When the Morning Glory Blooms (36 page)

He waited then, as if there were any real chance I would turn him away. My wide-swung door and wider smile invited him in.

Providentially, the evening was cool enough for a fire. Fire no longer frightened me as it had for long months after the attack. I saw it once more as a source of heat, light, fuel. No longer a weapon. That, too, was redeemed for me.

Josiah built and stoked the fire in the front parlor while I cut thick slices of apple pie for us and heated water for tea. The fireplace flames were well established by the time I returned to the parlor with our tray.

Yes. The flames were well established.

His hand brushed mine when he took the cup I offered. So brief a contact, but it rearranged all my internal organs—my heart into my feet, my stomach into my throat. When I extended a plate of pie, his hand intentionally engulfed mine. “Thank you, Anna.” The moment lasted a split-second lifetime.

The firelight was all we wanted or needed for illumination. Josiah’s sideburns showed flecks of silver in the fire’s amber glow. We both acknowledged the fair difference in our ages. But he never treated me like a child. Now that I think about it, I don’t believe I ever was one. I graduated much too quickly from babe-in-arms to adult, skipping the innocence and unconcerned days of childhood altogether. I’m sure it registered in my countenance. The lines on my face brought our ages closer together.

It occurred to me that Josiah Grissom could teach a thing or two to many of the young men who were the absent fathers of Morning Glory’s children. Professor of responsibility, with doctorates in kindness, gentility, godliness, and strength of character. I could gather the irresponsible, and the unkind, the uncouth, the harsh, and the weak-willed in a room, set Professor Grissom before them, and tell the reluctant students, “Watch this man! He will show you how to live.”

I am aware that Mr. Grissom, for all his gifts and purity of heart, was saddled with humanness. I’d seen him angry, but had never failed to see him ask forgiveness and make amends. I’d witnessed his irritation with the addlepated, the foolish of this world, but not without an accompanying repentance and a turning from agitation to prayer for the fool’s soul. And isn’t that the difference between those who please God and those who do not?

Unlike Josiah, for so many people failings are the pavement on the road they walk, not an occasional pebble quickly tossed out of the way.

Did he ever disappoint me?

No more than I disappointed him.

Dinner and a concert, he’d said a few weeks later, when the house began to fill again. A traveling musician I’d longed to hear, one my memory can no longer name.

Anticipation served as one of my long-suffering companions in that endless night of waiting for him to arrive. Anticipation sat with me in my lamp-lit office, twisting my stomach into a thick braid. She and I were like schoolmates at recess—she plaiting my stomach while I chattered about my fairy-tale dreams for the future.

But Anticipation grew tired of the game. As the evening wore on, Concern took her place.

Had I misunderstood his invitation? Not likely. One can wonder, in a busy week, is it Tuesday or Wednesday? One can get so caught up in the living of it that one fails to flip the calendar page from July to August, the days being so similar. But one does not misplace the particulars of something for which one has so long waited.

He was simply, unavoidably detained. That was all. An unexpected visit from an important client. A pressing matter that could not wait. I would not allow Concern to voice her well-reasoned opinion that it was unlikely anything in his caseload would be so pressing as to keep him this long beyond the close of the business day.

Having read
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
it didn’t surprise me when Concern grew ugly, convulsing and contorting herself into a hideous, sinister monster called Worry.

Picking up the gauntlet of the wait, Worry tormented me with thoughts of his body caught beneath the bulk of his overturned carriage. Or of a disgruntled client holding a derringer to his throat. For what earthly reason, Worry couldn’t elaborate. She spoke in clipped, disjointed sentences and seemed unbound
by laws of reason and logic. “
What if he
—?” she taunted, then left it to Imagination to fill in the blanks.

Imagination possesses a fair working knowledge of disasters and is a skilled artist. She sat musing at the easel in my mind. She painted him hurt, deathly ill, already dead, or worse—disinterested.

He’d changed his mind about dinner, the concert, me. He hadn’t sent word because he couldn’t find any that seemed appropriate. He tried them on—one at a time—like hats or ties. But none felt or looked right.

“Anna, I’m sorry. This was not a good idea. Best we keep our relationship strictly professional.”

“Anna, I don’t know what I was thinking when I invited you to accompany me for the evening. Surely you, too, can see that it would be in our best interests not to pursue this further.”

“Anna, I feared that my attentions might mislead you into thinking I care more than I do.”

Now watery thin, the evening once held the cream-rich potential of changing everything in my relationship with Josiah. From friendship to  . . .  to an indefinable something, the very thought of which tasted sweet. We’d shared many a dinner together. Always business. That night there was to be no business on the menu. That night was for us.

Us
. A coarse-sounding, wholly unlyrical word for a concept so soul-satisfying. How easy it is to invent a future from a mere possibility! The fact that all my dreams starred a gentle, refined, intense man with blue-delphinium eyes and spring-water laughter did not guarantee that
my
face had ever appeared in
his
dreams.

He was flawlessly kind to me, true. But he was kind even to his opponents in court or business. He seemed to enjoy
my company, but wasn’t he at ease in almost any circle and circumstance? Debating politics, theology, and literature with both conviction and grace.

