Emma was able to move the short distance to Mr. Knightley’s Donwell Abbey, having fulfilled her promise to stay at Hartfieldas long as Mr. Woodhouse needed her. She and George would in quick succession have five children, one more beautiful and cleverer than the next. Though not a grandmother by blood, I became one out of tender devotion.
Happiness has freed me to recognize Miss Austen’s kinder words, the ones describing Miss Bates as “a mine of felicity… a standing lesson of how to be happy.”
Compliments, yes, but heard by me as an overdue apology.
Mr. Woodhouse reminds me I am a vicar’s daughter. In the spirit of forgiveness, and with a healed full heart, I can wish Miss Jane Austen and her mostly beautiful words a fitting success.
The Bennets of Jane StreetADRIANA TRIGIANI
“What say you, Mary? for you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts.”
Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
Jane Austen,Pride and Prejudice
As Mary Bennet knelt, she tried not to plunge her head too deeply into the cavern inside the cabinet under the sink because dark places in the old house gave her the creeps. She avoided the basement and crawl space under the stairs for the same reason.
Mary wore a headband with an LED light to illuminate the leak in the main pipe. It was the same safety headband her father used when walking the dog through the streets of Greenwich Village at night. Mrs. Bennet insisted her husband wear a light because he had taken a tumble on the cobblestones and wound up black-and-blue. “You never look where you’re going! You’re absentminded!” she chided her husband at the time.
When Linguini, their beloved puggle, died of old age soon after, Mrs. Bennet was less anxious about her husband falling because he no longer had to walk the dog. She could keep an eye on her husband indoors. (The new battery in the headband outlasted the old dog.) Mary assumed her mother would soon find something else to nag her husband about; for now, there was peace in the village.
As Mary directed the beam of light, she observed that the plumbing grid was a mess, a clutter of too many pipes, some open-ended copper tubes sticking up from the floor, others welded into weird, animal-cracker shapes. She groaned. Typical Bennet family repairs—nothing more than patch jobs. Decades of them. Mary unspooled a swatch of duct tape, made a tear at the top with her teeth, and ripped it from the roll. She carefully wrapped duct tape around the hole in the pipe as if dressing a wound on a battlefield.
Mary had decided not to tell her father about the leak because he’d just feel bad that they couldn’t afford a plumber. Besides, atthirty-three years old, she needed to be able to fix whatever was broken. Mary had to be the adult in the family. Her four sisters and their husbands lived outside the city, close enough in case of an emergency, yet far away enough to relieve them of the day-to-day responsibilities of busted pipes, a leaky roof, and their demanding mother.
Her sisters had married and dispersed to the suburbs outside of New York City and beyond. Lizzie and Darcy had moved to Westport, Connecticut; Jane and Bing to Montclair, New Jersey; Kitty and Clem lived in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; while Lydia recently moved to Waterford, Virginia, with her second husband, Ethan, a career army guy. Her nieces were small (it turns out that all-girl families turn out all-girl families, at least in the Bennet crew). They gathered together once a year during Christmas. The holiday visits were fun but a tremendous amount of work for Mary, who prepared the house and the meals. Mary didn’t complain; after all, she reasoned, her sisters needed a break at holiday time.
Mary was also left behind to care for her parents in the crumbling old house, but to her it was a palazzo. She saw nothing but potential in the sun-soaked rooms with peeling plaster and cracks in the ceiling where the house had settled. The black-and-white-checked marble floor in the foyer was a reminder of the grandeur of another era. The chandeliers, dripping with crystal daggers and strands of beads, were antiques, and despite missing pendants here and there, the overall effect remained dazzling, especially at night. Mary cleaned the crystals with a soft cloth and vinegar so as not to loosen the metal hooks. The parlors were spacious, dark wooden beams on the floorboards, the rooms stuffed with a collection of mismatched styles of furniture that together somehow worked. The Louis XIV chairs and settee were originally coveredin pale green velvet, but the fabric had faded to a dull gold. Mary imagined the current patina was every bit as lovely as it had been when it was new years ago.
A crazy-quilt hodgepodge of books, some with jackets missing, others penciled with notes, most with dog-eared corners on their pages—a canon of all genres, colors, and sizes—were jammed into a pair of glass-front chimney closets in no particular order. The closets anchored the black marble fireplace in the back parlor. Their beloved children’s books, including Karla Kuskin’sThe Philharmonic Gets Dressedand Syd Hoff’sDanny and the Dinosaurwere wedged between Montaigne’sEssaysand an almanac collection that went as far back as 1942. Mary loved nothing better than choosing a random book and taking a day off to read in the velvet chair, under a bright lamp with a pot of hot coffee and her specialty, chocolate-caramel brownies, close by to snack on. Reading and eatingà deuxnever disappointed Mary Bennet. It shored up her soul.
