Summer in the South

by Cathy Holton

  “If something works you don’t replace it.”

  “Yes, but I would have expected BMWs and Jaguars. Or chauffeur-driven limousines along the lines of Driving Miss Daisy.”

  He smiled and said gently, as if explaining something to a child, “You don’t draw attention to yourself. You aren’t flashy. It isn’t—polite.”

  Maitland was telling them tales of his Phi Delta Theta days up at Sewanee in that jovial manner he had, and they were all laughing because what else could you do but laugh when Maitland started in on one of his tales? He was the amiable grandfather everyone longed to have, a cross between Santa Claus and Colonel Sanders, a big, white-haired bear of a man who made his own mayonnaise and spoke in a nearly unintelligible dialect. Although, curiously, after the nearly two weeks that she’d been in Woodburn, Ava found that she was understanding more and more of Maitland’s speech, much like a child dropped suddenly into a strange culture eventually begins to understand the language.

  In addition to her fondness for Maitland, Ava had grown close to Fanny and Clara, too. They fussed over her like she was a child, making sure that she got enough to eat, that her room was comfortable, that her skin was protected when she went out into the sun. For the first time in her life, Ava felt pampered and spoiled.

  In the front seat Maitland continued his wild stories, accompanied by Fanny’s relentless giggling.

  Ava had asked Will once what Maitland did for a living and Will, after some hesitation, had replied vaguely that he “looked after his investments.” Will was very polite, yet he seemed to imply that she was being vulgar asking such a thing. He told her that Alice had inherited the family home, but Maitland had inherited the family money and Ava deduced that Maitland’s sole occupation in life seemed to be taking care of Fanny. Certainly they had traveled the world, as the wealthy so often do, and they had socialized with celebrities, as the many photographs lining the walls of the Woodburn house attested to.

  The cemetery sat up on a hill overlooking Woodburn. It was a pretty place, filled with large trees, shaded benches, and tall, mossy monuments. In the distance, the blue-gray ridges of the Cumberland Mountains rose against an endless sky. A narrow road wound its way past iron gates, bisecting the cemetery into old and new areas, and off this main road ran other less-traveled paths. The Woodburn plot was toward the back of the older section surrounded by an ornate iron fence that stood chest high.

  Maitland parked slightly off the road, got out, and went around to open the door for Fanny. He was always courtly and respectful in his treatment of her, and Fanny was always gracious and affectionate toward him. Their marriage seemed a testament to true love and devotion, and it made Ava wistful to see the care they took of each other. Their son, Sumner, may have been a disappointment to both of them, but they never spoke of him in other than tender terms; they kept whatever pain he had caused them private.

  Ava had overheard Josephine discussing Sumner with Clara and Alice, and she had gathered from their conversation that he was the family black sheep, although no one ever came right out and said why. He was an engineer for the state highway department and was married to a woman Fanny detested, someone who “hadn’t had Sumner’s advantages,” as Fanny euphemistically put it. (“White trash,” Will translated.) Sumner rarely visited the aunts but Fanny spoke to him by telephone every Thursday afternoon, calling him at his office so she wouldn’t have to talk to the trashy wife.

  Ava didn’t wait for Will to open her door; she climbed out, although he would have come around and opened it if she had sat patiently as Fanny did, if she had expected it of him. Like Maitland, his manners were impeccable; he opened doors for women, stood when they entered a room, performed all the small courtesies that modern women so often found archaic and chauvinistic, and yet in Will, perhaps because of his good looks and self-deprecating manner, these courtesies seemed charming.

  Fanny had brought enough flowers to fill a vendor’s cart, and when Maitland opened the trunk, she laughed in that airy way she had, and said, “Goodness, I’ll have to start using silk. They’re cheaper and they last longer, and you can’t tell the difference now!” She and Maitland were both formally dressed, he in a sports coat, good slacks, and a shirt and tie, and she in a black dress and low-heeled sandals.

