The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  “Millie,” I ask, when she’s buttoning up my dress this morning, “you remember my Cousine Eliza?”

  The girl makes a little humming sound that could mean yes, no, or maybe. That’s one of her irritating habits. “You must,” I say. “My beautiful cousin who went away to Paris. They say she died of a fever.”

  This time the sound she makes is more like hmph.

  I catch her eye, its milky roll. Excitement rises in my throat. “Millie,” I say, too loud, “have you ever heard anything about that?”

  “What would I hear, Mam’zelle Aimée?”

  “Oh, go on! I know you house nègres are always gossiping. Did you ever hear tell of anything strange about my cousin’s death?”

  Millie’s glance slides to the door. I step over there and shut it. “Go on. You can speak freely.”

  She shakes her head, very slowly.

  “I know you know something,” I say, and it comes out too fierce. Governing the nègres is an art, and I don’t have it; I’m too familiar, and then too cross. Today, watching Millie’s purple mouth purse, I resort to a bribe. “I tell you what, I might give you a present. What about one of these little charms?” Through my sleeve, I tug the gold bracelet down to my wrist. I make the little jewels shake and spin in front of Millie’s eyes. “What about the tiger, would you like that one?” I point him out, because how would she know what a tiger looks like? “Or maybe these dance slippers. Or the golden cross, which Jesus died on?” I don’t mention the key, because that’s my own favorite.

  Millie looks hungry with delight. She’s come closer; her fingers are inches away from the dancing trinkets.

  I tuck the bracelet back under my wrist ruffle. “Tell me!”

  She crosses her arms and leans in close to my ear. She smells a little ripe, but not too bad. “Your cousine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your oncle and tante killed her.”

  I shove the girl away, the flat of my hand against her collarbone. “How dare you!”

  She gives a luxurious shrug. “All I say is what I hear.”

  “Hear from whom?” I demand. “Your Pa Philippe, or your Ma?” Millie’s mother works the hoe-gang, she’s strong as a man. “What would they know of my family’s affairs?”

  Millie is grinning as she shakes her head. “From your tante.”

  “Tante Marcelite? She’d never say such a thing.”

  “No, no. From your Tante Fanny.”

  I’m so staggered I have to sit down. “Millie, you know it’s the blackest of sins to lie,” I remind her. “I think you must have made up this story. You’re saying that my Tante Fanny told you – you – that she and Oncle Louis murdered Eliza?”

  Millie’s looking sullen now. “I don’t make up nothing. I go in and out of that dusty old room five times a day with trays, and sometimes your tante is praying or talking to herself, and I hear her.”

  “But this is ridiculous.” My voice is shaking. “Why would – what reason could they possibly have had for killing their own daughter?” I run through the plots I invented up in the attic. Did Eliza have a French lover? Did she give herself to him and fall into ruin? Could my uncle and aunt have murdered her, to save the Famille from shame? “I won’t hear any more of such stuff.”

  The nègre has the gall to put her hand out, cupped for her reward.

  “You may go now,” I tell her, stepping into my shoes.

  Next morning, I wake up in a foul temper. My head starts hammering as soon as I lift it off the pillow. Maman is expected back from New Orleans today. I reach for my bracelet on the little table beside my bed and it’s gone.

  “Millie?” But she’s not there, on the pallet at the foot of my bed; she’s up already. She’s taken my bracelet. I never mentioned giving her more than one little trinket; she couldn’t have misunderstood me. Damn her for a thieving little nègre.

  I could track her down in the kitchen behind the house, or in the sewing room with Tante Marcelite, working on the slave clothes, or wherever she may be, but no. For once, I’ll see to it that the girl gets punished for her outrageous impudence.

  I bide my time; I do my lessons with Tante Fanny all morning. My skin feels greasy, I’ve a bouton coming out on my chin; I’m a martyr to pimples. This little drum keeps banging away in the back of my head. And a queasiness, too; a faraway aching. What could I have eaten to put me in such a state?

