Summer in the South

by Cathy Holton

  “I’m thinking you’re a very interesting guy.”

  He wouldn’t play anything for her but he did give her a CD, sliding it into her purse. “Listen to it later,” he said. “When I’m not around. And then give me your honest opinion.”

  They went back downstairs into the kitchen, which was the only room in the house that seemed to be undergoing renovation. The walls were stripped down to the lathing, and he had left the old brick of the fireplace exposed. A bank of dilapidated cabinets stood along the back wall, crowded beneath a window overlooking the porch and the distant fields.

  “This was added later by one of the tenants, and they did a terrible job,” he said, standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the jamb. “When the house was originally built, the kitchen was a separate building out back. They did that to prevent fires.”

  “When was it built?”

  “Randal started construction in 1806 and finished in 1810. There was an old log cabin just to the east of here where he lived until then. There’s nothing left now, just an indentation in the earth and what remains of an old stone fireplace. A group of archeology students from Harvard came down a couple of summers ago and excavated the site, as well as some of the other outbuildings. They found all kinds of interesting things: iron nails, buttons, broken pieces of pottery and china.”

  “I like the way you’ve left the brick exposed,” she said, running her fingers across the rough surface. She went over to the old farmhouse-style sink and flipped on the tap, letting the water run before shutting it off.

  “Are you thirsty?” he asked. “Would you like some lunch?”

  She turned and leaned against the sink, giving the kitchen a doubtful look. “Should we go back to town and pick something up?”

  He grinned and walked over to the back door, swinging it open. Outside on the porch was a table covered by a white linen tablecloth, set with a picnic lunch.

  A two-story white columned gallery ran across the back of the house. The bottom floor held a line of rocking chairs and several large pots of flowering plants, as well as the small table where Ava and Will sat enjoying their lunch. Beyond the scattered outbuildings a patchwork of rolling fields, hazy beneath the noonday sun, stretched beneath a wide blue sky.

  “This is delicious,” Ava said, chewing slowly with her eyes closed. She didn’t know what else to say. No one had ever made her a picnic lunch before.

  “Uncle Mait made the chicken salad,” he said. “It’s his grandmother’s recipe.”

  “He’s quite the gourmet chef.”

  “It’s his hobby, the way music is mine.” He had finished eating and sat watching her with a bemused expression, two fingers tapping softly against the table.

  Ava had been surprised that Maitland did most of the cooking. She would have expected a cook or a housekeeper in a house as large as Woodburn Hall, although perhaps Will was right; she had read too many English novels, had watched too many old movies. The aunts had a cleaning service that came once a week but Maitland prepared all the evening meals. He was addicted to the food channel, and would spend long hours watching Bobby Flay whip up Fried Chicken with Ancho Honey or Black Pepper Biscuits with Orange-Blueberry Marmalade. Josephine handled breakfast and lunch.

  “And the woman who lives behind the house?” Ava asked hesitantly.

  “Clara?”

  “Yes. Clara. She never worked for the aunts as a housekeeper or a cook?”

  He seemed surprised by her question, a faint frown appearing above his brow. “No. Clara grew up with the aunts. Her mother, Martha, was the cook and her father, John, was the chauffeur for their parents. But Clara was a schoolteacher.”

  “So Clara and her parents lived in the little yellow cottage behind the garden?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Clara and the aunts were girls together?”

  “Yes.”

  He stood and began to gather the dishes from the table. A shaft of sunlight illuminated his face, the strong chin, the fine clean line of his jaw. “When you’re finished,” he said, “there’s something I want to show you.”

  After lunch they packed the leftover food in the old Philco refrigerator and stacked the dishes in the sink.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said, and she followed him out the back door and across the yard to a small barn. The afternoon had warmed considerably, but there was an occasional breeze, and in the shade it was not unbearable.

  The old barn was filled with a treasure trove of discarded machinery and farm equipment. A tractor sat in one corner beneath a wall hung with various tools and gardening implements. Sunlight slanted through the weathered boards, hazy with pollen and dust. He walked over and pulled a plastic tarp off a monstrous four-wheeler.

  “Would you like to take a ride?” he said, and without a moment’s hesitation, she grinned and climbed on behind him.

  She had never ridden a four-wheeler before and so she was unprepared for how exhilarating it was, flying up and down the green rolling hills, the wind in her face, rolling along darkly forested trails. He was a cautious driver, taking just enough risks to make her scream with laughter without fearing that they might flip over. They roared through gullies and creeks, up steep inclines and down steeper ones. She held tightly to him, resting her face against his shoulder when the climb became too steep or perilous. He took her all the way around the boundaries so she could see how far Longford stretched. They climbed to the top of a small rise, where he switched off the engine and they sat for a while, enjoying the quiet. To their left rose a tall stand of forest. Birds sang in the brush, flitting through the gloom like brightly colored wraiths.

  Below them a wide field sloped down to a narrow wash before rising again to the distant ridge where the house sat. From this rear angle it did indeed look like Tara, with its white-columned gallery gleaming in the sun. The prospect was so pleasing that Ava couldn’t help smiling, having thought of Elizabeth Bennett’s comment upon being asked when she first loved Darcy. I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.

