The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

John’s office was warm and comfortable, the heat had come on automatically. “How nice,” Mr. Delatte said.

  “John did all of the estate business down here,” I told him. “Most of his practice, and all of his political work, came from the office at home.”

  Mr. Delatte said: “That should make it so much easier for us.”

  “I do know the combination of the safe.”

  “Splendid. I’ll get right to work.”

  He did. The rest of that day and evening and all the following day, which was a Sunday. That last afternoon I left him there and took the children for a ride. When I came back in the early winter dusk, I found him waiting for me.

  “Mrs. Tolliver,” he said (and his voice had an edge of real respect in it), “I’m sure you were aware of this, but your grandfather was a very wealthy man.”

  “I think I saw the inventory of his estate, though I don’t remember too much about it.”

  “If I were a newspaperman with a license for loose talk, I would say that your grandfather owned the whole county—all the best timber lands, half the grazing land, most of the stock. Why he even owned a lot of these buildings in town. The hotel for instance—an uncle left him that some twenty years ago.”

  “Howlands always did gather things the way squirrels go after nuts.”

  “I can see that.” He smiled gently. “I’m city-born,” he added in explanation. “I always forget how a small town can be owned by one man. It always surprises me. … Is there something wrong?”

  “I’m sorry.” I had been staring at him and I hadn’t been seeing him at all. “I was thinking.”

  “Have I said something?”

  “Oh no.” I smiled back at him. “I think your observations are extremely useful. You’ve given me a wonderful idea. You really have.”

  Mr. Delatte worked weekends and one day a week, driving furiously back and forth, managing both his practice and my business. He stayed in our guest room—I suggested that, it was more comfortable than the hotel, and I was glad of the company. It also amused me to think of the town’s talk.

  It was a long tedious process, the separating of my belongings from John’s. Week after week I plodded along after Mr. Delatte, my head aching and spinning with unaccustomed ideas, strange words. But I kept on, because there was something I wanted. Something that neither my grandfather nor John had ever taught me. I wanted to learn precisely what I owned, what the generations of William Howlands had acquired.

  Mr. Delatte finished at last. He packed his briefcase with papers and went off to see John. A few more days and there was the statement of divorce. That part was over.

  And I waited, not forgetting. I had a plan; it rose to meet me out of the welter of figures I had studied over the last month. I knew now what I would do, and though I could have begun, I didn’t. I wanted everyone to know for sure what was happening, and who was responsible. I waited and let the time pass slowly.

  Mr. Delatte continued patient and hard-working. He was so gentle, so light, he was like a crisp brown leaf. If he noticed that people in Madison City were sharp or strange or stared at him, he gave no sign.

  “The records are in excellent order,” he said to me.

  “I’m sure John was very careful.”

  “Mrs. Tolliver,” he said, and his dark mild eyes fluttered uncertainly, “if I may, just for a moment, be personal—this will blow over, you know. This whole affair. People will forget.”

  I just looked at him. “You couldn’t be more wrong.”

  The emphasis in my voice startled him. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “I can’t forget.”

  “Ah,” he said, “well …”

  “I’ll have a chance,” I said. “Just wait.”

  At first, when I went into town with Edward Delatte, people turned their backs. In a month they no longer turned away; they only dropped their eyes. A bit more time, and they looked straight at me; “Good morning,” I said quietly. They didn’t answer. And then they did. They were curious. They were so very very curious. They were attracted by the very thing that repelled them. They pranced and danced around it like fighting cocks. And like the cocks, you knew that sooner or later they could not stand it any more. They would jump.

  The town did just that. It took about three months. Mrs. Otto Holloway asked me to tea to meet her granddaughter who was on spring vacation holiday from the university.

