The Secrets She Carried

by Davis, Barbara

  How had this become about him? Pretending to sip his wine, he fumbled for an answer. “I was speaking hypothetically.”

  “Not from experience?”

  Leslie’s gaze was just penetrating enough to make him squirm. “Everyone’s trying to forget something, I suppose. Some have more luck than others.”

  Mercifully, her gaze shifted again, back beyond the window. She was quiet a long time before she finally responded. “I don’t know the first thing about growing grapes or making wine.”

  Something like hope fluttered in Jay’s belly. Had she just said she was staying?

  “Buck and I can teach you that. But really, there’s something else you can do for us, something besides not selling your share of Peak, that will prove far more helpful than you poking around in the vines and must vats.”

  Her head came around. “The what vats?”

  Jay grinned. “You’ll learn the jargon. For now, it’s your marketing skills I’m after. We’re going to need a logo, label designs, photos of both the crush barn and the tasting barn for our brochure, and I was thinking—since I stink at that kind of thing, and you’ve got a bit of experience with it—I’d like to offer you the job.”

  “I know absolutely nothing about wine.”

  “Do you know anything about marketing? About creating an image?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Then say you’ll do it, say you’ll stay and be a part of this thing.” He picked up her nearly empty glass and pressed it back into her hands. “I’ll tell you now, there won’t be much up front. It takes a while to see a profit. But you’ll have a roof over your head, and somewhere, your grandmother will be smiling at the thought of Peak in the hands of yet another Gavin woman.”

  Leslie closed her eyes with a groan, then pulled in a long, deep breath, holding it for what felt like an eternity. Finally, she let it out and opened her eyes. “All right. I must be out of my mind, but I’ll stay. For now.”

  Chapter 11

  Adele

  Mama always says the worst sorrows come after dark.

  It begins at two in the morning—a quiet rush of bloody water, a high, thin wail of despair. Too early, Susanne knows at once, much, much too early. Like the others. When the pains commence she nearly loses her mind, cursing God and raging against her body’s betrayal, her eyes all queer and wrung of color. She pants like an animal, one minute howling for me to fetch Henry, vowing me to silence in the next, as if the man won’t see that she’s lost his child.

  The horror goes on forever, hour after hour of savage, sticky anguish, of sweating and keening and writhing, all for a child who will not—who cannot—live. It’s a merciless thing, I think, as I stare down at her paper white face on the pillow, to be torn apart for nothing, but sometimes life is merciless. And then, finally, it ends, with one last rush of fluid and a terrible silence.

  An hour after Dr. Shaw first cracks open his satchel of instruments and vials, it’s all over. He says what Susanne already knows, what we all know, that he’s come too late, though sooner would have made no difference. He scoops the little thing up, silent and blue, and swaddles it in a towel. A boy, he murmurs apologetically, and hurries it away. There is a pall over the room, a blackness that is only partly to do with the child, a sense of things ending.

  Henry stands at the foot of the bed, gray and stony. He can’t bring himself to look at Susanne, can’t bring himself to look at me either, as I strip away the bloody sheets, ruck up the cotton nightdress, and sponge the blood of his dead child from his wife’s pale thighs. I try not to look at her belly, white and flaccid, empty. For more reasons than I can name, I despise her. But I never wanted this—not this.

  She’s quiet now, lost in the merciful haze of whatever the doctor has given her. For now at least, the thrashing and wailing are past, and Henry and I are nearly alone in that wretched room. His eyes are shiny wet, his sun-lined face so near to breaking that I can hardly bear it. There’s a misery about him, a despair so complete it hangs on him like one of his old plaid shirts, and I realize with a start that his pain is my pain too, as alive and searing as if it were my own heart breaking.

  My hand goes to his, curled tight on the footboard. It is not my place to touch him, to comfort him, and yet I cannot seem to stop myself. The roughness of his skin, the warmth of it against my palm, acts on me in a way I have never known. I drop my eyes and draw my hand away, wondering as I scurry back to Susanne’s bloody sheets where this sudden breathless ache has come from, and how long it has been crouching within me, unseen and unbidden.

