A Sound Among the Trees

by Susan Meissner

  “You haven’t seen her in four years?” Frances echoed, eyes wide.

  “The last time I saw her was at Sara’s funeral. I don’t know how she heard Sara had died, but she did. She came to the funeral and then she left, and I haven’t heard from her since.”

  Frances’s mouth was an open O. For a second she said nothing. Then she spoke, and this time no one shushed her.

  “Why? Why don’t you know where she is?”

  Adelaide shrugged. “That’s how she wants it. That’s how she has wanted it since she placed her infant daughter in my arms and disappeared. Before then actually.”

  “My word! How long ago was that?”

  “Sara would’ve turned thirty-eight on Tuesday.” Adelaide rubbed an age spot on her arm. “And Caroline is sixty-four.”

  No one said anything for a long stretch of seconds.

  “Did you quarrel?” Frances’s tone was incredulous. “Could the two of you not make it right between you all these years?”

  Again, no one shushed her.

  “I have no quarrel with my daughter, Frances. She is unwell and she misuses drugs. She always has. It’s as simple as that.”

  Frances puffed out her cheeks in indignation. “There is nothing simple in that at all. You are her mother. How could you just let her throw her life away like that?”

  Pearl gasped, and Maxine, reaching to clap her hand over her mouth, knocked over her coffee cup. Deloris whispered the name of Jesus. A prayer perhaps.

  “How, indeed.” Adelaide’s voice was soft and unhurried.

  “Frances, you really don’t know what you are talking about!” Maxine began to mop up the spilled coffee with her napkin. “Caroline made her own choices. Adelaide did the best she could. It wasn’t easy raising a teenage girl without her father. I was here. I saw it all. When Adelaide’s husband had his heart attack, Caroline’s emotional problems just got worse. And she turned to drugs that her doctor didn’t prescribe. It wasn’t Adelaide’s fault.”

  “Please, let’s talk about something else!” Pearl pleaded, reaching for her water glass.

  Frances waved toward the hulking frame of Holly Oak. “You’ve been alone in this house with no husband since your daughter was a teenager? Nigh on fifty years?”

  Adelaide slowly turned her head to face Frances. “I have not been alone.”

  “Not alone?” Frances paused, puzzlement crossing her wrinkled face for several seconds. “Oh. You mean the ghost.”

  Pearl spewed the water out of her mouth, then proceeded to gasp and sputter. Deloris reached over and patted her back.

  “Frances! For heaven’s sake, I told you not to mention that either!” Maxine turned to Adelaide. “I am sorry, Adelaide.”

  Adelaide blinked slowly. “What have you got to be sorry about, Maxine?”

  Maxine lowered her voice. “I brought her.”

  “I told you not to mention the ghost,” Pearl wheezed at Frances, her silvery eyes glistening with moisture.

  “Pearl, I know you tell everyone who comes to Holly Oak about the ghost you think I have living here,” Adelaide said calmly. “I know you told the boy with the vacuum cleaner name, and I know you’ve probably told Marielle and her parents and her brother and his wife, so why would I assume you did not also tell Frances?”

  Pearl coughed. “I’m sorry, Adelaide. I can’t help it.”

  “So there is no ghost?” Frances looked from one woman to the other.

  Adelaide removed her napkin from her lap and stood. She reached for her teacup. “You are welcome to peek inside every nook and cranny at Holly Oak to look for my ghost, Frances. If you find one, let me know. And I haven’t been alone because I raised Sara here. And she brought Carson here and blessed me with two great-grandchildren here. Poke about as you please—but mind the cellar. Apparently, the ghost has a nasty grudge against the cellar. I need more tea.”

  Adelaide turned from the table and, with teacup in hand, headed for the kitchen and a hot kettle.

  Six decades later she could still remember the ache of hoping against fate for a boy. After all those second-trimester miscarriages, Adelaide had reasoned that the only child she had finally been able to carry to term would certainly be male; the lost ones were all female.

