by Cathy Holton
Maitland was obviously at a loss as to what to say. He busied himself mixing another shaker, then topped off Ava’s glass and poured himself another one. “We used to drink these on hunting trips. My father owned a plantation in the Delta, and we used to go down there to hunt and play cards with some of his Mississippi friends.”
Ava gave him a cynical look. “Mississippi friends? Let me guess. Faulkner?”
Maitland sipped his drink and made a wry face.
She’d said it as a joke but the truth gradually dawned on her. “Oh, my God!” she said. “You drank Singapore Slings with William Faulkner?”
Maitland grinned and shook his head. “Count Faulkner was a whiskey man,” he said, tilting his glass. “I never knew him to drink gin.”
Later, Ava helped Maitland serve finger sandwiches and appetizers to the club members while they talked business.
The investment club had been started ten years earlier by a schoolteacher named Mary Beckham, who’d moved south from Philadelphia and married a local attorney. The members contributed $90 a month in dues, and stocks were picked by unanimous approval. Their unorthodox method of picking stocks based on “gut feelings” and gossip had given them a respectable 15.6% return rating. They were an odd assortment of professional women and old-money dowagers, newcomers and descendants of founding fathers.
Mary Beckham started the new business with a joke.
“What do you call a Yankee water-skiing behind an Alabama fishing boat?” She rolled her eyes and looked around the room. “Bait.” She waited until the giggling had died down. “And I can say that,” she said, grinning at Ava. “Because I’m a Yankee.”
“We try not to hold that against you,” Josephine said. She was drinking a Gin Rickey, as were Alice and Fanny. They left the blush wine to the Presbyterians.
Louise Singleton stood up first and gave her report on The Gap. “Y’all, retail is down,” she said. “The Gap lost forty percent in one month, and Skechers wasn’t much better. It went from $21.85 to $18.50.”
“Well, no wonder. Have you been in The Gap and seen the clothes?”
“The colors are terrible! Tell me who can wear lime green and get away with it?”
“Or sherbet.”
“You mean orange?”
“Do you know what orange does to my face? It makes me look all puffy and pasty.”
“Well, those clothes aren’t really for women like us,” Josephine reminded them. “They aren’t really geared for the mature crowd.”
“Who’re you calling mature?” Fanny said and everyone laughed.
“I tell you, the designs this year are just terrible. I took my girls in there and they didn’t buy a thing. Not one single thing. And anytime the Truett girls go into a Gap store and don’t buy a thing, you know it’s not good.”
“Lord, that is a bad sign.”
“Armageddon,” Josephine said mildly.
Mary leaned to touch Susan Truett lightly on the arm. “I’m so glad Mattie decided to go ahead and be presented at the Gardenia Ball.”
“What a fight that was,” Susan said, rolling her eyes. She sipped her wine, then set it down on the coffee table. “It almost killed her daddy when she said she didn’t want any part of that old pagan ritual, that throwback to virgin sacrifice.” Susan shrugged and settled her plate on her lap, glancing around the room. “You know how it is. They’re so sweet as girls and then you send them off to college and they come back all educated and too cynical to participate in the old traditions.”
Mary said, “That’s funny, because in my house, I was the one pushing Katie to be presented. Evan, who was born and raised here, didn’t want her to have anything to do with it.”
“His mama must be rolling over in her grave,” Weesie Hartman said. “Because she was the Gardenia Queen back in nineteen fifty-two or fifty-three, I think it was.”
“Back in our day it really wasn’t an option,” Alice said, swirling the remnants of her cocktail in her rocks glass. “You just did it because it was expected of you. You didn’t have a choice, and even if you did, you wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint your mama and papa. I don’t think young girls today know anything of self-sacrifice.”
The room got quiet. Ava had the uncomfortable feeling they were all thinking about her. She was obviously the youngest woman in the room.
“What exactly are the criteria for being a debutante?” she asked politely.