The piano, a Steinway concertina, with a veneer as shiny as black patent leather, was tucked in the front parlor, between the windows that faced the street. Her father had acquired the piano from an ad in theVillage Voiceand given it to his wife on their wedding day in 1980. The piano had a story—a Wall Street banker, addicted to cocaine, sold off his belongings in a fire sale, making Mr. Bennet the beneficiary. The piano had a past, and Mary believed it made the music sound sweeter.
Mary left her sheet music in stacks on side tables and chairs. She would play whenever she had a few minutes. She taught piano lessons to students three days a week and found it exhausting. Organizing the annual recital was so taxing it nearly put her in the hospital, but when it was over, she felt a sense of accomplishment that she experienced nowhere else in her life. She enjoyedcomplaining about her students and their families, even though they were her bread and butter. Mary had to admit, as much as she identified with her father’s calm nature, like her mother, she had bought more than one ticket to the emotional roller coaster. Restraint was the goal, though Mary did not ever meet her own standard. Despite her shortcomings, there were things that brought Mary joy.
A cup of sharpened pencils balanced on the nearby windowsill. When Mary wasn’t teaching, she wrote plays. HB Studios was a two-minute walk away, which made it convenient for Mary to take playwriting classes. She had been trained over many years by Donna DeMatteo, a stellar playwright who encouraged Mary’s work. Mary’s ideas were nurtured by DeMatteo, something she lacked from her upbringing. The dark rehearsal space, lit by ghost lights, was her church. If HB Studios was Mary’s place of worship, the family homestead was her factory. The scent of chalk and paint were the perfume of her creativity.
Mary had everything she needed on Jane Street to teach music and write plays, with plenty of space to wander when she chose to procrastinate. Throughout the day, she followed the sunlight up the five floors, to work and do her chores. There were two spacious rooms per floor, front and back, and three bathrooms—one on the second floor, where her parents had a bedroom and dressing room, and one on the third floor, where she endured with the faulty pipes and used to live with her sisters. A third powder room on the parlor floor had not been operational in fifty years. It was on Mr. Bennet’s to-do list, but so far, renovation had not been done.
The sun rose on the front rooms and set on the back of the house. Mary never looked at the clock—there was no need—she followed the light. In this way, she was one with the familyhomestead. Old houses were idea factories, or at least they were to Mary Bennet. History had a way of speaking to her through wallpaper and paint, though she doubted anyone would understand her feelings.
The middle of five sisters, Mary assumed the role of the maiden aunt with an ease that can come only from resignation. Her fate was never to marry and to be of service in a different way, one that relieved her sisters of responsibilities. Mary was destined to take care of her aging parents and the house that went with them. Her mother had signs of early dementia, but Mary couldn’t remember a time when her mother, even when she was young, didn’t have a version of it. It seemed to Mary that everyone in her family was in denial about her mother’s emotional short-circuiting, fluctuating anxiety levels, and sporadic forgetfulness. Mary assumed there was some depression afoot, because Mrs. Bennet had recently begun to take to her bed more often than she got out of it. Mr. Bennet knew when he married his wife that he had made his bed, and until further notice, they would lie in it together until the end. It was the kind of love that endured because of the sheer numbers. They had five daughters together and seven granddaughters. It was a family held together by girls and their velvet ribbons.
Mary’s father had worked on and off as a freelance journalist through the years, and once in the 1980s he sold a book proposal that was sure to change the Bennet family fortunes, but it didn’t. The book didn’t sell, even though it was quite good. “And that’s that,” his wife said at the time, more disappointed at the failure than the author. When it came to finances, Mr. Bennet’s single lucky break came in real estate. His parents left him Number 10 Jane Street, though it was not a straight inheritance, as it was encumbered by debt. The specifics of the debt had always been murky, and it didmean that the old house with the leaky pipes, shoddy electrics, and old windows on one of the most enchanting blocks in New York City would not be renovated by Mr. Bennet due to lack of funds.
The Bennets raised their daughters in Greenwich Village, which they could ill afford if the house had not been an inheritance. But as it goes with families, gifts often come with strings. There was debt on the building to the Collins family, Mr. Bennet’s cousin, which her father assumed without complaint. Working and living under stressful financial circumstances was a Bennet family trait, like their predisposition for flat feet and adenoids. Her father believed, no matter what, it was his role to soldier on and hold on to the house.
Mary wished her father was not beholden to the Collins family. Surely they would allow the Bennets to remain in the house for as long as they lived, but it caused a deep sense of insecurity. Owning a home meant freedom from the tyranny of the landlord, a luxury the Bennets had never known. They would always be renters from the Collins family, who waited for Mr. Bennet to die so they might swoop in and sell the place. The reality of the bad deal, struck before Mary was born, made her shudder.
Mary’s phone buzzed. She had propped it on the nearby toilet lid like a photograph in a frame, in order to follow the YouTube repair video. She banged her head as she pulled it out from under the sink. She cursed under her breath and tapped the screen.
“Mary Bennet?”
“This is she.” Mary squinted at the phone, which said in big letters: BLOCKED CALLER. “May I ask who is calling?”
“Tsk. Lady de Bourgh, of course.”
“Oh, Ms. de Bourgh! Forgive me.”
