“I’m not leaving until…” I said before she broke in.
“It’s Jules,” she said. “He was brought home yesterday. He was found in an abandoned hospital at one of the German prisoner camps.”
I was so stunned I couldn’t respond at first and then finally said, “He’s home? This is his home?”
A weak shout came from the back room, “Celeste!”
“He’s terribly sick, Mathew,” she said. “He was near death when they found him. He was wounded so badly and he’s lost an eye and one of his arms.”
“Celeste…” I started to say.
“I’m so sorry, but…” she said, but the man yelled out weakly again. “It’s best that you go,” she said.
She turned and tried to pull away, tears now flowing down her cheeks. Her hands slipped out of mine. I looked down and saw a gold band on her finger I was sure had never been there before. She walked hesitantly back to the doorway and then turned to look at me. For just a moment our eyes met and then she walked into the room and closed the door.
I stood there letting all of the emotions rush through me. Ann Marie came up from behind and pushed me toward the door. I looked down at the little girl and she forced a smile and nodded again in the direction of the bedroom. She took my hand and led me down the narrow hall. When I reached for the knob on the door I saw my hand was shaking. Ann Marie pushed the door open for me and in the dim light I could see Celeste sitting on a narrow bed holding a cloth to the forehead of the lost soldier named Jules. His body was bare to the waist and frightfully gaunt and pale, his right arm missing below the shoulder with a heavy wrap of bandages.
Celeste turned and saw me in the doorway. When she pulled the cloth away from the man’s face I could see the far side of his head was wrapped heavily, covering his eye. I watched her stand and saw the look of sadness and confusion on her face. Then Jules noticed me standing there and an angry rage flushed his expression. I wondered about what he had been told about Celeste and me. He tried to sit up, but didn’t have the strength. He started yelling at me in French and then even louder at Celeste. She turned and tried to comfort him, but he pushed her away with his good arm and kept screaming at her.
An older woman came in and pressed by me, sitting on the bed and trying to comfort the man. Celeste looked at me and then rushed past out of the room. I looked one more time at Jules. In a low hiss of a voice he spoke directly at me. Although the words were unclear, his meaning was not. I backed away, the image of the broken man etched in my mind forever.
Back in the main room of the house I saw Celeste standing with her sister. Her mother came through the front door and went over to hold her daughters in her arms. Then she turned to me and in a clear voice said, “Private Coulter, I know you think this is unfair.”
Her English was not surprising to me. I had sensed she had chosen from the beginning not to speak to me in my own language.
“I know how much you care for my daughter,” she went on. She walked over to me and put her arms around me. “We all remembered Jules as the young man who left us to join the Army. He was a good boy.”
Celeste came up and pulled her mother away, “Mother, please…”
“He will need much care to bring him back,” her mother said. “Not just his body, his spirit has been so damaged.”
Celeste took my hand and led me out the door to the street. I looked back and her mother and sister were holding each other, the little girl’s face pressed into her mother’s stomach. Celeste wiped at the tears in her eyes. I looked for some little change of heart in her expression, but I found no encouragement.
“Please don’t ask me to explain,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”
“He has family to care for him,” I said, and then felt overwhelming guilt at my selfishness.
She just stared back at me, her eyes moist and searching and for just a moment I saw a flush of hopeful expectation.
I pulled her close and wrapped her in my arms. I felt hers around the small of my back and the full weight of her falling into me.
“Celeste, I love you. I want you to come home with me. I want you to spend the rest of your life with me.”
She took a deep breath and then looked away at the house behind us. When she looked back I tried to see some measure of acceptance in her expression, but there was none.
Finally, she said, “I told him I would wait.”
For several days after I returned to the Army camp I often sat on the steps of my barracks, staring off into the distance, not able to focus on what was going on around me. Friends tried to get me to go into the city and drink away the problem, but I had no interest in getting drunk. Several times I was on the verge of going back to Les Mureaux to see her again and try to convince her she belonged with me.
My orders finally came and I was to leave Paris by train in a week to catch a ship out of Calais back home to America. I watched the French coast slip away on the far horizon that day, not thinking about what lie ahead, but only what had been lost.
Chapter Two
Atlanta, Georgia 1926
I knew from an early age my family was in the whiskey business and that my father was a successful and powerful man. His business had supplied clubs and restaurants all across Atlanta with beer and liquor for many years. We lived in a house on West Paces Ferry that rivaled the Governor’s mansion and my older brother and sister and I had attended the finest private schools in Georgia. On Sundays after church we would all go to dinner at the Piedmont Driving Club and my mother and father would be greeted by the help there like they were local royalty. It was the pretense of it all, I suppose, that troubled me most. I was amazed at the great effort put forth by my parents to honor traditions of family and expectations of Atlanta society, in spite of my father’s more recent line of work. Doing what was right and proper was of utmost concern, which I found quite confusing considering the bread on our table was suddenly borne of illegal smuggling and distribution of spirits.