  Ava and Will helped them carry the flowers and distribute them where Fanny indicated. She walked cheerfully among the gravestones, chirping like a little bird, and Ava was struck by how animated Fanny seemed here in this tragic place, almost like a girl at a school dance. After a while, Ava and Will wandered off to leave the elderly pair to their careful work.

  They strolled along the narrow paths, reading the headstones. The smell of rain was in the air; the sky gradually darkened. Behind them, Fanny and Maitland kept up a steady chatter.

  When they had walked far enough to not be overheard Ava said, “I always thought a Southern accent was a Southern accent, but really there are several different dialects. The aunts, Clara, and Alice all speak differently from some of the shopkeepers in town.”

  “They speak what used to be called ‘Old Nashville.’ ”

  “So you mean it’s a class difference?”

  He smiled indulgently but didn’t look at her. They had stopped at a tall monument that read Crawford in large carved letters.

  “But you and Fraser don’t speak ‘Old Nashville.’ I mean, you don’t talk like me, but you don’t talk like the aunts either.”

  “Really?” he said teasingly. “I don’t talk like you?”

  She threw a pinecone at him.

  “Unfortunately, the Old Nashville dialect is dying out.” He pulled her suddenly into his arms and began to mimic the aunts’ pleasant voices. “Why, Ava, my dear, how lovely you look this fine morning with your beautiful hair and your eyes the color of pecan shells.”

  She pinched his waist and he let her go. They walked along a tree-lined path, stopping at a stone that read, In memory of our dear daughter, Hester Anne, who fell asleep in Jesus, 12th April, 1882, aged 16 years. He hath done all things well.

  “Sixteen,” Ava said. “How sad.”

  “We forget how quickly people died back then. You could wake up in the morning feeling fine and be dead by sundown.” Behind his head a line of gray clouds drifted like smoke.

  “Speaking of history,” she said, as they began to walk again, “I’m curious. I was thinking about Clara and that little cottage she lives in behind your aunts’ house.”

  She had been sitting on the kitchen steps this morning, drinking a cup of coffee and marveling at the garden that stretched beside the house and half a block beyond. A narrow alley ran behind the garden and the carriage shed, bisecting the block, and on the other side of the alley sat Clara’s little yellow house. A paved street ran behind Clara’s house. It was odd that the cottage faced the back of Woodburn Hall and not the street. The significance of this had slowly dawned on Ava.

  “You said that Clara’s mother and father worked for your family. Has her family always lived in that house, the one that Clara lives in now?”

  “For generations. It was given to her ancestress, Hannah, by my ancestor Randal.” He was quiet for a moment as if considering how much to say. “Hannah married a freedman, a carpenter named McGann. They went to New Orleans and had three daughters, and when Hannah and McGann died, Randal went to New Orleans and got the three children and brought them back to Longford.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “They were orphans. They had nowhere else to go.”

  “That was generous of him.”

  “He was a generous man.”

  A sudden gust of wind rattled the leaves. The sky seemed to be descending, pressing against the tops of the tall trees.

  “Damn,” Will said. “I left my tools in the yard.”

  They could see Fanny and Maitland behind the iron fence, Fanny squatting beside a grave and Maitland standing above her. She was laughing at something he’d said. They had started at one end of the Woodb
urn plot and were making their way slowly among the headstones, stooping to remove dead flowers and replace them with live ones.

  “They seem made for each other,” Ava said. She and Will were sitting on a bench under a spreading oak tree. The sky was ominous but the rain was holding off. “I’ve never seen two people more in love.”

  Will seemed to have fallen into some kind of brooding introspection. He had his eyes closed, leaning his head back against the trunk of the old tree. “They grew up together,” he said. “They were childhood sweethearts. The Sinclairs and the Woodburns have been neighbors for generations.”

  “Well, theirs seems a love match. I can imagine that that didn’t always happen when there was money involved. I’m sure there were plenty of arranged marriages in those days.”

  He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. It was apparent from his expression that he thought she was being vulgar again. “The Woodburns don’t have money. Not anymore, anyway.”

