Summer in the South (22 page)

“I’ll see you home,” Charlie said, taking her arm. His hand on her arm made her light-headed, and she leaned against him, hobbling as they walked. The streets smelled of sewer and burnt sugar. A drunken sailor stumbled out of the shadows and said, “Hello, doll,” but Charlie pushed him and said, “Shove off.”

They caught a cab at the corner and when they got back to the hotel, he climbed out behind her. “I can see myself up,” she said, fumbling for her key, and dropping it on the street.

Charlie picked it up and took her firmly by the elbow. “Cousin James would never forgive me if I didn’t see you to the door,” he said. His face was pale under the flickering gaslights, strangely tense, as if he was listening to the sound of distant music and found it slightly jarring.

When they got to her room, he put the key in the lock and turned it, smoothly shoving the door open with one hand and with the other pushing her up against the wall. He put his hand on her breast and kissed her.

When he had gone, she locked the door behind him and went into the bathroom to be sick. That’s how she knew she was doomed.

That’s how she knew she was in love with Charlie Woodburn.

Desire. The relentlessness of it, the exquisite agony of waiting for the loved one’s presence, his touch, the weight of his mouth. All her beaux up to now seemed like schoolgirl crushes compared to what she felt for Charlie Woodburn. And yet she did not see him for some time after the winter formal. It was as if he was avoiding her, denying what had happened between them. He spent Christmas in New Orleans, and when she returned to school in the spring she saw him at social events, always in the presence of throngs of people, and he was cordial but distant. She became awkward in his presence, tongue-tied and stammering. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep.

When her despair became too great for her to bear, he would give her a token of affection, a smile across a crowded room, a light touch at her waist, a murmured greeting in her ear. In February he sent her a Valentine signed—Always, C. At a picnic at the Hermitage he kissed her under a chestnut tree, and at a house party in May he whispered, “Don’t forget me this summer.”

As if she ever would.

He was spending the summer in Greenville, Mississippi, at a classmate’s house, clerking in his father’s bank. Josephine, who had spent the spring imagining the two of them together at Woodburn, was disappointed. She spent her days reading novels and writing her name as Mrs. Charles Woodburn. Did he know the depth of her feeling? Probably not. He was surrounded by girls at school and, no doubt, in Greenville, too. And yet she could have him, Josephine knew, she had seen it that night in his face when he first came to call on Papa, that hungry desire to rise above his station, to be, once and for all, a True Woodburn.

But would Papa have him for a son-in-law? That was harder to gauge. True, he was fond of Charlie, and he was always glad to receive his letters. (Charlie never wrote to Josephine but would include little notes for her in Papa’s letter—Remember me to my cousins; Tell Josephine the belles in Greenville think college for women is a waste.) But Papa was a proud man, a man who, once crossed, would never forgive. She would have to proceed slowly, patiently. Josephine spent the summer murmuring sweet remembrances of Charlie into Papa’s ear, reminding her sisters often of Dear Cousin Charlie, singing his praises loudly and sincerely to all who would listen.

In August he wrote that he would be coming through Woodburn on bank business. Josephine set about getting ready for his visit in a frenzy of excitement. She had the house aired and cleaned until the woodwork shone. She had Martha make chicken and dumplings, his favorite, according to Fanny, for dinner. She bought a new sheath dress and had her hair permed in the latest style.

The day he was to arrive dawned hot and airless, and Josephine rose early and went about her business on trembling legs. At noon she checked on dinner and, assuring herself it was all done according to his liking, she went out onto the verandah to await him and Papa. By twelve-thirty they still had not come, and Celia and Fanny came out to complain that they were hungry. The heat made them all irritable and they quarreled, and the younger girls went back into the house, slamming the door. At one o’clock, Josephine rose and, calling to her sisters, went in to dinner. She couldn’t eat, sitting expectantly at the table, waiting to hear the sound of their boots on the verandah. At one-thirty, Fanny and Celia climbed the stairs to their rooms to nap. Josephine sat at the table with her hands in her lap.

