she wore heels, and she dressed like a gypsy, in flounced skirts and costume jewelry.

  Libby kept studying her father’s picture, as if she might find in it the clue to his absence. There was great sweetness of expression in her face. That was Libby’s real attraction, Henrietta thought—the unexpected way her smile animated her face, moving it from severity to something as open as a flower. And in how she appeared to be loosely floating when she walked, at ease in her shapely body. But it was generally believed, almost universally agreed, that Libby was not the beauty of her family. That honor went to Libby’s fair-haired cousin Veronica, named “dazzling” by the Rocheste
r Times-Union at the Grand Cotillion of 1946. Veronica was honey blonde, composed, and even-featured and could easily have been a model like Nena von Schlebrügge if she had wished it. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred would declare that Veronica had snagged “the looks” of the Archer girls, but that one person would disagree, and disagree violently, amazed by the stupidity of the rest. Mr. Lockwood was one of these rarities, Henrietta thought with satisfaction. But her satisfaction was short-lived.

  “Does he even know you’re leaving?” she asked Libby. She didn’t need to identify the “he.” She saw that by the slight wince on her friend’s face.

  “Everyone received the same note,” Libby said quickly.

  “He won’t like it,” Henrietta said.

  “Fortunately,” said Libby, with an impatient toss of her head, “I am not in a position to care what your friend Caspar Lockwood will like.”

  The two friends gazed at each other a moment. Henrietta decided not to press, this once. Instead she said, “I don’t like it . . . Ireland is too far away.”

  A shadow fell across Libby’s face. “It’s not so far, Henry. One transatlantic flight. Hop across the pond.”

  “You’d better not start calling it the pond,” warned Henry. “Or take up tea and scones, or come back talking with a fake Irish accent, saying amongst and whilst.”

  “But I do like tea.” Libby grinned. “Whilst eating scones amongst the cream.”

  “No foxhunts, no tweeds,” Henry went on relentlessly. “No marrying a Trinity man. None of that foreign baloney.” She pushed the cuff of her white blouse up her arm, revealing a large, round, mannish-looking watch. “Speaking of tea . . . we have company again this afternoon, don’t we?”

  Libby hit her forehead and groaned.

  Henrietta reached out one long arm and helped her friend to her feet. “Shame on you. It’s your last for a long while. And you know they mean well.”

  “That’s the worst of it, isn’t it?” asked Libby with a wan smile.

  Four hours later, washed, polished, and brushed, the same two young women sat side by side in the second parlor, almost unrecognizable from their disheveled morning selves. They would have passed muster in any ladies’ magazine of the day. Henrietta had changed into a skirt and blouse, and Libby wore a plain black A-line dress, with black ballet-style slippers. Her thick, unruly brown hair was washed and brushed and rolled brilliantly over her shoulders, like a girl in the Breck shampoo ads. Henrietta’s green skirt hung an inch too short, a fact she kept trying to hide by tugging the hem down over her knees. She did not succeed, and every minute or two the skirt popped up again, as short as before.

  The parlor, once known as the Blue Room, had earned its name from its fading, china-blue wallpaper pattern. It was, in the final hours of Libby’s residence in her father’s house, the last room still fully furnished, making the rest of the house feel even emptier.

  Guests who came to comfort the young mourner threaded their way through hot, bare halls and stacked boxes and shrouded furniture to reach the one remaining haven of upholstered chairs, shabby sofas, pictures, silk flowers in figured vases. The items in the room seemed to have merely accumulated without beauty or attention. Mr. Archer had been a man who refused to throw anything away. It could have been a room neglected from an earlier century; there was nothing up-to-date or 1950s about any of it. The residents appeared to have given up any effort to live in their own time, and simply squatted among the artifacts of the past.

  “I don’t understand,” repeated their youngest visitor, Bridget Block, a pretty, plump blonde of sixteen who had not yet “come out.” She sat close to her mother, a worthy matriarch of Rochester society. “Why are you visiting people in Ireland?”

  “They are not people,” Mrs. Block corrected her. “They are family.” Like Libby, she wore black, though the June afternoon waxed sultry. Mrs. Block’s looks had been sometimes compared to Doris Day’s, a suggestion that thrilled her. She wore her hair in a Doris Day bob, but her chin had settled. She had been widowed ten years earlier by a man of industry. She knew that wearing black was the correct thing to do, especially on occasions like this, and she looked approvingly on Libby Archer, who had always been a dutiful and faithful daughter.

  “Family is everything,” intoned their eldest visitor, the Block grandmother, a sallow cricket of a woman. “What relation are these Irish people to you, dear, exactly?”

  “My uncle and my cousin Lazarus,” answered Libby. “My mother’s family. We were very close when I was young.” The old woman looked at her blankly. “My mother’s people,” Libby said a bit louder.

