The Gilder
The
GILDER
KATHRYN KAY
KENSINGTON BOOKS
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Gilder
-
HUDSON RIVER VALLEY, 1993
Part One
-
FLORENCE, 1977
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
Part Two
-
HUDSON RIVER VALLEY, 1993
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
THE GILDER
Copyright Page
For mothers and daughters everywhere
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to:
My agent, Meg Ruley; my editor, John Scognamiglio; and everyone at Kensington Books who worked on bringing this book to fruition.
Nancy Thayer, for introducing me to Meg and for her continued support and wisdom.
The members of my Nantucket writing group, for listening to this story as it evolved, and for their ongoing encouragement.
My workshop students, who inspire me with their honesty and courage.
Ariel, for being the best daughter a mother could have, and for being my first and most faithful reader.
Ted, for his invaluable technical support and for his part in creating my darling Elsie.
Tyler and Blakney, for showing me just how wide a heart can open.
Robert, for having faith that I would one day finish this book, and for loving me in spite of how long it took.
The Gilder
HUDSON RIVER VALLEY, 1993
I
t wasn’t unusual for soccer practice to run late, but Marina couldn’t shake the sense of uneasiness that had hovered all day. From the window, the road was all but invisible under a canopy of gold and russet oaks. Marina strained to see beyond the end of the drive, as if she could conjure Zoe’s appearance, but all she saw were leaves spiraling down and tumbling across the lawn into the thorny arms of a rosebush. She checked her watch again and then turned away to stoke the wood stove.
Slipping her hand into the ragged, patchwork oven mitt, she grasped the iron handle on the front of the stove, turned it smartly to the right, then dropped the mitt.
“Shit,” she muttered, shaking out her hand. She then folded the cloth in two and tried again. Thin as it was, she didn’t have the heart to throw the mitt away. It had been a birthday gift from Zoe, one of her first attempts at sewing. At age nine, her daughter had come to the realization that knocking boys down on the soccer field was not the best way to gain their friendship or affection, and had turned her attention briefly to the more feminine pursuits of cooking and sewing before realizing that her heart belonged to soccer and not to the boys. Now, at fifteen, Zoe was still passionate about soccer, but boys seemed to be ever more evident on the periphery. Time would tell.
Where was Zoe? Why was she feeling so damn anxious?
Marina leaned away from the heat of the glowing embers as she wedged two pieces of split oak into the cast-iron box. It had taken a couple of winters to get the hang of heating the studio she’d set up in the small, white clapboard chapel adjacent to her house. Before mastering the art of stoking and airflow, she’d worked layered in sweatshirts or stripped down to nearly nothing. Today, she wore a light cotton shirt and blue jeans under her coverall. Sitting back on her heels, she gazed into the flames, their smoky scent evoking thoughts of pumpkin pie and mulled cider, reminding her that Thanksgiving was just around the corner.
Marina straightened up, pressing her thumbs into her low back, and after a quick glance out the window, made herself return to her workbench. Her muscles protested as she bent to examine a corner of the massive frame. Although she’d designed the workbench to raise and lower, a certain amount of bending was unavoidable. She’d tried sitting on a stool, but it limited her range of motion and inhibited her rhythm. Besides, she was hard-pressed to make improvements on anything she’d learned during her apprenticeship in Florence all those years ago. She brought her face closer to the freshly gilded area and squinted. No, not a rip in the gold leaf, just a trick of the light. This stage of gilding was a welcome relief after the many hours of painstaking repairs, surface preparation, and application of the gold leaf. She picked up an agate-tipped burnishing tool and began to move it in a circular motion across the surface of the frame, her mind relaxing as the gilded leaves melded into a smooth surface, concealing any signs of the damage beneath.
At the sound of a car door, Marina hurried back to the window. Down at the bottom of the drive, her soccer cleats slung over one shoulder, Zoe waved to the Volvo station wagon just leaving the driveway. Marina lifted her hand to wave, but Zoe headed for the house without so much as a glance toward her mother’s studio. Marina sighed and turned back to her work. Granted, teenage girls could be moody, but Zoe had done nothing but sulk since Marina told her that, no, she could not accompany her to Florence, where she was to give a lecture on restoration. She’d cited missing school as the reason, but in truth, she didn’t know how she was going to cope with returning to the place she’d run away from all those years ago, and taking Zoe along would only complicate things. When she’d received the invitation to make a presentation at the conference, her immediate reaction had been to decline, but an event hosted by the Uffizi Gallery was not one to be passed over lightly, and in the end, prestige had won out over her reluctance to revisit Florence and the memories it held.
