Charlotte’s Story (4 page)

I probably should have gone with them. But Jack was a doctor and could do more for her than I could. Once again falling back on my training—to be polite and, yes, an obedient wife—I recovered myself and encouraged the crowd to move toward the house.

Chapter 4

Bliss House

Bliss House sits at the end of its lane, restful, like a journey’s end. Tall and straight, yellow-bricked and black against the sky, it wears its soft slate mansard roof as a man in a formal summer suit might wear a comfortable cap. The two shallow wings off either side of the house aren’t wide enough to imply any welcoming embrace. Press had told me it had been a wildly expensive house when it was built by his grandfather, Randolph Bliss, in the 1870s, designed by a black Frenchman named Hulot, whom he’d hired as a kind of slap in the face to his defeated neighbors. It’s very unlike the other grand houses in the area, having both a ballroom and a full theater on the third floor, and no columns or sweet porticoes or climbing ivy. When he first saw it, my father called it one of the ugliest houses he’d ever seen, but fortunately not in front of Press or his mother.

I don’t think of Bliss House as ugly.

I empathize with Bliss House. It is tall and ungainly, and a bit unsuited to its watercolor rural surroundings, just like me. It’s not
that I’m not at home in the country. But Old Gate is a kind of gateway to the wilds of western Virginia, and Bliss House might have been a happier house if it had been built on the eastern side of the state, where I was born. A region filled with people of wider experience, more sophisticated tastes.

There is romance at Bliss House. Its gardens are formal, but lush. Even the herb garden tucked around the back, with its circle on circle of tightly pressed stones and thick rings of soil filled with flowering herbs, was designed with an eye toward beauty, as well as usefulness. And then there is the dome set high in the center of the three-story front hall: a scene of the starry sky, just before full dark, as though the architect had left the roof off. Depending on the light outside, the stars may seem to almost disappear; but in the evening, even in the reflected light of the great chandelier, the stars emerge bearing their own vibrant light. Press and Olivia and even the servants never seemed to notice the stars change, which annoyed me. But I know what I have seen.

I have said that it is tradition for anyone from the town to be allowed to call at the house after a funeral, but the tradition didn’t just apply to funerals. Olivia had held a garden party every late spring when the azaleas bloomed, and another at the New Year. Guests always arrived with a cautious air of excitement and barely disguised curiosity. For a while, I was like them, but once I moved in, I began to resent their crude interest. We were not creatures on display for their prurient observation. Bliss House has a reputation for unnatural death and for the supposed presence of the lingering dead, but most of what people imagine and gossip about is untrue (yet what they don’t know is far more horrific). The family has seen more than its share of tragedy. Rachel had even prodded me about it, telling me that everyone in Old Gate believed that Randolph Bliss, who had come to Virginia from Long Island, had committed some crime and caused the house to be cursed before the first brick was laid.

“It’s infamous,” she said. “When you’re married, we can have fabulous séances and talk to all the people who died there.” We’d both been a little drunk on the crème de menthe she’d brought from her parents’ house after Thanksgiving break—the break during which I’d met Press. But after the wedding, she never mentioned it, let alone suggested a séance.

I believed in ghosts long before I moved into Bliss House.

I was six years old.

Practical Nonie had me collecting sticks in the back yard and putting them in the giant red wheelbarrow placed near the garage. Two days earlier, there had been a tropical storm that had hung about for days offshore, sweeping one narrow arm inland for just a few hours, bringing down several trees and power lines in our little town in eastern Virginia. I was hot and cross and plagued by the mosquitoes that had appeared quickly after the rain. The air was languid, making my hair stick to my neck and my romper to my back, and though I was not usually rebellious, I’d taken off my shoes in spite of Nonie’s admonition that I should not. What I really wanted to be doing was eating the red velvet cake that she was making in the kitchen for my father’s birthday, and so I was doing my chore reluctantly, trying to see how slowly I could walk across the grass to the wheelbarrow.

I’d picked up a particularly large stick and was dragging it behind me, pretending I was a horse put to work like Black Beauty, when the wind picked up and the air turned markedly cooler. It was as sudden as if there had been some loud horn or thunderclap to announce it, and I stopped walking, wondering if there
had
been
a sound. First I looked into the sky, but then my eyes came to rest on a woman standing at the other side of the yard, beside the wheelbarrow. She was a girl, really, and wore a belted robe the color of lemon custard whose hem played lightly around her bare feet. I was surprised but also terribly impressed that she was outside with bare feet, just like me. When she smiled and held out her hand, I realized she was the girl in all the pictures in my father’s bedroom, and in the one beside my bed. I knew her as
Mother
, but of course I’d been barely four years old when she died, and her voice, her touch, the way her face really looked, had faded from my mind. Her blond hair hung in untidy waves above her shoulders, and she was inhumanely pale. But I felt no fear.

