Summer in the South Page 9

  Papa needed a new wife, they told him. Those girls needed a stepmother or a governess. They were growing up wild and untamed as spring colts. They needed a firm female presence in their lives. If they continued on the same path they were on, they were sure to bring shame and disgrace to the family. Papa listened and thanked them quietly, then sent them on their way. He never said a word to Fanny and Josephine but several weeks later a new governess arrived.

  She was a French woman from New Orleans; her name was Madame Arcenaux. She called Josephine and Fanny “cherie” or “ma petite,” when Papa was around, and when he wasn’t, she called them “Hey, you, girl.” If she heard Papa’s voice in the house, she would hurry them through their lessons and go downstairs to smile and lay her hand coquettishly upon Papa’s arm.

  Fanny liked her well enough, but Josephine had no intention of allowing a stepmother into their lives, much less a French one. She set about figuring out a way to get rid of Madame Arcenaux.

  The woman had a fear of dark enclosed spaces. Josephine overheard her telling Martha about this, complaining that the room she occupied at the top of the stairs was “dark and airless as a wardrobe,” insisting that she be moved to the back bedroom downstairs (closer to Papa’s room). A few days later, in the middle of a history reading, Josephine let it drop that Papa had had all of Mother’s things moved to the attic, where they were stored in large trunks, boxes and boxes of hats, shoes, and lovely dresses.

  Fanny watched in horrified amazement as Sissy spun her lies.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Madame Arcenaux cried. “Why would your papa put all of your mother’s things in the attic?”

  “He thought the jewels would be safer there,” Josephine said.

  “Jewels?” Madame Arcenaux said.

  The next morning was market day. They stood at the window watching as Martha, dressed in a hat and a long coat, pushed Clara and Celia in the big pram on her way to town. Papa had left earlier to meet his lawyer.

  “What are you doing?” Madame Arcenaux said querulously behind them. “Come away from that window at once and get back to your lessons.”

  She waited a few minutes and then went to the window, peering down at the sidewalk where Martha had disappeared just a short time before. “Stay in your seats,” she said, hurrying out of the nursery. “I’ll be back shortly to check on your progress.”

  They heard her steps along the wide hallway and they stood and followed her, Josephine leading the way and Fanny trailing behind. They peeked around the doorway, watching Madame Arcenaux as she stood in front of the attic door. She put her hand out and touched the knob hesitantly, turning it so that the door opened with a slow creak. She leaned forward and pulled the light cord, standing illuminated against the dim glow of the bulb. Still, she hesitated. They could hear her breathing. With a sharp intake of breath, she squared her shoulders and started up, clutching the railing with both hands. They heard her footsteps, loud and clumsy on the wooden steps, and then the sharp sound of her heels striking the floor overhead.

  Josephine darted forward. She stood on tiptoe and pulled the cord, and the attic was plunged suddenly into darkness. She swung the door shut and locked it.

  There was a sudden howling like the sound of a dog that’s been run over in the street, and then a wild clumping as Madame Arcenaux made her frantic descent. She was crying, pleading with them to open the door. Fanny began to cry.

  Josephine said, “Hush. Wait.”

  At the sound of her voice, Madame Arcenaux began to scream, “Open this door, you horrible child!” followed by “I’ll tell your father!” then, “I’ll strangle you with my own two hands!” and finally a string of profanity so blue and explicit as to be unintelligible to the girls.

  It was at this point that Papa arrived, unlocking the attic door and swinging it open to the raging, disheveled Madame Arcenaux, and without a word, he went to his library and wrote her a final check, then called to John to bring the car to drive her to the train station.

