She realized that she and her parents were just as bad as the Whitmores. But she couldn’t do anything about it from this great distance. She fell into despair.
When work resumed a week after Ronald’s death, Benjamin was goal-oriented and swift in a way that suggested approaching burnout. Francesca watched him with bated breath, overheard his appointments with various members of staff, and listened as he talked to his father about all matters of receipts, new chefs, incoming diplomats, and celebrities who planned to spend the summer at the White Oak Lodge. But there was something anxious and pointed about everything Benjamin said, as though he wasn’t sure summer ever would come.
At the end of May, Francesca realized that Benjamin hadn’t spoken to, played with, or at all doted on their children since Ronald died. It occurred to her all at once, like a smack. Alone in the kitchen with the children, she burst into tears and clutched Allegra to her chest. At the same time, Lorelei and Alexander asked, “Mama, what is happening to you?” in adorable Italian. Their dark eyes were alive and glowing. She had half a mind to pack the four of them up and stay with her parents in Italy. Benjamin had left her alone emotionally, and she wasn’t at all sure he planned to come back. As she wept, one of the staff members of the Lodge went into the kitchen, ordered her to sit down, and made her a cup of tea. By the end of the workday, that staff member had quit the Lodge. Francesca guessed that she’d realized the depth of sorrow in the place and didn’t want to catch it.
But by early June, the White Oak Lodge was bubbly and alive, all its suites and rooms full of tourists, iconic figures, and wealthy folks from all over, here to indulge in the hotel's luxuries. Benjamin and his father, Charles, performed all the duties they were meant to and were careful never to bring up Ronald or what had happened. Because Ronald had never been a major player at the White Oak Lodge, had never schmoozed with any of the greats during his brief adulthood, nobody asked after him. Nobody remembered he’d ever been there at all. This, in particular, made Francesca feel insane.Ronald was here, and now he is not!was something she wanted to scream aloud to the heavens. He was my friend, and I loved him, but I didn’t know how to help him, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.
At the end of that first week, Benjamin collapsed on the grounds due to exhaustion and misery and a long list of other things so obviously wrong with him. A few people gossiped about it, so Benjamin was instrumental in making up a rumor that he and a celebrity singer had been drinking until all hoursof the morning, and that this drinking had led to the collapse instead. It was better to be wild and alive than to be weak and brokenhearted, especially in the eyes of the guests. He stayed in bed for four days, and Francesca did what she could to tend to both him and their children. She felt herself hanging by a thread.
Through all this time, nobody, save for that long-gone staff member, had asked her if she was all right or needed anything. To make matters worse, their regular babysitter quit out of nowhere, saying she’d found a job in the big city. Francesca begged her to stay. “My children trust you,” she said. But she soon realized there was no keeping the girl. She needed to get out of the miserable ecosystem that was the White Oak Lodge. Francesca wished she could go along with her, in a way. She wished she could be young and free and without sorrow again.
With Benjamin in and out of bed and only waking to tend to guest matters or help his father with something, Francesca was at the end of her rope. She put an advertisement in the paper for a new babysitter, someone who could come by once a day while Francesca caught up on housework and other menial tasks, but nobody answered her call. Francesca lost weight. She struggled to keep up with Alexander, who sped through the halls of the Lodge, screaming as though he had a vendetta against the world. Allegra and Lorelei were inspired by him, letting loose such cries that they were overheard on the opposite side of the grounds. Francesca wanted to cry with them.
Toward the end of June, another member of their staff quit: a young woman who was supposed to operate the front desk at the Lodge. Apparently, there at that very same front desk, she’d met a handsome and wealthy tourist and decided to elope with him. With nobody left to stand in for her and Benjamin so scattered that he wouldn’t manage to hire someone else any time soon, Francesca set herself and her children up behind that desk and performed the relevant duties. Tourists streamed in and out ofthe lobby. Bellhops wheeled suitcases, adjusted their little hats, and played games with Alexander when nobody was around.
It was six hours into her first shift that the wealthy LA-based father of a five-child family approached the front desk and accused the Whitmores and the White Oak Lodge of selling a “racket product.”
“We’ve been waiting all day for new towels!” he cried, smashing his fist on the front desk. “And the breakfast this morning was abysmal. I assume you didn’t eat it? You in your ivory Whitmore tower? But the rest of us had to suffer! I don’t suppose you know who I am?”
