Summer in the South

by Cathy Holton

  He rose and walked off toward the Woodburn plot. She watched him go, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his shoulders rounded as if against a cold wind at his back. She had always been a watcher, a chronicler of other peoples’ lives.

  It was easier sometimes to guess at other peoples’ secrets than it was to face her own.

  All the way home from the cemetery, Maitland and Fanny chattered as if they’d just come from a cocktail party. Will stared moodily out his window. No one mentioned Charlie Woodburn.

  Ava put her forehead against the glass, aware of Will’s silent brooding presence beside her. She felt that she had disappointed him. He had given her the chance to be incurious, deferential, and she had failed. She would always fail. Perhaps he was realizing this now as he had not realized it before, with fatal certainty and clarity.

  The storm, which had held off all morning, finally broke. In the front seat Maitland and Fanny chattered and teased each other like a pair of young lovers, as if they were the only two people in the world. Ava tried to picture Fanny as a girl, running off with a handsome scoundrel and leaving Maitland to nurse a broken heart. It was hard to imagine.

  When they arrived at the house, the rain was falling steadily. Josephine had made a quick lunch of tuna sandwiches and sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and afterward, she and Fanny and Maitland went upstairs to lie down for a siesta while Ava and Will cleaned up the kitchen. He was quiet but humorously attentive. Whatever disappointment he might have felt in her at the cemetery had obviously been tidied and put away. Smiling, he promised to take her four-wheeling tomorrow before Alice’s party.

  Alice Barron was throwing a barbecue so that Ava could meet some of the “right people.” “And I promise they won’t all be as old as Methuselah like the rest of us,” she had assured Ava. She was standing in the library holding a Gin Rickey in her hand when she said this, surrounded by the afternoon cocktail crowd. It was a few days after Ava first met Fraser Barron and learned more than she cared to know about Edgar Allan Poe.

  When they had finished in the kitchen, Ava and Will walked together out onto the back porch. The rain had diminished to a fine drizzle. Ava crossed her arms over her chest and followed him down the steps.

  “Do we really have to go to this barbecue?” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows in mock alarm. “You’re the guest of honor. Unofficially, of course.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  He laughed. “It won’t be bad, I promise. They aren’t going to run you out of town on a rail if they don’t like you.”

  “That’s encouraging.”

  He kissed her and walked out into the yard. “I’ll be back at Toddy Time. Try to get some writing done,” he said, and walked off whistling.

  It was easier said than done.

  She spent the next half hour observing the contents of her room, and then she went online and checked her messages, spending nearly an hour writing emails. Finally, with an act of sheer will, she signed off and pulled up a new file on her screen. She sat for a long time staring at the glaring brightness of the empty page.

  The trees outside the window were filled with a silvery light, and the sky beyond was a vivid glaring white. The rain had stopped, and in the noonday heat, the landscape seemed still and slumberous. Ava forced her attention back to her computer and wrote “I watched as my mother’s boyfriend spread a map on the kitchen table. ‘Pick a spot, any spot,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Wherever you choose is where we’ll move, kid.’ ”

  She sat back in disgust, massaging her forehead with her fingers as if to loosen the words she knew lay buried there. They stayed blocked, awaiting some magical incantation from her, some spell. She could see now why well-known authors were often alcoholics, why they used stimulants and alcohol to force the flow of words, to entice their muses like children leaving cookies for Santa Claus.

  The idea of writing a coming-of-age novel about a girl and her flighty mother, which had seemed so brilliant in Chicago, now seemed sentimental and unmanageable. What had she been thinking? Every word she wrote felt like a guilty confession, personal and humiliating, as if she was exposing herself, naked, to the world. She would have to begin again, writing this time from a third-person perspective to distance herself from the main character, Lorna.

  She let her eyes wander about the room, coming to rest finally on the copy of Rebecca she had found in the library. It was leaning against the lamp on the bedside table where Ava had left it. She had read Du Maurier as a girl, had spent one whole summer entranced by the Cornish coast with its windswept halls and lonely ghosts. She rose, went over, and opened the book, reading one random passage after another. Du Maurier made it look easy.

  “It isn’t easy,” she said to Clotilde, who watched impassively from the mantel. She had never known Clotilde to suffer from writer’s block. All her stories had begun with, “Once there was a girl,” or “In the middle of a dark wood there lived a witch/troll/ogre,” and from there they’d spooled out with ease.

  Ava went back to her computer, rereading what she had written, and then deleting it. She sat staring at her screen, trying to imagine Lorna and her mother, Margaret, but all she could see was herself and Clotilde. After a while even those images flickered and petered out. It was no use. The words wouldn’t come.

  The only other novel she’d ever attempted had been a rambling historical romance that she’d never finished. Perhaps she’d been kidding herself all along about being a writer.

  She yawned and lay down on the bed. She felt limp, discouraged, devoid of all energy and ambition, as if the heat and humidity had combined into some kind of unseen entity that was slowly draining her of life.

  The bed was soft and fragrant. The room was cool and quiet.

  She slept.