  Sleeping Dogs

  Over the next week Ava gradually adjusted to her new life. The occupants of Woodburn Hall, she soon discovered, followed a rigid routine. They rose early (everyone except for Ava) and breakfasted together, then Maitland would leave for his “Gentleman’s Club,” a stalwart group that met every morning at the downtown diner, while Josephine and Fanny drank their second cups of coffee in the breakfast room. Occasionally Alice or Clara would join them. Ava would stumble into the kitchen around nine, bleary-eyed and drowsy, drawn by the scent of freshly brewed coffee, just as the others were preparing to go about their day. Several times she stumbled in to find the kitchen empty, a note propped against the percolator to indicate where her breakfast might be found.

  Some mornings the women would linger over coffee, although they were always dressed when Ava joined them. Josephine was partial to tailored pantsuits and tea-length skirts or, if she was home, a pair of neatly pressed khaki pants and a pastel oxford cloth shirt. Fanny favored brightly colored dresses that showed off her legs. Clara most often wore a pair of jeans and a sweater. Alice, however, wore a never-ending supply of brightly colored tennis warm-up suits. She was partial to Keds and diamonds, which she never went anywhere without; she probably slept in diamonds.

  She would come through the kitchen door in the mornings towel-drying her damp hair and shouting, “What’s for breakfast?” in a loud, genial voice. Ava assumed it was from a morning shower, but no, Alice admitted one morning that she liked to swim nude in her pool every day for exercise.

  “Nude?” Ava said.

  “You’ve been warned,” Josephine said drolly.

  “It’s good for the skin!” Alice cried, slapping the underside of her chin.

  “Oh, Alice, really,” Fanny said, giggling over the rim of her newspaper. “Aren’t you afraid one of the neighbors will see you?”

  “If they do they’re in for the shock of their life,” Alice said.

  “I’ll say,” Josephine said.

  “Because I’ve got the body of a fifty-year-old!” Alice crowed.

  Fanny flattened the newspaper on the table and stared down at a full-color spread of a local garden party featured on the society pages. “Who are these people?” she said, looking closely. “I don’t know a one.”

  “The nouveau riche and their garden parties,” Alice said. “They do like to make a spectacle of themselves.”

  “This from a woman who likes to swim nude in her backyard,” Josephine said.

  Fanny stared thoughtfully out the window. “Papa used to say a lady should have her name in the papers only four times in her life. Her christening, her engagement, her marriage, and her death.”

  “He was right,” Alice said.

  Ava poured herself another cup of coffee. “What exactly is new money?”

  “Anything made after the War of 1812,” Josephine said.

  Lunch was usually tomato sandwiches or leftovers from the night before, served in the breakfast room, or if the weather was good on the side verandah. A nap always followed lunch, a holdover, Fanny said, from the old days before air-conditioning, when the downtown stores and businesses used to close for “siesta” at noon so people could go home and sleep during the hottest part of the day.

  Television in the house was limited to PBS, the History Channel, Turner Classics, and, of course, the Food Channel. Occasionally, Maitland would watch CNN but Fanny found the news “unpleasant.”

  “Doesn’t watching the news just make you want to kill yourself?” she asked Ava cheerfully one day. “If I watched too much of it I’d be tempted to jump off a tall building or ram a knitting needle through my temple.”

  “Who in their right mind kills themself with a knitting needle?” Josephine said.

  Monday mornings were reserved for hair or dental or medical appointments. Tuesday morning Maitland played golf with a group of friends while Fanny attended one of her church or garden club meetings. Wednesday mornings the housecleaner came, and Josephine
and Fanny and Maitland did the food shopping. Thursday mornings Josephine played bridge with a group of cutthroat card sharks called the Trump Queens, while Fanny and Maitland, one day a month, went downtown to collect rents from the shopkeepers along Main Street operating out of the Woodburn Building. Friday mornings were reserved for what Fanny cheerfully called Visiting the Dead, which meant taking fresh flowers out to the cemetery to adorn the graves of deceased family members, an occupation that, owing to the number of dead Woodburns and their kin, usually took most of the morning. Saturdays were for sleeping late, puttering in the garden, and supper clubs. Sundays were for going to church and golf.

