by Nelle Davy
“Lavinia,” began Piper and the two women held each other’s gaze for a long moment.
“Good night, Piper,” said Lavinia finally and she turned out the light as she left.
“What do you want in life, Merey?”
“I don’t know…to see the world I guess? Maybe go to college and do an art degree or something?”
She reared her head up like a cobra at that, her long hair spilling down her white nightdress so that she took on the visage of some horrifying phantom.
“You’re all so stupid. You think it’s so much better out there, so much more exciting, so much easier. You have no clue. You throw yourselves into exile. Don’t you know what happens when you try to go? You come to the edge of the world and you fall off.”
“How would you know?”
“That’s what happens, Meredith—haven’t you learned that by now?” And she leaned back with a soft laugh.
“I used to tell Claudia that, on those days when she would come to the house and we would sit and talk. You know, when I had her come up to see me when your father died. We would sit and tal. And out of everyone, she knew the most about how much this place meant to us. She would never have left it if she had the choice.”
I stiffened. I knew what was coming but I did not want it, not yet.
“But then she would have done well wherever she was. She was always lucky like that.”
Because of Piper’s illness we missed going to the house that Sunday, so it was nearly ten days before we saw her again. She missed Claudia’s birthday party on the Thursday but seemed to be fully recovered by the weekend so we dutifully made our way over to the main house for Sunday roast as normal. But when I saw her sitting in the living room by the window with a soda water in hand conversing with my grandfather I was visibly shocked. She seemed so thin and pale. Her skin beneath her eyes was wan and the rest of her face took on a chalky pallor. I stopped in the middle of the room and stared at her. Jude came from behind me and gently steered me away to a corner of the room.
“She hasn’t been very well,” he said softly.
“She looks like she is dying,” I muttered.
“She isn’t dying, she’s just…” He bit his lip thoughtfully. “She’s just tired.”
And he shook my shoulders in gentle reassurance and left to talk with my mother. Cal Jr., as if from nowhere, suddenly appeared at my side.
“He’s wrong, you know, it’s a lot worse than that.”
“What would you know?” I snapped.
“Oh, yeah, I only live here. Not that anyone seems to notice.” He rolled his eyes and leaned down to whisper to me, “Wait and see.”
My grandmother came into the room, resplendent as ever, and announced the meal was ready and we dutifully followed her into the dining room.
As we sat and watched our grandfather carve the meat and serve the plates down the table, Ava said, “It’s good to see you looking well again, Aunt Piper.”
Piper gave her a halfhearted smile.
“Oh, she wasn’t at death’s door, were you, Piper?” said my grandmother. “She’s a lot tougher than she looks, Ava.”
“Yeah, it would take a divine force to stop your great-aunt in her tracks,” said my grandfather jovially.
Piper blinked rapidly and chewed the inside of her mouth. “And what would it take to make you stop, Cal?” she asked quietly. Immediately, we all stilled in our seats.
“What do you mean?” asked my grandfather unconcernedly, still finishing off carving a slice of the meat onto a plate, but when she did not answer, he turned and frowned at his sister.
“Piper, are you sure you’re well enough just yet?” asked my grandmother silkily.
Piper licked her lip and then laughed. “Ignore me. I’m still…recovering.”
I looked over at Cal Jr. and watched him hide a smile behind the rim of his glass.
“Your mother was very close to Jude, wasn’t she?” my grandmother asked me. “As were you? Did you miss him when he left?”
I was tempted not to answer her, but I knew from experience that if I didn’t she would bait me until I lost my temper and then laugh at me for the same.
“Yes.”
“He was crying when he left, did you know that? Tears of anger, of anguish. So humiliating for him…” She broke off in a malevolent chuckle. “And I thought to myself, you suffer as you tried to make me suffer.”
She caught me looking at her. “I couldn’t let him get away with it. I couldn’t let him actually do it. After all these years, after everything I have done, lost, sacrificed—my God.” She choked on the last part and began to cough painfully. Her hacking rasps filled the petrified air.
Three years after he had first arrived, and two months after that Sunday dinner with Piper, Jude decided to organize a New Year’s Eve party on Aurelia. He had persuaded my grandfather to throw it because aside from that one time way back when they had first moved in on the farm, they had never thrown another large party. Oh, they had dinner parties and small select guests to private soirees, but not a loud-music, bright-lights, colored-streamer affair for everyone. My grandmother didn’t like to. She didn’t think such affairs were dignified, but it was more than that. She wanted to make Aurelia exclusive, a place that people would give their teeth to set foot on. She thought to share the place would make it less valuable.
But Jude was a grown man and he didn’t need or wish to play by my grandmother’s hierarchical rules. He invited neighbors, suppliers, businessmen my grandparents knew or wished to know. He threw in a whole mix of people under the blanket of fairy lights and rum punch. A week before the party, after coming back from town after one day shopping, my grandmother stalked out to the cornfield and demanded in front of my grandfather for Jude to bring her the guest list. He had burst out laughing.
