The Three Miss Margarets (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

P
EGGY MOVED WITH HER DOG PACK
into the living room, sat on the couch, and picked up the TV remote control. But the late-night offerings on the tube couldn’t compete with her memories.

P
EGGY WAS THE ONE WHO CALLED
D
ALTON
and told him about John Merrick. But she waited just long enough so that it was too late for him to help Grady. By the time he was back, the police knew about the gun in Dalton’s case. She braced herself for arguments and yelling, but he just bowed his head and she watched the energy drain out of him. Or maybe it was his spirit.

“Why?” he asked no one in particular. “Why would he do this?”

She couldn’t talk. He didn’t seem to notice.

“It was all for that woman? He said it was about the job. He says he never even went near her.”

“He’s lied before,” she managed.

“He says
you’re
lying.”

From somewhere she got the strength to look into his eyes. “Which one of us do you believe?” she asked him.

In the end, he believed her.

The high-priced Atlanta legal team Dalton hired said there was nothing for Grady to do but plead guilty. The local good ol’ boy Dalt hired to cover their bases on the home front agreed. Although the testimony from Li’l Bit and Maggie was damaging, they might have had a hope of shaking it. But the gun was too much to fight. So Dalt issued his ultimatum. And Grady capitulated. Dalton went by himself and sat in the court to listen while his son was sentenced and taken away.

When he came back home, Peggy was waiting for him.

“I’ll leave, if you want me to,” she said

He poured himself a drink. “No, I don’t want you to go,” he said. “You’re all I have now.” She had a drink with him, and he didn’t say a word about it. It was the first time she drank before noon.

He quit working and turned over the running of the resort and the Gardens to the trust. He stopped walking the grounds of his home and never even noticed when the gardeners let several of his favorite pink tea roses die. He stayed up late after she had gone to bed and fell asleep watching television. Eventually, he took to sleeping in the guest bedroom down the hall. They stopped entertaining, leaving that to the energetic young man from Vanderbilt who was hired to run the resort in his place. Dalton dropped all his political interests. Except for Peggy’s daily two hours on Li’l Bit’s porch, neither of them went out much.

They lived together in a silence that screamed through the house, bouncing off walls and getting caught in the corners, and the only thing that ever seemed to quiet it was the tinkle of ice in glasses. They lived like that and waited for something to deliver them.

Then Dalton had his first heart attack. In a way it was a gift. Now they had an excuse for the silence. Peggy took over his physical therapy and his diet, devoting herself to him completely. And if he never thanked her, at least he leaned on her arm when they went on their daily walk. And if she missed the vital man who had brought her little presents for no reason except she was so cute, she kept it to herself. Because by then she understood the bargain she had made. And she understood how utterly useless it was to look back.

The only time Dalton left Charles Valley was to go visit Grady in prison. A driver from the Lodge picked him up and returned him. He never suggested that Peggy might want to go with him.

After one of those trips he brought home a stray dog his driver hadn’t been able to miss when she ran out into the road. Her leg was broken and her mange was so bad the vet said it would be a kindness to put her down. But she was about to give birth to a litter, so Dalt kept her alive. When the pups were born, the mother was too sick to nurse. Peggy and Dalton fed them every three hours, wrapping their tiny bodies in blankets and resting them on their chests so the little guys could feel their hearts beat. Three pups and the mother died, but two survived. And when the vet said they were out of danger, Dalton looked genuinely happy for a moment.

The puppies had the run of the house. The screaming silence ended. And every once in a while, as they scrambled and barked around him, Peggy could hear Dalton laughing. She let herself hope that things would get better.

Then the call came from prison that Grady had been killed. And there was the funeral, where she didn’t even try to stop Dalt from drinking; she just did her best to keep up with him. The puppies were banished to the yard and the house was still again. And she and Dalton went back to waiting.

They waited for one more year. Dalt’s second heart attack was a massive coronary that killed him instantly. Li’l Bit and Maggie planned the funeral she could never remember, and Li’l Bit stayed with her for a week afterward. The night before Li’l Bit left to go home, she came into Peggy’s room with the two young dogs on leashes.

