Summer in the South (12 page)

“It’s a shame,” the librarian said that first night, tucking Ava in. “Your mother is a young woman and now she won’t have any more children.”

She said it with a peculiar expression on her face, a faraway look of longing and loss, and Ava understood that the woman was mourning her own childlessness. Ava pictured Clotilde lying bandaged head to toe in a hospital bed, and she felt a sudden pang of homesickness for her mother and for the lost siblings she would never have.

But even then, it was her own loss she was thinking of. It would have been nice to have someone to share the burden of her childhood with, a playmate, an ally, a witness.

F
anny had almost finished in the family plot. There was only one grave left to decorate, tucked away in the corner beneath a small neat headstone. She stepped forward, holding a bouquet of delphiniums against her breast. Maitland followed her but she lifted her hand and waved him away, and something in her dismissive manner, in the respectful way he dipped his head and stepped back, made Ava ask, “Whose grave is that?”

“Charlie Woodburn’s.”

“Who is Charlie Woodburn?”

“Her first husband.”

Ava watched as Fanny tenderly plucked the dead flowers from the vase on top of the grave and replaced them with fresh ones. There was something in her slow, imposing movements that made Ava think again of icebergs. Everyone thought the South a land of jovial, open-faced people but there was much here that was hidden away, dark and dangerous.

“Fanny was married before Maitland?” she said. “No one told me that.”

“We don’t talk about it.”

At his tone, Ava swiveled her head and looked at him. An insect whined in her ear. A ridge of swiftly moving clouds hung over the distant mountains. “But Maitland and Fanny were childhood sweethearts. You said so yourself.”

“Yes, they were.” Will sighed, as if realizing she wasn’t going to let this go. “But then Fanny met Charlie Woodburn up at Vanderbilt and they eloped against the family’s wishes. It was a painful time. That’s why we never discuss him. That’s why there aren’t any photos of him in the house.”

“What happened to Charlie?”

“He died.”

“How?”

“I believe he drowned.”

“And then after she was widowed, Fanny married Maitland?”

“After a while, yes. After Sumner was grown.”

She looked at him in astonishment. “So Sumner was Charlie’s son?”

“Yes.”

Ava was quiet for a moment, considering this. There was something here, she could feel it, something in the way Maitland had stepped away contritely to let Fanny tend the grave, something in Will’s reticence to speak of the matter. She, of all people, recognized evasion when she saw it. She said, “Charlie’s name was Woodburn?”

He hesitated, looking at his hands. “Yes,” he said finally.

“So he was related to your family?”

“Fanny and Charlie were very, very distant cousins. He came from a different branch of the family from Josephine and Fanny and me.” He took her hand, trying to draw her against him, but she resisted.

“Come here,” he said mildly.

“She must have loved him very much to have tended his grave all these years. The father of her only child. A man she was willing to run away with against her family’s wishes.”

He let go of her hand. It was obvious that he was unwilling to speak further of Charlie Woodburn. But Ava had a stubborn, perverse streak, and once her curiosity was aroused there was no stopping it. She said, “I understand Fanny not wanting to talk about him, but what about the rest of you? Why so secretive?”

His expression changed then, became flat and distant as it had that day at the river. “Because that’s what families do,” he said coldly. “We keep each other’s secrets.”

He rose and walked off toward the Woodburn plot. She watched him go, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his shoulders rounded as if against a cold wind at his back. She had always been a watcher, a chronicler of other peoples’ lives.

It was easier sometimes to guess at other peoples’ secrets than it was to face her own.

A
ll the way home from the cemetery, Maitland and Fanny chattered as if they’d just come from a cocktail party. Will stared moodily out his window. No one mentioned Charlie Woodburn.

Ava put her forehead against the glass, aware of Will’s silent brooding presence beside her. She felt that she had disappointed him. He had given her the chance to be incurious, deferential, and she had failed. She would always fail. Perhaps he was realizing this now as he had not realized it before, with fatal certainty and clarity.