Attentive to the ailing widow neighbor—whose conversations knew no other dimension than a recitation of her pains and menu of current treatments—and to the senator who wielded career-disabling or -enabling power.

When the situation called for it, he addressed the court with authority.

Your Honor, gentlemen of the jury, I direct your attention to . . 
.

I’d seen his legal finesse stop objections mid-word. And yet, he could sit in my parlor and listen with endless patience while I wrestled with one paltry crisis or another. He could be enraptured, as I, with a butterfly’s effortless flight pattern above the wildflowers at the creek’s edge. He could sip chicory-thinned coffee at my kitchen table and never let on that he noticed. Of course he noticed. His palate had been treated to the fare of the governor’s mansion just the evening before.

In our working relationship, I stiffened at some of his counsel. But I never doubted his wisdom. His presence was as calming to me as a cello played by a skilled muse with long, sonorous draws of the bow.

Could I have merely imagined his affection for me? No. But my mind may have exaggerated the depth of his caring. That’s what troubled me most that long evening of waiting—that I had perhaps
invented
the dream.

The mantel clock I’d always found comforting became a spine-wrinkling irritation as I waited for him that night. Its once dulcet tones stung like vinegar on an open wound. Six o’clock. Seven. Eight. Too late for dinner. Nine. Too late for the concert. Ten. Too late for us.

To the young women in my care, I had preached until I was hoarse that good men kept their promises. Always. Would I
now have the courage to follow my own counsel and let Josiah go  . . .  or rather, let my imagination-fed infatuation with him fade? The girls were watching. I would discipline my heart not to race when he drew near. I would sit with him across a desk, across a room, and not ache with what might have been if he had loved me in return.

How could I blame him for shying away from me? I was inextricably packaged with the work to which God had called me. We were inseparable. A heavy load for any man to consider sharing.

Reason spent but a few brief moments with me that night. She argued that since Josiah had never intentionally disappointed me in the past, his absence could be explained. I chased her and her opinion from the room with the groaning sound a heart makes when it is breaking.

What a sight I must have made. Bent inside. Ladder-straight in posture. Perched stiffly on the front edge of the settee facing the window through which I hoped to view his approach. I watched in vain.

My long-fussed-over attire was dismantled as the time slipped by. The wool cape was laid aside, my gray felt hat and Lydia’s lavender gloves summarily removed. The brooch at my neck—which I surmised interfered with my breathing—joined the pile of discards. My breath still felt pinched and strained.

Frugality finally pushed me to action. I could not justify letting the lamps burn for a lost cause.

My girls were long abed. Alone, I walked the halls of my suddenly hollow home, turning down the lamps with theatrical solemnity, as if each vanishing pool of light represented the snuffing of hope.

Ivy—1951

“Anna, that must have broken your heart! Even now, as you’re telling the story, you’re crying.”

“I’m not crying as much for that long-overcome disappointment as I am for how close I came to giving up on a good man because I couldn’t believe he could love me as much as I needed. Does that sound at all familiar, Ivy?”

Ivy leaned back.

“What is it about Drew that makes you so certain he won’t still love you?”

“I haven’t heard anything since I told him the truth.”

“And has the postal system always been prompt in getting mail from the battlefield to our doors?”

“I should have heard by now.”

“You’re assuming he will walk away from you and from the baby, that he’ll abandon his responsibilities and that his love for you will dissipate as soon as he reads those words. That’s a cad, Ivy, not the man you’ve described to me. Maybe you’re better off without him.”

“That’s not who he is.”

“No?”

“Drew is kind and generous, brave, strong but tender. He’s like no other man I’ve met.”

“Then what makes you so certain he won’t marry you?”

“Oh, he’ll offer to marry me. But will he do so out of obligation, because he is such a fine man, or because he loves me?”

“Can it be only one or the other? Or can love and responsibility blend to form something exquisitely beautiful?”

Her notebook never far out of reach, Ivy smoothed ointment on the scars on Anna’s legs as she and Anna talked. The strokes grew slower, lighter. “He  . . .  will  . . .  leave me.”

“Why would you dishonor him by saying such a thing?”

Ivy’s throat tightened. The room with solid walls shimmered. “This isn’t my first child. My mother left us the night she found me in our bathroom in the midst of a miscarriage. I was sixteen. Love had nothing to do with that one. And love wasn’t enough to overcome my mom’s disappointment in me.”

“That wasn’t it.” Ornell’s coarse voice, though subdued, stopped the shimmering. “That’s not why she left us.”

Ivy turned toward the doorway where her father stood, but she avoided his gaze. He took one step deeper into the room.

“She didn’t walk away because of you, Ivy. How could you think that?”

Ivy searched the ceiling—as she had for years—for some other explanation. “Because of me, your marriage broke up. Because of me, she abandoned us. Because of me, you were saddled with a soiled daughter who even after she grew up couldn’t survive on her own.”

“Ivy, stop!” his voice commanded now. Then softer, “You never were very good about recognizing the truth.”

She glanced from her father to Anna. Two sets of eyebrows arched high.

“What mother in her right mind would run away from her child in trouble?” He whispered the words, but they echoed in the room.

“Dad?”

“In her right mind. She weren’t in her right mind, Ivy.”