Charlotte’s Story

by Benedict, Laura

  I stood up, took off my gardening glove, and offered my hand.

  He was enormously tall, his hand surprisingly soft and much cooler than my own. Again, the painful half-smile.

  “Abram, ma’am.”

  The color. With a flash of irritation, I realized that I might have asked J.C. for suggestions about the exact color I was looking for. If only he’d brought a brochure or some kind of samples.

  “I want the walls to be white. Not bright white, but softer. Like. . . .” I closed my eyes searching for a word. An image.

  “Like new butter? Or cow’s cream?”

  Cow’s cream was the exact image that had come to my mind. Staring into the milk pitcher on my grandmother’s kitchen table after her neighbor had brought some Jersey cow’s milk over for our dinner as a treat for me, the cream floating on top like a soft, shapeless continent.

  “How did you know?”

  “Everyone wants cream. It’s a very popular color.”

  Of course it was. I was reassured.

  We went into the house through the mudroom, but the kitchen and hallways were empty. Marlene and Terrance were absent. Upstairs, even the theater was quiet behind its closed pocket doors.

  I turned on the lights in the ballroom and we were immersed in the reflection of the lights on the dark red wallpaper with its stern, identical men and beautiful Japanese women. Abram ran his hand over the wallpaper. “You want this paper painted over?”

  I bristled. It was only wallpaper.

  “I do. Is that a problem?”

  His hand dropped from the wall.

  “I can do that.”

  “You can get rid of those, too? And patch the ceiling?” I pointed to the giant metal circles screwed into the ceiling.

  “Yes, ma’am. I can do that too.”

  Chapter 20

  The Dinner Party

  Dinner that night was a fairly tame affair with Rachel and Jack for company, and the sheriff, Hugh Walters, to round out the table. Even though we were technically in mourning (a tradition that had fallen away more and more since I was a girl), I’d suggested a slightly larger party because I didn’t relish the idea of spending empty hours with J.C. and Press. But Press had vetoed the idea quickly.

  “She’s not worried about being entertained. I really want you to take the time to get to know her better. I’m sure you could be wonderful friends. I’ll make sure Rachel, Jack, and Hugh are here.”

  I’d been doubtful. Rachel and J.C. at the same table again? Despite the formidable nature of Bliss House, I wasn’t sure it could remain standing.

  I was wrong. The evening was unseasonably warm, so, after Michael was down for the night, we ate on the patio outside the dining room, our faces softened by the light of several torches. Press had brought a record player out and put on a stack of records that began with Tony Bennett, a favorite of mine. J.C. and Rachel exchanged a few very civil words, but otherwise J.C. dominated the conversation with gossipy New York stories that the men seemed to find very funny. Not surprisingly, Rachel was subdued, picking at the dinner Terrance served: oysters on the half-shell, consommé, breaded veal cutlets with zucchini and yellow squash, and Marlene’s special iced pumpkin-ginger cake. Rachel was elegant in her black knit maternity dress and jacket, but beneath her eyes there were dark circles that worried me. After the coffee came, she got up, restless, to smoke a cigarette. I followed her to the other side of the patio. The torchlight glimmered in her eyes as though they were wet with tears.

  “What’s going on, Rachel? Is it Jack?” She rarely complained about Jack. He was slavishly devoted to her—the kind of man someone like Rachel required. But men often reacted strangely to pregnancy.

  “What could possibly be wrong?” First cutting her eyes to Jack, who was listening carefully to something J.C. was saying over her wineglass, she looked back at me with a small, tight smile.

  I knew when she was being sarcastic, but also knew better than to try to drag information out of her, particularly information about her feelings. She would proclaim them loudly or she wouldn’t say anything at all.

  As we watched, J.C. stood up from her chair and declared that she couldn’t bear to sit any longer with Frank Sinatra singing “Night and Day,” right there under the stars. She asked the men who might possibly be brave enough to dance with her.

  Jack looked over his shoulder at Rachel, who stared back, impassive.

  “He wouldn’t. Not with J.C.,” I whispered. “Jack would never do that to you.”