“They’ve been neglected,” she said, as the dogs shied and tried to run. “It’ll take some doing to make them civilized. But you have to find something to take care of. It’s the only way.”

That night Peggy started working with the dogs. Dalt had called them Hunt and Whitey. She renamed them Ricky and Lucy.

Chapter Twenty-eight

S
OMEHOW IN THE PROCESS
of telling Laurel the story they’d lost the core of it, Maggie thought, as she settled into her big wingback chair. They hadn’t made Laurel understand. And while Maggie wasn’t about to apologize any more than Li’l Bit was, she did want to be understood. She wanted Laurel to realize the cost.

Poor proud Li’l Bit had lost the man who had made her happy for many years. Peggy had watched Dalton die by degrees and lived with the guilt of knowing she had helped cause it.

And what had she lost? Maggie asked herself. Vashti, of course. But then, they’d all lost the child for a long time. No, what Maggie had lost was an innocence about herself. She had never known she could be ruthless.

S
HE HAD TAKEN
Vashti and Lottie to Catherine in Atlanta. They had to keep the child away from Charles Valley, for her sake and theirs. So Vashti and Lottie stayed with Catherine until Grady pled guilty and Nella could leave Charles Valley. They decided Vashti would finish out her school year in a private academy in Atlanta. After that, they were going to send her north to a prep school in New England. Given her test scores and grades and all the new suddenly fashionable outreach programs for southern black students, it seemed like a pretty sure thing that she would get in somewhere. They all agreed the child had to have a fresh start.

It wasn’t that they were unaware that what they were doing might be bad for Vashti emotionally. They were worried about that. The little girl had been through a major trauma, and to take her away from everything she knew at such a time was not the best way to help her heal. But it was too dangerous to let her stay at home. So they sent her off and held their breath.

Vashti seemed to adjust. Her grades were good and she never complained. Nella fussed sometimes because she was too quiet, but all in all it could have been a lot worse, and they breathed a collective sigh of relief when, after the year in Atlanta, Vashti was accepted at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

When Maggie and Lottie went to Atlanta to see Vashti and Nella off, it was a shock to see how much Vashti had changed. The bright little girl was gone. In her place was a tight, controlled child who never laughed.

“We can’t expect her to be like she was before,” Lottie said sadly.

“She’s got so much bottled up inside,” Nella told them.

So Maggie took Vashti aside and said, “If you feel troubled, you need to talk about what’s bothering you to your momma. Or you can call your gran or me. Don’t let it stay inside, dear one. Talk about it.” That was all she said. Then Vashti and Nella left for Massachusetts.

Again, Vashti seemed to do well. Her teachers were pleased with her, though Nella was still fretting that she didn’t seem to be making any friends. The worried women back home told one another she was just adapting to a new place. And, above all, as Lottie said, they couldn’t expect her to be the same child she had been. There had to be scars.

Then one Saturday morning Nella woke up in their apartment in Massachusetts to find that Vashti was gone. She’d left a note saying she was going home. Nella called Charles Valley, and Lottie hurried to Atlanta to try to intercept Vashti at the bus station. But while Lottie was gone, there was a knock at Maggie’s kitchen door. She opened it to see Vashti standing on her back porch.

The child looked thin, and of course she was tired. But she had lost the tightness; there was a light in her eyes.

“Hello, Dr. Maggie,” she said.

The scolding she’d planned to deliver vanished. Maggie hugged her and brought her into the house. “You scared us half to death, child,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I hitchhiked from Atlanta. I had to see you, Dr. Maggie.”

She had never said
doctor
before. It had always been just plain Maggie.

It took a matter of minutes to call the bus station and have Lottie paged. But Vashti didn’t want to speak to her grandmother. “I have to talk to you,” she said.

Maggie settled her in a chair at her big kitchen table, put a pile of cookies and a glass of milk in front of her, and waited.

“I want to tell Mr. Dalton what I did,” Vashti said. She hurried on as Maggie started to protest. “I can’t keep it a secret anymore. I think about it all the time. I dream about it at night. You said I should talk about it—”

“To your mother, or your grandmother, or me.”