I had been back from the War for two years in 1920, when the Volstead Act was passed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States banned the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors, as I recall the specific language. Prohibition spread across the land like a dark and menacing cloud.
My father, Samuel Coulter, was a good businessman and he moved quickly to protect his enterprise. It wasn’t long before he had a whole network of bootleggers and moonshiners lined up to keep the supply coming. There was a lot of “shine” coming out of Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. The bootleggers were bringing in good liquor from the Caribbean and Mexico and by truck down from Canada. The family’s business moved quickly and almost seamlessly to its new configuration. As he was most adept in doing, my father was able to preserve honor and position in the midst of all of this new lawlessness. If anything, the Coulters somehow managed to elevate their social position during this transition, owing much to my parents’ efforts in maintaining a self-assuredness in their legacy and certainly even more so in their abundant generosity in community affairs, political campaigns, ongoing bribes and payoffs, and of course, a relentless social schedule to maintain proper appearances.
There was a warm Saturday night in that spring of 1926, when my family was throwing one of their typical extravagant parties. The substantial yard in the back of our house was illuminated with lines of tiny white lights strung through the branches of the trees. The dogwoods were in full blossom with their white flowers floating on the branches like soft cotton, the gardenias sending their sweet aroma out through the air on a light wind. A band was playing dance music on a small stage out beyond the pool. Tables covered with pressed linens were spread with food and attended by servers in white uniforms. The four bars set up on the porch and the far corners of the lawn were surrounded by guests. People had been arriving for hours in their fine cars, coming up the long drive and stopping in the circle in front of the house for the parking valets. Everyone w
as dressed quite formally, the men in dinner jackets with white starched shirts and black ties; the women in colorful flowing dresses adorned with layers of shining jewelry and feathered hats of every known design and color.
One of my father’s business partners and friends was Charles Watermann, a very high-ranking officer of the law in Atlanta, who also had an interest in a few clubs in town. They were standing by one of the bars being served some fine Canadian whiskey. Nearby were two other men dressed in dinner jackets, but conspicuous in their lack of gaiety or conversation with the other guests. They were associates of my father and his friend, actually, their bodyguards. Heavily armed and constantly on alert, they followed their employers most everywhere they went. The liquor business had become not only illegal, but much more competitive and dangerous and any number of young thugs were trying to break into the business by eliminating the competition.
My older brother, Jess, was standing there with the bodyguards. He was taller and stood above the others, his face a younger version of my father. He was laughing and looking out over the growing crowd, sizing up the gathering of young women. I had walked in Jess’s considerable shadow for my entire life and yet I felt no conscious resentment or ill will. As the youngest of the Coulter children I had always assumed my position in the genealogical pecking order with a matter-of-fact acceptance and tolerance.
I had just turned twenty-six at the time and had finished school the year before, a few years later than was expected due to a long convalescence following my return from France. Much to my father’s disappointment I had studied journalism at the University of Georgia in Athens and hoped to secure a position working for a newspaper in the near future. I had also begun work on my first book and had been taking time since graduation in that pursuit. My father had been trying to keep me involved in the family business working in the office; getting my hands dirty, as he would say. My brother was four years older and following a wildly precarious and barely successful college career at Georgia Tech right there in Atlanta, was taking on increasing responsibility in my father’s operations. He clearly had more of an aptitude for running liquor, and certainly enjoyed it far more than I.
Coulter Imports had moved with the times to distribute soda drinks, coffee and tea as a front for the real and lucrative business of liquor. I knew it was illegal, hell everyone did, and except for a few greedy politicians and cops that had to be convinced with a little cash now and then, most of the town chose to turn its back on the situation. Surely everybody we knew thought Prohibition was not only the most damned stupid thing the government had ever come up with, but also a short-term nuisance that would soon be a distant memory.
At my side that night was a most remarkable young woman. I was convinced I had fallen in love again, the first time since leaving young Celeste in France after the War.
Her name was Hanna Wesley and we stood looking out across the lawn from the back steps of the broad veranda, her hand in mine. The white sequined dress she wore, fashioned just below the knees, sparkled like a thousand stars. Her hair was trimmed short and shining black, even in the low evening light. I turned to look at her and she smiled back and gripped my hand with confidence and reassurance. I was to introduce her to my parents that night and I was far more nervous than she about the encounter ahead. I had never been really serious about any of the girls I had dated or brought home to the Coulter house, but none of them had been Hanna Wesley.
With every intent to ask for Hanna’s hand in marriage later that night, I felt it was only right to have made all of the proper introductions to family and friends. What better timing than a night with everyone in town that mattered as far as my parents were concerned, assembled for easy and hopefully relaxed encounters with the future Mrs. Mathew Coulter? My parents were always caught up in excessive protocol, as was the custom in their circle of friends in Atlanta. I had no particular interest in formalities, other than an obligation, beyond mere courtesy, to make sure Hanna knew what she was getting into.
