Where We Are Now (3 page)

The bottles clanked together as he picked his way over Lydia Pinkham's Compound, Dr. Glover's Tonic, Energy-Giving Elixir, Angostura Bitters! How did that get there? George probably. Kate and Edgar's boy. Liked cocktails. That was what Prohibition gave George, a taste for fancy mixtures. Ambrose's tongue curled in his mouth. He didn't much like moonshine himself. Raw tasting, made his throat burn, made him drunk too fast. Surely George hadn't tried mixing bitters with moonshine. The idea made him wince. There it was. Both of them had a drink the afternoon he first arrived, then Edgar stuck it back there. The bottle gleamed in the light, its brown liquid rocking forward as he withdrew it. Whisky wouldn't change Josephine's mind. It would quiet his. Yes, he told himself, his medicinal purpose. He could wash her out of his thoughts.

He sat down again at the farm's dining table in front of the fireplace that offered comfort in the winter months and a cool draft in the summer. The clock mounted over the fireplace marked the hour. His wrinkled piece of blue paper had drifted close to a bowl of wax fruit, which was dusted twice a week. Only his sister-in-law would lavish that much care on a bowl of wax. He turned a red apple in his hand before leaving it outside the cut glass bowl. In front of him a half-full bottle of bourbon waited. The loss of Josephine was a great grief. And no one had taken her from him, no one but himself.

He'd been drinking steadily for half an hour, chasing the bourbon with water now and then. His grief had intensified rather than dulled. Music rippled in his head. If he were at home, he could play some Chopin or DeBussy. A way of giving pain sound, not a way to overcome it. A spring breeze blew through the open windows, shifted the sheet of blue paper toward him. Half consciously he reached for it.

Dear Ambrose.
Here was the only kindness on the page. Her handwriting was cruel…back ink, tight little letters, deep scratches pitting the paper at periods, slashed black underlines.

This will be
no
great surprise to you although it was one to me. I have discovered you are not what you seem. I
cannot
see you again. I write
only
to prevent you being turned away from my parents' door.

Josephine Dupey

Her name scrawled across the page without even the word “sincerely” in closing. She had found out. How?

Unfortunately he was well known in Charleston; students came to him and went to concert halls next. Although he took on young students, he'd found he could also polish the older ones, those that had studied for years, the ones with discipline and talent enough to be winnowed out of the crowd. Jeanie May Swem, Jeanie Swem—he'd told her to choose between the two for the concert stage—was one of them, a girl from a light-hearted family of talented amateur musicians who lived in Savannah. The Swems were the sort who played in quartets and entertained visiting musicians. Members of the Bohemian set, they had plenty of money and liked the company of artists.

Her parents had decided not to try themselves in the professional music world. Their daughter was another matter. Had he been in love with her? Yes, at the time, he was. He fell in love easily, too easily perhaps. When he discovered she was pregnant, he had done the right thing, had proposed, but she wouldn't marry him, couldn't stick to the old order of things, she said. Did he think he was the only one who chaffed against convention?

Maybe she'd sensed his reluctance. It had taken him seventeen years to make his way from the mountains into a barely comfortable living. They both might feel trapped later, Jeanie insisted. She was going to visit friends somewhere in Virginia. She wouldn't say exactly where. Furthermore, she told him quite firmly, not to try to find out. After the boy was born, he learned later, she went to see part of the family still in Germany. With all the unrest there, Jeanie must have come home, must have brought their child back with her. He tried to keep up with her while she was gone, then two years ago he met Josephine. Gradually he cared less and less about what might be happening to Jeanie though he didn't forget he had a son living in the world somewhere, maybe even with the Swems in Savannah by now. But why would they have told anyone of the illegitimate child? Perhaps they hadn't. They could have concocted some story about a marriage abroad. Perhaps someone else had known and told Josephine or her parents.

He imagined Josephine's innocent face as she looked at a note, a single line in an unknown hand. “Ambrose Moore has a son.” Who had he told? When had he told? Who would hurt her like that? Had he babbled his secret to some stranger in a bar? How would that stranger know he'd fallen in love with Josephine Dupey? And what would be the point of telling her he had a bastard child? Sheer maliciousness.

