by Cathy Holton
“Goodness!” Fanny said.
“Hay fever,” Josephine said mildly.
The heat of midday had begun to wane, and the sky was a violet color as they walked across the lawn to the party. Behind Alice’s large house a brick barbecue grill belched smoke, and along one end of the patio, beside the pool, a long buffet table stood covered by a white cloth. The lawn was dotted with round tables and canvas chairs like a wedding party, Ava thought curiously. There was a large crowd already gathered on the lawn, and as they approached several people stepped forward to greet Will and be introduced to Ava. They were very friendly and kind, but there were so many of them, and Ava knew she’d never remember all of their names. Maitland and Will went off to find drinks, and Ava let herself be shepherded from group to group by Josephine and Fanny. In spite of the crowd’s friendliness Ava was nervous; she felt herself the object of much sly and murmuring attention, and she was thankful when Will returned and thrust a glass of red wine into her hand.
He whispered in her ear, “All right?” and she said, “Yes.”
He introduced her to a group of his prep school buddies and their wives. A young woman in a faux tuxedo came around to get their drink orders.
“I’ll have another Donnie Miller,” a man in plaid shorts said.
“Me, too.”
“Make that three.”
“What’s a Donnie Miller?” Ava said.
Everyone laughed politely.
“It’s a homegrown cocktail,” the man in plaid replied. “Whipped up by one of Woodburn’s finest.” He put his arm around a sandy-haired man in wire-rim glasses.
“Hey,” the man said, stepping forward and putting his hand out to Ava. “I’m Donnie.”
“Donnie Miller?”
“That’s right.”
“Wow,” Ava said. “I’ve never met anyone with a cocktail named after them.”
“Well, in the South, if you’re lucky, you get either a cocktail or barbecue sauce named after you.”
“Here,” one of the women said, handing her glass to Ava. “Try it.”
It was very sweet and very fruity. “It’s good,” Ava said. “What’s in it?”
“Rum,” Donnie said. “Two kinds. And lemonade. Orange juice. Peach nectar.”
“I’ll have one of these,” Ava said, holding the drink up and smiling at the waitress, already forgetting Will’s warning not to drink the local cocktails.
The sun had begun to set, and long shadows lay across the lawn. A scent of citronella drifted on the warm air. Ava found herself entranced by the scene, the smoky globes of candlelight on the tables, the softly glowing Japanese lanterns dangling from the branches of the trees like golden fruit, the gradual fall of dusk across the landscape. It was her favorite time of day, she’d discovered, that point where day met night and everything grew still. Will had told her that as a boy he’d run barefoot through the summer dusk with the neighborhood children, scooping fireflies into mason jars and playing flashlight tag when it grew too dark to see. It had sounded so idyllic, so perfect a childhood that Ava had felt a stir of envy.
She drifted over to a group of young matrons wearing sundresses and stacked-heel sandals that showed off their lean, tanned legs, and Ava realized now why Josephine had indicated, by her tacit refusal to look at Ava’s feet, disapproval of her flat, boyish sandals. The women were friendly and close to her in age, but most had been no farther than the University of Alabama, and they talked of sorority events and babies and au pair girls until Ava, growing bored, excused herself and walked off.
In the trees, the cicadas made a pleasant chorus. Ava settled herself under a crape myrtle, where she could sip her drink and watch the crowd unnoticed.
Woodburn was broken up into social classes that resembled Victorian England. At the very top were the old families, those who had been intermarrying for generations, the first settlers who came originally from Virginia or Maryland, and before that, England or Scotland. They sent their sons to boarding school and private colleges, and presented their daughters annually at debutante balls in Nashville, Atlanta, and Birmingham.
This class was presided over by a group of sharp-eyed dowagers who Will cheerfully referred to as “the dreadnoughts,” women who could recite pedigrees and family lineages down to the smallest and most trivial detail. They could look at a child and know if he was a Robinson or a Sinclair; they kept an almost-encyclopedic memory of family traits, ailments, and characteristics—the “Whaley nose,” the “Eldridge forehead,” the “Clairmont tendency toward suicide.” Josephine, Fanny, and Alice were clearly of this class.