The storm, which had held off all morning, finally broke. In the front seat Maitland and Fanny chattered and teased each other like a pair of young lovers, as if they were the only two people in the world. Ava tried to picture Fanny as a girl, running off with a handsome scoundrel and leaving Maitland to nurse a broken heart. It was hard to imagine.

When they arrived at the house, the rain was falling steadily. Josephine had made a quick lunch of tuna sandwiches and sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and afterward, she and Fanny and Maitland went upstairs to lie down for a siesta while Ava and Will cleaned up the kitchen. He was quiet but humorously attentive. Whatever disappointment he might have felt in her at the cemetery had obviously been tidied and put away. Smiling, he promised to take her four-wheeling tomorrow before Alice’s party.

Alice Barron was throwing a barbecue so that Ava could meet some of the “right people.” “And I promise they won’t all be as old as Methuselah like the rest of us,” she had assured Ava. She was standing in the library holding a Gin Rickey in her hand when she said this, surrounded by the afternoon cocktail crowd. It was a few days after Ava first met Fraser Barron and learned more than she cared to know about Edgar Allan Poe.

When they had finished in the kitchen, Ava and Will walked together out onto the back porch. The rain had diminished to a fine drizzle. Ava crossed her arms over her chest and followed him down the steps.

“Do we really have to go to this barbecue?” she said.

He raised his eyebrows in mock alarm. “You’re the guest of honor. Unofficially, of course.”

“Oh, shit.”

He laughed. “It won’t be bad, I promise. They aren’t going to run you out of town on a rail if they don’t like you.”

“That’s encouraging.”

He kissed her and walked out into the yard. “I’ll be back at Toddy Time. Try to get some writing done,” he said, and walked off whistling.

I
t was easier said than done.

She spent the next half hour observing the contents of her room, and then she went online and checked her messages, spending nearly an hour writing emails. Finally, with an act of sheer will, she signed off and pulled up a new file on her screen. She sat for a long time staring at the glaring brightness of the empty page.

The trees outside the window were filled with a silvery light, and the sky beyond was a vivid glaring white. The rain had stopped, and in the noonday heat, the landscape seemed still and slumberous. Ava forced her attention back to her computer and wrote “I watched as my mother’s boyfriend spread a map on the kitchen table. ‘Pick a spot, any spot,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Wherever you choose is where we’ll move, kid.’ ”

She sat back in disgust, massaging her forehead with her fingers as if to loosen the words she knew lay buried there. They stayed blocked, awaiting some magical incantation from her, some spell. She could see now why well-known authors were often alcoholics, why they used stimulants and alcohol to force the flow of words, to entice their muses like children leaving cookies for Santa Claus.

The idea of writing a coming-of-age novel about a girl and her flighty mother, which had seemed so brilliant in Chicago, now seemed sentimental and unmanageable. What had she been thinking? Every word she wrote felt like a guilty confession, personal and humiliating, as if she was exposing herself, naked, to the world. She would have to begin again, writing this time from a third-person perspective to distance herself from the main character, Lorna.

She let her eyes wander about the room, coming to rest finally on the copy of
Rebecca
she had found in the library. It was leaning against the lamp on the bedside table where Ava had left it. She had read Du Maurier as a girl, had spent one whole summer entranced by the Cornish coast with its windswept halls and lonely ghosts. She rose, went over, and opened the book, reading one random passage after another. Du Maurier made it look easy.

“It isn’t easy,” she said to Clotilde, who watched impassively from the mantel. She had never known Clotilde to suffer from writer’s block. All her stories had begun with, “Once there was a girl,” or “In the middle of a dark wood there lived a witch/troll/ogre,” and from there they’d spooled out with ease.

Ava went back to her computer, rereading what she had written, and then deleting it. She sat staring at her screen, trying to imagine Lorna and her mother, Margaret, but all she could see was herself and Clotilde. After a while even those images flickered and petered out. It was no use. The words wouldn’t come.

The only other novel she’d ever attempted had been a rambling historical romance that she’d never finished. Perhaps she’d been kidding herself all along about being a writer.

She yawned and lay down on the bed. She felt limp, discouraged, devoid of all energy and ambition, as if the heat and humidity had combined into some kind of unseen entity that was slowly draining her of life.

