Roses

by Leila Meacham

  Her head popped up. In horror, she stared at herself in the mirror over the water stand. Fearfully, she felt her breasts. They were sore and swollen. Oh, God!

  Down the stairs she flew to the library, where she yanked a heavy tome from a shelf. It addressed family illnesses, symptoms, and treatments and had been published in 1850, but certain ailments and their diagnoses had remained the same since the world began. Her head spinning, Mary read the symptoms of her feared infirmity. All applied to her—missed menstrual cycle, swollen breasts, darkened nipples, nausea, frequent urination, fatigue, loss of appetite…

  Sweet Jesus, have mercy—she was pregnant!

  She realized it was out of the question to go to Doc Tanner to have her suspicions confirmed. She’d have to consult a doctor out of the county, and that would require making an appointment by telephone. Her call would raise all kinds of talk on the party line, even if the operator did not spread the word that Mary Toliver was snubbing Doc Tanner to seek professional services elsewhere.

  She sped immediately to Beatrice, finding her snapping green beans with her cook. “Why, Mary!” she exclaimed when she was ushered into the kitchen. “What a wonderful surprise. What brings you down the street?”

  “Beatrice, I’m looking for Percy,” Mary said in a rush of words. She discovered she was wringing her hands and jammed them into the pockets of her skirt. “It’s extremely important that I speak with him.”

  “Well, I wish I could speak with him, too, dear,” Beatrice said, handing her bowl to the cook. She took Mary’s arm and directed her out of the kitchen into her morning room. “He’s somewhere in the Canadian Rockies working with one of the company’s logging crews. He left two weeks ago, and neither his dad nor I can get hold of him. Now, tell me, what’s the matter?”

  “I… I need to speak with him, that’s all,” Mary said, struggling to steady her breathing. Beatrice’s abilities of perception were as sharp as a honed saw, and it would take little for her to discern the cause of her anxiety. “We’ve had a falling-out,” she explained. “I came down to apologize and to tell him that I… I can’t seem to get through my days without him.”

  Beatrice smiled. “I’m happy to hear that, and he will be, too. I rather suspected you all had had a row when he took off to Canada to work on a logging site. When he calls, I’ll give him your message, and that’ll get him home soon enough.” She cocked her head fondly. “Don’t you think it’s about time you children tied the knot? Any longer and I’ll be too old to be a grandmother.”

  Mary’s smile burst full and glowing, despite the worry twisting her nerves into knots. “We’ll see that doesn’t happen. But please tell Percy to hurry home as fast as he can. I… need him.”

  “I most certainly will, child.” Beatrice held out her arms. “You’ve made me very happy.”

  Weeks passed. October arrived. Still no word from Percy. Each morning, Mary examined her abdomen for outward signs of the life forming inside her and was relieved to find none. But something else was growing within her as well. Like a worm, it had waited until all her losses were complete before inching from its burrow. She’d become aware of it shortly after the hail. One morning, tired from worry and lack of sleep, she had looked out over the ruined acres of Somerset and felt the land jeering at her, reveling in the failure of all her hard work and sacrifices. The feeling continued throughout the arduous weeks of cleanup, sorting the salvage, and struggling with the tenants’ low morale. It was her condition, she told herself. She had read that pregnancy affects a woman’s mental and emotional outlook. It could not be true that the land and nature had conspired against her, turned gloating traitor to all her hopes and dreams. Still, the notion persisted, and often as she rode Shawnee down the pummeled rows, one arm cradling her womb, it seemed that she could hear Percy’s voice in the sway of the bordering pines: Somerset is only soil and seed. I am flesh and blood.

  By the middle of October, she had come to accept with certainty that she could live without Somerset, but never, ever without Percy.

  Now at night when she couldn’t sleep, she sat in her window seat facing northward, where Canada lay. Hugging her knees to her chest, she prayed, “Please, God, have Percy come home. I’ll give up Somerset. I’ll be content to be his wife and the mother of our child the rest of my life. I know what’s important now. I know that I can never be happy without him. Please, God, send Percy home.”

