by Cathy Holton
“You told me you’d never seen a ghost.”
He groaned and shook his head. He chuckled, a dull, mirthless sound.
“Fraser told me that as a child you were terrified of the staircase because you used to see the ghost of Delphine Woodburn standing there.”
He dropped his chin and stared at her. “Oh, well,” he said. “If you’re going to bring the fantasies of childhood into it!”
“So, you did see her.”
He regarded her coolly, soberly. “Not that I recall. No.”
He had a clever way of remembering only what he wanted to remember. Ava supposed it was a useful trick.
“I don’t know what’s so hard about honesty,” she said.
He stood very still, staring at her. Then, without another word, he turned and walked out.
She lay back against the pillows and turned her face to the window, watching bats flit across the darkening sky. She could feel Clotilde observing her from the mantel. The atmosphere inside the house felt heavy, depressive.
After a while Ava got up and called Fraser Barron to see if he wanted to go for a drink.
They met at a small English pub on the square called Churchill’s. It was a restaurant, too, and the interior was crowded with families sitting at pub tables and in booths along the walls. Fraser sat at the bar. He was in one of his Poe moods, dressed in a dark gray sacque suit with a burgundy cape thrown over his shoulders. Ava indicated a booth in the far corner, and Fraser stood up and followed her, picking his way through the tables and flourishing his cape like a magician.
“I can’t believe you don’t have heatstroke in that outfit,” Ava said, sitting down. Fraser stood for a moment, allowing everyone in the pub to get a good look at him.
“One must suffer for beauty,” he said, sliding into the booth opposite her. “Look at you women and your high heels.”
Ava stuck one sandaled foot out for his appraisal. “Note that I am not wearing high heels.”
“No. But then you’re different. We’ve established that.”
A flustered-looking waitress brought them a couple of vodka tonics. Ava told Fraser about the argument with Will. She told him about meeting Jake at his shop.
“All alone?” Fraser asked casually. “Oh, dear.”
“I mean, Will was furious. I’ve never seen him so angry.”
“Someone probably told him about it before you had a chance to. He just got his male pride a little ruffled.”
Ava crossed her arms and leaned against the table, ducking her head and leaning in close so she could be heard over the noise of the restaurant. “I want you to tell me what’s going on between those two. Why does Will hate Jake so much?”
Fraser raised one eyebrow and sipped his drink, then set it down again. “You already know why,” he said.
“They can’t still be fighting over a girl who died years ago. There has to be something more to it than that.”
“You mean Will hasn’t told you?”
“There’s a lot Will doesn’t tell me.”
“Well, that’s a Southern thang.” He ran one finger absentmindedly around the rim of his glass. “I think it has less to do with Hadley and more to do with the fact that Will thinks Jake betrayed him. He’ll never trust him again. And now you come along and it’s obvious Will has feelings for you. Don’t blush and look away, you know he does.” He grinned at her discomfort.
“Will and I are just friends,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” Fraser said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I think having feelings for you and watching Jake move in on you brings up a lot of baggage from Will’s past. Stuff he’d rather not deal with right now.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Ava said. “I’m not dating either one.”
“Look,” he said, settling back and pulling his cape around him. “You’ve been in therapy, right?”
Ava looked around the pub. “Well,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” he said, snapping his fingers impatiently. “Of course you have. Anyone with any sense has been in therapy. I was in therapy even before I came out.” He stopped and gave her a curious look. “You knew I was gay, right?”
Ava laughed.
Fraser laughed, too. “I know. I was never any good at hiding it, even back when I still tried. When I was fifteen, I’d come home from prep school and go shopping with Mother and she’d tell all her friends, ‘Fraser has the best taste! Why, he’s just like a woman!’ We’d go to public high school football games and critique the cheerleaders, and it never occurred to her that I was gay; she just thought I was a little odd. Odd runs in our family. Look at the Captain. Mother was raised in a different time. Men lived by a different code then. They could drink, gamble, whore around, abuse the help and their own wives and children, and as long as they had the right pedigree, still be considered gentlemen. Hell, they could kill somebody and, as long as they did it for the right reasons, still be considered gentlemen. But homosexuality! That was a horse of a different color. That was impropriety on a grand scale. Hell, that was sin!”
In the booth behind them, a child stood on her seat and said shyly to Fraser, “I like your dress.”
“Thanks,” Fraser said. “I like yours, too.”
“Mary Ann, sit down,” her mother said sharply. “Don’t you be bothering those people with your foolishness.”
Fraser pushed his glass around, making little wet spots on the tablecloth. “When Mother caught me looking at the cheerleaders in the yearbook she said, ‘Fraser, there’s nothing wrong with you looking at pretty girls. You’ll have a pretty cheerleader one day to call your very own.’ I said, ‘Hell, Mother, I don’t want to have a pretty cheerleader. I want to be one.’
“She sent me to Father Nichols, of course, and he sent me to a therapist in Nashville, and that turned out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Because he got me talking about my past and about myself, and the more I talked the more I knew who I was and the more I knew how I wanted to live my life.”
Ava raised her hand to tell the waitress to bring them another round.
