Charlotte’s Story (3 page)

But it was the other man whom Rachel addressed, and who finally arrested my attention.

“Press! You and Porky Pig need to stop talking right this minute.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Rachel, you bitch.” He turned his gaze to me, frankly looking me up and down. There was the merest hint of approval in his unusual eyes. “What will your friend think?”

“Why, she’ll think you’re a perfect love, even though you used to be big as a house. Didn’t he used to be big as a house?” She rested a hand prettily on Press’s leg. “You remember you told me how he got a wad of icing stuck up his nose at your birthday party when you were kids?” Then she turned to me, rolled her eyes. “He made such a fuss, crying and carrying on, that he couldn’t breathe and his mama had to take him home.”

Press smiled and put a hand on her shoulder. “Jack was wrong to call you a bitch. Dogs are bitches. You’re just a brat.”

Rachel gave him an exaggerated pout.

“See? You love me.” She held her face close to his so he could kiss her cheek. His hand slipped down, lingering on her back, and for the first time I found myself wondering if there had ever been anything between them. It took me by surprise to realize that I had already begun to think of Press as belonging to me.

When Rachel formally introduced us, I felt my face and neck go hot. I offered my hand and hoped that he wouldn’t feel it shaking,
because I could feel just the slightest tremor in it. Even though the college Rachel and I attended educated only women, it had many male professors, and, of course, I’d known boys at home and met others at dances. But this felt new. Different. Preston Bliss, though he was only four years older than Rachel and me, was truly a man.

Getting off the stool, he stood up, and I was immediately glad I’d worn the flats. His eyes weren’t quite even with mine, and I soon learned he was five feet eight to my five feet nine. My reaction must have shown in my eyes because—after a tightening of his jaw that was so slight that I might have imagined it—he gave me a broad smile and enveloped my hand in his.

“Charlotte, I’m Preston. But please call me Press. Everyone does.” His cool, rather soft hand gripped mine with firm pressure.

Perhaps it was just because they weren’t quite even with mine that I noticed his thick eyebrows first. If he’d been a female friend of Rachel’s, she would’ve long ago attacked them with her vicious tweezers. (I had been one of her victims, but even now my brows are as fair as my hair, and so she didn’t torment me often. Also, she was a bit near-sighted and was too vain to wear her glasses.) Press’s hair, dark like his brows, was coarse with aggressive, barely tamed natural waves. He faced me with an unabashed frankness that showed in his brown eyes, which didn’t leave mine for a second. His skin was more olive than I had expected. Maybe it was something about his being young and wealthy and Virginian that had made me think he would be more like the fair, patrician-looking Jack Carstairs.

Press’s nose was rather large and his lashes brown and thick. His chestnut wool jacket hung neatly over darker brown pants and almost hid a deep-green sweater vest. His shirt was white, his tie the color of a yellowed autumn leaf. Jack’s more conservative gray wool jacket and regimental tie seemed rather dull in comparison.

Glancing away at Rachel for the briefest of moments, Press then looked back at me and said, “You’re much prettier than Rachel led me to believe. Like a fashion model.”

Jack guffawed, spewing Coca-Cola (which I later learned was probably spiked with bourbon) onto the bar.

Rachel was unfazed. “Just dance with the girl, Press. You don’t have to marry her this minute.”

As though it had been planned, Nat King Cole’s
Somebody Loves Me
dropped with a click onto the turntable in the jukebox and began to play.

Lifting my veil, I surveyed my red-splotched face in the Cadillac’s visor mirror. I hadn’t used mascara that morning, only a bit of powder out of habit and a few indifferent dabs of a muted pink lipstick. Using the lipstick had thrown me into fresh tears. Eva had raided my dressing table for it only the week before to draw lopsided stars on Michael’s cheek.

“Angel kisses,” she’d called them, with a little lisp in her lilting voice. Nonie had scolded her, but I couldn’t help but laugh. She was so much more cheerful, more adventurous than I had been as a child, raised as I was only by the watchful Nonie and my father. Whenever I put on lipstick, it is always Nonie’s voice in my head, telling me that only fast girls wore makeup, and only bounders required it of their wives.
Bounders
, as though we weren’t living in the 1950s but in some 19th-century novel in which all men are dangerous and all women damsels in distress.

I rolled the car window down halfway to get some air, telling myself I wouldn’t start crying again, wouldn’t make another scene as I had at the cemetery. I had only to get through the next couple of hours. Then I could cry. Then it wouldn’t matter.

The heat from the outside was stifling and quickly dispelled the weak cold generated by the clicking air conditioner.

“Dammit, what now? Charlotte, can you see anything?”

A long line of cars was stopped in the middle of the shady tunnel of trees leading to Bliss House. I could just see the buttery yellow brick of the house and a crisp blue patch of sky at the end of the lane.

Press got out with an agitated sigh, leaving the car idling, his suit jacket lying on the seat.

Was I supposed to follow him?

As he made his way through the line of cars, I strained to see him out the front window. There were mourners in the road, mostly women looking bewildered and upset, and a larger group of people gathered near the trees.

I shut off the car, and the air conditioner ticked to a stop.

Forgetting to pull the veil back over my face, I slipped back into the patent leather heels I had unconsciously taken off during the drive home, and started out the passenger door. Because it had been a wet fall, I checked to make sure I wasn’t getting out into mud, and pulled my foot back immediately when I detected a sudden movement in the grass feathering the edge of the lane. In another second I might have missed the flick of the black snake’s tail as the snake made for the cover of the trees. Is there any woman whose senses don’t sharpen when she sees a snake?
And you will bite her heel—she will curse you
. When you live in the country, there are injunctions against killing snakes in the wild. Especially black snakes. But I hate them. Pulling the door shut, I slid across the front seat and got out on the other side. Beneath my feet, the lane’s pale mix of crushed seashells and small stones was warm and uneven. In minutes, my shoes would be gloved with a fine, pearly dust.