  “What’s so funny?” he said, leaning to one side so he could see her better.

  “Nothing.” She raised her hand and pointed to the far field, to a distant island of gravestones surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. “What’s that?” she said.

  “The family cemetery. Randal and Delphine and all of their children except for Isaac and Jerome are buried there.”

  At the bottom of the ridge, behind the house, she could see the place where the slave cabins once stood. A grassy gully ran behind the staked plots, the remains of an ancient drainage ditch. She wondered where the slaves were buried. She wouldn’t ask him. She had seen from his expression when she asked about Clara that race was not something openly discussed down here. She felt like a blind woman feeling her way along a rocky precipice. She would have to go slowly. She would have to learn to keep her mouth shut.

  He turned his head. “What do you think?”

  She could smell the scorched cloth scent of his T-shirt, the faint fragrance of his cologne. “I think it’s beautiful.”

  “Come on. There’s something else I want to show you.”

  And restarting the quad, he accelerated, and they headed down to the river.

  They rode for a while through the dappled woods until they came to a strip of sandy beach spread between a jumble of large boulders. It was at a bend in the river where the water widened and slowed.

  “My swimming hole,” he said, holding her arm so she could climb off the back.

  “Are there snakes?”

  “Probably.”

  He laughed at her expression. After a few minutes of awkwardness, they stripped down to their underwear, Ava flinging her clothes atop a flat boulder while Will folded his carefully. He took her hand and they walked to the edge of the water. He was very tanned, with a slight sprinkling of freckles across his shoulders. The fact that he was attractive had not registered with her in college. Caught
up in her dysfunctional relationship with Michael, she had hardly noticed what went on around her.

  He let go of her hand, grinning. “I’ll go in first and scare off the snakes.” He dived, a pale swift shape in the clear green water.

  She smiled, watching him surface.

  Amazing how a few years of maturity could change your view of the world.

  They swam for a while, laughing and splashing each other like exuberant children. He showed her which rocks were safe to jump from and which ones were to be avoided. Afterward they stretched out on their backs in the hot sand.

  “Do you come here often?” she asked him. She could feel the warmth of the sun creeping through her drowsy limbs.

  “Every day.”

  She turned her head and looked at him, shielding her face with one hand. “So what’s a typical day in the life of Will Fraser? I’m trying to figure out how you spend your time.”

  He kept his eyes closed, lying on his back. “It’s not that exciting. I rise pretty early, around seven o’clock, and then I work on the house until lunch. Then I spend a couple of hours in the studio before coming down here to swim. After that I get dressed and drive in to join the aunts and Maitland for Toddy Time.”

  “The life of a country gentleman. It sounds pretty idyllic to me.”

  He grinned. “It’s not too bad,” he said.

  “And do you do the work yourself? On the house, I mean.”

  “Some of it I subcontract but a lot of it I do myself. It’s a labor of love.”

  The sun had begun its slow plummet in the western sky. The edge of the beach was bathed in shade. Will sat up, resting his arms on his knees.

  “What about you?” he said. “What’s it like to be Ava Dabrowski?”

  “Endless boredom followed by moments of intense anxiety.”

  “Have you considered medication?”

  “Constantly.”

  She thumped him playfully on the back, and that’s how it began. He leaned and tickled her around her waist, and she laughed and squirmed, and he pulled her against him and kissed her. Perhaps it was the slumberous spell of Longford that made her return the kiss. Or perhaps it was gratitude for the wonderful day, the first she had spent in a long time not thinking about her mother.

  She didn’t mean for it to go any further than a kiss. Even now she could feel herself withdrawing, retreating.

  “I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good friendship,” she said.

  “We won’t.”

  She sighed. What she took for a mild flirtation, he would take for something else entirely. She knew this about him, could see it in his earnest expression, in the slight trembling of his hands. “Look, Will, I just got out of a bad relationship.”

  He let go of her. “I know that, Ava.”

  “I’m sorry if you thought …”

  “No. Of course not. It was my fault.” He rested his arms on his knees and stared at the glistening water, his hair curling damply against his ears.

  A row of tattered clouds sailed across the pink sky. She had not consciously planned for this to happen and yet she had known it might. She had known last night in the hallway when he touched her back.

  She slapped the sand off her legs. She had gone into the woods earlier and she now noticed several red welts around her ankles. “I hope I don’t show up at your aunts’ house with poison ivy on my ass. That might be hard to explain.”

  “You’re more likely to show up with chigger bites on your ass.”

  “What are chiggers?”

  “Blood-sucking insects the size of fleas that live in tall grass.”

  “Great,” she said. “Now you tell me.” She hoped things wouldn’t be awkward between them. She thought of everything she had given up to follow this dream. She couldn’t just turn around and go back to Chicago.

  As if to reassure her, he nudged her with his shoulder and she smiled in relief and said, “So tell me this, Will Fraser. How has a guy like you managed to stay single?”

  He stood and leaned to help her up. “I’m a sprinter,” he said. “No one can catch me.” His eyes were more blue than gray in the slanting light.

