Summer in the South Page 6

  It was that detail of the lemon soap that had given the story its authenticity. Clotilde was a palm reader, and Ava could imagine her flipping Frank’s hand over to peruse its secrets. Picturing this, Ava had felt a sudden dizzying awareness of her parents as they must have been at that time in their young, hopeful lives. She had visualized the two of them, good-looking and wary, the whir of the giant machinery, the lights glittering on the water, the distant strident sounds of the band.

  At that moment her imagined life, intertwined with the lives of these two strangers, had felt fateful and expansively heroic. But now, looking down at Josephine standing next to Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, she could see what a small, inconsequential thing her family history really was.

  “Zelda was the better writer of the two,” Alice said. “That was the tragedy of the whole thing. She was the better writer, and his jealousy drove her to have a series of—spells.”

  “Nervous spells,” Fanny said.

  “Spells?” Ava said, looking from one to the other.

  “All the old families are prone to them,” Josephine said serenely.

  The Tale-Tell Heart

  It was a beautiful morning, sunny but not too warm, when they started out for Longford. Will drove so that he could show her “the scenic route.” The farther they got from Woodburn Hall, the more his mood seemed to lift. They drove through the shady streets of the old town, the very streets Ava had driven just a day before, and he pointed out sites of interest: the first African-American school in the county, a house with a cannonball still visibly lodged in its outer wall, a leftover from a Civil War skirmish known as the Battle of Harpeth Hill. From time to time, in between showing her the elementary school he had attended or the creek where he first learned to fish for crawdads, he remarked quietly, “It’s a great place to raise a family.”

  He was proud of his hometown, Ava could see, and she regretted now the times she and Michael had teased him at Bard about being from Hambone, Tennessee, the Chitlin’ Capital of the South. He had taken their teasing with a great deal of good-natured resignation but she realized now, having witnessed the courteous way Southerners treated one another, that he must have been appalled by their lack of manners and knowledge of geography.

  They turned onto the highway and crossed the bridge over the river, following the route Ava had taken earlier.

  “This is the old road to Longford,” he said. “It used to take almost a day of hard traveling by wagon to get to town. Now it only takes ten minutes.”

  She stared at the green fields and the distant rim of blue mountains. “What’s a vivisectionist?”

  He glanced at her and then back at the road, his expression a mix of annoyance and mild amusement. “I see you’ve been talking to the aunts about Great-Uncle Jerome.”

  “They’ve been filling me in on some of the sordid family history. So what’s a vivisectionist?”

  “Someone who dissects living organisms to see how they work. In the 1840s dissection of a human body was illegal, so doctors had to make do with what they could scrounge up—dogs, cats, birds.”

  Ava said, “Isn’t that what serial killers do?”

  He laughed, and she was glad to see laugh lines crinkling the corners of his eyes. She was anxious to recapture some of the free and easy camaraderie she had felt with him at Bard. He had seemed like such a good sport to her then: shy, self-conscious, but intelligent and quietly humorous, too. The kind of guy she never would have fallen for in college.

  In college she and Michael had teased each other cruelly. He insisted that he could always spot a girl with “daddy issues” because she invariably kept cats. (Ava didn’t particularly like cats but she had rescued a big black-and-white feline named Figaro her freshman year). She claimed she could always spot a “good” man by how he treated his mother. (Michael sulked and refused to speak to his mother when she denied him anything. He could go months without talking to her.)

  Their relationship had been less like a love affair and more like a fight to the death.

  Will had laugh lines around his eyes, but Ava had no way of knowing how he had treated his mother. She had died when he was six. Josephine had been a surrogate mother, he once told Ava. After his parents died and he came to live with the aunts, it was Josephine who helped him with homework, played ball with him in the yard, and volunteered as a den mother for his Cub Scout troop. Fanny and Maitland were always away, traveling the world.

  And his conduct toward Josephine, Ava had noted, was one of courteous and respectful affection.

