Charlotte’s Story

by Benedict, Laura

  Rachel went rigid. “No,” she echoed. Her legs gave way and she collapsed to the ground in a spicy flush of Lanvin’s My Sin.

  Before I could kneel down, Jack appeared seemingly from nowhere and gently pushed me aside so he could revive her. The concern on his face was very real. As much as Rachel complained about him, he was always solicitous of her. He carried her back to my Cadillac, which was closer than their car, and drove ahead to the house to get her out of the heat.

  I probably should have gone with them. But Jack was a doctor and could do more for her than I could. Once again falling back on my training—to be polite and, yes, an obedient wife—I recovered myself and encouraged the crowd to move toward the house.

  Chapter 4

  Bliss House

  Bliss House sits at the end of its lane, restful, like a journey’s end. Tall and straight, yellow-bricked and black against the sky, it wears its soft slate mansard roof as a man in a formal summer suit might wear a comfortable cap. The two shallow wings off either side of the house aren’t wide enough to imply any welcoming embrace. Press had told me it had been a wildly expensive house when it was built by his grandfather, Randolph Bliss, in the 1870s, designed by a black Frenchman named Hulot, whom he’d hired as a kind of slap in the face to his defeated neighbors. It’s very unlike the other grand houses in the area, having both a ballroom and a full theater on the third floor, and no columns or sweet porticoes or climbing ivy. When he first saw it, my father called it one of the ugliest houses he’d ever seen, but fortunately not in front of Press or his mother.

  I don’t think of Bliss House as ugly.

  I empathize with Bliss House. It is tall and ungainly, and a bit unsuited to its watercolor rural surroundings, just like me. It’s not that I’m not at home in the country. But Old Gate is a kind of gateway to the wilds of western Virginia, and Bliss House might have been a happier house if it had been built on the eastern side of the state, where I was born. A region filled with people of wider experience, more sophisticated tastes.

  There is romance at Bliss House. Its gardens are formal, but lush. Even the herb garden tucked around the back, with its circle on circle of tightly pressed stones and thick rings of soil filled with flowering herbs, was designed with an eye toward beauty, as well as usefulness. And then there is the dome set high in the center of the three-story front hall: a scene of the starry sky, just before full dark, as though the architect had left the roof off. Depending on the light outside, the stars may seem to almost disappear; but in the evening, even in the reflected light of the great chandelier, the stars emerge bearing their own vibrant light. Press and Olivia and even the servants never seemed to notice the stars change, which annoyed me. But I know what I have seen.

  I have said that it is tradition for anyone from the town to be allowed to call at the house after a funeral, but the tradition didn’t just apply to funerals. Olivia had held a garden party every late spring when the azaleas bloomed, and another at the New Year. Guests always arrived with a cautious air of excitement and barely disguised curiosity. For a while, I was like them, but once I moved in, I began to resent their crude interest. We were not creatures on display for their prurient observation. Bliss House has a reputation for unnatural death and for the supposed presence of the lingering dead, but most of what people imagine and gossip about is untrue (yet what they don’t know is far more horrific). The family has seen more than its share of tragedy. Rachel had even prodded me about it, telling me that everyone in Old Gate believed that Randolph Bliss, who had come to Virginia from Long Island, had committed some crime and caused the house to be cursed before the first brick was laid.

  “It’s infamous,” she said. “When you’re married, we can have fabulous séances and talk to all the people who died there.” We’d both been a little drunk on the crème de menthe she’d brought from her parents’ house after Thanksgiving break—the break during which I’d met Press. But after the wedding, she never mentioned it, let alone suggested a séance.

  I believed in ghosts long before I moved into Bliss House.

  I was six years old.

  Practical Nonie had me collecting sticks in the back yard and putting them in the giant red wheelbarrow placed near the garage. Two days earlier, there had been a tropical storm that had hung about for days offshore, sweeping one narrow arm inland for just a few hours, bringing down several trees and power lines in our little town in eastern Virginia. I was hot and cross and plagued by the mosquitoes that had appeared quickly after the rain. The air was languid, making my hair stick to my neck and my romper to my back, and though I was not usually rebellious, I’d taken off my shoes in spite of Nonie’s admonition that I should not. What I really wanted to be doing was eating the red velvet cake that she was making in the kitchen for my father’s birthday, and so I was doing my chore reluctantly, trying to see how slowly I could walk across the grass to the wheelbarrow.

