Roses (19 page)

Mary responded with the last white rose in the garden. It was bedraggled from the recent rain, but it would convey her message.
She sent it by Toby up the street to Warwick Hall with a note that read: “No need to ask forgiveness for speaking the truth
as you see it. It proves the irreconcilable differences between us. Mary.”

She expected him to roar up to the house or out at the plantation to refute her statement, but the Pierce-Arrow did not appear.
She heard from Ollie the next evening that Percy had gone out of town on business.

“Really?” she said. The news pierced her to the quick. They were chatting on the verandah after he’d spotted her sitting forlornly
in the porch swing after everyone had gone to bed, the loneliest time of the day for her. “He didn’t tell me.”

“No doubt with good reason. He’s heading to Oregon. The company’s bought timberlands there, and the loggers are causing problems.
They’re mighty tough customers, but Percy can handle them. He didn’t want to worry you, but I thought you’d like to know.”

Dear Ollie… ever the peacemaker between her and Percy. He had learned of their rift and must surely think his sacrifice had
been for naught. “Thank you,” she said. “I won’t look for him for a while, then.”

Bereft, she sat on the swing after he’d left. Two losses in one week, and there was no one left in her family to turn to for
solace. She recalled when Granddaddy Thomas had died. It was as if a wall of her house had blown away and a cold wind were
rushing in. After the funeral, her father had driven her out to the plantation in the late afternoon. It was almost picking
time, and the fields were a blinding white. She was eleven years old, and she’d thought she’d burst from her grief. Her father
had taken her hand, and together they had walked between the cotton rows, up one and down another, until the sun set. They
had talked, as always, of cotton. Never did he mention death or sorrow, but in their clasped hands, their feelings met, flowed
one into the other, and her grief was assuaged.

How she would like in this moment to slip her hand into her father’s.

The next week, she received a brief note from Lucy.

I’m thinking of reapplying for that position at Bellington Hall at the end of the school year if old Peabody will have me
back. As you may have heard (and predicted), Percy sent me packing the day after he came home. He is in love with someone
else, somebody he says he’s loved all her life. Do you know who she is?No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’d be eaten
up with jealousy. I imagine she’s all those things you told me he admired in a woman. I’m surprised you never mentioned her
to me so that I wouldn’t have misspent my dreams thinking there was a chance for me. You tried your best to dissuade me, though.
I’ll let you know my decision. In any event, I’ll probably not be seeing you again unless fate joins our paths. Best of luck,
Lucy.

Mary folded the note with a sense of guilt threaded with relief. Unless they married, it was unlikely now that her roommate
would ever learn that she was the girl Percy had loved all her life. Katie bar the door if or when she did. Lucy would believe
that she’d deliberately lied to her and—knowing Lucy—would live the rest of her life convinced she’d been betrayed.

Upon Percy’s return three weeks later, he sent a note from his office. Mary read it eagerly, thinking its purpose was to state
a time he’d drop by, but the quick scrawl was only to let her know he’d arrived safely and expected to be busy with sundry
business obligations in the weeks to come. Disappointed, Mary could not resist an ironic chuckle. Now Percy knew what it was
like to keep his nose to the family grindstone.

A few days later, his duties increased when Jeremy suffered a serious head injury. Percy was forced to take charge of the
company, overseeing interests now stretching into Oregon, California, and Canada. Even if they’d been seeing each other, Mary
realized ruefully, he would have found it difficult to find space in his days and calendar to coordinate with her unpredictable
routine. In a roundabout way, they’d been given the opportunity they owed themselves—the chance to see if they could live
without each other. Apparently, they could.

By the middle of November, things had wound down at Somerset. The fields were lying fallow under a blanket of snow, and the
tenants and Mary enjoyed a respite from their labors. She turned down invitations to the DuMonts’ and Warwicks’ for Thanksgiving
dinner, hoping her mother could be enticed downstairs to eat Sassie’s stuffed turkey, prepared with all the trimmings. She
refused, so Mary and Sassie and Toby shared the holiday meal in the kitchen and sent a tray upstairs.