What of Josephine's father? Milstead Dupey had never really favored him. How could he help being the sort of man that women often liked better than other men did? The banker was a careful person whose guarded look hid his whole-hearted interest in the meanest gossip. Hadn't he even overheard him questioning the cook about another family she worked for? He would have had his lines out the moment he knew one of Josephine's suitors was serious. Splaying his fingers out again on the round oak table, Ambrose could see Dupey with fishing poles cast all around him, floats bobbing and sinking suddenly in calm water until they were reeled in with odd bits of old underwear, socks riddled with holes, condoms, and various other pieces of life's little dirty business swinging in Charleston Bay's limpid air. How he would have gloried in the slightest rumor! How he would have gathered it to him and gone home to shake it out like a soiled rag in his wife's and daughter's shocked faces.

He knew what the whisperers would say:

“Ambrose Moore, only a poor musician. How can he make enough to support a wife?”

“Heard he's got a brother in the pen.”

“Tennessee mountain trash.”

“Owes money.”

“He has a bastard son, a son.”

The whispers grew louder.

“She was one of his pupils, remember?”

“Who?”

“Jeanie Swem, one of his discoveries.”

The unknown voices circled in his head. He put his hand over his ears, reached for the piece of blue paper, shoved it in his trouser pocket, stumbled out to the kitchen still smelling slightly of the cauliflower they had eaten for supper the night before, pushed the back door's screen so hard it banged against the wall as he fell down three cement steps into the
yard. For a while he lay on the ground noticing the clarity of the sky and the tranquillity of the farm with everyone gone. A branch from an adjacent bush stroked his cheek. Ambrose rolled over, sat up, and clasped his knees with both hands but got no further. Dizzy, bruised, and drunk, he waited.

Edgar's old black and tan hound came up and tried to lick his face.

Pushing him away with both arms, he lost his balance and collapsed on his side then gradually sat up clutching his arms around both knees again.

The dog sidled back to him.

“Go away.”

The dog sat down in front of him and regarded him with a face mirroring his own pathetic situation so exactly that he felt insulted.

“Go away, Roary!”

The rest of Edgar's hounds were gone, given to friends many years ago. Kate wouldn't have a pack of dogs around. Ambrose peered up at the noonday sun, then down at Roary's white front paws. The dog continued to regard him mournfully, his great brown eyes, drooping ears, and downcast mouth implied he'd seen everything, and none of it was much good.

“Nobody asked you,” Ambrose muttered aloud. He let go of his knees and put both hands on the ground. Moving forward, his fingers pressed against the dirt, feeling the dampness through his trousers, he faced the dog.

“Go away,” He shouted.

Shifting a bit, he vomited in Kate's flowerbed to the right of the door. He pushed himself up, walked over to a hose coiled round a rock next to the faucet in the yard, washed out his mouth, swallowed clean cold water, and wheeled around to spray Roary who, when he saw what Ambrose intended, swerved, and ran toward the barn.

Ambrose chased him, hose in hand, water spewing until he outran it and let it slip from his grasp.

Roary watched him from the barn door with such a complacent look Ambrose bent down to pick up a rock but when he found one, the dog had retreated inside.

Walking slowly, he blinked his eyes against the barn's semi-darkness. Enough light filtered in through doors and cracks to let him make out Roary's shape ambling through the door on the far side. Ambrose sighed and dropped the rock where he was leaning next to a horse stall. Except to accompany his brother, he'd never had a reason for being in the barn. Once he'd left their father's farm he'd avoided pens and barns altogether. Though he sometimes strolled in parks and on lawns, he tended to avoid the outdoors entirely. His future was to be spent inside. He meant to live in high ceilinged rooms, in great halls with shining floors, chandeliers, and grand pianos.

Well…his back slid slowly down against the stall's rough boards as he sank to the ground, knees raised chin high. Well…here he was in the barn again smelling dried hay, dust, and horse manure.

