Etta fought to keep her composure. She didn’t take rebuff so well, either. She lowered her voice, and all the play had left it. “You should have told me.”
“I thought you would have heard by now.”
Fickle indeed. The bite of rejection was a new intense sensation under Etta’s breastbone. Even though she had never been in love with Wallace, the fact that his attentions had turned elsewhere was a cruel blow.
Etta accepted an offer of more champagne. During the main course, although Matthias took over most of the travel oration, describing the Acropolis and the Parthenon, the Olympic Stadium, and then onward to Constantinople, Etta couldn’t listen. The words drifted in the air like a funeral toll. All she wanted was more champagne. That fluid full of bittersweet bubbles was the appropriate flavor for the moment.
She was having difficulty eating, too. The light in the room looked cheerless, and then even more panic crept into her chest, constricting her breathing. If she could so easily be replaced in Wallace’s affections, then what of the others?
Later, small groups at the table aborted the endless talk of the Christiansens’ journey and delved their way into separate conversations. Down the table, more talk of this Jewel Ann, who was said to be so rich and so wild that she ran her carriage during the day with only white stallions, then had them changed to black stallions for the night. Always she wore bright colors and enormous hats.
Etta drank more champagne. The light in the room took on a muted quality, as if a layer of smoke had filtered in. She eavesdropped on other conversations and felt herself growing distanced, the voices slurred together. Smiling faces appeared clown-like.
On her right, the conversation was centered on Grace and her charity work. Grace was saying how interesting poor people were. Etta let out a loud sigh. Wallace glanced her way and cleared his throat.
More boring and pointless chatter. She found herself listening not to the words but instead studying the way each one was formed. Some people smiled between their words, others paused, and still others curved their mouths around the words. Strange inflections and different kinds of laughter left a sour aftertaste in her mouth.
Some fool had asked Grace to elaborate on the personalities of the poor. It wasn’t Wallace but the young man whose graduation party she’d once attended. She remembered now. He smoked a pipe, and his name was Neil. He asked Grace, “Interesting in what way?”
Grace was basking in her moment. “Each is unique. They are less concerned with protocol and manners and more concerned with each other.”
“Truly?” asked another person.
Etta stared at her cousin. Saint Grace was looking a bit desperate. She was working to hold the others’ waning interest and to counter their disbelief that the poor could be interesting. “There’s an old voodoo man, and women who make stuffed crabs and hawk them, and children who make do with so little.”
Someone responded, but it sounded like a murmur to Etta. There wasn’t an interesting conversation at this entire enormous table, covered with nauseating food. Instead, she sat still and gulped more champagne.
She didn’t listen again until the conversation had turned to Miss Girl, and many eyes turned her way. Finally she would get some attention during this dreadful evening.
“How do you do it? The jump is so . . . far down,” someone was asking her.
Etta perked up and immediately played coy, so natural and so easy for her. Back to the way she should always be, in the center of attention. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
The faces turned her way, and people smiled and gave little nods.
But then Wallace said, “Etta is telling the truth. She truly has no idea what you’re talking about.”
A moment of silence then, and Etta stopped breathing. Wallace went on for all to hear. “She, in truth, is not the real Miss Girl. It’s someone else, and in fact Grace knows her.”
“Then who is she?” asked Neil as he turned in Grace’s direction.
Etta closed her mouth as even more eyes turned away from her. Yet another insult. Another slight. She wouldn’t claim to be the true Miss Girl; she had never claimed it, but it had been promising to let people believe it. It had buoyed interest in her. And what had Wallace said? Something about Grace?
Grace was trying to act as if this were nothing serious. She said, “It’s of no consequence.” But in fact she shot Wallace a darted glance that silenced him. She seemed panicked. Etta gazed at her cousin’s face and saw its disingenuous naïveté. Apparently Grace was going to pretend that it was the most innocent thing in the world to correct the assumption that Etta was Miss Girl.
“But is it true?” someone had asked again. “Do you know the real girl?”
“I do,” said Grace dimly, looking down. “But that’s all I can say on the matter.”
Here was another thing meant to harm her. Grace had done it again! Just when she needed this attention, Grace stole it away. Etta took another long gulp of the champagne.
“Who is she?” someone asked Grace.
“What is her name?” asked another.
“I’ll say no more. She’s a reserved person. She likes to keep to herself.”
Etta felt a cold distance from all of them. The child no longer asked to play, who sat on the sidelines and watched, only watched. Etta’s anger was thumping up inside her mouth by then, forcing out the words that she had sworn to herself not to say, words that under any other circumstance she would have kept to herself. But spite won a big battle inside her. Etta said, “Grace knows nothing.”
All heads turned her way. She must have spoken much louder than intended. Her scalp was numb, and her own voice had a gruff and slurred quality. “She doesn’t even know the whereabouts of her own father.”
Time stopped. A cold, quickening silence hung in the air.
Etta’s head spun. The light in the room was charged and dense. A little laugh sneaked out of her.
Someone said in a shocked whisper, “He’s dead”; it must have been Jonathan, coming to Grace’s defense.
