The Freedom Maze (3 page)

“I’ve been ringing for a good twenty minutes, Ofelia,” she said, gently reproachful.

“Yes, ma’am.” Ofelia poured coffee into a gold-rimmed cup, added hot milk from a pitcher, and put the cup into Grandmama’s hand. “Here’s your coffee, Miz Fairchild. You just visit with your little granddaughter here, and I’ll be back with your supper in two licks.”

She stumped out of the room, leaving Sophie alone with her grandmother.

“What are you doing all the way over there?” Grandmama beckoned irritably. “Come closer, so I can see you. Where’s your dear mama?”

Sophie negotiated a careful path over a footstool and around two straight-backed chairs and a spindly table covered with bright little boxes. “The snuff boxes!”

“I asked you a question, Sophia.”

Sophie touched a blue-enameled lid, smooth and cool under her finger. “Mama’s resting. It was a long drive from New Orleans.”

“When I was a girl, it took two full days,” Grandmama said. “Come here and let me look at you.” Reluctantly, Sophie obeyed, standing uncomfortably while her grandmother’s watery blue eyes moved over her face and hair like weightless fingers.

“I’m glad to see you favor the Fairchilds,” Grandmama said at last. “Not the eyes or the chin, of course. But you have your dear grandfather’s hair, and the Fairchild nose.” She sighed. “I must say, they looked better on him. It’s a pity about the spectacles, but I suppose they can’t be helped.” She took a sip of coffee. “Do you do fancywork, dear?”

Sophie shook her head. Mama had tried to teach her embroidery once. It had not gone well. “No, ma’am.”

“In my day, young ladies had accomplishments. I will teach you to tat, just as I did your dear mama, so you can start laying up some linens for your hope chest.” She turned her head toward the window. “I do believe I have had enough company for today. You may go away now, Sophia.”

Sophie curtsied and went.

Tatting. What
was
tatting, anyway? Sophie imagined herself sitting among the cups and spindly tables day after long, hot day, tatting under the direction of that gentle, impatient voice. She’d go crazy, she just knew it. She’d start throwing knickknacks, and Grandmama would send her back to New Orleans. Where she would get in the way of Mama’s house-hunting and schoolwork and be a burden.

As she crossed the parlor, she heard Mama calling her from her bedroom.

“Yes, Mama?”

“Come in here. I want to have a little talk with you.”

Mama had folded back the shutters and was sitting by the open window in a rocker. Her shoes were off, her stockinged feet were propped on a needlepoint footstool, and her eyes were closed. “Come here, darling, and sit by me.”

The closest seat was the cushioned bench of a mirrored vanity. Sophie sat down, trying to keep her back straight.

“Your Aunt Enid has a green thumb,” Mama said. “She has her church work to keep her busy, and Mama, of course, but that garden is her pride and joy. She always did like making mud pies.”

“What about worms?” Sophie hated worms.

“She loves them.” Mama hated worms, too. She gave a comic shudder, turned to share the joke, and then the inevitable happened. “Oh, Sophie,” she said. “What have you done?”

From long experience, Sophie knew that answering “I took off my stockings because I was hot” would lead to a speech about disobedience and ingratitude, followed by a freezing silence until Mama got over her disappointment. But then, so would any other answer.

“Sophia!” Mama’s voice sharpened. “Do you hear me?”

Sudden, furious tears blurred the sunlight into an unbearable glare. “I hear you.” Sophie knew she should stop right there, but she couldn’t. “I know you work like a slave to buy me stockings and things, and then I don’t appreciate them. I slouch and I mumble and my hair is a disgrace and I don’t have any manners and you’re very, very disappointed in me.”

Mama’s dark amber eyes opened wide with shock. “I’m surprised at you, Sophia Martineau, speaking to me in that tone of voice. How many times must I tell you that irony is not attractive in a young lady?”

“I guess I’m not a young lady,” Sophie said thickly and stumbled out of the room with her mother’s voice following her, calling her to come back, right this minute, before she was sorry.

There were three doors at the end of the back gallery. The first one she tried led into a bathroom, the second was locked. Sophie jerked open the third door, slammed it behind her, sat down on the floor, and cried.

