by Nora Carroll
“Jess, you live in a one-room walk-up in Fort Washington. How many times have you told me you don’t feel comfortable walking around your neighborhood late at night? And you’re always sending money to your mother—you could use the money. You have a right to it—why not take it?”
Jess stood looking at him without answering. Russ was standing in front of the windows. The light coming in from outside formed a halo across the top of his head, his light-brown hair shining like oat straw in the sun. She hadn’t answered him yet, and she did not have the slightest idea what she was going to say next. As if, instead of waiting to speak, she were waiting to hear what someone else in the room had to say.
Russ was right. What did it matter? If you don’t care about a place, you don’t care about it. She would take the money and move on, putting the cottage back where it belonged, in the past.
But she did care. She couldn’t forgive Phelps Whitmire for what he had done to her, and didn’t want to surrender Journey’s End to the wrong sort of people. There it was, Toni Barnes’s expression: The wrong sort of people. Well, it was clear that no one wanted any part of them—it just wasn’t clear who they were.
“Jess?”
Jess couldn’t read his face. Unexpectedly, Russ turned to look out the window, clasping her hand as he did, his palm soft, dry, slightly cool to the touch.
“Do you want to tell me what it is?” Russ said.
He looked up sidelong, his silky hair falling over one eye, his long nose sharp at that angle. “You know what I want, Jess?” Russ said. “I want to get you out of here. You’ve had a death mask on ever since we got here. Some people do better away from family. It seems like even dead family gets you down.”
Jess had to laugh a little at that.
What she hadn’t told him, yet, was that she was starting to want to keep it. Because this cottage was the closest an only child, daughter, and granddaughter—all in a lonely single-file line—could come to feeling a part of a family.
What if you kept coming back to the same place, as your mother did and her mother before her? What if four generations of women kept coming back and living their lives and depositing their stuff: old letters, telegraph receipts, photos, or dramatic stories of loving and drowning that got told and told again. Then, couldn’t it be that the house itself became the family story? Narratives bending, circling, and turning around the same set of rooms. She envisioned the rooms of Journey’s End as they encircled the central living room, layers of a family, intertwining and overlapping over time. Maybe, she thought, she was sunk in a lot deeper than she’d realized.
As it happened, when Jess opened her mouth to say all this to Russ, when she tilted her chin up, preparing to make a speech that she had never expected to hear herself make, Russ read that upward tilt as an amorous invitation, and so planted a full, wet kiss on the lips that were preparing to speak.
Afterward, Russ’s voice was husky.
“I love you, Jess,” he said, then waited for her to reply in kind, but the words, as always, stuck in her throat.
In that moment, Jess realized that the time to cling to the past was over—she needed to sell the cottage, and Phelps Whitmire had money.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll sell.”
Russ grabbed her and kissed her again. “You’re making the right decision,” he said.
Toni had accepted a glass of chilled white wine and was leaning against the counter in the kitchen, the papers for the sale ready to be signed. She was wearing white-linen pedal pushers, a lime-green T-shirt, and matching thong sandals. Her frosted hair was short; fat pearl earrings were hugging her minuscule lobes.
“Phelps and Martha are just beside themselves. You know, it’s been so hard for them being up at Aldergate with the four boys. You know how Muffin is, so difficult. They still dress for dinner every single night. Martha has to drag the boys up from the beach or sailing or whatever and dress them for dinner.” Toni looked so pleased, sipping her white wine.
“Muffin, now, that would be the cat?” Russ said.
Jess giggled.
“No, that’s Phelps’s mother.” No trace of irony from Toni. “She’s the Phelps.”
“Muffin,” Russ said, snorting through his nose. “Are there really grown women who go by Muffin in this world? God, you have to love this place.”
“Mrs. Wendell Randolph Whitmire, née Phelps. Her great-grandfather founded half the newspapers in the Midwest.” Toni recited the pedigree with assurance.
