The Sisters Montclair (10 page)

“Me?” She looked up in surprise.

“What’s your story?” His eyes were formidable. She could see how people, looking into their cool gray depths, would confess to anything. She’d have to be careful around him. She’d have to watch herself.

“I don’t have a story.”

He laughed. “I know that’s not true. I knew the moment I saw you, there was something unusual about you. And now, you see, you’re being coy. You’ve turned it into a challenge so I’ll have no choice but to obsess over it and hound you and carry around a big DVR to stick in your face every chance I get.”

He flushed a dull red and she looked down at her hands. They both grinned at the vague sexual connotation of his statement.

“Sorry,” he said. “A DVR is a camera.”

“Yeah, I kind of hoped it was.”

The coffee shop was crowded with students laughing and chattering, rushing, bleary-eyed, on their way to class.

“You know I won’t stop asking you,” he said. “Until I know your story. Where you come from. Where you hope to go. All the dark dreary secrets of your childhood.”

“Alabama,” she said quickly. “That’s where I come from.”

“Birmingham?”

“No. I mean, yes. I didn’t grow up there but I lived there once. For a brief time.” Her voice trailed off and she turned her head and stared out the wide glass windows at a patch of rolling lawn bordered by shrubs.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said finally. “Each time I meet you to copy your notes, I’ll tell you one thing about me.”

He stuck his hand across the table and she took it, giving it a firm shake. Gently he turned her hand over, palm up. “Start with this,” he said.

“What?” she said, swiftly withdrawing her hand.

“Your arm. Start with that.”

“It’s a tattoo. Everyone has one.”

“Not the tattoo,” he said softly. “The other.”

She pulled her sleeve down and stood, gathering her backpack. “This isn’t going to work,” she said.

He opened his binder and took out four sheets of paper and held them out to her. She hesitated, not looking at him, and then took them. “I’ll copy them at the library,” she said.

He wrote his cell number down on a piece of paper and gave it to her. “Call me,” he said. “I’ll meet you.”

She put the slip and the notes in her backpack and walked off, and it wasn’t until she had reached the door that she had the courage to look back over her shoulder.

He was sitting where she had left him, staring after her with an unreadable expression on his face.

December, 1934

T
here was no hope for it.
Alice would have to go home. Her mother would hound her until she did, driving her crazy with her slow drips of guilt, her endless wash of tears. It was worse than a Chinese Water Torture, reading her mother’s wild letters.

This one is a grease monkey,
she had written.
She met him at the County fair. I thought the last one, a railroad drummer, was bad but this one is worse. She will ruin us.

Alice lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. It was all she had ever wanted; to get away from this, to start fresh where no one knew her. To be a nameless face in a sea of nameless faces. She had recently read a novel,
What Mad Pursuit
, about a cynical female reporter who travels the world in search of personal fulfillment, immersing herself in bohemian society. She has many love affairs but refuses to submit to marriage, and it occurred to Alice, reading the novel with a rising sense of wonder and excitement, that she could be happy living this way. It seemed to her that only in work would she find the freedom and joy in living that she sought. She could be happy traveling the world alone and writing, the slave of no man. She and Clarice had already made plans to go to New York after graduation and now here she was being dragged back into this endless family drama.

Come home. She’ll listen to you. You’re the only one she’ll listen to.

At least she’d be spared any future acquaintance with Bill Whittington. He’d written her three letters since August and she hadn’t responded to any of them, and now he’d gone definitively quiet.

Your sister is crazy in love.

Alice, apparently, wasn’t made that way. At least she’d be spared that.

Mother was waiting for her at the train station wearing her fur coat and a black hat with a veil to hide her swollen face.

