The Secrets She Carried (15 page)

T
he book of Exodus calls me a sinner.

For surely the words
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife
, carved in stone by the hand of God, also charge that I shall not covet my neighbor’s husband. But I do. I covet Henry Gavin. There. I have said it, and may God and Mama forgive me. I covet his rare sweet smile and his quiet heart, his buried wishes, his silent aches. I want them for myself. But they belong to another, to a fool who does not want them at all.

A fool, yes, but Susanne Gavin is not blind. Since that first day in the downstairs parlor when she studied my shoes with such keen distaste, I have squirmed beneath her probing eyes, prickling with dread that they might see too much. Now when they linger my legs turn to water. I’m certain they have seen through my skin, to the feelings breathing just beneath the surface, waiting to burst out of me whole and alive. Each time she looks away I’m astonished that she cannot hear the pulse and whisper of his name through my veins.

Henry. Henry. Always Henry.

The months grind past. The days are hard, too long alone in that stifling room, my spine aching with the effort to remember my place. While the sun is up Henry takes refuge in his fields. I have no such
freedom. Lately, though, I am at least spared her tongue. She is numb, or nearly so, blind to anything that is not her, an untidy ghost made meek by her bourbon and her syrup. She does not leave her room, does not notice, or does not care, that I have unwittingly become, in all but name, mistress of her house, that her servants look to me now for their daily duties, and that her husband looks to me for company.

We share lunches now, Henry and I, carried down to the lake in small metal pails and eaten in the shade of the willows, where it’s cool and we are shielded from Susanne’s bedroom window. We do not touch, though I cannot forget that one time, when I reached out to him in his grief and felt my heart begin to beat in earnest, as if the eighteen years that came before had only been marking time. Instead, we sit carefully apart in the long, cool grass. Henry talks about tobacco or the new book he’s been reading, small things of no account. I live for these times, reveling in the low, rich timbre of his voice, these few brief stolen moments when he makes me a part of his life.

There is a current that runs between us, an inescapable, yearning connection. I am drawn to him like a tide. As if it was my right. As if it was not a sin. I do not deceive myself that he can ever be mine. We are unlike, mismatched in every way that matters. There are boundaries, rules for people like him and people like me. Still, there are times, fleeting moments when he is unguarded, when I imagine in his gentle eyes a reflection of my own heart. And so long as it remains only in his eyes, I can convince myself that it’s only
half
a sin.

No sooner do we finish our lunch than I begin to look toward supper and our quiet time after, when I will sit beside him in his study and listen to the slow ooze of his Carolina drawl, part tar, part honey, as he reads aloud from
Tom Sawyer
or
David Copperfield
. I love the room because it is Henry’s, filled with the things he loves, his books and clocks and pipes, how it smells like him—is him. There, surrounded by these treasures, I make believe we share a life instead
of only a stolen hour, and make believe I do not feel the small, harsh eyes of his wife fixed on us from the portrait above the fire.

It’s only a painting, I tell myself, a few feet of canvas, a few strokes of oil, not real, not alive. Yet she is always with us over that mantel, her probing eyes cold and accusing. I pretend not to feel them. Henry pretends too.

One night, when he can no longer pretend, he lays Mark Twain aside. “It was Mama that started it all,” he says, his eyes grave as he raises them to Susanne’s portrait. “She wanted to see me married before she died, to know there’d be someone to look after me. Everyone in Gavin knew she was looking to find me a wife. I was too busy to care one way or the other. Then Susanne’s daddy paid a call and offered all that land. At the time it seemed worth the price of a wife—even one I didn’t love.”

He does not love her.

Of all his words, these are the ones I hear, the ones that cause my heart to leap. Deep down, I have always known it, yet I hug the words to me like tender things, to unwrap when I am alone, to gaze upon and cherish. Who does it harm, this quiet, reckless joy?
She
has never missed his love. There is no sentiment in her, no woman’s heart. She wants only his name and Peak, and those she has.

“You made your mama happy, at least,” I manage to say, my heart such a tangle that I fear anything more would give me away.

Henry shakes his head and smiles, a grim twist of that full, firm mouth I’ve come to know so well. “Happy? No, I didn’t make her happy. Susanne wasn’t what my mother had in mind.”

“Was there somebody else she did have in mind?”

Henry’s eyes drift back to the portrait. “Anyone
but
Susanne would have been fine, I think. They were too alike. She saw through Susanne.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Back then all I could see was her daddy’s land and all the new
tobacco I could plant. We both wanted something, and for better or worse, I guess we both got it.”

For better or worse.

My eyes creep to Susanne’s likeness over the mantel, haughty even then in her fine white lace, and I think of Henry standing beside her at the altar, saying those words and hearing them in return. Had he meant them—even a little? Had he, in those early days, hoped for
better
, for at least some pretense of a marriage, rather than this aloof arrangement lived at opposite ends of the hall? I do not ask, but Henry answers the question as if I had.

“It went wrong from the first day,” he says, his voice suddenly thick, his gaze carefully turned from mine. “We were just back from the church. Mama wasn’t well and went to lie down. Susanne followed her to her room and told her she’d need to clear her things out by the end of the day, that as my wife she was entitled to the best room.”

Of course she had. It was like Susanne to demand her due, proper or not.

“Mama was stunned. She’d been sleeping in that room for nearly forty years, in the bed she shared with my father until he died. And Susanne was turning her out. They went at each other like a pair of cats.”

“And you were in the middle,” I said softly.

“I should have been, but no. I was in my tobacco fields.” His shoulders slumped then, with the kind of shame men rarely show to women, his words thick with regret. “When I heard them start up, I slipped out the back door. I didn’t come in until dark. By then, Mama was hanging her clothes in one of the upstairs rooms. That’s when I knew what my life would be, that for as long as they were both in this house, I’d be whittled down and pulled apart by the two of them.”