  The moment the delivering doctor pronounced the squalling thing in his hands was a girl, the slow waltz of destiny that fell on all women born to Holly Oak began, and Adelaide, spent and sweating, had no choice but to fall in step. What else could she do? She and her infant daughter would surely be pulled along anyway, as had her mother and her grandmother in those years after the war. It was an unspoken understanding among Holly Oak women—for who on the outside would believe it?—that the house had never grasped the notion that it was no longer a battleground, a hospital, a hiding place, a graveyard … no longer a refuge stripped of its meaning by the women who had lived inside it. It was still a house of penance, the cannonball on the north wall a tangible reminder of the indictments against it, and its women the apparent objects of its remorse.

  Her great-grandmother Susannah had intimated that Holly Oak seemed to bear a grudge, a notion reinforced when Adelaide was young by neighbors who pointed to the house and murmured that a female Union spy had lived there and that the house was haunted by Yankee soldiers buried in its cellar.

  Adelaide had said nothing of this to the delivery room doctor or nurses, nor to her husband, Charles, who was brought into the room after the child had been washed of the evidences of human nativity and placed in her arms. No one but a Holly Oak woman could possibly understand the strange psychosis of a house that could not reinvent itself. No one else but a Holly Oak woman would need to.

  Charles McClane, whom Adelaide had married in 1945, was a decorated Air Corps pilot and the son of an affluent Richmond family. His money had financed Holly Oak’s first major updating since the Civil War, and he would’ve found Adelaide’s perception that the house was stuck in a strange limbo of regret—eighty years after the war’s end—to be utter nonsense. Everything was new inside. And besides, houses aren’t sentient beings. The suggestion that Holly Oak would likely exact another toll, this time on Caroline, simply by virtue of her sex, would’ve sounded preposterous. So Adelaide did not suggest it. Once, in a moment of weakness, she proposed to Charles that they sell Holly Oak and build a new house, and when he said, “Whatever for?” she had no answer for him.

  Adelaide’s mother, Margaret, was still alive when Caroline was born in 1947, and when she held her granddaughter for the first time, she had whispered to Adelaide that with every new generation, past grievances lose some of their weight. Margaret had a debilitating stroke the year Caroline turned eight, however, and dissolved into a world where she recognized neither magnificence nor malevolence. Margaret wasn’t aware when Caroline began to exhibit mood swings that doctors attributed to inconsistent parenting and an indulged lifestyle. Adelaide’s mother passed through the fog of her last years unable to recall that she had imagined Caroline’s life might be different.

  Adelaide raised her daughter at a cautious distance, as if the house watched her every parenting move, reminding Adelaide when she might’ve lavished intimacy on Caroline that a Holly Oak daughter was destined for misfortune. Charles raised Caroline with the rules and structure he’d learned in the military. Caroline’s response to caution was to mistrust it and to authority, to test it. So when Charles died of a heart attack the year Caroline turned seventeen, she seemed to lose her method for measuring authority’s ability to make life safe. The depression she succumbed to was treated with cognitive therapies that should’ve worked and didn’t, and antidepressants that awoke in her a hunger for altered states which was never satisfied.

  Caroline left Holly Oak in 1965, on the one-year anniversary of her father’s death, with a hundred dollars in one back pocket and five foil-wrapped LSD-laced sugar cubes in the other.

  Adelaide heard from her daughter three times over the next eight years. Twice by phone to borrow money, an
d once she came back to Holly Oak in person.

  With a baby girl in her arms.

  he cannonball, firmly wedged between timber and stone, was an arm’s stretch on tiptoe. Its domed face beckoned from the flatness of the north wall of Holly Oak like a button to be pressed, an invitation to revisit the cold December day it hurtled into the house. On either side of it, clematis vines climbed skyward, bypassing the sunken orb as though it were a slumbering threat.

  Marielle watched as Chad extended his arm to touch the ball’s flinty surface. He turned to Carson and the co-worker who had followed them to the other side of the house.

  “Is this the only one?” Chad asked.

