“You didn’t hear the woman on the phone.”
Dr. Maggie didn’t answer. Miss Li’l Bit moved so Peggy had to look at her.
“I understand why you don’t want to say anything, Peggy. But the boy shouldn’t get off scot-free. Maggie and I can do something about that.”
“Li’l Bit—” Dr. Maggie broke in, but Miss Li’l Bit cut her off.
“We can, Maggie,” she said, and after a second Dr. Maggie seemed to understand what she meant because she nodded slightly. Then she turned to Peggy. “We can’t make this right, dear,” she said, “and I’m still not sure it wouldn’t be better for you to go to the police and take your chances—”
“I won’t,” Peggy said.
“Then will you give Li’l Bit and me permission to help? It’ll be better than doing nothing.”
They stood in front of her, two women who were older than she was and probably way smarter. They weren’t telling her all of this would go away if she trusted them. They weren’t saying they could make it all better. They were just offering to help her as much as they could. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done that.
There were sounds of a car in the driveway. A car door slammed. Mama had come to get her. In another minute she would be ringing the doorbell. When she saw Peggy’s battered face she would burst into tears. Peggy would have her hands full calming her down enough so she could drive them home. Suddenly she felt tired. Miss Li’l Bit and Dr. Maggie were still waiting for her answer. “You do what you think is right,” she said. And she moved to the front door to bring in her mama, who was already sobbing loudly out on the porch.
By the time Peggy woke up the next morning, Grady had left town. He was going to work on the new resort his family was building near their lodge in Montana. The police hadn’t been contacted. And according to Miss Li’l Bit, who came to visit, Mr. Dalton didn’t know a thing. A few days later, a note came from Myrtis Garrison inviting Peggy to tea.
She didn’t want to go. But Dr. Maggie and Miss Li’l Bit said she should.
“You made a big decision when you chose not to report what happened, Peggy,” Dr. Maggie said. “It wasn’t right that you had to, but now that you’ve done it you have to make it work for you.”
“Myrtis Garrison isn’t the warmest person, but she’s fair,” Miss Li’l Bit said. “Give her a chance to do what she can to make amends.”
Mama insisted that she wait until the swelling went down and her eye was no longer black and blue. Then Peggy went to tea. She had little sandwiches with no crusts and cookies with almonds in them on the patio that surrounded the pool where Grady had said he was going to take her swimming. Miss Myrtis sat upright on a white wicker lounge chair and said she was not well and she found herself in need of someone young and energetic to run errands for her for the summer while she recuperated. And if Peggy was interested, she named a salary that was three times what Mama had ever made in her best week at Boots’s. And Peggy said yes, she would like very much to work for Miss Myrtis. They never once mentioned Grady.
When she brought home her first week’s pay, Mama was ecstatic. And if she suspected that the sudden windfall had anything to do with her daughter’s accident, she never asked. Just the way she had never asked what happened to Peggy’s new white swimsuit.
When summer was over, Peggy kept on working for Miss Myrtis, often skipping school when she was needed. Only by now they had stopped pretending that she was simply running errands. She was a paid companion to a sick woman who had not regained her strength after her heart attack because she was never going to.
Even sick, Myrtis kept to an incredible schedule. She was on the boards of more hospitals, rescue missions, children’s homes, and soup kitchens than Peggy could count. It was not enough to simply give a check, she told Peggy; she believed in being involved. She spent her days going to endless teas and lunches and planning meetings. At night, especially during the season when the Lodge was full, she and Dalton entertained. Before she got ill she was up before dawn every day, she told Peggy, with something as close to pride as Myrtis Garrison would allow herself.
Dalton and Myrtis didn’t have servants; their household staff was provided by the resort. Every morning Myrtis called the housekeeping department at the Lodge, and maids, gardeners, waitresses, or whoever was needed would be sent over. On the day of a party, food in steam trays and chafing dishes would show up as if by magic.
