The Time of Her Life Read online

  Lily continued to gaze at him in frank appraisal of his earnest brown head, his pleasant and familiar face. She tucked her arm through his and moved them along down Church Street toward Stradler’s clothing store. “Of course I’ll marry you, Robert. I’ve always thought I would.”

  In May of 1913, Robert returned from Boston, and, in late June, Warren traveled back from a branch office of Scofields & Company in Pennsylvania to serve as Robert’s best man. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 28, Warren stood next to the groom in the oppressive two o’clock heat of Leo Scofield’s garden and looked on placidly with a polite air of expectation.

  Lily’s mother had arranged for the prelude and wedding music to be performed by a string quartet and a singer from the College of Music of Cincinnati, and although the strings were muted by the heat, the soprano’s voice was vivid. Lily’s five attendants and the two flower girls, sprinkling rose petals from a basket they carried between them, made their way along the shady aisle beneath those tall trees and emerged blinking in the sudden dazzle of sunlight in the garden, proceeding in traditional hesitation step along the freshly raked gravel path dividing the rows and rows of chairs set out upon the grass.

  One by one they arranged themselves across from the groomsmen on the other side of the trellised arbor where huge, clumsy-seeming bumblebees drank from the throats of the trumpet flowers, causing a little uneasiness among the bridesmaids. Robert’s father stood directly beneath the arbor, smiling solemnly, ignoring the bees, and waited to perform the marriage ceremony.

  But when Lily emerged on Leo’s arm from the shadows of the fervidly blooming catalpa trees, Warren startled visibly, lifting his hand and splaying his fingers across his chest. His gesture expressed not only surprise but dismay, and it appeared to a few of the onlookers that Warren hadn’t believed until that moment that it was a marriage that was about to take place. It caught the attention of the assembled guests particularly, of course, because Warren was playing out a role that generally fell to the groom. It was Robert, though, who grasped Warren’s arm to steady him. Nevertheless, just for a moment Warren’s attitude was stripped bare of any pretense, as if he were a man who had lost any possibility of comfort in the world.

  Lily saw nothing of that momentary drama. But Warren had been taken unawares by this clear bit of evidence that his youth was over. That he and Robert and Lily had become adults. It was the moment when he understood for the first time—grasped the clean, severe truth of the fact—that the three of them had become who they had become, and from now on the association of their youth would be relegated to nostalgic musings and remembrances. It was the first moment that Warren looked back at the years of his childhood and thought that they seemed to have flown by so fast.

  Lily stepped from the filtered light into the blinding sunshine, her hand resting lightly on Leo Scofield’s arm, so that she paused for a moment when he did while he waited to get his bearings in the bright day. For just an instant while she hesitated alongside her father she had a cursory glimpse of the waiting bridal party. She caught the gleam of her cousin Warren’s fair hair in juxtaposition to Robert’s darker head, and a hazy, amorphous happiness clarified itself in one swift thought before she stepped forward once again: Here we are together. The three of us. Here we are again at last. And then she remembered to move forward with care in order to accommodate her heavy satin train. She considered the next step and then the next, her mind fully concentrated on her progress. But in those few seconds, that fragmentary passage of time, she had satisfied herself that Robert Butler and Warren Scofield were both hers once again and ever after. And everyone looking on had seen—just during that tiny hesitation as she had stepped from the shadows into the sudden, shimmering, metallic illumination, in her pale dress and with her yellow hair—that Lily was as shocking and slender and brilliant with potential as the blade of a knife.

  It was one of those singular moments that is seared into a collective sensibility. In that instant when simultaneously Lily stepped into the garden on her father’s arm and Warren Scofield clutched his heart, there was a redefinition of Lily. That day in 1913, at just a little past two o’clock in the afternoon, on Saturday, June 28, Lily accumulated real consequence in the town of Washburn. Within the blink of an eye she acquired a reputation for possessing unparalleled charm and remarkable, if unconventional, beauty. It was the very same moment, of course, that Warren Scofield was privately acknowledged by many of the wedding guests to have suffered a broken heart.

  “Riveting…. An austerely, exquisitely beautiful book…. Dew’s sophistication is matched by her ability to keep the reader glued to the page.” —DAN CRYER, Newsday

  Claudia and Avery Parks, lovers since high school, are now in their thirties. Intelligent, charming, sympathetic, they seem to be the ideal couple, the perfect dinner-party guests, almost everything people should be—except responsible. They are casually yet cruelly oblivious to the ways in which their words and actions affect other people, most particularly their talented eleven-year-old daughter, who suffers the misfortune of being treated by her parents not as a child but as an equal.

  “A writer with a special gift for charting the subtle tidal flow of emotions that make up daily life…. Mrs. Dew can convey, with a skill matched by few writers today, the quick, peculiar shifts in feelings that we experience, moment to moment, day to day…. In The Time of Her Life, she uses this ability to map out the ambiguities of the Parkses’ marriage, and to show the devastating consequences that this unstable alliance has on their daughter.”

  —MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times

  “A powerful and disturbing book about a family gone wrong.”

  —ANNE TYLER

  “Without sentimentality or bitterness, Robb Forman Dew portrays the feral, stray, sly motives wriggling through the foundations of the American home…. Once Dew starts up her story, nothing can stop it.”

  —JUDITH MOORE, Los Angeles Times

  Robb Forman Dew is the author of three other novels—Dale Loves Sophie to Death, for which she received the National Book Award; Fortunate Lives; and, most recently, The Evidence Against Her—as well as a memoir, The Family Heart.