  Rachel gave a harsh little laugh. “Of course he wouldn’t. Not our Jack. But he does look worried, doesn’t he? Men are such bastards.” She rested a hand on her belly. “Every one of them.”

  “You city girls,” I heard Press say to J.C. “You can’t sit still.” But he didn’t get up either.

  “What a couple of mama’s boys you are!” She turned abruptly and waggled a finger at Hugh. “I guess that means you win, Sheriff.”

  Hugh stood quickly, knocking over his folding chair with a loud clatter, and everyone laughed. I felt bad for him. It had seemed to me an odd invitation for Press to make to Hugh. We didn’t often socialize with him. Because he had come to the house after Eva’s death, I still felt awkward around him. But at least I liked and trusted him.

  Before Hugh could pick up the chair, Terrance was there to do it, brushing off the seat with his ever-present white cloth. Then he stepped back through the terrace doors and into the dining room, where he waited. The glass hadn’t yet been repaired, and the small panels of wood in one corner were a constant reminder to me of Olivia.

  J.C. was tipsy and her steps were loose, compared to Hugh’s careful moves as he tried to lead her. Rachel and I watched as she caressed the thick brown hair at the back of Hugh’s head, and brought her mouth to his ear. When he finally leaned away from her a bit to look at her face, he laughed a laugh so clear and loud that Frank Sinatra’s voice faded into the background. The album continued, and even after two more songs J.C. would not let Hugh go. Not even after Rachel went to Jack and put her hand on his shoulder to tell him that she was tired and they should leave. Hugh only managed to get in a wave goodbye while J.C. blew them a kiss.

  I hugged Rachel close and whispered that I would call her, and inside I promised myself that I would. It was like her to be moody and somewhat cold—particularly with someone she disliked as much as J.C.—but not so subdued that she wouldn’t eat.

  As the lights of Rachel’s Thunderbird swept over us, throwing our shadows and those of the Japanese maples tall against the house, I went to sit beside Press, who had settled down again at the table while Terrance cleared the dessert plates and refilled the coffee cups. I finished my glass of wine.

  “Champagne cognac, Terrance? Or some of that yummy plum port?” J.C. called over Hugh’s shoulder. “You don’t mind if I boss Terrance around a little, do you, Press, darling?”

  Press nodded. “Whatever she wants, Terrance.”

  I put my hand on his arm. He was still mine, even if the woman who might try to take him from me was only a few feet away. Despite our distance and my guilt, I wasn’t ready to give him up.

  “It’s getting chilly. Maybe we should go inside.”

  “Do you want my jacket?” Press started to take his jacket off, but I stopped him.

  “No, I’m fine. We won’t stay out much longer.”

  We sat another moment, quiet.

  “Rachel doesn’t seem well,” I said.

  “Rachel is Rachel.”

  “She certainly doesn’t like J.C. very much.”

  Press laughed loudly enough for both Hugh and J.C. to glance our way. “She’ll learn.”

  “Do you want to?” We hadn’t danced since Olivia’s New Year’s Eve party, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to let J.C. see us together.

  “What?”

  “Dance?”

  “Hell, no. You know I don’t really like it. I only did it for as long as I did to get some pretty girl like you to marry me.” />
  I smiled in spite of myself. I’d let myself drink two glasses of wine at dinner, knowing Michael was safe asleep upstairs with both the bathroom and nursery doors locked. I’d been self-conscious, particularly with Hugh there, but my discomfort faded as the wine did its work.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what? Marrying you? That was my pleasure.”

  “No, silly. For changing your mind about the ballroom.”

  He turned his head to watch J.C. and Hugh. The Sinatra album had started over again, and Hugh was jokingly proclaiming that she was wearing him out.

  “Did I change my mind?”

  I squeezed his arm, feeling a tiny resurgence of the love I’d felt for him for so many years. Was it possible that it was still there? I wasn’t sure. Remembering now, I’m certain that it was the wine. The wall was still there, warning me, protecting me. But at that moment I was hopeful.