  “And why in the world didn’t you tell me you were related to Zelda Fitzgerald?”

  He gave her a mocking, martyred look. “Oh, God,” he said.

  “Despite the fact that it is universally accepted that Zelda was crazy as a loon, they seem to prefer to call her breakdowns ‘nervous spells.’ ”

  He laughed again. “It’s all a matter of perspective,” he said.

  They had stopped at a railroad crossing at the edge of a soybean field for a slow-moving train. He put the windows down and they sat for a minute listening to the pleasant rumbling, feeling the warmth of the sun on their arms.

  He put his head back and closed his eyes. “How do you picture it?” he asked.

  “Picture what?”

  “Longford.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She slipped her feet out of her sandals and put them up on the dash, hugging her knees. “Kind of like Tara, I guess. A big white house with columns across the front and girls in hoop skirts on the lawn.”

  He smiled indulgently, keeping his eyes closed. “Everyone expects Tara,” he said.

  The train passed and the crossing guard went up. They drove on.

  “I hope you won’t be disappointed,” he said.

  In college he had spoken with an almost neutral accent but down here he lapsed into the soft accents of his youth. When they passed a car or truck on the road, he lifted his hand off the steering wheel and waved. It was a small gesture, really, a slight lifting of a couple of fingers, but everyone did it.

  “Is that like some kind of secret handshake?” Ava asked him, after they had passed an old man standing at his mailbox and the two of them had exchanged the “wave.”

  “Just being friendly,” Will said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  She told him about the crazy old woman at the gas station who had shared the rambling tale of her father falling off the roof.

  He grinned and shook his head. “Down here we don’t say ‘crazy,’ ” he said. “We say ‘eccentric.’ ”

  Despite his obvious pleasure in showing her the house, he seemed in no particular hurry to reach Longford. They turned off the highway and drove aimlessly down country roads that meandered past fields, roadside vegetable stands, distant farmhouses, and every so often, a new brick ranch house set back from the road in a patch of green lawn. The sun had reached its zenith, and the light had changed to a hazy yellow-green, shimmering and rising off the asphalt in the distance like a mirage. In between the fields and clearings, tall trees lined the road, covered in some type of broad-leafed ivy. The ivy draped from power lines and mounded over the trees and greenery, and Ava was reminded again of the fantastic landscapes of fairy tales and dreams.

  “What is that stuff?” she said.

  “Kudzu. It covers everything in its path, growing up to a foot a day. They originally brought it in from the Orient to use as cattle feed and for erosion control, and now it covers the South.”

  “How do you kill it?”

  “Goats.”

  “Goats?”

  “They eat it. Frost also kills it. It dies back in the winter, thank God. When I was a boy we used to build forts in there. You can stand up under it and walk for miles. It’s like a big green circus tent.”

  He had left the windows down, and the air was fragrant with the scent of newly mown grass. She had always loved long drives in the country. When she was in high school in Chicago, she had befriended a girl who lived i
n a large rambling Victorian house close to the University of Chicago. Margaret Stanley’s grandfather had started Sentry Insurance, and although they attended the same private Catholic school (Ava as a scholarship student), Margaret was head and shoulders above Ava, socially and financially. They had met in honors English, bonding over Beowulf, and Ava would spend weekends and go for long drives in the country with Margaret and her parents.

  Mr. Stanley didn’t work. He spent most of his days on the golf course, and Mrs. Stanley spent most of hers shopping or playing bridge or drinking martinis in the kitchen with the maid, Frances. Margaret was an only child. (“Adopted,” she confided in Ava, “because Mother is barren.”) They giggled over this, making up tragic stories about Margaret’s “real” parents, who they called Mr. and Mrs. Ortho Slogett. Mr. Slogett was an alcoholic with a wooden leg who couldn’t find work, and Mrs. Slogett was so immensely obese she couldn’t get out of bed, and that’s why they had given Margaret up for adoption. Ava was good at this; like many children who spend a lot of time alone, she was a natural-born storyteller. And she had by this time settled on her dream of being a writer, although she didn’t tell anyone of this, not even Margaret, keeping her dream wrapped up and locked away where she could take it out in private and marvel at its cool, redeeming brilliance.

