Charlotte’s Story (19 page)

In the mirror, I was a different woman from the one I’d been a few weeks earlier. My face was puffy from oversleep, and the skin at my jaw looked slack, as though I were forty-seven instead of twenty-seven. Was my mouth harder? Less soft and appealing? I tried to think of how Press might see me now. Of course Rachel had been right about Press and J.C.; she had no reason to lie.

The door between our bedrooms was closed. On a mild day like this one, he often played tennis or golfed, but J.C. would be arriving in the afternoon. Press had assured me that she didn’t need a thing that he and Terrance and Marlene couldn’t provide, and that she would be there mostly to work on the theater.
Mostly.
I tried to imagine J.C. rolling up the sleeves of one of her expensive silk blouses to take up a paintbrush with the crew already at work in the ballroom, exposing her too-long, too-thin, insectile arms. A female praying mantis towering over the workers, biting the heads off of each one after—
Oh, God, what was I thinking?

Even before Rachel and I had gotten out the door of the Racquet Club, Rachel had said “Do
not
trust her.” Behind us, Press and J.C. were finishing their lunch. I glanced back to see J.C. lifting a glass of red wine to her lips, an act that had, indeed, made drinking red wine at lunch look unseemly.

Enough.

I ate a quick breakfast and showered and dressed, giving a thought to my clothes in the same way that Rachel had encouraged me the day before. Grief had made me thinner and pale, and, in truth, a part of me didn’t care what I wore. But there was also a warning voice in my head that told me to dress carefully. With that in mind, I slid into a pair of bright pink slacks and a soft white cardigan with pearl buttons of which Eva had been particularly fond. There was still a similar one in Eva’s middle drawer that she would have insisted on wearing when she saw mine.

It was always going to be like this. Always
What would Eva have said? What would she have liked?
I ran my lipstick over my lips almost in defiance, thinking:
I must do this now. I must bear it. I must remember.

My fault.

I was in the nursery when the telephone outside Olivia’s room rang. We had four telephones: one in the kitchen, one in the front hall, one in the second-floor gallery, and one in the library. Nonie was outside, hanging Michael’s laundry (she insisted on doing it herself in the wringer washer in the mudroom). The call went unanswered, and when the ringing started again, I put Michael on my hip and hurried to answer it.

Buck Singleton, my father’s best friend of thirty years, was on the other end of the line.

On hearing my voice, he immediately launched into what he’d called to say.

“Charlotte? Darlin’, your daddy was crossing the street the same way he does every day to get to the store—you know he never goes up to the corner—and a car came out of nowhere and clipped him, knocked him over. There weren’t any witnesses that we know of, but the car didn’t stop. I didn’t even see any brake marks on the street.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. My father was two years younger than Olivia had been when she died, but he was in excellent health, and even though it wasn’t rational, a part of me had believed he would stay exactly the same as he was the day Preston and I married.

“Are you there, Charlotte? Did you hear what I said? He asked me to call you, but to not get you upset. He said he doesn’t want you to come, but his leg is broken along with a couple of ribs. No one saw him hit, but they found him right away.”

“Have you seen him? How is he?”

In my arms, Michael began to tug on the handset, saying “Unh unh unh!”

In the confused moments that followed, I learned that my father was, indeed, in the hospital, but was conscious. Buck had promised to call me but was supposed to discourage me from coming. His wife, Callie, who occasionally helped at my father’s office-supply store, had said she would look after the store and cook any meals he needed.

“But someone needs to be there with him,” I told Buck. “I’ll come. Tomorrow, if we can’t get the train today.” I knew my aunts would certainly want to help, and that if they went instead of me, the stress would slow his healing considerably.

Buck demurred. “He won’t be happy about it, honey. He was adamant he doesn’t want you to leave that baby boy of yours. Is that who I hear?”

“Then I’ll bring him with me.” Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t a good idea. But together Nonie and I could certainly take care of both my father and Michael.

“We’ll get things ready on this end. You let us know when you get here.”

Michael let out a howl when I hung up the telephone without letting him have the handset. I held him closer, kissing him on the forehead.