“No,” said Etta. “That’s the most interesting part. In fact, he’s alive in an asylum. What everyone else doesn’t know, but what I have managed to find out, is that my long-lost uncle is a madman.”
Chapter Thirty-One
GRACE
Everyone was staring at me.
At first, Etta’s words floated past me, unreadable. What preposterous thing had Etta said? Later I would think of the careful expression I had put on my face. My reserve was so well practiced. My mother couldn’t have done it better herself.
But inside my head thoughts whirled like a tornado, and a small secret space that was tailor-made for shame and fear and disbelief was suddenly packed with too much turmoil to hold. My face never released its false appearance of calm, however—that mask I had been trained to wear.
Jonathan stood up beside me and tossed down his napkin. “What a ridiculous thing to say, Miss Etta Rahn. I fear you’ve had too much to drink.” Then sweet, kind Jonathan turned to me. Thank God he was there.
I could’ve coolly accused Etta of lying, but instead I rose from the table, excused myself, and found my way to the empty foyer. All sorts of confusing thoughts and memories built pressure in my face, behind my eyes, and there was something noxious in the air of that house.
Jonathan was close behind me. “Do you want to leave?” he whispered to me when we were out of the others’ hearing range and alone. I nodded to him instead of speaking, and he went in search of the butler to fetch our wraps and summon the carriage.
We rode back to my house in a kind of stunned stupor; the only comments I remember Jonathan making one-word expressions of his dismay at Etta’s behavior, such as “Shocking” and “Unbelievable.” The skin on his face was stretched as taut as a drum.
Above us, the night sky was dark and cold. I shivered against the upholstery although it was warm. We passed brittle grass and weeds, listing in the moonlight, trembling in the fragile
, dark air. I asked the driver to go past the gulf, and I got a glimpse of the ocean. The light of a soft-edged, nearly full moon caught on swells in a line that went straight toward the dark horizon, a quicksilver path showing me the way.
I don’t remember sorting through what I’d heard by any rational means. But as preposterous as Etta’s accusations had sounded to others, they didn’t sound so to me. A stunned quiet filled me, a complicated truth that I could feel in rising, hushed memories. And I was certain of one thing: shame this deep and fear this gripping had to have some root in truth.
In fact, he’s alive, in an asylum.
The few memories I’d had of my father contained an element of the unusual, of distance, of dreaminess, of tripping on the stairs and laughing about it, of studying ants and leaves. And the more I remembered, the more what Etta had said terrified me. Perhaps when Clorinda had said my mother was “too soft for dis here world,” which never fit my mother, she had been talking about my father instead.
The shudders continued to rise and arrive on the surface of my skin. And then other memories began flooding me, washing over me in cold, clear waves, young memories that had easily been suppressed, memories of a gentle man who didn’t seem of this world. Now the few things I remembered cast a new light.
How had Etta come up with this? How could she know that which I did not? She could only have learned through her mother; the secret must have been shared between her and my mother. They must have held on to a sisterly connection I knew nothing about.
When we arrived at the house, a thin layer of condensation coated the windows of the carriage like a veil of deceit. I told Jonathan, “Leave me, please.”
“Grace.”
“I mean it. Please. I must talk to my mother alone.”
He looked overcome. “Grace, I must tell you something. I’ve always heard rumors of something mysterious about your father’s death. Not what Etta put forth, but people have always wondered. Apparently it was all very sudden and unlikely.”
I took his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you. But for now it is Mother who must answer my questions.”
I stormed my way up the stairs, fully aware that the coming moments were most likely going to disintegrate all I’d known as true. I charged directly to her room after entering the house, past everything we owned, now seeming stained and tainted, while the servants stood about, stilled by my early return from a party that was supposed to last the evening and by my obvious rage.
I must have looked miserable, because when I took one last glance behind me, both Clorinda and Dolly stood on the landing below, gazing up at me. Clorinda appeared fraught, and Dolly was wringing her hands.
I found my mother upstairs on the settee with a book on her lap. This was the place she had painted herself into, her secret corner.
I concentrated on putting one foot before the other. Mother glanced up as I entered the room, and the expression on my face must have been telling, disastrously telling, for she dropped her book, and her face fell in shocked anticipation.
“Etta says that my father is alive and in an asylum. Is it true, Mother? Is my father alive?”
She looked stricken, which scared me, and then just as quickly she recovered. She straightened herself and then patted the edge of the settee, requesting me to sit. “Of course it isn’t true. Let’s talk.”
“No, Mother, I won’t sit down. Just tell me now, because I don’t believe you. I’ll find out if you mean to deceive me on this. Don’t let me find out you’ve lied to me again.”
“Lower your voice, Grace. I’ll explain.”
“Explain away,” I said but refused to sit.
She forced a resigned, sensible expression on her face. “You’ve been the recipient of malicious gossip. Something like it circulated long ago, and I had thought it was over. Who said this to you?”
“Etta, but it doesn’t matter who told me. I know you’re lying. I can tell by the way you’re avoiding my eyes and becoming tense.”
Mother appeared stunned but said calmly, “You’re upset and taking it out on me.”
