by Nelle Davy
Julia, however, was once more his golden girl. It was as if the shock of her elopement and their year apart made him need to draw her even closer. He would not talk of her elopement except to criticize Jess, and Julia let it be that way. She would walk into the white house from her own and sit at the table utterly comfortable with her surroundings, despite the hard hatred of her stepmother whenever she glimpsed her stepdaughter curled up on her settee, or baking Cal a pie using the contents from her fridge. Julia treated all as her rightful domain; the shock of California and being ripped from her comfort zone to a level of living she had only encountered once before, when she was too young to remember it fully, had taught her a valuable lesson. It was better to be queen in her small sphere, than insignificant in a larger one.
Of course, my grandmother noticed.
She took every one of these occurrences and built them up as slights to be recorded and remembered. She dipped into her legendary reserves of patience and let them feed her, rationing them for a long period of endurance. How long this would have to continue, she did not know, but a few weeks before Thanksgiving she got her answer.
Julia came into the living room, Jess’s arms shyly wrapped around her, and blushed with her eyes, though her skin remained smooth alabaster, before announcing that she was pregnant.
And a year later, on the 11th of July 1965, Cal Jr., my cousin, was born. Julia said she named him after my grandfather so that he would be as strong, as kind, as devoted. My grandfather cried there and then in the hospital room. Tears of pride coursed down his rough cheeks as he held his first grandson in his arms, utterly unashamed.
And so my grandmother drew herself inward, made a pact with her soul and stretched out her already thinning patience a little bit more.
Did Cal notice that she was not happy? Not likely, she would say later. She was too good at hiding it. Silence in her marriage was not a weapon; it was a source of respite. The quieter she was, the more secure Cal felt in his emotions. Instead of her pouring all her feelings and desires into him, he began to do it instead. Now it was he who would lie in bed next to her and tell her of his plans for the future, his ideas for the farm, his wishes for his family.
It was he who told her that whenever Ethan talked about his future, he always mentioned Allie’s name. It was he who told her that he would have to rewrite his will now that Cal Jr. was born and it was he who told her the most damning thing of all. He told her that he wanted to make peace with his brother.
At this, Lavinia sat upright.
“What on earth makes you think he’ll listen to you? He hasn’t spoken to you in nearly twenty years, Cal—he’s never even tried to get back in contact with you.”
“I know that—don’t you think I know that?”
“So why?” She rang out the last word in repressed fury. Cal did not look at her.
“Because if it had been the other way around, wouldn’t I have done the same? Pa gave me the land but his wishes could only have been carried out if I took it. And I wanted to take it even though I knew it shouldn’t have been mine.”
“So what?” his wife sneered. “You think by telling him this it’ll make a difference to him? You think he’ll forgive you, do you?”
“No, I don’t, but I think it’s about time I did the decent thing and asked.”
Lavinia stared at her husband, unseeing, unbelieving. “What has gotten into you?” she said at last.
“I’ve just been thinking these things over, that’s all. Family is family. I realized ain’t nothing more important. Nothing.”
And he leaned over and turned out the light.
He did not speak about this with her again. Though she probed him, he became unusually reticent. He had seen her disapproval, perhaps even guessed at her outrage, and so had drawn inward, closing his mouth and thoughts to her. It drove her mad.
“Why are you shutting me out?” she had raged at him one night when they were alone. “I’m your wife.”
“Do you tell me everything?” Cal had replied. “Of course you don’t, nor would you if I asked.”
“Someone’s put you up to this. Someone’s been turning you against me.”
“Lavinia, you’re being hysterical.”
“I’m not. You don’t think I don’t know what goes on in my own house? A husband and wife shouldn’t have secrets.”
“You didn’t always used to think that way,” Cal said softly.
“Wh-what do you mean?” my grandmother asked, disconcerted.
“I mean…well—Lou,” he said and then looked her in the eye. It was dark and my grandmother said later on, that it was just as well, because in that moment she let her face reveal how much she hated him.
They did not speak much after that. Not for a while. Cal knew he had overstepped a boundary, but an innate stubbornness would not let him come to his wife and admit his error. Though he did not know it, it would not have mattered to her if he had. My grandmother later told me that after that night, she knew Cal was not to be trusted. He was too malleable, too easily swayed. His thoughts were only what other people put there, his views what others before him had expressed. His only autonomy was in choosing his influence, but there was no doubt in her mind that he was merely a product of that influence. She knew those words were not Cal’s words, such thoughts would never occur to him, but she did not know whom to fully attribute them to and this worried her greatly. There are too many snakes in my house, she thought.
One Saturday morning she came down the stairs to find her family at the breakfast table. Cal had already gone out to work but Ethan was there, hunched over his cornflakes, Theo over his waffles. Piper was standing next to Julia, who was balancing Cal Jr. on her hip, and the two women leaned against the oven, each of them clutching a cup of coffee. Everyone glanced up as she walked in.
“Good morning,” Piper said.
Lavinia stared at her family and saw all their dirty secrets and she made herself a promise.
“What was it, Grandma?” I asked. “What did you promise yourself?”