  If Henry guesses what I feel, he gives no sign. He’s numb, blind just now to anything but his grief, and I am relieved, at least, for that. I cannot bear the thought of his knowing. I can hardly bear to think of it myself.

  For weeks, Susanne is too frail to leave her bed. She has lost too much blood—and too much hope. Her cheeks are sallow and chalky, the color of Lottie’s biscuit dough, but she will take no food, only her tincture with a little of the bootleg. Dr. Shaw has increased her dosage again, to ease the pain of her empty womb, though in truth I think he has done it for Henry, to give him a little peace and spare him Susanne’s rantings.

  I do my best to calm her when she’s in one of her moods, though at least once a day I find myself cleaning up some bit of crockery—cups, saucers, whatever is at hand to smash to the floor or hurl against the wall. She will receive no visitors, though they come in a steady stream. She will not sit by while they gloat, she tells me miserably, and of course they will gloat, happy to see her brought low yet again, denied the one thing—the only thing—she wants in all the world. They’re jealous, she rails, because she has Henry and Peak, and so they’re glad she cannot do and have this thing every true woman must do and have. I assure her they’ve come because they are her friends, to cheer her and offer condolences, but each time I say it I think of Celia Cunningham, and I know Susanne is right.

  Weeks fall away like the flesh from her bones, so that by spring Susanne is only a shadow of the haughty woman who greeted me that first day in the downstairs parlor. She is older somehow, shrunken and withered, as if ten years has passed instead of ten weeks since that terrible night. Her face, never pretty, is ravaged now, by misery and too much sipping from her teacup, and so she keeps to her room, too vain to show herself for the wreck she has become.

  Her moods are worse too, blank and reckless, swinging like a clock pendulum between self-pity and rage. She no longer cares for Peak and its daily workings, content to leave it all to me. And so between hair washings and letter writing, trips to the dime store, and trips to the druggist, I must now confer with Lottie about the menu for Henry’s dinner, must order about the woman who comes in to clean and polish once a week, and must oversee the household accounts. When there is a squabble among the help, it is mine to solve. When there is a choice between roasted or fried, it is mine to make. And when dinner is set out for Henry, it is mine to share.

  The first time I am invited to dine with Henry, I go numb with panic and can barely summon the sense to nod my head. I feel dull and plain in my boiled white apron, but Henry pretends not to notice me chasing my carrots around my plate. It rings in my head every minute that Susanne will choose tonight to end her exile, that she will come down to find me in her place, instead of in the kitchen with Lottie where I belong, and I am torn between bolting my food to hurry the meal and pushing it away untouched.

  The next night is easier. I leave my apron on the bed in my little room upstairs and slip into the chair across from Henry as if I belong, as if I were not the daughter of a French Quarter seamstress. And while Susanne pecks at the dinner I’ve brought up on a tray, I pass her husband the yams and the black-eyed peas, and I learn about tobacco, about priming and suckering and topping, about flue curing and the virtues of oil versus wood. I listen not because it enthralls me, but because tobacco is who and what Henry is, and because it’s important to this place he loves with his whole heart.

 
; When Lottie comes in to clear and sees me sitting in Susanne’s chair, she stops dead in her tracks. Her eyes shift from me to Henry and then back again. They say nothing good can come of this. She’s right, of course. How could good ever come of such a thing? Henry is fifteen years my senior, married to the woman who counts out my pay at the end of every week. But we are here now, standing on the edge of this thing that makes me want to cry and soar and sing all at once, and that is all I care for.

  That night, and every night after, we share our dinner, then go into Henry’s study. There is nothing improper, only Henry and me sitting among his books while he sips a bit of bourbon and enjoys his pipe. We do not speak of Susanne or the child or of that night. Henry pretends it never happened, and I let him. Still, it is there between us, this dead son, and all the ones who came before, etching quiet chinks into his armor, binding me to him.

