Roses

by Leila Meacham

  He slammed his fist into the wall beside the mirror and then sank to the bed to nurse the pain. The enormity of his rage at both himself and Mary overwhelmed him. He finished out the ride into Howbutker with his back against the frame of the Pullman bed, holding his head in his hands, the untouched coffee growing cold on the nightstand.

  Before it came to a full stop, he hopped off the train and called to Isaac, one of Howbutker’s two cabbies. “The Toliver place on Houston Avenue,” he said, throwing his gear into the hansom cab, and he climbed up to sit beside the driver, needing the sobering October wind on his face. As soon as Isaac drew his horse to a stop before the steps of the Tolivers’ verandah, he jumped down. “Wait here for me,” he ordered, and dashed up to the front door.

  Sassie answered the savage ringing of the bellpull. “You better come in,” she said, reading his face, her drooped mouth confirming Titus’s report.

  “It’s true, then?” Percy stated.

  “They married yesterday and left on the five o’clock train. It was all done so sudden like ’cause Mister Ollie, he had to go to Paris for some clothes show, or so Miss Mary say.”

  “What do you mean, ‘or so Miss Mary say’?”

  Sassie shrugged and folded her hands over her flowered apron. “That’s just what she say, is all. Mister Ollie, he loves her. You can be consoled by that, Mister Percy.”

  His voice gave way to his grief. “Why did she do it, Sassie?” he sobbed.

  Sassie put her arms around him and pulled his head down to her shoulder and stroked it. “She pine for you, Mister Percy. She grow sick from so much pinin’. She thought you be gone for good. Mister Ollie, he help her out of the jam she be in with Somerset, and I reckon she figure she owe him. If she wasn’t goin’ marry you, who else good enough?”

  Percy sobbed into her shoulder. “What have I done, Sassie?”

  “You be young, that’s what you and Miss Mary both done. Love ain’t got no business happenin’ to the young. Only the old be wise enough to treat it right. I’d offer you a bottle of somethin’, but they ain’t a drop of nothin’ in the house.”

  Percy straightened, extracted a handkerchief, and wiped his face. “That’s all right,” he said. “I won’t have any trouble finding a bottle.”

  When he returned to the cab, he said, “How much do you want for that bottle of gin you got stashed under your seat, Isaac?”

  “Two bucks. It’s only half-full.”

  “There’ll be five more for you if you can pick up another bottle on the way to my destination.”

  Isaac flipped the reins over the gray mare’s rump. “I imagine that could be arranged, Mister Percy.”

  A half hour later, Percy stepped down before the cabin in the woods. He peeled off a ten and a five and handed the bills to the cabbie. “Isaac, give me twenty-four hours without telling anybody I’m home or where I am. Then I want you to call my parents and tell them to come get me.”

  “Anything you say, Mister Percy.”

  Beatrice, alone, came to collect him. Her husband was at his office when Isaac telephoned. Percy heard the story later of how his mother, never having driven a Warwick motorcar, sent word to the stables to ready the surrey and then selected a few items from the pantry. Afterward, she went upstairs to his room to pack a few clothes into a valise. She donned hat and gloves, and without telling her housekeeper where she was going, she drove the matched pair of high-stepping bays to the cabin in the woods.

  She found her son lying awake on the sofa in the single room, his face deathly gray and his glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling. The sunlight from the open door illuminated a day’s growth of blond beard as well as two empty bottles of bathtub gin on the floor. The cabin reeked of cheap alcohol and vomit, some fresh on the front of her son’s shirt.

  Beatrice left the door open, raised windows, and got a fire going in the Franklin stove. She stripped Percy of his soiled clothes, then marched him naked to the shower by the lake, pumping while he soaped himself down and shivered beneath the cold spray. He dried off using the towels and wrapped himself in an eiderdown quilt she left him, then returned to the cabin to sit down to a bowl of hot, home-canned soup and a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Then they talked.

  “I love her, Mother, and she loves me.”