Russ topped off Toni’s glass. Jess could tell he was starting to enjoy himself. He loved hearing Toni talk about the Wequetona Club. Jess could see why Toni had done well in real estate. She had a knack for dropping names and making things sound even better than they were.
They all stood in the kitchen basking in that particular kind of warmth, an illusion at least of affection shared all the way around, an ample amount of California Chardonnay. Jess had been scrimping and saving her money for years—this would give her a little bit of comfort room. Her eyes felt blurry, she was sure, from the rightness of it, and she leaned into Russ’s arm as Toni regaled them with stories: about Muffin, about the Founder’s Day Regatta, about all the people who weren’t around anymore: Pete was a gay Episcopal priest. Sal had been in and out of drug rehab. Megan, God forbid, married a schoolteacher—“they’re poor as church mice”—couldn’t afford the Club membership, sold out to her cousin, the one who had done so well in real estate. Jess drank and laughed, allowing herself to think a little bit about the money. Maybe she could move somewhere a bit nicer and still afford the rent.
“And, of course, I haven’t even mentioned the obvious one you know. The riverboat captain-cum-poet—he’s a local boy.”
Jess got quiet, waiting to hear what Toni was going to say next.
“You remember Daniel Painter—didn’t you date him one summer for a while? He has one of those adventure outback kinds of enterprises, leads canoe trips up north of the Sault. You really ought to stop in and see him sometime. His office is right in town, behind the chamber of commerce. Course, this time of year, he’s probably out with an expedition.”
“Daniel . . . ” Jess said, her voice trailing off in confusion.
“Oh, maybe you don’t remember him. Their cottage wasn’t part of the Club—he was always kind of an oddball anyway.”
Jess got a flash of Toni’s face that seventeenth summer, when her hair had been down to her waist and streaked through by the sun. She remembered the first time she saw Daniel at the beach picnic, for a second could almost remember the way he smelled, like fresh ironing and pine needles and the damp loamy earth.
She shrugged off Russ’s arm from where it was resting, draped around her shoulder, and walked out to the porch to get some cool air.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MAMIE
With the clanging of the clubhouse bells, it did not take long for the whole citizenry of the Club, still sparse at that time of year, to gather outside the Lewis cottage, The Rafters, everyone abuzz with the words “Lila Flagg has drowned.” Thomas was inside the cottage, where he had carried Lila’s body, emerging a few moments later out back to get into Alvin Whitmire’s Studebaker.
“He’s gone to Ironton to get the reverend,” people were whispering among themselves.
I saw my mother, Miss Ada, come keening down the walk, a lady at each arm. She didn’t look at me at all, but blubbered past calling, “I’m coming, Lila, don’t worry, Mommy’s here.” As far as I know, she did not ever look for me or ask where I was. When she walked past me, she seemed not to see me at all.
I sat at the base of the big Dutch maple, still wet, clad only in my bathing suit and the thick wool sweater, watching The Rafters, the people swirling about with an air of frantic urgency. I observed all the activity with detached confusion. As I sat, I saw that, as always on Thursday afternoon, two Indian girls had
come to sell flowers; black haired and barefoot, they were carrying their baskets full of white gladiolas and yellow daffodils. They were wending among the small crowd that had gathered there, the Iveses, the Whitmires, the Millers. To my confusion, everyone was ignoring them. I was thinking, Buy the flowers from the Indian girls—you will need them for Lila’s grave.
I do not remember leaving there, only that I was gone. I remember too that the sun was gone and that the lake had turned to a brooding, wind-lashed silver. The sky was darkening with clouds, giving a late-afternoon cast.
I walked down the empty sidewalk along the bluff toward Journey’s End, but when I reached the front steps, I could not go in.
The two dark-haired Indian girls, young girls, perhaps nine or ten, were now standing upon the Journey’s End porch in front of the doorway, the daffodils in their baskets bright splashes of yellow in the now-darkened day. Miss Ada always bought flowers from the girls—as did most of the other cottagers—and the girls stood patiently, shifting from one foot to the other, expecting someone to open the door.