  Then one morning, Sassie huffed upstairs to tell Mary, hardly able to drag herself out of bed, that Miss Beatrice was downstairs and wished to speak with her. She ran down in her bare feet, but her surge of relief froze to incredulity when Beatrice explained that Percy had not returned to Seattle with the logging crew. He’d sent word by way of one of the men to let his parents know that he’d gone on a surveying trip deep into the Canadian Rockies and wouldn’t be returning for another month. Mary barely heard Beatrice’s rant of chagrin. “What could Percy be thinking to go off and leave his father to manage everything alone? Jeremy is not yet entirely well, and our son is needed at the plant. You all must have had one humdinger of a row, Mary Lamb.”

  Slowly, Mary felt for the safety of the chair behind her, feeling that the earth had opened beneath her feet. She cupped her hands over the imperceptible swelling of her belly. What am I going to do? she asked herself.

  And then she knew.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  That evening, at Mary’s request, Ollie came to call. He had returned a few days before from his trip to New York and brought her an adorable teddy bear from Macy’s department store. “I would have preferred something from Tiffany’s,” he said, “but you would have refused it.” The humid heat of summer was over. It was a perfect time to sit in the gazebo and enjoy the first nip of fall in the air. Seated in the swing, his crutches propped on the trellised wall, Ollie sipped a cup of chocolate and waited for Mary to state the reason for the invitation. Night closed in, the stars drew close. An owl hooted from the fence.

  “I know there’s something else on your mind besides a desire to hear about my trip, Mary. What is it?”

  She said in a voice dulled by pain, “I’m pregnant, Ollie. The baby is Percy’s.”

  Complete silence fell, disturbed by the indifferent sounds of night creatures in shrubs and trees. After a moment, Ollie coughed. “Well, Mary, that’s wonderful.”

  Her face in profile, she said, “It would be if Percy were here.”

  “Does he know?”

  “He’d left before I found out.”

  “What is the problem, mon amie?” His baby-smooth brow creased. As usual, the empty trouser leg had been pulled behind at the point of his knee and pinned discreetly. “You and Percy have been in love with each other since puberty. Once you tell him, he’ll come home and marry you like a shot. From the way you’ve moped around since he’s been gone, I do believe you’d both be better miserable together than apart. Who else but you could have sent him off to the wilds of Canada?”

  “The problem is that I have no way to reach him. The last word to his parents was that he’d be gone for a month or longer. That was yesterday.”

  “You mean… Oh, Mary Lamb…” Ollie reached for her hand. “How… far along are you?”

  “I’m not really sure. I would guess I’m into my third month. I’m beginning to show a bit.”

  “Oh, my dear girl, we’ll have to think of something. You wouldn’t… you’re not thinking of destroying the baby, are you?”

  “No, of course not. I wouldn’t even consider it.”

  “Well, we’ll have to set about finding him, that’s all.” Ollie wriggled in the swing as if he meant to strap on his crutches and lead the search. “I can hire trackers.”

  “No, Ollie.” Mary put a restraining hand on his arm. “There isn’t time for that. Finding Percy could take weeks or longer. By the time he got home and we were married, we could never pass off the baby’s birth as premature.”

  Ollie looked at her helplessly, his eyes deeply troubled.
“Well, then, what are you going to do?”

  She drew a deep breath and quickly—before she lost her nerve—turned to face him and asked point-blank, “Ollie, would you… would you consider marrying me and raising the child as your own? Percy need never know. He mustn’t ever know. I’d… be a good wife to you, Ollie. I promise. You’d never be sorry you married me.”

  Ollie’s soft mouth rounded in mute astonishment. When he’d caught his breath, he said, “Marry you? You, Mary? Never….”

  She heard his refusal like a thunderclap in her ears. She could not believe it. Hope plummeted like a dropped anvil, replaced immediately with shame. “Ollie, dear, forgive me. I’m so sorry I put you in this position. How awfully insensitive and ungrateful of me, after all you’ve done—”

  “No, no, Mary! You don’t understand!” He waved his hand frantically. In his distress, he’d moved perilously close to slipping off the swing. “Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d have the chance to marry you. As God is my witness, I’ve loved you since the day you were born, but…” His face puckered as if he were on the verge of crying. “But you see, I… can’t marry you. I can’t marry anybody.”

