The Sisters Montclair

by Cathy Holton

  Alice said to Stella, “She was one of those people who always had something wrong with her. Always complaining about some operation she was going to have.”

  “It got so bad after awhile that even her daughter, Rose, didn’t like going over to see her. I’m going to die, she’d say. There’s something wrong with me and I’m going to die.”

  They were all quiet for a moment and Stella waited patiently, looking around the room. “So what happened to her?”

  “She died,” Alice said.

  “Rose came in one morning and she was lying in her bed. Dead.”

  No one said anything. Outside the long windows, the late afternoon sun fell through the arching branches of the trees, dappling the lawn with shade.

  “So maybe there was something wrong with her after all,” Stella said.

  Weesie sighed. Adeline shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe,” she said.

  “You have to understand this went on for over thirty years,” Alice said to Stella. “She could have died from anything.”

  Stella got up and began to collect the empty glasses.

  “I think she did it out of spite,” Adeline said. “Because no one believed her and she wanted to prove them wrong.”

  “Laura, see if there are any of those macaroons in the refrigerator,” Alice said.

  “I’ll see what I can find.” Stella turned and walked out.

  Weesie slowly swiveled her head. She stared at Adeline and then at Alice. “You called her Laura,” she said.

  “Did I?”

  “Yes,” Adeline said. “You did.”

  “Who’s Laura?” Alice said mildly.

  Alice was tired after they left and Stella made an early supper. They usually ate around six-thirty so Alice could watch Wheel of Fortune at seven, but tonight she looked so tired, Stella didn’t think she’d be able to stay awake until then.

  They ate quietly, staring at the wall calendar marked with the caregivers’ schedules.

  “That new girl, Rita, comes on Friday,” Alice said, finishing her barbecue pork.

  “Is she nice?”

  “Very nice. She has a granddaughter that she takes care of. Her son is divorced and he lives with her. He has the granddaughter and Rita is always taking her out and buying her prom dresses. I guess the girl expects that.”

  “Girls can be expensive.”

  “They always want you to buy them things,” Alice said, starting in on the rest of her coleslaw. “When I was a girl, if my mother wouldn’t buy it for me, I’d call grandmother.”

  “And did that work for you?”

  “Always.”

  In the distance, a train whistle blew, deep and mournful. Stella had always hated the forlorn sound of a passing train; it depressed her, made her think of grief and loneliness and lost opportunities. Perhaps it was because her father had taken a train when he left her mother, bound for New Orleans. She pulled the crusts off the rest of her peanut butter sandwich and pushed them to the side of her plate.

  Alice said, “When I first married Bill, he asked me did I want him to open up a charge account for me down at Louella’s. Have you ever heard of Louella’s?” She turned her head slowly, her opaque eyes resting on Stella.

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s gone now. But in my day it was where all the young wives went to shop. I’d never heard of a charge account but when he explained to me how it worked and asked me did I want one, I said, Yes, please.” She finished the last of her okra and stared at the wall, her jaw moving slowly. Stella got up and began to clear the dishes.

  “What’s happened to Dob?” she said, trying to move Alice away from the melancholy memory of her dead husband. “We haven’t seen him for awhile.”

  “He’s been up visiting his son in North Carolina. You know the son and his wife have seven children.”

  “Seven?”

  Alice chuckled. “That’s what I said. Anyway, he’s back so I expect we’ll hear from him shortly.”

  Stella fixed Alice a scoop of mango ice cream and set it down in front of her.

  “Oh, goody,” Alice said. “Mango.” She ate for awhile in silence, staring straight ahead and bringing the spoon slowly to her mouth. After awhile she stirred and said, “They’re having a birthday party tonight for Charles Gaskins. Dob’s going to that. He and Dob used to play together as boys.”

  Stella rolled her paper placemat into a thin cone. “Is that the Charlie who used to throw rocks at you when you were a girl? The one with the stammer?”

  “He used to hit me on the backside with his slingshot.”

  “I’ll bet you were fond of him.”

  “Oh yes,” Alice said, setting her spoon down. She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “I never much cared for him when we were younger. Funny thing, though. He grew up to be a war hero. Stormed a German machine gun nest on Omaha Beach, I think it was.”

  “Really?”

  “No one was more surprised than me.” She pushed her ice cream bowl away. “Still,” she said. “I guess you never know how people will turn out.”

  After she put Alice to bed, Stella went into the library to wait for the night caregiver to arrive. It was a warm, balmy evening. Outside in the street, couples strolled in the gathering dusk with their dogs. Late spring had always been one of Stella’s favorite times of year. As a child she had counted down the days until the end of school, imagining herself splashing barefoot in the creek, riding her bicycle to the municipal pool, lying in the grassy shade beneath the branches of a spreading tree. Those were the summers Stella had imagined and yet the reality was always much different. They were always traveling in the summer, staying with family members or one of Candy’s friends in some hot, dusty town while Candy looked for work. Always striking out in search of a new life in a place where no one knew them.