“And I know what you’ll tell me. That I wasn’t to blame. That I’m a good girl and I didn’t deserve to have this happen to me. Momma says it every time I wake up crying. But it doesn’t help.”

“Going to Dalton won’t help either.”

“It will if I can make him understand. That’s what the priest said.”

And then it all came out. Because of what Maggie had said about talking to someone, she’d gone to a Catholic church in Andover and asked to speak to the priest.

“I didn’t tell him what happened that night, I just said I committed a crime. He said I should make amends to the person I’d injured. That’s Mr. Dalton.” The man probably thought she’d been shoplifting. Maggie loved her church, but it wasn’t the first time she wished the clergy would stick to praying.

“That priest couldn’t have known how complicated this is.”

“If Mr. Dalt just understands—”

“Darling child, he won’t. We all lied, and now his son is in prison. There is no way Dalton will ever understand that. You can’t tell him. For your sake, and your mother’s sake, and your grandmother’s sake.”

She watched the reality dawn on the little girl. “And for you and Miss Peggy and Miss Li’l Bit,” she added.

I am a coward, Maggie thought. I should tell her not to worry about us. To just do what is best for her. But instead she nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “We’d all be in trouble.”

The light in Vashti’s eyes went out. “I’m afraid,” she said softly. “I was so mad, Dr. Maggie. I remember how mad I was.”

Maggie took a moment. “When you get back to school, I think we should try to find a psychotherapist for you to talk to.”

Vashti shook her head. “You just said I can’t tell anyone. It might hurt Gran and Momma and you.”

“Talking to a doctor is different. They can’t tell anyone what you say.”

But it was too late to argue with Vashti; she’d already seen the possible repercussions. “I can’t take the chance,” she said. And as much as she hated herself for it, Maggie breathed a sigh of relief.

“Come outside with me,” she said.

Her intentions were good, that was some comfort later. All she was trying to do that night was pass along the source of her own strength. She took Vashti out to the pecan tree and told her about young Lottie climbing up high like a queen over all she surveyed. She told the girl about Lottie’s dream of being a doctor and the school that closed so she couldn’t finish high school. She left out the night in the barn, but she told the rest—about Lottie’s husband, who died trying to move his family to a better place, and her son who became a stranger. She told Lottie’s story with all the love she had. And then she said, “You have the chance to make all the dreams come true, for all those people. You can get an education and you can do something wonderful. You can’t throw this chance away. Too many people paid too much for it.”

Vashti looked at her. “I’m so unhappy,” she said.

“I’m not sure I know what happiness is,” Maggie said. “It seems to come when you’re not looking for it. It’s not something you can control. But you can control how well you do your work. And working well can bring you joy.”

She never meant it to be emotional blackmail. At least, that was what she told herself.

Whatever it was, it seemed to do the trick. Vashti went back to school, and once again her teachers were delighted even if her classmates found her aloof. She excelled in math and science, with an emphasis on biology. But Nella continued to fret. “She doesn’t seem happy,” she said. “All she does is work.”

Then, when Vashti was sixteen, Grady was killed. And Maggie got a phone call. “You never should have covered for me!” Vashti’s voice screamed into her ear. “You should have told the truth about what I did!”

“Vashti, darling, we talked about this—”

“Nothing would have happened to me if you had told the truth.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Bullshit! I was a little girl. They wouldn’t have done anything to me.” She had a clipped northern way of talking. Maggie wondered what she looked like now.

“Dear one, you haven’t been down here in a long time. You’ve forgotten how it is.”

“Oh, yes, I know. You and Miss Peggy and Miss Li’l Bit had to take care of the poor little colored child.”

“That isn’t fair. Your granma and your momma wanted to protect you. We were all afraid for you.”

“So you lied. And now another man is dead. And my momma and my granma are in it, so I can’t say anything. I just have to live with this for the rest of my life.”

“Grady Garrison killed your father.”

