The Three Miss Margarets (14 page)

They knew each other very well, having worked together for years in Dr. Maggie’s clinic. Even now, when Dr. Maggie had hired a nurse and a receptionist, Miss Li’l Bit still showed up twice a week to help with the books. Listening to them was an education for Peggy, and not just because of the things they talked about. She had never heard women argue so passionately on so many subjects without at least once invoking the opinion of some man.

There were things they agreed on. They both admired Eleanor Roosevelt, although Dr. Maggie said she was the type of woman who gave being good a bad name. And they both believed passionately in more rights for Negroes.

Dr. Maggie had always treated Negro patients in her clinic, which didn’t upset most people. But she always addressed them by their last names and said Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, which did bother many. Although, Peggy noticed, they weren’t so bothered that they wouldn’t call Dr. Maggie out of her bed in the middle of the night when they needed her.

Miss Li’l Bit gave money to an organization called the NAACP, and she was very excited because they were suing some school board in Kansas about segregation. If they won it would mean white children would have to go to school with colored children. Miss Li’l Bit said that meant there would finally be real equality. Separate but equal was a joke, she said.

When the black moods drove Peggy to the porch, she sat quietly, hoping the two older women would let her stay and listen silently to them until she felt better. But eventually they always turned to her. And a duet of high and low voices would begin.

“If you give in to depression, that monster will win. You can’t let that happen.” That was Miss Li’l Bit’s flutey sound.

“Just remember, you didn’t do anything wrong.” That was Dr. Maggie’s rich low cello tone.

“Think of him as a sick animal you happened to run into.” High voice.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Low voice.

“He’s evil.” High voice.

“You have to fight.” Both voices, almost in unison.

The voices found the place inside her that had not been damaged beyond repair. And little tiny flames of anger started to grow, which probably saved her. And no doubt led her to play a part in what came later.

P
EGGY POURED HERSELF A SMALL SHOT
, no more than a swallow really, from the thermos she’d filled and taken into the bedroom. Her makeup was done, no small feat this morning. She quickly flipped through the contents of her closet, rejecting anything with even a hint of black in it. Li’l Bit and Maggie might wear it, they were older than she was and sometimes they reverted to the rules they grew up with, but she couldn’t bear it. She made her choice and slipped the dress gingerly over her head, which was aching less since she’d had her medicinal nip. Outside, the dogs were barking. She let them in and put down their food bowls, something she couldn’t have imagined doing an hour ago. Let’s hear it for the thermos, she thought.

There was still one thing left to do. She punched a private number on her quick-dial and was rewarded by a cheery voice announcing that it was housekeeping at the Garrison Gardens Main Lodge and asking how could it help Mrs. Garrison this morning. She told it to send someone over to let her dogs out in two hours and to check again if she wasn’t home by five. The voice said it would be delighted and wished her a fine day. She headed for her car, realizing that, after all the years, she still felt like a kid with her very own genie in a bottle when she called the Lodge and gave her orders as Mrs. Garrison.

A
S
M
YRTIS
G
ARRISON GOT SICKER
, people talked about the way Grady stayed away and about the coolness between mother and son on his brief visits home. Mr. Dalt was said to be mystified and distraught. But whatever it was that had come between mother and son, it didn’t go away. Grady spent his winters in college and his summers out in Montana working for the family.

Miss Myrtis’s heart was failing by degrees. Peggy often found her gasping for air, her face as white as her bedsheets. It was obvious that she hurt most of the time, and she was terrified, although she never said it. When she was really bad, Peggy read out loud to her, novels by Dickens and Jane Austen that bored Peggy to tears but seemed to distract Myrtis from the pain. And maybe from the fear she wouldn’t talk about.

Meanwhile, Dalton began building Garrison Gardens.

It was a tradition that each generation of Garrisons did something to enhance the thousands of acres the family owned. Dalton’s father, Grady, had built a stone chapel complete with a church organ in one of the many pine forests and named it for his long-suffering wife—probably, according to the local gossip, as a tribute to her years of ignoring his infidelities.