  Stella put her head against the back of the wingback chair and stared through the long windows. She didn’t want to think about her mother. She felt depressed enough remembering Professor Dillard’s phone call. And yet a huge weight had been lifted from her, too. She had been dreading final exams, knowing it was too late to bring her grades up. She had been contemplating dropping out and yet that option had seemed so final, so cowardly, the act of a desperate woman who would not, could not think clearly. Despite making it easier for her in the short term, the medical leave suggested by Professor Dillard did little to reassure her that things would turn out well. She had known for some time that they would not. She had the feeling a reckoning was coming; she would have to pay, sooner or later, for her mistakes. Everyone did.

  Across the street, the gas lamps on the stuccoed gate posts of the white mansion came on, beginning to flicker. The lights were on in all the downstairs rooms of the house, glowing cheerfully in the gathering dusk.

  Odd, how it had all begun to unravel this spring. She had been in control up until then; she had managed to keep it all tamped down. She had overheard one of her professors say to another, She’s a strong-willed, determined girl. She’ll go far in life. How easily people were fooled. Pretend you are in control and you can convince anyone. Even the cutting had seemed a small thing, restrained and disciplined. Fragile incisions made to release that which couldn’t be acknowledged, like holes in an earthen dam, letting just enough trickle out to keep the dam from bursting.

  And now she had agreed, in a moment of desperation, to let Professor Dillard counsel her, to poke her fingers in among all the dark crevices where Stella had carefully hidden herself away. To breach those barricades she had so vigorously and painstakingly erected. The idea was excruciating. Humiliating and excruciating.

  She closed her eyes. It occurred to Stella that her education in psychology had been less about uncovering the psychic wounds of others, and more about hiding her own. She thought of Alice’s comment, You never know how people will turn out. But that wasn’t exactly true. Who was it who had said, Character is destiny?

  What a dismal future awaited her, if that was true.

  Sh
e opened her eyes, staring bleakly at the wall of books. On the top shelf a title caught her eye. Anna Karenina. She had never read Tolstoy. She rose and walked over to the bookshelves, and standing on a small step stool to reach the top shelf, she pulled the book toward her. It was a red leather-bound volume with gilt lettering. She opened it, inhaling the musty scent of old paper. An inscription in the front read, To Alice from her sister, Laura. Summer of 1935.

  Stella stared at the inscription until her vision shimmered and went dark at the center. She held the book to her chest and stepped down, walking carefully across the room to the wingback chair. She opened the book on her lap, fanning the brittle pages with her fingers. The musty scent rose again, reminding her vaguely of something not altogether pleasant, but compelling, and lifting the book she set her face against an open page and breathed deeply. Two fragile, faded pieces of paper fluttered to her lap. The first was a yellowed newspaper clipping showing a photograph of three lovely girls dressed in flowing white gowns, their faces turned in profile. The caption read, The Sisters Montclair as the Three Graces. Stella recognized Alice and Adeline. The third, and most beautiful, must be Laura. The lost sister.

  She picked up the other scrap and stared down at it, feeling a faint prickling along her scalp. Written in a childish scrawl so faded with age as to be nearly illegible were two lines.

  We forgive you.

  Please forgive me.

  There was a strange humming sound in her ears. Holding the translucent scrap up to the fading summer light, Stella noticed that her hand was trembling.

  Fourteen

  Stella had been to Professor Dillard’s house once before for a departmental party.

  It was in North Chattanooga, in a neighborhood of small, charming nineteen-twenty bungalows. On the morning after she found the odd scrap of paper in Anna Karenina, Stella parked in the street in front of Professor Dillard’s house and walked across the lawn. She stumbled once in the neatly-mown grass, catching her toe on a barely-submerged tree root. She had slept poorly the night before, awakened several times by a series of menacing dreams that left her groggy and irritable.

  She followed a bricked path around the side of the house to a large wooden gate set in a tall hedge. A sign on the gate read, Please Come In.

  The back yard was shady and pleasant, a small patch of lawn surrounded by shrubs and trees of varying heights and shades of green. Across the lawn was a small carriage house painted yellow, like the house, with dark green shutters. Professor Dillard’s office was on the bottom floor, Stella remembered. An outdoor stairway ran up the side of the carriage house to the floor above. Luke Morgan’s apartment. Professor Dillard had told her Luke was away, spending the summer in New York with his parents.

  She knocked on the door of the office and a voice called loudly, “Come in.”

  Professor Dillard was standing with her back to the door, going through a large gray filing cabinet. “Hello,” she said to Stella, turning and indicating two chairs in front of the narrow desk. “Would you like some tea?”

  “No. Thanks.” Stella was nervous; she could hear it in her voice which had a slight tremor and a touch of hoarseness.

  The desk was very sleek and modern. It looked like a door laid over a pair of black trestles, open and small in scale. The two chairs facing the desk were closest to the door, Stella noted, a classic clinical setting. Subtly implying to the patient that should she or he have a freak-out and need to escape, the flight path was clear. A series of built in bookcases covered three walls of the office and on the fourth was a sofa with an Edward Hopper print hanging on the wall above.

  “Morning Sun,” Stella said.

  “Oh?” Professor Dillard said, closing the filing cabinet with her hip. “Do you like Hopper?”

