by Cathy Holton
“They’re here, they’re here!” someone cried, and a moment later, Fanny burst through one of the doorways and came hurrying down the hallway, her hands fluttering around her skirt like a covey of rising doves. Her red-gold hair was cut in a stylish bob, and she looked even younger than Ava remembered, with her pale skin and large gray eyes. Ava had no time to examine her further, for she found herself pulled suddenly into a fragrant embrace. “We’re so glad you’ve come,” Fanny said in her ear, then stepped back, squeezing Ava’s hands before letting them go.
“Thank you for having me,” Ava said. She suddenly remembered the gift basket. “Oh, wait, I have something for you in the car.”
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Fanny said, taking Ava’s arm and steering her down the hallway.
“Come and have a drink,” Josephine called.
She was sitting on a long sofa in the library and she rose, smiling, her eyes resting lightly on Ava’s face, and yet managing to encompass all of her in that glance, from the tips of her toes to the ends of her short spiky hair. “We’re so glad you could come,” she murmured, putting her hand out to Ava. Her skin was cool and smooth to the touch. Like her sister, she was slim, and her hair was cut stylishly, although she did not color it, and it curved like two snowy wings on either side of her handsome face.
“And who’s this pretty thing?” Maitland bellowed, standing beside a tall sideboard laden with decanters and glassware and a silver cocktail shaker. He strode quickly across the room, pulling Ava into a clumsy embrace and kissing her loudly on both cheeks.
“Oh, Mait, don’t crush her!” Fanny cried but he only laughed and said, “I kiss all the pretty girls!” His accent was nearly unintelligible to Ava, much more hurried and softly rounded than the aunts’, as if he spoke through a mouthful of marbles. He was stylishly dressed in pleated trousers and a blue shirt. He wore a sport coat and a tie, and a pair of leather loafers.
He rubbed his hands together fiercely. “Now, what can I get you?” he said to Ava, indicating the decanters on the sideboard.
They were drinking something call a Gin Rickey, which Ava gathered from their conversation they had learned to drink in the twenties up at Vanderbilt. “We made it in the bathtub,” Fanny said gaily, lifting her rocks glass.
“We didn’t make it,” Josephine said mildly. “We bought it from bootleggers who did. It was during Prohibition.”
Ava looked around the room in astonishment. “You went to college in the nineteen-twenties?” she said.
“I was sixteen when I went up to Vanderbilt in 1927,” Josephine said. “In those days you finished high school at sixteen.”
Ava stared blankly at Josephine. “But that would make you—”
“Oh, I know. Don’t say it,” Fanny cried.
“Eighty-seven,” Josephine finished serenely. “Fanny is eighty-five and Maitland is eighty-seven.”
“But none of you look a day over seventy,” Ava said, and Will laughed nervously.
“Up at Sewanee we drank Singapore Slings,” Maitland said, and it was not too hard to imagine him as a college boy dressed in white bucks and a coonskin coat. He had the look of a perpetual college boy about him, jovial and outgoing. He was perched on the arm of a low sofa, sitting next to Fanny, who had her knees crossed, her drink resting on her lap. She had remarkable legs for a woman her age, astonishingly good legs. Josephine sat at the opposite end, the hand holding her drink resting lightly on the raised arm of the sofa. Both aunts wore tailored skirts and blouses and, looking down at her jeans and flip-flops, Ava felt badly underdressed.
She sat down in a wingback chair, trying desperately to drink her Gin Rickey, and looked around the spacious library. All her life she had wanted a room like this. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of a light blonde color stood along three walls, and a massive fireplace stood in the middle of the fourth paneled wall. All the furniture in the room was pulled away from the walls so one could reach the shelves unimpeded. There were literally hundreds of books; a sliding ladder on a rail allowed access to the very top shelves.
“What a wonderful room,” Ava said.