But it was Dalton who put the resort on the map by building the huge gardens and the beach and opening it all to the public. He was accused by his friends and family of exploiting the town for commercial gain and destroying the natural beauty of the area.

As Dalton was either enriching his heritage or destroying it, depending on your point of view, Peggy’s school career was staggering to a close. She continued skipping days and sometimes weeks, in order to work for Miss Myrtis, and barely passed her courses. To her mother’s dismay, she refused to try out for cheerleading or homecoming queen. She wouldn’t have made it anyway. She’d lost her sparkle. She still wore makeup, when Mama reminded her, but most times when she ate off her lipstick she forgot to excuse herself and go to the ladies’ room to put on more. She cut her hair short because it was easier and stopped adding the “sun streaks.” And her clothes were enough to send Mama to bed in despair. Gone were the figure-hugging sweaters and cinch belts. She wore white blouses loosely tucked into dowdy pleated skirts now. “It’s hanging around those two old maids, that’s what’s doing it!” Mama cried out in frustration.

But the truth was, Peggy was spending more and more time taking care of Miss Myrtis. And Mama wasn’t going to complain about that. So she fretted, but she didn’t interfere. Meanwhile, proms and parties and finally graduation itself came and went. After Peggy got through her final exams by the skin of her teeth, she didn’t even consider Li’l Bit’s generous offer to help her go to college.

“Wouldn’t you like to be with people your own age?” Maggie asked. “You might have fun.”

“I have fun right here on this porch, Maggie.” She’d dropped the titles; they were plain Maggie and Li’l Bit now. She didn’t have to explain to Maggie that she had nothing in common with people her own age anymore because of Grady. Maggie always knew what you were saying when you didn’t say it.

“You told me I made a big decision,” she said. “Now I have to make it work.”

Maggie nodded unhappily.

“Besides, Miss Myrtis really needs me now. I’m going to work full time for her.”

What she didn’t tell Maggie and Li’l Bit was how many nights she kept Dalton company when Myrtis was too tired to come down to dinner.

She did it because Myrtis suggested it. “She’s afraid I’ll grab a sandwich in the kitchen and swallow it in front of the TV if I’m on my own,” Dalton said, with a wink. He was the kind of man who winked when he was kidding because he wanted to make sure you got his joke.

So Peggy sat at the big dining room table and chatted with him about his all-time favorite movie, which was
Shane,
and her favorite, which was anything with Audrey Hepburn, and he said he didn’t know what people saw in that stick, he liked a girl with meat on her bones like Marilyn Monroe. And while they chatted, Peggy remembered how much she used to love talking about movies and things that were silly.

Then one night the most powerful man in her small world came home grinning like a bad kid and carrying a grease-stained brown paper bag from Lenny’s Barbecue. And after swearing her to secrecy he produced two drippy shredded pork and coleslaw sandwiches, which he served on TV trays in the living room with paper napkins, and they watched
Leave It to Beaver
while they ate.

After dinner he told her about the experimental new breeds of plants they were creating at the Gardens, and they laughed because she couldn’t pronounce the Latin names of all the flowers and he admitted neither could he at first. He took her out to the backyard to his private flower beds behind the swimming pool, where the gardeners had planted a new kind of pink tea rose that had been bred in the greenhouses, which he couldn’t name Myrtis, because his wife hated her name, and he couldn’t call Beloved, because she said that was too syrupy. Then suddenly he was starting to tear up, which embarrassed him until Peggy made him laugh by mispronouncing another flower name.

One afternoon, after the Gardens had opened for the public, he asked if she had seen them, and she said she hadn’t, so he insisted on taking her. There was no way to tell him that she hadn’t been to the Gardens because you had to go through a pine forest to get to them and his son had made her afraid of the woods. But she knew he wanted to show off his creation, so she got in the car and prayed that there would be hundreds of people there.