  “Apparently not as much as she loves Somerset and you your pride.”

  “My pride can go to hell. It’s not worth what it’s cost to keep it.”

  “Still, it would be mighty hard for a man to live with a wife who put her family name and interests above his. He might be able to at the beginning, but as time went on… when the passion died…”

  “I could have lived with her obsession, and our passion would never have died.”

  Beatrice sighed and did not argue. One look at her face told Percy she agreed with his conviction. “I guess the whole town knows why Mary married Ollie?” The wistfulness in his question held the hope that he was wrong.

  She removed his bowl from the table. “Yes, son, the whole town no doubt believes that Mary married Ollie to save Somerset.”

  “What do you think?”

  “You were unwise to leave her, son. She needed you. Who else but Ollie could she turn to when she thought you had left her for good? She was alone. Ollie was here—”

  Percy clasped his head with his hands. “Oh, God, Mother. How am I to handle this?”

  Beatrice laid her hand on his golden head, like a priest bestowing a benediction. “You must love them as deeply as ever, Percy, but now as one. That will be your gift to them. They will come back wanting your forgiveness, and you must give it graciously and sincerely, like a white rose. And you must forgive yourself, too.”

  “How can I?” Percy asked, lifting his streaming eyes to his mother’s face.

  Beatrice bent and gently wiped her son’s tears. “By remembering that what you cannot undo, you must accept. And in accepting—especially if they are happy together—you will find the grace to forgive yourself.”

  Soothed by his mother’s words, Percy drank another cup of coffee, cleaned up the cabin, put on the fresh clothes she had brought, and accompanied her home. That afternoon, impeccably dressed and clean-shaven, he surprised his father in his office at the Warwick Lumber Company.

  Jeremy displayed unabashed joy at seeing him. His pride in him was evident in his handshake and glowing eyes. His son had come through his baptism of fire and not been found wanting, his manner announced when they made the rounds of the staff to welcome him home. Toughened by war, tested in the field, seasoned by loss, he was a man to be reckoned with now, and his father knew it for sure when he laid a sheath of reports on his desk.

  “When you read those,” he said in the tone of a man who has nothing else on his mind but business, “you’ll agree it’s time to expand the Canadian operations.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  In November, he learned that Mary was pregnant. Abel DuMont, usually dignified and composed, had bounded up the steps of Warwick Hall at suppertime, glued a finger to the bell and, to the startled maid who answered the door, shouted the news that he was soon to be a grandfather. Imagine that! A grandfather!

  Abel had hosted an impromptu celebration the next evening in his home and passed around cigars and glasses of champagne. Percy had tolerated the event, grateful to his mother for fabricating an excuse that allowed him to leave the party early.

  Within days, he turned twenty-six. He declined a party and spent his birthday surveying new timber sites. The glorious autumn usually enjoyed by East Texans melted in rains that lasted through December and intensified his sense of irredeemable loss.

  “You ought to get out more, have more social life,” Beatrice advised him. “You spend too much time working.”

  “And with whom am I to have this social life, Mother? Howbutker does not exactly abound in single young women.”

  He offered the observation to allay her concern that he had no desire for any other woman but Mary and that she had destroyed his
trust in her gender for good. She was not far off the mark. Ever since puberty, when the young and likable widow of the choir director had introduced him to the joys of carnal pleasure, the sexual act had been an expression of liking. Not until Mary had he known intercourse for what it was supposed to be, the ultimate possessing and giving of two bodies consumed with love for each other. After Mary, how could he look at another woman?

  And she had shaken his faith in women. He was willing to bear much of the blame for his predicament, but in hindsight he apportioned an equal share to Mary. How could she have married another if she’d cared as deeply for him as he’d believed? Somerset had mattered more after all. And if he could not trust the love Mary had professed, how would he ever trust the promises of anyone else of her sex?