  “Oh, come on,” Ava said. “With that incredible house filled with all those historical treasures? The stuff alone must be worth millions.”

  “If they sold it.”

  “Right.”

  He opened his eyes and tilted his head forward, regarding her intently. “But you see, that’s the thing, they never would. It’s been in the family for generations, and they’d never sell any of it, no matter how much money it would bring. How do you put a value on a silver goblet once touched by your great-great-grandmother’s hands?”

  Ava tried, for a moment, to understand this, but it was difficult. She’d been raised to travel light. Material possessions, her mother had tried to teach her, were not important. They were not important when you’d never had any, but Ava imagined that it would be quite different if you had.

  “They’re caretakers,” Will said. “They’ve kept it together through flood, and tornadoes, and war. That’s how they look at it. And that’s why Sumner is left out of Fanny’s will, because they know he’ll break it up into pieces, all that family history, and sell it off bit by bit.”

  “So they’re leaving everything to you?”

  “God, I hope not.” He leaned forward, rolling his shoulders and resting his elbows on his knees, letting his hands dangle. “There’s been some talk of donating the house and most of the collection to the State Historical Society. They’d turn it into a museum, and that way everything couldn’t be sold off piecemeal.”

  “Would you want that?”

  He looked down at his feet. “It’s a lot of responsibility, caring for all that history. I’d rather it go to the museum so my children and grandchildren can come and look at it together in one place the way it was meant to be.”

  Ava said, “Your children?”

  He turned his head, grinning at her. “All twelve of them.”

  “I knew you were a masochist.”

  “I’ve always wanted a large family.” He hesitated, still looking at her. “How about you?”

  She shook her head. A faint breeze stirred her hair. “I have enough trouble just looking after myself,” she said.

  Ava had never thought seriously about having children. She had spent her entire adolescence fantasizing about being on her own, about having only herself to care for. Being Clotilde’s daughter had made her like that.

  All the girls she met in school were enamored of her mother. They developed crushes on her, imitated the way she talked, the way she laughed.

  “Your mother is so young,” they said. “She dresses like we do.”

  They didn’t understand that having a mother who was more like a sister than a mother was a hard burden to bear. Who took on the adult responsibilities when the adult wasn’t willing, or capable? Who worried whether the bills would get paid, who made excuses to the landlord? Ava did.

  “You’re an old soul,” Clotilde always said to Ava as she stood wringing her hands in the doorway. “But you need to lighten up. You need to learn to trust in the universe.”

  But where was the universe when the rent came due? When the car needed repairs or the utility company came to shut off the lights?

  Ava was ten when she realized completely and irrevocably that Clotilde wasn’t like other mothers, would never be like other mothers. It was parents’ night at one of the many schools Ava had attended over the years they spent on the run. Clotilde sailed in wearing a short, brightly colored dress, and all the other mothers, sedate and matronly, took one look at her and closed ranks. Clotilde laughed her tinkling laugh and said to Ava, “Show me where you sit,” as if it was some kind of game they were playing. She smiled brightly at the fathers, who smiled back, their foreheads glistening with sweat.

  “Is that someone’s mother?” a voice behind her hissed, and Ava felt a sudden wash of shame so intense she thought she might be sick. There was something wrong with Clotilde, as she had always suspected. She saw her mother then as the others must see her: Clotilde’s too-short dress, her hair that fell in thick waves down her back, her pale lipstick, her reckless, absurd little laugh. Why could she not have thick ankles and doughy legs like the other mothers, women who rose every morning to make their children hot breakfasts before bundling them off to school? Mothers who put down roots and built nests and made sure their children never had to worry about lunch money or overdrawn bank accounts?

  As a small child Ava had seen her mother as a playmate, someone always ready with a story or a bit of fun, but now that she stood on the cusp of adulthood she saw Clotilde as a continuous source of humiliation and embarrassment. She was just so different.