My poor Henry.

He is strong in many ways, though not in ways that matter to
most. He believes in the rightness of things, in honor and fairness and order. But I see in that moment that he is a man who cannot always stand in the fire. I have always known this somehow, from the first night I saw him in the dining room with Susanne. Women—strong women—overwhelm him. And so I’m determined not to overwhelm, to be, in every way I can think, different from Susanne Gavin. It is not hard. We have only our womanhood in common—and Henry.

That night I lie awake in my small room, listening to sounds that have become a part of Peak’s night song and wondering how women can be so very different. I think of how we love, and where, and why. I think of Mama and the man who was my father, of the sorrow that lingers with her still, because she gave him up too late—and because she gave him up at all. And I think of the man who has seized my heart, astonished that Susanne could be made of such hard stuff.

She has no use for a husband who holds the demands of tobacco fields and curing barns above wealth and social standing. She requires a husband worthy of the mistress of Peak Plantation. But Henry is Henry, not to be tucked in, polished up, or made over. And so the future of her dynasty will rest not with Henry, but with a son, one she can mold to be all his father is not. For nine years it has been her quest. Now it seems that too is over.

The next morning Susanne calls me to her room. She tells me to draw her a bath, lay out her clothes, and put up her hair. Dr. Shaw will be paying a call to examine her and tell her how soon she can try for another child. I am stunned that she could think of it after the agony of the last time and all the times before. I wonder what Henry thinks, or if he knows, but it isn’t my place to ask.

When Susanne has had her bath and dressed, she sits at her vanity, setting to work with her powders and rouges, going heavy beneath her eyes, where the shadows are deepest. She hopes the doctor will not see the wreck she has become. But there’s no chance of that. She’s
as pale as a shade, her hair limp and bled of color, her body all sharp bones and jutting angles so that her dress hangs on her like a rag.

I keep an eye on the clock as I tidy the room, dreading Dr. Shaw’s arrival. When his knock finally comes, I go down to greet him. He removes his hat and offers a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s brought no bag, I see. There will be no examination, then, only bad news.

Susanne rises from her dressing table and extends a pale hand as she crosses the room to meet him. Her eyes shift to me. “Leave us, Adele. I’ll call for you when the doctor has finished. And close the door on your way out, please.”

Susanne is already working at her buttons when Dr. Shaw suggests they sit and talk a bit. There’s a flicker of fear in Susanne’s eyes as they meet mine in the doorway, a moment of dark knowing. I turn away, eager to be gone when Susanne receives the news I know is coming, that her wreck of a body will not abide another pregnancy, that there will be no more babies.

I have just reached the foyer when the door to Susanne’s room bangs open. “You lie!” Her words screech down the stairs, echoing in the small space at the bottom. “It’s a lie! You’re like all the rest. You don’t want me to have a child!”

“Mrs. Gavin—”

“Get out! Get out of my house!”

The doctor’s voice is louder now, no longer muffled, and I look up to find him backing out into the hall. Susanne is advancing on him, two spots of hot color blazing high on her cheeks. He stops at the head of the stairs, trying again to make her see reason. “Mrs. Gavin, surely you know there has been too much damage. While conception is still technically possible, I would be negligent if I didn’t warn you that another episode like the last one could well prove fatal. Given your age and your…dependencies, a pregnancy is not ever likely to be…successful.”

But Susanne isn’t listening. She sends him away, fouling the air with a string of words Mama would even now wash my mouth out for using. Dr. Shaw doesn’t look at me as he slips past, just sweeps his hat off the foyer table and slips out.

She calls for me then, and I go to her. Henry has disappeared into his tobacco fields, leaving me to weather Susanne’s storm alone. She is at her dressing table when I enter, staring hard at her reflection.

“Am I old?” she asks without turning away from the glass. “You heard what he said, Adele—that I am too old to have a baby. Do you think I am?”

I have no earthly idea how to answer her. Instead, I reach for her tincture, startled to realize there is a part of me—an awful part—that is relieved by Dr. Shaw’s news, relieved to know there will be no need for Henry to visit his wife’s bed. I have seen her body; it is not beautiful, not young, yet thinking of it, of Henry doing what must be done to produce an heir, flays me raw.

I wait for the grief to tear through her, for her to dissolve into one of her sticky puddles of self-pity. I steel myself to offer the polite and proper sympathies, to splash a bit of bootleg into her teacup and dose out her tincture. But there are no tears. Instead her eyes go queer and cold in the glass.

“This is Henry’s fault,” she hisses. “Of course it’s Henry. He’s not man enough to give me a child!”

I cannot listen. I want to scream, to fly at her like a cat, to shriek what trembles on my tongue, that she has only herself to blame, that her desolate womb is a mirror of her empty heart, that she does not deserve Henry’s child. But I hold my tongue. Losing my place means losing Henry. And I am too far gone for that, whatever comes.

I feel her eyes on me now, hard but unseeing. She has become a feral thing, wild-eyed and unsteady on her feet, defiance swirling about her like smoke, and for the first time I am afraid. Not of her
probing eyes, but of what is in back of them, of the seething, glittering thing I am watching come to life.

“I’ll show them all! That doctor, and those gloating biddies, even Henry! They think I can’t produce an heir, that I’m not strong enough, not good enough. I’ll prove them wrong if it kills me!”

I flinch when she says it. I cannot believe that ravaged body of hers could produce a child without killing her. And yet I know she means to try. It’s a strange kind of revelation, and an uneasy one—the thought that she could die. I don’t want that, I tell myself. And it wouldn’t matter. Even if Henry were free, he couldn’t be mine. Not in the way he’s Susanne’s. Not ever that way.