She was still there when Papa came in at four o’clock. He seemed surprised to see her, sitting at the table with the electric fan raising little whorls of hair around her face, and he was more surprised still when, explaining that the train had been late and so he and Charlie had lunched at the hotel before Charlie left for Nashville, she rose with a little cry and, covering her face, ran out of the room.

In September, Fanny went up to Vanderbilt with her. Josephine steeled herself for the inevitable period of adjustment that always followed Fanny’s leaving home. Fanny was sixteen but she was much more girlish than most girls her age; she still carried her favorite doll in her suitcase, still spoke baby talk to Tom Penny, still cried at night for Martha and home. She had done the same when she went off to the Webb School, even though they were only day students. She had cried and carried a doll in her Gladstone bag every day, and no pleading from Josephine could make her stop. At Vanderbilt it was even worse, as they boarded at Mrs. Stillwell’s, and every night Fanny would cry herself to sleep with homesickness, her face buried deep in her pillow and Josephine stroking her back. Josephine had fallen into the habit of protecting Fanny years ago, not long after she realized that Fanny was so loving and trusting that she had to be protected at all costs. Having Josephine as an older sister had not broken her of this habit, it had not made Fanny suspicious or cynical, and so the only thing to do was to protect her.

It was exhausting. But it kept Josephine from spending all her time thinking about Charlie, it saved her from that misery. He had returned to school even more full of himself than before, clapping Josephine fondly on the shoulder when he saw her and calling her “old girl.” With Fanny he adopted a slightly more paternal role, warning his fraternity brothers to “keep your grubby paws off my little cousin,” and making sure she was not included in any of their wilder house parties.

In October, Papa dropped dead of a heart attack on his way to the bank. It happened on a bright, glorious day when he had insisted on walking to town, stopping in the middle of greeting Mrs. Chesney to grab his left arm before collapsing with a pained, surprised expression on his face. John drove up in the car to get them, and Charlie rode back with Fanny and Josephine for the funeral; the only sound above the smooth hum of the motor was that of Fanny’s shuddering sobs.

The funeral was well attended. Afterward Josephine met privately with Papa’s attorney, Mr. Atwood, and a few days later the sisters and a large retinue of family retired to Mr. Atwood’s office for the reading of the will. The estate was divided between Josephine, Fanny, and Celia, with generous bequests going to Martha, John, and Clara. Surprisingly, there was also a bequest for Charlie, a small trust set up to pay for his remaining terms at Vanderbilt, and several sealed envelopes, letters of reference to help Charlie find a job following graduation.

Josephine told Charlie of the bequest herself. He seemed not so much surprised as disappointed. “How kind of him,” he said, and Josephine, hearing something in his voice, looked at him, but his face was smooth and expressionless. He left early the next morning to return to Vanderbilt.

Josephine was a wealthy woman now. Perhaps not as wealthy as she would have been before the Crash, but certainly well-off. She could have anything she wanted, including Charlie Woodburn. And yet now that she was so close to achieving her dreams, she seemed to hear Papa’s voice in her head, Careful, Sister. What do you really know of this man? Why saddle yourself with a stranger you barely know? Mr. Atwood seemed to echo these sentiments.

She sent Fanny back to school while she stayed to tie up the loose ends with Mr. Atwood. Two weeks later, she set out for Vanderbilt. She was hopeful for the first time since Papa’s death, feeling oddly elated, as if her life were about to change, as if she were at the beginning of a long journey. She was free for the first time in her life. Anything was possible.

When she got off the train it was snowing. The sky was gray and wintry. Mrs. Stillwell had sent a car, and Josephine had anticipated a warm welcome, but when they reached the boarding house she found the windows darkened and Mrs. Stillwell, surrounded by several of the other boarders, crying in the kitchen. She was clutching a creased note in one hand. Josephine recognized the handwriting.