“Are you a reader?” Josephine asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“So was Papa,” Fanny said. “He and Josephine used to sit for hours in here on a rainy day with their noses buried in some dusty book. Now Will and I,” she said, looking fondly at Will, who was seated in a leather club chair across from Ava. “We were never too fond of reading. Board games and jigsaw puzzles were our favorite ways to spend rainy days.”
“And what do you do on rainy days?” Ava asked Maitland.
“I mix the drinks.”
She smiled and lifted her Gin Rickey in acknowledgment. Ava was not a big drinker—she preferred red wine when she drank anything—but she didn’t want to hurt Maitland’s feelings. He seemed to take his duties as cocktail master seriously.
“So Vanderbilt accepted women in the twenties?” she asked. Despite the cheerful appearance of the rows and rows of books, she was struck again by an odd, fleeting sense of melancholy. Houses have personalities just like people, she had learned in her years of traveling, and this one felt somber and dispirited. More like Thornfield Hall than Pemberley House.
“Oh, before that,” Josephine said. “In the eighteen-eighties, actually. They were very progressive.”
“Although women were not awarded degrees,” Fanny said. “At least not initially. They were allowed to audit classes but no degrees were conferred.”
Ava pretended to sip her drink. “It must have been unusual for women in your generation to attend college.”
“It wasn’t unusual for women of our—” Fanny began and then stopped, and Josephine finished smoothly, “It wasn’t unusual for women in our family, our friends, to attend college.”
“It’s amazing how much has changed over the last hundred years,” Ava said. “Women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement, the improvements in science and technology.” She was rambling; she always did that when she was nervous, and it often ended badly, with her saying something inappropriate or pointless.
The others stared past her, their faces fixed in polite expressions.
“I often feel that our forefathers must be turning in their graves,” Josephine said, lifting her glass to Maitland, who was pouring refills.
Fanny, who had been smiling at Ava with a dreamy expression, said, “You have the loveliest hair. Were your people Scottish?”
“My people?” Ava said.
“Your family,” Will said.
“Oh. Well, actually, I don’t know a lot about my family. My parents came from Detroit originally. I think. My mother’s maiden name was Govan, which sounds Irish, but I really don’t know. She never spoke of her family. Dabrowski has to be Polish.” She smiled at Maitland but indicated that she didn’t need a refill.
“Polish!” Fanny said. “How lovely! I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who was Polish.”
Ava turned her attention to one of the framed photographs on the coffee table. They seemed to be waiting for her to say something else and when she didn’t, Josephine turned her head and spoke to Maitland in a low voice about supper.
There were photographs everywhere, on all the tables in the room and on the bookshelves; the paneled wall around the fireplace was covered in them. Ava stood up and slowly made her way around the room clutching her unfinished drink in her hand, stopping to peer at the images. Some were in color but most were in black and white. A good many were of Fanny and Maitland in their younger days: standing in front of Niagara Falls, landing in a seaplane on Puget Sound, on the beach at Cannes, sitting in a café in Provence. Their life together seemed to have involved a great deal of travel. And drinking. There were photos of them in the Adirondacks, a cocktail table displayed prominently in the foreground; Maitland dressed in evening clothes holding a cocktail shaker and two glasses; Fanny, in a very short skirt, balancing a martini glass on her nose. Mixed in with the gay travel photos were
Victorian family portraits: sepia-tinted prints of somber, bearded men and women in long white dresses and huge hats. Ava picked up a photo of three young girls, startling in their prettiness and resemblance to one another. They wore white dresses and large bows in their hair, which fell in ringlets down their backs.
“My sisters and I,” Josephine said. “Celia, the baby, was Will’s grandmother. She died when Will’s mother was still a girl.”
“She was lovely,” Ava said. “You were all lovely.”
“Oh, don’t look at those old things,” Fanny said. “It was so long ago I can scarcely remember.”