“So you mean they could pick you out of a lineup because of your nose?” Ava had asked Will. “Even if they didn’t know you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s fascinating.”
“I used to long to live in a big city where no one knew who I was, where I could blend in like everybody else. Be one of the masses.”
“Trust me, you wouldn’t like being one of the masses.”
Ava hadn’t liked it either. In high school she had developed a careless, impertinent facade, a biting, caustic wit that made her popular with her peers but less so with their parents, who always asked the same tired questions.
“What was your last name again?”
“Dabrowski.”
“Where are you from?”
“All over.”
“What does your father do?”
“He’s dead.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s not.”
Their questions seemed sly, cunning assaults on her carefully constructed adolescent self. She felt their disapproval but couldn’t dispute it. She didn’t much like who she was either.
How much better to be a sweet, generous girl like Margaret Stanley, with her big house and carefree, loaded parents; her mother with her furs and martinis, her father with his grass-stained golfing pants. A world of safety and ease.
The Woodburn sisters would have known that same world. It was easy to picture them as girls, pretty and spoiled, going off to dances at the country club, letting well-bred young men rest their damp hands on their narrow, corseted waists.
She could see Fanny and Josephine now, standing in a group of other dreadnoughts across the lawn. Ava sighed and sipped her Donnie Miller. It was difficult to imagine herself growing up in such a world, freed from the constraints and worries of ordinary life.
Across the lawn, Will caught her eye and raised his glass. She smiled and raised hers in return, a glimmer of hopeful optimism stirring suddenly in her chest. He looked so handsome and sincere standing there in the lamplight. Perhaps she had been wrong about him. Already she could feel herself beginning to soften.
“Ava!” She turned to find Fraser Barron advancing quickly across the grass. He was wearing a maroon vest over a white shirt, rolled at the elbows, and a pair of dark pants and leather boots. Ava was struck again by the odd way he moved, like a wind-up toy or a slightly misfiring mechanical device.
“I love your dress,” he said. He took her drink from her, set it down, and took her hands in his, motioning for her to spin around.
“Thanks,” she said. “I think I blew it on the shoes, though. I’m the only woman in flats.”
He crossed his arms in front of him, then rested his chin in the palm of one hand, regarding her thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “The shoes don’t do the dress justice.”
“And you look very—literary.”
“Do I?” he said, pleased, adjusting the rolled sleeves.
“But aren’t you hot in all those clothes?”
“No, that’s the amazing thing, you get used to it. When I first started dressing like this I used to sweat like a whore in church.” He giggled. “But over time I got used to it and now I hardly perspire at all.” He was wearing mascara and a slight smudge of eye shadow. “What’s that you’re drinking?”
“A Donnie Miller.”
“Oh, God, don’t drink that swill.” He took
her glass and dashed the contents on the ground. “You need a real drink at your debut, honey, and not one of those fruity-fruity, sweety-sweet things.” He beckoned for a waitress and told her to bring two vodka martinis.
“My debut?” Ava said.
“Didn’t you know you were coming out?” Fraser made dramatic sweeping gestures at the crowd. “You’re Will Fraser’s friend and you’re being introduced to society. You’re having what we like to call a debut.”
“Does that make me a debutante?”
“Of course.”
“I always wondered what that felt like.”
“Well?” He raised one eyebrow rakishly. “What does it feel like?”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I finish the vodka martini.”
“See,” he said. “You’re a natural.”
Later, he tucked one arm under hers and propelled her across the lawn to an empty table. “I hear you’re a fiction writer,” he said in a low voice.
Ava smiled wryly and sipped her drink. “I’m trying.”
“Well, you’re in the right place. My God, the stories I could tell you—madness, murder, unrequited love, ghostly apparitions.”
“Ghostly apparitions?” Ava said.