I did not speak to them but kept walking instead, straight off the cement walk onto the little path that led into the woods.
What drew me into the woods that day? Was it simply the effort it would have taken to speak to the flower girls? Sorry, no flowers today because my sister is dead?
I was never much one to venture into the woods, preferring the pleasures of manicured lawns. It was Lila who loved the woods.
Lila why lila why lila why—it was a song with a coda, repeating over and over again in my head. The simplest explanation was that the path led me there. At the end of the sidewalk at Wequetona, the woods are all that is left.
The canopy of leaves spread over my head. With the clouds gathering, there was very little light, and that peculiar hush that seems present in the woods, where the silence is full and even quiet footsteps seem to echo in your ears.
I do not believe that I went there looking for something, but perhaps I did. I was dazed with grief, but something made me stumble down the same path that Lila had. Something made me know where she would have been, to look for the thing that she had left behind, in the place where she had left it.
I reached the place where the trees were so tall that they seemed to soar up out of the woods, appearing to cross overhead as if you were staring up into a church’s nave. Christian soldiers is what we used to call them, tall and straight, like soldiers marching, pointing the way to heaven. Lila and I used to go there to play as young girls. Journey’s End was completely hidden behind the wall of thick trees, but we were close enough that we could hear our mother’s call. I did not like it much, too many bugs, and soon forgot it. It was Lila’s place, and on that terrible day, I saw it as a place to hide.
Crying, the sound of crying.
I was crying and I did not know it. Could not hear the loud sound of my own rib-cracking sobs. So I could not have heard more crying, could I have? No, I do not think so. I think that I heard nothing but the sound of the woods, the wind whipping through the trees, urging them to speak.
And next I saw color—dark, heated, angry crimson, stark and vivid against the pure white of a white hand-stitched petticoat made of fine Savannah cotton. A petticoat just like mine.
Coiling out from under that petticoat was a hideous bluish and yellowy jellied cord, kinked and cold-looking, with a shredded gnawed-off end.
I would never have dared to move that petticoat; I was bone frightened, and ready to bolt, but at the horrible sight I started retching so violently that I could not move, and it was then that I saw something else peeking out from under the petticoat.
It was a tiny single hand opening and closing, its tiny perfect domed fingernails shining like pearls.
So I did what life must do when it sees life. I picked up that horrible, blood-stained, leaf-strewn bundle, and I held it close to me, right up against my skin under the thick sweater, and I held it there until I heard shrill crying again, and this time, I was sure that the cries were not mine.
CHAPTER TWENTY
JESS, AGE THIRTY-THREE
Later that night, they were celebrating. Russ had even cracked open champagne. Jess was wearing a sleeveless cotton T-shirt that glowed faintly in the moonlight. The air was cool enough to raise gooseflesh on her bare arms, but not cool enough to make her put on a sweater. They were sitting out on the Adirondack chairs at the top edge of the bluff. She still felt stunned that she had really gone and done it, sold the Tretheway cottage, Journey’s End.
Jess knew that the people who had first built the Wequetona Club were not wealthy people; they were ministers and Bible professors from a little college down in Illinois. The Wequetona Club had started out as a kind of spiritual retreat, a place to be devout and quiet in a spot less humid and bug-ridden than the cornfields of southern Illinois. Jess supposed that the college people had taken this place as a wilderness, approachable, as it was, more easily by water at that time. She didn’t suppose that they thought much about the Woodland Indians, who had settled at the edges of these lakes for millennia, before the good gentlefolk of the Presbyterian Bible Seminary reimagined it as a wilderness retreat. Jess did remember the Indians selling beaded trinkets on the street corners in Ironton—how she had begged Mamie to buy them for her on Sunday mornings when they were leaving the white-clapboard church in Ironton. Mamie always herded Jess quickly to the other side of the street, a firm hand on her shoulder, making little clicking sounds under her breath.
