“I still can’t really believe we’re doing this,” I say on Saturday morning.
“Sitting in a living room, drinking mint tea?” Margaret teases, eyeing me through the steam lifting off the mug in her hands. “Alice, dear, I think you should aim higher.”
She sits in the rattan chair across from the sofa where I’m perched, all the windows flung open and the smell of sun-warmed greenery drifting in toward us every time the wind blows, broken up by the occasional burst of brackishness from the marsh behind her property.
“Are you kidding?” I say. “This is my Everest. After this, I’ll be ruined for celebrity profiles. I’ll have to retire early or, like, get really into fixing up old cars or something. I honestly didn’t think you’d agree to this.”
“Then why’d you go to all the work of tracking me down?” she asks.
I shrug. “I had to try, at least.”
She gently sets her mug on the glass-topped table between us, a curious gleam in her blue eyes. “Do you remember what you said? In that last voicemail you left me, before I finally called you back?”
I shake my head. I’d called so many dozens of artists selling work on small islands in Georgia before a post on the Not-So-Dead Celebrities message board pointed me to Little Crescent, and plenty more even once I’d homed in on the right island. They’d all denied being Margaret Ives, which I figured couldn’t exactly rule them out. But she was the first to hang up as soon as the question was out of my mouth.
I hadn’t called her back for a week. I’d been too afraid she’d block me right away. When I finally did, she sent my call to voicemail, and I left a short message, explaining who I was and why I wanted to talk to her.
I made myself wait three more days, and then I took one last swing: another voicemail, this one more an impassioned pitch than a question, because at that point, I was already sixty percent convinced I’d found the right person. She’d called me back nine days later and I’d almost thrown my phone out the window of the cab I was in, trying to answer it as fast as possible.
“Honestly, it’s a blur,” I say.
She says, “You told me you cried when you heard that Cosmo had died.”
My face burns. “Did I really? God, I’m sorry. That was inappropriate.”
She cracks a smile. “Inappropriate? I didn’t think so. Curious? Exceptionally, seeing as how my husband had to have passed away at least thirty years before you were even born.”
I set my mug aside. “Yeah, but I only found out right around my seventh birthday. My dad was a big music guy. He always used to listen to Cosmo Sinclair when we were making dinner. Hearts on Fire was my favorite.”
“A great album,” Margaret says proudly.
“When I turned seven, my parents let me have a birthday party. But my sister and I were homeschooled back then and didn’t have many friends. So when my mom asked me who I wanted to invite, I said, ‘Cosmo Sinclair.’ And my parents, they just gave each other this look. Like, Oh no. They never lied to me. That was their policy. So when they made that face, it usually meant they were about to tell me bad news. So that’s how I found out. And I was so sad about it.”
“Sad that you’d never meet him?” Margaret says.
“Sad for Peggy,” I say. “That was my favorite song on the album. ‘Peggy All the Time.’ And I don’t know, I just knew it had to be true. That you couldn’t write a love song like that if you hadn’t found a once-in-a-lifetime love. And I didn’t want her to have lost the person who gave her that.”
Her gaze falls to her lap.
I wonder if I should stop, if I’m pushing too early on something too sore. But she’s the one who brought it up, and if I’m going to be a witness to her story, I want her to know that I understand.
I clear my throat. “My parents were both journalists. And all they really read was nonfiction. Serious stuff, about politics and climate change and sociology. Stuff I had no interest in. But there was this one book my dad bought at a garage sale. An unauthorized biography.”
Her eyes slice up to mine, and I swear I see something behind them close up, shutting me out. I understand why. But I keep going anyway: “The Fall of the House of Ives.”
She stares at me, shoulders square, a pleasant and unconvincing smile hanging around her mouth.
“You were my dad’s dream interview subject,” I explain. “He mostly did political stuff, and you’d already stopped doing interviews way before he started reporting. But he loved your story, yours and Cosmo’s, from his songs. And he always felt like there was so much more to it than what the press wrote about it.
“Anyway, even before I could read, I loved looking at the pictures in that biography he bought. I loved all your clothes and your shoes and your hats. You were so glamorous and my life had no glamour whatsoever. But it wasn’t just that. You always looked…not just happy, but like you were delighted by the world. The rest of your family, they looked so serious and secretive, but you were just you. Bright and bold and full of life. Especially in the photos with your sister, and with Cosmo. And then when I got older, when I could read it…I hated that book.”
A quiet laugh leaps out of her, her gaze softening. No, glistening. Her blue eyes have dampened, her lashes inky and dramatic.
A small laugh escapes me too. “Turns out my dad hated it too. He just didn’t want to tell me and ruin it. But there was nothing to ruin. It was all conjecture and judgment and—and recycled tabloid headlines. There was this one line, in the chapter about your courthouse wedding, where Dove Franklin wrote that a body language expert suggested you were—”
“Marching Cosmo to his death and he knew it,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t just that they didn’t believe he wanted to marry me. They also blamed me for what happened to him. My family’s cursed, if you haven’t heard.” A shred of a heartbreaking smile flutters over her lips again.