  “It means so much to me. I miss our life.”

  When he turned back to me, I believed I saw tenderness in his eyes.

  Terrance, as though to encourage my wine-induced vulnerability, came outside with a tray of after-dinner drinks.

  “Finally!” J.C. said. “We were about to turn into butter from spinning around out there. Hugh is a madman.”

  As the two thirsty dancers fell on the glasses of water and cognac Terrance had set out on the table, Press and I remained silent.

  I closed and locked the nursery door softly behind me, leaving the key on the commode table just outside. Sometime during the night, Michael had climbed out of his crib to sleep on Eva’s trundle bed. I wasn’t ready for him to move permanently from his crib, but as I looked down on him, sleeping with one arm flung over the back of Eva’s Lassie dog, I didn’t have the heart to put him back. Before leaving the room, I pulled out the lower mattress in case he rolled off.

  Moonlight streamed through the dome windows, brightening the stars on its surface and filling the well of the house with silver light. My feet were bare and cold on the gallery floor and I was about to hurry back to my room when I noticed that the door to the yellow guest room, J.C.’s room, was standing open.

  How horrid a thing jealousy is! I couldn’t help myself that my mind, rather than imagining that she’d gone down to the kitchen for something to eat or to the library for a book, went directly to the idea that she was in Press’s room. I’d seen nothing untoward passed between them that evening; but as the wine had worn off, my suspicions reasserted themselves. The idea of J.C. in any sort of sexual situation with my husband or anyone was repugnant to me. Hers would be like the embrace of a particularly feminine, but ghoulish, spider.

  So do not blame me when I tell you that I went to my husband’s room as though I were being pulled there. I swear, I had no choice.

  My hand trembled a bit as I touched the doorknob and rested my cheek against the wood. There was indeed a sound coming from the other side. As I turned the knob and let the door open of its own accord, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Press was snoring in the shadows of his tall bed. The shadows were familiar, too: he was alone.

  With his door safely closed, I went to stand at the top of the front stairs to listen for any sound that might come from downstairs. But I heard only the grandfather clock.

  I should have gone straight back to bed, ashamed of my suspicions, or at least comforted. But I was awake and curious. There had been another girl very like J.C. at Burton Hall: the same razor-sharp limbs and aggressive laugh. We rarely spoke and never shared a class, but she had caught me staring at her once, in the library. Before I could look away, she flicked her tongue from between her lips and ran it slowly across her large white teeth. It was a strange, sensuous thing for her to do, and I couldn’t look away, and for a moment it was as though we were the only two people in the room. My breath caught in my chest. Then she turned back to her book, amusement plain in her callous smile, and the spell was broken.

  Something about the stillness of the house, the heaviness of the air, made me give Olivia’s doorway a wide berth as I passed. Olivia’s room, like J.C., fascinated and repelled me at once. What other terrors waited inside for me? But Eva. Don’t forget Eva, I told myself.

  I knew I shouldn’t go into the yellow room. I’m sure I gave myself some foolish excuse about her possibly being injured or too ill to close the door herself. And of course there was the possibility that she’d just wanted to leave the door open, tempting, suggesting, to someone that he—yes, of course he—should make his way inside.

  I forced myself to breathe deeply to slow the beating of my heart. The anticipation I felt was inappropriate, surely, for a hostess who was only supposed to be checking on a guest’s welfare.

  The moon was high enough that the yellow room stood in deep shadow. I had stayed in this room more than once before Press and I were married, tucked up safely beside Olivia as though she might keep an eye on me there and keep Press away from me. Although Olivia called it the yellow room, its wallpaper was truly gold and silvery white. Large flowers traced in silver-white against a rich gold field caught the bit of moonlight and shone, iridescent. The far windows looked directly down on the garden maze. I’d sat in the window seat beneath them before, wondering what my life here in Bliss House would be like. That night, I wondered if J.C. had also been imagining what her life might be like if she were the mistress of Bliss House.