She laughed. “Never you mind, girl, never you mind. All you need to know is, I kept my promise. It took a while but I kept it all the same. That’s the thing about me, girl. People always thought different but I can be true to my word.” I had folded the blanket up under her hands.
“I don’t doubt it, Grandma,” I had said.
I suppose the time has come to talk about my eldest cousin. It is hard to think of him as an innocent child. In my memory there is no room for him in this light. I cannot see him as the pictures have shown—as a smiling baby in a blue onesie, or a curly red-haired child in jeans riding up on the thresher with my grandfather. An innocent, a blank with none of the monstrous imprint that he demonstrated when I came to know him, he existed at this stage as a source of joy, and a hope for the future. My uncle was eighteen and my father was sixteen when he was born. They played with him, they threw him up in the air and caught him again to make him laugh. His father, Jess, though intimidated by being wholly responsible for another life on this planet, was attentive and tender in the early years and Julia played the role of doting mother to outsiders, though history has it that Piper was more responsible for the actual practicalities of child rearing. As for my grandfather…well, my grandfather spoiled him rotten. He adored him, and Julia even more now for making him.
What did my grandmother make of him initially? What else could she make of the firstborn son of Julia but another rival? Most of all she saw him as an unstable catalyst. With his birth the dynamics in her family had changed in a way she did not like. Now Cal was hell-bent on reconciling with his brother and to her that meant that, if it went according to plan, Leo and his family could easily troop back on the farm and start taking an active hand in it. He had had a share in the farm and its profits all these years but aside from a check sent to his place in Indiana quarterly, Leo had never tried to have anything to do with Aurelia, and Lavinia wanted it to stay that way. But Cal had other ideas. And no
w with the arrival of my cousin he seemed to have finally found an incentive to bring those ideas to fruition. She saw her plans fray, the edges begin to disintegrate, and she watched on, finding herself for once unable to stop the slow descent with my cousin as its champion. Through him, her husband suddenly found the driving force he had been lacking. He bounced him on his thigh and stroked his face with his finger and saw in his grandson’s youth all the possibilities he had dreamed of creeping up on him and he was energized.
He had big plans.
He wasn’t the only one.
It is at this point in the fall of that year, a few months after Cal Jr. was born, that Georgia-May Healy enters our story. Her father bought the old McGregor place next to our farm. It was a good bit of land that boasted a successful dairy operation, one of the few farms around us to do so. When her family moved in, Lavinia and Piper went over to the farm to pay their respects. They were welcomed over the threshold by Georgia-May’s mother, who took their offers of sweet wine and apple cinnamon pie with both relief and gratitude.
They went into the kitchen, the only room in the house that was fully unpacked, and as they sat over the red-checked tablecloth and sipped their iced tea, my grandmother cast her eye over the daughter of her neighbor.
“How old are you, Georgia-May?” she asked over the rim of her cup.
“I’m nineteen, ma’am,” replied the girl. A slip of a thing at that age, Georgia-May was a petite girl with pale blond hair and even paler skin. Translucent, my grandmother described her: a quality that would come to be a hindrance, as well as in the end perhaps something of a blessing.
“I got a son near your age,” my grandmother said when she saw Georgia-May. “He’s in his last year at school. His name’s Ethan.”
“Oh,” said Georgia-May, lowering her voice slightly.
“Georgia-May’s going to be a teacher,” said her mother, who smiled proudly.
“Ethan will be a farmer,” replied my grandmother. “When you’re moved in you should come over and meet him,” she said, looking at Georgia-May, whose skin blushed a deep crimson so that her face slipped into fire before the color dissipated. My grandmother looked after her with renewed interest. Piper flicked her a look beneath her lashes.
On the way back my grandmother thought aloud: “Shy little creature, isn’t she?”
“Who?” asked Piper.
“Georgia-May.”
“Oh, I guess.”
“Sweet, though, but very shy.” She stopped and cast an eye around the Healys’ land.
“I wonder what they’ll make of the place,” she said. “Let’s give them a year.”
“To do what?” asked Piper, but my grandmother had already started to walk ahead and when Piper caught her up, she did not answer her.
Things carried on as much as before. The beginning of 1966 was a quiet period. Cal Sr. went away on a trip for two weeks without telling Lavinia where he was going or leaving her with a forwarding number, but she bit back her anger and did not question him when he left, or when he came home one night looking tired and asking for supper, which he only picked over. She suspected that he had gone to see his brother, but from both his heavy silence and snappish manner with Piper, she guessed it had not been successful.
She went over to the Healys’ farm often now and acquainted herself readily with Georgia-May’s mother. Both my grandfather and great-aunt were shocked. My grandmother had no real friends nor had she ever shown a desire for them, but she soon became a regular fixture at the Healys and vice versa. My father said that he would enter the living room and find the two women sitting there, barely speaking, just bent over their sewing or reading, and he would wonder why they needed each other for company when together they were still so solitary. Maybe that was part of the attraction, but only on Mrs. Healy’s side. No, my grandmother had other reasons for cultivating a relationship with her neighbors.
“Who are you taking to your senior prom?” she asked Ethan as she sat in her garden, three months after the Healys had moved in. He lay out on the grass next to my father, who was ripping blades to bits in his hands.