Dropping the stick, I hurried toward her, the grass cold and wet on my feet. The wind was loud in my ears, and it turned to a kind of static as though it were coming from a badly tuned radio. But as I got closer, I realized with some disappointment that she wasn’t looking at me, but beyond me. When I looked back over my shoulder, I stumbled and fell, sprawling onto the grass and its minefield of small, sharp sticks. I lay there breathing hard, waiting, half-hoping she would come to help me up.

Then the wind was gone, and Nonie was standing over me.

“You’d best get up, or you’ll be covered with chiggers.”

I stood still, watching the empty space where my mother had been, as Nonie brushed the dirt from my romper and legs and tut-tutted about little girls who should listen and keep their shoes on when they were told.

Somehow I knew not to say anything about my mother to Nonie, but that night I told my father.

“Did she look happy?” he asked.

It took me a minute to answer. Could ghosts be happy or unhappy? “Yes. I think so. I don’t know why.”

He smiled at that but didn’t offer any kind of explanation.

I was ten years old before I overheard the truth about my mother. Already at school, a rotten older boy named Scott had cornered
me in the coatroom and told me that my mother had hanged herself in our garage, but I called him a liar and ran away. He had given voice to my own deepest fears. My father would never park the car in the garage, but kept a small bass boat he rarely used in there on a trailer. The rest of the space was filled with old tools and the equipment he used to keep our lawn looking neat. A few weeks after Scott’s revelation, two of my father’s older sisters, my aunts, were washing the dinner dishes in the kitchen, which looked out on the garage. When I heard one of them, Ruth, say my mother’s name, I stopped just outside the doorway.

“He should’ve torn that down right after it happened. Gives me the willies just to look at it, and Lord knows the neighbors must want it gone. I’d faint dead away if I had to go in there.” The second aunt, Beth (for Rehobeth, a name I found strange and exotic), told her to lower her voice.

“If Charlotte doesn’t remember what happened, then it doesn’t matter. It’s only a garage. Roman says he can live with it, and that should be good enough for us, shouldn’t it? It’s
his
shame, and he has to suffer it. We’re not going to change him now.” She made a
tsk-tsk
sound that she used often to express her disapproval—and she disapproved of many things. Although she was the prettiest of my father’s three sisters, at thirty-eight her scowls had already creased her brow and set deep lines into either side of her unpainted lips. “We can only pray that she doesn’t have her mother’s unstable nature. Here, pass me that pan to dry.”

“If I had found
our
mother like that, I would’ve gone stark raving mad.”

It took me some moments to understand what they were saying—that
I
had been the one to discover my mother, dead. Leaning against the wall outside the kitchen, I ceased to hear their words, but only the low tones of their voices. When my father found me there, he asked me if anything was wrong, but I told him I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to go to bed. I finally met
his eyes, and he looked at me a long time. Perhaps he was hearing more of what my aunts were saying. I could not. Would not. But I could see he knew that I’d found out.

He let me go on to bed.

Despite my aunts’ opinions, I’ve never felt shame over what my mother did. Only sadness that she would leave us so callously. It was, perhaps, some strange kind of blessing that I can’t remember that day, that I had no remembered image of my mother, dead in her yellow robe, her limp body hanging in our garage. My only memory is of her standing outside on that strange, hot, windy day, holding out her hand to me. I never told Rachel or even Press. (Though I’m certain he found out.) Holding the knowledge close to my heart, I hoped it would make me a better mother to my own children.

My mother has never come to me in Bliss House. Until the day of Eva’s funeral, I had never experienced more than the occasional sense of something fluttering at the edge of my field of vision. An unexpected chill in a well-heated room.

Finally almost all the women who had been at the funeral were gathered on the wide terrace running along the front of the house. Someone—probably Terrance, our houseman, or one of the day women acting at Terrance’s instruction—had distributed a number of umbrellas and a few antique parasols that Olivia kept in storage.

One group stood in the thin band of shade at the edge of the forsythia bushes in the center of the circular drive as though they might draw some coolness from its tangle of shaggy branches. I could have told them that the only shade to be had from it was deep in the bowels of the overgrown mess.

Only a few months earlier, Shelley, the orchardkeeper’s shy younger sister who was very fond of the children, had given Eva
a real bunny for Easter, and I had to crawl inside the forsythia to find it when it escaped from its hutch near the entrance to the garden maze. The bunny had darted inside to hide, alarmed by his sudden freedom. While the outside of the bushy mass was covered in yellow flowers, there were no leaves or flowers on the gnarled trunks of the bushes, and branches arched and dipped overhead, slapping me gently as I crawled, calling nervously for the bunny. It was a dark cathedral redolent of dirt and rotting leaves, and I was glad Eva hadn’t come with me. It was a place to escape to, a secret, empty place in the vast outdoors. When I finally emerged with the bunny, I was stunned to find that Eva had gone into the house, leaving Michael asleep in the grass, and doubly stunned to see that, by my watch, I’d been inside for nearly twenty minutes.