by Cathy Holton
Perhaps Frank knew. He had thoughtfully included his phone number, but Ava was not ready to talk to him. She was not strong enough for that yet.
Instead she sat down and wrote him another letter.
Two days after the party at Longford, Jake called her. It was a rainy, dreary Monday morning and she was sitting at her computer, trying to work. She had not slept well the night before, and she was tired despite abundant cups of coffee.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.
“Have you?” she said coolly. Despite her intention to keep her distance, she couldn’t help but feel a flutter of pleasure at the sound of his voice.
“I heard you had a great time out at Longford the other night.”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“A little bird told me.”
“That little bird wouldn’t by any chance be named Darlene, would it?”
“I’m sworn to secrecy,” he said.
She regretted now that she had added Darlene’s name to the guest list. Ava had dreaded the aunts telling Will about her meeting with Jake but she had not expected Darlene to do it. It seemed disloyal and unfriendly, and not the kind of thing she would have expected from someone she had insisted be invited to a party (not that Darlene knew that, of course). Ava was beginning to understand Fraser’s warning that “down here people can be as sweet as a spoonful of honey to your face, all the while plunging a knife deep between your shoulder blades.”
“It was quite a party,” she said.
“I heard you were a dancing fool.”
“I have no recollection of that.”
He laughed. “It makes me wish I’d been invited.”
“You’ll have to talk to Will about that.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”
A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “Why didn’t you tell me your break with Will was over Hadley?” She was surprised by the vehemence of her own voice. She hadn’t meant to bring it up at all.
“I thought you knew. You said you’d talked to Darlene Haney and she’d told you.”
“She told me it was over a girl. She didn’t give me any specifics.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“And besides, you lied when you said it wasn’t over a girl.”
“I said it was over something a lot deeper than a disagreement over a girl.”
“You implied that it wasn’t over a girl at all.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, I’m sorry.” He was quiet for a moment and she could hear distant music in the background. She wondered where he might be calling from. “Look,” he said finally. “I’m not really proud of what happened between Hadley and me. We were both young and we’d known each other for a long time and it just happened. It wasn’t planned. We didn’t set out to hurt Will.”
“I’m sure that made him feel a lot better.”
“Don’t take his side without hearing the whole story.”
“I’m not taking anyone’s side. It’s none of my business.”
“That’s not how you’re acting.”
“Did you love her?”
The rain fell softly. On the leafy branch of an oak tree, a large black crow sat watching her with dark glittering eyes.
“Can we talk about this some other time?”
“I have to go,” she said, and hung up.
She knew she’d been hasty and narrow-minded. It occurred to her that she might have sabotaged the whole thing subconsciously, but she didn’t care. The work was what mattered now.
She didn’t have time for anything else.
She couldn’t work after the phone call. She walked around the room, picking up objects and setting them back down again, sorry now that she’d acted the way she had. She thought about picking up the phone and calling him back but she wasn’t sure how to manage it. What would she say to him? What would she tell Will?
Outside the window, a ridge of gray storm clouds rolled in, rattling the glass and splattering rain against the fat green leaves of the magnolia tree. After a while Ava stretched out on the bed to take a nap.
She dreamed of cold dark water. She was floating in a canoe under a starry sky. She had no paddles and she was drifting, being pulled slowly and inexorably toward a dangerous rocky shoal. She could hear the rushing sound of water and she could see the humped shapes of boulders rising out of the white-tipped waves. A black ridge of forest rose behind them, and a three-legged dog ran along the rocky shore barking incessantly. She looked down into the oily glistening river. She knew she could not survive the rocks, so she dived into the water and began to swim toward the opposite shore. She could breathe underwater (she was not surprised by this), and she darted back and forth like a fish, taking in great gulps of dark silty water, and leaping finally to the surface, where a beam of moonlight floated on the waves like a silver coin. Behind her the dog, cheated of its reward, barked voraciously.
She awoke to thunder rattling the glass. Faintly in the distance, the neighbor’s dog, which was afraid of storms, barked a frenzied warning. The room was lit by a watery green light, and a moment later the rain began in earnest, drumming against the roof and the gutters. Ava lay on her side, watching flashes of lightning against the dark gray sky. Outside the windows the old trees bent and swayed. After a while she switched on the bedside lamp and curled on her side, reading, and when she tired of this, she closed the book and lay back with one arm thrown behind her against the headboard, her fingers tracing the whorls and channels of the elaborate carvings.
She had always loved thunderstorms. In college she and Michael had stayed in bed on rainy days, using the weather as an excuse to skip class and roll around under the sheets. Despite their amorous exploits, love with Michael had always felt tragic, illusory. They had lain in each other’s arms and talked in a careless way about their “future”: the white picket fence around a house in the suburbs, two-point-five children, a life circumscribed by restraint and routine. The whole time they were talking, Ava had known it was false. A fairy tale.
