I am aware that Mr. Grissom, for all his gifts and purity of heart, was saddled with humanness. I’d seen him angry, but had never failed to see him ask forgiveness and make amends. I’d witnessed his irritation with the addlepated, the foolish of this world, but not without an accompanying repentance and a turning from agitation to prayer for the fool’s soul. And isn’t that the difference between those who please God and those who do not?
Unlike Josiah, for so many people failings are the pavement on the road they walk, not an occasional pebble quickly tossed out of the way.
Did he ever disappoint me?
No more than I disappointed him.
Dinner and a concert, he’d said a few weeks later, when the house began to fill again. A traveling musician I’d longed to hear, one my memory can no longer name.
Anticipation served as one of my long-suffering companions in that endless night of waiting for him to arrive. Anticipation sat with me in my lamp-lit office, twisting my stomach into a thick braid. She and I were like schoolmates at recess—she plaiting my stomach while I chattered about my fairy-tale dreams for the future.
But Anticipation grew tired of the game. As the evening wore on, Concern took her place.
Had I misunderstood his invitation? Not likely. One can wonder, in a busy week, is it Tuesday or Wednesday? One can get so caught up in the living of it that one fails to flip the calendar page from July to August, the days being so similar. But one does not misplace the particulars of something for which one has so long waited.
He was simply, unavoidably detained. That was all. An unexpected visit from an important client. A pressing matter that could not wait. I would not allow Concern to voice her well-reasoned opinion that it was unlikely anything in his caseload would be so pressing as to keep him this long beyond the close of the business day.
Having read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it didn’t surprise me when Concern grew ugly, convulsing and contorting herself into a hideous, sinister monster called Worry.
Picking up the gauntlet of the wait, Worry tormented me with thoughts of his body caught beneath the bulk of his overturned carriage. Or of a disgruntled client holding a derringer to his throat. For what earthly reason, Worry couldn’t elaborate. She spoke in clipped, disjointed sentences and seemed unbound by laws of reason and logic. “What if he—?” she taunted, then left it to Imagination to fill in the blanks.
Imagination possesses a fair working knowledge of disasters and is a skilled artist. She sat musing at the easel in my mind. She painted him hurt, deathly ill, already dead, or worse—disinterested.
He’d changed his mind about dinner, the concert, me. He hadn’t sent word because he couldn’t find any that seemed appropriate. He tried them on—one at a time—like hats or ties. But none felt or looked right.
“Anna, I’m sorry. This was not a good idea. Best we keep our relationship strictly professional.”
“Anna, I don’t know what I was thinking when I invited you to accompany me for the evening. Surely you, too, can see that it would be in our best interests not to pursue this further.”
“Anna, I feared that my attentions might mislead you into thinking I care more than I do.”
Now watery thin, the evening once held the cream-rich potential of changing everything in my relationship with Josiah. From friendship to . . . to an indefinable something, the very thought of which tasted sweet. We’d shared many a dinner together. Always business. That night there was to be no business on the menu. That night was for us.
Us. A coarse-sounding, wholly unlyrical word for a concept so soul-satisfying. How easy it is to invent a future from a mere possibility! The fact that all my dreams starred a gentle, refined, intense man with blue-delphinium eyes and spring-water laughter did not guarantee that my face had ever appeared in his dreams.
He was flawlessly kind to me, true. But he was kind even to his opponents in court or business. He seemed to enjoy my company, but wasn’t he at ease in almost any circle and circumstance? Debating politics, theology, and literature with both conviction and grace.
Attentive to the ailing widow neighbor—whose conversations knew no other dimension than a recitation of her pains and menu of current treatments—and to the senator who wielded career-disabling or -enabling power.
When the situation called for it, he addressed the court with authority.
Your Honor, gentlemen of the jury, I direct your attention to . . .
I’d seen his legal finesse stop objections mid-word. And yet, he could sit in my parlor and listen with endless patience while I wrestled with one paltry crisis or another. He could be enraptured, as I, with a butterfly’s effortless flight pattern above the wildflowers at the creek’s edge. He could sip chicory-thinned coffee at my kitchen table and never let on that he noticed. Of course he noticed. His palate had been treated to the fare of the governor’s mansion just the evening before.
In our working relationship, I stiffened at some of his counsel. But I never doubted his wisdom. His presence was as calming to me as a cello played by a skilled muse with long, sonorous draws of the bow.
Could I have merely imagined his affection for me? No. But my mind may have exaggerated the depth of his caring. That’s what troubled me most that long evening of waiting—that I had perhaps invented the dream.
The mantel clock I’d always found comforting became a spine-wrinkling irritation as I waited for him that night. Its once dulcet tones stung like vinegar on an open wound. Six o’clock. Seven. Eight. Too late for dinner. Nine. Too late for the concert. Ten. Too late for us.
To the young women in my care, I had preached until I was hoarse that good men kept their promises. Always. Would I now have the courage to follow my own counsel and let Josiah go . . . or rather, let my imagination-fed infatuation with him fade? The girls were watching. I would discipline my heart not to race when he drew near. I would sit with him across a desk, across a room, and not ache with what might have been if he had loved me in return.