Christmas proved as bleak and unfestive. Percy, who’d kept in touch through occasional notes (the Tolivers did not possess
a telephone), invited her to attend the Christmas ball at the country club, but she begged off, writing that she had nothing
to wear. “It wouldn’t matter if you wore a sack,” he wrote back, his script dark and strident. “You’d still be the most beautiful
girl there.”

In truth, she’d withdrawn entirely from society. She felt the weight of its judgment against her father for disregarding his
wife—and against her for not making it right. Descriptions of herself as working in the fields “like a field hand” reached
her ears. They angered and isolated her but strengthened her determination to restore the Toliver name to its former glory.

Meanwhile, she missed Percy sorely and wondered if that wasn’t his intention. He’d played this waiting game before. Was he
trying to impress upon her how lonely she was and how much she needed and wanted him? If that was so, it was working, especially
when she considered the paralyzing possibility that he might be seeing other girls.

A visit from Ollie forced her to agree to one small ceremony held Christmas Eve. “I won’t take no for an answer,” he said.
“Percy and I will drop by Christmas Eve with gifts and champagne. So dress up in your best party dress, Mary Lamb, and ask
Sassie to make some of her divine cheese crackers. Shall we say eight o’clock?”

Mary gave the order for the cheese crackers and decorated a small Christmas tree in the parlor. To prepare for the evening,
she manicured her nails and spent time soaking in a long, fragrant bath. She dressed in the dark green velvet gown she had
worn the night Richard Bentwood kissed her under the mistletoe, and with Sassie’s help, she coiled her shining, shampooed
hair into a party creation atop her head. She borrowed her mother’s pearls for her ears and throat, and when she inspected
the result in her mirror, she hardly recognized the girl staring back at her.

Neither did Percy or Ollie. “What’s the matter?” She laughed at their amazed faces when she answered the door. “Haven’t you
ever seen a girl in a party dress?”

Mary pretended to be unaware of their close observance of her through the exchange of gifts and champagne toasts—Percy’s expression
guarded and Ollie’s frankly awed. Feeling gauche and a little like a doe run to ground by two rutting bull elk, she avoided
their gazes from a lack of knowing how to handle the attention.

“Ollie, how thoughtful!” she exclaimed when she unwrapped his gift of a delicate silver pencil disguised as a handsome brooch.
“You remembered that I’m forever misplacing my pens.” She pulled the pencil on a retractable chain from its holder. “I’ll
be sure not to lose sight of this one.” She smiled at him and got up from her chair to kiss his round, rubicund cheek.

Percy’s gift was a pair of ladies’ finely sewn work gloves of buttery leather, dainty but durable. She flushed at their implication.
“How thoughtful of you as well, Percy, but they’re much too fine for what they’re intended.” A note was tucked inside one
of the cuffs, and she deliberately appeared not to notice it. She’d read it later, away from Percy’s disturbing scrutiny.

“Not for your hands,” he said, catching her eye in a way that made her heart leap as she bent to deliver the same reward she’d
given Ollie.

Her gift to Ollie was a volume of verse by Oscar Wilde, his favorite writer, and for Percy, a pictorial history of North American
trees. When the evening was over, she saw them both to the door, Percy seemingly not of a mind to stay behind for a private
word.

“Wish you were going with us,” Ollie said.

“Next year, perhaps.” She smiled, determined that they not sense her loneliness. They were off to Ollie’s, where Abel was
hosting his usual Christmas Eve party for friends and their families. It seemed so many years ago since her own family—her
mother swathed in fur and herself skipping along in a white fox muff and matching hat—had walked hand in hand to the party
and returned home singing “Silent Night” under the star-filled sky.

“We’ll hold you to it, Mary,” Percy said, and she found herself missing his nickname for her.

When they had gone, she leaned against the closed door for a few moments, listening to their male repartee as they went down
the steps. Then, despondent, she returned to the parlor, banked the fire, and took the remainder of the champagne to the kitchen,
where she poured it down the sink. She gathered her gifts and later in her room ensconced herself on her window seat to read
Percy’s note by the light of the moon: “For the hands I want to hold for the rest of my life. Love, Percy.”

Y
our mama wants to see you, Miss Mary.”