  Ava found that, true to Will’s promise, the aunts left her alone during the day. They were either gone, working in the garden, or napping. Ava would wander the house like a disconsolate ghost, picking up silver snuffboxes and antique porcelain vases, pressing her nose to the glass display cabinets in the dining room that housed the extensive sterling silver collection, bowls and platters and archaic utensils collected for generations, rows and rows of biscuit boxes and tea caddies and engraved wager cups. The house would be quiet except for the low hum of the central air-conditioning system and the steady ticking of the parlor clock. She would stand in front of the oil portraits and the framed documents and maps from the eighteenth century that covered the walls of every room, squinting to read the ornate antique script. The whole house was like a museum, every nook and cranny filled with items of historical significance. Each time she looked she found something new to marvel at.

  And always there was the feeling of other lives lived here among the antiquities, the eerie presence of the hovering dead, cold spots on the stairs, a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one eye.

  Her relationship with Will, too, fell easily into a routine. He never showed up at Woodburn Hall before Toddy Time, although he suspended this rule on the weekends, coming early in the morning to take Ava out to Longford or for a drive in the country to show her some site of historical or natural interest.

  He was attentive and coyly persistent. He seemed to take for granted that Ava would eventually relent and look upon him as more than a friend, abandoning whatever hesitation she felt about beginning a physical relationship with him. There were times when, sitting beside him on the porch swing on a sultry evening or noting his handsome profile as they traveled down some dusty back road, she had to wonder why she didn’t. It seemed to her then as if she was dreaming, as if she was floating, all time suspended, the image of her and this man as hazy and insubstantial as a mirage.

  But then she would remember why she was here, the unwritten novel still lying dormant inside her head, and she would feel a clutch of guilt, tinged with anger that he would expect her to give herself up so easily. As if he found her dreams of being a writer nothing more than a bluff, an idle hobby to fill her days while she waited for something better to come along.

  “Come out to Longford and spend the night,” he said one evening. They were out in the pergola in the garden. It was a moonlit night. The sky was clear and dotted with stars.

  “I can’t,” she said mildly. “What would the aunts say?”

  “They don’t have to know.”

  “What do you suggest? Climbing out the window?”

  “We could just tell them.”

  “Imagine the scandal,” she said.

  He kissed her lightly on the neck. “I may have to make an honest woman out of you yet.” He was teasing, yet there was something in his voice, some element of hopefulness that she chose to ignore.

  The truth was, she didn’t want anything more permanent than what they had now, the taunts, the helpless thrashings, the feeling that something wonderful waited, if only she could be patient.

  One night after supper she and Will walked downtown to see a movie, Mrs. Dalloway. It was a warm balmy night, and when they walked outside from the small theater the sky was still filled with light.

  A few people stood outside under the brightly lit marquee.

  “Vanessa Redgrave was made for that role,” Ava said. They stood for a moment looking up at the faint stars. “Did you like the movie?”

  “It was interesting.” He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “You certainly felt like you were there, in postwar London, although, I have to say, I’ve never been a fan of Virginia Woolf. I’m never quite sure what it is she’s trying to say.”

  “She was talking about choices, I think, and how those choices influence who we become. Clarissa could have chosen Peter and been one person but instead she chose dull old Mr. Dalloway and became someone else entirely.”

  “But that’s a romantic view of life, don’t you think? We’re all pretty much who we were meant to be regardless of whom we marry.” He seemed distracted, almost irritated, standing with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans.

  She laughed. “Now you sound like a Calvinist.”

  “And if she hadn’t been married to Dalloway she wouldn’t have been planning a dinner party anyway. He gave her the safety and stability she needed to plan dinner parties. Peter would have been too busy having affairs and running through her money.”

  “But that’s the whole point. She took the safe choice.”

  “And now she regrets it?” His voice rose, deep and affronted.