  During the Christmas holiday, to appease his mother, he accepted invitations to parties in Houston and Dallas and Fort Worth from the debutante daughters of oil and cattle barons, but he returned to Howbutker less inclined toward female company than before. At home, he was the only one of his social crowd unmarried, and when he attended alone the dinners and picnics and parties hosted by his married friends, he went away feeling disassociated, depressed, and not a little envious. He longed for a catharsis, a purging spirit to cleanse him of regret and bitterness and self-loathing so that he might feel the sun in his soul again.

  And then, in April, when Mary and Ollie had been gone nearly seven months and would not return until September, Lucy Gentry arrived for the Easter holiday.

  “I had no choice but to invite her,” Beatrice said, announcing her visit at breakfast prior to her arrival. The agitated drum of her fingertips on the starched table linen echoed her chagrin. “How could I say no? The girl practically begged us in her letter to put her up while the school closes for Easter break. She claims that her father can’t afford to pay for her transportation to Atlanta, and she’ll be the only member of the staff staying in the dormitory.”

  Her husband and son peered around their newspapers at her fuming at the head of the table.

  “Sounds pretty bleak,” Percy said.

  “Dreadful,” agreed Jeremy.

  “It’s a ruse,” Beatrice snapped. “As plain to see as an apple in a pig’s mouth.”

  “See what?” Jeremy asked.

  His wife speared him with a look at his end of the table. “You know what, Jeremy Warwick. That girl—with the goading of that awful father of hers—still has her eye on Percy.”

  “Well, let her look.” Unperturbed, he glanced at Percy. “Right, son?”

  Percy smiled. “I’d say I’m pretty safe from Lucy Gentry. Don’t worry, Mother. I can handle myself.”

  Beatrice’s tight lips expressed doubt as she buttered her toast. “Well, Lord help us if you’re wrong,” she said.

  On the day of Lucy’s arrival, Percy overslept and almost missed meeting her train. He’d been in Houston the day before, negotiating a hauling contract with executives of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and had not returned to Howbutker until the early hours of the morning. His mother was in the kitchen when he hurried downstairs. She stood with her back to him, chatting with the cook as they prepared Easter dinner, and for a moment, without announcing his presence, he halted in the doorway and observed her. When had that gray sprung up in her hair, he wondered in surprise, that slight hump appeared at the base of her neck? With dismay, he realized that his parents were growing older and that their suns had begun their declines. Wordlessly, unable to speak, he crossed to her and fastened his arms around her stout figure from behind.

  “Why, son!” Beatrice turned in his embrace, startled, until she saw something in his expression that caused her to lay a hand gently on his face. “Lucy’s due any minute, you know,” she said, her look soft with understanding.

  He kissed her forehead. “I’m on my way. Dad call?”

  “Only to say not to disturb you. You can make up for today on Friday. A shipload of timber has come in that you’ll have to inspect, since your father wants to give his foreman an extra day off to be with his family. That should give you an excuse to get out of the house. Dad and I will see after Lucy. We’ll take her to the Kendricks’ lawn party Saturday afternoon, and she leaves Sunday after dinner.”

  The train had already been relieved of its passengers when he parked his car. Lucy, standing with her luggage on the platform, spied him at once as he swung around the corner of the station house. Her whole countenance lit up with a joy so pure and unabashed that Percy laughed out loud.

  “There you are, Percy Warwick,” she sang out. “I thought maybe I’d been forgotten.”

  “Impossible,” he said, and smiled into her ingenuous blue eyes. “You’ve done something different with your hair.”

  “And shortened my hemlines.” Primly, she turned full circle in front of him, holding out the skirt of her coat so that he might see the knee-length chemise beneath. “What do you think?”

  “I think I like.”

  “It’s the new style.”

  “So Abel DuMont assures us.”

  He remembered her now. Short in stature, buxom, face round like a doll’s, and dotty over him. It had been only a little over a year since he’d seen her, but she’d disappeared from his memory as thoroughly as fog before the sun. He reached for her two pieces of luggage, but she snatched up a valise and slipped her hand into his free one with the familiarity of long acquaintance. She came only to his shoulder, and it amused him to look down upon the soft brown crown of her head and see the flurry of her Lilliputian feet working overtime to match his long stride to the Pierce-Arrow.