That was how she came to know what Mrs. Stillwell and the other boarders knew, what the entire campus had known since early that morning. Last night, while Josephine was packing her suitcase and preparing for her new life to begin, Charlie Woodburn had slipped into Mrs. Stillwell’s boardinghouse and eloped with Fanny.

A Superstitious Kind of Delicacy

O
ne of Clotilde’s favorite fairy tales was “The Tale of the Sleeping Princess.” She told it often to Ava over the years, in many different forms, but always it was the same story.

Once there was a princess of royal blood named Sheelin. She was very wise and brave, and when a plague came upon the land, the old king, her father, sent her to the East to obtain the One True Pearl. With this Pearl she could cure the land of sickness and famine, and restore her father to health. But it was a perilous journey, for the Pearl was buried at the bottom of the sea, guarded by a fierce dragon. The Princess Sheelin set forth with three companions, all of whom were killed along the way. When she arrived at the Hall of the Sea God, Sheelin disguised herself in the sparkling garments of the Sea People. But they guessed her mission and gave her a potion to drink. When she drank it she fell into a deep sleep, and when she awoke she didn’t remember who she was or why she was here. Her father, fearing she would never return, sent a letter in the form of a white bird that perched on Sheelin’s shoulder and reminded her of her noble birth and her destiny.

Then she awoke and kissed the bird. Remembering who she was and desiring to return to her own kind, she charmed the sleeping dragon and stole the Pearl. As she hurried from the hall with the Pearl she shed her false clothes, finding that the Pearl directed her home with its shining light.

Remembering this tale in the days following her receipt of the letter from Frank Dabrowski, it was all Ava could do not to lift the vase and throw it against the wall, dispersing Clotilde’s dusty remains everywhere. Every time she thought of the letter, she glared at her mother and hissed, “How could you?”

Her true father could have been any one of a number of nameless men. Clotilde may not have known herself, masking this fact in her false and elaborate stories. Her vain attempts, Ava saw now, to throw her off the scent.

B
ut later, after her anger had died down, she thought mournfully,
Who is my father? Who am I?

Perhaps Frank knew. He had thoughtfully included his phone number, but Ava was not ready to talk to him. She was not strong enough for that yet.

Instead she sat down and wrote him another letter.

T
wo days after the party at Longford, Jake called her. It was a rainy, dreary Monday morning and she was sitting at her computer, trying to work. She had not slept well the night before, and she was tired despite abundant cups of coffee.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

“Have you?” she said coolly. Despite her intention to keep her distance, she couldn’t help but feel a flutter of pleasure at the sound of his voice.

“I heard you had a great time out at Longford the other night.”

“Who’d you hear that from?”

“A little bird told me.”

“That little bird wouldn’t by any chance be named Darlene, would it?”

“I’m sworn to secrecy,” he said.

She regretted now that she had added Darlene’s name to the guest list. Ava had dreaded the aunts telling Will about her meeting with Jake but she had not expected Darlene to do it. It seemed disloyal and unfriendly, and not the kind of thing she would have expected from someone she had insisted be invited to a party (not that Darlene knew that, of course). Ava was beginning to understand Fraser’s warning that “down here people can be as sweet as a spoonful of honey to your face, all the while plunging a knife deep between your shoulder blades.”

“It was quite a party,” she said.

“I heard you were a dancing fool.”

“I have no recollection of that.”

He laughed. “It makes me wish I’d been invited.”

“You’ll have to talk to Will about that.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “Why didn’t you tell me your break with Will was over Hadley?” She was surprised by the vehemence of her own voice. She hadn’t meant to bring it up at all.

“I thought you knew. You said you’d talked to Darlene Haney and she’d told you.”

“She told me it was over a girl. She didn’t give me any specifics.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“And besides, you lied when you said it wasn’t over a girl.”

“I said it was over something a lot deeper than a disagreement over a girl.”

