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I’ve always prided myself on not looking back. Whenever something unpleasant has happened in my life, I have tried to deal with it and then forget it. Move on. Friends are always harboring grudges—I never do. I always figure that the present moment is the important one. Who cares if someone has slighted you, or worse belittled you? Life is full of promises, so let’s get at it and see what the next one will be. When I was a young actor in a television series in Hollywood, I had the privilege of acting in a “special” with the great actress Katharine Hepburn. One day in rehearsal, she came over to me.

“I heard you say you live above the Strip,” she said.

“Yes, I do,” I replied, overwhelmed that she was talking to me.

“Well I do too,” she said, “you can ride home with me if you like.” I was thrilled, and each night after rehearsal I climbed into her battered car that was driven by a nondescript man who looked like anything but a chauffeur. She had no airs and wanted anonymity away from her performing. She was such a legend. I just sat beside her afraid to say a word, hoping she would talk about her films and her director, George Cukor, and her lover, Spencer Tracy; but instead, as we drove from the Valley into Beverly Hills, she kept pointing at houses, really mansions. “I could have bought that one for fifteen thousand dollars,” she’d say. Then she’d point to another one, “I could have had that for twenty-five thousand.” And so she’d recount deal after deal that she hadn’t done and how much it would have made her. One of the most important figures of her time and she was still thinking about the wrong choices she’d made years before. I took it as a lesson, and remembered it years later as my friends would bemoan not buying a Basquiat painting for a few thousand dollars that was then worth millions. Out with the past. I decided that’s the way I’d live my life. And I’ve succeeded pretty well. That is, maybe, except for Sylvia. But I had just about stopped asking myself why she disappeared, and whether or not I was to blame, when today, all my resolutions about the past faded away. It all came rushing back like a sudden wind that makes every leaf on a tree tremble.

I had driven into New York for my weekly attempt to see agents who handled writers, trying to get an early look at a book I would be able to make into a movie. I wanted to jumpstart my career as a movie producer but I was getting nowhere. The money I’d made when I was an actor was gradually being eaten away. I was afraid that I would have to sell my house in the country that I had promised my wife, before she died, I would always keep. I was facing the dilemma of the aspiring producer: you can’t get a film made unless you have a property a studio wants. But you can’t find a good property unless the agents will give you one. And most of the agents didn’t take me seriously. They only knew me as an actor and must have figured I’d get over my determination to be a producer and go back to acting where I belonged. All of them must have thought that I was the last person who could get a deal at a movie studio. Well, they were right about that one.

I went from office to office, as if I were back to my early days as an actor “making the rounds,” looking for work. I’d scheduled appointments, but it turned out that the agents only offered me properties that I knew had already been turned down by Hollywood. Maybe I was in the wrong city. Friends on the West Coast said I should be there where the action was. I just couldn’t leave the small town where I still felt close to Hope—where we’d been so happy together. I told myself, anyway, the literary world is in New York, not in Hollywood. It was almost time for me to drive back to Connecticut and avoid the rush hour, but first I thought, I’d just drop in on Flora. Maybe she had something for me—a book by a young writer that hadn’t been seen yet by the studios. Flora Roberts was a leading literary agent, and she had been helpful to me in the past. She loved to talk and, usually when I went to see her, she would stop what she was doing and tell me stories about the stars she had handled and her liaisons with famous men. She was in her seventies with bright dyed red hair and a figure that was the result of endless noshing (as she called it) when she was watching rehearsals of her clients’ plays. She was hardly a sex object, but her charisma made everything she said about her former exploits seem absolutely true. Her office was high up in a building near Carnegie Hall. There was a small reception room with a secretary who sat in front of a wall of files. She said “hello” and immediately announced my name over the intercom and waved me in. It was always a shock. After the noise and bustle of the city, I walked into a quiet living room with two huge stuffed sofas and chairs covered in a patterned yellow linen. There was a sideboard with a tray of decanters and glasses. Colorful paintings of flowers made it all seem like a country room in my little town. There wasn’t a sign of any work being done except for a telephone on a coffee table in front of Flora, who was seated on one of the deep-buttoned plush sofas. I bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said, peering at me through her huge glasses. “You look tired. Are you sick?”