“Mother, I swear if you don’t tell me the truth now, I’ll walk away from you and never look back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Tell me the truth, Mother.”
I had never talked to my mother in such a tone, and her face reflected disbelief. I stood, waiting, as the clock ticked, and for long moments we remained locked with equal amounts of determination. Then something odd flashed across my mother’s face, perhaps the first realization that she was going to lose this fight. I watched as she moved through denial, fear, and finally arrived at some point of resignation. She’d hidden her deception for so long, perhaps she’d never imagined herself in this moment, when all would be inexorably revealed. But here she was; the truth was written all over her.
She slumped back, her face pale. Mother looked about the room, as if gathering strength from her possessions, and then she closed her eyes in a way that appeared like prayer. Finally she opened them and gazed up at me directly, her eyes pained but steady. “I wanted to spare you.”
She was a stranger to me. Completely unknown. “Spare me?”
“What I did, I did out of love for you.”
There was too much desperation in her voice for that to be true. Truth was apparently something my mother could enter and leave at will, like walking through a door. “You told me he was dead when he’s not, and that was for love?”
“In my position, you would have done the same. I was in a terrible spot. Listen to me . . .” Her fingers were white-knuckled and gripping the arms of her settee. “He was fine, perfectly fine, when we married. I envisioned nothing but a glorious wedded life ahead of me, and then he began to slip. Nothing monumental in the beginning, but as the years went by he became more and more confused and incapacitated. Soon I was handling everything, and he rarely went out anymore. I couldn’t trust him to run a simple errand. When he did go out in public, he would act strangely, either mired in silence or starting all kinds of talk with anyone he met, and I didn’t know what to do. Oh, Grace, do forgive me. You don’t know what torment I’ve been through.”
“You?”
“And you, too. I was thinking of you, of your safety. I remember once he was letting you handle an oleander leaf. Of course you know that oleander is poisonous. But he couldn’t make the simplest judgments.”
“Where is he? Locked away someplace?”
“I found the best care possible. He’s looked after and kept well, and no one has been hurt for it.”
My voice rose, shrill. “I have been hurt. I grew up without a father.”
“He couldn’t have been a father to you. He can’t even take care of himself. And I didn’t want you to be humiliated, shunned by others, and thought of as lacking.”
It all made sense to me now. My mother had always talked more about her courtship with my father than the marriage. “I’ll be the judge of whether or not he can be a father to me. You sent him away not because you couldn’t take care of him here, but because you wanted to hide him.”
New lines were etched beneath her eyes like commas, and the corners sagged as she looked at the truth. “I’ll grant you that. It was some of both.”
“But more so because you wanted to hide him.”
At first she seemed surprised at my insistence, but then her face crumpled. Two tears streaked down her face and shimmered in the lamplight. I was glad for the moment that I had hurt her. Every inch of me quivered with my right to be justifiably cruel after what she had done. So elaborate a deception. So carefully plotted.
“I guess I deserve that. You’re right. It was primarily because it was so, so”—she searched for the right word, her voice sounding hollow in the room—“humiliating.”
And so the truth at last. Easier for my mother to arrange the world to her liking than to accept something so powerfully less.
“Would you have wanted to grow up with a child for a father?”
&
nbsp; “I don’t know, but I wasn’t given that choice. How did you do it? How do you fake someone’s death?”
She sniffed. “I took him to New Orleans to see a specialist; that much is true. But the doctor said he was beyond help, and I couldn’t just bring him back here. People were beginning to talk. The doctor suggested the home outside Houston, where I took him for care and safety, and then as I was taking the train back to Galveston by myself, the idea struck me. I could simply say he’d fallen ill in New Orleans and had died. It solved everything. I did nothing illegal, Grace. I never executed his will; I had been handling things for years, so I simply continued doing so. I told people he didn’t have a will. His parents were dead and he had no siblings. No one questioned me. I’ve always visited him and made sure he was treated well. And no one has been able to spurn you because of it.” After her explanation, she sat quietly, crying.
I lingered, not sure if I was supposed to comfort her or leave, and in a few minutes, as the enormity of this news sunk in, as this new truth fully struck me, I didn’t want to watch another moment of her pain unfolding. My pain was a huge teeming bay that left no room to float hers. I couldn’t stay another moment in a home where appearances were more important than the truth.
I left the room and flew back down the main staircase, whisking past Clorinda and Dolly, past their frozen faces, but then I stopped. They deserved to know, or perhaps they already did, but I said it anyway, in recognition of their loyalty and steadfastness and years of devotion to us.
“My father is alive.”
Dolly’s face reflected shock, but Clorinda’s did not. Clorinda of course had probably helped my mother. She had probably been more my mother’s partner than ever I’d realized before; I could see it in her eyes. But her look back at me, although kind, was not apologetic.
Dolly reached out her hand to me as we stood there face-to-face. I took it in mine and squeezed. Then I turned away from them, and my body filled again with a hot rage.
I ran down the stairs to the front door. I paused, then strode into the main parlor and stared down at my mother’s collection of china figurines.
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