  I’d picked up a particularly large stick and was dragging it behind me, pretending I was a horse put to work like Black Beauty, when the wind picked up and the air turned markedly cooler. It was as sudden as if there had been some loud horn or thunderclap to announce it, and I stopped walking, wondering if there had been a sound. First I looked into the sky, but then my eyes came to rest on a woman standing at the other side of the yard, beside the wheelbarrow. She was a girl, really, and wore a belted robe the color of lemon custard whose hem played lightly around her bare feet. I was surprised but also terribly impressed that she was outside with bare feet, just like me. When she smiled and held out her hand, I realized she was the girl in all the pictures in my father’s bedroom, and in the one beside my bed. I knew her as Mother, but of course I’d been barely four years old when she died, and her voice, her touch, the way her face really looked, had faded from my mind. Her blond hair hung in untidy waves above her shoulders, and she was inhumanely pale. But I felt no fear.

  Dropping the stick, I hurried toward her, the grass cold and wet on my feet. The wind was loud in my ears, and it turned to a kind of static as though it were coming from a badly tuned radio. But as I got closer, I realized with some disappointment that she wasn’t looking at me, but beyond me. When I looked back over my shoulder, I stumbled and fell, sprawling onto the grass and its minefield of small, sharp sticks. I lay there breathing hard, waiting, half-hoping she would come to help me up.

  Then the wind was gone, and Nonie was standing over me.

  “You’d best get up, or you’ll be covered with chiggers.”

  I stood still, watching the empty space where my mother had been, as Nonie brushed the dirt from my romper and legs and tut-tutted about little girls who should listen and keep their shoes on when they were told.

  Somehow I knew not to say anything about my mother to Nonie, but that night I told my father.

  “Did she look happy?” he asked.

  It took me a minute to answer. Could ghosts be happy or unhappy? “Yes. I think so. I don’t know why.”

  He smiled at that but didn’t offer any kind of explanation.

  I was ten years old before I overheard the truth about my mother. Already at school, a rotten older boy named Scott had cornered me in the coatroom and told me that my mother had hanged herself in our garage, but I called him a liar and ran away. He had given voice to my own deepest fears. My father would never park the car in the garage, but kept a small bass boat he rarely used in there on a trailer. The rest of the space was filled with old tools and the equipment he used to keep our lawn looking neat. A few weeks after Scott’s revelation, two of my father’s older sisters, my aunts, were washing the dinner dishes in the kitchen, which looked out on the garage. When I heard one of them, Ruth, say my mother’s name, I stopped just outside the doorway.

  “He should’ve torn that down right after it happened. Gives me the willies just to look at it, and Lord knows the neighbors must want it gone. I’d faint dead away if I had to go in there.” The second aunt, Beth (for Rehobeth, a name I found strange an
d exotic), told her to lower her voice.

  “If Charlotte doesn’t remember what happened, then it doesn’t matter. It’s only a garage. Roman says he can live with it, and that should be good enough for us, shouldn’t it? It’s his shame, and he has to suffer it. We’re not going to change him now.” She made a tsk-tsk sound that she used often to express her disapproval—and she disapproved of many things. Although she was the prettiest of my father’s three sisters, at thirty-eight her scowls had already creased her brow and set deep lines into either side of her unpainted lips. “We can only pray that she doesn’t have her mother’s unstable nature. Here, pass me that pan to dry.”

  “If I had found our mother like that, I would’ve gone stark raving mad.”

  It took me some moments to understand what they were saying—that I had been the one to discover my mother, dead. Leaning against the wall outside the kitchen, I ceased to hear their words, but only the low tones of their voices. When my father found me there, he asked me if anything was wrong, but I told him I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to go to bed. I finally met his eyes, and he looked at me a long time. Perhaps he was hearing more of what my aunts were saying. I could not. Would not. But I could see he knew that I’d found out.