  The Holloways had lived, ever since I could remember, in the big grey Victorian house around the corner from the town square. (He was the only doctor in town and had been ever since Harry Armstrong retired.) On that morning, a Saturday, I drove in early with Edward Delatte. We parked in back of the office that had been John’s and was now mine. Funny, I couldn’t seem to remember that it belonged to me alone now. I was free, but I didn’t feel so. …

  The morning was crisp and cool. We went in the back door that John always used and went directly to his inner office, talking about trivial things, bits of business. A good morning for business, for doing things that needed to be done. …

  “Mr. Delatte,” I said abruptly. “I want to close up the Washington Hotel.”

  “If I remember correctly, it’s been quite profitable.”

  I hesitated, and in the interval I could hear the steady rattle of my new secretary’s typewriter in the outer office. “I’ve got enough money. I want to close it.”

  “It’s your decision of course.”

  “I want it closed right now. This morning.”

  He was horrified, but said nothing. He never did.

  “As for the people in there, they can stay as long as they planned this time, until they’re finished in town.”

  He had removed any traces of surprise from his face. “Shall I see about that now?”

  “Yes, please. And I want them to board up the front. Big boards. Right across the head of the steps.”

  I stood at the window and watched Mr. Delatte go down the street toward the hotel. I stood and waited a very long time, until I saw the porter drag a very large plank to the front of the building. It was too heavy for him to manage alone, so Mr. Delatte helped him lift it into place and steady it for the nails. I sat down then and listened to the banging of the hammer until they were finished.

  It was still a bit early for the Holloway party, so I picked up a new Reader’s Digest and read it straight through while I waited. Then I put on my coat and walked slowly around the corner to the Holloways’.

  There was a great crowd. You could see cars parked all up and down both sides of the street. So much the better, I thought. I need lots of people. I put my feet down firmly one before the other, I tensed and untensed my leg muscles and I kept walking.

  I knew what the tea would be like before I got there. A young woman with flowers on her shoulder, whom I did not know, and all the rest of the women, whom I did. The house would smell like fruitcake and pink gladioli, and there would be trays of sandwiches and iced cakes. The strict Baptists would sip their tea; the not-so-religious would turn giggly and confiding over discreet glasses of sherry or hot toddy because the day was cool.

  I’ve been to so many of these, I thought, as I climbed the front steps. John always wanted me to go, and I always did what he wanted. …

  “Abigail, my dear,” Mrs. Holloway called gaily from the front door.

  With her, just emerging from her elaborately fur-trimmed coat, was Jean Bannister, my cousin Reggie’s wife. I smiled at them both.

  “How nice of you to come,” Mrs. Holloway said.

  “I’ve been looking forward to coming.” I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. “How are you, Jean?”

  “But, Abigail,” Mrs. Holloway said, “you’ve lost weight.”

  “Have I? I really haven’t weighed in months, I’m afraid. John had a scale, but I don’t know where it is now. Perhaps he took it with him.”

  “Oh yes, of course, John …”

  “John, my ex-husband, yes.” The sound of that was harsh in the
tinkle of laughter and voices.

  “You must meet my granddaughter,” Mrs. Holloway said. “Oh dear, she seems to have gotten herself way across the room. …”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll manage to cross over in a bit.”

  “The room is just too crowded to move, isn’t it?” Mrs. Holloway said. “I really should have kept things smaller.”

  “But you have a lot of friends. …” Together we looked across the room. It was jammed with silk print dresses—straight through the double parlors into the dining room and even out on the sun porch. “I wonder how many are related to me.”

  Mrs. Holloway laughed. “Most of them are, I imagine.”

  “Let’s see now, just for fun. You aren’t, of course, but you moved here after your husband finished medical school, I believe.”

  “Long before your time, my dear.”

  “And Jean, now you’re from Montgomery, but your husband is my cousin. So let’s see how many cousins I can find if I don’t count degrees. … There’s Emily Frazer, and Louise Allen and Clarissa Harding, and Flora Creech …”

  “Mercy,” Mrs. Holloway interrupted me. She seemed to find the list vaguely disquieting. “Mercy!”