He waved at someone he knew, then leaned close to her, ducking his chin like a conspirator. “They’re all haunted,” he said, “each and every house along this street. You know how it is when people have lived and died in a place for more than two centuries. Now, some of the ghosts are more pleasant than others, of course. We have, excuse me, we had, one of the nastier ones. The Captain.” He shivered dramatically and took a long pull from his drink. “He rode with Forrest during the War of Northern Aggression.”
“The War of Northern Aggression?”
“The Civil War.”
“Oh. Right.”
“He was a truly despicable character, despite the fact that he was one of my revered ancestors, rumored to have beaten the help and, of course, he was there during the Fort Pillow massacre. Anyway, I used to see him when I was a child. I’d be playing in my room and I’d feel a brush of cold air and all the hair would rise along my arms and I would know he was there. He didn’t scare me at first—children don’t question such things—but I could tell he wasn’t a pleasant thing, and after a while I didn’t want him around. Mother didn’t mind, of course; she said he was family and we mustn’t be ashamed of him, but we mustn’t talk of him in public either. No airing of the family linen and all that rot. As I got older I saw him less and less.
“And then Mother remodeled the kitchen and one of the upstairs bedrooms, the room where the Captain used to sleep—she made it into a bathroom—and when they opened the walls, they found old whiskey bottles and French postcards hidden there, the old perv. Then things really got crazy. Pictures flying off walls, the workmen’s tools being moved, faucets turning off and on by themselves. Let me tell you this: if someone was spiteful in life, you can be sure they’ll be spiteful in death!
“After a while the contractors all quit and Mother was so afraid that it would get out, that people would be talking about the family, as if every family on this street doesn’t have their own ghosts to deal with.” He sipped his drink and rolled his eyes as if expecting her to acknowledge the truth of this statement. “Anyway, after college I had this friend who lived in Atlanta. He was an architect and he’d had a lot of experience remodeling old houses and chasing off the family ghosts, so he arranged for a psychic he knew to come to the house when Mother was away and do a cleansing. And after that everything stopped. It stopped just like that.” He snapped his fingers to emphasize his point. “And do you know what Mother did? A few weeks after things got quiet she said, ‘I miss the Captain,’ all sad and depressed, as if she wasn’t grateful at all that I’d gotten rid of him. But I can tell you when her damn Wedgwood plates were flying off the shelves she didn’t miss the Captain!”
Ava was quiet for a moment, sipping her drink, and then she said, “Is Woodburn Hall haunted?”
“Oh, yes. By the Gray Lady. Supposedly, she’s the ghost of Delphine Woodburn. She walks up and down the stairs in a long black dress. She was always mourning the death of one of her children. They used to die off like flies in those days. They say you can hear her crying at night.”
“Have you ever seen her?”
“No, but Will has. He used to see her when he was a boy. Hasn’t he told you?”
She looked across the yard to where Will stood talking to a woman in a low-cut flowered dress. She remembered that day at Longford when he’d ridiculed the idea of ghosts. “No,” she said. “He hasn’t mentioned it.”
“I’m surprised. He used to be terrified as a boy to go anywhere near the stairwell.”
The woman in the low-cut dress appeared to be an old friend of Will’s. She stood talking to him for a long time, laughing loudly and touching him from time to time on the shoulder. Drawn by her loud laughter, Fraser looked across the lawn and said, “Sweet Jesus, who invited Darlene Haney?”
“I did,” his mother said, coming up behind them. She had strolled over with Josephine, Fanny, and Clara to check on Ava. They all held rocks glasses in their well-manicured hands. “And I want you to be nice. She’s a guest.”
“What were you thinking?” Fraser said. “I don’t remember seeing her name on the list.”
“Well, I was over at the Debs and Brides Shoppe where she works and she mentioned the party. She said she so wanted to meet Ava, and really,” she looked at Fraser helplessly, “what was I to do?”
“You mean she invited herself.”
“Now, Fraser,” his mother said, wagging her finger in his face. “You be a gentleman.” Her cheeks were pink from the heat and the gin, and she seemed slightly tipsy. She slid her arm around Ava’s shoulders and said, “Having fun?”