“You implied that it wasn’t over a girl at all.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I’m sorry.” He was quiet for a moment and she could hear distant music in the background. She wondered where he might be calling from. “Look,” he said finally. “I’m not really proud of what happened between Hadley and me. We were both young and we’d known each other for a long time and it just happened. It wasn’t planned. We didn’t set out to hurt Will.”

“I’m sure that made him feel a lot better.”

“Don’t take his side without hearing the whole story.”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side. It’s none of my business.”

“That’s not how you’re acting.”

“Did you love her?”

The rain fell softly. On the leafy branch of an oak tree, a large black crow sat watching her with dark glittering eyes.

“Can we talk about this some other time?”

“I have to go,” she said, and hung up.

S
he knew she’d been hasty and narrow-minded. It occurred to her that she might have sabotaged the whole thing subconsciously, but she didn’t care. The work was what mattered now.

She didn’t have time for anything else.

S
he couldn’t work after the phone call. She walked around the room, picking up objects and setting them back down again, sorry now that she’d acted the way she had. She thought about picking up the phone and calling him back but she wasn’t sure how to manage it. What would she say to him? What would she tell Will?

Outside the window, a ridge of gray storm clouds rolled in, rattling the glass and splattering rain against the fat green leaves of the magnolia tree. After a while Ava stretched out on the bed to take a nap.

She dreamed of cold dark water. She was floating in a canoe under a starry sky. She had no paddles and she was drifting, being pulled slowly and inexorably toward a dangerous rocky shoal. She could hear the rushing sound of water and she could see the humped shapes of boulders rising out of the white-tipped waves. A black ridge of forest rose behind them, and a three-legged dog ran along the rocky shore barking incessantly. She looked down into the oily glistening river. She knew she could not survive the rocks, so she dived into the water and began to swim toward the opposite shore. She could breathe underwater (she was not surprised by this), and she darted back and forth like a fish, taking in great gulps of dark silty water, and leaping finally to the surface, where a beam of moonlight floated on the waves like a silver coin. Behind her the dog, cheated of its reward, barked voraciously.

S
he awoke to thunder rattling the glass. Faintly in the distance, the neighbor’s dog, which was afraid of storms, barked a frenzied warning. The room was lit by a watery green light, and a moment later the rain began in earnest, drumming against the roof and the gutters. Ava lay on her side, watching flashes of lightning against the dark gray sky. Outside the windows the old trees bent and swayed. After a while she switched on the bedside lamp and curled on her side, reading, and when she tired of this, she closed the book and lay back with one arm thrown behind her against the headboard, her fingers tracing the whorls and channels of the elaborate carvings.

She had always loved thunderstorms. In college she and Michael had stayed in bed on rainy days, using the weather as an excuse to skip class and roll around under the sheets. Despite their amorous exploits, love with Michael had always felt tragic, illusory. They had lain in each other’s arms and talked in a careless way about their “future”: the white picket fence around a house in the suburbs, two-point-five children, a life circumscribed by restraint and routine. The whole time they were talking, Ava had known it was false. A fairy tale.

She thought of beautiful Grayson Byrd settling for a safe, predictable life with David the Doctor, settling for the big sprawling house and the skiing vacations to Aspen and the two good-looking but socially awkward children. She had given up spontaneity and regular orgasms for money in the bank, because wasn’t that really what she’d been trying to tell Ava, in her reckless and inebriated way? If you settle, it isn’t always fair. It isn’t always pretty.

Despite the fantasies she had spun around Michael, Ava had never been able to see herself having a future with him. Or with Jacob either, for that matter. She had known she’d never want the same things they wanted, no matter how much she pretended. She had known instinctively that if she had children, writing would become a hobby, something to be taken out and fitted in between nap times and meals and playgroups, and then put away again. She needed more than that.

She was more like her mother than she liked to admit.

Clotilde hadn’t been able to settle either. At least not on the American Dream, the one every girl of her generation was raised to expect: matrimony, motherhood, a life of self-denial. Clotilde was a pretty woman and there had been plenty of men who would have liked nothing more than to slip a ring on her finger, to tie her down, but she was always on the move, she was always fleeing … what? What had driven her mother all those years?

