Charlotte’s Story

by Benedict, Laura

  Charlotte’s

  Story

  A BLISS HOUSE NOVEL

  LAURA BENEDICT

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For Monica and Teresa,

  my sisters, my friends

  Far safer, of a midnight meeting

  External ghost,

  Than an interior confronting

  That whiter host.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Charlotte’s

  Story

  Chapter 1

  1957: The End of Time

  We came to the end of time on a bright October afternoon. I had finished a second glass of champagne even though I thought three o’clock in the afternoon was a ridiculous time to be drinking wine. But that’s what we were doing because Press said we’d been too sad for too long and needed cheering. We were the only adults in the house for the first time in two months since his mother, Olivia, had died. The wine was the color of hay bathed in sunshine, sparkling in the filtered afternoon light of the salon. All the furnishings in the substantial room—the ornate European furniture, the gilt-edged mirrors and antique carpets—spoke of my mother-in-law’s preference for stateliness over comfort, and I had never dared to even slip my shoes off inside it. Now Bliss House and its orchards and woods were ours, and the birthright of our two children, Eva and Michael. I was mistress of Bliss House, but I didn’t quite feel it yet, and wondered if I ever would.

  Press took the bottle of Perrier-Jouet—his favorite, and what his mother had served at our wedding party—from the ice bucket to pour me a third glass.

  “We shouldn’t, Press. Really, we shouldn’t.” Secretly, I wanted more, but I protested because I thought I should. It was in my nature. Or, more rightly, in my bourgeois upbringing. (Bourgeois as in NOCD—Not our class, darling, as the thoughtlessly raised Yankee girls at Burton Hall, my college, used to say.) I was taught that people who drank in the afternoons were useless, and probably drunks.

  In answer, Press bent to touch his lips to my neck, tickling the tender skin beneath my right ear, and I felt the roughness of the late-day growth of his beard. With an agonizing slowness that I knew was intentional, his lips found my mouth and he kissed me deeply in a way that implied both hunger and possession.

  Had Bliss House still belonged to his mother, he certainly never would have kissed me with such passion outside the privacy of our bedroom.

  When he stood again, he was smiling and I was self-conscious of the flush that consumed my torso, neck, and face. Even my ears felt hot. The glass refilled, I drank as deeply as I dared, given the frantic bubbles. Press knew me well enough to know that my protest that we shouldn’t drink any more had held self-censure but not conviction. I was exhausted from caring for the children, and the wine was tempting.

  There is a haze around that afternoon that I’ll never be able to dispel, and I can’t remember if I truly could smell the scent of the roses just outside the room. The screens were still in the French doors that opened onto the gardens: a boxwood maze with a tall statue of the goddess Hera with her peacock at its center, and geometric rows of cultivated rose bushes. It was only early October and, because the climate in central Virginia is not overly harsh, the roses would continue to bloom through the earliest days of November. Their scent is strongest around four or five o’clock when the hum of the bees finishing their day’s work is most hypnotic. But I choose to believe that I did smell the roses. Some small recompense for the hell that was about to be unleashed on us.

  Press sat down on the hassock in front of the tufted slipper chair into which I had sunk and lifted my feet onto his lap.

  I laughed and tried to pull away, but he held my heels firmly.

  “Preston Bliss, what are you doing?” I’d teased him in the past about not liking to touch my feet. In fact, he didn’t much like anyone’s feet—not even the baby’s, which I was kissing and playing with all the time. But now he was sliding off one of my shoes, and then the other, so that my feet were bare in his hands. Some women wore stockings daily throughout the 1950s, but that day they seemed unnecessary, given that the staff had the day off and we weren’t planning to leave the house. He massaged my feet for a few moments, making me giggle as he stroked the arch of my foot with his smooth, uncallused fingers (he was a gentleman, a lawyer, and had never become as interested in working the estate’s orchards as his mother had imagined he should be). The house was so quiet that my laughter filled the room, and I quickly covered my mouth as though someone might hear. Olivia hadn’t minded laughter, but the room spoke so much of her that she might have been with us, watching from one of the enormous wing chairs stationed near the fireplace like guardians at the entrance to an ashen cave, instead of in the graveyard of St. Anselm’s Episcopal church buried beside her husband.

