by Nelle Davy
I don’t know what I was waiting for, but after a while I realized that my refusal to stand up and start getting on with things was less a willful act than an inability. Try as I might, I couldn’t move. I sat there feeling the weight of my legs anchor me to the floor. Time passed and I knew I had things to do. I saw the list on the notepad staring at me with reproach, but my body refused to cooperate. For the first time in my life my head was saying yes, but the rest of me was saying no, and there was nothing that I could do about it.
And suddenly I was reminded of my mother. She went through an exacerbated version of this when my father died. She didn’t emerge from her room for a month. After the funeral, she washed and cleaned the house, set out the breakfast things for the following morning, then went upstairs to her room and undressed before she climbed into her bed and then didn’t get out of it again.
Piper came to attend to her with my uncle’s wife, Georgia-May, but it was my grandmother who saw to me and my sisters. She moved us into the main house. There was no discussion, no preamble, she simply showed up at our home the day after the funeral and waited in the kitchen as we each packed a bag and then followed her up the long drive. She cooked breakfast, got us ready for school, watched over us as we did our chores and homework: she was faultless. During that month she took sole responsibility for our welfare. My grandfather helped, of course, but my father’s death hit him hard. I think it if weren’t for the fact that my mother had gotten there first, he would have taken to his bed just as she did.
The only thing that we really hated during that time was that we were not permitted to see Mom. That was Lavinia’s wish. She batted aside our questions with such ferocity that in the end we stopped asking. Once Claudia snuck away, when Lavinia was busy with our grandfather, who had drunk all the whiskey in the house and then tried to drive into town for some more. Claudia walked down to our home in the middle of the afternoon, but whatever it was that she saw or heard there, it caused her to lock herself up in her room when she came back and no matter how much Ava and I pushed and pressed her, she refused to tell us anything about it. In the end, because I wouldn’t leave her alone, she slapped me across the mouth and pushed me out the door. After that, at Ava’s request, I stopped asking her. We’ve never spoken to her about it since.
That was such a strange time, living with my grandparents. That was the first time I really began to see what being a Hathaway meant. Instead of sitting down for meals in our scrubbed kitchen, dinner was a stiff-backed affair every evening at the long polished oak table with triangles of white cloth and china plates with patterns of blue swallows around the rim. Instead of the eight rooms I was accustomed to in my house, I now had twenty-two. The finest linens were on our beds, fresh flowers were in every vase (of which there were plenty) and various newspaper clippings, framed and placed on the walls, were interspersed with the customary family portraits.
Piper caught me staring at them once. She smiled and smoothed her hand down my braid. “Hard to believe sometimes,” she said. “Things used to be so different when I was your age.”
I was not the only one awakened to my social status by our time there. Claudia came to learn of our position in quite a different manner. Our grandmother’s way of trying to help us in our grief was to talk about my father, not how my mother would come to talk of him, as a man, but as part of a legacy: a legacy cut short that we must now take up.
“Make him proud,” she’d say. And Claudia would look up at her so eagerly, her brow became knotted with confusion.
“How, Grandma?”
“Remember who you are. Remember what your last name is.” She leaned back and smiled. As if that were the key to everything. As if we had been born to a world of unlocked doors where everything that lay behind them was there for the taking. Claudia would come to think so and look what happened to her. But if we had been smart enough, we would have remembered our mother in her bed, utterly devastated by the loss of her husband, and known that our name was just a name: it gave us no magical protection; it had no divine right.
As I sit here in my chair, I wonder if this was how my mother must have felt immediately after my father’s death. I can understand now, how during that time her body was acknowledging a fact her mind hadn’t been able to process, which I believe was this: that she was afraid, more afraid than she had ever been in her life, of what was before her, of what she had to do and even more so that she had to do it alone. I know this because that is exactly what I am feeling now.
“We are all alone,” my grandmother had told me once. “No one feels our aches with us, or our pains or our joys. We are like islands floating in a sea together but that’s all, we are still just islands, so close we can touch each other, smell each other, but always from a distance.”
It is strange that it is her voice I remember now, not my mother’s comforting arms when we finally came home, or how she held us and buried her face in our hair and told us she would never leave us again. No, it is not this I think about; it is my grandmother’s words instead. I hear them strung out through the notes of her voice as I sit at my desk. They go around and around my mind in a continuous loop while the light outside seeps from pearl to gray.
A few weeks after her Decree Absolute came through, my grandparents stood in the courthouse and were married. There is only one remaining photograph of that day. It would come to sit in a frame of dark wood on a small chest of drawers in the entrance hallway. My grandfather stands there stiffly, his arm wound about my grandmother’s waist. He is squinting at the camera, though it is difficult to tell because the picture is so grainy. My grandmother is not looking at the camera: she is turned away, her face buried into her new husband’s chest. To the casual observer she looks adoring, overwhelmed with love. In truth she was fighting a bout of nausea that had been plaguing her for days. It didn’t take her long to figure out what had brought it on.
