A Special Providence by Richard Yates

Author:Richard Yates [Yates, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 0099518635
Publisher: Picador
Published: 1969-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

If Scarsdale was, as Sterling Nelson had promised, an isolated pocket of prosperity, the town of Riverside, only a few miles away in the Hudson Valley, was an isolated pocket of grandeur. It was like no place Alice had ever seen before, and she knew at once that she wanted to live there. It would change her life.

It wasn’t really a town at all, or even a village, but a colony of handsome dwellings built as close as possible to the high-walled borders of a great private estate called Boxwood. Both the estate and its careful environs were the work of a self-made Wall Street tycoon named Walter J. Vander Meer – a man whose eagerness to erase his own beginnings on a small Missouri farm had made him seek to establish a new dynasty here, among the ghosts of the colonial Dutch whom he believed, on slender evidence, to have been his ancestors.

He had spared nothing in creating Riverside: he had equipped it with two tasteful churches, Episcopal and Presbyterian; he had made certain that its Riverside Country Club would have the finest golf course in Westchester County; and had taken considerable pains over the founding of Riverside Country Day School, on the high marble panel of whose main hall were engraved the words:

MANNERS MAKETH MAN

But the full flowering of his zeal had gone into the creation of Boxwood. Its grounds were a marvel of professional landscaping in that every vista was pleasing to the eye – wide, rolling lawns, tall trees, rich hedges, and deep gardens. In addition to a number of servants’ quarters and guest cottages, there were four substantial homes intended for the families of his four sons, and all the winding roads and pathways led eventually to the high ground on which he’d built his own mansion, which might have been named Boxwood Manor if it hadn’t always been called “The Big House.” All the tall western windows of the Big House, and the marble-flagged esplanade beneath them, commanded a majestic view of the Hudson, a view only partially blemished by another and more famous Big House less than two miles upriver in which more than a few of Walter J. Vander Meer’s early business associates had spent their final days: the squat, ugly structure of Sing Sing Penitentiary.

Vander Meer had died of old age and bewilderment soon after the Crash, but enough of his millions remained to ensure a long and sound survival for his aristocratic widow, his progeny, his Boxwood, and his Riverside.

“Isn’t it something?” Maude Larkin inquired, moving through the summer breeze of the esplanade with the proud and stately tread of a pathfinder, and Alice had to agree, in something close to reverence, that it certainly was.

They paused to rest against the balustrade, and Maude Larkin said, “See? Those are the Palisades. That big one’s High Tor, the one Max Anderson wrote the play about. And look here—” She called Alice’s attention back from the mountains and away from the intermediate hulk of Sing Sing; she was pointing to the balustrade on which their forearms rested.

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