“I’m not sick,” I replied, “I’m just frustrated. I’ve had a terrible day. I must have seen every agent in the business.”

“That would be enough to make anyone sick,” she said. “It’s not a pretty group. Sit down and tell me about it.”

I sank down into a soft armchair opposite her. “Flora, I’ve tried and tried but I just can’t find any good material that a studio will buy.”

She put up her hand before I could continue, “First, you can stop kvetching. That’s not going to get you anywhere. You must be looking in the wrong places.”

“I’ve looked everywhere. No agent will give me anything, unless it’s already been turned down by a studio.”

“Listen,” she said, “remember, I’m an agent. I know nobody’s going to help you, you’re not bankable. But I have an idea. I’m going to give you some advice out of one of your ‘golden oldie’ movies that you’re always quoting from: it’s the scene in Imitation of Life where Ned Sparks tells Claudette Colbert he’ll give her two words that will make her a fortune.”

“Oh I know that one,” I said, “Claudette’s making pancakes in a diner and Ned says, ‘I’ll give you two words that will make you a lot of money: Box it,’ and she becomes a great success in pancakes like Aunt Jemima. So what do you want me to box?”

“The two words I’m giving you,” she replied, “are not ‘box it’, but write it.”

“Write what?” I asked.

“There must be something in your life that you know better than anyone else, or some experience that could make a movie.”

“But I’m not a writer,” I said. “That television idea for the series you sold for me was just a few lines. Besides, my life isn’t that interesting.”

“You are a writer,” she interrupted, “at least enough of a writer to put some ideas together. Do an outline and you’ll get a screen writer to develop it. I’ll give you one of my writers, but first you have to find the idea and write a premise. So my two words to you are ‘write it.’ You’ll come up with something. Remember, when you’re rich and can afford to buy a fancy yacht, I was the one who told you what to do. Now get out of here. One of my authors has a play opening off Broadway tonight, and I have to go home and get glamorous.”

As I drove back to Connecticut, I thought about what Flora had said. I knew she was right. I had to be the instigator of my career, no one else was going to do it. I wouldn’t get a telephone call that would change my life. Everything was going to go along as it had, unless I did something. But what? Write? Write what? Where was the idea? Was there anything interesting in my life? My childhood in Pittsburgh was nothing special. The years I spent at Julliard were filled with acting classes and stumbling affairs that never went anywhere. Writing about acting in a sit-com for five years would be as boring as it was to wait in a dressing room for hours to finally be called to do a scene. I can’t go through my wife’s battle with cancer. And living in Connecticut, in Still River, hardly lent itself to anything exciting. And then a tiny voice inside me, that I didn’t want to hear, said, “Sylvia.”

Sylvia. That’s certainly a story. Or at least it would be if I could ever find out what happened to her, and why, one day, she just vanished. I’m sure she’s alive. People have seen her – always at a distance. It’s a mystery. What was the hidden reason that made her disappear? I’ve always felt somehow responsible, but I’ve never been able to figure out what happened that day in London—three years ago—when I last saw her. I wonder if by discovering Sylvia’s story, I could find the movie I’m looking for.

I hardly noticed the time passing as I thought of Sylvia. It was dark when I reached Still River and the few shops were closed. As I turned onto the dirt road where I lived, still thinking about Sylvia, a huge deer came leaping out of the woods right in front of my car. I jammed on the brakes just in time to save both our lives. I sat back and forced myself to relax for a moment. What a close call, I thought. I’m not superstitious, but I do believe in signs. I immediately wondered if I was being warned that pursuing Sylvia was dangerous. Or, on the other hand was I being told that if I did find Sylvia, it would give me a new life? Well, one way or the other, I decided then I would try to find her.