To say that my grandparents’ marriage was a scandal would be something of an understatement, although the way it was expressed by the townsfolk was rather understated. Iowans by nature are polite at all costs and even though they may long to tell you what they actually think of you, something—be it the morals of church or their love of community—holds them in check. So to that end, despite the contempt they felt for her, people still nodded at my grandmother when they passed her in the street though their lips were pursed and they slid their eyes from hers. People still responded to her questions and doomed attempts at polite conversation, though as minimally as they could legitimately get away with. She always knew that once she passed them they would stare at each other and in low voices berate her and everything about her, starting from the day she showed up at her uncle’s house in a pinafore dress accompanied by a feckless mother.
But for the first time in her life she didn’t care. She didn’t care when they noticed her stomach grow and their eyebrows lifted into crescents of surprise and then lowered in disapproval. She didn’t care when her family refused to speak to or acknowledge her (the only people in the town who did so). She didn’t even care when people pointedly mentioned Lou within earshot. None of it mattered; none of it could touch her, because for the first time in her life she was happy. Truly, unadulteratedly happy. She sang to her belly, she did her chores, and while her husband worked in the fields, she imagined the Aurelia I would come to know and live on, the farm we would love and live for; the home we would die and sin for.
Meanwhile Piper despaired.
Her brother’s affair with the doctor’s wife and their marriage had upset her greatly. As long as she would live, she would remember the night Lavinia came to the farm with Cal. Piper had sat at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, waiting anxiously for her brother to return. He had been gone for hours with no indication of where he was or when he would be back and with everything that had gone on in the past few weeks, the uncertainty made her nervous. So she waited up for him after she had put Julia to bed, watching the sunlight outside eventually grow dim
and vanish. When she finally heard her brother’s footstep in the hall at around ten o’clock, she leapt up and ran out to see him, but when she saw the doctor’s wife standing behind him holding her suitcase, she took one look at the both of them and slapped her brother so hard across the face, the sound made my grandmother jump against a small rosewood table by the door and topple the flowers in their vase, so that the water spilled across the surface and dripped down onto the floor.
“For God’s sake, Cal,” Piper spat, “hasn’t this family enough to contend with?”
Cal rubbed his face gently, massaging the blood back into his cheek.
“It’s done, Piper.”
Piper looked at my grandmother, who peered at her uncertainly from behind Cal, and curled her lip in distaste.
“Anne-Marie Parks?” she asked, her eyes narrowed to slits. She assessed my grandmother in one long, contemptuous look.
“It’s Lavinia,” my grandmother corrected.
“What?”
“She’s coming to live here, Piper—she’s going to be my wife.” Cal looked down at his sister, who was staring at him in shocked horror.
“Her? She’s married, to a doctor, to our town’s doctor. For the love of God, do you know what people will say?” Piper screeched.
“Hush,” said Cal, looking up at the stairs, “you’ll wake the girl.”
“You need someone who can be a good, faithful wife,” she spat at my grandmother. “Someone who knows a thing or two about farming, someone who will be up with you from sunup to sundown. Not some prissy town maid whose only function is shopping and ordering linen from a catalogue.”
Cal took a step toward his sister.
“You just watch what you—” But then he stopped, because my grandmother had already moved away from him. She came to stand before Piper, her eyes burning a hole in Piper’s face so that my great-aunt leaned her head back and blinked. Then my grandmother stalked past her and went into the kitchen. She began to search through the drawers, opening and closing them, while Cal and Piper stood in the doorway, openmouthed.
When she took out the long kitchen knife and held it up so the light shone on the blade, Cal put his hands up and took a step back, but she was already coming toward them. They sprang away from her as she walked past and opened the door. She went out and stood on the porch and, holding the blade to the soft flesh of her inner arm, she drew the knife across it, so that her blood began to pour from the wound and splatter on the ground.
Piper stifled a scream; Cal stared at her, unbelieving. My grandmother held up the bloodstained knife and her arm from which her blood was continuing to fall. She looked Piper in the eye and said, “My name is not Anne-Marie and I am not a doctor’s wife anymore. I may not have been born here but I will live and die here. I may not have any claim on this land but now I’m part of it, just as much as you. And you’d better get used to it, because I ain’t going anywhere.”
For a minute no one spoke. Piper held her nightgown across her tightly as if it were a shield. Eventually, my grandfather stepped forward and after a brief hesitation took the knife from my grandmother. “It’s been a long day,” he said to his sister. “She doesn’t mean to scare you.”
Piper dropped her gaze and then slowly turned and went back into the house. What she must have thought, how that made her feel, no one ever knew. Piper only ever really confided in one person and that was her childhood friend, Bella. Bella was Piper’s closest ally. When together, they would finish each other’s sentences and fetch cups of tea back and forth from the kitchen in a strange ritual that was a prevalent feature of their relationship. They were a closed book only open for each other. Piper didn’t speak for days after Bella died in 1983 and I remember how every year on the anniversary of her death she would visit her grave and tend to the flowers there with Bella’s husband.
