The Legacy of Eden (22 page)

“Pretty strange. After all if anyone should have an aversion to the place it should be me,” she said, and lifted the cup of coffee to her lips.

She did not know. She had left by then and Ava would never tell her and neither would I. I wouldn’t even let myself believe it had happened for years.

“So when can we go over there then?” she asked.

“Sooner the better.”

“Fine, I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning. I suppose it might be too much to expect you to be awake before ten, so shall we say eleven-thirty sharp, just to be on the safe side?” She flicked me a scornful look before rising stiffly from her chair and smoothing her dress over her thighs. She paused for a minute.

“Do you think if she’d had any idea she could have stopped it?” she asked.

“Your mother did the best she could. Ain’t no one could have predicted how far things would go,” said Jane soothingly. Claudia looked down at her and then flicked her eyes at me before heading out. We did not correct her, but we both knew whom Claudia had meant and that it was not about Mom.

My grandfather’s favorite saying when we were younger was “And the meek shall inherit the earth.” He loved it because he thought it was talking about people like him, farmer folk, one of the last few classes that could still make money but could never earn as much respect and prestige outside of the farmland circle. But then when his grandchildren came along he would say it in such a way that we knew he was talking about us: specifically that we would be the inheritors of the earth he had stretched and built and added onto by marriage, work and corrupt means and what was now the most prosperous holding in our county.

And so we were all born, our mouths open wide to swallow all that he had laid out for us. Ava and Charles, Ethan’s only son, were spread across the year of ’73: Charles in the spring and Ava in the fall, closely followed by me by way of a near miscarriage in ’75. My grandfather had three granddaughters and two grandsons all crowded onto his beautiful property. We gave him satisfaction, knowing there were many who could potentially take up the mantle of work he had continued. We made him feel like he had a family again. We helped close up the holes Julia had made.

And of my early childhood, I was happy, I confess it. I never went without. I had a lovely home and sisters and cousins to play with amongst the tended gardens my grandmother had nurtured to burst with a multitude of buds in the summer months. My memories were the average memories of any girl who grew up on a farm in Iowa. My father taught me to ride horses, holding the reins and leading me in wide arcs while he clucked and encouraged my back to straighten, my legs to tighten. I rode on a thresher with him during the day, eating berries from a basket on my lap. I ran through the rose garden with my sisters in games invented and taught. I loved my mother, I loved my father. I was safe and warm. I assumed we all were.

When he was two Charles was taken away for testing and Georgia-May was told that her son would never grow past the mental age of seven. She told my mother this in hushed tones on our back porch. But she was not ashamed, nor did it stop her love for her son. If anything it strengthened it. She gave up teaching and dedicated her every waking hour to nurturing her child. As for Ethan—he never took any interest in Charles. When people first found out about his condition and apologetically asked after him and the family, he looked at them with distaste, as if they were stupid for expecting anything else.

“You deal with it,” he had told Georgia-May in the doctor’s room upon the diagnosis, before heading to a bar. Lavinia had tried to explain away the latter as grief. My father had snorted in disgust.

But out of all that came a flower from a pot of dirt, which was this: that Georgia-May loved Charles more than I’ve seen any mother with her child, because Charles needed love more than anyone and she knew what that felt like. Hers was a barren marriage with a husband who saw her only as a thing impairing the cool lines of his vision. She had known about Allie, to some degree everybody did, but no one outside of Ethan and Lavinia knew what had really happened the night of his proposal or the depth of the effect it had upon him. She looked upon my parents’ marriage with envy and in her darker moments begged and pleaded with her husband to touch her, but he only returned her efforts with a raised fist. She stayed with him, though, despite everything. She was a good woman but never a strong one. She was built for married life and she did not question, only lamented the lot that had befallen her.

Seven—for seven years we were happy. Well, at least I was.

I was too young to notice how my uncle and grandfather constantly drank, too young to let the icy thaw of my grandparents cast a chill around me when Lavinia leaned forward to kiss her husband in the afternoon and caught the stray wisp of alcohol on his breath. I was far too young to understand the strange dynamics of my grandparents’ relationship with Cal Jr. or to realize that Charles was different. When my youngest cousin smiled up at me, the thatch of brown hair falling across his eyes in blind happiness at the smallest things—a look you gave him, or gently trailing a blade of grass up and down his wrist—I never saw him as anything other than my cousin who loved water sprinklers in summer and who you could always, always play with because he never grew tired, and who adored us all even if we did not deserve it.

And Ava, my companion, who genuinely liked me, who was my best friend. I made her laugh and she made me care. With her I always felt like the older one. I was the one who fought Lucy Stevens when she called her stuck-up and broke my tooth on her foot when she kicked me. I was the one who stepped in the middle when Claudia blew up at her for whatever she had borrowed without asking. I was the one who braided her hair on our living room carpet watching cartoon reruns. I was so young, too young. Too young to know I was happy and too young to know this could not last. My life appeared to be following a set path and I could not see why it would ever change. Who would want it to?

I asked all the questions in the world but the important ones.

It’s strange when I look back on that early part, how the happiness was a haze. It never had the gift of clarity, it was all a delicious blur just slightly out of focus, like the feeling you get when you try to look directly at the sun. For those seven years, despite the undercurrents, despite the tensions that I stepped across and yet was untouched by, mine was a charmed existence.