Ethan peered at her, though he had to squint because the sun was in his eye.
“Allie, of course,” he said suspiciously.
“Well, not ‘of course.’ What if she didn’t want to go or she fell ill, what then?”
“Then I wouldn’t go.”
There was a pause.
“I think that’s very foolish of you,” his mother said softly.
“Well, it’s my choice, isn’t it?” he asked angrily, brushing a fly from his arm.
“Don’t raise your voice to me.”
“I wasn’t raising my voice.”
“Yes, you were.”
Ethan sank back into a gloomy silence. My father turned over onto his back and put his arms over his eyes.
“I don’t know why you’re so sensitive about such issues, Ethan. It’s not healthy the way you’re so defensive about that girl. I hope you don’t act the same way around her. It would make it very difficult for her to talk to you about anything, especially if it were something you might find unpleasant. Not a particularly nice footing to be on in a relationship, I can tell you.”
“I didn’t ask for any advice from you,” Ethan said between gritted teeth. His mother flashed him a look but let it pass. My father rolled over onto his side and closed his eyes.
“Is she going to college?” asked Lavinia.
“Who?”
“Alison.”
Ethan frowned against the sun and then raised himself up. “I hadn’t…I mean— Why would she?”
“Well, surely it’s one of those conversations the two of you would need to have, unless…she didn’t feel that it was a conversation she could have with you.” She watched the impassive expression of her son. She gave a snort. “Come now, Ethan. She’s a smart girl, isn’t she? She lives in town, not on a farm, and she’s got to do something with her life. The Healy girl—Georgia-May—is going to become a teacher, you know? Enrolling in the local community college. But Alison never did strike me as a girl who would be content with something like that.”
Ethan stood up so quickly his face blocked the sun over his mother and all she could see was a hole of shadow where his face would have been.
“You don’t know anything about anything.”
“Ethan, this is highly dramatic, don’t you think?”
“You don’t know her, you’ve no right to—to…”
“To what?” Lavinia put down her book and cocked her head to the side, seemingly confused. “I don’t understand this. These are perfectly sensible questions. Questions that if you have failed to ask will still need answering, though by that time the damage may have been done. With whom are you angry? Me, because I thought of it, you, because you didn’t, or—” she leaned forward “—her for causing them in the first place?”
My father had turned over now and could only see the sandaled foot of his mother behind the heaving form of his brother. Her voice flowed out over the winds rippling through the garden.
“Did you think because college wasn’t something that applied to you that it also wouldn’t to her?”
“You don’t know anything,” he repeated again. “We don’t talk about that stuff. There’s no need,” he added half-defiantly.
“Well, that’s good,” said my grandmother. “I know how much you hate surprises.”
They glared at each other before my uncle moved past her to go up the porch steps and inside the house.
“I might go to college,” my father said after a minute. His mother peered at him as if she had forgotten he was still there.
“If you and Dad think it’s the right thing to do, ma’am,” he added quickly.
“What would you study, Theo?” she asked with a smile playing at her mouth.
“Dunno yet, but—” and he seemed to struggle with himself but then he pressed on regardless “—but I wanna see things. In the world, I mean. There must
be more than just this,” he concluded and threw his arm out at the lawn.
“Yes, there are, Theo, but that doesn’t mean they are as good. And if you want to go to college you’re going to have to give your pa a better excuse than just wanting to see the world.”
My father leaned back, heavy thoughts furrowing his brow. My grandmother went back to her book.
Days later Ethan borrowed the truck and went into town. He spent four hours there and when he came back he looked flushed but content. Then one evening he drew his father aside. Though behind the closed door of the study their soft baritones could be heard through the wood, try as she might my grandmother could not decipher what they were saying…but she could guess. That night while her husband slept peacefully next to her, my grandmother stayed awake and plotted. She went through all the scenarios, all their likely conclusions and also their possibilities. It was nearly dawn before she was finished, gently closing her eyes as Cal stretched beside her and roused himself from sleep.
She did not ask questions, she did not pry; she let it come to her.
She observed my uncle anxiously, wondering when he would do it and then when she saw him come down the stairs not a week later, wearing a freshly laundered shirt, with his hair combed back, she knew.
My uncle went to the house of Alison Lomax, where he found her in her living room, reading a magazine while lying on her stomach.
“Is there somewhere private where we can go?” he asked her.
She took him to the garden, where they sat on her father’s handmade bench. Leaning into her, Ethan took the ring box out of his pocket. The weight of it settled naturally on his palm as he watched her, though her face had been drained of all expression. As he looked at her, he was full of hope, delight and expectation and when he opened the box to reveal a single diamond dropped on a bed of white gold, he believed her acceptance was inevitable. Hadn’t they already discussed this time and time again? Hadn’t they planned their future together? Hadn’t he dreamed of it for years, his mind pouring over the fantasies day and night: in times of despair when in need of hope, in moments of joy if only to exacerbate it; when bored, when wistful, when drunk with love and desire? He was a man now at eighteen. There was no need to wait any longer and after his discussion with his mother he realized that if he didn’t act soon, life might get in the way.