  “I’m sure they’ve tried,” she said. She grinned, tilting her head and tapping her chin with her fingers. “But wait, there was someone. I remember now. A fiancée. In college. Michael told me you were engaged, although I never met her. What happened?”

  His face changed suddenly; the happiness went out of it as swiftly as the falling of a curtain. Behind his head, a bank of feathery clouds drifted slowly across the sky.

  “We’d better go,” he said, turning and leaning to pick up his clothes. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

  He took her back to Woodburn Hall, staying for cocktails but not for supper. Ava felt wretched in the awkward silence that had fallen between them, wishing she could take back what she’d said about the fiancée. But later, when she was alone, getting ready for bed, she felt a quiver of anger. How was she to know that the broken engagement was a sore subject? It had happened eight years ago. Shouldn’t he be over it by now?

  She was always saying the wrong thing, always wounding male vanity in some small unintentional way. It was a pattern she had followed in all her previous relationships. She didn’t know how to talk to men, how to flatter. But then, why would she, when she had grown up without a father, when it had been only her and Clotilde against the world?

  She turned off the lamp and lay down in bed, listening to the sounds of the old house settling around her. Strands of moonlight pushed their way through the shutters. On the bedside table, the letter from the man purporting to be her father glimmered palely. She reached out and touched it with a tentative finger. She kept it there so that she could see it every evening when she went to bed and every morning when she woke up. The paper had gone frail and gauzy with her continued reading of it. I was so sorry to hear about your mother. She loved you very much. She had kept the envelope, too, turning it over and rereading the address until she had it memorized.

  All the time she was talking to Will on the phone and trying to decide whether to come south, she had been weighing what to do. He had signed his name, Frank. The envelope return address read, Frank Dabrowski, 1645 Hennipen Street, Garden City, Michigan. The father on her birth certificate was listed as Frank Dabrowski. It must be the same person.

  But how could she be sure? Would she know him if she saw him?

  She had the photograph she had found among her mother’s belongings, the one of Clotilde with a tall, long-haired boy. On the back of the photo, “Frank,” written in Clotilde’s beautiful script.

  By the time she accepted Will’s invitation to come south, she had decided.

  Before Ava headed south to Tennessee, she first took a detour to Garden City, Michigan. She took her time driving from Chicago to Detroit. The fields were flat and brown, still swollen with the spring rains. From time to time she passed a barn painted with a black-and-white portrait mural: Ben Franklin, Beethoven, Paul Revere.

  Ava had no recollection of her father; according to Clotilde, they had broken up not long after Ava began walking. “It was no big deal. He was a nice guy, but we just didn’t get along. He wanted someone who could stay put and I couldn’t. Besides, we figured it would be best for you, not being around all those bad vibes.” Ava would have liked a say in what was best for her, but she never got one. She stopped waiting soon after her tenth birthday for cards and Christmas presents that never came. When she was ten, Clotilde told her that Frank had been killed in an ice-fishing accident on the Detroit River. “He was drinking,” she said, “and fell into the fishing hole he’d cut. They found him later, several miles downriver, staring up through the ice.”

  They were living in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, at the time, house-sitting for a professor at the university where Clotilde had gotten a secretarial job. Clotilde had awakened one night to find Ava standing at the foot of her bed like an apparition, and when she swore and flipped on the lamp, Ava had stared
for a moment, and without a word, turned and walked back to her bedroom. The next morning she remembered nothing.

  “You scared me to death,” Clotilde said. “You were sleepwalking.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Ava said.

  But the episodes became more frequent. Clotilde would hear her padding through the house, or awaken to her small dark figure standing eerily beside the bed. And when they moved to a big Victorian house it was even worse, because then Clotilde would hear her walking up and down the tall staircase in the dark. Ava never stumbled, she never lost her footing, although if Clotilde flipped on the light she would stand like a zombie, and then, blinking, turn and head back to her room. She never said a word, never responded to questions, and in the morning she had no recollection of the episodes.

  Clotilde did what she always did when one of them was sick. She went to the health food store, bought a bunch of foul-tasting herbs, and brewed a tea that she made Ava drink daily.

  “Can’t I just see a doctor?” Ava asked belligerently.

  “The body will heal itself,” Clotilde said sweetly, “given the proper nutrients. If this doesn’t work we’ll try a hypnotherapist,” she added.

  For a while the sleepwalking episodes did become less frequent. But that was only because the disorder was changing, metamorphosing into something more terrible, as Ava discovered not long after their move to Indianapolis. She was in the seventh grade when she had her first attack of sleep paralysis and awoke to what she perceived as a room full of small dark men touching her arms and legs with long spidery fingers.

  This time Clotilde had no choice. She took Ava to a doctor.

  The doctor asked Ava if she began dreaming immediately upon falling into sleep and if she dreamed in color. Ava responded, “Yes.” Didn’t everyone?

  “Are you sleepy during the daytime?”

  “Of course,” Ava said.

  “Narcolepsy,” he said resolutely. “With symptoms of hypnogogic sleep paralysis.” He ordered a sleep study and put her on medication that made her nervous and forgetful, or dull and zombie-like, depending on the dosage.