  They seemed to be talking about something else now. Several people standing near them turned to stare.

  Ava spread her hands, trying to calm him. “I don’t think she regrets her choice, but she does wonder what it might have been like if she’d chosen Peter. Because, you know, she’s become kind of dead inside, she’s become Mrs. Dalloway instead of Clarissa. And you’re right, choosing Peter would probably have been disastrous but she can’t help but wonder if it might have made her feel more alive.”

  His expression changed, becoming still and attentive. “Feminine logic,” he said. He was staring across the street at a dark-haired man leaning against the tailgate of a pickup truck. The man seemed to be studying the two of them, his arms crossed over his chest, his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. While they watched, he nodded his head, slowly and deliberately, in greeting.

  Will took her hand and, turning, they began to walk home.

  “Who was that?”

  “No one,” he said.

  Halfway home, he let go of her hand. Neither one spoke. They walked now without touching. Something had happened at the theater: she had offended him in some way, and now he would punish her with his silence.

  A pale moon sailed over the trees. Insects flew in crazy circles around the streetlamps. Ava wished his feelings for her would fade, but love wasn’t like that. It came on with sudden, terrifying clarity. She’d seen Michael across a crowded cafeteria and known, without even talking to him, that he was for her. With Jacob it had been more subtle.

  It was like the steady ticking of a clock; one tick, there was nothing, the next tick, something bloomed.

  The following Friday, Fanny asked Will to accompany her to the cemetery and Will surprised everyone at the breakfast table by saying yes. He had come in unexpectedly while they were finishing their last cups of coffee. Ava was in the library reading when he stuck his head in to ask her if she wanted to come.

  Since she couldn’t seem to force herself to write, Ava had taken to spending her mornings in the library, reading. She had found a well-worn copy of Anna Karenina, and despite the fact that she had read the novel several times in college, she quickly found herself immersed in Tolstoy’s sweeping tale of illicit love and tragedy. It was one of the characteristics of good fiction, she had found, that rereading only enhanced the story rather than detracting from it, and so she found herself once again caught up in the passionate love affair between Anna and Count Vronsky, even though she knew that Vronsky was no good, that despite his charm and good looks he would betray Anna in the end.

  “What are you doing?” Will asked. He was standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the jamb, reg
arding her with a lazy, amused expression.

  “Research,” she said, embarrassed that he had caught her reading when she should have been writing. She was lying on one of the long sofas, and she sat up quickly, holding out the book, which featured a rather lurid dust jacket drawn in the style of a nineteen-fifties romance novel. “Tolstoy.” She wondered how long he had been standing in the doorway watching her.

  “I’m going with Fanny to visit the dead. Do you want to come?” He didn’t ask her how the work was coming, which she thought was rather pointed and brought a faint flush to her face.

  “Sure,” she said, rising and carefully folding the book flap over to mark her place. “I could use a break.”

  She went to get ready and when she came into the kitchen, Maitland and Will were standing in front of the small television set watching Alton Brown mix up Butternut Dumplings with Brown Sugar and Sage.

  “He’s kind of a smart-ass,” Maitland said. “But the boy knows his way around a pastry bag.”

  They rode out to the cemetery in Maitland’s old Mercedes, Maitland driving with Fanny beside him on the front seat, and Will and Ava settled into the back. The sky was a dark metallic gray. Pear blossoms littered the lawns and drives of the neighborhood. The car was a diesel, and rattled like marbles in a tin plate each time they stopped at a light or a stop sign, shooting out a plume of faint black smoke as they accelerated. It was an older-model sedan, Ava was guessing at least twenty years old, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at it; Maitland kept it in nearly perfect condition.

  It was one of the things Ava found amusing, the fact that the aunts lived in one of the largest houses in town yet drove a twenty-five-year-old Rambler. Alice and Maitland were the same.

  “It’s like Havana around here,” Ava had remarked to Will, “with all the old well-cared-for cars.”