“Here’s the thing about being Southern,” Fraser said. “You’re raised to be polite. Yes, sir. No, sir. On the surface it’s all moonlight and magnolias, but underneath it’s miscegenation and tragedy and poverty and ignorance. Sure we pay lip service to history, we pretend to admire it, but the truth is, no one really wants to talk about it, not the dirty part anyway. We don’t want to acknowledge all the bad things that happened. That gets swept under the carpet because it’s fucking unpleasant, and no one wants to talk about unpleasantness.”
His voice had risen as he talked. Ava glanced apologetically at the neighboring table. She dipped her head and said in a low voice, “Could we keep it down a little? There are children present.”
He smirked, raising his glass. He took a long drink, then set it down again with a loud thock. “Coward,” he said.
“Maybe. But I’m not hearing impaired.”
“I thought you wanted to talk about the past.”
“I do. But I want to talk about it quietly.”
“We’re tied to our history,” Fraser said. “We carry it around like rusty chains. No one does suffering better than us, unless it’s the Jews. Or maybe the Irish.”
The waitress brought their drinks. Trying to prompt him, Ava asked, “How did Hadley die?”
“I’m getting to that. I’m going to give you the broad outline but I’m not going to give you details, because you need to go home and talk to Will about that. You need to get him talking to Jake. You need to get those two talking. Somehow.”
“Have you ever been in love, Fraser?” That shut him up. He was quiet for a moment, tilting his glass and staring down into his drink like he was looking into a crystal ball.
“Of course I have. Many times. After college I lived in Atlanta with my significant other, Michael. Yes, I had a significant other. He was an architect and he was a lovely person. He was a cheating, lying bastard but he was lovely.” H
e set his glass down and waved his hand in front of his face, as if clearing away smoke. “But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. You and Will and Jake Woodburn.”
“No. We’re talking about Hadley and Will and Jake Woodburn.”
“Okay, so you already know that Jake and Will went off to boarding school together thanks to Fanny and Josephine. It was at boarding school that Will met Hadley. I guess it was love at first sight, at least on Will’s part. They dated all through high school. Jake took a year off after prep school and then went up to Sewanee. Hadley followed him while Will went to Bard. Will and Hadley got engaged sometime around their junior year. It was Christmas and there was a big engagement party out at Longford and everyone was there, even Jake. I guess Jake and Hadley had been carrying on for some time at Sewanee, so the engagement must have come as a surprise to him. Because not long after they announced it at the Christmas party, Jake dropped out of Sewanee and went to California. All that money Josephine and Fanny had invested in his education, and he just threw it back in their faces. It wasn’t that long after Jake left that Will found out about him and Hadley and broke off the engagement.
“It almost killed Will when he found out. They had to bring him home in the middle of the semester because they thought he was having a nervous breakdown.”
Ava could imagine Will’s suffering and she was sorry for it. She hadn’t really known him then. It was during the time at school when they hadn’t seen much of each other.
“Hadley,” she said, carefully folding the edges of her cocktail napkin. “Do you think Jake really loved her?”
“Jake?” He frowned and looked at her with surprise, as if trying to figure out why that mattered.
Ava wasn’t sure why it mattered, but it did. Perhaps it would show Jake in a better light. Perhaps it would help explain his actions. Ava imagined the three of them standing arm in arm beneath the portico. There was no doubt that Hadley had been a beautiful woman. That she had captured the hearts, or at least the desires, of two near-brothers spoke volumes of her power over men. And yet, how to draw a true picture of this fateful love triangle? Had she wanted it to happen? Had she instigated it? Ava didn’t know how to see Hadley as she truly was.
Death smooths the rough edges, obliterates the cruelties of the deceased. It makes heroes of monsters.
Fraser chuckled and shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows with Jake? He always had a certain charm with women.”
“I don’t think he would ever purposefully hurt Will.”
Fraser gave her a sly look. “Why are you defending him?”
“I’m not defending him. I’m just pointing out that there are always two sides to every story. There may be something we don’t know.”
“Anyway, six months after the broken engagement Hadley was killed in a car accident. The rumor is, she was driving back from visiting Will, trying unsuccessfully to get him to take her back. And Jake and Will have been stuck ever since. Neither one can forgive and move on because neither one wants to talk about what happened.”
“That’s not true. I think Jake is willing to talk but Will isn’t.”
An Irish jig played softly in the background. They were quiet for a while, sipping their drinks.
Fraser shrugged. “You may be right. Will keeps himself bound up pretty tight. Somehow you’ve got to get him talking. You know as well as I do that the thing that works about therapy is talking.”
Ava shook her head. “I’m no therapist. No one should accept psychological counseling from someone as fucked-up as me.”
“He’ll listen to you.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“Are we going to talk about denial then?” Fraser said mildly, setting his drink down. “Because I’m an expert on denial.”
Ava said, “Shut up.”
He giggled.
They sat quietly listening to the music. The waitress came and asked them if they wanted another drink and Ava hesitated, looking at Fraser.
“One more for the road,” he said.
“It’s a good thing we walked,” Ava said, watching the weary woman push her way through the crowd.