The click of the gate latch, followed by footsteps on slate, penetrated Marina’s thoughts. She looked up but kept her hand in motion as Zoe entered through the arched doorway at the far end of the studio. She had a sandwich in her hand.
“How’d practice go? How come you are so late?” Marina asked.
“It went good,” Zoe replied through a mouthful.
“
Well
. It went well.”
“Whatever.” Zoe pulled a stool out from under the bench and slipped onto it as Marina turned the frame a few degrees and continued working. Zoe finished her sandwich in silence.
“You know, Mom, I’ve been thinking.” She paused, and then rushed to the end of the sentence. “You really
should
take me with you to Florence.”
Marina’s hand faltered for a second as she continued burnishing the gilt. Without looking up, she said, “You have school.”
“I know, but you said you’d take me to Florence one day.”
Marina put down the tool. “And I will, sweetie. But
not
this time.”
Zoe’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “I have to go with you. I
need
to know more ... more about my dad.”
Marina looked at Zoe, who was studying a glob of dried gesso on the workbench, picking at it with her thumbnail. “What, exactly, do you want to know, Zoe?” She tried to keep her voice neutral, but her constricting heart gave it an inevitable edge.
“Just stuff. I want to see where you guys lived, your special picnic spot, stuff like that.”
Marina gripped the edge of the table. “I’ve already told you everything.”
Zoe lifted her head; her gray eyes, so like her father’s, sparked against her mother’s blue. “No, Mom, you
haven’t
. You never really tell me
anything!
”
Marina pushed her hair off her face with one hand. “Look, Zoe, it’s hard for me... .”
“Hard for you? What about me?” The stool wobbled as Zoe stood up abruptly.
“Zoe, I ...”
“You try not having a father. See how you like it!” Zoe spat the words at Marina and spun on her heel.
“Zoe, wait!” Marina called after her as Zoe ran the length of the workshop, yanked open the door, and disappeared into the dusky light.
Marina sank onto her stool, following the sound of her daughter’s feet across the paving stones to the house. The back door slammed. It had been so much easier when Zoe was little. She’d answered the tell-me-about-Daddy question with: “Your daddy liked to take pictures of people,” or “Sometimes I helped Daddy with his pictures,” or “Daddy is watching you from heaven. He loves you very much.” As Zoe got a little older, these platitudes became: “Your father was a well-known portrait photographer,” or “Sometimes I modeled for your father or helped him in the darkroom,” or “It was a terrible motor scooter accident.” The year Zoe turned twelve, her curiosity faded, seemingly displaced by nascent adolescence, but evidently it had merely lain dormant in her psyche, waiting to resurface.
The question now was how much of that story to share with Zoe. How much did Zoe really need to know about Thomas? He was her father, he was dead; couldn’t they just leave it at that? And then there was Sarah. It was impossible to talk about Thomas without talking about Sarah. Zoe already knew that Sarah had been her mother’s closest friend during that year in Florence; did she need to know more than that? Did she need the whole truth? After so many years of denial and lies, Marina wasn’t sure she even knew what the truth was, let alone how to explain it to her daughter.
Part One
FLORENCE, 1977
CHAPTER 1
M
arina felt the train ride in every limb as she hefted her backpack onto one shoulder and headed down the deserted platform. It was close to midnight. The tears she’d fought earlier that day blurred her vision as she headed for the exit in search of a taxi. Her plan of arriving in the safety of daylight had gone awry when she boarded the wrong train in Milan and, instead of arriving in Florence, had ended up in a tiny station somewhere on the coast. Her dream—of speeding through flat fields dotted with whitewashed farmhouses and cypress trees, of turreted towers and terra-cotta roofs in the distance, the red dome of the cathedral rising from their midst—had been reduced to a black nightscape dotted with blurred pinpoints of light.