It didn’t last long. Sophie never cried long — there wasn’t any use in it. “Go on, honey, and have a nice cry now,” Lily always said when Sophie brought home a disappointing report card. “It’ll do you the world of good.” But the report card never changed, no matter how many tears she shed over it, and neither would Mama.

Sophie wiped her face and glasses on her skirt. She couldn’t see in the gloom, and the air smelled damp and slightly sour, like musty paper. Sophie pulled off the torturous pumps, padded over to a window, folded back the shutters, raised the sash, and turned to see where she’d be sleeping all summer.

It could have been worse. Next to Grandmama’s room, the furniture was downright sparse — just a rocker and an armoire and a writing-desk and a bookcase stuffed with old books. The walls were papered with faded cabbage roses, and the bed was white iron, with a mint green chenille spread. Beside it, a rickety nightstand held a painted tin lamp, a book, and an electric alarm clock. One of the windows had a seat built into it, just exactly the right size and shape for reading in.

It was like a room from a book, and very much the kind of room Sophie had always dreamed of having. It was the crowning misery of a miserable day that she was too unhappy to appreciate it. Leaving the seersucker suit in a wrinkled pile on the floor, she put on an old skirt and blouse, opened the suitcase with the books, picked up Edward Eager’s
The Time Garden,
carried it to the window seat, and pulled back the curtain, revealing a scene like a watercolor illustration in an old book.

Sophie knelt on the faded chintz cushion and looked out. The watercolor effect came from the glass, she realized, which was old and wavy. She looked down into a neat garden shaded by a big live oak. Under the oak, a flowering vine draped a cabin with scarlet trumpets. In the field beyond, she saw a big, dark bushy blob, too low to be a grove and too big to be a hedge.

What she didn’t see was any sign of the famous brick Big House.

Sophie opened
The Time Garden
and read until she heard Aunt Enid shouting up the back stairs that supper was ready.

Mama was still not speaking to Sophie at supper time. By breakfast,
she’d thawed enough to ask for the salt, but it was clear she was still in a state. When Aunt Enid realized nobody was going to eat the fried eggs and grits she’d made, she got up and cleared the table. Sophie watched her stack the dirty dishes in the sink and run hot water over them.

Mama folded her unused napkin neatly. “I know Ofelia doesn’t come in on weekends. Would you like me to help you with the dishes?”

“I thought I’d let them soak. No use doing two or three little washings when one big one will do.” Aunt Enid turned off the water. “Why don’t you go up and see if Mama wants anything?”

Mama went, her opinion of Aunt Enid’s housekeeping unspoken but clear as glass.

Aunt Enid hung her apron by the door. “Come see my office, Sophie. I think you’ll like it.”

She was right. Sophie stood in the open door and stared, enchanted, at the cozy clutter of rose clippers, garden gloves, seed packets, and balls of brightly colored yarn. Books filled the shelves that covered the walls, bristled from two free-standing rotating bookcases, lay in shifting piles on the long table behind the sofa and the giant desk under the windows.

Aunt Enid stepped over and around the clutter to the big square fireplace at the end of the room and took a pipe off the mantel. “That was your great-grandpap’s,” she said, laying it in Sophie’s hands. “I have the whole collection around here somewhere.”

Sophie rubbed her thumb over the pipe bowl. The polished wood felt like silk.

There was horrified gasp from the door. Sophie jumped guiltily and thrust the pipe behind her back as Mama found her voice. “This place is a pigsty, Enid! How you can live like this, heaven alone knows. Daddy must be turning over in his grave!”

Sophie’s hands tightened nervously, but Aunt Enid just snorted. “I expect he’s gotten used to it by now. Did Mama finish her breakfast?”

Mama looked irked. “She did. And now she says she wants her bath, but I don’t think I can get her out of bed by myself.”

“There’s a trick to it,” Aunt Enid said. “I’ll come up and help you.”

“Thank you,” said Mama, and the two sisters exchanged tight smiles that made Sophie think having a sister wasn’t really as much fun as
Little Women
made it seem.