“Not so long ago as all that,” Maitland said gallantly, and Fanny, pleased, gave him a coquettish smile. They were so sweet with each other, married all this time and still acting like newlyweds. Ava hoped she would be so lucky. As if reading her thoughts, Will, sitting across the room with his empty glass resting on one knee, caught her eye and smiled.
She picked up another photo, this one of a young woman dressed in a shimmering dress, her hair parted smoothly and coiled at the nape of her neck. She was very slender and lovely, but her eyes were cold, and there was a haughty expression on her face, as if she knew and disapproved of the photographer. Ava recognized Josephine, a much younger Josephine, her chin tilted slightly upward, eyes heavy-lidded, caught somewhere between an expression of boredom and reproach.
At that moment there was the sound of a door closing and then a female voice called out, “Hello! Anybody home?”
“We’re in here,” Will called; he and Maitland stood and a moment later two women appeared in the doorway. They were both well dressed and appeared to be roughly the same age as the aunts, and Ava was struck again by the smooth, beautiful complexions of these Southern women. It made her wonder if there was a mysterious Fountain of Youth hidden somewhere on the grounds, something secretive and transforming known only to the women.
Will introduced Ava to Alice Barron and Clara McGann. Alice was Maitland’s widowed sister, and she lived next door with her son, Fraser. “I grew up with these two,” Alice said, indicating Fanny and Josephine. “We were girls together.”
“We were all girls together,” Clara said. Her skin was a pale mocha color, and her eyes were green. She held Ava’s hand for a moment, gazing at her curiously. “The resemblance is remarkable,” she said.
“I noted it when she first came in,” Josephine said.
“What?” Fanny said, excited by their tone. “Her resemblance to whom?”
“Delphine,” Alice said.
“Who’s Delphine?” Ava said.
“My great-great-great-great-grandmother,” Will said.
They took her into the dining room to show her the oil painting of Delphine Woodburn. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, and Ava saw little resemblance between them but she was too polite to say anything.
“She was French,” Alice said to Ava. “Are you French?”
“No,” Josephine said. “Polish. And Irish.”
“Well, I don’t really know what I am,” Ava began lamely, feeling her face flush. “I didn’t know it mattered.”
“It doesn’t,” Will said quickly.
“Randal married her in 1816 and brought her here from New Orleans,” Josephine said. Behind Josephine’s shoulder, on the wall facing her, Ava could see the portrait of Randal Woodburn, the patriarch. He was an exceedingly handsome man, with pale eyes beneath heavy brows and a wide, sensuous mouth. His hair was worn long over a high, starched collar, and his shoulders were wide beneath his buttoned coat. He was the very picture of masculine virility, yet there was something about his face, a hint of cruelty about the eyes, that Ava didn’t like.
“They were devoted to each other,” Josephine said, gazing at Randal’s portrait.
“She bore him sixteen children,” Alice said.
“Oh, everyone loves a good love story, don’t they?” Fanny said brightly, her eyes resting briefly on Maitland.
“Look at us, chattering like a bunch of old women while this child is probably bored to tears,” Clara said, sliding her arm around Ava’s waist and leading her back to the library. “That’s all we old folks have left, our stories.”
“Oh, I like stories,” Ava said.
Behind her, Josephine said quietly, “You’ve come to the right place then.”
After supper Will showed her to her room and helped her get her things settled. He brought in her box of books and her laptop, and she brought Clotilde, setting her on the mantel beneath a painting of red-coated hunters on the trail of a fox. The horses were all drawn with the small, sleek heads and long, tapering limbs common to the nineteenth-century style, and the human figures, too, seem disproportionate.
Will noted her careful positioning of Clotilde’s vase on the mantel, but again he said nothing, sliding his eyes away politely as he began to unpack her books. She liked that about him, that although he seemed curious about her, he did not push her to confide in him. He was patient. He seemed content to let her make the first move.