“Thank God you’ve come,” was all she said, motioning for Simon to collect Alice’s bags and put them in the car. They were both quiet on the ride home, Alice pushed into one corner of the luxurious automobile, her face turned toward the glass, and her mother pushed into the opposite corner, lost in her own thoughts. It had snowed the night before and a light dusting lay across the lawns and sidewalks, turning to slush in the streets. Children on sleds raced down the hills of the Country Club and in the distance the river was a gray fog. They turned into Riverview and the car began its slow ascent towards Ash Hill, past stately mansions with curved drives set back on wide sweeping lawns. Her father had bought the estate the year Alice went off to Sweet Briar. Ash Hill had belonged to a former governor of Tennessee and it had a swimming pool and a tennis court and ten bedrooms. It had seemed the height of folly to buy such a large estate during the middle of the Great Depression
,
but Roderick Montclair was a canny businessman and he’d had the cash to invest in real estate when so many did not. Ash Hill was a house Alice’s mother had always admired. As a girl she had attended Cotillions there and when it came on the market Roderick had bought it as a gift for his wife’s thirty-eighth birthday.

The house had been decorated for Christmas and lights shone merrily from the windows as they turned into the long drive.

“Home sweet home,” Alice said.

Her mother sighed, pulling at the tips of her gloves. “If only it was,” she said.

After Laura was rescued from the railroad drummer who’d tried to elope with her to Ringgold, Georgia, things had quieted down for awhile. Her parents had arrived in time; the justice of the peace’s wife had taken one look at Laura and said to her husband, “This girl is underage,” and he’d refused to go through with the ceremony. Roderick had the drummer arrested on some petty charge and secreted out of town one night, put on the train by the Sheriff and two of his stone-faced deputies who warned him not to return. Mother took Laura off for a rest cure to a sanitarium in Nashville which was rumored to be “very nice,” but the first evening Laura cried hysterically and clung to Mother’s skirt, and on the second night they had her so sedated she didn’t recognize her at all. They had dressed her in a coarse nightgown that Mother found “cheap” and when they brought Laura’s dinner in on a tray, the utensils were “dirty”, and on the third day one of the other female residents lifted her nightgown to expose her naked nether regions, and that was the end of the rest cure. Laura came home on the train with Mother and there was no more talk of sanitariums.

Laura was quietly subdued for awhile but the family was not relieved by this. They had learned that this was the course her illness ran; periods of great excitement and impulsiveness followed by days when she could not drag herself out of bed. Mother worried over her incessantly. The flightiness came in through her side of the family, her own mother had been “high strung,” and she had an aunt who had accidentally overdosed on laudanum, leaving a husband and five small children.

As worrisome as they were, Laura’s high-spirited moods were better tolerated by her mother than the days when she lay in a darkened bedroom with the blinds drawn and her face turned toward the wall. There was something frightening and insidious about these periods of pronounced lethargy, as if Laura might be under some kind of a strange sleeping spell from which she might never awake.

After they returned from Nashville, Laura stayed home from school, refusing to see anyone, refusing to eat, sleeping fourteen to sixteen hours a day. And then one night, without warning, she rose and carefully dressed herself and went out to the county fair with Adeline and a group of her giggling friends. There on a dance stage strung with lights like fallen stars, she was asked to dance by a dark-haired, green-eyed man named Brendan Burke.

And just as quickly as they had begun, Laura’s sleeping days were over.

The house was quiet when they arrived home but there was a pleasant smell of baking bread. Distantly, Alice could hear the faint lilting sound of Laura’s laughter. Simon took Alice’s bags up to her room and her mother followed, first laying her gloved hand on Alice’s arm. “Talk to her,” she said. “But don’t let her know I’ve asked you. She is so tired of being hounded by her father and me. She won’t listen to a word we say.”

“Have you met this boy?”

“He’s not a boy. He’s a man,” her mother said stiffly. “And no, I haven’t met him but your father has had words with him. He has some kind of a shop. A shop where they sell gasoline and repair motorcars. You know the kind of place. He’s older than she and entirely unsuitable.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Alice said. She watched her mother slowly climb the stairs. Then turning, she followed the sound of her sister’s laughter. She found her sitting in the kitchen with Nell, who was baking yeast rolls. When she saw Alice, Laura jumped up and flung her arms around her sister.