Unfortunately, Francesca had no idea who this man was. Benjamin would have slipped his name into her ear easily, telling her he was an elite businessman, banker, filmmaker, or what-have-you. But Francesca was knee-deep in the toils of motherhood and knew little about what other people called “the real world.” Rather than answer him with a prompt “I’ll find you those towels right away, sir,” she burst into tears. She felt Alexander tugging at the bottom of her skirt, picked him up, and burrowed her face in his shoulder. The tourist was so mystified that he backed slowly away from the front desk and returned to his wife by the pool, where Francesca saw them speaking in low tones, presumably about how insane she was.
She genuinely felt insane!
But the tears kept coming. Alexander, Lorelei, and Allegra joined her, weeping, and they formed a sort of musical collaboration that kept all the guests away. Francesca prayed that her father-in-law wouldn’t come in and find this mess. She prayed that Benjamin would never learn about how much she was failing him.
And then, out of nowhere, Jefferson Albright strolled into the lobby, picking up the pace when he saw what was happening. He scooped Lorelei and Alexander into his arms and orderedFrancesca to sit in the back office. “Relax,” he said, following her. “When was the last time you ate something? I’m going to make you some food.”
Francesca blinked at him. Besides the hired chefs in the Lodge, Francesca was the only person among them who ever entered the kitchen and made anything of value and taste.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Jefferson teased. “My mother taught me everything she knows.”
Francesca wet her lips. “Someone has to manage the front desk?”
Jefferson smiled. “I’ll have one of my stable boys come up. It’s hot in the stables today anyway. They’ll be fighting for a spot.”
Jefferson left Francesca with strict orders to rest and recalibrate while he tended to everything else. Within ten minutes, a stable boy of about twenty-two was at the front desk, fetching towels for the unhappy guest, giving advice to other tourists about where to eat and drink in town, and moderately flirting with the middle-aged women who walked through and waved. Who was this twentysomething? their eyes seemed to ask. Francesca laughed from her vantage point in the back office, marveling that Jefferson had fixed it so swiftly. Maybe the stable boy would stay at the front desk all season long.
When Jefferson returned with a massive bowl of pasta with a delightful red sauce, Francesca burst into tears again. Jefferson took baby Allegra in his arms and set her gently in the crib in the corner, then ordered Francesca to eat. Francesca’s hands shook as she twirled the pasta. She felt Jefferson’s eyes upon her, assessing her, and realized that since the night of Ronald’s disappearance, she’d hardly spoken with Jefferson at all. Those hours they’d shared on the porch as the storm that had killed Ronald had felt mystical to her, but also illicit and wrong. She knew Benjamin wouldn’t have liked it, although to her it feltlike two lonely people, talking about life as the world went on without them.
“You’ve been working yourself to the bone lately,” Jefferson said finally, raising his chin.
Francesca was caught off guard. She hadn’t thought anyone was paying attention to what a mess she was at the moment. “I’m trying to hang on till everything returns to normal,” she confessed. “But I don’t know if they ever will.”
“They’ll find a version of normalcy,” Jefferson said. “They always do. For better or for worse.”
Francesca’s heart pounded. “That’s the thing. I don’t want anyone to forget about Ronald. I want the Whitmores and me to talk about what happened. I want us to see it for what it really was, or is.” She swallowed, waiting for Jefferson to ridicule her or tell her she was being overly dramatic. He didn’t. “I worry that someday, something similar will happen to one of my children,” she said. “I worry that I’ll give up on them, or stop seeing them for who they really are, or fail them in some spectacularly terrible way.” She watched as Alexander revved a toy car across the hardwood floor, his face set with concentration. How she loved his earnest mind.
Jefferson clasped his hands. “You’re sweet for wanting that.”
“You don’t think I’ll ever get it?”
Jefferson heaved a sigh. “I’ve been at the Lodge since, what? March? But I think I’ve seen enough for me to say it’s almost impossible to demand the truth from a Whitmore. You and me, we’re not Whitmores, and it feels plain as day, especially when it’s just the two of us talking.”
Francesca’s eyes widened as she realized he was right. Sometimes she thought of herself and Jefferson Albright as two European creatures in an American world she couldn’t understand. “Are you going to quit?” she asked. “Everyone elsehas lately. The babysitter's leaving was particularly difficult to take.”
Jefferson’s face darkened. “You lost your babysitter?”
Francesca explained that she’d tried to find a new one to no avail.