  “And I’ll tell you another strange thing. I haven’t seen any of them in months. Strange, isn’t it? Even when you’re related. …”

  “Isn’t it?” Mrs. Holloway said. “Isn’t it strange? Would you like a glass of sherry?”

  And with a firm hand on my arm she launched me into the crowded room.

  For a while it was like any other tea. With talk about illnesses and weddings and whose child was entering which school and what grade. For a while.

  I said nothing. I could wait. I just didn’t think they could. And I was right.

  It was Mrs. Holloway herself who finally got around to it.

  “Dear,” she said, “the fire at your barn was terrible news.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it was.”

  “I mean, it was the very latest thing in barns, wasn’t it?”

  “It had a lot of expensive equipment inside. I don’t think I know exactly how much.”

  “How terrible.” Abruptly the room got very still. Only the granddaughter chattered away in a corner. I recognized her delicate tone, her sorority-trained lilt. In the hushed silence, the young light voice faltered: she looked uncertainly over her shoulder, and stopped, in the middle of her sentence.

  “Dreadful,” Mrs. Holloway repeated. “Do you have any idea how it started?”

  I looked at the smooth pink face perched atop the round shoulders and the heavy breasts, tightly wrapped in flowered silk. “Did I recognize them?” I asked. “They weren’t wearing masks. I suppose they were in too much of a hurry to bother with them.”

  Mrs. Locke, whose husband was a partner in the drugstore, clucked nervously. “White trash will be the death of the South. Dear, dear!”

  “It wasn’t all trash,” I said. “Which of you had husbands home that night?”

  A quick breathing silence, and Mrs. Holloway said: “Well, it was dreadful, but it’s over.”

  As she turned back to her silver coffeepot, I interrupted. “It’s not over. It’s my turn.”

  For a moment I caught sight of the granddaughter’s face. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said to her, “I’m ruining your party, but it really wasn’t given for you anyway.” Her mouth popped open, but nothing came out, no sound at all. I gave her a quick smile. “Your grandmother really should have explained to you. …” I took a deep breath. “You listen now, and you tell your husbands. You bring them a message from me. The Howlands were the first ones here, back when it was Indian country, and you set out your dogs at night, and you barred your doors against them, and went about daytimes with a rifle. It’s still Howland country. I’m taking it back.”

  They clucked then, all of them, nervously, and the fruitcake smell of the house was overpowering.

  “There’s precious little around here that didn’t belong to Will Howland, one way or the other. Only you forgot. But watch now, and you’ll be seeing it shrink together, you’ll be seeing Madison City go back to what it was thirty years ago. Maybe my son will build it back, I won’t.”

  A nervous titter again. Did they understand what I was saying? Had it gotten through the warmth of sherry? Or would it take a while? Would they understand only after I was gone? I would make them. And now.

  “I just closed the hotel,” I said. “That’s a start. Didn’t you hear the hammer sealing it up? Did you drive right by without noticing?

  I caught sight of Jean Bannister’s face. It looked frozen and stiff. She understands, I thought; she is the brightest and so she understands and she is trying not to let herself believe. Because she has a new expensive coat and her husband’s trucking business has just begun to make money.

  I watched her face, fascinated. The large wide-set grey eyes. The straight blond hair. She’s feeling her insides go cold, I thought, and she’s feeling the tips of her fingers start to shiver. She’s feeling just the way I did. …

  “Barn’s gone, and the equipment. I won’t rebuild. I won’t even pay you to haul the ashes away. I’ve already sold all my stock, excepting the children’s ponies, but I expect you know that. Without them what’s going to happen to the slaughter yards and the packing plant? Nobody else around here can fill them. And there’s the ice-cream plant. … Whose milk was that?”

  I went to a window and opened it, the room was stifling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Louise Allen begin to chew her finger nervously. Her husband and his brother owned the slaughter yards.