A storm had swept up from the Caribbean past the Carolinas. The noise of the rain hammering at the wood shingle roof, like a flock of woodpeckers, woke me in the night. I was startled by the pitch darkness. I thought for a minute that the bulb had burned out on the nightlight, but after I turned on a lamp and nothing happened, I realized the electricity was off. The generator didn’t reach to my bedroom so I walked to the kitchen, where it did. I flipped a switch and the room was flooded with light. What a relief it was working. Still River was in the middle of nowhere and sometimes days could pass before the power company repaired whatever had happened. I looked at the clock; it was still the middle of the night but I was wide awake. All I could think of was Sylvia. I started for the stairs to go up to my computer to see if there was any mention of her, but I realized the electricity would be off there as well. I forced myself to put her out of my mind or I’d never get back to sleep.

In the morning, when it was still too wet for my daily walk in the woods, I went up to my study at the top of the silo, sat at my old partner’s desk and tried to think of how to begin my search. I had made an attempt to find Sylvia once but without any success. Why should it be easier now? Maybe then I’d been too angry and had given up too easily. This time it would be different. What could have happened to her? Maybe the thing to do was to go back to the beginning and look for clues. There must have been signposts along the way that I wasn’t aware of then, or maybe I was too taken in by her to see them. Something had to have gone wrong. Sylvia seemed to have a perfect life: the perfect eighteenth-century house in the perfect New England town with money and friends and even what had seemed, at one time, to be a perfect relationship. But either it was all a sham or something happened to make it turn to ashes and force her to run away from everything, even from me.

I heard about Sylvia long before I met her. I was on the West Coast sitting in a tiny office, in the Writers Building at Warner Brothers. The room was probably no different than when Faulkner and Fitzgerald were working there on movie scripts in the forties, except that now it was 2003 so I was sitting at my laptop, not at a typewriter. I had gotten a development deal for a movie at Warners, and now I was trying to rescue a script that I was afraid the studio would turn down. It was called Starlets, and was about young girls going to Hollywood hoping to break into the movies, but finding themselves forced into sex and drugs by men who pretended to be important agents. I thought a woman would be perfect to write it since she could really get into the character of the girls who dominated the story.

The script was terrible. The writer had stolen from every movie about young actresses, even copying Lana Turner’s drunk scene in one of my favorite golden oldies, Ziegfeld Girl. She thought no one would remember it since the film dated to the beginning of World War II. Little did she know that I had studied the history of the movies and had watched every old film on Turner Classic Movies since I was a kid. Since the studio wouldn’t put up any more money, I was trying to rewrite it myself. I had written a few things when I sat in my dressing room on the days I was acting in Family Values. I was desperate to get the studio to rubber stamp the Starlets picture, but the script was unfixable. I sat for hours staring at the blank screen hoping for some inspiration, and my only relief would come when a friend called to see how I was doing. But when my cell phone rang this time, I got a totally unexpected call.

“Hey Judd, I tracked you down. It’s Stuart Chase,” he said, “you won’t believe where I am.”

“Good to hear from you, Stuart,” I replied. Stuart Chase had been one of the most important “suits” in the movie business. I had read that he had left Twentieth Century Fox and retired, so what was he calling me about?

“I’m in Still River, Connecticut, at the bottom of the hill looking up at your house,” he said. “Betty Burnham, the real estate agent told us where you were and that, since you’re doing a film, you’re thinking of renting and that it might be perfect for Lady Sylvia and me. Can we take a look at it?”

I had thought about renting my house, to at least pay for the maintenance, when I had hoped to be away filming the movie, but the bad script had changed everything. “Stuart,” I said, “I’d like nothing better than having you as a tenant, but this picture doesn’t look like it’s going to happen so I’ll be coming back home sooner than I planned.”