  He let me go on to bed.

  Despite my aunts’ opinions, I’ve never felt shame over what my mother did. Only sadness that she would leave us so callously. It was, perhaps, some strange kind of blessing that I can’t remember that day, that I had no remembered image of my mother, dead in her yellow robe, her limp body hanging in our garage. My only memory is of her standing outside on that strange, hot, windy day, holding out her hand to me. I never told Rachel or even Press. (Though I’m certain he found out.) Holding the knowledge close to my heart, I hoped it would make me a better mother to my own children.

  My mother has never come to me in Bliss House. Until the day of Eva’s funeral, I had never experienced more than the occasional sense of something fluttering at the edge of my field of vision. An unexpected chill in a well-heated room.

  Finally almost all the women who had been at the funeral were gathered on the wide terrace running along the front of the house. Someone—probably Terrance, our houseman, or one of the day women acting at Terrance’s instruction—had distributed a number of umbrellas and a few antique parasols that Olivia kept in storage.

  One group stood in the thin band of shade at the edge of the forsythia bushes in the center of the circular drive as though they might draw some coolness from its tangle of shaggy branches. I could have told them that the only shade to be had from it was deep in the bowels of the overgrown mess.

  Only a few months earlier, Shelley, the orchardkeeper’s shy younger sister who was very fond of the children, had given Eva a real bunny for Easter, and I had to crawl inside the forsythia to find it when it escaped from its hutch near the entrance to the garden maze. The bunny had darted inside to hide, alarmed by his sudden freedom. While the outside of the bushy mass was covered in yellow flowers, there were no leaves or flowers on the gnarled trunks of the bushes, and branches arched and dipped overhead, slapping me gently as I crawled, calling nervously for the bunny. It was a dark cathedral redolent of dirt and rotting leaves, and I was glad Eva hadn’t come with me. It was a place to escape to, a secret, empty place in the vast outdoors. When I finally emerged with the bunny, I was stunned to find that Eva had gone into the house, leaving Michael asleep in the grass, and doubly stunned to see that, by my watch, I’d been inside for nearly twenty minutes.

  My heart pounded. What might have happened to him? I told no one what I’d done. Had I simply been . . . entranced? I’m still not sure.

  Now I felt the same sense of living out of time, of having missed something. The accident had stolen my attention, pushing my grief away for a little while. I’d met my father on the lane as he hurried back to the overturned carriage: Michael and Nonie were safe in the house. Press was far down the lane, doing his part. If Olivia had been alive, she would’ve already made sure that everyone was inside, calmed and fed and given lemonade or sweet iced tea or sherry.

  I quietly cleared my throat.

  “Let’s all go inside, shall we? There are cold drinks in the dining room, and we can wait for news.”

  The women stopped talking and all turned to stare silently at me. For a moment I worried that I hadn’t actually spoken. Hoping they’d follow, I approached the front door where Terrance waited. I gave him a small smile.

  What shall I tell you, now, about Terrance? He was our houseman, tall and gaunt and of indeterminate age, with slight folds in the lids of his dark eyes that made me wonder if someone in his family had come from somewhere in Asia. He no longer had a single hair on his head or face—no brows or lashes, not even a single hair growing from one of the many moles dotting his face and neck. His clothes—including his jacket and, in winter, his pullover V-neck sweater—were always black, except for his white standard-collar shirt. He had worked for the family his entire life, and was as much a part of Bliss House as its cherry moldings and priceless carpets and motes of dust floating in the shafts of sunlight coming from the windows around the dome. Terrance simply was. Yet that day, I had no idea at all how much a part of Bliss House he truly was.

  Is?

  Waiting for the women to respond, I caught a movement over near the patio.

  Someone stood inside the glass French doors, watching from the dining room. It was a woman, but I couldn’t quite make out her face. Then she moved slightly, and, in a reflected flash of light, I saw the faded blond hair, the thick stroke of silver at the hairline that seemed to exist to highlight the long, pinkish scar just above her eye. Her mouth was wide and thin, firm with intent.

  Olivia.