  “You have relatives in Ireland?” insisted Bridget. “But that’s in—in Europe—isn’t it?”

  Henrietta chuckled. The mother glared at her.

  “I’m sorry,” Henrietta said. “I thought she was joking.”

  “It is no joke to cross the ocean,” said the grandmother. “In my day, of course, we had to travel by ship. But then, one will do anything for the sake of family.”

  “That’s true, Mother,” said Mrs. Block irritably. “And how many weeks will you be gone?” she asked Libby. “This has been so awful for you. Your poor father’s decline . . .”

  “The loss of a parent is a terrible thing,” said the old woman. “The cruelest blow.” She made a bubbling noise with her straw. Being mildly deaf, the old woman could not hear it and went on sucking till her daughter took the glass out of her hand.

  “More iced tea?” Libby offered. “Bridget, would you like a cookie?”

  “No thank you,” her mother answered for the girl, who had leaned forward hopefully, her hand outstretched. “Bridget is watching her waist.”

  “I’ll be gone a year or two,” said Libby.

  All the visitors’ heads snapped toward her in surprise.

  “Two years!” Bridget exclaimed. “Why in the world would you visit with family for two years?” Both her mother and grandmother shot her a warning glance, but they all regarded Libby with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.

  “We had hoped,” said Mrs. Block, “that you’d be settling down here in Rochester, and getting married.”

  “I have no plans,” answered their young hostess, “to be married.”

  “Why, Libby! I had no idea you were the driven career-woman type,” said Mrs. Block.

  “Are those the only two possibilities?” Libby asked, pleasantly enough. A closer listener would have heard the steeliness in her voice.

  “We thought that tall, good-looking man who’s always hanging around—” Bridget began.

  “Shh!” said her mother. “Men are unreliable. They change their minds. They die.”

  “Oh, men are beastly,” Bridget agreed happily.

  “I want to see the world,” Libby said. She leaned closer, hands clasped together in a gesture of appeal, as if to convince her guests. “I thought it might comfort me.”

  “The world is not necessarily a comforting place,” said the old woman, curving her veiny hand over Libby’s and patting it. “But I wish you luck. Indeed I do.”

  “I don’t see why you want to go to Europe,” Bridget insisted. “It’s so close to Russia. That’s dangerous, isn’t it, Mama? With the bomb and Communists and all. And there’s so much going on right here in Rochester.”

  The doorbell chimed just then, and the maid, Trilby, entered, ushering in more visitors. This larger group threatened to overwhelm the room, so chairs were drawn from some mysterious supply, and seating rearranged. Henrietta jumped to her feet, glad to be in motion. But the new guests brought no relief.

  “You poor orphaned darling!” cried one of the newcomers, her arms outstretched to Libby, who shrank back visibly. “All alone in the world!”

  At the same moment another female visitor headed into the parlor. She aimed straight for Henrietta, as if she had been directed there. The stranger grasped Henry’s arm with surprising strength.

  “Is it true,” she asked in a low voice, shaking Henry’s arm,
“that Libby Archer is getting married and selling this house?”

  “No,” gasped Henrietta.

  “None of it?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Henrietta, tugging her arm free. She kept her eye on her friend, hemmed in on all sides, her face thin and wan, like an orchid jutting from a jet black vase.

  A man had just approached Libby and was saying in a loud voice, “Well, you’ve earned a jolly nice vacation, I’d say! What’ll it be? Miami? Maine?”

  “Is any of it true?” persisted the stranger. “Is she selling this house?”

  “Not that I’m aware.” Henrietta managed to pull her arm free, but the visitor was relentless.

  The woman turned her head in all directions, birdlike. “My son has been looking for something in this neighborhood, and this house would do very well. He’s just recently married, and his wife is very particular.”

  “I am . . . surprised to hear it,” said Henrietta drily.

  “How many bedrooms are there?” the woman went on. “At least six or seven, I’ll bet.”

  “I haven’t counted,” said Henrietta.

  “What on earth will you do with yourself now?” a young woman across the room asked Libby. Her friend had, Henrietta thought, the look of a wild animal caught in a cage. “Will you join some clubs? Will you go to college?”

  “She’s thinking of becoming a career woman,” said Bridget.

  “Ohhhh!” called out several voices at once.

  “What’s that now?” said the old woman.

  “A career, Mother! Like a secretary. Or—or a nurse, I suppose.”

  “In my day,” said the old lady, “only women who were jilted took on a career.”

  “I’m a career woman!” Henrietta announced suddenly. Her voice rang out more loudly than she had planned. Without meaning to, she was now addressing the entire room. Though she had an air of authority, she hated speaking in public more than anything in the world. Henry’s voice shook with shy, nervous humor. At any instant she thought she might burst into hysterical laughter.