  She placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Is it because of your leg? Ollie, your loss doesn’t make you any less a man. In fact, the way you’ve coped with it… the courage you’ve shown, makes you an even better man than before, if that’s possible.”

  “It’s not only the loss of the leg, Mary Lamb…” Even in the darkness, Mary could see his face reddening. “There were… other losses as well. You see, the grenade injured… my… manhood. I cannot give you children. I cannot be a husband to you. I could only love you.”

  Paralyzed with disbelief, she listened to his halting description of his injury as her father’s parting words to her in his letter blazed in her memory: “I wonder that in remembering you as I have, I have not prolonged the curse that has plagued the Tolivers since the first pine tree was cleared from Somerset.” She saw Ollie’s lips move, but she heard only the prophetic voices of Miles and Miss Peabody jeering in her head. She pressed her hands to her cheeks. Oh, please, God, no. Not this.

  “So you see that I can’t marry you, Mary, though I’d like to with every fiber of my being,” Ollie said, looking on the verge of complete collapse on the swing.

  She dropped her hands and with all her might forced a demeanor that showed none of the emotions rocking her soul. “Does Percy know of the extent of your injury?” she asked.

  “No. He is never to know. It would add to the guilt he already feels.”

  Mary strained for a smile. “Then I can’t imagine a woman needing more from a man than to be wanted with every fiber of his being,” she said.

  His sandy brows rose almost to his hairline. “Does that mean that you—that you still would marry me?”

  “Yes,” she said, “if you will have me.”

  “Have you?” His cherubic face exploded with joy. “Of course I will have you! Mary, my dear… I never dared hope—” He stopped in midsentence, struck dumb. “But… what about Percy? What will this do to him? Mon dieu, Mary, he’ll be crushed. He’ll think I betrayed him!”

  She put her hand on his sound knee. “No, he won’t. He’ll think I betrayed him, that I enticed you to marry me so that I could be assured of the plantation always having your financial support. He’ll believe that because he understands clearly that I would do anything to save Somerset. It was the cause of our row.”

  “But, Mary, how can you allow him to believe that of you, when it’s not true?”

  “I can allow it in order to spare him the truth of why we married. Believing I married his best friend on behalf of Somerset will hurt him far less. You must surely see that, Ollie.”

  Ollie wagged his head as if it were buzzing with bees. “Oh, Mary Lamb, I want to marry you. I want the baby. I want it more than anything in the world, but to hurt Percy…”

  Without hesitation, Mary knelt before the swing. She gripped both his hands. “Listen to me, Ollie. Percy will never blame you for marrying me. He knows how you feel about me. We must let him believe I married you because of Somerset. It is the only way to spare this baby from scandal. Imagine what the stigma of being born out of wedlock would do to the child—what it would do to the Warwick name, to mine, to the child’s. You’re leaving for Europe soon. I’ll go with you. By the time we return, the baby will still be young enough to convince everyone it was born a couple of months later. If I wait, I won’t have that advantage.”

  “But Percy loves us so… how can we do this to him?”

  Mary took his face in a firm grip and stared deep into his eyes. “We will make it up to him, Ollie. We will love him as we always have, with the deepest love of friendship.”

  “But… now that you’ve… known each other, how will you bear to be apart, Mary? I couldn’t share you, not even with Percy. How can we go on together, the three of us, as only friends?”

  “We will have to, my dear,” Mary said, drawing up to kiss his forehead. “For the sake of all those we love—your father, Beatrice and Jeremy, Percy, the baby, and… ourselves—we have to. Percy will marry, have his own children, and the time we were together will become a distant memory for us both.” The lie flowed glibly off her tongue, but she spoke with her deepest sincerity when she said, “I will always be faithful to you, Ollie. I promise you that.”

  Ollie fished a handkerchief from the inner pocket of his suit and pressed it to his eyes. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “To think that you… would marry me… that my most impossible dream has come true. The only blunt to my happiness is Percy…. He will be devastated, but… I don’t know anything else to do.”

  “Exactly,” Mary said, and rose to sit beside him on the swing. There would be a place in her heart for this man, she thought, holding back her tears. He would never lack for her affection, commitment, and respect, but in that moment, she felt a movement within her, as if the part of her that belonged to the only man she would ever love had stolen off to curl up in some remote, hidden corner of her being, like an animal whose time has come to die.