  I see him guarding his bruises, veering wide of the grief he will not share, but I have come to know every inch of his face, every line and crease, and I see behind those suede brown eyes the part of him that longs to spend its sadness, to empty itself and crumble, and I wonder if he knows how desperately I want to be there for him when he does.

  Chapter 12

  The book of Exodus calls me a sinner.

  For surely the words Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, carved in stone by the hand of God, also charge that I shall not covet my neighbor’s husband. But I do. I covet Henry Gavin. There. I have said it, and may God and Mama forgive me. I covet his rare sweet smile and his quiet heart, his buried wishes, his silent aches. I want them for myself. But they belong to another, to a fool who does not want them at all.

  A fool, yes, but Susanne Gavin is not blind. Since that first day in the downstairs parlor when she studied my shoes with such keen distaste, I have squirmed beneath her probing eyes, prickling with dread that they might see too much. Now when they linger my legs turn to water. I’m certain they have seen through my skin, to the feelings breathing just beneath the surface, waiting to burst out of me whole and alive. Each time she looks away I’m astonished that she cannot hear the pulse and whisper of his name through my veins.

  Henry. Henry. Always Henry.

  The months grind past. The days are hard, too long alone in that stifling room, my spine aching with the effort to remember my place. While the sun is up Henry takes refuge in his fields. I have no such freedom. Lately, though, I am at least spared her tongue. She is numb, or nearly so, blind to anything that is not her, an untidy ghost made meek by her bourbon and her syrup. She does not leave her room, does not notice, or does not care, that I have unwittingly become, in all but name, mistress of her house, that her servants look to me now for their daily duties, and that her husband looks to me for company.

  We share lunches now, Henry and I, carried down to the lake in small metal pails and eaten in the shade of the willows, where it’s cool and we are shielded from Susanne’s bedroom window. We do not touch, though I cannot forget that one time, when I reached out to him in his grief and felt my heart begin to beat in earnest, as if the eighteen years that came before had only been marking time. Instead, we sit carefully apart in the long, cool grass. Henry talks about tobacco or the new book he’s been reading, small things of no account. I live for these times, reveling in the low, rich timbre of his voice, these few brief stolen moments when he makes me a part of his life.

  There is a current that runs between us, an inescapable, yearning connection. I am drawn to him like a tide. As if it was my right. As if it was not a sin. I do not deceive myself that he can ever be mine. We are unlike, mismatched in every way that matters. There are boundaries, rules for people like him and people like me. Still, there are times, fleeting moments when he is unguarded, when I imagine in his gentle eyes a reflection of my own heart. And so long as it remains only in his eyes, I can convince myself that it’s only half a sin.

  No sooner do we finish our lunch than I begin to look toward supper and our quiet time after, when I will sit beside him in his study and listen to the slow ooze of his Carolina drawl, part tar, part honey, as he reads aloud from Tom Sawyer or David Copperfield. I love the room because it is Henry’s, filled with the things he loves, his books and clocks and pipes, how it smells like him—is him. There, surrounded by these treasures, I make believe we share a life instead of only a stolen hour, and make believe I do not feel the small, harsh eyes of his wife fixed on us from the portrait above the fire.

  It’s only a painting, I tell myself, a few feet of canvas, a few strokes of oil, not real, not alive. Yet she is always with us over that mantel, her probing eyes cold and accusing. I pretend not to feel them. Henry pretends too.

  One night, when he can no longer pretend, he lays Mark Twain aside. “It was Mama that started it all,” he says, his eyes grave as he raises them to Susanne’s portrait. “She wanted to see me married before she died, to know there’d be someone to look after me. Everyone in Gavin knew she was looking to find me a wife. I was too busy to care one way or the other. Then Susanne’s daddy paid a call and offered all that land. At the time it seemed worth the price of a wife—even one I didn’t love.”

  He does not love her.