A few dozen feet away in the grass, a closed carriage—yes, a very few eccentric families drove them with their horses on a Sunday afternoon, or on special occasions, and I suppose a funeral is a special occasion—was overturned in the grass along the right side of the lane. Just beyond the line of oak trees, a horse, detached
from the carriage, rose on its rear legs, crying out, its eyes rolling white. Its flank shone with blood, and my heart broke for the poor animal. But it seemed more frightened than injured, and two men were doing their best to calm it and keep hold of the swinging reins.

Press clambered atop the wrecked carriage and was helping another man wrestle a wheel away from where it had collapsed against the carriage door. He normally wasn’t a person given to quick action, or any kind of physical labor, and so the scene felt even more strange to me. With the loud cries of the horse, I couldn’t hear if there were sounds coming from inside. As I got closer, I could see one gray head resting, motionless, in the shoebox-sized rear window of the carriage. Alarmed, I called out Press’s name.

Nearly everyone in the crowd turned to look at me. Press shouted, “Take everyone to the house, Charlotte. Quickly.”

I knew I should obey immediately, but I was paralyzed by the unnaturalness of the scene. I had to see. Had to know.

The carriage belonged to close friends of Press’s, Zion and Helen Heaster, an older couple who had retired to Old Gate after living in New York City for most of their lives. Zion was a playwright, Helen an actress who had started out as a Ziegfeld girl and later became famous—or so Press had told me—for playing Lady Macbeth. I rarely saw the two of them; but Press saw them often, as Zion was the unofficial head of the local theatre group he and Rachel and Jack belonged to. If they were badly hurt, Press would be devastated.

Perhaps it was the heady, oppressive heat of midday, or the terror of the horse that filled me with sudden dread, but I had a terrible feeling that Zion and Helen were already dead. That the accident had happened on the day of Eva’s funeral somehow made it seem even more likely to me. First Olivia, and now three more deaths so close together. How much were we supposed to bear?

Had Michael and Nonie made it safely to the house? What if the horse had bolted in front of my father’s car?

In the distance, I heard more car doors slamming. Voices.

What is it? What can it be? Why are we stopped?

Farther up the lane, the guests who had arrived but hadn’t yet gone inside the house were wandering back toward the accident. They were going the wrong way, and I knew Press was expecting me to head them off. Tearing myself away, I walked toward one of the groups of women gathered in the lane, well away from the men and the damp grass.

Rachel, immediately recognizable in a feather-trimmed black hat, black silk swing top, and narrow skirt, saw me and broke off from the group. No matter that she was halfway through her ninth month of pregnancy—she always looked as though she’d stepped out of the pages of
Vogue
or
Harper’s Bazaar
.

“Oh, Charlotte. They’re saying something spooked the horse. It nearly strangled itself.”

I touched her hand. “Rachel, you know it’s Zion and Helen in the carriage?”

Rachel’s brown eyes widened. She started past me toward the carriage, but I wrapped my hand around her arm before she could get away.

“Oh, God. It can’t be them! Helen said they were taking the car.” As she strained toward them, she almost pulled me off my feet. I was stronger and wouldn’t let her go.

“There’s nothing we can do. Let Press and the men handle it.”

“But Helen!” Her voice broke in a sob. Rachel was as close to the Heasters as Press was, almost as close to Helen as she was to her own mother. “Do you think they’re dead? Oh, God, what if they’re dead?”

Now the people near us were staring at Rachel instead of the carriage.

It was a strange role reversal. Rachel was usually the brave, confident one of the two of us, always ready with advice on how to handle Olivia or keep Press happy. It was the second time in a
week I’d seen her cry—the first was as she’d knelt beside me the day Eva died. As I drew her closer to me, I felt the violent shaking of her childlike shoulders. Jack had even told her that she should stay home from the funeral, that the upset wasn’t good for the baby she was carrying. I looked around but didn’t see him. Rachel rarely listened to him, anyway.

I knew Press wanted me to get everyone up to the house, but I had to know if Zion and Helen were still alive.

Press was lifting aside the carriage’s broken door. His face, which he had so carefully shaved that morning, dripped with perspiration. When the door was open all the way, one of the other men held it back, and Press thrust one arm and much of his upper body into the carriage’s interior. The crowd was silent.

Press was an actor, and a pretty good one—oh, yes, a very good one. I’d seen him onstage in community theatricals:
Our Town, Pygmalion, The Merry Wives of Windsor
. At first it had been hard to reconcile the man I saw every morning with the man in false beards and heavy makeup who showed up as Falstaff or the obstreperous Henry Higgins. It wasn’t just his face that changed, but the way he walked, and his gestures. When we traveled to see plays in D.C. or New York, I watched a change come over him as his eyes followed the actors. He had a hunger for the stage, a hunger to be someone else. I couldn’t help but think he imagined himself to be onstage that day.

When he looked up from the interior of the carriage, darkness like a shadow crossed his face. But there was no movement in the russet oak leaves hanging overhead or in the near-cloudless sky. I held my breath, just like everyone else who was waiting. We were rapt, and during those few seconds he was the center of our world. He lowered his eyes and slowly shook his head. As though on cue, a man shouted “No!” and a murmur of dismay rippled through the crowd.

Rachel went rigid. “No,” she echoed. Her legs gave way and she collapsed to the ground in a spicy flush of Lanvin’s
My Sin
.

Before I could kneel down, Jack appeared seemingly from nowhere and gently pushed me aside so he could revive her. The concern on his face was very real. As much as Rachel complained about him, he was always solicitous of her. He carried her back to my Cadillac, which was closer than their car, and drove ahead to the house to get her out of the heat.