  With a quick, gentle squeeze of each foot, Press tucked my feet beside him on the hassock.

  “Did you know that you’re a queen, my love?” Leaning forward, he touched my hair.

  I shook my head, already a bit silly with champagne. He’d greeted me with the first glass after I’d finished putting the children’s toys away. “I’m just the. . . .” I considered for a moment. My mother-in-law had been the queen of Bliss House, and Eva Grace, napping in her trundle bed in the nursery a few feet from one-year-old Michael’s crib, was certainly the princess. Where did that leave me? My pedigree was respectable, as Virginia pedigrees went. My father was a Carter, even though he owned an office-supply store, and my mother’s family had moved from Pennsylvania to Virginia before the Revolutionary War. But I was just plain Charlotte Frances Carter, daughter of a merchant from Clareston, Virginia, and hadn’t come from money as Preston had. There were people—people in my own family, in fact—who weighted pedigree far more significantly than money, and believed that Olivia had encouraged our marriage because pedigree was something that she and the Bliss family lacked. But my aunts hadn’t really understood Olivia. She hadn’t cared at all about such things.

  I felt languorous, even a little sleepy, and I suspected that I was about to make a fool of myself, but I didn’t care. Press hadn’t been himself, but more opinionated, tense, and somehow bolder since Olivia’s death, and I’d been so occupied with the children that I was happy to have this playful, attentive Press to myself.

  “I’m more like the daughter of a baronet. I don’t know what that would be. A baronetess?”

  “No. You’re a queen. My mother adored you, and she always told me that I didn’t treat you nearly as well as you should be treated.”

  His words made me happy. That day I was still such a girl, and the wine—at first surprisingly bitter, yet pleasing on my tongue—had given me the feeling of being on a honeymoon again. His watchful brown eyes still regarded me with a proprietary sense of both pride and indulgence that I identified as true love. At thirty-one, he was four years older than I and, when the weather was fine, kept himself trim with early-morning rowing on the James. I’ve described him as compact, and while his shoulders were square and facial features quite blunt, he was not a small man. He was only an inch shorter than my unladylike height of five feet, nine inches. His “golden goddess,” he called me, as though I were Kim Novak or a blond Bergman.

  He kissed me again, his hand covering the back of my bare neck, his fingers sliding up into my hair. (I’d had my hair cropped stylishly short to keep Michael from constantly pulling on it.) Tired as I was, I couldn’t help but respond. I had been a virgin when we married, and my attraction to Press showed no signs of abating. He was deeply sensual. I saw his effect on other women, too, though I never questioned his faithfulness. Later you may wonder at my naïveté, but try not to judge me too harshly.

  I almost stopped him as he unbuttoned the c
otton blouse so beautifully ironed by Marlene, our housekeeper, and slipped his hand inside. But I remembered that we were alone. The house was ours, and our children were asleep, and the birds were noisy outside the open window, and the champagne was pleasing on our twining tongues.

  Finally he pulled back and stood to help me from the chair. When I tried to stifle an unexpected yawn, he smiled. I giggled like a teenager. I was as in love with him at that moment as I ever had been. His faintly olive skin was also flushed, and I only felt a tiny amount of the embarrassment that I would have felt a few weeks before at being half-undressed in such a public room, the doors open to both the garden and Bliss House’s enormous central hall. I felt brave and desirable and voraciously needful of what we were about to do there. As he led me to the largest sofa (brocade chrysanthemums in varying shades of blue—I’ve long since gotten rid of it), I tripped, dizzy with heat and wine, but he caught and steadied me.