Jess sat sideways on the Adirondack chair, her knees pulled up under her sleeveless shirt now, bare feet tucked up, and arms clasped around her legs, trying to warm herself. She could see “down the line,” the cottages lining up along the bluff like maiden ladies, so decorous, each waiting her turn. The wooden footbridge over to the north side was invisible even on a bright night like this one, but she knew that down the north side it was the same: some cottages with screened porches, some with wide verandas, most of the front walks littered with plastic tricycles, discarded roller skates. Here and there, a forgotten beach towel draped over a porch railing or trailed up the cottage steps. Some of these cottages had been loved to death, passed along from generation to generation, parceled into ever-smaller and smaller shares, every two weeks a new batch of cousins and new babies and gay uncles and elderly widowed aunts. Jess supposed that must have been Mamie’s vision for Journey’s End when she bequeathed the cottage to Jess—as it must have seemed that it would be back in 1922, when they had hung their sorority banners in the balcony, before Lila had drowned and Mamie had borne an illegitimate child.
Well, she might get married yet, Jess thought. But what Mamie did not understand, could not ever understand, was that Jess was going to marry someone like Russ, someone who would never want to come here.
“Do you really think I’m doing the right thing?” Jess finally spoke.
“Selling to someone you don’t like very much is of perfectly no consequence as long as he has the cash in hand.”
“I don’t mean selling to Phelps and Martha. I mean selling at all.”
“Jess honey, when would we ever get up here? It’s nice and all, but it’s a little dull.”
“It’s like getting your dead mother’s diamond ring and then hocking it.”
“What any sane person would do, in my opinion,” Russ said. “But you know, Jess,” he said, his voice curiously thick, reaching out and grasping her thin bare hand, smoothing the backs of her fingers, where she wore no kind of ornamentation at all. “I feel like coming here was like coming to meet the family, and even though I still haven’t met your mother, the fabulous Margaret Carpenter, I still kind of think that . . . ”
Jess sat suspended in a frantic kind of silence, aware only of a high-pitched buzzing between her ears.
“I never would have shopped for a ring or anything outside of the city, and I guess I came here more in mind of
a photo shoot than a . . . Well, I didn’t know things would happen so fast, emotionally speaking . . . ”
Emotionally speaking. Jess realized that she was mourning the cottage like she was mourning a death, much more than the loss of Mamie, but the loss of a whole family of forebears who had gone away before she had ever had a chance to know them, leaving only yellowing photographs, malleable stories, and the faded stately grandeur of the house itself.
Russ paused again and Jess became aware, uncomfortably aware, that she had been unable to come up with a single word to fill the vibrant silence that Russ’s words had created. He looked at her deeply, cocking his head a little, like a golden retriever that thinks he’s about to be tossed a tennis ball. He took her hand, awkwardly attempting to embrace her but only managing to get ahold of the hand, which he drew up and pressed against his mouth.
Jess sat perfectly still like that for a pained moment, her hand resting passively against his lips. Mercifully, the ripping sound of a motorboat cut through the silence. Jess turned toward the lake, seeing the foamy boat-wake shining whitely in the black water. Peals of teenage laughter rang out each time the boat cut a sharp turn.
“Of course it’s blood money,” Russ said, his voice calm again. “Funding all the internecine strife in Sierra Leone. I don’t know how you feel about that. I’m sure you know more about that than I do—your mother, you know.”
Jess had to rack her brains to figure out what he was talking about, had trouble remembering that Sierra Leone was in Africa, couldn’t see what her mother had to do with it. It took her a lot of thought to realize he was talking about diamonds. She was feeling that same brain-glazed feeling that she always got when Margaret started discussing African politics. Russ was talking about buying her a diamond engagement ring. She was at a total loss for words.