Left alone, Sophie explored the library, finding a complete set of Dickens and several paperback mysteries with titles like
The Saint in Action
and
Hot Ice
that looked a whole lot more exciting than Nancy Drew. Around dinnertime, the morning rain cleared and Aunt Enid took Sophie on a tour of the garden.

It was a lot more businesslike than Mama’s garden in Metairie, with vegetables as well as flowers, and more kinds of roses than Sophie had known existed. Aunt Enid hunkered right down by the okra and started picking bugs off its leaves and squishing them between her fingers.

Mama glanced at Sophie and wrinkled her nose. Sophie wrinkled back, relieved that things were back to normal again. For now.

Supper that night was actually fun. Sophie picked okra out of Ofelia’s chicken fricassee and listened to her aunt and her mother reminisce about being the Fairchild girls of Oak River, with special emphasis on the numerous beaux who had squired Mama to church picnics and danced with her at parties.

“You got the best-looking ones,” Aunt Enid said. “But my beaux had spirit. Remember when that William Kenner dared Jeff Woodley to spend a night in the Big House, and he fell through the steps and broke his leg?”

“Served him right,” Mama said. “Wasn’t it Jeff who tied Cleo’s old apron on Apollo?”

Aunt Enid grinned. “No, that was Burney Fitzhugh. You remember how Mama wanted Daddy to get rid of all the statues in the maze? He told her, ‘They’re not naked, Isabel, they’re nude. Naked is wickedness. Nude is art.’ I thought she’d pop a vein, she was so mad.”

Sophie remembered the dark blob she’d seen from her window. Could that be the maze? And did it still have naked statues in it? Maybe, when Mama was gone back to New Orleans, she’d take a look for herself.

“Probably gone to rack and ruin now,” Mama said. “Didn’t we have fun, Enid, losing Cousin Nick in it?”

“What a nuisance that boy was!” Aunt Enid said.

“Still is, according to Elizabeth,” Mama said. And they plunged into family gossip, much to Sophie’s disappointment.

On Sunday afternoon, Mama went back to New Orleans, her job, and Soule College. Before she went, she gave Sophie a light hug. “Good-bye, darling.”

Sophie buried her face in her mother’s familiar smell of Shalimar perfume and fresh-ironed cotton. Mama patted her back and pushed her gently away. “Be good for your Aunt Enid, now.”

She got into the Ford and drove off, leaving a large, hot silence behind her.

“Well,” Aunt Enid said. “That’s that.”

She went back into the house, and Sophie kicked the bottom step so hard she had to sit down and squeeze her toe.

The screen door squeaked and Aunt Enid reappeared. “I brought you some lemonade.”

“I’m not thirsty, thank you,” Sophie said without looking up.

Aunt Enid set the frosted glass beside her. “In case you change your mind.”

Sophie nodded. A moment later, she felt a light touch on her hair. Then the steps squeaked under Aunt Enid’s feet and the parlor door opened and closed.

What was wrong with her, Sophie wondered, that everyone left her? Was it her frizzy hair? Her glasses? Was it because she read all the time? Would Papa have taken her to New York with him if she’d been the young lady Mama wanted her to be, who read
Seventeen
magazine and knew all the words to “Teen Angel”?

Because then she was doomed.

Sophie wiped her face and got up. Now Mama was gone, she was free to explore. She’d start with the garden shed, poke her nose into the maze, maybe even mount an expedition to the Big House, assuming there was anything left of it to find.

Close to, the garden shed looked like a woodcutter’s cottage from a fairy tale, with two small windows peeping out among the vines and a low wooden bench by the half-open door. She pushed it all the way open and went inside.

Given Aunt Enid’s housekeeping habits, Sophie was surprised to see that her gardening tools were clean and polished and laid out neatly on an old wooden table. The rest of the room was a jumble of broken furniture and flowerpots piled higgledy-piggledy between the door and a huge stone fireplace that took up nearly the whole back wall.

Sophie knew perfectly well that young ladies did not crawl into fireplaces, no matter how big, much less stick their heads up the chimney. She did it anyway, right on through a sticky barrier of ancient cobwebs. When she’d finished picking the clinging threads out of her hair, she settled her glasses and looked up into a close and total blackness that smelled sourly of old wood smoke and soot.