“You’ve come home,” she said. “Oh, look, Nell she’s come home.”

“Are you hungry, Miss Alice? I can make you a sandwich.”

“No thanks, Nell. I ate on the train.” She held Laura at arm’s length, studying her flushed face, her ethereal, fragile beauty. Her eyes were large and very blue.

“Have you come home to stay?”

Alice smiled and dropped her sister’s hands. “Would you like it if I had?”

“Only if you wanted to be here. I wouldn’t want you to come home for any other reason.” Laura frowned and tucked a stray curl behind one ear, watching as Nell pinched off pieces of dough and rounded them into smooth shapes between her palms.

“I thought we might take a ride,” Alice said.

“Oh?” Laura said.

“I have some Christmas shopping to do.”

“But I’m helping Nell bake bread.”

“You go on,” Nell said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well, all right.” Laura untied her apron and folded it neatly over the back of a chair. “Let me get my coat and my pocket book.”

“I’ll meet you in the garage,” Alice said.

Alice drove her father’s little Willys coupe and they parked downtown in front of Goldman’s Department Store. It was the most exclusive store in town, taking up a whole city block with the bottom windows blazing with their annual Christmas display. Women in fur coats hurried in dragging excited children behind them. It was as if the Depression had never happened. Alice and Laura went inside and shopped for a dressing gown for Roderick and a pair of gloves for Mother. When they were finished they went up to the fourth floor for hot chocolate in the Ladies Tea Room.

“So, how’ve you been?” Alice asked, looking around to see if she saw anyone she knew in the crowded room.

Laura stirred cream into her hot chocolate. She tapped the spoon gingerly against the side of the cup. “I’ve been fine,” she said.

“How’s school?”

“I hate school.”

“I did, too, at your age. That will change.”

“I don’t think so,” Laura said.

The waiter brought a plate of cookies and Alice got up and went over and talked to a group of girls she’d gone to school with.

When she returned to the table, Laura was sitting with her chin on one hand, gazing out the frosted window at the busy street below.

“Lord, these small towns,” Alice said in a low voice. “You can’t go anywhere without seeing someone you know.”

“I hate it,” Laura said.

“Oh, well, now it’s not so bad as that,” Alice said. She coughed delicately, opening her napkin on her lap.

“Everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

“I can’t wait to get away from here.”

Alice smiled brilliantly. “I know just how you feel,” she said.

Later, they drove down by the river and parked and watched the fog roll off the water. The sky was a gun-metal gray. A flock of starlings darted back and forth across the water like a school of fish. Laura sat stiffly on the seat as if suspecting that Alice had been sent to scold her, and so Alice didn’t. Instead she talked of Sweet Briar and going off to New York after graduation.

“How wonderful,” Laura said, smiling gently and turning her face to the glass. She seemed more relaxed now. “Maybe I can visit you.”

“I’ll say,” Alice said. “You can come anytime you like.”

“But aren’t you going to marry Bill Whittington?”

“What?” Alice said. Heat rose in her face. “Who told you that?”

“Mother.”

“Well, Mother doesn’t know everything,” Alice said sharply. A distant barge, slow and ponderous, passed on the river. They both began to giggle.

After that, it was better between them. Alice didn’t ask about the unsuitable beau, and Laura didn’t ask about Bill Whittington. They talked for awhile about Adeline, how Father and Mother spoiled her, giving into her temper tantrums the way they never had with them. And Alice talked about the Yankee girls she had met up at Sweet Briar, how they were so outspoken and sure of themselves in the way that Southern girls never were. How they smoked cigarettes in public and went away unchaperoned for weekends with boys, and Laura, wide-eyed, shook her head and said wistfully, “Don’t you wish we could be like them?”