by Gwen Florio
The description of the gown alone could run on for paragraphs, detailing type of lace, bodice, sleeve and train, the hundreds of beads, the satin-covered buttons – all that before the writer turned attention to the veil and bouquet. Yet for Hiram and Penelope, just a few short paragraphs:
Penelope Emmaline Smythe, daughter of Philippa and Geoffrey Smythe of Chateau, was joined in holy matrimony to Hiram Charles Best, son of Nathaniel and Louisa Best, in Newport, Vermont, on June 12, 1966. The groom will work as a manager at Smythe’s Backfin Crab. The bride recently graduated from Miss Phipps’s Academy and will be a homemaker …
No mention of a church, which meant they’d been married in a courthouse. That, and the lack of even a photo, led Nora Best at the age of fifty to the first-time realization that her parents had eloped.
She closed her eyes and thought hard. She must have asked her mother about her wedding. Hadn’t she, in the throes of first love with Alden, imagined herself in a dress of Alençon lace sweeping down the aisle as the music swelled? And, wrapping herself in shimmering fantasies, asked her mother about her own wedding? A memory, wispy as the fingertip veil she’d eventually worn when she and Joe married in a ceremony as briskly managed as the faculty meetings over which Nora by then presided, teased at her.
‘Mother, what if I wear your gown? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ A teenager’s clumsy attempt to finally view the dress she’d never seen.
Penelope’s laugh chimed. ‘Oh, I gave that away years ago, once I realized it would be too short for you.’ Nora had inherited her father’s height, towering nearly eight inches above her tiny mother.
At the time, it had seemed a reasonable explanation. Now she wondered. Women in Chateau preserved their wedding gowns like precious heirlooms, sending them to dry cleaners who handled the fragile lace with white cotton gloves before sealing them in airtight containers, which then were stored in cool, dark closets and never, ever the heat of an attic. A thought struck her and she scrolled back to the perfunctory announcement, sighing in relief at the date. Her own birth was a respectable two years later.
So why elope? Beyond the utter foreignness of his New England background, her father was a perfectly acceptable husband, his private school background easing his way in status-conscious Chateau. Having spent many a fall weekend in Vermont’s deer camps, he took to hunting ducks and geese with alacrity – ‘a lot easier to carry a bird home than a deer’ – and switched from Scotch to bourbon with what Nora would belatedly realize was far too much genteel enthusiasm.
Her eyes burned. She logged off the computer and sat a moment, not ready yet to return to Quail House, its empty echoing rooms a reminder that, had the trailer detached just a split second earlier, might have become its permanent state. She stepped out of the stacks and scanned the library’s main room to make sure she didn’t see anyone she knew, then headed across its expanse to the distraction of the reference room, where decades of Chateau High School’s yearbooks marched in gilt-lettered rows down the shelves. She started to pull her own from the shelf, then replaced it. She wasn’t sure she could handle all of those old photos of herself and Alden at the prom, sitting side by side in candid classroom shots, of Alden holding an ice-cream cone toward her at a senior social.
She ran her fingers along their spines until she came to her mother’s graduation year. The books were skinnier then, the photos faded, the crewcut boys in the geeky horn-rimmed glasses now favored by hipsters, the girls in pearls and lofty bouffant hairstyles that bespoke considerable time and effort with hairspray and a rattail comb.
She flipped through the seniors once, then twice, before laughing at her mistake. Penelope hadn’t graduated from Chateau High. She’d gone off to Miss Phipps’s Academy for her final two years. She selected a book from three years earlier, paging through to the sophomores, checking the S’s twice, but failed to see Penelope. Maybe she’d gotten the year wrong. She grabbed the previous year’s book and there was Penelope as a sophomore – the date on the wedding announcement must have been a typo – hair still falling loose around her shoulders rather than tortured into a tower atop her head, eyes wide and bright and expectant. Nora’s heart lurched.