I had met her only four short weeks earlier at the library in downtown Atlanta. I was there doing some research for my book. I had told her a lot about my family; everything except the more recent nature of my father’s business, which she would surely come to understand fully on this given evening. If she accepted my proposal, which I had every reason to believe would certainly be the case, I was planning to offer to accompany her back to Chicago as soon as possible to ask for her father’s blessing.
We started down the steps together, Hanna holding my arm and keeping me steady as I willed my stiff leg to follow along; the old war injury that would prove to be a lifelong nuisance. I scanned the crowd looking for my mother. Someone grabbed my arm and I turned to see my sister, Margaret, with her new husband trailing along beside. She and Desmond Raye had been married the previous year. He was an attorney who had, until recently, been working at a small firm in the city. The Rayes had been friends of our family for many years. Maggie looked spectacular as always, her blonde hair pulled back tight and piled on top of her head, dressed in the latest fashion from New York. All our family were taller than most and Maggie had inherited the same trait, standing nearly as tall as her husband. She had a drink in her free hand, spilling frequently on her white glove as she bounced nervously. My friends had always lusted after Margaret Coulter and she had been enough of a flirt to allow them to imagine she was actually interested in boys two years younger, even when we were in high school.
Desmond Raye was a different sort and we had yet to form much of a bond, although my father had asked him to join the business a few months earlier. I suspected he felt we would need in-house counsel for anticipated legal entanglements ahead. Unlike the gregarious and ever adventurous Maggie, Desmond was dry and humorless, reminding me of someone more suited to the undertaker’s profession than of a dynamic litigator. His dark black hair was greased back flat against his head and parted from the side to cover early signs of baldness. His ever-present scowl further reinforced my opinion of him.
“Maggie,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could manage and trying my best to hide my nervousness, “I want you to meet Hanna… Hanna Wesley, my new friend.” Of all the family, I wanted most for Maggie to approve. She had always been my closest confidant and we had often found ourselves in a self-protective alliance against our older brother or some other unwelcome intrusion in our lives. “Hanna, this is my sister, Margaret, and her husband, Desmond.” I turned to look at Hanna. She was smiling graciously and reached out her hand.
“It is very nice to meet you, Margaret,” Hanna said. “Mathew has spoken so often of you.”
“You must call me Maggie and I trust you don’t believe any of his scandalous lies!” my sister said.
“On the contrary, he talks like you’ve hung the moon. It really is so nice to meet you… and Mr. Raye,” Hanna said, reaching then for his hand.
Desmond nodded along with something resembling a grunt and then looked away across the crowd of people dancing, oblivious to all of us, apparently thinking we were unworthy of his time and attention. I noticed Maggie giving her husband a frustrated glare, but then she turned back to us and her face lit up again. “Have you met Momma and Daddy yet, Hanna?” she asked, taking a longer sip from her glass of whiskey.
“No, I’m so looking forward to it tonight.”
“And where are you from Hanna?” Maggie asked. “Did you go to school in Atlanta?”
“No, I’m from Chicago, actually. I finished up at Northwestern a little over a year ago and I’ve been down here working ever since. My friend’s father owns a line of clothing stores and they offered me a position.”
Maggie reached out and took her arm and pulled Hanna close to her side so she could talk girl-to-girl, I gathered. “So, you’re a college girl?”
Hanna laughed. “Yes, my father insisted I get an education.”
“Mathew, how have you ever attracted such a beautiful and brilliant girl? Clearly, you’ve foole
d her to this point,” my sister said in her normal teasing way with me and in a grossly exaggerated, nose-in-the air, old Atlanta southern accent for effect.
“Yes, I’m surprised she ever agreed to even have coffee with me,” I said, “but I just wouldn’t let up until she said yes.”
Hanna moved back over and put her arm around my waist. “Actually, I’ve found your brother to be quite charming,” she said, and then turned and kissed me on the cheek. “Not at all what his Southern hayseed accent might indicate.”
I watched as Maggie’s eyes opened wide at Hanna’s display of affection.
“Well, I do believe my little brother has fallen in love and somehow convinced this lovely woman of his merits and abilities,” Maggie said
“Please sister,” I responded, but she cut me off.
“I’m kidding of course, Hanna. My brother Mathew is the catch of Atlanta… a rich southern gentleman and war hero with looks that can chase your breath away. Just ask half the girls here tonight.” She reached over and tried to smooth a stray bit of brown hair back from my eyes.
“Really, Maggie,” I started to say and then Hanna came to my defense again.
“Well then, I have captured the prize tonight,” she said. I was so taken with her at that moment and we both lingered far too long in each other’s gaze.
Maggie finally interrupted. “Hanna Wesley, it’s really been so nice to see you and welcome to our home. Do enjoy yourself and please sample some of Daddy’s best whiskey while you’re here.” She held up her glass and the amber liquid reflected in the lights from the trees. “You’ll have to have Mathew take you down in the cellar where the really good stock is kept.” And with that she backed away with a quick and feigned curtsey and a tug on her sullen husband’s arm. Desmond managed a slight nod as he was pulled away.
“I hope I warned you sufficiently about dear sister Maggie.”
Grayton Winds Page 3
