but she’d be outwitted by a thirteen-year-old intent on making contact with some pimply boy in North London.”
Eliza was pretty sure that this was a knock on her sister, but she decided not to fight about it. The two hadn’t been alone for a long time, perhaps not since Eliza’s children were born. They had seen more of Vonnie in London than they had since they had moved back to the States because Vonnie’s work brought her there more often than it did to Washington. Even then, their visits tended to be dinners at London restaurants where people were constantly swanning up to Vonnie and kissing both her cheeks. Vonnie always chose the restaurants, so presumably she preferred that kind of atmosphere. She found multiple excuses not to come out to Barnet for dinner—so very far, and the Underground didn’t run that late, never mind that she could have spent the night in their spare bedroom, but she always had early meetings the next day. No, she met Eliza and Peter in the trendy restaurant of her choice, then sent them home weighed down with expensive, but not-quite-right, gifts for the children.
It was 9 A.M. and they had been on the road since seven, anticipating a fearful journey past the famous Capital Beltway knot called the Mixing Bowl. Although Eliza knew it only by its reputation, as delineated in the “on the eights” traffic reports on WTOP, she feared it. The Mixing Bowl was like the soulless killer in one of those serial horror films. It rested at times, but it never died. Eliza decided they should leave as early as possible in order to avoid rush hour. To her amazement, traffic in D.C. was quite heavy at seven, but they were going against the flow and sailed through the dreaded Mixing Bowl with such ease that she almost felt a twinge of disappointment. They would reach Richmond well before lunchtime, hours before they could check into their room. They could have left Saturday morning, but visiting hours were relatively early. Eliza, advised by Barbara LaFortuny, had decided it was better to arrive a day early, then make the short trip from Richmond, past a town amusingly known as Disputana and into Waverly, home to Sussex.
Not that Barbara had ever been allowed to visit Walter, she told Eliza. But she knew other men at Sussex I and II, and she was familiar with the procedure. Her voice had sounded wistful, actually, when she spoke of Eliza’s trip. “I’ve never met him. Can you imagine? All these years and I’ve never seen him, face-to-face. Yet I know him as well as I know anyone.”
It had been hard not to ask: “And just how well do you know anyone, Barbara?”
“Did we ever come to Richmond when we were young?” Eliza asked Vonnie now. The city that was coming into view seemed vaguely familiar.
“I don’t think so. We drove through, on one of my college trips, when I went to check out Duke.”
“I’d forgotten about your college trips, how the whole family went along.”
“That was because both Mother and Father wanted to go, and they couldn’t leave you at home alone.”
“Really? I didn’t remember that part. I thought you insisted they both go, said you needed their input.”
Vonnie laughed. “Does that sound like me? I didn’t even want to go on college trips. I knew Northwestern was the right place for me, but they said I had to apply to at least five schools and visit each one. I picked the other four knowing I wouldn’t like them as much as Northwestern—UNC, Duke, Bennington, and NYU. A big state school, an idiosyncratic almost-Ivy, a private school on a par with Northwestern, and a big-city school. It made me look open-minded. But I wanted a strong journalism program and a strong theater department, and only Northwestern had both.”
“So you went through that whole charade and put them through all those trips, your mind made up the entire time?” It was all too easy to imagine Iso doing something similar.
“Why not?”
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to tell them how you felt?”
“No, it would have been simpler for you. I broke them in, Elizabeth.” Vonnie was prone to use the old name when discussing their childhood. “All the privileges that you took for granted—I won them for you. I bet you weren’t told that you had to apply to at least five colleges and visit all of them.”
“No, but I didn’t have your grades, your opportunities.