What had her mother so looked forward to? Women’s lives were so prescribed then, especially in a place like Chateau. There was a template: Finish high school or, in a few rare cases, secretarial or nursing school, and immediately marry a local boy, preferably from another First Family and never mind the dwindling gene pool, produce between two and four children, spend the rest of your life doing socially acceptable works – yes to the Dahlia Club and under no circumstances a nascent civil rights group.
To her credit, Penelope had briefly broken the mold when she’d gone off to Miss Phipps’s and eloped with an outsider. But then, after those two brief but significant rebellions, she returned to Chateau and lived exactly the life expected of her.
Nora shook her head. The library lights blinked, Emily Beattie’s decades-old signal that closing time approached. The police would be long done with their investigation. It was safe to leave. Nora headed back to Quail House, with nothing to show for her hours of screen time but more questions.
FORTY-TWO
1967
Grace wiped her new notebook clean with a handkerchief. Then she put pencil to paper, listing every room in Quail House and noting the pieces of furniture in each, stopping every few minutes to sharpen the pencil with a paring knife. She aimed to check each piece and each room off after she’d searched it.
The library would pose her biggest challenge. She’d examine every book, flip through its pages, hold it open and shake it just in case. Who knows what bit of evidence the Chief might have hidden, and where he might have put it? She’d put off the library and start with his den, the big desk there, moving on to the bedroom he shared with his wife.
Then she’d tackle Penelope’s bedroom upstairs, now shared by her new husband, a taciturn New Englander only beginning to understand – as Grace surmised from the puzzled, hurt expression she so often glimpsed in his eyes – that the exquisite politesse of Southerners masked a rapier viciousness dripping honey until it drew blood. The only custom he’d apparently acquired since his arrival had been a taste for the bourbon she detected as she rinsed out his coffee cup, his toothbrush mug, the glass of iced tea that Penelope so disdained. Every time she looked at him, she wondered what he knew.
He tried to talk with her, in the clumsy way well-meaning white people had when they wanted to establish themselves as not like the rest. ‘I hope you understand,’ he said one day, ‘that not all of us feel the same way.’
But you married her, she thought. Some warning must have flashed in her eyes, for he backed away hurriedly, mumbling something about having to get down to the plant, the scent of bourbon and regret lingering long moments after his departure.
Penelope and her husband stayed away from Chateau for two weeks after Bobby’s death.
They’d been visiting his relatives in Vermont, the Chief explained, as though Grace gave a damn. The husband disappeared into the processing plant as soon as they returned, leaving for work before Grace arrived in the morning and returning home long after she’d prepared dinner and left it for Philippa to serve. Which was fine with Grace. She didn’t care about the husband. She cared very much about Penelope.
Penelope remained a ghost, returning to her teenage habits of sleeping until noon, the now-marital-bedroom door firmly shut against any possible intrusions, emerging at the last possible minute to drive into town with her mother for errands and social occasions. If she stepped to the top of the stairs only to find Grace polishing a balustrade, she hurried to take the back stairs down to the kitchen. When she and her mother returned from town, she avoided the enticing display of a tea tray set with two cups and melt-in-your-mouth divinity, snatching a piece from the plate and taking it and a cup of tea back to her bedroom. And once, when Grace rose up from her knees where she’d been working unseen in the herb garden,
screened by a riotous Bluebeard shrub, Penelope leapt from the chaise where she’d settled herself with a magazine and ran across the lawn to the dock, declaring to no one in particular her intention to row all the way to the bay.
One morning, though, well into autumn, her bedroom door stood uncharacteristically open. Grace peeped in, expecting to see Penelope at her vanity, or maybe on the phone. The room looked much as it did before the husband’s arrival, only now Penelope’s chaos was confined to one side, shoes lying wherever she’d kicked them off in contrast to the husband’s neat lineup beneath his side of the bed, clothing in a heap in insulting proximity to the hamper, a jumble of hairbrushes and makeup on the dressing table. But no Penelope.
Grace glanced across the hall. Quail House was built long before indoor plumbing, and even when it arrived, it preceded en suite bathrooms.