  I had a fleeting thought, wondering if it would always be like this, but I knew the children would soon wake, and the staff and Nonie, the woman who had raised me and was our children’s nanny, would return, and our lovemaking would again be confined to my bedroom or his. But then the thought was gone, and I asked for more to drink. Press laughed and said there was no more for me, but that he had something else I’d like, and I thought him terribly wicked.

  He lay down on the sofa, which was beneath a far window, and I remember looking at his mouth as he pulled me onto him, and there was something strange about the set of his lips—something hard and unfamiliar that made me think of the bitterness of the champagne. Then he parted them and kissed me again, and I closed my eyes and molded my body against his. But there is no trace of the next few hours left in my memory. It was as though we had reached the farthest border of some island of time and could not go on.

  When I opened my eyes again, it was dusk, and the light of a single lamp groped pitifully in the overwhelming dark of the big room. My best friend Rachel knelt beside me, and Press stood in the shadows beyond her, his face solemn. He was holding Michael, who was sucking his thumb as he rested his head against his father’s shoulder.

  Rachel’s face was wet with tears.

  Chapter 2

  The Children’s Grove

  I could feel the eyes of all of Old Gate on us once again. Once again I was grateful for the dense veil draped over the front of the black silk hat I’d bought for Olivia’s funeral. Its netting was more difficult to see out of than that of more delicate veils, but it also meant that it was harder to see behind it. Of course, friends and acquaintances alike wanted to see my face. Death had come to Bliss House again so quickly, and their eyes were hungry for its effect on us. If I had been thinking hard about it, I might have hated them all on that achingly clear, horrid October morning. But I wasn’t thinking about them. I was beyond thinking; I existed in a state that barely recognized words or even other people. Eva was dead, and I was the one responsible.

  As Father Aaron’s voice droned in the background, I watched a fly drift from rose to rose on Eva’s tiny oh, God, impossibly tiny white coffin. They were fat yellow roses from the garden at Bliss House, the garden where I’d pushed her as a baby in the big English pram that had once held Preston, the garden whose recently replanted maze had grown just tall enough to hide her as she ran away from Nonie and me—had it been only a few days earlier?—her laughter ringing shrill and joyful in the fall sunshine.

  The fly finally alighted, crawling over a single spotless petal, stopping every few seconds to rub its front feet together. Feeding or washing. Defecating. Defiling. Defiling!

  Unable to bear it any longer, I lunged forward to sweep the thing away, off of my baby’s coffin, breaking the rhythm of Father Aaron’s godly imprecations, giving gathered Old Gate confirmation of my pain. My pain and my shame. The armful of stems, which the florist had loosely tied together with a white ribbon, flew off the coffin and scattered at the feet of the priest. Preston grabbed me from behind, wrapping one arm about my waist and firmly staying my upraised arm with his other hand.

  As he pulled me away from the grave, I heard a feral keening that might have been mistaken for the call of some terrified animal. But of course it was my own cry. I can still hear it in my mind when Bliss House is restless in its silence and I think of that day. I collapsed back onto Press.

  “Charlotte, Charlotte.” His voice was a fierce whisper in my ear. Was he admonishing or comforting me? Now I think it was something else entirely.

  Nonie, seated behind us with Michael on her lap, released an uncharacteristic sob. Michael was blessedly silent.

  Press led me back to my chair and helped me sit down. A part of me wanted to tell him about the fly, to explain, but the words wouldn’t come. People talk of the numbness of grief, but I wasn’t numb. I felt as though the outermost layer of my skin had been peeled away so that the halting breaths and pitying gazes of everyone around us chafed me like dried thistles. In the end, it was my father who calmed me, taking my hand gently as though he knew how much any touch would hurt. Father Aaron continued the burial liturgy, condemning my daughter to darkness.