Ava’s earliest memory was of standing at a big glass window, half-hidden behind a filmy drape. It was night and it must have been Christmas because the house across the way was covered in multicolored lights, reflecting off the snow. Ava had her chin resting on the window ledge, that’s how small she was, and she was looking out into the street, waiting for someone. Clotilde, perhaps, on her way home from work.

No, that wasn’t right. Clotilde was in the kitchen behind her; she could hear her singing as she made dinner. So who was it she was waiting for?

Santa Claus.
She remembered now. She was scanning the sky looking for a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer but the only thing moving was a long black car coming slowly along the street. It stopped in front of the house, its headlights glittering on the snowy banks.

“What are you doing?” Clotilde said behind her, and, looking up, Ava saw her stricken face. “Come away from that window at once.” She pulled Ava away, standing at the edge of the drape and staring out as the big rumbling car began to move slowly down the street.

Ava’s fingers had stopped their exploration of the headboard, had lingered for a moment over an abrasion she could feel with her fingertips, scratched into the smooth surface of the wood in the narrow space between the headboard and the mattress. Curious, she rolled over and pulled the mattress away. She could see several letters carved there but she could not make out the words. She pulled the lamp closer and rubbed the scratches with a wet finger, but still she couldn’t make them out.

It wasn’t until she had pulled out the small flashlight she carried on her key chain and shone it against the dark wood that she could make out the faint words scratched there.

Help me.

T
here was a sudden loud clap of thunder and the lamp flickered and went out. The house was silent with the void left by the air-conditioning system shutting down. Distantly, above the roar of the rain, Ava could hear a faint scratching noise as of rodents in the walls. There was another flash of lightning, followed by a boom of thunder, and then a high-pitched yelp. She could hear voices coming from the kitchen, and she made her way there through the shadowy house. She met Fanny in the dining room as she hurried past with her hands clamped over her ears, wincing under each thunderous boom as if from a blow. Fanny was as frightened of thunderstorms as the neighbor’s dog, and she spent most stormy days cowering under the covers of her bed with a pillow over her head. She smiled apologetically at Ava but her mild gray eyes were as wide as a frightened child’s.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she said, as she hurried past. “It’s a doozy this time.” Maitland trailed behind her offering words of comfort, telling her the storm was nearly over and the power would be back on in no time.

Josephine and Clara were in the kitchen hunting candles and matches. They looked up, startled, as Ava appeared in the doorway.

“Are you all right?” Josephine said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Sorry,” Ava said.

Josephine pointed at the dimly lit breakfast room where Alice sat morosely observing the storm. “There’s sweet tea in the refrigerator if you’re thirsty,” she said to Ava. “Or coffee. The percolator’s still warm. The power hasn’t been off long.” She turned and went back to hunting candles.

Ava poured herself a glass of tea and sat down across the table from Alice, who sat with her cheek propped on her hand, her face turned anxiously toward the rain-swept window. “It’s at times like these that I hate having all those big trees around my house,” she said to Ava. Behind them, Josephine slammed one drawer and opened another. Without the background hum of the air-conditioning, all sound was magnified in the quiet house. “It’s funny. All the houses along this side of the street are out of power but the lights on that side are still on.”

“Different generators,” Ava said.

They could hear footsteps on the back stairs and a moment later Will burst through the kitchen door, shaking the rain out of his hair. His T-shirt was plastered to his wet skin and he went over to the sink to wring it out.

“Can you believe this?” he said.

“It’s a real duck drencher,” Clara said.

“Should I check the fuse box?” he asked Josephine. He came into the breakfast room and put a hand lightly on one of Ava’s shoulders. She had only seen him twice since the party at Longford and both times there had been a sense of restraint between them, a wariness. But the unsettled feeling appeared to have broken with the storm. He seemed almost cheerful today, smiling at her, the rain streaming down his hair into his collar.