The Reservoir (5 page)

What would his mother want him to do with the key? More important, what would Effie want? He knows, he knows. Yet what could he say to Mr. Meade now? He would have to wait until tomorrow, and then say, “Well, Mr. Meade, I was going my rounds this morning and I came across a curiosity.” It would be a lie, but it would be the right thing to do, much better than saying he’d discovered it Sunday.

He finds himself out walking in a drizzling rain, and without his realizing it he is headed up to the almshouse where the body of the drowned woman is being displayed for identification. Just to refresh his memory, he tells himself, in case he gets called up for a witness.

Inside, he takes his derby off and gets into the line of people. The girl is laid out in a dank stone-floored chapel, watery gray light filtering through the arched windows. It isn’t right to have her displayed like a sideshow curiosity, Lucas thinks. There is a rumor out that her name is Fannie something. He takes a look, but doesn’t recognize her as the same girl he pulled out of the water. She seems smaller and deader, and she has been cleaned up. The bruises around her eye and mouth are more noticeable, or, he wonders, does he just think that because the paper mentioned them? He’s disappointed she no longer looks like Effie, just a girl named Fannie. On the one hand he is relieved—he was half afraid he’d want to touch her or kiss her—but on the other hand he wants more than ever now to keep her watch key. He doesn’t know why. It just feels like it’s
his
now, something she gave him. Leaving the chapel, he touches his hand to his chest—it’s his.

On Monday evening Tommie is up in Tappahannock, where he spent the whole day with Brown Evans working on an estate settlement. There’s a will to probate, entailments to decipher, piles of papers to dig through, documents to copy, three contending branches of the family to satisfy, each with legitimate claims on a property going back to the 1700s—in short, it’s the kind of work Colonel Evans has taught Tommie to seek out and love. “We could be up to our elbows in this for weeks,” he says with satisfaction, lighting up a cigar at the inn where they are spending the night. “Not that I want a
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.”
As a friend of the family, he took Tommie on after law school, and Tommie has not disappointed him. The only thing that worried him a bit was that Tommie seemed reluctant for a while to cross the river. Tommie had his own reasons for not wanting to go over into King William, and it had nothing to do with being lazy.

“It’s a damn shame they can’t get a newspaper out here any quicker,” Tommie says, holding a copy of Saturday’s paper. Sunday’s might have something important.

“What were you looking for?”

“Oh, just wanted to see the news. It’s not every day you have a Democrat as President.”

Evans smiles. He massages his fringe of graying hair with his thumb and middle finger. Evans has a rotund face that goes naturally into a smile and reminds Tommie of a carnival barker in an orange-checkered suit he once saw in Richmond—though Evans wears dark, restrained clothes, Tommie can’t help picturing him sometimes as a pitchman. A case of Bell’s palsy half shuts his right eye, except when he’s excited about something, and then it becomes apparent that both eyes are equally alert. “Tommie, you never fail to impress me. Politics might be just the thing for you someday. You have a gift for persuasion. Your courtroom locution is coming right along. You’re clever too. You know when to be the educated gentleman and when to play the humble country boy.”

Tommie adds a polite word about the case at hand, then goes back to his paper. Evans wants to talk. “You know, someday you won’t have to wait a day for a newspaper. I’m sure of it. Do you know they’re planning on stringing electric lights all over Richmond? Right through a wire, and pop! Light on every street corner. And telephones too. They’re opening up a telephone office down in South Point next year. The modern world is coming, Tommie, and you’ll be a part of it. But the thing I like best is the cigarette. You ever try one? Of course you did.” He laughs as Tommie agrees. “Richmond Gems. Wish I had one on me now. I have another cigar, though.” He offers one, but Tommie declines. “And the negro, Tommie. The negro is, per my prediction, proving as educable, in many cases, as the poor white. You mark my words. The black race is very clever. Putting them in office just to make us squirm was hypocritical foolishness, but they’ll be back. Mark my words, Tommie. Nothing stays the same. If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that. And if you can’t go along with it, you might as well give up and die. And who wants to do that? A new world is opening up to you, Tommie.”