  By the time we crossed the graveyard, my black high heels sinking into the soft ground as we made our way toward the line of cars waiting along Church Street, I was calmer. All was muted and quiet, and time had still not returned to its normal pace. A single white cloud hung motionless in the sky above our heads, and even the chiming of the quarter-hour from the carillon at the Presbyterian church at the end of the block seemed too long and slow. My father was at my side; Press walked a few steps ahead, his head down, the hems of his pants wearing a thin line of morning damp from the brown and gold leaves strewn over the dying grass. He seemed to be watching the ground. I couldn’t know if he had chosen to leave me to the care of my father, or just couldn’t bear to walk by my side. He had assured me again and again that he didn’t blame me for Eva’s death, but how could I be certain? Though he had been the one to leave the house while the children napped and I slept—drunk with champagne—how could he have known that I wouldn’t wake before the children? That Eva would get out of bed and try to give herself a bath? In my heart, I knew I was at fault. I clung to my father’s hand. A lifeline.

  Far behind us in the Children’s Grove, the gravediggers had begun to shovel dirt into Eva’s grave. I wanted to run back to them to help. Or, better, to do it myself.

  Were there places in the world where mothers were the ones who buried their children? Clearing the ground of grass and leaves as though readying it for a garden, hauling away the stones, cleaving the naked dirt with a spade, the force of it driven by their wordless pain? There could be no better way to use that pain, that sharp, relentless, endless pain that sat like a rock in my gut and pulsed its poison throughout my body. Eva’s grave had been dug that morning (Or the day before. I didn’t know, didn’t want to know.), but I could at least help to cover her. Hide the bright, white coffin away in the sheltering earth. Who better to lay a child to sleep than her own mother?

  My father’s hand tightened around mine as though he’d heard my thoughts and might keep me from turning back.

  The Children’s Grove, with its pensive army of stone and marble cherubs guarding rows of small graves, had been my choice. Preston had wanted Eva buried in the gated section of the cemetery reserved long ago for the Bliss family; but even fighting from the depths of my guilt, I had won. She would sleep in the company of the twenty or so children who had died in a flu epidemic of forty years earlier, along with the several more who had been buried there since. Eva had loved being with other children and had adored Michael too. It was the right place for her.

  I stumbled on a hole that had been covered by leaves, and my father steadied me.

  “Are you sure you’re up to having all these people back at the house, Lottie?” He kept his voice low, no doubt to keep Press from hearing. Although he was always friendly with Press, they were never truly close. Neither of them ever spoke to me ab
out it, but I suspect it was a mutual choice.

  There was no question of canceling the wake. It was the tradition of the family to open the house to anyone who wanted to come and visit after a funeral. And there had been several funerals tied to Bliss House in the eighty years of its existence.

  “Marlene will have everything ready. It doesn’t matter, Daddy. I don’t care.”

  The truth was that I really didn’t care. Eva was dead. Let them stare. Let them wonder. Let them eat our food and gossip about us. It was both the cost and privilege of living at Bliss House, the house my father had once called “that worrisome place.”

  Chapter 3

  Death, Endless Death

  Press’s face and shoulders were canted over the steering wheel as though he might make the Cadillac sedan—which he’d bought for me when Michael was born—go faster. Several people had approached us before we reached the car, delaying our departure, and he had stood rudely fingering his keys, tolerating their condolences. I hadn’t wanted to speak with them either, and had just nodded at first, hoping they would finish so we could return to the house and get the whole thing over with. I suppose I fell back on my training, trying to be polite even though I felt dead inside.

  Press—at least this new Press—was very different from me. He wasn’t often rude, but his air of natural privilege had intensified. Months earlier, before Olivia’s funeral, he had shocked me by saying that he didn’t give a damn about the feelings of the people who kept calling and coming by to tell us how sorry they were. Father Aaron had told us grief might expose itself in unexpected ways, and, as the weeks progressed, I found myself even a little excited by Press’s unpredictability.

  “Without Olivia in the house, he can be his own man now, Lottie. That’s a good thing for you both,” my father had said.