“Well,” he replied, “that’s the bad news and the good news. The good news is we’ll be able to spend some time with you and you’ll get to know Lady Sylvia. We love your little town, and we’re determined to find something here.”

I hung up promising to find the two of them through Betty Burnham the minute I returned home. I had bought a house in the quiet New England town when I was doing well in Los Angeles, and Hope and I wanted a weekend hideaway, for her, from her busy life in advertising in New York, and for me, a place for the two of us to vacation when I wasn’t filming my series. The townspeople couldn’t care less that I was a television actor, and it was a great equalizer for Hollywood, the company town I had to work in where everything was about movies or television. But I wondered if Stuart moved to Still River if he would bring all of the show business life that I was so happy to leave behind me when I returned home. Would I now have to hear about how much money every movie was making when I bumped into Stuart at the hardware store? Would Stuart’s friends, who must include big movie stars, be changing the one horse town into paparazzi heaven when they visited? And what about Lady Sylvia? What would she bring with her? I had read about her: she was the ex-wife of the brilliant British film director Sir Richard Royce. The gossip was that Royce had only married Lady Sylvia, who’d been his mistress for years, in order to be knighted by a Queen who didn’t approve of a man and a woman living together without being married. Once he got the title he wanted so badly, he dumped her for someone else and now she was with Stuart. Well, if Stuart did find a house near me, it would bring a great deal of excitement and glamour to our little town. I was comforted by the knowledge that New England had its own way of absorbing all sorts of people, and never losing its Yankee values. The simplicity and the beauty was what had drawn Hope and me there in the first place.

Finally, in May, the studio said they were no longer interested in Starlets so I took off for Connecticut. Even though I still had a house I had bought in Beverly Hills when I was making money on my TV series, I never stayed there. It was for sale. The mortgage payments were eating up too much money. I didn’t need a house in Hollywood. No matter how much time I spent there, it wasn’t my home.

There had been an unusual amount of rain that spring, and when I got back, the countryside was as green as England and every flowering tree was bursting into blossom. I’d hardly had time to put the groceries in the refrigerator when the phone rang. It was Stuart Chase. “Betty Burnham told us she saw you at the market so we knew you were back. We were going to call you on the coast, but we decided we’d wait and surprise you. We’ve bought a house and we’re already in it.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, “it takes months to close on a house. How could you do it?”

“The woman died and we were able to get it from the estate before it went on the market if we paid cash and closed immediately.”

“But where is it?”

“It’s Mrs Carter’s house on Pin Oak Way,” Stuart replied. “Do you know it?”

“Wow,” I said, “that’s in the historic district. I’ve always admired it as I drove by. It’s a gem.”

“You won’t believe the inside: eighteenth-century and hardly touched. We’re ecstatic. Betty Burnham has been amazing. She arranged the whole thing.”

“That’s really terrific,” I said, “It’s looks like such a beautiful house.”

“Then Judd, when will you come to see us and meet Lady Sylvia?”

“Stuart,” I said, “I’ve just gotten here. Just give me a couple of days.”

“Then what about Saturday? Come for a drink while it’s still light so you can see everything and we’ll go to The Pilgrim Inn for dinner.”

Stuart already knew the best restaurant in town, but then there weren’t that many choices in Still River. “Perfect,” I said.

“You know how to get here?” he asked.

“Of course,” I replied. “What time?”

“Six?”

“Done.” I hung up the phone. Mrs. Carter’s house was one of the few real landmarks left in town. It was a classic, built late enough in the eighteenth-century so, I thought, it must have big rooms, high ceilings, and many fireplaces. I was eager to see it and I wondered what Lady Sylvia would be like, probably a faded beauty.