  “It’s the only one still imbedded in the house.” Carson slipped his hands into his pockets. “There were probably others. All the houses in this part of old downtown were shelled during the First Battle of Fredericksburg, especially along the river here. You can see from the upstairs bedroom windows one of the places where the Yankees built a pontoon bridge to cross the river. A lot of the houses on this street were destroyed. Holly Oak lucked out. The town was pretty much leveled.”

  Chad stepped back, and Carson’s co-worker Len moved forward to scrape his fingertips across the ball’s exposed arc.

  “But you’re not from around here, right? DC?” Chad asked. “You had to learn all this from someone else, I take it?”

  Carson smiled. “I guess you could say I’ve lived here long enough to know the history. This house is on the National Register; a number on this street are. Sometimes Adelaide will share a tale or two about what happened here during the war.”

  Chad laughed. “Adelaide? She that old?”

  Carson laughed as well and then seemed to notice anew that Marielle was beside him. He pulled a hand out of his pocket and reached for her. She took a step to shorten the distance between them. “Her great-grandmother lived in this house during the war. Adelaide remembers her. Sara knew all the stories too.”

  Marielle flinched slightly at Sara’s name, and Carson’s arm around her momentarily stiffened in response.

  Chad quickly filled the strained seconds of silence.

  “This great-grandmother wasn’t named Susannah, was she?” he asked.

  Carson stroked Marielle’s back with his thumb. “I suppose you heard that name from Pearl.”

  “Sweet old lady in a flowered hat who likes to tell people you’ve got a ghost named Susannah living in the house?”

  “That would be her.”

  Len stepped back from the wall. “A ghost?”

  “So the legend goes. I’ve never seen any ghost, and I’ve lived here for ten years.”

  “So why does Pearl think there’s a ghost?” Marielle asked. “It was the first thing she wanted me to know when she got me alone today. It’s not like you’ve ever mentioned it.”

  Carson smiled. “It’s her story, not mine. Pearl’s got a cousin who claims she’s clairvoyant or a medium or something. That cousin came here once and felt the presence of a ghost—or so she says.”

  “How did this cousin know it was Susannah’s ghost?” Chad asked.

  “My guess is she’s heard the stories. A lot of people around here know Susannah Page hid some Union soldiers in the house and helped them escape. Apparently she was also suspected of spying for the Union by marrying a Confederate officer named Nathaniel Page, who apparently got shot during the escape. Nearly killed him.”

  “So she was bad news, huh?” Chad said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think she probably had a terribly troubled life for such a young woman. Divided loyalties, unable to choose sides but living in a place where you simply had to. After all, she and her mother had only been living in the South for a year when the war broke. Pearl said her cousin heard Susannah’s ghost weeping over how her heart had literally been torn in two.”

  The image of a grieving faceless apparition, gray from age and death, glided into Marielle’s mind and then morphed into the young version of Susannah she’d seen in the portrait on the stairs inside Holly Oak. That Susannah looked about Marielle’s age. Sara’s age, too, when she died. Marielle pushed the image away. “Pearl doesn’t talk about a ghost when the kids are around, does she?” Marielle asked.

  “No, but I think it’s gotten back to Hudson. He knows Pearl thinks there’s a ghost. Of course, he thinks that’s cool.”

  “Pearl should be more careful. Brette’s too young to be hearing ghost stories,” Marielle murmured.

  Her brother turned to again study the north side of the house, starting with its rooftop spires, and Marielle watched as his gaze finally settled on the convex aberration of the cannonball. “A house this old probably has a boatload of memories inside it. I could almost believe there’s a ghost in there.”

  Marielle had no desire to continue contemplating the memories lodged inside Holly Oak. Or the dead people who had made them. “Can we talk about something else?”

  Chad turned back around to face her. “Sorry, Elle. No more talk of ghosts. I’m going to go find Lisa. She’ll want to see this.”

  Her brother began to walk back to the other side of the garden, and Len fell in step with him. Carson kissed Marielle at her temple as they turned away from the side of the house.

  “Having a good time?” he murmured.

  She laughed lightly. “Until we started talking about ghosts.”