  When she awoke nearly two hours later she was surprised at the length of time she’d slept. It was one of the symptoms of her sleep disorder that her dreams were always vivid and in full color. She’d been dreaming again of water, cold and deep and green. Only this time there’d been a bridge of lacy ironwork and, in the sky above it, a silvery moon that filled the sky with light. There was a sense of melancholy and loss about the dream, and she found herself in a blue mood when she arose, dispirited and irritable. She went into the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water and then combed her hair. That helped a little. She could hear Fanny, Maitland, and Josephine out on the side verandah, the distant murmur of their voices interspersed with periodic laughter.

  Through the long windows of her bedroom she could see Clara in the garden, trimming roses. She hesitated a moment, then turned and walked down the wide hallway and out the back door. The sky was a hazy blue. As she walked across the grass she could see Clara’s hat moving slowly along the curved wrought-iron fence separating the garden from the front lawn.

  The garden ran parallel to the house and was surrounded on three sides by a tall wrought-iron fence covered in trailing vines. Along the back, facing Clara’s little yellow cottage, ran a boxwood hedge, and in the far corner equidistant between Clara’s house and the Woodburn house stood a columned pergola covered in wisteria. The garden beds were set out in rectangular patterns, with masses of flowering shrubs and perennials along the front and side, facing the street and the house, and neat rows of vegetables on the interior. A raised bed of herbs stood in the corner closest to the kitchen. A series of stone paths crisscrossed the garden, with small wooden benches scattered throughout, and in the corner closest to the pergola stood an old oak tree, its massive limbs providing a shady respite from the summer heat. An ornamental pond filled with goldfish and a small fountain curved along one side of the pergola and filled the garden with a pleasant splashing sound.

  “Hello,” Clara called when she saw her, stopping to wipe her forehead with the back of one gloved hand.

  “You know it’s nearly Toddy Time,” Ava said to her.

  Clara made a dismissive gesture toward the house. “Some days I make it and some days I don’t,”
she said.

  “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of cocktail hour in the Bible Belt,” Ava said, falling into step beside her.

  Clara chuckled. “It was different back when we came of age. During Prohibition everybody drank.”

  “Did the aunts’ father drink?”

  “The Colonel? Oh, no. Not him.” She shook her head. “He was a very upright old gentleman, very proper and well-mannered. He wouldn’t allow so much as a drop of brandy in his house. It was the girls, Josephine and Fanny, who learned to drink up at Vanderbilt and then brought the habit home with them. And later, after he died, and it was just the three of them shut up in the house, then the parties got so wild.” She stopped for a moment, staring at the house, her eyes distant with the murky vision of the past.

  “The three of them?” Ava said. “You mean Josephine, Fanny, and Celia.”

  Clara startled, picking up the shears from the basket she carried on her arm. “No, not Celia. She’d gone to live with a cousin after her papa’s death.”

  “Who then?”

  Clara hesitated. “Charlie,” she said.

  “Charlie Woodburn? Fanny’s first husband?”

  “Yes.” She’d stopped to clip one of the pink roses growing along the fence, and Ava was hopeful that she’d continue with her story of Charlie but instead she held up the rose for Ava to sniff. “Souvenir de la Malmaison. Isn’t it lovely? It’s a bourbon rose named by Empress Josephine from specimens sent back by Napoleon.”

  “It smells wonderful. The whole garden smells wonderful.”

  “That’s because it was planned so that the prevailing winds would blow the fragrance toward the house.”

  “Really?” Ava knew nothing about gardening, recognizing only a few of the flowers she saw.

  “See,” Clara said, pulling forward the tip of a shrub covered in white flowers. “Tea olive. And this is myrtle, and this is mock orange.” Ava obediently sniffed each of the plants Clara indicated, murmuring her approval. “And here in this bed are the peonies and the pinks and the sweet violets.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Clematis,” Clara said. “Although you shouldn’t touch it because it causes skin irritation for some people.” Ava quickly drew her hand away. “And of course you know that foxglove and nightshade are poisonous, as well as all varieties of rhododendron and azalea.”

  “I guess that explains why you wear gloves when you garden,” Ava said, and Clara chuckled, bending above a pot of sweet peas and marigolds. Ava trailed behind her, working up the courage to speak. There was so much she wanted to ask about Charlie, and it had occurred to her that Clara might be willing to talk, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure how to start. Finally she began, blurting out portions of their strange trip to the cemetery. When she finished Clara was quiet, clipping shoots off the branches of an old gardenia. Ava knew from Clara’s silence that she had blundered, but her curiosity got the better of her. “So who was he? This Charlie Woodburn.”

  Clara continued snipping, and then said quietly, “He was a man best forgotten.”

  “So he was a bad person?” When Clara didn’t answer Ava said, “How did he die?”

  Clara eyed her from under the brim of her straw hat. “What did Will say?”

  “He says he drowned.”

  “Well, then,” Clara said, sliding her shears into her basket. “I guess he drowned.”

