her—but, but, even with Sir Mortimer, she didn’t… you know… they had to wait, until they were married. She told Ruth that she was looking forward to it, but that they had to wait till Captain Smith had married them, all legal. My mother would have closed up after I got pregnant. I would have been shut out, shut out of my own family; my life would have been colder, narrower, the color she brought to the lives of all us girls would have been gone for me.” She looked up at the sky. “I feel out of breath just thinking about it.”
“And your sisters? How are they? How have they been?”
She bit her lip. “Ruth and Faye were a bit shocked when I got pregnant—what I mean when I say a ‘bit’ shocked, is that they were very shocked. Shocked, upset, embarrassed, to be frank.”
“And Lottie?”
Sam thought for a moment. “Lottie was more understanding. This will sound harsh, Hal, but… Lottie is … well, she is the plain one among the sisters. I know I shouldn’t say that—it sounds cruel and arrogant all at the same time, and I would never say it to her face, of course—but… the fact is she rarely has had boyfriends. The fact is that Lottie loves it when Ruth and Faye have boyfriends—she lives through them, I suppose, enjoys the good times and suffers with them when they get thrown over. And she was the one who most kept in touch when I was pregnant. If she lived nearer she would have babysat tonight.”
Just then we were called back in for the second half of the play. I didn’t get a chance to follow up until later that evening when we were seated in the hotel dining room after the performance. Quite some time after the performance, as it turned out, since Sam had insisted on going upstairs to check on Will, who was fast asleep, with Blanche beside him, also fast asleep. Sam came down looking contented.
The dining room was quite busy—it was Saturday night, after all—and the service could have been quicker. But we were staying in the hotel and so were in no hurry. I ordered a bottle of wine and asked Sam what she had thought of the play now that we had seen all of it.
“Well, I’m glad they had the traditional ending.”
“What do you mean?”
“The ending of Lear—the king dies and his favorite daughter dies, after the other two have killed each other—was never very popular in the early days, and used to be changed, so that Lear doesn’t die and Cordelia marries Edgar, who of course loves her.”
“But why?”
“Oh, history. English royalists didn’t like what happened to Charles I and then James—1688 and all that—and Lear reminded them too much of the harsh reality. The traditional ending wasn’t reintroduced until Victorian times. They were certain of their own monarch, so Lear’s ending wasn’t threatening to them.”
The wine was brought, and the menus, a handwritten card. There was no choice: it was fish, then chicken.
“You prefer Shakespeare’s tragedies to his comedies?”
She nodded her head and picked at some bread. “I suppose I do. Tragedy is more real, somehow. It’s not the only mood for the theater, but the dominant one, the most classic. What did you think of the play?”
“I enjoyed the acting. I can’t imagine Isobel or me ever falling out like Lear’s daughters do.”
“As I said, you don’t have a kingdom to fight over.”
“Does that make so much difference?”
Sam chewed some bread. “Land, money, power… it’s all the same. It corrupts. I’m sure that if my sisters and I hadn’t been so poor, we’d never have got on so well.”
“You were going to tell me about Lottie.”
“Was I? What was I going to say, I wonder?”
I refilled our wine glasses. “You said she was plain—”
“Oh yes! I shouldn’t have said that. It’s not a nice thing… I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Do you get on?”
“Oh yes … it’s more … complicated than that.”
The fish arrived. We sat back and allowed it to be served.
“How was it complicated?” I asked when we were starting to eat.
She chewed for a moment. Then: “Let me ask you a question. Are you your parents’ favorite, or is it your sister? Have you noticed?”
“No, I can’t say I have.”
“Then you are the favorite.”
“How can you say—?”
Sam’s eyes shone. She was suddenly fired up. “Trust me.” She separated some fish from the bone, chewed, and swallowed. The muscles in her throat moved