The aunts and Clara and Alice had no such qualms. They had questioned Ava relentlessly over supper, although they were so good at it, so discreet at making inquiries in an offhand, roundabout way, that Ava did not realize until the interrogation was over that she had been thoroughly cross-examined. She was not one to spill her guts to strangers, yet in the space of less than an hour she had confessed much of her dysfunctional gypsy childhood, the fact that she had been raised without religion, had never known her father, had had a series of unfortunate love affairs, and although relatively well educated, had wound up in a job she detested. By the time they rose from the table, Ava felt as if she’d been prodded and poked by unseen fingers. She also felt that Josephine and Alice, in their subtle investigation of her past, had found her somewhat lacking.
“Through that door is a small office I thought you might use,” Will said, pointing to a door she had mistaken for a closet. It stood between the fireplace and a glass-fronted secretary filled with rows and rows of leather-bound books. The room they stood in was far grander than any bedroom Ava had ever slept in. A tall four-poster bed flanked by a mahogany armoire and a lowboy chest stood against one wall, opposite the fireplace. At one end, long shuttered windows overlooked the garden.
“Actually, I thought I might set my laptop up here,” Ava said, pointing to a table and a pair of leather chairs that stood in front of the windows.
“The light will be better,” he agreed. “And you’ll have a nice view of the garden.”
“Yes.” Ava strolled over, peering between the slats. She had noticed the wrought-iron fence when they came up the back steps, but in the dim light of early dusk she could see now that it surrounded a garden that was very wide and deep, set back from the side porch across a patch of lawn.
“Your great-aunts must have green thumbs,” Ava said. Swift black shapes flitted across the lawn. Bats, she thought.
“It’s mainly Clara. She loves to garden.”
“Oh?” She turned and looked at him in surprise. “Does she live here, too?”
“No. She lives in a cottage behind the property.” He set her laptop down on the table and stacked her books on one corner. “The closet is here,” he said, opening a corner cupboard. “It’s small, of course, because these old houses were built without closets. They were all added later.” He walked over and opened the door to the adjoining office. “Feel free to store anything you don’t need in here. My great-grandfather, Colonel James Woodburn, used it as an office. He was Josephine and Fanny’s father.”
She followed him into the narrow, paneled room. At one end a long window overlooked the garden and at the other end, a door opened into the center hallway of the house. An old-fashioned desk with a drop front and various cubbyholes stood along one wall, topped by a glass cabinet filled with large leather-bound books.
She was aware suddenly of the close atmosphere of the room and the fact that the two of them seemed to fill it so completely.
“It’s claustrophobic in here,” he said apologetically, stepping aside so she could edge her way over to the desk. “I hadn’t realized that. It was used as an office, although at one time I’m guessing it was a dressing room. I thought it would be a quiet place to write.”
She opened the cabinet and took out one of the books, realizing that they were journals, each with dates written in a flowing script.
“Those are the farm journals,” he said, “kept by the owners of Longford, the first Woodburns in the county. In those days farmers kept journals to use as guides for planting and harvesting.” Farm. Farmers. She noted how careful he was not to use the words plantation and planters.
The date on the first one read 1826. “Oh, my God,” she said, opening it reverently. “I can’t believe you have treasures like this just lying around.”
He grinned. “It’s my aunts’ doing, I’m afraid. The whole house is like a museum, but they won’t part with any of it. They like their old things around them.”
“I don’t blame them.”
“No?” he said, giving her a mocking, tender smile.
She peered intently at one of the entries, trying to read the archaic script. The words came suddenly into view, seeming to leap off the yellowed paper.
November 4th. Clear and cold. Commenced digging slips around 8 a.m. Got in 4 banks of leathercoats, pumpkin, Spanish and reds.
The baby was quite sick this morning. Gave her a little vitriol. Captain D. Sinclair stopped and took tea with me. Heard that James Fraser’s child died of scarlet fever.
“The ledgers used to be kept at Longford, but after Reconstruction the family moved into town. Longford was rented out to tenant farmers and that’s why the books were moved here.”