But illness was sapping Myrtis’s strength. She stayed in bed later and later in the morning, and she needed naps in the afternoon. Now it was Peggy who arranged the flowers that came over every other day from the resort’s cutting gardens. If a party was planned, it was Peggy who saw to it that the maids swept the patio around the pool for the cocktail hour and Peggy who ordered the platters of spicy cheese wafers and tiny butter biscuits with country ham that Myrtis was famous for.
On the days when Myrtis was so tired she had to bow out of the dinner or the happy hour, Dalton would take the guests over to the Lodge, while Peggy and Myrtis listened to the radio or played endless games of canasta until he got home. If Peggy thought Myrtis was in pain, she learned never to ask. And when she did something extra like polish the silver because it hadn’t been done in a while and she couldn’t stand to see anything so beautiful get tarnished, she learned that her boss would never say thank you. Myrtis signed Peggy’s generous paycheck every week, and that was it.
Peggy didn’t mind. From the moment she walked into the oversized log cabin, she loved it. All the living room furniture was built to order, it was big, and it looked like it would last for eternity. The walls and floors were heart pine, the hardest local wood you could find. The rugs on the floor were old and dark, antiques that had cost a fortune because they had already lasted through other lifetimes. Money was never mentioned. Whenever something needed to be fixed or replaced, it was. There was a sense of plenty and order that felt wonderful to Peggy after years of cornbread suppers.
But there were times when something cold and black seemed to descend on her and threaten to bury her. She knew it was left over from the day in the forest, and no amount of silver polishing or flower arranging would help. Those were the days when she found an excuse to ride her bike to Miss Li’l Bit’s house. She would get there in the late afternoon after Dr. Maggie had finished work, and the two women would be sitting on the porch, enjoying the first cool breezes of the day. There would be a Coke for Peggy, Miss Li’l Bit would sip her icy cold sweet tea, Dr. Maggie would have a lemonade as tart as she could stand it, and the talk would start. Names Peggy dimly recognized—Picasso, Faulkner, Welty, Marx, and Freud—flew over Peggy’s head like birds migrating in autumn. Fierce debates were waged over Miss Li’l Bit’s taste for murder mysteries by Dashiell Hammett and Dr. Maggie’s love of Frank Sinatra. Miss Li’l Bit said opera was the greatest art form, although she had given up someone called Wagner after all the country had been through in the war with the Germans. Dr. Maggie owned a television set, but Miss Li’l Bit felt the infernal boxes were the end of civilization. Miss Li’l Bit was devoted to Reddi-wip and cake mixes, but Dr. Maggie felt they were the work of Satan and would not have them in her house. As they talked and argued, Dr. Maggie emphasized her points with manicured hands tipped with scarlet nails, while tendrils of Miss Li’l Bit’s bushy hair pulled out of the knot at her neck.
They knew each other very well, having worked together for years in Dr. Maggie’s clinic. Even now, when Dr. Maggie had hired a nurse and a receptionist, Miss Li’l Bit still showed up twice a week to help with the books. Listening to them was an education for Peggy, and not just because of the things they talked about. She had never heard women argue so passionately on so many subjects without at least once invoking the opinion of some man.
There were things they agreed on. They both admired Eleanor Roosevelt, although Dr. Maggie said she was the type of woman who gave being good a bad name. And they both believed passionately in more rights for Negroes.
; Dr. Maggie had always treated Negro patients in her clinic, which didn’t upset most people. But she always addressed them by their last names and said Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, which did bother many. Although, Peggy noticed, they weren’t so bothered that they wouldn’t call Dr. Maggie out of her bed in the middle of the night when they needed her.
Miss Li’l Bit gave money to an organization called the NAACP, and she was very excited because they were suing some school board in Kansas about segregation. If they won it would mean white children would have to go to school with colored children. Miss Li’l Bit said that meant there would finally be real equality. Separate but equal was a joke, she said.
When the black moods drove Peggy to the porch, she sat quietly, hoping the two older women would let her stay and listen silently to them until she felt better. But eventually they always turned to her. And a duet of high and low voices would begin.