Dalton didn’t drive her to the greenhouse, or the beach, or any of the places where the schoolchildren played and families had picnics. He took her on one of the roads he’d put in the old forest where the live oaks and pines grew so thick that their branches blocked out the sky and the ground smelled moldy like it was damp even when it hadn’t rained. And the fear that started growing inside her was so strong that when he stopped the car she couldn’t breathe. But then he pointed at something ahead of them.

“Look at that,” he said, in a hushed voice. So she made herself look and saw a small stone building. It was square and rustic, almost like a small cottage. But then she moved a little and she could see the spire through the trees. And on the side wall there was a stained-glass window with brilliant blues and greens and reds. A sign by the side of the road said
MISS LUCY’s CHAPEL
.

“Would you like to go in?” Dalton asked, but she shook her head no.

“This is Myrtis’s favorite place in all of the Gardens,” he said. “I think she likes it better than anything I’ve built. My daddy put it up after Mother died.” He looked at the chapel. “My father was a great man.”

“I think you’re a great man,” Peggy said, and then couldn’t believe how pleased he seemed. Although what he said was, “Bless your heart, I’m not even smart.”

“You were smart enough to build the Gardens.”

“If you listen to most of the people I know, I turned a little piece of paradise into an eyesore and betrayed the family trust.”

“I don’t know about any of that. But a lot of people come here and have fun. And because of you a lot of people have jobs who didn’t before.”

Again, it was the right thing to say. “That was what I wanted,” he said eagerly. “To make this town self-sufficient and give a man a chance to earn a living for his family. It was never just to make money for myself.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with making as much money as you can,” said Peggy. “If I could, I’d make tons of it.”

He stared at her for a second and then he laughed. “Haven’t you ever heard that money is the root of all evil?”

“Yes, and people who think that should try being poor.”

He stopped laughing. “What would you do with tons of money, Miss Peggy?”

There was a time when she could have given him a list of the pretty clothes she wanted, and the perfume and makeup. But she hadn’t bought any of those things since his son taught her what fear was.

“I’d be safe,” she said.

After a moment he said, “Are you sure you don’t want to go inside my daddy’s chapel?”

And now she knew what he wanted to hear, so she shook her head. “I’d rather see the Gardens and the beach you built.”

He took her through the Gardens and the beach, and all the guests who were lined up had to stand back and wait for them to go first, and all the employees turned themselves inside out for them. And she enjoyed every minute of it.

But she decided not to tell Li’l Bit and Maggie.

Myrtis got worse, and a professional nurse was brought in to care for her. But even though she couldn’t play cards anymore and she never left her bed, Myrtis still liked to have Peggy there. So Peggy stayed at her job. She read to Myrtis when she was up to it, and arranged the flowers that still came in from the cutting garden, and sometimes she just sat with the sick woman and held her hand until she fell asleep. And in the evenings she listened to Dalton Garrison tell her stories about the great accomplishments of his forebears, and she told him he was better than all of them as if she knew what she was talking about. And what they were both really doing was helping each other get through his wife’s death. But she didn’t tell Maggie and Li’l Bit that either.

Then finally the fight was over. There was a heart attack in the middle of the night and Myrtis went to the hospital for the last time. Grady flew home from Montana, but his mother was already in a coma and she died before he could get there.

At first Peggy tried to get out of going to the funeral. She had managed to avoid Grady through all the years she worked for his mother, and the one thing in life she knew for sure was that she wanted to go on avoiding Grady; and she couldn’t very well do that at a funeral. But Dalton asked her to come to the ceremony and the private reception afterward. And when she tried to get out of it, he was so hurt she couldn’t refuse. Besides, the little flames of anger inside her said she belonged at that funeral, she had earned her place there.

She was alone in the kitchen when Grady walked in. He hadn’t changed much. He was still lean and tan, maybe even more tan than he had been. His hair was still sandy gold. His eyes were still bright blue, and the look in them was still evil.

“You little bitch,” he said. “You lied to my mother and she believed you. And now you run around this house like you own the place. But that’s over. Mama’s gone and I’m coming back home. And if you’re smart you’ll make sure I never set eyes on you again.” Then he walked out.