  Chapter Thirty

  They were married in the DuMonts’ elegantly appointed parlor a week later and left the same evening on the first leg of their journey to New York, where they would board an ocean liner to Europe. Mary wore a short, loose-fitting chemise of white satin, the first wedding dress ever worn in Howbutker that deviated from the traditional long gown and train. Only Abel, Jeremy and Beatrice Warwick, the Emmitt Waithes, and their son, Charles, were in attendance. Emmitt gave her away. The ceremony was conducted by a justice of the peace, with a small reception following that consisted of tea cakes and punch spiked with an excellent bootlegged rum.

  Announcements of the couple’s union were sent after Mary and Ollie were well on their way out of the country. Howbutker understood that the wedding had to be hurried in order for the honeymoon to coincide with the junior DuMont’s buying trip to Europe. What spiked its collective brow was Mary’s sudden and unexpected marriage to Ollie DuMont when everyone was anticipating an exchange of nuptials with the handsome Percy Warwick. They puzzled, as well, over Mary’s unprecedented leavetaking of Somerset, entrusting its supervision to her rather shiftless manager. It was finally determined over tea, porch, and supper tables that the only reason Mary married Ollie so soon after the hail disaster was to ensure the salvation of Somerset. It was an opinion Mary sadly hoped the Warwicks shared to relieve their disappointment that she had not married their son.

  But she couldn’t be sure. She’d expected a no-bones-about-it reaction of disapproval from Beatrice but instead received resigned acceptance. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait until Percy comes home to get married?” she asked. “He’ll be so disappointed.”

  “No, Beatrice,” Mary said. “It will be too late then.”

  Beatrice had given her a long, despairing look, and Mary was left to wonder if she’d guessed the real reason the wedding could n
ot be delayed. Only Jeremy remained a bit stiff when Mary stood on tiptoes to kiss him after the reception.

  The couple were no sooner landed in Paris and checked in at the Hotel Ritz than Ollie whisked Mary off to a family practitioner for her first medical examination. It was too early to estimate her baby’s due date, the French physician told her. Privately, Mary was projecting the end of April. When she mentioned this to him at her next appointment, he shook his head. “From what I can tell, your baby will arrive later than that. My diagnosis puts the date at least two, most likely three, weeks later.”

  “What?” Mary felt the room sway. “You mean I’m… not as fully pregnant as I thought?”

  The doctor smiled. “A most American way of putting it, but yes. Conception must have come at a later date than you figured, perhaps shortly before your first missed period.”

  Bile rose to the back of her throat. She remembered the “later date” quite well. The memory came rushing to her with such painful poignancy, she had to lean against the dressing room wall for support. It happened the week before the first picking, when her blood had thrilled at the prospects of having money in the bank, of paying off the mortgage, of exonerating her father. It was the first truly “good feeling” day she’d known since her mother’s suicide. Percy was waiting for her in the cabin when she pushed open the door, an apron around his waist and spoon in his hand. His foolish grin softened to an understanding smile when he saw the yearning on her face. Calmly he set aside the spoon, moved the pot from the burner, untied the apron, and went to her.

  Mary’s knees buckled as she relived their passion of that afternoon, how their bodies had melded, become one, inseparable, inviolate, holy, and eternal… the day their child was conceived. She slid down the wall and hugged her knees to her chest. Oh, my darling Percy, what have I done to us? What have I done?

  She was white-faced and trembling when Ollie collected her. He took her back to the hotel, where she stayed in bed for two days, eating crusty French bread and broth, the only food her stomach could tolerate. (She refused croissants.) Within two months of their departure from Howbutker, Abel DuMont passed around cigars at a small dinner party to which the Warwicks were invited. He was soon to be a grandfather, he announced. The child was expected in July 1921. Ollie wanted the baby to be born in their mother country, so the couple would return to Paris for the birth and sail home from France. Actually, Matthew Toliver DuMont was born in May of that year. Money exchanged hands with the delivering physician—a great deal of it—with the result that the birth certificate read that the only child ever to be born to the Ollie DuMonts had entered the world two months after his birth date.