“Well,” Alice answered promptly, as if she found this a valid question. “In the old days, of course, you wouldn’t have been invited to attend the Gardenia Ball unless your mother or grandmother had been presented. But things have changed now. They’ve become more—democratic. Girls are selected by committee vote.”
“Was Darlene Haney presented?” Ava asked. She smiled as Maitland took the empty tray from her and hurried off to the kitchen.
The two women nearest Ava turned their heads to look at her.
“No,” Alice murmured quietly, touching her mouth daintily with her napkin. “No, I don’t believe she was.”
Ava imagined that that must have been devastating for someone like Darlene. She felt a sudden twinge of pity for her. Ava hadn’t spoken to her since the party at Longford—she’d been ignoring her calls—but she remembered Darlene’s face that day in the Debs and Brides Shoppe as she helped young debutantes choose ball gowns. She remembered Darlene’s grimace of cheerful and hopeless resignation.
Debutante balls, sororities, and Junior League meetings had never appealed to Ava. She had always avoided large groups of women who had the power to blackball her.
The room was quiet except for the dull hum of the air-conditioning system. Fanny smiled and raised her chin. “Well, I’m glad the world has become more democratic than it used to be. The old ways weren’t always best, you know.”
“History is all about perspective,” Josephine agreed.
“You got that right,” Clara said.
Ava smiled at her.
Boofie Crenshaw cleared her throat. “I say we sell the Gap stock and buy Harley Davidson,” she said, trying to get them back on track.
Josephine cocked one eyebrow. “You mean the motorcycle company?”
Ava began to wander about the room, quietly replenishing everyone’s wine.
“I think we should buy Harley Davidson and I’ll tell you why,” Boofie said, lifting her chin defiantly. She looked around the room then ducked her head and said in a more confidential tone, “You know Baxter Bell left his wife for a younger woman.” Everyone stared at her, trying to make the connection. Boofie held her glass up to Ava. “I saw Celeste Bell in the grocery store last week, and she told me Baxter came to her last Christmas saying he wanted a Harley Davidson. I guess all the other anesthesiologists in town had one and he had to have one, too, and she said, ‘No, you’ll kill yourself on one of those things.’ Next thing she knows, she goes to Destin with her tennis team and when she comes home he’s moved out of the house and in with his twenty-six-year-old medical assistant. Celeste thinks now that it was one of those midlife crisis things men go through, and if she’d just said yes to the Harley Davidson, he’d still be sleeping in his own bed at night. Now I ask you,” she said, looking boldly around the room. “How many men do we know on the verge of a midlife crisis?”
Her logic was irrefutable. Josephine asked for a show of hands of all in favor of dumping the Gap stock in order to purchase Harley Davidson. The vote was unanimous.
Karen Ashton stood up next, holding a small clipping from The Wall Street Journal in her hand. “It says here that AOL Time Warner is looking to buy out AT&T’s cable unit. That would make AOL the largest cable Internet provider, so even though the stock has dropped from $30.55 to $24.19, I say we hold on to it and see if the merger happens.”
“I second that,” Boofie said, and Josephine asked for a show of hands.
Cheryl Ponsler said, “I know we talked last time about keeping Wachovia but I have to tell you, Mother has been dumping every bit
of her Wachovia stock.”
This got everyone’s attention. Cheryl’s mother, Lucille, lived out at the Suck Creek Retirement Village. She was hard of hearing and forgetful when it came to names and car keys, but she had an uncanny ability to pick stocks. “Mother was getting her hair done down at the House of Hair and she ran into Milly Stokes. Y’all remember Milly, her son, Buddy, was in my class at school. Anyway, Buddy works for Citigroup now—he’s some kind of bigwig—and Milly told Mother that the bonuses were so big this year that Buddy is putting in a pool and taking the family to Europe for Christmas. So Mother is buying up every share of Citigroup she can get her hands on, and y’all know she usually does better than the brokers at picking winning stocks.” She looked around the room as if challenging anyone to refute this, but no one did. It was Lucille who had urged them to buy Krispy Kreme two years earlier but they had instead heeded the advice of a broker friend who had advised them to buy tech stocks. When Krispy Kreme went public, it doubled within a few weeks and shortly thereafter issued a two-for-one split. No one liked to be reminded of the money they’d lost on that deal.