How could I blame him for shying away from me? I was inextricably packaged with the work to which God had called me. We were inseparable. A heavy load for any man to consider sharing.
Reason spent but a few brief moments with me that night. She argued that since Josiah had never intentionally disappointed me in the past, his absence could be explained. I chased her and her opinion from the room with the groaning sound a heart makes when it is breaking.
What a sight I must have made. Bent inside. Ladder-straight in posture. Perched stiffly on the front edge of the settee facing the window through which I hoped to view his approach. I watched in vain.
My long-fussed-over attire was dismantled as the time slipped by. The wool cape was laid aside, my gray felt hat and Lydia’s lavender gloves summarily removed. The brooch at my neck—which I surmised interfered with my breathing—joined the pile of discards. My breath still felt pinched and strained.
Frugality finally pushed me to action. I could not justify letting the lamps burn for a lost cause.
My girls were long abed. Alone, I walked the halls of my suddenly hollow home, turning down the lamps with theatrical solemnity, as if each vanishing pool of light represented the snuffing of hope.
Ivy—1951
“Anna, that must have broken your heart! Even now, as you’re telling the story, you’re crying.”
“I’m not crying as much for that long-overcome disappointment as I am for how close I came to giving up on a good man because I couldn’t believe he could love me as much as I needed. Does that sound at all familiar, Ivy?”
Ivy leaned back.
“What is it about Drew that makes you so certain he won’t still love you?”
“I haven’t heard anything since I told him the truth.”
“And has the postal system always been prompt in getting mail from the battlefield to our doors?”
“I should have heard by now.”
“You’re assuming he will walk away from you and
from the baby, that he’ll abandon his responsibilities and that his love for you will dissipate as soon as he reads those words. That’s a cad, Ivy, not the man you’ve described to me. Maybe you’re better off without him.”
“That’s not who he is.”
“No?”
“Drew is kind and generous, brave, strong but tender. He’s like no other man I’ve met.”
“Then what makes you so certain he won’t marry you?”
“Oh, he’ll offer to marry me. But will he do so out of obligation, because he is such a fine man, or because he loves me?”
“Can it be only one or the other? Or can love and responsibility blend to form something exquisitely beautiful?”
Her notebook never far out of reach, Ivy smoothed ointment on the scars on Anna’s legs as she and Anna talked. The strokes grew slower, lighter. “He . . . will . . . leave me.”
“Why would you dishonor him by saying such a thing?”
Ivy’s throat tightened. The room with solid walls shimmered. “This isn’t my first child. My mother left us the night she found me in our bathroom in the midst of a miscarriage. I was sixteen. Love had nothing to do with that one. And love wasn’t enough to overcome my mom’s disappointment in me.”
“That wasn’t it.” Ornell’s coarse voice, though subdued, stopped the shimmering. “That’s not why she left us.”
Ivy turned toward the doorway where her father stood, but she avoided his gaze. He took one step deeper into the room.
“She didn’t walk away because of you, Ivy. How could you think that?”
Ivy searched the ceiling—as she had for years—for some other explanation. “Because of me, your marriage broke up. Because of me, she abandoned us. Because of me, you were saddled with a soiled daughter who even after she grew up couldn’t survive on her own.”
“Ivy, stop!” his voice commanded now. Then softer, “You never were very good about recognizing the truth.”
She glanced from her father to Anna. Two sets of eyebrows arched high.
“What mother in her right mind would run away from her child in trouble?” He whispered the words, but they echoed in the room.
“Dad?”
“In her right mind. She weren’t in her right mind, Ivy.”
It took him hours to give birth to the rest of the story—a difficult labor. The women waited as the words crowned, then retreated, to crown again.
“You weren’t meant to be an only child, Ivy.”
And after a few more contractions, “Your mother would have had dozens, if she could have.”
With the next wave, “Instead, she had dozens of miscarriages.”
“Dad, I never knew.”
“Some of them, even I didn’t know about. But I guessed. She’d slip into her own world and I couldn’t reach her, couldn’t stop the pain.”
Ivy splayed her palms over her live, hiccupping child, cradling it. “I only knew she was sadder than other mothers. Until now, I thought it was her disappointment with me.”
“It was the others—the sons and daughters who refused to stay with her long enough to be born. With each one, she moved a few more inches away from me, until we lost sight of each other.” He inhaled a labored breath. “Then, that night, with you losing a child you hadn’t longed for, hadn’t prayed for, hadn’t begged the heavens for the privilege of holding . . . ”
No more.
“What happened to her, Mr. Carrington?” Anna braved the breach of speechlessness.
Ivy watched her father’s whiskered chin quiver. Then he turned and left the room.
Anna and Ivy sat in silence, the evening deepening around them, though a splinter of light had dawned.
Inhale and exhale. Breathing in the slivers of truth. Breathing out the shards of pain. A cricket in the basement sang a rusty tune with no meaning. Then her father stepped back into the room.