  The bed was empty and in disarray, but there were smells in the air that told me she hadn’t been gone too long. The peppery scent of Caron Poivre mixed strongly with flatulence and perhaps . . . what was it? Cognac.

  There was light enough to see how her belongings lay about the room with surprising carelessness: yesterday’s dress over the top of a chair, a stream of lingerie flowing from the suitcase on its stand to the floor, two pairs of shoes trailing along the middle of the carpet toward the far windows. The sight of the clutter reassured me, somehow. Press didn’t like clutter, would comment even if the nursery were in too much disarray. He could never live with a woman like J.C.

  I dipped my hand into the open suitcase, and its depths of silk and cotton and nylon released an invisible cloud of perfume. I lifted a slip to my cheek. It was fine silk, the lace at its bosom soft, not prickly, like the lace on so many of my undergarments. She, like Rachel, would pay attention to such things, I thought. The differences were often lost on me. How odd that the two women, so alike, disliked each other.

  I heard a voice through the open window. The evening had cooled, and J.C. had gone on at dinner about how much she liked sleeping in a cool room in the nude, and then she had laughed at my reddening face. “Oh, Precious Bride. I am so bad, I know. It’s age, I think. I have no reason to care what people know about me.”

  Still clutching the slip, I crossed the room to kneel on the window seat. (On the small table beside it was, indeed, a balloon glass with a splash of cognac in the bottom. Unfortunately, the glass was resting in a puddle of the stuff. How careless she was! But I didn’t dare clean it up lest she realize someone had been in the room.) Sighing, I pressed my forehead against the glass. The view from this side of the house was remarkable in the daytime: the garden below, the woods, and then the distant purple ridge of mountains beyond. It was a vast, romantic view, and it made sense that the largest, grandest bedrooms were on this side of the house. Now the ridge was just a faint line against the horizon, but I could see the maze in the garden and three figures in the center of it quite clearly. Three, where there should just have been Hera, standing on her moss-grown pedestal, her peacock in her arms. Stunned, I squeezed my eyes shut for a second to clear them. When I opened them again, the figures were still there, etched in the same silver light as the flowers on the wallpaper.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Hearing Press’s husky whisper, I should have been chagrined. Ashamed of myself. But I couldn’t look away.

  “Charlotte!”

  Without turning, I waved him toward the window.

  “Why are
you in here, Charlotte? Where’s J.C.?”

  I sat back on my heels, not knowing whether to laugh or cry out in indignation.

  Press put his hand on my shoulder as he leaned forward to look. I watched his face, looking for the same shock that had taken hold of me. Instead, a sly smile came to his face.

  I looked back down at the scene below. J.C. was on her knees in the white pea gravel surrounding the statue, just a foot or two away from one of the marble benches, her arms wrapped around the hips of the skeletally thin man standing in front of her, her face pressed into his groin. She wore a clinging robe, her head, back, and waist a trim, recognizable silhouette. The man’s face was upturned to the clear night sky; his eyes were closed, a look of sublime pleasure softening his sharp features.

  Terrance.

  I put a hand against the window to steady myself.

  Press looked down, still amused. “Poor Charlotte. Let’s get you back to your bed where you belong.”

  “But we can’t. They have to stop!”

  “They’re adults, Charlotte. This isn’t any of our business.”

  “Of course it’s our business. She may be a guest, but that man is at our table every day. He serves our food.” I shuddered. “It’s disgusting. And he’s. . . .” I couldn’t find the words.

  “What are you talking about?” Press looked genuinely puzzled. “Hugh?”

  I shook my head, continuing to whisper, afraid they’d hear even though we were many feet above them.

  “It’s not Hugh. Didn’t you see? It’s Terrance.”

  Press chuckled and rubbed my shoulder. “Honey, it’s not Terrance. That’s Hugh down there. Although I rather like the idea that she’d be a good sport and give Terrance a thrill.”

  “No. You’re wrong.”

  “Am I? Look again.”

  God knows, I didn’t want to look into the garden again; but Press seemed so confident, I had to see for myself. I leaned forward again, trying not to look at J.C. but at the man’s face.