“What for?” he’d asked.
“Because Claree Tyler couldn’t help but thank me over and over again for asking her to our New Year’s party in the hardware store while her brats were running amok with the chicken feed. It was excruciating. I don’t want people thinking I truck with those kinds of people.”
“What kind of people?” Jude asked benignly. “Widows? Because that’s what she is.”
My grandmother had turned to her husband. “Cal, you understand what I’m saying here. We have a name to protect and this party is going to rest on and more importantly reflect that name.”
“Well, I mean—” He’d rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the floor while his wife shifted her weight to her other foot in irritation. “Who is coming to this thing, Jude?” he had asked.
“Oh, well, there ain’t no list so to speak. Just who takes my fancy. This is a good town here, good people. I promise there won’t be anyone at that party who I wouldn’t want to know.”
“Well, maybe you’re just not as discerning as you should be,” said my grandmother tightly.
“I like to think of it as being open-minded,” Jude said, grinning.
I had such a good time at that party. I got to show off to my classmates the home I had, the one they had heard of and revered and finally now all got to see with their open mouths and wide eyes when I showed them what we took as our right. My grandmother was almost regal in the way she parted crowds and took presents and offered glasses of punch. My grandfather, after some initial anxiety, actually looked like he was enjoying himself. He was jovial, generous, his laughter a boom during the lapse in conversation around us. But Jude was something else. He teased me and my friends, made those who would never normally be associated with my family more at ease, oiled those who usually were as if he had known them as long as my grandparents had. He was so comfortable and he made everyone else feel the same. Even Claudia forgave him whatever grudge she had held against him that night. I saw the two of them share a joke as they leaned against the columns on the foot of the landing’s stairs. Claudia, a vision with her hair spilling over her left shoulder and fringing the top of her dress, smiled down at him. Th
ey looked striking, even though for once she didn’t seem to be aware of it. I saw her touch his shoulder and cock her head to the side, laughing. He clinked his punch glass against hers in response.
And then at the end when we had the fireworks display, I thought I would burst with happiness, watching the rockets punch an array of colors into the sky with hisses and crackles and booms that filled the air and covered the sounds of drunken incredulity below.
For my sisters and me, the party was a success. When we came back to school in January, our classmates were still talking about it and for a while there on the street, a whole new cast of people who we hadn’t even known existed before, would smile and nod at us with the glow of both memory and newfound respect.
Do you know, I think that party was one of the proudest moments of my life? When I first really appreciated the family I had standing behind me and I had thought how clever Jude was for orchestrating that, and how much he must have loved us and Aurelia to do it.
It should have made my grandmother love him; it should have made her accept him as one of us. It certainly cemented the bond he had with my grandfather, who the morning after, with the ravages of the party wreaked across his home, had smiled and wondered aloud why they hadn’t done this more often.
But it didn’t.
“Do you remember the party?” she asked. We were sitting in the glade near the garden on the white chairs. I had taken her for a walk. It was a good day for it. She had been quiet that day and restful, so Mom had told me to take her out for a while, when she was still in a compliant mood.
“What party?” I asked.
“The New Year’s one that Jude threw.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Do you remember who was there?” she asked, looking at me, and I saw in her face a sharpening of memory. She did this sometimes. She could fool you into thinking she was back, but it was only an echo of a voice that had already faded.
“Do you?”
She sighed. “Cal was so naive, so naive. A party—that’s all. Just a party.” She smoothed her hands over her lap.
“It wasn’t?” I asked.
“It wasn’t.”
Among the people at the party had been Mike Grayson and Laurence Caulfield, owners of G&C Foods Limited, a food produce company whose main profit was comprised of the main brand cereals they distributed. They had recently bought a large farm corporation in a neighboring county that would now be put to the directive of producing enough cereals for their growing demand.
I did not know they were there, I did not meet them. But my grandfather did.
They met on the 31st of December 1985 on Aurelia and they met again a month later in the head offices of G&C Foods Limited. And then once more a few weeks after that, and this time Piper was there.
And that is how my grandmother came to do the one thing I have never been able to forgive her for, and what I am sure is the event that has made her spirit haunt my dreams and memories in perpetual unrest. I don’t believe in the God of my mother, or the heaven and hell that were thrust upon me on Sunday mornings, but I do believe somehow that our unfinished business in this life will hold us like an anchor, tying our atoms together in a forcible bind that relives our pain.
A hell of a different making.
And that is where I think Lavinia is, because of what she did to Jude—and to Claudia.
And for what my mother then had to do and never really forgave herself for, even though she would never undo it.
I would discover the truth about my sister during my grandmother’s confessions, and after she instructed me to set fire to all her papers as she neared her end, I would find the letters Claudia had written to her after she’d been sent away: letters full of anger, of remorse, of bitterness and hatred. Of a desperate need for love and conciliation.
I did not burn these letters.
I buried them under the floorboards of our attic, convinced I would never see them again.