After years of planning, of practicing, and training on his first instrument, an old spinet his teacher's father had built himself, he'd run away from the farm and the long days of working its earth, found work in Knoxville as a gardener, got nowhere. Grubbing in the ground just as he'd done at his father's farm. But he'd held up his head, found friends, moved to Charleston, worked his way. He threw his head back remembering the sound of notes coming through an open bay window while he pulled dead iris leaves from the flowerbed below the sound of someone playing. Inside he discovered another teacher, the need to go north to study in New York, and eventually a conservatory. Then he'd turned back to the south, to Charleston where he might find pupils
more easily. He pulled himself off the barn's dirt floor. At his feet dribbled paint spotted it, blue, a trail of it…blue as Josephine's mocking blue eyes.

“Blue paint keeps wasps from nesting on the porch ceiling,” his sister-in-law once told him. Kate…the scourer of corners, polisher of fruit and furniture, the one who ordered silver and shoes shined.

“Light of my life,” Edgar called her. He liked a clean house as long as he didn't have to clean it.

A fly hovered over Ambrose's forehead. He brushed it off with one hand and heard his own voice's lonely sigh. He got up and started through the barn's central aisle following the trail of dribbles to the storeroom door, pushed it open and found, among the clutter, a large bucket of blue paint. Nearby a brush soaked in a glass quart jar partially filled with turpentine. He nudged the jar with his toe. Someone had obviously left it there in too much of a hurry. Dangerous to leave turpentine open. George and Edgar came out to the barn to smoke. Kate wouldn't let them light a cigar in the house. Dogs, tobacco, and most of the whisky stayed outside. There it was. Bourbon, three bottles, one two-thirds empty under a pile of old harness in the corner. Ambrose bent over, reconsidered, and decided against another drink. He couldn't hold whisky on his stomach long enough to benefit much by it.

Josephine, damn the woman for being led by her snooping father. Milstead Dupey, such an upright fellow. Never had a bit of fun, lived behind a blameless looking white picket fence straight as his spine. Ambrose picked up the bucket of paint and the jar holding the brush and started out of the barn. Full daylight blinded him. Throwing one arm across his eyes, he tripped over a small stone, and fell flat in the mud made by the hose. The open glass jar didn't break but rolled mixing turpentine with muddy water as it went.
Holding onto the paint bucket, he got to his knees, then to his feet to find Roary had reappeared and was grinning at him.

“Get out of here!” Ambrose shouted as he grabbed the brush from its jar. Still carrying the paint bucket, he chased him through the back yard to the front, the brush lifted before him as if he'd paint the dog when he caught him. Roary circled round the porch, squeezed under a gate, and returned to his favorite spot behind the barn.

Still furious with himself, with Josephine, and Milstead Dupey, still searching for distraction, Ambrose walked to a corner of the front lawn where he opened the paint bucket with his pocketknife and began painting the top rail of Edgar's fence blue. When he had to sit on the ground to paint the lower rail, he watched the top one fade into a limitless blue sky. Finding this illusion of the lack of boundaries appealing, he continued painting rails and posts of the fence all along one side of the lawn. Once out of paint, he fell asleep in the shade of a burr oak where Edgar eventually found him when he returned from town.

Paint spattered, muddy, aching from the falls he'd taken, Ambrose grimaced as he looked up at his brother with Roary beside him.

“I got drunk.”

“You plan on finishing it?” Edgar asked. He leaned down to pat the dog's head.

Ambrose pointed toward the empty bucket.

Edgar shook his head.

“Kate won't like the color, will she?” Ambrose struggled to his feet and picked up the brush leaving a smear of blue on the fresh green grass.

His brother shrugged. “It'll wear off,” he said. “You might let me know when you plan on drinking next. I could have some whitewash on hand.”

Together, the dog following, they walked back to the house.

“Women,” Ambrose muttered.

Edgar gave him a questioning look, which he ignored. A headache began in a far crevice of his skull. It would get worse. What else could he expect? He'd known whisky wasn't his friend. Edgar and Kate would look after him if he'd let them, but he'd have to talk, have to tell his whole story, have to confess about Jeanie and the boy. Better to go away. Why be bound to Josephine, to Charleston? He could go anywhere.