I had not one but two homes. I had the small yellow house, with the white framed windows and shutters and dragonfly knocker, which was utterly redundant as no visitors ever knocked—our door was always open. But as well as this, I also had the large white house with the tall columns, a place of luxury and finesse. I had the best of both worlds right on my doorstep: my loving, comforting home and the physical embodiment of grandeur that was the Hathaway name, right at my fingertips. I had cousins I played with across a sprawling mass of both tended and untended land, perfect for games, perfect for sunbathing, perfect for running under sprinklers in bathing suits in summer.

I had my mother and father, who adored us children. I was never hungry, never without, never lonely. I was never alone. I was always surrounded by noise and activity and work. Such a stark contrast to my life now. Now, I have chosen a place that hems me in, that is filled with the ringing of silence, but back then my life was full of color, and a tumult of voices rising and falling in laughter and shouts.

And then he died.

Dad, if you had lived, perhaps things would have been different. You would have sensed what was wrong the night before I left for college. You would have coaxed and cajoled it out of her. You would have told me what I did not want to believe. You would have made converts of us all and he would have been punished.

You’d have killed him, I suppose. Even you had your limits.

My strong Pa, who never needed to strike us, would only have to give us a look and we’d know we were in for it, our long legs hiking us the hell out of there. Red checked shirt, long blond hair. I cannot remember you. I only remember the feeling of you. In my head you have been immortalized in seven-year-old aspic—taller than you would have been, stronger, more handsome, good.

Mom told us all about you, but the things I wanted to ask I’ll never know because she would not ask you herself. Like, were you happy on Aurelia for the second time? Could you bear the change in your brother, who had been laid up in a bed after proposing to his girlfriend and had, in spirit at least, never gotten out of it? Did you mourn for the loss of your sister despite what she had done, because you saw the drinking of your father and the years of age finally fall onto the hunched shoulders of your aunt and long for the days that were now only a memory? Did you see the eyes of your nephew on your daughter and wince? Did you know even then, but how could you? Not even I, her closest confidante, knew.

Pa, my darling Pa—what things were in your mind on the day death came for you? Did you argue with him that he was too early? Or did you look at him and feel peace? When they found you in the field your legs were crumpled underneath you from your stroke, your eyes closed, lips parted, soaked through from the downpour that had held sway over the heavens all afternoon. Had you tried to cry out in pain or for help, or were you only attempting to catch the last few drops of rain you would ever taste, in your mouth?

I feel I am doing this memory a disservice. There should be more here surely? All other things have been relayed with painstaking precision and detail, but this—one of the most earth-shattering events of my life—has been rushed through, skimmed over, barely registered.

Even though I know he was thirty-three at the time and that his gravestone says his death was on the 27th of September 1982, I don’t actually remember those few days after he died. I don’t remember hearing about his death, I don’t remember anything about my family’s initial reactions to it, nothing. When I used to talk about my dad, remember him even, it was through the borrowing of other people’s stories, other people’s memories. I don’t think it was the same for my sisters, but that’s how it was with me.

Aside from my mother’s self-imposed isolation when we went to live with my grandparents, the episode of my father’s death is a blank where the truth presses, but never quite makes it past the edges. Even the funeral itself is a haze and then at the wake, which was held at home, I removed my hand from my mother’s grip as soon as we were inside and ran to hide under a large oak table facing the wall, with a white cloth peeking out over the edge so that the world was cut into two triangles.

My mother left me alone, as did my sisters. While they were comforted, I sat cross-legged with my back pressed to the wall watching the various legs of the adults pass in front of me. I wanted to stay underneath that table forever. If I stayed there, I thought, then nothing could happen to me, nothing else could change, there just wasn’t enough room.

And then somehow, Cal Jr. saw me. There was a knock on the top of the table. I looked up and as I did, he crouched down and knocked twice against the table leg.

“Can I come in?” he asked, half-smiling.

I paused and then shrugged indifferently.

He slid underneath the table but he had to curl his legs beneath him as there was so little room and I, obstinately, refused to move.

“Cramped in here,” he said.

“Not for me.”

He settled himself and then went still. I eyed him cautiously.

“You gonna stay here all night?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“What good will that do?”

“I don’t know.”

He sighed.

“At least you had your father for a good few years. May not be much but it’s more than some.”

I bit the inside of my lip.

“At least you got memories of him, at least he was there for you. You being ungrateful hiding in here when you got more than most. Some people ain’t got nowhere to hide. They got to bury their pain deep down, so deep that whenever they look inside themselves all they see is the darkness left behind. They don’t get sympathy or cucumber sandwiches. They don’t get to grieve. They get to lie and pretend and never question. Do you get what I am saying? Do you, huh?”

His voice was soft the whole time that he spoke, but there was such menace and pain in his tone that I began to feel afraid. He prodded me with his forefinger between my ribs when I did not answer him, but I did not move. Instead I closed my eyes and willed him to disappear. He leaned against me, his breath on my ear, his hand now on my knee. I squeezed my eyes shut and let the inside of my lids go red with the effort.

I could feel him watching me, could sense his eyes scurry up and down my face.

“Brat,” he said finally. And then he unfurled himself and slid out from underneath the table and left.

When I was sure he had gone, I slowly opened my eyes. The world beneath my table seemed starker, as if the softness had been pressed out of it. I wrapped my arms about my middle and pretended my hands were someone else’s as they rubbed my stomach in comfort.

Before my father died, I don’t have memories about anything of that time as much as feelings. It’s strange but when I look back on that episode of my life it’s the sensation of warmth I conjure up, not the images that tell me I am in a good place in the past. I never felt warmth like that after the wake. I guess that is what it means to grow up.