Lavinia once said to Cal in front of my father, “If you want to know why your sister won’t marry, all you have to do is look out there,” and she nodded to the two women sitting closely on the porch steps, their heads bowed in whispered conversation.
My father said that Cal had looked up from the accounts ledger frowning and said in a strange voice, “Darling, you got the strangest mind sometimes.”
But after the night she arrived, Piper saw the determined ambition in her sister-in-law and it scared her. She stood by and watched her marry Cal despite the fear that held her stomach in a cold fist; she stifled her humiliation as she heard conversations fall away whenever she entered a store in town and then resume after she left. She balked as she saw the judgment in people’s faces and though she longed to undo it all she was helpless. Leo would not speak to her and Cal would not listen. She was trapped.
A few days after my grandparents were married. Leo came over to get his things from the house. Piper saw the taillights of the removal trucks Leo had organized pass by in the drive, but when she went down to see him he refused to talk to her. In the end his wife came out onto their porch and stared down at her sister-in-law with icy disdain.
“My husband don’t truck with no traitor,” she said.
I suppose I can understand how Leo felt. He had worked his whole life on the farm and he had believed, right up until they heard the will, that he would continue to live and eventually die on it. But the share allotted to my grandfather was too much for him to bear. He may have been right, but even though everyone knew this and even though it had just been the two of them for so long, Piper refused to take a side. At least that was what she said. She didn’t realize that in not taking a side, to Leo, she had in fact taken up with my grandfather. Leo was not a man for neutrality.
He left town and moved to Indiana, where their mother had been born and raised. Rumor had it (though it was eventually proved to be true), that he stayed with one of their uncles there who owned a farm. People thought he would contest the will on the grounds of their father’s mental incompetence, but he never did. He simply left town and all the gossip and scandal with it. That was the last we really heard of him for a long time. He would not speak to my grandfather again for nearly twenty years and Piper for ten. That was the first of the splinters in our family. With hindsight you could take it as an omen, but maybe that’s just me being superstitious.
As for my grandparents, they rarely left the farm during the first year of their marriage. It was at Cal’s insistence that they laid low. Lavinia’s affair and divorce, and Leo’s departure, had brought a fierce amount of attention onto a man who, even when I knew him, was intensely uncomfortable with any kind of spotlight, be it good or bad. My grandmother did as he wished. My grandfather hoped that the less they were seen the more quickly they would fall to the back of people’s minds.
My grandfather began to concentrate on building up the farm. He wanted to show his neighbors that he was just as good as Leo, just as capable. He saw how aloof and wary the other farmers were toward him and he knew the only way that would change would be if he made something of Aurelia, or at least maintained it to the standard of his brother. So they lived and they worked and Lavinia, his wife full of so much ambition and pride, humbled herself and waited.
But she didn’t mind because it was all hers. At last, a home. She would say how different she felt on the farm compared to Lou’s redbrick house. She hadn’t liked the farm when she first saw it at the garden party, but as she worked on it with her husband, walked on it and explored it, while her belly swelled beneath her hand, she began to take strength from it. Soon she knew it as well as if she had been raised there, and every meal with her husband and his sister was always peppered with her questions. Cal was flattered; Piper suspicious.
And then she began to talk to Cal when Piper wasn’t around, about her thoughts and ideas for the place. While frustrating at first, she soon came to realize that their isolation was a blessing. It was a gift that allowed her to penetrate her husband’s strict principles without the interference of outside influence. At first Cal might have thought her ideas were just fa
nciful dreaming. He would sit next to her at the table and let her words pour over him as he ate his food, or read his paper. My great-aunt always believed that at first he never really believed in what his wife was saying; he was just humoring her. It was a severe underestimation and perhaps for that reason, one day without even fully realizing it, he began to listen.
For the first time in her life Piper felt like she may unravel. In the space of a few months she had lost her father and her younger brother, her family was the speculation of gossip and rumor and, worst of all, now Cal was beginning to act on his wife’s crazy ideas.
The first of which was about the house.
This part is really unclear. Piper never really spoke of it, nor did my grandparents. Whenever the subject was raised with my grandmother all she would say was that the old house was falling apart and needed so many repairs that it made sense to rebuild a new one entirely. Piper would snort if she was in the room and draw her lips together in silent disapproval. My grandmother would watch her as her face would draw to a close, until finally she would snap and say, “Piper, are you sucking on a lemon or something?”
Piper would look up, her features twitching in surprise. “I don’t know what you mean, Lavinia, my tooth is giving me trouble, that’s all,” she would respond, and then she would go on with either her reading or her sewing, unaffected by the glare of hatred my grandmother focused on her from the other side of the room.
How my grandmother managed to secure the approval of my grandfather to rebuild the house, when she was already six months pregnant and he himself was just getting re-accustomed to the farm and all its responsibilities, remains a mystery. What is clear is that she persuaded my grandfather to use most of the money Walter had left him to do it. It shows just how much sway she once had over him.