  “I think it’s interesting that so many of his women seem to be gazing wistfully out an opened window, as if they’re looking at something only they can see.”

  “An interesting observation.”

  Stella colored, aware that everything she said in this office would be construed in psychological terms. “Have we started already?”

  Professor Dillard laughed. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything to drink? Water? Coke?”

  “No. Thank you.” Stella sat down in one of the chairs facing the desk.

  Professor Dillard smiled, letting her eyes rest on Stella. She sat down, leaning forward with her arms resting on the desk, her hands clasped in front of her. “I want to reiterate what I said earlier, Stella. If you’re not comfortable talking to me, I’m happy to recommend a colleague.”

  “I’d rather not talk to anyone,” Stella said quickly. Professor Dillard continued to smile but said nothing. Stella sighed. “I know. A deal’s a deal. And I’d rather talk to you than anyone else.”

  Professor Dillard opened a file on her desk and made a few notes on a notepad. Outside the window a hummingbird hung motionless above a box of red geraniums.

  “You were very courageous to agree to this, Stella,” she said. “You seem to be a very confident, self-assured person. Tell me, have you ever seen a counselor before?”

  “No.”

  “We spoke briefly yesterday about you failing some of your classes. You’ve been a good student up until now. Can you tell me, from your point of view, what the problem might be?”

  “You mean, why my grades have slipped?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t have any money. I have to work to put myself through school.”

  “And how many hours do you work?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty-four or so a week.”

  “And where do you work? What kind of work do you do?”

  Stella told her, embellishing the details of caring for Alice so that it sounded like a more demanding job.

  “I see,” Professor Dillard said. “So you work one job?” She looked at Stella, who nodded in agreement. She glanced down at the file which Stella realized now was her school file. “And last semester you worked for awhile at a work study job and also at a coffee shop, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how many hours a week did those two jobs total?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty or forty, I guess.”

  “So you actually worked more hours last semester and still managed to keep your grades up.”

  “I didn’t work two jobs the whole semester. I had to drop the coffee shop job.” Stella shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Look, I’m under a lot of pressure,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like always having to worry whether you’ll have enough money to pay the rent or buy groceries.”

  Professor Dillard glanced up at her and then back down at the file. “Actually I do know,” she said. She made a few notes on the pad. “But you’ve always had to work. It’s been like that for you from the beginning, hasn’t it?”

  Stella stared at her. “Yes, I see what you’re implying. I’ve done it all in the past so I should be able to do it all now. I guess I’m just a fuck up.”

  Again that slight, evasive smile. The professor put the pen down and looked up. “How would you describe yourself, Stella? Would you say you were an optimist or a pessimist?”

  “A realist.”

  Professor Dillard continued to lean forward, still smiling.

  “A pessimist,” Stella said.

  “So, when an unexpected problem crops up, how do you handle it? What are your coping mechanisms?”

  “You mean, besides vodka?”

  Professor Dillard picked up her pen and made a few notes. “Yes,” she said. “Besides vodka.”

  “I don’t know that I have any coping mechanisms,” Stella said warily.

  “So, the problem that has cropped up between last semester and this semester. The problem that has caused your grades to slip. Can you put your finger on it?”

  “No.” Stella splayed her fingers, observing them carefully, waiting for Professor Dillard to fill the silence that spread out between them and, when she didn’t, Ste
lla said, “I guess I’m just overly anxious. I guess all this time I’ve been keeping it under wraps and now I’m beginning to feel like I’m losing it.”

  Outside the window, the hummingbird dipped its beak in the geraniums and then darted away. Sunlight fell in bright squares against the dhurrie rug on the floor.

  “So, if you had to put it into words, do you think your problem might be a feeling that you’re losing control of your life?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. I guess there’s some of that.”

  She scribbled more notes. “Well, you know there’s no such thing as a bad feeling or a good feeling. Feelings are just feelings. But I wonder if you can tell me how this problem – this sense that you’re losing control – makes you feel?”

  “It makes me feel like shit. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.”

  “So, anxious? Depressed? Stuck?”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  “How about anger? Do you feel anger?”

  “No.”

  More notes. Stella began to feel like she was being skillfully manipulated, and there was a part of her that looked on and admired Professor Dillard for this. If she disengaged, she could see the professor’s handling of this session in purely clinical terms, like watching a training video. From time to time the little voice in her head would trumpet, So that’s how it’s done, as Professor Dillard circled back and smoothly elicited an unexpected response from her. After awhile Stella began to feel dizzy, as if she was being spun around too quickly. She found it harder and harder to muzzle herself. Professor Dillard asked her about her job, whether or not she looked forward to going to work every morning. She asked her about her fleeting moods, if she had ever read self-help books to try and lift her depression (Stella had read countless books but she downplayed this, embarrassed.) She asked Stella how she felt about change, did she set goals for herself? If she had a magic wand what positive changes would she make in her life? She asked Stella what she hoped to gain from counseling and Stella said, To get out of having to take final exams, and Professor Dillard laughed. Stella relaxed at this point, grinning.