“That wasn’t very nice. It wasn’t your turn to talk on the telephone today.” I shifted him. “How would you like to see Grandpa?”

It wasn’t enough to interrupt his swelling tantrum. Already his full cheeks had bloomed with pink and his eyes filled with angry tears.

Needing to find Nonie, I carried a squirming Michael back to the nursery and put him in his crib to cry out his tantrum alone. As I shut and locked the door, I felt a swell of anxiety. Failure. If I couldn’t even handle a toddler, how useful could I be to my injured
father? Someone had hit him and left him helpless and broken in broad daylight on a Clareston street. I closed my eyes.

Helpless. Alone. Just like Eva.

I heard Nonie’s soft footsteps on the stairs and went to meet her.

“What is it? Where’s Michael?” Seeing my face, her gray eyes filled with fear.

“Everything’s all right.” I laid my hand on her arm, wanting to believe I was telling the truth.

Sometimes when I spoke in the hall, with the dome high above me, I felt as though I were speaking in a church or some other public building dedicated to worship or some arcane philosophy. It was suddenly a house that was no longer benign and simply grand—it breathed with purpose. But
what
purpose, if not for shelter and perhaps to be an ostentatious display of wealth? Surely I should know. In that moment, the house’s
being
felt so tangible to me that I lowered my voice almost to a whisper so that Nonie had to lean close to hear.

“Tell me, girl.” Nonie covered my hand with hers and squeezed so hard that it hurt.

“Daddy’s going to be all right, but he’s in the hospital.”

“Oh, good Lord.” Nonie swayed on her feet. I caught her and led her away from the stairs to an upholstered bench outside the morning room. “Is it his heart? What is it?”

Nonie, usually so composed, her responses measured, looked stricken with physical pain. She had been heartbroken when Eva died, and poured her grief into caring for Michael and for me, keeping our lives as normal as possible. But what I’d just told her had hurt her in a different way.

“It was a traffic accident. Someone hit him with their car but then drove away. He has a broken leg, and Buck told me some of his ribs are broken. But he’s in the hospital and awake enough to tell everyone not to worry about him. You know how he is.”

“I know how he is,” Nonie echoed. Now her voice was almost a whisper. Looking down, she took off her glasses and laid her
hands on her knees. Her breath was halting. “He’s going to be all right.”

“We’ll go right away, of course. You and Michael and I. There’s no reason for Press to go. And that J.C. woman will be here any minute.” I chose not to add, “They would probably prefer to be alone, anyway.” But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking it.

Nonie took her handkerchief from her dress pocket and pressed it to her face.

“Nonie?”

She wouldn’t look at me, but she kept her eyes cast down to her lap and was quietly sobbing. Around us, the hall was as bright as it ever got during the day, bathing the walls in pale gold, showing motes of dust in the beams from the windows around the dome. The stars had faded in the morning sun.

“He’s going to be all right,” I said more firmly. “Nonie, what’s wrong?”

When she finally looked up at me, I saw something unexpected in her eyes. She looked sorry. Apologetic.

I had known Nonie most of my life. I knew she had come from a family of teachers, and that her father had died of meningitis, that she had never been married, and that her mother lived with Nonie’s sister, Moriah, who taught history in Richmond. I knew she loved deviled eggs, got tearful on hearing “Silent Night” at Christmas, voted in every election, and that she knew I had—until I went to college and she briefly went to work for another Clareston family—sometimes raided the secret stash of sugar-dusted raspberry hard candies she kept in her sweater drawer. And at that moment I knew that she loved my father.

We sat, silent except for a few delicate, retreating sniffs from Nonie as she composed herself.

In the background, Michael had stopped screaming and was now just calling for Nonie as loudly as he could. Already he was learning to try to play us against each other. A clever boy. But Nonie didn’t yet get up.

“Does he know?” I said, quietly.

A denial rose to her lips, but she thought better of it and nodded.