She thought of beautiful Grayson Byrd settling for a safe, predictable life with David the Doctor, settling for the big sprawling house and the skiing vacations to Aspen and the two good-looking but socially awkward children. She had given up spontaneity and regular orgasms for money in the bank, because wasn’t that really what she’d been trying to tell Ava, in her reckless and inebriated way? If you settle, it isn’t always fair. It isn’t always pretty.
Despite the fantasies she had spun around Michael, Ava had never been able to see herself having a future with him. Or with Jacob either, for that matter. She had known she’d never want the same things they wanted, no matter how much she pretended. She had known instinctively that if she had children, writing would become a hobby, something to be taken out and fitted in between nap times and meals and playgroups, and then put away again. She needed more than that.
She was more like her mother than she liked to admit.
Clotilde hadn’t been able to settle either. At least not on the American Dream, the one every girl of her generation was raised to expect: matrimony, motherhood, a life of self-denial. Clotilde was a pretty woman and there had been plenty of men who would have liked nothing more than to slip a ring on her finger, to tie her down, but she was always on the move, she was always fleeing … what? What had driven her mother all those years?
Ava’s earliest memory was of standing at a big glass window, half-hidden behind a filmy drape. It was night and it must have been Christmas because the house across the way was covered in multicolored lights, reflecting off the snow. Ava had her chin resting on the window ledge, that’s how small she was, and she was looking out into the street, waiting for someone. Clotilde, perhaps, on her way home from work.
No, that wasn’t right. Clotilde was in the kitchen behind her; she could hear her singing as she made dinner. So who was it she was wai
ting for?
Santa Claus. She remembered now. She was scanning the sky looking for a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer but the only thing moving was a long black car coming slowly along the street. It stopped in front of the house, its headlights glittering on the snowy banks.
“What are you doing?” Clotilde said behind her, and, looking up, Ava saw her stricken face. “Come away from that window at once.” She pulled Ava away, standing at the edge of the drape and staring out as the big rumbling car began to move slowly down the street.
Ava’s fingers had stopped their exploration of the headboard, had lingered for a moment over an abrasion she could feel with her fingertips, scratched into the smooth surface of the wood in the narrow space between the headboard and the mattress. Curious, she rolled over and pulled the mattress away. She could see several letters carved there but she could not make out the words. She pulled the lamp closer and rubbed the scratches with a wet finger, but still she couldn’t make them out.
It wasn’t until she had pulled out the small flashlight she carried on her key chain and shone it against the dark wood that she could make out the faint words scratched there.
Help me.
There was a sudden loud clap of thunder and the lamp flickered and went out. The house was silent with the void left by the air-conditioning system shutting down. Distantly, above the roar of the rain, Ava could hear a faint scratching noise as of rodents in the walls. There was another flash of lightning, followed by a boom of thunder, and then a high-pitched yelp. She could hear voices coming from the kitchen, and she made her way there through the shadowy house. She met Fanny in the dining room as she hurried past with her hands clamped over her ears, wincing under each thunderous boom as if from a blow. Fanny was as frightened of thunderstorms as the neighbor’s dog, and she spent most stormy days cowering under the covers of her bed with a pillow over her head. She smiled apologetically at Ava but her mild gray eyes were as wide as a frightened child’s.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she said, as she hurried past. “It’s a doozy this time.” Maitland trailed behind her offering words of comfort, telling her the storm was nearly over and the power would be back on in no time.
Josephine and Clara were in the kitchen hunting candles and matches. They looked up, startled, as Ava appeared in the doorway.
“Are you all right?” Josephine said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Sorry,” Ava said.
Josephine pointed at the dimly lit breakfast room where Alice sat morosely observing the storm. “There’s sweet tea in the refrigerator if you’re thirsty,” she said to Ava. “Or coffee. The percolator’s still warm. The power hasn’t been off long.” She turned and went back to hunting candles.
Ava poured herself a glass of tea and sat down across the table from Alice, who sat with her cheek propped on her hand, her face turned anxiously toward the rain-swept window. “It’s at times like these that I hate having all those big trees around my house,” she said to Ava. Behind them, Josephine slammed one drawer and opened another. Without the background hum of the air-conditioning, all sound was magnified in the quiet house. “It’s funny. All the houses along this side of the street are out of power but the lights on that side are still on.”
“Different generators,” Ava said.
They could hear footsteps on the back stairs and a moment later Will burst through the kitchen door, shaking the rain out of his hair. His T-shirt was plastered to his wet skin and he went over to the sink to wring it out.
“Can you believe this?” he said.
“It’s a real duck drencher,” Clara said.
“Should I check the fuse box?” he asked Josephine. He came into the breakfast room and put a hand lightly on one of Ava’s shoulders. She had only seen him twice since the party at Longford and both times there had been a sense of restraint between them, a wariness. But the unsettled feeling appeared to have broken with the storm. He seemed almost cheerful today, smiling at her, the rain streaming down his hair into his collar.
“Why bother with the fuse box?” Alice said. “The lights are out all along the street.”
“It’s probably a good idea,” Josephine said, overruling her. “Let me get the flashlight.”