“She asked me to take her to the bus depot. So I did. Helped her purchase a ticket to Des Moines, where her grandmother lived. She got lost somewhere along the way.”
The slap of metal on metal signaled the mailman had tucked something into the narrow black box that hung near the doorbell, letting the lid drop shut.
Ivy made a pretense of taking time to dry her hands on the dish towel before racing to the mailbox. Nothing looked, smelled, or felt like Korea.
It was possible, she reasoned, that her letter had fallen on the floor of a mail room between here and there. So she wrote another, saying all she’d said in the first one and more, sketching a poor representation of the bungalow and of the crib she’d found at a late-season rummage sale. Ivy hand delivered it to the postmaster at the iron-barred window downtown and stood sentry while he postmarked it and slid it into the proper canvas mailbag along the wall behind the counter.
She asked again if her mail—all her mail—were being forwarded to the new address. No new mail carriers who hadn’t heard of the change? No stockpile of undelivered letters? No news?
How desperate she must have looked.
How desperate she was.
The fire of Anna’s life once roared and snapped, from what her stories revealed. Ivy watched now as the flames grew mellow and sparks became embers. If anything, her spirit glowed brighter, but Ivy found herself pausing at Anna’s door each morning. Would she find Anna smiling? Or gone? She adopted the habit of whispering, “Lord, help me accept whatever I find behind this door today.”
Anna would call that a habit worth keeping.
“Good morning, Ivy. How are you and the little one today? Did you sleep well?”
“I was up three times to the bathroom.”
Anna used her fingers to fluff her sleep-matted hair. “I am happy to have lived long enough to see the introduction of indoor plumbing for occasions such as this.”
Who would make Ivy laugh like that when Anna had drawn her last breath?
“Let’s get your morning routine done as quickly as we can. You left the story unfinished last night.”
“Which one?”
“Anna, you know very well which one.”
“My beloved . . . on the night he wasn’t. Or so I thought.”
“Let’s get some breakfast in us. The little one is especially hungry this morning. Then we’ll talk.”
When Anna finally felt up to talking, Ivy risked asking, “Where was he? Where was Josiah that night?”
Anna smoothed the blanket on her lap. “He was detained.”
“I suspected that. I couldn’t for a minute believe he stood you up. What detained him?”
“Not what. Who.”
Ivy set her dust rag aside and picked up the notebook, the third one since she’d started writing midsummer. “Who?”
Anna smirked. “The local law enforcement.”
“Josiah was arrested? For what?”
“Not arrested. Detained. They weren’t sure what to do with him, prominent attorney and all.”
“What did he do?”
“Speeding.”
“Speeding? A hot-rodder?”
Laughter filled the small room. “Hardly. Josiah’s motorcar was one of the few on the roads in those days. It was to be my first ride in it. He was . . . he was in a hurry to reach me that evening. Clairmont had a speed limit for horse-drawn vehicles but had yet to implement one for motorized vehicles.”
Ivy made a note in the margin of the page. “How fast was he going?”
“Ten.”
“Ten miles an hour over the speed limit?”
“Oh, no, dear. The speed limit was six miles an hour. He raced along at ten, the law enforcement officer estimated, and spent the night in the hoosegow, although we didn’t call it that at the time. No charges were filed because no one knew what to do without an adopted motorcar speed limit.”
“Anna! You forgave him, I hope. That’s so romantic. Racing to see you.”
She clutched the locket at her neck. “Eventually. I forgave him eventually. The law was in a greater hurry to do so than I was.”
So many of the young women sent to me arrived because they’d taken their relationships too far too fast. As Josiah and I grew to consider each other more than business partners, we talked about our responsibility to present an example to the residents. Patience. Self-restraint. Decorum. Purity. We were not children. But we lived our relationship under the scrutiny of those who had made unwise choices in their relationships. That put an additional restraint on our growing affection for each other.
The affection nearly flamed out before we gave it voice.
The conversation began innocently. Josiah and I walked in the orchard, under pretense of checking on the harvest readiness of the Yellow Transparents, as if Puff were not daily on the case. Truth be told, it was togetherness that drew us to the top of the hill. That and the impeccably blue canopy overhead, the autumn freshness and intoxicating fragrance in the air, and the joy of feeling comfortable and appreciated whether speaking or silent.
“This is a good place.”
I assumed he meant the property as a whole, not just the tiny square of it on which we stood. “Yes. I’m grateful.”
“Anna, have you ever considered having a family of your own?”
A bolt of lightning skittered recklessly through my body, exiting through my toes, though the sky remained cloudless and unthreatening.
“I have a family, Josiah. So many daughters and grandchildren that I find it increasingly difficult to name them all accurately.”
Did his silence mean he was considering the validity of my answer or constructing a response?
“Have you . . . thought about . . . marriage? About sharing your life and your future and your passion for this work . . . with a man who would love and cherish you and meld his efforts and his heart with yours?”
He had not specified which man.
“The work is so consuming,” I said. “It takes all my energies to love and care for these girls, to teach them how to be good mothers and godly women.”
When the Morning Glory Blooms (9781426770777) Page 24