“If you give in to depression, that monster will win. You can’t let that happen.” That was Miss Li’l Bit’s flutey sound.
“Just remember, you didn’t do anything wrong.” That was Dr. Maggie’s rich low cello tone.
“Think of him as a sick animal you happened to run into.” High voice.
“It wasn’t your fault.” Low voice.
“He’s evil.” High voice.
“You have to fight.” Both voices, almost in unison.
The voices found the place inside her that had not been damaged beyond repair. And little tiny flames of anger started to grow, which probably saved her. And no doubt led her to play a part in what came later.
PEGGY POURED HERSELF A SMALL SHOT, no more than a swallow really, from the thermos she’d filled and taken into the bedroom. Her makeup was done, no small feat this morning. She quickly flipped through the contents of her closet, rejecting anything with even a hint of black in it. Li’l Bit and Maggie might wear it, they were older than she was and sometimes they reverted to the rules they grew up with, but she couldn’t bear it. She made her choice and slipped the dress gingerly over her head, which was aching less since she’d had her medicinal nip. Outside, the dogs were barking. She let them in and put down their food bowls, something she couldn’t have imagined doing an hour ago. Let’s hear it for the thermos, she thought.
There was still one thing left to do. She punched a private number on her quick-dial and was rewarded by a cheery voice announcing that it was housekeeping at the Garrison Gardens Main Lodge and asking how could it help Mrs. Garrison this morning. She told it to send someone over to let her dogs out in two hours and to check again if she wasn’t home by five. The voice said it would be delighted and wished her a fine day. She headed for her car, realizing that, after all the years, she still felt like a kid with her very own genie in a bottle when she called the Lodge and gave her orders as Mrs. Garrison.
AS MYRTIS GARRISON GOT SICKER, people talked about the way Grady stayed away and about the coolness between mother and son on his brief visits home. Mr. Dalt was said to be mystified and distraught. But whatever it was that had come between mother and son, it didn’t go away. Grady spent his winters in college and his summers out in Montana working for the family.
Miss Myrtis’s heart was failing by degrees. Peggy often found her gasping for air, her face as white as her bedsheets. It was obvious that she hurt most of the time, and she was terrified, although she never said it. When she was really bad, Peggy read out loud to her, novels by Dickens and Jane Austen that bored Peggy to tears but seemed to distract Myrtis from the pain. And maybe from the fear she wouldn’t talk about.
Meanwhile, Dalton began building Garrison Gardens.
It was a tradition that each generation of Garrisons did something to enhance the thousands of acres the family owned. Dalton’s father, Grady, had built a stone chapel complete with a church organ in one of the many pine forests and named it for his long-suffering wife—probably, according to the local gossip, as a tribute to her years of ignoring his infidelities.
But it was Dalton who put the resort on the map by building the huge gardens and the beach and opening it all to the public. He was accused by his friends and family of exploiting the town for commercial gain and destroying the natural beauty of the area.
As Dalton was either enriching his heritage or destroying it, depending on your point of view, Peggy’s school career was staggering to a close. She continued skipping days and sometimes weeks, in order to work for Miss Myrtis, and barely passed her courses. To her mother’s dismay, she refused to try out for cheerleading or homecoming queen. She wouldn’t have made it anyway. She’d lost her sparkle. She still wore makeup, when Mama reminded her, but most times when she ate off her lipstick she forgot to excuse herself and go to the ladies’ room to put on more. She cut her hair short because it was easier and stopped adding the “sun streaks.” And her clothes were enough to send Mama to bed in despair. Gone were the figure-hugging sweaters and cinch belts. She wore white blouses loosely tucked into dowdy pleated skirts now. “It’s hanging around those two old maids, that’s what’s doing it!” Mama cried out in frustration.
But the truth was, Peggy was spending more and more time taking care of Miss Myrtis. And Mama wasn’t going to complain about that. So she fretted, but she didn’t interfere. Meanwhile, proms and parties and finally graduation itself came and went. After Peggy got through her final exams by the skin of her teeth, she didn’t even consider Li’l Bit’s generous offer to help her go to college.