“We’ll probably have to take a cab home. Mother said it was supposed to rain.”
He got up and went to the bathroom and when he came back, Ava said, “There’s something else I want to ask you.”
“Okay. Shoot.” He settled himself in the booth, pushing his cape back from his shoulders with fussy movements.
“Did you ever hear anything about Charlie Woodburn beating Fanny?”
Fraser frowned and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I mean, Mother rarely speaks of him, of course, no one does. But in the little I’ve heard her say, there’s never been any mention of him being abusive. Just unsuitable. I think she would have mentioned something like that.” He regarded her with bright, curious eyes. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” she said, smiling at the tired waitress who had brought their drinks.
When she got home that evening, she went straight to her laptop and began to write. It was a cool, rainy evening. The rain had started around nine o’clock, and had continued, steady and undiminished, for hours, a soft, rattling accompaniment to the sound of her fingers striking the keyboard.
Whatever block she had been suffering from was lifted. As the dark house settled around her and the rain lightly shook the windows, she wrote in long, continuous sections about Charlie. He had changed. He did not reveal himself so readily now; he was secretive, cunning. There was a hint of avarice in his love for Fanny that Ava had not realized before. Fanny was his possession. His chattel.
Ava wrote until the early hours of the morning. The rain eventually stopped and a pale ribbon of moonlight streaked the glass. The old house shifted and creaked, while all around her the unsuspecting Woodburns slept.
For the first time in her life, Ava knew what it was to be part of a family, a group of people whose opinions mattered to her. She could not bear to think of Josephine and Will’s faces if they should find out about her novel. She couldn’t bear to think what Fanny and Maitland would say. Yet she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t stop writing. She was like a medium receiving messages from the dead.
And they were everywhere in this house.
The next morning Fanny and Josephine were waiting for her in the breakfast room. The storm had broken in the night, and the air was cool and fresh. The breakfast room windows were open, a gentle scent of tea olive and honeysuckle wafting in.
Ava sat down at the table and Josephine brought her a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast that she’d been keeping warm on the stove. Fanny poured her a cup of coffee.
“Don’t you just love how clean the air smells after a rain?” she said, smiling brightly.
“It was a quiet storm,” Ava said, spreading pear preserves on her toast. “It stopped around three o’clock.”
“Oh?” Josephine said, sitting down beside her. “Were you awake then?”
“Well, yes,” Ava said. “I mean, I heard the rain stop. It had been drumming in the gutter for so long, and I guess I heard it stop and looked at the clock.” She had crawled into bed around four o’clock and had promptly fallen into a deep sleep.
Fanny and Josephine glanced at each other. “I hope you aren’t having trouble sleeping,” Josephine said quietly.
“Oh, no. It wasn’t that,” Ava said, not wanting to tell them about her nighttime labors. She realized that they had obviously overheard her argument with Will yesterday and that’s why they were still here at the breakfast table. They were waiting for her.
Fanny smiled nervously at Josephine. She put her elbows on the table and propped her cheek on one hand. “I think I’ll wash my hair today,” she said, to no one in particular.
Ava finished her eggs. She looked at Josephine, chewing thoughtfully. “Why are you still here? Don’t you have bridge this morning?”
Josephine said, “We don’t play in July. Too many Trump Queens off on vacation.
”
She and Fanny exchanged another swift look. Ava ate her breakfast, staring through the window at the deep green lawn and the glistening hedges. She had turned off her phone last night but this morning, thinking she might have missed a call from Will, she had turned it back on. She had been expecting him to call and apologize for their argument over Jake. Watching as the dial lit up, she realized there was no missed call.
“I hope you don’t think we’re prying,” Josephine began, then stopped, touching her mouth delicately with a napkin. “Will is such a private person. He was always like that, even as a child. And so, naturally, there are certain—things he wouldn’t have discussed with you.” She waited for this to sink in. Ava gave no sign of disagreement, and Josephine went on. “Jake was a handsome boy, handsome as—any of that side of the family. But like all of them, he was trouble.”
No one said anything. The word “them” hung heavily in the air.
Fanny plucked at her hair. “He was a lovely boy,” she said absently, her eyes fixed dreamily on the window. “He always had the nicest manners. ‘Miss Fanny,’ he used to call me in that teasing manner he has. So full of high spirits and so popular with the girls. Why, I remember …” She yelped suddenly and looked at Josephine, and Ava had the distinct impression that Josephine had kicked her under the table.
Josephine cleared her throat. “He was a lovely young man,” she murmured. “There’s no disputing that.” She hesitated as if uncertain how to continue. “And it was unfortunate what happened between him and Will.”
“Oh, yes, yes, it was tragic,” Fanny said, her eyes wide and tender. “I worried so about Will during all of that. It almost killed him.”
Josephine gave Fanny a piercing look but Fanny, oblivious, continued to stare sadly out the window. Josephine had obviously agreed to do much of the talking, but she seemed uncertain how to proceed. She appeared unwilling to mention Hadley. The dead girl seemed to haunt the occupants of the house like a ghost; her presence was felt everywhere, but especially in the long silences that fell across the breakfast room table.