Grace crept to the bathroom door. Heard water running. Which failed to mask the sound of uncontrollable retching and the reek of vomit. She flung open the door.
A half-naked Penelope knelt on the black and white octagonal tiles, bent over the toilet, shoulders heaving.
‘Aw, hell, no!’ Grace lunged for her, grabbed a skinny shoulder and wrenched her away from the toilet.
Penelope collapsed on to the floor, wrapping her arms around herself in an inadequate effort to hide breasts markedly plump and shiny in contrast to her ribby torso. ‘No, Grace,’ she whimpered. Vomit streaked her face and clung to her stringy, unwashed hair.
‘Tell me you’re not. That you’ve just got the flu or some shit.’
Penelope’s head bobbed weakly.
‘The flu. I’ve got the flu.’
Grace bent and slapped her.
‘Maybe something I ate.’
Grace slapped her again.
Penelope started to cry, ugly, strangled sobs. Her nose ran.
‘I’m sorry,’ she blubbered through strings of snot. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Not as sorry as you’re about to be.’
‘Grace, no!’ Penelope scrabbled on the floor, grabbing at Grace’s ankles. ‘Stop. What are you going to do?’
But it was too late. Grace was already gone.
Problem was, Grace didn’t know what she was going to do. She was in the kitchen, still scrubbing her hands although they’d long since been cleaned of the residue from Penelope’s befouled face, when the front door slammed and, moments later, the Chief burst into the kitchen, breathing hard.
Penelope must have called him from the princess phone in her room as soon as Grace’s foot had hit the top step.
The Chief stopped and made a visible attempt to compose himself. ‘Ah, Grace, there you are. I understand you and Penelope had a … conversation.’
Grace turned off the water and examined her hands, red and raw from her prolonged scouring. She dried them on a towel, deliberately taking her time, and turned to face the Chief, who now stood so close he loomed over her. The sink’s porcelain rim pressed into the small of her back.
‘We’ve been very generous with you, Grace.’
Generous to yourselves, more like. Paying to cover your own asses.
She squared her shoulders and stared into his cold gray eyes.
‘Be a shame to see that end.’
Hell with it. We don’t need your damn money.
‘I know you’re helping to support your parents. I thought they might use the money to move into a safer neighborhood. That part of Baltimore’s getting rougher by the day. Drugs, gangs, drive-bys – people getting shot right on the street in broad daylight. Kids. Even little kids. Kids as young as your brother Kwame.’
Motherfucker. Was he actually saying what she thought he was?
The words boiled up in her, dangerously close to the surface. She took a breath and clamped her lips shut.
‘My daughter is having my grandchild. The baby who will carry on the Smythe line. If anything, anything were to happen—’
Grace lost her internal battle.
‘Your grandchild? Your grandchild? Let’s tell the world just how much you care about your grandchild.’
The Chief’s hand strayed toward his waist. Grace’s gaze followed it as his fingertips caressed the service weapon there.
She actually smiled. ‘You wouldn’t dare. One Evans shot – you’ve gotten away with that. A second? I don’t think so.’
The hand on the gun trembled. Rage? Or fear? It didn’t matter. Now she knew what she was going to do.
‘Here’s what’s going to happen. Not one goddamn thing. I’m going to stay here in your house. You’re going to keep paying me, and I’m going to pay for Kwame’s college, and things are going to go along exactly as they’ve been.’ She stopped, but her thoughts ran on:
Until the day comes, when I find out what I need, and then I’m going to tell the world and take every last one of you, including that baby percolating in your daughter’s belly, straight to hell.
FORTY-THREE
At two in the morning, Nora kicked away the sweat-soaked sheets, headed into the kitchen and poured a glass of ice water.
She started back up the stairs but hesitated at the thought of returning to her room, which had yet to lose the heat of the day. Instead, she headed outdoors, trailed by the dog and cat, to the dock, secure in the knowledge that at this hour she could sit by the river untroubled by either insects or the possibility of Alden rowing past.