  When the boat arrives I don’t rush down to the pier; my mother hates such displays. I sit in the shady gallery and wait. When Maman comes to find me, I kiss her on both cheeks. “Perfectly well,” I reply. (She doesn’t like to hear of symptoms, unless one is seriously ill.) “But that dreadful brat Millie has stolen a bracelet from my room.” As I say it, I feel a pang, but only a little one. Such a story for her to make up, calling my aunt and uncle murderers of their own flesh! The least the girl deserves is a whipping.

  “Which bracelet?”

  Of course, my mother knows every bit of jewelry I own; it’s her memory for detail that’s allowed her to improve the family fortunes so much. “A, a gold chain, with trinkets on it,” I say, with only a small hesitation. If Eliza got it in Paris, as she must have done, my mother won’t ever have seen it on her. “I found it.”

  “Found it?” she repeats, her eyebrows soaring.

  I’m sweating. “It was stoppered up in a bottle,” I improvise; “it washed up on the levee.”

  “How peculiar.”

  “But it’s mine,” I repeat. “And Millie took it off my table while I was sleeping!”

  Maman nods judiciously and turns away. “Do tidy yourself up before dinner, Aimée, won’t you?”

  We often have a guest to dinner; Creoles never refuse our hospitality to anyone who needs a meal or a bed for the night, unless he’s a beggar. Today it’s a slave trader who comes up and down the River Road several times a year; he has a long beard that gets things caught in it. Millie and two other house nègres carry in the dishes, lukewarm as always, since the kitchen is so far behind the house. Millie’s face shows nothing; she can’t have been punished yet. I avoid her eyes. I pick at the edges of my food; I’ve no appetite today, though I usually like poule d’eau – a duck that eats nothing but fish, so the Church allows it on Fridays. I listen to the trader and Maman discuss the cost of living, and sip my glass of claret. (Papa brings in ten thousand bottles a year from his estates at Chateau Bon-Air; our Famille is the greatest wine distributor in Louisiana.) The trader offers us our pick of the three males he has with him, fresh from the auction block at New Orleans, but Maman says with considerable pride that we breed all we need, and more.

  After dinner I’m practicing piano in the salon – stumbling repeatedly over a tricky phrase of Beethoven’s – when my mother comes in. “If you can’t manage this piece, Aimée, perhaps you could try one of your Schubert’s?” Very dry.

  “Certainly, Maman.”

  “Here’s your bracelet. A charming thing, if eccentric. Don’t make a habit of fishing things out of the river, will you?”

  “No, Maman.” Gleeful, I fiddle with the catch, fitting it around my wrist.

  “The girl claimed you’d given it to her as a present.”

  Guilt, like a lump of gristle in my throat.

  “They always claim that, strangely enough,” remarks my mother, walking away. “One would think they might come up with something more plausible.”

  The next day I’m in Tante Fanny’s room, at my lessons. There was no sign of Millie this morning, and I had to dress myself; the girl must be sulking. I’m supposed to be improving my spelling of verbs in the subjunctive mode, but my stomach is a rat’s nest, my dress is too tight, my head’s fit to split. I gaze out the window to the yard, where the trader’s saddling his mules. He has four nègres with him, their hands lashed to their saddles.

  “Do sit down, child.”

  “Just a minute, Tante—”

  “Aimée, come back here!”

  But I’m thudding along the gallery, down
the stairs. I trip over my hem, and catch the railing. I’m in the yard, and the sun is piercing my eyes. “Maman!”

  She turns, frowning. “Where is your sunhat, Aimée?”

  I ignore that. “But Millie – what’s happening?”

  “I suggest you use your powers of deduction.”

  I throw a desperate look at the girl, bundled up on the last mule, her mute face striped with tears. “Have you sold her? She didn’t do anything so very bad. I have the bracelet back safe. Maybe she only meant to borrow it.”

  My mother sighs. “I won’t stand for thieving, or back-answers, and Millie has been guilty of both.”