III

Saturday was a glittering day, almost hot in the sun, but cool when you were in the shade. I spent most of the afternoon trying to clean up twigs and branches that the harsh winds of the winter had scattered everywhere. My back felt really ragged, so I was more than ready for a drink as I pulled up in front of the handsome white colonial. Stuart came bounding out of the house looking just the same as he did when I used to bump into him in Hollywood. He had made no concession so far to life in the country. I was in jeans, but he wore beautifully tailored slacks and a leather jacket that must have cost thousands. His hair and beard were perfectly groomed. He had an aura of confidence and success. “Welcome,” he said, as he opened the car door, “you’re our first guest and we’re thrilled.”

“So am I,” I said, “and the place looks great.” I handed him a loaf of French bread I’d gotten at the local eatery and a small shaker of salt. “These are for good luck and a happy home.”

Stuart embraced me as if we were old friends. “Lady Sylvia is in the apple orchard,” he said, “so let’s go through the garden before we take you inside the house.”

He led me along a path lined on both sides by perennials that were just sticking up their heads after the fierce winter. I was sure it would look like an illustration from an English garden book in a few weeks. As we rounded a corner of the house, the apple orchard came into view. There were rows of apple trees all laid out like ranks of soldiers lining up for a parade ground drill. Each tree was covered with white blossoms and at the end of the path, between the trees, sitting on a bench, was Lady Sylvia. With the spring blossoms above her head, she looked like she was posing for one of the old movies I had collected. My first thought was that she had chosen this setting to make an impression. But she certainly wouldn’t have wanted to impress me. My second thought was how young she was. She seemed to be in her early thirties, a couple of years younger than me, but half as old as Stuart. I had expected a much older woman since I’d heard she’d been with Sir Richard for a number of years. She was a beauty. From under a man’s straw hat, a mane of auburn hair fell loosely to her shoulders. It hung down like a waterfall around her face, framing her green eyes and British porcelain skin. She was wearing tweed pants, a man’s white shirt with long sleeves sparkling with silver cuff links, and a suede vest with turquoise buttons. She looked like she’d just come back from tramping the moors. I’m not sure I took all this in at that moment, but it is ingrained in my memory, so that now, after all these years, I can easily bring it back.

“This is Lady Sylvia Royce,” Stuart said as if he were announcing a dignitary’s arrival at a state dinner.

She got up and walked over to me with an outstretched hand. “I’m so happy to meet you Judd.”

I took her hand, it was cool and soft. I looked into her eyes and for a moment she looked directly into mine and then quickly turned away. It made me feel like she was hiding, as if I would find out something about her unless she avoided my look. How weird, I thought. And with all her glamour, why would she want to be in the little town of Still River?

“Stuart has told me that you know a great deal about old houses.” She spoke with what actors call a mid-Atlantic accent that sounded like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. “This one reminds me of the houses on the crescents in London. I always wanted to live in one. We’re just novices, so we’re anxious to hear what you think about what we’re doing.”

Obviously, Betty Burnham had given Stuart details about me. She loved filling in newcomers about any prominent resident. Most of the time, she just boasted of how much money they had—whether they had it or not. “I’m hardly an expert,” I said, “I took a few courses in Colonial architecture—I admire these old houses and what they tell us about the past.”

“Let’s go inside,” Stuart said, “and we’ll give you a drink.”

We left the dazzling light of the apple orchard and walked inside to the eighteenth- century. Stuart immediately hit the light switch. “These old houses are so dark, they never have enough windows,” he said. “Now, what will you drink? I’ve just opened a bottle of chardonnay.

“Perfect,” I replied.

After he poured the wine into over-sized glasses, we began the tour. Several of the rooms were paneled and the present living room, which originally must have been the kitchen, had old beams in the ceiling and the huge fireplace where they had once done the cooking. The rooms in the rear of the house had an expansive view of hills and what Stuart said would be the new garden. My enthusiasm was not feigned. They were doing everything right. I did have the feeling that Stuart had made all the decisions. Lady Sylvia said almost nothing. She seemed rather haughty, and I kept thinking of a film clip I had once seen of Princess Margaret walking through a crowd in a poor area of London trying not to get her clothes dirty by brushing against anyone. Lady Sylvia was equally stiff and I thought rather grand.