The bed was soft and fragrant. The room was cool and quiet.

She slept.

W
hen she awoke nearly two hours later she was surprised at the length of time she’d slept. It was one of the symptoms of her sleep disorder that her dreams were always vivid and in full color. She’d been dreaming again of water, cold and deep and green. Only this time there’d been a bridge of lacy ironwork and, in the sky above it, a silvery moon that filled the sky with light. There was a sense of melancholy and loss about the dream, and she found herself in a blue mood when she arose, dispirited and irritable. She went into the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water and then combed her hair. That helped a little. She could hear Fanny, Maitland, and Josephine out on the side verandah, the distant murmur of their voices interspersed with periodic laughter.

Through the long windows of her bedroom she could see Clara in the garden, trimming roses. She hesitated a moment, then turned and walked down the wide hallway and out the back door. The sky was a hazy blue. As she walked across the grass she could see Clara’s hat moving slowly along the curved wrought-iron fence separating the garden from the front lawn.

The garden ran parallel to the house and was surrounded on three sides by a tall wrought-iron fence covered in trailing vines. Along the back, facing Clara’s little yellow cottage, ran a boxwood hedge, and in the far corner equidistant between Clara’s house and the Woodburn house stood a columned pergola covered in wisteria. The garden beds were set out in rectangular patterns, with masses of flowering shrubs and perennials along the front and side, facing the street and the house, and neat rows of vegetables on the interior. A raised bed of herbs stood in the corner closest to the kitchen. A series of stone paths crisscrossed the garden, with small wooden benches scattered throughout, and in the corner closest to the pergola stood an old oak tree, its massive limbs providing a shady respite from the summer heat. An ornamental pond filled with goldfish and a small fountain curved along one side of the pergola and filled the garden with a pleasant splashing sound.

“Hello,” Clara called when she saw her, stopping to wipe her forehead with the back of one gloved hand.

“You know it’s nearly Toddy Time,” Ava said to her.

Clara made a dismissive gesture toward the house. “Some days I make it and some days I don’t,” she said.

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of cocktail hour in the Bible Belt,” Ava said, falling into step beside her.

Clara chuckled. “It was different back when we came of age. During Prohibition everybody drank.”

“Did the aunts’ father drink?”

“The Colonel? Oh, no. Not him.” She shook her head. “He was a very upright old gentleman, very proper and well-mannered. He wouldn’t allow so much as a drop of brandy in his house. It was the girls, Josephine and Fanny, who learned to drink up at Vanderbilt and then brought the habit home with them. And later, after he died, and it was just the three of them shut up in the house, then the parties got so wild.” She stopped for a moment, staring at the house, her eyes distant with the murky vision of the past.

“The three of them?” Ava said. “You mean Josephine, Fanny, and Celia.”

Clara startled, picking up the shears from the basket she carried on her arm. “No, not Celia. She’d gone to live with a cousin after her papa’s death.”

“Who then?”

Clara hesitated. “Charlie,” she said.

“Charlie Woodburn? Fanny’s first husband?”

“Yes.” She’d stopped to clip one of the pink roses growing along the fence, and Ava was hopeful that she’d continue with her story of Charlie but instead she held up the rose for Ava to sniff. “Souvenir de la Malmaison. Isn’t it lovely? It’s a bourbon rose named by Empress Josephine from specimens sent back by Napoleon.”

“It smells wonderful. The whole garden smells wonderful.”

“That’s because it was planned so that the prevailing winds would blow the fragrance toward the house.”

“Really?” Ava knew nothing about gardening, recognizing only a few of the flowers she saw.

“See,” Clara said, pulling forward the tip of a shrub covered in white flowers. “Tea olive. And this is myrtle, and this is mock orange.” Ava obediently sniffed each of the plants Clara indicated, murmuring her approval. “And here in this bed are the peonies and the pinks and the sweet violets.”

“What’s this?”

“Clematis,” Clara said. “Although you shouldn’t touch it because it causes skin irritation for some people.” Ava quickly drew her hand away. “And of course you know that foxglove and nightshade are poisonous, as well as all varieties of rhododendron and azalea.”