  “But Pa Philippe, and her mother – you can’t part her from them—”

  Maman draws me aside, her arm like a cage around my back. “Aimée, I won’t stoop to dispute my methods with an impudent and sentimental girl, especially in front of strangers. Go back to your lesson.”

  I open my mouth, to tell her that Millie didn’t steal the bracelet, exactly; that she thought I had promised it to her. But that would call for too much explanation, and what if Maman found out that I’ve been interrogating the nègres about private family business? I shut my mouth again. I don’t look at Millie; I can’t bear it. The trader whistles to his mules to start walking. I go back into the house. My head’s bursting from the sun; I have to keep my eyes squeezed shut.

  “What is it, child?” asks Tante Fanny when I open the door. Her anger has turned to concern; it must be my face.

  “I feel… weak.”

  “Sit down on this sofa, then. Shall I ring for a glass of wine?”

  Next thing I know, I’m flat on my back, choking. I feel so sick. I push Tante Fanny’s hand away. She stoppers her smelling salts. “My dear.”

  “What—”

  “You fainted.”

  I feel oddly disappointed. I always thought it would be a luxuriant feeling – a surrendering of the spirit – but it turns out that fainting is just a sick sensation, and then you wake up.

  “It’s very natural,” she says, with the ghost of a smile. “I believe you have become a woman today.”

  I stare down at myself, but my shape hasn’t changed.

  “Your petticoat’s a little stained,” she whispers, showing me the spots – some brown, some fresh scarlet – and suddenly I understand. “You should go to your room and ask Millie to show you what to do.”

  At the mention of Millie, I put my hands over my face.

  “Where did you get that?” asks Tante Fanny, in a changed voice. She reaches out to touch the bracelet that’s slipped out from beneath my sleeve. I flinch. “Aimée, where did you get that?”

  “It was in a trunk, in the attic,” I confess. “I know it was Eliza’s. Can I ask you, how did she die?” My words astonish me as they spill out.

  My aunt’s face contorts. I think perhaps she’s going to strike me. After a long minute, she says, “We killed her. Your uncle and I.”

  My God. So Millie told the truth, and in return I’ve had her sold, banished from the sight of every face she knows in the world.

  “Your cousin died for our pride, for our greed.” Tante Fanny puts her fingers around her throat. “She was perfect, but we couldn’t see it, because of the mote in our eyes.”

  What is she talking about?

  “You see, Aimée, when my darling daughter was about your age she developed some boutons.”

  Pimples? What can pimples have to do with anything?

  My aunt’s face is a mask of creases. “They weren’t so very bad, but they were the only defect in such a lovely face, they stood out terribly. I was going to take her to the local root doctor for an ointment, but your papa happened to know a famous skin specialist in Paris. I think he was glad of the excuse for a trip to his native country. And we knew that nothing in Louisiana could compare to France. So your papa accompanied us – Eliza and myself and your Oncle Louis – on the long voyage, and he introduced us to this doctor. For eight days” – Tante Fanny’s tone has taken on a biblical timbre – “the doctor gave the girl injections, and she bore it bravely. We waited for her face to become perfectly clear again – but instead she took a fever. We knew the doctor must have made some terrible mistake with his medicines. When Eliza died—” Here the voice cracks, and Tante Fanny lets out a sort of barking sob. “Your oncle wanted to kill the doctor; he drew his sword to run him through. But your papa, the peacemaker, persuaded us that it must have been the cholera or some other contagion. We tried to believe that; we each assured each other that we believed it. But when I looked at my lovely daughter in her coffin, at sixteen years old, I knew the truth as if God had spoken in my heart.”

  She’s weeping so much now, her words are muffled. I wish I had a handkerchief for her.

  “I knew that Eliza had died for a handful of pimples. Because in our vanity, our dreadful pride, we couldn’t accept the least defect in our daughter. We were ungrateful, and she was taken from us, and all the years since, and all the years ahead allotted to me, will be expiation.”