“If Lucille recommends Citigroup that’s good enough for me,” Susan said.
“Always listen to your mother,” Boofie said. “I say we dump Wachovia in favor of Citigroup.”
They all voted in favor. Ava finished pouring wine, then sat down next to Clara on the sofa.
“Now isn’t this a pretty sight?”
At the sound of a deep masculine voice they all turned to find Will standing in the doorway. He grinned, his eyes seeking Ava in the crowded room.
“Oh, Will, do come and join us,” Fanny said, rising and hurrying across the room to take his arm.
“Yes, we need a male perspective,” Josephine said.
“You ladies seem to do just fine on your own,” he said, smiling in that charming manner he had so that all the women in the room brightened instinctively and leaned toward him. He seemed so tall and straight standing there, the lamplight catching in his hair. “I just came to ask Ava if she minded me playing poker tonight.”
The women seemed amused by this. Ava felt a creeping warmth in her face, wondering why he’d thought it necessary to ask her. Their evenings together had tapered off considerably since the party at Longford.
“I’m sure Ava wouldn’t mind!” Fanny said, rising on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“I can’t believe you would ask her! My husband would never ask me. He would just go.”
“Young women don’t know how lucky they are nowadays. Young men are so—accommodating. Why, I don’t think Edgar has ever so much as made his own sandwich!”
Will continued to stare at Ava, a playful expression on his face. It was obvious that he was enjoying putting her on the spot. “So,” he said. “Do you mind?”
“Hell, no. Not as long as you win. Not as long as you bring home a big pot of money.”
He laughed, although the other women in the room seemed less certain of her answer. “It’ll be late when I finish. Sometimes we play until the wee hours.” Ava was afraid he would cross the room to kiss her but instead he winked and said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Ava said. “You do that.”
Fanny walked with him to the kitchen. A moment later she returned, rubbing her hands together briskly, and resumed her seat. The conversation in the room, which had fallen to a dull hum, rose now to a low roar.
The blush wine was having its effect. Looking around the room, Ava noted several red noses and glowing complexions. Some of the women who had seemed staid and conservative when she first met them were now giggling like schoolgirls.
Ava remembered how, when she first came to Woodburn, she’d been intimidated by these women. And now, oddly, she felt at ease among them. Maybe it was the cozy, lamp-lit room or the Singapore Slings. Whatever the reason, Ava felt a sense of fellowship here that she would not have imagined possible. It was pleasant to envision herself years from now, sitting in a room like this, drinking blush wine and gossiping about husbands and investments, a confident, mature woman with a settled life and a large group of female friends. Maybe even children. And a handsome, accommodating husband who saw to it that she was not disturbed by the unpleasantness of life but instead kept cloistered like a princess in an ivory tower.
Ava had a sudden dazzling vision of this other self, the Ava she might become.
And then it was gone.
The investment club members were growing raucous. They had moved on, embarrassingly, from talk of accommodating younger men to talk of sex.
“That’s right,” Weesie Hartman shouted. “I know when I hear Edgar doing his impression of Maurice Chevalier singing ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls,’ I’m in for it whether I want it or not.”
The others hooted and covered their mouths with their hands.
“Look at Ava. She’s blushing,” Fanny said.
“More wine, anybody?” Ava said.
“Young folks don’t like to think about old folks getting frisky, but we do!”
“Some of us are widows,” Alice said. “Some of us have been widows so long we don’t remember what frisky means.”
“You’re never too old for frisky!”
“What’s your definition of frisky?”