She dangled her feet in the water, and held the glass to her neck, willing her body temperature a couple of degrees lower. A flash caught her eye, far away, over the bay. Heat lightning, that cruel tease. She longed for the real thing, the blinding jagged line across a darkening sky, the subsequent crash and roar of thunder, the drenching downpour like a benediction.
She slid from the dock into the water, seeking the cool of its depths. The bottom dropped steeply away from the bank, her toes barely brushing it. She stroked toward the middle of the river, angling against the current, wary of the effort of her return should she let it carry her too far downstream.
Her nightgown clung to her skin, so light it was little impediment to her progress. She rolled on to her back and frog-kicked in the general direction of the dock. A mighty splash interrupted her languid progress. She gulped air and sank deep into the river, an instinctive urge to hide from whatever was that large, even as she reached for reasonable explanations. A deer? They sometimes swam the river. A muskrat of freakish proportions? A goose performing the clumsiest landing of all time? She crouched on the river bottom, buffeted by the current, praying that whatever had entered the water with her was anything but human.
But when her bursting lungs forced her to surface, Murph’s dripping face met her gaze as he churned toward her, huffing with exertion and delight at finally having a companion in his favorite activity. Nora grabbed him as he approached.
‘Tow me back to the dock, old man. After that heart attack you nearly gave me, I’m not sure I’ve got the strength to swim.’
She managed to get him turned around and, with one hand clutching his furry back, kicked alongside him toward the dock, where the cat paced in high feline dudgeon at their antics. Nora pulled herself from the water and fell on to the boards, now grateful for their lingering warmth. The time in the water, and the flash of fear, had finally cooled her.
She turned her head toward the hulking black mass of Quail House.
Hers. And yet her mother was urging her away.
But she couldn’t leave, not with her mother lying bruised and broken in the hospital.
She thought again of the yearbook photo, the look of barely concealed expectation on Penelope’s face. What had driven her away from the gentle lowlands and marshes and soft, humid air of the Eastern Shore to a school in New England’s hardwood forests, with their jagged rocky outcroppings? And why had she denied her parents the bragging rights of a lavish wedding, without the excuse of pregnancy? And even that mattered little; Nora had seen more than one Chateau bride pace demurely down the aisle in a flowing gow
n of purest white organza with a disguising Empire waist.
She wondered what her mother had worn in that brief ceremony. The announcement had omitted even that detail. Somehow she couldn’t imagine Penelope, even in her moment of rebellion, in a peasant skirt with rings on her sandaled toes and daisies in her waist-length hair. Had flower power reached Vermont in 1966?
She sat up so abruptly the cat hissed at her.
‘No. It can’t be.’
Murph cocked his head and lifted his ears.
She sat a few moments more, water falling in slow droplets from her sopping nightgown on to the dock. She ran across the lawn and into the house, flipping the light switches as she made her way from room to room, the animals at her heels, excited and puzzled by this middle-of-the-night activity. She flung open the library’s double doors and turned on more lights, heedless of the trail of wet footprints across the carpet’s faded flowers.
‘Where is it, where is it?’ She searched the shelves, impatient. So many books! When was the last time anyone had read any of them? ‘There!’
She pulled from a shelf the same slender, gilt-lettered volume she’d scanned in the library the previous afternoon. The Chateau Osprey, with a drawing of the school’s mascot covering the yearbook’s cover.
She flipped fast to the sophomores and there was her mother again, beaming bright-eyed from the page. In 1963. Three years before her mother’s wedding in 1966, right after her graduation from Miss Phipps’s Academy. She’d attributed the date in the wedding announcement to a typo, but that was crazy. She’d been looking through 1966 copies of the Crier. By the time she turned to the yearbooks in the library, not finding her mother where she expected, the mistake she’d attributed to a typo more likely had been due to fatigue.
Now, she counted on her fingers, trying to make the math come out right. If her mother graduated from Miss Phipps’s in 1966, she should have been a sophomore in 1964.