Most of the house was still in the process of being furnished so as soon as we’d finished the tour and the glass of wine, we headed for the nearby Pilgrim Inn. A wealthy, as well as tasteful, couple had bought and renovated the old building. It was now a Ralph Lauren fantasy of a great inn in England. You had the feeling that when you stepped outside, your groom would be waiting with your horse, saddled up and ready for the hunt.

We had a table in the bar close to a gas-burning fireplace. Leather English pub chairs and old movie posters brought warmth along with the fire; and the wine, as we began to drink, didn’t hurt our feeling that all was right with the world.

“Tell me what happened on the Coast,” Stuart said when we were settled.

“Oh I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times,” I replied; “The script wasn’t any good and they immediately lost faith in the project. I don’t think that anybody ever read it. The reader must have given them a report that said to ‘pass.’”

“You’re probably right. When I was there, so many projects just got lost in the shuffle. Everything is big blockbusters now and the small film has a really rough road. Are you going to try another studio?”

“No point,” I said. “I’d gone everywhere before Warners bought it.”

“There’ll be many others,” Stuart said. “Don’t you just love this place? We seem to come here almost every night.”

Lady Sylvia didn’t join in the conversation. She was even more distant than she’d been on the house tour. I thought it might be my fault for only speaking with Stuart, so I turned to her. “I’m sure you’ll be eating much more in your house when it’s finished.”

“Oh no,” Stuart said, “Lady Sylvia never learned to cook.” He seemed to talk for her, almost as if he were her interpreter. She hardly spoke. I continued drinking chardonnay, but Lady Sylvia covered her glass when I tried to give her some. She asked for Perrier while Stuart switched to burgundy with dinner making a great show out of swishing the wine around the goblet, inhaling the aroma, rolling some on his tongue, and finally drinking.

The conversation was mainly about movies and books, with some inside stories from Stuart who seemed to have known everyone. At one point Stuart asked me about my career before the sitcom and whether I’d done any stage work.

“I did some summer stock,” I said, “and I did a season at a Shakespeare theater.”

“You must have been very good,” he said.

“To tell you the truth, I was so young I kept getting into trouble.”

“That’s intriguing, how so?”

“I was so eager, I wanted to do everything.”

“What could have been wrong with that?”

“It’s embarrassing. You don’t want to hear it.”

“I do,” Stuart insisted.

I looked at Lady Sylvia whose face was as impassive as ever. “Alright,” I said, “I haven’t thought of it for years. Well. Julius Caesar was the first play of the season and I asked to do three roles since they were small and in three different acts. On opening night, I did my part in the first act and then changed my costume and was killed in another role in the second act.” Stuart nodded while Lady Sylvia looked bemused. “I then went to my dressing room to get ready for my role in the third act. We had never been able to have a dress rehearsal so, as I changed my costume, I had no idea how much time I had to get ready. Suddenly, I heard the stage manager screaming my name, “Judd, Judd, you’re on!” But I wasn’t dressed yet so I couldn’t go onstage. It was the scene in the play where Brutus asks two soldiers to sleep in his tent since he was having nightmares. He called for them and only one appeared since I was still in my dressing room. The soldier who was there was an extra who had no lines. To make it worse, the actor playing Brutus never really looked at anybody, he was afraid it would break his concentration. So he thought I was there and said, “Both of you, sleep in my tent.” This one guy lay down on the floor. Then Brutus had his bad dream about Caesar and woke up the soldiers still thinking I was there. “Did either of you see anything?” he asked expecting my answer. When there was no reply since I wasn’t there, he zeroed in on the extra, “Well did you see anything?” The poor extra didn’t have any lines so he just stood there. Brutus, quite confused, went over to a stool and sat down. Unfortunately, the stool collapsed and the critic the next day wrote that the actor playing Brutus was obviously drunk.”