  Ava loved the Stanleys. She loved the casual elegance of their lives: Mrs. Stanley wrapped in a fur coat sipping endless martinis, Mr. Stanley coming in from the golf course with grass stains on his pants and his face ruddy with health and happiness. Trouble did not seem to darken the Stanleys’ door; misfortune seemed incapable of finding them. They never worried about debt collectors or paying bills or being evicted. And it seemed to Ava that this was the wonderful thing about having money; not that it could buy you things, but that it kept the wolves at bay. It gave you security and stability. Freed from worry and care, it allowed you to live your life with oblivious abandon, taking everything for granted, even good fortune.

  And, oh, what a life they led!

  “Daddy, let’s go for a ride,” Mrs. Stanley would call to Mr. Stanley when he came in from the golf course. Wrapped in her fur, clutching her martini glass with jeweled fingers, she would climb into the front seat of the Lincoln Continental beside Mr. Stanley, and Ava and Margaret would climb into the back. They would drive out into the western suburbs and beyond, out into the country past dairy farms and Catholic shrines, and Mrs. Stanley would pour martinis from a little silver shaker for her and Mr. Stanley, and he would tell them stories of his youth. Sometimes they wouldn’t return home until late in the evening and Clotilde would be furious, threatening not to let Ava go anywhere with those “arch-Republican Stanleys.” But under Ava’s relentless pleading she would eventually give in.

  Mrs. Stanley had sized Clotilde up pretty quickly and she would have nothing to do with her, but she seemed genuinely fond of Ava. Ava had the feeling that she would adopt her, too, if given the chance, and she spent a lot of time fantasizing about becoming one of the fabulous Stanleys.

  Ava stuck her arm out the window and let it undulate in the wind like a snake fighting a swift current. All along the road were masses of greenery: tulip poplars and hickory trees and wild azaleas. They passed small shotgun houses with cars rusting in the yard and a lone trailer set back from the road beneath a sodium vapor lamp. They passed a boy riding a four-wheeler along a dusty road, and a flock of goats standing in the shade of a sycamore tree.

  “All this used to be Woodburn land,” Will said.

  “It doesn’t look very prosperous now.”

  “The town grew to the north and the west. I suppose that’s why the family stopped living out here after the Civil War.”

  “But they held on to the property?”

  “Yes. They rented the land first to sharecroppers and later to big farmers, but after a while the taxes and upkeep got to be too much. The aunts didn’t want to sell it. They were afraid it would be snatched up by some big developer and turned into McMansions on postage-stamp-sized lots and that’s why they gave it to me.”

  “Wow. Some gift.”

  He seemed amused by her reaction. “I inherited it when I turned twenty-one. It was in trust, and as the Colonel’s only remaining male heirs, it could have gone to either Sumner or me.”

  “Who’s Sumner?”

  “Fanny’s son. Her only child.”

  “So you got the family farm and Sumner didn’t? He must really like you.”

  He smiled ruefully and glanced in the rearview mirror. “He doesn’t like any of us much, I’m afraid.”

  She turned her face to the window. The scattered farmhouses and trailers gave way now to wide rolling fields of alfalfa and soybeans. Far off in the distance the land rose gradually to a prominent ridge crowned by a grove of tall trees.

  “Longford,” Will said, pointing to the grove.

  She couldn’t see the house. Even after they turned off the main road onto a narrow paved drive, it was still hidden by the trees. A white fence ran along both sides of the drive, flanked by a row of old oaks.

  “This used to be a dirt road,” Will said. “They’ve only recently paved it.”

  The sun glittered along the windshield as they broke from the trees into a wide grassy clearing. The house was not what she had expected, no thick white columns, no ornate antebellum splendor. Instead it was a rather simple-looking two-story brick house with a white portico across the front. The windows were bare and shutterless.