  Ava walked to the end of a row of summer squash and stood staring at Clara’s yellow cottage, visible through an opening in the tall hedge. She had been schooled in the art of listening. Clotilde had had a knack for befriending lonely people, and it was not unusual for Ava to come home for dinner to find a stranger seated at the table. Sometimes they were neighbors and sometimes they were people she had found God knows where. The thing Ava had learned listening to old people talk was that their age allowed them a particular farsightedness when it came to examining their own lives. They could look back with the benefit of regret and experience and see where they’d gone wrong. They could say, “I should have done that,” or “It was wrong that I did that,” with a cold, clear certainty.

  It was for this reason that she knew that once she got Clara talking about Charlie Woodburn, she would find out the truth about who he was and what had happened to him. But it was getting Clara started that was going to be the problem.

  “It was more than sixty years ago,” Ava said. “I don’t understand why no one wants to talk about it.”

  “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, down here we say ‘You don’t have to be a chicken to know a rotten egg.’ ”

  Ava turned around and looked at her. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means some things are best left forgotten.”

  “But nothing ever stays forgotten. It just festers.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” Clara said, shading her eyes with one hand and gazing up at the house. “Down here, denial is always best.”

  That night Ava had an episode of sleep paralysis.

  She was tired; she had slept poorly the night before, waking several times to find the room flooded in moonlight. On this evening she awakened three times, the last time to a feeling of dread so pervasive she couldn’t move, lying in terror, her body heavy and stiff, her mind agile and fully awake. From somewhere deep in the house she could hear a clock ticking, and she forced herself to concentrate on the steady rhythmic sound as the therapist had taught her to do, drowning out the unreal sensations with the real.

  Gradually the thumping of her heart subsided. She lay on her back and stared at the moonbeams rippling across the ceiling. After a while she found that she could move her eyes, and so she did, shifting them to the left and feeling her heart clutch again in horror.

  Someone was sitting in the chair beside the window, a tall, dark figure, smoking.

  After that, she switched on the lamp and lay in bed, rigid with terror, until falling into a restless sleep sometime after four o’clock. When she awoke again it was morning and sunlight flooded the room. In the cheerful light of day it was often difficult to remember the terror of the night before. She felt that old familiar dread, curled in her stomach like an embryo. The episode last night, coming so soon on the heels of the other nightmares, left her feeling uneasy and apprehensive. It had been years since she had suffered from nightmares and waking hallucinations, and yet now, in the space of less than three weeks, she had suffered two narcoleptic events.

  She hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come.

  Twins

  The last thing Ava wanted to do was attend a party with a group of strangers, especially one that included the “right people,” but she knew Alice Barron’s barbecue was not something she could avoid. She was very nervous, knowing she would be on display: Will Fraser’s Yankee friend come south for the summer.

  “I hope I don’t get drunk and make a spectacle of myself,” Ava said.

  “Whatever you do, don’t drink too much,” Will cautioned. “And don’t drink any of those local cocktail creations. Stick to beer or wine.” For some reason he seemed as nervous as she was.

  He picked her up around ten o’clock on Saturday morning to take her out to Longford and then brought her back to Woodburn Hall to get ready around three o’clock. She was hot and tired, and she had a rash on her arms from the hay. They had spent the morning riding around the farm on the four-wheeler and then had a picnic lunch down by the river. Afterward they had gone swimming. It was when they were putting away the four-wheeler that the trouble began.

  Sleepy from the sun and the swimming, Ava sat down in a pile of hay to wait for Will while he covered the quad with its tarp. She curled on her side and closed her eyes in the heat. She opened them later at the sound of rustling hay as he lay down beside her. He had mistaken her drowsy posture as an invitation.

  She sat up. “Will. Stop.”

  He lay back
with his arms behind his head, gazing rigidly at the ceiling.

  “You’re very sweet.”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “It’s not you,” she said. “It’s me.”

  When she came through the back door at Woodburn Hall, irritable and tired, Josephine looked at her as if she knew very well what Ava had been up to out at Longford. She and Fanny were sitting at the breakfast room table while Maitland leaned across the kitchen counter in front of the television set, writing down Food Channel recipes on a yellow legal pad.

  “There she is!” Fanny said brightly as Ava came in.

  “Hey there, Sugar,” Maitland said, glancing up briefly from his legal pad and giving her a broad wink.

  “We were all getting ready to go upstairs and dress for the barbecue,” Josephine said, looking her over.

  Ava pushed her damp hair off her face. “What should I wear?” she asked. “What’s the dress code?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, anything that’s comfortable, I guess,” Fanny said breezily. But then she went on endlessly about how pretty sundresses were on young women and Ava, taking the hint, tried to remember if she’d brought one. She had learned, in the short time she’d been here, that no one ever came right out and spoke directly. There were always hints and vague suggestions, double entendres and Freudian slips that were meant to be taken literally so that when you carried on a conversation, you had to listen not only to what was said but also to the tone and, through slight facial expressions, to what was implied.

  Ava had a scratchy feeling in her throat. She put one finger to her nose, warding off a sudden sneeze.

  “God bless you!” Fanny cried.

  Josephine stared at Ava’s waist and, looking down, Ava saw several pieces of hay caught beneath the waistband of her shorts.

  Behind them Maitland said, “We can’t be out late tonight. Bobby Flay’s making Cedar Plank Salmon.”

  Ava sneezed again.