Stuart laughed. “Did they fire you?”

“No, the actor playing Brutus never realized what had happened and no one blamed me since we had never rehearsed the costume changes. But I did become the butt of many jokes.” I noticed that at least Lady Sylvia reacted to this with a slight smile.

When we got to dessert, Stuart told a much funnier story about his early life in Jersey City. It seemed his father, a used car dealer, had traded one of his cars in order to get a brother for Stuart that his mother couldn’t have. Stuart’s eyes, behind his glasses, twinkled when he got to the end. Lady Sylvia laughed out loud, quite different then her reaction to my story. She never took her eyes off Stuart. It almost seemed as if she were spellbound.

I kept asking myself what Lady Sylvia saw in Stuart. Although he was rich and accomplished, he was so much older. I remembered things I’d heard on the grapevine about him. He had started as a page at NBC in New York and after that had gotten a job at an advertising agency. In no time, he was an executive in the film division of one of the biggest Hollywood studios. It was just a few more years before he took over the studio completely. He was worshipped by young directors and producers, giving chances to artists who were untried. Many times their films struck out, but every once in a while, one of them hit and made big bucks at the box office with a small investment of money. He got credit for the hits and quickly swept the flops under the table. He became the best friend of several of the top director-producers in the business, like Lady Sylvia’s ex-husband, Sir Richard Royce, and, as a result, they always brought their projects to him. Thinking about his stunning career, I couldn’t help but ask, “Stuart, why did you leave Hollywood? You were at the top of your game.”

There wasn’t a moment’s pause. “I’d had it,” he said. “I woke up one morning and realized that nothing was going to be any different, every day was going to be the same. I’d probably get bigger bonuses every year, and I might even get a few good pictures made along with all the schlock super-hero sequels, but I wouldn’t get to read the books that I’ve always wanted to read, or write the novel that has been in my head for so many years, and I’d only see Lady Sylvia in the evening, and at that, we’d probably have to go to some industry dinner. I figured I had enough money for us to live well and travel, so what the hell. Why not? And I wasn’t getting any younger. It wouldn’t be that long before I’d have to retire, so I handed in my resignation.”

“How did you happen to come here?” I asked.

“Lady Sylvia and I looked all over the world for a place to live as far from Hollywood as possible. We went to Tuscany, Ireland, England, Nantucket, you name it. And then, Lena Phillips, a writer friend of mine who lives here, I’m sure you know her, told me about Still River and the rest is history. We fell in love at first sight.”

I kept watching Lady Sylvia out of the corner of my eye. She was gracious and smiled occasionally, but I kept feeling she wasn’t with us. She was somewhere else. I wondered if she thought I wasn’t important enough to warrant her attention. I didn’t like that feeling, and I began to resent her. Was she really in love with Stuart? Why did he keep referring to her as Lady Sylvia? Did he call her Lady Sylvia when they were in bed? She had an odd habit of pushing back the hair on the left side of her face and cupping the ear with her hand. She reminded me of a Victorian statue, that was titled “Patience,” I’d once seen in a garden, of a woman sitting on a pedestal, leaning her hand against her cheek much as Lady Sylvia was doing now. They both seemed to be waiting for something. My hobby of collecting old movies popped into my head: this time it was Walt Disney’s early animated film of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I could see Snow White sitting by the wishing well singing, “I’m waiting, I’m waiting, for the one I love, to find me, to find me, one day, one day.” Was it possible that Lady Sylvia’s air of composure meant that she was waiting for something? Was it to find love? Was Stuart not the one? What difference did it make to me? I couldn’t care one way or the other. She didn’t contribute anything but her beauty and that didn’t add much to the conversation. I thought she’d turn out to be heavy furniture, but Stuart and I might become friends. How often I had liked just one half of a couple and put up with the other. I guessed I’d have to do that with Stuart and Lady Sylvia. What was her problem? I wondered. Well, it’s no concern of mine.