  He squeezed her shoulders as they began to stroll slowly back to the other side of the house and the reception. “Don’t pay any attention to Pearl and her stories. She’s just a funny old lady with an overactive imagination. There are no ghosts inside that house, I assure you.”

  “Does Adelaide believe there’s a ghost?”

  Carson took several steps in silence. “No,” he finally said.

  “You hesitated.”

  Carson shrugged. “She has kind of an eerie respect for this house. It’s kind of quirky sometimes.”

  Marielle had only spent scattered moments in Adelaide’s presence in the week since she and Carson and the children had returned from Phoenix. Not enough to know what Carson was alluding to.

  “What do you mean by quirky?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing, I guess. Anyway, she’s pretty quick to brush off Pearl’s stories. Pearl’s kind of, well, she’s a bit dramatic and silly sometimes. It surprises me that she and Mimi are such good friends. Mimi’s not that way at all. I guess sometimes opposites do attract …” He broke off and cracked a lopsided grin. “Hey. Weren’t you the one who wanted to talk about something else? You were having a lovely time until the subject of ghosts came up, right? Mimi did okay with the planning?”

  Marielle let her question fall away. “It’s been a lovely reception. She did a wonderful job.”

  “Didn’t she, though? I originally thought she’d rather we had the reception at one of the hotel ballrooms or the country club or even the church because—” He stopped abruptly, seeming to nearly choke on his words. He shot a look toward her.

  “Because you had your reception with Sara here,” Marielle finished for him.

  “Marielle, I’m sorry. I can’t believe I said that.”

  “We agreed not to eggshell this, right? You had your reception with Sara here. I’m sure it was lovely too.”

  He inhaled and exhaled audibly. “Yes. It was. And it was a long time ago.”

  “But a lot of these same people came to it, I suppose.”

  “Some. Yes.”

  The back of Holly Oak loomed over them as they turned at the northwest corner of the house. Marielle felt its shadow fall over them.

  Her thoughts carried her to the conversation she and Carson had after he proposed and she accepted. They had met up in DC—their second in-person meeting—and then driven to Fredericksburg the next day so that she could meet Hudson and Brette. Marielle had been awed by the house’s age and size, and she’d remarked to him what a beautiful house it was. As they stood at the window on the second floor landing overlooking the south-side garden and p
atio, he asked if she would be okay with living at Holly Oak after their wedding. He’d said the house would be jointly owned in trust by his children at Adelaide’s passing and that since they had never lived anywhere else, he was reluctant to move them. Her first thought was one of caution.

  “You don’t want us to have our own place?”

  “We kind of will have our own place. It’s a big house, Marielle. And Mimi’s almost ninety. We can keep the maid service I hired if you want, or I’ll let them go. Whatever you want. The kitchen can be all yours. Mimi makes all her own meals anyway.”

  She had stared at the bedroom doors that flanked her on all sides.

  “Which room did you and Sara share?” she had asked.

  Carson had turned his head toward a door at the southwest corner. “It’s just a guest room now.”

  And then he’d told her she would never even have to go into that room if she didn’t want to. There were plenty of bedrooms on the second floor and even one on the third floor where the kids slept.

  “Do you ever go in that room?” she asked.

  He had paused for just a second. “I used to. But I don’t anymore.”

  The resolve in his voice moved her. She said yes, that she was okay with it. Now as they walked in Holly Oak’s shadow, a trickle of doubt ribboned through her for the third time that day.

  “So, this is still what you think we should do, right? Live here? In this house?” she asked.

  Carson glanced up at the house’s massive backside before turning to face the lawn that stretched ahead of them. Hudson and Brette, twenty-some feet away, were sitting on the steps to the old slaves’ quarters, the rabbit sandwiched in between them. He tightened his arm around Marielle’s waist as if he’d started to fall and was catching himself. “I don’t want to be afraid to live here. I don’t want to think that I can’t be with you. Here.”

  “I know what you don’t want; I’m just a little … I mean, I know it’s only been a week, but … I wonder if maybe we’re asking too much of ourselves.”