I’d been planning to paraphrase the quote rather than lob it at her like a grenade. But hearing her say it outright leaves me feeling like my chest has been pierced. I swallow hard. “I looked at that picture, and I didn’t understand how I could see something so different.”
Her jaw muscles flex, and after a long beat, she says, “And what did you see?”
“I saw him trying to shield you,” I say, “from everyone around you. And realizing he couldn’t.”
She blinks several times, her gaze dropping to her lap again.
For a moment, we’re both silent. She clears her throat.
“Sorry,” I say softly. “I didn’t plan to start with anything quite that heavy.”
“I asked,” she replies, with a fragment of a shrug. “You answered. That’s how interviews work, as far as I remember.”
“Yes, but I’m not the one being interviewed,” I remind her.
A bit of wryness seeps back into her half smile. “Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s only fair that I get to know you and Hayden too, if I’m going to be trotting out the family’s map to all the buried bodies.”
“And just to clarify,” I say, “when you say ‘buried bodies,’ are we talking literal or metaphorical here?”
Her laugh is damp, but when she speaks, her voice is sure, clear, and bright again. “Why not both?” She leans forward over the table, where both my phone and my backup voice recorder are running, and enunciates clearly, “Let the record show that I winked.” Which she does.
I lean forward too. “She did,” I agree, “and then she dragged a finger across her throat like she was threatening me.”
Margaret hoots out a laugh as she sits back into her chair. “So where were you thinking we’d start?”
“The beginning,” I say. “I want to know what it was like to be born an Ives.”
She takes another sip of tea before returning her mug to its place on the table, right between my phone and my recorder. “I’ll be honest: When you told me you found me online, through those conspiracy theory websites, I figured you’d walk in here and kick off this interview with, Margaret, did you have Cosmo cryogenically frozen to be revived at a later date?”
“That is a popular one,” I agree.
“So Jodi tells me,” she replies.
“You never go looking?” I say. “To see what people are saying?”
She snorts. “You obviously didn’t grow up in a family like mine. The trick is to try not to see what they’re saying.”
“I think it’s safe to say no one grew up in a family like yours,” I point out.
“No, I suppose not.” Her eyes drift to where my bag sits at my ankles, and her head cocks, recognition writing itself across her face as she spots the book jutting out of it. “Can I see that?”
I half expect her to start tearing pages out of it and ripping them to shreds. But if that will help her feel comfortable opening up, so be it.
I pass The Fall of the House of Ives to her, and for several seconds, she flips through it in silence, her expression stern, until finally, a chortle leaps out of her, surprising me so badly that I jump in my chair.
She shakes her head to herself. “It’s funny. My family was one of the first to figure out that it isn’t news that sells. It’s headlines. Half the time, people don’t read a word past those big, splashy letters, and even if they do, the nuance isn’t what they’ll remember. It’s the simple version that sticks. Simple and salacious, that’s the winning combination.”
“Clickbait,” I say, “before the advent of clicking.”
“More or less,” she agrees. “That’s what my family used to make themselves very rich—and like Dove Franklin says, powerful too. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re the one to build the monster, you’re never going to be able to control it. It’ll gladly eat you alive and floss with your bones, once it’s finished with everyone else.”
My chest squeezes as some of the crueler headlines I’ve read about Margaret and her family cycle through my mind. Her younger sister, Laura, had especially suffered at the hands of the press, during her preteen years when she’d put on some weight and gotten an unfortunate haircut—normal kid stuff that seemed so much worse when you juxtaposed her with her glamorous and austere family on red carpets and at ribbon cuttings and attending every other manner of highly publicized event.
Margaret, on the other hand, had been the media’s darling. Until she wasn’t.
“It must’ve been strange,” I say, “growing up with all that attention on you.”
She almost smiles. It just barely reaches the corners of her lips but goes not a millimeter further. “No one knows how ‘normal’ or ‘strange’ their own life is until they see the alternative. Life in the House of Ives was all I knew.”
I must be making some kind of face, because one of her brows hooks sharply upward. “Whatever you’re thinking,” she says, “you don’t have to worry about breaking me, Alice. I’m hard to shake.”
My chest pinches. Of course she is. No one person survives everything she did plus years’ worth of public rehashing of those sad and bizarre events without getting some grit, I’m sure.
“Noted,” I say, but I don’t push her to begin, even so. These interviews need to be a safe place for her. The only way to get a person’s full, unfiltered story is to let them tell it to you when and how they want. The best stories are born when the words slip effortlessly from a subject’s lips, rather than being painfully cranked out of them bit by bit.
She sets the book on the table, her shoulders squaring as she meets my eyes. “Okay, Alice. Let’s start at the beginning.”
And then she does.