  Heedless of both Terrance and the women around me, I hurried into the cool embrace of the front hall. As my eyes adjusted, I found that there were five or six people who hadn’t come back outside on hearing of the accident, standing in the middle of the hall, beneath the dome. I didn’t have the presence of mind to greet them, and if they were offended, I couldn’t help it.

  I knew before I went into the dining room that Olivia wouldn’t really be standing by the window, or anywhere else. But perhaps there would be some vestige, something moved or disturbed. If it were possible for anyone to come back from death on the strength of her ties to a particular place, Olivia would be that person. Every room was stamped with some piece of artwork, some fabric, some piece of furniture that had been hers, or whose history she knew. Her face was on a number of portraits. I hadn’t yet changed anything in either her bedroom or morning room, even though she had left all of her personal belongings to me. Bliss House itself had belonged to her. So why would she leave in death?

  The dining room wasn’t empty, but there was no Olivia, and I surprised myself by feeling disappointed rather than relieved.

  Marlene, our housekeeper, looked up from the table where she was putting out a stack of linen luncheon napkins from the press in the butler’s pantry. I thought she was around fifty years old at the time, but even at twenty-seven I was a poor judge of the age of anyone who might be over thirty. In truth, Marlene was barely forty then, but she hadn’t bothered to cover the premature gray mixed into her brown hair, and her eyes were dark but not wide or lively. Beneath the short sleeves of her black, summer wool dress, her arms were fleshy and loose. There was a kind reserve in her eyes that I appreciated, even though what she said next brought me up short.

  “Mrs. Bliss would have me put out more sherry. Because of the accident.”

  How many more times would I have to hear similar suggestions beginning with the words Mrs. Bliss would have? Grief and the possible presence of Olivia couldn’t quell my own self-consciousness and irritation.

  “Sherry, and Scotch too, I think,” I told her, my voice sounding breathless even to me. “The men may want something strong.”

  She went back to arranging the napkins on the Sheraton sideboard, which, like the baronial dinin
g table, was overladen with food—ham biscuits, gelatin molds and tomato aspics, deviled eggs, peach and apple pies and crumbles, fruit salad, fried chicken, and fried chicken livers—that people had been bringing to the house for two days, and with more that Marlene and her helpers had made. The dining room was Marlene’s purview. Not mine. I didn’t like the room at all, and almost never used the steep, narrow stairs in the minuscule hallway between the dining room and kitchen, even though they were the closest to the second-floor nursery.

  The dining-room walls—twelve feet high like those of the rest of the rooms on the first floor—were completely covered with a mural of staring eyes. Not human eyes, but the eyes of peacock feathers that were so precisely drawn that they looked like they’d been painted from the memory of a terrible dream. Press had told me he’d been made to count them once as a punishment for some infraction he couldn’t now recall. How many eyes did he say there were? More than a thousand, I think. What a thing to do to a child!

  But it wasn’t just the walls. There, drooping in a grand crystal vase that someone in the family had brought from some long-ago European trip, was a lush armful of peacock feathers that begged to be touched. Stroked. The coronas around their opaque pupils glimmered gold.

  All those eyes. Had they witnessed Olivia’s return? My mind was restless, and I was so shaken that I believed I could feel my blood pulsing through my veins.

  If Olivia could come back, why not Eva?

  Chapter 5

  A Sign

  For nearly two weeks after the frantic strangeness of the day of Eva’s funeral, I stayed close to my bedroom, tethered by guilt and grief. The day itself lives in my memory in a series of tableaux: the fly on Eva’s flowers, the gray, bloody head against the carriage window, the terrified horse, Olivia’s face in the French doors. But isn’t that what our memories are? We walk down a long hallway, opening doors into rooms whose permanent contents wait to surprise or comfort or horrify us. I lay in my bed, not wanting to breathe, remembering brushing Eva’s teeth before bedtime, checking her for ticks when we returned from walking on the deer trail in the woods, her pleased laughter when, at two years old, she stuck her hand in a bowl of noodles and wiped them in her hair. Strangely, I even lingered over Eva in her bath, singing the Eensy Weensy Spider as she tried to string bubbles along the inner wall of the tub as though they would make a spider’s web.