Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

“You’d look like a little kid dressing up in her mother’s clothes.” Kate winced at her faux pas, as if Lilli Chandler Pembroke had disappeared yesterday and not twenty-five years ago and all Dani’s wounds were still raw. It was a reaction Dani often received, even from her best friends. “I’m sorry-I know tomorrow won’t be easy for you.”

“Forget it. Actually, you’ve just given me an idea. I knew I could count on you. See Ira before you leave for a bottle of champagne. Your choice. You and your people will deserve to celebrate after pulling off tomorrow night.”

“Thanks,” Kate said. “Believe me, we’ll need to unwind. Your auntie’s a great big pain in the butt, if you’ll pardon my saying so-but she’s ever so sweet. Kills you with a look and twenty polite demands, if you know what I mean.”

“A Chandler lady never raises her voice.”

“No wonder you don’t fit in with that crowd.”

“Shouldn’t you be julienning zucchini or something?”

But Kate’s expression suddenly turned serious. “Dani, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

She smiled. “No.”

“Look-”

“It’s okay, Kate. I don’t know exactly why I’m going this year. It’s true my grandfather and I have maintained an undeclared cease-fire in the last few years-mainly by each pretending the other doesn’t exist. But it’s August in Saratoga, and I’m here. I can’t ignore that I’m half Chandler.” She paused. “Neither can my grandfather.”

Kate stared at her for a few seconds, then threw up her hands. “Go for a little dress. You’ll look great.”

Not long after Kate left, Dani headed to her attic and pulled the string attached to the naked seventy-five-watt bulb at the top of the steep stairs. The air was hot and musty, the rough wood floors crowded with old kites and abandoned projects, college textbooks on subjects she barely remembered taking and a thousand-piece puzzle of a castle in Germany she and Mattie had put together one rainy July weekend. There was a vase she’d made in the first grade from an old liquid-detergent bottle for Mother’s Day; she had no idea how it had landed in Saratoga.

It was an attic of memories, but most attics were.

Pushing past overflowing cardboard boxes, she knelt on the dusty floor in front of a huge old Saratoga trunk. It had belonged to her great-great-grandmother, the intrepid Louisa Caldwell Pembroke. She’d been a survivor. Just twenty when she’d married Ulysses, she’d never been a real part of the extravagance-the notorious capitalistic excesses-of Saratoga in the last decade of the nineteenth century. But she’d fallen in love with a gambler, had known Diamond Jim Brady, the onetime bellhop who’d become a millionaire, and Lillian Russell, the voluptuous singer whose cocker spaniel Mooksie had a collar made of diamonds and gold. Louisa had been in Saratoga when Joseph Pulitzer sent Elizabeth Cochrane-“Nellie Bly”-to the upstate spa to write her famous exposés for his New York newspaper. One had been on Ulysses Pembroke’s oddball, money-eating estate.

The Saratoga trunk was now a valuable antique. Train conductors had despised their curved lids because they made stacking them difficult.

Dani threw open the trunk. On top was the frayed, moth-eaten fox stole Mattie Witt had worn in The Gamblers . It’d probably sell for a fortune. Gently pushing it aside, Dani dug through layers of dresses, scarves, old shoes, gloves, crushed hats. Things from Mattie, things from her mother. She felt the tears on her cheeks and angrily brushed them away. She had no business crying. The past was the past. She’d carved out a niche for herself separate from the self-destructive Pembrokes, the celebrated Mattie Witt, the lost Lilli Chandler Pembroke. She’d moved forward with her life and had learned to live in the present.

She’d learned to stay out of attics.

Refusing to knuckle under to self-pity, she got on with her task.

Deep in the trunk, she found the dress.

It was red and sleek and perfect. Mattie had worn it in Tiger’s Eye, the movie that had transformed her from an overnight sensation into a star.

Dani dug even deeper and produced the ostrich plume.

Rolling back on her heels, she held it up to the dim light. I must be out of my mind. Dyed red to match the dress, it was an integral part of Mattie’s glamorous look. Dani had never in her life worn a feather in her hair.

It’s my Pembroke genes. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

And she couldn’t stop herself.

The plume was squashed from having been stuffed in the trunk, but otherwise in good shape.

Would anyone at the Chandler lawn party recognize it?

Oh, yes.

In her unforgettable scene in Casino, Lilli Chandler Pembroke had worn Mattie’s ostrich plume. Nick had said she’d meant it as a tribute to her mother-in-law, a symbol of independence and freedom to Lilli and to millions of women.

Maybe Kate was right, Dani thought, and she ought to dust off her checkbook and go to town and buy a dress.

If no one else recognized the dress Mattie Witt had worn in one of her most famous roles, the feather she and Lilli both had worn, the Chandlers certainly would. And they’d know-as perhaps Dani meant them to know-that it was yet another of her attempts to force them to confront their image of who she was. To remind them she’d always fight that image. To show them she was determined, and would remain determined, to be herself.

She closed the lid of the trunk and rose stiffly, then pulled the string on the lightbulb and carried the dress and ostrich plume downstairs. She got a hanger from her closet, shook the dress out and hung it on a curtain rod in the bedroom window. Perhaps the clear light of day would make her change her mind.

It’d have to be cleaned. And she’d have to buy shoes. Preferably red. No. Definitely red.

She could wear her gold key with it. Maybe the scarred old brass one, too.

Eyeing it, she debated. Had the clear light of day helped her change her mind?

Nah. It was a great dress.

As far as Zeke could tell, the Pembroke “experience” could be anything from quiet, healthy luxury with a nutty twist to something approaching marine boot camp.

He didn’t care. He just wanted his experience to be brief.

He’d been put in a small room on the third floor with twelve-foot ceilings, a window seat, rose-flowered wallpaper and a jewel-colored crazy quilt on a brass queen-size bed. There was a marble-topped dresser and a needlepoint-cushioned chair he didn’t think he was supposed to sit on.

There was no beer in the tiny refrigerator, just a six-pack of Pembroke Springs Natural Orange Soda. He opened up a bottle. It was clear glass with a pale green label featuring a kite floating above a stand of birches. What kites and birches had to do with natural soda Zeke didn’t even want to speculate. He took a sip. It wasn’t as syrupy as regular orange soda, but it was still soda.

He examined a brochure. If he wanted to, he could take hang gliding lessons, climb rocks or show up on the front lawn at the crack of dawn for a hot-air balloon ride. There were quilting bees on the “north porch.” Nature walks. Kite-making and kite-flying lessons. Tubing expeditions on the Batten Kill. “Handson workshops” in the many flower, herb and vegetable gardens. Zeke took them to be weeding sessions. He could soak in mud if he wanted to. Get scrubbed, clipped, polished, deep cleaned and massaged. He could jog. Ride a bike. Climb a mountain. Tour Saratoga. Go to the races. Shop. Take in a concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a lecture at Skidmore College.

He could, if he chose, pick wild blueberries and make his own jam.

Only a Pembroke could get people to pay good money to do something they could do for free. Did Dani Pembroke have her guests do their own sheets as well? Beat them against rocks like in the old days?