The idea that two of the people I loved and imagined I knew best in the world had such a profound secret shocked me more than the telephone call from Buck had. I wanted to ask her how long she’d loved him, and if he loved her as well. But I already knew the answer. My father was always solicitous of her, always made sure she was comfortable and had what she needed. Whenever she came into the room, he smiled. Why had I not seen it? How difficult it must have been for the two of them to live in the same house for so long, with me, and not show affection. Or had it happened later, after I left? The child inside me felt a little wounded and unsettled, but I knew it was right.

It was 1957, and the world had changed a lot since I was a child, but I suspected it hadn’t changed enough to sanction a public relationship between my father and Nonie, no matter how light her blackness was. To me, they were just two people who had been alone for a very long time.

“He’ll need help,” I said. “Someone to do for him.”

“For a while,” Nonie said.

“Yes, for a while.”

She stood, and I could feel her embarrassment as a palpable thing between us. Not shame. Just her natural reserve reasserting itself, a reluctance to acknowledge that it was she who was experiencing a surge of emotion. She had always taken care of me, and it had never been the other way around.

“Nonie. . . .”

She stopped me. “We won’t speak of this, Charlotte. I’ll go and start packing Michael’s things.”

I took a deep breath, hardly believing what I was about to say. It didn’t feel right to intrude on my father’s and Nonie’s privacy. And I didn’t really want to leave Bliss House with Olivia and Eva so close. Not with J.C. about to descend.

“Michael’s not going, and I’m not going.”

As soon as I said the words, I felt the house relax. Almost sigh. I touched the wall beside the morning-room door and felt its velvety warmth. Yes, I was jealous and worried about my marriage, but it was more that I could see my absence as creating an emptiness. Who or what might take my place? I belonged there.

“It makes much more sense for you to go to Clareston without me. Michael is liable to trip Daddy or bother him when he’s resting. Terrance can take you to the train station after lunch. I’ll call Buck and ask him to pick you up.” While it would have been faster for Terrance just to drive her the two and a half hours to Clareston, I knew she wouldn’t have been comfortable alone with him in a car for that long. I didn’t blame her. Terrance rarely said a dozen words on a talkative day.

She touched my cheek. The fleeting tenderness in her eyes was quickly replaced by her usual sensible determination even before she started for her bedroom.

My heart pounded as though I were taking some great risk. I don’t know why. It was probably the most mature decision I’d ever made up to that point in my life.

I watched her walk away with urgency in her step, carrying herself even straighter than usual, if such a thing were possible. She was already like a different person to me. Not a stranger, but a woman with a different role. Still Nonie, but Nonie in love. What was she to my father? She had come to us Naomi Meriwether Jackson, a capable young woman with strong, safe hands and a firm but gentle manner. How unlike my fragile poet of a mother, a woman so fragile that she hanged herself in our garage for me to find. It was Nonie who had come in and set us both to rights, put me on a schedule and brought order to my life. Now she would mend my father.

I told myself that she would come back, even though I wasn’t sure I believed it. And she eventually did, with my father. But it was under circumstances I couldn’t even have imagined that morning.

Chapter 18

Violation

Knowing that leaving Michael alone a few minutes longer wouldn’t cause him any harm (perhaps I was delaying, not wanting to face the fact that once Nonie was gone, I would be his only caretaker), I went into the morning room. Someone, probably Terrance, had neatened it. The slide boxes were stacked in alphabetical order and there was a short crystal vase filled with fresh yellow roses—the kind Olivia preferred to have in her rooms—on the desk. The blanket was folded on the chaise longue, and on top of it sat a large pillow with a striped silk cover and long red tassels. It hadn’t been there before, but I remembered seeing it on the sofa in Olivia’s room. Had Terrance left it for me, knowing I’d fallen asleep there? It looked inviting, but the idea that Terrance, inscrutable and blank to me, was not only following but anticipating my actions was disturbing. In fact, I felt I could lie down and sleep more. Perhaps for days. How easily I might have pulled the curtains and slipped back into Olivia’s world, with her sensual
(a trait passed on to Press, I believed, though he was much more aggressive), attractive husband, and the aura of deep apprehension I felt around the Olivia of my . . . what? Dreams? Hallucinations?