times and had supposedly gone to rack and ruin, and was seedy now, and the furniture had been sold years before. The most recent owners were thinking of tearing it down. He’d never been inside it since he’d sold it, and didn’t want to see it again. He said it would make him too sad remembering what it had once been. But Eleanor cautiously suggested the Hamilton School which was what the Deveraux mansion had become. She hadn’t been back either, but she’d been told by several of her decorating clients that the school rented out for weddings, and with enough flowers and a good event decorator, it could look very pretty for an event. Seeing it again gave her some qualms, but at least the location had some meaning for them, especially since she and Alex had been married there. Ruby said she loved the idea. Zack was game for whatever they found. Neither he nor Ruby had an enormous number of friends, and they thought they would have about a hundred and fifty guests, maybe two hundred. The school appealed to both of them, for its historical ties to Ruby’s family.
“Shall I make an appointment to see it?” Eleanor asked Zack and Ruby one night when they had dinner with them, and Ruby said she’d love to. They wanted to get married in the fall, and were thinking October, which was when her grandparents had gotten married, too. Working out the wedding plans had suddenly superseded her search for a job, and she had decided to wait until the first of the year, after their honeymoon and the holidays before she got back to serious job hunting. They wanted to find a place they both loved for the wedding first.
Eleanor was surprised by how easy it was when she called the school. She thought she’d have to explain who she was, and what they had in mind. They had an events coordinator who handled the frequent rentals. The woman told her it had become a very popular venue for weddings, and they even had a brochure, which they sent her in the mail. It listed the prices, the packages, the available spaces, and the rules. When Eleanor studied it, she saw that the ballroom was almost unchanged. They used it for all school assemblies, the brochure said. Weddings were confined to the reception floors. The upstairs bedrooms were all classrooms now, and didn’t lend themselves to parties. But the grand staircase could be used for the bride to make an entrance if they wished. It was strange for Eleanor to read the brochure, and bittersweet when she saw the historical photos on one page, showing one of the grand parties of the past, which Eleanor recognized instantly as her coming out ball, with all the footmen standing at attention in the front hall, holding trays of champagne as the guests arrived. It gave her a pang of nostalgia to see it.
“Will it be too hard for you if they have the wedding there?” Alex asked her afterward, with a tender look.
“I don’t think so. Bittersweet perhaps, and nostalgic certainly. But I think it would mean a lot to Ruby. She is fascinated by our history.” His wife smiled at him. “And I like the idea of her getting married in the same house we did, even if everything is changed, and it doesn’t belong to us anymore.” But many things were still the same. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Camille had no interest in any of it, and Ruby does and is very attached to our family history. Maybe that kind of thing skips a generation,” she mused.
“They’re very different women,” Alex said quietly. “Ruby is much more like you. Camille wanted to forge her own path, and it led her to disaster.”
“I think Ruby has always been afraid she’d be like her mother. She said that to me once. But she’s nothing like her. Ruby is as conservative as we are, and she loves all our old traditions.” Their daughter had been gone for twenty-two years, and losing her still made them sad. Ruby had been an enormous consolation to them, and a lovely, easy child. They had never had any problems with her. She had never rebelled against them, and had always been close to her grandparents.
The day Eleanor and Ruby went to see the house, Zack decided to come with them. He was in awe of the beauty of the house the moment they