  And your quavering stomach, I thought, that will change to a permanent lump, a millstone to carry. …

  There was a shuffle and a rustle behind me as Mrs. Holloway pushed her way through the crowd to stand next to me. She seemed to start to say something, but she didn’t and all I heard was the creak and stretch of the old-fashioned stays of her corset. I didn’t even look at her.

  “The lumber business now, that’s the big one around here, and half of it is my land.” In the street outside a procession of three dogs went by, solemnly. I watched them out of sight. “That’s on contract, so I can’t do anything about it right now, but contracts run out. … Howlands have crazy blood, I used to hear. … It’ll cost me to do this, but I will. I figure to have enough money to live.” I was still holding the glass of sweet sherry that I had been drinking. I put it down carefully on the window sill. “You watch. This town’s going to shrivel and shrink back to its real size. … It wasn’t Will Howland you burned down, it was your own house.”

  There wasn’t a sound as I walked out, not even the rustle of breathing, just my heels tapping across the floor boards. I found my coat among the ones piled on the hall chairs. The maid, a thin mosquito in black dress and frilly white apron, peeped at me through a crack in the kitchen door. I nodded to her and she jerked back out of sight. I could almost hear her buzzing. I left, slowly, majestically. I didn’t feel the concrete street under my steps. My feet touched air, I was floating. You bastards, I told them all, you bastards. …

  And I said to my grandfather, who seemed to be walking right next to me, just a little behind where I couldn’t see: “I should think you’d be laughing.”

  I’m not, he said.

  “I can do it.”

  I reckon I know that.

  “I had to do something.”

  I heard him sigh, just as plain as the little wind that rippled the dry leaves. It had to be done, he said.

  “That was for you,” I said. “You won’t like what I’m going to do now, but this is for me.”

  I know, he said, and the light winter breeze sighed for him again.

  I went into the office that had been John’s. Two of the three secretaries’ desks were empty. Miss Lucy and Mrs. Carson were gone with John. There was only one typist now, a new one I’d hired—a slight mousy-colored girl with bad skin. Her mother was the town’s prostitute, she didn’t know her fath
er. She was bitter and ugly and efficient. I trusted her because she had no one else to be loyal to. She did not like me, but since I was paying her, she disliked the others more.

  I nodded to her. She bobbed her head slightly, not missing the rhythm of her furious typing. I went on into the inner office. Mr. Delatte was finishing his work; he smiled his neutral colorless smile.

  “Will you do me a favor, please?” I asked him. “Will you call a Dr. Mallory in Oakland, California? I don’t know his first name, but he’s a radiologist, so you can find him without any trouble. And would you ask him for the address and phone number of his son-in-law?”

  With a sudden sharp look in his mild rabbity eyes Mr. Delatte asked: “Who is his son-in-law?”

  “Robert Howland.”

  He hesitated, then picked up the phone. While he did that, I opened the back door, and I propped it wide. I turned back to the huge yellow oak desk; I emptied the drawers, all of them, carefully, tossing the papers and the rubber bands, and the clips and the envelopes, into empty chairs. Then I put my shoulder to the desk and began shoving it toward the door. Mr. Delatte looked up from the phone—he had at first tried to pretend not to notice what I was doing. “If you wait a minute, I’ll give you a hand.”

  The desk was not on rollers but it moved easily enough because the polished rugless floor was quite slippery. “No, thank you,” I said. “I can manage.”

  I pushed the desk toward the open door—its passage left long white scratches on the floor boards—until the slight rise of the sill blocked my progress. I checked quickly to be sure that the door was wide enough—it was. I reached as far under one end as I could, and lifted. It was very solid, my back began to ache—but the desk itself was top-heavy, and I managed to heave it high enough to have it topple of its own weight. Out the door, down the two steps, into the concrete yard. I left it there. It would block this door, but we could use the front. And anyway, I couldn’t move it again. I seemed to have strained my back. I put both hands to it and rocked gently while I looked at the gouges on each side of the painted door frame. “I seem to have done a bit of damage,” I said to Mr. Delatte. “But I’ve been meaning to do that for such a long time.”