And then years later I would change my mind and take them out of the ground.
And me, the nonbeliever, would exorcize the ghost of Claudia’s childhood.
My house was filled with photographs. My father loved them, loved taking them, loved showing them off, and after he died my mother maintained this hobby of his as a sort of memorial to a passion he would have continued had he lived. When you walked into my house, on the right-hand side of the wall was a row of black-and-white photographs in dark wood frames: my father in the field with his brother beside him staring off to the right and his father standing over him with his hand on his shoulder. I remember my father was squinting into the camera because the sun was in his eye. After that was a picture of him and my mother on their wedding day, his blond head bent over her veiled dark one with her smiling up to the camera. Then came pictures of him and my sisters up at the main house: Claudia’s first birthday in the large dining room, sitting on my grandfather’s knee before a pink-and-white iced cake; Ava on a white bed in a cotton baby dress laughing at an invisible photographer; me in Piper’s arms watching my sisters and Charles play; my grandmother and grandfather walking through the rose garden, my grandmother a few steps ahead. As the walls led up the staircase you could see us grow up and get color from our original beginnings of black and white, but though the people and the expressions changed, the setting was always the same. It was always on the farm. The one constant was Aurelia.
After the New Year’s Eve party, my mother put up a large photograph that would rest above the staircase as you turned left down to the bedrooms. It was on a starched white background with a bronzed gold frame. It was taken half an hour before the guests started to arrive. Piper had insisted.
“All of you, all together,” she’d said, using her hands to bat us all out to the front of the house, while we genially grumbled and fidgeted about standing out in the cold, caught up in a mixture of both excitement and trepidation. My grandfather let me go through the door in front of him and smiled. It was a nervous twitch of the lips and he sighed. I ran my hand down his arm in comfort.
That’s me in the middle. Claudia is to the left in the soft blue gauze gown she had finally agreed to wear, even though the hemline was about an inch longer than she would have liked. Ava is behind Charles to the right-hand side of Cal Jr. in white. My mother is standing next to Jude holding his arm with Georgia-May on the other side and in front with her husband is my grandmother in that emerald-green silk she so loved with the pearls my grandfather had bought her for Christmas a week before. And then Ethan, standing on the top of the porch landing in his suit, leaning against the white column. He was drunk, but not too much for him. He is almost upright.
Those photographs were more than just a depiction of our lives and history; they were a testament to our home. And that was what was drummed into me every day, every moment of my childhood: this is who you are; this is where you are from.
This is all there is.
This is what should have happened.
Jude would have aided my grandfather in selling the farm. It would have been a shock to all of us, as for my entire life certainly, I was raised with the unshrinking belief that whatever happened or whatever changed, the one constant was my home.
I wonder how I would have felt? Terrified, upset probably, but in a small way relieved? Would I have seen it as an opportunity to break away, to start afresh? Maybe we would have left Iowa, maybe we would have gone back to New York where my parents first lived and where I would eventually have ended up.
Perhaps my mother would have married again. Perhaps Jude would have…
But maybe that’s just fanciful.
Cal Jr. would have had to make a life of his own. Maybe he would have gone and found his mother, maybe he tried to do that anyway and failed. I never did learn of what happened to Julia and neither, I think, did my grandmother. She was gone, and that was all that mattered to her.
Piper could have got a small house with a nice garden and lived out her retirement. What happene
d with Ethan would have happened anyway but perhaps Georgia-May would have had the courage to leave sooner.
Strange all of this, all this wonder. We might have been free.
But she would have languished. She would have been devoured by a bitterness whose dark flame would have entered the rags of her soul and consumed it. It might have killed her, emotionally it certainly would have. And never as long as she continued to live, would she have forgiven any of them.
How could they? She would have raged, how could they do this to her?
For in the end, it was all for her, wasn’t it?
It started with the phone ringing after we had all gone to sleep. The sound woke us from our beds, made us turn our heads from our pillows and stare at the alarm clock in disbelief. Could that really be the time? Who could be calling? Was something—
Finally my mother went down into the hall and lifted the phone off the receiver. “Hello,” she said. Ava and I tentatively made our way to the top of the stairs. We were not afraid; we did not know.
“What did you say?”
The door was unlocked when Claudia and I went inside the house we had been raised in. It slid open with no noise as we surveyed the powder-blue-and-white paint of the hallway, the wood of the floors under their sheen of dust and the white steps of the staircase. It was eerie how silent everything was, how still intact—as if the place had been waiting for us. For a minute neither of us would step inside.
I looked over at Claudia and saw that she was trembling. I smoothed a hand down her arm. She jumped and stared at me—frightened? Was that what I saw?
“I will if you will,” I said, gesturing.
Even though it had been over ten years, there were still faded squares lining up the walls where those photographs of us had once hung, where paintings that were my mother’s favorites had been placed over small tables bearing an array of ornaments and china figurines that she had so loved in her lifetime.