At her father’s desk, Mary looked up with arched brows from the ledger where she was calculating expenses and profits for
the coming year. It was the first of January 1920. “Mama wants to see me? What for?”

Sassie lifted her shoulders. “Don’t ask me, but your mama is sittin’ up in bed, pretty as a picture. She got herself bathed
this mornin’ all by herself, combed her hair, and tied it with a pretty blue ribbon. She wants me to dress her to come downstairs
after her nap.”

Mary rose with cautious hope from the desk, glancing at the clock on the mantel. If this was another game of her mother’s,
she really hadn’t time to play it. She must have her figures in order before meeting at noon with Jarvis Ledbetter, a neighboring
planter. But if her mother had turned a corner…

Mary marked her place in the ledger. “What’s come over her, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know, Miss Mary. Somethin’s goin’ on behind them yellow eyes of hers.”

“I don’t know what could be going on that we don’t know about. She’s been nowhere, seen no one in over a year. Did she get
a letter from Miles?”

“If she did, I didn’t take it up to her.”

Mary patted Sassie’s shoulder. “I’ll go see what she wants. Bring us up some coffee, will you, and didn’t I smell cinnamon
rolls a while ago? Put a couple of those on a plate, and maybe she’ll eat one.”

“You smelled ’em all right. I expect Mister Ollie by this afternoon, and you know how that man do love my cinnamon rolls.”
She chuckled, following Mary out into the hall. “He’s a man I sure wouldn’t mind cooking for. Mister Percy, neither, though
he don’t get the pleasure out of food that Mister Ollie does.”

Mary studiously avoided a return comment by tying her green hair ribbon more firmly in place before going upstairs. Sassie’s
hints that it was time she married were about as subtle as pitched bricks. Already, since he rarely came calling anymore,
their faithful old housekeeper considered Percy a lost hope.

As she started up the stairs, Mary thought of him with the usual curling of anxiety in her stomach. Had he truly lost interest
in her? Was he banking on her loneliness to send her running into his arms? Did his absence mean he agreed that their union
was hopeless? Daily she recalled the words he’d written on the note slipped into the cuff of her Christmas present: “For the
hands I want to hold for the rest of my life.”

Mary hesitated before knocking on her mother’s door, dreading the gravelly, woeful “Come in” that marked the beginning of
every distasteful visit. Mary never heard it without feeling a prick of annoyance. One had only to look at how Ollie was dealing
with his situation to feel scornful of the way Darla Toliver was handling hers. No sulks or self-pity for Ollie! After a short
hospitalization in Dallas, he’d returned to work in the executive offices of the DuMont Department Store, wielding his onyx-and-silver-headed
crutches like a fashion extension of his smashing wardrobe.

“Come in!” Darla’s voice, strong and vibrant, answered her knock. Surprised, Mary opened the door and peeked in cautiously.

“Why, Mother, how… how lovely you look,” Mary declared in astonishment. She could not remember when she first began calling
her mother “Mother.” It had evolved out of the distance that had grown between them, the years of estrangement. “Mama” was
an endearment; “Mother,” an address.

At once, Mary saw that “lovely” was not the word. She doubted that her mother would ever look lovely again after such prolonged
abuse to her health. But today, propped up in bed on clean pillows, scrubbed and combed and dressed in a filmy peignoir like
the kind she’d worn when Mary’s father was alive, she looked fresh and rested. Mary approached the bed. “What’s the occasion?”
she asked, shocked to see that without the dark accumulation of oil and sweat, her mother’s hair was streaked with gray.

Darla laughed in her natural, light way, a sound Mary hadn’t heard in years, and flung a flaccid arm toward the windows. Sassie
had pulled open the draperies to a pale January sun, the first outside light that had been allowed to enter the room since
Mary’s father’s death. “The new year—that’s the occasion. I want to celebrate it, get up out of this bed, leave this room.
I want to walk out into the fresh air and feel the sun on my face. I want to feel alive again. Do you think it’s too late
for that, Mary, my lamb?”

My lamb.
It had been four years since her mother had called her that. Mary’s throat tightened at the echo from their past. “Mama,”
she murmured sadly. There had been these mood changes and resolutions before that had proved to be ruses to gain freedom of
the house and access to a hidden bottle.