Evans sniffs the air. “Mmm that smells good. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

At the same hour in Richmond, Justice Richardson is paying a visit to Cary Madison. The carriagemaker and his wife are distressed to learn that the reservoir girl has been identified as his cousin. He agrees to go over to the almshouse tomorrow; his wife invites Richardson to come sit in their cramped little parlor and have a cup of tea. From Cary, Richardson learns that Lillian (the name she went by) was teaching in Millboro’ Springs, Bath County. “She’d just gone up there in the fall, round about October, and hadn’t moved anywhere else that I knew. I heard from them—when? I reckon a few weeks ago.”

“Who was it you heard from?”

“Her folks, down in Manquin.”

Cary Madison strikes Richardson as a modestly educated, hardworking, reasonably honest young man. He works with his hands and has several days’ stubble on his face. “Do you know of any particular gentleman she kept company with?” Richardson asks.

Madison thinks a minute, shifting his gaze to the faded hooked rug. “There was a well-driller name of Jenkins she took to for a while. Her daddy sued out a peace warrant to make him behave hisself, and he went away. Last I knew she’d taken up with her cousin, Willie Cluverius from down in King and Queen, but I don’t know if that’s true. Fact is, she corresponded with lots of young men.”

“Oh?”

Madison glances at his wife, then down again. “I might as well tell you, we corresponded for a time, her and me. She was keen on me, but there wasn’t much to it. She told people we were engaged, but we never exchanged rings or nothing. I think there were lots of young men like that.”

“Were you intimate with her?”

He looks at Richardson. “Naw, not like that. We kissed once, in a friendly way.”

“So she had several young men friends in addition to this Willie Cluverius?”

“I believe so, but you better ask her papa.”

Richardson thanks him and hurries back to his office to wire the telegraph offices in Millboro’ and Manquin.

• CHAPTER FIVE •

T
HE WEEK BEFORE
he went off to school, Tommie found himself looking for Lillian out on the porch, or in the kitchen, and had to remind himself that she was gone. The wildflowers she put in vases around the house wilted and were thrown out. The last of her jam tarts was eaten. And then he was off in school and busy again with his books and new roommates. But sometimes at night after he said his prayers, he would invent heroic dramas for himself. Her school was less than five miles away, and he would imagine her venturing out into the night to use the necessary and, frightened by a snake or a robber, she would cry out; like Heathcliff he would somehow hear her and come to her rescue.

She wrote him once at school. He wrote back, wondering if her father would disapprove. They were friendly, cousinly letters. She told him her news and of her dreams of teaching or nursing in an orphanage in Richmond someday. Her teacher had been a nurse in a private Richmond hospital during the war, and it sounded like such a brave, romantic thing to do. She also told him that “Nola Bray has spread false rumors about me.”

He sat down to write a response, but the letter came out sounding too stilted and sententious, full of precepts borrowed from the Bible and his pocket Shakespeare quotations. He crumpled the page and threw it away. He took out another piece of paper and wrote, “Dear Lillie, How I long to see you, just to stare into your brown eyes. At night I imagine coming to your rescue and holding you and kissing your sweet lips. I would press my throbbing chest against yours. Would you let me kiss your soft neck, and stroke your hair? If you said yes, I would die happy. Nola is a prig and I don’t care for her.” Tommie looked over his shoulder, then wrote, “If I could have one wish before I die it would be to lie with you naked.”

He immediately tore the letter into small pieces and threw them in the wastebasket. His final draft was short and neutral. “Thank you for your thoughtful letter … I’ve been busy with Latin and natural philosophy, which I enjoy … Your fond cousin, Tommie.”

Over the Christmas holiday, he avoided Lillian and sought out the company of Nola. He and his brother and cousin were invited to the Brays’ house for a dancing party, but Willie found some excuse to stay behind. Lillian said that she was not good at dancing, and even though Aunt Jane encouraged her she refused to go. As Tommie was leaving she lifted her chin and said, “You look like you’re going to Sunday school.”

“You could go too, you know.”

She looked a little unsure, and he wondered if he should have asked her to go before now. “I know my place,” she said. “Anyway I wouldn’t want her to think I was stealing her time.”

“What, with me? Nola and I are just friends.”

“Uh huh.” She gave him a coy, lowered-eyelid look.