  Of all his words, these are the ones I hear, the ones that cause my heart to leap. Deep down, I have always known it, yet I hug the words to me like tender things, to unwrap when I am alone, to gaze upon and cherish. Who does it harm, this quiet, reckless joy? She has never missed his love. There is no sentiment in her, no woman’s heart. She wants only his name and Peak, and those she has.

  “You made your mama happy, at least,” I manage to say, my heart such a tangle that I fear anything more would give me away.

  Henry shakes his head and smiles, a grim twist of that full, firm mouth I’ve come to know so well. “Happy? No, I didn’t make her happy. Susanne wasn’t what my mother had in mind.”

  “Was there somebody else she did have in mind?”

  Henry’s eyes drift back to the portrait. “Anyone but Susanne would have been fine, I think. They were too alike. She saw through Susanne.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “Back then all I could see was her daddy’s land and all the new tobacco I could plant. We both wanted something, and for better or worse, I guess we both got it.”

  For better or worse.

  My eyes creep to Susanne’s likeness over the mantel, haughty even then in her fine white lace, and I think of Henry standing beside her at the altar, saying those words and hearing them in return. Had he meant them—even a little? Had he, in those early days, hoped for better, for at least some pretense of a marriage, rather than this aloof arrangement lived at opposite ends of the hall? I do not ask, but Henry answers the question as if I had.

  “It went wrong from the first day,” he says, his voice suddenly thick, his gaze carefully turned from mine. “We were just back from the church. Mama wasn’t well and went to lie down. Susanne followed her to her room and told her she’d need to clear her things out by the end of the day, that as my wife she was entitled to the best room.”

  Of course she had. It was like Susanne to demand her due, proper or not.

  “Mama was stunned. She’d been sleeping in that room for nearly forty years, in the bed she shared with my father until he died. And Susanne was turning her out. They went at each other like a pair of cats.”

  “And you were in the middle,” I said softly.

  “I should have been, but no. I was in my tobacco fields.” His shoulders slumped then, with the kind of shame men rarely show to women, his words thick with regret. “When I heard them start up, I slipped out the back door. I didn’t come in until dark. By then, Mama was hanging her clothes in one of the upstairs rooms. That’s when I knew what my life would be, that for as long as they were both in this house, I’d be whittled down and pulled apart by the two of them.”

  My poor Henry.

  He is strong in many ways, though not in ways that matter to most. He believes in the r
ightness of things, in honor and fairness and order. But I see in that moment that he is a man who cannot always stand in the fire. I have always known this somehow, from the first night I saw him in the dining room with Susanne. Women—strong women—overwhelm him. And so I’m determined not to overwhelm, to be, in every way I can think, different from Susanne Gavin. It is not hard. We have only our womanhood in common—and Henry.

  That night I lie awake in my small room, listening to sounds that have become a part of Peak’s night song and wondering how women can be so very different. I think of how we love, and where, and why. I think of Mama and the man who was my father, of the sorrow that lingers with her still, because she gave him up too late—and because she gave him up at all. And I think of the man who has seized my heart, astonished that Susanne could be made of such hard stuff.

  She has no use for a husband who holds the demands of tobacco fields and curing barns above wealth and social standing. She requires a husband worthy of the mistress of Peak Plantation. But Henry is Henry, not to be tucked in, polished up, or made over. And so the future of her dynasty will rest not with Henry, but with a son, one she can mold to be all his father is not. For nine years it has been her quest. Now it seems that too is over.

  The next morning Susanne calls me to her room. She tells me to draw her a bath, lay out her clothes, and put up her hair. Dr. Shaw will be paying a call to examine her and tell her how soon she can try for another child. I am stunned that she could think of it after the agony of the last time and all the times before. I wonder what Henry thinks, or if he knows, but it isn’t my place to ask.

  When Susanne has had her bath and dressed, she sits at her vanity, setting to work with her powders and rouges, going heavy beneath her eyes, where the shadows are deepest. She hopes the doctor will not see the wreck she has become. But there’s no chance of that. She’s as pale as a shade, her hair limp and bled of color, her body all sharp bones and jutting angles so that her dress hangs on her like a rag.