  That evening, laughter lightened the usual mood in the Warwick household. Lucy regaled them with hilarious tales of her students and teaching experiences, rolling her eyes and waving her small, dimpled hands in elaboration so that even Beatrice seemed captivated. At Percy’s invitation, she accompanied him to the lumberyard on Friday, and by calling off numbers on the delivery form, she cut in half the time it would have taken to tally the new shipment of timber. Saturday, it was he who escorted Lucy to the Kendricks’ lawn party, leaving before his parents’ departure, to take her to a supper hosted by one of his friends.

  “I thought you’d be married by now,” she said that evening. “What happened to the girl you’ve loved all her life?”

  “She married another man.”

  “She married another man over you!”

  “He offered more than I.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Believe it.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “The groom took her far away.”

  “Were you sad that she married someone else?”

  “Of course, but it’s water under the bridge now.”

  He discovered when he put her on the train Sunday afternoon that he was sorry to see her go. He’d found in their few days together that the traits Mary had disliked in Lucy, he thought refreshing. She called a toad by its name and tolerated little for the sake of good manners that was pretentious, pompous, or pedantic, a ship that wouldn’t have sailed with Mary. By nature a listener, he liked that Lucy was a talker with a view about everything, a compulsion that had sent her roommate’s head under the pillows at Bellington Hall.

  And though her face may not have “launched a canoe in an Indian raid,” as Beatrice remarked uncharitably in contradicting the glowing description Lucy’s father had sent prior to her first visit, Percy admired the unexpectedness of it—the way her eyes lit up, the impish wriggling of her small nose, the cute rounding of her lips in perpetual O’s of surprise and pleasure.

  He was charmed by her stature and size, the absurd roundness of her creamy limbs, the dainty joining of wrist to hand, arm to elbow, dimpled knee to leg. Her ears intrigued him. Though pink and delicately formed, they stuck out from her head like little pot handles, the lobes no bigger than the pad of an elf’s finger. She would never be svelte, but her waist was small, and he took great pleasure in encircling it with his hands to lift and
assist her when her height proved a hindrance.

  On the afternoon that he bade her good-bye, he kissed her for the first time. He meant merely to give her a brotherly peck upon a round little cheek, chuck her chin, and wish her well, but when she lifted her china blue eyes and he saw in them nothing but the most profound admiration, he slipped an arm about her waist and drew her toward him. Her mouth was warm and soft and yielding, and it was with great reluctance that he released it.

  To his surprise, he heard himself say, “How would you feel about my coming to visit you in Belton next weekend?”

  She stared goggled-eyed at him. “Percy! You mean it?”

  “I mean it,” he said with a laugh.

  And so it began.

  His mother hovered worriedly in the background. “Do not concern yourself, Mother,” he assured her. “The visits are simply a distraction.”

  “Lucy will not think of your visits as a distraction.”

  “I’ve promised nothing.”

  “It doesn’t matter. That girl can hear a note of song and take it as a symphony.”

  Lucy did not fill his thoughts, his every waking moment, as Mary had done. Indeed, he could go days without once thinking of her, but she was someone available to share his weekends, someone who made him laugh, pampered his ego, and cared for him unreservedly without hope of her feelings being returned.

  She was a woman of constant surprises. He expected her to be impressed by his wealth but discovered that, apart from its necessity to provide the essentials, Lucy had little interest in money, especially his. The pleasures she enjoyed were simple and carried no price tags. She preferred a buggy ride through woods draped in springtime splendor to being squired to a party in Houston in his new Cadillac, a blackberry hunt to dancing the night away at the country club, a picnic on the banks of the Caddo to a fine dinner at a grand hotel.

  It was during one of these simple excursions that his life turned on an irrevocable course.