Tommie rode off by himself, thinking about his little cousin. He had never danced either, but he was willing to learn. He had been to the Brays’ a few times, and Nola was always friendly, if a little too up-nosed. There were always other young people there, talking about cotillions and horse races and other things he had no familiarity with. Tommie had done his best to fit in. The Brays’ house was bigger, their garden more elaborate than Aunt Jane’s, and he wondered what it would be like to own such a grand place.

This time even though there were more people, Nola seemed especially attentive toward him, her eyes sparkling as he told her about Aberdeen. Many of the young men wore white vests with crop-tailed coats and tight pants; their hair was oiled and split in back, their breath perfumed with spearmint. Yet the fact that he wore a simple pinstripe suit and red necktie seemed unimportant to Nola; she took him by the hand and guided him over to a refreshment table laden with hot cider, lemonade, trifle, cakes, and raspberry sherbet in a big silver bowl. “I’m sorry you couldn’t get your brother and cousin to come to my little german,” she told him. “But you’ll just have to make up for them with your own dancing.”

“I’m not much of a dancer,” he told her.

“It’s easy,” she said. She was wearing a dark red dress with a tight basque and a loose black bow on the back of her hair. They were in the dining room, with the connecting doors opened onto the sitting room and the furniture cleared away. A few well-turned-out grown-ups—wistful, gossipy, proud, or indifferent—stood along the edges of the merriment like stately pillars from another time. The musicians were stationed in a corner of the sitting room, and when they took up a waltz, Nola showed Tommie the steps. He found that he was not as bad as he thought. Then came a polka, and again he picked up the steps so quickly he thought he must have some special talent, and he was delighted with himself.

“I don’t want to monopolize your time,” he told Nola.

She pulled back and regarded him with spirited eyes. “Aren’t you having a gay enough time with me?”

“Yes,” he said, embarrassed but quietly thrilled. He pressed his hand more firmly against her crepe de chine back.

She asked politely about his aunt, then said, “And I hear Lillie is making herself popular at Bruington.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“She told me so herself,” Nola said. “She and I have become great friends. We trade letters almost every week.”

And yet Lillie had told him that Nola was spreading rumors about her. He didn’t understand girls at all—could he possibly be an object of both their affections? It was vain to think so, yet he was not a bad-looking young man, he thought. His aunt told him he had nice symmetrical features and that both he and his brother were as handsome as young men could be. He had sandy brown hair, widespread eyes, and full lips that had, at nearly seventeen, never kissed a girl. “Want to take a walk in the garden?” he whispered.

She smiled and shook her head, then after the dance excused herself to go speak with a group of boys milling around the refreshments. He felt ashamed. Of course she couldn’t leave her own party and go out in the cold with him; he had sounded too eager, too unrefined. But she hadn’t been completely dismissive. She hadn’t slapped him or said he was rude. She seemed to understand boys and how to carry herself among people of all ages and stations. Lillie was friendly with Lewis and Maria back home, bringing them leftovers and vases of meadow flowers, but she could never order them around with the simple ease that Nola could. Nola was more sophisticated and grown up than Lillie would likely ever be. She could even play the piano and speak fluent French.

And yet he found himself thinking of Lillie’s tiny waist and the way she ducked her head when she was talking about something she was unsure of. She wasn’t elegant like Nola, but she was adorable, even if she did sometimes stretch the truth. The contrast between the two girls seemed to give him a window into the nature of his soul; he thought he must be in love with Lillie, but it disturbed him that the way he felt about her was passionate and physical, almost violent in its ability to take over his entire body and mind. It would be so much more pleasant if he were in love with Nola.

He danced again with Nola, inhaling the strange warm smell of her body. She was very lovely and refined, and though he didn’t want to crush her against himself it was still a joy to hold her. “You dance like an angel,” he said.

Nola gave him a mock smile, flaring her thin, aristocratic nose. “And you learn very quickly.”

He rode home in the late afternoon, a waltz still playing in his head. A light snow was falling and he pushed his horse, trying to fit its rhythm with the one in his mind—it would not work, there were too many beats. He slowed down, catching his breath, enjoying the cold stinging his cheeks. When he got home he called out for his brother. Lewis told him that Willie was out cutting wood.

He had not really wanted to see Willie, only to know where he was. Lillie was in the parlor, a piece of needlework in her lap; Aunt Jane was lying down in her bedroom. He stood for a moment staring at the fold in Lillie’s bodice as she bent over her work, his throat a dry husk. “You should have been there,” he said, his voice almost choked out.

