The Benedict Bastard (A Benedict Hall Novel) by Cate Campbell

the dark, crying for her favorite son. And he, Preston Benedict, as cold-hearted a bastard as was ever born, felt sorry for her. He even grieved for her.
    It was ludicrous.
     
    In the year Frank had lived in Benedict Hall, he had never seen the door standing open to the big bedroom at the front of the house, just across from the one Margot had occupied before their wedding. It mystified him at first, an airy front bedroom with all that space, an attached bath, two tall windows facing the park, all of it sitting empty.
    His own boyhood home, the ranch house where his parents still lived, had only three bedrooms on its cramped second floor. Until he went to college, he and his parents and the ranch hand had used an outhouse set thirty yards from the back porch. The building of an attached bathroom hadn’t taken place until the summer after his freshman year. It occasioned a lot of talk and laughter in the community, but after a few neighbors tried it out, imitators sprang up everywhere in the Bitterroot Valley.
    His and Margot’s rooms at the back of Benedict Hall were luxurious by contrast. From their windows they had a full view of the garden. Often, when the clouds parted, the shimmering silhouette of Mount Rainier hovered on the horizon in white-shouldered glory. There was a private bath, a sitting room that was almost as big as the small parlor on the main floor, and an enormous bed of black cherry, shipped around the Cape in the previous century. Before he and Margot returned from their wedding journey, someone had covered it with a wedding ring quilt and smooth, new, white sheets.
    Benedict Hall was a lively place. The servants lived on the third floor. The family occupied the second floor. Margot’s old room was kept ready for guests, dusted and cleaned, the windows opened frequently, the bedding aired often. Only that one bedroom at the front of the house remained always empty, its door closed. Edith Benedict forbade anyone to go into it except the maids, and then only under her supervision, and he knew Margot worried over that symptom of her mother’s obsession.
    “He’s never coming home, Frank,” she had said, the night she explained about the closed bedroom. “But everything in that room is just the way he left it. Once a month or so it gets dusted and swept, but Mother watches the maids as they do it so that everything is put back where he wanted it.”
    “Have you talked to her about it?” They had been relaxing in their sitting room, Frank with the Times spread out on the small coffee table, Margot with a medical journal in her lap.
    She closed the journal, and idly smoothed its cover with her fingers. “No. I’m not the right person.” She gazed out toward the dark garden and the glimmer of light from Blake’s apartment above the garage. “Mother can’t talk to me about Preston.”
    “She must know about him by now. What he’s done. What he is. ”
    “You would think so. I’m sure Father has tried to make her understand. I’m not sure if she listens.”
    “What about Dick?”
    Margot’s lips tightened at the corners. “It was always different with Dick. I’m sure Mother cared for him well enough, and he’s always done what was expected. He wasn’t a girl, obviously, so Mother didn’t need him to be—well, feminine.
    “She wanted something different from me, some interest in clothes, hairstyles. I passed up a debutante year in favor of getting myself into the University as early as possible. I was a terrible disappointment, I’m afraid. Dick tried to help, but—when a parent has a favorite, I suppose sometimes there’s nothing anyone can do.” Her shoulders hunched in a way he recognized, a gesture that appeared when something hurt her. He closed the newspaper, ready to go to her, to soothe the pain, but she drew a deliberate breath and straightened. She gave him a quiet smile. “It was all a long time ago,” she said. “I should be over it by now.”
    Frank said stoutly,