“Wouldn’t you like to be with people your own age?” Maggie asked. “You might have fun.”
“I have fun right here on this porch, Maggie.” She’d dropped the titles; they were plain Maggie and Li’l Bit now. She didn’t have to explain to Maggie that she had nothing in common with people her own age anymore because of Grady. Maggie always knew what you were saying when you didn’t say it.
“You told me I made a big decision,” she said. “Now I have to make it work.”
Maggie nodded unhappily.
“Besides, Miss Myrtis really needs me now. I’m going to work full time for her.”
What she didn’t tell Maggie and Li’l Bit was how many nights she kept Dalton company when Myrtis was too tired to come down to dinner.
She did it because Myrtis suggested it. “She’s afraid I’ll grab a sandwich in the kitchen and swallow it in front of the TV if I’m on my own,” Dalton said, with a wink. He was the kind of man who winked when he was kidding because he wanted to make sure you got his joke.
So Peggy sat at the big dining room table and chatted with him about his all-time favorite movie, which was Shane, and her favorite, which was anything with Audrey Hepburn, and he said he didn’t know what people saw in that stick, he liked a girl with meat on her bones like Marilyn Monroe. And while they chatted, Peggy remembered how much she used to love talking about movies and things that were silly.
Then one night the most powerful man in her small world came home grinning like a bad kid and carrying a grease-stained brown paper bag from Lenny’s Barbecue. And after swearing her to secrecy he produced two drippy shredded pork and coleslaw sandwiches, which he served on TV trays in the living room with paper napkins, and they watched Leave It to Beaver while they ate.
After dinner he told her about the experimental new breeds of plants they were creating at the Gardens, and they laughed because she couldn’t pronounce the Latin names of all the flowers and he admitted neither could he at first. He took her out to the backyard to his private flower beds behind the swimming pool, where the gardeners had planted a new kind of pink tea rose that had been bred in the greenhouses, which he couldn’t name Myrtis, because his wife hated her name, and he couldn’t call Beloved, because she said that was too syrupy. Then suddenly he was starting to tear up, which embarrassed him until Peggy made him laugh by mispronouncing another flower name.
One afternoon, after the Gardens had opened for the public, he asked if she had seen them, and she said she hadn’t, so he insisted on taking her. There was no way
to tell him that she hadn’t been to the Gardens because you had to go through a pine forest to get to them and his son had made her afraid of the woods. But she knew he wanted to show off his creation, so she got in the car and prayed that there would be hundreds of people there.
Dalton didn’t drive her to the greenhouse, or the beach, or any of the places where the schoolchildren played and families had picnics. He took her on one of the roads he’d put in the old forest where the live oaks and pines grew so thick that their branches blocked out the sky and the ground smelled moldy like it was damp even when it hadn’t rained. And the fear that started growing inside her was so strong that when he stopped the car she couldn’t breathe. But then he pointed at something ahead of them.
“Look at that,” he said, in a hushed voice. So she made herself look and saw a small stone building. It was square and rustic, almost like a small cottage. But then she moved a little and she could see the spire through the trees. And on the side wall there was a stained-glass window with brilliant blues and greens and reds. A sign by the side of the road said MISS LUCY’s CHAPEL.
“Would you like to go in?” Dalton asked, but she shook her head no.
“This is Myrtis’s favorite place in all of the Gardens,” he said. “I think she likes it better than anything I’ve built. My daddy put it up after Mother died.” He looked at the chapel. “My father was a great man.”
“I think you’re a great man,” Peggy said, and then couldn’t believe how pleased he seemed. Although what he said was, “Bless your heart, I’m not even smart.”
“You were smart enough to build the Gardens.”
“If you listen to most of the people I know, I turned a little piece of paradise into an eyesore and betrayed the family trust.”
“I don’t know about any of that. But a lot of people come here and have fun. And because of you a lot of people have jobs who didn’t before.”
The Three Miss Margarets Page 15