“He should have gone to jail for
that,
not for what I did.”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

“Go to hell, Dr. Maggie. You and Miss Peggy and Miss Li’l Bit and my gran can all rot in hell,” she said, and slammed down the receiver.

The next time Maggie saw her was at Nella’s funeral. When Vashti threw her out and young Laurel McCready overheard it.

Vashti stayed away from them for years after Nella’s funeral. Even after Lottie’s second stroke, she only came back for one day to see her grandmother installed in the nursing home and then she left. Maggie, Peggy, and Li’l Bit got used to the idea that she was gone from their lives. At least they tried to. Then one evening two years ago as Maggie was getting ready for bed, she heard a car come up the drive. By the time she got herself to the kitchen, Vashti was at the back door.

“Hi,” she said. For a moment Maggie thought her mind was playing tricks on her, because Lottie was standing in front of her: Lottie at her prime, young and strong and beautiful. Except that Lottie had never worn a severe black suit. Or had her hair cropped and styled. “May I come in?” Vashti asked. She had a bag of potato chips.

Wordlessly, Maggie opened the door.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” Vashti said.

“No. I’m just so . . . I never expected . . .”

“I know. I’m sorry about that too. So sorry, Dr. Maggie.”

“Don’t. There’s nothing to apologize for.”

“Oh, I have a lot to apologize for.” Then she grinned Lottie’s grin when she stole the fruitcake batter. “But I’m counting on you to forgive me.” The grin vanished. “I had to blame someone, Dr. Maggie. That was the only way I could live with it.”

“I know. We all knew.”

She started to say something; then she stopped. “Could we go outside?” she asked.

They went out and she walked to the pecan tree, with Maggie following. Vashti handed Maggie the potato-chip bag, reached for the lowest branch, and tried to pull herself up on it, but she couldn’t get high enough. “How the hell did Gran ever climb that?” she asked.

“She wasn’t wearing that skirt or those shoes,” Maggie said.

“I wish I could get up there, just to know how it felt.”

“Come with me,” said Maggie.

They got the ladder out of the shed and Vashti carried it to the tree. She climbed up and perched herself on the lowest branch. “Is this cheating?” she asked.

“Only a little.”

“Can you come up here? I think this branch will hold both of us.”

Maggie climbed up and forced herself not to look down as she sat on the branch. If I break my neck it will be worth it, she thought.

“I don’t feel very queenly,” Vashti said.

“We have to climb higher for that,” Maggie said.

“We should probably quit while we’re ahead.” Vashti began swinging her legs like a child. Maggie let hers swing a little too and waited for the girl who was now no longer a girl to say whatever it was she’d come so far to say. Vashti opened the bag and offered it to her.

“I guess the way normal people think of it, my life hasn’t been all that hot,” Vashti said at last. “No kids, no man. For a long time, not even a lot of friends. But when I add it up, it’s been pretty amazing. Because of the work and the political stuff. You were right about that. It gave me joy.”

“You sound like an old lady taking stock. You have years ahead of you.”

“Well, actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

And they sat in the pecan tree together while Vashti told her she was going to die.

And after she had choked back the tears that wouldn’t do any good, and asked the questions that Vashti answered with scientific precision, Maggie listened while Vashti told her what she’d come for. “I want all three of the Miss Margarets there with me when I go,” she said.

“You haven’t wanted to see us for years.”

“And now I’m coming back to lay this on you. It’s a bitch, I know.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I need you. I won’t be afraid if you’re there. I want three tough broads to see me out.”

It wasn’t a special night. There was no thunder or lighting, not even a full moon. Just still summer air and crickets making their dry music. She was sitting on a tree branch next to Vashti, who would be coming home to die. And the two of them were swinging their legs like little girls. And eating potato chips.

M
AGGIE GOT TO HER FEET
and went outside. She walked to the pecan tree and looked up to the top branches. When they’d talked to Laurel, she realized, what had gotten lost was the reason they did it all. They hadn’t made Laurel understand about Vashti. Laurel should have heard more about her. Not just the things she accomplished, the circle she made in her life. I wish I’d told Laurel about Vashti coming back to Lottie’s pecan tree, Maggie thought.