  The bracelet seems to burn me. I’ve managed to undo the catch. I pull it off, the little gold charms tinkling.

  Tante Fanny wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Throw that away. My curse on it, and on all glittering vanities,” she says hoarsely. “Get rid of it, Aimée, and thank God you’ll never be beautiful.”

  Her words are like a blow to the ribs. But a moment later, I’m glad she said it. It’s better to know these things. Who’d want to spend a whole life hankering?

  I go out of the room without a word. I can feel the blood welling, sticky on my thighs. But first I must do this. I fetch an old bottle from the kitchen, and a candle stub. I seal up the bracelet in its green translucent tomb, and go to the top of the levee, and throw it as far as I can into the Mississippi.

  Gravel

  Alice Munro

  Alice Munro (b. 1931) is a Canadian short story writer and winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, which honours her complete body of work. She has been awarded Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction three times, the Giller Prize twice and is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Fiction. She was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for her collection, The Love of a Good Woman.

  At that time we were living beside a gravel pit. Not a large one, hollowed out by monster machinery, just a minor pit that a farmer must have made some money from years before. In fact, the pit was shallow enough to lead you to think that there might have been some other intention for it – foundations for a house, maybe, that never made it any further.

  My mother was the one who insisted on calling attention to it. “We live by the old gravel pit out the service-station road,” she’d tell people, and laugh, because she was so happy to have shed everything connected with the house, the street – the husband – with the life she’d had before.

  I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture. All that I retain in my head of the house in town is the wallpaper with teddy bears in my old room. In this new house, which was really a trailer, my sister, Caro, and I had narrow cots, stacked one above the other. When we first moved there, Caro talked to me a lot about our old house, trying to get me to remember this or that. It was when we were in bed that she talked like this, and generally the conversation ended with me failing to remember and her getting cross. Sometimes I thought I did remember, but out of contrariness or fear of getting things wrong I pretended not to.

  It was summer when we moved to the trailer. We had our dog with us. Blitzee. “Blitzee loves it here,” my mother said, and it was true. What dog wouldn’t love to exchange a town street, even one with spacious lawns and big houses, for the wide-open countryside? She took to barking at every car that went past, as if she owned the road, and now and then she brought home a squirrel or a groundhog she’d killed. At first Caro was quite upset by this, and Neal would have a talk with her, e
xplaining about a dog’s nature and the chain of life in which some things had to eat other things.

  “She gets her dog food,” Caro argued, but Neal said, “Suppose she didn’t? Suppose someday we all disappeared and she had to fend for herself?”

  “I’m not going to,” Caro said. “I’m not going to disappear, and I’m always going to look after her.”

  “You think so?” Neal said, and our mother stepped in to deflect him. Neal was always ready to get on the subject of the Americans and the atomic bomb, and our mother didn’t think we were ready for that yet. She didn’t know that when he brought it up I thought he was talking about an atomic bun. I knew that there was something wrong with this interpretation, but I wasn’t about to ask questions and get laughed at.

  Neal was an actor. In town there was a professional summer theater, a new thing at the time, which some people were enthusiastic about and others worried about, fearing that it would bring in riffraff. My mother and father had been among those in favor, my mother more actively so, because she had more time. My father was an insurance agent and travelled a lot. My mother had got busy with various fund-raising schemes for the theater and donated her services as an usher. She was good-looking and young enough to be mistaken for an actress. She’d begun to dress like an actress too, in shawls and long skirts and dangling necklaces. She’d let her hair go wild and stopped wearing makeup. Of course, I had not understood or even particularly noticed these changes at the time. My mother was my mother. But no doubt Caro had noticed. And my father must have. Though, from all that I know of his nature and his feelings for my mother, I think he may have been proud to see how good she looked in these liberating styles and how well she fit in with the theater people. When he spoke about this time, later on, he said that he had always approved of the arts. I can imagine now how embarrassed my mother would have been, cringing and laughing to cover up her cringing, if he’d made this declaration in front of her theater friends.