“What’s your definition of old?”
“Born ten years before Moses,” Alice said.
“Getting long in the tooth,” Josephine said.
“I don’t know why y’all are talking about being old,” Fanny said, giving her head a little shake. “I don’t feel any different now than I did when I was sixteen years old.” Josephine snorted and Fanny exclaimed, “Well, I don’t.”
“Do you want to know what old feels like?” Clara said, looking around the room. “Old is going to get your annual mammogram and discovering that the X-ray tech is someone you taught in school—fifty years ago.”
“Don’t you just love those annual mammograms?” Cheryl said.
“My husband said, ‘What does it feel like?’ and I said, ‘It feels like laying your boob on a cold garage floor and having someone back over it with the car.’ ”
“I’m just standing there with my arm over my head,” Clara continued. “Squashed between two plates, and the lady looks at me and says, ‘Miss McGann, is that you?’ And I said, ‘Mary Montgomery, is that you?’ And she said, ‘Yes’m, you taught me world history back in high school.’ And I’m trying to remember if I’d given her an A or an F because suddenly it seemed real important.”
The room exploded in laughter and Ava rose and took a stack of plates into the kitchen. Maitland was standing at the counter mixing up a batch of his homemade mayonnaise. He was wearing his Kitchen Bitch apron.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Do y’all need me to make up some more of those little sandwiches?” Above the bib of his apron, his red face shone happily.
“I don’t think so. I think the meeting is winding down.” Ava put her hands behind her and pulled herself up on the counter, her feet dangling, looking around the cheery room. There was something soothing and intimate about a kitchen, the heart of the house, the place where families gather around a table to break bread and forget their differences, if only for a short while.
The last time she’d seen Jake Woodburn he’d been standing in his mother’s kitchen. She had not run into him since that day, and it seemed odd to the point where she had begun to wonder if he was avoiding her. And then she decided that he was avoiding her, and although she mentally shrugged her shoulders and washed her hands of him, she could not help but feel a vague sense of disappointment, too.
Maitland held the bowl of mayonnaise up for her to taste.
“Now that is good,” Ava said. “You could bottle it.”
He seemed pleased. “Do you think so?” he said.
“I do.”
“I put a little stone-ground mustard in this batch, and I think it kicks up the taste a notch.”
“Definitely.”
&
nbsp; He spooned the mayonnaise into a mason jar and carefully labeled it. Watching his meticulous preparations, Ava said, “Uncle Mait, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“You can ask me anything, Sugar. I’m pretty much an open book.”
Ava looked at her dangling feet. She traced the outline of the tiles in the air with her toes. “Why did it take you and Fanny so long to marry?”
He continued to smile, but his hands, she noted, shook with a delicate agitation as he put the mason jar down. Something dark, an expression of fear or remorse, passed quickly across his face, and was gone. He chuckled and shook his head, his florid face shining.
“Penance,” he said.
She couldn’t stop thinking of the words. Sometimes late at night when the work was slow, when she reached an impasse and the story felt heavy and cumbersome, she lay down on the bed and traced her fingers over the delicate carving. Help me.
Who had carved those words?
She felt certain it was Charlie Woodburn.
When she showed Will, he remarked scornfully, “That bed was built at Longford around the time of Napoleon. Do you know how many people have slept there? How many could have scrawled that?” His late-afternoon good cheer had evaporated the minute she mentioned Charlie. He strode angrily around the room, picking up items on the tables and setting them down abruptly. It was so unusual, this outburst, that at first Ava could do nothing but watch in astonishment.
“Why are you so angry?” she said.
“Because you make something out of nothing. You imagine things.” He put his hands on the foot of the bed, leaning over so she couldn’t see his face. Distantly they could hear the tinkling of barware as Toddy Time began. When he looked up again his face was calm, impassive. “Even if it was Charlie,” he said evenly. “How do you know it wasn’t the ravings of a man sunk in alcohol and depression?”