She glanced up. “You have snow on your shoulders.”

He just lingered there in the doorway while she laughed at him; she got up and came over. “Lost in thought, Professor?” A curl draped across her forehead as she went up on tiptoe and brushed the snow from his coat, her hand-stitched bodice stretching across her sides and chest as she reached for him.

She laughed gaily while he told her about the party. He hummed some of the music, then put his arm around her and began waltzing her around the room and out into the back entry-way and into the summer kitchen. “See?” he said, “You do know how to dance. You should’ve come.”

And then Willie entered. He stood there a moment, a bemused smile frozen on his face, his eyes uncertain.

“She’s
my
cousin too,” Tommie said.

Lillie stopped. “That’s enough dancing for me,” she said, and she took herself back to the parlor.

Willie bent to unlace his mud-caked boots. “That should be enough wood for the week.”

“Been out chopping?” Tommie asked. Willie grunted, and Tommie stood there watching his bare head. “Go on and hit me if you want to.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Willie said, standing, chest out. In his stockings he was taller than Tommie. He forced a good-natured laugh, then rapped Tommie on the chest with a fist. “I’d sooner hit myself.”

The next fall he was off to the College of Richmond, having kissed Nola twice—once on the cheek and once lingeringly on the lips behind an Oriental screen. She seemed to favor him over all other boys. She admitted that she had kissed boys at camp meetings, but “just for practice” and only “because they were sweet,” not boys she would take seriously as suitors, such as himself. He sensed that her logic was somehow flawed, but she sounded so convincing that he never tried to do anything except hold her hand unless she suggested he might do more.

As for Lillian, she and Willie had become such close friends that Jane had quit worrying about them. “I don’t know exactly what they’re doing when they’re gone together all afternoon,” she told Tommie, “but I think Willie is very mature and he’ll do the right thing by her. He’s not too young to marry at eighteen, nor she at fifteen.”

A few days before he left for Richmond, Tommie asked his brother what it was like to lie with a girl.

“Why do you ask me?” Willie said. They were standing out under a tremendous multitrunked pine in the front yard, a pre-storm wind shivering the needles. Willie’s shirt was soaked with sweat from lifting hay bales; Tommie had just bathed, though he had worked as hard as Willie earlier in the day, then gone in and studied for two hours—a habit he had kept up all summer.

“I’m going off to college and I wanted some pointers,” he said.

Willie made a puffing noise. “I don’t know anything about girls, especially Richmond girls. Though I expect they’re about the same as girls around here.” He grabbed a branch and leaned his waist into the trunk in a casual way that Tommie admired. His brother had always been a better athlete, a more outgoing and uncomplicated person than himself. But though they were best friends and he knew Willie better than anyone in the world, there were things Willie kept to himself. Tommie suspected that Lillian had become his new best friend and confidante. His brother had all but quit asking him to go out on fishing and hunting jaunts, not that he missed them so much, though he did miss being with Willie and having him desire his company.

“But you’ve been with a lot of girls,” Tommie said.

“Not so many. And only ones that I care about.”

“You used to ask me what I thought about her.”

Willie nodded. “So you want to know if I’ve lain with her?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then I won’t tell you.”

“Well, have you?”

Willie looked out across the oatfield. “Maybe. What about you and Nola?”

Tommie puffed and shook his head. “Nola’s not that kind of girl.”

“And you think Lillie is?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know some terrible things nobody else does,” Willie said. “About her father. Her father’s an evil man.”

“I know he beat her.”

“Worse than that,” Willie said. He flexed the muscles in his jaws. With Tommie waiting for him to go on, he opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “He made her feel dirty … he came into her room when she was getting dressed.”

“You know she tells lies.”

“So she fibs sometimes about where she’s been, or what she’s been doing. That’s the kind of fib you’d learn to tell if you didn’t want your father to hit you for living.”

And that was all that Tommie was able to get out of his brother. He knew that going away to college in Richmond would be different from going off to boarding school. He was fairly certain that both Nola and Lillie would miss him—what he did not know was whom he would miss more. Three days before he was to leave, Lillian had departed for her second term at Bruington. She’d stood on tiptoe and laid her head briefly against his chest. He’d started to pat her head, then stopped himself, his hand suspended awkwardly in the air.