  It was one of the most beautiful houses she had ever seen.

  Seeing her expression, Will laughed. “I told you it wasn’t Tara.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  They got out of the car and stood in the yard. The drive circled in front of the house and ran around the western side to a small graveled parking lot. Beyond the parking lot Ava could see a barn and several scattered log outbuildings, and farther on a grove of trees.

  “Come inside,” Will said.

  A brick sidewalk ran from the parking area to the front of the house. It was very quiet here; no sounds from the modern world broke the stillness of midday. She climbed the stairs and stood beside Will on the porch while he fumbled with the lock, listening to the gentle sighing of the breeze through the trees, the steady chanting of insects in the grass. He turned the key and swung open the front door, stepping aside for her to enter.

  Like Woodburn Hall, the house was bisected by a wide central hallway. A graceful staircase coiled upward from the first floor. The rooms opening off either side of the hall were large, with high ceilings and long windows overlooking the fields, but because they were so sparsely furnished, and the windows were clear of shutters and drapes, the light fell through unimpeded. It was marvelous, really, the quality of light slanting through the house. Whereas Woodburn Hall had a slightly damp, melancholy atmosphere, Longford felt bright and welcoming.

  I could be happy here, Ava thought.

  The walls were painted in various shades of slate blue and cream or covered in faded French wallpaper. Every room contained a fireplace and a marble mantel, and overhead a large brilliant chandelier.

  “I’m especially proud of those,” Will said, flipping a switch so that the chandelier overhead glittered suddenly with light. “They’re original to the house. They were made to hold candles, and I had them taken down and shipped to a place in Memphis that electrified them. It took almost nine months but it was worth it, I think.”

  “Incredible.” She stood in the middle of the room, turning slowly, admiring the way the large gilt-framed mirror over the mantel reflected the light. It seemed to Ava that she could imagine the house as it must have been two hundred years ago, the endless days and the quiet, because that’s the thing modern people with their constant noise and hurrying couldn’t imagine, the quiet stillness of places like this.

  She closed her eyes, struck suddenly by a memory of her mother standing in an empty room. “Do you think that houses soak up the energies of the people who have liv
ed there?”

  He stood watching her with an amused, baffled expression on his face. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think there’s some kind of residual energy left behind? Voices, emotions, images?”

  He laughed. “Do you mean like ghosts? Remember, I was a chemistry major. We have our feet firmly planted in the soil of scientific skepticism.”

  “You could have just said no,” she said.

  None of the rooms on the first floor were furnished but upstairs in one of the bedrooms overlooking the fields he had arranged a platform bed and several chests and chairs. A small television sat atop a tall dresser in the corner.

  “I pretty much live up here,” he said. “In these three rooms.”

  Despite its collection of furniture, the room still felt large and grand. The bed was very neatly made, and there were no clothes or books or used dishes scattered about. The energy here was slightly different, very left-brained and orderly.

  A door to the left led into a large bathroom. At the opposite end of the room was another closed door.

  “What’s in there?” Ava said, and he hesitated just long enough to make her curious, standing with his hand on the knob. As she approached, he leaned suddenly and threw open the door.

  It was a recording studio, complete with several guitars propped on stands, and various amps and speakers scattered around. A computer sat on a narrow table crowded with monitors and microphones, and beside it stood an electric keyboard.

  “Wow,” Ava said.

  “It’s just a hobby,” he said. “A way to pass the time.” He seemed shy again, his face beneath his summer tan flooded with color. Ava guessed he hadn’t told many about his music.

  “What’s that?” she asked politely, pointing.

  “An electronic drum kit.”

  “Do you play all these instruments?”

  “Yes. I write the music and then record it.”

  “Everything?”

  “I lay down one track at a time. It gives me more control, and I don’t have to depend on anyone else to show up and play.” He watched her move around the room. “What are you thinking?” he said.