  Clotilde didn’t seem to feel embarrassed at all. She laughed and twittered and smiled at all the adoring children and fathers who gathered around her like bees around a fragrant flower.

  Flighty. Ava would later read the word in a book and understand instantly that it described her mother.

  Later that same year Clotilde went to the hospital for a hysterectomy and Ava stayed with a neighbor, a staid, sedate spinster. A librarian. They ate microwave dinners on metal trays in front of the TV, and Ava slept on the sofa. The apartment was dark and dank, and it smelled of cat. But everything was tidy. Everything was in its place, the lace doilies on the backs of the chairs, the dishtowel on its little hook, the silk flowers in the middle of the kitchen table.

  “It’s a shame,” the librarian said that first night, tucking Ava in. “Your mother is a young woman and now she won’t have any more children.”

  She said it with a peculiar expression on her face, a faraway look of longing and loss, and Ava understood that the woman was mourning her own childlessness. Ava pictured Clotilde lying bandaged head to toe in a hospital bed, and she felt a sudden pang of homesickness for her mother and for the lost siblings she would never have.

  But even then, it was her own loss she was thinking of. It would have been nice to have someone to share the burden of her childhood with, a playmate, an ally, a witness.

  Fanny had almost finished in the family plot. There was only one grave left to decorate, tucked away in the corner beneath a small neat headstone. She stepped forward, holding a bouquet of delphiniums against her breast. Maitland followed her but she lifted her hand and waved him away, and something in her dismissive manner, in the respectful way he dipped his head and stepped back, made Ava ask, “Whose grave is that?”

  “Charlie Woodburn’s.”

  “Who is Charlie Woodburn?”

  “Her first husband.”

  Ava watched as Fanny tenderly plucked the dead flowers from the vase on top of the grave and replaced them with fresh ones. There was something in her slow, imposing movements that made Ava think again of icebergs. Everyone thought the South a land of jovial, open-faced people but there was much here that was hidden away, dark and dangerous.

  “Fanny was married before Maitland?” she said. “No one told me that.”

  “We don’t talk about it.”

  At his tone, Ava swiveled her head and looked at him. An insect
whined in her ear. A ridge of swiftly moving clouds hung over the distant mountains. “But Maitland and Fanny were childhood sweethearts. You said so yourself.”

  “Yes, they were.” Will sighed, as if realizing she wasn’t going to let this go. “But then Fanny met Charlie Woodburn up at Vanderbilt and they eloped against the family’s wishes. It was a painful time. That’s why we never discuss him. That’s why there aren’t any photos of him in the house.”

  “What happened to Charlie?”

  “He died.”

  “How?”

  “I believe he drowned.”

  “And then after she was widowed, Fanny married Maitland?”

  “After a while, yes. After Sumner was grown.”

  She looked at him in astonishment. “So Sumner was Charlie’s son?”

  “Yes.”

  Ava was quiet for a moment, considering this. There was something here, she could feel it, something in the way Maitland had stepped away contritely to let Fanny tend the grave, something in Will’s reticence to speak of the matter. She, of all people, recognized evasion when she saw it. She said, “Charlie’s name was Woodburn?”

  He hesitated, looking at his hands. “Yes,” he said finally.

  “So he was related to your family?”

  “Fanny and Charlie were very, very distant cousins. He came from a different branch of the family from Josephine and Fanny and me.” He took her hand, trying to draw her against him, but she resisted.

  “Come here,” he said mildly.

  “She must have loved him very much to have tended his grave all these years. The father of her only child. A man she was willing to run away with against her family’s wishes.”

  He let go of her hand. It was obvious that he was unwilling to speak further of Charlie Woodburn. But Ava had a stubborn, perverse streak, and once her curiosity was aroused there was no stopping it. She said, “I understand Fanny not wanting to talk about him, but what about the rest of you? Why so secretive?”

  His expression changed then, became flat and distant as it had that day at the river. “Because that’s what families do,” he said coldly. “We keep each other’s secrets.”