“Yes. Thank you. Great fun.”
“Oh, look, Fraser, her glass is empty. Be sweet and run up and get Ava another martini.”
“I’m fine,” Ava said, remembering Will’s warning not to drink too much. She was trying, belatedly, to pace herself.
“Are you sure? Well, maybe some iced tea then.”
“Dear God, Mother, don’t fuss,” Fraser said.
Across the lawn, Will had excused himself from Darlene Haney and walked away, stopping to speak to a young couple Ava hadn’t met. Darlene stood for a moment, sipping her drink and looking around the yard, then, noticing the group of young matrons, she set off unsteadily to join them. She was wearing high heels that sank into the soft earth with each step so that she walked with an odd lurching motion.
“I taught Darlene in school,” Clara said, watching her navigate the lawn. “She was such an interesting character. Darlene Smollett, she was back then. Before she married Eddie Haney.”
“Oh, now, that was a match made in heaven,” Alice said, and Fraser snorted.
He leaned over and said in a stage whisper to Ava, “Eddie was bad to drink.” And when she looked at him blankly he made a motion like someone tugging on a bottle. “He was the quarterback up at UT where Darlene was a cheerleader and he was rumored to be a top NFL draft pick. No doubt Darlene thought she’d won the lottery when she landed him.”
“That’s right,” Alice said. “Chased him until he caught her.”
Fraser snorted again and looked at his mother appreciatively. They were like a couple of schoolgirls. Ava imagined them sitting around at night with their cocktails gossiping about the townspeople, each trying to outdo the other in outrageousness.
“They came back here and had one of the biggest, tackiest weddings Woodburn has ever seen,” Fraser said. “And then Eddie blew his knee out his senior year and had to come back and go to work in his daddy’s body shop and that was the end of Darlene’s dreams of grandeur. I guess being an auto mechanic’s wife was not nearly as glamorous as being an NFL quarterback’s wife. The marriage didn’t last. Eddie ran off with a cocktail waitress—imagine that—leaving Darlene with three boys under the age of six.
”
“Poor thing,” Ava said. “That’s terrible.”
“You don’t know her,” Fraser said darkly.
“Yes,” Fanny said, shaking her head sadly. “I hear those boys are quite a handful.”
“You don’t know her yet but you will,” Alice said in a sweet, cautioning voice. “Because here she comes.” Darlene had seen them and was waving wildly. She launched herself and began to cross the lawn in their direction, her large bosom jutting before her like the prow of a ship.
“Quick,” Fraser said bleakly. “Run. Hide.”
“You be nice,” his mother warned in a low voice, and as Darlene got closer she smiled and called, “Come and meet Will’s friend.”
They watched her come and Ava, afraid she might stumble and fall against the table, stood up to greet her.
“Oh, my God, you must be Ava,” Darlene squealed, opening her arms wide. She held Ava out in front of her, looking her over. She was smaller but with her high heels they were almost the same height. Darlene was blonde and very pretty in the way that beauty pageant contestants and TV commentators are pretty, with their perfect makeup and hair and trim figures. “How are you?” she said, pumping Ava’s hand. A cloud of perfume billowed around her like smoke.
Ava, feeling suddenly tongue-tied by this effusive welcome, stammered, “I’m well, thank you. And you?”
“Oh, aren’t you precious?” Darlene pulled her into another flowery embrace. “I just know we’re going to be good, good friends,” she said.
“Which translated means, ‘I just know we’re going to be enemies for life,’ ” Fraser said darkly.
“Now Sparky, don’t be ugly,” Darlene said, pulling away from Ava and letting her feline eyes sweep over Fraser.
He flushed a dull red. “Don’t call me that.”
Darlene ignored him. “I am just so happy to meet Will Fraser’s Chicago friend,” she said, smiling to show her perfect teeth. “I hear you’re real smart. And so pretty, too!”
Ava noted that her accent was more nasal than the slow, deep-throated accent the aunts and Clara and Alice used. The older women’s voices were like water bubbling in a brook, while Darlene’s was a discordant twang.