She opened the cellar door, a narrow door off the pantry, and she and Will went down together. Clara shivered and joined them at the table. “I hate going down there,” she said. “Mama used to keep apples and potatoes in the cellar, and she’d make me go down and get them.”
“What were you afraid of?” Ava asked.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head ruefully and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Something.”
Alice said, “I hope Fraser remembered to unplug the TV. Last time we had a lightning strike it blew out the TV and we had to get a new one.” As if to prove her point, a sudden bright flash lit the room, followed by a boom of thunder.
“How many times has your house been struck?”
“Just the once that I know of.”
Clara propped her elbows on the table and sipped her coffee. “They say the Empire State Building gets hit at least twenty times every year.”
“Is that right?” Alice looked at her in mild astonishment.
Ava could hear Will and Josephine moving around down in the cellar. She thought of the words Help me. So pitiful and plaintive. She remembered her fingers touching the words, and she shuddered suddenly.
“Someone walk over your grave?” Clara said.
Ava looked into her dark, curious eyes. “Sorry?”
Clara chuckled and shook her head. The storm seemed to be moving off; lightning still flickered in the sky but the rumble of thunder was more distant, and the rain fell steadily but with diminishing force.
Ava splayed her fingers out on the table on either side of her glass. “You say there’s no photo of Charlie Woodburn?”
Clara stopped smiling and glanced at Alice. “No,” she said, setting her cup down. “Not that I know of.”
“I suppose he was handsome,” Ava said.
“As the devil,” Clara said, blowing her nose into a napkin.
Alice sniffed and ran her finger along the steamy window glass. “They used to practically swoon in the streets as he drove by. And at Vanderbilt, it was the same. He had that effect on women.”
“So he liked women?”
Alice frowned and glanced at Clara. “I wouldn’t say he liked women. He certainly used them.”
“He associated with loose women,” Clara said, getting up to throw the napkin in the trash. “Saloon girls and flappers and jazz singers.”
“He had a child out of wedlock with a woman by the name of Sweeney. Myrtle, I think her name was, or maybe Mabel. Before he ran off with Fanny. That’s the kind of man he was, although the family didn’t know it, of course. All that came out later. There was something wrong with the child, a son. He was crippled somehow, and when he saw the boy they say Charlie cried like a baby.” Alice shook her head slowly, as if trying to imagine this. “You wouldn’t expect a man like Charlie Woodburn to be tenderhearted over something like that but he was.”
Clara clucked her tongue and said in a less sympathetic tone, “Him and that boy of his, that crippled child he named King. King Woodburn. Can you imagine that? Always riding around in that big car like they owned the world. Like they expected everyone to bow and scrape. Well, pride cometh before a fall, as they both soon learned,” she added darkly.
Ava could hear footsteps on the cellar stairs. Josephine and Will were coming up. “What happened to the boy?” she asked quickly.
“Boy?”
“King Woodburn. Charlie’s son.”
Clara glanced at the cellar door and back at Ava. “Died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty. But not before he’d fathered his own son, that Jake, who’s caused Will so much heartache and trouble. That’s all Black Woodburns were ever good for. Causing trouble and heartache for decent folk.”
That evening Ava wrote long in
to the night. The novel had taken on a life of its own; the characters were beginning to reveal themselves in ways she’d never imagined. Charlie’s love for his crippled son, King, she had already anticipated. And yet despite his simple love for the child there is something hard in Charlie, something she had first glimpsed the day he went with his mother to the grand house on St. Charles Avenue, something she had seen in his face that day at the cemetery when he stood staring at his mother’s vault. He is a mysterious character, a man who loves his mother and yet not other women. Even Fanny, he loves fiercely and passionately but not as a woman: as a possession, a symbol. Sweet, vain Fanny who cares only for pretty dresses and parties.
But it is Josephine who is turning out to be the most astonishing character of all. Josephine carries a secret, and Ava glimpses it in her face one night as she sits watching a room of gaily plumed dancers twirl around the front parlor of Finn Hall. Bessie Smith is on the phonograph singing “Gulf Coast Blues.” The long windows have been thrown open to the night, and Josephine sits in front of one of them, trying to catch a breeze. She is looking at the crowd with a dazed, inattentive expression. She lifts her gloved hand to mop her brow, and in this vague, unguarded movement she gives something away. Something blooms in Josephine’s heart, seeping into her face, her eyes, and Ava, astonished, sees it.
Josephine is in love.
But with whom?
That night Ava had another attack. She awakened to a room so cold her breath left a faint plume in the air. She was lying on her back, stiff and lifeless as a moth pinned to a board. The shutters had been left open but it was a moonless night, and the only light was the faint glow of a distant streetlamp. She could hear deep breathing in the room. The sound came from the chair near the window. She could not turn her head to look but she could hear him, because she knew now that it was a masculine presence, she could hear it in his heavy uneven breathing, she could feel it in the cold, clammy pounding of her heart. There was a faint odor of smoke and whiskey in the room. The paralysis lasted just a few minutes, and when she could finally move, she drew a long, shuddering breath like a woman drowning, and turned her head.
